Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies

Encyclopedia of

Italian Literary Studies 1 A–J INDEX

Gaetana Marrone G E N E RAL E ditor

Paolo Puppa Luca Somigli E ditorS

New York London

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© 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, an Informa business Printed in the United States of America on acid‑free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number‑10: 1‑57958‑390‑3 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number‑13: 978‑1‑57958‑390‑3 (Hardcover) No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation with‑ out intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging‑in‑Publication Data Encyclopedia of Italian literary studies / [compiled by] Gaetana Marrone. p. cm. Includes bibliographical referenences and index. ISBN 1‑57958‑390‑3 1. Italian literature‑‑Encyclopedias. I. Marrone, Gaetana. PQ4006.E536 2006 850.9‑‑dc22 Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge‑ny.com

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CONTENTS

Editorial Staff

vi

Advisors

vii

Contributors

ix

Alphabetical List of Entries

xvii

Thematic List of Entries

xxvii

Introduction

xxxv

Entries A to Z

1

Index

I1

v

CO-EDITORS Maria DiBattista Jennifer Lorch Cormac O’ Cuilleanain Eduardo Saccone

ASSOCIATE EDITORS Elena Past Daniel Seidel

ASSISTANT EDITORS Nicholas Albanese Ileana Drinovan Barbara Garbin Simone Marchesi

vi

ADVISORS Franca Angelini Universita` di Roma ‘‘La Sapienza’’

Ben Lawton Purdue University

Albert Russell Ascoli University of California–Berkeley

Laura Lepschy University College, London

Daniela Bini University of Texas–Austin

Ernesto Livorni University of Wisconsin–Madison

Guido Bonsaver Pembroke College, University of Oxford

Romano Luperini Universita` di Siena

Gian Piero Brunetta Universita` di Padova

Millicent Marcus Yale University

Michael Caesar University of Birmingham

Giuseppe Mazzotta Yale University

Dino Cervigni The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Franco Musarra University of Leuven

Marinella Colummi Camerino Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Lino Pertile Harvard University

Teresa de Lauretis University of California–Santa Cruz

Olga Pugliese University of Toronto

Maria DiBattista Princeton University

Lucia Re University of California–Los Angeles

Robert S. Dombroski{ The City University of New York

Antonio Saccone Universita` di Napoli

Walter Geerts University of Antwerp

Anthony Julian Tamburri Florida Atlantic University

Amilcare Iannucci University of Toronto

Elissa Weaver University of Chicago

Victoria E. Kirkham University of Pennsylvania

Rebecca West University of Chicago

{

Deceased

vii

CONTRIBUTORS Stefano Adami Universita` per Stranieri–Siena

Gino Belloni Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Michael Aichmayr Universita¨t Salzburg

Ruth Ben-Ghiat New York University

Donatella Alesi Universita` di Roma

Alberto Bentoglio Universita` degli Studi di Milano

Beatrice Alfonsetti Universita` di Padova

Dirk Vanden Berghe Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Beverly Allen Syracuse University

Sandra Bermann Princeton University

Daniela Bisello Antonucci Princeton University

Diego Bertelli Yale University

Antonia Arslan Universita` di Padova

Giorgio Bertellini University of Michigan

Andrea Baldi Rutgers University

Maria Ida Biggi Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giuseppina Baldissone Universita` del Piemonte Orientale ‘‘Amedeo Avogadro’’

Noemi Billi Universita` degli Studi di Bologna Daniela Bini University of Texas–Austin

Susanna Barsella Fordham University

Barbara Bird University of Wisconsin–Madison

Fiora A. Bassanese University of Massachusetts–Boston Shaul Bassi Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Anna Bogo Biblioteca Teatrale Casa di Carlo Goldoni, Venezia

Mattia Begali University of Wisconsin–Madison

Julia Conaway Bondanella Indiana University–Bloomington ix

CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Bondanella Indiana University–Bloomington

Carlo Celli Bowling Green State University

Guido Bonsaver Pembrole College, University of Oxford

Dino Cervigni The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Fabrizio Borin Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia Antonello Borra University of Vermont Andrea Bosello Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia Norma Bouchard The University of Connecticut–Storrs Cristina Bragaglia Universita` degli Studi di Bologna Boris Buia Johns Hopkins University Theodore Cachey University of Notre Dame

Remo Ceserani University of Bologna Gary P. Cestaro DePaul University Paolo Chirumbolo McMaster University–Hamilton Paolo Cianfrone University of Toronto Luigi Contadini Universita` degli Studi di Bologna Graziella Corsinovi Universita` di Genova Stefano Cracolici University of Pennsylvania

Ann Hallamore Caesar University of Warwick

Alessandro Croce Universita` di Torino

Marinella Colummi Camerino Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Roberto Cuppone Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Jo Ann Cannon University of California–Davis

Roberto M. Dainotto Duke University

Rocco Capozzi University of Toronto

Giuseppina Dal Canton Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Francesco Carapezza University of Palermo

Mariano D’Amora Royal Holloway, University of London

Carla Carotenuto Universita` di Macerata

Emanuele D’Angelo Universita` di Bari

Peter Carravetta The City University of New York

Giovanna De Luca College of Charleston

Olivia Catanorchi Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa

Federica Brunori Deigan University of Maryland

x

CONTRIBUTORS

Barbara Del Mercato Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Barbara Garbin Yale University

Maria Pia Di Bella Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris

John Gatt-Rutter La Trobe University

Nicola Di Nino Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giuseppe Gazzola Yale University

Sara Elena Dı´az New York University

Walter Geerts University of Antwerp Academia Belgica, Roma

Maria DiBattista Princeton University

Flora Ghezzo Columbia University

Andrea Dini Montclair State University

Nella Giannetto{ Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Antonio D’Isidoro Universita` di Macerata

Manuela Gieri University of Toronto and Universita` della Basilicata

Konrad Eisenbichler University of Toronto

Simon A. Gilson University of Warwick

Edoardo Esposito Universita` di Milano

Paolo A. Giordano University of Central Florida

Massimo Fabrizi Universita` di Macerata

Gian Paolo Giudicetti Universite´ Catholique de Louvain

Marcella Farina Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Paola Giuli Saint Joseph’s University

Joseph Farrell University of Strathclyde–Glasgow Lucio Felici Centro Nazionale di Studi Leopardiani (Recanati) Valeria Finucci Duke University Vittorio Frajese Universita` di Roma Nicola Fuochi Biblioteca Ebraica, Venezia

Silvana Tamiozzo Goldmann Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia Manuele Gragnolati Somerville College, Oxford Emma Grimaldi Universita` di Salerno Elvio Guagnini Universita` di Trieste Lodovica Guidarelli University of Wisconsin–Madison {

Deceased

xi

CONTRIBUTORS

Angela Guidotti Universita` di Pisa

Antonia Lezza Universita` degli Studi di Salerno

Stefano Gulizia Colgate University

Ernesto Livorni University of Wisconsin–Madison

Nancy Harrowitz Boston University

Giancarlo Lombardi The College of Staten Island/CUNY

Brenda K. Hedrick Johns Hopkins University

Dennis Looney University of Pittsburgh

Angela M. Jeannet Franklin and Marshall College

Sara Lorenzetti Universita` di Macerata

Keala Jewell Dartmouth College

Stefania Lucamante The Catholic University of America

Victoria E. Kirkham University of Pennsylvania

Federico Luisetti The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Christopher Kleinhenz University of Wisconsin–Madison

Alfredo Luzi Universita` di Macerata

Charles Klopp Ohio State University

Joseph Luzzi Bard College

Patrizia La Trecchia University of South Florida

Armando Maggi University of Chicago

Marcia Landy University of Pittsburgh

Simone Marchesi Princeton University

Inge Lanslots University of Leuven

Anna Laura Mariani Universita` di Cassino

Gloria Lauri-Lucente University of Malta

Marina Marietti Universite´ Paris III–Sorbonne Nouvelle

Ben Lawton Purdue University

Gaetana Marrone Princeton University

Carol Lazzaro-Weis University of Missouri–Columbia

Renato Martinoni University of St. Gallen

Simone Lenzi Independent Scholar

Paola Martinuzzi Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giulio Lepschy University College, London

Giuseppe Mazzotta Yale University

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Erin M. McCarthy Yale University

´ ine O’Healy A Loyola Marymount University

Anna Meda University of South Africa

Frank Ordiway Princeton University

Alessandra Meldolesi Independent Scholar

Daniela Orlandi Dominican University

Grazia Menechella University of Wisconsin–Madison

H. Marie Orton Truman State University

Michela Meschini Universita` di Macerata Simona Micali Universita` di Siena Giuliana Minghelli Harvard University Lorenza Miretti Universita` degli Studi di Bologna Nelson J. Moe Barnard College, Columbia University Molly Morrison Ohio University, Athens Maria Laura Mosco University of Toronto

Michael Papio University of Massachusetts, Amherst Francesca Parmeggiani Fordham University Maria C. Pastore Passaro Central Connecticut State University Elena Past Wayne State University Eugenia Paulicelli Queens College, City University of New York Maria Nicolai Paynter Hunter College, City University of New York

Franco Musarra University of Leuven

Olimpia Pelosi State University of New York at Albany

Mariella Muscariello Universita` di Napoli ‘‘Federico II’’

Bernardo Piciche` Virginia Commonwealth University

Giuliana Muscio Universita` di Padova

Mark Pietralunga Florida State University

Thomas E. Mussio Iona College

Nicoletta Pireddu Georgetown University

Siobhan Nash-Marshall University of Saint Thomas

Gilberto Pizzamiglio Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Ellen Nerenberg Wesleyan University

Gian Filippo Pizzo Independent Scholar xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Alessandro Polcri Fordham University

Arielle Saiber Bowdoin College

Gordon Poole Universita` degli Studi l’Orientale

Laura Salsini University of Delaware

Paolo Puppa Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Giuliana Sanguinetti-Katz University of Toronto

Paolo Quazzolo Universita` degli Studi di Trieste

Carlo Santoli Independent Scholar

Lucia Re University of California–Los Angeles

Alessandro Scarsella Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Eileen Adair Reeves Princeton University

Daniele Seragnoli Centro Teatro Universitario, Ferrara

Antonio Ricci York University, Toronto

Mario Sesti University of Rome

Alessia Ricciardi Northwestern University Ricciarda Ricorda Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia Christine M. Ristaino Emory University Diana Robin University of New Mexico Gabriella Romani Seton Hall University

Alfredo Sgroi Universita` di Catania Anna Sica Universita` di Palermo Paola Sica Connecticut College P. Adams Sitney Princeton University Janet Levarie Smarr University of California–San Diego

Bruno Rosada Scuola Interateneo di Specializzazione degli Insegnanti del Veneto

Jon Snyder University of California–Santa Barbara

Rocco Rubini Yale University

Luca Somigli University of Toronto

Patrick Rumble University of Wisconsin–Madison

Matteo Soranzo University of Wisconsin–Madison

Myriam Ruthenburg Florida Atlantic University

Giuseppe Stellardi Oxford University

Antonio Saccone Universita` di Napoli

Eleonora Stoppino Dartmouth College

xiv

CONTRIBUTORS

Giorgio Taffon Universita` degli Studi di Roma 3

Alessandro Vettori Rutgers University

Anthony Julian Tamburri Florida Atlantic University

Daniele Vianello Universita` degli Studi di Roma 3

Anna Tedesco Universita` degli Studi di Palermo

Valerio Vicari Universita` degli Studi di Roma 3

Roberto Tessari Universita` di Torino

Antonio Vitti Wake Forest University

Carlo Testa University of British Columbia

Giada Viviani Bern University

Stefano Tomassini Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

David Ward Wellesley College

Anna Mauceri Trimnell John Cabot University, Rome

Elissa B. Weaver University of Chicago

Sabina Tutone Universitario Teatrale di Venezia

John P. Welle University of Notre Dame

Anne Urbancic Victoria College, University of Toronto

Rebecca West University of Chicago

Mario Valente Universita` di Roma ‘‘La Sapienza’’

Maria Agnese Chiari Moretto Wiel Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Franco Vazzoler Universita` degli Studi di Genova

Vito Zagarrio Universita` di Roma

Paola Ventrone Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano

Italo Zannier Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

Gabriella Veschi Universita` di Macerata

Teresa Zoppello Pe´ter Pa´zma´ny Catholic University, Budapest

Piermario Vescovo Universita` Ca’ Foscari di Venezia

xv

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES A

B

Academies Aganoor Pompilj, Vittoria Alberti, Leon Battista Alciato, Andrea Aleardi, Aleardo Aleramo, Sibilla (Rina Faccio) Una donna Alfieri, Vittorio Saul Mirra Algarotti, Francesco Alvaro, Corrado Amelio, Gianni Ammaniti, Niccolo` Andreini, Giovan Battista Andreini Canali, Isabella Angela da Foligno Angiolieri, Cecco Anglo-American Influences Animation Anthropology, Literature of Antonioni, Michelangelo L’avventura Arbasino, Alberto Arcadia (Accademia) Archibugi, Francesca Architecture, Literature of Aretino, Pietro La Cortigiana Ragionamenti Ariosto, Ludovico Cinque canti Comedies Orlando Furioso Satire Arpino, Giovanni Art Criticism Artusi, Pellegrino Autobiography

Bacchelli, Riccardo Balestrini, Nanni Bandello, Matteo Novelle Banti, Anna (Lucia Lopresti) Barbaro, Ermolao (The Younger) Baretti, Giuseppe Baricco, Alessandro Baroque. See Mannerism Bartoli, Daniello Basile, Giambattista Bassani, Giorgio Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura Beccaria, Cesare Belcari, Feo Belgioioso, Cristina di (Alberica Trivulzio) Bellezza, Dario Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino Bellocchio, Marco Bellonci Villavecchia, Maria Bembo, Pietro Gli Asolani Prose della volgar lingua Bene, Carmelo Benelli, Sem Beni, Paolo Benigni, Roberto Benni, Stefano Berchet, Giovanni Bernari, Carlo (Carlo Bernard) Berni, Francesco Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Berto, Giuseppe Bertolazzi, Carlo Bertolucci, Attilio Bertolucci, Bernardo Bestiaries Betocchi, Carlo xvii

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Betti, Ugo Delitto all’Isola delle Capre Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia Bettinelli, Saverio Bevilacqua, Alberto Bianchini, Angela Bianciardi, Luciano Bibbiena, I1 (Bernardo Dovizi) Bigiaretti, Libero Bigongiari, Piero Bilenchi, Romano Biography Biondo, Flavio Blasetti, Alessandro Boccaccio, Giovanni Filostrato Filoloco Decameron Latin Works Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia Boccalini, Traiano Boiardo, Matteo Maria Orlando Innamorato Boine, Giovanni Boito, Arrigo Boito, Camillo Bologna Bolognini, Mauro Bompiani, Ginevra Bonaviri, Giuseppe Bontempelli, Massimo Bonvesin da la Riva Book Culture Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio Borghini, Raffaello Borghini, Vincenzio Maria Bracciolini, Poggio Bracco, Roberto Brancati, Vitaliano Il bell’Antonio Bruni, Leonardo Bruno, Giordano Il Candelaio Eroici furori Bufalino, Gesualdo Diceria dell’untore Buonarroti, Michelangelo Burchiello, I1 (Domenico di Giovanni) Busi, Aldo Buzzati, Dino Il deserto dei tartari

xviii

C Calasso, Roberto Calvino, Italo I nostri antenati Le cosmicomiche Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore Camerini, Mario Camilleri, Andrea Camon, Ferdinando Campana, Dino Canti orfici Campanella, Tommaso La citta` del sole Campo, Cristina (Vittoria Guerrini) Campo, Rossana Cannibali Cantastorie. See Oral Literature Cantautori. See Songwriters Capponi, Gino Capriolo, Paola Caproni, Giorgio Capuana, Luigi Cardarelli, Vincenzo Carducci, Giosue` Rime nuove Odi barbare Caro, Annibal Carrer, Luigi Casanova, Giacomo Cassola, Carlo Castelvetro, Ludovico Castiglione, Baldassare Il libro del cortegiano Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa) Cattaneo, Carlo Cavalcanti, Guido Cavalli, Patrizia Cavani, Liliana Cavazzoni, Ermanno Cecchi, Emilio Cederna, Camilla Celati, Gianni Cellini, Benvenuto Vita Censorship Cerami, Vincenzo Cereta, Laura Ceronetti, Guido Cesarotti, Melchiorre Chiabrera, Gabriello

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Chiarelli, Luigi Children’s Literature Cialente, Fausta Cinema and Literary Writers Cino da Pistoia Classicism Cola di Rienzo Collodi, Carlo (Carlo Lorenzini) Le avventure di Pinocchio Colonial Literature Colonna, Francesco Colonna, Vittoria Comics. See Fumetti Comisso, Giovanni Commedia dell’arte Communism Compagni, Dino Compiuta Donzella Consolo, Vincenzo Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio Corazzini, Sergio Corti, Maria Courts and Patronage Crepuscolarismo Croce, Benedetto Estetica Storia del Regno di Napoli Croce, Giulio Cesare Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa

D Dance and Literature D’Annunzio, Gabriele Il fuoco La figlia di Iorio Alcyone Dante Alighieri Vita Nova De Vulgari Eloquentia Convivio Monarchia Comedı`a Commentaries Da Ponte, Lorenzo D’Arrigo, Stefano Davanzati, Chiaro D’Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli De Amicis, Edmondo Debenedetti, Giacomo Decadentismo De Ce´spedes, Alba

De Filippo, Eduardo Natale in casa Cupiello Filumena Marturano Deledda, Grazia Cenere Canne al vento Delfini, Antonio Del Giudice, Daniele Della Casa, Giovanni Galateo Della Porta, Giambattista Della Valle, Federico De Luca, Erri De Marchi, Emilio De Roberto, Federico De Sanctis, Francesco De Santis, Giuseppe De Sica, Vittorio Ladri di biciclette Dessı`, Giuseppe Detective Fiction Dialects. See Italian Language Di Giacomo, Salvatore Dolce, Ludovico Dolce stil novo Dolci, Danilo Doni, Anton Francesco Dossi, Carlo Duranti, Francesca Duse, Eleonora

E Eco, Umberto Il nome della rosa Enlightenment Epic Epistolary Novel Erba, Edoardo Erba, Luciano

F Fabbri, Diego Faldella, Giovanni Fallaci, Oriana Fantastic and Literature Farina, Salvatore Fascism and Literature Fashion and Literature xix

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Fedele, Cassandra Fellini, Federico Otto e mezzo Feminist Theory and Criticism Fenoglio, Beppe Il partigiano Johnny Ferrara Ficino, Marsilio Film Theory and Criticism Il fiore Firenzuola, Agnolo Flaiano, Ennio Florence Fo, Dario Mistero buffo Fogazzaro, Antonio Piccolo mondo antico Folengo, Teofilo (Merlin Cocai) Folgo´re da San Gimignano Folgore, Luciano (Omero Vecchi) Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi) Food, Culture of Fortini, Franco (Franco Lattes) Foscolo, Ugo Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis Dei sepolcri Fotoromanzo Frabotta, Biancamaria Francis of Assisi Franco, Veronica Frederick II of Hohenstaufen French Influences Fucini, Renato Fumetti Futurism

G Gadda, Carlo Emilio Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana La cognizione del dolore Gay Writing. See Lesbian and Gay Writing Galilei, Galileo Ga`mbara, Veronica Garboli, Cesare Gatto, Alfonso Gelli, Giovan Battista Genoa Genres Gentile, Giovanni German Influences Germi, Pietro Giacomino da Verona xx

Giacomino Pugliese Giacomo da Lentini Giacosa, Giuseppe Giallo. See Detective Fiction Giambullari, Pier Francesco Ginzburg, Natalia Le voci della sera Lessico famigliare Gioacchino da Fiore Gioberti, Vincenzo Giordani, Pietro Giovio, Paolo Giraldi, Giambattista (‘‘Il Cinzio’’) Giudici, Giovanni Giusti, Giuseppe Gobetti, Piero Goldoni, Carlo La Locandiera Il campiello I Rusteghi Govoni, Corrado Gozzano, Guido I colloqui Gozzi, Carlo Gozzi, Gasparo Graf, Arturo Gramsci, Antonio Quaderni del carcere Gravina, Gian Vincenzo Grazzini, Anton Francesco (‘‘Il Lasca’’) Grossi, Tommaso Gruppo 63. See Neo-Avant-Garde Guareschi, Giovanni Guarini, Battista Guazzo, Stefano Guerra, Tonino Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico Guglielminetti, Amalia Guicciardini, Francesco Storia d’Italia Ricordi Guidacci, Margherita Guiducci, Armanda Guinizzelli, Guido Guittone d’Arezzo

H Hermeticism Heroic-Comic Poetry Hispano Latin-American Influences Historical Novel Historiography

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Holocaust Literature Humanism

I Iacopone da Todi Imbriani, Vittorio Invernizio, Carolina Italian-American Literature Italian Language, History of the

J Jaeggy, Fleur Jahier, Pietro Joppolo, Beniamino Journalism Journals, Literary Jovine, Francesco

L La Capria, Raffaele Lagorio, Gina Landino, Cristoforo Landolfi, Tommaso Racconto d’autunno Latin, Literature in Latini, Brunetto Ledda, Gavino Leonardo da Vinci Leone Ebreo Leone, Sergio Leonetti, Francesco Leopardi, Giacomo Canti Operette morali Zibaldone di pensieri Lesbian and Gay Writing Levi, Carlo Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli Levi, Primo Se questo e` un uomo La tregua Liala (Amaliana Cambiasi Negretti) Libraries Libretto Linguistics and Philology Literary Criticism, History of Literary History Literary Prizes

Liturgical Drama Loi, Franco Longhi, Roberto Lonzi, Carla Loy, Rosetta Lucini, Gian Piero Lussu, Emilio Luzi, Mario Lyric Poetry

M Machiavelli, Niccolo` La mandragola Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio Il Principe Maffei, Scipione Mafia Maggi, Carlo Maria Magrelli, Valerio Magris, Claudio Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich Suckert) La pelle Malerba, Luigi (Luigi Bonardi) Manetti, Giannozzo Manfridi, Giuseppe Manganelli, Giorgio Mannerism and Baroque Manuscripts. See Book Culture Manzini, Gianna Manzoni, Alessandro I promessi sposi Tragedies Maraini, Dacia Donna in guerra La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a Marchesa Colombi (Maria Antonietta Torriani) Marin, Biagio Marinella, Lucrezia Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Marinisti Marino, Giovanbattista L’Adone Martoglio, Nino Masino, Paola Mastronardi, Lucio Masuccio Salernitano (Tommaso Guardati) Matraini, Chiara Contarini Mazzini, Giuseppe Medici, Lorenzo de’ Comento de’ miei sonetti Meli, Giovanni xxi

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Meneghello, Luigi Merini, Alda Metastasio, Pietro (Pietro Trapassi) Didone abbandonata Michelstaedter, Carlo Mieli, Mario Migration Literature Milan Monicelli, Mario Montale, Eugenio Tutte le poesie Monti, Vincenzo Morandini, Giuliana Morante, Elsa L’isola di Arturo La storia Moravia, Alberto Gli indifferenti Racconti romani Morazzoni, Marta Moretti, Marino Moretti, Nanni Morra, Isabella Morselli, Guido Moscato, Enzo Muraro, Luisa Muratori, Ludovico Antonio Music and Literature Music Criticism Mussato, Albertino Muzio, Girolamo

N Naples Neera (Anna Zuccari) Negri, Ada Neo-Avant-Garde Neoclassicism Neoplatonism Neorealism Niccolai, Giulia Niccolini, Giovanni Battista Nievo, Ippolito Le confessioni d’un italiano Novella Il Novellino Noventa, Giacomo (Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi)

O Ojetti, Ugo Olmi, Ermanno xxii

Onofri, Arturo Opera Oral Literature Orelli, Giorgio Oriani, Alfredo Ortese, Anna Maria Il mare non bagna Napoli L’iguana Ottieri, Ottiero Oxilia, Nino (Sandro Camasio)

P Pagliarani, Elio Palazzeschi, Aldo Il codice di Perela` Palermo Panzini, Alfredo Paolini, Marco Papini, Giovanni Parini, Giuseppe Il giorno Parise, Goffredo Sillabari Pascarella, Cesare Pascoli, Giovanni Myricae Canti di Castelvecchio Pasolini, Pier Paolo Ragazzi di vita Le ceneri di Gramsci Una vita violenta Cinema Passavanti, Jacopo Pastoral Pavese, Cesare Lavorare stanca Dialoghi con Leuco` La luna e i falo` Pazzi, Roberto Pea, Enrico Pellico, Silvio Penna, Sandro Percoto, Caterina Petito, Antonio Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) Canzoniere Triumphi Latin Works Commentaries Petrarchism Petrignani, Sandra Petroni, Guglielmo

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Philosophy and Literature Photography Piccolo, Lucio Piccolomini, Enea Silvio (Pius II) Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni Pier delle Vigne Pierro, Albino Pindemonte, Ippolito Piovene, Guido Pirandello, Luigi Il fu Mattia Pascal Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore I giganti della montagna Novelle per un anno Poliziano, Angelo Stanze Fabula di Orpheo Pomilio, Mario Pontano, Giovanni Pontecorvo, Gillo Pontiggia, Giuseppe Popular Culture and Literature Porta, Antonio (Leo Paolazzi) Porta, Carlo Pozzi, Antonia Praga, Emilio Praga, Marco Pratolini, Vasco Praz, Mario Pressburger, Giorgio Prezzolini, Giuseppe Printing and Publishing Psychoanalysis and Literature Pulci, Antonia (Antonia Tanini) Pulci, Luigi Il Morgante Puppa, Paolo

Ramat, Silvio Rame, Franca Ramondino, Fabrizia Rasy, Elisabetta Ravera, Lidia Rea, Domenico Rebora, Clemente Redi, Francesco Regional Literature Religion and Literature Renaissance Re`paci, Leonida Resistance, Literature of the Rigoni Stern, Mario Risi, Dino Risi, Nelo Risorgimento Romano, Lalla Romanticism Romanzo rosa Rome Rosi, Francesco Salvatore Giuliano Rossanda, Rossana Rosselli, Amelia Rossellini, Roberto Roma, citta` aperta Rosso di San Secondo, Pier Maria Marionette che passione! Rovani, Giuseppe Roversi, Roberto Rovetta, Gerolamo Russian Influences Rustico di Filippo (Rustico Filippi) Ruzzante, I1 (Angelo Beolco) La Moscheta

S Q Quasimodo, Salvatore Lirici greci Ed e` subito sera Questione della lingua. See Linguistics Questione meridionale

R Raboni, Giovanni Ragazzoni, Ernesto

Saba, Umberto (Umberto Poli) Il canzoniere Sacchetti, Franco Sacra rappresentazione Salgari, Emilio Salimbene da Parma (Ognibene de Adam) Salons, Literary Salutati, Coluccio Salvatores, Gabriele Salvemini, Gaetano Salviati, Lionardo Sanguineti, Edoardo Laborintus xxiii

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES Sannazaro, Jacopo Arcadia Sanvitale, Francesca Sarfatti, Margherita Sarpi, Paolo Satta, Salvatore Savinio, Alberto (Andrea De Chirico) Savonarola, Girolamo Sbarbaro, Camillo Scapigliatura Scarpetta, Eduardo Scholasticism Sciascia, Leonardo Il giorno della civetta L’affaire Moro Science and Literature Science Fiction Scola, Ettore Scotellaro, Rocco Screenwriters Serafino Aquilano (Serafino de’ Ciminelli) Serao, Matilde Sercambi, Giovanni Sereni, Clara Sereni, Vittorio Gli Strumenti umani Serra, Renato Settembrini, Luigi Sgorlon, Carlo Sicilian School of Poetry Silone, Ignazio (Secondino Tranquilli) Fontamara Simoni, Renato Sinisgalli, Leonardo Sla`taper, Scipio Socialism Soffici, Ardengo Soldati, Mario Solmi, Sergio Sommi, Leone de’ Songwriters Southern Question. See Questione Meridionale Spaziani, Maria Luisa Speroni, Sperone Sports Writing Stage Directing Stampa, Gaspara Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi Stu´parich, Giani Svevo, Italo (Aron Hector Schmitz) Una vita Senilita` La coscienza di Zeno xxiv

T Tabucchi, Antonio Notturno indiano Tamaro, Susanna Tansillo, Luigi Tarabotti, Arcangela (Galerana Baratotti) Tarantino, Antonio Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo Tarozzi, Bianca Tasso, Bernardo Tasso, Torquato Aminta Gerusalemma liberata Dialoghi Tassoni, Alessandro Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio Teatro Grottesco Tecchi, Bonaventura Technology and Literature Television Terracina, Laura Terrorism Tessa, Delio Testori, Giovanni Tiraboschi, Girolamo Tobino, Mario Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomizza, Fulvio Tommaseo, Niccolo` Tondelli, Pier Vittorio Tornabuoni, Lucrezia Tornatore, Giuseppe Toto` (Antonio De Curtis) Tozzi, Federigo Con gli occhi chiusi Tre croci Translation Travel Literature Trieste Trilussa (Carlo Alberto Salustri) Trissino, Gian Giorgio Tullia d’Aragona Turin Turoldo, David Maria

U Ungaretti, Giuseppe L’allegria Sentimento del tempo Universities Utopian Literature

ALPHABETICAL LIST OF ENTRIES

V Valduga, Patrizia Valeri, Diego Valla, Lorenzo Varchi, Benedetto Variety Theatre Vasari, Giorgio Vassalli, Sebastiano Venice Verga, Giovanni I Malavoglia Mastro-Don Gesualdo Novelle Verismo Veronesi, Sandro Verri, Alessandro Verri, Pietro Vico, Giambattista Principi di Scienza nuova Vigano`, Renata Villani, Giovanni Vinci, Simona Visconti, Luchino La terra trema

Visual Arts, Literature and Vittorini, Elio Conversazione in Sicilia Uomini e no Vivanti, Annie Viviani, Raffaele Volponi, Paolo Memoriale

W Wertmu¨ller, Lina Women’s History World War I, Literature of World War II, Literature of

Z Zanella, Giacomo Zanzotto, Andrea Il galateo in bosco Zavattini, Cesare Zeffirelli, Franco

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THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Overviews

French Influences Fumetti Futurism Genoa Genres German Influences Hermeticism Heroic-Comic Poetry Hispano Latin-American Influences Historical Novel Historiography Holocaust Literature Humanism Italian Language, History of the Italian-American Literature Journalism Journals, Literary Latin, Literature in Lesbian and Gay Writing Libraries Libretto Linguistics and Philology Literary Criticism, History of Literary History Literary Prizes Liturgical Drama Lyric Poetry Mafia Mannerism and Baroque Marinisti Migration Literature Milan Music and Literature Music Criticism Naples Neo-Avant-Garde Neoclassicism Neoplatonism Neorealism Novella Opera

Academies Anglo-American Influences Animation Anthropology, Literature of Arcadia (Accademia) Architecture, Literature of Art Criticism Autobiography Bestiaries Biography Bologna Book Culture Cannibali Censorship Children’s Literature Cinema and Literary Writers Cinema (Pasolini) Classicism Colonial Literature Commedia dell’arte Communism Courts and Patronage Crepuscolarismo Dance and Literature Decadentismo Detective Fiction Dolce Stil Novo Enlightenment Epic Epistolary Novel Fantastic and Literature Fascism and Literature Fashion and Literature Feminist Theory and Criticism Ferrara Film Theory and Criticism Florence Food, Culture of Fotoromanzo xxvii

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Oral Literature Palermo Pastoral Petrarchism Philosophy and Literature Photography Popular Culture and Literature Printing and Publishing Psychoanalysis and Literature Questione meridionale Regional Literature Religion and Literature Renaissance Resistance, Literature of the Risorgimento Romanticism Romanzo rosa Rome Russian Influences Sacra rappresentazione Salons, Literary Scapigliatura Scholasticism Science and Literature Science Fiction Screenwriters Sicilian School of Poetry Socialism Songwriters Sports Writing Stage Directing Teatro Grottesco Technology and Literature Television Terrorism Translation Travel Writing Trieste Turin Universities Utopian Literature Variety Theatre Venice Verismo Visual Arts, Literature and Women’s History World War I, Literature of World War II, Literature of

Persons Aganoor Pompilj, Vittoria Alberti, Leon Battista xxviii

Alciato, Andrea Aleardi, Aleardo Aleramo, Sibilla (Rina Faccio) Alfieri, Vittorio Algarotti, Francesco Alvaro, Corrado Amelio, Gianni Ammaniti, Niccolo` Andreini, Giovan Battista Andreini, Isabella Canali Angela da Foligno Angiolieri, Cecco Antonioni, Michelangelo Arbasino, Alberto Archibugi, Francesca Aretino, Pietro Ariosto, Ludovico Arpino, Giovanni Artusi, Pellegrino Bacchelli, Riccardo Balestrini, Nanni Bandello, Matteo Banti, Anna (Lucia Lopresti) Barbaro, Ermolao (The Younger) Baretti, Giuseppe Baricco, Alessandro Bartoli, Daniello Basile, Giambattista Bassani, Giorgio Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura Beccaria, Cesare Belcari, Feo Belgioioso, Cristina di (Alberica Trivulzio) Bellezza, Dario Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino Bellocchio, Marco Bellonci Villavecchia, Maria Bembo, Pietro Bene, Carmelo Benelli, Sem Beni, Paolo Benigni, Roberto Benni, Stefano Berchet, Giovanni Bernari, Carlo (Carlo Bernard) Berni, Francesco Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Berto, Giuseppe Bertolazzi, Carlo Bertolucci, Attilio Bertolucci, Bernardo Betocchi, Carlo Betti, Ugo Bettinelli, Saverio

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Bevilacqua, Alberto Bianchini, Angela Bianciardi, Luciano Bibbiena, Il (Bernardo Dovizi) Bigiaretti, Libero Bigongiari, Piero Bilenchi, Romano Biondo, Flavio Blasetti, Alessandro Boccaccio, Giovanni Boccalini, Traiano Boiardo, Matteo Maria Boine, Giovanni Boito, Arrigo Boito, Camillo Bolognini, Mauro Bompiani, Ginevra Bonaviri, Giuseppe Bontempelli, Massimo Bonvesin de la Riva Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio Borghini, Raffaello Borghini, Vincenzio Maria Bracciolini, Poggio Bracco, Roberto Brancati, Vitaliano Bruni, Leonardo Bruno, Giordano Bufalino, Gesualdo Buonarroti, Michelangelo Burchiello, Il (Domenico di Giovanni) Busi, Aldo Buzzati, Dino Calasso, Roberto Calvino, Italo Camerini, Mario Camilleri, Andrea Camon, Ferdinando Campana, Dino Campanella, Tommaso Campo, Cristina (Vittoria Guerrini) Campo, Rossana Capponi, Gino Capriolo, Paola Caproni, Giorgio Capuana, Luigi Cardarelli, Vincenzo Carducci, Giosue` Caro, Annibal Carrer, Luigi Casanova, Giacomo Cassola, Carlo Castelvetro, Ludovico Castiglione, Baldassare

Catherine of Siena (Caterina Benincasa) Cattaneo, Carlo Cavalcanti, Guido Cavalli, Patrizia Cavani, Liliana Cavazzoni, Ermanno Cecchi, Emilio Cederna, Camilla Celati, Gianni Cellini, Benvenuto Cerami, Vincenzo Cereta, Laura Ceronetti, Guido Cesarotti, Melchiorre Chiabrera, Gabriello Chiarelli, Luigi Cialente, Fausta Cino da Pistoia Cola di Rienzo Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini) Colonna, Francesco Colonna, Vittoria Comisso, Giovanni Compagni, Dino Compiuta Donzella Consolo, Vincenzo Corazzini, Sergio Corti, Maria Croce, Benedetto Croce, Giulio Cesare Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa D’Arrigo, Stefano Da Ponte, Lorenzo D’Annunzio, Gabriele Dante Alighieri Davanzati, Chiaro D’Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli De Amicis, Edmondo Debenedetti, Giacomo De Ce´spedes, Alba De Filippo, Eduardo Deledda, Grazia Delfini, Antonio Del Giudice, Daniele Della Casa, Giovanni Della Porta, Giambattista Della Valle, Federico De Luca, Erri De Marchi, Emilio De Roberto, Federico De Sanctis, Francesco De Santis, Giuseppe De Sica, Vittorio Dessı`, Giuseppe xxix

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Di Giacomo, Salvatore Dolce, Ludovico Dolci, Danilo Doni, Anton Francesco Dossi, Carlo Duranti, Francesca Duse, Eleonora Eco, Umberto Erba, Edoardo Erba, Luciano Fabbri, Diego Faldella, Giovanni Fallaci, Oriana Farina, Salvatore Fedele, Cassandra Fellini, Federico Fenoglio, Beppe Ficino, Marsilio Firenzuola, Agnolo Flaiano, Ennio Fo, Dario Fogazzaro, Antonio Folengo, Teofilo (Merlin Cocai) Folgo´re da San Gimignano Folgore, Luciano (Omero Vecchi) Fonte, Moderata (Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi) Fortini, Franco (Franco Lattes) Foscolo, Ugo Frabotta, Biancamaria Francis of Assisi Franco, Veronica Frederick II of Hohenstaufen Fucini, Renato Gadda, Carlo Emilio Galilei, Galileo Ga`mbara, Veronica Garboli, Cesare Gatto, Alfonso Gelli, Giovan Battista Gentile, Giovanni Germi, Pietro Giacomino da Verona Giacomino Pugliese Giacomo da Lentini Giacosa, Giuseppe Giambullari, Pier Francesco Ginzburg, Natalia Gioacchino da Fiore Gioberti, Vincenzo Giordani, Pietro Giovio, Paolo Giraldi, Giambattista (‘‘Il Cinzio’’) Giudici, Giovanni Giusti, Giuseppe xxx

Gobetti, Piero Goldoni, Carlo Govoni, Corrado Gozzano, Guido Gozzi, Carlo Gozzi, Gasparo Graf, Arturo Gramsci, Antonio Gravina, Gian Vincenzo Grazzini, Anton Francesco (‘‘Il Lasca’’) Grossi, Tommaso Guareschi, Giovanni Guarini, Battista Guazzo, Stefano Guerra, Tonino Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico Guglielminetti, Amalia Guicciardini, Francesco Guidacci, Margherita Guiducci, Armanda Guinizzelli, Guido Guittone d’Arezzo Iacopone da Todi Imbriani, Vittorio Invernizio, Carolina Jaeggy, Fleur Jahier, Piero Joppolo, Beniamino Jovine, Francesco La Capria, Raffaele Lagorio, Gina Landino, Cristoforo Landolfi, Tommaso Latini, Brunetto Ledda, Gavino Leonardo da Vinci Leone Ebreo Leone, Sergio Leonetti, Francesco Leopardi, Giacomo Levi, Carlo Levi, Primo Liala (Amaliana Cambiasi Negretti) Loi, Franco Longhi, Roberto Lonzi, Carla Loy, Rosetta Lucini, Gian Piero Lussu, Emilio Luzi, Mario Machiavelli, Niccolo` Maffei, Scipione Maggi, Carlo Maria Magrelli, Valerio

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Magris, Claudio Malaparte, Curzio (Kurt Erich Suckert) Malerba (Luigi Bonardi) Manetti, Giannozzo Manfridi, Giuseppe Manganelli, Giorgio Manzini, Gianna Manzoni, Alessandro Maraini, Dacia Marchesa Colombi (Maria Antonietta Torriani) Marin, Biagio Marinella, Lucrezia Marinetti, F. T. Marino, Giovanbattista Martoglio, Nino Masino, Paola Mastronardi, Lucio Masuccio Salernitano (Tommaso Guardati) Matastasio, Pietro (Pietro Trapassi) Matraini, Chiara Contarini Mazzini, Giuseppe Medici, Lorenzo de’ Meli, Giovanni Meneghello, Luigi Merini, Alda Metastasio, Pietro Michelstaedter, Carlo Mieli, Mario Monicelli, Mario Montale, Eugenio Monti, Vincenzo Morandini, Giuliana Morante, Elsa Moravia, Alberto Morazzoni, Marta Moretti, Marino Moretti, Nanni Morra, Isabella Morselli, Guido Moscato, Enzo Muraro, Luisa Muratori, Ludovico A. Mussato, Albertino Muzio, Girolamo Neera (Anna Zuccari) Negri, Ada Niccolai, Giulia Niccolini, Giovanni Battista Nievo, Ippolito Noventa, Giacomo (Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi) Ojetti, Ugo Olmi, Ermanno Onofri, Arturo Orelli, Giorgio

Oriani, Alfredo Ortese, Anna Maria Ottieri, Ottiero Oxilia, Nino (Sandro Camasio) Pagliarani, Elio Palazzeschi, Aldo Panzini, Alfredo Paolini, Marco Papini, Giovanni Parini, Giuseppe Parise, Goffredo Pascarella, Cesare Pascoli, Giovanni Pasolini, Pier Paolo Passavanti, Jacopo Pavese, Cesare Pazzi, Roberto Pea, Enrico Pellico, Silvio Penna, Sandro Percoto, Caterina Petito, Antonio Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) Petrignani, Sandra Petroni, Guglielmo Piccolo, Lucio Piccolomini, Enea Silvio Pico Della Mirandola, Giovanni Pier delle Vigne Pierro, Albino Pindemonte, Ippolito Piovene, Guido Pirandello, Luigi Poliziano (Angelo Ambrogini) Pomilio, Mario Pontano, Giovanni Pontecorvo, Gillo Pontiggia, Giuseppe Porta, Antonio (Leo Paolazzi) Porta, Carlo Pozzi, Antonia Praga, Emilio Praga, Marco Pratolini, Vasco Praz, Mario Pressburger, Giorgio Prezzolini, Giuseppe Pugliese, Giacomino Pulci, Antonia (Antonia Tanini) Pulci, Luigi Puppa, Paolo Quasimodo, Salvatore Raboni, Giovanni Ragazzoni, Ernesto xxxi

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Ramat, Silvio Rame, Franca Ramondino, Fabrizia Rasy, Elisabetta Ravera, Lidia Rea, Domenico Rebora, Clemente Redi, Francesco Re`paci, Leonida Rigoni Stern, Mario Risi, Dino Risi, Nelo Romano, Lalla Rosi, Francesco Rossanda, Rossana Rosselli, Amelia Rossellini, Roberto Rosso di San Secondo, Pier Maria Rovani, Giuseppe Roversi, Roberto Rovetta, Gerolamo Rustico di Filippo (Rustico Filippi) Ruzzante, Il (Angelo Beolco) Saba, Umberto (Umberto Poli) Sacchetti, Franco Salgari, Emilio Salimbene da Parma (Ognibene de Adam) Salutati, Coluccio Salvatores, Gabriele Salvemini, Gaetano Salviati, Lionardo Sanguineti, Edoardo Sannazaro, Jacopo Sanvitale, Francesca Sarfatti, Margherita Sarpi, Paolo Satta, Salvatore Savinio, Alberto (Andrea De Chirico) Savonarola, Girolamo Sbarbaro, Camillo Scarpetta, Eduardo Sciascia, Leonardo Scola, Ettore Scotellaro, Rocco Serafino Aquilano (Serafino de’ Ciminelli) Serao, Matilde Sercambi, Giovanni Sereni, Clara Sereni, Vittorio Serra, Renato Settembrini, Luigi Sgorlon, Carlo Silone, Ignazio (Secondino Tranquilli) Simoni, Renato xxxii

Sinisgalli, Leonardo Sla`taper, Scipio Soffici, Ardengo Soldati, Mario Solmi, Sergio Sommi, Leone de’ Spaziani, Maria Luisa Speroni, Sperone Stampa, Gaspara Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi Stu´parich, Giani Svevo, Italo (Aron Hector Schmitz) Tabucchi, Antonio Tamaro, Susanna Tansillo, Luigi Tarabotti (Galerana Baratotti) Tarantino, Antonio Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo Tarozzi, Bianca Tasso, Bernardo Tasso, Torquato Tassoni, Alessandro Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio Tecchi, Bonaventura Terracina, Laura Tessa, Delio Testori, Giovanni Tiraboschi, Girolamo Tobino, Mario Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe Tomizza, Fulvio Tommaseo, Niccolo` Tondelli, Pier Vittorio Tornabuoni, Lucrezia Tornatore, Giuseppe Toto` (Antonio De Curtis) Tozzi, Federigo Trilussa (Carlo Alberto Salustri) Trissino, Gian Giorgio Tullia D’Aragona Turoldo, David Maria Ungaretti, Giuseppe Valduga, Patrizia Valeri, Diego Valla, Lorenzo Varchi, Benedetto Vasari, Giorgio Vassalli, Sebastiano Verga, Giovanni Veronesi, Sandro Verri, Alessandro Verri, Pietro Vico, Giambattista Vigano`, Renata

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Villani, Giovanni Vinci, Simona Visconti, Luchino Vittorini, Elio Vivanti, Annie Viviani, Raffaele Volponi, Paolo Wertmu¨ller, Lina Zanella, Giacomo Zanzotto, Andrea Zavattini, Cesare Zeffirelli, Franco

Works Adone, L’ (Adonis) Affaire Moro, L’ Alcyone (Halcyon) Allegria, L’ Aminta Arcadia Asolani, gli Avventura, L’ Avventure di Pinocchio, Le (The Adventures of Pinocchio) Bell’Antonio, Il Campiello, Il Candelaio, Il (The Candle-Bearer) Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind) Canti Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs of Castelvecchio) Canti orfici (Orphic Songs) Canzoniere Canzoniere, Il (The Songbook) Cenere (Ashes) Ceneri di Gramsci, Le (The Ashes of Gramsci) Cinque Canti (Cantos) Citta` del sole, La (City of the Sun) Codice di Perela`, Il (Man of Smoke) Cognizione del dolore, La (Acquainted with Grief) Colloqui, I (Colloquies) Comedia (The Divine Comedy) Comedies (Ariosto) Comento de’ miei sonetti (Autobiography) Commentaries Con gli occhi chiusi (Eyes Shut) Confessioni d’un italiano, Le Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily) Convivio (The Banquet) Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia (Corruption at the Courthouse) Cortegiano, Il (The Book of the Courtier) Cortigiana, La (The Courtesan)

Coscienza di Zeno, La (Confessions of Zeno) Cosmicomiche, Le (Cosmicomics) Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli) De Vulgari Eloquentia Decameron Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres) Delitto all’Isola delle Capre (Crime on Goat Island) Deserto dei tartari, Il (The Tartar Steppe) Dialoghi (Dialogues) Dialoghi con Leuco` (Dialogues with Leuco`) Diceria dell’untore (The Plague-Sower) Didone abbandonata Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio Donna in guerra (Woman at War) Donna, Una (A Woman) Ed e` subito sera (And Suddenly It Is Evening) Eroici furori Estetica Fabula di Orfeo (Orpheus) Figlia di Iorio, La (The Daughter of Iorio) Filocolo Filostrato Filumena Marturano Fiore, Il Fontamara Fu Mattia Pascal, Il (The Late Mattia Pascal) Fuoco, Il Galateo (A Renaissance Courtesy-Book) Galateo in bosco, Il Gerusalemma liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Il (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) Giganti della montagna, I (Mountain Giants) Giorno della civetta, Il (Mafia Vendetta) Giorno, Il (The Day) Iguana, L’ (The Iguana) Indifferenti, Gli (The Time of Indifference) Isola di Arturo, L’ (Arturo’s Island) Laborintus Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) Latin Works (Boccaccio) Latin Works (Petrarch) Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor) Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings) Lirici greci (Greek Poets) Locandiera, La (Mirandolina) Luna e i falo`, La (The Moon and the Bonfires) Lunga vita di Marianna Ucria, La (The Silent Duchess) Malavoglia, I (The House by the Medlar Tree) Mandragola, La (The Mandrake) Mare non bagna Napoli, Il (The Bay Is Not Naples) xxxiii

THEMATIC LIST OF ENTRIES Marionette che passione! (Puppets of Passion) Mastro-Don Gesualdo Memoriale (My Troubles Began) Mirra (Myrrha) Mistero Buffo (Comic Mysteries) Monarchia (On World Government) Morgante, Il Moscheta, La Myricae Natale in casa Cupiello (The Nativity Scene) Nome della rosa, Il (The Name of the Rose) Nostri antenati, I (Our Ancestors) Notturno indiano (Indian Nocturne) Novelle (Bandello) Novelle (Verga) Novelle per un anno Novellino, Il Odi barbare (Ancient Odes) Operette morali (The Moral Essays) Orlando Furioso Orlando Innamorato Otto e mezzo (8 1/2) Partigiano Johnny, Il (Johnny, the Partisan) Pelle, La (The Skin) Piccolo mondo antico (Little World of the Past) Principe, Il (The Prince) Principi di scienza nuova (The New Science of Giambattista Vico) Promessi sposi, I (The Betrothed) Prose della volgar lingua (Writings in the Vernacular Language) Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio) Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana) Racconti romani (Roman Tales) Racconto d’autunno Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi) Ragionamenti (Dialogues)

xxxiv

Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman) Rime nuove (New Lyrics) Roma, citta` aperta (Open City) Rusteghi, I (The Rusteghi) Salvatore Giuliano Satire (Ariosto) Saul Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is a Man) Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) Senilita` (As a Man Grows Older) Sentimento del tempo (Feeling for Time) Sillabari Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio, Il (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner) Stanze Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) Storia del Regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples) Storia, La (History: A Novel) Strumenti umani, Gli Terra Trema, La (The Earth Trembles) Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia Tragedies (Manzoni) Tre croci (Three Crosses) Tregua, La (The Truce) Triumphi, I (Triumphs) Tutte le poesie (Collected Poems) Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) Uomini e no (Men and Not Men) Vita (Autobiography) Vita nova (The New Life) Vita violenta, Una (A Violent Life) Vita, Una (A Life) Voci della sera, Le (Voices in the Evening) Zibaldone di pensieri (Pensieri)

INTRODUCTION

Altogether, this encyclopedia contains 591 critically substantial entries. Embracing the whole of Italian literature from the thirteenth century to the present, it presents the notion of modernity and critical approaches that have a cultural, aesthetic, or socio-historical dimension. Thus, unlike similar and more narrowly defined literary reference works, which strictly limit the selection of authors and fields to "major" figures, or which offer essentially introductory descriptions, this encyclopedia contains a wide variety of approaches that defines Italian studies both in Italy and in the Anglo-American critical and scholarly communities. Any project of this kind, no matter how broad its scope, cannot be exhaustive or all-inclusive. Italian literature is a universe in constant expansion; as it continues to develop in a number of vital directions, the number of subjects, as well as their variety, proliferate also. We have tried in our selection of authors, works, and movements to represent fully the traditional literary canon, but also to pay special attention to contemporary culture and literature, women’s voices, theatre, philosophical and historical writing, and similar topics of interdisciplinary interest. We are especially pleased to present in these pages those writers and subjects that traditionally have been neglected or overlooked by critics because they did not seem to meet the standards associated with the traditional literary canon of the traditional literary establishment. Importantly, in addition to covering hundreds of writers and their works, the encyclopedia also gives broad and generous representation to genres and literary fields to encompass the rich variety of literary expression in the Italian language. Articles focusing on authors describe an individual’s contribution to Italian literature and culture and are followed by detailed examinations of specific works that require greater attention. Ample space is devoted to canonical figures from Dante, Petrarca, Boccaccio, Ariosto, Bruno, Metastasio,

The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is the first comprehensive reference work on Italian literature and culture to be published in English that offers a synoptic overview of the present state of the field through a wide array of critical perspectives. Although there are some notable dictionaries and literary companions that contain useful biographical and cultural information on Italian authors and their works, there is currently no encyclopedia that informs readers about Italian literature—its writers, its various schools and styles, movements, critical traditions, and historical contexts—in a series of substantive essays that describe and analyze the importance of the subject for students and scholars of Italian literature. This encyclopedia honors the figures and the legacy of canonical Italian literature, while also accommodating new developments in genre, media, and interdisciplinary writing, in its survey of the many forms literary creativity has taken over time, and of the various critical approaches by which this creativity might be understood. In our choices, we have been guided by the principles of representativeness and inclusiveness. As a result, the reader will find a broad and eclectic array of critical perspectives in the presentation of writers, individual works, literary movements, literary critics and critical schools, and more general literary topics. To realize this complex research project, we have enlisted the help and expertise of many scholars and critics. The Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies represents the authoritative work of 221 scholars and critics from Italy, Europe, and the Anglo-American countries. These contributors share the responsibility of providing expert evaluations of their subjects, which represent the current state of research in their designated fields. The editorial team has worked to eliminate possible overlaps and inconsistencies among individual entries, but it has not attempted to enforce uniformity of style or to dictate a single critical approach. xxxv

INTRODUCTION and Goldoni to Montale, Quasimodo, Calvino, Morante, and Primo Levi and lesser known figures outside the specialized areas such as Laura Ammanati Battiferri, Andrea Alciato, Antonio Petito, Luigi Meneghello, Bianca Tarozzi, and Franco Loi. Individual essays provide a comprehensive analytical framework placing authors in their historical and cultural contexts, including information about critical reception and important scholarship. Thematic essays comment on national, regional, intellectual, gender, and artistic traditions. The inclusion of these far-ranging essays will give those who consult these pages—whether generalist or specialist—a fuller as well as better understanding of the multiple and overlapping contexts which Italian literature reflects and out of which it emerged. These thematic entries thus serve two main purposes: to introduce the reader to Italian literary history and to provide information on writers or groups of writers who do not have individual entries in the encyclopedia. In addition, the entries on women writers, artist-writers, and filmmakers will give readers a sense of the artistic affinities and collaborations that more conventional literary histories, dominated by the example of canonical authors, have often completely overlooked. In recent times, there has been an attempt to re-write the literary and cultural history of Italy. New fields of study have emerged; many figures have been re-evaluated, others have been discovered. Cultural globalization has led to a different distribution of authors and movements across the literary and cultural landscape. Thus we have included a number of authors who traditionally were relegated to more specialized or less visible fields but who today have become familiar names due to international exposure and translation of their works (Arbasino, Cerami, Moscato). While acknowledging the rapidly expanding horizons of contemporary literary criticism and working to ensure that the discoveries and rediscoveries of scholars and critics have been included, we also kept in mind authors unanimously recognized as dominant figures and shapers of the Italian literary tradition and its contemporary offshoots in regional studies, gender studies, film, and other media. Our board of editorial advisors, selected to represent the broadest spectrum of diversified literary and ideological backgrounds, voted on the inclusion of particular authors, works, and topics; they also provided many creative suggestions. The encyclopedia reflects this collaborative approach xxxvi

within and between various fields and so provides a sensible solution for negotiating the conflicting demands of various specialized groups. In setting the categories representing our thematic entries, we chose topics that would group together writers with more specialized, often extra-literary concerns, authors who could beneficially be studied together (Castellani in sacra rappresentazione, Magalotti in science, or Montanelli in journalism). On the other hand, women authors, who have historically been relegated to ‘‘period’’ or group histories, are represented by individual entries rather than under the general rubric of ‘‘women writers.’’ Filmmakers were selected because of their relation to literature, because of the nature and scope of their literary adaptations, or because of their connections to literary and cultural trends, not because of their place or importance in the history of Italian or world cinema. We have also included essays that address innovative tendencies in the field, treating such topics as feminist theory, lesbian and gay writing, migration literature, Holocaust literature, fashion, television, technology, terrorism, and photography that represent the complexity of Italian studies today. These recent developments have not been included at the expense of more traditional topics, such as Neoplatonism, linguistics and philology, or genres. Cities, like Rome, are included only if they have given birth to and are associated with major cultural and literary traditions. Without pretending to cover every author, work, and cultural development, the Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies is both informative and critical. It is a significant reference source that provides both a rich description of tradition and a useful account of more recent literary and multicultural developments. Although we assume most readers may have some previous knowledge of Italian literature and culture, we also serve the needs of a wider audience by translating all passages cited in Italian and clarifying words, including titles, that are idiomatic or obscure. Criticism is normally quoted only in English. Titles of Italian works are followed by their date of publication and a translation of the title in parentheses. Wherever possible, we have adopted and cited known published translations. We have also noted the date of composition of works whose publication was delayed and provided the date of first performances of theatrical pieces. The Further Readings section appended to each entry is designed both to elucidate the critical approach of each essay and to reflect the current state of international scholarship in the field.

INTRODUCTION This encyclopedia represents a unique international venture. We hope its readers share our enthusiasm and appreciate the efforts of its many contributing scholars. Most importantly, we trust that general readers as well as students and specialists will benefit from a work in which they can learn about writers and movements enshrined in the traditional literary canon, but also satisfy their interest in those less canonical or more recent figures whose contributions to Italian literature and culture, both classical and contemporary, deserve to be recognized.

How to Use This Book Entries in the encyclopedia are of three main types (authors, works, and topics) and are arranged alphabetically, as listed in the Alphabetical List of Entries in the front matter of each volume. Because entries devoted to individual works or groups of related works by the same author follow immediately after and as part of the author’s entry, a separate Alphabetical List of Works is also provided in the front matter of each volume. Within the works entries for a given author, these entries are listed alphabetically where appropriate. For critical cohesion, entries on authors and their respective works are written by the same contributor. In the case of those authors who are primarily remembered for one specific production (e.g., Belli and his Sonetti romaneschi), the contributing scholar may have opted to discuss the work within the context of the author entry. Each of the three main types of entry consists of a critical essay followed by a Further Reading list. In addition, author entries contain a short intellectual Biography and a Selected Works section, and entries on specific works include an Editions section, in which bibliographical information for the first editions, selected critical editions, and selected translations is provided. In the encyclopedia, the first time a work is referred to in an essay, the first date of publication (or date of composition if publication was delayed) and an English translation of the title are given in parentheses. Wherever a translation has been published, the translation title has been selected, even if it is not a literal one. As for filmographies, titles of films are provided in translations only for worldwide English releases. With regard to biographical information, we provide a full disclosure of major events and dates whenever possible. For contemporary

authors we opted to respect their privacy, if so requested. For ease of use, cross references in the form of Blind Entries and See Alsos are provided, as is a thorough analytical Index. The blind entries direct readers to an entry that is listed under a different word or spelling. At the end of many entries, there are See Also listings, which refer the reader to entries on related topics. These have been kept to a meaningful minimum. The Index includes authors, works, and topics found throughout the encyclopedia. This index is particularly useful for locating references to individuals, works, and topics that do not have entries of their own. For the user’s convenience, an index appears in each volume of this Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies.

Acknowledgments From its inception, the Encyclopedia of Italian Literary Studies was envisioned as an intellectual journey, not a mere compilation manual. For first commissioning me to undertake the encyclopedia and making me believe in the feasibility of such a challenging long-term project, I wish to thank Lorraine Murray. At Routledge, I am most indebted to Kate Aker, director of development, and Mark Georgiev, editor, who have guided me in every way and at every stage of this publication. For their assistance and support I am most grateful. This project would not have been possible without the help of Paolo Puppa and Luca Somigli; the co-editors, Maria DiBattista, Jennifer Lorch, Cormac O’Cuilleanain, and Edoardo Saccone; and our extraordinary editorial Advisory Board. I would especially like to express my appreciation to Albert Ascoli, Guido Bonsaver, Gian Piero Brunetta, Peter Carravetta, Victoria Kirkham, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Letizia Panizza, Lino Pertile, Olga Pugliese, Lucia Re, and Anthony Tamburri for their assistance on various occasions, supervising entries and providing critical advice during the last phase of this project. I want also to thank Letizia Allais, Marina Petrova, and Thomas Rothenbach for their help at various stages, and also Barbara Garbin and Simone Marchesi, who also assisted in the editorial work. I would like to express my appreciation to Princeton University for providing me with a generous editorial research grant. To Daniel Seidel, Elena Past, Nicholas Albanese, and Ileana Drinovan, who have been devoted and tireless translators and editors on this project, I am indebted more than I can say. xxxvii

INTRODUCTION Maria DiBattista, Luca Somigli, and Jennifer Lorch especially worked tirelessly for many months to keep us on schedule. I would also like to acknowledge the many distinguished contributors who responded with enthusiasm to our invitation and who have remarkably shaped this encyclopedia in an international cooperative venture. Finally,

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the editors would like to record their sadness at the passings of our advisor Robert Dombroski and of contributor Nella Giannetto only days after completing her entry on Dino Buzzati. Gaetana Marrone Professor of Italian, Princeton University

A ABECEDARY See Sillabari (Work by Goffedo Parise)

ACADEMIES The first Renaissance academies were selfconsciously modeled on ancient examples of the coterie. Consistent with this allegiance to antiquity, these academies sought to recover a notion of knowledge, achieved mainly through dialogue, as the supreme value of human life, and their program of learning was eclectic, even encyclopedic. Among the most renowned early gatherings are those that flowered in fifteenth-century Naples, Rome, Florence, and Venice. These assemblies were similar to the academies, properly so-called, and have long been labeled so by historians. Recent criticism has convincingly argued, however, that they were distinct, more informal in organization, and less structured than the later academies. The term academia was used in the 1400s with various connotations loosely connected to the school of Plato and to Cicero’s practice and writings. It did not convey the idea of a fixed institution, with rules, a governing structure, membership, and a signature style or cultural program. For instance, in 1463 Marsilio

The academy is an Italian cultural institution of great historical significance. It originated in the early cinquecento in various Italian city-states, from Rome to provincial towns like Siena, rapidly taking hold with effects that reverberated throughout Europe. In simple terms, an academy was conceived as a place where humanists could gather and hold learned discussions, and these scholarly congregations provided the first blueprint and rules of order for many later scientific, artistic, and ecclesiastical organizations. Going through a chain of transformations, this seminal phenomenon reached its peak of importance and prestige in the 1600s, but its influence extended well into the nineteenth century. In their various forms, academies permeated much of the Italian peninsula, touching even smaller courts and municipalities. Notwithstanding this wide-reaching influence, most academies were unstable, ephemeral assemblies of individuals, sometimes at the mercy of politics. Many closed within a couple of years of being established. 1

ACADEMIES Ficino (1433–1499), under the aegis of Cosimo de’ Medici, purportedly established a Platonic academy, also known as the Florentine or the Careggian academy. Scholars have shown this to be, rather than a true academy, more a construct created by inferences of later historians. In fact, the definition probably refers metaphorically to a rustic house Cosimo gave Ficino, or, in other contexts, the scholarship on Plato that Ficino was collecting, or perhaps his lectures. David S. Chambers concludes, ‘‘there is no reason to take Ficino’s activities and utterances, whether in retreat at Careggi or in Florence, his lectures...or his other involvements in teaching, as evidence of his referring to a formally constituted early Florentine ‘Platonic academy’’’ (‘‘The Earlier ‘Academies’ in Italy,’’ 1995). So the term ‘‘academy’’ at this early date would have suggested only a common gathering of learned divulgation, not a structured organization with clearly defined goals and a distinct character. Along these lines, the printer Aldus Manuzio (ca. 1452–1515) established the Accademia Aldina in Venice in 1500, but this was probably little more than a fanciful title for his officina, given to promote scholarly camaraderie among his employees and proof-correctors. Also, among these protoacademies is the Sodalitas (brotherhood) founded by Cardinal Bessarion in Rome after 1443. The proceedings of the so-called Roman Academy (also known as Accademia Pomponiana) that gathered around Giulio Pomponio Leto (1428–1498) in the mid-1460s are somewhat obscure. It was suppressed by Pope Paul II in 1468 because it was suspected of paganism and republican inclinations (while, more likely, pursuing a skeptical academic and epicurean life) but soon reconstituted its ranks. The Accademia Pontaniana, led by the humanist Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503) and active in Naples during the last decades of the 1400s, was probably nothing more than his circle of disciples. Unlike most contemporary institutions, it advocated the use of the vernacular as well as Latin; fostered interests beyond traditional literary subjects, to include philosophy and the natural sciences; and reenacted some curious peripatetic rituals (reportedly, his members would discuss ethical issues while strolling through the countryside). Starting in the early cinquecento, academies appear to have followed more rigorous institutional patterns and practices. Notwithstanding the variety and complexity of these congregations, some common features emerge that are assembled in various combinations. First, the academy functions as, to use Amedeo Quondam’s label, a ‘‘collective 2

subject’’ whose members are engaged in a dialogue, often leading to the composition and printing of communal works (‘‘L’istituzione Arcadia,’’ 1973). In the most prominent of these organizations, a specific cultural strategy seems to have been at work. The members chose a collective name, and they invented an impresa (an emblem that represented their aims, usually a picture inspired by the heraldic tradition, with a motto from Latin or Italian poetry). Imbued with cryptic allusions, this custom combined refined literary knowledge with a playful spirit. In fact, the academies’ titles often exhibit a self-deprecating humor or irony, as shown by the Intronati (Stupefied) of Siena, the Ortolani (Gardeners) of Piacenza, the Sdegnati (Indignant) of Rome, the Oziosi (Idle) and Gelati (Frigid) of Bologna, and the Addormentati (Sleepy) of Genoa. The implications of these titles may convey more than just whimsical levity. The Intronati of Siena insisted on the polemical weight of their logo, which, in their self-serving reading, intended to capture an attitude of disdain and resistance, at a time of considerable political turmoil. Individual members often refashioned their identities by selecting a pseudonym consistent with the overall enterprise. For instance, in the Accademia degli Umidi (Humid) we find such names as Cigno (Swan), Frigido (Frigid), and Spumoso (Foamy). Members of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca, an institution founded in 1583 under the patronage of the Medici and still operating today, gave themselves aliases evocative of the gristmill or bakery, such as the Infarinato (Covered with Flour), the Impastato (Kneaded), the Riscaldato (WarmedUp), and the Avvampato (Inflamed). As these names suggest, these gatherings often expressed escapist and utopian longings or, at least, aspired to create a self-enclosed space insulated from mundane concerns and worldly obligations. Common, though by no means universal, operational features of these institutions are the formalization of their internal structures, a hierarchy of officials charged with administrative duties, and laws regulating their proceedings. The mostly spontaneous nature of their beginnings bears testimony to their prevailing detachment from contemporary politics. Sheltered from external scrutiny, the academy’s position facilitated the expression of political indifference, dissent, and unorthodox beliefs. Their proceedings, being secret, sometimes provoked distrust among local authorities, as was the case when, in 1547, the Viceroy of Naples, Pedro of Toledo, placed a cease and desist order on such groups. Church officials made inquiries, too, suspecting

ACADEMIES the Intronati of heresy in the late 1550s. Reformist tendencies circulated among the Venetian Pellegrini (Pilgrims) and Dubbiosi (Doubtful), the Argonauti (Argonauts) of Mantua, and the Grillenzoni of Modena. In its most fully realized form, the academy was a ‘‘literary republic’’ whose ‘‘citizens’’ engaged in a humanistic pursuit of knowledge. Members and affiliates could study outside of the more rigid university structure. A meticulous curriculum, formal disputations, and technical rhetoric were replaced, though not entirely, with far more uninhibited conversations and more casual lectures. In a vein of friendly emulation, the members’ collaboration seems to have largely superseded social and professional differences. Interestingly, this led to the empowerment of minor figures otherwise marginalized, if not excluded from the cultural arena, who could participate in communal projects, such as theatrical plays and collections of poems. This setting also fostered cross-fertilization of theories and dissemination of literary trends. Often scholars were active in various institutions, driven by their search for patronage, intellectual stimuli, prestige, and fame. Neo-Platonic tenets at the core of some academies are revealed in official statutes that claimed a rebirth of members under the sovereign of reason, thus renouncing the weight of corporeality and escaping worldly impediments. The creation of this realm protected from external controls gave free rein to controversy. In some instances, subverting the high moral standards Baldassare Castiglione predicated in Il cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, 1528), the members indulged in salacious conversations and erotic games rife with sexual innuendos (as happened among the Ortolani and the Virtuosi [Virtuous]). Traditional criticism has tended to ignore or dismiss this aspect of academies, regarding such output as a literary trifle symptomatic of cultural decadence. Recently, though, the significance of this component has been reassessed, and scholars see it as following the ancient principle of serio ludere, or serious fun, and argue that it has genuine cultural significance. For example, among the Intronati the prerequisite of erudition was not as demanding, and this allowed some noble women (envisioned as a coterie of femmes savantes flanking the learned academicians) to participate in evening games, filled with literary references. The same Intronati played a pivotal role in overseeing civic entertainments and organizing performances to celebrate public festivities, as well as encouraging scientific translations and other pedagogical advances.

A rigorous and very influential cultural enterprise was initiated around the mid-sixteenth century. Several academies, partaking in the debate on the questione della lingua, contributed to the strengthening of the Italian vernacular. Their erudite members translated classical works in order to make them more accessible and extol the communicative potential of the volgare. This was a central project of the Accademia degli Infiammati, established in 1540. Echoing the theories of their most prominent member, Sperone Speroni (1500–1588), the Infiammati wanted to see the vernacular used not only for poetry but also for philosophy. In Florence, linguistic concerns and a patriotic spirit coalesced with power strategies: The Accademia degli Umidi (founded in 1540) was soon forced under the terms of Cosimo I de’ Medici’s plan of cultural hegemony to reestablish itself as the Accademia Fiorentina. After some subtle political maneuvering by the prince’s associates, this latter congregation abandoned the former purpose of escaping boredom through some ‘‘honest pastime’’: Instead, it would be committed to celebrating and propagating the Tuscan language. Thus the academy became an effective means to control intellectual production in Florence and was charged with supervising the university and the local press. As the sixteenth century progressed, the academies’ independence from local authorities came under threat, as the power structure of principalities grew increasingly suspicious of secluded, and worse, secret meetings. On the other hand, the state could provide an academy with protection and financial and political support, at a time when literati could not prosper outside of court, church, or university. For this reason, the Accademia Veneziana (1557–1561) sought to secure the patronage of the republic. In fact, the ambitious if ill-fated project of its founder, Federico Badoer (1519–1593), intended to provide the Venetian state with ‘‘a vehicle for the expression of its cultural politics’’ (Lina Bolzoni, La stanza della memoria, 1995). A shift to a new phase in the life of Italian academies occurred in the late 1600s, according to most scholars. While such institutions continued to flourish even in smaller cities like Mantua, by the seventeenth century most were concentrated within major centers of political power. Rome, with its abundance and variety of such gatherings, became the undisputed cultural center of the peninsula. While the number of academies grew, their autonomy lessened, and they were subjected to stricter controls by state and local authorities. They had to 3

ACADEMIES exhibit a more official profile, complying with strategies of municipal propaganda. The last monumental event in the history of these literary institutions occurred at the turn to the eighteenth century, when a new academy was born, the Arcadia, one that would have great vitality and cultural impact. Founded in 1690 by 14 literati previously gathered around Queen Christina of Sweden, this academy included some renowned neoclassicists, such as Giovan Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728) and Gian Vincenzo Gravina (1664– 1718), who in his later years adopted and mentored Pietro Metastasio. Its seat was Rome, and its rituals and practices were complicated and, to modern eyes, sometimes rather artificial or precious. Its members chose pastoral names, selected Pan’s pipe as their symbolic device, and honored the child Jesus as their protector. In 1696, Gravina drafted its laws in Latin, modeling them on the Twelve Tables. In restoring well-honored customs of the pastoral tradition, the Arcadia instituted a principle of equality among its members. Its poetics exerted a pervasive influence in advocating a restoration of Petrarchism and rejecting what was seen as the excesses of Baroque poetry. The Arcadians encouraged mild literary hedonism but also exhibited impressive erudition and antiquarian interests. Crescimbeni, for instance, wrote the Istoria della volgar poesia (History of Italian Poetry, 1698), one of the first histories of Italian literature. Complex and multifaceted, the Arcadia sustained fierce internal conflicts and momentous changes but rose to national and international acclaim. Although it fostered the rise of regional branches (referred to as ‘‘Colonies’’) that assured its profound influence, the Arcadia had a strictly centralized structure. Its autocratic and hierarchical order was modeled on the Roman Curia, which helps account for its cultural positions. Its wide range of interests, however, allowed also the discussion of philosophical and scientific theories inspired by rationalism and in conflict with theological tenets. After this illustrious episode, in the course of the 1700s academies underwent a deep structural change, losing their former encyclopedic aims and specializing in addressing specific areas of study. In keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment, they often pursued projects of public improvement, especially in the agrarian, economic, and civic fields, as shown by the so-called Accademia dei

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Pugni (Academy of the Fists), established in Milan in 1761. Among its most influential members, it included distinguished intellectuals, such as Pietro Verri (1728–1797), his brother Alessandro (1741–1816), and Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794), who vented political theories and social activism in the periodical Il caffe` (1764–1766). ANDREA BALDI See also: Arcadia (Accademia) Further Reading Boehm, Laetitia, and Ezio Raimondi, Universita`, accademie e societa` scientifiche in Italia e in Germania dal Cinquecento al Settecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1981. Bolzoni, Lina, La stanza della memoria: Modelli letterari e iconografici nell’eta` della stampa, Turin: Einaudi: 1995; translated as The Gallery of Memory: Literary and Iconographic Models in the Age of the Printing Press, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Chambers, David S., ‘‘The Earlier ‘Academies’ in Italy,’’ in Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, edited by David S. Chambers and Franc¸ois Quiviger, London: The Warburg Institute, 1995. Chambers, David S., and Franc¸ois Quiviger (editors), Italian Academies of the Sixteenth Century, London: The Warburg Institute, 1995. Cochrane, Eric, ‘‘The Renaissance Academies in Their Italian and European Setting,’’ in The Fairest Flower: The Emergence of Linguistic National Consciousness in Renaissance Europe. International Conference of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, 12–13 December 1983, Florence: Presso l’Accademia, 1985. Di Filippo Bareggi, Claudia, ‘‘Per esser intellettuali: L’Accademia,’’ in Il mestiere di scrivere: Lavoro intellettuale e mercato librario a Venezia nel Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1988. Hankins, James, ‘‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy of Florence,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991): 429–475. Maylender, Michele, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, 5 vols., Bologna: Cappelli, 1926–1930; anastatic reprint: Bologna: Forni, 1976. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘L’Accademia,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘L’istituzione Arcadia. Sociologia e ideologia di un’Accademia,’’ Quaderni storici, 23 (May–August 1973): 389–438. Samuels, Richard S., ‘‘Benedetto Varchi, the ‘Accademia degli Infiammati,’ and the Origins of the Italian Academic Movement,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 29 (1976): 599–634. Yates, Frances A., ‘‘The Italian Academies,’’ in Renaissance and Reform: The Italian Contribution, vol. 2, London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

VITTORIA AGANOOR POMPILJ

ACQUAINTED WITH GRIEF See La Cognizione del Dolore (Work by Carlo Emibo Gadda)

THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO See Le Avventure di Pinocchio (Work by Carlo Collodi)

VITTORIA AGANOOR POMPILJ (1855–1910) Like Contessa Lara and Luisa Giaconi, Vittoria Aganoor was a woman writer who recognized a crisis in the tradition of male-dominated Romantic poetry. She responded by developing a lyrical language that evoked an intimate voice through secret analogies and hidden relationships between sounds and sense. Like many aristocratic women of letters who began to write poetry after the Unification, Aganoor was trained and educated in Greek, Latin, and Italian classical literature but was also exposed to European contemporary authors. Her teacher and mentor, Giacomo Zanella, was an esteemed literary critic, poet, and translator. He introduced her to recent developments in French, German, and English poetry and metrics and influenced her literary taste. Aganoor’s apprenticeship was slow, as her many letters to Zanella and Antonio Fogazzaro, the authors who guided her in her early poetic experiments, attest. The fact that she published her first collection, Leggenda eterna (Eternal Legend) in 1900, after the death of her

parents, also suggests how difficult it might have been for a literary woman of Aganoor’s time to reconcile her classical education with her awareness of contemporary literary trends such as Symbolism. The perceived inadequacy of her early verse, patiently ‘‘corrected’’ by Zanella and Fogazzaro, as well as Enrico Nencioni and Domenico Gnoli, convinced the young poet to put off its publication for years. Her letters reflect Aganoor’s literary concerns and poetic development through these years: the increasing freedom from classical models, the growing concern with gender, the relationship with contemporary Italian men of letters. Aganoor composed semiautobiographical love poems, tinged with pessimistic dreams and inner tensions: Passion and feverish activity are celebrated in verses evoking images of splendour and emptiness. She represents human anxiety as a modern condition of alienation and death. The discovery of such a condition from the point of view of a woman, sensitive and well educated, characterizes 5

VITTORIA AGANOOR POMPILJ Leggenda eterna, which signals a kind of poetic independence from the Petrarchist form of ‘‘love book.’’ The symbolic figures of women (the witch and Abene`zer) stand out in the Leggenda eterna. They invite young girls to assert their independence and freedom of speech against dominant points of view, as in ‘‘La strega’’ (The Witch): ‘‘Fanciulle, udite / la parola che salva, e uccide i folli / sogni che costan lagrime... Perche´ / fidate voi nell’uomo, e poi piangete, / piangete?... Ecco, io vi dico la parola / ch’io stessa udii per un prodigio’’ (Girls, listen / to the word which redeems, and kills the crazy / dreams which cost tears... Why / do you trust men, and then cry, / don’t you cry?... Here is the word / I heard by chance). Aganoor’s poetic voice manifests itself in the form of either interrogation or direct statement, a voice empowered by both its own poetic intentions and the contingencies of chance. Aganoor’s second collection, Nuove liriche (New Lyrics, 1908) possesses a double character as both meditative and civic poetry. Praised by Benedetto Croce as a remarkable work of ‘‘un’anima di donna che ha sperimentato la liberta` nella semplicita`’’ (the soul of a woman who has experimented with freedom in simplicity) (‘‘Vittoria Aganoor,’’ 1973), it contains texts written after her marriage to Guido Pompilj. Reflecting her experience of living in Perugia (her husband’s hometown), Aganoor celebrates the landscapes, colours, and fruits of Umbria in verses that are ultimately concerned with expressing a vision of nature. Her vision represents places through the perspective of a mind at peace. Aganoor was by then a famous poet, the wife of an influential politician, and a philanthropist working in league with her friends Maria Pascolato, Antonietta Giacomelli, Alice Hallgarten Franchetti, and Felicitas Bu¨chner. Her new attention to biblical figures such as Esau´ and Agar reflects the influence of a contemporary religious debate on reform in the Catholic Church, which inspired Fogazzaro’s novel Il santo (The Saint, 1905) and Paul Sabatier’s activity in Umbria. At first Aganoor’s reputation was not determined by readers and literary critics. She rose to popularity after the tragic death of her husband, who shot himself after she died. Before World War I, her poetry figured prominently in Croce’s survey of representative women writers and poets of the ‘‘new’’ Italy. In 1958, Luigi Baldacci broke a long critical silence on her work and included her in his nineteenth-century poetry anthology. Baldacci focused on Aganoor’s poetic art, her investigations of meaning and communication through rhythm 6

rather than on the themes of love, desire, and spontaneous poetic speech that are traditionally associated with women poets. In undermining the stereotypes advanced by male critics, he anticipated the feminist readings of Biancamaria Frabotta in 1983 and the pioneering work by Antonia Arslan, whose conference on Vittoria Aganoor in 1986 renewed efforts to assess the position of the Armenian-Paduan poet in Italian literature at the turn of the century.

Biography Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj was born in Padua on 26 May 1855 to Edoardo and Giuseppina Pacini, of noble Armenian extraction. Her first teacher and literary mentor was Giacomo Zanella, who frequented her aristocratic family circle. Her correspondence with preeminent poets and critics such as Enrico Nencioni, Antonio Fogazzaro, Domenico Gnoli, and Angiolo Orvieto attest to her long literary apprenticeship. She spent most of her adult life with her beloved mother, residing in Padua until ca. 1876, then in Naples, Venice, and Basalghelle; in 1901, at the age of forty-six, she married Guido Pompilj, a well-known member of the Italian Parliament and rich Umbrian landowner. Aganoor spent the last nine years of her life in her husband’s palace in Perugia and in Rome. Following surgery, she died of cancer in Rome, on 8 May 1910. After her death, Guido Pompilj shot himself. DONATELLA ALESI Selected Works Collections Poesie complete, edited by Luigi Grilli, Florence: Le Monnier, 1912; rpt. 1927.

Poetry ‘‘Leggenda eterna,’’ 1900. ‘‘Nuove liriche,’’ 1908.

Letters Lettere a Domenico Gnoli, edited by Biagia Marniti, 1967. Lettere a Giacomo Zanella, edited by Adriana Chemello, 1996. Aganoor, la brezza e il vento: Corrispondenza a Guido Pompilj, edited by Lucia Ciani, 2004. ‘‘Lettere a Antonio Fogazzaro,’’ edited by Adriana Chemello and Donatella Alesi, in Tre donne d’eccezione: Vittoria Aganoor, Silvia Albertoni Tagliavini, Sofia Bisi Albini: Dai carteggi inediti di Antonio Fogazzaro, 2005.

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI Further Reading Alesi, Donatella, ‘‘Lettere a Domenico Gnoli,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Dizionario delle opere, edited by Giorgio Inglese, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Arslan, Antonia, ‘‘Un’amicizia tra letterate: Vittoria Aganoor e Neera’’ and ‘‘Le ultime lettere di Guido Pompilj,’’ in Dame, galline e regine: La scrittura femminile italiana fra ‘800 e ‘900, edited by Marina Pasqui, with an Introduction by Siobhan Nash-Marshall, Milan: Guerini, 1998. Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj,’’ in Poeti minori dell’Ottocento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1958. Costa-Zalessow, Natalia, Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Testi e critica, Ravenna: Longo, 1983. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Vittoria Aganoor’’ (1910) in Letteratura italiana della Nuova Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Fiocchi, Stefania, ‘‘Vittoria Aganoor,’’ in Le stanze ritrovate, edited by Antonia Arslan, Adriana Chemello, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Mirano (Venice): Eidos, 1991. Frabotta, Biancamaria, ‘‘Alle soglie di una perduta femminilita` poetica: Contessa Lara e Vittoria Aganoor,’’ in

La donna nella letteratura italiana del ’900: Atti del convegno, Empoli maggio, 1981, Empoli: Litografia Zanini, 1983. Mancini, Franco, La poesia di Aganoor, Florence: Le Monnier, 1959. Marola, Barbara, et al., Fuori norma: Scrittrici italiane del primo novecento, Ferrara: L. Tofani, 2003. Moretta, Paola, Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj, Teramo: Il Risveglio, 1921. O’Brien, Catherine, ‘‘Poetry 1870–2000,’’ in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ortolani, Tullio, La poesia di Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj, La Spezia: Casa Editrice dell’Iride, 1900. Russi, Antonio, ‘‘Aganoor, Vittoria,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Treccani, 1960. Sanguinetti-Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘Aganoor, Vittoria,’’ in Italian Women Writers, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT-London: Greenwood Press, 1994.

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI (1404–1472) Alberti is a genuine rediscovery for the contemporary scenario of Renaissance studies: Since the 1970s, studies have remarkably increased on this atypical humanist who escapes the narrow definition of writer. His undying bent for addressing the most varied issues and for using a wide range of different genres and literary codes (love poems, eclogues, moral treatises, biographies, artistic treatises, moral fables, and the like), his direct involvement in many architectural works, and his interest in cryptography and cartography have won him the name of ‘‘universal man of the Early Renaissance’’ (Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti, 1969), thanks mainly to Jacob Burckhardt’s famous description of him. Following Eugenio Garin’s studies, the traditional, idealized image of an ‘‘Apollonian’’ Alberti was replaced by the image of a complex intellectual man, whose vision of the world was imbued with a vein of radical antihumanistic pessimism. The latest critical contributions tend to overcome such radical split between a ‘‘sunny’’ Alberti, the author of committed and constructive treatises, and the ‘‘nocturnal’’ Alberti of the Intercenales (Dinner Pieces, ca. 1441) and Momus (Momus, 1450), in the attempt to encompass his philosophy and the corpus of his

writings into one general vision. This bipolar characterization of Alberti’s contributions has suggested the notion that such texts as the Intercenales and Momus might be a sort of pessimistic counterpoint to his moral treatises in the vernacular. Alberti’s versatile work defies, however, such oversimplification: His ideas—often so distant from the prevailing ideology of his age—and his forms of expression shed light into the innovative program of Alberti’s experimentalism and, at the same time, classicism. His accomplishments in the vernacular and in Latin exemplify his theoretical scope in language or content. From the linguistic point of view, Alberti’s oeuvre is basically duplicitous, reflecting different social types of audiences for whom the two texts were intended and the nature of the subject matter—his underlying models were Lucian of Samosata and Cicero. Alberti’s meditations reflect his interest in moral issues and in every dimension of human life. His stern Stoic ethics owe little to Christianity, and his thought develops through the analysis of such key concepts as Nature, Virtue, and Fortune, the greatness and the meanness of mortals. Alberti is fully aware of the important role played by the linguistic 7

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI and stylistic components in the success of a literary or artistic work; hence his firm stance in supporting the vernacular within the humanistic debates on its suitability as a literary language. According to Alberti, the vernacular is endowed with its own nobility and field of applicability. With regards to the controversy on the nature and use of Latin in ancient Rome, an issue that had a direct impact on the status of the vernacular during the fifteenth century, he displayed his eloquence in the preamble to the third book of the Libri della Famiglia (The Family in Renaissance Florence, 1433–1441) as well as in the Grammatichetta (ca. 1438–1441; the very first Tuscan grammar), in the Protesta (A Protest; anonymous, but attributed to Alberti by many scholars), which comments on the certame coronario held on 22 October 1441 in Florence, a poetry contest Alberti himself helped organize under the sponsorship of Piero de’ Medici, and in the dedication of the Theogenius (Theogenius, ca. 1441). It is significant that Alberti decided to write his moral dialogues in the vernacular. Though the genre was already widespread in the early fifteenth century and was bound to meet more and more favor with time, the use of Latin in this type of text was virtually a necessary choice. Among his dialogues, the Libri della famiglia (the first three books date 1433–1434; the fourth, 1441) address three generations of the Alberti family and their civic and mercantile values: the upbringing of children (Book I), married life (Book II), household goods and mercantile banking (Book III), and friendship, a bond more important than family or marital ties (Book IV). They are treated in accordance with the psychological traits of each featured character, so that the discussion comprises the opinions of the scholar, the old patriarch, the man of the world, the young generations, and so forth. Introduced as an exemplary model of a family institution, as well as the ideal place for a ‘‘civilized conversation’’ about different but always important issues, the Albertis appear as wise, educated, and experienced individuals who can master together any subject of discussion. The writing of the Libri della famiglia served a personal and public scope. In the light of some of Alberti’s biographic events, the dialogue is an attempt to achieve a compromise between the intention to celebrate the Alberti family and the author’s desire to be accepted by them, due to his decision to devote himself to the arts instead of politics or trade. The remaining moral dialogues, which include the Theogenius, the Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III (Plight for 8

Hardship, 1441–1442), and the De iciarchia (On Governing a Household, 1470), discuss, once again, Alberti’s favorite subjects: the analysis of man’s soul and behavior, the search for possible remedies to unhappiness, devotion to one’s family and country; but they also reflect a Stoic rigor or, conversely, pragmatism, and they are written either in a didactic and pedagogical mode or with disillusioned and bitter tones. The Intercenales and the Momus reveal a darker pessimistic streak. They are ambitious contributions to Renaissance Latin literature in Italy. Alberti wrote the Intercenales over many years, and the satirical dialogues that have reached us seem to be organized in 11 books. The topics of this collection (mostly short fables) range from love, friendship, and family to the vanity of human beliefs, aspirations, and actions. Human endeavors are often impaired by fate or rather by people’s stultitia (stupidity). The reasoning is frequently semiserious, mockingly witty: The fierce condemnation of the world’s rampant injustice and contemporary mores is expressed in grotesque and irreverent tone; serious subjects, put into the mouths of gods and other fictional characters, are often treated with a ludicrous but not frivolous approach. The Momus is a satire with allegorical nuances, an account of the tragicomic events of the title character, the God of Blame. The protagonist’s adventures take place between a parodic Olympus and an earthly world ruled by folly and ambition. Alberti emphasizes the difficulty of writing in the shadow of antiquity and concludes by urging to be original in language and content. Among Alberti’s artistic treatises, the De pictura (On Painting, 1435), with a dedicatory prologue to Filippo Brunelleschi, is important for the birth and development of perspective. It was first written in Latin and later in the vernacular in order to interest architects and painters who could not read Latin. His second treatise, De statua (On Sculpture) was also written around this time. Alberti recommends the use of live models and the imitation of nature. De re aedificatoria (On the Art of Building), which was begun in 1449 but not printed until 1485, is comprised of ten books that were intended to be a continuation and an alternative to Vitruvius’s De architectura. These technical works exerted a longlasting influence on the theoretical guidelines of Italian architecture, also thanks to the canonization they received during the Council of Trent. For Alberti, architecture is essentially an intellectual quest: His profound analysis of Virtruvius’s treatise is based on his parallel investigations both on

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI ancient texts and products, two kinds of witness that he considered as reliable as literary ones. Beyond the lessons in design methods it offers, Alberti’s work is still prized by architects today— especially because it contributes to shape their professional role in society. Alberti was a theorist and a designer, but he never closely attended the practical accomplishment of his designs. His most important works, strongly anchored to the exempla of antiquity but also deeply influenced by the most modern works of Brunelleschi, Michelozzo, and Rossellino, include the churches of S. Sebastian and S. Andrew in Mantova, the Malatesta Temple in Rimini (all left unfinished on account of problems that arose with the patronage), the facade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, and the Holy Sepulchre in the Church of Saint Pancras in Florence. Alberti actively participated in the literary debates of his time in support of the vernacular. Several of his texts, such as the Libri della famiglia and the Intercenales, provide answers to the theoretical questions that engaged his contemporaries. Capable of capturing the stimuli coming from the surrounding cultural scenario and of developing several solutions, Alberti excelled in argumentative dialogues: For him there are no universal truths, and things should be investigated from different perspectives. Thus, since Alberti’s discoveries ‘‘had no sanctioned models’’ (Rosario Contarino, Leon Battista Alberti moralista, 1991), they would not become models for the later writers: Leon Battista, who was the boldest humanist in terms of speculation and versatility, and who, throughout his lifetime, felt haunted by slandering critics, had no immediate followers. His theoretical writings, however, are of fundamental importance for the history of art and architecture.

Biography Leon Battista Alberti was born in Genoa, 18 (?) February 1404, the illegitimate son of a Florentine exile, Lorenzo, from an important family engaged in trade. He studied first in Padua under the guidance of Gasparino Barzizza and then in Bologna; he graduated in canon law, 1428; he was also interested in mathematics and physics, especially at a time when he was troubled by health and family problems. As his father died in 1421, some relatives stripped Leon Battista and his brother, Carlo, of their inheritance; he was helped by Tommaso Parentucelli (future Pope Nicholas V) and began working for Cardinal Albergati and then for the

patriarch of Grado, Biagio Molin. He was employed as an apostolic abbreviator in 1432, a post he would hold until 1464; was given the priorship of S. Martino in Gangalandi and the attendant ecclesiastic benefices, thereby gaining good economic stability. Alberti visited Florence shortly after the ban against his family was lifted, 1428; then in 1434–1436 to attend the works of the Council for the union with the Greek Church. Both in Florence and at the papal court, Alberti was in contact with Italian humanists, artists, and prominent personalities such as Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, Leonardo Dati, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli. As an architect, he worked for Ludovico Gonzaga, Sigismondo Malatesta, and the Rucellai family. Alberti died in Rome, 20 April 1472. OLIVIA CATANORCHI Selected Works Collections Opere volgari, edited by Anicio Bonucci, 5 vols., Florence: Tip. Galileiana, 1843–1849. Opere volgari, edited by Cecil Grayson, 3 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1960–1973.

Treatises De iciarchia, in Opere volgari, edited by Anicio Bonucci, vol. 3, 1843–1849. De pictura praestantissima et nunquam satis laudata arte libri tres absolutissimi Leonis Baptistae de Albertis viri in omni scientiarum genere et praecipue mathematicarum disciplinarum doctissimi, 1540; Della pittura, critical edition by Luigi Malle`, 1950; as On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of ‘‘De Pictura’’ and ‘‘De Statua,’’ edited and translated by Cecil Grayson, 1972. De re aedificatoria, 1485; edited by Paolo Portoghesi and Giovanni Orlandi, 1966; as On the Art of Building in Ten Books, translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor, 1988. Descriptio Urbis Romae, edited and translated into French by M. Furno and M. Carpo, 1999. Grammatichetta, in Ciro Trabalza, Storia della grammatica italiana, 1908; as Grammatica della lingua toscana, in Opere volgari, edited by Cecil Grayson, vol. 3, 1960– 1973; as Grammatichetta e altri scritti sul volgare, edited by Giuseppe Patota, 1998. Intercenales, partially edited in Leonis Baptistae Alberti, Opera, Barlolomeo de’ Libri, 1499; Opera inedita et pauca separatim impressa, Hieronymo Mancini curante, Florentiae: J. C. Sansoni, 1890; Intercenali inedite, edited by Eugenio Garin, Florence: Sansoni, 1965; Intercenales, edited by Franco Bacchelli and Luca D’Ascia, 2003; as Dinner Pieces: A Translation of the ‘‘Intercenales,’’ translated by David Marsh, 1987. Libri della famiglia, in Opere volgari, edited by Anicio Bonucci, vol. 2, 1843–1849; in Opere volgari, edited by Cecil Grayson, vol. 1, 1960–1973; as I Libri della

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LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI famiglia, edited by Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti, 1969; revised edition by Francesco Furlan, 1994; as The Family in Renaissance Florence, translated by Rene´e N. Watkins, 1969; as The Albertis of Florence, translated by Guido A. Guarino, 1971; as The Family in Renaissance Florence: Book Three, translated by Rene´e N. Watkins, 1994. Momus, Rome: Iacopo Mazzocchi, 1520; as De Principe, Rome: Stephanus Guilleret, 1520; as Momo o del principe, critical edition by Rino Consolo, 1986; as Momus, translated by Sarah Knight, edited by Virginia Brown and Sarah Knight, 2003. Profugiorum ab aerumna libri III, as Della tranquillita` dell’animo, in Opere volgari, edited by Anicio Bonucci, vol. 2, 1843–1847; as Profugiorum ab aerumna, in Opere volgari, edited by Cecil Grayson, vol. 2, 1960– 1973; as Profugiorum ab aerumna libri, edited by Giovanni Ponte, 1988.

Further Reading Borsi, Franco, Leon Battista Alberti: The Complete Works, London and New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1986. Boschetto, Luca, Leon Battista Alberti e Firenze: Biografia, storia, letteratura, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Cardini, Roberto, ‘‘Alberti o della nascita dell’umorismo moderno,’’ Schede umanistiche, n.s., 1 (1993): 31–85. Choay Franc¸oise, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism, edited by Denise Bratton, Cambridge (MA) and London: MIT Press, 1997. Contarino, Rosario, Leon Battista Alberti moralista, Caltanissetta-Rome: Sciascia, 1991. Convegno Internazionale indetto nel V Centenario di Leon Battista Alberti (Roma–Mantova–Firenze, 25–29 aprile 1972), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1974. Furlan, Francesco, et al. (editors), Leon Battista Alberti, Actes du Congre`s International de Paris (Sorbonne– Institut de France–Institut Culturel Italien–Colle`ge de France, 10–15 avril 1995), 2 vols., Paris–Turin: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin and Nino Aragno Editore, 2000. Gadol, Joan, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969.

Garin, Eugenio, ‘‘Studi su Leon Battista Alberti,’’ in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo, Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1975. Grafton, Anthony, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance, New York: Hill and Wang, 2000. Grafton, Anthony, ‘‘Leon Battista Alberti: The Writer as Reader,’’ in Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Grayson, Cecil, Studi su Leon Battista Alberti, edited by Paola Claut, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Leon Battista Alberti: Architettura e cultura, Atti del Convegno internazionale (Mantova 16–19 novembre 1994), Florence: Olschki, 1999. Leon Battista Alberti e il Quattrocento. Studi in onore di Cecil Grayson e Ernst Gombrich, Atti del Convegno internazionale (Mantova, 29–31 ottobre 1998), Florence: Olschki, 2001. Marsh, David, Lucian and the Latins: Humor and Humanism in the Early Renaissance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Marsh, David, ‘‘Leon Battista Alberti and the Volgare Dialogue,’’ in The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation, Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press, 1980. Paoli, Michel, L’ide´e de nature chez Leon Battista Alberti, Paris: Honore´ Champion, 1999. Patetta, Luciano (editor), Disegni per il De re aedificatoria di Leon Battista Alberti, monographic issue, Il disegno di Architettura, 28 (2004). Ponte, Giovanni, Leon Battista Alberti umanista e scrittore, Genoa: Tilgher, 1981. Rinaldi, Rinaldo, Melancholia christiana: Studi sulle fonti di Leon Battista Alberti, Florence, Olschki, 2002. Tafuri, Manfredo, Ricerca del Rinascimento, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Tavernor, Robert, On Alberti and the Art of Building, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Westfall, Carroll William, In this Most Perfect Paradise: Alberti, Nicholas V, and the Invention of Conscious Urban Planning in Rome, 1447–1455, University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974.

ANDREA ALCIATO (1492–1550) A Lombard jurist and humanist, Andrea Alciato enjoyed a long and influential career as a lawyer, a jurist, and a university professor. Today his fame rests primarily on his invention of the Renaissance emblem.

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A precocious youth, Alciato received his earliest education in Milan under the celebrated humanist Aulus Janus Parrhasius. Here, he also heard the lectures of the Greek scholar Janus Lascaris. Both were to make a lasting impact on his professional

ANDREA ALCIATO life. Alciato received his higher education at the universities of Pavia (1507–1510), Bologna (1511–1514), and then briefly Ferrara, where he earned a doctorate in civil and canon law. A practicing lawyer, Alciato also pursued an academic career, teaching law first in Avignon, then in Bourges, and then finally in Italy at all three of his alma maters—Pavia, Bologna, and Ferrara. His prestige as a jurist was such that at Ferrara his annual salary alone consumed 10 percent of the university’s budget. In 1522–1527, in the hiatus between his two teaching posts at Avignon, Alciato returned to Milan and dedicated himself to the study of the classics and to translating from Greek into Latin selections from the Greek anthology and from Aristophanes. During the course of his illustrious career as a lawyer and a scholar, Alciato published several influential treatises and commentaries that revamped legal studies by applying humanist methodologies to the study of Roman law. This quickly drew the attacks of traditional jurists who accused him of foregrounding literary interests and pursuing useless philological or historical interests at the expense of the true study of the law. Humanists, on the other hand, showered him with wholesome praise, chief among them Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam, with whom Alciato actively corresponded in the 1520s and 1530s. His approach had a profound impact on Italian and French legal circles. In the latter, his many students from his years in Avignon and Bourges created a veritable school of law (the mos gallicus, or French method) that was highly influential in that country. In the history of Italian jurisprudence, Alciato is considered to be the founder of the ‘‘Scuola del Culto’’ and an opponent of the ‘‘Bartolisti,’’ that is, of medieval legal thinkers who followed the teachings of Bartolo da Sassoferrato. An excellent example of Alciato’s approach to the study of law is the De verborum significatione libri quattuor (Four Books on the Significance of Words, 1530), where Alciato uses the philological tools of the humanists to analyze and explicate the intended meaning of Roman law. Alciato’s Opera omnia, which included his commentaries on the corpus juris civilis, as well as other philological works on legal and nonlegal texts, was published twice by Michael Isingrin in Basel (1549 and 1558), by Thomas Guarinus (Basel, 1582), and by the heirs of Lazarus Zetzner (Frankfurt, 1617). There is no modern edition of his complete works. In spite of his brilliant career in the law and his profound impact on its practice, today Alciato’s fame rests primarily on his reinvention of the

emblem—a visual/literary device consisting of a title (or motto), an image, and an epigram. Breaking the emblem away from its medieval predecessor, Alciato classicized it by using a word or phrase taken from ancient Greek or Roman literature as the title, a simple engraving as the illustration, and an epigram often (but not always) referring to, or elucidating, the image. The three elements worked in tandem to deliver a moral lesson strongly imbued with Renaissance humanist ideals. Originally Alciato had not thought of including images in his emblems, but after they were added in the first, and unauthorized, edition of his Emblematum liber (Book of Emblems), published in Augsburg in 1531, he quickly accepted the innovation. The authorized edition (published by Christian Wechel in Paris in 1534) thus reaffirmed the use of images and established the standard format of the emblem book: one emblem per page, each consisting of a title, an image, and an epigram. During his lifetime, Alciato’s collection underwent many subsequent editions, revisions, and expansions. The work was soon translated into the major vernacular languages of Europe. With at least 170 editions before 1700, it was a runaway best seller, so much so that it spawned many imitations and led to the creation of a new genre, the emblem, which in turn profoundly influenced Mannerist and Baroque art and literature. The complete variorum edition (including the suppressed emblem No. 80 on the sin against nature) was prepared by Joannes Thuilius and published by Pietro Paolo Tozzi in Padua in 1621 (Emblemata cum commentariis). It contains one of the earliest biographies of Alciato and commentaries by Claude Mignault, Francisco Sa´nchez de las Brozas, Lorenzo Pignoria, and Fe´de´ric Morel.

Biography Andrea Alciato was born on 8 May 1492 in Alzate Brianza, near Como. His father, Ambrogio Alciato, was a wealthy Milanese merchant who had also served as ambassador to the Republic of Venice. His mother, Margherita Landriani, was of aristocratic stock. Educated first in Milan, Alciato then studied at the universities of Pavia (1507–1510), Bologna (1511–1514), and Ferrara (1515–1516), where he received a doctorate in civil and canon law on 18 March 1516. He moved to France and taught law in Avignon (1518–1522), then returned to Milan to pursue private studies in the classics and to translate from the Greek anthology and Aristophanes (1523–1526); he taught law again in Avignon 11

ANDREA ALCIATO (1527–1529) and then in Bourges (1529–1533, on the invitation of King Francis I who attended some of his lectures); returned to Italy to teach law at the universities of Pavia (1533–1537), Bologna (1537–1542), Ferrara (1542–1546, on the invitation of Ercole d’Este), and then again Pavia (1546–1550). In 1520 Alciato met Bonifacius Amerbach, who connected him with Desiderius Erasmus. He was made count palatine by Pope Leo X in 1521 and appointed to the Senate of Milan by Duke Francesco Sforza. In 1546 he declined the cardinalate offered to him by Pope Paul III and accepted, instead, only the title of Apostolic Protonotary. Alciato died in Pavia on 12 January 1550. His funeral monument was first erected in the Church of the Epiphany in Milan but in 1773 was transferred to the University of Pavia, where it remains today. KONRAD EISENBICHLER Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, Basel: Thomas Guarinus, 1549, 4 vols.; republished 1582. Opera omnia, Frankfurt: heirs of Lazarus Zetzner, 1617.

Emblem Books Omnia emblemata, Cvm commentariis ... per Clavdivm Minoem, Antwerp: Ex officina C. Plantini, 1577; republished 1583. Emblemata cum commentariis, Padua: Apud Petrum Paulum Tozzium, 1621; rpt. New York: Garland, 1976; as Emblemata, translated and annotated by Betty I. Knott, Aldershot, U.K. and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1996 (with facsimile of the Lyons, 1550 edition); as A Book of Emblems: The Emblematum liber in Latin and English, translated and edited by John F. Moffitt, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2004. Les emble`mes: facsimile de l’e´dition lyonnaise Mace´Bonhomme de 1551, introduction by Pierre Laurens,

concordance Florence Vuilleumier. Paris: Klincksieck, 1997.

Other De verborum significatione libri quattuor, 1530. Le lettere di Andrea Alciato, giureconsulto, edited by Gian Luigi Barni, 1953.

Further Reading Abbondanza, Roberto, ‘‘Alciato, Andrea,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 2, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1973. Abbondanza, Roberto, ‘‘A proposito dell’epistolario dell’Alciato,’’ Annali di storia del diritto 1 (1957): 467–500. Abbondanza, Roberto, ‘‘Jurisprudence: The Method of Andrea Alciato,’’ in The Late Italian Renaissance, edited by Eric Cochrane, London: Harper & Row, 1970. Andrea Alciato and the Emblem Tradition: Essays in Honor of Virginia Woods Callahan, edited by Peter M. Daly, New York: AMS Press, 1989. Callahan, Virginia W., ‘‘Andrea Alciato,’’ in The Contemporaries of Erasmus, vol. 1, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985. Callahan, Virginia W., ‘‘The Erasmus–Alciato Friendship,’’ in Acta Conventus Neo-latini Lovaniensis, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1973. DeGiacomi, H., Andreas Alciatus, Basel: Oppermann, 1934. Green, Henry, Andrea Alciato and His Book of Emblems. A Biographical and Bibliographical Study, London: Tru¨bner, 1872; reprinted, New York: B. Franklin, 1965. Grendler, Paul F., ‘‘Alciato, Andrea,’’ in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, vol. 1, edited by Paul F. Grendler, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. Kelly, Donald R., Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance, New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1970. Selig, Karl-Ludwig, Studies on Alciato in Spain, New York: Garland, 1990. Viard, P. E. Andre´ Alciat, 1492–1550, Paris: Socie´te´ Anonyme du Recueil Sirey, 1926.

ALEARDO ALEARDI (1812–1878) After the failure of the liberal revolutions of 1848, and the defeats of the Italian patriots in their attempt to free Italy from Austrian and Bourbon control, the spirit of Italian independence, which had been a great part of the literary production 12

until then, underwent a period of crisis and disillusionment. Along with his friend Giovanni Prati, Aleardo Aleardi was one of the most representative poets of this crisis. The biography of Aleardi is an exemplary case of the late Romantic generation.

ALEARDO ALEARDI Born Gaetano Maria into an aristocratic family of Verona, he changed his name into the more heroic Aleardo (from the Germanic Alhard or Adelhard, ‘‘courageous’’) when he became sympathetic to Italian revolutionaries. Educated in the Republicanism that animated nearby Venice and deeply influenced by Alessandro Manzoni’s brand of Catholic patriotism, Aleardi betrayed his class allegiance to the Austrians and joined the revolutionary Italian underground, participating actively in the insurrections of 1848–1849. By this time, the revolutionary Count had several volumes of poetry: the madrigal Il matrimonio (The Wedding, 1842), the historical poem Arnalda di Roca (1844), and, most notably, the successful Lettere a Maria (Letters to Maria, 1846), all typical examples of the sentimental and patriotic poetry, reminiscent of Ugo Foscolo and characteristic of Italy’s early Romanticism. However, his revolutionary fervor was mitigated in these early works by a fundamentally antipopular sentiment and the conviction that an Italian revolution should have been led by the moderate wing of the middle class—the same moderate bourgeoisie that found its own sentiment expressed in Aleardi’s poetry. In 1848, after the proclamation of the Republic of Venice, Daniele Manin, president of the shortlived Republic, sent Aleardi to Paris to negotiate for French military help against the Austrians, who were trying to regain control of Venice. In 1849, when the Austrian army reconquered the city, Aleardi was under close police control for his past revolutionary activities and was arrested twice, in 1852 and in 1859. In this dramatic period of his life, Aleardi created his most intense poetic production, marked by the publication of the poems Il monte Circello (The Circello Mountain, 1856); Le antiche citta` marinare e commercianti (The Ancient Naval and Trading Cities, 1856); the Biblical Le prime storie (The Early Histories, 1857), based on the Book of Genesis; the idyll Raffaello e la Fornarina (Raphael and the Fornarina, 1858); and the memorial Un’ora della mia giovinezza (One Hour of My Youth, 1858). The themes of defeat, despair, and even impotence dominated these poetic efforts. The fierce passion for a free Italy (and distrust for its populace) is present, especially in the Le antiche citta` marinare e commercianti, which celebrates the past glories of the maritime republics of Venice, Amalfi, Genoa, and Pisa. However, since they cannot be realized in the present, patriotic passions and the idealization of past Italian virtues often became languorous and melancholic sentimentalism or an escape into a world of aesthetic consolations, or, at

best, nostalgia for a bygone time contrasted to the vision of a decayed, corrupted present. Il monte Circello, the masterpiece of this period, compares for instance the ominous landscape of the Pontine marshes with an ideal prehistoric Italy painted in the classicist tone of the Parnasse. Another leitmotiv of Aleardi’s poetry emerges in Un’ora della mia giovinezza: the poet autobiographically depicted as a Don Juan—or, more precisely, as the Jacopo Ortis of Ugo Foscolo’s famous epistolary novel, who combines and confuses his sentiment for the country with that of an idealized woman. Aleardi’s love affairs were transfigured into symbols of patriotism: They appeared as Muses of the Nation who consecrate Aleardi as the poet of Italy. After 1860, Aleardi wrote more poetry of civic engagement and disillusionment: I sette soldati (Seven Soldiers, 1861), Canto politico (Political Song, 1862), and I fuochi sull’Appennino (Fires on the Apennines, 1864). Called to Florence to teach aesthetics at the Istituto di Belle Arti, he published in Switzerland a volume of Poesie complete (Collected Poems, 1863) and started preparing the more ambitious edition of his Canti (Songs), published in 1864. The selection of mostly blank verses in hendecasyllabic meter offered a literary language still close to the model of Foscolo and a typical sampling of Italian Romantic topics—beloved mothers, longing for women, and the overarching sentiment for the country—painted with the hues of pathetic sentimentalism. In the autobiographical Preface to the Canti, Aleardi presented himself as a new Vittorio Alfieri—the artist who, against a world of subterfuge and petty calculations, found in poetry a space of rebellion against tyranny. Not unaware of his own stylistic limits, Aleardi apologized for his artificial and veiled style, blaming the necessity to get around Austrian censorship for his obscure style. He also refused to take position in the querelle between Classicists and Romantics, arguing that such disputes only divided Italy for the benefit of the enemy. He advanced, instead, an ideal of poetry capable of reuniting Romantic passion with classicist roots in the local tradition. Aleardi’s simplistic reduction of Romanticism to passion and of Classicism to civic engagement was representative of the superficial and provincial level of the debate in Italy but was also a symptom of the ultimate affirmation of Romanticism—or, at least, of a romanticized classicism—in the peninsula. Devoted to the cult of Italian independence, the Canti balanced Aleardi’s much-frustrated love for country with his impossible love for Woman—an almost mythical creature that, from one poem to another, took the 13

ALEARDO ALEARDI changing shape of virginal youngsters, ephemeral ladies, dead ‘‘Michelangiolas,’’ and virtuous mothers. Like Italy, Aleardi’s women, in a tribute perhaps to the Stil Novo, always remained immaterial and unreachable for the poet. In this sense, Aleardi’s could be considered the Italian poetry of wanderlust, lack, nostalgia, and homelessness—the poetry of the Romantic wanderer with neither a country nor a family to call ‘‘home.’’ An interesting trait of Aleardi’s sensibility, in fact, is the way in which the political dimension of the search for Italy doubled into the private search for familial happiness. Aleardi’s last works are in prose: Sullo ingegno di Paolo Calliari (On the Genius of Paolo Calliari, 1872), Due parole di commemorazione sopra Paolo Emiliani Giudici (Some Words in Memory of Paolo Emiliani Giudici, 1872), and Discorso su Francesco Petrarca (On Francesco Petrarca, 1874). They were occasional works, suitable in tone and content to the new institutional status of Aleardi, professor of Belle Arti and deputy to the new Italian Parliament at the same time. United Italy initially celebrated Aleardi as one of the illustrious Risorgimento poets and as a bard of the new Italy. His strict adherence to the most Italian of meters, the hendecasyllable, was also praised as formal patriotism. Between 1864 and 1911, the Canti went through eleven reprints— quite an achievement in a small country with a high rate of illiteracy. However, his fortune declined with the decline of the myth of the Risorgimento, and his most compelling contribution to Italian literature remained his melancholic and often disillusioned aestheticism, which anticipated the tone of future writers such as Antonio Fogazzaro, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and the Italian crepuscolari poets.

Biography Aleardo was born Gaetano Maria Aleardi in Verona on November 14, 1812. He studied law at the University of Padua in 1829. He participated to the insurrections for Italian independence and worked as ambassador of the Republic of Venice in Paris around 1848. In 1852 he was arrested by the Austrian police and jailed in Mantua; in 1859 he was arrested again and sent to prison in Josephstadt, Bohemia. He returned to Italy and settled in Brescia in 1860. He was then nominated Professor

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of Aesthetics at the Istituto di Belle Arti of Florence in 1864. He became deputy at the Italian Parliament in 1866 and senator of the Italian Parliament in 1873. He died in Verona on July 17, 1878. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO Selected Works Collections Le piu´ belle pagine di Aleardo Aleardi, edited by Giuseppe Citanna, Milan: Treves-Treccani-Tumminelli, 1932. Poesie complete, Losanna: Presso la Societa` Editrice, 1863.

Poetry ‘‘Il matrimonio,’’ 1842. ‘‘Arnalda di Roca,’’ 1844. ‘‘Lettere a Maria,’’ 1846. ‘‘Il Monte Circello,’’ 1856. ‘‘Le antiche citta` italiane marinare e commercianti,’’ 1856. ‘‘Le prime storie,’’ 1857. ‘‘Raffaello e la Fornarina,’’ 1858. ‘‘Un’ora della mia giovinezza,’’ 1858. ‘‘I sette soldati,’’ 1861. ‘‘I fuochi sull’Appennino,’’ 1864. ‘‘Canti,’’ 1864.

Essays Sullo ingegno di Paolo Calliari, 1872. Due parole di commemorazione sopra Paolo Emiliani Giudici, 1872. Discorso su Francesco Petrarca, 1874.

Other Epistolario di Aleardo Aleardi, edited by G. Trezza, 1879.

Further Reading Comes, Salvatore, ‘‘Aleardo Aleardi,’’ Letteratura 2, no. 72 (1964): 20–29. Gallotti Giordani, Luisa, and Rosa Maria Monastra, Niccolo` Tommaseo e la crisi del Romanticismo, Bari: Laterza, 1976. Giuliano, Giuseppina, Aleardo Aleardi nella vita e nell’arte (1812–1878), Verona: La Tipografica veronese, 1934. Mazzini, Ubaldo, Amori e politica di Aleardo Aleardi, 2 vols., Aquila: Vecchioni, 1930. Scolari, Antonio, Scritti di varia letteratura e di critica: Machiavelli, Fracastoro, Ariosto, Leopardi, Aleardi, Settembrini, Carducci, Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1937. Staltari, Vincenzo, Aleardo Aleardi: Poeta scaligero, Modica: Gugnali, 1968. Vallone, Aldo, ‘‘Aleardo Aleardi,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I minori, Vol. 4, Milan: Marzorati, 1962.

SIBILLA ALERAMO (RINA FACCIO)

SIBILLA ALERAMO (RINA FACCIO) (1876–1960) Sibilla Aleramo’s name appears again and again in the history of twentieth-century Italian letters. A legend in her own right, she is also connected to many of the country’s leading poets, artists, activists, and intellectuals. Equally known for her groundbreaking writing and her scandalous life, she is a familiar subject of feminist critics and cultural historians. Active in the women’s emancipation movement from early in her career, she participates in social and cultural reform movements throughout her long life. More than most writers, Aleramo merges fiction and reality, whether it be in her autobiographical novels, lyric poetry, or drama. She herself repeatedly notes that all her creative writing is essentially lyrical, focused on the subjective venture of constructing a self-image and achieving self-awareness. Her first book, Una donna (A Woman, 1906) realistically tells the story of Rina Faccio’s early life, rape, loveless marriage, motherhood, intellectual blossoming, search for authenticity, and eventual desertion of husband and son. Il passaggio (The Passage, 1919) is a revised version of the same events presented in a more intimate way, with changes and additions made to the plot. Amo dunque sono (I Love Therefore I Am, 1927) is an account of the first phase of Aleramo’s affair with the young Giulio Parise; the novel borrows freely from the couple’s actual letters. Il frustino (The Whip, 1932) fictionalizes one of the author’s past emotional crises: her concurrent romantic entanglements with writers Giovanni Boine, Michele Cascella, and Clemente Rebora and the resultant psychological quandary. This ‘‘novel’’ also cites excerpts from their extensive epistolary and Aleramo’s journals. After Una donna, Aleramo’s subjective writing, including her many letters and voluminous diaries, tends toward narcissism and self-celebration. Whether in the first or third person, the novels are inherently exaltations of the female protagonist, a thinly veiled rendering of Aleramo herself. Throughout her career, the writer constructs a mythic identity based on her ‘‘truth,’’ a term she often uses to signify utter sincerity in self-representation, adhering to the Romantic aesthetic that posits art and life as an

indissoluble whole. The author believes that the intensity of her emotions and experiences nourish her creativity and enrich her writing. Nevertheless, Aleramo’s most memorable contribution to literature is her first and least lyrical book, Una donna. Having been urged to tell her story anonymously as everywoman’s by journalist and writer Giovanni Cena, her companion at the time, Aleramo’s fictionalized biography succeeds as an exemplary tale about woman’s need and struggle for self-fulfillment and validation. Both confession and manifesto, the work is acknowledged as an essential text of European feminism and as the first Italian feminist novel. Besides the overtly biographical elements, the novel deals with the political as well as the personal, touching on typical issues found in feminist fiction: the inferior legal and social status of women, marriage as oppression, maternity as self-abnegation, the physical and mental decline of unhappy wives. At the time of its publication, the book was greeted with cheers and jeers, adding to its author’s notoriety. Its detractors considered it a degenerate account of female selfishness that threatened family values. Its supporters hailed it as a second A Doll’s House (1879) that, like Ibsen’s play, challenges the social role of women and asserts the rights of the individual to self-determination. Although all of Aleramo’s later fiction and poetry deal with the definition of feminine identity, none achieved the same universal appeal as Una donna. Aleramo’s break with Cena in 1910 initiates a new phase in both her life and writing. As she explains it, in their time together ‘‘divenni libera amante, divenni scrittrice, imposi alla societa` la mia ribellione e la mia audacia’’ (I became a free lover, I became a writer, I imposed my rebellion and my daring on society) (Dal mio diario, 1945). Drawn to the idealization of absolute liberty, individualism, and self-affirmation preached by Nietzsche, Aleramo comes to a new ‘‘truth’’ for herself, realized artistically in her second novel, Il passaggio. A woman, she holds, has the right to explore erotic love, experience sensuality, and follow her instinctual drives. 15

SIBILLA ALERAMO (RINA FACCIO) Inevitably, Aleramo is compared to another literary voluptuary, Gabriele D’Annunzio, although she persistently refutes any suggestion that her work is imitative or artificial. While adamantly rejecting D’Annunzio’s tendency to view art as virtuosity or as a refined verbal game, she nevertheless shares his egoism and Dionysian drive. When compared to the realistic tones of Una donna, Il passaggio appears verbose; its penchant for effusive language, imagery, and emotion envelops the plot and stifles narrative logic, accentuating aestheticism and introspection. Aleramo’s unconventional and unrepressed attitudes translate into prose and verse that is erotically explicit, unlike most women’s writing in the 1920s and 1930s. The author insists that the genesis of her creativity resides in her sexual identity, distinguishing ‘‘womanly genius’’ from male intellect. Aleramo postulates gender difference and believes her art to be the product of a uniquely female spirit. In a controversial essay, ‘‘Apologia dello spirito femminile’’ (Apology for the Feminine Spirit, 1911), Aleramo states that women become true poets and discover a fresh creative voice only when they believe in their otherness, understood in psychological as well as biological terms. Inevitably, her own femaleness becomes a recurring theme in her writing, often viewed through the lens of love, an existential state Aleramo considers intrinsic to the emergence of her personal authenticity. Through the years, the writer’s themes remain exceptionally constant in both fiction and verse: the myth of the self, the beauty of nature and youth, the glorification of erotic and sensual love, the active quest for fulfillment, the examination of emotional states. Sibilla Aleramo’s poetry is contained in two anthological collections: Selva d’amore (Woods or Treasury of Love, 1947), which includes her poems from l912 to l946, while Luci della mia sera (My Evening Lights, 1956) covers her final lyric production. These anthologies integrate several earlier volumes: Momenti (Moments, 1920), Poesie (Poems, 1929), Sı` alla terra (Yes to the Earth, 1924), Imminente sera 1936–1942 (Imminent Evening, 1947), and Aiutatemi a dire: Nuove poesie (1948–1951) (Help Me Speak: New Poems, 1951). In terms of style, Aleramo’s verse is traditional rather than avant-garde. Her sources are primarily Italian Romantics and Decadents, especially Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Like them, she is a poet of sensations, feelings, symbols, and nature; unlike them, she is not a trained craftsman. Her lyric idiom is direct and approachable, 16

very different from the innovative verse produced by her poet-lovers Dino Campana, Vincenzo Cardarelli, and Salvatore Quasimodo. Aleramo generally opts for the open quality of free verse, preferring rhythm and phonic repetition to formal rhyme schemes and meters. Like her novels. Aleramo’s lyrics are autobiographically inspired. Her view of love as passion and sensual abandon is highly lyrical, and erotic tension is at the core of her finest verse. Aleramo’s lyric persona is represented as a vivifying life force for the beloved. At times she is transformed into an animist divinity who affords sensual delight and communion with nature. As Earth goddess, she generates love and, by extension, art: Aleramo transfigures the erotic experience into a literary maternity as a part of her ‘‘feminine spirit.’’ The poet’s images render the female body emblematic, often fusing the physical being with nature (woman as plant, flower, rose) in an Ovidian metamorphosis. Nature also serves as a mirror of the poet’s inner life in a symbiotic rapport in which femaleness is rendered through elemental metaphors such as sun, flames, moon, sea, water, air. Sı` alla terra marks a shift in the poet’s themes as her emphasis moves away from narcissistic self-description toward a growing sense of human solidarity, fostered in part by the darker motifs of aging, melancholy, death, and loss. Typical of Aleramo’s muse, the events of her life are transformed into art. As a living legend in physical decline, her fears and disheartenment become poems. Inspired by her decade-long liaison with the very young poet Franco Matacotta, even her final love poems reiterate Aleramo’s self-depiction as a life force in their unusual merging of desire and maternal tenderness for the beloved. In her last years, Aleramo replaced erotic love with an all-consuming passion for the ideology and solidarity of Italy’s Communist Party. Returning to the intense social activism of her youth, she shared her gifts and considerable skills with the comrades who offered her affectionate support. Her writing turned to political and socialist themes and took on some ideologically inspired rhetorical embellishments. The poetry of Luci della mia sera celebrates her new credo, the value of the proletariat working class, and the companionship of those committed to changing the face of postwar Italy. Leaning toward political panegyric, these poems nevertheless capture some of the epic spirit of the proletarian ranks committed to the Revolution. A special mention goes to Aleramo’s diaries, which provide an intimate yet eloquent portrait of the

SIBILLA ALERAMO (RINA FACCIO) woman and her adventurous life from youth to old age, thereby affirming her status as an archetypal confessional writer.

See also: Women’s History

Biography

Fiction

Aleramo was born Rina Faccio on 14 August 1876 in Alessandria. In 1888, the Faccio family moved to the Marches region. Although not formally educated, as an adolescent she contributed articles to regional newspapers; Aleramo continued writing on social issues throughout her long life. She was married at 16 to Ulderico Pierangeli, her father’s clerk, who had raped her a year earlier. Aleramo’s beloved son Walter was born in 1895. In 1899, she was offered a position as director of a new woman’s magazine, L’Italia femminile, in Milan, where the Pierangeli family transferred briefly. After a short, undesired return to the Marches, she deserted her abusive husband and moved to Rome in 1902. There she met Giovanni Cena, director of the prestigious literary journal La nuova antologia. Aleramo cohabited with Cena for seven years, developing intellectually and writing her major work, a fictionalized autobiography titled Una donna (1906). She took the name Sibilla Aleramo at this time. Aleramo turned to social activism, including the struggle for suffrage, working with Cena in establishing clinics and schools in the Agro romano. After 1910, she began a series of failed love affairs and wanderings across Italy and Europe. She became involved with avant-garde groups in Florence and Milan and was notably connected with the journal La Voce and Futurism; she wrote prolifically for numerous periodicals and edited the popular La Grande Illustrazione magazine. In 1925, Aleramo moved to Rome permanently. She was often destitute, due in part to being blacklisted by the establishment press for signing the anti-Fascist manifesto issued by Benedetto Croce. Her second volume of poetry, Poesie, was awarded a monetary prize by the Accademia d’Italia, 1929. Although never a regime supporter, Aleramo received a regular government subsidy after 1933. She enrolled in the Italian Communist Party in 1946, attracted to its sense of solidarity. She worked tirelessly for the Party, giving lectures and public readings as well as writing articles and a column for L’Unita`, the Communist daily. In 1948, the lyric collection Selva d’amore received the Viareggio Prize. Ever a prolific writer, Aleramo continued working until her death in Rome on 13 January 1960. FIORA A. BASSANESE

Selected Works Una donna, l906; as A Woman at Bay, translated by Mary Lansdale, 1908; as A Woman, translated by Rosalind Delmar, 1979. Il passaggio, l919. Amo dunque sono, l927. Il frustino, l932.

Poetry ‘‘Selva d’amore,’’ 1947. ‘‘Luci della mia sera: Poesie (1941–1946),’’ l956.

Diaries Dal mio diario (1940–1944), l945. Diario di una donna: Inediti 1945–1960, 1978–1980. Un amore insolito: Diario 1940–1944, l979.

Other Andando e stando, 1921. Gioie d’occasione, l930–1954. Orsa minore: Note di taccuino, 1938. Lettere (with Dino Campana), l958. Lettere d’amore (with Vincenzo Caldarelli), edited by G. A. Cibotto and Bruno Blasi, 1974. La donna e il femminismo: Scritti l897–1910, l978. Carteggio, 1915–1955, 1997. Lettere d’amore (with Salvatore Quasimodo), edited by Paola Manfredi, 2001.

Further Reading Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Sibilla Aleramo,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, vol. 114, edited by Giovanna Wedel De Stasio, Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Illiano, Detroit & London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1992. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Sibilla Aleramo: Writing a Personal Myth,’’ in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Buttafuoco, Annarita, and Marina Zancan (editors), Svelamento. Sibilla Aleramo: Una biografia intellettuale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988. Conti, Bruna, and Alba Morino (editors), Sibilla Aleramo e il suo tempo: Vita raccontata e illustrata, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981. Contorbia, Franco, Lea Melandri, and Alba Morino (editors), Sibilla Aleramo: Coscienza e scrittura, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986. Federzoni, Marina, Isabella Pezzini, and Maria Pia Pozzato, Sibilla Aleramo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Folli, Anna, Penne leggere. Neera, Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo. Scritture Femminili italiane fra Otto e Novecento, Milan: Gerini Studio, 2000. Guerricchio, Rita, Storia di Sibilla, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, l974. Gu¨nsberg, Maggie, ‘‘The Importance of Being Absent: Narrativity and Desire in Sibilla Aleramo’s Amo dunque sono,’’ The Italianist, 14 (1993): 138–160. Jewell, Keala Jane, ‘‘Un furore d’autocreazione: Women and Writing in Sibilla Aleramo,’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 7 (l984): 148–162.

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SIBILLA ALERAMO (RINA FACCIO) Luciano, Bernadette, ‘‘The Diaries of Sibilla Aleramo: Constructing Female Subjectivity,’’ in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon, edited by Maria Marotti, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Morino, Alba, L’analista di carta: Sibilla Aleramo, un’esperienza, un metodo, Imola (Bologna): La Mandragola, 2003. Morosoff, Anna Grimaldi, Transfigurations: The Autobiographical Novels of Sibilla Aleramo, New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, Politics of the Visible. Writing Women, Culture, and Fascism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Wood, Sharon, Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994, London: Athlone, 1995.

UNA DONNA, 1906 Novel by Sibilla Aleramo

In Sibilla Aleramo’s Una donna (A Woman), autobiography and fiction blend to produce a book that is both personal and universal. Evolving from journal entries for June 1901, this confessional novel takes episodes from the writer’s biography and recasts them into an exemplary tale of female oppression and liberation. Early on the literary critic Alfredo Gargiulo understood Una donna’s groundbreaking contribution to women’s writing, declaring it ‘‘nella bibbia del femminismo, al posto della genesi’’ (in the Bible of feminism, in the place of Genesis) (‘‘Una donna,’’ Il Giornale d’Italia, 10 May 1907). Generally acknowledged as Italy’s first feminist novel and acclaimed as a classic, Aleramo’s most celebrated book is equal parts paradigm and self-revelation. Told in the first person, in keeping with its confessional nature, Una donna resonates with the sincerity typical of a journal. At the same time, the book is explicitly written as a manifesto for women’s rights or, in keeping with the naturalist literary traditions of the time, as a thesis novel whose protagonist is proposed as an ‘‘everywoman.’’ Specific authorial choices underscore the universality of the individual life story being told: For example, Aleramo eschews proper names for social functions, so characters are simply 18

known as ‘‘father,’’ ‘‘mother,’’ ‘‘sister-in-law,’’ ‘‘doctor,’’ ‘‘friend,’’ ‘‘editor,’’ and so on. Similarly, few exact locations or dates are given, in part to focus on the tyranny of patriarchal conventions in the nation’s backwaters. The plot chronicles the coming of age of a girl whose autonomous androgyny is suppressed by societal gender norms and biology. Violated in adolescence, the girl marries her rapist, endures years of marital discord and abuse, finds temporary solace in maternity and romantic fantasies, saves herself and her sanity by studying and writing, and escapes her provincial prison for a time thanks to her own skills and intellect and a providential job offer, only to be forcibly returned to her husband’s domestic jail. Needing to choose between motherhood and self-affirmation, at the book’s end the heroine abandons the past and moves into an unknown and open-ended future. Aleramo’s central motifs are recurrent throughout women’s fiction, ranging from the pitfalls of romantic illusions to the powerful pull of cultural indoctrination, from marriage as imprisonment to the representation of the mad housewife. As part of the novel’s thesis, social institutions, the law, family and maternity, the treatment of women as the second sex, and their physical and mental abuse are all explored not as mere sociological issues but as part of the heroine’s lived experience. As a confessional novel, Una donna traces the physiological, psychological, and social development of the protagonist in her own impassioned words, so that the universal is given a human voice. At the time of its publication, Una donna was received with antithetical opinions. While some reviewers praised its feminist stand, others condemned the work on moral grounds, scandalized by its critique of marriage but more so by the protagonist’s desertion of her child. Even today, Aleramo’s emotional yet controlled fictional depiction of her early years has the power to move readers deeply for, as she herself declared, Una donna is ‘‘il capolavoro equivalente ad una vita’’ (the masterpiece that equals a life). FIORA A. BASSANESE Editions First edition: Una donna, Rome-Turin: STEN, l906. Other editions: Una donna, Milan: Treves, l919; Florence: Bemporad, l921; Milan: Mondadori, l930; Milan: Feltrinelli, l973.

VITTORIO ALFIERI Translations: as A Woman at Bay, translated by Mary Lansdale, New York-London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1908; as A Woman, translated by Rosalind Delmar, London: Virago, 1979.

Further Reading Angelone, Matilde, In difesa della donna: La condizione femminile in ‘‘Una donna’’ di Sibilla Aleramo, Naples: Fratelli Conte, 1990. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Una donna: Autobiography as Exemplary Text,’’ Quaderni d’italianistica, 9, no.1 (1990): 41–60.

Caesar, Ann, ‘‘Sybilla Aleramo’s A Woman,’’ Feminist Review, 5 (1980): 79–88. Drake, Richard, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Sibilla Aleramo, A Woman, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, l980. Folli, Anna, ‘‘Con Sibilla Aleramo,’’ Otto/Novecento, 2 (May/August 2003): 75–97. Gargiulo, Alfredo, ‘‘Una donna,’’ Il Giornale d’Italia, 10 May 1907. Kroha, Lucienne, ‘‘Strategies of Intertextuality in Sibilla Aleramo’s Una donna,’’ in The Woman Writer in Late Nineteenth Century Italy: Gender and the Formation of Literary Identity, Lewiston and Lampeter: Mellen Press, 1992.

VITTORIO ALFIERI (1749–1803) Acclaimed during his lifetime as a new Sophocles, Vittorio Alfieri is the greatest tragedian of the Italian theatrical tradition. His Tragedie (Tragedies, 1783–1785), published in Siena and then, in a polished and expanded version in Paris (1788–1789), created a new dramaturgical tradition. Departing from the restrictions of tragic theater in force from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, which imposed the avoidance of the representation of death, Alfieri developed a new practice of action and vision. If the prohibition against the display of certain events was a long-standing practice in Western theater, Alfieri can be considered the author of the eighteenth-century rupture. Breaking with the topos of ‘‘sweet death’’ or death by poison, his tragedies feature heroes and heroines who stab themselves and thus become icons of virtue (Cleopatra, Charles and Isabella, Haemon, Saul, Myrrha). Besides representing the more generally accepted suicide, Alfieri did not hesitate to portray even the most violent deaths inflicted by others. A fatal embrace covers the fratricide in Polinice (Polynices, 1783); Garzia is stabbed in the eye by the father-tyrant Cosimo dei Medici in Don Garzia (1788); Virginio stabs his daughter to spare her the lust of the consul Appius Claudius in Virginia (1783). Although he did not show Orestes’ matricide, he did, however, show Brutus’s parricide, which is also a tyrannicide, the outcome of the most grandiose conspiracy of all time. This was indeed a daring gesture, since, with the exception of

Shakespeare, no playwright had ever shown on stage the conspirators who kill Caesar. Although fascinated by the story, even Voltaire in his Mort de Ce´sar (1731) limited himself to showing the already-dead body of the dictator. Having surpassed the visual prohibitions respected in his earlier work Congiura dei Pazzi (The Pazzi Conspiracy, 1788), in Bruto secondo (Brutus the Second, 1789), written in 1786–1787, Alfieri restored visual action to the dramaturgy of the conspiracy. A tragic emblem of the eighteenth century, Alfieri’s theatrical works condense questions of political change and assume the form of a new tragic genre. The subjects are historical, the conflicts political, and the action is conspiracy itself. Thanks to their urgent rhythm, Alfieri’s tragedies seem to fly toward catastrophe, substituting a linear movement for the circular endings of Baroque theater. The catastrophe must arrive suddenly in order to surprise the spectator, who is caught up in the suspense of the action. Above all, in a departure from the lengthy unfolding of Seneca’s tragedies, in Alfierian theater, events must happen quickly: Alfieri does not tolerate protracted narration and favors horror and a macabre vision. The revolution of tragic language theorized by Voltaire is realized in Alfieri’s drama. Every narrative delay is eliminated with the eruption onto the scene of the topos of the oath, a consecration to pagan divinities in ancient source-texts that returns insistently in eighteenth-century painting 19

VITTORIO ALFIERI and stagings, and culminates in the great canvases of Johann Heinrich Fu¨ssli and Jacques-Louis David. Theatrical sets and scenes in painting influence one another. Finding himself in Paris in 1771, Alfieri most likely saw in the Salon of the Louvre the painting by Jacques-Antoine Beaufort of Brutus who swears to vindicate Lucretia, a painting commonly associated by contemporary journals to Shakespearean theater. In Paris again in the years 1787–1792, with his Bruto primo (Brutus the First, 1789), he influenced David, who met the Italian writer in the literary salons of the city. The oath, already used in a melodrama by Pietro Metastasio in considering the qualities of friendship and loyalty to the king, assumed in Alfieri the value of an indissoluble tie of the hero to his destiny. A fundamental sequence in the dramaturgy of conspiracy, the oath returned in the tragedies as a condition from which there is no means of escape. The contraposition between positive and negative characters is delineated in the opposition between giving and breaking trust. On stage are thus played out the rituals that ideally unite brothers in the Masonic coniuratio of the second half of the eighteenth century (the writer belonged to Freemasonry). Bitter and broken, Alfieri’s unrhymed hendecasyllables, in the tradition of Italian free verse, clear the effects of musicality and require a delivery based on meaning and pauses, not on the ends of verses. Style, structure, and language respond to the ideological choice of radical Enlightenment, expressed in Alfieri’s political treatises. The tragedies dramatize, in problematic fashion, the author’s reflections on despotism and on the possibility of the end of the ancien regime. The classical republicanism of his dramatic works soon became the emblem of the antityrannical spirit of the early years of the French Revolution. This coincidence enabled the birth of the myth of Alfieri as a writer with great political and patriotic weight. He was favored by Italian Jacobins, initially engaged in supporting France in the struggle against the sovereigns of the Italian states. The cult of Alfieri as father of a free homeland was then strengthened during the Risorgimento, when men of letters united in the struggle for unification, and was again taken again up by anti-Fascist intellectuals. Two important critical profiles written in the early 1940s, Walter Binni’s Vita interiore dell’Alfieri (1942) and Giacomo Debenedetti’s Vocazione di Vittorio Alfieri (written in 1943 but published in 1977), inaugurated a new wave of criticism on the 20

author, more attentive to his pre-Romantic preoccupations and to what Debenedetti called his romanzo familiare (family romance). The model of the hero’s unbounded fight against the tyrant does not wholly describe the complex theatrical and political experimentation of Alfieri’s theater. Twentieth-century criticism, fascinated by the titanism of his characters or by their Oedipal impulses, has privileged the existential conflicts of Saul (1788) and Mirra (Myrrha, 1789), the two works considered his tragic masterpieces. As an expression of forte sentire (strong feeling), his antityranny is often interpreted as a metaphor for a revolt against limits, in which there prevail instead a magma of sentiments and a dark sense of death. In this perspective, his tragic characters seem to share an overpowering subjectivity in which the discovery of the self as an individual (often a selfdestructive one) prevails, together with the realization of his inalienable tragic destiny. The question of Alfieri’s placement between Enlightenment and Romanticism is still open. On the one hand, the playwright would seem to belong to the changing culture of Enlightened thought (a revival of the category of pre-Romanticism), on the other, to that of radical Enlightenment. The most recent research on his network of relationships moves in this latter direction. Prone to introspection and to the self-portrait, as demonstrated by the Giornali (Journals, 1874–1875), written in his youth, and the posthumous Vita scritta da esso (The Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself, 1806), Alfieri had a strong personality characterized by contrasting attitudes and directions: There is the fiery sensibility and his fascination for solitude, uncovered in the lyrical voice of the Rime (Poems, 1788–1789); the satirical attitude that returns in the late Commedie (Comedies, 1807); the radical nature of the political themes brought to light in the tragedies about freedom; the search for poetic glory and a personal style; the competition with other great writers; and his dedication to the cult of the classics in his premature old age. A dandy, an aristocrat, and a rebel, he lived great passions (chocolate, women, horses) and painful separations (as a child from his sister Giulia, as an adult from his dear friend Francesco Gori Gandellini and from Luisa Stolberg, his degno amore, whom he met in Florence in 1777 and loved until her death). Immortalized in the Vita scritta da esso, the passions of his youth are re-evoked to mark the sudden shift to the literary and theatrical professions, after the irregular studies of his

VITTORIO ALFIERI squandered youth. The masterpiece of his life work, alongside the Tragedie, the Vita scritta da esso is a novel of poetic formation. Its greatness resides in its modernity and in its analysis, sometimes ironic, of the will and the exceptional destiny of the protagonist. The work of his beloved Montaigne is its closest antecedent. This tendency to create self-portraits was already manifest in the first part of the Rime, which can be considered his lyrical diary, his secret book. The poet portrayed himself as a character gifted with a heightened sensibility, in conflict with his times but also as pervaded by boredom and an unnatural melancholy. The noted verse in which he depicted himself as an ardent poet and unhappy lover captures the fascination he exerted on the Romantic generation, attracted by the new alpine or maritime landscapes in which the solitary poet of the wounded soul wanders about, rebellious and unhappy. Tragedy is codified in the eighteenth century as a political genre that must speak to the heart of the spectator (Voltaire). Alfieri, too, proposed a tragic system in his political writings in which the opposition between ‘‘passionate’’ and ‘‘cold’’ tragedy is directed toward the teaching of virtue. As self-critic, in the ‘‘Parere sulle tragedie’’ (Opinion on the Tragedies) published in the fifth volume of the Tragedie (1789), he distinguished between tragico vero (true tragedy) and vero sublime (true sublime). The first is achieved in the most passionate tragedies, in which contrasts, even when political, explode between kinsmen; the second instead is achieved by tragedies where conflicts derive from burning political passions, as in Bruto secondo. Having read the treatise on the sublime by the pseudo-Longinus, Alfieri saw freedom as a passion that kindles the soul and gives the hero a divine nature. The hero is inflamed, becoming an orator similar to a god. As such, all heroes of freedom, modeled on the Brutus of Plutarch’s Vitae parallelae, have divine stature. And just as Caesar in Voltaire’s Mort de Ce´sar affirms that he would have wanted to be Brutus, had he not been Caesar, Alfieri’s Caesar repeats this to Brutus. This reciprocal recognition is part of the culture and the heroic imaginary of the prerevolutionary eighteenth century, and tragedy is the theatrical practice delegated to incarnate it. In his youthful travels Alfieri came into contact with the culture of the French philosophes. He then discovered Machiavelli and Plutarch, whom he read along with French novels, and was a devoted attendee of the Parisian theaters. As a spectator, he

was familiar with English and French drama and with the different theatrical genres of the eighteenth century, from comic opera to melodrama, staged from London to Venice. This life as spectator is fundamental to understand his ability to draft and finish more than 14 tragedies in a short span of years (1775 –1782), followed by the five added to the Parisian edition, which consecrates the author’s status as a classic. Having acquired direct experience, his sense of theater guided him in reforming tragedy (passionate and brief, simple and bare, free of secondary characters and of informers, visual and fierce). In realizing this form of tragedy, Alfieri paid constant attention to the reactions of his public and to the delivery of the actors, about which he wrote the Parere sull’arte comica in Italia (Opinion on Comic Art in Italy, 1787). Before printing the tragedies, in fact, they had to be read, and he used a private circle of amateur actors to stage Antigone (Antigone, 1783). The set design in the theater of the Palazzo di Spagna, the residence of Duke Grimaldi, convinced Alfieri to modify the conclusion of the play: After having made the cadaver of the heroine appear on stage, slaughtered by order of the tyrant Creon, Alfieri intervened in the text and rewrote the resolution. The event, performed again over many evenings, saw the Roman nobility among the spectators together with artists and men of letters, waiting for the new Sophocles. Alfieri was thus recognized as the founder of Italian tragedy. His acting in the part of Creon was compared with the performances of other major European actors, Garrick and Lekain. Even after the work was printed, Alfieri cemented his role as actor, personally leading the performances held in his various Florentine residences. From these performances and the public ones during the Jacobin period (1796–1799), the tradition of the great Italian actor of the nineteenth century began, with Mirra and Saul forcefully taking place in the theatrical repertory. In his tragedies, Alfieri alternated between historical subjects (ancient and modern) and mythical ones. His first works were interwoven with the political discussions that took place in Masonic and literary societies, according to the custom of the time. After his first tragedy, Cleopatra (1814), written in 1775 and never printed by the author in his lifetime, Alfieri chose a subject from modern history, following the examples of Shakespeare and Voltaire. Criticized for his fierce portrayal of a Catholic sovereign, Filippo (Philip, 1783) tendentiously dramatizes the noted episode of the Spanish 21

VITTORIO ALFIERI king who, according to tradition, was the murderer of his son Charles. Alfieri’s point of view was not naı¨ve. Already a reader of Machiavelli and Montesquieu, of D’Holbach and Helve´tius, he followed the Huguenot and Protestant perspective. The legend of the parricide was born in this context, adopted from Abbot Saint-Re´al’s historical novel Don Carlos (1672), which mixed political and sentimental motivations. Charles, as in Alfieri’s version, is in love with his stepmother, Elisabeth of Valois. Suspicious and astute, able to simulate and merciless in his final vendetta, Philip inaugurates the gallery of Alfierian tyrants. He has his son condemned on false charges of parricide and then forces him to give himself up to death under his implacable gaze. After a series of less risky tragedies on classical subjects—Polinice (Polynices, 1783) and Antigone, on the Theban cycle and Agamennone (Agamemnon, 1783) and Oreste (Orestes, 1783) on the cycle of the Atreides—Alfieri returned to modern subjects. Fundamental was the discovery of the antidespotic tradition in Florence, his knowledge of which is documented by the books in his library. The controversial history of the Medici offered, in the 1770s, several subjects for tragedies, novellas, and theatrical peageants (feste teatrali). In fact, even Alfieri allowed himself to be tempted by the antidespotic value of this tradition and composed a cycle of works on the Medici: the plays La congiura dei Pazzi and Don Garzia and the poem L’Etruria vendicata (Etruria Vindicated, 1788). La congiura dei Pazzi dramatizes the conspiracy against Lorenzo and Giuliano dei Medici, depicted as tyrants and usurpers of the republican institutions of Florence. The plot involves the plan’s execution, only half achieved with the death of Giuliano. Altering history, Alfieri conceded Raimondo dei Pazzi an exemplary suicide, with which the tragedy of liberty ends bitterly. Don Garzia depicts the tyranny of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo dei Medici, who kills his son Garzia, who in his turn is the involuntary fratricide of his brother Diego. Alfieri took the narratives of Titus Livy and Plutarch as starting points for his sketches of events and exemplary gestures widely diffused in the tragic tradition, both French and Italian. From the former he took the subject for Virginia, in which the consul Appius Claudius opposes the marriage of the tribune of the people Icilius to Virginia, forcing the heroic Virginius to kill his daughter. From Plutarch, he took the tyrannicide of Timoleon in Timoleone (1783), who in the face of 22

the usurpation by his brother Timophanes gives the signal for his brother to be stabbed. Called ‘‘tragedies of freedom,’’ these works dramatize the argument made by Alfieri in the treatise Della tirannide (Of Tyranny, 1790) in which Alfieri expressed a radical position on tyrannical power, offering as solutions tyrannicide, conspiracy, and revolution. Other tragedies, such as Merope (1785) or Sofonisba (Sophonisba, 1789), seem to stem from a strongly competitive streak with regard to other tragedians who measured themselves by their portrayals of these subjects, from Scipione Maffei to Voltaire. His last tragedies, which feature two great heroes of Roman history, Junius Brutus, founder of the republic, and Marcus Brutus, killer of Caesar, sprang from the desire to compare himself to Voltaire. In these works, however, Alfieri expressed authentic tension and gave life to the highest example of antityrannical writing. In his second treatise, Del principe e delle lettere (The Prince and Letters, 1789), he resolutely negated that princely protection can favor art and poetry. The argument verges on utopianism in its delineation of a republic of letters, unanchored from any political power. In it, the few, free writers can teach virtue, in the hopes of forming an enlightened public. The trauma of the French Revolution seriously affected Alfieri. Already the cantor of the American Revolution in L’America libera (Ode to America’s Independence, 1788) and of the French in Parigi sbastigliato (Paris De-Bastilled, 1789), he summarized his pungent anti-French sentiments in the Il Misogallo (The Anti-Frenchman, 1814). He returned to his satirical vein by finishing six comedies, in which the great heroes of antiquity reveal their low, quotidian sides. The most successful is Il divorzio (The Divorce, 1807), which shifts its satirical intent from politics to aristocratic habits. Lucrezia breaks her engagement with the young Prosperino, in search of a husband disposed to tolerate the infidelities of his future wife. Old and toothless, the new betrothed is the prototype of the lady’s escort, at whom he takes aim. In denouncing the indissolubility of Catholic marriage, Alfieri found, without meaning to, that his own intentions were in tune with the changes effected by the Revolution.

Biography Vittorio Alfieri was born in Asti, 16 January 1749, to an aristocratic family. He took courses at the Royal Academy of Turin. In 1766 he began a grand

VITTORIO ALFIERI tour of Italy and Europe. He read Montesquieu, Voltaire, Helve´tius, Rousseau; attended theater; and frequented high society. Alfieri staged Cleopatra at the Teatro Carignano, 1775. He read Antigone to the society of the Sampaolina, 1776. He left Piedmont for Tuscany, where he met Luisa Stolberg, the wife of Carlo Edoardo Stuart. To be free, he gave his sister his property in exchange for a life income. He lived in Rome and acted in Antigone, 1781–1783. He was nominated a member of Arcadia with the name of Filacrio Eratrastico, 1783. Alfieri began to travel again and to circulate the tragedies. He lived in Paris, 1787–1792, where he printed the tragedies, 1788–1789. Alfieri enthusiastically followed the outbreak of the Revolution, then fled. He established himself in Florence and composed various works against the French. He completed his Vita scritta da esso, learned Greek, and translated Greek tragedies. Alfieri died in Florence, 8 October 1803. Antonio Canova sculpted his funerary monument in Santa Croce. BEATRICE ALFONSETTI Selected Works Collections Opere di Vittorio Alfieri da Asti, edited by Luigi Fasso et al., 39 vols., Asti: Casa d’Alfieri, 1951–1985. The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri: Complete, Including His Posthumous Works, translated by Charles Lloyd and Edgar Alfred Bowring, 2 vols., London: G. Bell, 1876.

Plays Tragedie, vol. 1, 1783 (Filippo, Polinice, Antigone, Virginia). Tragedie, vol. 2, 1783 (Agamennone, Oreste, Rosmunda). Tragedie, vol. 3, 1785 (Ottavia, Timoleone, Merope). Tragedie, vol. 4, 1788 (La congiura dei Pazzi, Don Garzia, Saul, Agide, Sofonisba). Tragedie, vol. 5, 1789 (Bruto Primo, Mirra, Bruto Secondo). Commedie, 1807 (La finestrina, Il divorzio, L’uno, L’antidoto). Cleopatra, 1814.

Poetry ‘‘L’America libera,’’ 1788; as ‘‘Ode to America’s Indipendence,’’ translated by Adolph Caso, 1976. ‘‘Parigi sbastigliato,’’ 1789. ‘‘L’Etruria vendicata,’’ 1789. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1788–1789. ‘‘Il Misogallo,’’ 1814.

Essays Parere sull’arte comica in Italia, 1787. Panegirico di Plinio a Trajano, 1787; revised edition, 1789. La virtu´ sconosciuta, 1788. Del principe e delle lettere, 1789; as The Prince and Letters, translated by Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan, 1972. Della tirannide, 1790; as Of Tyranny, translated by Julius A. Molinaro and Beatrice Corrigan, 1961.

Other Vita scritta da esso, 1806; as The Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself, translated by Sir Henry McAnally, 1953; as Memoirs, edited by E. R. Vincent, 1961. Vita, lettere, giornali di Vittorio Alfieri, edited by Emilio Teza, 1861.

Further Reading Alfonzetti, Beatrice, Congiure: dal poeta della botte all’eloquente giacobino, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Betti, Franco, Vittorio Alfieri, Boston: Twayne, 1984. Binni, Walter, Studi alfieriani, 2 vols, edited by Marco Dondero, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Binni, Walter, Vita interiore dell’Alfieri, Bologna-Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1942. Buccini, Stefania (editor), Alfieri beyond Italy, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004. Cerruti, Marco et al. (editors), Alfieri e il suo tempo, Florence: Olschki, 2003. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Vocazione di Vittorio Alfieri, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1977. Di Benedetto, Arnaldo, Le passioni e il limite. Un’interpretazione diVittorio Alfieri, Naples: Liguori, 1994. Fubini, Mario, Ritratto dell’Alfieri e altri studi alfieriani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1951. Lindon, John, L’Inghilterra di Vittorio Alfieri e altri studi alfieriani, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Meldolesi, Claudio, and Ferdinando Taviani, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Ottocento, Bari: Laterza, 1991. Raimondi, Ezio, Le pietre del sogno. Il moderno dopo il sublime, Bologna: il Mulino, 1985. Starobinski, Jean, 1789, les emble`mes de la raison, Paris: Flammarion, 1973. Tellini, Gino, and Roberta Turchi (editors), Alfieri in Toscana, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 2002. Trivero, Paola, Tragiche donne. Tipologie femminili nel teatro italiano del Settecento, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2000.

MIRRA, 1789 Tragedy by Vittorio Alfieri

Mirra (Myrrha) occupies an unusual place in the history of Alfierian theater, as it violated his decision not to write any more tragedies after Saul (1788). If tragedy is equivalent to bollore (ardor) and ardor is in turn equivalent to giovinezza (youth), the poet then feared that, at 35 years of age, he had forever lost his youthful impetus. He rediscovered it in the mountains of Alsace together with his beloved Luisa, to 23

VITTORIO ALFIERI whom he dedicated the tragedy of the ‘‘horrible’’ but ‘‘innocent’’ love of Myrrha for her father Cinyras. Written upon reading the passage of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the young girl implores her nurse to help her to consume her devouring passion, Mirra upends the long tradition of the characterization of the girl as guilty and evil. Passion burns and consumes the heroine who, however, does her best not to confess this love. This prohibition translates into her cries and her deathly pallor, from which transpires her incomprehensible anguish, the ‘‘inesplicabil cosa’’ (unexplainable thing). Her mother, her father, her betrothed, and the nurse try in vain to discover her secret, but Myrrha is silent or speaks of other things, adopting a contorted, enigmatic language, speaking for instance of death just a few hours before the wedding that she herself wanted in order to distance herself definitively from the object of her forbidden love. Thus she renews to the stunned Pereo her wedding promise, in order, it seems, to constrain herself to the mortal separation from her father. Prey to her obsession, however, she falls into a delirium during the wedding ceremony, when the choir sings celebratory songs in lyric verses. By then her destiny is settled. Alfieri’s Myrrha, too, loses her innocence and confesses her guilt, as if there is no escape from a love against the law. ‘‘Fuori di se´’’ (Out of her mind), Myrrha implores death, first to her father, then to her mother, in a confrontation that becomes increasingly more bitter. Left alone with her mother, Cenchreis, she explodes in an accusatory delirium; her reasons escape her dismayed mother, although the hate and jealousy of Myrrha do not. The final act finally places father and daughter in direct confrontation. Myrrha can no longer escape the increasingly close inquiries of her father, and pronounces his name, indicating him as the object of her revolting love. At the same time, without hesitation, she strikes herself with her father’s sword. In tormenting, almost syllabic and suspended verses, she implores him to distance himself from her disgraceful sight. A sign of her guilt, her broken body, is damned and abandoned by everyone, with the exception of the kind nurse. Myrrha directs her final words to her, and in these lines lies the antithesis at the core of the action of the play: In silence resides innocence, and in words, Myrrha’s transgression. Mirra had an impact on many exceptional readers and spectators, from Massimo D’Azeglio to Lorenzo da Ponte, from Stendhal to Byron. Her greatest nineteenth-century interpreter, Adelaide Ristori, won triumphal success, especially in Paris. 24

In the twentieth century, after being played by Anna Proclemer, directed by Orazio Costa (1949), the part was performed by the young Galatea Ranzi under the direction of Luca Ronconi (1988–1989). BEATRICE ALFONSETTI Editions First edition: in Tragedie, vol. 5, Paris: Didot, 1789. Critical edition: Mirra: testo definitivo e redazioni inedite, edited by Martino Capucci, vol. 23 of Opere, Asti: Casa d’Alfieri, 1974. Translations: as Myrrha, in The Tragedies, vol. 2, translated by Charles Lloyd and Edgar A. Bowring, London: G. Bell, 1876.

Further Reading Azzolini, Paola, ‘‘La negazione simbolica della ‘Mirra’ alfieriana,’’ Lettere italiane, 32 (1980), 289–313. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Lettura della ‘Mirra,’’’ in Studi alfieriani, edited by Marco Dondero, vol. 2, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Vittorio Alfieri, Mirra, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. Di Benedetto, Arnaldo, ‘‘L’‘orrendo a un tempo ed innocente amore’ di Mirra,’’ La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 2(2003), 738–747. Fabrizi, Angelo, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Vittorio Alfieri, Mirra, Modena: Mucchi, 1996. Ferrone, Siro, ‘‘Fortuna di Alfieri nell’Ottocento: dall’autobiografia al repertorio,’’ Annali alfieriani, 4 (1985), 185–198. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Saul e Mirra, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1993. Joly, Jacques, Le de´sir et l’utopie. E`tudes sur le the´aˆtre d’Alfieri et Goldoni, Clermont-Ferrand: Blaise Pascal, 1978. Pandolfi, Vito, Antologia del grande attore, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Schiavo Lena, Alessandra, Anna Fiorilli Pellandi una grande attrice veneziana tra Sette e Ottocento, Venice: Il Cardo, 1996.

SAUL, 1788 Tragedy by Vittorio Alfieri

After writing tragedies centered on heroes of ‘‘certainty,’’ Alfieri yielded to the temptations of the poetic, fantastical possibilities of the Old Testament and wrote Saul, a tragedy of ‘‘perplexity’’ and

VITTORIO ALFIERI madness. The author drew the subject from the first Book of Kings, a source of inspiration for a long musical and theatrical tradition, and read the work in public for the first time in April of 1783, during the ceremony in which he was proclaimed a shepherd in the Roman Arcadia. He performed the work, playing the part of the protagonist, in Tuscany in the years 1793–1795, staging simple, bare performances without a stage. At the same time, the work was also staged in various theaters by Antonio Morrocchesi. In the nineteenth century the part of Saul was played by Gustavo Modena and Tommaso Salvini, and in the twentieth century by Ermete Zacconi, Salvo Randone, and Renzo Giovampietro. The tragedy concerns four main characters: Saul, the first king of Israel; his children Jonathan and Michal; and David, Michal’s husband, a figure tied by fraternal love to Jonathan. The relationship between the two men is consolidated by an oath, superior to any ties of natural affection. David is thus dearer to Jonathan than his own father, his wife, his sons, or his kingdom. This introduces the central theme of succession and of the kingdom that, according to the will of the prophet Samuel, will pass to David. The king’s counselor, Abner, incites the by-then elderly Saul to hate the young, beautiful, and valiant David, but the hero’s sword protects him and his song cheers him, before Saul is devoured by the gnawing of implacable jealousy and the conviction that David will usurp his throne. The action begins with David’s return from exile. Without the king’s knowledge, David enters Saul’s camp in order to be with him in the final battle against the Philistines, but when he is identified by the king, the conflict erupts once again. Saul, who is affected by senile dementia, is inconstant and ambivalent about everything he encounters. Tragically alone, impotent in the face of his decline, rebellious against religious power, obsessed by guilt, attached to the scepter and the sword (which are also phallic symbols of his power), Saul stabs himself while his victorious enemies advance. In 1803, Franc¸ois-Xavier Fabre, a friend and portraitist of Alfieri and of his companion, Luisa Stolberg, completed a painting of Saul. The painting

represents the fifth act, when Saul, after having the priest Achimelech slain, is delirious. His hallucinations result from his fear of death and his sense of guilt at the crimes and transgressions he has committed. The specters of Samuel and Achimelech, described in verses of extraordinary intensity in the play, materialize in the painting, which shows Saul with the crown on his head, while the ghost of Samuel is about to hit him with the sword of God. On the left lies the priest with a dagger driven into his chest. In managing to dramatize the drama of regality and of old age, of love and hate, of guilt and disobedience, of knowledge through madness, Alfieri owed much to Shakespeare, especially King Lear. BEATRICE ALFONSETTI Editions First edition: in Tragedie, vol. 4, Paris: Didot, 1788. Critical edition: Saul: testo definitivo e redazioni inedite, edited by Carmine Jannaco and Angelo Fabrizi, vol. 31 of Opere, Asti: Casa d’Alfieri, 1982. Translations: as Saul, in The Tragedies, vol. 2, translated by Charles Lloyd and Edgar A. Bowring, London: G. Bell, 1876.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Saul di Vittorio Alfieri,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere. Dal Cinquecento al Settecento, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Barsotti, Anna, Alfieri e la scena. Da fantasmi di personaggi a fantasmi di spettatori, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Lettura del ‘Saul,’’’ in Studi alfieriani, edited by Marco Dondero, vol. 2, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Forthomme, Bernard, La folie du roi Sau¨l, Paris: Empeˆcheurs de penser en rond, 2002. Frye, Northrop, The Great Code. The Bible and Literature, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Ghidetti, Enrico, ‘‘Saul,’’ La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 2 (2003), 637–655. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Saul e Mirra, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1993. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Saul,’’ in Letture alfieriane, edited by Gino Tellini, Florence: Ed. Polistampa, 2003. Herr, Mireille, Les trage´dies bibliques au XVIII sie`cle, ParisGeneva: Champion-Slatkine, 1988.

25

FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI

FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI (1712–1764) Francesco Algarotti, a typical eighteenth-century literary figure and intellectual, occupies a position of undisputed importance among exponents of Illuminist culture in Italy. He authored numerous writings diverse in nature, the first of which was the celebrated essay on optics entitled Neutonianesimo per le dame (Newtonism for Ladies, 1737), or Dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori (Dialogues on Light and Colors), which earned him fame throughout Europe. Algarotti wrote with acumen about many subjects: poetry, philosophy, philology, the visual arts, physics, economics, political and military history, theater, and music. His writings are relevant to the most varied fields of knowledge in an eclectic way that was not uncommon in the eighteenth century, from mathematics to geometry, from military science to the visual arts, from literature to the Greek and Latin classics. Many of his works have been translated into a number of other languages, and all have been collected by the author in eight volumes, printed first in Livorno, then in Venice in 1764 and later published by Aglietti in 17 volumes, in Venice, from 1791 to 1794. Algarotti’s interests led him to engage with literary criticism: In 1744 he wrote the essay entitled Lettere sulla traduzione dell’Eneide del Caro (Letters on Caro’s Translation of the Aeneid) in which he affronted the difficulties associated with the translation of poetic works and with Caro’s style with respect to Virgil’s Classicism. His friendship with Voltaire stimulated him to reflect upon the Italian cultural situation in relationship to the various national cultures; in one of his Epistole in versi (Verse Epistles, 1758), sent to the French philosopher in 1746, Algarotti, following an amateurish eclecticism, underlined the cultural decadence in Italy. He even arrived at hypothesizing, in reaction to the provincial fragmentation of Italian culture, the idea of ‘‘one true Academy’’ composed of a large city, a capital where the most open and ingenious minds of humanity could meet and inspire one another. In the following years, Algarotti continued to produce works in which the historical and erudite content is evident and in which the echo of discussions of fashion in the cultural circles of the time is found. Particular attention must be given to the Saggio sopra la lingua francese (Essay on the French 26

Language, 1750) for the clarity with which the different histories of the French and Italian languages were established and for having compared the function of the French Academy with that of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca when it comes to language. Thanks to his numerous cultural interests, Algarotti became a collector and critic of eighteenth-century art by way of his writings on the visual arts: He published, in fact, Lettere sopra la pittura (Letters on Painting) and Lettere sopra l’architettura (Letters on Architecture), to which were added the two treatises, Sopra l’architettura (On Architecture, 1756) and Sopra la pittura (On Painting, 1762), where he took up the ideas of his Venetian master, Father Lodoli, attacking the decorative excesses of the Baroque style in defense of the principle of pure functionality of architecture. Of a wider scope are the writings dedicated to painting, which unite a didactic component regarding the education of a good painter to a discussion on the very essence of this art, defining its most general aesthetic problem, tied to the classical taste and to the principle of ideal imitation of the truth, which is typical of Illuminist thought. Algarotti also cultivated interests for musical theater, in which he participated firsthand by working on stage scenery; this is a recurring theme in many of his writings, especially in his Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (Essay on Opera in Music, 1755), published in Livorno and later expanded in Venice in 1763, as well as in the letters sent to Frederick II of Prussia and to the poet and librettist Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni. An evident result of his European experiences in the theaters of Berlin and Dresden, this volume represents one of the most coherent stances taken in favor of the reformatory tendencies of lyric opera that were making headway with the composer C. W. Gluck. Algarotti conceived of opera as a unitary and complete performance, at the base of which is found the literary text, but where all the components must collaborate to its overall outcome, from the music to the acting and singing, from the stage scenery to the choreography, even the taking into consideration of the architecture of the theater, in which Algarotti supported the necessity of good visibility of the stage to all spectators and the polemic against the

FRANCESCO ALGAROTTI indiscriminate use of the proscenium. Algarotti placed emphasis also on the importance of the lighting of scenes and above all invited a departure from the Baroque stage tradition by introducing new concepts of verisimilitude into the scenery and the costumes together with the necessity of coherence with the historic styles and respect for the stylistic unity in every single staging. Algarotti also wrote widely in verse, joining with Frugoni and Saverio Bettinelli in the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori (Blank Verses of Three Distinguished Modern Authors, 1757), prefaced by the Lettere virgiliane of Bettinelli. He was a typically eighteenth-century combination of classical taste and encyclopedic culture, an acute observer of the contemporary society, as his Viaggi di Russia (Travels in Russia, 1751), written in 1739, also shows.

Biography Born in Venice on 11 December 1712, Francesco Algarotti was the son of a rich merchant, Rocco. At the age of 13, he attended Greek lessons with his master Carlo Lodoli and the following year, after the death of his father, moved to Bologna, where he finished his education, studying art history, literature, and science. He occupied himself with experimental physics and medicine, and in his first publication, which dealt with optics and astronomy, he demonstrated a rigorous adhesion to Newton’s theories. He later went to Padua and Florence in order to deepen his classical taste and to be closer to the Arcadian society. In 1735, he was in Paris, where he met Voltaire and later in London, England, and then in Russia. From 1740 to 1742, Algarotti lived in the court of Frederick the Great of Prussia in Berlin. From 1742 to 1746, he was given the task by Augusto III of Saxony of collecting paintings for the Gallery of Dresden and of staging several musical operas. He returned to Berlin in 1746, where he was named Frederick’s chamberlain, knight of the Order of Merit, with a considerable pension, and declared a count with the right of conferring his title to his heirs. During

these years, he wrote much and consolidated his friendship with Voltaire. He returned to Italy definitively in 1753, for health reasons. He resided in Venice, then from 1757 to 1762 in Bologna, where he attempted to establish an academy named ‘‘of the Untamed’’ (degli Indomiti), and finally in Pisa, where he died on 3 March 1764. MARIA IDA BIGGI See also: Science and Literature

Selected Works Collections Opere del Conte Algarotti Cavaliere dell’Ordine del Merito e Ciambellano di S. M. il Re di Prussia, Livorno: Marco Coltellini, 1764. Saggi, edited by Giovanni Da Pozzo, Bari: Laterza, 1963.

Essays and Letters Dialoghi sopra l’ottica neutoniana, 1733. Lettere sulla traduzione dell’Eneide del Caro, 1744. Saggio sopra la lingua francese, 1750. Viaggio di Russia, 1751; edited by P. P. Trompeo, 1942. Saggio sopra il Cartesio, 1754. Saggio sopra l’opera in musica, 1755; enlarged edition, 1763. Sopra l’architettura, 1756. Epistole in versi, 1758. Sopra la pittura, 1762.

Poetry ‘‘Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori’’ (with Bettinelli and Frugoni), 1757.

Further Reading Arato, Franco, Il secolo delle cose: scienza e storia in Francesco Algarotti, Genoa: Marietti, 1991. Berardi, Cirillo, Studi critici, Bozzolo: Tip. Arini, 1914. Fubini, Mario, Dall’Arcadia all’Illuminismo, Milan: Goliardica, 1951. Mazza Boccazzi, Barbara, Francesco Algarotti: un esperto d’arte alla corte di Dresda, Trieste: Societa` Minerva, 2001. Petrobelli, Pierluigi, ‘‘Tartini, Algarotti e la corte di Dresda,’’ Analecta musicologica, 2(1965), 71–84. Siccardi, Margherita, L’Algarotti critico e scrittore di belle arti, Asti: Tip. Paglieri e Raspi, 1911.

27

CORRADO ALVARO

DANTE ALIGHIERI See Dante Alighieri

CORRADO ALVARO (1895–1956) Corrado Alvaro is particularly renowned for his collection of short stories, Gente in Aspromonte (Revolt in Aspromonte). Published in 1930, the book was praised by critics as a powerful return to realism in Italian fiction. In many respects, it represents the climax of Alvaro’s literary production and has often been hailed as a precursor of the neo-Realist movement. Of equal importance is the overall trajectory of Alvaro’s literary and intellectual career, which provides an example of the tensions and preoccupations of Italian intellectuals during the years of the Fascist regime and in the early postwar period. A decorated officer in WWI, Alvaro began his career as a journalist, working among other papers for Giorgio Amendola’s Il mondo, one of the few periodicals openly critical of the Fascist movement. In 1925, Benedetto Croce’s Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti was published in Il mondo, and Alvaro joined the group of signatories. The following year, however, with the establishment of Mussolini’s dictatorship, Alvaro refrained from openly criticizing the regime. He concentrated on his literary work and was employed as editor in Massimo Bontempelli’s journal, 900, which was attempting to establish a more cosmopolitan vision of culture in Fascist Italy. Alvaro also continued to work as a journalist for national papers such as Il corriere della sera, publishing short stories and often reporting from foreign countries such as Germany, Turkey, Greece, and Russia. His frequent trips were also the subject of a number of travel books: Viaggio in Turchia (A Journey to Turkey, 1932), Itinerario italiano (Italian Itinerary, 1933), and I maestri del diluvio: Viaggio nella Russia sovietica (The Masters of Deluge: A Journey to Soviet Russia, 1935). 28

Alvaro’s fictional production gradually lost the mixture of D’Annunzian, Pirandellian, and Expressionist influences of his early works, such as Poesie grigioverdi (Greygreen Poems, 1917), La siepe e l’orto (The Hedge and the Orchard, 1920), and L’uomo nel labirinto (The Man in the Labyrinth, 1926), and developed in the direction of a fictional exploration of his Calabrese roots through a stark form of realism. This is best exemplified by the 13 tales of Gente in Aspromonte, where Alvaro reconnected with the achievements of Italy’s verismo in the previous century and produced a powerful fresco of the social struggles in poverty-stricken Southern Italy. The story that gives its title to the entire collection tells of the rebellion of a young shepherd, Antonello Argiro`, against the brutal humiliation and exploitation suffered by his family. It contains a powerful cry against social injustice that, because of its setting in a primitive, lyrically described and almost fablelike southern countryside, was not perceived as an open critique of the political and social failings in Mussolini’s Italy. In parallel with his realistic works, Alvaro continued to produce fiction that was closer to the surreal ‘‘magic realism’’ of his friend Massimo Bontempelli. In this vein are works such as Misteri e avventure (Mysteries and Adventures, 1930) and L’uomo e` forte (Man Is Strong, 1938). The latter is a dystopian, psychological novel tracing the nightmarish life of a young man who naively decides to return and live in a totalitarian society. When the proofs of the books were submitted for approval, the Fascist Ministry of Popular Culture required Alvaro to introduce the novel with a short preface in which he clarified that the book had been inspired by his travels through Russia. Alvaro

CORRADO ALVARO and his publisher Mondadori complied with the request. The book’s positive reception was partly due to the fresh anti-Bolshevik sentiment deriving from Mussolini’s closer alliance with Hitler’s Germany. What seemed to have escaped the censor’s attention is the fact that it was not difficult to read L’uomo e` forte as an expression of Alvaro’s disillusionment with any form of totalitarian power. Soon after the fall of the regime, in the summer of 1943, Alvaro took up the editorship of one of Rome’s newspapers, Il popolo di Roma. As a consequence of this public expression of anti-Fascism, when the Nazis reinstated Mussolini at the head of a new puppet government, Alvaro had to leave the capital and live under a false name. In the early postwar years, he emerged as a militant intellectual, a founder of the Sindacato degli scrittori (together with fellow southern author Francesco Jovine) and a prolific journalist and fiction writer. He collaborated on various left-wing initiatives such as Emilio Sereni’s Alleanza della cultura and wrote for the Communist periodical Rinascita, although he never joined the Italian Communist Party. Alvaro’s fiction became more and more informed by the author’s moral and intellectual preoccupations, to the point that some of his works have been read as fictional essays dominated by the moralistic views of the narrative voice. In these years, Alvaro also published his intellectual diary, Quasi una vita (Almost a Life, 1950), which was awarded the prestigious Strega prize in 1952 and was followed by the posthumously published Ultimo diario (1948–1956) (The Last Diary, 1959). A recurrent theme in Alvaro’s fiction is the difficulty with which his protagonists integrate in a new social environment. The fact that these inhibited protagonists are often male and of southern Italian extraction adds strong autobiographical resonances to his work. These are particularly present in the trilogy Memorie del mondo sommerso (Memories of the Underworld) of which only the first volume, L’eta` breve (The Brief Era, 1946), was published in Alvaro’s lifetime. Together with the following two, Mastrangelina (1960) and Tutto e` accaduto (Everything Has Happened, 1961), the trilogy follows the life of a young man from his adolescent life in provincial Calabria to his discovery of the hypocrisies and moral corruption of urban life in Fascist Italy. Posthumously published was also an unfinished novel, Belmoro (1957). Set in a futuristic post-World War III world, the novel is to some extent a dystopian sequel to L’uomo e` forte, revealing Alvaro’s pessimism toward modern society. However, fully fledged novels were not the

media through which Alvaro’s artistic gifts were expressed at their best. His capacity to evoke realistic and at the same time lyrical atmospheres, as well as his tendency to create symbolic, more than three-dimensional characters, were more suited for the different pace offered by the short story. That is the field in which his most influential legacy lies. Alvaro also wrote some plays, among which his most renowned, La lunga notte di Medea (The Long Night of Medea, 1949), which takes its inspiration from the ancient Greek myth. It was first staged by Russian actress and director Tatiana Pavlova, with metaphysical artist Giorgio De Chirico providing the scenography. Critics agree in acknowledging the pivotal role played by Alvaro’s work in the revival of the Realist tradition during the Fascist period. Together with Francesco Jovine and Ignazio Silone, Alvaro has also contributed to the development of the literary tradition of narrativa meridionalista, or narrative about Southern Italy.

Biography Corrado Alvaro was born in San Luca d’Aspromonte (Reggio Calabria), 15 April 1895. The son of an elementary school teacher, he attended the Jesuit seminary of Villa Mondragone, near Frascati, 1906–1909. He was drafted in World War I and fought in the Carso region, 1914–1916, where he was wounded in both arms and decorated with a silver medal. Alvaro married Laura Babini in Bologna, 8 April 1918, and their son Massimo was born in 1919. He was awarded a degree in literature and philosophy at Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria of Milan, 1920; from 1916 onward, Alvaro worked as a journalist and critic for several newspapers, including Il resto del carlino, Il corriere della sera, Il mondo, Il Risorgimento, La fiera lettearia, and La stampa. He moved to Rome in 1922 and participated in the activities of the Teatro d’Arte founded by Pirandello, 1925–1928. He was editor of Bontempelli’s journal 900, 1926; traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, 1926–1931; and directed Il popolo di Roma, 1943, and Il Risorgimento, 1947. He founded the Sindacato degli scrittori (National Writers Union) with Francesco Jovine and Libero Bigiaretti in 1945. Alvaro won the Accademia d’Italia Prize for literature in 1940 and the Strega Prize for Quasi una vita in 1951. He died of an abdominal tumor in Rome, 20 April 1956. GUIDO BONSAVER 29

CORRADO ALVARO See also: Verismo

La lunga notte di Medea, 1949; as The Long Night of Medea in Plays for a New Theater, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1966. Bellezza per vivere, 1953.

Selected Works

Essays

Collections Cronache e scritti teatrali, edited by Alfredo Barbina, Rome: Abete, 1976. Opere, edited by Geno Pampaloni, 2 vols., Milan: Bompiani, 1990. Scritti dispersi, Milan: Bompiani, 1995.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie grigioverdi,’’ 1917.

Calabria, 1931. Viaggio in Turchia, 1932. Itinerario italiano, 1933. I maestri del diluvio: Viaggio nella Russia sovietica, 1935. L’Italia rinunzia?, 1945. Quasi una vita: Giornale di uno scrittore, 1950. Roma vestita di nuovo (Itinerario italiano II), 1957. Un treno nel Sud (Itinerario italiano III), 1958. Ultimo diario (1948–1956), 1959.

Fiction La siepe e l’orto, 1920. L’uomo nel labirinto, 1926. L’amata alla finestra, 1929. La signora dell’isola, 1930. Gente in Aspromonte, 1930; as Revolt in Aspromonte, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1962. Vent’anni, 1930. Misteri e avventure, 1930. L’uomo e` forte, 1938; as Man Is Strong, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1948. L’eta` breve, 1946. Settantacinque racconti, 1955. Belmoro, 1957. Mastrangelina, 1960. Tutto e` accaduto, 1961.

Plays Il paese e la citta`, 1923. Caffe` dei naviganti, 1939.

Further Reading Balduino, Armando, Corrado Alvaro, Milan: Mursia, 1965. Bo, Carlo, Realta` e poesia di Corrado Alvaro, Rome: Edizioni di Cultura e Documentazione, 1958. Cara, Domenico, Corrado Alvaro, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968. Fontanelli, Giuseppe, L’ultimo Alvaro, Messina: Sicania, 2000. Mauro, Walter, Invito alla lettura di Alvaro, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Morace, Aldo Maria, and Adriano Zappa, Corrado Alvaro. Atti del Convegno Letterario di Mappano Torinese, Reggio Calabria: Falzea, 2002. Paladino, Vincenzo, L’opera di Corrado Alvaro, Florence: Le Monnier, 1968. Reina, Luigi, Cultura e storia di Alvaro, Naples: Guida, 1973.

AGNOLO AMBROGINI See Angelo Poliziano

GIANNI AMELIO (1945–) Considered among the few contemporary Italian filmmakers of the same caliber as the generation working during the postwar years and in the 1970s, 30

Gianni Amelio was molded on the sets of 1960s genre cinema, at the same time as apprenticing in cinematic endeavors tailored for television. It is

GIANNI AMELIO certainly true he is unique in that, with the aforementioned background, he soon established himself as an auteur of great depth and was also known to successfully target audiences outside Italy. His films are characterized by a vision that strips mainstream conventions as well as by a tendency to free each frame of any trace of authorial subjectivity. Amelio is preoccupied with experimenting with film forms and language. His style evolves with his investigation into the actor’s craft to exceptional effect: The director charges each shot with subtle tension expressed through the actor’s body, a technique that, particularly in the eyes of some critics, links him directly to the masters of neo-realism. Amelio’s films are intrinsically centered on an autobiographical trait, which is imperative to understanding his entire body of work. His childhood was profoundly marked by the absence of a father figure: His father abandoned his family, including 2-year-old Gianni, and emigrated from povertystricken Calabria to Argentina. Amelio did not see his father again for 20 years. Such a traumatic event affected the director not only on a personal level but also because of the social stigma associated with emigration in the Italian south. This conflict is prominently displayed in his work, which often focuses on marginalized youth and highlights dislocated characters in constant motion. He emphasizes the confrontation between fathers and sons—with the father being shown in weak retreat and escape when confronted with the issue of authority. But it is Amelio’s troubled childhood that steered him toward the world of cinema, whose mesmerizing presence upon its discovery was developed into a refined appreciation and knowledge of the art of filmmaking. He confessed during an interview: ‘‘Ho detestato davvero molto le persone che mi stavano accanto, la societa` nella quale ero costretto a vivere. Ma quando invece entravo in un cinema, eravamo tutti seduti e uguali. Se dovessi fare un film dalla mia adolescenza, anche se interpretata da un altro personaggio, non penso riuscirei a tirare fuori una, dico, soltanto una, immagine di felicita`’’ (I truly detested the people that were close to me, the society in which I was forced to live. Each time I entered a movie theater, however, we were all seated as equals. If I ever were to make a movie about my youth, even as a fictional character, I don’t think I could retrieve one, I mean only one, image of happiness) (Mario Sesti, Regia di Gianni Amelio, 1992). Amelio made his directorial debut in 1970, with a film commissioned by RAI (Italian National Television), La fine del gioco (The End of the

Game), which immediately identified one of his central themes: the unmediated and unhindered face-off between an ‘‘adult’’ and a ‘‘young man.’’ The former role was played by a well-known director and intellectual, Ugo Gregoretti (who remembered the all-too-vivid and real dislike he bore the boy with whom, in his role of television journalist, he entertains a tumultuous relationship); the latter was played by a nonprofessional actor. Amelio’s avoidance of star actors became a choice laden with aesthetic implications. His films situate young people in a barren landscape that exemplifies their dead-end lives. The story takes place in a railroad car, which will later be the main set of what most consider his best film, Il ladro di bambini (Stolen Children, 1992). The following films, from La citta` del sole (City of the Sun, 1973), dedicated to Calabrian philosopher Tommaso Campanella, and Bertolucci secondo il cinema (Bertolucci According to Cinema, 1976), a documentary on the making of Bernardo Bertolucci’s film Novecento, to La morte al lavoro (Death at Work, 1978) and Effetti speciali (Special Effects, 1979), two thrillers based on the original score by Alfred Hitchcock’s composer Bernard Herrmann, are each a significant step in the development of Amelio’s cinematic language, which spans historical representation to documentary modes of production to the intellectual tradition of cine´ma d’essai. Amelio oftentimes makes use of literary sources, as exemplified by Il piccolo Archimede (Young Archimedes, 1979), on the life and work of Aldous Huxley; I velieri (Sailboats, 1983), based on a novel by Anna Banti; Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1990), an unflinching examination of the law and the way of life in a Sicilian town under Fascism (from Leonardo Sciascia’s homonymous novel); and Le chiavi di casa (The House Keys, 2004), adapted from Nati due volte by Giuseppe Pontiggia. Nonetheless, it is with his first original feature film, Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart, 1982) that he was able to map his personal thematic and imaginary paradigms, as he reflects on the unsettling social and cultural state of contemporary Italy. This film displays, with a tremendous tension, the opposite point of view of the societal realities of the 1970s in Italy: the anticipated scenario of a conservative father versus his revolutionary son is reversed. Thus, Amelio draws from a collective political conflict that of terrorism and transforms it into an unexpected territory of intimate obsessions, dealing with the father–son relationship. The film is compelling in its ambiguity and dramatic tension, a combination that becomes 31

GIANNI AMELIO a frequently used technique for the narrative and emotional vehicle of Amelio’s best cinematic work. However, despite its accurate and powerful portrayal of terrorism, the film did not have much success. Throughout the 1980s, Amelio directed important projects for television, such as I ragazzi di Via Panisperna (The Guys of Panisperna Street, 1988), which reconstructs the character of scientist Enrico Fermi and his experiments in the 1930s. After Porte aperte was rereleased in 1990, he began Il ladro di bambini. Amelio had already established himself as a sensitive observer of the desolate world of preadolescent kids, but not to the chilling understanding and empathy with which he endows the main character of this film, Antonio, a carabiniere who is assigned to escort the 11-year-old Rosetta and her 10-year-old brother Luciano to an orphanage after their Sicilian mother is arrested for pimping her daughter in the tenement section of Milan. Amelio focuses on the failure of traditional familial relations, projected onto isolated or abandoned spaces (waiting rooms, benches in police stations, toilets), before introducing those psychological nuances of a normal interaction between the young police officer and the children. Once the orphanage turns the girl away because she is a recognizable childprostitute, the carabiniere’s natural dignity and goodness allow him to provide for Rosetta and Luciano a temporary support in place of the father figure they never had. Without authorization, he decides to take the girl back to her birthplace in Sicily, and the film becomes a moving account of this journey. Nonetheless, in the end, the children return to the starting point, that is to once again survive on their own (as the ‘‘young kids’’ of Amelio are always forced to). The film’s final shot attests to their internalized encounter with Antonio, the only trace of human solidarity in their lives. Il ladro di bambini gained Amelio international critical recognition (the film won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes). The films that followed, Lamerica (America, 1994), the impressive adventure of a young Italian man in the post-Communist chaos of Albania, and Cosi ridevano (The Way We Laughed, 1998), on the relationships of two immigrant Calabrese brothers from the 1950s to the present, continued to explore the cultural and social problems of Southern Italy as well as beginning to question traditional national boundaries. A visually powerful tale of moral dilemma and the journey that leads to atonement, Lamerica bridges the destiny of Albania to that of Italy and 32

the myth of America (as the title implies). These themes reverberate with issues on the international immigrant front, exemplified mainly in the personal uprooting conflicts between poverty and comfort caused by prevalent demographical shifts. Amelio’s more recent film, Le chiavi di casa, describes the difficult relationship between a young father and his disabled son, yet another testament to the director’s ability to broach contemporary issues by looking within the intimacy of family bonds.

Biography Gianni Amelio was born in the mountain village of San Pietro Magisano (Catanzaro), 20 January 1945, to a family of emigrants: His grandfather went to Argentina and never returned, and his 20-year-old father also emigrated when Gianni was nearly 2. Amelio lived with his grandmother, who supported the family as a nurse and took him to the movies once a week. He studied philosophy for two and a half years at the University of Messina; worked as a film critic for the review Giovane critica, 1964; then dropped out of school and went to Rome to work as production assistant on the set of Un uomo a meta` by Vittorio De Seta, 1965. He began a long period of apprenticeship working as assistant director in advertising and the film industry with directors such as Anna Gobbi, Gianni Puccini, Andrea Frezza, Ugo Gregoretti, and Liliana Cavani; directed his first ad spot for Smarties, 1969; and made his television debut with a film commissioned by RAI, La fine del gioco, 1970. His film La citta` del sole was selected for the Quinzaine des Realisateurs, 1973; La morte al lavoro was presented at the Cannes Film Festival, 1978; Laura Betti was awarded the ‘‘best actress’’ award for Il piccolo Archimede at the San Sebastian Festival, 1979; Colpire al cuore won two silver ribbons (best original script and best upcoming actor to Fausto Rossi, who also received the David di Donatello), 1982. Amelio taught directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italian National Film School), 1983–1986. His Porte aperte won the Felix (the Europena Oscar), 1990; Il ladro di bambini was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, 1992; Cosı` ridevano won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 1998; and Le chiavi di casa was recognized with the Pasinetti prize, 2004. Since 1965, Amelio has lived and worked in Rome. MARIO SESTI

` AMMANITI NICCOLO Selected Works Films La fine del gioco, 1970. La citta` del sole, 1973. Bertolucci secondo il cinema, 1976 (documentary). La morte al lavoro (adapted from a short story by Hans H. Ewers), 1978. Effetti speciali, 1979. Il piccolo Archimede (adapted from a short story by Aldous Huxley), 1979. Colpire al cuore, 1982. I velieri (adapted from a short story by Anna Banti), 1983. I ragazzi di Via Panisperna, 1988 (television serial). Porte aperte (Open Doors) (adapted from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia), 1990. Il ladro di bambini (Stolen Children), 1992. Lamerica (America), 1994. Non e` finita la pace, cioe` la guerra, 1996 (documentary). Cosı` ridevano (The Way We Laughed), 1998. Poveri noi, 1999 (documentary). L’onore delle armi, 2000 (documentary). Le chiavi di casa (The House Keys) (adapted from the novel Nati due volte by Giuseppe Pontiggia), 2004. Le stella che non c’e` (The Missing Star), 2006.

Screenplays Il ladro di bambini, 1992 (with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli). Lamerica, edited by Piera Detassis, 1994. La fine del gioco, in Gianni Volpi (editor), Gianni Amelio, 1995. Il piccolo Archimede, 1996. Colpire al cuore, edited by Alberto Cattini, 1996 (with Vincenzo Cerami). I ragazzi di via Panisperna, 1996 (with Alessandro Sermoneta).

Cosı` ridevano edited by Franco Prono, 1999. Le chiavi di casa, 2004 (with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli).

Other Il vizio del cinema: Vedere amare, fare un film, 2004.

Further Reading Cattini, Alberto, Le storie e lo sguardo: Il cinema di Gianni Amelio, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Fofi, Goffredo, Amelio secondo il cinema, Rome: Donzelli, 1994. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘The Gaze of Innocence: Lost and Found in Gianni Amelio’s Stolen Children,’’ in After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Marrone, Gaetana (editor), New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Annali d’Italianistica, 17 (1999). Martini, Emanuela, Gianni Amelio, Milan: Il Castoro, 2004. Montini, Franco, and Piero Spila (editors), Il cinema di Gianni Amelio, special issue of Cinecritica, nos. 19–20 (October–March 1990–1991). Rais, Alessandro, Gianni Amelio: Conversazione in Sicilia, Palermo: Regione Sicilia, 1999. Ranvaud, Donald (editor), The Films of Gianni Amelio, Edinburgh: An Other Cinema Dossier, 1983. Sesti, Mario, Regia di Gianni Amelio, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1992. Volpi, Gianni (editor), Gianni Amelio, Turin: Edizioni Scriptorium, 1995. Vorauer, Markus, and Michael Aichmayr (editors), Gianni Amelio: Festschrift, Reihe Europa¨ischer Film/Band 3, 1999.

` AMMANITI (1966–) NICCOLO Niccolo` Ammaniti published his first novel, Branchie (Gills), in 1994, at the age of 28. The novel was published by Ediesse, a small Italian publisher, and even though it was not distributed well, it became a cult novel. Afterwards, Einaudi—a major Italian press—decided to publish the novel in their series Stile Libero (1997). In the preface to the 1997 edition, Ammaniti explained that Branchie derives from the project of his university thesis on ‘‘The Release of Acetilcolinasterasis in Neuroblastomas’’ (he never completed the dissertation or his university degree in biology). Ammaniti wrote: ‘‘Branchie was born as a

tumor (malignant?) of a dissertation in biology.’’ Set in Rome, it narrates with humor the adventures of a young man, Marco Donati, and how he deals with his tumor and with his mother, girlfriend, and friends. A great deal of attention is devoted to such interests as fish, music, parties, and so forth. In the opening of Branchie, the protagonist, drunk, sick, with a strong urge to vomit, comes back ‘‘home’’: a former fish store, still inhabited by some fish, a television set, a refrigerator, a broken couch, a folding bed. Marco Donati whispers his secret to the readers: ‘‘I have a tumor of the lungs. Don’t tell anybody.’’ The humor, the language, the mixture 33

` AMMANITI NICCOLO of different genres, the portrayal of Rome, the way the story unfolds, are all original and refreshing. In the conclusion, the author informs the reader that the story has a happy ending, and that the reader should therefore be pleased: ‘‘Are you happy? The story is finally concluded and you can start looking for another book to read. But be patient a little longer, let me add couple of things. This is not like one of those novels with a bad ending, so that you close the book full of anxiety and a handkerchief drenched with tears. Actually, I believe that you will be satisfied with how things end up.’’ In the radio play Anche il sole fa schifo (Even the Sun Is Disgusting), recorded in November 1996 and published in 1997, Angelo Rosati, like Ammaniti, studies biology at the university. He is 26 years old and is about to defend his dissertation on ‘‘The Development and Reproduction of the Sferictus pallidum in the Toro Grotto in Calcata’’—a thesis based on long field research spent studying the Sferictis pallidum, an ‘‘albino worm.’’ In 1996 Ammaniti participated in the annual Ricercare (Research) event held at the Hall of Mirrors at the Valli Theatre in Reggio Emilia. Traditionally, this meeting brings together a group of writers and critics and offers young, promising writers the opportunity to read their work. The invitation to Ricercare was a sign that Ammaniti’s talent as a writer had already been discerned by the writers and critics of Ricercare. In 1996, Ammaniti published the collection of short stories Fango (Mud) and the short story ‘‘Seratina’’ (with Luisa Brancaccio) in Gioventu´ cannibale (Cannibal Youth). The critical attention to both books and the excitement in the media for the new so-called giovani cannibali (young cannibals)—a group of writers that included Ammaniti—made Ammaniti very popular. These writers (among them Niccolo` Ammaniti, Aldo Nove, Simona Vinci, Isabella Santacroce, and Tiziano Scarpa) all shared an interest in mass culture, consumerism, American popular culture, British and American music, violence, the representation of the body, and so forth. Clearly Ammaniti is not just a ‘‘cannibalistic’’ writer. His stories are shocking because of the use of the fantastic: He pushes the reader to go into risky and unusual literary places. Branchie and Fango (1996) both have a very strong comic, hilarious tone. ‘‘L’ultimo capodanno dell’umanita`’’ (The Last New Year’s Eve of Humanity), the long short story that opens Fango, blends comedy and tragedy. Through parallel stories, the countdown to midnight and to the fireworks is a countdown toward shooting, explosions, fire, and 34

death in Rome—but while the violence is growing, the reader is laughing. His most successful book was his most traditionally plotted novel, entitled Io non ho paura (I Am Not Afraid). There is little left of the ‘‘cannibal’’ style in this work. In 2001, this bestseller confirmed Ammaniti as one of Italy’s most talented and original writers, both in Italy and abroad. Gabriele Salvatores’s film adaptation of the novel was very successful at the box office. The novel relates the story of Michele, a 9-year-old boy struggling, by force of imagination, to make sense of the rather unruly world around him. During what appears to be a summer spent with friends riding his bicycle and playing games (often brutal games), he happens upon the hiding place of a kidnapped boy around his age. The beautiful sun-drenched landscape of southern Italy clashes with the horrid dark cave in which the kidnapped child is kept. The story of young Michele intertwines with local legends, the stories from his readings, the stories from his family, and the story of the kidnapped boy (he learns part of this story from the news on television). Slowly Michele puts all the pieces of the puzzle together, and the solution of the mystery coincides with his confrontation of the crime and evil in which his family and his entire community are involved. The story has a double ending: a happy ending for the kidnapped boy and a less than happy ending for the other boy, Michele, who is brutally forced to grow up. Ti prendo e ti porto via (I’ll Come and Take You Away), published in 1997 and set in Ischiano Scalo, an unpleasant village swarming with mosquitoes, narrates the love stories of several of the locals. Again, Ammaniti structures this work into parallel stories in order to give us a close-up of his fictional characters. Fa un po’ male (It Hurts a Little), published in 2004, collects three comic stories: ‘‘Bucatini e pallottole’’ (Bucatini and Bullets), ‘‘Fa un po’ male’’ (It Hurts a Little), and ‘‘L’ultimo capodanno’’ (The Last New Year). Ammaniti provided the written texts, while the illustrators Daniele Brolli and Davide Fabbri provided the drawings and the illustrations. Again, Ammaniti seemed interested in experimenting with different genres, always resisting constraints on the possibilities of artistic creation and collaboration.

Biography Ammaniti was born in Rome on 25 September 1966; he studied at the University of Rome for a degree in biology, but never completed his Laurea (B.A.). He

` AMMANITI NICCOLO cowrote Nel nome del figlio (In the Name of the Son) with his father, a professor of psychology at the University of Rome, 1994. Ammaniti appeared, with his sister, in Fulvio Ottaviano’s film Cresceranno i carciofi a Mimongo (The Artichokes Will Grow in Mimongo), 1996. His radio play Anche il sole fa schifo was performed on RadioRai in 1997. A film adaptation of ‘‘L’ultimo capodanno dell’umanita`’’ (in Fango) was done by Dino Risi in 1998 and a film adaptation of Io non ho paura was done by Gabriele Salvatores in 2003. Ammaniti now lives in Rome, where he works as a freelance journalist. GRAZIA MENECHELLA See also: Cannibali Selected Works Fiction Branchie, Roma: Ediesse, 1994 [Torino: Einaudi, 1997]. Fango, Milano: Mondadori, 1996. Ti prendo e ti porto via, Milano: Mondadori, 1999. Io non ho paura, Torino: Einaudi, 2001.

Nonfiction Nel nome del figlio (with Massimo Ammaniti), Milano: Mondadori, 1995. Anche il sole fa schifo, Roma: Rai Eri, 1997. Fa un po’ male (with Daniele Brolli and Davide Fabbri), Torino: Einaudi, 2004.

Other ‘‘La figlia di Siva’’ in La giungla sotto l’asfalto, Roma: Ediesse, 1993. ‘‘Seratina’’ (with Luisa Brancaccio) in Gioventu´ cannibale (edited by Daniele Brolli), Torino: Einaudi, 1996. ‘‘Alba tragica’’ in Tutti i denti del mostro sono perfetti, Milano: Urania Mondadori, 1997. ‘‘Enchanted Music and Light Records’’ (with Jamie D’Alessandro) in Il fagiano Jonathan Livingstone, Rome: Minimum Fax, 1998. ‘‘L’amico di Jeffrey Dahmer e` l’amico mio’’ in Italia odia, Milano: Mondadori, 2000.

Further Reading Balestrini, Nanni, and Renato Barilli (eds.), Narrative invaders, Special Issue of La Bestia, Genova 1997. Bianchi, Alberto, ‘‘L’autenticita` dell’immagine: lo specchio catodico di Niccolo` Ammaniti,’’ in Narrativa, 20–21, June 2001. Cardone, Raffaele, Franco Galato, and Fulvio Panzeri (eds.), Altre storie. Inventario della nuova narrativa italiana fra anni ’80 e ’90, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1996. Ferme, Valerio, ‘‘Note su Niccolo` Ammaniti e il fango di fine millennio’’ in Narrativa, 20–21, June 2001. Lucamante, Stefania (ed.), Italian Pulp Fiction, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2001. Magni, Stefano, ‘‘Voci e punti di vista in Fango di Ammaniti,’’ in Narrativa, 20–21, June 2001. Pomilio, Tommaso ‘‘Le narrative generazionali dagli anni ottanta agli anni novanta,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, volume 12, Sperimentalismo e tradizione del nuovo, Milan: Federico Motta Editore, 1999. Venuti, Lawrence, ‘‘Tom, Huck and Michele,’’ The New York Times Book Review, February 16, 2003.

ANCIENT (BARBARIC) ODES See Odi barbare (Work by Giosue` Carducci)

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GIOVAN BATTISTA ANDREINI

GIOVAN BATTISTA ANDREINI (1576–1654) Giovan Battista Andreini was the most important Italian playwright of the seventeenth century. The scion of a famous theatrical family, he was also among the most prominent of his generation of professional arte (commedia dell’arte) actors in Italy. After performing with the La Compagnia dei Gelosi in the first years of the seventeenth century, Andreini formed his own company, La Compagnia dei Fedeli, of which he was actor and director and which became internationally renowned. La Compagnia dei Fedeli played both arte scenarios and his own works, which drew on Italian popular comic traditions as well as on the Renaissance revival of ancient comedy (known as commedia erudita) but sought to go in a new direction. The arte plays, based on improvisation, and Italian players were greatly in demand throughout Europe during most of Andreini’s lifetime. Productions were sometimes extravagant, but the scenarios could be performed by itinerant troupes almost anywhere or at any time that a stage could be set up and a public assembled, whether in piazzas or palaces, at carnival or court. Among the arte masks and stock characters, Andreini chiefly played the sincere young innamorato, Lelio, given to flights of poetic fancy and rhetorical bravura. However, he also played (among others) Harlequin, the greatest and most complex clown that Western theater has known, and, late in life, Pantaloon. The arte scenarios used by the Fedeli were probably very similar to those published by Flaminio Scala in his pathbreaking collection of 50 of the Gelosi’s scenarios, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (The Theatre of Representative Fables, 1611). In an age of increasing prestige for products that exploited art’s capacity for illusion, nothing could compete with the theater. The rapid development of the professional theater in early modern Europe provided Andreini with the opportunity, as a playwright, to reach beyond the arte tradition and to explore the limits of the art form from both a technical and aesthetic perspective. Twelve years younger than Shakespeare, he was intimately familiar not only with the intricate Renaissance court 36

spectacle of the opera regia but with the new multimedia opera that had emerged in Italy around the turn of the century. Music played a role in most of Andreini’s comedies, for example, and La Ferinda (1622) is clearly modeled on the first early modern operas of Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) and Jacopo Peri (1561–1633). Andreini’s late works, which often employed mythological and pastoral themes, in turn inspired the French neoclassical grand opera. His mastery of stagecraft and lighting, like his firsthand knowledge of new theatrical modes of representation, fed into his ‘‘Marinist’’ aesthetics of meraviglia (wonder), which sought to seduce the public through daringly inventive concepts that would astound and delight with their skillful artifice. The best of Andreini’s plays are built around a concept that pushed traditional representational practices of the theater to the breaking point. In Le due comedie in comedia (The Two Comedies within the Comedy, 1623), there are two competing plays within a play, performed by two separate troupes. In Li due Leli simili (The Two Look-Alike Lelios, 1613), identically named identical twins appear and speak together on stage in the final act and thus cannot be played by the same actor. In Amor nello specchio (Love in the Mirror, 1622), female characters knowingly make love to one another on stage in defiance of patriarchy (roles originally played by Andreini’s wife and lover, who in real life were bitter rivals). In La centaura (The Centauress, 1622), each part of the same play belongs in a different genre— comedy, pastoral, tragedy—and there are two pairs of identically named male–female fraternal twins. In La Ferinda, at least nine distinct languages and dialects are spoken extensively on stage, far outstripping even the multilingual arte plays. Doubles are common in Andreini’s works for the stage, including La Turca (The Turkish Woman, 1620) and Li duo baci (The Two Kisses, 1634), although there is often little psychological depth to the characters involved. His theatrical writing strove self-consciously for the status of a complex cultural artifact through formal experimentation at the level

GIOVAN BATTISTA ANDREINI of plot and language, rather than through analysis of motive and emotion. Andreini’s most productive years as a writer for the comic stage were undoubtedly 1620–1623, in which he published eight comedies, mostly in Paris. Some or most of these may have been composed years earlier and may have already been part of the standard repertory of the Fedeli. They all belonged to what Andreini called la commedia nuova, or ‘‘new comedy.’’ In his prefaces and treatises on comedy—including Teatro celeste (Celestial Theatre, 1624) and Lo specchio (The Mirror, 1625)—Andreini argued for a reformed postTridentine comic theater that would amuse and instruct the public with a socially and morally constructive message, rather than the salacious language and frank, often amoral sexuality of earlier Italian comedy. As Andreini remarked in the prologue to Lelio bandito (which he termed a pastoral tragicomedy), ‘‘benche´ nelle comedie molte volte si veggano atti lascivi, & azzioni profane, non son introdotte per insegnarle: ma per mostrar il modo con cui ce ne possiamo guardare’’ (although in comedies we often see lascivious acts and profane actions, they are not put there in order to teach us [how to perform] them, but in order to show us the way in which we may avoid them). He even argued in his theoretical works that far from being damned for immorality, many devout comedians had become saints and martyrs. Andreini’s sacred writings display a deeply felt religiosity consonant with the main currents of Counter-Reformation culture. Of his sacred plays (sacre rappresentazioni) and poetic compositions, the most memorable remain three revisions of the story of Mary Magdalene, whose figure held such powerful resonance in early modern Italian art and to whom he was especially devoted: La Maddalena (Mary Magdalene, 1610), a dramatic poem; La Maddalena, sacra rapresentatione (Mary Magdalene, Sacred Play, 1617); and La Maddalena lasciva e penitente (The Lascivious and Repentant Magdalene, 1657). His L’Adamo (Adam, 1613) has been identified by some critics as a source for Milton’s Paradise Lost. Most of Andreini’s output was published in his lifetime (circa 20 full-length theatrical plays, along with more than 20 collections of verse and criticism and circa 15 sacred works) but was largely forgotten after his death. None of his works were reprinted until the nineteenth century, and even today there are only a handful of modern editions. Andreini’s reputation has been revived in Italy in recent decades: The director Luca Ronconi has staged several

plays, and a motion picture based on Amor nello specchio and directed by Salvatore Maira was released in 1999. Andreini’s plays cannot be ranked with the greatest European theatrical texts of the age (Shakespeare, Molie`re, Lope de Vega), for they rely too greatly on rhetorical set pieces and stock characters that do not offer penetrating psychological or social critique. His inexhaustible experimentalism, on the other hand, seemed to anticipate trends in modern and postmodern European theater and cinema.

Biography Andreini was born in Florence on February 9, 1576, to Francesco Andreini, leading actor in the renowned comic troupe La Compagnia dei Gelosi, and Isabella Andreini, soon to be a noted actress, poet, and woman of letters. He spent his formative years in Bologna, but by circa 1594 he was acting with the Gelosi. In 1601, Andreini married Virginia Ramponi, an actress-singer, with whom he had several offspring. Circa 1601 he founded his own troupe, La Compagnia dei Fedeli. Although reorganized numerous times, the Fedeli were to endure for about half a century. In 1604 the Fedeli became a resident company at the Gonzaga court in Mantua. Andreini was director and leading man. The troupe worked throughout Po Valley, 1605–1613, taking part in spring 1608 in the festivities in Mantua for the marriage of Prince Franc¸ois to Marguerite de Savoie, where Virginia Ramponi sang the title role in Monteverdi’s new opera Arianna. Following a royal invitation, the Fedeli played in Paris in 1613–1614 at the The´aˆtre de Bourgogne and at court. After returning to Mantua, Andreini purchased a residence nearby in 1616 (Ca’ di Mandraghi). He traveled with the Fedeli across Northern Italy, 1614–1620, a period marked by dissension in the ranks of the company. On January 31, 1620, he signed an act of emancipation from his father, providing proof of some financial success. He likely began a liaison at about this time with the actress Virginia Rotari, a member of the company who would become his second wife. In autumn 1620, the Fedeli departed for Paris via Turin, remaining there until 1622. There were further sojourns in Paris in late 1622 and early 1623 and in late 1623– 1625. After returning to northern Italy, Andreini and the troupe went to the court of Emperor Ferdinand II in 1627–1628, with stays in Prague and Vienna. The War of the Mantuan Succession devastated the city of Mantua and surrounding countryside in 1630, and Andreini’s property was 37

GIOVAN BATTISTA ANDREINI sacked. Virginia Ramponi died in 1631, perhaps of plague. From 1629–1642 Andreini traveled widely with his company throughout Northern and Central Italy, struggling with legal and economic problems while continuing to write and publish. He returned to Paris, 1643–1647, apparently without his company, and acted with other Italian troupes. Andreini was back in Northern Italy by 1648 and in Rome by 1651 (where he played Pantaloon for another company at carnival). The Fedeli were formally disbanded in 1652. Andreini remained in the Po Valley, 1652–1654, continuing to work in the theater. He died on June 7, 1654, in Reggio Emilia. JON SNYDER Selected Works Plays La saggia Egiziaca, 1604. Lo schiavetto, 1606. Le due comedie in comedia, 1623. Li due Leli simili, 1613. L’Adamo, 1613. La Maddalena, 1617. La Veneziana, 1619. La Turca, 1620. Lelio bandito, 1620. Amor nello specchio, 1622. La centaura, 1622. La Ferinda, 1622. Li duo baci, 1634. L’Ismenia, 1639.

Lella piangente, 1634.

Poetry ‘‘Il pianto d’Apollo,’’ 1608. ‘‘La Maddalena,’’ 1610. ‘‘La Tecla vergine e martire,’’ 1623. ‘‘La divina visione,’’ 1623. ‘‘L’olivastro, ovvero il poeta sfortunato,’’ 1642. ‘‘Il Cristo sofferente,’’ 1651.

Letters Comici dell’Arte. Corrispondenze (G.B. Andreini, N. Barbieri, P.M. Cecchini, S. Fiorillo, T. Martinelli, F. Scala), edited by Siro Ferrone et al., 2 vols., 1993.

Essays Teatro celeste, 1624. Lo specchio, 1625.

Further Reading Carandini, Silvia and Luciano Mariti (editors), Don Giovanni o l’estrema avventura del teatro: Il nuovo ‘‘Risarcito convitato di pietra’’ di Giovan Battista Andreini, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Cohen, Judith, ‘‘Giovan Battista Andreini’s Dramas and the Beginnings of Opera,’’ in La Musique et le rite sacre´ et profane, edited by Marc Honegger, Christian Meyer, and Paul Pre´vost, 2 vols., Strasbourg: Association des publications pre`s les Universite´s de Strasbourg, 1986. Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari: La Commedia dell’Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Quarta, Daniela, ‘‘Lettura delle ‘Due comedie in comedia’ di Giovan Battista Andreini,’’ Abaco, 1 (2002): 103–143. Rebaudengo, Maurizio, Giovan Battista Andreini tra poetica e drammaturgia, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1994.

ISABELLA CANALI ANDREINI (1562–1604) Unrivaled as an actress since late adolescence, in fact already by 30 the most famous actress of the Italian Renaissance, Isabella Andreini was a versatile, multiform artist who excelled not only in acting heartfelt parts of young women in love but was also a writer of polished letters and of refined Petrarchan poems. Given her extensive humanist education, it has been suggested that Andreini was perhaps raised as an ‘‘honest courtesan,’’ like the Venetian contemporary poet and renowned 38

beauty, Veronica Franco. In one of her published letters Andreini explains, however, that her humanist education was the result of a personal thirst for knowledge as well as of a need to use productively whatever intellectual gifts she had. Be as it may, Andreini was able to avoid the route of sexual commerce, no matter how high-class, by marrying at 16 a fellow actor of some renown, Francesco Andreini. Francesco was already famous for his comic role of Capitan Spaventa, a braggart

ISABELLA CANALI ANDREINI captain, and was instrumental in making the traveling troupe of which he was the most distinguished member, the Compagnia dei Gelosi, one of the most thriving and successful commedia dell’arte groups of all times. By playing repeatedly on stage her signature part of the chaste young inamorata, Andreini was soon able to construct for herself the image of the virtuous actress with a comic talent while projecting offstage the figure of chaste wife and solicitous mother. We know little of how Andreini enthralled her audience as an actress, even though there are scenarios published by Flaminio Scala, the nobleman who directed the Compagnia dei Gelosi until her husband took over, in which she is represented in her customary part of inamorata. She must have had a remarkable and most pliable voice, because that part of her acting has often been remarked upon. Her range was wide by all means: She played comedies, tragicomedies, intermedi, and pastorals, both in fully scripted parts, like those necessary for the courtly commedia erudita, and in the improvised, or partially scripted, folios that commedia dell’arte groups favored. She often displayed her knowledge of different languages by using made-up foreign words when sweetly ranting her part of dejected damsel. Just as well, she could imitate many dialects by appearing to speak in tongues in scenes of feigned madness. The effect must have been wildly comic as well as thoroughly subversive. At a time in which only in Italy were women allowed on stage, Andreini acted not only the female parts that had just become available but, surprisingly, male parts as well. In Tasso’s pastoral Aminta, she seems to have played, in fact, the melancholic main male character, Aminta, leaving the part of the female protagonist, Silvia, to another known actress of her company, the divina Vittoria Piissimi, known at the time for virtuoso dramatic performances and ‘‘gypsy’’ parts. This belies the notion that Andreini was a jealous prima donna of the stage rather than a practical one. As she understood very well, the strategy of dividing prestigious roles among women was a good one for the bottom line, since it allowed all performers to play according to the needs of the stage, the desire of the audience, or even the vagaries of the day. What after all sealed the success of the commedia dell’arte companies in Italy (and soon in France) was the presence of women on stage, rather than any dramatic change in performance. Andreini referred only once in her writing to her profession of comica, when in the introductory sonnet to her collection of Rime (Rhymes, 1601) she recalled

her transvestite roles on stage and tied the necessary falseness of an actress to the finti ardori, or fake passions, needed by a love poet. Andreini’s most accomplished and original publication is her pastoral, Mirtilla (La Mirtilla, 1588), which was the first published play of a woman playwright, together with Maddalena Campiglia’s Flori (1588). The success of the tragicomedy Mirtilla was remarkable by all standards: The book enjoyed nine editions and was soon translated into French. In fact, just ten years after its publication, the influential critic Angelo Ingegneri categorized it as a founding text of the new popular pastoral form and placed it next to the output of Torquato Tasso and Giambattista Guarini, who, respectively in Aminta and Pastor Fido, had established the rules of the genre. Fully knowledgeable of Tasso’s theatrical lesson to the extent that some characters in both Aminta and Mirtilla have the same name—Tirsi and Filli—Andreini makes a point of displaying in her happy, careless Arcadia her knowledge of classical authors, such as Virgil and Ovid, as well as her thorough familiarity with Petrarch and Sannazaro. When Mirtilla was first staged, Andreini played the role of Filli, whom she constructed as an intelligent and sociable nymph, and left the part of Mirtilla to her fellow actress Piissimi. The lyric effusions of the pastoral were typical of the genre, and Andreini lavished in her play even more artificiality than usual to conform to public expectations. But in the thematic change of the scene most often repeated in any pastoral play—the threatened ravishment of a nymph (as in Tasso’s Aminta)—Andreini shows forcefully how much the presence of women as playwrights and actresses ultimately was changing the stage. Responding to the implied violence against women of contemporary plays that often staged the topos of the damsel in distress in titillating ways, Andreini cast lyricism aside and constructed instead a scene in which female shrewdness and ingenuity—practical virtues—overcome male strength and crassness and save the day. Mirtilla concludes with a hymn to female friendship and implies that women can surmount the pains of unrequited love by constructing a world of togetherness and sharing. Andreini also wrote Fragmenti (Fragments, 1617) an ensemble of 31 contrasti (contrasts) that allows us to get a sense of what kinds of performance all’improvviso a woman could give on stage. These are rough stage compositions that actors used with ad hoc embellishments according to the circumstances of the representation. The supple, 39

ISABELLA CANALI ANDREINI partially scripted monologues, which Andreini could play in any direction she needed, exemplify the kind of recitation women favored in commedia dell’arte representations. As it was often the case at the time, Andreini too has a collection of Lettere in print (Letters, 1601). This text is made up of 148 fictional pieces written to kings, such as Henry IV of France; to princes, such as Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua; and to other moneyed patrons and friends. It displays rhetorical flourishes and erudite asides, and it enjoyed six editions in the decades immediately following her death. Andreini’s tone is polished and courtly, and she consistently keeps the high ground, conscious that a woman whose profession is the public one of acting is always on the verge of losing her reputation and thus her favor with patrons. She therefore consistently fosters the image of herself as a chaste woman of letters, whose ambitions are well within the unscripted boundaries of her sex. Andreini’s work as a poet is well reflected in her Rime, a collection of 359 poems upon which, she hoped, her reputation as a female Petrarchist would rest. Using varying poetic forms, such as the sonnet, the eclogue, and the madrigal, as well as the lesser-known form of scherzo, Andreini employs with intelligence her humanistic education and her talent for sweetly delicate compositions. Her purpose is to foster the image of the dejected woman in love who at times, thanks to her pain, is able to find an impressive lyrical voice, like her fellow Paduan, Gaspara Stampa.

Biography Andreini was born in Padua in 1562 as Isabella Canali from a Venetian family; she was carefully educated and was able to speak a number of languages. She belonged to the Academy of the Intenti in Pavia with the nom de plume of l’Accesa; at 14, in 1576, she joined the commedia dell’arte group of I Gelosi and became known for playing the part of the young woman in love, often comically. She married Francesco Andreini, a playwright and known actor of 30, in 1577. Andreini was not only the leading actress of her compagnia, under the title of prima donna inamorata, but also an extraordinary appealing presence in the group; she performed a highly acclaimed role in Florence on the occasion of the marriage of Duke Ferdinando I of the Medici and Christine of Lorraine, in 1589. She traveled with her company throughout Italy, especially Venice, Rome and Mantua; invited to France by Henry IV, she 40

performed at his court with great acclaim in 1599. She had four daughters and three sons and died while pregnant with her eighth child in Lyon, France, on 10 July 1604. At her death the husband disbanded the Gelosi and spent the rest of his life celebrating his wife as a virtuous and learned woman through the publication of her poetry and letters. Andreini’s son Giovan Battista became a leading actor and playwright and performed to great acclaim in Italy and France. VALERIA FINUCCI See also: Commedia dell’Arte Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Mirtilla, pastorale d’Isabella Andreini, comica gelosa,’’ 1588; modern reprint edited by Maria Luisa Doglio, 1995; as ‘‘La Mirtilla: A Pastoral,’’ translated by Julie Campbell, 2002. ‘‘Rime d’Isabella Andreini Padovana,’’ 1601. ‘‘Rime d’Isabella Andreini comica gelosa & academia intenta detta l’Accesa: Parte seconda,’’ 1605.

Other Lettere d’Isabella Andreini Padovana, comica gelosa, 1601. Frammenti d’alcune scritture della Sign. Isabella Andreini comica gelosa e accademica Intenta, 1617. Lettere aggiuntovi di nuovo li ragionamenti piacevoli, 1638.

Further Reading Boggio, Maricia (editor), Le Isabelle: Dal teatro della Maddalena alla Isabella Andreini, Nardo`: Besa, 2002. Clubb, Louise, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. De Angelis, Francesca Romana, La divina Isabella: Vita straordinaria di una donna del Cinquecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1991. Doglio, Maria Luisa, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in I. Andreini, La Mirtilla, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1995. Ferrone Siro, Attori mercanti corsari: La commedia dell’arte in Europa tra cinque e seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Gilder, Rosamond, ‘‘Isabella Andreini,’’ in Enter the Actress, New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1960. Guardenti, Ezio, and Cesare Molinari, La commedia dell’arte, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1999. Ingegneri, Angelo, Della poesia rappresentativa e dell’arte di rappresentare le favole sceniche, edited by Maria Luisa Doglio, Modena: Panini, 1989. MacNeil, Anne, Music and Women of the Commedia dell’Arte in the Late Sixteenth Century, New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Marotti, Ferruccio, and Giovanna Romei, ‘‘La professione del teatro,’’ in La Commedia dell’arte e la societa`

ANGELA DA FOLIGNO barocca, edited by Ferdinando Taviani, vol. 2, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. McGill, Kathleen, ‘‘Women and Performance: The Development of Improvisation by the Sixteenth-Century Commedia dell’Arte,’’ Theatre Journal, 43(1991): 59–69. Pandolfi, Vito, Isabella, comica gelosa: Avventure di maschere, Rome: Edizioni Moderne, 1960. Ray, Meredith, ‘‘La castita` conquistata:The Function of the Satyr in Pastoral Drama,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 9(1998): 312–321. Rebaudengo, Maurizio, G. B. Andreini tra poetica e drammaturgia, Turin: Rosenberg Sellier, 1994. Scala, Flaminio, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative, vol. 1, Appendix 2, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1976.

Stampino Galli, Maria, ‘‘Publish or Perish: An Early Seventeenth-Century Paradox,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 10(1998): 373–379. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Bella d’Asia: Torquato Tasso, gli attori e l’immortalita`,’’ Paragone, 35(1984): 3–76. Taviani Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell’Arte: La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo, Florence: Usher, 1982. Tessari, Roberto, ‘‘Sotto il segno di Giano: La commedia dell’arte di Isabella e di Francesco Andreini,’’ in The Commedia dell’Arte from the Renaissance to Dario Fo, edited by C. Cairns, Lewinston: Edwin Mellen, 1989.

ANGELA DA FOLIGNO (CA. 1248–1309) Nearly everything we know about Angela, a mystic of the Franciscan tradition, is narrated in Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (The Book of the Blessed Angela of Foligno). Angela’s Libro is regarded as a work of great importance in the literature of Christian mysticism. Her influence extended beyond the group of followers to whom she addressed several of her teachings. Many penitents came to Foligno, most likely seeking to benefit from her experience as spiritual mother. The most notable of these was Ubertino da Casale, leader of the Franciscan Spirituals. To her, he credits his conversion to a more radical ascetic life. Angela’s writings inspired several saints, including Teresa of Avila, Ignatius Loyola, Francis de Sales, Alphonsus Liguori, and the French philosopher Ernest Hello. Angela’s Libro consists of two parts. Between 1292 and 1296 she dictated the first part, Il Memoriale (Memorial) to a scribe known simply as ‘‘Brother A.’’ The Memoriale is the most widely read and studied part of Angela’s Libro. Of course, this is because it furnishes more information on her own inner world. Angela experienced intense visions and mystical raptures that she narrated to Brother A. She also underwent intermittent periods of agony and joy. Drawing from these personal experiences, Angela defines the transformations the soul makes as it travels along its spiritual journey. The first twenty steps outline the early phases of her spiritual development. It is a painful process toward purification that involves great struggle

and suffering. The remaining stages are divided into seven ‘‘supplementary’’ steps. These attempt to describe her greater mystical ascent and her mysterious experiences of the Divine. The Memoriale actually contains three narrators: God, Angela, and Brother A. God reveals himself to Angela, and she then attempts to communicate her experiences to Brother A., who then writes down what he hears. As Angela’s confessor, Brother A. exerted some influence over her life and thinking. However, as she became more spiritually advanced, it appears that their roles may have shifted. Brother A. became more of a disciple and she his spiritual mother. Despite the particular nature of Brother A.’s role, Angela’s own voice dominates the Memoriale. Steps one through twenty describe her gradual spiritual catharsis through suffering and her subsequent intimacy with God. The first seven steps are characterized by painful struggle and extraordinary anguish and distress. In steps eight through seventeen, we see the role that suffering plays in her purification and in her attempts to reorient her affections and rid herself of possessions. During steps ten through fifteen, she experiences visions of the Passion. Angela’s emphasis on the crucified Christ echoes that of other women mystics of the time. Influenced by the medieval diffusion of devotion to Christ’s humanity, many of them emphasized the most pathetic elements of Christ’s sufferings (bleeding wounds, anguish, and torment). All the steps demonstrate her progress 41

ANGELA DA FOLIGNO toward self-knowledge. Thus, Angela’s Memoriale is a kind of spiritual biography, like Augustine’s Confessions, where self-knowledge is presented as an important aspect in one’s pursuit of God. In the seventeenth step, Angela’s faith acquires a new dimension as she passes into a mystical state that alters her level of contemplation. In step eighteen, she exhibits intense physical manifestations as a result of her impassioned absorption into God. In step nineteen, these mystical consolations continue to the point that she loses her power of speech. At the beginning of the twentieth step, God fulfills an earlier promise made to Angela. He had told her that the Trinity would come into her when she had finished divulging herself of her possessions. Here Angela manages to dispossess herself of almost everything. By his own admission, Brother A. abandons the writing of the twentieth step, saying simply that it is filled with great divine revelations. At this point, there is an important break in the narrative structure of Angela’s Memoriale that underscores the importance of Brother A. in the organization of Angela’s text. The process of creating her Memoriale generally followed a pattern: Angela dictated her experiences in the Umbrian dialect to Brother A., who recorded and translated her words into Latin. He often had to reread to her what she had dictated in order to be sure he had copied it accurately. Angela had originally designated thirty steps in her spiritual journey, but due to the difficulty he experienced in describing them Brother A. decided to reorganize them into seven ‘‘supplementary’’ steps. The first five supplementary steps demonstrate Angela’s heightened understanding of Christ’s Passion and her deep penetration into the mystery of the cross. These steps illustrate her intense visions and experiences of Christ crucified, the Eucharist, the universe filled with the presence of God, and various other formless visions of the Godhead. Angela grows even more intimate with Christ, whom she calls the suffering ‘‘God-man.’’ Despite the nature of these ecstasies, she endures periods of emptiness, terrible doubts, and temptations from the devil. However, these periods are intermingled with feelings of joy and certitude of God’s love. It is here where Angela begins to enter in to the mystical life proper. In the sixth supplementary step, Angela feels a ‘‘darkness’’ in her soul. This stage of spiritual development is common among great mystics. The result is that Angela’s soul undergoes extreme purgation and purification, preparing her for her final union with the Divine. From the depths of despair 42

and anguish Angela is hurled into the highest point of her mystical ascent—the seventh and final supplementary step. Here she undergoes a lofty vision of God in darkness where she sees both ‘‘nothing’’ and ‘‘everything’’ simultaneously. God’s transcendence is beyond conceptualization, and any attempt to describe it seems to be blasphemy. The second part of Angela’s Libro, Istruzioni (Instructions), was dictated to anonymous disciples. In Angela’s later years, a group of devotees began to gather around her to listen to her teachings. The wisdom that Angela gained from her journey is offered to these followers in the Istruzioni for their spiritual benefit. We know very little about Angela’s immediate disciples, but it is likely that many of them were part of the Franciscan first and third orders. Additionally, it is not clear exactly to whom each of the Istruzioni were addressed. What we do know is that Angela wished to teach those disciples near her as well as those who extended beyond the boundaries of Umbria. It is this concern for their spiritual formation that serves to unify the Istruzioni. The scribes of her teachings remain anonymous, but differing styles indicate that there were many of them. Some of the writings are more than likely additions and glosses composed by various disciples. The themes developed in the various steps of Angela’s Memoriale are repeated and expanded in the Istruzioni. Although they are frequently amplified, the teachings are firmly grounded in the Memoriale. Recently Angela’s Memoriale has enjoyed a good deal of critical interest. Scholars have studied Angela in the framework of other medieval holy women. Angela appears in various discussions regarding the role of food, eating, the Eucharist, female imagery, and the body in women’s writings and religious devotional practices. They have also attempted to decipher the role of Brother A. in the transcribing of the Memoriale and the role of language in Angela’s narrations of her mystical visions to him. Finally, the way in which many of Angela’s visions were inspired by ceremonies and dramatizations common in the Middle Ages during Holy Week has also been explored.

Biography Angela was born ca. 1248 in Foligno, a small town near Assisi in Umbria. She married in 1270. In the 1280s, Angela underwent a dramatic conversion; shortly thereafter, she suffered the abrupt death of her children, husband, and mother. Her Libro implies that before her conversion she enjoyed the

CECCO ANGIOLIERI excessive pleasures of the wealthy. The only explicit motives for her conversion indicate that she felt great sorrow for her sins and feared damnation. Angela encountered a Franciscan friar who was chaplain to the local bishop and made a full confession to him. Although little is known about him, it is believed that ‘‘Brother A.’’ was most likely her relative. Angela’s new life of penance was a slow and painstaking process as she struggled to free herself from her sinful past. Against the counsel of religious advisors, Angela decided to follow the example of St. Francis. In 1290–1291 she became a Franciscan Tertiary and gave her possessions to the needy. Angela had a companion whom later manuscripts of the Libro refer to as Masazuola. It is thought that initially she may have been Angela’s servant. From numerous references to her in the Libro, it is probable that she became Angela’s constant companion and spiritual confidante. Passages in the Libro highlight Masazuola’s exceptional goodness and piety. Together Angela and Masazuola cared for the sick and poor. Angela was never canonized by the Church but was given the title of ‘‘Blessed’’ in 1701. She died in Foligno on 4 January 1309. MOLLY MORRISON Selected Works Liber sororis Lelle de Fulgineo or Liber de vera fidelium experientia (1292–1296); as Il libro della Beata Angela da Foligno, edited by Ludger Thier and Abele Calufetti, Grottaferrata (Rome): Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas, 1985; as Memorial, translated by John Cirignano, Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999. Complete Works, edited and translated by Paul Lachance, New York: Paulist Press, 1993.

Further Reading Arcangeli, Tiziana, ‘‘Re-Reading a Mis-known and Misread Mystic: Angela da Foligno,’’ Annali d’Italianisica, 13(1995): 41–78. Bynum, Caroline Walker, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion, New York: Zone, 1991. Lavalva, Rosamaria, ‘‘The Language of Vision in Angela da Foligno’s Liber de vera fidelium experientia,’’ Stanford Italian Review, 11, nos. 1–2(1992): 103–122. Mazzoni, Cristina, ‘‘The Spirit and the Flesh in Angela da Foligno,’’ in Angela of Foligno: Memorial, translated by John Cirignano, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999. Mooney, Catherine M, ‘‘The Authorial Role of Brother A. in the Composition of Angela of Foligno’s Revelations,’’ in Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Morrison, Molly, ‘‘Connecting with the God-Man: Angela of Foligno’s Sensual Communion and Priestly Identity,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 10(1999): 308–314. Morrison, Molly, ‘‘A Mystic’s Drama: The Paschal Mystery in the Visions of Angela da Foligno,’’ Italica 78:1 (2001): 36–52. Morrison, Molly, ‘‘Ingesting Bodily Filth: Defilement in the Spirituality of Angela of Foligno,’’ Romance Quarterly 50: 3(2003): 204–216. Morrison, Molly, ‘‘Christ’s Body in the Visions of Angela of Foligno,’’ Magistra: A Journal of Women’s Spirituality in History, 10:2(2004): 37–59. Petroff, Elizabeth Alvilda, Body and Soul: Essays on Medieval Women and Mysticism, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Petroff, Elizabeth (editor), Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Sagnella, Mary Ann, ‘‘Carnal Metaphors and Mystical Discourse in Angela da Foligno’s Liber,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 13(1995): 79–90.

CECCO ANGIOLIERI (CA. 1260–1313) For his intensity of expression and stylistic consistency, Cecco Angiolieri is the leading exponent of the realistic (or comical, or burlesque) school of poetry, also known as poesia giocosa, probably initiated by Florentine rhymer Rustico di Filippo but practiced primarily in Siena between the end of

the thirteenth and the middle of the following century. Apart from Cecco, the manuscript tradition has conveyed the names of fellow citizens such as Musa or Muscia, Meo, and Iacopo dei Tolomei. Cecco’s high social rank (he belonged to a rich and aristocratic family of the Guelph party) and likely 43

CECCO ANGIOLIERI training in the Scholastic ‘‘arts of diction’’ (artes dictandi), explain his familiarity with medieval Latin and Romance literary traditions. Consisting exclusively of sonnets, his poetical work mainly survives in three anthological manuscripts (canzonieri, or songbooks) of the fourteenth century (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Chigiano L.VIII.305 [¼ Ch], copied in Tuscany; El Escorial, Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo, Lat. e.III.23 [¼ E], probably copied in Padua; and Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barberiniano Lat. 3953 [¼ B], copied in Treviso), where the realistic poems of the Sienese circle are collected alongside those of the major exponents of the contemporary Stilnovo school of poetry. The synchronicity of Cecco’s manuscript tradition has been interpreted as an evident sign of his wide and immediate, though not enduring, success. Moreover, the anonymous transmission of a large part of the realistic sonnets (namely, in the substantial section of MS Ch) has complicated the exact definition of his proper work: in all, only 76 pieces bear Cecco’s name (in the rubrics of MSS E and B) or can be safely ascribed to him on the grounds of internal elements. After a thorough critical analysis, however, Mario Marti attributed to him 112 sonnets, besides another 16 of dubious authenticity. Traditionally divided into two hendecasyllabic quatrains with alternate or crossed rhymes (A B A B, A B A B or A B B A, A B B A) followed by two tercets usually with alternate rhymes (C D C, D C D), the sonnet was originally conceived as a dialogical metrical form and soon became a vehicle for comical and realistic poetry, in opposition to the courtly and sophisticated canzone, which typically dealt with love as a philosophical matter. Cecco’s sonnets display a wide range of rhetorical devices and figures of speech, especially hyperbole, adynaton (a declaration of impossibility, usually in terms of an exaggerated comparison), and oratio recta (direct speech). His rough syntaxis, bulging with complex hypothetical clauses, and his vocabulary, rich in dialectal forms and learned neologisms, also attest to consummate technical skills and literary awareness. According to medieval aesthetics, each of Cecco’s themes can actually be ascribed to a specific tradition, which he exploits with originality, molding it to his personal appeal. As he claims, ‘‘Tre cose solamente m’e`nno in grado, / le quali posso non ben ben fornire, / cioe` la donna, la taverna e ’l dado: / queste mi fanno ’l cuor lieto sentire’’ (I only care for three things, which I cannot perfectly accomplish, that is, the woman, the tavern, and the dice: These are the things that 44

make my heart rejoice). Sex, wine, and gambling were among the favorite subjects of Latin Goliardic songs, whereas misogyny and an anti-uxorial attitude, omnipotence of money, and condemnation of poverty all find a precedent in ancient burlesque literature. Another key word of Cecco’s poetry is malinconia (literally, ‘‘black humor’’), which has been defined by Marti as a ‘‘desire for pure pleasure, discontent, cupidity of life, and consequent bad mood’’ (Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, 1953). Less frequent, but likewise remarkable, are some irreverent portraits of fellow citizens, a typical genre of Cecco’s ‘‘realistic’’ predecessor Rustico di Filippo. On the contrary, the violent satire against his own father is a peculiar feature of Cecco’s work. Although they must be viewed within the Latin tradition of the vituperium (that is, vituperation or invective) and interpreted according to the concrete and down-to-earth sense of humor of the Middle Ages, these antipaternal sonnets make a strong impression on our modern sensitivity, imbued with psychological concepts: ‘‘Il pessimo e ’l crudel odio ch’i’ porto / a diritta ragione al padre meo, / il fara` vivar piu´ che Botadeo... E poi m’e` detto ch’io nol debbo odiare! / Ma
cchi
ssapesse ben ogni sua taccia, / direbbe: ‘Vivo il dovresti mangiare’’’ (The terrible and cruel hatred that I feel by just reason for my father will make him live longer than Botadeo [i.e., the Wandering Jew, reputedly immortal]... And people say I mustn’t hate him! But if they knew full well his reputation, they’d say: ‘You should eat him alive’). And also: ‘‘Ma in tale guisa e` rivolto il quaderno, / che sempre vivero` grolificato, / po’ che messer Angiolieri e` scoiato, / che m’afriggea d’estate e di verno’’ (But now the tables have turned, so that I shall always live in glory: now that Sir Angiolieri, who used to torment me all the time [literally: in summer and in winter], has kicked the bucket). A typical feature of Cecco’s comical style is his breathtaking theatricality, which also has its roots in medieval minstrelsy and carnival traditions. The poet always refers to his public as ‘‘uditori’’ (hearers), never as readers, and his poems actually sound like monologues to be acted on stage. Their dramatic force is frequently strengthened by the insertion of short and poignant direct-speech clauses. In some cases, such as the famous ‘‘contrasto’’ ‘‘— Becchin’ amor! — Che vuo’, falso tradito?’’, the whole sonnet is effectively turned into an agitated dialogue between two theatrical characters. The caustic intentions and crude materialism of the poet’s work reveal a radical departure from the lofty and idealistic Tuscan love lyrics of the period.

CECCO ANGIOLIERI Such a stylistic and ideological opposition is intensively expressed in a group of sonnets that deal with the unfortunate and grotesque love story with a woman called Becchina, who represents profane, physical love, the exact opposite of the angel-like lady sung by the Stilnovo poets. Accordingly, two of the three sonnets addressed to Dante Alighieri can be interpreted as an ongoing dispute between Dante, who first formalized the ‘‘sweet new style’’ in his Purgatorio (Canto XXIV, l. 57), and Cecco, an adamantine supporter of the ‘‘comical’’ style. The first, ‘‘Dante Allaghier, Cecco, tu’ serv’ amico,’’ finds fault with the last sonnet in the Vita nuova; the second, ‘‘Dante Alleghier, s’i’ so’ buon begolardo,’’ refers to the misfortunes of exile and sounds like a response to a lost invective by Dante. Starting from the theoretical opposition of styles established by medieval treatises and stressing Cecco’s destructive attitude toward the communicative function of the poetical word, Elena Landoni concludes that his ‘‘nihilistic conversion of traditional procedures and contents’’ transcends a mere stylistic controversy and disputes the very essence of literary creation (‘‘Note su Cecco Angiolieri: Antistilnovismo o antipoesia?’’, 1990). Although contemporary concepts like ‘‘refusal of poetry’’ or ‘‘antipoetry’’ can hardly be applied to a medieval writer, it is probably true that Cecco pursued an unprecedented and subversive poetical itinerary by his complete adherence to negative and materialistic themes. As a matter of fact, the Tuscan realistic current of the thirteenth century was soon overcome by the masters of the Stilnovo, who set the rules for subsequent Italian lyric tradition. However, Cecco’s stylistic and poetical achievements, above all his expressive caricatural mimesis and dialogue effects, survived in the flourishing narrative tradition of the following century: Giovanni Boccaccio even turned ‘‘Cecco di messere Angiulieri’’ into a literary character, recounting one of the poet’s misadventures in his Decameron (IX, 4). The modern appraisal of Cecco Angiolieri dates back to 1874, when ‘‘romantic’’ scholar Alessandro D’Ancona evaluated his poetry in the light of sparse biographical data (which supposedly confirm the stormy lifestyle of the poetic character) and advanced an autobiographical reading that defined Cecco as a fine ‘‘humorist’’ of the thirteenth century. So convincing was this anachronistic interpretation that generations of critics accepted it as truthful (Masse`ra, Momigliano, Maier, and Figurelli, among others). In his 1933 Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte, Benedetto Croce framed Cecco’s poetry within a more rigorous

historical and literary context, and finally Mario Marti undertook a sound philological reading of his complete work. Marti’s criticism was later epitomized by Giorgio Petrocchi, who viewed Cecco’s poetry as a ‘‘literary transposition’’ of realistically modified and magnified biographical elements, ‘‘in order to fully enjoy all the resources of the comical style’’ (‘‘I poeti realisti,’’ 1965). Petrocchi also stressed Cecco’s absolute primacy in creating a dialect-based poetic language and in conveying previous burlesque traditions into the forms of Romance lyric poetry, which employed the first person as a constitutive feature. Stylistic concerns were further investigated by Luigi Peirone, whose study bears the revealing title of La coscienza dello stile ‘comico’ in Cecco Angiolieri (1979). Modern interest in this unique and controversial figure of Italian medieval literature contributed to the enduring success of some of his sonnets, such as the anthology piece ‘‘S’i’ fosse fuoco, arderei ’l mondo’’ (If I were fire, I would burn the world), a staggering series of mysanthropic adynata, which rightly became an emblem of Cecco’s ‘‘subjectivity’’ and powerful art.

Biography Cecco was born in Siena, around 1260, to the rich banker Angioliero Sola`fica of the Order of the ‘‘Frati Gaudenti’’ and noblewoman Lisa dei Salimbeni. He took part in the military expedition against Ghibellini in Turri, Tuscany, 1281, where he was twice fined for illicit departure and fined for nighttime disturbances, 1282 and 1291. He also took part in the military campaign with Florence against Arezzo (during which he perhaps met Dante Alighieri in Campaldino), 1288–1289. He was involved in bloody brawls and accused of wounding one Dino da Monteluco, 1291, and banished from Siena, unknown date. Cecco sold a vineyard in Siena to one Neri Perini in 1302. He probably spent some years in Rome at the court of Cardinal Riccardo Petroni, after 1302. Cecco died in Siena, before 25 February 1313. Five of his six children renounced his mortgaged inheritance to avoid heavy debts. FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA Selected Works Editions I sonetti di Cecco Angiolieri, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1906.

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CECCO ANGIOLIERI Le rime di Cecco Angiolieri, edited by Domenico Giuliotti, Siena: Giuntini-Bentivoglio, 1914. Nuovi sonetti, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Perugia: Unione Tipografica Cooperativa, 1916. Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari: Laterza, 1920 (revised edition by Luigi Russo, 1940). Il canzoniere, edited by Carlo Steiner, Turin: UTET, 1925. Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, edited by Mario Marti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1956. Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, edited by Maurizio Vitale, vol. 1, Turin: UTET, 1956. Rime, edited by Gigi Cavalli, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1959 (fifth edition, 2000). Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 2/1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Le rime, edited by Antonio Lanza, Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1990. Rime, edited by Raffaella Castagnola, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Sonetti, edited by Menotti Stanghellini, Siena: Il Leccio, 2003.

Translations The Sonnets of a Handsome and Well-Mannered Rogue, translated by Thomas C. Chubb, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1970. If I Were Fire: Thirty-Four Sonnets by Cecco Angiolieri, translated by Felix Stefanile, Iowa City: Windhover Press at the University of Iowa, 1987. Cecco, as I Am and Was: The Poems of Cecco Angiolieri, translated by Tracy Barrett, Boston, MA: International Pocket Library, 1994.

Further Reading Alfie, Fabian, Comedy and Culture: Cecco Angiolieri’s Poetry and Late Medieval Society, Leeds, U.K.: Northern University Press, 2001.

Bondanella, Peter, ‘‘Cecco Angiolieri and the Vocabulary of Courtly Love,’’ Studies in Philology, 69(1972): 55–71. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte: Studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento, Bari: Laterza, 1933. D’Ancona, Alessandro, ‘‘Cecco Angiolieri da Siena, poeta umorista del secolo XIII’’ [1874] in Studj di critica e storia letteraria, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912. Figurelli, Fernando, La musa bizzarra di Cecco Angiolieri, Naples: Pironti, 1950. Landoni, Elena, Il ‘‘libro’’ e la ‘‘sentenzia’’: Scrittura e significato nella poesia medievale: Iacopone da Todi, Dante, Cecco Angiolieri, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1990. Maier, Bruno, La personalita` e la poesia di Cecco Angiolieri: Studio critico, Bologna: Cappelli, 1947. Marti, Mario, Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1953. Marti, Mario, ‘‘Sui sonetti attribuiti a Cecco Angiolieri’’ [1950] in Dal certo al vero: Studi di filologia e di storia, Rome: Ateneo 1962. Momigliano, Attilio, ‘‘L’anima e l’arte di Cecco Angiolieri,’’ Italia moderna, 4(1908): 678–684. Orwen, Gifford Phillips, Cecco Angiolieri: A Study, Chapel Hill: University North Carolina Press, 1979. Peirone, Luigi, La coscienza dello stile ‘comico’ in Cecco Angiolieri, Savona: Sabatelli, 1979. Petrocchi, Giorgio, ‘‘I poeti realisti’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana. Le origini e il Duecento, directed by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘La lingua e l’arte di Cecco Angiolieri’’ [1929] in Letteratura e critica: Studi in onore di Natalino Sapegno, vol. 5, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Suitner, Franco, La poesia satirica e giocosa nell’eta` dei comuni, Padua: Antenore, 1983.

ANGLO-AMERICAN INFLUENCES Although Italy was a cultural model for England during the Renaissance, ‘‘before the eighteenth century, Italians do not seem to pay much attention to England, a country, according to Virgil, nearly outside the world.’’ Thus wrote Arturo Graf in his seminal study, significantly titled Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (1911), where he described the marked change in attitude that occurred with the Enlightenment: Growing admiration for English political institutions created, in turn, interest for the culture and 46

literature of Great Britain. Yet, even this initial curiosity necessitated the mediation of French, which remained for long the most influential foreign language in Italy and gave way to English only in the second half of the twentieth century, mostly as a consequence of the increasing influence of the United States. A case in point was the mixed fortune of Shakespeare, ignored by Italians until the late eighteenth century. His works were often known primarily through their operatic versions by Gioacchino Rossini and, especially, Giuseppe

ANGLO-AMERICAN INFLUENCES Verdi (Otello, Macbeth, Falstaff); through idiosyncratic translations, such as Giulio Carcano’s 12 volume Opere di Shakespeare (Shakespeare’s Works, 1875–1882) or Arrigo Boito’s versions for Eleonora Duse; or because popular actors such as Tommaso Salvini performed them worldwide with great success. The impact of the anglomania of the eighteenth century was thus felt not so much at the level of individual writers but rather in the foundation of important periodicals such as Il Caffe` (1764–1766) and La Frusta letteraria (1763–1765), inspired by their British counterparts (most notably, Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s The Spectator). In the next century, a number of significant episodes demonstrated the increasing influence of English culture. Ugo Foscolo translated Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey as Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia (1813) and assimilated his style in his later works. The fame of Lord Byron, who lived in Venice, Ravenna, and Pisa, was enormous and created the vogue of byronismo, with an equal number of followers and detractors. Walter Scott enjoyed phenomenal success, and among the many historical novels influenced by his model was Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827, 1840–1842). However, with the possible exception of Charles Dickens, Victorian literature failed to impress coeval Italian writers. Arrigo Boito and Carlo Dossi were among the few Italian literati who were interested in English literature. Only the twentieth century was characterized by a consistent policy of translation from and criticism of English literature, partially conditioned by the hostility to Britain and its liberalism on the part of the Fascist regime, which dubbed England la perfida Albione (the wicked Albion) and prohibited the use of the English language in mainstream culture (Mussolini even had a special version of Julius Cesar written for him by Giovacchino Forzano in place of Shakespeare’s dangerous representation of tyrannicide). The key figure in this period was the literary critic Mario Praz (1896–1982), who, besides his enormously influential Storia della letteratura inglese (History of English Literature, 1937), wrote several seminal studies on various aspects of English literature and noticeably La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica (The Romantic Agony, 1930), which traced the relationships among the English Decadent writers Algernon Swinburne, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Other important scholars of English literature were Emilio Cecchi and

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, whose notes on English literature based on private lessons he gave to a dedicated group of young pupils were published posthumously as Letteratura inglese (1990–1991). Modernist literature had a major, if somehow belated, influence on Italian culture. Virginia Woolf was a seminal figure for Italian feminism. T. S. Eliot was translated by Eugenio Montale, whose poetry he influenced. Joseph Conrad was fundamental for Italo Calvino’s development as a writer. The revolutionary style of James Joyce can be detected in experimental novels by Carlo Emilio Gadda and Stefano D’Arrigo, but his influence was paramount for the Gruppo 63, which included among others Umberto Eco, Nanni Balestrini, and Edoardo Sanguineti, and criticized the conservatism of Italian postwar literature. Amelia Rosselli (1930–1996) constituted a peculiar case: Born in France, she was the daughter of expatriated anti-Fascist activist Carlo Rosselli, murdered in 1937. She was then raised in England and the United States. Her experimental poetry is permeated by influences from Anglo-American literature and includes the use of the English language itself. In the second half of the twentieth century, Italian theater finally embraced Shakespeare with enthusiasm and produced memorable stagings by Giorgio Strehler and Leo De Berardinis as well as literary adaptations. Eduardo De Filippo translated The Tempest into the Neapolitan dialect and adapted The Merchant of Venice; the playwrightactor Carmelo Bene operated the most original deconstructive rewritings of Hamlet and Othello on page and on stage. Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter were also very popular on the Italian scene. The influence of English literature was particularly strong on writers such as Anna Maria Ortese, Giorgio Manganelli, and Alberto Arbasino, whose anglophile snobbery became a recognizable style. Luigi Meneghello drew on the lucid and ironical style of eighteenth-century English literature to reflect on his condition of Italian expatriate to England in Il dispatrio (The Expatriation, 1993) and translated Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hopkins, and Yeats into his native Vicentine dialect. Additionally, the dandyism of Oscar Wilde was a model for Aldo Busi, who has also skillfully translated Lewis Carroll and other English authors. Italian interest in American literature arose not only for literary reasons but also as a result of the shifting perceptions of the ‘‘new continent’’ and its culture. North America was consistently discussed on two levels in intellectual circles and in freemason 47

ANGLO-AMERICAN INFLUENCES lodges during the Enlightenment. First, following the War of Independence, there was great interest (particularly in Tuscany, Venice, and Naples) in the United States as a constitutional experiment. Benjamin Franklin was one of the most famous men of his time, known to Italians well before the first Italian edition of his Autobiography in 1830. In fact, in 1787, following a devastating earthquake in Calabria, the old town of Castelmonardo was rebuilt with the name of Filadelfia, in homage to the Pennsylvanian city. The second reason for interest was curiosity regarding North American geography, population, and crops. Peoples such as the ‘‘Indians’’ and the ‘‘Eskimos’’ and religious groups such as the Quakers provided the foundation for late eighteenth-century debates on the nature of humanity. America thus remained an eminently intellectual experience. Several eighteenth-century operas were set in the new continent, including Nicolo` Piccinni’s L’Americano (The American, 1760) and I Napoletani in America (The Neapolitans in America, 1768) and Pietro Guglielmi’s La Quakera spiritosa (The Witty Quaker Woman, 1783); and as late as the early twentieth century, America provided vivid characters and settings for Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly (1904) and La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West, 1910). Although Italian travellers began to arrive to North America in the early nineteenth century, the first important Italian travelogue on the United States, Giuseppe Giacosa’s Impressioni d’America (American Impressions), which devoted a section to the life of immigrants in large cities, appeared as late as 1892. The first American writer to enjoy wide success in Italy was James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels were published in Italy immediately after their release on the American market and who is also credited for the introduction of many neologisms of American origin into the Italian language. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) was published by two different Italian publishers and was serialized in three newspapers. The last chapter of Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un italiano (The Castle of Fratta, 1867) is set in the United States, where the protagonist’s son, Carlo, has emigrated after the failure of the revolutions of 1848. Enrico Nencioni (1837–1896), considered the first real Italian critic of American literature, studied and translated Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, whom he discussed with Giosue` Carducci and who subsequently influenced Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli. In the interwar period, North American literature found its most outspoken supporters in Carlo 48

Linati, Cecchi, and Praz, but the continent continued to be known almost exclusively through its books—a relevant exception being Mario Soldati’s memoir America primo amore, (America, First Love, 1934). The two literary figures that championed American literature from a distinctly antiFascist perspective were Cesare Pavese and Elio Vittorini, the editor of the two-volume anthology Americana (1941). Pavese explained retrospectively in the essay ‘‘Ieri e oggi’’ (Yesterday and Today, 1959): ‘‘Around 1930, when Fascism was beginning to be ‘the hope of the world,’ a few young Italians happened to discover America in its books—a pensive and barbaric America, happy and riotous, dissolute, fertile, burdened with all the world’s past and at once young and innocent.’’ The first edition of Americana was seized by censors because of the introductory historical profile by Vittorini, who argued for the political implications of literary history. This controversial piece was substituted by an essay by Emilio Cecchi in the second edition. The anthology included writers from Washington Irving to John Fante, as well as the Canadian Morley Callaghan. The list of the translators for this text reads as a ‘‘Who’s Who’’ of Italian culture of the time: Linati, Montale, Pavese, Guido Piovene, and Alberto Moravia, among others. American literature was especially important for the anti-Fascist authors who described the Resistance against Nazism and Fascism, from Vittorini and Pavese (particularly influenced by Hemingway) to Natalia Ginzburg, the early Calvino and Beppe Fenoglio. By 1947, such interest in American literature was by and large over. Pavese recalled: ‘‘Without Fascism to oppose, without, that is, a historically progressive thought to embody, even America, with all its skyscrapers, cars and soldiers, cannot be at the avant-garde of any culture. Without progressive thought and struggle, it is in danger of surrendering itself to a kind of Fascism, even in the name of its best traditions’’ (‘‘Ieri e oggi,’’ 1959). Post–World War II relations between Italy and the United States were deeply affected by the Cold War and the ensuing political polarization. During the Cold War, the anticapitalist impulses of both Communist and Catholic culture resulted in more critical perspectives on American culture and even a vocal form of anti-Americanism. Massive postwar aid contributed to the growth of consumerism and the popularity of the ‘‘American way of life.’’ In general, the presence of American literature on the Italian market became overwhelming: America was less a myth and a focus of cultural interest and

ANGLO-AMERICAN INFLUENCES more of a fashion or lifestyle. The diffusion of popular literary genres like science fiction and crime stories, alongside the boom of American cinema and television, make it extremely difficult to detect specific lines of influence and suggest a more pervasive presence of American culture. The critic who should be credited with making American popular culture a respectable object of critical examination is Umberto Eco with the essays collected in Diario minimo (Misreadings, 1963) and Apocalittici e integrati (Apocalypse Postponed, 1964), both informed by the theories of Canadian media critic Marshall McLuhan. The echoes of the Beat movement and counterculture showed that interest in America was not only academic and philological. Fernanda Pivano, who first became known as the translator of Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, took up the role of spokesperson for the new trends of American literature and introduced Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Leonard Cohen were role models for Italian cantautori such as Fabrizio De Andre´ and Francesco Guccini. Italian avant-garde theater was profoundly influenced by the Living Theatre, Chaikin-Open, and Bread and Puppet. In the ‘‘age of theory,’’ the lingering presence of semiotics, structuralism, and Marxism resulted in a limited presence of poststructuralism in Italy in comparison to its diffusion in the United States. The influence of American culture and literature, however, can be felt on a broad sociological level in the works of Italian journalists such as Vittorio Zucconi, Furio Colombo, Gianni Riotta, and Beppe Severgnini, who chronicle American society in broad strokes, but it can also be noticed on the level of pop culture, particularly in music, from jazz and blues to rock and hip-hop. In contemporary literature, authors such as Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Don Delillo have been particularly influential for younger writers such as Tiziano Scarpa and Alessandro Baricco, but in general it is the minimalism of Raymond Carver that seems to have been absorbed most by the younger generation. The most impressive literary example of this fusion and influence is that of a Canadian, Mordecai Richler, whose last novel Barney’s Version (1997), with its satirical

conservatism, became in 2000 a mass phenomenon that invested both Italian culture and politics. SHAUL BASSI and BARBARA DEL MERCATO

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana, Bologna: Mulino, 1995. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Preface,‘‘ to Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. Caretti, Laura (editor), Il teatro del personaggio. Shakespeare sulla scena italiana dell’800, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. De Marinis, Marco, Il nuovo teatro 1947–1970, Milan: Bompiani, 1987. Eco, Umberto, Apocalittici e integrati, Milan: Bompiani, 1964. Graf, Arturo, Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII, Turin: Loescher, 1911. Heiney, Donald, America in Modern Italian Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964. Klein, Holger, and Michele Marrapodi (editors), Shakespeare and Italy, Lewiston: Mellen Press, 1999. Lombardo, Agostino (editor), Gli inglesi e l’Italia, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1998. Massara, Giuseppe, Americani. L’immagine letteraria degli Stati Uniti in Italia, Palermo: Sellerio, 1984. Pavese, Cesare, ‘‘Ieri e oggi,’’ in La letteratura americana e altri saggi, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. Praz, Mario, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Milan and Rome: Societa` editrice la cultura, 1930; as The Romantic Agony, translated by Angus Davidson, London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Praz, Mario, Storia della letteratura inglese, Florence: Sansoni, 1937. Praz, Mario, ‘‘Gli studi di letteratura inglese,’’ in Cinquant’anni di vita intellettuale italiana: 1896–1946, edited by Carlo Antoni and Raffaele Mattioli, vol. 2, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1950. Romano, Sergio (editor), Gli americani e l’Italia, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1993. Spini, Giorgio et al. (editors), Italia e America dalla grande guerra a oggi, Venice: Marsilio, 1976. Spini, Giorgio et al. (editors), Italia e America dal Settecento all’eta` dell’imperialismo, Venice: Marsilio, 1976. Sullam Calimani, Anna-Vera, Il primo dei Mohicani. L’elemento americano nelle traduzioni dei romanzi di J. F. Cooper, Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 1995. Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, Letteratura inglese, edited by Nicoletta Polo, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1990–1991. Vittorini, Elio (editor), Americana, Milan: Bompiani, 1941.

49

ANIMATION

ANIMATION Freed from the presence of the human figure and based on single-frame exposure of its many compositional elements, the cinema of animation displays a range of technical and expressive modes. The technique of frame-by-frame exposure yields frames that, running at the rate of 24 per second (on television, the rate becomes 25 per second), produce the same sensation of movement as that of human figures filmed by a normal movie camera. The typological set of these films consists principally of cartoons, drawings, or animated cartoons of varying lengths that are structured into a ‘‘genre’’ above all ‘‘as regards the technique and the principal aesthetic on which the language of animation is based’’ (Gianni Rondolino, Storia del cinema d’animazione, 1974). Alongside these are educational materials, documentaries, and advertisements, with the use of photographs, molded plasticene, marionettes, puppets, and manipulations of shadows, which, even though there are fewer, have reached high levels with the Czechoslovakian Jirı´ Trnka´, the Soviets Ladislas Starewitch and Aleksandr Ptus˘ko, the Americans Willis O’Brien and Lotte Reiniger, a specialist in animated shadows. In the pioneering research leading to the birth of the ‘‘art without a future’’ (thus the Lumie`re brothers while, in 1894, Thomas A. Edison, with the demonstration of the Kinetoscope, was proposing film in cellulose nitrate), one certain antecedent is the Praxinoscope (1877) of the French photographer and inventor E´mile Reynaud. From this historic invention, which he patented by perfecting the Phe´nakistiscope (1832) of Joseph-Antoine-Ferdinand Plateau, who in 1829 articulated the principle of the persistence of images on the retina, Reynaud developed the famous The´aˆtre Optique. The development of the commercial approach to shoot one frame at a time moved through the works of the American Edwin S. Porter, the Spanish Segundo de Chomo´n (El hotel ele´ctrico, 1905), and the British Walter P. Booth and James S. Blackton. The latter, the inventor of ‘‘lightning sketches’’ (or ‘‘chalk talks’’), inspired E´mile Cohl’s (Courtet) Fantasmagorie (Phantasmagorias), which, projected in Paris at the The´aˆtre du Gymnase on August 17, 1908, marked the birth of cinematic animated drawing. 50

In the following decades, Winsor McCay, Raoul Barre´, Charles Bowers, John Randolf Bray (founder of the studios of the same name), Dave and Max Fleischer, Walt Disney, Alexandre Alexeieff, Ub Iwerks, Chuck Jones, Norman McLaren, George Dunning, Paul Frimault, Tex Avery, Hanna and Barbera, and Bruno Bozzetto, along with many others, created innovative ideas and optical techniques, up through the more recent introduction of computer graphics. From the traditional animation table or stand, in which the cells are filmed one at a time by a mobile camera, to Disney’s ‘‘multiplane,’’ which broadened the possibilities with the insertion of more planes in order to create depth, the use of new electronic procedures has replaced this entire apparatus. With the disappearance of animation cells, drawings scanned into computers allow teams of animators to work with extraordinary precision, simplicity, and speed. In turn, computer graphics have favored the combination of diverse technical processes and unprecedented syntheses, for example with the use of drawings of human figures, puppets, objects, settings, and virtual contexts in an immense set of solutions—from stop-motion to the new virtual frontier of MoCap (motion capture)—that range from realistic invention to the more fantastical sharp focus realism (hyper-realism). The situation has changed so radically since the bold experiments of the 1950s and 1960s that the simultaneity of ‘‘live’’ takes of animation techniques alongside those of electronic processing is now standard compositional practice. In Italy, the beginnings of animation related to children’s films or advertising. The year 1916 saw the first single frame exposures in a film by Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959), entitled La guerra e il sogno di Momi (The War and Momi’s Dream), in which a young boy dreams of a battle of puppets. In 1920, on behalf of Turin’s Tiziano Film, Zambonelli (Carlo Amadeo Frascari, 1877–1956) produced several comic shorts for children, and, in the same year, under the influence of American animation, La cura contro il raffreddore (The Cure for the Common Cold) by Antonio Bottini (Jean Buttin, 1890–1981), which offered single-frame shots and drawings on transparent paper, just like

ANIMATION the later La rana dispettosa (The Mischievous Frog, 1933). Also in the same period, and also for young children, there stands out Il topo di campagna e il topo di citta` (The Country Mouse and the City Mouse) by the screenwriter Guido Presepi (1886–1955), who had also planned a featurelength animated film, Vita di Mussolini (Life of Mussolini), which was never finished. On the advertising front, the first experimenters include Luigi Pensuti (1907–1948), Ugo Amadoro (1908), and Gustavo Petronio, while the Carlo brothers (1907–1964) and Vittorio Cossio (1911–1984), along with Bruno Munari (1907–1998), imported rotoscoping (already used in the United States for many years), producing Zibillo e l’orso (Zibillo and the Bear, 1932). In these same years, three editors of the satirical magazine Marc’Aurelio, Attalo (Giacchino Colizzi), Mameli Barbara, and Raoul Verdini, attempted unsuccessfully, in 1935, to produce Le avventure di Pinocchio—the following year Verdini produced a version of it that met with little success—in a demonstration that the technique of Italian animation compensated for the historic absence of large personalities and schools, although it offered important results. These included, for instance, the experiments of the historical avantgarde or the Futurist-tinged experiences of Arnaldo Ginna (1890–1982) and Bruno Corra (1892–1976), as well as the works of Anton Gino Domeneghini (1897–1966), whose La rosa di Bagdad (The Rose of Baghdad, 1949), despite the characters invented by Angelo ‘‘Nino’’ Bioletto (1906–1987), the set designs of Libico Maraja (1912–1983), and the clear anti-Disney ambition, did not succeed in becoming the cinematic symbol of Italian animation. There were also the popular works of Nino Pagot (1908–1972) and his brother Toni (1921–2001), Lalla, piccola Lalla (Lalla, Little Lalla, 1946) and I fratelli Dinamite (The Dynamite Brothers, 1948); of Osvaldo Cavandoli (1920–); of Gibba (Francesca Maurizio Guido, 1925–), a collaborator of the painter Luigi Giobbe, who shot Hello Jeep (1944) based on a script by the 24-yearold Federico Fellini, and L’ultimo sciuscia` (The Last Shoeshine, 1947), a valuable synthesis of neo-Realism and animation. After the advent of television in Italy (1954), the production of animation itself gradually intensified, particularly promoted by the popular Carosello (TV spots). Among the most innovative and eclectic films, Antonio Rubino’s I sette colori (The Seven Colors, 1955); Guido Manuli’s Fantabiblical (1977), Solo un Bacio (Only a Kiss, 1983),

Incubus (1985), and +1 –1 (1987); Roberto Gavioli’s La lunga calza verde (The Long Green Sock, 1961), based on a treatment by Cesare Zavattini; Giulio Gianini’s I paladini di Francia (The Knights of France, 1960), La gazza ladra (The Magpie, 1964), and Il flauto magico (The Magic Flute, 1978); Manfredo Manfredi’s Sotterranea (Underground, 1973) and Dedalo (Dedalus, 1976); more recently, Maurizio Nichetti’s Volere volare (1991), which can be considered both a live action film and as a trick (or animated film), and Enzo D’Alo`’s La gabbianella e il gatto (The Cage and the Cat, 1998). But it is the incomparable Bruno Bozzetto (1938–) who, under the banner of irony and paradox, popularized the genre in Italy and abroad with West and Soda (1965) and inevitably affected the art of animation. Dubbed by John Halas, one of the world’s most famous creators of animated drawings (Computer Animation, 1976), Bozzetto creates characters that enter into the popular cultural imagination, such as the neurotic and sarcastic Signor Rossi, the (anti) hero of several shorts and of three feature films. His rich filmography includes such parodies as Vip, mio fratello Superuomo (Vip, My Brother Superman, 1968) and Allegro non troppo (1976), a great success at the box office for Italian animation. Bozzetto started off as an advertising designer, producing at 20 his first animated film, Tapum! La storia delle armi (Tapum! The History of Arms, 1959), which was shown at the Cannes Film Festival and was noted for the ingenious ‘‘vertical’’ (apparently built by Bruno’s father with an ironing board). In 1960 he founded Bozzetto Film, and, after a series of very successful films, he shot, in collaboration with Guido Manuli, Opera (1973), an effervescent distortion of the world of melodrama, and, three years later, Allegro non troppo, a sort of critical response to Fantasia, up through his direction, ‘‘from life,’’ of the feature film Sotto il ristorante cinese (Under the Chinese Restaurant, 1987). Also outstanding are his educational productions for Swiss television (Lilliput Put, 1980) and the many shorts of Quark (1981–1988) for RAI-TV. During the 1990s, Bozzetto distinguished himself with his short Help? (1995), part of What a Cartoon! produced by Hanna-Barbera. Between 1999 and 2003 he tried his hand at digital animation, authoring various shorts in collaboration with Macromedia Flash (Olympics, Europe & Italy, Yes & No), and completed the 26-episode television series The Spaghetti Family. In 2003, the Fondazione Cineteca Italiana released a DVD with the films produced in the 1960s and 1970s by Studio 51

ANIMATION Bozzetto, known over the years for quality in culture and marketing in the world of Italian animation and audiovisual communication. Bozzetto has moved on to experimenting with using a 2D computer in the production of digital animations expressly conceived for the Internet. Bruno Bozzetto’s work has received numerous national and international prizes, including the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion for Il Signor Rossi al mare in 1964, an Oscar nomination for Cavallette in 1991, and the prestigious lifetime achievement award at the Zagreb Festival of Film Animation in 1998. Ultimately, Bozzetto’s career exemplifies the relationship between cinema and the art of animation in the last century, as well as the drive toward mechanization, which in the twentyfirst century has muted into the drive to digitization. FABRIZIO BORIN Further Reading Aloi, Dino (editor), Bruno Bozzetto. Cinquant’anni di cartoni animati, Turin: Il Pennino, 2005. Bastiancich, Alfio, Bruno Bozzetto: les multiples visages de l’animation (catalogue), Annecy: Journales Internationales du Cine`ma d’Animation, 1985.

Beckerman, Howard, Animation: The Whole Story, Mattituck, NY: Amereon House, 2001. Bendazzi, Giannalberto, Cartoons. Cento anni di cinema d’animazione, Venice: Marsilio, 1988. Bendazzi, Giannalberto, and Raffaele De Berti (editors), La fabbrica dell’animazione. Bruno Bozzetto nell’industria culturale italiana, Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 2003. Boledi, Luigi, editor, Grandi corti animati, Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 2005. Cotte, Olivier, Il e`tait une fois le dessin anime`, Paris: Dreamland, 2001. Dovnicoviy, Borivoj, La tecnique du dessin anime´, Paris: Dreamland, 2000. Fara, Giulietta, and Andrea Romeo, Vita da pixel. Effetti speciali e animazione digitale, Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 2000. Halas, John, Computer Animation, New York: Hastings House, 1976. Lutz, Edwin George, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made, Their Origin and Development, New York: Scribner’s, 1920. Maestri, George, Animazione digitale, Milan: McGraw-Hill, 2002. Rondolino, Gianni, Storia del cinema d’animazione, Turin: Einaudi, 1974; revised edition as Storia del cinema d’animazione: dalla lanterna magica a Walt Disney, da Tex Avery a Steven Spielberg, Turin: Utet, 2003. Williams, Richard, The Animator’s Survival Kit, London: Faber and Faber, 2001.

LITERATURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY After World War II, Italian anthropology was confronted by a past that a majority of its members wished to dismiss. Not that the scholarly results were all negative—names like those of Carlo Conti Rossini (1872–1949) or Enrico Cerulli (1898–1988), who worked extensively in Ethiopia, are until today serious references, demonstrating that the break between physical anthropology and ethnology that took place in 1911, during a congress in Rome, created the conditions for sound research. But since many scholars (including Cerulli) had collaborated with the Fascist regime and put ethnology in the service of colonization, new ways of defining the object of what is now called ‘‘cultural anthropology’’ became necessary in order to steer clear of this heritage (Maria Pia Di Bella, ‘‘Ethnologie et fascisme,’’ 1988). 52

Among these new ways of redefining anthropology, we enlist the pioneering studies of Ernesto De Martino (1908–1965), who focused on an original anthropological approach based on the study of Italy itself, leaving aside what a few years later Claude Le´vi-Strauss—in a famous book—labeled the ‘‘tristes tropiques.’’ De Martino’s interest in daily events and rituals that determine the rhythm of anonymous people characterized the anthropology he so daringly put into practice and his way of recreating it through a new form of literary writing. In fact, De Martino wished to present attitudes and beliefs that were practiced by a residual part of its population. He intended to show that these beliefs had their logic and a history and to translate them to his readers in what was not yet called ‘‘thick description’’ but anticipating already the concept

LITERATURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY (Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Thick Description,’’ 1973). He ‘‘gave a voice’’ to the people he interviewed and introduced, in the national culture, customs that were already waning. This new anthropological approach stems from a cultural trend called neo-Realism (neorealismo), dominant in Italy after World War II. On one side, the source was identified in the verismo of Giovanni Verga’s (1840–1922) Sicilian narratives—at least for anthropologists—while on the other, it seems closely linked to filmmaking as well. This new anthropological approach flourished in a very original cultural environment that contributed to its development, its standing, and its importance, but it turned out to be a phenomenon linked to the neo-Realist period and practically ended with it. Today, it is mainly apprehended historically. Clearly, some of the elements that characterized neo-Realist cinema were the same that contributed to the rise and development of this new anthropological approach. The main one is the fact that the focus was on Italy itself: People were encouraged to look at their own society with new eyes, in order to decipher the logic of its practices and meanings. Cultural anthropology was understood not just as a means to analyze ‘‘primitive societies’’ but as a tool for research into the neglected dimensions of Italian society and culture. The objective pursued was to integrate these neglected dimensions into the general consciousness. Thus, Italian anthropologists were the first to study the social life of their own society, long before the trend of studying a historical society was fully accepted in Anglo-Saxon anthropology, subsequent to the pioneering fieldwork of Julian Pitt-Rivers, published in The People of the Sierra (1954). The Italian anthropology of those years shared with the contemporary filmmaking the quest for ‘‘reality,’’ and the way of capturing and representing it was as important. In literature, cinema, and anthropology, the representation of ‘‘daily life’’ through its multifaceted forms allowed authors, scholars, and filmmakers to show their political and social commitment. The fall of Fascism gradually brought back themes elaborated by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) during his imprisonment from 1926 to 1937, which were published posthumously as Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1949). Gramsci’s writings shaped Italy’s political thought and history until the late 1980s. He claimed that the intellectuals constitute a hegemonic social group that should play a vital role in bridging the dichotomy between town and country, workers and peasants, North and South.

Thus, the ‘‘life’’ of the poor urban or rural population became the target of Italian intellectuals. The ‘‘documentary’’ style seemed apt in cinema, while in anthropology thorough descriptions of specific popular key events became the norm. But the way Italians applied the ‘‘documentary’’ style to their neorealist cinema or to their anthropology, its richness and originality also depended on literary masterpieces to whom we owe profound reflections on firsthand witnessing of defining moments in personal and social life, such as Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily, 1941), Carlo Levi’s Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), Primo Levi’s Se questo e` un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz, 1947), Rocco Scotellaro’s Contadini del Sud (Southern Peasants, 1954) and L’uva puttanella (The Tarty Grapes, 1955), and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958). Plots were based on news items (faits divers), for they exemplified events that revealed the specific culture of urban populations or peasants to the general public. In order to achieve these aims, neo-Realist cinema was shot mainly on location, where the action unfolded, and cast actors were ‘‘taken from the street,’’ that is, persons to whom these events could actually happen. Ernesto De Martino masterfully put these interests into anthropological practice. Initially he studied with philosopher Benedetto Croce and Raffaele Pettazzoni, a historian of religions, renowned for his original comparative methods; later, he turned also to psychoanalysis and to Martin Heidegger’s existentialism. He was an anti-Fascist and a member of the Italian Resistance; and soon after the war, he started his fieldwork in the South of Italy, following the credo that hegemonic intellectuals had to address the questione meridionale (southern question). But neo-Realist cinema also influenced the way of writing ethnography: De Martino became aware of the difficulty and the necessity of accessing the historical experience of others. His way of writing took into account the fact that anthropologists need to have recourse to ‘‘translation’’ and ‘‘reflexivity,’’ for they cannot reproduce firsthand experiences, not even as members of their own society, and that this incapacity distinguishes anthropology from literature. On these issues, De Martino’s major works are Morte e pianto rituale (Death and Ritual Lament, 1958) and La terra del rimorso (The Land of Remorse, 1961). The first one was based on the ritual of mourning still performed in Southern Italy during the late 1950s, while La terra del rimorso encompassed a multidimensional 53

LITERATURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY research that he carried out with a group of young colleagues and students in anthropology, ethnomusicology, history, sociology, and psychoanalysis. As Gramsci had suggested, De Martino listened attentively to the Mezzogiorno’s poor peasants and brought to Apulia a whole team of assistants, much like a film crew shooting outdoors. This type of research, his most important one, best illustrates all the potentialities that an Italian anthropology, concentrating on the Mezzogiorno, could bring to the discipline from a literary, historical, musical, and visual point of view. It studied women from the Salento region (Apulia) who experienced a tarantula’s bite, describing the way it was cured: The affected women danced for two or three days and nights their favorite tarantella, accompanied by a small orchestra, while wearing dresses having supposedly the colors of the tarantula. In the following years, they had to repeat the dancing ritual when the symptoms of the initial bite reappeared. Here De Martino suggests that the demise of these long-standing beliefs and practices was brought about by the lack of respect that the Catholic Church showed toward these frenzied dances. The association of a figure such as Saint Paul with these women, who once recovered used to visit his chapel in Galatina (Apulia), and the fact that they had to renounce their dancing while doing so, halted a tradition that had survived for centuries. The title of De Martino’s book underscores that if, on one hand, Apulia is the land of the rimorso (rebite), on the other, the Mezzogiorno is the land of the ‘‘remorse’’ of Italian intellectuals. Contrary to the Church, intellectuals need to show respect toward peasant traditions, and they should not—through their lack of real understanding—contribute to their decay. Ultimately, they have to learn from the peasants the place that these traditions hold in their cultures. With De Martino’s death in 1965, the ethnographical research he had pioneered came suddenly to an end. His reflexive method seemed by now too parochial, not in tune with what was happening internationally. Italians preferred to follow the French Structuralist school (mainly focused on kinship) or the Anglo-Saxon vade mecum for anthropologists (Notes and queries), as attested by works such as Adriana Destro’s L’ultima generazione (The Last Generation, 1984) or Maria Minicuci’s Qui e altrove (Here and Elsewhere, 1989). However, De Martino’s research indeed maintained a certain influence in anthropology: Clara Gallini’s I rituali dell’a`rgia (The Argia Rituals, 1967), which document a Sardinian ritual involving a local spider 54

named a`rgia, and Il consumo del sacro (The Consumption of the Sacred, 1971) bring useful comparative data to De Martino’s Apulia fieldwork. Also, Annabella Rossi published her correspondence with a tarantata in Lettere da una tarantata (Letters from a Tarantata, 1970), which was followed by Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo (Carnival Was Named Vincent, 1977), relating a major group research on carnival in Campania that she coordinated with Roberto De Simone, perhaps the only research to date comparable in scope (literary, historical, musical, visual) to La terra del rimorso. Since the late 1970s, De Martino’s interest in women, so central in his work, has been taken up by a number of scholars, due also to the impact of the Italian feminist movement on anthropology. Among them, the most original literary anthropologist working today is Elsa Guggino, whose La magia in Sicilia (The Magic in Sicily, 1978), Un pezzo di terra di cielo (A Piece of Land of the Sky, 1986), and Il corpo e` fatto di sillabe (The Body Is Made of Syllables, 1993) adopt De Martino’s approach on reflexivity while examining Sicilian attitudes toward magic and illness. Finally, Mariella Pandolfi’s field research, carried out in the Sannio region (Campania) and published as Itinerari delle emozioni (Itineraries of Emotions, 1991), continues to uphold this trend. Ernesto De Martino’s La terra del rimorso left its mark on historians such as Piero Camporesi (1926–1997) and Carlo Ginzburg (1939–). Camporesi has written extensively on literature, popular myths, and food in the Middle Ages and early modern times, focusing particularly on vagabonds, hunger, and the body in works such as Il paese della fame (The Land of Hunger, 1978) and Il pane selvaggio (Bread of Dreams, 1980). His baroque style of writing, in which he displays erudition as well as the structural method he applied to his sources, turned his books into best sellers. Though his work is often considered ‘‘anthropological,’’ he instead stopped at the threshold of the discipline, lacking the capacity of ‘‘giving a voice’’ to the marginal people he wrote about. Not so Ginzburg, the main representative of the microstoria school. In his two fundamental books, I Benandanti (The Night Battles, 1966) and Il formaggio e i vermi (The Cheese and the Worms, 1976), he presents wellanalyzed historical research in which he never loses sight of the victims’ side. For example, he skillfully dug into the unpublished accounts of trials of witches and heretics, in order to recover personalities and speeches gone for centuries; and he was able to restore them with a rare empathy,

LITERATURE OF ANTHROPOLOGY thus continuing a civil tradition born in Turin between the two world wars. Today, the postwar legacy of a realistic, nonFascist concept of national culture is still upheld in Italy by scholars and intellectuals such as Mario Isnenghi, author of I luoghi della memoria (The Sites of Memory, 1996). Since the mid-1960s, mainstream anthropology has split up in several different directions, yet we are indebted to Ernesto De Martino for having introduced an anthropological practice that helped to establish—through his keen interest in the objects he tackled and the reflexive character of his approach—a complex, realistic, and non-Fascist image of Italian society and culture. MARIA PIA DI BELLA

Further Reading Camporesi, Piero, Il paese della fame, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978; as The Land of Hunger, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press and Blackwell Publishers, 1996. Camporesi, Piero, Il pane selvaggio, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1980; as Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press and Blackwell, 1989. De Martino, Ernesto, La fine del mondo: Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali, edited by Clara Gallini, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. De Martino, Ernesto, Morte e pianto rituale: Dal lamento funebre antico al pianto di Maria, Turin: Universale Scientifica Boringhieri, 1958; rpt. 1975. De Martino, Ernesto, Sud e magia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1959. De Martino, Ernesto, La terra del rimorso: Contributo a una storia religiosa del Sud, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1961; as The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, London: Free Association Books, 2005. Destro, Adriana, L’ultima generazione: Confini materiali e simbolici di una comunita` delle Alpi Marittime, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984. Di Bella, Maria Pia, ‘‘Un culte pentecoˆtiste en Apulie,’’ Les Temps modernes, no. 435 (1982): 824–833. Di Bella, Maria Pia, ‘‘Ethnologie et fascisme. Quelques exemples,’’ Ethnologie franc¸aise, no. 2 (1988): 131–136.

Di Bella, Maria Pia, ‘‘From Future to Past: A Duce’s Trajectory,’’ in Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority, edited by John Bornemam, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004. Di Bella, Maria Pia, ‘‘Mythe et histoire dans l’e´laboration du fait divers: Le cas Franca Viola,’’ Annales ESC, no. 4 (1983): 827–842. Gallini, Clara, Il consumo del sacro: Feste lunghe di Sardegna, Bari: Laterza, 1971. Gallini, Clara, I rituali dell’a`rgia, Padua: CEDAM, 1967. Geertz, Clifford, ‘‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,’’ Interpretation of Cultures (1973): 3–30. Ginzburg, Carlo, I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrai tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1966; as The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Ginzburg, Carlo, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del ‘500, Turin: Einaudi, 1976; as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller, London and New York: Penguin, 1992. Gramsci, Antonio, La questione meridionale, edited by Franco De Felice and Valentino Parlato, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1966. Guggino, Elsa, Il corpo e` fatto di sillabe: Figure di maghi in Sicilia, Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1993. Guggino, Elsa, La magia in Sicilia, Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1978. Guggino, Elsa, Un pezzo di terra di cielo: L’esperienza magica della malattia in Sicilia, Palermo: Sellerio Editore, 1986. Isnenghi, Mario, I luoghi della memoria: Simboli e miti dell’Italia Unita, Rome: Laterza, 1996. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, Tristes Tropiques, Paris: Plon, 1955; Tristes Tropiques, New York: Modern Library, 1997. Minicuci, Maria, Qui e altrove: Famiglie di Calabria e di Argentina, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989. Pandolfi, Mariella, Itinerari delle emozioni: Corpo e identita` femminile nel Sannio campano, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991. Pitt-Rivers, Julian Alfred, The People of the Sierra, introduced by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, New York: Criterion Books, 1954. Rossi, Annabella, Lettere da una tarantata, ‘‘Nota linguistica’’ by Tullio De Mauro, Bari: De Donato Editore, 1970. Rossi, Annabella, and Roberto De Simone, Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo: Rituali di Carnevale in Campania, Rome: De Luca Editore, 1977.

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MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI (1912–) Michelangelo Antonioni is the modernist master of the Italian cinema. He was a crucial member of the second generation of Italian filmmakers to achieve distinction after World War II. His best-known contemporaries, Fellini and Rosi, had assisted Rossellini and Visconti respectively; Antonioni worked for both, and his work shows signs of that apprenticeship, inflected by an intense fascination with other modern arts—the painting of Giorgio Morandi, the Hermetic poets, the novels of Pavese, Camus, Fitzgerald. It was not until 1950 that he was able to make a feature film. The negative of his first work, an ambitious documentary, Gente del Po (People of the Po), was damaged during the war; so the version he finally released in 1947 hardly represents his original conception, although its moody evocation of the river and the landscape of its shores points to the poetic achievements of Antonioni’s mature work, especially Il grido (The Outcry, 1957), which he shot in several locations in the Po valley. Similarly, N. U. (1948), a documentary on the street cleaners of Rome, intimates the sensitivity to places and to gestures that would flourish in his portraits of Milano in La notte (The Night, 1961), Rome in L’eclisse (Eclipse, 1962), and London in Blow Up (1966). A third documentary, L’amorosa menzogna (The Amorous Lie, 1949), focused on the contrived production and frantic popular consumption of fumetti, anticipating by three years the ironies of Federico Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952). In its turn, it predicts the critique of photographic illusionism and the anxiety with which the filmmaker represents the reception and consumption of art and artifacts throughout his oeuvre. These three early films chart the contours of Antonioni’s world, in which consciousness is homeless but always haunted by a longing for a transcendental home. It is initially the Italy of displaced individuals, uprooted and relocated by the dictates of post–World War II economics. But whereas Luchino Visconti treated this phenomenon as a social problem, Antonioni reformulated it as an existential predicament. Gilberto Perez aptly characterized his cinematic perspective as ‘‘the point of view of a stranger’’ (The Material Ghost, 1998). 56

The young Alain Resnais and the film theorist Noe¨l Burch recognized Antonioni’s genius in his first feature film, Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair, 1950). The latter insisted, as late as 1969, that it was Antonioni’s greatest work, ‘‘an almost unparalleled achievement,’’ announcing the maturity of narrative cinema (Theory of Film Practice, 1993). The complexity of its camera movements, the sophistication of its interweaving of described and illustrated events from the past, and the brilliance of its jazz score (composed by Giovanni Fusco for saxophone and piano) distinguish it from other Italian films of the early 1950s. It also provides an unfamiliar insight into the upper bourgeoisie that would characterize most of the filmmaker’s work in Italy. In this ironical detective story, the inept investigation initiated by a jealous Milanese industrialist into his wife’s past actually brings her in contact with her former lover from Ferrara, rekindling the affair. But their failed attempt to murder him and his accidental death result in driving them apart. The uneasy displacement of the heroine from middle-class Emilia to affluent Lombardy, her lover’s failure to profit as a salesman of luxury cars, and their trysts in seedy hotels serve to stage their moral and romantic disintegration within the panorama of the slowly shifting economic and social vectors of Alcide De Gaspari’s Italy. Just as his first long film revealed Antonioni’s abiding interest in the tensions generated by class mobility, his second, I vinti (The Vanquished, 1952), evidenced the fascination with youth culture outside of his homeland that would characterize his films of the late 1960s and the 1970s. In each of its three independent stories, set in Paris, Rome, and London, a young man commits murder. Problems with the producers initially, and later censorship of the finished film, severely hampered the project. Even the most successful episode, the English story of a poet who first claims to have discovered a woman’s body, then later confesses to have killed her, driven by his obsessive desire to be featured in tabloids, lacks the originality and cogency of the episode Antonioni made soon afterward for Cesare Zavattini’s Amore in citta` (Love in the City, 1953): Tentato suicidio (Attempted Suicide). There he as-

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI sembled many men and women who had tried to kill themselves; he interviewed three women who fell into erotic despair and had them reenact their failed suicides: One stepped into rushing traffic, another waded into the Tiber, and a third slit her wrists. In his major films of the mid-1950s, suicide became more and more central. The husband of the protagonist of La signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias, 1953), a film producer, tries to kill himself when both their marriage and his financial stability are in trouble. The film is a mordant view of the pretensions and moral insipidity of the Italian film industry. Suicide plays more prominent roles in Antonioni’s two subsequent films, Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1955) and Il grido. The former is an adaptation of Tra donne sole by Cesare Pavese, himself a suicide. The novel’s first person narrative ventriloquizes a woman who has been sent from Rome to manage an haute couture salon in Torino, where she had grown up in a working-class environment. She moves within an affluent milieu where one of her companions kills herself when her married lover drops her. Antonioni demonstrated remarkable subtlety in his combination of camera movement, editing, and posing of characters within the frame to analyze the tensions and fleeting affiliations of his estranged and bored protagonists. An 8minute-long episode, made up of some 20 shots, usually with meaningful reframings and figures passing into and out of the frame, of the protagonist, Clelia, and eight of her friends on the beach stands out as the most intricate the filmmaker had fashioned since Cronaca di un amore. It heralds the style of his last four black-and-white films. Aldo, the protagonist of Il grido, commits suicide. At the beginning of the film he leaves his job as a refinery mechanic when Irma, the woman with whom he lives and the mother of his daughter, leaves him for another man. He travels through the Po valley, at first with the little girl, moving from one erotic liaison to another, only to return to where we first saw him—the factory tower from which he falls or jumps. The plot and the psychology of Il grido reveal Antonioni’s debt to Visconti’s Ossessione (1942). It is as if in revisiting the locations and relationships of the earlier film Antonioni had divested his of Visconti’s melodrama, almost even of a plot, to concentrate on the relationship of human figures to the landscape. Just as Visconti’s Gino seeks refuge from his relationship to the innkeeper, Giovanna, whose husband he conspired with her to kill, with a gentle prostitute, Aldo falls in love with a whore after leaving Virginia, the gas

station owner whose father he helped put away in an old-age home. The scene that marks Antonioni’s stylistic signature occurs on the mud flats of the Po. To the accompaniment of Fusco’s offscreen piano solo, Aldo wistfully tells the prostitute of the day he met Irma. They decided not to go dancing with their friends but visit a museum instead. ‘‘What kind of a story is that?’’ she asks; ‘‘How does it end? I don’t understand you.’’ She might have been speaking for that large segment of Antonioni’s audience unsatisfied with the suspended, inconclusive stasis of his mature cinema. However, the international audience he would attract with his next film came to recognize a unique cinematic drama found in the placement of the two characters within the frame, in the distance Aldo keeps from her, in the reframing of the image as he turns away while he talks as if speaking to himself in the flat plain, utterly empty aside from but two duck decoys and a rowboat. The magisterial control the filmmaker showed in the beach scene of Le amiche and on the mud flats in Il grido articulates from beginning to end the next four films he made. Seymour Chatman calls them ‘‘the great Tetralogy,’’ for they are linked in theme and by the presence of the actress Monica Vitti. Perhaps no maker of narrative feature films since World War II has achieved such a string of masterpieces in so short a time: L’avventura (1960), La notte, L’eclisse, and Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert, 1964). One of the most remarkable distinctions of these films is their radical disavowal of melodrama. L’avventura begins as the story of a yachting excursion in which a wealthy young woman disappears and becomes the narrative of the affair between her closest friend and her lover. Antonioni divests La notte of even that dramatic situation: It depicts a day in the life of a Milanese couple, a successful but vapid novelist and his disillusioned wife. The ‘‘eclipse’’ of L’eclisse is both a brief affair between a translator and a stock jobber and the sudden slump for the Roman stock exchange the weekend they meet and separate. Pier Paolo Pasolini, who deplored the first three films for their bourgeois perspective, praised Il deserto rosso because Antonioni located the narrative within the sensibility of a neurotic, bourgeois woman. He wrote: ‘‘. . .Antonioni no longer hangs his vision of the world, as he had done in his previous films, on a vaguely sociological content (the neurosis of alienation): rather he looks at the world through the eyes of a sick woman’’ (‘‘Il cinema di poesia,’’ 1965). He called this narrative displacement soggettiva libera indiretta 57

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI (free indirect subjective). In this first color film, Antonioni used chroma with great originality to emphasize the obsessive anxieties of his heroine, as she succumbs to the seduction of her husband’s employer, the owner of a factory he manages in Ravenna. Whereas each of the earlier films had crucial scenes in which the filmmaker gave evidence of his vision of how psychological depths are revealed by form, in the ‘‘tetralogy’’ such formal articulation of complexly shifting relationships spans each film from beginning to end. Naturally there are particularly impressive episodes—the search for the missing Anna on the island of Lipari in L’avventura; the aimless wandering of Lidia (the wife in La notte) through the nearly empty streets of Milan on the Saturday of an August holiday weekend; the extraordinary conclusion of L’eclisse, eight minutes of objects and strangers on the corner where the couple have agreed to meet but have stood up each other, a vivid Technicolor fantasy of a pubescent girl watching a rabbit, and ghost ships alone on a Sardinia beach in Il deserto rosso. But these extended passages are integral to the rhythmic fusion of architecture, landscape, and body language that marks the culmination of Antonioni’s art. In these four films he became the central cinematic analyst of the Italian economic miracle and its erotic malaise. Shifting his gaze from Italy to Britain, he made his most popular film, Blow Up, in which the ‘‘free indirect subjective’’ perspective is that of a stylish young fashion photographer who unwittingly photographs evidence of a murder, which is later stolen from his studio. The epistemological problematics of the plot devolve on the cognitive status of photographic images and processes. The protagonist’s furious quest to recover proof of the crime he had recorded both underlines and coarsens the psychoanalytic subtleties at play in his Italian films. Jacob Arlow, the American psychoanalyst, persuasively demonstrated how this film is rigorously structured around a primal scene fantasy. In his subsequent attempts to capture the mood and atmosphere of 1960s America (Zabriskie Point, 1970), Maoist China (Chung Kuo Cina, 1972), and both Saharan civil war and tourist Spain (Profession: reporter, also known as The Passenger, 1975), Antonioni abandoned the intense pictorial psychology and plotlessness of his Italian masterpieces for a nostalgic view of revolution. Then he experimented with electronic imagery in making Il mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, 1980), a historical drama based on a play of Jean Cocteau. 58

The video technology permitted him to return to the idea of using color as a key to meaning that had motivated Il deserto rosso. With Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman, 1981), he returned to his theme of the erotic dilemmas of contemporary Italy. After a debilitating stroke, he made Al di la` delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds, 1995) with the help of his wife and Wim Wenders: It is a film of four stories of erotic passion. Although Antonioni’s preeminent achievement perhaps has been to have portrayed the beneficiaries of the Italian economic miracle to themselves and to the world, he is certainly also one of the cinema’s greatest poets of landscape and of how the spiritual elements of geography influence human interactions.

Biography Michelangelo Antonioni was born in Ferrara, 29 September 1912, into a middle-class family; he studied in the Faculty of Economics at the University of Bologna, 1931–1935, where he became interested in cinema and theater and started making 16 mm documentaries. He moved to Rome, 1939, and began contributing to the journal Cinema, directed by Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s son. He enrolled as a student of directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1940–1941, but dropped out after a few months. He collaborated on the script of Un pilota ritorna by Roberto Rossellini, 1942, and was hired by La Scalera production house and sent to Paris to work with Marcel Carne´, but he returned to Italy due to the war and began working on his first short, Gente del Po, 1943, which would be completed only in 1947. He shot N.U., which won a Nastro d’argento for best documentary, 1948; collaborated with Giuseppe De Santis, Luchino Visconti, and Federico Fellini, 1949–1950; and directed his first feature film, Cronaca di un amore, 1950. L’avventura premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, with great critical acclaim, 1960. Antonioni directed his first color film, Il deserto rosso, 1964; his success allowed him to work abroad in English, filming Blow Up in England, 1966, and Zabriskie Point in the United States, 1970. He traveled to China for an RAI documentary, 1972, and shot Il mistero di Oberwald in video and transferred it to film, 1980. He suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, 1985. He married Enrica Fico, 1986. He directed his last film, Al di la` delle nuvole, in collaboration with Wim Wenders, 1995. He has won numerous awards, including the Special Jury Prize at the

MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI Cannes Film Festival for L’avventura (1960) and for L’eclisse (1962); Golden Bear for La notte, at the XI Berlin Film Festival, 1961; Golden Lion for Il deserto rosso, at the Venice Film Festival, 1964; Palme d’or at the Cannes Film Festival for Blow Up; and two Oscar nominations (for directing and screenplay). He was awarded an honorary Academy Award, 1995. Antonioni lives in Rome. P. ADAMS SITNEY Selected Works Films Gente del Po, 1943. N. U.—Nettezza Urbana, 1948. L’amorosa menzogna, 1949. Superstizione, 1949. Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), 1950. I vinti (The Vanquished), 1952. Le signora senza camelie (The Lady without Camelias), 1953. Tentato suicidio (episode of Amore in citta` by Cesare Zavattini), 1953. Le amiche (The Girlfriends, based on Cesare Pavese’s Tra donne sole), 1955. Il grido (The Outcry), 1957. L’avventura, 1960. La notte (The Night), 1961. L’eclisse (Eclipse), 1962. Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert), 1964. Blow Up (based on the short story by Julio Corta´zar, ‘‘Las babas del diablo’’), 1966. Zabrinskie Point, 1970. Chung Kuo Cina, 1972. Professione: reporter (The Passenger), 1975. Il mistero di Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery, based on Jean Cocteau’s play, L’Aigle a` deux teˆtes), 1980. Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman), 1981. Al di la` delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds), 1995.

Screenplays Il grido, edited by Elio Bartolini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1957. L’avventura, edited by Tommaso Chiaretti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960. L’eclisse, edited by John Francis Lane, Bologna: Cappelli, 1962. The Screenplays of Michelangelo Antonioni, New York: Orion Press, 1963 (includes Il grido, L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse). Il deserto rosso, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1964. Sei film, Turin: Einaudi, 1964 (includes Le amiche, Il grido, L’avventura, La notte, L’eclisse, Il deserto rosso). Blow-Up, Turin: Einaudi, 1968; edited by Sandra Wake, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971 Zabriskie Point, Bologna: Cappelli, 1970. Il primo Antonioni, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1973 (includes Gente del Po, Nettezza

Urbana, L’amorosa menzogna, Superstizione, Cronaca di un amore). Chung Kuo Cina, edited by Lorenzo Cuccu, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Professione: Reporter, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1975; as The Passenger (with Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen), New York: Grove Press, 1975. Il mistero di Oberwald, edited by Gianni Massironi, Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Identificazione di una donna, edited by Aldo Tassone, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Le amiche, in Cesare Pavese, tra donne sole, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Cronaca di un amore: un film di Michelangelo Antonioni, edited by Tullio Kezich and Alessandra Levantesi, Turin: Lindau, 2004.

Other Tecnicamente dolce, edited by Aldo Tassone, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Quel Bowling sul Tevere, Turin: Einaudi, 1983; as That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director, translated by William Arrowsmith, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Il film nel cassetto, edited by Carlo Di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, Venice: Marsilio, 1995; as Unfinished Business, translated by Andrew Taylor, New York: Marsilio, 1998. Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema, edited by Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi; American edition by Marga Cottino-Jones, New York: Marsilio-St. Paul, MN: Consortium Book Sales, 1996. Comincio a capire, Valverde, CA: Il girasole, 1999. L’aquilone, Cassina de’ Pecchi (Milan): Delfi, 1999. Sul cinema, edited by Carlo Di Carlo and Giorgio Tinazzi, Venice: Marsilio, 2004.

Further Reading Arlow, Jacob, ‘‘The Revenge Motif in the Primal Scene,’’ Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 28:3(1980), 519–541. Arrowsmith, William, Antonioni: The Poet of Images, edited with an introduction by Ted Perry, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Burch, Noe¨l, Theory of Film Practice, translated by Helen R. Lane, introduced by Annette Michelson, New York: Praeger, 1973. Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni: or, The Surface of the World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Cuccu, Lorenzo, Antonioni: il discorso dello sguardo e altri saggi, Pisa: ETS, 1997. Cuccu, Lorenzo, La visione come problema: Forme e svolgimento del cinema di Antonioni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973. Michelangelo Antonioni: Identificazione di un autore. Gli anni delle formazione e la critica su Antonioni, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1983. Orsini, Maria (editor), Michelangelo Antonioni: i film e la critica 1943–1995, with an essay by Lino Micciche`, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002.

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MICHELANGELO ANTONIONI Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Il cinema di poesia’’ (1965), in Empirismo eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 1972. Perez, Gilberto, The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Perry, Ted, and Rene` Prieto, Michelangelo Antonioni: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Rohdie, Sam, Antonioni, London: BFI, 1990. Sitney, P. Adams, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Tinazzi, Giorgio (editor), Michelangelo Antonioni: Identificazione di un autore. Forma e racconto nel cinema di Antonioni, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1985. Tinazzi, Giorgio, Michelangelo Antonioni, Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 2002. Wenders, Wim, My Time with Antonioni: The Diary of an Extraordinary Experience, London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2000.

L’AVVENTURA, 1960 Film by Michelangelo Antonioni

The premiere of L’avventura at the 1960 Cannes festival caused such derision that the audience hostility provoked a declaration of support by filmmakers and critics attending the festival. Antonioni himself seized the occasion to publish his most famous text, La malattia dei sentimenti (The Disease of the Emotions) on the insufficiency of traditional morality and the sickness of eros in contemporary life. The confrontation symbolically marked the inauguration of a new mode of narrative filmmaking and of a new e´lite audience of cine´philes who would transform the reception of such films in the emerging decade. Presumably the Cannes audience could not tolerate the slow pace and the apparent inconclusiveness of L’avventura’s plot—the story of a woman (Anna) who disappears from a yachting party and of the love affair between her fiance´ (Sandro) and her best friend (Claudia) as they search for her in Sicily. Eventually the film had a considerable financial success in Italy and internationally; but, more significantly, it marked the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni’s major phase of filmmaking while securing for him a reputation as one of the central filmmakers of the 60

1960s; likewise, the female star of the film, Monica Vitti, became an emblem of Italian beauty and intelligence. The action of the film quickly moves from Rome to the Lipari Islands and concludes with a series of episodes in Sicily. Italo Calvino declared, ‘‘Its Southern Italian setting. . . —the inferno of underdevelopment contrasted with the affluent inferno— is the most truthful and the most impressive that ever appeared on the screen, without the least indulgence to populism or local color’’ (‘‘Quattro domande sul cinema italiano,’’ 1961). With that concluding phrase he might have been thinking of Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy, 1953), where the historical richness of Naples and the piety of its citizens restore the marriage of an alienated British couple. Antonioni’s film revises and criticizes the ‘‘populism [and] local color’’ of Rossellini’s by marking the hiatus between the magnificence of the Italian past—in his case Baroque Sicily—and its erotically obsessed, morally ambivalent present. The filmmaker divested the film of melodrama, concentrating instead on figures in elegantly photographed landscapes. The long, nearly abstract choreography of the yacht party searching, singly and in small groups, the deserted island where they last saw Anna divides the film into an initial part in which Claudia is the mediator for the filmmaker’s observation of the tension between Anna and Sandro and the other couples, and a longer final part in which the unexplained disappearance seems to enliven the powers of observation of both Sandro and Claudia as they vainly follow up rumors of Anna’s movements. More than any film of its time, L’avventura was the cinematic expression of the philosophical and psychoanalytical concerns then current in Italian intellectual culture. Antonioni was the only filmmaker to receive repeated attention in Aut-Aut, the journal of the Italian phenomenologists. Like Alberto Moravia’s novel La noia (The Empty Canvas, 1960), to which it was often compared, Antonioni’s film owes a debt to Kierkegaard’s trenchant analysis of boredom and erotic questing. The very inconclusiveness of the film, and its minute dissection of the initial phases of an affair, opens the work to an unusual intensity of scrutiny. Thus psychoanalytic critics were enticed into reading the transformation of Claudia from an excluded observer to an erotic partner as a narrative of the primal scene in which fascination was fused with guilt for displacing Anna as the lover of Sandro. By depicting Sandro as a failed architect who

ALBERTO ARBASINO specializes in making cost estimates, the filmmaker has fashioned an observer of Sicilian baroque architecture who can confuse his erotic exuberance with enthusiasm for the Cathedral of Noto one day and deliberately ruin the meticulous drawing a younger man has made of a detail of the same building the next morning. Out of such elements Antonioni constructed the psychology of his protagonists. The conclusion epitomizes the antidramatic, intensely visual mode of Antonioni’s mature cinema. After an anxious night in which Claudia worries that Sandro did not return to her because he might have found Anna, she discovers him at dawn with another woman. Rather than confront him, she follows him from their hotel to an empty public square. In an exquisite composition with Sandro sobbing on a bench and Etna in the far background, Claudia stands behind him slowly caressing his head. Like the filmmaker she shows pity, comprehension, and no expectation of a resolution. P. ADAMS SITNEY

Further Reading Aristarco, Guido, ‘‘Cronaca di una crisi e forme strutturali dell’anima,’’ Cinema nuovo, 149(January–February, 1961), 43. Arrowsmith, William, Antonioni; the Poet of Images, edited with an introduction by Ted Perry, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. L’avventura. From the Filmscript by Michelangelo Antonioni, with Elio Bartolini and Tonino Guerra, New York: Grove Press, 1969. Brunette, Peter, The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Quattro domande sul cinema italiano,’’ Cinema nuovo, 149(January–February 1961), 33–34. Chatman, Seymour, Antonioni; or, The Surface of the World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. Chatman, Seymour, and Guido Fink (editors), L’avventura: Michelangelo Antonioni, Director, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1989. Eco, Umberto, ‘‘Antonioni ‘impegnato,’’’ in Michelangelo Antonioni, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, Rome: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 1964. Lesser, Simon O., ‘‘L’avventura: A Closer Look,’’ Yale Review, 54:1(1964), 41–50. Sitney, P. Adams, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995.

ALBERTO ARBASINO (1930–) One of the most prolific Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century, Alberto Arbasino is generally known as a former member of the Gruppo 63, the name adopted by a group of artists of the neo-avant-garde who first met in Palermo in October 1963. Arbasino’s writing is highly cultivated, parodic, and imbued with literary and historical references. So begins one of his recent collections of committed and shrewd civic poetry: ‘‘La Musa civica / non sempre organica / o armonica / soffia quando e dove / puo`, non come si deve’’ (The civic muse / not always organic / or harmonious / blows when and where / it may, not as it ought) (‘‘Ciao,’’ in Rap 1, 2001). Although Arbasino’s writing can appear at times lighthearted and casual, he is a particularly attentive and harsh observer of the worst of the Italian national identity, in its difficult transition to a fuller civil consciousness, which remains in his view, however, servile and immature, pusillanimous, whining, and querulous.

Using the most recent reactionary cliche´s, which Arbasino renders with consummate precision in a narrative that sometimes reads like an essay, at other times like poetry, the difficult changes of contemporary life become a complex literary game in which the rules are always marked by a bright, redeeming irony concerning the deprovincialization of Italian culture that, in his analysis, is still waiting to happen. The truth he seeks and the language he uses to convey it are not to be found among the educated but are uttered by committed housewives and frivolous gurus of fashionable thought. Thus the denunciation of uniformity, the rising homogenization, and the imposture of the powers-that-be sound not as insincere, vain indignation or as the hypocritical clamor of a conformist outrage but as an inquiry. This eloquent, interpolated question mark is a striking characteristic of Arbasino’s writing. The reader is interrogated, but it is impossible to arrive at any answer that can 61

ALBERTO ARBASINO alleviate and resolve to what the question mark alludes. His first book, Le piccole vacanze (The Little Holidays, 1957), is a collection of five stories, which stand as independent works but are subtly linked by the clear style expressive of the author’s personality. The theme of summer or winter holidays, at the end of adolescence, becomes the experience of passing beyond the habitual confines of the average, rich Italian bourgeoisie and is taken here as the preferred backdrop for a new literature, lending itself to an implacable though tempered irony concerning the search for happiness and a more authentic life. A similar care for the setting of tragic stories, which are laid bare according to the ‘‘poetica del sale nella ferita’’ (poetics of pouring salt on wounds), with youth at their center, can be found in L’Anonimo lombardo (The Lost Boy), written in 1959 and revised in 1973. Through a fictional collection of letters, the writer attempted to revive a dormant homosexual passion, behind which are shamelessly exposed the literary presences of the great Lombards, from Alessandro Manzoni to Carlo Emilio Gadda. The language became increasingly erotic and cerebral as Arbasino revised the work for subsequent editions—a process to which he subjects all of his works, especially when he changes publishers. Arbasino’s most significant work is Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, 1963), rewritten many times—the last edition is dated 1993 and is 1,371 pages long. This important novel is representative of an entire era: Italy during the postwar years of economic recovery. Conceived in the 1950s and then first drafted between 1961 and 1962, ‘‘sulla spinta della scoperta entusiastica della ‘messa a punto del congegno narrativo’ secondo Slovskij’’ (in the wake of the enthusiastic discovery of the ‘‘development of narrative design’’ according to Slovskij), as Arbasino himself recalls, along with the theoretical suggestions of Roland Barthes and analyses of nineteenth-century models (especially French) by Jean Rousset and Jean Starobinski. The book recounts a trip throughout Italy during the summer period of the theatrical and music festivals and tells of nighttime encounters in various suburbs, in a kind of postmodern Grand Tour, which is no longer educational or formative but an ‘‘itinerario eminentemente libresco e risolto quasi del tutto in parlerie’’ (eminently bookish itinerary which comes down almost entirely to parlerie), as the author wrote in his 1977 ‘‘Afterword’’ to the novel. The protagonists are four young men (the Swiss narrator; an Italian, Andrea; a Frenchman, 62

Jean-Claude; and a German, Klaus), ‘‘frenetici come bambini e insonni come giocattoli’’ (as frenetic as children and tireless as toys), who are to make a film about Italy and who were described by Arbasino without any real psychological or situational development but rather as if they were placed in a zone free from moral and social obligations. The book takes the form of a novel-essay, in which the author consciously assembled, disassembled, and reassembled the traditional structures of the nineteenth-century novel, through the conspicuous inclusion of theoretical discussions on the nature of the genre, redefining or rather abolishing to conversation any debate about the value that literature has always recognized and through the abolition of the distinction between high and low genres and a strong propensity for the meta-novel as a ‘‘strumento buonissimo per tener lontanto il ridicolo’’ (an excellent tool to keep the ridiculous at bay). The meta-novel is also used to reveal the truth—all truths—about contemporary customs and the provincial habits of a society in crisis, in which the important work (whether it be a film, theatrical production, or novel)—in short, the masterpiece in the mode of Marcel Proust’s Recherche du temps perdu or Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus—cannot yet be completed, and hence the end of the book can only be funereal. In the different versions of the novel, it is above all its language, as well as, naturally, its nearly doubled size, that have earned it a more persuasive autonomy. The novel was written in a spoken language, which may be both erudite and multilingual but which can often simulate through the use of everyday language a flowing simplicity of discussion, resulting in the effect of an endless conversation, concerning ‘‘ambience’’ rather than ‘‘characters,’’ that is both fast-paced and unprecedented in Italian literature. Another important achievement is Super-Eliogabalo (Super-Heliogabalus, 1969), in which the youth movement of 1968 is interpreted through the exemplary lens of Roman decadence and is recounted in the structures typical of early-twentieth-century avant-garde experimentalism, perhaps alluding, after Ste´phane Mallarme´, to Antonin Artaud’s He´liogabale ou l’anarchiste couronne´ or to Alfred Jarry’s Le surmaˆle. The apparent defeat of the imagination by commodities and entertainment was here described by Arbasino in floating fragments, even as he celebrated its funeral and also performed a nostalgic lament for it. The long trip of Heliogabalus’s cortege for a weekend in Ostia, the Roman beach town, with which the novel opens, is also a wonderful tour de force through the catalogues

ALBERTO ARBASINO of the anticlassical (which had already been expounded by Ernst Robert Curtius’s pupil, Gustav Rene´ Hocke, or by the research of Eugenio Battisti), and through the Renaissance grotesques according to the idea that mannerism is the most authentic expression of modernity. Amid the dilapidated villa and the robbers’ raids at the temple, among thugs and victimized old ladies, the book is notable for a bewilderingly frenetic eulogy of the street urinal, along with the eventual abandonment of science and embrace of the anarchy of the imagination: ‘‘all’intelletto intollerabile sostituire l’aberrazione e l’immaginazione [...] Cioe`, la parola poetica’’ (to replace the intolerable intellect with aberration and imagination...that is, with poetic speech). In Italy, criticism (literary, dramatic, and moral) has not always forgiven, even while appreciating, Arbasino’s distancing of himself in horror and amusement from the mediocre and controlled tone of stylistic schools, or, even worse, of the academic style, which lacks the high notes, excesses, and excitement abundant in Arbasino’s writing. As a critic, as in his jottings on theater, La maleducazione teatrale (Theatrical Bad Manners, 1966), and particularly in Certi romanzi (Some Novels, 1964), in which can be found all of the authors who prepare the way for Fratelli d’Italia, Arbasino, deeply versed in the methods of formalism and structuralism of the central European school, freed himself from the twentieth-century Italian critical tradition, which he views as tattered and provincial, still in thrall to the most recent strand of Crocean idealism, along with the claustrophobic political-ideological debates of the 1960s. Arbasino’s militant criticism frequently turns into narrative, as in Sessanta posizioni (Sixty Positions, 1971), which brings together 60 critical stories, inspired by as many famous writers, without any distinction of genre; or La Belle ´ poque of the E´poque per le scuole (The Belle E Schools, 1977), a long tale of atmospheric narration, in which the essayistic inserts with didactic intent are indistinguishable and at the very edge of ‘‘letture passabilmente terroristiche’’ (tolerably terroristic readings). In all of these works, there is always the idea of criticism as a collaboration with literature and as capable of greatly expanding the boundaries of the definition of what is, or what ought to be, narrative. Arbasino’s most recent work, Marescialle e libertini (Marshals and Libertines, 2004), collects his accounts as a spectator of the great music of the twentieth century, ‘‘frutto di mezzo secolo, di irreprensibili presenze’’ (the fruit of half a century of irreproachable presences), expressed as a

continuous multilingual workshop through which there shines his desire to remake the history of post-Verdian operatic theater, during worldwide premieres and concerts, into a search for the pleasurable, a quality not always admitted by the most diligent adepts. As in other works, Arbasino’s style is sustained by the provisional language of the workshop, the only language now able to testify to the scattered and lost events and myths of history.

Biography Alberto Arbasino was born in Voghera (Pavia), on 22 January 1930, to a well-off family of professionals. In Voghera, he attended the Regio Liceo Ginnasio Severino Grattoni, and then, in 1947, he enrolled at the University of Pavia in the Faculty of Medicine and later at the Law Faculty of the Universita` Statale of Milan, where he received a degree in international law in 1955. He contributed to Il Mondo, Illustrazione italiana, Paragone, Tempo Presente, Il Verri, Il Ponte, and then beginning in 1960 to Il Giorno, in 1962 to L’espresso, in 1967 to Quindici and Il corriere della sera, and in 1976 to La Repubblica. In 1957, Arbasino moved to Rome. In 1959, he participated at Harvard in an international seminar on political science conducted by Henry Kissinger. In 1963, he participated in the first meeting in Palermo of Gruppo 63, of whose experiments Arbasino perhaps represents the communicative, playful aspect. In 1965, he staged Verdi’s La Traviata in Cairo, and in 1967 he staged Bizet’s Carmen, as well as, in the same year, John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence. He was a member of the Italian Parliament for the Republican Party, 1983–1987. Arbasino has been awarded many prizes, including the Bagutta for the revised version of Fratelli d’Italia, 1994; the Grinzane Cavour for Mekong, 1995; the Ennio Flaiano for Rap!, 2001; the Chiara for his career achievement, 2003; and the Viareggio for Marescialle e libertini, 2005. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Fiction Le piccole vacanze, 1957. L’Anonimo Lombardo, 1959; revised 1973; as The Lost Boy, translated by Bernard Wall, 1964. Fratelli d’Italia, 1963; revised editions in 1967 and 1993. La narcisata—La controra, 1964. Super-Eliogabalo, 1969; revised in 1978 and 2001. La bella di Lodi, 1972. Il principe costante, 1972.

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ALBERTO ARBASINO Specchio delle mie brame, 1974; reprinted, 1995. ´ poque per le scuole, 1977. La Belle E

Poetry ‘‘Matine´e. Un concerto di poesia,’’ 1983. ‘‘Rap!,’’ 2001. ‘‘Rap 2,’’ 2002.

Theater Amate sponde! Commedia italiana, 1974.

Reportage Trans-Pacific Express, 1981. Mekong, 1994.

Essays Parigi o cara, 1960. Dall’Ellade a Bisanzio, 1960; reprinted, 2006. Certi romanzi, 1964; reprinted, 1977. Grazie per le magnifiche rose, 1965. La maleducazione teatrale, 1966. Due orfanelle: Firenze e Venezia, 1968. Off-off, 1968. Sessanta posizioni, 1971. I Turchi, 1971. Fantasmi italiani, 1977. In questo stato, 1978. Un paese senza, 1980. Il meraviglioso, anzi, 1985. Passeggiando tra i draghi addormentati, 1997. Paesaggi italiani con zombi, 1998. Le Muse a Los Angeles, 2000. Marescialle e libertini, 2004.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: Dalla nascita del ‘‘Verri’’ alla fine di ‘‘Quindici’’, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Belpoliti, Marco, and Elio Grazioli (editors), Alberto Arbasino, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2001. Bolla, Elisabetta, Invito alla lettura di Arbasino, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Curi, Fausto, La scrittura e la morte di Dio: Letteratura, mito, psicoanalisi, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Le ‘riscritture’ di Arbasino,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 5, Milan: Marzorati, 1988. Gramigna, Giuliano, ‘‘Alberto Arbasino,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 11, Milan: Marzorati, 1988. Martignoni, Clelia, et al., La scrittura infinita di Alberto Arbasino, with a text by Alberto Arbasino, Novara: Interlinea, 1999. Panella, Giuseppe, Alberto Arbasino, Florence: Cadmo, 2004. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Alberto Arbasino, Specchio delle mie brame’’ (1975), in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, edited by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Pieri, Marzio, Una stagione in Purgatorio: Schegge per una storia di scritture minimamente diversa, Parma: La Pilotta, 1983.

ARCADIA (ACCADEMIA) Founded in 1690 in Rome and still active today, the Accademia dell’Arcadia is best known as the most representative literary institution of eighteenthcentury Italy. At a time when academies and salons were at the center of cultural life, Arcadia’s membership outnumbered the cumulative membership of all other Italian academies. For this reason, Arcadia has been called the first cultural phenomenon to unify Italy. In his Breve notizia dello stato antico e moderno dell’adunanza degli Arcadi (Brief Account of the Present and Past Situation of the Academy of Arcadians, 1712), the academy’s leading figure and first Custode Generale, Giovan Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728), acknowledged that it was founded in order to foster the study of science, restore good taste, and reclaim Italian cultural 64

preeminence in Europe. In its criticism of baroque extravagance, Arcadia proposed a taste for classical simplicity and directness. It called itself ‘‘Arcadia’’ after the region that Virgil had consecrated to bucolic poetry in his Eclogues: ‘‘By choosing the pastoral state it began to moderate . . . contemporary Italian poetry’s pomposity with the simplicity and spontaneity of the Pastoral style’’ (Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, L’istoria della volgar poesia, 1698). Arcadia’s ideal was that of producing, through a masterful use of technique, the impression of the natural poetry of a Virgilian golden age. Thus, enlightened reform, not pastoral vogue, was the motive behind the idea for the academy, which was originally inspired by the patronage of the selfexiled Christina, Queen of Sweden, who had settled

ARCADIA (ACCADEMIA) in Rome after converting to Catholicism. Upon her death in 1689, 14 admiring members founded Arcadia in order to promote the artistic and cultural ideals embraced by her circle. Pastoral poetry had long been part of Italian literary tradition, as Jacopo Sannazaro’s most successful vernacular work Libro pastorale nominato Arcadia (Arcadia, 1504) attests. Crescimbeni’s homonymous book (1708) recounts the foundation of the academy as a romance. However, the adoption of a pastoral fiction with members (who called themselves shepherds) taking on Arcadian names was a novelty, a ritual introduced in order to foster a literary republic where privileges of class and status were erased together with the members’ proper names. On 20 May 1696 the academy approved its charter as scripted in elegant Latin by Gian Vincenzo Gravina (1664–1718), who taught civil and canon law in Rome. Although the study of Arcadian protocols reveals an attention to class (Atti Arcadia 1–7, Ms. Biblioteca Angelica; Arcadian Records), and while the academy had a centralized organization, Arcadia was a true literary republic, with an elected president and elected officers, and fostered the participation of ‘‘all the most intelligent and productive society of the time’’ (Benedetto Croce, La letteratura italiana del Settecento, 1949). Among the members were some of the most popular poets (Giambattista Felice Zappi, Carlo Innocenzo Frugoni, Tommaso Crudeli, Paolo Antonio Rolli). The egalitarian tendency favored the admission of women to Arcadia, where they soon flourished, especially as poets. Critics are divided over the extent of Arcadia’s literary prominence. Because of the academy’s complex development, its expansion into different cities (as far north as Milan, as far south as Palermo), and its diffusion into varied environments (from courts to salons to schools), it changed character over the course of the century. Arcadia was a meeting place for prominent and influential Italian writers and intellectuals and an entity that can only be understood taking into account the history of philosophy and of science. By choosing to focus on the pastoral and supposedly ‘‘effeminate’’ aspect of the academy, Enlightenment and Risorgimento critics polemically reacted to what they saw as a formal poetry and aesthetics, preferring instead a literature that promoted social and political reforms. Giuseppe Baretti considers Arcadia as a ‘‘very celebrated childish thing’’ (La frusta letteraria, 1932). Romantic writers, who fostered ideas of a secular state, identified Arcadia as a Papal Roman Academy and rejected what they

perceived as a structure that supported the ancien re´gime. Luigi Settembrini saw Arcadia as a forum for Jesuit propaganda, the ultimate expression of the eighteenth-century Italian spiritual and artistic decadence (Lezioni di letteratura italiana, 1927). As historian Michele Maylender has explained, because of its closeness to the Vatican following the Italian unification, political anticlerical sentiments prevailed against it (Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, 1926–1930). Twentieth-century assessments of Arcadia often present the image of a scarcely innovative (when not intellectually and morally vacuous) aristocratic academy, segregated in gardens, courts, and palaces, and controlled by the Church. A re-evaluation of Arcadia began at the end of the nineteenth century with Giosue` Carducci (Rime di Francesco Petrarca, 1905). What emerges is the picture of an erudite, eclectic, cosmopolitan, and relatively democratic institution that was a cradle of the arts and proponent of Enlightenment principles. Carducci maintained the literary, if not poetic, value of the academy: Arcadians’ refined forms of Italian prosody and poetic language developed a tradition that would influence authors such as Parini and Baretti. Benedetto Croce singled out Giambattista Vico and Gravina as the leading Arcadian thinkers, whose work embodied European rationalism. Arcadian poets did not produce great poetry, just exquisite ‘‘literature,’’ as was the case with Parini and its celebratory, didactic, satirical poetry (La letteratura italiana del Settecento, 1949). For Mario Fubini, Arcadians promoted not only a revival of the Italian literary tradition but also works by historians, philologists, and scientists such as Gravina, Antonio Conti, Eustachio Manfredi, Scipione Maffei, and Ludovico Muratori, who laid the ground for Enlightenment reformers (Dal Muratori al Baretti, 1954). Francesco Redi, Marcello Malpighi, Lorenzo Bellini, and Vincenzo Viviani were also members of Arcadia, as were the most significant representatives of the intellectual South (Francesco D’Andrea, Giuseppe Valletta, Gravina, Vico). In a new climate of free research, which marked the beginning of the Italian Enlightenment, Arcadians debated Descartes, Newton, Locke, Leibnitz, and Spinoza. Furthermore, Muratori’s Della perfetta poesia italiana (Concerning Perfect Poetry, 1706), Gravina’s Della tragedia (Concerning Tragedy, 1715), and Maffei’s De’ teatri antichi e moderni (Concerning Ancient and Modern Theatres, 1753) articulated a reform of the theater according to classical models, in response to aesthetic problems raised by Arcadian rationalism. Gravina wrote tragedies with Roman 65

ARCADIA (ACCADEMIA) subjects on strictly Aristotelian principles, quite undramatic and rhetorical; Muratori championed the reality of human feelings as intrinsic to the poetic language; Maffei defied the idea that Italy was a poor match for French drama. These authors aimed at finding a middle ground between what they saw as the necessary moral rigor of the theater and indispensable concessions to the public’s entertainment. In Rome, the Torlonia theater reopened in 1690 under the auspices of Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, patron of Arcadia and host of oratorio performances in his Roman palace. According to religious tradition, sacred and moral plays were represented as well as musical pastoral dramas of the type of Alessandro Guidi’s cantata, Dafne (Daphne, 1692). Arcadia played an important role in unifying the literary and artistic spheres, which had never before been so complementary and interactive. Giovan Pietro Bellori and Carlo Maratti were the driving force of Arcadian reform in the arts. Several theorizations of the classical ut pictura poesis can be found in the Prose degli Arcadi (Prose Works by Arcadia Members, 1718). Although critics and historians have long noticed the leading role played by Arcadia in fostering women’s literary activity and providing it with a forum (beginning with Ginevra Canonici Fachini’s 1824 Prospetto), there have been few studies on the subject, and those have mostly focused on Faustina Maratti Zappi and Petronilla Paolini Massimi. Women’s involvement in Arcadia developed from a merely honorary mention, to active participation, to a privileged position of honor. Women devoted themselves to literature and science and debated about economic and political issues. The manuscript collections, containing works presented in Arcadia during public and private academies, reveal that their contribution began no later than 1695 (Ms. 4 d’Arcadia, Biblioteca Angelica). During the first 38 years of the organization’s history, under Crescimbeni’s directorship, 74 women were admitted (2.8 percent of Arcadia’s membership). They were highly published: Out of the 237 authors selected for the first eight volumes of the Rime degli Arcadi (Poems by Arcadian Members, 1716), 20 were women. The academy followed the deliberate strategy of holding literary women up as models for both intellectual and social fashion. Women played an influential role not only as sponsors and patrons (Teresa Grillo Pamphili, Maria Isabella Cesi Ruspoli, Prudenza Gabrielli), but also as poets and academicians. Most prolific were Gaetana Passerini from Spello, Maria Selvaggia Borghini 66

from Pisa, and the famous Petronilla Paolini Massimi and Faustina Maratti Zappi from Rome (Ms. d’Arcadia 4, 5, 7, 8). Arcadian women wrote in a variety of poetic forms, including madrigals, sonnets, eclogues, canzoni, cantate, elegies, and sestine. In addition to Petrarchan and occasional poetry, they wrote about maternal love and the gentleness of nature, as well as philosophic, religious, and autobiographical poems. Maratti and Paolini were also known for their academic disputes on the theme of Platonic love. During her lifetime, Borghini was internationally recognized for her knowledge of Latin and Greek and is especially remembered for her translation of Tertullian moral works, Opere scelte di Tertulliano (Tertullian’s Selected Works, 1821), which was published posthumously. PAOLA GIULI See also: Academies Further Reading Atti e memorie: Terzo centenario d’Arcadia, Rome: Arcadia, 1991. Baretti, Giuseppe, La frusta letteraria, edited by Luigi Piccioni, Bari: Laterza, 1932. Binni, Walter, L’Arcadia e il Metastasio, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Calcaterra, Carlo (editor), I lirici del seicento e l’Arcadia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1936. Carandini, Silvia, Teatro e spettacolo nel seicento, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Carducci, Giosue`, Rime di Francesco Petrarca, Florence: Sansoni, 1905. Costa, Gustavo, ‘‘L’Arcadia: Movimento letterario o utopia?’’, Annali d’italianistica, 8(1990): 420–430. Crescimbeni, Giovan Mario, Breve notizia dello stato antico e moderno dell’adunanza degli Arcadi, Rome: De Rossi, 1712. Crescimebni, Giovan Mario, L’istoria della volgar poesia, Venice: L. Basegio, 1730. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura italiana del settecento, Bari: Laterza, 1949. Croce, Benedetto, Nuovi saggi della letteratura italiana del seicento, Bari: Laterza, 1931. Donato, Maria Pia, Accademie romane: Una storia sociale (1671–1824), Naples and Rome: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000. Felici, Lucio, ‘‘L’Arcadia romana tra illuminismo e neoclassicismo,’’ Accademia degli Arcadi: Atti e Memorie, 5 (1969): 167–182. Fubini, Mario, Dal Muratori al Baretti: Studi sulla critica e la cultura del Settecento, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Giannantonio, Pompeo, L’Arcadia tra conservazione e rinnovamento, Naples: Loffredo, 1993. Graziosi, Maria Teresa Acquaro, L’Arcadia: Trecento Anni di Storia, Rome: Fratelli Palombi, 1991.

FRANCESCA ARCHIBUGI Maylender, Michele, Storia delle Accademie d’Italia, 5 vols., Bologna: Cappelli, 1926–1930. Meier, Bruno, Faustina Maratti Zappi, donna e rimatrice d’Arcadia, Rome: L’Orlando, 1954. Piromalli, Antonio, L’Arcadia, Palermo: Palumbo, 1975. Prose degli Arcadi, edited by Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, 3 vols., Rome: De Rossi, 1718. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘L’Arcadia e la repubblica delle lettere,’’ in Immagini del 700 in Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1980. Quondam, Amedeo, Cultura e ideologia di Gianvincenzo Gravina, Milan: Mursia, 1968.

Ricaldone, Luisa, La scrittura nascosta: Donne di lettere e loro immagini tra Arcadia e Restaurazione, Florence: Cadmo, 1996. Rime degli Arcadi, edited by Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, Rome: A. Rossi, 1716. Settembrini, Luigi, Lezioni di letteratura italiana, Turin: UTET, 1927. Tre secoli di storia dell’Arcadia, Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali, 1991. Vichi, Giorgetti A. M., Gli Arcadi dal 1690 al 1800: Onomasticon, Rome: Arcadia, 1977.

FRANCESCA ARCHIBUGI (1960–) As one of the few women film directors of the 1990s ‘‘New Italian Cinema,’’ Francesca Archibugi is compelled to confront the issues and topics related to gender, both in terms of the female characters found in her movies and of the role of women in film direction and other ‘‘production crafts.’’ Her career began in the years between 1982 and 1985 with a few short films: Riflesso condizionato (Conditional Effect, 1982), Lo stato delle cose (The State of Things, 1982), La guerra e` appena finita (War Has Just Ended, 1983), Il vestito piu´ bello (The Most Beautiful Dress, 1984), Un sogno truffato (A Swindled Dream, 1983), and La piccola avventura (The Little Adventure, 1985). Il vestito piu´ bello was broadcast by RAI (Italian National Television) as part of a TV series devoted to new filmmakers, titled ‘‘Passione mia.’’ La piccola avventura, sponsored by the city of Rome, addresses the issue of children with disabilities. Fame, however, came with her first featurelength film, Mignon e` partita (Mignon Has Come to Stay, 1988), a refined tale of comedy and feelings set in middle-class Rome. The protagonist, Giorgio, is a young boy who passes from childhood to adolescence through an encounter with the beautiful family houseguest, his French cousin Mignon, who at the end of the film is discovered to be pregnant. The film benefits from the excellent acting of the young male protagonist as well as that of Stefania Sandrelli and Massimo Dapporto. In addition, the great technical skill found in the photography of Luigi Verga, the editing by Alfredo Muschietti, and the screenplay of Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia (regular collaborators of

Archibugi) increase the quality of the film. Critics responded well to this ‘‘excellent debut,’’ which immediately put Archibugi among the representatives of the new Italian cinematic trend, namely the cinema based on leggerezza, or ‘‘lightness,’’ as defined by Italo Calvino in his Lezioni americane. Archibugi’s first film appeared to be the manifesto of this new cinema that aspires to replace the ‘‘old’’ masters. Mignon e` partita won six David di Donatello Awards (the Italian equivalent of the Academy Awards), among which are included Best First-Time Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, as well as the San Sebastian Festival’s prize for the Best First Work. However, Archibugi’s second film, Verso sera (By Nightfall, 1990), divided critics because of its intensely ideological plot. An old staunchly Communist professor (Marcello Mastroianni) receives a visit from his daughter-in-law (Sandrine Bonnaire) and her daughter Papere, an event that disorients and fascinates him at the same time. Archibugi achieved a more unanimous success with Il grande cocomero (The Great Pumpkin, 1993), in which the protagonist is a young girl suffering from a psychological disorder and who is also at the center of conflicting family affections. The film is based on the book Una concretissima utopia by the psychiatrist Marco Lombardo Radice, and it is set in a neuropsychiatric hospital for children where the young girl, Pippi, is often hospitalized due to her frequent seizures and where she is subsequently treated by a psychiatrist named Arturo (superbly played by actor-director Sergio Castellito). The film offers a remarkable overview of the deficiencies of state-provided health 67

FRANCESCA ARCHIBUGI care and an interesting analysis of mental disease, which mirrors a broader social malaise. Roberto Missiroli’s editing is also noteworthy. The following film, Con gli occhi chiusi (With Closed Eyes, 1994), was adapted from the homonymous novel by Federigo Tozzi. Once more, Archibugi reflects on the difficulty of growing up. This story of lost innocence is set during the 1910s in the Tuscan countryside and follows, with melodramatic tones, the impossible love affair between its two young protagonists as they evolve from childhood to adulthood. In the end, though, Grisola becomes a prostitute, and Pietro still worships her with ‘‘closed eyes.’’ Archibugi’s subsequent movie was L’albero delle pere (Shooting the Moon, 1998), whose protagonist is again an adolescent, this time a 14-year-old boy named Siddartha. Together with his half-sister, Siddharta lives with his eccentric mother Silvia (Valeria Golino), who does not have a stable job but earns just enough to survive. The plot develops an intricate triangular relationship of love and parenthood: Siddartha’s father is Massimo, an experimental director with occasional jobs, while the young girl Domitilla is a product of the relationship between his mother and Roberto, the sole source of financial support for the family. The story reaches a tragicomic twist when Domitilla has been pricked with a syringe and Siddartha believes his mother has infected her with AIDS. The cinematographer Luca Bigazzi, who also works with Silvio Soldini, Gianni Amelio, Daniele Ciprı`, and Franco Maresco, is remarkably skillful at capturing the aura of nocturnal Rome, both lunar and lunatic. In 2000, Archibugi wrote and directed Domani (Tomorrow). The film dwells on the feelings characteristic of provincial Italy and on the tensions between adolescent and adult viewpoints. Domani began with the 1997 earthquake in Umbria and was shot without indulging in the fashionable trend of docudramas, that is, of the instant movie. In an imaginary town, Archibugi presents the deeds of a diversified group of people, which include a family (the vice-mayor husband, the beautiful wife saddened by the impending tragedy, and their two 16- and 11-year-old children), the teacher Betty, a foreign restaurateur, and an inseparable duo of girlfriends. Life proceeds according to the rhythms of the aftermath of the earthquake, from which emerge the pain of the adults, the anger of the youths, and the quick maturity of the children. It is a story depicted with touching melancholy, especially when Archibugi portrays the emotional tremors of childhood. A metaphor of growth closes 68

the film, one that is as strong and poetic as that which concludes Mignon e` partita: The young protagonist brutally realizes he has entered into adulthood when he is physically unable to pass through the bars of the house gate as he used to do as a child. It is the dramatic recognition of lost childhood, a topic very dear to the director. Archibugi’s most recent films include a TV adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 2004), photographed by the talented Pasquale Mari, and Lezioni di volo (working title, Flying Lessons), still in production at this writing. The story is about two 18-year-old young men of very different social backgrounds (one is Italian, the other is an Indian adopted by an Italian family) who decide to travel to India following a scholastic misadventure. Lezioni di volo is both a road movie and bildungsroman that confirms the director’s interest in the difficult passage that marks the journey from adolescence to adulthood. The screenplay was written in cooperation with Doriana Leondeff, who has also collaborated with Soldini. Francesca Archibugi’s work reflects an important turning point in the history of Italian cinema, from the so-called cinema carino, or the cute cinema of good feelings (light and not aggressive in regards with social issues), to a cinema that mirrors a society of displaced individuals in search of an identity. As a director who is also a woman (and there are not many in the Italian cinema), she is committed to telling moral stories of childhood and adolescence with an original perspective and remarkable sensitivity. She explores the injustice endured by children and the difficulties of family life. As Mario Sesti puts it: ‘‘At the beginning it seems as if one is only aware of the solid traditional nature found in her films . . . yet soon one discovers beneath this, an ability to give life to an unedited and fascinating world . . . the strong connection and dialogue with the culture of the 1970s. . . that are aspects of an authorial personality among the most recognizable and interesting found in the panorama of the New Italian Cinema’’ (Nuovo cinema italiano, 1994).

Biography Archibugi was born in Rome, 16 May 1960, to a bourgeois family. She started at a very young age as an actress, after a few years in modeling. In 1979, she was selected to play Ottilia in a film made for television (RAI-Uno), directed by Gianni Amico and adapted from Goethe’s Elective Affinities. More interested in directing, Archibugi

LITERATURE OF ARCHITECTURE entered the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 1980; graduated in directing, 1983; took courses in film production at the Ermanno Olmi’s Scuola di Bassano as well as some in screenwriting with Furio Scarpelli; and acted in a few films in the early 1980s, such as La caduta degli angeli ribelli by Marco Tullio Giordana in 1981. In 1989, she started as a screenwriter for Giuliana Gamba’s La cintura, the cinematic adaptation of a play by Alberto Moravia. For this film, Archibugi worked with Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia, who later become her collaborators. She briefly returned to acting in a feature documentary directed by Laura Betti, entitled Pier Paolo Pasolini: La ragione di un sogno, presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2001. She has won prestigious awards, among them several David di Donatello prizes, for Mignon e` partita as best first film, 1989; for Verso sera exequo with Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo, 1991; and for Il grande cocomero, 1993. In October 2003, the Museum of Modern Art in New York hosted her first film retrospective in the United States. Married to the jazz musician Battista Lena, Archibugi has three children. She currently lives in Rome, following many years living in a villa in the Chianti region of Tuscany. VITO ZAGARRIO Selected Works

Verso sera, 1990. Il grande cocomero, 1993. Con gli occhi chiusi (adapted from the novel by Federigo Tozzi), 1994. L’albero delle pere, 1998. Domani, 2000. I Promessi Sposi (adapted from the novel by Alessandro Manzoni), 2004. Lezioni di volo, in post-production.

Screenplays Mignon e` partita (with Gloria Malatesta and Claudia Sbarigia), 1991. Il grande cocomero, 1996.

Further Reading Di Giammatteo, Fernaldo, Dizionario del cinema italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1995. Laviosa, Flavia, ‘‘Archibugi’s Cinematic Representations of the Socio-Cultural Changes in the Italian Family’’, Italica, 80: 4(2003): 540–549. Martini, Giulio, and Guglielmina Morelli (editors), Patchwork Due: Geografia del nuovo cinema italiano, Milan: Il Castoro, 1998. ´ ine, ‘‘Are the Children Watching Us? The Roman O’Healy, A Films of Francesca Archibugi,’’ in New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, edited by Gaetana Marrone, Annali d’Italianistica, 17 (1999). Proto, Carola (editor), Francesca Archibugi, Preface by Mario Sesti, Rome: Dino Audino Editore, 1994. Sesti, Mario, Nuovo cinema italiano: Gli autori, i film, le idee, Rome-Naples: Teoria, 1994. Zagarrio, Vito (editor), Il cinema della transizione: Scenari italiani degli anni novanta, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Zagarrio, Vito, Cinema italiano anni novanta, Venice: Marsilio, 1998; new ed. 2001.

Films Mignon e` partita, 1988.

LITERATURE OF ARCHITECTURE A consideration of Italian architects from humanism to the present reveals a fascinating succession of individuals who worked, each in a unique way, to reconcile the practice of architecture with the production of literature. The architectural practice of each individual is of course embedded in the particular social and historical time in which he works and is influenced by the artist’s memory and experience and with the

literature, arts, and aesthetics of the epoch. The architect’s ability to transfer an idea, a mental itinerary, or a complicated concept into visible form in some cases can reveal, in the architectural project, the spirit of the times. Some artists discover, in this way, a true literary calling, whether metaphorical or literal. As various themes are confronted, this narrative ability allows the architect to juxtapose different genres and artistic forms; the results of 69

LITERATURE OF ARCHITECTURE such juxtapositions are sometimes abstract, utopian, and visionary, and the world that results can be rich with figurative significance. In some cases a given literary or aesthetic theme influences the architect directly, giving the project an allegorical meaning; in others, the artist composes a literary work that accompanies and inspires his architectural project or creation of a space. In the passage from late Gothic naturalism to humanist culture, the work of the individual artist is no longer subordinated to religious ends but instead is connected to the secular sphere of the new bourgeoisie. The unity of architectural space reflects the ultimate rationality of the cosmos and of the human microcosm. The representative figures of this transitional period are Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and Antonio Averlino, known as Filarete (ca. 1400–1469). Brunelleschi was a technician who used the tools of science without elaborating a particular theoretical framework, privileging a classical repertoire and situating architecture within the new cultural system. He was the inventor of linear perspective and defined its rules in the realms of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Filarete helped diffuse Renaissance style with his Trattato di architettura (Treatise on Architecture, 1461–1464), the first theoretical work on the subject written in the vernacular, in which he described his complex plan for Sforzinda, an ideal city. Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), a versatile and original architect also influential for his literary and cultural production, is considered to be the archetypal embodiment of the Renaissance man. Alberti’s architectural plans and constructions developed in symmetry with his literary production, and his ethical and philosophical thought thus developed through the physical form of the figurative arts. This transference of thought into form was made possible by his study of physics and mathematics and his profound knowledge of classical monuments. Alberti contributed to the ‘‘renaissance’’ in the humanist perspective by writing De pictura (On Painting, 1435), De statua (On Sculpture, ca. 1433–1437), and De re aedificatoria (On Architecture), published posthumously in 1485. The latter became a fundamental reference text for future generations, reflecting as it does Alberti’s concept of man as the architect and organizer of civil society. Alberti forged a path that many later treatise writers would follow, discussing art as a method of scientific enquiry. Among Alberti’s most prominent followers was Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), 70

who worked in the fields of painting, architecture, anatomy, nature, mechanics, and engineering. Leonardo’s connection with the written word was instinctive; his prose is filled with unique, poetic epiphanies that translate his vision of reality into lyrical terms. His vast encyclopaedic work, the Codice atlantico (Atlantic Code, facsimile ed. 1894–1904), unfinished and seemingly disorderly, forms an indissoluble connection between writing, drawing, and planning, elaborating the details of each subject with acute insight. Some of his other works discuss the influence of the Florentine literary milieu and of popular literature: This is the subject of the Bestiario (Bestiary) and of the Facezie (Jests), fragments found in his manuscripts, as well as of the Favole (Fables). Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) was a painter, sculptor, architect, and poet. While planning the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral late in life, he wrote his Rime (Lyrics, 1623), a collection that experimented with a variety of styles and themes: the love impulse, solitude and sleep, matter and spirit, death and eternity. In 1570, Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) published I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books on Architecture), a rigorous theoretical description of Roman temples, the first treatise of its kind, which also served as a manifesto of the architect’s projects. Palladio’s work enjoys universal success; it is the summa of the architect’s thought, an impressive dossier describing his projects in the making. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), another successful architect and painter, celebrated other great artistic personages in his literary work. His monumental Le vite de’ piu´ eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters and Sculptors from Cimabue to the Present Day, 1550, rev. 1568) represents an impressive quantity of research developed into a text unparalleled for its technical information, historical descriptions, and literary merits. Vasari’s dedication to the arts and to the most important artistic figures in Italy guided him in the production of a literary work closely connected to his own professional practice. The strategic function of Renaissance architects in staging aristocratic ceremonies and rituals that involved the piazza, gardens, and palaces in their elaborate plans (and which anticipated the institution of the theater as an urban building), led to crucial changes in Baroque Rome. Since theatrical works developed thanks to a collaboration among all the performing arts, the reigning political power

LITERATURE OF ARCHITECTURE constantly called on the prominent figures working in these artistic fields. This fact was significant for the architect, as he entered into direct contact with theatrical performance: The ‘‘theatricality’’ of the piazza corresponded to the arrival of professional theater in noble palaces. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) was a key figure in stimulating the development of the theater and in designing sets. He devised fantastic stage sets, acted, directed, and even composed several theatrical works, including Li due Covielli (The Two Coviellis), which he staged in 1637 with his brother Luigi, and the comedy La fontana di Trevi (The Trevi Fountain, 1643–1644). For the setting of the latter he developed the theme of the theater within the theater, taking the spectator behind the scenes to depict ‘‘how a show is made’’: The image was reflected and refracted, projecting his belief that the language of the stage forms part of the cultural quality of theater. Bernini’s work influenced Guarino Guarini (1624–1683), a cleric from Chieti who was a novice in Baroque Rome. An artist, scholar, and architect, Guarini pushed the language of architectural invention to surprising levels in such works as Architettura civile (Civic Architecture, posthumous, 1737); Placita philosophica (1665), which explains the connection between astronomy and architecture; and La pieta` trionfante (The Triumph of Pity, 1660), a moral tragicomedy staged in Messina, in which he developed a parallel between the plot and the baroque complexity of the Church of the Padri Somaschi. The birth and subsequent development of modern technology transformed the structures and functions of art; craftsmanship became dispensable, and artistic perspectives changed, leading to the condemnation of Baroque and Rococo excesses and to the reevaluation of the technical and scientific capabilities of engineers. During the Enlightenment the architect no longer imitated nature but rather captured and modified it: he adapted nature to reflect human feelings and the usefulness of social life, interpreting the natural world and inserting it in the new structure of the city. Within this context, the emblematic figure of Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) is significant for his visionary architectural imagination. During the nineteenth century, Camillo Boito (1836–1914) was particularly central. Boito recognized the uncertainty in which his generation worked and condemned blind eclecticism, favoring instead choices in tune with the needs of society. Boito engaged his perspective as architect and art critic in the literature he wrote: He treated the

crisis of bourgeois conscience in Storielle vane (Vain Novellas, 1876), Senso: Nuove storielle vane (Senso: New Vain Novellas, 1883), and Il maestro di Setticlavio (The Teacher of the Seven Keys, 1891). There were frequent allusions to figurative arts, evoking the artistic or musical context in which the characters lived. Boito also published Architettura del Medio-Evo in Italia (Medieval Architecture in Italy, 1880) and Gite di un artista (An Artist’s Travels, 1884). In the early twentieth century, the European avant-garde movement brought a new perspective on ethical, philosophical, political, and cultural values, as well as a new conception of human life in the modern world. Futurism was especially important in the context of contemporary Italian art, given its influence on a number of creative fields. Traditional barriers between genres were overcome in the attempt to create works (even utopian works) that created or transmitted a global experience. The pioneers of the First Futurism established the common goal of moving toward the total reconstruction of the universe, toward the concurrence of life and art. Urban and architectural space as well as interior design became fundamental. The image of the futuristic city transmitted by the architect Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916) was linked to the idea of simultaneity, exalting macchinismo (machinism). He eliminated every trace of historical memory and concerned himself instead with exalting modern technology. He also devised theories and plans in which, by way of transfers, slides, and rotations, complex structures and masses interacted with one another in a form of virtual movement, as can be observed in the drawings for La citta` nuova (The New City, 1914). Sant’Elia’s was a utopian architecture and often proved impossible to construct. His architectural sensibility was nevertheless consistent with the theories of his own Manifesto dell’architettura futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914) and was evident in his writings on theater and in the structure of theatrical pie`ces transformed by Futurist artists into ‘‘syntheses.’’ For Virgilio Marchi (1895–1960), to stage this new reality meant to practice a more rigorously defined lyricism, theorized in his work, Architettura futurista (Futurist Architecture, 1924). He compared architects to lyric artists par excellence (poets, musicians, painters, sculptors), defining his project as ‘‘dramatic architecture.’’ Giacomo Balla’s (1874–1958) inventive approach aimed to transform the human environment; to this end, he employed the visual arts but also interior decorating, stage planning (his 71

LITERATURE OF ARCHITECTURE 1915 Feux d’artifice by Stravinskij), performance texts, and ‘‘syntheses,’’ which foreshadowed the theater of the absurd. In this sense, Sconcertazione di stati d’animo (Disconcerting of Inner States, 1916) and Per comprendere il pianto (To Understand Weeping, 1916) were exemplary. Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) and Fortunato Depero (1892–1960), on the other hand, favored the settings of dwellings, nightclubs, and ‘‘art houses,’’ places in which shows and debates came alive. The Futurist sphere, with its numerous manifestos, finds in theater a concrete but fictional setting in which to dramatize the poetic union between art, stage setting, and architecture. Later Futurist revolutionary projects transcended the theater to invade the piazza, even the metaphoric, political one. Under the Fascist regime, one of the most courageous architects and intellectuals was Giuseppe Terragni (1904–1943), whose interest in abstraction concerned both the reality around him and the formulation of his own work. His poetics was close to metaphysical painting, as if his buildings no longer belonged to a real place. His extraordinary project-emblem Danteum (1938) was representative of symbolic architecture: Through complex formal allusions and immediate literary references, it became the architectural equivalent of Dante’s Comedia, reducing every style, every temporal reference, and every material reality to zero. The plan for the Danteum overlapped Massentius’s basilica in Rome. Among Terragni’s unfulfilled plans, this was the purest and most complex, a pivotal project through which to analyze his architectural production in its relation to literature. In the second half of the twentieth century, the search for and the freedom of style led artists into uncharted areas, made possible by new materials and construction techniques. Architects and designers such as Aldo Rossi (1931–1997), Renzo Piano (1937– ), Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978), and Gae Aulenti (1927–) used their personal poetics to convey themes of obsession, the metaphor of a literary text, or the atmosphere of drama or painting into the narrative space of architecture. Time and space, energy and naturalness were connected to the marketplace, the villa, the tower, and the gable. These forms were Aldo Rossi’s main ‘‘modules,’’ composed from fragments, relics of time, found objects that were reused to become the source of a thousand creations. Rossi’s most successful attempt at recovery was his conception of the theater as a delimited space, where performance was imposed with the orchestra’s first notes. Theater and architecture shared a common foundation in ritual, in 72

the moment when action comes into being. This common thread was exemplified in the productions of the Teatro Scientifico and its poetic and symbolic apex, Teatro del mondo (Theatre of the World, 1979), a bizarre floating castle that arrived by sea to dock in the Venetian lagoon during carnival. This theater-ship became an emblematic site in which architecture ended and imagination began. With an explicit reference to the Shakespearean Globe Theater and to premonumental Venice, its prestige lay in its mixing of themes, types, and materials. These traits, also reflected in Rossi’s paintings and stage sets (as in the 1992 Electra staged at Taormina), refuted the superfluous, entrusting themselves to the imaginations of actor and audience. After L’architettura della citta` (The Architecture of the City, 1966), Rossi’s Autobiografia scientifica (Scientific Autobiography, 1981) was one of his most suggestive poetic narratives. In I dialoghi del cantiere (Dialogues in the Building Yard, 1986) and Giornale di bordo (The Renzo Piano Logbook, 1997), Renzo Piano used a firstperson narrative voice to describe his adventures as architect. His works rely on a complex team effort, the wise use of technology, and experimentation. Piano ventured into the theatrical realm by participating in the challenging project for Luigi Nono’s Prometeo (Prometheus, 1984–1985), a work with a libretto composed by philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Piano designed not a set but a musical space: Meant for the church of San Lorenzo in Venice, the stage structure became a great sound box that contained audience, orchestra, and soloists, itself a musical instrument. It was necessarily a unique space; after the Venice premiere it was adapted in entirely different contexts in Milan, Paris, and Berlin. Themes and strong iconographic influences drawn from figurative art (Klee, Mondrian, Kandinskij, Arp) characterized Carlo Scarpa’s production, which reevaluated architecture in terms of its contamination by painting and sculpture. In works such as the restoration of the Castelvecchio Museum near Verona and of the Querini Stampalia Foundation in Venice, Scarpa integrated concepts and combinations into his creative process without disturbing the Gothic elements of the original buildings. His efforts as an organizer of exhibitions (the Venice Biennale and the Galleria d’Arte Nazionale Moderna in Rome) were also essential. In some cases, he conceived spaces through analogy with the exhibited works. For example, in the Padiglione del libro (1950), he built a ‘‘book for books,’’ in the form of a construction that can be leafed

PIETRO ARETINO through, changing in space and time. Scarpa created a narrative in which architecture accentuated the meaning of the work of art by way of shaping the way it is perceived in a particular space. Gae Aulenti (1927–) is an eclectic architect whose stage and costume design connects different artistic fields, turning the spaces in which she works into theaters, museums, or exemplars of civic architecture. Her stage sets often evoke Marinetti’s Manifesto del Teatro di Varieta` (The Vaudeville Manifesto, 1913). She uses provocative sets to create a theater architecture in which ‘‘noise’’ dominates, as in her staging of Shakespeare’s King Lear (1992). Aulenti’s poetics can be best seen through her work on restructuring projects and museum exhibitions (the Muse´e d’Orsay in Paris, 1980–1986, and the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, 1985–1986) or in her creation of stage sets for operas and plays, often in collaboration with director Luca Ronconi. Aulenti recreates spaces and their functions in the stage sets she designs for Ronconi, finding dramatic action in surprising and innovative places, such as the Laboratorio di Progettazione Teatrale in Prato (1978), which she adapts for Pasolini’s Caldero´n and Hofmannsthal’s La torre (The Tower), both indebted to Caldero´n de la Barca’s Life’s a Dream, and for Euripides’ Bacchae. SABINA TUTONE Further Reading Bernardini, Maria Grazia, and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Regista del Barocco, Milan: Skira, 1999. Buchanan, Peter, Renzo Piano Building Workshop: Complete Works, London: Phaidon, 1993–2000.

Caramel, Luciano, and Alberto Longatti, Antonio Sant’Elia: L’opera completa, Milan: Mondadori, 1987. Carandini, Silvia, Teatro e spettacolo nel Seicento, RomeBari: Laterza, 1990. Consonni, Giancarlo, Teatro corpo architettura, RomeBari: Laterza, 1998. Dal Co, Francesco, and Giuseppe Mazzariol (editors), Carlo Scarpa: Opera completa 1906–1978, Milan: Electa, 1984; as Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works, New York: Rizzoli, 1988. Fossati, Paolo, La realta` attrezzata: Scena e spettacolo dei futuristi, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Maderna, Marco (editor), Pensieri di un architetto del secondo Ottocento: Documenti e frammenti per una biografia intellettuale di Camillo Boito critico militante e architetto, Milan: Archinto, 1998. Magnago Lampugnani, Vittorio, and Millon A. Henry (editors), The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture, New York: Rizzoli, 1994. Malacarne, Gino, and Patrizia Montini Zimolo, Aldo Rossi e Venezia: Il teatro e la citta`, Milan: Unicopli, 2002. Meek, Alan, Guarino Guarini, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Petranzan, Margherita, Gae Aulenti, New York: Rizzoli, 1997. Piano, Renzo, I dialoghi di cantiere, Bari: Laterza, 1986. Piano, Renzo, Giornale di bordo, Florence: Passigli, 1997; as The Renzo Piano Logbook, London: Thames and Hudson, 1997. Quadri, Franco, Gae Aulenti, and Luca Ronconi, Il Laboratorio di Prato, Milan: Ubu Libri, 1981. Rossi, Aldo, L’architettura della citta`, Padova: Marsilio Editori, 1966; as The Architecture of the City, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1982. Rossi, Aldo, Autobiografia scientifica, Milan: Nuove Pratiche Editrice, 1999; as A Scientific Autobiography, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1981. Schumacher, Thomas L., Terragni e il Danteum, Rome: Officina, 1980; as The Danteum: A Study in the Architecture of Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985.

PIETRO ARETINO (1492–1556) An eccentric and transgressive man of letters of the early sixteenth century, Pietro Aretino owed his fame above all else to his exceptional life, which he was able to construct with tenacious determination as the most ingenious of his works. Given the tight interweaving of writing and biographical

incident, his literary production must be considered in the light of the fundamental stages of his eventful life and his relation to the politics and mores of the time. His writings, in fact, spring from the immediacy—often opportunistic—with which he was able to react to contemporary events. 73

PIETRO ARETINO His origins being obscure and humble—he was the illegitimate son of a shoemaker and a beautiful courtesan—he wished to be known, according to a widespread custom among artists and adventurers of the time, only by the name of his city of birth. In Perugia, having entered a refined circle of painters, writers, and scholars from the provinces, he made his debut as a poet and painter; he remained tied to painting for his entire life, counting Titian, Raphael, Sansovino, and Sebastiano del Piombo among his friendships and associations. During this period he published his first collection of verse, Opera nova (New Work, 1512). A conventional effort under the influence of Petrarch, Pietro Bembo, and of the then-dominant fifteenth-century lyric, this early short work allows us to reconstruct the formation and the beginning of the writer’s ambitious literary career. An autodidact and dilettante, far from possessing humanistic discipline, the young Aretino was already adept at mastering the literary exercise, and here in particular the courtly lyric, which was considered a means of access to the courts. The famous Pasquinate (pasquinades), a typically Roman literary form that Aretino recast in the vernacular, date to the first years he spent in Rome (1517–1522), at the court of Pope Leo X and later of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. In Aretino’s modernization, the Pasquinate, biting satires against the corruption of the Curia, cardinals, authorities, and government leaders, became a true instrument of struggle and political propaganda. On the occasion of the conclave that followed the death of the pope, Aretino, a supporter of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, composed a series of aggressive and desecrative sonnets in order to denigrate the other candidates. Around these Pasquinate, he built the myth of the satiric poet, a master in the art of defamation, which in a short time brought him fame throughout Europe. The figure of Pasquino became the desecrative and feared alter ego of Aretino himself. With a frenetic activity as a libeler, he created a new technique, a new rhythm, and a new lexicon, characterized by the vivacity of spoken language and the use of dialectal and slang terms, in open contrast with the classicizing ideals of the time. The election in 1522 of the Flemish Pope Adrian VI, whom Aretino opposed and denigrated in the Pasquinate del Conclave (Pasquinades of the Conclave), published only in 1891, forced him to leave Rome, to which he would be able to return only after the election of the Medicean Pope Clement VII. In a papal court that was favorable to him but 74

already beset by the winds of the Lutheran revolt, he pursued the edification of his own image as a free and daring writer. Aware of his own genius, he knew how to exalt or sway and blackmail the powerful, who loved and feared him and were prepared to buy his praises or, even more, his silence. Ludovico Ariosto defined him as the ‘‘flagello dei principi’’ (scourge of princes). In 1524 he composed the Sonetti lussuriosi (Lascivious Sonnets) and Sonetti sopra i XVI modi (Sonnets on the Sixteen Pleasures) to accompany a matching number of erotic engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi. In them, he described the copulative positions in a burlesque tone. He made an enemy of Cardinal Gian Matteo Giberti, the powerful pontifical datary, who, accusing him of obscenity, forced him to leave the city once again. In Mantua, aspiring to a possible post at the court of the Duke Federico Gonzaga, in 1527 he began to write the chivalric poem Marfisa in his honor, along with the comedy Il Marescalco (The Marescalco), which were both reworked some years later. He also dedicated to the duke a celebrated ‘‘prognostication’’ (only a fragment survives), in which he foretells violent and traumatic events that appear to be realized shortly afterward with the terrible sack of Rome on May 5, 1527; the prognostication was interpreted as an authoritative prophecy of the disaster. No longer feeling secure at the Mantuan court, he moved to Venice in 1527, where he spent the rest of his years. The Serenissima, the center of the arts, capital of the fashionable world and of European publishing, seemed to him the ideal place to be able to achieve his social and literary ambitions. Esteemed by the Doge Andrea Gritti and the Venetian aristocracy, within a short time he built a thick web of political and cultural connections at the highest level. Artists, architects, men of letters, princes, ecclesiastics, noblewomen, and businessmen frequented his house on the Canal Grande. He was immortalized by the brush of his friend Titian, and his success knew no limits. The greatest powers of the time, from the King of France, Francis I, to the Emperor Charles V, from Pope Clement VII to Cosimo de’ Medici, showered him with tributes and recognition. Alongside his political and social activity is his febrile literary productivity, which resulted in a dizzying flow of various publications, thanks as well to the close relation he established with the publisher Marcolini. To the Pasquino ‘‘scourge of princes,’’ he added the figure of the refined man of letters, epic poet, treatise writer, author of

PIETRO ARETINO comedies, and letter writer. The recent invention of the printing press allowed writing to reach a wide audience rapidly, bringing it into the fast-moving circle of production and consumption. Aretino exploited all of the potential of this new instrument of publishing, and he relied on the printing press for the amplification of his fame. It is impossible, therefore, to approach Aretino using the standards of Humanism. As the child of a new age, he opposed the rituality of the court models and the aspiration to classicism the reversal of that world and of those models. Having understood that the market is the engine of the new society, he was aware that his own literary works were subject to an economic logic. The genres and subjects that his abundant, disordered production approached are at times libertine and erotic and at others ascetic and religious; but not libertine or religious for their own sakes but as a function of their destination, accessibility, and consumption. In Venice, Aretino composed his masterpiece, the dialoghi puttaneschi (whore’s dialogues), traditionally grouped together under the title Ragionamenti (Dialogues, 1534, 1536), a paradoxical pedagogy of the trade of the prostitute and the madame. Following this work are the Ragionamento de le Corti (Court Dialogue, 1938), in which not only courtiers, but the court itself is compared to whores; and Carte parlanti (The Speaking Cards, 1543), a reportage on the life of the powerful depicted as a place of deception and the negation of every human virtue. The two works represent and carry to an extreme typically Aretinian themes and attitudes, but they remain far from the felicitous spontaneity and expressive immediacy of the dialoghi puttaneschi. With his Lettere (Letters), Aretino invented a new successful genre, transferring to the vernacular the model of humanistic letter writing. The approximately 3,000 letters were published in six volumes (the first in 1538, the last posthumously in 1557). They are not simple missives but rather the literary monument of his entire existence. Addressed to the most diverse personages, they converge to build the image of the author as ‘‘secretary of the world,’’ someone who is placed at the center of a web of excellent personal connections. Aretino’s letter writing is an indispensable point of reference for the vast sixteenth-century production of letters in the vernacular. Also significant, for their inventive and stylistic force, are the early comedies, which break with the classical schemes and constitute an atypical presence in the panorama of Renaissance Italian comedy. Having arisen within the life of the court,

these comedies represent with a pungent vivacity the corruption of the clergy and the powerful. The brilliant La Cortigiana (The Courtesan, 1534) was rewritten and published in Venice after a distinct first composition in Rome of 1525. In 1533, Il Marescalco reelaborated the text that was already partly composed during his stay in Mantua. With an amusing burlesque plot built around the homosexuality of Duke Federico Gonzaga’s chamberlain, the comedy resulted in a lively satire of life at court. The court setting is preserved as well in the theatrical works to follow, which, while remaining faithful to the poetics of the spoken word, blend elements of comedy and the novella and even represent the author’s harkening back to the schemes he had previously rejected. Lo Ipocrito (The Hypocrite, 1542), which is dominated by the figure of a Tartuffe avant le lettre, is a traditional comedy built around the classical plots, mistaken identities, the customary matrimonial misunderstandings and arrangements. In Talanta (1542) as well, performed during the carnival of the same year with a prestigious set decoration by Giorgio Vasari, there is an evident Terentian ancestry and the essential acceptance of classicizing rules. Il Filosofo (The Philosopher, 1546), which is derived explicitly from Boccaccio’s Decameron, is a conventional erotic situational comedy. La Orazia (The Horatii, 1546) is the only tragedy Aretino composed in hendecasyllables; it represents a break with respect to his previous production. With this work, he attempted to conform to the highest level recognized by the poetics of classicism, thus contributing to the sixteenth-century codification of tragedy in the vernacular. In contrast, and running parallel to, the erotic writings, letters, and comedies, beginning in 1534, he published his religious prose with great success. There are two quite distinct series, chronologically and in argument. On the one side are the biblical works: Passione di Gesu´ (The Passion of Christ, 1534), Salmi (The Psalms, 1534), Umanita` di Cristo (Christ’s Humanity, 1535), and Il Genesi con la visione di Noe` (Genesis with Noah’s Vision, 1538). On the other are the hagiographical writings: Vita di Maria vergine (The Life of the Virgin Mary, 1539), Vita di Catherina vergine (The Life of Catherine, 1540), and Vita di San Tomaso signor d’Aquino (The Life of Saint Thomas, 1543). Both series were published in two volumes (1551, 1552) and offered to the Arezzan Pope Giulio III. Stylistically, the manneristic refinement of the sacred compositions is not without dramatic and pictorial-figurative effects. Composed as he aspired to the cardinal’s 75

PIETRO ARETINO chapel, in reality they allow a sympathy to shine through for reformed attitudes and perspectives that are widespread in Italian evangelical circles. In his practice of poetry, which he began during his years as a young man and continued for his entire life, Aretino had multiple models—he looked to Petrarch, but also to Luigi Pulci, Teofilo Folengo, and Ariosto. His is above all an occasional poetry that cannot claim to reach the heights of epic poetry. Nevertheless, he wished to try his hand at this genre as well: Marfisa, a poem begun in 1527 of which he published two cantos in 1532, conceived in order to celebrate the Gonzaga family but never completed; and Orlandino (only two cantos published in 1540), a savage desecration of chivalry. Innovation and tradition, anticlassicism and classicism, the profane-obscene and the sacred seem to alternate with one another and in some stretches to coexist in Aretino’s work. Though he always asserted the ideal of a spontaneous writing, imbued with immediacy and naturalness, he proved to be well aware of the fact that only a high, refined language could assure him dignity as a writer. In 1559, three years before his death, his works were placed on the Index and his reputation was quickly tarnished, remaining for centuries that of the pornographic and scandalous writer, a cynic and adventurer, a symbol of corruption and dissoluteness. Contemporary criticism has reevaluated the complexity of his personality, emphasizing his modernity and openness to any form of experimentation.

Biography Pietro Aretino was born in Arezzo, between April 19 and April 20, 1492, to Luca Buta and Tita (Margherita) Bonci. He moved to Perugia in 1510. He was in Rome, the guest of the banker Agostino Chigi and afterward at the court of Pope Leo X, in 1520. He passed into the service of the Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici in 1521. Upon the election of Pope Adrian VI, he followed Cardinal de’Medici to Bologna and Florence in 1522. Aretino was in Mantua, first with the Gonzagas, and then in the summer at the camp of the condottiere Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, in 1523. Having come into conflict with the cardinal Giberti, he sought refuge in Fano, where he met the King of France, Francis I. He returned to Rome in 1523. He faced an attempt on his life, probably commissioned by Gilberti, and sought refuge in Mantua in 1525. He moved definitively to Venice in 1527. After a period of oscillation between the Francophile party and the pro-imperial 76

party, he aligned himself with Charles V, from whom he received an annual pension of 200 scudi in 1536. With his lover Caterina Sandella, he had his first daughter, Adria, in 1537. He was denounced for blasphemy and, perhaps, for sodomy, in 1538. He was accepted into the Accademia degli Infiammati of Padua in 1541. In Peschiera he met with Charles V in 1543. Caterina Sandella bore him a second daughter, whom he named Austria in honor of the Emperor, in 1547. The city of Arezzo named him gonfaloniere, and the new Arezzan Pope Giulio III conferred on him the knighthood of San Pietro in 1550. He returned to Rome and was named Chief Captain of the pontifical army in 1553. He died in Venice on October 21, 1556, from an attack of apoplexy. DANIELE VIANELLO Selected Works Collections Prose sacre di Pietro Aretino, edited by Ettore Allodoli, Lanciano: Carabba, 1914. The Letters of Pietro Aretino, edited by Thomas Caldecot Chubb, New York: Archon, 1967. Teatro, edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Le vite dei santi, edited by Flavia Santin, Rome: Bonacci, 1977. Pasquinate romane del Cinquecento, edited by Valerio Marucci, Antonio Marzo and Angelo Romano, 2 vols., Rome: Salerno 1983. Lettere, edited by Gian Mario Anselmi, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, Rome: Salerno, 1992–2004.

Poetry ‘‘Opera nova,’’ 1512. ‘‘Esortazione de la pace tra l’Imperatore e il Re di Francia,’’ 1524. ‘‘Laude di Clemente VII,’’ 1524. ‘‘Sonetti lussuriosi,’’ 1524. ‘‘Sonetti sopra i XVI modi,’’ 1524; as I Modi: The Sixteen Pleasures, translated by Lynn Lawyer, 1988. ‘‘Canzone in laude del datario,’’ ca. 1524–1525. ‘‘Dui primi canti di Marphisa,’’ 1532. ‘‘D’Angelica due primi canti,’’ 1535. ‘‘Stanze in lode di madonna Angela Sirena,’’ 1537. ‘‘Tre primi canti di battaglia’’ (three cantos of Marfisa), 1537. ‘‘De le lagrime d’Angelica due primi canti’’ (fragment Marfisa), 1538. ‘‘Abbattimento poetico del divino Aretino, et del bestiale Albicante,’’ 1539. ‘‘Li dui primi canti di Orlandino,’’ 1540. ‘‘Il capitolo e il sonetto in laude de lo Imperatore,’’ 1543. ‘‘Ternali in gloria di Giulio terzo pontefice, et delle maesta` della Reina cristianissima,’’ 1551. ‘‘Pasquinate di Pietro Aretino e anonime per il conclave di Adriano VI,’’ 1891.

PIETRO ARETINO Plays Il Marescalco, 1533; as Marescalco, translated by George Bull, 1978; as The Marescalco, translated by Leonard G. Sbrocchi and Douglas J. Campbell, 1986. La Cortigiana, 1534. Lo Ipocrito, 1542. Talanta, 1542; as Talanta in Three Reanaissance Comedies, translated by Christopher Cairns, 1991. Il Filosofo, 1546. La Orazia, 1546.

Other Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, 1534; as Dialogues, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1971. La passione di Gesu´ con due canzoni, 1534. I sette salmi della penitentia di David, 1534. I tre libri de la humanita` di Cristo, 1535. Dialogo nel quale la Nanna [...] insegna alla Pippa sua figliuola, 1536. Ragionamento de le Corti, 1938; as Dialogues, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1971. Il Genesi con la visione di Noe`, 1538. Vita di Maria vergine, 1539. Vita di Catherina vergine, 1540. La vita di san Tomaso signor d’Aquino, 1543. Dialogo nel quale si parla del giuoco con moralita` piacevole (known as Carte parlanti), 1543.

Letters Lettere Lettere Lettere Lettere Lettere Lettere

I, 1538. II, 1542. III, 1546. IV, 1550. V, 1550. VI, 1557.

Further Reading Aquilecchia, Giovanni, ‘‘Pietro Aretino e altri poligrafi a Venezia,’’ in Nuove schede di italianistica, Rome: Salerno, 1994. Cairns, Christopher, Pietro Aretino and the Republic of Venice: Researches on Aretino and His Circle in Venice 1527–1556, Florence: Olschki, 1985. Cleugh, James, The Divine Aretino, New York: Stein & Day, 1966. Cottino-Jones, Marga, Introduzione a Pietro Aretino, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993. Hutton, Edward, Pietro Aretino: The Scourge of Princes, London: Constable, 1922. Innamorati, Giulio, Tradizione e invenzione in Pietro Aretino, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1957. Larivaille, Paul, Pietro Aretino, Rome: Salerno, 1997. Larivaille, Paul, Pietro Aretino tra Rinascimento e Manierismo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Petrocchi, Giorgio, Pietro Aretino tra Rinascimento e Controriforma, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1948. Pietro Aretino nel cinquecentenario della nascita. Atti del Convegno di Roma-Viterbo-Arezzo (28 settembre–1 ottobre 1992) e Toronto-Los Angeles (23–29 ottobre 1992), 2 vols., Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1995. Procaccioli, Paolo, ‘‘Pietro Aretino,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, vol. 4, edited by Walter Pedulla` and Nino Borsellino, Milan: Federico Motta, 2004.

Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘Nel giardino del Marcolini. Un editore veneziano tra Aretino e Doni,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 157(1980), 75–116. Romano, Angelo, L’officina degli irregolari. Scavi aretiniani e verifiche stilistiche, Viterbo: Sette citta`, 1997. Romano, Angelo, Periegesi aretiniane. Testi, schede e note biografiche intorno a Pietro Aretino, Rome: Salerno, 1991. Romei, Danilo, ‘‘Aretino e Pasquino,’’ Atti e Memorie della Accademia Petrarca di Lettere, Arti e Scienze, 54 (1992), 67–92. Valletta, Giovanni, Le prose sacre di Pietro Aretino, Naples: Societa` di Cultura per la Lucania, 1974. Waddington, Raymond B., Aretino’s Satyr, Sexuality, Satire, and Self-Projection in Sixteenth-Century Literature and Art, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

LA CORTIGIANA, 1534 Play by Pietro Aretino

La Cortigiana (The Courtesan), Aretino’s first dramatic work, remained for a long time in manuscript form. A prose comedy in five acts, composed in Rome between February and July of 1525, it was printed in Venice after almost a decade by the publisher Marcolini, with significant modifications. This manuscript was published in a modern edition in 1970. As the title suggests (La Cortigiana is a ‘‘court comedy’’), the central theme is the world of the court, in particular the corrupt Roman Curia in which Aretino lived between 1516 and 1526. The first draft of the work is entirely Roman and pasquinesco, a violent satire against the pettiness of daily life and the parasitism the courts of the cardinals. Rome and the papal Curia are represented as a modern Babel, a topsy-turvy world ruled by money, envy, ambition, and above all by the practice of deception: ‘‘Voi credevate che ci fussi sotto la torre di Babilonia, e sotto ci era Roma’’ (You thought that beneath was the Tower of Babel, but it was Rome) asserts the long introductory section (Prologo, 7), which insists upon the ‘‘Roman-ness’’ of the comedy. 77

PIETRO ARETINO The plot turns on two parallel pranks: The first is planned at the expense of the foolish Sienese Messer Maco, who, having come to Rome to become the perfect courtier and cardinal, falls into the trap of Mastro Andrea and is savagely mocked. The victim of the second ‘‘prank’’ is the ceremonious Parabolano, a Neapolitan in love with a Roman noblewoman named Laura, who is mercilessly deceived by the cunning servant Roso and Aloigia, a procuress. The two principal pranks are interwoven with a number of minor episodes, which are defined by the author himself as parts ‘‘fuor di commedia’’ (outside the play). The dramatic structure of the first Cortigiana breaks down into a tangle of rapid and independent situations and chaotic scenes. In the Prologo and the Argomento, Aretino, calling himself the ‘‘omo di suo capo’’ (man of his own mind) declares his own rejection of preconstituted models. The rules of classical comedy, which are precisely defined in the dramatic works of the first two decades of the century (from Ariosto’s Cassaria to Machiavelli’s La mandragola), are here reversed. The Prologo begins with the typical send-off ‘‘Plaudite et valete’’ (Applaud, and farewell), and the comedy threatens to end even before it begins. The Rome of the first Cortigiana is a ‘‘citta` reale’’ (real city): The scene is moved off the stage, into the street, and the sendoff seems to present the possibility of a continuation of the spectacle ‘‘a ponte Sisto’’ (on the Ponte Sisto). Having now settled in Venice, far removed from the Roman world, and with fewer subjective reasons for his involvement in and aggression toward the papal court, Aretino reorganized the new comedy principally around the pranks. A great many of the references to real events and people of Medicean Rome disappear. Of the first Roman version, the Venetian edition preserves the plot, the parodic exaggeration, and the reversal of the Petrarchan amorous code; but the style, imbued with a more refined form of theatrical writing, changes. On the anarchy of the original text, Aretino superimposed a more disciplined compositional structure, a primitive comic language, encrusted with dialect forms, mixed with the use of regular Tuscan forms, in the service of a rigorous literary design. The anticourt polemical vein turns into the juxtaposition of the order of the Serenissima to the chaos of the Roman court, with Venice being identified as the ideal city in which justice and liberty reign supreme. DANIELE VIANELLO 78

Editions First edition: Cortigiana, Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1534. Critical edition: La cortigiana (from the ms. of 1525), edited by Giulio Innamorati, Turin: Einaudi, 1970; rev. ed. 1973; Cortigiana, in Teatro, edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1971; Cortigiana, edited by Angelo Romano, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001.

Further Reading Baratto, Mario, ‘‘Commedie di Pietro Aretino’’ (1957), in Tre studi sul teatro, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 1964. Ba`rberi, Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘L’invenzione della ‘Cortigiana,’’’ Campi immaginabili, 11–12 (1994), 7–33. Borsellino, Nino, ‘‘La memoria teatrale di Pietro Aretino: i prologhi della ‘Cortigiana,’’’ Annali FM, 1(1979), 21–35. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Il teatro di Roma: la prima Cortigiana,’’ in Le voci dell’istrione. Petro Aretino e la dissoluzione del teatro, Naples: Liguori, 1977. Guidi, Jose, ‘‘Visage de la vie de cour selon Castiglione et l’Are´tin, du ‘Cortegiano’ a` la ‘Cortigiana,’’’ in Culture ˆ ge a` la Renaissance, et Socie´te´ en Italie du Moyen-A hommage a` Andre´ Rochon, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1985. Larivaille, Paul, ‘‘Vers un the´atre a` une seule voix: les prologues de l’Are´tin au ‘Marescalco’ et a` ‘La Cortigiana’ du 1534,’’ in L’e´crivain face a son public a` la Renaissance, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1989. Procaccioli, Paolo, ‘‘L’anticamera della corte: dalla ‘Farza’ alla ‘Cortigiana,’’’ Annali FM, 1(1979), 37–56. Romano, Angelo, ‘‘Appunti sui personaggi della ‘Cortigiana’ (1525) dell’Aretino,’’ in Scenary, Set & Staging in the Renaissance. Studies in the Practice of Theatre, edited by Christopher Cairn, Lewiston–New York– Lampeter: Edwind Mellen, 1996. Tonello, Mario, ‘‘Lingua e polemica teatrale nella ‘Cortigiana’ di Pietro Aretino,’’ in Lingua e strutture del teatro italiano del Rinascimento, Padua: Liviana, 1970.

RAGIONAMENTI, 1534–1536 Dialogues by Pietro Aretino

Two works are grouped together under the heading Ragionamenti: the Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (The Dialogue of Nanna and

PIETRO ARETINO Antonia, 1534) and Dialogo della Nanna e della Pippa (Dialogue of Nanna and Pippa, 1536). Printed in Venice (even if the former bears the marking Paris, the latter Turin), they were both probably released by the publisher Marcolini. It is the author himself who created confusion surrounding the title, defining the work as a whole as dialoghi puttaneschi (whore’s dialogues) but calling the Ragionamento at times a ‘‘dialogue,’’ at times capricci (caprices), or at other times ragionamenti (discussions). To the Ragionamenti Aretino owed his fame not only as a licentious writer but also as a paradoxical exponent of Renaissance etiquette. The characters of the dialogues seem to incarnate, in a provocative manner, the brutal reversal and degradation of the courtly model proposed by Baldassarre Castiglione into the feminine. In this work, more than in others, Boccaccio’s Decameron constitutes a clear point of comparison. Both dialogues take place over the course of three days. In the Ragionamento, these correspond to the description of three different female conditions: that of the nun, the wife, and the whore; the three days of the Dialogo mark an excursion into the whore’s trade covering the profession’s dangers and the art of pandering. The protagonist is the Roman courtesan Nanna, the mother of Pippa. In the Ragionamento, the dialogue takes place in Rome on the via della Scrofa, under a fig tree. On the first day, Nanna, encouraged by Antonia, her peer, tells how as a nun she had been precociously initiated into sex at a libertine convent, the site of wild orgies in which the bishop himself participated. The second day is devoted to the life of married women, a dull and unbearable life for those who, like Nanna, have taken as their model the practice of betrayal and transgression. The third day describes the life of whores, which Nanna finally arrives at, persuaded that only in prostitution can the status of a ‘‘free’’ and ‘‘honest’’ woman be achieved. She therefore has no doubts about directing her daughter along the same path, confident of choosing the best possible future for her. The three days of the Dialogo are largely removed from the life of the characters. The first day Nanna devotes to teaching her daughter how to be an honest whore, revealing the pitfalls and secrets of the trade. On the second day, Nanna acquaints Pippa with male betrayal, which is symbolized in the parody of the love affair of Dido and Aeneas. On the third day, mother and daughter listen to a midwife and a wet nurse who evoke their pasts and discuss the art of pandering.

‘‘Le puttane non son donne, ma sono puttane’’ (Whores are not ladies, but whores): This is the conclusion of the argument that unfolds over the course of the three days. Prostitution is a trade that justifies itself with the realization of its own objectives: ‘‘la puttana [...] fa come un soldato che e` pagato per far male, e facendo non si tiene che lo faccia, perche` la sua bottega vende quello che ha a vendere’’ (the whore acts like a soldier who is paid to act badly, and she does not think about what she is doing, since her shop is selling what she has to sell) (Ragionamento, Day III). The scene is filled with female characters portrayed through an entirely masculine lens. Nanna is both a character and the presence of the author; she is a symbol of the commodified woman, an assertion of the value of the ‘‘civilta` puttanesca’’ (whorish civilization) on the social conventions and idealizations of the courtly world. Whores and panderers seem to suggest, for Aretino, the image of literature itself. All of his work is dominated by a vision of the world as a market, in which the relations between the sexes show their cynical tie with the brutal reality of money. At bottom, there circulates the bitter feeling of a human being, whether man or woman, who is dominated by economic and sexual appetite, overpowered not so much by passions (it is not appropriate here to speak of love) as by primordial instincts, within a corrupt, compromised, and violent social context. It is a world in which there is no room for authentic human relations, and it is very far from the ideal images of love and women popularized by lyric poetry, treatises, and courtly literature. The dialogues, characterized by teeming language with a strong theatrical cast, proceed through rapid scenes and images, with a frantic style full of jokes, Latinisms, dialect, and metaphors: ‘‘io favello a la improvvisa,’’ Aretino would have us believe, ‘‘non stiracchio con gli argani le cose che io dico in un soffio’’ (I speak off-the-cuff and I do not dilute the things I say on the spur of the moment) (Dialogo, Day I). In reality, the Ragionamenti had a long and slow gestation (the author was already working on them in 1530). Although achieving a felicitous immediacy and expressive spontaneity, they reveal on the one hand a close confrontation with certain models of the ancient and modern tradition and on the other hand an elegant virtuosity, the fruit of the subtle work of refining with which Aretino exhibited the skill of a cultured and successful writer. DANIELE VIANELLO 79

PIETRO ARETINO Editions First Edition Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia, Paris (but Venice): probably Francesco Marcolini, 1534; and Dialogo nel quale la Nanna [...] insegna a la Pippa sua figliuola, Turin (but Venice): Francesco Marcolini, 1536.

Critical Editions Sei giornate. Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (1534), Dialogo nel quale la Nanna insegna a la Pippa (1536), edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Bari: Laterza, 1969. Opere di Folengo, Aretino, Doni, edited by Carlo Cordie´, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1976. Ragionamento. Dialogo, edited by Paolo Procaccioli, Introduction by Nino Borsellino, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Ragionamento. Dialogo, edited by Carla Forno, Introduction by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988. Sei giornate, edited by Angelo Romano, Milan: Mursia, 1991.

Translation Aretino’s Dialogues, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, New York: Stein & Day, 1972.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Il ‘Ragionamento’ e il ‘Dialogo’: le ambizioni dell’Aretino alla totalita` della let-

teratura,’’ in Parodia e pensiero: Giordano Bruno, Milan: Greco & Greco, 1997. Bragantini, Renzo, ‘‘Il testo allo specchio deformante: Petrarca e Bembo in un passo di Aretino,’’ Filologia e critica, 10: 2–3(1985), 295–306. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Il teatro della Nanna,’’ in Le voci dell’istrione. Pietro Aretino e la dissoluzione del teatro, Naples: Liguori, 1977. ´ ducation e´rotique. Pietro Aretino ‘‘RagioFischer, Carolin, E namenti’’ im libertinen Roman Frankreichs, Stuttgart: M&P, 1994. Larivaille, Paul, ‘‘La ‘grande diffe´rence entre les imitateurs et les voleurs’: a` propos de la parodie des amours de Didon et d’Ene´e dans les ‘Ragionamenti’ de l’Are´tin,’’ in Re´e´critures. Commentaires, parodies, variations dans la litte´rature italienne de la Renaissance, vol. 1, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1983. Marini, Quinto, ‘‘Eversione e controriformismo in Pietro Aretino,’’ La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 84 (1980), 501–519. Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘Pietro Aretino rielaboratore di Virgilio,’’ in Spigolature romane e romanesche, Rome: Bulzoni, 1967. Patrizi, Giorgio, ‘‘Il gioco dei generi: Per una lettura delle ‘Sei giornate,’’’ Annali FM, 1 (1979), 65–79. Procaccioli, Paolo, ‘‘Per una lettura del ‘Ragionamento’ e del ‘Dialogo’ di Pietro Aretino,’’ La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 91(1987), 46–65. Procaccioli, Paolo, ‘‘Ragionamento e Dialogo,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le Opere, vol. 2, Dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1993.

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO (1474–1533) Ludovico Ariosto, whose life and work bridged the period of fifteenth-century humanism with that of the vernacular classicism that burgeoned later in the sixteenth century, is a crucial figure in the development of Italian Renaissance literary culture. An accomplished neo-Latin poet whose earliest letter requested books on neo-Platonism from the prominent Venetian publisher Aldus Manutius (1498), Ariosto used his considerable knowledge of classical literature, primarily Roman, to forge a literary corpus that blended classical models with medieval ones to create an impressive example of vernacular classicism. At the same time, he succeeded in turning his vernacular literary language, a variant of Tuscan inflected with his Ferrarese dialect, into a dazzling linguistic vehicle that later 80

critics would claim rivaled even the classical languages. No less than his contemporary Michelangelo Buonarroti, Ariosto took the literary revival of antiquity to new heights. Accordingly, Ariosto can be seen as a forerunner of Miguel de Cervantes and other vernacular prose artists whose critical recapitulations of medieval chivalric fiction under the influence of classical works and classicizing authors (like Ariosto) eventually led to the birth of the novel. For readers of today accustomed to the conventions and constraints of modern fiction, Ariosto sounds strangely familiar and modern, even postmodern. By most reckonings, Ariosto achieved a degree of popularity greater than any other writer in Europe in the sixteenth century. His fame derives

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO primarily from his narrative poem in octave stanzas, Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando), which he published in three versions over the course of his life in 1516, 1521, and in the definitive third edition of 1532. In the poem, Ariosto used Charlemagne’s war against the Saracens as a backdrop to explore typical Renaissance themes such as love, madness, and fidelity, with an elaborate subplot that dramatizes how these themes affected the dynastic fortunes of his patrons in the house of Este, the ducal rulers of Ariosto’s hometown, Ferrara, in northern Italy. The poem had come out in over 100 editions by 1600, so great was its appeal to readers of the time. Almost immediately upon its publication in the definitive third edition in 1532, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso became an important site, frequently a hotly contested one, of critical investigation, and it has remained such throughout most of the history of its reception. It was the first poem in the European literary tradition to sustain an ongoing debate about its canonicity. Early critics such as Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio and his prote´ge´ Giovanni Battista Pigna were interested in legitimating Ariosto’s poem through a variety of strategies, including affiliating it to canonical works of antiquity, many of which had originally influenced Ariosto’s shaping of the Orlando Furioso’s narrative. Legitimating the Orlando Furioso in this way also contributed to the ongoing process in the cinquecento of arguing for the value of the vernacular language as an adequate linguistic vehicle for epic and other examples of high literature. Thus, as the poem increased in canonical stature, so did the vernacular language in which it was written. It is significant that as Ariosto revised his poem in preparation for its second edition in 1521, he worked to bring it more in line with the linguistic precepts of Pietro Bembo’s standardization of Italian, fully spelled out in Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (Prose Writings about the Vernacular Language, 1525), the gist of which Ariosto would have learned during Bembo’s extended sojourns in Ferrara between 1497 and 1504. In fact, Bembo most likely began drafting this work that would make a case for the elevated status of the vernacular as early as 1501–1502, years when he was closely associated with Ariosto and other Ferrarese writers. The canonization of the Orlando Furioso as a new kind of vernacular classic was simultaneously a victory for the Italian language and for Ariosto’s hometown of Ferrara (Daniel Javitch, Proclaiming a Classic, 1991). By the middle of the cinquecento, Ariosto was readily referred to as the Ferrarese

Homer and often represented in classical profile wearing the laurel crown, a symbolic marker that his own poetic excellence had matched that of the classical touchstones. Even in early descriptions of the poet’s life, biographers emphasized what they perceived to be a Virgilian track to his career in his progress from smaller poetic genres to his larger poem. A crucial point of contention in these first debates on the Orlando Furioso’s status as a vernacular classic was the poem’s narrative design, specifically the extent to which it resembled a classical epic and/or a medieval romance. Bembo had promoted Petrarch and Boccaccio as models for Italian lyric and prose, respectively, but there was no idealized equivalent for narrative poetry in the vernacular. The example of Dante’s poem was too controversial and idiosyncratic, with its divine subject that was rather distant from the more civic goals of the humanists, to serve as a model for narrative poetry in the cinquecento. As early as the 1540s, Ariosto’s poem was positioned to satisfy the need for such an Italian model. It was in these same years that Italian critical discourse was being shaped by the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica, whose strictures of a unified narrative design were contradicted by Ariosto’s poem. Accordingly, the Orlando Furioso landed at the center of an acrimonious debate between neoclassical Aristotelians who found Ariosto’s narrative wanting in epic features and other critical readers who sought to justify the romance qualities of its narrative design. The primary criticism against the poem was that its plot focused on many actions of numerous characters rather than a single unifying action of one heroic character. In addition, many Aristotelians interpreted the intermittent interventions of the narrator into the narrative as a breach of epic decorum. Finally, the poem lacked verisimilitude. Strategies to defend the Orlando Furioso against these criticisms varied. Some readers emphasized those features of the poem that did indeed recall classical epic, for example, its many allusions to Virgil’s Aeneid and the occasional allusion to Homeric poetry. Ariosto’s recycling of classical similes from Virgil and Homer was a case in point. In this way, these classicizing critics countered that the Orlando Furioso, despite appearances to the contrary, was much more epic than the untutored reader might recognize. On the other hand, a critic like Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio pointed out that the poem’s vast interlaced narrative recalled instead the genre of medieval romance in his 81

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi (Essay on the Composition of Romances, 1554). An intriguing tactic adopted by Ludovico Dolce, among others, was to affiliate the Orlando Furioso with those poems of antiquity that were themselves somewhat less than faithful to the canonical standards of classical epic narrative. Ovid’s Metamorphoses played an important role in this regard. This strategy proved so successful that subsequent Italian translators of Ovid’s poem frequently created the impression in their renderings that the Latin work was a romance-epic poem akin to Ariosto’s. Moreover, Venetian publishers packaged these Italianized classics in editions that in many ways looked like the Orlando Furioso in order to capitalize on Ariosto’s poem’s critical fortune. This proved a successful marketing ploy, for readers had begun to expect that literary narratives, even classical ones, should conform to the parameters of Ariosto’s poem. By the second half of the sixteenth century, the Orlando Furioso had become the touchstone of narrative art. In the end, although critics could not always agree on what to call it—epic, romance, romanceepic—and whether or not it should be canonized a vernacular classic, Orlando Furioso’s popularity surged among general readers. Translated into all the major European languages (including Latin) as well as dialects of Italian, Ariosto’s poem continued to experience unprecedented success as a best seller into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There is, however, less foundational and lasting criticism of the poem from this period. Moving forward in time, the rise of interest in the modern novel that the Orlando Furioso had helped to create eventually led to a marked decrease in its popularity among readers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But somewhat ironically, Ariosto’s poem experienced a resurgence in critical attention as general readers lost their interest in it. From the mid-nineteenth century on, the poem regained its position in Italian literary criticism as one of the preeminent sites of critical interrogation (along with Dante’s Comedia) to which critics have continued to turn in their work. The sweeping panorama of critical approaches over approximately the last century and a half devoted to the Orlando Furioso has been impressive in its variety. This work has included philological research; studies in textual criticism and textual bibliography; stylistic, metrical, and linguistic research; source criticism; studies of Ariosto’s ties to the chivalric tradition; examinations of the links between Ariosto and the new learning of 82

the humanists; the poet’s relationship with his patrons, the Este, their court, and with Ferrarese culture in general; the philosophical aesthetic interpretations of Benedetto Croce and his followers; investigations into Ferrarese material culture; narratological studies and other structuralist projects; the presence of the figurative arts and music in the Orlando Furioso and its impact on subsequent artists and composers; gender and sexuality in Ariosto’s work; and the study of individual characters in the poem, among many other topics. Despite the marginalization of Ferrara as a case for study when compared to the scholarly dialogues that thrive around Florence, Rome, and Venice (even though Ferrara’s peripheral status could be challenged), Ariosto and the Orlando Furioso have consistently been a focus for the investigations of literary and cultural historians. In fact, Ariosto’s presence in the Ferrarese dossier has done more than any other single figure to attract attention to Ferrara and Ferrarese culture. One of the fields that led the way in reestablishing the poem’s critical preeminence in the late nineteenth century was source criticism, Quellenforschung, and its leading practitioner in Ariosto studies was Pio Rajna. Rajna dedicated his research to amassing and interpreting the sources that Ariosto brought together in the composition of his poem. With some disdain for prior critics, who in his opinion overestimated the value of Ariosto’s classical allusions, Rajna used his incomparable knowledge of medieval Franco-Italian literary culture to demonstrate the importance of the medieval narrative traditions underlying the Orlando Furioso. Rajna’s special contribution was to note that the poem that Ariosto took as his point of departure, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Innamoramento di Orlando (Roland in Love, 1483, 1495), was itself a sophisticated blend of Arthurian romance, Carolingian epic, and classical culture, knowledge of which was deepening with the new learning of successive generations of humanists. With Rajna’s investigations in the 1870s and for several decades following, a much more complex picture emerged of Ariostan poetics and literary influence in the Ferrarese cultural tradition moving from Boiardo to Ariosto. Rajna’s work, reprinted in 1975, one century after it was first published, remains fundamental today. A much more recent trend in Ariosto studies, almost at the opposite end of the chronological span opened by the focus on source criticism that marked the beginning of the revival of critical interest in the poem, has been in the field of gender

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO studies. Modern critics have undertaken comprehensive studies on the relationship between gender and genre in the Orlando Furioso, exploring specifically the foundational role that Ariosto’s poem played in the sixteenth-century debate on the status of women, the querelle des femmes (Durling, Finucci, McLucas, Shemek). An important voice in the 1980s that set the tone for subsequent readings of the Orlando Furioso was Albert Russell Ascoli’s Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony (1987). Whereas previous generations of critics under the sway of the philosophical aesthetics of Benedetto Croce read the Orlando Furioso as a poem of perfection and cosmic harmony, Ascoli made a convincing case for the poem’s artful lack of harmony. His investigation into the poet’s engagement with political, cultural, and religious crises of various types has become a necessary lens through which subsequent critics have come to consider the poem. The Orlando Furioso that emerged from Ascoli’s reading and from the interpretations of others in its wake in the 1990s and in the new millennium often reflects the postmodern tendency to distrust objectivity and authority, to resist moral and ideological absolutes. The vast array of modern responses to Ariosto’s major poem does not yet include a critical voice that places Ariosto on the bookshelf of the general reader, though Italo Calvino’s playfully serious novel Il cavaliere inesistente (1959) is probably the work that comes closest to doing so. Calvino, moreover, edited an abridged version of the poem for Italian students in 1970, which made it more accessible to scholastic readers than it had been before. Several studies of the 1980s and 1990s made a strong case for the Orlando Furioso’s importance as a prototype for the modern novel (Hart, Javitch, Zatti), a venue of research that should be explored in more detail. Along these lines, David Quint provided a useful examination of the links between Cervantes and Ariosto in Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times (2005). Ariosto’s major narrative deserves the attention it has garnered over the centuries, but he composed other significant works, which inevitably came to be considered minor in comparison to the magnitude and popularity of the Orlando Furioso. These minor works also helped to establish the poet’s place in cinquecento literary history. Moreover, they shed light on the cultural traditions of Estense Ferrara during his lifetime. The variety of his secondary writings is impressive, as is their quality. In some cases, reading the minor works in relation to the Orlando Furioso offers insights into Ariosto’s

epic poem and the culture that produced it, but these works, when read as independent pieces, more than hold their own. They include lyric poetry in Italian and Latin composed over the course of most of his adult life (1493–1528); five highly influential comedies written between 1508 and 1529 for the stage in Ferrara and Rome; Satire (Satires, 1517–1525); seven autobiographical epistolary poems in Dantesque terza rima that document the poet’s critical attitude toward his culture, family, patrons, and more; the Cinque Canti (Five Cantos, 1518–1519, 1526), a substantial fragment of five cantos in octave stanzas which Ariosto may have intended to add to the end of the Orlando Furioso; one striking example of a satirical prose piece, the Erbolato (The Herbal Remedy, ca. 1525–1530); and over 200 letters composed between 1498 and 1532. Ariosto left behind an authenticated corpus of 98 lyric poems in Italian and 71 in Latin composed over the course of his lifetime. Many of the poems Ariosto wrote when he was a young man reveal his proximity to momentous events impinging on Ferrarese history in the 1490s and the first decade of the 1500s. He wrote, for example, of the Duchess Eleonora’s death in 1493 in a capitolo in Italian (Lirica 59), of Alfonso’s marriage in 1502 to Lucrezia Borgia in a lengthy epithalamium in Latin hexameters (Lirica 217), and of the failed conspiracy in 1506 against Duke Alfonso and Cardinal Ippolito by their brothers Ferrante and Giulio in a pastoral poem in Italian (Lirica 129). In 1495, the young poet delivered the inaugural oration for the academic year at the University of Ferrara in elegant Latin verse, De laudibus philosophiae (In Praise of Philosophy). Though there is no indication that Ariosto intended his Latin poetry to be published as a separate volume, Pigna assembled it into a collection that he brought to light in 1553. There is, however, no standard edition of these poems, nor has there been much serious scholarship devoted to them, Giosue` Carducci’s fine study notwithstanding. In I romanzi (1554), Pigna reported that even Pietro Bembo, the sternest critic, praised the author’s latinity, urging him to write in the classical language over Italian. The poetry reveals a keen awareness of the Latin lyric tradition with imitations of Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, and Ovid, and even some knowledge of Greek poets from the Greek Anthology, whom Ariosto knew in Latin translation. An interesting feature of the collected Latin lyrics is the collocation of subsequent versions of a given poem. We can observe the author’s attempt at perfecting the latinity of ‘‘Ad Philiroe¨m’’ (Lirica 180) and numerous epitaphs 83

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO (194, 227), including his own (226). He experimented with classical meters, diction, and style, aspects of which reappear in his Italian Rime and in his narrative poetry. The aging poet had a Latin couplet inscribed over the door of his new home built in 1527 on Via Mirasole (now Via Ariosto) in the ‘‘Herculean addition,’’ the masterpiece of urban planning that doubled the size of medieval Ferrara to create what Jacob Burckhardt called Europe’s first modern city: ‘‘It may be small but it suits me; it’s not offensive or ugly; and I paid for it with my own money’’ (Lirica 232). Published posthumously in 1546, his Italian lyric poems, for their part, bear the imprint of the day’s reigning fad, Petrarchism. The poems show the heavy influence of Petrarch’s poetry in style and substance with canzoni, sonnets, madrigals, and several other subgenres of lyric making up their number. But Ariosto’s response to Petrarchan poetry was hardly the work of a poetaster; he imbued his imitations with details that link them to his narrative poem, suggesting that his lyrics were meant to be seen in a much broader context than one might imagine, as if his lyrics were related to his narrative in the way that drawings and sketches of a master painter are related to larger artistic projects in oil or fresco. If this status relegates the vernacular lyrics to the category of the minor, there are still many good poems worthy of attention. Several Italian critics, notably Claudio Vela continuing the research of Cesare Bozzetti, have worked to establish a new and improved text of Ariosto’s Rime, but there has been little attention given to these poems outside of Italy. Ariosto’s earliest theatrical works, written in 1508 and 1509 for carnival celebrations in Ferrara, established his reputation as a literary figure in the circle of the Estense court. La Cassaria (The Coffer, 1508) and I Suppositi (The Pretenders, 1509) were examples of the new style of comedy dear to humanists, commedia erudita (intellectual vernacular comedy), modeled on the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus but adapted to contemporary Italian life. The themes of love, mistaken identity, and incompetent public officials characterize these two early plays. By the time Ariosto produced his later play, Il Negromante (The Necromancer, 1529), written in 1520, he had become head of the revived ducal theater and oversaw the stage design of artists like the Dossi brothers. Il Negromante deals with the quintessential Renaissance theme of folly, while La Lena (Lena, or the Procuress, 1528), generally recognized as his best comedy, focuses on another recurrent topic of interest to early 84

modern Italian writers, moral corruption. Ariosto never finished his fifth work, I Studenti (The Students, 1518–1519), but both his brother and his son composed completed versions of it after his death. The themes of folly and corruption are also central to Ariosto’s Satire, begun in Ferrara in the lull after the publication of the Orlando Furioso’s first edition and completed at the end of his stint in the Garfagnana, where he served as an official Estense commissioner from 1522 to 1525. These epistolary poems are in the tradition of the ancient Roman literary genre of the same name, a genre marked by the freedom it gives the poet to criticize his contemporaries. Ariosto took full advantage of the satire’s conventions to lambaste the ambitions and foibles of his peers in general, with many individuals in particular skewered by his witty barbs. Traditional readings of the satires have often assumed that their numerous autobiographical details provide accurate and ‘‘true’’ glosses on the poet’s life. In contrast, more recent interpretations appreciate the literary nature of these poetic exercises, in which the author created his own narrating voice, a voice owing much to classical Roman precedents, especially Horace, and to Dante, whose terza rima provided the metrical framework for Ariosto. The sixth satire, composed for Bembo between 1524 and 1525, gives a glimpse into Ariosto’s mature position on humanism and education. The poet asked his friend’s help in locating a tutor of Greek for his son, Virginio, studying in Padua at the time. In this satire Ariosto raised questions about the potential moral shortcomings of humanistic learning, having moved far beyond his youthful enthusiasm for classical knowledge for its own sake. At some point during these later years (between 1525 and 1530), he carried the criticism of humanism further in his Erbolato, a prose parody of the work of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and other neo-Platonists. The Erbolato is composed in the form of a speech delivered by Master Antonio Faventino. Faventino, an amalgam of several identifiable contemporaries of Ariosto, is portrayed hawking a miraculous medicinal potion in the town square. In the venerable tradition of the charlatan or quack doctor he claimed that his herbal medicine—the ‘‘erbolato’’ that gives the work its title—is a universal remedy for any illness. His pseudo-philosophical description of the importance of medicine for humankind, in part based on the proem to book 7 of Pliny’s Natural History, eventually becomes a theatrical sales pitch for his elixir, recalling Il Negromante. As the rhetoric modulates from a pastiche of Pliny

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO and neo-Platonic oratory to the verbal playfulness of street theater, we witness Ariosto’s searing criticism of the academy and its relation to the marketplace. The piece becomes nothing less than a meditation on the perennial question of who owns knowledge. That vague sociological construct, the marketplace of ideas, gives way to the actual market stall from which Faventino tries to sell his brain child. This short prose work provides a good example of how Ariosto employed the classics in an ironic critique of his own contemporary culture. He might have struck a pose of Horatian disdain for all the hoopla of courtly life (Satire 3.40–44), but Ariosto remained very aware of his surroundings, and he disapproved of much of what he saw. In the same spirit and also in the latter decade of his life, Ariosto rewrote the Cinque Canti, originally composed in 1518–1519 and resumed in 1526, most likely with an eye to adding them to the narrative of the Orlando Furioso. The cantos tell the grim story of the disintegration of Charlemagne’s army, indeed of the chivalric world as a whole. The narrative foregrounds the themes of evil, deceit, and betrayal in a martial setting that is radically different from the world depicted in the Orlando Furioso, so different, in fact, as to prompt a new wave of interpretive debate over the position of the cantos in Ariosto’s corpus. David Quint argued forcefully that the Cinque Canti were meant to be a freestanding work, whereas others, such as Sergio Zatti and Alberto Casadei, argued that the five cantos are fragments the poet could not insert into his larger narrative of the Orlando Furioso. We have 213 letters by Ariosto. The majority of them deal with issues arising from his position as the local representative of the Este family in the Garfagnana region of northern Tuscany from 1522 to 1525. In these letters we sense the author’s fatigue from dealing with the rough inhabitants of the mountainous outpost. As local magistrate of the Estense government, Ariosto was put in the unfamiliar position of serving as a provincial representative of the ruling power. His letters are often merely reports or requests, but in some of them one detects the critical and ironic voice of the poet, on the verge of commenting on the justice of whatever circumstance he must relay to his ducal lords. The remaining letters, approximately 25, are fascinating documents of Ariosto’s intellectual development, shedding light on the composition and production of Orlando Furioso and his other works, especially the comedies. The poet had to make arrangements for the production of his works, for example, requesting permission to have

paper shipped across state lines from the Veneto into the Estense territories. These artistic letters, while not nearly as rich as the collection of lettere poetiche left by Ariosto’s great successor, Torquato Tasso, are worthy of more attention than they have heretofore received. Ariosto’s youthful minor works no less than the first edition of the Orlando Furioso in 1516 reveal a probing authorial mind quickened by the new learning of the humanists. But by contrast the later works, the Lena, Erbolato, Satire (especially the sixth), Cinque Canti, and the final additions to the definitive Orlando Furioso of 1532, bespeak a more mature, critical, darker interpretation of the human condition, one that critiques humanism for its failed promises. After enduring Ferrara’s political marginalization by the various powers of the Italian peninsula in the opening decades of the sixteenth century and after witnessing the political machinations in Europe of the 1520s, the sack of Rome in 1527 among them, how could the humanist poet not be skeptical of the march of progress promised by the revival of antiquity? The vernacular humanism inaugurated by Ariosto would have to deal with this problem in the century that followed.

Biography Born in Reggio Emilia on 8 September 1474, Ariosto grew up in Ferrara, where his father, Count Niccolo` Ariosto, served the Este family. His mother, Daria, was the daughter of a scholar, Gabriele Malaguzzi. Envisioning for him the career of a civil servant, his father forced him to study law, which he did with reluctance in the early 1490s. After his father’s death in 1500, Ariosto began to serve Cardinal Ippolito d’Este as a diplomatic and administrative aide. Representing Ferrarese interests during the papacies of Julius II and Leo X, he undertook numerous missions to Rome in the first two decades of the 1500s. After a break with Ippolito for refusing to follow him to Hungary in 1517, Ariosto was welcomed as a courtier by the cardinal’s older brother, Alfonso I, who had assumed the leadership of Ferrara when Ercole I died in 1505. The poet published Orlando Furioso in 1516, then revised it in 1521 to bring it in line with the linguistic strictures of Pietro Bembo. Shortly thereafter, Alfonso appointed him the local Estense official in the province of Garfagnana between Tuscany and Romagna from 1522 to 1525. Upon returning to Ferrara, he supervised the ducal theater. In 1528 he produced La Lena for the festivities surrounding the wedding of Ercole II and Rene´e de France. In 85

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO 1528, Ariosto wed Alessandra Benucci, but secretly, so as not to lose his ecclesiastical benefices. That same year he accompanied Duke Alfonso in a ceremonial encounter with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V when he passed through Ferrarese territory near Modena. In 1531, Alfonso d’Avalos, a high-ranking soldier in Charles’s army, awarded the poet an annual pension of 100 ducats. The definitive edition of the Orlando Furioso came out in 1532 with four new episodes that increased the poem’s length by 5,600 lines, from 40 to 46 cantos. Ariosto died in Ferrara on 6 July 1533. DENNIS LOONEY See also: Epic Selected Works Lyric Poems ‘‘Rime,’’ ca. 1493–1525; as Le Rime di M. Lodovico Ariosto, edited by Iacopo Coppa Modanese, 1546; as Lirica, edited by Giuseppe Fatini, 1924. ‘‘Carmina,’’ ca. 1494–1528; Carminum Lib. Quatuor, edited by Giovanni Battista Pigna, 1553; as Carmina, edited and translated into Italian by Ezio Bolaffi, 1938. ‘‘Le Satire,’’ 1517–1525; as The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto: A Renaissance Autobiography, translated by Peter DeSa Wiggins, 1976; as The Satires, translated by Rodolf B. Gottfried, 1977.

Plays La Cassaria, 1508; as The Coffer, translated by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 1975. I Suppositi, 1509; as The Pretenders, translated by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 1975. I Studenti, ca. 1518–1519; as The Students, translated by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 1975. La Lena, 1528; as Lena, translated by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 1975. Il Negromante, 1529; as The Necromancer, translated by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 1975.

Narrative Poems ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ 1516, 1521, 1532; as Orlando Furioso, translated in prose stanzas by Allan Gilbert, 1954; as The Frenzy of Orlando, translated in verse by Barbara Reynolds, 1975; as Orlando Furioso, translated in prose by Guido Waldman, 1983. ‘‘Cinque Canti,’’ ca. 1518–1519; 1526; as Five Cantos, translated by Leslie Z. Morgan, 1990; as Cinque Canti: Five Cantos, translated by Alexander Sheers and David Quint, 1996.

Prose Lettere, 1498–1532; in Tutte le opere di Ludovico Ariosto, edited by Cesare Segre, vol. 3, 1984. Erbolato, ca. 1525–1530; as Herbolato di M. Lodovico Ariosto, edited by Iacopo Coppa Modanese, 1545; as Erbolato in Tutte le opere di Ludovico Ariosto, edited by Cesare Segre, vol. 3, 1984.

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Further Reading Agnelli, Giuseppe, and Giuseppe Ravegnani, Annali delle edizioni ariostee, 2 vols., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1933. Ascoli, Albert Russell, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Beecher, Donald, Massimo Ciavolella, and Roberto Fedi (editors), Ariosto Today: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by S. G. C. Middlemore, London: Penguin, 1990. Calvino, Italo (editor), ‘‘Orlando Furioso’’ di Ludovico Ariosto. Raccontato da Italo Calvino, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Carducci, Giosue`, La gioventu´ di Ludovico Ariosto e le sue poesie latine, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1881. Casadei, Alberto, ‘‘Alcune considerazioni sui Cinque canti,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 165(1988), 161–179. Catalano, Michele, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, 2 vols., Geneva: Olschki, 1930–1931. Durling, Robert M., The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Finucci, Valeria, The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Giraldi Cinzio, Giovanni Battista, Discorso dei romanzi, edited by Laura Benedetti, Giuseppe Monorchio, and Enrico Musacchio, Bologna: Millennium, 1999. Hart, Thomas R., Cervantes and Ariosto: Renewing Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Looney, Dennis, and Deanna Shemek (editors), Phaethon’s Children: The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara, Tempe, AZ: MRTS, 2005. McLucas, John C., ‘‘Amazon, Sorceress, and Queen: Women and War in the Aristocratic Literature of Sixteenth-Century Italy,’’ The Italianist, 8(1988), 33–55. Mori, Barbara, ‘‘Le vite ariostesche del Fornari, Pigna e Garofalo,’’ Schifanoia, 17–18(1997), 135–178. Pigna, Giovanni Battista, ‘‘Messer Giovambattista Pigna a Messer Giovambattista Giraldi,’’ in G. B. Giraldi Cinzio, Scritti critici, edited by Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti, Milan: Marzorati, 1973. Pigna, Giovanni Battista, I romanzi, Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1554. Quint, David, Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of ‘‘Don Quixote,’’ Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Quint, David, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Ludovico Ariosto, Cinque Canti: Five Cantos, translated by Alexander Sheers and David Quint, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Rajna, Pio, Le fonti del’’’Orlando Furioso’’ (1876), Florence: Sansoni, 1975. Shemek, Deanna, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Vela, Claudio, ‘‘Gli studi di Cesare Bozzetti sulle rime di Ariosto,’’ in Fra satire e rime ariostesche, edited by Claudia Berra, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000.

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO Zatti, Sergio, L’ombra del Tasso: Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1996; as The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso, edited by Dennis Looney, translated by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

CINQUE CANTI, CA. 1518–1519; 1526 Fragmentary Poem by Ludovico Ariosto

The Cinque Canti or Five Cantos is a substantial fragment in octave stanzas, which Ariosto may have intended to add to the Orlando Furioso. Most critics interpret the work as an addition to Ariosto’s major poem, but a growing minority have argued for its status as a freestanding literary work (Beer, Quint), a position held by some sixteenthcentury readers (Casadei). In a letter of 15 October 1519, Ariosto probably referred to the material of the Cinque Canti when he reported to Mario Equicola, the secretary of Isabella d’Este at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, that he had composed some extra episodes to add to the first edition of the poem that had been published in 1516. This specific addition, however, was not published in the poet’s lifetime. The manuscript of the fragmentary work was carefully guarded and eventually seen through the press by his son, Virginio. First printed in 1545 by the heirs of Aldus Manutius in Venice as an appendix to the Orlando Furioso, the work contains five cantos of approximately 4,400 lines of verse. The date of his letter to Equicola as well as several internal textual references in the Cinque Canti strongly suggest that Ariosto completed the bulk of the work between 1518 and 1519; there are other indicators that he was revising the work into the middle of the 1520s. The continuation resumes the action at the end of the Orlando Furioso after the marriage of Bradamante and Ruggiero, the union that founded the Este family. The cantos relate the story of the disintegration of Charlemagne’s army, indeed of the chivalric

world as a whole, as Sergio Zatti put it so aptly in his study of the Cinque Canti (‘‘La frantumazione del mondo cavalleresco,’’ 1996). The agent of the evil enchantress Alcina is none other than Ganelon, chief villain in the Carolingian tradition who betrayed Roland/Orlando at Roncevaux. In the Cinque Canti, Ganelon agitates effectively to create dissension among Charlemagne’s soldiers (cantos 1–2). Rinaldo rebels against his lord as the soldiers squabble over a golden shield to be awarded to the most valiant paladin (canto 3). In a subsequent episode that takes its inspiration from a passage in Lucian’s True History (1.30ff), a whale under the demonic control of Alcina swallows Ruggiero (canto 4). Inside the beast, the hero encounters another Christian warrior, Astolfo, who frets about having been a wayward soul. The narrator leaves the heroes inside the whale to return to the situation of Charlemagne, who is preparing for a massive battle in and around Prague. Rinaldo and Orlando duel, and the final canto breaks off with Charlemagne falling precipitously into the Moldau River, to be saved, barely in the nick of time, by his horse (canto 5). The ideology that animates the work is articulated very clearly in the hour of the Christian leader’s need: ‘‘Carlo ne l’acqua giu´ dal ponte cade, / e non e` chi si fermi a darli aiuto; / ... che poco conto d’altri ivi e` tenuto: / quivi la cortesia, la caritade, / amor, rispetto, beneficio avuto, / o s’altro si puo` dire, e` tutto messo / da parte, e sol ciascun pensa a se stesso’’ ([Charlemagne] falls into the water below the bridge, and there is no one who stops to give him help . . . there is little concern for others there: there courtesy, charity, love, respect, gratitude for favors received in the past, or anything else one can say is put aside, and each one thinks only about himself; 5.92). As David Quint argued in the introduction to his translation, this is a very different world from that depicted in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The focus here is on the darker side of internecine politics and intra-Christian conflict, in a martial landscape that owes much to the poetry of civil war depicted in Lucan’s Pharsalia, a Roman epic from the first century AD on Julius Caesar’s machinations that contributed to the fall of the Roman Republic. DENNIS LOONEY Editions First edition: Cinque canti, Venice: in casa de’ figliuoli di Aldo [Aldus Manutius], 1545. Critical editions: in Opere minori, edited by Cesare Segre, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1954; Cinque canti di un nuovo libro di M. Lodovico Ariosto, edited by Luigi

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LUDOVICO ARIOSTO Firpo, Turin: UTET, 1963; Cinque canti, edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Turin: Einaudi, 1977; Orlando Furioso e Cinque Canti, edited by Remo Ceserani and Sergio Zatti, vol. 2, Turin: UTET, 1997. Translations: as Five Cantos, translated with afterword by Leslie Z. Morgan, New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1992; as Cinque Canti: Five Cantos, translated by Alexander Sheers and David Quint, introduction by David Quint, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996.

Further Reading Beer, Marina, Romanzi di cavalleria. Il ‘‘Furioso’’ e il romanzo italiano del primo cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Casadei, Alberto, ‘‘Alcune considerazioni sui Cinque canti,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 165(1988), 161–179. Casadei, Alberto, ‘‘I Cinque canti o l’ultima eredita` di Boiardo,’’ Italianistica, 21(1992), 739–748. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Appunti sui Cinque Canti e sugli studi ariosteschi,’’ in Studi e problemi di critica testuale, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1961. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Per la data dei Cinque Canti,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 137(1960), 1–40. Larosa, Stella, Poesia e cronologia nei ‘‘Cinque canti.’’ Una nuova ipotesi, Rende (Cosenza): Centro editoriale e librario, University of Calabria, 2001. Quint, David, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Ludovico Ariosto, Cinque Canti: Five Cantos, translated by Alexander Sheers and David Quint, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Appunti sulle fonti dei Cinque canti’’ and ‘‘Studi sui Cinque Canti,’’ in Esperienze ariostesche, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1966. Zatti, Sergio, ‘‘La frantumazione del mondo cavalleresco: i Cinque Canti dell’Ariosto,’’ in L’ombra del Tasso: Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1996.

COMEDIES Plays by Ludovico Ariosto

On 18 March 1532, Ariosto posted a copy of four comedies to the Duke of Mantua, Federico Gonzaga, with an accompanying letter to his secretary, Giangiacomo Calandra, in which the Ferrarese poet-playwright explained that he was sending all the comedies he had written up to that point. The plays he sent included: La Cassaria (The 88

Coffer), I Suppositi (The Pretenders), Il Negromante (The Necromancer), and La Lena (Lena, or The Procuress). In the letter he made reference to a fifth incomplete comedy, which came to be called I Studenti (The Students) and, in a later continuation by Ariosto’s brother, Gabriele, was renamed La Scolastica (The Scholastics). Virginio, the poet’s son, also published a posthumous continuation of this fifth play, called L’imperfetta (The Imperfect Woman). These five comedies, two of which, La Cassaria and I Suppositi, Ariosto rewrote in verse after having first composed and produced them in prose, and a third, Il Negromante, was rewritten in an expanded version, constitute his theatrical corpus. La Cassaria and I Suppositi were composed as part of the celebrations for carnival in 1508 and 1509, respectively. I Suppositi was produced again in 1519 in Rome for Pope Leo X, who was so enthralled with Ariosto’s comedy that he encouraged him to complete another one as soon as possible. The playwright quickly complied with Il Negromante, which may have incurred papal displeasure for its irreverent comments on indulgences and was not produced until 1529 in Ferrara. For his later plays, beginning with Il Negromante, Ariosto depended on an unrhymed hendecasyllabic verse line that sounds a bit more formal than standard prose. In the last years of his life, Ariosto became the supervisor of the revived ducal theater, producing plays that included several revivals of his earlier comedies and a new work, Lena, in 1528, restaged the following year with additional scenes. He also acted in plays, designed sets, and even oversaw the construction of a permanent stage in the palace, which burned down shortly before the author’s death in 1533. Ariosto composed his plays around themes typical in early cinquecento comedy, such as human passion, frustrated desire, folly, fortune, mistaken identity, and moral corruption. The publication history of Ariosto’s dramatic works is complicated, as is often the case with theatrical compositions. The inherent instability of a text created for presentation on the stage combined with the vicious commercialism of early modern printers created circumstances that made it difficult for early textual critics to establish authoritative versions of Ariosto’s comedic works. In the prologue to the second version of La Cassaria, Ariosto lamented the pirated, clandestine editions of the first version of the play. He reported that the play ‘‘data in preda agli importuni et avidi / Stampator fu, li quali laceraronla / E di lei feˆr cio` che lor diede l’animo. / E poi per le botteghe e per li

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO publici / Mercati a chi ne volse la venderono / Per poco prezzo’’ (It became the prey of pesty and greedy printers who tore it apart, doing what they liked with it; they sold it everywhere—in shops and public markets—to whomever would buy it, at bargain prices). We gather more details about the author’s struggle to control his texts from several fascinating letters where he complained about being robbed by both printers and actors. A full discussion of the editorial history of Ariosto’s theatrical texts can be found in Cesare Segre’s critical note to his edition of Ariosto’s Opere minori (1954). The revival of the Roman playwrights Terence and Plautus in northern Italy in the late quattrocento was the most important influence on Ariosto’s drama. The restoration of Latin comedy in Ferrara began in the 1470s and 1480s under the impetus of Ercole I, who was an avid reader of classics in translation. Ercole sponsored events that frequently included recreations of Roman comedies, and Ariosto himself may have performed in Plautus’s Menaechmi at the wedding festivities of Ludovico Sforza and Beatrice d’Este, another of Ercole’s children, in 1491. There is some speculation that Ariosto may have translated or collaborated on translations of Latin comedy and poetry presented on various occasions in the ducal court of Ferrara in the decades around the turn of the century. Ariosto’s early theatrical works, La Cassaria and I Suppositi, were in the vein of the new humanistic commedia erudita, comedy based on Roman models but adapted to contemporary Italian life. These classicizing works contributed significantly to the rebirth of classical comedy in Renaissance Italy. In addition to the influence of Ariosto’s theater on Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena’s Calandra (1513), his work also impressed Niccolo` Machiavelli, who commented at some length on the language and style of I Suppositi in his Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua (Discourse on Language, ca. 1524). Ariosto’s plays had a considerable impact on later Italian comedies, as well as on developments in European theater, especially Elizabethan, Spanish, and French. At the beginning of I Suppositi, Ariosto accounted for some of his artistic choices in an explanatory prologue, noting that he treats his Latin models, Plautus and Terence, as the Roman authors had treated their Greek models: Qui tra l’altre supposizioni el servo per lo libero et el libero per lo servo si suppone. E vi confessa in questa l’Autore avere e Plauto e Terenzio seguitato ... perche´ non solo ne li costumi, ma ne li argumenti ancora de le fabule vuole essere de li antichi e celebrati poeti, a tutta

sua possanza, imitatore; e come essi Menandro et Apollodoro e li altri Greci ne le lor latine comedie seguitoro, egli cosı` ne le sue vulgari e modi e processi de’ latini scrittori schifar non vuole. (In this play, among other things, the servant is substituted for the master and the master for the servant. The author confesses that in this he has followed both Plautus and Terence . . . He has done so because he wants to imitate the celebrated classical poets as much as possible, not only in the form of their plays, but also in the content. And just as they in their Latin plays followed Menander, Apollodorus, and other Greek writers, so he, too, in his vernacular plays is not averse to imitating the methods and procedure of the Latin writers.)

Ariosto’s remarks recall a passage from the opening of Terence’s Andria, familiar to humanistic readers and audiences of his day, in which the Roman playwright explained that he had combined two comedies of Menander into his own. Terence’s image for this combination of sources is contaminatio, the mixing of multiple models through imitation. Ariosto, for his part, did his Roman model one better by combining two plays of two different authors (Louise G. Clubb, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, 1989). But he assured the audience at the end of the prologue that his Roman models ‘‘non l’arebbono a male, e di poetica imitazione, piu´ presto che di furto, li darebbono nome’’ (would not be offended and would call it poetic imitation rather than plagiarism). This bold mixing of sources is characteristic of Ariosto’s artistry in general. By the time he came to write what many critics consider his masterpiece, La Lena, he was not as dependent on Roman comic models and went so far as to emphasize the innovative quality of this late work in its prologue. Finally, one should note that there is a decisive theatrical element in many of the scenes and episodes in Orlando Furioso. In addition, Ariosto’s minor work, the Erbolato, is highly theatrical, bearing many of the characteristics of a dramatic monologue. Although Ariosto worked in the theater only in certain periods of his life, the theater was always alive and well in him. DENNIS LOONEY Editions First Editions La Cassaria: Comedia Nuova titolata Chassaria Composta per Lodovico Ariosto nobile Ferrarese, Ferrara: Mazzocco, 1509 or 1510; Cassaria in versi, as La Cassaria: Comedia di M. Ludovico Ariosto, da lui medesimo riformata, et ridotta in versi, Venice: Giolito, 1546. I Suppositi: Comedia Nuova Composta Per Lodovico Ariosto nobile Ferrarese, Ferrara: Mazzocco, 1509 or 1510;

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LUDOVICO ARIOSTO Suppositi in versi as I Suppositi Comedia di M. Lodovico Ariosto, da lui medesimo riformata, et ridotta in versi, Venice: Giolito, 1551. Il Negromante: Comedia di Messer Lodovico Ariosto, Venice: Bindone e Pasini, 1535. La Lena: Comedia di Messer Lodovico Ariosto, Venice: Marchio Sessa, 1532 or 1533 or 1534. La Scolastica: Comedia di M. Lodovico Ariosto. Novellamente posta in luce. . ., Venice: Griffio, 1547.

Critical Editions Commedie, edited by Michele Catalano, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1933. Opere minori, edited by Cesare Segre, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954. Commedie, edited by Angela Casella, Gabriella Ronchi, and Elena Varasi, vol. 4 of Tutte le opere di Ludovico Ariosto, Milan: Mondadori, 1974.

Translation As The Comedies of Ariosto, translated by Edmond M. Beame and Leonard C. Sbrocchi, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Further Reading Catalano, Michele, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, 2 vols., Geneva: Olschki, 1930–1931. Clubb, Louise George, Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Coluccia, Giuseppe, L’esperienza teatrale di Ludovico Ariosto, Lecce: Manni, 2002. Ferroni, Giulio, Il testo e la scena, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Giannetti, Laura, and Guido Ruggiero, ‘‘Playing the Renaissance,’’ in Five Comedies from the Italian Renaissance, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Marangoni, Marco, In forma di teatro. Elementi teatrali nell ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ Rome: Carocci, 2002.

ORLANDO FURIOSO, 1516; 1521; 1532 Romance-epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto

Ariosto’s literary fame deservedly rests on his narrative poem in octave stanzas, Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando), published in three editions during his lifetime. The first edition came out 90

in 1516 in 40 cantos. Ariosto then revised it for publication in a second edition in 1521, to bring it in line with the linguistic strictures of his friend and fellow humanist, Pietro Bembo. The third and definitive edition of the epic poem was published in 1532 with four new episodes that increased its length by 5,600 lines, from 40 to 46 cantos. Ariosto used Charlemagne’s war against the Saracens as a backdrop to explore typical Renaissance themes such as love, madness, and fidelity, with an elaborate subplot that dramatizes how these themes affect the dynastic fortunes of the house of Este. There are three specific plots that the poet wove in and out of each other over the vast canvas of the poem’s narrative: the ongoing martial struggles between the Christian forces of Charlemagne and the forces of Islam led by Agramante; the story of Orlando’s relentless love and quest for the princess, Angelica, and his eventual madness when he discovers that she has given herself to another man; and the story of the love between Bradamante and Ruggiero, a Muslim who converts to Christianity, whose marriage will be the foundational union that creates the house of Este in Ferrara. The poem concludes with a duel between Ruggiero and Rodomonte, the colleague in arms of Ruggiero in his former life, which dramatically interrupts the wedding festivities of the Estense progenitors. In the poem’s final scene, Ruggiero slays Rodomonte, dispatching his soul to the underworld, Ariosto’s striking literary allusion to Aeneas’s actions at the end of Vergil’s Aeneid that presage the founding of Rome. The fiction pretends that the poet as minstrel or cantastorie recites the poem before his patron, Ippolito d’Este, supposedly a descendent of Bradamante and Ruggiero. This fictitious guise was maintained after Ippolito dismissed Ariosto from his services in 1517 and even after his former patron died in 1520. The minstrel’s voice lends the narrative the air of a medieval romance, while the backdrop of war provides the poem with an appropriately epic setting. As Robert M. Durling has noted, the poet often intervened in the narrative to editorialize on the situation at hand and he frequently spoke in propria persona in the proems that open each canto and at each canto’s conclusion (The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, 1965). The poet registered the Orlando Furioso’s epic pretensions by paraphrasing the beginning and ending verses of the Aeneid at his poem’s start and finish—but the reader who expects to find the poem full of the stuff of epic will be disappointed.

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO The poem’s titular hero, Orlando, who carries much of its epic burden, goes mad in the middle of the narrative and therefore cannot move inexorably toward the completion of his appointed task in the manner of an epic hero (vv. 23–24). The protagonist’s course is characteristic of romance, for he wanders off his literal track, eventually falling into madness. The narrative characteristics of romance defy the straightforward teleology of epic: Deviation, diversion, and digression are typical of its design. And there is at least one notable medieval romance precedent for Orlando’s madness: Chre´tien de Troyes’s Yvain also deviates from the typical behavior of a proper knight. Orlando, however, exists in a netherworld somewhere between the two generic possibilities offered by epic and romance. He sets out on a quest for Angelica like a good knight of medieval romance (9.7), zigzagging along the way. But despite occasional deviations, like the episode of Olimpia (9–11) or Atlante’s castle (12), his application to the quest has an epic seriousness about it. The narrator draws our attention to the heroic expansiveness of Orlando’s search with an unusual classical allusion that likens his search for Angelica to Demeter’s for Persephone (12.1–4). And just before he comes upon the site of Angelica’s betrayal (as he sees it), a simile of Homeric inspiration describes Orlando in heroic terms (23.83). When Orlando finds himself in the pastoral-romance setting at the end of canto 23, whereas the romance knight in him should defer the quest and indulge momentarily in this place of pleasure, the epic misfit goes berserk. Ariosto’s treatment of Orlando as a creature who moves between two genres, two traditions, two kinds of narrative, depended on his immediate predecessor at the Estense court, Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441–1494). Orlando, a traditional figure in medieval Franco-Italian literature, is associated with the chanson de geste, the heroic war poetry of medieval France. In that literary tradition he fights and dies nobly as befits Charlemagne’s most heroic knight. For later Italian writers, however, Boiardo’s treatment of Orlando would be the prism through which prior literary representations of his heroism are refracted. And Boiardo blended the Carolingian stories of war with Arthurian legends full of love and magic to create a paradoxical Orlando who falls madly in love, as caught in his poem’s title, Innamoramento d’Orlando (Roland in Love, 1483, 1495). In such condition he is hardly the stuff of literary heroism. Add to this mix the resurgent classical humanism that was coming into its own in Ferrara, and one can see that Ariosto

had to deal with challenging precedents when he began to sketch his own picture of Orlando. His version recalls the figure of medieval legend and bears some resemblance to Boiardo’s courtly lover, but his Orlando is also a creature of the new classicism. Moreover, Ariosto’s portrait of Orlando was affected by the other traditions that his chronological position required him to hold in the balance. The intervention of medieval romance turned Ariosto’s would-be Aeneas into something more like an imitation of Dido in a compromise of the Vergilian epic model. In other episodes of the poem, similar confrontations occur between romance and epic, often brought about through the imitation of somewhat more marginal classical models like Lucan and Lucian. Ariosto’s complicated and filtered reception of antiquity, especially his understanding of genre, has received much attention in recent criticism (Javitch, Looney, Marinelli, Quint, Zatti). Under the influence of Benedetto Croce, many critics, from approximately the 1920s until the 1980s, read the Orlando Furioso as an ahistorical and timeless text of cosmic harmony, a perfect example of Renaissance classicism. Robert Durling and Eduardo Saccone, notable exceptions, argued for the role of the narrating poet in a more complex picture of poetic irony and truth. Following their lead, critics since the 1980s have been making the case for a different interpretation of the poem, drawing attention to its problematic narrative structure, its threatened thematic coherency, its linguistic polish and lack thereof (Ascoli). Moreover, Ariosto’s engagement with current events does not support the romanticized image of the aloof poet. His poem contains numerous passages, often in the proems to cantos, where he expressed, among many other views, his concern about political and military alliances of the day based in part on his diplomatic experience; his fascination with the increasing knowledge of world geography; his abhorrence for the application of new technology to war machines; and his position on the place of women in Renaissance society (Casadei). The Orlando Furioso is a fantastic poem very much rooted in the real world, as is a substantial fragment in octave stanzas, which Ariosto perhaps meant to add, Cinque Canti, begun in 1518 or 1519 and worked on sporadically until finished around 1526. Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso had become wildly successful by the time the author died in 1533. Print records document that the poem was a best seller in the cinquecento, its popularity lasting well into the next century. The third edition, published 91

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO under Ariosto’s watchful eye over the summer of 1532, came out in an unusually large run of some 3,000 copies. By 1600 well over 100 editions had been published. Often produced to look like classical texts with commentaries and other accompanying paratexts (for example, the life of the poet, lists of classical allusions, historical notes), these editions helped the poem become an important touchstone in debates over narrative poetry, with readers sometimes arguing that Orlando Furioso was equal or even superior to classical narrative poems. This process of the poem’s canonization as an authoritative text would eventually earn it the status of a new kind of classical work, a vernacular classic that helped to grant the Italian language a degree of linguistic nobility. The debate between neo-Aristotelians and their opponents over the Orlando Furioso’s status as a classicizing poem focused on the degree to which it abided by rules governing the epic genre, which were deduced primarily from Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars poetica. One strategy to make the poem legitimate was to claim that it resembled a canonical epic of antiquity, a position that could lead a critic like Giovanni Battista Pigna to interpret Ariosto’s poem (and even his biography) as Virgilian. Another tactic directly in response to Aristotelian criticism of the poem was to turn the argument around and claim that the poem was a new kind of long narrative, not an epic but a romance, a theory propounded most vigorously by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinzio in the middle of the sixteenth century. Proponents of this argument pointed to classical models of romancelike narratives such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses as precedents for the Orlando Furioso’s interlaced narrative. This line of argument could lead no less a critic than Lionardo Salviati (1539–1589), the guiding force behind the foundation of the Accademia della Crusca, to revise his interpretations of the classical poems themselves in the 1580s. In a curious role of reversed influence, interpretations and translations of certain classical poems began to be influenced by the Orlando Furioso. The Orlando Furioso was a source of inspiration for European illustrators and painters from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, including Annibale Carraci, Guido Reni, Peter Paul Rubens, Nicolas Poussin, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Rensselaer W. Lee, Names on Trees, 1977). This may be in part because the poem itself highlights Ariosto’s interest in art: It contains many ecphrases (for example, in cantos 3, 33, 42, 46), and it includes a detailed description of a woman (7.11–15) that 92

became a prominent case in subsequent theoretical discussions of descriptive poetry, such as Ludovico Dolce’s Dialogo della pittura (1557) and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon (1766). The poem praises nine contemporary artists at 33.2 and exhibits a classical harmony like that that dominated art in Italy during Ariosto’s lifetime. The definitive third edition of the Orlando Furioso is decorated with a woodcut portrait of Ariosto supposedly based on a drawing by Titian. The illustrations in the editions of Gabriel Giolito (Venice, 1542) and Francesco dei Franceschi (Venice, 1584) are especially handsome. In the 1780s Jean-Honore´ Fragonard prepared over 150 drawings for a volume that was never published. A noteworthy later edition contains over 500 drawings by Gustave Dore´ (Paris, 1879). Anonymous artisans have used the poem for decorating everything from ceramics and weavings of the late Renaissance to the carts and marionettes of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Sicilian folk art (opera dei pupi). The Orlando Furioso was also a source of material for musicians, playwrights, nondramatic authors, and at least one landscape designer from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. As early as 1517, Bartolomeo Tromboncino set to music Orlando’s lament from the scene at the center of the poem where the protagonist goes mad (23.126). Subsequent composers, including Claudio Monteverdi, adapted the poem’s more popular passages, its idyllic scenes and lovers’ laments, for madrigal settings. Many European authors rewrote, alluded to, or parodied the Orlando Furioso, elaborating on its characters and multiple plots, perhaps challenged by the poet himself, who invited later and ‘‘better’’ writers to resume the story of Angelica and Medoro (30.16). Lope de Vega, for example, accepted the challenge with La Hermosura de Ange´lica (The Beauty of Angelica, 1602). Notable operatic works that take their inspiration from Ariosto’s work include Antonio Vivaldi’s Orlando Furioso (1727) and Handel’s Orlando (1733) and Alcina (1735). The garden at the Villa Orsini in Bomarzo, near Viterbo, may have been designed to recreate in three dimensions the experience of reading the Orlando Furioso’s narrative. DENNIS LOONEY Editions Early editions: Orlando Furioso, Ferrara: Mazocco del Bondeno, 1516; second edition, Ferrara: Giovanni Battista da la Pigna, 1521; third and definitive edition, Ferrara: Francesco Rosso da Valenza, 1532.

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO Critical editions: Orlando Furioso, edited by Santorre Debenedetti, Bari: Laterza, 1928; Orlando Furioso, edited by Santorre Debenedetti and Cesare Segre, Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1960; Orlando Furioso, edited by Cesare Segre, Milan: Mondadori, 1976; Orlando Furioso, edited by Emilio Bigi, 2 vols., Milan: Rusconi, 1982. Translations: as Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harington (1591), edited by Graham Hough, London: Centaur Press, 1962; as Orlando Furioso, translated by Allan Gilbert, 2 vols., New York: Vanni, 1954; as Orlando Furioso, translated by William Stewart Rose, edited by Stewart A. Baker and A. Bartlett Giamatti, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; as The Frenzy of Orlando, translated by Barbara Reynolds, 2 vols., London: Penguin, 1975; as Orlando Furioso, translated by Guido Waldman, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Ascoli, Albert Russell, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Beer, Marina, Romanzi di cavalleria. Il ‘‘Furioso’’ e il romanzo italiano del primo cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Brand, Peter C., Ludovico Ariosto: A Preface to the ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974. Carne-Ross, Donald S., ‘‘The One and the Many: A Reading of Orlando Furioso, Cantos 1 and 8,’’ Arion, 5:2(1966), 195–234. Carne-Ross, Donald S., ‘‘The One and the Many: A Reading of the Orlando Furioso,’’ Arion, n..s. 3:2 (1976), 146–219. Casadei, Alberto, La strategia delle varianti. Le correzioni storiche del terzo ‘‘Furioso,’’ Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1988. Durling, Robert M., The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Fahy, Conor, L’‘Orlando Furioso’ del 1532. Profilo di una edizione, Milan: Universita` Cattolica, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Lee, Rensselaer W., Names on Trees: Ariosto into Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Looney, Dennis, Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996. Marinelli, Peter, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Quint, David, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Saccone, Eduardo, Il soggetto del ‘‘Furioso,’’ Naples: Liguori, 1974. Salviati, Lionardo, [R]isposta al libro intitolato Replica di Camillo Pellegrino. Nella qual risposta sono incorporate tutte le scritture, passate tra detto Pellegrino, e detti Accademici intorno all’Ariosto, Florence: Padovani, 1588.

Wiggins, Peter DeSa, Figures in Ariosto’s Tapestry: Character and Design in the ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Zatti, Sergio, Il ‘‘Furioso’’ fra epos e romanzo, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1990. Zatti, Sergio, The Quest for Epic: From Ariosto to Tasso, edited by Dennis Looney, translated by Sally Hill with Dennis Looney, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

SATIRE, 1517–1525 Poems by Ludovico Ariosto

Ariosto’s Satire (Satires) are in the tradition of the ancient Roman literary genre of the same name, a literary form marked by the freedom it gives the poet to mock and criticize his contemporary culture. Ariosto took full advantage of the satire’s generic conventions to lambaste the ambitions and foibles of his peers in general, with many individuals in particular skewered by his witty barbs. He accomplished this ongoing critique in these seven poems, composed between 1517 and 1525, in a colloquial and often ironic tone that contributes to what Cesare Segre has called his best comic writing (‘‘Struttura dialogica delle ‘Satire’ ariostesche,’’ 1979). Traditional readings of the satires have often assumed that their numerous autobiographical details provide accurate and ‘‘true’’ glosses on the poet’s life. In contrast, more recent interpretations appreciate the literary nature of these poetic exercises in which the author created his own narrating voice, a voice owing much to classical Roman precedents, especially Horace, and to Dante, whose terza rima provides the metrical framework for Ariosto. Despite the pitfalls of the autobiographical fallacy, the tone of the Satire does reveal something of a private Ariosto, a man with familial cares and desires in addition to concerns about his career as a poet. In a tone that blends the colloquial and formal, the Satire provide a glimpse into Ariosto’s life, as it is and as he would have liked it to be. Often, the poet gave a passionate defense of the status quo. The first satire, composed and sent both to his brother, Alessandro, and a friend, Ludovico da 93

LUDOVICO ARIOSTO Bagno, in October 1517, deals with Ariosto’s decision not to follow his patron, Cardinal Ippolito d’Este, to Hungary. This poem is an appropriate opening for the collection of satirical writings, for in it the author lamented his marginalized fate, while at the same time casting judgmental aspersions on those who would disagree with the decision that put him in the position he found himself. His curmudgeonly tone, sometimes moralizing but at other times simply ill-tempered, lends the Satire much of their appeal. The second satire, to his brother Galasso (December 1517), is critical of Church, especially papal, corruption, and contrasts contemporary Rome with the city and culture of days of yore. Ariosto had little sympathy for the pomposity of the current ecclesiastical hierarchy. The third satire, addressed to a cousin in March 1518, explores the ambitions and fortunes of men in Ariosto’s day. The poet reiterated that he preferred to stay at home rather than travel the world, asserting that he could journey just as far and much more safely following maps in the comfort of his abode. The image of Ariosto as an armchair traveler is a striking endorsement for the power of the word, which is in line with the values of Renaissance humanism. The fourth, fifth, and seventh satires were written while Ariosto was working as a provincial governor for the Este family in the rugged Garfagnana region of northern Tuscany, 1522–1525. In the fourth satire, he longed for the life of leisure and learning he was forced to leave behind in Ferrara. In the fifth, sent to a cousin about to be married, Ariosto engaged in a playful tirade on the institution of marriage. In the seventh, written in the last year of his service in the Garfagnana, Ariosto rejected an invitation to serve as ambassador to the Vatican for the Estense rulers of Ferrara. Addressed to the Ferrarese ducal secretary, Bonaventura Pistofilo, the seventh satire revisits many of the arguments against ambitious careerism that Ariosto made in the third satire. The sixth satire, composed for Pietro Bembo sometime between 1524 and 1525, is Ariosto’s most programmatic statement about humanistic learning. The occasion for the poem was the author’s request that his friend help him locate a tutor of Greek for Virginio, his son, who was around 15 at the time. Although he was an illegitimate child, the father was very solicitous of his well-being and training. Ariosto explained that he had taught the boy something of the Latin tradition (6.142–144): Gia’ per me sa cio` che Virgilio scrive Terenzio, Ovidio, Orazio, e le plautine / scene ha vedute...(Through me he’s already 94

learned what Vergil’s text is like, and how Terence, Ovid and Horace write theirs, and he has seen Plautus staged...). But he confessed that he did not know Greek well enough to teach it to his son because his priorities had always been with the language of Rome (6.178–180): che ’l saper ne la lingua de li Achei / non mi reputo onor, s’io non intendo / prima il parlar de li latini miei. (I don’t believe that knowing the language of the Achaeans will bring me honor, unless I first understand the way my Latins speak). The author then recounted in some detail the autobiographical circumstances that first fostered, then eventually hindered his own education. The nostalgic reverie yields to what seems at first glance a conventional humanistic encomium of classical culture, concluding with a plea that Bembo help the boy scale the tops of Mount Parnassus. But the satire, as Albert R. Ascoli showed, in keeping with its generic conventions, allows the author a certain liberty of expression, which he used to register an implicit critique of humanism (Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony, 1987). The oldest manuscript copy of the satire with corrections in Ariosto’s hand (referred to as F by textual critics) reveals that he rewrote the verse to highlight the noun umanista (humanist). But any positive value associated with this relatively new word in the Italian language is undermined by its context: ‘‘Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti / che fe’ a Dio forza, non che persu¨ase, / di far Gomorra e i suoi vicini tristi’’ (Few humanists are without that vice that forced God–it didn’t take much persuading—to render Gomorrah and her neighbors woeful!). By impugning humanists as potential sodomites, Ariosto suggested that the typical humanistic education is deficient and sterile, much as Dante implied in his portrayal of Brunetto Latini in Inferno 15. This criticism is borne out in the character of Ruggiero in the Orlando Furioso, the knight who appears impervious to didactic instruction in much of the first part of the poem, notwithstanding the fact that he is destined to become the founder of the Ferrarese house of Este and progenitor of Ariosto’s (sometime) patrons. Virginio reported that his father composed a satire, now lost, for Baldassare Castiglione (Michele Catalano, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, vol. 1, 1930). That satire, should it ever turn up, would likely provide us with tantalizing glimpses of Ariosto’s take on courtly politics and power. The satirical poems that we do have were published posthumously in 1534. DENNIS LOONEY

GIOVANNI ARPINO Editions

Further Reading

First edition: Le Satire di M. Ludovico Ariosto. . . Ferrara: Francesco Rosso da Valenza, 1534; Le Satire autografe di Lodovico Ariosto, introduction by Prospero Viani, Bologna: Guido Wenk, 1875 (this is a facsimile of a manuscript in Biblioteca comunale di Ferrara, no longer considered an autograph; rather, it is held to be an apograph with corrections in Ariosto’s hand). Critical editions: Satire, edited by Cesare Segre, vol. 3 of Tutte le opere di Ludovico Ariosto, Milan: Mondadori, 1984; Satire, edited by Alfredo D’Orto, Parma: Guanda, 2002. Translations: as The Satires of Ludovico Ariosto, translated by Peter DeSa Wiggins, Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976; as The Satires, translated by Rudolf B. Gottfried, Lunenburg, VT: Stinehour Press, 1977.

Ascoli, Albert Russell, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Berra, Claudia (editor), Fra satire e rime ariostesche, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Bonatti, Bruno, Ariosto pensoso. Lettura delle ‘‘Satire,’’ Florence: Nuova Toscana, 1984. Catalano, Michele, Vita di Ludovico Ariosto, 2 vols., Geneva: Olschki, 1930–1931. Cuccaro, Vincent, The Humanism of Ludovico Ariosto: From the ‘‘Satire’’ to the ‘‘Furioso,’’ Ravenna: Longo, 1981. Durling, Robert, The Figure of the Poet, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Floriani, Piero, Il modello ariostesco. La satira classicista nel Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1988. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Struttura dialogica delle ‘Satire’ ariostesche,’’ in Semiotica filologica. Testo e modelli culturali, Turin: Einaudi, 1979.

GIOVANNI ARPINO (1927–1987) Alberto Asor Rosa classifies Arpino among those Italian writers who, during the 1960s and 1970s, placed themselves in a rather compromising ‘‘medium’’ level by diluting the ‘‘quality’’ of their work in order to make it more accessible to a larger audience (‘‘Il best seller all’italiana,’’ 1999). As a prolific fiction writer, Giovanni Arpino kept his distance from the contemporary narrative establishment and rejected any form of experimentalism. Originally from Istria, he worked in publishing and journalism while pursuing a literary career. At the age of 22 he published Sei stato felice, Giovanni (You Have Been Happy, Giovanni, 1952), in which he dealt with his youth while examining his cultural heritage. Overtly influenced by Ernest Hemingway, this book figures as the stepping-stone for a dense and plentiful career. The publication of Arpino’s debut novel with Einaudi was facilitated by Elio Vittorini, the first to recognize Arpino’s narrative talent and to discern in his writing neo-Realist elements (a label Arpino never fully accepted, preferring instead the term ‘‘Realist’’). Indeed, Vittorini’s artistic patronage became, for the young writer, a cage he felt compelled to escape, and later on he resisted reprinting his first novel, maintaining a particularly critical attitude toward it.

It is with the collection of poems Il prezzo dell’oro (The Price of Gold, 1957) that elements that would eventually characterize Arpino’s mature writings began to surface: the autobiographical search for his roots as in ‘‘Lunga strada, soldati a Napoli’’ (Long Road, Soldiers in Naples) and ‘‘Un rapido saluto’’ (A Quick Regard); the life in the village Bra inhabited by rough and unsociable farmers, which is portrayed in ‘‘Cronache piemontesi’’ (Piemontese Chronicles); the city of Turin in its seasonal changes; love conceived as something eternal that transcends momentary passion as in ‘‘Tendo la mano, la Compagna’’ (I Reach out, the Partner). With the exception of Un crimine d’onore (A Crime of Honor, 1961), Arpino’s novels represent one thematic corpus. When, in 1958, Gli anni del giudizio (The Judgment Years) was published, the poetics of neo-Realism had already exhausted its expressive strength, and writers needed to search for other modes to tell their stories, looking for wider perspectives. At this point, politics began to appear in Arpino’s work. In Gli anni del giudizio, through the words of the protagonist, the worker Ugo, politics is not seen as a simple ideological commitment; rather it becomes a means to 95

GIOVANNI ARPINO understand how life evolves around us. Ugo develops the awareness that the individual, alone, is destined to fail if alienated by the society in which he lives, and the absence of solidarity among individuals is the greatest fault of all. Also, Antonio Mathis of La suora giovane (The Novice, 1959), a novel praised by Montale, is an alienated subject. Incapable of carrying on his love story with Serena, Antonio is doomed to loneliness. In this novel, written in a diary form, love is something elusive, a utopian moment of slender joy destined to end. As Giorgio Ba`rberi-Squarotti has pointed out, La suora giovane offers ‘‘an opportunity to reveal the true state of everybody, of all those oppressed by misery and by the horror within the industrial society’’ (‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Giovanni Arpino, Opere, 1991). Una nuvola d’ira (A Cloud of Anger, 1962) explores the rapport between class aspirations and individualism. As it happens, three workers, Matteo, Angelo, and Sperata (the narrator) are fascinated by Marxist ideology and choose to defy the bourgeois myth of marriage by experimenting a free cohabitation. They create a love relationship based primarily on their belief in the same political ideal, beyond traditional conventions and religious scruples. But it is a utopia and, by definition, unattainable. In the end, Matteo, overwhelmed by jealousy, flees the hospital in which he has been recovering from an ulcer, destroys their house in a ‘‘cloud of anger,’’ and escapes to the mountains, where he eventually kills himself. Such a dramatic conclusion is metaphorically a return to the roots by a generation defeated in their ideological beliefs. Arpino was convinced that the illusion of wellbeing and the middle class’s small horizons had invaded the working class. Ideological commitment figures as something contrary to a society composed of individuals not yet mature to understand it. But ideology has its shortcomings as well: It brings Matteo to his suicidal restlessness, while it fails to offer any shelter from his human weakness. Una nuvola d’ira was Arpino’s last ‘‘political’’ novel. It was followed by a new narrative trend that no longer focused on man’s alienated relationship to society. For example, Un’anima persa (A Lost Soul, 1966) is a symbolist novel, lacking any concrete reference to contemporary history; it is an homage to the stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Finally, with Randagio e` l’eroe (Stray Is the Hero, 1972) Arpino returned to the use of a daily language that had marked his literary beginnings. Once again his investigation focused on a grotesque 96

character in conflict with the ‘‘civilized’’ world that is turning chaotic and iniquitous. As a playwright, Arpino viewed the stage as a way to escape the traps of everyday life and adopted irony and satire, as in his narrative, in order to reveal the face of a corrupt humanity. In La riabilitazione (The Rehabilitation, 1968) he described presumed dictatorships in which the political system turns men into puppets; in L’uomo del bluff (The Man of Bluff, 1968) he criticized the old middle class through three characters: a teacher addicted to gambling, a counterfeiter countess, and a weak boy. In Arpino’s literary production there is never linguistic plurality as a mirror of social plurality, even though the choral aspect is present in his depiction of characters and their ambience. One of his leading narrative motifs, the journey, is reinterpreted each time at different levels: It can be an integral part of the story as for L’ombra delle colline (The Shadow of the Hills, 1964) and Il buio e il miele (Darkness and Honey, 1969); it can evoke a return to the maternal womb for Marx’s repudiated children (Una nuvola d’ira); or it is conceived not as something preplanned but as unexpected wandering (Sei stato felice, Giovanni). In this context, Geno Pampaloni speaks of the influence of Cesare Pavese on Arpino as well as of American reminiscences (Hemingway, Steinbeck) (La narrativa italiana del dopoguerra, 1968). There is also the writer’s fascination for picaresque wanderings derived from his readings of the Spanish novelists of the 1500s and 1600s. In this narrative journey, Turin, the city of maturity, is also often a strong presence. The city’s seasonal changes correspond to the characters’ psychological and emotional changes. Turin is introduced in her grand architecture but also through her very own citizens. As Arpino wrote in La stampa: ‘‘Non sono solo i muri e i portoni a definire una citta`, sono le facce della gente, il suo muoversi, le abitudini collettive... che formano la sostanza di un agglomerato urbano’’ (Not only the walls and the front doors define a city, also the faces of the people, the collective habits create an urban agglomerate) (‘‘Torino, Malamata,’’ 10 November 1971). Like the Piedmontese Pavese and Beppe Fenoglio, Arpino assigned a central place to the langhe in his novels. But while Pavese adopted a psychological perspective, projecting onto the landscape the anguishes and existential dilemmas of his displaced characters, and Fenoglio’s langhe were the historical sites of Resistance fights, Arpino chose a more

GIOVANNI ARPINO naturalistic approach: He saw in the hills surrounding the village of Bra an example of real family life, sometimes pleasurable while at others dramatic but perpetually fascinating. Arpino’s fiction, as well as his work as a sports reporter (he viewed sport as a way to live more intensely without useless intellectualisms) attest to his capacity to engage in literary ventures that also combine wide readership appeal.

Randagio e` l’eroe, 1972. Racconti di vent’anni, 1974. Azzurro tenebra, 1977. Lune piemontesi, 1978. Il fratello italiano, 1980. Bocce ferme, 1982. La sposa segreta, 1983. Passo d’addio, 1986. Trappola amorosa, 1988. Rafe` e Micropiede, 1988. Nel bene e nel male, 1989. Storie dell’Italia minore, 1990.

Biography

Poetry

Giovannie Arpino was born in Pola (Istria) on 1 January 1927. In 1929 the family moved to Piacenza where he lived for 11 years. In 1941, he moved to Bra (Turin), where he finished high school. In 1946, he enrolled in the Facolta` di Lettere at the University of Turin, where he graduated in 1951. In 1953, he married Rina Brero, and they moved from Bra to Turin; three years later Thomas was born. Between 1953 and 1960, Arpino worked for publishers Einaudi and Zanichelli. From 1969 to 1979, he was a sports reporter for La stampa. Arpino received a number of literary awards: the Strega Prize in 1964 for L’ombra delle colline; the ‘‘Gold Moretti’’ in 1969 for Il buio e il miele; the Campiello for Randagio e` l’eroe in 1972 and, again, in 1980 for Il fratello italiano. Arpino died in Turin on 10 December 1987. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Collections Opere (1927–1997), edited by Rolando Damiani, Milan: Rusconi, 1991. Opere scelte (1927–1997), edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

Fiction Sei stato felice, Giovanni, 1952. Gli anni del giudizio, 1958. La suora giovane, 1959; as The Novice, translated by Peter Green, 1964. Delitto d’onore, 1961; as A Crime of Honor, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1963. Una nuvola d’ira, 1962. L’ombra delle colline, 1964. Un’anima persa, 1966. La babbuina e altre storie, 1967. Il buio e il miele, 1969.

‘‘Il prezzo dell’oro,’’ 1957. ‘‘Fuorigioco,’’ 1970.

Theater La riabilitazione (produced 1968). L’uomo del bluff (produced 1968). Donna amata dolcissima (produced 1969).

Other Le mille e un’ Italia, 1970. I racconti del calcio, 1975. Grazie azzurri, 1978. Area di rigore, 1979. Calcio nero: Fatti e misfatti dello sport piu´ popolare d’Italia, 1980.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, Narrativa italiana 1975–1983 con vecchie e nuove varianti, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Il best seller all’italiana,’’ in L’altro novecento, Scandicci (Florence): La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1999. Balduino, Armando, Messaggi e problemi della letteratura italiana contemporanea, Venice: Marsilio, 1976. Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Giovanni Arpino, Opere, Milan: Rusconi, 1991. Cetta, Bernardo, Giovanni Arpino, ‘‘il narratore di storie,’’ Cavallermaggiore: Gribaudo, 1991. Montale, Eugenio, Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920–1979, edited by Giorgio Zampa, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Pampaloni, Geno, La narrativa italiana del dopoguerra, Bologna: Cappelli, 1968. Pullini, Giorgio, Volti e risvolti del romanzo italiano contemporaneo, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Quaranta, Bruno, Stile Arpino, una vita torinese, Turin: Societa` Editrice Internazionale, 1989. Romano, Massimo, Invito alla lettura di Giovanni Arpino, Milan: Mursia, 1974. Scrivano, Riccardo, Giovanni Arpino, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Varese, Claudio, Occasioni e valori della letteratura contemporanea, Bologna: Cappelli, 1967. Veneziano, Gian Maria, Giovanni Arpino, Milan: Mursia, 1994.

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ART CRITICISM

ART CRITICISM Art criticism is, in the strict sense, the study and interpretation of artistic products in order to arrive at a value judgment about them, while in a broad sense any attitude implying an evaluation of works of art may be considered ‘‘art criticism.’’ As a verbal formulation of judgments, art criticism is born as a specific literary genre only in the eighteenth century and takes on a high degree of specialization beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century. The emergence in the eighteenth century of a new intellectual figure—the militant critic who, unlike the historian, is concerned with contemporary art—gave rise to the prejudice, which survives in some form to this day, that art history and art criticism operate in separate spheres: The former should be concerned only with ancient art, classifying and arranging it according to certain criteria, while the latter, confining itself to judgments of contemporary art, should not be compelled to follow historical methods. Such a dichotomy between art history and art criticism has no legitimate grounds, since every judgment—even one concerning the present—is necessarily historical and, likewise, every historical reconstruction necessarily involves criticism. To judge a work is to compare it with those that precede and those that follow it and implies reconstructing the figurative and cultural context in which it was produced and with respect to which it offers itself as an original phenomenon: This is because, beyond the distinctions of convenience between the historical and the critical fields, a critical-evaluative operation is not conceivable without serious historical study, just as a history of art is not conceivable without critical assessments, unless the critic declares explicitly that he wishes to participate in the programs and plans of particular schools of poetics, at the cost of sometimes forcing history with a view toward action (operative criticism). After the abbot Luigi Lanzi (1732–1810), who was a precursor to the figure of the expert in his Storia pittorica dell’Italia dal risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso la fine del XVIII secolo (A History of Painting in Italy from the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century, 1789), a form of criticism emerged that was based on attribution, that is to say on the distinguishing 98

of the original from the fake and on placing works within the coherence of individual artistic personalities. Authors and schools were distinguished with the aid of scholarship and a rigorous examination of particular styles. Among the first Italian experts in the nineteenth century it is necessary to mention Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (1817– 1897) and Giovanni Morelli (1826–1891). A doctor and collector, Morelli (who went by the pseudonym of Lermolieff-Schwarze), in seeking to provide a scientific basis for the expert’s method, returned to the old theory of ‘‘manner,’’ understood as the ‘‘artistic writing’’ typical of each creator (their characteristic ways of rendering the form of the ear, the hand, drapery, and so on). Focusing on all of the inimitable elements of the style of each artist, he was able to reimpose order to the attributions of works belonging to various German and Roman painting galleries. A map of the tendencies of art criticism in Italy from the twentieth century until the present day practically coincides with a review of the schools of Italian art and the critical methodologies that these schools apply in the study and evaluation of the work of art. This map—whose borders become permeable, moreover, after the opening of many Italian scholars to the interpretive tools shared by recent disciplines (anthropology, psychoanalysis, semiotics)—does not encompass those who opt for a predominantly operative and militant criticism, among whom we should at least mention, in recent years, Germano Celant (1940–), who launched the so-called arte povera (‘‘poor’’ art), and Achille Bonito Oliva (1939–), a theorist of the trans-avant-garde. Among modern experts, a prominent place belongs to Adolfo Venturi (1895–1941), who based the interpretation of works on an analysis of their formal values, reconstructing the individual personality of the artist without neglecting the cultural aspects that are necessary in order to illuminate the work itself. Through the influence of his most gifted and lively pupils, he also became conscious of what, in the cultural panorama of his time, represented novelties: the ‘‘pure visibility’’ (Reine Sichtbarkeit) of the Viennese school and Crocian criticism. We must also mention Pietro Toesca

ART CRITICISM (1897–1962), who became editor-in-chief of Venturi’s journal L’arte beginning in 1904. Scholarly rigor and the concreteness of the historical terrain, on which all of his research was based, were the most prized characteristics of a method that made fundamental contributions to whole artistic cultures (for example, the Lombard figurative civilization of the Middle Ages and the fourteenth century). Adolfo Venturi had many students: his son Lionello (1885–1961); Giuseppe Fiocco (1884–1971), who helped to widen and renew decisively the study of Venetian art; Antonio Morassi (1893– 1976), who later on, methodologically, became close to the school of Vienna and Dvorˇak; and Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), who was in turn the ‘‘father’’ of the current generation of experts. The young Longhi also studied with Toesca and was partly influenced by the ‘‘pure visibility’’ school and by Bernard Berenson, though he eventually distanced himself from both in equal measure; above all, he brought to fruition the ideas of Benedetto Croce. In opposition to the history of art as the ‘‘history of culture,’’ the ‘‘history of artists,’’ and the ‘‘history of the evolution of the arts,’’ he proposed avoiding any undertaking of a theoretical or philosophical nature and turned his attention instead to problems intrinsic to the work of art. He approached the latter with a language that intended to mimic it, using an extremely personal prose and a refined multiplicity of linguistic styles in order to penetrate as far as possible into the work of art and to recover the vast pictorial ‘‘provinces’’ of the Italian art of various centuries. Some of Longhi’s pupils made richly documented and always timely contributions in the historicalscholarly sense to the panorama of Italian studies: Among others, there is Mina Gregori (1924–), the president of the Fondazione Longhi and the director of the review Paragone-Arte, a scholar of Caravaggio and of Lombard painting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Giuliano Briganti (1918–1992), known for his studies of artists and currents of various periods, from Mannerism to Romanticism to the twentieth century; Federico Arcangeli (1915–1974), who was concerned largely with contemporary art, thus separating himself from the interests of a great many Longhians, among whom the writer Giovanni Testori stands out for his declared aversion toward the contemporary avant-gardes. Finally, we should mention Federico Zeri (1921–1998), a student of Toesca who later came into contact with Longhi and Berenson, until he settled on his own original sociological

approach. Also of the historical-scholarly school were Rodolfo Palluchini (1908–1989) and Paolo Barocchi (1927–), who integrated the method of the expert with the social history of art, prominent among whom were Ferdinando Bologna (1925–), Enrico Castelnuovo (1929–), and Giovanni Previtali (1934–1988). Lionello Venturi was the leading proponent of the historical-cultural conception of the work of art. A professor at the Universita` di Torino beginning in 1915, in 1926 he published his famous essay ‘‘Il gusto dei primitivi’’ (The Primitive Taste), which had vast resonance in the Italian and European culture of the time. In this text he distinguished the concept of art, understood as the particular style, the creative and original contribution of the artist, from the concept of taste, understood as the institutionalized culture within which artists make their choices. An idealist and a Crocean, as he defined himself, Venturi also fused idealism with the criticism of ‘‘pure visibility,’’ while managing to avoid the dangers most frequently run by the latter: His principal intention was to define the formal culture of the artist, in line with the principles of the Viennese for whom art is the knowledge of form, but he did not let abstract modes of vision overwhelm the concreteness of the work of art. In his History of Art Criticism, published for the first time in the United States in 1936, Venturi asserted that a ‘‘preference in art is always the beginning of art criticism,’’ though it is not yet criticism, but, precisely, gusto, or taste. In this way, by understanding artistic choices themselves as the beginning of critical activity and conceiving the work of art as an objective reality, which does not dissolve in the moment of creation, but which, over time, continues to exercise a decisive influence on human thought, he arrived at an identification of the history of art with art criticism. Unlike Longhi, who concerned himself occasionally with twentieth-century art, Venturi took it upon himself to interpret and defend contemporary art with a singular passion. Showing a balanced appreciation of the ancients and the moderns, in the popularizing text published first in English with the title Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture, from Giotto to Chagall (1945), he attempted to modernize the past and to historicize the present. This book echoes, in its very title, Come si guarda un quadro (How to Look at a Picture, 1927) by Matteo Marangoni (1876–1958), another Croceian critic and successful popularizer of the grammar of seeing, as the numerous editions of his Saper vedere (The Art of Seeing Art, 1933) attest. 99

ART CRITICISM Despite the limits springing from his Croceanism, Lionello Venturi initiated a methodological procedure whose outlines expanded to include new interdisciplinary interests, as occurred for some of his disciples, including notably Giulio Carlo Argan (1909–1992), who elaborated a ‘‘philosophy of history’’ imbued with phenomenology and a method of interpreting artworks in which various approaches converge, among which sociological and iconological inquiry are prominent. Argan’s interests ranged from problems of preserving the artistic heritage to the historical reconstruction of the art—and especially of the architecture—of various ages, with particular attention to contemporary art. For Argan, the history of art was the study of cultural, social, and technical structures, which let the work of art be understood as a freely creative act with respect to historically given conditions. The corollary—an idea descending from Venturi—that followed was that the artistry and the historicity of the work coincide. A prominent space in Italian art criticism belongs to Carlo Ludovico Raggianti (1910–1987), a disciple of Marangoni, who elaborated a critical-historical method (‘‘aesthetic historicism’’) that was based on modern thought from Giambattista Vico to Francesco De Sanctis to Croce and in particular on the contributions of Konrad Fiedler, whom he considered the first authentic linguist of figurative art. Raggianti was concerned not only with the figurative arts but also with the cinema and entertainment, and he remained substantially faithful to the notion of visual art as a language, which can be traced back to the Crocean concept of aesthetics as general linguistics, with the result that the linguistic analysis of the artwork is given the task of grasping within the work itself narrative or poetic traits. Raggianti did not conform to the specific interpretive systems of the most recent semiotics, but he devoted particular attention to the ‘‘exact verification’’ of works of art through the tools provided by new technologies (like the computer), which would confirm experimentally ‘‘the justness of the conception of art as a formal language’’ (Arti della visione, vol. 3, 1979). Involved in problems of conserving and restoring artworks and in aesthetic speculation, Cesare Brandi (1906–1986), who was a poet as well, began from idealistic premises, but he arrived at a rather personal synthesis of thought, in which Husserlian phenomenology and the experience of the most recent structuralist criticism were interwoven. Sergio Bettini (1905–1986) was also a follower of the school of Vienna and especially of Alois Riegl. 100

In his studies, he united a solid scholarly foundation with a control of methodological procedures and tools. A specialist in the history of Byzantine and medieval art, he roamed, however, within a horizon that extended from the late Roman period up to the art of the present day, pursuing a critical investigation based on the texts of Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, on structuralism, and on semiology. Among the others indebted, to varying degrees, to the Vienna school we enlist the archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli (1900–1975) and the historian of architecture Bruno Zevi (1918–2000). The formalism of ‘‘pure visibility’’ is commonly juxtaposed to the emphasis on content of the iconological method, which, focusing its critical interest on the meaning of images, tends toward the cultural interpretation of artistic phenomena. This latter method does not have much success in Italy, and only since the 1970s has it become the object of noteworthy interest. Schematically, we can say that there are at least two different ways of applying the interpretive method of Erwin Panofsky and, more generally, of the Aby Warburg school: The first consists in privileging the conscious and rational meaning of an artistic creation; the second, on the other hand, consists in going beyond into the interpretation of the work’s unconscious meanings understood in a psychoanalytic sense. Both ways of applying iconology find followings among Italian scholars. There are some who investigate the aspect of intentional meanings or even those expressed unawares by the artist, but which can be reconstructed, however, on the basis of cultural codes: This was the case of Eugenio Battisti (1924–1989), who, inspired by Warburg, made use of the contributions of fields of inquiry thought to be foreign to the tradition of the criticism of the figurative arts (fable, folklore, the history of religions, with references that range from Propp to Kerenyi); of Salvatore Settis (1941–), a professor of classical archaeology, but also a scholar of modern art; of Augusto Gentili (1943–) and, in part, of Michelangelo Muraro (1913–1991) and Lionello Puppi (1931–). But there are also those who apply Jungian psychology, such as Maurizio Calvesi (1927–) and Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (1939–2002). Art historians with different make-ups, but all inspired by Marxist theories, follow what is generically defined as the sociological method (which studies artistic products in relation to social situations), often combining it with other methodologies. In Italy one of the first to lay the foundations

ART CRITICISM for a methodical sociological reading of poetry and art in general was the philosopher Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968). His importance for aesthetics lies mainly in Critica del gusto (A Critique of Taste, 1960), where he maintained that the assessment of the ‘‘sociological nature’’ of the work of art coincides with the assessment of its ‘‘structural meanings or values,’’ that is, the semantic structures corresponding to historical, social, in short empirical, conditions. In Della Volpe we thus see a convergence between the sociological and the semantic-structural interpretations of the work of art. During the 1950s and early 1960s some art historians were particularly interested in the relation between art and society, among them, Corrado Maltese (1921–2001), who was mostly concerned with modern art from the nineteenth century onward. In the second half of the 1960s and the 1970s, some of the most important contributions in various fields of inquiry included the works of Manfredo Tafuri (1935–1994), Mario Manieri Elia (1929–), Antonio Del Guercio (1923–), Francesco Poli (1949–), Fernando Bologna, and other experts also interested in social history, such as the previously mentioned Giovanni Previtali and Enrico Castelnuovo. The semiotic-structural perspective examines the work of art as a system of signs, from the point of view of signification and communication, and highlights the aesthetic level and the originality of the message. The interest in structuralism and semiology grew during the 1970s, when the writings of art historians responded to the numerous and sometimes decisive theoretical contributions of scholars of aesthetics such as Umberto Eco and Emilio Garroni (1925–). Brandi participated in the semiotic-structural field with Le due vie (The Two Ways, 1966), Struttura e architettura (Structure and Architecture, 1967), and Teoria generale della critica (A General Theory of Criticism, 1974), which constitutes a summa of his aesthetic positions, in which phenomenology, structuralism, and semiology are combined. Brandi did not renounce the interpretive tools offered by semiology (witness the essays on architecture in his book from 1967), but he maintained that the essence of art is astanza, which is to say that the work of art is an aesthetic object that does not signify but gives itself as pure presence. After the contributions of several architect-theorists, such as Italo Gamberini and Giovanni Klaus Koenig, who approach architecture from the semiotic-communicative perspective, we should mention the contributions to the history of architecture by Maria Luisa Scalvini

(1934–) and Renato De Fusco (1929–). Formed in the school of Roberto Pane (1897–1987), a Crocean architectural historian, De Fusco, known as the founder of Op. Cit, a journal of criticism of contemporary art, and for various popularizing texts, elaborates the methodological hypothesis of uniting Fernand De Saussure’s linguistics with Fiedler’s theory of pure visibility and with the conception, borrowed from August Schmarsow, of architecture as Raumgestaltung (shaped space). He is concerned with defining the specificity of the architectural sign, its levels of articulation, as well as the characteristics of the urban sign. To verify his own theses, De Fusco conducts a number of interpretations of buildings in various styles and from various ages. He thus makes semiology assume a concrete applicability and attributes to it a utility that, not restricted to the history of architecture but extending to practical design, confers upon it an effective role in the outline of a new cultural politics. Beginning in the 1960s, Bruno Zevi also made numerous forays into the debate over architectural semiotics, which were collected in Il linguaggio moderno dell’architettura (The Modern Language of Architecture, 1972), an essay in which the linguistic system of modern architecture was distinguished through the ‘‘seven invariants of the anticlassical code.’’ Because only classical architecture is codified, Zevi extracted these invarianti from the exceptions to the classical rules contained in the most important contemporary architectural texts. At the time of this writing, semiological contributions to the history of the visual arts come from Gillo Dorfles (1910–), one of the most active and prolific contemporary scholars of art and aesthetics, and Filiberto Menna (1926–1989), whose La linea analitica dell’arte moderna: Le figure e le icone (The Analytical Strain in Modern Art: Figures and Icons, 1975) proposed a semiotic interpretive paradigm that can be applied to art ranging from Seurat to Conceptual Art. Finally, Renato Barilli (1935–) has devoted numerous studies to modern and contemporary art, opting since Culturologia e fenomenologia degli stili (A Culturology and Phenomenology of Styles, 1982) for the method of ‘‘cultural, or, better yet, technological historical materialism’’ (which is developed, among others, by Marshall MacLuhan). Barilli offered interesting contributions to the semiotic debates of the 1970s, writing a seminal essay entitled Tra presenza e assenza: Due modelli culturali in conflitto (Between Presence and Absence: Two Cultural Models in Conflict, 1974). 101

ART CRITICISM At the foundation of much criticism inspired by semiotics is the idea of giving an objective and scientific explanation of artistic facts, essentially the fear of seeing concepts like the ineffability and the uniqueness of artistic phenomena undermined. But, on the other hand, Marxist scholars also have launched attacks against the idealists—for example, that they pursue a sterilely formalistic approach and that they are incapable of explaining the ‘‘why’’ of the work. In fact, the risk of dehistoricization of artistic facts is run only by those structuralist scholars who privilege the synchronic approach over the diachronic. Moreover, if we apply to art criticism the same principle recommended for literary criticism by Cesare Segre in Semiotica filologica: Testo e modelli culturali (Scholarly Semiotics: Text and Cultural Models, 1979), it becomes indispensable to be furnished with a scholarly arsenal adequate to confront any semiotic study of cultural codes, texts, and contexts. Once again, therefore, the recovery and restitution of the work of art to history become necessary, as much for those who make use of a single methodology as for those who, in a globalizing project, utilize the contributions of various disciplines. GIUSEPPINA DAL CANTON See also: Literature and Visual Arts

Further Reading Argan, Giulio Carlo, ‘‘Critica d’arte,’’ in Enciclopedia del Novecento, vol. 1, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1975. Argan, Giulio Carlo, Progetto e destino, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965. Argan, Giulio Carlo, Salvezza e caduta nell’arte moderna, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1964. Barilli, Renato, Culturologia e fenomenologia degli stili, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982. Barilli, Renato, Tra presenza e assenza: Due modelli culturali in conflitto, Milan: Bompiani, 1974. Battisti Eugenio, L’antirinascimento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Battisti, Eugenio, Rinascimento e Barocco, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Bettini, Sergio, Venezia nascita di una citta`, Milan: Electa, 1978. Blunt, Anthony Frederick, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450–1600, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940. Bologna, Ferdinando, ‘‘I metodi di studio dell’arte italiana e il problema metodologico oggi,’’ in Storia dell’arte italiana, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Brandi, Cesare, Le due vie, Bari: Laterza, 1966.

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Brandi, Cesare, Struttura e architettura, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Brandi, Cesare, Teoria generale della critica, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Croce, Benedetto, La critica e la storia delle arti figurative, Bari: Laterza, 1934. Croce, Benedetto, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Bari: Laterza, 1902; as Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London: Macmillan, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995. Dal Canton, Giuseppina, ‘‘Le scuole di critica d’arte in Italia,’’ Op. cit.: Selezione della critica d’arte contemporanea, 47(1980): 33–65. De Fusco, Renato, Segni, storia e progetto dell’architettura, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Della Volpe, Galvano, Critica del gusto, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960; as Critique of Taste, translated by Michael Caesar, London: NMB, 1978. Filippi, Elena, ‘‘Critica d’arte e storia dell’arte in Italia a partire dagli anni Trenta: Appunti per un consuntivo,’’ Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 156 (1997–1998): 551–611. Grassi, Luigi, Teorici e storia della critica d’arte, 3 vols., Rome: Multigrafica, 1970–1979. Kultermann, Udo, Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer wissenschaft, Wien-Du¨sseldorf: Econ-Verlag, 1966; as The History of Art History, New York: Abaris Books, 1993. Longhi, Roberto, ‘‘Proposte per una critica d’arte,’’ Paragone, 1(1950): 5–19. Longhi, Roberto, Da Cimabue a Morandi: Saggi di storia della pittura italiana scelti e ordinati da Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Marangoni, Matteo, Come si guarda un quadro: Saggio di educazione del gusto sui capolavori degli Uffizi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1927. Marangoni, Matteo, Saper vedere, Florence: Vallecchi, 1933; as The Art of Seeing Art, London: Shelly Castle, 1951. Menna, Filiberto, La linea analitica dell’arte moderna: Le figure e le icone, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico, Arti della visione, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1975–1979. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico, Profilo della critica d’arte in Italia, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Schlosser, Julius Ritter von, Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte, Wien: Anton Schroll, 1924. Sciolla, Gianni Carlo, La critica d’arte del Novecento, Turin: UTET, 1995. Segre, Cesare, Semiotica filologica: Testo e modelli culturali, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Sohm, Philip, Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Tafuri, Manfredo, Teorie e storia dell’architettura, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Toesca, Pietro, Il Medioevo, 2 vols., Turin: UTET, 1927. Toesca, Pietro, Il Trecento, Turin: UTET, 1951. Venturi, Adolfo, Storia dell’arte italiana, 25 vols., Milan: Hoepli, 1901–1945. Venturi, Lionello, History of Art Criticism, translated by Charles Marriot, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936.

PELLEGRINO ARTUSI Venturi, Lionello, Painting and Painters: How to Look at the a Picture, from Giotto to Chagall, New York and London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945. Zeri, Federico, Pittura e Controriforma: L’arte senza tempo di Scipione di Gaeta, Turin: Einaudi, 1957; rpt. 1970.

Zevi, Bruno, Il linguaggio moderno dell’architettura: Guida al codice anticlassico, Turin: Einaudi, 1972; as The Modern Language of Architecture, London: University of Washington Press, 1978; rpt. New York: Da Capo Press, 1994.

ARTURO’S ISLAND See L’Isola di Arturo (Work by Elsa Morante)

PELLEGRINO ARTUSI (1820–1911) When, in 1891, Pellegrino Artusi printed at his own expense La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), where the term ‘‘cucina’’ means ‘‘kitchen’’ as well as ‘‘cookery,’’ he had already collected two editorial failures. In fact, his collection of essays Vita di Ugo Foscolo (The Life of Ugo Foscolo, 1878) and Le osservazioni in appendice a trenta lettere di Giuseppe Giusti (Observations on Thirty Letters by Giuseppe Giusti, 1881), for both of which he ‘‘footed the bill,’’ went almost unnoticed. As Artusi remarked in the humorous preface to the fourth edition of La scienza in cucina (1899), this new book also initially seemed to go down the same path: He had sent two complimentary copies to the charity fair of Forlimpopoli (his birthplace) only to learn that the winners had immediately rushed to the local tobacconist to resell them; then he sent another copy to a Roman literary review that listed it in the ‘‘Books Received’’ column with a wrong title. After these disappointments, a decisive breakthrough came in the form of a note of encouragement from Professor Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910), one of the most celebrated academics of the time, whose intention to popularize a scientific approach to bodily pleasures could not miss the profane and progressive importance of Artusi’s cookery manual.

Mantegazza’s support was a good omen for the book, which by its fourth edition had sold 52,000 copies and turned Artusi’s Florentine address in Piazza D’Azeglio into the most famous Italian book agency. Artusi was a member of Mantegazza’s newborn Societa` Italiana di Antropologia ed Etnologia (Anthropological and Ethnological Italian Society) and a recurring presence in the audience of its lectures and debates. His use of ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘art’’ in the title of his book attests to the author’s faith in a knowledge that partakes in the wider aesthetic involvement of human beings. This hedonistic approach, for Artusi, is not adverse to ethics. If ethics is now viewed in the light of Charles Darwin’s survival logic, it inevitably comprises the imperative of mid-nineteenthcentury popular manuals on hygiene. Against the ‘‘ideali illusioni’’ (idealistic illusions) and the ‘‘anacoreti’’ (anchorites), now outdated, Artusi invited his readers to understand that ‘‘il mondo corre assetato, anche piu´ che non dovrebbe, alle vive fonti del piacere’’ (the world thirsts after the living sources of pleasure, even beyond its needs) and advised them ‘‘a temperare queste pericolose tendenze con una sana morale’’ (to temper these dangerous tendencies with healthy ethics). ‘‘Healthy ethics’’ relies upon appropriate nourishment, 103

PELLEGRINO ARTUSI which can be obtained by following the hygienic rules that Artusi himself dictated in La scienza in cucina. Far from being the result of recent experimental discoveries, as Piero Camporesi has shown in his critical edition, Artusi’s recommendations were rooted in the medieval School of Salerno or Renaissance treatises such as Leon Battista Alberti’s Libri della Famiglia (The Family in Renaissance Florence, 1433–1441), which was reworked by Agnolo Pandolfini (1360–1446) into the Trattato del governo della famiglia (A Treatise on the Administration of the Family, 1734). The precise, almost liturgical, articulating of meals; the salubrious promenades; the temperance in drinking; the vigil hermeneutic of corporeal needs under the control of a refined taste that combines pleasure with a sober inclination to parsimony—all are designed to offer the reader a healthy itinerary toward preservation of life, wellbeing, and happiness by means of a most delightful discipline. The decision to include in the later editions a letter by Countess Maria Fantoni Mantegazza, in which the professor’s second wife thanks the author for his precious recipes, is a vindication of the educational importance of the book. If the fundamental functions of life are ‘‘species proliferation’’ and ‘‘nutrition,’’ Artusi’s work strove to educate the latter as Mantegazza’s Fisiologia del Piacere (The Physiology of Pleasure, 1877), aimed at improving the former. Indeed Artusi succeeded in shaping his cookeryhedonology with an unsurpassed style, which explains the success of his steady seller. Artusi is to be especially commended for writing a unified cookery book within the context of a young nation that had so far been split in two: The few who knew how ‘‘to cook in French’’ (for instance, the Royal Family, who influenced Florentine gastronomy idiolect when the capital city was moved to Tuscany in 1865) and the many who were used ‘‘to cooking in dialect,’’ that is, the food of the poor commoners. The anti-French pronouncements in Artusi’s book were often meant to encourage, according to an ideal of moderate indulgence for the pleasures of eating, the simplicity of flavors as the most authentically Italian response to French grandeur: Exemplary recipes are no. 123 (Salsa alla maitre d’hotel) and no. 137 (Balsamella) or the humorous etymological digression on the Brandade de morue in recipe no. 118. The author also avoided his predecessors’ French jargon. He purposely entrusted to the recipe for caciucco, a stew made up of a great variety of fishes, the task of enunciating 104

his linguistic program via a perfect metaphorical correspondence of food- and language-theory. After pointing out that the term caciucco is strictly Tuscan-Mediterranean, as opposed to the Adriaticcoast brodetto, he concluded: ‘‘Dopo l’unita` della patria mi sembrava logica conseguenza il pensare all’unita` della lingua parlata, che pochi curano e molti osteggiano, forse per un falso amor proprio e forse anche per la lunga e inveterata consuetudine ai propri dialetti’’ (After the unification of Italy, I thought it necessary that one should also care about a unified spoken language: Few, however, take it at heart while many oppose it perhaps out of misguided self-love or the old and lasting habit of practicing their own dialects). For Artusi, the simplicity of flavors corresponded to the quest for a ‘‘simple and pure’’ language that reflects the pleasure that readers will experience while executing each and every recipe. Thus Artusi offers this advice to neophytes: ‘‘Scegliete sempre per materia prima roba della piu´ fine, che questa vi fara` figurare’’ (Always begin by choosing the finest of ingredients; they will help you succeed). Furthermore, instead of the detached ‘‘lay-down-the-law’’ tone of recipe books where verbs appear in the imperative, Artusi’s style is friendly, humorous, sometimes even amusing. Therein are all sorts of digressions: Recipes often become a vehicle for scientific remarks (nos. 479 and 490) or for historic-mythological glosses, as in nos. 546 and 550 on peacock, which, as happens sometimes in this amazing book, is followed by no recipe at all. These recipes become a pretext for anecdotal tales and sketches (no. 47), where the narrative verve leads the reader into the recipe through unexpected and puzzling paths. Indeed, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene was Artusi’s life work: He continued to revise, enlarge, and restructure it, until its final form of 790 recipes. By the time of his death, his book had become a classic, omnipresent in the homes of the Italian bourgeois families. For a Catholic nation where even the reading of the Bible was better left to the priests, this book became a cultural companion for many ladies, who found in the instructions of an old gentleman the appropriate discrete advice in the kitchen.

Biography Pellegrino Artusi was born in Forlimpopoli (Forlı`), 4 August 1820, the only son among seven daughters

PELLEGRINO ARTUSI of Teresa Giunchi and Agostino, a wealthy grocer who had been involved in the 1831 patriotic riots. He attended high school at the Episcopal Seminar in Bertinoro and university in Bologna, where he graduated in Italian literature. The only thrilling episode of a life otherwise devoted to the prudent enjoyment of affluence and licit pleasures took place in the night of 25 January 1851, when the gang of Stefano Pelloni, the famous ‘‘Passatore,’’ broke into the Theater of Forlimpoli and robbed the audience. Afterward, the bandits went on pillaging the houses of local prominent families, including his own. Artusi negotiated with the bandits after his father managed to escape. After this incident, his family moved to Florence and, from there, Artusi went to Livorno in 1853. Back in Florence in 1854, he established his Banco, where he dealt in textiles. A bachelor at 50, he retired from business and dedicated himself to literary and gastronomic interests, with the help of his two cooks: the Tuscan Mariella Sabatini and Franceso Ruffilli from Emilia-Romagna. He died in 1911, in Florence. SIMONE LENZI See also: Culture of food

Selected Works Cookbooks La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, 1891; edited by Piero Camporesi, 1970; as Italian Cook Book, adapted by Olga Ragusa, 1945; as The Art of Eating Well, translated by Kyle M. Phillips, 1996; as Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well, translated by Murtha Baca and Stephen Sartarelli, 2003.

Other Vita di Ugo Foscolo, 1878. Le osservazioni in appendice a trenta lettere di Giuseppe Giusti, 1881. Autobiografia, edited by Alberto Capatti and Andrea Pollarini, 1993.

Further Reading Benporat, Claudio, Storia della gastronomia Italiana, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Camporesi, Piero, Introduction to Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari, La cucina italiana: Storia di una cultura, Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1999. Faccioli, Emilio, L’arte della cucina in Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Pollarini, Andrea (editor), La Cucina bricconcella 1881/ 1991: Pellegrino Artusi e l’Arte di Mangiar bene cento anni dopo, Bologna: Grafis, 1991. Roncuzzi, Alfredo, Profilo biografico di Pellegrino Artusi, Forlimpopoli: Cassa rurale ed artigiana, 1990.

AS A MAN GROWS OLDER See Senilita` (Work by Italo Svevo)

ASHES See Cenere (Work by Grazia Deledda)

105

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

ASHES OF GRAMSCI, THE See Le Ceneri di Gramsci (Work by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

AUTOBIOGRAPHY The first recorded English use of the neologism ‘‘autobiography’’ (the writing of one’s own life) appeared in 1797, and it is indeed the Romantic period, with its sustained and self-conscious inquiry into inner life, that is generally considered to be the golden age for this genre. Though many scholars believe that the Romantics raised autobiography to the status of a major literary genre by discovering its range of expressive possibilities, the ‘‘invention’’ or initial use of autobiography is an issue of an altogether more ancient and complex provenance. The desire to write about one’s own life, however varied, is arguably one of the most enduring tendencies of the Western literary tradition. From early Greek lyric fragments to twenty-first-century tell-alls, the proliferation of autobiographical works, both in Italy and abroad, has been matched in scale perhaps only by the cultural, political, and social controversies that have attended this literary practice. Moreover, the malleability and fluidity of the word ‘‘autobiography’’ and its cognates continually thwart most attempts to define or imbue with consistent theoretical principles the changing and idiosyncratic literary practices associated with self-representation. Notwithstanding this critical confusion, in Italy and elsewhere the question of autobiography has attracted a vast number of authors wishing to leave a record of their lives and a corresponding amount of powerful critical voices, as one would expect from a literary matter that bears so viscerally upon individual and collective notions of identity. Over any study of literary autobiography in the Italian tradition looms the specter of Dante, at 106

once a sacred precedent and a soaring challenge for Italian authors attempting to translate their life story into apologetic and self-mythologizing form. Indeed a great deal of what Dante wrote drew on, represented, or interpreted his life experiences in some way. Dante acknowledged Boethius and St. Augustine’s Confessiones (397–401) as authorities for speaking about oneself but above all as models of spiritual and intellectual conversion. His first major composition, the youthful Vita nova (New Life, ca. 1294), whose pioneering impact as a ‘‘book’’ has been explored by, among others, Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), recounts his love for Beatrice and his poetic apprenticeship in the dolce stil novo of Guido Cavalcanti and Guido Guinizzelli. And, of course, Dante’s masterpiece, the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), walks a literary tightrope between the allegorical plight of all Christian souls and Dante’s private spiritual path. Even when Dante did not directly write about his life, the palinodic aspect of his work (its tendency toward incorporating and revising earlier autobiographical components) often asserts itself. For example, it is accepted to argue that when Dante swooned in Inferno 5 after hearing Francesca tell how she and Paolo arrived at their adulterous embrace, he did so partly for autobiographical reasons: namely, because of his guilt over composing the kind of un-Christian, stilnovistic lyric that Francesca literally ‘‘mouths’’ when she describes to Dante, in a rhetorically graphic manner, how her beloved bestowed upon her lips a trembling kiss. On the whole, literary self-representation is a privileged

AUTOBIOGRAPHY means in the Comedia for exploring the plethora of concerns, secular and divine, that subtends Dante’s encyclopedic vision. Critic William Hazlitt once said of William Wordsworth that he saw only himself and the universe; for Dante, one might say, the self and the universe were one, from the slightest of personal details to the glory of the godhead. Throughout the poem, all knowledge is to a degree felt, lived, and experiential, and hence a form of selfknowledge, even (and perhaps especially) when Dante’s vision transcended the limitations of individual identity. Moreover, it is not only the life of the Pilgrim but also that of his readers that Dante wished to ‘‘write’’ or compose in some manner. The intensely personal and interpersonal nature of the poem, for all its erudition, finds its distillation in the text’s 20 or so addresses to the reader, which according to Erich Auerbach represent a groundbreaking instance in which a medieval author forged an intimate connection between himself and the interpreters of his work (‘‘Dante’s Addresses to the Reader,’’ 1954). The Italian writer considered to be Dante’s autobiographical successor, Petrarch, also obsessively employed the figure of apostrophe, but often his imaginary interlocutors (who included Cicero) existed only in the history books or in Petrarch’s imagination. A prestigious guide to the autobiographical element in the Petrarchan lyric came in 1823 from Ugo Foscolo, whose ‘‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch’’ (1823) transforms a comparison of the two—a practice that was a hallmark of Romantic criticism in Italy and abroad—into a cosmic struggle between those poets whom he referred to as the founders of Italian literature. Foscolo mentioned Petrarch’s claims for himself of the title of supreme poet, while consigning Boccaccio and Dante to the status of, respectively, great Christian and philosopher. Petrarch, Foscolo wrote, was an observer of the extreme of ‘‘the history of his own heart’’ and allowed ‘‘his mind to prey incessantly on itself’’ (‘‘Essay on the Poetry of Petrarch,’’ 1823). It would be a mistake, however, to take Petrarch at his word and read the Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374) as simply the record of a self in crisis. For, much in the manner of his modern heir Giacomo Leopardi, Petrarch’s stylized lyrical self-representation hums with an aesthetic pleasure at odds with the more dolorous and self-accusatory themes of the verses. In the labyrinth of the Petrarchan lyrical self, part of the interpretive challenge derives from the author’s capacity to create this engaging contrast between the measure and harmony of the poetry’s

formal articulation and, conversely, its more official (because stated explicitly) melancholic descriptions of the self. The Renaissance witnessed major contributions to the autobiographical genre, including the Vita (My Life, 1558–1562) by Benvenuto Cellini, an artisan whose picaresque memoir emphasizes (and often exaggerates) the author’s adventurous life and career. The prosimetrum form of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Comento sopra alcuni de’ suoi sonetti (Commentary on Some of His Sonnets, ca. 1476) recalls the Dantesque mix of prose self-commentary and poetic composition in the Vita nuova. Echoes of Petrarchan strategies of self-representation permeate the lyric poetry of the European Renaissance to a profound degree, in authors ranging from Michelangelo Buonarroti in Italy to Louise Labe´ (1522–1566) in France and Thomas Wyatt (1503–1542) in England, to name only the more prominent exponents. For all the richness of the literature on the self in the early modern period, however, it was not until the Enlightenment that the modern contours of the genre began to take shape. A major scholar of literary self-representation, Philippe Lejeune, dated the interest of the French and English reading public in autobiographical texts from about 1750 onward (L’autobiographie en France, 1971). A survey of eighteenth-century European literature of the self reveals a striking and unprecedented quantitative and qualitative breadth. One can categorize the major strands of the eighteenth-century autobiography into five groups. The most prominent version is the traditional memoir, by a range of authors including Giovanni Giacomo Casanova an his Histoire de ma vie (History of My Life, 1821), one of the massive autobiographies of the century; Lorenzo Da Ponte’s four volume Memorie (1823– 1827); Carlo Goldoni’s anecdotal Memoirs, a personal and melancholic diary, which he wrote in French between 1783 to 1787; and Carlo Gozzi’s Memorie inutili (Useless Memoirs, 1797–1798), which elucidates his positions on the function of the dramatic. In the style of Voltaire, these absorbing autobiographies recount the major external episodes of the authors’ lives and the development of their reputation, vocation, or public persona. Another type of autobiography consists of third-person narratives of intellectual development (cursus studiorum) in such texts as Giambattista Vico’s Vita scritta da se` medesimo (Autobiography, 1725–1731) and his contemporary Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s Intorno al metodo seguito ne’ suoi studi (On the Method Followed in His Studies), written in 107

AUTOBIOGRAPHY 1721. The era also witnessed the proliferation of fictionalized autobiographical accounts between 1770 and 1800 by authors including Goethe and Foscolo, who represented aspects of their personal lives through the veil of literature in, respectively, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) and Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798–1817). Two final categories are literary diaries such as Vittorio Alfieri’s Giornali (Journals, 1774–1775) and the retrospective personal accounts narrated according to the methodological principles and practices of the historian, for example, Edward Gibbon’s Memoirs of My Life and Writings (1796). Scholars, however, continue to locate the official birth of the modern autobiographical genre in the Romantic age rather than the Enlightenment period so well documented by the preceding examples. One might approach this distinction by comparing the modes of self-representation in the predominant eighteenth-century form, the me´moire, with a more unclassifiable work from that time, JeanJacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782–1789). The rich interiority of the Confessions and its focus on the author’s elusive quest for personal identity diverge from the more traditional autobiographical texts then in circulation. In many respects, Rousseau’s text embodies what scholars of the genre understand to be a modern autobiography proper: an author’s retrospective narrative of his or her personal identity, in both its external and internal manifestations. By contrast, in the eighteenthcentury memoirs, the emphasis falls on the public nature of the life in question, while personal identity is implicit and incidental. In the Italian tradition, a great example of pre-Romantic change in autobiographical thinking is Vittorio Alfieri’s Vita scritta da esso (The Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself, posthumous 1804). In direct opposition to the memoir tradition, the Vita scritta da esso applies an organic pattern of human growth, which Alfieri described in terms of the pianta umana. As a whole, it makes the life of the writer, and not of the individual per se, the central theme of the text, for the narrative balances upon that Archimedean point in Alfieri’s life in which he dedicated himself to becoming Italy’s premier tragedian, in part by learning the illustrious Tuscan literary idiom of Dante. Though the conversionary topos is one of the most hallowed in the Italian literary tradition (Dante’s confession to Beatrice in the Earthly Paradise, Petrarch’s prayer to the Madonna at the conclusion of the Canzoniere, or Manzoni’s chapters on the Innominato 108

in I promessi sposi), Alfieri was the first author to imbue this Pauline, Augustinian topos with a vocational, aesthetic, and secular twist. The rediscovery in Alfieri’s Vita scritta da esso of the internal and eternal mysteries of the life of the writer became a rite of passage for subsequent authors. For example, Foscolo conceived Jacopo Ortis in such lifelike terms that he wrote about his novel: ‘‘Non si legge mai; si ode sempre; ne` s’ode l’oratore o il narratore, bensı´ l’uomo giovine che parla impetuosamente, e lascia discernere i varj colori della sua voce e i mutamenti della sua fisonomia’’ (One never reads it; one always hears it; nor does one hear the orator or the narrator, but rather a young man who speaks impetuously and lets one perceive the various textures of his voice and the changes of his countenance) (‘‘Notizia bibliografica,’’ 1816). For Foscolo, the merits of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis reside in its lack of an artificial literary style. By 1814, however, Foscolo began to distance himself from the unmediated and transparent Ortis and adopted a new literary alter ego, Didimo Chierico, who viewed life with ironic detachment. Since Foscolo, the Italian literary tradition has witnessed a rich diversity of autobiographical writings. The subgenres include the self-representations by Italian patriots during the Risorgimento, such as Ippolito Nievo’s Confessioni di un italiano (The Castle of Fratta, 1867); Holocaust testimonials, most notably Primo Levi’s Se questo e` un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz, 1947), La tregua (The Reawakening, 1963), and I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986); and literary self-portraits that depict the perennial struggles over the questione meridionale, such as Carlo Levi’s chronicle of his political exile in Lucania, Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945). During the twentieth century, Italian autobiography transformed self-representation into a site for philosophical and theoretical inquiry. Indeed, autobiography became as much a literary mode as it was a genre. In Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno, 1923), the fictional persona (the patient-protagonist Zeno Cosini) embodies the author’s interests in Freudian psychoanalysis and the subconscious. In Italian, the word coscienza means both ‘‘conscience’’ and ‘‘consciousness.’’ In recent times, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), a fictional biography of the author’s great-grandfather, prompted Giorgio Bassani to introduce the novel as ‘‘forse ancor piu´ un autoritratto, lirico e critico insieme’’ (perhaps even more a self-portrait,

AUTOBIOGRAPHY at once lyrical and critical). Prince Lampedusa’s reconstruction of the Leopard’s life is part of a dialectic between the worldview of the ancien re´gime, the perennial crisis of the Southern Question, and the revolutionary politics of the Risorgimento. The insertion of anachronistic details, including the American-made bomb that would devastate the family estate in World War II, speaks of the relationship between the historically displaced Leopard and the successive generations who would presumably confront their own crises of identity. In Bassani’s novel Il giardino dei FinziContini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1962) the narrative frame distills a similar lyrical nostalgia. The epigraph, drawn from Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, asks ‘‘Ma che sa il cuore? Appunto un poco di quello che e` gia` accaduto’’ (But what does the heart know? Just a little of what already occurred); the novel’s conclusion attests to the firstperson narrator’s pledge to speak no more of ‘‘quel poco che il cuore ha saputo ricordare’’ (what little the heart was able to remember). The affective modalities of memory counter the brutal historical record of the Finzi-Continis’ deportation to Nazi Germany in 1943 and ultimately coalesce to form a literary epitaph for a family denied proper burial. Other literary works of the twentieth century comprise the monumental lyrical collections of Umberto Saba and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Saba spent much of his life editing his poetic opera omnia into the anthology form made famous by Petrarch’s Canzoniere (also the title of Saba’s work). As in the early Humanist model, Saba’s poems highlight temporal gaps in experience and signal both the interdependence and intrinsic singularity of the poetic insights in a life that was, by the author’s own admission, relatively lacking in external drama. Instead the vatic rhetoric of the cosmopolitan Ungaretti’s lyrical voice in Vita d’un uomo (Life of a Man, 1969) seems a world apart from the more homely lexicon and themes of Saba. The fact that both poets cast their lifetime work into a coherent autobiographical form attests to a continuity and influence of the enduring precedents for selffashioning set by Dante and Petrarch at the origins of the Italian literary vernacular. A significant aspect of the autobiographical genre in contemporary Italian studies has been the recovery of lost voices (especially women and immigrants). One such case is the Historia (Story, 1622) by Camilla Faa` Gonzaga, a pioneering woman’s autobiography. More conventional but nevertheless appealing memoirs were written by

Rita Levi Montalcini, Luisa Passerini, and Enif Robert. But, for all the variety in the strategies of self-representation adopted by canonical and lesser-known authors alike, a common thread in Italian literature has been its consideration of the cultural, historical, political, social, and spiritual dimensions of Italian identity from the perspective of autobiography. Thus the dialogue between italianita` and individualita`—however divergently conceived and indelibly inflected with the ideologies and worldviews of a given era—represents one of the most powerful and abiding elements of Italian literary history. JOSEPH LUZZI See also: Biography

Further Reading Auerbach, Erich, ‘‘Dante’s Addresses to the Reader,’’ Romance Philology, 7(1954), 268–278. Bassani, Giorgio, ‘‘Preface’’ to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il gattopardo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1958. Battistini, Andrea, Lo specchio di Dedalo: Autobiografia e biografia, Bologna: ll Mulino, 1990. Briganti, Paolo (editor), Autobiography, Annali d’Italianistica, 4(1986). Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953. De Man, Paul, ‘‘Autobiography as De-Facement,’’ in The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Foscolo, Ugo, ‘‘An Essay on the Poetry of Petrarch,’’ in Essays on Petrarch, London: John Murray, 1823. Foscolo, Ugo, ‘‘Notizia bibliografica,’’ in Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Zurich: Orell and Fu¨ssli, 1816. Foscolo, Ugo, ‘‘A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch,’’ in Essays on Petrarch, London: John Murray, 1823. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Memoria e scrittura: L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. ´ ditions Lejeune, Phillipe, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris: E du Seuil, 1975. Luzzi, Joseph, ‘‘Literary Lion: Alfieri’s Prince, Dante, and the Romantic Self,’’ Italica, 80:2(2003), 175–194. Olney, James (editor), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Parati, Graziella, Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Starobinski, Jean, ‘‘Le style de l’autobiographie,’’ in La relation critique, Paris: Gallimard, 1970. Tiozzo, Enrico, La trama avventurosa nelle autobiografie italiane del Settecento, Rome: Aracne, 2004. Weintraub, Karl, ‘‘Autobiography and Historical Consciousness,’’ Critical Inquiry, 1:4(1975), 821–848. Weintraub, Karl, The Value of the Individual, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978.

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B RICCARDO BACCHELLI (1891–1985) Bridge, 1927), Bacchelli narrates the failure of the insurrectional attempts of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin in the Emilia region between 1873 and 1876. The narrative techniques belong to the nineteenth century, to which are added a dose of skepticism along with a subtle form of humor, from a writer who, thanks to detachment operated by time, is able to keep his distance from the story he tells. This same artistic approach is found in his biblically inspired novels as well as in the narratives with a strictly historical background. His capacity to narrate exciting tales never yields to sentiment or to intimacy: Only when Bacchelli recounts events centered on the psyche of his characters does he write his least convincing works. Whenever there is a historical background that can be precisely documented, the author succeeds in entering into the innermost feelings of his characters, thereby offering to the reader a credible, interior representation of them. His most celebrated novel is Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po, 1938–1940), from which a cinematographic adaptation by Alberto Lattuada (1949) and a TV series were produced. The work is divided in three parts: Dio ti salvi (God Save You, 1938), La miseria viene in barca (Trouble Travels by Water, 1939) and Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo (Nothing New Under the Sun, 1940). The trilogy embraces almost a century of Italian history, from the retreat of the Napoleonic campaign in Russia to the Battle of Vittorio Veneto to the conclusion of World War I. The image that runs throughout

During his long life, the versatile writer Riccardo Bacchelli produced works in almost every literary genre: from lyric poetry to narrative, from dramaturgy to opera librettos, from essays to short stories, newspaper articles, and literary criticism, becoming an author who played an important role on the twentieth-century Italian artistic scene. His works, which span almost the entire century, succeed in maintaining a notable stylistic and ideological coherence in spite of such a wide variety of interests. Although faithful to a prose style that draws upon the examples of Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi, Bacchelli never relinquished the freedom to choose his personal style, which helped him to become an important twentieth-century narrative writer. After an education based on the ideology of Vincenzo Cardarelli’s La Ronda, which, following the challenges provoked by the Futurist movement, urged a ‘‘return to order,’’ Bacchelli turned to Manzoni’s writings from which his first and strongest interest for narrative, particularly the historical novel, was derived. This is the most congenial genre for Bacchelli, to which he dedicates a large part of his literary production. For Bacchelli, moving toward Manzoni did not only signify— according to the approach of the rondisti—the recovery of a nineteenth-century tradition in terms of form, but also a return to great historical panoramas and to captivating events capable of speaking to a wider audience. In one of his early novels, Il diavolo al Pontelungo (The Devil at the Long 111

RICCARDO BACCHELLI the novel is suggested by the parallelisms between the Po River and the life of man: As the river, flowing slowly and majestically, can sometimes have sudden surges that cause profound modifications to the landscape, so the life of man, appearing always to be the same, is capable of changing from one minute to the next. In the background of the novel are the great historical events such as the wars, the technological revolution, and the pressure put on the common man by the powers that be. In the forefront is the story of the Scacerni family, millers from the city of Ferrara, with which are interwoven the daily occurrences of life in the country. The first part, Dio ti salvi, recounts how Lazzaro Scacerni, survivor of the Russian campaign, is able to buy a mill on the shores of the Po with the money he made from a sacrilegious theft. He lives a good life even though dangers of every kind—from the local mafia to a devastating flood—are always lying in wait. The second part, La miseria viene in barca, narrates the events of Lazzaro’s son, Giuseppe, who greatly increases the family’s patrimony through illegal activities, up until his death and another flood, which makes Lazzaro lose his mind, causing him to be confined to a mental hospital. In the third part, Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo, Giuseppe’s widowed wife, Cecilia, must battle a calamitous disgrace: Her oldest son ends up in prison, accused of arson in the burning of the mill, while her second son dies in the Piave River at the end of World War I, just a few days before the Italian victory. Il mulino del Po recounts the history of the Italian people, persistent and industrious, strong in the face of every adversity. Permeated by a strong moral tone, the novel offers idyllic depictions, moments of caricature, pages of authentic suspense, and ample but well-balanced descriptions. Its length—almost 2,000 pages—and division into parts allows the work to assume the aspect of a multiple novel, which, however, comes through as unified. Along with the narrative works, Bacchelli also wrote poetry, such as Poemi lirici (Lyric Poems, 1914) and Parole d’amore (Words of Love, 1935), which move along the lines of a rich, autobiographical experience to which is added an inclination toward philosophical discourse resulting in a complex formal and thematic approach. All of this reveals, from his early works, Bacchelli’s determination not to dedicate himself to a purely contemplative treatment of the lyric material, but rather to utilize poetry as an effective means of discussion. The structure of Bacchelli’s verses approaches prose as it rejects rhyme schemes and facile 112

musicality. The only form of poetry possible for modern writers, according to Bacchelli, is a sort of rhythmic prose in which basic themes founded on the truth predominate. In his later years, with his three collections of Versi e rime (Verses and Rhymes, 1971–1973), Bacchelli seems to return to a heightened musicality, although his poetry tends toward unusual themes, such as science, theology, or morality, according to a model that could lead back to the philosophic poetry of a Clemente Rebora, or even of a T(homas) S(tearns) Eliot. Bacchelli’s theatrical pieces (collected in the first two volumes of Tutte le opere, 1957–1974) are articulated and well-constructed in a dialectical framework. He begins with a reworking of Amleto (Hamlet, 1919), which faithfully recovers the storyline of the Shakespearian tragedy, although the protagonist is much more aware of his predicament—so much so that he loses the ambiguity of his predecessor. Conceived as an autobiographical projection of the author, Amleto becomes a poet in whom persists the regret for a life no longer possible for him. Of greater impact is L’alba dell’ultima sera (The Dawn of Last Evening, 1949), a drama that deals with the inner conflict of a scientist who, after having created a terrifying atomic device, refuses to make it known to anyone, preferring rather to die. There are about 10 other theatrical pieces that are rarely performed today. The monologues written for actress Paola Borboni had greater success. Bacchelli is also the author of radio plays, television screenplays, and of farces, such as La notte di un nevrastenico (The Neurasthenic’s Night, 1957), which was transformed in 1960 into a libretto for the music of Nino Rota. It recounts the grotesque event of a man in a hotel, who tries in vain to find nocturnal tranquility. Bacchelli was also a literary critic, a travel writer, and a music critic, whose writings include a biography of Gioacchino Rossini published by UTET in 1941. All of these activities make of Bacchelli a multifaceted author who is at the same time endowed with an admirable coherence of style and commitment, to the point of being notable, in clear contrast with the poetics of the fragment typical of rondismo, as one of the most remarkable exponents of the twentieth-century novel.

Biography Born in Bologna 19 April 1891; son of a lawyer, enrolled in the Department of Letters at the University of Bologna, where he was a student of

RICCARDO BACCHELLI Giovanni Pascoli, among others; his studies were interrupted in the third year; he collaborated with the newspapers Il Resto del Carlino and La Patria, and with the journals La Raccolta, Primato, and La Voce; was among the founders of the journal La Ronda in 1919; during World War I, fought as a volunteer artillery officer, an experience that would later be recalled in Memorie del tempo presente; in 1941, his enormous narrative, poetic, and essay production earned him the nomination to the Accademia d’Italia (a position from which he would resign in 1944) and, later, to the Accademia della Crusca and to the Accademia dei Lincei; the University of Milan and the University of Bologna bestowed upon him an honorary degree (honoris causa) in letters; along with his artistic activity, he edited the editions of Opere by Giacomo Leopardi (1935) and by Alessandro Manzoni (1953). Bacchelli died in Monza (Milan) on 8 October 1985. PAOLO QUAZZOLO Selected Works Collections Tutte le novelle, 1911–1915, Milan: Rizzoli, 1952. Tutte le opere, 28 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1957–1974.

Novels Il filo meraviglioso di Lodovico Clo`, 1911. Il diavolo al Pontelungo, 1927; as The Devil at Long Bridge, translated by Orlo Williams, 1929. La citta` degli amanti, 1929; as Love Town, translated by Orlo Williams, 1930. Una passione coniugale, 1930. Oggi domani e mai, 1932. Il rabdomante, 1936. Il mulino del Po, 1938, 1939, 1940; as The Mill on the Po, (contains God Save You and Trouble Travels by Water), translated by Frances Frenaye, 1952; as Nothing New Under the Sun (volume 3 of Il Mulino de Po), translated by Stuart Hood, 1955. Lo sguardo di Gesu`, 1948. La cometa, 1951. L’incendio di Milano, 1952; as The Fire of Milan, translated by Kathleen Nott, 1958. Il figlio di Stalin, 1953; as Son of Stalin, translated by Kathleen Nott, 1956. Tre giorni di passione, 1955. Non ti chiamero` piu` padre, 1959. Il coccio di terracotta, 1966. L’‘‘Afrodite’’: un romanzo d’amore, 1969. Il progresso e` un razzo: romanzo matto, 1975. Il sommergibile, 1978. In grotta e in valle, 1980.

Short Stories ‘‘Bella Italia. Novelle, fiabe e racconti,’’ 1930. ‘‘La fine d’Atlantide e altre favole lunatiche,’’ 1942.

‘‘L’elmo di Tancredi ed altre novelle giocosa,’’ 1942. ‘‘Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo ed altri racconti disperati,’’ 1942. ‘‘La bellissima fiaba di Rosa dei venti,’’ 1948.

Poetry ‘‘Poemi lirici,’’ 1914. ‘‘Amore di poesia. Poemi lirici. Memorie. Riepilogo. Liriche,’’ 1930. ‘‘Parole d’amore,’’ 1935. ‘‘La notte dell’8 settembre 1943,’’ 1945. ‘‘Versi e rime: primo libro, la stella del mattino,’’ 1971. ‘‘Versi e rime: secondo libro, bellezza e umanita`,’’ 1972. ‘‘Versi e rime: terzo libro, giorni di vita e tempo di poesia,’’ 1973.

Theater Amleto, 1919. L’alba dell’ultima sera, 1949. La notte di un nevrastenico (libretto), 1957. La smorfia (libretto), 1959. Il calzare d’argento (libretto), 1961.

Travel Writings Italia per terra e per mare. Capitoli di viaggio, 1952. Viaggio in Grecia, 1959. Viaggi all’estero e vagabondaggi di fantasia, 1959. America in confidenza, 1966. Africa tra storia e fantasia, 1970. Questa nostra Italia, 1978.

Critical Essays La ruota del tempo, 1928. Confessioni letterarie, 1932. Gioacchino Rossini, 1941. Rossini e esperienze rossiniane, 1959. Leopardi e Manzoni. Commenti letterari, 1960. Saggi critici, 1962. Giorno per giorno. Dal 1912 al 1922, 1966. Giorno per giorno. Dal 1922 al 1966, 1968.

Historical and Political Writings La congiura di Don Giulio d’Este, 1931. Nel fiume della storia. Riflessioni, discorsi e saggi storici, 1955. La politica di un impolitico 1914–1945. ‘‘Dieci anni di ansie’’: Due saggi su Giolitti e altri scritti, 1948.

Further Reading Bergamo, Giorgio Mario, Il mio Bacchelli, Verona: Stamperia Valdonega, 1998. Briganti, Alessandra, Riccardo Bacchelli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Casotti, Claudia, Uno scrittore nel tempo: bibliografia di Riccardo Bacchelli, Florence: Le Lettere, 2001. Della Peruta, Franco, Riccardo Bacchelli e il mondo rurale padano, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992. Dosi Barzizza, Antonietta, Invito alla lettura di Riccardo Bacchelli, Milan: Mursia, 1986. Masotti, Claudia, Riccardo Bacchelli, Naples: Morano, 1991. Ragni, Eugenio, ‘‘Cultura e letteratura dal primo dopoguerra alla seconda guerra mondiale,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 9, Il Novecento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2000.

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RICCARDO BACCHELLI Saccenti, Mario, ‘‘Il romanzo plurim,’’ in Novecento, vol. 5, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorato, 1980. Saccenti, Mario, Bacchelli: memoria e invenzione, Florence: Le Lettere, 2000.

Vitale, Maurizio, Sul fiume reale: tradizione e modernita` nella lingua del Mulino del Po di Riccardo Bacchelli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999.

NANNI BALESTRINI (1935–) Nanni Balestrini’s experience is perhaps one of the most radical and contradictory within the neoavant-garde panorama. Balestrini’s search for both open and experimental ways of expressing ideological concerns brought him in contact with many genres and different forms of writing—from virtual or electronic visual poetry to the collage and combinatorial methods—in order to destroy any mechanism of control that might establish the subject’s authoritative presence in words. However, even if he seems to follow Dadaistic combinatory techniques, his writing appears nevertheless restrained by an evident unwillingness to abandon rhetoric. According to Alfredo Giuliani, Balestrini’s ‘‘writing is provisional, provocative even if it shows impeccable ‘formalisms,’’’ therefore addressed to a pragmatic outcome like a machine showing its mechanisms, so that the recipient could make more practical and concrete use of the verbal material toward a full recovery of ‘‘the wonderful organic, anonymous, casual sense of life’’ (Le droghe di Marsiglia, 1977). Today, Balestrini’s first poetical attempts written in the 1950s are regarded as remarkable— collected in Osservazioni sul volo degli uccelli: poesie 1954–1956 (Observations on the Flight of Birds: Poems 1954–1956, 1988). The richness of the images and evoked objects reminds John Picchione of Ezra Pound’s lesson: ‘‘The juxtaposition of objects and events follows paratactic or asyndetic constructions that try to capture the simultaneity of perceptions and discard discursive and descriptive modes of writing’’ (‘‘Nanni Balestrini and the Invisibility of the Poetic ‘I,’’’ 2004). A more extensive search for linguistic short-circuits can be seen in Il sasso appeso (The Dangling Rock, 1961), then again in Come si agisce (How to Act, 1963): ‘‘Here, possibilities of narration are continuously frustrated by the presence of semantic oppositions, antitheses, and antinomies that not only cause a state 114

of tension but also create a linguistic and mental suspension that opens the text to a multiplicity of meanings,’’ (John Picchione, ‘‘Nanni Balestrini and the Invisibility of the Poetic ‘I,’’’ 2004). Suffering from a slow and difficult political disillusionment, immediately after the Gruppo 63 experience, Balestrini created a remarkable allegory of the will toward social change with a WomanBird character, the protagonist of Le ballate della signorina Richmond (Miss Richmond’s Ballads, 1977). In 1987, this allegory can still be found in Il ritorno della signorina Richmond (Miss Richmond’s Return)—a narrative cycle in progress about the political transformations in Italy between the 1970s and 1990s, almost a counter melody to the author’s life between his political engagement in Italy and his exile in France. In 1999, he published the collection Le avventure complete della signorina Richmond (Miss Richmond’s Complete Adventures). This is a new kind of civic poetry where the language is a mixture of everyday sentences, proverbs slightly changed in order to modify their meanings, direct speech, violent invectives and explicit allusions to films, songs, newspapers and novels. There are many different sources: ornithological and cookery handbooks, poetry and drama collections, Vladimir Propp, extracts and quotations from Bertolt Brecht, political and trade-union speeches, Erik Satie’s musical advice and, amidst all of this, a remarkable homage to the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Balestrini collaborated with his friend and muse Valeria Magli, who performed a harsh and dissonant dance arrangement many times. In Ipocalisse (Hypocalypse, 1986) Balestrini experiments with a new, open sonnet form: 49 compositions where the verses seem ‘‘like threads hanging while going on, ever breaking inside, still in the impossibility of giving shape to a plausible continuity of sense’’ (Maurizio Cucchi, ‘‘Nanni Balestrini,’’ 1996).

NANNI BALESTRINI After the anthology of the Il romanzo sperimentale, Palermo 1965/Gruppo 63 (The Experimental Novel, Palermo 1965/1963 Group, 1966), his prose work, too, shows an explicit interest in the combinatory method and civic subjects. The prose cycle including Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything, 1971), Gli invisibili (The Unseen, 1987), L’editore (The Publisher, 1989) was reissued under the title La grande rivolta (The Great Revolt, 1999). These works tell of the crucial moments of social and political life in Italy: the insurrection of the new Southern working class against the Northern industrial automatism, the physical and cultural suppression of the rebels, and the emblematic and tragic death of the Milanese publisher Gian Giacomo Feltrinelli. Whereas in I furiosi (The Furious, 1994), the collective ‘‘I’’ speaks through a syntax free from any literary boundary, in a language so colloquial and full of slang as to seem onomatopoeic, and describes the ritual of soccer supporters in a polyphonic self-odyssey. As in a mimetic flux, the prose is interrupted only by lyrical-like inserts with echoes of fanatical soccer fan songs and jibes and is characterised by its lack of any punctuation, recalling the language of children. The writing represents an instinctual and superficial animality, displaying something provincial in the description of the wonder for the rites of the sporting community. The individual plots are always intertwined in the text and remain at the early stage of pure voices, even where there is an evident embryonic notion of a community ideal, of a collective sharing that goes far beyond the support and the sense of belonging that pertains to soccer fans to the extent that they consider themselves and not the players the Milanese soccer team. After Una mattina ci siam svegliati (One Morning, We Woke Up, 1995), where the organization of a big national political manifestation is described through the lower-class flux of voices, in a collective, almost psalm-like tale, Balestrini wrote his last narrative, Sandokan: Storia di camorra (Sandokan: A Camorra Story, 2004) where the title alludes to the name of the main character, a mafia boss. The deterioration of the environment and cultural backwardness of a little village near Caserta under the obsessive control of the mafia lead a group of men into delinquency. This story tells about the rise and fall of an economic empire built on blood and grounded in an artificial ideal of ‘‘honour’’ and ‘‘honourableness,’’ in the name of which all the most challenging expiations are accepted. In this documentary novel, Balestrini’s language reflects

the subject, as an epic confession-conversation, a simple and sterile monologue to reflect the language of the mafia, created out of the fake cliche´ that the American movies love and overuse. In this prose, a simple and barren language seems to be the most suitable means to show his impossible reconciliation.

Biography Born in Milan 2 July 1935. Poet and novelist, cultural and political activist. Began publishing his poetry in the early 1950s in the periodical Mac Espace directed by Gillo Dorfles. His first volume of poetry Il sasso appeso published in 1961. In 1961, wrote his first computer-aided poem Tape Mark 1 (pubished in the Almanacco Bompiani). Played a decisive role in the creation of the culture reviews Il Verri, Quindici, and Alfabeta. Took part in the Gruppo 63 and Italian neo-avant-garde, being both coeditor (with Alfredo Giuliani) and contributor to the volume I novissimi (1961). Founding member of Potere Operario, 1969. In 1973, joined the extreme left movement Autonomia Operaia. On April 7, 1979, with many others of the movement, was accused of subversive association and involvement in 19 murders, among them Aldo Moro’s. Took refuge in Paris in order to avoid arrest (later dropped). His novel Gli invisibili translated as The Unseen and shown as a documentary on the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1989. Balestrini also works in performing and visual arts. Exhibited in many galleries in Italy and abroad and the Biennial International Exhibition of Modern Art in Venice in 1993. In 2003, along with Maria Teresa Carbone, founded the review online Zoooom—libri e visioni in rete. In 2004, a number of exhibitions including at the Contemporary Art Museum in Rome, the Communal Gallery in Macerata and the Hermete Gallery in Turin. In 1963, was awarded the Premio Ferro di Cavallo prize for the most experimental book of the year. In 1996, appointed Chevalier dans l’ordre des arts et des lettres in France. Nanni Balestrini divides his time between Paris and Rome. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Neo-Avant-Garde Selected Works Collections La grande rivolta (Vogliamo tuttoGli invisibiliL’editore), Milan: Bompiani, 1999.

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NANNI BALESTRINI Le avventure complete della signorina Richmond, Turin: Testo & Immagine, 1999. Tutto in una volta, autoantologia delle poesie 1954–2003, Venice: Edizioni del Leone, 2003.

Anthologies

Poetry

Radiodrama

‘‘Il sasso appeso,’’ 1961. ‘‘Come si agisce,’’ 1963. ‘‘Altri procedimenti,’’ 1965. ‘‘Ma noi facciamone un’altra,’’ 1968. ‘‘Ballate distese,’’ 1975. ‘‘Poesie pratiche. 1954–1969,’’ 1976. ‘‘Le ballate della signorina Richmond,’’ 1977. ‘‘Blackout,’’ 1980. ‘‘Finisterre,’’ 1982. ‘‘Cieli,’’ 1984. ‘‘Ipocalisse,’’ 1986. ‘‘Il ritorno della signorina Richmond,’’ 1987. ‘‘Osservazioni sul volo degli uccelli: poesie: 1954–1956,’’ 1988. ‘‘Il pubblico del labirinto, quarto libro della signorina Richmond,’’ 1992. ‘‘Estremi rimedi,’’ 1995. ‘‘Elettra, operapoesia,’’ 2001. ‘‘Sfinimondo,’’ 2003.

Fiction Tristano, 1966. Vogliamo tutto, 1971. La violenza illustrata, 1976. Gli invisibili, 1987; as The Unseen, translated by Liz Heron, 1989. L’editore, 1989. I furiosi, 1994. Una mattina ci siam svegliati, 1995. Sandokan. Storia di camorra, 2004.

Essays Prendiamoci tutto: conferenza per un romanzo: letteratura e lotta di classe, 1972. L’orda d’oro, 1988 (with Primo Moroni).

Gruppo 63. La nuova letteratura, 34 scrittori, Palermo, ottobre 1963, 1964 (with Alfredo Giuliani). Il romanzo sperimentale, Palermo 1965/Gruppo 63, 1966. Deposizione, 1973. Parma 1922: una resistenza antifascista, 2003.

Translations Claude Simon, Trittico, 1976. Samuel Beckett, Sussulti, 1991.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: Dalla nascita del «Verri» alla fine di «Quindici», Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Cucchi, Maurizio, ‘‘Nanni Balestrini,’’ in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1995, edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. De Stasio Wedel, Giovanna, Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Iliano, editors, Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, Detroit and London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1993. Esposito, Roberto, ‘‘Produzione poetica e forma di riproduzione: Nanni Balestrini,’’ in Le ideologie della neoavanguardia, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Giuliani, Alfredo, Le droghe di Marsiglia, Milan: Adelphi, 1977. Picchione, John, ‘‘Nanni Balestrini and the Invisibility of the Poetic ‘I,’’’ in The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetics Practices, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Riccardi, Antonio, ‘‘Osservazioni sul volo degli uccelli di Nanni Balestrini,’’ in Poesia, 2, no. 5 (May 1989): 64–65. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Come agisce Balestrini,’’ in Ideologia e linguaggio, edited by Erminio Risso, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2001.

MATTEO BANDELLO (1485–1561) Matteo Bandello is considered one of the most important novella writers after Giovanni Boccaccio. He was also the chronicler of sixteenth-century courtly society in Northern Italy. His life reveals a religious and theological education as well as a talent for diplomatic missions; he moved easily in society and was in contact with the most important representatives of the Renaissance. The encyclopedic character of his literary work offers not only a source for historical and literary studies of history of his time but also evidence of real human 116

experiences showing the different aspects of the Renaissance. Bandello is thus a symbolic figure for Lombardian humanism. His uncle Vincenzo Bandello, an extraordinary theologian who became famous for his theses about the Immaculate Conception, is responsible for Matteo’s intellectual and social education. With the intention of reforming the order of St. Dominic, Vincenzo travels to France, Spain, and Germany in 1501. Having returned to the monastery of Sant’Eustorgio in Milan, he finally calls a

MATTEO BANDELLO general assembly of the order. In 1505 he will invite Matteo to accompany him during his religious mission to Central and Southern Italy. The basis of the first literary experience of Matteo is formed during his studies in Genoa by the friendship of Giambattista Cattaneo, an exceptionally gifted young monk of the Dominican Order, who dies of the plague. Founded on this experience, Matteo writes his first literary work, which is a report on the life of Cattaneo in Latin: Religiosissimi Fratris Joannis Baptistae Cattanei Genuensis vita (Life of the most religious brother Giambattista Cattaneo of Genoa, ca. 1501). The inscription on Cattaneo’s tombstone says: ‘‘Invitis parentibus, ad Praedicatorum Religionem convolavit, in qua quadraginta dumtaxat diebus exercitus, morte praescita, sevissima peste interrempta’’ (Against the will of his parents, he flocked to the Dominican Order, in which he militated for just 40 days; he was killed by a most cruel plague, his death having been foretold). This literary biography is a valuable document of Matteo’s religious sense and the real life of a Dominican convent of that time. In 1505, having definitively entered the convent and accompanying his uncle he gains another experience that bears fruit in his literary works. Staying at the monastery Santa Maria Novella in Florence he gets to know a young lady called Violante Borromea, whom he admires platonically and to whom he paid tribute. Although she dies one year later (only a few days before his uncle’s death), her name appears several times in Matteo’s poetry. In Canto I,28 of Canti XI de le lodi de la signora Lucrezia Gonzaga (Eleven Cantos, 1545) he mentions her name and her origin, Florence. Moreover, to her he dedicates novella I,18 Il Bandello a la Diva Violante Borromea Fiorentina Salute (Bandello to the Diva Violante Borromea Fiorentina), which is Bandello’s first novella, probably written in 1505. On his journeys he visits many important courts, gaining much diplomatic and literary experience. When Vincenzo dies in Calabria, Matteo takes the corpse to Naples, where he buries him in the monastery of San Domenico Maggiore. Back in Milan Matteo, in touch with poets Cecilia Gallerana e Bergamina and Camilla Scarampa e Guidobuona, he is inspired to collect his novellas by Ippolta Sforza. He dedicates the first novella of the first volume to his patron by calling her the founder of this collection and also the founder of the individual composition. In novella IV/16 Bandello describes his journey to the court of Louis XII in Blois. In 1509, we can find the translation of Boccaccio’s eighth novella of the 10th day, the novella of Titus and Gisippus,

translated into Latin by Bandello between 1504 and 1508. This translation with the title of Titi Romani Egisippique Atheniensis amicorum historia in latinum versa (The story of the two friends Titus the Roman and Gisippus the Athenian translated into Latin) reveals Bandello’s particular interest in the Boccaccio’s Decamerone. Bandello is also the author of the introduction to the Calipsychia (1515) of Radini Tedeschi, a work in the tradition of medieval allegory. When Bandello takes refuge with Isabella d’Este Gonzaga in 1515 he has the opportunity to get to know the educated aristocracy of Mantova, especially Elisabetta Gonzaga, Emilia Pio, and Ippolita Torelli, the wife of Baldassare Castiglione. Having returned to Milan in 1522, Bandello is forced to leave Milan again in 1525 when his house is plundered by the Spanish troops (Bandello mentions this in novella I,23), and valuable manuscripts are destroyed and lost. Back to Mantova during the battles against the Spanish army he contacts famous generals, as for example Giovanni dalle Bande Nere and the Renaissance tactician and theorist of war, Niccolo` Machiavelli. Meetings with those historical characters are mentioned in novella I,40, which he dedicates to Giovanni de’ Medici. Bandello’s poetry in terza rima (three-line stanza), Le tre Parche, ne la nativita` del signor Giano, primogenito del signor Cesare Fregoso e de la signora Gostanza Rangona sua consorte (The Three Fates, 1531) is written in the honour of Giano, the firstborn child of Cesare and Gostanza Fregoso. Cesare Fregoso is also mentioned by Ludovico Ariosto in the 46th canto of his Orlando furioso. Having met Marguerite de Navarre, Bandello keeps in touch with the author of the Heptame´ron, a work that had a great influence on Bandello’s novellas. In 1539, he sends his translation in the Italian vernacular language (volgare) of Euripides’ play Hekuba (Ecuba) to Marguerite. Between 1535 and 1538 he writes Canti XI de le lodi de la signora Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazuolo in octaves. Marguerite de Navarre will get one manuscript in 1544. Moreover, Bandello mentions in his novella II, 11 a vocabulary in Latin that he has collected from many works of the best authors. This encyclopedia, as he says, was lost during the occupation of Milan in 1525: ‘‘E tra l’altre cose mi rubarono la maggior parte de le mie rime ed alcune novelle insieme con quel mio gran volume dei vocaboli latini da me raccolti da tutti i buoni autori’’ (And, among other things, they stole most of my poetry and some novellas together with that big book of mine of Latin words which I had assembled from all the 117

MATTEO BANDELLO good authors). In 1545, Bandello releases Canti XI and Le tre Parche to be published in Agen, and also the first three volumes of his novellas Le tre parti de le Novelle del Bandello, edited in Lucca in 1554 by Francesco Busdrago. These volumes containing the first 186 novellas, the following 28 novellas, partly obtained in Italy and partly written by himself, are published in Lyon in 1573, 12 years after Bandello’s death. The first literary judgment on Bandello comes from the monk Leandro Alberti in a collection on famous Dominicans of 1517. Alberti praises Bandello’s clear and direct style: ‘‘Virum in scribendo floridum, clarum, nitidum, emunctum et accuratum’’ (A copious, straightforward, polished, refined, and precise writer) (cited in Giuliano Pirotta, Bandello narratore, 1997). In the course of literary criticism, Bandello’s light and fluent style is commonly mentioned. It is considered to contain a sense of realism. Natalino Sapegno talks about his ‘‘stile giornalistico’’ ( journalistic style), a language that follows the truth, a ‘‘linguaggio di cose’’ (Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, 1941), which is connected, as Bruno Maier says, with a ‘‘poetica del vero,’’ a poetics of contemporary and real life (Matteo Bandello, 1990). Bandello rules out that his novellas are fictitious and states that he has experienced all events himself and then wrote them down (Giusi Baldissone, Le voci della novella, 1998). Through this oral tradition, Bandello collects in his works different kinds of truth, which show the social and political confusion of his times. Especially in the dedication letters, an attempt to order the chronology of the events in his unstable life can be registered. There are many differences between the novellas of Giovanni Boccaccio and Matteo Bandello, which are a consequence of the conditions at that time. Bandello experiences war, which gives him the opportunity to contact different royal courts and generals. The centre of power is no longer the city republics of the fourteenth century, but the royal courts, often in conflict between the emperor and the Pope and thus having to endure foreign occupying powers. The omission of a frame story in Bandello’s collection of novellas is the expression of a ‘‘instabil varieta`’’ (unpredictable variety) of the circumstances, which puts the courtly culture of conversation at the centre of attention (Willi Hirdt, review of Matteo Bandello, novelliere europeo, 1986). There is a huge and dialectic contrast between the culture of aristocratic patronage, sense of art, artistic awareness, the elevated conversation of the court life and the violence of the period, which 118

he criticises from an aesthetic distance. In novella IV,25, which is dedicated to Berlingieri Caldora, Bandello judges the use of firearms as an agreement to modern types of war and calls it an evil instrument by referring to the wound of Fregoso’s colonel Lelio Filomanino, who is ‘‘ferito di una palla di arcobuso, instrumento diabolico’’ (wounded by a shot from an arquebus, a diabolical instrument). Bandello’s moral judgment is true, but it is much more difficult to explain the tension between the morality of the Dominican and the immoral stories of his literary work. Bandello is a monk and a courtier at the same time; at the court he tells stories and agrees with rules that conversation is to be enjoyed, but also to be useful ( prodesse et delectare). The varied character and development of the author is explained by Adelin Charles Fiorato in Bandello entre l’histoire et l’ecriture (1979), which lays the foundation for the literary scientific treatment of Bandello, who is viewed as ‘‘un produit des e´coles et de la ville’’ and whose ‘‘expe´rience s’est paracheve´e dans les chaˆteaux, les camps et les garnisons de l’Italie septentrionale, dans les demeures e´piscopales de Guyenne.’’ Nevertheless he stands by his roots. So Bandello justifies the usage of the Lombardian language by dedicating the Le novelle to Ippolita Sforza: ‘‘Se poi, come di leggiero forse avverra`, cose assai vi saranno rozze, mal esplicate, ne´ con ordine conveniente poste, o con parlar barbaro espresse, a la debolezza del mio basso ingegno l’ascriva e al mio poco sapere, e pigli in grado il mio buon volere, pensando ch’io son lombardo e in Lombardia a le confini de la Liguria nato e per lo piu` degli anni miei sin ad ora nodrito, e che, come io parlo cosı` ho scritto’’ (If then, as perhaps may easily happen, many things seem rough, ill explained or expressed uncouthly and not placed in appropriate order, ascribe this to my weak wit and to my litle knowledge, and take into account my good will, remembering that I am a Lombard born in Lombardy on the border with Liguria and for most of my years brought up there and that I write as I speak). On the one hand, Bandello regards himself as God’s unworthy tool following the traditions of Christian hermeneutics, on the other hand he attaches great importance to the individual character of his poetry, with his special emphasis on the Lombardian language by showing the distance and independence from the idioms of Tuscany and the Trecento, especially in relation to Boccaccio. Already in the introduction to the first volume it is important for Bandello to announce his linguistic and stylistic difference to Boccaccio: ‘‘Io non voglio dire come disse il gentile ed eloquentissimo

MATTEO BANDELLO Boccaccio, che queste mie novelle siano scritte in fiorentin volgare, perche´ direi manifesta bugia, non essendo io ne´ fiorentino ne´ toscano, ma lombardo. E se bene io non ho stile, che il confesso’’ (I do not want to say, as the noble and eloquent Boccaccio said, that these stories of mine are written in the Florentine vernacular, because I would be telling an obvious lie since I am neither Florentine nor Tuscan, but Lombard. And if I don’t have style, then I admit it). Through this confession Bandello counts himself among the tradition of novellas established by Boccaccio, but at the same time he asks the reader not to compare him with Boccaccio. The use of the Lombardian language shows less the incompetence of Bandello to use the Tuscan language than his pride in his origins, which he explains in his work. In the preface of the third part of the novellas he mentions again his Lombardian origins and his descent from the Ostrogoth who founded his home Castelnuovo under the Ostrogoth King Teodorico. In novella I,52 and 53 there is some evidence of his father, Giovan Francesco, yet his mother is never mentioned. Moreover, in novella I,23 he tells a love story of his ancestor and founder of the family Bandelchil, which was already written in an old book: ‘‘La novella io gia` vidi in un antichissimo libro scritto a mano ove erano molte cose de le antichita` de la nostra terra’’ (The story which I took from a very old book written by hand where there were many things about the ancient times of our land). With much self-irony, Bandello tells of the true love of his ancestor Bandelchil, who with trickery got into the bedroom of his beloved Aloinda; after their marriage she bore him many descendants. The description of the true affection of a couple, whose love can only come true through trickery, reminds us of Romeo and Juliet, who have no other wish than to get married. In novella II,9 their passionate words of love and longing seem as true and honest as the ones of Bandelchil and Aloinda. That is what Aloinda says to Bandelchil: ‘‘Signor mio, da me piu` che la vita mia amato, se voi tanto m’amate quante mi dite e scritto m’avete, voi farete di modo che possiamo lungamente esser insieme, che sara` se per moglie mi sposate’’ (My lord, loved by me more than my life, if you love me as much as you say you do, you will act so that we can be together for a long time, which will be if you take me as your wife).

Biography Born in 1485 in Castelnuovo Scrivia (Alessandria), then in Lombardy, son of Giovan Francesco

Bandello of an old aristocratic family. In 1497 goes to Milan to the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where he is taught and educated by his uncle Vincenzo Bandello, the prior of the monastery. In 1500 or 1501 he follows his uncle, who teaches theology in Pavia, and from 1503 to 1505 completes his theological education in Genoa in the convent of S. Maria di Castello. Having survived the plague and having taken the vows, he accompanies his uncle Vincenzo, who has been appointed as the Superior General of the Order of St. Dominic, to a religious mission to Florence, Rome, Naples, and Calabria to reform the order. He familiarizes self with not only the monasteries of the central and southern part of Italy but also life at the residence of Pope Jules II in Rome and the courtly life at the royal court of Beatrice d’Aragon, at Castle Capuano in Naples. After the death of Vincenzo Bandello on 27th August 1506, returns to Milan to the monastery of S. Maria delle Grazie, where he is ordained a priest in 1507. There cultivates his contacts with the aristocrats of Lombardy as well as with the most important literary circles. With Ippolita Sforza Bentivoglio, the wife of Alessandro Bentivoglio of Bologna, he develops profound cultural contacts and is inspired by her to make his collection of novellas. In the function of a courtier he offers his services to the Bentivoglio and in 1508 he is sent on a diplomatic mission to the court of Louis XII in Blois. In consequence of the various battles between the Italian dynasties of the Po Valley and the foreign French, Spanish, and Imperial forces, Bandello comes into the service of several representatives of the Italian Renaissance such as Massimiliano Sforza, the son of Ludovico il Moro, who reaches Milan in 1512. Bandello is in direct contact with the nobility of Milan, the aristocratic families Atellani and Sanseverino and with the poets Cecilia Gallerana e Bergamina and Camilla Scarampa e Guidobuona. After the battle at Marignano the Sforza family has to sustain the loss of its territories and the French are turning to Milan. Takes refuge with Isabella d’Este Gonzaga, placing himself under her protection. Again he is sent on diplomatic missions to important courts of northern Italy. The battle of Bicocca and the combined defeat of the French stabilize the condition and power of the Sforzas, and in 1522 Bandello goes back to Milan until 1525, when Lombardy is occupied by the Spanish and the house of Bandello is looted. Bandello finds refuge in Mantova, where he is taken into service by Francesco Gonzaga and gets to know the garrisons and battlefields. Finally, in 1529 Bandello is indentured to the Genoese 119

MATTEO BANDELLO emigrant and Venetian general Cesare Fregoso, who is, on instructions from Venice, stationed in Verona, where Bandello will live from 1529 to 1536. After a short stay in Castelgoffredo (Mantova) in 1536 he follows Fregoso to France where he meets Queen Marguerite de Navarre. On 2 July 1541 Cesare Fregoso is murdered on orders of the Emperor Karl V. Bandello accompanies the widow, Gostanza Rangona, to Venice, then to Bazens near Agen, where Gostanza Rangona lives under protection of the King of France, Franc¸ois I. There until his death, Bandello concentrates on his literary works. After the demise of the bishop of Agen, Antonio della Rovere, Bandello is appointed bishop, responsible as vicar general for the administration of the diocese of Agen. From 1550 to 1555, he holds the office of bishop of Agen until Ettore Fregoso, the son of Gostanza, is of age. In 1561, Matteo Bandello died in Bazens and was buried in the Dominican convent of Port SainteMarie near Agen. MICHAEL AICHMAYR See also: Novella Selected Works Collections Le novelle, edited by Gioachino Brognoligo, 3 vols., 2nd revised edition, Bari: Laterza, 1928–1931. Tutte le opere di Matteo Bandello, edited by Francesco Flora, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1934–1935. Novelle, critical edition by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1978; as The Novels of Matteo Bandello, 6 vols., translated by John Payne, London: Villon Society 1890.

edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 3: Rinascimento e Umanesimo: Dal Quattrocento all‘Ariosto, Milan: Motta, 2004. Fiorato, Adelin Charles, Bandello entre l’histoire et l’ecriture: La vie, l’expe´rience sociale, l’e´volution culturelle d’un conteur de la Renaissance, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Griffith, T. Gwynfor, Bandello’s Fiction: An Examination of the ‘‘Novelle,’’ Oxford: Blackwell, 1955. Hirdt, Willi, review of Matteo Bandello, novelliere europeo: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (7–9 novembre 1980), edited by Ugo Rozzo, Tortona: Cassa di Risparmio, 1982, in Romanische Forschungen, 98, nos. 3/4 (1986): 463–466. Maier, Bruno, ‘‘Bandello, Matteo (1485–1561): Matteo Bandello e la novellistica del Cinquecento,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, 2nd edition, Turin: U.T.E.T, 1990. Masi, Ernesto, Matteo Bandello o vita italiana in un novelliere del Cinquecento, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1900. Ordine, Nuccio, Teoria della novella e teoria del riso nel Cinquecento, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Petrocchi, Giorgio, Matteo Bandello: L’artista e il novelliere, Florence: Le Monnier, 1949. Pirotta, Giuliano, Bandello narratore, Florence: Polistampa, 1997. Rozzo, Ugo (editor), Matteo Bandello, novelliere europeo: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (7–9 novembre 1980), Tortona: Cassa di Risparmio, 1982. Sapegno, Natalino, Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965–1966. Sauer, K.M., Geschichte der italienischen Literatur von ihren Anfa¨ngen bis auf die neueste Zeit, Leipzig: Verlag Wilhelm Friedrich, Hofbuchha¨ndler, 1883. Schalk, Fritz, ‘‘Bandello und die Novellentheorie der italienischen Renaissance,’’ in Romanische Forschungen, 85 (1973): 96–118. Toffanin, Giuseppe, Il Cinquecento, 7th revised edition, Milan: Vallardi, 1965. Wolter, Christine, ‘‘Begebnisse und Leidenschaften,’’ in Matteo Bandello: Novellen, edited by C. Wolter., vol. 2, Berlin:Ru¨tten & Loening, 1988.

Short Stories ‘‘La prima (la seconda, la terza) parte, de le Novelle del Bandello,’’ Lucca: Francesco Busdrago, 1554. ‘‘La quarta parte de le Novelle del Bandello nuovamente composte ne´ per l’adietro date in luce,’’ Lyon: Alessandro Marsilii, 1573. ‘‘La prima, la seconda, la terza, la quarta parte de le novelle,’’ critical edition by the Centro Studi ‘‘Matteo Bandello e la cultura Rinascimentale,’’ Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1992; rpts. 1993, 1994, 1996; selection in Italian Renaissance Tales, edited and translated by Janet L. Smarr, Rochester, MI: Solaris Press, 1983.

NOVELLE, 1554; 1573 Short Stories by Matteo Bandello

Further Reading Baldissone, Giusi, Le voci della novella: Storia di una scrittura da ascolto, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Cremonte, Lelia, Matteo Bandello e i casi veri delle sue novelle, Alessandria: Comitato onoranze Bandelliane, 1966. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘La cultura del Cinquecento: Il modello delle corti,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura italiana,

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‘‘Io, gia` molti anni sono, cominciai a scriver alcune novelle, spinto dai comandamenti de la sempre acerba e onorata memoria, la vertuosa signora Ippolita Sforza, consorte de l’umanissimo signor

MATTEO BANDELLO Alessandro Bentivoglio, che Dio abbia in gloria’’ (Many years ago now, I began to write some short stories, encouraged by the commands of the virtuous Lady Ippolita Sforza, of ever fresh and honoured memory, consort of the most humane Lord Alessandro Bentivoglio, whom God may keep in glory). With this dedication to Ippolita Sforza, who has, as he says himself in the introduction to novella I,1, inspired him to make the collection of novellas, Bandello emphasizes the courtly character of his writing, which is closely connected to the royal courts of the time. In contrast to the urban inspired novellas of the authors of the period of the fourteenth century, Bandello stresses the courtly character of his work. The dedication letters to famous characters of his time, which introduce his novellas, show not only his practical style and realistic tone but also his intention to create a literature that is directly connected to life and everyday events. His style, an expression of this literary conception, underlines the historic relevance of literature, and not only in the area of fiction. It is, of course, a mistake to accept all the dates in the dedication letters as historically approved. These letters, which were once seen as authentic historical documents, are currently also considered a part of poetic fiction and have to be interpreted in connection with the novella to which they belong. But certainly there are some facts that can be seen as historically confirmed, concerning the names, the mentality, the political unrest and war at that time, which all can be proved in history, especially from the point of view of the courtier and the servant Bandello. In deference to Il Decamerone by Giovanni Boccaccio and many other models of the tradition of novellas up to the Heptame´ron by Marguerite de Navarre (1492–1549), the sister of the French King Franc¸ois I and Queen de Navarre, there is no frame story in Bandello’s novellas, which were published in four parts: Le tre parti de le Novelle del Bandello (1554) and La quarta parte de le Novelle del Bandello (posthumously 1573). Nevertheless, there is a significant separation into two parts, the first as a dedication letter to a character of the time who knew Bandello, and the second as an event that the author experienced or heard himself: ‘‘E queste mie novelle ... non sono favole ma vere istorie’’ (And these stories of mine are not fables but records of real events). This shows a tight structure that can be compared with a separation into a frame story and the actual novella. The dedication letters present the introduction to the novella and at the same time they seem to act as a guarantee for the truth of the story. Both story and dedication letter reflect

the social situation of the time. The difference is that the first part is more representative-historical, whereas the second part is written on the basis of different transmissions of the matter concerning the social and political circumstances in the Renaissance. Even the order of the novellas, strung along without an overall structure, gives an impression of the chaos at that time in a world without order. Bandello lets all social classes appear, indicates their different types of dialogue, from the colloquial to courtly discourse. Not only are the protagonists explained in detail, the minor actors, too, are described with psychological interest. Bandello’s novellas can be considered a seismographic representation of the tumultuous times of the Renaissance. From the point of view of content variations of love provided by the main themes, as in the rough sexual comedy of a clever Don Faustino (Nov. II,2), the brutal rage of the betrayed wife Violante on her husband (Nov. I,42), and the noble courtly love between Romeo and Juliet and her tragic end (Nov. II,9). Luigi da Porto (1485–1529), storyteller from Vicenza, composed the story of Romeo and Juliet for the first time in 1524, adapting it from Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino (1476). Bandello changed it into a poetic prose version and led it to its artistic perfection. William Shakespeare’s dramatic version in 1595 turned it into one of the most famous love stories in world literature. The merit of Bandello is founded on the dialogical structure of the work, prefiguring the conception of the drama. Language and story are fused into one unity: Through language, passion strives to overcome the distance between the loving couple, separated because of the conflict between the families. Even at the time of death, the surviving lover tries to connect himself with the soul of his loved one through words. The love story of Ugo and Parisina (Nov. I,44) also ends tragically. Ugo is the son of Niccolo` III d’Este and Parisina, his young stepmother. In this story both are sentenced to death. References to Boccaccio’s Il Decamerone occur several times. Yet his themes appear in a new context in Bandello’s novellas. An example is novella II,59, which reverses the contents of Boccaccio’s novella about Nastagio degli Onesti (Il Decamerone, Nov. V,8). During a journey to Ravenna, Bandello enjoys the hospitality of Messer Carlo Villanova in a famous pine grove mentioned by Boccaccio, whose novella tells a story about this grove in which the ghost of Guido degli Anastagi follows a woman who did not accept him as her 121

MATTEO BANDELLO lover at her lifetime. Now Bandello introduces a story in this place that makes people laugh and leads to love and happiness. Bandello is proud of several meetings with famous characters, for example Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni delle Bande Nere, and Niccolo` Machiavelli. The meeting with Leonardo da Vinci occurs when Bandello is a young man, watching the artist in 1497 in the Dominican monastery Santa Maria delle Grazie, when da Vinci is painting the L’ultima cena (Nov. I,58). Bandello tells many stories about the tricks played by the court jester Gonnella at the Este court of Ferrara. In contrast to the Florentine author Franco Sacchetti, who highlights the tricks Gonnella played in his collection Il Trecentonovelle, Bandello emphasizes the pleasant and cheerful character of the court jester (Nov. IV,2). Gonnella was good at conversation and worked faithfully for his lord. When he wants to cure the Marchese of Ferrara of illness and throws him into the icy waters of the river Po, he is sentenced to death, but only to all appearance. Yet before he can be put to death he dies of fright, to the sorrow of the whole court. This is a typical sign of the reverse side and contradictions of the Renaissance. At that time a death sentence could be given easily by the absolute ruling prince. A film, E ridendo l’uccise (2000), was adapted from this novella by the director Florestano Vancini, who was born in Ferrara. There is also a play, Baruffino Buffone (1991) with stage directions by Florestano Vancini and Massimo Felisatti. The reception of Bandello’s works begins during the sixteenth century and continues until the twentyfirst century. Between 1559 and 1616, 56 different versions of French translations of his novellas were released, the most famous one by Pierre Boaistuau continued by Franc¸ois de Belleforest entitled Histoires tragiques extraictes des œuvres italiennes de Bandel. Translations into Spanish and English followed, which brought to fame the theater of Lope de Vega and the Elizabethan theater of England. In addition to the tragic novella of Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare was inspired by the novella I,22 about Timbreo and Fenicia to write Much ado about nothing (1599), and by novella II,36 to write the comedy As you like it (1599). John Webster’s drama The Duchess of Malfi (1602) is also connected with the motive of rage in Bandello’s novella I,26. Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza (1631) is related to the scandal at the house of Niccolo` III d’Este (Nov. I,44), a novella that laid 122

the foundation for the verse drama Parisina by Gabriele d’Annunzio. Lord Byron’s Parisina (1816) is also indirectly influenced by this novella of Bandello. Several other novellas of Bandello are models for Lope de Vega’s Es desde´n vengado, 1617 (Nov. III,17), La Quinta de Florencia, 1598 (Nov. II,15), El padrino desposado, 1598 (Nov. III,54), and El castigo del discreto, 1608 (Nov. I,35). In France, Bandello’s novella I,21 became the model for the comedy La Quenouille de Barberine by Alfred de Musset. Stendhal admired Bandello and mentioned his work several times, especially in the Chroniques italiennes. Bandello worked on his collection at the same time as Francesco Straparola (1480–1557), who, like Boccaccio, provided a frame story for his narratives. At that time Bandello was in contact with Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529) and Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527) and chose the characters of his works on the basis of the tradition of the medieval and ancient literary motives. So the contents are based not only on the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, but also on the Classical world and the ancient figures, with a dramatic and mythological meaning that is confronted with the Renaissance. The suicide of the Roman Lucrece (Nov. I,8), the behaviour of Phaedra (Nov. I,44), or the journey into the underworld,with the evocation of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth in the novella of Romeo and Giulietta (Nov. II,9) stand as the basis of the critical reflection on the era of the Renaissance. MICHAEL AICHMAYR Editions First editions: La prima (la seconda, la terza) parte, de le Novelle del Bandello, Lucca: Francesco Busdrago, 1554; La quarta parte de le Novelle del Bandello nuovamente composte ne´ per l’adietro date in luce, Lyon: Alessandro Marsilii, 1573. Critical editions: Novelle, edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1978; La prima, la seconda, la terza, la quarta parte de le novelle, Centro Studi ‘‘Matteo Bandello e la cultura Rinascimentale,’’ Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1992; rpts. 1993, 1994, 1996; Le Novelle, edited by Gioachino Brognoligo, 3 vols. Second revised edition,Bari: Laterza, 1928–1931; in Tutte le opere di Matteo Bandello, 2 vols., edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1934–1935. Translations: as The Novels of Matteo Bandello, 6 vols., translated by John Payne, London: Villon Society, 1890; selection in Italian Renaissance Tales, edited and translated by Janet L. Smarr, Rochester, MI: Solaris Press, 1983.

ANNA BANTI (LUCIA LOPRESTI) Further Reading Aichmayr, Michael, ‘‘Matteo Bandello: A Poet Touching the Key of History,’’ in Gonnella, in Mittelalter-Mythen: Verfu¨hrer, Schurken, Magier, edited by Ulrich Mu¨ller and Werner Wunderlich, vol. 3, St. Gallen: UVK, Fachverlag fu¨r Wissenschaft und Studien, 2001. Baldissone, Giusi, Le voci della novella: Storia di una scrittura da ascolto, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Besomi, Ottavia, ‘‘Un cartone umanistico per Bandello (II,21),’’ in La novella italiana: Atti del Convegno di Caprarola 19–24 settembre 1988, vol. 2, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1989. Blask, Dirk J., ‘‘Nachwort: Matteo Bandello und sein Erza¨hlwerk,’’ in Matteo Bandello, Mit List und Leidenschaft: Italienische Liebesgeschichten der Renaissance, Mu¨nchen: Winkler, 1985. Brigantini, Renzo, ‘‘La sorte de il riso,’’ in Il tema della Fortuna nella letteratura francese e italiana del Rinascimento: Studi in memoria di Enzo Giudici, Florence: Olschki, 1990.

Ciccuto, Marcello, ‘‘Il novelliere ‘en artiste’: strategie della dissimiglianza fra Boccaccio e Bandello,’’ in La novella italiana: Atti del Convegno di Caprarola 19–24 settembre 1988, vol. 2, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1989. Cremonte, Lelia, Matteo Bandello e i casi veri delle sue novelle, Alessandria: Comitato onoranze Bandelliane, 1966. Felisatti, Massimo, et al., Baruffino Buffone, Ferrara: Liberty House, 1991. Hirdt, Willi, review of Matteo Bandello, novelliere europeo: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (7–9 novembre 1980), edited by Ugo Rozzo, Tortona: Cassa di Risparmio, 1982, in Romanische Forschungen, 98, nos. 3/4 (1986): 463–466. Ordine, Nuccio, Teoria della novella e teoria del riso nel Cinquecento, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Pirotta, Giuliano, Bandello narratore, Florence: Polistampa, 1997. Porcelli, Bruno, La novella del Cinquecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1979.

THE BANQUET See Convivio (Work by Dante Alighieri)

ANNA BANTI (LUCIA LOPRESTI) (1895–1985) Anna Banti, the literary pseudonym of Lucia Lopresti, was a writer, art historian, and literary and film critic. She published 10 novels, a play, and six collections of short stories, numerous critical monographs and articles, and one fictionalized version of her own life and work. The recipient of prestigious literary awards, founder and coeditor with her renowned art historian husband, Roberto Longhi, of the cultural and literary journal Paragone, translator of Virginia Woolf, Colette, Alain Fournier, and William Makepeace Thackeray, among others, author of a literary biography of

popular novelist Matilde Serao, as well as monographs on several artists, and a frequent contributor to the cultural columns of Italian newspapers, the prolific Banti was a prominent figure on the Italian literary scene for almost 50 years and she is one of the most important Italian female modernist writers. In the 1920s, Banti, a trained art historian, published critical essays on seventeenth-century Italian artists such as Marco Boschini, Francesco Crassia, and Francesco Cozza, which attracted the attention and praise of many critics, including Benedetto 123

ANNA BANTI (LUCIA LOPRESTI) Croce. At the age of 42 she launched her literary career with the publication of a semiautobiographical narrative, Itinerario di Paolina (Paolina’s Itinerary, 1937), comprised of loosely organized chapters that recount diverse events and experience in the protagonist’s childhood and adolescence. A second fictionalized autobiographical novel, Sette lune (Seven Moons, 1941) continues the life of a female protagonist, now named Maria Alessia, at the university. In both novels, Banti explores in various fictional contexts and genres: the representation of a female subjectivity different from that of men; the difficulties of establishing friendships among women and necessity of female bonding; and the difficulty in representing a female subjectivity grappling with the conflicts and solitude resulting from the desire to be different. Banti’s sophisticated modernist style reflects the influence of the prosa d’arte movement, which was prominent in Italian literary circles of the 1920s and 1930s, and was characterized by highly stylized prose and the indirect treatment of autobiographical themes that functioned to transform reflections of the self and lived experience into descriptive pieces of poetic brilliance with broad human significance. Another influence was her training with Longhi, whose emphasis on formal analysis of works of art informs her complex descriptive prose and narrative style as well as the representation of artists in her fictional works. As a chronicler of women, Banti’s style is also linked to works of the women writers she translated, namely Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, and Colette. Unlike some of her models, though, Banti is not interested in portraying her characters as products of specific psychological or socially determined forces. Her work is grounded in specific situations, highlighting the reactions and often incongruous behavior of her protagonists after they have suffered a real or perceived injustice, most often related to their status as a woman. Banti published her first two collections of short stories in the early 1940s, Il coraggio delle donne (The Courage of Women, 1940) and the semiautobiographical Le monache cantano (The Nuns Are Singing, 1942). The short story ‘‘Il coraggio delle donne’’ portrays a woman’s seemingly passive yet courageous resistance to an abusive husband; the other stories illustrate the bitter ironies in the lives of average women struggling to break out of the seclusion and monotony of their daily routine, where heroism and accomplishment are lacking. In Banti’s fiction, women of varying talents and from different epochs avail themselves of three 124

means of establishing their own identity: study, work, and artistic creation. Work is the solution attempted by the petite bourgeoise Ofelia in ‘‘Vocazioni indistinte’’ (Indistinct Vocations), a short story subsequently republished in the collections La monaca di Sciangai e altri racconti (The Shanghai Nun and Other Stories, 1957) and Campi Elisi (Elysian Fields, 1963). Ofelia oscillates between two antithetical vocations, that of wife and mother versus independent woman. When a courtship falls through, Ofelia is required to choose the second vocation, that of the ‘‘new independent, self-sufficient woman’’ described in the women’s journals of the time. Ofelia becomes a piano teacher of some repute before she resorts to marriage in order to escape endless self-doubts and a bad family situation. In this domestic fairy tale gone awry, Ofelia’s grotesque pathological complexes result in madness. In 1947, Banti published the acclaimed Artemisia, a highly innovative blend of art history, history, fiction and autobiography that firmly established her reputation as a writer. In a prefatory note in the reader, Banti, who rewrote the story of Artemisia from memory after her manuscript was destroyed in the 1944 bombings of Florence, calls the text a ‘‘simbiosi storico letteraria’’ (historical-literary symbiosis). In this novel, a fictionalized account of the life of the brilliant seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, Banti reinvents an Artemisia who, in her search of a father’s recognition, her embattled femininity, and an artistic vocation, is both the key to the condition of Banti’s experience of femaleness in Italy. Banti departs from official historical records to creatively draw a rich inner life by interweaving real with imaginary events: female solidarity and difference stand out in Artemisia’s relationships with other women and in the representation of female creativity. The female artists, composers, writers, and intellectuals are figures that often appear in Banti’s short stories. The embattled artist is once again a protagonist in ‘‘Lavinia Fuggita’’ (Lavinia Has Fled), in the collection Le donne muoiono (Women Are Dying, 1951), which received the prestigious Viareggio Prize in 1952. Lavinia is a young and gifted musician living in an orphanage known for training women musicians. Unable to accept playing only the masters, she substitutes one of her works for a new one by Vivaldi, who teaches in the orphanage. When discovered, her music is publicly destroyed and she runs away, although her friends preserve copies of her work. The title story in this collection, ‘‘Le donne muoiono,’’ is one of

ANNA BANTI (LUCIA LOPRESTI) three science fiction stories written by Banti. Set in the year 2617, ‘‘Le donne muoiono’’ depicts the return of female oppression when sexual difference becomes a means of isolating and disparaging women. Men discover that they have ‘‘a second memory’’ that enables them to remember past lives, conquer their traditional fear of death and claim immortality for themselves through their constant reincarnation. Instead of participating in this self-preserving and self-serving continuum, many women retreat to communities, which resemble old convents. Women are now free to create and even dominate the realm of literature and art. Their masterpieces are, however, ignored by the male establishment that has marginalized all practitioners of the arts. Here and in other of Banti’s short stories, the convent and other enclosed spaces are depicted as communities that privilege autonomous females and their traditions, they also come to signify women’s isolation and the disruption of their history. ‘‘Joveta di Betania,’’ which appeared in Je vous e´cris d’un pays lointain (I Write to You from a Faraway Land, 1971), is the story of an eleventh-century princess turned abbess after arranged marriages fail. Joveta is committed to learning and independence and chooses the convent, ‘‘un harem senzo letto coniugale’’ (a harem without a conjugal bed). Joveta becomes a distinguished abbess and founder of a community that encourages the aesthetic capacities of women. She is also a mentor to her niece Melisenda, who is placed for safety in Joveta’s care until a marriage partner can be found for her. The failure of the arranged marriage of her beloved niece will eventually destroy Melisenda’s life, as well as Joveta’s intellectual legacy. In the end, Joveta, like Ofelia, falls into an embittered and seemingly senile state as she awaits death. Betrayals that lead to hopelessness and/or social conformity in their romantic or family relationships characterize Banti’s novels of the 1950s and 1960s: Il bastardo (The Bastard, 1954), Allarme sul lago (Alarm on the Lake, 1962), and Le mosche d’oro (The Golden Flies, 1962). These works have been classified as examples of ‘‘feminine realism,’’ although Banti, like other women writers of her generation, did not identify openly with any feminist movement. Banti drew some of her plots from la cronaca section of newspapers, which recount in a somewhat tabloid fashion the details of local crimes and dramas. Whether or not they are based on actual anecdotes, the fictional works of Banti’s realist period tend to represent marriage as a failed relationship and to emphasize jealousy,

vengeance, and brutality as predominant experiences in the lives of many women. In her last novels Banti focuses on historical characters and events. The male narrator of her fictionalized political memoir Noi credevamo (We All Believed, 1967) is based on Domenico Lopresti, a distant relative of Banti who lived during the Risorgimento; and La camicia bruciata (The Burned Nightgown, 1973), features the erratic and sensual Princess Marguerite Louise d’Orle´ans, who was forced by Louis XIV to marry the overly religious Cosimo III. As in Artemisia, Banti creatively mixes the genres of biography and historical fiction through the use of multiple viewpoints to subvert notions of subjectivity as a unified entity and to question traditional historiography. The elusive Banti created herself in and through her art. She experimented with various narrative forms and techniques and, at the same time, she used her own experience to mold and understand her vivid fictional characters. In her last collection of short stories, Da un paese vicino (From a Nearby Town, 1975), she included ‘‘La signorina,’’ a thinly disguised portrait of the young Banti facing her own uncertain vocations, confronting the two traditional female destinies, and attesting her evolution from la signorina into a married woman (la signora). Finally, in 1981, she published Un grido lacerante (A Piercing Cry), where the narrator, a young Roman woman, is a compendium of all Banti’s heroines. Here the author reassesses her own life and identity, and bids an emotional farewell to Longhi (her professor-husband), while proclaiming herself a feminist and ‘‘una donna di lettere.’’

Biography Born Lucia Lopresti in Florence on June 27, 1895, to a family of Calabrian origin. Majored in art history at the University of Rome. Married art critic Roberto Longhi in 1924. Founder and coeditor with Longhi of Paragone, which she directed after his death in 1970. Also film reviewer for L’approdo letterario. Winner of several literary awards, including the Viareggio in 1952 for Le donne muoiono; the Marzotto for Allarme sul lago in 1955; the Veillon for La monaca di Sciangai in 1957; the Ceppo for the short story ‘‘Tela e Cenere’’ in 1974; and the Antonio Feltrinelli from the Accademia dei Lincei in 1982 for Un grido lacerante. Died at Ronchi di Massa (Florence) on September 2, 1985. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS 125

ANNA BANTI (LUCIA LOPRESTI) Selected Works

Colette, La vagabonda, 1977. Andre´ Chastel, Storia dell’arte italiana, 1983.

Novels Itinerario di Paolina, 1937. Sette lune, 1941. Artemisia, 1947; as Artemisia, translated by Shirley D’Ardia Caracciolo, 1988. Il bastardo, 1953. Allarme sul lago, 1954. Le mosche d’oro, 1962. Noi credevamo, 1967. La camicia bruciata, 1973. Un grido lacerante, 1981; as A Piercing Cry, translated by Daria Valentini, 1996.

Short Stories ‘‘Il coraggio delle donne,’’ 1940. ‘‘Le monache cantano,’’ 1942. ‘‘Le donne muoiono,’’ 1951. ‘‘La monaca di Sciangai e altri racconti,’’ 1957. ‘‘Campi Elisi,’’ 1963. ‘‘Je vous e´cris d’un pays lointain,’’ 1971. ‘‘Da un paese vicino,’’ 1975. ‘‘The Signorina and Other Stories,’’ translated by Martha King and Carol Lazzaro-Weis, 2001 (includes ‘‘Vocazioni indistinte,’’ ‘‘Le donne muoiono,’’ ‘‘Joveta di Betania,’’ ‘‘I velieri,’’ ‘‘La signorina’’).

Plays Corte Savella, 1960.

Critical Essays Lorenzo Lotto, 1953. Fra Angelico, 1953. Diego Vela´squez, 1955. ClaudeMonet, 1956. Opinioni, 1961. Matilde Serao, 1965. Giovanni di San Giovanni: Pittore della contraddizione, 1977. Quando anche le donne si mettono a dipingere, 1981. Rivelazione di Lorenzo Lotto, 1982.

Translations William Makepeace Thackeray, La fiera della vanita`, 1948. Virginia Woolf, La camera di Jacob, 1950. Alain Fournier, Il gran Meaulnes, 1974.

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Further Reading Biagini, Enza, Anna Banti, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Biagini, Enza (editor), L’opera di Anna Banti: Atti del Convegno di Studi, Firenze 8–9 maggio 1992, Florence: Leo Olschki, 1997. Caru`, Paola, ‘‘Uno sguardo acuto dalla storia: Anna Banti’s Historical Writings,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by Maria Marotti and Gabriella Brooke, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999. Di Blasi, Maria Luisa, L’altro silenzio, Florence: Le Lettere, 2001. Finucci, Valeria, ‘‘‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Female Panter’: The Kunstlerroman Tradition in A. Banti’s Artemisia,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 8 (1987): 167–193. Gallucci, Carol, ‘‘Anna Banti: On the Courage of Women,’’ Colophon, 4 (1998): 69–76. Garrard, Mary, Artemisia Gentileschi Around 1622: The Shaping and Reshaping of an Artistic Identity, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Heller, Deborah, ‘‘History, Art and Fiction in Anna Banti’s Artemisia,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, ‘‘Stranger than Life: Autobiography and Historical Fiction,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by Maria Marotti and Gabriella Brooke, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Anna Banti,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Valentini, Daria, ‘‘A House of Mirrors. A case of Spatial Disintegration in Anna Banti’s Fiction,’’ in Romance Languages Annual (1995): 350–356. Valentini, Daria, ‘‘Anna and Her Sisters: The Idyll of the Convent in Anna Banti,’’ in Forum Italicum 30, no. 2 (1996): 132–350. Valentini, Daria, and Paola Caru (editors), Beyond Artemisia: Female Subjectivity, History, and Culture in Anna Banti. Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 2003.

ERMOLAO BARBARO (THE YOUNGER)

ERMOLAO BARBARO (THE YOUNGER) (1453–1494) A scientist, philosopher, philologist, and ambassador, Ermolao Barbaro is one of the key figures of fifteenth-century Italian Humanism. Unlike other Humanists of the period, whose activities were often solely speculative, Barbaro divided his career between intellectual and political activity, and between scientific and moral concerns. Two letters written in Latin around 1480 and collected in Epistolae, Orationes et Carmina (Letters, Orations, Poems, 1943) define Barbaro’s position as a Humanist. The first letter documents the author’s ideas about his priority in life: ‘‘Since I am speaking openly about myself, I want you to know that nothing but literature really mattered in my life.’’ The second letter presents his intellectual self-portrait, summarized in the statement: ‘‘I recognize two Lords, Christ and literature.’’ Barbaro identifies literature with human knowledge and adopts philology as his principal instrument of understanding. His interests are eminently philosophical and scientific. As a philosopher, Barbaro attempted to revive Aristotelian studies and to restore Aristotle’s works to their original versions. In conjunction with this cultural project, in 1478–1479 he translated Aristotle’s Rhetorica (1544) and interpreted Themistius in the Libri paraphraseos Themistii (Paraphrases of the Books of Themistius, 1499). In his philosophical works, Barbaro paid constant attention to rhetorical perfection. He once confessed in a letter to a follower: ‘‘I translate all of Aristotle’s books, and I craft them as brilliantly, appropriately and carefully as possible.’’ As a scientist, he tried to renew botany and the natural sciences by returning to and editing the primary sources and adopting a new scientific method. The first phase of this cultural project was a philological commentary of Pliny’s text Naturalis Historia, which he entitled Castigationes Plinianae (Studies on Pliny, 1493). Barbaro’s method of restoring the primary text consists in identifying Pliny’s terms throughout the book and cross-referencing them with historical quotes in order to re-establish their original meanings. The second phase was the development of a new scientific method documented in writings such as In

Dioscoridem corollari (Corollaries in Dioscorides, 1510) and by the foundation of the Botanical Garden of Padua, the first in Europe. Barbaro’s direct observation of natural phenomena foreshadowed the experimental method. Two moral treatises outline his ideal of life, De coelibatu (On Celibacy, ca. 1472) and De officio legati (On the Ambassador’s Office, ca. 1490), in which he analyzed the dilemma of the contemplative versus the active life, and addressed the humanistic theme of the dignity of man. The two works also renewed a tradition of philosophical and technical writing that uses portraits of welldefined ideal figures to represent the author’s ideas. De coelibatu, Barbaro’s first completed work, was written during the author’s youth at the Court of Naples. It defends the reasons for being celibate by citing the writings of Aristotle, Cicero and Saint Jerome, and disputes his uncle Francesco’s treatise on wifely duties, De re uxoria (On Marriage, 1416), written in defense of marriage. Barbaro defines celibacy as the ideal state of the scholar and describes the nature and condition of the man who is completely devoted to contemplation and studies. Left incomplete at some point between Barbaro’s diplomatic mission to Milan (1488–1489) and his nomination as Patriarch of Aquileia (1491), De officio legati documents his political experience. On first examination, this work is a rejection of the ideal life outlined in De coelibatu, as it defends the reasons and the duties of the active life embodied in the figure of the ambassador. However, its composition attests to Barbaro’s dedication to refined language and behavior, as well as to moral perfection, which constitute the tenets of the contemplative life. These works generally echo the trust that Petrarch placed in the supreme value of literary studies along with attention to Christian faith. They also evoke the Humanist tradition of Venice, with its particular combination of cultural and practical tasks and its attention to daily life and moral behavior. De coelibatu and De officio legati began the tradition of Renaissance writings about the perfect figure of the 127

ERMOLAO BARBARO (THE YOUNGER) courtier and were the model for treatises such as Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). Barbaro’s combination of culture and faith also had an impact on European Humanists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam. In 1485, Barbaro’s strong convictions led him to a dispute with Pico della Mirandola, the Florentine Humanist, over the dilemma of philosophy and eloquence, doctrine and style. Traditionally, their disagreement is said to represent two different humanistic positions: Barbaro’s, which focused on literature and rhetorical perfection, and Pico’s, which emphasized philosophy and speculative engagement. More precisely, it documents the dialogue between two factions of Italian culture: the philological, Aristotelian, erudite Humanism of Venice and the poetic, Platonic, spiritual Humanism of Florence.

Collections Epistolae, Orationes et Carmina, edited by Vittore Branca, 2 vols., Florence: Bibliopolis, 1943. De coelibatu, De officio legati, edited by Vittore Branca, Florence: Olschki, 1969.

Treatises De coelibatu, ca. 1472; edited by Vittore Branca, 1969. De officio legati, ca. 1490; edited by Vittore Branca, 1969. Castigationes Plinianae et in Pomponium Melam, 1493. Compendium scientiae naturalis ex Aristotele, 1514.

Commentaries Castigationes Plinianae, 1493. Libri paraphraseos Themistii, 1499. In Dioscoridem corollari, 1510.

Translation Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1544.

Letters Filosofia o eloquenza? (with Pico della Mirandola), edited by Francesco Bausi, 1998.

Biography Born in Venice, 1453. Early studies in Verona, Rome, Ravenna, 1460–1468. Given the title of poeta by Emperor Frederick III in Verona, December 3, 1468. Member of the Maggior Consiglio of the Repubblica di Venezia, September 26, 1471. In Naples with his father, ambassador of the Republic of Venice, 1471–1473. Graduated as doctor artium from the University of Padua, August 23, 1474. Graduated as doctor utriusque iuris from Padua, October 17, 1477. Lectured on Aristotle in Padua, 1474–1479. Followed his father to Rome, 1480–1481. Became Senatore de la Republica and then Ufficiale de le Rason Vecchie, 1483–1484. Private lectures on Demosthenes and Theocritus. Founded the Botanic Garden of Padua, 1484. Lectured on Aristotle in Venice, 1484. Ambassador to Bruges (1486), to Milan (1488–1489), and to Rome (1490). Exiled from the Republic of Venice because of a conflict between his political position and his designation as patriarch of Aquileia, 1491. Died in Rome during the plague, 1493, probably in July. MATTEO SORANZO

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Selected Works

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, ‘‘L’umanesimo veneziano alla fine del Quattrocento. Ermolao Barbaro e il suo circolo,’’ in Storia della cultura veneta, edited by Giorgio Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980. Branca, Vittore, ‘‘Umanesimo veneziano fra Barbaro e Bembo,’’ in Una famiglia veneziana nella storia: i Barbaro. Atti del Convegno (Venezia, 4–6 novembre 1993), edited by Michela Marangoni e Manlio Pastore Stocchi, Vicenza: Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, 1996. Branca, Vittore, La sapienza civile. Studi sull’Umanesimo a Venezia, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘Rhetoric and Humanism in Quattrocento Venice,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 56, no. 3 (2003): 652–694. Figliuolo, Bruno, Il diplomatico e il trattatista: Ermolao Barbaro ambasciatore della Serenissima e il De officio legati, Naples: Guida, 1999. Frank, Maria Esposito, Le insidie dell’allegoria: Ermolao Barbaro il Vecchio e la lezione degli antichi, Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti, 1999. Garin, Eugenio, L’umanesimo italiano, Bari: Laterza, 1947. Garin, Eugenio, La cultura filosofica del Rinascimento italiano: ricerche e documenti, Florence: Sansoni, 1961.

GIUSEPPE BARETTI

GIUSEPPE BARETTI (1719–1789) Journalist and traveler, Giuseppe Baretti, known for his unabashedly critical voice, is credited for the popularity of Italian literature in England in the eighteenth century. Born in Turin in 1719, he was educated by the Jesuits. At 18, he left his family and his childhood home and moved to Guastalla, in the province of Reggio Emilia, where he worked for two years as a clerk in a mercantile house. Here he devoted his leisure time to literature and criticism. His ideas were profoundly influenced by the works of Carlo Cantoni. Baretti next moved to Venice, where he met many of the future members of the Academy of the Granelleschi. His first published works were translations of Ovid and of some tragedies of Pierre Corneille, the Tragedie di Pier Cornelio tradotte in versi italiani (Pierre Cornelie’s Tragedies Translated into Italian Verses, 1747–1748). One year later he moved to Milan, where he came in contact with the poets of the Academy of the Trasformati. In addition to continuing his linguistic studies, he published his first poems, Piacevoli poesie di Giuseppe Baretti torinese (The Pleasing Poetry of Giuseppe Baretti of Turin, 1950), which he later declared of no value on the grounds that a true poet must know how to do much more than simply compose rhymes. After wandering Italy for several years, supporting himself with his writings, Baretti felt compelled to leave his homeland because of the scandal caused by his opposition to the erudite intellectuals in Turin. He arrived in London in 1751 and embraced the liberalism and tolerance he found in English society. He was appointed secretary to the Royal Academy of Painting, where he met a group of friends including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Samuel Johnson, the latter of whom would have a profound influence on his career. Baretti’s critical voice was already taking shape, and he expressed strong opinions, especially in reaction to certain criticisms of Italian culture. He attacked Voltaire’s ideas about epic Italian literature in A Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry (1753), calling Voltaire’s criticisms unfounded and ignorant. Baretti defended Dante’s poetry and suggested that it may have inspired John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). This, the first of his publications in English, was very well-received in England.

In London, Baretti worked first as a poet for the Italian Opera, composing Don Chisciotte in Venezia (Don Quixote in Venice), an unpublished bizarre theatrical piece in which the famous character from Spanish literature finds himself in a Venetian background. However, his main profession in London was that of a teacher of Italian language. He published several textbooks and manuals, including Remarks on the Italian Language and Writers (1753); An Introduction to the Italian Language (1755); A Dictionary of English and Italian Languages (1760), and A Grammar of the Italian Language (1762). These last two works are considered the most proficient and complete texts of their kind until the twentieth century. His first significant literary contribution is The Italian Library (1757), a catalogue of the lives and works of several Italian authors. Baretti left London in 1760 to return to Italy. He published Lettere famigliari a’ suoi tre fratelli (1762–1763), a four-volume work based on his travels through Spain, Portugal, and France. The work was soon censored in Milan, probably due to his defense of the Jesuits. As a result, Baretti attempted to publish it again in Venice. This scandalous work also treats polemic subjects such as the education of women, the importance of foreign language education, and his respect for English society. He later expanded this work and translated it into English as Journey from London to Genoa through England, Portugal, Spain and France (1770). Upon his return to Italy in 1763, Baretti founded a journal of literary criticism, La frusta letteraria, which he published under the pen name ‘‘Aristarco Scannabue’’ (Aristarchus the Ox-Slayer) due to the strict censorship laws of that time. This bimonthly publication, for which he wrote almost all the articles under the guise of a retired soldier who passes his time writing book reviews, is considered Baretti’s masterpiece. Two years after its first publication, and after printing 25 issues, the Venetian government banned the publication because of several attacks on Father Appiano Buonafede. The next eight issues of La frusta letteraria were published in Ancona, and were devoted to criticism of Buonafede. His arguments center on a few recurring themes, especially the contrast 129

GIUSEPPE BARETTI between conservative and innovative ideas, or rather the difference between tradition and Enlightenment. He spoke out against the Arcadia and the Accademia della Crusca, criticizing the usage of literary language to exclude readers, and offering easily comprehensible English literature as a model. In this literary journal, Baretti rediscovers Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (My Life, 1558–1562), praising the lively, picturesque writing. He also criticized Pietro Bembo’s devotion to Petrarch’s style and attacked Carlo Goldoni’s theater for his lack of refined and distinguished language and for characters representative of human errors rather than embodiments of universal archetypes. Indeed, Baretti remained tied to the notion of a wise, classical culture, and preferred Molie`re’s comedic style to that of Goldoni. He idealizes a strong protagonist, whose language reflects morality, not reality. It was Baretti’s criticism, joined with that of other conservative Venetians, that eventually forced Goldoni to leave Venice. As a literary critic, Baretti freely expressed his opinions on many of the fundamental traditions of Italian literature. His critical views were influenced by French culture and criticism. More appreciative of writers such as Lodovico Ariosto and Francesco Berni than of many of his contemporaries, he criticized Gian Vincenzo Gravina for lacking ‘‘a poetic soul,’’ Pietro Verri for abuse of the Italian language, and Ludovico Antonio Muratori for his lack of elegance in writing. He gave his highest praise to Metastasio, whom he considered an original, noble and incisive writer endowed with a refined, yet simple style. He also favoured the work of Carlo Gozzi, whose antirealistic and antibourgeois themes contrast those of Goldoni, going so far as to call him a new Shakespeare because of his classical use of language and for the complexity of the drama set in a variety of backgrounds. Overall, Baretti insisted on the spontaneity of form, the pre-eminence of content, and on the quality of language used. The theater should be edifying, poetry simple and inspired, and literary criticism should become a work of art rather than a form of speech with no style. Shortly after La frusta letteraria was censored, Baretti left Italy, never to return. Arriving in London in November 1766, he soon resumed publishing, continuing his defense of Italian literature and culture in An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), written in response to Samuel Sharp’s derogatory Letters from Italy (1767). Soon thereafter he was appointed secretary of foreign correspondence at the Royal Academy 130

of Painting. A short time later, after rejecting a prostitute’s advances, he was involved in a struggle with her procurers and killed a man with a fruit knife. Charged with homicide, he defended himself in the court trial, and was acquitted after some of London’s most important intellectuals, among them Samuel Johnson, acted as character witnesses on his behalf. Baretti then published Tutte le opere di Niccolo` Machiavelli (All the Works of Niccolo` Machiavelli, 1772), for which he also wrote a significant preface. One of his most polemic works from this period is a dissertation on Shakespeare and Voltaire, Discours sur Shakespeare et Monsieur de Voltaire (Discourse on Shakespeare and Mr. Voltaire, 1777), which is considered his greatest work of literary criticism. Here Baretti defends Shakespearean theater against Voltaire’s criticisms, calling his philosophy a menace to the Italian language and culture. He scrutinizes Voltaire’s translations of Shakespeare, describing his language and style as artificial, and accusing him of ignorance of the English tradition. He praises Shakespeare’s passion and variety, calling him a poetic genius, thus anticipating Romantic criticism of the great English playwright. Baretti rejects the notion of a universal standard for literature, arguing instead for a set of literary standards that take into account national and cultural backgrounds. He considers the theater a venue for entertainment rather than a forum for critical interpretation and attributes the success of Shakespeare to his ability to engage his audience and to his disregard for contemporary critical rules. In Scelta delle lettere familiari fatta per uso degli studiosi della lingua italiana (A Selection of Family Letters for the Use of Students of Italian Literature, 1779), Baretti offers an instrument through which to learn the Italian language, while reemphasizing some of his own ideas about literary criticism. This last work demonstrates his philosophical transformation from a conservative Italian viewpoint to a more liberal English one. He presents lively, argumentative and stalwart positions, at times insisting more on creating scandal than on serious reflection on literary ideas. The authors of nearly all these letters are fictitious, created to allow Baretti an alternative outlet for his polemic debates.

Biography Born in Turin on 25 April 1719, the first of four brothers. An avid traveler since his youth, he lived in Venice, 1739; Milan, 1740; back to Turin, 1742;

ALESSANDRO BARICCO until his trip to London, where he supported himself as a teacher of Italian and working at the Opera House, 1751–1760. Returned to Italy, traveling through Spain, Portugal and France, 1760; founded the journal La frusta letteraria, 1763–1765; returned to London, 1766; received royal pension in England, 1782. Died in London on 5 May 1789. BARBARA BIRD See also: Enlightenment Selected Works Collections Prose scelte ed annotate da Luigi Piccioni, Turin: Paravia, 1907. Prefazioni e polemiche, edited by Luigi Piccioni, Bari: Laterza, 1911. Scritti, edited by Mario Menghini, Florence: Sansoni, 1935. Opere scelte di Giuseppe Baretti, edited by Bruno Maier, Turin: UTET, 1972.

Poetry ‘‘Piacevoli poesie di Giuseppe Baretti torinese,’’ 1750.

Play The Sentimental Mother, 1789.

Essays Remarks on the Italian Language and Writers, 1753. A Dissertation upon the Italian Poetry, 1753. An Introduction to the Italian language, 1755. The Italian Library, 1757. A Dictionary of English and Italian Languages, 1760; as Dizionario della lingua italiana, ed inglese, translated into Italian, 1795. A Grammar of the Italian language, 1762. Easy Phraseology, for the Use of Young Ladies, Who Intend to Learn the Colloquial Part of the Italian Language, 1775. An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, 1768. Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire, 1777. Scelta delle lettere familiari fatta per uso degli studiosi della lingua italiana, 1779. A Guide through the Royal Academy, 1781.

Letters Lettere famigliari a’ suoi tre fratelli, 2 vols., 1762–1763; as Journey from London to Genoa through England, Portugal, Spain and France, translated and expanded by Baretti, 1770. Epistolario, edited by Luigi Piccioni, 2 vols., 1936. Lettere sparse, edited by Franco Fido, 1976.

Edited Works Tutte le opere di Niccolo` Machiavelli, 3 vols., 1772.

Translations Tragedie di Pier Cornelio tradotte in versi italiani, 2 vols., 1747–1748.

Further Reading Anglani, Bartolo, Il mestiere della metafora: Giuseppe Baretti intellettuale e scrittore, Modena: Mucchi, 1997. Astaldi, Maria Luisa, Baretti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977. Bracchi, Cristina, Prospettiva di una nazione di nazioni: an account of the manners and customs of Italy di Giuseppe Baretti, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso, 1998. Cerruti Marco, and Paola Trivero (editors), Giuseppe Baretti: un piemontese in Europa, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993. Collison-Morley, Lacy, Giuseppe Baretti: With an Account of His Literary Friendships and Feuds in Italy and in England in the Days of Dr. Johnson, London: John Murray, 1909. Crotti, Ilaria, Il viaggio e la forma: Giuseppe Baretti e l’orizzonte dei generi letterari, Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1992. Devalle, Albertina, La critica letteraria nel ‘700: Giuseppe Baretti, suoi rapporti con Voltaire, Johnson e Parini, Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1932. Fubini, Franco, Dal Muratori al Baretti: studi sulla critica e sulla cultura del Settecento, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Gustarelli, Andrea, Giuseppe Baretti, Milan: Antonio Vallardi, 1940. Jonard, Norbert, Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789): l’homme et l’oeuvre, Clermont-Ferrand: De Bussac, 1963. Morandi, Luigi, Voltaire contro Shakespeare, Baretti contro Voltaire, Rome: Sommaruga, 1882. Prosperi, Carlo (editor), Giuseppe Baretti: Rivalta bormida, le radici familiari, l’opera, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1999.

ALESSANDRO BARICCO (1958–) Although his education had prepared him for a more academic career, Alessandro Baricco has become since the 1990s one of Italy’s most popular novelists. Baricco studied philosophy at the

University of Turin, where Gianni Vattimo supervised his dissertation on Adorno and the Frankfurt School. He also studied musicology at the Conservatory, studies that resulted in two essays, Il genio 131

ALESSANDRO BARICCO in fuga (The Genius in Fugue, 1988) and L’anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin (Hegel’s Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin, 1992), in which he analyzed, respectively, Gioacchino Rossini’s compositions and the relationship between music and modernity. Baricco is also a columnist-editorialist for the daily newspaper La stampa. His articles on contemporary high and low culture were collected in two volumes entitled Barnum: Cronache del Grande Show (Barnum: Chronicles of the Big Show, 1995) and Barnum 2: Altre cronache del Grande Show (Barnum 2: Other Chronicles of the Big Show, 1998). More recently, his articles in La repubblica dealing with social problems like globalization were collected in Next: Piccolo libro sulla globalizzazione e il mondo che verra` (Next: A Small Book on Globalization and the World to Come, 2002). Baricco’s popularity as a writer has been reinforced by his work for both television and radio. Whereas the greater public was especially drawn to Pickwick, del leggere e dello scrivere (1994), a television program dedicated to book reviews and discussions, his major breakthrough came with the first of three programs entitled Totem (1998–2003). Alternating literary or musical fragments with commentary meant to familiarize a wider audience with literature and music, the show was created by Baricco and some of the colleagues with whom he had founded the ‘‘Holden’’ school of creative writing, named after the protagonist of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The success of Baricco’s performances and public initiatives was met with skepticism from some of his fellow writers and intellectuals. His success also affected the reception of his literary works, praised for their stylistic bravura but at times criticized for their lack of substance. Baricco made his literary debut in 1991 with the novel Castelli di rabbia (Lands of Glass), which was awarded the prestigious Prix Me´dicis e´tranger. Set in a fictitious frontier country, Castelli di rabbia presents the stories of its inhabitants, whose eccentricities range from the dysfunctional to the highly ingenious. The nonlinear and intricate storytelling revolves around the construction of a linear railway track. Baricco’s second novel, Oceano mare (Ocean Sea, 1993), further explores the themes of Castelli di rabbia: Its characters’ eccentricities as well as their heightened awareness are linked to the search for artistic expression. The novel’s setting is now a hotel rather than a town, and the writing process itself becomes a theme as one of the hotel’s mysterious guests happens to be the writer of the story. Baricco’s latest novel, City (1999), is his most experimental 132

work to date. Whereas changes of perspective and shifts in plotlines were clearly evident in the earlier novels, they are barely perceptible in City. The novel is set in a twentieth-century town in which each street leads to a different story (the street map functions as a textual topography). While focusing on three major plots, Baricco intertwines very different forms of storytelling: the Bildungsroman, the western, and sport journalism, the latter coming closest to an oral form of expression. As a novelist, Baricco pays particular attention to the rhythm of his works. The circularity or nonlinearity of his storytelling is striking: There is no chronology and the repetition of episodes or textual fragments that may be slightly altered is reminiscent of a musical refrain. Indeed, Baricco’s writing strategies can be seen as musical techniques, imitating the example of his favorite composer, Rossini, whom Baricco admires for his capacity for complicating his compositions by repeating the same motive in an almost unaltered form but accelerating the rhythm, as in a crescendo. The other influences on Baricco’s writing are mainly nontextual. The author claims that he belongs to the first generation of Italian writers who did not have literary models as their point of reference, but drew inspiration from popular culture including film, media culture (video games and the like), and sports icons such as tennis star John McEnroe. Baricco’s work echoes these eclectic sources by combining different registers, styles, and genres, creating a representative form of postmodern contamination. This elaborate and intricate way of writing is notably absent from a play and two shorter texts generally defined as long short stories. The theatrical monologue, Novecento (1900; 1994), widely known because of the film adaptation by Giuseppe Tornatore, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900, 1998), resembles Baricco’s novels in terms of its circular composition and the presence of music. At its center is the story of a virtuoso pianist named Novecento who spends his life on a cruise ship. The two stories are Seta (Silk, 1996), about the impossible love of a nineteenthcentury silk tradesman for a Japanese woman, in which silence is their primary means of communication; and Senza sangue (Without Blood, 2002), which tells two episodes in the life of Nina, a woman who willingly relives a traumatizing experience with her torturer. Both stories are characterized by linear and single plots. In spite of their restrained style these short stories superbly reveal Baricco’s qualities as a writer.

DANIELLO BARTOLI

Biography

Next: Piccolo libro sulla globalizzazione e il mondo che verra`, 2002.

Born in Turin, on January 28, 1958. University degree in philosophy under the supervision of Gianni Vattimo, 1980; studied piano and saxophone at the Conservatory of Turin. Made his literary debut in 1991 with the novel Castelli di rabbia. Also worked as a music critic for La repubblica and as an editorialist for La stampa. Worked for RAI television, hosting the shows L’amore e` un dardo, on opera, 1993; and Pickwick, del leggere e dello scrivere, on literature, 1994. Cofounded the ‘‘Scuola Holden,’’ a school for creative writing, in 1994. Cocreated several performance shows, called Totem: Letture, suoni, lezioni introducing literature and music to a wider audience, 1998–2003. As of this writing, he lives in Rome. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Fiction Castelli di rabbia, 1991; as Lands of Glass, translated by Alastair McEwen, 2002. Oceano mare, 1993; as Ocean Sea, translated by Alastair McEwen, 1999. Seta, 1996; as Silk, translated by Guido Waldman, 1997. City, 1999; as City, translated by Ann Goldstein, 2002. Senza sangue, 2002; as Without Blood, translated by Ann Goldstein, 2004. Questa storia, 2005.

Theater Novecento, 1994. Partita spagnola, with Lucia Moisio, 2003.

Essays Il genio in fuga: Sul teatro musicale di Gioachino Rossini, 1988. L’anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin, 1992. Barnum: Cronache del Grande Show, 1995. Barnum 2: Altre cronache del Grande Show, 1998.

Other Totem: L’ultima tourne´e, 2003. Omero, Iliade, 2004; as An Iliad, translated by Ann Goldstein, 2006.

Further Reading Bellavia, Elisa, ‘‘La lingua di Alessandro Baricco,’’ in Otto/ Novecento, 25, no. 1 (2001): 135–168. Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Corrente e controcorrente,’’ in Narrativa, 12 (1997): 27–50. Fuchs, Gerhild, and Lange Wolf-Dieter (editors), Alessandro Bariccos Variationen der Postmoderne, Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2003. Gargiulo, Gius, ‘‘Esercizi di stile: Baricco giornalista sportivo,’’ in Narrativa, 20–21 (2001): 263–283. Giannetto, Nella, Oceano mare di Baricco: Molteplicita`, emozioni, confini tra Calvino e Conrad, Milan: Archipelago, 2002. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘Alessandro Baricco’s Infinite Tales,’’ in Spunti e Ricerche, 14 (1999): 47–57. Lazzarin, Stefano, ‘‘Bartleby, Barnabooth, Bartlebooth, Bartleboom: Baricco e il grande oceano delle storie,’’ in Narrativa, 16 (1999): 143–165. Milanesi, Claudio, ‘‘Baricco et la Meduse,’’ in Cahiers d’Etudes Romanes, 1 (1998): 87–97. Pezzin, Claudio, Alessandro Baricco, Sommacampagna (Verona): Cierre, 2001. Rorato, Laura, ‘‘La realta` metropolitana del Duemila: Ambaraba di G. Culicchia e City di A. Baricco. Due opere a confronto,’’ in Narrativa, 20–21 (2001): 243–261. Rorato, Laura and Simona Storchi, ‘‘Citta` versus City: The Globalized Habitat of Alessandro Baricco,’’ in Romance Studies, 22, no. 3 (2004): 251–262. Scarsella, Alessandro, Alessandro Baricco, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2003. Senardi, Fulvio, ‘‘Alessandro Baricco, ovvero... che storia mi racconti?’’, in Problemi, 112 (1998): 261–296. Van den Bogaert, Annelies, ‘‘Alessandro Baricco: Fra Novecento e il mare c’e` di mezzo la musica,’’ in ‘‘...E c’e` di mezzo il mare’’: Lingua, letteratura e civilta` marina, edited by Bart Van den Bossche, Michel Bastiaensen, and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, Florence: Cesati, 2002.

DANIELLO BARTOLI (1608–1685) Daniello Bartoli, Paolo Segneri (1624–1694), and Sforza Pallavicino (1616–1644) make up what is considered to be the triad of great Jesuit writers. Bartoli’s decision to join the Order of St. Ignatius

played a fundamental role in his life, contributing tremendously to his literary output. In 1637, he began his preacher’s career, obtaining great fame throughout Italy. Although none of his homilies 133

DANIELLO BARTOLI are available to us today, it is agreed by scholars that these works constitute an important step in his literary education. It was during this experience that Bartoli probably developed his unique writing style, characterized by a perfect balance of formal elegance and religious fervor. His intellectual and culture skills attracted the attention of his superiors who, in 1648, decided to entrust him with the task of writing the monumental Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu` (History of the Company of Jesus), completed in 1673. It is important to stress that no other religious order had before encouraged the writing of a humanistic historiography. This ambitious project is a prime example of the efforts made by the Jesuits during the seventeenth century to challenge the expanding laical culture using secular genres. Although the young Bartoli longed for the martyrdom that could be obtained through participation in one of the many Jesuit missions, he remained faithful to his vow of obedience and devoted himself totally to the titanic enterprise that had been set before him. In 1650 he began work, publishing Della vita e dell’istituto di S. Ignazio fondatore della Compagnia di Gesu´ (History of the Life and Institute of St. Ignatius de Loyola: Founder of the Society of Jesus), with the intent of demonstrating the critical role of the founder in the evolution of the religious order. The first pages of the biography outline Bartoli’s plan for the Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu`, proposing a geographical criterion that would describe the missions of the order in four continents: Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. A number of volumes on different geographical areas followed: L’Asia (Asia, 1650), Il Giappone (Japan, 1660), La Cina (China, 1661), L’Inghilterra (England, 1667) and L’Italia (Italy, 1673). In 1663, Bartoli also published La missione al Gran Mogor del p. Ridolfo d’Acquaviva (The Mission of Father Ridolfo d’Acquaviva to the Great Mogul) that was later added to the 1667 edition of Asia. At the end of his life, realizing that there was not enough time to finish his ambitious project, Bartoli summarized his collected materials in a five-book compendium entitled: Degli uomini e dei fatti della Compagnia di Gesu`—Memorie Storiche (On the Men and the Deeds of the Company of Jesus—Historical Memoirs, 1684). Over the centuries, Bartoli’s detractors have accused him of lacking historical accuracy. This claim has been disproved by the recent discovery of notes written in the author’s hand that testify to his thorough preliminary research. Clearly, this 134

meticulous scrutinizing of documents (from travel records to minutes of Sacred Colleges) does not erase the openly apologetic nature of Bartoli’s work, and his enthusiastic adherence to Jesuit doctrine. His ideological stance is particularly evident in the books devoted to Europe, where narrative and artistic endeavors are stifled by the insistent defense of his fellow Jesuits’ conduct. Much more captivating are the pages devoted to the evangelization of Asia. Bartoli, following the Jesuit tradition, takes great interest in describing with curiosity and respect the exotic customs of the continent. With regards to China, such feelings become open admiration. In the seventeenth century, the Mandarin ruling class was viewed as being both literarily educated and sophisticated, corresponding in many ways to the Jesuits’ own aspirations for political and cultural influence. The activities of missionaries such as Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and Francis de Sales (1567–1622) are enlivened not only by geographic and anthropological digressions but also by an underlying sense of adventure and a taste for the exotic that could lead the reader to consider Bartoli’s masterpiece as a polyphonic novel in which the role of the main characters is interpreted by the Jesuit martyrs. Although Bartoli’s work clearly influenced later novel writers such as Alessandro Manzoni, however, any attempt to interpret the Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu` as a kind of prototype of this literary genre risks being anachronistic. Unlike a novelist, Bartoli is not interested in any kind of psychological treatment of his characters, who often appear to be nothing more than one-dimensional, stereotyped allegories of the Christian virtues that he wanted to extol. Bartoli alternated the long and painful drafting of his main work with the composition of several essays on literary, religious, and moral topics. In the first category falls L’uomo di lettere difeso ed emendato (The Learned Man Defended and Reformed, 1645), in which he portrays the writer as a wise stoic, detached from earthly life and totally absorbed in his intellectual pursuits. In this text, as in Il torto ed il diritto del non si puo` (The Right and the Wrong of the ‘‘You Cannot,’’ 1655), Bartoli proves his competence in literary and linguistic issues and argues for a balancing of grammatical rule with poetic inspiration, of classical tradition with Baroque sensibility. The finest example of Bartoli’s many religious essays is L’huomo al punto, cioe` l’huomo al punto di morte (Man at the Turning Point, That Is, Man on the Point of Death, 1667), where he attempts to dissipate the

DANIELLO BARTOLI fear of death with the assertion that for those who believe in God a cadaver is just a body sunk in a deep sleep. The third group of literary works is formed by moral essays such as La ricreazione del savio (The Wise Man’s Recreation, 1659) and La geografia trasportata al morale (The Moral Transposition of Geography, 1664). These works are devoted to a refined description of several natural phenomena, from the mouth of the Nile to tiny marine snails. Bartoli invites the reader to see in these displays of beauty the glaring proof of God’s existence. This last group of essays is also the source of the most famous passages of his entire work, in which emerges Bartoli’s talent for transforming moral and religious ideas into images of great visual strength. Toward the end of his life, Bartoli became increasingly interested in empirical research. In the wake of Catholic scientists like Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), Bartoli hoped to bridge the gap between science and faith. It is this optimistic aspiration that inspired works such as Del suono, de’ tremori armonici e dell’udito (On Sound, Harmonic Trembling and Hearing, 1679) and Del ghiaccio e della coagulatione (On Ice and Coagulation, 1682). Although Bartoli was highly esteemed by his contemporaries, his work was met with both enthusiastic praises and harsh criticism in the following centuries. The Romantics emphasized the artificiality of the style and the lack of originality of the content of his works. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify a series of important literary and historical figures, from Giacomo Leopardi to Giorgio Manganelli, who expressed admiration for the elegance and the richness of the Jesuit father’s prose. The twentieth century has witnessed a reassessment of Baroque culture that has also involved Bartoli. Influential scholars from Luciano Anceschi (‘‘La poetica del Bartoli,’’ 1954) to Ezio Raimondi (‘‘Daniello Bartoli e la ‘Ricreazione del Savio,’’’ 1961) and Bice Mortara Garavelli (‘‘Note sui Ritratti,’ di Daniello Bartoli,’’ 1965) have made possible a more balanced critique of his work and have brought to light Bartoli’s original method of using to the fullest the syntactic and rhetorical structures of Italian artistic language. The resulting prose presents itself as an intermediary between the classical tradition and the Baroque.

Biography Daniello Bartoli was born in Ferrara on 12 February 1608. His father was Tiburzio Bartoli, a

chemist, who worked at the court of the duke Alfonso II d’Este. After studies under the Jesuits, he entered the novitiate of San Andrea, Rome, in 1623. In Piacenza he studied rhetoric and, in 1625, took his first three religious vows (his definitive ordination would take place in 1643 in Pistoia). The following three years (1626–1629) he studied philosophy in Parma where he taught rhetoric from 1629 to 1633. Between1634–1636, Bartoli studied theology first in Brera then in Bologna. One of his professors was Giovanni Battista Riccioli, great astronomer, who in his Chronologia reformata (1669) would describe his old student as one of the most prominent figures of his age. In 1637, he began his apostolic career as preacher throughout Italy. In 1646, Bartoli had a narrow escape from a shipwreck during a trip from Naples to Palermo. The following year he kept preaching in Naples and Malta. From 1648 until his death he lived in Rome where he devoted himself to literary production. He interrupted his studies only from 1671 to 1673, when he reluctantly became rector of the Roman College. On 13 January 1685, Bartoli died from an apoplectic stroke. MATTIA BEGALI Selected Works Collections Delle opere del padre Daniello Bartoli della Compagnia di Gesu`, 34 vols., Turin: Marietti, 1825–1842.

Essays L’uomo di lettere difeso ed emendato, 1645. Della vita e dell’istituto di S. Ignazio fondatore della Compagnia di Gesu´, 1650; as History of the Life and Institute of St. Ignatius de Loyola: Founder of the Society of Jesus, translated, 1855. Il torto ed il diritto del non si puo`, 1655. La ricreazione del savio, 1659. La geografia trasportata al morale, 1664. L’huomo al punto, cioe` l’huomo al punto di morte, 1667. Dell’ultimo e beato fine dell’uomo, 1670. Dell’ortografia italiana, 1670. Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu`, 1650–1673; 6 vols. (L’Asia, 1650; Il Giappone, 1660; La Cina, 1661; La missione al Gran Mogor del p. Ridolfo d’Acquaviva, 1663; L’Inghilterra, 1667; L’Italia, 1673). Del suono, de’ tremori armonici e dell’udito, 1679. Del ghiaccio e della coagulatione, 1682. Degli uomini e dei fatti della Compagnia di Gesu`—Memorie Storiche, 1684.

Correspondence Lettere inedite del padre Daniello Bartoli, 1834. Lettere inedited e rare, edited by Ottavio Gigli, 1838.

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DANIELLO BARTOLI Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, ‘‘La poetica del Bartoli’’ in Del barocco ed altre prove, Firenze: Vallecchi, 1954. Angelini, Franca, and Alberto Asor Rosa, Daniello Bartoli e i prosatori barocchi, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975. Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘La narrativa italiana del seicento,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 3, part 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Basile, Bruno, ‘‘L’Asia del Bartoli, ’’ in Il tempo e le forme: studi letterari da Dante a Gadda, Modena: Mucchi, 1990. Basile, Bruno, ‘‘Dell’uomo di lettere difeso ed emendato di Daniello Bartoli,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. Le opere, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Basile, Bruno, ‘‘Argomentazione e scienza: due esempi secenteschi,’’ in Come si legge un testo: percorsi di lettura da Dante a Montale, edited by Maria Luisa Altieri Biagi, Milan: Mursia, 1999.

Beltramo, Laura, De rebus physicis: Daniello Bartoli e la prosa scientifica, Turin: Libreria Stampatori, 2004. Daniello Bartoli, storico e letterato, Ferrara: Accademia delle scienze di Ferrara, 1986. Di Grado, Antonio, Il gesuita e la morte: congetture su Daniello Bartoli, Catania: CUECM, 1992. Di Grado, Antonio, Dissimulazioni: Alberti, Bartoli, Tempio: tre classici (e un paradigma) per il millennio a venire, Caltanisetta: Salvatore Sciascia, 1997. Mortara Garavelli, Bice, ‘‘Un uso particolare dell’infinito in Daniello Bartoli,’’ in Atti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 17 (1962): 486–495. Mortara Garavelli, Bice, ‘‘Note sui Ritratti,’ di Daniello Bartoli,’’ in Lettere italiane, 17 (1965): 129–140. Raimondi, Ezio, ‘‘Daniello Bartoli e la ‘Ricreazione del Savio,’’’ in Letteratura barocca. Studi sul Seicento italiano, Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1961. Renaldo, John J., Daniello Bartoli: A Letterato of the Seicento, Naples: Nella sede dell’Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1979.

GIAMBATTISTA BASILE (1575?–1632) According to Benedetto Croce, Giambattista Basile’s oeuvre should be read ‘‘simply as a work of art.’’ This repositioning of Basile’s works in a more illustrious situation within the ‘‘national’’ literary tradition (a repositioning that was in no way obvious, given the fact that they are for the most part in dialect) followed and to a certain extent registered what had happened ‘‘naturally’’ in the rest of Europe, as a result of the numerous translations of Basile’s most important work, Lo cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de’ Peccerille (The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, 1534–1536), defined by Croce as ‘‘the richest, the oldest and most artistic among the books of popular tales’’ (Giambattista Basile e l’elaborazione artistica delle fiabe popolari, 1928). Indeed, the Grimm brothers and Charles Perrault expressed their appreciation for it, while Croce himself translated it into Italian as Pentamerone, ossia la fiabe delle fiabe (Pentamerone, or the Tale of Tales, 1925) (the alternative title Pentamerone had been used as early as the 1674 edition). However, the objective of Croce’s comment was the ‘‘romantic prejudice’’ regarding popular themes and stories. Although inspired to such popular production, Basile’s tales, in the critic’s account, are the product of an autonomous 136

Baroque vein ideally related, if anything, to the Italian artistic literature of Pulci, Lorenzo the Magnificent, and, to some extent, Boiardo and Ariosto, who refashioned, through laughter, the matter of chivalric romances. Basile was educated in Naples, the city of Giovanbattista Marino and of Torquato Tasso and his literary heritage, the most important centre of the Italian Baroque, and the Spanish vice-royalty capital, where Neapolitan, Italian, and Spanish could all be heard (in fact, Basile himself wrote occasional verses in the language of Go´ngora and Quevedo). Early poems in Italian such as Il pianto della Vergine (The Virgin’s Tears, 1608) follow the lyric patterns of Mannerism, with a preference for themes derived from authors such as Luigi Tansillo, Tasso, and Angelo Grillo. Basile also had a talent for poetry for music, written in particular for his sister Adriana, a well-known singer, to whom he dedicated the first of the three editions of his Mandriali et ode (Madrigals and Odes, 1609–1617), as well as for tales on maritime subject, such as Le avventurose disavventure (The Adventurous Misadventures, 1611). His poetic production in Italian was always in the service of a court, first that of Prince Luigi

GIAMBATTISTA BASILE Carafa of Stigliano, who protected Adriana and her family of musicians and writers, and later that of the Spanish viceroy, the duke of Alba. He also wrote numerous works for the festivals and celebrations typical of Baroque culture. With his editions of the works of Pietro Bembo (1616), Giovanni della Casa (1617) and Galeazzo di Tarsia (1617) and with his solid philological knowledge, Basile mapped out a variation on the canon of poetic production that can no longer be considered manneristic, but that possibly belongs rather to the Baroque. For the Neapolitan Giulio Cesare Cortese (1575–1627?), author of La Vaiasseide (The Poem of the Maids, 1612), a parodic poem in dialect, Basile wrote the outline of some prose pieces and the daring dedication ‘‘Allo Re delli Viente’’ (To the King of Winds), the windy receiver of poetic deeds. Basile’s first work in Neapolitan is a series of nine eclogues in seven-syllable lines and hendecasyllables, each with a subtitle disclosing the content, entitled Muse napoletane (Neapolitan Muses, 1635) and published under the pseudonym of Gian Alessio Abbattutis. The genre, derived from Virgil, suits Basile’s vocation for mimetic and grotesque prose, with its eloquent words and gestures. The narrative pretext develops scenes of everyday life, with popular characters caught in their immediate spontaneity yet described in a controlled style that is far from instinctive. The young guy falling in love with a prostitute, the old man shamelessly wooing an adolescent girl, the conceited self-made man who does not realize the opportunism of the people around him are some of the characters of Basile’s tales, which also relate quarrels over women and gambling, and the nostalgia for the music of the past that the inexorable flow of time has replaced with the sophisticated and artificial music of the present—all held together by a playful and cheerful moralism that owes something to the influence of Cortese. On the contrary, Lo cunto de li cunti is a collection of popular fairy tales, the subtitle of which implies an intended audience of children (Lo trattenemiento de’ Peccerille means ‘‘entertainment for the little ones’’). This aspect was emphasized by Giovanni Getto, who also found in Basile’s popular dimension an evident extraneousness from archaic values. For Getto, the popular and the childish are ‘‘provisional forms’’ and ‘‘occasional pretexts’’ ‘‘for the abundant use of absurd situations and of an extremely structured language in its constant playfulness (leaving aside the savvy technique and the culture that underlie the whole work

and make it anything but popular)’’ (‘‘La fiaba di Giambattista Basile,’’ 1969). Lo cunto de li cunti, Basile’s true masterpiece, is also the first and foremost example of seventeenth-century Southern Italian prose, which demonstrates the use of the Neapolitan dialect as an instrument in the search for consciousness and identity, in open opposition to the Florentine norms of the Accademia della Crusca. This work is also known as Pentamerone as it is composed of 50 tales told in five days and alternated with four eclogues that echo the ballate in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1373), an unavoidable source, as well as the eclogues in Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), and Francisco Quevedo’s El mundo por de dentro (1612) in which servants, cooks and household staff of the princely palace are the main characters. The tales in the collection are nourished by a popular imagination rather than by mythology, and delineate, as Michele Rak shows, a theater of human miseries by adapting the material of myths and legends, ‘‘of exempla and proverbs, of jokes and stories, of the minor chronicles of posters and the major chronicles of the istorie, of the ne varietur retelling of the sacred works of the noble ideology and of the ritual retelling of the equally sacred popular works, of the open conversation around a fireplace in the country houses, inns, fairs, markets, and celebrations’’ (La maschera della fortuna, 1975). The author imagines that 10 peasant women, whose names are cleverly expressive, come and tell tales to three characters: Tadeo, the prince of Camporotondo, a Moorish slave who has deceived him into becoming his wife, and the young girl Zoza, who is in love with him. In the end, the deceits of the slave girl are discovered and she is sentenced to death, while Zoza can at last be loved back by the prince. This is the plot of the 50th and last story, the one that includes all the previous tales and gives the title to the collection. The tales are governed by a conception of the world dominated by chance and contingency, in which human beings are passive cogs. Another dominant element is the Baroque theme of metamorphoses and transformations that are, in this case however always controlled by a kind of magical Providence that enlightens the strangest and most absurd aspects of things and events, thus widening the essentially rational perspective of Boccaccio’s collection. This is a new perspective that looks toward an ever-changing universe that flows also and perhaps above all at the level of language, due to a skillful use of metaphors and anagrams, which from merely expressive, linguistic facts turn into existential, physical instances. 137

GIAMBATTISTA BASILE Some of the tales in the collection are wellknown, for example ‘‘La gatta cenerentola’’ (The Cinderella Cat), the archetype of the story of Sleeping Beauty in ‘‘Sole, Luna e Talia’’ (Sun, Moon and Talia), and ‘‘Le tre cetre’’ (The Three Lyres), from which Carlo Gozzi derived his famous dramatic tale L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges, 1761). Moreover, in Gagliuso Basile tells the story of a wise cat who leads a poor man to better fortune and is repaid with nothing but ingratitude, which was used by both Charles Perrault and Ludwig Tieck.

Novelle Lo cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de’ Peccerille, 5 vols., 1634–1636; as The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, translated by N. M. Penzer, 1932.

Edited Works Pietro Bembo, Rime, 1616. Giovanni della Casa, Rime, 1617. Galeazzo di Tarsia, Rime, 1617.

Biography Born in Naples, possibly in Posillipo around 1575 (although some say in 1566, or 1570/1572). Between 1603 and 1604 joined the Venetian armies and reached Candia, which at that time was threatened by the Turks and there attended the Accademia degli Stravaganti founded by Andrea Cornaro. Returned to Naples, 1608. Worked as secretary, administrator, and courtly writer for some of the great families of the kingdom; his services included the organization of celebrations and official ceremonies. Member of the Neapolitan Accademia degli Oziosi, 1611. At the end of 1612, joined his sister, the singer Adriana Basile, in Mantua, where he was knighted and made Earl Palatine. Back in Naples, was under ´ lvarez di, who the protection of Viceroy Antonio A appointed him governor of the city of Aversa in 1626. In his last years, the duke of Acerenza Galeazzo Pinelli appointed him governor of Giugliano where, during the winter 1631–1632 he was infected by a violent epidemic. He died in Giugliano (Naples) on February 23, 1632. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Novella Selected Works Collections Le opere napoletane, edited by Olga Silvana Casale, Rome: Benincasa, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘Il pianto della Vergine,’’ 1608. ‘‘Mandriali et ode,’’ 1609; expanded as Mandriali et ode prima e seconda parte, 1612; expanded as De’ Madrigali et delle ode del Cavalier Giovan Battista Basile, 1617.

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‘‘Le avventurose disavventure,’’ 1611. ‘‘Opere poetiche di Giovan Battista Basile il Pigro cioe` Mandriali et Ode prima e seconda parte. Venere addolorata, Favola tragica. Egloghe amorose e lugubri. Avventurose disavventure. Pianto delle Vergine, Poema sacro,’’ 1613. ‘‘Le Muse napoletane,’’ 1635. ‘‘Del Teagene,’’ 1637.

Other Varieta` de’ testi nelle rime del Bembo, 1616. Osservationi intorno alle rime del Bembo e del Casa, 1618.

Further Reading Canepa, Nancy L., From Court to Forest: Giambattista Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti and the Birth of the Literary Fairy Tale, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Giambattista Basile e l’elaborazione artistica delle fiabe popolari,’’ in Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1928. Fulco, Giorgio, ‘‘La letteratura dialettale napoletana. Giulio Cesare Croce e Giovan Battista Basile. Pompeo Sarnelli,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 5, Rome: Salerno, 1997. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘La fiaba di Giambattista Basile,’’ in Barocco in prosa e in poesia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Guaragnella, Pasquale, ‘‘Il mondo dal ‘di dentro.’ Un intermezzo de Lo cunto de li cunti di G.B. Basile: ‘La Coppella,’’’ in Gli occhi della mente. Stili nel Seicento italiano, Bari: Palomar, 1997. Moro, Anna L., Aspects of Old Neapolitan: The Language of Basile’s Lo cunto de li cunti, Mu¨nchen: Lincom Europa, 2003. Petrini, Mario, Il gran Basile, Rome: Bulzoni, 1989. Picone, Michelangelo and Alfred Messerli (editors), Giovan Battista Basile e l’invenzione della fiaba, Ravenna: Longo, 2004. Porcelli, Bruno, ‘‘Il senso del molteplice nel Pentamerone,’’ in Novellieri italiani: dal Sacchetti al Basile, Ravenna: Longo, 1969. Praz, Mario, ‘‘Il Cunto de li cunti di G.B. Basile,’’ in Bellezza e bizzarria, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960. Rak, Michele, La maschera della fortuna: letture del Basile ‘‘toscano,’’ Naples: Liguori, 1975. Rak, Michele, Napoli gentile: La letteratura in ‘‘lingua napoletana’’ nella cultura barocca (1596–1632), Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Ussia, Salvatore, ‘‘I Sacri sospiri di Giambattista Basile,’’ in Il Sacro Parnaso: il lauro e la croce, Catanzaro: Pullano, 1993.

GIORGIO BASSANI

GIORGIO BASSANI (1916–2000) Bassani began his career in 1940 with Una citta` di pianura (A City on the Plain), a collection of short stories set in his native city, Ferrara. The book was published under the pseudonym of Giacomo Marchi, a precaution made necessary by the antiSemitic legislation passed by the Fascist government in 1938. The racial laws and the memory of the people who died in the concentration camps during the war are the themes of his first collection of poems, Storie dei poveri amanti e altri versi (Stories of Miserable Lovers and Other Verses, 1945). A second collection of poems, Te lucis ante (To You before the Close of Day, 1947), whose title refers to the ancient hymn ‘‘Te lucis ante terminum,’’ consists of brief religious verses written by a poet who does not believe in God but nonetheless feels the terrible and sometimes horrible fascination for a superior power who controls history. His next work, Un’altra liberta` (Another Freedom, 1951), is a collection of autobiographical poems referring to his war experience. It reflects the poetics of neorealism, in which Italian literature and cinema realistically represented the condition of postwar Italy and imagined what was to be done for its reconstruction. Bassani, however, is by no means a historian, bur rather a writer who transfigures history through fantasy. In the 1950s, he was also active as a scriptwriter. This experience taught him new methods, more visual than descriptive, that he would then apply to his own writing, as witnessed by the short stories ‘‘La passeggiata prima di cena’’ (The Walk Before Dinner, 1953), ‘‘Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti’’ (The Last Years of Clelia Trotti, 1955), ‘‘Storia d’amore’’ (Love Story, 1956), ‘‘Una lapide in via Mazzini’’ (A Tablet in Via Mazzini, 1956), and ‘‘Una notte del ’43’’ (A Night in ’43, 1956), which were collected as Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara, 1956), and for which he was awarded the prestigious Strega prize. In ‘‘La passeggiata prima di cena,’’ Bassani comes to terms with the trauma of Jewish persecution and extermination. In the other stories, people and documents are directly taken from actual reality, as in ‘‘Una notte del ’43.’’ Jewish identity is central to the five stories, both as a burden (given the persecution

against the Jewish community) and as a source of spiritual strength. Memory is another important theme of Bassani’s works, which show the influence of his great literary mentor, Marcel Proust. The desire and the necessity of remembering are expressed in various ways, as situations, atmospheres and moods again and again rise to the surface of memory. Indeed, memory is for the writer ‘‘a refuge and, at the same time, an optimal dimension from which one can look at world, [...] not in order to divine the future, to establish useless and illusory parallelisms, but rather in order to clarify once and for all what happened inside and outside us,’’ as Massimo Grillandi aptly put it (Invito alla lettura di Giorgio Bassani, 1972). The time gap separating the different stories of Cinque storie ferraresi only underlines the static immutability of the human condition. The only way to escape from human isolation and social alienation is through memory. A direct consequence of this reliance on memory is the characters’ inability to communicate, to decide what to do or even what to think. Not sufficiently strong enough to engage in life’s battles, they prefer to hide, to deny the truth because it is a truth they cannot accept. All of the stories are set in Ferrara, which is both protagonist and backdrop of the works. From story to story, in fact, there reappear, as variations on the theme, characters representing both the good and the bad in provincial life under Fascism and in the years after World War II. Beginning with ‘‘La passeggiata prima di cena,’’ Ferrara becomes a tumultuous and bizarre microcosm of passions, conflicting emotions, courageous or vile actions, uncertainties, and obsessions. The writer’s intention is to pin down and represent the habits and mentalities of the well-to-do Jewish community of his native city. Ferrara, writes Roberto Cotroneo, ‘‘is constructed as a mental place, so vivid that it becomes ever more unreal, impossible, vague; as a mental place, but also as a place of collective memory of a city that becomes a memory of the narrator and of his characters’’ (La ferita indicibile, 1998). With Gli occhiali d’oro (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, 1958), Bassani’s style becomes more 139

GIORGIO BASSANI literary and less cinematic. In Cinque storie ferraresi the author had observed his characters from the outside, and their existences had been reconstructed with historical precision. In Gli occhiali d’oro, he dwells on the consciousness of his characters. The story is told from the point of view of a first person narrator who relates the story of Athos Fadigati, a homosexual doctor who is driven to suicide by his isolation. His friendship with the narrator, a young Jewish student, and the solidarity they develop, forms the core of the novel. By linking together racial and sexual persecution, Bassani brings into sharp relief the central themes of his narrative: the struggle for equality and the need for tolerance. Two years later, he revised and collected Cinque storie ferraresi and Gli occhiali d’oro in a single volume, Le storie ferraresi, demonstrating his relentless desire to rewrite his works. If, as Giorgio Varanini has suggested, the reader’s first impression of this omnibus volume may be that of a certain ‘‘narrowness of visual angle, of an all too exclusive predilection for Ferrara and its Jewishness and, with rare exceptions, for a strictly limited period, between 1936 and the end of World War II’’ (Giorgio Bassani, 1970), a closer analysis of the texts demonstrates that this visual angle opens up a whole world of human and social experiences. The writer’s direct and conscious knowledge of the events represented is the point of departure for a more profound investigation of the human condition. Nevertheless, unlike in the previous Ferrara stories, Bassani here avoids the accumulation of lyric passages: The Ferrarese settings, which previously seemed places of enchantment, now are rendered with unfaltering lucidity. After a very long preparation, Bassani published his best-known book, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, 1962). This novel is the fullest expression of the writer’s world. In its vision of reality, the reader can detect the influence of Bassani’s master, the philosopher and literary critic Benedetto Croce. In the following two decades, Bassani continued to publish new novels, essays and poems, as well as to revise all of his former works. Among his later books, perhaps the most complex is Dietro la porta (Behind the Door, 1964), which deals with an adolescent’s discovery of the world—and particularly of sexuality. The story is told from the point of view of the boy himself as an adult. Returning to the themes of memory and alienation, Bassani paints a sharp and, in the end, profoundly pessimistic psychological portrait of the youth. The novel is a first-person 140

narrative, in which the protagonist, who belongs to a family of the city’s well-to-do bourgeoisie, attends his first year at a secondary school in Ferrara. There he attracts the fascinated attention of his classmate, Luciano Pulga—who is poor, meek, and in some ways repugnant—and simultaneously yearns to become friends with the best student in the class, Carlo Cattolica. But friendship with Carlo seems impossible, and Luciano insinuates himself into the protagonist’s life, despite his feeble attempts to withdraw from such intimacy. Carlo proposes to make Pulga fall into a trap: He will invite him to his house, hide him behind the door, and have him hear his false friend spout malicious things about him. The plan succeeds, but Luciano prefers to flee instead of confronting his false friend. Adolescence is described as a time constantly threatened and invaded by morbidity and sadism. In its explicit taste for suffering, the novel recalls the morbid relations among the young in the fiction of Andre Gide. Finally L’airone (The Heron, 1968) shows Bassani’s desire to find new themes. With pitiless minimalism, the novel recounts Edgardo Limentani’s day of hunting, registering—alongside the objective details—the slow and inexorable mounting of disgust, of the muffled horror of existence, with potentially tragic results. In contrast to his hunting companion, Gavino, a young man with a brusque and soldierly air, the protagonist identifies himself with the heron of the title, a wounded bird whose slow, agonizing death he watches. The bird thus comes to represent a ‘‘double’’ of the protagonist, a symbol of the world’s agonies and of everlasting death. More than a recollection of a period, the novel is the story of a man and his personal vicissitudes. It reflects the more general crisis of a generation that can no longer identify itself with the values of its fathers.

Biography Born in Bologna on 4 March 1916, into a middleclass family from Ferrara; educated at the Liceo ‘‘Ludovico Ariosto’’ in Ferrara until 1934; studied literature at the University of Bologna, and graduated in 1939; arrested in May of 1943 and imprisoned in Ferrara because of his anti-Fascist activities; released on 26 July 1943; married Valeria Sinigallia, a young Jewish woman from Ferrara, on 4 August 1943; lived for a few months in Florence, under a false name, then in Rome, until the end of the war; had two children, Paola and Enrico;

GIORGIO BASSANI worked as a civil servant, a secondary school teacher in Velletri; editor of the journal Botteghe Oscure in 1948–1960; Strega prize for Cinque storie ferraresi, 1956; discovered the creative talent of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and edited his Il Gattopardo for the publisher Feltrinelli, 1958; director of the ‘‘Biblioteca di letteratura’’ for Feltrinelli, 1958–1963; professor at the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte Drammatica ‘‘Silvio D’Amico’’ in Rome, 1957–1967; vice president of the RAI television network, 1957–1967; Viareggio prize for Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1962; Campiello prize for L’airone, 1969; visiting professor of Italian literature in several North American universities, including Berkeley, 1976; honorary degree in arts and letters from Saint Mary’s College, in 1980; honorary degree in natural sciences, University of Ferrara, in 1996. Died in Rome on 13 April 2000. MARCELLA FARINA Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Roberto Cotroneo, Milan: Mondadori, 1998.

Fiction Una citta` di pianura, 1940. La passeggiata prima di cena, 1953. Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti, 1955. Cinque storie ferraresi, 1956; republished as Le storie ferraresi, 1960; as A prospect of Ferrara, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1962; as Five Stories of Ferrara, translated by William Weaver, 1971. Gli occhiali d’oro, 1958; as The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1960. Una notte del ’43, 1960. Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, 1962; as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1965; as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, translated by William Weaver, 1977. Dietro la porta, 1964; as Behind the door, translated by William Weaver, 1992. L’airone, 1968; as The Heron, translated by Jonathan Keates, 1993. L’ odore del fieno, 1972; as The Smell of Hay, translated by William Weaver, 1996.

Poetry ‘‘Storie dei poveri amanti e altri versi,’’ 1945. ‘‘Te lucis ante,’’ 1947. ‘‘Un’altra liberta`,’’ 1951. ‘‘L’alba ai vetri. Poesie 1942–1950,’’ 1963. ‘‘Epitaffio,’’ 1974. ‘‘In gran segreto,’’ 1978. ‘‘In rima e senza,’’ 1982.

Other Le parole preparate, e altri scritti di letteratura, 1966. Di la` dal cuore, 1984.

Further Reading Chiappino, Alessandra, and Gianni Venturi (editors), Bassani e Ferrara: le intermittenze del cuore, Ferrara: G. Corbo, 1995. Cotroneo, Roberto, ‘‘La ferita indicibile,’’ introduction to Giorgio Bassani, in Opere, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Di Napoli, Thomas P. (editor), The Italian Jewish experience, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 2000. Dolfi, Anna, Le forme del sentimento: prosa e poesia in Giorgio Bassani, Padua: Liviana, 1981. Dolfi, Anna, Giorgio Bassani: una scrittura della malinconia, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Duncan, Derek, ‘‘Secret Wounds: The Bodies of Fascism in Giorgio Bassani’s Dietro la porta,’’ in Queer Italia: Same-sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, edited by Gary P. Cestaro, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Frandini, Paola, Giorgio Bassani e il fantasma di Ferrara, San Cesario di Lecce (Lecce): Manni, 2004. Gaeta, Maria Ida (editor), Giorgio Bassani: uno scrittore da ritrovare, Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 2004. Gagliardi, Antonio (editor), Bassani: lo scrittore e i suoi testi, Rome: NIS, 1988. Gialdroni, Michele, Giorgio Bassani, poeta di se stesso: un commento al testo di Epitaffio (1974), New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Grillandi, Massimo, Invito alla lettura di Giorgio Bassani, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Guiati, Andrea, L’ invenzione poetica: Ferrara e l’opera di Giorgio Bassani, Fossombrone: Metauro, 2001. Kroha, Lucienne, ‘‘The Sound of Silence: Re-reading Giorgio Bassani Gli occhiali d’oro,’’ in The Italianist, 10 (1990): 71–102. Moloney, Brian, ‘‘Giorgio Bassani, James Joyce and the Storie ferraresi,’’ in Journal of Anglo-Italian Studies, 5 (1997): 231–243. Neiger, Ada, Bassani e il mondo ebraico, Naples: Loffredo, 1983. Oddo De Stefanis, Giusi, Bassani entro il cerchio delle sue mura, Ravenna: Longo, 1981. Prebys, Portia, Giorgio Bassani: bibliografia sulle opere e sulla vita, Florence: Centro editoriale toscano, 2002. Rinaldi, Micaela (editor), Le biblioteche di Giorgio Bassani, Milan: Guerini, 2004. Risari, Guia, The Document Within the Walls: The Romance of Bassani, Market Harborough, UK: Troubador, 1999. Roveri, Alessandro, Giorgio Bassani e l’antifascismo (1936–1943), Sabbioncello San Pietro: 2 G, 2002. Schneider, Marilyn, Vengeance of the Victim: History and Symbol in Giorgio Bassani’s Fiction, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Sempoux, Andre` (editor), Il Romanzo di Ferrara: contributi su Giorgio Bassani, Louvain-la-Neuve: Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 1983. Sicher, Efraim, (editor), Holocaust Novelists, Detroit: Gale, 2004. Toni, Alberto, Con Bassani verso Ferrara, Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2001. Varanini, Giorgio, Giorgio Bassani, Florence: La nuova Italia, 1970. Varanini, Giorgio, Bassani: narratore, poeta, saggista, Modena: Mucchi, 1991.

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GIORGIO BASSANI

IL GIARDINO DEI FINZI-CONTINI, 1962 Novel by Giorgio Bassani

Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) is Bassani’s most popular novel. It was translated into more than 100 languages and in 1970 made into a film by Vittorio De Sica. The story, which takes place during the Fascist era in Ferrara, centers around a garden where young Jewish men and women are invited to pass their time as an alternative to their insecure destiny. Bassani draws on Anton Chekhov and Giovanni Pascoli, as well as Alain Fournier’s Grand Meaulnes (1913), in representing adolescent friendship. Furthermore, Bassani subtly analyses the subtle social differences between the upper, middle and lower strata of the bourgeoisie and their entanglement with the hierarchies imposed by Fascism. The novel opens with the protagonist’s visit to the Finzi-Contini family mausoleum and then divides into four parts. The first part recalls the narrator’s childhood experiences leading up to his encounter with Alberto and Mico´l Finzi-Contini. The next two parts follow the characters as they attend university, develop their friendship, especially in the ‘‘tennis club’’ in the garden of the Finzi-Contini’s villa, and are confronted with the restrictions imposed by Fascist racial laws. The final section of the book covers the gradual fading of the narrator’s involvement in the tennis club, his futile attempts to restart his romance with Mico´l, and his eventual departure from Ferrara. The idyllic and peaceful garden hides the thoughtless snobbery of its noble inhabitants who, through indifference, try to detach themselves from what is happening outside the ancient walls of their villa. In the end, their serene refuge of peace and love will be destroyed by war and racial persecution. Knowing their fate, the narrator must come to terms with the inability to bury the memories of the past and the need to face reality.

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The novel is founded on two themes. The first one is familiar to Bassani’s readers as one that inspires all his fiction and poetry: the idea of solitude and of seclusion, projected now onto ‘‘the garden,’’ a natural space so replete with poetic analogies. The garden remains Vittorio De Sica’s central archetypal image of his 1970 cinematic adaptation. The main female character, Mico`l, seems to be inhibited: She does not love, she does not want to get engaged, she is unable to enter the normal circle of life, and, like the rest of her family, she does not believe in the future. Her friendship with the protagonist is not based on the expectation of a happy future together but rather serves as a tender and elegiac evocation of the past. The other main theme is death. Already evoked in the prologue, where the reader is presented with images of the Etruscan necropolis of Cerveteri, images of death recur throughout the novel, infusing it with an atmosphere of melancholy. Rather than being horrible, the end of the rich and illustrious FinziContini family, destroyed in the concentration camps, has the gloomy faintness of a lost love. MARCELLA FARINA Editions First edition: Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Translations: as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, translated by Isabel Quigly, New York: Atheneum, 1965; as The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977. Other editions: in II romanzo di Ferrara (III), Milan: Mondadori, 1974.

Further Reading Andreoli, Annamaria, and Franca De Leo (editors), Giorgio Bassani. Il giardino dei libri, Rome: De Luca, 2004. Bon, Adriano, Come leggere Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini di Giorgio Bassani, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Bosetti, Gilbert, ‘‘Il mito della fanciullezza ne ‘Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini’’’ in Narratori italiani del Novecento: Ginzburg, Moravia, Bassani, Pratolini, Saviane, Soldati, Tobino: Premi Pirandello dal 1985 al 1991, edited by Gilbert Bosetti, Palermo: Palumbo, 1996. Cannon, Joann, ‘‘Memory and Testimony in Primo Levi and Giorgio Bassani,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, edited by Peter Bondanella and Andrea Ciccarelli, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Caproni, Giorgio, ‘‘Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini,’’ in La scatola nera, Milan: Garzanti, 1996.

LAURA BATTIFERRA DEGLI AMMANNATI Davis, Harry, ‘‘Narrated and narrating I in Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini,’’ in Italian Studies, 43 (1988): 117–129. Grillandi, Massimo, Invito alla lettura di Giorgio Bassani, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Kroha, Lucienne, ‘‘Judaism and Manhood in the Novels of Giorgio Bassani,’’ in The Italian Jewish Experience, edited by Thomas P. Di Napoli, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 2000.

Marcus, Millicent, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation, Baltimore-London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Possiedi, Paolo, ‘‘Prima dell’Olocausto: Il giardino dei FinziContini di Giorgio Bassani,’’ in Nemla Italian Studies, 17 (1993): 107–119. Schneider, Marilyn, ‘‘Dimensioni mitiche di Mico`l FinziContini,’’ in Italica, 51.1 (1974): 43–65. Silva, Annamaria, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Milan: Mursia, 1994.

LAURA BATTIFERRA DEGLI AMMANNATI (1523–1589) Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati flourished as a poet in turbulent times, when Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim worldviews came into collision across Europe, sparking religious and aesthetic reform in Italy. Of an intellectual elite fiercely loyal to the Church of Rome, Battiferra expresses in her art a major cultural transition, from the high Renaissance to the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and beyond, through decades of deepening spirituality. Her poetry reflects sources astonishing in their reach, wittily targeted and adapted, from the Bible, Virgil, and Ovid to Dante, Petrarch, Jacopo Sannazzaro, Pietro Bembo, Giovanni Della Casa, Tullia d’Aragona, Chiara Matraini, and her Florentine mentor, Benedetto Varchi. At once successor to the Tuscan master sonneteer and namesake of his lady, she fashions a distinctive Petrarchist identity as ‘‘Dafne,’’ a new Laura seeking her laurels on the Parnassus of sixteenth-century Italy. Born into Urbino’s intellectual aristocracy, upon her first husband’s premature death (mourned in a private sequence of sonnets influenced by Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Ga`mbara), she went to live in Rome with her father, a wealthy Vatican cleric responsible for her classical education and elegant Italian chancery script, displayed in her few surviving letters (16 to Varchi; two to Duke Guidobaldo Della Rovere about her dowry; several others penned for her husband to Michelangelo and the Medici duke). Remarried to the Tuscan sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati, a loving

match that would last 40 years, she moves in elite Roman circles, judging from personages featured in her poetry: Annibal Caro, secretary to Alessandro Farnese (Pope Paul III’s grandson); Livia and Ortensia Colonna; Ersilia Cortese Del Monte, niece to Pope Julius III; Lucrezia Soderini of the great banking family; Eufemia, the Neapolitan singer-poet whose angelic strains enchanted the city. Five letters to her from Caro survive as well as sonnets they exchanged, printed in Il primo libro dell’opere toscane (First Book of Tuscan Works, 1560) and Caro’s posthumous Rime (1569). The death of Julius III in 1555 forced the Ammannati to move to Florence, where Bartolomeo found new patronage with Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Although devastated, his wife soon took root in a rich cultural milieu on the Arno shores, where she published Il primo libro dell’opere toscane. Dedicated to the Duchess Eleonora di Toledo, this carefully shaped lyric anthology, a tribute to Cosimo’s conquest of Siena, collects 187 poems, 146 by the author and 41 by distinguished male correspondents, among them Varchi, Caro, il Lasca (Anton Francesco Grazzini), Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, Antonio Gallo, and Girolamo Razzi. Mostly sonnets, including a sequence in honor of her husband ‘‘Fidia,’’ it displays a programmatic mix of forms: madrigals, canzonette or odes, sestina, canzone, terza rima in translations of Jeremiah’s lament, and a hymn attributed to St. Augustine (actually Peter Damian), and verso sciolto (free verse) in an eclogue.

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LAURA BATTIFERRA DEGLI AMMANNATI Her second book, I sette salmi penitentiali del santissimo profeta Davit . . . con alcuni suoi sonetti spirituali (Penitential Psalms of the Most Holy Prophet David . . . with Some of Her Spiritual Sonnets, 1564), announces the post-Tridentine era. Sent to the pious Vittoria Della Rovere, duchess of Urbino, it addresses a larger female public by offering each of the Psalms to cloistered nuns, among them her aunt Cassandra Battiferra. A third collection, entitled simply Le rime (The Rhymes, before 1859), survives in a manuscript left incomplete at her death and rediscovered in 1995. It was intended to contain all she had ever written, except for her poetry preserved in collections by others (e.g., Bronzino’s Rime, Varchi’s Contro gl’Ugonotti, Cento sonetti in morte di Luca Martini, Laura Terracina’s Rime libro nono, Lodovico Domenichi’s funeral anthology for Eleonora and her sons Giovanni and Garzia, Michelangelo’s funeral anthology, Mario Colonna’s Poesie toscane, Curzio Gonzaga’s Rime). This long lost trove reflects her intensifying religious sentiments during the 1570s and 1580s, when the Ammannati became Jesuit sponsors. Battiferra’s late Rime honor the Society of Jesus and touch on such Catholic Reformation themes as the Magdalene, Crucifixion, and Massacre of the Innocents. The final entry, which breaks off after only 17 stanzas of ottava rima, is a heroic poem based on the biblical account of Samuel with poignant sympathy for Hannah, infertile as the poet herself apparently was. To the same period belongs her one known prose work, the Oratione sopra il Natale di Nostro Signore (Orison on the Birth of Our Lord, before 1859), an impassioned meditation on the Nativity inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Connected to Urbino, Rome, and Florence, she attracted the attention of literati not only across Italy (Lodovico Beccadelli, bishop of Ragusa, Malatesta Fiordiano of Rimini, Lucia Bertana of Bologna), but also at the imperial courts of Prague and Madrid. Male peers canonized her in catalogs of famous women (Bernardo Tasso, Amadigi; Pietro Calzolari, Historia monastica; Vasari, Vite de’ piu´ eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani, second ed.; Tomaso Garzoni, Vite delle donne illustri della scrittura sacra). They embraced her in prestigious academies and more informal groups that met like salons. These coteries gravitated to the venerable monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli in the heart of Florence beside Brunelleschi’s Rotunda, to patrician villas in the surrounding

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countryside, and sometimes to the warmth of Battiferra’s own fireside. In ever-shifting combinatory activity, they produced fashionable, multivoiced lyric anthologies that measure the parabola of Battiferra’s fame. Still praised in the eighteenth century by Giovan Maria Crescimbene, Francesco Saverio Quadrio, and Girolamo Tiraboschi, as of the nineteenth century she virtually disappears, except for trickles of memory that recall I sette salmi penitentiali and a handful of autobiographical sonnets. The occasional verse, Petrarchist and Mannerist, that made up the bulk of her production—a corpus of more than 500 poems, 400 that she herself wrote and over 100 addressed to her by literary correspondents—was all but forgotten. She may herself have diminished the fame that she so aggressively pursued when younger by retreating into a more secluded life as an older woman to meditate on the vanities of the world, to pray for salvation, and to compose religious poetry that never crossed the threshold of print.

Biography Born St. Andrew’s Day, 13 November 1523, probably in Urbino, to Giovan’ Antonio Battiferri of Urbino and his concubine Maddalena Coccapani of Carpi; educated by her father; legitimized with her brother Ascanio and her half-brother Giulio by Pope Paul III in a document of 9 February 1543; married to Vittorio Sereni, organist in service of Duke Guidobaldo II Della Rovere of Urbino, 1549; remarried to the Tuscan sculptor and architect Bartolomeo Ammannati, at Casa Santa in Loreto, 1 April 1550; lived in Rome 1550–1555; then in Florence in orbit of the Medici court. No children; first woman inducted into the Sienese Accademia degli Intronati, 1560; member of the Accademia degli Assorditi in Urbino; assisted in preparation of funeral anthology for Benedetto Varchi, 1566. Died in Florence of unknown causes, 3 November 1589; buried in the Jesuit church San Giovannino (today San Giovannino degli Scolopi). She left a planned third volume of verses unfinished in manuscript at her death. Two portraits survive: by Agnolo Bronzino (ca. 1560, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence), by Alessandro Allori (ca. 1590, in the Ammannati funeral chapel at San Giovannino, Florence); another by Hans Van Aachen is lost. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM

CESARE BECCARIA Selected Works

Further Reading

Collections Il primo libro dell’opere toscane di M. Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati, 1560 (based on the holograph in Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Magl. VII, 778); republished as Rime della Sig. Laura Battiferra nuovamente date in luce da Antonio Bulifon, 1694; Il primo libro delle opere toscane, edited by Enrico Maria Guidi, 2000. Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati and her Literary Circle: An Anthology, edited and translated with commentary by Victoria Kirkham, 2005.

Poetry ‘‘Rime, Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense,’’ Ms. 3229, before 1589.

Other Oratione sopra il Natale di Nostro Signore, Macerata, Biblioteca Comunale Mozzi-Borgetti, Ms. 137, fols. 137r– 141v, before 1589. I sette salmi penitentiali del santissimo profeta Davit. Tradotti in lingua Toscana da Madonna Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati. Con gli argomenti sopra ciascuno di essi, composti dalla medesima; insieme con alcuni suoi Sonetti spirituali, 1564; rpt. 1566, 1570; republished in Salmi penitentiali, di diuersi eccellenti autori con alcune rime spirituali di diuersi illust. cardinali, di Reuerendissimi uescoui, et d’altre persone Ecclesiastiche. Scelti dal reuerendo P. Francesco da Triuigi Carmelitano (Francesco Turchi), 1568; rpt. 1569, 1570, 1572, 1749; edited by Enrico Maria Guidi, 2005. Lettere di Laura Battiferra Ammannati a Benedetto Varchi, edited by Carlo Gargiolli, 1879; rpt. 1968.

Guidi, Enrico Maria, ‘‘I salmi penitenziali di David nella traduzione di Laura Battiferra,’’ in Accademia Raffaello: Atti e studi, 1 (2004): 83–92. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Laura Battiferra’s ’First Book’ of Poetry: A Renaissance Holograph Comes out of Hiding,’’ in Rinascimento, 35 (1996): 351–391. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Dante’s Fantom, Petrarch’s Specter: Bronzino’s Portrait of the Poet Laura Battiferra,’’ in ‘‘Visibile parlare’’: Dante and the Art of the Italian Renaissance, edited by Deborah Parker, special issue of Lectura Dantis, 22–23 (1998): 63–139. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati benefattrice dei Gesuiti fiorentini,’’ in Committenza artistica femminile, edited by Sara F. Matthews Grieco and Gabriella Zarri, Quaderni storici, 104, no. 2 (2000): 331–354. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Creative Partners: The Marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 55 (2002): 498–558. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘La poetessa al presepio: Una meditazione inedita di Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati,’’ in Filologia e critica, 27, no. 2 (2002): 258–276. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Sappho on the Arno: The Brief Fame of Laura Battiferra degli Ammannati,’’ in Strong Voices, Weak History: Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France and Italy, edited by Pamela Benson and Victoria Kirkham, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Zaccagnani, Guido, ‘‘Lirici urbinati del secolo XVI,’’ in Le Marche, 3 (1903): 87–114.

THE BAY IS NOT NAPLES See Il Mare non bagna Napoli (Work by Anna Maria Ortese)

CESARE BECCARIA (1738–1794) Cesare Beccaria, a marquis who sought change through a rejection of his own privileged status in the hierarchical social system of Milan, is the author of what is widely considered the most

important work of Italian Enlightenment, Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764). A defining event in Beccaria’s ideological formation was the radical break from his family, which 145

CESARE BECCARIA he suffered in 1760 when he fell in love with Teresa Blasco, a woman of inferior social status. Despite the disapproval of his noble family, the couple married in 1761 and sought financial independence. In the same year, Beccaria made the acquaintance of Pietro and Alessandro Verri, two intellectuals whose support and friendship would have a profound effect on his intellectual development and accomplishments. Beccaria, along with the Verri brothers and other young intellectuals of Milan, formed an informal accademia in the tradition of the French philosophes who gathered around the Encyclope´die. The group became known as the Societa` dei Pugni (1762–1766) because of reputed fistfights among the young participants during heated debates. As a member of the Accademia, Beccaria’s intellectual curiosity was heightened by intense philosophical discussions with its members, and especially with Pietro Verri, who was 10 years his senior and became a mentor figure. Under the tutelage of Verri, Beccaria studied the authors of the French Enlightenment and was especially influenced by Montesquieu—whose Lettres persanes (1721), Beccaria claims, contributed to his philosophical conversion—as well as by Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the help of Verri, he reunited with his family in 1762. At the end of this period of conflict, Teresa gave birth to their first child, Giulia, who would be the mother of Alessandro Manzoni. In recognition of one of his intellectual influences, Beccaria named Giulia after Julie, the heroine of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se (1761). However, the period of conflict greatly influenced the young writer, who later included a chapter on the spirit of the family in Dei delitti e delle pene, in which he criticizes parental tyranny and emphasizes the necessity of destroying familial autocracy before social equality can be achieved. The members of the Societa` dei Pugni published a number of treatises and articles in their years as an official group. Beccaria published his first treatise with the Accademia, Del disordine e de’ rimedi delle monete nello Stato di Milano nell’anno 1762 (On the Disorder and on Remedies Regarding Currency in the State of Milan in the Year 1762, 1762), which opposed the possibility of Milan forming its own currency. In an effort to promulgate the ideas of the Accademia, its members founded the periodical Il Caffe` (1764–1766) under the leadership of Pietro Verri. In the year of the periodical’s foundation Beccaria, aged 25, wrote Dei delitti e delle pene, published in Livorno by the publisher Giuseppe 146

Aubert and released on April 12, 1764. The treatise, divided into 42 short chapters, is a critique of the Italian juridical system. It advocates the abolition of the death penalty and the humanitarian treatment of prisoners, and condemns the use of torture as a means of punishment. Scholars agree that, although neither the subject matter nor the ideology expressed in the book is new, the style of writing set it apart from other juridical works. Instead of employing an expository style in hopes of defining and clarifying what the law is, Beccaria writes a censorial treatise that postulates what the law ought to be. For this reason, the English theorist in the philosophy of law Jeremy Bentham called Beccaria the ‘‘father of censorial jurisprudence.’’ Beccaria begins his treatise with the idea, later made famous by Bentham in Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), which states the importance of ‘‘la massima felicita` divisa nel maggior numero’’ (greatest happiness shared by the greatest number). Strongly influenced by Rousseau’s Le contrat social (1762), Beccaria writes that men are forced ‘‘a cedere parte della propria liberta`: egli e` adunque certo che ciascuno non ne vuol mettere nel pubblico deposito che la minima porzion possibile, quella sola che basti a indurre gli altri a difenderlo. L’aggregato di queste minime porzioni possibili forma il diritto di punire; tutto il di piu´ e` abuso e non giustizia’’ (to give up part of their personal liberty, and it is certain, therefore, that each is willing to place in the public fund only the least possible portion, no more than suffices to induce others to defend it. The aggregate of these least possible portions constitutes the right to punish; all that exceeds this is abuse and not justice, 13). Basing his philosophy upon this premise of maintaining the greatest possible portion of individual liberty, Beccaria seeks to define the purpose, the necessity, and the objectives of punishment for crimes, advocating for swift castigation in its least cruel form to serve as a deterrent to would-be criminals in the greater community. The circumstances surrounding Beccaria’s work—as well as his reaction to the immediate fame he received from its publication—contributed to doubts regarding its authorship. Dei delitti e delle pene was first published anonymously for fear of a potentially negative reaction from the Austrian government in Milan. The book was received well by Austrian rule, however, and was soon printed with Beccaria’s name. Pietro Verri had persuaded the author to write the treatise on crimes and punishments, a subject about which the

CESARE BECCARIA young scholar initially knew little. The idea for the book evolved over the course of time from discussions between the two men as well as other members of the Accademia. However, Beccaria, who suffered from anxiety and a general disinterest in participating in the intellectual atmosphere, was in need of constant prodding and encouragement from Verri and others to finish the project. Once Beccaria had written the brief chapters, Verri edited, reordered, and wrote out the text to be sent to the publisher. Verri sent this revised manuscript to Aubert, the same publisher who had recently published his own Meditazioni sulla felicita` (Meditations on Happiness) in 1763. Verri’s close involvement with the work, as well as a publication of his defense of the work in 1765, created skepticism about Beccaria’s authorship. Both Verri and Beccaria made quite clear their roles in the book’s production, however, and Verri asserted Beccaria’s claim to the work long after the dissolution of their friendship. Dei delitti e delle pene met with enormous success outside of Italy as well. Catherine the Great invited the young author to Russia in 1766 to help her implement the changes for which he advocated, but Beccaria, increasingly uncomfortable with his newfound fame, declined the offer. In the same year, he reluctantly accepted an invitation to Paris from the French intellectuals who had admired his work and success. In his brother’s place, Alessandro Verri accompanied him to France. Upon arrival, however, the young author’s anxious and antisocial behavior failed to impress the French intellectual crowd. Despite Verri’s pleas to Beccaria to stay, he left Paris in autumn of 1766 to return to Milan. The author’s abrupt departure was followed by the demise of his friendship with the Verris and the eventual dissolution of the Accademia. Beccaria failed to write another major work after Dei delitti e delle pene, but the fame he received, as well as the invitation from Catherine the Great, brought him to the attention of the Austrian government. He held various positions for Lombardy’s Austrian rulers for the remainder of his life and contributed to the Hapsburg reforms. In 1768, he was appointed to the newly created chair of ‘‘cameral sciences’’ at the Palatine School in Milan, where he gave his inaugural address in January of 1769. He lectured there for two years before petitioning for an administrative position with the Supreme Economic Council of Lombardy, to which he was elected in 1771. He remained in charge of monetary reforms until 1773, at which time he began supervising matters regarding the food supply. In 1778, Beccaria

became the provincial magistrate of the mint, a position he held until his sudden death on November 28, 1794. Two years before his death, Beccaria authored a proposal to abolish the death penalty and reprised many of the arguments from his famous treatise. The reputation of Beccaria and the reception of the Dei delitti e delle pene have been subject to the vicissitudes of historical perspective. The Catholic Church listed the book on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1766 for its extremely rationalistic approach. In the nascent United States of America, John Adams quoted Beccaria’s recently translated book in his defense of the British soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre of 1770. Nearly 80 years after its publication, in his Storia della Colonna Infame (The Column of Infamy, 1842), Alessandro Manzoni acknowledged the limitations of his grandfather’s work and his views, and proposed that the juridical system was not as unambiguously unjust as Beccaria’s portrayal had suggested. The text, which Beccaria continually edited, reorganized, and appended, underwent at least seven editions within the author’s lifetime. Andre´ Morellet’s fourth edition, a French translation that appeared in December of 1765 at the behest of the French Illuminists, completely reordered the book from Beccaria’s first edition and left only four paragraphs unedited and in their original position. Although Beccaria added a note to the fifth edition claiming that the French ordering was preferable to his own, he oversaw two later editions of the work that retained, for the most part, the original arrangement of material. Since 1958 Beccaria scholars have accepted the fifth edition, the so-called ‘‘Harlem’’ edition, as the standard Italian text.

Biography Born March 15, 1738, in Milan; attended Jesuitrun Collegio Farnesiano in Parma, 1746–1754; entered University of Pavia, 1754; graduated September 13, 1758; married Teresa Blasco, 1761; first daughter, Giulia, born 1762; member of Societa` dei Pugni, 1762–1766; traveled to Paris and returned to Italy three weeks later, autumn 1766; appointed to the newly created chair of ‘‘cameral sciences’’ at the Palatine School of Milan, 1768; elected to the Supreme Economic Council of Lombardy, 1771; placed in charge of monetary reforms, 1771–1773; supervised matters regarding the food supply, 1773; wife Teresa died and he married Anna Barbo` four months later, 1774; son Giulio born, 1775; named provincial magistrate of the 147

CESARE BECCARIA mint, 1778; died suddenly in Milan on November 28, 1794. ERIN M. MCCARTHY Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Sergio Romagnoli, 2 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Cesare Beccaria, edited by Luigi Firpo and Gianni Francioni, 11 vols., Milan: Mediobanca, 1984–2004. On Crimes and Punishments and Other Writings, edited by Richard Bellamy and translated by Richard Davies with Virginia Cox and Richard Bellamy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Treatises Del disordine e de’ rimedi delle monete nello Stato di Milano nell’anno 1762, 1762. Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764; as On Crimes and Punishments, translated by Richard Davies et al., 1995; as Of Crimes and Punishments, translated by Jane Grigson, 1996. Ricerche intorno alla natura dello stile, 1770. Elementi di economia pubblica, 1804.

Further Reading Andrews, Richard, ‘‘The Cunning of Imagery: Rhetoric and Ideology in Cesare Beccaria’s Treatise On Crimes and

Punishments,’’ in Begetting Images: Studies in the Art and Science of Symbol Production, edited by Mary B. Campbell and Mark Rollins, New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Angiani, Bartolo, Il dissotto delle carte: sociabilita`, sentimenti e politica tra i Verri e Beccaria, Milan: F. Angeli, 2004. Biagini, Enza, Introduzione a Beccaria, Rome: Laterza, 1992. Cesare Beccaria tra Milano e l’Europa: convegno di studi per il 250 anniversario della nascita promosso del comune di Milano. Milan: Cariplo; Rome: Laterza, 1990. Corpaci, Francesco, Ideologie e politica in Cesare Beccaria, Milan: Giuffre`, 1965. Dioguardi, Gianfranco, Attualita` dell’illuminismo milanese: Pietro Verri e Cesare Beccaria, Palermo: Sellerio, 1998. Fubini, Mario, ‘‘Beccaria scrittore’’ in Saggi e ricordi, Milan-Naples: R.Ricciardi: 1971. Gaspari, Gianmarco, Letteratura delle riforme: da Beccaria a Manzoni, Palermo: Sellerio, 1990. ———, Cesare Beccaria and the Origins of Penal Reform, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1973. Mereu, Italo, La pena di morte a Milano nel secolo di Beccaria: cinquanta tavole, Vincenza: Neri Pozza, 1988. Monachesi, Elio, ‘‘Cesare Beccaria,’’ in Pioneers in Criminology, edited by Hermann Mannheim, Chicago: Quadrangle, 1960. Villari, Lucio (editor), Illuministi e riformatori, Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello stato, 1995. Wheelock, James T. S., ‘‘The Anonymity of the Milanese ‘Caffe`’ 1764–1766,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 5, no. 4 (1972): 527–544. Zorzi, Renzo, Cesare Beccaria: il dramma della giustizia, Milan: Mondadori, 1966.

FEO BELCARI (1410–1484) Feo Belcari was a renowned poet in Medicean Florence whose strict religious education informed his literary writings. His first work, finished in 1445, Il prato spirituale (The Spiritual Meadow), was a vernacular translation of the Latin lives of the saints by Ambrogio Traversari. In 1449, he compiled a version of the Vita del Beato Giovanni Colombini (Life of the Blessed Giovanni Colombini), which narrates the life of the founder of the fourteenth century Order of the Gesuati. In this prose work, Belcari revived the biographical genre by supplementing previous biographies with data derived from public records. He composed numerous laudi (ca. 120 attributed), which show innovative features when compared with the traditional 148

religious Laud. Modeled on the terza rima of Dante’s Commedia and the rhymed verses of secular songs and madrigals, these laudi praise the virtues of the Holy Virgin and the saints, describe the state of the soul in love with God, and illustrate some articles of faith. Some 40 rhymed compositions are also ascribed to Belcari; mainly sonnets that answer religious queries asked by eminent poets and figures of the time. As a high authority on the Sacred Scriptures, Belcari was frequently consulted on theological and moral matters. The purity of his volgare was acknowledged by the Academicians of the Crusca in their dictionary. Belcari is best known for his sacre rappresentazioni, or religious plays in the vernacular, a dramatic

FEO BELCARI genre that enacted stories from the Old and New Testament, as well as from the hagiographic and devout literature. This new genre was created around the mid-1440s by a group of poets and men of letters, who, under the sponsorship of Archbishop Antonino Pierozzi, endeavored to represent edifying exercises and examples of good life for the boys of the newly formed compagnie di fanciulli (boys companies), who acted in them. The educational effectiveness of this dramatic entertainment, however, was instrumental in extending its influence beyond the circle of the boys companies, merging with other forms of religious spectacles practiced at that time in Medicean Florence. Belcari became one of the important protagonists of this new activity. Among the eight plays attributed to him, two of his most impressive are the Rappresentazione di Abraam e di Isaacsuo figliuolo (The Play of Abraham and Isaac, ca. 1485), first performed in 1449 in the church of Santa Maria Maddalena in Cestelli, and the Rappresentazione della Nunziata (The Play of the Annunciation, ca. 1495), composed between 1448 and 1464. The first one may be considered the prototype of the new genre, as it establishes its essential dramatic features: the use of a hendecasyllabic eightline stanza, stage directions with captions minutely detailed, and the presence of an Annunzio (Announcement) and a Licenza (Valediction) delivered by an angel. The text is structured as follows: The Announcement demands the people’s attention, expounds the subject of the play, disclosing God’s intention that Isaac be sacrificed, and describes the protagonists’ journey toward the place of sacrifice. The play unfolds according to Genesis 22:1–14, and focuses on the theme of the obedience that man owes to God, sons to their fathers, and servants to their masters. A relevant role is given to Sarah, Isaac’s mother, whose pain for her son’s fate represents an allegory of human earthly affections versus Abraham’s obedience to God. In the end, all the actors assemble in a choral lauda, while the Angel delivers a valedictory address in the context of the audience’s familiarity with the Biblical story. The play conforms to fifteenth-century preaching styles, stressing the importance of its moral message. Impressive stage effects disclose Belcari’s command of his craft. This play, dedicated to Giovanni, son of Cosimo de’ Medici, enjoyed a wide circulation in its manuscript and printed versions. The Rappresentazione della Nunziata has a similar structure. After the Announcement, a long procession of prophets and sibyls predicts the coming

of Christ; the next scene takes place in Paradise where, in the Disputa delle Virtu` (Dispute of the Virtues), the Advent of Christ for the deliverance of humankind is decided. Then the Annunciation is presented according to Luke I: 26–38, and the play ends with the valediction delivered by the Angel. The text introduces subtle considerations on the mystery of the Incarnation and attests to the poetical and theological nature of Belcari’s theatre. A performance of the Nunziata, probably in 1471, to honor Galeazzo Sforza, duke of Milan, confirmed Belcari’s place among the Florentine literary elite.

Biography Born in Florence, 4 February 1410. His father, Feo di Coppo, belonged to a family of Florentine upper middle class. Nothing is known about his studies, but he surely had a serious religious education, which is reflected by his works. He married around 1435; had seven children; worked for several years as a copyist and financial manager of the church of San Lorenzo al Monte. A Medici supporter, held several public offices, among them Priore (Prior) in 1454; and Gonfaloniere delle Compagnie del Popolo (Standard-bearer of the People Companies) in 1468. Died in Florence, 16 August 1484; was buried in the church of Santa Croce. PAOLA VENTRONE See also: Sacra Rappresentazione Selected Works Collections Le Rappresentazioni di Feo Belcari ed altre di lui poesie edite ed inedite, edited by Gustavo Galletti, Florence: Moutier, 1833. Prose di Feo Belcari edite ed inedite sopra autografi e testi a penna, edited by Ottavo Gigli, Rome: Salviucci, 1843–1844. Sacre Rappresentazioni e Laude di Feo Belcari, edited by Onorato Allocco Castellino, Turin: UTET, 1926. Lirici toscani del Quattrocento, edited by Antonio Lanza, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973 (41 sonnets and rhymes). Newbigin, Nerida, Feste d’Oltrarno: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth-century Florence, Florence: Olschki, 1996 (Nunziata Ascensione and Pentecoste, published from ancient manuscripts).

Plays Rappresentazione di Abraam e Isaac, ca.1485. Rappresentazione di San Pafnunzio, ca. 1490. Rappresentazione di San Giovanni Battista nel deserto (written with Tommaso Benci), ca. 1490. Rappresentazione del dı` del Giudizio (written with Antonio di Matteo di Meglio Araldo), ca. 1495.

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FEO BELCARI Rappresentazione Rappresentazione Rappresentazione Rappresentazione

della Nunziata, ca. 1495. dell’Ascensione, 1833. della Pentecoste, 1833. di San Giorgio, 1833.

Poetry ‘‘Laude fatte e composte per piu` persone spirituale,’’ 1486.

Other Lettere di Feo Belcari, edited by Domenico Moreni, 1843. Il prato spirituale, edited by Ottavio Gigli, 1844. Giovanni Colombini, 1874. Vita del Beato Giovanni Colombini, ca. 1477; edited by Rodolfo Chiarini, 1914; as The Life of Beato.

Further Reading Cremonini, Stefano, ‘‘Sui sonetti di Feo Belcari: Intertestualita` di una ‘poetica theologia,’’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 68 (2004): 5–36. Eisenbichler, Konrad, ‘‘Per un nuovo approccio all’’Abramo et Isac’ di Feo Belcari,’’ in Cultura e potere nel Rinascimento, Atti del IX Convegno Internazionale, edited by Luisa Secchi Tarugi, Florence: Cesati, 1999. Figliuolo, Bruno, ‘‘Tre lettere inedite di Feo Belcari a Ottone Niccolini,’’ Lettere italiane, 52 (2000): 265–271. Guccini, Gerardo, ‘‘Retoriche e societa` nell’Abramo e Isacco di Feo Belcari,’’ Biblioteca teatrale, 19 (1977): 95–117.

Guccini, Gerardo, ‘‘Domande sulla sacra rappresentazione e su Feo Belcari,’’ Quaderni di teatro, 15 (1982): 127–35. Guidi, Remo L., ‘‘Influenza delle tradizioni religiose e agiografiche nella Vita del B. Giovanni Colombini di Feo Belcari,’’ Rivista di storia e letteratura religiosa, 5 (1969): 391–412. Martelli, Mario, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento: Il filtro degli anni Sessanta, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Newbigin, Nerida, ‘‘Il testo e il contesto dell’Abramo e Isac di Feo Belcari,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 23 (1981): 13–37. Newbigin, Nerida, ‘‘Between Prophecy and Redemption: The ‘‘Disputa delle Virtu`’’ and Florentine Plays of the Annunciations,’’ in Atti del IV Colloquio della Socie´te´ Internationale pour l’E´tude du The´aˆtre Me´die´val, edited by Miryam Chiabo` and Federico Doglio, Viterbo: Union Printing, 1984. Ventrone, Paola, ‘‘Per una morfologia della sacra rappresentazione fiorentina,’’ in Teatro e culture della rappresentazione: Lo spettacolo in Italia nel Quattrocento, edited by Raimondo Guarino, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988. Ventrone, Paola, ‘‘La Rappresentazione di Abraam e Isaac di Feo Belcari,’’ in Ingresso a teatro: Guida all’analisi della drammaturgia, edited by Annamaria Cascetta and Laura Peja, Florence: Le Lettere, 2003.

CRISTINA DI BELGIOIOSO (ALBERICA TRIVULZIO) (1808–1871) Milanese writer and journalist, best known as a heroine of the Italian wars of independence, a patriot, a cosmopolitan, a free spirit, Cristina Trivulzio di Belgioioso has been called the ‘‘Revolutionary Princess’’ and the ‘‘Romantic Princess.’’ While biographers have produced numerous studies on her controversial and intense life, few analyses of her vast literary production have been published. She revealed her anticonformist and independent spirit at the age of 20 when she separated from her libertine husband, Prince Emilio Barbiano di Belgioioso, and began what she would later define a ‘‘nomadic’’ life. Traveling to Genoa, Rome, and Florence in the years 1828 through 1830, she came into contact with liberal and revolutionary groups fighting for Italian independence. By this time her political views had already been influenced by her friend and art teacher, Ernesta Bisi, who was 150

affiliated with the secret society Carboneria, and by her stepfather, the Marquis Alessandro Visconte d’Aragona, who was a member of the liberal Il conciliatore group. When her political activities eventually made her a target for Austrian prosecution, she fled to France. In the 1830s her Paris salon became a meeting point for Italian expatriates and politicians (Vincenzo Gioberti, Nicolo` Tommaseo, Camillo Cavour) and for European intellectuals and artists such as Alexis de Tocqueville, Honore` de Balzac, Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, and Franz Liszt. She also encountered historians Augustin Thierry and Franc¸ois Mignet, who would play an influential role in her life. The 1840s were a decade of intense political and intellectual activity for Belgioioso. Having returned to Italy after a short stay in England, she published the Essai sur la formation du dogme catholique

CRISTINA DI BELGIOIOSO (Essay on the Formation of Catholic Dogma, 1842), a history of Christianity from its origin to modern times, emphasizing the importance of free will in the church’s doctrine of salvation. It was followed in 1844 by her translation of Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nova into French, with a critical introduction maintaining history’s inevitable progress toward the abolition of social injustice. Back in Paris, she directed and contributed to several reviews, among them, La gazzetta italiana (1845), La rivista italiana (1846), and Ausonio (1846–1848). These activities attracted some criticism even among liberal thinkers, as evidenced by Terenzo Mamiani’s refusal to be a codirector of La gazzetta italiana, because he disapproved of a woman directing a political journal. When in 1848 the Milanese patriots revolted to overthrow the Austrian regime, Belgioioso went to the aid of the insurgents with a battalion of volunteers, which she financed and equipped. When this most celebrated revolution ended in total defeat, Belgioioso was forced to flee to Paris again. Between 15 September 1848 and 15 January 1849, she published a series of articles in the renowned Revue des Deux Mondes under the general title ‘‘L’Italie e la re´volution italienne de 1848’’ (Italy and the Italian Revolution of 1848). They address the siege and capitulation of Milan, Venice’s insurrection, and the war in the Italian Tyrol. In 1949, after assisting Giuseppe Mazzini’s illfated Roman Republic as a hospital director, she fled Italy in order to avoid political persecution. The last days of the Roman Republic and her journey to Malta, Constantinople, and Asia Minor are recounted in a series of articles published in the French magazine Le National as ‘‘Souvenirs dans l’exil’’ (Memories in Exile, 1850). Her experience in the Orient is central to her next two works: Asie Mineure et Syrie (Asia Minor and Syria, 1858), an account of her 11-month journey from Turkey to Jerusalem, and the Re´cits turques (Turkish Short Stories, 1856–1858). Not only did Belgioioso’s orientalist works break with the traditional erotic perception of the Orient, they also implicitly challenged western patriarchal values: the harem becomes the symbol of women’s marginality and exclusion. Belgioioso shows that, deprived of education as a means to emancipation, women came to accept the very system that enslaved them. She further explained in ‘‘Della condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire’’ (Of Women’s Condition and of Their Future, 1866) that women needed to coin new roles for themselves

through learning experiences before reforms could be implemented. Cristina di Belgioioso spent her last years in semiretirement, residing between Milan and Lake Como, and continuing to comment on political issues. Her last works, Osservazioni sullo stato dell’Italia e del suo avvenire (Observations on Italy and its Future, 1868) and Sulla moderna politica internazionale (About Modern International Politics, 1869), discuss the socio-political problems facing the recently unified Italian nation.

Biography Born in Milan on 28 June 1808; lost her father and inherited a great fortune, 1812; married Prince Emilio Belgioioso, 1824; left her husband and traveled to Genoa, Rome, Florence, 1828; escaped to Paris, where she opened famed salon, 1830; her daughter Marie was born, 1838; returned to Italy, 1840; inspired by Franc¸ois Charles Marie Fourier and Claude Henri Saint-Simon, modernized the Trivulzio properties, opened nurseries and schools in 1840s; returned to Paris, reorganized opposition to Austria, reopened her salon to Italian exiles, 1848; aided Mazzini’s Roman Republic, 1849; escaped with daughter to Asia Minor and bought land in a remote area, Ciaq-Maq-Oglou, 1850; traveled from Turkey to Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, 1852; stabbed by a servant, 1854; returned to Italy and lived in Milan and on Lake Como with her daughter and son-in-law Marquis Ludovico Trotti, 1855; died in Milan on 5 July 1871. PAOLA GIULI Selected Works Essays Essai sur la formation du dogme catholique, 1842. Etude sur l’historie de la Lombardie dans les Trente dernie`res anne´es, ou les causes du de´faut d’energie chez les Lombards, 1846. ‘‘L’Italie et la re´volution italienne de 1848,’’ Revue des Deux Mondes, 15 September 1848–15 January 1849. Premieres notions d’histoire a` l’usage de l’enfance, 1850. Histoire de la maison de Savoie, 1860. ‘‘Della condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire,’’ Nuova Antologia, November 1866. Osservazioni sullo stato dell’Italia e del suo avvenire, 1868. Sulla moderna politica internazionale, 1869.

Travel Writing ‘‘Souvenirs dans l’exil,’’ Le National, 15 September–12 October 1850; as Souvenirs dans l’exil, 1946. Re´cits turques, 1856–1858.

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CRISTINA DI BELGIOIOSO Asie Mineure et Syrie, 1858; as Oriental Harems and Scenery, translated by George Carlton, 1862. Sce`nes de la vie turque, 1858.

Fiction Emina, 1856.

Translations La Science Nouvelle par Vico, 1844.

Further Readings Barbiera, Raffaello, La Principessa Belgiojoso, Milan: Treves, 1902.

Brombert, Beth Archer, Cristina: Portraits of a Princess, New York: Knopf, 1977. Gattey, Charles Neilson, A Bird of Curious Plumage: Princess Cristina di Belgiojoso, 1808–1871, London: Constable, 1971. Guicciardi, Emilio, Cristina di Belgiojoso Trivulzio cento anni dopo, Milan: La Martinella, 1973. Incisa, Ludovico and Alberica Trivulzio, Cristina di Belgioioso, Milan: Rusconi, 1984. Malvezzi, Aldobrandino, La Principessa Cristina di Belgiojoso, 3 vols., Milan: Treves, 1936–1937. Severgnini, Luigi, La Principessa di Belgioioso. Vita e opere, Milan: Edizioni Virgilio, 1972. Whitehouse, H. Remsen, A Revolutionary Princess, Christina Belgiojoso Trivulzio. Her life and Times, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1906.

DARIO BELLEZZA (1944–1996) What in the 1960s was called ‘‘new poetry’’ had in the poet and novelist Dario Bellezza its prophet. Bellezza enters the Roman intellectual world in the mid-1960s when, thanks to literary critic and writer Enzo Siciliano, he becomes increasingly close to Sandro Penna, Aldo Palazzeschi, Attilio Bertolucci, Alberto Moravia, and Elsa Morante. Morante eventually becomes a confidant. The decade from 1950–1960 was a period in which the working class, the PCI (Italian Communist Party), the trade unions, and all their hopes for radical cultural change were dramatically defeated. The political and economic growth of the Christian Democrat middle class and the new, changed free masonries prevailed. Bellezza thus lived in a political-cultural era convulsed by the ideological confrontations of the 1960s and the subversive ideological line of the aggressive neoavant-garde that struggled against conventional linguistic codes. Nevertheless, he managed to carve out his own poetic space, one untouched by cultural strategies or projects of linguistic experimentalism. When Invettive e licenze (Invectives and Licenses) appeared in 1971, it was hailed by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his introduction: ‘‘Here is the best poet of the new generation.’’ Invettive e licenze, notable for its technical rigor, depicts people overwhelmed by bitterness, shame, feelings of guilt, alienation, scandal, and sexual perversions. The poems also express a constant, thinly veiled desire for death. Bellezza was a 152

bourgeois, as were many other intellectuals, but differed from them, according to Pasolini, in being ‘‘the first poet bourgeois to judge himself.’’ Pasolini had a profound affection for Bellezza’s work and his artistic experience. The young poet reciprocated this feeling, and also was deeply grateful to Elsa Morante for what he called his poetic apprenticeship. In 1981, enraged by the publication of the ‘‘obscene’’ photographs of the dead Pasolini, ‘‘in tutta la loro gelida, disarmante crudezza... nudo, esposto, con tutte le macabre ferite esibite del suo ‘sacro’ martirio’’ (in their icy, disarming rawness... naked, exposed, with all the grisly wounds exhibited of his ‘sacred’ martyrdom), Bellezza wrote the biographical essay Morte di Pasolini (Death of Pasolini). The essay afforded him the chance not only to speak of Pasolini’s violent death in November 1975, but to try to understand if his death had been an act of blind fate or a predictable ending of Pasolini’s complex and ambiguous personality. Bellezza’s reaction to his own historical situation differed from his colleagues of the neoavant-garde, who tried to discover any irrational fanciful escape from their social condition. He pessimistically accepted reality and began looking to psychoanalysis, an interest that will also become a vehicle of provocation. In 1983, he published io (me), the lack of capital letters intentional. In this work Bellezza lightly but

DARIO BELLEZZA concretely describes his everyday life and the mediocre desperation of his loves in ample detail. The poet associates life with insomnia, a curse that constantly pursues him: ‘‘mi imprigioni, o insomnia’’ (you imprison me, o insomnia). He suffers from insomnia because, as a highly educated bourgeois and homosexual bigot, he feels tortured by a feeling of guilt and driven by the many contradictions that struggle against each other. Such contradictions are the quintessence of his existence: ‘‘l’insomnia viene solo ai bugiardi, / a chi disobbedisce’’ (insomnia comes only to liars, / to those who disobey). In his guilt-ridden insomniac persona he anticipated the poetry that would be too often adopted in the 1980s, that of the artist-outcast. Bellezza is consumed by anguish and by the relics of (a now mocking) sense of hope: ‘‘E se l’orecchio poso al rumore solo / delle scale battute dal rimorso / sento la tua discesa corrosa/dalla speranza’’ (And if the ear I place to the noise only / of staircases beaten by remorse / I hear your descent corroded / by hope). He is reduced to corrosive accounts of his own social condition: ‘‘Io / dimenticato relitto di una civilta` / passata sono il solo che piango i defunti / miraggi di un’eta` morta’’ (I / forgotten wreckage of a civilization / from the past I am the only one crying the dead / mirages of an age gone); and again: ‘‘Sciagurato solo di me so parlare’’ (Alone wretch am I, I know how to speak only of me). Dario Bellezza’s obsessive use of the first person was a conscious literary choice connected to his need to describe a single self corroded by loneliness and isolation. This obsessive monotone is the underlying theme to all of his poetic works until Proclama sul fascino (A Proclamation on Charm, 1996). This work amplifies Bellezza’s sense of his degenerative unhealthy loneliness and renders this loneliness exaggerated, tragic, cathartic.

1994. Died of AIDS in Rome on March 31, 1996. That year a poetry prize was established in his name. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Collections Poesie 1971–1996, edited by Elio Pecora, Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Invettive e licenze,’’ 1971. ‘‘Morte segreta,’’ 1976. ‘‘Libro d’amore,’’ 1982. ‘‘Colosseo,’’ 1982. ‘‘Io,’’ 1983. ‘‘Piccolo canzoniere,’’ 1986. ‘‘Undici erotiche,’’ 1986. ‘‘Serpenta,’’ 1987. ‘‘Libro di poesia,’’ 1990. ‘‘Gatti e altro,’’ 1993. ‘‘L’avversario,’’ 1994. ‘‘Proclama sul fascino,’’ 1996.

Novels L’innocenza, 1970; new edition as Storia di Nino De Donato, 1983. Lettere da Sodoma, 1972. Il carnefice, 1973. Angelo, 1979. Turbamento, 1984. L’amore felice, 1986. Nozze col diavolo, 1995.

Plays Testamento di sangue, 1982. Apologia di teatro, 1985. Salome`, 1991. Morte funesta, 1993. Ordalia della croce, 1994.

Other Morte di Pasolini, 1981.

Further Reading

Biography Dario Bellezza was born in Rome on 5 September 1944. He worked for several Italian literary and poetry magazines: Paragone, Carte segrete, Bimestre, Periferia, Il Policordo. From the early 1960s on, Bellezza collaborated with the magazine Nuovi argomenti, becoming associate director shortly before his death. Bellezza won the Viareggio prize in 1976 for Morte segreta, the Gatto prize in 1991 for Invettive e licenze, the Montale prize in 1994 for L’avversario, and for the play Ordalia della croce he received the Fondi la Pastora prize in

Battisti, Silvia, and Mariella Bettarini, Chi e` il poeta?, Milan: Gammalibri, 1980. Cordelli, Francesco, Il poeta postumo, Cosenza: Lerici, 1978. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi, Poeti italiani del secondo novecento 1945–1995, Milan: Mondatori, 1996. Della Bella, Marina, Sacro e diverso: Percorsi genettiani nell’opera di Dario Bellezza, Ancona: Il Lavoro Editoriale, 1990. Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Metrica: Tra norma e infrazione’’ in Letteratura italiana del novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Gregoriani, Maurizio, Morte di Bellezza: Storia di una verita` nascosta, Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Introduction to Invettive e Licenze, Milan: Garzanti, 1971.

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DARIO BELLEZZA Pautasso, Sergio, Gli anni ottanta e la letteratura: Guida all’attivita` letteraria in Italia dal 1980 al 1990, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Reina, Luigi, Scenario novecento, Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1993.

Salerno, Rocco, Utopia della speranza nella poesia di Dario Bellezza, Rome: Edizione del Giano, 1994. Spagnoletti, Giovanni, Storia della letteratura italiana del novecento, Rome: Newton Compton, 1994.

GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO BELLI (1791–1863) Belli is one of the most complex and contradictory figures of Italian literature. A Catholic zealot and a faithful subject of the pontifical state, with a tentative openness to moderate liberalism, he participated in the rituals of an extremely backward culture that was devoted to the antiquarian, to idle and sterile erudition, and to the performances of the dying Arcadia. For the academies—in particular for the Accademia Tiberina, which he founded along with other writers in 1813—he produced an enormous number of poems in Italian, only a small fraction of which is collected in two volumes of Versi (Verses, 1839) and Versi inediti (Unpublished Verses, 1843). They are unoriginal compositions in which the expert rhymer tries his hand at the burlesque genre, at the opposing genre of ‘‘vision’’ in the manner of Vincenzo Monti, and at the sepulchral lyricism that came into fashion at the end of the eighteenth century. La proverbiade (A Poem of Proverbs, ca. 1813–1815) possesses a certain interest. It is a series of 37 sonnets, each one of which playfully exemplifies a proverb, supporting a gnomic vein that draws its stylistic inspiration from the fourteenth-century Franco Sacchetti. The Canzoniere amoroso (Amorous Verses, ca. 1822–1825), to the marchesa Vincenza Roberti, is a late product of Arcadian Petrarchism. There remain two theatrical experiments, which show some degree of vivacity and an innate taste for scenic representation: the farce Il tutor pittore (The Painting Tutor, 1816), and the cicalata (burlesque chatter) in the form of a monologue, Il ciarlatano (The Charlatan), written and performed for the carnival of 1828. This is the official Belli, who serves as a screen for the ‘‘other Belli,’’ the one who in secret wrote the 2,279 Sonetti (Sonnets) in the Roman dialect, the most disturbing and transgressive work of 154

the Italian nineteenth century. Their composition was concentrated, for the most part, in two relatively brief phases: the creative fury of the years 1830–1837 and the later, slower resumption in the years 1843–1849. Like their composition, their circulation was also clandestine: the poet recited some of them, with extraordinary bravura, to his close friends, who transcribed them and transmitted them by word of mouth. Only one sonnet, ‘‘Er padre e la fija’’ (Father and Daughter), dedicated to the dramatic art of his friend the actress Amalia Bettini, was published in a theatrical journal with the author’s consent; another 22 sonnets were printed against his will. The work, therefore, remained subterranean, both because censorship would not allow publication and because Belli himself considered it a great blasphemy. In approaching Belli’s masterpiece (the sonnets), the first misconception to be dispelled is the comparison with the published works and Roman watercolors of Bartolomeno Pinelli and JeanBaptiste Thomas (if anything, the appropriate comparison is with Goya’s Caprichos and Proverbios). The part of the Sonetti that makes Belli great has nothing in common with the folkloristic model of so much popular and dialectal literature. In the ‘‘Introduzione’’ (Prologue) to the Sonetti, in fact, he speaks of ‘‘a monument to what the people of Rome are today,’’ hence of a unified creation, made up of distinti quadretti (distinct pictures) tied together by un filo occulto (a hidden thread) that must be identified with the continuous, implacable laying bare of the natural state of the lowest and most powerful of the plebe di Roma (plebeians) in the entire inexhaustible range of their doleful and diverse expressions. Each sonnet, though it can be read autonomously, conceals amidst its folds a

GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO BELLI characteristic—a situation, a thematic element, an image—that will resurface in other sonnets that are chronologically near or distant, on different planes of representation. That characteristic, however, belongs to the power of unmasking that is precisely of the plebeian instinct and that acts obliquely to connect the countless pictures that, while remaining distinct, tend to combine and form a potential poetic construction with imprecise boundaries. The sonnet form—which is the closed form par excellence, replicated and practiced by Belli—becomes therefore a living cell in relation to other countless cells, within a grandiose and incomplete organism. We can find evidence of this subterranean stream, the ‘‘hidden thread,’’ in the poet’s linguistic laboratory, that is, in the hundreds of ‘‘notes for Roman poems’’ that he disseminated in notebooks of every kind and made on the corners of letters, on the blank margins of printed invitations, on the sides of shopping lists, amidst the lines of any memo: We are dealing with thoughts, phrases, fragments of dialogue, sayings, witticisms, insults, and malapropisms that Belli collected from the living voice of the people and around which he constructed the schemes, outlines, and rhymes of sonnets. Yet it must be emphasized that frequently a thread ties annotation to annotation, and that from the very same nucleus there arise hints for various sonnets, even those composed at a distance of years from one another, through a game of unexpected refractions, associations, and analogies. Belli chose the life of the people as the subject of his work because in a society like that of the pontifical state, without cultural outlets and oppressed by violence, corruption, and hypocrisy, the common people appeared to him, precisely because of their marginalization, to be the sole depository of truth (a truth he defines as ‘‘naked’’ and ‘‘shameless’’). But the descent into the obscure recesses of the people, though liberating, is never playful or purifying because Belli’s primitive does not possess the characteristics of the ‘‘noble savage’’ of Rousseau, whom the poet read, along with Voltaire and the Italian, French, English, and German Romantics: His Zibaldone (Miscellany), begun in 1824 and almost entirely unpublished, attests to this reading. Nor does this common man bear any resemblance to the Milanese character of Carlo Porta (an admired and imitated model in the first sonnets), with whom he has in common the protest against injustice and oppression, but not the ruling class that is its target: The Milanese are reactionary, but are nevertheless thrown into crisis by the democratic pressures of the new bourgeoisie; the Romans are

clerical, and blinded in a kind of atemporal and theological immunity. The Bellian primitive is a figure condemned to the life of the senses, of outward instincts, which Belli the ‘‘upright citizen’’ cannot easily absolve. Hence the double process of attraction and repulsion that the murky universe of plebeian demonstrations engenders in the poet’s soul, resolving itself artistically into the form of comedy, the form most adapted to mix and objectify the incurable antinomies and ambiguities of a poetic and existential adventure that does not recognize cathartic approaches. It is ‘‘comedy’’ in the theatrical and ancient sense of the term as well because Belli constantly uses an actor-speaker who claims sole responsibility for what is argued and narrated in the Sonetti, both when a monologue takes a ‘‘self-reflexive’’ direction (it speaks of itself, answers or poses questions to a silent interlocutor), and when it incorporates and mimes in its own discourse thoughts, acts, and dialogues of other characters absent from the scene, multiplying an array of voices that will, however, be reunited in the focal point of the narrating voice, within which even the voice of the author—and we never know with what degree of agreement or dissent—may be dissimulated. The descent into the ‘‘commoner’’ character necessarily entails the total adoption of its speech, and even this operation is for Belli anything but painless. First of all, it implies the devaluing of the longlived literary practice of the Roman academy, the rejection of illustrious ‘‘speeches,’’ which the poet himself judges to be ‘‘rotten through seven centuries of life.’’ The choice of the Roman dialect, on the other hand, is quite different from the choice of the Milanese, Venetian, or Neapolitan dialect, languages common to all the strata of their respective societies, and hence able to express every kind of content, both ingenuous and learned. For a host of historical reasons, the Roman dialect of the nineteenth century is an exclusively subaltern idiom that is used only by the lower classes: to choose it therefore means transporting oneself wholly into the mental and cultural structures of the crowd of people that is—according to its very etymology, on which the poet dwells briefly in Zibaldone—disordered, unstable, and incoherent. Belli, like no other Italian realist writer, carries out the arduous imitation by succeeding in conjuring an entire reality and humanity, as various and contradictory as ever, only through the logical categories of the lower classes. Which reality? The anachronistic reality of a theocratic state in the middle of the nineteenth 155

GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO BELLI century is a pyramid at the top of which sits the Pope, the vice-God, the despot deaf to the voice of his subjects (‘‘Er Papa’’; The Pope), and which for centuries has remained the same because it only changes its appearance, not its spirit, which migrates from one papal body to another (‘‘Er passa-mano’’; The Human Chain). Under the Pope are the cardinals, the corrupt and powerful prelates. At the base are the people, resigned or rebellious, who in order to forget and to forget themselves take refuge in a religion of grimaces or stupefy themselves with the elementary pleasures of eating, drinking, and sex, who become excited by bragging and bloody quarrels (‘‘Chi cerca trova’’; Whoever seeks shall find), who boast of being the heirs of a pagan and warlike race, carrying the rosary beads in their pockets along with the knife (‘‘L’educcazione’’; The Upbringing). And part of the displays of boastfulness is the provocative and impudent celebration of the matchless splendors of the city (‘‘Piazza Navona’’). Belli does not deny an echo, a memory of ancient Roman greatness, to this crude and impetuous boasting. There is a spark of wretched and painful magnanimity in the bloodthirsty bully, as in the hyperbolic figure of the prostitute (‘‘Santaccia de Piazza Montanara’’; Saint Strumpet of Piazza Montanara), who multiplies the simultaneity of her services until it becomes visually grotesque, not only out of greed, but also to perform an act of mockery toward a poor, penniless man. Particularized in an infinity of characters and situations, this is Belli’s ‘‘Roman comedy,’’ which expands beyond the confines of the city to encompass the destiny of all men, and of God himself, who is responsible for this destiny. The Bellian god is the tyrant who, when he created the world, remained in ambush in order to catch Adam and Eve red-handed and to thunder sinisterly the eternal punishment of future generations (‘‘La creazzione der monno’’; The Creation of the World); he is the Christ who, on the cross, sheds his blood for the powerful, and for the poor the serum, thus sanctioning the splitting of humanity in two (‘‘Li du’ggener’umani’’; The Two Kinds of Humans). The terrible, face-to-face confrontation of the disinherited with divinity is a theme that spans the entire Bellian monumental oeuvre. For long stretches, nevertheless, the dramatic tension slackens and new spaces are therefore opened within the endless poem: the pure entertainment of the commediole (little comedies), of the bickerings, and of the neighbors’ quarrels (‘‘Le chiamate dell’appigionante’’; 156

The Neighbor’s Calls); the scrupulously mimetic exercises of languages altered by social affectation (‘‘Er parla` ciovı´le de piu`’’; The Kindest Way of Speaking), maternal simpering (‘‘Le smammate’’; Mothers’ Mawkishness), or pathological defect (‘‘Er tratajjone arrabbiato’’; The Angry Stammer); the rare concessions to lyric abandon (‘‘Er tempo bbono’’; Nice Weather), to the elegiac meditation (‘‘La bbona famijja’’; The Good Family), or to controlled pathos (‘‘La famijja poverella’’; The Poor Family). These are moments of respite that vary and enrich, but do not threaten or destroy, the heroless epic of the Sonetti. Laden with a subversive and destructive energy and dominated by a gloomy fatalism that concedes nothing to nineteenth-century progressivism, Belli’s work has long been misunderstood. Even in his times, however, there was significant recognition from Nikolaj Gogol, who, having heard the poet himself perform some sonnets in the Roman salon of the princess Zinaida Volkonskij, spoke of Belli with enthusiasm to his friend Charles Augustin de Sainte-Beuve, who, in his turn, recorded his detailed impressions in a page from Premiers Lundis (First Mondays, 1845) and in other of his writings. Italian criticism—first Carduccian and then Crocian—has long privileged Carlo Porta, Cesare Pascarella, and Salvatore Di Giacomo, while Belli had to wait until the 1940s and 1950s to obtain the position that he deserves among the great writers of the nineteenth century: He left a profound mark on Alberto Moravia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Carlo Emilio Gadda; and it was a poet of the generation between La voce and La ronda, Giorgio Vigolo, who edited the first complete and annotated edition of the Sonetti. Of the foreign writers fascinated by Belli mention should be made of the German Nobel-prize winner Paul von Heyse, Rafael Alberti, William Carlos Williams, and Anthony Burgess, the author of a novel, Abba abba (1977), which has Belli and John Keats for its protagonists.

Biography Born in Rome on 7 September 1791 to the accountant Gaudenzio and Luigia Mazio. Completed his studies at the Collegio Romano and lost both parents, and found modest private and public employment. In 1812 entered the Accademia degli Elleni; one year later, along with friends, he founded the Accademia Tiberina. In 1816 married Maria Conti, a rich widow with whom he had one son, Ciro; in

GIUSEPPE GIOACHINO BELLI 1822 he met the marchesa Vincenza Roberti, for whom he nurtured a passion that was eventually transformed into friendship. Some travels (especially those to Milan between 1827 and 1829) put him in contact with liberal and Romantic circles. In 1830 he began, within his residence in Piazza Poli, a ‘‘Reading Society’’ on the model of Gabinetto Vieusseux, which he attended in Florence. From 1834 to 1836 he contributed to Lo spigolatore, especially with reviews of theatrical shows. After the death of his wife in 1837 he was afflicted by economic troubles. The bloody events of Mazzini’s republic of 1849 upset him and pushed him into the camp of the most intransigent reactionaries. Assailed by religious scruples, he burned the pages containing the Roman Sonetti; however, he had entrusted drafts and calligraphic copies of them to his friend the monsignor Vincenzo Tizzani, with instructions to destroy them after his death (Tizzani in fact consigned them to Belli’s son, Ciro). Died in Rome of apoplexy, 22 December 1863. LUCIO FELICI Selected Works Sonnets in Dialect ‘‘I sonetti romaneschi di Giuseppe Gioachino Belli,’’ edited by Luigi Morandi, 6 vols., 1886–1889. ‘‘I sonetti,’’ first completed edition based on the authographs, edited by Giorgio Vigolo, 3 vols., 1952. ‘‘Poesie romanesche,’’ critical edition by Roberto Vighi, 10 vols., 1988–1993; translation of nine sonnets by Frances Eleanor Trollope, in ‘‘The Homes and Haunts of the Italian Poets,’’ Belgravia (July-October 1880): 60–72; as The Roman Sonnets of G. G. Belli, 46 sonnets in New York slang translated by Harold Norse, preface by William Carlos Williams, introduction by Alberto Moravia, Highlands: Williams, 1960; as The Sonnets of Giuseppe Belli, translated by Miller Williams, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1981; 71 sonnets translated in Anthony Burgess, Abba abba, London: Faber & Faber, 1977.

Poems in Italian ‘‘Versi,’’ 1839. ‘‘Versi inediti,’’ 1843. ‘‘Belli italiano,’’ edited by Roberto Vighi, 3 vols.

Prose Le lettere, edited by Giacinto Spagnoletti, 2 vols., 1961. Lettere Giornali Zibaldone, edited by Giovanni Orioli, preface by Carlo Muscetta, 1962. Lettere a Cencia (Vincenza Perozzi Roberti), edited by Muzio Mazzocchi Alemanni, 2 vols., 1974.

Further Reading Abeni, Damiano et alia, Belli oltre frontiera: La fortuna di G. G. Belli nei saggi e nelle versioni di autori stranieri, Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Almansi, Guido, Barbara Garvin, and Bruce Merry, Tre sondaggi sul Belli, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. De Michelis, Eurialo, Approcci al Belli, Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1969. Fasano, Pino, I tarli dell’alberone: Saggi belliani, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘Arte del Belli,’’ in I viaggi la morte, Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Gibellini, Pietro, Il coltello e la corona: La poesia del Belli tra filologia e critica, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Gibellini, Pietro, I panni in Tevere: Belli romano e altri romaneschi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1989. Janni, Guglielmo, Belli e la sua epoca, 3 vols., Milan: Cino Del Duca, 1967. Letture belliane, 10 vols., Rome: Istituto di Studi RomaniBulzoni, 1981–1990. Merolla, Riccardo, Il laboratorio del Belli, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Merolla, Riccardo (editor), Belli romano, italiano ed europeo, Atti del II Convegno Internazionale di Studi Belliani (Rome, 12–15 November 1984), Rome: Bonacci, 1985. Muscetta, Carlo, Cultura e poesia di G. G. Belli, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961; Rome: Bonacci, 1981. Samona`, Giuseppe Paolo, G.G. Belli: La commedia romana e la commedia celeste, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Studi belliani, Atti del primo Convegno (Rome, 16–18 December 1963), Rome: Colombo, 1965. Teodonio, Marcello, Introduzione a Belli, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1992. Teodonio, Marcello, Vita di Belli, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993. Vigolo, Giorgio, Il genio del Belli, 2 vols., Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963.

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MARCO BELLOCCHIO

MARCO BELLOCCHIO (1939–) Marco Bellocchio is a politically committed filmmaker who combines a Bun˜uelian scorn for bourgeois ritual with a documentary filmmaker’s attraction to monolithic institutions and belief systems. He attacks all institutions—the army, the socialist politics, Jesuit education, and the Vatican—but rails most fiercely against the falsity and hypocrisy of family life. He wants not only to challenge traditional mores, but to promote a personality independent of the family and its values. These aims can be traced to his first feature film, I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket, 1965), hailed as the most important film debut of the decade. Inspired by the British ‘‘Free Cinema’’ (particularly Lindsay Anderson, Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz) and the French nouvelle vague, it marked a break with neorealistic tradition and commedia all’italiana. The film is a dark and violent meditation on the new generation’s moral crisis. The story involves a provincial middle-class family, of which three out of four children are mentally and physically ill. The two adolescent protagonists, who suffer from epilepsy, rebel against their repressed and repressive situation. Eventually Sandro, the second born, decides to eliminate his epileptic siblings. Having confessed his crimes to his sister Giulia, he dies of an epileptic fit. The centre-right Christian Democrat Party was so incensed by the film that it wanted it banned as an offence against the Italian family—a charge of some irony because the director made the movie with money borrowed from his relatives and shot it in Bobbio, not far from where he grew up. The film immediately established Bellocchio as a major new talent in the Italian cinema. Bellocchio returned to his favourite subject matter in his second feature, La Cina e` vicina (China Is Near, 1967), a political farce that he regards as a didactic film on how one should not live. The plot once again centers on a disintegrating family. Vittorio, the older brother, is a Socialist Party candidate; Camillo, the younger brother, is a Maoist who directs his revolutionary actions against Vittorio (who represents the Italian political compromise); their sister Elena dominates both. The following year Bellocchio joined the Marxist-Leninist group Servire il popolo and renounced fictional films for politically militant cinema. He became involved in 158

the co-operative production of propaganda shorts and seemed lost to mainstream cinema. This is symptomatic of Bellocchio’s complex character. He returned to features and to his antiestablishment themes with Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father, 1971). Here Bellocchio explores the disruptive potential of human neurosis with a sort of joy and satisfaction. The film has its autobiographical roots in adolescent memories of his high school years with the Padri Barnabiti; years that are transformed in a grotesque way. It was the first film in which Bellocchio used color; he then started thinking more directly about problems of form and expressive technique. A common element in Bellocchio’s cinema is the absence of a paternal figure. Even his female characters, like Giulia in Diavolo in corpo (The Devil in the Flesh, 1986), suffer from an unresolved Oedipal complex. Giulia does have a love relationship, but her love is disordered and possessive, sometimes a morbid and pathological one. The inability to love or even to experience sex in a normal way afflicts many of his protagonists. In La condanna (The Conviction, 1990), a couple locked in a museum at night eventually have semicoerced and ecstatic sex. Their experience becomes the occasion for a philosophical argument staged as a courtroom drama. As the film clearly states, woman’s inferiority consists in her not having the courage of her desires: Sandra tries to destroy the man for whom she feels an attraction because she fears losing herself in a loving union. This theory of inferiority is later contradicted by Bellocchio’s film based on a short story by Luigi Pirandello, La balia (The Nanny, 1999), a sensitive and intelligent work in which the director treats social life and primal emotional relationships in a thoughtful manner. Bellocchio made many changes to his source, the Pirandellian story written in 1903. Thus, the father is no longer a socialist politician, but a psychiatrist, Vittoria is conscious of her incapacity to love her own child, and the nanny’s husband is not a violent man. The story of the nanny, forced to abandon her own son in order to feed the doctor’s one, argues against a system of social relations that produces coldness, paralysis, and alienation. But the film avoids sentimentalism as well as violence

MARCO BELLOCCHIO and tragedy. The characters are able to learn from one another. The director concentrates on the relationship between normality and neurosis by focusing the story on the doctor, a tolerant democrat who believes in everybody’s right to grow up. Bellocchio had already adapted a Pirandellian play in his Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1984), where he had worked a similar transformation. This film seems to be a minor adaptation, but it contains some harsh scenes that contribute to the semidarkness that represents Bellocchio’s characteristic scenic atmosphere. Bellocchio returned to the family in L’ ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre (The Religion Hour: My Mother’s Smile, 2002), where he again presents a fascinating drama about a clash of values between members of a family. Ernesto is a painter and successful illustrator separated from his wife but still very close to his young son Leonardo. He discovers that for the last three years his aunt has been campaigning to have his mother canonized as a saint. But the protagonist, an atheist, is skeptical about this process and recalls his mother’s stupidity and her religious subservience to Catholicism. Bellocchio is deeply critical of the Vatican process of canonization. The real source of contention between Ernesto and his relatives is his disapproval of their greediness. In one of his more recent films, Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003), Bellocchio comes to terms with the Italian political situation of the 1970s. The film recounts the events surrounding the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, a former prime minister and head of the Christian Democrat party, through the eyes of Chiara, one of his kidnappers. Moro was taken hostage by Red Brigade members on March 16; almost two months elapsed while negotiations were pursued with no avail. His bullet-riddled body was found on May 9 after a phone call informed authorities. A shocking crime had been committed and Italy teetered on the edge of political chaos. Though the title is taken from one of Emily Dickinson’s poems, the film is in fact inspired by Anna Laura Braghetti and Paola Tavella’s book Il prigioniero (1998). Bellocchio re-created the ways Moro’s kidnappers contrive to keep their hiding place a secret, and how the character of Chiara struggles to decide whether the choices she is making are truly justified. Italy in the 1970s is evoked through footage from various television programs and news reports. The consummate skill of his filmmaking and the quality of the performances he secured in producing a complex film of devastating emotional power confirm Bellocchio’s

position as one of Italian cinema’s most intriguing contemporary auteurs.

Biography Born in Piacenza on 9 November 1939, the son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher; studied in Catholic schools and attended the Liceo Padri Barnabiti in Lodi; abandoned his intention to study philosophy at the university of the Sacred Heart in Milan; applied to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, 1959, where he studied performance and direction; started his career as director with two shorts, La colpa e la pena, 1961, and Il ginepro fatto uomo, 1962, and a documentary, Abbasso il zio, 1961; attended London’s Slade School of Fine Arts, 1962; his first feature, I pugni in tasca premiered at the Venice Film Festival, 1965; joined the extreme-left Communist Union and abandoned fictional films for politically militant cinema, 1968; returned to features, Nel nome del padre, 1971; met the psychoanalyst Massimo Fagioli, 1985; winner of several awards, including Silver Sail at Locarno International Film Festival, 1965, for I pugni in tasca; Venice Film Festival, Special Jury Prize ex-equo and International Critics Award, for La Cina e` vicina, 1967; Berlin Film Festival, Silver Bear for La condanna, 1991, and for Il sogno della farfalla, 1994; David di Donatello for La balia, 1999; Moscow International Film Festival, Silver St. Gorge, for his contribution to World Cinema, 1999; Cannes Film Festival, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury—Special Mention, for L’ora di religione, 2002. Currently lives in Rome. MARCELLA FARINA Selected Works Feature Films I pugni in tasca (Fists in the Pocket), 1965. La Cina e` vicina (China Is Near), 1967. Amore e rabbia (episode Discutiamo, discutiamo), 1969. Nel nome del padre (In the Name of the Father), 1971. Sbatti il mostro in prima pagina (Slap the Monster on Page One), 1972. Marcia trionfale (Victory March), 1976. Il gabbiano (The Seagull, adapted from Anton Chekhov’s play), 1977. Salto nel vuoto (Leap Into the Void), 1980. Gli occhi, la bocca (The Eyes, the Mouth), 1982. Enrico IV (Henry IV, adapted from Luigi Pirandello’s play), 1984. Diavolo in corpo (The Devil in the Flesh, adapted from Raymond Radiguet’s novel), 1986. La visione del Sabba (The Witches Sabbath), 1988.

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MARCO BELLOCCHIO La condanna (The Conviction), 1990. Il sogno della farfalla (The Butterfly’s Dream), 1994. Sogni infranti (Broken Dreams), 1995. Il Principe di Homburg (The Prince of Homburg, adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s novel), 1997. La balia (The Nanny, adapted from Luigi Pirandello’s short story), 1999. Un altro mondo e` possibile (Another World Is Possible), 2001. L’ ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre (My Mother’s Smile), 2002. Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night), 2003. Il regista di matrimoni, 2006.

Documentaries Ginepro fatto uomo, 1962. Paola (co-operative production), 1969. Viva il primo maggio rosso (co-operative production), 1969. Nessuno o tutti/Matti da slegare, 1975. La macchina cinema (with Silvano Agosti, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli), 1978. Vacanze in Val Trebbia, 1980. Un romano nell’arena, 1984.

Screenplays I pugni in tasca: un film, Milan: Garzanti, 1967. La Cina e` vicina, edited by Tommaso Chiaretti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1967; as China Is Near, translated by Judith Green, New York: Orion Press, 1969. Nel nome del padre, edited by Goffredo Fofi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1971. Marcia trionfale, edited by Anna Maria Tato`, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Salto nel vuoto, edited by Alberto Barbera and Gianni Volpi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Il principe di Homburg di Heinrich von Kleist, edited by Giovanni Spagnoletti, with a preface by Tullio Kezich, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997. La balia (with Daniela Ceselli), Rome: Gremese, 1999. L’ ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre. La sceneggiatura originale, le immagini, le differenze con il film, Rome: Elleu Multimedia, 2002. Buongiorno, notte, Venice: Marsilio, 2003.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano (editor), Marco Bellocchio: Il cinema e i film, Venice: Marsilio, 2005. Bandirali, Luca, and Stefano D’Amadio (editors), Buongiorno, notte: Le ragioni e le immagini, Lecce: Argo, 2004. Bernardi, Sandro, Marco Bellocchio, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Bertuzzi, Laura, Il cinema di Marco Bellocchio, Castelsangiovanni (PC): Edizioni Pontegobbo, 1996. Bolzoni, Francesco, and Mario Foglietti, Le stagioni del cinema: Trenta registi si raccontano, Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro): Rubbettino, 2000. Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, 3rd ed., New York-London: Continuum, 2002. Callegari, Giuliana, and Nuccio Lodato (editors), Marco Bellocchio, I pugni in tasca e La macchina cinema, Pavia: Centro stampa dell’Amministrazione provinciale, 1979. Camerino, Vincenzo, Cinema e politica: Il film di Marco Bellocchio, Cavallino di Lecce: Capone, 1982. Ceretto, Luisa, and Giancarlo Zappoli (editors), Le forme della ribellione: Il cinema di Marco Bellocchio, Turin: Lindau, 2004. Costa, Antonio, Marco Bellocchio: I pugni in tasca, Turin: Lindau, 2005. Landy, Marcia, Italian Film, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Lodato, Nuccio, Marco Bellocchio, Milan: Moizzi, 1977. Malanga, Paola (editor), Marco Bellocchio: Catalogo ragionato, Milan: Edizioni Olivares, 1998. Martini, Giacomo (editor), Una regione piena di cinema: Marco Bellocchio, S.I.: Regione Emilia-Romagna, 1997. Masoni, Tullio, Marco Bellocchio: Quadri, il pittore, il cineasta, Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2003. Nicastro, Anita (editor), Marco Bellocchio: Per un cinema d’autore, Florence: Brancato, 1992.

MARIA VILLAVECCHIA BELLONCI (1902–1986) Well-known in the literary world as the cofounder, director, and manager of one of the most coveted Italian literary prizes, the Premio Strega, Maria Villavecchia Bellonci is equally recognized as a historical novelist, journalist, commentator, and translator. While a satisfactory and complete 160

assessment of her contribution as a writer is still to come, her impact on female historical novelists such as Rosetta Roy, Marta Morazzoni, Dacia Maraini, Francesca Sanvitale, and Gina Lagorio is unquestioned. Bellonci’s first attempt as a novelist was the unpublished Clio e le amazzoni (Clio and

MARIA VILLAVECCHIA BELLONCI the Amazons), written under her maiden name Villavecchia. It is through the circulation of this manuscript that she met her future husband and most important mentor, the Bolognese journalist and militant critic Goffredo Bellonci. After the marriage, the Belloncis permanently settled in Maria’s native Rome, notwithstanding her numerous stays in several other Italian cities. In the aftermath of World War II, the Belloncis’ home became the meeting place of a group of literati, the Amici della domenica, who gathered to discuss the advancement and promotion of Italian literature after a period of hardship and sorrow. From these meetings stemmed Bellonci’s idea of creating a literary prize whose jury would be comprised of these same writers and intellectuals and that would reward the best written works among those proposed by various publishing houses or sponsors. The name Strega was chosen as a tribute to the Alberti family, the makers of the liquor of the same name, who generously agreed to fund the prize. In 1947, Ennio Flaiano won the first award with his Tempo di uccidere (Time to Kill), and many of the most significant names of twentieth-century Italian literature have competed for the award ever since. More than 20 years later, Bellonci documented her ongoing commitment to the role of director and manager of the prize in Come un racconto gli anni del Premio Strega (The Years of the Premio Strega Told as a Story, 1970). In this memoir, she recalls not only the pervasive atmosphere of sorrow in the postwar period and the excitement of creating a prize, but also the sentiments of rivalry among those being considered for the Premio Strega. By the time the prize was established, Bellonci had already gained a vast commercial success as a historical novelist thanks to her first-published novel, Lucrezia Borgia, la sua vita e i suoi tempi (The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia, 1939), which details the life of the nefarious daughter of Pope Alexander VI. Although fully aware of the predominant literary trends, Bellonci defied them, choosing her own path, that of the historical novel, which anticipates the popularity of later works such as Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980). One cannot deny the influence that Alessandro Manzoni played in Bellonci’s treatment of the genre. However, one must not forget such other examples as Benedetto Croce’s Vite di avventure, di fede e di passione (Lives of Adventure, Faith and Passion, 1936) and Riccardo Bacchelli’s Congiura di don Giulio d’Este (The Conspiracy of Don Giulio d’Este, 1931), from which she may have benefited. In

addition, her work was influenced by her knowledge of authors such as Stendhal. In his introduction to Bellonci’s Opere (Complete Works, 1994), Massimo Onofri has dubbed Bacchelli and Bellonci ‘‘scrittori della salute’’ (writers of health) because of the anachronistic traits that they share. Nonetheless, while Bacchelli’s archival research aims at studying society, Bellonci’s original research focuses on specific historical figures, often women, and their inner and private lives. This is considered her most original contribution to the historical novel as a literary genre. Her historical research is guided by her interest in secondary sources such as jewelry, ornaments, furniture, clothing and painting, especially portraits. The so-called minor arts, from which she draws inspiration to create her stories, acquire a primary status. As a fully documented novel, Lucrezia Borgia is both a reliable biography and a work of fiction. Segreti dei Gonzaga (A Prince of Mantua: The Life and Times of Vincenzo Gonzaga, 1947), her second novel, shares most of the narrative features of the previous book. Set once again in the Renaissance, it tells the story of Vincenzo Gonzaga, ruler of Mantua in the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Divided in three parts, the novel is at once dramatic and rooted in politics. The first edition also includes Vincenzo’s epistles and an inventory of the jewels belonging to the Gonzaga family. A substantial novelty surfaces in Bellonci’s work with the publication of the trilogy Tu vipera gentile (You, Noble Viper, 1972), which is composed of the novella of the same title, Delitto di stato (Crime for Reasons of State) previously published in 1961, and Soccorso a Dorotea (Help for Dorotea). This collection documents Bellonci’s increasingly mature style. While including the usual erudite and accurate historical documents, in Delitto di stato she also decides to insert fictitious characters for the first time, entrusting the unfolding of the story to two protagonists, Tommaso Striggi and Paride Maffei. Even more than in the previous stories, her last narrative work, Rinascimento Privato (Private Renaissance, 1985), calls into question the relationship between fiction and history. It is in this same novel that she also reaches the maturity of her own personal style. The story is told in the first person by the main character, Isabella d’Este, who had previously appeared in Lucrezia Borgia, la sua vita e i suoi tempi as the sister of Lucrezia’s husband. By using fictional characters like Robert de la Pole, to whom the writer assigns the major role of describing actual historical events, Bellonci leaves the realm of history in order to give voice to timeless 161

MARIA VILLAVECCHIA BELLONCI human dramas and passions. Thus, Rinascimento Privato is a metahistorical novel that documents Bellonci’s attempt to create a ‘‘feminine novel,’’ even though she never identified with the feminist movement and was always critical in its regard. Bellonci’s active involvement in the reshaping of the literary, cultural and intellectual life of postWorld War II Italy is also documented by her work as a contributor to several periodical publications such as the weekly Il punto (1958–1964) and the Roman daily Il Messaggero (1964–1970). Her articles on a variety of topics were collected in Pubblici segreti (Public Secrets, 1965) and the posthumous Pubblici segreti N. 2 (1989). Another posthumous volume, Segni sul muro (Signs on the Wall, 1988), brings together a series of commentaries on several Italian cities and on modern and classical European writers such as Virginia Woolf and Albert Camus. Bellonci’s translations include Vanina Vanini e altre cronache italiane (1961) and La duchessa di Paliano (1994) by Stendhal, I tre moschettieri (1977) by Alexandre Dumas, and Nana (1955) by E´mile Zola, among others. Bellonci also wrote an introduction for a publication of Andrea Mantegna’s complete works (1967) and another for a book of poems by Gaspara Stampa (1994), confirming once more her keen interest in several aspects of Italian literature and culture.

Biography Born in Rome, on November 3, 1902. Graduated from Liceo Umberto, 1921; married Goffredo Bellonci, 1928; cofounded the Premio Strega in Rome, 1947; organized the first international congress ‘‘Pen Club’’ in Venice, 1949; contributed to the weekly Il punto, 1958–1964, and the daily Il Messaggero, 1964–1970; Premio Viareggio for Lucrezia Borgia, 1939; Penna d’oro award, 1985; Premio Strega, received posthumously for Rinascimento privato, 1986. Died in Rome of cardiovascular complications on May 13, 1986. LODOVICA GUIDARELLI Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1994–1997.

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Fiction Lucrezia Borgia, la sua vita e i suoi tempi, 1939; as The Life and Times of Lucrezia Borgia, translated by Bernard Wall, 1953. Segreti dei Gonzaga, 1947; as A Prince of Mantua: The Life and Times of Vincenzo Gonzaga, translated by Stuart Hood, 1956. Delitto di stato, 1961. Tu vipera gentile, 1972. Marco Polo, 1984. Rinascimento privato, 1985; as Private Renaissance, translated by William Weaver, 1989.

Nonfiction Milano viscontea, 1954. Pubblici segreti, 1965. Come un racconto gli anni del Premio Strega, 1970. I Visconti a Milano, 1977. Io e il premio Strega, 1987. Segni sul muro, 1988. Pubblici segreti N. 2, 1989.

Translations

E´mile Zola, Nana, 1955. Stendhal, Vanina Vanini e altre cronache italiane, 1961. Alexandre Dumas, I Tre moschettieri, 1977. Marco Polo, Il Milione, 1982. Jules Verne, Viaggio al centro della terra, 1983. Stendhal, La duchessa di Paliano, 1994.

Further Reading Grillandi, Massimo, Invito alla lettura di Maria Bellonci, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Maria Bellonci e i suoi segni,’’ in Il Veltro 40, no. 1–2 (1996): 149–153. Onofri, Massimo, Introduction to Maria Villavecchia Bellonci, Opere, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Petrignani, Sandra, Le signore della scrittura, Milan: La tartaruga, 1984. Reeb, Gerda, ‘‘Rinascimento privato: A Historiographic Carnival,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti and Gabriella Brooke, Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Roush, Sherry, ‘‘Isabella Inventrix: History and Creativity in Maria Bellonci’s Rinascimento privato: Romanzo,’’ in Italica, 79, no. 2 (2002): 189–203. Scarparo, Susanna, ‘‘‘Sono uno storico in quanto scrittore’: Imagining the Past in Maria Bellonci’s Rinascimento privato,’’ in Modern Languages Notes, 117, no. 1 (2002): 227–240. Simonetta, Marcello, ‘‘Maria Bellonci, Manzoni e l’eredita` impossibile del romanzo storico,’’ in Lettere Italiane, 50, no. 2 (1998): 248–263.

PIETRO BEMBO

PIETRO BEMBO (1470–1547) A Venetian humanist, grammarian and poet, Pietro Bembo was one of the most influential and representative figures of the high Renaissance in Italy. His career began amidst the Italian linguistic and literary crisis of courtly culture at the end of the fifteenth century, flourished during the politically turbulent period of the Italian wars during the first decades of the sixteenth century, and extended into the first years of the Counter-Reformation, when Bembo was nominated cardinal by Pope Paul III, the culminating acknowledgment of a brilliant literary career. Titian’s impressive portrait of 1540 depicts Cardinal Bembo shortly after his elevation. Bembo’s most significant and long-lasting contribution was the establishment of an Italian national linguistic and literary standard in his Prose della volgar lingua (Prose on Vernacular Eloquence, 1525), published at the height of the Italian political crisis, when the cultural and political fragmentation that had always characterized the peninsula was aggravated by the competition of France and imperial Spain for political dominion. A linguistic, literary, and cultural antidote to Italian political vulnerability, Bembo’s Prose established the rhetorical, literary, historical, and grammatical bases, in the era of modern print culture, for a unified tradition in the vernacular based on the classic Italian authors of the fourteenth century, Boccaccio for prose and Petrarch for poetry ( just as Cicero and Virgil had served as exemplars for modern humanist eloquence in the Latin). He followed the Prose with the publication of a book of his vernacular lyric poetry, the Rime (Poems, 1530), which offered a practical application of his linguistic and rhetorical principles and marked the point of departure for both Italian and European Renaissance Petrarchism. Pietro Bembo’s father, Bernardo, was one of the most prominent cultural and political personalities of late fifteenth-century Italy. He passed on to his son a passion for books, humanistic letters, and the Tuscan vernacular literary tradition, an interest that Bernardo cultivated also while serving as Venetian ambassador to Florence between 1478–1479, with the young Pietro in tow. Under the guidance of Giovanni Alessandro Urticio and perhaps of Giovanni Alessandro Augurello, Pietro

acquired impeccable humanistic credentials, also studying Greek with his friend Trifone Gabriele for two years in Messina at the school of Constantinus Lascaris. On his return from Sicily, he made available Lascaris’ Greek grammar to Aldus Manutius, who published it in 1495. Bembo published another souvenir from his Sicilian sojourn the following year, also with Aldus, a Latin dialogue with his father about the ascent of Mt. Etna (De Aetna). Between 1496 and 1503, Bembo frequented the philosophical, humanist and vernacular courtly environment of Ferrara, where his father was visdominio, a kind of Venetian ambassador to the Estense. There he came into contact with the philosophical school of Niccolo` Leoniceno, with the poets Lodovico Ariosto, Antonio Tebaldeo, and with the humanist Ercole Strozzi, who will assume the role of the defender of Latin language and opponent of the vernacular in the fictional dialogue of the Prose. Upon his return to Venice, Pietro Bembo did not undertake the Venetian political career expected of young men from patrician families and especially of the son of Bernardo Bembo. Instead, Pietro pursued a courtly and ecclesiastical career that would lead to his frequenting various courts of north and central Italy, initially Ferrara and Urbino, and eventually brought him to Rome where he achieved the position of papal secretary. Early in the new century, however, Bembo’s association with Aldus Manutius led to the publication of Petrarch’s Sonetti e canzoni (1501) and of Dante’s Commedia (1501) and Le terze rime (1502). These editions were editorially supervised by Bembo, and were based upon the consultation of authoritative manuscripts (in Petrarch’s case of the autograph). They marked a watershed in the history of Italian vernacular philology due to their quality and the context of renewed interest in the vernacular literary tradition from which they emerged. Bembo’s treatment of vernacular works of Dante and Petrarch as classics, implicitly on the same level as the Greek and Latin classics that Aldus was publishing in the same format, represented an unprecedented championing of Italian vernacular for a non-Tuscan humanist of his stature. Bembo followed up shortly thereafter with the publication of a vernacular love treatise in dialogue 163

PIETRO BEMBO form, Gli Asolani (Gli Asolani, 1505), the first in a series of Renaissance vernacular works in this genre on this topic. Initially dedicated to Lucretia Borgia, whom Bembo had fallen in love with while in Ferrara, the dialogue explores positive, negative and Neoplatonic views of love in three books, alternating between courtly Boccaccian prose and Petrarchan poetry in the mixed prose and verse tradition of Dante’s Vita nuova and Boccaccio’s Ameto. In 1506, Bembo moved to the court of Guidobaldo di Montefeltro of Urbino and resided there during a period that is memorialized in Baldesar Castiglione’s masterpiece, Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), which features Bembo delivering a dissertation on Neoplatonic love in the third book, in part, no doubt in response to Bembo’s reputation as an authority on the topic, as established by the recent publication of Gli Asolani, for which Bembo will also be remembered in the last canto of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (46.15). While residing in Urbino, Bembo wrote his own less famous portrait of the Urbino court, the De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elisabetha Gonzaga Urbini ducibus (On the Duke of Urbino Guido of Montefeltro and Elisabetta Gonzaga, 1530). It was during this period that he also composed two vernacular poems that established his reputation as one of the leading court poets of the age: the Stanze (1507) on the occasion of the carnival in Urbino, and a canzone, in commemoration of his brother Carlo who had died in 1503. While in Urbino, Bembo set his sights on papal patronage and an ecclesiastic career. At the beginning of 1508, Bembo received a commenda from Julius II of a manor in the city of Bologna belonging to the knights of St. John of Jerusalem, although he did not take formal religious orders until 1522, following the death of his father (1519). Bembo moved to Rome in 1512 and there entered into polemic with Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola on the question of imitation, assuming in his De imitatione (On Imitation, 1513) the Ciceronian position of imitation of the single best model, in opposition to the eclectic position of Pico that had been expressed by Paolo Cortesi in an earlier polemic with Agnolo Poliziano, and to the antiCiceronianism of Erasmus. Bembo’s election by Leo X in 1513 to be papal secretary represented a triumph of Ciceronianism and a consolidation of his cultural position as a leading cultural figure. Bembo returned again to Venice in 1519 following the death of his father and remained there until 1522, when he returned to Rome, but soon returned to the Veneto and settled in Padua, 164

where despite the fact that he had taken vows of the Order of St. John, he lived with a woman, Faustina Morosina della Torre. He returned to Rome in 1524 to present to Pope Clement VII the dedication manuscript of the Prose della volgar lingua, and at this time he also composed a Latin poem, Benacus (1524), dedicated to Bishop Giovan Matteo Giberti. Following the publication of the Prose della vulgar lingua, Bembo returned to Venice, where in 1530 he was nominated historiographer of the Venetian republic and librarian of the Nicean Library (later the Marciana). He undertook the writing of the Historiae venetae libri XII (Venetian Histories, 1551), and at the same time published in 1530 with the da Sabbio brothers in Venice the Rime, and a second revised edition of Gli Asolani, as well as editions of some of his Latin writings including the philological dialogue De Virgilii Culice et Terentii fabulis (On Virgil’s ‘‘Culex’’ and the Comedies of Terence, 1530). In 1535, the collection of his Latin briefs written for Pope Leo X were published and he was elected cardinal in 1539. After stays in Venice and Gubbio, of which he was bishop, Bembo resided in Rome after 1544 until his death. His last years were dedicated to the translation into the vernacular of his Venetian histories, Della historia vinitiana libri XII (1552) and to the reordering and revision of his works in preparation for the posterity that had always represented the ideal public for his writings in Latin and in the vernacular. Finally, however, it was Ariosto who granted Pietro Bembo the highest and most appropriate recognition at the end of the Orlando Furioso (Canto 46: 15) when he praised the Venetian for his contributions to Italian vernacular linguistic and literary history, as the one ‘‘che ‘l puro e dolce idioma nostro, / levato fuor del volgare uso tetro, / quale esser dee, ci ha col suo esempio mostro’’ (who raised that pure and sweet idiom of ours out of vulgar dark usage, and showed us with his example what it should be).

Biography Son of Bernardo and Elena Morsini, is born in Venice 20 May 1470; in June 1491 he meets the Florentine poet and philologist Agnolo Poliziano in Venice and assists him in the Bembo family library with the collation of a manuscript of Terrence; between 1492 and 1494 he studies Greek at the school of Costantino Lascaris in Messina; between 1497 and 1499 he lives in Ferrara; in December 1503 his brother Carlo dies and Bembo returns to Venice from Ferrara; in 1506 he quits Venice for

PIETRO BEMBO the court of Urbino, where he is the guest of Guidobaldo of Montefeltro; in 1512 he leaves Urbino and takes up residence in Rome, where he is the guest of Federigo Fregoso; in 1513 he is elected papal secretary by Leo X; in December 1514 he undertakes an unsuccessful diplomatic mission to Venice on behalf of the pope; his father dies 28 May 1519 and Bembo returns to Venice 2 June, where he remains for a year for family and health reasons; in April 1520 he returns to Rome; in April 1521 he quits Rome and moves to Venice; in 1522, after having survived a grave illness, he settles in Padua where he lived with a woman, Faustina Morosina della Torre, with whom he had three children (Lucilio b. 1523; Torquato b. 1525; Elena b. 1528); in December of 1522 he finally takes vows, becoming a knight of St. John; in September 1525 the first edition of the Prose della volgar lingua is published by Tacuino in Venice; in 1529, Bembo travels to Bologna to participate in the imperial coronation of Charles V; in September 1530 he is named historiographer of the Venetian republic and also librarian of the Nicene library of the Venetian republic; in 1532, his son Lucilio dies; in June of 1535 the first edition of his papal briefs written for Leo X is published in Venice; his companion Morosina dies August 6, 1535; in March of 1539 he is made cardinal by Pope Paul III and moves to Rome; in July 1541 he is named bishop of Gubbio; Cola Bruno, Bembo’s secretary and friend of nearly 50 years, dies in May 1542; in the summer of 1543 he returns to Venice for the last time for the marriage of his daughter Elena to Pietro Gradenigo; in November 1543, he is residing in the bishopric of Gubbio; in 1544 he is named bishop of Bergamo but never takes up residence there; he leaves Gubbio and returns to Rome in March of 1544; he dies on 18 January 1547 in Rome, where he is buried in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. THEODORE CACHEY Selected Works Collections Opere del card. Pietro Bembo ora per la prima volta tutte in un corpo unite, 4 vols.,Venice: F. Hertzhauser, 1729. ‘‘Motti’’ inediti e sconosciuti di Pietro Bembo, edited by Vittorio Cian, Venice: Tipografia dell’Ancora, 1888. Opere in volgare, edited by Mario Marti, Milan: Sansoni, 1961. Lettere I. (1492–1507), critical edition by Ernesto Travi, 4 vols., Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1987.

Prose della volgar lingua; Gli Asolani; Rime, edited by Carlo Dionisotti, Milan: TEA, 1966; rpt. 1989. Carmina, Turin: Edizioni RES, 1990.

Works in Vernacular Gli Asolani, 1505; edited by Giorgio Dilemmi, 1991; as Gli Asolani, translated by Rudolf Brand Gottfried, 1954; rpt. 1971. Stanze, 1507; edited by Alessandro Gnocchi, 2003. Prose della volgar lingua, 1525; edited by Claudio Vela, 2001. Rime, 1530; enlarged edition, 1535. Carteggio d’amore, 1500–1501: Maria Savorgnan—Pietro Bembo, 1950.

Works in Latin De Aetna, 1496; edited by Vittorio Enzo Alfieri, Marcello Carapezza, and Leonardo Sciascia, 1981; as Lyric Poetry: Etna, translated by Mary P. Chatfield, 2005. De imitatione, 1513; as Le epistole ‘‘De imitatione’’ di Giovanfrancesco Pico dellaMirandola e di Pietro Bembo, edited by Giorgio Santangelo, 1954. Benacus, 1524. De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elisabetha Gonzaga Urbini ducibus, 1530; in vernacular as Volgarizzamento des Dialogs De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elisabetha Gonzagia Urbini ducibus, edited by Maria Lutz, 1980. De Virgilii Culice et Terentii fabulis, 1530. Historiae venetae libri XII, 1551; in vernacular as Della historia vinitiana libri XII, 1552.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, Il Petrarchismo italiano nel Cinquecento, Padua: Liviana, 1974. Cian, Vittorio, Un medaglione del rinascimento: Cola Bruno messinese e le sue relazioni con Pietro Bembo, Florence: Biblioteca della letteratura italiana, 1901. Clough, Cecil H., ‘‘Pietro Bembo’s Edition of Petrarch and His Association with the Aldine Press,’’ in Aldus Manutius and Renaissance Culture. Essays in Memory of Franklin D. Murphy, edited by Davis S. Zeidberg, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Dionisotti, Carlo, Scritti sul Bembo, edited by Claudio Vela, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Floriani, Piero, Bembo e Castiglione: studi sul classicismo del Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. ———, I gentiluomini letterati. Studi sul dibattito culturale nel primo Cinquecento, Naples: Liguori, 1981. Kidwell, Carol, Pietro Bembo: Lover, Linguist, Cardinal, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Lowry, Malcolm J. C., The World of Aldus Manutius, Oxford: Blackwell, 1979. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, Misure del classicismo rinascimentale, Naples: Liguori, 1990. Perocco, Daria, ‘‘Rassegna di studi bembiani (1964–1985),’’ in Lettere italiane, 37 (1985): 512–540. Prada, Massimo, La lingua dell’espistolario volgare di Pietro Bembo, Genoa: Name, 2000. Richardson, Brian, Print Culture in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sabbatino, Pasquale, La ‘‘scienza’’ della scrittura: dal progetto del Bembo al manuale, Florence: Olschki, 1988.

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GLI ASOLANI, 1505 Dialogue by Pietro Bembo

Gli Asolani is a vernacular dialogue on love written in prose with lyric poetic compositions interspersed (prosimetron), a genre that traced its Italian origins via Boccaccio to Dante’s Vita nuova. The work treats the nature, effects and ends of love in three books, and is imagined to have taken place in Asolo, located in the Treviso area of the Veneto region and home to the court of Caterina Cornaro, the exiled queen of Cyprus, to whom the Venetians had granted Asolo in compensation for the loss of the island. Written between 1497 and 1502, the work emerges out of the context of a flourishing late fifteenth-century courtly vernacular literary culture that was imbued with Florentine Neoplatonism, and at a time when Pietro Bembo was first exploring courtier life as an alternative to the political career expected of a Venetian patrician. Gli Asolani was published in Venice in 1505 in the wake of Aldus Manutius’ groundbreaking editions of the vernacular classics that were edited by Bembo. A significantly revised edition of the Asolani was published in 1530, which brought the work into greater linguistic and stylistic conformity with Bembo’s watershed contribution to the Italian language question debate (questione della lingua) and the Prose della volgar lingua. Indeed, while the dialogue’s speculative or philosophical value is generally considered to be marginal at best (on a plane with the courtly conversations of the third book of Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano with which the second edition of the work enters into implicit dialogue), Gli Asolani is nonetheless a major milestone in Italian linguistic and literary history. In the first place, this dialogue represented a bold, not to say scandalous foray into the vernacular literary realm for an intellectual with Bembo’s impeccable humanist credentials (in both Latin and Greek). It put into practice the author’s idea that writers in the vernacular should scrupulously adhere to the Tuscan language and adopt the prose writings of Boccaccio and Petrarch’s lyrics as standards for Italian vernacular literary expression. Moreover, the work marks an important transitional moment (parallel to the more or less contemporary Arcadia 166

by Jacopo Sannazaro) in Italian Renaissance literary history, between the eclectic and stylistic Petrarchism of the fifteenth century and the more mature and more profoundly ideological Petrarchism of the sixteenth century that Bembo himself would inaugurate with the publication of his Rime in 1530. In Book I of Gli Asolani, the fictional courtier Perottino embodies the figure of the unhappy lover and reflects on love’s negative effects while, by contrast, in Book II a more positive view of love is represented by Gismondo. Book III features the Neoplatonizing courtier Lavinello, who, thanks to the corrective counsel of a holy hermit, eventually arrives at a Christian and ascetic view of earthly love that denies its capacity to lead to God. While the position of the author is not explicitly revealed, it may be observed that the medieval and traditional Christian perspective of the Hermit at the end of Book III is consistent with the ideological framework informing Petrarch’s Canzoniere (in which the poet turns away from his earthly love Laura toward the Virgin) as well as with Bembo’s mature Renaissance Petrarchism. THEODORE CACHEY Editions First edition: Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1505; revised edition, Venice: Da Sabbio, 1530. Critical edition: as Gli Asolani, edited by Giorgio Dilemmi, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1991. Translations: as Gli Asolani, translated by Rudolf Brand Gottfried, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1954; rpt. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971.

Further Reading Berra, Claudia, La scrittura degli asolani di Pietro Bembo, Scandicci (Florence): La Nuova Italia, 1995. Cachey, Theodore J. Jr., ‘‘In and Out of the Margins of a Renaissance Controversy: Castiglione in the 2nd Asolani (1530),’’ in Rivista di letteraturaItaliana, 3 (1985): 253–263. ———, ‘‘Il pane del grano e la saggina: Pietro Bembo’s 1505 Asolani Revisited,’’ in The Italianist, 12 (1992): 5–23. Capasullo, Rosa, ‘‘Appunti su un’edizione degli Asolani,’’ in Lettere Italiane, 46, no. 3 (1994): 442–458. Clough, Cecil-H., ‘‘Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani of 1505,’’ in MLN 84, no. 1 (1969): 16–45. Curti, Elisa, ‘‘L’Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta e gli Asolani di Pietro Bembo: Alcune osservazioni sulle postille bembesche al codice Ambrosiano D 29 Inf,’’ in Studi sul Boccaccio, 30 (2002): 247–297.

PIETRO BEMBO Kidwell, Carol, Pietro Bembo. Lover, Linguist, Cardinal, Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004. Rizzarelli, Giovanna, ‘‘La favola della Regina delle Isole Fortunate negli Asolani di Pietro Bembo,’’ in Lettere Italiane, 54, no. 3 (2002): 389–401. Scarpa, Emanuela, ‘‘Qualche proposta (e qualche ipotesi) per i primi ‘Asolani,’’’ in Studi di Filologia Italiana, 52 (1994): 93–109.

PROSE DELLA VOLGAR LINGUA, 1525 Dialogue by Pietro Bembo

The Prose della volgar lingua (Prose on Vernacular Eloquence), a dialogue in three books, is generally considered, alongside the De vulgari eloquentia by Dante Alighieri, to be one of the two most influential works of literary criticism and rhetorical theory in the history of Italian literature. A decisive intervention in the Italian questione della lingua, which had been at issue since Dante’s time, the Prose della volgar lingua established the cultural autonomy and prestige of the vernacular language vis-a`-vis Latin, and provided a grammatical and rhetorical model for modern Italy based upon the model of Boccaccio’s Decameron and Petrarch’s Canzoniere. The signal importance of the work is reflected by the fact that it is generally possible to date to before or after the watershed year 1525 Italian Renaissance writing according to whether or not it adheres to the linguistic model established by Bembo. Authors of Renaissance classics including Lodovico Ariosto, Baldesar Castiglione, and even the Florentine historian Francesco Guicciardini conducted linguistic revisions of their works in order to bring them into greater conformity with the modern Italian standard established by Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua. Bembo’s promotion of the ‘‘vulgar tongue,’’ and his arguments for a vernacular humanist or classicizing literary solution to the linguistic question

met the resistance of purist partisans of the Latin (who are represented in the dialogue by the humanist Ercole Strozzi); of proponents of the lingua cortigiana, or courtly school of thought, who favored an eclectic model based upon the spoken language of the courts of Italy (a viewpoint expressed and indirectly attributed to Vincenzo Calmeta); and of defenders of the contemporary Florentine language (a position assumed in the dialogue by Giuliani de’ Medici). Bembo’s own point of view is presented by his brother Carlo, and the dialogue is situated at the Bembo home in Venice in 1502 (a fictional dating designed to grant Bembo priority in the vernacular field over Le regole della vulgar lingua published by Gianfrancesco Fortunio in 1516). Book I of the Prose presents Bembo’s response to the competing schools of thought on the language question and provides the theoretical premises for the literary-historical discussion of the vernacular tradition in Book II. A detailed grammar based on the careful study of the language of Petrarch and Boccaccio is discussed and exemplified in Book III. Bembo’s seminal contribution in the Prose is best understood within the context of the technological, cultural and political factors that fostered the resolution of the Italian language question in the direction of the vernacular humanism theorized and practiced in the dialogue. In fact, the technological advance of printing had made urgent the need for a linguistic model that might serve the entire peninsula above and beyond the local spoken dialects. Within the cultural sphere, the triumph of humanistic Ciceronianism in Latin suggested the path of imitation that the vernacular might follow. Bembo’s classicizing solution to the crisis represented a historically efficacious cultural response to the political disunity and vulnerability of Italy that reached a peak during the high Renaissance. The literary and linguistic unification of the peninsula fostered by means of Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua would represent the only form of national cultural identity available to Italians between the Renaissance and the political unification of Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century. THEODORE CACHEY Editions First edition: Venice: Giovanni Tacuino, 1525. Critical editions: Prose della volgar lingua : l’editio princeps del 1525 riscontrata con l’autografo Vaticano latino 3210, edited by Claudio Vela, Bologna: CLUEB, 2001; as Prose della volgar lingua; Gli Asolani; Rime,

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PIETRO BEMBO edited by Carlo Dionisotti, Milan: TEA, Editori Associati, 1989; La prima stesura delle Prose della volgar lingua: fonti e correzioni:con edizione del testo, edited by Mirko Tavosanis, Pisa: ETS, 2002.

Further Reading Dionisotti, Carlo, Scritti sul Bembo, edited by Claudio Vela, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Floriani, Piero, Bembo e Castiglione: studi sul classicismo del Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976.

Morgana, Silvia Scotti, Mario Piotti, and Massimo Prada (editors), Prose della volgar lingua di Pietro Bembo: Gargnano del Garda (4–7 ottobre 2000), Milan: Cisaplino, 2000. Pertile, Lino, ‘‘Trifon Gabriele’s Commentary on Dante and Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua,’’ in Italian Studies, 40 (1985): 17–30. Sabbatino, Pasquale, La ‘‘scienza’’ della scrittura: dal progetto del Bembo al manuale, Florence: Olschki, 1988. Tavoni, Mirko, ‘‘Prose della volgar lingua,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Dizionario delle opere, directed by Alberto Asor Rosa (Turin: Einaudi, 1999–2000).

CARMELO BENE (1937–2002) No Italian actor in twentieth-century theater has been more extravagantly praised or more bitterly vilified than Carmelo Bene. His historical importance for the Italian avant-garde and experimental theater is beyond discussion, and he was described by the Encyclope´die Francaise as ‘‘one of the most significant presences in twentieth-century theater, along with Diaghilev, Nureyev, Maria Callas and Orson Welles.’’ However, in 1963 his first theater, Teatro Laboratorio, was closed by the authorities when charges of blasphemy and of causing a public outrage were brought against the play, Cristo ‘63 (Christ ‘63), in 1974 S.A.D.E. ovvero libertinaggio e decadenza del complesso bandistico della gendarmeria (S.A.D.E. or Libertinism and Decadence of the Bandit Gang of the Gendarmerie) was taken off by magistrates on the grounds of obscenity, and his 1989 production of Sem Benelli’s La cena della beffe (The Supper of Hoaxes, 1909) caused riots in Milan. Rational discussion of his theater or his stagecraft is made difficult by his insistence, taken by acolytes as proof of high seriousness, that his drama unfolds in a dimension transcending rationality and hence closed to interpretation. His own utterances are Delphic, couched in grandiloquent, hyperbolic and even deliberately self-contradictory terms. These pronouncements seem part of a lifelong labor to construct for himself, both in life and on stage, an image as Nietzschean superman, dandy or flaneur. He is given to expressing a lofty contempt for fellow actors and for audiences, as well as a misanthropic view of humankind, a distaste for democracy and a detestation of both the 168

theater and cinema in which he worked all his life. Giorgio Strehler, Dario Fo, and Eugenio Barba were all dismissed as holding inadequate views of theater. Cinema he described as ‘‘la pattumiera di tutte le arti’’ (the dustbin of all the arts) (Carmelo Bene and Giancarlo Dotto, Vita di Carmelo Bene, 1998). Modern theater, in his view, can be divided into two streams, one inspired by Bertold Brecht and the other by Antonin Artaud. Political beliefs held no interest for him; his production in 1968 of a Don Quixote set outside time and history was his way of cocking a snook at the political fervor of that year. It was with the visionary Artaud, with his refusal of rationality, his love of excess, his probes into the unconscious, his search for the overwhelming stage impact, as well as his rejection of realism and narrative, that Bene identified. He referred also to Arthur Schopenhauer as his educatore permanente or permanent educator (La ricerca impossibile, 1990). Schopenhauer’s reflections on the enigmatic power of music to make a deep emotional impact influenced the kind of abstract, antirealist, ‘‘metaphysical’’ and ultimately music-based theater Bene aimed to provide. His stage work seems to hark back to ritual, ceremonial or prerational rites; it came increasingly to be imbued with the forms of nonsense or of musical theater, and was finally reduced to performance based on voice, or on the transmission of the fonema (phoneme). He formed intellectual partnerships with maverick figures like Salvador Dalı`, opera singer Giuseppe De Stefano and composer Sylvano Bussotti.

CARMELO BENE Bene, although he wrote, performed and published his scripts, proclaimed himself a demolisher rather than a creator of drama, aiming at teatro senza spettacolo (theater without spectacle). To him, performance was impossible but also necessary and unavoidable, respect for the script was a symptom of mummified theater, and attempts to create images were self-defeating. Tragedy and comedy in the classical sense were to be swept aside in favor of parody, pornography, vulgarity and the ridiculous. Even if he was reluctant to admit any such debts, Bene was a successor of surrealism and an heir of wider irrationalist trends. Indeed, he made his impact in the turbulent, irreverent, anarchic 1960s, when such imprecise events as ‘‘happenings’’ were saluted in theaters all over Europe. His debut was, in retrospect, a false start. After a brief and fruitless period at the Accademia di Arte Drammatica in Rome, he persuaded Albert Camus to give him the rights to Caligula (1959). As an actor, Bene was acclaimed, but never again did he work with a director or accept the discipline of another author’s script. Bene was an apostle of ‘‘indiscipline,’’ so the choice of Caligula, the deranged emperor, was a significant one. Over the years Bene was drawn toward grand, titanic, solitary figures, hovering on the margins of society and civilization, never integrated or balanced. Such figures include: the broodingly playful (a dark Pinocchio altered beyond the imaginings of Carlo Collodi, 1961); the self-destructive (six Hamlets in various media, staged from 1961 to 1994); the monstrous (Marquis de Sade, or King Richard of Riccardo III staged in 1977); the bewildered (a Mayakovsky who has lost faith in the revolution in Spettacolo-Concerto Majakovskij, 1960); the cannibalistic (La storia di Sawney Bean, 1964); the demonic (Lorenzaccio al di la` di Musset, 1986). Bene’s theater is solipsistic. His success with Caligula and his acting talent guaranteed his access to major Italian theaters, where he would only stage his own work. He creates his production in every detail, dramatizes personal dilemmas in styles of his choosing, allowing other performers only subsidiary roles. One of the paradoxes of his career is that, though an iconoclast, his own vision is shaped by the classics, but classics radically reformed in his own image and likeness. Thus, little of the texts of the classics he performed remained. The phases of his career can be traced through the variations introduced into successive reworkings of certain preferred plays, notably Hamlet and Pinocchio.

After Caligula, he was invited to Genoa, where he produced a version of Lo strano caso del dottor Jekyll e del signor Hyde (The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 1961), but an attentive observer would have paid heed to the credits, which ran: ‘‘da R. L. Stevenson, due atti di Carmelo Bene, traduzione, rielaborazione, protagonista e regista, Carmelo Bene’’ (from R. L. Stevenson, two acts by Carmelo Bene, translation, re-elaboration, protagonist and director, Carmelo Bene). His Teatro Laboratorio in Rome was a quintessentially 1960s alternative venue, or ‘‘cellar.’’ It was a site for wild ‘‘happenings,’’ but the opening productions were Pinocchio and Hamlet, even if both were defiantly cut to measure. Addio porco (Farewell, Pig), staged in 1963, had the anarchy, or spontaneity, of works by Julian Beck’s Living Theater. The first half consisted of caricatures of opera arias, while the second half was a silence interrupted by actors eating and drinking on stage. In the notorious Cristo ‘63, Bene played Christ in a Last Supper scene. There was no script, and in the general mayhem one evening an actor urinated over the Argentinian ambassador. Bene was able to move between experimental venues and the commercial, city-center theaters. His Salome` (1964) from Oscar Wilde had a cast of prisoners from a Roman jail, appearing on stage in top hats and red velvet suits before a piece of furniture that was both altar and bar. The cocktail party in progress, with guitars languidly strumming, is interrupted when the guests fall on John the Baptist and throw him into a cistern. After that production, the critic-playwright Ennio Flaiano gave the striking description of Bene as a director ‘‘con i piedi fermamente poggiati sulle nuvole’’ (with his feet firmly planted in the clouds) (‘‘Salome´,’’ in C. Bene, Opere, 1995). His restless imagination produced endless shifts of style and topic. His production of Il rosa e il nero (The Pink and the Black) in 1966 was based on the gothic novel The Monk by Matthew Gregory Lewis, but can also be viewed as a mixture of autobiography and manifesto. The staging was enriched by music specially composed by Sylvano Bussotti and Vittorio Gelmetti. His second production of Hamlet, Amleto o le conseguenze della pieta` filiale (Hamlet, or the Consequences of Filial Piety, 1967), offered a multilayered script rewritten and reimagined by Bene but also seen through psychoanalytic lenses provided by Jules Laforgue. Everywhere, sacred texts are debunked, demystified, parodied and mocked. Some Italian critics view Bene’s works at this time as examples of postmodern metatheater, 169

CARMELO BENE but they are also a star vehicle by which Bene asserts his own position as virtuoso. Music assumed an ever greater position as support and eventually alternative to plot. Bene also directed and acted in films. His most adventurous and successful was Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Our Lady of the Turks, 1968), first written as a novel and later adapted for the stage. A series of brief sketches set in his native Puglia, the film was acclaimed in France as a reply to the contemporary American underground cinema, but dismissed by others as unintelligible. On his return to theater in 1973, he remained the enfant terrible but emerged simultaneously as champion of the musicality of the voice and word in theater. For his Riccardo III, he removed all the palace maneuverings, the Machiavellian schemes of the despot Richard to leave a private man grappling with love-hate for women, and indeed Bene’s overtly misogynistic depiction of women, often naked and abused on stage, drew the ire of feminists. His 1979 recital of Byron’s Manfred at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, with orchestral backing, marked a phase in which voice and music almost converted theater into oratorio, even if one underwritten by an intricate technology of amplifying devices. The development of the voice and what he called the ‘‘phoneme’’ rose to prominence in his later discussions of his theater. Carmelo Bene made a huge impact in his lifetime, but the career of an actor is ephemeral, and his fashioning of his dramatic writings to suit his own idiosyncratic stage persona means that few of his writings are likely to survive. Film and video will grant a longevity unknown in other centuries to stage works that were violent encounters, made to shine with bright luster by the sheer vivacity of his presence, between a living audience and an extraordinary actor.

Biography Born on 1 September 1937, in Campi Salentino (Lecce); 1957, enrolled at the Accademica di Arte Drammatica in Rome but was expelled for indiscipline; 1959, stage debut with Caligula directed by Alberto Ruggiero, and committed to mental hospital by family to prevent marriage to Giuliana Rossi; 1960, begins collaboration with Sylvano Bussotti with performance of readings from Vladimir Mayakovsky; 1961, set up in Rome Teatro Laboratorio, an alternative venue, opening productions are Pinocchio and Amleto o le conseguenze della pieta` filiale. Same year, Alessandro, his only 170

son born; 1963, theater closed by authorities; 1964, son, in care of grandparents in Florence, dies; 1966, wrote his only novel, Nostra Signora dei Turchi, subsequently staged twice and made into a film; 1967–1968, returns to underground theater at Teatro Beat 72 with new version of Amleto; 1967, plays Creon in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film, Edipo re, and begins a relationship with actress Lydia Mancinelli; 1968, opens Teatro Carmelo Bene in Rome with Arden of Feversham, but theater lasts only six months; 1968–1973, abandons theater for cinema; 1972, publishes L’orecchio mancante, an attack on his critics; 1973, return to stage, but now playing in main theaters, concert halls and opera houses; 1977, first appearance on television with poetry readings; 1979, relationship with Mancinelli ends violently; 1981, reads Dante’s Comedia from Asinelli Tower in Bologna to commemorate victims of railway station terrorist bombing; 1982, marries ex-Miss Italy, Raffaella Baracchi, by whom he has a daughter, Salome`, with her, too, there are reported episodes of violence; 1983, publishes autobiography, Sono apparso alla madonna; 1988, appointed director of drama at Venice’s Biennale: suffers first heart attack due to excessive drinking and drug abuse; 1990, his association with the Biennale ends in a welter of legal cases brought by either side: Bene received deferred sentence of more than two years imprisonment; 1994, Hamlet Suite in Roman Arena in Verona. 16 March, 2002, dies of heart attack. JOSEPH FARRELL Selected Works Collections Opere, Milan: Bompiani, 1995.

Plays Spettacolo-concerto Majakovskij (produced 1960). Lo strano caso del dottor Jekyll e del signor Hyde (produced 1961). Tre atti unici (produced 1961). Gregorio: Cabaret dell’800 (produced 1961). Pinocchio (produced 1961); as Pinocchio e Proposte per il teatro, 1964. Amleto (produced 1961; 1974). Cristo ‘63 (produced 1963). Edoardo II (produced 1963). I Polacchi (Ubu Roi) (produced 1963). Addio porco (produced 1963). Salome` (produced 1964). La storia di Sawney Bean (produced 1964). Manon (produced 1964). Faust o Margherita (produced 1966). Pinocchio ‘66 (produced 1966). Il rosa e il nero (produced 1966), 1979.

SEM BENELLI Nostra signora dei Turchi (produced 1966). Amleto o le conseguenze della pieta` filiale (produced 1967). Arden of Feversham (produced 1967), 1967. Don Chisciotte (produced 1968). Amleto (produced 1974). S.A.D.E. ovvero libertinaggio e decadenza del complesso bandistico della gendarmeria salentina (produced 1974), 1976. Romeo e Giulietta (Storia di W. Shakespeare) (produced 1976). Riccardo III (produced 1977), 1995. Otello, o la deficienza della donna (produced 1979), 1981. Manfred (produced 1979), 1980. Pinocchio (produced 1981). Macbeth (produced 1983), 1995. L’Adelchi di A. Manzoni in forma di concerto (produced 1984); as L’Adelchi o della volgarita` della politica, 1984. Lorenzaccio al di la` di Musset e Benedetto Varchi (produced 1986), 1986. Hommelette for Hamlet, operetta inqualificabile da J. Laforgue (produced 1987). Pentesilea (produced 1990), 1995. Hamlet Suite (produced 1994), 1995.

Films Ventriloquio, 1967. Hermitage, 1968. Nostra Signora dei Turchi, 1968. Capricci, 1969. Don Giovanni, 1970. Salome`, 1972. Un Amleto di meno, 1973.

Fiction Nostra Signora dei Turchi, 1966. Credito italiano V.E.R.D.I., 1967.

Other L’orecchio mancante, 1972. La voce di Narciso, 1982. Sono apparso alla Madonna, 1983. Il teatro senza spettacolo, 1990. ‘‘La ricerca teatrale nella rappresentazione dello stato, o dello spettacolo del fantasma prima e dopo Carmelo Bene,’’ in La ricerca impossibile, Biennale ‘89 (with critical essays by other writers), 1990. Vulnerabile invulnerabilita` e necrofilia in Achille, 1994.

Further Reading Bartalotta, Gianfranco (editor), Carmelo Bene e Shakespeare, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Bene, Carmelo, and Giancarlo Dotto, Vita di Carmelo Bene, Milan: Bompiani, 1998. Brunello, Yuri, ‘‘Carmelo Bene tra espressione e contemplazione: appunti su un teatro della presenza e della crisi,’’ in L’asino di B., 6–7 (November, 2002): 44–88. Flaiano, Ennio, Lo spettatore addormentato, Milan: Rizzoli, 1983. Giacche`, Piergiorgio, Carmelo Bene: Antropologia di una macchina attoriale, Milan: Bompiani, 1997. Grande, Maurizio (editor), Carmelo Bene: Il circuito barocco, special issue, Bianco e Nero, 24, nos. 11–12 (1973). Puppa, Paolo, Teatro e spettacolo nel secondo novecento, 6th ed., Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004. Quadri, Franco, Il teatro degli anni settanta: Tradizione e ricerca, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Saba, Cosetta, Carmelo Bene, Florence: Il Castoro, 1999. Tessari, Roberto, Pinocchio: ‘‘Summa atheologica’’ di Carmelo Bene, Florence: Libero Scambio, 1982.

SEM BENELLI (1877–1949) ‘‘Academician of no Academy, conferred upon with no decoration. Pontifex Maximus of neither church, nor monastery, nor conventicle’’: Few critics in the twentieth century subscribed to Vicenzo Errante’s emphatic albeit legitimate appraisal of Sem Benelli’s role in modern Italian theater: ‘‘He had fought to transfigure the Italian entertainment into Italian Theatre and the Italian Theatre into a Temple of paramount poetry’’ (Orazione commemorativa di Sem Benelli, 1953). Most critics in fact were hostile to his work, considered him unreadable, and remorselessly mocked his tragic verse. As early as 1916 Giovanni Papini tore him to pieces

in an almost resentful way: Sem Benelli is ‘‘il cenciaiolo della letteratura drammatica’’ (the ragman of dramatic literature) (Stroncature, 1916). And Ennio Flaiano in 1940 sensed ‘‘un’anima di piombo’’ (a lead soul) in his work (I vezzi di Sem Benelli, 1940). In the postwar period, a reaction set in against an artificial and decadent literary style. Critical distaste for what was considered to be the worst D’Annunzio style, a style linked (mostly wrongly) to Fascist bombast, ended up jeopardizing the reception of Benelli’s poetic and especially dramatic works. His theatrical characters, according to 171

SEM BENELLI Antonio Gramsci, were created ‘‘dalla gola canora e dall’anima di legno’’ (from a singing throat and a wooden soul), that is, from the union of song and melodrama, and were said to lack an authentic psychological life (Letteratura e vita nazionale, 1950). In Studi sul teatro contemporaneo (1923), the most influential dramatic critic of his time, Adriano Tilgher, complained of Benelli’s work because there were ‘‘fatti quanti ne vogliamo, anche troppi, ma esperienze di vita interiore, no’’ (As many facts as we want, even too many; but no experience of inner life whatsoever). Despite this criticism, Sem Benelli was an authentic and fertile stage craftsman. He enjoyed an early success with his public, both in Italy and internationally. His earnings allowed him to build himself a castle in Switzerland. The recent rediscovery (1973) by Carmelo Bene of La cena delle beffe (The Supper of Practical Jokers, 1909), Benelli’s most famous theater work, has led to a reconsideration of his poetic style now also seen as evoking a dizzying emptiness that reflects a horror of the inorganic, as Umberto Artioli put it (‘‘Quella risibile escrescenza dell’umano,’’ 1988). Notwithstanding these revisionary readings of his work, it must be said that Benelli’s wavering between Fascism and anti-Fascism, between fervent interventionism and journalistic disillusion did not help secure his identity as a national writer, someone capable of creating a poetic drama, one free from retrospective longing, in the wake of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s legacy. Among his first works is the intimate and autobiographical Tignola (The Moth, 1908), a comedy first performed in Genua on 10 February 1908. Its protagonist is a bookshop assistant who is unable to love. In this play, according to Carla Apollonio, the author’s lyrical vein, which coexisted with the other more external forms that were soon to prevail, is revealed in grey tones of painful defeat (‘‘Sem Benelli,’’ 1987). Benelli’s first unhoped-for triumphant success arrived in the evening of 16 April 1909 at Rome’s Teatro Argentina. Between Tignola and Cena delle beffe, Benelli’s lyrical vein develops into a project for poetic theater. It was a theater based on tragedy and aimed at connecting fantasy with reality (teatro di poesia), in opposition to the predominant theatrical vogue for life-likeness (teatro di vita), typical of the bourgeois and veristic literature, which was mainly imported from France. In reviewing the play, Gramsci spoke of La cena delle beffe as a ‘‘castelletto di carta pesta e di stucco cinquecentesco’’ (tiny castle made of papier-mache´ and sixteenth century stucco) (Letteratura e vita 172

nazionale, 1950). The play was adapted from ‘‘Le cene,’’ a novella by Antonio Francesco Grazzini, known as Il Lasca, set in Renaissance Florence. It was inspired by a historical taste that quickly turned into lasting fashion, at least until the 1930s. As a matter of fact, dealing with the horrific revenge of Gianetto on his two brothers, this drama at once became a big international success, attracting the talent of great actors: Sarah Bernhardt performed it in France in Jean Richepin’s adaptation, playing the male role of Gianetto; Ida Roland in Germany; John, Lionel and Ethel Barrymore in numerous performances in the United States. Benelli envisaged a theater of popular poetry that can be technically characterized as dramatic poetry competing with figurative arts; a kind of poetry in which the ‘‘sound’’ must overrule and be recipient of colour. Above all, Benelli’s dramatic style was based on the conception of an easy, almost airy but at the same time cultivated verse, which was unmistakably his own. His verse tended to simulate a simple conversational prose with colloquial verisimilitude. Benelli complemented this conversational style with a skillful handling of dramatic action. The following pie`ces in verses were all warmly welcomed by the public: L’amore dei tre re (The Love of Three Kings), a lyrical drama with music by Italo Montemezzi taking place in the Middle Ages, was first performed in Rome in 1910. Il mantellaccio (The Ugly Cloak) was performed at the same time in Rome and Turin in 1911, as was Rosmunda (1912), which was staged in Milan by the so-called ‘‘Benellian’’ company starring Irma Gramatica and Giulio Tempesti. La Gorgona (Gorgon, 1913) followed, in direct competition with D’Annunzio’s La nave; and after that Le nozze dei Centauri (The Centaurs Wedding, 1915), staged in Turin by Ermete Novelli with Lyda Borelli. Benelli seemed to changed on his return from the war. This change can be seen beginning with Ali (Wings, 1921), through Con le stelle (With the Stars, 1927), Eroi (Heroes, 1931), a one-act war drama, Madre Regina (Queen Mother, 1931), a revolutionary one-act drama, and concluding in his last prose dramas, from Il ragno (The Spider, 1935), to Paura (Fear, 1947), which are dominated by gloomy pessimism and polemical verbal harshness. Benelli was now making his own theater an instrument of social and historical conceptions. The theme of Adam’s fall and of the loss of Eden, which was present in his previous dramas, and the grip of passions were the subjects of his last

SEM BENELLI theater works. Echoes of these concerns are found in his Ethiopian war reporting Io in Affrica (Africa and Me, 1936–1937), and Schiavitu` (Slavery, 1945), in which he is highly critical of the Fascist regime. As of this writing, there exists no available modern edition of Sem Benelli’s poetry and theater works.

Adamo ed Eva, 1932. Caterina Sforza, 1934. Il ragno, 1935. L’elefante, 1937. L’orchidea, 1938. La festa, 1940. Paura, 1947. Oro vergine, 1949.

Biography

Libretti

Born in Filettole, in the province of Prato, on 10 August 1877. Studied at the Scolopi Fathers School in Florence. After his father’s death (1895) worked as a salesman in a furniture shop and then as bookshop clerk. Also worked at Marzocco’s editorial office and then for the La rassegna internazionale, living between Rome and Milan. Wrote sport articles for the magazine Verde azzurro. 1905–1907, coeditor, with F. T. Marinetti and Ponti, of the review Poesia, rassegna internazionale multilingue. Volunteered for World War I and was decorated. Initially a Fascist, but after the murder of Socialist Giacomo Matteotti, turned anti-Fascist. In 1925, subscribed to Benedetto Croce’s countermanifesto, as an answer to the Fascist intelligentsia. Volunteered for the war in Ethiopia, and during World War II sought shelter in Switzerland. Died in Zoagli (Genova), on 18 December 1949. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Plays La morale di Casanova, 1906 (with Giulio De Frenzi). Tignola, 1908. La maschera di Bruto, 1908. La cena delle beffe, 1909, as The Supper of Practical Jokers, adapted into English verse by Ada Sterling, 1919, as The Jest, translated by Marjorie Bowen, 1922; as The Jest, new English adaptation by Sem Benelli and Reuss Emerson, 1926. L’amore dei tre re, 1910; 1932, as The Love of the Three Kings, translated by Howard M. Jones in Chief Contemporary Dramatists, edited by T.H. Dickinson, 1930. Il mantellaccio, 1911. Rosmunda, 1912. La Gorgona, 1913. Le nozze dei Centauri, 1915. Ali, 1921. L’arzigogolo, 1922. La santa primavera, 1923. L’amorosa tragedia, 1925. Il vezzo di perle, 1926. Con le stelle, 1927. Orfeo e Proserpina, 1929. Fiorenza, 1930. Eroi, 1931. Madre Regina, 1931.

L’amore dei tre re, 1913, music of Italo Montemezzi, English version by R. H. Elkin. La cena delle beffe, 1926; 1934, music of Umberto Giordano; as The Jester’s Supper, English version by K.H.B. de Jaffa, 1925. Rosmunda, 1926, music of Erardo Trentinaglia. Incantesimo, 1932, music of Italo Montemezzi.

Nonfiction Ricordo di Giovanni Pascoli, 1913. Parole di battaglia, 1918. Il Sauro, 1919. Io in Affrica, 1936–1937. La mia leggenda, 1939. Schiavitu`, 1945.

Poetry ‘‘Un figlio dei tempi,’’ 1905. ‘‘L’altare,’’ 1916. ‘‘La passione d’Italia,’’ edited by P. Arcari, 1918. ‘‘Notte sul Golfo dei Poeti,’’ 1919.

Further Reading Antonucci, Giovanni, Storia del teatro italiano del Novecento, Rome: Studium, 1986. Apollonio, Carla, ‘‘Sem Benelli,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1987. Artioli, Umberto, ‘‘Quella risibile escrescenza dell’umano. La Cena di Bene: l’artificio dell’affermar negando,’’ in Il castello di Elsinore, 3 (1988): 122–129. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, La vita e il libro: Terza serie, Turin: Bocca, 1913. Cecchi, Emilio, Studi critici, Ancona: Puccini, 1912. Errante, Vincenzo, Orazione commemorativa di Sem Benelli, Milan: Ariel, 1953. Flaiano, Ennio, ‘‘I vezzi di Sem Benelli’’ (1940), in Lo spettatore addormentato, edited by Emma Giammattei and Fausta Bernobini, Milan: Rizzoli, 1983. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale (1950), Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971. Grande, Maurizio, La lettera mancata: Uno studio su La cena delle beffe di Carmelo Bene, Rome: Marchesi, 1988. Marotti, Ferruccio, ‘‘Sem Benelli,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 8, Rome: Treccani, 1966. Palazzi, Fernando, Sem Benelli: Studio biografico-critico, Ancona: Puccini, 1913. Papini, Giovanni, Stroncature (1916), Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. ´ poPersonne´, Luigi Maria, Il teatro italiano della ‘‘Belle E que’’: Saggi e studi, Florence: Olschki, 1972. Picchi, Arnaldo, ‘‘In margine alla Cena delle beffe di Sem Benelli,’’ in Quindi (November 1989): 2–18.

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SEM BENELLI Stassi, Maria Gabriella, ‘‘Tra sogno e realta`: un’ipotesi di teatro,’’ in La letteratura in scena: Il teatro del Novecento, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1985.

Tessari, Roberto, Teatro italiano del Novecento: Fenomenologie e strutture 1906–1976, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Tilgher, Adriano, Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, Rome: Libreria di scienze e lettere, 1923.

PAOLO BENI (1552/53–1625) ‘‘Concerning the concepts that Aristotle uses in his definition... Paolo Beni distinguishes up to 12 or 15 differing opinions that he then refutes before giving us his own.’’ With these words the French dramatist Pierre Corneille described Paolo Beni, in his Discours de la trage´die (1660), as the last great commentator on Aristotle’s Poetics. Beni’s In Aristotelis Poeticam commentarii (Commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics, 1613) is not only a final summing-up of a long interpretative tradition of which he was surely the last exponent, but also the first of the modern era. After studying philosophy and theology, Beni was suddenly called to the University of Padua in November 1599 to take up the chair of humanities left vacant on the death of Antonio Riccoboni (1541–1599), the last Italian master of classical philology. Still largely unknown, Beni accepted the position and conscientiously assumed his role. In his academic teaching, he expressed his firm belief in the renewal of contemporary literature, and he actively intervened in the debate on university reform. Evidence of these intense activities remains in his numerous unpublished works. In Padua, he became immediately involved in a number of violent literary controversies. In this context, he maintained a revisionist position; however, while he was personally inclined to the modern, he was able to engage in a fruitful way with the tradition. In his Risposta alle considerazioni o dubbi dell’Ecc.mo Sig. Dottor Malacreta accademico ardito sopra il Pastor Fido (Reply to the Considerations or Doubts of the Most Excellent Doctor Malacreta about the Pastor Fido, 1600), he adopted a position in favor of Battista Guarini and the legitimacy of his new model of tragicomedy, although not without some ambiguity. He further clarified his opinion in the Discorso nel qual si dichiarano e stabiliscono molte cose pertinenti alla Risposta (Discourse in Which Are Declared and 174

Established Several Things Relating to the Reply, 1600), probably spurred on by Guarini himself. In his Disputatio in qua ostenditur praestare comoediam atque tragoediam metrorum vinculis solvere (Discourse in Which Comedy Is Demonstrated to Be a Superior Genre, and Tragedy Is Freed of the Bondage of Meter, 1600), Beni promoted the use of prose in tragedy, and discussed the established custom of actors who delivered verses in performances by going beyond the metrical breaks. He thus demonstrated his increasing openness to theatrical practice as well as to theory. In 1612, Beni published the polemical treatise Anticrusca, overo Paragone dell’italiana lingua (The Counter-Crusca, or Comparison of the Italian Language), which argued against the canonization of Giovanni Boccaccio as a linguistic model in the dictionary of the Accademia della Crusca published that same year. He vehemently opposed the prevailing use of obsolete, old-fashioned normative practices in current speech and poetry, and voiced an open dislike for Dante that anticipated the more general reaction of the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The Florentines resentfully replied with similarly pointed and at times insulting words. In response, Paolo Beni wrote another work under cover of a pseudonym: Il Cavalcanti overo la difesa dell’Anticrusca di Michelangelo Fonte (The Cavalcanti, or the Defense of the Counter-Crusca by Michelangelo Fonte, 1614), the title of which referred to the exiled Tuscan humanist Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (1503–1562), who differed from the Florentine academic tradition because of his antipurist position. Further evidence of Beni’s activities in Padua is found in a letter by Giambattista Manso (1569?–1645), sent from Naples in March 1610. Here Beni is described in his ‘‘unofficial’’ role as the purveyor of the most recent lunar discoveries of Galileo Galilei, and as an astute witness to the

PAOLO BENI impact that the discovery and installation of the telescope in 1609 had on the Italian imagination. But Beni’s critical thought is more clearly in evidence in his most substantial work, the exegesis of Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580) that argued in favor of contemporary literature. In 1616, he personally financed the publication of Il Goffredo ovvero Gerusalemme liberata col commento (The Goffredo, or Jerusalem Delivered), his extensive commentary on Tasso’s poem. This work had been preceded by the publication in 1607 of his Comparatione di Torquato Tasso con Homero e Virgilio (Comparison of Torquato Tasso with Homer and Virgil), a work composed of seven discourses, subsequently increased to 10 in the 1612 edition. Tasso’s poem, which Beni considers as a unified whole, is critically analyzed using the principal rhetorical categories of inventio and dispositio. Subsequently, his wide-ranging commentary in Il Goffredo ovvero Gerusalemme liberata col commento focused mainly on the category of elocutio. While Tasso discusses the nature of his heroic poem in terms of its distance from the ‘‘romance’’ registers of the ‘‘heroic’’ material of Ludovico Ariosto’s age, Beni considers it in terms of the opposition between ‘‘ancient’’ and ‘‘modern.’’ His support of Tasso’s poetic style thus reinforces the identity of the poetic style of Northern Italy, as opposed to that of Florence. However, as a result the vindication of the category of the ‘‘modern’’ is accompanied for the first time by a clear devaluation of the ‘‘ancient,’’ including the poetry of Homer and Virgil. This view of modernity reflects, as Pierantonio Frare has remarked, ‘‘the idea of continuous improvement that extends from the sciences to language and the arts’’ (‘‘La ‘nuova critica’ della meravigliosa acutezza,’’ 1997). However, this defense of the modern was not clear-cut and unequivocal. In his commentary on Aristotle’s works, Beni carefully separates authority and reason, making Aristotle an academic polemicist ante litteram, Plato’s rival and Homer’s partisan. As Paul B. Diffley explains in his 1988 biography of the author, ‘‘while Beni was clearly a Modern in his linguistic works, his instinct in the commentary on the Poetics, as elsewhere in his Latin commentaries, is to put the old before the new.’’

Biography Born in Gubbio in 1552 or 1553, day and month unknown; he had four brothers and two sisters. Against the will of his father, Francesco, who

wanted him to become a lawyer, studied at the Collegio Germanico in Rome and after an unhappy period of legal studies in Perugia, he decided to study philosophy and theology in Bologna, 1566, and then at the University of Padua, 1573, where he joined the Accademia degli Animosi, sponsored by the abbot Ascanio Martinengo, and where he possibly met Torquato Tasso for the first time. He took his degree in theology and philosophy and entered into the service of Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo in Rome and then of Francesco Maria II, duke of Urbino. He entered the Jesuit Order, leaving it in 1596, probably because of theological disagreements, remaining, however, a member of the secular clergy. Until 1593 he was reader of theology in Perugia. From 1594, he was reader of philosophy at the Universita` La Sapienza in Rome, at the invitation of Pope Clemente VIII. In 1600, he was appointed to the chair of humanities at the University of Padua. He retired from teaching in 1623 and died in Padua on 12 February 1625. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Essays Risposta alle considerazioni o dubbi dell’Ecc.mo Sig. Dottor Malacreta accademico ardito sopra il Pastor Fido, 1600. Discorso nel qual si dichiarano e stabiliscono molte cose pertinenti alla Risposta, 1600. Disputatio in qua ostenditur praestare comoediam atque tragoediam metrorum vinculis solvere, 1600. Comparatione di Homero, Virgilio e Torquato, 1607; rev. 1612. De historia libri quatuor, 1611. Anticrusca, overo Paragone dell’italiana lingua, 1612. Orationes quinquaginta, 1613. Il Cavalcanti overo la difesa dell’Anticrusca di Michelangelo Fonte, 1614. In Aristotelis Poeticam commentarii, 1614; rev. 1622; rev. 1625. Il Goffredo ovvero Gerusalemme liberata col commento, 1616. Commentarii in Aristotelis libros Rhetoricorum, 2 vols., 1624–1625. L’Anticrusca, parte II, III, IV, edited by Gino Casagrande, 1982.

Other Rime, 1614.

Further Reading Corneille, Pierre, Discours de la trage´die, in Oeuvres comple`tes, edited by Andre´ Stegmann, Paris: Seuil, 1963.

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PAOLO BENI Dell’Aquila, Giulia, ‘‘Sulle Rime varie di Paolo Beni,’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 14, nos. 1–3 (1996): 97–118. Dell’Aquila, Michele, La polemica anticruscante di Paolo Beni, Bari: Adriatica, 1970. Diffley, Paul Brian, Paolo Beni. A Biographical and Critical Study, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Frare, Pierantonio, ‘‘La ‘nuova critica’ della meravigliosa acutezza,’’ in Storia della critica letteraria in Italia, edited by Giorgio Baroni, Turin: UTET, 1997. Landoni, Elena, ‘‘A proposito della vita e delle opere di Paolo Beni (1552–1625),’’ in Rendiconti dell’Istituto lombardo, 113 (1979): 27–34.

Martiradonna, Maricla, ‘‘Nuovi paradigmi dell’ ‘Heroico’ nella Comparatione di Paolo Beni,’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 14, nos. 1–3 (1996): 77–95. Sangalli, Maurizio, ‘‘Di Paolo Beni e di una riforma dello studio di Padova (1619),’’ in Studi Veneziani, 42 (2001): 57–134. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘‘Il brunir de la corazza’: Beni commenta Tasso (1616),’’ in Philo-logica, 4 (1993): 39–69. Tomassini, Stefano, L’ ‘‘Heroico,’’ ad esempio. Tasso idea del poema nell’opera di Paolo Beni, Turin: Genesi, 1994. Villa, Edoardo, ‘‘La ‘Comparatione’ di Paolo Beni,’’ in Italianistica, 24, nos. 2–3, (1995): 649–658.

ROBERTO BENIGNI (1952–) Although a fixture in Italian popular culture on television and in film since the late 1970s, Tuscan comedian actor and director Roberto Benigni gained international renown when his film La vita e` bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997) won three Academy Awards, one of which was for best actor, the first ever bestowed for a non-English speaking role. Benigni is part of a generation that directly experienced the waning of the traditional peasant life by the industrialization underway in Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s. At this time, the Benigni family left their agricultural community to search for work in the nearby city of Prato. As a child, Benigni enjoyed rhyming contests and linguistic games in the tradition of Tuscan improvisational poetry. Benigni’s verbal abilities developed through his participation in country festivals with improvising poets, the so-called poeti a braccio who sang octets in the old regional tradition in a display of wit and verbal acrobatics. Despite their origins in a popular setting, the poeti a braccio are quite sophisticated and their performances are the fruit of careful and detailed preparation including careful study of poets such as Ludovico Ariosto and Dante in order to gain familiarity with the hendecasyllable meter. After Benigni finished middle school, his parents enrolled him in a Jesuit college in Florence; he might very well have completed religious training and become a priest but his seminary shut down due to the devastating flooding of the Arno River in 1966. Benigni, who had plans to attend the university, pursued instead a career as a performer. 176

He became a fan of the Italian pop star Adriano Celentano and even attempted to join Celentano’s production Clan in Milan. In the early 1970s, Benigni went to Rome where he entered the milieu of the avant-garde theater. He used this period to hone his performing skills and fill in the gaps of his formal education by reading voraciously and attending screenings at cinema clubs. The encounter of Benigni’s heritage of oral poetry and the free-form experimentation of counterculture theater eventually resulted in the monologue Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia (Cioni Son of Gaspare and the Late Giulia, 1975). The piece, cowritten with Giuseppe Bertolucci, combines stories and voices from Benigni’s rural Tuscan past with the influences of the avant-garde theater and his own readings, particularly Dostoevski and Rabelais. Benigni’s performance was an archaic, primitive explosion of coarse invective that perhaps needed the climate of avant-garde experimentation to come to fruition. Benigni’s first television shows, Onda libera (Free Wave, 1976–1977) and Vita da Cioni (Cioni’s Dog Life, 1978), were based on his foul-mouthed Tuscan country bumpkin character Mario Cioni taken from his early monologue. Benigni also starred in an unsuccessful cinematic adaptation of Cioni Mario entitled Berlinguer ti voglio bene (Berlinguer I Love You, 1977), directed by Giuseppe Bertolucci. During the late 1970s, he played small roles in films by Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Ferreri, Costas Gravas, and eventually appeared in Renzo Arbore’s popular television show L’altra domenica (1978–1979). This landed

ROBERTO BENIGNI him a role as a costar in Arbore’s Il pap’occhio (Pope in Your Eye, 1980), an example of the Italian commercial cinema of the time featuring television-based performers. Then came his association with Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), the great theorist and storyteller of the neorealist style, the art of ‘‘naked reality,’’ who could endow the most contrived events with extraordinary emotions. In his twilight years, Zavattini was preparing what was to be his last film, La verita`aa (The Truth, 1983), for which he wanted Benigni in the starring role. Although Zavattini eventually decided to cast himself in the film, the period that Benigni spent with the aging master was a fundamental influence on his later work in terms of its fabulist approach and its stylized imagery, blending realistic elements with moments of sheer fantasy. In the early 1980s, Benigni costarred in Il minestrone (1981), a film directed by Sergio Citti, who had been, with his brother Franco, a faithful follower and friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975). Citti did not share Pasolini’s tragic sense of life, and his ability to shape farcical elements in an intriguing narrative secured him a position among the leading directors of comedy. For Il minestrone, he had enlisted as his screenwriter Vincenzo Cerami, who would exercise a defining influence on Benigni’s artistic career. After appearing in Giuseppe Bertolucci’s documentary of his national stage tour Tuttobenigni (1983), and in a collection of comedy sketches directed by Arbore, F.F.S.S. (1983), Benigni tried his own hand at directing with Tu mi turbi (You Bother Me, 1983), working with his future wife and costar in all of his films, the classically trained actress Nicoletta Braschi. Then followed Non ci resta che piangere (Nothing Left to Do But Cry, 1984), codirected with the gifted Neapolitan actor Massimo Troisi (1954–1994). The film is a fabulist comedy, in which the pair travels back in time to the fifteenth century and where the topical satire of the 1980s is replaced by a sensitive view of the individual’s relationship to society. After meeting Jim Jarmusch at a film festival, Benigni would star in Jarmusch’s 1986 films Down by Law and Coffee and Cigarettes, as well as in the Roman episode of Night on Earth (1992). Despite their differences in background and overall creative practices the Tuscan actor and the Ohio-born independent filmmaker shared an awareness of tragicomic human weaknesses; and perhaps Benigni’s quintessential performances are to be found in Jarmusch’s films and, most importantly, in Federico Fellini’s 1989 La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon).

Il piccolo diavolo (The Little Devil, 1988) was completed with Vincenzo Cerami as scriptwriter. It is the first in a series of films in which the Benigni/Cerami collaboration adjusts the persona originated in the Cioni monologue to a variety of situations for comic effect, in this specific case as a devil tormenting a priest played by Walter Matthau. In the 1990s, Benigni directed himself in a double role as an uncanny bus driver/mafia boss in Johnny Stecchino (1991) and then as an urban scrounger mistaken for a serial killer in Il mostro (The Monster, 1994). Both films held all-time record profits: Johnny Stecchino outdid Robin Hood and Terminator II at the box office; Il mostro outdrew The Lion King and Forrest Gump. Due to the success of the genre, 44% of the Italian films produced in that period were comedies. Benigni’s next film with Cerami, La vita e` bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), broke out of the international art house circuit to gain the sort of popular audience that he already enjoyed in Italy. The film, however, was steeped in controversy for Benigni’s casting of his comic persona as an Italian Jew deported to the concentration camps during World War II. In the 1990s, the Jewish experience had become a prominent issue in Italy, Benigni (who is not Jewish) immersed himself in the works of Primo Levi. The idea grew out of a personal experience: Benigni’s father was sent to a German labor camp in 1943. What shaped the film was the way his father recounted his experience, with a mixture of chilling and funny details. Benigni plays Guido, a free-spirited bookseller who lives in Arezzo. He pursues Dora, a charming schoolteacher, whom he eventually marries. Halfway through the film, Guido is deported with Dora and his 5-year-old son Giosue` to a German camp. In order to shelter the boy from the horrific reality, he concocts an elaborate game of deception, which will eventually save Giosue`’s life. Benigni’s next film, Pinocchio (Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio, 2002), an adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s popular children’s book, was initially scheduled to be made by Federico Fellini. It combines cultural sophistication with mainstream appeal. Rather well-received in Italy, Pinocchio sharply failed during its North American release. In another film, La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow, 2005), Benigni plays a poet struggling with themes of love and war in settings including contemporary Iraq. Besides working in the cinema, Benigni has also staged numerous public performances, particularly of selected cantos of Dante’s Comedia, including 177

ROBERTO BENIGNI L’ultimo del paradiso (2002) in which he commented Paradiso XXXIII in a nationally televised event.

Biography Born on October 27, 1952 in Misericordia (Arezzo), an agricultural community; attended Jesuit college in Florence, 1966; attended Istituto Commerciale Datini in Prato, 1966; moved to Rome, 1972; performed one-man show as Cioni in Rome, 1975; Cioni Mario made into film Berlinguer ti voglio bene by Giuseppe Bertolucci, 1977; married actress Nicoletta Braschi, 1991; film La vita e` bella won three Oscars, 1998. CARLO CELLI Selected Works Theater Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia, 1975. Tuttobenigni, 1983. Lectura Dantis, 1990. Tuttobenigni 95/96, 1995. L’ultimo del paradiso, 2002.

Acting Roles Berlinguer ti voglio bene, 1977. I giorni cantati, 1979. Letti selvaggi, 1979. La luna (Luna), 1979. Chiedo asilo, 1979. Il pap’occhio, 1980. Il minestrone, 1981. F.F.S.S. ovvero che mi hai portato a fare sopra Posillipo se non mi vuoi piu bene?, 1983. Tuttobenigni, 1986. Down by Law, 1986. Coffee and Cigarettes, 1986. La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon), 1989. Night on Earth (Episode - Rome), 1992. Son of the Pink Panther, 1993. Aste´rix et Obe´lix contre Ce´sar, 1999.

Films Tu mi turbi, 1983. Non ci resta che piangere, 1984. Il piccolo diavolo, 1988. Johnny Stecchino, 1991. Il mostro, 1994. La vita e` bella (Life is Beautiful), 1997. Pinocchio (Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio), 2002. La tigre e la neve (The Tiger and the Snow), 2005.

Screenplays Tuttobenigni (with Giuseppe Bertolucci), Rome: Theoria, 1992. E l’alluce fu monologhi e gag, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. La vita e` bella (with Vincenzo Cerami), Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Io un po’ Pinocchio, Florence: Giunti, 2002.

Further Reading Ambrogi, Silvano, Quando Benigni ruppe il video i primi testi televisivi di Roberto Benigni, Turin: Nuova ERI, 1992. Borsatti, Cristina, Roberto Benigni, Milan: Il Castoro, 2001. Bullaro, Grace Russo (editor), Beyond ‘‘Life Is Beautiful’’: Comedy and Tragedy in the Cinema of Roberto Benigni, Leicester, UK: Troubador Publishing, 2005. Celli, Carlo, The Divine Comic: The Cinema of Roberto Benigni, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001. Cosentino, Andrea, La scena dell’osceno. Alle radici della drammaturgia di Roberto Benigni, Rome: Oradek, 1998. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘The Seriousness of Humor in Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful,’’ in After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore-London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Martinelli, Massimo, Carla Nassini, and Fulvio Wetzel, Benigni Roberto di Luigi fu Remigio, Milan: Leonardo Arte, 1997. Masi, Stefano, Roberto Benigni ‘‘Superstar,’’ Rome: Gremese, 1999. Parigi, Stefania, Roberto Benigni, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1988. Simonelli, Giorgio, and Gaetano Tramontana, Datemi un Nobel! L’opera comica di Roberto Benigni, Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano, 1998.

CATERINA BENINCASA See Catherine of Siena

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STEFANO BENNI (1947–) Stefano Benni began his literary career in 1976 with a collection of comic short stories, Bar Sport. Like its companion volumes, Bar Sport 2000 (1997) and the surrealist stories of Il bar sotto il mare (The Bar Beneath the Sea, 1987), this book subordinates plot to descriptions of curious and unusual characters. Since then, Benni has expanded his range of literary production to include novels, plays, poetry, as well as nonfiction, in particular journalistic writing, the genre he had practiced before devoting himself to fiction. In fact, to this day Benni is a regular contributor to La repubblica, Il manifesto, and other periodicals. In spite of the multifaceted nature of his writing, all of Benni’s works betray an underlying pessimism about contemporary society, which he believes is preoccupied by a consumerism encouraged by the mass media and justified as a mode of progress. In his first novel, Terra! (Terra!, 1983) he explores the philosophical possibilities of science fiction, and in L’ultima lacrima (The Last Tear, 1994) he satirizes technological exuberance. Consumerism leads to populism and goes hand in hand with political opportunism, and in this context political leaders soon abandon the principles of democracy and install authoritarian regimes. In this sense, Benni’s earlier texts seem to be visionary insofar as they announce the rise of media mogul Silvio Berlusconi in Italian politics. In the dystopian future of novels such as Elianto (1996), holding a deviant opinion is no longer acceptable and leads to exclusion, confinement and other forms of punishment. The novel’s repeated slogan, ‘‘Siate Maggioranza’’ (Be the Majority), is obviously meant to recall ‘‘Think majority,’’ the political slogan of 1984, George Orwell’s vision of a terrifying future. While it takes place in a futuristic world, Elianto is easily recognizable as a darkly parodic version of Western society and in particular of Italy, here called Tristalia. Benni stubbornly rejects the protocols of the realist novel, appropriating tropes and situations from low literary genres ranging from science fiction to fantasy, as well as from popular culture, including television and pop music. Some recurrent patterns can be detected in Benni’s novels. The inhabitants of his fictional worlds can be fantastic

creatures, such as the metamorphic ghosts of Spiriti (Ghosts, 2000), or fictional characters come to life, as in Achille pie` veloce (Fleet-Footed Achilles, 2003). The young protagonists are assisted by a host of curious characters who are usually endowed with special gifts, like Eliant’s high IQ, the great soccer skills of Memorino, Lucifero and Ali in La compagnia dei celestini (The Fellowship of the Celestinians, 1992) or the incredible powers of Salvo in Spiriti. However, their gifts can make them vulnerable to the totalitarian regimes that want to eliminate them for their deviant nature. The protagonists are always children, usually boys, on a quest to save the world from decay. The outcome of their rebellion is often uncertain, and even the more positive ending of recent works like Saltatempo (Timejumper, 2001) and Achille pie` veloce do not overcome an underlying pessimism. Notwithstanding this pessimism, the dominant tone of Benni’s fiction is comic. A great parodist, Benni is especially amusing in his verbal puns (indeed, character names are often the result of a play on words, as ‘‘Edgar Allan Disney’’ in La compagnia dei celestini). Equally comic is the wordplay issuing from different forms of contamination and multilinguism: Words are constantly contracted or combined with each other; different registers, discourses, and languages (French, Latin, and English) intermingle, often in distorted transcriptions. Benni’s discourse is thus familiar and yet bewildering; it creates both a sense of distance from reality while capturing the complexity of its multiracial and multimedia dimensions. Finally, Benni frequently resorts to a literary device also typical of the comic—combining inventories, repetitions, and lists at various textual levels, a compositional strategy Benni shares with Italo Calvino, from whom he also derives the frequent metatextual interventions of the narrator. Indeed, for all their structural and thematic similarities to popular fiction, Benni’s novels are carefully constructed texts, with a high degree of intertextuality and a complex paratextual apparatus that includes lists of characters, epigraphs, and warnings to the reader. In this sense, Benni is one of the most accomplished representatives of postmodern fiction in Italian literature. 179

STEFANO BENNI

Biography

Plays

Born in Bologna, 12 August 1947. Started his career as a journalist writing for La repubblica, Il manifesto, Panorama, cultural journals (Micromega), humor magazines (Cuore) and others. Scriptwriter and director, Musica per vecchi animali, 1989. Has worked in the theater as a performer of his own and other authors’ works. Organizes seminars and courses on various artistic forms on a regular basis. Since 1999 he has been artistic consultant for the international jazz festival Rumori mediterranei. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Fiction Bar Sport, 1976. Terra!, 1983; as Terra!, translated by Annapaola Cancogni, 1985. I meravigliosi animali di Stranilandia, 1984. Comici spaventati guerrieri, 1986. Il bar sotto il mare, 1987. Baol: una tranquilla notte di regime, 1990. La compagnia dei celestini, 1992. L’ultima lacrima, 1994. Elianto, 1996. Bar Sport 2000, 1997. Spiriti, 2000. Saltatempo, 2001. Achille pie` veloce, 2003. Margherita Dolcevita, 2003.

Teatro, 1999. Teatro 2, 2003.

Nonfiction La tribu` di Moro seduto, 1977. Non siamo Stato noi, 1978. Il Benni furioso, 1979. Spettacoloso, 1981. Il ritorno del Benni furioso, 1986. Leggere, scrivere, disobbedire (with Goffredo Fofi), 1999. Dottor Niu`. Corsivi diabolici per tragedie evitabili, 2001.

Further Reading Boria, Monica, ‘‘Echoes of Counterculture in Stefano Benni’s Humour,’’ in Romance Studies 23, no. 1 (2005): 29–42. La Porta, Filippo, La nuova narrativa italiana. Travestimenti e stili di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995. Paternoster, Annick, ‘‘Terra! di Stefano Benni: Viaggio nella leggerezza cosmica,’’ in Piccole finzioni con importanza: Valori della narrativa italiana contemporanea, edited by Nathalie Roelens and Inge Lanslots, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Perissinotto, Cristina, ‘‘The Pen and the Prophet,’’ in Romance Languages Annual 8 (1996): 287–291. Perissinotto, Cristina, ‘‘Di vincitori, di vinti e d’idee: Fanciulli e filosofia nei romanzi di Stefano Benni,’’ in Romance Languages Annual 9 (1997): 300–304. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo del ritorno. Dal romanzo medio degli anni sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Ward, David, ‘‘Stefano Benni,’’ in Italian Novelists since World War II, 1965–1995, edited by Augustus Pallotta, vol. 196 of The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Prima o poi l’amore arriva,’’ 1981. ‘‘Ballate,’’ 1991. ‘‘Blues in sedici: ballata della citta` dolente,’’ 1998.

ANGELO BEOLCO See Il Ruzzante (Angelo Beolco)

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GIOVANNI BERCHET

GIOVANNI BERCHET (1783–1851) The figure and works of Giovanni Berchet fully represent Italian Romanticism for their theoretical commitment, their polemical tendencies, and the undeniable evocative energy present in his poetry. His production is articulated on the one hand through theoretical writings and articles that appeared in the Milanese periodical Il conciliatore, and on the other through compositions in verse varying in nature. Critically speaking, his most significant is Sul ‘‘Cacciatore feroce’’ e sulla ‘‘Eleonora’’ di Goffredo Augusto Bu¨rger. Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (On the ‘‘Ferocious Hunter’’ and ‘‘Eleonora’’ by Gottfried August Bu¨rger: A Semi-Serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son, 1816), which, although it cannot be considered a complete expression of his poetics, outlined the main principles and, above all, laid the foundations of Italian Romantic thought. Writing in the wake of the impressions raised by Madame de Stae¨l’s article ‘‘Sulla maniera e l’utilita` delle traduzioni’’ (On The Manner and Use of Translations), which appeared in 1816 in the first issue of the Milanese periodical La biblioteca italiana, Berchet clearly distinguished between the poetry of the ancients and that of the moderns, affirming that the poetry of the former was dead since audiences could no longer relate to the themes of mythology. The poetry of the moderns, conversely, must have truth and history as sources, must use a living and spoken language, and must provoke immediate interest. The ancients, however, were not to be ignored: They remained an example to follow, if it were true that Homer and Virgil were considered ‘‘Romantics’’ because they were able to write poetry about subjects that, in their time, were alive in the collective sensibility. The true poet, for Berchet, was the one who faced life with a ‘‘modern’’ soul, rejecting the imitation of the classics: The polemic, then, was not against the ‘‘classics,’’ but against the ‘‘classicists.’’ In the new artistic vision, what predominated was the concept of literature as an instrument for the education of the people, the only true recipient of art. Found at the opposite end of the spectrum were those whom Berchet defined ‘‘Parigini’’ (Parisians) and ‘‘ottentotti’’ (Hottentots): The former, dominated by an excessive refinement, were no longer capable

of abandoning themselves to sentiment; the latter, conversely, lived an existence deprived of the light of the spirit. The fictitious author of Lettera semiseria is a certain Giovanni Grisostomo, a kind of sage (the symbolic name is indicative), who wrote to his son in answer to a question on the usefulness of foreign literature. The adjective ‘‘semiserious’’ is appropriate because Grisostomo, at the end of the letter, jokingly pretended to retract his own affirmations. The satiric pamphlet, which distanced itself from the classical tradition, took on notable importance within Italian literature, which was strongly linked to models from the ancient world. For his stance against an entrenched cultural system, Berchet anticipated in some ways the extremist positions of the Futurist avant-garde a century later. Among his contemporaries, Berchet felt most vividly the need for a renewal of lyric poetry from both a thematic and stylistic point of view. His work in this field has a prevalent patriotic inclination, beginning with the poem ‘‘I profughi di Parga’’ (Parga’s Refugees, 1823), written following an event that shook public opinion: England’s cession of the Greek city of Parga to the Turks. Similarly, in the other long poem ‘‘Fantasie’’ (Fantasies, 1829), he imagined an Italian exile far from his homeland as he remembered its former grandeur, comparing it to the misery of the present. In the collection Romanze (Romances, 1829), the themes were taken from contemporary life and the poems narrated important events: The protagonist of ‘‘Clarina’’ is a Lombard woman who, after having married an Austrian man, realizes with horror that she will be the mother of a child who is an enemy of her homeland; in ‘‘Romito del Cenisio’’ (The Hermit of Mount Cenis), a tourist admires Italy’s beauty but, when he learns that the country is held under foreign domination, he declares that he prefers to these sun-drenched lands the dark, foggy, but free landscapes of his own country; in ‘‘Giulia,’’ the agony of a Lombard mother who watches her son leave as a soldier for Austria is narrated. In order to present these themes in poetry, the author used the meter of the ode and of the canzonetta, but he infused them with a new musicality, utilizing a realistic language that was in tune with the basic themes presented and, above all, 181

GIOVANNI BERCHET made them accessible to a large public. Berchet’s translations, such as Vecchie romanze spagnuole (Old Spanish Romances, 1837), held more than marginal interest and, although not yet sufficiently studied, can be considered one of his most stylistically convincing works. Praised by his contemporaries, Berchet was initially judged exclusively in light of the political and patriotic value of his production. Later, the stylistic and linguistic novelties of his poetry were highlighted. More recently, attention has been focused on the sociological dimension of his work, extolling his profuse commitment in the research for a new audience. Among literary critics, the first to recognize the artistic value of Berchet’s patriotic poetry, detaching it from purely political considerations, was Giosue` Carducci, who lauded its ‘‘nervous versification,’’ ‘‘pictorial precision of the images,’’ and ‘‘substantial agitation of the representation’’ (‘‘Goffredo Mameli,’’ 1937).

Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Marcello Turchi, Naples: Rossi, 1972.

Poetry ‘‘I funerali,’’ 1808. ‘‘Amore,’’ 1809. ‘‘I profughi di Parga,’’ 1823. ‘‘Romanze,’’ 1829. ‘‘Fantasie,’’ 1829. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1830.

Letters Lettere alla marchesa Costanza Arconati, edited by Robert van Nuffel, 2 vols., 1956–1963.

Traduzioni Thomas Gray, Il bardo, 1807. Oliver Goldsmith, Il vicario di Wakefield, 1810. Vecchie romanze spagnuole, 1837.

Essay Sul ‘‘Cacciatore feroce’’ e sulla ‘‘Eleonora’’ di Goffredo Augusto Bu¨rger. Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo, 1816.

Biography Born in Milan on December 23, 1783, the son of Federico, a tradesman of Swiss origin; completed classical studies in Milan and in 1810 entered in the bureaucratic apparatus of the Italian kingdom; from 1814 on, he was in the Austrian administration where he was entrusted with translating duties; took part in the polemic against the classicists, and was among the first supporters in Italy of the Romanticist movement, 1816; between 1818 and 1819 collaborated with Il conciliatore, for which he wrote articles on literature; became a member of the ‘‘Carboneria,’’ 1820, and was involved in the uprisings of 1821 against Austria; was forced to flee first to Switzerland, then to France and finally to London, where he remained until 1829 and where he published his most famous poetic pieces; became tutor in the house of the Marquis Giuseppe Arconati, moving with him to Belgium, France, and Germany; returned to Italy, 1845; participated in the revolts of 1848 in Milan, taking part in the provisory government; at the return of the Austrians, sought refuge in Tuscany and then in Piedmont, relocating definitively in Turin, where he was elected deputy to the Subalpine Parliament as a moderate. Died in Turin, following a serious illness, on December 23, 1851. PAOLO QUAZZOLO See also: Romanticism

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Further Reading Bertelli, Italo, L’itinerario umano e poetico di Giovanni Berchet, Pisa: Giardini, 2005. Cadioli, Alberto, Introduzione a Berchet, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1991. Carducci, Giosue`, ‘‘Goffredo Mameli,’’ in Opere. Edizione nazionale, vol. 18, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1937. D’Ambrosio Mazziotti, Anna Maria, ‘‘L’apprendistato poetico di G. Berchet,’’ in Critica letteraria, 12, no. 2 (1984): 237–263. D’Aronco, Gianfranco, Berchet e la nuova poesia ‘‘popolare’’: guida a una lettura di Grisostomo, Udine: Del Bianco, 1979. Floris, Gonaria, ‘‘All’origine del dibattito romantico: Sapienza e retorica dei ‘Manifesti,’’’ in Yearbook of Italian Studies, 7 (1988): 43–58. Mauri, Paolo, ‘‘La letteratura dell’Italia statuale regionale. La Lombardia,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia, vol. 2, L’eta` moderna, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Morace, Aldo Maria, Il raggio rifranto: percorsi della letteratura romantica, Messina: Sicania, 1990. Portinari, Folco, ‘‘I poeti romantici,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, vol. 4, Il Settecento e il primo Ottocento, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: UTET, 1992. Scotti, Mario, and Valerio Marucci, ‘‘Romanticismo europeo e Romanticismo italiano,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 7, Il primo Ottocento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1998.

CARLO BERNARI (CARLO BERNARD)

CARLO BERNARI (CARLO BERNARD) (1909–1992) A self-made man with no formal schooling after grade seven, Carlo Bernari grew up in Naples and was active in the socialist intellectual circles that saw debates on Crocean idealism, Lukacsian and Marxist aesthetics, avant-garde art, fascism, and political engagement in the arts. His favorite writers were Andre´ Gide, Franz Kafka, and Thomas Mann, and he read extensively books on philosophy and history. With the help of his best friend, painter and art critic, Paolo Ricci, he acquired an impressive knowledge of art and in particular of Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, and French surrealism. This is evident in the recurring painterly descriptions found in his works, from the 1930s to the 1950s, where colors, light effects, and shadows play a major role. The author’s cultural and political background as well as his views on the social function of literature in unveiling what he defined as ‘‘la realta` della realta’’ (literally ‘‘the reality of the reality’’ but also referring to the hidden contradictions that lie under superficial appearances) are reflected throughout his writings. The essay ‘‘Sulla realta`’’ (On Reality) appears together with several other writings on art and aesthetics and on the genesis of his own novels in Non gettate via la scala (Do Not Throw Away the Ladder, 1973). His first publication, the Manifesto dell’ UDA (Manifesto of the Union of Destructive Activists, 1929), written in collaboration with art critic Paolo Ricci and architect Gugliemo Peirce, advocated the revolutionary features of avant-garde art and a closer relationship between science and the arts. Bernari’s attention to historical and cultural phenomena is at the base of his entire work that scrutinizes the conditioning elements of sociopolitical institutions on all aspects of daily life. Some early critics spoke of Bernari’s excessive eclecticism and experimentalism ranging from realism and naturalism present in his first novels, from Tre operai (Three Workers, 1934) to Quasi un secolo (Almost a Century, 1940) and short stories, Siamo tutti bambini (We Are All Children, 1951) and Per cause imprecisate (For Indeterminate Causes, 1965) to

elements of Bontempellian magical realism in Il pedaggio si paga all’altra sponda (The Toll Is Paid on the Other Side, 1943) and Tre casi sospetti (Three Suspicious Cases, 1946), psychological love stories, as in Amore amaro (Bitter Love, 1958), metafiction and detective fiction, as in Un foro nel parabrezza (A Hole in the Windshield, 1971), Tanto la rivoluzione non scoppiera` (The Revolution Will Not Take Place, 1976), and Il giorno degli assassinii (The Day of the Murders, 1980). Some critics (Eugenio Ragni, for example) have instead underlined Bernari’s coherence in his consistent examination, for nearly half a century, of the notion of attesa (the ‘‘endless sense of waiting’’ that dominates in most of his early works), and of the conflicts between individuals and sociopolitical structures, as he unveils hidden contradictions (the ‘‘reality of the reality’’) in our society (Ragni, Invito alla lettura di Bernari, 1978). His first novel, Tre operai, published by Cesare Zavattini, is a milestone in contemporary Italian fiction both as a forerunner of Neorealism and of the literary trend ‘‘Letteratura e industria’’ (Literature and Industry). Thirty years later, with Era l’anno del sole quieto (It Was the Year of the Quiet Sun, 1964), Bernari was to write once again about workers; this time in relation to the failures of industrialization in Southern Italy. Written during 1928–1929, Tre operai combines historical background, sociopolitical criticism, free indirect discourse, Neapolitan dialect, symbolism, and cinematic zooming techniques in focusing on landscapes and characters. There are no touristy postcard pictures in Bernari’s Naples, afflicted with a polluted sea, rainy days, unemployment, and factory strikes. The unstable political realities of the time provide the background for the economic and sentimental failures of the three workers Anna, Teodoro, and Marco. In Inchiesta sul Neorealismo (1950), Carlo Bo pointed out the importance of Tre operai and was instrumental in the republication of the novel by Mondadori. Bernari adds the ‘‘Nota 65’’ to the 1965 reprint of the novel in which he explains the genesis of his first novel 183

CARLO BERNARI (CARLO BERNARD) and the sociohistorical and cultural ambience that inspired him to write. The ‘‘Nota 65’’ will accompany all subsequent editions. In over 30 published texts, not including his numerous pieces of journalism, Bernari has examined a variety of aspects of Italian life such as fear under fascism—see Tre casi sospetti and Prologo alle tenebre (Prologue to Darkness, 1947)—centuries old feudal social structures Quasi un secolo and Domani e poi domani (Tomorrow and Tomorrow, 1957), deep-rooted bureaucracy, corrupt institutions, failures of industrialization (Era l’anno del sole quieto), terrorism in the 1970s (Tanto la rivoluzione non scoppiera` and Il giorno degli assassinii) and, above all, the eternal conflict between individuals and social institutions. All of his fiction, even the most fantastic stories like in Il pedaggio si paga all’altra sponda and Tre casi sospetti prove to be deeply rooted in historic and social realism. His antifascist novel Prologo alle tenebre contains numerous autobiographical elements and references to well-known intellectuals who fought fascism in Naples. In the shorter revised version, with the new title Le radiose giornate (The Radiant Days, 1969), the names of artists and intellectuals appear without acronyms and the message about the contradictions surrounding the characters is much more clear. As Giuseppe Amoroso shows, the revision also provides evidence of how the author, in rewriting this and other novels, was constantly working on his style, language and narrative techniques (Sull’elaborazione dei romanzi contemporanei, 1970). And this may be a reason why critics found his work too eclectic. The author has often displayed a love-hate relationship with his native city, and Naples is present as a character even when it is not mentioned, as illustrated in Era l’anno del sole quieto and Il giorno degli assassinii. He detested the notion of theatrical napolitanita` (Neapolitan way of life) that surfaces for example in Eduardo De Filippo’s theater but loved to write about the dramas that can be witnessed in the streets of Naples. Vesuvio e pane (Vesuvius and Bread, 1952), Bibbia napoletana (Neapolitan Bible, 1960), and Napoli silenzio e grida (Naples Silence and Cries, 1977) provide some of his best accounts of people and events in his cities, from the Fascist era to the immediate postwar days. In a war-torn Naples occupied by the Allies and on the eve of voting on the referendum in 1946, the dramas of several poor families unfold in Speranzella (Little Hope, 1949)—winner of the Premio Viareggio in 1950. The novel shows 184

great linguistic and stylistic merit (especially in the harmonious fusion of Neapolitan dialect with standard Italian) as well as being an entertaining and moving story of poor people divided between returning to the monarchy and voting for a republic. The social plights and contradictions of the entire mezzogiorno (the Italian South), in an endless state of ‘‘waiting,’’ appear in several of Bernari’s novels but especially in Quasi un secolo Domani e poi domani, and Era l’anno del sole quieto. Tanto la rivoluzione non scoppiera` and Il giorno degli assassinii are two fascinating mystery-detective fictions, in the style of Leonardo Sciascia, that denounce the political situation during the 1970s, when black and red brigades terrorized Italy. Four months before suffering a stroke Bernari completed Il grande letto (The Big Bed, 1988) an autobiographical novel that revisits his days growing up in Naples and the antifascist activities narrated in Prologo alle tenebre. Bernari’s novels have resisted labeling and classification, and with few exceptions his role in contemporary Italian literature has not been explored fully by academics, but it has instead attracted wide attention by reviewers in newspapers and journals who have recognized his skills as writer and witness of postwar social changes. His major novels have appeared in French, Russian, German, and Spanish. The author’s opus was donated to the Archives of Twentieth Century Authors at the University of Rome. The first international congress paying tribute to Carlo Bernari took place, in Rome, at the Casa delle Letterature in October 2002.

Biography Born in Naples on 13 October 1909. 1922: expelled from school. 1926–1933: with his close friends Paolo Ricci and Guglielmo Peirce participated in Neapolitan cultural activities that took him close to leftist artists and intellectuals such as Antonio Ambrosio, Ugo De Feo, Franco Cangiullo, and Carlo Cocchia. 1930: short trip to Paris with Paolo Ricci. Meets Andre´ Breton and RibemontDessaignes. 1932–1938: while remaining active in cultural circles performs odd jobs including journalism and helping with the family dye and drycleaning business. 1939: moves to Milan. Becomes editor of Il Tempo and Milano Sera and a close friend of the publisher Arnaldo Mondandori. 1939: Marries Marcella Palance, the lifelong companion who will bear him three sons. 1941–1943: serves in the Italian army as a journalist. 1943: moves

CARLO BERNARI (CARLO BERNARD) permanently to Rome. His home often becomes a meeting place for writers and artists hiding from fascist authorities. 1953–1962: his diversified writing career intensifies as he works on essays, newspapers, fiction, and film scripts. 1955: goes to China as a correspondent for L’Europeo. 1962: awarded an Italian Oscar for the script of Nanny Loy’s Le quattro giornate di Napoli. 1968: lecture tour in United States (Los Angeles, Buffalo, New York City). 1970–1988: regular contributor to the cultural page of the daily Il Mattino of Naples. 1988: a stroke leaves him speechless and unable to write. 1992: dies in Rome, 22 October 1992. ROCCO CAPOZZI Selected Works Fiction Tre operai, 1934. Quasi un secolo, 1940. Il pedaggio si paga all’altra sponda, 1943. Prologo alle tenebre, 1947. Speranzella, 1949. Vesuvio e pane, 1952. Domani e poi domani, 1957. Amore amaro, 1958. Bibbia napoletana, 1960. Era l’anno del sole quieto, 1964. Le radiose giornate, 1969. Un foro nel parabrezza, 1971. Tanto la rivoluzione non scoppiera`, 1976. Il giorno degli assassinii, 1980. Il grande letto, 1988. L’ombra del suicidio: Lo strano Conserti, 1993. Gli stracci, 1994.

Short Stories ‘‘Tre casi sospetti,’’ 1946. ‘‘Siamo tutti bambini,’’ 1951. ‘‘Per cause imprecisate,’’ 1965. ‘‘Alberone eroe a altri racconti non esemplari,’’ 1971. ‘‘Napoli silenzio e grida,’’ 1977. ‘‘Dal Tevere al Po,’’ 1980. ‘‘Romanzesco ma non troppo,’’ 1992.

Poetry ‘‘Ventisei cose in versi,’’ 1977. ‘‘Il cronista giudizioso,’’ 1979.

Essays Manifesto dell’UDA, 1929. Il gigante Cina, 1957. Non gettate via la scala, 1973. Non invidiate la loro sorte, 1991.

Film Scripts I due sergenti, 1936. Sul ponte dei sospiri, 1952. Terza liceo, 1953. Le quattro giornate di Napoli, 1962. L’immorale, 1966. Un foro nel parabrezza, 1983.

Theater Via Rasella non passa per via Fani, 1981.

Further Reading Accrocca, Emilio Filippo, Ritratti su misura, Venice: Il sodalizio, 1960. Amoroso, Giuseppe, Sull’elaborazione dei romanzi contemporanei, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Bernard, Daniela (editor), Omaggio a Carlo Bernari, special issue of Nord e Sud, 47, no. 6 (2000). Bo, Carlo (editor), Inchiesta sul Neorealismo, Rome: Edizioni RAI, 1950. Capozzi, Rocco, ‘‘Myth Reality and Theatricality in Carlo Bernari,’’ in Forum Italicum, 13, no. 3 (Fall 1979): 231–248. Capozzi, Rocco, Bernari. Tra fantasia e realta`. Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1984. Capozzi, Rocco, ‘‘Arti visive e nuova oggettivita` nel primo Bernari,’’ in Forum Italicum, 25, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 140–162. D’Ambrosio, Matteo, I circumvisioniti a Napoli, Naples: CUEN, 1996. Infusino, Gianni, Napoli da lontano, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1981. Mauro, Walter, ‘‘Carlo Bernari’’ in I Contemporanei, vol. 2, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Pesce, Emilio, Bernari, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970. Ragni, Eugenio, Tre operai e pagine di altri romanzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Ragni, Eugenio, Invito alla lettura di Bernari, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Silvi, Nicola, Pretesto Bernari, Rome: Casa Editrice Stella, 1982. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Scrittori per un secolo, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Toscani, Claudio, La voce e il testo, Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1985.

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FRANCESCO BERNI

FRANCESCO BERNI (1497 OR 1498–1535) Born in a poor, though noble family in a small town in Tuscany, Berni received a humanist education in Florence and then, in his late teens, moved to Rome in search of employment. In the elegant world of Leonine Rome not only did he find a good position and supportive friends, but he also began to approach life from a rather carefree and nonconformist angle. Casting aside his earlier sophisticated Latin love lyrics (carmina) in the style of Catullus, he now drew pleasure and garnered fame from his facility in composing burlesque poetry that ridiculed the sins of the age or proclaimed the glories of the banal. A hint of his future flowering as a comic writer can already be gleaned in his first literary work, La Catrina (Cathrine, ca. 1516), a rustic drama in ottava rima that clearly points to his lively interest in the popular language of the lower classes and to the Tuscan tradition of burlesque poetry. Berni was heir to a long-standing medieval comic vein in vernacular literature represented by such writers as Rustico di Filippo, Cecco Angiolieri, Domenico di Giovanni, called ‘‘il Burchiello,’’ Luigi Pulci, and, more recently, Lorenzo de’ Medici himself. While following in the path of previous comic poets, Berni was also pointing the way for future ones and making himself the leader of a new tradition of nonconformist poetry that was to include, among others, Anton Francesco Grazzini, Agnolo Firenzuola, Giovanni Della Casa, Agnolo Bronzino, Benvenuto Cellini, and Annibal Caro. As prolific as he was humorous, Berni thrived in the frivolous and risque´ atmosphere of the first Medici papacy. During the second Medici papacy, and while in the service of the reforming bishop of Verona, Berni blossomed and produced most of his literary corpus. He composed capitoli, sonnets, and sonetti caudati (sonnets with a tail) that are generally satiric or polemical, and always comical. The editio princeps of his collected works appeared posthumously in Venice in 1538. In the years that followed, his poetry would be republished many times both by itself and together with that of his major contemporaries. The bulk of his poetry is still not available in English translation. While in the service of Bishop Giovanni Matteo Giberti, Berni began to revise Matteo Maria 186

Boiardo’s masterpiece, the incomplete epic poem Orlando innamorato (Roland in Love). His aim was to cleanse it of its ‘‘Lombard’’ blemishes (Boiardo came from the lower Po valley near Ferrara) and give it an elegant Florentine makeover. Berni thus Tuscanized the ‘‘Lombard’’ vocabulary and idiomatic expressions present in the original and then added over 250 moralizing and autobiographical stanzas of his own to the text, thus carrying out a complete remake (rifacimento) of Boiardo’s epic. While Berni’s contemporaries, and scholars as late as the nineteenth century, strongly favoured it, modern scholars have cast it aside and look at it only within the context of the wider sixteenth-century debate on the Questione della lingua. Berni’s far more important contribution to Italian literature lies, instead, in his comic poetry. His vitality and productivity in this field quickly lent his name to a new genre—bernesco (Bernesque poetry). His poetry focuses on the quotidian. He composed capitoli in terza rima on such everyday objects as needles, jelly, artichokes, or peaches; he touched the sensitive with his verses on disease and the current scourge of syphilis; he descended into the vulgar with capitoli in praise of chamber pots and urinals; and he did not hesitate to leap eagerly in the sexually risque´ with his works in praise of young male servants and his overt dallying with lust (desire is too light a word in his case). Though often in the first person, his poetry is not usually, or necessarily, autobiographical. In spite of his moral and literary nonconformity, Berni’s poetry is firmly based on a very refined sense of language and a profound love for the idiom of his native land. Linguistically, his verses are of the highest quality. His stile bernesco revels in lexical virtuosity, frolics liberally with wordplays and puns, brings to the page the lively idioms and crisp spoken language of the masses, and never holds back when the possibility of an obscene allusion to sexual activities or bodily functions might arise. In so doing, Berni tilts at the windmill of sixteenth-century Petrarchism and takes issue with the current literary fashion. His 1526 Dialogo contro i poeti (Dialogue Against Poets) challenges the Renaissance theory of imitation and the perceived

FRANCESCO BERNI prophetic role of poetry (two ideas strongly advanced by Bembo and the Bembisti) to declare, instead, that poetry is nothing more than entertainment, simply a literary diversion to idle away time. This might be a fine claim, but Berni himself puts the lie to it. In spite of his linguistic and sexual nonconformity, he remains a strongly moral individual (albeit not in a Christian sense) who uses his poetry to advance a much more profound agenda than mere diversion. His satiric barbs at the corruption of the clergy, at the intellectual indolence of the learned, at the servility of the poets, at the pomposity of courtiers, at Adrian’s dourness and Clement’s indecisiveness, all point to a profound sense of irony in the recognition of the inconstancy and selfishness that is human life. Ultimately, his poetry proposes a detached, perhaps even stoic understanding of human nature, and challenges the reader to shed the trappings of fatuous servility in favour of a more dynamic and direct connection with life. Clearly one of the enfants terribles of his century, Berni remains still largely unknown and unexplored today. Aside from his contribution to literature by way of the Bernesque style, he is remembered also for his epigrammatic summary of Michelangelo’s poetry in a capitolo addressed to the Venetian painter Fra Bastiano del Piombo, where he writes: ‘‘tacete unquanco, pallide viole / e liquidi cristalli e fiere snelle: / e’ dice cose e voi dite parole’’ (be quiet at last, pale violets / and watery crystals and lithe beasts: / he says things and you say words).

Biography Born in 1497 or 1498 in the small town of Lamporecchio (just west of Pistoia), in a noble but impoverished family. His father, a notary, sends the boy to Florence to be educated. In 1517 Berni moves to Rome and enters the service of Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, a distant relative. At his patron’s death in 1520, he transfers to the cardinal’s nephew, the Apostolic Protonotary Angelo Dovizi. In 1522, on the election of Pope Adrian VI, who had inspired some of Berni’s most lively and virulent satires, he leaves Rome for a safe haven in the abbey of San Giovanni in Venere, in the Abruzzi regions, at that time administered by his patron. With Adrian’s passing Berni returns to Rome (end of 1523) and becomes secretary to Giovanni Matteo Giberti, bishop of Verona and former datary to Leo X. In the years that follow, Berni travels extensively in the bishop’s service and

divides his life between Verona and Rome. In 1527 he witnesses the Sack of Rome. In 1531 he leaves the bishop’s service and spends a year in Padua completing his revisions and rewriting of Boiardo’s epic poem Orlando innamorato. Returning to Florence, Berni enters into the service of Cardinal Ippolito de’ Medici (1532) who, the following year, appoints him a canon of the Florentine cathedral (1533). On 26 May 1535, Berni dies under mysterious circumstances in the palazzo of Cardinal Innocenzo Cybo, apparently a victim of poisoning. KONRAD EISENBICHLER See also: Pietro Bembo, Petrarchism Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere [...] in terza rima, nuovamente con somma diligentia stampate, Venice: Curzio Navo et fratelli, 1538, in 8 . Opere burlesche. Con annotazioni, e con un saggio delle sue lettere piacevoli [by Anton Maria Salvini], Milan: Societa` tipografica de’ Classici italiani, 1806. Opere, Milan: G. Daelli, 1864; 2nd ed. Milan: Sonzogno, 1874. Rime, poesie latine, e lettere edite e inedite, edited by Antonio Virgili, Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1885. Poesie e prose, edited by Ezio Chiorboli, Geneva and Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1934. Rime facete, edited by Ettore Bruni, Milan: Rizzoli, 1959. Rime, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1969; selection in Italian Poets of the Renaissance, translated by Joseph Tusiani, Long Island, NY: Baroque Press, 1971 (contains seven poems). Rime, edited by Danilo Romei, Milan: Mursia, 1985. Rime burlesche, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Carmina, Turin: Edizione RES, 1995. (also includes the carmina of Baldassare Castiglione and Giovanni Della Casa).

Poetry ‘‘Capitolo del gioco della primiera col comento di messer Pietropaulo da San Chirico,’’ Rome: F. Minitio Calvo, 1526, in 4 . ‘‘Le terze rime del Bernia et del Mauro novamente con ogni diligentia et corretione stampate,’’ Venice: Curzio Navo, 1537, in 8 . ‘‘Sonetti in diversi sugetti, et a diverse persone scritti,’’ Ferrara: Scipion et fratelli, 1537, in 8 . ‘‘I capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia et altri authori nuovamente con ogni diligentia et correttione stampati,’’ Venice: Curzio Navo, 1537, in 8 . Matteo Maria Boiardo, ‘‘Orlando innamorato nuovamente composto da M. Francesco Berni Fiorentino,’’ Venice: Heredi di Lucantonio Giunta, 1541, in 4 . Matteo Maria Boiardo, ‘‘Orlando innamorato, composto gia` dal Signor Matteo Maria Bojardo et rifatto tutto di

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FRANCESCO BERNI nuovo da M. Francesco Berni,’’ Milan: Andrea Calvo, 1542, in 4 . ‘‘Il primo libro dell’opere burlesche di Francesco Berni, di Gio. della Casa, del Varchi,’’ Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1550, in 8 . ‘‘Il secondo libro dell’opere burlesche di m. Francesco Berni, del Molza, di m. Bino, di m. Lodouico Martelli. Di Mattio Francesi, dell’Aretino, et di diuersi autori. Nuouamente posto in luce, et con diligenza stampato,’’ Florence: Eredi di Berrnardo Giunta il vecchio, 1555, in 8 . ‘‘Carmina quinque Hetruscorum poetarum. Nunc primum in lucem edita,’’ Florence: Giunta, 1562, in 8 (includes: Benedetto Accolti, Fabio Segni, Francesco Vinta, Francesco Berni, Benedetto Varchi).

Theater La Catrina, atto scenico rvsticale, Florence: Valente Panizi e compagni, 1567, in 8 .

Other Dialogo contra i poeti, Rome: Francesco Minizio Calvo, 1526, in 4 . Ventisei lettere famigliari. Edite ed inedite, Venice: Alvisopoli, 1833.

Further Reading Allodoli, Ettore, ‘‘Il pensiero del Berni,’’ in La Rinascita 6, alt. no. 29 (1943): 3–18. Bettella, Patrizia, ‘‘Discourse of Resistance: The Parody of Feminine Beauty in Berni, Doni and Firenzuola,’’ in MLN, 113, no. 1 (1998): 192–203. Clements, Robert J., ‘‘Berni and Michelangelo’s Bernesque Verse,’’ in Italica, 41, no. 3 (1964): 266–280. Corsaro, Antonio, Il poeta e l’eretico. Francesco Berni e il ‘Dialogo contra i poeti,’ Florence: Le Lettere, 1989. Ferrajoli, Alessandro, ‘‘Due lettere inedite di Francesco Berni,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 45 (1905): 67–73.

Longhi, Silvia, ‘‘Le rime di Francesco Berni. Cronologia e strutture del linguaggio burlesco,’’ in Studi di filologia italiana, 34 (1976): 249–299. Reynolds, Anne, ‘‘Francesco Berni: Satire and Criticism in the Italian Sixteenth Century,’’ in Comic Relations: Studies in the Comic, Satire, and Parody, edited by Pavel Petr, David Roberts, and Philip Thomson, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Reynolds, Anne, ‘‘The Poet in Society: Francesco Berni and Court Life in Cinquecento Rome,’’ in Spunti e ricerche, 4–5 (1988–1989): 51–62. Reynolds, Anne, ‘‘Ambiguities of Apollo and Marsyas: Francesco Berni and His First Published Work, Dialogo contra i poeti,’’ in Studies in Iconography, 16 (1994): 191–224. Reynolds, Anne, ‘‘The Earliest Editions of Dialogo contra i poeti by Francesco Berni (1497?–1535),’’ in Bulletin du bibliophile, 2 (1996): 341–360. Reynolds, Anne, Renaissance Humanism at the Court of Clement VII: Francesco Berni’s ‘‘Dialogue against Poets,’’ in Context, New York: Garland, 1997 (incl. trans. of the Dialogo contro i poeti). Reynolds, Anne, ‘‘Francesco Berni, Gian Matteo Giberti, and Pietro Bembo: Criticism and Rivalry in Rome in the 1520s,’’ in Italica, 77, no. 3 (2000): 301–310. Sorrentino, Andrea, Francesco Berni: poeta della scapigliatura del Rinascimento, Florence: Sansoni, 1933. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘The Spurious Text of Francesco Berni’s Rifacimento of Matteo Maria Bojardo’s Orlando Innamorato,’’ in The Journal of Modern Philology, 75, no. 2 (1977): 111–131. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Erotic Language and Imagery in Francesco Berni’s Rifacimento,’’ in MLN, 99, no.1 (1984): 80–100. Woodhouse, H.F., Language and Style in a Renaissance Epic: Berni’s Corrections to Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1982.

GIAN LORENZO BERNINI (1598–1680) Gian Lorenzo Bernini is considered the ‘‘director of the Baroque,’’ a title that takes into account his undertakings as architect, sculptor, and painter, as well as the culture of macchinatore dello spettacolo (builder of theatrical machines), creating a comprehensive portrait of a ‘‘composite’’ man in whom there compete different artistic practices. If little remains of Bernini’s work as a painter thanks to the artist’s dissatisfaction with his own work, the 188

almost complete loss of his work in the theater and as a dramatist is due to the conditions of theatrical practices of the time, by definition ephemeral. In biographies and other information collected during Bernini’s lifetime, the artist untiringly narrates his own dramatic and theatrical engagement and the admirable results he attained therefrom. Filippo Baldinucci, Bernini’s contemporary biographer, suggests in his Vita del cavaliere Gio.

GIAN LORENZO BERNINI Lorenzo Bernino (first ed., 1682) that triple excellence in the arts of architecture, sculpture, and design perfectly complemented the artist’s talent for ‘‘composing excellent, ingenious comedies.’’ Besides recalling the inventions of Bernini as set designer, constructor of ‘‘flying cupids,’’ and author of texts, the biographer also remembers his acting skills: ‘‘He also admirably performed all the serious and humorous parts, and in all of the languages that they were performed.’’ Many of his contemporaries testified to Bernini’s multiple abilities in the context of theater. In 1644, John Evelyn famously referred to a theatrical work for which Bernini ‘‘painted the sets, sculpted the statues, invented the stage apparatuses, composed the music, wrote the comedy and built the theater’’ (cited in the Appendix to Fontana di Trevi, 1963). The artist also excelled in the intermediate terrain of creating festivities, from the catafalque for Paolo V Borghese (1622), to the apparatuses for canonizations, to festivities for the infanta of Spain and for the heir apparent of France, to the festive transformations of the hill of Trinita` dei Monti or Piazza Farnese. Bernini recalls, as Chantelou records in his Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France regarding the artist’s stay in France in 1665, a comedy titled La verita` discoverta dal tempo (Truth Uncovered by Time). This work revealed a more complex idea of the widespread iconography of the Veritas filia Temporis (Time That Reveals Truth), in which time, upon the raising of the curtain, arrives too late: ‘‘It is true that Time reveals Truth, but often it does not reveal it in time.’’ A celebrated sculpture is dedicated to the same theme; it was conceived in the period of Bernini’s dismissal from his previous commissions subsequent to the election of Pope Innocent X in 1644. More significant than marvelous theatrical machinations—floods of the hall restrained just in time, fires, and other simulated cataclysms—is in fact the revelation in another lost comedy, Li due Covielli (The Two Coviellos, 1637), of a mirror-theater behind the curtain, where, at the conclusion of the work, the real public watches a long procession of a fictional audience as it returns home. The parade transforms into a funeral procession for the funeral of the sun. Death makes a brief appearance from behind a final curtain (which quickly closes) on a skeletal horse, representing that ‘‘which breaks with the past tradition of all comedies,’’ as correspondent of the Duke of Modena reported in a description of the play

in 1637 (cited in the Appendix to Fontana di Trevi, 1963). The practice of combining arts and artistic techniques by way of the bel composto (beautiful composition) is representative of Bernini’s undoubtedly theatrical disposition: architecture, sculpture, and painting converge in unitary creations, as in his Roman works, the Cappella Cornaro at Santa Maria della Vittoria, the Cappella Fonseca of San Lorenzo in Lucina, and the Cappella Albertoni of San Francesco a Ripa. But the final project invented by the elderly Bernini surpasses his own previous artistic output, comprising a comprehensive ars moriendi, as Irving Lavin has suggestively shown, to prepare himself for his encounter with the Creator (Bernini and the Unity of Visual Arts, 1980). As far as dramatic literature in the true sense is concerned, only part of one of the more than 20 comedies which, according to sources, Bernini composed, seems to have survived. The existent theatrical work comprises two acts and the beginning of a third. Moreover, this untitled comedy published by two modern editors as Fontana di Trevi and L’impresario was discovered only in the early 1960s. The ample fragment is found in a file of the Bibliothe`que Nationale of Paris contained in a miscellaneous codex, listing the cost of repairing the Fontana di Trevi in 1652. Dated 1643–1644, the comedy translates the author’s creative and practical abilities into the genre of the commedia ridicolosa. Commedia ridicolosa, a genre popular in Rome, is a written comedy performed with masks by amateur players. The protagonist of Bernini’s work is Graziano, machinator in the double sense of constructor of theatrical apparatuses and inventor of comic plots. The Bolognese doctor allows himself to be convinced to write and stage a comedy for which he constructs a machine that simulates the movement of clouds (a device that appears in accounts of plays, as I due Covielli, actually realized by Bernini). Pretending to be a manager, the playwright and painter Cinzio—thanks in part to the shrewdness of the servant Coviello—organizes the spectacle, in order to both comprehend the secret of Graziano’s genius and obtain the good graces of Angelica, his daughter. Particularly vibrant are those scenes dedicated to the theatrical workshop, a space populated by characters of artisans, painters, and various workers. Neither of the two narrative threads concludes decisively, and contrary to the opinion sustained by Franca Angelini in her ‘‘Gian Lorenzo Bernini e la sorpresa del vedere,’’ (1994), it appears implausible 189

GIAN LORENZO BERNINI that this is a completed work. Presumably two acts and a part of the third are missing if the text is conceived in canonical, five-act form, the typical structure of other commedie ridicolose of the period.

Biography Born in Naples, 7 December 1598. Followed his father, Pietro, to Rome, 1606–1607. First relevant commissions came under the protection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, from the Enea, Anchise e Ascanio in fuga da Troia (1618) to the David (1623), to Apollo e Dafne (1622–1623). Architect from 1627, completing the fac¸ade of the Palazzo di Propaganda Fide. Under the protection of Cardinal Barberini (Pope Urban VIII) from 1623, was briefly dismissed after his death and the election of Innocent X in 1644. Completed the Cappella Cornaro in Santa Maria della Vittoria with the famed Santa Teresa in estasi, 1647. There followed the curved fac¸ade of the Palazzo di Montecitorio, 1650; and the Fontana dei Fiumi in Piazza Navona, 1651. Under Pope Alexander VII, began construction of the colonnade and pulpit of St. Peter’s. In 1665, traveled to Paris to design the Louvre (although these plans were not realized). Died in Rome, 28 November 1680. PIERMARIO VESCOVO

See also: Literature of Architecture Selected Works Plays Commedia senza titolo (ca. 1643–1644); as Fontana di Trevi, edited by Cesare D’Onofrio, 1963, as L’impresario, edited by Massimo Ciavolella, 1992; translated by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, 1985.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, Il teatro barocco, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975. Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Gian Lorenzo Bernini e la sorpresa del vedere,’’ in Silvia Carandini (editor), Il valore del falso, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Baldinucci, Filippo, Vita del cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino (1682), edited by S. Samek Ludovici, Milan: Il Milione, 1948. Carandini, Silvia, ‘‘La festa barocca a Roma,’’ in Biblioteca teatrale, 16–17 (1976): 276–308. Chantelou, Fre´art de Paul, Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France (first ed. in Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1877), Paris: Macula, 2001. Fagiolo dell’ Arco,Maurizio, Bernini: Una introduzione al gran teatro del barocco, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Maurizio, Berniniana: Novita` sul regista del Barocco, Milan: Skira, 2002. Lavin, Irving, Bernini and the Unity of Visual Arts, New York-London: Oxford University Press, 1980. Lavin, Irving, Bernini e il Salvatore: La ‘‘buona morte’’ nella Roma del Seicento, Rome: Donzelli, 1998. Molinari, Cesare, Le nozze degli dei, Rome: Bulzoni, 1968.

GIUSEPPE BERTO (1914–1978) Novelist, playwright, scriptwriter, and journalist, Giuseppe Berto owes his fame to his 1947 novel Il cielo e` rosso (The Sky Is Red), for which he was awarded the Premio Letterario Firenze, and later to Il male oscuro (Incubus, 1964), for which he received the prestigious Viareggio and Campiello prizes. One of the chief qualities of Berto’s writing is his independence from any fashionable literary trends and his refusal to be associated with any political parties or ideological movements—a rare occurrence for an Italian writer of his generation. This independence of thought, combined with the diversity and variety of his 190

literary production, makes Berto a unique case in the Italian panorama of twentieth-century literature. Berto creates stories by drawing his inspiration from factual life experience. His recurrent theme is a sense of evil, but evil cannot be explained: It is a mysterious force that rules history. It governs human life in all its multifaceted manifestations. It can take the shape of an armed conflict, a physical or psychological disease, or even a more abstract notion, such as disloyalty and betrayal. It is named male universale (universal evil) and is accompanied by an inevitable sense of guilt.

GIUSEPPE BERTO Berto’s literary production may be subdivided in four subsequent phases, corresponding to different periods in the author’s life. The first, usually ascribed to the neorealist tradition, features Il cielo e` rosso, Le opere di Dio (The Works of God, 1948) and Il brigante (The Brigand, 1951). Here Berto gives a penetrating account of his experiences during World War II, which had a profound and traumatic effect on him as a young man. Berto fought as a volunteer in the Ethiopian war and the North African campaign from 1941 to 1943. Captured by the Allied Forces in Tunisia, he served time in the prisoner-of-war camp in Hereford (Texas), where he reads and hears stories about the war in Italy. He writes Le opere di Dio and Il cielo e` rosso (original working title, La gente perduta) to describe the devastation of his own country under German occupation and during the liberation. In Le opere di Dio, a peasant family must evacuate their home during the fighting between German and American troops in northern Italy. They disperse and their house is destroyed. In Il cielo e` rosso, which was adapted for the screen by Claudio Gora in 1950, the (undisclosed) setting is Treviso, Berto’s hometown, following a heavy bombing that has destroyed a good portion of the city. Four young people, two boys and two girls, find shelter among the ruins of fallen buildings and live there as in a small commune. Two of them are killed, and Daniele, an authorial alter ego, commits suicide by jumping off a train. Piety and compassion for the poverty and dejection of his people are at the core of both novels. More than literary, Berto’s motivations to produce these stories are existential. His realistic rendition of the events of war is influenced by contemporary American writers whose works he finds in the Hereford camp library. For example, Berto’s use of dialogue, which is inspired by John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, remains a primary tool of narration and characterization, while description is limited to a minimum. A less successful novel, Il brigante, relies on contemporary reports on southern Italian bandits, who aimed at fighting disenfranchisement and sociopolitical alienation. The second period, a transitional phase, comprises a diary, Guerra in camicia nera (War in a Black Shirt, 1955), a collection of short stories, Un po’ di successo (A Little Success, 1963), and a drama, L’uomo e la sua morte (Man and His Death, 1964), while he attempts to find his own stylistic identity and distinguishing authorial traits. His war experiences continue to dominate his imagination and writing well into the 1960s: the North African

campaign is recounted in journal form in Guerra in camicia nera, based upon notes drafted at the time, and confronting his allegiance to Fascism; Un po’ di successo offers diversified insights into the horrors of war. L’uomo e la sua morte details the last moments in the life of the legendary Sicilian outlaw Salvatore Giuliano, who brought political attention to the poverty of southern peasants and was eventually assassinated on July 5, 1950. For Berto, Giuliano is a Christlike archetypal figure of existential intrigue and legalized subterfuge. During the third period, the most intensely original, Berto draws his subject matter from his personal experience with psychoanalysis and translates it into a spellbinding, self-reflective masterpeice, Il male oscuro. This is one of the most important Italian novels of the twentieth century. The first-person narrative, with little or no punctuation, fits the monologic, confessional style, which is strongly influenced by Italo Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923). The book’s chief thematic clusters include the protagonist’s impossible relationship with his father, marital troubles, sexual guilt, difficulty in adjusting to his own fatherhood, and physical disease. Psychoanalysis is connected to artistic creation as a form of authorial exploration within one’s own psychological frailty. Writing objectifies the protagonist’s paranoid and hypochondriac tendencies and helps to exorcise them; an important redeeming factor is the transformation of anxiety into humor. Subsequently, Berto publishes La fantarca (A Fantasy Ark, 1965), a parodic remake of science fiction stories, narrated with a tinge of social and political irony. As a paradoxical solution to the questione meridionale (southern question), in this divertissement, Berto proposes the deportation of all Italian southerners to the planet Saturn. La cosa buffa (Antonio in Love, 1966), which was begun in 1958 and evokes Joseph Conrad’s saying that life is a funny thing, tells of the unhappy and pathetic love story of Antonio and Maria from a psychological perspective, but uses the detaching device of a thirdperson narration and a bitter irony to describe the frustration and alienation of its male protagonist, whose constant point of reference is a possible suicide. The last phase begins with the ecological fable Oh, Serafina! (1973), which declares Berto’s opposition to the profit-oriented Italian society of the 1960s and 1970s. This highly ironic, fantastic tale finds its chief inspiration in traditional accounts of St. Francis of Assisi’s life. The main characters’ refutation of capitalism, humoristic love of birds, 191

GIUSEPPE BERTO and preference for ecologic issues attest to its Franciscan matrix. A concentration on spiritual matters brings Berto to leave irony behind in his last two works, which are rewritings of the biblical canon. Indeed, the drama La passione secondo noi stessi (Passion According to Ourselves, 1972) and the novel La gloria (Glory, posthumous 1978) conclude Berto’s literary career with reflections on guilt and betrayal. The first, a rewriting of Christ’s Passion, focuses on the rediscovery of Jesus’ human identity and on Judas’ complex relationship to him; the second serves as Berto’s personal and authorial testament. In La gloria, Judas Iscariot, the traitor par excellence in the Western tradition, is offered an opportunity to give his version of the last moments in Christ’s earthly existence, and also his own. The conglomeration of responsibility and predestination finds an insoluble conclusion in the necessity for Judas’ guilt in order to accomplish Christ’s glory. La gloria brilliantly encompasses the main themes of Giuseppe Berto’s literary production: from the inexplicable presence of evil to the unavoidable sense of human guilt, and the persistent thought of suicide as an impossible liberation from an existence of suffering and alienation.

Biography Born in Mogliano Veneto (Treviso) on December 27, 1914. His antagonistic relation with his father will shape his personality and will originate his psychological condition, thereby indirectly contributing to his literary career. Studying art history at the University of Padua, he joins the army and fights in Ethiopia for four years. He graduates after his return to Italy in 1940 and teaches history and Latin in a high school in Treviso. In 1942, he joins the Fascist army again and is sent to Libya. In May 1943, he is captured by American troops and deported to a Texas prisoners’ camp, where he remains until 1946. 1948: Premio Letterario Firenze for Il cielo e` rosso. 1964: Viareggio and Campiello prizes for Il male oscuro. Worked as a journalist for Il resto del Carlino and as a scriptwriter. Between 1955 and 1964, Berto suffers from a serious psychological crisis, which he temporarily overcomes thanks to psychoanalysis, but which will continue intermittently for the rest of his life. Berto dies in Rome on November 1, 1978. ALESSANDRO VETTORI See also: Neo-Realism 192

Selected Works Fiction Il cielo e` rosso, 1947; as The Sky is Red, translated by Angus Davidson, 1948. Le opere di Dio, 1948; as The Works of God and Other Stories, translated by Angus Davidson, 1950. Il brigante, 1951. Un po’ di successo, 1963. Il male oscuro, 1964; as Incubus, translated by William Weaver, 1966. La fantarca, 1965. La cosa buffa, 1966; as Antonio in Love, translated by William Weaver, 1968. Anonimo veneziano, 1971; as Anonymous Venetian, translated by Valerie Southorn, 1973. Oh, Serafina! Fiaba di ecologi, a di matrimonio e d’amore, 1973. E` forse amore, 1975. La gloria, 1978.

Plays L’uomo e la sua morte, 1964. La passione secondo noi stessi, 1972.

Other Guerra in camicia nera, 1955. Modesta proposta per prevenire, 1972.

Further Reading Artico, Everardo, and Laura Lepri (editors), Giuseppe Berto: La sua opera, il suo tempo, Venice: Marsilio, 1989. Bartolomeo, Beatrice, and Saveria Chemotti (editors), Giuseppe Berto vent’anni dopo, Atti del Convegno, Padova, Mogliano Veneto 23–24 ottobre, 1998, Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2000. Biagi, Dario, Vita scandalosa di Giuseppe Berto, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Heiney, Donald, ‘‘The Final Glory of Giuseppe Berto,’’ in World Literature Today, 54, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 238–240. Lanapoppi, Aleramo P., ‘‘Immanenza e trascendenza nell’opera di Giuseppe Berto: La trappola del neorealismo,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 85, no. 1 (1970): 42–66. Lombardi, Olga, Invito alla lettura di Giuseppe Berto, Milan: Mursia, 1974. Marabini, Claudio, ‘‘Giuseppe Berto,’’ in Nuova Antologia di lettere, arti e scienze, 102, no. 1993 (January 1967): 70–94. Monterosso, Ferruccio, Come leggere ‘‘Il male oscuro’’ di Giuseppe Berto, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Piancastelli, Corrado, Berto, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970. Pullini, Giorgio, Giuseppe Berto: Da ‘‘Il cielo e` rosso’’ a ‘‘Il male oscuro,’’ Modena: Mucchi Editore, 1991. Striuli, Giacomo, Alienation in Giuseppe Berto’s Novels, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1987. Toscani, Claudio, ‘‘Giuseppe Berto: Proposte critiche e riproposte editoriali,’’ in Vita e pensiero, 53 (1970): 579–583.

CARLO BERTOLAZZI Vettori, Alessandro, ‘‘La parodia come strategia ermeneutica in Oh, Serafina! di Giuseppe Berto,’’ in L’anello che non tiene, 6, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1994): 38–66. Vettori, Alessandro, ‘‘La predestinazione al male nell’opera di Giuseppe Berto,’’ in Forum Italicum, 36, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 316–338.

Vettori, Alessandro, ‘‘Giuda tradito, ovvero l’ermeneutica parodica di Giuseppe Berto,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 118, no. 1 (2003): 168–193.

CARLO BERTOLAZZI (1870–1916) Carlo Bertolazzi’s works are notable for the peculiarity of both their audience and their critical reception. The divergence between praise and indifference on the part of critics and public originates in differing perspectives on the importance of dialect in Italian theater, and in the fact that Carlo Bertolazzi’s controversial works challenged the expectations of audiences and actors alike. Bertolazzi’s career suffered the artistic tensions that marked the turn of the nineteenth century. On the one hand, there was the project for a unified theater capable of molding Italian-speaking citizens, and, on the other, the strong presence of a regional theater in dialect. At both the national and local levels, theatrical companies also suffered internal struggles between authors and actors. Disappointed by the failure of an artistic authorial theater in dialect, Bertolazzi turned to writing psychological drama in Italian. But both in Italian and in dialect theater, he came into conflict with the powerful figure of the actor: at first in Milan with the farcical repertory of Edoardo Ferravilla (1846–1915), who as actor-author, theater manager, and director literally dominated the Milanese theatrical scene from 1870 until his death; then with the Italian mattatore, when major actors persistently rejected his plays because his main characters were too unpleasant to win over audiences. Bertolazzi was very young when his first one-act plays were performed by the Sbodio-Carnaghi, the theater company created by actor Gaetano Sbodio (1844–1920) after leaving Ferravilla’s company. Sbodio and other critics of Ferravilla accused him of ruining Milanese theater repertory, concentrating solely on commercial success or on his own talent (to the exclusion of others). Bertolazzi’s best known work, El nost Milan (Our Milan, 1894), is divided into two parts: La

povera gent (The Poor People) and I scioˆri (The Rich People, 1905). The first was performed to great acclaim in 1893 (and later staged by Giorgio Strehler at Piccolo Teatro di Milano in 1961); the second was represented in 1894. They depict different social environments: the poor and the amoral nobility. The plot of La povera gent revolves around Nina, a victimized girl typical of Bertolazzi’s comedies and of Milanese theater in general. She falls in love with Togasso, a violent criminal, and for him becomes a prostitute. To vindicate their honour, her father kills Togasso. Nina rejects her father’s morality to follow her destiny, asserting the overwhelming power of hunger over respectability. The play offers no hope, no rescue of the destitute, no revolution, and no God to save them. The social issues typical of Milanese theater find new strength in this play, thanks to its innovative dramaturgical structure and matter-of-fact style. Nina is constantly surrounded by a crowd of characters, each with a story developing in the various places harboring Milan’s poor. In I scioˆri, Nina is now a high-class prostitute with whom Baron Riccardo di Rivalta falls in love. She expresses her father’s ideas about honor and rejects Riccardo, who escapes to Africa to forget his love and the corruption of his own family and class. The moralistic condemnation of the higher classes and opposition of good and bad (Riccardo and his brother Cesare) are more mechanical, as are the characters and the conceit of the prostitute with a heart of gold. Opera and feuilleton provide the background for the poor girl who becomes a prostitute in La gibigianna (1898), a psychological drama in Italian, in which Maria is stabbed by her jealous lover Enrico in the name of love and honor and is forgiven by him. Maria survives, but the protagonist of Lulu´ (1904) is less fortunate, although at first she 193

CARLO BERTOLAZZI dominates the difficulties of the city by deceiving her lovers in pursuit of their money. She falls in love with and marries a student, Mario, but when he discovers that she is pregnant and has a lover, he kills her. Lulu´ mixes Italian with dialect and follows a more traditional dramaturgical structure, while also adhering more strictly to the morals of the times. Initially written in Italian in 1900, L’egoista (A Selfish Man, 1902) was refused by all major Italian actors, and in 1901 the author agreed to its translation into Venetian for actor Ferruccio Benini (1854–1916). Its success was immense, according to Bertolazzi, and Benini’s acting somewhat smoothed the character. In one of the latest performances of the play, directed in 1987 by Marco Sciaccaluga, the popular actor Alberto Lionello transformed the protagonist, a cruel businessman, into a beguiling scoundrel. Franco Marteno, the ‘‘egoist’’ of the title, uses his charms to obtain power over people: his brother, the wife he marries for money and allows to die in solitude, and even his daughter, whom he persuades to renounce marriage to dedicate her life to him. In his old age, frantic with terror at the idea of God’s punishment, he leaves his possessions to the church he despised as a young man. In Lorenzo e il suo avvocato (Lorenzo and His Lawyer, 1905), also performed by Benini, Bertolazzi depicts a poor schoolteacher, Lorenzo, distraught at the departure of his niece Nannina for the city, where she will marry her beloved fiance´e. After the young couple has gone, Lorenzo kills himself with carbon monoxide fumes. In the last scene, the actor waits, silent and still, for death, facing the audience in a scene of astonishing cruelty. Benini was also the protagonist of L’amigo de tuti (Everybody’s Friend, 1899), a play in Venetian dialect (and Bertolazzi’s last in dialect) that anticipates L’egoista. In his effort to please, the protagonist Alessandro painfully discovers the age-old laws of selfishness and survival. Bertolazzi was unable to manage his career as a playwright. Theater was not lucrative in early nineteenth-century Italy, and he thus also worked as secretary in the municipality of Rivolta D’Adda. He never achieved the success he hoped for, and in May of 1916 announced his retirement from theater. He died a month later.

Biography Born on 2 November 1870 in Rivolta d’Adda (Cremona), into a well-to-do family. Graduated in law from the University of Pavia, 1894, where he met 194

the Sbodio-Carnaghi company. Worked as drama critic for Il corriere della sera and Guerin meschino. First symptom of the illness that would eventually be fatal, 1906. In a letter to a friend, announced his retirement from the stage, May 1916. Died in Milan on 2 June 1916. TERESA ZOPPELLO Selected Works Collections Teatro (L’egoista, La maschera, La casa del sonno, Il successore, Lorenzo e il suo avvocato, La zitella), Milan: Agnelli, 1915. El nost Milan e altre commedie, edited by Folco Portinari, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

Plays Preludio, (I benis de spos, Al mont de pieta, Ona scena de la vita, In Verze´e), 1892. I benis de spos, 1893. El nost Milan: La povera gent, 1894. La gibigianna, 1898. L’amigo de tuti, 1899. L’egoista, 1902. Lulu´, 1904. El nost Milan: I scioˆri, 1905. Lorenzo e il suo avvocato, 1905. Il diavolo e l’acqua santa, 1905. La rovina, 1907. La sfrontata, 1907. Ombre del cuore, 1909.

Short Stories ‘‘Le mie bricconate,’’ 1908.

Further Reading Acerboni, Giovanni, ‘‘El nost Milan: I Scioˆri: Opera trascurata di Carlo Bertolazzi con una bibliografia ragionata degli studi,’’ in Acme, 44, no. 1 (1991): 5–13. Albini, Ettore, Cronache teatrali 1891–1925, edited by Giuseppe Bartolucci, Genoa: Edizioni del Teatro Stabile di Genova, 1972. Althusser, Louis, ‘‘Le Piccolo, Bertolazzi et Brecht. Notes sur un the´aˆtre materialiste,’’ in Pour Marx, Paris: Franc¸ois Maspero, 1965. Carlo Bertolazzi e la scena, special issue of Ariel, 15, nos. 2–3: (2000). Curti, Antonio, Preface to Carlo Bertolazzi, Preludio, Milan: Aliprandi, 1892. Manzella, Domenico, and Emilio Pozzi, I teatri di Milano, 2 vols., Milan: Mursia, 1985. Palmieri, E. Ferdinando, Del teatro in dialetto, Venice: Edizioni del Ruzante, 1976. Portinari, Folco, ‘‘Realismo e realta` (Premesse per uno studio sul teatro di Bertolazzi),’’ in L’approdo letterario, 51 (1970): 73–90. Pozza, Giovanni, Cronache teatrali (1886–1913), Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1971. Rovetta, Girolamo, Preface to Carlo Bertolazzi, La gibigianna, Milan: Baldini-Castoldi, 1898.

ATTILIO BERTOLUCCI

ATTILIO BERTOLUCCI (1911–2000) Attilio Bertolucci is considered one of Italy’s greatest twentieth-century poets. During his lifetime, he also distinguished himself as a major essayist, prolific translator, and editor. A recognized master of descriptive and narrative poetry, Bertolucci remained unconnected with any particular poetic movement. His nonconformist attitude resulted, initially, in his remaining in the shadows of his contemporaries because critics were unable to categorize him. His poetry represented for many years an alternative to the once prevalent hermetic tradition. Unlike the hermetic poets, Bertolucci was drawn to the concrete elements of reality and chose to render them in a natural and ordinary manner. His essential inspiration was the familiar world of his origins, as he focused on the surrounding countryside of his native region of Parma. A son of the agricultural middle class, Bertolucci’s childhood represented a period of happiness, and in his poems he returns almost obsessively to those simple elements of his land that recall the joys of his youth. Like his beloved Marcel Proust, whose A la recherche du temps perdu he discovered at the age of 14, Bertolucci’s poetry is strongly based on memory. Through his poems, he attempted to create a protective, privileged ‘‘shelter’’ in order to defend himself against the painful intrusion of reality. He chose to weave his discourse within margins that are extremely limited and intimate. Consequently, his poetic and emotional sanctuary is the neatly circumscribed world of the family. This attachment to the family reflects a need for a constant, consolatory presence. From an early age, Bertolucci learned to transfer this emotional liability into poetry. His recourse to a world of invention serves as a brief and only temporary remedy against the painful loss of his domestic universe. While a high school student in the 1920s, Bertolucci discovered another of his passions, the cinema. This interest was reinforced by his friendship with the future, celebrated screenwriter and leading exponent of neorealism, Cesare Zavattini, who had briefly been one of Bertolucci’s high school instructors. Zavattini was also among those friends who encouraged him to publish in 1929, not yet 18 years old, his first collection of poetry, Sirio (Sirius). This early production reveals those characteristics that

will distinguish Bertolucci’s poetry from prevailing contemporary poetical trends and movements: a kinship with Giovanni Pascoli and the crepuscular poets, the representation of reality through isolated fragments, and a colloquial and prose-like style. In 1931, Bertolucci enrolled unwillingly in the School of Law at the University of Parma. The following year he was ill and bedridden for several months. He would later state that one of the reasons for contracting pleurisy was to find an excuse to avoid taking his ‘‘dreadful’’ law exams. His poetry also began to appear in prominent reviews and to draw attention of important literary figures such as Eugenio Montale and Enrico Falqui. Bertolucci’s faith in the common objects of a familiar world and his use of ordinary language persists in his second volume of poetry, Fuochi in novembre (Fires in November, 1934). Here again his poetry is anachronistic with respect to the literary climate of the times. His preference for a language and style that were consistent with the simple, unobtrusive reality depicted in his poetry was a marked contrast to the pure, sublime poetry of the predominant hermetic movement. Bertolucci did not feel that it was necessary to seek recourse in an obscure language in order to free his poetry from any realistic constraints. In Fuochi in novembre, he returns to the calm, natural setting of rural Emilia and to the intimate relationship that exists between the poet and his surroundings. This intimacy personalizes ordinary objects and invests them with a sense of uniqueness. In 1935, while at the University of Bologna, Bertolucci came in contact with Giorgio Bassani and Francesco Arcangeli, all of whom were students of the famed art historian Roberto Longhi. After the declaration of an armistice in Italy on 8 September 1943, Bertolucci sought refuge with his family at the abandoned seventeenth-century family residence in the Apennine village of Casarola. Cardiac arrhythmia had prevented him from active participation in the war. After a long silence, his third volume of poetry, La capanna indiana (The Indian Hut), was published in 1951. It contains selections from Sirio and Fuochi in novembre; in addition, Bertolucci collected poems written from 1935 to 1950 and 195

ATTILIO BERTOLUCCI included them in the section titled ‘‘Lettera da casa’’ (Letter from Home). The three-part poem ‘‘La capanna indiana’’ and ‘‘Frammento escluso’’ (Excluded Fragment) complete the volume. In the volume’s later works, the timeless, privileged dimension of his earlier poems is invaded by outside forces: the reality of war, the deaths of loved ones, and the sight of his children growing up, all of which have affected the serenity of his personal environment. His reaction to any possible change affecting his idyllic world is to establish an enclosed space, which has the capacity of evoking a mythic dimension. In his ‘‘La capanna indiana,’’ for example, the simple storage space for agricultural equipment becomes the emblematic center of the universe, a type of womb. In Rome, Bertolucci had difficulty adapting to a new life and longed to return to Parma. Nevertheless, he recognized that the pain caused by this uprooting was necessary for his poetry. In 1955, an enlarged edition of La capanna indiana was published. It included the 18 new poems of ‘‘In un tempo incerto’’ (In an Uncertain Time), which signal a transition in Bertolucci’s vision of the universe. The nostalgia that was already a part of his poetic realm, even when he lived in contact with his land, is now imbued with a sense of resignation. He intensifies the idyllic aspects in order to compensate for the pain and anxiety of the loss. The elegiac tone of his previous poetry yields to a more epic expression. Viaggio d’inverno (Winter Voyage, 1971), boldly experimental and one of the most significant poetic collections published in postwar Italy, attests to a dramatic existential crisis that originates with his separation from his natural paradise. Away from home and unable to exorcise his neuroses, Bertolucci resorts, in these poems, to sharp contrasts between lightness/darkness, solitude/sociability, time/eternity, stasis/movement, and life/death. What follows is book 1 of a novel in verse, entitled La camera da letto (The Bedroom, 1984), which he had begun in 1955. In 1988, book 2 was added. In this novel, Bertolucci focuses, with almost obsessive detail, on the places, figures, and events that constitute his intimate family history, dating from 1798 to 1951. His decision to write a long narrative poem was an exceptional event for the contemporary Italian literary scene and signaled his autonomy among fellow poets. The publication of three volumes of critical essays, Aritmie (Arrhytmias, 1991), Ho rubato due versi a Baudelaire (I Stole Two Verses from Baudelaire, 2000), and Amici, viaggi, incontri (Friends, Travels, Encounters, 196

2003) witness Bertolucci’s versatile interests, ranging from cinema, theater, literature, and art, and his role as a protagonist of twentieth-century Italian culture. Among his last works are the collections of poems Verso le sorgenti del Cinghio (Toward the Springs of the Cinghio River, 1993) and La lucertola di Casarola (The Lizard of Casarola, 1997). The titles of these volumes remind us of Bertolucci’s allegiance to his birth region: The Cinghio is a creek in the mountains near the village of Antognano, while Casarola is the Apennine site that inspired La camera da letto.

Biography Born in San Lazzaro (Parma) on 18 November 1911. Contributed to the local newspaper, Gazzetta di Parma, under the direction of longtime friend Cesare Zavattini, 1928; enrolled in law school at the University of Bologna, 1931; participated in a national poetry contest, held during the Fascist era, and was awarded second place, 1933; studied at the University of Bologna with art historian Roberto Longhi, BA in letters, 1938; married Ninetta Giovanardi in 1938; taught art history at the Maria Luigia Lyce´e in Parma, 1938–1943 and 1945–1950; founded the foreign poetry series La fenice for Guanda publisher, 1939; his son Bernardo is born, 1941; his second son Giuseppe is born, 1947; moved to Rome, 1951; the death of his father led to a period of severe anxiety, 1954; coedited the literary journals Nuovi argomenti (1966–1980), Paragone, and L’approdo letterario; served as a consultant of the publisher Garzanti; collaborator for the cultural programs of the Italian radio (RAI); Viareggio prize for La capanna indiana, 1951, and La camera da letto, 1989; Etna-Taormina and Tarquinia-Cardarelli prizes for Viaggio d’inverno, 1971; Librex-Guggenheim prize for Le poesie, 1991; the Antonio Feltrinelli prize of the Accademia dei Lincei, 1992, and the Flaiano d’oro in 1993 for his poetic collections. Died in Rome on 14 June 2000. MARK PIETRALUNGA Selected Works Collections Le poesie, Milan: Garzant, 1990; as Selected Poems, translated by Charles Tomlinson, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1993. Opere, edited by Paolo Lagazzi and Gabriella Palli Baroni, Milan: Mondadori, 1997.

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI Poetry

Translations

‘‘Sirio,’’ 1929. ‘‘Fuochi in novembre,’’ 1934. ‘‘Lettera da casa,’’ 1951. ‘‘La capanna indiana,’’ 1951; revised and enlarged, 1955; further revised and enlarged edition, 1973. ‘‘In un tempo incerto,’’ 1955. ‘‘Viaggio d’inverno,’’ 1971. ‘‘La camera da letto,’’ 1984–1988. ‘‘Al fuoco colmo dei giorni. Poesie 1929–1990,’’ edited by Paolo Lagazzi, 1991. ‘‘Verso le sorgenti del Cinghio,’’ 1993. ‘‘La lucertola di Casarola,’’ 1997. ‘‘Poesie scelte,’’ 1997. ‘‘Il viaggio di nozze: versi inediti,’’ edited by Gabriella Palli Baroni, 2004.

Honore` de Balzac, La ragazza dagli occhi d’oro, 1946. D.H. Lawrence, Classici italiani, 1948. Ernest Hemingway, Verdi colline d’Africa (with Aldo Rossi), 1948. Thomas Love Peacock, L’abbazia degli incubi, 1952. Poesia straniera del Novecento, 1958. Charles Baudelaire, I fiori del male, 1975. Imitazioni, 1995.

Essays Aritmie, 1991. Ho rubato due versi a Baudelaire: prose e divagazioni, 2000. Amici, viaggi, incontri, 2003.

Other Una lunga amicizia. Lettere 1938–1982 (with Vittorio Sereni), 1994. Le pause operose del poeta. Attilio Bertolucci alla radio e alla tv, 1998. Il divino egoista (with Doriano Fasoli), 2002. Un’amicizia lunga una vita: carteggio, 1929–1984 (with Cesare Zavattini), edited by Guido Conti and Manuela Cacchioli, Parma: Monte Universita` Parma, 2004.

Further Reading Briganti, Paolo, and Maurizio Schiaretti, Sulla paziente storia dei giorni, Parma: Silva, 1998. Castellari, Mariagiulia, Attilio Bertolucci. La trama dei giorni da ricordare, Faenza: Moby Dick, 2001. Giovanuzzi, Stefano, Invito alla lettura Attilio Bertolucci, Milan: Mursia, 1997. Iacopetta, Antonio, Attilio Bertolucci: Lo specchio e la perdita, Rome: Bonacci, 1984. Jewell, Keala, The Poiesis of History: Experimenting with Genre in Postwar Italy, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Lagazzi, Paolo, Attilio Bertolucci, Florence: Nuova Italia, 1982. Lagazzi, Paolo, Reˆverie e destino, Milan: Garzanti, 1993. Lavagetto, Mario, ‘‘Pratica pirica,’’ in Nuovi Argomenti, 23–24 (1971): 221–233. Magro, Fabio, Un ritmo per l’esistenza e per il verso: metrica e stile nella poesia di Attilio Bertolucci, Padua: Esedra, 2005. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Attilio Bertolucci,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978.

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI (1941–) Bernardo Bertolucci is the most international director ever to come out of the Italian film industry. Yet his first films were devoted to representing Italian national history from the early twentieth century to the present. He treated contemporary Italy in his early feature films, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962), Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) and Partner (1968), then looked back upon the decades of Fascism in Il conformista (The Conformist, 1970) and the Resistance in La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970). He returned to contemporary times with Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), and subsequently took a retrospective,

century-long look at modern Italy in Novecento (1900, 1975–1976). In his subsequent film, La luna (Luna, 1979), Bertolucci adopted the viewpoint of the ‘‘stranger.’’ Italy was seen from the vantage point of the film’s protagonist, Caterina, a recently widowed American opera singer who goes on a tour to Italy with her teenage son, Joe. While she is performing in various Verdi operas in Rome, Caterina is shaken by the discovery that her troubled and lonely son is a heroin addict. Her desperate attempts to free Joe from his addiction result in an incestuous relationship; it also provides the possibility of reuniting him, and herself, with his father. The film’s

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BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI apparently personal journey into an individual’s psychological and existential universe represents one of Bertolucci’s many attempts to remap the cultural and historical identity of Italy. In the early days of his career as a filmmaker, he critically deconstructs Italy, but later recreates it as a mythical place that is the source of fears, anguishes, and dilemmas but also the source of inner dreams and hopes. As Francesco Casetti shows, the journey is a common trope in Bertolucci’s films, a way of exploring the complex web of issues that define Italy’s identity as perceived both by Italians generally and by Bertolucci personally (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1978). Bertolucci’s own perspective is framed by his ideological—mostly Marxist—and psychoanalytic—mostly Freudian—paradigms. Inherently and profoundly self-reflexive and intertextual, the whole of Bertolucci’s work, despite its diversity, remains utterly coherent and cohesive in its thematic and ideological structure. Three key images are constantly evoked in Bertolucci’s cinema: the journey, suggesting a coming from and/or going to one’s place of origin; ambiguity, often connected to a generational discomfort; and finally death, constantly attributed to or associated with a painful father-son relationship. Beginning with his first feature film, La commare secca, where a murder takes place in Rome but the murderer comes from Veneto, the trope of the journey provides a distinct narrative structure and thematic strategy for all of Bertolucci’s narratives. More often than not, an arrival provokes de´paysement, while a departure is rarely shown on screen. This dynamic informs the destiny of the main character in La strategia del ragno, a free adaptation of Jorge Louis Borges’ short story ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’’ that preserves the ambiguity and labyrinthine nature of its literary source. The protagonist is a young man, Athos Magnani, who resembles his father in the most minute details. He returns to his hometown, Tara, to meet his father’s lover, but ends up investigating his father’s past and the circumstances of his death in order to make sense of his own present. The film ends as the camera slowly pans over railroad tracks clogged with weeds and frozen in a timeless dimension suggesting the impossibility of departure from Tara. The search for personal meaning is also the search for a collective and generational understanding about one of the most crucial and problematic moments in Italy’s modern history, Fascism and the Resistance. This historical quest is developed in Bertolucci’s next film, released in 198

the same year, Il conformista, another free adaptation, this time from the novel by Alberto Moravia. The film centers on the troubled existence of a young man from a wealthy family, Marcello Clerici (played by Jean Louis Trintignant) who, in an extreme attempt to conceal his unconfessed abnormality, decides to collaborate with the Fascist regime and work for its secret police. He agrees to assist in the murder of his former teacher, professor Luca Quadri, an exiled anti-Fascist in Paris. The film takes the spectator through a series of flashbacks—a visual tour de force that explores a discomforting personal life and the compulsion to conform—that place Clerici’s actions within a larger metaphorical and political dimension, thus revealing the reasons for the collective fall into Fascism. A brilliant, decadent film, Il conformista fully discloses Bertolucci’s cinematic talent. As Angela Dalle Vacche perceptively remarks, Il conformista proposes an interpretation of Fascism that explicitly grounds the genesis of the regime in the vices of the bourgeois class, but also exploits Benito Mussolini’s ideology of a unified body politic translating it into a mesmerizing spectacle film (The Body in the Mirror, 1992). Bertolucci’s camera becomes an acting subject in exploring the past, together with Trintignant’s highly stylized performance. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro entices the viewer with the same representational strategies promoted by the regime in order to gain consent from the nation: He uses chiaroscuro and the colour spectrum to blend iconographic elements, philosophical allusions, and psychological nuances. Both La strategia del ragno and Il conformista develop a sense of ambiguity that characterize Bertolucci’s cinema as a whole, including his next film, Ultimo Tango a Parigi, acclaimed as a landmark in cinema history. Such ambivalence works at the level of both form and content. Formally, Bertolucci’s narratives oscillate between diverse generic solutions, resisting facile, prefabricated, and codified plot strategies. At first influenced by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whom he met when he moved to Rome with his family and whom he assisted in the direction of his first feature film Accattone (1961), and later inspired by the French New Wave directors, most importantly by Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci pursued a new and contemporary interpretation of cine´ma ve´rite´ that expressed his personal authorial voice. It was with Ultimo Tango a Parigi that he dispatched the past and moved forward to a thoroughly new stage in his development as a filmmaker. The film is a self-reflexive and metadiscursive statement on cinema, its past and

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI its future, as well as a disenchanted commentary on contemporary social behaviours. Marlon Brando’s performance as Paul, a middle-aged American in Paris, brings to the text Brando’s private and public persona and to the cinema to which he belongs. Brando’s character, indeed, serves as a testament to the last romantic hero. Paul meets the 20-year-old Jeanne (Maria Schneider) in an empty apartment that they both wish to sublet. They make love and come back during the following days, acting out their erotic fantasies. To visually represent their story, Storaro relied on the light of the winter sun to naturally convey a warm tonality and, inspired by Francis Bacon’s paintings, he chose orange as the colour of passion, of emotion. The tragic and romantic ending of the film invokes another trope in Bertolucci’s cinema, death. As they exit the apartment in which most of the story has unfolded, Paul and Jeanne walk to a dance hall where, during a heartbreaking tango sequence, Paul changes from a mythical and mysterious figure to become an older and unhappy man. A fairly plain and vacuous young woman, Jeanne is frightened by him and, as he follows her into her mother’s apartment wearing her father’s military hat, she shoots him. Bertolucci records Brando/Paul’s death in a splendid moment of cinematic bravura. A dying man, but also a fallen angel, he slowly retreats into the background of the image, steps onto the balcony, and raises his gaze to the sky with a smile that will forever remain in the spectator’s memory as a tender and tragic goodbye. Ultimo Tango a Parigi remains, along with Il conformista, one of Bertolucci’s most engaging and experimental films of the 1970s. The director’s remapping of modern Italy continued in his next film, Novecento, where in a long flashback he reviews 75 years of national history through the intertwined lives of Olmo Dalco (Ge´rard Depardieu), nephew of a peasant, and Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro), the son of a landowner, born on the same day in the year 1900. The screenplay, authored by Bertolucci with his brother Giuseppe (also a filmmaker and a theatrical director), is a melodramatic saga staged as a political epic (the original director’s cut was five hours and 45 minutes). The film reaches its most climactic and controversial moment in the representation of the violence, decadence, and corruption of the Fascist years. As a whole, however, the film is uneven in its cinematic effects. With La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981), Bertolucci ends his investigation of Italy’s modern history but continues to

use the recurring figure of death as a reflection of a precarious and difficult father-son relationship. The film tells the story of an Italian industrialist Primo Speggiari (played by Ugo Tognazzi) who, when his son is kidnapped and killed, tries to use the ransom money for his personal gain. La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo brings to an end Bertolucci’s personal journey to a place of origin, to the ambiguous relationship one often entertains with one’s past, often due to a deeply strained relationship with one’s father. As he seemed to bid farewell to his own country, he also recapitulated a lifelong dialogue with psychoanalysis, with cinema, but perhaps most importantly with ideology. Indeed, this farewell was reiterated in a documentary released in 1984 and dedicated to the death of Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer, tellingly entitled L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer. After that, Bertolucci’s journeys take the spectator to foreign places—China in L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, 1987), Africa in Il te` nel deserto (The Sheltering Sky, 1990), India in Piccolo Buddha (Little Buddha, 1993). These films were produced with foreign financing and originally released in English. In L’ultimo imperatore, Bertolucci used a flashback structure to relate the spectacularly ambiguous life of Pu Yi, enthroned in 1908, at the age of three, as the emperor of China. He conjures up a complex vision to balance historical reconstruction with imaginative interpretation: Pu Yi’s journey unfolds from the imperial orange glow of his early age in the Forbidden City to the cold and bleak hues (blues and greys) of his prison years. Once again he creates a film of epic grandeur. When he returned to Italy, he did so by representing a group of foreigners who look at Italy as a place of beauty, memory, and inspiration for personal and sexual awakening, as happens in Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty, 1996), a film that taps a reservoir of mythical and perhaps even stereotypical images of the country. The foreign experience and understanding of Italy is once again the focus of Bertolucci’s L’assedio (Besieged, 1999), where an African woman Shandurai goes into exile in Italy, after a dictator jails her husband. She studies medicine and lives in one room of a Roman palazzo owned by Mr. Kinsky, an eccentric English pianist and composer. As the story unfolds in beautifully lit, womb-like interiors, the English man besieges her with flowers, gifts, and music, and declares his passionate love for her. Unquestionably, this film, like many other works by Bernardo Bertolucci, raises relevant and pressing questions about 199

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI personal and collective identity. Italy is once again presented as the ideal place for individual, ideological, and sexual exploration. But the film also raises questions about ambiguity and death, two of the most recurrent topoi in Bertolucci’s distinctive and personal cinematic journey. Bertolucci’s way of telling a story is one of the most sophisticated in cinema. Always torn between Marxist politics and sensuous aesthetics, he works with ideological threads that become tangential, as he weaves a hauntingly beautiful visual fabric. His film, I sognatori (The Dreamers, 2003), which is set in Paris, pays the ultimate homage to Godard, to the great city of cinema. Once again Bertolucci shows that he can create images about which others can only dream.

Biography Born on March 16, 1941, in Parma. His father, Attilio, leading poet and film critic, inspired a love for the cinema by taking him frequently to the movies. Brother Giuseppe born, 1947. In his early teens, made two short films, La teleferica and Morte di un maiale. In 1952, family moved to Rome and settled in an apartment building where Pier Paolo Pasolini lived. Attended University of Rome (1958–1961), studying modern Italian literature; assistant director to Pasolini in Accattone, 1961. After that, left the university without completing his degree, and began training in film independently. In 1962, Bertolucci published his first book of poems, In cerca del mistero, and won the prestigious Viareggio prize. Directed his first feature film, La commare secca, 1962. Prima delle rivoluzione opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, but did not receive theatrical distribution until 1967. In the 1960s, directed documentaries, such as La via del petrolio (1965–1966), and collaborated with Sergio Leone and Dario Argento on the screenplay for Leone’s C’era un volta il West (1968). Joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI), 1969, and began Freudian analysis. Ultimo tango a Parigi opened at the New York Film Festival, 1972. Recipient of numerous awards including an Oscar nomination for Il conformista (best screenplay), 1970, and for Ultimo tango a Parigi (best director), 1973; L’ultimo imperatore won nine Academy Awards, including set design, editing, and cinematography, 1988. Married to Clare Peploe, his closest collaborator on the set; lives in London and Rome. MANUELA GIERI 200

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘In cerca del mistero: poesie,’’ 1988.

Films La commare secca (The Grim Reaper), 1962. Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution), 1964. La via del petrolio (documentary), 1965–1966. Partner (based on Dostoyevsky’s ‘‘The Double’’), 1968. Amore e rabbia (segment ‘‘Agonia’’), 1969. La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’’), 1970. Il conformista (The Conformist, based on Alberto Moravia’s novel), 1970. La salute e` malata (documentary), 1971. Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris), 1972. Novecento Atto I and Atto II (1975–1976). La luna (Luna), 1979. La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), 1981. L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer (documentary), 1984. L’ultimo imperatore (The Last Emperor, based on the book From Emperor to Citizen by Aisin-Gioro Pu Yi), 1987. 12 registi per 12 citta` (segment ‘‘Bologna’’), 1989. Il te` nel deserto (The Sheltering Sky, based on the novel by Paul Bowles), 1990. Piccolo Buddha (Little Buddha), 1993. Io ballo da sola (Stealing Beauty), 1996. L’assedio (Besieged, based on a short story by James Lasdun, ‘‘The Siege’’), 1999. Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (segment ‘‘Histoire d’eaux’’), 2002. I sognatori (The Dreamers), 2003.

Screenplays La commare secca, Milan: Zibetti, 1962; rpt. 1988. Ultimo tango a Parigi (with Franco Arcalli), Turin: Einaudi, 1973; as Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, with essays by Pauline Kael, New York: Delacorte Press, 1973. Novecento, atto primo (with Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci), Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Novecento, atto secondo (with Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci), Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Piccolo Buddha (with Rudy Wurlitzer and Mark Peploe), Milan: Bompiani, 1993. Il te` nel deserto (with Mark Peploe), Milan: Bompiani, 1994. L’ultimo imperatore (with Mark Peploe and Enzo Ungari), Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Stealing Beauty, edited by Susan Minot, New York: Grove Press, 1996.

Further Reading Amengual, Barthe´lemy et al. (editors), Bernardo Bertolucci, Paris: Lettres modernes, 1979. Bertetto, Paolo (editor), Vittorio Storaro: Un percorso di luce, Turin: Umberto Allemandi & Co., 1989. Bertolucci Bertolucci: Interviews, edited by Fabien S. Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline and Bruce Sklarew, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

BESTIARIES Campani, Ermelinda M., L’anticonformista: Bernardo Bertolucci e il suo cinema, Florence: Cadmo, 1998. Campari, Roberto, In viaggio con Bernardo: il cinema di Bernardo Bertolucci, Venice: Marsilio, 1994. Carabba, Claudio, Gabriele Rizza, and Giovanni Maria Rossi, La regola delle illusioni: il cinema di Bernardo Bertolucci, Florence: Aida, 2003. Casetti, Francesco, Bernardo Bertolucci, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Dalle Vacche, Angela, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. Garofalo, Marcello, L’ultimo imperatore. Storia di un viaggio verso Occidente: dal film di Bernardo Bertolucci, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1991. Garofalo, Marcello, Bertolucci: Images, Lucca: M. Pacini Fazzi, 2000. Gerard, Fabien S., Ombres jaunes: journal de tournage du film Le dernier empereur de Bernardo Bertolucci, Paris: Cahiers du Cine´ma, 1987.

Kline, T. Jefferson, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Kolker, Robert Phillip, Bernardo Bertolucci, London: British Film Institute, 1985. Pillitteri, Paolo, Il conformista indifferente e il delitto Rosselli, Milan: Bietti, 2003. Pitiot, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Mirabella, Sur Bertolucci, Castelnau-le-Lez: Climats, 1991. Prono, Franco, Bernardo Bertolucci: Il conformista, Turin: Lindau, 1998. Socci, Stefano, Bernardo Bertolucci, Milan: Il Castoro, 1996. Tonetti, Claretta, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995. Ungari, Enzo (with Bernardo Bertolucci), Scene madri, Milan: Ubulibri, 1987.

BESTIARIES The literary works whose protagonists are animals have Semitic and Arian origins, which have been passed down through the Assiro-Babylonian tradition and the Indian Panchatantra to Giovanni da Capua, who popularized the animal tale in the West in the twelfth century. This heritage was further elaborated in ancient Greece with Aesop’s literary personification of animals in the fourth century BC. Aesop was followed by Phaedrus, who lived during the first empire. Then, in the second-century AD, Apuleius wrote the Metamorphoses, influenced by the Fabulae Milesiae by Aristide of Mileto (second century BC). The first Italian fables with animal protagonists stem from earlier Latin and French fables found in three different medieval collections: (a) the fables in elegiac couplets, well known in the Middle Ages and Renaissance as Aesopus communis; (b) the Ysopets by Marie de France (late twelfth century), translated into standard Tuscan in the thirteenth century; (c) the medieval bestiaries, allegorical treatises with a morally didactic purpose in strict agreement with medieval aesthetics. Bestiario moralizzato, published in 1889 and reprinted in 1983, presents a manuscript from the fourteenth century written by an anonymous author from Umbria. It

is composed of 64 sonnets, each of which is about a different animal. While the text often refers to the classical tradition—Aesopus communis in particular—it was written in the spirit of medieval mysticism. Thus, it is based on the understanding of the function of literature in terms of a specific manGod relationship, a common feature among the bestiaries of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the Esopi volgari from the fourteenth century offer political rules of civil prudence to the reader, and, therefore, surpass the exclusively didactic and moralizing medieval tradition. Bestiario politico by the Anonymous Goriziano and the Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio reveal the same sort of innovative thinking, and so does the mystical bestiary of the Fioretti of Franciscan literature, a simplified Tuscan version (1370–1390) of a doctrinal Latin work. The Italian Humanists also turned back to Aesop and Phaedrus, and their critical approach to the animal tale was later passed down to the thinkers of the Enlightenment. Among those who popularized Aesop in Italy are Chiaro Davanzati in the thirteenth century, Antonio Pucci (1310–1388), Luigi Pulci (1432–1484), Bernardino da Siena (1380–1440), Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574), and Giaovan Battista Gelli (1498–1563), who 201

BESTIARIES translated the Metamorphoses by Apuleius, discovered by Boccaccio. Moreover, famous Humanists from Poggio Bracciolini (Facetiae, 1452), to Giovanni Pontano (Asinus, 1491) and Leon Battista Alberti (Intercoenales, 1438) also adopted themes from Aesop in their works. Additionally, Leonardo Da Vinci’s writings in praise of Aesop (1483–1499) make up a part of the Codice Atlantico in the Ambrosiana Library in Milan. Written in a style in harmony with the philosophy of the Renaissance, Leonardo’s Aesopian apologies form a Bestiario moralizzato. In them, the author seeks to reveal certain truths about mankind through various images of animal nature. Then, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) creates an adaptation of the Second Book of Panchatantra focusing on contemporary customs and morality. The work is entitled Prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (The First Version of the Animals’ Discourses) and was published in 1548. On the other hand, Niccolo` Machiavelli’s L’asino d’oro (The Golden Ass, 1515) refers back to the Cricket by Plutarch. It is a work written in a philosophically critical way. Likewise, in Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (The Intrigue of the Winged Horse, 1585), Giordano Bruno makes use of the images of animals in a broader antiperipatetic discourse. The zooepic is another mainstream genre in which the protagonists are animals. Its literary antecedent is the Batrachomyomachy, attributed to Homer. In the twelfth century this work became the basis of the French Roman de Renart, popularized in Italy in Franco-Veneto dialect in the work Rainaldo e Lesengrino. The Batrachomyomachy was then translated anew by Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century. Moreover, the zooepic is also present in Teofilo Folengo’s Moschea (The Battle of the Flies, 1521), a parody in macaronic language, well known in Europe at the time. Thus, the zooepic gradually acquired ironic, social, anticlerical, and antifeudal overtones. In the tradition of the fable after Aesop, the animal characters are often the mouthpieces of mankind. The posthumous work of the Abbot Francesco Fulvio Frugoni (ca. 1620–1686), Il cane di Diogene (The Dog of Diogenes, 1689), is even divided into ‘‘barks,’’ thus referring to the Novelas Esemplares (1613) by Miguel De Cervantes composed in accordance with the Baroque taste for laughter. In the eighteenth century, the antisatirical vein of the Arcadia places the animals in a pastoral melicidyllic context. Giovanni Meli (1740–1815) is one of the greatest masters of this style. His Favule murali (Moral Fables, 1814), told in Sicilian dialect, attest to a basic Enlightenment faith in human progress, 202

even though human beings are less wise than the animals, which lead a life according to nature. In opposition to the mild moralism of the Favole esopiane (Fables After Aesop, 1748) by Gasparo Gozzi, a great number of gnomic and satirical works inspired by the poignant moralism of Il giorno (The Day, 1801–1804) by Giuseppe Parini appear in the second half of the century. The most important of these gnomic poets is Giancarlo Passeroni (1713–1803), who parodies all aspects of eighteenthcentury Italian life in the seven volumes of his Favole esopiane (Fables After Aesop, 1779–1786). A characteristic of Italian romantic poetry is the fusion of a sentimental subject matter with classical and realistic elements. Giosue` Carducci (1835– 1907) gives rise to this style with his rendition of the bucolic myth about Versilia in poems such as ‘‘Il bove’’ (The Ox), ‘‘A un asino’’ (To a Donkey), and ‘‘Canti di marzo’’ (March Songs). The works of Giacomo Zanella (1820–1888), in particular his most famous poem ‘‘Sopra una conchiglia fossile’’ (On a Fossil Shell in My Study) and the satiric short poems of Filippo Pananti (1766–1837) are also written in this poetic vein. The latter, moreover, became a model and inspiration for the satirical poetry of Giuseppe Giusti (1808–1850), such as in ‘‘Il re Travicello’’ (King Log) and ‘‘La chiocciola’’ (The Snail), and Gioachino Belli (1791– 1863). Other examples of works composed in this style are Ommini e bestie (Humans and Animals, 1914), Lupi e agnelli (Wolves and Lambs, 1919), Giove e le bestie (Jupiter and the Animals, 1932), three bestiaries by Trilussa (1871–1950) written in modern Roman dialect. Undoubtedly, Giacomo Leopardi’s work surpasses the compositions discussed above with the depth of its insight. In 1815, Leopardi himself translated the Batrachomyomachy, and, therefore, drew the heroic component of his Romanticism from the very source of the zooepic. His heroic and comic poem, Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (The War of the Mice and the Frogs), for instance, is a biting satire of the Restoration. Aesopian themes are also present in Leopardi’s Operette morali (Little Moral Exercises) and his Grandi idilli (Great Songs). In fact, the anthropocentric aspect of the Aesopian literature of the Renaissance is brought to an end by Leopardi, whose writing gives rise to the twentieth-century Italian bestiaries. Today, animals no longer serve as moral exemplum in literature and have lost the sacred, fantastic, and symbolic qualities prescribed to them by the allegorical tradition. Giovanni Pascoli, for example, combines his decadent style with images

BESTIARIES from the animal world. Aesopism is also a part of the pantheistic metamorphosis in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s work. Finally, Luigi Pirandello’s bestiaries in Favole della volpe (Fox Tales, 1905) and Novelle per un anno (Short Stories, 1937) are written in the context of the crisis of positivism. Moreover, in the twentieth century, animal protagonists become the embodiments of psychological themes such as the metamorphic imaginary of the unconscious. Arturo Loria’s 70 Aesopian fables, published in 1957, and his Bestiario poetico (A Poetic Bestiary, 1959) are also modeled on Leopardi’s ideas. Likewise, Italo Svevo represents familiar everyday life in his ornithological bestiary Una burla riuscita (The Hoax, 1925), based on Leopardi’s operetta morale ‘‘Elogio degli uccelli’’ (In Praise of Birds). Svevo also uses Darwin’s vision of biological existence as a perpetual struggle and competition. In the sarcastic Primo libro delle favole (The First Book of Fables, 1952) by Carlo Emilio Gadda, the principal characters in a world of chaos are sparrows that represent the author’s anticonformist views, and the pteromorphic moralism of Le favole della dittatura (Fables of the Dictatorship, 1950) by Leonardo Sciascia also goes back to Phaedrus. The protagonist of Il corvo (The Raven) by Sciascia, inspired by Poe’s tale, embodies human illusions, while the work as a whole represents certain existential dramatic tensions. Moreover, in La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Famous Invasion of the Bears in Sicily, 1945), Dino Buzzati rejects the Aristotelian understanding that animals do not have a rational soul. Similarly, Aldo Palazzeschi’s Bestie del 900 (Twentieth-Century Animals, 1951) is a critique of anthropocentrism. This is a parody of medieval bestiaries that satirizes the institutions. In his unfinished Favole e apologhi (Fables and Apologues), Umberto Saba takes up Leopardi’s approach to the personification of animals. The sparrows in his ‘‘Quasi una moralita`’’ represent archetypal domestic sentiments. The she-goat, for instance, becomes a zooerotical image of the womananimal in his well-known poem ‘‘A mia moglie.’’ The same symbol also appears in Italo Svevo’s writing. Likewise, the okapi, the vixen-lover, and

the birds of Eugenio Montale all have a Jungian psychological function. Dialoghi con Leuco` (1947) by Cesare Pavese discusses mythological monsters such as Lycaon (woolf-man), Chimera, Centaurs, while Antonio Tabucchi in his Angelo nero (1991) and Requiem (1992) calls forth a bestiary deprived of any kind of heraldic allure. Tommaso Landolfi has a predilection for insects, from the spider to the cockroach, and, thus, composes a bestiary based on the very first stages of evolution. The creatures in his writing are never presented in an allegorical context. Finally, Giorgio Manganelli transforms his bestiary into a representation of the crisis of literature. His moths, butterflies, worms, and earthworms are all images of the lowest forms of life whose destiny can only be to fade away. PAOLA MARTINUZZI See also: Literature of Anthropology Further Reading Auerbach, Erich, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Archivium Romanicum, Nuova rivista di Filologia Romanza, 22 (1938): 436–489. Biagini, Enza, and Anna Nozzoli (editors), Bestiari del Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Cassirer, Ernest, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Durand, Gilbert, Les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire, Paris: Bordas, 1969. Eco, Umberto, and Chiara Frugoni, ‘‘A Bestiary in Stone,’’ in FMR: the magazine of Franco Maria Ricci, 92 (1998): 17–36. Lecomte, Mia, Animali Parlanti, Florence: Firenze Atheneum, 1995. Lewinsohn, Richard, alias Morus, Gli animali nella storia della civilta`, Milan: Mondadori, 1956. Mezzalira, Francesco, Beasts and Bestiaries: The Representation of animals from Prehistory to the Renaissance, Turin: Allemandi, 2001. Morini, Luigina, Bestiari medievali, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Seppilli, Anita, Poesia e magia, Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Theobaldus Epicopus, Physiologus, London: J & E Bumps, 1928. Zambon, Francesco, Il bestiario di Cambridge, Milan: FMR, 1974. Zambon, Francesco, L’alfabetico simbolico degli animali: I bestiaridel medioevo, Milan: Lumi, 2001.

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CARLO BETOCCHI

CARLO BETOCCHI (1899–1986) In 1932, Carlo Betocchi’s first book, Realta` vince il sogno (Reality Defeats Dreams), a thin volume of 32 lyrics, was published in the poetry series of Frontespizio, the literary Catholic review for which Betocchi was an active contributor. This volume declared a new poetics. In the 1930s, Hermeticism was the dominant poetic movement in Florence. Although Betocchi struck up a friendship with many of its major representatives, such as Mario Luzi, Carlo Bo, and Alfonso Gatto, his poetry is not considered a part of the movement. Realta` vince il sogno does not share any of the Hermetic commonplaces or poetic principles. Betocchi’s main intellectual point of reference was a circle of young Florentine intellectuals rather removed from the Hermetics that included the Catholic novelist Nicola Lisi (1893–1975) and the critic and essayist Piero Bargellini (1897–1980). Sharing Lisi’s and Bargellini’s profound religiosity, he collaborated with them in launching the periodical Calendario dei pensieri e delle pratiche solari in 1923. Betocchi’s non-Hermetic poetics are exemplified by the following verse, from the poem ‘‘Della solitudine’’ (On Solitude): ‘‘E godo la terra / bruna e l’indistruttibile / certezza delle sue cose’’ (I enjoy the brown / earth and the indestructible / certainty of earthly things). The poem is typical of Betocchi’s abiding desire to converse with reality, especially with the landscape with which he enjoys intimate contact. The poet seems immune to the exalted mysticism typical of Hermeticism. Saba’s poetics of direct feeling is a more appropriate reference point for understanding his poetry. In their very titles, Betocchi’s poetic collections describe humble events and common facts and creatures in spiritual communion with a divine presence that permeates reality. As he stated in ‘‘Diario della poesia e della rima’’ (Journal of Poetry and Rhyme), a short essay collected in Tutte le poesie (Complete Poems, 1984), rhyme itself is a rhetorical device to achieve objectivity. Betocchi’s verses could be called a poetry of images in which he represents the lyric scene as if drawing it by hand. His poem ‘‘Piazza dei fanciulli la sera’’ (Square with Children at Night), also in Realta` vince il sogno, is an example. The whole 204

poem develops out of a descriptive catalogue of fixed and moving images; the setting and the people are poetically framed as in an idyll. Yet, the poem is a static representation of nature and humanity. Only with his subsequent collections did Betocchi develop this poetic stasis into a more dynamic form of representation. However, the core of his poetry remained essentially the same: Altre poesie (Other Poems, 1939) as well as Notizie di prosa e di poesia (News on Prose and Poetry, 1947) confirm Betocchi’s poetic craft, and display a deeper cultural consciousness and a better use of his metrical skills. The volume Poesie (Poems, 1955) represents a collection of all his poetic production up to that year. Betocchi continued to update his collected works in Prime e ultimissime (First and Latest Poems, 1974), which included L’estate di San Martino (Indian Summer, 1961) and Un passo, un altro passo (A Step, Another Step, 1967). Un passo, un altro passo opens a new phase in Betocchi’s poetic career: As his poetry matured, he began to understand reality in a deeper sense. His poetry became freer to express itself and to release his religious spirit. Considered his greatest poetic achievement, the volume embodies the sincere and humble image of a man dealing with the everyday aspects of religion and deriving from them profound theological insights. The greatness and mystery of the Christian God are treated as facts that must be taken as they are. Indeed, Betocchi’s final message is simply that God is what He is: This dogmatic, biblical formula contains every necessary explanation. Betocchi’s poetry is thus at its most captivating at the very end of the poet’s life. His final collection, Poesie del sabato 1930–1980 (Saturday’s Poems, 1980), which contains the extraordinary section ‘‘Breviario della necessita`’’ (Breviary of Necessity), constitutes both a summa and a continual beginning of his poetry.

Biography Born in Turin on May 23, 1899. When his father died in 1911, family moved to Florence. Graduated from the Istituto Tecnico Statale of Florence as a land surveyor, 1915. Moved to Parma where he joined the army, 1917. Served on the Austrian

CARLO BETOCCHI front during World War I and in Libya as a garrison officer, 1918. Discharged, 1920. In Florence, with Nicola Lisi, Pietro Parigi, and Piero Bargellini, founded the Calendario dei pensieri e delle pratiche solari, 1923. Cofounded Frontespizio, 1930. Contributor to Il Selvaggio, Primato, Campo di Marte, Letteratura, 1929–1938. Moved to Trieste, 1939. Moved to Bologna and then to Rome, 1941. Appointed professor at the Conservatorio Statale of Venice, 1942; professor at the Conservatorio ‘‘L. Cherubini’’ in Florence, 1952–1968. Awarded the Viareggio prize for Poesie, 1955. Appointed editorin-chief of the radio programme ‘‘L’Approdo,’’ 1958; editor-in-chief of L’Approdo letterario until 1977. Awarded the Citta` di Florence prize for L’estate di San Martino with the ‘‘Dante Alighieri’’ Medal, 1961; Bergamo prize for Sparsi nel mondo, 1962; Lerici-Pea prize for poetry, 1966; Libri dell’anno della scuola italiana prize for Un passo un altro passo, 1967. Awarded the Feltrinelli International Prize for poetry, 1967; Isola d’Elba prize for Un passo, un altro passo, 1968. Awarded the ‘‘Penna d’oro’’ by the president of Italy Sandro Pertini for his achievements in poetry, 1981; E. Montale (Librex-Guggenheim) prize for poetry, 1984. Died in Bordighera on May 25, 1986. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Poems translated by Isidore Lawrence Salomon, New York: Clarke & Way,1964. Tutte le poesie, edited by Luigina Stefani, Milan: Mondadori, 1984.

Poetry ‘‘Realta` vince il sogno,’’ 1932. ‘‘Altre poesie,’’ 1939. ‘‘Notizie di prosa e di poesia,’’ 1947. ‘‘Un ponte nella pianura,’’ 1953. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1955. ‘‘L’estate di San Martino,’’ 1961. ‘‘Un passo, un altro passo,’’ 1967. ‘‘Prime e ultimissime,’’ 1974. ‘‘Poesie del sabato,’’ 1930–1980, 1980.

‘‘Il sale del canto,’’ 1980. ‘‘Del sempre,’’ 1982. ‘‘Dal definitivo istante: poesie scelte e inediti,’’ edited by Giorgio Tabanelli, 1999.

Fiction Cuore di primavera, 1959. Sparsi pel monte, 1965. Vino di Ciociaria, 1965. L’anno di Caporetto, 1967. Collodi, Pinocchio, Florence, 1968. Memorie, racconti, poemetti in prosa, 1983. Confessioni minori, 1985.

Essays Mistici medievali, with Nicola Lisi and Luigi Fallacara, 1956.

Letters Lettere a Franco Scataglini (1976–1984), edited by Massimo Raffaelli, 1991. Incontro a Tursi. Lettere di Betocchi a Pierro, poesie, testi critici vari, edited by Emerico Giachery, 1973. Io son come l’erba: epistolario Carlo Betocchi-Maria Pia Pazielli, edited by Paola Mallone, 2004.

Further Reading Agnello, Nino, La poesia di Carlo Betocchi tra relativo e assoluto, Foggia: Bastogi, 2000. Baldini, Michela (editor), Pagina illustrata: prose e lettere fiorentine di Carlo Betocchi, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2004. Bo, Carlo, Nuovi studi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1946. Civitareale, Pietro, Carlo Betocchi, Milan: Mursia, 1977. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Altro Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1962. Dolfi, Anna (editor), Anniversario per Carlo Betocchi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Macrı`, Oreste, Esemplari del sentimento poetico contemporaneo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1941. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Descrizioni di descrizioni, edited by Graziella Chiarcossi, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Ramat, Silvio, La pianta della poesia, Florence: Vallecchi, 1972. Stefani, Luigina (editor), Dal sogno alla nuda parola, Florence: Gabinetto G. P. Viesseux, 1987. Stefani, Luigina (editor), Carlo Betocchi: Atti del Convegno di studi, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Stefani, Luigina, La biblioteca e l’officina di Betocchi, 2 vols., Rome: Bulzoni 1994. Volpini, Valerio, Betocchi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971.

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UGO BETTI

THE BETROTHED See I Promessi sposi (Work by Alossandro Manzoni)

UGO BETTI (1892–1953) Next to Pirandello, Ugo Betti is one of the most significant Italian playwrights of the twentieth century. His work dramatizes the typical existential crises of his generation. As a dramatist he is concerned with identifying the underlying causes and motives of human action. Moreover, his writing follows, in form as well as in content, the norms imposed by his career as a magistrate. Questions concerning legal ‘‘actuality’’ and the dialectical confrontation between characters are rather prominent, particularly in his dramatic work. The basic structure of Betti’s dramatic work, his poetry, and his short stories, is rather complicated. The ‘‘three-dimensionality of his poetic writing’’ combines realism, psychology, spirituality, or escapology. His works thus may fluctuate in surprising ways between everyday facts and fairy tale, a logical consequence of Betti’s situating himself al confine, on the ‘‘boundary line’’ (Gaetana Marrone, La drammatica di Ugo Betti, 1988). Literary criticism has often dealt with only one of these three components, although studies open to the multiple sense of Betti’s texts are not totally absent. Betti is mainly preoccupied with problems linked to war, emigration, the contrast between generations, and family. His work not only presents eternal or universal aspects of human reality, but also refers to specific moments in history. His characters are drawn from the social types he had come into contact with during his career as a lawyer. His work is further characterized by religious and existential anxiety, by a desire for some sort of harmony, and by a continuous effort to find a path of escape from worldly concerns. His own experience of social life and of human behaviour is vividly 206

expressed in his representations of modern existential situations. His attempt to be always ‘‘within his time,’’ to give his writing a profound social and existential meaning, is particularly evident in works such as Ispezione (The Inquiry, 1942), Delitto all’isola delle capre (Crime on Goat Island, 1948), La regina e gli insorti (The Queen and the Rebels, 1949), Il giocatore (The Gambler, 1950), L’aiuola bruciata (The Burnt Flower-Bed, 1951– 1952). According to Betti himself, in the essay ‘‘Religione e teatro’’ (Religion and Theatre, 1957), his texts are not intended ‘‘a passare la sera’’ (to pass an evening). For Betti there is a profound identity between art and life: Art is born as ‘‘una scintilla dall’attrito dell’artista con la vita vivente che gli e` intorno’’ (a spark from the friction of the artist with the living life surrounding him). The artist therefore is always ‘‘il giudice e l’interprete’’ (the judge and interpreter) of his own time (‘‘Esame di coscienza,’’ 1933). In the essay ‘‘Teatro grande’’ (Great Theatre), which appeared in La gazzetta del popolo of 16 May 1933, he wrote that the theater had to ‘‘costringere il secolo a guardare in se stesso, a illuminarsi, a ribellarsi magari’’ (to compel the century to look at itself, to illuminate itself, possibly to rebel), a phrase that expresses the threefold structure of his work: rebellion (revolt against a certain way of family and social life), introspection, and escape into some transcendental realm. Apart from a play inspired by a fairy tale, L’isola meravigliosa (The Marvellous Island, 1930), the theater of Ugo Betti resumed the tradition of a naturalistic triangle: the principal character, man or woman, is in conflict with two other characters;

UGO BETTI all of them desire self-realization. La padrona (The Mistress, 1926), La casa sull’acqua (The House on the Water, 1928) and Un albergo sul porto (An Inn on the Harbor, 1930), plays that are clearly influenced by the Russian theater of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, are representative of this initial way of conceiving drama. In a letter to Luigi Almirante dated 9 November 1936, dealing with the staging of Frana allo Scalo Nord (Landslide at the North Station, 1932) by the Palmer-Almirante Company at the Teatro Valle in Rome, Betti emphasized that dramatic performance should be ‘‘su un tono di assoluta reale umanita`: verita` e naturalezza’’ (in a tone of absolutely real humanity: truth and naturalness) and that the actors ‘‘devono solo essere veri e umani’’ (they should only be true and natural). Drama should be played out in accordance with the real world. However, ‘‘senza che gli attori se lo siano proposto deve sorgere nello spettatore una impressione e quasi un vago sospetto di soprarealta`’’ (an impression and almost a vague suspicion of surreality ought to arise in the spectator, without the overt suggestion of the actors). The transition from reality to surreality should not be signaled by the actors, but suggested by allusions or through scenographic transformations. In Frana allo Scalo Nord Betti achieves his singular artistic style, which had already been anticipated in some passages of his farse, Il diluvio (The Flood), written in 1931 (first performed in 1942). For Betti’s characters the clash between good and evil leads to the acknowledgment of the good and therefore of the divine. The modes of ‘‘suspension’’ and ‘‘silence’’ characterize his theatrical discourse. The Bettian character does not succeed in opening himself up to the other. On the contrary, he withdraws from contact with others and into a sort of existential ressentiment. The central dramatic situation of Betti’s plays thus involves the arrival of a stranger, a sort of ‘‘messenger,’’ who forces the other characters to look into themselves. Soon, the walls between the characters begin to disintegrate. Crevices are opened, sometimes veritable breaches, from which confessions, some of them violent, emerge; confessions that express Angst and desires, themselves feelings that inspire fear. The building contractor Gaucker, in Frana allo Scalo Nord, cries: ‘‘mi sono visto... come se mi si fosse spaccata una crosta’’ (I have seen myself... as if a crust had been cracked). Bettian drama is divided among three principal characters and their distinct functions: the principal character or characters, who admit their guilt; their antagonists, particularly

‘‘lawyers’’ and ‘‘judges,’’ who try to detect the secret motives of the central character; the stranger, the ‘‘messenger,’’ who provokes a confession. The dramatic language accordingly adopts the syntax of the legal debate. Although admitting his guilt, the protagonist goes on to defend his actions. Another, more emotional mode of discourse interacts with the mode of debate without interrupting or fracturing it. Because of this stylistic uniformity, the spectator has the impression that Betti privileges the logical, whereas, in reality, he is abandoning himself to intuition and emotion. Betti’s plays increasingly came to emphasize individuality. Simone in Un albergo sul porto, Valerio in Notte in casa del ricco (Night in the Rich Man’s House, 1938), Antonio in Il vento notturno (The Night Wind, 1941), Cust in Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, (Corruption in the Palace of Justice, 1949), Amos in La regina e gli insorti, and Ennio in Il giocatore are characters born from a historical context; characters who still are beset by the problem of innocence and individual guilt. As Lia Fava Guzzetta shows in her introduction to Novelle edite e rare (2001), the spaces in which the Bettian characters move do not allow memory to effect idyllic or sentimental transformation: Objects are present in all their corporeality and, often, abjection. When nature appears in its most destructive form, as for instance in the short story ‘‘La cancellata’’ (The Gate, 1920), the town is also present in its most impersonal dimension, showing no traces of its historic and cultural past. Bettian characters lose their contact with each other, even if they live close to one another or are separated only by thin walls that transmit sounds but not meaning, as in Il vento notturno. Sometimes space is limited to a few poor rooms in small flats or boarding houses, as in Ispezione, Lotta fino all’alba (Struggle Till Dawn, 1945), Spiritismo nell’antica casa (Spiriualism in the Ancient House, 1946), and in most of the short stories in the collection Le case ( Houses, 1933). The same atmosphere dominates in the plays that are most directly linked to Betti’s profession, as for instance Frana allo Scalo Nord and Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia. Justice loses its way in a maze of personal passions and interests. In the preface to La padrona, Betti says that he does not want to identify himself with certain writers who only seek to show off their own intelligence and excellent literary style. For him, on the contrary, ‘‘solamente tutto l’altro, ci sta a cuore: la nostra fatica, il nostro amore, e la gioia... e soprattutto il dolore...’’ (all the other things are most 207

UGO BETTI important: our struggles, our love, and our happiness... but above all our suffering). His moral and social commitment prevented him from conceiving writings as game, artifice, evasion. By virtue of this commitment, the dramatic, narrative, and poetic works of Betti are continuous reflections on the ‘‘why’’ of human conduct. Through his analysis of the individual, Ugo Betti is a ‘‘judge’’ who pronounces on the misery of his time. To Betti, history is only interesting to the extent it mirrors the story of the individual. He concludes his essay ‘‘Religione e Teatro’’ with words that define his poetics: Nell’animo dell’uomo ingiusto e addirittura del giudice eversore della giustizia, scopriremo, alla fine, che egli stesso non potra` respirare e sopravvivere senza una giustizia. Sorprenderemo, nell’animo dei crudeli, degli egoisti, dei perduti, nel fondo delle amarezze piu` indurite, a un certo punto, un ‘ingiustificato’ bisogno di pieta`, d’armonia, di solidarieta`, d’immortalita`, di fiducia, di perdono; e soprattutto d’amore... Ognuna di queste misteriose esigenze e` il lato di un perimetro, il cui disegno completo, quando lo intravediamo finalmente, ha un nome: Dio In the soul of the unjust... we shall discover, at the end, that the unjust himself cannot live without justice. At the far end of atrocity, egoism, moral decline of the most hardened bitterness... we may discover by surprise an ‘unjustified’ need of pity, harmony, solidarity, immortality, trust, forgiveness; and especially love... Each of these mysterious requirements is an edge of a perimeter, of which the complete design, when it will finally be transparent to our sight, has a name: God.

We may place the plays that apparently are connected with the political context of the immediate postwar period within this moral perspective, plays such as La regina e gli insorti and L’aiuola bruciata, which may seem prophetic to the extent that Betti foresaw the growing indifference of human beings toward others. Betti dealt with the same motifs in his poetry and short stories as in his dramatic texts: poverty, family relations, emigration, accidents caused by work, corruption, and political interference into private life. In his first volume of poetry, Il re pensieroso (The Pensive King, 1922), and in his later verses as well, Betti often abandoned himself to the fairy tale. Due to the elegance, grace, and lightness of his poetic style he has a certain affinity with the socalled crepuscolari, although he is substantially far from the manner in which this group of poets privileges the pure musicality of word, rhythm, and metre. His poetry plays the darkness of death and human misery against an ardent desire for light 208

and life. The fairy tale also appears in works that devote a great deal of attention to problematic social issues, such as Canzonette-La morte (Little Songs-Death, 1932), Uomo e donna (Man and Woman, 1937), and the posthumous collection Ultime liriche 1938–1953 (Last Lyrics, 1957). The short stories center on a single and focal point of view. The narrative voice selects and displays the facts in a way that reflects his own sensibility and emotion. Today we can read all the short stories in a critical edition, Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi in 2001. For the first time, therefore, it is possible to appreciate the high aesthetic value of the whole corpus of short stories, among which are also stories with a realistic, interior, and metaphysic dimension: Caino (Cain, 1928) Le case (Houses, 1933), and Una strana serata (A Strange Evening, 1948). The short stories are certainly not to be considered as test cases for themes that are developed later in the dramatic work. Betti followed his own experimental course from La Ronda to Solaria, one that took as its point of departure a fruitful combination of fairy tale elements with various modes of realism. The same combination of elements appears in the short novel La piera alta (The High Stone, 1948), initially published as a serial in L’illustrazione italiana (6 July–30 November 1947), and thematically based on the film treatment I tre del Pra’ di Sopra (The Three from the Meadow), which Betti had submitted to a 1939 contest promoted by the review Cinema. The innovative aspects of Ugo Betti’s art stem from his disregard of specific literary schools and ideologies. His art originates in his attentive observation of reality and in an irrepressible urge to find the meaning of life.

Biography Born in Camerino (Macerata) on 4 February 1892. In 1901 moved to Parma, where the father had an appointment as director of the municipal hospital. With his brother Emilio, Ugo often returned to visit his grandparents in Camerino. He remained closely attached to his native town. After having completed his high school studies, he enrolled as a student of law at the University of Parma. His doctoral thesis, ‘‘Il diritto e la rivoluzione’’ was later elaborated as the essay ‘‘Considerazioni sulla forza maggiore come limite di responsabilita` del vettore ferroviario,’’ 1920. After attending the military academy in Turin (1916), he volunteered for the front, where he was taken prisoner after the defeat of Caporetto (1917). During his captivity

UGO BETTI he stayed first in Rastatt, then in Cellelager, in barrack 15/C, where he befriended the writers Bonaventura Tecchi and Carlo Emilio Gadda. After the war he worked as a magistrate, first in Parma and then in Rome in 1930, also the year of his marriage to Andreina Frosini. He published his first volume of poetry, Il re pensieroso, in 1922, followed in 1928 by his first volume of short stories, Caino. In 1925, his first drama, La padrona, won a prize in a literary contest; L’isola meravigliosa won first prize in a contest in Rome, 1930; polemicized against the rondisti, 1933; Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia received an award from the Istituto del Dramma Italiano as best play in the 1948–1949 theatrical season. Diagnosed with stomach cancer in February 1953. Died in Rome on 9 June 1953. FRANCO MUSARRA Selected Works Collections Teatro completo, preface by Silvio D’Amico and Achille Fiocco, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955; rpt. 1971. Raccolta di novelle, edited by Lia Fava, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963. Il filo verde: Poesie, edited by Luigi Fontanella, Camerino: MIERMA, 1993. Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro Edizioni, 2001.

Fiction Caino, 1928. Le case, 1933. Una strana serata, 1948. La piera alta, 1948.

Poetry ‘‘Il re pensieroso,’’ 1922. ‘‘Canzonette-La morte,’’ 1932. ‘‘Uomo e donna,’’ 1937. ‘‘Ultime liriche 1938–1953,’’ 1957.

Ispezione, 1942; in Ugo Betti: Three Plays, translated by David Gullette and Gino Rizzo, 1966. Marito e moglie, 1943. Lotta fino all’alba, 1945; in Three Plays on Justice, translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1964. Irene innocente, 1946. Spiritismo nell’antica casa, 1946. Delitto all’isola delle capre, 1948; as Crime on Goat Island, translated by Henry Reed, 1961. Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, 1949; as Corruption in the Palace of Justice, translated by Henry Reed, The New Theatre of Europe, vol. 1, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, 1962. La regina e gli insorti, 1949; in Three Plays, translated by Henry Reed, 1956; rpt., 1958; as The Queen and the Rebels, translated by Henry Reed, in Three European Plays, edited by E. Martin Browne, 1965. Il giocatore, 1950; in Ugo Betti: Three Plays, translated by Barbara Kennedy, 1966. Acque turbate, 1951. L’aiuola bruciata, 1951–1952; in Three Plays, translated by Henry Reed, 1956; rpt. 1958; in Two Plays, edited and translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1965; rpt. 1968, 1973, 1978. La fuggitiva, 1952–1953; in Three Plays on Justice, translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1964.

Essays Ugo Betti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Religione e teatro. Il canto XXIX del Paradiso, edited byAndreina Betti, 1957; as ‘‘Religion and Theatre,’’ translated by Gino Rizzo and William Meriwether, The Tulane Drama Review, 5 (December 1960): 2–12; as ‘‘Religion and Theatre,’’ in Theatre in the Twentieth Century, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, 1963. ‘‘Preface to The Mistress,’’ translated by Gino Rizzo and William Meriwether, in The Tulane Drama Review, 5 (December 1960): 13–14. Scritti inediti, edited by Antonio Di Pietro, 1964; selection as ‘‘Essay, Correspondence, Notes,’’ translated by William Meriwether and Gino Rizzo, The Tulane Drama Review, 8 (Spring 1964): 51–86. Viaggio nella memoria 1892–1953, edited by Sergio Celestre, 2001.

Theater

Further Reading

La padrona, 1926. La casa sull’acqua, 1928. Un albergo sul porto, 1930. L’isola meravigliosa, 1930. Il diluvio, 1931. Frana allo Scalo Nord, 1932; in Three Plays on Justice, translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1964; in Two Plays, edited and translated by G. Harry McWilliam, 1965; rpts. 1968, 1973, 1978. Il cacciatore d’anitre, 1934. Una bella domenica di settembre, 1935. I nostri sogni, 1936. Il paese delle vacanze, 1937; in Three Plays, translated by Henry Reed, 1956; rpt. 1958. Notte in casa del ricco, 1938. Favola di Natale, 1940. Il vento notturno, 1941.

Corotenuto, Carla, ‘‘La scrittura bettiana tra realismo e trascendenza,’’ in Ugo Betti, Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro Edizioni, 2001. Di Pietro, Antonio, L’opera di Ugo Betti, 2 vols., Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1966–1968. Doglio, Federico, and Wanda Raspolini (editors), Betti drammaturgo, Viterbo: EUP, 1984. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Ugo Betti, Novelle edite e rare, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro Edizioni, 2001. Imberty, Claude, ‘‘L’atto unico d’Ugo Betti,’’ in The´atre civilisation contemporaine. Me´langes offerts a` Janine Menet-Genty, edited by Marie-He´le`ne Caspar, Paris: Centre de Recherches Italiennes, 2004. Licastro, Emanuele, Ugo Betti. An Introduction, Jefferson, N.C.-London: McFarland, 1985.

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UGO BETTI Lo Cicero, Elena F., Ugo Betti: Teatro de la culpa y el rescate, Buenos Aires: Plus Ultra, 1976. Luzi, Alfredo (editor), Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Marrone, Gaetana, La Drammatica di Ugo Betti. Tematiche e Archetipi, Palermo: Novecento, 1988. Moro, Gildo, Il teatro di Ugo Betti, Milan: Marzorati, 1973. Musarra, Franco, Impegno e astrazione nell’opera di Ugo Betti, L’Aquila: L.U. Japadre, 1974. Musarra, Franco, ‘‘La spettacolarita` in ‘Frana allo Scalo Nord,’’’ in The´atre Civilisation contemporaine. Me´langes offerts a` Janine Menet-Genty, edited by Marie-He´le`ne Caspar, Paris: Centre de Recherches Italiennes, 2004. Pandolfi, Vito, Teatro italiano contemporaneo 1945–1959, Milan: Schwarz, 1959. Ruschioni, Ada, ‘‘Stilemi di luce e ansia di trascendenza nella poetica di Ugo Betti,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 5, nos. 5–6 (1981): 183–226. Spera, Gianni, ‘Coscienza e responsabilita`’ nell’opera di Ugo Betti, Florence: Edizioni CLUSF, 1977.

CORRUZIONE AL PALAZZO DI GIUSTIZIA, 1949 Play by Ugo Betti

Literary critics agree in considering Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia (Corruption in the Palace of Justice) Ugo Betti’s masterpiece and one of the strongest dramas of Italian twentieth-century theater. In the play, which belongs to Betti’s dramas concerned with questions of social and community relations, corruption intrudes itself into the very institution, known as the Palace of Justice, originally intended to protect society from this sort of depredation. The special prosecutor Erzi is appointed by the ministry to clear up some questionable sentences, which might be the work of a corrupt judge. The presence of Erzi is alarming to various suspect persons, who maintain their innocence. The old President Vanan is the most surprised by the inquiry. Finally Cust, a corrupt judge, confesses his guilt to the Alto Revisore (The Supreme Judge), an ambiguous, almost divine being. In Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, written between the end of 1944 and the summer of 1945, Betti 210

has rendered characters of great dramatic depth: Cust, judge and murderer, efficient orator, who cunningly accuses himself in order to divert attention away from his real guilt; Crost, the First Judge, old and seriously ill, who, although having seen in Cust the murderer of the businessman Ludvi-Pol, does not bring charges against him, convinced that the ‘‘palace’’ must have a ‘‘worthy’’ king; Elena, the daughter of the President Vanan, who cannot prevent the collapse of her dreams; Erzi, the investigating magistrate, who assumes the dramatic role of the ‘‘messenger,’’ who induces the various characters, particularly Cust, to confess their anxieties, tensions, weaknesses, repressed desires. Even today Betti’s representation of corruption and justice continues to persuade us with its sense of actuality. Erzi’s investigation, which unfolds like a detective story, leads to the exposure of the guilty Cust, who confesses his guilt only when Croz is struck by a heart attack and Cust imagines that he is dead. Cust as well as Croz are diabolic characters. Betti has the theatrical intuition to have Croz summon the other judges, while dying, but only to frighten Cust. After having been congratulated by Erzi for his appointment as the new president (the moment of his final triumph), Cust capitulates to his sense of guilt, particularly for having caused the death of Elena. Although some critics have read the play politically as an antifascist drama, or religiously, seeing the Alto Revisore as a divine being, the drama finds its most tense meaning in the dialogues, in particular when Cust is talking. The thesis of the drama is that human justice is always defective, that ‘‘true’’ justice has to originate in the soul of those called before the High Judge. It is, however, not only the theme that makes the masterpiece, but the clever plot and the succession of monologues and dialogues in the various scenes. FRANCO MUSARRA Editions First edition: originally published in Sipario (March 1949); rpt. in Teatro completo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955. Other editions: Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1966; Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, introduction by Giovanni Antonucci, Rome: Newton, 1993; Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia, edited by Gaetana Marrone, Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 2006. Translations: as Corruption in the Palace of Justice, translated by Henry Reed, The New Theatre of Europe, vol. 1, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, New York: Dell, 1962; as Corruption in the Palace of Justice,

UGO BETTI translated by Henry Reed, in Classics of Modern Theatre, edited byAlvin Kernan, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965.

Further Reading Antonucci, Giovanni, ‘‘Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia: fra cronaca e storia,’’ in Ugo Betti, edited by Federico Doglio and Wanda Raspolini, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Carlos De Miguel, Juan, ‘‘Progressione drammaturgica in Ugo Betti: da ‘Frana allo Scalo Nord’ a ‘Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia,’’’ in Studi italiani, 2 (2000): 95–109. Curetti, Elettra, Zu den Dramen von Ugo Betti, Zu¨rich: Juris Druck, 1966. Di Pietro, Antonio, L’opera di Ugo Betti, vol. 2, Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1968. Genot, Ge´rard, ‘‘Ugo Betti, l’Engrenage et la balance’’ in La mort de Godot, edited by Pierre Brunel, Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1970. Marrone, Gaetana, La Drammatica di Ugo Betti. Tematiche e Archetipi, Palermo: Novecento, 1988. Musarra, Franco, ‘‘Il concetto di impegno nel teatro di Ugo Betti,’’ in Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Portier, Lucienne, ‘‘Le the´aˆtre en question: Ugo Betti,’’ in Italianistica, II, no. 2 (1973), 247–267. Usmiani, Renate, ‘‘The ‘Felix Culpa’ Motif in the Drama of Ugo Betti,’’ in Humanities Association of Canada, Bulletin, 21 (1970): 39–44.

DELITTO ALL’ISOLA DELLE CAPRE, 1948 Play by Ugo Betti

Since its first performance on 20 October 1950 at the Teatro delle Arti in Rome (Compagni ZareschiRandone), Delitto all’Isola delle Capre (Crime on the Goat Island) has been considered one of Betti’s most successful and significant plays. The plot is quite simple. In a house situated in a barren land lives Agata with her daughter Silvia and her sisterin-law Pia. Her husband Enrico has left her. At first it seems that harmony reigns in the house, where Agata and her husband, professor Enrico Ishi, had chosen to live in order to escape the arbitrary

compromises that prevented them from living according to the ideal of freedom to which the professor had subscribed. But their isolated life causes husband and wife to enclose themselves in silence. After the departure of her husband, Agata falls into a state of apathy and indifference. The life of the three women is upset by the arrival of the stranger Angelo, a name that suggests a´nghelos, messenger. Angelo claims to have been in captivity in Africa with Agata’s husband and to have promised Enrico that he would tell Agata of his death. He settles into the house and becomes the ‘‘pastore delle capre’’ (shepherd), seducing alternately the three women. Both an angel and a demon who subjects them to his own erotic desires, Angelo drags the women into a degrading emotional maelstrom. When it appears that reason is destined to succumb to instinct, Agata revolts. She invents a secret plan while Angelo is trapped in a well, where he had gone down to fetch some bottles of wine, when the rope ladder accidentally falls inside. She decides to help Angelo get out of the well only after her daughter and sister-in-law leave. Her plan, however, does not succeed. When she calls Angelo, she gets no answer. In her final decision to make Angelo her lover-victim and live with him in perpetual struggle, there is an unassailable conviction that human choices may know neither reflections nor forgiveness. Agata’s words that conclude Act Three are in this respect significant: ‘‘Ora siamo noi due, e tutto e` semplice. Tu non potrai certo andartene, e nemmeno io. Seguiteremo a chiamarci e a lottare per tutta l’eternita`’’ (Now we two are alone, and everything is very simple. You cannot go away, no more than I. We shall continue to call each other and to struggle in all eternity). Delitto all’Isola delle Capre, which Betti presumably wrote between 1946–1948 after Ispezione, is a drama rich in symbols that refer to more or less concealed erotic meanings. The language of the characters has a personal value: Agata is a mysterious and dominant character (she is the ‘‘mistress’’); Silvia is a figure of innocence, an innocence that begins to lose its original state as a windowpane that is about to lose its transparency; Pia, in her purity, lives in a world of dreams from which she tries vainly to escape; Angelo, who is first enticing, persuading, then violent when he is convinced he can dominate the women and take full possession of the house. His arrival unchains an ancient struggle between male and female, but also among the three women who each desire to take possession of the male. Central symbols are the island, a space separated from the rest of the world, the well as 211

UGO BETTI reference to the female and to a possible contact between the earthly and the spiritual, the wind as an element of destruction and creation, the wine and the goats as ritual elements of the Dionysian. Delitto all’Isola delle Capre is exemplary in teaching us to understand ‘‘the expressive, staging and thematic codes, on which the theatre of Betti is structured’’ (Gaetana Marrone, ‘‘‘Delitto all’Isola delle Capre,’’’ 1996). Film versions of the play, such as Charles Brabant’s Les posse´de´es (1957) and Gerardo Puglia’s Woman in the Wind (1990), attest to the continuing power of the play over audiences and the particular intellectual and human depth of its drama. FRANCO MUSARRA Editions First edition: originally published in Teatro, 15 November 1950; in Teatro completo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955; rpt. 1971. Translations: Crime on Goat Island, translated by Henry Reed, San Francisco: Chandler Publishing Co., 1961; in Ugo Betti: Three Plays, translated by Gino Rizzo and David Gullette, New York: Hill and Wang, 1966; Crime on Goat Island, translated by Henry Reed, in Masterpieces of the Modern Italian Theatre, edited by Robert Corrigan, New York: Collier Books, 1967.

Further Reading Balducci, Marino, Alberto, ‘‘La ritualita` dionisiaca nel ‘Delitto all’Isola delle Capre’ di Ugo Betti,’’ in Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Di Pietro, Antonio, L’opera di Ugo Betti, vol. 2, Bari: Edizioni del Centro Librario, 1968. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Sta`sis e empatheia: la trascendenza dell’immagine in una versione cinematografica americana di ‘Delitto all’isola delle capre,’’’ in Lingua e letteratura italiana nel mondo oggi, edited by Ignazio Baldelli and Bianca Maria Da Rif, Firenze: Olschki, 1991. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘‘Delitto all’Isola delle Capre’: dalla filologia testuale alla forma cinematografica,’’ in Ugo Betti. Letterato e drammaturgo, edited by Alfredo Luzi, Macerata-Camerino: Comune di Camerino, 1996. Moro, Gildo, Il teatro di Ugo Betti, Milano: Marzorati, 1973. Musarra, Franco, Impegno e astrazione nell’opera di Ugo Betti, L’Aquila: L.U. Japadre, 1974. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Il Teatro di Betti: la scena come confessione pubblica del passato,’’ in Betti drammaturgo, edited by Federico Doglio and Wanda Raspolini, Viterbo: EUP, 1984. Tuscano, Pasquale, ‘‘Il senso della vita e della morte nel dramma bettiano ‘Delitto all’isola delle capre,’’’ in Ugo Betti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981.

SAVERIO BETTINELLI (1718–1808) The polemicist, poet, and critic Saverio Bettinelli was part of the climate of renewal that had a profound impact on literary studies in the age of the Enlightenment. His intellectual activity was complex, and reveals the convergence of numerous and diverse interests. His Jesuit education, acquired in his native Mantua as well as in other northern Italian cities, was an essential component of his productive literary career, and his loyalty to the order remained constant throughout his life. His capacity to remain abreast of the times and his acceptance of the new Enlightenment culture—as well as the tendency to curb its more revolutionary aspects—were indeed the result of the cultural teachings of the Jesuits. Bettinelli’s work can be articulated chronologically. The first phase includes the years up to 1755, during which he obtained his first successes and 212

accolades as he traveled through some of the most vibrant cultural centers of the period: Bologna, Venice, and Parma. He wrote for the theater, imitating French models in plays intended for Jesuit boarding schools. Even though successful, they are works of little interest, just as the satiric poem in octaves Le raccolte (Collections, 1751) and the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori (Poems in Blank Verse by Three Excellent Modern Authors, 1758), published under the Arcadian pen name Diodoro Delfico. Two essential events took place between 1756 and 1759: a trip to France and the publication in Venice of Dieci lettere di Publio Virgilio Marone scritte dagli Elisi all’Arcadia di Roma sopra gli abusi introdotti nella poesia italiana (Ten Letters by Publio Virgilio Marone Written from the

SAVERIO BETTINELLI Elysian Fields to the Roman Arcadia Concerning the Malpractices Introduced into Italian Poetry, 1757), also known as Lettere virgiliane. His sojourn in France allowed him to frequent the most important literary circles and to meet Helve´tius, Rousseau, and Voltaire, who exerted a lasting influence on Bettinelli. The Lettere virgiliane function as an introduction to the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori, a collection of poems written by Algarotti, Frugoni, and Bettinelli himself. In this work, the leading voice is Virgil, who launches a trenchant attack on the Italian poetic tradition and calls for reforms. He begins with Dante, on whom he expresses a limitative judgment, pointing out the obscurity and the lack of good taste in the Comedia. Petrarch is singled out as a model of elegance and harmony, but also accused (with the petrarchisti) of repetition. When Virgil arrives at the eighteenth century, during a trip to Rome, he illustrates the current state of Italian poetry, criticizing its xenophilous trends. The Lettere virgiliane, which caused a great deal of controversy for their critical stance with respect to tradition, are animated by a contentious style, however informed by a mild classicist vein. Bettinelli’s appeal to an ideal of renewal resumes in Dodeci lettere inglesi sopra varii argomenti, e sopra la letteratura italiana principalmente (Twelve Letters by an Englishman on Various Matters and Particularly on Italian Literature, 1766), or Lettere inglesi, which were written for the Milanese journal Il caffe` but published as an appendix to the reprint of the Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori. More attention is now given to sociological conditions: the decadence of the contemporary literary scene is now identified in the lack of a national capital and of a common civilization, which cause men of letters to become argumentative and consequently of little benefit to the society in which they live. Bettinelli invited his contemporaries to look outside of Italy, and, at the same time, to protect the autonomy of their poetic experience from the academies and from the trivialization of the editorial industry. These themes are further discussed in an essay on aesthetics, Dell’entusiasmo delle belle arti (On Enthusiasm in the Fine Arts, 1769), which Bettinelli published in Milan under the auspices of Pietro Verri. The sources of aesthetic emotion, whose basic element is identified as enthusiasm (founded on imagination and sensitivity), are researched empirically rather than theoretically. With its focus on the power of feeling and nature, this essay privileges the artist’s freedom, along with a significant openness to the experience of the sublime; though tempered by a constant

appeal to ‘‘good taste’’ or rational control, it reveals Bettinelli’s sensitivity to the most advanced ideas in the field of aesthetics, from sensualism to Romanticism. In the forefront of Enlightenment thinking, Bettinelli reconstructed the Italian civilization from the eleventh to the fifteenth century in his most important work of literary historiography Del risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti, e ne’ costumi dopo il mille (On the Revival of Italy in Scholarship, Arts, and Customs after the Year 1000, 1775). The first part is chronological, while the second discusses specific topics such as language, music, the arts, theater, and customs. Influenced by Voltaire’s historical writing (Essai sur les moeurs), Bettinelli sets civil history against political history, using some particularly well-chosen episodes. In the years that followed, he continued his literary investigations with Delle lodi del Petrarca (On Praising Petrarch, 1786) and the Saggio sull’eloquenza (Essay on Eloquence, 1802). Also important for his perspective on contemporary theater are his Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues on Love, 1796). Bettinelli’s severe judgment of opera and tragicomedy discloses a constant attention to tragedy, recognizing the greatness of Vittorio Alfieri. He also dedicated a series of writings to the new and important female audience with Lettere d’un’amica (Letters from a Girlfriend, 1785) and Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia sopra gli epigrammi (Letters to Lesbia Cidonia Concerning Epigrams, 1788). Bettinelli’s critical reception is mixed. Over time his works have met with diverging judgments, beginning with Gasparo Gozzi’s polemical attacks on Lettere virgiliane to a difficult placement between Classicism, Enlightenment, and pre-Romanticism (Bonora and Binni, respectively). What is clear is the nonlinearity of dynamic ideas of renewal and moderate classicism, respectful of the social and ideological status quo. Yet the attention that he gives to the modes of cultural communication as well as those of the aesthetic experience reveal his sensitivity to the most enlightened cultural debate of the time.

Biography Born in Mantua on 18 July 1718. Studied at Jesuit boarding schools in his native town and later in Bologna; entered into the order, 1738; named instructor of rhetoric in Brescia, and after being ordained a priest, became professor of poetics in Venice, 1748; moved to Parma where he remained 213

SAVERIO BETTINELLI for seven years as instructor of history at the Collegio dei nobili; left Parma and traveled extensively in Germany, Switzerland, and France; relocated to Verona, 1759; appointed professor of eloquence of the University of Modena, 1772; the following year, at the suppression of the Society of Jesus, retired to his native Mantua, where he resided for the last 30 years of his life. Died in Mantua, 13 September 1808. RICCIARDA RICORDA See also: Historiography Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Venice: Zatta, 1780–1782. Opere edite ed inedite in prosa ed in versi. Seconda edizione riveduta, ampliata, e correttadall’Autore, 24 vols., revised and enlarged edition, Venice: Cesare, 1799–1801. Lettere virgiliane e inglesi e altri scritti, edited by Vittorio Enzo Alfieri, Bari: Laterza, 1930. Opere di Francesco Algarotti e di Saverio Bettinelli, edited by Ettore Bonora, Milan: Ricciardi, 1969.

Poetry ‘‘Le raccolte,’’ 1751. ‘‘Versi sciolti di Diodoro Delfico,’’ 1755.

Prose Dieci lettere di Publio Virgilio Marone scritte dagli Elisi all’Arcadia di Roma sopra gli abusi introdotti nella poesia italiana, 1757.

Dodeci Lettere Inglesi sopra varii argomenti e sopra la letteratura italiana principalmente, 1766. Dell’entusiasmo delle belle arti, 1769. Del Risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti e ne’ costumi dopo il mille, 1775. Lettere d’un’amica, 1785. Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia sopra gli epigrammi, 1788. Dialoghi d’amore, 1796. Lettere XX ad una sua amica sopra le Belle arti, 1798. Dissertazione accademica sopra Dante, 1800.

Further Reading Arato, Franco, ‘‘Le tentazioni della filosofia: Bettinelli e Denina,’’ in La storiografia letteraria nel Settecento italiano, Pisa: ETS, 2002. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Fra Illuminismo e Romanticismo: Saverio Bettinelli,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1947. Bonora, Ettore, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Illuministi italiani: Opere di Francesco Algarotti e di Saverio Bettinelli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1969. Bonora, Ettore, Parini e altro Settecento: Fra Classicismo e Illuminismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982. Colagrosso, Francesco, Saverio Bettinelli e il teatro gesuitico, 2nd revised ed., Florence: Sansoni, 1901. Crotti, Ilaria, and Ricciarda Ricorda (editors), Saverio Bettinelli: Un gesuita alla scuola del mondo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Fubini, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione alla lettura delle Virgiliane,’’ in Dal Muratori al Baretti, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Gozzi, Gasparo, Difesa di Dante, Venice: Zatta, 1758. Marcialis, Maria Teresa, Saverio Bettinelli: Un contributo all’estetica dell’esperienza, Palermo: Aesthetica Preprint, 1988. Muscetta, Carlo, ‘‘Saverio Bettinelli,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I minori, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1961.

ALBERTO BEVILACQUA (1934–) Alberto Bevilacqua is among Italy’s most exemplary writers of the postwar period. An immensely prolific novelist, poet, and film director, he has published more than two dozen novels and other prose writings plus several collections of poetry. In recent years, this veteran writer has been especially attentive to changing social and literary tastes. For example, Giallo Parma (Parma Thriller, 1997) is indicative of a new interest by Italian readers in the serious detective novel; Gli anni struggenti (The Yearning Years, 2000) is an attempt to reach a prosperous younger readership eager to find its 214

attitudes toward life and the future taken seriously; and Eros (Eros, 1994), like several of Bevilacqua’s other works, reflects Italian society’s acceptance of more explicit fictional descriptions of sexual activities. In his best fiction, Bevilacqua works against the grain of literary conventions and expectations. His most successful narratives are either set in his native Parma or involve a resident of that city who has moved away physically from familial and cultural roots only to return in imagination to the settings of his childhood. In this regard, the critic

ALBERTO BEVILACQUA Stefano Tani has characterized Bevilacqua as a chronicler of the ‘‘microcosm’’ who has turned away from the macrocosm of history to focus instead on an elegiac description of the land of his youth (Il romanzo di ritorno, 1990). In Bevilacqua’s case, this land is the city of Parma plus the lowlands lying between the city walls and the huge and storied fluvial artery of the Po River. The characters who appear in such collections of loosely connected stories and anecdotes as those in La polvere sull’erba (Dust on the Grass, 1955), Una citta` in amore (A City in Love, 1962), and La festa parmigiana (Parma Festival, 1980), or in the novel La califfa (Califfa, 1964), are sharply unconventional individuals, men and women from different social classes who defy prevailing social customs in pursuit of their unique and often colorful destinies. Among Bevilacqua’s most notable female characters is the demimondaine but utterly honest Irene Corsini, ‘‘La Califfa,’’ who makes the most of her overpowering physical attractiveness to get ahead in the world no matter what. All of Bevilacqua’s fictional women—including Empress Maria Luisa of Austria—are powerfully driven by love and desire. Bevilacqua’s men, by contrast, typically inhabit a world that is political before it is sexual, often to the despair of their female partners who can only mourn when their loved ones are beaten by the police, jailed, exiled, or executed. In Bevilacqua’s stories set in the earlier years of the twentieth century, these heroes are often anti-Fascist political subversives. Later, during the civil war of 1943– 1945—a war that Bevilacqua was too young to fight in but not too young to witness—they are partisans. Combatants of a related but different sort appear in the stories about the years right after the war, when a lawlessness without precise ideological coloration swept over the Po lowlands with the same mindless fury as that of the floods periodically caused by the overflowing of the great river. In these tales, the often fantastic preChristian folklore of the region melds with the equally fantastic but historically based events of these confusing years, which Bevilacqua is one of the few Italian writers to have chronicled. The central characters of these works are individuals of great charisma. They include ‘‘La Califfa’’ and ‘‘La grande Gio`’’ (the big Gio`) of the 1986 novel by that name, the partisan Marco Ridolfi of La polvere sull’erba and the anti-Fascist activist Guido of Una citta` in amore. Like ‘‘La Califfa,’’ who was apparently easily recognized by other Parmigiani, Guido was based on a historical figure, the Parma native and left-wing leader Guido

Picelli. In La pasqua rossa (Red Easter, 2003) Bevilacqua returned to this fictional treatment of a historical person; Ezio Barbieri, the Milanese bandit and leader of a prison revolt, is the near legendary figure at the narrative’s center. Bevilacqua’s favorite, and in his eyes most charismatic character, was drawn from popular history, however, but from his own intimate experience. To an extraordinary degree, and even when writing about such historical individuals as those mentioned, Bevilacqua is always writing about himself as he is or would like to be. This autobiographical obsession, plus his ‘‘cannibalistic’’ tendency to repeat episodes from one book to another, marks the limits of this writer’s achievement. The Parma and the Rome that appear in Bevilacqua’s books are unlike the London of Charles Dickens’ novels, the Paris of Honore´ de Balzac’s, or the Yoknapatawpha County of William Faulkner. Instead of putting into motion the fully realized characters created by these English, French, and American authors, Bevilacqua never seems quite able to create autonomous individuals with their own unique preoccupations, desires, and destinies. Whatever happens in his books, and whatever his characters happen to be named, it is clear that this author’s dominant subject is always himself: his childhood, his family, his sex life, his quirks, the stories he has heard and made up about his native region as they resonate on his own sensibility. The creator of a vigorous, muscular Italian prose unlike that of some of the other writers of best-selling novels in the Italy of the 1960s and 1970s, Bevilacqua has followed a career trajectory similar to that of the film director who appears in many of Federico Fellini’s films from the same period. These films often depict a provincial intellectual of great talent who moves from the outskirts of the dominant culture to a corrupt and corrupting Rome whose corrosive effects on his character and art he is finally unable to escape even as he denounces those who fall prey to its allure. In his films, mostly adapted from his fiction and produced by RAI-TV, Bevilacqua continues to memorialize the promises and disappointments of the plight of many Italian intellectuals throughout the final decades of the twentieth century and, in his case, beyond.

Biography Born in a working-class neighborhood of Parma on 27 June 1934. Studied law at the University of Parma. In 1956, moved to Rome where he has 215

ALBERTO BEVILACQUA lived since. Correspondent or staff writer for the daily newspapers Il messaggero, L’approdo, Il resto del carlino, and Il corriere della sera. Literary prizes include the Campiello in 1966 for Questa specie d’amore, the Strega in 1968 for L’occhio del gatto, and the Bancarella in 1972 for Il viaggio misterioso. Frequent appearances on television talk shows. CHARLES KLOPP Selected Works

Poetry ‘‘L’amicizia perduta,’’ 1961. ‘‘L’indignazione,’’ 1973. ‘‘La crudelta`,’’ 1975. ‘‘Immagine e somiglianza,’’ 1982. ‘‘Vita mia,’’ 1985. ‘‘Il corpo desiderato,’’ 1988. ‘‘Messaggi segreti,’’ 1993. ‘‘Poesie d’amore,’’ 1996. ‘‘Piccole questioni di eternita`,’’ 2002. ‘‘Legame di sangue,’’ 2003. ‘‘Tu che mi ascolti—Poesie alla madre,’’ 2005.

Films

Fiction La polvere sull’erba, 1955; revised edition, 2000. Una citta` in amore, 1962. La califfa, 1964; as Califfa, translated by Harvey Fergusson II, 1969. Questa specie d’amore, 1966. L’occhio del gatto, 1968. Il viaggio misterioso, 1972. Umana avventura, 1974. Una scandalosa giovinezza, 1978. La festa parmigiana, 1980. La mia Parma, 1982. Il curioso delle donne, 1983. La donna delle meraviglie, 1984. La grande Gio`, 1986. La misteriosa felicita`, 1988. Il gioco delle passioni, 1989. I sensi incantati, 1991. Un cuore magico, 1993. L’eros, 1994; as Eros, translated by Ann McGarrell, 1996. Lettera alla madre sulla felicita`, 1995. Anima amante, 1996. GialloParma, 1997. Sorrisi dal mistero, 1998. Gli anni struggenti, 2000. Viaggio al principio del giorno, 2001. Attraverso il tuo corpo, 2002. La pasqua rossa, 2003. Parma degli scandali, 2004. Il Gengis, 2005.

La califfa, 1970. Questa specie d’amore, 1972. Attenti al buffone, 1975. Le rose di Danzica, 1979. Bosco d’amore (based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s story), 1981. Il grande respiro, 1981. La donna delle meraviglie, 1985. Tango blu, 1988. GialloParma, 1999.

Further Reading Ba´rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘I giochi dell’invenzione: Bevilacqua, Malerba e Siciliano,’’ in Storia delle letteratura Italiana, vol. 5, part 2, Turin: UTET, 1996. Bertacchini, Renato, Il romanzo del novecento in Italia, Rome: Studium, 1992. Cadioli, Alberto, L’industria del romanzo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1981. Ragoni, Eugenio, and Toni Iermano, Scrittori dell’ultimo Novecento, edited by Enrico Malato, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 9, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Sanguinetti, Giacinto, Storia della letteratura italiana del Novecento, Rome: Newton Compton, 1994. Scorrano, Luigi, Alberto Bevilacqua, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Toscani, Claudio, Invito alla lettura di Alberto Bevilacqua, Milan: Mursia, 1974.

ANGELA BIANCHINI (1921–) Many authors contributed to Angela Bianchini’s development, from the United States’ Southern writers to Colette, and from the representatives of Hispanic cultures to Natalia Ginzburg. Bianchini is a writer with a cosmopolitan background, although 216

firmly rooted in Rome’s cultural life. The themes that are central to her fiction are evident in the three short stories composing Lungo equinozio (A Long Equinox, 1962): the intertwining of private passions and historical events, the anguish of exile,

ANGELA BIANCHINI the disenchanted realization of the elusiveness of all returns, and the mysterious quality of love in all its forms. Inevitably, as for many Italian writers of the twentieth century, history is one of her fiction’s protagonists. It shapes the lives of all her characters and visits its violence upon them. It also gives her characters a maturity consisting of humility and compassion that they could not otherwise have achieved. In Capo d’Europa (The Edge of Europe, 1991), a young girl caught in the Jewish diaspora caused by Italy’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws is forced to acknowledge her lack of awareness but also opens her eyes at last to the beauty and tragedy of a world she had until then not known. Capo d’Europa is a masterful narrative about seldom-explored aspects of the Jewish experience in the 1930s and 1940s. The theme of exile returns often in Bianchini’s fiction. The struggle to make sense of personal losses, the errors, the misunderstandings, and the desperate search for new reasons to live are the themes of Le nostre distanze (The Distances We Crossed, 1965). On a barely disguised Johns Hopkins campus, the protagonist, a young woman exiled from her country, discovers the charms of American university life, the hypocrisies and cruelties of the world, loneliness in an American city, and also a hard-won awareness. Earlier short stories, especially ‘‘Gli oleandri’’ (Oleanders, 1962), had already spoken about the heartbreak of displacement and the impossibility of returns, but La ragazza in nero (The Girl in Black, 1990) revisits those themes, suggesting that life will reassert itself with an invincible, sensual power. A young woman, her mother, and a fascinating grandmother are the story’s protagonists. Rome, contemplated with profound love, is more than a background to their lives; it is as changeable and seductive as is the ‘‘girl in black’’ of the title. Human passions and, above all, love cannot exist outside their historical contexts; they are transformed and distorted by events. Le labbra tue sincere (Your Candid Lips, 1995), whose title comes from an early twentieth-century song, takes place in Rome while it undergoes a major political and architectural change because it recently became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy. Nostalgia and the sense of youthful energy that is inherent in all transformations alternatively permeate the novel. Un amore sconveniente (An Unsuitable Passion, 1999) chronicles the stages of a love that blossoms during the first half of the twentieth

century and is bound to be terribly damaging. A Jewish intellectual passionately loves a beautiful woman, marries her, and sees his whole existence ruined not only because of the persecution visited on Jewish people but also because of his wife’s opportunism and his own inability to distance himself from her. Another recurrent element in her writing is the United States, which appears frequently in Bianchini’s fiction. It is a mirage in Capo d’Europa and a puzzling reality in Le nostre distanze, a haunting memory in ‘‘Festa dell’indipendenza’’ (Independence Day, 1962) and a memory of disappointment in ‘‘Gli oleandri.’’ In Nevada (2002), it is the state of Nevada in the early 1950s to which young and not-so-young women flock to get quick divorces and are the guests of a dude ranch that caters solely to them. They are forced to remain in one location as if cloistered. They hide painful secrets, but Bianchini gives each unhappy plot the fragrance of youthful passion. In the background, as essential to the story as any of the characters, hovers the American West, a place of fabulous and forbidding immensity. Most of Bianchini’s essays concern topics of twentieth-century Italian, Spanish, and Latin American literature. However, she also published a fundamental essay on nineteenth-century culture and the serial novel, translated Old French medieval romances, and was the curator of an edition of the letters written by the Florentine patrician Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi (1408–1471) to her exiled sons. Voce donna (Voice: Woman, 1979), a diachronic study of women’s presence in society and literature, remains one of the best works in Italian inspired by the women’s movement. In the 1970s and 1980s, the RAI (Italian Radio and Television) broadcast a number of Bianchini’s adaptations of fictional texts.

Biography Born in Rome on 21 April 1921. In 1941 immigrated to the United States because of the ‘‘racial laws’’ promulgated by the Fascist regime in 1938. Attended Johns Hopkins University, studied with Leo Spitzer, who was also an exile, and gained a Ph.D. in romance philology. In 1952, returned to Rome, where she currently resides, and started writing for prestigious periodicals and journals, Il Mondo, Tempo presente, and L’Espresso. She also wrote plays and contributed to the cultural programs of RAI, the Italian radio and television. 217

ANGELA BIANCHINI She writes for La Stampa and Tuttolibri as well as the RAI, and is a prominent figure in Italian cultural life. She has won a number of literary prizes including the Premio Rapallo in 1991 for La ragazza in nero and the Premio Donne-Citta` di Roma in 1992. She has one son, Mario Fales, a well-known archaeologist. ANGELA M. JEANNET Selected Works Fiction Lungo equinozio, 1962 (includes ‘‘Gli oleandri,’’ ‘‘Festa dell’indipendenza,’’ and ‘‘Lungo equinozio’’). Le nostre distanze, 1965. La ragazza in nero, 1990; as The Girl in Black, translated by Giuliana Sanguineti Katz and Anne Urbancic, 2002. Capo d’Europa, 1991; 1992 (includes a revised version of ‘‘Gli oleandri, ’’ ‘‘La ragazza in nero,’’ and ‘‘Capo d’Europa’’); as The Edge of Europe, translated by Angela M. Jeannet and David Castronuovo, 2000. Le labbra tue sincere, 1995. Un amore sconveniente, 1999. Nevada, 2002.

Radio Play Una crociera di sogno, 1997.

Other Il romanzo d’appendice, 1969, revised as La luce a gas e il feuilleton: due invenzioni dell’Ottocento, 1988. Romanzi medievali d’amore e d’avventura, translated and edited, 1979. Voce donna, 1979. Alessandra e Lucrezia. Destini femminili nella Firenze del Quattrocento, 2005.

Further Reading De Giovanni, Neria, and Giacomo F. Rech (editors), Scrittrici italiane dell’ultimo Novecento, Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio, 2003. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Exiles and Returns in Angela Bianchini’s Fiction,’’ in Italica, 75, no. 1 (1998): 93–111. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Esilio e ritorno nella narrativa di Angela Bianchini,’’ in Angela Bianchini, Capo d’Europa, Milan: Frassinelli, 1998. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘The Search for Identity in Angela Bianchini’s The Girl in Black,’’ in Angela Bianchini, The Girl in Black, Welland, Ontario: Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 2002. Urbancic, Anne, ‘‘Memory in The Girl in Black,’’ in Angela Bianchini, The Girl in Black, Welland, Ontario: Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 2002. Wright, Simona, ‘‘Lo sguardo all’indietro: esilio e coscienza nella narrativa di Angela Bianchini,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 40, nos. 157–158 (2003): 71–87. Wright, Simona, ‘‘Intervista a Angela Bianchini,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 40, 157–158 (2003): 89–108.

LUCIANO BIANCIARDI (1922–1971) Luciano Bianciardi was one of Italy’s most provocative writers of the 1950s and 1960s. During his lifetime, he distinguished himself as a novelist, journalist, prolific translator, popular historian, and pamphleteer. His works, which bear a strong autobiographical imprint, present a skeptical analysis of post-World War II Italy. Bianciardi’s early writings demonstrate his close ties to the proletarian values of his native region of the Maremma. He wrote, with the collaboration of Carlo Cassola, I minatori della Maremma (Miners of the Maremma, 1956), a sociological inquiry of the living and working conditions in the mines of the Maremma region. The study investigates the tragic mine explosion at Ribolla of May 1954 and denounces those responsible for the death of 43 218

mine workers. In 1954, Bianciardi left his hometown of Grosseto and moved to Milan, determined to participate in the cultural industry that was then in its nascent stages, and joined the newly formed Feltrinelli Publishing House as a member of its editorial staff. Bianciardi experienced a sense of alienation in Milan, as he failed to accept the rhythm and values of the city. His nonconformist behavior led to his being released by Feltrinelli in 1957. Bianciardi’s first single-authored book, Il lavoro culturale (Cultural Labor, 1957), is set in a small town in the provinces during the immediate postwar years. It is a witty pamphlet/novel of a generation of young Italians, who came out of the war with a sense of social commitment and cultural

LUCIANO BIANCIARDI renewal; instead, they became mired in abstract formulations, indifference, and political bureaucracies, settling ultimately for a life of routine. In his next work, the satiric novel L’integrazione (Integration, 1960), Bianciardi relives his traumatic experiences in Milan’s cultural industry. For the author, the ‘‘moral capital of Italy’’ becomes the bleak symbol of alienation and consumption during the ‘‘miracle,’’ or ‘‘boom,’’ years. Also in 1960, Bianciardi published Da Quarto a Torino (From Quarto to Turin), the first of his four historical works on the Risorgimento. It was followed by La battaglia soda (The Tough Battle, 1964) and by two studies that were originally targeted to a young readership, Daghela avanti un passo! (Move a Step Onward, 1969), and Garibaldi (1972). These writings are a personal and popularized approach to the Risorgimento and are intended to challenge the standard histories of the period whose prejudices and political interferences have transformed history into hagiography and myth. The ‘‘failed revolution’’ of the Risorgimento becomes a transparent allegory that allows Bianciardi to observe and judge the contemporary Italian situation. In 1962, Bianciardi published his masterpiece, La vita agra (It’s a Hard Life), which garnered him international success as an inventive ironist. The novel tells the story of an intellectual from the provinces who comes to the city on a revolutionary mission only to fall victim to the stifling, dehumanizing metropolis that is overly devoted to conformism and economic progress. La vita agra is a satiric protest against Milan, in particular, and the capitalistic society in general. The novel’s innovative style and language reflect the neurotic state of its protagonist, as Bianciardi chose to mix the variety of styles, genres, and languages from his numerous translations in order to illustrate the chaotic condition of contemporary society. Bianciardi’s reaction to the notoriety gained by the critical and popular success of the novel is to retreat from the city to the seaside town of Rapallo where he immersed himself in his translations, an activity that would accompany him his entire professional career. Over his lifetime, his translation production exceeded well over 100 titles and included works by Henry Miller, Saul Bellow, Jack London, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, and the Beat Generation writers. During these years, Bianciardi continued to contribute to numerous magazines and newspapers on a variety of topics, ranging from sports and social customs to television and film.

In his final years, Bianciardi published Viaggio in Barberia (Journey to Barberia, 1969), a diary of an 8,000-mile expedition across North Africa. This journey to the Maghreb region became closely linked to the author’s childhood and enabled him to step outside the boundaries of one’s routine and enter into a world of unrestricted exploration. The last published novel in his lifetime, Aprire il fuoco (Open Fire, 1969), is a highly innovative work in which Bianciardi adapted the revolutionary event of ‘‘The Five Days of Milan’’ in 1848 to a contemporary setting of 1959. It is the story of an exiled, revolutionary professor who, having been deprived of a cause, sees no values in which to believe. Having failed to reignite the mythical passions of the past, his only solution is death. In 1970, Bianciardi returned to Milan where he died on 14 November 1971 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Biography Born in Grosseto on 14 December 1922. Served as interpreter of the Allied forces, 1943; joined the Action Party, 1945; studied at the Scuola Normale of Pisa, degree in philosophy, with a thesis on John Dewey, 1948; married Adria Belardi; his son Ettore is born, 1949; taught history and philosophy at the ‘‘Liceo Classico Carducci-Ricasoli’’ of Grosseto, 1949–1951; contributed to the newspaper Gazzetta of Livorno with the column ‘‘Incontri provinciali,’’ 1952; began collaboration with the literary and cultural magazines Contemporaneo, Belfagor, Il Mondo, and Comunita`, 1954; director of the Chelliana library of Grosseto, 1952–1954; moved to Milan and joined the Feltrinelli Publishing House, 1954; his daughter, Luciana, is born, 1955; his third child, Marcello, is born from his relationship with longtime companion Maria Jatosti, 1958; moved to Rapallo, 1964; began column of television commentaries for magazine ABC, 1965; began to contribute to the magazines Kent, Executive, and Playmen, 1967; returned to Milan, 1970; died in Milan, 14 November 1971. MARK PIETRALUNGA Selected Works Fiction Il lavoro culturale, 1957. L’integrazione, 1960. Da Quarto a Torino, 1960. La vita agra, 1962; as It’s a Hard Life, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1965.

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LUCIANO BIANCIARDI La battaglia soda, 1964. Aprire il fuoco, 1969. Daghela avanti un passo!, 1969. Viaggio in Barberia, 1969. Garibaldi, 1972. Il peripatetico ed altre storie, 1976. La solita zuppa, 1994.

Journalistic Writing I minatori della Maremma, coauthored with Carlo Cassola, 1956. Chiese Escatollo e nessuno raddoppio`: Diario in pubblico 1952–1971, edited by Luciana Bianciardi, 1995. L’alibi del progresso. Scritti giornalistici ed elzeviri, edited by Luciana Bianciardi with a preface by Dario Fo, 2000.

Letters ‘‘Bianciardi com’era (Lettere ad un amico grossetano),’’ in L’intellettuale disintegrato: Luciano Bianciardi, Rome: Ianua, 1985. La nascita dei ‘‘Minatori della Maremma.’’ Il carteggio Bianciardi-Cassola—Laterza e altri scritti, edited by Velio Abati, Florence: Giunti, 1998.

Translations Saul Bellow, Il re della pioggia, 1959. Aldous Huxley, Ritorno al mondo nuovo, 1961. Gene Feldman and Max Gartenberg (editors), Beat Generation e Angry Young Men, 1961. Henry Miller, Tropico del Cancro. Tropico del Capricorno, 1962. Kenneth Patchen, Memorie di un pornografo timido, 1962. John Steinbeck, L’inverno del nostro scontento, 1962. William Faulkner, Il palazzo. Romanzo della famiglia Snopes, 1963.

Stephen Crane, Il segno rosso del coraggio e altri racconti, 1964. Richard Brautigan, Il generale immaginario, 1967. John Barth, Il coltivatore del Maryland, 1968. Jack London, John Barleycorn. La strada, 1971. William Faulkner, Una favola, 1971. Thomas Berger, Il piccolo grande uomo, 1971.

Further Reading Bianchi, Nedo, Arnaldo Bruni, and Adolfo Turbanti, editors, Luciano Bianciardi tra neocapitalismo e contestazione, Conference Proceedings (Grosseto, 22–23 March 1991), Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Bianciardi, Luciana, editor, Carte su carte di ribaltura. Luciano Bianciardi traduttore, Conference Proceedings (Grosseto, 24–25 October 1997), Florence: Giunti, 2000. Clotilde, Angelini, Bianciardi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Corrias, Pino, Vita agra di un anarchico. Luciano Bianciardi a Milano, Milan: Baldini &Castoldi, 1993. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, La morte irridente. Ritratto critico di Luciano Bianciardi uomo giornalista traduttore scrittore, Lecce: Piero Manni, 2000. Mauro, Walter, ‘‘Luciano Bianciardi,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. V, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Paoloni, Giovanni, and Cristina Cavallaro, editors, Dal bibliobus alla ‘‘ Grossa Iniziativa ’’ Luciano Bianciardi, la biblioteca, la casa editrice nel dopoguerra, Conference Proceedings (Viterbo-Grosseto, 21–22 November 2002), Rome:Vecchiarelli Editore, 2004. Pietralunga, Mark, ‘‘The Emotional Deterioration of an Ordinary Man: Luciano Bianciardi and the ‘Miracle’ Years in Milan,’’ in Italiana, 4 (1992): 127–142.

IL BIBBIENA (BERNARDO DOVIZI) (1470–1520) Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, a cardinal, diplomat, and playwright, was a conversationalist of such great skill that Baldassare Castiglione in his dialogue Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) considered him as the exemplary interlocutor, so much so that in Book II he is called upon to describe the types and forms of witticisms, since ‘‘per una acuta e piacevole prontezza d’ingegno fu gratissimo a qualunque lo conobbe’’ (everyone who knew him appreciated him for his sharp and pleasant quick wit). His was the intelligence of a man of letters who was at the same time 220

a diplomat who did not believe that in politics the only option was that of power and an army. A nobleman, he followed the path that, after a Humanist education in Tuscany usually led to the Medici Court in Florence. He was attracted to neither the literary nor philosophical careers prevalent in Marsilio Ficino’s circles. Rather, he steadily pursued the role whose ideal perfection was later described in the portrait made by Castiglione, eventually receiving the honour of being known by the name of his native place while still living. Indeed, the change from his family name, Dovizi, to a

IL BIBBIENA (BERNARDO DOVIZI) toponym suggests the ostentatious display, on the part of a man whose whole life was devoted to the service of the Medici family, of both an autonomous identity and a degree of independence from their milieu. In his early career, Bibbiena’s dispatches from his diplomatic missions were characterized by a certain confident impudence and carefree intelligence. For instance, on October 4, 1494, during a serious political crisis, he wrote a famous narrative letter (a veritable short story) about the love affair between Ferdinand of Aragon and Caterina Gonzaga, as if he were unable to reflect on the meaning of the events, to see himself as an agent and not a mere spectator. Even after the Medicis’ exile from Florence, Piero kept trusting the young diplomat. Following Piero’s death, Bibbiena was appointed as secretary of Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, and, in opposition to Pope Julius II, became involved with political plans to bring the Medicis back to Florence. On September 1, 1512, after an 18-year exile, the Medicis returned to power, but Bibbiena, who had humbly worked toward that goal, decided to remain in Rome, which he now perceived as the actual centre of politics and power. On September 23, 1513, Giovanni de’ Medici, now Pope Leo X, appointed him cardinal for his personal merits, including services rendered during the conclave. He was, as Carlo Dionisotti has pointed out, ‘‘cardinale diacono, non prete, differenza allora importante’’ (a cardinal-deacon, not a priest, an important difference at that time) (Ricordo del Bibbiena, 1980). At the end of 1515, he moved to the Vatican and commissioned Raphael to arrange his residence, including a bathroom or stufetta decorated according to an iconological project that he had conceived himself and that Franco Ruffini recently interpreted as an interlacing and coexistence of ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘reason’’ (Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento, 1997). This double use of the intellect against the mere use of force in political life is evident in the numerous dispatches and letters in defense of the Medici cause, collected in their entirety only in recent times by Giuseppe Lorenzo Moncallero in the two-volume Epistolario (1955–1965). In the correspondence written between 1512 and 1515, Bibbiena articulated the idea of a league of the main Italian and European states in opposition to Louis XII of France, who was threatening to invade Italy. However, as Dionisotti shows, this was mainly a literary defense, a form of political literature that, although produced in Tuscany, was also already national rather than regional, in an increasingly tighter

intertwining of politics and literary activity (Ricordo del Bibbiena, 1980). The year 1513 attests to Bibbiena’s political triumph as well as the composition of his scurrilous play La Calandria (The Follies of Calandro, 1521), for which he is chiefly remembered. His only writing within a specific literary context, indeed, within the genre of comedy, La Calandria was first performed in Urbino on February 6, 1513, during carnival, two weeks before the death of Julius II (and thus before the ascent of a Medici to the papal throne). The staging of the play in the throne room of Urbino was prepared by Castiglione, appointed duke of Novellara, who also wrote a prologue for it (although its attribution was questioned by Giorgio Padoan in his 1970 edition of the play). The scenes were designed by Girolamo Genga, a pupil of Raphael and ducal architect. As a result of its success, the play was staged again on several occasions: in the Vatican, in December 1514 and January 1515, with scenery by Baldassare Peruzzi, one of the architects of the Cathedral of St. Peter; in Mantua in 1520 and in 1532, with sets by Giulio Romano; in Venice in 1521 and 1522; in Lyon in 1548 for the entrance into the city of King Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici; and finally in Mu¨nich in 1569. Although attributing to Plautus the main source of the comedy, Castiglione’s prologue argues for its originality and novelty on the basis of the superiority of modern over ancient taste, in line with the position articulated by Ludovico Ariosto regarding his Latin models in, for instance, the prologue to La cassaria (The Coffer, 1508). The subject of the lost twins is inspired by Plautus’ Menaechmi, but also by Boccaccio’s short stories (in particular Decameron, III, 6 and 8; VII, 4, 8, and 9; IX, 5), often to the point of almost verbatim quotations or calques. The main character, the unbelievably gullible Calandro, mimicks the silly, naı¨ve hero from Boccaccio, while the action comes from Plautus: the result is a double and symmetrical game of misunderstandings and mistaken identities, of practical jokes and de´nouements deriving from the incredible likeness of the twins Lidio and Santilla. Lidio, disguised as Santilla, charms Calandro and at the same time enjoys his wife Fulvia. Calandro is persuaded by his servant Fessenio to fake death and is carried away in a coffin to his lover’s house, where he lies with a prostitute. Here, Fulvia arrives, wearing men’s clothes and impatiently waiting to meet Lidio, and angrily yells at her improvident husband. The servants’ intrigue and Ruffo’s supposed magical skills turn Lidio into a woman; the 221

IL BIBBIENA (BERNARDO DOVIZI) de´nouement happens when Fulvia is about to be discovered by Calandro, but once again manages to replace him with his look-alike sister. A double wedding ensues: Lidio marries Perillo’s daughter and Santilla marries Flaminio, Fulvia’s son. This inexhaustible comic vitality and the truly theatrical structural ambiguity of the play (staging the carnivalesque plot of beffa) have been variously interpreted. For Franco Ruffini, they represent the political quest for the union of opposites (Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento, 1986), while for Roberto Alonge, who considers the text in relation to the myth of the androgyne, they stand for the search for the original unity capable of ‘‘trascendere le contraddizioni che determinano la propria nevrosi’’ (transcending the contradictions that define one’s own neurosis) (La riscoperta rinascimentale del teatro, 2000). The text is full of sequences of words and gestures, obscene double meanings, and blasphemous allusions usually derived from the theme of cross-dressing and the carnivalesque inversion of the male/female binary that, in the end, constituted for courtly society an exemplary model of the absolute theatrical autonomy of literary play.

Biography Bernardo Dovizi was born in Bibbiena (Arezzo), on August 4, 1470. Diplomat for the Medici and the Signoria of Florence, 1488; missions to Rome, 1492, and Naples, 1494. After the banishment of the Medicis from Florence (1494), followed Piero and, after his death in 1503, Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, residing in Urbino, first as a guest of Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, then of Francesco Maria della Rovere. Appointed cardinal, 1513; diplomatic missions to Urbino, 1516, and as the pope’s ambassador to France, 1518. Patron of Raphael and of Francesco Berni, to whom he was related. Died in Rome on November 9, 1520. His death was rumored to have occurred from poisoning. He is buried in the church of Aracoeli in Rome. STEFANO TOMASSINI

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Selected Works La Calandria, 1521; edited by Giorgio Padoan, 1970. Epistolario di Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, edited by Giuseppe Lorenzo Moncallero, 2 vols., 1955–1965.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, ‘‘La riscoperta rinascimentale del teatro,’’ in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, edited by Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, vol. 1, La nascita del teatro moderno Cinquecento-Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios. The Performances of Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Baratto, Mario, La commedia del Cinquecento: aspetti e problemi, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1975. Baratto, Mario, ‘‘La fondazione di un genere (per un’analisi drammaturgica della commedia del Cinquecento),’’ in Il teatro italiano del Rinascimento, edited by Maristella de Panizza Lorch, Milan: Edizioni di Comunita`, 1980. Bottoni, Luciano, ‘‘Una commedia per il mistagogo parodico: la ‘Calandria,’’’ in Tra storia e simbolo: Studi dedicati a Ezio Raimondi dai Direttori, Redattori e dall’Editore di «Lettere italiane», Florence: Olschki, 1994. Bottoni, Luciano, Leonardo e l’androgino: L’eros transessuale nella cultura, nella pittura e nel teatro del Rinascimento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2002. De Feo, Sandro, ‘‘Bernardo Dovizi da Bibiena: La Calandria,’’ (1967), in In cerca di teatro, edited byLuciano Lucignani, vol. 1, Milan: Longanesi, 1972. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Ricordo del Bibbiena,’’ in Machiavellerie: Storia e fortuna di Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Fanelli, Carlo, La Calandria. Tematiche e simbologia, Florence: Atheneum, 1997. Guidotti, Angela, Specchiati sembianti. Il tema dei gemelli nella letteratura, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1992. Moncallero, Giuseppe Lorenzo, Il cardinale Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena umanista e diplomatico (1470– 1520): Uomini e avvenimenti del Rinascimento alla luce di documenti inediti, Florence: Olschki, 1953. Ruffini, Franco, Commedia e festa nel Rinascimento: La «Calandria» alla corte di Urbino, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Stewart, Pamela D., Retorica e mimica nel «Decameron» e nella commedia del Cinquecento, Florence: Olschki, 1986.

LIBERO BIGIARETTI

THE BICYCLE THIEF See Ladri di biciclette (Work by Vittorio de Sica)

LIBERO BIGIARETTI (1905–1993) Libero Bigiaretti’s prolific literary career spanned almost 60 years. This keen interpreter of Italian social realities first achieved success with the novel Esterina in 1942, followed by Un’amicizia difficile (A Difficult Friendship, 1945). Already an accomplished poet who had published the collections Ore e stagioni (Hours and Seasons, 1936) and Care ombre (Dear Shadows, 1940), Bigiaretti’s talent as narrator and essayist became evident with the publication of Paese di Roma (Rome’s Country, 1942). In these early works, several conceptual nucleic pairings surfaced: love and estrangement, friendship and hypocrisy, city and country, microhistory and macrohistory, obligation and disengagement, writing and publishing. On one hand, he paid particular attention to describing in great minutiae the sentimental microcosm in bourgeois society; on the other, he analyzed with equal care the process of artistic endeavors. His characters live on a threshold between past and present times. In this liminal space, memory plays the decisive role that drives the narrative of Disamore (Estrangement, 1956). This novel is composed of two elements (the letters exchanged by two ex-lovers) and it is published in an unprecedented two installments. The first half, published in 1948 as Un discorso d’amore (Love Talk), comprises the man’s letter; it is followed eight years later by the woman’s reply. With I figli (Sons, 1954), Bigiaretti shifted the focus to the sentimental life inside the family. The chronicle of the Bernabeis family is the vehicle for a portrait of contemporary bourgeois society. Bigiaretti thus elaborated on themes already visited by great French authors

whose works he had also translated (Flaubert, Gide, Maupassant, Proust, Stendhal). A different narrative structure controls Carlone (1950), a short formative novel that marries leftist ideology with the revival of neorealist literary canons. Bigiaretti was praised by critics for an uncanny ability to condense 70 years of Italian history in the short span of 60 pages. This neorealist influence dominates Il villino (The CountryHouse, 1946). In the 1940s and 1950s, Bigiaretti’s journalistic career exploded in many worthy collaborations with the likes of Giovanni Macchia, Cesare Pavese, Giacomo Debenedetti, Giorgio Caproni, Corrado Alvaro, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. He was responsible for cultural affairs at the Ivrea press office of Adriano Olivetti from 1952 to 1964. He would continue to draw on this experience throughout his literary activity, as well as deepen his understanding for the world of industry through his close friendships with writers such as Paolo Volponi, Franco Fortini, Luciano Codignola, Geno Pampaloni, as well as many architects and artists. Both the poetic collection Lungodora (Along the Dora, 1955) and the novel Il congresso (The Convention, 1963) draw on his time spent at Olivetti. Il congresso presents the reader with the theme of the intellectual engagement in the industrial world woven into the works’ personal resonance. Back in Rome, Bigiaretti published Le indulgenze (Indulgences, 1966), a novel marked by a Fellini-esque atmosphere portraying bourgeois society in the 1960s. Another important narrative strand in Bigiaretti’s work surfaces with the short-story

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LIBERO BIGIARETTI collection Uccidi o muori (Kill or Die, 1958); the surreal and fantastic stories place their protagonists in a world described by the author himself as a sort of ‘‘elsewhere.’’ Abitare altrove (To Live Elsewhere, 1990) is in fact the title of a much later collection that reprises the old theme. Likewise his novels La controfigura (The Stuntman, 1968) and Dalla donna alla luna (From Woman to the Moon, 1972) describe events that spite commonplace morals and the rules of civil existence. With Le stanze (Rooms, 1976) Libero created yet ‘‘another kind’’ of space—a free recourse into the compartments of memory for the author to peruse in searching for traces and protagonists from his familial and social past. Bigiaretti concluded his literary career with the novels Due senza (Two Down, 1979), Il viaggiatore (The Traveler, 1984), the collection of poems Posto di blocco (Checkpoint, 1986), and the story Un sogno di ferragosto (A Mid-August Dream, 1993). Critics took great interest in Bigiaretti’s work as witnessed by his great revival and posthumously published works. In 1995, Il mio paese (My Country) was published—a collection of essays dedicated to Libero’s much loved mother region of the Marche; the stories in Discorsi all’osteria (Discourses at the Tavern, 1999) were likewise inspired by the region. The volume Esercizi di dattilografia (Typing Exercises, 1999) focuses on the problems associated with literary activities. The vehicle of the book is the art of typing; through it the author examines the role of the writer, the function of literature and publishing as previously noted in Il dito puntato (The Pointed Finger, 1967). Bigiaretti’s last published work, Profili al tratto (Sketches, 2003), assembles interviews, or ‘‘encounters,’’ he made with well-known intellectuals. They appeared mainly in the periodical Successo between 1965 and 1966. Libero Bigiaretti’s works have been translated into many languages. In his honor, the township of Matelica has been awarding the National Biennial Prize for Narrative since 1998.

Biography Born in Matelica, in the region of the Marche, 16 May 1905 (not in 1906 as generally reported). Moved to Rome with family at the age of 6; selftaught, interrupted school and started working on construction sites and other odd jobs. In 1932, began publishing poems and short stories in La fiera letteraria, Meridiano di Roma, La tribuna, Il corriere padano, and Augustea; enrolled in the 224

Socialist Party and joined the fight against fascism, 1942; cofounder of the Sindacato Nazionale Scrittori (National Writers Union) together with Corrado Alvaro and Francesco Jovine, 1944; editor of Avanti! and Mondo operaio, 1945; Il villino qualified second for the newly instated Strega Prize, 1947; Fiuggi Prize for the unpublished Un discorso d’amore, 1947; collaborated with Palmiro Togliatti at L’unita`, 1947; as well as Italia libera, MilanoSera, Rinascita, Vie nuove, Il mattino; traveled to Russia as special correspondent for L’unita`, 1949; Venezia Prize for Carlone, 1950; directed the press office for Olivetti, 1952–1964; Selezione Marzotto Prize for I figli, 1955; Puccini-Senigallia Prize for I racconti; 1961; contributed to Paese sera, Il mondo, Successo, Il contemporaneo, Paragone 1960–1966; Chianciano Prize for Le indulgenze, 1966; Viareggio Prize for La controfigura, 1968. Among numerous other honors, Commende de l’Ordre du Merite of the French Republic, 1975; and the Penna d’Oro of the President of the Italian Republic, 1982. Died in Rome, 3 May 1993. CARLA CAROTENUTO Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Ore e stagioni,’’ 1936. ‘‘Care ombre,’’ 1940. ‘‘Lungodora,’’ 1955. ‘‘A memoria d’uomo,’’ 1982. ‘‘Epigrammi, proverbi e altre inezie (1975–1981),’’ 1983. ‘‘Un osso duro,’’ 1985. ‘‘Posto di blocco,’’ 1986; as Checkpoint, translated by Gabriele Erasmi and Gerald Chapple, 1991; it includes the poem ‘‘ Lettera a Valeria’’ (A Letter to Valeria) and the article ‘‘Guida allavecchiaia’’ (A Guide to Old Age). ‘‘Lettera a Valeria,’’ 1988.

Novels Esterina, 1942. Un’amicizia difficile, 1945. Il villino, 1946. Un discorso d’amore, 1948. Carlone, 1950. I figli, 1954; revised edition, 1960. Disamore, 1956. Il congresso, 1963; as A Business Convention, translated by Joseph Green, 1965; as The Convention, translated by Joseph Green, 1965. Le indulgenze, 1966. La controfigura, 1968. Dalla donna alla luna, 1972. Le stanze, 1976. Due senza, 1979. Il viaggiatore, 1984.

PIERO BIGONGIARI Short Stories ‘‘Incendi a Pale`o,’’ 1945. ‘‘La scuola dei ladri,’’ 1952. ‘‘Leopolda,’’ 1957. ‘‘Uccidi o muori,’’ 1958. ‘‘I racconti,’’ 1961. ‘‘Cattiva memoria,’’ 1965. ‘‘Il dissenso,’’ 1969. ‘‘L’uomo che mangia il leone,’’ 1974. ‘‘Abitare altrove,’’ 1990. ‘‘Un sogno di ferragosto,’’ 1993. ‘‘Discorsi all’osteria,’’ 1999.

Plays Intervista con Don Giovanni, 1958. Licenza di matrimonio, 1968.

Nonfiction

Libero Bigiaretti),’’ Dalla sala riservata: Reperti d’autore, Rivista di Letteratura italiana, 19, nos. 2–3 (2001): 295–300.

Translations Henry Becque, La parigina, 1946. Andre´ Gide, La scuola delle mogli, 1949. Gustave Flaubert, La signora Bovary, 1949. Guy de Maupassant, Pietro e Giovanni, 1952. Jean Giraudoux, La bugiarda, 1970. Robert Louis Stevenson, L’isola del tesoro, 1977. Mark Twain, Le avventure di Tom Sawyer, 1984. Jules Verne, Il giro del mondo in ottanta giorni, 1987. Jules Verne, Le tribolazioni di un cinese in Cina, 1989. James Fenimore Cooper, L’ultimo dei Mohicani, 1991.

Further Reading

Paese di Roma, 1942. Roma borghese, 1945. Schedario, 1956. Carte romane, 1957. Olivetti 1908–1958, edited by Libero Bigiaretti et alia, 1958. Il dito puntato, 1967. Questa Roma, 1981. Con i tempi che corrono: Una conversazione-autobiografia con Gilberto Severini, 1989. Scritture di fabbrica: Dal vocabolario alla societa` (Bigiaretti et alia), edited by Carlo Ossola, 1994. Il mio paese, 1995. Esercizi di dattilografia, 1999. Profili al tratto, 2003.

Letters D’Ina, Gabriella, and Giuseppe Zaccaria (editors), ‘‘Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Caro Bompiani: Lettere con l’editore, 1988. Mazza, Antonia, ‘‘‘Cio` che conta e` la moralita` della scrittura’ (Quattro lettere inedite e uno scritto raro di

Baroni, Giorgio, Bigiaretti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Carotenuto, Carla, ‘‘Tra gli autografi di Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Autografo, 13, no. 35 (July-December 1997): 59–70. Carotenuto, Carla, ‘‘La pluridiscorsivita` di Bigiaretti: Leopolda e Le indulgenze tra scrittura e Immagine,’’ in Autografo, 15, no. 38 (January-June 1999): 61–73. Luzi, Alfredoet alia,, ‘‘Incontro con Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Studi romani, 30, no. 4 (October-December 1982): 496–507. Luzi, Alfredo (editor), Libero Bigiaretti: La storia, le storie, la scrittura. Atti del Convegno Matelica 21–22 marzo 1998, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro, 2000. Mazza, Antonia, ‘‘Libero Bigiaretti,’’ in Scrittori italiani, Milan: Letture, 1989. Piscopo, Ugo, Libero Bigiaretti, Naples: Ferraro, 1977. Silori, Luigi, Invito alla lettura di Bigiaretti, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Strappini, Lucia, et alia, ‘‘Bigiarettiana,’’ in Studi romani, 45, nos. 1–2 (January-June 1997): 27–69.

PIERO BIGONGIARI (1914–1997) From his first poetic work, La figlia di Babilonia (The Daughter of Babylon, 1942), a collection of verses dating from 1934 to 1939, Piero Bigongiari was one of the most systematic and radical representatives of the third Hermetic generation— the so-called Florentine Hermeticism of the 1930s. The poet never distanced himself from this context, which was as much aesthetic as geographic. His entire literary production, both in verse and in prose, presents a strongly homogenous character, to the point of being called by critics

the most coherent oeuvre of twentieth-century Italian literature. Stylistically, Bigongiari’s poetics is characterized by the dissolution of linguistic structure in favor of a new, allusive and combinatorial language, much like that with which the symbolists and surrealists had already experimented. Images are put on the same level almost without any mediation, and thus unprecedented associations are achieved. In this way, the reciprocal relationship between the individual and the world is profoundly renewed, 225

PIERO BIGONGIARI thereby improving the capacity to comprehend reality. The frequent use of symbols and metaphors, the juxtaposition of terms, and the presence of iteration, assonance, and alliteration all assume primary importance in describing this general and thorough disintegration of language. The determination of meaning occurs therefore by way of new syntactic connections and isolated words where language, reduced to the essential, is pushed toward an extreme concentration. Actions are compressed in dense lexical aggregates that are developed in the course of unresolved contradictions. The sense of the grammatical functions appears therefore forced in light of the systematic reinterpretation of traditional hierarchies: adverbs are multiplied, nouns lose their central role in favor of the unopposed affirmation of the adjective, which is pushed to an efficiency of definition that originally only the verb possessed, the verb itself becomes a metaphor, a psychological figure of speech, potential energy bound to the present. Clearly, then, for Bigongiari language is no longer a simple expression of reality, nor does it transcend reality as did symbolist images. As an act of volition, it instead intervenes in the story line of existence: That is, it extracts phenomena from their absolute condition—atemporal and prehuman— and inserts them into the flow of events. Here the phenomena assume an imperfect nature since their dependence on the human will condemns them to a necessarily precarious state. However, it is only in this way that they are able to become a concrete reality in time and become cognizable objects to the individual. Similar themes recur in all of Bigongiari’s writings, both in his literary works and in his critical and journalistic texts. The poet’s unfolding artistic development is evident above all in the tendency to simplify language in order to render the expression simpler and to facilitate communication. After the second collection of poems, Rogo (Pyre, 1952), which still shares with the first volume an often indecipherable symbolism, the poet gradually tended to limit the excesses of obscurity in order to develop a more serene relationship with reality. This process begins already in Il corvo bianco (The White Crow, 1955), but becomes more explicit with Torre di Arnolfo (Arnolfo’s Tower, 1964). In fact, it is from here that one can trace a somewhat linear artistic path that runs throughout all of the successive works up to Dove finiscono le tracce (Where the Tracks End, 1996). Poetic creation consequently occurs as if it were one continuous narrative 226

where the individual books are incarnations of transitory stages that launch the successive phase of evolution. In this compact story line there are attempts at something new, as in the case of the dynamic experimentalism of Antimateria (AntiMatter, 1972) and Col dito in terra (With the Finger to the Ground, 1986). However, the intention of exploring all of the expressive potential of language never calls into question the need for a more serene lyricism, an attitude present above all in the collections Moses (Moses, 1979), Col dito in terra, and Nel delta del poema (In the Delta of the Poem, 1989). Critics are unanimous in recognizing the importance of Bigongiari’s critical writings, to the point of attributing a fundamental role among contemporary reflections on poetry to Il senso della lirica italiana e altri studi (The Meaning of Italian Lyric Poetry and Other Studies, 1952). From his thesis, published with the title L’elaborazione della lirica leopardiana (The Elaboration of Leopardi’s Lyric Poetry, 1937), Bigongiari’s interest focused mainly on Giacomo Leopardi, culminating in the monograph Leopardi (1962). His great merit is the elaboration of a methodology that focuses especially on the ‘‘internal story’’ of the work, in which the understanding of the essence of lyric expression feeds off the concrete testimonies of the ‘‘conditions’’ leading to poetry. The result is an analysis of the text that, starting with its interior relationships, can then observe the new forms that it assumes in its reception by the readers.

Biography Born in Navecchio (Pisa) on October 15, 1914; degree in letters from the University of Florence, 1936; between 1937 and 1938 he came into contact with Montale, Rosai, Gadda, Landolfi, Vittorini and Bonsanti; collaborated with the most significant literary journals of the time such as Letteratura, Campo di Marte, Prospettive and competed with Bo, Macrı`, Gatto, Luzi, Parronchi, and Traverso to define the characteristics of the Florentine Hermetic movement; in the 1950s, collaborated with the literary journals L’approdo and L’approdo letterario as well as with several newspapers, among which Il Nuovo Corriere and La Nazione; was professor of modern and contemporary Italian literature at the University of Florence from 1953 to 1989. Died in Florence on October 8, 1997. GIADA VIVIANI

ROMANO BILENCHI Selected Works

Prosa per il Novecento, 1971. La poesia come funzione del linguaggio, 1972.

Collections

Letters

Tutte le poesie, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, vol. 1, Florence: Le Lettere, 1994.

Poetry ‘‘La figlia di Babilonia,’’ 1942. ‘‘Rogo,’’ 1952. ‘‘Il corvo bianco,’’ 1955. ‘‘Le mura di Pistoia,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il caso e il caos,’’ 1960. ‘‘Torre di Arnolfo,’’ 1964. ‘‘Stato di cose,’’ 1968. ‘‘Antimateria,’’ 1972. ‘‘Moses,’’ 1979. ‘‘Autoritratto poetico,’’ 1985. ‘‘Col dito in terra,’’ 1986. ‘‘Diario americano,’’ 1987. ‘‘Nel delta del poema,’’ 1989. ‘‘La legge e la leggenda,’’ 1992. ‘‘Dove finiscono le tracce,’’ 1996.

Fiction Visibile invisibile, 1985. Tre racconti inediti: 1933–1934, 1991. Una citta` rocciosa e altri frammenti di un’autobiografia, 1994. Nel giardino di Armida e altre prose memoriali, un racconto e una poesia, edited by Roberto Carifi, 1996. L’azzurro e altri racconti, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, 1999.

Essays L’ elaborazione della lirica leopardiana, 1937. Il senso della lirica italiana e altri studi, 1952. Poesia italiana del Novecento, 1960. Leopardi, 1962; expanded, 1976. Capitoli di una storia della poesia italiana, 1968. Poesia francese del Novecento, 1968.

Giovinezza a Pistoia: autoritratto del poeta attraverso le lettere a Mario Ciattini, 1933–1971, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, 1994.

Others Testimone in Egitto, 1985. Nel mutismo dell’universo: interviste sulla poesia 1965–1997, edited by Anna Dolfi, 2001. Un pensiero che seguita a pensare: giornale 1933–1997, edited by Paolo Fabrizio Iacuzzi, 2001.

Further Reading Bernardi Leoni, Margherita, Informale e Terza generazione. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Biagini, Enza (editor), Per Piero Bigongiari, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Noferi, Adelia, ‘‘Piero Bigongiari: la critica come segno di contraddizione,’’ in Le poetiche critiche novecentesche, Florence: Le Monnier, 1970. Noferi, Adelia, ‘‘Piero Bigongiari,’’ in Novecento. I contemporanei. Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa` italiana, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1979. Papini, Maria Carla, ‘‘Il viaggio poetico di Bigongiari,’’ in Italianistica, 6 (1977): 295–315. Pinotti, Gianna, ‘‘Giano bifronte come anti-icona dell’essere in ‘Abbandonato dall’Angelo’ di Piero Bigongiari,’’ in Gradiva, 22 (2002): 50–57. Pozzi, Gianni, La poesia italiana del Novecento da Gozzano agli ermetici, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Ramat, Silvio, Invito alla lettura di Piero Bigongiari, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Santoro, Jose Luiz, ‘‘Aspetti surreali del primo Bigongiari,’’ in Forum Italicum, 11 (1977): 19–35.

ROMANO BILENCHI (1909–1989) Romano Bilenchi is a greatly respected, but not always widely read, author whose beautiful and unusual short stories and novels have yet to be translated into English. Bilenchi was also a political journalist and a cultural figure of major importance in twentieth-century history in Italy. Bilenchi’s fame, however, is likely to rest on his achievements as a writer of prose fiction, especially his Conservatorio di Santa Teresa (The Santa Teresa Conservatory, 1940), a carefully crafted and

elegant coming of age novel set in the provinces during the 1930s that many considered the most enduring work of fiction produced in Italy under Fascism. From a small town in the countryside outside Siena, Bilenchi can be considered part of a tradition of Tuscan writing by authors such as Federigo Tozzi, Mario Pratesi, Carlo Cassola, and Mario Tobino, who expressed themselves in a linguistic style that, while clearly the national language, 227

ROMANO BILENCHI contained nevertheless the regional dialect from where the national language was born centuries ago. Throughout his life, Bilenchi never strayed very far from Tuscany. As a young man, he contributed to such local, regional, and national publications of the 1930s as Il selvaggio, Il bargello, L’universale, Il lavoro fascista, and even Benito Mussolini’s own mouthpiece, Il popolo d’Italia. With the coming of the war and the Resistance, he continued his journalistic militancy—but this time on the other side of the political barrier, first through his contributions to newspapers and other clandestine anti-Fascist publications, and then in active combat. After the war, Bilenchi worked for a number of Communist-supported publishing ventures. These included Societa`, which he helped found, and later Il nuovo corriere and Il contemporaneo. Toward the end of his life, he wrote for less militantly sectarian and nonparty publications, among them La nazione, Il mondo, L’approdo letterario, Il corriere della sera, and Il ponte. Bilenchi’s career as a public intellectual could be said to be paradigmatic of the changing positions held by many Italians on the left during and after Fascism. Like his friend Elio Vittorini and many others, Bilenchi began as a ‘‘frondista’’ (rebel) or left-wing ‘‘sansepolcrista’’ (a term designating someone who had attended the gathering in Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro at the beginning of the Fascist movement in 1919). After the Civil War in Spain and with the coming of the Communist-Fascist struggle to Italy, he switched to the Communist side. He left the party in 1956, however, after writing an article critical of the suppression of an uprising in Poland that preceded the better-known upheavals in Budapest later that same year. In Italy, these events led to massive defections from the Communist Party by a number of intellectuals and other militants. Unlike many of his comrades from this period, however, whose breaks with the party were definitive, Bilenchi returned to the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1972. His return, significantly, took place at the beginning of the anni di piombo (years of lead) when the party was coming under attack from the radical left as well as from its usual adversaries on the right and the center. His value as a cultural commentator was based in part on his experience as a witness—often from close up where bullets were literally flying, to many of the most dramatic events in Italy during more than six decades of cultural and political activity. Bilenchi wrote two full-length novels, the Conservatorio di Santa Teresa and Il bottone di Stalingrado (Button from Stalingrad, 1972). The 228

latter’s title refers to a button taken by an Austrian soldier from the body of a Russian soldier during the Battle of Stalingrad. This button is passed on to the novel’s protagonist, Marco, as a symbol for his political reawakening. Marco’s story unravels from his school days under Fascism through World War II, the Resistance, and the postwar years. His transformation appears to reflect Bilenchi’s progressive political shifting. On the other hand, Bilenchi’s stories, which were written for the most part in the 1930s and published in revised versions in different collections later, dealt almost exclusively with life under Fascism in provincial Tuscany. Much of this writing has to do with childhood. Unlike Marcel Proust, Bilenchi found childhood less than perpetually idyllic—a time filled not only with the universal pains of growing up but hedged in as well by the more pervasive discomforts of life under totalitarianism. Despite this, the characters Bilenchi depicts enjoy the reassurance provided by simple social rituals like communal meals, quiet conversations, or family outings, and activities whose venerability and seeming inevitability, though sometimes marked by eruptions of violence, nonetheless sustain them through the more difficult moments of their personal growth. Such patterns of social interaction endure, Bilenchi’s narratives seem to suggest, despite the violence and bloodshed in the squares, streets, and countryside of an otherwise peaceful Tuscany. All those who have written about Bilenchi’s prose have commented on his undemonstrative style and his aversion for rhetoric that he shared with other writers from the same period such as the poets and his personal friends Eugenio Montale and Mario Luzi. Bilenchi himself has stressed the poetic nature of good narrative. It is partly because his work is so lyrical in intention that it won the admiration of Montale and Luzi as well as that of such sensitive readers of Italian poetry as the critic and philologist Gianfranco Contini. Not at all psychological narratives, Bilenchi’s texts rarely speculate about the inner workings of a character’s mind. What counts instead in these emotionally restrained texts is the simple elegance of Bilenchi’s writing and his skill in rendering even the subtlest of moods. Bilenchi’s descriptions of his native Colle d’Elsa and the surrounding Tuscan landscape are just as lacking in undue effusion. The result is a seemingly effortless prose that, while deeply rooted in the Tuscan literary tradition, seems to have come into existence—as commentators including Montale have remarked—as though arriving from nowhere.

ROMANO BILENCHI While there is a vivid sense of place in Bilenchi’s writings, his narratives, with the exception of the Resistance memoirs set in a carefully described Florence, typically unfold in locations that cannot be precisely verified on any map but are often combinations of places that can be better understood as zones in the author’s memory. An attentive and engaged witness to some of the most difficult times in modern Italian history, Bilenchi was able to capture the essence of those times in at least one region of Italy with insight and restrained precision.

Biography Born in Colle Val d’Elsa (Siena) on 9 November 1909. In 1925, moved to Florence to study at the Liceo Scientifico and began to write fiction. Contracted tuberculosis and followed courses at the University of Bologna. Back in Florence, became friends with Elio Vittorini and worked as a journalist for Il selvaggio, L’universale, Il popolo d’Italia and La nazione, among others. In the 1930s, member of the radical left wing of the Fascist Party but in Florence kept company with critics of the movement and later overt anti-Fascists such as Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eugenio Montale, Vasco Pratolini, Mario Luzi. In 1938, joined the clandestine Italian Communist Party and subsequently took an active part in the Resistance fight in Florence, 1943–1944. Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s wrote and published a number of short stories and his first novel, Conservatorio di Santa Teresa (1940). From 1948 to 1956 the editor-inchief of the left-wing daily Il nuovo corriere and helped establish Societa` and Il contemporaneo, both supported by the Italian Communist Party. In 1957, resigned from the Communist Party but rejoined in 1972. That same year published Il bottone di Stalingrado, which won the Viareggio prize. In 1973, married Maria Ferrara. In 1982, won the prize for narrative for Il gelo from the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Died in Florence on 18 November 1989. CHARLES KLOPP Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Benedetta Centovalli, Massimo Depaoli and Cristina Nesi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977.

Fiction Vita di Pisto, 1931.

Il capofabbrica, 1935, revised edition, 1972. Anna e Bruno e altri racconti, 1938. Conservatorio di Santa Teresa, 1940. La siccita`, 1941. Dino e altri racconti, 1942. Mio cugino Andrea, 1943. Una citta`, 1958. Il processo di Mary Dugan, 1972. Il bottone di Stalingrado, 1972. Il gelo, 1982. Gli anni impossibili, 1984.

Memoirs Cronaca dell’Italia meschina, ovvero storia dei socialisti di Colle, 1933. I silenzi di Rosai, 1971. Amici. Vittorini, Rosai, e altri incontri, 1976.

Other La ghisa delle cure e altri scritti (1927–1989), 1997.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Sei capitoli per il Conservatorio,’’ in Narrativa italiana 1975–1983 con vecchie e nuove varianti, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Banchini, Ferdinando, Bilenchi. Analisi e cronistoria, Milan: Laboratorio delle Arti, 1999. Brouwer, Olga-Maria, Invito alla lettura di Bilenchi, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Per Bilenchi e i suoi ‘Amici,’’’ in Romano Bilenchi, Amici, edited by Sergio Pautasso, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Romano Bilenchi, ovvero connotazione toscana e denotazione italiana,’’ in Metodi e fantasmi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969. Klopp, Charles, ‘‘Reconsidering Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Italica, 80 (2003): 428–432. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Parole e cose, scrittura ed ethos in Bilenchi,’’ in Controtempo. Critica e letteratura fra moderno e postmoderno, Naples: Liguori, 1999. Luti, Giorgio, Passione e inganni. Dieci ritratti di scrittori contemporanei, Verona: Bi & Gi, 1987. Luzi, Mario, Introduction to Romano Bilenchi, Opere, edited by Benedetta Centovalli, Massimo Depaoli and Cristina Nesi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977. Macrı` Tronci, Albarosa, La narrativa di Romano Bilenchi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1977. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Racconti di Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920–1979, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Muraca, Giuseppe, ‘‘Romano Bilenchi direttore de ‘Il Nuovo Corriere,’’’ in Utopisti ed eretici nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2000. Peritore, Giuseppe Angelo, ‘‘Ritratti critici dei contemporanei. Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Belfagor, 28 (1973): 685– 701. Petroni, Paolo, Bilenchi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Polimeri, Giuseppe (editor), Romano Bilenchi, Anna e Bruno: Rami di un romanzo inedito, Milan: Lupetti/ Piero Manni, 1996. Virdia, Ferdinando, ‘‘Romano Bilenchi,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 2, Milan: Marzorati, 1963.

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BIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHY Biography, the description of an individual life, necessarily implies that the culture in which it occurs and the philosophy upon which it is based attribute value to individual lives. The roots of this tenet in Europe are to be found in Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of the bios, or manner of living, of an already-made man, and not a man in his becoming. The focus on the individual remains consistent throughout the history of biography, but the kind of individual deemed worthy of note and the reasons for an individual’s value vary over time. On the Italian peninsula, biography begins as eulogy, continues as in example or a guide for living, becomes a vehicle for political and religious ideologies, flourishes as praise of accomplished men, serves as a vehicle of patriotism and nationalism, and embodies modern notions of psychology and social reality. Often several of these functions occur simultaneously. Early examples of biography outside Italy are to be found in Homer’s laments for dead heroes and praise for victors, kings, and princes, all of which measure the individual in the context of a concept or an ideal. Socrates and Euripides tend toward greater historicization in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. The biblical and apocryphal Gospels provide biographies of Jesus and, by the second century CE, Plutarch writes his famous Lives. We can see in early biography an impulse toward pedagogy and moralizing that at times veers into the realms of epic and mythology. The Middle Ages demonstrate a theocratic mentality that is far removed from any interest in the study of an individual’s struggle and inner growth. Biographic stories abound, nonetheless, in accounts of the lives, deaths, and miracles of saints, bishops, and abbots. The overwhelming tendency of the genre in medieval times is that of hagiography, and its social function is to provide examples of Christian lives that may serve to inspire its public to stronger faith and moral behavior. Well-known medieval biographies include Tommaso da Celano’s Actus beati Francisci (Life of Saint Francis) in the thirteenth century, and the anonymously penned Vita di Frate Ginepro (Life of Fra Ginepro) of the late fourteenth century. Pope Gregory IX commissioned Tommaso da Celano’s biography of 230

Saint Francis of Assisi in 1228 and approved the finished work the following year. His Via prima was supplemented by a Vita secunda (1246–1247) and in 1253 he added an account of Saint Francis’ miracles. Tommaso was a skillful historian and a writer, well versed in medieval rhetoric. This early biography inspired a Vita written by Giuliano di Spira between 1231 and 1235. We also note the Vite dei Santi Padri (Lives of the Holy Fathers), medieval legends that were rendered in the vulgate by Domenico Cavalca during the first half of the fourteenth century. Not all medieval biography deals with saints or church fathers, however. For example, in addition to his Gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium (Acts of Medieval Bishops), Arnolfo of Milan had produced the Gesta Berengarii imperatoris (Acts of the Berengar Rulers) already during the eleventh century. Nonetheless, medieval biography never attempts to convey any sense of individual personality development, limiting itself, as its ‘‘acts’’ titles imply, to the straightforward chronicling of actual events or events deemed to have occurred. The aim of such works is to convey moral, religious, and political values or to engage in polemics of a historical nature. The Middle Ages are succeeded by the humanism of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others. Even here biography insists more on type than on individual variant and in fact goes to some lengths to ‘‘Italianize’’ its subjects—that is, to make them resemble the ancients. Petrarch’s own De Viris illustribus (Lives of Illustrious Men), begun in 1338 and amplified many times, exemplifies this era in biography, where it is joined by Boccaccio’s Vita di Dante (Life of Dante, 1373–1374) and, in Latin, by Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris (Concerning Famous Women, ca. 1361–1375) and De casibus virorum illustrium (The Cases of Illustrious Men, ca. 1355–1374). Worthy of mention is also the Vita di Cola di Rienzo (Life of Cola di Rienzo), transcribed by an anonymous writer in the middle of the fourteenth century from a lost Latin text and taken up in the 1800s by both Richard Wagner and Gabriele D’Annunzio. The first half of the fifteenth century witnesses Leonardo Bruni’s lives of Dante, Petrarch, and Cicero. With Bruni, we see an ascendancy of

BIOGRAPHY value given by the biographer to his subjects’ artistic production. Vespasiano da Bisticci (1421–1498), the leading bookseller of Renaissance Florence, further typifies this new attitude in his simple, graceful Vite di uomini illustri del XV secolo (Lives of Famous Men of the Fifteenth Century), which treats contemporary biographic objects. Biographers now emphasize remarkable creative and spiritual achievements of the individuals whose lives they recount variously in Latin or in Italian. Feo Belcari’s exemplary Vita del Beato Giovanni Colombini (Life of the Blessed Giovanni Colombini, 1449) is among the best biographies of its era, while the Vita del Brunellesco (Life of Brunelleschi), attributed to Antonio di Tuccio Manetti (1423–1497), and this same author’s lives of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Pope Nicolas V also exemplify the tendency to favor spiritual and artistic values in a biographical object. Biography flourishes in Renaissance Italy, given the era’s reclaimed emphasis on the validity of human perception and experience per se. Foremost among its social tasks is its capacity to pit political and religious ideologies against each other as we see in such works as Bernardino Baldi’s Vita di Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, duca d’Urbino (Life of Guidubaldo of Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino) and in Pier Candido Decembrio’s lives of Filippo Maria Visconti (1447) and Francesco Sforza (ca. 1449). Among such exemplary sixteenth-century lives of lords, heads of state, and military leaders, Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Vita di Castruccio Castracani (Life of Castruccio Castracani, 1520) stands out as a clear attempt to create an ideal. In this work, the author cares little for establishing the facts of his object’s life but rather has recourse to invention to the extent that it serves his ideological purpose. In 1549, Paolo Giovio wrote Vite di uomini illustri (Lives of Famous Men) in Latin, later translated into the vulgate, the first volume of which contains biographies of the Visconti family. Along with the use of biography for political goals, we find a continued sixteenth-century emphasis on artistic, spiritual, and heroic achievements presented outside evident politicizing contexts in such works as the Historie della vita e dei fatti di Cristoforo Colombo (Stories of the Life and Events of Christopher Columbus), written by Columbus’ son, Fernando, Pietro Aretino’s Vita di San Tomaso signor d’Aquino (Life of Saint Thomas, 1543), and Ascanio Condivi’s Vita di Michelagnolo Buonarroti (Life of Michelangelo, 1553). The year 1550 sees the appearance of a landmark work, Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ piu´ eccellenti Architetti,

Pittori, et Scultori Italiani (Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors), an outstanding eulogizing biography. Praising Rafael in his typical fashion, for example, Vasari writes ‘‘Di costui fece dono al mondo la natura’’ (With him nature made a gift to the world). With his Vite, Vasari sets in place a body of artistic achievement in visual and spatial arts that will serve to codify a canon of his era for centuries to come. Several biographies of the following century illustrate the new era’s passion for compendiums. These include Carlo Roberto Dati’s Vite dei pittori antichi (Lives of Ancient Painters, 1667) and Filippo Baldinucci’s Notizie dei professori di disegno da Cimabue in qua (Biographical Data about Design Instructors from Cimabue on, 1681). As the high Renaissance passes into the seventeenth century, a decidedly modern attitude becomes evident in biography. No longer is biography based on praise alone. Now, spiritual, psychological, and moral aspects of a subject contribute to the biographer’s evaluation of the individual, such as in Filippo Sassetti’s Vita di Francesco Ferrucci (Life of Francesco Ferrucci, ca. 1557) and Jacopo Nardi’s Vita di Antonio Giacomini (Life of Antonio Giacomini, ca. 1540). Now, too, biographers engage in acts of effective canon formation by producing actual biographical dictionaries. Foremost among these is Giovanni Baglione (ca. 1573–1644) with his Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Lives of Painters, Sculptors and Architects, 1642). Toward the end of the century, Vincenzo Viviani, Galileo’s disciple, is commissioned by Leopoldo de’ Medici to write Sulla vita di Galileo Galilei (About the Life of Galileo), a biography from the 1680s that aims at establishing the facts of its subject’s life in the spirit of the awakening Enlightenment and in an effort to mend Galileo’s posttrial and posthumous reputation. In the secular/religious ideology spectrum, we find the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli’s Vita del cardinale Bellarmino (Life of Cardinal Bellarmine, 1678). Two salient aspects of seventeenth-century biography in Italy as exemplified in the biographies just mentioned are its effort to divide its material into categories of knowledge (artistic, religious, and political) and its emphasis on erudition and research, both of which reflect the European valorization of reason that will lead to the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century biography in Italy, not straying far from the influence of the erudite contemporary historian Ludovico Muratori, is generally characterized by an emphasis on research and documentation. We note the oratorios recounting 231

BIOGRAPHY the lives of the prophets written by the Venetian Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), Giammaria Mazzuchelli’s Scrittori d’Italia (Italy’s Writers, 1753– 1763), and the works of such biographers as the Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi (Muratori’s successor as director of Este’s library in Modena), and Pier Antonio Serassi (1721–1791). A prescient instance of what in the following century will appear as emphatic patriotism and nationalism in biography, Francesco Milizia’s Vite dei piu` celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo (Lives of the Most Famous Architects of Every Nation and Every Era) appears in 1771. During the eighteenth century, we also find imported from England, France, and Germany a new aesthetic sensitivity regarding the value, purpose, and possibilities of an individual life. This Romantic attitude allows for a deepening of the biographical endeavor by adding to the alreadyestablished practice of rigorous research and documentation of a new understanding of the value of such work. Romanticism entails a re-evaluation of several aspects of life: its religious meaning, the role of feeling, or sentiment, and the spiritual function of the real world. History for the Romantics is thus the gradual working out of spiritual ideals in which the individual’s role is foremost, agential, and profoundly, even transcendentally, important. The philosopher Giambattista Vico occupies a unique niche with his De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphae (About the Life of Antonio Carafa, 1716). Having already penned his own autobiography, Vico brings to his telling of Carafa’s life a reinvention of biography as a genre including both historical accuracy and psychological analysis. Biography in the nineteenth century is part and parcel of the movement for the unification of Italy as a nation state, the Risorgimento. In 1802–1803, Francesco Lomonaco (1772–1810) publishes his sweeping Vite degli eccellenti Italiani (Lives of Excellent Italians), which contains 23 biographies, from Boccaccio to Lorenzo de’ Medici, from Guicciardini to Tasso, from Campanella to Beccaria, in a classicizing narrative style inspired by Tacitus and Plutarch. Such positivist analyses of figures from the past that exhibit and exemplify nationalist tendencies at times result in ideological exaggerations, such as the neo-Guelph ideology evident in Cesare Balbo’s Vita di Dante (Life of Dante, 1830). Throughout the century, patriotic zeal characterizes such works as Cesare Cantu`’s L’abate Parini e la Lombardia nel secolo passato (The Abbot Parini and Lombardy during the Past Century, 1854) and Luigi Carrer’s Life of Foscolo (1842), which 232

typify biography’s capacity to constitute a national identity by means of ideologically appropriate life stories. Pasquale Villari’s La storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi (A History of Girolamo Savonarola and His Times, 1859–1861) and Niccolo` Machiavelli e i suoi tempi (Niccolo` Machiavelli and His Times, 1877–1882) are both published after the success of the national unification movement. Not to be forgotten is the remarkable biography of Cardinal Borromeo that Alessandro Manzoni situates within his masterly novel of national unification, I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), first published in 1827. Here we see an undiluted if subtle example of biography used for nationalist ends. While a historic framework of positivism may at times obscure the object of biography in contemporary European traditions, in Italy, biography remains generally anchored in a tradition of praise throughout the nineteenth century. However, a relative lack of popularity may be due to readers’ suspicions of biography as not being scientific but erring from fact in order either to praise or to blame its object. In the twentieth century, biography takes on elements of novelistic writing and expands its gamut of objects to include figures of industry and popular culture. Giovanni Papini’s Storia di Cristo (History of Christ, 1921), Dante vivo (Dante Alive, 1933), and Vita di Michelangelo nella vita del suo tempo (Michelangelo and Its Times, 1949) exemplify this novelistic narrative bent. Margherita Sarfatti’s Dux, the first official biography of Benito Mussolini, was published in English in 1925 and then appeared in a revised Italian version a year later. Another widespread tendency is the use of literary biography as a kind of philosophical and even political essay. Benedetto Croce, in his 1946 essay, Ariosto, for example, harshly criticizes the Renaissance epic poet for what the critic perceives to be Ariosto’s scarce intellectual, religious, and political passions. In 1973, Nino Borsellino’s biography of Ariosto defends the poet on nationalist grounds, claiming that he gave Italy a national model for modern literature. One may read these two biographies as statements of and a debate about the political role of art. Other biographers have taken up Petrarch as their object. Umberto Bosco publishes a detailed biography of the poet in 1946, focusing his attention entirely on Petrarch’s poetic production rather than on actual biographical events. In 1987, Ugo Dotti gives us a life of Petrarch that highlights the

BIOGRAPHY troubled mind of a poet engaged in an unending existential search for peace and serenity. Such diverse portraits contain implicit and widely diverse value systems, indicating the wide scope of recent biography as a genre in Italy. By similar tokens, such twentieth-century biographies as Giuseppe Prezzolini’s Machiavelli anticristo (Machiavelli Antichrist, 1954) make claims about historic figures that indicate the writer’s ideology in a modern context, including the unique coexistence in Italy of Catholicism and Communism. Prezzolini holds, for example, that Machiavelli believed that political activity was not compatible with Christian ethics; therefore, the Roman state, a great political creation, was weakened and destroyed by Christianity. Freudian elements come to the fore in Rolando Damiani’s 1998 biography of Italy’s great Romantic poet, Leopardi. All’apparir del vero: Vita di Giacomo Leopardi (When Truth Appears: Life of Giacomo Leopardi), in which Damiani sees Leopardi’s life as a continuous unstable balance between dreams of escape from and rebellion against his father’s vigilant power and his own great fear of the real world. Literary lions of the early twentieth century attract biographers engaged in elaborating those writers’ philosophies. Luigi Pirandello, who famously introduced humorism in Italy and sensitized readers internationally to the vicissitudes of apparent identity, is the object of numerous biographies, among them those by Gaspare Giudice, Luigi Pirandello (1963), and by Andrea Camilleri, Biografia del figlio cambiato (Biography of a Changed Son, 2000). Giudice, a scholar, traces the life of the Sicilian author in detail; Camilleri, on the other hand, gives us what he calls a ‘‘novel of Luigi Pirandello’s life’’ in an attempt to understand the man as separate from the author, an endeavor with roots in the psychologizing and sentimental tendencies of Romanticism. Several twentieth-century biographers seem motivated by a desire to set the record straight about certain historical figures, generally when those figures have political significance in contemporary contexts. For example, Marco Nozza and Indro Montanelli’s Garibaldi (1962) intends to fill the gaps that Garibaldi’s own memoir leaves open and to correct later writers who have exiled this hero of the Italian Risorgimento to the realm of mythology. Piero Chiara’s Vita di Gabriele d’Annunzio (Life of Gabriele D’Annunzio, 1978) revisits D’Annunzio’s infamous association with Mussolini and emphasizes his opposition to any

alliance with Germany. A final example of this strand of biography is Giorgio Bocca’s Palmiro Togliatti (1973), where the journalist relies on interviews with such Communist Party comrades as Amendola, Berti, and Secchia in order to trace Togliatti’s political ascent. Biography as an investigation into the lives of living persons is also popular during the twentieth century. Often, such biography is based on interviews between a journalist and the object, as is the case with Enzo Biagi’s Ferrari, l’uomo che invento` il mito del cavallino rampante (Ferrari, the Man Who Invented the Myth of the Rearing Horse, 1980). Maurizio Giammusso’s biography of Eduardo de Filippo, Eduardo (1993) relies on the actor’s private papers to trace his development from the early years when he worked with his brother and sister through his meeting with Pirandello to his international success. Italo Moscati’s Anna Magnani: Vita amori e carriera di un’attrice che guarda diritto negli occhi (Anna Magnani: Life, Loves and Career of an Actress Who Looks You Straight in the Eyes, 2003) presents her as embodying 70 years of Italian history, from variety showgirl to international star. This trend in biography also includes magazines devoted to journalistic and gossipy coverage of the lives of celebrities such as film stars, royalty, politicians, industrialists, and the wealthy in general. In 1983, the novelist Natalia Ginzburg takes up an extensive biographic project when she writes La famiglia Manzoni (The Manzoni Family). This unusual biography attempts to recompose Manzoni and his family’s history through reports of events, actual letters, and contemporary journalistic accounts. The story ranges from 1762, when Giulia Beccaria, Manzoni’s mother, is born to the events of the life of Stefano Borri, the son of Manzoni’s second wife, born from her first marriage. Such a unique and vast range implies that the biography of a single individual, if limited to that person’s lifetime, is inadequate to an understanding of that individual, for which one must, on the contrary, expand the very notion of biography as an individual life story. Finally, we cannot fail to mention the parallel development of biography in twentieth-century Italy and the annals school in first French and then international practice of historiography. This trend in history writing holds that biography is important for the purpose of re-evaluating an appropriate historical object. This perspective includes a valorization of the lives of persons not traditionally considered by scholars to be historic actors (peasants, 233

BIOGRAPHY for example), rather than powerful figures who perform what traditional historiography sees as noteworthy deeds. As is the case in Carlo Ginzburg’s groundbreaking work, Il formaggio e i vermi (The Cheese and the Worms, 1976), this historiography project ranges past the boundaries of traditional genres and even traditional fields defined by high and popular culture, blending history, sociology, and biography, to provide contemporary postmodern insights into the past. BEVERLY ALLEN

Further Reading Backsheider, Paula, Reflections on Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Baldinucci, Filippo, The Life of Bernini, translated by Catherine Enggars, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966. Boccaccio, Giovanni, The Life of Dante, New York: Garland, 1990. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Croce, Elena, Lo specchio della biografia, Rome: De Luca, 1960. Ellis, David, Literary Lives: Biography and the Search for Understanding, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000. Gianolio, Valeria (editor), Scrivere le vite: Consonanze critiche sulla biografia, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1996. Holroyd, Michael, Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography, Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002. Tommaso da Celano, St. Francis of Assisi: First and Second Life of St. Francis with Selections from the Treatise on the Miracles of Blessed Francis (1257), Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1988.

FLAVIO BIONDO (1392–1463) Born into a family of notaries in the northern Italian city of Forlı`, Flavio Biondo became the most notable historian and antiquarian of the fifteenth century. As a whole, his body of work dictated the rules and to a great extent defined a methodology of historiographic research that remained canonical well after his death. Although Biondo eventually gained acceptance among the Humanist elite, the domestic and geographical circumstances concerning his birth did not grant him immediate access to the liveliest cultural centers of Renaissance Italy. Rather, he was exposed from an early age to the aggressive and factious diplomacies of the political powers (Venetian Republic) and families (Visconti, Sforza) that were then vying for supremacy in Northern Italy. Educated in the liberal arts but most importantly trained as a notary, Biondo was forced to lead an itinerant life during which, given his professional education, he had the chance to hone his diplomatic abilities and to develop a necessary pragmatism. From this he acquired the skills that led him to a successful career as the foremost diplomatic representative of Pope Eugenius IV, an experience that played a pivotal role in his life. 234

The year 1433 marked a turning point in Biondo’s career. Eugenius IV appointed him papal secretary at a time in which the Roman curia had been temporarily transferred from Rome to Florence. Even though as a youth he had already had the chance to converse with personalities such as Pier Candido Decembrio (1392–1477) and Guarino Veronese (1374–1460), his period in Florence gave him the opportunity of meeting the leading Humanists of his time. Among them, Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444), and his works played the most important role in the genesis and development of his ideas. In his short treatise entitled De verbis romanae locutionis (On the Words of Roman Speech, 1435), Biondo undertook the refutation of Bruni’s argument according to which ancient Rome would have been bilingual, its two languages being the Latin of the masterpieces of classical antiquity, and a vernacular idiom spoken by the illiterate. Contrary to Bruni’s view, Biondo asserted that literary and nonliterary language differed in degree and not in kind and based his argument on evidence directly culled from Cicero’s Brutus. The inherent qualities of Latin, Biondo maintained, remained unchanged until the time of the barbaric invasions.

FLAVIO BIONDO The conclusions reached in his first confrontation with Bruni are also central to a work that in its most definitive edition was entitled Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades (Decades of History from the Decline of the Roman Empire, 1453). This work, which Biondo began writing in 1435, was again inspired by Bruni, who at the time was occupied with his Historiae florentini populi (History of the Florentine People), which he had begun as early as 1415 and formally introduced the first six books to the city government in 1439. Although at first Biondo meant to limit himself to the history of his own century, in the following decades he repeatedly revised the date of his research until finally settling for the event that in his view marked the beginning of Rome’s decline—the sack of Rome of 410 AD. Despite its monumental breadth, the work retained a remarkable unity of intent. Rather than being noted for its historical accuracy—a quality that can more easily be attributed to Biondo’s later works—the Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades also suggested for the first time the possibility of viewing secular history synoptically. Even though he effected a total departure from the providential historicism presented by Saint Augustine in his De civitate Dei (413–426), a universal history such as Biondo’s unfailingly revealed the temporal identity of man’s misused passions and overpowering greed. In 1443, the papal court returned to Rome and Biondo, just as Petrarch a century earlier, was enraptured by the appeal of the city’s ancient ruins. The antiquarian and archeological frenzy evoked by the Roman sights led Biondo to the composition in 1446 of his Roma instaurata (Rome Restored, 1446). Drawn upon a genre popular in the Middle Ages, this work was a fairly systematic topography of the ancient city’s monuments and architecture. Biondo’s archeological interests were shared by other illustrious Humanists, most notably Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), who in those very same years was working on his De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitude of Fortune, 1448). From a comparison of these two works, the novelty of Biondo’s more positive methodology clearly emerges as an alternative to the emotiveness that still permeated the works of his contemporaries. Almost coeval to this work was his Italia illustrata (Italy Illustrated, 1453), in which Biondo undertook, between 1448 and 1453, a comprehensive geographical and archeological description of the

entire Italian peninsula. A peculiar characteristic of his work is the author’s successful attempt to demythologize the accounts regarding the origins of Italy’s most illustrious cities and his acclamation of the personalities who contributed to the rise of Humanism. Thus, after having established the date for the end of the Roman Empire, Biondo also determined, through his descriptions, the places and time central to that period in history that we now call Renaissance. Biondo’s last major historiographic effort is the Roma triumphans (Rome Triumphant, 1457–1459). This work represents the natural conclusion to a career dedicated to the investigation and revelation of Rome’s true features. Famous for the vivid descriptions (especially in the last book) of Rome’s institutions and the activities of its inhabitants, Roma triumphans serves as a true living picture of Rome at the peak of its power. Biondo liberated the study of history from all the philosophical, moralistic, rhetorical, and ultimately subjective contaminations to which it was liable in the works of the early Humanists and in a way proved what, up until then, had been merely taken for granted regarding the magnificence of Rome and its institutions. Only after Biondo did historiography become a truly positive science.

Biography Born in Forlı`, 1392; received an education in rhetoric and grammar by Giovanni Balestreri and trained as a notary; befriended Pier Candido Decembrio, and later Guarino Veronese who introduced him to the Humanistic movement of his time, 1420; resided in many Italian cities, including Imola, Ferrara, and Venice and occasionally worked on diplomatic mission for the Sforza family before moving to Rome, 1433; Pope Eugenius IV appointed him apostolic secretary, 1433. For more than a decade, he oversaw all the diplomatic relations between Rome and the Northern states, and played a significant role in the Council of FerraraFlorence, 1438–1445; forced to leave Rome when Nicholas V succeeded Eugenius IV, 1448; dedicated the last decade of his life to his historiographic research and to the promotion of a Crusade against the Turks. Died in Rome on 4 June 1463. ROCCO RUBINI See also: Historiography

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FLAVIO BIONDO Selected Works Collections Blondi Flauii Forliuiensis De Roma Triumphante libri decem priscorum scriptorum lectoribus utilissimi, ad totiusque Romanae antiquitatis cognitionem pernecessarij; Romae Instauratae libri tre. Italia Illustrata. Historiarum ab inclinato Romano imperio decades tres, Basel: Froben, 1531. Scritti inediti e rari di Biondo Flavio, edited by Bartolomeo Nogara, Rome: Tipografia poliglotta Vaticana, 1927.

Treatises De verbis romanae locutionis, 1435. Roma instaurata, 1446. Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades, 1453. Italia illustrata, 1453. Roma triumphans, 1457–1459.

Other Recuperi Ammianei da Biondo Flavio, edited by Rita Cappelletto, 1983.

Further Reading

Clavuot, Ottavio, Biondos ‘‘Italia illustrata’’: Summa oder Neuscho¨pfung?: u¨ber die Arbeitsmethoden eines Humanisten, Tubingen: M. Niemeyer, 1990. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘‘Biondo, Flavio,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 10, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1968. Hay, Denys, Annalists and Historians: Western Historiography from the Eighth to the Eighteenth Centuries, London: Methuen, 1977. Ianziti, Gary, ‘‘From Flavio Biondo to Lodrisio Crivelli: The Beginnings of Humanistic Historiography in Sforza Milan,’’ in Rinascimento, 20 (1980): 3–39. Mazzocco, Angelo, ‘‘Rome and the Humanists: The Case of Biondo Flavio,’’ in Rome in the Renaissance: The City and the Myth, edited by Paul A. Ramsey, Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982. Robathan, Dorothy, ‘‘Flavio Biondo’s Roma Instaurata,’’ in Medievalia et Humanistica, 1 (1970): 203–216. Weiss, Roberto, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity, Oxford: Blackwell, 1969.

Ariemma Capriglione, Anna, Flavio Biondo da Forli: storiografia e storiografi dell’eta` dell’Umanesimo, Naples: Loffredo, 1969.

ALESSANDRO BLASETTI (1900–1987) An Italian film, theater, and television director, Blasetti was a central figure within Italian film culture for much of the twentieth century. His belief in the expressive possibilities of film led him to champion and experiment with the medium throughout his 60-year career. Blasetti founded Italy’s first cinema school, La Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia (1932); he was the first Italian director to use sound in the film Resurrectio (Resurrection, 1931); and the first to use Technicolor in the documentary Caccia alle volpe nella campagna romagna (Wolf Hunt in the Roman Countryside, 1938), shot by the English cinematographer Jack Cardiff. He pioneered the film-inchiesta (film as investigation), of which Europa di notte (Europe by Night, 1959) is the prime example, the episodic film in Italy with Altri tempi (Other Times, 1952), and was among the first filmmakers to work in television. Yet Blasetti has remained little known outside of Italy and underappreciated within his native 236

country, in part because his name is not associated with any one cinematic school or tendency. Although his film 1860 (1934) is considered a precursor of the postwar neorealist movement, he also made historical epics, expressionist-tinged dramas, romantic comedies, and costume films. Blasetti’s early support for Fascism, which translated into several overtly political films, such as Vecchia guardia (The Old Guard, 1934), which celebrated Fascist squadrism, also accounts for the relative silence that has surrounded his career. Although he became disenchanted with the dictatorship much earlier than many of his peers, the aura of ‘‘Fascist filmmaker’’ long surrounded him. Indeed, the ‘‘rediscovery’’ of his work came only in the course of a reappraisal of Fascist-era cinema by critics in Italy and elsewhere that began in the 1980s. Blasetti began his career in the mid-1920s, when the national film industry still suffered from the lingering effects of wartime devastation. His reviews

ALESSANDRO BLASETTI Lo schermo (1926–1927), Cinematografo (1927–1931), and Lo spettacolo d’Italia (1927–1928) urged political and financial elites to invest in the industry. They contributed greatly to the spread of a professional film culture in Italy. His first film, Sole (Sun, 1929), which celebrated Fascism’s reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, mixes realism and expressionism, melodrama and politics. His films of the early 1930s confirm this stylistic eclecticism and his commitment to marrying entertainment and mass persuasion. They range from populist paens, such as Terra madre (Mother Earth, 1931) to experimental movies (the avant-garde tinged Resurrectio, which explores the possibilities of film, music, and sound) to hybrid works (the Risorgimento-themed 1860, which combines realism with stylized historic spectacle). Ideological agendas of reconciliation (classes), unification (national), and redemption (of the nation and its individual members, especially male authority figures who pass from crisis to rebirth) provide continuity among these films. From the mid-1930s on, as Fascism became more bellicose and repressive, Blasetti moved away from overtly political filmmaking. Made on the eve of Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Aldebaran (1935) highlights a naval officer’s conflict between private emotions and official duties. La contessa di Parma (The Countess of Parma, 1937), Ettore Fieramosca (1938), and Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (An Adventure of Salvatore Rosa, 1940) take the director into the genres of sophisticated comedy and lavish spectacle even as they promote Italian achievements and history. Blasetti’s disaffection is more evident in his dark costume dramas: La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown, 1941) and La cena delle beffe (The Jester’s Supper, 1941) question the cult of virility that surrounds male authority figures and highlights their power abuses. The crazed despots of these films represent the culmination of Blasetti’s filmic meditations on the figure of the father-dictator: Quattro passi fra le nuvole (A Walk in the Clouds, 1942), and Nessuno torna indietro (There’s No Turning Back), which was released in 1945, return to the quotidian, in setting if not always in style. The former film, which marks the beginning of a 20-year collaboration with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, introduces a reflection on the social and psychological costs of bourgeois egotism that is developed in postwar films such as Prima comunione (First Communion, 1950), Amore e chiacchiere (Love and Gossip, 1957), and Io, Io, Io...e gli altri (Me, Me, Me...and the Others, 1966). Although Blasetti liked to proclaim himself a father of neorealism, he did not contribute much

to that movement. His Resistance film, Un giorno nella vita (A Day in the Life, 1946), is a conventionally scripted and professionally acted appeal for an ideal trait d’union between Catholics and Communists (represented in the film by cloistered nuns and partisans). Indeed, his next work, a grand costume epic made with an international cast and set in imperial Rome, Fabiola (1948), ran counter to neorealist style and its national-popular spirit. Blasetti hit a more congenial vein with his 1950s comedies, which featured well-known stars, such as Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni in Peccato che sia una canaglia (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 1954) and La fortuna di essere donna (The Fortune of Being A Woman, 1955), and wittily delivered social satire. These films influenced younger directors such as Pietro Germi, who would develop the popular commedia all’italiana. Although Blasetti had mastered a successful commercial formula, he continued to explore new models of filmmaking and forms of narration, such as those proposed in his episodic films of this period—Altri tempi and Tempi nostri (Our Times, 1954)—and in his film inchieste—Europa di notte, and Io amo, tu ami... (You Love, I Love..., 1961)—which documented nightlife in various continental capitals. Both of these new genres spawned many imitators. When Blasetti was in his 60s, his perennial interest in the cultures and technologies of modernity (his 1950s documentaries include a film on the Fiat 600 car and another on the use of animals in laboratory science) as well as his desire to communicate to younger generations led him to embrace television. His works in this medium encapsulate the scope of his talents and interests: They include historical documentaries and dramas, most notably, La lunga strada del ritorno (The Long Road Home, 1962), a three-part series on Italian prisoners of war, and a science fiction program entitled Racconti di fantascienza (Science-Fiction Stories, 1979–1980) that he directed into the last decade of his life.

Biography Born in Rome on 3 July 1900. Studied law at University of Rome, graduated in 1924; married Maria Laura Quagliotti, 1923; daughter Mara born, 1924. Begins column of film criticism at the newspaper L’Impero, 1925; founds Il mondo a lo schermo in 1926, which becomes Lo schermo (1926) and Cinematografo (1927); founds a film co-operative, Augustus, with Solari, Vergani, Serandrei, Alessandrini and Barbaro, 1927; founds journal Lo 237

ALESSANDRO BLASETTI spettacolo d’Italia, 1928; premires Sole, his first feature film, 1929; founds Cine Club d’Italia, 1930; founds Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia, 1932; premieres his first documentary, Assisi, 1932; produces his experimental mass theater 18BL, 1934; meets the actress Elisa Cegnani, who starred in many of his films and with whom he had a 50year love relationship, 1935; founds Nembo Film to produce Ettore Fieramosca, 1937; King Victor Emmanuel III names him Cavaliere della Corona d’Italia, 1939; wins Leone d’Oro at the ninth Venice International Film Festival for La corona di ferro, 1941; refuses Fascist regime’s invitation to direct war film Bir-el-Gobi, 1943; after the Armistice, he refuses to work in the new Cinecitta` studios of the German-backed Republic of Salo, fall 1943; begins career as a theater director with Il tempo e la famiglia Conway by John Boynton Priestley and Ma non e´ una cosa seria by Luigi Pirandello, 1945. Awarded Nastro d’Argento for Un giorno nella vita, 1946; French ‘‘Victoire’’ for Fabiola, 1949; Spanish ‘‘Triumfo’’ for Prima comunione, 1951; named Commendatore al Merito della Repubblica by President Luigi Einaudi, 1952; Grolla d’oro career award at Saint-Vincent, 1958; re-edits his 1934 film 1860 with a non-Fascist ending, 1958; first documentary, La lunga strada del ritorno, for the RAI-TV, 1962; David di Donatello for ‘‘his professional contribution to the Italian cinema,’’ 1963; special Jury prize at the Moscow Film Festival for Simon Bolivar, 1969; Leone d’Oro for his career at the 50th Venice International Film Festival, 1982; struck by cerebral ictus, which forces him to stop all professional activity, 1981; wife Maria Laura dies, 1984. Dies at home in Rome on 1 February 1987. RUTH BEN-GHIAT Selected Works Feature Films Sole, 1929. Nerone, 1930. Resurrectio, 1931. Terra madre, 1931. Palio, 1932. La tavola dei poveri, 1932. 1860, 1934. Vecchia guardia, 1934. Aldebaran, 1935. La contessa di Parma, 1937. Ettore Fieramosca, 1938. Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa, 1940. La corona di ferro, 1941. La cena delle beffe, 1941.

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Quattro passi fra le nuvole, 1942. Nessuno torna indietro, 1945. Un giorno nella vita, 1946. Fabiola, 1948. Prima comunione, 1950. Altri tempi, 1952. Tempi nostri, 1954. Peccato che sia una canaglia (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore), 1954. La fortuna di essere donna, 1955. Amore e chiacchiere, 1957. Europa di notte, 1959. Io amo, tu ami... , 1961. Io, Io, Io...e gli altri, 1966. La ragazza del bersagliere, 1967. Simon Bolivar, 1969. Napoli 1860: La fine dei Borboni, made for TV, 1970.

Documentary Films Assisi, 1932. Caccia alle volpe nella campagna romana, 1938. Napoli nuova, 1940. La gemma orientale dei Papi, 1947. Castel Sant’Angelo, 1947. Quelli che soffrono per noi, 1951. La lunga strada del ritorno, made for TV, 1962. Gli italiani del cinema italiano, made for TV, 1964. Storie dell’emigrazione, made for TV, 1972. Racconti di Fantascienza, made for TV, 1979. Mio amico Pietro Germi, made for TV, 1980. Venezia-Una Mostra per il Cinema, made for TV, 1981.

Theater Directing 18 BL, 1934. John Boynton Priestley, Il tempo e la famiglia Conway, 1945. John Boynton Priestley, Ma non e una cosa seria, 1945. Robert Emmer Sherwood, La foresta pietrificata, 1947. Ugo Betti, La regina e gli insorti, 1951.

Writings Scritti sul cinema, edited by Adriano Apra`, 1982.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, ‘‘Linee di politica cinematografica da Blasetti a Freddi,’’ in Cinema italiano sotto il fascismo, edited by Riccardo Redi, Venice: Marsilio, 1979. Apra`, Adriano, ‘‘Blasetti regista italiano,’’ in Scritti sul cinema, Venice: Marsilio, 1982. Apra`, Adriano, and Riccardo Redi (editors), Sole: Soggetto, sceneggiatura e note per la realizzazione, Rome: Di Giacomo, 1985. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy 1922–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Dalle Vacche, Angela, ‘‘National Tradition in Blasetti’s 1860,’’ in Film Criticism, 9, no. 1 (1984): 74–81. Gori, Gianfranco, Alessandro Blasetti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1984. Grmek Germani, Sergio, ‘‘Blasetti dal periodo fascista al neorealismo,’’ in Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, edited by Lino Micciche`, Venice: Marsilio, 1975. Masi, Stefano (editor), Alessandro Blasetti 1900–2000, Rome: Comitato per il Centenario della Nascita, 2001.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Micheli, Paola, Il cinema di Blasetti parlo` cosi: Un’analisi linguistica dei film, 1929–1942, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Prono, Franco (editor), Alessandro Blasetti: Il cinema che ho vissuto, Bari: Dedalo, 1982. Salizzato, Clavier, and Vito Zagarrio, La corona di ferro- un modo di produzione italiano, Rome: Di Giacomo, 1985.

Schnapp, Jeffrey, 18BL and the Theatre of Masses for Masses, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. Verdone, Mario, Alessandro Blasetti, Rome: Editrice Roma Amor, 1988. Verdone, Luca (editor), I film di Alessandro Blasetti, Rome: Gremese, 1989.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (1313–1375) Founding father of Italian fiction, Boccaccio forged new literary genres in a late Gothic cultural world, creating classics for the moderns by taking inspiration from antiquity; the recent literary past—above all, his idol Dante; and his revered contemporary, Petrarca. This son of a Florentine banker, educated for business and then a career in canon law, found himself drawn instead by natural inclination to poetry, a pursuit he passionately defends at the finale of his Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, ca. 1350–1360). By ‘‘poetry,’’ he means the highest form of human expression, a vehicle for moral truth that hides its lesson beneath a fanciful narrative, much as the pith of a tree lies covered inside its bark. Consonant with the medieval aesthetic of allegory, his theory of poetry resonates as well with the ancient ideal defined by Horace, who advocated an art ‘‘sweet and useful.’’ In practice, Boccaccio’s genius as a storytelling teacher leads him to write prolifically, as ready to ply a Latin quill as to play with his native Italian. Unlike Dante and Petrarca, who left much of what they wrote unfinished, he completes one book after another—24 titles in Vittore Branca’s 10-volume edition of the complete works. From sunny university days to solitary last months of tormenting illness, he answers his destiny as a poet with brilliant experiments of genre, register, and style that brought powerful literary revival to the Italian peninsula. Associated today mainly with the Decameron (ca. 1350–1352; rev. ca. 1373), whose history has given him a distorted reputation for obscenity, Boccaccio enjoyed fame of a very different sort during his time. A poet, Humanist, orator, and ambassador (who probably composed the official

correspondence he carried), he was one of only about 70 men among several tens of thousands in Florence with the title dominus (lord), reserved for knights and jurists. Trained as a canonist at the University of Naples, he was well-suited to carry out diplomatic missions for the Florentine Commune, among them trips to popes in Avignon and Rome. The many authors he cites in his writings (no full inventory has ever been compiled) and the contents of his important personal library, bequeathed to the monastery of Santo Spirito in Florence, display the autodidact’s all-embracing curiosity. More eclectic than either Dante or Petrarca, he knows the Church Fathers, citations from whom form the basis of canon law (Augustine, Jerome, Gregory the Great); curriculum authors (Boethius, Martianus Cappella, Macrobius, Fulgentius, Bede, Rabanus Maurus); the Scholastic canon of Aristotle as explicated by Thomas Aquinas (the latter’s commentary on the Ethics survives in Boccaccio’s own hand); the poets (Ovid, Virgil); and an antique heritage newly re-emerging (Cicero’s orations, rediscovered by Petrarca in Lie`ge; Tacitus, which Boccaccio found at Benevento; Homer, translated by Leontius Pilatus at Boccaccio’s behest). In his day and for more than a hundred years thereafter, he was read across Europe as a moral authority, primarily for his histories and encyclopedias, which by the turn of the fifteenth century were circulating both in the original Latin and vernacular translations: Genealogie deorum gentilium; De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris (On Mountains, Forests, Springs, Lakes, Rivers, Ponds or Swamps, and Diverse Names of the Sea, 1350–1365); De casibus virorum illustrium (Falls of Illustrious Men, 1355–1360; 1373–1374); 239

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO De mulieribus claris (Famous Women, 1361–1362). Even the Decameron contributed to his good name, since stories from it were used to decorate quattrocento bridal chests (cassoni) with pictures that provided models of wifely fidelity. In the cinquecento the Decameron triumphs as Boccaccio’s most popular work. Subsequently, scholars constructed his career as an amorous youth’s ‘‘apprenticeship’’ up to that masterpiece, considered a brief moment of perfection before rapid decline into learned but sterile and moralistic Latin. A challenge to this dated ‘‘Boccaccesque’’ paradigm comes from recent ‘‘Boccaccian’’ criticism, which recognizes sophisticated artistic accomplishment throughout his corpus. Protocols of self-naming and early portraits express how seriously Boccaccio took his calling. His first four epistolary exercises, signed ‘‘Johannes, at the tomb of Virgil,’’ announce his wish to emulate the poet whose burial place brought honor to Naples. Another youthful signing, encoded at midpoint in Filocolo (1336–1339), identifies him as ‘‘Giovanni di Certaldo,’’ whose fiction will attain renown. In the acrostic of the Amorosa visione (Amorous vision, ca. 1342–1343; rev. ca. 1355– 1360), he proudly spells both a patronymic and toponymic, ‘‘Giovanni di Boccaccio da Certaldo.’’ The formula ‘‘Johannes de Certaldo,’’ consistent in his later Latin works, suggests that the family’s ancestral village was also his birthplace. A talented amateur artist, he paints a late self-portrait in dialogue with his Muse, who greets him, ‘‘Ave, frater, laurum dignum te concipe sertum’’ (Hail, brother, consider thyself worthy of a laurel crown). In this frontispiece for Buccolicum carmen (Pastoral Song, ca. 1347–1366), he sits as a plump cleric in cathedra (a professorial stall chair) explicating his allegorical eclogues to a circle of tonsured monks. Below, the kind of aphorism that was one of his signature motifs teaches, ‘‘Chi semina virtu` fama [raccoglie]’’ (he who sows virtue reaps fame) (Victoria Kirkham, ‘‘Iohannes de Certaldo,’’ 1998). The Certaldan makes his literary debut in Naples, an urban magnet with the most cosmopolitan court in Europe, a distinguished university (Thomas Aquinas had taught on its faculty), and a port that drew merchants from across the Mediterranean. In his early teens, Boccaccio traveled there overland from Florence with his father, chief agent for the Bardi banking house at Robert of Anjou’s court. Business keeps them for a 13-year sojourn, during which, while still a teenager he spends his days working the money counters in the commercial district (ca. 1327–1331) and then studies canon law for another four years at the 240

Neapolitan Studium (ca. 1331–1335). Although he blames his father for forcing him to waste time in such uncongenial pursuits (Genealogie XV, 10), he will later turn to literary profit his reluctant immersion in the mercantile milieu, his privileged proximity to the aristocracy, and contacts cultivated in the lively intellectual community at Naples, always remembered nostalgically as the happy city of his youth. Boccaccio’s habit of endlessly revising, as well as the gaps in our historical knowledge, make it difficult to establish precise dating, but he was in his 20s when he began testing his skills. To this period belong Elegia di Costanza (Costanza’s Elegy, ca. 1332), Allegoria mitologica (Mythological Allegory, 1332–1334), and four Epistole allegoriche (Allegorical Epistles, 1339), all rhetorical exercises in Latin. From Latin he also translates the third and fourth decades of Livy’s History of Rome (ca. 1338–1347), and possibly—a disputed attribution—Valerius Maximus’ Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings, ca. 20 BC–ca. AD 50). A jocose letter to Francesco de’ Bardi (1339) attests to his fluency as a speaker of Neapolitan dialect. This is one of only three that survive in vernacular, the two others being his magnificent Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi (Consolatory Letter to Pino de’ Rossi, 1361–1362) and a casual note of 1366 to Leonardo del Chiaro, a Certaldan money changer in Avignon. His early vernacular fiction reveals roots in a society ruled by the French Angevin dynasty, politically allied to pro-Guelf Florence. Caccia di Diana (Diana’s Hunt, ca. 1333–1334) cleverly pays tribute to 58 Neapolitan court ladies. Summoned by the goddess Diana to a hunt in Parthenope (Naples), they kill a fabulous menagerie (leopard, lion, wolf, a snake with seven snakelings, unicorn, ostrich, elephants, etc.), but the one unnamed lady incites her companions to reject Diana for Venus. The latter descends, resuscitating the dead animals as handsome young men, who jump into a river and emerge garbed in vermilion. Venus instructs the ladies to be their faithful mistresses, and the narrator, now revealed to be a stag, is transformed like the other beasts (‘‘di cervio mutato in creatura umana e razionale esser per certo’’) into a ‘‘human being and a rational creature’’ (XVIII, 11–12). Casting the Caccia di Diana in 18 cantos of terza rima (1,047 vv.), Boccaccio is the first to authorize Dante’s metrical invention with imitative homage. He draws on many other sources, including Dante’s lost sirventese naming 60 women, Ovid’s Actaeon myth, Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO (via Dante’s Purgatory 14), Claudian’s panegyric On Stilicho’s Consulship, the thirsting heart of the Bible (Psalms 42.1), and the bestiaries. Not definitively credited to Boccaccio until 1939, the Caccia di Diana is at surface a bid for patronage in a triumph of love over chastity. Beneath the veil of fiction, it is an allegorical psychomachia, or struggle in the soul, between sinful appetites (symbolized by the beasts) and uplifting virtue, embodied in the huntresses. In Filostrato (ca. 1334–1335) Boccaccio changes his pose from an amorous heart to a man ‘‘vinto d’amore’’ or ‘‘man struck down by love’’ (the meaning he intended for the title) and addresses his absent lady Filomena. His lonely situation frames a sad story suited to his mood. With a subject filtered through medieval accounts of the Trojan War, Filostrato employs a metrical vehicle from oral tradition (ottava rima, or stanzas of eight hendecasyllables with a rhyme scheme Boccaccio is credited with inventing ABABABCC). A novel fusion of epic and romance, classical and modern, learned and popular gives this tale its Boccaccian stamp, as does the fictional frame, a device that creates distance, permitting a humorous, ironic reading of the narrator’s misogynistic stance and Troiolo’s delusions as a courtly lover. The long prose romance Filocolo follows a creative path along which Boccaccian signature motifs are clearly forming—a Greek compound title ‘‘fatiche d’amore’’ (love’s labors), a frame tale with an amorous narrator named Giovanni from Certaldo, but in a ‘‘fictional persona’’ (a strategy inherited from Roman elegiac poetry); a love story inside the frame, a technique that juxtaposes material from ancient epic and medieval cantari (oral songs); mythological content and Christian conversion. New here is the poet’s mistress Fiammetta, prominent in the proemial scene, where the author describes falling suddenly in love with King Robert’s love child, Maria, also known as Fiammetta. Her returns in Boccaccio’s fiction give rise to a legend of his affair with a princess, not debunked until the second half of the twentieth century. Both the lady and her nickname are the young canonist’s inventions, tailored to the catechism of Filocolo and its calendar, which revolve around the feast days of Easter and Pentecost. With Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (Thesead of Emilia’s Nuptials, 1339–1341), Boccaccio again sets up a fictional frame, this time in a prose letter to Fiammetta, for whom he pretends to have found a ‘‘most ancient’’ story. His autograph manuscript displays what pains he took to articulate, decorate,

and illuminate with paratextual structures the ottava rima narrative, self-consciously aware of its status as the first Italian epic. Most important is the autocommentary, by an unnamed glossator who wants to make sure we understand its classical features and allegorical meaning. Like Caccia di Diana (and Dante’s Divina Commedia, always in the background), beneath its fictional veil the Teseida describes conflict in the soul between rational and irrational impulses. Resolving both the plot and this inner tension through marriage, Boccaccio anticipates a message central to the Decameron, setting his sights not on the afterworld, as Dante had done, but in civilized society, epitomized by Athens under the rule of Theseus. Boccaccio’s Teseida commentary, completed after an economic downturn forced him back to Florence in the winter of 1340–1341, turns on the cusp of a more difficult decade, when he must confront the end of carefree youth and establish himself in a place that, by comparison with Naples, seems unwelcoming, provincial, and philistine. Adversity brings productivity. Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Comedy of the Florentine Nymphs, 1341–1342) translates the Caccia di Diana’s Parthenope into mythic Etruria. Ameto, a primitive hunter, joins seven nymphs with patrician Florentine names hidden in riddles (Tosa, Tornaquinci, Peruzzi, Gianfigliazzi, Strozzi—not all are decipherable). They witness a singing contest between the good shepherd Alcesto (fervid virtue) and the sluggard Acaten accompanied by Teogapen (love of god) on his pipes. Each woman then tells a story in this ‘‘little Decameron’’ of how she betrayed her husband and took a lover—that is, abandoned Diana for Venus—who then descends as Trinitarian grace. The nymphs strip Ameto, bathe, and reclothe him; ‘‘e brievemente, d’animale bruto, uomo divenuto essere li pare’’ (it seems to him that he has been made from a brute animal into a man; XLVI. 5). In an allegory as surprising as it is transparent, the women personify the seven virtues (Mopsa-Wisdom; Emilia-Justice; Adiona-Temperance; Acrimonia-Fortitude; Agapes-Charity; Fiammetta-Hope; Lia-Faith). Beauties described in exquisite cameos modeled on rhetorical treatises by Matthew of Vendoˆme and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, they each subdue a contrary vice and effect Ameto’s Christian conversion. By proper name a Comedia like Dante’s poem—but also known as Ninfale d’Ameto, or just Ameto—this is the first of Boccaccio’s fictions to have a real, historical dedicatee, Niccolo` di Bartolo del Buono. Menippean in structure, with 50 chapters alternating between terza 241

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO rima and prose, its neo-Platonic dynamics recall both Boethius’ Consolatio Philosophiae and Dante’s Vita nuova. The Divina Commedia again makes a foil for the Amorosa visione. Accompanied by a guide who is an amusing Virgil in skirts, its dreaming narrator allows two youths to pull him into a castle, where he views painted triumphs of Knowledge, Fame, Riches, Love, and Fortune. Outside in a garden, Dreamer sees 15 beautiful women, a scene close to Boccaccio’s contemporary ternario (poem in terza rima), ‘‘Contento quasi ne’ pensier d’amore’’ (Content—almost—in thoughts of love). Just as Dreamer is about to possess the one who is his lady, Maria d’Aquino, he awakens bathetically to find the guide still beside him. Maria’s surname in this teasing allegory suggests a Thomistic key: reason (the Guide), assisted by Wisdom (Maria), subdues the sensual appetites of irascibility and concupiscence (the two young men) and sets the narrator on a less worldly path. A virtuoso metrical feat, the Amorosa visione is the world’s longest acrostic with three prefatory sonnets formed by the first letters of each terzina in 50 cantos of terza rima. Boccaccio returns to prose and contemporary Naples for Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (Lady Fiammetta’s Elegy, 1343–1344). The married lady of the title, supremely unself-aware, tells how she became the unhappiest female ever—would even have committed suicide like Dido were it not for her wise old nurse—all because her lover Panfilo left her. Although set far from mythic, epic, or visionary landscapes, this is not the realistic modern psychological novel criticism has wanted to make it. A late medieval romance divided like Filostrato into nine books (perhaps with an allusion to the number of circles in Dante’s Hell), it stages a familiar allegorical drama. Fiammetta (who reprises Filostrato in the tale of Troiolo and anticipates their counterpart Filostrato in the Decameron) personifies concupiscence and irascibility; her nurse, reason. In this tour-de-force of crossvoicing, inspired by Ovid’s Heroides and Seneca’s tragedies, Boccaccio explores with brilliant irony the elegiac style, a mid-register between high tragedy and low comedy: ‘‘per elegiam stilum intelligimus miserorum’’ (by elegy we mean the style of those who are miserable) (Dante, De vulgari eloquentia II, 4.6). In Ninfale fiesolano (Nymphs of Fiesole, ca. 1344–1346), a pseudoprimitive pendant to Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, rustic Africo comes upon the huntress Mensola, Diana’s follower, among 242

beautiful nymphs singing and bathing in the wild, but unlike Ameto, he acts on precivilized instincts and translates his desire into brutal physical possession. Punished by the goddess of chastity, the weeping lovers turn into streams near Fiesole that bear their names. Their son Pruneo, raised by Africo’s parents, fathers 10 children and participates in that town’s legendary foundation. This pastoral jewel (473 octaves), an etiological fable that fosters Boccaccio’s epithet as ‘‘the Tuscan Ovid,’’ resembles Filostrato in its sophisticated antirhetorical stance, which mimics the simple, light oral style of the cantari. With these nymphals, Boccaccio’s invention as a genre, and the burnished Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Italy’s master narrator comes to the Decameron (ca. 1350–1352; rev. ca. 1373). The Certaldan’s defining work is a confluence of his manifold writing experiences. Three men, counterparts to the Teseida protagonists, and seven female narrators are protagonists in a frame tale structure carried over from Ameto (but first tested in the Filocolo love debate). Bucolic settings re-created as utopian country gardens surround 100 tales, a symbolically perfect total like the number of cantos in Dante’s Comedia. Their setting is the mercantile world that had been part of his life since his teens in Naples, where he began harvesting a universal narrative heritage with motifs that run from ancient oriental sources to recent bourgeois anecdotes. Pith beneath the bark holds submerged allegorical suggestions that descend from as far back as Boccaccio’s first fiction, Caccia di Diana, and anticipate the overtly moralistic lines of his later Latin humanism. At midcentury, new poetic directions open to Dante’s great admirer when he meets personally Francesco Petrarca, admired from a distance ever since the 1330s and subject of the laudatory De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo (On the Life and Habits of Lord Francesco Petrarca of Florence According to Giovanni Boccaccio of Certaldo, ca. 1348–1350). Cicero’s oration Pro Archia (For Archias), received from Petrarca in 1351 as Boccaccio was working on the Decameron, prompts him to draft in the first of three major redactions De origine, vita, studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis aligerii florentini poete illustris, et de operibus compostis ab eodem (On the Origin, Life, Studies, and Habits of the Most Distinguished Man Dante Alighieri, Illustrious Florentine Poet, and the Works Composed by Him, ca. 1351–1363), known better as Trattatello in laude di Dante (Little Treatise

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO in Praise of Dante). It echoes the ancient text in a plea for citizenship, argued as an apology for the poetic art: Archias, a Syrian, deserved to become a Roman; Dante, a Florentine should have the ban of exile lifted and his remains honorably returned to his natal city. The ‘‘little treatise,’’ a portrait of Dante’s life and works set around a stirring central defense of poetry, was intended as an accessus ad auctorem (introduction to the author) for one of three anthologies of Alighieri’s poetry that Boccaccio himself transcribed, enhanced with Argomenti (summaries) in terza rima and descriptive prose rubrics (1355; 1363–1366). Always an ardent Dantista, he preserves in his Zibaldoni (Notebooks, 1330s–1350s) the sole copies of letters by the older writer and the latter’s eclogue exchange with Giovanni del Virgilio. During the fertile decade of the 1350s, he further begins taking notes for his Genealogie, drafts his geographical gazeteer De montibus, and conceives De casibus virorum illustrium after seeing De viris illustribus by Petrarca. The latter’s influence clearly also touches Boccaccio’s Rime (Rhymes), composed from youth into old age. The last sonnet, ‘‘Or sei salito, caro signor mio’’ (Now you have risen, my dear lord) mourns Petrarca’s death in 1374. Petrarca’s influence bears, too, on Boccaccio’s last fiction, Corbaccio (Evil crow, 1355), often compared to the novella of the scholar’s revenge (Decameron VIII, 7). Its protagonist, an aging canonist, recounts how he is cured of his mad love for a woman who has publicly spurned him. The ghost of her dead husband comes to the narrator while the latter sleeps to lead him out of a nightmarish valley, ‘‘Venus’ pigsty,’’ with savagely misogynistic attacks against all members of the female sex and the widow in particular (to whom the pejorative title probably alludes). Long taken as autobiography, this ‘‘humble treatise’’ (Corb. 3) seems rather to be a literary joke that uses the dream vision to parody Dante’s Vita nuova in an anthology of antifeminist topoi that Boccaccio had been collecting from such canonical authorities as Jerome, Martial, and Theophrastus since the 1330s. Following the years at Naples (1327–1340/41) and Florence (1340/41–1361), the final phase of Boccaccio’s career attaches him to Certaldo. A Florentine political climate turned hostile and tensions with his half-brother Jacopo prompt his retreat in winter of 1361–1362 to his home in the Boccacci ancestral village. There in a meditative mood he continues work on his Genealogie and De mulieribus claris and completes Buccolicum carmen. His tremendously popular consolatory epistle

to Pino de’ Rossi, a friend exiled from Florence for his role in a rebellion against the Guelph party, reflects the moralistic slant of those Latin works in a mosaic of set pieces on such themes as aging and friendship. Finding the analogies between his own situation and Pino’s (both are removed from Florence, poor, and corpulent), Boccaccio invokes a panoply of literary examples (Dante, Boethius, Seneca, Valerius Maximus) in a rhetorical format resembling the Scholastic method of sic et non (yes and no)—comfort offered cannot help (exile means loss of home, friends, possessions) rebutted by counterargument (the whole world is our home, we can correspond with friends, riches are a burden). Peaceful withdrawal from society is the theme, too, of his Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis (Life of the Most Sainted Father Peter Damian Hermit and Then Bishop of Ostia and Cardinal of the Roman Church, 1361–1362), composed for Petrarca, who was writing his treatise on the solitary life. After moving to Certaldo, where he communes with his books, recites Psalms, and meditates on the generosity of God’s gifts to man, Boccaccio still visits Florence and continues to travel, both as a diplomat and poet. On Sunday, October 23, 1373, he begins his last great project, the Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (Expositions on Dante’s Comedy, 1373–1374), presented in public readings in the church of Santo Stefano di Badia at the invitation of the Florentine city fathers. Medieval by format, the commentary begins with an Accessus that explains in Aristotelian terms the work’s four ‘‘causes’’: its material cause, or matter (literal and allegorical meanings); its formal cause, or form (three canticles in cantos of terza rima); its efficient cause, or maker (Dante); and its final cause, or purpose (to remove the living from misery and lead them to happiness). Literally, the poem describes the state of souls after death; allegorically, it shows how justice rewards or punishes depending on whether we exercise free will for good or evil. Boccaccio then presents for each canto first a literal, then an allegorical exposition (Inferno XI is an exception, having no allegory). He draws on vast knowledge, including the Letter to Can Grande and Dante’s earlier commentators (his sons Pietro and Jacopo, Jacopo dalla Lana, Guido da Pisa), but he digresses creatively to mold engaging poetic biographies (as for Homer and Virgil in Limbo) or develop little novellas (the story of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno V). Ill health interrupted the Esposizioni just as Boccaccio 243

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO reached Inferno XVII. During his final months at Certaldo, late in 1374, he received the crushing news of Petrarca’s death, which he mourns in the last of his Epistole (Epistles, 1339–1374) and in a moving sonnet, where he imagines that his departed friend has risen to rejoin Dante in the heaven of Venus. The epitaph he composed for himself is mounted on the wall near the marble cenotaph bust of Boccaccio by Gian Francesco Rustici in his burial church at Certaldo: Hac sub mole iacent cineres ac ossa Iohannis, mens sedet ante Deum meritis ornata laborum mortalis vite; genitor Boccaccius illi, patria Certaldum, studium fuit alma poesis. Under this stone lie the bones and ashes of John; his spirit stands in the presence of God, adorned with the merits his mortal labors on earth have earned him. Boccaccio sired him; his native Fatherland was Certaldo; he cherished the nourishing Muses. (Trans. Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio, 1981)

Biography Born in Tuscany (either in the Boccacci family’s ancestral village of Certaldo or Florence), JuneJuly, 1313, the illegitimate son of Boccaccino di Chelino and an unknown mother; schooled in Florence by the grammarian Giovanni di Domenico Mazzuoli da Strada for a career in business. Moves ca. 1327 to Naples with his father, an agent of the Bardi bank. Trains as a money changer, then studies canon law at the University of Naples, probably also attends lectures on Justinian code by the jurist and poet Cino da Pistoia. Other important intellectual encounters in Naples with the royal librarian, Paolo da Perugia; the Florentine mathematician Paolo dell’Abbaco; the astrologer Andalo` del Negro; Dante’s commentator Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, the historian Paolino Minorita (Paolino Veneto); the Augustinian theologian and Petrarca’s spiritual advisor, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro. Forms friendships with his compatriot Niccolo` Acciaiuoli, a pivotal political figure on the Neapolitan scene; Giovanni Barrili and Barbato da Sulmona, leading men of letters at court. Financial reversals force father and son back to Florence in winter 1340–1341. Serves Florentine Commune as official of the Condotta (in charge of administering condottieri, or mercenary soldiers), 1355, 1365, 1367–1368; as chamberlain of the Camera (a city treasury post) and in negotiations for the annexation of Prato, 1351. Diplomatic missions for 244

Florence to Ostasio da Polenta in Ravenna, 1346; to Francesco Ordelaffi in Forlı`, 1347–1348; to Romagna and Ravenna, where he delivered 10 gold florins to Dante’s cloistered daughter, Suor Beatrice, 1350; to Ludwig of Bavaria in Tyrol, 1351–1352; to Pope Innocent VI in Avignon, 1354; to Certaldo, 1354; to Lombardy, 1359; to the Grimaldi doge in Genoa and to Pope Urban V in Avignon, 1365; to Pope Urban V in Rome, 1367. Formally welcomes Petrarca to Florence on latter’s pilgrimage to Rome for Jubilee of 1350; visits Petrarca in Padua, 1351; in Milan, 1359; in Venice, 1363; with Petrarca’s daughter and her family, 1367; visit to Padua with Petrarca and Venice with Donato Albenzani, 1368. Returns to Naples 1355, 1362–1363, 1370–1371. Friendships in Florence include the poets Sennuccio del Bene, Antonio Pucci, and Zanobi da Strada; Francesco Nelli, prior of the church Santi Apostoli; Coluccio Salutati, from 1374 chancellor of Florence; the historian Filippo Villani (Boccaccio’s first biographer); Benvenuto da Imola, who was present for Boccaccio’s Dante readings and wrote one of the most important Trecento commentaries of the Divina Commedia; Giovanni Gherardi, author of the Paradiso degli Alberti, and Franco Sacchetti, his epigones in the novella genre. Never married, fathered at least five natural children; godfather of Mainardo Cavalcanti’s child, born 1373. Legitimized by Innocent VI, 1360; already in holy orders as a cleric and probably eventually as a priest. Cedes house south of Arno to half-brother Jacopo in summer 1361 and the following winter withdraws to Certaldo; gives church of SS. Jacopo and Filippo two altarpieces (lost), one with his portrait as donor, in 1366. Final will dated 28 August 1374. Ill health in last years associated with obesity, scabies, and dropsy; dies in Certaldo on December 21, 1375. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Selected Works Collections Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, corrette su i testi a penna, edited by Ignazio Moutier, 17 vols., Florence, Marghera, 1827–1834. Vols. 1–4 Decameron, 1827; vol. 5, Corbaccio, 1828; vol. 6, Fiammetta, 1829; vols. 7–8, Filocolo, 1829; vol. 9, Teseide, 1831; vols. 10–12, Il comento sopra la Commedia di Dante Alighieri, 1831–1832; vol. 13, Filostrato, 1831; vol. 14, Amorosa visione. La caccia di Diana, 1832–1833; vol. 15, La vita di Dante Alighieri. L’Ameto, 1833; vol. 16, Rime. L’Urbano, 1834; vol. 17, Ninfale fiesolano. Lettere volgari, 1834.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Opere, 14 vols. Bari: Laterza, 1918–1951. Vol. 1, Filocolo, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, 1938; vol. 2, Filostrato, Ninfale fiesolano, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, 1937; vol. 3, Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Aurelio Roncaglia, 1941; vol. 4, L’elegia di madonna Fiammetta con le chiose inedite, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, 1939; vol. 5, L’Ameto, Il corbaccio, edited by Nicola Bruscoli, 1940; vol. 6, Le rime, L’amorosa visione, La caccia di Diana, edited by Vittore Branca, 1939; vols. 7–8, Il Decameron, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1927; vol. 9, Opere latine minori, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1928; vols. 10–11, Genealogie deorum gentilium, edited by Vincenzo Romano, 1951; vols. 12–14, Il commento alla Divina commedia e gli altri scritti intorno a Dante, edited by Domenico Guerri, 1918. Decameron, Filocolo, Ameto, Fiammetta, selections edited by Enrico Bianchi, Carlo Salinari, Natalino Sapegno, in La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, vol. 8, Milan: Ricciardi, 1952. Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, 10 vols., Milan, Mondadori, 1964–1998. Vol. 1, Filocolo, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, 1967; vol. 2, Filostrato, edited by Vittore Branca; Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Alberto Limentani; Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, 1964; vol. 3, Amorosa visione, edited by Vittore Branca; Ninfale fiesolano, edited by Armando Balduino; Trattatello in laude di Dante, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, 1974; vol. 4, Decameron, edited by Vittore Branca, 1976; vol. 5, pt. 1, Rime, edited by Vittore Branca, with Argomenti e rubriche dantesche, edited by Giorgio Padoan; Carmina, edited by Giuseppe Velli; Epistole e lettere, edited by Ginetta Auzzas with Augusto Campana; Vite, edited by Renata Fabbri; De Canaria, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1992; vol. 5, pt. 2, Elegia di madonna Fiammetta, edited by Carlo Delcorno; Corbaccio, edited by Giorgio Padoan; Consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, edited by Giuseppe Chiecchi; Bucolicum carmen, edited by Giorgio Bernardi Perini; Allegoria mitologica, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1994; vol. 6, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, edited by Giorgio Padoan, 1965; vols. 7–8, Genealogie deorum gentilium, edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, 1998; vol. 9, De casibus virorum illustrium, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci and Vittorio Zaccaria, 1983; vol. 10, De mulieribus claris, edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, 1967. Opere in versi, Corbaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, Prose latine, epistole, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, in La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, vol. 9, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Opere minori in volgare, edited by Mario Marti, 4 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Vol. 1, Filocolo; vol. 2, Filostrato. Teseida. Chiose al Teseida; vol. 3, Comedia della ninfe fiorentine. Amorosa visione. Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta. Ninfale fiesolano; vol. 4, Caccia di Diana. Rime. Corbaccio. Trattatello in laude di Dante. Dalle Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. Lettere. Opere minori, Florence: D’Anna Thesis, 1995, three computer disks with Caccia di Diana, Filocolo, Filostrato, Teseida, Amorosa visione, Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Ninfale fiesolano, Corbaccio, Rime, Trattello in laude di Dante.

Works in Vernacular Caccia di Diana (ca. 1333–1334); first edition, in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 14, 1832; in Opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 6, 1939; in Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, 1967; rpt. 1990; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 4, 1969; bilingual edition, Caccia di Diana. Diana’s Hunt: Boccaccio’s First Fiction, translated by Anthony K. Cassell and Victoria Kirkham, 1989. Rime (ca. 1334–1374); first ed. 1802; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 16, 1834; in Opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 6, 1939; edited by Vittore Branca, 1958; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 4, 1969; in Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992; rpt. 1999. Filostrato (ca. 1334–1335). Filocolo (ca. 1334–1336). Lettere volgari, 1. A Francesco de’ Bardi, written 1339; first edition Prose antiche di Dante, Petrarcha et Boccaccio et di molti altri nobili et virtuosi ingegni nuovamente raccolte, 1547; in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. 2. A Leonardo del Chiaro, written 1366; first edition, Roberto Abbondanza, ‘‘Una lettera autografa del Boccaccio nell’Archivio di Stato di Perugia,’’ Studi sul Boccaccio, 1 (1963): 5–13; in Tutte le opere, edited by Ginetta Auzzas, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (ca. 1339–1341). Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Ameto) (ca. 1341–1342); first edition, 1478; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 15, 1833; in Opere, as Ameto, edited by Nicola Bruscoli, vol. 5, 1940; in Tutte le opere, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, vol. 2, 1964; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 3, 1969; as The Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, or Ameto, of Giovanni Boccaccio, translated with a critical introduction by Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli, Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1970; as An Annotated Translation of Boccaccio’s Ameto (Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine), by Bernadette Marie McCoy, Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1978; as L’Ameto, translated by Judith Powers Serafini-Sauli, 1985. Amorosa visione (ca. 1342–1343, rev. ca. 1361); first edition, Amorosa visione Di messer Giou. Bocc., nuouamente ritrouata, nella quale si conte[n]gono cinq[ue] Triumphi, 1521; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 14, 1833; in Opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 6, 1939; in Tutte le opere, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 3, 1974; rpt. 2000; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 3, 1969; Amorosa visione, bilingual edition translated by Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel, 1986. Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (ca. 1343–1344); first edition, Johannis Bochacci viri eloqventissimi Ad Flamettam Panphyli amatricem libellvs materno sermone aeditus, 1472; in Opere volgari as Fiammetta, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 6, 1839; in Opere, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, vol. 4, 1939; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 3, 1969; edited by Maria Pia Mussini Sacchi, 1987; edited by Francesco Erbani, 1988; in Tutte le opere, edited by Carlo Delcorno, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994; as Amorous Fiammetta wherein is sette downe a catalog of all and singular passion of loue and iealousie, incident to an enamored yong gentlewoman with a notable caueat for all women to eschewe deceitfull and

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GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO wicked loue, by an apparant example of a Neapoltian lady, her approued and long miseries and wyth many sounde dehortations from the same, 1587; as La Fiammetta, translated by James C. Brogan, 1907; as Amorous Fiammetta, translated by Bartholomew Young (1587), 1926; as The Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, translated by Mariangela Causa-Steindler and Thomas Mauch, 1990; as The Elegy of Madonna Fiammetta Sent by Her to Women in Love, translated by Roberta L. Payne and Alexandra Hennessey Olsen, 1992. Ninfale fiesolano (1344–1346); first dated edition, 1477; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 17, 1834; in Opere, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, vol. 2, 1937; in Tutte le opere, edited by Armando Balduino, vol. 3, 1974; rpt. 1997; edited by Pier Massimo Forni, 1991; as A Famous Tragicall Discourse of Two Lovers. Affircan and Mensola, their lives, unfortunate loves and lamentable deaths . . . Newly translated out of Tuscan into French by Anthony Guerin [sic] . . . and out of French into English by Jo. Goubourne [Golburne], 1597; rpt. as Two Tracts: Affrican and Mensola, an Elizabethan Prose Version of Il ninfale fiesolano, edited by Cyril H. Wilkinson, 1946; as The Nymphs of Fiesole, translated by John Goubourne with woodcuts by Bartolomeo di Giovanni, 1952; as The Nymph of Fiesole (Il ninfale fiesolano), translated by Daniel J. Donno, 1960; rpt. 1974; as Nymphs of Fiesole, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1971. Decameron (1350–1352; rev. 1373); editio princeps 1470; as Decameron, the John Payne translation, rev. and annotated by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., 1982; as The Decameron, translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, 1982; as The Decameron: Selected Tales. Decameron: Novelle scelte. A dual-language book, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, 2000. Argomenti e rubriche dantesche Argumentum super tota prima parte Comedı`e Dantis Aligherii florentini . . . super tota secunda parte . . . super tota tertia parte, 1355; as Brieve raccoglimento di cio` che in se´ superficialmente contiene la lettera della prima parte della Cantica overo Comedı`a di Dante Alighieri di Firenze . . . della seconda parte . . . della terza parte (ca. 1363–1366); in Opere, vol. 14, edited by Domenico Guerri, 1918; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giorgio Padoan, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. Corbaccio, or Laberinto d’amore (ca. 1355); 1487; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 5, 1828; in Opere, edited by Nicola Bruscoli, vol. 5, 1940; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giorgio Padoan, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994; as The Corbaccio, translated by Anthony K. Cassell, 1975; revised as The Corbaccio, or The Labyrinth of Love, 1993; as Boccaccio’s Revenge: A Literary Transposition of the Corbaccio, translated by Normand R. Cartier, 1977. Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi (1361–1362); first edition, 1487; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giuseppe Chiecchi, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994. Testamento, will written 21 August 1365; 1574, following Annotazioni e discorsi sopra alcuni luoghi del Decamerone; vernacular draft of will written 28 August 1374, in Domenico Maria Manni, Istoria del Decameron, 1742. Esposizioni sopra la Comedı`a di Dante (public readings 1373–1374); first edition, Commento sopra la Divina

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Commedia di Dante, with annotations by Antonmaria Salvini, 1724; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vols. 10–12, 1831–1832; in Opere, edited by Domenico Guerri, vols. 13–14, 1918; in Tutte le opere, edited by Giorgio Padoan, vol. 6, 1965; rpt. 1994.

Works in Latin Elegia di Costanza, ca. 1332. Allegoria mitologica, 1332–1334. Epistole allegoriche, 1339. Epistole, 1339–1374. Buccolicum carmen (ca. 1347–1366). De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo, ca. 1348– 1350. Genealogie deorum gentilium ca. 1350–1360. De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris, (1350–1365). De origine, vita, studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis aligerii florentini poete illustris, et de operibus compostis ab eodem (Trattatello in laude di Dante; Vita di Dante) (first redaction ca. 1351; second redaction ca. 1359– 1366; third redaction before 1372); first edition, Vita di Dante, 1477; in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 15, 1833; in Opere, edited by Domenico Guerri, vol. 12, 1918; in Tutte le opere, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, vol. 3, 1974; rpt. as Vita di Dante, 2002; in Opere minori, edited by Mario Marti, vol. 4, 1969; as A Translation of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Life of Dante with a Note on the Portraits of Dante, translated by G. R. Carpenter, 1900; as The Earliest Lives of Dante, translated by James Robinson Smith, 1901; various rpts., e.g., 1963; as Life of Dante, translated by Philip Henry Wicksteed, 1904; as The Life of Dante Trattatello in laude di Dante, translated by Vincenzo Zin Bollettino, 1990. De casibus virorum illustrium 1355–1360. De mulieribus claris 1361–1362. Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis 1361–1362.

Translations Le Deche di Tito Livio. Volgarizzamento della Prima, Terza e Quarta Deca di Tito Livio, 1476; I primi quattro libri del Volgarizzamento della Terza Deca di Tito Livio Padovano, attribuito a Giovanni Boccaccio, edited by Carlo Baudi di Vesme, 1875.

Further Reading Battaglia Ricci, Lucia, Boccaccio. Rome: Salerno, 2000. Bergin, Thomas G., Boccaccio, New York: Viking, 1981. Billanovich, Giuseppe, Restauri boccacceschi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1945. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Branca, Vittore, Giovanni Boccaccio: Profilo biografico, Florence: Sansoni, 1977; second ed., 1992. Branca, Vittore (editor), Boccaccio visualizzato: Narrare per parole e per immagini fra Medioevo e Rinascimento. 3 vols. Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Bruni, Francesco, Boccaccio: L’invenzione della letteratura mezzana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Hollander, Robert, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Amorous Vision, Scholastic Vistas,’’ in The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Iohannes de Certaldo: La firma dell’autore,’’ in Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura, edited by Michelangelo Picone and Claude Cazale´ Be´rard, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘L’immagine del Boccaccio nella memoria tardo-gotica e rinascimentale,’’ in Boccaccio visualizzato, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Russo, Vittorio, Con le Muse in Parnaso. Tre studi su Boccaccio, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983. Smarr, Janet Levarie, Boccaccio and Fiammetta: The Narrator as Lover, Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986. Studi sul Boccaccio, published annually or semiannually under the auspices of the Ente Nazionale Giovanni, Boccaccio, 1963-present. Surdich, Luigi, Boccaccio, Bari: Laterza, 2001. Tateo, Francesco, Boccaccio, Bari: Laterza, 1998.

DECAMERON, CA. 1350–1352; REV. CA. 1373 Novelle by Giovanni Boccaccio

A treasury of tales unrivaled in European literary history, Boccaccio’s masterpiece has become—for better or worse—a book synonymous with his name. Within a generation of its appearance, amateur scribes were recopying the Decameron, which by the quattrocento had traveled beyond the mercantile milieu where it first took hold into more courtly settings. In his Prose della volgar lingua (1525), Pietro Bembo canonized it as a linguistic model for literary prose. Others, including Anton Francesco Grazzini, Giovan Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio, and Giovambattista Basile, consecrated it as the archetype of a new vernacular genre, collected novelle (short stories) unified by a fictional frame story. Boccaccio himself drew on framed tales in traditions descended from the Middle Eastern Thousand and One

Nights and related medieval compilations (Dolopathos, Il libro de’ setti savi, and Pietro Alfonsi’s Disciplina clericalis), but in the history of Italian literature he was the first to develop this complex narrative structure. Regarded as the high point of his creative trajectory, the Decameron is a complex, sophisticated construction, to which the frame brings dimensions that make a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Its title rubric christens the collection: ‘‘Comincia il libro chiamato Decameron cognominato Prencipe Galeotto, nel quale si contengono cento novelle in diece dı` dette da sette donne e da tre giovani uomini’’ (Here begins the book called Decameron, surnamed Prince Gallehault, wherein are contained one hundred stories told in ten days by seven women and three young men). Boccaccio, playing a fictionalized ‘‘author,’’ presents himself in the proem as a recovered lover who now offers consolation to others still afflicted. For the neediest, ladies who pine away in their chambers under the watchful eye of fathers and brothers, he will offer his ‘‘novelle, o favole o parabole o istorie’’ (stories or fables or parables or histories), both to entertain and instruct. A long introduction to Day I paints in grim strokes Florence besieged by the Black Death of 1348, all social and moral order destroyed. In the midst of this chaos, seven young women— Pampinea, Fiammetta, Filomena, Emilia, Lauretta, Neifile, and Elissa—gather after Mass in the Dominican sanctuary of Santa Maria Novella and come to a rationally determined, life-affirming choice. Led by Pampinea, the oldest at 28, they will retreat into the countryside. Decorum is preserved thanks to Panfilo, Dioneo, and Filostrato, young men whose fortuitous arrival provides an escort. The merry brigata (company) departs on Tuesday and begins its bucolic sojourn at a villa set amidst marvelous gardens. There, taking turns as king or queen for a day, they conduct their leisure in the measured pursuit of pleasure. Every afternoon, seated in a circle, each tells a story, a ritual repeated 10 times during two calendar weeks for a total of 100 tales. Boccaccio as author intervenes once, in the introduction to Day IV to defend his stories, and as part of the apologia he tells a fragmentary tale sometimes called the 101st novella of the Decameron. He returns for a third and final word of self-justification in the author’s conclusion, at the end of Day Ten. Behind his mask as author, Boccaccio builds an edifice like a Gothic cathedral, on aesthetic principles of analogy, symmetry, and hierarchy. Felicitous in variety, individual tales run from around 247

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 800 to 8,000 words; they imitate, sometimes with self-conscious parody, many genres—hagiography, exemplum, fabliau, history, joke (beffa), witty saying (facezia); and they illustrate the three rhetorical registers (comic, elegiac, tragic). With primary themes of fortune, intelligence (ingegno), and love, the stories are on open topics (Days I and IX), the power of luck (II), the power of human industry (III), love that ends badly (IV), love that ends well (V), witty retorts (VI), wives who cuckold their husbands (VII), trickery of all sorts (VIII), and deeds of magnificence (X). The frame tale (cornice), a narrative vehicle for all the other stories (novella portante), echoes the macrotext by enveloping each day in its own introduction and conclusion. These transitions lay a background carpet design from sunrise to bedtime daily and carry the frame down yet one more level, to the narrators’ comments before and after the stories. Alike in their exemplary demeanor, they are distinct personalities, defined through their stories, the topics they impose as ruler, and their evening ballads (10 poems by Boccaccio that make the Decameron a prosimetrum, or Menippean composition). Filostrato, for example, ‘‘abbattuto dall’amore’’ (struck down by love), presides over a day of tragic romance; rambunctious Dioneo, whose name derives from Dione, mother of Venus (cf. Paradiso VIII), delights in amorous escapades and defies each day’s assigned topic. Pauses and shifts articulate the succession, which aptly opens on the day of Mercury, god of speech (mercoledı`, Wednesday). Neifile at the end of Day II, a Thursday, proposes the brigata suspend storytelling Friday and Saturday for religious observances and bathing. On the first day of their second calendar week (III), they move to a second garden setting, reminiscent of the Earthly Paradise. A bawdy servants’ quarrel breaks into the early hours of Day VI, when unusually short tales leave time before sunset for the women to explore the nearby Valle delle Donne. To that secluded circular Valley of the Ladies, with hints of the chaste Venus and Celestial Paradise, the whole brigata retreats for Day VII. Day VIII, again a Sunday, begins after a second two-day devotional break, and Day X concludes with the brigata’s return to Santa Maria Novella. Thus they advance on a circular path, while the novelle extend through two weeks in a symmetrical diptych. Boccaccio’s ‘‘mercantile epic,’’ as Vittore Branca calls it, sings the rising middle class, businessmen who brandish not sword but florin, yet who look back nostalgically on an age of chivalry (Boccaccio 248

medievale, 1956). In this gallery of humanity, historical characters mingle with fictional, secular with ecclesiastical, Christian with Jewish and Moslem (Saladino and Melchisidech’s tale of three rings, I, 3). Mankind from worst to best throngs in a population of hundreds, spanning the social ladder— emperors, kings, popes, knights, aristocrats (tragic Ghismonda, IV, 1), merchants, soldiers, lawyers, judges, doctors, painters (Calendrino, Bruno, and Buffalmacco, VIII, 3; Giotto, VI, 5), poets (Guido Cavalcanti, VI, 9) nuns, abbots, priests, monks, abbesses, gardeners (Masetto in the nunnery, III, 1) sailors, pirates, thieves, usurers, horse traders (Andreuccio da Perugia, II, 5), damsels, wives, widows, prostitutes, virgins (adventures of the sultan’s daughter Alatiel, II, 7), artisans, and peasants. Although mostly set in Florence during the first decades of the trecento, the novelle reach well beyond their Tuscan epicenter. Chronologically, they bridge an era from Roman antiquity (the friendship of Tito and Gisippo, X, 8) to recent living memory; geographically, they crisscross the cardinal points, from Spain and England to China (Natan and Mitridanes, X, 3), wintry Friuli in the Italian Alps, to the desert sands of north Africa (Alibech and Rustico put the devil in Hell, III, 10). Its stylistic realism and anticlerical satire, heavily censored during the Catholic Reformation, led late Romantic critics, notably Francesco De Sanctis, to read the Decameron as a book that bursts the shackles of Dark Ages morality. Seminal midtwentieth-century studies by Giuseppe Billanovich and Vittore Branca set new directions, emphasizing Boccaccio’s literary debts (including those to his own earlier works) and his serious Christian ethic, solidly rooted in a classical and medieval heritage. Oriented intellectually to the trends of the day (Scholasticism, nominalism), the Decameron’s underpinnings lie in Boccaccio’s experience as a student of canon and civil law, patristics, and Aristotle explicated by the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas. With a protohumanistic stamp already seen in titles like Filostrato and Filocolo, he coins Decameron (10 days). Its etyma renew Hellenic culture but recall patristic commentaries on Genesis (cf. St. Ambrose’s Hexameron). Pushing his calendar through a second week, Boccaccio as creator forges an earthly time frame in contrast to scripture, where for exegetes like Augustine God’s Creation heralds a transcendental Eighth Day of eternal life. The Decameron subtitle ‘‘Prince Gallehault’’ alludes to Dante’s Inferno V, where Francesca da Rimini, punished among the lustful, tells how she and Paolo fall into a fatal kiss while

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO reading about Lancelot and Guinevere in the book she calls their ‘‘Galeotto.’’ Boccaccio’s suggestion is that like Gallehault, the knight who arranged for King Arthur’s queen to tryst with her lover, his ‘‘Prencipe Galeotto’’ is a go-between bearing its message from an author-character to amorous women. They are an emblematic audience, not a historical public. The poet’s choice, faithful to the courtly tradition of poets addressing pedestaled ladies, also depends on medieval notions of the female’s proclivity for lust. His program, announced in the proem as literature that will teach both what to eschew and what to pursue, allows him, in the manner of the Discipline of Scholars and Ovide moralise´ (early fourteenth century; Moralized Ovid), to tell bawdy tales under the protective cover of a didactic shield. Tension between these poles allows for wide interpretive possibilities. Giosue` Carducci, Italy’s first Nobel Laureate in literature, puts the Three Crowns of Florence into a nutshell: Dante directs his gaze upward, Petrarca inward, and Boccaccio outward. The Certaldan’s artistic space is the world around us, not the afterlife. He is ‘‘the Tuscan Ovid.’’ From Heroides, Tristia, Ars amatoria, and Remedia amoris, he draws conspicuously for his three appearances (Proem, IV Intro., Author’s Concl.), passages that humorously mark the Decameron both as an Ovidian art of love and remedy for love. Yet Boccaccio is also Dante’s heir—ironically rejecting him some say; still in a medieval spirit for others. He writes his ‘‘human comedy’’ not in the scholar’s Latin but vernacular, a decision underlined by the dedication to women. His anthology, with a total of 10  10 stories, echoes the perfect number 100, sum of Dante’s cantos. The diabolical notary Ser Cepperello, ‘‘il piggiore uomo forse che mai nascesse’’ (perhaps the worst man who ever lived; I, 1), launches the tales, which proceed to the most extreme imaginable example of virtue, ‘‘saint’’ Griselda (X, 10). The narrators progress from an infernal city to bucolic settings that rise from a luminal pastoral scene to places emblematic of Eden and Heaven. The gardens peak with the third, reserved for Day VII. That intersection of three and seven plays out in the pattern opened by the Author’s Defense (30 tales before, 70 after) and again in the brigata gender division, seven women and three men with seven servants among them. On one level, the brigata invites literary comparisons—Boccaccio played Filostrato in his homonymous romance; Fiammetta is the poet’s mistress beginning with the Filocolo; Elissa is another of Dido’s names; Lauretta points to

Petrarca’s Laura and Filomena to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. On another, the women can personify the canonical seven virtues, reiterating Boccaccio’s plan in Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine, a ‘‘little Decameron’’; the men may adumbrate Aristotle’s tripartite soul (the rational, concupiscible, and irascible appetites), already a triad of protagonists in Teseida. The Decameron’s 10 days culminate under Panfilo, who rules as a figure of reason paired chiastically with Pampinea-Wisdom, queen on Day I and brigata leader (in Pythagorean numerology her age is ‘‘perfect,’’ 28 being the sum of its factors). Panfilo decrees as theme for his day deeds of ‘‘magnificence,’’ a virtue of generosity that in Aristotle’s Ethics (IV, 3) crowns and adorns all the others. Ascensional dynamics couple with typically medieval poetics of centering. Approaching the center (intro. to Day IV) Boccaccio inserts his defense as author. Whether so placed as a response to actual criticism (although there is no evidence that the Decameron stained his reputation in his lifetime) or as part of a preconceived structural plan, the interruption grapples jocosely with human sexuality. It is for Boccaccio a powerful, natural, and healthy impulse. Filippo Balducci, in the 101st tale, becomes an anchorite who tries to protect his teenage son from women by naming them papere (goslings), but the 18-year-old craves one anyway. To ‘‘accommodate’’ this drive, disruptive when uncontrolled, society channels it into marriage. Marriage is Fiammetta’s theme as queen, a ‘‘flamelet’’ who alludes to the virtue of temperance, which in Aristotle’s system is a mean between extremes. Speaking for the tempering, happy medium, she fittingly rules at a midpoint and on day 5 (the Pythagorean marriage number). Day VI, also central, begins with a metanovella about how to tell a good story. Devoted to witty retorts, it emphasizes Boccaccio’s respect for Cicero’s civic ideal of wisdom coupled with eloquence (De inventione) and Aristotle’s public virtue of eutrapelia (Ethics), the ability to entertain with a well-turned phrase. The frame narrators, whose speech is exemplary, tell stories in a recreational program of medical and moral healing. Restoring the plague-stricken community in a pastoral utopia, they enact Boccaccio’s commitment to the unity of the polity, under threat in mid-Trecento Florence from disease, internal dissension, and the aggressive duchy of Milan. Anchored to historical reality, the Decameron is above all a fictional construct. Boccaccio crafted his solemn opening pages in the metered cadences (cursus) of formal medieval prose composition (ars 249

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO dictaminis), achieving heights that would earn him Ciceronian status as the model for imitation from Pietro Bembo onward. Artifice governs his description of the Black Death, meant to remind us of Dante’s Inferno and mounted to display more subtle borrowings from Cicero, Livy, and Paulus Diaconus, who recounts a similar disaster in his Historia Langobardorum (History of the Longobards, eighth century). Scholars have traced wide-reaching sources for almost all the novelle, where even in microtextual bytes, just when he claims to be telling the truth most realistically, as Pier Massimo Forni has shown, Boccaccio is most rhetorical (Adventures in Speech, 1995). Although it was long believed that he rejected the Decameron in old age, the Berlin autograph, not reidentified until the 1960s and decorated with his own lively catchword drawings, dates from the early 1370s, proving that he continued lovingly to revise it into his very last years. Until the great chivalric epics of the Renaissance, no other work of Italian fiction enjoyed such widespread European currency. Beginning with Petrarca’s Latin translation of the Griselda story (Letters of Old Age XVII, 3), Boccaccio’s novelle have left their traces on more than a thousand writers including Aretino, Balzac, Bandello, Byron, Capuana (Il Decameroncino), Chaucer, Dryden, Goethe, Goldoni, Keats, La Fontaine, Lessing, Longfellow, Luther, Machiavelli, Marguerite de Navarre, Morata, Quevedo, Pepys, Shakespeare, Swift, Tennyson, Lope de Vega, and Voltaire. Not until the Index branded it a ‘‘forbidden’’ book did the author take on his reputation as an amoral iconoclast. In twentieth-century popular imagination the Decameron continued to lend a name to whatever promises sensual delight and erotic titillation—I.A. Waters, The Cook’s Decameron (1901; classic Italian recipes tested by upper-crust Londoners on a country holiday); Leo Frobenius, The Black Decameron (1910; Das Schwarz Dekameron, African folktales); Julia Voznesenskaya, The Women’s Decameron (1985; 10 women in a Russian maternity ward tell stories against men and the political regime); Giuseppe Sabino, Il Decamerone popolare (1990; racy Calabrian folk tales). Cinema, too, has mined this archetype. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s splendid Decameron (1971) paved the way for such soft-porn spinoffs in 1972 as Mino Guerrini’s Decameron n. 2, Mario Stefani’s Decameron ‘300, Franco Martinelli’s Decameron proibitissimo, Gian Paolo Callegari’s Le caldi notti del Decameron, and Pier Giorgio Ferretti’s Decameroticus (1974). Meanwhile, on the scholarly front, this masterpiece is still bringing major revelations, 250

among them an early authorial redaction with a complete program of pen and ink drawings in Boccaccio’s own hand. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: The ‘‘Deo Gratias’’ Decameron, Naples: Francesco del Tuppo (?), ca. 1470, so named from the colophon, is considered the editio princeps. It is closely related both to the autograph (ca. 1370–1372; Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Ms. Hamilton 90) and the authoritative manuscript transcribed by Francesco d’Amaretto Manelli, 1384 (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana, Ms. 42.1) from a copy probably belonging to Boccaccio. The first edition with a certain date was published by Christopher Valdarfer in 1471 at Venice. Other early editions, more than for any other vernacular book in quattrocento Italy, appeared in Mantua, 1472; Bologna, 1476; Milan, 1476; and Vicenza, 1478. Venice alone produced 11 incunables at five different publishing houses. The first illustrated imprint (Venice: Giovanni and Gregorio de’ Gregorii, 1492) has 104 original woodcuts. Noteworthy among numerous sixteenth-century editions are the first quarto (Venice: Gregorio de’ Gregorii, 1516), the Decameron with Lucilio Minerbi’s appended Vocabolario (Venice: Bernardino di Vidali, 1525) apparatus that was to become customary and a forerunner of the modern Italian dictionary; the ‘‘ventisettana’’ (Florence: Giunti, 1527), admired for textual accuracy; Lodovico Dolce’s Decameron, which went through eight editions and contained his catalogue of the ‘‘words, sayings, proverbs, unfamiliar or difficult figures of speech in the book’’ (Venice: Francesco Bindoni and Mapheo Pasini, 1541, etc.); imprints edited by Francesco Sansovino with textual variants and the author’s life (Venice: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1546, etc.); those by Girolamo Ruscelli (Venice: Vicenzo Valgrisio, 1552, etc.); Francesco Giuntini’s edition, which indicates passages from the Decameron quoted by Bembo in his Prose della volgar lingua (Lyon: Guglielmo Rovillio, 1555); the Decameron corrected by the Accademia Fiorentina (Venice: Paolo Gherardo, 1557); and the three infamously expurgated texts edited by the ‘‘Deputati,’’ a committee of churchmen headed by Vincenzo Borghini (Florence: Giunti, 1573); Lionardo Salviati (Florence: Giunti, 1582); and Luigi Groto (Venice: Fabio and Agostino Zoppini Fratelli, et Onofrio Fari Compagni, 1588). Critical Editions: The critical tradition, with an ancestor in the 1527 Giunti Decameron, returns after a long period of censorship in an edition sponsored by the Accademia della Crusca (Lucca: Jacopo Giusti, 1761). See further Decameron, edited by Ignazio Moutier, in Opere volgari del Boccaccio, vols. 1–5, Florence: Magheri, 1827–1828; Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari: Laterza, 1927; Giuseppe Petronio, Turin: Einaudi, 1950; Enrico Bianchi, Milan: Ricciardi, 1952; Charles S. Singleton, Bari: Laterza, 1955; Natalino Sapegno, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1956; Mario Marti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1958; Mario Pazzaglia, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1965; Antonio Enzo

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Quaglio, Milan: Garzanti, 1974; Aldo Rossi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977; Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Fratelli Fabbri, 1977; Cesare Segre, Milan: Mursia, 1978; Mario Marti, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 2001 (with the 1492 woodcuts). Vittore Branca’s editions include: Florence: Le Monnier, 1950–1951; 1965 (with woodcuts from the 1492 Gregori edition); Naples: Marotta, 1966 (3 vols. handsomely illustrated in color from the manuscripts); Decameron: Edizione critica secondo l’autografo hamiltoniano, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1976; Turin: Einaudi, 1980; Milan: Mondadori, 1976; 1992; Florence: Le Lettere, 1999 (with Boccaccio’s illustrations). Selections: Decameron: Venticinque novelle scelte e ventisette postille critiche, edited by Luigi Russo, Florence: Sansoni, 1944; Decamerone da un italiano all’altro: Cinquanta novelle, translated into modern Italian by Aldo Busi, 2 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1990–1991. Facsimiles: Decameron. Facsimile dell’autografo conservato nel codice Hamilton 90 della Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz di Berlino, edited by Vittore Branca, Florence: Alinari, 1976; Decamerone, o ver Cento novelle, Stuttgart: Cornetto Verlag, 1999 (Reproduces Stadbibliothek, Ulm copy of Venice: Maestro Manfrino da Monferrato da Sustrevo de Bonelli, 1498). Diplomatic Edition: Decameron: Edizione diplomaticointerpretativa dell’autografo Hamilton 90, edited by Charles S. Singleton, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Translations: as The Palace of Pleasure, Beautified Adorned and Well Furnished with Pleasant Histories and Excellent Novells (selections), translated by William Painter, London: W. Denham for R. Tottell and W. Jones, 1566; as The Decameron, Containing an Hundred Pleasant Nouels, Wittily Discoursed Between Seauen Honourable Ladies, and Three Noble Gentlemen, London: Isaac Jaggard, 1620; as The Decameron of Giovanni Boccacci (Il Boccaccio), now first completely done into English prose and verse by John Payne, London: Printed for the Villon Society by private subscription and for private circulation only, 1886; frequently reprinted, e.g., New York: The Modern Library, 1931; as The Decameron, translated by J.M. Rigg, 2 vols., London: H.F. Bumpus, 1906; London: privately printed for the Navarre Society, 1921, rpt. as late as 1957; translated by Richard Aldington, 2 vols., New York: Covici Friede, 1930; Chicago: Puritan Publishing Co., 1930, several times reprinted; available on audio cassettes and cd; translated by Frances Winwar, New York: Limited Editions Club, 1933; as The Decameron; the Modell of Wit, Mirth, Eloquence and Conversation Framed in Ten Dayes, of an Hundred Curious Pieces, by Seven Honourable Ladies, and Three Noble Gentlemen; Preserved to Posterity by the Renowned John Boccaccio, the First Refiner of Italian Prose, translated into English, 1620, with an introduction by Edward Hutton and woodcuts in the Renaissance manner by Fritz Kredel, New York: The Heritage Press, 1940; as The Decameron, translated by G. H. McWilliam, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972; rpt. 1995; as The Decameron: A New Translation. 21 Novelle, Contemporary Reactions, Modern Criticism, translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, New York: Norton, 1977; as Decameron, the John

Payne translation, rev. and annotated by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982; as The Decameron, translated by Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella, New York: Norton, 1982; as Decameron: A Selection, edited by Kathleen Speight, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983; as Decameron, translated by Guido Waldman, edited with introduction and notes, Jonathan Usher, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993; 1998; as The Decameron: Selected Tales. Decameron: Novelle scelte. A dual-language book, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000. See further F.S. Stych, Boccaccio in English: A Bibliography of Editions, Adaptations, and Criticism, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995, who lists 189 English complete or partial translations of the Decameron.

Further Reading Barolini, Teodolinda, ‘‘The Wheel of the Decameron,’’ in Romance Philology, 36 (1983): 521–539. Bausi, Francesco, ‘‘Gli spiriti magni. Filigrane aristoteliche e tomistiche nella decima giornata del Decameron,’’ in Studi sul Boccaccio, 27 (1999): 205–253. Billanovich, Giuseppe, Restauri boccacceschi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1945. Bragantini, Renzo, and Pier Massimo Forni (editors), Lessico critico decameroniano. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri Editore, 1995. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Branca, Vittore, ‘‘Il narrar boccacciano per immagini dal tardo gotico al primo Rinascimento,’’ in Boccaccio visualizzato, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Carducci, Giosue`, Ai parentali di Giovanni Boccaccio in Certaldo, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1876. Decameron Web. A Growing Hypermedia Archive of Materials Dedicated to Boccaccio’s Masterpiece, http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/ dweb/dweb.shtml. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Paolo Arcari, 2 vols., Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1925. Forni, Pier Massimo, Adventures in Speech. Rhetoric and Narration in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Greene, Thomas M., ‘‘Forms of Accommodation in the Decameron,’’ in Italica, 45 (1968): 297–313. Hollander, Robert, Boccaccio’s Dante and the Shaping Force of Satire, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Kern, Edith, ‘‘The Gardens in the Decameron cornice,’’ in PMLA, 66 (1951): 505–523. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘John Badmouth: Fortunes of the Poet’s Image,’’ in Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and his Renaissance Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Victoria Kirkham, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–1992): 355–376. Kirkham, Victoria, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Marcus, Millicent, An Allegory of Form. Literary SelfConsciousness in the Decameron, Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1979.

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GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. McGregor, James, Approaches to Teaching Boccaccio’s Decameron, New York: Modern Language Association, 2000. Olson, Glending, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Symmetry and Balance in the Decameron,’’ in Mediaevalia, 2 (1976): 159–187. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Ovid and Boccaccio: A Note on Self-Defense,’’ in Mediaevalia, 13 (1987): 247–255. Stewart, Pamela, ‘‘La novella di madonna Oretta e le due parti del Decameron,’’ in Retorica e mimica nel ‘‘Decameron’’ e nella commedia del cinquecento, Florence: Olschki, 1986. Wallace, David, Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Weaver, Elissa (editor), The Decameron First Day in Perspective, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

FILOCOLO, CA. 1334–1336 Prose Romance by Giovanni Boccaccio

Boccaccio’s Filocolo inaugurates on a grand scale the Italian tradition of prose fiction. Three times in the book the young author trumpets his awareness of its importance. For King Robert’s natural daughter Maria (also known as Fiammetta, or ‘‘Flamelet’’), he recasts the love story of Florio and Biancifiore on a high literary register (I, 1). At precisely the center (IV, 1), he embeds in a riddle his signature as a man with a name ‘‘full of grace’’ who comes from an ‘‘oak grove’’ (cerreto)—Giovanni of Certaldo. His farewell in the final chapter (V, 97) imitates Dante in Limbo (‘‘sixth among so much wisdom’’; Inferno IV, 102) and Statius before (Thebaid XII, 810–819), by creating a new canon that he joins behind Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Ovid, and Dante. Filocolo opens with the author’s description of how, on Holy Saturday in the Franciscan church of San Lorenzo at Naples, he was lovestruck by the sight of Maria, who later asks him to save from ‘‘fabulous parlance of the ignorant’’ an exemplary 252

tale of amorous fidelity. Florio, prince of Spain, and the orphan Biancifiore, born on Pentecost, grow up in his parents’ household and fall in love over ‘‘Ovid’s holy book.’’ The disapproving rulers sell Biancifiore into a harem, but Florio, traveling under the pseudonym Filocolo, ‘‘fatiche d’amore’’ (love’s labors, III, 75), rescues and marries her, once before a statue of Cupid and again, after her Christian origins have been revealed and Filocolo converts, at San Giovanni in Laterano. The newlyweds complete a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela begun by Biancifiore’s parents, Florio ascends the throne, and his kingdom embraces Christianity. From Old French, Spanish, and Italian versions of a source tale that circulated across Europe, Boccaccio derives his plot, which he complicates with new characters in a late antique setting, dresses with an apparatus of pagan gods, elevates with borrowings from Ovid and Dante, and amplifies with imaginative digressions: Fileno, whose tears melt him into a fountain (III, 26–37; V, 34–37); Idalogos, the author’s Venerean double entrapped in a pine tree (V, 8); the ‘‘Questioni d’amore,’’ a love debate presided over by Fiammetta, whose playful court anticipates the Decameron frame tale and two of its novelle (X, 3 and 4). Here Maria/ Fiammetta makes her first appearance in Boccaccio’s oeuvre, a lady not historical but fictional, invented to serve the Filocolo’s fiery Paschal and Pentecostal symbolism. With a five-book structure that points to the Pythagorean marriage number (5) and to Pentecost, the Filocolo is a gold mine of Boccaccio’s Gothic culture. Reflecting Angevin loyalties, it reconciles the poet’s study of canon law with his ambition for fame in an epic-romance of love and church triumphant. Less read today than it should be, the book saw numerous Renaissance editions and left traces in authors from Chaucer, Boiardo, Bembo, and Ariosto to Milton and Keats. The love debate, which circulated independently in Italy from the quattrocento, has enjoyed happy fortunes in English, with reprints of the Elizabethan translation that continue into the twentieth century. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: Il Philocolo, Florence, Magister Ioannes Petri de Magontia, 1472; Philocolo, Venice, Gabriele di Pietro, 1472; Philocolo, Milan: Domenico da Vespola, 1476; Philocolo, Milan: Phil. de Lavagnia, 1478; Philocolo, Naples: Sixto Riesenger Tedesco, 1478 (with important woodcuts); Philocolo, Venice: Philipo de Piero, 1481; Philocolo, Venice: Pelegrino Pasquale da Bologna, 1487; 1488; 1490; Philocolo, Venice: Antonio

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO da Gusago Bresano, 1492; 1497; 1514; Venezia: Pincio, 1503; Milan, 1514; Milan, 1520; Venice, 1520; Milan, 1524; Il Philopono, edited by Gaetano Tizzone da Pofi, Venice: Jacopo da Lecco, 1527; Il Philocolo, edited by Marco Guazzo, Venice: Francesco di Alessandro Bindoni and Mapheo Pasyni, 1530; Il Philocopo, edited by Marco Guazzo and Niccolo` Zoppino, Venice: Niccolo di Aristotile detto il Zoppino, 1530; Il Philocopo, Venice, 1538; Il Filocopo, Venice: Giovita Ragirio, 1551; Venice, 1553, Il Filocopo, edited by Francesco Sansovino, Venice: Francesco Lorenzini, 1564; Venezia: Lorenzini, 1566; Venice, Giovan Antonio Bertano, 1575; 1578; Venice, 1585; Filocolo, Florence: Giunti, Edizione della Crusca, 1594; Il Filocopo, edited by Francesco Sansovino, Venice: Lucio Spineda, 1612. Critical Editions: Il Filocopo, in Opere volgari di Giovanni Boccaccio, edited by Ignazio Moutier, Florence: Magheri, vols. 7–8, 1829; Il Filocolo, edited by Ettore De Ferri, 2 vols., Turin: UTET, 1921–1922; 1927; Il Filocolo, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, Bari: Laterza, 1938; Filocolo, edited by Antonio Enzo Quaglio, in Tutte le opere, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1967; rpt. 1998; Filocolo, edited by Mario Marti, in Opere minori in volgare, vol. 1, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Selections: Filocolo: Scelta, edited by Carlo Salinari and Natalino Sapegno, in Decameron, Filocolo, Ameto, Fiammetta, Milan: Ricciardi, 1952; rpt. Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Facsimile: La storia di Florio e Biancifiore: FarbmikroficheEdition der Handschrift Kassel, Gesamthochschul-Bibliothek—Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel 2o Ms. poet. et roman. 3, Munich: H. Lengenfelder, 1999. Theatrical Adaptation: Beatrice del Sera, Amor di virtu`: Commedia in cinque atti 1548, edited by Elissa Weaver, Ravenna: Longo, 1990. Translations: as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Il Filocolo, or The Labours of love, translated, annotated and with an introduction by Rocco Carmelo Blasi, doctoral dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago, 1974; as Il Filocolo, translated by Donald Cheney with the collaboration of Thomas G. Bergin, New York: Garland Publishing, 1985; as Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (selections), edited and translated by N. R. Havely, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980. The Love Debate: A Pleasaunt Disport of Divers Nobel Personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace, Florentine and poet laureat, in his boke which is entituled Philocopo, and nowe Englished by H.G., London: at the signe of the Marmayd, by H. Bynneman, for Richard Smyth and Nicolas England, [1566] 1567; rpt. as Thirteene Most Plesant and Delectable Questions, Entituled a Disport of Diuers Noble Personages, written in Italian by M. Iohn Bocace Florentine and poet Laureat, in his book named Philocopo, London: Henry Bynneman for Richarde Smyth, 1571; London: Thomas Woodcocke, 1587; London: Peter Davies, 1927, introduction by Edward Hutton; as Pleasant Questions of Love, illustrated by Alexander King, New York: Falstaff Press, 1930; as The Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love, illustrated by Alexander King, introduction by Thomas Bell, New York: Illustrated Editions Company, 1931 (printed in several versions, including New

York: Three Sirens Press, 1931; Cleveland, NY: World Publishing Co., 1931); rpt. New York: World Publishing Co., 1942; Garden City, NY: Halcyon House, 1950; Filocopo (reprints 1567 edition), Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum and New York: Da Capo Press, 1970; as The Filocolo of Giovanni Boccaccio with an English Translation of the Thirteen ‘‘Questioni d’amore,’’ doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1971; Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1978; Thirteen Most Pleasant and Delectable Questions of Love, Entitled a Disport of Divers Noble Personages, refashioned and illustrated by Harry Carter, New York: C.N. Potter (Crown), 1974.

Further Reading Grieve, Patricia, Floire and Blanchefleur and the European Romance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Grossvogel, Stephen, Ambiguity and Allusion in Boccaccio’s Filocolo, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘Reckoning with Boccaccio’s Questioni d’amore,’’ in MLN, 89, no. 4 (1974): 47–59. Kirkham, Victoria, Fabulous Vernacular: Boccaccio’s Filocolo and the Art of Medieval Fiction, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Morosini, Roberta, Per difetto rintegrare: Una lettura del Filocolo di Giovanni Boccaccio, Ravenna: Longo, 2004. Perella, Nicolas J., ‘‘The World of Boccaccio’s Filocolo,’’ in PMLA, 76 (1961): 330–339. Quaglio, Antonio Enzo, Scienza e mito nel Boccaccio, Padua: Liviana, 1967. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Boccaccio’s Filocolo: Romance, epic, and religious allegory,’’ in Forum Italicum, 12 (1978): 26–43. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘‘Boccaccio’s First Octave,’’ in Italica, 33 (1956): 19.

FILOSTRATO, CA. 1334–1335 Verse Romance by Giovanni Boccaccio

Filostrato, a treasure that traveled into English through Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, and Dryden’s Palamon and Arcite, marks Boccaccio’s debut in the genre of romance. Set to rhyming octaves in 253

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO the style of the cantari (minstrel songs sung by oral poets), it filters through humorous irony a tale of ill-fated love at the siege of Troy. Troiolo, a son of Priam smitten by Cupid’s arrow, confides in Pandaro, who acts as go-between and topples the chaste widow Criseida’s resistance. Daughter of the seer Calca`s, whose prophetic vision makes him defect to the Greeks, she rejoins her father in the enemy camp and finds amorous consolation with Diomede. Troiolo dwindles in misery over her betrayal, eventually meeting death in battle at the hand of Achilles. Boccaccio frames his ancient story with a present-day parallel: Playing the unhappy poet-lover Filostrato, he hopes his book will bring back Filomena, who has abandoned Naples for the baths at Sannio. Multiple sources flow into Filostrato, FrancoItalian in flavor. Long predating Boccaccio’s acquaintance with Homer, it draws for characters and setting on medieval accounts of the Trojan War, from the apocryphal Dares and Dictys to the Old French Roman de Troie by Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure and Guido delle Colonne’s Historia destructionis Troiae (History of the Destruction of Troy, 1287). Boccaccio’s ‘‘author,’’ no stranger to Virgil and Ovid, has also mastered Andreas Capellanus’ De arte onesti amandi (The Art of Courtly Love, ca. 1185), and he has explored his immediate vernacular heritage—the dolce stil novo (sweet new style), including poetry by Cino da Pistoia; Dante’s Vita nuova, Rime petrose, and Comedia. Yet for all its debts and early date (deduced from the author’s dedicatory letter to Filomena, a penlady preceding Fiammetta), Filostrato is delightfully fresh. The Hellenizing title (‘‘struck down by love’’), while true to the medieval axiom that ‘‘Names are the consequence of things,’’ heralds Boccaccio the Humanist. He raids a courtly repertoire—love is illicit, difficult, secret, all-consuming, and irresistible; widows make best mistresses; lovers have rivals; they grow pale, sick, insomniac; write letters, give tokens as gifts—but he puts it in witty, ironic perspective. He creates a memorable new character, the go-between Pandaro (whose name via Chaucer’s homonymous character gives the English verb and noun ‘‘pander’’). He articulates the book in nine ‘‘parts,’’ allusive to Dante’s infernal number; enhances it scholastically with a proemial epistle, subdivisions, rubrics, and congedo (farewell). Obedient to dictates of prose composition (ars dictaminis), the proem frames the whole with the parallel voice of an ‘‘author-lover’’ no wiser than the protagonist. Troiolo, a ‘‘little Troy’’ who crumbles under besieging love, speaks like 254

Francesca da Rimini (II, 7), compares himself to Myrrha, Biblis and Phaedra (II, 20), and rages like Dante’s Minotaur (IV, 27). With a psyche dominated by lust and wrath, he makes a perfect match for Criseida, who tosses off her honor like an extra sweater and incarnates the cliche´ of female fickleness. Boccaccio recounts their ‘‘mal concetto amore’’ (ill-conceived love, VIII, 28) in marvelous counterpoint to the Vita Nuova, crafting ‘‘light’’ vernacular rhyme in a ‘‘pietoso stile’’ (Proem 29), later renewed as a vehicle for Madonna Fiammetta’s Elegia and Filostrato in the Decameron. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: Philostrato, Venice: Luca Veneto, ca. 1480– 1483; El Fylostrato, Bologna: 1498; Fylostrato, Milan: Ulderich Scinzenzeler, 1499; Filostrato, Venice: Sessa, 1501; Filostrato, Venice: Penzio da Lecco, 1528. Critical Editions: Filostrato, in Opere volgari, edited by Ignazio Moutier, vol. 13, Florence: Marghera, 1831; edited by Savj Lopez, Strassburg: Heitz, [1911]; in Opere, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1937; Filostrato, edited by Vittore Branca, in Tutte le opere, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1964; rpt. 1990; Filostrato, edited by Mario Marti, in Opere minori in volgare, vol. 2, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969; Filostrato, edited by Luigi Surdich with Elena d’Anzieri and Federica Ferri, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Translations: as Il Filostrato: The Story of the Love of Troiolo as It Was Sung in Italian by Giovanni Boccaccio and Is Now Translated into English Verse by Hubertis Cummings, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1924; rpt. as Prose and Poetry of the Italian Renaissance in Translation, edited by Blanchard Harold Hooper, New York: Longmans, 1949; 1955; as The Filostrato of Giovanni Boccaccio, translated with parallel text by Nathaniel Edward Griffin and Arthur Beckwith Myrick, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1929; New York: Biblo and Tanner, 1929; London: Milford, 1930; rpt. New York: Biblo and Tanner, 1967; New York: Farrar, Strauss (Octagon Books), 1970; 1973; 1978; as The Story of Troilus, as Told by Benoıˆt de Sainte-Maure, Giovanni Boccaccio (Translated into English Prose) Geoffrey Chaucer, Robert Henryson, translations and introduction by R. K. Gordon, London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1934; rpt. New York: Dutton, 1964; Medieval Academy Reprints for Teaching, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978; as Il Filostrato, Italian text edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, translated with an introduction by Robert P. Roberts and Anna Bruni Seldis, New York: Garland, 1986; as Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (selections), edited and translated by N. R. Havely, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980.

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, Il cantare trecentesco e il Boccaccio del Filostrato e del Teseida, Florence: Sansoni, 1936.

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO Gozzi, Maria, ‘‘Sulle fonti del Filostrato: Le narrazioni di argomento troiano,’’ in Studi sul Boccaccio, 5 (1968): 123–209. McGregor, James H., The Shades of Aeneas. The Imitation of Vergil and the History of Paganism in Boccaccio’s Filostrato, Filocolo, and Teseida, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Picone, Michelangelo, ‘‘Boccaccio e la codificazione dell’ottava,’’ in Boccaccio: Secoli di vita. Atti del Congresso Internazionale: Boccaccio 1975. Universita` di California, Los Angeles 17–19 Ottobre, 1975, edited by Marga Cottino-Jones and Edward F. Tuttle, Ravenna: Longo, 1977. Stillinger, Thomas, The Song of Troilus: Lyric Authority in the Medieval Book, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Wallace, David, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio. Woodbridge, Suffolk: D.S. Brewer, 1985.

LATIN WORKS During the first century after his death, Boccaccio’s renown rested on his Latin writings. The major works coalesced into a canon, shaped by his admirers and biographers. When Coluccio Salutati, chancellor of Florence from 1375, composed a tribute to follow Boccaccio’s own modest autoepitaph in the Certaldan’s burial church, he took his cue from Virgil’s tomb verses and cast it as a catalog of the poet’s classics: Why, O glorious Bard, do you speak of yourself so humbly? You with your limpid notes have exalted pastoral verses; You with your arduous labors have numbered the hills and the mountains; You have described the forests and springs and the swamps and marshes; Aye, you have counted the names of the seas and the lakes and the rivers. You bring before us great princes, relating their trials and downfalls, From our first father Adam down to the magnates of our times. You, in most lofty measures, celebrate notable matrons; You have traced all the immortals to their dark and unknown beginnings, Filling fifteen golden volumes, second to none of the ancients. Labors past counting have made you famous among all the people

Nor will an age ever come that will pass over you in silence. (trans. from the Latin by Thomas G. Bergin, Boccaccio, 1981)

Salutati puts Boccaccio’s pastoral song, Buccolicum Carmen (ca. 1341–1342), at the top of his list. Thereafter he inventories the geographical gazetteer De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris (On Mountains, Forests, Springs, Lakes, Rivers, Ponds or Swamps, and Diverse Names of the Sea, ca. 1350–1365), two biographical compilations De casibus virorum illustrium (Falls of Illustrious Men, ca. 1355–1360, revised 1373–1374), De mulieribus claris (Famous Women, 1360–1375), and last, the ‘‘epic’’ Genealogie deorum gentilium libri quindecim (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods in Fifteen Books, ca. 1360). Filippo Villani, earliest to give Boccaccio a vita in his lives of famous Florentines (ca. 1380– 1390), similarly eulogizes Boccaccio the Latinist. He itemizes the same titles as Salutati and, tellingly, dismisses in a coda Boccaccio’s Italian fiction as just so many unnamed ‘‘worklets’’ (opuscula). Around midquattrocento, Giannozzo Manetti can speak well of Boccaccio’s vernacular prose and poetry, but he too clearly more admires the Latinist, rating the Genealogies a crowning achievement. By 1486, however, matters have changed. Angelo Poliziano’s Nutricia (Homage to My Wet Nurse, Lady Poetry), a universal inventory of famous writers, remembers Boccaccio as ‘‘the man who recounts one hundred short stories in ten days.’’ This shift, which signals revived interest in Italy’s mother language among Lorenzo de’ Medici’s circle, heralds the trend that will triumph. Boccaccio himself moved freely back and forth between Latin and Italian throughout his career. Three working notebooks, the Zibaldone laurenziano and Miscellanea laurenziana (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Plut. 29.8; Ms. Plut. 33.31), and the Zibaldone magliabechiano (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Ms. Magl. II, II, 327, now Banco rari 50), preserve some of his earliest experiments in Latin. Side by side in the Zibaldone laurenziano appear his first Latin poem, the so-called Elegia di Costanza (Costanza’s Elegy, 1330s), and his Allegoria mitologica (Mythological Allegory, 1330s). In the former (135 vv), inspired by the ancient epitaph of Homonoea and Atimetus, a Neapolitan beauty called Costanza speaks from the tomb where her body decays to console her grieving lover. The Allegoria mitologica, 2,000 words of obscure prose, opens with a gallop 255

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO through world history, from its golden to iron ages. Following that decline calqued on Ovid’s Metamorphoses I, renewal comes with the Christian era. Into this scenario drops a mysterious figure represented as Phaethon (following Metamorphoses II), who visits disaster on trecento Naples. Perhaps the baffling allegory alludes to conflict between old and new church doctrines. Its syncretism captures perfectly the author’s shared loyalties as a canon law student drawn to poetry. In the same Zibaldone, Boccaccio transcribed four early epistolary experiments. Bombastic salutations announce their tenor: ‘‘Crepor celsitudinis Epyri principatus’’ (Fame of the height of the principality of Epirus), ‘‘Mavortis miles extrenue’’ (Worthy soldier of Mars), ‘‘Nereus amphytritibus lymphys’’ (Nereus with Amphitritean waters), and ‘‘Sacre famis et angelice viro dilecto forti’’ (‘‘To the beloved man of holy and angelic fame’’—perhaps Petrarca). Boccaccio probably never intended to send any of these letters, which are rhetorical practice pieces in the medieval art of prose composition (dictamen), crafted in rhythmic clauses (cursus) after the best models (Dante’s Epistole to Cino da Pistoia and Moroello Malaspina) to display virtuosity on a set theme (friendship). Dating from 1339, they declare the author’s cult for Virgil, near whose tomb at Naples he pretends to be writing. Once back in a bleak Florence, seeking escape to the wonders of a wider world, he drafted De Canaria (On the Canary Islands, ca. 1342). This fascinating account, entrusted to the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, renders into Latin a lost Tuscan letter sent to their native city from Florentine merchants in Seville. An Italian-led expedition of 1341 circumnavigated many of the Canary Islands, where instead of hoped for treasure, they discovered lush vegetation, blond natives, flourishing gardens, and wellbuilt houses. The sailors broke into these dwellings, stocked with figs and luxuriant grain. Discovering a temple, they removed the statue of its god and took it back with them to Lisbon, along with four young men, who had swum out to meet the boats. Precious for ethnographic details, De Canaria has its historical context in the competition among European powers for commercial control over new lands in a burgeoning age of colonialism. Other travels carry Boccaccio into ideal fantasy realms. In 1347, when at Forlı`, he exchanges epistolary eclogues with Checco di Meletto Rossi, secretary to the lord of the city Francesco Ordelaffi, in a four-part correspondence like that between Dante and Giovanni del Virgilio (1319–1320). 256

Later, after seeing Petrarca’s Buccolicum carmen (1359), he forms the idea for a book of eclogues, poems allegorical in intent like their ideal classical antecedents by Virgil. Dedicated to Donato Albenzani and completed ca. 1366, but not released to his friends until 1370, Boccaccio’s Buccolicum carmen (Pastoral song—in the singular because it is a unified collection) gathers 15 eclogues plus a 16th, their ‘‘Messenger.’’ All except the second, a monologue, are dialogues whose speakers dwell variously on love, friendship, politics, religion, and the literary vocation, in registers that run from satiric comedy to serious theological teaching. In ‘‘Faunus’’ (III) Palemon (Boccaccio) and Pamphylus (Checco) praise the laureate Mopsus (Petrarca) and express concern for the present situation of Parthenope (Naples), under threat from Polyphemus (King Ludwig of Hungary) and his ally Faunus (Ordelaffi); in ‘‘Iurgium’’ (The Quarrel, VII), Daphnis (Emperor Charles IV) and Florida (Florence) lock horns; ‘‘Midas’’ (VIII) refers in its title to Nicola Acciaiuoli, a former friend now resentfully attacked; ‘‘Vallis opaca’’ (The Dark Valley, X) imagines a tyrant and prisoner in hell; ‘‘Pantheon,’’ in contrast (XI), convokes Mirtilis (the church of God), Glaucus (the apostle Peter), and Amintas (St. Paul) to recount Christian salvation history; ‘‘Sapphos’’ (XII) and ‘‘Laurea’’ (The Laurel Wreath, XIII) address the quest for poetic fame; ‘‘Olympia’’ (Heavenly realm, XIV), mourns Boccaccio’s little daughter Violante, who has gone to Paradise. For this ‘‘poetry of wisdom,’’ which follows a loosely structured rising narrative line from the lusts of this world to love of the next (Eclogues, xxviii), Boccaccio himself provides a partial key in a letter of ca. 1372–1373 to an Augustinian eremite monk at Santo Spirito, Fra Martino da Signa (Epist. XXIII). Boccaccio’s friendship with Petrarca, beginning at midcentury, inaugurates a second more humanistic period in his Latin poetry. Marked by direct access to previously undiscovered classical sources, it culminates with the Certaldan’s exposure to Homer in the original language, which he studied with Leontius Pilatus, proudly taking credit for restoring Greek to Tuscany (Genealogie XV, 6–7). Even before meeting Petrarca, Boccaccio avidly follows his career. The epistle ‘‘Sacre famis’’ of 1339 extols a man at Avignon, ‘‘educated in the bosom of the Muses’’ and ‘‘nursed on the milk of philosophy.’’ Two years later he copies into his Zibaldone Magliabechiano Petrarca’s Privilegium (Certification for Laureation, 1341). Petrarca’s Coronation Oration, delivered at Rome on Easter

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO of 1341, buttresses Boccaccio’s laudatory De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo (On the Life and Habits of Lord Francis Petrarch of Florence According to John Boccaccio of Certaldo, ca. 1348–1350). This vita proliferated from an apograph (an exemplar transcribed from the autograph, in the Zibaldone Laurenziano) through copies made at the Florentine prison of Le Stinche, where inmates worked as amanuenses for money. Together with Petrarca’s Posteritati (Letter to Posterity) it became the basis of all subsequent Renaissance lives of the Aretine man of letters. Shortly after his first stay with Petrarca at Padua in the spring of 1351, when the two visited Livy’s tomb, Boccaccio seems to have composed another biographical piece, his Pauca de T. Livio a Iohanne Boccaccio collecta (A Few Things on Titus Livius Collected by John Boccaccio). Little more than a page and reminiscent of the medieval accessus ad auctorem (introduction to the author), it incorporates from his Zibaldoni two earlier notes on the Roman historian dating from the Neapolitan period when he translated into Italian Livy’s third and fourth Decades. Ten years later, during a sojourn in Peter Damian’s city of Ravenna, Boccaccio received a message from Petrarca, then at Milan, with a request for information about the saint. To comply, the Certaldan located an eleventh-century life of Damian by one of his disciples, Giovanni da Lodi, and rewrote it as Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis (Life of the Most Sainted Father Peter Damian Hermit and Then Bishop of Ostia and Cardinal of the Roman Church, 1361–1362). A second visit with Petrarca, at Milan in March of 1359, spurred Boccaccio to complete his De casibus virorum illustrium, a monumental gallery of humanity from Creation to his own day dedicated in its second redaction to Mainardo Cavalcanti (1373). Wide in its range of ancient sources, the compilation retains much that is medieval. Divided into nine books, a number of shortfall vis-a`-vis the perfect 10, this dream vision lays out the universal trajectory of human events as an endless struggle between good and evil, pride and punishment, fortune and providence. As in the Divina Commedia, shades crowd before the author to tell their mournful fates. Adam and Eve lead the procession, which continues through the ages with notables like Nimrod, Saul, Dido, Tarquinius Superbus, Hannibal, Cicero, Arthur King of the Britons, and last, the Sicilian washerwoman who rose to control the

throne of Naples. Between these accounts the author pauses to moralize, bemoaning man’s mortal condition or railing against such evils as pride, riches, and women. Boccaccio, whose energies seem to have flagged after completing seven books, imagines that his ‘‘excellent and venerable master’’ Petrarca appears to rouse him (VIII, 1). Man, argues a laureated Franciscus in Boccaccio’s eloquently scripted speech, was born to strive for fame, a divine gift that brings life after death. If even Jerome and Augustine sought temporal as well as eternal glory, should we not do the same, that we may inspire posterity? An ideal diptych with De casibus, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris is the first collection of female biographies in Western literature. Drafted around 1361, after Boccaccio’s encounter with Leontius, it passes through eight more compositional phases. An autograph (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana XC, sup. 98) reflects the final version of 1375, dedicated to the noblewoman Andrea Acciaiuoli, manly in spirit like her name, ‘‘since in Greek andres means precisely men.’’ From Eve to Queen Giovanna of Naples, 106 females parade before us in 104 chapters (two are double), each displayed in a cameo that establishes her geographical origins and genealogy, then the story of her life and death, and finally, why she is memorable and what rituals or monuments are linked to her name. Boccaccio the protohumanist details temples, idols, and cult centers; he weighs critically his classical sources. His talent for portraying female beauty warms these lives of women, both good (Lucretia) and evil (Cleopatra), ordered by hierarchy (immortals before mortals) and history, from the beginning through the translatio imperii (translation of empire) from Thebes to Troy to Rome. The lives are unframed, but they cohere through the author’s formulaic narrative pattern and his preacher-like Christian slant, which dismisses pagan beliefs as silly fictions. The same perspective rules Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium, an encyclopedia of pagan myths in 15 books written for King Hugo IV of Cyprus. King Robert of Anjou’s erudite librarian Paolo di Perugia must have early suggested this project, for which Boccaccio began making notes around 1350. By 1360–1365 he had a draft, further elaborated in successive phases up to ca. 1373, date of the autograph (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, LII, 9). A proem questions his capacity as mere ‘‘homunculus’’ to accomplish a daunting task better suited to Atlas or Hercules—or Petrarca. So much of the pagan heritage has been 257

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO lost to fire, floods, and zealots that his task will be like gathering from a vast beach the scattered fragments of a great shipwreck. More than 700 gods and their progeny animate the Genealogie in its first 13 books, each headed by a genealogical tree. (Boccaccio himself drew and colored them in the autograph.) The last two books are a defense of poetry, defined as ‘‘a sort of fervid and exquisite invention’’ that ‘‘veils truth in a fair and fitting garment of fiction’’ (XIV, 7). Boccaccio applies his theory to the myths, deconstructing them with euhemerism (the idea that the gods were once mortals elevated through legend to divine status) or naturalistic explanations to uncover their allegorical meaning. The Genealogie reflects Boccaccio’s newly won knowledge of the Homeric poems, from which he quotes passages in the original language, the first time Greek appears in a humanistic text. This imposing accomplishment became a standard text of reference for scholars, poets, and artists throughout the Renaissance. Several early editions of the Genealogie print it together with De montibus, a geographical gazetteer. Uniquely modern among Boccaccio’s works and ostensibly written as a relaxing pastime (so he claims in a prefatory page), this compendium simply presents its information raw, without any moralistic commentary. Mountains come first, as he explains, because upon them forests grow and from them flow the rivers that feed lakes, swamps, and the sea. Within each category, the order is alphabetical. The mountains go from ‘‘Aalac’’ to ‘‘Ziph,’’ both in Syria; forests include the Ardennes; fountains, Aganippe of the Muses, Arethusa in Sicily, and Sorgue, which gave a retreat from Babylon (Avignon) to the celebrated poet Francesco Petrarca, ‘‘my compatriot and preceptor’’; lakes, Galilee; rivers, Arno (which takes precedence since it is the one he has ‘‘known above all others from infancy’’); swamps, Styx, both one in Upper Egypt and the other in the underworld, famous in the songs of the poets. Boccaccio’s miscellaneous Latin verse goes under the title Carmina (Poems): I. Elegia di Costanza; II. A pastoral poem to Checco di Miletto (1347–1348); III. Faunus, part of same exchange, revised as third eclogue in Buccolicum carmen; IV. Epitaph for the father and son Pino and Ciampi della Tosa, preserved by Coluccio Salutati (ca. 1348); V. To Petrarca (ca. 1351–1353), a metrical epistle accompanying Boccaccio’s gift of a copy of Dante’s Commedia); VI. An epigram to the archbishop of Milan, as if spoken by the Florentine 258

lion; VII. A metrical epistle to Zanobi da Strada, recently crowned poet laureate (ca. 1355); VIII. A tetrastich written as colophon to a copy of Dante’s Commedia in Boccaccio’s hand (Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, Ms. 1035. ca. 1360–1365); IX. Verses to Petrarca’s Africa expressing concern about that still-unpublished epic’s fate (1374); X. Boccaccio’s autoepitaph in the church of SS. Jacopo and Michele in Certaldo. Latin is the language of all but three of Boccaccio’s 24 surviving Epistole (Letters)—a pathetic remnant of what his correspondence must have been. Earliest are the four rhetorical exercises of 1339. The others have dates between 1341 (V, to Niccolo` Acciaiuoli, complaining of how unhappy he is to be back in Florence, survives only in Italian translation) and 1374 (XXIV, condolences on the death of Petrarca, to his son-in-law Francescuolo da Brossano): VI, to Zanobi da Strada, in praise of friendship (1348); VII, carried to Petrarca in Padua from the Signoria by Boccaccio as ambassador with the invitation to return, live, and teach in Florence (1351); VIII, a fragment to Zanobi da Strada in praise of ‘‘Virgilian Naples’’ (1352); IX, to Zanobi (1353); X, to Petrarca from Ravenna, obliquely criticizing him for having accepted patronage at the court of the Visconti tyrant (1353); XI, to Petrarca from Ravenna, ‘‘the sewer of transalpine Gaul,’’ referring to Petrarca’s wish for information about Peter Damian (1362); XII, to Barbato da Sulmona about Petrarca (1362); XIII, to his close friend Francesco Nelli, prior of the church of Santi Apostoli in Florence, from Venice, a ferocious attack on Niccolo` Acciaiuoli, who made Boccaccio’s trip to Naples a disaster (1363; survives in an Italian translation except for a fragment of the original Latin); XIV, to Pietro da Moglio, praised as a master of rhetoric (ca. 1366); XV, to Petrarca, a touching letter describing his visit at Venice with the recipient’s daughter Francesca (‘‘Tullia’’) and son-in-law (1367); XVI, to Niccolo` da Montefalcone from Naples, perhaps in hopes of retiring to that monk’s monastery (1371); XVII, to the Neapolitan Matteo d’Ambrasio, from Naples (1371); XVIII, to the nobleman Niccolo` Orsini, a Ciceronian orator and friend of Petrarca, from Certaldo (1371); XIX, to the knight Iacopo Pizzinga (1371); XX, to the lawyer Pietro da Monteforte from Certaldo (1372); XXI, to Mainardo Cavalcanti, describing his deteriorating health, from Certaldo (1373); XXII, to Mainardo (1373); XXIII, to Fra Martino da Signa, of the Augustinian Eremites, with an allegorical key to Buccolicum

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO carmen (1372–1374); XXIV, to Francesco da Brossano, son-in-law of Petrarch, on the latter’s death (1374). VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Collections Carmina, miscellaneous Latin verse compositions written throughout Boccaccio’s life, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, bari: Laterza, 1928; edited by Giuseppe Velli, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Epistole, written 1339–1374; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari: Laterza, 1928; edited by Ginetta Auzzas, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Genealogia deorum gentilium . . . de montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis, seu paludibus, et de diversis nominibus maris, Reggio: Bartholomeus et Laurentius de Bruschis, 1481; Vicenza: Simone de Gabis, 1487; Genealogiae Ioannis Boccatii, cum demonstrationibus in formis arborum designatis. Eiusdem de montibus et sylvis, de fontibus, lacubus, et fluminibus. Ac etiam de stagnis et paludibus, necnon et de maribus, seu diuersis maris nominibus, Venice: Bonetus Locatellus for Octavianus Scotus, 1494–1495]; Venice: Manfredo de Strevo da Monferrato, 1497; Venice: Agostino de’ Zanni da Portesio, 1511; Genealogie Johannis Boccacij cum micantissimis arborum effigiationibus cuiusque gentilis dei progenium . . . Eiusdemque De montibus et siluis de fontibus, lacubus et fluminibus . . ., Paris: Opera et expensis Dionisii Roce, Lodouici Hornken, 1511; Ioannis Boccatii Peri genealogias deorvm libri quindecim, cum annotiationibus Iacobi Micylli. Eivsdemque De montium, sylvarum, fontium, lacuum, fluuiorum, stagnorum, et marium nominibus, Basel: Ioannes Hervagius, 1532. Lettere, carmi ed altri scritti minori, edited by Attilio Hortis, in Studj (epistolary exchange between Boccaccio and Checco da Mileto, Elegia di Costanza, Allegoria mitologica), 1879, Appendices VI and VII. Le lettere edite e inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio tradotte e commentate con nuovi documenti, edited by Francesco Corazzini, Florence: Sansoni, 1877. Opere in versi, Corbaccio, Trattatello in laude di Dante, prose latine, epistole, edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Opere latine minori (Buccolicum carmen. Carminum et epistolarum quae supersunt. Scripta breviora), edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Bari, Laterza, 1928. Vite di Petrarca, Pier Damiani e Livio, edited by Renata Fabbri, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1992.

Editions Elegia di Costanza, written ca. 1332–1334; in Hortis, Studj, 1879; in Vittore Branca, Tradizione delle opere di Giovanni Boccaccio I. Un primo elenco dei codici e tre studi, 1958; Carmina, 1992. Allegoria mitologica, written ca. 1332–1334; in Hortis, Studj, 1879; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, Opere latine minori, 1928; edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994.

Epistole, written 1339–1374; first editions: I, II, III, IV, VI, IX, XI, XIV. Sebastiano Ciampi, Monumenti di un manuscritto autografo e lettere inedite di Messer Giovanni Boccaccio, Milan: P.A. Molina, 1830. V. (Survives in the manuscripts only in Italian translation) Prose antiche di Dante, Petrarca e Boccaccio e di molti altri nobili e virtuosi ingegni, Florence: Anton Francesco Doni, 1547. VII, XV. Jacques Franc¸ois Paul Aldonce De Sade, Me´moires pour la vie de Franc¸ois Pe´trarque, Amsterdam [Avignon]: Aske´e and Merkus, 1764–1767, vol. 3. VIII. Francesco Macrı` Leone, ‘‘Il Zibaldone boccacciano della Magliabechiana,’’ in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 10 (1887): 1–ff. X. Johannes Boccatius ad Franciscum Petrarcham nunc primum edita epistola, Padua, 1819. XII. Marco Vatasso, Del Petrarca e di alcuni suoi amici, Roma: Tipografia Vaticana, 1904. XIII. Anton Maria Biscioni, ed., Prose di Dante Alighieri e di messer Giovanni Boccaccio, Florence: G.G. Tartini e Santi Franchi, 1723. XVI, XVII, XVIII, XX. In Le lettere edite e inedite, edited by Corazzini, 1877. XIX. Giovanni Boccaccio, Rime di messer Giovanni Boccacci, Livorno: T. Masi e Compagno, 1802. XXI, XXII. Ioannis Boccaccii ad Maghinardum de Cavalcantibus epistolae tres, edited by A.N. Veselovskii, St. Petersburg: V. Demakova, 1876. XXIII. Domenicus Antonius Gandolfi, Dissertatio historica de ducentiis celeberrimis Augustinianis scriptoribus, Rome: Buagni, 1704. XXIV. Lorenzo Mehus, Ambrosii Traversarii latinae epistolae, Florence: Cesareo, 1759. De Canaria, written, ca. 1342; edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 1, 1992. Buccolicum carmen, written ca. 1341–1342, 1347, 1362–1366, published 1369–1370; in Opere latine minori, edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra; edited by Giorgio Bernardi Perini, in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, pt. 2, 1994. De vita et moribus Domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo, written ca. 1348–1350; first edition: Document historique de Boccace sur Pe´trarque: Manuscrit de la Bibliothe`que de Saint-Marc de Vinese (Ms. Marc. Lat. XIV 223) publie´ pour la premie`re fois et accompagne d’ une dissertation et de recherches nouvelles (includes Boccaccio’s De vita et moribus with facing French trans.), edited by Marquis De Valori (Henri Zosime), Avignon: Typographie de Th. Fischer, 1856; Petrarca, Giul. Celso, e Boccaccio: Illustrazione bibliologica delle vite degli uomini illustri del primo, di Cajo Giulio Cesare attribuita al secondo, e del Petrarca scritta dal terzo (includes Boccaccio’s De vita et moribus with Italian trans.), edited by Domenico Rossetti, Trieste: G. Marenigh, 1828; Solerti; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1928; edited by Renata Fabbri, in Vite, 1992. Pauca de T. Livio a Iohanne Boccaccio collecta, after 1351; edited by Attilio Hortis, Studj sulle opere latine; Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, in Opere latine minori, 1928; Renata Fabbri, in Vite, 1992. De casibus virorum illustrium, first draft 1355–1360; completed 1373–1374; De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris, written ca.

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GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO 1355–1357, revisions continue until 1374; Venice: Vindelinus de Spira, 1473; edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, in Tutte le opere, vols. 7–8, pt. 2, 1998. De mulieribus claris; first redaction 1360, nine redactional phases continue until 1375; edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere, vol. 10, 1967; 1970. Genealogie deorum gentilium, written ca. 1360, final redaction after 1372; edited by Raffaele Zovenzoni, Venice: Vindelinus de Spira (Wendelin of Speier), 1472; 1473; Cologne: Printer of the ‘‘Sancte Flores Agostini’’, 1473; Reggio: Bartholomeus et Laurentius de Bruschis, 1481; Vicenza, 1487; Venice: Per D. Octauiani Scoti ciuis Modoetiesis, 1494 (the first to include the genealogical trees); Venice: Manfredo de Strevo de Monferrato, 1495; 1497; Paris, 1511; Venice: Per Agostinum de Zannis de Portesio, 1511; edited by Jacobus Micyllus (Jakob Moltzer), Basil: Apud Io, Hervagium, 1532; Venice: Fabio e Agostino Zoppini, 1581; Hecker 1902; edited by Vincenzo Romano, Bari: Laterza, 1951; Ruggiero Stefanelli, Boccaccio e la poesia, Naples: Loffredo, 1978; edited by Vittorio Zaccaria, in Tutte le opere, vols. 7–8, pts. 1 and 2, 1998. Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis, written 1361–1362; edited by Aldo Francesco Masse`ra, 1928; edited by Renata Fabbri, in Vite, 1992.

Facsimile Genealogiae [and De montibus, Venice, 1494], New York: Garland, 1976.

English Version, translated by Charles G. Osgood, Princeton: Princeton University Press, London: Oxford University Press by H. Milford, 1930; rpt. New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956; 1978; as Book Eleven of the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods of Giovanni Boccaccio: A Translation with Glossary, translated by Melanie Hoover, M.A. dissertation, University of Florida, 1985; as Vulcan: The Genealogy of the Pagan Gods, translated by Fred Lock, Kingston, Ont.: Lock’s Press, 1999.

Further Reading Bergin, Thomas G., Boccaccio, New York: Viking, 1981. Hortis, Attilio, Studj sulle opere latine del Boccaccio con particolare riguardo alla storia della erudizione nel medio evo e alle letterature straniere aggiuntovi la bibliografia delle edizioni, Trieste: Libraria Julius Dase Editrice, 1879. Pastore Stocchi, Manlio, Tradizione medioevale e gusto umanistico nel ‘‘De montibus’’ del Boccaccio, Padua: CEDAM; Florence: Olschki, 1963. Picone, Michelangelo, and Claude Cazale´ Be´rard (editors), Gli Zibaldoni di Boccaccio: Memoria, scrittura, riscrittura, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, The University of Chicago Manuscript of the Genealogia Deorum Gentilium of Boccaccio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1927. Zaccaria, Vittorio, Boccaccio narratore, storico, moralista e mitografo, Florence: Olschki, 2001.

Translations Note: All titles in Tutte le opere except De montibus are facing text editions with the Latin original and Italian translations. Epistole: as Buccolicum carmen: Boccaccio’s Olympia, edited, with an English rendering by J. Gollancz, London: Chatto and Windus, 1913; rpt. 1914, 1921; as Eclogues, translated by Janet Levarie Smarr, New York: Garland, 1987. De casibus virorum illustrium: as The Fall of princes, translated by John Lydgate, London: Richard Pynson, 1494; rpt. 1527; rpt. London: Richard Tottel, 1554; rpt. London: John Wayland, 1554; rpt. 1558; as Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, edited by Henry Bergen, Washington: The Carnegie Institute, 1923–1927; rpt. Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1924–1927; rpt. 1967; The Fates of Illustrious Men, translated and abridged by Louis Brewer Hall, New York: Frederick Ungar, 1965. De mulieribus claris: as De Preclaris Mulieribus, That Is to Say in Englyshe, Of the Ryght Renoumyde Ladyes, translated by Henry Parker (Parcare), Lord Morley, London: Printed for the Editor, 1789; as Forty-Six Lives, translated by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, edited by Herbert G. Wright, London: Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1943; as Concerning Famous Women, translated by Guido A. Guarino, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press-London: George Allen and Unwin, 1964; as Famous Women, translated by Virginia Brown, I Tatti Renaissance Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Genealogie deorum gentilium: as Boccaccio on Poetry, Being the Preface and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Books of Boccaccio’s ‘‘Genealogia deorum gentilium’’ in an

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TESEIDA DELLE NOZZE D’EMILIA, CA. 1339–1341 Epic Poem by Giovanni Boccaccio

Memorable as the first epic in Italian, Boccaccio’s Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (Thesiad of Emilia’s Nuptials) answers a deficiency Dante notes in De vulgari eloquentia II, 2, 10, when he identifies the three subjects worthy of poetic treatment as rectitude, love, and arms, adding that no one, so far, has written on the last in Italy’s vernacular. The compound title announces a creative mix, ‘‘arms and the man’’ (Aeneid I, 1), leavened with love and the woman. Theseus, king of Athens, liberates Thebes and defeats the Amazons, returning triumphant with their queen Ippolita and her sister Emilia,

GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO whose beauty captivates the knights Arcita and Palemone. To resolve their rivalry, Theseus decrees a tournament. The night before, Arcita prays to Mars for victory, Palemone to Venus for the lady, and Emilia to Diana for a happy outcome. Arcita wins but dies from wounds, allowing Palemone to marry Emilia. Final words addressed by the author to his book proclaim his pioneering accomplishment, a song of Mars inspired by Muses in the ‘‘nude’’—without Latin clothing (XII, 84). A bizarre hybrid to the modern eye, the autograph manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms. Doni e Acquisti 325) reproduces classical epic as it looked to Boccaccio in exemplars such as his surviving a twelfth-century copy of Statius’ Thebaid. In the Teseida, after a dedicatory letter to Fiammetta, 15 sonnets frame 12 books of ottava rima (9,904 verses), each further subdivided into chapter-like units by rubric-titles. Boccaccio himself, writing as if he were an anonymous commentator, provides an apparatus of interlinear and marginal glosses that swells on some folios to thousands of words. Inside this complex architecture, he sprinkles his lexicon with a Latinate vocabulary, slips the tale into a time frame before the Trojan War, and decks it with such reminders of antiquity as a machinery of pagan deities, mythic heroes who parade in an epic catalogue, a Roman amphitheater, and funeral games. The Teseida affirms the canonical epic length of 12 books but correlates them with the 12 houses of the zodiac, merging classical epic and medieval Arabic astronomy. Astronomical number symbolism, which Chaucer echoes (‘‘The Knight’s Tale,’’ first in the Canterbury Tales), connects the planetary gods to their protege´s. To the central verse (VII, 30, 1) and chapter (VII, 50, 1) Boccaccio links key descriptions of Mars and Venus, a pair allusive to marriage. Allegorically, in the terminology of Aristotelian-Thomistic ethics, they signify the irascible and concupiscible appetites. Belonging to a tradition that runs from Prudentius’ Psychomachia (fourth century; Battle in Mansoul) to Dante’s Comedia, the Teseida has its moral locus in the mind, site of conflict between reason’s civilizing power, represented by the just ruler Theseus, and the lower appetites of wrath and lust, dramatized by the rival protagonists. The closing marriage of Emilia and Palemone, which couples a tempering Diana with Venus, asserts chaste love in the well-ordered society. Widely read during the manuscript era, the Teseida waned in popularity once printed books took over. Public interest veered to newer narratives,

but their formal debt to Boccaccio is evident. His choice of ottava rima set the metrical standard for Italian chivalric epic throughout the Renaissance, from Pulci and Boiardo to Ariosto and Tasso. VICTORIA E. KIRKHAM Editions Early Editions: La Teseida, Ferrara: Agostino Carnerio, 1475, with the commentary by Andrea da Bassi; La Theseida, edited by Gaetano Tizzone da Pofi, Venice: Gerolamo Pentio da Lecco, 1528. Critical Editions: Teseide, edited by Ignazio Moutier, in Opere volgari, vol. 9, Florence: Marghera, 1831; Teseida, edited by Salvatore Battaglia, Florence: Sansoni, 1938; Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Aurelio Roncaglia, Bari: Laterza, 1941; Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia, edited by Alberto Limentani, in Tutte le opere, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1964; Teseida, edited by Mario Marti, in Opere minori in volgare, vol. 2, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Translations: as The Book of Theseus, translated by Bernadette Marie McCoy, Sea Cliff, NY: Teesdale Publishing, 1974 (highly unreliable); as Chaucer’s Boccaccio: Sources of Troilus and the Knight’s and Franklin’s Tales (selections), edited and translated by N. R. Havely, Woodbridge, Suffolk: D. S. Brewer, 1980.

Further Reading Anderson, David, Before the Knight’s Tale: Imitation of Classical Epic in Boccaccio’s Teseida, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Hollander, Robert, ‘‘The Validity of Boccaccio’s Self-Exegesis in his Teseida,’’ in Medievalie et Humanistica, n.s., 8 (1977): 163–183. Kirkham, Victoria, ‘‘’Chiuso parlare’ in Boccaccio’s Teseida,’’ in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, edited by Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini, Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1983; rpt. in Victoria Kirkham, The Sign of Reason in Boccaccio’s Fiction, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Savj-Lopez, Paolo, ‘‘Sulle fonti della ‘Teseide,’’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 36 (1900): 59–78. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ‘‘Un commento all’autocommento nel Teseida,’’ in Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and His Renaissance Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Victoria Kirkham, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–1992): 185–203. Schnapp, Jeffrey T., ‘‘A Commentary on Commentary in Boccaccio,’’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 91.4 (1992): 813–834. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Boccaccio and the Stars: Astrology in the Teseida,’’ in Traditio, 35 (1979): 303–332. Vandelli, Giuseppe, ‘‘Un autografo della Teseida,’’ in Studi di filologia italiana, 2 (1929): 1–76. Wetherbee, Winthrop, ‘‘History and Romance in Boccaccio’s Teseida,’’ in Boccaccio 1990: The Poet and His Renaissance Reception, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Victoria Kirkham, Studi sul Boccaccio, 20 (1991–1992).

261

TRAIANO BOCCALINI

TRAIANO BOCCALINI (1556–1613) Born into a middle-class family (his father was a known architect), Boccalini spent his childhood and adolescence in his native town of Loreto, which he always mentions in his writings with endearing words. Strongly inclined toward literature and poetry, he desired to become a full-time writer, but the meager finances of his family did not allow him to pursue a literary career and he was compelled to choose more profitable judicial and administrative posts. Boccalini would later portray the years spent studying law in Perugia and then Padua as miserable and dull; indeed, as he reported in De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso (Reports from Parnassus, 1612–1613), in order to endure the effort required, such a career was only suitable to individuals having ‘‘un cervellaccio di bue, una complessionaccia di facchino’’ (the brain of an ox, the body of a porter). In Perugia, Boccalini attended lessons by the famous Giovan Paolo Lancellotti and Rinaldo Ridolfi, and met the satirical poet Cesare Caporali (1531–1601), who might have influenced his initial conception of De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso. As a student in Padua, Boccalini developed a passionate interest in the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus. His reflections culminated in the compilation of his Commentarii di Traiano Boccalini romano sopra Cornelio Tacito (Commentaries on Cornelius Tacitus), published posthumously in 1677. In this text, a meditation on the contrast between ragion di stato (reason of state) and ethical instances, Boccalini shows his inner nature as a political moralist and opponent of Niccolo` Machiavelli, typical of the Counter-Reformation movement of Tacitism. At the same time, he openly and harshly criticizes the political corruption of his times. In 1592, with the proclamation of the new pontiff, Clement VIII, Boccalini was able to get a permanent position as pontifical governor of small cities belonging to the state of the church, thanks to the intervention of the pope’s nephew, Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini. It was a difficult task that obliged Boccalini to wander throughout Italy for the rest of his life, and in the course of which he experienced frustration, humiliation, and threats, including troubles with the Holy Office. It was indeed in the midst of these difficult years that 262

Boccalini left aside his Commentarii sopra Cornelio Tacito and started to conceive the draft of De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso, an allegoric treatise divided in two centurie (chapters). In it, Boccalini depicts a utopian world out of earthly time and space (Parnassus), where mythical and historical events are mingled with no distinction. The benevolent king is Apollon, who supervises his guests with a serene smile. In Parnassus congregate the greatest philosophers, writers, and statesmen of different historical times, engaged in vivacious diatribes on heterogeneous topics, such as social habits, erudition, literature, science, politics, and ethics. In this context, Boccalini ostensibly penned himself as the menante or gazzettiere (reporter), who objectively takes notes of all discussions. The leitmotiv of the De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso is social and political satire, astutely blended with poetic descriptions and literary reflections. Elegantly positioned at the intersection of several genres—mythical-allegorical fiction, political treatise, and satire—and structured according to the Horatian formula utile dulci (useful and sweet), the work enjoyed the immediate favor of a large audience and consecrated Boccalini as a writer. However, the tone of four satirical chapters, which had long circulated only in manuscript form because their author feared the revenge of the Spanish rulers and of the Inquisition, is quite different. The first collection of these writings was published anonymously in 1614 with the title La cetra d’Italia (The Lyre of Italy). Twenty-nine additional chapters were then published in Venice with the title Pietra del paragone politico (Political Touchstone) later that same year, although the volume was dated 1615. Abandoning the carefully crafted strategy described in a letter of August 27, 1612, to James I, king of England as wrapping ‘‘l’aperta verita` [...] con le larve delle metafore’’ (the open truth within [...] the maggots of metaphors), in Pietra del paragone politico Boccalini compared Spaniards to hopeless lovers, fooled by the clever and beautiful women they want to possess in vain (the Italians): ‘‘Pero´ prestate fede a me [Spagnoli], che purtroppo a mie spese l’ho esperimentato, che nel negozio di soggiogar Italia altro non caverete [...] che danno e vergogna’’ (Therefore trust me [Spaniards], all you will gain from your

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO attempt to subjugate Italy will be nothing but damage and shame. Boccalini’s attacks against the Spanish invaders hit such a crude and polemical vein that Lope de Vega called him a boca de infierno (a mouth from hell). Thus, De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso and its appendixes made Boccalini famous and infamous, loved and hated. Translated, imitated, and counterfeited for decades, his works became, as Harald Hendrix has rightly put it, the ‘‘cultural conscience’’ of the intelligentsia of seventeenth-century Europe (Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica, 1995).

Biography Born in Loreto (Ancona), probably in 1556 (there are no official birth records). Studied at the local Jesuit college. Studied law at the University of Perugia, 1578. Moved to Padua to finish his studies, after 1580. Married Ersilia Ghislieri in Rome, 1584. Settled in Rome, 1585. Became a writer of apostolic briefs, 1586. Secretary of the Marquis Spinola, Genoa, 1590. Papal governor of Trevi Umbra, 1592. Magistrate of Tolentino, June 1594. Governor of Brisighella, November 1594. Lieutenant of Scipione Gottifredo, Benevento, 1596. Mission to Venice, 1598. Criminal judge in Campidoglio, Rome, 1599. Governor of Comacchio, 1603. Denounced to the Holy Office, 1603. Faced the trial of the Inquisition, Ferrara-Rome, 1604. Governor of Bagnacavallo, 1606. Governor of Argenta, 1608. Apostolic commissioner, Matelica, 1609. Settled in Rome. His writings attracted again the attention of the Inquisition; tried and acquitted, 1610. Governor of Sassoferrato, 1611. Governor of Nocera Umbra, 1612. Moved to Venice. Died in his house of the neighborhood of Santa Maria Formosa, Venice, probably of a tumor of the liver,

September 29, 1613. However, rumors (unfounded) rapidly spread about his murder by Spanish hands (either by poison or by physical assault). Was buried in the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, through the intervention of his longtime friend, the abbot Angelo Grillo. OLIMPIA PELOSI Selected Works Collections Ragguagli di Parnaso e scritti minori, edited by Luigi Firpo, 3 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1948.

Treatises De’ Ragguagli di Parnaso. Centuria prima, 1612; Centuria seconda, 1613. La cetra d’Italia, 1614. Pietra del paragone politico, 1615. Commentarii di Traiano Boccalini romano sopra Cornelio Tacito, 1677.

Further Reading Firpo, Luigi, ‘‘Boccalini, Traiano,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 11, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1969. Hendrix, Harald, Traiano Boccalini fra erudizione e polemica. Ricerche sulla fortuna e bibliografia critica, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Marconi, Laura, ‘‘Traiano Boccalini studente a Perugia (1578–1582): Documenti inediti sulla sua permanenza e laurea nello Studium perugino,’’ in Pensiero politico, 31, no. 1 (1998): 73–87. Martinelli, Bortolo, ‘‘Boccalini Traiano,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Turin: Utet, 1986. Sterpos, Marco, ‘‘Boccalini tacitista di fronte al Machiavelli,’’ In Studi secenteschi, 12 (1971): 255–283. Varese, Claudio, Traiano Boccalini, Padua: Liviana, 1958. Zaccaro, Vanna, Arte dello stato e retorica in Traiano Boccalini, Fasano: Schena, 2002.

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO (1441–1494) Matteo Maria Boiardo perfectly embodied the instability, the genius, and the compromises of the late fifteenth century, a turbulent moment in Italian history and culture. Symbiotically connected to the Este court of Ferrara and its culture, Boiardo

successfully negotiated in his literary career the contrast between classical models and medieval romance, typical of the hybrid culture of the Este court. Dividing his energies between political and military duties on one side, and the cult of literary 263

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO form on the other, he achieved a position of prestige in both realms, as a quintessential courtly man. His most important work, the incomplete Orlando innamorato or Inamoramento de Orlando (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483/1495), makes him the first poet to bring Italian chivalric literature within the realm of high literature, paving the way for the masterpieces by Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso. The connection of Boiardo’s family to the Este court dated back to his grandfather, Feltrino, who had obtained the county of Scandiano from the lords of Ferrara in 1423. Boiardo spent his youth at the court of the Humanist Prince Leonello d’Este until the year 1460, when he became the ruler of his feudal territory. Nevertheless, he always manifested a strong attachment to Ferrara, where the political and cultural life of the duchy was increasingly concentrated. He was an active participant in the life of the Este court, serving and writing under dukes Borso and Ercole, who shaped the cultural life of Ferrara, partially changing the humanistic tradition initiated by Guarino Guarini under Leonello d’Este. Boiardo’s first poetic endeavors were in Latin, strictly connected to his role as a courtly poet, and they inscribe him within the humanistic circle of Ferrara. Both written between 1463 and 1464, the Carmina de laudibus Estensium (Songs in Praise of the Este) and the Pastoralia (Pastoral Songs, 1500) were both inspired by a close imitation of Vergil. In the Carmina de laudibus Estensium, Boiardo lent his poetic voice to the dynastic reconstruction envisioned by Borso d’Este when the duke decided to call from Naples Ercole and Sigismondo, the two legitimate heirs of the dynasty. The praise of Borso naturally turns into the praise of Ercole, who later became Boiardo’s most important patron. The dynastic project, realized through poetic praise and legitimization of the house of Este, is a constant element of Boiardo’s career, culminating in the Orlando innamorato. The same project characterizes the 10 eclogues of the Pastoralia, where political and love themes alternate. As in the Carmina de laudibus Estensium, Boiardo represents the present and the future lord through common praise, realizing through poetry the continuity desired by the Este dynasty. Both poems clearly point to the school of Guarino Guarini (1374–1460), who had established a canon that included auctores such as Virgil, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, Horace, as well as Claudianus and Lygdamus. In the same tradition we can inscribe a later work, which Boiardo composed in 1476. The poem, entitled Epigrammata (Epigrams), 264

praised the victory of Duke Ercole over an internal revolt promoted by his nephew Nicolo`. The use of the humanistic model at the time of his intellectual maturity discredits any easy identification between Boiardo’s Latin production and an early phase of his literary training. During the last years of Borso’s reign, Boiardo was assigned important diplomatic responsibilities. While he was in Reggio Emilia at Sigismondo’s court, he met Antonia Caprara, to whom he dedicated the Canzoniere, the collection of his lyric poems dated by the author 1469–1471 and entitled, following the Ovidian model, Amorum libri (Books of Love, 1499). The collection includes texts composed before these years, organized according to the fiction of a chronological sequence. There are explicit markers placing the Canzoniere into a concrete reality. The setting for the collection is the town of Reggio (sonnet 16), and the first letters of the first 14 sonnets of the first book form the name of the beloved lady. The same is true of the 14 initials of the 14 lines of sonnet 14. In structuring his Amorum libri, Boiardo was more severe than his model, Petrarch: Each of the books consists of 50 sonnets and 10 poems in a different meter, generally highly experimental. Following a classical model, the text is divided into three thematic parts: The first part praises beauty and reciprocated love; the second part describes the frustration and misery of the rejected lover; the third part evokes the nostalgic memory of the lost love, and explores the theme of the ‘‘prison of love.’’ The most reliable manuscript of the Amorum libri (ms. Egerton, London, British Library) is dated January 4, 1477, but Boiardo wrote the poems at an earlier stage. As explained in the opening sonnet, the poet has systematized a series of texts composed during his youth. Boiardo used the Petrarchan model, combining it with a variety of other inspirations, including not only the classics, but also stilnovistic and Provencal poetry. His attitude toward Petrarch is innovative: Stylistically and thematically, Boiardo seeks a colorful tone, and locates himself far from Petrarch’s medietas (middle tone). The lady praised in the collection is framed even more abstractly than the Petrarchan Laura. Distancing himself from Petrarch, Boiardo chooses to reject a representation based upon the filter of memory, embracing the present and its immediate effects. However, to avoid a critical anachronism, we should not judge Boiardo’s heterodox Petrarchism from the point of view of the Petrarchan orthodoxy of the Italian cinquecento: Boiardo was inventing a

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO tradition, rather than distancing himself from an existing one. The years between 1476 and 1483 were the most productive in his literary career. To this period belongs the Pastorale (Pastoral Song), composed of 10 eclogues in Italian, thematically divided between politics and allegories of love. The political eclogues can be dated after 1482, since they are linked to the war against Venice for the territory of Polesine, whereas the love poems cannot be dated as precisely. The dark tones of the descriptions of the war and of its effects on the familiar landscapes, which Boiardo uses consistently in the political eclogues, expose the most dramatic aspects of a time of uncertainty and fear. In these years, Boiardo was also engaged in the composition of his chivalric poem, the Orlando innamorato. Throughout his career, Boiardo also wrote various translations from the classics (volgarizzamenti) for the use and entertainment of Ercole d’Este, who had not studied Latin. Boiardo’s translations include excerpts from the works of Xenophon and Aemilius Probus (before 1471), the Chronicon Imperatorum by Riccobaldo Gervasio da Ferrara (1472–1478), a history of the Roman and Germanic emperors, Cornelius Nepos and Herodotus’ Histories (translated from a Latin version). The court, with which Boiardo became officially affiliated on January 1, 1476, provides the background and the reason for all these literary endeavors, and the work as a translator acquires particular meaning when connected to the specific nature of the translated texts. Duke Ercole, a courtly lord and military chief, had a particular interest in historiography, and the poet provided him with historical narrations of the past that serve as a model for the present. The poet also translated Lucian and Apuleius. In particular, his translation of the Metamorphoses, which had been attributed erroneously to his grandfather Feltrino, features a very open manipulation of the original, as Boiardo adds a final part to the text, taking it from Lucian’s Lucius e onos. Besides his translations, Boiardo also wrote short poems for the entertainment of the court, such as the sonnets and poems in terza rima written in 1460–1465 and entitled Capitoli (Chapters, 1523), which illustrate the Tarots. Both the translations and this minor production shed light on the various aspects and interests of the court, including the more mundane and playful. The idea of the chivalric poem was also born within the court, and Duke Ercole encouraged its composition. In order to write the Orlando

innamorato, the great epic poem of the origins of the Este, Boiardo was exempted from his political duties. In the same year that he began to write the Orlando innamorato, 1478, he married Taddea dei Gonzaga di Novellara, with whom he lived a happy domestic life. When the political and military life of the court took a turn for the worse, however, Boiardo returned to his diplomatic duties. He was captain of Modena in 1480, a task entailing heavy responsibilities, especially when the war with Venice and the pope broke out in 1482. He ultimately needed to leave the command of Modena in order to defend his own feud, Scandiano. Meanwhile, in 1483, the first edition of the Orlando innamorato appeared: It contained only the first two books of the poem and is now lost. The war was a success, and after the peace signed in 1484, Boiardo followed his lord Ercole in his travels. This is probably one of the reasons for the 1487 Venice edition of the Orlando inamorato, still composed of two books. During this time of peace, Boiardo experimented with new genres, following and shaping the taste of the court. In these years, the Este palace in Ferrara acquired an avant-garde position in the production and representation of plays, and Boiardo contributed the Timone (Timon, 1500), a classical play. This work, probably written between 1486 and 1494, is a re-elaboration of a play by Lucian (which Boiardo could read in a Latin translation), and it is probably the only surviving example of a more extensive production. The adaptation of a classical play to the taste of the modern public involves metric solutions, such as the use of the hendecasyllable, and thematic revisions. As in his translation and rewriting of the Metamorphoses, Boiardo expands the text with his own additions. In writing his Timone, he doubles the two main characters, and this results in a very effective treatment of the main theme of the original comedy. If in Lucian’s play excessive spending is inevitable, and it leads to poverty and misanthropy, in Boiardo’s rewriting there is a more optimistic view, and the poet endorses a vision of human behavior based on balance and courtesy, as he will do in the Orlando innamorato. In 1487, another phase of great political and military endeavor began. Appointed military governor of the town of Reggio, Boiardo must again relinquish his literary efforts. In 1494, due to the military pact between France, Milan, and Ferrara, the French troops left through the Este territories, an event that acquired symbolic undertones, and was perceived as marking the end of independence and freedom for the peninsula. 265

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO Boiardo, who interrupted the Orlando innamorato with this image of invasion (book 3, canto 9) died during the same year, on December 19. For centuries, Boiardo has been relegated to a marginal position within the canon of Italian literature. As far as the Orlando innamorato is concerned, Boiardo has suffered from the obscuring fame of his successor, Ludovico Ariosto, while, for the rest of his production, he paid a price to the generalized prejudice against courtly literature as instrumental and insincere. His active participation in the courtly life has often produced a stereotyped representation of his personality as a lesser Ariosto, a courtier with a superficial poetic vision of life and love. Once catalogued only as a precursor, Boiardo has now recovered some autonomy, but still only as the author of the Orlando innamorato. Even the Amorum libri, one of the most important canzonieri of the fifteenth century, has received limited critical attention. The volgarizzamenti, of crucial importance as tokens of a cultural project within the court, have never been edited in their entirety. New directions in Boiardo criticism, begun in the 1970s and culminating with the celebrations for the fifth centenary of his death in 1994, seek to focus on the totality of the poet’s works. Boiardo’s multifaceted production could provide critics a wealth of unexplored texts on the uncertain borders of Humanism.

Biography Born in Scandiano (Reggio Emilia), 1441, the son of Giovanni and Lucia Strozzi (sister of Tito Vespasiano Strozzi, Humanist and poet). Spent childhood in Ferrara; after the death of his father (1451), lived with his grandfather Feltrino, count of Scandiano and poet himself (died 1456); educated by the priest Bartolomeo da Prato; invested coruler of his territory along with his cousin Giovanni, 1460; joined the Este court in Ferrara, 1460. Diplomatic missions to Rome with Duke Borso, 1471; to Naples with Sigismondo d’Este, 1473; division of the county, 1474, which left him in charge of Scandiano, Gesso, and Torricella; hired as a direct dependent of Duke Ercole, 1476. Marriage to Taddea di Giorgio Gonzaga di Novellara, 1479; military governor of Modena, 1480–1482; military governor of Reggio Emilia, 1487–1494. Died in Reggio Emilia on December 19, 1494. ELEONORA STOPPINO See also: Epic; Ludovico Ariosto 266

Selected Works Collections Tutte le Opere, edited by Angelandrea Zottoli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1936–1937. Opere volgari. Amorum libri, Pastorale, Lettere, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Bari: Laterza, 1962.

Poetry ‘‘Carmina de laudibus Estensium,’’ (ca. 1463–1464); edited by Angelo Solerti, 1894. ‘‘Epigrammata,’’ (1476), edited by Giovan Battista Venturi in Poesie, 1820. ‘‘Pastorale,’’ (ca. 1482), edited by Giovan Battista Venturi in Poesie, 1820. ‘‘Orlando innamorato,’’ 1482–1483 (first two books), 1495 (book 3). ‘‘Amorum libri,’’ 1499; critical editions by Tiziano Zanato, 1998; as Amorum libri: The Lyric Poems of Matteo Maria Boiardo, translated byAndrea Di Tommaso, 1993. ‘‘Pastoralia,’’ edited by Bartolomeo Crotti, 1500; critical edition by Stefano Carrai, 1996. ‘‘Capitoli,’’ 1523; as Tarocchi, edited by Simona Foa`, 1993.

Play Timone, 1500; critical edition by Tissoni Benvenuti and Mussini Sacchi, 1983.

Further Reading Anceschi, Giuseppe (editor), Il Boiardo e la critica contemporanea. Atti del convegno di studi su Matteo Maria Boiardo. Scandiano-Reggio Emilia, 25–27 aprile 1969, Florence: Olschki, 1970. Anceschi, Giuseppe, and Tina Matarrese (editors), Il Boiardo e il mondo Estense nel Quattrocento, Padua: Antenore, 1998. Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘La poesia latina del Boiardo,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 146 (1969): 321–338. Cavallo, Jo Ann, The Romance Epics of Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso: From Public Duty to Private Pleasure, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Cavallo, Jo Ann, and Charles Stanely Ross (editors), Fortune and Romance. Boiardo in America, Tempe: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Dionisotti, Carlo, Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, edited by Giuseppe Anceschi and Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Looney, Dennis, ‘‘A Reading of Boiardo’s Herodotus in the Late Quattrocento: Annotations to Modena MS a. H.3.22,’’ in Manuscripta, 41, no. 2 (1997): 127–132. Marinelli, Peter, Ariosto and Boiardo: The Origins of Orlando furioso, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, La lingua del Boiardo lirico, Florence: Olschki, 1963. Monducci, Elio, and Gino Badini, Matteo Maria Boiardo: la vita nei documenti del suo tempo, Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 1997. Navarrete, Ignacio, ‘‘Boiardo’s Pastorali as a Macrotext,’’ in Stanford Italian Review, 5, no. 1 (1985): 37–53. Quint, David, ‘‘The Figure of Atlante: Ariosto and Boiardo’s Poems,’’ in MLN, 94 (1979): 77–91.

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO Quint, David, ‘‘The Best of Romance and Renaissance Epic,’’ in Romance: Generic Transformations from Chre´tien de Troyes to Cervantes, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985. Tissoni Benvenuti, Antonia and Sebastiano Corradi (editors), Gli Amorum libri e la lirica del Quattrocento con altri studi boiardeschi, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Tristano, Richard, ‘‘The Istoria imperiale of Matteo Maria Boiardo and Fifteenth-Century Ferrarese Courtly Culture,’’ in Phaeton’s Children: The Este Court and Its Culture in Early Modern Ferrara, edited by Dennis Looney and Deanna Shemek, Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Villoresi, Marco, Da Guarino a Boiardo. La cultura teatrale a Ferrara nel Quattrocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994.

ORLANDO INNAMORATO, 1482–1483 (BOOKS 1–2), 1495 (BOOK 3) Epic-chivalric poem by Matteo Maria Boiardo

Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love), left incomplete upon the death of the author, is the title traditionally used for Matteo Maria Boiardo’s masterpiece, although Boiardo experts agree that the original title was probably Inamoramento de Orlando (which is also the title given to the new, and most authoritative, critical edition by Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti and Cristina Montagnani). Along with Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), the Orlando innamorato is considered one of the best examples of Renaissance chivalric poetry. Boiardo’s text is deeply rooted in the cultural milieu of the Este court in the city of Ferrara, where the poet (like Ariosto) worked and lived. The poem is conceived as a dynastic epic, aimed at a legitimization of the Este as rulers and defenders of the church. The cultural tradition of the court, divided between the passion for chivalric romances and customs and a recovery of the classical tradition, is perfectly

embodied in the hybrid character of the Orlando innamorato. Traditionally, at least since the definition given by Pio Rajna in Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso (1876), the Orlando innamorato has been interpreted as a mixture of the two great epic cycles of the French Middle Ages, the Carolingian and the Arthurian cycles. The Carolingian cycle, featuring Charlemagne and his knights as protagonists, revolves around the wars between Christians and pagans at the end of the eighth century, whereas the Arthurian cycle, depicting heroes such as Tristan and Lancelot, establishes love at its center. Boiardo’s innovation would consist of presenting the Carolingian heroes as affected by the ‘‘Arthurian’’ forces of love, as the title itself demonstrates. Orlando, the bravest knight of the Frankish army, falls in love with the beautiful pagan princess Angelica, and is drawn to the adventures (venture or aventure) typical of the Arthurian tradition. This mixture, however, is already a specific trait of the tradition of the cantari and poemi cavallereschi, a popular epic genre widespread in Northern Italy during the century preceding Boiardo’s poem. Moreover, the relation between the two cycles is unbalanced: Boiardo’s intent is to subordinate the serious Carolingian knights to the rules of love and unpredictability, as Riccardo Bruscagli has remarked in Stagioni della civilta` estense (1983). Among the main characters of the Orlando innamorato, together with Charlemagne, Orlando, and Angelica, we can find Ranaldo, Orlando’s cousin, the sorceress Falerina, the pagan king Agramante and the two knights Rodamonte and Madricardo, Brunello the thief and Atlante the sorcerer, as well as Rugiero and Bradamante, the destined founders of the Este dynasty. The plot traces the centrifugal and centripetal movements of the pagan and Christian knights in pursuit of war and love, toward and away from the two sites of Paris and Albracca`. The first two books were published in 1482– 1483, and their elaboration probably started even before the reign of Ercole I (1471–1505), during the last years of Borso d’Este, who was duke from 1452 to 1471. Manuscript copies of the first two books circulated in the court before the publication of the editio princeps, of which no copies survive. The second edition in two books (1487) is preserved by only one exemplar (Venice, Biblioteca Marciana). After the publication of the first two books, the composition of the third proceeded slowly, due to the critical political and military situation of the dukedom and of Italy. It is precisely this tragic moment that Boiardo describes in the last lines of 267

MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO the poem, before leaving it incomplete at the ninth canto of the third book: While the poet writes, in the year of his death, Italy is invaded by the French army of Charles VIII. The unfinished poem ends on the striking contrast between poetry and life. The third and last book is also the one that introduces directly the dynastic theme, leaving often aside ventura to focus on Rugiero and Bradamante. The success of the poem was immediate and unprecedented, and such instantaneous triumph encouraged many poets to continue the story at the point where Boiardo had abandoned it. The Orlando innamorato immediately presented itself as a real epic text, subject to rewritings and expansions. The sixteenth century sees many editions of the original text with the addition of continuations by other authors, including Nicolo` degli Agostini, Raffaele Valcieco da Verona, and Pierfrancesco de’ Conti da Camerino. Even the most famous poem of the Italian Renaissance, Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, presents itself as a continuation (gionta) of the Orlando innamorato, a fact that contributed to relegating Boiardo’s poem to a marginal space in the canon of Italian literature. The other factor that obscured the understanding of a poem so widely appreciated soon after its appearance was its rewriting in a different language, the sixteenthcentury Toscanizing rifacimento (rewriting) by Francesco Berni entitled Orlando innamorato, nuovamente composto (The Newly Composed Orlando in Love, 1541). Both factors are part of a crucial phenomenon taking place at the beginning of the cinquecento: the creation of a linguistic norm for literary production, a stable form of language transcending regional differences, embodied in Pietro Bembo’s treatise Prose della volgar lingua (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525). The Orlando innamorato, marked by Emilian linguistic traits, is linguistically obsolete only a few years after its first publication, while the Orlando furioso, whose author has exactly the same regional provenance as Boiardo, is corrected and ‘‘normalized’’ by Ariosto himself. Through rewritings and poorly realized editions of the text, the Orlando innamorato faded into the darkness once reserved to the popular texts. Even the title of the poem, obscured by the loss of the editio princeps, is a reconstruction: Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti points in the direction of a different designation, Inamoramento de Orlando. This title, used by Boiardo himself in his correspondence with Isabella d’Este, links the poem even more cogently to the tradition of the cantari and poemi cavallereschi. One of the most read poemi is entitled Innamoramento di Carlo, and 268

features an old and comic Charlemagne falling in love with a young princess. The rediscovery of the Orlando innamorato in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, started by Antonio Panizzi’s edition of the original text published in London in 1830–1831, changed the field of Italian literary studies. The poem provided a bridge to the mutual understanding of the popular and learned epic traditions in Italy by coupling, for instance, the fiction of orality (reminiscent of the cantari tradition) with the use of the entrelacement technique, typical of the French prose romances. Another ‘‘wave of rediscovery’’ of the poem took place in the 1980s and 1990s, when critics such as Tissoni Benvenuti and Montagnani in their edition of the poem, Jo Ann Cavallo (Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato: An Ethics of Desire, 1993), Neil Harris (Bibliografia dell’Orlando innamorato, 1988–1999), and Marco Praloran (Maraviglioso artificio, 1990), to name a few, started interpreting the poem on its own terms. These studies shed more light on the true innovations of the text: its bold insertion of the two cycles within the tradition of learned literature in Italian, its moral tension, its introduction, within the interlaced narration, of various novelle, its creation of a new world of characters and topoi. The history of the poem is a tale in itself, made of readings, rewritings, and misreadings. A necessary part of this tale is to read the Orlando innamorato before its history. ELEONORA STOPPINO Editions First editions: Orlando innamorato, Reggio Emilia, possibly Modena or Scandiano: Pietro Giovanni del fu Filippo da San Lorenzo, 1482 or 1483 (books one and two, no exemplars survive); Venice, Piero de’ Piasi, 1487 (books one and two); Venice, Cristoforo de Pensis da Mandelo, 1491 (books one and two); as El fin de l’inamoramento d’Orlando, Venezia, Simone Bevilacqua da Pavia, 1495 (third book, cantos I–VIII); Scandiano, Pellegrino de’ Pasquali, 1495 (first complete edition, no exemplars survive). Rewriting: Francesco Berni, Orlando innamorato, nuovamente composto, Venice: Eredi di Lucantonio Giunta, 1541. Critical editions: Orlando Innamorato di Bojardo; Orlando Furioso di Ariosto; With an Essay on the Romantic Poetry of the Italians; Memoirs, and Notes by Antonio Panizzi, London: Pickering, 1830–1831; L’Inamoramento de Orlando, in Opere, edited byAntonia Tissoni Benvenuti and Cristina Montagnani, vol. 1, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1999. Translation: Orlando Innamorato, translated by Charles Stanley Ross, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

GIOVANNI BOINE Further Reading Alhaique Pettinelli, Rosanna, L’immaginario cavalleresco nel Rinascimento ferrarese, Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Bruscagli, Riccardo, Stagioni della civilta` estense, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983. Bruscagli, Riccardo (editor), I libri di ‘‘Orlando innamorato,’’ Modena: Panini, 1987. Bruscagli, Riccardo, and Amedeo Quondam (editors), Tipografie e romanzi in Val Padana fra Quattro e Cinquecento. Ferrara, Giornate di Studio 11–13 febbraio 1988, Modena: Panini, 1992. Cavallo, Jo Ann, Boiardo’s ‘‘Orlando innamorato’’: An Ethics of Desire, London and Cranbury, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993. Di Tommaso, Andrea, Structure and ideology in Boiardo’s Orlando inamorato, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.

Durling, Robert, The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Harris, Neil, Bibliografia dell’Orlando innamorato, Modena: Panini, 1988–1991. Kisacky, Julia, Magic in Boiardo and Ariosto, New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Praloran, Marco, «Maraviglioso artificio ». Tecniche narrative e rappresentative nell’Orlando innamorato, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1990. Rajna, Pio, Le fonti dell’Orlando furioso, Florence: Sansoni, 1876. Sangirardi, Giuseppe, Boiardismo ariostesco: presenza e trattamento dell’Orlando innamorato nel Furioso, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1993. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Erotic Language and Imagery in Francesco Berni’s Rifacimento,’’ in MLN, 99, no. 1 (1984): 80–100.

GIOVANNI BOINE (1887–1917) Though a solitary and independent thinker, Giovanni Boine had much in common with members of several literary and cultural groups active in Italy on the threshold of World War I. Like Clemente Rebora and Dino Campana, both of whom he knew and admired, Boine was first and foremost a poet of ecstasy. In his prose poems especially, he scorned logic and pressed language to its limits to attain a more intense and expressionistic apprehension of reality and of the mysteries that lie beyond. Boine could also be compared to the Futurists. Although very unlike him in their enthusiasm for the industrial age just dawning in Italy, and optimistic rather than skeptical about what would come next, the Futurists, too, were determined to break with the past and create new modes of artistic expression. As a contributor to the Florentine journal La voce, moreover, Boine shared in the collective struggle of other ethically committed writers to raise the level of cultural and, in his case, religious discourse in Italy. Boine hailed from the olive country on the Ligurian Riviera between Genoa and the French frontier. Although relatives on his mother’s side were small landholders there, his own economic circumstances were modest at best, and it was only through the help of the Milanese aristocrat Alessandro Casati that he was able to attend the

university. Though he became a member of Casati’s circle of young thinkers concerned with reexamining the tenets of religious belief in Italy, he felt very much the outsider among these wealthy patricians. In addition to his poverty and the sensitivity and acute intelligence that had set him apart from others since childhood, Boine was also mortally ill from tuberculosis and his awareness of this made him an outsider everywhere. A key word in Boine’s writings is ‘‘sano’’ or ‘‘healthy,’’ used in regard to both biological and material matters, and clearly tied to the writer’s own physical condition. Boine’s writings, collected and published only in part during his lifetime, can be considered a vast work in progress rather than a series of completed texts. His miscellaneous prose works include the article ‘‘La crisi degli ulivi in Liguria’’ (The Crisis of the Olive Groves in Liguria, 1911), published in La voce, a lyric evocation, in the context of a contemporary economic crisis, of the Ligurian countryside and the patient and dignified workers who tend the terraced slopes above the sea where olives have been grown for centuries. Published in the periodical L’anima in 1911, ‘‘L’esperienza religiosa’’ (Religious Experience) is a mixture of lyric outbursts and philosophical investigation that concludes with a description not of faith but of the Divinity as ‘‘l’ansia dell’incerto, in ogni definita 269

GIOVANNI BOINE forma, il tremore germinale del vago e del nuovo: una immensa ombra che incombe, che minaccia sul mondo (in cui si divincola il mondo) e che infiltra, che imbeve, che fascia tutte quante le cose’’ (a yearning for the uncertain in every definite form, a germinating tremor for the vague and the new: an immense shadow that hangs over, that threatens the world (and beneath which the world fidgets) and that infiltrates, that soaks, that swaddles everything). In this conceptualization, God is energy, conflict, and above all mystery rather than received truth. Moral struggle is also at the heart of Il peccato (Sin, 1914), a short novel that is perhaps the most finished of all of Boine’s writings. The transgression of the title involves a sensitive, autobiographically inspired young man who, carried away by the singing of a nun in a hillside convent above the sea near his home, persuades the young woman to abandon the cloister and run away to marry him. At the work’s conclusion, the hero has moved successfully from unsatisfied desire and agonized inaction to an act that is certainly a ‘‘sin,’’ but also life affirming and spiritually fruitful. Though not usually included as a major component of the canon of twentieth-century Italian narrative, Il peccato has received high praise from Giorgio Ba`rberiSquarotti, who finds it ‘‘one of the loftiest novels of the entire Italian twentieth-century’’ (‘‘Giovanni Boine,’’ 1994). James Joyce also knew the work, and some have seen connections between it and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published just two years later, in 1916. Frantumi (Smithereens, 1918) is the title that Boine gave the prose poems he wrote at various periods during his life and that were published posthumously in a volume together with his book reviews. Many of these poems were first published in the Riviera ligure, a publication sponsored by another of Rebora’s patrons, the oil merchant Mario Novaro. In them, Milva Maria Cappellini has pointed to ‘‘the prevailing theme of identity— sought out, lost, dissolved by an individual faced with a world that is blind and dumb, but filled with an undecipherable mythology’’ (Il percorso di Giovanni Boine, 2000). Other matters treated include the disturbing disappearance of familiar verities; the passing of time and rush toward an early death for the ill poet; isolation, solitude, and intimations of madness that blur together in a longing for annihilation. The sea, boats, and setting sail as a way of escaping the abyss of an unbearable life are recurring images in these lyrical texts that evoke the Ligurian landscape and shorelines as settings 270

for the poet’s metaphysical anguish. The physical world evoked is itself frequently unstable, even putrid and disgusting but at the same time achingly beautiful. Boine’s style in Frantumi breaks sharply with conventional linguistic practice as he coins new words, jams adjectives together in a way that is not acceptable in usual Italian practice, and inserts bouncing rhymes in the midst of his highly wrought, rhythmical prose. Such a rush of images liberated from conventional syntax is another reminder that Boine was experimenting with language at the same time as the Futurists, though the suffering at the center of his vision gave his writing a loftier cast than their merely aggressive verbal gesticulations. Throughout his brief life, Boine felt tugged by powerful opposing forces. These included the desire to believe and his disgust with the hierarchy of the contemporary church, his thirst for anarchy and a countervailing respect for tradition. Some of these contradictory forces are at work in his Discorsi militari (Military Statements, 1915), a pamphlet praising military service as a manifestation of loyal citizenship and a means for establishing national identity. The only work by this writer that earned him any significant financial rewards, the Discorsi militari have puzzled some later readers not entirely able to reconcile this work’s support of the conflict already in course at the time of its publication with Boine’s generally antiestablishment stance. Boine also left hundreds of lively, well-written, and revealing letters. The four, carefully edited volumes of this correspondence include communications from many of the better-known writers and intellectuals of the period, among them La voce founder Giuseppe Prezzolini, the poets Rebora and Campana, the polygraph and enfant terrible Giovanni Papini, the scandalous novelist and poet Sibilla Aleramo (with whom Boine had a brief affair), the literary critic Emilio Cecchi, and many more. When read with Boine’s poetry and prose, and the nonconformist and very lively book reviews collected as Plausi e botte (Plaudits and Thumps, 1918), the letters provide an open and often fascinating portrait of this sometimes physically challenged but deadly serious, energetic provincial intellectual. Boine’s turbulent personal life often mirrored the more general intellectual and political confusion of pre-Fascist Italy. Dead before he could outgrow his youthful enthusiasms, intransigencies, and follies, Boine is a writer whose attitudes seem adolescent. But they were typical of a moment of dissatisfaction with the existent order

ARRIGO BOITO and remain as fluid examples of the often inchoate and sometimes incoherent attempts at rebellion by an entire generation of dissatisfied young intellectuals and artists.

Essays

Biography

Letters

Born September 2, 1887, in Finale Marina, today Finale Ligure (Savona), a seaside town on the coast of Liguria. Educated in Genoa and then in Milan, where he studied philosophy with Gioacchino Volpe and became acquainted with Alessandro Casati, Clemente Rebora, Giovanni Amendola, and Antonio Banfi. While in Milan, contributed articles to Il Rinnovamento, a journal associated with the ‘‘modernist’’ religious movement that was later suppressed by the Catholic Church. After completing his studies in Milan, moved to Porto Maurizio (today Imperia) on the Ligurian coast, where he worked as a librarian, 1909. Wrote for La voce and became well-acquainted with its editor, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and for La Riviera ligure. Died of tuberculosis in Porto Maurizio (Imperia) on 16 May 1917. CHARLES KLOPP Selected Works Collections Scritti inediti, edited by Giorgio Bertone, Genoa: Il melangolo, 1977. Il peccato. Plausi e botte. Frantumi. Altri scritti, edited by Davide Puccini, Milan: Garzanti, 1983.

Fiction Il peccato ed altre cose, 1914.

Poetry ‘‘Frantumi seguiti da Plausi e botte,’’ 1918. ‘‘Frantumi. I materiali preparatori,’’ edited by Laura Gatti, 1998.

Discorsi militari, 1915. La ferita non chiusa, 1921; expanded edition by Mario Novaro, 1939. Esperienza religiosa, 1948. La citta`, 1994. Carteggio, edited by Margherita Marchione and S. Eugene Scalia, 4 vols., 1971–1979. Lettere – Letras (with Miguel de Unamuno), 1981.

Further Reading Aleramo, Sibilla, Il frustino, Milan: Mondadori, 1932. Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Giovanni Boine,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, vol. 5, Turin: UTET, 1994. Benevento, Aurelio, Primo Novecento: saggi su Giovanni Boine e Piero Jahier, Naples: Loffredo, 1986. Bertone, Giorgio, Il lavoro e la scrittura. Saggio in due tempi su Giovanni Boine, Genoa: Il melangolo, 1987. Cappellini, Milva Maria, ‘‘Il percorso di Giovanni Boine,’’ in Giovanni Boine, Esperienza religiosa, Turin: Aragno, 2000. Cassinelli, Giuseppe, Il tormento, la poesia, gli ulivi: note su Giovanni Boine, La riviera ligure e Mario Novaro, Bologna: M. Boni, 1981. Circeo, Ermanno, Ritratto di Boine ed altri saggi, Naples: Guida, 1974. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Alcuni fatti della lingua di Giovanni Boine,’’ in Varianti e altra linguistica, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Boine, Giovanni,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Turin: UTET, 1986. Luperini, Romano, Il novecento: apparati ideologici, ceto intellettuale, sistemi formali nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, 2 vols., Turin: Loescher, 1981. Raimondi, Ezio, Prime lezioni: Scipio Slataper, Giovanni Boine, edited by Andrea Battistini et al., Bologna: Pendragon, 2004. Rossani, Wolfgango, Tormento di Boine ed altri saggi, Bologna: Alfa, 1959. Viazzi, Glauco, ‘‘Boine nell’oralita` dell’epistolario,’’ in Belfagor, 38, no. 6 (1983): 621–644.

ARRIGO BOITO (1842–1918) A musician, poet, playwright, critic, and writer of short stories and librettos, Arrigo Boito was one of the most complex figures of Italian cultural life in the second half of the nineteenth century. In his

precocious operatic de´but as the poet and composer of Il quattro giugno (The Fourth of June, 1860) and Le sorelle d’Italia (Italy’s Sisters, 1861), he already demonstrated dissatisfaction with 271

ARRIGO BOITO contemporary Italian culture and a need for innovation. He was truly fascinated by the broader European artistic tradition. In the early years of his career—a period marked by his membership in the literary and artistic Milanese movement La Scapigliatura—Boito published a number of articles revealing his extraordinary erudition. An avid reader of a wide variety of literary genres, he admired and studied Dante, Shakespeare, and Victor Hugo throughout his life. The short-lived journal Figaro is the culmination of Boito’s passionate journalistic activity. It was founded by him with Emilio Praga in the beginning of 1864 and became the vanguard of La Scapigliatura’s critical view of Romanticism. Furthermore, Figaro advocated a greater openness toward European culture and reform in Italian opera. According to Boito, it was time to abandon the old operatic conventions because, ‘‘per far breccia nell’avvenire c’e` gran bisogno di pungere, di piegare, di crivellare’’ (in order to break through to the future, one needs to sting, bend, and prick) (‘‘Polemica letteraria,’’ Figaro, 4 February 1864), that is, to demolish all obstacles to innovation. Figaro also publicized the four principles Boito considered fundamental in operatic reform. To begin with, he believed in the complete abolition of the traditional opera formula, namely the aria, rondo`, cabaletta, stretta, ritornello, and pezzo concertato. Instead, he called for the creation of a new dramatic and musical form, free of genre conventions, and for the realization of the greatest tonal and rhythmic development presently possible. Finally, he demanded that the opera be the supreme incarnation of drama (‘‘Cronache dei teatri,’’ Figaro, 21 January 1864). Clearly, these are the very cornerstones of the Wagnerian operatic reform. Yet it cannot be said that Arrigo Boito was strictly an admirer of Wagner. In 1871, Boito wrote Ero e Leandro (Hero and Leander), a Mediterranean alternative to Tristan and Isolde, and, thus, came into direct conflict with the German composer. Then, having quickly abandoned this project, in 1875–1876, Boito wrote a crypto-parodist translation of the Nordic masterpiece in ‘‘i piu` infami versi che siano stati sputati da una penna’’ (the most infamous verses a pen ever scribbled), as he writes in a letter to Eleonora Duse dated 5 June 1888. A cultured man of elitist tastes, a Freemason, and an alchemist, Boito did his best to be misunderstood or even poorly understood by the public. As Angela Ida Villa has recently claimed, Boito’s polysemic works are usually based on esoteric plots 272

(‘‘Arrigo Boito teorico e poeta scapigliato,’’ 1994). Thus, there is much room for ambiguity and mischief in them, which serves the artist well in his conviction that art must be freed from moralistic assumptions. ‘‘Re Orso’’ (King Bear, 1864), for example, is a polymetric narrative poem recounting a sinister fable. The poet’s interest in a wide variety of written forms is revealed in a daring metric and lexical experimentalism, Gnosticism, and complex esoteric symbolism, typical for Boito. Yet, the elaborate form of Boito’s work is unfairly defined as ‘‘an ‘empty mould,’ an exercise of the most sophisticated craftsmanship,’’ by Mario Lavagetto (‘‘Introduzione’’ in A. Boito, Opere, 1979). At first, his short poem is criticized as too gratuitously eccentric, while later, it is believed to demonstrate the author’s intellectual experiments and a certain semantic flimsiness. The critical response to the collection of Boito’s best poems, Il libro dei versi (The Book of Verses, 1877), is identical to that of ‘‘Re Orso’’. The book includes ‘‘Dualismo’’ (Dualism, 1863), which is rich in images and coincidentia oppositorum. Learned Satanism, virulent anti-Catholicism, and Baroque realism come together in this poem. Moreover, ‘‘Dualismo’’ is a firmly anti-Romantic and anticlassicist work. A calculated distortion of figures and concepts leads to intentionally grotesque and ironic endings in a number of the poem’s sections. Moreover, these final lines also reveal the repeated use of aprosdoketon or the effect of scenic surprise. In this context, Boito’s lack of emotional involvement may be viewed as a weakness, but discarding his use of opposites as a mere intellectual amusement might be misleading. In his short stories ‘‘L’alfier nero’’ (The Black Bishop, 1867), ‘‘Iberia’’ (Iberia, 1868), ‘‘Il pugno chiuso’’ (The Closed Fist, 1870), ‘‘La musica in piazza’’ (Music in the Square, 1870–1871), and ‘‘Il trapezio’’ (The Trapeze, 1873–1874), Boito’s poetics is less violent but remains conceptually unchanged. Among those stories, ‘‘Iberia’’ stands out as an aesthetic forerunner of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s prose. Boito’s refined narration is carried out in a decadent style that brings out a mellow and dream-like sensuousness in the text. A story with a significant Templar-Gnostic substratum, ‘‘Iberia’’ ends with the birth of the Antichrist as a result of the alchemic unification of the two young protagonists. Thus, Boito concludes ‘‘Iberia’’ with a universal palingenesis. A distinct decadent style characterizes Boito’s theater as well. The only exception is ‘‘Le madri galanti’’ (The Amorous Mothers, 1863), a weak

ARRIGO BOITO bourgeois comedy written in collaboration with Emilio Praga. While the influence of the French pie`ce a` the`se is easily recognizable in it, this work echoes La Scapigliatura’s experimentalism only linguistically. Likewise, the link between Le madri galanti and Boito’s criticism of Alessandro Manzoni’s use of language is rather superficial. A few years later, Amleto (Hamlet, 1865), a libretto-like adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, was a success. At the opening night, Boito improvised a Sapphic ode, making a toast ‘‘alla salute dell’Arte Italiana! / perche´ la scappi fuora un momentino / dalla cerchia del vecchio e del cretino / giovane e sana’’ (to the health of Italian art! / that it may escape, if just for a moment, / the circles of the old and of the idiots, / and remain young and genuine). Thus, the poet offended Giuseppe Verdi, who broke all relations with him even though the two had written Inno delle Nazioni (The Hymn of Nations, 1862) together only three years before. This bright phase in Boito’s career ended in 1868 with the fiasco of Mefistofele (Mephistopheles) at La Scala in Milan. A synthesis of Goethe’s Faust, this work was intended to be the application of Boito’s theory on reforming opera. As usual, the poetic text is based on esoteric ideas. It, furthermore, reveals the author’s experiments with classical prosody, which were later used by Giosue` Carducci as well. In 1875, Mefistofele was revised and put on stage again in Bologna. Still, after the opera’s initial debacle, Boito preferred to sign his works with the anagram-pseudonym Tobia Gorrio. In the following years, his dramatic works often followed a pattern: The plot was always extravagant while the characters were psychologically abstract. The Gnostic idea of the alchemic wedding of the protagonists also invariably added an esoteric level to the text. Finally, the writing style revealed a restless to and fro between innovation and ironic insertions of conventional structures. Not devoid of esoteric allusions, Boito’s lyrical comedies differ in tone from the rest of his dramatic works. For example, in Ira`m and Basi e bote (Kisses and Blows in Venetian dialect), which were written between 1879 and 1881, Boito finds an expression for his exceptional humoristic talent. During this time he also reconciles with Verdi and writes two libretto masterpieces, namely Otello (Othello, 1887) and Falstaff (1893). It is for these works that Arrigo Boito is best known. Shakespeare was also the starting point of Boito’s stormy artistic and sentimental liaison with actress Eleonora Duse, for whom he translated and adapted Anthony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth.

Immediately after Verdi’s death, Boito published Nerone (Nero, 1901), the ultimate realization of the poet’s artistic journey. Boito worked on it for over 40 years, and this opera embodies his talent for the theatrical, his dramatic and intellectual impulse, and his endless research of aesthetics and esoteric ideas as a foundation for his work. A scrupulous historical reconstruction of imperial Rome, subtly balancing modernity and antiquity, Nerone reveals more than a simple touch of selfirony. It was performed posthumously in 1924 at La Scala, directed by Arturo Toscanini.

Biography Enrico Giuseppe Giovanni Boito was born in Padua, on February 24, 1842. His father, Silvestro, was a painter who died in 1856. His mother, Jo´zefa Karenicka-Radolieska, a Polish countess, died in 1859. Boito was first schooled in Venice. From 1853 to 1861 he studied at the Conservatory of Milan, and then traveled, meeting Verdi, Gounod, and other musicians in Paris. In 1862, he returned to Italy, settled down in Milan, and joined the Scapigliatura movement. In 1866, he fought under the command of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Among his friends at the time were Victor Hugo, Antonio Fogazzaro, Giovanni Verga, Camille Bellaigue, and Arturo Toscanini. Had an affair with actress Eleonora Duse in 1887–1888. In 1890–1891, was appointed honorary director of the Parma Conservatory. He frequently traveled in Italy and Europe. In 1893, he was awarded an honorary degree in music by Cambridge University, England. In 1912, he became a senator of the Italian Kingdom. Died in Milan, June 10, 1918, from angina pectoris. EMANUELE D’ANGELO Selected Works Collections Tutti gli scritti, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1942. Opere, edited by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Poesie e racconti, edited by Rodolfo Quadrelli, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Opere letterarie, edited by Angela Ida Villa, Milan: IPL, 1996.

Poetry ‘‘Inno delle Nazioni,’’ 1862. ‘‘Re Orso,’’ 1864; other editions, 1873, 1877, 1902. ‘‘Il libro dei versi,’’ 1877; new edition, 1902.

Opera Il quattro giugno, 1860. Le sorelle d’Italia, 1861.

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ARRIGO BOITO Mefistofele, 1868; new edition, 1875; as Mefistofele, translated by Theophilus Marzials, 1880; 1920. Nerone, 1901; new edition, 1924.

Libretti Amleto, 1865; new edition, 1871. Un tramonto, 1873. La falce, 1875. La gioconda, 1876; new edition, 1880; as La gioconda, translated by Henry Hersee, 1883. Ero e Leandro, 1879; new edition, 1896; as Ero e Leandro, translated by Mowbray Marras, 1896. Otello, 1887; as Otello, translated by Francis Hueffer, 1887; translated by Walter Ducloux, 1963; in Giuseppe Verdi, Seven Verdi Librettos, translated by William Weaver, 1973. Pier Luigi Farnese, 1891. Falstaff, 1893; as Falstaff, translated by William Beatty Kingston, 1894; in Giuseppe Verdi, Seven Verdi Librettos, translated by William Weaver, 1973; translated by Andrew Porter, 1979. Basi e bote, 1914. Ira`m, edited by Piero Nardi, 1942. Semira, edited by Piero Nardi, 1942.

Plays Le madri galanti, 1863 (with Emilio Praga).

Fiction L’alfier nero, 1867. Iberia, 1868. Il pugno chiuso, 1870. La musica in piazza, 1870–1871 Il trapezio, 1873–1874

Translations Richard Wagner, Rienzi, 1869. Richard Wagner, La cena degli apostoli, 1872. Michail Glinka, Ruslano e Ludmilla, 1875. Richard Wagner, Tristano e Isotta, 1876; new edition, 1888 (with Angelo Zanardini). William Shakespeare, Antonio e Cleopatra, edited by Laura Vazzoler, 1973.

William Shakespeare, Giulietta e Romeo, edited by Laura Vazzoler, 1984. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, edited by Laura Vazzoler, 1984.

Letters Lettere, edited by Raffaello De Rensis, 1932. Lettere inedite e poesie giovanili, edited by Frank Walker, 1959. Carteggio Verdi-Boito, edited by Mario Medici and Marcello Conati, 1978; as The Verdi-Boito Correspondence, translated by William Weaver, 1994. Lettere d’amore (to Eleonora Duse), edited byRaul Radice, 1979.

Further Reading Ashbrook, William, and Gerardo Guccini, Mefistofele di Arrigo Boito, Milan: Ricordi, 1998. D’Angelo, Emanuele, ‘‘Il Tristan und Isolde di Boito,’’ in Ero e Leandro: Tragedia lirica in due atti di Arrigo Boito, edited by Emanuele D’Angelo, Bari: Palomar, 2004. Farinelli, Giuseppe, ‘‘Arrigo Boito (1842–1918),’’ in La Scapigliatura: Profilo storico, protagonisti, documenti, Rome: Carocci Editore, 2003. Lavagetto, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione’’ in Arrigo Boito, in Opere, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Maeder, Costantino, Il real fu dolore e l’ideal sogno: Arrigo Boito e i limiti dell’arte, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2002. Morelli, Giovanni (editor), Arrigo Boito, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Nardi, Piero, Vita di Arrigo Boito, Milan: Mondadori, 1942. Tintori, Giampiero (editor), Arrigo Boito musicista e letterato, Milan: Nuove Edizioni, 1986. Villa, Angela Ida, ‘‘Arrigo Boito massone, gnostico, alchimista, negromante,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 3–4 (1992): 5–51. Villa, Angela Ida, ‘‘Arrigo Boito teorico e poeta scapigliato,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 2 (1994): 135–195.

CAMILLO BOITO (1836–1914) The intellectual figure Camillo Boito must be characterized by diverse descriptions—designer-architect, teacher, art and literary critic—which are all united by an extraordinary capacity to observe the contemporary world. Accused of being superficial and eclectic, in reality Boito was able to understand the complexities and varied nature of his own times. His skill in describing and analyzing the 274

real meanings of the contemporary world are illustrated in his theoretic works. The cultural activity he carried out, along with his teaching and research in history and theory, exceeded the limits of his architectural production. Opposing the tired eclecticism prevalent in Italian architecture of the time, which he considered to be an evident consequence of the deterioration of Romanticism, he strongly

CAMILLO BOITO advocated a renewal of the Italian architectural culture. Boito intended to highlight what are for him the fundamental components in architecture, which he defines as ‘‘the organic part and the symbolic part,’’ meaning with the first the logical framework that is dependent upon distributive and functional qualities as well as to the structural and material elements of the building, and meaning with the symbolic part the aesthetic qualities of the architecture. His didactic activity was long and constant, both at the Brera Academy in Milan— of which he became president, remaining in this capacity up until his death—and at the Polytechnic Institute, where he taught for 43 consecutive years, first teaching history of architecture, then embossment and restoration, and later style and finally architecture. Boito was present and often even arbitrator in almost all the most important architectural debates of the united Italy: from the competition for the new fac¸ade of the Cathedral of Milan to the events for the completion of the Cathedral of Florence, from the monument dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II to the Justice Building of Rome. In the field of restoration, Boito emphasized respect for history, meaning reverence for the formal stratifications caused by the successive epochs of the same building. His stance clearly differed from that of Viollet-le-Duc and of John Ruskin as it supported the conservation and absolute respect for the monument as historic testimony as well as a product of a specific style. He proposed discreet interventions that provided for consolidation and, in the most difficult cases, reparation with different materials with the intent, however, to not alter the appearance of the work. He also collaborated with art and cultural journals; from 1865 to 1899 he was involved with the artistic and literary review for Nuova Antologia, and he periodically wrote for L’Illustrazione Italiana; his writings about various topics, including literary and musical subjects, appeared in Lo Spettatore. He attributed a noteworthy importance to the minor arts, teaching them and editing several volumes about them, but above all directing the journal Arte italiana decorativa e industriale, from July 1892 until the last issue in December 1911. Unique in its kind in Italy, this journal was for more than a decade among the first European journals to provide graphic models for industry. Boito’s narrative experience, though marginal with respect to his overall cultural production, reveals an authentic writing ability. In his first volume, Storielle vane (Vain Little Stories, 1876), seven short stories, pictorial in nature, recall the

atmosphere of the Milanese Scapigliatura; the taste for the fantastic and the macabre is accompanied by a vivacious interest for the visual arts and for the figure of the artist, often the protagonist of the narrated action. His second volume, Senso. Nuove storielle vane (Senso and Other Stories, 1883) is a more mature writing effort that demonstrates how the verismo movement influenced his new manner of narrating. His most famous novella, Senso, is in some ways a small masterpiece: It recounts, with force and coherence, the story of an unprincipled and cruel noblewoman, the lover of a cynical Austrian officer, with the Venice of the historical crisis of the wars of independence in the background. In 1953, the director Luchino Visconti adapted this work into the celebrated film of the same name, which accentuates the climate of bitter decadence. In the short story, Il maestro di setticlavio (The Master of the Setticlavio), published in Nuova Antologia in 1891, Boito nostalgically elicits the Venetian musical life of his childhood and introduces several autobiographical elements from his youth spent in the lagoon city where, together with his brother, he received a good musical education.

Biography Born in Rome on October 30, 1836, oldest of two brothers (Arrigo) of Silvestro and the Polish Countess Giuseppina Raolinska; at the age of 14, frequented courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice with professors Francesco Lazzari and Pietro Selvatico, where in 1856 was appointed adjunct faculty member in the Department of Architecture; in 1860, became full professor in architecture at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Brera in Milan, which he held until 1909; also taught at the Politecnico from 1862 to 1908; in 1862, married his cousin Cecilia Guillaume and, in 1887, Madonnina Malaspina of the Marchionesses of Portogruaro; enjoyed a long activity as a designer, participating in important competitions, such as that for the job of the square of the Cathedral in Milan; in 1861, restored the Pusterla of Porta Ticinese in Milan; in 1965, constructed the new cemetery of Gallarate and, from 1873 to 1880, executed three demanding works in Padova: the Debite palace, the entrance and staircase of the Civic Museum, and the elementary schools of the Reggia Carrarese; in 1882 in Venice, completed the large staircase in the Cavalli Franchetti palace with precious materials in the neoGothic style; worked at length on Donatello’s altar in Saint Anthony’s Basilica in Padova, where in 1895 also designed the bronze doors; last work 275

CAMILLO BOITO was the Casa di riposo for musicians, desired by Giuseppe Verdi, completed in Milan in 1899; as a narrator Boito published numerous short stories and travel journals; died in Milan on June 28, 1914. MARIA IDA BIGGI Selected Works Fiction Storielle vane, 1876. Senso. Nuove storielle vane, 1883; edited by Piero Nardi, 1961; Senso and Other Stories, translated by Christine Donaugher, 1993. Il maestro di setticlavio, 1891.

Art Writing I restauri e la ricchezza dell’arte vecchia a Verona e a Padova, in Nuova Antologia, June 1873. Architettura del Medio Evo in Italia, 1880. Gite d’un artista, 1884. I restauratori, 1884.

Questioni pratiche di Belle Arti, 1893. I principi del disegno e gli stili dell’ornamento, 1910.

Further Reading Agosti, Giacomo, and Costanza Mangione (editors), Camillo Boito e il sistema delle arti, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2002. Borlenghi, Aldo, Narrativa dell’Ottocento, Milan: Goliardica, 1961. Castellani, Francesca, and Guido Zucconi (editors), Camillo Boito, un’architettura per l’Italia unita, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Crippa, Maria Antonietta (editor), Camillo Boito: Il nuovo e l’antico in architettura, Milan: Jaca Books, 1989. Grassi, Liliana, Camillo Boito, Milan: Il Balcone, 1956. Maderna, Marco, Camillo Boito: pensiero sull’architettura e dibattito coevo, Milan: Guerini, 1995. Nardi, Piero, ‘‘Camillo Boito narratore,’’ in Lettere italiane, 11, no. 2 (1959): 217–223. Zucconi, Guido, and Tiziana Serena (editors), Camillo Boito: un protagonista dell’Ottocento italiano, Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 2002.

BOLOGNA The chief city of the Emilia Romagna region, Bologna bases much of its own cultural image on the role played by a nine-century-old university, among the oldest in Europe, which from its beginnings develops the study of grammar, rhetoric, and legal research. Between the twelfth and thirteenth century, the dictatores, the initiators of the exegesis of the Justinian Corpus iuris, and the theoretical systematization of the law, made Bologna into the European capital of jurisprudence. Among these theorists are Irnerio, Adalberto Samaritano, and Ugo da Bologna. Meanwhile, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, an intense effort began to translate the classics into the vernacular, which was thereby elevated into a complex language and form. There emerged a group of rhymers, among whom stand out Onesto da Bologna and Guido Guinizzelli, one of the initiators of the Stilnovo. In the first decades of the fourteenth century, Bologna became one of the centers of Dante scholarship, with the commentaries of Graziolo de’ Bambagliuoli on the Inferno and especially those of Iacopo della Lana on the entire Commedia. However, there occurred a 276

profound crisis in the university, which was shaken by internal ideological disagreements and by the repression directed by the church, even during the Avignon captivity, against any theoretical and scientific innovation. Later, it was Cardinal Egidio Albornoz who would restore the fortunes of the studio by establishing the Department of Theology and encouraging the opening of the colleges to host foreign students (among them the Collegio di Spagna, founded in 1364 and still active today). Legal studies, along with grammar and rhetoric, also began to flourish again, now imbued with the doctrine of Petrarch and Boccaccio. One famous teacher of the period was Benvenuto da Imola, a pupil of Petrarch and one of the principal commentators on the Commedia. The transition from the Comune to the Signoria in 1401, with the definitive supremacy of the Bentivoglio family in 1454, saw first another decline in the university’s fame, and then the growth of a profound work of renewal that led to the flowering of ‘‘academic humanism,’’ in which exegetes and scholars such as Antonio Urceo detto Codro,

BOLOGNA Francesco dal Pozzo, and Filippo Beroaldo Senior and Junior emerged. Along with Latin, room was given to culture in the vernacular, supported by the patronage of the Bentivoglios. Out of this setting came the Porretane (1483), by Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (ca. 1445–1510), a collection of 61 novelle narrated by members of the nobility at Porretta over five days in 1475. In addition, an intense publishing industry developed, sustained by the university demands and the cultural policies of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, who had numerous printing presses running in Bologna, and that included among its most noteworthy products Ptolemy’s Cosmography, along with texts on law and medicine. With the end of the Bentivoglios in 1506, and the definitive return of the church, Bologna’s phase of humanistic civilization came to an end. The cultural models changed in the sixteenth century. Family-run typographical enterprises were set up that diffuse classical and humanistic texts, treatises on law, philosophical and scientific works, and texts on Christianity, but also those popularizing heterodox doctrines, which are consequently subject to rigorous control in the age of the CounterReformation. During the first half of the 1500s, the debate between Latin and the vernacular, of whether or not to adopt the Ciceronian model, remained alive. In the middle of the sixteenth century, various literary academies were born, though they did not produce any important achievements. On the other hand, the theater was rather lively, in the form of the public festivals organized on the occasion of solemn events, often with the staging of comedies, as in 1530 with Agostino Ricchi’s I tre tiranni (The Three Tyrants) for the coronation of Charles V. But it is above all the piazza festivals (like the famous Porchetta), the jousts, and the tournaments that animated Bolognese life. The decline of legal studies corresponded to the growth of philosophical, historical, geographical, and scientific interests, above all with Pietro Pomponazzi’s De Immortalitate animae (On the Immortality of the Soul, 1516), Leandro Alberti’s monumental Descrittione di tutta Italia (A Description of All of Italy, 1550), as well as Carlo Sigonio (an investigator of antiquity) and Ulisse Aldrovandi, the founder of a rich museum and botanical garden (1568) and the creator of an observatory that opened the path for the Galilean method. However, at the beginning of the seventeenth century an ecclesiastical restoration mobilized against this scientific method, and provoked another period of crisis for the university. This crisis notwithstanding,

individual personalities were still able to take shape, such as the doctor and biologist Marcello Malpighi (1628–1694). Various academies emerged as a counterweight to the declining university, among them, in the scientific field, that of the Inquieti (1690), and later the Accademia delle Scienze (1711). Furthermore, the literary, musical, and artistic academies endured; musical drama and oratorios achieved great success; and a literary trend emerged that had its benchmark in the Accademia dei Gelati and in the figure of Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625), without, however, elevating itself to the level of a school. Bologna remained, therefore, within the limits of a provincialism that is little inclined to new experimentation, and that preserved the poetic heritage of a prudent moralistic classicism. Ultimately, the most prominent figure was Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609), the author of Bertoldo (1606) and Bertoldino (1608), a witty testimony of the daily life of the lower classes. At the other end of the century, important cultural experimentation found expression in the stage setting and theatrical architecture choreographed by the brothers Ferdinando and Francesco Bibiena, the founders of a dynasty that imposed all throughout Europe the model of the scenography ‘‘seen from an angle’’ that is able to create illusionary effects. In Bologna, the Arcadia found an active representative in the lyric poet and playwright Pier Jacopo Martello (1665–1727), who proposed a modern form of versification (the heptasyllabic instead of the free hendecasyllables) that was inspired by the French alexandrine. The theater was still a considerable presence in the second half of the eighteenth century: The count Francesco Albergati Capacelli, a cultured amateur and supporter of democratic ideals, enjoyed relations with Carlo Goldoni, Vittorio Alfieri, Giuseppe Baretti, and Carlo Gozzi, but above all with Voltaire. In a city controlled by the church, however, the culture of the Enlightenment was not able to penetrate effectively; the literature of this period was barely touched by new ideas. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that there was in Bologna a true cultural flowering, which coincided with the appointment of the university chair of Italian literature to Giosue` Carducci in 1860. Thanks to Carducci’s teaching, Bologna became the intellectual capital of Italy. Two classical licei (high schools) were established (Galvani and Minghetti), whose role was the formation of the new ruling class. The publishing house Zanichelli opened in 1866, and became another Carduccian 277

BOLOGNA place: It was not simply a commercial enterprise, but a true literary caffe`. In 1887, along with Carducci’s Odi barbare (The Barbarian Odes), there came out the erotic collection Postuma by Lorenzo Stecchetti, a pseudonym of Olindo Guerrini (1845– 1916), the first of the poets of the Carduccian school, which boasted many other authors, among whom is noted Enrico Panzacchi, an intellectual with multiple interests (music, painting, poetry). When Carducci died, his university chair passed in 1905 to his most famous pupil, Giovanni Pascoli, who, just as ideologically committed as his teacher, marked out another path that was decisive for the image of modern Bologna and of Italian literature, through a poetics that foreshadows later stylistic and formal experimentations. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the progressive decline of the Carduccian school, the cultural primacy of Bologna ceased to exist, though the city did generate novelists such as Adolfo Albertazzi and Alfredo Panzini and poets such as Renato Serra. The university was no longer the undisputed center of the city’s intellectual life, and its function was replaced by periodicals and cultural journalism. Among the many newspapers were La raccolta, founded in 1919 by Giuseppe Raimondi, which opposed Futurism, and Il resto del Carlino, which was established in 1885 but expanded into a national daily under the management of Mario Missiroli between 1919 and 1921. In a period of social tension and postwar crisis, Il resto del Carlino maintained its terza pagina (third page) open to intellectuals such as Georges Sorel, Piero Gobetti, Adriano Tilgher, Benedetto Croce, Filippo Turati, and Claudio Treves. It was a brief season that was harshly snuffed out by the advent of Fascism and by the expulsion of Missiroli. The subsequent cultural journalism boasted titles such as L’Italiano (1926) of Leo Longanese, balanced between provincialism and refined intellectual presences; Vita Nova (1925), founded by the Fascist Leandro Arpinati; L’orto (1931), born under the influence of journalist and politician Giuseppe Bottai, which became training ground for young intellectuals. Fascism welcomed the adherence of classicist academics, but intellectual autonomy was restricted. Still, prestigious figures were able to emerge: the philosopher Rodolfo Mondolfo, the jurist Arturo Carlo Jemolo, the art historian Roberto Longhi. But the racial laws of 1938 practically emptied out the university, which was populated by teachers and students of Jewish descent. The 278

students belonging to the Gruppo Universitario Fascista (GUF) nevertheless reacted to the widespread conformism through the pages of Architrave (1940), a journal that openly rejected the denigration of contemporary art and poetry, before it was shut down by the regime. Also in 1942, under the group name ‘‘Antonio Labriola,’’ a political-cultural initiative was born whose mouthpiece was the journal Tempi nuovi, which, at the height of the world conflict, advocated social, economic, and cultural changes. This initiative failed nevertheless in the immediate postwar period, with the advent of a city government formed by leftists who lacked a broad vision for the future. During the 1950s, there was a profound renewal that extended beyond politics. Catholic culture produced a Centro di Documentazione (1952), which was later transformed into the Istituto per le Scienze Religiose (1960), and into the journal Il Regno. In 1951, the first number of the periodical Il Mulino came out, the work of a group of young university intellectuals who, three years later, created the eponymous publishing house and who introduced into political culture the innovations of sociological, anthropological, and economic studies. Among the founders were Antonio Santucci, Luigi Pedrazzi, and Nicola Matteucci. Later, they will include Ezio Raimondi and Gino Guigni, who shared secular and Catholic reformist visions, and established a dialogue with the Catholic antiFascism parliamentarian Giuseppe Dossetti. In the meantime, Il resto del Carlino refurbished its own image under the leadership of the liberal Mazzinian Giovanni Spadolini (1955–1968). The reinvigoration of Bolognese culture during the second half of the twentieth century was also attested to by other publishing houses (Cappelli, Nuova Alfa, CLUEB Pa`tron), as well as the glorious Zanichelli. But it was still the cultural journals that signaled an intellectual commitment, which existed side-by-side with a reorganization of the university into close harmony with the city’s policies: Opinione (1956), Il Verri of Luciano Anceschi (originally established in Milan in 1956), Rendiconti (1961), Lingua e stile (1966), Impegno presente (1960), Classe e Stato (1965), and more recently, Intersezioni (1981). These publications give space to the neoavant-garde, linguistic structuralism, semiology, as well as new philosophical and psychoanalytical trends, and Marxist political intellectuals. Among the many writers (several are university professors) who regularly contribute are Alberto Arbasino,

BOLOGNA Umberto Eco, Renato Barilli, Alfredo Giuliani, Angelo Guglielmi, and Gianni Celati. Therefore journals became a vital component of Italian culture, in particular Officina, a bimonthly of poetry founded by Roberto Roversi, Francesco Leonetti, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, which is published by the antiquarian bookstore Palmaverde (owned by Roversi himself), a veritable workshop of poetic apprenticeship situated in a street with a prophetic name: Via de’ Poeti. Officina carries a spirit of renewal that is opposed both to the official nineteenth-century tradition and to postwar neorealism, whose theoretical failure it denounced. Its declared ‘‘new task’’ begins with the cultural modification of reality in order to erase the distance between writer and society, between politics and culture. Its contributors include Carlo Emilio Gadda, Franco Fortini, Paolo Volponi, Alberto Moravia, Italo Calvino, and Leonardo Sciascia. In this climate of a cultural city-laboratory (which also comprises sociologist Achille Ardigo`, economists Romano Prodi and Beniamino Andreatta, psychologists Renzo Canestrari and Gianfranco Minguzzi), the 1970s witnessed the inauguration of one of the most advanced academic curricula undertakings in Italy: the DAMS (Discipline delle Arti, della Musica, e dello Spettacolo), inspired by the work of the Greek scholar Benedetto Marzullo. It is an atypical institution in the field of humanistic studies, based on a project that merges the many languages of contemporary neoexperimentation and mass media, while promoting a renovation of traditional methodologies. Alfredo Giuliani, Umberto Eco, Furio Colombo, Renato Barilli, Gianni Celati, and Gianni Riotta are some of the intellectuals brought to teach there, alongside directors (Luigi Squarzina), musicologists and musicians (Luigi Rognoni, Roberto Leydi, Aldo Clementi), theater and film critics (Fabrizio Cruciani, Claudio Meldolesi, Giuliano Scabia, Adelio Ferrero), to name only a few. Thanks to DAMS as well, the cultural profile of Bologna changed radically during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Not only for the flowering of new enterprises, above all in the theater and the cinema, but for establishing in 1974 the regional Istituto per i Beni Artistici, Culturali e Naturali (IBC), which, among other things, produced during the 1980s a research project on the eighteenthcentury Emilia Romagna. Beginning in 1988, with a series of multidisciplinary initiatives on the occasion of the ninth centenary of the university, the relationship between the city and the academy was

consolidated and culminated in the choice of Bologna, along with eight other cities selected by the European Community, as the European city of culture in the year 2000. DANIELE SERAGNOLI Further Reading Ady, Cecilia M., I Bentivoglio, Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1968. Anselmi, Gian Mario, and Alberto Bertoni, ‘‘L’Emilia e la Romagna,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. Storia e Geografia, vol. 3, L’eta` contemporanea, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Avellini, Luisa, ‘‘Cultura e societa` in Emilia Romagna,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall’Unita` a oggi. L’EmiliaRomagna, edited by Roberto Finzi, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Avellini, Luisa et al. (editors), Sapere e/e potere. Discipline, dispute e professioni nell’Universita` medievale e moderna: il caso bolognese a confronto, Atti del 4 Convegno, Bologna, 13–15 aprile 1989, 3 vols., Bologna: ComuneIstituto per la Storia di Bologna, 1991. Basile, Bruno (editor), Bentivolorum magnificentia: principe e cultura a Bologna nel Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Berselli, Aldo (editor), Storia dell’Emilia Romagna, 3 vols., Imola: University Press Bologna, 1975–1980. Berselli, Aldo (editor), Editoria e Universita` a Bologna tra Ottocento e Novecento, Atti del 5 Convegno, Bologna, 26–27 gennaio 1990, Bologna: Comune-Istituto per la Storia di Bologna, 1991. Calore, Marina, Bologna a teatro: vita di una citta` attraverso i suoi spettacoli 1400–1800, Bologna: Guidicini e Rosa, 1981. Capitani, Ovidio et al. (editors), L’Universita` a Bologna, 2 vols., Bologna: Cassa di Risparmio, 1987–1988. Cremante, Renzo, and Walter Tega (editors), Scienza e letteratura nella cultura del Settecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Regioni e letteratura,’’ in Storia d’Italia. I documenti, vol. 2, edited by Ruggiero Romano, and Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Fasoli, Gina, and Mario Saccenti (editors), Carducci a Bologna, Bologna: Cassa di Risparmio, 1985. Federzoni, Luigi, Bologna carducciana, Bologna: Cappelli, 1961. Ferrarotti, Franco, and John Fraser, Pci e intellettuali a Bologna in Studi sul rapporto cultura e societa`, edited by Franco Ferrarotti, vol. 4, Naples: Liguori, 1982. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Officina.’’ Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni cinquanta, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Lenzi, Deanna, and Jadranka Bentini (editors), I Bibiena. Una famiglia europea, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Malatesta, Maria, ‘‘Il Resto del Carlino.’’ Potere politica ed economia a Bologna dal 1885 al 1922, Parma: Guanda, 1978. Oldrini, Guido, and Walter Tega (editors), Filosofia e scienza a Bologna tra il 1860 e il 1920, Bologna: Cappelli, 1990.

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BOLOGNA Piana, Celestino, Nuovi documenti sull’Universita` di Bologna e sul Collegio di Spagna, Bologna: Publicaciones del Real Colegio de Espan˜a, 1976. Raimondi, Ezio, Codro e l’Umanesimo a Bologna, Bologna: Zuffi, 1950. Ricci, Giovanni, Bologna, Bari: Laterza, 1985. Saccenti, Mario (editor), Carducci e la letteratura italiana. Studi per il centocinquantenario della nascita di Giosue` Carducci, Atti del Convegno di Bologna, 11–12–13 ottobre 1985, Padua: Antenore, 1988.

Sorbelli, Albano, I Bentivoglio: signori di Bologna, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969; rpt. 1987. Tega, Walter (editor), Storia illustrata di Bologna, 8 vols., Repubblica di San Marino: AIEP Editore, 1987–1991. Trezzini, Lamberto (editor), Due secoli di vita musicale: storia del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, 2 vols., Bologna: Alfa, 1966. Verti, Roberto, Il Teatro Comunale di Bologna, Milan: Electa, 1998. Zangheri, Renato (editor), Bologna, Bari: Laterza, 1986.

MAURO BOLOGNINI (1922–2001) Italian criticism quickly included Mauro Bolognini in the ranks (often reviled and, in any case, regarded with suspicion) of the formalists. An architect with a degree in stage design from the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, as well as an assistant director in Italy and France, Bolognini never showed off his own cultural credentials. He started modestly as an assistant to Luigi Zampa in 1948 and then debuted working on lightweight comedies in the early 1950s. His first film was Ci troviamo in galleria (Let’s Meet on the Balcony, 1953), but he refused to cultivate the shameless vulgarity of the traditional comedies, unlike the cinematic hirelings. It was only in 1959 that he began attracting attention, under the banner of literature. Bolognini is credited for revealing to the Italian cinema the talent of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose ‘‘scandalous’’ first novel, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955), about the life of the underclasses inhabiting the Roman slums, is at the root of La notte brava (Night Heat), with a screenplay by the writer himself, while the following year, Alberto Moravia’s Racconti romani (Roman Tales, 1954) offer the subject matter for La giornata balorda (A Crazy Day), scripted by Pasolini and Moravia himself. They are two stories of wild young boys in search of a future, set among Rome’s working class and subproletariat. They are tragic characters in their atavistic indolence and sullen bluster, which Bolognini transfers to the screen with great accuracy, with a kind of pictorial complacency and great narrative sharpness that certainly border on formalism but which do not themselves constitute formalism. They, rather, attest to the commitment—both 280

cultural and ideological—of an intellectual who strives to practice cinema with a close realistic gaze filtered through the rigor of the production (the precise portrayal of characters and of setting, suggestive photography, a constantly monitored rhythm that never becomes an end in itself). This commitment, which is of entirely literary descent, is far from the neorealist movement that had just come to an end, and is inclined toward the subtle pleasures of classicism. The dry, immediate, often brutal realism that imposes itself on the glorious path of postwar Italian cinema is not congenial to him: He cannot tolerate the simplistic manipulation and flavor of raw discovery of the world, which cannot but conflict with his temperament as a patient lover of order. Bolognini’s films would not always be so rigorous (the industry has demands that are not easily reconciled with artists’ fidelity to their own inspiration). This occurred on at least five occasions, all tributaries of literature (like a great deal of the director’s filmography). They are five little gems, which are adapted from a sarcastic novel by Vitaliano Brancati about the sexual obsessions of an impotent southern male, Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, 1960); from a novel by the more cynical Moravia focused on a boy’s sentimental education, Agostino (1962); from a naturalistic story by Mario Pratesi, a minor Tuscan writer of the nineteenth century, La viaccia (The Lovemakers, 1961); from one of the most lucidly existential masterpieces of Italo Svevo, Senilita` (As a Man Grows Older, 1962); and, finally, from an ambitious novel by Vasco Pratolini— almost a social panorama—that the director envelops in the luminous Florentine atmosphere of the

MAURO BOLOGNINI beginning of the twentieth century, at the time of the first great trade-union struggles, Metello (1970). All are shot in black-and-white, with the exception of the last, whose figurative look is inspired by the paintings of the Florentine artistic movement named macchiaioli. All disclose a cultivated feeling for the visual portrayals of certain Italian cities and landscapes. They are all portraits of men who are suffering, inept, or wounded by destiny: Masks or marionettes of a life—of a society, a psychology—that are in danger at every step of losing their way in the attempt to gain, or to brush up against, freedom. Beneath the veneer of a severe classicism there rumbles an indefinable disquiet—a hidden neurosis, one might say. The wretched and mocked protagonist of Il bell’Antonio, played by Marcello Mastroianni, hides within himself a malaise that gives a meaning to the clinical case that is the object of Brancati’s satire. The precocious nastiness depicting the sexual and intellectual awakening of the young boy Agostino, who, neglected by his mother, gives in to the temptation of adventure— a piece of moralism that recalls Vittorio De Sica’s I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1944)—proves to be something more than an initiation into adult life. Similarly in La viaccia, Bolognini’s clever cinematic reconstruction of ‘‘time lost’’ unfolds the story of a peasant family from Tuscany shattered in the clash between country and city, between patriarchal styles of life and those of the ascending bourgeois class. Although La viaccia does not transcend the limits of a small melodrama, Bolognini’s polished presentation of the portrait of the defenseless Emilio and of a gray, uninviting Trieste at the center of Svevo’s Senilita` (1898) often comes close to the bitterness of an irremediable desperation. Even though it is rougher and brighter, less enclosed within a neurotic introspection, the pathos-filled panorama of Metello denounces, at each turn of the story, the plight of characters condemned to struggle each day to hold onto the improbable thread of their proletarian existence. This, perhaps, is Bolognini’s narrative leitmotif. This is the reason for his successes, as of his failed attempts: from Bubu` (1971), Gran Bollito (Black Journal, 1977) to La venexiana (The Venetian Woman, 1981), La villa del venerdı` (In Excess, 1992); and of his search for difficult themes as in Fatti di gente per bene (The Murri Affair, 1974), Libera, amore mio...! (Libera, My Love, 1975), Per le antiche scale (Down the Ancient Stairs, 1975), and L’eredita` Ferramonti (The Inheritance, 1976).

For Bolognini, filmmaking means being always in a condition of extreme freedom. Sometimes freedom, however tenaciously sought, does not let itself be captured—because it is too elusive, or too remote from the director’s temperament.

Biography Born in Pistoia, 28 June 1922. Studied architecture at the University of Florence; then attended the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, section of art direction. Worked as assistant director in Italy and in France, 1948–1952; awarded the Golden Sail for Il bell’ Antonio at the Festival of Locarno, 1960; and for the best director at the Festival of St. Sebastian for Senilita`, 1962; directed Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome, 1964; prize for the best director for Madamigella di Maupin at the Festival of St. Sebastian, 1966; directed Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, 1972; special Jury Prize at the Locarno Film Festival for Per le antiche scale, 1975; directed Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Teatro Romano in Verona, 1975; worked for RAI, the national Italian television (operas and miniseries) 1977–1995; member of the Jury of the Festival of Cannes, 1985; awarded the Ecumenical Jury Prize for Mosca addio at the Montre´al Film Festival, 1987; directed Luigi Pirandello’s I giganti della montagna at the Valle dei Templi in Agrigento, 1989; Franc¸ois Truffaut award at the Giffoni Film Festival, 1990; David di Donatello for career achievement, 1999. Died in Rome on 14 May 2001. CRISTINA BRAGAGLIA Selected Works Films Ci troviamo in galleria, 1953. Gli innamorati, 1955. Giovani mariti, 1958. La notte brava (Night Heat, based on the novel Ragazzi di vita by Pier Paolo Pasolini), 1959. Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio, based on Vitaliano Brancati’s novel), 1960. La giornata balorda (A Crazy Day or From a Roman Balcony, based on Racconti romani by Alberto Moravia), 1960. La viaccia (The Lovemakers, based on the novel L’eredita` by Mario Pratesi), 1961. Agostino (based on Alberto Moravia’s novel), 1962. Senilita` (Senilita` or Careless, based on Italo Svevo’s novel), 1962. Madamigella di Maupin (based on The´ophile Gautier’s novel), 1966. Le streghe (episode Senso civico), 1967.

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MAURO BOLOGNINI Un bellissimo novembre (based on Ercole Patti’s novel), 1969. L’assoluto naturale (based on Goffredo Parise’s play), 1969. Bubu` (based on Bubu` de Montparnasse by Charles Louis Philippe), 1970. Metello (based on Vasco Pratolini’s novel), 1970. Libera, amore mio...!, 1973. Fatti di gente per bene, 1974. Per le antiche scale (based on Mario Tobino’s novel), 1975. L’eredita` Ferramonti (based on Gaetano Carlo Chelli’s novel), 1976. Gran bollito, 1977. La storia vera della signora delle camelie, 1980. Mosca addio, 1987.

Screenplays La viaccia, edited by Pietro Bianchi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1961, rpt. 1978.

Further Readings Bolognini, Rome: Ministero delgi Affari Esteri, 1977. Di Montezemola, Vittorio Cordero (editor), Bolognini, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1977. Frintino, Antonio, and Pier Marco De Santi, Mauro Bolognini. Cinema tra letteratura, pittura e musica. Restauro del film ‘‘La viaccia,’’ Pistoia: Brigata del Leoncino, 1997. Frintino, Antonio (editor), Mosca addio: Storia di Ida Nudel ebrea russa dissidente deportata, Pistoia: Brigata del Leoncino, 2000. Micciche`, Lino (editor), Il bell’Antonio di Mauro Bolognini: Dal romanzo al film, Turin: Lindau, 1996. Natta, Enzo (editor), Mauro Bolognini il fascino della forma, Rome: ANCCI, 1996.

GINEVRA BOMPIANI (1939–) The end of the 1960s saw the emergence of a new generation of women writers and intellectuals in Italian literary culture. Ginevra Bompiani was part of this group. Her first novel, Ba`rtelemi all’ombra (Ba`rtelemi in the Shadow, 1967), dealt with a theme often underrated in contemporary Italian fiction: the relationship between literature and myth. The novel charts a woman’s search for an alternative space in a world of fixed and rigid gender roles. There are few previous works in this mythological vein: I daloghi con Leuco` (Dialogues with Leuco`, 1947) by Cesare Pavese, and Anna Maria Ortese’s Il prto di Toledo (The Port of Toledo, 1975). La specie del sonno (A Kind of Sleep, 1975) was favorably received by Italo Calvino, who observed in his introduction to the book: ‘‘Ginevra Bompiani’s eye fixes the mythological emblems like Rorschach ink blots, with the difference that her perception cannot be naı¨ve.’’ Bompiani’s relation to myth has nothing of the bitterness of death that we find in Pavese, nor does her writing contain the disturbing surreal aspects of Ortese’s fiction. On the contrary, she depicts mythical creatures who have no inkling that they are mythical. Sleepless centaurs, hypnotic hermaphrodites, the god Pan, struggling heraldic lions, the monster in the labyrinth, and an exhausted Eracles live in her pages, but their mythical qualities are absorbed into the 282

details and routines of their everyday life. Her creatures live in a suspended time, as if they could never have a life; they speak as if they could never have a language. This explains the somnambular effect— Bompiani’s myths lightly set about unstitching the threads connecting words and the world, creating a small break between ourselves and our lives in which we see our existence fading away, that is, when we feel the approaching end of our own myth. Thus, Bompiani fuses dream, fable, and myth, in an exotic and fantastic world of her own imagining. Her subsequent novels L’incantato, (The Enchanted, 1987), Vecchio cielo, nuova terra, (Old Sky, New Earth, 1988), and L’attesa (The Waiting, 1988) are characterized by a surrealist poetic tone. Reality is presented as hostage to an imagination that dominates and torments it. In each of Bompiani’s novels, as Neria De Giovanni writes, ‘‘there is a strong tendency toward not only psychological, but I would say psychoanalytical introspection, toward...the metamorphosis of objects and people’’ (E dicono che siamo poche, 2003). In 2001, Bompiani published L’eta` dell’argento (The Silver Age), a work inspired by three motifs: farina, eta` dell’argento, and nostos (flour, silver age, nostalgia). Each motif is conceived as a pivot of a narration that, according to Bompiani, is generated

GINEVRA BOMPIANI ‘‘dall’attrito poetico fra un segno e l’immagine da esso suggerita; in grado di generare un’emozione narrativa’’ (from the poetic friction between a symbol and the image it suggests, thus creating a narrative emotion). The first motif ( farina) reminds us of the baker-character in fairy stories. The second (eta` dell’argento) alludes both to ‘‘una parola che salva la sera, la stanchezza, la vecchiaia dalle sue zavorre’’ (a word which rescues the evening, fatigue, and old age from its wastes), and also to the spring of life ‘‘agitata dal vento e dalle risa, che non va da nessuna parte’’ (shaken by the wind and by laughter, which goes nowhere). The silver age is symbolized by two opposing figures: an elderly woman (Amber) enrapt in thought to the point of disenchantment, and a young woman (Cecilia), sensual and rather empty-headed, ‘‘bambina formosa, di quelle che fanno gola agli uomini’’ (a big busty child, so tempting to men). The third motif centers on nostos or homecoming, which conveys a longing to return to one’s native land. It is a word evoking regret and nostalgia, the pain that comes with the perceived impossibility of such a return. Such feeling is experienced by one of the main characters in the story: a traveler, returning home after many years, finds it ‘‘il luogo piu` estraneo di tutti’’ (the most foreign place of all). When Cecilia drowns after she falls down into a well, a sense of anxiety makes its way into the fable. Homicide is suspected. A young male may have witnessed the crime; he saw someone near Cecilia on the evening of the crime but was only able to make out a vague shape. ‘‘Ho visto un’ombra su per la collina’’ (I saw a shadow on the hill) but he then adds that he is not sure. A chorus composed of the native islanders voicing their despair gives the novel the structure of a musical score composed of the solos of the main characters and the choric echoes alternating with and responding to each other. The main character in the story is the old woman Amber, who eventually will have to solve the mystery, but not before she has taken an important step in her own life. She must examine her own self and ask questions about the meaning of the silver age. She concludes that the silver age is the age ‘‘in cui l’isola diventa raccontabile’’ (in which the island becomes narratable), a time and place ‘‘dove infanzia e senilita` s’incontrano e si confondono’’ (where childhood and senility meet and merge into one another). Bompiani’s age/land of silver alludes to the mythological epoch described by Hesiod in his Works and Days, but hers is one inhabited by a race of ‘‘bambini incanagliti, vanitosi e storditi’’ (vain, nasty, benumbed, children), whose toys are ‘‘parole

senza peso e senza radice’’ (meaningless and rootless words). Among her critical works, Lo spazio narrante (The Narrating Space, 1978) is particularly remarkable for introducing the methods and insights of structuralism to Italian literary criticism. In analyzing narrative spaces, Bompiani discusses Jane Austen’s ‘‘gardens and labyrinths,’’ Emily Bronte¨’s ‘‘imaginary geography,’’ and Sylvia Plath’s ‘‘difficult limbo.’’

Biography Bompiani was born in Milan on August 5, 1939, daughter of the publisher Bompiani. She studied at La Sorbonne in Paris, where she took a psychology degree. Bompiani got her first job in her father’s publishing house as a director of a fantasy literature series, ‘‘Pesanervi.’’ In 2002, she founded a new publishing house with Giulia Einaudi: ‘‘Nottetempo.’’ L’incantato was shortlisted for the Rapallo-Carige prize in 1988. From 1986 to 1996 Bompiani was member of the jury for the Italo Calvino literary prize. She currently teaches comparative literature at the University of Siena, where she lives. All her works have been translated into French. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Novels Ba`rtelemi all’ombra, 1967. Piazza pulita, 1968. La specie del sonno, 1975. Mondanita`, 1980. L’incantato, 1987. L’attesa, 1988. Vecchio cielo, nuova terra,, 1988. L’orso maggiore, 1994; as The Great Bear, translated by Brian Kern and Sergio Parussa, 2000. L’eta` dell’argento, 2001. Ritratto di Sarah Malcolm, 2005.

Children’s Books Via terra, 1994. L’amorosa avventura di una pelliccia e di un’armatura, 2000.

Essays Lo spazio narrante, 1978. L’attesa, 1988. Tempera, 1993.

Translations Emily Bronte¨, Poesie, 1971. Emily Dickinson, Poesie, 1978. Virginia Woolf, ‘‘Fasi della narrativa,’’ in La signora dell’angolo di fronte, 1979. Marguerite Yourcenar, I trentatre´ nomi di Dio, 2003.

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GINEVRA BOMPIANI Further Reading Botta, Annalisa, Monica Farnetti, and Giorgio Rimondi, Le eccentriche, Mantua: Tre Lune, 2004. Calvino, Italo, Introduction to La specie del sonno, Milan: Franco Maria Ricci, 1975. Ceserani, Remo, Raccontare il postmoderno, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997. De Giovanni, Neria, E dicono che siamo poche, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca di Stato, 2003.

Farnetti, Monica, ‘‘Scritture del fantastico,’’ in Letteratura italiana del novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Farnetti, Monica (editor), Il centro della cattedrale: I ricordi d’infanzia nella scrittura femminile, Mantua: Tre Lune, 2002. Rasy, Elisabetta, Le donne e la letteratura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000. Ronchey, Silvia (editor), La decadenza, Milan: Nuovo Prisma, 2002.

GIUSEPPE BONAVIRI (1924–) Giuseppe Bonaviri, a poet and novelist, belongs to the group of Sicilian twentieth-century novelists, such as Gesualdo Bufalino, Vincenzo Consolo, and Leonardo Sciascia, who form a unique postmodern stream within Italian literature. He began his literary career with Il sarto della stradalunga (The Tailor on Main Street, 1954), published by Elio Vittorini in the prestigious Einaudi series I gettoni. Il sarto della stradalunga is an autobiographical novel whose protagonist is the author’s father, Settimo Emanuele, the tailor of the title, who secretly wrote poems that his son would later collect and edit under the title L’arcano (The Arcane, 1975). As a result of the success of his first novel, the young author was able to leave the hospital where he worked as a doctor and set up a private practice as a cardiologist in Frosinone, so that he could dedicate his time primarily to writing. Bonaviri was influenced not so much by Sicilian or Italian literary personalities, but rather by the simple elements of nature, such as the different shapes of clouds, or the sounds and colours of the landscape, which he saw as the elements of a sort of ‘‘prelogical’’ language. Through irony and fantasy, he overcame the naturalist tradition without a wholesale acceptance of any specific antirealist poetics such as surrealism. Rather, Bonaviri severed himself from the naturalist tradition using a unique style. For instance, while Bufalino became receptive to the complexity of linguistic quotations, which echoed the unnaturalistic mood of his narrative, Bonaviri, on the contrary, uses a direct, simple language to enrich his magic imagination populated by hidden symbols and myths. Thus, Bonaviri’s writing is an original synthesis of both the stream 284

of neorealism and the contemporary avant-garde, while also recalling Marcel Proust in its evocation of past impressions, and Dino Buzzati and Garcı`a Ma`rquez for its atmospheres of enchantment. The novel La divina foresta (The Divine Forest, 1969) continued Bonaviri’s narrative maturation toward a new literary direction. The story, which includes underlying elements of myth, history, and science, deals with traveling and metaphysical research, and is part of a trilogy consisting of L’isola amorosa (The Loving Island, 1973), which narrates the Arabic atmosphere and civilization of Bonaviri’s birthplace by means of the structure of the fable, and Notti sull’altura (Nights on the Heights, 1971). In the latter, Bonaviri is much more involved with the theme of investigation and unravels his plot within fascinating and surreal landscapes, An atypical novel within the context of contemporary Italian narrative, Notti sull’altura tells the story of a mysterious bird that leaves unusual symbols upon the death of the father of the narrator, who then starts an investigation to find the bird of death and consequently to find signs of his father’s thoughts. Dolcissimo (Dolcissimo, 1978) is acclaimed as Bonaviri’s most complex, rich and characteristic novel, in which the Sicilian novelist combines the detached irony of Leonardo Sciascia with the magical settings of Garcı`a Marquez. The story tells of the physician Ariete returning to his Sicilian birthplace to investigate the inexplicable disappearance of its villagers. He and Mario Sinus, the psychoethnologist sent to accompany him, discover a world of archaic gods, rituals, and beliefs that may provide redemption from the destructive forces of modern life. Il dottor Bilop (Doctor Bilop, 1994) is

GIUSEPPE BONAVIRI an anachronistic novel that includes fictional and poetical forms. The plot is apparently unreal, but strongly plausible, and the book narrates Doctor Giovanni Bilop’s life and his daughter’s wedding. On the train back from Rome, Giovanni meets a young physician who is working on an experiment to transform any kind of sounds into music. In Bonaviri’s novels, the realistic elements of any single circumstance and plot are subjected to his surrealistic imagination and this is a characteristic that increasingly dominates all his narratives and poetry. Most of his novels and tales closely parallel events in his own life. Hesitantly but openly, he writes about his private circumstances. His novels, tales, and poems blend neorealism, fantasy, and autobiography; he combines linguistic experimentation with the more traditional storytelling techniques of Sicilian folklore. His work has been translated into several languages, including English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Swedish, Russian, and Chinese.

Biography

Novelle saracene, 1980. L’incominciamento, 1983. ` un rosseggiar di peschi e d’albicocchi, 1986. E Il dormiveglia: Sicilia-Luna-New York, 1988. Lip to lip, 1988. Ghigo`, 1990. Apologhetti, 1991. Il dottor Bilop, 1994. Silvinia, 1997. L’infinito lunare, 1998. Il verde ramo oscillo`: fiabe di folli, 1999 (with Giuseppina Bonaviri). Il vento d’argento: un racconto con dodici finali, 2002. Acqua d’argento e altre storie, 2003. Il vicolo blu, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Martedina e il dire celeste,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il dire celeste e altre poesie,’’ 1979. ‘‘Nel silenzio della luna,’’ 1979. ‘‘Di fumo cilestrino,’’ 1981. ‘‘Quark,’’ 1982. ‘‘corpo sospiroso,’’ 1982. ‘‘L’asprura,’’ 1986. ‘‘Il re bambino,’’ 1990. ‘‘Poemillas espan˜oles ed altri luoghi,’’ 2000. ‘‘I cavalli lunari,’’ 2004.

Plays

Giuseppe Bonaviri was born in Mineo (Catania), 11 July 1924, the first of five children. Began to write poems and stories before he was 10; enrolled in medical school at the University of Catania, 1943; graduated in 1949; was drafted and sent to the Accademia Militare in Florence, 1950; specialized in cardiology, 1955; practiced as a doctor and health official in Mineo, then moved to the Ciociaria region and married Raffaella Osario, 1957; they had two children (Pina and Emanuele); began private practice as a cardiologist in Frosinone, 1964. Awarded the Campiello prize Dolcissimo, 1978. His work has been widely translated. Currently lives in Frosinone. ANNA SICA Selected Works Fiction Il sarto della stradalunga, 1954. La contrada degli ulivi, 1958. Il fiume di pietra, 1964. La divina foresta, 1969. Notti sull’altura, 1971; as Night on the Heights translated by Giovanni R. Bussino, 1990. Le armi d’oro, 1973. L’isola amorosa, 1973. La Beffa`ria, 1975. L’enorme tempo, 1976. Dolcissimo, 1978; as Dolcissimo translated by Umberto Mariani, 1990. Il treno blu, 1978.

Follia, 1976. Giufa` e Gesu`, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 2001.

Nonfiction L’arenario, 1984. Minuetto con Bonaviri, with Sarah Zappulla Muscara` and Roberto Bertoni, 2004.

Edited Work Settimo Bonaviri, L’Arcano, 1975. Fiabe Siciliane, 1990. Giufa` e altre storie della terra di Sicilia, 1996.

Further Reading Bertoni, Roberto, ‘‘Bonaviri ermetico: il motivo del rito di passaggio,’’ in Italianist, 16 (1996): 161–175. Di Biase, Carmine, Bonaviri e l’oltre: l’opera intera, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2001. Di Biasio, Rodolfo, Giuseppe Bonaviri, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Iadanza, Antonio, and Marcello Carlino (editors), L’opera di Giuseppe Bonaviri, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1987. Mauri, Paolo, L’opera imminente: diario di un critico, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Musarra, Franco, Scrittura della memoria, memoria della scrittura: l’opera narrativa di Giuseppe Bonaviri, Florence: Cesati-Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1999. Zangrilli, Franco, Bonaviri e il mistero cosmico, Abano Terme: Piovan, 1985. Zangrilli, Franco, Il fior del ficodindia: saggio su Bonaviri, Acireale (CA): La cantinella, 1997. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Giuseppe Bonaviri, Catania: G. Maimone, 1991. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, and Enzo Zappulla (editors), Bonaviri Inedito, Mineo (CA): La cantinella, 2001

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MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI

MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI (1878–1960) Bontempelli’s literary career unfolded in several stages, each a mirror of issues at the forefront of twentieth-century history. Poetry was his first genre; he began with traditional forms (the eclogue and sonnet) and then moved to avant-garde forms with a Futurist edge. Bontempelli eventually disavowed nearly all his entire poetic production and after 1919 wrote only short stories, novels, theater and various forms of journalism and criticism (literary, film, music). The author’s strong convictions about the social and political value of aesthetic forms were instrumental in his changes in styles over the years. This makes his output fascinating from a historical perspective. What remained from avant-garde experiments was an antirealist bent coupled with a profound disgust for ‘‘anemic’’ nineteenth-century naturalism. The antinaturalist viewpoint implied the conviction that literary change would occur only if the practice of copying an all-too-prosaic and overmaterialistic world were abandoned in favor of fictions striving for what Bontempelli called stupore (wonderment) or miracolo (miracle). In the work that Bontempelli produced right after World War I, he used jarring, even boggling literary forms such as the micronovel or the comic halfpage dialogue. La vita intensa (Intense Life, 1920), first published serially in L’Ardita in 1919, collects a series of miniature novels, one of which tells the minimalist ‘‘adventures’’ of one man in a city, Milan, between 12:00 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. on a single day. Serialized in 1920 in Industrie Italiane Illustrate and collected in a volume in 1921, La vita operosa (Productive Life) tells the story of a soldier who returns to Milan from the front. It illustrates Bontempelli’s attempt to avoid an overrealist style by drawing together descriptions of the city and hallucinatory landscapes that in some sections are close to science fiction—for instance, when the protagonist imagines frightening new devices such as a prototelevision set. Bontempelli’s literary thinking was by the mid1920s consolidated into a critical voice that became influential in the interwar years. As editor-in-chief of the literary review ‘900, Bontempelli articulated positions that are considered points of reference in literary history. He produced a theory and practice 286

of realismo magico (magical realism) that was linked in distinctive ways both to his advocacy of European literary culture and his critique of twentieth-century culture in Italy, which he found provincial and rotting. A supranational outlook was a key element of his position in the crucial debates in the interwar years. In the context of Fascist politics of culture, Bontempelli stood for an urban viewpoint dubbed stracitta` (ultracity) as opposed to a rural, traditional, nationalist one called strapaese (ultracountry). At issue was which of these two contrasting cultural heritages might be the way of the future and how each might serve the Italian nation by providing a system of values suited to a culture moving into modernity. The meaning of ‘‘modernity’’ is, and has always been, hard to pin down. What concerns Bontempelli is how the cultural imagination will interact with the historical realities of modernization. The growing dominance in Europe of industrialized nations threatened an Italian sense of national identity based on the longevity and splendor of its heritage, so that modern Italian literary texts often lament the alienating effects of a modernity that separates its population from comforting and magnificent traditions. In this sense, Bontempelli undertakes a critique of a potentially dangerous modernity, and even of ‘‘rationality,’’ and he engages these issues in both fiction and nonfiction (including editorials, journalism, and travel writing). No reactionary, however, he did not advocate a return to former eras. His works attempt to blend elements of the tradition with an attack on what he sees as a dominant middle-class ideology that refuses revolutionary changes in modern society. The parts of tradition that Bontempelli held on to were narrative coherence over fragmentary temporalities, and spatial cohesion over the deformed spatialities of Futurist writing and cubist painting. While his style of writing is lucid, he inserted the ‘‘jarring’’ element of fantasy in his works in order to shake up his readers. The blend of tradition and experiment that Bontempelli forged was consonant with Fascist policies and aesthetic ideals. Since Mussolini both engaged in a rhetoric of revolutionary change and at the same time harked back to the imperial grandeur

MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI of ancient Rome, Fascism appeared to Bontempelli to be a hybrid movement with a potential for conservative innovation. He theorized that Fascism was the dawn of a new era in world history: First the Roman world collapsed and then Christian Europe ended with the cataclysm that was World War I. This schema was complicated by the author’s views on European unity. Disdainful of institutions such as the League of Nations, which has not furthered Italian territorial demands, he believed that the writer’s task in modern society was the invention of new myths for this new, Fascist epoch. Fascist Italy became the model in his view for a new European collectivity rooted in Latin and Mediterranean culture (Italy being the link). In the good graces of Mussolini and the head of the Fascist writers’ union for several years in the mid-1920s and 1930s, Bontempelli advocated Fascism wholeheartedly as a bulwark against both plutocratic capitalism and Soviet communism. In time, his dissent from Fascism cohered around nonnationalist positions. Italian writers were in his view in a unique position to invent new myths, yet culture cannot be contained by national borders. Bontempelli resisted the idea that specific political formulations should dictate any literary themes and styles, since that would kill all spontaneity and stupore. He argued against the institution of a government authorization for the work of the critic. In 1938, Bontempelli was officially censored by the regime for criticizing Fascist leaders. His party card was confiscated with the result that he was not allowed to speak in public—although he was able to continue to publish in the press. He was allowed to reside only in Venice. Significantly, when Bontempelli was offered the position of a noted Jewish scholar, Attilio Momigliano, forced to resign from the university because of the racial laws of 1938, he refused it. Bontempelli’s refusal to accept domination by one political outlook is not wholly surprising for another reason: It was typical of Bontempelli’s way of composing his works to dramatize belief systems at odds with one another. Evidence of multiple viewpoints and their complex interactions is found in the deep structure of his texts. Frequently, an enigmatic or ‘‘magical’’ event is imagined; that in turn stimulates controversial interpretations stemming from clashing viewpoints. He adds openly social and political contents to the theme of the ‘‘relativity’’ of subjectivity. His novel Il figlio di due madri (The Boy with Two Mothers, 1929) is exemplary. Set in the year 1900, this novel tells the story of a miraculous eruption of the past into

the present: A 7-year-old boy becomes another boy who had died seven years earlier, and so he comes to have two mothers—each with her own ‘‘reality.’’ The boy represents a knot of enigma that cannot be untied. Bontempelli orchestrates a contradiction meant to put old paradigms of the unity of being into question. This undefined being, named Mario and Ramiro, articulates a series of fearful doublings in the novel. Maternal love, which ought to be prime and indivisible, is split into two conflicting loves and thus two worlds. Gendering is an important signifying discourse in this effort. Men are cast as the representatives of the institutions that have murdered the imagination and thus the possibility of leaving behind profane, materialist modernity: They are callous businessmen, narrow-minded doctors, and grasping lawyers. None believes in miracles or magic. The triumphant mother in the novel, Luciana, is, instead, a kind of ‘‘new woman.’’ She undergoes an apotheosis founded on her association with the richness of flux, with journeys, and with a liberating rootlessness. She befriends a gypsy (in this exceptional case, a male) who is an emblem of transformation in the book and who attempts to retrieve the lost son. Bontempelli associates ‘‘Woman’’ with a fecund distance from a post-Risorgimento, preFascist Italy. Realistic narrative logic is also stymied. When two universes (death and life) enter into contact, the temporal progression one expects in a novel comes to a halt. The novel cannot propel itself forward toward a conclusion because the enigma introduced cannot be resolved by any of the characters. This device suits Bontempelli’s realismo magico; mystery does not evoke a spirit world, or a national spirit, but instead it opens up a perspective onto social dilemmas inseparable from the culture’s myths. Bontempelli puts into relief in other works of fiction the defects in familial, legal, economic, and government institutions that are the bases of social stability and yet at the same time are causes of social stagnation. Vita e morte di Adria e i suoi figli (The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children, 1930) dramatizes the degeneration of the social institutions of post-Risorgimento Italy. The ruling classes (made up principally of property owners), the bourgeois family, and gender conventions all are put under a microscope in the narrative of one mother, the beautiful and extremely fashionable Adria, who becomes the cult object of Roman high society. Adria lives only to propagate and preserve her beauty; she decides at age 30 to wall herself up before she begins aging. Bontempelli’s 287

MASSIMO BONTEMPELLI novel takes on tragic tones when Adria forsakes her children and husband, interrupting life cycles that had always been presumed to be natural. Even natural death is at issue for the modern citizen, for example in Gente nel tempo (People in Time, 1937), in which a family member mysteriously dies on the same day at five-year intervals. In the play Nostra Dea (Dea by Dea, 1925), another fashionable protagonist changes personalities each time she changes outfits. Constructed identities constitute mere cogs in wheels of industry—fashion or otherwise. In the drama Minnie la candida (Candid Minnie, 1929), Bontempelli moves away from the family context toward even broader categories: The naı¨ve protagonist believes that a race of soulless, artificial beings is taking over humanity. The high purpose of the literary imagination and the writer’s work as Bontempelli conceived them was to move modernity out of its paralysis and dullness and to usher in a new era in world history. Fiction is an expose´ and at the same time it draws its readers away from that soulless modern world into a ‘‘magical’’ one that exists in the pages of the book. The war years delivered little by the way of either fantastical or literal escapes to Bontempelli, however, as he remained confined in Venice and his writing veered away from fiction. Full of hope for the future of Italy when Fascism began losing ground and battles, and eager to redeem a nowsuspect past by means of enduring anti-Fascist activity, he was in 1948 elected to office in Tuscany as a senator on a Popular Front ticket. Because of his association with Fascism, however, Bontempelli was not allowed to be seated in the Parliament of the newly minted Italian Republic.

Biography Born 12 May 1878, in Como; 1897, he enrolls in Turin University and earns two degrees, in classics and philosophy; adheres to Fascism in 1924 and in the same year founds the Teatro degli Undici with Luigi Pirandello; the first issue of ‘900 appears in 1926; appointed to the Accademia d’Italia in 1930; in 1933 he founds the architectural journal Quadrante; in 1938 he is confined to Venice by the Fascist government; in 1948 he is elected as a senator for the Popular Front party but is not seated because of his collaboration on a textbook in the Mussolini years; L’amante fedele wins the Strega prize in 1953; died in Rome, 21 July 1960. KEALA JEWELL 288

Selected Works Collections Racconti e romanzi, edited by Paola Masino, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1961. Opere scelte, edited by Luigi Baldacci, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Nostra Dea e altre commedie, edited byAlessandro Tinterri, Turin: Einaudi, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘Verseggiando: Intermezzo di rime,’’ 1905. ‘‘Amori,’’ 1910. ‘‘Purosangue e L’Ubriaco: Poesie nuove,’’ 1919.

Fiction Sette savi, 1912. La vita intensa, 1920. La vita operosa, 1921. La scacchiera davanti allo specchio, 1922. Eva ultima, 1923. La donna dei miei sogni, 1925. Il figlio di due madri, 1929; as The Boy with Two Mothers, translated by Estelle Gilson, 2000. Vita e morte di Adria e i suoi figli, 1930; as The Life and Death of Adria and Her Children, translated by Estelle Gilson, 2000. Mia vita, morte e miracoli, 1931. ‘‘522’’: Racconto di una giornata, 1932. Gente nel tempo, 1937. Giro del sole, 1941. L’amante fedele, 1953.

Nonfiction La donna del Nadir, 1924. L’avventura novecentista, 1938. Pirandello, Leopardi, D’Annunzio: Tre discorsi, 1938. Dignita` dell’uomo (1943–1946), 1946.

Plays La guardia alla luna, 1920. Siepe a nordovest, 1922. Nostra Dea, 1925; as Dea by Dea, translated by Anthony Oldcorn, 1994. Minnie la candida, 1929. Bassano padre geloso, 1934.

Further Reading Airoldi Namer, Fulvia, Massimo Bontempelli, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Amigoni, Ferdinando, ‘‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi,’’ in Italica 77, no. 1 (2000): 69–80. Amoroso, Giuseppe, Il Realismo Magico di Bontempelli, Messina: Editrice Universitaria, 1964. Baldacci, Luigi, Massimo Bontempelli, Turin: Borla, 1967. Bo, Carlo, Massimo Bontempelli, Padova: CEDAM, 1943. Caesar, Ann Hallamore, ‘‘Changing Costume, Changing Identity: Women in the Theatre of Pirandello, Bontempelli and Wedekind,’’ in Romance Studies, 20 (1992): 21–29. Cecchini, Carlo, Avanguardia, mito e ideologia: Massimo Bontempelli tra futurismo a fascismo, Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1986.

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA Donati, Corrado, and Fulvia Airoldi Namer (editors), Massimo Bontempelli: Scrittore e intellettuale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Fontanella, Luigi, Storia di Bontempelli. Tra i sofismi della ragione e le irruzioni dell’immaginazione, Ravenna: Longo, 1997. Lapini, Lia, Il teatro di Massimo Bontempelli. Dall’avanguardia al novecentismo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1977. Mascia Galateria, Marinella, Tattica della sorpresa e romanzo comico di Massimo Bontempelli: Saggio su ‘‘La vita intensa’’ e ‘‘La vita operosa,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Masino, Paola, Io, Massimo e gli altri: Autobiografia di una figlia del secolo, edited by Maria Vittoria Vittori, Milan: Rusconi, 1995.

Piscopo, Ugo, Massimo Bontempelli: Per una modernita` delle pareti lisce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2001. Saccone, Antonio, Massimo Bontempelli. Il Mito del ’900, Naples: Liguori, 1978. Somigli, Luca, ‘‘Modernism and the Quest for the Real: On Massimo Bontempelli’s Minnie la candida,’’ in Italian Modernism, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Urgnani, Elena, Sogni e visioni. Massimo Bontempelli fra surrealismo e futurismo, Ravenna: Longo, 1991.

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA (CA. 1240/1250–CA. 1313/1315) Bonvesin da la Riva lived in Milan and Legnano, where he was a teacher, educating the children of the wealthy classes. He is the most important author of the didactic literature written in Northern Italy in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and composed approximately 20 poems in the old Milanese vernacular, amounting to a total of about 9,000 lines, as well as three works in Latin. Bonvesin’s poems in the vernacular are contained in eight manuscripts of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the two most significant ¨ ffentliche Wisof which are now in Berlin (O senschaftliche Bibliothek) and in Milan (Biblioteca Ambrosiana). Like most Northern Italian didactic poems, they consist mainly of vernacular adaptation of medieval Latin and French didactic and hagiographic literary texts. Bonvesin wrote the majority of them in monorhymed alexandrine quatrains and intended for them to be recited in front of wide, popular audiences with the practical aim of enhancing moral and religious beliefs. Ezio Levi, who brought this didactic literature to scholarly attention in the 1920s, argued that its genesis was connected with heretical movements (I poeti antichi lombardi, 1921). Levi’s thesis is now generally rejected, and it is commonly agreed that no heterodox element is present in any of the texts of this literary tradition. Bonvesin, in particular, was a lay tertiary of the Humiliati—a religious group that

originated from mid-twelfth-century pauperistic and evangelic movements in Northern Italy—and his religiosity is, as Gianfranco Contini argues, mite e ordinaria (mild and ordinary). In addition to being some of the earliest and most extended documents in old Milanese, Bonvesin’s poetry therefore also conveys the common beliefs and culture of the time in which it was written. Bonvesin’s vernacular poems can be grouped in three categories: debates, expository, and narrative poems, and didactic poems. Of the six debates, three—Disputatio rose cum viola (The Debate of the Rose and the Violet), Disputatio musce cum formica (The Debate Between the Fly and the Ant), and Disputatio mensium (The Debate of the Months)—convey a moral and, albeit not explicit, sociopolitical message. Maria Corti locates the sociopolitical implication in the contrast between the rose and the violet, which for the first time has the humble violet (the people and merchants of Milan) win against the arrogant rose (the powerful magnates) (‘‘Il genere disputatio e la transcodificazione indolore di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ 1973). In his 1987 edition of the Volgari scelti, Ruggero Stefanini extends such sociopolitical overtones to the other two poems. However, unlike the Disputatio rose cum viola and the debate between the lazy fly and the zealous ant—which also praises the humbleness and industriousness of the communal 289

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA class—the Disputatio mensium (where the months of the year contest the leadership of January but fail) expresses the claims of the new signories and indicates that a leader is necessary. Bonvesin’s remaining three debates are more overtly religious, and the Virgin Mary, who is at the core of Bonvesin’s spirituality, is the protagonist of two of them. The De peccatore cum Virgine (The Sinner and the Virgin) depicts Mary’s contrast with a sinner and deals with the familiar theme of Mary’s ties with the rest of humankind. The De Sathana cum Virgine (Satan and the Virgin), on the other hand, is one of the most original poems written by Bonvesin and portrays Satan arguing with Mary about why, unlike all other sinners, he was not granted the opportunity to repent. As Francesco Zambon shows, Mary’s words here represent the official doctrine of the church against the beliefs of Cathar heresy as they were defended in the anonymous Liber de duobus principiis, a mid-thirteenth-century treatise contesting the principle of free will (‘‘Bonvesin e il libero arbitrio degli angeli,’’ 1993). The lively and sophisticated figure of Satan, who denies his responsibility and refuses to accept the irrevocability of his condemnation, is one of Bonvesin’s best (and most tragic) figures and has often been related to the logician devil of Dante’s Inferno 27. The last debate is the De anima cum corpore (Soul and Body), a dialogue between the body and the soul on Earth, after physical death and at the Resurrection. It is an original variation of a common genre and attests to the great interest in the afterlife frequently found in Northern Italian didactic poetry. Three of Bonvesin’s expository and narrative poems are in fact eschatological descriptions that aim to convince audiences to follow Christian precepts on earth. The ‘‘De die iudicij’’ (Judgment Day) and the ‘‘De quindecim miraculis que debent apparere ante diem iudicij’’ (The Fifteen Marvels Which Are to Appear Before the Day of Judgment) are short poems concerned with the traditional preoccupation with the end of time and the Last Judgment, while ‘‘Il Libro delle tre Scritture’’ (Book of the Three Scriptures) is a long poem expressing the newer interest in the experience of separated souls during the eschatological time between physical death and the Resurrection. As the author of ‘‘Il Libro delle tre Scritture’’, Bonvesin has often been considered—together with Giacomino da Verona—as one of Dante’s precursors. The poem is divided into three parts: Nera (Black Scripture), which describes the 12 pains of 290

hell; ‘‘Rossa’’ (Red Scripture), which gives a detailed account of Christ’s Passion and physical sufferings; ‘‘Dorata’’ (Golden Scripture), which describes the 12 glories of Heaven. ‘‘Il Libro delle tre Scritture’’ illustrates the significance that medieval culture attributed to the body as a component of human identity and to physical pain as a productive experience of change. Bonvesin’s poem is also important as a document of contemporary eschatology, and a joint analysis of the ‘‘Scrittura Rossa’’ and Dante’s Purgatorio reveals the tight connection between the suffering body of Christ and the transformative power of pain in purgatory (Manuele Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, 2005). The religious and moral didacticism of Bonvesin’s eschatological texts also informs some of his other expository poems: the ‘‘De Vanitatibus’’ (On Vain Things), which is composed of two parables contrasting the deceptive and transient possessions of Earth to the eternal rewards of Heaven; the ‘‘De falsis excusationibus’’ (On False Excuses), which refutes the pretexts usually adduced by men in order to neglect Christian obligations, and pushes its audience—as Bonvesin often does—toward humility, moderation and acceptance; and the ‘‘Vulgare de elymosinis’’ (On Almsgiving), which recommends the practice of almsgiving and exemplifies its value through a series of parables. In this text, Bonvesin shows great narrative technique and achieves some of his best results, as in the ‘‘exempla De Ortulano’’ (The Gardener) and ‘‘De patre cuiusdam Donati’’ (Donatus’ Father). Three poems are hagiographic and offer more positive examples of acceptance and humility— the virtues that transform suffering into a productive experience: the ‘‘Vulgare de passione Sancti Job’’ (The Suffering of Saint Job), which retells the Job story from the Bible; the ‘‘Vita Beati Alexi’’ (The Life of Saint Alexis), which translates a tenth-century account of a Roman nobleman who endorsed a life of suffering and penitence; and the ‘‘Laudes Virginis Mariae’’ (In Praise of the Virgin Mary), which begins by praising Mary’s greatness and ends with five exempla of people—including the prostitute Mary of Egypt and the humble ‘‘friar Ave Maria’’—being saved or benefited by her. The remaining two expository poems are related to Bonvesin’s intense devotion to Mary and to Christ: the ‘‘Rationes quare Virgo tenetur diligere peccatores’’ (Reasons Why the Virgin Is Obligated to Help Sinners), which is very similar to the ‘‘De peccatore cum Virgine,’’ and the fragmentary ‘‘De Cruce’’ (On the Cross), which narrates the legend of Christ’s cross.

BONVESIN DA LA RIVA The last two poems in Bonvesin’s corpus in the vernacular provide secular teachings and attest to Bonvesin’s civic and social commitment: the Expositiones Catonis (An Exposition of Cato’s Distichs), which translates the popular Distica Catonis from Latin, and the Quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam (Fifty Table Manners), which outlines 50 rules about appropriate dining behavior. Although the two texts are also written in alexandrine quatrains, the quatrains are not monorhymed (as they are in the rest of Bonvesin’s vernacular poetry) but rhymed instead according to the scheme AABB. Bonvesin’s three extant works in Latin are contained in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century manuscripts. The De controversia mensium (The Contrast of the Months) is written in hexameters and is similar to the vernacular debate between the months of the year. The De vita scholastica (The School Life), which is written in couplets and was widely read until the late Renaissance, adapts the anonymous poem Rudium doctrina and is also connected to Bonvesin’s work as a schoolteacher. It instructs students how to attain wisdom and also briefly offers advice to teachers about teaching effectively. The De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (The Marvels of Milan) is the only text in prose and is a panegyric of Milan. Written in 1288, it narrates the events of Milanese history until the death of Emperor Frederick II in 1250. It praises the city first for its material excellence (location, buildings, inhabitants, and wealth) and then for its moral distinction (fortitude, loyalty, freedom, and nobility). The text differs from the conventions of the genre and supports the rhetorical praise of Milan with the accuracy of archival research and the liveliness of real-life observations. It was usually read as a nostalgic idealization of Milan’s past, but, in their critical editions, Guido Orlandi and Paolo Chiesa argue that a more pragmatic Bonvesin is siding with the Viscontis (who were consolidating their power in Milan when the work was written).

Biography The son of Petrus de Laripa, Bonvesin was most likely born in Milan between 1240 and 1250. He was a successful and wealthy teacher of Latin in a private capacity in both Legnano and Milan. A tertiary of the Humiliati and arguably also of the Franciscans, he was committed to constant charitable activity, such as donations to public hospitals and participation in the administration

of charity institutions. He was married twice and died between 1313 (the date of his last testament) and 1315. MANUELE GRAGNOLATI Selected Works Collections Le opere volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva, edited by Gianfranco Contini, Rome: Societa` Filologica Romana, 1941; as Volgari scelti: Selected Poems, edited and translated by Patrick Diehl and Ruggero Stefanini, 1987.

Works in the Vernacular Poeti del Ducento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 1, 1960; reprint 1995. De Cruce. Testo frammentario inedito, edited by Silvia Isella Brusamolino, 1979. Le cinquanta cortesie da tavola, edited by Mario Cantella and Donatella Magrassi, 1985. I volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva: Testi del ms. berlinese, edited by Adnan Go¨kc¸en, 1996. Expositiones Catonis, edited by Carlo Beretta, 2000. I volgari di Bonvesin da la Riva. Testi dei mss. Trivulziano 93 (vv. 113-fine); Ambrosiano T. 10 sup., N 95 sup.; Toledano Capitolare 10–28, edited by Adnan Go¨kc¸en, 2001.

Works in Latin De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (1288); as Grandezze di Milano, edited by Angelo Paredi, 1967; as Le meraviglie di Milano, edited by Giuseppe Pontiggia, introduction by Maria Corti, 1974; edited by Paolo Chiesa, 1998. Quinque claves sapientiae. Incerti auctoris rudium doctrina. Bonvicini de Ripa Vita scolastica, edited by Anezka Vidmadova´-Schmidtova´, 1969. De controversia mensium, in Giovanni Orlandi, ‘‘Letteratura e politica nei Carmina de mensibus (De controversia mensium) di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Felix olim Lombardia. Storia di studi padani dedicati dagli allievi a Giuseppe Martini, 1978, 103–195.

Further Reading Avalle, D’Arco Silvio, ‘‘Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 1, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970. Bologna, Corrado, ‘‘La letteratura dell’Italia settentrionale del Ducento,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Storia e geografia, directed by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Cerroni, Monica, ‘‘Tipologia dell’allegoria e dinamiche del vero in Giacomino da Verona e Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Strumenti critici, 15 (2000): 53–74. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Il genere disputatio e la transcodificazione indolore di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Strumenti critici, 7 (1973); rpt. in Il viaggio testuale, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Degli Innocenti, Mario, ‘‘L’ Elucidarium o l’Elucidario in antico milanese fonte di Bonvesin da la Riva?’’ in Italia medioevale e umanistica, 25 (1982): 125–149. Garbini, Paolo, ‘‘Sulla Vita scolastica di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Studi medievali, 31 (1990): 705–737.

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BONVESIN DA LA RIVA Gragnolati, Manuele, ‘‘From Decay to Splendor: Body and Pain in Bonvesin da la Riva’s Book of the Three Scriptures,’’ in Last Things: Death and Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, edited by Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Gragnolati, Manuele, Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture, Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005. Leonardi, Lino, and Francesco Santi, ‘‘La letteratura religiosa,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, directed by Enrico Malato, vol. 1, Rome: Salerno, 1995. Levi, Ezio, I poeti antichi lombardi, Milan: Cogliati, 1921. Marri, Fabio, Glossario al milanese di Bonvesin, Bologna: Patron, 1977. Mussafia, Adolfo, ‘‘Darstellung der altmaila¨ndischen Mundart nach Bonvesins Schriften,’’ in Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosoph.–histor. Klasse), 59 (1868): 5–40.

Orlandi, Giovanni, ‘‘Note sul De magnalibus Mediolani di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Studi Medievali, series 3, no. 17 (1976): 863–906. Orlandi, Giovanni, ‘‘Letteratura e politica nei Carmina de mensibus (De controversia mensium) di Bonvesin da la Riva,’’ in Felix olim Lombardia: Storia di studi padani dedicati dagli allievi a Giuseppe Martini, Milan: [s.n.], 1978. Pasquini, Emilio, ‘‘La letteratura didattica e allegorica,’’ in La letteratura italiana: Storia e testi, edited by Carlo Muscetta, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Rossi, Aldo, ‘‘Poesia didattica e poesia popolare del Nord,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Sasse Tateo, Barbara, Tradition und Pragmatik in Bonvesin’s ‘‘De Magnalibus Mediolani,’’ Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1991. Zambon, Francesco, ‘‘Bonvesin e il libero arbitrio degli angeli,’’ in Omaggio a Gianfranco Folena, Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1993.

BOOK CULTURE The history of printing presupposes a neat separation between the manuscript and the book, between a culture of the manuscript and one of the printing press, differentiated within the history of communication. The history of printing, however, does not concern simply ancient books, but books in all of their forms, including the nonbook form that cannot be ignored. The history of printing is often restricted to manual printing, incunabula, cinquecentine, seicentine, eighteenth-century books, with the important appendix that reaches to 1830, and manually printed nineteenth-century books. Yet all of this keeps the modern book trade out of the discussion, although it too must be the object of the history of printing. There is also another aspect to touch upon, namely the confusion in the history of printing between production and product. Concepts such as Renaissance book, Baroque book, Bodoni’s neoclassicism, and so on are useful in connecting the book-product to literary history, art history, and aesthetic history, but they say little about the specific history of printing. One can decide to leave aside technology, but an exclusive approach to the book as product places its origins in the history of ideas, of arts, and, letters. Indeed this is sufficient when 292

considering the history of the book as literary history, but it does not suffice from the point of view of a history of printing that takes into account the processes of production, which occurs according to determinate materials, that generate, accordingly, new materials. The material component of the book is a reality long denied, because, particularly in Italian culture, an entire system of humanistic knowledge founded on idealistic premises has always considered the book separately from the text. The book as a material object remains in some sense scandalous, because the habit of considering it an intellectual object has given way to deeply rooted automatism. The concept of the book as material object transgresses the common perception of the book as fetishized object, the neutral container of an idea. On the contrary, the container sometimes contains more information than the content, provided that it is considered the fruit of a process, specifically, the history of printing as determined by technological variables. Technology and investment of capital also change the concept of author, as editors follow the book from the incision of the characters, to the accuracy of the text, to the construction of the binding. Presiding over such a process are the alpha and omega of the history of

BOOK CULTURE the Italian book: Aldo Manuzio (ca. 1452–1515), whose creative innovations have left an enduring mark in publishing, and Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813), who brought the art of printing to great heights in pursuit of neoclassical beauty. In this way, the uniqueness of the author is divided and multiplied; one can no longer speak of the author if not in the sense indicated by the rules of cataloguing. The author is responsible for the intellectual content of the text, but in the sixteenth century he is already surrounded by coauthors responsible, in modern terms, for the editing. This happens above all in the author’s absence: For example, when planning for the publication of an edition by a classical author, highly qualified support was requested by Humanist philologists; or in the case of other publications, the publisher and typographer would seek the advice of an expert of the language and of texts to prepare the definitive edition of the manuscript to send to the presses. Aside from some charismatic authors who followed their book in the phases of typographical production (from Ludovico Ariosto to Giambattista Vico to Alessandro Manzoni), there exists another typology of publication that requires the participation of people specialized in the preparation of editions dealing with the question of context, including printing costs, the graphic aspect, decorations, and the illustration of the book. In the archives, there also exist other traces that help us reconstruct the contexts of production that can relate to either private or public laws, as evidenced in the form of records and documents relating to the history of printing (contracts, licenses, etc.). In the analysis of these documents, three main figures stand out: typographer, publisher, and author, or alternatively, the translator or other figures not recorded in the book. Legal permission was conceded to the book, not to each of its reprinting, excluding short works and loose sheets, The classical formula cum gratia et privilegio at times does not apply in some editions. The privilege covered a span of a number of years, which were requested by the publisher himself to safeguard his assets. In the case of Francesco Colonna’s famous Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream, 1499), for example, the publisher, Leonardo Grassi, obtained a 20-year privilege that he successively renewed in 1519, and it expired around 1540. He is thus a figure who appears in the paratext, only in the dedicatory letter, and not in the explicit capacity of publisher, nor with a proper typographical mark that, in any case, in 1499, was not yet conceived with protective criteria.

From one of the hieroglyphs contained in that book, Aldo Manuzio derives the mark of the Anchor and Dolphin that will be the same used in 1545 when the heirs of the great Humanist-printer (who had preserved the xylographs of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili) republished the work, considering it by then a text of distinction. Several historians of printing value the Aldine edition of Colonna’s remarkable novel as the most beautiful book printed during the Italian Renaissance. Until the modern era there does not exist a homogeneous form of protection of publishing rights. From the second half of the sixteenth century forward, in order to in some way protect literary property, which did not exist in modern terms, some printers began to record the concession of privilege after the colophon. When the censorship of the Indice dei libri proibiti impoverished, from 1550 onward, publishers’ catalogues, the way to escape a relatively strict control was to use pseudonyms to falsify the names of the censored authors or auctores damnati (for example, from Pietro Aretino to Partenio Etiro). Conferring a centrality to the editions, the history of printing becomes the history of publishing. In the fifteenth century, considering the Roman and Venetian editions of Cicero, there exist an exorbitant number with respect to the effective demands of the community of literate people. Regarding classics that were part of the Humanist library more generally, if one adds up the editions produced from Italian presses, those of French presses and, in particular those of Lyon that always competed with the Italian catalogues, it is evident how, at the end of the sixteenth century, the Italian market was relatively saturated. However, leafing through the inventories of the libraries of men of letters until the end of the nineteenth century, we do not yet find first editions in their libraries used as the definitive editions. The incunabulum is considered a reliable edition until the beginning of the nineteenth century, while in the seventeenth century, there is little reason to reprint either Cicero or the classics. The realm of the ancient book also comprises brief printed texts, in octaves or smaller formats, on one printing folio. Furthermore, in the history of printing, there is also a nonbook production, that is to say, a type of production not centered on the printing of booklets, but rather on one side of the page for the printing of loose sheets, calendars, and posters. This is the nonbook trade use of texts, to be hung in public or private places, or affixed in the act of selling, at fairs, in markets, or in piazzas. 293

BOOK CULTURE Regarding formats, in the fifteenth century, two formats prevail: in-folio and in-quarto; in the sixteenth century, the dominant commercial format becomes the octavo that anticipates the folding of the folio three times. This is the ‘‘pocket-edition’’ format, corresponding to an increasing demand for transporting a book as a more personal object, a need emerging from documents and private writings of the time. But classic editions also emerge in the form of the octavo, as demonstrated by the collection by Aldo Manuzio of ‘‘enchiridia’’ (reference books) that emerged from his press with personalized binding, giving the qualified reader an elegant, finished product that combines textual reliability, printed equilibrium, and aesthetic uniformity (including binding ‘‘in the Greek style’’). The seventeenth century is a century of crisis, above all in the realm of technology: old machines, shoddy paper, and acid ink. But it has its dimension: dramatic editions in duodecimo and sextodecimo format, destined for the theater-going public, find a style and a market position, rendering this typology specific to the historical epoch. In the seventeenth-century book, there is a mistake connected to the birth of the antiporta (the page that precedes the frontispiece): The Baroque book must ‘‘overflow,’’ or ‘‘escape the edge’’ by definition from the frontispiece, occupying an extra page with its own rhetoric of graphic communication. In truth, the antiporta arises in the high Renaissance, with the goal of summarizing an entire text in a single image, reaching maturation only in the eighteenth century. One of the most important editions of the first half of the eighteenth century, Giambattista Vico’s Principi di scienza nuova (The New Science), emerged in three editions between 1725 and 1744 and is characterized by an antiporta conceived and designed by the author himself. The antiporta cannot alone define the book of the seventeenth century, which remains, like the eighteenth century, a century still little known from this point of view. Finally, in the modern definition of the activity of printing works for distribution and profit, publishing did not emerge in Italy as a business venture independent from typesetting until the nineteenth

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century, and even during the twentieth century some prominent publishers, who had began as printers (Mondadori, Laterza, to name a few), continued to retain a combined printing/publishing activity. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA See also: Printing and Publishing Further Reading Baldacchini, Lorenzo, Il libro antico. Nuova edizione aggiornata, Rome: Carocci, 2001. Baldacchini, Lorenzo, Lineamenti di bibliologia, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1992. Braida, Lodovica, Stampa e cultura in Europa tra 15 e 16 secolo, Rome: Laterza, 2000. Fahy, Conor, Saggi di bibliografia testuale, Padua: Antenore, 1988. Febvre, Lucien P. V., The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800, edited by Geoffrey NowellSmith and David Wootton, London: NLB, 1976. Infelise, Mario, Prima dei giornali: alle origini della pubblica informazione, secoli XVI e XVII, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Nuovo, Angela, Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998. Petrucci, Armando, Libri, scrittura e pubblico nel Rinascimento: Guida Storica e critica, Bari: Laterza, 1979. Romani, Valentino, Bibliologia: avviamento allo studio del libro tipografico, Milan: Sylvestre Bonnard, 2000. Santoro, Marco, Storia del libro italiano: libro e societa` in Italia dal Quattrocento al Novecento, Milan: Bibliografica, 1994. Sorella, Antonio (editor), Dalla textual bibliography alla filologia dei testi italiani a stampa, Pescara: Libreria dell’Universita`, 1998. Stoppelli, Pasquale (editor), Filologia dei testi a stampa, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Tavoni, Maria Gioia, Precarieta` e fortuna nei mestieri del libro in Italia: dal secolo dei lumi ai primi decenni della restaurazione, Bologna: Pa`tron, 2001. Tortorelli, Gianfranco (editor), Fonti e studi di storia dell’editoria, Bologna: Baiesi, 1995. Tortorelli, Gianfranco (editor), Gli archivi degli editori: studi e prospettive di ricerca, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1998. Zappella, Giuseppina, Il libro antico a stampa: struttura, tecniche, tipologie, evoluzione, 2 vols., Milan: Bibliografica, 2001–2004. Zappella, Giuseppina, Manuale del libro antico: guida allo studio e alla catalogazione, Milan: Bibliografica, 1996.

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE

THE BOOK OF THE COURTIER See Il libro del Cortegiano (Work by Baldassare Castiglione)

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE (1882–1952) Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a writer known for his critical and political writing, is a rare example of a scholar who published the entirety of his creative works—aside from an early volume of poetry— during his 40s and 50s. His first novel, Rube` (Rube`), was published in 1921, and his last volume of prose, Tempesta nel nulla (Tempest into Nothingness), in 1931. Rube` is one of the first Italian novels to relate World War I. Told in the first person, this semiautobiographical novel tells the story of a young Sicilian lawyer recently relocated to the continent in search of fortune and success. Filippo Rube` deludes himself with a quest for serenity in his professional career, in his marriage to the docile Eugenia, in the campaign in support of Italy’s involvement in the war, in the war itself (which he survives wounded), and in his amorous affair with the beautiful Celestina. Constantly dissatisfied and incapable of reconciling his superhuman desire for self-elevation with the mundane difficulties of life, Rube` dies in 1919, while casually involved in a political demonstration during the turbulent postwar period in Italy. He is clutching the black and red flags of the Fascist and Communist parties. Both the Italian and foreign critics (especially the French) read Rube` through a political and ideological lens (as a representation of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie and of a general rendition of Italian history during the Great War), thus foreseeing the protagonist as unfit for living, a reference to the inept antiheroes in the fiction of Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, or Alberto Moravia. Only from

1986 onward do critics like Giuseppe Langella and Luciano Parisi highlight the hopeful component seeded in the novel. In fact, the defeated character of Filippo Rube` is contrasted in essence with a religious armature of metaphors, symbols, and allusions. Borgese’s other literary works met with minor attention from both camps of critics and publishers. Most of these works have not been re-edited since the 1950s. Among them is his second novel, I vivi e i morti (The Living and the Dead, 1923). The main character, Eliseo Gaddi, is in a way successor to Rube`. In the vein of Tozzi’s Remigio in Il podere or Tolstoy’s Levin in Anna Karenina, the intellectual Gaddi, tired by urbane existence, retires to an unsuccessful endeavor in agriculture with his mother. Lacking practical affinities as well as an interest in life itself, Eliseo subsequently refuses Sofronia’s advances (a woman he nevertheless loves); abandons his agricultural pursuits; stops reading occult books—through which he had aspired to seek his raison d’etre. Eventually he allows himself to die detached from the reality of all political events. Borgesse’s two plays, L’arciduca (The Archduke, 1924) and Lazzaro (Lazarus, 1925) are also untouched by current events. L’arciduca accounts for the last days in the life of Rodolfo of Hapsburg, the prince heir to the imperial crown, before committing suicide together with his lover Maria Ve´tzera in Mayerling, 1889—an event historically reconstructed by Borgese in La tragedia di Mayerling (The Tragedy of Mayerling, 1925). Lazzaro tells the story of the biblical character’s resurrection 295

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE through a distinctive religious exaltation. Lazzaro toils with accepting the idea of his own resurrection because he will have to face death yet again, and he is indebted to Jesus. Borgese’s three volumes of short stories, La citta` sconosciuta (The Unknown City, 1925), Le belle (Beautiful Women, 1927) and Il sole non e` tramontato (The Sun Has Not Set, 1929), republished with very few alterations as Il pellegrino appassionato (The Passionate Pilgrim, 1933) are equally neglected by critics. Borgese’s stories are clear examples of geographical and historical abstraction, as well as of the classical style encumbered by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s influence, which marks Borgese’s narrative up until the last novel, Tempesta nel nulla. Set in Engadine, this novel tells the story in the tradition of Nietzsche, of a man who, during the course of a stroll through the mountains, comes to believe he has discovered the secret of existence itself and ascended into Man-God; only later he realizes that he has been mistaken and committed the mortal sin of pride. The resulting Christian lesson in humility is Borgese’s conscious and zealous aim, pervasive throughout his novels, stories, and plays. The other key to understanding the writer is his reaction against the ‘‘fragmentism’’ and impressionism that has marked Italian literature in the first three decades of the 1900s. He reflects on the problem of the juxtaposition of lyricism and storytelling, and between these two poles, he chooses the latter. Even on critical grounds, Borgese rails against those whom he calls (using a term he minted) ‘‘calligraphers.’’ He accuses these refined novelists and the literary milieu of La ronda of sacrificing literature’s moral voice for the superficial aesthetic product of the ‘‘pretty page.’’ In order to follow his view on this matter, it is important to read Tempo di edificare (Time to Build, 1923), whose title bears two intended meanings of Borgese’s. One relates to the personal sphere: Borgese explains that time for criticism has expired—to be allotted to the devices of the youth—and time for literary creation has begun. The other, more general meaning is the incitement to return to a kind of fiction that is architectural, organic, capable of conjugating form and human vibrancy, and modeled on the great novelists of the 1800s—first among them Alessandro Manzoni, Giovanni Verga, and Dostoyevsky. Borgese passionately favors and pursues with a characteristic provocative predilection the narrative over the lyrical. Even in Le poesie (Poems, 1922), his verses are consecrated to the prosaic in their rhythm and flow, 296

written using the colloquial long line. He also coined the term crepuscolari (twilight poets), now commonly used to identify a number of poets such as Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Sergio Corazzini. Borgese pays particular attention to foreign works (German, French, English, American, Russian, Scandinavian) in the three volumes of La vita e il libro (Life and the Book, 1910–1913), in Studi di letterature moderne (Studies of Modern Literatures, 1915), and again in Ottocento europeo (Nineteenth-Century Europe, 1927). Within these books, the weight attributed to foreign literatures (Borgese had for a long time been a professor of German literature) is directed above all to the narrative and theater. Borgese’s critical career had an early start. Already in 1903, as a 21-year-old university student in Florence, Borgese contributed to Giovanni Papini’s Leonardo, Enrico Corradini’s Il regno, and Benedetto Croce’s La critica. The latter quickly remarked the youth’s talent. In 1904, he founded the literary review Hermes (which folded in 1906), influenced by D’Annunzio both artistically and politically. In the editorial manifesto printed in the first issue, Borgese writes: ‘‘Aristocratic in our own art...we are pagan and D’Annunzian. And yes: we love and admire Gabriele D’Annunzio more than any other of our modern poets, whether dead or alive, and from him we set off within our own art.’’ In 1905, he publishes, thanks to Croce’s favoritism, his thesis entitled Storia della critica romantica in Italia (History of Romantic Criticism in Italy). Borgese is usually described as an ambitious, charismatic and fiery youth. In 1903, he nearly crosses swords with Prezzolini. According to Giacomo Debenedetti’s famous statement, Borgese ‘‘already from recruitment seemed to have the marshal’s stick in his satchel’’ (Il romanzo del Novecento, 1971). In 1909, he publishes the essay entitled Gabriele D’Annunzio, trying to define once and for all the poet’s work while at the same time expressing the will to supercede the D’Annunzian aesthetic. In 1911, he launches into his 40-year collaboration with the newspaper Il corriere della sera. Borgese will prove to be among the most important collaborators to Editor Luigi Albertini, and within the pages of that newspaper will recognize the budding talents of young writers such as Guido Piovene, Mario Soldati, and Moravia. His review of Moravia’s first novel, Gli indifferenti (1929), is particularly relevant. Furthermore, Borgese is one of the first to perceptively remark on the merit of the narrative voice of Tozzi, whom he befriends and whose posthumous works Ricordi di un impiegato

GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE (1920), Gli egoisti (1923), and L’incalco (1923) he edits. Borgese’s last important critical work is Poetica dell’unita` (Poetics of Unity, 1934). With it he insists on the literary impetus to transcend man’s cognitive barriers and to sublimate oneself into what he calls ‘‘the unity of idea.’’ Elsewhere he speaks of ‘‘representing the world as a form of perfection and eternity; a virtual world which exists as a sublimation or transfiguration of that which we live’’ (Il senso della letteratura italiana, 1931). In Poetica dell’unita`, rather than focus on the narrative character of literature, Borgese insists upon its symbolic and idealistic aspects, thus re-addressing at a distance the 1911 dispute with Croce over the essay Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1910). In support of the Italian involvement in World War I, he publishes mostly political (though not nationalistically extreme) works—Guerra di redenzione (War of Redemption, 1915); Italia e Germania (Italy and Germany, 1915); La guerra delle idee (War of Ideas, 1916); L’Italia e la nuova alleanza (Italy and the New Alliance, 1917)—and often carries out diplomatic services in Switzerland. After the declaration of peace and at the recommendation of Luigi Albertini, Borgese plays an important role in the establishment of the Italian-Yugoslavian accords. His self-imposed exile to the United States in 1931—where he remained to avoid the Fascist oath—as well as his marriage to Thomas Mann’s daughter, Elizabeth, have served critics as events indicative of his firm antitotalitarian and liberal principles. This interpretation is seconded by Goliath, the March of Fascism (1937), a fluent English language study of Fascism, aimed to support peace and the vision of a world republic. For further reading on this subject, refer to Common Cause (1944) and Foundations of the World Republic, published posthumously in 1953, as well as Idea della Russia (The Idea of Russia, 1951) related to the same utopian ideal.

Biography Born in Polizzi Generosa, in Sicily, 12 November 1882. Studied literature at the University of Palermo and then at the University of Florence, 1903; married Maria Freschi, with whom he had two children, Leonardo and Giovanna; contributor to Leonardo, Il regno, and La critica, 1913; established Hermes, 1904–1906; lived in Germany as correspondent for Il mattino (Naples) and La stampa (Turin), 1907–1908; taught German literature at the universities of Turin and Rome, 1909–1917;

contributor to Il corriere della sera, 1911–1952; established La nuova cultura, 1913, later published under the name Il conciliatore; publicly intervened in support of anti-Fascist Gaetano Salvemini, 1925; taught aesthetics and history of criticism, at the University of Milan, 1926. In 1930, several members of the Association of Fascist Academics obstructed his courses; took refuge to the United States, 1931; taught at Berkeley, 1931–1932; Smith College, 1932–1936; the University of Chicago, 1936–1948; U.S. citizen, 1937; divorced from Maria Freschi, married Elizabeth Mann, 1937; returned to Italy, 1948; resumes his chair of aesthetics at the University of Milan, 1949. Died in Fiesole (Florence), 4 December 1952. GIAN PAOLO GIUDICETTI Selected Works Fiction Rube`, 1921; as Rube`, translated by Isaac Goldberg, 1923. I vivi e i morti, 1923. La citta` sconosciuta, 1925. Le belle, 1927; as Beautiful Women, translated by John Shepley, 2001. Il sole non e` tramontato, 1929. Tempesta nel nulla, 1931. Il pellegrino appassionato, 1933. La Siracusana, 1953.

Plays L’arciduca, 1924. Lazzaro, 1925.

Poetry ‘‘La canzone paziente,’’ 1910. ‘‘Le poesie,’’ 1922.

Nonfiction Gabriele d’Annunzio: Da ‘‘Primo Vere’’ a ‘‘Fedra,’’ 1909. La nuova Germania, 1909. La vita e il libro, 3 vols., 1910–1913. Studi di letterature moderne, 1915. Guerra di redenzione, 1915. Italia e Germania, 1915. La guerra delle idee, 1916. L’Italia e la nuova alleanza, 1917. Tempo di edificare, 1923. La tragedia di Mayerling: Storia di Rodolfo d’Austria e di Mary Ve´tzera, 1925. Ottocento europeo, 1927. Autunno di Costantinopoli, 1929. Escursioni in terre nuove, 1931. Il senso della letteratura italiana, 1931. Poetica dell’unita`, 1934. Atlante americano, 1936. Goliath, The March of Fascism, 1937. Common Cause, 1944. Idea della Russia, 1951. Foundations of the World Republic, 1953.

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GIUSEPPE ANTONIO BORGESE Da Dante a Thomas Mann, 1958. La citta` assoluta e altri scritti, 1962.

Letters Olivieri, Mariarosaria (editor), Lettere a Giovanni Papini e Clotilde Marghieri, 1988. Stentella Petrarchini, Giuliana (editor), Lettere a Giovanni Gentile, 1998. ——— (editor), Per una cultura europea: Le lettere di Giuseppe Antonio Borgese a Otto von Taube (1907– 1952), 2002.

Further Reading Cavalli Pasini, Annamaria, L’unita` della letteratura: Borgese critico scrittore, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1994. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Gentili, Sandro, Gli anni di apprendistato di Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Verona: Gutenberg, 1991.

Langella, Giuseppe, ‘‘Borgese e Manzoni,’’ in Aevum, 60 (September-December 1986): 397–414. Licata, Vincenzo, L’invenzione critica: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1982. Parisi, Luciano, Borgese, Turin: Tirrenia, 2000. Rampolla del Tindaro Dominici, Ida (editor), Atti del Convegno su G. A. Borgese (Polizzi Generosa 11–12 settembre 1982), Polizzi Generosa, Palermo: Comune di Polizzi Generosa, 1984. Santangelo, Giovanni Saverio (editor), G. A. Borgese: La figura e l’opera. Atti del convegno nazionale (PalermoPolizzi Generosa 18–21 aprile 1983), Palermo: Stass, 1985. Sciascia, Leonardo, Per un ritratto dello scrittore da giovane, Milan: Adelphi, 2000. Sipala, Paolo Mario (editor), Borgese, Rosso di San Secondo, Savarese: Atti del convegno di studio CataniaRagusa-Caltanissetta 1980–1982, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983.

RAFFAELLO BORGHINI (1537–1588) A typical representative of the Florentine courtesan literary environment in the late sixteenth century, characterized by the Counter-Reformation academic spirit and bigoted religiosity, besides the treatise Il riposo (The Rest, 1584), Borghini wrote poetical works, translations, and plays, some of which he signed with the significant pseudonym of Filarete. Born into a noble and historically wealthy family, alternating between hostility and good relations with the Medicis, Raffaello in his early period appears to have been in a relationship with their opponents (1567–1573), as the canzone addressed to Archbishop Antonio Altoviti attests. Later Borghini also wrote a canzone on the death of Cosimo I (1574), another one on the death of Grand Duchess Giovanna (1578), and was in contact with all the noble families who collaborated with the grand duke. Borghini’s first poetical work is the still-unpublished short poem La veglia amorosa (The Love Vigil, 1565), addressed to Filippo Spina, whose original manuscript is catalogued at the Vatican Library (Fondo Patetta, n. 361). This allegorical-pastoral composition, rich in mythological and classical influences, is based on examples by Giovanni Boccaccio and Angelo Poliziano; it tells the tragic story 298

of Alcee’s love for the beautiful Luclitia, enriched with a discussion about Platonic and carnal love. Apart from a few sonnets and the canzone on the death of the duchess, all of Borghini’s poetical works are recorded in an autograph manuscript entitled Rime di R. B. detto Filarete (Rhymes by Raffaello Borghini, Called Filarete, undated) in Florence at the Biblioteca Nazionale (ms. II. IX.18), with notes and corrections by the author himself. The Rime include a large number of love sonnets, sonnets of religious or moral theme, five canzoni, short poems in ottave, like the Stanze alla Ninfa Tabelista (Stanzas for the Nymph Tabelista, undated) or the Stanze alla Ninfa Trialuce (Stanzas for the Nymph Trialuce, undated), and a group of sonnets on the death of Piero di Gherardo Capponi (1586). In the manuscript, Borghini was careful in evaluating his own work, and separates those poems he considered his best from the ones he rejected. The Rime were edited by Domenico Moreni only in 1882, and were published together with the poetry of court artist Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572). As a translator from French into Tuscan volgare, Borghini edited the Trattato di Giovanni Marco Villa sopra l’Origine de’ Tempii de’ Giudei, de’ Cristiani e dei Gentili, e la infelice morte di quelli che gli hanno saccheggiati, spogliati e ruinati (Treatise by

RAFFAELLO BORGHINI Giovanni Marco Villa on the Origins of Jewish, Christian and Pagan Temples and the Doomed Death of Those Who Sacked, Spoiled, Damaged Them, 1577). This is a curious historical work written in 1563 by Jean de Marcouville, which concerns the origins of temples of various religious denominations and the tragic destiny reserved to those who desecrated them. Borghini also authored theatrical plays: La donna costante (The Constant Woman, 1578) and L’amante furioso (The Delirious Lover, 1583), the latter written during his second trip to France (1579–1580). La donna costante is based on the dramatic story of Romeo and Juliet, which Borghini adapted from an anonymous literary source but chose to take to a happy end. Instead, L’amante furioso, which is more fragmentary than the earlier play, is characterized by a complex plot where particular attention is given to the female characters. Moralizing and pathetic elements also prevail, with some spectacular events. Finally, the pastoral play Diana pietosa (Merciful Diana, 1586) unfolds a pathetic plot, in accordance with the taste of the period. In 1584, Borghini wrote his most famous work, Il riposo, a treatise in the form of dialogue, first published in Florence with a dedication to Giovanni de’ Medici, Cosimo’s illegitimate son. It is divided into four books: the first two are theoretical in nature, the others historical. The dialogue derives its title from the name of the villa in which the author imagines it was held: Il riposo, the property of Bernardo Vecchietti, an art collector. The interlocutors, besides Vecchietti himself, are the sculptor Rodolfo Sirigatti and the Florentine noblemen Baccio Valori and Girolamo Michelozzi. Much of the treatise lacks originality, because Borghini, who could be considered Vasari’s successor, somehow relies on Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1568) for most of his background data. The prose style is often academic and pedantic notwithstanding a certain brilliance in the dialectical Platonic form, modeled on authors from the late antiquity (Athenaeus and Macrobius), rather than on Plato himself. Anyway, Il riposo remains an important source of information reflecting the oral culture of its age, because Borghini accurately describes art works exhibited in Tuscan villas, palaces, and churches, as well as the prevailing tastes of contemporary Florentine society. In the historical section of the treatise, when the author departs from his Vasarian source, he provides a valuable discussion of Florentine (and also non-Florentine) artists of the second half of the cinquecento.

Biography Born in Florence, in 1537 or 1541, probably from Francesco and Alessandra Buontempi. In his early period an opponent to the Medicis; forced to move to Provence (1572–1575), changing both name and activity and probably becoming a dance master. Back to Florence, wrote plays and published translations (1575–1586). A second trip to France is documented in 1579–1580. Often distressed because of economical reasons, by the end of his life his circumstances improved because of closer relations with Florentine nobility. Some register him as a Benedictine monk in 1584, but there is no real evidence for this. Died in Florence on 26 December 1588 and is buried in the church of Santa Croce. MARIA AGNESE CHIARI MORETTO WIEL Selected Works Treatises Il Riposo di R. B. in cui della pittura e della scultura si favella, de’ piu` illustri pittori e scultori e delle piu` famose opere loro si fa mentione, e le cose principali appartenenti a dette arti s’insegnano, 1584; as Il riposo, translated by L. H. Ellis, 2002.

Plays La donna costante, 1578. L’amante furioso, 1583. Diana pietosa, 1586.

Poetry ‘‘La veglia amorosa’’ 1565. ‘‘Canzone in morte della Serenissima Reina d’Austria Granduchessa di Toscana,’’ 1578. ‘‘Rime,’’ edited by Domenico Moreni, 1882.

Translations Trattato di Giovanni Marco Villa sopra l’Origine de’ Tempii de’ Giudei, de’ Cristiani e dei Gentili, e la infelice morte di quelli che gli hanno saccheggiati, spogliati e ruinati, 1577.

Further Reading Avanzini, Elena, Il Riposo di Raffaello Borghini e la critica d’arte nel Cinquecento, Milan: Gastaldi, 1960. Barocchi, Paola, Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1977–1979. Blunt, Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1540–1600, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. Ceserani, Remo, ‘‘Borghini, Raffaello,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, Rome: Istituto Enciclopedico Treccani, 12 (1970): 677–680. Ellis, L.H. Jr., Raffaello Borghini’s ‘‘ Il Riposo ’’: A Critical Study and Annotated Translation: Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University, 2002.

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RAFFAELLO BORGHINI Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Le commedie di Raffaello Borghini,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 78 (1969): 37–63. Geerts, Walter, Annick Paternoster, and Franco Pignatti (editors), Il sapere delle parole. Studi sul dialogo latino e italiano del Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001.

Rosci, Marco, introduction to Raffaello Borghini, Il riposo, 2 vols, Milan: Labor riproduzioni e documenti, 1967. Schlosser Magnino, Julius, Die Kunstliteratur (1924); as La letteratura artistica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977.

VINCENZIO MARIA BORGHINI (1515–1580) A leading figure in the Florence of Cosimo I, Borghini divided his time between the duties of administering the Spedale degli Innocenti (and other works of piety) and participation in the cultural life of the city, which saw him among the protagonists of a society still enjoying the splendor of the High Renaissance. With a solid classicist formation, and an excellent knowledge of Greek, the Benedictine monk, beginning in his youth, assured himself a constantly growing prestige with those whom he knew, and soon began to collaborate with the duke himself (and later grand duke) Cosimo de’ Medici, who made him one of the cornerstones of his cultural policy. In fact, Cosimo kept him bound to the exacting tasks of administration, but at the same time gave him rewards: in the literary circles toward which his most authentic callings drew him; and in the milieu of artists, for whom Borghini did not hesitate to acknowledge ‘‘singolare inclinazione e affezzione’’ (singular inclination and affection). From 1563 as the lieutenant of the ‘‘Accademia del disegno’’ (Academy of Drawing) that has its seat in the new sacristy of San Lorenzo, Borghini enjoyed final say and influence on the disputes and debates of the artists, and his activity as an inventore (inventor) was diverse: from his various interventions as a deviser of pictorial subjects, often in collaboration with his friend Giorgio Vasari (among others, the scenography of the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio in 1565); the preparation of Michelangelo’s obsequies in 1564; the displays for the marriage of Prince Francesco and Giovanna d’Austria in 1565; the obsequies of the Grand Duke Cosimo himself in 1574. His industriousness in public celebrations and in apparati effimeri (ephemeral displays) developed 300

in parallel to his studies of and interests in antiquity and in the history of Florence’s origins: His activity as an inventore is a channel in which his erudition and his talents gradually found an outlet and concrete realization. On the other hand, the greater part of his writings—works that are long and laborious, meticulous and erudite, most often unfinished—was not published. This is noteworthy when we consider his friendship and collaboration with Florentine typographers. He wrote a letter to Filippo Giunta (in the Florence codex, Biblioteca Nazionale, Filze Rinuccini 21, 11) about an edition of Matteo Villani, an edition later printed for Giunta press. The edition of Michelangelo’s Esequie (Obsequies) was also published by Iacopo Giunta. With Torrentino, Borghini collaborates on an edition of Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1550), compiling its illustrations. Later, Borghini continued to help Vasari in improving his grand biographical work until its publication by Giunta in 1568. In 1565, his debate with Girolamo Mei on the origins of Florence was important in countering the thesis that the city was rebuilt by the Longobards on a different site from that of Augustus’ ancient colony. Borghini demonstrated that Mei’s idea of a supposed refoundation by the Longobards was based on a forgery by Annio da Viterbo. It is believed that an early development of this correspondence with Mei prompted the idea for a short treatise on the mode of conducting literary polemics, a treatise that survives in manuscript (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, II.X.107), published in the nineteenth century with the title Dello scrivere contro alcuno (On Writing Against Someone). The composition was first begun between November and December of 1559, and remains in

VINCENZIO MARIA BORGHINI draft form. In this work, Borghini intends to formulate an etiquette of writing, or, better yet, a breviary of literary polemic, excluding the subject matters of satire and those of religious polemic. Borghini was concerned, among other things, with an argument close to his heart: his Florentine tongue, defended many times by those who are unqualified to do so—hence his accusations against Ludovico Dolce and Girolamo Ruscelli. He identifies the border that separates humanistic studies from those that conceal, on the other hand, personal attitudes unworthy of the high function of writing, and in this way become ‘‘studi di bestialita`’’ (studies of beastiality). We can see not only the originality of the theme, but also its timeliness, when we consider that the fierce polemic between Annibal Caro and Ludovico Castelvetro on the so-called canzone of the gigli d’oro had already broken out, in which many Italian literati participate, and about which, in 1559, Castelvetro published in Modena the contest’s final document, entitled Ragione d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro (The Reason for Certain Things Recorded in the Canzone of Annibal Caro). The polemic with Mei, moreover, produced a decisive turning point in the historical studies of Borghini, whose antiquarian investigations are begun at the end of the 1540s with a vast work on the names and history of Roman families, and with a small treatise on the Conviti degli antichi (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale, Strozzi XXVIII, 52; Feasts of the Ancients), and which are followed by studies on Florence in the high medieval period that served him well for the frescoes of the Palazzo Vecchio in 1565. He then developed his design for a history of Florence, from its origins through the times preceding the famous chronicles of fourteenth-century Florentine writers, with studies like the Trattato della chiesa e vescovi fiorentini (Treatise on the Church and Florentine Bishops), published in the posthumous Discorsi (Dicourses, 1584–1585); and he began to occupy himself with other historical disciplines: with coins, in Trattato sulle monete fiorentine (Treatise on Florentine Coins, 1577), and with heraldry, in particular with the escutcheons of the Florentine nobility. The last of the three books of his grand project foresaw a treatise on the language of Florence, on its origin, its characteristics, and the reasons it should not be contaminated by foreign tongues. In Borghini’s judgment, not only had Pietro Bembo not ‘‘compreso il tutto della lingua’’ (understood the language in its entirety), but Benedetto Varchi himself had been unequal to the task. The Trattato

della lingua (Treatise on the Language), planned as an appendix to the treatise on origins, began to be conceived as an autonomous treatise. It is based on the language of the fourteenth-century writers, and is open to the so-called minori (minor ones) as long as they are Florentine, to the vernacular editions, and to a wide range of documents, including domestic writings and family memoirs, which represent for Borghini ‘‘la lingua pura e propria del popolo’’ (the pure, true language of the people). Borghini’s great ability in linguistic matters had a foundation in his solid philological preparation. The ascertaining of the original reading, which he practiced in the school of Pier Vettori on Greek and Latin classical texts, was primary for Borghini, and demanded resorting to the manuscript tradition. It is not coincidental that it is precisely to the texts recommended by Bembo as models for prose—that is, Boccaccio’s Decameron and Giovanni Villani’s Cronaca—that Borghini dedicated his most difficult studies in the field of the vernacular: He was in fact the organizer of the grand philological undertaking at the basis of the edition of the Decameron (published in 1573), and prepared, without being able to publish it, the text of Villani’s Cronaca. The edition of the Decameron put back into circulation a work that according to the Roman Inquisition contains passages contrary to religion. The Inquisitors in Rome sent a copy with the incriminating passages to Duke Cosimo himself, who presided at a commission of Florentine men of letters, the so-called deputati alla rasettatura, which included Borghini himself. The deputati, with Borghini at their head, exploited this chance to revise the manuscript tradition of Boccaccio’s work, so that, although producing a severely altered text, they improved the readings of the vulgata (vulgate), making use especially of the oldest manuscripts and particularly of the one they called l’ottimo (the very best), which is to say the manuscript transcribed in 1378 by Francesco d’Amaretto Mannelli. The endeavor of Borghini and the deputati is documented by a book entitled Annotazioni et discorsi sopra alcuni luoghi del Decameron (Annotations and Discourses on Some Places of the Decameron, 1574), that is in fact a philological commentary on the text. Borghini refused, on the subject of language, to accept fixed norms, and therefore conceived that the work of restoration as well cannot obey rigid rules. However, while he worked on Villani and on the Decameron, he had the idea of gathering his approach on the ways of emending ancient texts, and in particular on the problem of the choice of 301

VINCENZIO MARIA BORGHINI the best manuscripts and of the recognition of a good reading: ‘‘che regola ci ha da conoscere la miglior lezione dalla men buona o pure autorita` da risolversene’’ (what rule there is to know the better reading from the worse one, or else what authority to resolve it). Once again, a completed book does not emerge, but rather a work halfway between a responding letter (addressed to an unnamed friend) and a short treatise, of which we have the autograph manuscript, and which has been published in modern times under the title Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antichi (Letter on Ancient Manuscripts, 1995). It is a short treatise of Italian philology, and as such it is unique among Italian studies on philological method in the sixteenth century and for long afterwards. At the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared the studies of Michele Barbi, whose nuova filologia (new philology), fundamental for the textual studies of the twentieth century, has strict presuppositions in Borghini’s philology.

Biography The fourth son of Domenico and of Mattea di Agnolo Capponi is born on October 29, 1515. He dons the Benedictine habit in the Abbey of Florence in 1531. He studies in the Benedictine abbeys, and primarily in the Florentine Abbey: among his teachers are Francesco Verino the elder, Chirico Strozzi, and Francesco Zeffi. But his most important teacher is the great philologist Pier Vettori, who from 1538 on is lector of Greek and Latin in the Florentine studio, and with whom the young Borghini collaborates on the publication of classical texts. In 1539, he visits with his abbot the Benedictine monasteries of southern Italy during a long trip, in the course of which he meets Pope Paul III with his cardinals, among whom is Gaspare Contarini, a protector of the Benedictine Order. In 1541, he is ordained a deacon and moves from the Florentine abbey to the abbey of San Fiore d’Arezzo. In 1542, he is temporarily moved to the monastery of San Benedetto in Mantova, where he teaches Greek, and in 1544 he is in Venice, where he stocks up on books. In 1553, he assumes the post of Spedalingo degli Innocenti, a position he maintains for his entire life, and which will occupy much of his time. In 1563, he inaugurates the Accademia del Disegno, of which he is named lieutenant. In the first months of 1571, he works on the correction of the manuscript of the Decameron. By order of Cosimo, the Florentine academicians chosen to compile the ‘‘regole della lingua toscana’’ (rules of the Tuscan language) consult with Borghini and with Giovan 302

Battista Adriani on everything. On June 22, 1574, he writes his testament, and is able to make a will— subject to papal permission—in favor of his nieces, Baccia and Maria, the daughters of his brother Lorenzo. He dies on August 15, 1580, in Florence, where he has a tomb in the church of the Spedale degli Innocenti. In the papers of the Florentine notary Raffaello Eschini, there survives an inventory, composed after his death, of his books and goods (unpublished in its entirety). GINO BELLONI Selected Works Collections Raccolta di prose fiorentine. Parte Quarta. Volume quarto contenente lettere, Florence: Stamperia Ducale, Tartini e Franchi, 1745. Scritti inediti o rari sulla lingua, edited by John R. Woodhouse, Bologna: Commissione dei testi di lingua, 1971. Vincenzio Borghini dall’erudizione alla filologia. Una raccolta di testi, edited by Gino Belloni, Pescara: Libreria dell’Universita` editrice, 1998.

Philological Writings Annotazioni, 1574; Le Annotazioni e i Discorsi sul Decameron del 1573 dei Deputati Fiorentini, edited by Giuseppe Chiecchi, 2001. Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antichi, edited by Gino Belloni, 1995. Annotazioni sopra Giovanni Villani, edited by Riccardo Drusi, 2001.

Historical Treatises Discorsi recati in luce da’ Deputati per suo testamento, 2 vols., 1584–1585. Storia della nobilta` fiorentina, edited by John R. Woodhouse, 1974.

Other Dello scrivere contro alcuno. Discorso inedito di V. Borghini, edited by Giuseppe Aiazzi, 1841; rpt. in Opuscoli inediti e rari di classici ed approvati scrittori, vol. 1, 1844. Ruscelleide, ovvero Dante difeso dalle accuse di G. Ruscelli, edited by Carlo Arlia, 2 vols., 1898. Considerazioni sopra l’allogare le donne degli Innocenti, fuori dal maritare o monacare, edited by Giorgio Bruscoli, 1904. Ricordi intorno alla sua vita, edited by Antonio Lorenzoni, 1909. Carteggio artistico inedito, edited by Antonio Lorenzoni, 1912. Il Carteggio di V.B., vol. I (1541–1552), edited by Daniela Francalanci, Franca Pellegrini, and Eliana Carrara, 2001.

Further Reading Barbi, Michele, ‘‘Degli studi di Vincenzio Borghini sopra la storia e la lingua di Firenze,’’ in Il Propugnatore, new

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI series, 2 (1889): 87–131; rpt. in Vincenzio Borghini dall’erudizione alla filologia. Una raccolta di testi, edited by Gino Belloni, Pescara: Libreria dell’Universita` editrice, 1998. Belloni, Gino, ‘‘Borghini. Dello scrivere contro altrui: un abbozzo di galateo per lapolemica letteraria,’’ in Bufere e molli aurette. Polemiche letterarie dallo Stilnovo alla ‘Voce,’ edited by Maria Grazia Pensa, Milan: Guerini, 1996. Belloni, Gino, ‘‘Notizia di un nuovo documento per la biblioteca del Borghini,’’ in Il filodella ragione. Studi e testimonianze per Sergio Romagnoli, edited by Enrico Ghidetti e Roberta Turchi, Venice: Marsilio, 1999. Belloni, Gino, and Riccardo Drusi (editors), Vincenzio Borghini. Filologia e invenzionenella Firenze di Cosimo I, Florence: Olschki, 2002. Bertoli, Gustavo, ‘‘I quaderni storico-linguistici di Vincenzio Borghini,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana,’’ 176 (1999): 85–93.

Bertoli, Gustavo, and Riccardo Drusi (editors), Fra lo «Spedale» e il Principe. Vincenzio Borghini. Filologia e invenzione nella Firenze di Cosimo I. Atti del Convegno (Firenze 21–22 Marzo 2002), Padua: il Poligrafo, 2005. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Borghini Vincenzio,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 12, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970. Gigli, Ottavio (editor), Studi sulla ‘Divina Commedia’ di Galileo Galilei, Vincenzo Borghini e altri, Florence: Le Monner, 1855. Legrenzi, Ada, Vincenzo Borghini. Studio critico, Udine: Del Bianco, 1910. Pozzi, Mario, Lingua e cultura del Cinquecento. Dolce, Aretino, Machiavelli,Guicciardini, Sarpi, Borghini, Padua: Liviana, 1975. Tapella, Claudia, and Mario Pozzi, ‘‘L’edizione del ‘Decameron’ del 1573: lettere edocumenti della rassettatura,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 165 (1988): 54–84, 196–226, 366–398, 511–544.

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI (1380–1459) Like many other Humanists of his time, Poggio Bracciolini owed his fame to treatises, dialogues, and letters as much as to his own biography. Praised first and foremost for his role as a restitutor antiquitatis (meaning at once he who ‘‘returns to’’ and ‘‘restores’’ the ancient past), Bracciolini’s life is so exemplary that it has often overshadowed his literary merits. Undoubtedly, the accounts regarding his enthusiastic recovery of hitherto unknown masterpieces of classical literature embody all too perfectly those pioneering qualities that were attributed to Humanism as a whole. In connection with his discoveries, Bracciolini rejected Gothic bookhand and invented a new graphic system drawn from elements of Carolingian script, which is an antecedent of contemporary Roman type. Bracciolini’s lifelong quest led him through the monasteries and abbeys of Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and France where he discovered, among others, works by Cicero, Lucretius, Valerius Flaccus, and the complete text of Quintilian’s Institutiones Oratoriae. However, this yearning for rare manuscripts should not be seen as the only significant aspect of his life. Bracciolini also witnessed the decline and end of that first golden age of cultural rebirth, which took place in Florence between the

last decades of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century. Over the course of his life Bracciolini mourned, one by one, the deaths of his mentors and chief interlocutors—among them, Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Niccolo` Niccoli—and proudly, albeit unsuccessfully, resisted the methodological suggestions advanced by the upcoming generation of Humanists. Absorbed as he was by practical missions (his journeys and duties as secretary to several popes), Bracciolini began circulating his ideas in written form at a mature age. Taken singularly, his works touched upon most of the subjects that were debated in his own time. One of the first and most notable is certainly the dialogue De avaritia (On Avarice), which he sent to the Venetian senator and Humanist Francesco Barbaro in 1428. In this work, differing views regarding the topical subject of human greed were argued in utramque partem (on both sides of the question) according to the best norms of Renaissance moral dialogues. While rehashing many of the commonplaces concerning the theme of avarice, Bracciolini had one of his characters, Antonio Loschi, present a firm and quite novel defense of capitalist acquisition. Together with the more elaborated ideas developed in Leon Battista Alberti’s I Libri della Famiglia 303

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI (The Family in Renaissance Florence, 1433–1441), Antonio’s words represented a definitive acknowledgment of the shift of values that went hand in hand with the rise of a mercantile society. In the De avaritia, Antonio affirms that everyone, even children, desire money and this proves that such a yearning is natural to human beings. Avarice, which in the character’s words is taken to define an appropriate approach to civic life rather than a mere vice, is thus identified as the true force spurring both practical labor and intellectual activity. Bracciolini’s dialogue sets the standard for a moral philosophy the terms of which are no longer dictated by either religious or philosophical doctrines, but rather by a sound and appreciative observation of social life. Qui enim sunt isti qui publicum quaerant bonum seposito privato emolumento? Ego ad hunc diem neminem cognovi, qui id quidem posset impune. Dicuntur eiusmodi nonnulla a philosophis de praeponenda utilitate communi magis speciose quam vere. Sed vita mortalium non est exigenda nobis ad statheram philosophiae. Who, in fact, are those who setting aside their private advantage go after the public good? Up until this day I have not met anyone who could afford to do this. The philosophers maintain something of this kind, namely that the common use should take precedence over one’s own, but this is more of a pretended argument than a true one. We cannot weigh human life with the scale of philosophy.

Bracciolini’s relativistic approach to the definition of human virtue—an interest that is fully elaborated in the dialogue De Vera Nobilitate (On True Nobility, 1440)—was coterminous with his attack upon the ascetic values advocated in those very same years by religious preachers such as Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444). If read within the social and economic framework of the De Avaritia, Bracciolini’s criticism of the existential model advanced by the observants emerges as an updated restatement, in terms of the opposition between poverty and wealth, of the medieval dispute over the relative merits of the active and the contemplative life. Bracciolini’s moral philosophy found ready application in later attempts to define human virtue within a societal and urban context as, for example, in the work of Giovanni Pontano. Later, in his Contra hypocritas (Against Hypocrites, 1447–1448), Bracciolini developed the antimonastic and anticlerical sentiments first adumbrated in the dialogue on avarice. Such an indictment of those who preach the withdrawal from civic life was made in a tone at once sardonic and 304

injuriously polemical that Bracciolini contributed to legitimize as a viable form of expression and for which he would be criticized by, among others, Erasmus of Rotterdam. In view of Bracciolini’s celebration of every aspect of active life, the De Avaritia and the Contra hypocritas delineated a moral philosophy that was reminiscent of Lorenzo Valla’s Christian Epicureanism: an ethos in which the principles of Christian charity were assimilated to the values inherent to secular life. Bracciolini’s conclusions are less surprising if one considers that his views must have been greatly influenced by his reading of Lucretius’ De rerum natura, a text that he himself had rediscovered. The salacious language and the criticism of contemporaries found in the Contra hypocritas is also at the basis of the work that made Bracciolini internationally known and turned him into an unchallenged model for satirical writing: His notorious Facetiae, a term that can be translated as ‘‘witticisms’’ or ‘‘jests,’’ written between 1438 and 1452. The anecdotes and short stories that comprise the collection lay bare the fallibility and ludicrous nature of human beings. Even though the clergy is reserved a special treatment, Bracciolini’s insightful eye considers every possible human typology. While the Facetiae were soon translated into the vernacular, Bracciolini himself asserted in his preface to the collection that he meant to prove that Latin could be made to accommodate a subject as base as his. The straightforward nature of his language, which never shies away from calling things by their proper name, is definitely part of the background of any polemical discourse against the linguistic abstruseness of the literati up until and including Pietro Aretino and Giordano Bruno. The Humanist who could so skillfully portray the essence of human existence was also the author of a series of pessimistic works such as De infelicitate principum (On the Unhappiness of Princes, 1440), De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitude of Fortune, 1448), and De miseria humanae condicionis (On the Misery of the Human Condition, 1455). In these later works the vicissitudes that Bracciolini himself had pointed out as being at the basis of human existence led him to less celebratory conclusions. Bracciolini’s surliness, however, was not merely a pose struck in order to reject what he had accepted as an essential part of human earthly experience. Rather, his pessimism should be interpreted as the reaction of an older man who, throughout his entire life, made it his priority to take in and elaborate as many aspects of the social

POGGIO BRACCIOLINI world as possible. Certainly, Bracciolini was also motivated to write these dialogues by the negative example set by the Roman Curia under the pontificate of Eugenius IV. Among these works, the most significant is probably De varietate fortunae, in which Bracciolini explores the topography of ancient Rome by strolling through the city’s ruins. As had been the case for Petrarch, the visit leads him to considerations regarding the power of fortune and the objective causes of the decline of ancient majesty. These musings give way in books II and III to contemporary history, evidence of an interest for historiography that Bracciolini also developed in a work that he never brought to completion, the Historiae Florentini populi (History of the Florentine People), later translated into Italian by his son Jacopo as Historia fiorentina (History of Florence, 1476). Of particular significance, finally, is the last book of De varietate fortunae, in which the disquisition on fate is now continued by Niccolo` de’ Conti, a traveler through whose eyes Bracciolini described exotic India. In addition to his dialogues, Bracciolini is a crucial figure for our understanding of the fifteenth century because of his vast corpus of letters as well as a series of polemical texts and invectives. In these works, which should be read alongside those penned by his adversaries, Bracciolini engaged in fierce controversies with some illustrious contemporaries such as Guarino Veronese (1374–1460) and Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), and most notably with Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) over the approach to ancient texts, authors, and their language. His controversy with Valla, in which he defended the authorities of the classical period from the intrusion of the new philological science, gave Bracciolini the label of conservative and reactionary. In truth, he was the last representative of a world that also owed its decline to the force of the individualism that he defended.

Biography Born in Terranuova (Arezzo) in the Arno Valley on February 11, 1380; received his first education in Arezzo before moving to Florence and training as a notary. Moved to Rome in 1403 where through the mediation of Coluccio Salutati he was employed as a scribe in the papal curia. Worked for Popes Boniface IX, Innocent VII, and Gregory XII as well as the antipopes of the Pisan party Alexander V and John XXIII, the latter of which appointed

him apostolic secretary. After the deposition of Pope John at the Council of Constance in 1415, Bracciolini remained in Germany looking for rare manuscripts of classical works, traveling then also to Switzerland and France. Between 1418 and 1423 he lived in England and worked for the bishop of Winchester, Henry Beaufort. Returning to Rome as apostolic secretary to Martin V, he worked for the Roman Curia until 1453, when he moved to Florence and succeeded Carlo Marsuppini as the city’s chancellor. Died in Florence on October 30, 1459. ROCCO RUBINI See also: Humanism Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, edited by Riccardo Fubini, 4 vols., Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1964–1969.

Dialogues De avaritia, 1428. De Infelicitate Principum, 1440. De Vera Nobilitate, 1440. Contra hypocritas, 1447–1448. De Varietate Fortunae, 1448. Facetiae, 1452; as The Facetiae, translated by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, 1968. De miseria humanae condicionis, 1455.

Historical Works Historia fiorentina di Messer Poggio, 1476.

Other Lettere, edited by Helene Harth, 3 vols., 1984–1987. La Controversia di Poggio Bracciolini e Guarino Veronese su Cesare e Scipione, edited by Davide Canfora, 2001.

Further Reading Bisanti, Armando, ‘‘Dall’‘exemplum’ alla facezia: L’apologo dell’asino,’’ in Esperienze letterarie, 19, no. 3 (1994): 37–50. Bradley, Dennis R., ‘‘Poggio’s Noble Dialogue: Textual Variations in Three Early Printed Editions,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 8, no. 1 (1994): 1–12. Castelli, Patrizia (editor), Poggio Bracciolini, un toscano del ’400 (1380–1459), Arezzo: Sant’Agnese, 1980. Flores, Enrico, Le scoperte di Poggio e il testo di Lucrezio, Naples: Liguori, 1980. Fubini, Riccardo, Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Marsh, David, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

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POGGIO BRACCIOLINI Oppel, John W. ‘‘Poggio, S. Bernardino of Siena, and the Dialogue on Avarice,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 30, no. 4 (1977): 564–587. Poggio Bracciolini, 1380–1980: Nel VI centenario della nascita, Florence: Sansoni Editore, 1982. Struever, Nancy S., The Language of History in the Renaissance. Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in

Florentine Humanism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970. Ullman, Berthold L., The Origin and Development of Humanistic Script, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960

ROBERTO BRACCO (1861–1943) Roberto Bracco was a poet, short-story writer, playwright, critic, musicologist, and journalist. A complex personality, he had intense relations with such intellectuals as Marco Praga, Renato Simoni, and Lucio D’Ambra. Through his theatrical and musical criticism, Bracco also contributed to the diffusion of Ibsen’s theater in Italy and helped overcome the hostility against Wagner, especially in Naples. He was the author of several successful popular songs (often written upon request or in response to a current fashion), including ‘‘Salamelic’’ (1882), which he wrote for the Piedigrotta Festival at Martino Cafiero’s request, ‘‘La frangetta’’ (1884), ‘‘Come te voglio ama`’’ (1887). He wrote verses in Neapolitan dialect, dealing with the themes of love, social matters, oddities (the bicycle), current events (the war of Africa). He even wrote duet scenes or tragicomic fantasias with a clear theatrical structure. An original and nonconformist writer, he was attracted, in both his journalistic writings and in his literary works, by such matters as spiritualism, women, the animal kingdom, and by social and moral themes, such as the celibacy of priests, which he addressed both in a text published in volume 25 of Opere (Works, 1935–1938), the author’s complete works, and in Il piccolo santo (The Little Saint, 1910), one of his best-known works. In Il piccolo santo, the protagonist Don Fiorenzo, a priest-saint, tries to suppress his feelings for the young Annita, but Barbarello, an insane young man, acting on thoughts the priest has not confessed to himself, kills Don Fiorenzo’s brother Guido, to whom Annita is engaged. Bracco also won great theatrical acclaim with works such as Infedele (Unfaithful, 1895), in which the protagonist, Clara, who, though faithful 306

and in love with her husband, is unwilling to abdicate her freedom. She avenges all the wrongs she has suffered by making fun of her husband and her several suitors. The title character of Don Pietro Caruso (1895), memorably interpreted by the great actor Ermete Zacconi, is a shady and deceitful fellow, but also a loving father and protector of his only daughter. He commits suicide when he feels responsible for the negative example he has given her. The protagonists of Sperduti nel buio (Lost in Darkness, 1901) are two foundlings, Pauline and Nunzio, who, in a shady and disreputable Naples, suffer abuses and degradation. The work of Bracco’s full artistic maturity was I pazzi (The Madmen, 1922), dealing with madness and the uncertain boundary between sanity and insanity, a frequent theme in the early twentieth century’s theater, especially in Pirandello. Notwithstanding the success of his works, Bracco was an outsider in Naples, which seemed to him the last outpost before the desert. Unhappy with himself and with the world of the theater, he often burned or wished to burn his plays, despite being one of the most translated and staged playwrights outside Italy, known even in America, where one of his most famous works, Infedele, was performed in New York to great acclaim. This strong feeling of exclusion pervades his texts, and led to the revision of his entire corpus, the last edition of which, for the publisher Carabba (1935–1938), was edited by himself. His drama belonged to the neoidealistic and Ibsenian current that spread throughout Italy at the end of the nineteenth century. His constant search for new cultural themes and tendencies spurred him to welcome enthusiastically the new experiences of the twentieth century, even anticipating the

ROBERTO BRACCO psychoanalytic and surrealist theater. To Bracco, the theater was a valid medium for representing the reality of human emotion. There was a strong link between his narrative and theatrical productions: Many short stories were sketches for future plays and in them, as in the theater, tragic and humorous elements, sometimes eccentrically burlesque, alternated. The title of his two 1909 short story collections, Smorfie gaie (Cheerful Grimaces) and Smorfie tristi (Cheerless Grimaces), confirmed this double intent, where the grimace is the grotesque deformation of the truth. Interested in novelties, he could not be indifferent to the invention of silent films. In 1914, he consented to the cinema version of his drama Sperduti nel buio, directed by Nino Martoglio and starring Gianni Grasso and Maria Carmi. During the next decade, several of Bracco’s plays were adapted, including Don Pietro Caruso (1916), La piccola fonte (1917), Il perfetto amore, 1918), and Il piccolo santo (1920). Friends with such actresses as Adelaide Ristori, Eleonora Duse, Tina Di Lorenzo, Irma and Emma Grammatica, and actors such as Ermete Novelli and Ermete Zacconi, he had strong relationships with such intellectuals as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Ferdinando Russo, and Luigi Pirandello. He was friends with Raffaele Viviani and Peppino De Filippo, and strongly appreciated by Matilde Serao, who wrote the preface to an anthology of Bracco’s texts, Col permesso del babbo (With Daddy’s Permission, 1926). Due to Fascist persecution, his texts, in the last years of his life, were censored.

Biography The date of Bracco’s birth is uncertain; Bracco himself did not clarify the several hypotheses and gave the date as ‘‘Naples, 1861,’’ without indicating the day. Son of Achille and Rosa De Ruggiero, who belonged to a noble family. Self-taught; at 17 the manager of Il mattino d’Italia, Martino Cafiero, invited him to contribute to the newspaper. Wrote under the pseudonym of Baby. Also wrote for Il corriere del Mezzogiorno, Capitan Fracassa, Il piccolo, and Il corriere di Napoli. In 1914, at the age of 56, married 20-year-old Laura Del Vecchio. In 1924, joined the ‘‘Unione nazionale’’ of Giovanni Amendola in opposition to Fascism, and was later persecuted and boycotted for his political position. After refusing an allowance the Fascist government

had offered him, retired to Sorrento, where he died on 20 April 1943. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Collections Col permesso del babbo: versi dialettali, teatro, novelle, scritti vari, Palermo: R. Sandron, 1926. Opere, 25 vols., Lanciano: Carabba, 1935–1938.

Plays Infedele, 1895. Don Pietro Caruso, 1895; as Don Pietro Caruso, translated by Carl A. Swanson, 1948. Maschere: dramma in un atto; Le disilluse: fiaba in un atto per marionette, 1896. Uno degli onesti, 1900. Il diritto di vivere, 1900. Sperduti nel buio, 1901. La piccola fonte, 1906. Il piccolo santo, 1910. Il perfetto amore, 1913. I pazzi, 1922.

Fiction Il diritto dell’amore, 1898. Smorfie umane, 1906. Smorfie gaie, 1909. smorfie tristi, 1909.

Poetry ‘‘Vecchi versetti,’’ 1910. ‘‘Versi napoletani: con postille, glossario e una chiaccherata dell’autore; poi Pulcinella innamorato,’’ 1939.

Essays Frottole di baby, 1881. Spiritismo di baby, 1886. Donne, 1893. Lo spiritismo a Napoli nel 1886, 1907. Tra le arti e gli artisti, 1919. Tra gli uomini e le cose, 1921. Tra i due sessi. Fioretti di esperienza, 1921.

Letters Lettere a Laura, edited by Pasquale Iaccio, 1994. Roberto Bracco e la societa` teatrale fra Ottocento e Novecento: lettere inedite a Stanislao Manca, Adolfo Re Riccardi, Luigi Rasi, Francesco Pasta, edited by Antonella Di Nallo, 2003.

Further Reading Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano 1895–1945, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 6, Bari: Laterza, 1945. Frascani, Federico, ‘‘Riflessioni in un cinquantenario: la parte viva del teatro di Roberto Bracco,’’ in Misure critiche, 88–89 (1993–1994): 139–149.

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ROBERTO BRACCO Giovanelli, Paola Daniela, ‘‘...i posteri sapranno che siamo stati amici.’’ Lettere di Roberto Bracco a Sabatino Lopez e Dario Niccodemi, Marano di Napoli: GraficArte, 2002. Gobetti, Piero, Scritti di critica teatrale, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Iaccio, Pasquale, L’intellettuale intransigente. Il fascismo e Roberto Bracco, Naples: Guida, 1992. Kuitunen, Maddalena, ‘‘Ibsen and the Theatre of Roberto Bracco,’’ in Petrarch to Pirandello: Studies in Italian Literature in Honour of Beatrice Corrigan, edited by Julius Molinaro, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973. Lezza, Antonia, ‘‘La casa editrice Carabba e la cultura italiana ed europea tra Ottocento e Novecento,’’ in

La casa editrice Carabba e la cultura del Novecento, edited by Gianni Oliva, Rome: Bulzoni Editori, 1999. Palomba, Salvatore, La canzone napoletana. La storia, i testi, gli autori, Naples: L’a`ncora del Mediterraneo, 2001. Pedulla`, Gianfranco, Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Salsano, Roberto, Intrighi e dissonanze: sondaggi critici e percorsi di lettura in Bracco novelliere, Citta` di Castello: Edimond, 2002. Stau¨ble, Antonio, Tra Ottocento e Novecento: il teatro di Roberto Bracco, Turin: ILTE, 1959. Venditti, Mario, Roberto Bracco, Naples: Marotta, 1962.

VITALIANO BRANCATI (1907–1954) A vital link between the tradition of nineteenthcentury verismo and the generation of Leonardo Sciascia, Vitaliano Brancati was a key transitional figure in the evolution of contemporary Sicilian literature. A writer of short stories, novels, essays, plays, and film scripts, he began his literary career as a follower of Gabriele D’Annunzio. In his youth he adhered to Fascism, deluding himself that the regime would help Sicily out of its inertia. His early works, in which Brancati favored drama, are to be understood in this context. The play Fedor (1928), for instance, is a ‘‘myth’’ whose protagonists are, metaphorically, D’Annunzio and Fascism. In the play, Prometheus orders the sculptor Fedor to make a series of statues of the Titans to place at the summit of several mountains. In the name of art, Fedor renounces his life and discovers too late that he has made a mistake. The play exalts strength and vitality, in accordance with the demands of the Fascist regime. Brancati’s encounter in 1930 with Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, perhaps the critic who best understood his psychology and work, constituted a turning point in his intellectual maturation. Borgese sowed the seeds of doubt in the mind of the young Fascist playwright, who rose above his D’Annunzian apprenticeship to conceive a radically new approach to writing in which the example of the veristi played a notable part. Abandoning every illusion, he developed a skeptical and pessimistic worldview. He translated this pessimism narratively into the atmosphere of death and corruption that 308

pervades much of his fiction, in which he implacably describes the decline of the contemporary bourgeoisie. After his youthful enthusiasm, Brancati no longer believed either in the myth of ‘‘progress’’ or in the church. He transformed himself into a radical heretic, a critic who suspected every dogmatic institution (political or ecclesiastical) and supported liberal views. Brancati’s fiction now focused on a Sicily filled with ambitious and foolish ‘‘Don Juans,’’ failed rakes defeated by life who live in a world of sensual fantasies, and amazing, erotic adventures (the so-called Italian ‘‘gallismo’’). In a Catania beaten by the sirocco, which numbs and blocks all vital impulses, his characters often fall into a condition of total inertia, metaphorically represented by long afternoon siestas and by vain gossip, the sole subject of which is women. The characters’ murky eroticism, which is expressed only on the level of fantasy, is seen as the manifestation of a Mediterranean sensuality that is closely intertwined with a fatal sense of imminent death. The protagonists of Brancati’s works are thus unable to carry out actual transgressions (even their desire to escape to the North ends in failure when put into practice), and their main ambition is to live a ‘‘normal’’ and conformist life. Brancati’s characters cannot really communicate with others. Living on dreams on which they were incapable of acting, they represent the soul of the Sicilians. When he had written his thesis on Federico De Roberto (1861–1927) for his university degree in

VITALIANO BRANCATI 1929, Brancati had criticized the static conception of history expressed in I vicere´ (The Viceroys, 1894), one of the most important works of Italian verismo. He completely reversed himself in his later years when he contributed to the antibourgeoisie and anticonformist debate and compared himself with another master of verismo, Giovanni Verga. He looked at turn-of-the-century literature with a growing sense of nostalgia, and completely identified with the realist and skeptical tradition. His style shifted from the D’Annunzian pomposity of his youth to a more careful and synthetic prose, and he attempted to reach the extreme essentiality of Verga. For this reason, he disowned his early works, and placed himself in that ‘‘impure,’’ demystifying, and materialistic line that makes the literary history of Sicily unique, up to and including Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri. When Brancati abandoned Fascism in 1934, he started to write the first novel that he did not repudiate in his later years: Gli anni perduti (The Lost Years, 1941). The novel represents a group of bored, young noblemen in Catania, tired of both the Fascist regime and D’Annunzianism, who devote their energies to building a tower. In the end, their project fails and its originator, Buscaino, is forced to leave the city. The plot, which emphasizes the Southern aristocratic and petty bourgeois incapacity for action, was a turning point in Brancati’s career. The same theme reoccurs in Sogno di un valzer (Dream of a Waltz, 1938), the story of Ottavio Carruba, a defrocked priest who is charged with organizing a ball in the Sicilian city of Caltanissetta and in the end is assassinated. Don Giovanni in Sicilia (Don Juan in Sicily, 1941), the grotesque story of Giovanni Percolla, a 40-year-old man from Catania who is roused from his inertia after his marriage to the Florentine Ninetta, was Brancati’s most successful attempt at a ‘‘comic’’ novel (it was also made into a film directed by Alberto Lattuada in 1967). When he moved to Milan, Giovanni underwent another metamorphosis, or at least he appeared to conform perfectly to the industrial city. But when he returned to Sicily he fell once more into a deep depression, as if his return to his homeland had brought his authentic character back to the surface. The comedy of the novel lies in its parodic overturning of every form of heroism and in the bizarre figures that crowd Fascist Catania, all condemned to a grey, monotonous existence with no possibility of escape. Paradoxically, the female characters display a greater practical

sense and energy, even though Brancati appears to favour a male (and aristocratic) point of view in his works. Not by chance, Brancati returned to the ‘‘myth’’ of Don Juan, turning the character once again into an ambitious fool in Don Giovanni involontario (The Involuntary Don Juan, 1943). The decadence of the nobility was described in a muted way in Il vecchio con gli stivali (The Old Man in Boots, 1946). Its protagonist is Aldo Piscitello, a clerk who was forced to become a party member during the Fascist era in order to keep his job. After the fall of the regime the mayor, a true Fascist, fires him for political reasons. In the society represented by Brancati, there is no space for redemption and the sufferings caused by Fascism have not taught anything. Brancati’s works for the theater suffered from the censure of the Fascist regime and, after the war, the hostility of the church: Indeed, a number of scenes had to be deleted when his play Raffaele (1946) was first staged. Political satire is present also in some other of Brancati’s later theatrical works, such as Questo matrimonio si deve fare (This Marriage Must Happen, 1936), the story of Pierina Monelli who, in order not to marry the extremely powerful Paolo Pannocchietti, prefers to remain a spinster. In other dramas, such as the gloomy La governante (The Governess, 1952), in which the Calvinist Caterina Leher conceals that fact that she is a lesbian behind an apparently rigid morality, Brancati revisits the theme of the hidden tensions behind the fac¸ade of bourgeois society. In the end, everything goes back to its initial state, with the privileged and the ‘‘astute’’ returning to their places of command. The bitter metaphoric situation of Paolo Castorina, the protagonist of Brancati’s last, unfinished novel Paolo il caldo (Paolo the Hot, 1955) presents familiar themes through the perspective of the author’s concerns about postwar Italy. In order to escape from an existence of increasing boredom, Castorina lives in a state of growing anxiety fed by an overactive sensuality. The novel also testifies to a crisis of faith in reason, which now appears unable to affirm itself in the triumph of sensuality. Above all, it demonstrates the disappointment of the writer faced with Italian society of the 1950s, a society characterized by a Ritorno alla Censura (Return to Censorship, 1952), as he had put it in the title of a polemical pamphlet, and by the victory of the most bigoted form of clericalism. Nor could Brancati find consolation in Communism, like 309

VITALIANO BRANCATI many other Italian intellectuals did, as he considered it as inimical to freedom as Fascism itself.

Il bell’ Antonio, 1949; as Bell’Antonio, translated by Stanley Hochman, 1978. Paolo il caldo, 1955.

Biography

Plays

Born in Pachino (Siracusa) on 24 July 1907; his father was a fairly rich lawyer. Spent the first years of his life in Sicily where he became close to his paternal grandfather, while experiencing difficult relations with his mother; attended the ‘‘Liceo Ginnasio’’ in Modica with excellent results; moved to Catania, 1920; joined the Fascist Party, February, 1922; university degree in literary studies with a thesis on Federico De Roberto, 1929; moved to Rome and became a collaborator of the newspaper Il Tevere, 1929; met Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, 1930, and Benito Mussolini, 1931. His novel Singolare avventura di viaggio was hindered by censorship, 1934; returned to Sicily and taught in Caltanissetta, 1934; returned to Rome, 1941, where he met the actress Anna Proclemer; married Proclemer, 22 July 1946; after World War II, retired from teaching and worked for several periodicals including L’europeo, Cronache, and Il corriere della sera; daughter Antonia was born, 1947; met Benedetto Croce, 1947; worked as scriptwriter, 1947–1954; awarded the Bagutta prize for Il bell’Antonio, 1949; separated from Proclemer, 1953. Died in Turin on 25 September 1954 during surgery to remove a cyst. ALFREDO SGROI Selected Works Collections Teatroi, Milan: Bompiani, 1957. Opere, edited by Angelo Guglielmi, Milan: Bompiani, 1974. Opere 1932–1946, edited by Leonardo Sciascia, Milan: Bompiani, 1987. Opere 1947–1954, edited by Leonardo Sciascia, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Tutti i racconti, edited by Domenica Perrone, Milan: Bompiani, 1994. Romanzi e saggi, edited by Marco Dondero, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Racconti, teatro, scritti giornalistici, edited by Marco Dondero, Milan: Mondadori, 2003.

Novels L’amico del vincitore, 1932. Singolare avventura di viaggio, 1934. Sogno di un valzer, 1938. In cerca di un sı`, 1939. Don Giovanni in Sicilia, 1941. Gli anni perduti, 1941; as The Lost Years, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1992. Il vecchio con gli stivali, 1945.

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Fedor, 1928. Everest, 1931. Piave, 1932. Questo matrimonio si deve fare, 1936. Don Giovanni involontario, 1943. Raffaele, 1946. La governante, 1952.

Essays I piaceri: (parole all’orecchio), 1943. I fascisti invecchiano, 1946. Ritorno alla censura, 1952. Le due dittature, 1952. Diario romano, edited by Sandro De Feo and Giovanni Antonio Cibotto, 1961. Il borghese e l’immensita`: scritti 1930–1954, edited by Sandro De Feo and Giovanni Antonio Cibotto, 1973. De Roberto e dintorni, edited by Rita Verdirame, 1988.

Letters Lettere da un matrimonio, with Anna Proclemer, 1978.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, Brancati, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Brancati, Corrado, Vitaliano mio fratello, Catania: Edizioni Greco, 1991. Dombroski, Robert, ‘‘Brancati and Fascism: a profile,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 13 (1969): 41–63. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, L’infelicita` della ragione: nella vita e nell’opera di Vitaliano Brancati, Milan: Guerini, 1998. Gazzola Stacchini, Vanna, Il teatro di Vitaliano Brancati. Poetica, mito e pubblico, Lecce: Milella, 1972. Gesu`, Sebastiano (editor), Vitaliano Brancati. Incontri con il cinema, Acicatena: Incontri con il cinema, 1989. Gioviale, Fernando, Intermezzi serio-comici e idilli imperfetti, Cosenza: Marra, 1992. Lauretta, Enzo, Invito alla lettura di Vitaliano Brancati, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Mangiavillano, Sergio, I piaceri dell’umorismo: Vitaliano Brancati a Caltanissetta (1937–1938), Caltanissetta: Salvatore Sciascia, 2004. Perrone, Domenica, Vitaliano Brancati: le avventure morali e i ‘‘piaceri’’ della scrittura, Milan: Bompiani, 1997. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘La scena disturbata di Vitaliano Brancati,’’ in Storia della Sicilia, vol. 8, edited by Natale Tedesco, Rome: Editalia, 2000. Schiliro`, Massimo, Narciso in Sicilia: lo spazio autobiografico nell’opera di Vitaliano Brancati, Naples: Liguori, 2001. Spera, Francesco, Vitaliano Brancati, Milan: Mursia, 1981. Tedesco, Natale, La scala a chiocciola: scrittura novecentesca in Sicilia, Palermo: Sellerio, 1991. Traina, Giuseppe (editor), Vitaliano Brancati scrittore del Novecento, Ragusa: Centro studi Feliciano Rossitto, 1995.

VITALIANO BRANCATI Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Vitaliano Brancati, Catania: Maimone, 1986. Zarcone, Stefano, La carne e la noia: la narrativa di Vitaliano Brancati, Palermo: Facolta` Magistero di Palermo, 1989.

IL BELL’ANTONIO, 1949 Novel by Vitaliano Brancati

In a letter to the publisher Bompiani dated 21 September 1948, Vitaliano Brancati defined Il bell’Antonio (Bell’Antonio), first entitled Il gallo non ha cantato (The Rooster Did Not Crow), ‘‘la mia opera piu` completa’’ (my most complete work). It was a lucid judgment, as the novel is a polyphonic work in which all narrative forms typical of Brancati’s fiction found their best expression. The text is formally balanced, thanks to a classically limpid prose enhanced by lyrical interludes, concise descriptions of settings and characters, and refined psychological analysis. At the center of the novel is Antonio Magnano, a very handsome man who attracts all the women he meets. Antonio, however, is a Narcissus with a defect, a defect made worse in a Fascist Italy that exalts the myth of virility: Antonio is impotent. His impotence is a metaphor for Italy under Fascism and its cult of power and strength. The novel thus runs along two parallel lines: the history of Fascist Italy and the personal story of Antonio. Catania, the city in which the characters move and act, is crowded with grotesque figures, metaphors of a nation that is going to the dogs. Antonio’s cousin, Edoardo Lentini, first tries to become the ‘‘podesta`,’’ but eventually develops a profound disgust for the empty rituals of the regime, represented by Calderara, who exhibits his uncontrolled sexual desire in a whorehouse in Catania. The degradation of the dominant social class

finds its sharpest expression in Antonio: Once his reputation as a Don Juan is dispelled, even his old father Alfio is dragged into ruin and shame. The novel is set against a crepuscular and nocturnal background in a Catania suffocated by the warm sirocco winds. The tragedy of the Anglo-American invasion looms on the horizon and the church positions itself to be on the side of the victor. A novel in the style of Stendhal, as Leonardo Sciascia wrote in his introduction to Brancati’s Opere 1947–1954 in 1992, Il bell’Antonio has been compared to Armance. Yet the novel is much richer in its implications and should be read with great care. For example, the final telephone conversation between Antonio and Edoardo is significant (and well-staged in Mauro Bolognini’s 1960 film adaptation starring Marcello Mastroianni). Two typical representatives of a world in ruins face each other: the defeated Edoardo, who believed he could change the course of history, and Antonio, the dreamer locked in his own private world. Ultimately, the bourgeoisie is condemned to sterility and death. ALFREDO SGROI Edition First edition: Il bell’Antonio, Milan: Bompiani, 1949. Translation: Bell’Antonio, translated by Stanley Hochman, New York: Ungar, 1978.

Further Reading Di Grado, Antonio, ‘‘Per i quarant’anni del Bell’Antonio,’’ in Da Malebolge alla Senna, Palermo: Palumbo, 1993. Di Grado, Antonio, ‘‘Brancati o Vittorini? L’intellettuale al bivio,’’ in La parola quotidiana, edited by Fernando Gioviale, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Lo Curzio, Guglielmo, Scrittori siciliani, Palermo: Novecento Editrice, 1989. Mineo, Nicolo`, Letteratura in Sicilia, Catania: Tringale, 1988. Schiliro`, Massimo, ‘‘Tempo del privato e tempo della storia. Il XII capitolo del Bell’Antonio,’’ in La letteratura, la storia, il romanzo, edited by Mario Tropea, Caltanissetta: Edizioni Lussografica, 1998. Sciascia, Leonardo, and Salvatore Guglielmino (editors), Narratori di Sicilia, Milan: Mursia, 1967. Sciascia, Salvatore, Introduction to Vitaliano Brancati, Opere 1947–1954, Milan: Bompiani, 1992.

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LEONARDO BRUNI

LEONARDO BRUNI (CA. 1370–1444) Leonardo di Cecco Bruni d’Arezzo, hence also known as Leonardo Aretino, is a leading figure of Florentine Humanism. A diplomat at the papal curia and chancellor of the Florentine republic, he significantly contributed to Humanist historiography and translation theory. Crucial to his intellectual formation were his decision to study Greek with the Byzantine scholar Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1355–1415) and his lifelong friendship with Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), the learned chancellor of the Florentine republic. Influenced by Salutati, Bruni pursued an ideal of erudition that places classical antiquity at the core of civic education, supporting Salutati’s ideals of republicanism and freedom. His works show the synthesis of culture and politics he exemplarily achieved in life. Bruni’s contribution to the theory and practice of translation is remarkable. For him translation had both political and moral purposes. In divulging and preserving the glory of the Greco-Roman civilization and in providing society with valuable ethical and political models, the translator becomes with Bruni a paradigmatic figure of Humanist. His translation of Saint Basil’s Oratio ad adolescentes (Letter to the Youth, 1400–1403) is dedicated to Salutati, who was engaged in a controversy with the Camaldulese monk Giovanni of San Miniato on the beneficial study of pagan literature, and offers him an authoritative Christian opinion in support of the study of classical literature. Basil argues that, by inspiring virtue, classical poetry is not only compatible with, but also valuable to, Christianity. Controversial but of great influence are Bruni’s Latin translations of Aristotle’s Ethics (1417–1418), Economics (1420–1421), and Politics (1437), in which he reaffirms the compatibility of Aristotle’s moral philosophy with Christian doctrine and stresses the importance of introducing moral philosophy in the educational curriculum. Complementing these translations is the Isagogicon moralis disciplinae (Introduction to Moral Philosophy, ca. 1421), a commentary to Aristotle’s ethics in which Bruni supports a universal ideal of happiness founded on classical virtue. Attacked by his contemporaries, Bruni defended his translations in the De recta interpretatione (On Correct Interpretation, 312

1420–1426). Although his method rested on grammatical and rhetorical expertise, Bruni abandoned the medieval ‘‘word by word’’ translation to adopt an ‘‘ad sensum’’ criterion whereby the translator must adhere to the meaning of the original text. To achieve this goal, he must combine command over both the original and the target languages with the ability to imitate the stylistic elegance of the original texts. Bruni’s translations had exceptional diffusion in Italy and Europe. Furthermore, he translated from Homer (Iliad book IX), Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch’s Vitae, and from Eschynes and Demosthenes’ orations, and offered Latin paraphrases of some of the works of Polybius and Xenophon. In these selected translations, through the exemplary deeds of illustrious men of the Roman republic and Greek city-states, Bruni celebrates his republican ideal. His Latin version of Giovanni Boccaccio’s novella of Ghismonda and Guiscardo (Decameron IV.1) is also notable. Political and literary writings represent another important aspect of Bruni’s activity as a ‘‘civic’’ Humanist. Among these, the most significant is the Laudatio Florentinae urbis (Panegyric of the City of Florence), written before 1405. Although almost a rhetorical exercise, this oration already shows the fundamental traits of a mature historian. Modeled on Panathenaicus by Aelius Aristides (117–181), it conveys the idea that political freedom produces cultural supremacy and presents Florence as an ideal city, built on Roman republican foundations and equal to Athens in its cultural achievements. In the oration, the defensive war against the Visconti of Milan becomes the paradigmatic war against tyranny in defense of freedom. The Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (Dialogues for Pier Paolo Vergerio), dedicated to Pietro Paolo Vergerio and probably composed between 1401 and 1406, is a work of particular interest for its humanistic themes. Modeled on the genre of the ‘‘pro-con’’ debate, it establishes the literary value of the vernacular canon of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. In the first book, the Humanist antiquarian Niccolo` Niccoli attacks the poets by contrasting their inelegant language with the eloquence of the ancients. In the second book, Niccoli offers a

LEONARDO BRUNI palinody of his previous speech by arguing that excellence in the vernacular is comparable with excellence in any ancient language. The work shows Bruni’s rhetorical dexterity and, in a typical Humanist way, does not solve the question posed. Ultimately, it celebrates the cultural supremacy of Florentine genius. Bruni rarely engages in pure literary production. Among his works are an early carmen composed for the descent in Italy of Emperor Venceslaus (1397–1398); a Latin play, Gracchus et Poliscena (Gracchus and Poliscena, 1407–1408); and a canzone morale (Moral Song, 1421), restating the principles exposed in the Isagogicon moralis disciplinae. Of particular relevance is the educational treatise on De studiis et litteris tractatulus ad Baptistam Malatestam (A Treatise on Literary, 1423–1426), dedicated to the wife of Galeazzo Malatesta from Pesaro, in which Bruni expounds the principles of the studia humanitatis and insists on the harmonization of classical and Christian education. Two biographies, Vita di Dante (Life of Dante) and Vita di Petrarca (Life of Petrarch), both of 1436, set a model for studies on Dante and Petrarch and posit the equal literary dignity of vernacular and Latin literatures. From a Humanist perspective, Bruni praises Dante for his civic commitment over the solitary Petrarch. During his diplomatic career, Bruni wrote many orations, from the funeral orations for Ottone Acciaiuoli (1406) and Giovanni Strozzi (1428), to the antimonastic polemic of the Oratio in hypocritas (Oration against Hypocrites, 1417). In all, Bruni celebrates Florentine libertas. He also significantly contributed to the formation of Humanist historiography. His most important historical work is the Historiae Florentini populi (History of the Florentine People) completed by 1430, and written in classicizing Latin. Although in some books Bruni maintains the annalistic structure and oratorical digressions typical of medieval historiography, his accurate archival research, his philological approach to the analysis of the documents, and his effort to distinguish facts from imagination, evidence a Humanist imprint. Introducing an innovative perspective, the author presents the local history of Florence as reflecting universal history. The narrative shows that ideals of peace and freedom have constantly inspired the presence of republican institutions in Florence and determined the crucial political role the city achieved in Bruni’s time. He thus expresses similar views to those already articulated in his Vita Ciceronis (Life of

Cicero, ca. 1415), which celebrates the orator as defender of the Roman republic. The Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentaria (Commentary on the Events of His Own Time), written between 1440 and 1441, contains Bruni’s autobiographical account of the main historical events that occurred between 1378 and 1440, when the Battle of Anghiari ended the war against Milan. It is followed by De bello italico adversus Gothicos libri IV (On the Italian War against the Goths, 1441), a rather free adaptation of an earlier classical history by Procopius. The most celebrated Humanist after Petrarch, Bruni’s political thought aimed at reconciling the popular Florentine republicanism with the rise of the oligarchy, later ruled by the Albizzi and Medici families.

Biography Born in Arezzo around 1370. In the 1380s, the Ghibelline victory affects his family, and he moves to Florence after his mother and father die. Because of the political turmoil in Arezzo, Bruni completes his secondary education relatively late, in Florence, where he studies with Giovanni Malpaghini. From 1397 until 1400, he studies Greek with Manuel Chrysoloras, the first Byzantine scholar Coluccio Salutati had called to teach Greek in Florence. In the Florentine intellectual circles of Chrysoloras, Ambrogio Traversari, and Coluccio Salutati, he meets great Humanists such as Niccolo` Niccoli, Giovanni Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Francesco Filelfo. In 1405, Poggio recommends Bruni for a secretarial post at the papal curia of Innocent VII. The political complexity of the period, in which three popes claimed to be the legitimate Roman bishop (Western Schism), makes this position important and delicate as diplomatic letter writing requires rhetorical skills rather than technical legal competence. Bruni remains apostolic secretary during the vicissitudes of Innocent VII and, after his death in 1406, to Gregory XII. In 1409, when Florence withdraws its support to Gregory XII, Bruni leaves the curia and moves to Pisa, called by the cardinals who elect Alexander V. Bruni maintains his post after the death of Alexander V in 1410, and during the first months of John XXIII’s papacy. From November 1410 to April 1411, he accepts the chancellorship of the Florentine republic. Probably attracted by better economic conditions, he returns to his secretarial post in Rome and in early 1412, he marries Tommasa della 313

LEONARDO BRUNI Fioraia, of a noble Florentine family. In 1416, Bruni becomes a Florentine citizen and, after the Council of Constance deposes John XXIII, he settles in Florence. The council elects Martin V in 1417, and the new pope decides to move his residence to Florence from 1419 to 1420. In this period, Bruni resumes his secretarial offices, but when the pope returns to Rome, he does not follow him. From 1420 to 1427 Bruni resides and works in Florence as a private citizen. From 1427 to 1444, Bruni is chancellor of the Florentine republic. Bruni grew in authority during the Florentine residence of Pope Eugenius IV (1434–1443) and during the Council of Florence (1439–1445). He plays an important role in the war against Lucca and in the long struggle with the Visconti of Milan, which ends with the Battle of Anghiari in 1440. He assists in the rise of the Medici political power under Cosimo I, but does not see the end of the republic and the establishment of the Medici Signoria. Bruni died in Florence on March 9, 1444. The city celebrates Bruni’s funeral with solemn public honors, in recognition of his prestige. Giannozzo Manetti pronounces the eulogy and crowns his teacher and friend with the laurel wreath. Bernardo Rossellino is the sculptor of Bruni’s funeral monument in the Church of Santa Croce. SUSANNA BARSELLA See also: Humanism Selected Works Collections Opere letterarie e politiche, edited by Paolo Viti, Turin: Utet, 1996.

Latin Works Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum, 1401–1406; critical edition by Stefano U. Baldassarri, 1994. Laudatio Florentine urbis, before 1405; critical edition by Stefano U. Baldassarri, 2000. Vita Ciceronis, ca. 1415. Oratio in hypocritas, 1417. Isagogicon moralis disciplinae, ca. 1421. De recta interpretazione, 1420–1426. De studiis et litteris tractatulus ad Baptistam Malatestam, 1423–1426. Historiae Florentini populi, 1430; critical edition by Emilio Santini and Carmine Di Pierro, 1914; as History of the

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Florentine People, translated by James Hankins, 2 vols., 2001–2004. Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentaria, 1440–1441; critical edition by Carmine Di Pierro in Rerum Italicarum Scriptors, 19, no. 2 (1926). De bello italico adversus Gothicos libri IV, 1441.

Vernacular Works Vita di Dante, 1436; as Life of Dante, translated by Francesco Basetti-Sani, in The Earliest Lives of Dante, 1963. Vita di Petrarca, 1436.

Plays Gracchus et Poliscena, 1407–1408.

Letters Epistolarium libri VIII, edited by L. Mahus, 1741.

Further Readings Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966. Baron, Hans, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni, Chicago: Newberry Library and The University of Chicago Press, 1968. Baron, Hans, In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Garin, Eugenio, ‘‘Retorica e Studia humanitatis nella cultura del Quattrocento,’’ in Rhetoric Revalued: Papers from the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, edited by Brian Vickers, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1982. Griffiths, Gordon et al. (editors), The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987. Hankins, James, ‘‘The ‘Baron Thesis’ after Forty Years and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni,’’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 56, no. 2 (1995): 309–338. Ianziti, Gary, ‘‘A Life in Politics: Leonardo Bruni’s Cicero,’’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 61, no. 1 (2000): 39–58. Luiso, Francesco Paolo, Studi su l’Epistolario di Leonardo Bruni, edited by Lucia Gualdo Rosa, Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1980. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘Bruni, Leonardo,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 14, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1972. Viti, Paolo, Leonardo Bruni e Firenze: studi sulle lettere pubbliche e private, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Viti, Paolo (editor), Leonardo Bruni cancelliere della repubblica di Firenze, Florence: Olschki, 1990. Wilcox, Donald J., The Development of Florentine Historiography in the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969.

GIORDANO BRUNO

GIORDANO BRUNO (1548–1600) The life and thought of Giordano Bruno have always symbolized, in Italian culture, the conflict between the Counter-Reformation and intellectual freedom. In fact, aside from being the consequence of the harsh, repressive conditions that ruled Italy during the Counter-Reformation, Giordano’s death was an integral part of his life, the result of his particular character and philosophy. For the most part, those who came before the inquisitors of Sant’Uffizio recanted and thus saved their lives. That Bruno refused to retract his writings, and on 17 February 1600 was burned at the stake in Rome in the Campo de’ Fiori, constitutes an inescapable comment on his philosophy. Like many Italian intellectuals of the sixteenth century, especially those from Southern Italy, Bruno donned the habit of the Dominicans without ever taking up their intellectual beliefs. He therefore soon came up against inquisitorial investigations. He faced them while being subjected to trials and beginning an itinerant life that led him first throughout Italy, and later to Geneva and France. In Geneva, Bruno joined the Calvinist Church but soon found himself in conflict with the city’s academic authorities. He resumed his travels and arrived in France, where after much wandering he settled in Paris. Here his intellectual efforts followed the philosophy of knowledge inspired by Lull’s Ars Magna and the art of memory. In 1582, he published De umbris idearum (Shadows of Ideas), in which he re-elaborated Lull’s work in a mnemotechnic register, developing the Platonic principle of the correspondence between the physical world and the world of ideas. This work was followed by the publication of the Cantus Circaeus (The Incantation of Circes, 1582), two dialogues in which he offered a concrete mnemotechnic application of the principles laid out in De umbris idearum. The second dialogue of Cantus Circaeus in fact constitutes a short treatise on the art of memory based on the theory of shadows: Sensible images are the appearances of the real forms that in turn represent the appearances of the ideas. The book served to introduce him to the court of Henry III, where an interest in the secrets of the art of memory was quite strong. In Paris, Bruno also had his sole experience of the theater, publishing Il

Candelaio (Candlebearer, 1582), a burlesque comedy featuring a bitter polemic against the humanistic and university culture of the day. But the Brunian philosophy truly emerges in the great dialogues published in London, where the philosopher moved in 1583 to live at the residence of the tolerant French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. In a rapid series of texts published in the brief two-year span of 1584–1585, Bruno set forth the core of his philosophy, the concept of ‘‘infinity’’ as a constitutive problem for cosmology as much as for the relation between God and the world, the human intellect and truth. In La cena de le ceneri (The Ash-Wednesday Supper, 1584), a literary adaptation in the form of a dialogue of a real incident that occurred on 11 February 1584 (Ash Wednesday) at the residence of Sir Fulke Greville, Bruno defends the Copernican theory while extending it to embrace his own cosmological conception of the infinite universe populated by multiple worlds and innumerable stars. These stars are animate and eternal, distinct from the tiny individuals inhabiting them, who are subjected instead to death and the transmigration of the soul. Bruno ontologically grounds this conception of an infinite and spiritual universe in De la causa, principio, et uno (Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1584): Form, or soul, and matter are indissolubly united in the one who is ‘‘whole.’’ Life is an infinite material effect constituted by innumerable stars, ‘‘grand intellectual souls’’ inhabited by simple and composite individuals. In De l’infinito universo et mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, 1584), the theory of the infinity of the universe and of the plurality of worlds at last receives a theological foundation. The infinite cause can only produce an infinite effect: God therefore cannot have produced a finite universe. In De l’infinito universo et mondi, the new cosmological doctrine inevitably raised the question of its relation to the theological doctrines of the world’s creation taught by the contemporary churches. Bruno resolves the conflict by recurring to Averroes’ doctrine that philosophy and religion are complementary: Philosophy teaches the rational truth that can be understood by the learned, while religion dresses rational content in a mythic 315

GIORDANO BRUNO form suited for the minds of the unlearned majority. The solution posited in De l’infinito universo et mondi thus established a complementarity between philosophical truth and ecclesiastical teaching based not only on the supremacy of the first over the second, but also on the esoteric fate of truth, inevitably limited to narrow circles. This solution, however, constituted only one aspect of Bruno’s philosophy, since the pages of De l’infinito universo et mondi were shortly followed by Spaccio de la bestia trionfante (The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, 1584), in which he wrote about the subject of the moral universe, and with it of the Christian religion. Constructed in a satiric register probably derived from the burlesque dialogues of Niccolo` Franco (1515–1570), which in turn were composed in the mode of Lucian, Bruno’s dialogue develops a critique of Christian morality turning on a critique of the Pauline theology of justification through faith. This doctrine, according to Bruno, destroys the necessary and real relation between works and the fate of the soul, and hence dissolves the justice that can only exist through communication between the human and the divine. In the same way, it destroys magic, which, like justice, is founded on communication between the human and the divine. The departure of the gods, lamented by Hermes Trismegistus in Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, alludes to this decline of the effectual relation between the human and the divine, upon which the operations of magic, as well as human justice, are founded. The task of hermetic reform will therefore be to restore such a relation. As for the reform of the current religion, the solution offered by Spaccio de la bestia trionfante is ambivalent, since on the one hand Christianity is destined to be overcome by hermetic reform and the return of the gods among men, and on the other hand, pending the reform of the current church, it is temporarily left in place. To crown his grand theoretical effort in London, he published the Eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585), in which the question of the infinite is seen under the gnoseological aspect of the encounter of the exceptional spirit, the frenzied hero, with the intelligible species of emanations from the divine infinity. As the place of the coincidence of contraries, the infinite is also where the subject and the object coincide. To know infinite being is also to be a being known by the infinite, to become an object of knowledge. On the whole, the world of the Reformation rejected Bruno, academically as much as religiously. This occurred in Geneva and at Oxford. He 316

suffered a better fate in Germany, where he nevertheless lacked a position within the university circles that alone would have allowed his teachings to flourish. The fact is that Bruno was a total foreigner to the Protestant culture of Northern Europe because his departure from Catholic orthodoxy pointed in precisely the opposite direction from the one taken by Reformation theologians: While these men abandoned justification through ‘‘works,’’ leaving only ‘‘justification through faith,’’ Bruno instead abandoned justification through faith and allowed only for justification ‘‘through works,’’ establishing a direct relation between merit and the place of the soul’s transmigration. The only political and intellectual environment in Europe that Bruno found congenial, therefore, belonged to the French politiques, the more tolerant Catholic current that sought a settlement of the wars of religion based on a common submission to the ruler’s sovereignty. The North of Europe was able to offer Bruno a somewhat greater degree of freedom than Italy, where the Inquisition was operating, but it could not furnish him a greater intellectual affinity with its culture. This was the cause of such substantial uneasiness that when the intolerant Pope Sextus V died, Bruno decided to return to Italy, and after a brief stay in the university city of Padova settled in Venice. Here, however, he fell into the clutches of the Inquisition, prompted by the denunciation of Giovanni Mocenigo, the nobleman who had invited and then hosted Bruno so that he would teach him the art of memory outlined in De minimo (On the Minimum, 1591). Thus began the last stage of Bruno’s life, the period of the inquisitorial trial that lasted eight years and kept him detained first in Venice and then in Rome, where he was extradited in February 1593. The lengthy trial was based on the accusatory testimony of Giovanni Mocenigo and the doctrines contained in Bruno’s books. Bruno’s writings were thus subjected to a new type of reading: judiciary examination by the censors of Sant’Uffizio. Bruno’s defense at his trial was the one traditionally adopted by writers in his position: It consisted in denying the gravest accusations, taking shelter behind the ‘‘Averroist’’ distinction between philosophical and theological discourse. What was not traditional was the conclusion of the trial at the end of 1599, when Bruno, after proposing various compromises with the judges’ demands, determined that a recanting of his entire philosophy was not possible, and faced the punishment the Inquisition reserved for impenitent heretics.

GIORDANO BRUNO

Biography Born in Nola (Napoli) in January or February 1548; in 1562 comes to Naples where he takes lectures in dialectic taught by Giovan Vincenzo Colle, and in logic taught by the Augustinian Teofilo da Vairano; on 15 June 1565 enters the novitiate of the Dominican Order in the great convent of San Domenico Maggiore; in February 1572 is ordained a priest; on 21 May 1572 registers for the course in theology in the studium of the convent of San Domenico Maggiore; in 1576 flees Naples as a result of a trial instigated by the provincial father for heresy relating to the concept of incarnation; takes refuge in Rome, where he resettles in the Dominican convent of Santa Maria sopra Minerva at the end of March; caught up in a new judicial inquiry and leaves Rome for Genova; after two years of wandering through various Italian cities, in 1578 comes to Geneva; registers in the local university, making a living as an editor of proofs in a print shop; is brought to trial on the charge of defaming a professor of philosophy; reaches an honorable settlement, but, disillusioned with Calvinist discipline, leaves Geneva and comes to Paris in 1581; in April 1583, travels to London, armed with letters of recommendation from King Henry III and is received by the French ambassador, Michel de Castelnau; in June 1583, visits Oxford and there first disputes with the theologian John Underhill and then participates in a series of conferences on cosmology and the immortality of the soul; in October 1585, returns to Paris with the French ambassador; in June 1586, leaves Paris for Germany; in March 1592, comes to Venice as a guest of the nobleman Giovanni Mocenigo; on 23 May is detained and then denounced as a heretic by Mocenigo; on 19 February is extradited to Rome to be subjected to the direct justice of the cardinal congregation of Sant’Uffizio; on 21 December 1599 refuses to retract the errors drawn from his writings; on 20 January 1600 is condemned as a formal, impenitent heretic; on 17 February 1600 is led to the Roman piazza of Campo de’ Fiori, tied to a stake and burned alive. VITTORIO FRAJESE Selected Works Collections Opera latine conscripta, edited by Felice Tocco et alia, 3 vols., Naples-Florence: Le Monnier, 1879–1891; rpt. Stuttgart: Holzboog, 1961–1962.

Scritti scelti, edited by Luigi Firpo, Turin: UTET, 1949. Opere di Giordano Bruno e di Tommaso Campanella, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, MilanNaples: Ricciardi Editore, 1956. Dialoghi italiani, annotated by Giovanni Gentile, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Opere latine, edited by Carlo Monti, Turin: UTET, 1980. Opere italiane, edited by Giovanni Aquilecchia, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991; edited by Nuccio Ordine, Turin: UTET, 2002. Oeuvres comple`tes, edited by Yves Hersant and Nuccio Ordine, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993–1999. Dialoghi filosofici italiani, edited by Michele Ciliberto, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Opere magiche, edited by Simonetta Bassi et alia, Milan: Adelphi, 2000. Opere mnemotecniche, edited by Marco Matteoli et alia, Milan: Adelphi, 2004.

Philosophical Writings De umbris idearum, 1582; as Arte della memoria: Le ombre delle idee, edited by Manuela Maddamma, 1996. Cantus Circaeus, 1582. La cena de le ceneri, 1584; edited by G. Aquilecchia, 1955. Spaccio de la bestia trionfante, 1584; edited by M. Ciliberto, 1985; edited by Eugenio Canone, 2001; as The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, translated and edited by Arthur D. Imerti, 1964. De l’infinito universo et mondi, 1584. De la causa, principio, et uno, 1584; edited by G. Aquilecchia, 1973; edited by Augusto Guzzo, 1985; as The Infinite in Giordano Bruno: Concerning the Cause, Principle, and One translated by Sidney Greenburg, 1950, rpt. 1978; as Cause, Principle, and Unity, 1962; translated and edited by Robert De Lucca, with Essays on Magic, translated and edited by Richard J. Blackwell, 1998. De gl’eroici furori, 1585; as The Heroic Enthusiasts: An Ethical Poem, translated by L. Williams, 1887–1889; as The Heroic Frenzies, translated by Paul Eugene Memmo, 1964. Cabala del cavallo pegaseo, 1585; edited by Carlo Sini, 1998; as The Cabala of Pegasus, translated by Sidney L. Sodergard and Madison U. Sowell, 2002. De minimo, 1591.

Plays Il Candelaio, 1582; as Candlebearer, translated by Gino Moliterno, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2000.

Further Reading Aquilecchia, Giovanni, Giordano Bruno, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2000. Ciliberto, Michele, Lessico di Giordano Bruno, 2 vols., Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo e Bizzarri, 1979. Ciliberto, Michele, Giordano Bruno, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Ciliberto, Michele, Dialogo recitato: per una nuova edizione del Bruno Volgare, Florence: Olschki, 2002. De Le´one-Jones, and Karen Silvia, Giordano Bruno and the Kabbalah: Prophets, Magicians, and Rabbis, New Haven, CT: Yale UP 1997. Firpo, Luigi, Il processo di Giordano Bruno, edited by Diego Guaglioni, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1993.

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GIORDANO BRUNO Gatti, Hilary, Giordano Bruno and Renaissance Science, Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999. Gentile, Giovanni, Giordano Bruno e il pensiero del Rinascimento, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920, rpt. 1925. Ingegno, Alfonso, Cosmologia e filosofia nel pensiero di Giordano Bruno, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Ingegno, Alfonso, La sommersa nave della religione: Studio sulla poemica anticristiana del Bruno, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1985. Ingegno, Alfonso, Regia pazzia: Bruno lettore di Calvino, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1987. Mercati, Angelo, Il sommario del processo di Giordano Bruno, Citta` del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1942. Nappi, Andrea G., Giordano Bruno, quattro tempi drammatici, Naples: Guida, 1982. Ordine, Nuccio, La cabala dell’Asino: Asinita` e conoscenza in Giordano Bruno, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Ordine, Nuccio, La soglia dell’ombra: Letteratura, filosofia e pittura in Giordano Bruno, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Ricci, Saverio, La fortuna del pensiero di Giordano Bruno (1600–1750), Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Sacerdoti, Giliberto, Sacrificio e sovranita`: Teologia e politica nell’Europa di Shakespeare e di Bruno, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Singer, Dorothea, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1950, rpt. 1977 (with a translation of On the Infinite Universe and Worlds). Vedrine, He´le`ne, Censure et pouvoir: Trois proce`s, Savonarola, Bruno, Galile´e, Paris-La Haye, Mouton, 1976. Vincenzo Spampanato, Vita di Giordano Bruno con documenti editi e inediti, Messina: Principato, 1921. Yates, Frances Amelia, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964. Yates, Frances Amelia, Giordano Bruno e la cultura europea del Rinascimento, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1978.

IL CANDELAIO 1582 Play by Giordano Bruno

Il Candelaio (The Candlebearer) is a comedy written in Italian that Giordano Bruno published in Paris, but which he probably sketched out in Italy and completed in the summer of 1582. This play, Bruno’s sole theatrical production, is divided into five acts, as the ancient and humanistic canon demanded, but it is preceded by a series of unusual 318

literary materials: a burlesque sonnet recited by the book, a dedicatory letter to ‘‘Madama Morgana B.,’’ a tripartite ‘‘argument,’’ and finally a prologue, also in three parts. If the division into five acts is canonical, the long introduction constitutes instead a pyrotechnic phantasmagoria of inventions with which Bruno establishes his distance from the humanistic tradition and from the models of the contemporary culture, literary as well as philosophical and religious. And indeed the comedy is written in a language that is rich in terms drawn from spoken Neapolitan, and that absorbs the realistic and burlesque practice of Aretino and Berni, mixing it with parodic echoes of classical and ecclesiastical rhetoric. The result is a contamination of linguistic planes, rhetorical levels, and literary genres that yields a violent critique of the learned language, which is reduced to a repertory of formulas, and that transports onto the social plane the coincidence of ‘‘greatest’’ and ‘‘least,’’ infinitely large and infinitely small, illustrated in the cosmological dialogues. Candelaio is a play of action, of gesture, and above all of word. It is a theater of sight, but more particularly a theater of the ear. As occurs in many Renaissance dialogues and comedies, the characters are not the bearers of particular dramatic tasks (to which specific speeches are attributed) but are the occasion for witticisms, jokes, plays on words, judgments, and interventions by the author himself. The action unfolds in Naples in 1577, near the Nilo quarter and thus not far from the convent of San Domenico, which had hosted Bruno during his stay in that city. The theme of the comedy consists of the interweaving of three jokes concerning the fixations of three characters: ‘‘the love of Bonifacio, the alchemy of Bartolomeo, and the pedantry of Manfurio.’’ Bonifacio is an ancient ‘‘candle-bearer,’’ an obscene allusion to the practice of anal sex, who wants to restore the normal relation with a woman, and to do this he chooses Vittoria, whom he courts as a grand lady but who is in reality a cunning courtesan who tries to steal his money. Bartolomeo is a dilettantish alchemist who seeks to transform base metals into gold, while Manfurio is a Humanist pedant who adopts a ridiculous language. Each of the three characters will be mocked for his improper desires or ridiculous habits. Deceived by the classical expedient of the substitution of another person, the ‘‘candle-bearer’’ will only be able to go to bed with his own wife, will have his unfaithful intentions discovered, and will be punished in turn by his wife, Carubina, with her love for the painter Giovan Bernardo, and then by

GIORDANO BRUNO his arrest and scorn. Bartolomeo will be cheated by the cunning Cencio and then beaten, and the same fate will befall the pedant Manfurio, who is mocked and then beaten in order to put an end to his unbearable language. We are dealing therefore with a traditional comedy of mockery, where each character, through his behavior, deserves the mockery he suffers and is punished for an unbridled desire or improper attitude. While in the traditional structure of Renaissance comedy the peripeteia of the character leads to a happy ending, an improvement of his original condition (through marriage, social advancement, wealth, etc.), in Candelaio the happy ending is replaced by the simple enactment of the mockery itself, which assumes the moral function of a ‘‘just recompense’’ for the characters’ stupidity. We thus see applied the correlation between deed and destiny that is at the foundation of Bruno’s ethics. The entire comedy is subjected to a philosophical lesson illustrated by Bruno in the dedicatory letter to Madama Morgana B., according to which ‘‘time takes everything away and gives everything, everything changes, nothing is destroyed; there is only one who cannot change, only one who is eternal and can persist eternally as one, similar and the same.’’ Of this fundamental ontology, the comedy lays out the moment of ‘‘vicissitude,’’ of the contrariety and mutability ordained by the correspondence of distinct elements within the one who is universal. And this principle implies on the gnoseological plane the mnemotechnical designs set forth in the Latin works. The comedy thus develops a bitter satire against the insipid lover, the sordid miser, and the foolish pedant, and through these figures against Petrarchan love, bourgeois greed, and academic knowledge. Both on the linguistic level and in the weaving of the scenic action, Bruno challenges institutional knowledge in a provocative, or ‘‘avantguardistic’’ way, as Ba´rberi Squarotti defines it (‘‘La struttura del Candelaio,’’ 1993). And he also rejects the false lyricism of the spiritualized lover, who is deceived by the reality of economic interest; the illusions of alchemical science, which is mocked for its desire for easy gain; the empty formulas of the humanistic language, which is reduced to pure grammatical declamation; and finally, the deceptive versatility of biblical quotations, which are always subject to deformations and double meanings. And this is precisely the function of the frequent obscene allusions throughout the comedy. These perform the task, for the most part traditional, of ‘‘bringing down’’ the formulas of ritual

language in order to subject them to the critique of popular materialism. VITTORIO FRAJESE Editions First edition: as Candelaio, Paris: Guillaume Julien, 1582. Critical editions: in Opere, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, Milan: Naples: Ricciardi, 1956; edited by Giorgio Ba´rberi Squarotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1964; as Chandelier, bilingual edition by Giovanni Aquilecchia, in Oeuvres comple`tes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993. Translations: as Candlebearer, translated by Gino Moliterno, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 2000.

Further Reading Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘La struttura del Candelaio,’’ in Ariel, vol. 7, no. 1 (1993): 51–66. Borrelli, Clara, ‘‘Spoglio linguistico del Candelaio di Giordano Bruno,’’ in Misure critiche, vol. 10, nos. 35–36 (1980): 25–67. Borsellino, Nino, ‘‘Necrologio della pazzia,’’ in Rozzi e intronati: Esperienze e forme di teatro dal Decameron al Candelaio, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Ferrone, Siro, ‘‘Il Candelaio: Scienza e letteratura,’’ in Italianistica, vol. 2, no. 3 (1973): 518–543. Hodgart, Amelia Buono, Giordano Bruno’s The CandleBearer: An Enigmatic Renaissance Play, LewstonQueenston-Lampeter: Mellen, 1997. Quarta, Daniela, ‘‘Sul Candelaio di Giordano Bruno,’’ in Il mago, il cosmo, il teatro degli astri: Saggi sulla letteratura esoterica del Rinascimento, edited by Gianfranco Formichetti, Rome:Bulzoni, 1985. Quarta, Daniela, ‘‘De umbris idearum, Candelaio, Cena delle Ceneri: Considerazioni e osservazioni sulle strutture comunicative nei primi dialoghi bruniani,’’ in Il dialogo filosoficonel ‘500 europeo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Milan, 28–30 May 1987), edited by Davide Bigalli and Giorgio Canziani, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990.

EROICI FURORI, 1585 Philosophical Dialogue by Giordano Bruno

Eroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies) was published in England and dedicated to Philip Sidney, a prominent member of the court of Queen Elizabeth I. It was the last philosophical dialogue written in the 319

GIORDANO BRUNO course of Bruno’s stay in London at the residence of the French ambassador to England, Michel de Castelnau. On the literary level it is presented as 10 dialogues in Italian, constructed as a commentary on a sonnet (set out in the course of the dialogue) whose symbolic significance is uncovered. The interlocutors of the dialogues are two inhabitants of Nola, Bruno’s birthplace, or else friends of Bruno’s father. After having shown in the cosmological dialogues the relation that exists between the infinite cause and the infinite universe that is its effect, which is to say the relation between God and the worlds, Eroici furori illustrates the process through which the knowledge of the heroic frenzy is united with the infinite cause and, passing beyond the apparent wisdom of sensible knowledge, rises to knowledge of the truth. Finite reality, a shadow of the shadow of the infinite cause, is marked by the opposition of contraries. The infinite, on the other hand, is the place where contraries coincide—center and circumference, potentiality and action, matter and spirit. The movement of spirit toward the infinite is thus the movement through which the contraries present in the frenzy achieve their union. The path of the intellect toward truth is represented through the myth of the hunter Actaeon, symbol of the intellect, who seeks Diana, symbol of the supreme intelligible species of the divine. While in Spaccio de la bestia trinofante, the false Diana, symbol of the false representation of divinity, transformed Actaeon into a beast; the perception of the true Diana, which is to say the intelligible forms produced by divinity, transforms Actaeon into the hunted, that is, the subject into an object and the seeker of the first cause into that which is sought by it. At the end of the path, therefore, the understanding of the intelligible species achieved by the soul coincides with the being composed of these forms. Having attained the sight of the infinite cause, the intellect is converted into it, and as the knower is changed into the known through the operation of the act of love. The intellect of the heroic frenzy no longer has to seek outside of itself for what it has ‘‘drawn’’ into itself. This path of the intellect toward the infinite cause is conceived by Bruno in terms of an initiation: It is

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not a path open to all, but a fate reserved for the few. Hence the particular kind of Averroeism set forth in La cena de le ceneri and De l’infinito universo et mondi: Only few can know and unite themselves with philosophical truth, while the multitude must be content with the representations offered by the religious leges or laws. The heroic destiny is thus reserved only for the frenzied man. VITTORIO FRAJESE Editions First edition: De gli eroici furori, Paris: Antonio Baio, 1985. Critical editions: De gli eroici furori, in Opere, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1956; as Gli eroici furori, edited by Nicoletta Tirinnanzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1999; as Des fureurs he´roiques, bilingual edition by Giovanni Aquilecchia, commentary by Michelangelo Granada, in Oeuvres comple`tes, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1999; De gli eroici furori, in Giordano Bruno, Dialoghi filosofici italiani, edited by Michele Ciliberto, Milan: Mondatori, 2000. Translations: as The Heroic Enthusiasts: An Ethical Poem, translated by L. Williams, London: G.Redway, 1887– 1889; as The Heroic Frenzies, translated by Paul Eugene Memmo, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina, 1964.

Further Reading Aquilecchia, Giovanni, ‘‘Dialoghi tassiani e dialoghi bruniani: Per una comparazione delle fonti,’’ in Nuove schede di italianistica, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1994. Badaloni, Nicola, ‘‘Note sul bruniano De gli eroici furori,’’ in Scienza e filosofia: problemi teorici e di storia del pensiero scientifico. Studi in onore di Francesco Barone, edited by Silvestro Marcucci, Pisa: Giardini, 1995. Canziani, Guido, Le metamorfosi dell’amore: Ficino, Pico e i Furori di Bruno, Milan: CUEM, 2001. Ellero, Maria Pia, ‘‘Allegorie, modelli formali e modelli tematici negli Eroici furori di Giordano Bruno,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, vol. 98, no. 3 (1994): 38–52. Farinelli, Patrizia, Furioso nel labirinto: Studio su Degli eroici furori di Giordano Bruno, Bari: Adriatica, 2000. Ingegno, Alfonso, ‘‘L’unita` dell’opera bruniana e il significato degli Eroici furori,’’ in Il dialogo filosofico nel ‘500 europeo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Milan, 28–30 May 1987), edited by Davide Bigalli and Giorgio Canziani, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Nelson, John Charles, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giodano Bruno’s ‘‘Eroici Furori,’’ New York: Columbia UP, 1958.

GESUALDO BUFALINO

GESUALDO BUFALINO (1920–1996) Sicilian novelist and poet Gesualdo Bufalino had been teaching in a secondary school in Comiso, his hometown, for some 25 years when he published his first novel, Diceria dell’untore (The PlagueSower), in 1981, and became an overnight success at the age of 61. Bufalino fell passionately in love with writing at a very early age, secretly composing verses since he was 10. His omnivorous reading habits, equaled by his relentless moviegoing, afforded him imaginative escape from provincial Sicilian life. Drafted in 1942, he brought along, as part of his baggage, a thick notebook of verses by Baudelaire, Montale, and Dante. At the end of the war he continued to write and, with the encouragement of a friend, Angelo Romano`, one of the most important editors of Officina, contributed to various newspapers. He soon withdrew, however, from all public engagements and publishing ventures. At the beginning of the 1970s, Bufalino completed a novel, a kind of a fable that recounted his stay at a sanatorium between 1944 and 1947. In 1978, he found some old nineteenth-century photographs in an attic. He decided to organize an exhibition and write the introduction to the catalogue. The publisher Sellerio put them together as a book, Comiso ieri (Comiso Yesterday, 1978). Persuaded to submit his manuscripts, he reluctantly sent Diceria dell’untore. After the remarkable critical reception of his debut novel, Bufalino published many books and essays. Le menzogne della notte (The Night’s Lies, 1988), which was translated into 16 languages, won the coveted Strega prize. The eminent author and literary critic Pietro Citati would write about Bufalino: Per lui, esiste soltanto il libro [...] Il libro e` l’oggetto supremo, che raccoglie in se´ tutta la vita reale—quel bambino che in questo momento attraversa la strada, quella nuvola che proprio ora splende sotto i raggi del sole—e la vita fantasticata, immaginata, irreale, impossibile; e questa mescolanza lo affascina come la piu` inebriante delle bevande For him, only the book exists [...] The book is the supreme object, which encloses actual life—that kid who is crossing the street, that cloud that is shining under the rays of the sun—and fantastic life, that which is imagined, unreal, impossible; and this mixture fascinates him like the most inebriating drink (‘‘Cannibale divoratore di libri,’’ 1988).

Thus, for Bufalino, to read is to renounce living. Literature exists apart and beyond empirical reality. The artist engages in a kind of personal resistance toward the raw experiences and facts of life. In an autobiographical portrait sketched for the Antologia del ‘‘Campiello’’ 1981, he wrote: Una vita come tante [...] un cristianesimo ateo e tremante, inetto a capire se l’universo sia salute o metastasi, grazia o disgrazia; un odio della storia: lastrico di fossili ideologici, collana inerte di errori; un trasporto per cio` che dura e resiste—luoghi, solidali gerghi, abitudini oneste, strette di mano-nel fondo della mia provincia sperduta. In letteratura un amor di menzogna e di musica, purche` radicate nel punto favoloso e geometrico del dolore e della memoria My life is like many others [...] a Christian faith, fickle and atheistic, unfit to understand whether the universe is healthy or cancerous, grace or damnation; a hatred of History: paved with ideological fossils, an inert series of errors; a transport for what lasts and endures—places, sound jargons, honest customs, firm handshakes—in my secluded region. In literature, a love for the untrue and music, provided they are rooted in the fantastic and geometric dimension of suffering and memory; cited in Nunzio Zago, Gesualdo Bufalino, 1987.

The appeal of Bufalino’s literary production is in this self-integrated conception of life and in Bufalino’s sensory evocations of Sicily: its light, sound, and odor, which stimulate his own self-creativity. He was preoccupied with writing, an art he mastered after a long apprenticeship in reading—primarily the work of Baudelaire, Proust, Montale, and Dante. His syncopated style, characterized by a certain ironic distance and Baroque tendency, is whimsical, transparent, objective, and yet utterly personal. Much of his nonfiction, with sensitive portrayals of the local people of his childhood and adolescent years, depicts the vanishing culture of Comiso and its surroundings. During the early 1980s, Bufalino became, with Vincenzo Consolo, whose Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, 1976) had also set new standards for the historical novel, the main figure in the revival of the great tradition of Sicilian fiction. Diceria dell’untore was followed by a number of remarkable books: the 321

GESUALDO BUFALINO autobiographical Museo d’ombre (Museum of Shadows, 1982), a fantastic-historical portrait of Comiso and its vanishing past, and Argo il cieco, ovvero, i sogni della memoria (Blind Argus, or, The Fables of the Memory, 1984), a story about love and memory, an elegant diary recoding the painfulness of aging; the short stories of L’uomo invaso e altre invenzioni (The Keeper of Ruins and Other Inventions, 1986); the verses of L’amaro miele (Bitter Honey, 1982); a collection of aphorisms, Il malpensante (The Evil-Minded, 1987), and a theatrical pie`ce, La panchina (The Bench, 1989). Bufalino’s essays and journalistic articles are collected in two volumes, Cere perse (The Lost Wax) and La luce e il lutto (Light and Mourning, 1988). Among his later major works: Calende greche (On the Greek Calends, 1990) and Qui pro quo (1991), a parody of the detective novel. Although Bufalino’s work has been translated into several languages, the first English edition of The Plague-Sower appeared only in 1988, with a preface by Leonardo Sciascia. In 1988, Bufalino returned to fiction with the widely acclaimed Le menzogne della notte, which many consider his masterpiece. This intellectually subtle novel is remarkable and intriguing in its use of wordplay. It is set in an inhospitable islandfortress where four political prisoners—a baron, a poet, a soldier, and a student—await death for plotting against the Bourbon Monarchy. On the eve of their execution, the governor proposes a last-minute reprieve: If only one of them were to reveal the identity of their leader, they would all go free. The prisoners sit through the night telling stories of love and war, loyalty and revenge. As they see the scaffold being set up, each searches into his past for a memory that will give meaning to approaching death. Through the narrators’ inventions, one unequivocal fact surfaces: Whether their leader will be betrayed or not, the truth will rescue them anyway. Magnificently structured, Le menzogne della notte is the work of a magical poet in full control of his writing powers. Bufalino’s storytelling is deeply rooted in such narratives as Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350–1352) and the tales of the Arabian Nights. His is fabulist territory evocative of Italo Calvino’s best fiction. It is indeed metafiction in the most ancient tradition. Le menzogne della notte is a book that transcends the formal constrictions of literature. It reveals Bufalino’s vision of the fate of man: We are nothing, he says, but ‘‘paper tropes,’’ ‘‘uncreated symulacra,’’ and ‘‘unsubstantial non-existences’’ on the stage of a pantomime of ashes, bubbles blown by 322

the straw of a hostile conjurer. Bufalino indulges in stories and, like a cinematic spectator, finds shelter in the darkness of the screening room: His writing is private, touching upon the meaning of existence through mystification, ambiguity, and the tricks of the human tongue. As Leonardo Sciascia has pointed out in his introduction to the English edition of Diceria dell’untore, ‘‘a book, indeed, is a theatre of ‘untruth’—‘untruth’ that has become ‘truth.’’’ In all of his works, Bufalino uses a highly stylized form of Italian, which he purposely cultivates. In his last novel, Tommaso e il fotografo cieco (Thomas and the Blind Photographer, 1996), he uses elaborate realistic and fantastic imagery to present paradoxical attitudes toward life. Bufalino introduces the motifs of sickness and memory and emphasizes the healing of his protagonist, Gesualdo, the same Gesualdo, whom Bufalino had named, since Argo il cieco ‘‘lo stesso autore, forse, ma forse no, a dispetto della coincidenza onomastica’’ (the same author, perhaps, but perhaps not, notwithstanding the onomastic coincidence). Gesualdo, whoever he may or may not be, revisits himself from novel to novel in search of a long lasting recovery. Bufalino is aware of the lack of stability of the human condition. All of his leading characters know that they are condemned. Their creator offers no solution, no superior vision of the death awaiting all. Not even art has the power to transcend the absurdity of living. Bufalino’s work speaks of a nature and tradition particular to Sicilian narrative from Luigi Pirandello to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Sciascia. Unlike them he is not moralizing in his representations of Sicily. The world is represented as a theater where life is played, as a game, a labyrinth, a chessboard. He wonders in Cere perse: si scrive per popolare il deserto, per non essere piu` soli nella volutta` di essere soli; per distrarsi dalla tentazione del niente o almeno procrastinarla. A somiglianza della giovane principessa delle Mille e una Notte, ognuno parla ogni volta per rinviare l’esecuzione, per corrompere il carnefice One writes to populate the desert; not to be alone in the voluptuousness of being alone; to distract oneself from the temptation of nothingness or at least to postpone it. Like the young princess in the Arabian Nights, one speaks each time to delay death, to bribe the executioner.

Gesualdo Bufalino is the mythical island’s magic man of letters, who was able to translate his uneventful life into fictional themes of loneliness and dread. Bufalino also made an important contribution to the field of literature with his translations; above

GESUALDO BUFALINO all, with his translations of Hugo, Baudelaire, Toulet, and Giraudoux.

Biography Born in Comiso (Ragusa) on 15 November 15 1920, to Biagio, a blacksmith, and Maria Elia, a housewife. Began his studies in Comiso; his scholastic accomplishments included a first prize in Latin prose for high school students bestowed upon him by the Institute of Roman Studies, 1939; this award encouraged him to attend the university, but he was drafted in the Italian Army in 1942 and so interrupted his studies. After the Armistice (8 September 1943), was taken prisoner by the Germans; escaped and hid at first with a family of peasants and later in Scandiano (Emilia), where he remained until the winter of 1944, when he contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to the local hospital. After liberation, went to a sanatorium, ‘‘La Rocca,’’ situated between Monreale and Palermo, where he stayed until February 1947. Returning to Comiso, he took up private tutoring and substitute taught until he was appointed to a permanent position in 1951. Taught humanities in a high school for 25 years; retired from teaching in 1976. Diceria dell’untore published in 1981. In 1982, met and befriended Leonardo Sciascia, and married in December. That same year, lost his father. He retired in Comiso in voluntary isolation, until his death in a car crash, on 14 June 1996. GAETANA MARRONE-PUGLIA Selected Works Collections Opere 1981–1988, edited by Maria Corti and Francesca Caputo, Milan: Bompiani, 1992.

Poetry ‘‘L’amaro miele,’’ 1982; enlarged edition, 1989.

Fiction Diceria dell’untore, 1981; as The Plague-Sower, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1988: as The Plague-Spreader’s Tale, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1999. Museo d’ombre, 1982. Argo il cieco, ovvero, i sogni della memoria, 1984; rpt. 1990; as Blind Argus, or , The Fables of the Memory, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1989. L’uomo invaso e altre invenzioni, 1986; as The Invaded Man and Other Inventions, translated by Kathrine Jason, 1990: as The Keeper of Ruins and Other Inventions, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1994. Le menzogne della notte, 1988; as Night’s Lies, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1990 (English edition); as Lies of the Night, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1991 (American edition).

Calende greche, 1990; rpt. 1992. Qui pro quo, 1991. Bluff di parole, 1994. Tommaso e il fotografo cieco, 1996; as Tommaso and the Blind Photographer, translated by Patrick Creagh, 2000.

Theater La panchina, in Trittico: Bufalino Consolo Sciascia, edited by Antonio Di Grado and Giuseppe Lazzaro Danzuso, 1989.

Aphorisms Il malpensante, lunario dell’anno che fu, 1987.

Essays Cere perse, 1985. La luce e il lutto, 1988. Saldi d’autunno, 1990.

Anthologies Dizionario dei personaggi di romanzo da Don Chisciotte all’Innominabile, 1982; rpt. 1989 Il matrimonio illustrato: testi d’ogni tempo e paese scelti per norma dei celibi e memoria dei coniugati (with Giovanna Bufalino), 1989.

Other Comisso ieri, 1978. Saline di Sicilia, 1988. Il guerrier meschino: Frammento di un’opera dei Pupi, 1993. Carteggio di gioventu`, 1943–1950 (with Angelo Romano`), edited by Nunzio Zago, 1994. Il fiele ibleo, 1995. Il languore e le furie: Quaderni di scuola (1935–38), 1995. In corpore vili: Autoritratto letterario, 1997.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in La realta` e il sogno: Narratori italiani del Novecento, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1987. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Gli eredi di Verga, Catania: Letteratura Amica, 1984. Cinquegrani, Alessandro, La partita a scacchi con Dio: Per una metafisica dell’opera di Gesualdo Bufalino, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2002. Citati, Pietro, ‘‘Cannibale divoratore di libri,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 22 April 1988, p. 3. Curry, Corrada Biazzo, ‘‘La sicilianita` come teatralita` in Sciascia e Bufalino,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 22, no. 2 (2001): 139–157. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino: Baroque to the Future,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Lo Curzio, Guglielmo, Scrittori siciliani, Palermo: Novecento Editrice, 1989. Monastra, Rosa Maria, ‘‘Bufalino e il linguaggio biblicocristiano: Tra pieta` empieta`,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 19, no. 2 (2001): 107–118. Neri, Francesca, and Giampiero Segneri, ‘‘Reshaping Memory: Bufalino, Consolo and the Sicilian Tradition,’’ in European Studies, 18 (2002): 91–105.

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GESUALDO BUFALINO Nigro, Salvatore, ‘‘Gli specchi scritti: Sciascia e Bufalino,’’ in Scrivere in Sicilia: Vittorini ed oltre,’’ Syracuse: Ediprint, 1985. Rizzo, Cettina (editor), Le voleur de feu: Bufalino e le ragioni del tradurre, Florence: Olschki, 2005. Sciascia, Leonardo, Introduction to Gesualdo Bufalino, The Plague-Sower, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1988. Zagarrio, Vito, ‘‘La moviola della memoria: Il caso Bufalino,’’ in Studi Novecenteschi, 28, no. 61 (2001): 199–213. Zago, Nunzio, Gesualdo Bufalino: La figura e l’opera, Marina di Patti (ME): Pungitopo, 1987. Zago, Nunzio (editor), Simile a un colombo viaggiatore: per Bufalino, Comiso: Selarchi Immagini, 1998. Zampardi, Arnaldo, ‘‘Bufalino e la memoria,’’ in Studium, 2, no. 2 (March-April 1986): 268–271. Zampieri, Walter, ‘‘Notes from an Invisible Orchestra: Gesualdo Bufalino as Historical Novelist,’’ in Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema, edited by Norma Bouchard, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Narratori siciliani del secondo dopoguerra, Catania: Maimone, 1990.

DICERIA DELL’UNTORE, 1981 Novel by Gesualdo Bufalino

When Gesualdo Bufalino’s most celebrated book, Diceria dell’untore (The Plague-Sower), was published in Italy in 1981, it became the major literary event of the year, winning the Campiello prize. A high school teacher until his retirement in 1976, Bufalino, who had lived in enforced seclusion from the literary world, captivated the attention of the Palermitan publisher Elvira Sellerio through a photography book on his hometown. Eventually, he agreed to surrender a manuscript he had begun to write in 1950, completed in 1971, and subjected to several revisions. The plot of Diceria dell’untore exemplifies Bufalino’s economy of style and the themes that preoccupied him. In 1946, in a sanatorium near Palermo, an estranged group of people find themselves brought and bound together by disease and destiny. All survivors of the war, they are kept 324

waiting in the antechamber of death. Life for them pulsates with a monotonous, wearisome beat, but their gestures and words enact a cathartic ritual. As the narrator-protagonist recalls at the end of chapter 2, ‘‘Oh sı`, furono giorni infelici, i piu` felici della mia vita’’ (Ah yes, those were unhappy days, the happiest of my life). Bufalino’s memory evokes the most extraordinary characters: Il Gran Magro (The Great Thin One), who is the direct opposite of the young narrator; a doctor/ director who orchestrates the spectacle of life and death; Father Vittorio, the military chaplain; Sebastiano, who throws himself down a spiral staircase; Angelo, for whom ‘‘la morte e` un paravento di fumo fra i vivi e gli altri’’ (death is a mere screen of smoke between the living and the others); Marta, a Jewish deportee from the Nazi camps, the main female character, a mysterious ballerina the protagonist passionately loves. Feverish, vibrant, sensuous, Baroque, atoned by an atmosphere that envelops hyperbole and excess, intemperance and passion; a striking blend of irony and theatricality: these are some of the distinguishing features cited by the reviewers of Diceria dell’untore. The novel begins memorably with a dizzying opening confession: O quando tutte le notti—per pigrizia, per avarizia— ritornavo a sognare lo stesso sogno: una strada color cenere, piatta, che scorre con andamento di fiume fra due muri piu` alti della statura di un uomo; poi si rompe, strapionba sul vuoto [...] mi sorprende un ribrezzo di pozzo, e con esso l’estasi che solo un irrisorio pedaggio rimanga a separarmi...da che? O that time when each night-out of laziness or greed—I would dream the same dream: a flat, ash colored road, running with a river’s flow between two walls taller than a man; then it breaks off, jutting over the void [...] suddenly I am overwhelmed by the horror of the pit, accompanied by delight at the knowledge that a trifling toll is all that separates me... from what?

With this bravura opening, Bufalino establishes the tone and the boundaries of that unique literary form that is ‘‘diceria,’’ that vivacious rigmarole through which the protagonist will recount his personal story as well as memories. In Bufalino’s novel, the traumatic experience of the war and the hallucinatory impressions recorded at ‘‘La Rocca’’ sanatorium, near Palermo, produce a complex representation of reality and a lucid investigation into the agony of being. At the end, we are told why the protagonist is the only survivor: M’aspettava una vita nuda, uno zero di giorni previsti, senza una brace ne´ un grido. Uscire mi toccava dalla

GESUALDO BUFALINO cruna dell’individuo per essere uno dei tanti della strada, che amministrano umanamente la loro piccina saviezza d’alito e d’anni. Ma, allo stesso modo dell’istrione in ritiro che ripone nel guardaroba i corredi sanguinosi di un Riccardo o di un Cesare, io avrei serbato i miei coturni, e le tirate al proscenio dell’eroe che avevo presunto di essere, in un angolo della memoria. Per questo forse m’era stato concesso l’esonero: per questo io solo m’ero salvato, e nessun altro, dalla falcidia: per rendere testimonianza, se non delazione, d’una retorica e d’una pieta` A naked life awaited me, a nothingness of predictable days, without a sparkle or voice. I had to come out from the eye of my selfhood in order to be one of the many men in the street who humanly administer the petty wisdom of their breath and years. Like a retired actor putting back into the closet the bloody vestments of King Richard or Caesar, I would lay aside my buskins, and the soliloquies of the hero that I had pretended to be, in a corner of my memory. Perhaps this was why I had been granted a pardon, why I alone, and no one else, had survived the massacre: to bear witness to, if not denounce, a rhetoric and pity.

In his first novel, the artist offers a poetic tribute to his memories of Sicily, her people and her traditions. The Mediterranean island becomes a mythic place where stories are told through highly expressive words. As Bufalino explained in his ‘‘Istruzioni per l’uso’’ of Diceria dell’untore, originally addressed only to his friends, he devised his narrative rhetoric with great care: Confesso che il primo capitolo che scrissi (non e` il primo nell’ordine canonico e non conta dire qual e`) nacque come un gioco serio, la scommessa di trovare intrecci plausibili fra 50 parole scelte in anticipo per timbro, colore, carica evocatoria comuni. Qualcosa di meno maniacale delle matematiche di Raymond Roussel... I must confess that the first chapter I wrote (it is not the first in the definitive order, and there is no need to say which one it is) was born of a serious game, the challenge of finding plausible interconnections among fifty words chosen beforehand for their common tone, color, and evocative charge. Something a bit less maniacal than the mathematics of Raymond Roussel.

Such connections are neither esoteric nor cabalistic, but are born ‘‘da una parentela e coalizione

espressiva e musicale’’ (of a kinship and an expressive and musical coalition). He strives to construct, through literature, a mythopoeic self. Diceria dell’untore is a successful experiment in self-critical autobiography. It was adapted to the screen in 1991 by director Beppe Cino, with a remarkable Vanessa Redgrave playing the role of Suor Crocifissa. GAETANA MARRONE Editions First edition: Diceria dell’untore, Palermo: Sellerio, 1981. Other editions: in Opere 1981–1988, edited by Maria Corti and Francesca Caputo, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Translations: as The Plague-sower, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, with an introduction by Leonardo Sciascia, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1988; The Plague-Spreader’s Tale, translated by Patrick Creagh, London: Harvill, 1999.

Further Reading Aronica, Salvatore, ‘‘La trama della menzogna in Diceria dell’untore,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 16 (1995): 289–293. Cattanei, Luigi, ‘‘Per la poetica di Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 19 (March-April, 1995): 215–222. Di Biase, Carmine, ‘‘Il mistero della more in ‘Diceria dell’untore,’’’ in Studium, 77, no. 5 (September-October 1981): 603–608. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Imagining Losers in Bufalino’s Diceria,’’ in European Memories of the Second World War, edited by Helmett Peitsch, Charles Burdett and Claire Gorrara, Oxford and New York: Berghan Books, 1999. Klopp, Charles, ‘‘The Return of the Spiritual with a Note on the Fiction of Bufalino, Tabucchi and Celati,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 19 (2001): 93–102. Marrone, Gianfranco, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino: Diceria dell’autore,’’ in Nuove effemeridi (Palermo), 4, no. 13 (1991): 4–11. Papa, Enzo, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Novecento, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1989. Raspanti, Antonino, ‘‘La domanda sulla morte in Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Letteratura siciliana del novecento. Le domande radicali, edited by Massimo Naro, Caltanissetta-Roma: Sciascia, 2002. Zago, Nunzio, ‘‘Gesualdo Bufalino,’’ in Gli eredi di Verga, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Catania: Letteratura Amica, 1984.

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MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI (1475–1564) God sent Michelangelo down to Earth, Giorgio Vasari writes in the last chapter of Vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori, architetti (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568), because he saw that modern artists were struggling to compose a perfect imitation of nature in the attempt to attain ‘‘quella somma cognizione che molti chiamano intelligenza’’ (that supreme knowledge that many call intelligence). Vasari portrays Michelangelo as a second Christ who has descended from Heaven ‘‘per cavarci da tanti errori’’ (to take us away from all our errors) caused by our ‘‘arroganza’’ (arrogance). Living in the darkness of our fruitless efforts, we now can turn to Michelangelo to receive God’s enlightenment, what he defines as ‘‘intelligenza.’’ In Vasari’s view, Michelangelo is not only the greatest artist who has ever lived, but his art has a deeply moral and religious significance as well. Accompanied by a profound knowledge of ‘‘filosofia morale’’ (moral philosophy) and of ‘‘dolce poesia’’ (sweet poetry), Michelangelo is a divine model of perfection. As Vasari states in a later passage of his biography, his ‘‘bellissime canzoni’’ (beautiful canzoni) and his ‘‘stupendi suoi sonetti gravemente composti’’ (wonderful sonnets that he composed with grave care) are read and debated in all Italian academies. Michelangelo’s ‘‘dolce poesia,’’ as Vasari says, is the most original collection of poetry of the Italian Renaissance, an unprecedented and candid autobiographical account, a unique meditation on the relationship between visual and verbal expression, and a heartfelt meditation on religious enlightenment. Michelangelo’s Rime bear a close resemblance with Shakespeare’s canzoniere because of their essential themes: the love for a young man and for a woman, who is also but not exclusively Vittoria Colonna. In these two collections of poetry, the tone and philosophical influences are also very similar. Walter Pater’s powerful definition of ‘‘Michelangelesque,’’ which expresses ‘‘sweetness and strength, pleasure with surprise, an energy of conception that seems at every moment about to 326

break through all the conditions of comely form, recovering, touch by touch, a loveliness found usually only in the simplest natural things,’’ is in part applicable also to Michelangelo’s poetry (The Renaissance, 1877). ‘‘Strength’’ more than ‘‘sweetness’’ dominates the artist’s texts. ‘‘Loveliness’’ in his poetry becomes the painful struggle to bring out the concept lying dormant within the matter, as we see in his unfinished four sculptures called Schiavi (Slaves) for the tomb of Julius II. Thus the legacy of Michelangelo’s poetry might truly lie in his tormented and unfinished compositions, which challenge the traditional metrical forms of Petrarchan poetry. Only a few of Michelangelo’s poems were published during his life. His Rime (more than 302 pieces) were composed between 1503 and 1560. In a letter to Vasari dated September 19, 1554, from his vast epistolary, Michelangelo jokes about his crazy decision to write sonnets in such a late period of his life. His poems often defy the metric and structural rules of the Italian lyric tradition. Along with some 80 sonnets and some 100 madrigals on habitual themes such as the love experience, we find numerous ‘‘fragments,’’ isolated stanzas, but also single verses written in a seemingly spontaneous manner, for instance on the back of letters or next to his sketches. Michelangelo’s canzoniere is both a product alternative to his figurative works and the invaluable means through which the artist meditates upon his expression. Thematically, Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonism, primarily his De amore (On Love, 1469), a seminal rewriting of the Symposium, exerts a central influence on Michelangelo, together with Pico della Mirandola’s Commento sopra una canzone de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni (Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, 1486), which is considered one of the first treatises on love. In terms of poetic models, Dante’s Comedia deeply influenced Michelangelo’s Petrarchan language. Michelangelo’s ‘‘fragmentary’’ poetry must be related to the debate on the ‘‘nonfinito’’ (unfinished) in his sculpture, that is, the artist aims at giving form to a ‘‘concetto’’ (concept), a

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI key term of Renaissance art theory. He dedicates some of his most famous sonnets to this theme, for instance ‘‘Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto’’ (The best of artists never has a concept), which is a perfect, albeit very dense, synthesis of Michelangelo’s artistic view. The poet contends that a great artist succeeds in bringing out the ‘‘concept’’ that a marble block contains (‘‘in se´ circonscriva’’) within its husk (‘‘suo superchio’’) only if his hand follows the intellect (‘‘la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto’’). That is, hand and mind must work together to give life to the artist’s insight. This sonnet was the object of a famous lecture of the philosopher Benedetto Varchi at the Florentine Academy in 1546. Varchi underscores that a ‘‘concept’’ is an act of the imagination, and it stands for ‘‘form,’’ ‘‘idea,’’ ‘‘example,’’ ‘‘similitude,’’ ‘‘image,’’ but first of all for the Aristotelian forma agens, which exists in the artist’s mind and compels him to create an immaterial hybrid, something between seeing and sensing. The presence of Aristotelian philosophy in Michelangelo’s poetics, usually underestimated, plays in fact a major role in shaping the artist’s idea of ‘‘concept.’’ For Michelangelo, a ‘‘concept’’ is both an act of imagination and a synonym for ‘‘form’’ and ‘‘image,’’ thus his incomplete texts materialize his effort to give form to a ‘‘concept,’’ and therefore are fragmentary only from a metrical point of view. Take for example the fragment ‘‘Ben fu, temprando il ciel tuo vivo raggio’’ (To me Heaven was surely merciless), which is part of a brief sequence of three poems (two complete sonnets and a fragment) dedicated to a young man, Febo del Poggio, all of them focusing on the end of their friendship. In a letter written before September 23, 1534, Michelangelo shares with Poggio his decision of leaving Rome for Florence and reassures him of his unflinching love and dedication. The letter also reveals that some sort of disagreement has tainted their relationship. In ‘‘Ben fu, temprando il ciel tuo vivo raggio,’’ Michelangelo offers a deeply spiritual analysis of his love for Febo, in which self-discovery and self-abandonment coincide. By punning on the name of his young friend, ‘‘Febo’’ (Phoebus) and ‘‘poggio’’ (hill), in only eight verses the poet visualizes the act of falling in love through sight (the sun’s rays descend on those who love the young man-Phoebus) as a blinding experience and as an actual fall from the hill (poggio) to which the beloved Febo had decided to fly. This intense, obscure ‘‘fragment,’’ which rephrases the opening lines of Canto 28 of Dante’s Purgatorio (the pilgrim’s walking up the hill over the forest of Eden),

works as a cogent concetto, that is, as an insight that transcends expression. Its main source is Ficino’s De raptu Pauli (Paul’s Rapture, ca. 1476), in which the Florentine philosopher interprets the apostle Paul’s ascension to the third heaven in connection with his Neoplatonic vision of Christian theology. Michelangelo had explored a similar theme in some of his famous sketches for Tommaso Cavalieri, such as Il ratto di Ganimede (Ganymede’s Rapture) and La caduta di Fetone (The Fall of Phaeton). Michelangelo’s poetry could be thus seen as an original form of anti-Petrarchism, which questions the strict rhetorical structures of Italian poetic tradition, its trite metaphors, and its empty and redundant language. The influence of Ficinian Platonism is apparent in Michelangelo’s concept of love. However, it is important to bear in mind his unique interpretation of the meaning and role of the body in the love experience. In the sonnet ‘‘D’altrui pietoso e sol di se´ spietato’’ (With grace to all, to itself only scorn), written for Tommaso Cavalieri, Michelangelo describes himself as a lover who, like a snake, wishes to shed his own skin in order to protect the limbs of his beloved. The extent of Michelangelo’s allegiance to Renaissance Florentine thought is still the object of an intense academic discussion. The fundamental emphasis on the transcendence inherent in human physicality is at once accepted and modified in Michelangelo’s poetic works. In this regard, aging and death become recurrent themes, only partly justifiable by the fact that most of his literary production corresponds to a mature phase of his life. Images of tortured, flayed, dissected bodies recur both in his verses and his figurative works (such as his self-portrait in the Giudizio universale). In Michelangelo’s masterpiece, the saints manifest signs of their martyrdom according to traditional Christian iconography, whereas St. Bartholomew, who was flayed to death, holds his skin like a shroud. The face we see on the saint’s crumpled skin is Michelangelo’s. Michelangelo turns the act of sculpting into a metaphor for a process of self-revelation that can be attained only through suffering. He himself is the matter or stone from which an inner form is chipped forth. The act of molding, or better yet, bringing to the surface one’s own identity by means of hammering or melting becomes the key metaphor of Michelangelo’s verses. But similar to the ‘‘nonfinito’’ in sculpture, the poet’s self-image can only be a work in progress that defies the static rules of poetic rhetoric. The concetto expressed through poetry is a partial reflection of an inner image that lies under 327

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI the aegis of human physicality, as in the beginning lines of the long poem ‘‘I’ sto rinchiuso come la midolla/da la sua scorza, qua pover e solo’’ (I live shut up here, like the doughy middle/inside the bread crust, poor and all alone). Michelangelo’s poems on visual art (primarily sculpture) are particularly original. The opening section includes poems that address the figurative arts and the artist’s work. They comprise important autobiographical references, like the famous ‘‘I’ ho gia` fatto un gozzo in questo stento’’ (I’ve got myself a goiter from this strain), in which he humorously describes his painful working on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Other lyrics present his philosophical view of artistic expression, where Michelangelo emphasizes the power of art to produce beauty and thus self-knowledge, according to the well-known concepts of Florentine Platonism. In a compelling manner, the artist envisions love as a form of sculpture: He does not visualize the beloved’s beautiful forms in order to make them eternal (a common topos of the Petrarchan tradition) but contends that it is the beloved who, through the power that love has granted her or him, is able to give form to the lover. For Michelangelo, the beloved is a sculptor that ‘‘carves’’ out the truthful, and beautiful, form of the lover. The beloved, as he writes in a madrigal dedicated to Vittoria Colonna, has the power to strip away the bark that hides the good lying inside the poet. The last part comprises a handful of compositions in which Michelangelo speaks of divine creation as a form of artistic expression. Of particular relevance for a correct understanding of Michelangelo’s poetic writing is his complex relationship with Vittoria Colonna, whose influence on the artist’s religious expression has been the object of intense critical scrutiny. In 1546, Michelangelo made a selection of his verses in the attempt to create a coherent canzoniere, as the manuscript Vaticano Latino 3211 proves. This project failed also because of Vittoria Colonna’s death in 1547. In his poetic anthology, Michelangelo excluded his ‘‘realistic’’ and occasional compositions and emphasized his love verses. The artist created two female interlocutors, a mysterious ‘‘donna bella e crudele’’ (a beautiful and cruel woman) and Vittoria Colonna, who became the sole recognizable addressee of the entire selection. Critics have noted that Michelangelo’s important anthology does not offer spiritual compositions, although spiritual concerns later become a central component of Michelangelo’s poetic production. Michelangelo continues his dialogue with Vittoria 328

Colonna after her death by appropriating and responding to some of her deeply religious sonnets. Students of sixteenth-century Italian Catholicism have debated Michelangelo’s possible adherence or interest in Italian Protestantism. Vittoria Colonna, who was in contact with the followers of Juan Valde´s’ reform spirituality, gave Michelangelo a manuscript of her poetry (MS Vaticano Latino 11539), which exclusively focuses on her love for Christ and thus challenges the traditional structure of a Renaissance Petrarchan canzoniere. Michelangelo began writing explicitly religious poetry also in response to Vittoria Colonna’s religious canzoniere. Michelangelo’s canzoniere can be roughly divided into three periods. A first group of poems (written between 1503–1532) covers a variety of different themes, but apart from the self-ironic sonnet on the labor in the Sistine Chapel, it focuses, at times with uneven results, on the love experience using basic topoi of Petrarchan language (the vision of love as inner fire, sight as the origin of love). For instance, ‘‘La vita del mie amor non e` ‘l cor mio’’ (What sets my love alive is not my heart), ‘‘I’ fe’ degli occhi porta al mie veneno’’ (I let my eyes become my poison’s gate), and ‘‘Dagli occhi del mie ben si parte e vola’’ (A burning beam from my beloved’s eyes). The most famous section of the canzoniere is the series of poems composed between 1532–1547, including the sonnets for the young Tomaso Cavalieri considered to be the highest poetic expression of the Florentine Neoplatonic notion of homoerotic love. Among them, the stunning ‘‘Sento d’un foco un freddo aspetto acceso’’ (I feel how a cold face that fire has lit), in which the poet gives new life to the trite theme of the paradoxical nature of love (cold and burning), a recurring topos in his early lyrics. These also comprise a handful of intense compositions on the young Febo del Poggio, 50 epitaphs in memory of the young Cecchino Bracci, and the better-known poems for Vittoria Colonna. The final part of the canzoniere (between 1547 and 1560) is primarily made of spiritual texts and meditations on death.

Biography Born in Caprese, Arezzo, on March 6, 1475, he first studied with the Humanist Francesco Galatea of Urbino and the painter Francesco Granacci. In 1488, he joined the Florentine bottega of the painters Domenico and David Ghirlandaio, who gave him a three-year contract. At Lorenzo de’ Medici’s, he met Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, and

MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI Poliziano. He became acquainted with Florentine Neoplatonic thought. He left Florence before the arrival of Charles VIII’s armies, moving first to Venice and then to Bologna. In 1496, in Rome he sculptured the Bacco, which is at the Bargello. In 1498, he began working on the Pieta` now in St Peter’s. In 1501, he was back in Florence. In 1502, his first poetic works. In 1504, he painted the Tondo Doni. On September 8, 1504, his David was placed in Piazza della Signoria. In May 1508, he embarked on the project for the frescoes on the vault of the Sistine Chapel, which occupied him until 1512. In 1509, he described his travail in a sonnet for Giovanni da Pistoia. In 1513–1515, for the tomb of Pope Julius II, he completed the Mose` in St Peter’s in Vincoli and the Schiavi in the Louvre. In 1526, for Giuliano’s tomb, he completed the Notte e Giorno. In 1528, his brother Buonarroto died. In 1532, he met Tommaso Cavalieri in Rome, where he was working on a new project for the tomb of Julius II. In 1534, the death of his elderly father, Ludovico, occurred. He moved to Rome in September to plan the Giudizio universale in the Sistine Chapel, which he started in 1535, the same year of his last letter to the young Febo del Poggio. In 1536, he became friends with Vittoria Colonna, who died in 1547. In 1544, he sketched the tomb for Cecchino Bracci, to whom he dedicated a series of epitaphs. In 1561, he completed the great model in wood for the cupola of St. Peter’s. Died on February 18, 1564. ARMANDO MAGGI See also: Literature and Visual Arts Selected Works Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti, raccolte da Michelagnolo suo nipote, Florence: Giunti, 1623. This seminal edition (137 poems) is deeply flawed because of its editor’s frequent subjective interventions. Le Rime di Michelangelo Buonarroti, pittore, scultore e architetto, edited by Cesare Guasti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1863. Rime, con varianti, apparato, nota filologica, edited by Enzo Noe` Girardi, Bari: Laterza, 1960; as The Complete Poems of Michelangelo, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Noonday Press, 1960; as The Poetry of

Michelangelo: an Annotated Translation, edited by James M. Saslow, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991 (this is the only recent translation including the original Italian texts); as The Complete Poems of Michelangelo, edited by John Frederick Nims, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. The Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo, translated by Creighton Gilbert, New York: Modern Library, 1965. Carteggio di Michelangelo, edited by Giovanni Poggi, 5 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1965–1983.

Further Reading Altizer, Alba B., Self and Symbolism in the Poetry of Michelangelo, John Donne, and Agrippa d’Aubigne´, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973. Barsella, Susanna, ‘‘Michelangelo. Le rime dell’arte,’’ in Letteratura e arte, 1 (2003): 213–225. Binni, Walter, Michelangelo scrittore, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1965. Cambon, Glauco, Michelangelo’s Poetry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Clements, Robert John, The Poetry of Michelangelo, New York: New York University Press, 1965. Colonna, Vittoria, Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition, edited and translated by Abigail Brundin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 1–45. Fedi, Roberto, La memoria della poesia, Rome: Salerno, 1990, 264–305. Francese, Joseph, ‘‘On Homoerotic Tension in Michelangelo’s Poetry,’’ in Modern Languages Notes, 117, no. 1 (2002): 17–47. Girardi, Enzo Noe`, Studi sulle Rime di Michelangelo, Florence: Olschki, 1974. Maggi, Armando, ‘‘L’immagine del concetto d’amore: Una lettura del frammentomichelangiolesco ‘Ben fu, temprando il cielo tuo vivo raggio,’’’ in Revue d’e´tudesitaliennes, 46, nos. 3–4 (2000): 259–268. Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, New York: Macmillan, 1877; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Ryan, Christopher, The Poetry of Michelangelo. An Introduction, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Scarpati, Claudio, ‘‘Michelangelo poeta dal ‘canzoniere’ alle rime spirituali,’’ in Aevum, 78 (2003): 593–613. Summers, David, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Vecce, Carlo, ‘‘Petrarca, Vittoria Colonna, Michelangelo. Note di commento a testi e varianti di Vittoria Colonna e di Michelangelo,’’ in Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 44 (1992): 101–125. Wallace, William E. (editor), Michelangelo, selected scholarship in English, 5 vols., New York: Garland, 1995.

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IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI)

IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI) (CA.1404–1447/1449) Domenico di Giovanni, generally known as Il Burchiello, was a Florentine barber as well as a poet. His barbershop is considered one of the most interesting cultural centers of fifteenth-century Florence, and was frequented by prominent poets and intellectuals of the day, including the architect Leon Battista Alberti. Contemporary perspectives on his biography and literary work are often influenced by a nineteenth-century myth that portrayed him as a second Dante and a rebellious poet sent into exile because of his unconventional personality. More recently, archival research and Michelangelo Zaccarello’s 2000 critical edition of his poems have helped to clarify his complex literary career. A considerable number of fifteenthcentury Italian manuscripts attribute the authorship of a varying number of poems to Burchiello, under the title Sonetti del Burchiello (Burchiello’s Sonnets). This poetic corpus includes about 220 sonetti caudati, that is, sonnets characterized by the addition of at least one tercet to the customary 14 lines. While most of the poems are indeed by Burchiello, some are by different authors; thus, the Sonetti del Burchiello was a work in progress, rather than a compact collection of poems, organized into a book only in later editions such as Anton Francesco Grazzini’s I sonetti di Burchiello, et di Messer Antonio Alamanni, alla burchiellesca (Burchiello’s Sonnets and Those of Antonio Alamanni in the ‘‘Burchiellesca’’ Fashion, 1552) and Anton Francesco Doni’s Le rime del poeta Burchiello (Burchiello’s Poems, 1553). In addition, the texts circulated independently and were often rewritten, transformed, and renamed by new writers. Defining the genre of the sonnets is a problematic task. The corpus is a synthesis of at least three Tuscan literary traditions: comic-realistic poetry, and the oral traditions of motti (witty sayings) and facezie (witty remarks). In addition, it documents the formation of a new poetic style, the so-called stile alla burchia. The comic-realistic component is evident in certain poems that transform typical situations of the medieval tradition. Sonnet CVXXIII, ‘‘Ardati il fuoco vecchia puzolente’’ 330

(May fire burn you, stinking old woman), for instance, develops the topos of the vituperation of an old woman, and Burchiello respects the conventional elements of this tradition, which fuses the goliardic genre of the vituperium with the motifs of misogynist literature. The elaboration of such elements results in a caricatural deformation: The woman’s ‘‘veder sottile’’ (attentive sight) may refer either to her habit of splitting hairs or to her wrinkled and feeble eyes. The comic-realistic tradition is also rich in models that are suitable to express autobiographic experiences. A night spent in bad lodgings, for instance, is a common situation and also a comic topos: the so-called mala notte (bad night) or malo albergo (bad lodging). This traditional situation is present in sonnet LXXXII, ‘‘Borsi spetial, crudele e dispietato’’ (Oh Borsi the apothecary, cruel and pitiless), where the poet describes the night he spent on a disgusting bed filled with fleas, bedbugs, and lice, and compares his pain to a religious penitence. Time spent in prison, on the other hand, is both a documented autobiographical detail (Burchiello was indeed arrested in Siena in 1439) and a literary situation modeled on Cecco Angiolieri’s poetry. Burchiello’s lament is rich in grotesque and visionary elements, such as the hyperbolic description of how his stomach rumbles for food: ‘‘El corpo m’urla spesso e fa rimbombo / onde un dı` mi rispose una colomba / la qual credette ch’i’ fussi un colombo’’ (My body howls and echoes so loudly / that one day a female dove answered me, for she believed I was a male dove). The oral tradition of the motti and facezie is represented, for instance, by sonnet CXCVI, vv. 9–11, in which a cat confuses his owner’s testicles with a mouse and attacks him; or in sonnet LXXIX, ‘‘Prestate nobis de oleo vestrosso’’ (Lend us some of your oil), which reports the dialogue of two ignorant ambassadors who, forgetting the text of their speech, misquote Matthew’s Gospel and engage in a pointless argument. Both anecdotes are documented, respectively, in Franco Sacchetti’s Trecentonovelle (Three Hundred Tales, 1390s) and in Poggio Bracciolini’s Facetiae (1452).

IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI) The sonnets written in alla burchia represent the originality of the Sonetti del Burchiello. This locution literally means ‘‘pell-mell’’ in that it refers to the way a certain kind of boat (‘‘burchiello’’) is usually loaded with everyday goods like food, tools, and sundry items. Some critics suggested that the locution might also refer to written inventories of goods, as numbers introduce most of the lists used in the poems. The Florentine painter, architect and poet Andrea di Orcagna (ca. 1308–1368), whose poems are included in the main corpus, invented this poetic style. Burchiello, however, took this literary game a step further, turning it into a veritable poetic genre. According to the definition given by Emilio Pasquini, the style alla burchia consists of a ‘‘decomposition of reality into its elements and their subsequent recomposition on a different level of visionary and oneiric reality’’ (‘‘Letteratura popolareggiante, comica e giocosa, lirica minore e narrativa volgare del Quattrocento,’’ 1996). The effect is an optical illusion in which objects of daily life and names of real places are fused and connected to mythological, biblical, and literary names, or an everyday creature, such as a duck, is said to produce milk and butter. As Zaccarello noted in his introduction to Sonetti del Burchiello (2004), the poet reinterprets reality through an ‘‘illogical and visionary creative syntax, which constantly threatens the conventional linearity (causal, chronological, narrative) of the text with unexpected developments and verbal associations.’’ Sonnet XCIX, ‘‘A meza notte, quasi in sulla nona’’ (At midnight, almost at the ninth hour) is a good example of the new technique. The incipit of the text is a chronological detail and also an oxymoron, as ‘‘in the ninth hour’’ corresponds to three in the afternoon. The second line introduces two characters, a fictional hero from the Carolingian tradition, ‘‘Bravieri,’’ and a Florentine physician and geographer, ‘‘Pozzo Toscanegli’’ (whose name is also misspelled). The two characters are engaged in the quaint activity described in the third line: ‘‘presono una nidiata di bacegli’’ (they caught a nest of peapods). The setting of the action is described with a geographical oxymoron, ‘‘tra il corso degli Strozi e Pampalona’’ (between Strozzi street and Pamplona), which are respectively a street in Florence and a Spanish town. Sometimes Burchiello’s poems are rich in obscene double meanings associated with the carnivalesque tradition. Sonnet CCXXVII, ‘‘Qualunque al bagno vuol mandar la moglie’’ (He who wants to send his wife to the thermal waters), for instance, explains a remedy for infertility in women, thermal

baths, which implies abundant sexual activity described with rather explicit sexual metaphors. Obscenity, however, is not the only way to interpret Burchiello’s poems, and frequently this reading is deceptive. For instance, sonnet LXXVII, ‘‘Ficcami una pennuccia in un baccello’’ (Stick me a little pen in a pod) is only apparently vulgar; according to Zaccarello, it should in fact rather be read in the context of other sonnets about prison, so that the opening line explains a way to hide a pen for a prisoner. The alla burchia style neither obscures nor foreshadows the poetics of the absurd or surrealism, as has been rather anachronistically suggested. Rather, Burchiello and the other poets collected in the Sonetti del Burchiello sought a new way of practicing literature. This is documented specifically by autobiographical poems that do not exactly fit the comic-realistic cliche`s. For example, sonnet XCIII, ‘‘Va in mercato Giorgin, tien qui un Grosso’’ (Go to the marketplace, Giorgin, here is a Grosso) seems to follow the traditional scheme of the shopping list. Since ‘‘Grosso’’ is the name of a Florentine coin whose value is not enough to buy all the things on the list, however, Burchiello transforms this traditional scheme into a new discourse meant to be imaginary, rather than realistic. The essential elements of this new poetics are more evident in sonnet CXXVI, ‘‘La poesia contende col rasoio’’ (Poetry argues with the razor), and sonnet CXIX, ‘‘Fior di borrana, se vuoi dire in rima’’ (Herbaceous flower, if you want to write verses). In the first sonnet, Burchiello, barber and poet, refers to himself in a fictional discussion between the allegorical figure of his literary activity, poetry, and the symbol of his work, the razor. For parodic purposes, both characters adopt the language and the style of lyric poetry; only the poet, in the end, stops the conversation with a statement of practical wisdom, by saying: ‘‘Non piu` romore, / ch’e’ non ci corra la secchia al bacino, / ma chi meglio mi vuol mi paghi il vino’’ (No more quarrel: / so that the pail and the bowl are not in danger, / rather, let the one who loves me best pay for some wine). In ‘‘Fior di borrana, se vuoi dire in rima,’’ Burchiello defines his innovative idea of poetry. He counsels the poet to refuse erudition and philosophical doctrine; rather, daily life should be the only source of inspiration in order to write ‘‘naturale e facilmente’’ (naturally and easily), while fantasy should be the only method for editing. Burchiello thus contributes a new idea of poetry to Renaissance literature. Culturally speaking, his literary production is an alternative to the imitation of Petrarch and to 331

IL BURCHIELLO (DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI) the Humanist idea of art. Ideologically, his poetry and its considerable number of imitators reflect a rejection of institutions like the court, the academy, and the university and instead favor the manual arts, painting, sculpture, and architecture.

Biography Born in Florence, near Santa Maria Novella, 1404. His mother was a weaver, and his son a carpenter. Began to work as a barber, 1427. Involved in a trial against a barber named Giovanni de’ Nobili, 1428. Involved in another trial, against a barber named Cambio di Marco, 1431. Admitted to the ‘‘Arte dei Medici e Speziali,’’ 1432. Rented his barbershop, 1432. Exiled from Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici because of his political ideas, 1434. Arrested in Siena on charges of robbery, 1439. Joined the Vatican court, 1443. Died in Rome, sometime between 1447 and 1449. MATTEO SORANZO Selected Works I sonetti di Burchiello, et di Messer Antonio Alamanni, alla burchiellesca, edited by Anton Francesco Grazzini, Florence: Giunti, 1552. Le rime del poeta Burchiello, edited by Anton Francesco Doni, Venice: Francesco Marcolini, 1553. Sonetti del Burchiello, critical edition by Michelangelo Zaccarello, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 2000.

I Sonetti del Burchiello, edited by Michelangelo Zaccarello, Turin: Einaudi, 2004.

Further Readings Alfie, Fabian, ‘‘I’ son sı` magro che quasi traluco: Inspiration and Indebtedness among Cecco Angiolieri, Meo Dei Tolomei and Il Burchiello,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 35, no. 135–136 (1998): 5–28. Avellini, Luisa, ‘‘Metafora ‘regressiva’ e degradazione comica nei sonetti del Burchiello,’’ in Lingua e stile, 8 (1973): 291–319. Corsaro, Antonio, ‘‘Burchiello attraverso la tradizione a stampa del ’500,’’ in ‘‘La fantasia fuor de’ confini.’’ Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449– 1999), edited by Michelangelo Zaccarello, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Una proposta per Burchiello,’’ in Rinascimento, 8 (1968): 3–120. Pasquini, Emilio, ‘‘Letteratura popolareggiante, comica e giocosa, lirica minore e narrativa volgare del Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. 3, Il Quattrocento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1996. Smith, Alan K., ‘‘Fraudomy: Reading Sexuality and Politics in Burchiello,’’ in Queering the Renaissance, edited by Jonathan Goldberg, Durham-London: Duke University Press, 1994. Tartaro, Achille, ‘‘Burchiello e i Burchielleschi,’’ in La letteratura italiana. Storia e testi, edited by Carlo Muscetta, vol. 3, tomes 1–2, Il Quattrocento. L’eta` dell’Umanesimo, edited by Francesco Tateo and Achille Tartaro, Bari: Laterza, 1972. Zaccarello, Michelangelo (editor), ‘‘La fantasia fuor de’ confini.’’ Burchiello e dintorni a 550 anni dalla morte (1449– 1999), Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. Zaccarello, Michelangelo, Introduction to I Sonetti del Burchiello, Turin: Einaudi, 2004.

ALDO BUSI (1948–) Aldo Busi is one of the most prolific and controversial writers in the contemporary Italian literary landscape. At the age of 14, he decided to leave his family and school to travel around Europe, study languages, and earn a living working as a waiter in restaurants and hotels. His literary debut came in 1984 with the publication of an autobiographical bildungsroman, Seminario sulla gioventu` (Seminar on Youth). The story begins in Busi’s hometown, Montichiari, where the young Barbino is carefully observing his own world: his mother’s harsh life, 332

the labour in the country, his father’s shortcomings, his peculiar interest and love for the world of women, and, finally, the violent and traumatic discovery of his sexual diversity. Barbino understands that he has to escape from the ghetto of his family, overcoming the limits of his condition and education, and this escape is the subject of the early chapters. The core of the novel, however, is dedicated to Barbino’s new life in Milan, where, working as a barman, he follows his homosexual sensibility, even as it leads him to extremely violent

ALDO BUSI experiences with strange and complex characters such as the Colonel and Adel the Egyptian. As Walter Pedulla` points out in La letteratura italiana contemporanea (1998), for all its humor and irony, the huge success of this novel is due to its fascinating mixture of the protagonist’s inner life and current popular culture, especially in the second part. Moreover, Seminario sulla gioventu` came totally unexpected upon the Italian literary scene of the 1980s. Although then-current critical debates focused on the so-called ‘‘death of the novel’’ and on the quest for new forms of experimental novel, Busi’s work was able to revitalize the genre. His postmodern fiction signaled a new beginning and was especially praised for its extravagant plot, for the spontaneity and audacity of the narrative and the language, and for its literary style. In the following years, Busi published a number of novels that continued to defy conventional expectations of genre, mixing stream of consciousness narrative with the explicit representation of contemporary life (particularly for sexual encounters between men). Works such as Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman, 1985), La delfina bizantina (The Byzantine She-dolphin, 1986), Sodomie in corpo 11 (Sodomies in Elevenpoint, 1988), Altri abusi: viaggi, sonnambulismo e giri dell’oca (Uses and Abuses: Journeys, Sleepwalking and Fool’s Errands, 1989) display a similar Baroque mixture of mannerism and parody of sentimental pathos. From this point of view, Vendita galline Km 2 (Chicken for Sale 2 Km, 1993), a book characterized by a complex structure and an elaborate style, marks a turning point. The novel is the long autobiographical monologue of a dead Argentinean woman, Delfina Unno Pastalunghi, a proud lesbian who rebels against her family and her society, whose corruption and hypocrisy she carefully reports. In recounting her love story with a poor Sardinian musician, Caterina Multimuoriu, Delfina mercilessly describes the Italian ruling class, its thirst for power, its dishonesty. Busi is influenced by the trials for corruption held in Milan after 1991—the so-called ‘‘Mani Pulite’’ operation—that laid bare the utmost degeneration of the political class. Casanova di se stessi (Casanova to Yourself, 2000), apparently structured as a mystery, is more obviously satirical. A judge, Eros Torellino, and a schoolmaster, Amato Perche, are found dead and stark naked in a chalet on the Lake of Iseo. Nearby, investigators discover a copy of

Gian Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie. Subi, the homosexual narrator and thinly disguised alter-ego for Busi himself (his name is an anagram of the author’s) tries to solve the mystery and to tell the story of the victims because he does not trust heterosexuals to truly understand it. Casanova’s autobiography, a book viewed as a mere product of vanity and egoism, is a symbol of this lack of understanding. Busi’s latest works, often couched ironically in the guise of manuals and guidebooks, challenge both gender roles and social institutions. Manuale della perfetta Mamma: con qualche contrazione anche per il Papa` (Guidebook for the Perfect Mother: With a Few Contractions for Dad, 2000) tends more toward the portrayal of an idealized mother figure. On the contrary, Manuale del perfetto papa`: beati gli orfani! (Guidebook for the Perfect Father: Orphans Are Lucky!, 2001) is a fierce indictment of the cult of virility because, for Busi, masculinity (and above all paternity) signifies spite, violence, caginess, and an inability to listen to others. Busi’s eclectic interests have driven his literary career in various directions, including the cinema. In his quest to develop a personal language and style, he has translated European classics, among them Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Friedrich Schiller’s works. But his most controversial work of ‘‘translation’’ is undoubtedly his rewriting into contemporary Italian of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1991) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortigiano (1993). Busi’s fascination with the icons of mass media culture has resulted in numerous articles on celebrities, which were collected, along with other pieces on ‘‘commoners’’ he had met during his lecture tours, in the volume Sentire le donne (Listening to Women, 1991). With his latest book, E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno? (And I, Who Has Roses Blossomed even in Winter?, 2004), Busi returns to the genre of the travel memoir, already exploited in Cazzi e canguri. Pochissimi i canguri (Cocks and Kangaroos. Very Few Kangaroos, 1994). In its seven chapters, E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno? tells the story of the author’s travels to Paris, Moscow, Argentina, and New Zealand. In the end, he finds himself alone, but not altogether unhappy with his life.

Biography Born in Montichiari (Brescia), on 25 February 1948, the son to a family of farmers. Left his hometown in 1962 to work and study around Europe; excluded from military service because of his 333

ALDO BUSI homosexuality, 1968; traveled and lived in France, England, Germany and Spain, 1969–1974; completed high school in Florence, 1976; graduated from the University of Verona with a thesis on the American poet John Ashbery, 1981; tried for obscenity and acquitted, after the publication of Sodomie in corpo 11, 1990; edits the series ‘‘I classici classici’’ for publisher Frassinelli, 1995. Works as a freelance journalist, translator, and consultant for various publishers and media. Lives in Brescia. STEFANO ADAMI

Baldassare Castiglione, Il Cortigiano, with Carmen Covito, 1993. Friedrich Schiller, Intrigo e amore, 1994.

Other Sentire le donne, 1991. Manuale del perfetto Gentilomo, 1992. Manuale della perfetta Gentildonna, 1994. Nudo di madre: manuale del perfetto scrittore, 1997. Per un’Apocalisse piu` svelta, 1999. Manuale della perfetta Mamma: con qualche contrazione anche per il Papa`, 2000. Manuale del perfetto papa`: beati gli orfani!, 2001. Manuale del perfetto single: e della piu`ccheperfetta fetta per fetta, 2002. Incipit, 2004.

Selected Works Fiction Seminario sulla gioventu`, 1984; as Seminar on Youth, translated by Stuart Hood, 1988. Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant, 1985; as The Standard Life of a Temporary Pantyhose Salesman, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1989. La delfina bizantina, 1986. Sodomie in corpo 11. Non viaggio, sesso e scrittura, 1988; as Sodomies in Elevenpoint, translated by Stuart Hood, 1992. Altri abusi: viaggi, sonnambulismo e giri dell’oca, 1989; as Uses and Abuses: Journeys, Sleepwalkings and Fool’s Errands, translated by Stuart Hood, 1995. Vendita galline km 2, 1993 Madre Asdrubala: all’asilo si sta bene e s’imparan tante cose, 1995. Grazie del pensiero, 1995. Casanova di se stessi, 2000. La signorina Gentilin dell’omonima cartoleria, 2002. Guancia di Tulipano, 2003.

Plays Paˆte´ d’homme: tragoedia peninsulare in tre atti, uno strappo, due estrazioni e taglio finale, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘L’amore trasparente (canzoniere),’’ 1997.

Travel Writing Cazzi e canguri. Pochissimi i canguri, 1994. Aloha!!!!!: gli uomini, le donne e le Hawaii, 1998. La camicia di Hanta: viaggio in Madagascar, 2003. E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno?, 2004.

Translations John Ashbery, Autoritratto in uno specchio convesso, 1983. Giovanni Boccaccio and Aldo Busi, Decamerone da un italiano all’altro, 2 vols., 1990–1991. Lewis Carroll, Alice nel paese delle meraviglie, 1993.

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Further Reading Ammirati, Maria Pia, Il vizio di scrivere: letture su Busi, De Carlo, Del Giudice, Pazzi, Tabucchi e Tondelli, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1991. Bacigalupo, Massimo, ‘‘Aldo Busi: Writer, Jester and Moral Historian,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Camarota, Francesca Romana, ‘‘Aldo Busi ovvero l’opposto nelle Lezioni Americane di Italo Calvino,’’ in Piccole finzioni con importanza: Valori della narrativa italiana contemporanea, edited by Nathalie Roelens and Inge Lanslots, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Capoferri, Federica, ‘‘Barocco e i suoi fratelli: Busi sceneggia Boccaccio tra cinema e letteratura,’’ in Quaderni dell’archivio Barocco, 7 (2001): 125–156. Ferme, Valerio C., ‘‘Aldo Busi’s Gay Detectives: The Otherness of Homosexual Discourse as a MysterySolving Tool,’’ in Pacific Coast Philology, 33.1 (1998): 58–68. Giusti, Eugenio, ‘‘Aldo Busi: Writer, Translator, Celebrity,’’ in World Literature Today, 71.2 (1997): 325–330. Jansen, Monica, ‘‘Verso il nuovo millennio: Rappresentazione dell’apocalisse nella narrativa italiana contemporanea (Benni, Busi, Vassalli),’’ in Narrativa, 20–21 (2001): 131–150. Neiger, Ada (editor), Il vampiro, don Giovanni e altri seduttori, Bari: Dedalo, 1998. Papotti, Davide, ‘‘Lo spazio violentato: Strategie di descrizione spaziale in Sodomie in Corpo 11 di Aldo Busi,’’ in Tropos, 22:1 (1996): 83–97. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura italiana contemporanea, Rome: Newton Compton, 1998. Raimondi, Ezio, Barocco moderno, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Sommavilla, Giorgio, Peripezie dell’epica contemporanea, Milan: Jaca Book, 1983.

DINO BUZZATI

DINO BUZZATI (1906–1972) There is an Italian writer, recorded in his birth registry as Dino Buzzati Traverso, who has had a rather peculiar fate. On the one hand, he has been much read and widely known abroad; in Italy, on the other hand, proportionately much less so. Today this division has weakened, and we can speak of him as a classic author in Italy as well. Buzzati was an artist greatly fascinated by the obscure and occult side of things, so that he considered his masters to be writers like Edgar Allan Poe or Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, insofar as he found in them an explicit attention to mystery, the invisible, and the unknowable. His most famous novel is Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe, 1940), which is followed in importance by the collection Sessanta racconti (Sixty Tales), composed and published in periodicals between 1942, as Temporale sul fiume (A Storm on the River), and 1958, with the title Appuntamento con Einstein (An Appointment with Einstein). Buzzati began his career as a journalist with Il corriere della sera in 1928. He occupied himself with news, and hence with crime and gossip, but also with mountain climbing, a grand passion that would accompany him throughout his life, and with theater and music criticism. He remained a journalist until the end of his life, becoming one of the most authoritative and respected names in Italian journalism of the time. Some of his memorable work includes his legal reporting on the Fort murder case, his pieces as a war correspondent, the articles dedicated to mountains, among which is ‘‘Una grande notizia’’ (Big News), in which he comments on the Italian conquest of K2, and the epic pages as a correspondent on the Giro d’Italia, in which, reliving his youthful passion for cycling, he harkens back to the image of Achilles slaying Hector in order to describe the duel between the legendary cyclists Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. But there is also Buzzati the painter and illustrator. Right from his adolescence, he was enamored of painting and drawing—he often represented, for example, images of mountains or of bicycles in the letters he wrote to his friend Brambilla. This passion expressed itself in a series of experiments of great figurative interest, albeit of scant technical value, often supported by ideas or rhetorical suggestions

of high impact. Drawings and other types of illustration emerged from this that are devoted to his first literary compositions, both in verse and in prose. In particular, Buzzati personally illustrated the fable La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia (The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily), which was designed in 1945 and immediately afterwards adorned with captions as well. Buzzati also wrote texts for the theater, even though they are of minor literary value. The most important of these is Un caso clinico (A Clinical Case), adapted for the stage by Giorgio Strehler and performed for the first time in 1953 at the Piccolo Teatro in Milano. The work reached the stage in Paris in 1955, and thanks to the role played by Albert Camus in the French translation and reworking of the script, was a success. The success of this theatrical show allowed the French translation of Il deserto dei Tartari to enjoy a noteworthy circulation, to the point that it even became a classic in French-speaking countries. Buzzati also composed the monologues Sola in casa (Home Alone, 1958) and L’orologio (The Clock, 1959), both written for the famous actress Paola Barboni, in which the technique of kammerspiele conjures a claustrophobic atmosphere with grotesque implications; as well as Piccola passeggiata (A Little Walk, 1942) and Drammatica fine di un noto musicista (The Dramatic End of a Famous Musician, 1955), in which we find the Nordic and neo-Gothic motif, taken from August Strindberg and Maurice Maeterlinck, of the arrival of death personified or announced by strange noises, and which is taken up as well in Il mantello (The Cloak, 1960), an adaptation of the story of the same name in the collection I sette messaggeri (The Seven Messengers, 1942), a story imbued with a strong antimilitarist polemic. In particular, for its unusual experimental openness, we must single out La fine del borghese (The End of the Bourgeoisie, 1968), with a dramaturgical syntax articulated by nursery rhymes, in which the parody of family and of perbenismo (good behavior) is mixed with the apocalyptic denunciation of Marxist ideologies and the specter of social revolution. Buzzati also wrote several librettos for operas. Among these, for the music of Luciano Chailly, is Ferrovia sopraelevata (The Elevated 335

DINO BUZZATI Rail, 1955), which tells the story of the devil Max who, having fallen in love with his prey, sacrifices himself in order to save her. The text foreshadows many themes that will be treated in Poema a fumetti (A Poem in Comics, 1969), one of whose frames actually represents the devil’s train emerging from the clouds. Among Buzzati’s novels, in addition to Il deserto dei Tartari, of note before all else are his first two efforts as a young man, Ba`rnabo delle montagne (Ba`rnabo of the Mountains, 1933) and Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio (The Secret of the Old Forest, 1935), both markedly different from the stories, which often draw their origins from journalistic ideas, insofar as they are set in a simple, natural world. Ba`rnabo delle montagne is the story of a forest guard who is fired for having fled during a firefight with some brigands. Readmitted into the service many years later, in the same mountains, he finds himself once again face to face with the same brigands, and he might easily take revenge by killing them, but he ‘‘pensa a quante inutili pene gli hanno riempito la vita’’ (thinks about how many useless troubles have filled his life) and lets them go. With this novel, which is of notable importance in his development as a writer, Buzzati expressly proposed writing something dedicated to the mountains—dedicated not in a superficial, but rather in a slightly unusual manner. It is enough to consider that, speaking of its genesis in a letter to Brambilla, he writes: ‘‘Io sto cercando una storia in cui la montagna si riveli da sola, semplicemente’’ (I am attempting a story in which the mountains are revealed in themselves, simply). Such a perspective is decidedly peculiar because normally we do not think of the mountain as an object of liberation. Buzzati’s debut novel was awarded a prize by, among others, Il popolo di Lombardia, which had already published some of his stories (including satires) and vignettes. Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio is structured like a fable. Within a fantastical setting consisting once again of forests and mountains, its protagonists, along with humans, are various beings, such as the genii of the forest and the powers of nature. It is the story of a bitter and surly old man, the colonel Sebastiano Procolo, who freezes to death in the forest while he searches for his nephew Benvenuto, whom he fears has been overwhelmed by an avalanche. The book closes with the unforgettable page devoted to the extreme ascent by the wind Matteo, who, having recounted to Benvenuto his uncle’s noble end, dissolves into the high mountain peaks. 336

During the 1960s, Buzzati’s life underwent some noteworthy changes determined by his encounters with two women: Silvana Costa, whom he met in St. Moritz, and Almerina Antoniazzi, whom he met in Milan during a photographic assignment and married six years later. The theme of the woman, presented above all as a negative being, particularly in the novels Il grande ritratto (Larger than Life, 1960) and Un amore (A Love Affair, 1963) thereafter becomes very important in his works. This can be considered a limitation of Buzzati’s poetic world—having represented the female world only under certain aspects. The woman also returns in the minor stories, and is for the most part an ambiguous figure. In Il grande ritratto, which tells the story of a scientist in the grips of a mysterious machine (an enormous electronic brain in which Laura, the woman he loved, is reincarnated), the role given to science fiction is emphatic. It is immediately defined as the first novel of Italian science fiction that is not mere entertainment. Un amore, on the other hand, is the story of the architect Antonio Dorigo, who is overcome by a morbid and desperate love for a Milanese prostitute, Laide, ‘‘creatura verde, spavalda, impertinente, autentica’’ (a young, arrogant, impertinent, authentic creature). It is a fascinating novel, not only for the themes already noted, but also for two other important elements: its language, full of fractures and symbolic expressions, and the utterly crucial role assumed in it by the city of Milan. And in this case the style seems intended, in its way, to brush up against the flux of consciousness, to represent the emotional and depressive disorientation of the protagonist, the victim of the senses and of the anxiety of possession. In these same years, Buzzati devoted much time to painting, and as an art critic. In this role, new fundamental ideas entered into his maturation as an artist, as he frequented, among others, the studios of artists of the ‘‘pop art’’ movement in New York. They, together with the surrealists and the metaphysicists, had a discernible influence on Buzzati’s art. Important examples from this period are the ex voto collected in I miracoli della Val Morel (1970). Buzzati has also written numerous stories, which, along with the novels, are, taken as a whole, the most important part of his oeuvre. His first collection, I sette messaggeri, contains stories published in Il popolo di Lombardia (a weekly newspaper of the fascist federation of Milan) and in La lettura (an illustrated monthly magazine with Il corriere della sera). These stories succeed in

DINO BUZZATI expressing, in an extraordinary way, many things about life, man, and his destiny; they succeed in condensing emblematic incidents, and moral and emotional tensions, into a few pages, through an undisputable talent of narrative montage. His second collection, Paura alla Scala (Fear at La Scala, 1949), contains perhaps Buzzati’s finest story of the same title, and one of the most complex, since it plumbs not only the human aspect but also the sociopolitical one at a particular historical moment for Italy: We are on the eve of the political elections of 1948. And it is in the foyer of the celebrated theater, the gathering place of the Milanese bourgeoisie, that the fear spreads of some kind of revolution underway in the city. Like the first two collections, Il crollo della Baliverna (The Fall of the Baliverna, 1957) also contains 18 stories, all characterized by the sense of catastrophe, of the unexpectedness of things, through which we may find ourselves at the collapse of a house or in another terrifying situation without having any apparent responsibility and without understanding anything. In this case as well, the most important story is the one that gives its name to the entire collection. La Baliverna is a ‘‘squallido e torvo’’ casermone (squalid and forbidding housing project) that crumbles in a domino-like effect when a rusted iron pole, which the protagonist off-handedly grabs and begins to climb, collapses. Esperimento di magia (A Magic Experiment, 1958) groups together stories of a previous age. Part of this fourth collection is ‘‘Ehi, ce l’hai tu un cavallino’’ (Hey, you got a horse?), a unique story for its originality and inventiveness. The protagonist, a young boy, badly wants a little horse. At a certain point he finds one, like a kind of gift, and he does not know from whom it could have come. This sense of seemingly implausible gratuity leaves everyone astonished. I sessanta racconti also collects texts published previously. The most interesting thing is that Buzzati is able to express his best work within the form of the short story. The first 36 stories come from the first three collections. In the second block, we have less important stories that are characterized by a decidedly repetitive common thread: the negative woman, who betrays and deceives, or, only through a discourse of speculative projection, the man who does the same to her. The privileged theme remains fear and the impending, indeterminate threat. The fear is private before all else, as in ‘‘La notte’’ (The Night), which presents a handbook-like summary of noises and shadows, but it is also a collective fear, as in ‘‘Qualcosa era

successo’’ (Something Happened), a story in which the passengers on a train appear inexorably drawn toward the place of a mysterious catastrophe. And it is, finally, a class fear, as in the case of ‘‘Paura alla Scala.’’ But it is not the short stories that characterize the second part of Buzzati’s life and artistic production. His most interesting work is in fact Poema a fumetti, in which both his experience as a writer and as an illustrator come together simultaneously, with a whole series of extremely suggestive crossreferences. The work re-creates the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in a modern key. And it places the entrance to Hades in the imaginary via Saterna, between the famous via Solferino (the locale of the newspaper, Il corriere della sera), and Corso Garibaldi, in the very center of a nocturnal Milan where witches fly around the Velasca tower. The city of Milan is also the protagonist of another important part of Buzzati’s activity during this period: verse poetry. The most interesting aspect is surely that of the double binary he attempts in this period: a binary in which decidedly satirical moments and references to the news are mixed together. Apart from the short poem entitled ‘‘Tre colpi alla porta’’ (Three Knocks at the Door), which is connected with the satirical journal Il caffe´, the thematic and ideal center of this new nucleus of poetic inspiration is for the writer the city of Milan, of which he furnishes a particularly lively, personal, and new image: the Milan of the glass mountains, of numerous license plates and of billboards, where already the wheel of Theobroma with its chocolate smell evokes nostalgia and memory.

Biography Born in Belluno on 16 October 1906, the second son of four, among whom is also the nuclear physicist Adriano, born in 1913. Having obtained a high-school diploma in classics, he enrolls in 1924 at the Facolta` di legge, where he graduates in 1928 with a thesis on canonical law. He is hired as a trainee reporter with Il corriere della sera on July 10 of the same year, and, promoted to editor in 1929, remains there until his death. In 1941 he participates as a war correspondent in the battle of Capo Matapan. In 1951, he wins the Napoli prize for his collection Il crollo della Baliverna, and in 1958 he wins the Strega prize for his collection Sessanta racconti. In 1966, he marries Almerina Antoniazzi. In 1967, he takes on the post of art critic at Il corriere della sera. In 1970, he paints I miracoli della Val Morel. He dies in Milan on 337

DINO BUZZATI January 28, 1972, of pancreatic cancer, like his father. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages. NELLA GIANNETTO Selected Works Collections Teatro, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Romanzi e racconti, edited by Giuliano Gramigna, Milan: Mondadori, 1982. Opere scelte, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1998.

Novels Ba`rnabo delle montagne, 1933. Il segreto del Bosco Vecchio, 1935. Il deserto dei Tartari, 1940; as The Tartar Steppe, translated by Stuart C. Hood, 1952. Il grande ritratto, 1960; as Larger than Life, translated by Henry Reed, 1962. Un amore, 1963; as A Love Affair, translated by Joseph Green, 1965.

Short Stories ‘‘I sette messaggeri,’’ 1942. ‘‘Paura alla Scala,’’ 1949. ‘‘In quel preciso momento,’’ 1950. ‘‘Il crollo della Baliverna,’’ 1957. ‘‘Esperimento di magia,’’ 1958. ‘‘Sessanta racconti,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il colombre,’’ 1966. ‘‘Le notti difficili,’’ 1971; as Restless Nights, translated by Lawrence Venuti, 1983.

Plays and Librettos Piccola passeggiata, 1942. Un caso clinico, 1953. Drammatica fine di un noto musicista, 1955. Ferrovia soprelevata, 1955. Sola in casa, 1958. L’orologio, 1959. Procedura penale, 1959. Il mantello, 1960. Fantasmi al Grand-Hotel, 1960. Battono alla porta, 1963. Era proibito, 1963. La fine del borghese, 1968.

Poetry

Le montagne di vetro, 1989. Il buttafuoco: Cronache della guerra sul mare, 1992. La nera di Buzzati, 2002.

Further Reading Arslan Veronese, Antonia, Invito alla lettura di Buzzati, Milan: Mursia, 1974; rpt. 1988. Asquer, Renata, La grande torre: Vita e morte di Dino Buzzati, Lecce: Manni, 2002. Baumann, Barbara, Dino Buzzati: Untersuchungen zur Tematik in seinem Erza¨hlwerk, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980. Cavallini, Giorgio, Buzzati: Il limite dell’ombra, Rome: Studium, 1997. Chailly, Luciano, Buzzati in musica: L’opera italiana nel dopoguerra, Turin: Eda, 1987. Crotti, Ilaria, Buzzati, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Gianfranceschi, Fausto, Dino Buzzati, Turin: Borla, 1967. Giannetto, Nella, ‘‘Buzzati a teatro: Rassegna,’’ in Quaderni veneti, 14 (1991): 117–146. Giannetto, Nella (editor), Il pianeta Buzzati, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Giannetto, Nella (editor), Dino Buzzati: La lingua, le lingue, Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Giannetto, Nella, Il sudario delle caligini: Significati e fortune dell’opera buzzatiana, Florence: Olschki, 1996. Giannetto, Nella, Buzzati giornalista, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Lagana` Gion, Antonella, Dino Buzzati: Un autore da rileggere, Venice: Corbo and Fiore, 1983. Panafieu, Yves, Les miroirs e´clate´s, Paris: Y.P. E´ditions, 1988. Panafieu, Yves, Le myste`re Buzzati, Liancourt-Saint-Pierre: Y.P. E´ditions, 1995. Stempel, Ute, Realita¨t des Phantastischen: Untersuchungen zu den Erza¨hlungen Dino Buzzatis, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977.

IL DESERTO DEI TARTARI, 1940 Novel by Dino Buzzati

‘‘Il capitano Pic e altre poesie,’’ 1965. ‘‘Due poemetti,’’ 1967. ‘‘Poema a fumetti,’’ 1969.

Other La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia, 1945; as The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, translated by Frances Lobb, 1947. Egregio signore, siamo spiacenti di..., 1960. Buzzati al giro d’Italia, 1969. Cronache terrestri, 1972. Lettere a Brambilla, edited by I. Simonelli, 1985.

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Il deserto dei Tartari (The Tartar Steppe) was written by Dino Buzzati before the outbreak of World War II, between 1938 and 1939. It is therefore incorrect to consider this novel as a war narrative. The story is inspired by life, in all of its absurdities and contradictions: the protagonist, Giovanni Drogo, is a border soldier who lives in a fortress at

DINO BUZZATI the edges of a strange, surreal kingdom. The Tartar steppe is one of the countries bordering this kingdom, and certainly the most significant, on the symbolic level as well. Of the other bordering countries, we have the impression that the author prefers to identify them for us with the minimum number of characteristics, in such a way as to accentuate the mystery that looms within. Drogo, arriving at the Bastiani Fortress for his first assignment, spends his life waiting for the enemy. When at last ‘‘l’armata del Nord’’ (the army of the North) approaches, Drogo, old and sick, is forced to flee. He goes to close out his life in the dark room of an inn. The plot, terse and peculiar, takes place within an equally suggestive setting, which is dominated by the yellowed color of the fortress’s walls, the ever-swirling dust in the desert, called ‘‘Il sudario delle caligini’’ (the shroud of mist), which is a favorite phrase of Buzzati’s, and the strange sounds that are always the same, which repeat themselves to the point of exasperation, like the cloc cloc of the boiler, which strikes Drogo the first night of his arrival at the fortress. Buzzati was interviewed many times about the genesis of this novel. Among the most famous interviews, the oldest was published on May 26, 1959, in Milan’s Il giorno, and conducted by Guido De Monticelli, a literary critic and dramatist: ‘‘in the monotonous routine of composing at night...very often I had the impression that this would go on forever, that it would thus uselessly consume my life. It’s a common feeling, I think, for the majority of men, especially if they are pigeonholed in an existence within the timetable of the city. The transposition of this idea into a fantastic military world was, for me, instinctive: Nothing better than a fortress at the extreme frontier, it seemed to me, could be found to express precisely this strain of waiting.’’ Buzzati extends this argument to all of existence, which is understood by him as the stressful, albeit motivating, expectation of something that does not come, in this respect connecting himself explicitly to a certain twentieth-century tradition of absurdism and nihilism, ranging from Franz Kafka to Samuel Beckett. What tie is there between the novel’s protagonist, Drogo (and his alter-ego, the author himself ),

and life? What ties Drogo (and the author himself) to life is precisely his way of looking at it. Both of the story’s protagonists, the one in the literal sense of the word (the Drogo who goes in search of his fortune in a remote fortress in the mountains), the other in a more symbolic sense (Buzzati, who sets up his post at Il corriere della sera), both spending their lives in pursuit of an important goal without being able to reach it. At this point, the choice that the writer makes for Drogo is to confront death in a dignified manner. What becomes important in the novel’s epilogue is not life, but rather death and the way in which it is accepted and confronted by Drogo in definitively stoic terms: ‘‘poi nel buio, benche´ nessuno lo veda, sorride’’ (then in the dark, although no one sees it, he smiles). NELLA GIANNETTO Editions First edition: Il deserto dei Tartari, Milan-Rome: Rizzoli, 1940. Critical edition: in Opere scelte, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Translations: The Tartar Steppe, translated by Stuart C. Hood, New York: Avon Books, 1952; rpt. 1985; rpt. 2000.

Further Reading Biaggi, Pietro, Buzzati: I luoghi del mistero, Padua: Messaggero, 2001. Biondi, Alvaro, ‘‘Metafora e sogno: La narrativa di Buzzati tra ‘Italia magica’ e ‘Surrealismo italiano,’’’ in Il pianeta Buzzati, edited by Nella Giannetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Carlino, Marcello, Come leggere ‘‘Il deserto dei Tartari’’ di Buzzati, Milan: Mursia, 1976. De Monticelli, Roberto, ‘‘L’uomo libero Buzzati cerca un uniforme per vincere la paura,’’ in Il giorno (Milan), 26 May 1959. Giannetto, Nella, Il coraggio della fantasia: Studi e ricerche intorno a Dino Buzzati, Milan: Arcipelago, 1989. Giannetto, Nella, Il sudario delle caligini: Significati e fortune dell’opera buzzatiana, Florence: Olschki, 1996. Ioli, Giovanna, Dino Buzzati, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Livi, Franc¸ois, Le De´sert des Tartares de Dino Buzzati: Analyse critique, Paris: Hatier, 1973. Panafieu, Ives, Dino Buzzati: Un autoritratto, Milano: Mondadori, 1973.

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C GIACOMO CA’ ZORZI See Giacomo Noventa

ROBERTO CALASSO (1941–) Since the beginning of the 1980s, Calasso has been engaged in a complex project of investigation of myths and knowledge, which incorporates philosophy, literary criticism, and anthropology. He has so far published four volumes. The first, La rovina di Kasch (The Ruin of Kasch, 1983), is a book constructed of fragments and digressions, anecdotes and aphorisms, in a sort of search of what Italo Calvino called the ‘‘fonti avvelenate del ‘moderno’’’ (poisoned sources of the ‘modern’) in his ‘‘La rovina di Kasch e quel che resta’’ (1995). At the center of the narration is the historical figure of Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, the prototype of the turncoat and the supporter of the concept of the legitimacy of power but also a marginalized figure in the salons of the period after the Congress of the Vienna. Calasso also articulated a theory of sacrifice as ‘‘cerchio vibrante dell’ordine antico’’ (vibrating circle of ancient order), to which the title alludes, inspired by an African legend that was narrated by Frobenius. Other topics include douceur (sweetness),

‘‘Clever fellow, that Calasso,’’ Theodor W. Adorno is reported to have said. ‘‘He’s read everything I’ve written and even some things I haven’t had the time to write yet’’ (Andrea Lee, ‘‘The Prince of Books,’’ 1993). Adorno’s comment finds an echo in the experience of many readers of Roberto Calasso’s works: Indeed, he seems to have read all the books, both present and future. His very first work, L’impuro folle (The Impure Madman, 1974), already conveys this impression. It is, ideally, the sequel of Denkwu¨rdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903), by Daniel Paul Schreber, the president of the Royal Superior County Court of Dresden who was detained in an asylum between 1893 and 1902, from whom Sigmund Freud derived his theory of paranoia. Here Calasso described the slow collapse of the dogma of the immateriality of the soul, the rediscovery of the nervous system as the prison of the psyche, medical research on the material conditions of brain activity, and the dependence of spirit and ethics on the body. 341

ROBERTO CALASSO taste as a ‘‘sigillo dell’esistenza’’ (seal of existence) that replaces esoteric knowledge, and repetition as an instance that can warn about the ‘‘debolezza e precarieta` del gesto fondatore di ogni cultura’’ (weakness and precariousness of the foundation act of every culture). At the same time, the figure of the ‘‘grande tappeto’’ (great carpet) or of the ‘‘smisurato tappeto senza margini’’ (immeasurable carpet without edges) returns constantly as a symbol of continuity and of the correspondence between sky and earth, space and time, myth and destiny. The second volume, the encyclopedic Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia (The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 1988), was a best seller in Italy and has enjoyed a great international success in translation in many languages. The book is a vision of ancient Greece through some of its cultural mythologies, in a complex plot whose climax is finally reached ‘‘nel silenzio della mente’’ (in the silence of the mind) and with the introduction of the alphabet by Cadmus, as told in a passage by Nonnus of Panopolis’s Dionysiaca (fifth century AD). Calasso investigated the rules governing the parallelisms between myths and events that stem from the remote depths, thus giving back to myth, as to language, integrity even in a fragmented state and distinguishing it from ritual. He ultimately viewed myths from a modern perspective, as the source of human behavior and aesthetics. In his third book, Ka (1996), Calasso applied the procedure used in Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia to the literary tradition of archaic India, from the Veda (the sacred books of Aryan Indians from the first half of the second millennium BC) to Buddha (sixth century BC). The title Ka, which literally means ‘‘Who,’’ is the initial syllable of a hymn, ‘‘Essence of the Veda, estuary toward the hidden Ocean,’’ in which, starting with the question, a new interrogation is generated: the ‘‘secret name’’ of the original father god, whose sacrifice implies the loss of plenitude and the origin of finitude. Finally K. (2002) explores the work of Franz Kafka. It is neither an essay nor an interpretation but rather a quest for traces that may enlighten against the common places and the most overused critical readings of the writer. The starting point is precisely the letter of the alphabet through which Kafka narrates the world and thus completely renames it. Calasso’s essays on subjects ranging from Karl Kraus to Max Stirner to Coca-Cola are collected in the volume I quarantanove gradini (The Forty-Nine Steps, 1991), a title is derived from the Talmudic doctrine of the degrees of meaning of every passage of Torah, with which Walter Benjamin introduced 342

his experience of allegorical exegesis. In 2000, Calasso was visiting professor at Oxford, where he held the Weidenfeld Lectures, later collected in the volume La letteratura e gli de`i (Literature and the Gods, 2001). STEFANO TOMASSINI

Biography Roberto Calasso was born in Florence on 30 May 1941. He studied in Rome under Mario Praz and wrote a dissertation on I geroglifici di Sir Thomas Browne. In 1962, Calasso joined the small intellectual group directed by Roberto Bazlen and Luciano Foa` and worked on the program for a new publishing house, Adelphi, founded in 1963. He became its publishing director, 1969, then managing director and president, until 1999. He was awarded the Prix Veillon and the Prix du Meilleur Livre E´tranger, 1991. He was appointed Literary Lion in New York, 1993, and appointed Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2000. He is married to the writer Fleur Jaeggy and lives in Milan. Selected Works Narrative Works L’impuro folle, 1974. La rovina di Kasch, 1983; as The Ruin of Kasch, translated by William Weaver and Stephen Sartarelli, 1994. Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, 1988; as The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, translated by Tim Parks, 1993. Ka, 1996; as Ka, translated by Tim Parks, 1998. K., 2002; as K., translated by Geoffrey Brock, 2005.

Essays I quarantanove gradini, 1991; as The Forty-Nine Steps, translated by John Shepley, 2001. La letteratura e gli de`i, 2001, as Literature and the Gods, translated by Tim Parks, 2001. Cento lettere a uno sconosciuto, 2003. La follia che viene dalle Ninfe, 2005.

Further Reading Calvino, Italo, ‘‘La rovina di Kasch e quel che resta,’’ in Saggi 1945–1985, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Di Biase, Carmine, ‘‘Il mito, o la riconquista dell’armonia,’’ Esperienze letterarie, 14:3(1989), 115–117. Doniger, Wendy, ‘‘The Ancient Postmoderns,’’ The New Republic, 7 December 1998, 42–45. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Scritture saggistiche,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Franz Kafka: Nel mondo disadorno la normalita` e` terrorizzante,’’ La Repubblica, 1 November 2002, 38–39.

ITALO CALVINO Kirby, John T., ‘‘The Revestiture of Myth. Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,’’ in Secret of the Muses Retold, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. Lee, Andrea, ‘‘The Prince of Books,’’ The New Yorker, 26 April 1993, 43–51. Manguel, Alberto, ‘‘Mnemonic waves,’’ TLS, 13 September 2002, 6–7. Nigro, Salvatore S., ‘‘Il mondo in un risvolto,’’ Il Sole 24 ore, 12 October 2003, 33.

Pieri, Marzio, ‘‘Casa Greci: La letteratura italiana moderna e la provocazione della grecita`,’’ in Nicola Villani, Trettanelo`: Poesie sopra Venetia, edited by Marzio Pieri, Parma: Zara, 1989. Shorrock, Roberto, ‘‘The Artful Mythographer: Roberto Calasso and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony,’’ Arion, 11:2(2003), 83–99. Simic, Charles, ‘‘Paradise Lost,’’ The New York Review of Books, 48:14(2001), 62–64.

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) At the time of his death in 1985, Italo Calvino was widely acclaimed as Italy’s most prominent contemporary writer. Calvino began his literary career in the period immediately following World War II with a novel considered both neo-Realist and fantastic. He ended his career internationally acknowledged as Italy’s most original postmodernist. Never an easy author to label, Italo Calvino explored the nature, limits, and role of literature in both his fiction and his essays. The author’s fictional creations, ranging from the baron in the trees, to Le cosmicomiche’s Qfwfq, to the nearsighted Mr. Palomar, engage in a never-ending search for a map of the universe, a compass by which to navigate in a labyrinthine world. Calvino’s first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947), tells the story of a band of Resistance fighters from the perspective of a young boy, Pin. Critics have debated where this novel fits in the context of the neoRealist movement, which focused on telling the story of the Resistance and the immediate postwar period in Italy. While Calvino’s novel is a testimonial to the partisan experience, it differs from other neo-Realist novels in that it is narrated from an ideologically neutral perspective, that of the young Pin. Furthermore, it exhibits a ‘‘fantastic’’ quality that would characterize much of the author’s later fiction. That quality was first noted by the novelist Cesare Pavese, one of early Calvino’s mentors. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno was followed by Ultimo viene il corvo (Adam on Afternoon, and Other Stories, 1949), another look at the Resistance period but from a darker, less triumphant perspective. Calvino then began work on two projects that

would be faithful to the tenets of neo-Realism by focusing on the present day from an ‘‘objective’’ perspective: Il bianco veliero and I giovani del Po. As a diversion from the project, which stalled for several years, Calvino wrote, in the space of only three months, the first novel in the trilogy, Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount, 1952). Apparently worlds apart from the neo-Realist concern with documenting the immediate social and political reality, the fantastic novels of I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors, 1960) tell the stories of a viscount cloven in half in a battle between Christians and Turks, an eccentric Italian nobleman who lives in the trees and a nonexistent knight in Charlemagne’s army. These otherworldly tales may be read as allegories, as the author himself has suggested. The nonexistent knight whose only identity is an empty suit of armor, the symbol of the chivalric code that dominates his every action, serves as an allegory of modern ‘‘organization man.’’ Cosimo’s ‘‘aloofness’’ dramatizes the need for evasion and escape from the heaviness of the world, or, conversely, symbolizes the intellectual’s need to establish a critical distance in order to intervene in the world’s affairs. The cloven viscount stands for the divided self, the mutilation of modern man. As J. R. Woodhouse has suggested, however, ‘‘It would be pedantic and dull to interpret the three stories simply as moral allegories’’ (Italo Calvino, 1968). The trilogy is a fantastic romp through the fictional woods of Calvino’s imaginary universe. The second novel in the trilogy, Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees, 1956), chronicles the development of the main character from his youthful determination to defy his father and live out his life 343

ITALO CALVINO in the trees to his mastery of his new environment and overcoming of such obstacles as forest fires and invading Turkish pirates, from the youthful pangs of first love to maturity to the wisdom and indignities of old age. Cosimo’s story contains in nuce many of the motifs of Calvino’s fiction. The importance of nature and modern man’s loss of contact with the natural world, the need for political solidarity, and the potential for disillusionment in the political arena, the utopian craving that can never be satisfied, the role of literature and its didactic function are recurring themes in the author’s work. In Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta` (Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City, 1963), Calvino returns to the reality of postwar Italy from the ‘‘otherworldliness’’ of the fantastic trilogy. Marcovaldo is a collection of stories set in an unnamed, industrialized city. The protagonist, an alienated worker struggling to feed his family on his meager salary, wants nothing more than to participate in the prosperity surrounding him. In ‘‘Marcovaldo al supermarket,’’ he takes his family to window shop in a supermarket filled with brightly packaged merchandise. Dazzled by these riches, his family and the paterfamilias himself cannot follow Marcovaldo’s advice, ‘‘Look but don’t touch.’’ In the surreal, deus ex machina ending, Marcovaldo, his wife, and their children each escape with brimming shopping carts through a hole in the supermarket wall only to be confronted by a monstrous crane that devours the family’s stolen booty. The conclusion underscores the painful reality that Marcovaldo will never participate in the prosperity surrounding him. In each of the stories in the volume, this Chaplinesque character doggedly perseveres in his attempts to offer his family a better life, only to be defeated by the modern industrial city. Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta` reflects the growing uneasiness, the dark underbelly of the ‘‘miracolo economico,’’ the economic miracle that brought prosperity to some of Italy after World War II. Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics, 1965) and ti con zero (T zero, 1967) are loosely related stories featuring a chameleonic protagonist, Qfwfq. Qfwfq narrates his adventures from the time of the Big Bang to the present day as he changes form. Qfwfq’s metamorphoses, from a dinosaur, to a mollusk, to an amphibian, to a human, cannot be contained within the confines of a traditional narrative persona. The only thing that Qfwfq’s various incarnations have in common is their exercise of language in the function of storytelling. One section of ti con zero, ‘‘Il conte di Montecristo’’ (The 344

Count of Monte Cristo) features Edmond Dante`s and Faria imprisoned in the Castle of If in a fanciful rewriting of the Dumas story. Although Dante`s and Faria do not escape at the end of Calvino’s fiction, the story dramatizes the potential of the literature of the labyrinth to serve as a challenge to the complexity of the world. Le citta` invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972) is Calvino’s rewriting of Il Milione, Marco Polo’s account of his travels to the East. The novel is composed of a dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, interspersed with Marco Polo’s description of the cities in Kublai Khan’s vast empire. The emperor is at Polo’s mercy for any knowledge he has of his boundless realm. The Khan experiences a sense of relief when he begins to perceive order in his chaotic realm. He is convinced that he can arrive at a generative model from which to deduce all the possible cities in his empire. That model is symbolized by the chess board. The emperor decides he need no longer send Marco Polo on expeditions throughout his realm. Instead, he engages Polo in interminable games of chess in which he generates various combinations that would correspond to the cities in his empire. But the Khan’s is a pyrrhic victory. By reducing his world to an abstract model, a system of pure differences, he has lost its richness and variety. Through his persistent storytelling Polo undermines the Khan’s attempt to reduce his empire to an abstract, relational model. Marco Polo cannot describe a city without entering into its specificity by telling a story. Storytelling transforms the reductive model and acknowledges the inexhaustible richness of the world. Calvino’s fascination with literature as a combinatory game inspired one of his most intriguing texts: Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1973). The novel is divided in two parts. The first, ‘‘Il Castello dei destini incrociati,’’ tells the story of wayfarers who lose the power of speech in an enchanted forest. They take shelter in an inn where they use tarot cards to exchange the stories of their adventures. The narrative unfolds as each player lays down a sequence of cards, reproduced in the margins of the text. The written text poses as just one of many possible interpretations of the tarot cards. When the cards are read in reverse, they produce entirely new stories. Ariosto’s tale of Astolfo on the moon, for example, when read in reverse becomes the story of Helen of Troy. In both ‘‘Il castello dei destini incrociati’’ and ‘‘La taverna dei destini incrociati,’’ Calvino uses the tarot cards to represent the minimal units or fictional universals of which all stories

ITALO CALVINO are composed. Calvino’s perception of narrative as a combinatory game in which a limited number of prefabricated elements is combined and recombined is outlined in his essay ‘‘Cibernetica e fantasmi’’ (‘‘Cybernetics and Ghosts’’). Calvino’s essay was inspired by his reading of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1968) and of the structuralist critics, including Roland Barthes, A. J. Greimas, and Tzvetan Todorov. ‘‘Cibernetica e fantasmi’’ serves as a companion piece to the combinatory game masterfully played by Calvino in Il castello dei destini incrociati. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this experimental text is the way in which it underscores the importance of the reader in the creation of fiction. Although the stories of ‘‘The Castle’’ and ‘‘The Tavern’’ are composed of a finite number of elements, the combinatory potential of the narrative system is portrayed as infinite. As Calvino’s text unfolds, the reader sees that the same card may be read in a variety of ways. This underscores the idea, articulated in several of Calvino’s essays, that it is ultimately the reader who invests the fictional text with meaning. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1979) is a series of beginnings of novels, contained by a framing story that recounts a search for the ideal novel. The protagonist of the novel is the reader, ‘‘tu’’ (you). The search for the missing book leads the reader-protagonist to a writer-in-crisis and a charlatan, Ermes Marana, whose jealousy of the writer has inspired a diabolical plot to produce a literature of apocrypha, false attributions, and pastiches. This postmodern pastiche acknowledges what John Barth calls the ‘‘exhaustion’’ of literary forms and lays bare the Borgesian notion that the writer, a mere a translator or annotator, can only rewrite. Palomar (Mr. Palomar, 1983) is an ambitious and highly original work of fiction. Calvino’s protagonist is in search of nothing less than ‘‘la chiave per padroneggiare il mondo’’ (the key to master the universe). Palomar attempts to master the phenomenal world—a wave, a lizard, a flock of birds—through observation. As the author explained in a 1983 lecture in New York, he adopted a phenomenological approach to ‘‘il mare dell’oggettivita`’’ (sea of objectivity) surrounding him: ‘‘An important international trend in the culture of our century, what we might call the phenomenological approach in philosophy, the estrangement effect in literature, urges us to break through the screen of words and concepts and see the world as if it appeared for the first time to our sight’’ (‘‘The Written and Unwritten Word,’’ The

New York Review of Books, 12 May 1983). The phenomenological approach translates in the novel into the narrative technique known as estrangement or defamiliarization. As Palomar observes the awkward lovemaking of two turtles, an otherwise familiar scene is ‘‘defamiliarized’’ by the comical addition of the turtles’ cumbersome shells. He attempts to give order to the multiformity of the world through the catalog. In ‘‘Un chilo e mezzo di grasso d’oca,’’ the catalog poses as the key to mastering the external world. The enumeration of delicacies in a Parisian shop seems to capture the richness and heterogeneity of the world. However, the catalog ultimately fails as a means to shape an intelligible reality. As the various delicacies are swallowed up in shopping bags coated with mayonnaise, the multiplicity of forms that the catalog strives to capture disintegrates into a formless, amorphous mass. In each story of Palomar the hapless, nearsighted, ineffectual protagonist exercises his powers of observation with dogged determination. Each time the protagonist’s good intentions give way to a sense of bemused perplexity. Palomar provides no easy answers or reassuring consolation to the reader. It does embody, however, Calvino’s conviction that literature should represent not a surrender but rather a challenge to the labyrinthine complexity of the world. Calvino’s early works, while often sparking controversy, were widely discussed and generally acclaimed. His genius was immediately recognized by his mentors, the novelists Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Although never formally a member of the Gruppo 63, Calvino was loosely affiliated with many of the writers of that Italian experimentalist movement. His move to Paris and the increasing degree of experimentalism in his fiction baffled many Italian critics, as Renato Barilli has pointed out: ‘‘Gone was a solely Italian Calvino, son of the Resistance, heir apparent to Cesare Pavese’’ (‘‘My ‘Long Infidelity’ Towards Calvino,’’ 1989). Gradually, the ‘‘new’’ Calvino came to be accepted, admired, and virtually revered in Italy and throughout Europe. No other twentieth-century Italian writer is more widely recognized and read in North America than Italo Calvino. As Rebecca West shows, Calvino was ‘‘discovered’’ and popularized in the United States by several American writers, Gore Vidal, John Barth, and John Updike (‘‘L’identita` americana di Calvino,’’ 1987). Gore Vidal’s ‘‘Fabulous Calvino’’ published in New York Review of Books (30 May 1974) introduced Italo Calvino to the American public. Articles by John Barth and John Updike followed. Barth’s 345

ITALO CALVINO ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment’’ (1980) gave the English-speaking world a ‘‘label’’ to attach to Calvino’s work and a perspective from which to understand him. Barth cites Calvino’s Le cosmicomiche and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as examples of works that approach an ideal, postmodernist program. From the mid-1970s until his death in 1985, Calvino enjoyed tremendous popularity in North America. His 1956 collection, Fiabe italiane, was published in English translation (Italian Folktales) in 1980 to rave reviews. His subsequent works were immediately translated in English by William Weaver and favorably reviewed in The New Yorker, New York Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. The invitation to deliver the 1985 Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, lectures never delivered due to his untimely death on the eve of his departure, was a further sign of Calvino’s international stature. Five of the six Norton lectures were published posthumously under the title Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988). This volume, like the author’s earlier volumes of essays, Una pietra sopra (The Uses of Literature, 1980) and Collezione di sabbia (Collection of Sand, 1984), provide the reader with a useful interpretive framework in which to read Calvino’s fiction.

Biography Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, La Habana, Cuba, 15 October 1923, where his parents worked as botanists. He moved to Italy in 1925. Calvino studied agriculture at the University of Florence for one year, 1943; then Literature at the University of Turin. He joined the Resistance movement in 1944 and fought with the Garibaldi brigade in the Alps. After the Liberation, Calvino worked in Turin for the publisher Einaudi. He married Esther Judith Singer, ‘‘Chichita,’’ in La Habana, 19 February 1944. Calvino was awarded the Premio Bagutta for I racconti in 1959 and the Premio Feltrinelli in 1972. His daughter Giovanna was born in Rome, 1965. He moved to Paris, 1967. Calvino was awarded the prestigious Legion d’Honneur in 1981. For Adam Pollock, who directs every summer in Tuscany the baroque opera festival Musica nel Chiostro, Calvino wrote a ‘‘frame’’ for Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide, 1981. Calvino died of brain hemorrhage in Siena, 18 September 1985. JO ANN CANNON 346

Selected Works Collections Romanzi e racconti, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1991. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Fiabe italiane, Preface by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1993. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 3, Milan Mondadori, 1994. Saggi, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1995.

Fiction Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, 1947; as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1976. Ultimo viene il corvo, 1949; as Adam One Afternoon and Other Stories, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1957. Il visconte dimezzato, 1952. L’entrata in guerra, 1954. Il barone rampante, 1957; as The Baron in the Trees, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1959. Il cavaliere inesistente, 1959; as The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1962. La giornata d’ uno scrutatore, 1963; as The Watcher and Other Stories, translated by William Weaver, 1971. Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta`, 1963; as Marcovaldo or The Seasons in the City, translated by William Weaver, 1993. La formica argentina, 1965. Le cosmicomiche, 1965; as Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver, 1968. Ti con zero, 1967; as T zero, translated by William Weaver, 1969; Also known as Time and the Hunter, translated by William Weaver, 1993. Gli amori difficili, 1970; as Difficult Loves. Smog, A Plunge into Real Estate, translated by William Weaver, 1985. Le citta` invisibili, 1972; as Invisible Cities, translated William Weaver, 1974. Il castello dei destini incrociati, 1973; as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, translated by William Weaver, 1977. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, 1979; as If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, translated by William Weaver, 1992. Palomar, 1983; as Mr. Palomar, translated by William Weaver, 1992. Sotto il sole giaguaro, 1986; as Under the Jaguar Sun, translated by William Weaver, 1993. La strada di San Giovanni, 1990; as The Road to San Giovanni, translated by Tim Parks, 1993.

Edited Works Fiabe Italiane, 1956; as Italian Folktales, translated by George Martin, 1980.

Nonfiction Una pietra sopra, discorsi di letteratura e societa`, 1980; as The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1986. Collezione di sabbia, 1984. Lezioni americane, 1988; as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1988.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Stile Calvino. Cinque studi, Turin: Einaudi, 2001.

ITALO CALVINO Barilli, Renato, ‘‘My ‘Long Infidelity’ Towards Calvino,’’ in Calvino Revisited, edited by Franco Ricci, Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Barth, John, ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment’’, The Atlantic (January 1980): 65–71. Belpoliti, Marco, L’occhio di Calvino, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Belpoliti, Marco, Settanta, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Benedetti, Carla, Pasolini contro Calvino, per una letteratura impura, Turin: Boringhieri, 1998. Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, Possibile Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Cannon, JoAnn, Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Jeannet, Angela, Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent Moon: Italo Calvino’s Storytelling, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Lavagetto, Mario, Dovuto a Calvino, Turin: Boringhieri, 2001. Lucente, Gregory, Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. McLaughlin, Martin, Italo Calvino, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Milanini, Claudio, L’utopia discontinua, saggio su Italo Calvino, Milan: Garzanti, 1990. Quaderni d’Italianistica, 5 (1984): issue devoted to Calvino. Re, Lucia, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Ricci, Franco (editor), Calvino Revisited. Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Rushdie, Salman, Imaginary Homelands, London: Granta, 1991. Scarpa, Domenico, Italo Calvino, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1999. Vidal, Gore, ‘‘Fabulous Calvino,’’ New York Review of Books, 30 May 1974, 13–21. West, Rebecca, ‘‘L’identita` americana di Calvino,’’ Nuova corrente, 34(1987): 363–374. Woodhouse, J. R., Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy, Hull: Hull University Press, 1968.

I NOSTRI ANTENATI, 1960 Novels by Italo Calvino

In his 1960s trilogy, I nostri antenati (Our Ancestors), Italo Calvino apparently left behind the problems that animated Italian neo-Realist fiction of the postwar period. The first novel, Il visconte

dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount, 1952) tells the story of a viscount, Medardo of Terralba, who is cloven in two halves in a battle between the Christian forces and the Turks. Medardo’s evil half returns to his homeland and wreaks destruction in his path. The good half returns to Terralba. Order is restored after the two halves fall in love with the same woman, fight a duel, and are miraculously sewn together by Dr. Trelawny. Il visconte dimezzato is not unequivocally an allegory of human wholeness or good and evil. Martin McLaughlin cites the conclusion to Il visconte dimezzato in support of this supposition. The whole Medardo at the end ‘‘does not inaugurate ‘an era of marvelous happiness; . . . obviously a whole Viscount is not enough to make all the world whole’’’ (Italo Calvino, 1998). In his preface to the trilogy Calvinosuggests that the figure of the cloven viscount is an allegory of contemporary man: ‘‘Dimidiato, mutilato, incompleto, nemico a se stesso e` l’uomo contemporaneo; Marx lo disse alienato, Freud represso; uno stato d’antica armonia e` perduto, a una nuova completezza si aspira’’ (Mutilated, incomplete, an enemy against himself, that’s contemporary man. Marx called him alienated, Freud repressed. We have lost an ancient harmony, and aspire to a new completeness). In Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees, 1956), the second book in Calvino’s fantastic trilogy, the protagonist is an eighteenth-century nobleman, Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo`. As a 12-year-old, Cosimo defies his dictatorial father and climbs into the trees, vowing never to return to terra firma. The story, as narrated by Cosimo’s younger brother, Biagio, has an episodic, picaresque quality. Cosimo overcomes trials and obstacles, much like Calvino’s folktale heroes whose stories constitute ‘‘il catalogo dei destini che possono darsi’’ (the catalog of potential destinies) beginning with ‘‘la giovinezza, dalla nascita . . . al distacco dalla casa, alle prove per diventare adulto e poi maturo, per confermarsi come essere umano’’ (youth . . . then the departure from home, and finally, through the trials of growing up, the attainment of maturity and the proof of one’s humanity) (Introduction to Fiabe italiane, 1956). Cosimo fights savage cats and Turkish pirates. When Ombrosa is threatened by forest fires, Cosimo organizes a volunteer fire brigade and discovers the joy of solidarity in a common cause. This youthful episode of activism and camaraderie undoubtedly reflects Calvino’s participation in the Italian Resistance movement. But Cosimo’s political activism, like Calvino’s, is short lived and ends in disillusionment. 347

ITALO CALVINO Cosimo opts instead for mapping out plans for a utopian society in the trees. The protagonist’s utopianism might at first seem to brand him as a disengaged, aloof, misanthrope. But Calvino himself articulated another interpretation of Calvino’s withdrawal from the world. Cosimo’s aloofness is characterized as a necessary condition for true commitment. This is made clear when Biagio is questioned by Voltaire about his eccentric brother Cosimo: ‘‘Mais c’est pour approcher du ciel, que votre frere reste la` haute?’’ (But is it to be nearer the sky that your brother stays up there?). The brother explains, ‘‘Mio fratello sostiene che chi vuole guardare bene la terra deve tenersi alla distanza necessaria’’ (My brother considers that anyone who wants to see the earth properly must keep himself at a necessary distance from it.). This need for a critical balance between activism and withdrawal from the world, between contemplation and action, is also articulated in the ‘‘Leggerezza’’ (Lightness) chapter of Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988). Many of the motifs of Calvino’s later, experimental works may be located in Il barone rampante. Entering the exotic garden of the neighboring Ondariva family, Cosimo navigates the garden through the sense of smell. Later in the novel, the protagonist begins to master his arboreal realm through the sense of touch. He classifies the various trees in the vicinity of Ombrosa using a tactile classification system. Cosimo’s enriched, multisensory access to the world foreshadows the posthumously published novel of 30 years later. The desire to draw upon all five senses, much like primitive man, is a theme that inspired Sotto il sole giaguaro (Under the Jaguar Sun, 1986). The protagonists of Sotto il sole giaguaro fail in their attempts to use the five senses as a means of mastering the world. By contrast, Cosimo confidently and masterfully draws upon his five senses in Il barone rampante in order to navigate his arboreal realm. Another theme of the novel is the self-conscious exploration of the status and limitations of language. This is evident in the chapter describing Cosimo’s madness. Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight, 1959) is a fanciful rewriting of the exploits of Charlemagne’s knights. The protagonist, Agilulfo, an empty suit of armor, represents ‘‘inesistenza munita di volonta` e coscienza’’ (nonexistence furnished with will and conscience). His companion, Gurdulu, is his specular opposite, ‘‘uno che c’e` ma non sa d’esserci’’ (one who exists but does not know he exists). As Calvino has explained in his 348

introduction to the trilogy, Agilulfo, who is entirely defined by his devotion to the laws of an institution, in this case chivalry, represents contemporary ‘‘organization man’’ in consumer society. The other characters in the novel include two couples, Rambaldo and Bradamante and Torrismondo and Sofronia. Rambaldo and Torrisomondo are familiar character types in Calvino’s work, young men on the brink of maturity who define themselves by overcoming trials and obstacles. One of the more interesting aspects of the novel is the figure of the narrator. The early chapters seem to be narrated by an undramatized, omniscient narrator. At the beginning of Chapter Four, however, we learn that the story is being told by a nun, Sister Teodora. At the conclusion of the novel, it is revealed that Sister Teodora and Bradamante, the warrior maiden of Carolingian legend and heroine of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, are one and the same. With this conclusion, Calvino is attempting to unite the realms of contemplation and action, writing and engagement in society. The conclusion anticipates similar moments in Calvino’s later fiction, where the man of contemplation, the Hermit, is equated with the man of action, the Knight of Swords. The desire to reconcile the apparent incompatibility between contemplation and action, art and life, withdrawal and commitment, is a constant theme in Calvino’s works. JO ANN CANNON Editions First Editions Il visconte dimezzato, Turin: Einauadi, 1952. Il barone rampante. Turin: Einauadi, 1957. Il cavaliere inesistente, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. As I nostri antenati with author’s preface, Turin: Einaudi, 1960.

Critical Editions In Romanzi e racconti, vol. 2, edited by Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

Translations The Baron in the Trees, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York: Random House, 1959. The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York: Random House, 1962.

Further Reading Adler, Sara, Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, Potomac: Jose Porrua Turanzas, 1979. Bolongaro, Eugenio, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

ITALO CALVINO Bonura, Giuseppe, Invito alla lettura di Italo Calvino, Milan: Mursia, 1972. McLaughlin, Martin, Italo Calvino, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Woodhouse, J. R., Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy, Hull, U.K.: Hull University Press, 1968.

LE COSMICOMICHE, 1965 Stories by Italo Calvino

Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics) is one of Calvino’s most engaging and well-received texts. Inspired by the author’s reading of books on cosmology, astronomy, and non-Euclidean geometry, Le cosmicomiche has often been described as science fiction. For Calvino, however, science fiction deals with the future, while his stories deal with the origin and evolution of the universe. The protagonist of Le cosmicomiche is one Qfwfq, a chameleonic consciousness and observer of the universe from the Big Bang onward. Qfwfq takes many forms, including a mote of cosmic dust, a one-celled organism, a dinosaur, and a university researcher. As Qfwfq adapts to his ever-changing universe, he speculates about time and space, predictability and randomness, the birth of language. Each tale is an encounter between Qfwfq and the ‘‘Mare dell’oggettivita`’’ (sea of objectivity) surrounding. Each begins with an italicized epigraph summarizing a scientific theory on the origins of the universe or the evolution of the species. The epigraph is followed by the introduction of a human consciousness, Qfwfq. In ‘‘Gli anni-luce’’ (The LightYears) Qfwfq, observing the night sky through his telescope, spots an admonishing sign from a faraway galaxy: ‘‘TI HO VISTO’’ (I Saw You). He calculates that the unspecified, shameful action witnessed occurred two million light-years earlier. Qfwfq frets about the injustice of being captured in an uncharacteristically unflattering moment and wrestles with ways to correct the bad impression

the universe has formed of him. Toying with excuses such as ‘‘LASCIATE CHE VI SPIEGHI’’ (Let me explain) and ‘‘AVREI VOLUTO VEDERE VOI AL MIO POSTO’’ (I would have liked to have seen you in my place), he settles on responding with a terse sign of his own: ‘‘E CON ` ?’’ (What of it?). As the story continues, CIO Qfwfq takes comfort in the fact that his many subsequent, decent actions will by now have reached the distant galaxies that have so misjudged him. Alas, he patiently waits the millions of lightyears for the distant galaxies to see him at his best, only to read the evidence that his hopes have been ` ,’’ dashed. The signs reading ‘‘TRA LA LA LA ` ? VATTELAPESCA’’ (Who Can It ‘‘CHI SARA Be? Go Figure) and ‘‘HAI LA MAGLIA DI LANA’’ (You Have a Woolen Sweater) indicate the bitter reality that the universe has become indifferent. In the conclusion, Qfwfq resigns himself to being misunderstood, misjudged, and, finally, ignored. A fanciful conte philosophique, Le cosmicomiche provides a poignant glimpse at the human condition. John Barth calls it ‘‘beautifully written, enormously appealing space-age fables . . . whose materials are as modern as the new cosmology and as ancient as folktales, but whose themes are love and loss, change and permanence, illusion and reality’’ (‘‘The Literature of Replenishment,’’ 1980). JO ANN CANNON Editions Le cosmicomiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. As La memoria del mondo e altre storie cosmicomiche, Milan: Club degli editori, 1968 (Including Le cosmicomiche and Ti con zero, Turin: Einaudi, 1967). As Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove, Milan: Garzanti, 1984.

Critical Editions In Romanzi e racconti, vols. 2 and 3, edited by Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

Translation As Cosmicomics, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968. T zero, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969.

Further Reading Barth, John, ‘‘The Literature of Replenishment,’’ The Atlantic (January 1980): 65–71. Bernardini, Napoletano Francesca, I segni nuovi di Italo Calvino. Da ‘‘Le cosmicomiche’’ a ‘‘Le citta` invisibili,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.

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ITALO CALVINO Carter, Albert Howard, Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Hume, Kathryn, Calvino’s Fictions: Cogito and Cosmos, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Olken, Ilene, With Pleated Eye and Garnet Wings: Symmetries of Italo Calvino, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984. Ricci, Franco, Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001. Weiss, Beno, Understanding Italo Calvino, Columbia: University of South Carolina, 1993.

SE UNA NOTTE D’INVERNO UN VIAGGIATORE, 1979 Novel by Italo Calvino

breach the gap between signifier and signified mirrors Calvino’s own anxiety. In essays such as ‘‘The Written and the Unwritten Word’’ (1983) and throughout his fiction Calvino explores the nature, limitations, and inadequacies of literary language. The centrality of the reader, a recurring theme in Calvino’s work, is embodied in Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore in the character of Ludmilla. An avid reader, Ludmilla becomes the object of Flannery’s obsession. His desire to seduce the reader comes to symbolize the writer’s always unrealized desire to endow literature with power. The encounter between Arkadian Porphyritch and the reader further dramatizes the importance of the reader in determining literature’s influence. The Director of the Archives of the unnamed Police State points out that, in countries where there is no censorship, literature descends to the status of ‘‘un passatempo innocuo e senza rischi’’ (an innocuous pastime without risks). Only the police state acknowledges the true power of the pen. This novel explores the relationship between fiction and society, writer and reader, reader and text. The novel ultimately defends the supremacy of reading over writing while it poignantly portrays the writer’s unquenchable desire to ‘‘seduce’’ the reader through the pleasure of the text. JO ANN CANNON

Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) is one of Calvino’s most experimental and self-referential texts. The protagonist is a reader who opens a book by Italo Calvino and becomes immersed in the text. Unfortunately, through an error in the binding, the first 32 pages repeat over and over throughout the book. The reader goes to the bookstore to return the defective book, only to discover that the Calvino book was accidentally switched with another novel. This is the novel that has captured the reader’s attention. Thus begins a search for the missing book. Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore is a series of interrupted fragments embedded one within the other and interspersed with the protagonist’s search for the original, authentic text. The repeated interruptions of the novels within the novel function as an extended metaphor on the fragility and inconclusiveness of literary communication. This deficiency is captured in the character of Silas Flannery, the hack detective novelist who has lost his ‘‘fiducia nella comunicazione’’ (faith in communication) because his novels fail to capture or compete with the material world. The hack detective novelist is a comical authorial surrogate. Flannery’s inability to 350

Editions First Edition Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore, Turin: Einaudi, 1979.

Critical Edition In Romanzi e racconti, vol. 3, edited by Mario Barenghi and Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

Translations As If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, translated by William Weaver, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1981.

Further Reading Calvino, Italo, ‘‘The Written and the Unwritten Word,’’ The New York Review of Books, 12 (May 1983), 38–39. Cannon, JoAnn, Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic, Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1981. Contini, Gianfranco, Schedario di scrittori italiani moderni e contemporanei, Florence: Sansoni, 1978. Feinstein, Wiley, ‘‘The Doctrinal Core of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, in Calvino Revisited, edited by Franco Ricci, Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Le avventure di un lettore. Calvino, Ludmilla e gli altri, Lecce: Piero Manni, 1997. Milanini, Claudio, L’utopia discontinua. Saggio su Italo Calvino, Milan: Garzanti, 1990.

MARIO CAMERINI

MARIO CAMERINI (1895–1981) Mario Camerini’s long and influential career as a film director began with Jolly, clown da circo (Jolly, Circus Clown, 1923), featuring a carnivalesque setting to which he would return in Daro` un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935). His subsequent silent films—Voglio tradire mio marit o (I Want to Betray My Husband, 1925) a version of C. B. DeMille’s successful Hollywood comedy Why Change Your Wife (1920); Maciste contro lo sceicco (Maciste Against the Sheik, 1925), one of the many adventure films produced during the silent era involving the popular superhero, Maciste; and Kiff Tebbi (As You Please, 1927), a romantic adventure film set in Africa, a location to which Camerini would return in Il grande appello (The Last Roll Call, 1936)—are rich with signs of his directorial promise. Many of his films, once unknown to the postFascist world, were finally screened during a 1975 retrospective at Ancona, enabling an overdue critical reassessment of his style and of Italian popular culture during Fascism. The screening of these films not only revealed that the Italian cinema of the Fascist era was innovative but became an occasion to rethink the complex relations between the culture and politics of those years. Camerini’s first notable achievement as director was the silent melodrama Rotaie (Rails, 1929), reissued as a sound film in 1931. Not a propagandistic text in behalf of the regime, the film is notable for its experimentation with camera work and editing, heralding new directions in an Italian cinema struggling to regain its former commercial and international prestige. Rotaie follows the vicissitudes of a young petit bourgeois couple, led astray by the promises of wealth via gambling but ultimately converted to acceptance of a working-class milieu, a narrative common to many of his subsequent films. The style of the film exploits the image of train wheels linked to that of a roulette wheel. The reiterative circular images of the wheels, the rhythmic editing, and the chiaroscuro lighting develop a tension between the couples’ entrapment in a selfdestructive life and their struggle to extricate themselves from an obsession for wealth that almost destroys their relationship. Camerini’s films were not overtly political, despite Fascism’s authoritarian, theatrical, and

propagandistic tendencies. They have been described as ‘‘escapist,’’ similar in certain ways to pre–World War II Hollywood cinema with its indirect but meaningful insights into the changes induced by modernity and the rise of mass culture. With the coming of sound (1929), Camerini directed films in genres that were to become his trademark: in particular, sentimental light comedies and melodramas that were tinged with pathos. His first successful sentimental comedy, Gli uomini che mascalzoni... (Men What Rascals, 1932), starred Vittorio De Sica as a chauffeur-mechanic trying to impress a young woman by pretending to be a wealthy man whose affectations threaten the relationship. The romance is coupled to the landscape of modernity: the automobile, industry, commerce—and the fast pace of life inherent to it. The dynamic character of landscape is developed through a mobile camera and the use of location setting (in the street scenes, at an inn, and at the Milan Trade Fair). The film’s popularity was enhanced by Cesare Bixio’s song, ‘‘Parlami d’amore Mariu`.’’ The film elevated De Sica to stardom, and his collaboration with Camerini left a mark on De Sica’s later films as a director. The comedies that followed—Gli uomini che mascalzoni, Il signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937), Daro` un milione, Batticuore (Heartbeat, 1938), and I grandi magazzini (Department Stores, 1939)—pair De Sica with Assia Noris and feature a motif common to Camerini’s films: impersonation. A millionaire masquerades as a beggar and a beggar as a millionaire. A newspaper vender assumes the identity of an upper-class gentleman. A young woman, the graduate of a school for thieves, assumes the role of an aristocrat. A delivery driver seeks to extort money from a department store. In the spirit of Frank Capra’s films, with their sympathetic focus on petit bourgeois protagonists, the culprit in Camerini’s films is the vain and destructive desire for wealth, success, and upward mobility expressed through the protagonists’ attempts to escape their everyday existence. After their encounters in the upper-class world, the protagonists find safety in restored familial, if not community, relationships. Daro` un milione was remade in Hollywood by Walter Lang as I’ll Give a Million (1938) and 351

MARIO CAMERINI Batticuore as Heartbeat in 1946. Camerini was also responsible for remakes of his earlier films— T’amero` sempre (1933; I’ll Love You Always, 1943) and Il cappello a tre punte (The ThreeCornered Hat, 1934) retitled as La bella mugnaia (The Miller’s Wife, 1955) based on the short novel by Pedro de Alarc¸on. Il cappello a tre punte, set in the eighteenth century, is a satire on the abuse of power, focusing on a lecherous, vain, and incompetent governor who seeks to seduce a miller’s wife. The film, unlike other Camerini films, was subject to censorship, cut, and denied approval for several months. The witty dialogue, the exaggerated characterization (thanks to the famous Neapolitan comic actors Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo), the vivid character of the pastoral setting, and the use of song are characteristic of Camerini’s comedic style, which invites comparison with the French director Rene´ Clair in the ironic and self-conscious focus on the cinematic medium, masquerade, and carnival. Camerini’s melodramas also portray conflicts between domesticity and the desire for adventure and leisure. T’amero` sempre highlights the fate of a young woman abandoned by her aristocratic lover. Pregnant and alone in the city, she seeks to rebuild her life. The film’s opening introduces images reminiscent of documentaries produced by LUCE (L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa) on maternity but veers in a darker direction in its portrait of the female protagonist, whose early blighted life is presented through flashbacks of her mother’s death, life in an orphanage, and meeting with the Count. Through vignettes, the film presents a contrast between the leisurely and extravagant life of the aristocracy and the modest life of workers, ending not in reconciliation with the Count but in her engagement to a modest accountant. Come le foglie (Like Falling Leaves, 1934) portrays a wealthy family almost destroyed by the social pretensions of the maternal figure and her playboy son. The beleaguered family that appears in so many of his films is not a celebration of Fascist familial ideology but a critical flight from the harsh realities of contemporary life. Camerini’s images of Italian modernity often portray images of upperclass life while at the same time disavowing their appeal. His only film that qualifies as conforming to the Fascist ideology of nationalism is Il grande appello, and even that film is tempered by the pathos of the father-and-son relationship that overwhelms the patriotic and nationalist motifs. Not often commented on by critics, Camerini’s oeuvre also includes adaptations of Italian literary 352

and dramatic classics to film. His version of Luigi Pirandello’s Ma non e` una cosa seria (It’s Really Not Serious, 1936) is set in a boardinghouse run by an aging and unappreciated woman whose life changes when a handsome rake, weary of womanizing, proposes marriage to her in jest and thereby alters her life. Parallels are evident between Camerini’s comic treatment of bourgeois life and marriage and Pirandello’s use of humor to dissect the folly of romantic love, sexual intrigue, and self-deception. The filmmaker’s adaptation of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1941) is another instance of a compatible union between the filmmaker and his literary source. Though he had to scale down characters and episodes, Camerini’s film creates a dramatic sense of the novel’s historical milieu and conveys the filmmaker’s populist predilection for dramatizing the disruption of familial and class solidarity through abuses of power by the upper classes and through elevating the virtues of religious belief and modest aspiration. In the immediate postwar era, Camerini made Due lettere anonime (Two Anonymous Letters, 1945), which displays ‘‘almost the same intensity as Roma, citta` aperta’’ (Gili, 1993). From the 1950s to the early 1970s, he directed a variety of genres: comedies, dramas, crime films, and the superproduction Ulisse (Ulysses, 1954), another adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey. Camerini’s last film was another literary adaptation, based on a Giovanni Guareschi novel, Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (Don Camillo and Today’s Youth, 1972), a congenial vehicle for a filmmaker who excelled in a form of comedy that was critical of crude materialism, elevated common sense as a strategy for survival, and displayed a sympathy for religious piety, though not a devotee of individualism. Camerini continued to be actively involved in legal, cultural, and political issues affecting postwar Italian cinema.

Biography Mario Camerini was born in Rome, 6 February 1895, and educated at the Lyce´e le Tasse in Rome. He worked as scriptwriter, 1913, and abandoned his intention to study law and served as officer in the Italian light infantry from 1914–1918. He was taken as prisoner of war by the Austrians in 1917 and repatriated to Italy in 1919. Camerini worked as scriptwriter and assistant to the prominent director, Augusto Genina, 1919–1923; he debuted as a

MARIO CAMERINI director of silent cinema with Jolly, clown da circo; 1923, and had his first directorial successes with Rotaie and Gli uomini che mascalzoni, 1930, 1933. Camerini married Assia Noris, who starred in several of his films, in 1940. They were divorced in 1943, and he married Mathilde ‘‘Tully’’ Hruska, 1943. The couple had two children. Camerini retired from filmmaking in 1972. He was the featured speaker at the Ancona retrospective of films of the Fascist era, 1975. A retrospective of his films was shown at the 45th Locarno Festival in 1992. Camerini died of pneumonia at Gardone Riviera, 4 February 1981. MARCIA LANDY Selected Works Films Jolly, Clown da circo, 1923. Saetta principe per un giorno, 1924. La casa dei pulcini, 1924. Voglio tradire mio marito (based on the play by Ermanno Geymonat), 1925. Masciste contro lo sceicco, 1925. Kiff Tebbi (based on the novel by Luciano Zuccoli), 1927. Rotaie, 1929. La riva dei bruti (based on Victory by Joseph Conrad), 1930. Figaro e la sua gran giornata (based on the play Ostrega che sbrego! by Arnaldo Fraccaroli), 1931. Gli uomini che mascalzoni..., 1932. T’amero` sempre, 1933. Giallo (based on The Man Who Changed His Name by Edgar Wallace), 1933. Il cappello a tre punte (based on El sombrero de tres picos by Antonio Pedro de Alarc¸on), 1934. Come le foglie (based on the play by Giuseppe Giacosa), 1934. Daro` un milione, 1935. Ma non e` una cosa seria (based on the play by Luigi Pirandello), 1936. Il grande appello, 1936. Il signor Max, 1937. Batticuore (based on a short story by Lilly Janu¨sse), 1938. I grandi magazzini, 1939. Centomila dollari, 1940. Una romantica avventura (based on The Loves of Margery by Thomas Hardy), 1940. I promessi sposi (based on the novel by Alessandro Manzoni), 1941.

Una storia d’amore (based on the novel by Mary McDougal Axelson), 1942. T’amero` sempre, 1943. Due lettere anonime, 1945. L’angelo e il diavolo, 1946. La figlia del capitano (based on the novel by Aleksander Pushkin), 1947. Molti sogni per le strade, 1948. Il brigante Musolino, 1950. Due mogli sono troppe, 1950. Moglie per una notte (based on the play L’ora della fantasia by Anna Bonacci), 1952. Gli eroi della domenica, 1952. Ulisse (based on the Odyssey by Homer), 1954. La bella mugnaia (re-make of Il cappello a tre punte), 1955. Suor Letizia, 1956. Vacanze a Ischia, 1957. Primo amore, 1958. Via Margutta (based on the novel Gente al Babuino di Ugo Moretti), 1960. I briganti italiani, 1961. Kali-Yug, la dea della vendetta, 1963. Delitto quasi perfetto, 1966. Io non vedo, tu non parli, lui non sente, 1971. Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi (based on the novel by Giovanni Guareschi), 1972.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, and Patrizia Pistagnesi, I favolosi anni trenta: Cinema italiano 1929–1944, Milan: Electa, 1979. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano: Il cinema muto 1895–1929, vol. 1, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano: Il cinema del regime, 1929–1945, vol. 2, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001. Farassino, Alberto, Mario Camerini: Sous la direction de Alberto Farassino, Belgium: Editions Yellow Now, 1992. Gili, Jean A., ‘‘Etre cine´aste en Italie pendant les anne´es du fascisme,’’ Dossier Mario Camerini, Positif, 301 (March 1986): 38–43. Gili, Jean A., ‘‘Terzo tempo: Retrospective Mario Camerini,’’ Positif, 384 (February 1993): 70–71. Grmek Germani, Sergio, Mario Camerini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Landy, Marcia, Fascism in Film: The Italian Commercial Cinema 1931–1943, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Savio, Francesco, Cinecitta` anni trenta: Parlano 116 protagonisti del secondo cinema italiano (1930–1943), vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979.

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ANDREA CAMILLERI (1925–) Although a contemporary of his distinguished literary colleague and often-acknowledged font of inspiration Leonardo Sciascia, Andrea Camilleri began his own prolific narrative production much later in life. His first novel, Il corso delle cose (The Way Things Go), was published in 1978, and his publicly acclaimed series of works dedicated to the investigations of the Commissario Montalbano began with the publication of La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water) in 1994. Like Sciascia, Camilleri has produced numerous works of historical and investigative fiction, rooted firmly in the geographic, linguistic, and historical context of Sicily. His novels engage topics of contemporary interest to Sicily and to Italy, such as the controversy over police brutality at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001, which is a source of great professional and personal frustration for Montalbano, in Il giro di boa (Rounding the Buoy, 2003), or the problems posed by waves of immigration from northern Africa, subject of La gita a Tindari (Excursion to Tindari, 2000). These novels take as inspiration microhistorical episodes from chronicles, elaborating narratives around such events as public opposition to the opening of a theater in Caltanissetta as in Il birraio di Preston (The Brewer from Preston, 1995). His historical fiction, set in large part in at the end of the nineteenth century, criticizes the immobility of the Sicilian bureaucracy, the corruption of the clergy, and the insidious presence of the Mafia. But Camilleri, who has frequently paid homage in both novels and in interviews to Sciascia and to other eminent Sicilian literary predecessors, including Verga, Pirandello, De Roberto, Brancati, and Toma`si di Lampedusa, shapes a Sicily markedly different from that of his regional peers. This difference is exemplified in the Montalbano series, which creates a serialized, demystified Sicily in which the police chief confronts the laws of omerta` and the difficulties of bureaucratic inefficacy with ironic humor: He can meet with and come to grudging understandings with Mafia bosses or ridicule the practice of sending anonymous letters by writing them, strategically and contemptuously, to himself. The weighty, cyclical nature of Sicilian history depicted in Verga’s I Malavoglia, Tomasi di 354

Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, or Sciascia’s Il consiglio d’Egitto is replaced by the linear functioning of the classical detective story, proceeding from the commission of a crime through its investigation and eventual resolution. Camilleri’s Sicily is marked by a grudging optimism, the hesitant belief in the possibility for change; and his detective hero, as head of the police force of Viga`ta, works to successfully fight crime from within the very system of bureaucracy that he perpetually critiques. The resulting narrative structure enjoys the epistemological stability made possible in a context where evidence is provided and questions answered, a framework that derives more directly from the tradition of detective fiction than from the workings of Sicilian literature, which often depicts obscure, destabilized foundations of knowledge and thus dysfunctional or unresolved detective narratives (such as Sciascia’s A ciascuno il suo, in which the detective-figure is killed). In fact, the author acknowledges in part his appreciation of traditional detective fiction in the very name of his protagonist, which besides being a common last name in Sicily also recalls Manuel Vasquez-Montalba`n, a prolific Catala`n writer of detective fiction. Like Maigret and Pepe Carvalho, Vasquez-Montalba`n’s detective, Montalbano is an outsider in a system that privileges an ever-greater reliance on technology. He relies on old methods of detection and a traditional sense of integrity and morality in his administration of justice and does not adhere strictly to the procedural or legal tenets of the police bureau. As in the canonical detective fiction of his investigative fictional muses, Montalbano employs reason and the gift of intuition to combat bureaucratic and societal complications and unravel the intricacies of the mysteries he confronts. Camilleri’s fiction develops in great detail the regional qualities that tie his writing firmly to his native island. Both historical and detective fiction occupy a universe centered around the fictional town of Viga`ta, situated between the hills and the sea and near the real city of Porto Empedocle in the province of Agrigento. Recurrent themes such as Montalbano’s passion for Sicilian delicacies, like the beloved arancini, or rice balls, of the title of the short story collection Gli arancini di Montalbano

ANDREA CAMILLERI (Montalbano’s Arancini, 1999), or his affection for a gnarled olive tree under which he contemplates difficult cases, contribute to the creation of Camilleri’s characteristic atmosphere of sicilianita` (‘‘Sicilianness’’). Foremost among the distinguishing features of Camilleri’s cultural landscape is his language, a dialect-inflected, inventive version of standard Italian that creates the lingua franca of his narrative universe and serves as a unifying force throughout his literary production. The most elaborately developed language is Sicilian in derivation, but his linguistic innovation also extends to other regional varietals, including a Tuscanized Italian in Il birraio di Preston, the Spanish-influenced language of Il re di Girgenti (The King of Girgenti, 2001), and various passages in a Genoese-inspired Italian in La mossa del cavallo (The Knight’s Move, 1999). These idiosyncratic ‘‘dialects’’ are used to differentiate social strata and regional appurtenance of the characters, to distinguish their particular humor, or to shed light on their relationships with other characters. The most important function of Camilleri’s version of Sicilian, however, is the creation of the contextual theater in which the narrative action unfolds. Virtually all of the direct and indirect discourse in his work is reported in some version of this dialect, but the narrative voice, too, employs the fictional regional language to create the colorful backdrop against which the action is set. In order to facilitate the reading of the sometimes unfamiliar vernacular, the narrative often explains the significance of Sicilianisms, either defining them directly or including the standard Italian version alongside them. This linguistic stage, then, upon which both the historical and the contemporary plots are performed, lends a sense of coherence and continuity to Camilleri’s fiction, linking the Viga`ta of the past to that of the present. The peculiar language that initially caused editors concern about the comprehensibility and wide public appeal of Camilleri’s work has ultimately become one of the most celebrated and critically discussed characteristics of his fiction. While the Sicilian landscape predominates in Camilleri’s work, the author’s books are also filled with references to other literary traditions that allow him to situate himself stylistically, thematically, and philosophically in a global literary context. All of Camilleri’s writing is marked by literary self-consciousness, sometimes present thematically in his work (as when Montalbano, for example, deciphers a clue in the short story ‘‘La sigla’’ by remembering the plot of a short story by Edgar

Allan Poe), and sometimes employed as part of the form of the text itself (as in Il birraio di Preston, in which the first sentence in each chapter is a citation from a famous work of fiction). The often playful pastiche of literary reference also contributes to the tone that predominates throughout Camilleri’s production, one of ironic self-awareness, often described as farcical, in which even the most biting critiques or tragic occurrences are rendered humorous or curious. This sense of distance from the subjects of his works has been a topic of criticism for those who perceive it as a lack of seriousness, although for Camilleri irony represents a mode of self-defense in the face of the problems confronted by Sicily and Italy. The tradition of detective fiction in which Camilleri participates, and which has also been criticized as indicative of a lack of literary seriousness, has provided a model not simply for narrative creation but also for the enthusiastic popular success of his work. The philosopher and cultural critic Antonio Gramsci famously noted in his Quaderni dal carcere (written in the late 1920s and 1930s, the ‘‘golden age’’ of detective fiction), that Italy lacked a national popular literature and that even detective fiction had failed to flourish among Italian-language writers. Camilleri’s works arguably fill the literary gap of which Gramsci made note; his success is discussed among critics as the ‘‘caso Camilleri,’’ the literary and publishing phenomenon that his writing represents. Critical interest in the Sicilian author follows on the heels of overwhelming, unprecedented public success, both in Italy and abroad (as in 2000, when he was the Italian writer most read in France). Thanks to his resulting status as a public figure of note, Camilleri also regularly contributes short stories, essays, and articles on literature, culture, and politics to Italian periodicals, including Il messaggero, La repubblica, and La stampa. His writing career was preceded by a long stint as director of works for radio, television, and theater, during which he produced two television series, the first Tenente Sheridan and the second based on Georges Simenon’s Chief Maigret mysteries for the RAI. It was in deconstructing and reconstructing the narrative lines for the television public that he became skilled in exploiting the mechanisms of the detective story. Almost a half-century later, the former television producer has collaborated in writing scripts for the popular adaptations of his own Montalbano works for television and radio by the RAI, with Luca Zingaretti playing the part of the renowned detective. 355

ANDREA CAMILLERI

Biography Andrea Camilleri was born in Porto Empedocle (Agrigento), 6 September 1925. He married in 1957 and is the father of three children. Camilleri studied at the University of Palermo, where he wrote his dissertation on Mallarme´; he completed further study at the Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica in Rome under Orazio Costa. Beginning in 1942, Camilleri directed numerous theatrical productions, including works by Beckett, Ionesco, Adamov, T. S. Eliot, and Pirandello. He worked as assistant to Ruggero Jacobbi, noted director and poet; together with Jacobbi, he directed Pirandello’s La Sagra del Signore della Nave in Agrigento. Commencing in 1958, Camilleri produced television and radio series on the theater of Eduardo De Filippo, the investigator Tenente Sheridan, and adaptations of Georges Simenon’s Maigret series, Commissario Maigret, starring Gino Cervi. He taught at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, 1958–1965 and 1968–1970, and held the Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica ‘‘Silvio D’Amico,’’ chair in directing, 1977–1997. Camilleri has been a contributor to several periodicals, including Il messaggero, La stampa, and La repubblica. He was winner of the Gela prize for Un filo di fumo, 1980; the Vittorini prize for Il birraio di Preston, 1995; the Elsa Morante prize for La mossa del cavallo, 1999; and the Flaiano prize for La voce del violino, 1998. ELENA PAST See also: Detective Fiction Selected Works Fiction Il corso delle cose, 1978. Un filo di fumo, 1980. La strage dimenticata, 1984. La stagione della caccia, 1992. La bolla di componenda, 1993.

La forma dell’acqua, 1994; as The Shape of Water, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2002. Il gioco della mosca, 1995. Il birraio di Preston, 1995. Il cane di terracotta, 1996; as The Terra-Cotta Dog, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2002. Il ladro di merendine, 1996; as The Snack Thief, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2003. La voce del violino, 1997; as The Voice of the Violin, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 2003. La concessione del telefono, 1998. Un mese con Montalbano, 1998. La mossa del cavallo, 1999. Gli arancini di Montalbano, 1999. La gita a Tindari, 2000. La scomparsa di Pato`, 2000. Biografia del figlio cambiato, 2000. Il re di Girgenti, 2001. L’odore della notte, 2001. La paura di Montalbano, 2002. Il giro di boa, 2003. La prima indagine di Montalbano, 2004.

Other I teatri stabili italiani (1898–1918), 1959. Interviste impossibili, 1975–1976.

Further Reading Capecchi, Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2000. De Montis, Simona, I colori della letteratura: Un’indagine sul caso Camilleri, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Lodato, Saverio, La linea della palma: Saverio Lodato fa raccontare Andrea Camilleri, Milan: Rizzoli, 2002. Lupo, Salvatore, et al., Il caso Camilleri: Letteratura e storia, Palermo: Sellerio, 2004. Pistelli, Maurizio, ‘‘Montalbano sono’’: Sulle tracce del piu` famoso commissario di polizia italiano, Florence: Le Ca`riti, 2003. Santoro, Antonella, ‘‘I romanzi storici di Andrea Camilleri,’’ Quaderni d’italianistica, 22:2(2001): 159–182. Sorgi, Marcello, La testa ci fa dire: Dialogo con Andrea Camilleri, Palermo: Sellerio, 2000. Vitale, Armando, Il mondo del commissario Montalbano: Considerazioni sulle opere di Andrea Camilleri, Caltanissetta: Terzo Millennio, 2001. Vizmuller-Zocco, Jana, ‘‘I test della (im)popolarita`: Il fenomeno Camilleri,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 22:1(2001): 35–46.

FERDINANDO CAMON (1935–) The poet, novelist, and critic Ferdinando Camon occupies a special place in Italian literature. His concern for and understanding of country life in the Italian northeast are rooted in his own 356

experience because he comes from a peasant family, a very unusual occurrence in the world of Italian letters. He has explored in depth the conflict between oral culture and the culture of the written

FERDINANDO CAMON word. He has elaborated a most personal medium to write about that chasm and about war violence, both of which he experienced personally. He has addressed in his fiction the most disturbing phenomena of post–World War II Italy, terrorism and consumerism, reaching a varied and responsive readership. Il mestiere di poeta (The Poet’s Trade, 1965) and Il mestiere di scrittore (The Writer’s Trade, 1973) are collections of interviews that focus on the ‘‘craft’’ of writing. The dialogues, which Camon called ‘‘spoken criticism,’’ explore the relationship between technique and experience, writer and audience, and the place of literature in a society in rapid transformation. This last topic inspired Camon’s most influential critical work, Letteratura e classi subalterne (Literature and the Subordinate Classes, 1974). Language is the place where conflicts between past and present social realities are revealed: On the one hand there is a literary tradition whose medium is the Italian written language, and on the other hand there is the dialectal orality of the subproletariat. Camon, however, was not concerned with the fate of industrial workers, city proletariat, and lower-level bourgeoisie. His ambition—which he felt was almost a compulsion and a curse—was to give a voice to the forgotten humanity that still lived in the plains bordering the Po river, ‘‘a pocket of Third World, unchanging and on the verge of extinction, at the heart of one of the most rapidly changing European nations,’’ as he wrote in Romanzi della pianura (Novels of the Plain, 1988), ‘‘people who did not know their nation’s language, either written or spoken, anchored in ancient beliefs.’’ Camon’s poems and a volume of newspaper articles, Avanti popolo (Go Ahead, People, 1977), also address the persistence of memories from a phantom world and the monstrosity of a soulless postindustrial culture. His first novel, Il quinto stato (The Fifth Estate, 1970), is utterly original in form and thematics. It is the story of the ‘‘fifth estate,’’ the despised subproletariat who lived and died in the harsh environment of the marshy lands along the Po. A firstperson narrator, a boy, relates his experience of a way of life that is bound toward extinction. His sudden discovery of a different world, the alien and marvelous cities of the Italian ‘‘economic miracle,’’ fills him with awe and yearning. But moving away from ‘‘the plains’’ in which the boy is rooted and being reborn in that other wondrous place is a transgression that brings loneliness, rage, and the torments of a divided consciousness. Language is the witness of that betrayal and the instrument of

salvation. Un altare per la madre (Memorial, 1978) is an homage to the different codes of expression, celebration, and interpretation of the two universes, the one that was left behind and the writer’s present home. An altar handmade by a widower in memory of his lifelong companion is paralleled by the written memorial of their estranged son. La vita eterna (Life Everlasting, 1972) completes the ‘‘ciclo degli ultimi’’ (cycle of those who come last). It revisits the same landscape during the many wars that unleashed unspeakable ferocity on its inhabitants. The peasant world does not distinguish between armies and causes, years and centuries; it remains immobile, subjected to violence, and eternally last. La malattia chiamata uomo (The Sickness Called Man, 1981) is one of the most original Italian novels of the second half of the twentieth century. Psychoanalysis provides the tools to probe deeper in the dislocation caused by the disappearance of an entire social class that existed since prehistoric times and a man’s choice to enter the world of the city and written language. Instead, Occidente (The West, 1989) and La storia di Sirio: parabola per la nuova generazione (The Story of Sirio: A Parable, 1991), components of a ‘‘Cycle of Terror,’’ record the effects of terrorism during a period of Italian life filled with mysterious assassinations. Later novels excoriate the trends of contemporary society and speak about today’s chaotic human migrations. But in 2004, Camon returned with a hard-won serenity to the fields that lie along the Po River. La cavallina, la ragazza e il diavolo (The Young Mare, the Girl and the Devil) is a novella about the pleasure and beauty one can find in that earth. Animals and plants elicit the admiration and love of the narrator, who praises the wisdom of those who have remained faithful to the land.

Biography Ferdinando Camon was born in San Salvaro d’Urbana (Padua), 14 November 1935. He studied in Montagnana (Padua), then at the University of Padua in the School of Letters and Philosophy. He taught at the University of Padua and Bologna (1976), then became a functionary of the Ministry of Public Instruction. In 1973, he began a career in journalism as a columnist for several major Italian newspapers. He was editor of Nord-Est, a collection of short essays he authored and/or edited (1987–1989). Camon writes for La Stampa, l’Unita`, L’Avvenire, and a number of newspapers in the Italian northeast. He is married to Gabriella Imperatori, a journalist. They have two sons, Alessandro 357

FERDINANDO CAMON and Alberto. He has won many prizes, including the Viareggio Prize (1973), the Campiello Prize twice, the Strega Prize (1978), and the Giovanni Verga Prize (2004). ANGELA M. JEANNET Selected Works

I miei personaggi mi scrivono, 1987. Autoritratto di Primo Levi, 1987; republished as Conversazione con Primo Levi, 1991; as Conversations with Primo Levi, translated by John Shepley, 1989. Alberto Moravia: io e il mio tempo, intervista, 1988. Perche´ scrivete? Rispondono 109 scrittori italiani 1989. Il Santo assassino: dichiarazioni apocrife, 1991.

Further Reading

Fiction Il quinto stato, 1970; as The Fifth Estate, translated by John Shepley, 1987; definitive version in Romanzi della pianura, 1988. La vita eterna, 1972; reprinted, 2001; as Life Everlasting, translated by John Shepley, 1987; definitive version in Romanzi della pianura, 1988. Occidente, 1975. Un altare per la madre, 1978; as Memorial, translated by David Calicchio, 1983. La malattia chiamata uomo, 1981; as The Sickness Called Man, translated by John Shepley, 1993. Storia di Sirio: parabola per la nuova generazione, 1984; as The Story of Sirio: A Parable, translated by Cassandra Bertea, 1985. La donna dei fili, 1986. Romanzi della pianura, 1988 (includes Il quinto stato and La vita eterna). Il canto delle balene, 1989. Il Super-Baby, 1991. Mai visti sole e luna, 1994. La terra e` di tutti, 1996. La cavallina, la ragazza e il diavolo, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Liberare l’animale,’’ 1973. ‘‘Dal silenzio delle campagne: tori, mucche, diavoli, contadini, drogati, mercanti di donne e serial killer, scene e raccontini in versi,’’ 1998.

Critical Writing Il mestiere di poeta, 1965; reprinted, 1982. La moglie del tiranno, 1969; republished with one addition as Il mestiere di scrittore, 1973. Letteratura e classi subalterne, 1974. Avanti popolo, 1977. Nord-Est, 1987–1989.

Albu-Stanescu, Ion, ‘‘Die Kontinuitat eines Krisenbewusstseins: Ferdinando Camon,’’ Weimarer Beitrage, 33(1987), 222–235. De Michelis, Cesare, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ Studi novecenteschi, 12(1985), 7–35. De Michelis, Cesare, ‘‘Camon, Ferdinando,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura Italiana, Torino: UTET, 1987. Dornetti, Vittorio, ‘‘Sociologia e letteratura nel Quinto stato di Camon,’’ Otto-Novecento, 3(1979), 329–340. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Conversazione con Ferdinando Camon,’’ Italian Quarterly, 29(1988), 59–68. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Italian Novelists Since World War II, 1965–1995. Vol. 196, edited by Augustus Pallotta, Detroit, Washington, DC, and London: Gale, 1998. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘The Worlds of Ferdinando Camon,’’ in Italiana, edited by Albert N. Mancini, Paolo Giordano, and Pier Raimondo Baldini, River Forest, IL: Rosary College, 1988. Liucci, Raffaele, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ Belfagor, 55(2000), 545–560. Madrignani, Carlo A., ‘‘Il rosso e il nero del ‘cittadino’ Camon,’’ Quaderni piacentini, 58–59(1976), 19–195. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon: Letteratura e classi subalterne,’’ in Scritti corsari, Milan: Garzanti 1975. Pesetti, Nada, ‘‘Camon: lingua e narrazione dei ‘vilani,’’’ L’immagine riflessa, 1(1977), 182–198. Postman, Sheryl-Lynn, ‘‘From Amorphous Nuances to Specific Visions: The Use of Memory in Ferdinando Camon’s The Fifth Estate,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 12(1994), 91–100. Toscani, Claudio, ‘‘Ferdinando Camon,’’ in Novecento. Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa` italiana, edited by Gianni Grana, vol. 11, part 2, Milan: Marzorati, 1989.

DINO CAMPANA (1885–1932) ‘‘Dino Campana, even independently of the merits of his poetry, would remain one of the most striking, dramatic, and exciting figures of Twentieth Century Italian literature, and certainly one 358

of the most controversial.’’ Thus wrote Luigi Bonaffini in his preface to his 1991 translation of Campana’s single work, Canti orfici (Orphic Songs, 1914). Bonaffini inadvertently raised a sore point:

DINO CAMPANA Campana, widely translated into English, was famous and beloved, not (or not exclusively) for the merits of his poetry but for the mythical quality of his poetic biography. Campana’s life was undoubtedly characterized by misunderstandings and confusion. Impulsive in temper, even morbid from childhood, he spent a considerable part of his short life in prisons and asylums. Like Rimbaud, Campana made his life into a sort of book of his own existence. More than in Rimbaud’s case, his fame as a poet was conditioned by the myth of the man—a myth that Campana himself was careful to nurture. His restless, nomadic life was full of actions that, in the context of provincial Tuscany in the beginning of the last century, appeared strange and eccentric. His wanderings, his disregard for his appearance, his total rejection of social and literary conventions, played a great part in the creation of his personal myth of the cursed poet, adventurous and unstable. This mythology of the maudit poet has undermined the understanding of Campana’s poetic production, hiding the logical approach underlying his literary researches. Campana’s poetry reflects a wide array of mundane and intellectual experiences, the extraordinary breadth of his readings and travels, his knowledge of the world and of foreign languages. Thanks to his familiarity with the languages and literatures of the rest of Europe, with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson, Campana was able to sketch a complex cultural project, one that sought to filter the primacy of contemporary German philosophical thought through the theories of primitivism he detected in the Italian tradition. Campana’s travels first took him through all of northern Italy and Switzerland. His wanderings then took him to South America, to Montevideo and other parts of Argentina, from which he returned to Europe by way of Odessa. At the beginning of 1909 Campana was in Saint-Gilles, Belgium, where he spent two months in prison for vagrancy. After his prison term he was transferred, because of his eccentric behavior (and, no doubt, because the specification ‘‘demented’’ appeared on his passport), directly to the mental asylum of Tournay, where he remained, however, for only a few days. Released, he returned to Florence, where he was again committed, under duress, to a mental clinic. Once he left the clinic, however, he experienced what was probably the most tranquil and productive period of his life. He returned to Marradi, his hometown near Florence, to work on a project, left untitled and referred to simply as

Taccuino (Notebook). These writings were subsequently repudiated by the author and published only posthumously in 1949. In 1912 he published a small group of poems in Il papiro, the Bolognese student magazine with which he had remained in contact since his years at the university. Spending time with the members of the Florentine avantgarde, he befriended Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini, and the new generation of poets who were crowding the issues of La Voce and Lacerba. Late in 1912 he began to compose verse and lyrical prose for the Canti orfici, which he presented to Soffici and Papini as a manuscript entitled Il piu` lungo giorno (The Longest Day), a title derived from a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio, hoping that they would agree to publish it in the series Quaderni della Voce. However, in what was to become the most famous controversy of Italian literature, Soffici lost the manuscript. It was rediscovered in 1971, among the papers of the Soffici archive in Florence, and published in 1973. Overcome with grief, and having threatened Soffici with death on several occasions, Campana returned to Marradi to reconstruct the text from memory and notes. He published the work privately as Canti orfici in 1914. A fog of facts and legends surround the book’s publication. It is true that Campana, oppressed by the rumors about him in Marradi, inserted the polemical subtitle ‘‘Die Trago¨die des letzen Germanen in Italien’’ (The Tragedy of the Last of the Germans in Italy), and dedicated the entire work to ‘‘Guglielmo II, Imperatore dei Germani’’ (William II, Emperor of the Germans) at the very moment when Italy was about to enter the war against Germany. But he later regretted this act, and biographies tell of how he wanted to use a penknife to cut the dedication out of all the printed copies. Probably mere legend, on the other hand, is the story that he used to tear out the pages containing poems that, in his opinion, the purchaser of the book would not be capable of understanding, and that the copy sold to F. T. Marinetti retained only the front and back cover. It is certain that sales of the book in Florentine cafe´s did not make him any richer or more famous than he had already become for his eccentricities. And so Campana again began to wander. Not even the love of his life, the writer Sibilla Aleramo, could make him happy, even though she did everything she could to help him, even standing surety for him when, in 1917, he was committed to the asylum of Novara. Campana began writing verse again for Aleramo, composing poems that have since been 359

DINO CAMPANA incorporated into the critical editions of the Canti orfici. But their love story was doomed from the beginning by Campana’s mental instability. In 1918 he was definitively rejected by the military authority of Florence and was transferred to the asylum of Lastra a Signa, which he would never leave. It is easy to understand how these biographical details, coupled with Campana’s visionary, ‘‘orphic’’ poetic vocation, gave rise to the legend of the crazed, vagabond poet. Even the intelligent and thoughtful biography written in the form of a novel by Sebastiano Vassalli still tends toward the romantic description of Campana as the pure artist trapped in a hostile, philistine environment. Only recently have Campana’s angst, his irresistible impulse to wander, the recklessness of his character, that is to say everything that were once regarded as the symptoms of madness, been seen as signs of his uniqueness, a psychological uniqueness that translates into a unique poetic production. Campana’s poetry aims at the absolute, transcending the cultural horizons and literary movements of his epoch. Even if the reference to symbolism is unavoidable in describing his poetry, philological scholarship has demonstrated that the Canti orfici owes much more to Dante than to Campana’s poetic contemporaries. Above all, the Canti orfici is indebted to the author’s experience. As Ruggero Jacobbi notes, ‘‘Campana pursues a lyrical ideal, a personal expressive note, and failing to establish it fully, he multiplies his approaches and experiments, he attacks the problem from different points of view, always starting over from the beginning, and in so doing he introduces psychological data and vague philosophical references, always however in pursuit of poetry. [...] It is poetry, in conclusion, that justifies a life otherwise wasteful and senseless; it is in poetry that this life burns itself out and, at the same time, defines itself as whole’’ (Invito alla lettura di Campana, 1976). Campana’s protest against society and flight from the world was expressed in dark, desperate tones that often clash with the music derived from Giosue` Carducci’s ottonari. An example is this line from ‘‘La petite promenade du poe`te’’ (The Poet’s Short Walk): Me ne vado per le strade Strette oscure e misteriose: Vedo dietro le vetrate Affacciarsi Gemme e Rose. ... E cammino poveretto Nella notte fantasiosa,

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Pur mi sento nella bocca La saliva disgustosa. Via dal tanfo Via dal tanfo e per le strade I go walking through the streets Mysterious dark and narrow: Behind the windowpanes I see Gems and Roses looking out.... And poor wretch I keep on walking In the whimsy of the night, Still I feel inside my mouth The disgust of my saliva. Away from the Stench From the stench and through the streets

The maudit expressions of such lyrics did not, however, make Campana a hopeless pessimist: On the contrary, he opened up the aspirations of the flaneur to the entire world. He lingered over the themes of departure and voyage and descriptions of port cities, transforming them into fabulous and syncretic images that blended mysterious nocturnal atmospheres, chimerical echoes, and the secret voices of the arcane, as in ‘‘Il canto della tenebra’’ (The Song of Darkness): La luce del crepuscolo si attenua: Inquieti spiriti sia dolce la tenebra Al cuore che non ama piu`! Sorgenti sorgenti abbiam da ascoltare, Sorgenti, sorgenti che sanno Sorgenti che sanno che spiriti stanno Che spiriti stanno a ascoltare... Ascolta ... The twilight is waning: Unquiet spirits may darkness be sweet To the heart that no longer loves! Springs springs we must listen to, Springs, springs that understand Spring that understand that spirit stand That spirits stand by and listen... Listen ....

Campana’s orphic technique is well represented here: a pattern of repetitions, accumulations, and successive augmentations of the phrases. The resulting rhythm is very recognizable (an accented syllable and two nonaccented syllables) and recalls, once again, Carducci’s experiments. But the vortexes of sounds and the suggestions derived from the verbal accumulations reveal a carefully considered poetic heritage: Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose influence is apparent in the use of ‘‘Ascolta’’ (Listen) in the poem just cited. Precisely because he was unique, Campana very early on became a sort of litmus test for aesthetic theories, which championed or discarded him according to the objectives they sought to achieve.

DINO CAMPANA He was despised by Umberto Saba and all others who aspired to any measure of classicist formalism. However, the Hermetic movement saw in him the founder, in Italy, of its own orphic experience, and the neo-avant-garde appreciated above all his challenging of literary institutions.

Biography Dino Campana was born in Marradi (Florence), 20 August 1885. He had a turbulent childhood and a troubled relationship with scholastic authority. Around his fifteenth year, the first manifestations of aggression were recorded, involving his mother. After graduating from the Liceo classico, he studied general chemistry in Bologna, then pharmaceutical chemistry in Florence and Genoa, 1903–06, but he never earned his degree. After being committed, for the first time, to the mental hospital in Imola, 1906, he was released after two months at the request of his father and against the advice of his doctors: This first diagnosis of mental instability marked him for life. In the following year he began the wanderings described in the Canti orfici: He was first in France, then in Argentina, Russia, Belgium, and again in France. By late 1908, Campana returned to Marradi and was again committed, for a fortnight, to a Florentine clinic. He submitted the manuscript of Il piu` lungo giorno to Papini and Soffici, but the manuscript was lost, 1913. He returned to Marradi and rewrote the manuscript, privately printed by Ravagli, a local publisher, 1914. At the outbreak of World War I, he sought to enlist as a volunteer but was rejected on grounds of insanity and was again sent to a clinic. He returned to live with his father in Lastra a Signa, near Florence. He met Sibilla Aleramo, with whom he had a tempestuous relationship that lasted only a few months, 1916. After a second examination by the military authority, he was committed to the asylum of Castel Pulci, 1918. Campana died from septicemia in Castel Pulci, March 1, 1932. See also: Hermeticism

GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA

Selected Works Collections Opere e contribute, edited by Enrico Falqui, 2 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1973.

Poetry ‘‘Canti orfici,’’ 1914; as Orphic Songs, translated by Charles Wright, 1984; as Orphic Songs, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 1991. ‘‘Inediti,’’ edited by Enrico Falqui, 1942. ‘‘Taccuino,’’ edited by Franco Matacotta, 1949. ‘‘Taccuinetto faentino,’’ edited by Domenico De Robertis, 1960. ‘‘Fascicolo marradese,’’ edited by Federico Ravagli, 1972. ‘‘Il piu` lungo giorno,’’ 2 vols., edited by Domenico De Robertis, 1973.

Letters Lettere, with Sibilla Aleramo, edited by Niccolo` Gallo, 1958. Le mie lettere sono fatte per essere bruciate, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 1978. Souvenir d’un pendu. Carteggio 1910–1931, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 1985. Un viaggio chiamato amore, Lettere 1916–1918, with Sibilla Aleramo, edited by Bruna Conti, 1987.

Other Dolce illusorio sud: autografi sparsi 1906–1918, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 1997. Dino Campana: sperso per il mondo: autografi sparsi 1906–1918, edited by Gabriel Cacho Millet, 2000.

Further Reading Bazzocchi, Marco A., Campana, Nietzsche e la puttana sacra, Lecce: Manni, 2003. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca (editor), Dino Campana nel Novecento, il progetto e l’opera, Rome: Officina, 1992. Bonaffini, Luigi, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Orphic Songs and Other Poems, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, New York: P. Lang, 1991. Bonifazi, Neuro, Dino Campana, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1968. Capodaglio, Arturo, Un’idea di poetica: nuovo saggio su Dino Campana, Galatina: Congedo, 1991. Cudini, Piero (editor), Materiali per Dino Campana, Lucca: Fazzi, 1986. Dino Campana oggi, Florence: Vallecchi 1973. Gentilini, Anna Rosa (editor), Dino Campana alla fine del secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Jacobbi, Ruggero: Invito alla lettura di Campana, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Mazza, Riccardo, La forza, il nulla, la chimera: saggio su Dino Campana, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1986. Millet, Cacho Gabriel, Dino Campana fuorilegge, Palermo: Novecento, 1985. Vassalli, Sebastiano, La notte della cometa: il romanzo di Dino Campana, Turin: Einaudi, 1984; as The Night of the Comet, Manchester: Caracanet, 1989.

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DINO CAMPANA

CANTI ORFICI, 1914 Poetry by Dino Campana

The Canti orfici (Orphic Songs) is Campana’s unius libri, as he himself (re)wrote and organized it. The construction is more solid than might appear at a first reading. As Mario Luzi pointed out in his important essay ‘‘Al di qua e al di la` dell’elegia’’ (1973), Campana grafted the tradition of symbolist prose poetry onto the form of the Dantean prosimetrum of La vita nova (New Life, 1294), which is, indeed, cited within the text. But it was Dante’s other work, the Comedia (1305–1321) that provided the inspiration for the tripartite structure of the Canti orfici: an initial descent into the infernal city in section one, ‘‘La notte’’ (The Night); a purgatorial, artistic pilgrimage in the second section, ‘‘Notturni’’ (Nocturnes) and ‘‘Immagini del viaggio e della montagna’’ (Images of the Journey and of the Mountain); and an ascent, though not to Paradise, in the third section. The book’s ‘‘trajectory,’’ however, is not only vertical: The poem’s horizontal movement, an account of the vagrant wanderings for which Campana was stigmatized by the medical authorities of his day, metaphorically represents the experience par excellence of sensory knowledge and of the human condition. The biographical element, though it has assumed a mythical character or rather has been deliberately adapted in the work of art, is fundamental for the Canti orfici. The poet is not only the author of the work, even within the text itself, but is also the privileged object of the poem, the first-person speaker who comprehends all the other themes of the book: the erotic instinct (purged, however, of the homosexual references found in Campana’s early poems); poetry in all its incarnations and manifestations (whether the Chimera, or Michelangelo’s sculpture, or the bordello owner); the wanderings of the first-person narrator (Faenza, Genoa, the Argentine pampas, even the asylums and hospitals). However, it should be said that to explain fully the Canti orfici would be an oxymoronic undertaking and would, indeed, be contrary to the very essence of the text. Starting with the title itself, the book refers to a lyric that takes leave of logic 362

and that, by invoking the figure of Orpheus, openly declares its own mystical and esoteric component, while suggesting its tragic character. The Orpheus-poet sacrifices himself, becoming literally the scapegoat who makes poetry possible. Both the subtitle of the book, ‘‘Die Trago¨die des letzten Germanen in Italien’’ (The Tragedy of the Last of the Germans in Italy), where Campana understood ‘‘German’’ as the superior moral type, a perspective that, at the dawn of World War I, did not yet carry the stain of racism; and the epigraph, ‘‘They were all torn / and cover’d with / the boy’s / blood,’’ which is a modified quotation of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself (‘‘The three were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood,’’ v. 894), articulate the idea that sacrifice is required in order for the poet to realize his destiny and for poetry to cross the boundary of knowledge and of expression. GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA Editions First edition: Canti orfici, Marradi: Tipografia F. Ravagli, 1914. Critical editions: Canti orfici e altri scritti, edited by Enrico Falqui, Florence: Vallecchi, 1952; Canti orfici, edited by Fiorenza Ceragioli, Florence: Vallecchi, 1985; Canti orfici, edited by Giorgio Grillo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1990; Canti orfici e alter poesie, edited by Renato Martinoni, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Translations: as Orphic Songs, translated by I. L. Salomon, New York: October House, 1968; translated by Charles Wright, Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1984; as Orphic Songs and Other Poems, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, New York: P. Lang, 1991.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Canti orfici di Dino Campana,’’ in Letteratura Italiana: Le opere, vol. 4, Il Novecento, part 1, L’eta` della crisi. Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Dino Campana,’’ in Esercizi di lettura, Florence: Parenti, 1939. Del Serra, Maura, L’immagine aperta. Poetica e stilistica dei ‘‘Canti orfici,’’ Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Falqui, Enrico, Per una cronistoria dei ‘‘Canti orfici,’’ Florence: Vallecchi, 1960. Li Vigni, Ida, Orfismo e Poesia in Dino Campana, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1983. Luzi, Mario, ‘‘Al di qua e al di la` dell’elegia,’’ in Dino Campana oggi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Martinoni, Renato, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Dino Campana, Canti Orfici e altre poesie, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Parronchi, Alessandro, ‘‘‘Genova’ e il senso dei colori nella poesia di Campana,’’ in Artisti toscani del primo Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Savoca, Giuseppe, Concordanza dei Canti orfici di Dino Campana: testo, concordanza, liste di frequenza, indici, Florence: Olschki, 1999.

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568–1639) Campanella was a Calabrian philosopher, magician, and astrologer who spent most of his adult life in prison, where he wrote the vast majority of his works. He therefore constitutes one of the most important cases of prison writing in Italian cultural history. An inexhaustibly prolific writer and poet, a man of surprising physical resources and extraordinary vitality, he was able to survive horrendous torture and a desperate legal predicament to regain, after a long imprisonment, a prophetic role in the Europe of Urban VIII and Richelieu. His was an exceptional human journey. In the communist messianism that animated his political-religious ideals—and that was later readapted in a form of authoritarian messianism—we can glimpse the representation of the profound hopes of the rural world from which he came and whose imprint he never lost. On the philosophical level, he was a theorist of the identity of God and Nature, a philosophy that, during his imprisonment, he pushed toward a reconciliation, or an attempt at reconciliation, with Christianity. Whether this was done with full conviction or with a degree of dissimulation is a question that cannot be resolved, and in any case is hardly pertinent in the Italy of the Counter-Reformation. The extraordinary harshness of his life, in fact, only compelled Campanella, moreso than others, to the conditions of dissimulation generally imposed by the repressive apparatus of the Inquisition on all those who wrote. These circumstances prevented him from being either a rigorous system builder or a great innovator in philosophy, but they let him perceive with an extraordinary sensibility the cultural structures of his time and to arrange them in grandiose and brilliant syntheses. In order to understand an oeuvre that can sometimes appear contradictory, it is therefore necessary to connect it with the life to which it was indissolubly tied. Born to a working-class family—his father was a cobbler—in one of the poor provinces of Southern Italy, Campanella donned the habit of the Dominicans when he was 14 and went to study first in Placanica, then in San Giorgio Morgeto, and afterward to Nicastro, ending up at the great Dominican school of Cosenza to receive the traditional Thomistic theological formation appropriate to

the order. He quickly distanced himself from Thomism, however, and was drawn to the philosophy of nature propounded by Bernadino Telesio, a compatriot whose De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) he read. From this cultural encounter sprang various writings, among which was Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Experimental Philosophy, 1591)—the only text we possess that we know to have been written before his imprisonment—in which Campanella attacked Aristotle and defended Telesio, expounding the idea that the divine essence may be contained in an anima mundi (spirit of the world) that permeates the universe, rendering it sensible and intelligible. Just as hungry for human experiences as he was for intellectual ones, in 1589 he abandoned the Calabrian province and went to live in the Naples, at that time the largest city in Italy, where he took up residence in the convent of San Domenico, a political and intellectual center rather liberal in its discipline and politically inclined toward the lower classes. It was here that he formed his first cultural politics. Subjected to an investigation within the order for his Telesian philosophy and asked to return to Calabria and to San Tommaso, he left instead in the opposite direction and came to Padova, which at that time contained the most anti-Curial university and intellectual atmosphere in Italy. The great rebellion, a radical attitude of thought and practice of which today we are only able to make out faint traces, had begun. In Padova, in fact, Campanella traveled in heterodox circles and was investigated for the first time for ‘‘acts of sodomy’’ toward the general of his order, and hence was subjected by the Inquisition to a trial that, beginning on more limited grounds, quickly expanded to include accusations of heresy and atheism. The trial came to an end in Rome in October 1595 with a recantation, followed by a condemnation of his writings and a confinement that lasted until the end of 1597. Returning to Calabria, Campanella tried at first to win the goodwill of the Spanish authorities by writing Monarchia di Spagna (A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, 1633)—an astrological defense interwoven with Machiavellian hints of the universal mission assigned to Spain—but was then involved in 1599 in a plot aimed at having Calabria 363

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA rise up against the Spanish. Campanella’s contribution to the plot was announcing that the stars indicated a political-religious revolution for the year 1600 and preaching the advent of a new age of love and brotherhood ruled by natural law and communal life. After the plot was uncovered through an informer, he was arrested and transferred to a Neopolitan jail where his Dominican habit protected him from the judgment of the Spanish tribunal—which would have immediately sentenced him to death—in order to subject him instead to an ecclesiastical trial based on a doctrinal scrutiny of his preaching. At the Neapolitan trial there emerged evidence of his pantheism; his political-Machiavellian explanation of miracles, religious dogmas, and ceremonies; along with his self-proclamation as a new messiah entrusted by an astrological conjunction of the stars with the task of reforming humanity. Because he had recanted in his previous trial of 1594–1597, even the ecclesiastical tribunal would have sentenced him to death, and, in order to escape it, on 2 April 1600 his formidable theatrical talent helped him to simulate madness. Subjected on May 4 and 5 of 1601 to the terrible torture of the veglia (36 hours suspended from a rope with dislocated bones) in order to legally certify the authenticity of his madness, he passed the test and thus escaped a death sentence. He then began his life sentence in Neapolitan jails, an imprisonment in the course of which Campanella reelaborated the themes of his Calabrian preaching. He wrote the Aforismi Politici (Political Aphorisms, 1601), in which he recast in a propapal key his previous religious Machiavellianism, and La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun, 1602), in which he described the kind of communist hierocracy promoted in his revolutionary designs. Between the end of 1605 and the first half of 1606 he portrayed his own conversion to Catholicism in mournful poems and in Atheismus triumphatus (Atheism Defeated, 1631), an autobiographical journal of his own philosophical evolution from initial disbelief to discovery of the identity of Christianity and natural law. Following the conflict between Rome and Venice in 1606, Campanella tried to earn merit in the eyes of the new pope, Paul V, and of the congregation of Sant’Uffizio, on whom his future fate depended, by compiling various writings against the Venetians. The most important of these was La Monarchia del Messia (The Monarchy of the Messiah, 1633), in which Campanella reelaborated the messianic prophecy he had preached during the Calabrian 364

plot, altering it to support the pope and his rights. The reign of the new messiah there took on the connotations of the church, and the future city was identified with all humanity reunited in one flock under the reformed papal power. The temporal powers reclaimed in the conflict with the Venetians were therefore no different, for Campanella, from the powers possessed by the sacerdotal prince described in La citta` del sole. In the following long years of his Neopolitan imprisonment, Campanella dedicated himself to the composition of grand systematic works. He wrote the Filosofia epilogistica (Epilogist Philosophy), dividing it into the three parts of Physics, Ethics, and Politics; wrote a Medicina (Medicine) in two books; reelaborated his Metaphysica (Metaphysics); compiled a Philosophia rationalis (Rational Philosophy) composed of Rhetoric, Dialectics, Poetics, and Historiography; and drafted a Theologia (Theology, 1623–1624) and a large part of the seven books of the Astrologicorum. On the philosophical level, this last work entailed a grandiose project of constructing a system of universal philosophy that would be a compendium of all knowledge, from metaphysics to politics. On the theological and religious levels, it involved an attempt to reconcile the primitive identification of God and Nature with Christianity. The keystone of such a reconciliation is the ‘‘discovery’’ of the identity of Christianity and natural reason, based in turn on the identification of Christ–Divine Logos with ‘‘first reason’’ or universal rationality. From this premise derived several Campanellian ideas: that the truths known through revelation are not qualitatively different from those known through natural illumination, but rather constitute a completion of them made necessary by the limitation of our minds; that the truth of the Bible is no different from any other true book; and that Christianity is reason perfectly unfolded and adds nothing to nature except the sacraments, which are intended to be natural signs of rational truths. But, in turn, such an identification of Christ-Divine Logos with universal reason has as its necessary premise the identification of God and Nature. We are not dealing therefore with a denial of his previous philosophy but simply with its recapitulation in a Catholic key. In 1626, Campanella was finally able to leave the Neapolitan prisons and to have himself extradited to Rome, where, however, he was once again locked up until 1629 for further judicial investigations. In 1629, after 33 years in prison, he began the

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA last phase of his life as a free man, in the course of which Campanella obtained a certain degree of credit in Rome by earning the favor of the new pope, Urban VIII, and his title of Magister in theology, thanks especially to his astrology. He now tried to publish the works he wrote in prison and was able to publish La Monarchia del Messia (1633) and Atheismus triumphatus in Latin, not to mention, in Lyon, the Astrologicorum (1629). But the persistent doctrinal ambiguity of his works, together with the harsh condemnation of astrology emerging in 1631, put him in new difficulties in the papal circles, causing him to leave for the more hospitable Paris at the end of 1634. There he received a warm welcome from Richelieu and the French cultural establishment, but as an old man he was unable to enter fully into the circle of the court. He died in Paris at peace with the church and above all with his order which, on the whole, had never denied him its protection.

Biography Giovanni Domenico, in religion Tommaso, was born in Stilo, in Calabria, 5 September 1568, the son of Geronimo, a cobbler, and of Caterina Martello. In 1582, he entered as a novice the Dominican convent of Placanica, near Stignano; having completed the year of apprenticeship, he was sent to the convent of the Annunciation, in San Giorgio Morgeto, where he undertook his first philosophical studies. In the autumn of 1586 he was transferred to the convent of the Annunciation of Nicastro, where he completed his philosophical formation. In the summer of 1588, he was sent to Cosenza for theological studies, but at the end of the year he was exiled to the convent of Altomonte. In 1589, he came to Naples, where he took up residence at the grand convent of San Domenico Maggiore. In 1592, he was subjected to an investigation within the order and sentenced to return to Stilo. On 5 September 1592, he left Naples for Rome and then Florence. The Grand Duke Ferdinand I refused him the assignation of a post as lecturer in the school at Pisa. At the beginning of 1593, he was in Padova. He was involved in a trial for sodomy, and at the beginning of 1594 he was put on trial by an inquisition for heresy; he tried to escape imprisonment in Padova. He was extradited to Rome and locked up in the prisons of the Sant’Uffizio. On 30 October 1595, he was condemned to recant de vehementi; he remained shut up in Rome in various convents. On 17 December 1597, all of his

books were banned, and Campanella was sent to Calabria, where he was put under surveillance. In September 1599, he was arrested for having participated in an anti-Spanish plot and transferred to a Neapolitan prison. On 2 April 1600 Campanella staged his madness. On 4–5 June 1601, he survived the atrocious torture of the veglia and thus avoided a death sentence. On 13 November 1602, Campanella was sentenced to life in prison; he remained detained in Neapolitan prisons until 23 May 1626, when he was extradited to Rome, where he arrived on 8 July 1626 and was locked up in the jails of the Sant’Uffizio. He left the Sant’Uffizio prison on 27 July 1628 and was lodged in the Dominican convent of Minerva pro loco carceris; on 11 January 1629 he was set free; and on 6 April 1629 his name was crossed out from the Indice dei proibiti (Index of Banned Books). On 2 June 1629 the chapter-head of the Dominicans conferred on Campanella the title of Magister in theology, and he entered into the good graces of Urban VIII. On 21 October 1634, he left Rome dressed as a brother of the Minimi in order to escape Spanish reprisals and the ever-growing distrust of the Romans. Arriving on 1 December 1634 in Paris, he endorsed the policies of Richelieu. He died in Paris, 21 May 1639, and was buried in the nearby Church of the Annunciation. VITTORIO FRAJESE See also: Utopian Literature Selected Works Collections Scritti scelti, edited Luigi Firpo, Turin: UTET, 1949. Opere di Giordano Bruno e di Tommaso Campanella, edited by Augusto Guzzo and Romano Amerio, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1956. Opere letterarie, edited by Lina Bolzoni, Turin: UTET, 1977.

Political and Philosophical Treatises Philosphia sensibus demonstrata (1591), edited by L. De Franco, 1974. Monarchie d’Espagne (1598), as La monarchia di Spagna, 1600; first Latin edition 1640; edited by Germana Ernst, 1997; as A Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, translated by Edmund Chilmead, 1654. Aforismi politici (1601), edited by Luigi Firpo, 1941. La citta` del sole (1602), edited by Luigi Firpo, 1997; as The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, translated by Daniel J. Donno, 1981. Del senso delle cose e della magia (1604), first Latin edition, 1620; edited by Antonio Bruers, 1925. Antiveneti (1606), edited by Luigi Firpo, 1945.

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TOMMASO CAMPANELLA Atheismus triumphatus (1607), 1631. Articuli prophetales (1608–09), critical edition by Germana Ernst, 1977. Teologia (1613–24), edited by Romano Amerio, 1936; 1950; 1955. Apologia pro Galileo (1616); as Apologia di Galileo, edited by Luigi Firpo, 1968; A Defence of Galileo, translated by Richard J. Blackwell, 1994. La Monarchia del Messia (1606), first Latin edition 1633; edited by Vittorio Frajese, 1995. De libris propriis et recta ratione studendi syntagma (1632), edited by Vincenzo Spampanato, 1927; edited Armando Brissoni, 1996. Epilogo Magno (Fisiologia italiana), edited Carmelo Ottaviano, 1939. Astrologicum (1629), as Opuscoli astrologici, edited by Germana Ernst, 2003.

Poetry

Yates, Frances Amelia, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964; 2002.

` DEL LA CITTA SOLE, 1602 A Philosophical Dialogue by Tommaso Campanella

‘‘Poesie, edited by Giovanni Gentile,’’ 1915; edited by Francesco Giancotti, 1998.

Letters Lettere, edited by Vincenzo Spampanato, 1927. Lettere 1595–1638, edited by Germana Ernst, 2000.

Trial Proceedings Amabile, Luigi, Fra Tommaso Campanella, la sua congiura, i suoi processi e la sua pazzia, 3 vols., Naples: Morano, 1882. Firpo, Luigi, Il supplizio di Tommaso Campanella: Narrazioni, documenti, verbali delle torture, Rome: Salerno, 1985. Firpo, Luigi, I processi di Tommaso Campanella, Rome: Salerno, 1998.

Further Reading Amabile, Luigi, Fra Tomaso Campanella ne’ castelli di Napoli, in Roma e in Parigi: Narrazione con molti documenti, 2 vols., Naples: Morano 1887. Amerio, Romano, Introduzione alla teologia di Tommaso Campanella, Turin: SEI, 1948. Amerio, Romano, Il sistema teologico di Tommaso Campanella, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1972. Blanchet, Le´on, Campanella, Paris: Alcan, 1920. De Mattei, Rodolfo, Studi campanelliani, Florence: Sansoni, 1943. Dentice D’Accadia, Cecilia, Campanella, Florence: Vallecchi, 1921. Ernst, Germana, Tommaso Campanella: Il libro e il corpo della natura, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Firpo, Luigi, Ricerche campanelliane, Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Frajese, Vittorio, Profezia e machiavellismo: Il giovane Campanella, Rome: Carocci, 2002. Gardner, Edmund, Thomas Campanella and His Poetry, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1923. Headley, John M., Tommaso Campanella and the Transformation of the World, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Kvacˇala, Jan, Thomas Campanella, ein Reformer der ausgehenden Renaissance, Berlin: Trowitzsch and Sohn, 1909.

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La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun) is a short text in the form of a dialogue, composed by Tommaso Campanella in 1602, nearly three years after his arrest in September of 1599 for agitating against the Spanish in Calabria and little more than a year after his terrible torture by the veglia. The small text is presented as the tale of a navigator who has discovered a perfect city established on a lost island in the ocean. The traveler is ‘‘a Genovese helmsman of Columbus,’’ and the city has good reason to be called a new world, though it is found in the Orient, not the Occident, on the island of Taprobana—Ceylon, south of India—and is populated by ‘‘people who came from India.’’ The city is a perfect image of the universe. It is divided into seven concentric circles spread along the slopes of a hill and ‘‘named after the seven planets.’’ Four intersecting roads traverse and end at the summit of the hill, at the central and highest point, where a circular temple is topped by a cupola representing the sky with all of its major constellations. At the center of the temple is an altar above which ‘‘there is only a rather large globe, where all of the heavens are depicted, and another which depicts the earth.’’ Nature is at once the model of the city and the object of its cult. The two globes placed above the altar are means of influencing the heavens and represent the object of the cult of the solari (the inhabitants of the city of the sun), which is, in the strictest sense, a religion of nature. As Francis Yates has written, ‘‘it is clear that the temple is a model of the world, intricately described, and that the elaborate cult must be a cult of the world’’ (Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 1964). This religion has an extensive basis in the

TOMMASO CAMPANELLA philosophy of Campanella, a philosophy that identifies God and Nature, and hence Christ and reason, Christian and natural law. Aside from its description in La citta` del sole, such a religion of nature, with its cult of the sun and the planets, was practiced by Campanella during his years of imprisonment. The government of the city, in its turn, repeats the theological structure of God-Nature: It is entrusted to a supreme philosopher-king named ‘‘Sole’’ (‘‘Sun’’) and to ‘‘three collateral princes, Pon, Sin, Mor: which mean Power, Wisdom, Love’’ corresponding to the three ‘‘divine primal qualities’’ in which God-Nature reveals itself. Therefore, in its form, government, and religion, the city recapitulates the structure of the universe. Campanella, who practiced astrology, constructed an astrological city built so as to capture celestial causality, and, what is more, to influence it. Sowing, harvesting, mating, and reproduction are ordained as a ‘‘second science’’ by priest-astrologers who know the conjunctions of the stars and, according to those conjunctions, rule all economic activity. In this sense, his city furnishes us with a perfect example of the ‘‘microcosmic city’’ in which social organization and the institutions and form of government are meant to echo nature and harness its powers. The literary inventio at the heart of the text that assures its lasting reputation consists in the extraordinary Campanellian intuition that the utopian genre inaugurated by Thomas More can provide the most suitable and persuasive narrative frame for representing the unity of messianic prophecy, the myth of the Golden Age, and the Platonic doctrine of the ideal republic, which is essential to Campanella’s political thought. The defining trait of La citta` del sole, in fact, is that it is not only a literary text but also one that Campanella forcefully preached to Calabrian conspirators during the messianic agitation of 1599, which he was to pay for with two episodes of torture and 27 years of prison. This city is discovered by a follower of Columbus, but it is a new world in the Orient and arises from the most ancient of civilizations. These ambivalent characteristics respond to the astral character of La citta` del sole, which retains a literary frame and important ideas from More’s Utopia even as it transplants them into a substantially different ideological soil. Despite the characteristics of this frame—the story of the voyage and its presentation as a lost happy isle in the ocean—that seem to make it a utopia, La citta` del sole does not have much in common with the literary playfulness and humanistic irony of Thomas More’s treatise.

For Campanella, it is grounded on a prophetic model—something hoped for and anticipated for the future. La citta` del sole is a messianic writing or, more precisely, the place in which the propheticmessianic tradition spills into a new utopian genre. Its political construction constitutes the realization of the ideal Platonic republic and is located in the time of the new messianic advent, when the return of the heavenly bodies to their positions at the birth of Christ will lead to the reunification of all mankind into one fold, under one pastor. La citta` del sole possesses all the characteristics attributed by Campanella’s prophetic preaching to the happy age of the new messiah: the community of goods, the well-regulated procreation of the virtuous, the unity of sacerdotal and political power, the rational religion that will be professed, the white clothes of its citizens, and the radiance that distinguishes it. Rather than a utopia, it therefore constitutes an event that, far from taking place in no particular place, discovers its justification in divine and astral prophecies and assigns itself to a not-too-distant future. VITTORIO FRAJESE Editions First Edition La citta` del sole appears first in a Latin translation as Civitas Solis, Appendix Politicae, in Thoma Campanella, Realis philosophia epilogistica, Frankfurt: Typis Egenolphi Emmeli, 1623; enlarged edition in Philosophia realis, Paris: Denis Houssaye, 1637; first Italian published edition by Edmondo Solmi Modena: Tip. Lit. della Provincia, 1904; edited by Giuseppe Paladino, Naples: Giannini, 1920; edited by Norberto Bobbio, Turin: Einaudi, 1941.

Critical Editions Edited by Luigi Firpo in Scritti scelti di Giordano Bruno e Tommaso Campanella, Turin: UTET, 1949. As La citta` del sole, new updated edition by Luigi Firpo, Bar: Laterza, 1997.

Translations The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, translated by Daniel J. Donno, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. The City of the Sun: A Poetic Dialogue, translated by A. M. Elliot and R. Miller, London: Journeyman Press, 1981.

Further Reading De Mattei, Rodolfo, La politica di Campanella, Rome: Anonima Romana Editoriale, 1927.

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TOMMASO CAMPANELLA Firpo, Luigi, ‘‘La Cite´ ideale de Campanella et le culte du soleil,’’ in Le soleil a` la Renaissance, Bruxelles: Presses Universitaires de Bruxelles, 1965. Firpo, Luigi, ‘‘L’Utopia politica della Controriforma,’’ in Lo stato ideale della Controriforma, Bari: Laterza, 1957. Frajese, Vittorio, ‘‘La Monarchia del Messia di Tommaso Campanella: Identificazione di un testo tra profetiamo e Controriforma,’’ Quaderni storici, 3(1994): 723–768. Kelly-Gadol, Joan M., ‘‘Tommaso Campanella: The Agony of Political Theory in the Counter Reformation,’’ in

Philosophy and Humanism Renaissance: Essays in Honor of P. O. Kristeller, edited by E. P. Mahoney, Leiden: Brill, 1976. Solari, Gioele, ‘‘Di una nuova edizione critica della Citta` del Sole e del comunismo del Campanella,’’ Rivista di filosofia, 32(1941): 180–197. Treves, Paolo, La filosofia politica di Tommaso Campanella, Bari: Laterza, 1930. Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

CRISTINA CAMPO (VITTORIA GUERRINI) (1923–1977) Cristina Campo, a pseudonym of Vittoria Guerrini, was a poet, essayist, and translator. Her fate is a typically literary one. She was marginalized by critics while she was alive, perhaps because her works, permeated by the spiritualism for which she had exchanged aestheticism, were foreign to the Italian trend that demanded realism and political commitment from writers. She was reevaluated only at the end of the 1990s, due to, above all, the interest of her friends Alessandro Spina and Margherita Pieracci and of the publishers Scheiwiller and Adelphi. Cristina Campo spent her youth in Florence, where she developed under the guidance of private tutors. During World War II, she published her first translations (of Bengt von To¨rne and Katherine Mansfield) and met Leone Traverso, who introduced her to the circle of Florentine literati and to the work of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who became for Campo a stylistic model. In the 1950s, she began to collaborate on the literary review Paragone and initiated the column ‘‘La posta letteraria’’ in Corriere dell’Adda with Gianfranco Draghi. In the meantime, her house in Florence became a gathering spot and was frequented by Margherita Pieracci, Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari, Maria Luisa Spaziani, Maria Chiavacci, Maria Chiappelli, the Draghi brothers, and the De Robertis family. It is in this context that Mario Luzi had her read Simone Weil’s La pesanteur et la graˆce (Gravity and Grace, 1947). Campo discovered deep affinities with the French writer and began to translate her works into Italian; most importantly, she shared 368

with her the constant and patient quest for ‘‘attenzione’’ (attention). She took up this concept again, in fact, in the programmatic essay Attenzione e poesia (Attention and Poetry, 1953), in which Campo wrote that l’attenzione e` il solo cammino verso l’inesprimibile, la sola strada al mistero’’ and ‘‘chiedere a un uomo di non distrarsi mai, di sottrarre senza riposo all’equivoco dell’immaginazione, alla pigrizia dell’abitudine, all’ipnosi del costume, la sua facolta` di attenzione, e` chiedergli di attuare la sua massima forma. Attention is the only path toward the inexpressible, the only road to mystery’’ and ‘‘to ask a man never to distract himself, ceaselessly to withdraw his faculty of attention from the ambiguity of imagination, the laziness of habit, and the hypnosis of custom, is to ask him to realize his highest form.

It is thus that that Campo understood her distance from the contemporary world, which is banal and heedless, and she began to seek another value that earthly reality had forgotten: perfection. ‘‘La tensione continua verso la perfezione,’’ wrote Luzi in the essay ‘‘L’imperdonabile voglia di poesia’’ (1966), ‘‘era il segno di una incontentabilita` vera, Cristina Campo ha pubblicato pochissimo e quando lo ha fatto se ne e` sempre scusata come se la sua opera non fosse quella che secondo lei avrebbe dovuto essere’’ (the continuous straining toward perfection was the sign of a true insatiability; Cristina Campo published very little, and when she did she always apologized for it, as though her work were not,

CRISTINA CAMPO (VITTORIA GUERRINI) according to her, what it ought to have been). Hence the driving force of Campo’s literary production was precisely this quest for perfection, which was to be achieved both from the point of view of form and of content. Her move from Florence to Rome marked a fundamental break in her young life. The need to erase the signs of past experiences can be seen in the request she made her to friends to destroy every letter predating 1957, and especially in Passo d’addio (Farewell Time, 1956), her first and only collection of poems published during the poet’s lifetime. The 11 compositions of the slender plaquette (some of them anticipated in the private Quadernetto, or notebook, which she gave to her friend Pieracci) retrace the painful incidents of an impossible, irrecoverable love to which her memory returns, distinguishing its now-vanished traces in the Florentine landscape. The theme is condensed in the beautiful lines of ‘‘Moriremo lontani’’ (We will die far apart): ‘‘E` rimasta laggiu`, calda, la vita / Ora non resta che vegliare sola’’ (Life remained down there below, warm / Now there is only waking up alone). It is not so much a love song or a journal of summer, but, as Pietro Gibellini suggested, a ‘‘canzoniere dello spirito’’ (songbook of the spirit), a movement from profane love to sacred love, a perfecting of the soul, an education toward the forsaking of vain things (La poesia di Cristina Campo, 2001). Campo returned to poetry after another ten years of silence, a sign that a new existential season had opened within her. The new poems, intended for a new but uncompleted plaquette entitled Le temps revient, attest to the tormented, endless interior quest of the poetic animus in desperate search for a stable resting place. This yearning for spirituality became more marked at the end of the 1960s, when the death of her parents and Vatican Council II, which put an end to the liturgy in Latin, increased Campo’s sense of loss and detachment and the desire to withdraw into complete solitude. In this regard the poems ‘‘La Tigre assenza’’ (Tiger Absence) and ‘‘Missa romana’’ (Roman Mass) are emblematic. Campo emerged from this retreat only to attend the Collegium Russicum in Aventino, where she celebrated the orthodox rites. The splendid final poems of Diario bizantino (Byzantine Diary), published in Conoscenza religiosa along with the announcement of her death in 1977, are really the spiritual testament of the poet who had finally found peace and interior serenity due to primitive Christianity.

Ultimately, poetry was for Campo a spiritual exercise, intimate and unsharable. For her, composing poems meant seeking to achieve the highest degree of perfection—a long and tiring path that entailed complete involvement. During her years in Rome, Campo met Ele´mire Zolla, who introduced her to Eastern philosophies, to mysticism, and to esotericism. Together they participated in the Italian group of La voce, which sought to stop the liturgical reform effected by the Church after the Vatican Council II (1962–1965). Zolla turned Campo toward new reading, and thus Campo’s interests moved from Hofmannsthalian aestheticism to religion and Western and Eastern asceticism. With Zolla, she edited the anthology I mistici (The Mystics), which was published in 1963. In these years she also made the acquaintance of the Greek poet Margherita Dalmati, Bobi Bazlen, and Alessandro Spina. To the latter she remained bound by a deep friendship, which began with Storia della citta` di rame (A History of the Copper City, 1963), translated from the Arabic by Spina and introduced by Campo and which was nourished by the correspondence Lettere ad un amico lontano (Letters to a Distant Friend, 1998), a conversation between two writers outside the mainstream. From the second half of the 1950s, Campo dedicated herself entirely to translating—German novels, the seventeenth-century mystics, William Carlos Williams, and Donne, which can be read in part in La Tigre assenza (1991), which also collects all of her poems. She began a close correspondence with the American poet before the publication of Il fiore e` il nostro segno (The Flower Is Our Sign, 1958), a selection of 16 poems by Williams translated by Campo. A wider collection, with the addition of translations by Vittorio Sereni, was published by Einaudi in 1961. Her first collection of essays, Fiaba e mistero (Fable and Mystery) was published in 1962 and was partially merged with Il flauto e il tappeto (The Flute and the Carpet, 1971), which includes other unpublished writings or those already published in magazines. Finally, Gli imperdonabili (The Unforgivable, 1987) gathers all of the essays contained in the works already cited and other contributions that appeared in magazines. Sotto falso nome (Under a False Name, 1998), on the other hand, collects all of her scattered writings and includes some contributions to radio during her collaboration with RAI. Campo did not write literary essays in the common sense of the term, but her discourse is filled 369

CRISTINA CAMPO (VITTORIA GUERRINI) with references that are precious gems of interpretation. We find ourselves confronted with dense and perfect texts that approach various themes. One of the most important of these is fable. Fable, according to Campo, hides a path of initiation that, if observed with ‘‘attention,’’ reveals to us our destiny. The same message is contained in the parables of the evangelists and in the lives of the saints, monks, and the hermits. Abandoning oneself to one’s destiny is the way that leads to perfection, and those who make this choice are ‘‘imperdonabile’’ (unforgivable) to the common person, who is not able to strain toward a higher reality where beauty, truth, and spirit converge. Campo thus dedicated her essays to those few authors who have contrasted to the horror of the world the ‘‘sapore massimo di ogni parola’’ (the greatest taste of each word), that is, absolute linguistic perfection. Her two principal models are, as noted earlier, Hofmannsthal and Weil (the cult of beauty and the impulse to charity), but we can add D’Annunzio, Dante, Borges, Proust, and Shakespeare. The language of the poems and of her poetic translations unites the rich images of hermeticism with a great precision and elegance. The same musical perfection can be found in her essays and in the ardent, crystalline letters to her closest friends (Pieracci, Spina) that have been only partly published and that are useful in reconstructing the stages of her life and, more importantly, her literary and spiritual evolution.

Biography Cristina Campo was born in Bologna on April 28, 1923, the only daughter of Guido Guerrini, a music teacher, and Emilia Putti. Because of a congenital heart defect, which made her health precarious, she did not pursue a regular course of studies but spent her childhood in San Michele in Bosco, near the residence of her uncle Vittorio Putti in the park of the Istituto Rizzoli in Bologna. In 1928, she moved to Florence, where her father was director of the Conservatorio Cherubini. She met Leone Traverso, who became her companion for a number of years, 1946–1954; later, in 1955, she moved to Rome, again following her father, who headed the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia. There she met Ele´mire Zolla, with whom she formed an intense emotional and intellectual relationship. At this time, Campo collaborated with RAI and wrote for numerous magazines, among which are Conoscenza religiosa, Elsinoire, La Chimera, Palatina, Paragone, Questo 370

e altro, and Stagione. The loss of her mother (December 1964) and of her father (June 1965) caused such pain that she moved from her home at the Foro Italico first to a pensione in the San Anselmo Hotel in Aventino and then, in May 1968, to a nearby apartment. Campo died in Rome on January 10, 1977 of a heart attack. NICOLA

DI

NINO

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Passo d’addio,’’ 1956. ‘‘Diario bizantino,’’ 1977. ‘‘La Tigre Assenza,’’ edited by Margherita Pieracci Harwell, 1991.

Essays Attenzione e poesia, 1953. Fiaba e mistero e altre note, 1962. Il flauto e il tappeto, 1971. Gli imperdonabili, edited by Margherita Pieracci Harwell, 1987. Sotto falso nome, edited by Monica Farnetti, 1998.

Translations Bengt Von To¨rne, Conversazioni con Sibelius, 1943. Katherine Mansfield, Una tazza di te` ed altri racconti, 1944. Eduard Morike, Poesie, 1948. Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Viaggi e saggi, 1958. William Carlos Williams, Il fiore e` il nostro segno, 1958; enlarged edition as Poesie, 1961 (with Vittorio Sereni). Virginia Woolf, Diario di una scrittrice, 1959 (with Giuliana De Carlo). Storia della Citta` di Rame, 1963 (with Alessandro Spina). Simone Weil, Venezia salva, 1963; new edition, 1987. John Donne, Poesie amorose. Poesie teologiche, 1971. Racconti di un pellegrino russo, 1973. Simone Weil, La Grecia e le intuizioni precristiane, 1974 (with Margherita Pieracci Harwell). Detti e fatti dei Padri del deserto, 1975 (with Piero Draghi).

Other

I mistici (with E´lemire Zolla), 1963. Lettere a un amico lontano, 1998. Lettere a Mita, edited by Margherita Pieracci Harwell, 1999. Il fiore e` il nostro segno. Carteggi e poesie, 2001 (with William Carlos Williams and Vanni Scheiwiller).

Further Reading Bianchi, Enzo, and Pietro Gibellini (editors), Cristina Campo, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2001. Cristina Campo, Florence: Citta` di Vita, 1996. De Stefano, Cristina, Belinda e il mostro. Vita segreta di Cristina Campo, Milan: Adelphi, 2002. Di Nino, Nicola, ‘‘Commento a ‘Passo d’addio’ di Cristina Campo,’’ Il Nuovo Baretti, 1(2003), 277–317.

ROSSANA CAMPO Di Nino, Nicola, ‘‘Cristina Campo: ritratti e carteggi,’’ Rivista di letteratura italiana, I(2004), 185–199. Farnetti, Monica, and Giovanna Fozzer (editors), Per Cristina Campo, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1998. Ghibellini, Pietro, ‘‘La poesia di Cristina Campo: un ‘passo d’addio,’ ’’ Humanitas, 3(2001), 333–340.

Luzi, Mario, ‘‘L’imperdonabile voglia di poesia,’’ Citta` di Vita, 6(1996), 551. Pieracci Harwell, Margherita, Cristina Campo e i suoi amici, Rome: Studium, 2005. Spina, Alessandro, Conversazione in Piazza Sant’Anselmo e altri scritti. Per un ritratto di Cristina Campo, Brescia: Morcelliana, 2002.

ROSSANA CAMPO (1963–) Rossana Campo belongs to a generation of Italian writers who in the 1990s experimented with a new approach to the novel; among them are Silvia Ballestra, Niccolo` Ammaniti, Enrico Brizzi, Tiziano Scarpa, Aldo Nove, Giuseppe Caliceti, and Giuseppe Culicchia. Calvino’s latest work and that of the neo-avant-garde (Sanguineti, Balestrini, early Celati) supplied Campo with a departure point into a narrative course all her own. From the first she chose an easygoing and ironic tone used by youth culture of the media. The language is interspersed with obscenities and literary and cinematographic references: The exaggerated language of her first novel, the uninterrupted mimesis of oral speech overwhelmingly present starting with Mai sentita cosı` bene (I Never Felt So Good, 1995) represent her attempt to be in touch with reality. However, the reality that usually emerges from her novels (mostly narrated in the first person) proves void, deformed, tragically loaded with unanswerable questions about the world even when transfigured into a comic vision. The paradoxical and at times surreal comic aspect arises first in the title of her first novel, In principio erano le mutande (It Began with Underwear, 1992)—the book that inspired the namesake film starring Stefania Rocca, directed by Anna Negri in 1999. It tells the story of a lonely, idle girl who describes, employing vivid language, her romantic failures, her passion for bakers, lady-killer gynecologists, mama’s-boy psychologists, and depressed archeologists. It all comes to an end when she encounters a bizarre portly man, semialcoholic as the protagonist herself, and true love happens. Rossana Campo’s world is purely feminine— with the immutable setting of Paris in the background—and inhabited by somewhat unstable and

outcast Italian girls with a strong sense of life. They live by their wits in a postmodern bohemian world and cross paths with ostracized characters in a world naturally populated by alcohol, drugs, and homosexual encounters. In some ways, the young and coarse protagonists of these novels are the rebellious followers of the small, frail, disorganized, and straying, nonetheless charming women populating the novels and dramaturgy of Natalia Ginzburg. Il pieno di super (Fill It up with Premium, 1993) tells the story of a group of sexually curious young girls who run into an unpredictable coming-to-terms face-off: the racist teacher, sexual repression leading up to the disappointing discovery of boys. Mai sentita cosı` bene is a true conversational novel wherein nothing seems to happen. It is a collection of eccentric, quasi-theatrical stories told on a September afternoon by a group of Italian girlfriends living in Paris. The featured men, despised though obsessed over constantly, are dull muscle-heroes, frustrated writers, and obese psychoanalysts. They are the underside of a reality that revokes happiness as it nonetheless accepts games and slapstick humor even throughout the telling of the stories: ‘‘O un uomo e` uno stronzo che ti considera una specie di cosa di sua proprieta`, e in tal caso le corna se le merita, oppure e` un tipo a posto che ti capisce e non rompe i coglioni’’ (Men are either assholes who consider you property, in which case they deserve to be cheated on, or they’re someone all right who understands you and doesn’t bust your balls). In L’attore americano (The American Actor, 1997), the protagonist travels from Paris to New York to follow the American actor who made her fall desperately in love. She is in possession of her own fundamental theory: ‘‘Comunque al primo posto per me c’e` la liberta`, 371

ROSSANA CAMPO sı`, andarmene in giro col naso per aria e vaffanculo alla sicurezza’’ (the number one thing for me is freedom, yeah, going around with my nose in the air and ‘‘fuck you!’’ to safety). Campo’s other works feature complicated love stories of women, as in Il matrimonio di Maria (Maria’s Wedding), a radio drama aired in 1997 and published in 1998, whose protagonist agrees to an arranged marriage with a crazy musician. However, on the night of their wedding, the fake husband and wife end up making love, and Maria becomes pregnant. In Mentre la mia bella dorme (While My Darling Is Sleeping, 1999), Campo experiments with the detective novel. There are obvious allusions to the Parisian detective novels of Daniel Pennac. La gemella buona e la gemella cattiva (The Good Twin, the Bad Twin, 2000) recalls for Campo the world of her childhood. In Sono pazza di te (I’m Crazy About You, 2001), she describes the tumultuous life of a painter who rediscovers in Paris the father who abandoned her at an early age. The most recent novel, L’uomo che non ho sposato (The Man I Never Married, 2003), narrated in the third person, is the well-choreographed and enthralling story of Rosi, who after 20 years reencounters her first love. Throughout Rossana Campo’s novels, a vital life-vision prevails over the often negative conclusion of the stories otherwise filled with a sense of disappointment and emptiness. The reader emerges from her work with the idea that one can make light of life’s bad tidings.

Biography Campo was born in Genova as Rossana Iannantuomo, of Neapolitan origins, 17 October 1963. She attended the University of Genova (influenced by the courses of Edoardo Sanguineti and anthropologist Ernesta Cerulli) and graduated with a degree in literature, June 1987. Campo collaborated as translator to Feltrinelli publishers and became an occasional contributor to L’espresso; she won the Capri Prize for first literary work for In principio erano le mutande, 1992. She made her debut as a painter in 2002 and exhibited at the Baruchello Foundation in Rome, 2003; some of her drawings

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have graced the covers of her novels. She lives in Rome and Paris with her companion, writer Nanni Balestrini. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN Selected Works Fiction La storia di Gabri, in Narratori delle riserve, edited by Gianni Celati, 1992. In principio erano le mutande, 1992. Il pieno di super, 1993. Mai sentita cosı` bene, 1995. L’attore americano, 1997. Mentre la mia bella dorme, 1999. La gemella buona e la gemella cattiva, 2000. Sono pazza di te, 2001. L’uomo che non ho sposato, 2003. Duro come l’amore, 2005.

Plays Il matrimonio di Maria, 1998.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, ‘‘Campo, due donne sole e un padre randagio,’’ Il corriere della sera, 19 June 2001, p. 33. Barilli, Renato, ‘‘Maschio di celluloide cercasi, scopo erotico,’’ Il corriere della sera, 13 March 1997, p. 33. Guglielmi, Angelo, ‘‘Rossana Campo ritorna a Parigi sempre spregiudicata e rivoltosa,’’ Tuttolibri, 21 July 2001, p. 3. La Porta, Filippo, La nuova narrativa italiana: Travestimenti e stili di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Lepri, Laura, ‘‘Donne che si prendono in giro,’’ in Tirature ‘96, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1996. Pellini, Pierluigi, ‘‘Tra noir e romance,’’ L’immaginazione, no.160 (September 1999): 27–28. Rosa, Giovanna, ‘‘Giovani scrittrici nella ‘citta` proibita,’’’ in Tirature ’93, edited by Vittori Spinazzola Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1993. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Un nuovo studio sull’uomo,’’ L’immaginazione, no.141 (September– October 1997): 30–31. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Ragazze sguaiate e tenere conversano,’’ L’immaginazione, no.124 (November 1995): 23. Turchetta, Giovanni, ‘‘Romanzo comico: Sette specie di comicita`,’’ in Tirature 2000, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2000.

CANNIBALI

THE CANDLE-BEARER See Il Candelaio (Work by Giordano Bruno)

CANNIBALI Giovani cannibali is the name accorded a group of emerging writers who have been active from the mid-1990s onward. The Cannibali groups together writers of such disparate style, content, and narrative strategies as Aldo Nove, Simona Vinci, Tiziano Scarpa, Isabella Santacroce, Daniele Luttazzi, Silvia Ballestra, Enrico Brizzi, Rossana Campo, Elena Stancanelli, Niccolo` Ammaniti, Luisa Brancaccio, Carlo Lucarelli, and Guiseppe Caliceti. The name was derived from an anthology of stories, Gioventu´ cannibale: La prima antologia dell’orrore estremo (Cannibal Youth: The First Anthology of Extreme Horror, 1996), published by Einaudi in the ‘‘Stile libero’’ series. Prior to its publication, several of these authors had already found small publishers; after publication, they were acknowledged by a large number of reluctant critics and literary journalists. Because of their visible, if often critical, fascination with American mass culture, these new writers were quickly characterized as purveyors of pulp and ‘‘splatter’’ fiction, that is, with a subliterary mode of writing. They all seemed to have been creatively stimulated by the consumerism of today’s open market, which sells the belief that merchandise can bring happiness. After the 1996 symposium Narrare dopo Pulp Fiction, the Cannibali have often been described as cultivators of the cinematic narrative approach of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino. The term ‘‘Italian pulp’’ is more useful as a point of comparison, however, since there were actually few structural, thematic, or contextual commonalities between the Italian literary movement and American cinema during approximately the same period. Indeed, the Cannibali reject any artistic resemblance, and

their blood-and-splatter narratives are limited to superficial effects. The editor of the anthology, Daniele Brolli, contended that academic moralism, reacting against their cutting edge subject matter, gritty narrative approach, and the ambiguity inherent in their everyday stories of violence, has prevented the Cannibali from being widely accepted or seriously read. Brolli further claimed that dictating what a writer can or cannot say prevents literature from becoming a legitimate source of reference for future readers who would like to study the society and popular culture of the 1990s as it was represented in contemporary fiction and not merely in newspapers. Cannibali narratives are disturbing, even if we are aware that they present only a simulation of reality. The Cannibali were encouraged, however, by Pier Vittorio Tondelli and Ricercare, the annual meeting held in Reggio Emilia that showcases emerging talents in poetry and fiction. Furthermore, the endorsement by Renato Barilli and Edoardo Sanguineti, former members of Gruppo 63, has contributed to their success, while giving renewed notoriety to the old guard of Gruppo 63. The works of the Cannibali mirror the heterogeneous provenance of their authors. For example, Cannibali tales of metropolitan horror are generally set in disturbing postindustrial urban and suburban landscapes (chiefly Milan and Rome, although Emilia-Romagna and Bologna are also common settings), which breed alienation and nihilistic action. The depiction of urban chaos and squalid hinterlands at the peripheries of Italian larger cities often alludes to the authors’ own marginalization, both in real life and in their creative expression. 373

CANNIBALI Apart from the unrelenting commercialism in the works of Nove, Scarpa, Ammaniti, and others, there are serious reservations about the Cannibali’s calculated use of subcultural codes and the manner in which they downplayed linguistic experimentation. Their jargon derives directly from regional expressions: for instance, the Milanese urban slang identifying Nove’s characters; the Venetian idioms of Scarpa; the Romanesque-Italian of Ammaniti’s ‘‘Seratina,’’ published in Gioventu´ cannibale. They use the language the average Italian speaks every day; the regional elements in their work help give the ‘‘pulp’’ phenomenon an even stronger Italian resonance. The Cannibali challenge an arcane literary mannerism that they believe had entrenched itself in Italian narrative since the death of Italo Calvino in the mid-1980s. What worked for them was the ‘‘market,’’ in particular, mass media. They thus became part of the so-called globalization of ‘‘the false.’’ The splatter and the blood and the stress on violent action in their works signal, however, their need to tear reality apart. Some of the most interesting examples of Cannibali fiction are Enrico Brizzi’s Jack Frusciante e` uscito dal gruppo (Jack Frusciante Left His Group, 1994) and Niccolo` Ammaniti’s Branchie (Gills, 1994), which became a cult novel, and Fango (Mud, 1996). Ammaniti always strikes readers with his vivid characters, often retelling stories taken from the newspapers’ cronaca (news). Unlike the shady characters of Vinci and Santacroce, Ammaniti proposes clear-cut situations in which protagonists face choices. Aldo Nove’s syntax in Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine (Woobinda and Other Stories without a Happy Ending, 1996) and Superwoobinda (1998) shows his innate ability to recreate, in poetic ways, the squalor of industrialized northern Italy. The imagery in his settings is paralyzing, even in the literary flop Puerto Plata Market (1997). He wrote two Proustian novels, Amore mio infinito (My Endless Love, 2000) and La piu´ grande balena morta della Lombardia (The Biggest Dead Whale in Lombardy, 2004). Amore mio infinito remains poetic even when we read about Milan. But Nove’s elegy to Milan—further exemplified in his city guide Milano non e` Milano (Milan Is Not Milan, 2004)—is written according to his style. It is spectacular, ironic, satiric, a rap version of Lombard history. Along with Scarpa and Raul Montanari, Nove published Nelle galassie oggi come oggi (In the Galaxies Today as Today, 2001), a collection of poems based on the lyrics of some of the most 374

popular songs of the period. Once again high-low, hybrid culture, poetry, and musical texts are mingled, illustrating the Cannibali dictum that the very existence of an uncorrupted culture is impossible. Even though Silvia Ballestra, Isabella Santacroce, and Simona Vinci were not initially included in Gioventu´ cannibale, they share similar aims and literary methods. For example, with Compleanno dell’iguana (The Birthday of the Iguana, 1991), Ballestra (1969–) establishes herself as a famed writer of slangy fiction focused on urban youth, mostly in Milan where she lives. In 1996, Santacroce formed, with Scarpa and Nove, the group SS9. This year was important in the history of the Cannibali because so many of their works were published at that time, including Santacroce’s own Destroy; Tiziano Scarpa’s Occhi sulla graticola (Eyes on the Grill, 1996), an exhilarating love story notable for its offbeat sense of irony; and Aldo Nove’s Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine. While the fragment in Nove’s prose is devoid of any lexical refinement and deliberately flat and banal, Santacroce’s uses oxymoron and paradox to visualize a world turned upside-down. She writes in short sentences (unusual for Italian literary style). Thus far the legacy of Santacroce is to show that female narrative is more open in its presentation of sexuality. While Santacroce represents sexuality as transgressive and desperate, Simona Vinci writes about ambiguous sexuality with very different results. Aside from the different literary itineraries these writers have chosen, it is important to recognize their inexhaustible desire for describing a society in which people seem to have lost a clear sense of who they are and where they want to go. The desire to speak of human (or posthuman) beings is still the founding premise of the work of the Cannibali. In a world where the unbelievable happens all the time, fragmentary discourse, excessive lyricism, and merchandisable narrative become tools for representation. STEFANIA LUCAMANTE See also: Niccolo` Ammaniti, Rossana Campo, Simona Vinci Further Reading Barengo, Mario, Oltre il Novecento: appunti su un decennio di narrativa (1988–1998), Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1999.

GINO CAPPONI Barilli, Renato, E` arrivata la nuova ondata: dalla neo alla neo-neoavanguardia, Turin: Testo & immagine;, 2000. Barilli, Renato, Nanni Balestrini, et al. (editors), Narrative Invaders: Narratori di Ricercare 1993–1999, Turin: Testo & immagine, 2000. Brolli, Daniele, Introductio to Gioventu´ Cannibale: la prima antologia dell’orrore estremo, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Lucamante, Stefania (editor), Italian Pulp Fiction: The New Narrative of the Giovani Cannibali Writers,

Madison-Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh-Dickinson University Press, 2001. Ottonieri, Tommaso, La plastica della lingua: stili in fuga lungo un’eta` postrema, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. Pezzarossa, Fulvio, C’era una volta il Pulp: corpo e letteratura nella tradizione italiana, Bologna: Clueb, 1999. Sinibaldi, Marino, Pulp: la letteratura nell’era della simultaneita`, Rome: Donzelli, 1997.

CANTOS See Cinque Canti (Work by Ludovico Ariosto)

GINO CAPPONI (1792–1876) Count Gino Capponi is considered one of the most influential personalities amongst the intellectuals who lived during the Italian Risorgimento. He was not only a politician, but also an economist, a philologist, an educator, a historian and one of the advisors of the founders of the Italian nation. He passionately read St. Augustine, Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal and formulated his personal pedagogical theories combining the thought of John Locke and Etienne de Condillac with that Anthony Shaftesbury and Jean Jacques Rousseau. He had also a close and fruitful relationship with Giampietro Viesseux, whose pedagogical ideas he shared. He developed an ethical-religious and personal notion of education that rejected any form of intellectual analysis of the educational process, whether on a philosophical basis, as in the case of the Jesuits, or on a scientific basis, as in the case of positivism. Capponi favoured the establishment of a public school system administered by the state and firmly believed both in the superiority of the study of the humanities over that of the sciences and in the preeminence of family and maternal education over that provided by public

schools. However, he did not produce any single work that can witness to the greatness of his intelligence, the breadth of his culture, and the strength of his style. Fragmentation seems to be the most evident characteristic of his literary production. Rich in critical acumen and expository clarity, Capponi’s prose displays evident classical influences in the articulation of its rhetorical structure. His Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (A History of the Republic of Florence, 1875) is one of the most significant products of Tuscan political thought of the Risorgimento. In 1843 the French writer Hortense Allart published the Histoire de la Republique de Florence. Upon the author’s request, Capponi contributed to it by adding some notes and by expanding or reducing certain sections. In the end, he wrote his own Storia, which was influenced by his disappointment over the failure of his government and the consequent return of the Grand Duke at the head of the Austrian troops after his overthrow in 1848. Because of its complex and troubled genesis, this is not an organic work, and it lacks unity in spite of some wonderful pages full of historical truth and the simple and effective writing style. 375

GINO CAPPONI The first book is an introduction to the city from its origins to the triumph of the Guelfs. The central section, which constitutes the core of the work, is more than a thousand pages long. The last ten pages describe in a concise way the historical events of the state from the collapse of the Republic to the wise rule of Leopoldo I. Storia di Pietro Leopoldo (A History of Pietro Leopoldo, 1877), one of his minor works, was begun in 1823 and never finished. Only the first chapter, which concisely analyses the origins and the characteristics of the absolute monarchies in Europe, and some other fragments remain. Capponi’s interest in Pietro Leopoldo, whose government of Tuscany in the eighteenth century was one of the most significant examples of enlightened despotism, clearly demonstrates his reformist attitude, which he shared with other liberal Tuscans. Capponi’s most significant work is Frammento sull’educazione (Fragment on Education, 1845). It can be considered the most important essay on education of the first half of the nineteenth century and certainly the one that best shows how Catholic thought influenced the liberal reform in Italy. Capponi starts by observing that, with the French Revolution, education shifted from the clergy to secular teachers, something that the Restoration was unable to change. The responsibility for this shift lay not with the Enlightenment but with the Jesuits who had inspired it. Pushed to its extreme consequences, the Enlightenment had denied itself, and Romanticism had risen from its ashes. After Napoleon’s fall, realizing the impossibility of going back to the old ways, people had begun reading Rousseau, and most misinterpreted him by taking him literally. Rousseau describes the kind of abstract education that must be avoided by educators at all costs. The core concept of his work is that, in the educational process, synthesis must prevail over analysis. Capponi condemns everything that makes reason prevail over the emotions and art over nature: Indeed, it is absurd to encourage sentiments by means of reason. Education should find its grounds within the family, with the support and the enlightenment of the ethical values of Catholicism. Profoundly sceptical regarding the validity of the educational methods of his times, Capponi saw history as a progressive unfolding, and, as good Catholic, he considered positively the educational function of the papacy. His conclusion was that the spiritual personality of the educator himself holds the secret for good results, but these results depend only on the will of the Divine Providence. Arguing further that education must also arise from the 376

history of a people and not from the solitary mind of a reformer, Capponi reached an obvious contradiction.

Biography Capponi was born on 13 September 1792 into an old and illustrious Florentine family. He traveled extensively throughout Italy, France, England (where he befriended Ugo Foscolo), Switzerland, Holland, and Germany; in Florence, he worked within the academies and other cultural associations and became a prominent personality in the Tuscan liberal Catholic party. He married the Marchioness Riccardi in 1811. Capponi founded the periodical L’Antologia with Giampietro Viesseux in 1821. He was elected senator of the Kingdom of Tuscany in 1848 (he was Prime Minister between 17 August and 12 September 1848). He supported annexation of Tuscany to Italy in 1859 and was senator of the Kingdom of Italy from 1860 to 1864. Capponi died in Florence, 3 February 1876. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Scritti editi e inediti di Gino Capponi, edited by Marco Tabarrini, 2 vols., Florence: Barbera, 1877. Scritti inediti, edited by Guglielmo Macchia, Florence: Le Monnier, 1957.

Historical Writings Sulla dominazione dei longobardi in Italia, 1844. Storia della Repubblica di Firenze, 1875. Storia di Pietro Leopoldo, 1877.

Letters Niccolo` Tommaseo e Gino Capponi. Carteggio inedito, dal 1833 al 1874, edited by Isidoro Del Lungo and Paolo Prunas, 1911–1932. Lettere di Capponi e di altri a lui, edited by Alessandro Carraresi, 1882–1990. Carteggio Capponi-Galiotti (1845–1875), edited by Aglaia Paoletti Lange´, 2002. Carteggio Capponi-Ridolfi (1817–1863), edited by Aglaia Paoletti Lange´, 2002.

Other Cinque lettere di economia toscana, 1845. Frammento sull’educazione, 1845.

Further Reading Bagnoli, Paolo (editor), Gino Capponi. Storia e progresso nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Bonafede, Giulio, La pedogogia di Gino Capponi, Palermo: Fiamma Serafica, 1971.

PAOLA CAPRIOLO Gambaro, Angiolo, La critica pedagogica di Gino Capponi, Bari: Laterza, 1956. Gentile, Giovanni, Gino Capponi e la cultura toscana nel secolo XIX, Florence: Vallecchi, 1922. Gentili, Rino, Gino Capponi, un aristocratico toscano dell’800, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Nencioni, Giovanni, Gino Capponi: linguista, storico, pensatore, Florence: Olschki, 1977.

Paoletti Lange´, Aglaia, Gino Capponi, un fiorentino europeo, Florence: Le Monnier 2000. Sestan, Ernesto, La Firenze di Vieusseux e di Capponi, Florence: Olschki, 1986. Spadolini, Giovanni, La Firenze di Gino Capponi fra restaurazione e romanticismo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1985. Treves, Piero, Ottocento italiano fra il nuovo e l’antico, Modena: Mucchi, 1992.

PAOLA CAPRIOLO (1962–) Much of Capriolo’s fiction might be classified as fantastic. In La spettatrice (The Woman Watching, 1995), for example, an actor turns to stone, Don Giovanni-style. In La grande Eulalia (The Great Eulalia, 1988), a young woman falls in love with a man inside a mirror and is at once magically transformed from an impoverished waif into a musical phenomenon and grande dame. An accomplished translator from German, including works of Goethe and Thomas Mann, Capriolo writes fiction often characterized by a gothic feel, creating labyrinthine, puzzling, often feudal or restorationstyle spaces whose inhabitants seem ghostly and ethereal. The appellations ‘‘fantastic’’ or ‘‘magical’’ cannot, however, capture the complexities of Capriolo’s works. The singularity of her style within the panorama of contemporary prose derives from the exceptional direction Capriolo’s fantastic bent takes. The scholar Gianfranco Contini observed in his introduction to the collection Italia magica (1988) that the literary sensibility toward ‘‘magic’’ appears too often geographical specific: It reigns, we think, in the foggy North or in the Orient. On the contrary, Italy, with its overbearing classical tradition, is usually considered to be bereft of ‘‘gothic’’ sensibilities, and authors of fantastic literature not fitting into the gothic or horror mode are said to belong in modern times to the currents of magical realism or, perhaps, surrealism. Yet these particular currents have characteristics that do not apply to Capriolo’s brand of fantasy. Contini noticed that Italian fantastic literature is often crossed with the burlesque mode. Paola Capriolo stands out as an exception because she creates subtly magical atmospheres and plots without including comic

or satirical notes. In her fiction, philosophy and the fantastic are blended in a masterly elegance of style. Combining psychological insights about the instability of the self with modern philosophical discourse on the relativity of individual perceptions, one of Capriolo’s most important themes is the labyrinth of existence. Her texts are often visionary, imagining in detail other, metaphysical, worlds—as when a character steps into a mirror world. Her novels are closely focused on characters in pursuit of something intangible that often proves their undoing. These characters are far from types, though, and their courageous flights into creativity (imagining lovers, for example) are unforgettable. Many live out obsessions that verge on madness. Though rife with visual and musical metaphors, Capriolo’s short stories and novels tend to leave settings and historical epochs indeterminate and enigmatic. For this reason and because of her use of magical elements, critics have often used the word ‘‘fable’’ to describe these narratives. The short novel Barbara (1998) provides an excellent example of a fablelike story with gothic elements. In it, a young knight’s father, fearful of losing his fiefdoms, arranges the son’s marriage to Barbara, the daughter of a nouveau riche family. The distant, cryptic Barbara insists that her betrothed, utterly smitten by her despite her ordinary looks, carry out the task of recovering a precious ring. In obtaining it, the handsome but naive knight commits a crime, murder; the marriage match is dissolved, the father’s lands are lost, and the son is eventually imprisoned. The protagonist seeks for years to unravel the enigma of the woman, embarking on exploits of various kinds, yet he is unable to 377

PAOLA CAPRIOLO exact the vengeance that he passionately desires. The symbolically unnatural, cruel, and unmaternal Barbara so puzzles the protagonist that he ‘‘creates’’ for himself an otherworldly, distant, nearly mythic being who becomes his only raison d’eˆtre. Perversely, she inspires him to ‘‘author’’ his own life and worldview, and as such she is a fearsome muse—a sadistic Beatrice or Laura of lyric fame. Ultimately, the knight’s destruction is complete. Only as an impoverished old man can he put together what now appear to him as the fragments of a lifetime around the empty space of Barbara’s mysterious aberrations. Barbara is not Capriolo’s only work to undertake a revision of a familiar genre such as the knight’s tale. Capriolo’s sophisticated rewritings of well-known myths and motifs of European intellectual life take the form of metafictions and are particularly well represented by the novel Vissi d’arte (Floria Tosca, 1992). The focus is diverted from the Tosca of the operatic narrative to the lustful, villainous Baron Scarpia, the police chief who tracks down political dissidents and arranges the hero’s execution and, indirectly, Tosca’s suicide. Written in diary form, the novel reformulates the problem of sadistic violence. Rather than follow a suspenseful melodrama, the reader learns the inner workings of perverse desire in the form of metafiction. In another accomplished novel, Una di loro (One of Them, 2001), echoes of nineteenthcentury Europe resonate in a love story between a hotel guest and an immigrant maid. The protagonist, a writer, discovers that a colony of poor and apparently homeless people have taken over an abandoned, eerie, grand-style hotel that once housed the aristocratic elite on holiday. The dense woods surrounding the unearthly place are menacing; and, in a twist on gothic romance, tree boughs are sporadically laden with trash from floods instead of serving as bandits’ lookouts. Capriolo presents us the decay of the European continent but also brings the elegant prose style and narrative wealth of its earlier eras into the new contexts of contemporary literature and its postmodern experimentation.

Biography Paola Capriolo was born in Milan on 1 January 1962. She earned her degree in philosophy from the University of Milan. Her first work of fiction, La grande Eulalia, won the Giuseppe Berto Prize in

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1988; Il nocchiero won the Premio Selezione Campiello in 1991. Capriolo works as a translator from German and writes for the culture section of the Corriere della sera. She lives in Milan. KEALA JEWELL Selected Works Fiction La grande Eulalia, 1988. Il nocchiero, 1989; translated as The Helmsman by William Weaver, 1991. La ragazza dalla stella d’oro e altri racconti, 1991. Il doppio regno, 1991; translated as The Dual Realm by Gillian Ania and Doug Thompson, 2000. Vissi d’amore, 1992; translated as Floria Tosca by Liz Heron, 1997. La spettatrice, 1995; translated as The Woman Watching by Liz Heron, 1998. Un uomo di carattere, 1996; translated as A Man of Character by Liz Heron, 2000. Barbara, 1998. Il sogno dell’agnello, 1999. Una di loro, 2001. Qualcosa nella notte: storia di Gilgamesh, signore di Uruk, e dell’uomo selvatico cresciuto tra le gazzelle, 2003.

Nonfiction L’assoluto artificiale: Nichilismo e mondo dell’espressione nell’opera saggistica di Gottfried Benn, 1996.

Further Reading Ania, Gillian, ‘‘At Capriolo’s Hotel: Heaven, Hell, and Other Worlds in Il Doppio Regno,’’ Italian Studies, 54 (1999): 132–156. Ania, Gillian, ‘‘Inside the Labyrinth: The Thematics of Space in the Fiction of Paola Capriolo,’’ Romance Studies, 18:2(2000): 157–171. Ania, Gillian, ‘‘Simulated Bodies: Transforming Relationships in Capriolo’s ‘La Donna di Pietra’ and Un Uomo di Carattere,’’ Spunti e Ricerche, 18(2003): 53–76. Basili, Sonia, ‘‘Il doppio regno e Oceano mare: Punti di confine e alibi di fuga nei personaggi di Paola Capriolo e Alessandro Baricco,’’ Narrativa, 10(1996): 185–206. Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Italia magica, Turin: Einaudi 1988. De Luca, Giovanna, ‘‘Un uomo di carattere di Paola Capriolo: Il movimento impossibile,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 19: 2(1998): 137–143. Hipkins, Danielle, ‘‘Evil Ambiguities: The Fantastic Flight from Interpretation in Dino Buzzati’s Il deserto dei Tartari and Paola Capriolo’s Early Fiction,’’ Spunti e Ricerche, 13(1998): 81–98. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘The Space(s) of Myth in Paola Capriolo’s Con i miei mille occhi,’’ Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 12:2(1999): 37–57.

GIORGIO CAPRONI

GIORGIO CAPRONI (1912–1990) ‘‘Oggi tutti gli de`i e tutte le dee son morti’’ (All Gods and Goddesses are dead today): This quotation recalls the title of one of Giorgio Caproni’s most representative ‘‘scritture in versi’’ (verse writings), as he called them. Indeed, ‘‘il congedo’’ (farewell) is a favorite subject of his poetic speculation. His is departure without redemption, between despair and joy, often taking allegorical forms peculiar to musical variations, almost a sentimental oxymoron. In his life, he experienced a number of farewells, as when he left Genoa to move to Rome and also when he left Livorno—where he was born—for Genoa. He adopted the Ligurian capital and was linguistically educated there, if not in a dialectical sense, in the actual structure of the language, in its mentality. In fact, he remembered and lived Genoa as ‘‘citta` di continua musica per il vento,’’ ‘‘citta` dagli amori in salita’’ (the city of never-ending music for the wind, the city of climbing loves) (‘‘Sirena’’). Caproni is one of the most individual of modern Italian poets and one of the most inattuali (out-of-date), along with Vittorio Sereni and Attilio Bertolucci, often in opposition to Montale’s nobler and better-known literary position. Recently, renewed interest in twentieth-century counterpoetics—whose main representative is Pier Paolo Pasolini—has led to a new interest in Caproni. His interviews, correspondence, and essays are now read again, and even his work as a narrator, journalist, critic, and translator, though partially edited, is deemed important. After studying violin and composition, Caproni demonstrated a talent for narration, and his initial immediacy and sensory easiness, experienced in his first poetic works, gradually became a complex achievement. As a mature author, especially after fighting in World War II and then as a partisan in the Resistance, Caproni began to expose the inner tragedy of human life; he explored anatomically the pain of enduring loss while facing the void, a testament to the absence of God, even though it did not mean atheism, necessarily, as the poet himself often stated. As a youth he read both Spanish and South American Surrealists widely. He then felt the need for a more astute analysis of the poetical word,

from Giosue` Carducci to Umberto Saba and Carlo Betocchi’s musical realism. Thanks in part to his discovery of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s ‘‘word economy,’’ Caproni composed Come un’allegoria (Like an Allegory, 1936), his first collection, gathering 16 poems, 11 of which had already been published in literary reviews. Aldo Capasso, who wrote the preface, defined it as ‘‘descriptive poetry’’; poetry of things, almost a macchiaiolo style of writing, a lyricism based on rhythm and timbre, yet with some crepuscolare tones. Caproni experimented with being concise, through skilful variations; his images, almost allegorical signs, echo something that eludes reason and are therefore inevitably unattainable. In the sensory universe of Ballo a Fontanigorda (Dance at Fontanigorda, 1938), women begin to appear. The collection’s main subject is youth, described by Caproni as painfully fragile. These first two collections also outline the landscapes and emblematic milieu of his homely minded style, such as the image of the sea as a metaphor of female sensuality in ‘‘Spiaggia di sera’’ (Beach by Night); the Ligurian landscape and its dialect; the succession of days in a symbolic cycle of death, exemplified by the night in ‘‘Fine di un giorno’’ (End of a Day); and rebirth in ‘‘Prima luce’’ (First Light), a title in Latin from Julius Caesar’s Prima luce Caesar profectus est, which hints at dawn. In Finzioni (Deceitfulness, 1941) and Cronistoria (Chronicle, 1943), Caproni continually experimented with the closed form of the sonnet—as in the series of 18 ‘‘Sonetti dell’anniversario’’ (Anniversary Sonnets)—according to a new structure the poet himself defined as a ‘‘monoblocco’’ (‘‘monoblock’’). The formal technique consists of a steady use of enjambments, a modern style that also adheres to tradition, in accordance with Stravinsky’s modernist experimentalism in a still tonal language, an example that Caproni followed. Between 1940 and 1947 he wrote three short stories published in 1984 in Il labirinto (The Labyrinth), including ‘‘Giorni aperti’’ (Open Days), a recollection of war, and ‘‘Il labirinto,’’ on the Resistance struggles for liberation. These first literary documents— about the Italian army at the Western front and the partisan war—were written chronologically in 379

GIORGIO CAPRONI direct connection with the action and the events described. The following collection, Stanze della funicolare (Funicular Rooms, 1952), describing a funicular connecting the two very different sections of Genoa, seems to lead Caproni’s poetry further toward the themes of the metaphysical journey and the meeting with the limit, or as he calls it ‘‘il muro della terra o l’ultimo borgo’’ (the Earth’s wall or the last stop), the unknowable. Instead, Il passaggio d’Enea (The Passage of Aeneas, 1956) alludes to a monument in Genoa dedicated to Virgil’s hero, a monument for which no suitable place was found in the city squares. Caproni’s Virgilian antihero—‘‘figlio e nel contempo padre, Enea sofferse tutte le croci e le delizie che una tale condizione comporta’’ (son and father at the same time, Aeneas suffered both joys and pains for such a condition)—becomes the symbol of modern humankind, exiled and unable to cope under the weight of tradition and who need support following the fall of the myth. The sonnet form dominates the section entitled ‘‘Gli anni tedeschi’’ (The German Years), which is overwhelmed by the slaughter of war. Caproni gradually mistrusted the word, to the point of perceiving its ‘‘insufficienza’’ (inadequacy), dispelling the object it names, moving toward the exile of pure nominalism: ‘‘E chi si salvera` dal vento / muto sui morti — da tanto distrutto / pianto’’ (Who will survive the wind/ dumb on the dead / who will survive such a painful cry; ‘‘I lamenti 1’’). Il seme del piangere (The Seed of Weeping, 1959), a title taken from Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XXXI, v. 46), includes the important section ‘‘Versi livornesi’’ (Livornese Verses,), dedicated to the memory of his beloved mother, whose figure is celebrated in a loving relationship with a young girl. His rhymed couplets suggest the poetic desubjectification of the characters, if only in defying tradition (specifically, the Sicilian canzone and Guido Cavalcanti’s ballad). From the mid-1960s, the poet took on forms that were distinctively ironic. In the collection Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee (The Ceremonious Traveler’s Farewell and Other Prosopopoeis, 1965), which gathers the work of four years (September 1960–November 1964), his writing shows a theatrical, meta-literary bent, giving the (anonymous) characters a voice: Caproni called it ‘‘simulazione teatrale’’ or theatrical simulation (with a dedication to the actor Achille Millo). Il muro della terra (The Wall of the Earth, 1975), the title of which is the incipit of Canto X of Dante’s Inferno and hints at the boundaries of the walled city of 380

Dite, opened Caproni’s final poetic season. Repetition and the ironic use of parenthesis obstruct the prosodic stream, which is more typical than that of Caproni’s former works, up to the paradox of ‘‘Ritorno’’ (Going Back): ‘‘Sono tornato la` / dove non ero mai stato’’ (I went back there / where I had never been). Some of his last collections are ambitious poetic works as well. In Il Conte di Kevenhu¨ller (The Earl of Kevenhu¨ller, 1986), the theme of the hunt for evil (embodied by the Beast), partly anticipated in his 1982 Il franco cacciatore (The Free Hunter), carries on the game of ‘‘simulazione teatrale.’’ It was inspired by an eighteenth-century Avviso, or note, Caproni found, in which the Earl promised fifty sequins to the man who would kill a fierce beast infesting Milan. Res amissa (Lost Thing, 1991) leads instead to the edge of the darkness. This collection, published posthumously, is dedicated to the theme of Evil and Lost Good represented by the indefinite object hinted at in the title; it is perhaps the Grace given ab origine to humanity, who would not thus need any further Grace, what St. Augustine violently rejected in Pelagius’s notion of ‘‘admissible Grace.’’ As Giorgio Agamben noted in his introduction to the collection, nostalgia becomes a hopeless loss, clearing out a landscape almost totally empty, ‘‘taking leave of the farewell itself while entering the regions of extreme disengagement between man and God.’’ A definitive congedo is the main theme of Caproni’s last poetry that, beyond Redemption and Fall, expresses the joy of not belonging to worldly things. As in ‘‘Tombeau per Marcella’’ in Res amissa: ‘‘Ma che vale il lamento? / La legge e` la separazione’’ (What is grief worth? / Departing is the law).

Biography Giorgio Caproni was born in Livorno on January 7, 1912, to Attilio, an accountant, and Anna Picchi. From 1922 to 1938 he lived in Genoa, where he studied music and taught at the elementary school until 1973. He fought as a soldier in World War II and later in the anti-Fascist armed resistance in Alta Val Trebbia. In 1938, Caproni married Rina (Rosa Rettagliata) and had two children, Silvana and Mauro. In 1945 he moved to Rome. He was a delegate at The First World Intellectuals for Peace Congress in Wroclaw (Breslavia), Poland, August 25–28, 1948. Caproni was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Le stanze della funicolare (1952) and

GIORGIO CAPRONI Il seme del piangere (1959). In 1982, he received the Feltrinelli Prize for Poetry. Caproni died January 22, 1990, and is buried in Loco di Rovegno, in Val Trebbia; as he requested, only his name is on his grave. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Collections Poesie, 1932–1986, Milan: Garzanti, 1989. L’opera in versi, critical edition by Luca Zuliani, Milan: Mondadori, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Come un’allegoria (1932–1935),’’ 1936. ‘‘Ballo a Fontanigorda,’’ 1938. ‘‘Finzioni,’’ 1941. ‘‘Cronistoria,’’ 1943. ‘‘Stanze della funicolare,’’ 1952. ‘‘Il passaggio d’Enea,’’ 1956. ‘‘Il seme del piangere,’’ 1959. ‘‘Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso & altre prosopopee,’’ 1965. ‘‘Il muro della terra,’’ 1975, as The Wall of the Earth (1964– 1975), translated by Pasquale Verdicchio, 1992. ‘‘Erba francese,’’ 1979. ‘‘Il franco cacciatore,’’ 1982. ‘‘Il Conte di Kevenhu¨ller,’’ 1986. ‘‘Res amissa,’’ edited by Giorgio Agamben, 1991. ‘‘L’opera in versi,’’ edited by Luca Zuliani, 1998. ‘‘I faticati giorni: quaderno veronese 1942,’’ edited by Adele Dei, 2000.

Fiction Giorni aperti. Itinerario di un reggimento dal fronte occidentale ai confini orientali, 1942. Il gelo della mattina, 1954. Il labirinto, 1984; reprinted, 1992. La valigia delle Indie e altre prose, edited by Adele Dei, 1998. Aeroporto delle rondini e altre cartoline di viaggio, 2000. Aria celeste e altri racconti, 2003.

Nonfiction Frammenti di un diario (1948–1949), edited by F. Nicolao, 1995. La scatola nera, edited by Giovanni Raboni, 1996.

Carissimo Giorgio, Carissimo Mario: Lettere 1942–1989, edited by Stefano Verdino, 2004. ‘‘Era cosı` bello parlare’’: conversazioni radiofoniche con Giorgio Caproni, 2004.

Translations Marcel Proust, Il tempo ritrovato, 1951. Rene´ Char, Poesia e prosa, 1962. Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, Morte a credito, 1964. Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami, 1965. Andre´ Fre´naud, Il silenzio di Genova e altre poesie, 1967. Andre´ Fre´naud, Non c’e` paradiso, 1971. Guillaume Apollinaire, Poesie, 1979. Gustave Flaubert, L’educazione sentimentale, 1997. Quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Enrico Testa, 1998.

Further Reading Baroncini, Daniela, Caproni e la poesia del nulla, Pisa: Pacini, 2002. De Marco, Giuseppe, Caproni poeta dell’antagonismo e altre occasioni esegetiche novecentesche, Genoa: Il melangolo, 2004. Dei, Adele, Le carte incrociate: Sulla poesia di Giorgio Caproni, Genoa: Edizioni San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2003. Dei, Adele, Giorgio Caproni, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Frabotta, Biancamaria, Giorgio Caproni: Il poeta del disincanto, Rome: Officina, 1993. Frabotta, Biancamaria, ‘‘Il seme del piangere di Giorgio Caproni,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le Opere, vol 4, pt. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Genova a Giorgio Caproni, edited by Giorgio Devoto and Stefano Verdino, Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 1982. Leonelli, Giuseppe, Giorgio Caproni: Storia d’una poesia tra musica e retorica, Milan: Garzanti, 1997. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Giorgio Caproni,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Per la poesia di Giorgio Caproni,’’ in Giorgio Caproni, L’opera in versi, edited by Luca Zuliani, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Orlando, Roberto, La vita contraria: Sul Novecento di Giorgio Caproni, Lecce: Pensa, 1998. Scarpa, Raffaella, Sintassi e respiro nei sonetti di Giorgio Caproni, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004. Surdich, Luigi, Giorgio Caproni: Un ritratto, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1990. Surdich, Luigi, Le idee e la poesia: Montale e Caproni, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1998.

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LUIGI CAPUANA

LUIGI CAPUANA (1839–1915) A novelist and critic, Luigi Capuana played a crucial role in opening up Italian culture to the newest European trends at the end of the nineteenth century. Influenced by the theory of the death of poetry expressed by Angelo Camillo De Meis (1817–1891) in his autobiographical novel Dopo la laurea (After the Degree, 1868), Capuana formulated the hypothesis that the novel was the modern artistic form par excellence and that literary genres, like natural beings, are subject to the law of evolution. Thus, the novel represents the modern version of the ancient epic, a ‘‘mixed genre’’ whose realism, voided of fantastic and supernatural elements, fully expresses the modern sensibility dominated by the advent of positivist science. His wide-ranging interests led him to the discovery of the theories of physiologist Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and of sociologist Hippolyte Taine (1828–1893), as well as those of E´mile Zola (1840–1902), to whom he dedicated many essays. He was profoundly influenced by literary realism, admiring especially the works of Victor Hugo, Honore´ de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert, while in philosophy he read Hegel’s works and absorbed the idealist doctrine. In 1865 he wrote his first short story, ‘‘Il dottor Cymbalus’’ (The Doctor Cymbalus) and planned the novel Adriana, which he never wrote. However, Capuana’s first important contribution to the literary debate were the theatrical reviews that he wrote between 1864 and 1868, while he lived in Florence, and later collected in the volume Il teatro italiano contemporaneo (Italian Contemporary Theatre, 1872), published in Palermo with the active cooperation of his friend Giuseppe Pitre´ (1841–1916), the founding figure in the study of folk culture in Sicily. In addition to the influence of the intellectual figures mentioned above, the volume witnesses to Capuana’s debt to the Florentine cultural milieu and in particular to the painter Telemaco Signorini and the critic Enrico Nencioni. From the latter, he took the notion of the need to redefine the canons of an authentically modern art, based on the observation of real events and their transposition onto paper. Consequently he revised his opinions about the theater and forcefully argued for the superiority of the novel over all other 382

artistic forms. His articles of literary criticism published between 1877 and 1882 and later included in the two volumes of Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea (Studies on Contemporary Literature, 1880–1882) also exemplify his scientific and evolutionary approach to literary forms. Articulating his theory of the modern novel, Capuana explained the meaning of the ‘‘positive method’’ in literature: The new art must set aside every form of subjectivity and adopt the method of modern science. For the text to be realistic and objective, the author must be invisible in his works and simply let realistic events with realistic characters unfold. Nevertheless, Capuana did not accept the naturalistic theories of Zola wholesale, preferring to consider naturalism simply as a method. The task of the artist should be to organize the narration in an organic way, but art cannot limit itself to photographing reality. Art is form, or rather the organization of data according to set principles in which the artist must use his imagination and not only represent what he sees. His involvement, however, must remain hidden, and this is the norm of the so-called canon of impersonality. In a later volume of criticism, Gli ismi contemporanei (Contemporary Isms, 1898), Capuana recognized the crisis of the novel and suggested some solutions to overcome it. Most importantly, he now considered the different schools as outdated and called for a return to realism interpreted, however, as a simple method of composition. In his last major theoretical statement La scienza della letteratura (The Science of Literature, 1902), Capuana’s theories found yet another arrangement, linking materialism and evolutionism, Taine and Darwin. Capuana was an eclectic writer and in his career wrote numerous short stories, novels, plays, and fables. Indeed, his eclecticism is evident in his themes as well, since while exalting the scientific method, he also cultivated his interests for the occult world, about which he wrote two important essays, Spiritismo? (Spiritualism?, 1884) and Mondo occulto (The Occult World, 1896), in addition to conducting experiments such as photographing ectoplasms. He also wrote works devoted to Sicilian traditions and history, including the provocative

LUIGI CAPUANA L’isola del sole (The Island of the Sun, 1898), in which he examined the phenomenon of ‘‘brigantaggio’’ and of the Mafia, arguing, against the false image of Sicily then common in Italy, that the island was not a land inhabited by violent and wild people but rather that its misery was quite common all over the world. In fact, the representation of Sicilian social reality constitutes an essential element in Capuana’s art, and many of his novels and short stories are set on the island. For example, he presented its corrupted clergy in the short story ‘‘Breviario di quaranta fogli’’ (A Forty-Sheet Breviary), from the collection Dalla terra natale (From the Native World, 1915), which features the figure of Dean Monitore, who prefers playing cards to performing his priestly office, or in ‘‘I bestia’’ (The Animals), from Anime a nudo (Naked Souls, 1900), in which the priest Don Bastiano devotes himself above all to the pleasures of the table. Indeed, all classes, including peasants and the bourgeoisie, come under scrutiny and are described realistically, with their financial or psychological problems. Capuana made his literary debut in 1877 with the collection of six short stories Profili di donne (Portraits of Women), which presents women involved in a variety of love relations. In every story, the plot is slight, as the writer was more interested in focusing on the psychology of his characters, articulating a phenomenology of love based on a series of fixed stereotype, and contrasting the passionate temperament of women to the superficiality and egoism of men. Following a fortunate trend of nineteenth-century fiction, Capuana privileged the portrayal of the middleclass and of drawing-room environments, where superficial amorous intrigues develop. The psychology of the characters is analysed using a scientific and analytical method, and as a result the passion of love is derived from psychological factors linked to organic physiology, especially in women. In ‘‘Fasma,’’ for instance, the author considered the repercussions on the body of a psyche tormented by the sentiment of love. At the same time, Capuana attempted to apply the principles of realism by writing some tranches de vie, ‘‘slices’’ of reality presented in an objective way, a task in which he had some difficulties, especially with language. In an attempt to overcome his Sicilian dialect, he wrote in a language that was too close to literary Tuscan and too rich in archaic words to sound like common speech. The problem is present also in Giacinta (1879), a ‘‘documento umano’’

(human document) in the vein of Zola, to whom it is dedicated. The novel, based on a true story told to the author by his friend the Senator Lorenzo De Luca during one of their walks in Rome, revolves around Giacinta, a woman who as a young girl was raped by the cruel Beppe. As an adult, this event marks her psychology. She falls in love with Andrea Gerace and takes him as a lover, preferring to marry a dull suitor, and accepting with full awareness the role of dishonored woman to which she was predestined after the rape. The growing mental illness that will lead her to commit suicide is examined by Doctor Follini, Capuana’s alter ego. The internal world of the character is thus scientifically analyzed in all its aspects, and such analysis represents the most important element in the novel. Giacinta thus effected a clear and revolutionary break with the Catholic tradition, represented by Alessandro Manzoni, and as a result was branded immoral upon publication. For its adherence to the principles of Zola’s naturalism, the novel is considered a sort of manifesto of early Italian verismo. The novel Profumo (Perfume, 1892), first published in instalments in Nuova Antologia, shows a partial overcoming of Capuana’s previous influences and his adhesion to the new cultural models of decadent culture, from Friedrich Nietzsche and Paul Verlaine to Joris Karl Huysmans and Gabriele D’Annunzio. As a result, the decadent theme of ‘‘disease’’ becomes the focal point of the new novel, the protagonists of which are Patrizio Moro-Lanza and his wife Eugenia. Their family life is disturbed by Gertrude, Patrizio’s mother. In a backward, patriarchal Sicily, the tragedy of a man torn between his love for his wife and the Oedipal love for his mother is enacted. After many torments, Eugenia falls prey to a terrible hysterical crisis, and she inexplicably emanates a perfume of orange blossom from her skin. However, she is far from mad: On the contrary, she plans an adulterous relationship with the young man Ruggiero. However, the affair does not happen, and the woman finally rejoins her husband, now finally free from the morbid bond with his mother. The most relevant element in this novel lies not in the setting but in the acute psychological analysis of the main characters and in particular of what Freud will later call the unconscious, although still considered from a fundamentally objective and external perspective. Without a doubt Capuana’s masterpiece is Il marchese di Roccaverdina (The Marquis of 383

LUIGI CAPUANA Roccaverdina). The product of a long gestation, the novel appeared in 1901, when the age of realism was almost at an end. Once again, the topic is a family tragedy. A Sicilian nobleman, the Marquis of Roccaverdina, kills his lover Agrippina Solmo’s husband, and as a result an innocent is accused of the crime and dies in prison. The marquis now lives in the pangs of remorse, made worse by the lawyer Don Aquilante’s fondness of spiritualism, as he declares that he is in touch with the spirit of the dead man. At the end the marquis can no longer bear the weight of his guilt and commits suicide. In addition to the careful representation of the protagonist’s mental breakdown, the novel also offers an effective rendition of the life of a Sicilian village of the nineteenth century, Rabbato, described using the usual objective method. The reality that emerges is one still dominated by feudal social relations, in which the rich and proud aristocrats can abuse their subordinates and live outside the law. Capuana also wrote for the stage. His most successful theatrical works were his plays in dialect, contaminated by Italian to express the language of the Sicilian petit bourgeoisie. While he turned to the theater for its financial rewards and the hope of recognition (but also following the example of his friend Giovanni Verga), his naturalism presented a number of original elements. In Malia, first produced in 1891 and published in Teatro dialettale siciliano (Theater in Sicilian Dialect, 1911–1912), the protagonist Jana lives a lacerating inner drama that leads her to death. The traditional ingredients of the theater of verismo (honor, passion, greed) are thus reinterpreted in a new framework. His best-known work, however, is Lu paraninfu (The Paranymph, 1914), the story of a retired officer, Don Pasquali Minnedda, whose only obsession is arranging marriages, from which ensue all kinds of misunderstandings and comic situations, thanks also to a lively cast of ridiculous secondary characters leading up to the inevitable happy ending. After the publication of Il Marchese di Roccaverdina, Capuana worked intensely and published numerous volumes of short fiction and essays in which he confirmed his sensitivity and receptiveness for the new literary tendencies of the time but above all expressed an increasingly disenchanted and sceptical vision of the world. He thus gradually overcame his previous adhesion to the canons of positivism and reached the belief that the ‘‘isms’’ that had flourished in literature all had a relative value. 384

Biography Luigi Capuana was born in Mineo (Catania) on 29 May 1839, the firstborn son of a large rich family, and spent his childhood in Mineo, influenced by his Uncle Antonio, who educated him and convinced him to study law. He moved to Catania, 1857, where he befriended poets and men of letters, showing a natural inclination for classical studies. He worked with the Sicilian poet Lionardo Vigo on the composition of a collection of Sicilian songs, some invented but passed off as more ancient works. Capuana supported the national unification process and devoted his life to intense political activity, 1859. He lived in Florence, 1864–1869, where he met Giovanni Verga and worked as a theater critic. He served as mayor of Mineo, 1870–1876. He lived in Rome where he remained, 1888–1902, where he contributed to periodicals such as Fanfulla della domenica and Cronaca Bizantina and established relationships with critics and writers like Gabriele D’Annunzio. He taught at the university, 1890. In 1902 he returned to Catania, where he taught at the local university, 1910. He married Adelaide Bernardini, 1908. Luigi Capuana died on 29 November 1915. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Verismo Selected Works Novels Giacinta, 1879; Giacinta: secondo la prima edizione del 1879, edited by Marina Taglieri, 1998. Profumo, 1892. Il marchese di Roccaverdina, 1901. Rassegnazione, 1907; edited by Luciana Pasquini, 2000.

Short Stories ‘‘Profili di donne,’’ 1877. ‘‘Storia fosca,’’ 1883. ‘‘Homo,’’ 1883. ‘‘Fumando,’’ 1889. ‘‘Le appassionate,’’ 1893. ‘‘Le paesane,’’ 1894. ‘‘Nuove ‘‘paesane,’’ 1898. ‘‘Anime a nudo,’’ 1900. ‘‘Il Decameroncino,’’ 1901. ‘‘Delitto ideale,’’ 1902. ‘‘Un vampiro,’’ 1907. ‘‘Passa l’amore,’’ 1908. ‘‘Nel paese della Za`gara,’’ 1910. ‘‘La volutta` di creare,’’ 1911. ‘‘Gli ‘‘Americani’’ di Rabbato,’’ 1912. ‘‘Dalla terra natale,’’ 1915. ‘‘Le ultime paesane,’’ 1922.

VINCENZO CARDARELLI Poetry ‘‘Semiritmi,’’ 1888.

Plays Garibaldi, 1861. Giacinta, 1890. Teatro dialettale siciliano, vols. 1–3, 1911–1912; vols. 4–5, 1920–1921. Lu paraninfu, 1914. Ribelli: dramma inedito, edited by Gianni Oliva, 1981.

Essays Il teatro italiano contemporaneo, 1872. Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea, 2 vols., 1880–1882. Spiritismo?, 1884. Per l’arte, 1885; edited by Riccardo Scrivano, 1994. Libri e teatro, 1892. Mondo occulto, 1896; edited by Simona Cigliata, 1995. Gli ismi contemporanei, 1898. L’isola del sole, 1898. La scienza della letteratura, 1902.

Letters Carteggio Verga-Capuana, edited by Gino Raya, 1984. Luigi Capuana e le carte messaggiere, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 2 vols., 1996. Lettere inedite a Lionardo Vigo (1857–1875), edited by Luciana Pasquini, 2002.

Further Reading Gallini, Clara, La sonnambula meravigliosa. Magnetismo e ipnotismo dell’Ottocento italiano, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983. La Monaca, Donatella, Il marchese e la maestrina: Luigi Capuana e altri studi, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 2003. Madrignani, Carlo Alberto, Capuana e il naturalismo, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Pestelli, Carlo, Capuana novelliere. Stile della prosa e prosa in ‘‘stile,’’ Povegliano Veronese: Gutenberg, 1991. Raya, Gino, Bibliografia di Luigi Capuana, 1839–1968, Rome: Ciranna, 1969. Romagnoli Robuschi, Giuseppina, Luigi Capuana, scrittore per l’infanzia, Milan: Le stelle, 1969. Santangelo, Vincenzo, Luigi Capuana e i suoi critici, Rome: Ciranna, 1969. Scalia, Samuel Eugene, Luigi Capuana and His Times, New York: Vanni, 1952. Sipala, Paolo Mario, Capuana e Pirandello: storia e testi di una relazione letteraria, Catania: Bonanno, 1974. Storti Abate, Anna, Introduzione a Capuana, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1989. Traversa, Vincenzo, Luigi Capuana, Critic and Novelist, The Hague: Mouton, 1968. Tropea, Mario, Nomi ethos follia negli scrittori siciliani tra Ottocento e Novecento, Caltanissetta: Lussografica, 2000.

VINCENZO CARDARELLI (1887–1959) Writer and poet Vincenzo Cardarelli is mostly considered in relation with the literary experience of the periodical La Ronda, of which he was one of the founders, and, for a short time, also director, as well as the main theoretician. Self-taught, he consolidated his culture through readings of modern and contemporary authors, with a preference for French writers such as Blaise Pascal, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Pe´guy. Later on, he ‘‘discovered’’ Giacomo Leopardi, and particularly his Operette morali (Moral Essays, 1827), who became the principal model in his new poetics. He in fact began advocating a return to formal classicism, based on a refined prose, freed from sentimentalism and controlled by reason. Thus, Cardarelli intended to distance himself from the literary tendencies of the early twentieth century, characterized by experimentalism and the refusal of the Italian literary canons. He discarded the Italian authors after Leopardi, particularly

Giovanni Pascoli, to whom he dedicates a rather polemical survey in La Ronda, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Futurists, the crepuscolari poets, the early works of Ungaretti, and also the experience of La Voce, a journal with which he had previously collaborated. Against the extremism of the avant-gardes, Cardarelli proposed a form of ‘‘ritorno all’ordine’’ (return to order), meaning that the literary discourse should be characterized by a quiet regularity, a classical prose, intellectual and meditative tones, the richness of a solid morality, and should avoid any autobiographical gratification. In fact, though Cardarelli’s works show autobiographical references, they are changed into a profound meditation, a means for measuring human destiny and its relationship with nature. The stream of his poetry is constantly interrupted by the determination of explaining, commenting, motivating his choice for a chosen subject and style of writing. In this way, Cardarelli intended ‘‘to 385

VINCENZO CARDARELLI show an absolute model of prose, and he succeeds in this by denying any form of eloquence, any emotional writing, any verbal gratification (Folco Portinari, et al., ‘‘Il secondo Ottocento e il Novecento,’’ 1996). It is difficult to isolate a single work in Cardarelli’s production, as his whole opus is characterized by a continuous stylistic commitment to create an authentic ‘‘prosa d’arte.’’ His first work, Prologhi (Prologues, 1916), is often considered by critics as his best. It is a collection of prose and poetic writings, structured according to a scheme that will return also in the following works, Viaggi nel tempo (Journeys in Time, 1920) and Favole e memorie (Fables and Memories, 1925). The collection comprises 12 lyrics and a prose section that has the form of a poem in prose. The Prologhi begins with the author presenting himself and his art, underlining his limits, the clashes in his soul, and his aspirations. It is an internal dialogue that already reveals some of Cardarelli’s central themes, such as the sentiment of time, solitude, and the search for an elegant language. Viaggi nel tempo, which reproposes the same mixed structure of prose and poetry, is a transitional work. Here, Cardarelli enriched the precedent selection of topics with the theme of the encounters: encounters with nature, women, or historical literary figures such as Socrates, Ibsen, and Leopardi. The journeys of the title are quests for the meaning of life, and they start from the awareness that Cardarelli found in Leopardi’s works of the flowing of time and the endless repetition of the seasons, which underline the precariousness of the self. By alternating prose and poetry the poet also moved between instinctive and meditative moments, in the second of which he submitted his soul to the control of reason. In Prologhi, viaggi, favole (Prologues, Journeys, Tales, 1929), the author attempted a new vision of the universe with a journey at the origins of time. He searched for the self through the myths of humanity that he read with a Leopardian allegorical eye. He then reproposed and reread the biblical tales since the creation of humanity, and a sense of human suffering powerfully emerges. Poesie (Poems, 1936), published in successive stages (enlarged editions appeared in 1942 and 1946), accompanied Cardarelli throughout his artistic life. In comparison with the prose writings, his lyrics appear more linear and communicative, openly opposing the hermetic poetry that was becoming established in the same years. His poems unfold with linearity and clarity, yet not without a meditative tone and stylistic elegance. They show a 386

tendency to prose, however, often allowing for long passages of landscape descriptions, portraits of women, melancholic evocations of the end of youth, and the despair for the end of a love. Through his entire artistic production, Cardarelli incessantly returned to the question of the sentiment of death, and, with it, to related themes such as the consuming action of time, life’s progression to its extreme limit, youth yielding to old age. Yet, before death, the author dwelled also on solitude, though with illusory moments of trust in friendship, as in the poem ‘‘Amicizia’’ (Friendship, 1936): Noi non ci conosciamo. Penso ai giorni che, perduti nel tempo, c’incontrammo, alla nostra incresciosa intimita`. Ci siamo sempre lasciati senza salutarci, con pentimenti e scuse da lontano. Ci siam rispettati al passo, bestie caute, cacciatori affinati, a sostenere faticosamente la nostra parte di estranei. Ritrosie disperanti, pause vertiginose e insormontabili, dicevan, nelle nostre confidenze, il contatto evitato e il vano incanto. Qualcosa ci e` sempre rimasto, amaro vanto di non ceduto ai nostri abbandoni, qualcosa ci e` sempre mancato we do not know each other. I think of the day that, lost in time, we met, our unfortunate regrettable intimacy. We always left without saying goodbye, with regrets and apologies from far away. We showed respected at the step cautious animals, keen hunters, laboriously bearing our role as strangers. Despairing reluctances, vertiginous and insurmountable pauses, they spoke, in our confidences, of the avoided contact and the vain enchantment. Something was always left, sour pride of not surrendering to our abandons something we always missed

Other recurrent themes in Cardarelli’s lyrics are disappointment, refusal of love, the departing from beloved people and things, and the ultimate conclusion, where everything is canceled out. All

VINCENZO CARDARELLI these themes are then related to the sentiment of time, which almost entirely dominates his poetry. The apprehension and uncertainty characterizing his art find an explanation in his awareness of the changing of the self, in the recognition of the inexorable passage of the seasons and life. Thus, the poet needs to travel back in time to find the origins and the explanations of human life. These are journeys both in time and space, either to physical or imaginary places, often intended to exorcize death and exalt life. Yet, his journeys to the past also presuppose returns and rediscoveries, such as the one in Il sole a picco (The High Sun, 1929), in which the author experienced the land of his origins, the Etruscan civilization, the places of his childhood, and its beloved people, getting a grasp of the self through memory. Another important theme in Cardarelli’s art is nature, not only in the descriptions of seasons, nocturnal landscapes, dawns, and sunsets, but also in the evocation of the places of his childhood, magnified through the eyes of the imagination. Without surrendering to Romanticism, the author transferred his state of mind onto nature and found a perfect consonance between humanity and the surrounding landscape, between imagination and reality. In the rich variety of topics characterizing Cardarelli’s poetry, there is however a stylistic and inventive consistency, which, as Carmine Di Biase showed, ‘‘focuses and revolves around the central theme of the sentiment of time-space, whose passing and changing mark the very rhythm of life’’ (Invito alla lettura di Vincenzo Cardarelli, 1975).

Biography Vincenzo Cardarelli (pseudonym of Nazareno Caldarelli) was born in Corneto (today Tarquinia, Viterbo) on May 1, 1887. From a modest family, he spent the first part of his life in his native town, where he attended school, though irregularly because of his father’s opposition. After his father’s death, he left Tarquinia to Rome, where he began his cultural and journalistic apprenticeship as theater critic for the Socialist newspaper Avanti!, 1906. Cardarelli met the writer Sibilla Aleramo, with whom he had a relationship until 1912. He contributed to cultural journals such as Il Marzocco, La Voce, and Lirica. After a period in Florence (1911– 1914), he settled definitely in Rome, where, in 1919, he founded, together with Riccardo Bacchelli, Emilio Cecchi, and Antonio Baldini, the literary magazine La Ronda, from where he fought for a

classicist restoration modeled on Leopardi’s example. He traveled to Russia as a reporter for the newspaper Il Tevere, 1928. During World War II and in the postwar years, Cardarelli suffered from a physical paralysis and retreated in increasing isolation, which reinforced his reputation as an unsociable person. He was awarded the Strega Prize for Villa Tarantola, 1948. He directed the periodical La Fiera Letteraria and was a theater critic for the daily Il Tempo, 1949–1955. Cardarelli died on June 18, 1959, in Rome, at the hospital of the Polyclinic from a thrombosis complicated by bronchial pneumonia. PAOLO QUAZZOLO Selected Works Collections Opere complete, edited by Giuseppe Raimondi, Milan: Mondadori, 1962.

Prose Terra genitrice, 1924. Favole e memorie, 1925. Il sole a picco, 1929. Prologhi, viaggi, favole, 1929. Parole all’orecchio, 1929. Parliamo dell’Italia, 1931. Il cielo sulle citta`, 1939. Rimorsi, 1944. Lettere non spedite, 1946. Solitario in Arcadia, 1947. Villa Tarantola, 1948. Il viaggiatore insocievole, 1953. Viaggio d’un poeta in Russia, 1954.

Poetry ‘‘Prologhi,’’ 1916. ‘‘Viaggi nel tempo,’’ 1920. ‘‘Giorni in piena,’’ 1934. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1936; expanded edition, 1942; expanded edition, 1948. ‘‘Poesie nuove,’’ 1946. ‘‘Invettiva e altre poesie disperse,’’ edited by Bruno Blasi and Vanni Scheiwiller, 1964.

Further Reading Benevento, Aurelio, Vincenzo Cardarelli: l’opera in versi e in prosa, Naples: Loffredo, 1996. Boni, Massimiliano, Cardarelli, Montale, Tilgher: appunti per un ritratto e quattro note, Bologna: EDIM, 1980. Burdett, Charles, Vincenzo Cardarelli and His Contemporaries: Fascist Politics and Literary Culture, Oxford: Claredon Press, 1999. D’ Alerio, Dante, Vincenzo Cardarelli sindacalista rivoluzionario: politica e letteratura in Italia nel primo Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2005.

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VINCENZO CARDARELLI Di Biase, Carmine, Invito alla lettura di Vincenzo Cardarelli, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Fuselli, Roberto, Sul cammino di Cardarelli, Bologna: Massimo Boni, 1985. Grasso, Giuseppe, La poesia di Vincenzo Cardarelli, Rome: Cadmo, 1982. Martellini, Luigi (editor), Vincenzo Cardarelli: il sogno, la scrittura, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2003. Piccioni, Leone, Cardarelliana, Florence: Panati, 1993.

Portinari, Folco, et al., ‘‘Il secondo Ottocento e il Novecento,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, vol. 6, Turin: UTET, 1996. Romani, Bruno, Vincenzo Cardarelli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Vecchio, Salvatore, Vincenzo Cardarelli: l’etrusco di Tarquinia, Rome: Edizioni Italiane di Letteratura e Scienze, 1989.

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI (1835–1907) Whether considered as a late and even anachronistic chapter in the history of Italian classicism, or as an anticipation of the ‘‘dark’’ and disillusioned sensibilities of post-Romantic scapigliatura, Giosue` Carducci’s anti-Romantic poetry, written in the critical years 1857–1899, is representative of all the passions, illusions, and disillusionments inspired by the Italian Risorgimento. Raised in the provincial, dormant Tuscan Maremma and then educated in Florence at the Jesuit College of the Scolopi by the hyper-classicist and ‘‘Tuscanist’’ Father Geremia Barsottini, Carducci soon found himself caught up in the querelle of classicists and romantics that characterized Florentine intellectual life in the 1850s. As the heir of an artistic patrimony—Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Renaissance—that had been eclipsed by the recent cultural hegemony of Milan, Florence resisted all trends coming from the new cultural capital. The novel, above all, which Milanese Alessandro Manzoni had theorized and promoted as the Romantic genre par excellence, was denounced by the local intelligentsia as a fundamentally un-Italian literary form. Against the ‘‘foreign’’ novels of Walter Scott and Manzoni, the academies and journals of Florence advocated, with a mixture of narrowmindedness and sheer dilettantism, a return to the classical genres and forms (such as the sonnet) of the great Tuscan writers of the trecento. Under the slogan ‘‘we ought to be Italians,’’ Carducci gave intellectual coherence and poetic substance to this otherwise sterile parochialism, which, by 1856, has been institutionalized in the academic circle of the Amici Pedanti. The program of the Amici Pedanti led by Carducci had one single 388

objective, which was political and cultural at the same time. First, after the failure of the revolutions of 1848, the Amici called for a departure from radical Jacobean politics fashioned on the model of the French Revolution and proposed a more Italian type of liberal or socialist reformism. Second, from a cultural perspective, they felt the need to dispose of the Romantic experience as a whole, since it was responsible for the contamination of Italian culture with foreign models. For Carducci and his circles, the Risorgimento and the Unification were inseparable from the question of national culture. On May 18, 1856, Carducci wrote to his Pedante friend Giuseppe Chiarini complaining that the peninsula was not only occupied militarily but was also subject to a literary invasion. From this xenophobic point of view, a return to classicism meant nothing less than a resistance against all foreign yokes, and the restoration of the civic poetry of Dante and Petrarch, as well as Alfieri, Foscolo, and Leopardi. That Carducci, in his spirited defenses of national culture, often assumed that what is national equals Tuscan, remains one of the critical problems about his work. He is deeply convinced, for instance, that the question of national language, which engaged the likes of Alessandro Manzoni and Graziadio Isaia Ascoli, was but an irrelevant one. Despite all evidence to the contrary, for Carducci, Italians had one language, and that language was Tuscan. Furthermore, the Tuscan one found in Dante or Leopardi was not the highly individualized language of the Romantic bourgeoisie but a classicist encounter of aristocratic and popular language. In sum, it was national and popular.

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI Carducci’s first poetic collections, the Rime (Rhymes, 1857), or Rime di San Miniato from its place of publication, and the Juvenilia (Poems of Youth), which were published in Levia gravia (Light and Heavy, 1868), show such a mixture of professed nationalism and anti-Manzonism. In adherence to classicist precepts of imitatio, these collections can be viewed as early exercises in which the aspiring poet learns the art of the trade by emulating established models: for love poetry (Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Petrarch), for elegy (Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi), and for satirical invective (Giuseppe Giusti). The praise of the ancients as examples of high style and lofty civic engagement, which provides the material for many poems, is indeed explicit in the Dedication and Preface of Juvenilia. It is also a pretext to chastise contemporary ‘‘sophists and poets.’’ Thus, for Carducci, the rich apparatus of classical citations, allusions, and reminiscences represents a form of poetic militancy against the corruption of both taste and virtue in present-day Italy. Classicism becomes a cultural program that identifies poetic value with the overcoming of Romantic sentimentalism and a return to the civic morality of the poet-patriot. An interesting by-product of such an exercise in classicism is, paradoxically, linguistic hybridism: The more Carducci reverts to a classical (if not archaic) lexicon, the more he is forced to coin neologisms in order adequately portray present-day reality. In this coexistence of Homeric battlefields and cannonballs with Republican Rome and ‘‘liverpolica’’ (Liverpoolian) England, of Horace with ‘‘Voltero’’ (Voltaire), lies perhaps the most interesting aspect of Carducci’s early poems, which are an important chapter in the history of the modernization of Italian literary language. In 1860, Carducci moved from Florence to Bologna, where he was called to teach at the university. The change was an important one because it offered him the possibility to mold, as a teacher and academic, future generations of educators and poets (Giovanni Pascoli was among his students). Leaving Florence also meant a widening of his cultural horizon well beyond the Amici Pedanti. From this point on, Carducci no longer resisted foreign literary invasions and began to read the socialist Proudhon, the Romantic Sainte-Beuve, and even the European Romantics par excellence, Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo. He was also exposed to the radical environment of Bolognese revolutionaries. For example, the ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (Hymn to Satan, 1865), like many of the poems composed in the 1860s and published in Levia

Gravia (under the pseudonym of Enotrio Romano), reacts to the historical events that were shaping the new Italy. Carlo Pisacane’s heroic expeditions to Ponza and Sapri to free the Italian patriots from Austrian jails, and, most importantly, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s liberation of Sicily from the Bourbons in 1860, created a climate of revolutionary euphoria, in which Carducci poetically partook. In ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (a William Blake–like allegory of Revolution and Reaction, which he would later disclaim as youthful radicalism), he singled out two forces driving European history: Satan, symbolizing health, progress, democratic freedom, and the revolutionary will of the people; and the anti-Satan, embodying the force of despotism, malady, and decadence institutionalized in the forms of political and religious power. Attacked by contemporaries not for its anticlericalism but for being antidemocratic (its populist celebration of revolutions is imbued with obscure classicist allusions), the ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ sets the tone of youthful rebellion, maudit Satanism, Baudelairian posing, and moralistic denunciation of petty bourgeois mentality. In other poems more overt is the sense that Satan’s work is unstoppable, and that the poetry of revolution, in the 1860s, has decayed into the prose of a mediocre political reality. Levia Gravia is perhaps the most ambivalent of Carducci’s collections: along with a certain euphoria for Italy’s Unification, there is a profound sense of disillusionment, exemplary of an entire generation, for the incompleteness of the Unification (papal Rome was annexed only in 1870). Carducci’s dismay at the inability of the Italians, whose virtues he had sung in the Juvenilia, to achieve anything without international negotiations and foreign aide, is genuine. Giambi ed epodi (Iambics and Epodes, 1882), collecting poems from 1867 to 1879, reaffirms Carducci’s civic indignation and social denunciation already present in Levia gravia but also begins, from its very title, a new epoch of metric experimentation. The iambics Carducci had in mind were those of Greek and Latin classical satiric poetry, notably Archilocus and Horace. The term ‘‘epodes’’ alludes to the rhythm and prosody of ancient satire. The overall satiric tone attests to Carducci’s continued faith in the loftiest ideals of civic life and to his frustration at a less heroic reality that fails to meet his high standards. While still indebted to the model of civic and even militant poetry, Giambi ed epodi introduces a new dimension to Carducci’s poetics of disillusionment: the impotence of poetry to change or even influence 389

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI historical reality. But what the poet could not accomplish, indeed il popolo (the people) can: This is truly the leitmotif of the collection. Carducci’s popolo is endowed with the whole repertoire of Romantic virtues: uncontaminated instincts and superior ideals, always ready to fight for a new cause, always ready for martyrdom and heroism. It is utterly committed and selfless. Carducci, who was once accused of writing about revolutions but never participating in one, excused himself on the account of having to feed his family. The antithesis of such popular virtues is of course Italy’s hegemonic ruling class, the despicable bourgeoisie of parliamentary negotiations and half measures, but also, and more importantly, the intellectuals, like Carducci himself, who failed to lead the people to their just historical nemesis. As Giambi ed epodi concludes with the poet’s mea culpa, the annexation of Rome and the normalization of the political situation seem to relieve Carducci from his defiant civic responsibilities. The satirical Muse made room for a more docile, homely Muse. In a letter to his old friend Chiarini dated 10 December 1871, Carducci communicated his intention to leave satirical poetry behind in favor of a pure form of art for art’s sake. As a matter of fact, by disposing of the tone of invective that had defined Giambi ed epodi, the poet also relinquished the mythical Frankenstein he had contributed to create: that is, the people. Convinced by now that the Italian Unification process had exhausted its historical course, Carducci believed that internal peace should be the next goal. But internal peace was jeopardized by peasants asking for the longpromised redistribution of lands and church estates; by workers’ strikes in Milan and Turin; by the formation of a revolutionary International; and by the panic caused by news of the Paris Commune spreading in Italy. It is therefore not surprising that the diagnosis was that the people should be stopped and the bourgeoisie protected. Carducci turned monarchist. He wrote a poem entitled ‘‘Alla regina d’Italia’’ (To the Queen of Italy. 1878) and even a curious essay, ‘‘Eterno femminino regale’’ (The Eternal Regal Feminine, 1882), which claimed that the monarchy was, in Italy, the only ‘‘realized ideal.’’ The transformation of the revolutionary poet into an institutional one, and the shift from invective to more elegant tones, ensured the possibility of Carducci becoming the literary giant, the best seller of the new Italy. In these years, working-class crowds cheered him, the bourgeois bought his books, and the nobility courted his presence in its salons: Carducci had become a 390

national icon—responsible for shaping the cultural and poetic physiognomy of a unified country. Rime nuove (New Lyrics, 1887) and the third edition of Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes, 1893) collect the poems written during these years of celebrity. Conscious of his role as national poet and cultural conscience of Italy, Carducci sought inspiration from the once-abhorred foreign literatures. Along with the usual classical authors (Archilocus, Sappho, Anacreon), the Rime nuove and the Odi barbare reveal the poet’s more modern literary preoccupations: Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe for their bleakness, Leconte de Lisle for the myth of barbarism, and then Heine, Goethe, and Hugo for the tone of classicist sentimentalism. Although such opening to European literatures widened the scope of Carducci’s poetry, both the Rime nuove and the Odi barbare are hardly experimental. Long past was the time when Carducci searched for his own poetic voice: The poems composed after 1870 show the confidence of a poet consciously and solemnly planning, without taking too many risks, his ultimate canonization. Carducci’s last collection, Rime e ritmi (Rhymes and Rhythms, 1899), is stylistically a composite of all preceding ones, and it combines traditional verses reminiscent of Juvenilia with the more experimental classicist meters of Giambi ed epodi and Odi barbare. Thematically, this new collection is characterized by a radicalization of Carducci’s monarchic reactionary nationalism that may well irritate even the most conservative of modern readers. A conviction in Italy’s historic mission was at the basis of his decision to poetically celebrate the most important episodes of Italian history. In these poems, the Risorgimento becomes myth, and all the frictions between realists and revolutionaries, republicans and monarchists (let alone the invectives against Italian quiescence) that characterized the history of the Risorgimento are set aside to make room for mere hagiography. Along with the celebration of popular heroes who sacrificed their lives for the nation, Rime e ritmi introduces the new (for Italian poetry) topic of colonialism. Written before the defeat of Adowa, Ethiopia, in 1896, these poems about Italian colonial glories exercised some influence on Gabriele D’Annunzio. Carducci stopped writing poetry long before his death. Already Rime e ritmi did not indicate any new direction for Carducci’s poetry except the revisitation of old meters and modes. Much of its success seems to derive from its anachronistic tone: It must have sounded, especially after Adowa, like a reminiscence from the days of Risorgimento heroics.

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI Carducci’s prose production is gathering particular interest today as an example of an ‘‘Italian style’’ of eloquence that defined the institutional rhetoric (public speeches, eulogies, praises of heroes, commemorative plaques) of post-1870 Italy until, and arguably past, the Fascist era. Along with epigraphs and the celebratory pieces, characterized by an archaic and baroque language, worth mentioning are the political and militant pamphlets, and the pieces of literary criticism, in which Carducci distanced himself not only from Manzoni’s Romanticism but also from the historical Hegelianism of Francesco De Sanctis. Read in postwar Italy as a typical document of positivist criticism, reevaluated in the 1970s for its prescient attention to formal values, and praised in the 1990s for its attention to geographical and regional differences, Carducci’s critical writings are at times rather naı¨ve, especially when compared to those of De Sanctis. They remain, nonetheless, extremely important to understand the formation of a generation of writers and critics (the so-called northern philologists versus De Sanctis’s Neapolitan school) that Carducci taught in Bologna between 1860 and 1904. Finally, especially instructive are Carducci’s book reviews, which remain perhaps the highest achievement in the cynical art of the stroncatura, the savage trashing of both book and writer.

Biography Giosue Carducci was born in Val di Castello (Lucca) on July 27, 1835; the family moved to Bolgheri (Livorno), in the Tuscan Maremma, 1838. His father Michele, suspected of revolutionary activities, moved to Bolgheri, 1848. In Florence, Carducci attended the College of the Scolopi, 1849. He became a founding member of the classicist Accademia dei Filomusi, 1852, and studied at the Universita` Normale Superiore of Pisa, 1853–1956. He was active in the controversies between classics and romantics and constituted the group of the ‘‘Amici Pedanti,’’ 1856. He taught rhetoric at the high school of San Miniato (Florence), where he published his first collection of poems, 1857. Carducci married his cousin Elvira Menicucci, 1859. The Minister of Education offered him a professorship in ‘‘Italian Eloquence’’ at the University of Bologna, 1860, but he was fired from the University of Bologna for alleged conspiratorial activities, 1867. He was reinstated at the university and published Levia gravia, 1868. His son Dante died on November 9, 1870. He conducted an epistolary correspondence with Carolina Cristofori-Piva,

whom the poet addressed with the more classical name of Lidia, 1871, and had an affair with Lidia, 1872. Carducci met the royal family in Bologna, 1878. He collaborated with the philo-monarchic journal Fanfulla della domenica, 1879. He met Annie Vivanti, his last love affair, 1890. He was contested by his students at the University of Bologna for his radicalized monarchism, 1891. He defended Francesco Crispi’s colonial policies even after the Italian defeat at Adowa, 1894–1895. He published Rime e ritmi, 1899. He retired from the University of Bologna, 1904 and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, 1906. Carducci died in Bologna on February 16, 1907. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO Selected Works Collections Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giosue` Carducci, 30 vols., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1935–1940. Lettere, 20 vols., Bologna: Zanchelli, 1938–1957. Selected verse, translated by David H. Higgins, Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1994.

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 1857. ‘‘Levia gravia,’’ 1868. ‘‘Odi barbare,’’ 1877. ‘‘Giambi ed epodi,’’ 1882. ‘‘Nuove odi barbare,’’ 1882. ‘‘C ¸ a ira: settembre 1792,’’ 1883. ‘‘Rime nuove,’’ 1887; as The New Lyrics of Giosue` Carducci, translated by William Fletcher Smith, 1942. ‘‘Terze odi barbare,’’ 1889. ‘‘Odi barbare,’’ 1893; as Odi barbare, translated by William Fletcher Smith, 1950. ‘‘Rime e ritmi,’’ 1899.

Other Prose critiche, edited by Giovanni Falaschi, 1987. Carteggio, ottobre 1888–aprile 1904, edited by Torquato Barbieri, 2000.

Further Reading Binni, Walter, Carducci e altri saggi, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Caccia, Ettore, Poesia e ideologia per Carducci, Brescia: Paideia, 1970. Contarino, Rosario, and Rosa Maria Monastra, Carducci e il tramonto del classicismo, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Croce, Benedetto, Giosue` Carducci: studio critico, Bari: Laterza, 1920. Della Torre, Renato, Invito alla lettura di Giosue` Carducci, Milan: Mursia, 1985. Flora, Francesco, La poesia e la prosa di Giosue` Carducci, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1959. Getto, Giovanni, Carducci e Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1957.

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GIOSUE` CARDUCCI Masini, Pier Carlo, Poeti della rivolta: da Carducci a Lucini, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Panzini, Alfredo, and Renato Serra, Carducci, Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1994. Pascoli, Giovanni, Commemorazione di Giosue` Carducci nella nativa Pietrasanta, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1907. Pasquazi, Silvio, Antimanzonismo del Carducci e altri saggi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1966. Pavarini, Stefano, Carducci, Palermo: Palumbo, 2003. Piromalli, Antonio, Introduzione a Carducci, Bari: Laterza, 1988. Russo, Luigi, Carducci senza retorica, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Scalia, Euge`ne, Carducci: His Critics and Translators in England and America 1881–1932, New York: Vanni, 1937. Toppani, Innocente, Carducci e il mondo latino, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1973.

ODI BARBARE, 1893 Poetry by Giosue` Carducci

Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes) were initially published in three separate volumes as Odi barbare (1877), Nuove Odi barbare (New Barbaric Odes, 1882), and Terze Odi barbare (Third Book of Barbaric Odes, 1889). In 1893, Carducci restructured these volumes into a single one, divided into two parts. Composed at a time when he was preparing an edition of the Rime nuove (New Rhymes, 1887), the Odi barbare comprise many of the themes and concerns of his previous collection, most notably, the poet’s adherence to a classicist model of poetry understood as civic engagement. The novelty of the Odi barbare is stylistic. These poems represent an attempt to return to classical meters and transpose them into modern verse. The ancient system of versification, typically Greek or Latin, organized the verse according to the length, and not, as is normative in modern poetry, according to the rhythmic accentuation of the syllables. By now well secured within the boundaries of official culture, Carducci was confident that he could take some formal risks. Whereas in the Rime nuove he had conformed to the taste of the intellectual e´lites and his classicism was perceived as a continuation of the poetic discourse advanced 392

by Ugo Foscolo and Giacomo Leopardi, in the Odi barbare, Carducci felt that he no longer needed to abide to any models. He abandoned the blank verse of Foscolo and the canzone of Leopardi, recapturing instead the architectural complexity of Petrarch’s canzone as well as the rhythmic experimentation of classical lyrics. Thus the Odi barbare attest to and call for a new reform of the classic tradition. They are so entitled, with a clear allusion to Leconte de Lisle’s Poe`mes barbares (1862), because they experiment in adapting ancient odes into Romance languages, born from the corruption of Latin. For Carducci, such a conversion would have been viewed as ‘‘barbaric’’ by the ancients. However, his position is not that of a naı¨ve return to a mythical past but rather a critical operation that involves reviving and confronting the classics with the demands of present-day poetic experimentations. Although some models are easy to discern (Horace, Gabriello Chiabrera, and the neoclassic Giovanni Fantoni), this collection includes some of Carducci’s more original and memorable lyrics. This return to classical meters also has social and political implications. Carducci assimilated Greek metrics not by direct imitation of Pindar and Sappho but through the mediation of Horace, in whose style he identified the model suited for unified Italy. Thus it is Rome, not Athens, that inspires the nationalist myth of Carducci’s classicism; and to Rome he devoted an impressive number of the poems. After the dissemblement of the Papal States and their annexation to the kingdom of Italy in 1870, the myth of Rome was a central preoccupation for the new nation. Carducci participated in such epochal discussions by pitting the myth of the great empire of the past against the decay of the present. Albeit liberated, Rome was no longer what it ought to be. His poetry entered into a more conservative phase. In ‘‘Alle fonti del Clitumno’’ (At the Sources of the Clitumno), he depicted emblematically the old happiness of a pastoral world of peasants and simple sentiments corrupted by the ruling of the Catholic Church. Nationalism and anticlericalism resurface in ‘‘Nell’annuale della fondazione di Roma,’’ written for the celebrations of the 2,630th anniversary of the founding of Rome (1877). For Carducci, the pontiff was accountable for the loss of all the ancient glories, and these poems are reminiscent of his polemical secularism in ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (Hymn to Satan, 1865) as well as the coeval attacks of Italian patriots against the Pope’s ‘‘betrayal’’ of the Risorgimento. With its

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI preaching of asceticism and renunciation, Christianity was primarily responsible for the decline of Roman civilization. ‘‘Dinanzi alle Terme di Caracalla’’ (Before the Baths of Caracalla), a poem in sapphic stanzas, translates this discrepancy between the grandeur of past and the miseries of the present into the Romantic figure of the ruins: What remains of the Empire is nothing but a heap of rubble, a site where ‘‘uomini novelli’’ (new men) desecrated the monuments of antiquity, now mere subject matter for a poetic archeology of what no longer exists. This recurrent feeling of belonging to a great civilization now gone, of being excluded from a heroic past, transformed the poet into an elegist living the contradictions of his own epoch as a formal dichotomy between old meters and modern barbarisms. Old meters, like ancient civilizations, cannot be fully restored; and the poet’s experimental e´lan is a constant negotiation of past and present. Compared to the Rime nuove, the Odi barbare reveal a sort of Romantic melancholic disenchantment, which intensifies in the second part of the collection, when the poet focused more and more on his sorrow rather than on the larger canvas of public history. Whereas in the Rime nuove Carducci could still find shelter from the present in the memories of the uncontaminated Tuscan Maremma of his youth, in the Odi barbare no recollection of Rome, or any other place for what matters, can prevent the observation of its present corruption. Reality is nothing more that the perception of a world devoid of meaning; a world at its twilight. Landscapes become funereal, dark and frigid: for example, in ‘‘Nevicata’’ (Snowfall), where the premonitory signs of death are highlighted by the winter storm; or in ‘‘Alla stazione in una mattina d’autunno’’ (At the Station, on an Autumn Morning), composed in alcaic stanzas, where the poet describes the departure of his beloved on a cold, rainy morning at the Bologna railway station. Both poems evoke the gloomy atmosphere that underlines much northern Romantic poetry. In Odi barbare, the sense of a larger epochal disillusionment coincides with a more intimate sense of melancholia: Carducci, the late descendant of a once-glorious race, experienced the sadness of a man who has reached the winter of his life. His ‘‘barbaric’’ odes attest to the epochal distance between the old tone of the epic and the modern mood of angst, grief, and spleen. The classical model of civic poetry became, at times, mere self-commiseration. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO

Editions First editions: Odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1877; Nuove odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1882; Terze odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1889; collected as Odi barbare, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1893. Critical editions: Odi barbare, edited by Gianni A. Papini, Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 1988. Translations: as Odi barbare, translated by William Fletcher Smith, New York: S.F. Vanni, 1950

Further Reading Allan, Alberto, Dizionario delle voci, delle forme e dei versi notevoli contenuti nelle Odi barbare e in Rime e ritmi di G. Carducci, Pavia: Mattei, 1913. Caruso, Carlo, ‘‘Metri barbari, verso libero,’’ in Poe´tiques barbares/Poetiche barbare, edited by Juan Rigoli and Carlo Caruso, Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Ferrari, Demetrio, Commento delle Odi barbare di Giosue` Carducci, 3 vols., Bologna: Zanichelli, 1919–1922. Giordani, Maria Anna, Le Odi barbare di Giosue` Carducci, Mantua: CITEM, 1968. Lopriore, Giuseppe Italo, ‘‘Saggio d’una lettura critica delle ‘Odi barbare,’’’ Preludio, 1(1950), 1–47. Papini, Gianni A., Osservazioni sugli autografi delle ‘‘Odi barbare’’ carducciane, Florence: Sansoni, 1964. Petrini, Mario, Letture delle prime Odi barbare (1877), Pisa: Libreria goliardica, 1962. Petrini, Mario, Postille al Carducci barbaro, Messina and Florence: G. d’Anna, 1963. Piromalli, Antonio, ‘‘Giosue` Carducci: Le ‘Odi barbare,’’’ Cristallo, 30:3(1988), 19–36. Robecchi, Franco, Carducci, poeta barbaro, Milan: Cooperativa libraria I.U.L.M., 1981.

RIME NUOVE, 1887 Poetry by Giosue` Carducci

Published in the heyday of Giosue` Carducci’s popular and critical fame, the Rime nuove (New Lyrics) assembles poems previously included in other collections or that appeared in literary journals. By then Carducci was conscious of his new role as the bard of a nation. The title alludes not so much to newly composed poems, but rather to their selection and critical arrangement carefully orchestrated by Carducci himself: These 105 poems, divided into nine books and ranging from 1861 to 1887, represent a kind of autobiography in verse, the story of a 393

GIOSUE` CARDUCCI poetic education; an ambitious project aimed at providing an authoritative manifesto of his poetics. The collection enjoyed instant success, and, with the Odi barbare, became the capstone of Carducci’s oeuvre. Rime nuove opens, significantly, with an Anachreontic ode entitled ‘‘Alla rima’’ (To Rhyme), in which Carducci proclaimed his continued faith in the rhythmic pacing of classical vernacular poetry and attacked modern experiments in the area of blank verse. Other poems present the author as the heir of a classical, more specifically Italian tradition that harks back to the Tuscan Middle Ages and humanism: among them, ‘‘Al sonetto’’ (To the Sonnet), ‘‘Omero’’ (Homer), ‘‘Virgilio’’ (Virgil), ‘‘Dante,’’ and ‘‘Commentando il Petrarca’’ (Commenting on Petrarch). Carducci also wanted to be remembered as an innovator capable of revitalizing old meters and rhymes. Then he chose poems with a modern sensibility, which display a more personal inspiration: the sentimental ‘‘Pianto antico’’ (Ancient Lament) and ‘‘Funere mersit acerbo’’ (Plunged in Bitter Death), in which he lamented the sudden passing of his 3-year-old son, Dante, and painfully summoned his dead brother to welcome the soul of his little boy; the gothic ‘‘Notte d’inverno’’ (Winter Night); the melancholic ‘‘Nostalgia’’; and the picturesque ‘‘Traversando la maremma toscana’’ (Crossing the Tuscan Maremma). Whereas earlier collections were bound by a strict adherence to conventional models, the Rime nuove proposes a lighter version of classicism, tempered by Romantic sentimentalism. Though ancient lyric genres (sonnet, ode, and canzone) are still predominant, modern forms (such as ballad) were also included. Arguably the most modern of Carducci’s compositions remains ‘‘Davanti San Guido’’ (In front of San Guido), a masterpiece of intimate and solipsistic sentimentalism beginning with the poet traveling on a train in the midst of a bucolic countryside after meeting his beloved Lina. Nostalgia for the abandoned lover soon turns into nostalgia for his carefree childhood. The translation of melancholic sentiment onto the soothing beauty of nature, which was at the basis of the Romantic experience of Heine and Wordsworth, is a striking novelty for Italian lyrics and would later inspire Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli. By the time Carducci published the Rime nuove, he had politically shifted from a distinctively

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republican sensibility to one of monarchic conservatism; however, he selected a few poems written earlier in the spirit of the liberal and Jacobin ideals. One of 12 sonnets devoted to the events of 1792, ‘‘C ¸ a ira!’’ (It Will Happen), titled after the songmanifesto of the French Revolution, ignited heated discussions in 1887. Carducci felt compelled to answer his critics with an apologetic essay, also titled ‘‘C ¸ a ira!,’’ in which he assured that the poem was just a poem and not a revolutionary anthem. The ninth and last book is devoted to a single poem, ‘‘Congedo’’ (Farewell), in which Carducci celebrated himself as an exemplary prophet-poet: Neither courtier nor clown, the poetic genius forged artifacts out of humankind’s loves, memories, nostalgias, hopes, and disillusionments. This poem, an apt conclusion to the Rime nuove, is a synthesis of Carducci’s poetics. ROBERTO M. DAINOTTO Editions First edition: Rime nuove, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1887. Critical edition: Rime nuove, edited by Pietro Paolo Trompeo and Giambattista Salinari, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1961. Translation: as The New Lyrics of Giosue` Carducci, translated by William Fletcher Smith, Colorado Springs: Privately printed, 1942.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Motivazioni oscure di una poesia troppo chiara,’’ Bimestre, 2:1(1970), 1–5. De Michelis, Eurialo, ‘‘Il ‘silenzio verde,’ o della sinestesia in Carducci,’’ Nuova antologia, 493(1965), 463–482. Gorni, Guglielmo, ‘‘Il melograno, l’asino e il cardo (su due ‘Rime nuove’ del Carducci),’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 50(1992), 183–195. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Nell’officina carducciana,’’ Italica, 43:3(1966), 264–275. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Una lettura di ‘Pianto antico’ (con un’appendice),’’ Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 57:2(2004), 169–178. Papini, Gianni A., ‘‘Ipotesi e realta` per dieci primavere elleniche,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 32(1974), 205–282. Ruggiero, Gerardo, ‘‘Tempo, natura e storia nel ‘Comune rustico’ di Giosue` Carducci,’’ Critica letteraria, 16:1 (1988), 141–150. Salinari, Giambattista, ‘‘Storia ed interpretazione della lirica carducciana ‘Brindisi funebre,’’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 135(1958), 304–316.

ANNIBAL CARO

ANNIBAL CARO (1507–1566) Annibal Caro was a poet, playwright, translator of Latin and Greek, and diplomat who perhaps most vividly realized sixteenth-century classicism. A cleric and courtier, Caro was also the protagonist in one of the greatest literary quarrels of the Renaissance. The young Caro’s friendship with the humanist man of letters Benedetto Varchi introduced him to the literary circle of Giovanni Gaddi, clerk of the Apostolic Chamber and a patron of the publication of classical and contemporary works, to whom he became private secretary. Through Gaddi, he made the acquaintance of literary figures such as Cardinal Bembo and Benvenuto Cellini and became a member of the Roman Accademia dei Virtuosi, a society of literati and papal secretaries who showed off their technical ability through literary dialogues. In the company of the academy, Caro penned at least three burlesque parodies and became well known for his comic writing. Gli straccioni (The Scruffy Scoundrels, 1582), Caro’s only published play, seems to integrate the author’s comic sensibility and linguistic interests with ‘‘realistic’’ aspects of life in contemporary Rome. The structure of the play combines elements of erudite comedy and poesia bernesca, a burlesque satirical style (named after Francesco Berni) that reverses conventional literary models and portrays deformed images of reality and social values. Three loosely connected plots are delineated: the story of the two straccioni, based on well-known Roman citizens, brothers Giovanni and Battista, who don the clothing of beggars after their unsuccessful lawsuit against the Bank of San Giorgio; the love story, derived from Achilles Tatius’s Greek romance Leucippe and Cleitophon, of Tindaro and his Giulietta, who is abducted and assumed dead, only to reappear before Tindaro is forced to marry another woman; and finally the revelation of Argentina as the long-lost niece of the straccioni. The secrecy with which Caro treated the play’s production and the jealousy with which he thereafter guarded it from publication have caused some scholars to suggest that the play served a purpose of more than mere entertainment. Pier Luigi Farnese, son of Pope Paul III, commissioned Caro to write the play upon employment as his private secretary

in 1543 and seems to have taken an active role in its development. The result is a masterpiece in Tuscan vernacular prose fulfilling all of the expectations in the tradition of the commedia erudita but with a propagandistic subtext, promoting specific enterprises by the Farnese family. The play is set in a new Rome under the Farnese reforms in which the ‘‘hero’’ and the only rational character in the play, the attorney Messer Rossello, acts as representative of the Farnese regime and restorer of order. Scholars further suggest an allusion in the title to the 1531 revolt of the straccioni, a reference to the poor citizens of Lucca in defense of whom Caro’s former employer, Monsignor Guidiccioni, wrote a well-known speech, the Orazione ai nobili di Lucca (Speech to the Noblemen of Lucca, 1557). Diplomatic assignments and the assassination of Pier Luigi prevented Caro from staging Gli straccioni. Long after his patron’s death, however, the author repeatedly refused permission for the play to be copied or performed. His insistence that its moment had passed, testified by several letters, suggests the existence of an outdated political aim. It was published posthumously in 1582, and only in 1942 was it edited according to its original manuscript (Vaticano Urbinate 764). Caro’s poetry is important for its stylistic and linguistic experimentation and is said to exemplify the height of the development of the verso sciolto, or blank verse, in Italy. His place in poetic history, however, is perhaps secured by his well-known antagonism toward the critic Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–1571) in one of the greatest literary and philological disputes of the sixteenth century. The dispute is centered around the poem ‘‘Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro’’ (Come to the shade of the great golden lilies), one among the 100 sonnets and five canzoni in a collection commissioned by Alessandro Farnese in 1553 in praise of the French house of Valois. Castelvetro criticized not only Annibal Caro’s lack of Petrarchan style but also his use of non-Tuscan and unconventional or vernacular linguistic elements. Incensed by this critique, Caro launched a bitter attack against Castelvetro, writing a defense of linguistic invention in the Apologia degli Accademici di Banchi contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro (Apology of the Banchi 395

ANNIBAL CARO Academics against Ludovico Castelvetro, 1558), a series of texts in which fictitious characters emphasize the importance of enriching literary Tuscan with components of the spoken language. The popular volume was reprinted three times by the original publisher in Parma and later printed in Florence, Milan, Venice, and Turin. Castelvetro replied with Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro (Argument on Some Things Noted in the Canzone of Annibal Caro, 1559). Caro, greatly insulted by the criticism, accused Castelvetro of heresy and denounced him to Church authorities. Although the accusations were found false, Castelvetro left his native Modena and eventually Italy. After Caro’s death, Benedetto Varchi further defended his position in L’Ercolano, subtitled Dialogo nel quale si ragiona generalmente delle lingue e in particolare della fiorentina e della toscana (Ercolano: Dialogue in Which One Argues Generally about Languages, in Particular about Florentine and Tuscan, 1570). In addition to his legacy as a poet and playwright, Caro left behind a number of translations and a vast collection of letters. A talented translator, he enjoyed exploiting the expressive possibilities of the vernacular and adroitly transformed the languages of antiquity into some of the most classical poetry in Italian. His earliest translation, written between 1537 and 1539, was Longus’s Gli amori pastorali di Dafni e Cloe (The Pastoral Love of Daphnis and Chloe, 1784), followed by Aristotle’s Rettorica (Rhetorics, 1570) and the works of Saints Cyprian and Gregory Nazianzen. Undoubtedly his most famous translation is the Aeneid of Virgil. Written in hendecasyllables and published in 1581, Caro’s Aeneid endured until the twentieth century as a standard text in Italian schools. The epistles, published in two volumes entitled Lettere familiari (Familiar Letters, 1573–1575), provide a detailed history of the period, painting a colorful portrait of life in sixteenth-century Italy. The 800 letters document the complex and at times artificial social relationships in the writer’s daily life.

Biography Annibal Caro was born in Civitanova Marche (Macerata), June 19, 1507; his father was an apothecary and clothes merchant, his mother a noblewoman. He moved to Florence to study, 1525, and became private secretary to Giovanni Gaddi, 1529. He served Monsignor Guidiccioni, Bishop of Frossombone, 1542, and became secretary to Pier Luigi 396

Farnese, 1543. Gli straccioni was completed, June 28, 1543. Caro was appointed administrator of justice in Piacenza, 1545, but he fled Piacenza upon assassination of Pier Luigi Farnese (1547) when rumors that he was in collusion surfaced. He moved to Rome and became secretary to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, 1547. He engaged in a literary dispute with Lodovico Castelvetro, 1553– 1560. He retired to his own villa near Frascati, 1563. Caro died in Rome, November 20, 1566. ERIN M. MCCARTHY See also: Ludovico Castelvetro Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Milan: Classici italiani, 1807–1812. Opere, edited by Vittorio Turri, Bari: Laterza, 1912. Opere, edited by Stefano Jacomuzzi, Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1974.

Poetry ‘‘Commento di ser Agresto da Ficaruolo sopra la prima ficata del Padre Siceo,’’ 1539. ‘‘Nasea o vero diceria de’ nasi,’’ 1539. ‘‘La statua della Foia ovvero di Santa Nafissa. Diceria al Sesto Re della Virtu`,’’ 1547. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1569.

Play Gli straccioni 1582; as The Scraffy Scoundrels, translated by Massimo Ciavolella and Donald Beecher, 1980.

Other Apologia degli accademici di banchi di Roma contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro, 1558. Lettere familiari, 1573–1575.

Translations Aristotle, Rettorica, 1570. Virgil, Eneide, 1581. Longus, Gli amori pastorali di Dafni e Cloe, 1784.

Further Reading Aurigemma, Marcello, Studi sulla letteratura teatrale ed eroica del Rinascimento, Rome: A. Signorelli, 1968. Battaglia, Salvatore, ‘‘Tradizione e attualita` nella coscienza linguistica di Annibal Caro,’’ Lingua parlata e lingua scritta: Convegno di studi 9–11 novembre 1967, Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici, 1970. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Mutazione’’ e ‘‘Riscontro’’ nel teatro di Machiavelli e altri saggi sulla commedia del Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1972. Greco, Aulo, Annibal Caro, cultura e poesia, Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1950. Olivieri, Caterina, L’Eneide del Caro, Turin: Paravia, 1965.

LUIGI CARRER Phillips-Court, Kristin, ‘‘Emblematic Narrative in Caro’s Gli straccioni (with an Eye to Titian’s Paul III),’’ Italica 81:2(2004), 184–199. Samuels, Richard S., ‘‘An Addition to Annibal Caro’s Lettere familiari: Notes on a Letter to Benedetto Varchi,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 27:3(1974), 300–305.

Sarri, Francesco, Annibal Caro: saggio critico, Milan: L’Universita` del Sacro Cuore, 1933. Ward, Michael T., ‘‘Benedetto Varchi and the Social Dimensions of Language,’’ Italica, 68:2(1991), 176–194.

LUIGI CARRER (1801–1850) Polymath, romantic, Venetian: Luigi Carrer joined the cultural and political movements of his era through his intense activity as a writer, philologist, biographer, and translator, but above all for his poetry and his work in theater, for which he is most widely known. The theater was the first object of his study. At 16, after having heard the famous Tuscan improviser Tommaso Sgricci in Venice, he attempted to emulate him. He appeared at the Accademia degli Invulnerabili in two improvised tragedies, Saul (1818) and La morte di Agrippina (The Death of Agrippina, 1818). Success gained him enormous fame and countless invitations for similar performances in the houses of noble families and academies. He became famous at the impromptus held at the salon of Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1760–1836), where he improvised a tragedy on the theme of Medea in front of Sgricci in person; another performance was witnessed with enthusiasm by Byron; his Atalia was hailed by Luigi Pezzoli (1772– 1834) as a return to the tragic form of the Greeks in the light of the poetry of Vittorio Alfieri. Of these performances, subsequently repudiated by the author, along with the two years of tourne´es throughout the Veneto region in which he was acclaimed as ‘‘Ovid brought back to life,’’ only La Morte di Agag (The Death of Agag) remains. It was included in his first collection of verse, Saggio di poesie (Essay of Poems, 1819) along with comments on the failure of La sposa di Messina (The Wife of Messina), a pie`ce written in imitation of the tragedy of the same name by Schiller and staged in Venice in 1821 by actor-impresario Gustavo Modena (1803– 1861). Disenchanted with the theater, Carrer would only write one more complete tragedy, Giulia Cappelletti (1837), a weak rewriting of Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare and a short story by Luigi Da Porto, that was eventually published in the

anthology Il teatro contemporaneo italiano e straniero (The Italian and Foreign Contemporary Theater, 1837–1839). L’ultimo colloquio di Antonio Foscarini (The Last Conversation of Antonio Foscarini) remained unfinished, although he did publish a few scenes from it in 1839. His interest turned to biographical studies, such as the three-volume Vita di Carlo Goldoni con notizie della commedia italiana prima di lui (Life of Carlo Goldoni with Notes on Italian Comedy before Him, 1824–1825), in reality a compendium of Goldoni’s own Me´moires (1784). The Vita contained a superficial classification of the works of the famous Venetian playwright as ‘‘familiari, romanzesche, popolari, eroiche’’ (familiar, romantic, popular, heroic) and a dissertation on the theater taken from the monumental work by Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731– 1815). Despite its excesses, such as the criticism of Goldoni’s language as ‘‘la piu` abbietta e trasandata che dare si possa’’ (the most contemptible and slovenly to be used), the work was the first mournful defense of Italian dramaturgy against the European ‘‘nordiche novita`’’ (Nordic novelties). His classical education, his admiration for Vittorio Alfieri and Ugo Foscolo, and his acquaintance with Vincenzo Monti did not prevent his reacting to the romantic influences reaching him from Europe through Bu¨rger, the early Schiller, and Byron himself. His work became more and more a personal me´lange of classicism, innovation, and nationalistic ideals. For example, he composed Clotaldo (1826), a short story in blank verse on the Venice revolt against foreign dominion; the first of 15 unfinished poems of La fata vergine (The Virgin Fairy), which was published in 1840 but written in 1827; a small volume of Poesie per nozze Papadopoli-Mosconi (Wedding Poems for Papadopoli-Mosconi, 1831). He revealed himself 397

LUIGI CARRER as a poet to a wider public with the publication of 14 Ballate (Ballads, 1834), some of which had already appeared the previous year in the periodical Il Gondoliere (formerly La Moda), which Carrer had transformed into a new literary journal, frequently filled with civil and patriotic invective, which enjoyed a great following. Carrer’s successes are also attributable to his having been one of the first to introduce the romantic ‘‘ballad’’ into Italy, with its historical, legendary subject matter and polymetric structure. It is not by chance that, at a time when his creative vein and civic inspiration are becoming more reconciled, he wrote his best prose work, Anello di sette gemme o Venezia e la sua storia. Considerazioni e fantasie di Luigi Carrer (The Ring of Seven Jewels or Venice and Its History. Considerations and Fantasies by Luigi Carrer, 1837), in which he narrated the history of Venice through its seven most brilliant jewels: Giustina Renier Michie`l, Catterina Corner, Gaspara Stampa, Bianca Cappello, Eufemia Giustinian, Irene da Spilimbergo and Elena Corner Piscopia. Carrer’s activity as a critic and philologist, aimed at a revival or ‘‘risorgimento’’ of national culture, also deserves attention. After a youthful edition of Petrach’s Rime (Rhymes, 1826) and the compilation, together with the Abbot Fortunato Federici, of the Dizionario della lingua italiana (Dictionary of the Italian Language, 1827–1830), Carrer set to work on an old, titanic project, a ‘‘Biblioteca classica italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti’’ (Classical Italian Library of Science, Literature and Art, 1839–1841), managing to finish the prefaces and comments for 27 volumes of the 100 initially planned. He also assumed the trusteeship of the economic series, ‘‘Scelte opere d’italiani illustri antichi e moderni’’ ( Selected Works of Illustrious Italians, Ancient and Modern, 1842) and, for the same publisher Tasso, undertook the management of an encyclopedia. Lastly, he edited the complete works of Ugo Foscolo, the major inspiration of his youth, availing himself of unpublished documents and the poet’s collection of correspondence: Prose e poesie edite e inedite di Ugo Foscolo (Published and Unpublished Prose and Poetry by Ugo Foscolo, 1842). Perhaps this marked the highpoint of Carrer’s militancy as a critic. Carrer planned, but never finished, a history of Italian literature as an expression of the reviving spirit of nationalism.

Biography Luigi Carrer was born in Venice on February 12, 1801. From 1814, he attended high school at Treviso, 398

then continued his studies in Venice; he received a law degree in Padua. At the age of 22, he fell ill with tuberculosis. He taught high school at Castelfranco Veneto until 1823. Once again in Venice, and later in Padua, he managed the Minerva Printing Works. He married Brigida Palicala`, 1825. In 1827 his daughter Elena was born, and he was appointed assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Padua, a post he held until 1830. In 1832 Carrer returned to Venice, separating from his wife. He was a professor of literature and geography at the Venice technical school, 1842–1844. He also held the positions of vicesecretary of the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti; secretary and later vice-president of the Ateneo Veneto; and curator of the Correr Museum, 1846. In 1847 his daughter died. With the failure of the insurrection of 1848, some patriotic poems led to his dismissal; this measure was revoked at the price of his disavowal. Ill, aided by Adriana Renier, an organizer of a salon of artists and a neighbor to whom he would leave his manuscripts, he died in Venice on December 23, 1850. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Collections Opere di Luigi Carrer, con cenni biografici dell’autore, edited by Francesco Prudenzano, Naples: Rossi, 1852. Scritti critici, edited by Giovanni Gambarin, Bari: Laterza, 1969.

Poetry ‘‘Saggio di poesie,’’ 1819. ‘‘Clotaldo,’’ 1826. ‘‘La Gerusalemme liberata col riscontro della Conquistata,’’ 1828. ‘‘Poesie per nozze Papadopoli–Mosconi,’’ 1831. ‘‘Ballate (La sorella, La vendetta, Jerolimina, Il cavallo di Estremadura),’’ 1834. ‘‘Poesie edite e inedite,’’ 1845.

Fiction Racconti, 1857.

Plays Ultimo colloquio di Antonio Foscarini, 1839.

Prose Discorso sopra la rappresentazione de La sposa di Messina, tragedia di Luigi Arminio Carrer, 1822. Vita di Carlo Goldoni con notizie della commedia italiana prima di lui, 3 vols., 1824–1825. Anello di sette gemme o Venezia e la sua storia. Considerazioni e fantasie di Luigi Carrer, 1837. Prose edite e inedite, 1846. L’amore infelice di Gaspara Stampa, 1851.

GIACOMO CASANOVA Edited Works Dizionario della lingua italiana (with Fortunato Federici), 7 vols., 1827–1830. Prose e poesie edite e inedite di Ugo Foscolo, 1842.

Further Reading Abrate, Mario, L’opera poetica di Luigi Carrer, Turin: Paravia & C., 1905. Cattelan, Levi Clotilde, Tracce dell’arte giovanile di Luigi Carrer nelle opere della sua maturita`, Venice: Libreria Emiliana Editrice, 1927. Crotti, Ilaria, ‘‘Carrer biografo di Goldoni,’’ Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 18(2000), 2–3. Damerini, Gino, Tommaseo amico e nemico di Carrer. Con lettere e documenti inediti, Venice: Per la fondazione Omero Soppesa, 1934.

Dani, Aristide, ‘‘Lettere inedite di L. Carrer a P. Mistrorigo,’’ in Studi in onore di F. M. Mistrorigo, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1958. Giachino, Monica, In ignorata stanza: studi su Luigi Carrer, Treviso: Canova, 2001. Lattes, Laura, ‘‘Luigi Carrer, la sua vita, la sua opera,’’ in Miscellanea di storia veneta, series 3, 10(1916), 216–245. Molmenti, Pompeo, ‘‘Pier Luigi Carrer di Pompeo Molmenti,’’ in Atti del Reale Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 58:2(1898–1899), 7–88. Sartorio, Guido, Luigi Carrer, Rome: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1900. Tommaseo, Niccolo`, ‘‘Notizie sulla commedia italiana, compilate da Luigi Carrer, Venezia 1824,’’ Antologia (August 1826), 52–62.

GIACOMO CASANOVA (1725–1798) In Casanova’s own biography, not even his birth escapes the ambiguity and mystification that enshrouds his entire life. In the first pages of his masterpiece, Histoire de ma vie (The History of My Life, 1826–1837), Casanova claimed to be the son of actors Gaetano Casanova and Zanetta Farusso (Farussi), both performing at the San Samuele theater in Venice. This version contradicts his booklet Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita (Neither Loves nor Women, or The Stable Cleaned Out, 1782) in which he declared to be the illegitimate son of a Venetian noblemen, Michele Grimani. Commonly with Casanova, it is difficult to verify the historical accuracy of such statements. Yet, the ambiguity about his origins highlights an important aspect of his personality. Beginning with Edmund Wilson’s article ‘‘Uncomfortable Casanova’’ (1941), scholars have consistently pointed out the simultaneous presence in Casanova of a sense of pride in being a self-made man and a strong inferiority complex due to his obscure origins. The personal myth he tried to build through his eccentric life and great literary output can be seen as a desperate attempt to make a place for himself in the social and intellectual e´lite of the old re´gime. His autobiographical works certainly played a fundamental role in this struggle to become a prominent protagonist of his age.

As Gilberto Pizzamiglio wrote in his Englishlanguage edition of Histoire de ma vie (2000), the monumental work should not be seen as an isolated literary achievement but rather as the final product of an autobiographical project that was started in 1780 with Il duello (The Duel). Published in Opuscoli miscellanei, a monthly journal written entirely by Casanova during his last Venetian sojourn (1774–1783), it presents a lively account of his encounter with Count Branicki 14 years earlier in Warsaw. The composition of Il duello coincided with a difficult moment for Casanova, whose libertine and transgressive past was preventing him from finding a role in Venetian society. This work can therefore be seen as an attempt to restore its author in the eyes of the establishment, presenting Casanova as a defender of national honor grievously offended by the statements of a Polish nobleman. In spite of being an editorial failure, the booklet, combining autobiography and novelistic writing, represents an important artistic accomplishment and is the first step toward the perfect merging of life and literature that characterizes the author’s subsequent works. In 1785, Casanova accepted the position of librarian offered to him by Count Waldstein, a Bohemian nobleman. In the Castel of Dux, the former adventurer spent his last years saddened 399

GIACOMO CASANOVA by loneliness and constantly quarreling with the count’s servants. In spite of the inconveniences of his new accommodations, however, Casanova during this period was able devote himself fully to his literary activity. The results of his efforts amounted to an enormous number of manuscripts, ranging from history to mathematics and philosophy, which demonstrate his openness and versatility. Among the published works is the noteworthy Soliloque d’un penseur (The Soliloquy of a Thinker, 1786), a pamphlet attacking Giovanni Balsamo, otherwise known as Count Cagliostro. There is little doubt that this work was motivated by selfinterest in order to obtain the sympathy of Emperor Joseph II and an offer of employment. Nevertheless, the opportunistic invective against the necromancer becomes an indirect way of reckoning with his own past. By demolishing Cagliostro’s myth, Casanova abjured, not without a streak of irony, his brilliant career as adventurer and unscrupulous gambler. The same autobiographical and apologetic attitude emerges openly in the Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs (Story of My Escape from the Prisons of the Republic of Venice Called ‘‘I Piombi,’’ 1787), an account of Casanova’s spectacular escape from the jails of the Venetian government in 1756. The episode, with which he had entertained princes, mentors, and friends for over 30 years, was later reelaborated and included in his autobiography. There is critical agreement over the fact that in the Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs, Casanova can be seen at his best as a writer. Far from stifling the narrative, the detailed descriptions help the reader visualize the scene of action, creating the condition for involvement in the story, and the result is one of the most engaging and suspenseful texts of eighteenth-century literature. Even though the public’s immediate reaction did not match the author’s expectations, the relative success of the work encouraged Casanova to undertake more challenging and ambitious artistic enterprises. A year later, he completed an extravagant novel in five volumes that he entitled Icosameron. Published in Prague in 1788, it is the heir of the eighteenth-century tradition of allegoricalphilosophical tales best typified by Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759). However, it is also possible that Casanova was inspired by other minor works such as Charles de Fieux de Mouhy’s novel, Lamekis ou les Voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la Terre inte´rieur (1734), and La de´couverte australe 400

par un Homme-Volant (1781) by Restif de la Bretonne. In deference to its genre, the plot of Icosameron is thin and straightforward: Two brothers, following a shipwreck, fall to the center of the earth. Here, they encounter the ‘‘Megamicrons,’’ a race of small, brightly colored people, with whom they live for 81 years, studying in depth their social organization. In fact, the detailed description of the customs and habits of the Megamicrons serves as a pretext for the insertion of learned digression on every field of human knowledge. The most interesting pages are devoted to scientific and technological problems. With an imagination comparable to Julius Verne’s, Casanova foresaw the motorcar, the airplane, television, and several other inventions that were not realized for more than a century. The Icosameron thus displays the encyclopedic knowledge of its author, showing an important aspect of his personality often overshadowed by the more famous image of Casanova as lover and adventurer. It is significant that the idea of a novel concerned with an escape to a perfect society dates back to 1782, when the author, at odds with the Venetian aristocracy, was forced to leave his homeland. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to look at it as a work animated by a revolutionary spirit. Far from being a Jacobin project, the perfectly organized world of Megamicrons is presented as an idealized picture of the Old Regime. Like the Histoire de ma vie, the Icosameron was written in French, in order to reach a wider European audience. The complete disregard of readers for a work on which Casanova bestowed so much care disappointed and embittered the author. In the spring of 1789, he fell gravely ill, showing signs of deep melancholy, and Dr. James Columb O’Reilly ordered him to suspend his philosophical and mathematical research. Knowing Casanova’s temperament, he suggested a form of entertainment that he considered more restful: writing his reminiscences. The patient followed the prescription, relying not just on his prodigious memory but also on a great bundle of notes (the so-called capitulares) that he had carried with him throughout the years all over Europe. According to a letter addressed to Johann Ferdinand Opiz, he had completed the first draft by July 27, 1792. From that time to the eve of his death six years later, Casanova was constantly retouching and redrafting his monumental work. The more than 3,600 manuscripts later entitled Histoire de ma vie represent an original literary achievement that is difficult to classify among traditional autobiographical genres.

GIACOMO CASANOVA By describing a dissolute life, Casanova distinguishes his work from the more sober autobiographies of the early eighteenth century in which the authors, usually historians or philosophers, would present themselves as models to be imitated. Not less significant is the fact that a title like Confessiones, already used by St. Augustine and by the hated Rousseau, had to be discarded as an option for his work, writing in a letter to Opiz dated February 20, 1792: ‘‘I cannot, as man of honor, give these memories the title of Confession, for I repent of nothing and without repentance one cannot, as you know, be absolved.’’ It would be wrong to consider these statements simply as the product of an impenitent effrontery. Scholars have pointed out the influence exerted on Casanova by Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), the French philosopher who, during the seventeenth century, tried to blend the ideas of Epicurean philosophy with Christian morality. From his readings of Gassendi, Casanova most likely developed the belief that satisfying the sexual appetite is in conformity with natural and divine laws. According to these philosophical argument, ‘‘pleasure is not simply entirely emancipated from feelings of guilt but also indefinitely and happily repeatable,’’ as Giorgio Ficara has written (Casanova e la malinconia, 1999). Literary activity plays an important role in this hedonistic Weltanschauung. As Casanova explicitly emphasized, writing his autobiography allowed him to live his life again, recalling happy experiences with retrospective pleasure. From this premise, his decision to end his account in the year 1774 seems clear: After the age of 40, all he would have to record would be a tale of declining vigor and increasing melancholy. Born with a therapeutic aim, the Histoire de vie soon became the last and most accomplished literary enterprise of the Venetian writer. With this work, which was put on the Index even before it was finished, past experiences were reinterpreted through the conventions of the novel. Casanova was able to make a mark in the literary world and finally establish his place in the European literary canon. The image of Casanova that we get from this work, far from being uniform and consistent, is chameleonic and fluid: an actor able to change masks and roles while simultaneously keeping his inner authenticity and genuineness. The history of Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie often seems nearly as complicated as the story of his life itself. On his deathbed, the author gave the manuscript to Carlo Angiolini, the son-in-law of his sister Maria Maddalena. In 1820, Angiolini’s son in turn sold the

manuscript to the Leipzig publishing firm Brockhaus for the small sum of 200 thalers. The text was first published between 1822 and 1828 in a German translation and adaptation by Wilhelm von Schu¨tz. While the German edition was being readied for publication, Herr Brockhaus employed Jean Laforgue, a professor of French at Dresden, to revise the original manuscript and correct Casanova’s vigorous but often somewhat Italianate French. His edition actually presents wholesale changes in Casanova’s original. James Rives Childs has noted that the French editor ‘‘had omitted few episodes he found overly licentious and, on other occasions, he had disfigured Casanova’s generally chaste prose with offensively prurient details’’ (Casanova, 1961). Being an anticlerical republican, he ignored many of Casanova’s professions of Christian faith and expurgated most of the passage in which the Venetian violently inveighs against the ‘‘execrable’’ French revolution. This ‘‘revised’’ text was published in 12 volumes, the first two in 1826, the third and fourth in 1828, the fifth to the eighth in 1832, and the ninth to the twelfth in 1837. Unfortunately this edition became the most accepted and authoritative version of Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie and the text upon which nearly all other editions and translations would be based for over 130 years. It was not until 1960 that Brockhaus allowed the unexpurgated, uncut, and ‘‘unpolished’’ publication of Casanova’s manuscript. In his 1976 film Casanova, Federico Fellini, who was initially reluctant to adapt the (in) famous libertine’s memoirs, lavishly visualized Casanova’s picaresque erotic stories as a somber journey leading to self-annihilation. Fellini’s images, charged with the baroque opulence of eighteenth-century Venice and decadent sexual symbolism, fully translate the ambiguity and vulnerability of the protagonist’s existential quest.

Biography Giacomo Casanova was born in Venice on April 2, 1725. He studied law at the University of Padua from 1738 to 1742. After having attempted the military and ecclesiastic career, Casanova became a friend and adopted son of the Venetian patrician Matteo Giovanni Bragadin (1745). Suspected by the Inquisition, Casanova fled Venice in 1749 and traveled to Lyon (where he joined the Masonic order) and then to Paris (1750–1752), Dresden, Prague, and Vienna. After returning to Venice in 1753, Casanova was arrested in 1755, on suspicion of being a Freemason and a magician, and was cast 401

GIACOMO CASANOVA into the state prison, I Piombi, from which he escaped on the night of October 31, 1756. In 1757, Casanova returned to Paris where he instituted the French State Lottery, amassing a large fortune that he promptly lost. Beginning in 1759, Casanova traveled throughout Europe, stopping in Spain, England, Poland, and Russia. On November 15, 1774, the Venetian government allowed Casanova to return to his homeland after a long exile. In Venice he devoted himself to writing and also to his position as a theatrical producer. He became a secret agent for the Inquisitors at the end of December 1776. In 1782, he published Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita, a satirical pamphlet on the Venetian aristocracy, which focused specifically on the powerful Grimani family. The book provoked an uproar that forced him to leave the city on January 17, 1783. In 1784, Casanova met Count Josef Karl Emmanuel von Waldstein, who offered him a position as a librarian at his castle in Dux (now in the Czech Republic). Casanova spent the rest of is life in Dux, where he suffered from depression as a result of partial isolation. In April 1798, Casanova became ill with a urinary tract infection and died on June 4, 1798. According to Prince de Ligne, his last words were: ‘‘I have lived as a philosopher, and die as a Christian.’’ MATTIA BEGALI Selected Works Collections Saggi, libelli e satire, edited by Piero Chiara, Milan: Longanesi, 1968.

Autobiographical Works Il duello, 1780; as The Duel, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2003. Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita, 1782. Soliloque d’un penseur, 1786. Histoire de ma fuite des prisons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs, 1787. Histoire de ma vie (1789–1798), 12 vols., 1826–1837; critical edition, 12 vols., 1960–1965; as History of My Life, translated by Willard R. Trask, 12 vols., 1966; as The Story of My Life, edited and abridged by Gilberto Pizzamiglio, translated by Stephen Sartarelli and Sophie Hawkes, 2000.

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Fiction Icosameron, 1788; as Casanova’s Icosameron, translated and abridged by Rachel Zurer, 1986.

Essays Confutazione della Storia del Governo Veneto d’Amelot de la Houssaie, 3 vols., 1769. Istoria delle turbolenze della Polonia, 3 vols., 1774. Scrutinio del libro ‘‘Eloges de M. de Voltaire par diffe´rents auteurs,’’ 1779.

Letters Epistolario (1759–1798), edited by Piero Chiara, 1969. Lettere di Lorenzo da Ponte a Giacomo Casanova, 1791– 1795, edited by Giampaolo Zagonel, 1988. A Giacomo Casanova: lettere d’amore di Manon Balletti ed Elisa von der Recke. edited by Vittorio Orsenigo, 1997.

Further Reading Abirached, Robert, Casanova ou la dissipation, Paris: Grasset, 1961. Aruta Stampacchia, Annalisa, Passione e gioco della moda nell’Histoire de ma vie di Giacomo Casanova, Naples: De Frede, 2000. Boatto, Aldo, Casanova e Venezia, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Capaci, Bruno, Le impressioni delle cose meravigliose: Giacomo Casanova e la redenzione imperfetta della scrittura, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Childs, James Rives, Casanova, A Biography Based on New Documents, London: Allen and Unwin, 1961. Childs, James Rives, Casanoviana, Vienna: Nebehay, 1956. Ficara, Giorgio, Casanova e la malinconia, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Flem, Lydia, Casanova, ou, L’exercice du bonheur, Paris: Seuil, 1995. Luna, Marie‐Franc¸oise (editor), Casanova fin de sie`cle, ´ diteur, 2002. Paris: Honore´ Champion E Luna, Marie‐Franc¸oise, Casanova me´morialiste, Paris: Honore´ Champion E´diteur, 1998. Parker, Derek, Casanova, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2002. Pieri, Piero, Duelli di penna: Casanova, Goudar e Caterina II, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Pizzamiglio, Gilberto (editor), Giacomo Casanova tra Venezia e L’Europa, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Poulet, Georges, ‘‘Casanova et le temps,’’ in Sensibilita` e razionalismo nel Settecento, edited by Vittore Branca, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Roustang, Franc¸ois, Le bal masque´ de Giacomo Casanova, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984. Serra, Francesca, Casanova autobiografo, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Sollers, Philippe, Casanova l’admirable, Paris: Plon, 1998. Wilson, Edmund, ‘‘Uncomfortable Casanova,’’ in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature, Cambridge, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1941.

CARLO CASSOLA

CARLO CASSOLA (1917–1987) Carlo Cassola, a prolific author and intellectual, is recognized as an emblematic figure of a Tuscan literary tradition that spans from Federigo Tozzi to Vasco Pratolini and Mario Tobino. Cassola himself disclaimed any labels and was often in disagreement with the specific ideas endorsed by contemporary literary currents such as neo-Realism or the neo-avant-garde. His writing distinctively identified with a poetics of the subliminal experience (subliminare) that is found in the intensely emotional experience that lies below the threshold of consciousness and awareness. His narrative is characterized by an antiheroic vision of the world, and recurrent themes include an opposition to any repressive force, whether physical or psychological, and the material life of working people. Cassola disclosed his literary inclination at the age of 15, when, as a student of the popular Liceo Tasso in Rome, he became involved in an antiFuturist movement called ‘‘Novismo.’’ In 1935, he entered the University of Rome to study law. At the same time, he continued reading Italian and foreign classics, particularly James Joyce. Indeed, Joyce’s Dubliners provided a significant inspiration for Cassola’s earliest works, a series of short stories written in the late 1930s for periodicals such as Il meriadiano di Roma and Letteratura and later collected in two volumes, Alla periferia (On the Outskirts, 1942) and La visita (The Visit, 1942). Both collections portray ordinary people and their uneventful existence over the course of one day: Young women, adolescents, widows, soldiers, hunters, all are involved in chance encounters described in an unsophisticated language that relies on paratactic structures and avoids an elegiac tone. The result is nevertheless poetic, as Cassola, evoking Joyce’s ‘‘epiphanies,’’ attempted to represent, through linguistic sublimation, the sense of the Absolute that lies behind the ordinary and its manifestations. In the essay ‘‘Il film dell’impossibile’’ (The Film of the Impossible), published in 1961 in the journal Tempo di letteratura, the writer rejected the naturalistic narrative of the nineteenth century and proclaimed that the role of narration is not to portray reality as the result of observation and experience but rather to evoke an image of reality that is divested of any ideological, psychological,

scientific, or moral content. During the postwar years, Cassola was often criticized for his lack of political commitment. Like many artists and intellectuals of his generation, Cassola joined the anti-Fascist Resistance movement in 1942. His family was no stranger to political activity, as his father had been the editor of the socialist newspaper L’Avanti, but Carlo viewed his war experience not so much in terms of his political engagement and growth but rather as an opportunity to become more closely acquainted with ‘‘la gente del popolo’’ (the common people), as he wrote in his introduction to the 1965 Einaudi edition of Il taglio del bosco (The Cutting of the Woods, 1959, but first published in Paragone in 1949). After the war, he began a new phase in his writing career, moving toward longer works in which the autobiographical element becomes clearly visible. Following his wife’s sudden death (1949), Cassola faced a period of profound crisis, aching unceasingly from the loss of his beloved. He stopped working on Il taglio del bosco for a few months, and, when he resumed writing, he started his Resistance novel Fausto e Anna (Fausto and Anna, 1952). A new edition appeared in 1958 with major structural and linguistic changes. Here Cassola enriched his previous poetics of subliminare, adopting new narrative strategies that called for a more traditional approach in tune with the historical events, a greater attention to detail, and a deeper articulation of the psychological dimension of the characters. Set against the background of Fascism and the war, the novel tells the story of Fausto Errera and Anna Mannoni, who meet during a summer holiday and fall in love. Fausto, a selfcentered intellectual with a complicated personality, embraces those very bourgeois values that he also fiercely challenges. Anna, a quieter individual, becomes increasingly fascinated by the young man’s intellectual appeal and urban life. They separate and write letters, but Fausto’s jealousy, which turns into verbal abuse, takes a toll on their relationship. Eventually Anna marries the simple but reliable Miro, while Fausto joins the Resistance fight. They will meet again, one last time, when the Allied forces arrive and the Resistance comes to an end. A complex novel, Fausto e Anna weaves 403

CARLO CASSOLA together several themes, from Fausto’s existential struggle, to ideological and political disillusionment, to the conflict between the private dimension and history. It was also Cassola’s first best seller, although it was attacked for its structural and stylistic ambiguity as well as for its unflattering depiction of the partisans. The author’s defence stressed his refusal to submit literature to any political and ideological propagandistic purpose. But it was with his second major work, La ragazza di Bube (Bebo’s Girl, 1960), which was awarded the Strega Prize, that Cassola achieved notoriety. The novel, a best seller, was translated into some 20 languages and was adapted to the screen by Luigi Comencini, with popular stars (a young Claudia Cardinale and George Chakiris). Again, the author deals with life’s expectations, history, love, chance, political involvement, and hope. The novel, based on a true story, is divided into four parts and is carefully structured. Arturo Cappellini, also known as Bube, is a former partisan whose nickname is ‘‘the Avenger’’; Mara Castellucci is a young girl, beautiful and self-confident. After the war, they fall in love and get engaged, but Bube has to flee the country after committing a murder partly justified by the rancors of his past fight. Mara has to choose between him and Stefano, whom she had met in the meantime, eventually deciding to stay with Bube, who is in jail serving a 14-year sentence. Far from simply being a story of love, sacrifice, and destiny, the novel calls for a deeper understanding of its themes, which include loyalty and ethics in a broad sense: loyalty toward a lover but also a role, that of the ‘‘avenger,’’ construed by political ideology. The novel reflects Cassola’s explicit disenchantment from the ideals of the Resistance. At the awards ceremony for the Strega Prize, Pier Paolo Pasolini uttered a funerary oration, ‘‘In morte del realismo’’ (Upon the Death of Realism, 1960), patterned after Anthony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which he cast Cassola as Brutus and blamed him for betraying his socialist ideas and for indulging into a kind of ‘‘lyrical’’ writing that sealed the death of Realism. Negativity takes over in Un cuore arido (An Arid Heart, 1961), which offers vividly detailed descriptions of objects and places that, for Cassola, encompass the authenticity of human existence. The novel is not set in any specific historical context nor does it indulge in naturalistic portrayals of reality. Clearly, Cassola had no intention of abiding by the neo-Realistic mandate, but 404

rather of finding a model in authors such as the late-nineteenth-century English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy. The same process of distillation of life into a revealing moment returns in his fourth novel Paura e tristezza (Fear and Saddness, 1970), where the condition of ‘‘fear’’ and the sentiment of ‘‘sadness’’ for an ill-fated life are not simply related to the miserable existence of the protagonist, Anna Dell’Aiuto, but more generally to an a priori universal human condition, torn between the impossibility of understanding each other and the unknown destiny to which human beings are subject. In the same anti-Realist vein, Cassola wrote Monte Mario (Portrait of Helen, 1973) in the form of a dialogue that elucidates the incommunicability of his protagonists, following a tradition that, from Luigi Pirandello to Alberto Moravia, highlighted the psychological condition of the characters. Cassola also wrote numerous essays on a wide range of topics: from the role of literature to political engagement and social change, to antimilitarism and disarmament. Some of the most significant are Viaggio in Cina, (Journey to China, 1956), describing his experiences in Maoist China, perhaps with an overly appreciative tone; and I minatori della Maremma (Miners in Maremma, 1956), written in collaboration with Luciano Bianciardi, which offers a sensitive and compelling reportage of the poor working conditions of miners in southern Tuscany. In the 1970s Cassola took up an antinuclear stance, and his writings such as Diritto alla sopravvivenza (The Right to Survival, 1982) and La rivoluzione disarmista (The Unarming Revolution, 1983) attest to a continuous interest in the pacifist movement.

Biography Carol Cassola was born in Rome on March 17, 1917, and educated at the Liceo Tasso, where he joined the anti-Futurist movement of ‘‘Novismo.’’ He published his first poems in the student journal Anno XIII, 1935. He entered the Faculty of Law of the Universita` ‘‘La Sapienza’’ in Rome, 1935, and graduated with a thesis on civil law, 1939. After the armistice of September 8, 1942, Cassola joined the Resistance movement in Tuscany, where he had moved with his family. He spent most of his life in Grosseto, in southern Tuscany; he taught in high school, 1949–1962; his wife died, 1949. He remarried and had a daughter, 1951. Cassola travelled to China, 1955. He was awarded the Strega Prize for La ragazza di Bube, 1960; and was

CARLO CASSOLA awarded the Napoli Prize for Una relazione, 1969. He collaborated with peridocals such as Il corriere della sera and Il mondo and the literary journals Il ponte and La fiera letteraria. Cassola died in Montecarlo (Lucca) on January 29, 1987, after a long illness. MARIA LAURA MOSCO Selected Works Fiction Alla periferia, 1942. La visita, 1942. Fausto e Anna, 1952; as Fausto and Anna, translated by Isabel Quingley, 1960; reprinted, 1975. Il taglio del bosco, 1949; expanded as Il taglio del bosco: racconti lunghi e romanzi brevi, 1959. La casa di Via Valadier, 1956. Un matrimonio del dopoguerra, 1957. Il soldato, 1958. La ragazza di Bube, 1960; as Bebo’s Girl, translated by Marguerite Waldman, 1962. Un cuore arido, 1961; as An Arid Heart, translated by William Weaver, 1964. Il cacciatore, 1964. Tempi memorabili, 1966. Storia di Ada, 1967. Una relazione, 1969. Paura e tristezza, 1970. Monte Mario, 1973; as Portrait of Helena, translated by Sebastian Roberts, 1975. Gisella, 1974. L’uomo e il cane, 1977. La disavventura, 1977. Un uomo solo, 1978. Ferragosto di morte, 1980. La morale del branco, 1980. La zampa d’oca, 1981. Gli anni passano, 1982. Colloquio con le ombre, 1982. Mio padre, 1983. Le persone contano piu` dei luoghi, 1985.

Nonfiction Viaggio in Cina, 1956. I minatori della Maremma, with Luciano Bianciardi, 1956. Poesia e romanzo, with Mario Luzi, 1973. Fogli di diario, 1974. Ultima frontiera, 1976.

La lezione della storia, 1978. Contro le armi, 1980. Il romanzo moderno, 1981. Diritto alla sopravvivenza, 1982. La rivoluzione disarmista, 1983.

Letters La nascita dei Minatori della Maremma: il carteggio Bianciardi–Cassola–Laterza e altri scritti, edited by Velio Abati 1998.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo: saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia, Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1965. Bertacchini, Renato, Carlo Cassola: introduzione e guida allo studio dell’opera cassoliana, Florence: Le Monnier, 1977. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Due domande su La ragazza di Bube,’’ Mondo Operaio, 13(1960), 87–100. Carlo Cassola: letteratura e disarmo, San Giovanni Valdarno: Lega per il disarmo unilaterale, 1988. D’Agostino, Annamaria and Mariantonietta Mariotti, Cassola: l’intellettuale dimenticato, Empoli: Ibiskos, 1988. Falaschi, Giovanni (editor), Carlo Cassola. Atti del convegno (Firenze, Palazzo Medici–Riccardi, 3–4 Novembre 1989), Pontassieve: Becocci Editore, 1993. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Letteratura e ideologia: Bassani, Cassola, Pasolini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1964. Jodi Macchioni, Rodolfo, Cassola, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Il sentimento della vita in Cassola saggista,’’ Paragone, 478(1989), 32–42. Madrignani, Carlo, L’ultimo Cassola: letteratura e pacifismo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991. Napoleone, Patrizia, Carlo Cassola e la ragazza di Bube, Turin: Loescher, 1997. Pedroni, Peter N., Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola’s Fiction, New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Rutter, Itala T. C., ‘‘Carlo Cassola: Partigiano nella vita,’’ Italian Culture, 11(1993), 301–310. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Il realismo esistenziale di Carlo Cassola, Modena: Mucchi, 1993. Turchetta, Gianni, ‘‘Dall’ ‘epifania’ al ‘film dell’impossibile’: il giovane Cassola e il giovane Joyce,’’ in Studi vari di lingua e letteratura italiana in onore di Giuseppe Velli, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Valori, Massimo, Ipotesi di lavoro su La ragazza di Bube e Carlo Cassola, Florence: Libra, 1992.

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LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO

LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO (1505–1571) Ludovico Castelvetro is generally known as the critic and commentator of Aristotle’s Poetics who codified the rules for the unity of time and the unity of place. Yet his works reflect an independence of thought and a tireless devotion to close reading, and his acute and original observations on a wide variety of literary and philosophical texts make him one of the outstanding critics of the sixteenth century. Castelvetro’s most important work is his commentary on the Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (The Poetics of Aristotle Translated and Explicated, 1570), to which he devoted the last years of his life, which he spent in exile. He also commented on Dante’s Inferno (1305–1308) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ca.1342–1374) and I Triumphi (The Triumphs, 1354–1374). His work on Petrarch was first published posthumously in 1582 but was already well developed by 1545. Castelvetro’s minor critical notes are selected in Lodovico Antonio Muratori’s 1727 edition, which includes observations on such diverse topics as Roman comedy, poetic inspiration, and the role of poetry in society. In addition, there are short essays on Plato, Euripides, Julius Caesar, Virgil, and Boccaccio, among others. During the twentieth century, important discoveries concerning Castelvetro’s authorship led to a number of publications of his work. In 1903, for example, Giuseppe Cavazzuti identified a manuscript, in Castelvetro’s hand, comprising his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics. Francesco Donati traced and published in 1970 a series of notes on Aristotle’s Rhetoric (‘‘Un commento inedito del Castelvetro: ‘In tertium rhetoriches Aristotelis’’’). In his 1963 essay entitled ‘‘Castelvetro’s Annotations to the Inferno: A Second Look at a Scarcely Known Manuscript,’’ Robert Melzi made the case that Castelvetro wrote a commentary on not only the first 29 cantos of the Inferno but on the entire Comedia. This work was presumably lost in Lyons in 1567, when the author had to flee the city. Castelvetro’s literary scholarship consistently disclosed a sharp and uncompromising mind, at times impertinent and pedantic. His fierce polemic with the academician Annibal Caro (1507–1566), a poet of wide renown and the secretary of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, spanned across a period of 406

nearly 20 years. The dispute began in 1553 when he attacked Caro’s canzone, ‘‘Venite all’ombra dei gran gigli d’oro’’ (Come to the shade of the great golden lilies), because it praised the Farnese family as well as the French throne. Often rancorous and distasteful, their exchange, consisting of four major documents, nevertheless reflects many aspects of the contemporary debates on language and literary models. As a defense to Castelvetro’s initial critique, Caro wrote a commentary of his poem, entitled Apologia degli Accademici di Banchi contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro (Apology of the Banchi Academics against Ludovico Castelvetro, 1558). Here he focused on the linguistic liveliness of the canzone and his desire to imitate the spirit rather than the language of Petrarch. Castelvetro’s reply engages in a more detailed criticism of the disputed poem, Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro (Argument on Some Things Noted in the Canzone of Annibal Caro, 1559). Then Caro enlisted the support of Benedetto Varchi, who prepared a first draft of a response as early as 1560, but his dialogue, the Ercolano, remained unpublished until 1570. Varchi aimed at discussing broader issues of linguistic relevance, not at a mere refutation of Castelvetro’s arguments. But Castelvetro’s response, Correttione d’alcune cose del Dialogo delle lingue di Benedetto Varchi (Correction of a Few Things in the Dialogue on Language by Benedetto Varchi, 1572), rejects Varchi’s position and indeed expands the controversy to include his handling of dramatic dialogue as a genre. At times too restrictive, Castelvetro’s criticism is dictated by a strong sense of the need for verisimilitude, a close attention to the text, and a concern for philological rigor. For him, poetic license indicates lack of artistic skills. Such a thorough reading of texts represents his strongest asset. For example, Castelvetro’s commentary on Petrarch stands out for its meticulous references to the original sources (Dante in particular) and an ability to break away from orthodox views when they compromise a rational inquiry. His commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics also reveals how he defined his work as an effort to fill in what others had missed by emphasizing the main theme of the text, or the poetic act.

LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO Yet his goal was not to elucidate Aristotle’s ideas but rather to interpret, expand, and correct the incomplete text for the benefit of the reader: ‘‘quello anchora che doveva o poteva essere scritto per utilita` piena di coloro che volessero sapere come si debba fare a comporre bene poemi’’ (what still he should or could have written for the full benefit of those who want to know what they must do to compose poems well). He singled out some inconsistencies and erroneous assumptions in Aristotle’s text and highlighted, at the same time, the powerful effects on the soul of melodia (melody) and vista (vision). Castelvetro set out to ‘‘supplire anchora quello che manca’’ (supply what is missing), when he proposed three types of plots by subdividing Aristotle’s category of complex plots into plots that have only one change in fortune and those with multiple changes. Thus Castelvetro used Aristotle’s Poetics as a point of departure for his own treatise on poetics, so much so that he extended his discussion to include contemporary works as well as sources not available to Aristotle (from the classical Latin period to Dante, Boccaccio, and Marguerite de Navarre). For Castelvetro, the plot was the fundamental element of the work of art, and it should imitate human action. This led him to draw a close connection between history and poetry: The poet must look to history in order to know what action is probable and possible. Yet, he cannot merely put into verse known historical events; he must contrive a story that does not imitate any specific event but rather a possible action. Furthermore, Castelvetro rejected the commonplace that poetry ought to teach and delight (docere delectando); instead it ought to give only pleasure to the audience, whom he viewed as an uneducated throng. This is the reason why he expelled science from poetry (science was meant to teach). Somehow Castelvetro was faithful to Aristotle, since the latter never mentioned poetry’s ‘‘instruction,’’ even though he seemed to admit its moral effect on the audience. In one of his most interesting expansions on Aristotle, when he explored the complexity of the tragic effect, Castelvetro allowed that after an initial displeasure at viewing a fortunate evil man or an unfortunate good man, the audience experiences a kind of pleasure, because a sense of justice is revealed: ‘‘Onde godiam per quel dispiacere della riconoscenza della nostra giustizia’’ (whence through this displeasure we enjoy the recognition of our own justice). This passage shows that Castelvetro recognized that poetry ‘‘may’’ instruct, even if that is not its primary function.

Castelvetro’s polemical vein resurfaces in the commentary. He contested the opinions of such authorities as Quintilian, Cicero, and Horace; he labeled Terence and Plautus (who take their plots from the Greeks), not poets of invention but mere versificatori (verse-makers) and traslatori (translators). In the end, even Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto are classified as ‘‘thieves’’ for their various stages of borrowing.

Biography Ludovico Castelvetro was born in 1505 in Modena to Jacopo Castelvetro and Bartolomea dalla Porta. He studied law at the University of Siena and became a member of the Accademia degli Intronati. After earning his degree in law, he abruptly left Rome for Siena, where he immersed himself in the study of literature. To appease his father, he returned to Modena but continued his studies, despite his chronic ill health. In Modena, he promoted the study of Greek, Latin, and law in the public schools. By the early 1540s he had joined the Accademia di Modena. Active in civic work, in 1551 he was on the governing counsel of Modena. In 1555, the Inquisition began an investigation of him and in 1560, after a period in hiding, he went to Rome to face charges of heresy. In custody, but not willing to be on trial indefinitely, he escaped with his brother, also held by the Inquisition in Rome. He spent more than two years in Chiavenna and then went to Lyons where he composed his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics (1563–1567). Because of religious violence in Lyons and his sudden flight from his house in 1567 there, many of his works were lost. From Lyons, Castelvetro went to Geneva for several days, before he returned to Chiavenna, where he gave private lessons in Greek. He then joined his brother Giovan-Maria in Vienna, where he was received by Massimiliano II in 1569 and first published his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics in 1570. Because of the threat of the plague in Vienna, Castelvetro moved back to Chiavenna, where he died on February 21, 1571. THOMAS E. MUSSIO See also: Annibal Caro Selected Works Collections Opere varie critiche di Lodovico Castelvetro, edited by Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Bern: Pietro Foppens, 1727.

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LUDOVICO CASTELVETRO Commentaries Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro, 1559. Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta, 1570; critical edition by Werther Romani, 2 vols., 1978–1979; as Castelvetro on the Art of Poetry: An Abridged Translation of Ludovico Castelvetro’s Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata, et sposta, edited and translated by Andrew Bongiorno, 1984. Correttione d’alcune cose del Dialogo delle lingue di Benedetto Varchi, 1572. Le Rime del Petrarca brevemente sposte, 1582. Sposizione di Lodovico Castelvetro a XXIX canti dell’Inferno dantesco, ora per la prima volta data in luce da Giovanni Franciosi, 1886.

Further Reading Adams, Hazard (editor), Critical Theory since Plato, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971. Cavazzuti, Giuseppe, Lodovico Castelvetro, Modena: Societa` Tipografica Modenese, Antica Tipografia Soliani, 1903. Charlton, Henry Buckley, Castelvetro’s Theory of Poetry, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1913. Crane, Ronald Salmon (editor), Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952. Donadi, Francesco, ‘‘Un commento inedito del Castelvetro: ‘In tertium rhetoriches Aristotelis.’’’ Lettere italiane, 22(1970), 545–581.

Drusi, Riccardo, La lingua ‘‘cortigiana romana’’: note su un aspetto della questione cinquecentesca della lingua, Venice: Il Cardo, 1995. Jossa, Stefano, ‘‘Petrarchismo e umorismo: Ludovico Castelvetro poeta,’’ Lettere italiane, 57:1(2005), 65–86. Marazzini, Claudio, ‘‘Varchi contro Castelvetro: ‘Tipologie’ linguistiche in una polemica letteraria del sec. XVI,’’ in Kontinuita¨t und Innovation: Studien zur Geschichte der romanischen Sprachforschung vom 17. bis zum 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Gerda Haler and Ju¨rgen Storost, Mu¨nster: Nodus, 1997. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Aristotele a corte. Il piacere e le regole: Castelvetro e l’edonismo,’’ in Culture et socie´te´ en Italie du Moyen Age a` la Renaissance, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1985. Melzi, Robert C., Castelvetro’s Annotations to The Inferno: A New Perspective in Sixteenth Century Criticism, The Hague: Mouton, 1966. Melzi, Robert, C., ‘‘Castelvetro’s Annotations to the Inferno: A Second Look at a Scarcely Known Manuscript,’’ Italica, 40:4(1963), 306–319. Nasta, Michel, Le fonctionnement des concepts dans un texte ine´dit de Castelvetro, Padua: Antenore, 1977. Perocco, Daria, ‘‘Lodovico Castelvetro traduttore di Melantone (Var. Lat. 7755),’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 156(1979), 541–547. Romani, Werther, ‘‘Lodovico Castelvetro e il problema del tradurre,’’ Lettere italiane, 18(1966), 152–179. Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE (1478–1529) Baldassare Castiglione, the man whom Emperor Charles V called one of the finest gentlemen in the world, was born into an old noble family of Mantua. Castiglione had an active, successful, and sometimes difficult life, earning the reputation of an exemplary courtier. He served in the most brilliant courts of the age for families such as the Gonzaga, the Sforza, the Montefeltro, and the Della Rovere. Through such experiences, he gained deep insights into the realities of courtly life and politics that underlie his idealized and nostalgic portrait of the court of Urbino, Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), which had a remarkable influence on the behavior and manners of European courts for over two centuries. He also wrote Italian and Latin poems, a eulogy, and a

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substantial body of private letters and diplomatic correspondence. Castiglione’s poetry reflects the classical and vernacular traditions. His ten sonnets and four canzoni are derivative efforts that describe lover and lady with the standard Petrarchan images and phrases—love as a burning fire, rivers of weeping, fire and ice. Authentic emotion is far more apparent in letters written to his wife, Ippolita. The sonnet ‘‘Cesare mio, qui sono ove il mar bagna...’’ (My dear Cesare, I am here where the sea bathes...) describes the disastrous French campaign of 1503 in southern Italy with Petrarchan language that reveals his misgivings about war. The splendid sonnet, ‘‘Superbi colli e voi sacre ruine’’ (O lofty hills and you, sacred ruins), inspired by the past glory

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE of Rome and its inevitable decline, was often imitated but never surpassed. His canzone ‘‘Manca il fior giovenil de’ miei primi anni’’ (Gone is the youthful flowering of my early years) laments the loss of youth and the folly of his amorous passions. Castiglione’s Latin carmina regularly appeared in collections of Latin poetry over the next two centuries. Most are fashionable and technically good imitations of classical eclogues and elegies, and sincere sentiments enliven some of them. Expressing his sorrow over the death of his dear friend Falcone (ca. 1505), Castiglione’s eclogue Alcon imitates Virgil’s fifth eclogue, from which he takes the name Alcon as well as the setting, meter, and metaphors. With its deeply felt sorrow, this elegiac poem inspired the ‘‘Alcon’’ of William Drummond of Hawthornden on the death of his friend Sir William Alexander (1648) and the ‘‘Epitaphium Daminis’’ (1640) John Milton wrote on the death of his friend Charles Diodati. His wife’s complaints at his absence from Mantua inspired his touching ‘‘Elegia qua fingit Hippolyten suam ad se ipsum scribentem’’ (Elegy to Himself Supposedly Written by His Wife Hippolyta), written while he was serving as Federico Gonzaga’s ambassador at the papal court. Although it draws inspiration from an elegy of Propertius, the affection Castiglione depicts between husband and wife is fresh and new. He also wrote an elegy on the death of his friend Raphael, who had painted his portrait and to whom he provided assistance in producing a survey of classical monuments in Rome, ‘‘De morte Raphaelis pictoris’’ (On the Death of Raphael, Painter). To celebrate carnival in 1506 and to pay tribute to the duke and duchess of Urbino, he composed the dramatic eclogue Tirsi (Thyrsis), collaborating with his cousin Cesare Gonzaga. Written in ottava rima, Tirsi takes place in a pastoral countryside, where three shepherds, Iola, Tirsi, and Dameta, tell a tale of unrequited love. Iola laments the cruelty of the nymph Galatea for rejecting his love; in traditional pastoral fashion, all of nature joins in his sorrow. Attracted by the song, Tirsi arrives and goes with Dameta to the goddess’s court, a splendid environment like the one created by Duchess Elisabetta at Urbino. Over this pastoral kingdom the good shepherd, representing Duke Guidobaldo, keeps watch, ensuring a peaceful existence. Meant to entertain the aristocrats at court, Tirsi also reminds them of the importance of good government and the rewards of service, notions central to Il Cortegiano. When King Henry VII gave the ailing Guidobaldo a knighthood, Castiglione went to England

in 1507 to receive the honor on his behalf. At the Italianate English court, he met the English king and his son, the future Henry VIII, eulogized in the Il Cortegiano. After Guidobaldo’s death, Castiglione sent the English king a Latin eulogy, ‘‘Ad Henricum Angliae regem Epistola de vita et gestis Giudubaldi Urbini Ducis’’ (To Henry, King of England, Epistle on the Life and Deeds of Guidobaldo, Duke of Urbino), which commemorates Guidobaldo’s great virtues, decorum, self-restraint, and stoicism, qualities indispensable to courtiership in Il Cortegiano. Castiglione’s own broad knowledge and experience inform Il Cortegiano, which looks back to precedents such as Plato’s Symposium, Cicero’s De oratore, humanistic models like Marsilio Ficino and Leon Battista Alberti, and Pietro Bembo’s dialogue, Gli Asolani. The book is set in Urbino on four evenings during the visit of Pope Julius II in March 1507. The characters, from Julius’s retinue and Guidobaldo’s court, form a cross section of Italian society and a range of personalities and opinions. Although Castiglione’s depiction of the court at Urbino is idealized, the use of historical figures lends an element of realism, and multiple viewpoints on the issues debated reflect the ambiguities of courtly environments. Each book in Il Cortegiano contains a philosophical exordium by the author, who claims he was not present at the gathering in Urbino and that he is only recounting the conversations at second hand. In book one, Castiglione’s fiction of nightly conversations as a form of courtly entertainment permits him to create a less formal atmosphere in which topics are discussed from different perspectives and at different degrees of seriousness. His physical and moral portrait of the courtier draws on Cicero’s Roman orator, the medieval chivalric code, and classical and contemporary humanist ideals. By requiring a noble background for his courtier, Castiglione conservatively ties nobility to family origins rather than individual merit, but his view conforms to the social prejudices typical of courtly settings. An aptitude for both physical and intellectual activities is crucial, but the goal of the courtier’s training is to enable him to act with grazia (grace). The courtier achieves grace through self-restraint, mastery of the social conventions, and sprezzatura, an ideal invented by Castiglione to refer to a certain nonchalance or casualness in word and deed, often associated with disinvoltura (natural spontaneity). Since the chief tool of action at court is wit, the courtier needs a sophisticated knowledge of the 409

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE humanities, essential to developing verbal skills, sound judgment, and morality. Thus, the humanist ideal becomes an integral part of the education of the courtier, the prototype of the gentleman, but his learning must never be obvious, just as affectation and pedantry must be avoided. Graceful behavior must be seemly, reflecting the classical ideal of the ‘‘golden mean.’’ Castiglione’s courtier is well rounded, able to adjust his behavior to every person or situation, and the second book focuses on how the courtier should exercise his talents, emphasizing the importance of acting with discretion and good timing. Such adaptability is an invaluable, practical skill in a profession that had to navigate adroitly through the complex, even perilous, courtly environment. The model courtier avoids flattery, provides honest counsel, and tries to avoid serving a wicked ruler. He chooses proper fashions and friends, because first impressions matter at court. The discussion of humor and laughter at the end of this book grows rather naturally out of the emphasis on the role of wit in the courtier’s success. In Castiglione’s courtly world, all human relationships are defined through words, and humor may provide a kind of safety valve to deflect the tensions that lie beneath the polished surface. In the third book, the ladies move the conversation to the courtly lady, who creates the refined environment of a court. Beauty and circumspection are more important for the courtly lady, but she must be the courtier’s equal: She must come from a noble family, exhibit liveliness of mind, be clever in conversation, shun affectation, engage in appropriate exercise, know how to dress herself, and possess natural grace and virtue. She needs sufficient wit to maintain an atmosphere of goodwill, while entertaining all kinds of people; she must be adept in matters of love. Her essence lies in her affabilita` piacevole (pleasing affability) and in conduct and speech measured against una certa mediocrita` difficile (a certain difficult mean). In a lively debate that opposes misogynistic attacks and protofeminist positions, the idea that a woman can be as worthy as a man is supported with classical examples. Women create the sophisticated background against which the courtier displays his talents. Relationships between the prince and the courtier and between men and women are at the center of courtly life. In book four, the discussion moves beyond role playing and appearances, assigning to courtiership tangible moral and political goals. Whereas book two leaves moral distinctions to the courtier’s discretion, book four expands the courtier’s role to teaching the prince the difference 410

between reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, good and evil. Machiavelli and other political theorists ascribed Italy’s political chaos to corrupt leadership. Castiglione’s courtier addresses the problem by teaching the prince an essentially Platonic morality, linked to knowledge and choice of the good. A second radical ideal transforms courtiership. The perfect courtier must be in love, because love can lead him to the divine. Modeled on Plato’s Symposium and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pietro Bembo, the debate contrasts physical love and ideal love. The vision of earthly, corporeal beauty eventually leads the courtier up the ‘‘ladder of love’’ toward ideal beauty and the divine. The courtier must love the lady in her beauty of mind no less than that of her body. Aided by the senses of sight and hearing, this rational love involves no physical contact. Moving away from one beauty to the contemplation of many beauties allows him to form a universal concept of beauty, which liberates his soul from its earthly prison and guides it to a purifying introspective, intellectual experience allowing the soul to see in itself a spark of the divine. Finally, it experiences a mystical union with the divine, leaving behind all the senses and rational discourse. The company is spellbound by Bembo’s final discussion of ideal beauty, but the book ends on a playful note that brings both the speakers and the reader back to reality. Used as a book on etiquette and a guide to life at court, Il libro del Cortegiano earned a large public audience all over Europe. Others have seen it as an idyllic picture of a dazzling and fleeting moment in Italian culture. Yet, Castiglione clearly has more serious goals—an exploration of wit and humor in human society, the nature of women, the goal of providing wise counsel to the prince, spirituality and Platonic love, and the pleasures of living in a refined environment. Il Cortegiano moves beyond a sorrowful preoccupation with the past: Its primary concern is the formation and education of a moral individual. At his best, the courtier reflects the humanistic ideal of realizing one’s potential and living a rewarding life, a matter of concern to aristocrats, the wealthy bourgeoisie, artists and writers in societies centered around the institution of the court. As a courtier and diplomat, Castiglione may have sought the reputation of a wise and moral counselor, and his tone in Il Cortegiano would have appealed to the age, which reacted so negatively to Machiavelli’s realistic portrait of princes. Charles V kept the book by his bedside, along with the Bible and, interestingly, Il Principe.

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE Unable to retrieve the copy he had given to Vittoria Colonna, Castiglione hurried to publish his book at the famous Aldine Press in Venice, where it appeared in April 1528 according to his meticulous instructions. Castiglione’s future as a courtier and diplomat seemed secure, because of Charles V’s favor and the historical situation pointing to Spanish supremacy in Italy and central Europe. In early 1528, he was offered the bishopric of Avila, which he did not accept; it was rumored that Pope Clement was considering him for a cardinalate. But the capricious fortune that took away so many of his friends and family denied him his reward. At his death in 1529, he also left behind a significant diplomatic and personal correspondence that offers the reader a fascinating view into Renaissance society.

Toledo Cathedral, his remains were carried back to Italy in 1530 and buried next to his beloved wife in a church outside Mantua. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA Selected Works Collections Opere volgari e latine, edited by Gianni Antonio e Gaetano Volpi, Padua: Comino, 1733. Poesie volgari e latine, edited by Pierantonio Serassi, Rome: Pagliarini, 1760. Opere, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, Milan‐Rome: Rizzoli, 1937. Libro del cortegiano con una scelta delle opere minori di Baldesar Castigione, edited by Bruno Maier, Torino: Unione tipografico–editrice torinese, 1964.

Dialogues

Biography Baldassare Castiglione was born into an old noble family on December 6, 1478, at Casatico (Mantova), his father’s estate, and named for his paternal grandfather. He moved to Milan in 1492, where he completed his education and gained experience while enjoying the cultural attractions at the court of Ludovico Sforza, Il Moro. Castiglione returned to Mantua after his father’s death in October and assumed his father’s responsibilities at the court of Francesco Gonzaga, the Marquis of Mantua. He witnessed the French invasion of Milan and the fall of Ludovico in the autumn of 1499. He worked for the French alliance for five years, accompanying Gonzaga on the ill-advised campaign against the Spanish in the Kingdom of Naples in 1503. Castiglione remained as Gonzaga’s representative in Rome, cultivated the papal Curia, and met Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and his wife, Elisabetta Gonzaga. He entered Duke Guidobaldo’s service at the court in Urbino in 1504, much to Gonzaga’s displeasure, and remained with Francesco Maria della Rovere after Guidobaldo’s death. He participated in several military campaigns organized by Julius II between 1509 and 1514 and again entered the service of Francesco Gonzaga, when Pope Leo X removed Francesco Maria as Duke of Urbino. Castiglione married Ippolita Torelli in 1516 and had three children before her death in 1520. During this period he again represented the Marquis of Mantua in Rome. He was appointed papal nuncio to Spain in July 1524 by Clement VII and gained the favor of Charles V. He died on February 7, 1529. Although he was buried in

Il Cortegiano, 1524; as The Book of the Courtier, edited by Daniel Javitch, translated by Charles Singleton, 2002.

Letters Lettere, edited by Pierantonio Serassi, 1769–1971. Lettere inedite e rare, edited by Guglielmo Gorni, 1969. Le Lettere. Tomo primo (1497–March, 1521), edited by Guido. La Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1978.

Further Reading Cartwright, Julia, The Perfect Courtier Baldassare Castiglione: His Life and Letters, 1478–1529, 2 vols., New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927. Cian, Vittorio, La Lingua di Baldassarre Castiglione, Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1942. Cox, Virginia, The Renaissance Dialogue: Literary Dialogue in Its Social and Political Contexts, Castiglione to Galileo, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Finucci, Valeria, The Lady Vanishes: Subjectivity and Representation in Castiglione and Ariosto, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. Fucilla, Joseph G., Superbi colli e eltri saggi, Florence: Olschki, 1963. Hanning, Robert W., and David Rosand (editors), Castiglione. The Ideal and the Real in Renaissance Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983. Harrison, Thomas Perrin, Jr., ‘‘The Latin Pastorals of Milton and Castiglione,’’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 50(1935): 480–493. Ossola, Carlo, Dal Cortegiano’’ all’ ‘‘ Uomo di mondo’’: Storia di un libro e di un modello sociale, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Saccone, Eduardo, ‘‘The Portrait of the Courtier in Castiglione,’’ Italica, 64(1987): 1–18. Scarpati, Claudio, and Uberto Motta. Studi su Baldassarre Castiglione, Milan: ISU Universita` cattolica, 2002. Woodhouse, John R., Castiglione: A Reassessment of ‘‘The Courtier,’’ Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1978.

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BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE

IL LIBRO DEL CORTEGIANO, 1528 Dialogue by Baldassare Castiglione

Baldassare Castiglione worked on Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier) for nearly 20 years between around 1508 and 1524. He hurriedly sent the manuscript to the Aldine Press in Venice, because he feared a copy in the hands in Vittoria Colonna might be printed without his permission. After publication in April 1528, its popularity extended across Europe and made Castiglione’s model of civilized conduct a useful and enduring one, despite the idealized character of the work, which honors Guidobaldo da Montefeltro and the illustrious court of Urbino. The earliest plans for Il Cortegiano appear in a manuscript notebook dating from around 1508. After returning to Francesco Gonzaga’s service in Mantua in 1514, Castiglione had two manuscripts for his book prepared: The first dates from 1514– 1515; the second, which contains the first version of Il Cortegiano, from 1515–16. He revised and enlarged a second version of Il Cortegiano in three books around 1520–1521. The final manuscript, composed of four books, dates from 1524, after most of the characters in Il Cortegiano were dead. The dedicatory letter to Don Michel de Silva dates from 1527. Written as a dialogue or symposium in four books, Il Cortegiano has both classical and humanistic antecedents. Although Castiglione claims Cicero’s De oratore as his model, the form of the work is closely related to that of Plato’s Symposium. Besides the dedicatory letter to the work, each book contains an address to Alfonso Ariosto by the author. The book’s fiction is that Castiglione himself was in England at the time of the gathering in March 1507 at Urbino’s ducal palace, and that he is only setting down in writing a detailed account he heard of the lively conversations that took place as part of the entertainment, after the arrival of Pope Julius II and his entourage. The participants include a variety of notable historical figures, who lend an element of realism to the idealized picture of this brilliant court. 412

In book one, the speakers decide to amuse themselves by defining an ideal courtier. At the center of his physical and moral attributes lies grace that arises from sprezzatura, often defined as nonchalance or a kind of artful naturalness. They focus on the courtier’s nobility; his devotion to arms and sport; his education, especially in letters as the foundation of moral character; his cleverness in speaking and writing; and his expertise in social interactions. The second book focuses upon such issues as sound judgment, good timing, offering honest counsel, avoiding affectation, and following the classical rule of moderation. The long analysis of humor and the role of laughter in human life relates to the necessity of wit in the often dangerous courtly environment. When the question of the courtier’s behavior with women arises, the ladies insist that the courtier must have a woman who is his equal. The courtly lady, the topic of book three, has a civilizing function at court. While a natural kind of beauty is important, a lady must be circumspect and cautious in her behavior. Yet, many of her traits are identical to those of the courtier: liveliness of mind, appropriate physical exercise, prudence, virtue, skill in conversation, and securing goodwill. The courtly woman must exhibit a pleasing affability while observing a certain difficult mean. Some of the speakers defend women from misogynistic attacks through ancient examples, suggesting that women can be as worthy as men. Finally the concern with appearances is superseded by the question of the courtier’s political functions and higher aspirations, in particular toward Platonic love. The courtier’s principal goal serves an important political function, that of guiding his prince toward virtuous thoughts and actions. Furthermore, the perfect courtier must be in love, because love can lead him to the divine and spiritual, to true virtue. Rather than mere physical sensation, love becomes, in the words of Bembo, a purifying force inspired by the sense of sight rather than touch. Modeled on Plato’s Symposium and the writings of Marsilio Ficino and Pietro Bembo, the vision of earthly, corporeal beauty leads the courtier up the ‘‘ladder of love’’ toward ideal beauty and, ultimately, the divine. Talking until dawn, the company is captivated by the final discussion of ideal beauty that transforms the woman into an inspiration to lead the soul to the good or God. The book ends on a playful note that brings both the speakers and the reader back to reality.

BALDASSARE CASTIGLIONE Il Cortegiano is about the education of the ruling classes, but it offers a higher purpose. The contemplative ideal of love complements the active life of guiding the prince. The enthusiastic reception of this work demonstrates the power of its advice in European courtly circles for nearly two centuries. It appeared in over 150 editions in various European languages between 1528 and the end of the eighteenth century. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA Editions First Edition Il libro del Cortegiano, Venice: Aldus, 1528.

Critical Editions Il libro del Cortegiano, edited by Vittorio Cian, Florence: Sansoni, 1897, reprinted in 1947. Il libro del Cortigiano, edited by G. Preti, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. As Il libro del Cortegiano con una scelta delle Opere minori, edited by Bruno Maier, Turin: UTET, 1964. Il libro del Cortigiano, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1987. Il libro del Cortigiano, edited by Walter Barberis, Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

Translations As The Book of the Courtier, edited by Daniel Javitch, translated by Charles Singleton, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002.

Further Reading Berger, Harry, The Absence of Grace: Sprezzatura and Suspicionin, Two Renaissance Courtesy Books, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1995. Cavallo, JoAnn, ‘‘Joking Matters: Politics and Dissimulation in Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 53(2000): 402–424. Motta, Uberto, Castiglione e il mito di Urbino: studi sulla elaborazione del ‘‘Cortegiano,’’ Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2003. Motta, Uberto, ‘‘Per Elisabetta: Il ritratto della Duchessa di Urbino nel Cortegiano di Castiglione,’’ Lettere Italiane, 56(2004): 442461. Patrizi, Giorgio, and Amedeo Quondam (editors), Educare il corpo, educare la parola: nella trattistica del Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Pugliese, Olga Zorzi, ‘‘L’evoluzione della struttura dialogica nel Libro del cortegiano, ’’ in Il sapere delle parole: Studi sul dialogo latino e italiano del Rinascimento, edited by Walter Geerts, Annick Paternoster, and Franco Pignatti, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Quint, David, ‘‘Courtier, Prince, Lady: The Design of the Book of the Courtier,’’ Italian Quarterly, 37(2000): 185–195. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘Questo povero Cortegiano,’’ Castiglione, il Libro, la Storia, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Rebhorn, Wayne, Courtly Performances: Masking and Festivity in Castiglione’s ‘‘ Book of the Courtier,’’ Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1978. Wirth, Petra, ‘‘Il libro del cortegiano: La figura femminile– segno ideale nel mondo illusorio del cortigiano,’’ Romance Review, 8(1998): 38–59.

THE CASTLE OF FRATTA See Le confessioni d’un italiano (Work by Ippolito Nievo)

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CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA)

CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA) (1347–1380) Dominican tertiary, mystic, theologian, canonized saint, doctor of the Catholic Church, and patroness of Italy, Catherine is the most prominent mystic of the fourteenth century. She was the author of 382 Lettere (Letters, ca. 1374–1380), 26 Orazioni (Prayers, ca. 1376–1380), and one book, the Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza (Dialogue of Divine Providence), also known as Dialogo della Divina Dottrina, or Dialogo delle Rivelazioni (Dialogue of Divine Doctrine, or Dialogue of Revelations), or simply as Dialogo (Dialogue). Catherine was the first woman to have left substantial amounts of writing in the Italian vernacular. Despite her lack of education and her social class, Catherine broke the boundaries of feminine conventions for her times. Rather than remaining within the confines of the household or monastery, as would have been customary for a religious woman, she became a public figure and a strong presence in the civic, ecclesiastical, and political struggles of the fourteenth century. She gained unprecedented power, to the point of being consulted by the pope for advice and being asked to lecture the College of Cardinals on its dutiful loyalty to the pope. Her influence on two major historical occurrences is particularly noteworthy: convincing the pope to return to Rome from Avignon and contributing to a peace agreement between Florence and the pope. Living at the time of papal residency at Avignon, Catherine actively committed herself to the pope’s return to Rome and eventually succeeded in convincing him to abandon his political intrigues and to revert to his traditional role as bishop of Rome. Pope Gregory XI moved the court back to the Vatican in 1378. In March of the same year, at the pope’s request, Catherine departed on a mission to Florence, which was then under papal interdict, in order to bring peace between the two contending states. In Florence, she witnessed the Ciompi revolt in June. Catherine imposed herself on popes and princes by means of her wisdom and her simple but profound rhetoric. Her written works are a unique specimen of what may be called ‘‘ecclesiastical mysticism.’’ They are nothing more than an inspired 414

exposition of basic Catholic creeds, which Catherine renewed and presented in a more approachable fashion, thanks to her acquired closeness to God. Traditional criticism focused on the retelling of Catherine’s life and began while she was still alive. In 1374 Tommaso della Fonte and Bartolomeo Dominici wrote hagiographic texts on her life. In 1398 her secretary Raymond of Capua wrote the Legenda maior (Major Legend), the first biography, from which over 40 subsequent lives would draw their material for edifying purposes. In recent years, Catherine’s mystical writing has received more attention, both for its theological content and for its literary value. After being proclaimed Doctor of the Catholic Church in 1970, her written works have been investigated more thoroughly, paying particular attention to the originality of her theological approach and her unique style. Catherine overcame the obstacle of her own illiteracy with the help of her spiritual director and secretary, the Dominican friar Raymond of Capua, who was a theologian and a scholar in his own right. Despite her initial ignorance, the constant interaction and discussion about theological and spiritual issues with her cohort of followers, most of whom were literate and knowledgeable people, and the continuous reading of mystical and theological texts helped Catherine develop a cultural background of her own. Although at some point she may have learned how to write her own texts, she always preferred to dictate her writings to her numerous followers who served as her secretaries. Through her writings, Catherine contributed strongly to the spreading of the vernacular, which was at its beginning stages of development as a written language. She wrote in Sienese dialect, and her works, besides being crucial theological investigations, gain importance from a literary and linguistic point of view, because they were written at a time when literary language was not yet definitively formed. After a long period of prayerful solitude climaxed in an unexpected ‘‘mystical marriage’’ with Christ at the age of 21, Catherine came to the realization that the love of God must be complemented by service to her fellow human beings. She

CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA) began by tending to the indigent and underprivileged, but soon her service would involve civic, political, and ecclesiastical commitments. Catherine quickly became well known for her ecstasies and also gathered around herself a large number of followers, whom she named famiglia, the Italian for ‘‘family.’’ Some of her followers were secular, but most of them were religious belonging to different orders. The formation of the group around her is important because theologically Catherine was influenced by the four major mystical schools of the Middle Ages: Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, and Benedictines. Some of her followers were Dominicans like herself (Raimondo da Capua, Tommaso Caffarini, Bartolomeo Dominici), others were Franciscans (Gabriele da Volterra, Lazzarino da Pisa), still others were Augustinians (Giovanni Tantucci and other hermits of Lecceto, as well as William Flete), and one was the Vallombrosan Benedictine Giovanni dalle Celle. Catherine’s Lettere constitute indispensable documents of cultural and historical significance. The variety of her correspondents and abundance of situations offer an opening into the real life of fourteenth-century Europe. Catherine corresponded with friends, relatives, strangers, prisoners, prostitutes, popes, queens, and kings. To all of them she imparted advice, counsel, and information, in an attempt to find a spiritual explanation and moral maturation for their private or public condition. She wrote most of her letters between 1370 and 1380, at a most difficult time in the history of the Church, when the Avignon ‘‘captivity’’ underwent important changes, before a permanent solution was found. For this reason, some of the letters addressed to the pope or to government officials attest to Catherine’s political stance. Her undeniable political naı¨vete´ transpires through her observation of every situation from a moral and spiritual perspective. She maintained deference and subordination in her relations with state and clerical officials, but she surpassed the confines of her sex and role, when she clearly voiced judgment and expressed condemnation. While hiding behind the rhetorical shield of misogynistic inferiority, she made strong arguments to support her opinions. In literary history, at the time of the diatribe over the standardization of the Italian language, her letters would be considered a model of Sienese dialect to be contrasted with the Florentine dialect. The Lettere were the subject of numerous critical studies in the course of the nineteenth century. Given the historical approach of most scholarship in that period of time, the letters offer abundant

material for investigation into the crucial questions linked to the papal exile in France. Catherine wrote the Dialogo between 1377 and 1378, dictating it to her secretaries, who were already used to writing the letters she dictated. In this case, they transcribed what the saint uttered during her ecstatic moments, when she was rapt in visions. As suggested by the title, the structure of the book is that of a dialogue with God the Father, in which Catherine reports her experience of Christ and concerns herself with the whole spiritual life of human beings. The dialogic form of this work derives directly from Catherine’s composition technique, because the book was divinely inspired and the result of her prayerful exchanges with God. It is divided into six sections: an Introduction (Chapters 1 to 8), the ‘‘Trattato della Discrezione’’ (Treatise on Discretion, Chapters 9 to 64), the ‘‘Trattato dell’Orazione’’ (Treatise on Prayer, Chapters 65 to 134), the ‘‘Trattato della Divina Provvidenza’’ (Treatise on Divine Providence, Chapters 135 to 153), the ‘‘Trattato dell’Obbedienza’’ (Treatise on Obedience, Chapters 154 to 167), and the ‘‘Devota rivelazione’’ (Devout Revelation) or ‘‘Dialogo breve’’ (Brief Dialogue). In the Dialogo, Catherine concentrates on the suffering body of Christ. The incarnate Word and above all the crucified Christ originate all her revelations, which then become expanded to the mystical body of Christ, the Church. The underlying theological concept involves a refutation of self-love, which is the root of all vices, and the desire to achieve perfect virtue, which is the gift of charity and must be complemented by the service of others. The Dialogo is an expansion of the revelation that Catherine had in a vision, after receiving Holy Communion on the feast of the Blessed Virgin. It gathers together the spiritual teachings she had already scattered in the various letters. Its language attempts to express the ineffable essence of God in the symbolism of its own times. Catherine’s Orazioni follow the same compositional technique as the Lettere and the Dialogo. The prayers report words she uttered during her ecstasies, which were recorded by her secretaries, possibly without her consciousness of it. The majority of her prayers were recorded in the last few months of her life, during her stay in Rome between 1379 and 1380. Catherine’s exchanges with God in the Orazioni are rhetorically and spiritually not very dissimilar from the Dialogo, because they are conceived as reporting revelations inspired in her by the Spirit during ecstatic moments. Judgment on Catherine’s theological thinking varies greatly. Far from trying to develop a 415

CATHERINE OF SIENA (CATERINA BENINCASA) systematic theology, she more simply offered her spiritual intuitions and pastoral suggestions. Catherine’s mystical theology concentrates on imagery rather than theoretical conceptualization. Some of her images are particularly significant, such as the ‘‘bridge.’’ The humanity of the divine Christ, the incarnate Word, stands as the bridge between prayer and action, heaven and earth, humans and God, contemplation of God and service of others, time and eternity. The cross of Christ becomes the bridge uniting humanity and divinity; three most important constitutive parts of the cross are the three steps of the bridge: Christ’s feet nailed to the Cross, his pierced side, and his mouth reveal in ascending succession his ineffable love and peace. The ‘‘inner cell’’ or cell of the mind is another such powerful image. It signifies the bringing into the interior of the prayerful practice of contemplation. Living in the world, Catherine made her own monastic cell inside herself; even while living in the troublesome family environment in her youthful years, she gained isolation by retreating in her private cell of the mind. Other concrete images include the ‘‘rope’’ of charity, which binds God and humans together, and the tree of life, which was dead but has been restored to new life thanks to its grafting with the love of God; it is now a new and fruitful tree. Catherine’s novelty is stylistic more than conceptual. She used very concrete and graphic images to account for her theological arguments. Morality, truthfulness, and strong imagery are some of the chief qualities of her literary work, which manages to express even the most complex and sublime theological concepts in popular style and simple, direct language. The depth of Catherine’s spiritual revelations shaped her humble rhetoric into inspiring images that can be easily comprehended by scholarly and ignorant readers alike.

Biography Catherine of Siena was the twenty-fourth child born to Jacopo and Lapa Benincasa, middle class wool-dyers from Siena, in southern Tuscany. Prophetic indications of her religious mission have been identified in her date of birth, March 25, 1347, which coincides with the feast of the annunciation to Mary and the miraculous conception of Christ, in the fact that Catherine was the only one of 25 children to be nursed by her mother, and also in her death in 1380 at the age of 33, traditionally the age of Christ. Catherine displayed clear signs of her religious vocation from a very early age. She 416

decided not to marry, in order to devote herself entirely to the service of God. After her first vision at the age of 6, she made a vow of virginity. In defiance of her parents’ marriage plans for her, Catherine cut off her hair and lived as a recluse in the basement of her family home. At 16, she took the habit of the Sisters of Penance of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, the Mantellate, which up to that time had been an order solely for widowed women. She devoted her life to praying, fasting, physical penance, and the service of her family members. Catherine received no formal education and taught herself how to read and write during the years of isolation at home. When she was 20, Christ instructed her in one of her visions to conduct an active life of service in the world. She gathered around herself a large group of followers, from every station of life and rank. Most of her followers were older, more educated, and socially higher than she. She even gained the faith of popes, cardinals, politicians, kings, and queens, who exchanged letters with her in search of advice. On April 1, 1375, while in Pisa on a mission, she received the stigmata. She also convinced Pope Gregory XI to move the papacy back to Rome from Avignon, thereby ending the 70-year ‘‘captivity’’ in 1378. In the same year, she witnessed the Ciompi revolt in Florence, where she was sent by the pope to pacify the city. At the death of Gregory XI, she became deeply involved in the dispute between the newly elected Pope Urban VI and the anti-Pope Clement VII, which started the Great Schism of the western Church. Having been called to Rome by the pope to be on his side, Catherine lived in Rome for the last two years of her life and died on the Sunday before the Feast of the Ascension, on April 29, 1380, after offering her life for the unity of the Church. Since Catherine’s death, her relics have been credited with numerous miracles. Upon the demand of the Sienese people for the saint’s body to be returned, Catherine’s head was severed and sent to Siena to be venerated as a relic. She was canonized in 1461 and proclaimed patroness of Italy in 1939 and doctor of the Church in 1970. ALESSANDRO VETTORI See also: Religion and Literature Selected Works Libro della divina dottrina: Barduccio Canigiani, Epistola della morte di S. Caterina (written in 1377–1378), ca. 1475. Epistole: Orazioni scelte, edited by Bartolommeo da Alzano, 1500.

CARLO CATTANEO Il Dialogo (written in 1377–1378), edited by Giuliana Cavallini, as The Dialogue (1968), translated by Suzanne Noffke, 1980. Le orazioni (written in 1376–1380), edited by Giuliana Cavallini, 1993, as The Prayers of Saint Catherine of Siena, translated by Suzanne Noffke, 1983. Epistolario di Santa Caterina da Siena (written in 1374– 1380), edited by Eugenio Dupre´ Theseider, 1940; as The Letters of Saint Catherine of Siena, 2 vols., translated by Suzanne Noffke, 2000–2001.

Further Reading Anodal, Gabriella, Il linguaggio cateriniano: indice delle immagini, Siena: Cantagalli, 1983. Bell, Rudolph M., Holy Anorexia, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Cavallini, Giuliana, Catherine of Siena, London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1998. Fawtier, Robert, and Louis Canet, La double expe´rience de Sainte Catherine Benincasa, 6th edition, Paris: Librairie Gallimard, 1948.

Foster, Kenelm, and Mary John Ronayne, editors, I, Catherine: Selected Writings of Catherine of Siena, London: Collins, 1980. Getto, Giovanni, Saggio letterario su S. Caterina da Siena, Florence: Sansoni, 1939. Hilkert, Mary Catherine, Speaking with Authority: Catherine of Siena and the Voices of Women Today, New York: Paulist Press, 2001. Levasti, Arrigo, My Servant, Catherine, translated by Dorothy M. White, Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1954. Noffke, Suzanne, O.P., Catherine of Siena: Vision through a Distant Eye, Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Papa`sogli, Giorgio, Sangue e fuoco: Santa Caterina da Siena, Rome: Citta` Nuova, 1986. Raimondo da Capua, The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, translated by George Lamb, London: Harvill, 1960. Zanini, Lina, Bibliografia analitica di s. Caterina da Siena: 1901–1950, Rome: Edizioni Cateriniane, 1971.

CARLO CATTANEO (1801–1869) The Milanese philosopher and economist Carlo Cattaneo launched his career as a writer in 1822, publishing a review of his university professor Gian Domenico Romagnosi’s influential book Assunto primo della scienza del diritto naturale (The First Thesis of the Science of Natural Law, 1820) in the Florentine journal Antologia di Vieusseux. Romagnosi (1761–1835) was the most important figure in Cattaneo’s formation; in his article, Cattaneo strongly supported Romagnosi’s esteem for the French Enlightenment, especially as exemplified in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopedie. In 1839 Cattaneo founded Il Politecnico: Repertorio mensile di studi applicati alla prosperita` e alla cultura sociale (The Polytechnic: Monthly Index of Studies Applied to Welfare and Social Culture), which became the most important cultural journal of its time. Il Politecnico continued to be published until 1844, then resumed in 1859, continuing under Cattaneo until 1862 and ceasing publication in 1868. As its editor, he sought to analyze the Italian and European situation from historical, sociological, and economic perspectives and to disseminate news of the latest scientific advances among his readers. Cattaneo also wrote on literary matters from a quasi-anthropological perspective, addressing the

problem of romanticism, the status of the ‘‘modern’’ novel in Italy, and the relationship among literature, history, and responsible citizenship within the context of national customs. He analyzed and recommended such books as Vita di Dante (Life of Dante, 1839), by Cesare Balbo and the Romancero del Cid, translated into Italian by Pietro Monti in 1839, while criticizing works like Niccolo` Tommaseo’s Fede e Bellezza (Faith and Beauty, 1840), which he faulted for its weakness in ideas and style. In 1843 he was appointed to the Istituto Lombardo-Veneto, composed of scholars in economic and historical studies, and was entrusted to prepare a guide of Lombardy for the scholars who were to come to Milan for the Congress of Scientists in 1844. Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia (Natural and Civic Notes on Lombardy, 1844) is a two-volume analysis of the scientific and social history of the region that concludes with a discussion of its contemporary problems. Between 1846 and 1847, Cattaneo published Alcuni scritti (Some Writings), a collection of essays elaborating his political hopes for independent European states. In 1848 he was part of Consiglio di Guerra, which organized the ‘‘cinque giornate,’’ the ‘‘five days’’ of political insurgency in Milan, of which he wrote a 417

CARLO CATTANEO vigorous account in French, L’Insurrection de Milan (The Insurrection of Milan, 1848). Cattaneo abandoned active political involvement when King Carlo Alberto and his ministers, who considered him an unreliable reactionary, became the leaders of Risorgimento. Cattaneo’s position was, in fact, a republican federalist one: He was hostile to the unification strategy of Giuseppe Mazzini and Camillo Cavour. In Cattaneo’s view, Mazzini’s politics were idealistic, mystic, and visionary, while Cavour took the opportunistic and utilitarian line of a professional politician. Cattaneo held that social and political policy should be based on an objective analysis of all the relevant economic and historical factors. In his view, the vision of the leaders of the Italian Risorgimento was a vast idealistic synthesis that lacked a scientific foundation. The very first step of the Risorgimento movement, the unification between developed Lombardy and the backward Piedmont, was a social and economical mistake in Cattaneo’s view, an example of such unrealistic idealism. Cattaneo’s attitude was in any case the attitude of a scholar who worked to apply the principles of the French Enlightenment to contemporary realities. Analysis should be based on experimental observation, on a lucid and considered rational judgement, on a scientific culture, able to mediate, as he wrote in the introduction to his Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia, between ‘‘le meditazioni dei pochi e i costumi e le necessita` dei molti’’ (the thoughts of the few and the habits and needs of the many). He hoped to ‘‘render fertile il campo d’azione e di pratica’’ (to fertilize the field of action and pratice) by inspiring a series of social and economical structural reforms. Cattaneo was profoundly hostile to the ideas of the ‘‘primato morale e civile degli italiani’’ (the moral and civic preeminence of the Italians) introduced and promoted by the republican philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti. In 1860 Cattaneo published a collection of his complete essays in economics, Memorie di economia pubblica (Memoirs of public economics). As he wrote there: ‘‘L’Italia dovrebbe muoversi all’unisono con l’Europa, per conquistare una nobile posizione nell’associazione scientifica d’Europa e del mondo, poiche` gli scopi del popolo son gli stessi, coerenti, unici e comuni: una scienza, un’arte, una cultura, una societa`’’ (Italy should move in unison with Europe, to assume a noble position in the scientific association of Europe and the world, because the aims of the people are the same, consistent and common ones: one science, 418

one art, one culture, one society). Switzerland was a political model for him. In the ancient League of the Free Cantons, it gave birth to a new constitution in which political rights and individual freedom were guaranteed; it had a common army, security policy, and government, but the economic and social individuality of each of the cantons was respected. In Switzerland Cattaneo published his Corso di filosofia (Course in Philosophy, 1852), in which, in powerful and incisive language and images, he discussed the economic value of free enquiry and the importance of combining intellectual with scientific, technical research. When he resumed publication of Il Politecnico in 1860, he published an essay dedicated to the poet Ugo Foscolo and his fight for Italian independence and autonomy. After 1867 Cattaneo became an elected member of the Italian Parliament, but he never exercised his mandate, being deeply disappointed by the way in which a united Italy was achieved and ruled. Cattaneo’s ideological positions were revived during World War II when Elio Vittorini launched a literary and cultural review called Il Politecnico (1945–1947).

Biography Born in Milan, on 15 June 1801, Cattaneo studied law in Pavia under Gian Domenico Romagnosi and graduated in 1824. He worked as a professor in various high schools in Milan and as a German translator for the Lombard publisher, Londonio. He became a leader of the 1848 ‘‘cinque giornate’’ insurrection in Milan. When the Austrians regained their power, Cattaneo took refuge first in Lugano, then in Paris, where he sought French republican support to the Italian independence movement. He moved to Lugano in 1855. In 1860, he joined Garibaldi in Naples. He was elected a member of the Italian Parliament in 1867. Cattaneo died in Castagnola (Switzerland), on 6 February 1869. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Risorgimento Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Alessandro Bertani, Florence: Le Monnier, 1881. Le piu` belle pagine di Carlo Cattaneo, edited by Gaetano Salvemini, Milan: Treves, 1922.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI Scritti filosofici, edited by Norberto Bobbio, Florence: Le Monnier, 1960. Tutte le opere, edited by Luigi Ambrosoli, Milan: Mondadori, 1967. Opere scelte, edited by Delia Castelnuovo Frigessi, 4 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Scritti filosofici letterari e vari, edited by Franco Alessio, Florence: Sansoni, 1990. L’innovazione come leva dello sviluppo: Scritti e discorsi per la Societa` d’Incoraggiamento d’Arti e Mestieri di Milano, edited by Carlo G. Lacaita, Florence: Le Monnier, 2001.

Philosophic, Political, and Economic Writings Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia, 1844. Alcuni scritti, 1846–1847. Dell’insurrezione di Milano nel 1848 e della successiva guerra, edited by Norberto Bobbio, 1949. Corso di filosofia, 1852. Memorie di economia pubblica, 1860.

Letters Epistolario, edited by Rinaldo Caddeo, 1949–1956.

Further Reading Armani, Giuseppe, Carlo Cattaneo, una biografia, Milan: Garzanti, 1997. Bracaloni, Ruggero, Cattaneo, un federalista per gl’italiani, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Cafagna, Luciano (editor), Atti di intelligenza e sviluppo economico. Saggi per il bicentenario della nascita di Carlo Cattaneo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Della Peruta, Franco, Carlo Cattaneo politico, Milan: Angeli, 2001. Frabotta, Biancamaria, Carlo Cattaneo, Lugano: Fondazione Ticino, 1971. Gili, Antonio, Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869) un italiano svizzero, Lugano: Casagrande Editore, 2001. Levi, Alessandro, Il positivismo politico di Carlo Cattaneo, Florence: Centro Editoriale Toscano, 2001. Moos, Carlo, L’altro Risorgimento: L’ultimo Cattaneo tra Italia e Svizzera, Milan: Angeli, 1992. Puccio, Ugo, Introduzione a Cattaneo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Rotelli, Ettore, L’eclissi del federalismo: da Cattaneo al Partito d’Azione, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003.

GUIDO CAVALCANTI (CA. 1259–1300) Guido Cavalcanti was one of the most distinctive poetic voices of the dolce stil nuovo; indeed, in the Vita Nuova, Dante refers to him as his ‘‘first friend.’’ Cavalcanti’s poetic compositions, 52 in all (2 canzoni, 2 cobbole, 11 ballate, 36 sonnets, and 1 mottetto), are collected in more than 100 manuscripts, among which the oldest and most authoritative are three in the Vatican Library (Chigi L.VIII.305, Lat. 3214, and Barb. 3953), two in Florence (Laurentian Rediano 9 and Banco Rari 217, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale), one in Spain (Escorial e.III.23), one in Verona (Capitolare 445), and one in Milan (Ambrosiano O.63 sup.). Cavalcanti’s poetry is generally dedicated to the exploration of amorous phenomena and may be divided into several distinctive and broad categories defined both by subject and style: the doctrinal and intellectual disquisition on the nature of love and loving; the praise of love and the lady’s beauty; the complaint over the harshness of love’s tyranny; humorous caricature in the comic-realistic vein; and poetry of more popular inspiration. No fewer than eight of his sonnets are in correspondence (tenzoni) with other poets. Of these, perhaps

the earliest ‘‘historically datable’’ one was written in response to the younger Dante’s first sonnet in the Vita Nuova,‘‘A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core,’’ which requests an interpretation of his erotically charged dream. In his responsive sonnet, ‘‘Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore,’’ Guido provides an explanation that, at the time of its composition, may have been plausible, but one that, in retrospect, Dante found wanting. In the category of tenzoni, some poems directed to other poets do not appear to have had a response, or at least none has survived, as, for example, the two sonnets he addressed to Dante—‘‘Dante, un sospiro messagger del core’’ and ‘‘Se vedi Amore, assai ti priego, Dante’’— and particularly the one he addressed to Guittone d’Arezzo, ‘‘Da piu` a uno face un sollegismo.’’ In this latter sonnet Guido takes the older poet to task for the lack of clear logical procedures and structures in his poetry. As was the case with most of the important poets of the age, Cavalcanti both borrowed from the lyric tradition and contributed to it; he was an imitator as well as an innovator. Nevertheless, his poetic voice almost always has a fresh and distinctive 419

GUIDO CAVALCANTI quality. Cavalcanti was a poet with many faces, perhaps as many as five different aspects. In poems such as ‘‘Fresca rosa novella’’ and ‘‘Avete ‘n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura,’’ we may observe the more ‘‘traditional’’ Cavalcanti, for here he shows himself to be the master of the relatively uncomplicated poetry of praise that imitates both the Sicilian School and Guido Guinizzelli. In sonnets such as ‘‘Tu m’a`i sı` piena di dolor la mente’’ and ‘‘Voi che per li occhi mi passaste il core,’’ we may view the poet’s darker, tragic side, particularly in his seeming obsession with the ‘‘spiritelli’’ (little spirits) and with the torment occasioned by love that leads to death. In other poems, such as the sonnet ‘‘Guata, Manetto, quella scrignutuzza,’’ Cavalcanti displayed his ability to write effectively and humorously in the lower stylistic register of the goliardic poets and the ‘‘rimatori comico-realistici,’’ such as Rustico di Filippo and others. In the ballata ‘‘In un boschetto trova’ pasturella,’’ Cavalcanti demonstrated his awareness of the troubadour tradition of the pastourelle and his skill in composing in a more popular genre. Finally, in his doctrinal canzone ‘‘Donna me prega,’’ he gave ample evidence of his intellectual powers and exegetical talents—of what Dante termed in Inferno 10 Guido’s ‘‘altezza d’ingegno’’ (v. 59). Indeed, Cavalcanti’s reputation as a ‘‘natural philosopher,’’ a follower of Epicurus and Averroes, is attested by the chroniclers Giovanni and Filippo Villani and by Giovanni Boccaccio, who cast him as such in the ninth tale of the sixth day of the Decameron. These philosophical strands found their way into many of his poems and into ‘‘Donna me prega’’ in particular. Cavalcanti was obsessed with the psychology of love, and in many of his poems he represented, externalized, the inner struggle of the soul afflicted by contrasting emotions, which he personified as spiritelli. The tragic, mournful quality of his lyrics attests to the mental and physical anguish induced by love and often reflects the abject state of the lover, as in the following sonnet, which also marks a new development in the history of the form: L’anima mia vilment’ e` sbigotita de la battaglia ch’ell’ave dal core: che s’ella sente pur un poco Amore piu` presso a lui che non sole, ella more. Sta come quella che non ha valore, ch’e` per temenza da lo cor partita; e chi vedesse com’ ell’ e` fuggita diria per certo: Questi non ha vita. Per li occhi venne la battaglia in pria, che ruppe ogni valore immantenente,

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sı` che del colpo fu strutta la mente. Qualunqu’ e` quei che piu` allegrezza sente, se vedesse li spirti fuggir via, di grande sua pietate piangeria. My soul suffers harsh anguish because of the battle the heart wages on it: if it senses that Love is closer to it than normal, it will die. It remains as one that has no power and is through fear separated from the heart; whoever would see how it has fled would say for certain: ‘‘This one is not alive.’’ The battle first came through the eyes and immediately broke down all resistance, such that the mind was devastated by the blow. Whoever may be in a state of great happiness, if he were to see my spirits fleeing, he would weep from pity

This intentionally asymmetrical and unique rhyme scheme (ABBB BAAA CDD DCC) is the metrical counterpart to the emotional disequilibrium, to the disordered state of the poet-lover’s existence brought about by love. Relying neither on fragmented syntax nor on harsh language, Cavalcanti was able to convey the sense of imbalance through subtle manipulation of the rhyme scheme. As is customary, the poet-lover’s amorous affairs are acted out with ‘‘real’’ characters, the personifications of his soul, mind, and heart. Cavalcanti’s doctrinal canzone ‘‘Donna me prega’’ is structured along the lines of a philosophical and scientific treatise and was intended to be a sort of scientific proof (a ‘‘natural dimostramento’’) that defines the origin, nature, and effects of love. The first stanza of the canzone announces the several questions about love that the poet will seek to resolve: Donna me prega, — per ch’io voglio dire d’un accidente — che sovente — e` fero, ed e` sı` altero, — ch’e` chiamato amore: sı` chi lo nega — possa ’1 ver sentire! Ed a presente — conoscente — chero, perch’io no spero — ch’om di basso core a tal ragione porti canoscenza: che`, senza — natural dimostramento non ho talento — di voler provare la` dove posa, e chi lo fa creare, e qual sia sua vertute e sua potenza, l’essenza — poi e ciascun suo movimento, e ’l piacimento che ’l fa dire amare, e s’omo per veder lo po` mostrare. A lady beseeches me, and therefore I am willing to treat of an accident that is often fierce, and yet so majestic, which is called Love: so that those who disbelieve in it may hear the truth. And now I require an intelligent audience, because I have no hope that people of inferior quality can muster sufficient understanding for a discussion of this kind. For I am not inclined to try, without

GUIDO CAVALCANTI scientific exposition, to demonstrate where it resides, and who brings it into existence, and what its virtue and its power are, and then its essence and all its movements, and the attraction that earns for it the name of loving, and whether one can show it so that it can be seen. [Translated by J. E. Shaw]

Although the exact meaning and sources of the canzone are still the subject of much debate, certain points emerge as valid: The lover, gazing upon a real woman, formulates within himself his own idea of beauty, and this ideal conception then completely dominates his mind, causing him to strive anxiously and ceaselessly to obtain its earthly manifestation, that is, a real woman. The anguish and torment of this vain pursuit (vain because the real can never measure up to the ideal) ultimately deprives the lover of reason and causes death. Cavalcanti’s poetry, for the most part, has as its subject the externalization, with appropriate personifications, of this inner struggle. While Cavalcanti is well known for his distinctively ‘‘tragic’’ poetry, not all of his lyrics are concerned with the anguish of the lover. The ballata ‘‘Fresca rosa novella’’ is a fine example of his richly flowing and exuberantly optimistic love lyrics, which demonstrate his strong ties to the poetic tradition. The first line evokes the colorful contrasto of Cielo d’Alcamo, ‘‘Rosa fresca aulentissima,’’ as well as a host of other poems that feature the Natureingang with the related floral and seasonal imagery of springtime: Fresca rosa novella, piacente primavera, per prata e per rivera gaiamente cantando vostro fin presio mando — a la verdura. Fresh, new rose, pleasing springtime, through meadows and streams joyously singing I proclaim your worth to all the countryside

The first two verses contain the almost ecstatic double invocation of the lady who is both rose and spring, flower and season. The adjectives ‘‘fresca,’’ ‘‘novella,’’ and ‘‘piacente’’ focus on her marvelous aspects: vitality, newness, and beauty. These are the qualities that combine to form the lady’s worth— her ‘‘presio’’— that the poet will evoke in his song of praise and that will echo throughout the springtime landscape, denoting the universality of Cavalcanti’s message. The ballata form, not common among the earlier poets, became for Cavalcanti a major vehicle for expression. This five-line ripresa contains the essential elements of the composition,

and its repetition after each strophe would ensure that the poem’s message—the celebration of the woman’s beauty, worth, and miraculous qualities—was proclaimed unequivocally and universally. The ballata is then a prime example of what we might call Cavalcanti’s overt adherence to the Guinizzellian ‘‘poetics of praise’’ and, more generally, to the celebration of the lady’s beauty and worth that is integral to a large part of duecento poetry. In a related vein, the sonnet ‘‘Bilta` di donna e di saccente core’’ belongs to the genre of the Provenc¸al plazer, which is intended to evoke those things that bring pleasure to the poet. One of many topoi in the thirteenth-century lyric is the presentation of the scene describing the encounter between the lover and the lady on the street (e.g., Giacomo da Lentini’s ‘‘Meravigliosamente’’; Guinizzelli’s ‘‘Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare’’; Dante’s ‘‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’’; Cino da Pistoia’s ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’). Cavalcanti’s variation on this particular theme, the sonnet ‘‘Chi e` questa che ve`n, ch’ogn’om la mira’’ (Who is she who comes, that every man admires), demonstrates his attempt to bridge the distance between the joyful and the tragic styles. While Cavalcanti was obviously not the first poet to speak of the pains and anguish of love, his poetry is distinguished because of the intensity of the emotion and the dramatic qualities of the poetic mise-en-sce`ne. In a number of finely tuned lyrics, mainly sonnets, Cavalcanti demonstrated his ability to describe the state of desolation wrought by love, to stage a dramatic scene of conflicting emotions that results in the harsh reality of a battlefield of love strewn with the victims of passion, as, for example in the sonnet ‘‘Voi che per li occhi mi passaste il core,’’ which presents a fantastic vision of Love who destroys the poet’s inner self. Cavalcanti’s preoccupation with the tragic dimension of amorous passion found followers in two of the minor members of the dolce stil novo, Dino Frescobaldi and Gianni degli Alfani. For his many fine qualities and numerous innovations Cavalcanti has a place of prominence in the poetic tradition of the thirteenth century.

Biography Guido Cavalcanti was born in Florence sometime in the 1250s (and not later than 1259) into a wealthy and powerful Guelf family. Guido’s father, Cavalcante, participated in the battle of Montaperti (1260) that resulted in the defeat of the Guelfs 421

GUIDO CAVALCANTI and the six-year reign of the Ghibellines in Florence (1260–1266). In 1267 Guido was married to Bice, a daughter of Farinata degli Uberti, the leader of the Florentine Ghibellines, in an attempt to make peace between the warring political factions of the city. They had two children, Tancia and Andrea. Guido was active in Florence politics. In the peace concluded by Cardinal Latino in 1280 he was one of the guarantors for the Guelf party, and in 1284 he served, together with Brunetto Latini and Dino Compagni, on the Consiglio Generale del Comune. In his chronicle, Compagni refers to the animosity between Guido and Corso Donati, a hatred based on political affiliations (Guido was a white Guelf, Corso a leader of the black Guelf faction), and this enmity led to Corso’s attempted assassination of Guido while he was on pilgrimage to the shrine of St. James in Compostella (1293–1295). The passage of the Ordinances of Justice in 1295 effectively excluded Guido from serving in the Florentine government. Fierce partisan rivalry continued, however, and Guido took part in an attack on the Donati family in Florence and was wounded. On June 24, 1300, Guido and other leaders of both the white and the black factions of the Guelf party were exiled to Sarzana in an attempt to restore civic order. On August 19, 1300, the ban was lifted, but Guido had contracted an illness, probably malaria, and died shortly after his return to Florence on August 29. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ See also: Dolce stil novo Selected Works Collections Rimatori del Dolce Stil Novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. La poesia lirica del Duecento, edited by Carlo Salinari, Turin: UTET, 1951. Le rime, edited by Guido Favati, Milan–Naples: Ricciardi, 1957; as Rime, edited by Giulio Cattaneo, Turin: Einaudi, 1967; as Rime con le rime di Iacopo Cavalcanti, edited by Domenico De Robertis, Turin: Einaudi, 1986; as Rime, edited by Letterio Cassata, Rome: Donzelli, 1993; as The Poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, edited and translated by Lowry Nelson, Jr., New York: Garland, 1986; The Complete Poems, translated by Marc Cirigliano, New York: Italica Press, 1992.

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Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan–Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969.

Selected Translations Pound, Ezra, Translations, New York: New Directions, 1963. German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited and translated by Frederick Goldin, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani. New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets [1861], edited by Sally Purcell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Wilhelm, James J., Lyrics of the Middle Ages, New York: Garland, 1990.

Further Reading Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, Guido Cavalcanti: The Other Middle Ages, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa (editor), Guido Cavalcanti tra i suoi lettori, Fiesole: Edizioni Cadmo, 2003. Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Calenda, Corrado, Per altezza d’ingegno: Saggi su Guido Cavalcanti, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Cecchi, Emilio, and Natalino Sapegno (editors), Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1: Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Corti, Maria, La felicita` mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Corti, Maria, ‘‘La fisionomia stilistica di Guido Cavalcanti,’’ Rendiconti dell’Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 8(1950): 530–552. Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric, New York: Harper & Row, 1968; 2nd ed., 1977. Favati, Guido, Inchiesta sul Dolce stil nuovo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1975. Fenzi, Enrico, La canzone d’amore di Guido Cavalcanti e i suoi antichi commenti, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1999. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Malato, Enrico, Dante e Guido Cavalcanti: Il dissidio per la ‘‘ Vita nuova’’ e il ‘‘disdegno’’ di Guido, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1997. Marti, Mario, Storia dello stil nuovo, 2 vols., Lecce: Milella, 1973. Pasquini, Emilio, and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Lo stilnovo e la poesia religiosa, Bari: Laterza, 1971. Russell, Rinaldina, Tre versanti della poesia stilnovistica: Guinizzelli, Cavalcanti, Dante, Bari: Adriatica, 1973., Shaw, James E., Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love: The ‘‘Canzone d’Amore’’ and Other Related Problems, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949.

PATRIZIA CAVALLI

PATRIZIA CAVALLI (1947–) ‘‘Qualcuno mi ha detto / che certo le mie poesie / non cambieranno il mondo. / Io rispondo che certo sı` / le mie poesie / non cambieranno il mondo’’ (Someone said to me / that for sure my poems will not change the world. / I replied that for sure / my poems / will not change the world). These verses from a poem that supplies the title of Patrizia Cavalli’s first collection, Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo (My Poems Will Not Change the World, 1974), have been taken as the motto of her poetry since her debut. Cavalli’s profound awareness of being immersed in a subjective reality in which absolute truth is elusive or unknowable is reflected in her clear conviction that poetry cannot provide salvation and cannot change the ‘‘present.’’ The claim that her work has no pragmatic consequences demonstrates an intellectual honesty that denies any larger role for poetry. At the same time, this claim also leads her to focus on the personal experience of everyday life. Most of her poems are sharp, concise sketches or portraits of ordinary human experience. The poetic world of Patrizia Cavalli, dominated as it is by erotic themes, in some ways resembles that of a modern-day Sappho. Her poems are often populated with unspecified lovers who so lack a specific identity that they are often indistinguishable from each other. Cavalli offers constant reflections on life that show her ability to perceive lucidly and directly every event in the very moment in which it happens. She thus conveys the feeling that the present is temporary and unstable. As in Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo, emotions are often presented as fleeting: ‘‘Ridero`, sparlero` / raccontero` bugie. / E domani l’avro` gia` dimenticato’’ (I’ll laugh, I’ll defame, / I’ll tell lies. / And tomorrow / I will have already forgotten). Cavalli employs stylistic devices that place her poetry outside traditional lyric modes without surrendering to experimentalism. Her poetic diction excludes the rhetorical exhibition of literary forms in favor of transparency and clarity. There is consequently a minimal gap between the language of her poems and spoken language. Colloquialisms are completely absorbed into her work, which occasionally presents ‘‘streetlevel’’ treatment of certain words and phrases in an amusing and provocative way.

In form and structure, she shows a preference for brevity. Her poems are short, as are the measures of her lines and verses. Her poems assume the style of conversations, diaries, and above all, epigrams, without renouncing rhythm and musicality. Her style encompasses a wide range of registers and tones: ironic, calmly thoughtful, or tender and melancholy. In their variety, her poems recall important poets in the Italian canon such as Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, and, above all, Sandro Penna. In Cavalli’s poems the first person is omnipresent. The poet herself explains the nature of the continuous use of io (I) in a poem entitled ‘‘L’io singolare proprio mio’’ (The Singular I, Really Mine, 1992): ‘‘Se quando parlo dico sempre io / non e` attenzione particolare e insana / per me stessa, non e` compiacimento / che´ anzi io mi considero soltanto / un esempio qualunque della specie, / percio` quell’io verbale non e` altro / che un io grammaticale’’ (If I always say I when I talk, / it’s not because of a particular and unhealthy self-obsession / it’s not self-gratification / because I consider myself just / an ordinary example of the human species, / therefore that word I is nothing more / than a grammatical I). As Stefano Giovanardi noted, Cavalli casts doubt upon the origin of the poetic ‘‘I’’ in a self-derisory manner (‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ 1996). The ‘‘I’’ therefore becomes a voice without any expressed identity and acts as a vehicle for collecting, examining, and transmitting to the reader the multiple fragments of reality. The diction used in the poems has a theatrical quality. This tendency is particularly evident in the collection Sempre aperto teatro (Always Open Theatre, 1999), which follows a narrative line that is clearly autobiographical, with a troubled selfaware undertone. The story represents a relationship between two female protagonists who play their respective parts in a very modern yet ancient human tragedy of unsatisfied and empty love. Although her poetry is thematically oriented toward erotic subjects, one can also see in the poems wider references to the life of contemporary society. However, Cavalli’s poetic world is characterized by its strong passions, which are expressed in a vital, colloquial style and centered on everyday life. Cavalli has also translated plays by Molie`re and Shakespeare. 423

PATRIZIA CAVALLI

Biography

Fiction

Patrizia Cavalli was born in Todi (Perugia), 17 April 1949. She studied at the University of Rome, ‘‘La Sapienza,’’ and graduated with a thesis in musical aesthetics. Besides being a poet, she is also a theater translator. Her translation of Molie`re’s Amphitryon was staged by Carlo Cecchi in 1980, and her translation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was staged by Elio De Capitani in 1987 as well as by Carlo Cecchi in 1997. She travels in Italy and abroad giving poetry readings, among them at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura, New York City, 1997; the San Francisco International Poetry Festival, 2003; Auditorium in Rome, 2005; Salon international du livre, Geneva, 2005. She was awarded the Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Sempre aperto teatro, 1999. Cavalli currently lives in Rome. ANNA MAUCERI TRIMNELL Selected Works Collections Poesie: 1994–1992, Turin: Einaudi, 1992; as My Poems Will Not Change the World. Selected Poems 1974–1992, edited by Barry Callaghan and Francesca Valente, translated by Judith Baumel et al., 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Le mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo,’’ 1974. ‘‘Il cielo,’’ 1981. ‘‘Sempre aperto teatro,’’ 1999. ‘‘La guardiana,’’ 2005.

‘‘Ritratto,’’ in Narratori delle riserve, edited by Gianni Celati, 1992. ‘‘Arrivederci addio,’’ in Il pozzo segreto, edited by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, 1993.

Translations William Shakespeare, Sogno di una notte d’estate, 1996. Molie`re, Anfitrione, 1981. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, edited by Paolo Bertinetti, 2002.

Further Reading Cecchetti, Valentino, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli: Poesie,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 46(1993), 109–112. Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ in Poeti italiani del Secondo Novecento 1945–1995, edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Manacorda, Giorgio, ‘‘Per la poesia. Manifesto del pensiero emotivo,’’ Poesia, 66(1993), 71–72. Merola, Nicola, ‘‘Vecchie fedi e nuovi credenti in alcuni esemplari della recente poesia italiana,’’ Filologia antica e moderna, 8(1995), 217–229. Nunez Garcia, Laureano, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli: la poesia que no cambiara el mundo,’’ in Lengua y lenguaje poetico. Actas del IX congreso nacional de italianistas, edited by Porra Castro Soledad, Valladolid: Universitad de Valladolid, 2001. O’Brien, Catherine, ‘‘Poetry 1870–2000,’’ in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pautasso, Sergio, Gli anni Ottanta e la letteratura. Guida all’attivita` letteraria in Italia dal 1980 al 1990, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Pontiggia, Giancarlo, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ in Poesia italiana del Novecento, edited by Ermanno Krumm and Tiziano Rossi, Milan: Skira, 1995. Raboni Giovanni, ‘‘Patrizia Cavalli,’’ Tabula, 2(1979), 35–36.

LILIANA CAVANI (1937–) One of Italy’s most challenging and controversial filmmakers, Liliana Cavani began her career at RAI, Italy’s national television network, in the early 1960s as a director of historical documentaries and investigative programs. Her four-part documentary series La storia del terzo Reich (History of the Third Reich, 1961–1962), which chronicles the rise of the Nazi regime, was the first

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historical investigation of German totalitarianism to appear on television. Among her subsequent documentaries are L’eta` di Stalin (The Stalin Years, 1962), an investigation into the massive abuse of power perpetuated by the Soviet leader, and Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy (Trial at Vichy, 1965), on Pe´tain’s collaboration with Nazi Germany. The issues of power, its negotiation and

LILIANA CAVANI abuse, are investigated in depth in her early work for television and reappear in many of her subsequent feature films. Cavani’s interest in ‘‘heretical’’ idealists also dates from her early career. Francesco di Assisi, her highly acclaimed first feature film, produced by RAI in 1966, reconstructs the life of the radical idealist who became Italy’s most popular saint. In a spare, minimalist style that evokes to some extent the work of Roberto Rossellini, the film focuses on the youthful defiance of the legendary St. Francis, whose spiritual conversion led him to divest himself of all the possessions that were his birthright as the son of a wealthy merchant. Years later, availing of more sophisticated production values, a cast of internationally recognized actors (Mickey Rourke, in the title role, and Helena Bonham Carter, as Chiara) and more complex stylistic strategies, Cavani explored a different aspect of the same medieval figure. Francesco (1989) presents a wearier, more mature Francis who struggles in tormented fashion not with his family and society but with his own religious calling. Milarepa (1974), similarly inspired by a story of spiritual searching, invokes the figure of the eleventh-century Buddhist saint Milarepa. Shifting in setting from the contemporary world to a timeless, imaginary Asian landscape, the narrative unfolds on two levels, as contemporary characters become the reincarnations of ancient Tibetan figures. Like Francesco di Assisi, this is a story of radical divestiture, of idealism and heroic transgression. Milarepa, however, has a more complex narrative structure than the earlier film and points forward to the stylistic assurance of the director’s mature work. Galileo (1968), also commissioned by RAI, was the first of Cavani’s dramatic films to fall prey to censorship. This film, which relies heavily on dialogue, focuses on the ‘‘heretical’’ struggle of the seventeenth-century scientist Galileo Galilei to maintain his intellectual integrity in the face of official censure. Purportedly as the result of its provocative depiction of the battle of the intellectual against the vested interests of ecclesiastical authority, RAI administrators deemed the film unsuitable for broadcast. Eventually sold to Cineriz, it was cut from 105 minutes to 92 for theatrical release. I cannibali (The Cannibals, 1969), Cavani’s first independently produced feature film, is also concerned with acts of resistance by courageous individuals in the face of oppressive rule. An allegorical drama that unfolds in an urban setting in the near future, it is loosely based on Sophocles’s

Antigone and recounts the struggle of the young protagonists Antigone and Tiresias against the inhuman cruelties of a tyrannical state. Though Cavani’s early films did not attain broad international distribution, they received high praise from contemporary Italian critics and commentators, who appreciated their stylistic freshness and originality of inspiration. The power of her early work is symptomatic of the wave of creativity and innovation that invigorated Italian cinema in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and she was acclaimed, along with her contemporaries Bernardo Bertolucci and Marco Bellocchio, as part of a new, talented generation of Italian filmmakers. It was not until the release of Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter, 1974), however, that Cavani’s work came to the attention of audiences throughout the world. Though the film was received with widespread acclaim, it also provoked a degree of scandalized perplexity. Set in Vienna in the 1950s, the narrative focuses on the accidental reunion of Lucia, a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp played by Charlotte Rampling, and Max (Dirk Bogarde), the former SS officer who sexually abused her as a 14-year-old prisoner. Cavani’s screenplay puts into the foreground not only the woman’s compulsion to reenact the scene of her earlier, enforced submission, but also the man’s obsessive dedication to renewing their transgressive bond, despite the threat of death at the hands of his former comrades. In the course of the years that followed, Cavani directed Al di la` del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil, 1977) and Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair, 1985), which similarly contextualize private, transgressive relationships within a specific sociohistorical framework. Along with Il portiere di notte, these films constitute what Cavani describes as her ‘‘German trilogy.’’ Unfolding mainly in German or Austrian settings, the three films construct a series of striking erotic scenarios against a background of crucial moments in modern German history: the consolidation of Bismarckian nationalism in the late nineteenth century, the tightening grip of Nazi terror in the 1930s, and the horror of the concentration camp system in the 1940s. In contrast to the austerity of much of Cavani’s earlier work, the films of the trilogy are reminiscent of the sumptuous visual style of the late director Luchino Visconti. Al di la` del bene e del male offers a fictionalized account of the triangular friendship established by Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Re´e, and Lou AndreasSalome´ in the 1880s. In a lavish, almost operatic 425

LILIANA CAVANI style that alternates realistic sequences with surreal, hallucinatory tableaux, the film sketches the course of a highly unconventional relationship from its intense beginnings to its painful aftermath, ending with Nietzsche’s descent into madness and Re´e’s untimely death. The negotiation of power and transgression, prohibition and freedom, attachment and independence is central to the erotically charged struggle played out among the characters. Only the figure of Salome´ survives the struggle intact, as she internalizes the lessons of Nietzsche, defying convention and rejecting personal attachments to pursue her own fiercely independent path. In ironic contrast to Salome´, Cavani’s Nietzsche is vulnerable, undisciplined, and unable to transcend his own human weaknesses. Since the film is ultimately more concerned with exploring the negotiation of desire and the pull of sociohistorical forces than with constructing a factual biography, it was criticized by those reviewers who had anticipated a more conventional presentation of the events of Nietzsche’s life. Interno berlinese is similarly concerned with an intense triangular relationship, though its characters are entirely fictional. Loosely based on the novel Manji by Junichiro¯ Tanizaki, the plot focuses on the wife of a German government official who embarks on a passionate affair with a young daughter of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin at the height of the Nazi moralization campaign. By shifting the setting of the novel from Osaka in the 1920s to Berlin in the late 1930s and introducing the element of racial difference, Cavani invests a narrative that might otherwise have been interpreted simply as melodrama with a provocative political dimension. Here, as in much of Cavani’s work, there is a blurring of the lines between victims and victimizers, obsession and opportunism, domination and divestiture. At the heart of the German trilogy lies Cavani’s concern with the connections among sex, politics, power, and knowledge, issues that are explored in each film through the prism of a transgressive relationship that is simultaneously linked to and set against the forces of political or societal repression. In response to critics’ heated comments and occasional hostility toward Il portiere di notte and Al di la` del bene e del male, the director’s controversial approach to the representation of politics and sexuality was praised and defended at various junctures by such prominent figures as Michel Foucault, Fe´lix Guattari, Alberto Moravia, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. 426

Cavani’s choice of film projects has sometimes puzzled even her keenest supporters. La pelle (The Skin, 1981), which is adapted from a novel by the politically controversial writer Curzio Malaparte, met with a sharply divided response. Set in Naples during the Allied occupation in 1943, the film offers a bitterly ironic depiction of the ‘‘liberation’’ of the city’s residents from wartime suffering. One of the harshest portrayals of the deprivations of war ever presented by a filmmaker, La pelle is a deliberately disturbing film. In its unflinching portrayal of human degradation, it stands in sharp contrast with the constructions of the same historical period presented by other Italian filmmakers. After completing Francesco in 1989, Cavani directed only two feature films over the course of the next 16 years. Offering a sensitive portrayal of the relationship between two deaf mutes, Dove sei? Io sono qui (Where Are You? I’m Here, 1993) took critics by surprise. Though some themes characteristic of Cavani’s cinema, such as resistance to the influence of a bourgeois family system, reappear here, it has a gentler, more intimate tone than any of her previous films. In 2002 she directed Ripley’s Game, based on the eponymous thriller by the American novelist Patricia Highsmith, which focuses on the relationship between the ruthless, yet sympathetic, Ripley and the hapless man he obliges to become his accomplice in murder. Though the film echoes some of the themes present in Il portiere di notte (the intimate complicity of victim and victimizer) and Al di la` del bene e del male (Ripley’s effort to fashion himself as a type of Nietzschean Overman), it is shot through with a mordant humor, unusual in Cavani’s work, that undercuts the dramatic potential of the narrative events. Though Liliana Cavani has been recognized as one of the most gifted film directors working in Italy since the 1960s, she remains a self-declared outsider. In an era dominated by the values of mass media, she is uncompromising in her efforts to pursue an independent artistic vision. Indifferent to imperatives of political correctness, she embraces a purely aesthetic vocation. Since the late 1970s, she has increasingly devoted her energies to the production of operas, a medium to which she brings her unique directorial skills and striking visual imagination. She returned to filmmaking in 2005, however, with De Gasperi, a film produced by the RAI network, which undertakes an original investigation into the personal and political life of one Italy’s most popular Catholic leaders and reformists, Alcide De Gasperi.

LILIANA CAVANI

Biography Liliana Cavani was born in Carpi in Modena Province, January 12, 1937. She studied literature and philology at the University of Bologna, then moved to Rome and enrolled in the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Italy’s national film school) to study directing in 1960. She began working at RAI (Italian national television network) in 1961 as a producer of documentaries and made several documentaries between 1961 and 1965, including Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy, winner of the Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival (documentary section), 1965. She directed her first feature film, Francesco di Assisi, in 1966. Her film Galileo was suppressed by RAI in 1968. I cannibali was shown at the New York Film Festival in 1969. Il portiere di notte received international distribution and won widespread acclaim in 1974. In 1979, Cavani began directing operas with Wozzeck in Florence; subsequent operas include Iphigenie in Taurus and Medea at the Ope´ra de Paris, 1984, 1986; Cardillac in Florence, 1991; La vestale at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, 1993; La cena delle beffe in Zurich, 1995; Cavalleria rusticana at the Ravenna Festival, 1996; Il ballo in maschera and La traviata in Milan, 2001–2002. Carpi, her hometown, has established the Associazione Fondo Liliana Cavani, where her films are preserved and made available for consultation. She was appointed to the administrative board of RAI in 1996. Awards include Labaro d’oro for Francesco di Assisi at the Valladolid Film Festival, 1966; Premio Cineforum for Galileo, 1968; Premio Riccione and Consorzio Stampa Cinematografica for Il portiere di notte, 1974; Palladio d’oro and Nastro d’Argento for Al di la` del bene e del male, 1977; Coppa Volpi at the Venice Film Festival for Dove siete? Io sono qui, 1993. She was also awarded the title of Commendatore by the President of the Italian Republic, in 1986, and the Vittorio De Sica Prize for career achievement in 1998. She lives in Rome. ´ INE O’HEALY A Selected Works Documentary Films La vita militare, 1961. Gente di teatro, 1961. Storia del Terzo Reich, 1961–1962. L’eta` di Stalin, 1962. L’uomo della burocrazia, 1963. Assalto al consumatore, 1963. La casa in Italia, 1964.

Gesu` mio fratello, 1964. Il giorno della pace, 1965. La donna nella Resistenza, 1965. Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy, 1965.

Feature Films Francesco di Assisi, 1966. Galileo, 1968. I cannibali (The Cannibals), 1969. L’ospite (The Guest), 1971. Milarepa, 1973. Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), 1974. Al di la` del bene e del male (Beyond Good and Evil), 1977. La pelle (The Skin), 1980. Oltre la porta (Beyond Obsession), 1982. Interno berlinese (The Berlin Affair), 1985. Francesco, 1989. Dove siete? Io sono qui, 1993. Ripley’s Game, 2002. De Gasperi, 2005.

Screenplays ‘‘Uno ‘Spiritual cinematografico’: Black Jesus,’’ Fiera letteraria, 12 December 1965, 6–7 (with Ludovico Alessandrini; unfilmed). ‘‘Francesco di Assisi,’’ Part 1, Rivista del cinematografo, 41 (August 1968): 503–512. ‘‘Francesco di Assisi,’’ Part 2, Rivista del cinematografo, 41 (September–October 1968): 577–587. ‘‘Galileo,’’ Cineforum, 78(October 1968): 598–624. Francesco e Galileo: Due film, Turin: Gribaudi, 1970. ‘‘I cannibali,’’ Sipario, 25(February 1970): 40–49 (with Italo Moscati). Milarepa, edited by Italo Moscati, Bologna: Cappelli, 1974. Il portiere di notte, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Lettere dall’interno: Racconto per un film su Simone Weil, Turin: Einaudi, 1974 (with Italo Moscati; unfilmed). Al di la` del bene e del male, Turin: Einaudi, 1977 (with Franco Arcalli and Italo Moscati). Oltre la porta, Turin: Einaudi, 1982 (with Enrico Medioli). Francesco, Milan: Leonardo, 1989 (with Roberta Mazzoni). Dove siete? Io sono qui, Venice: Marsilio, 1993 (with Italo Moscati).

Further Reading Buscemi, Francesco, Invito al cinema di Liliana Cavani, Milan: Mursia, 1996. Marrone, Gaetana, The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. ´ ine, ‘‘Desire and Disavowal in Liliana Cavani’s O’Healy, A ‘German Trilogy,’’’ in Queer Italia, edited by Gary Cestaro, New York: Palgrave, 2004. Silverman, Kaja, ‘‘The Female Authorial Voice,’’ in The Acoustic Mirror, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Tallarigo, Paola, and Luca Gasparini (editors), Il cinema di Liliana Cavani: Lo sguardo libero, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1990. Tiso, Ciriaco, Liliana Cavani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Waller, Marguerite, ‘‘Signifying the Holocaust: Liliana Cavani’s Portiere di notte,’’ in Feminisms in the Cinema, edited by Laura Pietropaolo and Ada Testaferri, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.

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ERMANNO CAVAZZONI

ERMANNO CAVAZZONI (1947–) Starting with his first novel, Il poema dei lunatici (The Voice of the Moon, 1987), which inspired Federico Fellini’s 1990 film La voce della luna, Cavazzoni’s interests lie with the theme of the relationship (both complex and comical) between reality and fiction: The genre best fit to describe Cavazzoni is, as the author himself declares, the tradition of the fantastical, which runs the gamut from Teofilo Folengo to Ariosto, and all the way to Gogol. The self-styled inspector Savini’s exploits happen within a moon cycle and show the reader, against the background of the Padan plains, extravagant dreams and strange illusions—like voices that leap from wells and speak or the imagined cityscape as theatrical backdrop. Savini accomplishes his eccentric investigations flanked by an ex-prefect in disgrace, Gonnella. The investigation stories are paradoxical in their referral to the secret regions of the soul and involve those who are assailed by great doubts. It is a voyage within people’s habits and customs that burrow in our thoughts: obsessive echoes, pigeons that resemble the Madonna, minute worms, deserts of melancholy, characters and enterprises that are extraordinary or just simply bizarre. Among these the following stand out: Alessandro Magno, who saddles alligators and water snakes; Nestor and his insatiable wife, who resembles a steam engine; Father Solimano, who does not know how to officiate the mass; the gravedigger, who dresses up the dead in evening attire; the Visigoths, who do not manage to impress anyone. The full moon, with its influence, creates more charms and paradoxical stories, leading up to the story of Judas Iscariot, who symbolizes a nonsensical world. The skeptical glance cast on the human world and the mistrust in its great positive moral systems are the common denominator in Cavazzoni’s novels, who uses as countermeasure an easygoing though sometimes harsh comical voice derived from the incoherence inherent to the story. In this respect, Cavazzoni resembles Ariosto, whose emblematic theme was that of considering human life one great idiocy: ‘‘The knights of Ariosto and the idiots I try to describe are like insects in a field. They have no sense of birth, life, death, the beyond, or God [...] The idea of the beauty in living without 428

seeing the sense of living has always attracted me’’ (Peter Kuon and Hermann H. Wetzel, Cavalieri, santi, lunatici, idioti... e scrittori inutili, 1997). In Le tentazioni di Girolamo (Jerome’s Temptations, 1991), Cavazzoni continued to focus on eccentric characters: Jerome (allusion to the saint bearing this name) searches for an impossible place of peace and quiet in a library inhabited by strange nocturnal creatures. In Vite brevi di idioti (The Short Lives of Idiots, 1994), the main theme is that of the idiot as maniac but also as philosopher who tries to give an explanation to the problems of the world: The character of Primo Apparuti, for example, reveals his personal take on moral philosophy through his compassion for ordinary objects, mistreated and snubbed by people. The short stories, inspired by evangelical parables, though without any teaching aspirations, descend also from lengthy research conducted by the author in the archives of the insane asylums of Emilia Romagna. Thus, the free translation of Leggenda aurea by Jacopo da Varagine (ca. 1229–1298) recreates the moving yet comical simplicity of the socalled miracles of the saints shown as inadaptable, as nuts that lead incomprehensible lives in the eyes of common men. Cavazzoni’s narratives proceed by accumulation: The ‘‘main’’ story unfurls into digressions, which in turn spin off autonomous stories into a sort of ‘‘word relay’’ from one protagonist on to the next. Cirenaica (Cyrenaic, 1999) sets up flawed characters, ‘‘life failures’’ who populate a ‘‘lowly world,’’ a place where they arrive by train and where everything is lacking: There are only the dreams entrusted to the movie by the same name (‘‘Cirenaica’’), gradually worn out by the endless screenings in the only theater of the place. The characters are also actors who live for the spectacle, unaware of the true identity of their spectators. The protagonist who roams this fantastical city at a certain point reemerges in the central train station of Milan and discovers that in the real city one cannot distinguish between being and seeming. The novel of great stature is very theatrical in its choral effects (the grand nocturnal scenes, the sudden apparitions). In an enjoyable though bitter catalogue, Gli scrittori inutili (Useless Writers, 2002), Cavazzoni illustrated the indispensable

ERMANNO CAVAZZONI seven vices to becoming a ‘‘useless’’ writer: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, envy, anger, and pride. The novel is a manual that presents, in an impious and surreal way, the contemporary literary world: from writers who are ‘‘slaves of other writers’’ to ‘‘obsolete’’ writers; from alcoholics to those who love inflatable dolls, leading up to his final delirious tale of pride, which concludes the work. A lateral but significant side to Cavazzoni is that of play, of ‘‘oulipian’’ exercises in the vein of Perec, like the brief text Morti fortunati (The Fortunate Dead, 2001), or the literary jokes of I sette cuori (Seven Hearts, 1992), in which the comical aspect emerges from the incongruous coexistence of different discursive registers.

Biography Ermanno Cavazzoni was born in Reggio Emilia on June 5, 1947. He lives in Bologna. He was educated through the school of Luciano Anceschi and is currently teaching aesthetics at the University of Bologna. In 1994 he cofounded, with Gianni Celati and Stefano Benni, the magazine Il semplice, published by Feltrinelli. Cavazzoni serves as codirector, with Gianni Celati and Walter Pedulla`, of the bimonthly Il caffe` illustrato. He worked as a screenwriter for La voce della luna of Fellini, based on his Il poema dei lunatici, 1990. He has been awarded various literary prizes, among which are the Arcangeli prize for Il poema dei lunatici and the Comisso prize for Cirenaica. His novels have been translated into English, French, Portuguese, German, Dutch, Spanish, and Turkish. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN Selected Works Fiction Il poema dei lunatici, 1987; as The Voice of the Moon, translated by Ed Emery, 1990. Le tentazioni di Girolamo, 1991. Vite brevi di idioti, 1994. Cirenaica, 1999.

Morti fortunati, 2001. Gli scrittori inutili, 2002.

Other I sette cuori, 1992. Jacopo da Varagine Le leggende dei santi, 1998 (translation and adaptation). Galleria san Francesco (libretto for Tristan Honsinger), 2002. Anatra al sal (text for Lucia Ronchetti), 2002.

Further Reading Budor, Domenique, ‘‘En e´coutant la voix des lunatiques,’’ Chroniques italiennes, 63–64(2000): 419–430. Caddeo, Rinaldo, ‘‘I nomi e le cose (resoconto di un viaggio a ritroso nell’incubo labirintico del romanzo di Ermanno Cavazzoni Le Tentazioni di Girolamo),’’ Arenaria, 9:29–30(1994): 10–22. Cavazzoni, Ermanno, ‘‘Risposte al questionario,’’ Il verri, 19(May 2002): 51–54. Ceserani, Remo, Treni di carta. L’immaginario in ferrovia: L’irruzione del treno nella letteratura moderna, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2002. Cortellessa, Andrea, ‘‘In favore di un testo frenologico: Piccolo avviamento a Cavazzoni,’’ in Stupidi e idioti, edited by Felice Ciro Papparo, Rome: Sossella, 2000. Deshoulie`res, Vale´rie, Le don d’idiotie, Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2003. Jaccard, Roland, ‘‘Humor macabre,’’ Critique, 53(1997): 412–413. Kuon, Peter, and Hermann H. Wetzel (editors), ‘‘Cavalieri, santi, lunatici, idioti... e scrittori inutili: A colloquio con Ermanno Cavazzoni,’’ Sonderdru¨ck aus Italienisch, 38(November 1997): 5–20. La Porta, Filippo, La nuova narrativa italiana: Travestimenti di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Morbiato, Luciano, ‘‘Di una varieta` padana nel sogno raccontato: Cavazzoni tra ‘‘poema e tentazioni,’’ in Il sogno raccontato, Atti del Convegno Internazionale (Rende, 12–14 November, 1992), edited by Nicola Merola and Caterina Verbaro, Vibo Valentia: Monteleone Stampa, 1995. Pedulla`, Walter, Le caramelle di Musil, Milan: Marietti, 1993. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Che cosa e` ancora narrabile?’’ in Le donne, i cavalier, l’arme, gli amori: Poema e romanzo: La narrativa lunga in Italia, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno: Dal romanzo medio degli anni Sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni Ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990.

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EMILIO CECCHI

EMILIO CECCHI (1884–1966) Emilio Cecchi was a conservative literary and art critic, a mannerist writer, and an ‘‘official’’—although radically anti-academic—intellectual. He was awarded the highest Italian prizes and honorary posts and worked for the most prestigious cultural institutions of pre-Fascist, Fascist, and postFascist Italy, including the film institute Cines (1932–1934) and the newspaper Il corriere della sera (1927–1966). His literary works mainly consist of prose d’arte and journalistic essays, which were collected in a number of books, the most famous of which are Pesci rossi (Red Fishes, 1920), L’osteria del cattivo tempo (The Tavern of Bad Weather, 1927), and Corse al trotto (Trotting Races, 1936). Pesci rossi includes 12 capriccios that previously appeared in the journal La Ronda, and eight articles written, from London, for the newspaper La Tribuna. The book represents the best example of Cecchi’s lyrical prose and his aptitude for elegant critical discourse, midway between Tuscan idiomatic literary speech and Roman academism. In 1910, Cecchi started his career of literary critic, collaborating with other periodicals such as Il Leonardo, Il Regno, Hermes, and Il Nuovo Giornale. Cecchi was deeply influenced by Gabriele D’Annunzio and by the idealistic aesthetics of Bendetto Croce, with whom he started a long-lasting correspondence. Croce’s conception of the autonomy of art is well represented by Cecchi’s prosa d’arte, a rhetorical device meant to create an Alexandrine literary atmosphere, a formally elaborated and refined style. This literary taste was applied by Cecchi to both criticism and journalism and represents his most original contribution to Italian cultural discourse. During his critical apprenticeship at Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce (1909–1912), Cecchi developed a literary vision, marked by the attempt to connect Italian literary tradition with British literature (such as in his 1911 Rudyard Kipling) and visual arts (Note d’arte a Valle Giulia, 1912). Most the articles of La Voce, which were mainly devoted to the exploration of D’Annunzio’s and Pascoli’s poetry (such as his 1912 La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli), were later collected in Studi critici (Critical Studies, 1912). A self-taught art critic and a 430

follower of Bernard Berenson, whom he translated into Italian, Cecchi wrote extensively on figurative art and coedited, with the influential art historian and critic Roberto Longhi, the periodical Vita artistica. Although technically naı¨ve, his books and catalogs on nineteenth-century Italian painting, Piero Lorenzetti, Giovanni Fattori, Giotto, Donatello, and the Florentine sculpture of the quattrocento showed a coherent project: A fervent anti-avant-gardist, Cecchi tried to counteract the revolutionary aesthetics of Futurism. He therefore elaborated a historicist defense of classicism, opposing Greek-Florentine classicism to AngloAmerican pragmatic visual culture and grounding on a classical and ethical dimension the constellation of words, images, and human nature that same reality that Futurism directed toward a utopian renovation of mankind, driven by technology. Cecchi’s name is commonly associated not only with his literary and critical contributions but also with the rebellion against avant-gardism of La Ronda, the literary magazine that Cecchi helped to found at the end of the war and the closing of Prezzolini and De Robertis’s La Voce. A refuge for liberal intellectuals, many of whom then joined Fascism, La Ronda pursued, in an age of militant art, the dream of a national classicism and a petrified literary language, able to communicate universally within the realm of art. Influenced by Giacomo Leopardi’s classicism and Renato Serra’s ideology of stylistic balance, the founders of La Ronda (Vincenzo Cardarelli, Riccardo Bacchelli, Lorenzo Montano, Bruno Barilli, and Antonio Baldini) affirmed in the midst of political turbulence the absolute value and purity of art: The rhetorical elegance of Cecchi’s prosa d’arte was a telling expression of this program, which Fascist despotism helped to overcome. Cecchi, the travel writer and the snobbish ruler of aesthetic taste, is well represented by his reportage, written mainly for Il corriere della sera and then assembled as Messico (Mexico, 1932), Et in Arcadia ego (1936), America amara (Bitter America, 1940), and Appunti per un periplo dell’Africa (Notes for a Periplus of Africa, 1954). In his travel accounts of Mexico, the United States, Africa, and Greece, Cecchi

EMILIO CECCHI explicitly underlined the exotic, sacred, and demonic sides of cultural difference. However, in America amara he offered a polemic and derisory account of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Mexico his approach to America was less schematic: Cecchi, who resolutely discredited Diego Rivera’s paintings and the Communist revolutionary ideology, gave voice to his irrational fascination for the marvels of the New World, describing both the pagan religion of Mexico and California’s cultural industry. Cecchi, who went to London as a correspondent, befriended writers such as Gilbert Keith Chesterton and Lytton Strachey and was an admirer of Rudyard Kipling and Charles Lamb, as well as a passionate critic of British literature, which he introduced in Italy with his Storia della letteratura inglese nel secolo XIX (History of British Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1915). He also translated works by Shelley, Shakespeare, and Chesterton. Cecchi also worked in the cinema and published several collections of poems, among them Inno primo (First Hymn, 1908), Liriche (Lyrics, 1913), and L’uva acerba (Sour Grapes, 1947). Emilio Cecchi, once strongly criticized for his political and cultural conservatism, remains an influential voce as a literary and art historian as well as a prolific journalist. This is attested by his important collection of essays Ritratti e profili (Portraits and Profiles, 1957) and by the project that he coedited, with Natalino Sapegno, of the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1965–1969).

Biography Emilio Cecchi was born in Florence, July 14, 1884. He was educated in Prato and Florence, where he attended the Istituto di studi superiori until 1910, studying literature but not taking the ‘‘laurea’’ (which he received ad honorem in 1958). He joined the Gabinetto Vieusseux, 1901. Cecchi moved to Rome in 1906. He married Leonetta Pieraccini in 1911; their daughter Giuditta was born in 1913, their daughter Suso was born in 1914, and their son Dario was born in 1918. Cecchi was a captain in the army during World War I, 1915–1918. He collaborated on a number of literary journals and newspapers, such as Il Leonardo, Il Regno, Hermes, La Voce (1909–1912); La Critica, Primato, La Tribuna (1910–1923); Il Secolo, La Stampa, Il corriere della sera (1927–1966); and the Manchester Guardian (1919–1025). Cecchi founded the literary periodical La Ronda in 1919. He was a professor of Italian culture at the University of California at

Berkeley (1930–1931) and was nominated director of film productions for Cines, 1932. He became Accademico d’Italia in 1940. Cecchi joined the Accademia dei Lincei, 1947. He was awarded the literary prize Penna d’oro, Presidenza della Repubblica italiana, in 1961. Cecchi died in Rome, September 5, 1966. FEDERICO LUISETTI See also: History of Literary Criticism Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Inno primo,’’ 1908. ‘‘Inno,’’ 1910. ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1913. ‘‘L’uva acerba,’’ 1947.

Prose Writings Pesci rossi, 1920; critical edition by M. Ghilardi, 1989. L’osteria del cattivo tempo, 1927. Messico, 1932. Corse al trotto, 1936. Et in Arcadia ego, 1936. America amara, 1940. Appunti per un periplo dell’Africa, 1954. Taccuini, edited by N. Gallo and P. Citati, 1976.

Literary and Art Criticism Rudyard Kipling, 1911. Studi critici, 1912. La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli, 1912. Note d ’arte a Villa Giulia, 1912. Storia della letteratura inglese nel secolo XIX, 1915. Pittura italiana dell’Ottocento, 1926. Trecentisti senesi, 1928; as The Sienese Painters of the Trecento, translated by Leonard Penlock, 1931. Pietro Lorenzetti, 1930. Giotto, 1937; as Giotto, translated by Elizabeth Andrews, 1960. Donatello, 1942. Scultura fiorentina del Quattrocento, 1956. Ritratti e profili, 1957. Piaceri della pittura, 1960. I macchiaioli toscani, 1963. Ricordi crociani, 1965. I cipressi di Bolgheri, 1970. Fiorentinita` e altri saggi, 1985.

Edited Works Storia della letteratura italiana, 1965–69 (with Natalino Sapegno).

Translations P. B. Shelley, La difesa della poesia, 1911. G. C. Leibniz, Nuovi saggi sull’intelletto umano, 1911. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Opere scelte, 1956. William Shakespeare, Le allegre comari di Windsor; Otello, in Teatro di William Shakespeare, 1946–1947. Bernard Berenson, I pittori italiani del Rinascimento, 1965.

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EMILIO CECCHI Further Reading Bolzoni, Francesco (editor), Fra Buster Keaton e Visconti, Rome: Centro Sperimentale per la Cinematografia, 1995. De Crescenzo, Assunta, La forma gordiana: classicismo e romanticismo in Emilio Cecchi, Naples: Giannini, 1988. Dei, Adele, La scacchiera di Cecchi, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1984. Di Biase, Carmine, Emilio Cecchi, Florence: Nuova Italia, 1982. Fedi, Roberto (editor), Emilio Cecchi oggi, Florence: Vallecchi: 1981.

Jeannet, Angela, and Louise Barnett (editors), New World Journeys: Contemporary Writers and the Experience of America, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977. Leoncini, Paolo, Cecchi e D’Annunzio: Cecchi critico tra novecentismo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Luzi, Giorgio, ‘‘Emilio Cecchi,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I critici, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Macchioni Jodi, Rodolfo, Emilio Cecchi, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Scudder, Giuliana (editor), Bibliografia degli scritti di Emilio Cecchi, Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1970.

CAMILLA CEDERNA (1921–1997) Camilla Cederna belongs to a tradition of Italian literature in which literature and journalism converge. This tradition, which developed especially in the late 1960s and 1970s, is recent but prestigious, and includes, among others, Luigi Barzini, Indro Montanelli, Enzo Biagi, and Oriana Fallaci. Their writings enrich popular literature with books that, through critical comment and analysis of current events, create a historical perspective on the present. Cederna’s attention was initially focused exclusively on fashion and lifestyle; for this reason it is also possible to place her in the ranks of Matilde Serao and many other contemporary female journalists. Her unique style is characterized by a great liveliness, accessibility, and simplicity. She is light but never frivolous and can be caustic and cutting in her descriptions. As Giulia Borgese wrote in the preface to the 2000 edition of Cederna’s Il lato debole (The Weak Side), first published in 1977, her writing is elegant and humorous, easy to read, yet severe. She had the ability to observe and convey social reality through small details. People’s gestures express their habits, their manner of speaking reflects the moral and material world they inhabit. How people dress and behave in Milanese high society thus comes to signify their underlying ambition and what they strive to become. Cederna’s habit of using apparently light subjects to comment on society is already evident in an article entitled ‘‘Moda nera’’ (Black Fashion), written for Il corriere della sera on 7 September 1943, the day before the armistice between Italy and the Allies during World War II. The article discussed 432

the dress of women in the Fascist hierarchy, in particular Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s lover. Because of the article, she was arrested by the Fascist police and subsequently sent to prison. After the war, Cederna wrote for magazines and periodicals that had wide circulation, including L’europeo and L’espresso. She concentrated her critical observations on the habits, vices, slang, and fashion of the rapidly changing Italian society of the 1950s and 1960s. She commented on the first postwar trips to the United States and first holidays in exotic locations made by the nouveaux riches. She recorded the effects of the so-called Italian economic miracle by describing the manifestations of luxury, such as the increase in antique shops and interior designers and the enthusiasm of women on receiving expensive gifts. Her articles, which portrayed stereotypical women from Milanese high society, offered a detailed typology: the Single Woman, the Boring Lover, the ManHunter, the Efficient Woman, the Shrink-Obsessed Woman, the Snob, and so on. She also wrote cutting portraits of artists, including conductor Arturo Toscanini, popular singer Wanda Osiris, soprano Maria Callas, film director Federico Fellini, as well as of young entrepreneurs like Silvio Berlusconi. This long and intense work gave rise to numerous books of criticism on Italian lifestyle and habits: Noi siamo le signore (We Are the Ladies, 1958), La voce dei padroni (The Masters’ Voice, 1962), Signore & Signori: personaggi illustri e meschini della vita pubblica e privata dell’Italia d’oggi (Ladies and Gentlemen: Famous and Squalid Figures of

CAMILLA CEDERNA Public and Private Life in Italy Today, 1966), and Callas (1968). She also began to write about current events and politics: investigative reports on the city of Avellino and its politicians and on the femminielli (transvestites) of Naples; articles on Algeria, China, Greece under the dictatorship of the colonels; and the rebirth of neo-Fascism in Germany. September 12, 1969, the day of the terrorist bombing at the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana in Milan, marked a turning point in Cederna’s career. Being among the first to reach the scene, she was forced to report on the horror of what she witnessed and could not distance herself from what had happened. In spite of sharp criticism from her colleagues, first among them Montanelli, the focus of her work became increasingly political and her journalistic activities more investigative, including denunciations and accusations. Although she continued her lifestyle column, ‘‘Il lato debole,’’ in L’espresso until 1976, she wrote increasingly on the events of the day. Concurrently, the lightness that had always characterized her style and tone gradually gave way to seriousness. Her capacity to observe details remained intact, but her observations took on the character of an investigation marked by a scrupulous examination and analysis of the facts. At the same time, however, her work remained focused on the men and women caught up in events. Her books and articles were still populated with complex characters and personalities, with the important difference that these figures were no longer the Milanese stereotypes of her earlier works but real people: the victims of the Piazza Fontana slaughter, their relatives, and the survivors. She also turned her attention to the victims of injustice and the silence and lies of the authorities and the police. In 1971, she published Pinelli: una finestra sulla strage (Pinelli: A Window on the Slaughter), dedicated to the controversial case of Giuseppe Pinelli, the anarchist accused of the Piazza Fontana bombing who died after falling out of Police Commissioner Calabresi’s office window. In Sparare a vista: Come la polizia del regime DC mantiene l’ordine pubblico (Shoot on Sight: How the Police of the Christian Democrat Regime Maintain Public Order, 1975), she investigated the police violence, especially during political demonstrations. Toward the end of the 1970s, her militant journalistic activity focused on political corruption. Reacting against the unaccountability of powerful politicians, she examined the personality and actions of the then president of the republic, Giovanni Leone.

The result was Giovanni Leone. La carriera di un president (Giovanni Leone. The Career of a President, 1978), in which she accused him of having various suspect connections. The book was a big success, selling more than 700,000 copies, and the president was forced to resign. However, because of some inaccuracies in her book, Cederna was found guilty of defamation of character, and all remaining copies were ordered destroyed. Cederna’s works touch a wide variety of subjects, but they all exhibit, as she writes in Sparare a vista, the same profound principles: the search for truth and the desire to ‘‘capire...denunciare, spiegare a tutti’’ (understand...denounce and explain to everyone). These principles explain the value of her work for deepening our understanding of the difficult years of the 1970s and 1980s.

Biography Camilla Cederna was born in Milan, 21 January 1921. She graduated from the University of Milan with a degree in Latin literature and a thesis on feminine luxury in the view of the minor Greek philosophers and the founding fathers of the Church. Cederna wrote for L’Ambrosiano, 1939, and Secolo Sera, 1940. She wrote an article on the fashion of Fascist women, 1943, and was subsequently sent to prison for a month. She worked for the new magazine L’Europeo, writing a column called Societa`, 1945–1955. She was a columnist and special correspondent and for L’Espresso, 1956–1981 and then wrote for Panorama, 1981–1997. Camilla Cederna died of cancer in Rome on 5 November 1997. ANNA MAUCERI TRIMNELL See also: Journalism Selected Works Noi siamo le signore, 1958. La voce dei padroni, 1962. Signore & Signori: personaggi illustri e meschini della vita pubblica e privata dell’Italia d’oggi, 1966. Callas, 1968. Le pervestite, 1968. Pinelli: una finestra sulla strage, 1971. Sparare a vista: Come la polizia del regime DC mantiene l’ordine pubblico, 1975. Il lato debole, 1977. Giovanni Leone. La carriera di un presidente, 1978. Nostra Italia del miracolo, 1980. Il mondo di Camilla, with Grazia Cherchi, 1980. Casa nostra, 1983 Vicino e distante: gente, ambienti, salotti, usi, costumi: impressioni sull’Italia di ieri e di oggi, 1984.

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CAMILLA CEDERNA De gustibus, 1986. Il meglio di Camilla Cederna, 1987. Il lato forte e il lato debole, 1991. Quando si ha ragione: cronache italiane, edited by Goffredo Fofi, 2002.

Further Reading Ajello, Nello, ‘‘La svolta politica,’’ La repubblica, 12 February 2000, 39. Aspesi, Natalia, ‘‘Quel lato forte della frivolezza,’’ and ‘‘Camilla Cederna, giornalista contro,’’ La repubblica, 10 November 1997, 9. Bellesia, Giovanna, ‘‘Camilla Cederna: Portrayer of Italian Society,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Sante Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

Borgese, Giulia, ‘‘La Camilla,’’ in Camilla Cederna, Il lato debole, edited by Giulia Borgese and Anna Cederna, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000. Bossi Fedrigotti, Isabella, ‘‘Tutta la forza del lato debole. Dal salotto alla rabbia civile,’’ Il corriere della sera, 10 November 1997, 23. Cagnetta, Mario, Il giornalismo di denuncia di Camilla Cederna, Milan: Associazione Culturale Ponte della Ghisolfa, 1999. Del Buono, Oreste, ‘‘Preface,’’ to Camilla Cederna, Il meglio di Camilla Cederna, Milan: Mondadori, 1987. Fofi, Goffredo, ‘‘Preface,’’ to Camilla Cederna, Quando si ha ragione: cronache italiane, Naples: L’a`ncora del Mediterraneo, 2002. Polese, Ranieri, ‘‘La fiera Camilla armata di penna contro la sua Manhattan,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 28 February 1992, 21.

GIANNI CELATI (1937–) Gianni Celati began to publish essays in the 1960s, at a time when the neo-avant-garde was at its height of activity in Italy. This early work, appearing in journals associated with the neo-avantgarde, such as ll verri and Quindici, was on writers and theorists such as Joyce, Ce´line, and Bakhtin, and it often took as its starting point a critique of institutionalized and traditional forms and ideas about language and literature. Celati was, from the first phase of his career, a writer with strong ties to scholarly pursuits; he was a professor of AngloAmerican literature at the University of Bologna for many years, and he is an accomplished translator of works from French and English. His first fictional work, the 1971 Comiche (Slapstick), was included in an Einaudi series, ‘‘La Ricerca Letteraria,’’ edited by Davico Bonino, Giorgio Manganelli, and Edoardo Sanguineti, and oriented toward the presentation of first works by young experimental writers. It was introduced by Italo Calvino, who admired Celati’s brand of experimentalism and comic flair. Calvino describes Celati’s book as being made up completely of ‘‘verbal gags, lapses, malapropisms, ecolalia, and incomplete actions’’ (‘‘Gianni Celati Comiche,’’ 1971). He also highlights the importance of the cinema to Celati’s mode of writing, which is inspired by spoken rather than literary language and is akin to 434

slapstick comic films such as those of Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Comiche is recounted in the voice of its protagonist, a professor who finds himself in a strange place, which is some sort of repressive institution, be it a school, a regimented inn for seaside vacationers, or a psychiatric hospital. The professor is persecuted by phantom voices as well as by the eccentric and menacing people who share this odd place with him, and the book is not so much plot driven as fuelled by the sound of language as spoken and heard by a person in the grips of extreme (and comic) paranoia. Celati was to remain friends with Calvino for the rest of the latter’s life, and they enjoyed many years of informal collaboration as writers strongly committed to literary creation and innovation. Celati’s second novel, Le avventure di Guizzardi (The Adventures of Guizzardi, 1973), is the culmination of his early interest in linguistic and stylistic experimentation based on spoken language and filmic techniques. The book is a tour de force, maintaining throughout the comically grotesque, agrammatical language of Guizzardi, a clownish figure who flees his oppressive family home only to end up embroiled in seemingly endless mishaps and adventures that are reminiscent once more of those of cinematic comics such as Chaplin, Harry Langdon, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx

GIANNI CELATI Brothers. In 1976 and 1978 were published, respectively, La banda dei sospiri (The Gang of Sighs) and Lunario del paradiso (Paradise Almanac), books that embodied avant la lettre what would become, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the trend in Italian fiction of novels by, for, and about youth. These books, called racconti comuni (everyday tales) by Celati himself, take as their inspiration the daily, common vicissitudes of the family and of young men seeking love and their place in the world, and they, like the first two novels, were written in a comic, if less linguistically extreme, style. The stories they recount are picaresque and somewhat autobiographical, mirroring Celati’s own experience as a young man who traveled about looking for independence, love, and some future direction in his life. These three books were published in a single volume in 1989, with an entirely rewritten version of Lunario del paradiso, under the title Parlamenti buffi (Funny Chatter). Celati continued to teach and to write essays and do translations throughout the 1970s and into the mid-1980s; however, after the positive critical response to his early fictional works, which resulted in the award of the coveted Bagutta Prize in 1973 for Le avventure di Guizzardi, for example, he nonetheless felt the need to withdraw from the literary scene in order to rethink his approach to writing prose fiction. He therefore remained essentially absent from the mainstream publishing world until 1985, when his collection of short stories, Narratori delle pianure (Voices from the Plains), appeared, to great interest on the part of readers and critics alike. This was an apparently entirely different Celati; from the exuberant linguistic experimentation of his early fiction, he had moved to a minimalist style and a more somber and, for some, dark thematic emphasis on the loneliness and alienation of contemporary life. Celati had become interested in the work of photographers during his period of silence, and his collaboration with Luigi Ghirri and others as they traveled around the Po Valley in search of photographs of landscapes and everyday scenes strongly influenced his thinking about and elaboration of the stories included in the new collection. He and Ghirri shared a deep conviction about the necessity of avoiding aesthetically contrived effects and of instead validating quotidian experience in all of its apparent banality and lack of extreme spectacle, the latter of which they believed had come to dominate art and media in the contemporary world with very deleterious effects. Celati therefore sought to lower the threshold of his prose’s tonalities and to reach after a

mode of recounting allied to ancient forms of shared oral storytelling. His stories of this period are moving, quirky, and sometimes sad tales of people living their lives in the desolation of a world more and more shaped by today’s impersonal technology, solitude, fears, and loss of human companionship once provided by traditions of shared histories and styles of daily life. He wrote essays and gave interviews in which he described his poetics of the everyday, which has an ethical as well as aesthetic basis. Celati believes that only by finding our common links as mortals and by facing the limits of our own existences, embracing without desperation caducity and our own death, can we escape the negative effects of an increasingly impersonal and spectacularized Western society. Storytelling is one of the means by which we can share our common humanity, and language is the medium of this sharing, language that is itself a repository of centuries of common usage, modes of life, and culture. Since moving to England in the mid-1980s, when he gave up his teaching career at the University of Bologna, Celati has continued to write fiction and essays and to translate, and he began to make art films, starting with Strada provinciale delle anime (Provincial Road of Souls, 1991). He has since then directed two documentary films, Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri (Luigi Ghirri’s World, 1998) and Visioni di case che crollano (Crumbling Houses, 2003), and another, on the culture of the Dogon people in Northwest Africa, was prepared for release in 2005. His interest in Africa is of long standing, and in 1998 he published a travel diary, Avventure in Africa (Adventures in Africa). Celati was a cofounder of the short-lived literary journal, Il Semplice: Almanacco delle prose (Almanac of Prose Writings), which appeared in six issues between 1995 and 1997, and he often contributes essays and stories to newspapers such as Il manifesto. Celati has become an important model for and mentor of younger writers, especially those with an interest in Emilia-Romagna, his region of origin and inspiration for much of his more recent work. Celati is a peripatetic and restless soul, always on the move and always searching for an understanding of his art and of human existence. His preferred authors include Boiardo, Melville, Tomaso Garzoni, and Leopardi, upon whose works he has written illuminating essays. In 1991 he published his translation of Melville’s famous story ‘‘Bartleby,’’ with a deeply thoughtful introduction that was the fruit of many decades of contemplation of the tale, and in 1994 he published 435

GIANNI CELATI a prose version of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love), which he has recited in many venues in Europe and North America to the delight of rapt audiences. Celati is a genuine scholar and theorist of literature, as well as a completely original fiction writer and filmmaker. He is one of contemporary Italy’s most richly talented voices, a multifaceted artist and thinker who has never stopped honing his craft through hard work, experimentation, and risk taking. Although it might seem that his body of work is eclectic, there are certain interests and orientations that run throughout it and condition his large production: a belief in the ethical and human value of artistic creations; disdain for the institutional and hierarchical aspects of the literary and academic worlds; a preference for the marginalized, the eccentric, and the muted aspects of experience and expressive modes; a love for travel, discovery, and alterity of both the personal and cultural kinds. His central importance to the contemporary Italian and European literary world is by now evident, and he has joined the ranks of those few creative individuals who, through their books and their films, have shaped post–World War II Italian culture both by returning to its regional and local riches and by deprovincializing it through serious attention to its ties to other literary and cultural traditions.

Selected Works Fiction Comiche, 1971. Le avventure di Guizzardi, 1973. Il chiodo in testa, 1974. La banda dei sospiri, 1976. Lunario del paradiso, 1978. Narratori delle pianure, 1985; as Voices from the Plains, translated by Robert Lumley, 1989. ‘‘Condizioni di luce sulla via Emilia,’’ in Esplorazioni sulla via Emilia, edited by Giulio Bizzarri, 1986. La farsa dei tre clandestini: Un adattamento dai Marx Brothers, 1987. Quattro novelle sulle apparenze, 1987; as Appearances, translated by Stuart Hood, 1991. ‘‘Il paralitico nel deserto,’’ Dolcevita (1987): 19–23. ‘‘Verso la foce (estratti da un diario di viaggio)’’, in Narratori dell’invisibile: Simposio in memoria di Italo Calvino, edited by Beppe Cottafavi and Maurizio Magri, 1987. Verso la foce, 1989. Parlamenti buffi, 1989. L’Orlando innamorato raccontato in prosa, 1994. ‘‘Fata Morgana,’’ Il Semplice: Almanacco delle prose, 2 (January 1996): 15–30. Recita dell’attore Vecchiatto nel teatro di Rio Saliceto, 1996. ‘‘Notizie sul popolo dei Gamuna,’’ Altofragile, 7(February 1997): 1. Avventure in Africa, 1998; as Adventures in Africa, translated by Adria Bernardi, 2000. Cinema naturale, 2001. Fata Morgana, 2004.

Edited Work

Biography Gianni Celati was born in Sondrio, 10 January 1937. His family origins were in Ferrara. Celati studied at the University of Bologna and graduated with a thesis on James Joyce. He was a visiting professor at Cornell University, 1970–1972 and professor of Anglo-American literature at the University of Bologna, 1972–1978 and 1980–1985. Celati moved to Brighton, England, 1985. He was a visiting professor at the University of Caen, France, 1986–1987; Brown University, 1989–1990 and 2000; Princeton University, 1999; and the University of Chicago, 2003. Celati has been the winner of several literary awards, including the Bagutta Prize for Le avventure di Guizzardi, 1973; Cinque Scole and Grinzane–Cavour Prizes for Narratori delle pianure, 1983; Mondello Prize for Parlamenti buffi, 1990; Zerilli-Marimo` Prize for Avventure in Africa, 1998; and the Chiara and Settembrini Prizes for Cinema naturale, 2001. His books have been translated into eight languages. REBECCA WEST 436

The Celebrated Art of U.S. Short-Story Writing, with Guido Fink, 1986. Narratori delle riserve, 1992.

Translations Jonathan Swift, Favola della botte, 1966; new ed., 1990. William Gerhardie, Futilita`, 1969. E. T. Hall, Il linguaggio silenzioso, 1969. Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, Colloqui con il professor Y, 1971. Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, Il ponte di Londra, 1975. Jack London, Il richiamo della foresta, 1986. Herman Melville, Bartleby lo scrivano, 1991. Stendhal, La certosa di Parma, 1993. Friedrich Ho¨lderlin, Poesie della torre, 1994. Jonathan Swift, I viaggi di Gulliver, 1997. Joseph Conrad, La linea d’ombra, 1999. Henri Michaux, Altrove, 2001.

Other ‘‘Salvazione e silenzio dei significati,’’ Marcatre´, 14–15 (1965): 112–113. ‘‘Parlato come spettacolo,’’ Il verri, 26(1968): 80–88. ‘‘Il sogno senza fondo,’’ Quindici, 9(1968): 6. ‘‘Anatomie e sistematiche letterarie,’’ Libri nuovi, 5 August 1969; rpt. in Riga, edited by Mario Borenghi and Marco Belpoliti, 14(1998): 84–87. ‘‘Al bivio della letteratura fantastica,’’ Periodo ipotetico, 6 (1972): 10–12. ‘‘Il racconto di superficie,’’ Il verri, 1(1973): 93–114.

BENVENUTO CELLINI ‘‘Finzioni occidentali,’’ Lingua e stile, 2(1974): 289–321. Finzioni occidentali: Fabulazione, comicita` e scrittura, Turin, Einaudi, 1975; 2nd edition, 1986. ‘‘Il bazar archeologico,’’ Il verri, 12(1975): 11–35. ‘‘Il corpo comico nello spazio,’’ Il verri, 3(1976): 22–32. ‘‘La bottega dei mimi,’’ Nuovi argomenti, 50(1976): 9–20. La bottega dei mimi, Pollenza and Macerata: La Nuova Foglio, 1977. ‘‘Oggetti soffici,’’ Iterarte, 17(1979): 10–15. Frasi per narratori, 1984. ‘‘Finzioni a cui credere,’’ Alfabeta, 67(1984): 13. ‘‘Commento su un teatro naturale delle immagini,’’ in Luigi Ghirri, Il profilo delle nuvole, Milan, Feltrinelli, 1989. ‘‘Morte di Italo,’’ Riga, 9(1995): 204–208. ‘‘Le posizioni narrative rispetto all’altro,’’ Nuova corrente, 43(1996): 3–18. ‘‘In memoria di Enzo Melandri,’’ with Ivan Levrini, Il semplice, 3(1996): 171–177. ‘‘Il narrare come attivita` pratica,’’ in Seminario sul racconto, edited by Luigi Rustichelli, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1998.

Films Strada provinciale delle anime, 1991. Il mondo di Luigi Ghirri, 1998. Visioni di case che crollano, 2003.

Further Reading Almansi, Guido, ‘‘Celati, uno, due, tre,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 59–60(1978): 74–90. Barile, Laura, ‘‘Un ostinato inseguimento: Linguaggio e immagine in Calvino, Celati, Perec, e l’ultimo Beckett,’’ Forum Italicum, 26:1(1992): 188–200. Benedetti, Carla, ‘‘Celati e le poetiche della grazia,’’ Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 1(1993): 7–33. Caesar, Michael, ‘‘Caratteri del comico nelle Avventure di Guizzardi,’’ Nuova corrente, 97(1986): 33–46. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Gianni Celati Comiche,’’ in G. Celati, Comiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

Hanne, Michael, ‘‘Narrative Wisdom in Celati’s Narratori delle pianure,’’ Rivista di studi italiani, 14:1(1996): 133–152. Iacoli, Giulio, Atlante delle derive: Geografie da un’Emilia postmoderna: Gianni Celati e Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2002. Kuon, Peter, ‘‘La vita naturale, cosa sarebbe? Modernita¨t und Identita¨t in Gianni Celati’s Narrratori delle pianure,’’ Italianistica, 37(1997): 24–37. Lumley, Robert, ‘‘Gianni Celati’s Fictions to Believe In,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zigmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Manica, Raffaele, ‘‘La pianura e la frontiera di Celati,’’ in Discorsi interminabili, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1987. Moroni, Mario, ‘‘Il paradigma dell’osservazione in Verso la foce di Gianni Celati,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 4 (1992): 307–313. Nocentini, Claudia, ‘‘Celati, artigiano della narrativa,’’ Civilta` italiana, 19:1(1995): 129–139. Novero, Cecilia, ‘‘Baratto di Gianni Celati e l’affermazione passiva del pudore,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 4 (1992): 314–318. Piazza, Roberta, ‘‘The Usual Story: The Narrative Imperfect in Celati as an Indicator of Information Already Familiar to the Reader,’’ Sguardi sull’Italia: Miscellanea dedicata a Francesco Villari, Leeds: The Society for Italian Studies, 1997. Piccolo, Pina, ‘‘Gianni Celati’s Silence, Space, Motion, and Relief,’’ Gradiva., 4:2(1988): 61–65. Picone, Generoso, ‘‘Da Walser a Celati: Materiali per un’ecologia dello sguardo,’’ Grafica, 8(1989): 9–16. Rizzante, Massimo, Il geografo e il viaggiatore: Variazioni su I. Calvino e G. Celati, Fossombrone (Pesaro): Tipografia Metauro, 1993. ‘‘Scritture Contemporanee: Gianni Celati,’’ Nuova Corrente, 97(1986) (special issue on Celati). Sironi, Marco, Geografie del narrare: Insistenze sui luoghi di Luigi Ghirri e Gianni Celati, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 2004. West, Rebecca, Gianni Celati: The Craft of Everyday Storytelling, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

BENVENUTO CELLINI (1500–1571) A celebrated artist and writer, Benvenuto Cellini composed the first surviving modern autobiography. Written between 1558 and 1562, Cellini’s Vita (My Life) was not published until 1728. Two English translations followed in 1771 and 1822; Goethe himself translated it into German (1798). Stendhal had enormous enthusiasm for the book,

and it inspired Hector Berlioz’s famous opera Benvenuto Cellini (1838). Not surprisingly, Cellini’s work appealed to the Romantic mythology of the solitary, brilliant, bold, and misunderstood artist. In recent times, Cellini has inspired a variety of undertakings, which reflect the tastes of the twentieth century, including psychoanalytic studies by 437

BENVENUTO CELLINI Paul Courbon, Francesco Querenghi, Luigi Roncoroni, and George E. Price; several films, including the 1934 The Affairs of Cellini, adapted from Edwin Justus Mayer’s 1924 play The Firebrand by Bess Meredyth and directed by Gregory La Cava; the operetta, The Firebrand of Florence, with lyrics by Ira Gershwin and music by Kurt Weill (1934), also inspired by Mayer’s play; an issue of Classic Comics’ Classics Illustrated series (No. 38) in 1947; and, in 2001, an off-Broadway play, Cellini, written and directed by John Patrick Shanley, who wrote the script for Moonstruck. Cellini now appears in recent anthologies or works on gay literature. Cellini, whose life spanned most of the sixteenth century, depicted himself as an individual of vast talent, while providing fascinating insights into his life and times and into the nature of his crafts, both goldsmithing and sculpture. He left over 100 poems, several discourses on art, many letters, and a prose commentary on two dream poems. Cellini, who had no formal university training, began the transition from artist to writer after his conviction for sodomy. His works mirror social, intellectual, and historical tendencies and tensions of the age of Counter-Reformation, revealing much about social and economic relationships; codes of male behavior, including homoeroticism; the system of patronage; the education and technical knowledge of artists; their relationship to antiquity; and the nature of creativity. His Vita depicts him as a multitalented artist of special excellence (virtu`), whose lineage, which he traced back to Roman Florence and the staff of Julius Caesar, made him the equal of any aristocrat. His birth and childhood were punctuated by miraculous events. His struggle with his father over whether he would study music or goldsmithing revealed the power of his artistic vocation. His constant competition with other artists disclosed his incomparable talent in whatever he touched—jewelry, medals, coins, vases, and finally large bronzes and marble. Cellini’s superhuman feats as a soldier during the 1527 Sack of Rome, of later escaping from the prison there, of surviving a second imprisonment, and of casting his Perseus against all odds show him in a heroic and saintly light. Toward the end of his second incarceration in a horrible dark, humid dungeon, God himself blessed Cellini with a mystical vision, reflecting the religious fervor of the Counter-Reformation. During the casting of his great Perseo, Cellini arose from his sickbed, warned by yet another divine vision, to save his imperiled masterwork from the ignorance of his workers and the elements of wind, rain, and fire. 438

Although Cellini’s story of his halo can be traced to the scientific phenomenon of the Heiligenschein (halo effect), it is more difficult to determine whether or not he killed the commander of the imperial forces, Charles de Bourbon, during the assault on the Castel Sant’Angelo; whether Pope Clement compared his medal favorably to the ancients; whether Pope Paul III said that uniquely talented men like Benvenuto are above the law; or whether King Francis called him ‘‘mon ami’’ and said that his works surpassed those of the ancients. Cellini’s life was a continual series of struggles and competitions with jealous rivals, stingy patrons, and ignorant women, whose knowledge of the arts was never as great as they assumed. Occasionally his confrontations resulted in physical violence or death, but he was absolved by popes. Cellini was arrogant, impatient, and argumentative with prelates, kings, dukes, their wives and servants, not to mention his fellow artists, because they failed to appreciate his genius, his painstaking methods, or the Herculean labors (fatiche) needed to produce extraordinary artistic achievements. His Renaissance-style individualism seemed somehow out of step with the authoritarian Counter-Reformation culture, but it reflected his attempt to elevate the social and professional status of the artist. Against the background of these struggles, Cellini’s unique talents appear in sharp relief. Demonstrating his worth as an artistic adviser and a witty interlocutor, he regularly offered his judgments of other artists’ work. Contributing to scholarly discourse on art, he also discussed his own works of art in detail. In the case of the conception of the famous Saliera di Francesco I, he competed with intellectuals at the court of the Cardinal of Ferrara, insisting that his own ideas were superior to their suggestions and that he alone knew how to create such a work. All of these elements contributed to Cellini’s desire to transform his own image and status as well as those of his fellow artists. Cellini proved himself a master goldsmith and sculptor, capable of working in both bronze and marble. By moving from sculptures in bronze to marble, he provided a worthy conclusion to his great success story, in which originality and mastery of materials and techniques were key. At Fontainbleau, Cellini’s Giove (now lost) outshone Il Bologna’s copies of classical statues. Cosimo observed that the Perseo (Perseus) could become the most beautiful work in the square, thereby surpassing Donatello’s Giuditta e Oloferne (Judith and Holofernes) and Michelangelo’s David. Even Vasari, no friend to Cellini, described his cantankerous

BENVENUTO CELLINI contemporary in the Vite not merely as terribile (forceful) but as terribilissimo, the special adjective he reserved for Michelangelo. Cellini’s technical writing, poetry, and letters contain many links to the Vita. These works, setting forth his boschereccia filosofia (rustic philosophy), defend his poetry and himself as an expert and innovator, who understood issues central to the arts, their history, their methods, and their secrets. Dedicated to Cosimo De’ Medici’s sons Francesco and Ferdinando, both potential patrons, the Trattati dell’oreficeria e della scultura (Treatises on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, ca. 1565–1567) exist in two versions. The more polished and technically focused manuscript published in 1568 had been revised and edited by Gherardo Spini. The second version, based on a manuscript in the Biblioteca Marciana, was finally published in 1857. It is the text used in virtually all modern editions, with its closer ties in form and content to the Vita. It contains autobiographical elements, including stories of artistic competitions and Cellini’s tribulations. In the treatise Dell’oreficeria, he provided a brief historical summary of goldsmiths who preceded him. He emphasized the role of design and drawing in this craft, bringing it in line with the greater arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture. He discussed various methods for working in niello, filigree, and enamel; making jewelry, including setting, cutting, and tinting stones; making small pieces (seals, seals, dies, medals) and larger pieces (vases, gilding, parting, etching, engraving), and casting bronze. The Trattato della scultura examines casting bronzes as well as chiseling and sculpting marble, specifically projects on a large scale, which require great talent, skill, and experience. Like the Vita, the second version of these treatises contains examples, stories about other artists, and accounts of his own experiences. He actually praised Salvatore Guasconti, with whose family he had had a violent quarrel; and his life of Piero di Nino, reminiscent of Boccaccio, ends with a beffa or joke that leads to the old man’s death. The theoretical and practical elements reveal much about the artistic practices of Cellini’s age. Cellini’s suggestion that he may have done sculptures in Rome in the 1530s cannot be verified. Several short discourses continue these technical and philosophical discussions. The Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno (Discourse on the Art of Design, n.d.) explores materials and methods in drawing and design, in particular sketching the human figure, and the family relationship between sculpture

and painting. In Della architettura (On Architecture, n.d.), as in the discourse on design, he discussed the family relationship between sculpture and its ‘‘children,’’ painting and architecture. In these works, he showed his familiarity with other writers and famous practitioners. Sopra la differenza nata tra gli scultori e pittori circa il luogo destroy stato dato alla pittura nelle essequie del gran Michelangolo Buonarroti (On the Difference between Sculptors and Painters upon the Place of Painting in the Funeral Rites of Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1564) debates the artistic arrangements for Michelangelo’s funeral, during which Cellini found himself at odds with other artists, especially with the representation of the arts. With Platonic overtones, he described two-dimensional painting as a ‘‘lie’’ and clearly less real and worthy than sculpture, which is three-dimensional. The incomplete Sopra i principii e ‘l modo d’imparare l’arte del disegno (Principles and Method of Learning the Art of Drawing, ca. 1665) provides a guide, based on Michelangelo’s works, to teaching anatomical drawing to workshop apprentices in goldsmithing and the greater arts. Learning to draw anatomical structures, especially bones and muscle that support flesh, is crucial, and he systematized the order in which bones must be learned, beginning with the legs and moving upward. He attacked artists who work too quickly and imprecisely. Cellini’s poetry, which includes madrigals, canzoni, and sonnets, touches on his personal and artistic experiences, spiritual concerns, and the polemics of art, particularly the debate over the superiority of sculpture or painting. The poems exhibit an innovative and original spirit in the use of language and literary tradition. In one group of poems, Cellini clearly took the side of sculpture, observing that God made man as the first sculpture and that even philosophers cannot understand the tools of sculpture. He found a new use for the tenzone in this artistic debate. In a significant group of sonnets, which reject the idealized love, celebration of female beauty, lofty sentiments, and refined diction of the Petrarchan tradition, he attacked his artistic rivals, caricatured his enemies, or celebrated sex over love, sex with whores or sex between males. ‘‘Porca fortuna, s’tu scoprivi prima / che ancora a me piacessi ‘l Ganimede!’’ (Filthy Fortune, had you found out before / that Ganymede, too, pleases me) curses Fortune as a woman to be discarded for a male lover in rather crude and vulgar language. His spiritual poems, which tend to conform to the conventions of love poetry, 439

BENVENUTO CELLINI including those written while he was imprisoned, contain images of crucifixion and martyrdom, prayers of thanks, poems of contemplation, and expressions of his hope that God will rescue him. Many other poems, including encomiastic sonnets, are addressed to patrons, fellow artists, men of letters, and friends on a variety of topics. Offering further insights into Cellini’s artistic philosophy, two dream poems (84 and 85), placed within the context of a prose analysis, echo Dante and the visions of the Vita. Mostly a product of his later years, Cellini’s writings served to glorify his artistic virtuosity, to enhance his reputation as a man of letters, and to depict the artist as an educated, witty, and wellrounded gentleman worthy of mingling with the best of Renaissance society and capable of teaching them the high secrets of art. He made a distinctive contribution to the task of elevating art from the status of a craft through establishing connections with classical antiquity and providing a theoretical and practical basis for artistic production.

Michelangelo in Rome (1551). A son was born in 1553. Cellini unveiled Perseo in 1554; the finishing took seven years. His stipend from the duke began in 1555, continuing irregularly until 1565. Cellini was imprisoned in 1556 for assaulting a goldsmith. He was condemned for sodomy in 1557, fined, and released to house arrest, with the duke’s intervention. Cellini completed his marble Crocifisso in 1562. He composed the Vita between 1558 and 1562. A second son, Giovanni, was born in 1561. Cellini joined the new Accademia delle Arti del Disegno in 1563; he was delegated to organize the funeral for Michelangelo in 1564, but withdrew after a quarrel. He officially married Piera de’ Parigi in 1567, the mother of three daughters, born in 1562, 1564 (Reparata), and 1566, and a son, in 1569. Cellini began the Trattati in 1567. He died on 13 February 1571, with official ceremonies by the Accademia and burial in the Chapel of St. Luke in the Church of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA

Biography Benvenuto Cellini was born in Florence on 3 November 1500. He entered the workshop of Michelangelo Grandini, a goldsmith and father of Baccio Bandinelli, in 1513 and, for about ten years, trained and worked with goldsmiths in Siena, Bologna, Pisa, Florence, and Rome. Cellini executed a silver belt buckle in 1518 and gained admission into the goldsmiths’ guild in Florence. He moved to Rome in 1519 and opened his own workshop in 1524, making vases, medals, and seals for important churchmen. He helped defend the Castel Sant’Angelo during the Sack of Rome in 1527. He moved to a shop in 1530 on the Via dei Banchi Nuovi. He visited various Italian cities and went to France, meeting other artists and patrons. Cellini killed the goldsmith Pompeo de’ Capitaneis in 1534. He was imprisoned in 1538. Cardinal Ippolito d’Este obtained his release in late 1539. Cellini lived in France between 1540 and 1545, working on large statues and various projects for King Francis I, including the Ninfa di Fontainebleau. He probably completed the ‘‘saliera di Francesco I’’ in 1543. His daughter Costanza was born in June 1544. After his return to Florence in 1545, Cellini received various commissions from Duke Cosimo I. In 1547, he completed a bronze bust of the duke, restored the Greek marble Ganimede, and sculpted a marble Narciso. He cast the Perseo (1548–1549); completed a bust of Bindo Altoviti (1550); and met 440

Selected Works Collections Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, 2 volumes, edited by Gio. Palamede Carpani, Milan: Societa` Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1806. Le opere di Benvenuto Cellini arrichite di note ed illustrazioni, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 1843 (uses first printed edition of the Trattati, not the Marciano manuscript). Scritti di Benvenuto Cellini scelti a illustrazione della sua vita e della sua arte, edited by Giulio Urbini, Milan: Vallardi, 1923. Opere, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan: Rizzoli, 1968. Opere di Benvenuto Cellini, edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Turin: UTET, 1980. La vita, i trattati, i discorsi, edited by Pietro Scarpellini, Milan: Gherardo Casini, 1987. Benvenuto Cellini, Rime, edited by Vittorio Gatto, Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 2001.

Autobiography Vita (1558–1562), 1728. As Autobiography, translated by George Bull, 1956. As My Life, translated and edited by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Treatises Due trattati di Benvenuto Cellini uno intorno alle otto principali arti dell’oreficeria. L’altro in materia dell’arte della scultura; dove fi veggono infiniti fegreti nel lauorar le Figure di Marmo, & nel gettarle di Bronzo (ca. 1565–1567), 1568. Due trattati di Benvenuto Cellini scultore fiorentino uno dell’oreficeria, l’altro della scultura, 1731.

BENVENUTO CELLINI I trattati dell’oreficeria e della scultura di Benvenuto Cellini, edited by Carlo Milanesi, 1857; reprinted 1994. The Treatises of Benvenuto Cellini on Goldsmithing and Sculpture, translated by C. R. Ashbee, 1967; rpt. 1999 (based on the Biblioteca Marciana manuscript).

Scalini, Mario, Benvenuto Cellini, Antella: Scala and New York: Riverside, 1995. Woods, Gregory, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

Further Reading Altieri Biagi, Maria Luisa, ‘‘La Vita del Cellini. Temi, termini sintagmi,’’ in Benvenuto Cellini artista e scrittore, Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1972. Barzman, Karen-edis, The Florentine Academy and the Early Modern State: The Discipline of Disegno, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Biancofiore, Angela, Benvenuto Cellini artiste-ecrivain: L’homme a` l’oeuvre, Paris: Harmattan, 1998. Coates, Victoria C., ‘‘‘Ut vita scultura’: Cellini’s Perseus and the Self-Fashioning of Artistic Identity,’’ in Fashioning Identities in the Renaissance, edited by Mary Rogers, Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000. Courbon, Paul, E´tude Psychiatrique sur Benvenuto Cellini, Paris: Maloine, 1906. Gallucci, Margaret A., Benvenuto Cellini: Sexuality, Masculinity, and Artistic Identity in Renaissance Italy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Gardner, Victoria C., ‘‘Homines non nascuntur, sed figuntur: Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita and the Self-Presentation of the Renaissance Artist,’’ The Sixteenth-Century Journal, 28(1997): 447–465. Gatto, Vittorio, La protesta di un irregolare: Benvenuto Cellini, Naples: Liguori, 1988. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Memoria e scrittura. L’autobiografia da Dante a Cellini, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Mimis, Jean, ‘‘La Vita de Benvenuto Cellini: Espace de la me´moire, espace du re´citt,’’ Litte´ratures, 40(1999): 79–93. Morigi, Lorenzo, ‘‘Cellini’s Splendor: The Reversible Theory of Restoration,’’ Sculpture Review, 48:3 (1999), 16–19. Pope-Hennessy, John, Cellini, London: Macmillan, 1985. Price, George E., ‘‘A Sixteenth Century Paranoic: His Story and His Autobiography,’’ New York Medical Journal, 99(1914): 727–731. Querenghi, Francesco, La Psyche di Benvenuto Cellini, Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1913. Roncoroni, Luigi, ‘‘Benvenuto Cellini (Contributo allo studio delle parafrenie),’’ Minerva Medicolegale, 26(1905): 271–297. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘The History and Reception of Cellini’s Trattati,’’ in Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer, edited by Margaret A. Gallucci and Paolo L. Rossi, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘Sprezzatura, Patronage and Fate: Benvenuto Cellini and the World of Words,’’ in Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, edited by Philip Jacks, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: Il caso Cellini,’’ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trevor Dean and K. J. P. Lowe, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

VITA, 1558–1562 Autobiography by Benvenuto Cellini

Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita (My Life) glorifies personal accomplishments over personality, avoiding the pattern of Pauline conversion that rejects worldly success. Lively, anecdotal, fresh and fast-paced, like oral discourse, Cellini’s Vita, part of which he claims to have dictated, was carefully composed, scarcely the result of casual recollections. With its varied style, it draws on the rhetoric of mercantilism, comedy, art, honor codes, and legal defense. By combining the genre of the artist’s life, especially the model of Vasari’s life of Michelangelo, with traditions reflective of historical, heroic, chivalric, picaresque, and hagiographic narratives, Cellini created a tale of heroic resistance, artistic preeminence, and the sometimes hilarious struggle between an often malevolent Fortune and his unique talent (virtu`). He constructed a recognizable selfportrait around the facts of his life, but he transformed them into a self-defense and his own personal myth of the artist as hero. The Vita never, however, reaches a definitive ending in which Cellini would have had to recount his difficult last years. Centered on the climactic event of his imprisonment after being accused of stealing papal jewels during the Sack of Rome in 1527, the narrative focuses on his early artistic training and his achievements. Cellini depicted himself as an artist who far surpasses his competitors—even the ancients. Cellini also proved himself to be a uomo universale, a true Renaissance man. He was a goldsmith, sculptor, poet, musician, courtier, and warrior. His family history and the events surrounding his early years foreshadow his greatness. Rebelling against his father’s wish that he study music, Cellini insisted on learning the goldsmith’s trade. Like all artists of the time, he served as an apprentice, 441

BENVENUTO CELLINI finally settling in Rome, where he lived for almost 20 years. Following humanist tradition, he educated himself by studying the work of the ancients and great contemporary innovators, including Michelangelo and Raphael. Including jewels, medals, coins, and vases, even his early work shone in comparison with that of contemporary and ancient artists. Bound by codes of honor and masculinity, which he sometimes flouted, Cellini cultivated male friendships, sought important commissions, and engaged in aggressive and violent behavior that included murder and assault. Cellini developed powerful and wealthy social connections but provoked conflicts with competitors and patrons with the strong speech, biting wit, and defiant impatience of someone who refused to recognize any superior. He personified a new kind of hero in his ability to use modern military technology, which energized his almost single-handed defense of Castel Sant’Angelo during the 1527 Sack of Rome. His impetus to greatness was, however, challenged by revenge killings, envious competitors, and accusations of theft. When he killed a jeweler named Pompeo who had spoken ill of him to the new pope, Paul III, he made an enemy of Pompeo’s son-in-law, Pier Luigi Farnese, who also happened to be the pope’s son. No matter where he went, Cellini faced down the obstacles to achieving his goals. Although he received commissions and a pardon from Pope Paul III, who declared men of his gifts above the law, Pier Luigi succeeded in having him imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo. His incarceration tested his physical and spiritual powers, but he also amuses the reader with the stories of his daring escape and the mad castellan. Betrayed by Cardinal Cornaro, he returned to prison with a broken leg. During his Dantesque experience in an infernal dungeon, a heavenly presence saved him from suicide. God then rewarded him in the form of a medieval, otherworldly vision of Christ and the Virgin in molten gold that freed him from the darkness of his prison and the power of his captors. Finally rescued by the Cardinal of Ferrara and the King of France, Cellini left prison with the halo of a Christian martyr, the affirmation of his honor and his spiritual and artistic prowess. Cellini revealed a broad sense of humor with such stories as those about his role as a magus, capable of raising demons in the Colosseum, and his trial in a French court for sodomy, both reminiscent of novelle by Boccaccio. After his imprisonment, he became an intimate of two of the most 442

important patrons of the age, King Francis I of France and Duke Cosimo de’ Medici of Florence, whom he served, not always harmoniously, as an artist and an expert who could advise them on matters of art. In Paris, he completed the famous ‘‘saliera di Francesco I’’ and several statues, now lost, including a silver Giove that in King Francis’s opinion outshone Il Bologna’s copies of ancient statues. While in France, he received great favors from the king but also combated jealous courtiers and competitors, as well as King Francis’s mistress, Madame d’E´tampes. In a show of male dominance, he regularly assaulted one of his models, Caterina, out of concern for his art and his reputation. Back in Florence, the stingy Duke Cosimo, his servants and court artists, along with the Duchess Eleonora, another small-minded woman incapable of understanding his great male talent, made his life equally miserable. Again accused of sodomy, this time by the sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, Cellini rose above his enemy, using his wit to ridicule Bandinelli’s claim and to praise homosexual love through an allusion to the figure of Ganymede. His analytic tour de force on the defects of Bandinelli’s Ercole e Caco demonstrated his superior artistic knowledge. His own brilliant creations included bronze busts of Duke Cosimo and Bindo Altoviti, a Florentine banker, the Perseo, and a marble crucifix. Michelangelo himself praised the bust of Bindo, and the Perseo won wide acclaim for Cellini and his patron. His account of the casting of the Perseus is a heroic tale of creative frenzy, masculine vigor, and technical achievement, which allowed him, arising from a vision in his sickbed, to save the statue. Still struggling for commissions and honor, Cellini rode off to Pisa at the end of his autobiography to find the Duke. JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA Editions First Edition Vita, published in Naples by Antonio Cocchi in 1728 with a fictitious place of publication, i.e. Colonia, the first edition contains many errors and is not based on the autograph manuscript, the Codice Mediceo-Palatino 2342 in the Biblioteca Laurenziana of Florence. The first edition based on this manuscript is Vita di Benvenuto Cellini orifice e scultore fiorentino scritta da lui medesimo restituita alla lezione originale sul manoscritto Poirot ora Laurenziano ed arricchita d’illustrazioni e documenti inediti, 3 vols., edited by Francesco Tassi, Florence: Guglielmo Piatti, 1829.

CENSORSHIP Critical Editions La vita di B. Cellini, edited by O. Bacci, Florence: Sansoni, 1901; in Opere, vol.?, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan: Rizzoli, 1968; edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Turin: Einaudi, 1973; edited by Ettore Camesasca, Milan: Rizzoli, 1985; edited by Lorenzo Bellotto, Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 1996.

Translations As The Life of Benvenuto Cellini, translated by Robert H. Hobart Cust, 2 vols., London: G. Bell, 1910; as The Life of Benvenuto Cellini Written by Himself, translated by John Addington Symonds, introduced and annotated by John Pope-Hennessy, London: Phaidon, 1951; as Autobiography, translated by George Bull, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956; revised edition, 1998; as The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (abridged edition with illustrations), edited by Charles Hope, translated by John Addington Symonds, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1983; as My Life, translated and edited by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Further Reading Arnaldi, Ivan, La vita violenta di Benvenuto Cellini, RomeBari: Laterza, 1986. Barolsky, Paul, ‘‘Cellini, Vasari, and the Marvels of Malady,’’ The Sixteenth-Century Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies, 24(1993): 41–45. Cervigni, Dino S., The Vita of Benvenuto Cellini: Literary Tradition and Genre, Ravenna: Longo, 1979. Davico Bonino, Guido, Lo scrittore, il potere, la maschera: Tre studi sul Cinquecento, Padua: Liviana, 1979. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Dalla Farnesina a Fontainebleau: Il confronto con la donna nella Vita del Cellini,’’ in Culture et socie´te´ en Italie du Moyen Age a` la Renaissance, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1985.

Galetta, Maria, ‘‘Tradizione ed innovazione nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini,’’ Romance Review, 5(1995): 65–72. Gaspari, Gianmarco, ‘‘La Vita del Cellini e le origini dell’autobiografia,’’ Versants, 21(1992): 103–117. Goldberg, Jonathan, ‘‘Cellini’s Vita and the Conventions of Early Autobiography,’’ Modern Language Notes, 89 (1974): 71–83. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Dalla parte del’io: modi e forme della scrittura autobiografica nel Novecento, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2002. Klopp, Charles, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Mirollo, JamesV., ‘‘The Lives of Saints Teresa of Avila and Benvenuto of Florence,’’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 29:1(1987): 54–73. Mirollo, James V., ‘‘The Mannerisms of Benvenuto Cellini (1500–71),’’ in Mannerisms and Renaissance Poetry: Concept, Mode, Inner Design, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Morigi, Lorenzo, ‘‘Cellini’s Splendor: The Reversible Theory of Restoration,’’ Sculpture Review, 48:3(1999), 16–19. Orsino, Margherita, ‘‘Il fuoco nella Vita di Benvenuto Cellini: Aspetti di un mito dell’artista-fabbro,’’ Italian Studies, 52(1997): 94–110. Rossi, Paolo L., ‘‘The Writer and the Man: Real Crimes and Mitigating Circumstances: Il caso Cellini,’’ in Crime, Society and the Law in Renaissance Italy, edited by Trevor Dean and Kate J. P. Lowe, Cambridge, U. K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Tylus, Jane, ‘‘Resisting the Marketplace: The Language of Labor in Benvenuto Cellini’s Vita,’’ Bucknell Review, 35(1992): 34–50. Woods-Marsden, Joanna, Renaissance Self-Portraiture: The Visual Construction of Identity and the Social Status of the Artist, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

CENSORSHIP The critical discussion about censorship acquired considerable importance after World War II. The themes related to freedom of speech and thought, along with the rights of freedom itself, considered the pillars of the Republican Constitution (1948), emerged when the Fascist dictatorship came to an end. Since the Roman period, from Livius, Svetonius, and Tacitus’s time, to the persecution of Arius’s heresy determined by Constantine after the Nicæa Council (325), forms of censorship were imposed

on freedom of thought through repressive measures. The Commento sulla sfera (Comment on the Sphere, 1324–1327) by Cecco d’Ascoli sent the author and his works to the stake. Giordano Bruno was found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition due to his anti-Ptolemaic philosophical dialogues on cosmology and was sentenced to death and burnt alive at Campo dei Fiori, in Rome, on 17 February 1600. In 1633, Galileo Galilei went on trial for his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, 443

CENSORSHIP 1632), in which he backed Copernicus’s theory. The biblioclastia (the pyre of books that is the most symbolic and effective form of censorship) was found in every historical period. In a single day, for example on 18 March 1559, in Venice (the most important European center of Hebrew printing up to the eighteenth century) 12,000 volumes of Hebrew culture were burnt. The damaging effects of censorship on Italian literary life often reflected the Catholic Church’s claim that it was its pastoral duty to review books and condemn them if necessary (this included unauthorized translations of the Bible). However, the first official indices were issued in the sixteenth century by secular governments in Milan (1538), Siena (1548), and Venice (1549). During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, governments of several Italian states limited the interventions of clerical censors. In April 1848, the Decreto Albertino introduced freedom of the press, and in 1897 Pope Leo XIII entrusted the duties for the control of literary books to diocesan bishops. The activities of the Congregation of the Index were transferred back to the Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office) in 1917. Far more incisive was the repression during the Fascist ventennium (1922–1943). After the racial laws were introduced in 1938, a committee for the bonifica libraria (Book Cleansing) was created by Alfieri, Minister of Popular Culture. It aimed at using censorship as an instrument of racial and political purges. Over time, the objectives of censorship were subject to change. During the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation, it was the Church of Rome that first established defensive barriers in an effort to protect its own orthodoxy. This was especially evident after the invention of the movable-type printing press and the rise of the Lutheran Reformation. At the onset of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance cultural climate of freedom persisted; paradoxically, Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Mandragola (The Mandrake, 1518), which was once forbidden, was performed in Venice by religious companies in 1522. In the following years, there was a deep consciousness of the repressive mechanism. This meant not only a factual limitation, but also a self-limitation of the free creative ability, and literary works were subjected to self-censorship and revision. An example that supports this situation is the self-censorship of Torquato Tasso in his Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered, 1593), an emended rewriting of the Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1575). 444

In 1542, the Holy Office and the Inquisition, which was established in 381 after the Edict of Theodosius made Christianity official, involved the whole Christian world. Pope Paul IV (Gian Pietro Carafa, 1476–1559) banished the vulgarization of the Bible and Erasmus’s works and created the Congregazione dell’Indice (The Congregation of the Index) in 1571. Defying the ecclesiastic censorship, princes and kings implemented their own tactics of vigilance within their political territory. Italy was the testing ground of all European censorial situations due to the political divisions that made it the theater of many historical changes: from the invasion of Charles VIII of France (1494), to the Cateau-Cambre´sis treaty (1559) that ratified the Spanish dominance, which was then followed by the Hapsburg reign, in 1748. The Republic of Venice, which used to take great care of its own independence, and where 40 percent of all books were published, opposed the ecclesiastic censorship; and, in order to safeguard its own sovereign rights, challenged Pope Paul V (Camillo Borghese, 1552–1621), who excommunicated Venice and subjected it to an interdiction. The works by Paolo Sarpi, and in particular his Istoria dell’Interdetto (The History of the Quarrels of Pope Paul V with the State of Venice, 1624) and the Istoria del Concilio tridentino (History of the Council of Trent, 1608–1612) are remarkable documents of this jurisdictional conflict, which represented one of the most infamous episodes of censorship in Italian history. The Church also interfered by means of expurgation, which was practiced in Rome by the Holy Office after the first Index librorum prohibitorum (Index of the Forbidden Books, 1559), and it was enforced by the General Inquisitor, Michele Ghisleri, in 1561. In their instructio, or guidelines, the Indexes laid down the procedures to apply to the text. In 1560, Ascanio Censorio degli Ortensi expurgated the Novelle by Matteo Bandello: He eliminated 64 tales because they were indegne (disgraceful). Girolamo Malipiero undertook a meticulous rewriting of the Canzoniere by Francesco Petrarca, which resulted in Petrarcha spirituale (1536–1587), surpassed by a Decamerone spirituale by Francesco Dionigi da Fano in 1594. In 1582, Leonardo Salviati twisted the 100 tales in such a way that he was nicknamed Boccaccio’s ‘‘public killer.’’ The same happened to Il libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) by Baldessare Castiglione in 1584 and to Il Morgante (Morgante, 1483) by Luigi Pulci in 1574. The Imprimatur, which lay

CENSORSHIP down the ecclesiastic preventive censorship in accordance with a medieval custom, unfolded with Innocent VIII in 1487. In 1549, the first Index was produced in Venice by I Savi dell’Eresia (Secular magistrates) in collaboration with the local inquisitor of the Holy Office. In 1564, the Council of Trent appointed a Committee of Bishops, whose regulations concerning censorship lasted until 1897. The ecclesiastic censorship lost its incisiveness in 1789 when the Diritti dell’uomo e del cittadino (The Rights of Men and Citizens) were proclaimed according to the culture of the Enlightenment. The Index changed into an internal instrument used only within Catholic environments (the last Index was published in 1948, and it eventually was abolished in 1966). But the clerical censorious behavior did not come to an end. In 1864, Pius IX published the Sillabo with the Quanta Cura Encyclical, a document that precedes the decrees by Pius X (1907) about the condemnation of modernism. The industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, by promoting the publishing of periodicals that were able to deeply influence society and its opinions, decreased the censorial hold on books and, at the same time, extended it to theatrical performances and products of new technology. Since medieval times, the various ecumenical councils had criticized the art of the theater, taking a strong stance against comic actors. After the Council of Trent, bishops watched over the theaters, and women were not allowed to perform. Innocent XI (1611–1689), who was named the ‘‘Attila of the stage,’’ spared no performance. In 1697, Innocent XII had the Roman theater of Tordinona pulled down; this extreme intervention revived the old polemical custom of the pasquinade (lampoon). The most famous writer of pasquinades was the arch-censured Pietro Aretino. In addition, Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) collaborated on censorial operations by fighting to abolish carnival and attacking the commedia dell’arte and the presence of women on stage. Many Italian theatrical companies went abroad. At the end of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment and moralism became allies to banish obscene jokes from the commedia dell’arte. During the French Revolution, Italy was also involved in the famous querelle des the´aˆtres, which aimed at faire du the´aˆtre une e´cole des mœurs (to turn theater into a school of behavior). A new, anticlerical form of censorship was born, provoking the repressive intervention of many rulers. In January

1791, the censorship on drama came to an end; however, given the political divisions of the peninsula and the local systems of control, not all governments acted upon it. For example, after the fall of the Repubblica Partenopea (1799), the reactions against the stage were intensified, and dramatists and actors exiled, condemned, and imprisoned. The Hapsburg censorship hit the historical drama, and in Venice, a number of theaters had to close down. Ferdinand II of Bourbon, who recaptured the throne of Sicily in 1849, assigned the supervision of theatrical works to the police. In the Papal States, Pius IX abolished the preventive censorship but exacerbated the repressive one. As for opera, the librettos had to be approved, as well as costumes, sets, bulletins, and programs. The most censured author of the Italian theater was Vittorio Alfieri, whose tragedies could not be performed even if they were published. Carlo Goldoni and Ugo Foscolo were also subject to censorship. The theater was feared more than books. After the Unification, local control was retained, and censorship powers were passed on to prefects. Under Fascism, censorship became an important weapon of social control. In 1923, the freedom of the press was limited by decree; it was completely abolished by 1925. The Press Law of December 1925 lay down that only registered journalists could write for newspapers (and the regime controlled the register). The preventive censorship of the theater was reinstated with the decree of 6 January 1931. Particularly rigid was radio censorship. Some of the banned plays were Uno degli onesti (One of the Honest, 1900) by Roberto Bracco and Viaggio di nozze (Honeymoon, 1917) by Giannino Antona Traversi. In the second half of the 1930s, the regime embarked on a more rigorous censorship of literature and cinema. One famous case was Vittorini’s Il garofano rosso (The Red Carnation), which was not published until 1948. When the Republican Constitution was ratified in 1948, there was only partial change, as the Fascist laws on censorship of cinema and theater remained in force until 1962. In order to voice his disillusionment as a liberal intellectual, Vitaliano Brancati wrote ‘‘Ritorno alla censura’’ (Back to Censorship), a prefatory essay to his play La governante (The Governess, 1952), censored over its lesbian content. Neo-Realist cinema, which is identified with films such as Rossellini’s Roma, citta` aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945), De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948;), and Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), 445

CENSORSHIP suffered clerical censorship because of its complex representation of postwar life. Neo-Realist drama was also affected. When L’Arialda by Giovanni Testori was staged in 1960 by Visconti at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan (MorelliStoppa Company), the play was seized due to its obscene content and the playwright tried in court. The same happened to Anima nera (Dark Soul, 1958) by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi. During the 1960s, some of the films censored include Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959), Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), Bolognini’s Una giornata balorda (A Foolish Day, 1960), and Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960). Galileo (1968) by Liliana Cavani, initially intended as a three-part series for RAI-TV, never aired due to Vatican interference. Sold to Cineriz, the film was cut down for theatrical distribution in 1969, and R-rated (the condemnation of Galileo was recognized as an error by Pope John Paul II in 1992). In an act of self-censorship, Dino De Laurentiis chose not to produce Il prete bello (Don Gastone and the Ladies), adapted from the 1954 novel by Goffredo Parise. A conflict of power and the lack of the certezza del diritto (knowledge of the law) characterized both the theatrical and cinema world. Article 21 of the Republican Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and specifically condemns censorship of the press. Article 529 of the Penal Code, however, limits its application to any work that might be offensive to the comune sentimento del pudore (a common sense of decency). From the 1970s onward, the concept of censorship changed. The control was taken over by commercial corporations that promoted conventional programs, a new form of self-censorship. Broadcasting and television networks were subjected to a state monopoly. Then, in 1976, through a Constitutional Court decree, private ‘‘independent’’ channels were approved. Media enterprises, such as Silvio Berlusconi’s Fininvest, began to dominate the market. These new leaders were industrial entrepreneurs. Since the late 1990s, the state has retained only minimal power of control, and the principal threat to freedom of expression has come

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from a commercial monopoly that established the direction to be taken by cinema and television. Gasparri’s Law, which passed on 3 May 2004 and was intended to rule on broadcasting organization, simply promotes monopoly. This calls for a necessary reform of antitrust legislation. PAOLA MARTINUZZI Further Reading Argentieri, Mino, La censura nel cinema italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Baldi, Alfredo, Schermi proibiti: La censura in Italia 1947– 1988, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Barbierato, Federico (editor), Libro e censure, Milan: Edizioni Sylvestre Bonnard, 2002. Bonsaver, Guido, ‘‘Fascist Censorship on Literature and le Case of Elio Vittorini,’’ Modern Italy, 8:2(2003): 165–186. Bonsaver, Guido, and Robert Gordon (editors), Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th Century Italy, Oxford, U.K.: Legenda, 2005. Caroli, Menico, Proibitissimo! Censori e censurati della radiotelevisione italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 2003. Censura e spettacolo in Italia, monographic issue of Il Ponte, 17:11(1961). Cesari, Maurizio, La censura nel periodo fascista, Naples: Liguori, 1978. Cesari, Maurizio, Censura in Italia oggi (1944–1980), Naples: Liguori, 1982. Di Stefano, Carlo, La censura teatrale in Italia (1600– 1962), Bologna, Cappelli, 1964. Fabre, Giorgio, L’elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei, Turin: Zamorani, 1998. Giornata, Luigi Firpo, Censura ecclesiastica e cultura politica in Italia tra Cinquecento e Seicento, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Liggeri, Domenico, Mani di forbice: La censura cinematografica in Italia, Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano, 1997. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Non placet: La censura e il cinema italiano,’’ in Incontri con il cinema italiano, edited by Antonio Vitti, Caltanissetta: Salvatore Sciascia Editore, 2003. Prima dei codici 2: Alle porte di Hays, 48th Mostra Internazionale d’Arte Cinematografica, La Biennale di Venezia, Milan: Fabbri Editori, 1991. Pulitano`, Domenico, ‘‘Il buon costume,’’ in Valori socioculturali della giurispridenza, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Quadri, Franco, Teatro del regime, Milan: Mazzotta, 1976.

VINCENZO CERAMI

VINCENZO CERAMI (1940–) Vincenzo Cerami not only wrote the screenplays for some of the most popular Italian films of the last decades but has explored the darker aspects of contemporary life in his fiction. Both theater and film mark his literary style. He frequently pays tribute to his mentor, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was his high school teacher in Ciampino: indeed, Cerami credits Pasolini for instilling in him a love for literature and for teaching him how to narrate life through language and dissimulate one’s intentions through indirection. Indeed, cinema has been particularly important in the definition of his literary technique, which is often intent on communicating images. Cerami’s ‘‘art of fiction’’ is summarized in his book Consigli ad un giovane scrittore (Advice to a Young Writer, 1996), where his advice is expressed in a simple and clear style. However, Pasolini has not been his only influence. Cerami first devoted himself to the theater and in 1975 produced an adaptation of Paolo Volponi’s novel Il sipario ducale (Last Act in Urbino, 1975), performed in Rome under the direction of Franco Enriquez, and in 1984 he wrote the comedy L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of the Three Oranges), which was performed the same year under the direction of Angelo Savelli in Fiesole. From his first novel, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Very Petit Bourgeois, 1976), made into a movie by Mario Monicelli in 1977 starring Alberto Sordi in the title role, to his recent La sindrome di Tourette (Tourette’s Syndrome, 2005), Cerami attempts to adhere to the reality of his times. Un borghese piccolo piccolo, the story of a civil servant, Giovanni, who spends his life shuffling paperwork and waiting for retirement, demonstrates the writer’s taste for representing the horror of everyday life. Giovanni’s greatest desire is to have his 20-year old son, Mario, join the Ministry of the Interior in order to ensure a life of ease and quiet dreariness. He supplicates his superiors and joins a masonic lodge in order to further his scheme for his son. But then his son is accidentally killed during a bank robbery, and the despairing father is subsequently transformed into the sadistic persecutor and kidnapper of the killler. Cold and controlled, the writing confines itself to registering the facts, leaving the satire of the deeply corrupt state bureaucracy

in the background. The author returns to the headlines with Fattaci (Brutal Crimes, 1997), four tales that recall the noir thriller and that assume the tone of real-crime accounts. Little room is left, therefore, for the personal interpretations of the narrator, who rather privileges objectivity. The facts are communicated in raw reportage, a police document, or a journalistic article. Cerami illuminates all the characters equally, probing their psychologies and exploring their environments. Echoes of his work as a scriptwriter can be found in one of his latest works, Fantasmi (Ghosts, 2001), the story Morena, a woman haunted by the ghosts of her father and her lover. As she travels through Italy, anxious to experience the different realities that she encounters, she becomes two different women, Angela and Gabriella. The problem is not simply changing her outward appearance but also altering her own personality. Morena finally returns to herself when she is finds she is expecting a child. Her approaching motherhood inspires reflections on life. In 2005, Cerami published a collection of short stories, La sindrome di Tourette, and a novel, L’incontro (The Encounter). The stories range from the romantic to the grotesque to the unreal. However, even in the most absurd situations there are glimpses of truth. Cerami’s language is supple enough to articulate the many themes and situations that contribute to the sense of uneasiness in contemporary life. In L’incontro, Cerami turns again to the Italy of the 1970s. The meeting of the title, which occurs only in the book’s final pages, is between two people who have never seen one another and belong to very different generations: an old univeristy professor, Sandro Bulmisti, who disappears without leaving a trace, and 20-year-old Lud, who has a passion for puzzles. In a magazine, Lud comes across a mystery fashioned by Bulmisti in the form of a nursery rhyme. In pursuit of the solution, Lud goes from Rome to Paris and little by little comes to know the professor’s private life. Meanwhile, terrorism is emerging on the horizon. Cerami’s style moves across registers and mixes levity with ethical engagement. The writing is fast paced, thanks to the unexpected turns of the plot. While the characters come to terms with history and with their consciences, the past does not seem to have changed. 447

VINCENZO CERAMI As a scriptwriter, Cerami is primarily known for his long collaboration with actor and director Roberto Benigni. The most important result of their partnership is La vita e` bella (Life Is Beautiful, 1998), a film Benigni defined in his introduction to the published script as ‘‘una storia in bilico tra la lacrima e il riso’’ (a story suspended between tears and laughter). La vita e` bella does not mock the Shoah, the greatest tragic moment in contemporary history, but rather tries to find a germ of hope even in horror.

Biography

MARCELLA FARINA

Fiction Un borghese piccolo piccolo, 1976. Amorosa presenza, 1978. Tutti cattivi, 1981. Ragazzo di vetro, 1983.

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Poetry ‘‘Addio Lenin: 1977–1980,’’ 1981.

Plays L’amore delle tre melarance, 1985. Sua Maesta`, 1986.

Scripts

Vincenzo Cerami was born in Rome, 2 November 1940. He abandoned his intention to study physics at the University of Rome and began working as scriptwriter for Pier Paolo Pasolini in Teorema (1968). He became an assistant director in films with Toto`. Cerami traveled to the United States in 1968 where he worked for a year. He married Mimsy Farmer and had a daughter, Aisha, in 1970. He was awarded the ‘‘Bartolo Cattafi’’ poetry prize for Addio Lenin, 1982. Cerami and Mimsy Farmer divorced in 1986. He was awarded the Vittorio De Sica Prize in 2004. Since 1996, he has taught creative writing at several universities, including La Sapienza and the Pontificia Universita` Gregoriana in Rome and the Catholic University in Louvain. Since the 1980s Cerami has contributed to various newspapers: Il messaggero, Il giornale, L’unita`, La repubblica, La stampa, Il secolo XIX, Avvenire. He has been a scriptwriter for directors Roberto Benigni, Marco Bellocchio, Gianni Amelio, and Giuseppe Bertolucci. Cerami currently lives in Rome.

Selected Works

La lepre, 1988. L’ipocrita, 1991. La gente, 1993. Il mostro, with Roberto Benigni, 1994. Fattacci, 1997. Fantasmi, 2001. La sindrome di Tourette, 2005. L’incontro, 2005.

Johnny Stecchino, with Roberto Benigni, 1991. Colpire al cuore: trattamento e sceneggiature dell’omonimo film di Amelio, 1996. La vita e` bella, with Roberto Benigni, 1999.

Comic Books Olimpo S.p.A., 2000. Olimpo S.p.A. caccia grossa, 2002.

Other Consigli ad un giovane scrittore, 1996. Canti di scena: concerto di parole e musica, with Nicola Piovani, 1999, Storia di altre storie, with Francesco Guccini, 2001. Pensieri cosı`, 2002. Vincenzo Cerami racconta l’Odissea tradotta da Giovanna Bemporad, 2003.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Novecento primo, secondo e terzo, Milan: Sansoni, 2004. Barbalato, Beatrice (editor), Vincenzo Cerami: le re´cit et la sce`ne, Louvain: Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2004. Benigni, Roberto, Introduction to La vita e` bella, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Comes, Annalisa, ‘‘Un borghese piccolo piccolo,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Dizionario delle opere, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. De Candia, Mario, ‘‘Vincenzo Cerami dal cinema al teatro,’’ Ridotto, 1–3(1985): 26–32. Mannocchi, Maria Cristina, ‘‘Tabucchi, Vassalli, Cerami, Morselli, Ceronetti,’’ in Storia generale della Letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 15, Part 1, Il Novecento: sperimentalismo e tradizione del nuovo, Milan: Motta, 2004. Mauri, Paolo, L’opera imminente: Diario di un critico, Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

LAURA CERETA

LAURA CERETA (1469–1499) In 1488, on the threshold of European forays into Africa and the New World, Laura Cereta sent her patron, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, a manuscript of her collected letters, announcing that she was offering him not the monkeys of Mauritania or the rhinoceroses and cinnamon of Ethiopia but instead ‘‘mercedula...ex secretis ingenii—maius inventum’’ (little gifts from the secret places of my mind—a greater discovery). Cereta’s epistolario, containing 82 letters and a dialogue in Latin, circulated widely in manuscript during her lifetime, as did the substantial Latin letter collections of two other women humanists, Isotta Nogarola (1410–1466) and Cassandra Fedele (1465–1558). Discoursing on stock humanist themes, Cereta addresses female friends as often as males. She stages the humanist debate on the virtues of city versus country in a pair of letters to women. Imitating Petrarch’s letter on his ascent of Mt. Ventoux in her letter to Deodata di Leno, Cereta describes her scaling of Mt. Iseo, while she echoes Lorenzo Valla’s Epicurean interlocutor’s praise of the pleasures of the mind in his De voluptate (1431). Perhaps modeling her advice to a woman she calls Europa solitaria on Coluccio Salutati’s famous epistle to his friend Zambeccari urging him not to retire from city politics to enter a monastery (1398), she seems to take issue with Petrarch’s eulogy of rural life in his De vita solitaria (1346). Cereta’s self-consolatory letters after her husband’s death comprise at least one third of her letterbook. But epistles venting her sorrow, addressed to the nun Olympica Nazaria and the widow Martha Marcella, also include detailed narratives of her early life, her intellectual formation, and the terrifying, recurrent dreams that plague her. Cereta’s letter to another woman friend, Elena di Cesare, on the threat from Islam, differs from other humanist responses to the Turkish invasion of Constantinople: She calls for the waging of peace, not war, with the Turks, since an Italian campaign will only end in further death and destruction on Italian soil. Two epistolary essays—the De de subeundo maritalis iugo iudicium (On entering the bonds of matrimony, 1486) addressed to Pietro Zecchi and the De liberali mulierum institutione defensio (In defense of a liberal education for women, 1488) to

Bibolo Semproni—represent her most feminist and polemical works. Both works follow the period of her father’s banishment from Brescia in 1485, when, according to Cereta’s own testimony, she wholly assumed on the role of paterfamilias herself, supervising her father’s business and legal dealings as well as her brothers’ education. Relying largely on Boccaccio’s history of famous women (De claris mulierbus), to argue the worth of women as a class, her letter to Zecchi constitutes an antiepithalamium in which Cereta characterizes marriage as slavery for women and motherhood as a trap. Revealing a struggle for power and erotic frustration in her marriage, her five extant letters to her husband do not undercut her essay on matrimony so much as they supplement it. Continuing to draw exempla from Boccaccio’s lives, Cereta’s letter to Bibolo on women and education views the rich history of learned women as a continuity and a fact: She calls her historically constituted community the respublica muliebris (republic of women). As in Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies (1404–1405), Cereta’s catalog of distinguished women from antiquity to the present— from the Greek poet Sappho to the Ethiopian prophet Sabba and the Roman orator Hortensia down to such contemporary scholars as Isotta Nogarola and Cassandra Fedele—stands as irrefutable proof of women’s worth. Extending the quattrocento idea that the greatness of a man’s mind is not tied to class or birth to cover gender, Cereta argues that women too are born with the right to education. Concerned with the commitment and hard work an education demands, she worries only that not all women will push for advancement. Writing at the precise moment when debates about women’s nature and women’s roles in the family and society were beginning to awaken interest in the Italian cities and courts in the ‘‘female point of view,’’ Cereta met frequently with other scholars and writers at the Santa Chiara convent, the Ursine monastery, and several literary coteries in Brescia. Some of her epistolary essays were tailor-made for such scholarly circles: Among these are her essays Execratio contra fortunam (An invective against fortune, undated), De Theutonico 449

LAURA CERETA conflictu (On the German War, 1487), In avaritiam admonitio (A Warning Against Greed, 1487), and Consolatio de morte filiolae (On the Death of a Child, 1486). The participants in these circles included the learned friar Lodovico de la Turre, the professors of rhetoric Clemenzo Longolio and Bonifacio Bembo, and the physicians Michele Beto and Felice Tadino, among others. Only two fifteenth-century humanist dialogues by women are known: Cereta’s comic In asinarium funus oratio (On an Asses’s Funeral, 1485–1486); and Isotta Nogarola’s De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato (On the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve, 1451). Placing In asinarium funus oratio at the head of her letterbook, right after the dedication letter, Cereta showcases the dialogue as her most original and impressive work. A mockserious inquest into the murder of a donkey, with three speakers in dialogue, Cereta herself acts as the lead interlocutor (‘‘Laura’’), while the miller who owns the ass (‘‘Soldus’’) and the miller’s rogue slave (‘‘Philonacus’’) play supporting roles. While the In asinarium funus oratio borrows heavily from Apuleius’s second-century novel The Golden Ass (Metamorphoses) for its plotline and rustic Latin vocabulary, ‘‘Laura’’ delivers a bizarre oration on drugs and ointments made from the body parts and bodily fluids of asses, lifting her medical data from Pliny’s Natural History. Cereta’s dialogue and humanist themes live on in the call for social, legal, and economic advances for women in the early seventeenth-century Venetian writers Lucrezia Marinella, Modesto da Pozzo, and Arcangela Tarabotti. Her letters further anticipate themes commonly associated with the French and British feminists of the eighteenth century: among these, the contextualization of the debate on women within a historical ‘‘republic of women’’; the attempt to redefine and reconstruct the concept of gender; the privileging of the emotions in humanist discourse—a genre long assumed to be the preserve solely of the rational faculties; the construction of housework as a barrier to women’s literary and artistic aspirations; and the use of the salon or convent salon as a passage for women into the public sphere.

Biography Laura Cereta was born the first of six siblings, three brothers and two sisters, in Brescia in 1469, to Silvestro Cereto, an attorney and magistrate in Brescia, and Veronica di Leno, whose family 450

claimed descent from a noble lineage. She was convent educated, 1476–1480, and taught Latin and classics by a learned nun; her father played no role in her schooling. She moved to Lake Iseo with her father during the war of Ferrara, 1482–1484 and served as her father’s secretary, 1484–1485. Cereta married to Pietro Serina, a Venetian merchant, in 1484/85; she was widowed in 1485. There were no children. She met regularly with humanist circles at Brescia and the monastery at Chiari and gave readings from her epistolary essays in both venues; she sustained a number of intellectual friendships with women, the nuns at Chiari among them. Her attempt at forging a literary friendship with the famous Venetian humanist Cassandra Fedele failed. Cereta died at age 30 of unknown causes in 1499; her burial mass was said at San Domenico in Brescia. She left behind an unpublished manuscript dedicated to Cardinal Ascanio Sforza of Milan containing 82 Latin letters and a comic dialogue also in Latin; her complete works first appeared in print in 1640 in Padua. DIANA ROBIN Selected Works Laurae Ceretae Brixiensis Feminae Clarissimae Epistolae iam primum e MS in lucem productae, edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini. Padua: Sebastiano Sardi, 1640. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Vat. Lat. 3176. Cart. 3. XVI in 73 fols. Contains 83 items; the only manuscript source containing all Cereta’s extant works. Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. Marc. Cod. Lat., XI.28 [4186] mbr. XV, 154 fols. Includes 74 items containing many lacunae. The manuscript begins on fol. 11. Divae Laurae in Asinarium Funus Oratio and selected letters, in Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist, edited by Albert Rabil, Jr., Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1981. Contains the Latin texts of the dialogue and 11 letters not included in the 1640 edition. Collected Letters of a Renaissance Feminist, transcribed, translated, and edited by Diana Robin, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Further Reading Fedele, Cassandra, Letters and Orations, edited and translated by Diana Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. King, Margaret L., and Albert Rabil, Jr., Her Immaculate Hand: Selected Works by and about the Women Humanists of Quattrocento Italy, Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 1983. Nogarola, Isotta, Complete Writings: Letterbook, Dialogue on Adam and Eve, Orations, edited and translated by

GUIDO CERONETTI Margaret L. King and Diana Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pasero, Carlo, ‘‘Il dominio veneto fino all’incendio della loggia,’’ in Storia di Brescia, Vol. 2, La dominazione Veneta (1426–1575), edited by Giovanni Treccani degli Alfieri, Brescia: Marcelliana, 1961. Rabil, Albert, Jr., ‘‘Laura Cereta,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Rabil, Albert, Jr., Laura Cereta: Quattrocento Humanist, Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1981. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Culture, Imperialism, and Humanist Criticism in the Italian City-States,’’ in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance. 1500–1700, edited by Glyn P. Norton, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Humanism and Feminism in Laura Cereta’s Public Letters,’’ in Women in Italian Renaissance

Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza. Oxford: Legenda European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford, 2000. Robin, Diana. ‘‘Laura Cereta,’’ in Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, edited by Paul F. Grendler, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Laura Cereta: Biography, Latin Texts, Translations,’’ in Women Writing Latin, Vol. 3: Early Modern Women Writing Latin, edited by Laurie Churchill, Phyllis R. Brown, and Jane E. Jeffrey, New York: Routledge, 2002. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Space, Woman, and Renaissance Discourse,’’ in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, edited by Barbara K. Gold, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Russell, Rinaldina (editor), Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

GUIDO CERONETTI (1927–) An acclaimed and renowned translator of biblical as well as classical and modern texts, Guido Ceronetti is also an influential critic and poet. His exemplary and courageous translation of a passage from the Book of Job (19, 26), made difficult by its corrupted textual tradition, does in itself full justice to his intense and multiform literary activity, in which narrative and theater, journalistic writing and translation converge. Ceronetti—for whom writing is a moral mission and translating an act of faith in the liberating power of the word—seems to be especially concerned with recovering the sacredness of creation and the relation between the divine and human flesh. He professes a gnostic faith in the possible redemption of the obviously evil nature of humankind. His art is thus opposed to the spectacle and appearances of everyday life that, in contemporary society, are illusions diametrically opposed to true life. In this context, writing is a form of plague (‘‘pestigrafia’’ as Ceronetti calls it) because, as Giovanni Mariangeli explained, ‘‘it expresses the impossibility of disembodying form from its content, of freeing words from the turbid journeys and the secret rooms where thought is constrained’’ (Guido Ceronetti il veggente di Cetona, 1997). An example is the ‘‘favola sommersa’’ (hidden fable) Aquilegia (1973), the name of a rare Alpine

flower and symbol of a prophetic initiation in which Ceronetti, a radical vegetarian, described and denounced the slaughter of creation in the practice of vivisection. Olam and Enarchı`, the male and female protagonists of the fable, escape from an impending catastrophe that can only be resisted through inner freedom, exemplified by conjugal love, the mystical union recalled symbolically by the flower. The collection of short stories, D. D. Deliri disarmati (D. D. Disarmed Deliria, 1993), notable for its surrealistic and fantastic atmosphere, also uses the moral apologue to develop an allegory of the mystery of evil that is also aimed at the repressive mechanisms created by human society. In Ceronetti’s literary universe, even a journey through the Italian landscape turns into the quest for understanding and a conceivable truth. This is the case of Un viaggio in Italia 1981–1983 (An Italian Journey, 1983). At the urging of the publisher Giulio Einaudi, Ceronetti traveled through Italian cities and towns between 1981 and 1983, describing in detail the vulgar and declining way of life in which the moral discomforts of modernity are revealed. In 1970 Ceronetti established, with Erica Tedeschi, a marionette theater, Teatro dei sensibili, for which he wrote La iena di San Giorgio (St. George’s Hyena), written in 1984 and published 451

GUIDO CERONETTI in 1994. This work was followed in 1988 by the so-called ‘‘Mystic Luna Park,’’ a variety theater that marked the debut of the marionette ‘‘ideofore’’ (from the Greek etymological root meaning ‘‘carrying’’ or ‘‘producing’’ ideas). In recent years, Ceronetti has tried to revive the folk tradition of street performers and has toured Italian cities with his marionette theater. Ceronetti is an indefatigable explorer of contemporary reality and a vocal opponent of mass consumer culture in his essays as well. Driven by a moral imperative to bear witness and to denounce the evils of society, his political writings attempt to unite disenchantment and participation, anger and contemplation, as is the case with the articles that appeared in La stampa and were later collected in La carta e` stanca (The Paper Is Tired, 1976), or with the diary La pazienza dell’arrostito: Giornale e ricordi 1983–1987 (The Patience of the Roasted Man: Journal and Memories, 1983–1987, 1990). His notion of writing as a totality made up of fragments is most clearly evident in his poetry, however, of which the most important collection is Compassioni e disperazioni: Tutte le poesie 1946–1986 (Compassions and Despairs: Complete Poems 1946–1986, 1987). Starting with Poesie per vivere e non vivere (Poems for Living and Not Living, 1979), Ceronetti experiments with an increasingly warped and almost strident vocabulary. In his prose writings in particular, Ceronetti’s style echoes that of Maurice Blanchot (whom he translated), while his poetry continues the dark and apocalyptic lineage of Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud, and Emil Cioran.

Fiction Aquilegia, 1973. D. D. Deliri Disarmati, 1993. La vera storia di Rosa Vercesi e della sua amica Vittoria, 2000. N.U.E.D.D.: nuovi ultimi esasperati deliri disarmati, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie per vivere e non vivere,’’ 1979. ‘‘Il silenzio del corpo: materiali per studio di medicina,’’ 1979; as The Silence of the Body: Materials for the Study of Medicine, translated by Michael Moore, 1993. ‘‘I pensieri del te`,’’ 1987. ‘‘Compassioni e disperazioni: Tutte le poesie 1946–1986,’’ 1987. ‘‘Scavi e segnali: 1986–1992,’’ 1992. ‘‘La Distanza: poesie 1946–1996,’’ 1996.

Plays Viaggia viaggia, Rimbaud!, 1992. La iena di San Giorgio, 1994.

Journalistic and Critical Writing Difesa della luna, 1971. La carta e` stanca, 1976. La musa ulcerosa, 1978. La vita apparente, 1982. Un viaggio in Italia 1981–1983, 1983. Albergo Italia, 1985. Briciole di colonna 1975–1987, 1987. L’occhiale malinconico, 1988. La pazienza dell’arrostito: Giornale e ricordi 1983–1987, 1990. Tra pensieri, 1994. Cara incertezza, 1997. Messia, 2002. Piccolo inferno torinese: fogli dispersi restaurati, 2003. Oltre Chiasso: collaborazioni ai giornali della Svizzera italiana, 1988–2001, edited by Paolo Tesi, 2004.

Translations

Biography Guido Ceronetti was born on August 24, 1927, in Turin. He earned a degree in humanities at the University of Turin (where he studied with Luigi Pareyson), with a thesis entitled Considerazioni sul valore della poesia, 1954. In Albano (Rome), with Erica Tedeschi, he founded the puppet theater Teatro dei sensibili, 1970. He began his long-standing collaboration with the newspaper La stampa, 1972. In the autumn of 1996, the ‘‘Fondo Guido Ceronetti’’ opened at Archivi di Cultura Contemporanea della Biblioteca Cantonale di Lugano, to which the author gave his archive, catalogued by Diana Ru¨esch and Prisca Orler. He lives in Cetona (Siena), where he has resided since the 1980s. STEFANO TOMASSINI 452

Selected Works

Nuovi Salmi, 1955. Martial, Epigrammi, 1964. Catullus, Le poesie, 1969. Maurice Blanchot, Il libro a venire, 1969 (with Guido Neri). Qohe´let o l’Ecclesiaste, 1970; revised edition, 1980. Juvenal, Le satire, 1971. Il Libro di Giobbe, 1972. Il Cantico dei cantici, 1975. Il libro di Giobbe, 1982.

Further Reading Bezzi, Valentina, ‘‘Il viaggio di Guido Ceronetti: Un nuovo pellegrinaggio nell’Italia della fine del XX secolo,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 22:49(1995), 219–246. Fioroni, Giosetta, Marionettista: Guido Ceronetti e il Teatro dei sensibili, Mantua: Maurizio Corraini, 1993. Fortini, Franco, Nuovi saggi italiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Sacro e dissacro di Guido Ceronetti,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 11, Milan: Marzorati, 1988.

MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI Mariangeli, Giovanni, Guido Ceronetti il veggente di Cetona, Isola del Piano (Pesaro-Urbino): Fondazione Alce Nero, 1997. Pagnamenta, Roberto Bruno, ‘‘I segni della fine: Un viaggio in Italia con Guido Ceronetti,’’ in Erwartung des Endes: Apokalypsen in der Literatur des 20. Jahrhunderts,

edited by Christiane Uhlig and Rupert Kalkofen, Bern: Peter Lang, 2000. Roncaccia, Alberto, Guido Ceronetti. Critica e poetica, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Zolla, Ele´mire, Uscire dal mondo, Milan: Adelphi, 1992.

MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI (1730–1808) An attentive interpreter of the Italian literary scene of the second half of the eighteenth century and a teacher of style for entire generations of writers, from Vittorio Alfieri to Ugo Foscolo, the abbot Melchiorre Cesarotti lived and worked almost exclusively in the Veneto region, which did not prevent him from carrying on epistolary relations with all of Europe and from achieving undisputed international fame through his works. His first cultural formation was as a classicist in the seminary of Padua, onto which he soon grafted a lively attention to the Enlightenment, facilitated by the long period he spent in Venice as a tutor, beginning in 1760. It was in Venice, in fact, which was certainly more open to European influences, that Cesarotti conceived his first works of translation, thus beginning a reflection that, perpetually balanced between theory and practice, would form the mainstay of his literary activity and that was expressed with Discorso sull’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (Discourse on the Origin and Progress of Poetic Art, 1762) and Ragionamento intorno al diletto della tragedia (An Argument on the Pleasure of Tragedy, 1762), introduced by Italian versions of two tragedies by Voltaire. The same principles expressed here—of a poetry that imitated the infinite variety of nature and that therefore could not be contained within rigid limits—soon animated his clamorous and innovative poetic version of the Poesie di Ossian, antico poeta celtico (The Poems of Ossian, Ancient Celtic Poet, 1763), a series of popular epic songs in prose and verse, a good deal of which the Scot James Macpherson had composed and popularized with great success with the title A Fragment of Ancient Poetry (1760), passing them off as the work of the mythical bard and Scottish prince Ossian (third century AD), and which Charles Sackville, a friend of Cesarotti, had

quickly translated literally into Italian. It was a fabrication that the Padovan abbot, and a large part of Europe along with him, believed to be authentic, and with which he intended to propose an epic model distinct from and even superior to Homer. This model was of a modern ‘‘primitive,’’ distinguished by tumultuous and extreme passions that are stirred up in characters with strong wills and, just as frequently, melancholic doubts, up until the tragic catastrophes set in misty and disquieting Nordic landscapes where the great powers of nature, along with those of men, are encountered. Although he was not a poet himself, Cesarotti, with his rather free reelaboration of the Ossianic text, thus proved to be a metrical innovator of great importance for his work in the prose sections of the short poems in hendecasyllabic free verse, which, from the Enlightenment on, was the principal meter of Italian poetry between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Alfieri, Foscolo, Monti, and later, with a more sparing use, Manzoni and Leopardi). The construction of a new poetic style derived from this innovation, a style distinct from the Petrarchan one on which the Arcadia had remodeled itself in the first half of the century and opposed to the purist temptations of strictly observing the Tuscan fourteenth century that became popular at the century’s end. At the same time, the lesson of the classics was put to good use and revised in the guise of a new syntactic structure, rendered more ruptured and dramatic by suspensions, pauses, and inversions that were shaped by the characters’ sentiments. It was precisely these elements that attracted Alfieri in the course of his stylistic quest, in which Cesarotti participated directly as an adviser and reviser of the Astian poet’s verses through a thoughtful epistolary correspondence 453

MELCHIORRE CESAROTTI and direct meetings, which were broken off, however, in 1783, because of Cesarotti’s growing wariness of the antityrannical sentiments carried to their extreme consequences that typified Alfieri’s tragedies. Published for the first time in 1763—the same year as the first part of Giuseppe Parini’s Il giorno—and then continually revised and expanded up through 1772, Cesarotti’s translation of Poesie di Ossian, with its many apostrophes and invocations, with the repetitions, questions, and unanswered exclamations of his broken and fragmented style, also exercised a strong influence on nineteenthcentury libretto writing. The translation was strongly marked, furthermore, by the use of a certain metrical variety that Cesarotti adopted to render the parts in verse by Macpherson, taking up cadences and motifs of popular poetry that surpassed the example of Pietro Metastasio’s musicality and constituted a reference point for the romantic opera’s quest for new languages. This same grafting of a modern sensibility onto the classical tradition was also at the heart of Cesarotti’s complex work of translating the Iliad, which began in 1768 when he came to occupy the chair of Greek and Hebrew at the University of Padua and devoted a renewed attention to classical texts, ranging from the Greek orators to the Homeric poems. At this time, he also published Elegia sopra un cimitero di campagna (1772), a new important version of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which was also destined for great success in the field of sepulchral poetry. In actual fact, for the Iliade di Omero, we are dealing with three successive ‘‘translations,’’ which kept him occupied until 1794; the first, literal and in prose, with a vast apparatus of notes and essays; the second, free, in hendecasyllabic free verse; and a third in free verse, which was a true, liberal reworking entitled La morte di Ettore (The Death of Hector, 1795). This was a full confirmation, in this latter text and beyond its modest success, of Cesarotti’s idea of translation as recreazione poetica (poetic re-creation), which was meant to re-evoke in the reader the spirit rather than the letter of the original. Along with practical examples of translation, Cesarotti also developed, as with his versions of Voltaire, a prolonged theoretical reflection, the most original moments of which came in 1785 with the Saggio sulla filosofia del gusto (Essay on the Philosophy of Taste) and especially with the famous Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue (Essay on the Philosophy of Languages). Here, in a brilliant synthesis of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism and 454

the study of tradition, and distinguishing grammatical aspects, which remained stable from rhetorical and stylistic ones, which were subject to continual changes insofar as the style only followed reason and taste, Cesarotti maintained the legitimacy of every language. He broadly reevaluated the historical dynamics against the normative claims of the purists, on the basis of the principle that linguistic changes corresponded to the changing in time of the spirito nazionale (national spirit) and the genio retorico (rhetorical genius) of every country. The last years of his life saw Cesarotti aligned during the three-year Jacobin rule alongside the Padovan municipality in launching projects of educational reform, and, afterwards, with the oscillation peculiar to many writers of the neo-Classical age, he participated in the Napoleonic myth with a short encomiastic poem, Pronea (1807), which attracted severe criticism from his old disciples, most notably Ugo Foscolo.

Biography Melchiorre Cesarotti was born in Padua to a noble family on 15 May 1730. He studied at the Seminary of Padua, where he took vows and became a teacher; he lived in Venice as a tutor for the Grimani family from 1760 to 1768. Cesarotti returned to Padua to occupy the university chair of Greek and Hebrew in 1768 and spent the rest of his life in his villa of Selvazzano, near the city. In the final years of his life, he occupied himself with revising all of his writings and with a monumental edition of them in 40 volumes (1800–1813). Cesarotti died at Selvazzano on 4 November 1808. The edition of his works, including his letters, was completed by his pupil Gaetano Barbieri in 1813. GILBERTO PIZZAMIGLIO See also: History of Italian Language Selected Works Collections Opere scelte, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1945–1946.

Translations Poesie di Ossian, antico poeta celtico, 1763; enlarged ed., 1773; final ed., 1802. Thomas Gray, Elegia sopra un cimitero campestre, 1772. Iliade di Omero, 1786–1794. La morte di Ettore, 1795.

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA Other Discorso sull’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica, 1762. Ragionamento intorno al diletto della tragedia, 1762. Saggio sulla filosofia del gusto, 1785. Saggio sulla filosofia delle lingue, 1785. Pronea, 1807.

Further Reading Barbarisi, Gennaro, and Giulio Carnazzi (editors), Aspetti dell’opera e della fortuna di Melchiorre Cesarotti, 2 vols., Milan: Cisalpino, 2002. Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Le idee estetiche di Cesarotti,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 136(1959): 341–366. Bigi, Emilio (editor), Critici e storici della poesia e delle arti nel secondo Settecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Melchiorre Cesarotti e la mediazione dell’Ossian,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano (2nd ed., 1948), Bari: Laterza, 1974.

Folena, Gianfranco, L’italiano in Europa: Esperienze linguistiche del Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Gilardino, Sergio Maria, La scuola romantica: La tradizione ossianica nella poesia dell’Alfieri, del Foscolo e del Leopardi, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Mari, Michele, Momenti della traduzione fra Settecento e Ottocento, Milan: IPL, 1994. Marzot, Giulio, Il gran Cesarotti: Saggio sul preromanticismo settecentesco, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1949. Pizzamiglio, Gilberto, ‘‘Melchiorre Cesarotti: Teoria e ‘pratica’ della tragedia tra Voltaire e Alfieri,’’ in Le The´aˆtre italien et l’Europe (XVIIe-XVIIIe sie`cles): Actes du II Congre`s International, edited by Christian Bec and Ire`ne Mamczarz, Florence: Olschki, 1985. Ranzini, Paola, Verso la poetica del sublime: L’estetica ‘‘tragica’’ di Melchiorre Cesarotti, Pisa: Pacini, 1998. Romagnoli, Sergio, ‘‘Melchiorre Cesarotti politico’’ (1948), in La buona compagnia, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983.

THE CHEERFULNESS OF SURVIVORS See Allegria di naufragi (Work by Giuseppe Ungaretti)

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA (1552–1638) Gabriello Chiabrera’s literary muse did not limit itself to one specific itinerary, nor did it follow one path. This wide variety of literary interests goes far in explaining his pervasive and long-lasting fame, which waned only during the twentieth century. Respected by many of his contemporary writers, Chiabrera was a friend of such prominent writers and intellectuals as Ansaldo Ceba` of the Accademia degli Addormentati, the Florentine librettist Ottavio Rinuccini, and scientist-poet Francesco Redi. Chiabrera’s influence on his contemporaries and the succeeding generation of writers was such that he is considered a precursor of the eighteenthcentury literary movement, Arcadia. Chiabrera began his prolific writing career in the Ligurian city of Savona, where he wrote the heroic

poem Della guerra de’ Goti (The War of the Goths, 1582), as well as Pindaric odes, canzonette amorose, poemetti sacri, canzoni against the Protestant reformers, and celebratory verses dedicated to various princely dynasties of the Italian peninsula. From 1586 to 1588 he published three books of canzoni in Genoa, and in 1590 he began writing the Amedeide (1620), an epic poem dedicated to Amedeo of Savoy. Chiabrera’s poetry, much like that of Giovanbattista Marino, is innovative and evokes a sense of meraviglia (wonder) in the reader. Unlike Marino and his followers, who created this effect through an abundance of extravagant metaphors and witty conceits, Chiabrera’s sense of wonderment was based on his use of classical forms. Although he read widely and was well versed in the 455

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA classical canon, his models were Pindar, Anacreon, Horace, and Catullus. His understanding of the Greek and Latin tradition was filtered through his reading of Pierre de Ronsard, the preeminent poet of the Ple´iade, who aimed at breaking away with the earlier French poetry and enriching his native language with a literature equal to that of the classical world and the Italian Renaissance. Chiabrera produced a vast quantity of verse (epic, tragic, pastoral, lyrical, and satirical), but his reputation as Italy’s most celebrated poet of the seventeenth century after Marino is associated with lyrical compositions, in particular the Canzonette (1591) and the verses written in celebration of epic deeds. Chiabrera was drawn to the composition of canzonette by his love for metrical and strophic experimentation, his quest to connect his lyrics with the world of music, and his search for a greater reading public. He was well aware that a variety of short verses are more easily adaptable to music and that such verses are sung with greater ease. The beauty and value of these compositions reside in their high level of musicality, in their proclivity to being sung, and in their aural quality, whereby the sounds emanating from the succession of words become more important than the images themselves. It was also Chiabrera’s contention that a new reading public, made up of less sophisticated young men and women, needed a poetry radically different from the gravity of a Dante or of a Petrarch. In his Dialoghi dell’arte poetica con altre prose e lettere (Dialogues on the Art of Poetry, 1830), Chiabrera discussed the art of writing heroic verse (‘‘Il Vecchietti’’), canzoni (‘‘L’Orzalesi’’ and ‘‘Il Geri’’), verse composition (‘‘Il Bamberisi’’), and a Petrarchan sonnet (‘‘Il Forzano’’). In Il Geri, dedicated to the Florentine Francesco Geri, he also suggested that not all readers are able to understand or enjoy lyric poetry and that it is up to the poet to compose light verses that are pleasing to them and can also be sung or recited. Thus, he popularized the canzonetta metrical form, and through the use of iterations, he gave us charming melodies and magical images, gracious poems where the logical sense of the words and the use of diminutives created a blend of images and sounds that heighten the senses. Chiabrera’s Canzonette and anacreontic poems appealed later to the taste of the Arcadians and were critically praised during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Chiabrera wanted to be remembered by posterity as the celebratory poet of epic deeds. To this end, he composed numerous canzoni and odes that praised the exploits of heroes and famous 456

individuals. His verses celebrated the election of popes, sang the praises of the victors of athletic events, and extolled the victories of Christian knights over the infidels. Some of his odes were written in honor of Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy; Christopher Columbus; Maria de’ Medici; and Pope Urban VIII on the day of his inauguration. Here Chiabrera emulated Pindar and attempted to construct a new noble, learned, heroic poetry previously unknown in Italy. His canzoni were also in a broad sense ‘‘Pindaric’’ due to Chiabrera’s frequent use of classical topics and mythology. Chiabrera’s characters were immersed in a world populated by heroes and heroines, gods and demigods, legends and myth, Achilles and Jason, the Odyssey and the Iliad, elements that create the fantastic scenery for Chiabrera’s paradigm of the meraviglioso. Gabriello Chiabrera was also a writer of librettos and tragedies. He played a central role in the development of musical and dramatic theater at the courts of Florence, with Il rapimento di Cefalo (The Abduction of Cephalus, 1600) set to music by Giulio Caccini, and of Mantova, where he composed intermezzi for Guarini’s comedy Idropica (1584), set to music by Claudio Monteverdi in 1608, and ‘‘favolette’’ (little fables) to be recited while singing. His technical inventions for the intermezzi in honor of Giovanni de’ Medici, as well as the sumptuous balls and veglie at the Florentine court, were highly celebrated. Chiabrera’s theatrical activity brought him fame and recognition and solidified his reputation as a preeminent man of letters. Much less known is his involvement with the theater in his hometown of Savona and in Genoa, where he wrote numerous pieces that parody the idleness and rivalries among the ruling aristocracy and that bring to light certain aspects of contemporary Genoese society. In his pastoral fables Gelopea (1604) and Alcippo (1614), he introduced relevant innovations to the favola boschereccia by eliminating the chorus, simplifying the story with the omission of the subplot and the resolution through recognition. He stressed also the rapport between the audience and the performance. In his Gelopea, inspired by Guarini’s Il pastor fido, Chiabrera interwove games of trickery and jealousy with the theme of ‘‘rightful marriage.’’ The rivalry between Filebo, a poor shepherd boy, and Berillo, a farm laborer, for the hand of Gelopea, the daughter of a rich and powerful shepherd, alluded to the conflicts afflicting the Genoese nobility (the new and old, the rich and the impoverished). In the end, the marriage of Filebo with Gelopea pointed to a

GABRIELLO CHIABRERA solution based on tolerance, love, and reconciliation. Women’s destiny was the theme of Alcippo: whether they are free to pursue their wishes or rather entrapped by the existing patriarchal structure. The play concludes with the matrimony of Alcippo and Clori, the protagonists, but the traditional ending is marred by the bride, who is resigned to her fate and accepts the inevitable marriage with an unconventional remark: ‘‘che piu´ dirvi degg’io? / Sia nelle vostre mani, e voi reggete il freno / di ciascun mio desio’’ (What more can I say to you?/I am in your hands / and you apply the brakes / to all of my desires). In his autobiography, Vita scritta da lui medesimo, published posthumously in 1718, Chiabrera wrote that he endeavored to discover a new world as Columbus did. Indeed, his discovery was to create a new world of poetry, as a reaction against the constraints of a lackluster Petrarchism that saturated the poetry of his time. Chiabrera’s verse and poetic reforms were influential in the development of the eighteenth-century Arcadian ideals, informing the literary and cultural patterns of the Roman Academy.

Biography Gabriello Chiabera was born in Savona, 18 June 1552. His father passed away before he was born. After his mother remarried, he was brought to Rome by his paternal uncle, Giovanni, 1561; his uncle entrusted him to the Jesuits at the Collegio Romano, where he studied Latin and philosophy, 1561–1572; he entered the court of the Venetian Cardinal Luigi Cornaro in Rome, where he met a number of leading cultural figures, like MarcAntoine Muret, friend and translator of Pierre Ronsard, the critic, dramatist, philosopher Sperone Speroni, and Torquato Tasso, 1572–1576. Chiabrera had a violent altercation with a Roman gentleman and was forced to leave the city and return to Savona, 1576; he then became involved in violent altercations and was forced to flee the city, 1581. Chiabrera returned to Savona in 1585 a changed man, and there he lived, almost uninterruptedly, for the rest of his life. He was invited to Florence to attend the wedding of Maria de’ Medici to Henry IV, King of France, and received the title of Gentiluomo del Granduca (Courtier of the Grand Duke of Tuscany), with a monthly allowance for the rest of his life and no residency requirement, in 1600. He married his cousin Lelia Pavese, 29 July

1602. Chiabrera presented the first edition of the Amedeide to Carlo Emanuele I, Duke of Savoy, 1607. He received a brief from Pope Urban VIII that praises the moral, classical, and heroic values of his poetry, 1623. Chiabrera died in Savona, 14 October 1638. PAOLO A. GIORDANO Selected Works Collections Opere, 5 vols., 1757. Liriche, edited by Francesco Luigi Mannucci, 1926. Canzonette, rime varie, dialoghi, edited by Luigi Negri, 1952; reprinted, 1968; selected poems in From Marino to Marinetti, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1974. Opere di Gabriello Chiabrera e lirici del classicismo barocco, edited by Marcello Turchi, 1974; reprinted, 1984; includes the five dialogues on the art of poetry and the Vita scritta da lui medesimo Maniere, scherzi e canzonette morali, edited by Giulia Raboni, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Della guerra dei Goti,’’ 1582. ‘‘Canzoni,’’ 1586–1588. ‘‘Canzonette,’’ 1591. ‘‘Scherzi e canzonette morali,’’ 1599. ‘‘Le maniere dei versi toscani,’’ 1599. ‘‘Herodiate,’’ 1602. ‘‘Alcuni scherzi,’’ 1603. ‘‘Rime sacre,’’ 1604. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1605; with Le vendemmie di Parnaso and the poemetto Egloghe, 1608. ‘‘Il Firenze,’’ 1615 (9 cantos); 1628 (15 cantos). ‘‘Vegghia delle Grazie,’’ 1616. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 3 vols., 1618. ‘‘Il presagio dei giorni,’’ 1618. ‘‘Per lo gioco del pallone celebrato in Firenze,’’ 1618. ‘‘Il vivaio dei Boboli,’’ 1620. ‘‘Per San Carlo Borromeo,’’ 1620. ‘‘Amedeide,’’ 1620. ‘‘Galatea o le grotte di Fassolo,’’ 1623. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 4 vols., 1628. ‘‘Ruggiero,’’ 1653. ‘‘Foresto,’’ 1653.

Plays and Melodramas Il rapimento di Cefalo, 1600. Gelopea: Favola boschereccia, 1604; edited by Franco Vazzoler, 1988. Alcippo, 1614. La vegghia delle grazie, 1615. Il pianto di Orfeo, 1615. Angelica in Ebuda, 1615.

Other Sermoni, 1718. Vita scritta da lui medesimo, edited by G. Paolucci, 1718. Dialoghi dell’arte poetica con altre prose e lettere, 1830. Autobiografia, dialoghi, lettere scelte, 1912. Lettere: 1585–1638, edited by Simona Morando, 2003.

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GABRIELLO CHIABRERA Further Reading Bertone, Giorgio, Per una ricerca metricologica su Chiabrera, Genoa: Marietti, 1991. Bertone, Giorgio, Per una ricerca su Chiabrera, Genoa: Marietti, 1988. Bianchi, Fulvio, ‘‘Per una definizione critica del Chiabrera: Riflessioni su una questione ancora aperta,’’ in Studi di filologia e letteratura offerti a Franco Croce, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1997. Bianchi, Fulvio, and P. Rossi (editors), La scelta della misura: Gabriello Chiabrera. L’altro fuoco del barocco italiano, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1993. Calcaterra, Carlo, Il Parnaso in rivolta: Barocco e antibarocco nella poesia italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1961. Calcaterra, Carlo, Poesia e canto: Studi sulla poesia melica italiana e sulla favola per musica, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1951. Cerisola, Pier Luigi, L’arte dello stile: Poesia e letterarieta` in Gabriello Chiabrera, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Corradini, Silvia, Teatro e spettacolo nel Seicento, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Croce, Benedetto, Storia dell’eta` barocca, Bari: Laterza, 1921.

Fasoli, Paolo, ‘‘‘Non Prima ebbe favella che vena’: Preliminari per un discorso su Marino e Chiabrera,’’ in The Sense of Marino, edited by Francesco Guardiani, New York-Ottawa-Toronto: Legas, 1994. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Gabriello Chiabrera poeta barocco,’’ in Barocco in prosa e poesia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Girardi, Enzo Noe´, Esperienza e poesia di Gabriello Chiabrera, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1950. Mamone, Sara, Il teatro nella Firenze medicea, Milan: Mursia, 1981; rev. ed., 1991. Merola, Nicola, ‘‘Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 24, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1980. Neri, Ferdinando, Chiabrera e la Ple´iade francese, Turin: Bocca, 1920. Pieri, Marzia, ‘‘Vanita` e onesti diletti: Il teatro di Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ Rassegna della letteratura, 95(1991): 5–11. Vazzoler, Franco, Introduzione to G. Chiabrera, Gelopea: Favola boschereccia, Genoa: Marietti, 1988. Vazzoler, Franco, ‘‘Lettere inedite di Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ Rassegna della letteratura italiana (1969): 29–36.

LUIGI CHIARELLI (1880–1947) The same type of irony that led Pirandello to embrace the concepts of the grotesque in some of his earlier plays is found in an essay by Luigi Chiarelli entitled ‘‘Anticipo alle mie memorie’’ (In Anticipation of My Memoirs), written in 1921 at the height of his popularity for the international success of La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face, 1916): E` giunta una grande notizia da Londra. Un illustre cercatore ha scoperto in quella meravigliosa testa di Omero che e` al ‘British Museum’ il manoscritto di una commedia sconosciuta di Willy Shakespeare. La commedia s’intitola La maschera e il volto. L’azione si svolge sul lago di Como. Si tratta di un marito che.... Ahime`! Adesso tutto si spiega! Great news from London! An illustrious scholar has discovered the manuscript of an unknown comedy by Willy Shakespeare in that wonderful head of Homer that is at the British Museum. The comedy is called La maschera e il volto. The action is set on Lake Como. It deals with a husband who... Alas! Now all becomes clear!

This post scriptum by Chiarelli to his humorous ‘‘memoirs’’ describes the artistic vision of Italy’s 458

most prominent grottesco dramatist, whose La maschera e il volto promoted a kind of theater that breaks down middle-class barriers by destroying rigid ways of responding to life. At the same time, Chiarelli’s statement acknowledges the relevance of tradition exemplified by the age of Shakespeare and the commedia dell’arte. In Italy, the term ‘‘grottesco’’ (borrowed from a line in Chiarelli’s play) applies to a group of playwrights whose works were written and produced during the World War I era. First used by Renaissance art critics, the adjective ‘‘grotesque’’ is retained in its original connotation of fantasy and playfulness, with ironic overtones. The best plays of the teatro grottesco, which comprise Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo’s Marionette, che passione! (Puppets of Passion, 1918), Luigi Antonelli’s L’uomo che incontro` se stesso (The Man Who Met Himself, 1918), and Enrico Cavacchioli’s L’uccello del paradiso (The Bird of Paradise, 1919), attest to the destruction of the classical notion of personality at the core of modern humanity’s alienation. Such esteemed critics as Adriano Tilgher and Silvio D’Amico

LUIGI CHIARELLI claimed it to be an innovative movement with a shared philosophical experience. From his early works, Chiarelli experimented with contemporary literary models, particularly the popular verist and psychological dramas. The same holds true for the plays that he wrote before La maschera il volto and succeeded in having staged in Milan: Er gendarme (The Policeman, 1912), Extra Dry (1913), Una notte d’amore (Night of Love, 1913), and La portantina (The Sedan Chair, 1913). Between 1904 and 1910, Chiarelli strengthened his theatrical training while working for several newspapers. During this time he submitted a new play, Dissolvimento (Dissolution), to Luigi Pietriboni, the artistic director of the Compagnia Virginia Reiter. It depicted the decline of an aristocratic family. Though it was well received, Dissolvimento lacked a strong role for the leading actress and therefore was rejected. He also wrote a social drama, Sorgente amara (Bitter Spring), a historical play about a Roman patriot set in 1849 (Don Prospero Spada), and a light comedy, Il terzo gode (The Third One Lucky). He became a regular at the Caffe` Aragno, the gathering place for many Roman artists and literary figures, and with a group of friends, he founded the Societa` dei Giovani Autori. In 1911, after spending six months in Paris, he decided to move to Milan, where he joined the newspaper Il secolo as a reporter. Milan was considered to be an ideal city for aspiring young playwrights. Historically, it had been the first Italian city to officially support a theatrical company (the Compagnia Reale Italiana). Here some of the best actors had settled. Chiarini collaborated with the Compagnia Gastone Monaldi and in 1912 he wrote in six days Er gendarme, a patriotic drama in Roman dialect that was successfully represented at the Teatro Fossati on September 21. In the play, which is set in 1867 Rome, a Vatican policeman is forced to arrest his daughter’s revolutionary fiance´ in order to do his duty. During the next year, Chiarelli wrote a satirical comedy for the actor Ferruccio Benini, La portantina, which was not produced until 1917, and two one-act plays, Extra Dry and Una notte d’amore, for Alfredo Sainati, the capocomico of the Grand Guignol Company. They both premiered on 24 January 1914 at the Teatro Olimpia. Of these three plays, only Extra Dry has been published in La scena (1926). Chiarelli’s masterpiece, La maschera e il volto, was written in 20 days during the summer of 1913, at the Pensione Piemontese in Milan. Gabriellino D’Annunzio, as well as Paolino Giordani and Cesare Ludovici, among others, attended the

evening readings of the play, which always concluded with singing Chopin’s Funeral March. At this time, D’Annunzio was working with the Compania Virgilio Talli, and he submitted the play to the famous actor, who rejected it. So did the companies of Marco Praga, Armando Falconi, and Dario Niccodemi. In 1916 Chiarelli’s playwriting career entered a new era. On 31 May, upon the recommendation of Annibale Gabrielli, the Compagnia Drammatica di Roma, housed at the prestigious Teatro Argentina, premiered La maschera e il volto. It was directed by Ernesto Ferrero, and the principal roles of Paolo Grazia, his wife Savina, and Cirillo Zanotti were played by Giannina Chiantoni, Ettore Paladini, and Ferrero himself. It was an instant success. As Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti wrote (‘‘L’opera di Luigi Chiarelli nella storia del teatro moderno,’’ 1948), by the end of the first act the audience became aware that they were witnessing something new and provocative. La maschera e il volto, which began like a traditional realist play (the stock bourgeois ‘‘triangle’’), was unfolding on a subversive premise: the protagonist’s defiance of preestablished social norms. At the core of Chiarelli’s grottesco lies a satirical attack on psychological drama, with its empty social conventions. The critical reception of La maschera e il volto’s first performance was hailed as a new form of playwriting. Luigi Chiarelli considered himself to be an innovator. At the end of the nineteenth century the Italian theater was still geared toward the bourgeoisie, a class that knew exactly how to represent its values. Chiarelli’s polemical reform aimed at subverting all aspects of bourgeois comedy, yet using the traditional triangle of husband-wifelover, which was the basic plot for much of the teatro borghese. In his essay ‘‘L’ironia’’ (Irony), which first appeared in L’idea nazionale in 1920, Pirandello defined La maschera e il volto as ‘‘a transcendental farce.’’ La maschera e il volto deals with the discrepancy between the attitudes imposed on people by societal codes and their true feelings. Count Paolo Grazia and his wife Savina are typical members of the high bourgeoisie. Paolo pretends to kill his wife to avoid the appearance of looking ridiculous, and he is acquitted for it, only to be tried again when she is found to be alive. The play opens by establishing its programmatic thesis: One evening, during a gathering of friends at his villa on Lake Como, Paolo declares that a husband is required to kill an unfaithful wife in order to retain his selfrespect or otherwise commit suicide. However, 459

LUIGI CHIARELLI once he is faced with his own wife’s infidelity, he plans a stratagem, fearing ridicule should he forgive her. He will make everyone believe that he has killed Savina in order to avenge his honor and dispose of her body in the lake. Savina is sent abroad under a false name. Ten months later complications arise when a decomposing body is recovered from the lake. Once Savina’s death is discovered to be a setup, Paolo is facing a prison sentence. Having recaptured their old love bond, the couple decides to escape the cynical norms of their society, running away to start a new life incognito. In the closing scene, Paolo and Savina embrace passionately at the sound of Chopin’s Funeral March. In Chiarelli’s grottesco, fantastic, bizarre situations create a bitter ironic comment on societal values. The author injected himself into the play by means of an alter ego character, Cirillo, who embodies his aesthetic philosophy. During the following years, Chiarelli’s theatrical work relied primarily on the celebrated grottesco plot and dramatic setups that made him famous overnight. However, he never enjoyed the same critical reception. With the end of World War I and the rise of Fascism, the appeal of the grotesque movement on the public faded away. Such influential critics as Adriano Tilgher would label it as a reflector of the intellectual crisis of the times. Few looked beneath the mask to see the intimate human drama that existed there. Chiarelli wrote his second grottesco, La scala di seta (The Silken Stairs, 1917), and a propaganda war drama, Le lacrime e le stelle (The Tears and the Stars, 1918), both staged by the Compagnia Drammatica di Roma. Tilgher’s and D’Amico’s somewhat mixed reviews of Chiarelli’s political satire La scala di seta, as a work in which the playwright failed to achieve a balance between drama and farce—which both critics considered to be the authentic novelty of La maschera e il volto— are telling examples. The play is based on the conflict between two men: the honest Roberto Felci, doomed to failure, and Desire´, a ruthless ballet dancer, who enjoys a life of success represented by the silken staircase that leads him up to fame. Around them lies a world of corrupt politicians, greedy businessmen, and complaisant women, who embody degrading human appetites. La scala di seta, which premiered at the Teatro Argentina on 28 June 1917, becomes a mirror of a generational attitude toward society. These same themes return in Chimere (Chimeras, 1920) and La morte degli amanti (Death 460

of the Lovers, 1921), a parody of melodramatic bourgeois comedy. What concerned Chiarelli was the inability of people to speak the language of truth and to express genuine love for each other, particularly in their emotional responsiveness. In his 1918 essay concerning the state of the theater, Teatro di prosa (Prose Theater), he lamented the lack of undefined and poetic elements that are the quintessential components of a work of art. At that point, Chiarelli was recognized as one of Italy’s foremost playwrights, and his ambition was to have his own company. And so in 1918 he formed the Ars Italica (1918–1919), under Virgilio Talli’s artistic direction. The company successfully produced a repertoire of comedies, which included Carlo Goldoni and Guido Morselli. By the early 1920s the grotesque movement had virtually disappeared. Chiarelli would write one last grottesco, Fuochi d’artificio (Fireworks, 1922). It portrays the plight of Gerardo, a poor man whom everybody believes to be wealthy. He is helped in this game of appearances by his own secretary, Scaramanzia. Fuochi d’artificio enjoys the distinction in Chiarelli’s career of being the only other play as widely acclaimed and translated as La maschera e il volto. Luigi Chiarelli was also instrumental in promoting the establishment of the Teatri di Stato (State Theaters). Traditionally a few managers controlled the national theaters, often selecting troupes and their repertoires to please the public. His commitment to the theater continued until the last years of his life, combining artistic endeavors with administrative appointments. During this period, he officially joined the Fascist Party, as did Pirandello and other contemporary artists. Chiarelli also wrote about 100 short stories, which originally appeared in La stampa and then were published in the collections La mano di Venere (The Hand of Venus, 1935), La figlia dell’aria (The Daughter of the Air, 1939), and Karake` e altri racconti (Karake` and Other Stories, 1944). The importance of Luigi Chiarelli in the history of dramatic literature has to be viewed in relation to the Italian repertoires at that time, which were embedded in old formulas and foreign models and lacked originality (with the exception of D’Annunzio). La maschera e il volto marks a date in the Italian theater, not just because it was very successful, but mostly because it was a turning point in Italian dramatic literature, while remaining within the limits of the national tradition.

LUIGI CHIARELLI

Biography Luigi Chiarelli was born in Trani (Bari), on 7 July 1880, the eldest of five sons of Carlo Chiarelli and Maria Teresa Fortunato. His father belonged to a wealthy Sicilian family and had enlisted as a volunteer with the Italian army in 1866. After finishing his studies in Palermo, he moved to Rome, where he met and married Maria Teresa in 1879. Luigi was born in his mother’s hometown and was named after his paternal grandfather, a patriot with Giuseppe Garibaldi’s 1860 expedition. Brought up in Rome, Luigi received his secondary education at the Liceo ‘‘Ennio Quirino Visconti,’’ where he disclosed an early inclination for writing love poems and dramas. At the age of 15, he composed his first play, Lena, a realist portrait of a peasant girl that transcends the mere regionalism of Italian verismo. However, Luigi had little interest in school. He loved to read dramatic literature and attend theatrical productions. In 1900, the sudden death of his father interrupted Luigi’s studies, and so he had to forego his university career. Carlo Chiarelli had lost his substantial fortune in risky investments and died heartbroken, leaving his family in financial distress. The 20-year-old Luigi was entrusted with supporting his mother as well as his younger brothers. He eventually found a position as a government employee at the Corte dei Conti, where his father had also worked. This post only lasted for a few months. Luigi’s uncommitted performance and recurring absences from work led to his resignation. Soon after he became a journalist and gained a reputation in literary circles, contributing regularly to the daily papers L’Alfiere and La patria. In 1914 the playwright moved to Turin to direct the review Armi e politica, whose publication was discontinued with the outbreak of World War I. Though drafted and assigned to spend his military service in Terni, he was able to continue his literary activities. In 1923, he joined the Il corriere italiano as a regular drama critic. In December 1916 Luigi married Anna (Ne`nette), to whom he dedicated La maschera e il volto with an inscription that read: ‘‘Alla mia Ne`nette, di cui conosco tutte le maschere e i volti’’ (To my Ne`nette, of whom I know all masks and faces). In his later years, Chiarelli became the regular film critic for the Roman daily Il tempo and was commissioned by the Istituto Nazionale del Dramma Antico to translate Plautus’s L’Aulularia (1938) and I Menecmi (1938), which were staged in the Roman theaters of Ostia, Gubbio,

and Fiesole. Some of his plays were also adapted for the screen. Among them are La maschera e il volto, directed by Augusto Genina (1919) and by Camillo Mastrocinque (1942); La scala di seta, directed by Arnaldo Frateili (1920); and Fuochi d’artificio (Fireworks, 1938) with Amedeo Nazzari, directed by Gennaro Righelli. In 1942 Chiarelli collaborated on the screenplay entitled Luisa Sanfelice by Leo Menardi. During the early 1940s Chiarelli directed the Compagnia Ninchi-Lanczy and began experimenting with new theatrical approaches, including a mythical representation, Ninon (1940), and an allegorical drama, Essere, staged posthumously in 1953, which discloses the playwright’s search for a supreme being. In 1946 he suffered a stroke and died in Rome on 20 December 1947. GAETANA MARRONE Selected Works Plays Er gendarme, 1912. Extra Dry, 1914. Una notte d’amore, 1914. La maschera e il volto, 1916; as The Mask and the Face, translated by Chester Bailey Fernald, 1927; translated by Noel de Vic Beamish, in International Modern Plays, 1950; translated with an Introduction by M. Vena, in Italian Grotesque Theater, 2001. La scala di seta, Rome, Teatro Argentina, 28 June 1917. La portantina, 1917. Le lacrime e le stelle, 1918. Chimere, 1920. La morte degli amanti, 1921. Fuochi d’artificio, 1923. Les Tripes a` la mode de Caen, 1925. Jolly, 1928. K. 41, 1929. La reginetta, 1931. Leggere e scrivere, 1931. Lettere d’amore, 1931. Un uomo da rifare, 1932. Una piu` due, 1935. Il cerchio magico, 1937. Il teatro in fiamme, 1945. Essere, 1953.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, Il teatro del novecento, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1976. Antonucci, Giovanni, Storia del teatro italiano del novecento, Rome: Studium, 1986. Apollonio, Carla, ‘‘Luigi Chiarelli,’’ in Novecento, vol. 2, part 1, Settimo Milanese: Marzorati, 1989.

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LUIGI CHIARELLI Bassnett, Susan, ‘‘The Mask and the Face,’’ in International Dictionary of Theatre: Plays, Chicago-London: St. James Press, 1992. Calendoli, Giovanni, ‘‘Chiarelli,’’ in Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, vol. 3, Rome: Editrice Le Maschere, 1956. Cardarelli, Vincenzo, ‘‘‘Le lacrime e le stelle’ di L. Chiarelli all’Argentina,’’ in La poltrona vuota, edited by G. A. Cibotto and B. Blasi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. D’Amico, Silvio, ‘‘Il teatro grottesco,’’ in Il teatro dei fantocci, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Ferrante, Luigi, Teatro italiano grottesco, Rocca di San Casciano: Cappelli, 1964. Fiocco, Achille, Teatro italiano di ieri e di oggi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1958. Gobetti, Piero, ‘‘‘La Scala di seta’ di L. Chiarelli,’’ L’ordine nuovo (7 May 1921); reprinted in Scritti di critica teatrale, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Gori, Gino, Il grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura: Comico, tragico, lirico, Rome: Stock, 1926. Gramsci, Antonio, ‘‘‘La maschera e il volto’ di Chiarelli al Carignano,’’ Avanti! (Turin ed., 11 April 1917) and

‘‘‘Chimere’ di Chiarelli al Carignano,’’ Avanti! (Turin ed., 7 February 1920), reprinted in Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Livio, Gigi, Teatro grottesco del novecento: Antologia, Milan: Mursia, 1965. Lo Vecchio Musti, Manlio, L’opera di Luigi Chiarelli, Rome: Cenacolo, 1942. Lo Vecchio Musti, Manlio, ‘‘L’opera di Luigi Chiarelli nella storia del teatro moderno,’’ Il dramma, 53(15 January 1948), 28–34. Pirandello, Luigi, ‘‘Immagine del ‘grottesco’’’ and ‘‘Ironia,’’ in Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, edited by Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti, Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Tilgher, Adriano, ‘‘Il teatro del grottesco,’’ in Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1923. Vena, Michael, ‘‘Luigi Chiarelli (1880–1947): Profile of a Playwright,’’ Connecticut Review, 7(1974), 59–63. Vena, Michael, ‘‘The ‘Grotteschi’ Revisited,’’ Forum Italicum, 31:1(1997), 153–162. Verdone, Mario, ‘‘Teatro grottesco,’’ in Teatro contemporaneo, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1981.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Although children’s literature as a recognized genre emerged in Italy during the nineteenth century, its origins go back to Greek, Latin, and Asian models. Its artistic significance and its pedagogical and psychological effectiveness are the subject of never-ending debate. In his La letteratura della nuova Italia (1914–1940), the leading philosopher Benedetto Croce examined the question of whether children’s literature can truly express artistic values. On the other hand, Ernesto Codignola, Lamberto Borghi, and Francesco De Bartolomeis, who were influenced by John Dewey, all took a more modern stance on this subject. Indeed John Dewey and his pedagogical activism had a strong impact in Italy, particularly on writers like Gianni Rodari. In recent years, however, the focus of school reforms and pedagogical trends has shifted to more complex technologies, granting children’s literature a minor part in education. The traditional novella (a specifically Italian form of the tale) and the fable have been the two predominant forms of prose fiction in the Italian vernacular since the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Handed down orally, the fable retains its ancient origins in the emblematic character of the Fata (Fairy), which is 462

etymologically related to the Latin fatum (destiny) and Parca (the goddess of childbirth and destiny), as well as the Greek Moira (the goddess of destiny). In the folk and popular traditions, the character of the fairy has great ethical significance, as is the case of the Fata Turchina in Carlo Collodi’s classic children’s story Le avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1883). The century of humanism mainly championed education based on classical texts. Venice, Milan, and Florence were the pivotal centers of the cultural translatio, or transformation, of this age. Scholarly work was no longer done solely in convents and monasteries. Instead, humanists promoted a secular curriculum whose purpose was to reform and improve the way humankind thought and lived. In the process the pagan fable was revived. The Medicis’ commitment to philology assured the collection and proper contextualization of classical primary texts. Thus, subsequently adapted to the vernacular, these works provided a model and inspiration for spiritual growth among aristocrats. It was precisely in this way that the pedagogical school of the most famous of the humanist educators, Vittorino da Feltre (ca. 1378–1446), promoted

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE a progressive cultural opening toward a secular education. Vittorino became the tutor of the young Gonzaga noblemen in Mantua and founded the Ca’ Giocosa (as he named his school) where the curriculum focused on the studia humanitas, Latin and Greek classics were taught in addition to the natural sciences, mathematics, and music. The Ca’ Giocosa emphasized strict moral discipline resting on Stoic ethics, with physical training as well. Vittorino’s pedagogical approach became the epitome of the humanistic ideals of learning and virtue. Such reformist views on education are also expressed in Della vita civile (On Civic Life, 1529) by Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) and in Della famiglia (The Family in Renaissance Florence, 1433– 1441) by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), whose first book (‘‘De officio senum erga juvenes...et de educandis liberis’’) is devoted to educational practices. Both treatises define the qualities of the ideal citizen of all ages and are among the most telling expressions of Florentine humanism. It was, however, Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) who introduced the first innovations to the literary genre of the fairy tale. He had a good knowledge of Aesop and Phaedrus and was well acquainted with the narrative techniques used by Ovid. Furthermore, Firenzuola had translated The Golden Ass by Apuleius and, thus, was proven to have a talent for working with language as well as erudition. He wrote a popular collection of novelle in the vernacular, La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (The First Version of the Animals’ Discourses, 1548), through which he introduced, with strong moral overtones, a series of Asian tales—the Indian Panchatantra, which had first appeared in a Latin translation during the thirteenth century. Firenzuola went beyond the original pedagogical drive of the humanists of the Italian Renaissance. This, however, can also be said about the fables that Ludovico Ariosto chose to include in his Satire (The Satires, 1517–1525). Two other early texts of great importance for children’s literature in Italy are Le piacevoli notti (The Entertaining Nights, 1550–1553) by the Venetian Giovan Francesco Straparola (ca. 1480–before 1557) and Pentamerone (The Pentameron, 1634–1636) by the Neapolitan Giambattista Basile (ca. 1566/1575–1632). Straparola’s collection is comprised of 75 fables narrated by a group of storytellers invited to the island of Murano on the 13 nights of carnival. Each fable ends with a riddle with multiple interpretations, some of which are of obscene nature. In fact, the relevance of Le piacevoli notti to children’s

literature lies in Straparola’s storytelling techniques, which were common at the time. The Venetian author chose to retell magical Asian folk stories and to include animal fables in a larger narrative of a different genre. He is also famous for having presented the oldest known version of the classic ‘‘Puss in Boots.’’ Like Le piacevoli notti, Basile’s tales are set within a frame story modelled after Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373). Basile’s work reveals the growing interest of humanist writers in the literary and popular folk narrative traditions and in Asian legends in particular. Basile wrote in the old Neapolitan dialect, and his Pentamerone’s first important Italian translation was done by Benedetto Croce. It later became an inspirational text for the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Ludwig Tieck. In fact, the subtitle of the original text is Lo cunto de li cunti, o vero lo trattenemiento de li peccerille (The Tale of Tales, or the Entertainment of the Little Ones). Thus, the Pentamerone was adequately abridged for children and published in Florence in 1889 in an edition illustrated by Enrico Mazzanti. Moreover, the first theatrical fantasy by Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of Three Oranges, 1761), was also an adaptation of a story by Basile, ‘‘I tre cedri’’ (The Tree Cedars). Finally, Basile’s ‘‘La gatta cenerentola’’ (The Cinderella Cat) was presented by Roberto De Simone in 1976, during the Spoleto Festival, while many of the Renaissance author’s tales continue to be staged today. During the eighteenth century, Italian literature was predominantly influenced by the fables of La Fontaine. Aurelio Bertola De’ Giorgi, Giambattista Casti, Lorenzo Pignotti, Luigi Fiacchi, and Giovanni Meli are some of the writers who celebrated the spirit of learning particular to the Enlightenment. De’ Giorgi wrote a Saggio sopra la favola (An Essay on the Fable, 1788), while Casti composed the Animali parlanti (Talking Animals, 1802), a poem in 26 canti in six-line stanzas that was praised by Giacomo Leopardi as a model of political satire. Pignotti also achieved some literary success with his verse fables, Favole e novelle (Fairy Tales and Novellas, 1782), inspired by La Fontaine and by the sensualist philosophy of Condillac, a pedagogue at the court of Ferdinand of Bourbon in Parma. Another key figure in children’s literature of the time is the educationalist Father Francesco Soave (1743–1806), whose pupils included Manzoni. His Novelle morali (Moral Fables, 1786) were written in the spirit of an eclectic philosophical empiricism, 463

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE derived from John Locke, Bonnet, and Condillac, underlying the author’s Christian humanitarian style. A landmark in Italian children’s literature, the Novelle morali went through numerous editions and were translated into French and German. Furthermore, Father Soave’s pedagogical commitment led him to establish the first state elementary school in Lombardy (1786–1789). With the birth of the Italian nation-state, the production of books and magazines for children became associated with national schooling policies. Language problems emerged due to the diversity of Italian dialects. The Italian language of the sixteenth century, a heritage of those of letters only, could not be understood by children. Thus, in 1860, under the secretariat of Terenzio Mamiani, a project of linguistic and cultural unification was put forward. Manzoni proposed to adopt the Florentine dialect as the official language, an idea eventually implemented despite the criticism of Isaia Ascoli, Raffaello Lambruschini, Giosue` Carducci, and Luigi Settembrini (among others), who hoped to preserve the century-old oral traditions of fables, legends, and nursery rhymes. The reintegration of the local linguistic and cultural features of children’s literature was only initiated a century later. Thus, for example, the reforms affecting the Scuola Media (middle school) of 1979 and the Scuola Elementare (elementary school) of 1985 were based on theories of comparison and bilingualism in education. The books for early childhood had to meet pedagogical standards after a decree was issued on September 15, 1860. The tales by Francesco Soave and Il Giannetto (1837) by Luigi Alessandro Parravicini (1800–1880) became a part of the national syllabus and circulate among the schools of many Italian regions to this day. The plot of Parravicini’s short stories, set in the industrial factories of Lombardia, is based on the exemplary deeds of the main character, a sort of Italian self-made man. Historian Cesare Cantu` also published a collection of poems for children, Fior di memoria pei bambini (The Best of Memory for Children, 1846). Other exemplary writers for children include Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), whose Cuore (Heart, 1886) reflects his patriotic educational zeal and a deeply felt mission to engender a sense of nationhood in the youth of different regions; Ida Baccini (1850–1911), with Le memorie di un pulcino (Memories of Hatchling, 1875), who was also the editor of Cordelia, a magazine for young ladies founded in 1895 by the ethnologist Angelo De Gubernatis; and Antonio Stoppani (1824–1891), whose Il Bel 464

Paese (The Beautiful Country, 1875), addressed to young readers, praises the beauty of Italy’s diverse regions and variety of customs. In 1870, when Rome became the capital of the new kingdom, interest in children’s literature grew, particularly in central and northern Italy. Both educational and publishing enterprises doubled in number, which led to a boom in pedagogical texts as in the translation of a number of important foreign authors. Post-Risorgimento Italy was greatly influenced by Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe was available in many abridged versions for children), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and the works of Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens. James Fenimore Cooper also exercised a decisive influence on adventure novelists for the young, from Emilio Salgari (1862–1911) to Mino Milani (1928–), with his Leatherstocking tales. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, interest in fables and adventurous tales waned while legends became a more popular genre for young readers: for example, Luigi Capuana’s reworking of Sicilian folk stories in C’era una volta (Once upon a Time, 1882) and the collections of fables and folk songs by Giuseppe Pitre`, Vittorio Imbriani, Gherardo Nerucci, Alessandro D’Ancona, and Costantino Nigra. The poetics of Giovanni Pascoli’s Il fanciullino (The Eternal Child, 1897), endorsing a theory of poetry as a purely intuitive act, also had a strong impact on children’s literature. For Pascoli, the poet is endowed with a childlike vision; his lexical innovations were based on Hermann Hebbingham’s theory of perception founded on simple sensory elements linked according to coordination, proximity, and contrast. Pascoli’s poetics affected the crepuscular writers for children (Guido Gozzano, Marino Moretti, Corrado Govoni), as well as authors such as Angelo Silvio Novaro, Giuseppe Fanciulli, Ada Negri, Luciano Folgore, Diego Valeri, and Alfonso Gatto. At the beginning of the twentieth century, journalism for children achieved high standards with Il giornalino della domenica (1906–1927) and Il corriere dei piccoli (1908–). Years later the Fascist regime also tried to indoctrinate schoolboys by means of children’s newspapers such as the popular Il balilla, first published in 1923. Other significant publishing initiatives include the series Biblioteca dei miei ragazzi (1931–1955), sponsored by Salani in Florence, ‘‘La Scala d’oro’’ (1932–) by UTET, and Libri per ragazzi (1956–) by Einaudi in Turin, Junior Mondadori (1988–) in Milan, and Il battello a vapore (1992–)

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE by Piemme. More recently, Antonio Faeti, the founder of the first Italian department of children’s literature at the University of Bologna in 1994, proposed the reedition of the Libri d’acciaio of the 1930s, a project carried out by Bompiani in their series I Delfini. In general, during the twentieth century, children’s literature underwent considerable development, partly due to the growth in the number of Italian publishers. An increasingly larger group of writers chose to specialize in literature for young readers. Yet, as this industry grew, the market became a greater factor in the production of books for children. Hence, almost every established author at the time (including Dino Buzzati, Alberto Moravia, Tommaso Landolfi, Luigi Malerba, Mario Tobino, Alberto Arbasino, Andrea Zanzotto, Mario Rigoni Stern, and Elsa Morante) wrote at least one children’s book. In addition, the two world wars were reflected in children’s literature in the works of Salvator Gotta, Giovanni Arpino, Pinin Carpi, and Beppe Fenoglio, among others. The postwar reconstruction, industrial boom, and the ever-increasing development of the mass media have had a strong impact not only on writing for children, but on the role of the young reader as well. A high order of imaginative writing resurfaces with Italo Calvino in his Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales, 1956), a collection of Italian fairy tales that he translated from different regional dialects, and Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947), the story of a band of Resistance fighters recounted from the perspective of a young boy, Pin. More recently, Roberto Piumini and Susanna Tamaro, among others, have published significant children’s fiction; while a particular sort of avant-garde theater, born in Turin in 1969 and centered on the role of the animatore, captures the actor-director on stage, side by side with the young, as he guides them in a collective writing/acting of a spectacle. Memorable animatori include Giuliano Scabia, Remo Rostagno, Franco Passatore, Silvio De Stefanis, and Loredana Perissinotto. On the other hand, the best-known twentiethcentury Italian children’s writer was Gianni Rodari (1920–1980), who began working for Il corriere dei piccoli in the early 1960s. From Il libro delle filastrocche (Nursery Rhyme Book, 1950) and Filastrocche in cielo e in terra (Nursery Rhymes in the Sky and on the Ground, 1960) to the impressive Favole al telefono (Fairy Tales on the Telephone, 1962) and C’era due volte (Twice upon a Time,

1978), Rodari proposed a fancy that becomes real through a verbal game. In his stories, he combined elements from popular European children’s literature (the Grimm brothers, Brentano, Arnim, Lewis Carroll, and Saint-Exupe´ry) as well as ancient aphorisms and sayings, with a touch of utopian Marxism. In his 1973 Grammatica della fantasia (The Grammar of Imagination), Rodari introduced his educational approach and advanced experimental techniques that foster creativity. Among his most successful illustrators were Bruno Munari, whose work, along with that of Carlo Chiostri, Enrico Mazzanti, Giove Toppi, and Piero Bernardini is grounded in the tradition of the figurinai of the nineteenth century. Children’s literature also made a breakthrough in academia. In 1965, in Genoa, the ‘‘Centro Studi di Letteratura Giovanile’’ was founded along with the ‘‘Biblioteca Internazionale per Ragazzi De Amicis,’’ following the model of the Jugendbibliothek in Munich. Two years later the University of Padua also developed a research department for children’s literature, under the guidance of Giuseppe Flores d’Arcais. In Florence, the ‘‘Biblioteca di Documentazione Pedagogica,’’ founded in 1974, has become the most important pedagogical archive in Italy and holds some 33,000 texts of children’s literature, collected since the nineteenth century. Similarly, the library ‘‘Gianni Rodari’’ in Florence, established in 1987, currently publishes an important review entitled ‘‘Li.B.e.R,’’ which includes bibliographic information in the field of children’s literature. At last, in 1996, the ‘‘Associazione Culturale Hamelin’’ was founded by some of Antonio Faeti’s students, aiming at promoting continuity in Italian publishing for young readers. PAOLA MARTINUZZI

Further Reading Argilli, Marcello, Ci sara` una volta: Immaginario infantile e fiaba moderna, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995. Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Le voci di un’Italia bambina,’’ in Storia d’Italia, vol. 4, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Boero, Pino, Una storia, tante storie: Guida all’opera di Gianni Rodari, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Boero, Pino, and Carmine De Luca, La letteratura per l’infanzia, Rome: Laterza, 1995. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura dell’Italia unita 1861– 1968, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Faeti, Antonio, Guardare le figure: Gli illustratori italiani dei libri per l’infanzia, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Faeti, Antonio, Letteratura per l’infanzia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977.

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Liberovici, Sergio, Un paese: Esperienze di drammaturgia infantile, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Lugli, Antonio, Libri e figure: Storia della letteratura per l’infanzia e la gioventu`, Bologna: Cappelli, 1982. Perissinotto, Loredana, In ludo: Idee per il teatro a scuola e nella comunita`, Rome: Armando, 1998.

Rostagno, Remo, Un teatro-scuola di quartiere, Venice: Marsilio, 1975. Solinas Donghi, Beatrice, La fiaba come racconto, Venice: Marsilio, 1976. Zanzotto, Andrea, Fantasie di avvicinamento, Milan: Mondadori, 1991.

CHRIST STOPPED AT EBOLI See Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Work by Carlo Levi)

FAUSTA CIALENTE (1898–1994) The question of inhabiting, whether a geography or an historical period, is central to the work of Fausta Cialente, who, in a 1984 interview with Sandra Petrignani (Le signore della scrittura, 1984), described herself as a ‘‘straniera dappertutto’’ (foreigner everywhere). Her first novel, Natalia, was completed in 1927 but published only in 1930. Natalia’s story unfolds in a remote Italian province with her nomadic family constantly uprooted by the father’s military career—a situation reflecting Cialente’s own childhood. The novel is a daring representation of the coming of age of a young girl during the historically traumatic rite of passage of World War I. As is often the case in Cialente’s narrative, the story is filtered through the disingenuous yet ironic and pitiless eyes of children who judge the adult universe: a crumbling bourgeois world, self-satisfied, blinded by its lies and rituals. In contrast to the claustrophobic universe of Alberto Moravia’s Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929)—a text that resembles Natalia in other regards—the geographical displacement here has shaken the structures of the traditional family, freeing Natalia’s experience. Natalia’s transgressive love for her childhood friend Silvia gives her an unconventional access to 466

the world. A victim at first of this process of selfdiscovery is Malaspina, the young soldier who falls in love with Natalia and eventually discovers with her that life must be reinvented together in order to be lived. Awarded a prestigious literary prize, Natalia was soon suppressed by Fascist censorship because of its antiwar stance and frank depiction of female sexuality. In a world shaken to the roots, the images of the old overgrown courtyard where Natalia and Silvia played as children and Malaspina’s old farmhouse emerge with great poetic force, emblematic of a tension dominating all of Cialente’s stories, that between a homeless humanity and an affective spaciality. In Cortile a Cleopatra (Courtyard in Cleopatra, 1936), written after the writer’s move to Egypt, it is a courtyard at the outskirts of Cleopatra (a suburb of Alexandria) that structures a story whose formal beauty, elegance, and inventive freshness make it a little-known masterpiece of twentieth-century Italian literature. The multi-ethnic exile community of Greeks, Italians, Armenians, and Jews in Egypt is the central setting; their lives revolve around the indolent vagabond Marco, just arrived from Italy in search of his Greek mother Crissanti. Cialente represents through Marco the

FAUSTA CIALENTE condition of outsider/insider of all her subjects as they confront the otherness of Egypt, a familiar yet distant Europe, and the both loved and hated space of the colony. This world, rich, lively, yet dominated by pettiness, envy, and distrust, comes to life with the unforgettable characters of Dinah, daughter of the Jewish merchant Abramino and the beautiful Eva; Haiganush, an Armenian girl; and Kiki, a resilient girl of mixed race. The wanderings and careless behavior of the sensual and indifferent Marco—a character without a home, a future, or a country—constitute an ironic counterpoint both to the colonial subject, with its ethos of work and respectability, and the Fascist subject just prior to the Ethiopian adventure. In Cialente, the Orient, the ‘‘other’’ on which Europe relies for its identity, offers instead a stage for its dissolution—a theme that links Cialente’s work to that of Joseph Conrad; Andre´ Gide, who she greatly admired; and another writer of the Levant, Lawrence Durrell. After a 20-year silence, during which Cialente actively participated in the anti-Fascist resistance in Alexandria, and returned to postliberation Italy to work as a journalist and occasional screenwriter, Ballata levantina appeared (The Levantines, 1961). Here the memorialistic impulse that would dominate Cialente’s subsequent production was central to the epic representation of three generations of an outcast Levantine family: the grandmother, a dancer who became the lover of a rich merchant; the mother, marked by the stigma of illegitimacy; and Daniela, the protagonist and first-person narrator of the story. An upper-middle-class society of merchants, aristocrats, and artists became the object of a pitiless scrutiny that unveiled their racism and their guilty enthusiasm for Mussolini, the irresistible father figure for an orphaned exile community. The story of Daniela—like Natalia, a young woman defiantly in search of her own path—can be read as a first ‘‘gynealogy,’’ the construction of a sense of belonging, identity, and personal and collective history by retracing the almost invisible, yet arduous path of individual women (Graziella Parati, Public History, Private Stories, 1996). In her subsequent work, Cialente gradually approached the memories of her Triestine family. There was a first rehearsal of these autobiographical motifs with Il vento sulla sabbia (Wind on the Sand, 1972), in which a middle-aged narrator revisits her Italian youth. Before this novel, Cialente returned to an Italian setting with Un inverno freddissimo (An Icy Winter, 1966), a story of hope, solidarity, and disillusionment set in the winter of

1946 in an overcrowded attic in Milan. Since Ballata levantina, Cialente had been experimenting with a double register, one oscillating between an intimate setting and the wider social and historical canvas. This movement is central to Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger (The Four Wieselberger Sisters, 1976). The unhappy destiny of the Wieselberger sisters is played contrapuntally with the representation of a society on the brink of self-annihilation. The condemnation of the blind and exasperated nationalism of the Triestine bourgeoisie, which brought about its irreparable economic decline by severing all ties with Austria and Europe and ‘‘marrying’’ the Italian cause, finds an allegorical parallel in the story of the last sister, Fausta’s mother, who starts a brilliant career as an opera singer, only to abandon it for an unhappy marriage to an Italian officer. Both the collective and personal histories reflect blindness and self-denial. Out of this void, however, the narrator’s voice emerges, firm and full of pathos. Told in a first person that grows more and more present as the narration progresses, this last novel is enriched by an insistent dialogism; the family sayings in Triestine dialect are woven into the text like a faraway musical motif. Such a linguistic attention to the local language was already present in the use of dialect and Arabic in the Levantine novels. Lastly, Cialente collected her short stories in the volume Interno con figure (Interior with Figures, 1976). As Emilio Cecchi wrote in his 1952 introduction to Cortile a Cleopatra, it is surprising that Cialente’s name does not appear more often in a discussion of twentieth-century Italian literature. The honest and irreverent glance of Cialente’s women— displaced subjects, nomads within the crumbling architecture of various societies—still compels a readership, enticed by her protagonists’ stubborn faith in life and the possibility of inhabiting the world.

Biography Fausta Cialente was born in Cagliari (Sardinia), 29 November 1898. She had a nomadic childhood with her father, an army officer. In 1921, she married the composer Enrico Terni and moved to Alexandria, Egypt, where she took part in the intellectual life of the colony. In 1940, Cialente joined the anti-Fascist resistance, writing pamphlets and making broadcasts from Radio Cairo. She returned to Italy in 1947, where she lived until 1984, when she moved to England. She was winner of numerous literary awards, including the Dieci 467

FAUSTA CIALENTE Savi Prize, for Natalia, 1929; Premio Galante Bompiani for ‘‘Marianna,’’ 1931; Enna Prize, for Il vento sulla sabbia, 1973; Strega Prize for Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, 1976. Cialente died 13 March 1994 in Pangbourne, England. She was survived by her daughter, Lionella Muir Terni. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Fiction ‘‘Marianna,’’ in L’Italia letteraria, 1929. Natalia, 1930. ‘‘Pamela o la bella estate,’’ in Occidente, 1935. Cortile a Cleopatra, 1936. Ballata Levantina, 1961; as The Levantines, translated by Isabelle Quigly, 1962. Un inverno freddissimo, 1966. Il vento sulla sabbia, 1972. Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger, 1976. Interno con figure, 1976. I bambini, 1995.

Translations Lawrence Durrell, Clea, 1962; new edition 1973. Louisa May Alcott, Piccole donne, 1976. Louisa May Alcott, Le piccole donne crescono, 1977. Louisa May Alcott, Piccoli uomini, 1981. Henry James, Giro di vite, 1985.

Further Reading Asquer, Renata, Fausta Cialente, la triplice anima, Novara: Interlinea, 1998. Cecchi, Emilio, Introduction to F. Cialente, Cortile a Cleopatra, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘La libera passione di Fausta Cialente,’’ L’unita`, 13 March 1994, p. 4. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Autobiography, Art, and History in Fausta Cialente’s Fiction,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Merry, Bruce, ‘‘Fausta Cialente,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russel, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Minghelli, Giuliana, ‘‘L’Africa in cortile: La colonia nelle storie levantine di Fausta Cialente,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 15:1–2(1994): 227–235. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Fausta Cialente: testimonianza storica e tipologia femminile,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: la condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Papotti, Davide, ‘‘Urban Winter Landscape with Female Figures: Representations of Space in Fausta Cialente’s Un inverno freddissimo,’’ in Italian Women and the City, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2003. Parati, Graziella, ‘‘From Genealogy to Gynealogy and Beyond: Fausta Cialente’s Le quattro ragazze Wieselberger,’’ in Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Petrignani, Sandra, ‘‘Fausta Cialente. Straniera dappertutto’’ in Le signore della scrittura, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1984.

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS The relationship between literary writers and cinema constitutes one of the key dynamics of twentieth-century Italian culture. From the arrival of the Edison kinetoscope and the Lumie`re cine´matographe in the 1890s to the emergence of digital forms of cinema and new media technologies in the 1990s, Italian writers have reacted to the moving image and taken part in shaping its development. Literary writers have collaborated directly in the development of film art by contributing intertitles and dialogues, scenarios and screenplays, as well as by participating in publicity campaigns, discussions, and debates. Influential arbiters in the cultural reception of cinema, writers were called upon in the early decades of the twentieth century 468

to lend cultural prestige and to articulate an identity for the new cinematic medium. In the years between the wars, literary writers played a role in the rebirth of the Italian film industry after its collapse in the early 1920s. They also helped to establish an intellectually serious and methodologically rigorous film criticism and to lay the foundation for Italian film historiography. In the postwar period and through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Italian writers contributed to neo-Realism, helped shape popular film genres, and collaborated with internationally successful directors. Furthermore, in addition to their direct contributions to film art, and in the process of mediating between print and visual cultures, Italian writers

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS have also produced a rich body of ‘‘cinema literature’’: interviews and articles, criticism, theoretical interventions, and manifestos, as well as poems, literary fiction, and plays that demonstrate the impact of cinema on literature. Given the richness of this tradition, and the multiplicity of forms involved, the relationship between cinema and literary writers in Italy sheds light on film and literary history, on the history of intellectuals and media, and on cultural history more broadly. The early period of film history constitutes one of the most important periods in the relationship between cinema and Italian literary writers. After moving picture technology arrived in the 1890s, a decade of transitory exhibition venues ensued, with films being shown in fairground tents, in public squares, and in cafes and theaters. In 1905, with the establishment of permanent cinemas and with the beginning of Italian film production, literary writers began to play a key role in forming an identity for the nascent cinema. The first Italian essay to examine film from a theoretical perspective, La filosofia del cinematografo (The Philosophy of the Cinema), was penned by Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) and published in La stampa in May of 1907. Reacting to the proliferation of permanent cinemas in the major cities, Papini observed that the cinema constituted a new social space, marked a change in the urban landscape, and resembled other emerging modern phenomena. According to Papini, the cinema was already more popular than theater due to its lower cost, the brevity of its performance, and the effort of attention required of the film spectator. Due to film’s technological means of reproduction, the cinematic apparatus makes possible the representation of ‘‘avvenimenti vasti e complicati, che non potrebbero esser riprodotti sopra un palcoscenico neppure dai piu` abili macchinisti’’ (vast and complicated events that could not be reproduced on a stage even by the most able technicians) (‘‘La filosofia del cinematografo,’’ 1907). Most importantly, recognizing that cinema was worthy of serious reflection, Papini called on Italian intellectuals to pay greater heed to this burgeoning form of popular entertainment. Responding to the booming appetite for film, the international film industry around 1908 began to turn from documentaries or actualities to fictional stories. Film language developed through an increasing emphasis on narrative. Seeking to counter the moral criticism directed against the cinema and in an attempt to expand its audience to the middle and upper classes, film producers

sought to gain respectability by moving toward established forms of culture. Following the lead of the film d’art movement in France, the Italian film industry developed films based on literary works or featuring scenarios written (sometimes purportedly) by literary authors. Shortly after their initial discovery of the cinema, literary writers were invited to permit their works to be adapted into films or to write film subjects and scenarios. Writers drawn to the film industry during this period, although with varying degrees of enthusiasm, included Guido Gozzano, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Nino Martoglio, Giovanni Verga, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Matilde Serao, Luigi Pirandello, Lucio D’Ambra, Ferdinando Martini, Luciano Zuccoli, Grazia Deledda, Nino Oxilia, and many others. During the ‘‘Golden Age of Italian Silent Film’’ in the years around World War I, when the Italian film industry was among the most prominent internationally, a number of masterworks exemplified the literary writer’s ‘‘authorial’’ presence in the cinema. The Milano Film Company’s version of Dante’s Inferno in 1911, directed by Adolfo Padovan and Francesco Bertolini, marked a high point in the early cinema’s turn toward canonical literature. It was the longest Italian film yet produced at 1,300 meters, boasted marvelous special effects, and was innovative in its distribution methods. Its success contributed in the transition from the onereel to the multireel film as the new international standard, a process that occurred between 1911 and 1914. Cabiria (1914), directed by Giovanni Pastrone (1883–1959) with the collaboration of D’Annunzio, capitalized on the success of earlier Italian historical spectacles. The legendary Sperduti nel buio (Lost in the Dark, 1914), directed by Nino Martoglio (1870–1921) and based on a successful verismo play by Roberto Bracco, gave further impetus to the impression that the Italian cinema had a literary foundation. Assunta Spina (1915), another verismo play written by Salvatore Di Giacomo and directed by Francesca Bertini (1888–1985) and Gustavo Serena (1882–1970), also reflected this tendency. In addition to his key role in ‘‘authorizing’’ Cabiria, another form of D’Annunzio’s influence on the cinema can be found in divismo, an Italian version of stardom. Diva films, one of the richest veins of Italian silent cinema, featured femmes fatales and new modern women in melodramas centered around high society. The successful Ma l’amor mio non muore (Love Everlasting, 1913), starring Lyda Borelli and directed by Mario Caserini (1874–1920), provided a prototype for 469

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS this genre. Through flamboyant characters, exotic locales, and opulent settings, diva films reflected the world of dangerous women and decadent aesthetes portrayed in D’Annunzio’s novels and short stories. D’Annunzio also wrote a number of scenarios, including the avant-garde L’uomo che rubo` la Gioconda (The Man Who Stole the Mona Lisa) and a scenario resembling a religious mystery drama, La crociata degli innocenti (The Crusade of the Innocents), which was made into a film in 1920. The poet Guido Gozzano also composed a lengthy scenario on the life of St. Francis of Assisi (for a film that was never produced). Giovanni Verga, while remaining highly conflicted in his relationship with the emerging cinema, participated in scenario writing as well. Literary narratives about early cinema frequently involved going to the movies or took the reader ‘‘behind the scenes’’ into the world of filmmaking. These fictional works constituted another important dimension in the cinema’s relationship with writers. Luigi Pirandello published a film novel in serial format, Si gira! (Shoot!) in 1915. He later republished this work under the title Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1925). Pirandello’s novel has long been considered one of the high points in the development of film discourse in the early decades. Other writers to publish fictional narratives about the world of filmmaking, or who register the influence of film on modes of perception during this period, included Edmondo De Amicis, Gualtiero Fabbri, Yarro (Giulio Piccini), Guido Gozzano, Ettore Veo, Annie Vivanti, Federico Tozzi, Enrico Roma, Bruno Corra, and Paolo Buzzi. The Futurists, together with avant-garde intellectuals such as Ricciotto Canudo and Anton Giulio Bragaglia, made significant contributions to Italian film culture, particularly in the areas of aesthetics and theory. Seeking to valorize film as an autonomous art form, F. T. Marinetti, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, and other Futurist writers published ‘‘La cinematografia futurista’’ (Manifesto of Futurist Cinema) in 1916. Celebrating film as a prototypical form of modern art, the Futurists sought to free cinema from its moorings in the theater, while emphasizing film’s potential to develop as a visual form of expression. A scenario written by Marinetti, Velocita` (Speed), illustrated the aesthetic principles articulated in the ‘‘Manifesto.’’ A self-proclaimed cine-letterato, an Italian coinage that combines the identity of the literary intellectual with that of the film enthusiast, Lucio 470

D’Ambra (1880–1939), the pen name of Renato Manganella, was an important journalist, novelist, dramatist, and literary and film critic who became one of the leading figures in the Italian film industry. From 1916 when he wrote his first ‘‘official’’ film script (he had worked anonymously in the cinema since 1911) until the crisis of the Italian film industry in the early 1920s, D’Ambra was a key figure in the cinema’s relationship with writers. Active as a director, scriptwriter, and producer, D’Ambra was involved in the production of some 24 films, most of which are now lost. Known for an offbeat sense of humor, whimsical flights of fancy, and modernist sets and decor, his films have been compared to those of Ernst Lubitsch ante litteram. Two of d’Ambra’s many films, Le mogli e le arance (Wives and Oranges, 1917), and L’illustre attrice Cicala Formica (The Illustrious Actress Cicala Formica, 1920), were restored in the 1990s. Following the absorption of his production company, Lucio D’Ambra Film, into the ill-fated Unione Cinematografica Italiana, a consortium of film producers that became bankrupt in 1922, he returned definitively to journalism and literature. His memoirs concerning the film industry in Rome during this pivotal period of grandeur and crisis, Sette anni di cinema (Seven Years of Cinema, 1937–1938), provide rich material for the study of Italian film history during its formative stages. The years following World War I brought on a decade-long decline in the Italian film industry. During the 1920s, therefore, given the predominance of American, French, and German films on Italian screens, the role of literary writers lay primarily in the realm of cultural reception. Among the notable contributions in this area, Umberto Saba published a poem ‘‘Un poeta ha incontrato Charlot’’ on Charlie Chaplin. Short stories by Ada Negri, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Giacomo Debenedetti describe fictional visits to movie theaters. The avant-garde author Alberto Savinio wrote perspicacious articles of film criticism. Beginning around 1926, literary journals such as Il Baretti, Solaria, and La fiera letteraria took up the ‘‘question of the cinema.’’ Under the rubric ‘‘letterati al cinema,’’ an intellectually serious film criticism began to emerge. From within the ranks of these ‘‘writers at the cinema,’’ Emilio Cecchi (1884–1966), who had visited Hollywood, made the transition from writing about cinema to producing films. He played a crucial role in the rebirth of the Italian film industry as head of the Cines Company in the early 1930s, opening the door to such writers as Mario Soldati, Luigi Pirandello,

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS Umberto Barbaro, and Corrado Alvaro. He served as a bridge between the literary community in Rome and the film industry, which was now centered in the Italian capital. The transition to sound in the early 1930s and the rebirth of the Italian film industry under Cecchi’s leadership at Cines intensified the relations between literary intellectuals and cinema. While during the silent period writers had been recruited to bring a patina of high culture to film production, literary intellectuals and theater personnel were now being asked to contribute in a more concrete fashion. As film production became more robust, writers were needed to create film subjects, to write dialogue, to create screenplays, and to participate in dubbing practices, while remaining practically nameless in the process. Reflecting the anonymity surrounding their work in the cinema, Emilio Cecchi characterized these literary writers associated with film as la Legione Straniera dell’intellettualita` italiana (the Foreign Legion of the Italian intelligentsia) (Margherita Ghilardi, editor, Cecchi al cinema, 1984). This phrase indicated that the cinema had yet to obtain the full acceptance of Italian high culture. At the same time, however, Cecchi’s characterization illustrated that artists and writers active in the film community may have chosen or at least accepted this marginality as a form of evasion from and perhaps even resistance to the official culture of Fascism. And in fact, toward the end of the decade and in the early 1940s, through journals such as Cinema and Bianco e nero and within institutions such as the national film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, a segment of Italian film culture began to develop a critical stance regarding Mussolini’s politics and cultural policies. Indeed, in 1939, the president of Cinema, Vittorio Mussolini, invited prominent Italian writers to submit a scenario for a national competition. The jury presided by Camerini, De Feo, Meccoli, Pasinetti, Riganti, Visentini, Leone, and Cecchi awarded the prize to Ugo Betti’s I tre del Pra’ di Sopra, which was never made into a film, but began Betti’s intense collaboration with the film industry and directors such as Gherardo Gherardi and Augusto Genina. Between 1930 and 1943, therefore, three interrelated phenomena could be detected with regard to cinema and literary writers: a quantitative increase in the presence of literary intellectuals in the film industry; a qualitative shift in the nature of their contribution; and a dramatic increase in popular writing about cinema as well as the establishment

of film criticism as an institution. This period also witnessed the emergence of Italian film historiography through the writings of Leo Longanesi, Francesco Soro, Eugenio Ferdinando Palmieri, Umberto Barbaro, Luigi Chiarini, and Francesco Pasinetti. Given this explosion of writing about film, the definitive recognition of film as an art form, and the significant presence of literary writers in the film industry, the title of Giacomo Debenedetti’ essay, La conversione degli intellettuali al cinema (The Conversion of Intellectuals to the Cinema, 1931), stands as a defining description of this ‘‘conversion’’ phase in the relationship between cinema and writers. Delio Tessa (1886–1939) was a particularly significant case in point. A Milanese lawyer and journalist and one of the major Italian poets of the last century, Tessa wrote over 100 articles of film criticism, two screenplays, and numerous poems registering the influence of cinema. A number of literary figures who began their careers in the cinema as scriptwriters and critics during the 1930s and 1940s continued to be active in film through the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), for example, debuted as a popular writer with the highly successful Parliamo tanto di me (Let’s Talk a Lot About Me, 1931) and became in turn a film critic, screenwriter, novelist, dramatist, dialect poet, and film director. His accounts of Hollywood stars, Cronache da Hollywood (Hollywood Chronicles), which appeared in Italian movie fan magazines such as Cinema illustrazione in the early 1930s, were written without ever leaving Italian soil. His contributions to neoRealism in the 1940s and 1950s as a screenwriter, theorist, and advocate were second to none. In a similar fashion, Mario Soldati (1906–1999) transitioned from journalist, to screenwriter, to critic, to novelist, to film director. His literary narrative, 24 ore in uno studio cinematografico (24 Hours in a Film Studio, 1935), published under the pseudonym Franco Pallavera, added to the list of Italian film novels, as did his Le due citta` (The Malacca Cane, 1964). In addition to his ‘‘calligraphic’’ films of the late Fascist period such as Piccolo mondo antico (Little World of the Past, 1941) and Malombra (1942), adapted from Antonio Fogazzaro’s novels, Soldati directed some 26 films, including La donna del fiume (The Woman of the River, 1955) starring Sophia Loren. Emilio Cecchi’s daughter, Suso Cecchi d’Amico (1914–), who grew up in a household frequented by writers and film artists and who began her career as a journalist and translator after World War II, 471

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS would become one of cinema’s leading screenwriters, working with directors such as Luchino Visconti and Francesco Rosi. ‘‘Il dato concreto del rapporto tra cinema e letteratura e` la sceneggiatura’’ (The concrete datum in the relationship between cinema and literature is the screenplay), Pier Paolo Pasolini declared (Empirismo eretico, 1972). In his essay La sceneggiatura come struttura che vuole essere altra struttura (The Screenplay as a Structure That Wants to Become Another Structure), Pasolini reflects on the necessity of developing new critical codes for analyzing the screenplay. In addition to its value as a theoretical statement, Pasolini’s essay, and more importantly Pasolini’s career itself, shed light on the relationship of cinema and literary writers during the extraordinary flowering of Italian film culture in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Pasolini began his career in the film industry by collaborating on screenplays with such directors and scriptwriters as Federico Fellini, Mario Soldati, and Giorgio Bassani. His first films as a director, Accattone (1960) and Mamma Roma (1962), share linguistic and thematic affinities with his Roman novels of the period, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959). Pasolini’s encounter with the cinema found expression in his novels, poetry, and prose narratives, while his work as a filmmaker, as a film critic, and as a film theorist was profoundly marked by his vocation as a poet. Moreover, while Pasolini’s poetry in the 1960s began to register the effects of his turn to directing, his films provided him with a new outlet in which to experiment with the cinematic adaptation and rewriting of classical literary texts: from the Bible and Greek tragedies to the Il Decamerone (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), and Le storie delle mille e una notte (The Arabian Nights, 1973). The effects of cinema on literature, the impact of the mass media on society, and film’s influence on modes of human perception were dealt with by a number of writers during this period. Andrea Zanzotto’s long poem in Veneto dialect, Filo`: per il Casanova di Fellini (Peasants Wake for Fellini’s ‘‘Casanova,’’ 1976), for example, which grew out of his collaboration with Fellini on his film with Donald Sutherland, Casanova (1976), stages a dialogue between poetry and film, between the spoken idiom of a small agricultural community and the powerful visual language of an increasingly global medium. In a similar fashion, Italo Calvino’s novel Palomar (Mr. Palomar, 1983) was an exemplary 472

literary text that explored the effects of visual media. Calvino’s essay L’autobiografia d’uno spettatore (The Autobiography of a Spectator, 1974) published as a preface to a volume of Fellini’s screenplays, described the role of the cinema in the lives of Italians growing up under Fascism. The literary generation following that of Pasolini, Zanzotto, and Calvino continued to express an interest in cinema through references to film in novels, criticism, short stories, and poetry. These writers and poets included Gianni Celati, Andrea De Carlo, Valerio Magrelli, and Gianni d’Elia, among many others. From neo-Realism and the popular cinema of the 1950s, to the great season of famous directors and comedy hits of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the careers of a number of notable Italian writers, poets, and dramatists intersected with the cinema. Alberto Moravia (1907–1990), for example, developed a relationship with film that found creative expression in a variety of ways. Novels such as Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951) and La ciociara (Two Women, 1957) were adapted into important films by Bernardo Bertolucci and Vittorio De Sica, respectively. His brief stint as a screenwriter provided the background for his novel, Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon, 1955), whose storyline revolved around tensions between a director and scriptwriter in their ill-fated attempt to collaborate on a film based on Homer’s Odyssey. This novel was also adapted into a film by Jean Luc Godard, Le me´pris (Contempt, 1964). Moravia’s most notable contribution to film culture, however, remained in the realm of criticism. Having begun to write about the cinema in 1945 for the short-lived Roman weekly, La nuova Europa, he went on to write weekly film reviews for such magazines as L’europeo (1950–1954) and then for L’espresso from its founding in 1955 until his death in 1990. A collection of some 148 of his reviews—he penned around 1,800—are gathered in a volume, Al cinema (At the Cinema, 1975). Ennio Flaiano (1910–1972) was an equally distinguished contributor to Italian film culture. As a literary writer, he is perhaps best known for his novel, Tempo di uccidere (The Short Cut, 1947), considered one of the most acute descriptions of the Italian experience of Fascism. As a writer for the cinema, Flaiano was a major force in the years between 1950 and 1965, credited with the creation of some 80 film subjects, scenarios, and screenplays. Attracted to modern spectacle in its many forms, he was also a prolific film and theater critic who authored plays and theatrical sketches.

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS A volume of his selected writings on film, Lettere d’amore al cinema (Love Letters to the Cinema, 1978), reveals his talent as a satirist. For Flaiano a reflection on a particular film offered an occasion for criticizing commonly held attitudes and social customs. Another literary writer with a distinguished career in the cinema, Tonino Guerra (1920–), discovered his vocation as a poet during World War II. Deported to a concentration camp in Germany, he composed poetry in his native Romagnol dialect for the diversion of his fellow prisoners. These poems form the backbone of his first volume of poetry, I scarabo´cc (The Scribbles, 1946). In 1952, Guerra made his debut as a writer of tales and short stories with La storia di Fortunato (Fortunato’s Story). In 1953, he began his career in the cinema working as a screenwriter. In the ensuing decades, his film treatments and screenplays would bring him into collaboration with some of Italy’s most prestigious directors, including Giuseppe De Santis, Elio Petri, Francesco Damiani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Francesco Rosi, and the Taviani brothers. Guerra’s collaboration with Antonioni on the film Zabriskie Point led to a trip to the United States in 1969 and an ensuing nervous breakdown. Guerra described these experiences in his prose fiction work, L’uomo parallelo (Parallel Man, 1969), which dealt with alienation, anxiety, and the loss of personal identity in contemporary culture. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Guerra collaborated with the writer Luigi Malerba to coauthor a series of popular stories centered around Millemosche, a hapless medieval knight. Published collectively as Storie dell’anno Mille (Stories from the Year One Thousand, 1977) these ‘‘comic-surreal fables’’ became the basis of a television series and a film. A novelist, poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist, and filmmaker, as well as a leading voice of Italian feminism, Dacia Maraini (1936–) began her career with the novel, La vacanza (The Holiday, 1962). Over the ensuing decades, she published numerous narrative and theatrical works focusing on the social conditions facing women, among them a book of short stories, Mio marito (My Husband, 1968); a film, Mio padre amore mio (My Father My Love, 1978); as well as three novels that have been made into films. Memorie di una ladra (Memories of a Female Thief, 1972) inspired a film, Teresa la ladra (Theresa the Thief, 1973), starring Monica Vitti. In Storia di Piera (Piera’s Story, 1980) the actress Piera Degli Esposti recounts her life to Dacia Maraini in an interview. This

experimental literary work is the basis of an eponymous film (1983) starring Hannah Schygulla and Marcello Mastroianni. Maraini’s acclaimed historical novel La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (The Silent Duchess, 1990) was brought to the screen in 1997 by Roberto Faenza. In the 1990s and in the early years of the third millennium, Italian cinema continued its longstanding fertile relationship with literary writers. Faenza collaborated with the novelist Antonio Tabucchi (1943–) on an adaptation of the writer’s award-winning historical novel, Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Maintains, 1994) set in Portugal in 1938. Tabucchi himself contributed to the screenplay and assisted in shaping the film’s dialogues. Moreover, Tabucchi, like other writers of his and the following generation, including Vincenzo Cerami (1940–), Susanna Tamaro (1957–), Alessandro Baricco (1958–), and Niccolo` Ammaniti (1966–), exemplify the current situation of the ‘‘new Italian cinema,’’ in which literary and cinematic storytelling have become closely interrelated. Cerami, for example, at the young age of 20, began working in the cinema as an assistant to Pasolini, who had been his teacher in a junior high school at Ciampino in the early 1950s. Pasolini’s vital experimentalism in various media inspired in Cerami a similar desire to tell stories through diverse means of expression. A prolific screenwriter, Cerami has collaborated with such directors as Sergio Citti, Gianni Amelio, Marco Bellocchio, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Ettore Scola, and Roberto Benigni. His most notable literary works include his first novel, Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Tiny Bourgeois, 1976) made into a film by Mario Monicelli in 1977; Fantasmi (Ghosts, 2001), and Consigli a un giovane scrittore (Advice to a Young Writer, 2002). Susanna Tamaro, a graduate of Rome’s film school, the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, earned a degree in film directing before publishing in 1994 her internationally acclaimed bestseller, Va dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart), made into a film by Cristina Comencini in 1996. Alessandro Baricco worked as a music critic, an advertising copywriter, and a journalist before publishing his first novel, Castelli di rabbia (Castles of Rage, 1991). His third novel, Novecento: un monologo (The Twentieth Century: A Monologue, 1994) was adapted into a film, La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900, 1998) by Giuseppe Tornatore. In 1999, Baricco’s prose work, City, became the first Italian novel to be published exclusively online. Niccolo` Ammaniti debuted as a writer in 1994 with the novel Branchie. His short 473

CINEMA AND LITERARY WRITERS stories in the genre of horror fiction were featured in the best-selling anthologies, Gioventu` cannibale (Cannibal Youth, 1996) and Tutti i denti del mostro sono perfetti (All of the Monster’s Teeth Are Perfect, 1997). His novel, Io non ho paura (I Am Not Afraid, 2001) was made into a widely acclaimed film in the thriller genre by Gabriele Salvatores in 2003. JOHN P. WELLE See also: Screenwriters Further Reading Bernardini, Aldo, Cinema muto italiano, 3 vols., Bari, Laterza, 1980. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Gli intellettuali italiani e il cinema, Milan, Mondadori, 2004. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Intellettuali, cinema e propaganda tra le due guerre, Bologna, Patron, 1972. Ca`llari, Francesco, Pirandello e il cinema, Venice, Marsilio, 1991. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘L’Autobiografia di uno spettatore,’’ in Federico Fellini, Quattro film, Turin, Einaudi, 1974. Canosa, Michele (editor), A nuova luce: Cinema muto italiano. I / Italian Silent Cinema, I, Bologna, CLUEB, 2000. Cerami, Vincenzo, Consigli a un giovane scrittore, Turin, Einaudi, 1995. Colombo, Fausto, La cultura sottile: Media e industria culturale in Italia dall’ottocento agli anni novanta, Milan, Bompiani, 1998. Costa, Antonio, Immagine di un’immagine: Cinema e letteratura, Turin, UTET, 1993. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Al cinema, edited by Lino Micciche`, Venice, Marsilio, 1983. Falaschi, Francesco (editor), Scrittori e cinema tra gli anni ’50 e ’60, Florence: Giunti Gruppo Editoriale, 1997. Flaiano, Ennio, Lettere d’amore al cinema, edited by Cristina Bragaglia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Gambacorti, Irene, Storie di cinema e letteratura, Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2003.

Genovese, Nino, and Sebastiano Gesu` (editors), Verga e il cinema, Catania: Maimone, 1996. Ghilardi, Margherita (editor), Cecchi al cinema: Immagini e documenti 1930–1963, Florence: Gabinetto Vieusseux, 1984. Marcus, Millicent, Filmmaking by the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Meneghelli, Andrea, ‘‘Il cinema italiano e le nuove leve letterarie,’’ Annali d’Italianstica, 17(1999), edited by Gaetana Marrone. Moravia, Alberto, Al cinema: Centoquarantotto film d’autore, Milan, Bompiani, 1975. Papini, Giovanni, ‘‘La filosofia del cinematografo,’’ La stampa , 18 May 1907, 1–2. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Empirismo eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 1972. Pellizzari, Lorenzo, L’avventura di uno spettatore: Italo Calvino e il cinema, Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990. Tinazzi, Giorgio, and Marina Zancan (editors), Cinema e letteratura del neorealismo, Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Verdone, Mario, Cinema e letteratura del futurismo, Rovereto: Manfredi, 1990. Welle, John P., ‘‘The Cinema of History: Film in Italian Poetry of the 1960s and 1970s,’’ in From Eugenio Montale to Amelia Rosselli: Italian Poetry in the Sixties and Seventies, edited by John Butcher and Mario Moroni, Leicester, U.K.: Troubador Publishing, 2004. Welle, John P. (editor), ‘‘Film and Literature,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 6(1988). Welle, John P., ‘‘Film on Paper: Early Italian Cinema Literature, 1907–1920,’’ Film History: An International Journal, 12(2000): 288–299. West, Rebecca (editor), Pagina pellicola pratica, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Zanzotto, Andrea, Peasants Wake for Fellini’s Casanova and Other Poems, edited and translated by John P. Welle and Ruth Feldman, Champaign and London: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, and Enzo Zappulla, Martoglio cineasta, Rome: Editalia, 1995. Zavattini, Cesare, Cronache da Hollywood, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996.

CINO DA PISTOIA (CA. 1270–CA. 1336/1337) In many respects, Cino was the major poetic link between the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian lyric traditions, for he was an acquaintance not only of Dante and the poets of the dolce stil 474

novo, but also of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Because of his extreme poetic versatility and longevity, Cino mediated among various ‘‘schools’’ and individual poets, composed lyrics in a number of modes and

CINO DA PISTOIA styles, and ultimately benefited from and contributed directly to the several major literary currents of his age. Cino’s literary consciousness developed during his period of study in Bologna: He became aware of poets such as Guido Guinizzelli, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Onesto degli Onesti and more than likely met Dante, who was present in Bologna in 1287, although the first textual evidence of their friendship dates from 1290, the date of Beatrice’s death, for which Cino composed the consolatory canzone ‘‘Avegna ched el m’aggia piu` per tempo’’ (Although more than once). As evidence of his long and productive friendship with Dante, we have the testimony of several tenzoni on amorous topics, the citation in De vulgari eloquentia of no fewer than three of Cino’s canzoni for their excellence—‘‘Degno son io ch’io mora’’ (I am worthy to die), ‘‘I’ no spero che mai per mia salute’’ (‘‘I hope that never for my salvation’’), and ‘‘Avegna ched el m’aggia piu` per tempo’’—and the letter (Epistola III) addressed to the ‘‘exulanti Pistoriensi’’ (Pistoians in exile). Cino and Dante were also joined in their enthusiastic support of Henry VII of Luxemburg, who was elected Holy Roman Emperor on 27 November 1308, as the one leader capable of bringing peace to the warring factions of Italy. Unfortunately Henry’s death in 1313 dealt a severe blow to this hope. In his solemn canzone marking Henry’s death, ‘‘Da poi che la natura ha fine posto’’ (Since nature has brought to an end) Cino conveys the desolate state that many felt in Italy at the time, and in another moving canzone, ‘‘Su per la costa, Amor, de l’alto monte’’ (Up the slope of the tall mountain, Love), he commemorates the death of Dante. Cino’s poetic corpus is the largest of the dolce stil novo (Marti’s edition includes 20 canzoni, 11 ballate, and 134 sonnets, including fragments; another 21 poems are of dubious authenticity) and reflects virtually all of their major themes, images, and ideas. Cino’s poetry contains an exceptionally high degree of emotional fervor, as well as an unusual sense of spatial orientation. Both of these characteristics give his poems their distinctive nature. Cino fashioned his lyrics in such a way as to reflect the psychological contours and recesses of the persona of the poet-lover who is, at once, the same as and different from himself, presenting the broad range of a person’s affective life in an objective and conventionalized manner, yet ostensibly being the subjective account of these experiences. The tension produced in the individual poems provides the dynamic force for the corpus as a whole.

In addition to his lyrics on amorous topics, Cino’s canzoniere is especially rich in tenzoni (some 22 in all) and in poems inspired by local partisan strife and political exile. The object of Cino’s affection is known as ‘‘Selvaggia,’’ and she has been identified as the wife of Giovanni de’Cancellieri (nicknamed ‘‘Focaccia’’), whom she had married in 1289. While Selvaggia’s identity, either as an historical figure or as a literary fiction, remains an open question, this is relatively unimportant for a critical appraisal of Cino’s lyrics, many of which were written to praise a woman (whom he addresses with this particular senhal or poetic code-name), to complain of her harshness and lack of mercy, to describe the ambivalent nature of the amorous relationship, and to mourn her death. If Selvaggia was a member of the Vergiolesi family, then she belonged to the White faction, was exiled in 1306, and died sometime between 1307 and 1309. The historical data, however, are less important than the literary persona described in Cino’s lyrics, through which Selvaggia has a place in the literary tradition alongside the other two famous ladies of Dante (Beatrice) and Petrarch (Laura). After Selvaggia’s death, Cino was attracted to a number of other women, for and about whom he wrote lyrics. Dante, for one, takes him to task for his inconstancy in matters of love in the sonnet ‘‘Io mi credea del tutto esser partito’’ (I thought that I had utterly departed), and other poets shared this view as well. The greatest contemporary Italian poets recognized Cino’s brilliance: Dante praised him in De vulgari eloquentia as the most excellent Italian love poet (2.2.9), Boccaccio honored him by incorporating almost all of his canzone, ‘‘La dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave’’ (‘‘The sweet sight and the lovely soft look’’) in the Filostrato (5:62–5:65), and Petrarch lamented his death in the sonnet, ‘‘Piangete, donne, et con voi pianga Amore’’ (‘‘Weep, ladies, and let Love weep with you’’). Just as Dante defined Cino as the most excellent Italian poet of love, so Petrarch in this commemorative sonnet centers on precisely these qualities—Cino is called amoroso (v. 10: ‘‘’l nostro amoroso messer Cino’’) and dolce (v. 13: ‘‘sı´ dolce vicino’’), he is the one who knew how to bestow honor on women and lovers in general in his verses: ‘‘colui che tutto intese / in farvi ... honore’’ (vv. 3-4: the one who was wholly intent on honoring you). In the second quatrain, Petrarch reveals his very strong sense of personal loss, and this may suggest the extent of his literary indebtedness. He also refers to Cino’s participation in Pistoian politics, for which the 475

CINO DA PISTOIA ‘‘cittadin perversi’’ (v. 12) exiled him—their loss and, we are given to understand, heaven’s gain: ‘‘Pianga Pistoia, e i cittadin perversi / che perduto a`nno sı´ dolce vicino; / et rallegresi il cielo, ov’ello e` gito’’ (vv. 12–14: May Pistoia together with her perverse citizens weep, who have lost such a sweet companion, and may heaven rejoice, where he has gone). Cino’s lyrics present most of the various themes and motifs of the earlier schools of poets, from the troubadours to the Scuola Siciliana and the ‘‘guittoniani’’ to the dolce stil novo. These include the image of the beloved ‘‘painted’’ within the lover’s heart or mind, the constant combination of love and fear, the use of personified figures (Amore, Pieta`, Merce´), the reference to those idle gossipers who seek to destroy love—the losengeors or ‘‘malparlieri,’’ the play on phonically similar terms (e.g., amore-amaro and amore-morte), and the incorporation of the senhal to hide the identity of the lady (Selvaggia). In terms of poetic language, we see evidence of Occitan (dolzore, coraggio, leanza, dottanza), Old French (cera, beltate, doneare, aitare), and Sicilian (finare for finire), as well as certain metrical characteristics, such as the so-called rima siciliana (vui / fui, grido / credo, allora / criatura). Of course, the greatest influence on Cino’s poetry came from his fellow stilnovisti, and we may see how he assimilated their themes in sonnets such as ‘‘Una gentil piacevol giovanella’’ (A noble and pleasing young woman) and ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’ (I am completely saved by the sweet greeting) where he praises his lady’s angelic qualities and speaks of her marvelous effect on those whom she meets and greets (the ‘‘saluto salutifero,’’ the greeting that confers a state of blessedness). Similarities between these poems and those by Guinizzelli (‘‘Io vogl’ del ver la mia donna laudare’’: I truly wish to praise my lady), Cavalcanti (‘‘Chi e` questa che ve`n ch’ogn’om la mira’’), and Dante (‘‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’’) abound, although in Cino’s poetry, in general, we do not sense the mental and physical anguish present in Cavalcanti or the idea of spiritual salvation contained in Dante. While Cino’s lady is certainly beautiful and ‘‘angelic,’’ she is not a transcendental being, remaining quintessentially earthbound both in her being and in her effects. A defining characteristic of Cino’s lyrics is their phonic quality; for example, he was able to convey the sorrow induced by love through use of mournful notes, as in the two sonnets—‘‘Omo smarruto che pensoso vai’’ and ‘‘Signori, i’ son colui che vidi 476

Amore’’—that represent aurally the lover’s lament through repeated use of the vowel o, especially in rhyme position (for example, ‘‘Signori, i’ son colui che vidi Amore / che mi ferı` sı` ch’io non campero`e / e sol pero` cosı` pensoso voe....’’; My lords, I am the one who saw Love, who wounded me such that I cannot survive, and for this alone I go about so mournfully). This same pathetic quality is also present in the canzone on the death of his lady Selvaggia, ‘‘Oime`, lasso, quelle trezze bionde’’ (Alas, those blonde tresses), and may have influenced Petrarch in the composition of his sonnet, ‘‘Oime` il bel viso, oime` il soave sguardo’’ (Canzoniere 267, Alas the lovely face, alas the soft look). Political themes are also present in Cino’s poetry. His distaste for the city of Naples and her citizens occasioned his bitingly satiric canzone, ‘‘Deh, quando rivedro` il dolce paese’’ (Ah, when will I see the sweet country), in which he complained about the vile, untutored citizenry; the envy of his legal colleagues; and the generally disreputable nature of the city. The political vicissitudes of Pistoia played an important role in Cino’s lyrics, as, for example, in the sonnet ‘‘Deh, non mi domandar perche´ sospiri’’ (Ah, do not ask me why I sigh) that may refer to the poet’s return from exile in 1306 and his discovery that his lady (Selvaggia) and her family have left the city, an absence that caused him ‘‘pene e martiri’’ (v. 8: torment and pain). What is new in this poem is the idea that the poet’s weeping eyes may be at least partially consoled by the sight of the now empty dwelling where they had fallen in love: ‘‘li usci e’ muri / de la contrata u’ sono ’nnamorati’’ (vv. 13–14: the doors and the walls of the place where they fell in love). It is precisely this keen sense of spatial orientation that is without precedent in thirteenth-century poetry. Memories were occasioned by sight, by the observation of a particular physical place, and this anticipated the ‘‘memorializing’’ tendency to which Petrarch subscribed in many of his lyrics, for example in ‘‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro (It was the day the sun’s discolored) and ‘‘Chiare, fresche et dolci acque’’ (Clear, fresh and sweet waters). In addition to his synthesis of various elements of the earlier poetic traditions, Cino’s most important contributions were his extensive use of the phonic/musical qualities of poetry, his recognition of the commemorative power of the sonnet (and of the lyric in general), and his objective psychological realism, which manifested itself in the intensely personal, almost confessional tone of his poems.

CINO DA PISTOIA Cino da Pistoia is the major link between the dolce stil novo and Petrarch.

Biography Cino (or Guittoncino) was born ca. 1270 in Pistoia, a prosperous city some 20 miles northwest of Florence. His father, Francesco dei Sinibuldi (or Sighibuldi, or Sigisbuldi), was a notary and a member of one of the older and powerful families (and adherents to the Black faction). His mother, Diamante, was the daughter of the well-known physician Bonaventura di Tonello. Cino’s first introduction to the law probably began in Pistoia under the tutelage of Dino dei Rossoni of Mugello (1279–1284), after which he continued his legal studies in Bologna, where he remained in all probability from 1284 to 1292, attending the lectures of Francesco d’Accursio and Lambertino Ramponi. In 1292–1294, Cino’s work as a jurist may have taken him to France (Orleans and Paris), for in his major juridical work, the Lectura in codicem, he made specific references to the legal writings of Pierre de Belleperche and Jacob da Revigni, both teachers in Orle´ans. Cino referred to Belleperche as doctor meus (my teacher), the same phrase he used for Dino dei Rossoni. Having returned to Italy, Cino lectured at the Studium in Bologna (1297–1301/2). In 1302, he was in Pistoia, where he married Margherita di Lanfranco degli Ughi, whose family belonged to the White faction. We may imagine that, since Cino’s family belonged to the Black party, the marriage was probably contracted in an attempt to establish peace between the two factions, at least at the level of individual families. The marriage produced five children: one son—Mino—and four daughters— Diamante, Giovanna, Lombarduccia, and Beatrice. In the early years of the fourteenth century Pistoia was beset by civil strife, and in 1303 Cino was exiled. Shortly after his return from exile, on 11 April 1306, he was elected as a judge to preside over civil suits (assessore di cause civili), and some of his legal decisions found their way into his legal writings. Cino was deeply involved with the political aspirations of Henry VII in Italy. As part of the preparations for his coronation, Henry sent Ludwig of Savoy as his personal ambassador (June 1310) to Rome, and Ludwig in turn invited Cino to accompany him first to Florence (in what was a futile attempt to secure Florentine support for Henry) and then to Rome, where Cino served as advisor to the Imperial tribunal. However, this great plan was never completed, for on 24 August 1313,

Henry VII died, probably of malaria, at Buonconvento, near Siena, and with his death all hopes (Cino’s and Dante’s in particular) for peace and political unity under the Imperial aegis dissipated. After Henry’s death Cino withdrew from active involvement in partisan politics but not from his dedication to Ghibelline ideals, as may be observed in his legal writings. Cino’s most famous work, the Lectura in codicem (an extensive commentary on the first nine books of the Justinian code of laws), was finally completed on 11 June 1314. Cino was awarded the doctoral degree in legal studies in Bologna on 9 December 1314. As both lawyer and teacher, Cino practiced in several cities (Florence, Macerata, Siena, Bologna, and Perugia), and it was during these peregrinations that he may have met Petrarch, who was a student in the Studium at Bologna in 1324. Because of Cino’s great reputation, gained through his legal writings and lectures, many Italian cities sought his services to enhance the luster of their respective Studia. On 15 August 1330, Robert of Anjou invited him to teach civil law at the University of Naples, where he remained for only one year. If Cino’s brief residence in Naples and his political inclinations displeased King Robert, we should note that the king did value the Lectura in codicem, for he acquired a personal copy in 1332. Cino spent the last four years of his life in Florence, Perugia, and Pistoia. He was elected ‘‘gonfaloniere’’ in Pistoia for August and September of 1334, a post that he resigned perhaps because of failing health. Nevertheless, on 31 March 1336, the citizens elected him to a six-month term on the Consiglio del Popolo (Council of the People). On 23 December 1336, Cino made his will and died shortly thereafter in Pistoia, either in late December, 1336, or early January, 1337. See also: Dolce stil novo

CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ

Selected Works Collections Le rime di Cino da Pistoia, edited by Guido Zaccagnini, Gene`ve: Olschki, 1925. Rimatori del Dolce Stil Novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. La poesia lirica del Duecento, edited by Carlo Salinari, Turin: UTET, 1951. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969.

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CINO DA PISTOIA Selected Translations German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited and translated by Frederick Goldin, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets (1861), edited by Sally Purcell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Further Reading Chiappelli, Luigi, Nuove ricerche su Cino da Pistoia, Pistoia: Officina Tipografica Cooperativa, 1911. Chiappelli, Luigi, Vita e opere giuridiche di Cino da Pistoia con molti documenti inediti, Pistoia: Tip. Cino dei Fratelli Bracali, 1881. Colloquio Cino da Pistoia (Roma, 25 October 1975), Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1976. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Il linguaggio poetico di Cino da Pistoia,’’ Cultura neolatina, 12(1952): 185–223. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino e le ’imitazioni’ dalle rime di Dante,’’ Studi danteschi, 29(1950): 103–177.

De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia’’ in I Minori, Milan: Marzorati, 1961. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia e la crisi del linguaggio poetico,’’ Convivium, 1(1952): 1–35. De Robertis, Domenico, ‘‘Cino e i poeti bolognesi,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 128(1951): 273– 312. Hollander, Robert, ‘‘Dante and Cino da Pistoia,’’ Dante Studies, 110 (1992): 201–231. Kleinhenz, Christopher, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia and the Italian Lyric Tradition,’’ in L’imaginaire courtois et son double, edited by Giovanna Angeli and Luciano Formisano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1992. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Monti, Gennaro Maria, Cino da Pistoia giurista, Citta` di Castello: ‘‘Il Solco,’’ 1924. Ragni, Eugenio, ‘‘Cino da Pistoia,’’ in Dizionario Critico della Letteratura Italiana, 2nd ed., dir. Vittore Branca, Turin: UTET, 1986. Treves, E., ‘‘La satira di Cino da Pistoia contro Napoli,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 58(1911): 122–139. Zaccagnini, Guido, Cino da Pistoia: Studio biografico, Pistoia: Pagnini, 1918.

CITY OF THE SUN See La Citta` del sole (Work by Tommaso Campanella)

CLASSICISM The term ‘‘classicism’’ comes from the Latin classicus, which in ancient Rome indicated those citizens belonging to the highest social class, hence implying a difference based on social, moral, and cultural superiority. In literature, the term ‘‘classic’’ was used for the first time in the first century AD by Quintillian, and later by the erudite Aulus Gellius, to indicate an excellent and exemplary author. Thus, classicus would denote an author of ‘‘first class,’’ or ‘‘excellent quality.’’ Subsequently, the adjective was adopted to identify the authors of the 478

Augustan era who were to be taken as literary models for their noble contents and formal perfection. In the broadest sense, the word ‘‘classic’’ refers to the ancient Greek and Latin cultures, whereas ‘‘classicism’’ refers to the numerous cultural movements repeatedly occurring in the history of Italian literature, which looked at the ancient world for models and canons of expression. This would take place any time an ancient work was considered ‘‘classic,’’ hence worthy of being imitated for its superior contents and its stylistic and linguistic excellence.

CLASSICISM A first form of classicism may already be found in the Middle Ages, when the fracture following the advent of Christianity generated a form of nostalgia for the ancient world and produced, in authors such as Fulgentius and Boetius in the fifth and sixth centuries, a first timid attempt for reinstating the ancient culture. As a matter of fact, even before this reemergence of classicism, ethical principles and rhetorical figures of the ancient world had been readopted by Saint Augustine (354–430). However, the presence in medieval culture of classical philosophers such as Aristotle and the use of examples from ancient poetry ought to be ascribed to two separate sources. Whereas in matter of philosophy the classical age was considered imperfect and limited, needing therefore to be included in Christianity and reread in the light of Christian teaching, classical poetry, on the contrary, was constantly considered as a sort of absolute model, thus explaining the great and perpetual fortune of poets such as Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, and Statius, whose works and examples were imitated throughout history. Occasionally, however, even these forms of literary classicism were condemned as an allusion to pagan culture, hence opposed to Christianity and therefore deserving to be banned. Indeed, an overtly anticlassical movement occurred in early Christian time, both in the Patristic tradition, which condemned the pagan world as an enemy of Christianity, and in Tertullian (160–ca. 220/230), an impetuous and intolerant author, who not only repeatedly attacked the ancient world, but in his De spectaculis (About Performances, ca. 197–202) even forbade Christians from participating in pagan spectacles, regarded as a source of corruption. Medieval classicism reached its greatest splendor in the eighth and ninth centuries with the Carolingian revival and later in the twelfth century with Scholasticism, which found the highest achievements of philosophical speculation in the classical world. It should not be forgotten that forms of classicism were present also in vernacular literature, for instance in the various chansons de gestes, which celebrated the glorious deeds of Aeneas, the events of the war of Troy, and the heroic actions of Alexander the Great. Finally, Dante achieved the climax of classicism by choosing Virgil as his guide through Hell and Purgatory, by assuring salvation to figures of the classic world such as Statius and Trajan, and by placing numerous Greek and Latin heroes in Limbo. From medieval classicism derived Humanism, especially in Italy. In this historical period the classical world was acclaimed as an

instantiation of perfection and a crucial model to ensure any work its dignity and place in the world of literature. Differently from medieval classicism, quattrocento and cinquecento classicism not only bestowed an increasing admiration toward the ancients but also established the definitive detachment of modern humankind from the classic world. From now on, imitation involved images as well as ideas, thus profoundly influencing both the figurative arts and architecture. In Humanism, ancient works were not only philologically recuperated but also investigated and studied to unveil rules and patterns that would then be applied in modern literature. In the broadest sense, Humanist intellectuals sought in the ancient works directions to outline norms of conduct, ideologies, political techniques, as for instance Niccolo` Machiavelli did in his works on military strategies. After Humanism, with its primary interest in rediscovering and studying classical texts, Renaissance intellectuals began to formulate classicist poetics, modeled first and foremost on Aristotle. In Renaissance classicism, theater played a crucial role. On the example of ancient dramatic texts and theoretic works such as Aristotle’s Poetics and Vitruvius’s De Architectura, the academicians of the early cinquecento—in particular the members of the Roman Academy of Giulio Pomponio Leto (1428–1497)—elaborated a scenic praxis and a theatrical space that simultaneously resuscitated ancient theater and opened the road to the birth of modern theater. The ‘‘commedia regolare’’ (regular comedy), written to revere the ancient models, represented the starting point of a profound renovation in drama. It not only paid respect to classical works but also reflected modes and ideals of Renaissance humanity. Court feasts were particularly important. Organized to celebrate crucial events of the city life, these feasts revolved around a theme designed to establish a precise connection between the current celebration and classic mythology. In the organization of these events, artists were inspired by the spectacular shows of Roman time, as for examples the Roman parades that were reenacted in the Renaissance ‘‘trionfi’’ (triumphs), featuring magnificent corteges of classical characters and allegorical figures. The classical influence was also tangible in newly adopted theatrical settings. Inspired by Vitruvius’s teachings, specific settings for tragedy, comedy, and satire started being employed and codified. Vitruvius also conveyed the concept of the ‘‘ideal city,’’ that is, the perfect organization of the urban environment. Renaissance artists aspired to re-create the ‘‘ideal 479

CLASSICISM city’’ in theatrical settings, using perspective painting, which was one of the great discoveries of the time. The Trattato di architettura (Treatise on Architecture, 1537–1575) by Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554), in seven books, is the first Renaissance treatise on architecture in which an entire section is dedicated to theater and stage design. In the literary scene, the courtly literature of the cinquecento created a series of well-defined genres aiming not only at satisfying the taste of the courts but also at proposing the genres of Latin literature in the vernacular. The study of the ancient cultures raised in classicist scholars the urge for traveling to Rome, Florence, and Venice, considered privileged locations for gaining knowledge of the new classicist sensitivity. It became a sort of initiatory visit, indispensable for anyone who wanted to devolve his or her time to classical studies. The word ‘‘classicism’’ was employed also in architecture and in the figurative arts both to indicate the imitation of the ancient works’ formal perfection and to define universally accepted paradigms. The points of reference were, above all, Greek architects and sculptors from the fifth and fourth centuries BC, such as Phidias and Polycletus. From their teachings and from Vitruvius’ De Architectura, exceptional Humanist and Renaissance artists such as Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Donatello (1386–1466), Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1436), Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506), Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), Vincenzo Scamozzi (1548–1616), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), and many more found inspiration. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the period generally classified as Mannerism, classicist canons became more rigid, in opposition with the moralistic tension following the CounterReformation. Thus, literary genres were subjected to extremely severe regulations that limited the author’s imagination and creative freedom. At the end of the cinquecento, for historic and artistic reasons, a new sensitivity, the Baroque, spread, carrying with it an anticlassicist perspective. By this time, the disappearance of courts and artistic patrons, the closures of academies, and the occurrence of deep changes in society resulted in an artistic position that diverged overtly from the previous aesthetics. The quest for novelty, characteristic of the Baroque, brought a refusal of classicist rules and their limitations and fostered an exploration of all the expressive possibilities of literature. A new interest for the ancient world rose in the Arcadia era, in the first decades of the eighteenth 480

century. Born as a reaction to baroque conceptualism, the Academy of Arcadia founded its poetical ideals on Cartesian rationalism, generating an elegant and formally simplified literature, close to the aristocratic classicism of the cinquecento. The resolute refusal of previous poetics also brought numerous literary reforms, first of all the reform of opera by Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750) and Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782). Determined to return artistic dignity to the libretto, the two authors profoundly reconfigured the genre by simplifying the language, unraveling the plots, and, above all, using mythological contents. Between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a movement called neoclassicism emerged in many European countries and in different forms of art. In literature, it originated from archeological and architectural experience and more generally from the fashion and taste inspired by ancient Greece. The theory of ‘‘ideal beauty’’ of the German archeologist Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717– 1768)—an absolute beauty that does not exist in nature and can be created only in art by combining the most perfect things in the world—profoundly influenced Italian intellectuals and generated increasing numbers of artistic treatises, as for example the works on architecture of Francesco Milizia (1725–1798). The appeal of the classic world became visible in the novels of Alessandro Verri (1741–1816), such as Notti romane (Roman Nights, 1792), where the author imagined conversing with ancient Romans on the tombs of the Scipios. The major representative of Italian literary neoclassicism was Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828), a prolific author whose translation of the Iliad would receive great favor from its appearance and is now considered one of the most significant works of the time. In neoclassical style, Ugo Foscolo wrote his sonnets in 1803 and the incomplete poem Le Grazie (The Graces), both of which echoed classic elegance and transfigured characters and events from personal and modern life into a distant and mythical world. Moreover, his poem Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807), an original meditation on the consolatory role of sepulchres, was partially inspired by neoclassical style. Generally speaking, neoclassical literature favored elegant words, a linear construction of thoughts, mythological erudition, and harmonious unity. However, in Dei sepolcri, the imitation of ancient classics and their art reveals not only the desire to reach the same level of artistic beauty and perfection but also a deep nostalgia for a world irremediably lost. Through

COLA DI RIENZO Winkelmann’s theoretical principles, neoclassicism influenced architecture and figurative arts as well, as is testified by the hundreds of palaces and paintings still visible throughout Italy. Neoclassicism was soon replaced by a Romantic sensitivity, which, though acknowledging the artistic relevance of the ancient world, encouraged modern humankind to differentiate ourselves from it. The decorous harmony of classical and neoclassical poetry was now substituted by a ‘‘sentimental’’ poetry, restless, dramatic, nostalgic, and capable of expressing new tensions. In the contemporary era, classicism has been interpreted mainly as a cult of the ancient world, often in polemical position against the canons of the Christian culture. The classical world may epitomize supreme human values, a primordial and uncontaminated contact with nature, or a place with no moral restriction, where desires, impulses, and sexual drives remain unbound. Numerous authors are still inspired by the classical models—particularly in theater—and rewrite ancient works offering a new interpretation and exalting their extraordinary actuality. In music, classicism defines the style elaborated in Vienna by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, between 1760 and the first decade of the nineteenth century. It was characterized by the search for maximum formal and stylistic equilibrium, and the use, technically speaking, of the sonata, structured in three movements: exposition, development, and recapitulation, in both chamber and symphonic music. PAOLO QUAZZOLO

Further Reading Antal, Frederick, Classicism and Romanticism, with Other Studies in Art History, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Assunto, Rosario, L’antichita` come futuro, Milan: Medusa, 1973. Binni, Walter, Classicismo e Neoclassicismo nella letteratura del Settecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Carlson, Marvin, Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present, Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 1984. Castelli, Patrizia (editor), L’ideale classico a Ferrara e in Italia nel Rinascimento, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Fornaro, Pierpaolo, Trapassato presente: l’appropriazione psicologica dell’antico attraverso la narrativa moderna, Turin: Tirrenia, 1989. Gigliucci, Roberto (editor), Furto e plagio nella letteratura del Classicismo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Grandi, Roberto, Il suono del flauto: ricognizione critica antologica del gusto classico, Milan: Eura Press, 1996. Munk Olsen, Birger, I classici nel canone scolastico altomedievale, Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’alto Medioevo, 1991. Pieri, Piero, Il violino di Orfeo: metamorfosi e dissimulazione del classicismo, Bologna: Pendragon, 2000. Quondam, Amedeo (editor), Rinascimento e classicismo: materiali per l’analisi del sistema culturale di antico regime, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Settis, Salvatore, Futuro del classico, Turin: Einaudi, 2004. Spaggiari, William, La favolosa eta` dei patriarchi: percorsi del classicismo da Metastasio a Carducci, Rome: Archivio Izzi, 1996. Sypher, Wylie, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400–1700, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1965. Treves, Piero (editor), Lo studio dell’antichita` classica nell’Ottocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Zorzi, Ludovico, Il teatro e la citta`: saggi sulla scena italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1977.

COLA DI RIENZO (1313–1354) In 1342, during his first important political mission as ambassador of the Roman government to the papal court in Avignon, Cola di Rienzo met the poet Petrarch. This was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and correspondence based on the two men’s hopes of reconciling and uniting the Italian municipalities under the political guidance of

Rome. Petrarch and Cola shared an admiration for ancient Rome and for the classical spirit, which they considered models of political and social perfection. On May 20, 1347, Cola summoned the populace to the Campidoglio, proclaiming a series of edicts against the nobles. He formally assumed control of Rome and shortly thereafter

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COLA DI RIENZO assumed the title of tribunus. This event established his political career, even though this government lasted only a few months. Cola was a famed anticlerical, a fame justified by the tone of some of his comments on Dante’s Monarchia (Monarchy, ca. 1317). Nevertheless, his political ascent was due to the support he received from the Catholic Church as well as the widespread approval of the citizens. Thus, once he lost that support and his disagreements with the Church became apparent, his government collapsed. Nevertheless, during this period Cola maintained extremely good relations with the pontiff, Clement VI, who intended to build a new empire under the political and spiritual guidance of papal authority. Cola’s short-lived government, which sought to limit the power of the ruling nobility while working to raise the morale of the lower social classes, brought about profound changes in the Italian peninsula. His actions were intended to reestablish the image and the prestige of Rome and to spread the idea of a popular regime throughout Italy. It was precisely because of the success of these notions among the people that Cola lost the support of the pope, who pushed for the readmission of the barons into government in December 1347, after which Cola left the city. The most important of Cola’s written works is his commentary on Dante’s Monarchia, which remained anonymous for centuries but is now unanimously attributed to him. It was probably written between 1348 and 1352, during the period in which Cola lived at the court of Carl IV of Bohemia. Indeed, the aim of the commentary was to convince the emperor to demand his legitimate rights over the throne of Rome and to restore the kingdom of God on earth. In this work, Cola showed his admiration for Dante’s concept of an ideal Church devoid of political ambition. He fiercely criticized the corrupt clerical authorities, whose corruption he probably experienced firsthand during his time he lived in a monastic community of Fraticelli after his fall from power. From a literary point of view, the text shows some weaknesses. Cola was not highly educated in matters of philosophy and theology and was thus incapable of understanding the full complexity of Dante’s work. Nevertheless, in his attacks against the Church he demonstrated a lucidity and strength in recalling the greatness of ancient Rome, a strength in part derived from his extensive knowledge of classical authors, of Latin historians in particular. In addition to his commentary on Monarchia, Cola’s correspondence is a significant 482

document on the culture of his times. Cola’s style recalls Cicero’s but also shows the influence of his contemporaries, Dante and Petrarch in particular. The letters, full of cultural and historical references, are remarkably unlike the flat and dry political prose of the time. Much of what is known about Cola derives from an anonymous fourteenth-century Cronica. Although the section on Cola had already appeared in print as early as 1624, the Cronica was published for the first time in 1740 by Ludovico Antonio Muratori with the editorial title of Historiae Romanae Fragmenta (Fragments of Roman History) in the third volume of his Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi (Medieval Italian Archeology). The myth of Cola, the Roman tribune, survived in Lord Byron’s verses and in Richard Wagner’s opera Rienzi (1842), which describes him as a hero who fought for freedom and against tyrannical rulers.

Biography Born Nicola di Rienzo, in Rome in 1313, while still young Cola was educated in classical texts and Roman law. He was appointed first ambassador of the popular government of Rome to Avignon, 1342. He assumed the title of tribunus, May 1347; fell from power and was sent into exile, December 1347; and after a period spent in a monastic community of Fraticelli, moved to the court of Charles VI of Bohemia with the intention of urging him to claim his rights to the throne of Rome, 1350. Suspected of heresy, he was arrested, sent to Avignon, and eventually freed, 1353. He returned to Rome to represent the interests of the pontiff, 1354. On August 1, he assumed political power for the second time. Cola di Rienzo died in Rome on October 8, 1354, during an insurrection organized by the Colonna family. VALERIO VICARI Selected Works Epistolario di Cola di Rienzo, edited by Annibale Gabrielli, Rome: Lincei, 1870. Commentario di Cola di Rienzo (1348–1352), in Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, edited by Francesco Furlan, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2004.

Further Reading Anonimo Romano, Cronica, edited by Giuseppe Porta, Milan: Adelphi, 1979.

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) Collins, Amanda, Greater than Emperor: Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313–54) and the World of Fourteenth-Century Rome, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Crescenti, Carmela, Cola di Rienzo: simboli e allegorie, Parma: All’Insegna del Veltro, 2003. Di Carpegna Falconieri, Tommaso, Cola di Rienzo, Rome: Salerno, 2002. Musto, Ronald G., Apocalypse in Rome: Cola di Rienzo and the Politics of the New Age, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Reale, Ugo, Vita di Cola di Rienzo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982. Ricci, Pier Giorgio, ‘‘Il commento di Cola di Rienzo alla ‘Monarchia’ di Dante,’’ Studi medievali, 4:2(1965), 665–708. Vigueur, J.-C. Maire, ‘‘Cola di Rienzo,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 26, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1982.

COLLECTED POEMS See Tutte le poesie (Work by Eugenio Montale)

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) (1826–1890) Journalist, humorist, author of pedagogically oriented children’s stories, Carlo Collodi first made his literary mark with Il Signor Alberi ha ragione! (Mr Alberi Is Right! 1860), a work written to support his political and cultural vision of a democratic, independent, secular, and united Italy. It was in this work that he first used his pseudonym, Collodi, taken from the name of his mother’s hometown. In 1875, he translated Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, Histoires, which were to prove a major influence on his development. During this period he became a public figure in Florence, a cultural center and the capital of the new state. He was a regular contributor to reviews and newspapers such as La Nazione, La Gazzetta del Popolo, Il Fanfulla, and La Gazzetta d’Italia. Collodi’s experience with Il Fanfulla della Domenica was an especially important one. Its first issue was introduced by a long letter written by the critic Francesco De Sanctis that discussed the

educational and unifying function of literature and culture in the new Italy. Moreover, in publishing stories and articles by Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Giosue` Carducci, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and other Italian and European authors of the age, this journal was a workshop for the new Italian writers and—for Collodi—a confrontation with them. The political unification of Italy presented writers with the literary challenge of understanding and describing the life and cultures of the different regions of the new state. There was also, however, a strong normative tendency in contemporary visions of the political role of literature, visions primarily based on Alessandro Manzoni’s ideas about the best way to create and educate a new country. Thus, Collodi’s work was inspired by a tradition of nostalgic and poetic description of Tuscan life but also reflected a strong pedagogic and ethical desire to help in the creation of a new world. In fact, Collodi published a collection of 483

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) vivid and witty stories under the impressionistic title Macchiette (Sketches, 1880), which was soon followed by Occhi e nasi: Ricordi dal vero (Eyes and Noses: Memories from Real Life, 1881). Collodi himself emphasized his connections to De Sanctis and Carducci, writers who criticized the traditional, formal, and sentimental tendencies of Italian literature symbolized by the ‘‘empty’’ poetry written by Giovanni Prati. Collodi’s tone was close to satire, especially in his stories and theatrical pie`ces, whose characters, as in his three-act drama Gli amici di casa (The Friends of the House, 1856), are generally hypocritical and treacherous. His plays, showing the influence of the free-flowing dialogue of French drama, reflect the sparkling conversation of the salon and the caustic wit of the typical discussion play. There is, unquestionably, a strong streak of moral denunciation in his work. One of the most famous sketches in Macchiette, ‘‘Un paio di stivaletti’’ (A Pair of Ankle Boots), is in fact a detailed study of corruption that insinuates itself into the soul of a poor young girl through her desire for a pair of new boots. Moreover, Collodi seems to be very close to the linguistic quest of the scapigliati Giovanni Faldella and Carlo Dossi. Yet Collodi’s writing also displays a profound documentary and social interest. For example, in Un romanzo in vagone, da Firenze a Livorno, guida storico-umoristica (A Train Novel, from Florence to Leghorn, a Humorous and Historical Guide, 1856), Collodi offered a comic chronicle of the people he met travelling from Florence to Livorno on a train that was a wonder of Tuscany at that time. Collodi published a novel in the same vein called I misteri di Firenze, scene sociali (The Mysteries of Florence, Social Scenes, 1857), in which, following the great model of Eugene Sue’s Myste`res de Paris, he described a city divided between the rich classes in all their falseness and hypocrisy and the poor and their struggle for life. This, Collodi sadly said in his book, was the only real mystery of Florence: the mystery of a rich city that, due to the blindness of its inhabitants, was a poor, confused and ‘‘ill’’ city. In 1872, there was a significant new interest in Collodi’s intellectual life: writing for children. Florence had a great tradition in children’s literature, of which Collodi was perfectly aware. In 1836 the Genovese reformer and pedagogist Raffaello Lambruschini (1788–1873) founded a magazine called La guida dell’educatore. Sometime later, Pietro Thouar (1809–1861) published a collection of tales under the title Nuova raccolta di scritti per fanciulli (New Collection of Writings for Children, 484

1868), which established the form of the ‘‘moral story’’ for children, written in a Manzonian style. Another important book in this tradition was the enormously popular children’s book, Le memorie di un pulcino (The Memories of a Chick, 1875), published by Paggi and written by the Florentine school teacher Ida Baccini (1850–1911). With her anthropomorphic and childlike animal protagonist, Baccini anticipated Pinocchio. Indeed, Paggi, realizing the profitable market in the new genre of children’s literature, asked Collodi to translate Perrault’s Contes and Histoires as well as the French fairy tales written by the Countess de Aulnay and Madame Leprince de Beaumont. Translating the best of French writing for children, Collodi had the opportunity to study carefully the themes and structures, the psychological motives and patterns, and the various forms of the genre. Deeply stimulated by his experience as translator and by his editor, who wanted Italian settings for children books, Collodi soon attempted to write original children’s stories himself. He soon published a volume under the title Racconti delle fate (Tales of the Fairies, 1875), which was very close in both its form and content to the French models of Perrault. Collodi’s first original production was a series called Giannettino (1877), whose title echoes Dossi’s ironic Giannetto prego` un dı` la mamma che il lasciasse andare a scuola (Giannetto Prayed His Mother Once to Let Him Go to School), written in 1866. In Collodi’s story, a wild, unruly, and lazy boy has a number of funny and humiliating experiences, first in Florence, then travelling all around Italy. Soon after, Collodi published Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: l’Italia superiore (The Italy of Giannettino: Northern Italy, 1880), followed by a book dedicated to L’Italia centrale (Central Italy, 1883), and by another about L’Italia meridionale (Southern Italy, 1886), in which the unruly Giannettino, learning from his experiences, becomes, finally, a good boy. As we can see, the plot and moral scheme of Giannettino is the same as that of Pinocchio, but the inspiration, the style and the setting of the entire Giannettino series, like the one that follows it, dedicated to Minuzzolo (Scrap, 1878), are dull, rigid, and mechanical, lacking in the liveliness of the characters in Collodi’s most famous work. On 7 July 1881, Collodi published the first instalment of his serial, Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet) in Il giornale dei bambini (1881–1883). Collodi was now an older man of 55, sceptical and disenchanted. In fact, Guido Biagi, one of Collodi’s

CARLO COLLODI (CARLO LORENZINI) best friends and his collaborator in Il giornale per i bambini, asked Collodi many times to write a new children’s story, but Collodi seemed uninterested. Finally, wrote Biagi in his Aneddoti letterari (1887), Collodi sent him the first pages of his Storia di un burattino, called ‘‘bambinata’’ (childish thing). This ‘‘bambinata’’ was in fact his Pinocchio. In its basic conception, the story resembled the story of Giannettino: a ‘‘wild’’ boy who becomes, after a series of adventures, a good boy. The serial adventures of the puppet who becomes human and who alternates between rebellion and resignation may have intensified Collodi’s own divided feelings. For an entire intellectual generation, it may also have intensified the conflict between their Mazzinian idealism and the necessary compromises imposed upon them by a still authoritarian society and by a nation that remained, in reality, poor and underdeveloped. Since it was first written in the early 1880s, Pinocchio has remained one of the most universally recognizable works of Italian literature. All versions of the story, from the well-known Disney cartoon to Roberto Benigni’s controversial cinematic version of 2002, emphasize Pinocchio’s status as a national icon.

Biography Carlo Collodi was born in Florence, November 22, 1826, the son of a cook, Domenico, and Angiolina Orzali, a seamstress, both employed by the Marquis Ginori Lisci. He studied at the seminary in Colle Val d’Elsa, 1837–1842, and Florence, 1842. Collodi served among the Tuscan volunteers in the battles of Curtatone and Montanara, 1848, and in the Piedmontese Army in the Second War of Independence in 1859. He was editor to the humorous magazine Il Lampione, which he had founded himself in 1848; moreover, he founded in 1853 another magazine called La Scaramuccia. Collodi died in Florence, 26 October 1890. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Children’s Literature

Selected Works Collections Tutto Collodi per i piccoli e per i grandi, edited by Pietro Pancrazi, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1948. Opere, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mondadori 1995.

Fiction Un romanzo in vapore: Da Firenze a Livorno. Guida storicoumoristica, 1856. I misteri di Firenze: Scene sociali, 1857. Racconti delle fate, 1875. Giannettino, 1877. Minuzzolo, 1878. Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: L’Italia superiore, 1880. Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: L’Italia centrale, 1883. Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino, 1883; as The Adventures of Pinocchio, translated by Nicolas J. Perella, 1986, rpt. 1992. Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: L’Italia meridionale, 1886.

Theater Gli amici di casa, 1856.

Other Il Signor Alberi ha ragione! 1860. La manifattura delle porcellane di Doccia, 1861. Macchiette, 1880. Occhi e nasi: Ricordi dal vero, 1881. Bettino Ricasoli, Camillo Cavour, Luigi Carlo Farini, Daniele Manin: Biografie del Risorgimento, 1941.

Further Reading Benigni, Roberto, Io un po’ Pinocchio, Florence: Giunti, 2002. Bertacchini, Renato, Collodi educatore, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964. Bertacchini, Renato, Il padre di Pinocchio: Vita e opere di Collodi, Milan: Camunia, 1993. Biagi, Guido, Aneddoti letterari, Milan: Treves, 1887. Cantucci, Luigi, Collodi, Brescia: La Scuola, 1982. Maini, Riccardo, and Piero Scapecchi (editors), Collodi giornalista e scrittore, Florence: S.P.E.S., 1981. Marcheschi, Daniela, and Carlo Alberto Madrignani (editors), I ragazzi grandi: Bozzetti e studi dal vero, Palermo: Sellerio, 1989. Petrini, Enzo, Dalla parte di Collodi, Bologna: Patron, 1982. Serenella, Salimbeni, (editor), Da Collodi, su Collodi, Florence: Salimbeni, 1984. Traversetti, Bruno, Introduzione a Collodi, Bari: Laterza, 1993.

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LE AVVENTURE DI PINOCCHIO, 1883 Novel by Carlo Collodi

Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino (The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet) was never intended to be a book. In 1881, Collodi was asked by the editors of a magazine for children, Il giornale per i bambini, to write a series of tales. The stories—simple, linear, and vivid, but extremely ironic, full of philosophical reflections and allusions to the literary canon—recounted the adventures of a ‘‘child’’ who is trying to learn the strange rules of the adult world. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Collodi’s stories initially took the form of a classic novel of formation; they were stories that could help educate the children of the new Italy unified in 1870 after a long period of struggle. But Collodi’s central character is another thing: He is a pezzo di legno (piece of wood) trying to be human. His story thus invokes mythic tales of metamorphosis, and, in fact, there are many interpretations (Giovanni Jervis, Ge´rard Genot, and Sergio Martella, among others) that stress the anthropological and religious aspects of the story, casting Geppetto as a paternal figure like St. Joseph and presenting Pinocchio’s metamorphosis as a form of reincarnation. But in the novel, Collodi also skillfully combine many other traditions of storytelling: the old Tuscan tradition of village children tales, popular oral tradition, biblical tales like the story of the prophet Jonah, and elements from Apuleius’s Latin romance The Golden Ass. The book begins like a traditional Tuscan tale, the veglia, in which an old man is telling a story to children. When the children express surprise, even disbelief, about what they are about to hear, they are told to pay close attention to every detail. The narrator relates how Maestro Ciliegia, a carpenter, finds a piece of wood that can cry and wail. He makes his friend Geppetto a present of it. Geppetto intends to make a puppet that can dance and fence out of the wood. He christens it Pinocchio and hopes to make a living displaying it. But the puppet’s eyes 486

can move and look at him, and his nose begins to grow by itself. Finally, the puppet grabs and plays with Geppetto’s wig, rushing out from the house. Geppetto, trying to stop him, is arrested by the carabinieri. In a later episode, Pinocchio is going to school with a new spelling book, determined to learn everything at once, when he hears music coming from the puppet theater. Pinocchio changes his mind: School can wait until tomorrow; today he will go to the theater. The adventure does not prove to be a happy one, since the master of the theater, Mangiafuoco, wants to kill him. However, when Pinocchio starts crying and praying, Mangiafuoco takes pity on him and gives him five gold pieces to help him and his father. Outside the theater, Pinocchio meets two of Collodi’s best inventions, the lame Fox and the blind Cat. They explain to Pinocchio how he could profit from the money Mangiafuoco has given him by going to the Field of Miracles. If he sows his coins there, they tell him, he will find a tree laden with gold pieces. On his way to the field, the puppet meets some assassins. They run after him and, after a long pursuit, they capture Pinocchio and hang him on a tree called Big Oak. This was the original ending of Collodi’s story. Pinocchio is finally and cruelly punished for his idleness, his credulity, his obstinacy. But many readers, charmed by the character, protested that he did not really deserve to die. Collodi revived Pinocchio in the February 16, 1882, issue of the Il giornale per i bambini. He introduced new inventions into the story, including the Fata Turchina and a final reward for Pinocchio—the chance to become a flesh-and-blood boy. Collodi’s social criticism also became more precise in satirizing the new Italian political situation: Pinocchio, being robbed of his money, is sent to prison. Four months later, there is a general amnesty for all the criminals, but Pinocchio does not qualify because he is not a criminal. Once he insists that he is a criminal, he is immediately released. In the Paese dei Balocchi (Land of Toys), he meets Lucignolo, and the two of them are transformed into a pair of donkeys. As a ciuchino, or little donkey, Pinocchio works in a circus until he becomes ill and is thrown into the sea. Like the prophet Jonah, he is eaten by a fish, which also has eaten his father Geppetto, who was swallowed during his quest for the puppet. Finally the puppet becomes a boy ‘‘perche` quando i ragazzi, di cattivi diventano buoni, hanno la virtu` di far prendere un aspetto nuovo e sorridente anche all’interno delle loro famiglie’’ (because when bad boys become good, they have the power of putting

COLONIAL LITERATURE a new and smiling expression on the faces of their family). Moreover, Pinocchio becomes a living boy, leaving the realm of myth for the moral human world, during the constricted and severe Italy of King Umberto I. STEFANO ADAMI Editions First Edition Le avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un burattino, Florence: Paggi, 1883; revised editions by the author were published by Paggi in 1886, 1887, 1888, and by Bemporad in 1890.

Critical Editions Le avventure di Pinocchio, edited by Amerindo Camilli, Florence: Sansoni, 1946. Le avventure di Pinocchio, edited by Ornella Castellani Polidori, Pescia: Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, 1983. In Opere, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mondatori, 1995.

Translations The Story of a Puppet, or, The Adventures of Pinocchio, translated by Mary Alice Murray, London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892, revised by Giovanna Tassinari, London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1951. The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, translated by Nicolas Perella, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, reprinted 1992.

Further Reading Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Pinocchio,’’ La critica, 20 November 1937; reprinted in La letteratura italiana della nuova Italia, vol. 5, Bari: Laterza, 1939.

Dedola, Rossana, Pinocchio e Collodi, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2002. Gagliardi, Antonio, Il burattino e il labirinto, una lettura di Pinocchio, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Garroni, Emilio, Pinocchio uno e bino, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Gayling, Willard, Adam and Eve and Pinocchio: on Being and Becoming Human, New York: Viking, 1990. Genot, Ge´rard, L’Analyse structurelle de Pinocchio, Pescia (Montepulciano): Fondazione Nazionale Carlo Collodi, 1970. Giannelli, Luciano, ‘‘Una lettura dei ’dialettalismi’ di Pinocchio,’’ in Interni e dintorni del Pinocchio. Atti del Convegno ’Folkloristi italiani del tempo del Collodi,’ edited by Mariano Fresta and Pietro Clemente, PesciaMontepulciano: Editori del Grifo, 1986. Incisa di Camerana, Ludovico, Pinocchio, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Jervis, Giovanni, Introduction to C. Collodi, Le avventure di Pinocchio, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Malerba, Luigi, Pinocchio con gli stivali, Milan: Mondadori, 1988. Manganelli, Giorgio, Pinocchio: Un libro parallelo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Martella, Sergio, Pinocchio eroe anticristiano: il codice della nascita nei processi di liberazione, Padua: Saper, 2000. Papini, Giovanni, Schegge: Le fonti di Pinocchio, Florence: Vallecchi, 1995. Perrella, Nicolas, ‘‘An Essay on Pinocchio,’’ Italica, 63:1 (Spring 1986): 1–47. Rodari, Gianni, Grammatica della fantasia, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Teahan, James, The Pinocchio of Carlo Collodi, New York: Schocken, 1985. Tommaso, Rodolfo, Pinocchio: Analisi di un burattino, Milan: Sansoni, 1992. Wunderlich, Richard, The Pinocchio Catalogue, New York: Greenwood, 1988.

COLONIAL LITERATURE A milestone of Italian colonial literature was the speech ‘‘La grande proletaria s’e` mossa’’ (The Great Proletarian Has Set Off ) by Giovanni Pascoli in Florence in November 1911 and later published in his 1912 collection of writings Limpido rivo (Clear Stream). With it, Pascoli intervened in the complex public discussion on Italian colonial policy. After unification, the Italian government believed that founding some colonies could be

very useful to the new state, although this was by no means a generally held view. Already in 1897, for instance, Emilio Salgari had called colonial policy a crime in his novel Le stragi delle Filippine (The Slaughters of the Philippines). A number of articles published in 1911 in the periodical La Voce criticized the basis of Italian colonialism, arguing that the idea that the countries to be conquered were rich and represented a solution to Italian

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COLONIAL LITERATURE social problems was only propaganda. In ‘‘La guerra’’ (The War) published in La Voce on 15 June 1911, Giovanni Amendola, presented the war against Libya as an affirmation of national will, in which Italians would have the feeling of being part of a great nation. On 8 October 1911, the newspaper Il corriere della sera published a long poem by Gabriele D’Annunzio, ‘‘La canzone d’oltremare’’ (The Song of Overseas), the first of a number of poems that celebrated the Italian expedition as ‘‘la meravigliosa visione di preti benedicenti le chiese in cui giacciono le bandiere degli infedeli’’ (the wonderful view of the priests blessing the churches in which lie the flags of the infidels). In Pascoli’s speech, Italy was a poor nation compared to the other European countries, from which many had to emigrate in order to earn a living. This was an unbearable situation, and, in Pascoli’s opinion, the only solution was the foundation of one or more colonies where Italians could live and work not as modern slaves but as citizens. Their colonial enterprise would be the colonial enterprise of workers and peasants, not of soldiers and warriors. The Italian presence would be, in Pascoli’s words, the presence of conscientious men like Marco Polo or the Jesuit priest Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), who lived in China, where he taught mathematics and European culture and history, and died in Beijing. Previously, in his work ‘‘L’Avvento’’ (The Advent, 1901), Pascoli had described his age as ‘‘il tempo dell’orribile guerra universale’’ (the time of horrible universal war), producing an interesting synthesis of socialism, pacifism, and Christianity into a philosophy based on the ideals of justice and charity. Moreover, he had bitterly criticized the first Italian colonialism of the 1880s and 1890s in poems such as ‘‘La favola del disarmo’’ (The Fable of Disarmament), ‘‘Pace!’’ (Peace!), and ‘‘Il ritorno di Colombo’’ (Columbus’s Return), collected in his Odi e Inni (Odes and Hymns, 1906). In 1885, Italy occupied Massaua, on the Red Sea, but the Italian Army was defeated at Dogali in 1887, with the death of 500 Italian soldiers. In 1892, Italy gained control of Somalia. In 1896 the news of another ruinous defeat at Adua, where 18,000 Italians soldiers died, was a shock, and Prime Minister Francesco Crispi was forced to resign. This dramatic event resulted in a trauma in the imagination of the country, almost a neurotic excuse, which became the primary reason for future colonial initiatives. The humiliating rout of the Italian Army caused serious popular insurrections in many Italian cities, while some socialist newspapers such as La scopa and L’asino published an 488

ode dedicated to Menelik, the Ethiopian leader. The satirical writer Lorenzo Stecchetti (pseudonym of Olindo Guerrini, 1845–1916) published a number of poems defining Italian colonial policy as a market of lies and the art of Punchinello. In the poem ‘‘Africa, mentre partono’’ (Africa, While They Leave, 1900), he says to a dead Italian soldier: ‘‘che tu sia benedetto, figlio, non soffrirai piu` la fame’’ (Bless you, poor son, you’ll never suffer from hunger again). The Italian defeat at Adua was the result of an erroneous sense of superiority and of lack of preparation on the part of the soldiers and the commanders. It was also true that the colonial policy was a way of escaping from the problems of the country and that therefore the nation was unprepared to face a military campaign. The Italian government attempted to forget the events of Adua. As Silvana Palma reports, Prime Minister Antonio Starabba De Rudinı` refused to pay a ransom for the prisoners, declaring: ‘‘non importa se il mio rifiuto sara` causa di sofferenze per loro: il mio dovere e` rifiutare ogni accordo, il loro di morire per la patria’’ (It doesn’t matter if my refusal will cause them sufferings; my duty is to refuse any agreement, their duty is to die for the motherland) (L’Italia coloniale, 1999) The survivors were received in Italy as traitors and were forbidden to publish memoirs or to talk to journalists. In the public debate, the peaceful peasant-colonist described by Pascoli soon became the heir of the Roman Empire, who would bring culture, health, and education to primitive countries. Italy was still working on its unification: The country and the ruling classes were looking for useful public myths, and the myth of the Roman Empire was perfect. This myth was the basis for the notion of the civic and moral primacy of Italians: In establishing a new colonial empire, Italy was in fact taking back its old Roman colonies. As D’Annunzio states in Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (Hymns in Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth and Heroes, 1903), Italian colonialism was a quest in the name of the Latin sea, based on the four ‘‘deita` operose’’ (active goddesses): Volonta`, Volutta`, Orgoglio, Istinto (Will, Voluptuousness, Pride, Instinct). In 1912, D’Annunzio wrote the intertitles for the first ‘‘colonial’’ Italian film, the monumental Cabiria (1914), directed by Giovanni Pastrone. The main character is a Latin nobleman who, with his faithful servant, the ‘‘good primitive’’ Maciste, tries to civilize the barbaric Africans, who are represented as violent and irrational and who immolate their sons to the god Moloch. This popular film contributed to establishing the principles and ideas of the public

COLONIAL LITERATURE debate on colonialism, becoming a model for colonial cinema. During the 1930s, Benito Mussolini promoted a military expedition to Ethiopia, to avenge the defeat of Adua. Italy, for Mussolini, should follow the Latin tradition of power and empire, and Africa was its future. The natives were in any case considered as inferior beings who lived like animals. Ethiopia was invaded again in 1935, and this time the Italian Army was ready to use any means to conquer the country, from the bombing of civilians to the use of chemical warfare. In his 1937 reportages for Il corriere della sera, the journalist Tommaso Besozzi (1903–1964) described African everyday life through comic vignettes: the ridiculous head of the village who sports a uniform of the Italian carabinieri with a great sense of importance; the Somali sultan with 203 wives; the corrupted, lascivious and tricky natives, who are always trying to cheat the Italian workers. Fascist propaganda used the reports of Italian travellers and explorers—among them Carlo Piaggia, Antonio Miani, Gaetano Casati, Romolo Gessi, Vittorio Bottego, and Edmondo De Amicis—as documents of the inferiority of the natives and their necessity of a European guide. During the Fascist period, the Italian colonies were also a site where some intellectuals confronted the brutality of the regime and began to develop a democratic conscience. In the collection of poems Diario d’Algeria (A Journal of Algeria, 1947), written by Vittorio Sereni during his imprisonment in Algeria between 1943 and 1945, the end of the tragedy of Fascism in Italy and Germany is seen as the hope for a new Europe, and the period spent in Africa is lived as a deep human experience. The same feeling is described by Renzo Biason in his autobiographical stories Sagapo` (1953), which describe the events lived by a number of Italian soldiers during the occupation of Greece. Mario Tobino’s Il deserto della Libia (The Desert of Libya, 1952) recounts his dramatic experience as a young soldier in Libya—an experience of moral awakening. Ennio Flaiano’s Tempo di uccidere (Time for Killing, 1947) is the dramatic description of the war crimes perpetrated by the Italian Fascist army in Etiopia. After the fall of the Fascism and the end of World War II, Italy obtained from the United Nations the Protectorate of Somalia, which lasted until 1960. Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his unfinished novel Petrolio (Oil), posthumously published in 1992, describes the dictatorial way in which the Italians of the 1960s—including the intellectuals— dealt with people in the so-called Third World

countries. More generally, recent historiography has demonstrated the extent in which both high and popular literature, from Pascoli to Salgari, contributed to the formation of the image of the good Italian solider in Africa. Indeed, Fascist rhetoric merely recycled this ideological tradition. The reality was quite different: In 1935 and 1936 in Ethiopia, the Italian army was the first to use gases against civilians. STEFANO ADAMI

Further Reading Aristarco, Guido, Il cinema fascista: Il prima e il dopo, Bari: Dedalo, 1996. Battaglia, Roberto, La prima guerra d’Africa, Turin: Einaudi, 1958. Bono, Salvatore, Morire per questi deserti: Lettere di soldati Italiani dal fronte libico, 1911–1912, Catanzaro: Abramo, 1992. Borruso, Massimo (editor), Il mito infranto: la fine del ‘sogno africano’ negli appunti e nelle immagini di Massimo Borruso, funzionario coloniale in Etiopia (1937– 1946), Manduria: Lacaita, 1997. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Cinema Italiano tra le due guerre, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Calchi Novati, Giampaolo, Fra Mediterraneo e Mar Rosso: momenti di politica Italiana in Africa attraverso il colonialismo, Rome: Istituto Italo Africano, 1992. Del Boca, Angelo, Gli Italiani in Africa orientale, 4 volumes: Vol. 1, Dall’unita` alla marcia su Roma (1976); Vol. 2, La conquista dell’Impero (1980), Rome-Bari: Laterza. Del Boca, Angelo, Gli Italiani in Libia: Tripoli bel suol d’amore: 1860–1922, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1986. Del Boca, Angelo, I gas di Mussolini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Isnenghi, Mario, and Rochat, Giorgio, La Grande Guerra 1914–1918, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2000. Labanca, Nicola, Una guerra per l’Impero, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. Maggi, Stefano, Colonialismo e comunicazioni: Le strade ferrate nell’Africa Italiana, 1887–1943, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996. Negash, Tekeste, Italian Colonialism in Eritrea, 1882–1941: Policies, Praxis and Impact, Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1987. Palma, Silvana, L’Italia coloniale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1999. Pascoli, Giovanni, ‘‘La grande proletaria s’e` mossa,’’ Limpido rivo, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912. Taddia, Irma, Autobiografie africane: Il colonialismo nelle memorie orali, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996. Taddia, Irma, L’Eritrea-colonia 1890–1952: Paesaggi, strutture, uomini del colonialismo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986. Tomasello, Giovanna, La letteratura coloniale Italiana dalle avanguardie al fascismo, Palermo: Sellerio, 1984.

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FRANCESCO COLONNA

FRANCESCO COLONNA (CA. 1433/34–1527) Probably one of the most enigmatic figures of fifteenth-century Italian Humanism, Francesco Colonna is traditionally considered the author of an anonymous book printed in Venice by Aldo Manuzio in 1499, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (The Strife of Love in a Dream). Francesco Colonna’s identity, however, is still uncertain. Some critics, such as Maurizio Calvesi, have identified the author as Francesco Colonna, Lord of Palestrina, a town in the environs of Rome (‘‘Hypneratomachia Poliphili,’’ 1987). Other scholars (for example, Giovanni Pozzi) have identified Colonna as a friar connected to the Humanist environment of Treviso and the Dominican Convent of SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. Colonna’s unsolved biography reflects his mysterious work, which is also considered the masterpiece of fifteenth-century Venetian printing. As stated in the foreword of his book, hypnerotomachia is a Greek expression (greco vocabulo) that the narrator, named Poliphilo (Polia’s lover), adopts to define the subject of his narrative, a ‘‘pugna d’amor in sonno’’ (strife of love in a dream). The actual identity of Polia’s lover is revealed by an acrostic, as the initial letters of the book’s 38 chapters form the Latin sentence: Poliam frater Franciscus Columna peramavit (Brother Francesco Colonna did love Polia). Hence, the reader is encouraged to consider the author and the narrator as the same person. Poliphilo’s dream frames a long narrative divided into two main sections. In the first, Poliphilo tells the story of his voyage from a dark forest, through many different dangers, encounters, and trials, to a beautiful town where he meets his beloved Polia. Then, the two lovers travel to the sacred island of Cytera, where they visit Adonis’s grave and contemplate the statue of Venus suckling Cupid. In the second section, Polia is asked by a group of nymphs to recount the love story of a girl pledged to Diana in the town of Treviso. Though hindered by the girl’s vow, the love story has a happy ending. Finally, when Poliphilo wakes up, the dream ends. The sequence of events also includes digressions in which descriptions 490

of antiquities such as buildings, monuments, and crafts document the author’s antiquarian expertise and his contemplative approach to classical culture, as well as his knowledge of philosophy, iconology, and the hermetic sciences. Poliphilo’s dream is probably an allegory of human life that contains autobiographical components. According to Giovanni Pozzi’s allegorical interpretation in his critical edition of the work (1980), the dark forest and the symbolic monuments of the first section (for example, the elephant that hides the graves dedicated to men and women or the horse that bears babies) may represent the human being’s prenatal confusion. The five nymphs that the protagonist encounters can be interpreted as an allegory of the five senses and the first form of knowledge. Poliphilo’s choice between Love and Glory may have a pedagogic function, since love and marriage, according to the author, are the accomplishment of a perfect life. The autobiographical elements probably include Polia’s account of a personal love story prevented by a vow of chastity, which may be connected to the writer’s own world and indicate a nun involved in a romantic affair. The genre and language of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili are problematic. The story is most certainly modelled on fourteenth-century vernacular works such as Boccaccio’s Ninfale fiesolano (The Nymphs of Fiesole, ca. 1344–1346) and Filocolo (ca. 1334–1336); the dream that frames the story is probably an imitation of Petrarch’s Triumphi (Triumphs, ca. 1354–1374); the vision of the dark forest is probably modelled on Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). Though Colonna imitated his predecessors, his masterpiece is absolutely unique and original. First, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili combines visual and verbal language, and the text is constantly surrounded by images that describe, narrate, and comment on the protagonist’s dream, thus engaging the reader in a complex process of reception. Second, the verbal sections are written in a unique literary language, invented by the author, which is a rather ordinary example

VITTORIA COLONNA of northern Italian vernacular, imitating Tuscan models at the level of phonology and morphology, but is characterized by a sophisticated Latin vocabulary adapted to vernacular structures. Colonna’s experimentation thus reflects the encounter of two different cultural traditions. On the one hand, the author’s mastery of visual and manual arts such as gold casting, architecture, sculpture, and painting demonstrates his acquaintance with the world of workshops and craftsmen, and the Hypneratomachia Poliphili was therefore intended as an artistic object. Francesco Colonna was proficient in ancient Greek and Latin and well versed in philosophy and literature and encompassed an encyclopaedic notion of culture. Hence, his literary effort is also the work of a talented Humanist.

Biography Francesco Colonna was probably born in Venice in 1433 or 1434. He became a Dominican friar and lived in Venice at the Covent of SS Giovanni e Paolo. He moved to Treviso, 1462–1467, and returned to Venice, 1471. He was awarded a bachelor’s degree in theology in Padua, 1473–1474, and a doctoral degree in Padua, 1481. He became involved in a scandal (details unknown) and was expelled from his convent and threatened with excommunication. In the meanwhile, Colonna became popular as an expert preacher, 1482–1500. He lived on the fringes of the Dominican Order, probably in Venice, 1500–1515. He lived in Treviso for three years, 1515–1518. He was readmitted to the convent of Venice, 1518, where he died, in October 1527. MATTEO SORANZO

Selected Works Hypneratomachia Poliphili, 1499; critical edition by Giovanni Pozzi and Lucia A. Ciapponi, 1980; as Hypnerotomachia: The Strife of Love in a Dreame (1592), translated by Robert Dullington, edited by Lucy Gent, 1973; as Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. The Strife of Love in a Dream, translated by Joscelyn Godwin, 2003.

Further Reading Barolini, Helen, Aldus and His Dream Book, New York: Italica Press, 1992. Borsi, Stefano, Polifilo architetto: cultura architettonica e teoria artistica nell’Hypnerotomachia Poliphili di Francesco Colonna (1499), Rome: Officina, 1995. Calvesi, Maurizio, ‘‘Hypneratomachia Poliphili. Nuovi riscontri e nuove evidenze documentarie per Francesco Colonna signore di Preneste,’’ Storia dell’Arte, 9 (1987), 85–136. Calvesi, Maurizio, La pugna d’amore in sogno di Francesco Colonna romano, Rome: Lithos, 1996. Calvesi, Maurizio, Il sogno di Polifilo prenestino, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1980. Casella, Maria Teresa, and Giovanni Pozzi, Francesco Colonna: biografia e opere, 2 vols., Padua: Antenore, 1959. Cheney, Liana de Girolami, ‘‘Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: A Garden of Neoplatonic Love,’’ Discoveries. South-Central Renaissance Conference News and Notes, 21:1(2004), 12–17. Fierz-David, Linda, The Dream of Poliphilo, foreword by C. G. Jung, New York: Pantheon, 1950. Pelosi, Olimpia, Il sogno di Polifilo: una queˆte dell’umanesimo, Salerno: Edisud, 1988. Pozzi, Giovanni, ‘‘Il ‘Polifilo’ nella storia del libro illustrato veneziano,’’ in Giorgione e l’Umanesimo veneziano, edited by Rodolfo Pallucchini, Florence: Olschki, 1981. Pozzi, Giovanni, and Giulia Gianella, ‘‘Scienza Antiquaria e Letteratura. Il Feliciano. Il Colonna,’’ in Storia della Cultura Veneta, edited by Giorgio Arnaldi and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, vol. 3, Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1980.

VITTORIA COLONNA (1490–1547) In her own day, Vittoria Colonna, Marchesa of Pescara, was a celebrity due only in part to her prestigious social standing and talent. As the focus of considerable public scrutiny, the Marchesa projected an upright character and faultless behavior, which led to universal acclaim for her as a woman and as a writer. Her life was considered

beyond reproach during both her marriage and her long widowhood, and many of her contemporaries saw in her the embodiment of their culture’s ideal of noble femininity. She was viewed as a living paragon: intelligent, gifted, devout, virtuous, charming, and chaste. In the guise of exemplary figure, Colonna was often extolled as the model 491

VITTORIA COLONNA to imitate, although proclaimed inimitable. This ringing endorsement of the woman easily transferred to her verse. The most famous panegyric appears in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532), when the author chooses the Marchesa to represent the growing number of modern women writers in Canto 37. Having praised Colonna for ‘‘a sweet style that has not been surpassed,’’ filled with ‘‘lofty words,’’ Ariosto goes on to compliment her verse as a chaste wife’s fitting tribute to her deceased spouse. This convergence of writing, character, and biography is typical of much scholarship dedicated to Colonna who, for centuries, was considered Italy’s most famous woman writer. In his seminal study of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), historian Jakob Burckhardt established the modern perception of Colonna as the female poet who not only ‘‘made [herself] famous’’ through her writing but ‘‘may be called immortal.’’ Today, Vittoria Colonna continues to be judged one of Italy’s foremost female poets and a major poet of the sixteenth century. Like other aristocratic daughters, Colonna was taught the humanities at an early age, including the study of literature. She probably began composing verse in the context of social exchange, that is to say, as an integral part of the fabric of courtly entertainment. The composition and appreciation of poetry was a common avocation in the salons and courts of her time, and poems were often employed as instruments for communication and compliment, as can be seen in Colonna’s own occasional verse, which is addressed to notable individuals of her day. Like many Renaissance poets, the Marchesa began her literary apprenticeship with the study and assimilation of classical works, the foundation of a humanistic education. The imitation of Petrarchan verse followed, forming the stylistic and thematic model for her rime amorose (love rhymes). Like most Renaissance poets, Colonna shared her endeavors with her limited circle of friends and other versifiers. Notwithstanding her celebrity status and the insistence of admirers, she did not wish to have her poems published, not seeking the recognition or judgment of an unknown audience. Nevertheless, a handful of poems were printed in 1535 and 1536 in anthologies, and the first publication of her collected poetry appeared in 1538, without her consent or involvement. The fact that some 20 editions of the Rime (Rhymes) were issued in the sixteenth century alone bears witness to her popularity and appeal. In 1558, a decade after her death, Rinaldo Corso prepared the first major edition of Vittoria 492

Colonna’s Rime, which includes a critical commentary and supplies variants of the poems. Like later editions, it divides the poetry into two sections, love poems and sacred works. In 1760, Giambattista Rota gathered all Colonna’s known verse into one volume for the first time. Two editions are essential for serious study of Colonna’s verse, the critical editions prepared by Pietro Ercole Visconti in 1840 and Alan Bullock in 1982. The latter provides extensive commentary, bibliographical data, synoptic tables, comparisons of manuscript versions and published sources, as well as variants. Some 400 poems are included in Bullock’s edition of the Rime, a considerable creative output. Colonna’s love poetry focuses on the memory of her dead mate, Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, who is transformed into a spiritual guide for the grieving lover in the manner of Francesco Petrarch’s fourteenth-century commemorations of the deceased Laura. Colonna adheres to the imagery and language of Petrarch’s Canzoniere or, as it was known in the sixteenth century, the Rime. The Marchesa’s strong faith and ethical character emerge in the elevated and dignified tone of the compositions. As time progressed, her verse took on a more devout tone, as the subject matter shifted from earthly to divine love, from d’Avalos to Jesus. The Rime also includes assorted epistolary verse addressed to various friends, acquaintances, and public figures, which is of cultural but not necessarily artistic interest. The immediate popularity of Colonna’s poetry in her own day was due in large measure to her social identity: the writing of a celebrated icon of the highest echelon of society inevitably fascinated the general reading public. But it was Colonna’s adherence to the conventions of Petrarchism, the reigning standard for all serious love poetry, that carried an innate aesthetic mark of approval. The emulator’s text was considered enriched, not diminished, by the overt presence of the canonical subtext. Moreover, the philosophical and theological underpinnings of both the amatory and sacred poetry utilize the discourse of Christian neo-Platonism, also a mainstream model suitable for adoption by a female writer. As both woman and poet, Vittoria Colonna ideally reflected the taste and values of her society. Predominantly sonnets, the Rime’s hundreds of compositions are connected stylistically and metaphorically by their adherence to Petrarchan prosody interpreted through the prism of Pietro Bembo’s teachings. The major proponent of imitation as a literary norm, Bembo was also a personal friend and literary mentor to the Marchesa. The surviving

VITTORIA COLONNA love poetry was modeled on the second section of the Canzoniere. In both texts, the lost beloved, devoid of their physical beings, have ascended to their new role of heavenly beacon or guide. They are idealized and spiritualized, projecting all that is good and holy. Colonna’s rime amorose move between the description of grief and loss and the exalted praise of the virtues and person of the beloved. As a female writer operating in a male discourse, Colonna was at a disadvantage. To counter this disequilibrium, she emphasized the beloved’s maleness, stressing the virile qualities of the dead spouse, which contrast to her yearning fragility and suffering femininity. The emerging portrait is more idol than man. Eventually the lyric D’Avalos attains apotheosis, transformed into a shining sun that lightens the darkness of her grief. Colonna’s selfrepresentation as the mournful widow mirrors her culture’s expectations of exemplary femininity: faithful even in death, honorable in her behavior and thought, and pious. Colonna’s love lyrics emphasize the Christian and spiritualized version of Petrarchan love and function as high-minded tributes to the departed. However, sixteenth-century sources mention earlier poems directed to the living d’Avalos, which have been lost. Only one ‘‘Epistola’’ (Epistle, 1512) survives. Titled ‘‘Excelso mio signor’’ (My Great Lord), this letter in verse was addressed to her husband after his capture in the Battle of Ravenna. Joseph Gibaldi connected the style of this composition to Colonna’s early classical period and noted its debt to Ovid’s Heroides: The ‘‘Epistola’’ offers an atypical representation of d’Avalos, highlighting the suffering and solitude inflicted on the Marchesa by his ambition and penchant for war (‘‘Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman and Poet,’’ 1987). In the long poems of the Heroides, the narrators are women; thus, Colonna might have found a prototype for a feminine discourse before turning to the Petrarchan model. Some feminist critics, such as Luciana Borsetto, consider Colonna’s tendency to lift lines, imagery, and metaphors directly from Petrarch as a female reproduction of the male canon (‘‘Narciso ed Eco,’’ 1983). However, even when employing the codified language of Petrarchism, Colonna was able to convey deep feeling and individuality in her best verse. Vittoria Colonna’s consolatory poems laid the foundation for her meditations on faith, as her attention shifted from man to God, and she gradually embraced militant evangelical Christianity. Human love became a spiritual quest for moral elevation, a motif present in Petrarch and revisited

by Colonna in a neo-Platonic context. Borrowing the imagery from the Renaissance neo-Platonic notion of man’s intermediate position between immanence and transcendence, the poet visualized her Ferrante as a rung on the ladder leading to God. In such sacred love, the union of purified souls is realized, as the material self is no longer central. In her devotional verse, Colonna transformed her beloved into the celestial body of Christ. But the new sun of her religious verse was the Savior: Jesus, like d’Avalos before him, was the solid rock to which the poet secured her Petrarchan ‘‘frail bark,’’ safe from the storm. As early as 1538, she disclosed a poetics of faith in several sonnets that posit the crucified Christ as her primary source of artistic inspiration; an instrument for exploring the relationship of the soul to the Creator, the anguish of spiritual uncertainty, and the need for divine forgiveness. The aging Colonna was captivated by the figure of the Savior who died to redeem sinful humanity. Some of her religious poems are considered too intellectual or doctrinaire, lacking passion and an individual voice, but they are relevant to understanding her theological beliefs on controversial issues of dogma, such as the nature of salvation and redemption by faith alone. In the 1530s, Colonna befriended Michelangelo Buonarotti, in whom she discovered a kinship of spirit that grew into a powerful platonic love. Spiritually attracted to ascetic reformist ideals, she was challenged as possibly heretical by the Catholic hierarchy during the 1540s. She died before she could be formally investigated by the Inquisition. Scholars interested in the religious history of the Counter-Reformation in Italy value both the Rime and Colonna’s correspondence as important historical documents. The Marchesa’s Carteggio (Correspondence, 1889) provides a window to her spirit, thoughts, and ethos, while depicting the taste, expectations, and concerns of her class. But it is Vittoria Colonna’s poetry that remains her greatest contribution to literary studies.

Biography Born in Marino (Rome) in 1490, Vittoria Colonna was the daughter of Fabrizio and Agnese of Montefeltro. As an aristocrat, she received a solid humanistic education; she entered an arranged marriage to Neapolitan Ferrante Francesco d’Avalos, the Marquis of Pescara, in 1509. A distinguished military leader, d’Avalos was often away fighting for Pope Paul III or for Emperor Charles V. At their estate on the island of Ischia, she opened her court 493

VITTORIA COLONNA to artists and intellectuals, including poets Jacopo Sannazaro, Bernardo Tasso, and Cariteo. Childless, the Marchesa raised an orphaned cousin, Alfonso d’Avalos del Vasto. The Marquis died of wounds sustained in the battle of Pavia, 1525. The Marquesa left Naples for Rome and entered the convent of San Silvestro but did not take vows. She initiated Sunday gatherings focused on theological study and discussion as well as the arts and was involved with religious reformers such as Juan Valde`s, Reginald Pole, Cardinal Contarini, and Bernardino Ochino. In poor health and grieving the loss of her adopted son, she suffered a debilitating illness while residing in Viterbo in 1543. Vittoria Colonna died in the Benedictine convent of Sant’Anna in Rome, 25 February 1547, Michelangelo at her side. FIORA A. BASSANESE Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Rime de la Divina Vittoria Colonna Marchesa di Pescara, nuovamente stampate,’’ 1538. ‘‘Tutte le Rime della illustrissima ed eccellentissima Signora Vittoria Colonna marchesa di Pescara, con l’esposizione del Signor Rinaldo Corso nuovamente mandate in luce da Girolamo Ruscelli,’’ 1558. ‘‘Rime di Vittoria Colonna marchesana di Pescara corrette ed illustrate con la vita della medesima scritta da G.B. Rota,’’ 1760. ‘‘Le Rime di Vittoria Colonna corrette su i testi a penna e pubblicate con la vita della medesima dal cavaliere P. E. Visconti: Si aggiungono le poesie omesse nelle precedenti edizioni e le inedite,’’ 1840. ‘‘Rime e Lettere di Vittoria Colonna,’’ edited by Guglielmo Enrico Saltini, 1860. ‘‘Rime,’’ edited by Alan Bullock, 1982. ‘‘Sonetti: In morte di Francesco Ferrante d’Avalos marchese di Pescara,’’ edited by Tobia R. Toscano, 1998. ‘‘Sonnets for Michelangelo: A Bilingual Edition,’’ edited and translated by Abigail Brundin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

Other Carteggio, edited by Ermanno Ferrero and Giuseppe Mu¨ller, 1889; enlarged edition with Domenico Tondi, 1892.

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Further Reading Bainton, Roland H., Women of the Reformation in Germany and Italy, Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1971. Borsetto, Luciana, ‘‘Narciso ed Eco: Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento: Esemplificazioni ed appunti,’’ in Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo, edited by Marina Zancan, Venice: Marsilio, l983. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, New York: Macmillan, 1890. De Blasi, Jolanda, Le scrittrici italiane dalle origini al 1800, Florence: Nemi, 1930. Gibaldi, Joseph, ‘‘Vittoria Colonna: Child, Woman and Poet,’’ in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, AthensLondon: University of Georgia Press, 1987 (includes translations of some poetry). Jerrold, Maud F., Vittoria Colonna, with Some Account of her Friends and her Times, London: Dent-New York: Dutton, 1906. Jung, Eva-Maria, ‘‘Vittoria Colonna: Between Reformation and Counter-Reformation,’’ Review of Religion, 15 (1950–1951): 144–159. Mazzetti, Mila, ‘‘La poesia come vocazione morale: Vittoria Colonna,’’ Rassegna della letteratura italiana, 77 (1973): 58–99. Mazzone, Rocco, Vittoria Colonna e il suo canzoniere, Marsala: Martoglio, 1897. McAuliffe, Dennis J., ‘‘The Language of Spiritual Renewal in the Poetry of Pre-Tridentine Rome: The Case of Vittoria Colonna as Advocate for Reform,’’ Veltro: Rivista della civilta` italiana, 40(1996): 196–199. McAuliffe, Dennis J., ‘‘Neoplatonism in Vittoria Colonna’s Poetry: From the Secular to the Divine,’’ in Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism, edited by Konrad Eisenbichler and Olga Zorzi, Pugliese, Toronto: Dovehouse, 1986. McAuliffe, Dennis J., ‘‘Vittoria Colonna and Renaissance Poetics: Convention and Society,’’ in Il Rinascimento: Aspetti e problemi attuali, edited by Vittore Branca et al., Florence: Olschki, 1982. Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘Vittoria Colonna, Bembo e Firenze: Un caso di recezione e qualche postilla,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 44(1992): 127–155. Russell, Rinaldina, ‘‘The Mind’s Pursuit of the Divine: A Survey of Secular and Religious Themes in Vittoria Colonna’s Sonnets,’’ 26:1(Spring 1992): 14–27. Therault, Suzanne, Un Ce´nacle humaniste de la Renaissance autour de Vittoria Colonna chatelaine d’Ischia, ParisFlorence: Didier-Sansoni Antiquariato, 1968.

GIOVANNI COMISSO

COMIC MYSTERIES See Mistero Buffo (Work by Dario Fo)

GIOVANNI COMISSO (1895–1969) Giovanni Comisso represents an exceptional case in the history of early-twentieth-century Italian fiction. Because of his irregular education, his style has always been difficult to define and classify. Although many critics initially welcomed his first works for their youthful novelty, they later modified or repudiated their initial enthusiasm. At the beginning of his literary career, Comisso was frequently compared to Gabriele D’Annunzio. There were superficial similarities in their prose style, and both seemed to embody the myth of the writer who drew on his life experiences for his subject matter. While serving in the army during World War I, Comisso wrote some verses published as Poesie (Poems, 1916). His first prose work was Il porto dell’amore (The Seaport of Love, 1924), a collection of short stories that closely reflected his experiences with D’Annunzio’s legionaries during the occupation of Fiume in 1919, undertaken to protest the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, which had not given Italy that Dalmatian city. These stories, along with Giorni di guerra (War Days, 1930), based on notebooks and a journal written during the war, seek to express life in a direct and immediate way, especially in relation to nature. For Comisso, the immediacy of life, the events of the war, and the adventure of Fiume were vivid enough constitute literature in themselves; they only need to be transcribed. Giorni di guerra is in fact a sort of diary about a group of soldiers crossing the Veneto countryside after the Caporetto defeat. This directness is found also in Gente di mare (People of the Sea, 1928), a collection of short stories in a veristic style about the everyday life of people living on the Veneto coast.

Comisso had a rare aptitude for choosing the simplest and easiest and yet sharpest and most appropriate words to describe any fact or situation. However, it would be wrong to consider his prose as merely reproducing simple sensations. Comisso’s directness is associated with his profound relationship with the culture and language of the Veneto. Although he never wrote dialect literature, his language and his grammar are best understood in the Venetian cultural context. Although the atmosphere of the Veneto region molded him, Comisso always kept his own identity. He certainly had a strong literary instinct, but this instinct was nurtured by an education that, however irregular, played an important role in his formation. Thus, in opposition to earlier critical judgments, recently scholars have begun to recognize the presence of literary techniques in his work and the importance of his readings of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche. It would also be simplistic to consider Comisso’s political beliefs as hovering on the margins of official Fascism. His collaborations with Fascist newspapers like Camicia nera and his nationalistic positions might lead to this conclusion, but Comisso is better understood as a strongly individualistic writer who took an aesthetic approach to events. The fiction of the 1940s, and in particular the novels Un inganno d’amore (A Deceit of Love, 1942), Capriccio e illusione (Caprice and Illusion, 1947) and Gioventu` che muore (Dying Youth, 1949), treat a theme with profound autobiographical importance for Comisso—that of the older man or woman who falls in love with a much younger person. Although they observe the form of a 495

GIOVANNI COMISSO heterosexual romance, these works were in fact inspired by Comisso’s own passions, first for his young house servant Bruno and then for the 16year-old poet Guido Bottegal, who was killed by partisans during the war. Capriccio e illusione in particular is a moving story about the conflict between human emotions and the harsh historical reality in which the two protagonists, the mature Adele and the young Guido, find themselves caught. This autobiographical element is also found in Comisso’s last works, such as Le mie stagioni (My Seasons, 1951), a memoir-like narrative in which the author recollected the salient moments of his life, and La mia casa in campagna (My Home in the Country, 1958), which celebrates the peace of his home in Conche di Zero Branco, in the countryside near Treviso. Several of Comisso’s works belong to the genre of travel literature: Cina-Giappone (China-Japan, 1932) and Amori d’Oriente (Loves of the Orient, 1949), about the Far East; L’italiano errante per l’Italia (An Italian Roaming Italy, 1937) and La Sicilia (Sicily, 1953) about Italy; and finally Questa e` Parigi (This Is Paris, 1931), Viaggi felici (Happy Journeys, 1949), and Approdo in Grecia (Landing in Greece, 1954), about Europe. These works were, for the most part, the result of commissioned articles that the author, who traveled widely, sent to several Italian newspapers. Journalism offered him the opportunity to learn a new form of writing that was to play an important role in his later works. However, it would be difficult to find a real development in Comisso’s style throughout his life. Although it is difficult to classify his work or assign it to any particular genre, he cannot be considered an experimental writer. His prose expresses a strict connection between words and facts. Although very few of his works have been translated, in June 1930 Samuel Beckett did publish an English version of a tale from Giorni di guerra under the title ‘‘The Homecomings’’ in the journal This Quarter.

Biography Giovanni Comisso was born in Treviso on October 3, 1895, son of Antonio, a wealthy merchant, and Claudia Salsa. In 1914, having failed his secondaryschool graduation exam, he enlisted as a volunteer in the army. His service lasted six years, during which he took part enthusiastically in World War I. He participated in the occupation of Fiume together with D’Annunzio’s legionaries, 496

1919. Although he collaborated with newspapers and periodicals of Fascist tendency, he did not enroll in any political party because of his strong individualism. He earned a law degree at the University of Siena, 1924, but never practiced law. He was awarded the Bagutta Prize for Gente di mare, 1929. Comisso traveled extensively in Europe and North Africa, writing reportage for the Gazzetta del popolo and other newspapers, including La stampa, Il corriere della sera, and Il messaggero. He visited China, Japan, and Russia, 1930. He remained tied to the Veneto countryside for most of his life. Despite several friends in the Fascist party, in 1935 he had problems with censorship. He was awarded the Strega Prize for the short stories Un gatto che attraversa la strada, 1954, and the Motefeltro Prize for career achievement, 1964. In September 1968 he was hospitalized in Treviso, where he died on January 21, 1969. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Rolando Damiani and Nico Naldini, Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1916.

Fiction Il porto dell’amore, 1924; revised as Al vento dell’Adriatico, 1928; definitive edition as Il porto dell’amore, 1959. Gente di mare, 1928. Giorni di guerra, 1930 Il delitto di Fausto Diamante, 1933. Storia di un patrimonio, 1933. Felicita` dopo la noia, 1940. Un inganno d’amore, 1942. Capriccio e illusione, 1947 Gioventu` che muore, 1949. Una donna al giorno, 1949. Le mie stagioni, 1951. Capricci italiani, 1952. Un gatto attraversa la strada, 1954. La mia casa di campagna, 1958. Satire italiane, 1960. Gioco d’infanzia, edited by Nico Naldini, 1987. Solstizio metafisico, edited by Annalisa Colusso, 1999.

Travel Writing Questa e` Parigi, 1931. Cina-Giappone, 1932; revised as Donne gentili, 1958. L’italiano errante per l’Italia, 1937. Amori d’Oriente, 1949. Viaggi felici, 1949. La Sicilia, 1953. Approdo in Grecia, 1954.

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE Memoir Diario 1951–1964, 1969.

Letters Trecento lettere di Giovanni Comisso a Maria e Natale Mazzola`: 1925–1968, edited by Enzo Dematte´, 1972. Caro Toni, 1983. Il giovane Comisso e le sue lettere a casa, 1914–1920, edited by Luigi Urettini, 1985. Vita nel tempo: lettere, 1905–1968, edited by Nico Naldini, 1989.

Further Reading Accame Bobbio, Aurelia, Giovanni Comisso, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Comisso, e Pisis e il dannunzianesimo,’’ in Figure e problemi di narrativa contemporanea, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960.

Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Giovanni Comisso,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Novecento. I contemporanei, vol. 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1979. Duncan, Derek, ‘‘The Queerness of Colonial Space: Giovanni Comisso’s Travels with Fascism,’’ in In a Queer Place: Sexuality and Belonging in British and European Contexts, edited by Kaye Chedgzoy et al., Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Naldini, Nico, Vita di Giovanni Comisso, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Naldini, Nico, and Cino Boccazzi (editors), Album Comisso, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1995. Pullini, Giorgio, Comisso, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Pullini, Giorgio (editor), Giovanni Comisso, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Ricorda, Ricciarda, ‘‘Rassegna Comissiana (1969–1989),’’ Quaderni Veneti, 11(1990), 189–229.

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE Commedia dell’arte is the ambiguous but common designation for the type of theater, featuring masked characters and schematic plots (a canovaccio), that arose in Italy between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries and became widespread in France and throughout Europe. It is also a genre that inspired the most diverse theatrical experiences. The term, initially part of actors’ jargon, first appears in written literature in the eighteenth century controversy between Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, between the ‘‘reformed’’ authors’ theater and the traditional actors’ theater. Goldoni’s Il teatro comico (The Comic Theater, 1750) offers the first full discussion of the old commedia dell’arte. Goldoni is followed by Giuseppe Baretti, commenting on the teatro comico and Gozzi’s Il teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino (The Comic Theater in the Pilgrim’s Tavern, 1760). Yet none of these works consider commedia dell’arte as a ‘‘genre.’’ Goldoni helps extend the meaning of the term when he translates it into French in his Me´moires (1784). In addition to its accepted meanings (like ‘‘les come´dies de l’art,’’ ‘‘une come´die de l’art’’) and synonyms (‘‘come´die a` l’impromptu,’’ ‘‘des masques,’’ ‘‘a` l’italienne’’), Goldoni speaks of a tradition of the ‘‘come´die de l’art’’ in the singular.

It is in this particular French usage that commedia becomes almost synonymous with theater: la Come´die Franc¸aise, la Come´die Italienne; la come´die humaine. George and Maurice Sand invested the term with the romantic sense of the theatrical art (for example, the art dramatique of The´ophile Gautier or the art ignoble defended by Jules Janin [Masques et bouffons, 1860]): Nous avons entrepris d’esquisser l’histoire d’un genre de repre´sentation sce´nique qui n’existe plus en France, et qui n’y a meˆme jamais porte´ son nom propre. En effet, ce genre s’est appele´ chez nous come´die a` l’impromptu, come´die improvise´e, come´die sur canevas. Aucune de ces de´nominations n’exprime suffisamment ce que les Italiens ont appele´ comedia dell’arte, c’est-a`-dire, litte´ralement, come´die de l’art, et, par extension, la come´die parfaite, le nec plus ultra de l’art. Nous prions donc le lecteur franc¸ais d’accepter, une fois pour toutes, ce titre italien, que rien ne saurait remplacer avec avantage, la comedia dell’arte We have attempted to sketch the history of a genre of scenic representation which no longer exists in France, and which has never even born its proper name there. In fact we call this genre impromptu comedy, improvised comedy, comedy on a schematic plot. None of these descriptions sufficiently expresses what the Italians have called comedia dell’arte, that is to say, literally, comedy of art, and, by extension, perfect comedy, the ne plus

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COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE ultra of art. We therefore ask the French reader to accept, once and for all, this Italian title, which nothing could replace to advantage, the comedia dell’arte.

Twentieth-century discussions of the lexical meaning of the expression, which seem limited in comparison, are divided between those who give it the meaning of ‘‘profession’’ (Benedetto Croce, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte, 1932) and those who see it as a ‘‘singular talent’’ (Allardyce Nicoll, The World of Arlequin, 1962). For a long time the emergence of the commedia dell’arte was attributed to the first actors’ contract (Padua, 1545; year of the beginning of the Council of Trent). Today it is clear that the professional commedia was not born with the first commedia degli zanni (comedy of the zanies). The spread of stanze per la commedia (comedy rooms), suitable for companies to stage their performances, was also an important factor in the creation of a comedy circuit. The use of masks did not itself separate the commedia from the medieval theater, where underworld figures are often represented by masks. Ferdinando Taviani and Mirella Schino suggested that the commedia matured into a theatrical phenomenon only when, in addition to these three aspects (professionalism, circuit, mask) women also took part in productions. Women, especially cultured courtesans and poetesses, often brought to their comic characters a knowledge of the classic fabula of Plautus and Terence (Il segreto della commedia dell’arte, 1982). Among the most famous of these women were Lucretia Senese, the first woman to have a contract (1564), Vittoria Piissimi, Silvia Roncagli, Isabella Andreini, Vincenza Armani, Diana Ponti, and Virginia Ramponi. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, there are records of the first tourne´es of companies to Nordlingen, Nuremberg, Strasburg, Vienna, Munich, London, Poland, Spain (to Seville, Toledo, Guadalajara, and Madrid) and above all to France, where from 1570 onward, legendary visits by the Confidenti, the Gelosi, and the Accesi followed one after the other. It was in 1600, during one of these visits, that Tristano Martinelli made a great success of the maschera of Arlecchino. Arlechino, settling into the name and into costume of a pulp character from Nordic medieval legends, acquires the attributes (diabolical, jesterlike, and folkloric features) that make him the first paradoxical emblem of things ‘‘made in Italy.’’ The spread of the commedia throughout Europe led to the creation of permanent theaters in Madrid, Vienna, Dresden, and Warsaw, but above all in Paris, where the Ancien The´aˆtre 498

Italien was founded (1660–1697) by Domenico Locatelli (Trivellino), Domenico Biancolelli (Harlequin), Angelo Costantini (Mezetin), Evaristo Gherardi (Harlequin), and Tiberio Fiorilli (Scaramouche). For a considerable period, this company shared quarters at the Hotel de Bourgogne with Molie`re’s troupe. After the famous ‘‘expulsion’’ of the Italians (supposedly because they were censored, but actually because they were competition for the native French troupe), the theater was reborn as the Come´die Italienne (1716–1780; after 1762, directed by Goldoni) through the efforts of the chief comedy actor Luigi Riccoboni (Lelio), Antonio Tommaso Visentini (Harlequin), and later with the Pantaloons Antonio Collalto and Carlo Antonio Veronese, and the last Harlequin, Carlo Bertinazzi. The company by now consisted of naturalized Frenchmen (Ange Lazzari). It learned to live with the bonfires on which the French Revolutionaries burned maschera characters, which they regarded as emblems of a feudal and immovable society, in the public squares. The names of these pioneers and their creations become legends, with or without a maschera: in the sixteenth century, Alberto Naselli (Zan Ganassa), Tristano and Drusiano Martinelli (Harlequin), Flaminio Scala (Flavio), Adriano Valerini (Aurelio), Giulio Pasquati (Pantaloon), Giovanni Pellesini (Pedrolino), Giovanni Battista Amorevoli (Franceschina), Francesco Andreini (Capitan Spavento), Pier Maria Cecchini (Frittellino); in the seventeenth century, Silvio Fiorillo (Capitan Mattamoros and Pulcinella), Francesco Gabrielli (Scapino), Niccolo` Barbieri (Beltrame), Giovanni Battista Andreini (Lelio); in the eighteenth century, Attanasio Zannoni (Brighella) and Antonio Sacchi (Truffaldino). There is a vast, local literature on these figures and, today, a renewed interest in their biographies as a means of understanding the commedia. The actors skillfully promoted these historic companies (Uniti, Desiosi, Fedeli, and Cortesi), publicizing their famous battles against censorship and above all publishing their productions, from the burlesque—Tristano Martinelli, Compositions de Rhe´torique (Compositions of Rhetoric, 1601), to the first collections of texts—Francesco Andreini, Le bravure del Capitano Spavento (The Courageous Deeds of Capitano Spavento, 1607)— and schematic plots—Flaminio Scala, Il teatro delle favole rappresentative (The Theater of Representative Tales, 1611)—up to the first theoretical elaborations of the commedia in Pier Maria Cecchini, Brevi discorsi intorno alla Comedia

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE (Brief Discourses on Comedy, 1616), and Niccolo` Barbieri, La supplica (The Plea, 1634). Of particular interest, especially in light of avant-garde recuperations of the commedia, is the characteristic way of producing shows that combine the maschera and canovaccio. The maschera (the more ancient heritage) ensured great visibility and immediate recognition, even in situations en plein air; furthermore, the mask enabled the actor to improvise easily within a given structure. The schematic plot of the canovaccio, a development of the mature commedia dell’arte, described the ‘‘actions’’ and intrigues of the character. It staged entrances and exits, the variety of types and their opposition to each other, and comic and dramatic progressions with spectacular effects. In combining maschera and canovaccio, the first companies were able to produce shows more quickly and to keep more of them in their repertory for a longer time. Even during the long tourne´es, they were able to adapt themselves to open and closed spaces, to a popular or a refined public, to Italians and foreigners. At this stage, the first inventories of schematic plots came primarily from Anglo-Saxon historiography: Nicoll was the first to list 760 titles, followed by Lea, who collected around 700. Pandolfi published a slightly more extensive list, providing, with few exceptions, a summary of each plot with brief comments. Heck, in the most extensive bibliography of the commedia dell’arte up to the present day, listed the names and place of origin of 820 titles. Zorzi left his transcription of the main Italian collections in existence incomplete in order to pursue a comparative analysis of the plots. The commedia as a genre, indeed as an archetype, can be traced from romantic confusion perpetuated by the Sands, who in their first ‘‘encyclopedia’’ of the commedia dell’arte annexed the French foires to the phenomenon, through the Ope´ra Comique, Goldoni, Gozzi, and Ruzzante; the French pantomime; the English arlequinade; and some fixed Italian types (the Milanese meneghino of Carlo Maria Maggi, 1697; the stenterello of Luigi Del Buono, 1776, to the nineteenth-century Pulcinellas of the Cammaranos and the Petitos). It was transformed by the avant-garde in the first quarter of the twentieth century. At first the mask and the image of the tumbler as a solitary, acrobatic artist were adopted, as Jean Starobinski stated, by the figurative arts: James Ensor, George Rouault, and Pablo Picasso, the Futurists, and even by abstractionism (Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque, 1970). The commedia then exerted a strong influence on dancing, on the creations

of Mikhail Fokine (Arlequinade, 1905; Carnaval, 1910; Adventures of Harlequin, 1922; The Immortal Pierrot, 1925), of Leonid Myasin (Petruska, 1916; Pulcinella, 1921), and above all on the Russian ballets of Sergei Diagilev. In 1917, these various strains of the European avant-garde converged in the extraordinary production of Parade (book by Jean Cocteau, music by Eric Satie, scenes and costumes by Picasso). The epic poem of the comedians and the romantic rhetoric of the performance that ‘‘must go on’’ were on the other hand preferred by opera: Le maschere (premie`re 1901) by Pietro Mascagni; Pierrot lunaire (premie`re 1912) by Arnold Scho¨nberg; Arlecchino e Turandot by Ferruccio Busoni (premie`re 1917). The Russians, with their formalistic taste, rediscovered the spectacular element and acrobatics of the commedia for modern theater. Vsevolod Mejerchol’d staged Balagancik (The Tumblers’ Hut, 1906) by Aleksa`ndr Blok, Sarf Kolombiny (Colombina’s Scarf, 1910) from the pantomime by Arthur Schnitzler, Arlekin chodataj svadeb (Harlequin Para Faun, 1910) by Vladimir Solov’ev. He founded a magazine, whose name was taken from Carlo Gozzi’s theatrical fable Ljubov’k trem apel’sinam (The Love of Three Oranges, 1914), in which he published essays, schematic plots, and debates. His collaborators included Konstantin Miklasevsij, noted for transposing elements drawn from iconography into the ‘‘biomechanics’’ of the actor; Nicolaj Evreinov, who staged his own Harlequin work Veselaja smert’ (The Joyous Death, 1909); Aleksa`ndr Tairov who staged two tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1920 and 1922); Solov’ev who wrote and managed Prodelki Smeral’diny (The Cunning Tricks of Smeraldina, 1921) from an Italian scenario; Evgenij Vachtangov, who staged a historic Turandot for which Konstantin Stanislavskij congratulated him. In France, Jacques Copeau moved to the country with a band of dreamers, destined to become the future Copiaus, in search of a new public and new conditions for the actor. Between 1924 and 1930, they produced Arlequin magicien (Harlequin the Magician), Les sottises de Gilles (The Follies of Gilles), Gilles cherche un me´tier (Gilles Looks for a Profession), and Jean Bourguignon. His entourage, Le´on Chancerel and Pierre Duchartre, Jean Daste´ and Michel SaintDenis produced essays, compositions, and shows that constituted popular theater in France. In the meantime, there was a renewed interest in the history of the commedia in Italy, thanks to the work of Luigi Rasi, Benedetto Croce, Ireneo Sanesi, and Gordon Craig, who founded a magazine in Florence, The Mask (1908), and in Europe, with the 499

COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE essays of Miklacˇevskij, who in 1914 summarized the discoveries that followed on the experiences of Mejerchol’d; and of Duchartre, who in 1925 summarized the research of Copeau and Chancerel. The symbolic closing of this great cycle of revivals of the commedia dell’arte was perhaps the 1934 Volta Convention in Rome, presided over by Luigi Pirandello, in which Renato Simoni accused the Russians of having turned the idea of the commedia into a fetish. While Tairov defended that great season, Stepan Mokul’skij, risking selfcriticism, confronted the directors and historians who had made a myth out of the commedia. Some productions by the Teatro di Regia remain memorable: two productions of Servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters), one directed by Max Reinhardt, with Hermann Thimig as Harlequin (Vienna 1924), and the other by Giorgio Strehler, with Marcello Moretti (Milan 1947, since 1952 with the leather masks recuperated by Amleto Sartori). Other memorable productions were La commedia degli zanni (The Comedy of the Zanies, 1956) staged by Giovanni Poli, organizer of the Teatro A l’Avogaria; some performances by Ariane Mnouchkine, Le Capitaine Fracasse (The Captain Fracasse, 1964) and L’age d’or (The Golden Age, 1975), in which, as Copeau, he attempted to make the masks contemporary. Between the 1960s and 1970s, militant groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Florentine Pupi e Fresedde, and the TAG Teatro in Venice, staged a succession of revivals that led to the 1er Festival International de Commedia dell’Arte in Val de Marne in 1983. The current heirs working in this ‘‘reinvented’’ tradition are yet to be determined: They may be the proselytes of French mime, from Jacques Lecoq to Marcel Marceau, the children of art like Peppe Barra, the actors coming from the experience of Strehler’s Servitore (Enrico Bonavera and Renzo Fabbris), or lone researchers, such as the female Harlequin Claudia Contin; or, above all, the marvelous, isolated case of Dario Fo, who relates his experience in Manuale minimo dell’attore (The Actor’s Minimum Manual, 1987). It can generally be said that the theater conserves intact the desire to decipher the commedia on stage. Recent work has been done of the iconography of the commedia by Jacques Callot, Claude Gillot, and Antoine Watteau. Attempts have also been made to conduct anthropological researches on the gestural meanings of the masks, comparing them to those in oriental theater. But the main source of interest today is, perhaps, the corpus of approximately 1,000 canovacci that have survived, 500

representing theatrical writing across many centuries. Flaminio Scala, in his prologue to Il finto marito (The Fake Husband, 1619) was the first to suggest that drama of real ‘‘actions’’ around which focused of the work of Stanislavski, Copeau, and Antonin Artaud. Pier Maria Cecchini, reflecting on the saying ‘‘canovacci lombardi, lazzi napoletani’’ (Northern plots, Southern gags), anticipated the twentieth-century problem of editing the commedia and understanding its effect on the public. The explosive theatrical effect of having ethnic, linguistic, and social opposites confront each other is explored in the theater of Jerzy Grotowski or Eugenio Barba. For this reason the vast corpus of surviving scenarios seems likely to be the next frontier for studies on the commedia dell’arte, helping us to penetrate the ‘‘secrets’’ of Italian theater and the fascination with its masks. ROBERTO CUPPONE

Further Reading Apollonio, Mario, Storia della commedia dell’arte, RomeMilan: Augustea, 1930. Attinger, Gustave, L’Esprit de la Commedia dell’Arte dans le The´aˆtre Franc¸ais, Paris-Neuchatel: Librairie The´atrale, 1950. Barbieri, Nicolo`, La supplica, discorso famigliare di Nicolo` Barbieri detto Beltrame diretto a coloro che scrivendo o parlando de’ comici trascurando i meriti delle azzioni virtuose. Lettera per que’ galantuomini che non sono in tutto critici ne´ affatto balordi, Venezia: M. Ginammi, 1634. Bartoli, Francesco Saverio, Notizie istoriche de’ comici italiani che fiorirono intorno all’anno MDC fino ai giorni presenti, 2 vols., Padua: Conzatti, 1782. Cecchini, Pier Maria, Brevi discorsi intorno alla Comedia, Comedianti & Spettatori di P. M. Cecchini Comico Acceso et Gentilhuomo di S. M. Cesarea dove si comprende quali rappresentationi si possino ascoltare e permettere, Naples: Roncagliolo, 1616. Cecchini, Pier Maria, Frutti delle moderne comedie et avvisi a chi le recita, Padua: Guareschi, 1628. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte, Bari: Laterza, 1932. Cuppone, Roberto, CDA. Il mito della Commedia dell’Arte nell’Ottocento francese, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Duchartre, Pierre Louis, La Commedia dell’Arte et ses enfants, Paris: Editions d’Art et Industrie, 1955. Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari. La commedia dell’arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Fo, Dario, Manuale minimo dell’attore, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Gambelli, Delia, Arlecchino a Parigi. I: Dall’inferno alla corte del Re Sole, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Heck, Thomas, Commedia dell’Arte: A Guide to the Primary and Secondary Literature, New York-London: Garland, 1988.

COMMUNISM Lea, K. M., Italian Popular Comedy: A Study in the Commedia dell’Arte 1560–1630, with Special Reference to the English Stage, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934. Mariti, Luciano (editor), La Commedia dell’Arte. Alle origini del teatro moderno. Atti del convegno di studi. Pontedera 28–30 maggio 1976, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Marotti, Ferruccio, and Giovanna Romei, La commedia dell’arte e la societa` barocca: la professione del teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. Mic, Constant (Konstantin Miklasˇevskij), La Commedia dell’Arte, ou le the´aˆtre des come´diens italiens des XVIe, XVIle et XVIIIe sie`cles, Paris: Schiffrin, aux e´ditions de la Ple´iade, 1927. Molinari, Cesare, La Commedia dell’Arte, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Nicoll, Allardyce, The World of Arlequin: A Critical Study of the Commedia dell’Arte, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1963. Pandolfi, Vito, La Commedia dell’Arte. Storia e testi, 6 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1957–1961. Perrucci, Andrea, Dell’arte rappresentativa premeditata et all’improvviso. Parti due. Giovevole non solo a chi si diletta di rappresentare, ma a’ predicatori, oratori, accademici e curiosi, Naples: Mutio, 1699.

Riccoboni, Luigi, Discorso della Commedia all’improvviso e scenari inediti, edited by Irene Mamczarz, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1973. Riccoboni, Luigi, Histoire du The´aˆtre Italien depuis la de´cadence de la Come´die Latine, avec un catalogue des Trage´dies et Come´dies imprime´es depuis l’an 1500 jusqu’a` l’an 1600 et une dissertation sur la trage´die moderne, Paris: Delormel, 1728. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’arte: A Documentary History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Sand, Maurice, Masques et bouffons. Come´die Italienne, textes et dessins par Maurice Sand, gravures par A. Manceau, pre´face par Georges Sand, 2 vols., Paris: Le´vy, 1860. Starobinski, Jean, Portrait de l’artiste en saltimbanque, Gene`ve: Slatkine, 1970. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della commedia dell’arte. La memoria delle compagnie italiane del XVI, XVII e XVIII secolo, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982. Tessari, Roberto, Commedia dell’Arte: la Maschera e l’Ombra, Milan: Mursia, 1981. Zorzi, Ludovico, L’attore, la commedia, il drammaturgo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

COMMUNISM Italian Communism owes its peculiar theoretical structure to Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), whose capital work Quaderni dal carcere (Prison Notebooks) was published in six volumes posthumously after World War II under the supervision of the secretary of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964). Gramsci’s original interpretation of Marxism—deeply influenced by Hegelian philosophy, and especially by the Hegelian concepts of dialectics and conscience—was based on the role of intellectuals in the social revolution. In his vision, intellectuals were the conscience of the proletariat, instead of being the ‘‘notary’’ of the status quo, as had been the case with the traditional intellectual (of which, for Gramsci, Benedetto Croce was a symbol). Thus, it would be impossible to have a Communist revolution in Italy comparable to that in Russia because each country and each society has its own laws of evolution: The Italian revolution would have a longer course, based on the development of a precise social and political awareness. For this reason, Gramsci was critical of the Russian way to Communism, based on violence and constraint.

He studied the process of formation of the modern state in Europe and the Italian Risorgimento as a failed revolution, and in a famous letter to Togliatti written on 14 October 1926, he articulated his critique of Russian Communism and Stalin’s rule, defining the Russian revolution as a revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital. For him, Communism was a form of education, a pedagogy, a critical vision of the world, and intellectuals played a central role in the evolution of a community and a state. The main problem in Italy was that the intellectual class had never been independent and autonomous. In this context, Communism was an important evolutionary factor, especially in literature. Italian contemporary literature should free itself from its tradition and its conventions and become a means of knowledge and awareness. Gramscian thought provided the basis for the Alleanza per la cultura, a movement in support of the Socialist and Communist electoral alliance in 1948. Founded in Florence under the leadership of Emilio Sereni (1907–1977), the man in charge for the cultural policy in the Partito Comunista Italiano, the Alleanza includes 501

COMMUNISM among its participants intellectuals and artists such as Sibilla Aleramo, Corrado Alvaro, Anna Banti, Giorgio Bassani, Carlo Bo, Alfonso Gatto, Mario Luzi, Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Umberto Saba, Vittorio Sereni, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Elio Vittorini, and Cesare Zavattini. In the 1950s, Italian writers were profoundly influenced by Gramsci’s vision, and Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicated to him one of his most important books of poetry, Le ceneri di Gramsci (Gramsci’s Ashes, 1957). In 1949, Edizioni Rinascita published Politica e cultura (Politics and Culture), a collection of essays written by the Russian ideologist and leader Andrei Zdanov (1896–1948), in which the author theorized the development of culture under the strict guidance of politics. However, after 1956, several Italian intellectuals began to move away from Communism as a result of the Krusciov Report on Stalinism and, above all, of the violent invasion of Hungary. Many, including Vittorini and Luca Canali (1925–), declared that the Russian invasion demonstrated that the Communist state was similar to a dictatorship, and they either left the party or were expelled from it. Calvino’s crisis was perfectly described in his novel Il cavaliere inesistente (The Nonexistent Knight, 1959), the symbolic story of a man whose life is reduced to a pure existential illusion. In 1961, Vittorini opened an important debate on the relationship between literature and industry in Il Menabo`, the literary review that he directed. He stressed the inability of Italian culture to describe and understand the new social transformations. A number of novels were in fact trying to portray the problems of industrial society, such as Ottiero Ottieri’s Donnarumma all’assalto (Donnarumma on the Assault, 1959), which describes the life in a factory in southern Italy; Paolo Volponi’s Memoriale (Memorandum, 1962), the story of a worker and the mental illness he contracts while working in an alienating factory environment; Luciano Bianciardi’s La vita agra (The Bitter Life, 1962), on a provincial intellectual who moves to Milan and finds a community deeply changed by the new economic conditions and deprived of its humanity and solidarity; and Lucio Mastronardi’s Il calzolaio di Vigevano (The Shoemaker of Vigevano, 1962), which describes the desire for money of the owner of a small shoe factory. In many of the ‘‘industrial novels’’ published between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, the despotic, dictatorial, and destructive aspects of capitalists and capitalism were extensively described and analysed. In the opinion of the Italian Communist leaders, however, 502

capitalism was only a necessary phase of transition toward Communist society: In this perspective, writers who presented a simple, personal, and individual escape from the problems of capitalist society were to be condemned. In this period Calvino published three influential essays, Il mare dell’oggettivita` (The Sea of Objectivity, 1960), La sfida al labirinto (The Challenge of the Labyrinth, 1962), and ‘‘L’antitesi operaia’’ (The Working Class Antithesis, 1964), in which he argued that literature must not be a pure acceptance of the objective world, but—in a Gramscian way—a place of knowledge and awareness. The aim of the literary work is to change the world. However, a new literary and political review founded in 1962, Quaderni piacentini, was very critical of the Partito Comunista Italiano and its cultural and political tradition. A totally new literary style and a totally new way of looking at the world were necessary to describe the new reality. This new style was illustrated by the anthology I Novissimi (The Newest, 1961), edited by Alfredo Giuliani, and by the postmodernist literary movement Gruppo 63, founded at a conference held in Palermo in 1963. Its main theoretical argument was that, since the world has been reduced to a commodity, the literary work has simply to reproduce and show the chaotic commodification of the world. In the late 1960s the student movement began with the idea of freeing Communism from the control of the Party and of bringing the imagination to power. For the generation of 1968, Communism was a personal achievement, obtained by rejecting the state and society and fighting against them. Likewise, the theatrical groups that operated outside the traditional circuits and the cooperatives linked to the far left, including Nuova Scena (in which Dario Fo participated at his most radical), accepted the negative myth of the supposed resigned surrender of social-democracy. During the 1970s, a part of the movement of the ‘‘New Left’’ degenerated, theorizing the necessity of political violence. This was the beginning of the terrorist group Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), which declared itself the heir of the Resistance against Nazi-Fascism at the end of World War II and fought against the state and the intellectual middle class. On 16 March 1978, the Red Brigades abducted Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Rome and executed him after a 55-day imprisonment and a ‘‘trial’’ held by a self-styled ‘‘popular court.’’ Leonardo Sciascia dedicated a book, L’Affaire Moro (The Moro Affair, 1978), to the letters Moro wrote from his prison. According to many scholars, the terroristic strategy of the 1970s was so extremist

COMMUNISM that Italian intellectuals found it impossible to describe it in essays and novels. Sciascia published a satirical novel, Candido, ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia (Candide, or a Dream in Sicily, 1977) that criticized bitterly the 1968 generation and its schematism, ideology, and lack of realism. In order to reintroduce the Gramscian point of view in the public discussion on Communism, in 1975 the publisher Einaudi issued a new edition of Gramsci’s works, edited by the Communist scholar Valentino Gerratana. But for the 1968 movement, Communism was not so much a cultural and political strategy or an intellectual analysis of social and economic structures, but rather a way of life: the quotidian sharing of resources in illegally occupied buildings and the total rejection of society and its laws. Nanni Balestrini described the student and workers’ movement in Turin in his novel Vogliamo tutto (We Want Everything, 1971). Other novels on the movement include Nord e sud uniti nella lotta (North and South United in the Struggle, 1974) and La fabbrica dei pazzi (The Factory of Madmen, 1978), by Vincenzo Guerrazzi (1940–). Even in Umberto Eco’s first novel, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980), the protagonist’s description of the heretical sects and of their struggle against the institutions (the Pope and the Vatican) during the thirteenth century can be interpreted as the description of the left-wing factions and their fights in Italy. In the 1980s, Communism was primarily considered as the analysis of the beginning of modern capitalism and of the development of neo-capitalism. After the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as Secretary of the Russian Communist Party in 1985, and his political and social reforms, the Soviet Union crumbled. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Partito Comunista Italiano changed its name to Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS). A smaller and nostalgic party, Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, was founded in 1991, but it was clear that the history of Italian Communism was at its twilight.

Further Reading Aglietta, Adelaide, Diario di una giurata popolare al processo delle Brigate rosse, Milan: Milano Libri, 1979. Ajello, Nello, Intellettuali e Pci: 1944–1958, Bari: Laterza, 1979. Alicata, Mario, Scritti letterari, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1968. Asor Rosa, Alberto, Intellettuali e classe operaia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Bobbio, Norberto, Politica e cultura, Turin: Einaudi, 1955. Cafagna, Lucio, C’era una volta...riflessioni sul comunismo italiano, Padua: Marsilio, 1991. Cammett, John, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967. Canfora, Luciano, Togliatti e i dilemmi della politica, Bari: Laterza, 1989. Fiori, Giuseppe, Vita di Enrico Berlinguer, Rome: Laterza, 1989. Fortini, Franco, Dieci inverni: 1947–1957, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Galli, Giorgio, Storia del partito armato 1968–1982, Milan: Rizzoli, 1986. Garin, Eugenio, Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Gramsci, Antonio, Opere, Turin: Einaudi, 1948–1951. Lucia, Piero, Intellettuali italiani del secondo dopoguerra: impegno, crisi, speranza, Naples: Guida, 2003. Meade, Robert, The Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism, Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990. Medici, Rita, Giobbe e Prometeo: filosofia e politica nel pensiero di Gramsci, Florence: Alinea, 2000. Ostellino, Piero (editor), Gorbaciov e i suoi fratelli, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Rosini, Emilio, L’ala dell’angelo: Itinerario di un comunista perplesso, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003. Scalia, Gianni, Critica, letteratura e ideologia: 1958–1963, Padua: Marsilio, 1968. Togliatti, Palmiro, I corsivi di Roderigo: interventi politicoculturali dal 1944 al 1964, Bari: De Donato, 1976. Togliatti, Palmiro, La politica culturale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Vittoria, Albertina, Togliatti e gli intellettuali, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Vittorini, Elio, Gli anni del Politecnico, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica, The Moro Morality Play: Terrorism as Social Drama, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

STEFANO ADAMI See also: Socialism

503

DINO COMPAGNI

DINO COMPAGNI (CA. 1246/47–1324) The Florentine historian and Guelf politician Dino Compagni wrote his important, three-volume Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne’ tempi suoi (Chronicle of Events Occurring in His Times) between the years 1310 and 1312. This work, not published until 1726 in Ludovico Muratori’s Rerum italicarum scriptores (Volume IX), covers the history of Florence from 1280 to 1312. It thus differs from the history writing of its time in not going back to the origins of human civilization. Actually, it is an autobiographical book, a reflection on the social and political history of Florence written with indignation and sorrowful passion. In his precise descriptions of individuals and in reports of his own actions as a political figure and as a public administrator, Compagni dramatizes the conflict between his conscience, his love for his hometown, his Christianity, and the unscrupulous violence, the fraud, the treachery, the opportunism of the Florentine political leaders. In this light, Compagni’s major historical work demonstrates the same strong moral passion of Dante’s Divina Commedia. They both analyze the same period of Florentine history, the same characters, and the same events. They both pronounce, after their reflections, the same judgment about the moral decay and the mediocrity and hypocrisy of the Florentines. Dino Compagni’s political activity, the most important source for his Cronica, began in 1282, when, as a guelfo bianco (White Guelf ), he promoted the creation of a new institution, the Priorato delle Arti (Priorate of the Arts). He supported Giano della Bella (expelled in 1295), a leader of the popular classes who helped enact the Ordinamenti di Giustizia (Ordinances of Justice), a democratic constitution for the city government that prescribed that no man of noble family should be appointed Priore. In the year 1300 Compagni, along with Dante, also a white Guelf, was among the savi or wise men who suggested to the Priori that all the leaders of the fighting factions be banished from Florence. In Compagni’s opinion, the superbia (haughtiness) and the ambizione (ambition) of the powerful Florentine families gave birth to the civil conflict that had developed in a strong crescendo: from the division between Guelf and Ghibelline in 1215, to 504

the conflict between the Cerchi and Donati families, divided again between the Bianchi and Neri, who fought until Charles of Valois intervened and banished the Bianchi from Florence. Due to its inner violence, instability, and political immaturity, Florence was not able to rule itself and so had invited, in the most important episodes of its history, the intervention of outside powers. According to Compagni, the endemic conflicts were rooted in old resentments, and many political figures were using them for their own advantage. Compagni’s intelligent and acute description of Pope Bonifacio VIII, for instance, to whom he dedicated the first chapters of the second volume of his Cronica, is close to Dante’s own description. Compagni was both a witness and a participant in the conflicts he was representing, so that his account is less a history or chronicle than a personal diary, often lacking in objectivity, of the White Guelf defeat. As chronicler, Compagni hurls invective at his adversaries and hopes for the punitive intervention of the Emperor Henry VII, to whom he dedicates the last part of his work. According to Compagni’s interpretation, the ‘‘capital sin’’ of the city was the unethical political behavior of the ruling classes. The threat of the total destruction of the city after Montaperti should have taught them to rule only for the good of the city. But the powerful Florentine families persisted in using the political and social divisions, the aversions and hostilities of the city to their own advantage and for their own purposes. In the second part of the second volume of his chronicle, Compagni analyzes the misrule of the Neri in Florence and the various attempts of the exiles to return to their hometown and assume power. Like Dante, Compagni saw in the Emperor Henry VII a wise person, a figure of providential intervention, the repairer of all the city’s evils and conflicts. For him the recent and violent deaths of the Neri leaders were a clear sign of the coming of Divine justice. Compagni’s Cronica is a political history infused with a profound sense of drama and a deep rhetorical consciousness that is most evident in the chornicles’ descriptive parts: in the many pages dedicated to portraits, often very lively and picturesque,

COMPIUTA DONZELLA admonitions, invectives. A clear sample of this descriptive ability is the portrait of Messer Vieri de’ Cerchi, the leader of the Bianchi faction, a rich and generous nobleman, ‘‘senza malizia ne` buon parlare’’ (with neither malice nor good speech), as well as his portrait of Messer Corso Donati, the leader of the Neri, a ‘‘knight’’ similar to Catiline, cruel, skilful in oratory, beautiful, well dressed, ‘‘di mente sottile, sempre inteso a far cattive cose, superbo e per cio` detto Il Barone’’ (with a subtle mind, always intent on bad things, superb and for that reason called The Baron). The anonymous didactic and allegorical poem called ‘‘Intelligenza’’ (‘‘Lady Intelligence,’’ 1308–1309), published in 1850, is also attributed to Compagni. It is a poem in nona rima at whose center is a lady, symbol of the human intellect, whose splendid palace embodies the spirit of the literature of courtesy, the philosophy of Averroes and of medieval bestiaries.

Biography We do not have a clear document about the precise date of Compagni’s birth. According to the interpretation of the scholar Nicola Ottokar, he was born in Florence between 1246 and 1247; in the opinion of other scholars, the year of his birth was 1260 or even 1256/1257. Son to the rich merchant Compagno di Perino, he had a good traditional education in grammar and rhetoric. In 1269, we find him a member of the Silk Guild. In 1284 he took part to the Consiglio generale del Podesta`, acting as a counsellor to the various Consigli that ruled Florence in the following years. During the battle of Campaldino, he was Priore. In 1298 he was member—then captain—of the Confraternita

religiosa della Madonna di Or San Michele. Compagni died in Florence on 26 February 1324. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘L’Intelligenza,’’ 1850.

Historical Writing Cronica delle cose occorrenti ne’ tempi suoi, 1726, edited by Guido Bezzola, 1995; as Dino Compagni e la sua Cronica (includes poetry), edited by Isidoro Del Lungo, 3 vols., 1879–1887; critical edition by Davide Cappi, 2000; as Dino Compagni’s Chronicle of Florence, translated and edited by Daniel E. Bornstein, 1986.

Further Reading Cappi, Davide, Del Lungo editore di Dino Compagni, Rome: Palazzo Borromini, 1995. Ciccuto, Marcello, Il restauro de ‘‘L’Intelligenza’’ e altri studi dugenteschi, Pisa: Giardini, 1985. Folena, Franco, Filologia testuale e storia linguistica, Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1961. Luzzatto, Gino, Dai servi della gleba agli albori del capitalismo. Saggi di storia economica, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Monaci, Ernesto (editor), Crestomazia italiana dei primi secoli, Rome-Naples: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1955. Moro, Donato, Fonti e autonomia di stile nella Cronica di Dino Compagni, Galatina: Editrice Salentina, 1971. Palmarocchi, Roberto, Cronisti del Duecento, Milan: Rizzoli, 1935. Sapegno, Natalino, Rimatori del Trecento, Milano: Ricciardi, 1952. Vallone, Aldo, Percorsi danteschi, Florence: Le Lettere, 1991. Zanella, Giacomo (editor), Storici e storiografi del medioevo italiano, Bologna: Patron, 1984.

COMPIUTA DONZELLA To La Compiuta Donzella (literally, the accomplished damsel), the only female voice in vernacular poetry of the thirteenth century, the Canzoniere Vaticano (Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticano Lat. 3793) ascribes three sonnets, one of which is responsive in a tenzone with an

anonymous Tuscan poet. Nothing is known of the person behind the text: Although it appears in contemporary documentary sources, the name ‘‘Compiuta’’ is perhaps a pseudonym. Guittone d’Arezzo’s Epistle 5 is addressed to a woman by that name, but no reference is made there to her

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COMPIUTA DONZELLA activity as a poet; a sonnet by Torrigiano da Firenze is also addressed to a ‘‘donzella di trovare dotta’’ (a damsel skilled in writing poetry). Two main hypotheses have been formulated about this enigmatic signature: Either the author of the sonnets may be a real woman (which would make her the first woman writer in the Italian literature), or the pseudonym may hide a male poet ventriloquizing a feminine subject (not an isolated phenomenon in early vernacular poetry). The three sonnets, which one should avoid reading as indication of the author’s biography, present topical situations in Provencal and Sicilian poetry. The first, ‘‘A la stagion che ’l mondo foglia e fiora’’ (In that season when everywhere leaves and flowers appear, I.1) is a lament on an impending arranged marriage that is set against the background of springtime, the season that regenerates nature and rekindles love in the hearts of noble youths. The second, anticipating what will be a Dantean line of argumentation in the first stanza of the great moral canzone ‘‘Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire’’ (Grief brings boldness to my heart, Rime 106), reiterates the author’s dislike for the idea of marriage, based on the disappearance from the world of the main courtly virtues: ‘‘Senno e cortesia ... e lo fin pregio e tutta la bontade’’ (Wisdom, nobility of soul ... as well as refined elegance and all of goodness, II.5–6). As radical alternative to marriage with an unworthy man, the text proposes the service of God. Using language reminiscent of the Bible, the first two lines read: ‘‘Lasciar vorria lo mondo e Dio servire / e dipartirmi d’ogne vanitate’’ (I would like to abandon this world and serve God / and leave behind all vanity, II.1–2). The central verb ‘‘to serve,’’ which in the first and possibly also nextto-last lines of the poem preserves its original association with Christ’s words, ‘‘nemo servus potest duobus dominis servire’’ (No servant can serve two masters, Luke 16:13), also resonates with the technical Ovidian (and courtly) meaning of ‘‘devotion in love’’ (cf. I.6). The resulting contamination of semantic fields had already been exploited in the Sicilian tradition, as in Giacomo da Lentini’s

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‘‘Io m’aggio posto in core a Dio servire’’ (I have set my mind to serve the Lord). The final text credited to Compiuta Donzella is a response to an invitation from an anonymous correspondent to become better acquainted and possibly to engage in a literary love story: ‘‘so che molto mi poria ’nantire / aver contı`a del vostro segnoraggio’’ (I know that it would advance me greatly / to have direct knowledge of your mastery; that is, to serve you, III.1.13–14). To the hyperbolic praises the sender lavishes upon her (in the tercets, she is compared to Morgana, the Damsel of the Lake, and Constance of Hauteville) as well as to his somewhat skeptical aside on her reputation as a learned woman, the author replies by deflating with modesty the latter and reaffirming only her ‘‘buon volere’’ (goodwill) to serve ‘‘a ciascun ch’ama sanza fallimento’’ (whoever loves without deception, III.2.13). SIMONE MARCHESI Selected Works Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, 2 vols., Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960.

Further Reading Carrai, Stefano, ‘‘Il dittico della Compiuta Donzella,’’ Medioevo Romanzo, 17(1992): 207–213. Cherchi, Paolo, ‘‘The troubled existence of three women poets,’’ in The Voice of the Trobairitz: Perspectives on the Women Troubadours, edited by William D. Paden, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Crespo, Roberto, ‘‘La Compiuta Donzella,’’ Medioevo Romanzo, 13(1988): 203–222. Kleinhenz, Christopher, ‘‘ ‘Pulzelle e maritate’: Coming of Age, Rites of Passage, and the Question of Marriage in Some Early Italian Poems,’’ in Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, edited by Robert R. Edwards and Vickie Ziegler, Woodbridge, Suffolk, U.K., and Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1995. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Uncovering Women’s Writings: Two Early Italian Women Poets,’’ Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, 9(1988):1–15.

VINCENZO CONSOLO

CONFESSIONS OF ZENO See La Coscienza di Zeno (Work by Italo Svevo [Aron Hector Schmitz])

VINCENZO CONSOLO (1933–) Vincenzo Consolo’s youth is set against the cultural and geographical hinterland of his birthplace, Sant’Agata Militello in the province of Messina, Sicily. Without exception, his books focus on aspects of Sicilian history, leaving no period unconsidered. Of all recent writers of Sicilian descent, Consolo is probably the one who most systematically carries through the idea, stemming from Leonardo Sciascia—a personal friend and literary patron—of Sicily as an existential and literary metaphor: an image for a magnificent past and for a present of missed opportunities, both individual and collective. Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, papal, Bourbon-Neapolitan, and, only recently, Italian cultural influences characterize Consolo’s environment, both during decisive years of learning and throughout a whole life of literary creation. Though profoundly interested in history and literature, he was pushed toward a law degree at the Catholic University of Milan. For a few years he practiced as a notary but was more attracted by the literary and historical archives of his native Sicily than by the land register. At 30, he published La ferita dell’aprile (April’s Wound, 1963) without much commercial success. The partly autobiographical story concerns the young first person narrator’s coming of age during his last year spent in the Catholic secondary school in his home village on the northeastern coast of Sicily. This first book was as much Consolo’s timely contribution to Italian literary neo-Realism as it was the author’s first illustration of an innovative technique of evoking historical and political moments through a stylistic mosaic of different languages and styles. Such a technique would become

his literary trademark. The pivot of La ferita dell’aprile, the ‘‘wound’’ the title refers to, is the defeat inflicted to the Christian Democrats and to Alcide De Gasperi in particular in the regional ballot held in Sicily on April 20, 1947. The assassination, one week later, by Salvatore Giuliano’s Mafia mob, of children and workers during the Labor Day celebrations, looms as a warning sign for Italian politics and society in the 1960s. Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, 1976), published after more than ten years of literary silence, was immediately recognized by readers and reviewers as a masterpiece, setting new standards for the historical novel. This short but complex fictional tour de force carries the reader to the last stages of Italian national unity, Garibaldi’s landing on Sicilian soil in Marsala, May 1860, and the subsequent liberation of Sicily—annexation in the eyes of the separatist movement. The plot focuses on the revolutionary uprising of villani e pastori (villains and shepherds) at Alcara Li Fusi, a few days after Garibaldi’s landing, an uprising quelled by Garibaldi’s lieutenant. In Lunaria: Favola teatrale (Lunaria: A Theatrical Fable, 1985), linguistic pastiche, so forcefully elaborated in the Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, combines with modes of irony and the grotesque. In an allegorical development, the moon is pictured as the ultimate comfort in a world and historical time permeated by melancholy. The moon thus becomes an emblem for fiction, illusion, dream and fantasy, and ultimately for all forms of literary invention. When eventually the moon falls to earth—not far from Palermo, then still under the rule of the Vicere´—poets, scientists, priests, and 507

VINCENZO CONSOLO counselors gather to elucidate the mysterious and threatening event. In vain: No science or power can withstand the imaginative strength of the moon. Developing a well-known theme illustrated by poets like Giacomo Leopardi and Lucio Piccolo— another of his literary mentors in Sicily—Consolo provided a final Calderonesque turn to his theatrical fable: There is no such thing as reality since everything, including the Vicere´ himself, is earmarked as illusion and representation. Retablo (Retable, 1987) may be considered a highly elaborate literary ‘‘triptych.’’ In its central ‘‘panel,’’ Fabrizio Clerici—homonymous with the twentieth-century Milanese artist, in Consolo’s book a fictional nobleman and artist, Cesare Beccaria’s contemporary and rival in love—narrates an adventurous archaeological and art-historical journey in western Sicily. The encompassing story in the enclosing panels, the popular counterpart as it were of the central plot, depicts the erotic pursuit of Rosalia by a runaway monk, Fabrizio’s servant Isidoro. Both stories intertwine both thematically and linguistically. As much as Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, Retablo, due to its highly wrought composition and style, is at the root of Consolo’s reputation among critics as a neo-Baroque writer. Consolo himself qualifies his particular choice of language as an antidote to the oversimplified and flattening language of Italian media, especially television. Le pietre di Pantalica (Stones of Pantalica, 1988), a collection of short stories, was followed by a philosophical play Catarsi (Catharsis, 1989) in which Sicily’s glorious past is dramatically put in contrast with the moral and social degradation of the Italian south. In the 1990s, modern Italy and what is increasingly experienced by Consolo as its decay—moral, political, linguistic—was systematically brought into focus in his writings and put in a historical perspective. Since Leonardo Sciascia’s death in 1989, Consolo has been broadly considered his spiritual heir and a moral authority for the nation. The attention he paid to his own time from then on followed two different paths, the fictional and the nonfictional, with some interesting blending between the two. Nottetempo, casa per casa (At Night, One House at a Time, 1992) signaled Consolo’s return to his own times with the fictional depiction of the 1920s and the advent of Fascism in Messina province, thus filling the chronological gap between 1860 (Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio) and 1947 (La ferita dell’aprile). At least as much as La ferita dell’aprile, Nottetempo, casa per casa is a bildungsroman that 508

picks up the destiny of the young man, Petro, more or less at the age in which Scavone leaves Don Sergio’s school in La ferita dell’aprile. Petro— reminiscent of Cesare Pavese’s compagno in the novel of that name—through instructive contacts with friends, direct experience of lasting feudalism, and even esoteric ventures—the fraudulent aspect of which can be read as a foreboding of the irrationality of looming Fascism—matures as a young intellectual attracted by anarchy but finally rejecting it and preparing himself to be an exiled writer. Significantly perhaps—in contrast with Elio Vittorini’s protagonist in Conversazione in Sicilia, who returns to Sicily with the aim of appeasing his ‘‘furor’’— Petro escapes from the island and sails to Tunis, underlining Consolo’s own growing anger. Nottetempo, casa per casa also clarifies Consolo’s underlying epic undertaking as a whole, highlighting a broad narrative design aiming at a novelistic cycle embracing major epochs and events in Italian and Sicilian history. With a return to a more genuine rereading of Vittorini and adopting a sort of docu-fictional mode, L’olivo e l’olivastro (The Olive Tree and the Oleaster, 1994), relates the impressions of a Sicilian migrant, Nicola, traveling from the north of Europe to his modern dehumanized homeland. The journey comes to an end with Nicola turned into a desperate spectator of a play representing the collective suicide of the zealots in Masada. This is a highly symbolical ending, since the theatrical representation takes place in Nicola’s birthplace, Gibellina, destroyed in the earthquake of 1968. In 1998 Consolo returned to fiction and to his ambition of completing a large historical cycle, with Lo Spasimo di Palermo (The Pangs of Palermo, 1998). Lo Spasimo di Palermo is the novel of a certain post–World War II generation of Italian intellectuals: Their fathers’ dream of a better future, ‘‘better’’ also in moral terms, is wrecked by the terrorist violence of the 1960s and 1970s, violence perpetrated by their own sons’ generation, producing a sense of failure and guilt. The novel’s complex plot focuses on a father-writer, Gioachino, who loses all creative strength and faith in fiction, swaying back and forth between two cities: Paris, where his revolutionary son finds refuge from prosecution, and Palermo, where memories and the present are filled with guilt and oppression. The father-writer, with no personal illusions left, afflicted by guilt, and a judge, his neighbor, Gioachino’s public counterpart and model of active moral integrity, for his dynamic involvement in Mafia trials, are both killed in the same bomb blast, devised by the Mafia.

VINCENZO CONSOLO A year later Consolo’s pessimism pervaded the essays of Di qua dal faro (This Side of the Lighthouse, 1999). The more Consolo’s writing focuses on the present time, the more violence and death emerge as metaphoric instances of the ill-fated island of Sicily, burning under its swaying palms.

Fuga dall’Etna, 1993. L’olivo e l’olivastro, 1994. Nero` Metallico`, 1994. Lo Spasimo di Palermo, 1998.

Play Catarsi, 1989.

Essays

Biography Vincenzo Consolo was born in Sant’Agata di Militello (Messina), 18 February 1933. His father was a shopkeeper. From 1951 to 1953, he studied at the Catholic University of Milan. In 1955 he served in the military in Orvieto. Consolo’s first short story, ‘‘Un sacco di magnolie,’’ was published in the Milanese journal La Parrucca in 1957. In 1956 he returned to Messina. He was awarded a degree at the University of Messina with thesis in philosophy of law on the crisis of human rights and the League of Nations in 1960. Between 1960 and 1967 he was a notary trainee and teacher in Sicily. In 1968 he began his collaboration with RAI (Italian National Television), in Milan. In 1977 Consolo became an editorial consultant for publisher Einaudi. He won the Pirandello prize in 1985 for Lunaria. He married Caterina Pilenga in 1986. In 1988 he won the Grinzane Cavour prize for Retablo; in 1992, the Strega prize for Nottetempo, casa per casa. In 1993 Consolo wrote the text for a requiem mass to honor Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, judges assassinated in 1992 by the Mafia; he then started his political opposition to Lega Nord, a separatist political party of the Po-area. In 1994 he won the Unione Latina prize for L’olivo e l’olivastro. In 1998 Consolo wrote the libretto for L’ape iblea: Elegia per Noto, with music by Francesco Pennisi, which was performed at Teatro Verdi in Florence. In 1999 he won the Flaiano prize, Brancati prize, and Fiano prize for Lo Spasimo di Palermo. Consolo lives now in Milan and Sicily. WALTER GEERTS Selected Works

’Nfernu veru (La letteratura dello Zolfo), 1985. La pesca del tonno in Sicilia, 1986. Il barocco in Sicilia, 1991. Veduta dello stretto di Messina, 1993. Di qua dal faro, 1999.

Other Oratorio (contains Catarsi and L’Ape iblea), 2002.

Further Reading Bouchard, Norma (editor), Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Budor, Dominique (editor), Vincenzo Consolo: E´thique et e´criture, Paris: Presses de l’Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2005. Ciccarelli, Andrea (editor), special issue on Vincenzo Consolo, Italica, 82:1(Spring 2005). Lavezzi, Gianfranca, Anna Modena, and Carla Riccardi, Lezioni sul Novecento, Pavia: Collegio Nuovo, 1991. Nuove effemeridi (Palermo) 29, 1995 (special issue on Vincenzo Consolo). Reichardt, Dagmar (editor), Sicilia letteraria, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003. Schneider, Jane (editor), Italy’s ‘‘Southern Question,’’ Oxford-New York: Berg Press, 1989. Sciascia, Leopardo, Cruciverba, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Zappulla Muscara`, Sara (editor), Narratori siciliani del secondo dopoguerra, Catania: Maimone, 1990.

IL SORRISO DELL’IGNOTO MARINAIO, 1976 Novel by Vincenzo Consolo

Fiction La Ferita dell’aprile, 1963. Il Sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, 1976; as The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1994. Lunaria: Favola teatrale, 1985. Retablo, 1987. Le Pietre di Pantalica, 1988. Nottetempo, casa per casa, 1992.

Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio (The Smile of the Unknown Mariner) is Consolo’s contribution to the highly controversial question of Sicily’s incorporation into the Kingdom of Italy—made ‘‘in the 509

VINCENZO CONSOLO name of King Victor Emmanuel’’—following Giuseppe Garibaldi’s landing on the island in May 1860. The historical so-called ‘‘fatti di Bronte’’ (facts of Bronte)—the sanguinary repression in Bronte, a small town on the slopes of Mount Etna, exercised by Garibaldi’s lieutenant Nino Bixio, of the peasants’ equally bloodstained uprising against the local middle class of landowners—provide the factual background for Consolo’s highly innovative fictional project. With an implicit reference to the state of affairs in Italy more than one century later, when workers and intellectuals tried to join forces, Consolo turns the historical facts, located at Alcara Li Fusi, into the centerpiece of a conflict situated in the consciences of two men. Mandralisca, a nobleman and marine biologist, is completely absorbed by his study of molluscs, while his friend Interdonato is one of the agents of the exiled republican leader, Giuseppe Mazzini. The complex plot evolves in such a way that the first will become so deeply impressed by the suffering of the poor and the injustices produced by the legal system that he abandons all scientific interest, whereas the second, promoted interior minister of Sicily made a part of Italy, will be forced into political pragmatism and resign from his post. At the end Interdonato is called to try in court the insurgents of Alcara Li Fusi, one of the villages involved in the uprising. Consolo’s novel thus becomes an essential part of the debate on the political and ideological implications of one of the last stages of Italy’s unification. Through the ‘‘facts of Bronte’’ a deeper conflict is highlighted between alternative political options to be taken once Italy unified: a democratic option, with land reform, supported by Mazzini and his followers, or a conservative option, more in the line of Count Cavour’s aims. In Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958), the suffering of Sicily’s peasants is presented as the ineluctable fate history has determined for this sun-dried island and its inhabitants. Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio breaks up this assumed cycle of fatality, showing how and why the legal system, built by the elite, favored the elite, illustrating how and why land reform, for instance, never took off in Sicily. In addition to this profound political message, Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio reformulates the rules for the historical novel itself at a moment in which the traditional novel in Italy was put into question by

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the neo-avanguardia (neo-avant-garde). Fact and fiction are intertwined, historical documents alternate with highly sophisticated inventions such as the events Consolo imaginatively weaves around Antonello da Messina’s painting, Ritratto d’ignoto—the title’s ‘‘ignoto marinaio.’’ The fine compositional structure of the novel is also illustrated by the use of various leitmotifs, the most striking of which is that of the snail, combining metaphorically both Mandralisca’s scientific interests and the inklike tortuous excretions of the invertebrate. Tortuosity is a familiar characteristic both for the scribbling of the clerks and for the obscure arabesques of the law. Throughout the novel, Consolo’s specific language can be heard, made up of archaisms, both real and invented, and local idiom, again real and invented. Masterly from this point of view is the series of graffiti the jailed insurgents of Alcara jot on the walls: Sicilian language, partly invented, political criticism, and symbolic imagination combine to turn these writings into the climax of the novel. WALTER GEERTS Editions Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Il sorriso dell’ ignoto marinaio, Milan: Mondadori, 1995.

Translation The Smile of the Unknown Mariner, translated by Joseph Farrell, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994.

Further Reading Coassin, Flavia, ‘‘L’ordine delle somiglianze nel Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio,’’ Spunti e ricerche, 17(2002), 97–108. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘Rewriting Sicily: Postmodern Perspectives,’’ in Italy’s ‘‘Southern Question,’’ edited by Jane Schneider, Oxford-New York: Berg, 1998. Farrell, Joseph, ‘‘Metaphors and False History,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994. O’Neill, Tom, ‘‘Il Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio di Vincenzo Consolo ovvero la riscrittura del Risorgimento in Sicilia,’’ in Literature and Film in the Historical Dimension, edited by J. D. Simmons, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Sciascia, Leonardo, ‘‘L’ignoto marinaio,’’ in Cruciverba, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘La costruzione a chiocciola nel Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio,’’ in Vincenzo Consolo, Il sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio, Milan: Mondadori, 1987.

SERGIO CORAZZINI

CONVERSATION IN SICILY See Conversazione in Sicilia (Work by Elio Vittorini)

SERGIO CORAZZINI (1886–1907) Sergio Corazzini’s poetic experience as well as his life was short but intense, because the poet died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. In his lifetime, he published five small poetry collections; two prose poems in the periodical Cronache Latine, ‘‘Soliloquio delle cose’’ (Soliloquy of Things, 1905) and ‘‘Esortazione al fratello’’ (Exhortation to His Brother, 1906); various pieces of criticism; and the play Il traguardo (The Goal, 1905), presented unsuccessfully on May 26, 1905, at the Teatro Metastasio in Rome. His earliest poems, in Italian or in Roman dialect, appeared in literary journals: For instance, his very first sonnet, ‘‘’Na bella idea’’ (A Good Idea, 1902), is dated May 17, 1902, and was published in Pasquino de Roma, a satirical and political magazine. In 1904, the young poet published his first volume, Dolcezze (Sweetness), which reflects Corazzini’s readings and interests at the time, first among them Rome and its environs at the turn of the century, which infused his poetry with a realistic perspective that the poet would never completely relinquish. His intellectual influences include not only the masters of twentiethcentury European literature but also contemporary symbolism, the lesson of which he quickly metabolized (he taught himself French so as to be able to read authors like Paul Bourget, Victor Hugo, Honore´ de Balzac, Guy de Maupassant, and Jules Laforgue). In Italy, the dominating presence of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetry affected him as it did most of his contemporaries; what struck Corazzini in particular, however, was rather the humble tone of a specific work that he felt close to his own—the Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893). In addition, the poetics of humility and the

minimalism of Giovanni Pascoli became relevant in Corazzini’s poetic development. He also appreciated the works of colleagues who were making their debut in those years, and he became engaged in an intense correspondence with Aldo Palazzeschi, Corrado Govoni, Marino Moretti, and others, who in their turn were influenced by Corazzini’s charming, spontaneous, deeply passionate, and naı¨f poetry. Indeed, Moretti’s decision to visit him just before his death, in 1907, confirmed this sort of canonization of the poet. Corazzini’s works have usually been read in relation to the poetics of the so-called crepuscolarismo, a term coined by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese in 1910 and which has come to be identified at the most superficial level with a series of themes evoking a melancholic and at times slightly morbid atmosphere, as well as a whole array of images (hospitals, churches, organ-grinders, poor children, and so on) derived from shabby, quotidian experience and rather removed from the poetic mainstream. However, Corazzini’s poetic voice goes well beyond this repertoire. As a result of the heterogeneous cultural context in which he developed his poetic skills, the ‘‘sweet’’ sense of death and sickness and the delicate nostalgia for life that underlies much of his poetry are kept always under firm rhetorical control. The opening verses of Dolcezze summarize these characteristics: ‘‘il mio cuore e` una rossa / macchia di sangue dove / io bagno senza posa / la penna’’ (My heart is a red / spot of blood where / I endlessly dip / my pen). Thus, it may better to describe Corazzini’s poetry as both a struggle between and a communion of pathos and sadness, expressed by the figure of the 511

SERGIO CORAZZINI poet described in the work that came to be seen as his statement of poetics, ‘‘Desolazione del povero poeta sentimentale’’ (Desolation of the Poor Sentimental Poet), from Piccolo libro inutile (Little Useless Book, 1906): ‘‘Perche´ tu mi dici: poeta? / Io non sono un poeta. / Io non sono che un piccolo fanciullo che piange. / Vedi: io non ho che le lagrime da offrire al Silenzio’’ (Why do you call me: poet? / I am not a poet / I am only a small weeping child. / Look: I have only tears to offer to silence). If the notion of Corazzini’s poetry as the song of a dying body and soul may have become over time a simple way to catalogue him, it is in the structures and the metrical choices of his poems that can be traced his evolution as an artist. At the beginning, the presence of the poetic tradition clearly permeates his verses, although on some occasion they achieved surprising and original results, as in the early sonnet ‘‘Un bacio’’ (A Kiss). Written in 1902, when Corazzini was 16, the poem plays off the tune of an operetta, and its seven-syllable metrical scheme strikingly shows an already mature poetic consciousness. After the publication of Dolcezze, Corazzini began to contribute articles and reviews to several periodicals, including Roma Flamma and Cronache latine, both of which he cofounded, and Sancio Pancia. L’amaro calice (The Bitter Cup) is Corazzini’s second poetic work, dated 1905, but actually published in 1904, as a review appeared on 19 November 1904 in Il Fracassa. It is followed by Le aureole (The Halos, 1905). The question of vers libre became increasingly important, as over the three years of his poetic activity, Corazzini went through a radical crisis regarding traditional verse. The final result of this process is evident in his last work, Libro per la sera della domenica (Sunday Evening, 1906), in which, with rare exceptions, the poems do not follow any metrical pattern. In the end, Corazzini’s poetics defy simplifications: Although the suffering of his human experience suffuses his whole production, it was never used as a primary means of expression. Indeed, in his final poems the emotional charge of such a painful life always finds a formal balance that is the sign of true poetry.

Biography Sergio Corazzini was born in Rome on February 6, 1886. He attended Catholic school at the Oratorio di San Rocco, 1895. He then moved to Spoleto, where he attended the boarding school Collegio Nazionale Umberto I, 1895–1898. He abandoned secondary school because of family economic setbacks. 512

Corazzini worked for the insurance company ‘‘La Prussiana’’ in Rome, 1898. He frequented the intellectual circles that met at the Sartoris and Aragno cafe´s in Rome, along with Fausto Maria Martini and many other young Roman artists and writers, 1898–1905. He contributed to numerous periodicals, including Mamorfio, Rugantino, Capitan Fracassa, Gran mondo, Vita letteraria, Giornale d’arte, Tavola rotonda, and L’unione sarda, 1902. He cofounded Roma Flamma along with Corrado Govoni, Alfredo Tusti, and Biagio Chiara, 1904. The piece Il traguardo was performed at the Teatro Metastasio in Rome, 1905. There was a public reading of his verses in the Sala degli Autori Lirici e Drammatici at the Teatro Nazionale in Rome, 1905. He cofounded Cronache latine, 1905 (the journal folded after three issues, in 1906). He experienced the first symptoms of tuberculosis and had surgery, 1905. He moved to a sanatorium in Nocera Umbra, in 1906, then to the sanatorium of Padre Orsenigo dei Fatebenefratelli in Nettuno, 1907. Corazzini died in Rome on June 17, 1907. DIEGO BERTELLI See also: Crepuscolarismo Selected Works Collections Liriche, Naples: Ricciardi, 1909; expanded edition by Fausto Maria Martini, Naples: Ricciardi, 1922. Poesie edite e inedite, edited by Stefano Jacomuzzi, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Opere: poesie e prose, edited by Angela Ida Villa, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Dolcezze,’’ 1904. ‘‘L’amaro calice,’’ 1905. ‘‘Le aureole,’’ 1905. ‘‘Piccolo libro inutile,’’ 1906. ‘‘Libro per la sera della domenica,’’ 1906; as Sunday Evening: Selected Poems, translated and edited by Michael Palma, 1997.

Play Il traguardo, 1905.

Further Readings Baldacci, Luigi, I crepuscolari, Turin: ERI, 1961. Benevento, Aurelio, Sergio Corazzini: saggi e ricerche, Naples: Loffredo, 1980. Donini, Filippo, Vita e poesia di Sergio Corazzini, Turin: De Silva, 1948. Jacomuzzi, Stefano, Sergio Corazzini, Milan: Mursia, 1963. Livi, Franc¸ois, Dai simbolisti ai crepuscolari, Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1974.

MARIA CORTI Livi, Franc¸ois, La parola crepuscolare. Corazzini, Gozzano, Moretti, Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1986. Livi, Franc¸ois, and Alexandra Zingone (editors), Io non sono un poeta: Sergio Corazzini, 1886–1907, Rome: Bulzoni-Nancy: Press universitaires de Nancy, 1989. Martini, Fausto Maria, Si sbarca a New York, Milan: Mondadori, 1930. Papini, Maria Carla, Corazzini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977. Petronio, Giuseppe, Poeti del nostro secolo: i crepuscolari, Florence: Sansoni, 1937.

Porcelli, Bruno, Momenti dell’antinaturalismo. Fogazzaro, Svevo, Corazzini, Ravenna: Longo, 1975. Pupino, Angelo R., L’astrazione e le cose nella lirica di Sergio Corazzini, Bari: Adriatica, 1969. Savoca, Giuseppe, Concordanza di tutte le poesie di Sergio Corazzini, Florence: Olschki, 1987. Villa, Angela Ida, Neoidealismo e rinascenza latina tra Otto e Novecento: la cerchia di Sergio Corazzini: poeti dimenticati e riviste del crepuscolarismo romano, 1903–1907, Milan: LED, 1999.

CORRUPTION AT THE COURTHOUSE See Corruzione al Palazzo di giustizia (Work by Ugo Betti)

MARIA CORTI (1915–2002) Maria Corti was known primarily for her scholarly production, but she wrote fiction from a very young age and continued to do so until her death. She was a firm believer in the synergy of creative and scholarly writing, a tradition with deep roots in the Italian humanistic tradition, as the case of Dante clearly shows. From the medieval period in which the ‘‘father of the Italian language’’ lived and wrote his treatises and the great poem, the Divine Comedy, that has given him immortality, through the Renaissance and into modern and postmodern times, Italian writers have rarely not had an academic as well as a creative bent, and Maria Corti fit perfectly into this line. Her fictional works are imbued with learning, yet they are also often autobiographical and deeply personal accounts of experiences and insights that, while always in some way tied to her commitment to the life of the mind, also express aspects of Corti’s thoughts and feelings that she could not fully explore through her rich and always impeccable scholarship.

As a student and young teacher, Maria Corti often traveled on trains, sharing third-class compartments with commuting workmen. She wrote her first novel, originally entitled in its unpublished form Il trenino della pazienza (The Train of Patience) at an early age, and in it she described these daily trips. The novel was not published until 1981, with the title Cantare nel buio (Singing in the Dark), after Corti had extensively revised it. However, she had begun to publish fiction as early as 1962 when L’ora di tutti (translated as Otranto by Jessie Bright) appeared; for this debut prose fiction work she won the Crotone Literary Prize in 1963. It recounts the true story in fictional form of a southern Italian community in the fifteenth century that is put to the test when it is invaded by the Turks. In 1966, Corti published Il ballo dei sapienti (The Dance of the Wise), a novel set in the contemporary academic world of the 1960s. In it, she painted a vivid picture of academia’s conventions and hypocrisies.

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MARIA CORTI The decades of the 1970s and 1980s were years of prolific scholarly production for Corti, as she became involved in the then-burgeoning field of semiotics; she also continued her work as a historian of the Italian language and as a textual editor. Her dual loves of medieval and modern literature resulted in important books on Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Beppe Fenoglio, neo-Realism and neoexperimentalism and essays on Calvino and other contemporary writers who were also her personal friends, such as Eugenio Montale and Luigi Malerba. She did not relinquish her creative work, however, and in 1986 Voci dal Nord Est: Taccuino Americano (Voices from the Northeast: American Notebook) appeared. This work is a fictionalized travel diary in which Corti recounted her experiences and observations during a trip to the United States when she taught at Brown University, gave lectures at other Eastern universities, and visited Chicago. She provided a running commentary not only on her personal adventures, including the terrible mugging that left her injured and deeply shaken, but also on American colleagues and students, styles of life in the United States, and the differences that distinguish the cultures of Italy and America. The book ends up being something midway between fiction and social critique, all of it presented not in a dry documentaristic style but in subjective, meditative prose that captures well the strong personal opinions and ideological convictions of its author. Other stories and fictional pieces of diverse kind continued to appear in the later years of Corti’s career, just as her scholarly work continued in an uninterrupted flow. An openly autobiographical vein opened out onto Corti’s eventful life as a cultural mentor and intellectual leader in works such as the book-length interview with Cristina Nesi, Dialogo in pubblico (Dialogue in Public, 1995) and Ombre dal fondo (Shadows from the Depths, 1997), the title of which alludes to the important Fondo, or Foundation, for modern and contemporary writers’ manuscripts that Corti established at the University of Pavia, her home institution for many years. Beginning with autograph materials given to her by her long-standing friend, the Nobel Prize–winning poet Eugenio Montale, Corti built an amazing repository and resource of materials for scholars of twentieth-century Italian literature, and the book recounts the complex process by which she achieved this admirable goal. Perhaps her best fictional work, Il canto delle sirene (The Sirens’ Song) was published in 1989. Again autobiographical in essence, it combines scholarly 514

erudition with very personal narrative, telling the story of a young woman who is torn between the life of the mind and creative writing, as well as between two very different men and the sort of shared life each would represent for her. Corti uses the myth of the sirens, who are most commonly seen as seductresses seeking to lure men from their dutiful paths, as representative instead of the endless human thirst for knowledge and wisdom. As in so many of her scholarly and creative works, here too the metaphor of the journey of life conditions the shape and tone of the book. This novel is philosophical in essence, and it dovetails nicely with Corti’s work on Ulysses, specifically as this emblematic voyager and seeker functions in Dante’s imaginative and scholarly explorations of knowledge and transcendence, which Corti also studied in great depth. Corti’s creative writing may be seen as an essential adjunct to her production as one of contemporary Italy’s most important scholars. In an interview published on April 26, 1986, in the newspaper La stampa, Corti declared her sustained belief in the interrelationship of scholarly and creative writing: ‘‘The best critics are also writers. I am thinking of Vale´ry, of Baudelaire....Creative writing gives a certain humility to the critic, who must understand but not judge.’’ Corti’s long career reflected her constant search for understanding—of texts, cultures, language, and herself—as well as her unique ability to personalize erudition and to share it with academic and general readers alike. Her legacy includes well-crafted fictional works that, like her learned studies, are invaluable contributions to modern Italian letters.

Biography Maria Corti was born in Milan, 7 September 1915. Her mother died young, and Corti lived her youth in boarding schools in and around Milan while her father, an engineer, worked in Puglia. She studied for degrees in literature and philosophy at the University of Milan, under the tutelage of the important scholars Benvenuto Terracini, a professor of the history of language, and Antonio Banfi, a professor of philosophy. Corti was first employed as a high school teacher in and around Como and Milan. She worked with anti-Fascist groups during and after World War II. She was appointed as a professor at the University of Pavia in 1972, where her work on the history of the Italian language and on semiotics helped to found the so-called school of

MARIA CORTI Pavia and where she established the Fondo Manoscritti degli Autori Moderni e Contemporanei. She remained at Pavia until her death. Corti was cofounder or founder of the journals Autografo, Alfabeta, and Strumenti critici, and a frequent contributor to the cultural page of the newspaper La repubblica. She was elected a member of many academies, including the Accademia della Crusca, and was awarded many prizes for her scholarly and creative writing, including the prestigious Campiello Prize for her entire production. Corti died in Milan on 22 February 2002. REBECCA WEST See also: the extensive bibliography of writings about Maria Corti in Dialogo in pubblico, 1995.

Nuovi metodi e fantasmi, 2001. I vuoti del tempo, edited by Francesca Caputo and Anna Longoni, 2003.

Edited Works Pietro Jacopo De Jennaro, Rime e lettere, 1956. Vita di San Petronio, con un’appendice di testi inediti dei secoli XIII e XIV, 1962. Giacomo Leopardi, ‘‘Entro dipinta gabbia’’: Tutti gli scritti inediti, rari e editi 1809–1810, 1972. Elio Vittorini, Le opere narrative, 1974. Autografi di Montale, with Maria Antonietta Grignani, 1976. Beppe Fenoglio, Opere, 1978. Ennio Flaiano, Frasario essenziale per passare inosservati in societa`, 1986. Ennio Flaiano, Opere, with Anna Longoni, 1988. Alda Merini, Vuoto d’amore, 1991. Gesualdo Bufalino, Opere 1981–1988, with Francesca Caputo, 1992. Alda Merini, Fiore di poesia: 1951–1997, 1998.

Fiction

Selected Works Nonfiction Studi sulla latinita` merovingia in testi agiografici minori, 1939. Studi sulla sintassi della lingua poetica avanti lo Stilnovo, 1953. Metodi e fantasmi, 1969. I metodi attuali della critica in Italia, with Cesare Segre, 1970. Principi della comunicazione letterararia, 1976; as An Introduction to Literary Semiotics, translated by Margherita Bogat and Allen Mandelbaum, 1978. Il viaggio testuale: Le ideologie e le strutture semiotiche, 1978. Una lingua di tutti: Pratica, storia e grammatica della lingua italiana, 1979. Beppe Fenoglio: Storia di un ‘‘continuum’’ narrativo, 1980. Dante a un nuovo crocevia, 1981. La felicita` mentale: Nuove prospettive su Cavalcanti, 1983. Il cammino della lettura: Come leggere un testo letterario, 1993. Percorsi dell’invenzione: Il linguaggio poetico e Dante, 1993. Dialogo in pubblico, 1995. Ombre dal fondo, 1997.

L’ora di tutti, 1962; as Otranto, translated by Jessie Bright, 1993. Il ballo dei sapienti, 1966. Cantare nel buio, 1981. Il canto delle sirene, 1989. Voci dal Nordest: Taccuino americano, 1986. Catasto magico, 1999. Storie, 2000. Pietre verbali, 2001.

Further Reading ‘‘Autointervista,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 7(1989): 423–429. Dizionario della letteratura italiana contemporanea, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Guerra, Giorgia, Maria Corti: Voci, canti, catasti, Novara: Interlinea, 2000. Kirschenbaum, Blossom, ‘‘Maria Corti’s Discovery of America,’’ in Italian Americans in a Multicultural Society, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1994. Scorrano, Luigi, Carte inquiete: Maria Corti, Biagia Marniti, Antonia Pozzi, Ravenna: Longo, 2002. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Maria Corti,’’ Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, New York: Garland, 1991.

COSMICOMICS See Le Cosmicomiche (Work by Italo Calvino)

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COURTS AND PATRONAGE

THE COURTESAN See La Cortigiana (Work by Pietro Aretino)

COURTS AND PATRONAGE The relationship between patrons and clients and the correlated phenomena of patronage and clientage offer the most viable approach to the intricate question of the Italian courts and their culture in the period between the fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The complexity of the question dates back to an old view of the late medieval and early modern periods, a view haunted by the legend of the rise of the Italian middle class, once seen as the pivotal factor in the development of the modern liberal state. Neglected by political and social historians, who excluded the courts from this historical itinerary, the undeniable and almost disturbing presence of the courts spawned a form of descriptive history among intellectual and cultural historians chiefly interested in portraying the ceremonial splendor of Italian courtly life. This resulted in an artificial dichotomy between two separate forms of institutions, in which the political concept of state was favored over the cultural concept of court, the modern idea of bureaucratic administration over the archaic idea of personal cult, and the rational implementation of economic policies over the passionate dimension of luxury. From this perspective, the differing concepts of state and of court seemed utterly irreconcilable: The state came to identify a positive pole in the institutional development of European history, associated as it was with a strong and shared claim to modernity; the court represented instead a negative pole, doomed as it was to irrationality, waste, and corruption. This old dichotomy, and the concomitant devaluation of the court, was overturned by a set of groundbreaking studies, pioneered outside the field of history by sociologist Norbert Elias (The 516

Court Society, 1983) and anthropologist Clifford Geertz (Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali, 1980). These studies made historians aware of the complex web of public and private relations deeply ingrained in princely governance and of the ritual, sacred, and symbolic aspects that informed the very idea of princely power. As synthetically affirmed by British historian Trevor Dean, ‘‘court and state are now seen as complementary, confused, or identical, and no longer as separate worlds’’ (‘‘The Courts,’’ 1995). Courtly patronage, whether in the arts, government, academies, or business, is currently regarded as a fundamental, if not an unreservedly necessary, dynamic component in the gradual process of centralization of power that characterized the various forms of rulership in pre-industrial Europe. The unique patron–client relationship certainly involved idiosyncratic favoritism, self-interested nepotism, and the tribal preferment of friends, prote´ge´s, and other acolytes active within the princely sphere of influence. But it also enabled the emergence of a new class of court managers, carefully chosen on the basis of their merit and competence, to recast in cultural and political terms the prestige and authority of the prince and his family. It is still a matter of debate whether the activity of these courtly operators ought to be interpreted as a strategic maneuver to domesticate and integrate nobility into a composite ruling class, as Elias had influentially purported, or, conversely, as a way to allow members of the aristocratic elites to gain influence and status within the court, as suggested by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, in their introduction to Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility (1991). There

COURTS AND PATRONAGE is no doubt, however, that the study of the way systems of patronage operated, their aims and procedures, their cultural ramifications and social stratification, and their aesthetic and ideological influence on the actual production of culture constitute an important and vibrant branch of historical investigation. If it is true that patronage studies and court studies converge on numerous issues, their respective domains do not entirely coincide. Patronage, broadly defined as the patron’s act of supporting and protecting a given client in exchange for a given service, is not limited only to the courtly context; it also comprises the sponsoring activity of several corporations not necessarily connected to a prince or to members of his family, such as religious confraternities, civic organizations, oligarchic republics, learned academies, independent presses, or professional guilds. The distinction between courtly patronage and other forms of corporate patronage can be heuristically described by means of what anthropologists have termed the ‘‘Big Man’’ system, in which historians have recognized several key features of the courtly institution. This comparison has allowed scholars to portray the court as a hierarchical institution resembling certain tribal societies characterized by the accumulation of power in the hands of one political leader; by the development of patterns of reverence and benefaction governing exchanges between the leader and his or her subordinates; by competition between rivals and their client groups, both in politics and the arts. To be applied to the courtly system, this model needs some further refinement. The institutional figure of the leader entails not only ‘‘Big Men’’ but also ‘‘Big Women,’’ at the center of a complex system of relations that includes members of their families, their extended household, and the local aristocratic establishment, all deeply entangled in a web of self-interest, personal relationships, and political allegiances, both private and public. A paramount example of the gendered dimension of the courtly system is provided by Mantua, ruled by the marquis Ludovico Gonzaga (1412–1478) and his influential wife Barbara Hohenzollern of Brandenburg (1422–1481), whose international connections and political intelligence assured the small city-state of northern Italy European renown and prestige, well before the reign of Francesco Gonzaga (1466–1519) and his famous wife Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), eager collectors of art, avid readers of chivalric literature, and sensitive patrons of humanists and poets. The system of reverence

and worship that governs the highly ritualized discourse of the client toward the patron entails a progressive differentiation of the leader’s entourage from the rest of the aristocratic entourage, a differentiation that depicts the leader, whether man or woman, as a distant and sacred entity. This becomes evident in the proliferation of panegyric orations, where the leaders are portrayed as godlike entities, heavenly creatures, or divine rulers, but affects also the conventions of regular epistolary exchanges, where the princes are addressed as dei (gods), semidei (demigods), celsitudini (celestial entities), and so on. Patrons seek to assert and confirm their political and cultural supremacy within a given territory; clients provide them with a highly discerning discourse with which to manage and control, but also justify and legitimize, their power. The relationship between patrons and clients involves a complex system of procedures through which notions of merit, competence, and efficiency, whether within the realms of diplomacy, politics, medicine, or the arts, are sophisticatedly elaborated and consciously implemented in a web of reciprocal exchanges and interdependences. In the case of Italy, the study of courtly culture is further complicated by the geographical distribution of different forms of power, government, and dynastic traditions within the sociopolitical mosaic of the peninsula, which make it almost impossible to discern a unified rationale for investigating the phenomenon from a national perspective. During the fifteenth century, cities with strong municipal or oligarchic traditions, such as Florence, Venice, or Siena, tended to produce a quite different culture from the one produced in territories traditionally subjected to aristocratic families, such as Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, and Naples. Equally different was the culture produced in centers within the papal state and in centers governed by imperial feudatories, not to mention those hybrid cases, such as the court of the Estensi, where the rulers were feudatories of both the pope and the emperor. Similar discrepancies are also to be found between courts ruled by families descending from ancient aristocratic stocks, such as the Gonzaga, the Visconti, the Este, and those, such as the Medici and the Sforza, descending from bourgeois origins or more recent nobility. The flourishing of lyric poetry during the second half of the fifteenth century, to name just one prominent example, is less pronounced in Florence and Venice than in cities hosting major courts, such as Milan, Naples, Ferrara, and Mantua; similar differences could be found by studying the distribution of other emblematic 517

COURTS AND PATRONAGE genres, such as chivalric or pastoral poems. All these complexities and regional differences have so far prevented a more general study of at least one single court from its medieval origins to its modern eclipse—a study that must also take into account from a political point of view, the increasing presence in Italy of foreign powers and from a cultural point of view, the emergence of other forms of institutional patrons, both private and public, such as learned academies, presses, theaters, religious orders, prominent religious figures, professional associations, and even banks (the famous Pietro Aretino started his career at the service of the prominent banker Agostino Chigi). A further distinction should be advanced, at least heuristically, between forms of political patronage and forms of cultural patronage active within the court. A corresponding divergence exists between historians who tend to concentrate on the administrative relations between court and household, as well as between court and state, and historians who instead consider the court a microcosm of intrinsic political, social, and economic forces that converged in shaping the main subject of their inquiry, namely courtly culture. If the first approach mainly characterizes the kind of history practiced outside of Italy, and to some extent outside the field offered by the Italian courts, privileging instead the courts of France, Burgundy, England, and Germany, the second approach, ambitiously endorsed by the Centro Studi ‘‘Europa delle corti,’’ active since the late 1970s, is predominantly concerned with the study of the Italian courts, especially those that flourished in the northern part of the peninsula from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. In the first phase of this interdisciplinary project, the center sponsored a wide range of conferences and studies primarily focused on the literary, artistic, and more generally cultural legacy of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), seen as the epitome of the intricate system of values, beliefs, and forms of life that informed the courtly culture in Italy primarily during the sixteenth century. The goal of this initial approach was to elicit a discursive vocabulary, both verbal and gestural, through which to understand and appreciate the way in which the highly differentiated courtly operators staged their existence in theoretical and conceptual terms. In the second, current phase of the project, focussing on the rather abstract ‘‘grammar’’ that helped to define the court as a labyrinthine, self-enclosed, and highly symbolical space of action, the center turned its attention to the 518

ways in which various categories such as adroitness (accortezza), discretion (discrezione), dissimulation (dissimulazione), favor (beneficio), gracefulness (grazia), honor (onore), magnificence (magnificenza), nonchalance (sprezzatura), politeness (politezza), as well as their various synonyms and antonyms, were part of a tangible system of political references and social conditions that allowed Italian courtiers to act, feel, and think accordingly. In this vein Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (The Art of Conversation, 1574) is read as an arbor textualis (textual tree) defining a complex code of behaviors that deeply informed courtly life (Amedeo Quondam, ‘‘Introduction,’’ 1993). From a literary and cultural perspective, this approach has made possible the reevaluation of a different canon of works, hitherto confined to an archaic repertory of unprofitable and unavailing books by certain modernist interpretations of the Renaissance. Besides authentic best sellers, such as Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano, Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo, overo de’ costumi (Galateo, 1558), and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione, the references used by contemporary cultural historians to explore the phenomenon of the courts also include once-neglected treatises and repertories such as Paolo Cortesi’s De Cardinalatu (On Cardinalship, 1510), Francesco Alunno’s La fabrica del mondo (The Edifice of the World, 1548), Giulio Camillo Delminio’s L’idea del teatro (The Idea of Theatre, 1550), Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (The Universal Square of All the Professions of the World, 1585), or Torquato Accetto’s Della dissimulazione onesta (On Honest Dissimulation, 1641). Dynastic poems and princely treatises, such as Catone Sacco’s Semideus (Demigod, 1438), written for Filippo Maria Visconti (1392–1447); Francesco Filelfo’s Sforziade (1450) for Francesco Sforza (1401–1466); Tito Vespasiano Strozzi’s Borsias for Borso d’Este (1413–1471); Giovan Mario Filelfo’s Martiados for Federico da Montefeltro (1422– 1482); and Laurentias for Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–1492), to name but a few, are also being studied seriously for the first time. Together with encomiastic, nuptial, and funeral oratory performances, these works form the cultural background for a different appreciation of already canonical works, such as Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando Innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483), Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580), as well as

COURTS AND PATRONAGE famous pictorial cycles, such as those exemplified in Mantua by Andrea Mantegna’s Camera picta for Ludovico Gonzaga (1414–1478), the ‘‘studiolo’’ for Isabella d’Este (1474–1539), and the sumptuous Palazzo Te, built and decorated by Giulio Romano for Federico Gonzaga (1500–1540). This new body of texts, sometimes available in accurate critical editions but often still unedited, allows for a better comprehension of those works traditionally labelled as anticourtly literature (notably those of Pietro Aretino, whom Ariosto used to call by the nickname of ‘‘flagello dei principi’’ or ‘‘scourge of princes’’), away from the partisan and sometimes instrumental readings of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which promoted these titles as documents of the degeneration of courtly culture, toward a more dynamic and dialectical understanding of the phenomenon. The vast number of scattered studies sponsored and produced under the aegis of the Centro Studi ‘‘Europa delle corti’’ has been sharply criticized by social and political historians active outside of Italy, who blame them for the excessive attention initially paid to the symbolic, textual, and totalizing dimension of the court, viewed primarily as an ‘‘epiphany of power,’’ to use Carlo Ossola’s expression (‘‘Il ‘luogo’ della corte,’’ 1978), at the expense of different typological varieties, political-dynastic variables, and historical realities. As Trevor Dean bluntly expressed, the ‘‘study of the grammar and rules of court society has not only questionably elevated the court as a closed system but has also neglected the study of relations between court and society (whether the material support of the court or its political support through patronage networks and faction)’’ (‘‘The Courts,’’ 1995). The polemical note called for a greater scrutiny of the mechanisms of patronage and clientage in relation to the ascendancy of princely power and to the hierarchies of skilled officers. This system of relationships gradually transformed the traditional retinue of courtiers into a prebureaucratic system of political and administrative professionals. For British historians, writes David Starkey, ‘‘the history of the court is the history of those who enjoyed access to the king’’ (‘‘Introduction: Court History in Perspective,’’ 1987); for Italians, the same history tends to be approached as a formulaic vocabulary, a symbolic labyrinth, a stage for a graceful and highly idealized conversation, viewed as an institutional system that shaped the culture of the Italian ancien re´gime. This methodological divergence, motivated also by the considerable typological diversity of the Italian courtly mosaic, has been fruitfully resolved

in the groundbreaking studies edited or written by Cesare Mozzarelli such as, for instance, ‘‘Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?’’ (1989) and La corte nella cultura e nella storiografia (1983), and in a set of recent Italian publications sponsored by various institutions, such as the well-established Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo and the newly founded Centro Studi ‘‘Matteo Maria Boiardo.’’ In these studies, the combination of different disciplines and different methodologies constitutes an innovative field of scholarly inquiry in which to define, in new terms and new perspectives, the culture of what was once called the Italian Renaissance. STEFANO CRACOLICI See also: Renaissance Further Reading Asch, Ronald G., and Adolf M. Birke, ‘‘Introduction: Court and Household from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,’’ in Princes, Patronage, and the Nobility: The Court at the Beginning of the Modern Age, c. 1450–1650, edited by Ronald G. Asch and Adolf M. Birke, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Biow, Douglas, Doctors, Ambassadors, Secretaries: Humanism and Professions in Renaissance Italy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Bourdua, Louise, The Franciscans and Art Patronage in Late Medieval Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Burke, Jill, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘‘Cortegiano,’’ Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. Chittolini, Giorgio, Anthony Molho, and Pierangelo Schiera (editors), Origini dello Stato: Processi di formazione statale in Italia fra medioevo ed eta` moderna, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Cummings, A. M., The Maecenas and the Madrigalist: Patrons, Patronage, and the Origins of the Italian Madrigal, Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2004. Dean, Trevor, ‘‘The Courts,’’ The Journal of Modern History, 67(1995), 136–351. Droste, Heiko, ‘‘Patronage in der fru¨hen Neuzeit—Institution und Kulturform,’’ Zeitschrift fu¨r Historische Forschung, 30:4(2003), 555–590. Elias, Norbert, The Court Society, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Gallo, F. Alberto, Music in the Castle: Troubadours, Books, and Orators in Italian Courts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Geertz, Clifford, Negara: The Theatre State in NineteenthCentury Bali, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

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COURTS AND PATRONAGE Gundersheimer, Werner L., ‘‘Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach,’’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, edited by Guy F. Lytle and Stephen Orgel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Kent, Francis W., and Patricia Simons, ‘‘Renaissance Patronage: An Introduction Essay,’’ in Patronage, Art, and Society in Renaissance Italy, edited by Francis W. Kent and Patricia Simons, Canberra: Humanities Research Centre Australia–New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. King, Catherine, Renaissance Women Patrons: Wives and Widows in Italy c. 1300–c. 1550, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. Korshin, Paul J., ‘‘Types of Eighteenth-Century Literary Patronage,’’ Eighteenth-Century Studies, 7:4(1974), 453–473. Lazzarini, Isabella, Fra un principe e altri Stati: Relazioni di potere e forme di servizio a Mantova nell’eta` di Ludovico Gonzaga, Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1996. Matarrese, Tina, and Cristina Montagnani (editors), Il principe e la storia, Novara: Interlinea, 2005.

Mozzarelli, Cesare (editor), ‘‘Familia’’ del principe e famiglia aristocratica, 2 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1988. Mozzarelli, Cesare, ‘‘Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?’’ Schifanoia, 8 (1989), 33–36. Mozzarelli, Cesare, and Giuseppe Olmi (editors), La corte nella cultura e nella storiografia: Immagini e posizioni tra Otto e Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Ossola, Carlo, ‘‘Il ‘luogo’ della corte,’’ in Le Corti farnesiane di Parma e Piacenza (1545–1622), edited by Marzio A. Romani and Amedeo Quondam, vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Quondam, Amedeo, Introduction to Stefano Guazzo, La civil conversazione, vol. 1, Ferrara: Panini, 1993. Santagata, Marco, and Stefano Carrai, La lirica di corte nell’Italia del Quattrocento, Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1993. Starkey, David, ‘‘Introduction: Court History in Perspective,’’ in The English Court from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War, edited by David Starkey, London: Longman, 1987.

CREPUSCOLARISMO The term crepuscolarismo (from crepuscolo, twilight) was introduced by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, a critic who later gained celebrity for the originality of his literary production and for his opposition to the Fascist regime. He coined the expedient label in an article published on 10 September 1910 in the Turin newspaper La Stampa, thereby baptizing what could not, until the moment of his naming, be properly understood as a poetic movement. For the poets in question did not themselves forge any poetic manifesto or define a set of tenets in the pages of any single literary journal. It is instead at the hands of critics that, for their similarly but independently gained conceptions of life and poetry, they have come to be understood under the single title of crepuscolari. In his seminal article, predictably entitled ‘‘Poesia crepuscolare’’ (Crepuscular Poetry), Borgese simultaneously reviewed Marino Moretti’s Poesie scritte col lapis (Poems Written in Pencil, 1910), Fausto Maria Martini’s Poesie provinciali (Provincial Poems, 1910), and Carlo Chiaves’ Sogno e ironia (Dream and Irony, 1910). He warned: 520

A interrogare i critici, che distribuiscono ogni anno eque razioni di lodi fra cinquanta o sessanta volumi di versi, si direbbe che Apollo musagete tenga fermo il suo carro di fuoco sullo Zenith del nostro cielo. A interrogare il gran pubblico si direbbe invece che, dopo le Laudi e i Poemetti, la poesia italiana si sia spenta. Si spegne, infatti, ma in un tenue e lunghissimo crepuscolo, cui forse non seguira` la notte If one asks the critics, who annually distribute equal portions of praise among fifty to sixty volumes of verse, one is told that Apollo holds firm his chariot of fire on the zenith of our sky. If one asks the common reader one is told that, to the contrary, after the Laudi and the Poemetti, the sun of Italian poetry has set. In fact, that sun is still setting through a long and gentle twilight, and it is by no means clear that utter night will fall.

In the wake of this suggestive metaphor, Borgese situated the crepuscular poets within the contemporary literary landscape: ...poiche´ il gran campo della nostra letteratura e` stato mietuto con falci d’oro, essi indugiano sui margini delle vie spigolando i residui del romanticismo e le scorie del classicismo e accontentandosi di capire in Pascoli la balbuzie, in D’Annunzio il Poema paradisiaco

CREPUSCOLARISMO ...Since the great field of our literature was harvested with golden sickles, [the crepusculars] linger by the roadside gleaning the residue of Romanticism and the remnants of Classicism, content in their understanding of Pascoli’s stutter and of D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco.

As has been the case for other artistic movements of modernity, the definition is cast in negative terms, framed in Hegelian theories about the end of art: Borgese intended to make evident the limits of the poets in question and certainly not to eulogize them. If the definition has taken hold, it is because poets of different geographic, social, and cultural backgrounds came to share, despite their circumstantial differences, a radical refutation of the social and civil role of poetry established by the great poets of the nineteenth century. As a consequence, a major feature of crepuscular poetry is the circumscription of the poet within a highly marginalized, private function. The literary map indicates that the movement developed in distinct geographical areas: Turin, where Guido Gozzano, Carlo Vallini, Nino Oxilia, and Carlo Chiaves lived and worked; Rome, where the group led by Sergio Corazzini, including Fausto Maria Martini, Alberto Tarchiani, and Guelfo Civinini, was based; and the area between Emilia and Romagna, whose writers mainly moved to and worked in Florence, like Corrado Govoni and Marino Moretti, to whom should be added the name of Aldo Palazzeschi, who never took part in the movement but maintained a long and fruitful friendship with the crepuscular poets, especially with Moretti. The season of crepuscular poetry was ephemeral: We may locate its inauguration in Govoni’s books Le fiale (The Phials, 1903) and Armonie in grigio et in silenzio (Harmonies in Gray and in Silence, 1903) and its conclusion in Guido Gozzano’s 1911 masterpiece, I colloqui (The Colloquies). Between these dates Corazzini wrote and published Piccolo libro inutile (Small Useless Book, 1906), Elegia (Elegy, 1906), and Libro per la sera della domenica (Book for Sunday Evening, 1906); Moretti wrote Poesie scritte col lapis and Poesie di tutti i giorni (Poems for Every Day, 1911); Chiaves published his only book, Sogno e ironia, in 1910; between 1906 and 1910 Fausto Maria Martini published Le piccole morte (Little Dead Things, 1906), Panem nostrum (Our Bread, 1907), and Poesie provinciali; Nino Oxilia published his Canti brevi (Short Cantos, 1909); Carlo Vallini published his La rinunzia (The Sacrifice, 1907) and Un giorno (A Day, 1907). But by 1907, Corazzini had already died, rather prematurely, of tuberculosis, and Govoni and Palazzeschi would soon desert the

movement, for the opposing camp of the Futurists: In short, well before the outbreak of World War I, the creative drive of the crepuscular movement was definitely exhausted. The founder of crepuscular poetry, chronologically speaking, was Corrado Govoni: In his first collections, all the themes that would later become definitive of the movement are already present. In a 1914 unpublished letter from Govoni to Gian Piero Lucini, there is a list of the most famous elements of crepuscular poetry: Ho sempre amato le cose tristi, la musica girovaga, i canti d’amore cantati dai vecchi nelle osterie, le preghiere delle suore, i mendicanti pittorescamente stracciati e malati, i convalescenti, gli autunni melanconici pieni di addii, le primavere nei collegi quasi timorose, le campagne magnetiche, le chiese dove piangono indifferentemente i ceri, le rose che si sfogliano sugli altarini nei canti delle vie deserte in cui cresce l’erba, tutte le cose tristi della religione, le cose tristi dell’amore, le cose tristi del lavoro, le cose tristi delle miserie I’ve always had a love for sad things, gypsy music, love songs sung by old men in taverns, nuns’ prayers, sick beggars in quaint dress, convalescents, melancholy autumns full of goodbyes, hesitating springtimes at boarding schools, magnetic countrysides, churches where candles weep indifferently, roses dropping theirs petals on the altars of deserted streets in which grass is growing, all the sad things of religion, the sad things of love, the sad things of work, the sad things of miseries (cited in Giacinto Spagnoletti, Storia della letteratura del Novecento, 1994)

Corazzini and Gozzano, respectively in Rome and Turin, acted as poles of attraction to which other young poets, sharing an interest in lyrics characterized by the simple tones and humble subjects of daily life, were drawn. The crepuscolari refused to play the role of laureate poets, to celebrate bourgeois pomp and convention, as Giosue` Carducci did for his poetpioneer: ‘‘Il poeta e` un grande artiere, / che al mestiere, fece i muscoli d’acciaio: / capo fier, collo robusto / nudo il busto, duro il braccio, e l’occhio gaio’’ (The poet is a great pioneer, / whose craft has gained him muscles of steel/ a proud head, a strong neck / a bared chest, hard arms, and a gay eye; ‘‘Congedo’’). Thus Moretti portrays the poet as a clown: ‘‘ma voglio che questa nostra / grande famiglia discreta / mi guardi e dica: il poeta, / il poeta su la giostra, / e rida rida perche´ / il poeta che si mostra / su un cavallo della giostra / sembra il pagliaccio che egli e`’’ (but I want this / large family of ours / to look at me and say: a poet / a poet on a merry-goround / and to laugh, to laugh because / the poet 521

CREPUSCOLARISMO who shows himself / on the merry-go-round’s horse / looks like the clown that he is; ‘‘La giostra’’). Often the function of the poet is negatively described, as in Corazzini: ‘‘Perche´ tu mi dici: poeta? / Io non sono un poeta. / Io non sono che un piccolo fanciullo che piange’’ (Why do you say to me: poet? / I am not a poet. / I am but a child who cries; ‘‘Descrizione del povero poeta sentimentale’’); or in Gozzano: ‘‘Io mi vergogno, / sı`, mi vergogno d’essere un poeta!’’ (I am ashamed, / yes, I am ashamed of being a poet!; ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’); and Palazzeschi: ‘‘Infine, / io ho pienamente ragione, / I tempi sono cambiati, / gli uomini non domandano piu` nulla / dai poeti: / e lasciatemi divertire!’’ (At last, / I am entirely right, / times have changed;/ the men no longer ask anything / of poets: / so let me have fun; ‘‘Lasciatemi divertire’’). This refusal appears to be an act of insubordination, a gesture of rebellion against the establishment. Indeed the crepuscolari endorsed a mode of writing that opposed tradition and chose a language that would neither falsify the ontological experience nor dissemble it through empty rhetorical terms. There is a certain nonchalance toward the technical perfection of verse, what Eugenio Montale called a clash between the aulic and the prosaic (Sulla poesia, 1976). Also in La letteratura dell’italia unita (1968), Gianfranco Contini noted that a frequent unintentional fluctuation in the count of syllables (that he called anisosillabismo) is to be found in both Corazzini’s and Gozzano’s poems. This tendency speaks not to any technical incompetence on the part of the authors but rather to a conscious espousal of prosaic modes of expression. Along with the veristi, the crepuscolari reacted to the political, social, and economic crisis that followed the unification of Italy. But, unlike the more polemical Giovanni Verga, they avoided any explicit critical analysis of the world, as well as any constructive engagement with the future. Poised on the threshold of the twentieth century, the crepuscular movement bridged two very different and yet very similar worlds. Thus critics consider crepuscolarismo either as the final product of decadentismo (the epigone of an already expired mode of poetry) or as the beginning of twentiethcentury lyricism. On the one hand, after Borgese and De Robertis, some view the crepuscolari as minor authors of late nineteenth century, linking them to Pascoli and to the realistic tradition of decadent poetry. But on the other hand, their work appears to be innovative, the inaugural moment of an entirely modern way of conceiving poetry and its relationship to society. The penchant for worn-out 522

things, for the individual existential malaise, for a poetry playing on irony and understatement, on the contrast between form and content, might be interpreted as signs of a break with the past; a break free of the flamboyance and revolutionary fervor that marked the development of other -isms of the same period, but equally effective. Crepuscular verse attests to the rise of a consciousness concerning the fracture between the poet’s personal world and social and national myths. These aspects of the movement have led critics (such as Edoardo Sanguineti) to interpret crepuscolarismo as a major current in twentieth-century Italian literature. In this perspective, D’Annunzio’s Poema Paradisiaco (Paradisiac Poem, 1893), Sbarbaro’s Pianissimo (1914), and Montale’s Accordi (Chords, 1922) would be considered within the crepuscular mode. GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA See also: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Sergio Corazzini, Guido Gozzano, Marino Moretti, Aldo Palazzeschi Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, I crepuscolari, Turin: ERI, 1961. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e ideologia borghese, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Poesia crepuscolare,’’ La Stampa, 10 September 1910. Contini, Gianfranco, La letteratura dell’italia unita, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Fantasia, Rita, and Gennaro Tallini, Poesia e rivoluzione: simbolismo, crepuscolarismo, futurismo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Guglielminetti, Marziano, La ‘‘scuola dell’ironia’’: Gozzano e i viciniori, Florence: Olschki, 1984. Livi, Franc¸ois, La parola crepuscolare. Corazzini, Gozzano, Moretti, Milan: IPL, 1986. Livi, Franc¸ois, Tra crepuscolarismo e futurismo: Govoni e Palazzeschi, Milan: IPL, 1980. Montale, Eugenio, Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Quatela, Antonio, Invito a conoscere il crepuscolarismo, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Tra liberty e crepuscolarismo, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Savoca, Giuseppe, I crepuscolari e Guido Gozzano, Bari: Laterza, 1976. Slataper, Scipio, ‘‘Perplessita` crepuscolare,’’ in Scritti letterari e critici, Milan: Mondadori, 1956. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Storia della letteratura del Novecento, Rome: Newton, 1994. Tedesco, Natale, La condizione crepusculare: saggi sulla poesia italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970. Villa, Angela, Neoidealismo e rinascenza latina tra Otto e Novecento. La cerchia di Sergio Corazzini, Milan: LED, 1999.

BENEDETTO CROCE

CRIME ON GOAT ISLAND See Delitto all’isola delle capre (Work by Ugo Betti)

BENEDETTO CROCE (1866–1952) The philosophical and critical work of Benedetto Croce established itself as a dominant cultural model on the Italian intellectual scene in the first half of the twentieth century. The influence exercised by his thought up until the 1950s was so considerable that we can speak of a true hegemony in several fields of knowledge. One of the determining features of his activity was his methodical, daily involvement in cultural work, understood as a mediation between the individual and his conscience, and the larger movement of the human spirit, the course of history, within the framework of a constant search for balance and morality. The philosopher’s early development was in the field of historical studies, from which he derived a capacity for the minute analysis of facts, a capacity that also characterized his subsequent activity. This period saw the beginnings of his research on history, popular traditions, and the affairs of southern Italy, such as his contributions on the revolution of 1799 in Naples, Studi storici sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799 (Historical Studies of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, 1897) or on I teatri di Napoli: secolo 15–18 (The Theaters of Naples: From the 15th to the 18th Century, 1891) and many of the Storie e leggende napoletane (Neapolitan Histories and Legends, 1919). An interest in history and literature led Croce to try his hand early on at questions of method. In the essay La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte (History Reduced to the General Concept of Art, 1893), he confronted, through a wide range of cultural and philosophical references, the problem of history, distinguishing it from science and bringing it within the field of individual knowledge.

In La critica letteraria: questioni teoriche (Literary Criticism: Theoretical Questions, 1894), he discussed the status of criticism and suggested aesthetic judgment as a privileged form of approach to the literary work. His knowledge of Marxism and his reading of Francesco De Sanctis were also decisive for the maturation of his thought. After an initial appreciation, he adopted a critical position toward Marxism, which he approached through the mediation of Antonio Labriola, attested to by the essays of Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica (Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, 1900), but he also took from it an awareness of the importance of economic factors and of the concreteness of historical change. His engagement with De Sanctis pushed him to meditate on the problem of art and poetry in their relations with the other activities of the spirit. This first phase of reflection on history, philosophy, and art had its end point in the fundamental volume of 1902, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General), which contains the first, decisive assertion of the autonomy of art, understood as a cognitive activity founded on intuition and which was destined to be identified, in the artistic synthesis, with expression. As the philosopher himself clarified in his suggestive autobiographical work Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Benedetto Croce: An Autobiography, 1918), the Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale contains a kind of ‘‘program’’ that is taken up again in the theoretical and historical writings on the other forms of the spirit and tested at 523

BENEDETTO CROCE the level of concrete research. As early as 1902, a consequence was the idea for a journal, La critica, which was intended to illustrate Italian intellectual life from the birth of the unified state; meanwhile, his philosophical reflection was further enriched by his fundamental studies of Hegel, Cio` che e` vivo e cio` che e` morto nella filosofia di Hegel (What Is Living and What Is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel, 1907) and of Vico, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 1911). His rethinking of the Hegelian positions led Croce to deepening of his idealist perspective, with the elaboration of the system of the ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’ (Philosophy of the Spirit), which is divided into four parts, corresponding to the forms of the spirit: logic, discussed in Logica come scienza del concetto puro (Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, 1909); economics and ethics, studied in Filosofia della pratica: Economia ed etica (Philosophy of the Practical: Economics and Ethics, 1909); and aesthetics. Among the four forms of the spirit, there is not an opposition but rather a distinction, which is based on a double difference: between theoretical activity and practical activity and between the individual and the universal. Thus, art is knowledge of the individual, and logic of the universal; both constitute the ‘‘theoretical’’ forms of the spirit. Economics, desire for the particular, and ethics, desire for the universal, represent the two ‘‘practical’’ forms. On the other hand, opposition is produced within each form between a value and the corresponding countervalue: beautiful and ugly in art, true and false in logic, useful and useless in economics, good and bad in the moral realm. Positive and negative elements coexist, finding themselves in a dialectical relationship: One error of Hegel, according to Croce, is that of attributing the dialectical relation to distinct phenomena rather than to opposites. At the center of Logica come scienza del concetto puro is the definition of the ‘‘pure concept,’’ the principal characteristics of which are expressiveness, universality, and concreteness. The ‘‘pure concept’’ must be distinguished from the ‘‘pseudo-concept,’’ which is empirical and abstract; on pseudo-concepts, according to Croce, are based the natural and mathematical sciences, whose constructions can have a practical value but cannot lead to universal knowledge. The Filosofia della pratica takes on the analysis of the ‘‘practical’’ forms of the spirit, economics (and politics) and morality, which make up its modes of action in reality. Here, a crucial distinction is that between ‘‘action,’’ a work of the lone individual, 524

and ‘‘event,’’ a sum of all actions, a moment of the eternal evolution of the spirit. At this point, the question of history becomes crucial, and Croce returned to it in Teoria e storia della storiografia (Theory and History of Historiography, 1917), the last of the series of works of ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’: The relationship among the various forms of knowledge is a historical relationship, a circulation of experiences in the development of the spirit. History and philosophy thus come to be identified, philosophy arising as a methodological moment of historiography, as a clarification of the controlling concepts of historical interpretation. Every history, the philosopher maintained, is contemporary history, insofar as it is conceived in relation to the moral and intellectual needs of the present, to the demands of life at that moment. This position, as well as the denial of the possibility of a universal history, excludes the intervention of a transcendent power. History is immanent rationality, which is realized in the circularity of the spirit, the sole reality on which philosophy continually reflects, without ever reaching a definitive truth but developing itself before new problems that appear along the way. Here, then, Croce’s thought gave birth to a great many essays and articles that take up particular problems and questions. At the very least we should mention La storia come pensiero e come azione (History as Thought and as Action, 1938), which offers a synthesis of Crocean historicism and in which the concept of freedom is central: If historical development unfolds according to an immanent rationality, human history always arises as a ‘‘history of liberty,’’ notwithstanding the seeming disappearance of liberty itself in decisive moments of the life of nations. Fundamental for the clarification of Croce’s ethical and political historiography are the great historical works written between 1925 and 1932, which also attest to an evolution of his political position. Known for his liberal conservatism in the years before the war, the philosopher initially suspended judgment toward Fascism, from which he expected a conservative restoration of the institutions of the state, but gradually he developed an attitude of mounting criticism that turned into the most clear-cut opposition. His historical research was also influenced by the new demands of moral conscience, within the perspective of a secular ‘‘religion of liberty.’’ Thus, in Storia del regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1925), which recounts the affairs of the Neapolitan kingdom up to 1860, and in Storia dell’eta` barocca in

BENEDETTO CROCE Italia (History of the Baroque Age in Italy, 1928), a grand portrait of seventeenth-century Italy, the attention to the moral commitment of humanity is central. The Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (A History of Italy, 1871–1915, 1928) is constructed as an homage to postunification, liberal Italy, and, analogously, the Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (A History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, 1932) is based on an appreciation of the bourgeois and liberal nineteenth century, which is seen as the century of the affirmation of the ideal of liberty, destined to establish itself once more in European history. In the essay ‘‘Principio, ideale, teoria. A proposito della teoria filosofica della liberta`’’ (Principle, Ideal, Theory: On the Philosophical Theory of Freedom) included in the volume Il carattere della filosofia moderna (The Character of Modern Philosophy, 1941), Croce took up the problem of liberty again at the philosophical level. He distinguished its roots not in a particular political or economic order, but in the moral conscience. Liberalism, therefore, is configured as an eternal moment of the spirit but also as a modern awareness of the value of liberty: an ethical perspective destined to gather around the philosopher the greatest cultural forces of anti-Fascism. The aspect of Croce’s philosophical system destined to have the greatest resonance is his aesthetics, and the field in which his influence turns out to be decisive is literary criticism. The positions expressed in his Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale are full of integrations and openings: His lecture of 1908, ‘‘L’intuizione pura e il carattere lirico dell’arte’’ (Pure Intuition and the Lyrical Character of Art) published in Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana (Problems in Aesthetics and Contributions to the History of Italian Aesthetics, 1910), confronts the problem of the relationship between poetry and feeling. Feeling is the center of attention as well in Breviario di estetica (Guide to Aesthetics, 1913): Pure intuition is art when it is animated by a vital principle, when it is a clear representation of a feeling. In the lucid lectures collected in this volume, the principle of the autonomy of art is articulated through a series of distinctions that establish, simultaneously, an equal number of relationships between art itself and the other activities of the spirit. Croce also dealt with concepts that he judged to be prejudices regarding art, but to which he found himself repeatedly returning, such as the distinction between content and form, which art instead ought to synthesize; the distinction between the image and its physical translation, or between

‘‘art’’ and ‘‘technique,’’ which always tends to be undervalued; the possibility of distinguishing between various forms of art, presupposed by the theory of literary and artistic genres, a theory whose validity he does not recognize. Finally, Croce treated the status of literary and art criticism, a status condensed into the definition of the critic as a philosophus additus artifice (a philosopher added to the artist), who, in his judgment, calls upon thought as well. A further deepening of Croce’s aesthetics comes with his acquisition of the notion of cosmicita` (cosmicness) expressed in an essay of 1918, ‘‘Il carattere di totalita` dell’espressione artistica’’ (The Character of the Totality of Artistic Expression) collected in Nuovi saggi di estetica (New Essays on Aesthetics, 1920). As he explained, art is indeed intuition, not of the individual, but of the universal: It embraces in itself the entire human being, life in its totality. The notion of totality and of cosmicita` also leads to the reintroduction of morality into the field of aesthetics. The concept of personality takes on significance in the artistic work and comes to indicate no longer the single artist in his or her individuality, but the poetic work in its universality. From this derives a new conception of literary and artistic historiography that is articulated in monographs that respect the autonomy of the work of art and try to detect its prevailing sentiment. The end point of Croce’s thought in the field of aesthetics is La poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura (Poetry: An Introduction to the Criticism and History of Poetry and Literature, 1936). Poetry, an eternal, ahistorical spiritual category, is distinct from literature, which comprises a wide range of forms and works—sentimental and effusive, rhetorical, didactic, entertaining. Criticism must distinguish between poetry and nonpoetry, the beautiful and the ugly, but also proceed to characterization, that is the detection of the generating motive of the art work. With his deepened theoretical reflection, Croce undertook a vast work of interpretive practice, examining aspects, problems, and authors of Italian and European literature and engaging in a thorough examination of the most recent literary production in the essays that he publishes in La critica between 1903 and 1914 and then collected between 1914 and 1915 in the four volumes of Letteratura della nuova Italia (Literature of the New Italy), to which another two volumes were added between 1938 and 1940. From these essays there emerges (also thanks to the suggestive style of Croce’s writing) a series of polemical objectives and 525

BENEDETTO CROCE proposals for teachers and cultural models, against the backdrop of a well-defined aesthetic canon and the concept of art as intuition, which is suited to explain Croce’s choices and rejections. On the polemical front he took on (along with positivist thought, which he considered incapable in its determinism of accounting for the complexity of the spiritual life), verismo and the erudition of the scholars of the ‘‘historical school.’’ He was even sharper is his condemnation of the aestheticism, decadence, and irrationalism of the beginning of the century, a condemnation that concerned not only the domain of art but also that of morality. From this ensued a precise table of values that had at its apex Giosue` Carducci, offered as a model at the ideological, moral, and stylistic levels and contrasted, as a ‘‘sano’’ (healthy) man, to the ‘‘malati’’ (sick) Giovanni Pascoli, Antonio Fogazzaro, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. In the studies dedicated to the latter, we see a transition from a certain cautious initial recognition, with an admission of the value of poetic form, which is able to compensate for the moral uneasiness generated by the content, to the increasingly decisive condemnation of the growing success of the school of D’Annunzio on Italian culture. After his thorough traversal of the literature of the ‘‘new Italy,’’ seen as a kind of cultural duty that brought him to review analytically contemporary literary productions, including minor and negligible writers, Croce became engaged both with the broader European context and with that of other centuries. The results were the monographs on Goethe (1919), who, in the postwar climate, was offered as a model of the universal poet and as a master of formal harmony; on Ariosto in Ariosto, Shakespeare, e Corneille (1920), and on Dante in La poesia di Dante (The Poetry of Dante, 1921), with the clear-cut and much-discussed distinction between the poetic aspects and the ‘‘structural’’ aspects of the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). The criterion of the contrast between moments of works that can be ascribed to the realm of poetry and those that are nonpoetic seems operative as well in the essays devoted to European authors of the nineteenth century, collected in the volume Poesia e non poesia. Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonono (European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, 1923). This criterion, even though it is meted out cautiously, leads to some grave misunderstandings. Croce’s studies of Italian literature, which proceed with essays devoted to Italian poetry from the fourteenth century to the Renaissance, the baroque age and 526

the seventeenth century, to the Arcadia and eighteenth-century culture, are matched as well by his painstaking work in publishing and his close association with the publisher Laterza, for which he devised the series ‘‘Writers of Italy.’’ Croce’s tireless productivity entails a series of positive aspects: the claim for the philosophical basis of criticism, a great intellectual curiosity, the solidity of the factual basis of his analysis, the reliability of his investigations, his European openness. While his critical make-up seems, on careful inspection, to have been less rigid than has often been thought (partly as a result of the application of his methodology by his less gifted followers) it must be acknowledged, however, that his search for clarity, good sense, and classicality, his essential cultural conservatism, did not allow him to engage fully with the art of modernity. Such limitations, along with the spread of new philosophical and historical orientations and new literary methodologies, led in the 1950s to the beginning of the decline of Croce’s fortune. Between the end of 1980 and 1990, there was a renewal of interest, attested to by the republication of several of Croce’s works by the publishing house Adelphi and by the beginning of a national edition by the Neapolitan publisher Bibliopolis. Alongside a commitment at the level of publishing, there has also been a reemergence of critical studies that are gradually restoring a revised portrait of Croce, composed of lights and shadows and evaluated, in the end, without regard for preformed opinions. Thus, for example, we are by now definitively beyond a dependence on his critical positions, which are on various occasions at the root of misunderstandings and harsh criticisms, as in the case of his severe reaction to Luigi Pirandello’s essay on L’umorismo (On Humor, 1908). On the other hand, his research on specific historical and literary subjects, such as his studies of local history, which are also supported by a robust narrative structure, and his pages on literature and poetry in dialect remain of great interest.

Biography Benedetto Croce was born on February 25, 1866 in Pescasseroli (L’Aquila), in Abruzzo, to a family of landowners. He completed his studies in Naples at the Collegio della Carita` and then at the Genovesi secondary school; he lost his parents and sister in the earthquake of Casamicciola, on the island of

BENEDETTO CROCE Ischia, 1883. He then moved to Rome, into the house of his uncle, Silvio Spaventa, and enrolled at the law school but preferred to spend time in the libraries. In 1886, no longer thinking of a degree, which he never received, Croce returned to Naples and undertook learned inquiries. With Salvatore Di Giacomo, he founded the journal Napoli nobilissima, 1892. He founded the journal La critica, 1903. On a proposal of the minister Sonnino, he was nominated senator of the realm, 1910; he also participated in the local administrative world in various positions. Angelina Zampanelli, his companion of many years, died, September 1913. He married the young Adele Rossi, 1914, with whom, in addition to Giulio, who died as an infant, he had four daughters: Elena, destined to participate actively in Italian cultural life; Alda; Lidia; and Silvia. He served as Minister of Public Education in the last government of Giolitti, 1920, at the end of which he returned to his life as a scholar. His opposition to Fascism grew, particularly in the wake of the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, 1924. He published the Manifesto degli intelletuali antifascisti, 1925. During the Fascist regime, he remained in the Senate, exercising his function as a member of the opposition; for the importance of his cultural figure and the prestige he enjoyed abroad, his activity was tolerated by Fascism. When the regime collapsed, he engaged in energetic political activity; he supported the new liberal party, played a part in several governments, and participated in the Constituent Assembly of the Republic. In 1947, in Naples, he inaugurated the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in the Palazzo Filomarino, its headquarters. In 1950, he was struck by paralysis, which did not affect his mental lucidity; he died in Naples on November 20, 1952. RICCIARDA RICORDA See also: Historiography; Philosophy and Literature Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 74 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1908–1952. My Philosophy and Other Essays on the Moral and Political Problems of Our Time, edited by R. Klibansky, translated by E. F. Carritt, London: Allen & Unwin, 1949. Essays on Literature and Literary Criticism, edited and translated by M. E. Moss, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Benedetto Croce, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1991.

Philosophical, Historical, and Literary Essays I teatri di Napoli: secolo 15–18, 1891; new edition as I teatri di Napoli dal Rinascimento alla fine del secolo decimottavo, 1916. La storia ridotta sotto il concetto generale dell’arte, 1893. La critica letteraria: questioni teoriche, 1894. Studi storici sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1799, 1897; new edition as La rivoluzione napoletana del 1799: biografie, racconti, ricerche, 1912. Materialismo storico ed economia marxistica, 1900; as Historical Materialism and the Economics of Karl Marx, translated by Christabel M. Meredith, 1914. Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, 1900. Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, 1902; as Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1909; as The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, translated by Colin Lyas, 1992. Cio` che e` vivo e cio` che e` morto nella filosofia di Hegel, 1907; new edition as Saggio sullo Hegel, 1913; as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1915. Filosofia della pratica. Economia ed etica, 1909; Philosophy of the Practical. Economic and Ethic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1913. Logica come scienza del concetto puro, 1909; as Logic as the Science of the Pure Concept, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1917. Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, 1910. Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del Seicento, 1911. La filosofia di Giambattista Vico, 1911; as The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, translated by R. G. Collingwood, 1913. Breviario di estetica, 1913; as The Essence of Aesthetic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1921; as Guide to Aesthetics, translated by Patrick Romanell, 1965. La letteratura della nuova Italia, 6 vols., 1914–1940. Teoria e storia della storiografia, 1917; as Theory and History of Historiography, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1921. Una famiglia di patrioti ed altri saggi storici e critici, 1919. Goethe, 1919; as Goethe, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1923. Ariosto, Shakespeare e Corneille, 1920; as Ariosto, Shakespeare and Corneille, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1920. Nuovi saggi di estetica, 1920. Storia della storiografia italiana nel secolo decimonono, 1921. La poesia di Dante, 1921; as The Poetry of Dante, translated by Douglas Ainslie, 1922. Poesia e non poesia. Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonono, 1923; as European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Douglas Ainslie, Storia del regno di Napoli, 1925; as History of the Kingdom of Naples, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1970. Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia, 1928. Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915, 1928; as A History of Italy, 1871–1915, translated by Cecilia M. Ady, 1929. Aesthetica in nuce, 1929; ‘‘Aesthetics,’’ in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 14, 1929. Etica e politica, 1931.

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BENEDETTO CROCE Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono, 1932; as History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Henry Furst, 1933. Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte. Studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento, 1933. Ultimi saggi, 1935. La poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura, 1936. La storia come pensiero e come azione, 1938; as History as the Story of Liberty, translated by Sylvia Sprigge, 1941. Il carattere della filosofia moderna, 1941. Aneddoti di varia letteratura, 3 vols., 1942. La letteratura italiana del Settecento: note critiche, 1949.

Other Writings Contributo alla critica di me stesso, 1918; as Benedetto Croce. An Autobiography, translated by Robin G. Collingwood, 1927. Conversazioni critiche, 5 vols., 1918–1939. Pagine sparse, 4 vols., 1919–1927. Storie e leggende napoletane, 1919. Vite di avventure, di fede e di passione, 1936. Nuove pagine sparse, 2 vols., 1948. Scritti e discorsi politici (1943–1947), 2 vols., 1963. Taccuini di lavoro, 6 vols., 1987. Taccuini di guerra (1943–1945), edited by Cinzia Cassani, 2004.

Letters Carteggio Croce-Vossler: 1899–1949, edited by Vittorio De Caprariis, 1951. Scelta di lettere curate dall’autore: 1914–1935, 1967. Lettere ad Alessandro Casati: 1907–1925, 1969. Carteggio Croce-Valgimigli, edited by Marcello Gigante, 1976 Lettere a Vittorio Enzo Alfieri (1925–1952), 1976. Carteggio Croce-Omodeo, edited by Marcello Gigante, 1978. Lettere a Giovanni Gentile. 1896–1924, edited by Alda Croce, 1991. Carteggio Croce-Amendola, edited by Roberto Pertici, 1982. Carteggio: 1902–1953, with Luigi Einaudi, edited by Luigi Firpo, 1988. Carteggio Croce-Prezzolini, edited by di Emma Giammattei, 2 vols., 1990. Lettere 1930–36, with Thomas Mann, 1991.

Contini, Gianfranco, La parte di Benedetto Croce nella cultura italiana, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1967. Cotroneo, Girolamo, Questioni crociane e post-crociane, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994. D’Amico, Jack, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. D’Angelo, Paolo, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1982. Franchini, Raffaello, Giancarlo Lunati, and Fulvio Tessitore, Il ritorno di Croce nella cultura italiana, Milan: Rusconi, 1990. Giammattei, Emma, Retorica e idealismo: Croce nel primo Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Giordano Orsini, Gian Napoleone, Benedetto Croce. Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. Lamanna, Emilio Paolo, Introduzione alla lettura di Croce, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, Estetica e politica. Croce e Gramsci, Milan: Angeli, 1989. Maggi, Michele, La filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Florence: Il Ponte alle Grazie, 1989. Nicolini, Fausto, Benedetto Croce, Turin: Utet, 1962. Ocone, Corrado, Bibliografia ragionata degli scritti su Benedetto Croce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1993. Parente, Alfredo, Croce per lumi sparsi: problemi e ricordi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Puppo, Mario, Il metodo e la critica di Benedetto Croce, Milan: Mursia, 1964. Sasso, Gennaro, Benedetto Croce: la ricerca della dialettica, Naples: Morano, 1975. Sasso, Gennaro, Filosofia e idealismo, vol. 1. Benedetto Croce, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1994. Sasso, Gennaro, Per invigilare me stesso: i taccuini di lavoro di Benedetto Croce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989. Stella, Vittorio, Il giudizio su Croce: momenti per una storia dell’interpretazione, Pescara: Trimestre, 1971. Stella, Vittorio, La trasparenza del valore: saggi su Benedetto Croce, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1998. Tessitore, Fulvio (editor), L’eredita` di Croce, Naples: Guida, 1985.

Further Reading Boncompagni, Mauro, Ermeneutica dell’arte in Benedetto Croce, Naples: Loffredo, 1980. Bonetti, Paolo, Introduzione a Croce, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1984. Bonetti, Paolo (editor), Per conoscere Croce, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1998. Borsari, Silvano (editor), L’opera di Benedetto Croce: bibliografia, Naples: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici, 1964. Bruno, Raffaele (a cura di), Per Croce. Estetica, etica, storia, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995. Caponigri, A. Robert, History and Liberty: Historical Writings of Benedetto Croce, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Cingari, Salvatore, Benedetto Croce e la crisi della civilta` europea, 2 vols., Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro): Rubbettino, 2003.

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ESTETICA, 1902 Essay by Benedetto Croce

The publication of Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General) marked Croce’s establishment on the

BENEDETTO CROCE cultural scene, and not merely in Italy. It displays a complex structure of thought that, beginning from the aesthetic, articulates itself in the wake of the various forms of the ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’ (Philosophy of the Spirit). As the philosopher recalled in the pages of his Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Benedetto Croce: An Autobiography, 1918), the idea of composing a treatise and a history of aesthetics occurred to him in the autumn of 1898. One of the results of a first phase of research was the lecture Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienze dell’espressione (Fundamental Theses of an Aesthetic as a Science of Expression, 1900), delivered at the Accademia Pontaniana in Naples in 1900, in which there already appears the theoretical core at the center of Estetica, which came out in April of 1902. The book is composed of two parts: The first, in 18 chapters, is of a theoretical character; and the second, which takes up 19 chapters, but more than twice the pages of the first, contains a broad historical analysis of aesthetic thought, from antiquity to the most recent tendencies. Already in the first pages, the philosopher announced his fundamental thesis: Art is intuition, and intuiting coincides with expressing. He distinguished, therefore, intuitive knowledge, which is knowledge of the individual and the producer of images, from logical knowledge, which is knowledge of the universal and the producer of concepts, and he differentiated intuition both from perception and from sensation. Art and philosophy, even though they are distinct, are, however, indissolubly tied together. There follows, in the treatise, a pars destruens in which Croce pointed out the errors that derive from the inadequate consideration of this aspect and also from the confusion between the two forms of knowledge and the mistaken attribution of characteristics of one to the other. This procedure, which alternates the critique of prejudices and errors with the exposition of philosophical subjects, characterizes all of Croce’s work and confers on his writing its characteristic, vigorous polemical thrust. Aesthetic activity is then placed in relation to the other forms of the spirit, economics and ethics, which belong to the practical sphere. The author discussed some corollaries, such as the impossibility of translation and the critique of the categories of rhetoric, related to the definition of art as intuition, which makes it impossible to attribute to art various modes or grades of expression. He then confronted the question of the relation between theory and practice and deepened his

analysis of the concept of feeling. He continued, in parallel fashion, to clear the field of prejudices relating to the problems he took on along the way: He critiqued the aesthetic that confuses the beautiful with the pleasurable, the resort to psychological concepts in the aesthetic field, the division of the arts, the confusion between the physical fact and the artistic vision; finally, he proposed an inquiry into the methodology of artistic and literary history. Once the aesthetic act is considered ‘‘in se´ medesimo e nelle sue relazioni con le altre attivita` spirituali, col sentimento del piacere e del dolore, coi fatti che si dicono fisici, con la memoria e con la elaborazione storica’’ (in itself and in its relations with the other spiritual activities, with the feeling of pleasure and pain, with the facts that we call physical, with memory and historical elaboration), it remains for Croce to justify the subtitle of the work, which postulates the identification of aesthetic and the linguistic in general. If intuition is such only insofar as it is objectified in an expression, art cannot help but be language: A philosophy of one and a philosophy of the other ought to coincide, and the linguistic ought to be identified with the aesthetic. At the beginning of the second part of the work, the history, Croce asked whether aesthetics was born in the eighteenth century or whether it was already formed in antiquity: If it is considered a ‘‘scienza dell’attivita` espressiva’’ (science of expressive activity), we see it emerge only when the nature of expression is determined, and hence in modernity. On the other hand, the Greco-Roman world presented, in his mind, a series of ‘‘deviations’’ and erroneous attempts, which derived essentially from the failed recognition of the autonomy of art, from its submission to a hedonistic, moralistic, or mystical end. In the medieval period, the philosopher pointed out the recovery of the directions of ancient aesthetics, with an emphasis on mystical and pedagogical aspects and the superimposing of moral and religious allegory on the artwork. He held that not even the Renaissance, despite the great passion of scholars, elaborated any new fundamental ideas in this field: Nevertheless, as demonstrated by the major literary polemics of the sixteenth century on poetic truth and on verisimilitude, the ‘‘moto del pensiero estetico’’ (movement of aesthetic thought) appears to have been reactivated. It would fall to the next century to resume inquiries with renewed interest and intensity, with the circulation of new words and new concepts like genius, taste, imagination, feeling: 529

BENEDETTO CROCE Here is the beginning of the great age of aesthetics, which Croce covered in the various regions of European philosophy, from Shaftesbury’s England to the Germany of Baumgarten, important but not quite a true innovator, to the Italy of the revolutionary Giambattista Vico, to whom he attributes the merit of discovering ‘‘la scienza estetica’’ (the aesthetic science) and sanctioning its autonomy. In order to find a temperament as highly speculative in European thought, it was necessary to wait for Kant, in whom Croce recognized depth of knowledge and reflective seriousness, but not systematic and unified thought. Nor was Hegel, to whom he returned in greater depth some years later, spared from criticism, for his idea of placing art on a lower level than pure thought. With equal argumentative power and polemical vis, Croce retraced the path of aesthetics along the entire arc of the nineteenth century, restoring an analytic picture of it. An important chapter is devoted to the master Francesco De Sanctis, while there is a strongly critical view of the positivists and naturalists, who, with their disdain of history, are guilty of severing ties with the thinkers of the past and of nourishing a kind of superstition toward the natural sciences. The treatise closes with the most recent tendencies of thought, moving from neocriticism and empiricism up through Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and Bergson. The solid idealist underpinning, at the time of a pronounced crisis for positivism, along with the breadth of the positions presented, accounts for the great resonance achieved in Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, which was also attested to by the numerous translations that appeared quickly in the wake of the first edition. Croce’s positions were destined to generate, in time, a wide critical debate: To cite only one significant aspect in Italian circles, we should mention Piero Gobetti, who, although he called for an aesthetic able to give a better account of the creative process as a process of criticism, always found in Croce a privileged point of reference, and Antonio Gramsci, who was perpetually in conflict with Croce’s positions. However, it was Galvano Della Volpe who subjected Croce’s structure to a bitter critique, making a claim for the rational character

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of the artwork and for the intellectual nature of poetry. RICCIARDA RICORDA Editions First edition: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale, Milan, Palermo, and Naples: Sandron, 1902; revised edition as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, Bari: Laterza, 1908; newly revised edtion as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, Bari, Laterza, 1941. Other editions: Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale. Teoria e storia, edited by Giuseppe Galasso, Milan: Adelphi, 1900. Translations: as Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, translated by Douglas Ainslie, London: Macmillan & Co, 1909; revised edition, London: Macmillan, 1922; revised edition, New York: Noonday, 1953; as The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, translated by Colin Lyas, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Futher Reading Antoni, Carlo, Chiose all’estetica, Rome: Opere nuove, 1960. Assunto, Rosario, ‘‘La revisione critica del pensiero crociano e il problema della categoria estetica,’’ in Interpretazioni crociane, Bari: Adriatica, 1965. Bruno, Raffaele (editor), Per Croce. Estetica, etica, storia, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995. Colorni, Eugenio, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce, Milan: La Cultura, 1932. Cordie`, Carlo, ‘‘Per la storia della fortuna dell’Estetica di Croce,’’ Rivista di studi crociani, 4(1967), 450–476. D’Angelo, Paolo, L’estetica di Benedetto Croce, Bari: Laterza, 1982. D’Angelo, Paolo, ‘‘L’estetica di Benedetto Croce,’’ in L’estetica italiana del Novecento, Bari: Laterza, 1997. D’Angelo, Paolo, ‘‘One Hundred Years Later: Croce’s Estetica, 1902–2002,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 20:2(2002), 95–105. Jacobitti, Edmund E., ‘‘The Impact of Croce’s Aesthetic of 1902 and Today’s Revolt against Modernity,’’ in The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, edited by Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Sasso, Gennaro, ‘‘L’Estetica di Benedetto Croce,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le Opere, vol. 4, Il Novecento, part 1, L’eta` della crisi, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1995.

BENEDETTO CROCE

STORIA DEL REGNO DI NAPOLI, 1925 Essay by Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce’s sensitivity to problems of the historical and political order was heightened in the wake of the experience of World War I. He confronted the theoretical problems of historiography and, in various essays later collected in Etica e politica (Ethics and Politics, 1931), he offered a new model, a ‘‘storiografia etico-politica’’ (ethicalpolitical historiography), which was meant to integrate mere ‘‘political’’ history with the history of culture and of civilization. The Storia del Regno di Napoli (History of the Kingdom of Naples), then, was born from the convergence of his growing interest in contemporary politics, particularly in the contested question of the south, and this new conception of history, one driving thought of which is precisely the intention of restoring to Neapolitan history the hegemony of intellectual and moral life. The first scheme for an essay on the history of southern Italy dates to the end of 1922. In 1923, Croce anticipated its publication in installments in La critica, then collected them in one volume, adding two ‘‘piccole monografie di storia locale’’ (short monographs of local history), an homage to the ‘‘paeselli’’ (small villages) of his native Abruzzo, Montenerodomo, and Pescasseroli. In the introduction, Croce reiterated that the true history of a people is not legal-social history, but ‘‘solamente quella etica o morale e, in alto senso, politica’’ (only ethical or moral and, in a high sense, political) and that ‘‘promotori di siffata storia sono i ceti e i gruppi che si chiamano dirigenti, e gl’individui che si dicono politici e uomini di stato’’ (promoters of such history are the classes and groups defined as ruling, and the individuals who are called politicians and men of state). He therefore retraced Neapolitan history by following the formation of a ruling class. His point of departure is not the epic of the Norman-Swabian kingdom but the moment that Croce considered as marking the true constitution of a kingdom of southern Italy, with the

separation from Sicily after the Sicilian Vespers and the definitive nomination of Naples as the Angevin capital. The first chapter is devoted to the period of the ‘‘Kingdom,’’ between Angevins and Aragonese: At its center is always the ‘‘storia della nazione napoletana, degli abitatori dell’Italia meridionale e della parte attiva, quale che fosse, molta o poca, che dispiegarono nella politica e nella civilta`’’ (history of the Neapolitan nation, of the inhabitants of southern Italy and of the active part, whatever it may have been, great or small, that they played in politics and in civilization). The next chapter concerns the years of the Spanish domination, which is granted the merit of defending the territory from external dangers and from subjection to the baronage. The development of a new culture is described beginning from its first signs in the later seventeenth century up through its full unfolding in the century of reform, in which the French Revolution erupts, followed by the great upheavals destined to last until the Risorgimento, when the kingdom of Naples disappears by joining the Italian nation. In the face of the emergence, in a united Italy, of a ‘‘questione meridionale’’ (southern question), one task of the historian is demonstrating that the conditions of the Mezzogiorno do not derive from an unchangeable state of nature, but that, on the contrary, each practical and political problem is a moral and spiritual one, which entails the responsibility of the individual. For the breadth of the total picture it proposes, Croce’s volume marks a turning point in southern historiography, which it strongly influenced. Contemporary scholars point out its limitations, in the first place the absolute importance given to the ruling class, within a perspective that isolates it from the other classes, contrasting its affairs with the social history of the rest of the country. Nevertheless, the work continues to be considered a point of reference that it is necessary to confront. RICCIARDA RICORDA

Editions First edition: Storia del Regno di Napoli, Bari: Laterza, 1925; revised edition as Storia del Regno di Napoli, Bari: Laterza, 1931 and 1944. Other editions: Storia del Regno di Napoli, edited by Giuseppe Galasso, Milan: Adelphi, 1992. Translation: as History of the Kingdom of Naples, translated by Frances Frenaye, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

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BENEDETTO CROCE Futher Reading Catalano, Franco, ‘‘Croce storico,’’ L’Osservatore politico letterario, 9(1966), 17–68. Chabod, Federico, ‘‘Croce storico,’’ in Lezioni di metodo storico, edited by Luigi Firpo, Bari: Laterza, 1969. Galasso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Considerazioni intorno alla storia del Mezzogiorno d’Italia,’’ in Mezzogiorno medievale e moderno, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Galasso, Giuseppe, Croce e lo spirito del suo tempo, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1990. Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, ‘‘Croce e la storiografia contemporanea,’’ in La scienza della storia. Interpreti e problemi, Naples: Liguori, 1999.

Macera, Guido, ‘‘Croce storico del Regno di Napoli,’’ in L’eredita` di Croce, edited by Fulvio Tessitore, Naples: Guida, 1985. Musi, Aurelio, ‘‘Dimenticare Croce?’’ in Dimenticare Croce? Studi e orientamenti di storia del Mezzogiorno, edited by Aurelio Masi, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1991. Trafton, Dain A., ‘‘Political Doctrine in Croce’s History of the Kingdom of Naples,’’ in The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, edited by Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Villani, Pasquale, ‘‘Croce storico del Mezzogiorno,’’ in L’eredita` di Croce, edited by Fulvio Tessitore, Naples: Guida, 1985.

GIULIO CESARE CROCE (1550–1609) More than 400 works are ascribed to the popular poet Giulio Cesare Croce. Many of them, written in Italian or in the Bolognese dialect, are ironic and witty descriptions of the life, jokes, sayings, and moralities of the poor. Among the best (many of Croce’s works remain unedited) is an autobiography in verse, Descrizione della vita del Croce (A Description of the Life of Croce). Croce’s style is at its best in the brilliant, sharp, and fierce dialogues and in the acuteness of the farcical comedies he published in the 1590s. His comedies feature typical situations and characters of the commedia dell’arte: Il tesoro (The Treasure), Sandrone astuto (Sandrone the Cunning), La Farinella (Farinella), and the original tragic-comedy Il dialogo del banchetto de’ malcibati (The Dialogue of the Banquet of the Badly Fed Men), a grotesque representation of the great famine of 1590. Croce also published the Ventisette mascherate piacevolissime (Twenty-Seven Very Pleasant Masquerades, 1603), creating new dialogues and plots for popular characters and maschere. His most popular work, however, was Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (The Sharpest Stratagems of Bertoldo, 1606), which carried the subtitle ‘‘Dove si scorge un Villano accorto e sagace il quale dopo vari e strani accidenti a lui intervenuti, alla fine per il suo ingegno raro e acuto vien fatto huomo di Corte e Regio Consigliero. Opera nuova e di gratissimo gusto’’ (Where Is Seen a Peasant 532

Discerning and Astute Who After Various and Strange Accidents Happened to Him Is Finally Made, on Account of His Rare and Acute Ingenuity, a Man of Court and Councellor to the King. A New and Most Pleasing Work). The book is a reworking of the popular medieval legend known as Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolphi (Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolfus). Here the traditions of the commedia dell’arte are explicitly invoked in the carnivalesque pairing of the learned man and the worldly peasant, a pairing that plays to his antipedantic strategy. His plots involve, on the one hand, the great hunger of the poor, and on the other hand, the epic cunning of the peasant in outwitting the arrogance of power, dramatic perspectives destined to be recuperated in a heightened key in the work of Dario Fo. Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo is about the adventures of the ugly and cunning peasant Bertoldo, who is invited to the court of the Lombard King Alboino. He is loved by the king for the wit, honesty, and frankness of his speech but is hated by the queen for the same reasons: He is not respectful and refuses to share the opinion of the powerful figures of his age. Alboino is persuaded by his wife to sentence Bertoldo to death, but the peasant obtains from the king the right to choose the tree from which he will be hanged. The hangmen must follow him in a long search for the right tree which, of course, will never be found. Alboino appreciates

GIULIO CESARE CROCE the trick and appoints Bertoldo as a personal counsellor. Bertoldo ultimately dies, however, because he cannot survive on the sophisticated food of the court, which is ‘‘troppo fino per il suo gusto’’ (too fine for his taste). The structure of the book is irregular. Its shape derives from the popular form of the centone; it piles up episodes consisting of short and vivid descriptions and dialogues in which Bertoldo shows the dignity and the value of his world. The style of the composition is taken from the technique of the street singers, who recited rhyming stories in response to the images of posters or banners. Croce himself had a gift for improvisation, singing his songs and accompanying himself on his lyre. Especially remarkable are Bertoldo’s answers to the questions of Alboino: When the king asks him who are his ancestors, the peasant says they are the beans that, boiling in the pot, gave him life. In answer to the question, what is the fastest thing in life, Bertoldo replies ‘‘il pensiero’’ (the thought). And, of course, for Bertoldo, the most tasty wine is the one we drink in other people’s houses; the unending sea is the greed of the miser; the craziest man in the world is the one who considers himself to be the wisest; and, to the capital question ‘‘chi sei?’’ (who are you?), Bertoldo says ‘‘sono un uomo e il mio paese e` il mondo’’ (I am a man and the world is my country). Even though Bertoldo dies in the book, his story became so popular that Croce published a sequel, Le piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino, figlio del gia` astuto Bertoldo (The Pleasant and Ridiculous Simplicity of Bertoldino, Son to the Late Astute Bertoldo, 1608). After Bertoldo’s death, a sad Alboino calls Bertoldo’s family, his clever wife Marcolfa and their son Bertoldino, who is a dupe, to his court. Marcolfa’s dialogues with the king are as witty as her husband’s, but everyone in the court laughs at Bertoldino’s foolishness. Finally, hating the artificial life of the court, Marcolfa asks Alboino for permission to return to her hut. Several critics, including Piero Camporesi in his La maschera di Bertoldo (1976), have considered this novel a sign of the sad, pessimistic view of the old Croce: His hero Bertoldo was able to speak his mind freely in front of a king, showing him the world was wider than his court. He thus becomes a respected figure, but his son Bertoldino returns to the original positon of a poor and confused peasant with no clear vision of the world. Croce’s story became so well known that in 1621 a Bolognese abbot and composer, Adriano Banchieri (1568–1634), using the pseudonym Camillo Scaligeri della Fratta,

wrote a celebrated sequel, Novella di Cacasenno figlio del semplice Bertoldino (Story of Cacasenno, Son of the Simple Betoldino), in which he creates a son for Bertoldino named Cacasenno.

Biography Guilio Cesare Croce was born in San Giovanni in Persiceto (Bologna), son to a poor family, ‘‘the day of carnival’’ 1550. He worked as a blacksmith and as a popular street singer until 1575; then he gave up his father’s trade in order to be a full-time street singer working in the local markets. Croce died in Bologna, 12 January 1609. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo. Le piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino. Col ’Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolphi’ e il suo primo volgarizzamento a stampa, edited by Piero Camporesi, Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Due commedie bolognesi del cinquecento, edited by Fabio Foresti, Bologna: CLUEB, 1990.

Plays Il tesoro, 1590. Sandrone astuto, 1591. La Farinella, 1591. Il dialogo del banchetto de’ malcibati, 1591. Ventisette mascherate piacevolissime, 1603.

Fiction Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo, 1606. Le piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino, figlio del gia` astuto Bertoldo, 1608.

Further Reading Bellettini, Pierangelo, Rosaria Campioni, and Rita Zanardi (editors), Una citta` in piazza. Comunicazione e vita quotidiana a Bologna tra Cinque e Seicento, Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2000. Bruni, Roberto, Rosaria Campioni, and Diego Zancani (editors), Giulio Cesare Croce dall’Emilia all’Inghilterra. Cataloghi, biblioteche e testi, Florence: Olschki, 1991. Camporesi, Piero, La maschera di Bertoldo. Giulio Cesare Croce e la letteratura carnevalesca, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Camporesi, Piero, Il palazzo e il saltimbanco, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Casali, Elide, and Bruno Capaci (editors), La festa del mondo rovesciato. Giulio Cesare Croce e il carnevalesco, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002.

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GIULIO CESARE CROCE Dursi, Massimo (editor), Affanni e canzoni del padre di Bertoldo, Bologna: Alfa, 1966. Guerrini, Olindo, La vita e le opere di Giulio Cesare Croce, Bologna: Forni, 1879. Marini, Quinto, Bertoldo, Bertoldino, Marcolfo, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1986.

Rouch, Monique, Storie di vita popolare nelle canzoni di Piazza di Giulio Cesare Croce, Fame, fatica e mascherate nel ’500, Bologna: CLUEB, 1982. Rouch, Monique (editor), Varii al mondo son gli umori, ovvero La gran pazzia nelle poesie di Giulio Cesare Croce, Bologna: CLUEB, 2001.

MARIA ROSA CUTRUFELLI (1946–) The versatility and skill of novelist Maria Rosa Cutrufelli have their roots in her unconventional apprenticeship. From 1974 to the 1990s, Cutrufelli wrote essays about the little-explored universe of blue-collar women’s working lives. Those essays comprise sociological analyses and interviews. The women’s speech is filtered through the written medium of the interviewer, yet Cutrufelli’s ‘‘translation’’ does not alter the authenticity and flavor of the women’s voices. One of this period’s most original sociological investigations is Il cliente. Inchiesta sulla domanda di prostituzione (The Costumer: An Inquiry on Prostitution, 1981). Cutrufelli’s metaphor for male sexuality is the iceberg, a hidden and mute presence. The interviews challenge a pattern of silence, a sort of cultural omerta`; They become first-person monologues, which she calls ‘‘testimonials,’’ the first step in a process of discovery. As is the case with many contemporary Italian women writers, Cutrufelli consistently crosses the boundaries of genres. Her first novel, La briganta (The Woman Outlaw, 1990), evokes historical events but is also a memoir. It takes place in Sicily during the 1860s, when Garibaldi and his volunteers fueled the hopes of those Sicilians who felt most oppressed by the Bourbon monarchy and the big landowners. The female protagonist transgresses all the rules imposed on her sex in that time and place by murdering a man and then joining a band of outlaws. As she perused dry trial records, Cutrufelli imagined the lives of women outlaws, the ambiguities of their position inside emphatically masculine societies, and the hardships they endured in their efforts to define their own identities. Ultimately, writing is the greater transgression for Margherita, the protagonist, and through it she attains true freedom. 534

The story of Canto al deserto. Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia (A Song to the Desert: The Story of Tina, a Mafia Foot-Soldier, 1994) also revolves around a Sicilian theme and locale. The protagonist is a young woman of today and the narrator a journalist. A contemporary phenomenon, women’s entrance into male domains, provides the background. Women used to have passive roles in organized crime, but in recent times they have become active participants. Tina, the story’s protagonist, is an enterprising girl who succeeds in becoming a Mafia foot soldier. However, when she attempts to join the ranks of Mafia leaders she is blocked and destroyed. Only a written record, the reporter’s account of her life and death, will insure the survival of her memory. Cutrufelli’s previous novel, Complice il dubbio (Doubt as the Accomplice, 1992), opens a new narrative path. It is an unconventional mystery novel and a psychological study that includes a sexual encounter, a violent death, fear, and suspense; but its focus is the solitude of women’s lives in a European metropolis and the complexities of human relationships. A magnificently evoked contemporary Rome is one of the novel’s most impressive ‘‘characters.’’ Ominous signs and a Roman summer’s suffocating heat are forebodings of the tragedies that involve human beings and environment. Yet, it is Rome’s natural/urban landscape that ultimately provides relief and the promise of human connection. Through the years Cutrufelli has also perfected a narrative that blends imagination with travel reportage, biography, autobiography, and social commentary. She brings to life the realities of remote peoples, landscapes, and atmospheres and the intense emotions they evoke: Donna perche´ piangii? La condizione femminile in Africa Nera (Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, 1976), a factual essay;

MARIA ROSA CUTRUFELLI and Mama Africa. Storia di donne e di utopie (Mama Africa: Stories of Women and Utopias, 1989), a personal reflection based on notes she took during her travels as a journalist in Angola and Zaire. The novel Giorni d’ acqua corrente (The Days of Running Water, 2002) follows the narrator’s journey to locations in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, where people struggle against injustice and manage to survive against all odds, while Il paese dei figli perduti (The Land of the Lost Children, 1999) explores the familiar theme of a young person’s sudden impulse to find out more about a lost parent. It is the story of a father’s desertion, a woman’s discovery of a faraway continent, Australia, and a journey of self-discovery. Cutrufelli’s latest narrative, La donna che visse per un sogno (The Woman Who Lived for a Dream, 2004), again brings to life a historical episode, the memory of women’s voices, and the violence that attempted to silence them. During the bloodiest months of the French Revolution several women of various ages and from different social strata speak about their experiences. Among them, most striking of all, is the voice of the ‘‘woman who lived for a dream,’’ Olympe de Gouges, the tragic champion of women’s rights. The voices, with their choral interweaving, provide a multiplicity of perspectives and unveil the unseen facets of a founding event that looms, remote and monolithic, in the annals of history. Once again fiction and fact, first-person narrative and biography blend in a compelling and original way.

Biography Maria Rosa Cutrufelli was born in Messina, 26 January 1946. She graduated from the University of Bologna with a dissertation in aesthetics on the Russian Formalists, which was directed by Luciano Anceschi. She moved to Rome and began her career as a journalist and a writer of fiction. In the late 1970s and early 1980s she was in Africa for the first time and published two volumes about that experience. All through the years, Cutrufelli has been a contributor to the Italian daily press. In 1990 she founded a periodical focusing on women’s writing, Tuttestorie (1990–2000). Several of its issues have become fundamental texts in women’s literature: Il pozzo segreto (1993), Nella citta` proibita (1997), and the June 2000 issue, which was entirely devoted to Italian-American women’s writing. Cutrufelli teaches Theory and Practice of Creative Writing at the University of Rome, ‘‘La

Sapienza.’’ La donna che visse per un sogno was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2004. ANGELA M. JEANNET Selected Works Fiction La briganta, 1990; as The Woman Outlaw, translated by Angela M. Jeannet, 2004. Complice il dubbio, 1992. Canto al deserto. Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia, 1994. Il paese dei figli perduti, 1999. Giorni d’acqua corrente, 2002. La donna che visse per un sogno, 2004.

Nonfiction L’invenzione della donna. Miti e tecniche di uno sfruttamento, 1974. L’unita` d’Italia: guerra contadina e nascita del sottosviluppo del Sud, 1974. Disoccupata con onore. Lavoro e condizione della donna, 1975. Operaie senza fabbrica. Inchiesta sul lavoro a domicilio, 1977. Economia e politica dei sentimenti. La ‘‘produzione’’ femminile, 1980. Il cliente. Inchiesta sulla domanda di prostituzione, 1981; reprinted as Il denaro in corpo, 1996. Donna, perche´ piangi? La condizione femminile in Africa Nera, 1976; translated as Women of Africa: Roots of Oppression, 1983. Mama Africa. Storia di donne e di utopie, 1989; reprinted, 1993.

Edited Work Le donne protagoniste nel movimento cooperativo. La questione femminile in un’organizzazione produttiva democratica, 1978. Il pozzo segreto, 1993. Nella citta` proibita, 1997; as In the Forbidden City, translated by Vincent J. Bertolini, 2000.

Further Reading Amoruso, Giuseppe, Il cenacolo degli specchi. Narrativa italiana 1993–1995, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1997. De Giovanni, Neria, Scrittrici italiane dell’ultimo Novecento, Rome: Dipartimento per l’informazione e per l’editoria della Presidenza del Consiglio, 2003. Giunta, Edvige, ‘‘Sicilian Lives at the Crossroads: Reading Maria Rosa Cutrufelli,’’ Academic Forum, 10(2002), 44–48. Jeannet, Angela M., ‘‘Between Document and Fiction: Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Voices,’’ Italian Culture, 16 (1998), 129–141. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

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MARIA ROSA CUTRUFELLI MacCarthy, Ita, ‘‘Mobility and Subjectivity in Maria Rosa Cutrufelli’s Il paese dei figli perduti,’’ in Cross-Cultural Travel: Papers from the Royal Irish Academy Symposium on Literature and Travel, edited by Jane Conroy, New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Marotti, Maria Ornella, and Gabriella Brooke (editors), Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999.

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Parati, Graziella, ‘‘The Impossible Return: Women, Violence, and Exile,’’ VIA: Voices in Italian-Americana, 7 (1996), 257–262. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘Maria Rosa Cutrufelli e il suo punto di vista sulla sessualita` femminile,’’ in Cultura e societa` alla fine del secondo millennio: Italia e Ungheria, Budapest: ELTE, 1999.

D DANCE AND LITERATURE ballet—the planimetric formation of figures to be read as though from above. Within this visionary evocation, there is everything that founds the Western conception of cultured dance: the quest for an inscribed sign within the subject, the cartography of a ‘‘text.’’ Indeed, among the numerous dance librettos composed in the first half of the seventeenth century by the Marinist Bernardo Morando (1589–1656), we should mention the ballet Victoria d’Amore (Victory of Love, 1641), set to music by Claudio Monteverdi (though the libretto indicates, for one of the two projected ballets, an ‘‘aria leggiadrissima, inventata di nuovo dal Prevosto Aschieri’’ (a very light aria, invented anew by Prevosto Aschieri), and perhaps choreographed by Pompeo Ugo Ballarino, with a commission by the duke Odoardo Farnese in order to celebrate in Piacenza the birth of his seventh child, Ottavio. This ballet, with narrative sections that are sung, pits the chaste Diana, who calls for a ballet that reproduces in song and visualizes ‘‘ne I Balli istessi’’ (in the dances themselves) the sentence ‘‘AMOR FUGGIAMO’’ (we flee from love), against an indignant Cupid, who, as proof of his undisputed power, draws from the sky an ‘‘inusitate e dilettosa Pioggia, o Tempesta, di freschissimi et odorati Fiori’’ (unusual and delightful rain, or Storm, of fresh, scented flowers), producing, through dance, an actual text of bodies that is self-sufficient and able to contain and reveal, at the same time, an unprecedented performative idea of the body.

After making a preliminary, generic distinction between writing for dance and writing about dance, we should consider the literary evidence from a double perspective. It should be able to distinguish the quality of the literary sources used for dance compositions (dance librettos in verse and in prose) and the quality of other sources that can be used as textual witnesses on aesthetic and also historical questions concerning the practice and social world of dance (poetic and dramatic texts, novels and short stories, letters) from the normative nature of texts usually examined from a historiographic perspective (academic treatises, normative poetics in all genres, collections of dances with scant literary value). In Italy, before the emergence of a dance culture (in accordance with treatises and schools) from within the Renaissance Courts, the Neoplatonic idea of dance as a metaphor for the harmony of the universe and the motion of the stars survives particularly in poetry. This idea is dominated by the Pythagorean ideal, which is clearly felt, as Alessandro Arcangeli notes, in the numerical symbolism that, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, suffuses theoretical reflection on art as much as choreographic praxis (Davide o Salome`?, 2000). In Dante’s Paradiso (Canto XVIII, vv. 73–81), it is possible to contemplate the spectacle of some blessed souls that are splayed out across the sky, dancing and singing in flight, and finally forming a sequence of several letters of the alphabet, thus anticipating a typical procedure of the Baroque 537

DANCE AND LITERATURE But it is with L’Adone (Adonis, 1623) by Giovanbattista Marino, the most enduring figure of the Italian literary Baroque, that the decisive encounter between dance and poetry seems to take place. In the poem’s final canto, the 20th, amid the festive celebrations of the games of Adonis, dedicated to the young, mortal shepherd loved by Venus and who is killed by a wild boar, there is a long series of octaves (43) dedicated to several important exhibitions of dance. The considerable number of references to orchestration, the transferring of the game of the dancing variations into verse (it mentions 12 different types of dances), the emphasis placed on the athletic qualities of the male dancers, the reflection on the expectant reactions of the spectator, even the censuring of the maledancer, all these tell us that we are already at the dawn—well before the critical enterprise of The´ophile Gautier (1811–1872)—of what we recognize today as dance criticism. L’Adone conveys an idea of dance as an art and not as a mere spectacle, as the grace of an interior feeling and not as an exhibitory triumph of the physical, athletic, and acrobatic power of the performers. It is Ugo Foscolo, on the other hand, who in a celebrated episode of his unfinished poem, Le Grazie (The Graces), experiments through language, in verse, with the vehement enthusiasm of a dancer’s art, beginning with a range of variations that are hardly transformed into a definitive lesson, and are admirably illustrated by Giorgio Orelli in his Foscolo e la danzatrice (1992), as though the correlation and interweaving with the movement of this art that eludes thought might introduce the design of poetry to new and still unfinished questions. But the greatest result of dance’s quest for literary dignity, after the adoption of a well-structured plot with recognizable characters capable of eloquent gestures, suggested by John Weaver (1673–1760) and reinforced through the ballet d’action up through Jean-Georges Noverre (1727–1810) and Gaspare Angiolini (1731–1803), is summed up exemplarily in the libretto of Prometeo (Prometheus), a famous ballet at La Scala in Milan by the celebrated ‘‘poeta muto’’ (mute poet) Salvatore Vigano` (1769–1821), probably composed with the discreet collaboration of the scholar and poet Giovanni Gherardini (1778–1861), who is also the first Italian translator of A.W. Schlegel’s History of Dramatic Literature. Carlo Porta himself recounts in a parody the immense reverberation of Vigano`’s ballet. Vigano` and Gherardini’s writing experiment remains exemplary, however, of an entire preRomantic ambience in Milan, led by the figures of 538

Ermes Visconti and Alessandro Manzoni. In the ballet’s libretto, the widespread and explicit presence of the auctoritates of Italian literature—from Petrarch to Marino and Monti—signals an attempt to promote the genre in accordance with its own cultural autonomy and literary dignity. In the twentieth century, when the reclaiming of the nonverbal marks the frontier between the mimesis of ancient theater and dance in the West, and the modern age, Gian Pietro Lucini, perhaps as a tribute to Loie Fuller’s time in Milan in 1902, publishes in Marinetti’s journal, Poesia, a long poem, ‘‘La Danza Sacra’’ (The Sacred Dance, 1908), which is dedicated to her, and which is an entire critical edition of the Hermetic themes so important for the ‘‘technological’’ dance of the dancer from Illinois. In the union of the theme of the production of the future with the irrational as the scene of its realization, Lucini highlights the intuition of the value of the true otherness of the new free dance, pervaded at all levels by emotion, the realm of the feminine, and by a rediscovery of the interior values of movement, as compared to the technological and progressivist modernity of the masculine dominion of reason. And it is intuition in the poetry of a dance that reclaims the prerogatives of the body and of the feminine in the allegorical figure, both unreal and disturbing, of the androgyne. Even Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in his Manifesto della danza futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Dance) issued on July 8, 1917, recognizes in the mechanical and lighting-technical evolutions of Fuller’s dance ‘‘quell’ideale corpo moltiplicato’’ (that ideal multiplied body), which is able to ‘‘superare le possibilita` muscolari’’ (go beyond muscular possibilities): the heroic expansion of the soul through the sublimation of the vile mecanico as an aesthetic joining with the imminent ‘‘metallismo della danza futurista’’ (metallism of futurist dance), and opposing, on the other hand, couple dances like the waltz and the tango. Finally, after the decline of the image of the nineteenth-century ballerina in the gloomy theaters and cabarets of the verist Italy (described, for example, in many novels by Giovanni Verga) the dimension of eloquent silence as the sole and most authentic horizon of meaning for a poetics of gesture and movement capable of marking the difference between body and word, is perhaps exemplary in the romantic relationship (with notable reverberations in his poetry and letters) between Salvatore Quasimodo and the dancer Maria Cumani, to whom the poet writes in 1937: ‘‘canto e` anche la

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO danza come la poesia (...) anche tu traducevi in sillaba qualche ritmo che poi doveva mutarsi in gesto perche´ cosı` voleva la tua musa’’ (like poetry, dance is also song...you also translate into syllables a certain rhythm which you then must transform into gesture because your muse desired it). STEFANO TOMASSINI Further Reading Arcangeli, Alessandro, Davide o Salome`? Il dibattito europeo sulla danza nella prima eta` moderna, TrevisoRome: Edizioni Fondazione Benetton Studi Ricerche/Viella, 2000. Cumani, Maria, and Salvatore Quasimodo, L’arte del silenzio: La danza, la poesia, l’immagine, edited by Delfina Provenzali, Milan: Spirali/Vel, 1995. Cumani, Maria, ‘‘O forse tutto non e` stato,’’ Rovereto (Trento): Nicolodi, 2003. Delfini, Laura, et al. (editors), Danza e Poesia, Bologna: Des, 2004. Franko, Mark, Dance as Text. Ideologies of the Baroque Body, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Goellner, Ellen W., and Jacqueline Shea Murphy (editors), Bodies of the Text: Dance as Theory, Literature as Dance, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Guglielmo Ebreo of Pesaro, On the Practice or Art of Dancing, edited by Barbara Sparti, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Lo Iacono, Concetta, ‘‘Il tramonto di Venere: L’immagine della ballerina nell’eta` umbertina,’’ in In cerca di danza: Riflessioni sulla danza moderna, edited by Cristian Muscelli, Ancona and Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1999. Lombardi, Carmela (editor), Il ballo pantomimo: Lettere, saggi e libelli sulla danza (1773–1785), Turin: Paravia, 1998. Louppe, Laurence, ‘‘Les imperfections du papier,’’ in Danses trace´es: Dessins et Notation des Chore´graphes, Paris: Editions Dis Voir, 1991. Louppe, Laurence, ‘‘E´criture litte´raire, e´criture chore´graphique au XXe sie`cle: une double re´volution,’’ in La litte´rature et la danse (nume´ro monographique), Litte´rature, 112, de´cembre 1998, Paris: Larousse, 1998. Milloss, Aurel M., Coreosofia: Scritti sulla danza, edited by Stefano Tomassini, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Morris, Gay (editor), Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Orelli, Giorgio, Foscolo e la danzatrice: Un episodio delle Grazie, Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Raimondi, Ezio (editor), Il sogno del coreodramma: Salvatore Vigano`, poeta muto, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Danza & scrittura. Corpo e modernita` nella cultura del primo Novecento,’’ in Il castello di Elsinore, 15 (2002): 23–34. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Melodramma, musica e danza,’’ in Il Teatro Municipale di Piacenza: Nel bicentenario di fondazione 1804–2004, edited by Stefano Pronti, Piacenza: Tipografia Le.Co., 2004. Vigano`, Salvatore, Il Prometeo: libretto del ballo. Con i testi della polemica, edited by Stefano Tomassini, Turin: Legenda, 1999.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO (1863–1938) Gabriele D’Annunzio is one of the most influential and prolific writers of twentieth-century Italy. Albeit often controversial, his works, which include poetry, short stories, novels, plays, memoirs, political and other prose writings, were widely applauded in his times and translated into several languages. Admired also outside Italy for the innovative and aesthetic value of his works, by prominent writers like D.H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Henry James and the young James Joyce, D’Annunzio leaves a farreaching and lasting legacy with his literary production,which influences generations of Italian writers in different ways. Never quite comfortable with any of the literary trends that affected European literature during his lifetime, such as naturalism, its Italian variant Verismo, symbolism, Expressionism, Decadentism, avant-garde movements and

Modernism, he experiments widely with them in a constant search for new forms of artistic expression that would still retain his own personal imprint. D’Annunzio is a larger-than-life protagonist of the literary, political, and intellectual scene of Italy for most of his long and transgressive life. Yet, after World War II and the demise of Fascism, his works are ignored or stigmatized on political and moralistic grounds for what are perceived as his compromising connection with Mussolini, his scandalous lifestyle and his immoral works. Although many prejudices still exist against D’Annunzio, the revival of scholarly interest in his work since the 1970s has finally addressed the most flagrant misconceptions propagated by previous literary criticism. The reappraisal of his life and oeuvre, which is now taking place both in Italy and 539

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO elsewhere, has finally brought to light his major contribution to European literary modernity. D’Annunzio publishes his first volume of poems, Primo vere (First Spring, 1879) at the age of 16. This small collection of 30 lyric poems deals vividly with the Abruzzi and Tuscan landscapes and romantic love. It is modeled on Giosue` Carducci’s Odi barbare (Barbarian Odes, 1887), which break away from Italian versification in favor of new meters inspired by Greek and Latin poetry. Although it is an early and immature work by an adolescent poet, the collection is favorably reviewed in the prestigious literary journal Fanfulla della Domenica and warmly received in literary circles. In 1880, D’Annunzio meets the photographer and painter Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851–1929) and is subsequently introduced to his Cenacolo. This is a closely knit group of artists, including the sculptor Costantino Barbella (1852–1925), musicians Francesco Paolo Tosti (1846–1916) and Paolo De Cecco (1843–1922), and the ethnologist Gennaro Finamore (1836–1923), who share the same love for their region, the Abruzzi, and a theoretical approach to art that favors the meaningful fusion of all artistic forms of expression. The fruitful and prolonged interaction with Michetti’s group over the years plays a fundamental role in the formulation of D’Annunzio’s poetics and makes him more susceptible to the innovations of symbolism and other experimental art forms later on. By the time he is 19 years old, D’Annunzio has three more publications to his name: In memoriam (In Memory, 1880), poems in memory of his grandmother, Rita Lolli, who had recently passed away, Canto novo (New Song, 1882), his second major book of poetry, and Terra vergine (Virgin Land, 1882), his first collection of short stories. The inspired portrayal of nature’s beauty, of sensual pleasure and physical exuberance in Canto novo already shows signs of what will be D’Annunzio’s distinctive trait in most of his later works. The book creates a stir as it seems to defy the conventional morality of the bourgeois society of the time. The short stories of Terra vergine are set in the primitive and often violent rural environment of the Abruzzi and are narrated in the then fashionable naturalistic style that lays bare the dehumanizing effects of poverty and ignorance on simple people in their struggle for survival. In 1881, D’Annunzio plunges himself in the mundane life of Rome where he meets influential artists and other personalities. Here he starts his journalistic career writing for several important periodicals and newspapers, among them Capitan 540

Fracassa, Tribuna, Il Fanfulla, and Cronaca bizantina, owned by innovative publisher Angelo Sommaruga. In just over a decade he produces several works, among which are various novels, four collections of poetry—Intermezzo di rime (Poetic Interlude, 1883), Isaotta Guttadauro (1886), Elegie romane (Roman Elegies, 1892), Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893)—and two volumes of short stories—Il libro delle vergini (The Book of the Virgins, 1883) and San Pantaleone (1886). The way in which D’Annunzio mingles his personal life with his writing and explicitly alludes to his sexual experiences in some of the poems contained in Intermezzo di rime causes great scandal and his rejection by some of his previous supporters like Giuseppe Chiarini (1833–1908) and Giosue` Carducci. The scandal, however, places the author and his work at the center of attention, thus contributing to his success. Much interest is generated by his first novel, Il piacere (The Pleasure, 1889), set in the refined and aristocratic society of Rome and written in a lyrical and poetic style. It is the first book of the trilogy I romanzi della Rosa (The Novels of the Rose), which includes L’Innocente (The Victim, 1892) and Trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894). The publication of both novels in France in the translation by Georges He´relle (1835–1848) soon after their appearance in Italy contributes greatly to D’Annunzio’s international fame. Although these novels deal with very different themes and settings, they all have in common a male character who is seeking spiritual renewal after a dissipated life and who wants to affirm his intellectual superiority, which places him above the average man and outside the suffocating and hypocritical conventions of bourgeois morality. This portrait of a potential Dannunzian superman ¨ bermensch. only partially echoes the Nietzschean U D’Annunzio’s hero is invariably bound to fail. His search for sensual pleasure ends in tragedy. A very avid reader open to the suggestions of the European avant-garde, D’Annunzio over the years develops ideas that converge with those of other prominent intellectuals and writers, such as Paul Bourget, Maurice Barre`s, The´odor de Wyzewa and Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, whose writings contributed substantially to the debates on the renovation of art in the new century. D’Annunzio’s experimentation with prose, from his earlier naturalistic short stories to the subsequently refined aestheticism and psychological depth of Il Piacere takes the novel as a genre into a new expressive direction. While the short novel Giovanni Episcopo (Episcopo & Company, 1892) is influenced in its themes of

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO victimization, guilt and redemption and in its more prosaic style by the Russian masters, especially Leo Tolstoy and Feodor Dostoyevsky, the other novels of this period, L’Innocente, Trionfo della Morte and Le vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks, 1895), show an increased ideological shift toward a more aggressive affirmation of the Dannunzian hero, the extraordinary individual inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Jenseits von Gut und Bo¨se (Beyond Good and Evil). This figure will become also the protagonist of many of his future plays. In Trionfo della Morte, D’Annunzio perfects his poetic prose, which, in the dedicatory letter to Michetti he calls ‘‘prosa plastica e sinfonica, ricca d’imagini e di musiche’’ (a plastic and symphonic prose, full of images and music), in line with the aesthetic ideal he embraced years before when he joined Michetti’s Cenacolo. The turn of the century sees D’Annunzio’s art reach its peak with the composition of his major poetic works, the three books of the Laudi (Lauds): Maia (1903), and Elettra and Alcyone (Halcyon, 1904) and the beginning of his career as a playwright. Of fundamental importance to his theatrical works are the three ‘‘encounters’’ with the most influential personalities of his time: a philosopherpoet, Nietzsche, a musician, Richard Wagner, and an actress, Eleonora Duse (1858–1924). Nietzsche’s notion of the ‘‘will to power’’ embodied by the ¨ bermensch entails the superiority of all that U affirms itself and the full and enthusiastic acceptance of life, hence also the affirmation of the supreme value of art as an expression of such an adherence to life. In an article on Tribuna of 2 August 1897, La Rinascenza della tragedia (The Renaissance of Tragedy), D’Annunzio links the Nietzschean aesthetic notion derived from Die Geburt der Trago¨die (The Birth of Tragedy) to the Hellenic inspiration of his own drama, La citta` morta (The Dead City, 1898). His aesthetic manifesto is written into the novel, Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900) which, although published after the tragedy, is conceived at the same time. In an attempt to create the Latin counterpart to the Wagnerian Bayreuth Theatre and to provide a suitable venue for his Teatro d’Arte, D’Annunzio dreams of building a great open-air theater on the banks of Lake Albano near Rome. The project receives the support of Duse and several other sponsors, among them Gordon Bennet, the owner of the New York Herald. However, it never takes off. Over the next 18 years D’Annunzio, besides completing the fourth book of the Laudi, Merope (1912) and another novel, Forse che sı` forse che no

(Perhaps Yes, Perhaps No, 1910), devotes most of his writing to the theater. The lukewarm reception that La citta` morta receives in Paris, in spite of having Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role, does not bode well for the success of the other plays written for Duse in rapid succession, Sogno d’un mattino di primavera (Dream of a Spring Morning, 1897), Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno (Dream of an Autumn Sunset, 1898), La Gioconda (Gioconda, 1899) and La gloria (Glory, 1899). The complexity of language and themes, and a predilection for cruel eroticism, madness and murder, may explain the poor reception of these plays. However, Duse’s international reputation and D’Annunzio’s departure from the prevailing conventions of bourgeois drama bring his work to the attention of even larger audiences with performances on the most important stages of Europe, the United States and South America. His next three plays, Francesca da Rimini (1902), La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Jorio, 1904), his masterpiece, and La fiaccola sotto il moggio (The Light under the Bushel, 1905) are his best known and they are still performed in Italian theaters. Set in medieval times, Francesca da Rimini takes its title and plot from Canto 5 of Dante’s Inferno. It marks D’Annunzio’s new approach to drama, which he now writes in verse, and it is visually spectacular, with its magnificent settings and costumes. In the other two tragedies, D’Annunzio’s native region of the Abruzzi is once again re-created with all its primitive passions that lead to tragic endings. His other Italian tragedies, including Piu` che l’amore (More than Love, 1907) and Fedra (Phaedra, 1909), do not enjoy much success, nor do his French plays written in the course of his stay in that country between 1910 and 1915, Le Martyre de Saint Se´bastien (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, 1911), La Pisanelle ou la mort parfume´e (Pisanella or Perfumed Death, 1914) and La Che`vrefeuille (Honeysuckle, 1914), which is also performed in Italian as Il ferro (The Weapon, 1914). The only exception is La nave (The Ship, 1908), which is performed on its opening night before the king and queen of Italy in Rome and receives enthusiastic applause, as it responds to the country’s growing nationalist and imperialist ambitions. D’Annunzio’s impact on the performing arts extends well beyond drama. Several of his plays are made into operas or put to music by leading composers such as Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968), Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) and Riccardo Zandonai (1883–1944). Claude Debussy composes the music for the mystery play, Le Martyre de Saint Se´bastien. D’Annunzio is also a 541

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO pioneer in cinema and writes the screenplay for the silent film Cabiria (1914), contributing greatly to its success. Following the political adventure of the occupation of Fiume, D’Annunzio withdraws in the voluntary confinement of Il Vittoriale, the villa where he lives until his death. His later literary production is mostly of a memorialistic nature. Notturno (Nocturne, 1921) is a collection of autobiographical prose and poetry narrated in the first person, written mostly in the present tense and in total darkness. The poet is convalescent and temporarily blinded following a forced landing of his plane during the war in 1916. Besides the extraordinary circumstances of its composition, the work is highly innovative for its fragmented and subdued style that aptly describes the poet’s inner life: war memories, reminiscences from the recent and distant past, reflections and descriptions of the sensations heightened by the darkness of his present condition. Very well received by readers, who are enthralled by D’Annunzio’s prowess in war and in his expedition to Fiume, the book will have a profound influence on Italian Modernism. The two volumes of Le faville del maglio (Sparks from the Hammer, 1924 and 1928) contain essays on episodes from his childhood and youth, his visits to Egypt and Greece, the fervent period spent at his Capponcina residence in Florence and the loss of all his possessions to his creditors, his years of ‘‘exile’’ in France, his ideas on art and on himself as an artist. Some of the essays, dating back to 1911–1915, are a re-elaboration of prose compositions that had appeared in the Milanese newspaper Corriere della sera during his prolonged stay in France. The striking novelty of the Faville is both in the tone, which is at times nostalgic and melancholic, and in the refined and dry style, far remote from the magniloquence that characterized his earlier works. His last work of note, published three years before his death, is Cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire, better known as the Libro segreto (A Hundred and a Hundred and a Hundred and a Hundred Pages from the Secret Book of Gabriele D’Annunzio Tempted to Die, 1935), which continues in the memorialistic vein of the two previous collections. Fragments of recollections, dreams and reflections in prose and poetry on different autobiographic topics alternate with pieces of deep introspection in which the aged poet ponders on the meaning of life and the elusive quality of all that matters most, which makes it impossible even for the greatest artist to fully 542

express it and transpose it into art form. One of the last thoughts with which this most skillful and brilliant master of artistic expression leaves his readers regards the painful awareness of the limits of language. In the author’s own words: ‘‘Le piu` arcane comunicanze dell’anima con le cose...sono le parole del silenzio’’ (The soul’s most secret communication with things...are the words of silence) (Libro segreto).

Biography Born in Pescara, 12 March 1863; completed his schooling at the Reale Collegio Cicognini, 1881; moved to Rome and began his journalistic activity; married Duchess Maria Hardouin di Gallese, 1883; became editor of Cronaca bizantina, 1885–1886; a son, Mario, is born, 1884, followed by Gabriellino, 1886, and Veniero, 1887; a daughter, Renata, is born out of wedlock, 1893; met and initiated a fruitful artistic cooperation and liaison with Eleonora Duse, 1894–1904; elected to Parliament as one of the representatives of the right, 1897, then crossed over to the left, 1900; moved to Capponcina, a Renaissance villa in Settignano (Florence), 1898; moved to France due to severe financial difficulties, 1910–1915; returned to Italy and left for the front at the break of World War I, 1915; occupied and held Fiume with a small army of Italian volunteers, 1919–1920; took up residence in Gardone in the villa ‘‘Il Vittoriale,’’ 1921; his residence in Gardone, now called Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, is made into national monument, 1923; named prince of Montenevoso, 1924; appointed as president of the Italian Academy, 1937; died from a cerebral hemorrhage, 1 March 1938. ANNA MEDA Selected Works Collections Opera Omnia, 48 vols. and 1 vol. of indices, Milan: Mondadori, 1927–1936. Tutte le opere di Gabriele D’Annunzio, edited by Egidio Bianchetti, 11 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1939–1976. Versi d’amore e di gloria, edited by Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, 2 vols., Milano: Mondadori, 1982–1984. Prose di romanzi, edited by Annamaria Andreoli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1988–1989. Tutte le novelle, edited by Annamaria Andreoli e Marina De Marco, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Scritti giornalistici 1882–1888, edited by Annamaria Andreoli, Milano: Mondadori, 1996.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO Fiction Terra vergine, 1882. Il libro delle vergini, 1883; as The Book of the Virgins, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2003. San Pantaleone, 1886. Il piacere, 1889; as The Child of Pleasure, translated by Georgina Harding, 1898; as The Pleasure, translated by Virginia S. Caporale, 2000. L’innocente, 1892; as The Victim, translated by Georgina Harding, 1991. Giovanni Episcopo, 1892; as Episcopo & Company, translated by Myrta Leonora Jones, 1896. Trionfo della morte, 1894; as The Triumph of Death, translated by Arthur Hornblow, 1896. Le vergini delle rocce, 1895; as The Maidens of the Rocks, translated by Annetta Halliday-Antona and Giuseppe Antona, 1898. Il fuoco, 1900; as The Flame, translated by Susan Bassnet, London: Quartet Books, 1991. Le novelle della Pescara, 1902; as Tales of My Native Town, translated by Rafael Mantellini, 1920. Forse che sı` forse che no, 1910. La Leda senza cigno, 1916.

Poetry ‘‘Primo vere,’’ 1879. ‘‘In memoriam,’’ 1880. ‘‘Canto novo,’’ 1882. ‘‘Intermezzo di rime,’’ 1883. ‘‘Isaotta Guttadauro,’’ 1886. ‘‘L’Isotteo. La Chimera,’’ 1890. ‘‘Elegie romane,’’ 1892. ‘‘Odi navali,’’ 1892. ‘‘Poema paradisiaco,’’ 1893. ‘‘Maia,’’ 1903. ‘‘Elettra,’’ 1904. ‘‘Alcyone,’’ 1904; as Halcyon, translated by J. G. Nichols, 1988. ‘‘Merope,’’ 1912.

Plays Sogno d’un mattino di primavera, 1897. La citta` morta, 1898. Sogno di un tramonto d’autunno, 1898. La Gioconda, 1899; as Gioconda, translated by Arthur Symons, 1902. La Gloria, 1899. Francesca da Rimini, 1902; as Francesca da Rimini, translated by Arthur Symons, 1902. La figlia di Iorio, 1904; as The Daughter of Jorio, translated by Charlotte Porter, Pietro Isola, and Alice Henry, 1907. La fiaccola sotto il moggio, 1905. Piu` che l’amore, 1907. La nave, 1908. Fedra, 1909. Le Martyre de Saint Se´bastien, 1911. Parisina, 1913. La Pisanelle ou la mort parfume´e, 1914. La Che`vrefeuille, 1914. Il ferro, 1914.

Other Contemplazione della morte, 1912. Notturno, 1921; as Nocturne, translated by Raymond Rosenthal.

Le faville del maglio, vol. 1, 1924; vol. 2, 1928. Cento e cento e cento e cento pagine del libro segreto di Gabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire, 1935.

Further Readings Alatri, Paolo, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Turin: UTET, 1983. Andreoli, Annamaria, Il vivere inimitabile. Vita di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Andreoli, Annamaria, D’Annunzio, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, II gesto improbabile: Tre saggi su Gabriele D’Annunzi, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1971. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, La scrittura verso il nulla: D’Annunzio, Turin: Genesi Editrice, 1992. Gibellini, Pietro, Logos e Mythos: Studi du Gabriele D’Annunzio, Florence: Olschki, 1985. Gibellini, Pietro, D’Annunzio dal gesto al testo, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Granatella, Laura, Arrestate l’autore! D’Annunzio in scena, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Griffin, Gerald, Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Warrior Bard, London: J. Long, 1935. Klopp, Charles, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Boston: Twayne, 1988. La dimora di D’Annunzio: Il Vittoriale, Palermo: Novecento Editrice, 1980. Lorenzini, Niva, D’Annunzio, Palermo: Palumbo, 1993. Luti, Giorgio, La cenere dei sogni: studi dannunziani, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1973. Marabini Moevs, Maria Teresa, Gabriele D’Annunzio e le estetiche della fine del secolo, L’Aquila: L. U. Japadre, 1976. Mariano, Emilio, Sentimento del vivere, ovvero Gabriele D’Annunzio, Milan: Mondadori, 1962. Perfetti, Francesco (editor), D’Annunzio e il suo tempo, Genoa: Sagep, 1992. Pistelli, Maurizio, II ‘divino testimonio’: D’Annunzio e il mito dell eroica Rinascenza, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Raimondi, Ezio, II silenzio della Gorgone, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1980. Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), D’Annunzio giornalista, Pescara: Fabiani, 1984 Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), Verso l’Ellade, Pescara: Ediars, 1995. Valesio, Paolo, Gabriele D’Annunzio. The Dark Flame. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Woodhouse, John, Gabriele D’Annunzio. Defiant Archangel, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.

ALCYONE, 1904 Poetry by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Alcyone is the third book of the Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (Hymns in Praise of Sky, Sea, Earth and Heroes) and is considered 543

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO D’Annunzio’s highest achievement in lyric poetry. Originally he had planned seven books of Laudi, each taking its title from the name of one of the seven stars that form the Pleiades in the constellation of Taurus. However, he only wrote five: Maia (1903), Elettra (1904), and Alcyone over the period 1899–1903, then Merope (1912) and Asterope (Canti della guerra latina) (Songs of the Latin War, 1933). Maia consists of one long poem, ‘‘Laus vitae’’ (In Praise of Life) celebrating the Greek and Latin roots of Western civilization and the accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance. Elettra is devoted to the praises of heroes, great men, and cities of the past that can inspire modern Italians to reach even greater achievements. Merope and Asterope are different in tone and celebrate the Italian war in Lybia and Italy’s participation in World War I, respectively. Whereas in Maia and Elettra heroic and political themes are predominant, in Alcyone, nature in all its beauty takes central stage, as a source of regeneration and inspiration. The Tuscan countryside and shore in their summer splendour become the perfect setting for D’Annunzio’s poetic message. Written in a highly evocative style, the book presents a wide spectrum of themes and poetic forms. It is divided in five sections separated by four dithyrambs that mark the different stages of the season and the changing moods of the poet as summer comes, then triumphantly explodes and finally draws to a melancholic end with the approach of autumn. The opening poem, ‘‘La tregua’’ (The Respite), sets the mood and the tone for the whole collection. After the hectic activities of his political campaigns, the intense touring and staging of his plays during the previous five years and the poetic labours of writing another two books, the poet needs a break from the ‘‘Despot,’’ his despotic creative demon who dictates and drives him, so that he may be young again. Also of particular interest as a sort of poetic manifesto for Alcyone is the second poem, ‘‘Il fanciullo’’ (The Boy), consisting of seven ballads that evoke the orphic image of a young boy playing the flute and charming all the creatures who listen to the melody of his music. The boy is the child of the Cicada, sacred to Apollo, the god of poetry and symbol of the free expression of instinctual inspiration, and of the olive tree, sacred to Athena, the goddess of knowledge and culture, possibly representing artistic labour and technique. Figuratively, the boy represents the two complementary components of D’Annunzio’s poetry: nature and art. A mythic atmosphere pervades most of the poems in the 544

collection. The sudden appearance of a stag in the forest, the changeable shapes and rhythms of the waves in the sea, the powerful flight of a vulture in the sky are seen through pristine eyes of wonder and are transformed into the wondrous creatures of classical mythology. Under the visionary gaze of the poet, everything undergoes a metamorphosis whereby the difference between plants, animals, and humans is constantly blurred: a galloping stag acquires the shape of a centaur, a mythical being half-man and half-horse in ‘‘La morte del centauro’’ (The Death of the Centaur); summer is a beautiful woman to be chased and possessed in ‘‘Stabat nuda aestas’’ (Summer Stood Naked); the poet lying on the beach becomes godlike, one with the sand and the seawater, in ‘‘Meriggio’’ (Noontide); a nymph breaks out of a tree in the woods and tempts the poet with promises of erotic pleasure and good hunting in exchange for a basket full of peaches in ‘‘Versilia.’’ The 88 poems in Alcyone vary greatly in form and metre, ranging from sonnets and madrigals to ballads and several other types of lyrical compositions. They all share the same unparalleled use of language that seems to dissolve into music in its sensuous adherence to nature in all its manifestations. ANNA MEDA Editions First edition: in Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi, vol. 2: Elettra - Alcione, Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1904. Critical editions: in Versi d’amore e di gloria, vol. 2, edited by Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1984. Alcyone, edited by Federico Roncoroni, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Translation: Halcyon, translated by J. G. Nichols, Manchester: Carcanet, 1988.

Further Readings Alvino, Luca, Il poema della leggerezza. Gnoseologia della metamorfosi nell’ ‘‘Alcyone’’ di Gabriele D’Annunzio, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Benussi, Cristina, ‘‘«L’anima si fa pelago». Simbologia equorea nell’Alcyone,’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 2 (2002): 107–123. Diano, Carlo, ‘‘D’Annunzio e l’Ellade,’’ in L’arte di Gabriele D’Annunzio, edited by Emilio Mariano, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. Gibellini, Pietro, D’Annunzio dal gesto al testo, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Marabini Moevs, Maria Teresa, Gabriele D’Annunzio e le estetiche della fine del secolo, L’Aquila: L. U. Japadre, 1976. Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), Da Foscarina a Ermione. Alcyone: prodromi, officina, poesia, fortuna, Pescara: Ediars, 2000.

GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO

IL FUOCO, 1900 Novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio

In D’Annunzio’s original plan, Il fuoco (The Flame) was supposed to be the first book of the trilogy of the Romanzi del Melograno (The Novels of the Pomegranate). Although the other two novels, La vittoria dell’uomo (Man’s Victory) and Trionfo della vita (Triumph of Life) were never written, the complex symbolic value and mythical reference of the pomegranate that gives the trilogy its name serves as a key to a deeper understanding of the novel. The pomegranate stands for abundance, regality, joy. As stated by D’Annunzio’s alter ego in the novel, the protagonist Stelio Effrena, himself a writer and composer, it is the symbolic representation of his desire for ‘‘una vita ricca e ardente’’ (a richer and more ardent life). Set against the backdrop of an enchanted Venice in 1883, the novel tells the story of a young artist, Stelio, and his muse, Foscarina, an aging actress (clearly modeled on Eleonora Duse, who was then at the peak of her career and international renown and who had been D’Annunzio’s lover since 1895). Aside from the morbid interest in the love story (especially keen in its contemporaries), with all the crude details of the actress’s physical decadence, the novel is particularly significant as it represents D’Annunzio’s true theoretical manifesto on art and the role of the artist in the renewal of Italian drama and the promotion of a Latin Renaissance parallel to the one brought about in Germany by great thinkers and artists like Nietzsche and Wagner. Influenced by the former’s revisitation of the Hellenic concept of drama as a form of Dionysian art, D’Annunzio seeks to bring modern drama to the same heights as ancient tragedy. Tragedy is the art form in which the duality of the opposite principles of the Apollonian and Dionysian is overcome. The new drama, in D’Annunzio’s view, needs to regain the solemnity and ritualism of a sacred representation in order to bring about ‘‘una ideale trasfigurazione della vita’’ (an ideal transfiguration of life, Il fuoco). A revelation of beauty thus takes place before a silent multitude like in an ancient temple. In order for this inner transformation to happen, music, dance, the figurative arts and the poet’s

words must work together to create a ‘‘total drama’’ along similar lines to the Wagnerian ‘‘Wort-ton-drama’’(Poetry-Music-Drama). Wagner, whose Tristan und Isolde had already influenced the structure of D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte (1894), in this later novel appears as a Titan, the ‘‘Rivelatore che aveva trasformato in infinito canto per la religione degli uomini le essenze dell’Universo’’ (Revealing One who had transformed into infinite songs the essences of the Universe for the religion of men). While in Wagner’s operas, D’Annunzio finds inspiration for his own drama, in Foscarina/ Duse, Effrena/D’Annunzio recognizes the living manifestation of the Dionysian woman, ‘‘lo strumento mirabile dell’arte novella...quella che doveva incarnare nella sua persona mutevole le future finzioni di bellezza’’ (the marvelous instrument of his new art...who would incarnate in her changeable being his future imaginings of beauty). The new drama is not only the tragedy La vittoria dell’uomo (The Victory of Man) that Effrena is busy writing in the fictional setting of Il fuoco, but also D’Annunzio’s first work for the theater, La citta` morta, performed in Paris in 1898. Thus D’Annunzio’s vision in the novel of a new drama celebrating the transformational power of tragic beauty finds its realization in the play he had already written by the time Il fuoco was published. ANNA MEDA Editions First edition: Il fuoco, Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1900. Critical edition: in Prose di romanzi, vol. 2, edited by Annamaria Andreoli and Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Mondadori, 1989. Il fuoco, edited by Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1996. Translation: as The Flame, translated by Susan Bassnett, London: Quartet Books, 1991.

Further Reading Artioli, Umberto, Il combattimento invisibile. D’Annunzio tra romanzo e teatro, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Giacon, Mariarosa, ‘‘Da Venezia all’Iˆle-de-France: per una ricognizione delle fonti «pittoriche» del Fuoco,’’ in Nuovi Quaderni del Vittoriale, 2 (1995): 73–92. Jacomuzzi, Stefano, ‘‘La citta` anadiomene e il dio magnifico: la Grecia nelle pagine del Fuoco,’’ in Verso l’Ellade dalla Citta` morta a Maia, edited by Edoardo Tiboni, Pescara: Ediars, 1995. Lucente, Gregory L., ‘‘D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: From Allegory to Irony,’’ in Italica, 57 (1980): 19–33.

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GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘D’Annunzio e Wagner,’’ in D’Annunzio e la cultura germanica,’’ Pescara: Centro Nazionale di Studi Dannunziani, 1985. Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘Il Fuoco,’’ in D’Annunzio a cinquant’anni dalla morte,’’ vol. 1, edited by Edoardo Tiboni, Pescara: Centro Nazionale di Studi Dannunziani, 1989. Piga, Francesco, Il mito del superuomo in Nietzsche e D’Annunzio, Florence: Vallecchi, 1979.

LA FIGLIA DI IORIO, 1904 Play by Gabriele D’Annunzio

Written in only 33 days during the same period of extraordinary creativity as Alcyone in the summer of 1903, La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Jorio) has been hailed as D’Annunzio’s masterpiece and is still performed successfully in contemporary Italian theaters. The play was premiered at the Teatro Lirico in Milan in 1904 with Irma Grammatica in the leading role and was set to music twice by Alberto Franchetti in 1906 and Ildebrando Pizzetti in 1954. Roberto Hazon adapted it for ballet in 1976. The play is set in rural and primitive Abruzzi in archaic times. The young and beautiful Mila di Codra is Iorio’s outcast daughter. She seeks refuge in Aligi’s family home from a mob of harvesters crazed with drink and the heat when the family is celebrating his marriage to Vienda. Aligi, a young shepherd, has come down from the mountain where he lives to marry a woman he does not even know, chosen for him by his parents, as was customary. He finally yields to Mila’s desperate cries for help and gives her sanctuary at the sacred hearth in spite of the pressure from his family to throw her back to the mob of lecherous men. The marriage rite is thus profaned and Aligi goes back to his mountain where he is later joined by Mila. There they live chastely together while Aligi prepares to go to Rome to seek the annulment of his unconsummated marriage from the pope in order to marry Mila. Aligi’s father suddenly turns up at the cave and tries to rape the girl. In the fight that 546

ensues, Aligi kills his father to protect Mila. He is condemned to death and given a customary drink of drugged wine before his execution. Mila, however, takes the blame for having bewitched Aligi and for murdering his father. She is then taken away to be burned alive as a witch, while Aligi, now under the influence of the drugged potion, curses her. In a state of ecstatic exaltation, caused by her will for redemption and self-sacrifice, Mila burns at the stake crying out ‘‘La fiamma e` bella’’ (The flame is beautiful) amongst the curses and yells of the crowd. The tragedy is written in verse and in a language that blends the Abruzzi dialect forms with an old Tuscan variety of Italian and adapts popular rhymes, ritual formulas and proverbs in its dialogues. Costumes and settings are meticulously researched by the author to create an aura of authenticity. D’Annunzio’s Abruzzi is an archaic and primitive world where the conflagration of archetypal conflicts takes on a primordial dimension. Although plot and characters are placed in a specific geographical and cultural context, La figlia di Iorio possesses a timeless mythical dimension. By giving her life for the man she loves, Mila places her faith completely in the redeeming power of love. In death, she overcomes the conflicts created by a society driven by blind hatred and prejudice. Mila embodies a kind of heroism that manifests itself in the acceptance of her own destiny in the name of love, without resisting or challenging it. One of the fundamental traits of D’Annunzio’s drama appears in this tragedy: the failure of the male hero, overshadowed by the prominence of the female character. In this tragedy, D’Annunzio deals with the affirmation of individuality, as manifested in Aligi’s and Mila’s life events. This affirmation is abortive in Aligi, as he regresses back to the undifferentiated state of mystical participation with the collective values of his clan; on the contrary, Mila undergoes spiritual rebirth through fire like the mythical phoenix. ANNA MEDA Editions First edition: La figlia di Iorio, Milan: Fratelli Treves Editori, 1904. Critical editions: in Tragedie, sogni e misteri, vol. 2, edited by Egidio Bianchetti, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. La figlia di Iorio, edited by Pietro Gibellini and Raffaella Bertazzoli, Milan: Garzanti, 1995. La figlia di Iorio, edited by Milva Maria Cappellini, Milan: Mondadori, 1995;

DANTE ALIGHIERI La figlia di Iorio, edited by Raffaella Bertazzoli, Gardone Riviera (Brescia): Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, 2004. Translation: The Daughter of Jorio, translated by Charlotte Porter, Pietro Isola, and Alice Henry, Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1907.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, Donne terrifiche e fragili maschi. La linea teatrale D’Annunzio-Pirandello, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘I miti de La figlia di Iorio,’’ in Critica letteraria, 90–93 (1996): 57–90. Bertazzoli, Raffaella, ‘‘L’elaborazione della Figlia di Iorio dal ‘naturale’ al ‘mitico,’’’ in Otto-Novecento, 5–6 (1981): 163–181. Bertazzoli, Raffaella, ‘‘La figlia di Iorio da Michetti a D’Annunzio,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 5 (1987): 161–177.

Gunzberg, Lynn M., ‘‘La figlia di Iorio, La lupa and the Locus of Patriarchy,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 5 (1987): 60–73. Isgro`, Giovanni, D’Annunzio e la mise en sce`ne, Palermo: Palumbo, 1993. Kibler, Louis, ‘‘Myth and Meaning in D’Annunzio’s La figlia di Iorio,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 5 (1987): 178–187. Lorenzini, Niva, ‘‘Il mito della parola. Riflessioni in margine alla Figlia di Iorio,’’ in Lingua e stile, 32.3 (1997): 505–517. Meda, Anna, Bianche statue contro il nero abisso. Il teatro dei miti in D’Annunzio e Pirandello, Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1993. Puppa, Paolo, La parola alta. Sul teatro di Pirandello e D’Annunzio, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993. Rosina, Tito, Mezzo secolo de La figlia di Iorio, Genoa: Principato, 1955. Tiboni, Edoardo (editor), La figlia di Iorio. Pescara: Centro Nazionale StudiDannunziani, 1986.

DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321) Dante has long been acknowledged as the supreme Italian author, as the founder of the Italian literary language and history, and possibly as the highest narrative poet in Western tradition. His general appeal nowadays rests almost entirely on a single work, the Comedia, a visionary poem of uncommon beauty and depth. For all its power to surprise and unsettle the reader with its inventiveness, the central metaphor sustaining the narrative is not unusual: Life is a journey. The conceit is the point of departure for the telling of Dante’s own providential journey, on Good Friday of the year 1300, across the three realms of the beyond, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, which culminates in the wayfarer’s vision of God face to face. The motif of the journey belongs to a long literary tradition. The soul’s exile and spiritual quest that variously lead to the palace of wisdom, to the promised land, or to the place where God is to be found has constantly been the true field of the epic genre, philosophy, biblical revelation, and theology. The travel stories of Ulysses and Aeneas have never been understood as merely entertaining fictions. They have been allegorized as spiritual ciphers akin to the Platonic ascents of the mind. Similarly, by directing their gaze inwardly, the

Fathers of the Church—say, St. Augustine and St. Bonaventure—traced the path of the mind’s ascent to God through the intermediate steps of sense knowledge, understanding, reason, and through the soul’s sources of light. At every juncture of his poem, Dante casts a different light on this venerable tradition. Like his patristic predecessors, he seeks transcendent Christian values to guide him and the world. But more than anybody else before him, Dante awakens an absolutely unique way of thinking and feeling that would bring him (and us) beyond the ordinary reaches of the mind. To discuss and to articulate the whole spectrum of the intellectual and moral reality, as he means to do, to chart the vast spaces of God’s creation in its unity and gradations, a new journey and a shift in perspective were needed. The Comedia comes through as a poetic journey in search of a new way of seeing the world. Dante finds and delivers this. He does so, first of all, by retrieving and redefining the layers and folds of the cultural sediments of the Middle Ages. An emblem and, at the same time, a genuine historical source of information for the complex and hybrid understanding of culture at the time 547

DANTE ALIGHIERI was the encyclopedic tradition. Historically, this repertory of knowledge extended from Isidore of Seville to Vincent of Beauvais and Brunetto Latini, some of the most notable names steeped in the practice of the genre. Dante delves into this tradition, rewrites and reinvents it, and makes it the sinew of his poem. His reason is to show that poetry, which in earlier years was generally dismissed as a frivolous courtly and worldly game, in fact, gathers all doctrines and claims to contain all possible knowledge. By yoking together this new understanding of poetry and the encyclopedic tradition, he unveils the necessary correlation of all the arts and sciences: Poetry joins together theology, politics, ethics, and philosophy (a term that in the Middle Ages defined the domain of the sciences) and, thereby, it is singularly equipped to inquire into the knot unfolding into the multiplicity of phenomena. The poetic encyclopedia he forges opens to him unsuspected intellectual vistas. He sees the conversation of the arts and sciences—as well as the conversation among the great figures of the past and between the past and the future—as nothing less than an educational adventure through the spiritual and political crisis of his age. There is in Dante’s life and thought an extraordinary openness to the public and private challenges mounting on all sides. Such openness is made apparent by his tendency to see his life as an uninterrupted, ongoing learning process. The journey of education lies at the heart of the Comedia. In true medieval fashion toward the authority of tradition, the protagonist opens himself to the teachings and authority of great thinkers: Virgil, Boethius, St. Augustine, Guido Cavalcanti, Brunetto Latini, Guido Guinizelli, Aristotle, Cicero, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, not to mention political theorists, rhetoricians, grammarians, jurists, painters, etc. Even his beloved Beatrice becomes a teacher of desire for God, for the journey Dante undertakes is more than an intellectual experience. Rather, it takes place through the thick reality of history and under the compulsions of love. In a well-known encyclopedic compendium of the twelfth century, Honorius of Autun characterizes learning as the path the soul travels to its divine homeland. For Dante, who is always restlessly seeking and is always underway, and who sees life itself as a journey, the way, with its bends and turns, is given to him. It is the way of tradition. This sense of the past, however, does not hamper his subjectivity. Rather, it provides the foundation for his growth and enables him to carve his own 548

unique path. On this path he could go astray, and when he does he is rescued by supernatural mediators and messengers (Beatrice, Lucy, the Virgin Mary) who beckon him out of the depths and show him his true destination. And he is rescued from the land of the dead by his listening to, responding and contesting the lesson of his teachers such as Virgil. As a matter of fact, Dante is singularly unencumbered by the weight of the wisdom of the classical and medieval past, and he insists on seeing the world for himself, on the terms of his irreducible individuality, not because, as we Moderns might say, the self guarantees the existence of the world. He chooses to walk his own way in the conviction that to know coincides with seeking and that, by finding out anew the answer to life’s ancient riddles, he can bear witness to the knowledge that tradition has handed down. This mixture of reverence for the wisdom of the past and iconoclasm (or need for a shift in direction of history) is not for Dante a purely intellectual posture. It is nothing less than his way of being. It is rooted in the concrete realities of his times and in the experiences with which he constantly comes face to face. Like many of his contemporaries, Dante is only too aware of the moral temper of his times. He witnesses all around him the spiritual crisis enveloping the church. And later in his life he will not hesitate to take to task the claims of the church’s absolute supremacy advanced by the popes and their hierocrats. He sees the political storms in which the empire was floundering and he has firsthand knowledge of the abyss of civil war between the Guelfs and Ghibellines (or White Guelfs and Black Guelfs) into which his own city of Florence was sinking. He had learned from his teachers at the philosophical schools of the Franciscans and the Dominicans he attended in Florence around 1292 about the fierce philosophical debates at the universities of Paris and Oxford, which culminated in 1277 in the condemnation of 219 propositions by the bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier. Dante even knew the details of the doctrinal dissent represented by the followers of the so-called ‘‘Latin Averroism,’’ Siger of Brabant among them. He lived in the midst of the apocalyptic ferments and longings of the Joachists and Spiritual Franciscans, including Jean Pierre Olivi, who preached for years in Santa Croce. Nor was the violence of and against the heretical movements neglected, if one is to judge by the way he faces the events unfolding in his own days and by the audacious way he looks ahead into what he thinks the future will deliver. In

DANTE ALIGHIERI short, he stands within his own era and brings it into his poetry. But, prophet-like, he feels like a stranger in it. Such an ambivalent attitude thoroughly permeates his moral stance in the Comedia. This attitude is also visible from the very beginning of his career in his questions and reflections about poetry, language, love, politics, and philosophy. The first work he writes, the Vita nova (New Life, 1294), can legitimately be thought of as an autobiography-in-progress: It relates the story of a love epiphany, of the sudden appearance of Beatrice to a 9-year-old boy and later to an 18year-old young man, Dante. The question about the sense Beatrice acquires in Dante’s mind multiplies into a series of mutually implicated themes in the Vita nova. These are questions of love, memory, friendship, poetry, the self, death, forgetfulness of the dead beloved, fraud in love, and they include hope, the future, and the immortality of Beatrice. Dante raises these questions through the very structure of the ‘‘libello’’ (little book), a mixture of poetry and prose-commentary or self-interpretation. Together they relate a double apprenticeship mirroring each other: a sentimental education and a poetic growth. His poetry is written as his love experience unfolds. Dante thoroughly absorbed the strains of the lyrical tradition: the poetry of the Provenc¸al troubadours, the Sicilian school, Guittone d’Arezzo, and the Sweet New Style, which recognized as its founder Guido Guinizzelli and counted in its ranks practitioners such as Cino da Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, Gianni Alfani, and Dino Frescobaldi. Although he learns from all these conventions, Dante engages mainly the aesthetics of the Sweet New Style and finds his interlocutors in the circle of its practitioners. With them he partakes in the ongoing redefinition of the erotic and moral vocabulary of past poetic modes (nobility, gentleness, virtue, passion, love, etc.). He retraces their insights and understands himself through the language of this modern form of poetry. One interlocutor Dante privileges in the Vita nova: Guido Cavalcanti, hailed as his ‘‘first friend.’’ His road to an original poetic vision passes through the teachings of Guinizzelli (in which he ‘‘localizes’’ himself) and, above all, through the probably daily contacts with the poetic-philosophical reflections of Cavalcanti. In his classical poem, ‘‘Donna me prega’’ (A Woman Begs Me), Cavalcanti had articulated his radical views about the ontology of love, its essence, and its effects on the mind (and not just on the body, as one finds in the phenomenology of love as passion celebrated by the troubadours). In

Cavalcanti’s metaphysics, love is a dark experience shattering the mind, robbing the self of any rationality, and never inducing transcendent knowledge. Dante echoes and responds critically to these radical views. He argues in his Vita nova that love is neither a passion ravaging the mind nor a physics of bodies. It belongs to the horizon of time and, thus, reveals the temporality of existence. And he brings the debate with his friend on to the terrain of poetic language. To grasp the core and significance of love, Dante takes the path of poetry he must inquire into the structure of metaphorical language. In chapter XXV of Vita nova, in an overt dialogue with Guido Cavalcanti, he etches his personal aesthetic conception that redefines both poetry and love. As befits a text self-consciously constructed to reflect on one’s poetic education, the Vita nova had embarked on technical considerations on personification, allegory, process of composition of sonnets, poetic inspiration, and general craft of writing. In chapter XXV, he faces squarely the question of poetry and of his own self-understanding as a poet. He claims originality for the poetry of his times (poets of antiquity did not, he says, take the theme of love as a subject for verses). He goes on to say that, from a rhetorical standpoint, the poetry of his time—especially his own—does not differ from that of the past. He adds a twist to his sense of tradition: Poetry is for him an orphic art that animates the world of inanimate entities and the world of the dead. He also asserts that writing poetry is and ought to be a conscious, rational practice: If a poet is asked why he introduces a rhetorical argument, he ought to be able to divest his words of their fabulous coverings and reveal their inner meaning. Rationality pivots poetry’s visionary impulse. With the death of Beatrice, the crucial event of the Vita nova, the boldness of Dante’s imagination comes to the fore. Absence of the beloved ushers in an awareness of the finiteness of the empirical world. By a thrust of the imagination, which is no longer merely empirical but visionary, he goes beyond the boundaries of time and death—he sees Beatrice sitting at the foot of God’s majesty—and rejects any notion of closure for his narrative. In its open-endedness, the last paragraph of the Vita nova reverses the rhetorical structure of the ‘‘libello’’: It began as a book of memory and turns into a vision of the future: It promises a work to come so that Beatrice can be properly praised. By this visionary openness, Dante distances himself from the circumscribed, contracted representations 549

DANTE ALIGHIERI of Cavalcanti’s world, made of separate domains such as love and knowledge that are never allowed to interact. Dante wills to bridge the gap yawning in his friend’s thinking. Beatrice’s death (June 1290) marks a new departure in Dante’s life and attitude. For about 30 months, as his philosophical Convivio (The Banquet, 1304–1307) makes clear, while he attends the schools of theology and philosophy with the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella and the Franciscans at Santa Croce, he stands at the threshold of new intellectual discoveries. The teachings he receives from the friars make the political-rhetorical education Brunetto Latini imparted appear in a new light. A decisive turning is about to take place. That which gives coherence to the domain of politics is not the Ciceronian principle of rhetoric and order, as Brunetto Latini’s ancient classical models had argued. The Dominicans and the Franciscans, who transposed their ideas of church reform, imminent apocalyptic ending of history, need of spiritual conversion, evangelical poverty, and rational order into practical discourse, provide Dante with a universalizing perspective in the understanding of the ‘‘political.’’ The narrow focus of the city requires a transcendent dimension. Or, to say it differently, politics entails a theology. Under the impact of the philosophical-theological training that lays the foundations of his culture, Dante writes a series of doctrinal poems (including the brilliant ‘‘Stony Rhymes’’) while entering political life. He brackets the purely poetic dimension of his life (displayed in the Vita nova), enrolls in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, and serves in a number of posts (member of the council, supervisor of public works, ambassador, and prior of the city). Political involvement for Dante is not sudden. In 1289, he fought the Aretines at the battle of Campaldino and at the Siege of Caprona. He lives within the world and believes that he can bring about changes in the world through action and civic engagement. He actively opposes, as the Franciscans did, the drive to power of the authoritarian Pope Boniface VIII, his unholy alliance with the bankers and designs over Florence, as well as his dealings with the French royal house of Valois. Yet, not only did Dante fail to bring about historical change, he was led into a desperate predicament. In the winter of 1302, he is sentenced to exile from Florence, and lives as an exile until his death in 1321. For all its harshness, exile turns out to be a blessing in disguise, nothing less than the central experience of his life. His texts always speak of exile as a 550

darkening time and a ‘‘ravage of the spirit.’’ But he also accepts that exile should not be construed as a hopeless condition. Instead it affords him with the possibility of recognizing the necessity to transcend the particularisms of local Florentine history and to occupy a universal standpoint. In the initial stage of his nomadic existence, he undertakes to write the Convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, 1304–1305), both of which he leaves unfinished and both of which create a vantage point from which the world—as a human world—can be constructed and grasped. Both texts reaffirm the moral and theological truths that constitute the framework of his Christian vision, while granting legitimacy to the historical world as the product of human language and thinking. That Dante works by a contrapuntal practice is made evident by the symmetry between the two discursive tracts. The De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, argues for the dignity of Italian, and proposes rules to stem the anarchic, arbitrary corruption of the vernacular so that it can serve as the ‘‘illustrious,’’ ‘‘courtly,’’ ‘‘curial,’’ and ‘‘cardinal’’ language of Italy. The Convivio, in contrast, is written in Italian, but it asserts the superiority of Latin. The De vulgari eloquentia begins as a study of grammar, expatiates on the origin of language as a divine gift, refers to philosophical speculations about universal language, narrates the confusion of tongues, maps the geography of Romance languages, and ends up as a treatise on poetry and rhetoric. In the second book, it takes on the status of a poetics that recalls and broadens the concerns put forth in the Vita nova. Poetry is now defined as ‘‘nothing else but a rhetorical fiction set to music.’’ In keeping with this musical understanding of poetry as voice, sound, and harmony, Dante proceeds to discuss theories of style (the hierarchy of tragic, comic, and elegiac modes of representation); he delves into the intricate structure of the song; and he chooses the words best capable of generating the musical order he pursues. The Convivio, on the other hand, by explicitly turning to a discussion of moral philosophy, makes good the teachings he had received some ten years earlier by the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The underlying, sustaining issue of the four books Dante completes is the age-old interplay between philosophy and theology. Yet the Convivio is not a ‘‘Pelagian’’ text (Pelagius was one of the philosophers condemned in Bishop Tempier’s 219 propositions). Under the impact of Boethius’ figuration

DANTE ALIGHIERI of Philosophy as a woman in De consolatione philosophiae (from which Dante takes the initial impulse to philosophize), he deploys the Aristotelian conceit of the erotics of knowledge: He has fallen in love with a beautiful woman, whom Pythagoras named Philosophy. She is the ‘‘donna gentile,’’ whom he first met in the Vita nova and who provisionally replaces Beatrice. The nourishment the Convivio administers (a metaphor faintly recalling the eerie food of love consumed in the Vita nova) ranges from the cardinal virtues (justice, fortitude) to the virtues discussed in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as well as in St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentary on it: the nature of true nobility and magnanimity, the value of authority, the relation between philosophy and politics (the authority of the philosopher vs. the authority of the emperor), the mechanism of allegorical language, the power of the author’s self-hermeneutics, etc. Since ethics is the branch of philosophy bound up with the conduct of life in this world, Dante’s philosophical project expresses itself as the desire to provide the grounds for authority, his own included. He adheres to the view that philosophy is capable of giving a comprehensive account of the highest principles of human affairs. But although the Convivio presents philosophy as the love and quest of wisdom, and philosophy enjoys autonomy from theology, a link exists between the two. At several key points of this text (IV, xxviii), Dante asserts that philosophy, far from appearing as a self-enclosed discipline, leads to theology. His concerns for the philosophical good life and for the practice of the moral virtues (chief, among them, justice) is underlined by the close attention with which he follows the events unfolding on the political scene in both the secular and ecclesiastical domains. In 1310, Henry VII of Luxembourg’s visit to Italy revives the poet’s hopes for peace. In 1313, he excoriates in a Latin epistle (VI) the ‘‘most wicked Florentines.’’ He writes letters on behalf of the exiled White Guelfs as well as to Henry VII urging him to bring peace to the warring Italian factions. In July 1314, Dante even addresses a blistering letter (Ep. XI) to the Italian cardinals meeting in conclave at Carpentras and bickering over the choice of a successor to the deceased Clement V. He urges the election of an Italian pope who would free the Avignonese Church from its bondage to French national interests. This moral and political commitment sustaining Dante’s public acts during the years of his exile is not disconnected and occasional. Late in his life, possibly in 1317, after years of ruminations, in spite

of so many personal defeats and dashed hopes (maybe just because of them), Dante proceeds to construct a complex, concise system of political philosophy, Monarchia (Monarchy, 1317), to advance the end of happiness in this life as distinct from the happiness of eternal life. Monarchia argues that human beings arrive at the first goal through the teachings of philosophy, whereas they arrive at the second through spiritual teachings, which transcend human reason. Monarchia’s central argument—the necessary separation and equal dignity of the ‘‘two luminaries,’’ church and empire—recalls the treatise by the Dominican John of Paris (also known as Jean Quidort), who, at the time of the quarrel between Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, wrote De potestate regia et papali (On Kingly and Papal Power, ca. 1302). The distinction of the two powers (or of the order of nature and grace) was theorized by Aquinas in his treatise De regimine principum (On Kingship). In the wake of Aquinas, John challenges the claims made by an Augustinian, who had studied under Aquinas in Paris, Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus). In his De ecclesiastica potestate (On Ecclesiastical Power, 1302–1303), he mounts a spiritual defense of the pope’s supremacy over and jurisdiction in all things of life. Like John of Paris, Dante refutes in his Monarchia the contention—made by the hierocrats—that priesthood is superior to kingship in all areas. Dante similarly holds that neither power derives from the other. Yet the radical quality of Monarchia—that which possibly accounts for the fact that in 1327 it triggered an attack by Guido Vernani (De Reprobatione Monarchia) and in 1329 the book was burned as heretical in Bologna—lies elsewhere. It has long been alleged that in writing Monarchia Dante espouses the Averroist doctrine of the ‘‘double truth.’’ This notion rested on Dante’s use and citation of Averroes’ theory of the ‘‘possible intellect’’ in his commentary ‘‘On the Soul’’ (Monarchia I, 3–4) to describe the universal form of the intellect whereby the unity of the human race could be actualized. But Monarchia does not argue in favor of an Averroist political theory. If anything, to stave off the moral corruption of the church and preserve its genuinely spiritual mission (severely compromised by the politics of the Avignonese court), Dante upholds the distinction between these two beatitudes and guides in human life. The political unity and peace of mankind is not an immutable given: It can be constructed now, just as it was constructed when Rome, under Emperor Augustus, providentially unified the whole 551

DANTE ALIGHIERI world under its laws. The basically anti-Augustinian argument (as St. Augustine puts forth in De civitate Dei with its critique of Rome) in favor of the dignity of empire and temporal life was bound to unsettle the theorists of absolute papal power. All these reflections on language, love, ethics, poetics, history and political philosophy mark Dante’s whole career (with the possible exception of the brief interlude into public service) and flow into the writing of the Comedia. He transposes these debates and experiences into the poetic-theological context of the poem and discovers the complex, inextricably intertwined links between these disparate topics. This consistent strategy in drafting his poem is evident in seemingly academic, innocuous questions he treated on various occasions that are salvaged and imaginatively redeployed. Between 1319 and 1320, Dante writes two Latin eclogues in the form of epistles to a Bolognese university professor, Giovanni del Virgilio. Giovanni had written to Dante, who was by now living in nearby Ravenna, inviting him to write Latin verse worthy of the learned. Dante, fully aware of his own ‘‘untimeliness’’ as a poet in the vernacular, resists the academician’s call to follow the Humanists’ vogue of reviving Virgilian pastoral poetry. Nonetheless, an echo of this polite exchange figures in Dante’s exordium in canto XXV in Paradiso. By the same token, on January 1320, Dante presents in Verona, in the presence of the city’s theologians, a lecture, Questio de aqua et terra (Question of the Water and of the Land) on whether land is heavier or lighter than water. Written in the mode of a medieval university exposition, the text provides a picture of the Earth standing at the center of the cosmos (as does Inferno XXXIV with its account of the emersion of the landmass), going exactly contrary to the view of the Earth as a little globe in the vastness of space articulated in Paradiso XXII. One self-same issue became for Dante the source of questions to be answered by science, theology, and poetry. Finally, even the Il fiore (The Flower), whose authorship is contested, but believed to have been adapted by Dante from the Roman de la rose in 1286, is recuperated. The sonnet sequence (possibly compiled when the poet was under the tutelage of the ‘‘French’’ author Brunetto Latini and when the French Franciscan Olivi taught in Santa Croce) is retrieved in the lexicon of lower Hell. In short, the Comedia, which Dante drafts from 1305 to the year of his death in 1321, is a poetic encyclopedia that transcribes and contains his 552

intellectual and personal experiences as well as notions drawn from the most disparate sciences. It is impossible to give a full inventory of the poem’s rubrics. Nonetheless, it is clear that Dante absorbs the fund of knowledge available in medieval lapidaries, bestiaries, optics, apocalyptics, astronomy, medieval romances, cosmology, angelology, mythology, historical chronicles of contemporary events, pagan Roman and church history, ethics, patristics, medieval scholastic philosophy, theology, geography, Provenc¸al and early Italian literary history, classical epic and lyrical poetry, Victorine aesthetics and symbolism, etc. But an encyclopedic inventory, even if possible, could not begin to explain the essence of Dante’s poetic vision in the Comedia. What rescues the poem from being a mere reliquary of erudite scraps is the power of an imagination capable of forging subtle connections and resources between scenes, words, and cantos. It is also the poet’s will to install himself imperiously in the midst of the most complex intellectual and political debates of his time and to make them the burning center of his intense questioning. He responds to the twelfth-century reinterpretation of Plato as well as to the twelfthcentury philosophical debates over Aristotle’s most problematical theses: the immortality of the soul, the existence of free will, the relationship between will and intellect, etc. Around those propositions, thinkers such as Averroes, Siger of Brabant, Aquinas, and Bonaventure had long staked their polemical positions. Further, what distinguishes the Comedia from a technical encyclopedia (such as Brunetto Latini’s Tresor) is the central fact that the poem recounts the spiritual and moral education of a historical agent, Dante himself. He is the pilgrim who, impelled by love, engages in an itinerary of self-knowledge, and it ends in the objects of his love quest, Beatrice and God. He inserts the historicity of his own life within the larger pattern of creation and thus contradicts the idea of a merely objective, forever fixed and abstract knowledge. Finally, Dante gives the Comedia the shape of a visionary poem. As such, it shows the limitations of traditional theological discursiveness and takes the reader beyond the horizon and representation of rational theology. A most eloquent introduction to the radical claims made for Dante’s poetry is available in the letter written to Cangrande della Scala to introduce Paradiso (Ep. XIII). First, the letter, which I take to be Dante’s, inscribes the whole of the Comedia within the branch of moral philosophy or ethics, (‘‘insomuch as the whole and the part have been

DANTE ALIGHIERI conceived for the sake of practical results’’). The ethical finality is stressed by an assertion that, taken literally, the subject of the whole work is the state of souls after death: (‘‘if the work is to be understood allegorically, the subject is man, as he is liable to rewording or punishing justice, according as he is worthy or unworthy in the exercise of the freedom of the will’’) (Paragraph 8). The figure sustaining the literal and allegorical dimensions of the narrative is identified as the story of the biblical exodus, the narrative of the Jews who leave Egypt behind and journey toward the Promised Land. Exodus does not afford a merely liturgical framework. It crystallizes Dante’s own exile, which for him is the Christian mode of being on Earth. Second, the letter outlines and evokes the array of visionary analogues he deploys in Paradiso: prophetic visions from the Old Testament, ecstatic raptures from the New Testament, patristic treatises of mystical and contemplative theology, which depend on St. Paul’s account of his rapture to the Third Heaven (II Corinthians 12:2–5). Third, the letter acknowledges the metaphorical mode of narration. In short, the epistle to Cangrande articulates an inventory of the apparently incongruous elements gathered in the Comedia: poetry, allegory, Biblical history, philosophy, prophecy, and visionariness. These elements embrace the whole of knowledge and make up an imaginative world where the poet’s art brings to light the encounter between poetry and faith. This road sign shows the way to the depths of the divine. It is small wonder that Dante over the years has been increasingly acknowledged as the very voice of Western spirituality.

Biography Born in Florence in May/June 1265 under the sign of Gemini to Alighiero, who in 1277 arranges the son’s marriage contract to Gemma Donati and who dies in 1283. In 1283, Dante meets for the second time Beatrice, whom he had first met in 1274. In 1285, Dante marries Gemma, with whom he will have four children (Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia). On June 11, 1289, Dante takes part in the Battle of Campaldino against the Ghibellines of Arezzo. On August 16 of the same year, he is present at the siege of the Fortress of Caprona. On June 8, 1290, Beatrice dies. From 1291 to 1294, Dante, who had studied under Brunetto Latini, goes to schools of philosophy and theology with the Dominicans at Santa Maria Novella (where Remigio de’ Girolami, Aquinas’ disciple in Paris,

taught) and the Franciscans at Santa Croce. In 1294, the year Brunetto Latini dies, Dante composes his Vita nova. In 1295, he enters political life and enrolls in the guild of ‘‘Physicians and Apothecaries.’’ Between 1295 and 1300, he serves in the city government in various capacities (councilman, ambassador, and prior). On October 1301, he is sent as a member of an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII, who was backing Charles of Valois’ plans to control Florence. On January 27, 1302, the Black Guelfs banish from the city a number of prominent White Guelfs. Dante, one of them, goes into exile until his death in Ravenna on September 13–14 of 1321. Between 1303 and 1306, while living in Verona, Treviso, Padua, and Lunigiana, he writes Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia. From 1307 to 1321, while he was a guest of Cangrande della Scala in Verona, and in Ravenna of Guido Novello da Polenta, he wrote the Comedia. In September 1321, the malarial fever contracted while he was on a mission to Venice brought about his death. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Selected Works Works in Vernacular Il fiore, ca. 1280–1320; as The Fiore, translated by Christopher Kleinhenz and Santa Casciani, 2000; as Il Fiore, translated by John Took, 2004. Rime, ca. 1283–1307; as Dante’s Rime, translated by Patrick S. Diehl, 1979. Vita nova, ca. 1294; as Dante’s Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, 1973. Convivio, ca. 1304–1307; as The Banquet, translated by Christopher Ryan, 1989; Dante’s Il Convivio, translated by Richard H. Lansing, 1990. Epistole, 1304–1310. Comedia, ca. 1305–1321; as The Divine Comedy, translated by John D. Sinclair, 1939–1948; as The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles S. Singleton, 1970–1975.

Works in Latin De vulgari eloquentia, ca. 1304–1305; De vulgari eloquentia, translated by Steven Botterill, 1996. Monarchia, ca. 1317; as Monarchy, translated by Prue Shaw, 1996; Dante’s Monarchia, translated by Richard Kay, 1998. Questio de aqua et terra, 1320; as Question of the Water and of the Land, translated by Charles Hamilton Bromby, 2004.

Further Reading Auerbach, Eric, ‘‘Figura,’’ in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays, New York: Meridian Books, 1979.

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DANTE ALIGHIERI Baranski, Zygmunt G., ‘‘Sole nuovo, luce nuova’’: saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante, Turin: Scriptorium, 1996. Barolini, Teodolinda, and H. Wayne Storey (editors), Dante for the New Millenium, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Boyde, Patrick, Dante, Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Enciclopedia dantesca, 6 vols., Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978. Foster, Kenelm, The Two Dantes and Other Studies, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1977. Franco, Charles, and Leslie Morgan (editors), Dante: Summa Medievalis, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1995. Freccero, John, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Gilson, Etienne, Dante the Philosopher, translated by David Moore, London: Sheed and Ward, 1948. Gilson, Simon, Medieval Optics and Theories of Light in the Works of Dante, Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2000. Jacoff, Rachel (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Dante, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Nardi, Bruno, Nel mondo di Dante, Rome: Istituto Grafico Tiberino, 1944. Scott, John A., Understanding Dante, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Singleton, Charles S., Dante’s ‘‘Commedia’’: Elements of Structure, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

COMEDIA, CA. 1305–1321 Poem by Dante Alighieri

The Comedia (Divine Comedy) tells the story of a providential journey that a man, Dante himself, takes while still alive, across the three realms of the beyond—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In this sense, it is essentially the narrative of a spiritual conversion. By playing out the implication of the central conceit of life as a journey, the protagonist at the beginning of his adventure casts himself as a wayfarer who, ‘‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’’ (in the middle of the journey of our life), loses his 554

path in the wilderness and finally, under the guidance of Virgil, Beatrice, and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, reaches the beatific vision. The pilgrim’s journey takes place during the Eastertide of the year 1300 and is, thus, patterned on the Good Friday Passion and Sunday Resurrection of Christ, an event which in turn is rooted in the fundamental, paradigmatic figure of conversion: the biblical Exodus. The epic narrative of the Jews, who leave the house of bondage in Egypt, travel through the desert and reach the Promised Land, organizes the pilgrim’s dramatic experience. It stands behind its poetic representation as the basis of the theological allegory or figura (as Charles S. Singleton and Erich Auerbach have shown) of the human soul’s exile and passage from sin to redemption, from time to eternity. As a ‘‘story,’’ the Comedia is the recollective account of Dante’s extraordinary experience of his journey to God. The narrative, told from the standpoint of the final vision, unfolds over 100 cantos, which in turn are divided into three canticles and are arranged in terza rima. The general ternary structure reflects Dante’s Trinitarian understanding of the divinity. It also signals that the symbolic numerical harmony ordering the poem alludes to a biblical aesthetic principle available in the Book of Wisdom: God has created everything according to measure, weight, and number. Dante calls his narrative a ‘‘comedy’’ for a number of reasons. The trajectory of the story, from wilderness to God, satisfies one fundamental requirement of the genre. According to the poetic conventions of antiquity (Horace), comedy describes a narrative movement from an initial chaos to a happy ending. Rhetorically, as Dante himself has it in De vulgari eloquentia, comedy entails a low, humble style: His use of the Italian vernacular acknowledges the plain, Christian impulse of his ‘‘comic’’ representation. But since his humble experience is in fact sublime, by calling it a ‘‘comedy’’ he manages to unsettle the rigid hierarchy of styles prescribed by classical poetics and ushers in a new moral world where the low is high and the high is low. Dante’s narrative strategy reaches even further. He posits a necessary disjunction between the journey and the telling of it. Such a disjunction accounts for the ‘‘poetics of conversion’’ (as John Freccero put it) that Dante dramatizes in the form of an ironic discrepancy between the pilgrim, who dwells in the shadows of time and is caught in the predicament of uncertain knowledge, and the transcendent, synoptic vision of the poet.

DANTE ALIGHIERI The dialectics between the two modes of knowledge of the pilgrim and the poet describes the Pauline process of the ‘‘old man’’ becoming the ‘‘new man,’’ which culminates in the convergence, at the end of the poem, of their perspectives. Yet, the disjunction between the journey and its metaphoric account expresses other radical concerns of Dante’s poetic thought. The poem itself, more than a mere retrospective retelling of a past experience, is itself a journey, fraught with temptations and errors, to which the poet yields and during which his guide, the poet Virgil, falters. From this standpoint, the poem constitutes a way to make God accessible to human beings but, at the same time, is marked with risks, questions, progress and steps backward that are meant to reveal the quest for God as the horizon of human history. The circle of all knowledge Dante evokes especially in Paradiso (whereby knowledge is a ladder to the divine) is drawn within the overarching concern of making knowledge a quest and a question: It is a question that lies at the source of science, philosophy, and decisions in one’s own life. The idea of poetry as a quest and a question is rooted in the acknowledgment of man’s exile and the homelessness of the human condition. For Dante, exile entails both a longing for Heaven and for a place on Earth, and it coincides with the deeply religious consciousness that one is forever out of place. Inferno (1305–1308) The opening canto of Inferno features two journeys. The pilgrim, finding himself lost in a frightening wilderness, tries to escape by climbing a hill and following the route and direction of the sunlight. If Dante’s journey were a mere abstract journey of the mind, such as those related by Neoplatonic interpretations of the epic voyages of Ulysses and Aeneas, he would be safe. Dante’s turning to the light captures sufficiently the requisites of an intellectual or philosophical conversion. But such a journey, prevalent in classical antiquity, proves inadequate because the protagonist’s failings are not of the mind. They involve his will, which is wounded and must be healed by a descent into humility. His humility expresses itself through the wayfarer’s yielding to a guide, Virgil, who will literally show him the way down into the depths of Hell as the precondition for ascending into Purgatory and beyond. The way down under the guidance of Virgil, the ‘‘author’’ of the Aeneid, the poem of Rome and history, will take the pilgrim through the circles of incontinence, violence, and fraud, which constitute the moral topography of Hell.

The emphasis on Virgil and on the Aeneid as the poem of Rome marks Dante’s deliberate shift from abstract poetic allegories to the world of history (and to an allegory based on history). In the Convivio (IV, xxiv, 1–10), in the wake of commentators such as Bernard Silvester and John of Salisbury, Dante understands Aeneas’ journey from Troy to the shores of Italy as the philosophical allegory of human life. In Inferno, Dante abandons this view of the Aeneid. Under the impact of St. Augustine’s De civitate Dei, he views it as the poem of history. St. Augustine entertains few doubts about the political value of the Virgilian epic: The Aeneid provides the justification of the imperial ideology of Rome. He adds that the Roman Empire, far from being providential, represents another tragic, lamentable episode in a succession of violence, an emblem of the libido dominandi, which characterizes the secular economy of history. Dante disagrees with St. Augustine’s assessment. He views Virgil and the Roman Empire as aspects of God’s providentiality. The initial polemics with St. Augustine’s view of Rome prepares the extended reflection on secular and church politics, on the ambiguous judgment of the classical world, and on the uses and abuses of literature, which constitute the major thematic lines of force running through Inferno. More than the empire, Dante steadily evokes in Inferno the tragic reality of civil wars. Such a concern figures also elsewhere in the poem (for instance, in the reference to Cato in Purgatorio I), but its awareness is unmitigated in the early going. In the explicitly political cantos of Inferno, VI, X, XIII, XV, and XXXIII, the focus falls not on the empire, which is a distant and, as it were, absent model of order, but on the sinister reciprocity of injustice within Italian cities. In Inferno VI, the canto where gluttony is punished, the deformities of the body politic are sharply drawn as Ciacco’s devouring is masked as a politics of taste: The canto’s language is punctuated by allusions to what is sweet and bitter. In Inferno X—the canto of those (such as Epicurus) who do not believe in the immortality of the soul—Dante re-enacts the quarrels between Guelfs and Ghibellines in Florence: the soulless city has split apart into unrelated parts and each figure thrusts his own partisan will as the universal will. In Inferno XV and XXXIII, Dante stages, respectively, the sparks of evil inflaming Florence and the tragic confusion of all values (hatred appears as love, redemption or violence, etc.) in the encounter with Ugolino. Inferno XIII, the canto of the suicide of Pier delle Vigne, 555

DANTE ALIGHIERI the secretary of Frederick II, evokes the world of the imperial court as a den of envy and injustice. By the same token, Inferno XIX, the canto where simony is punished, shows the church, from the beginning of her history, engaged in idolatrous commerce of the ‘‘sacred,’’ as if what descends from God’s grace could be bought and sold at a price. This impure mixture of the sacred and the secular is crystallized by the Donation of Constantine, an act by which the church has contaminated her spiritual essence. Such is the magnitude of the moral crisis enveloping the contemporary world that Dante deliberately seeks to retrieve and to question the legacy of the classical world as if to recover the foundations on which the world can be rebuilt. His encounter with his own teacher, Brunetto Latini (canto XV), who adapted Cicero’s rhetorical work to the needs of contemporary Florence, belongs to this wide orbit of concerns about the power of the past to shape the present. His choice of Virgil, who dwells in Limbo (the moral area at the edge of Hell) but who also wrote the messianic IV Eclogue (or so was it understood by patristic literature) also signals the bent of Dante’s thought. Virgil and Rome are viewed as sources of redemption in history. But Dante’s endorsement of the classical world is not unequivocal. Its representation in Limbo (Inferno IV)—where Greek and Roman intellectuals are enumerated and, ironically, are also shown to dwell side by side with unbaptized infants—shows the limits of classical wisdom. The powerful story of Ulysses, moreover, dramatizes the classical degradation of philosophical wisdom into fraudulent rhetoric. The concern with the Greek hero’s language brings to a climax another crucial dimension of Inferno: the world of literature, its power to affect the phantasms of the imagination, its seductiveness and its proneness to deception and selfdeception. Inferno V, the canto of Paolo and Francesca—of the sinners who subject reason to desire—explicitly evokes the pleasurable medieval world of romances. Francesca and Paolo read of Lancelot and Guinevere; she cites the poetry of the Sweet New Style, and the act of reading displays her aesthetic voluntarism, her way of reducing the world to images, abiding in it, and making it the projection of her will. All of these concerns (to which we can add the question of the contrapasso, the recall of Dante’s other works, such as the De vulgari eloquentia, etc.) are judged from the standpoint of the moral order articulated by Aristotle’s Ethics and Physics as well as St. Thomas Aquinas’ commentaries on them. 556

Purgatorio (1308–1314) It is Easter Sunday morning, and the pilgrim and his guide emerge from the eternal night of Hell to the light of Purgatory. An austere old man, drawn from the republican history of Rome, Cato of Utica, tries to stop them. The startling presence of Cato, the hero of Lucan’s Pharsalia (a poem about the Roman civil war), a pagan, a suicide, and an enemy of Caesar gives an idea of Dante’s complex conception of Purgatory. It is the place of purification of souls. It is also the place where Dante’s own moral education is continued and will be perfected when he reaches the Garden of Eden at the top of the mountain. Above all, the island of Purgatory, though rising in the Southern hemisphere and inaccessible to human beings in this life, comes through as a symbolic extension of this life. More than the other two canticles, which belong to the realm of eternity, Purgatory is shown with the temporal characteristics of this world and it stages the world’s temptations. The first temptation takes place in Purgatorio II and it involves the pilgrim himself. He has met an old friend, the musician Casella, who, to relieve the pain and loneliness of the desert shore, sings to Dante a poem from his Convivio: ‘‘Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona’’ (Love that discourses in my mind) (l. 112). For both penitents and pilgrim the song evokes nostalgia for the sweetness of the earth as well as forgetfulness of the supernatural goal to which they are directed. The ambiguity staged by the scene enacts the specific temptation of nostalgia and of aesthetic delight diverting the mind from its moral goal. All thoughts of moral ascent are here provisionally bracketed. This dramatic ambiguity—the disjunction between the ethical and the aesthetic pulls—recalls the moral conflict lying at the heart of the story of Exodus, which is unveiled here (Purgatorio II, 45) as the fundamental structure of the narrative. Just as Exodus placed the Jews in the desert, the ambivalent space where the law is given and idolatry is committed (the worship of the golden calf, which is the Jews’ nostalgia for Egypt), so does Purgatorio place the pilgrim in a middle area where past and future are implicated. Another specific temptation of the past occurs in the exordium of Purgatorio VIII, to say nothing of the Dream of the Siren (XIX, 1–33). The focus on the pilgrim’s moral and existential drama in the opening two cantos suggests that in this second canticle the pilgrim’s subjectivity emerges as its central unifying theme. It is in Purgatory that Dante’s own name is registered for the first and only time in the poem (XXX, 55). The

DANTE ALIGHIERI focus on subjectivity is made plain by the pilgrim’s encounter with Beatrice and his confession to her (Purgatorio XXX-XXXI). So marked is the textual insistence on the self that the epic narrative edges toward taking on the form of a novel of the self. At the heart of the novelistic structure lies the education of the self in all its tentativeness. The protagonist moves across the ledges of Purgatory, where pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, and lasciviousness are purified; yet, throughout, he is engaged in his own moral-spiritual education about doctrinal issues of love, free will, imagination, and choice. The emphasis on the pilgrim’s self removes the abstractions inherent in these questions and draws them within the concreteness and historicity of his lived life. In an overt extension of this existential dimension, the reader is allowed to glimpse at the domain of the pilgrim’s interiority and dream world (see especially the Dream of the Siren in Purgatorio XIX). The thematics of self reaches its climax in the scene of self-confrontation of Purgatorio XXXI. Here the pilgrim is engaged in a moral and Augustinian confession, which amounts to a spiritual conversion or a taking stock of his past life in view of his ascent to the realm of Paradise. But the conversion is not final. It is a process that continues as long as one lives. The pilgrim is told by Beatrice to prepare himself for a possible future encounter with the Siren. The reference to the future gives more than a hint about the implications of a novel of the self: The temptations of the past are not neutralized once and for all. The pilgrim lives in time, and he experiences time in all its problematical and authentic essence. No foreclosure is possible. In time, he will face other temptations and dangers. The focus on the self of the pilgrim invests also the poet, who speaks in different voices. The Casella episode, with its display of indulgence in poetic self-recognition by a pilgrim who, on the shore of Purgatory, finds himself as if in a foreign land, is a case in point. In Purgatorio VI, after witnessing the embrace between two Mantuan poets, Virgil and Sordello, Dante literally ‘‘steps out’’ of his narrative and prophetically denounces the lawlessness rampant in Italy (the symmetry to the corresponding political cantos of Inferno and Purgatorio is transparent). Finally, the long segment on the poets (Purgatorio XXI–XXVI)—that ranges from the recognition scene between Virgil and Statius, the reunion between Dante and Forese, the debate with Bonagiunta on the Sweet New Style (Purgatorio XXIV), to the homage Dante pays to Guido Guinizzelli and, indirectly, to the Provenc¸al poet

Arnaut Daniel—places Dante at the center of his construction of literary history. It would be a gross distortion, however, if one were to suggest that the question of self eclipses other concerns dramatized over these cantos, such as Dante’s consciousness about the relationship existing between poetry and belief, poetry and food, and poetry and love. These issues were treated earlier in the Comedia and in his other works. The other long segment of Purgatorio is devoted to the pastoral scene at the top of the mountain (from canto XXVII to XXXIII). It shows Dante’s poetics of this canticle. He rewrites the bucolic convention of the classical tradition as he collates it with the biblical imagination of the Earthly Paradise. In his handling, Purgatory’s Garden of Eden appears as the imaginative locus of ambivalences and contrasts. It marks a point of arrival for the pilgrim, who is ‘‘crowned’’ by Virgil and attains the state where his will is free. It also figures the point for a new departure to the garden-city of Heavenly Jerusalem and beyond in Paradiso. In addition, it represents the moral space where Virgil vanishes and Beatrice arrives (canto XXX—and she will be present for 33 cantos, symmetrically until Paradiso XXX). It evokes a prelapsarian order, yet the pilgrim’s residual erotic desires linger (as the encounter with Matelda, which makes this into a garden of love, exemplifies). Above all, in the Earthly Paradise nature and history converge. Here Beatrice utters the enigmatic prophecy of 515. Couched in Joachistic language, and to be linked with the prophecy of the ‘‘Veltro’’ in Inferno, the prophecy does not announce—as Joachim of Flora does— the imminent apocalyptic end of the world. It announces the messianic advent occurring at an unspecified end of history. For Dante’s exilic poetic imagination, the pastoral world cannot be reduced to a picture of idyllic oasis. As Virgil had done in both the Bucolics and in the Aeneid, Dante draws the pastoral tradition into the world of history. Paradiso (1317–1321) The subject matter of this last canticle, the journey to see God face to face, is announced in its first tercet: ‘‘La gloria di colui che tutto move / per l’universo penetra e risplende / in una parte piu` e meno altrove’’ (The glory of Him who moves all things / penetrates and shines throughout the universe / in one part more and in another less) (Paradiso I, 1–3). The reader glimpses at what the pilgrim saw: the Kingdom of glory, and glory is to be understood as the light of God. More importantly, the tercet casts 557

DANTE ALIGHIERI God in the cosmological role of the Aristotelian Prime Mover, while creation is described through the Neoplatonic principle of plenitude as a hierarchical distribution of light. The next few tercets of Paradiso I (lines 4–20) shift the narrative focus on the specific drama of the poet. He cannot remember what he saw. He prays to Apollo, the god, who, challenged by the satyr Marsyas to a musical contest, defeated and punished him. Fear flanks Dante, fear of a poetic hybris as the boat of his poetry sails over unmapped waters. He is not Marsyas, who violates the boundaries dividing the human from the divine, nor is he St. Paul, alluding to 2 Corinthians 12:2, where Paul writes of being rapt to the third Heaven (meaning the highest mode of vision). Out of fear of violating the divinity, Paul observes silence. Dante, caught between love and fear of God, steers clear of (and possibly re-enacts) Marsyas’ pride and Paul’s silence as he proceeds, in this most intellectual of canticles, to describe the beauty and order of creation. Without a doubt, Dante’s primary concern in Paradiso is to show the link between beauty and the divine. Beauty is the face of the divine. As Joseph Mazzeo has eloquently argued, in Paradiso we witness the interplay of beauty and light. This means that aesthetics, which here appears as the conjunction of the good and the beautiful, plays a decisive role in the structure of Dante’s experience. Issues, such as poetic ineffability, the yoking of memory and forgetfulness, the metaphoricity of Paradiso (a poetics of adaptation or accommodation of the souls to the pilgrim’s limited perception), vision and optics, etc., hinge on aesthetics and show Dante’s sense of its epistemological value. If aesthetics is the principle that unifies Paradiso’s representation of the cosmos, its specific structure depends on the model of Ptolemaic astronomy (with the Earth at the center of the universe and the ‘‘heavens’’ revolving around it). Beyond them lie both the sphere of the fixed stars and the crystalline or primum mobile. It is a singular feature of Dante’s imagination to combine each sphere with each of the liberal arts (the moon and grammar, Mercury and dialectics, etc.). The arts and sciences are the ladders of the pilgrim’s intellectual illumination as he approaches the beatific vision. The several doctrinal questions debated in the unfolding of Paradiso (the relation between the realm of unity and the multiplicity in the world of time, the probing of a number of complex philosophical, scientific and theological questions, such as the nature of light and materiality, degrees of beatitude, the relation between beatitude and the souls, place 558

in the rank ordering of Paradiso, the role of the will in knowledge, relation between the intellect and the world of contingency, the salvation of pagans, theories of creation and separate substances, astronomy and vision, etc.) belong to the domain of the pilgrim’s intellectual education since his moral education was achieved in Purgatorio. The insistence on the philosophical, theological, and scientific discussion in this canticle should not be construed as a sign that Paradiso ultimately points to Dante’s forgetfulness of the Earth. The canticle, indeed, comes forth as a prayer, to put in terms of De vulgari eloquentia as human language’s own journey to God, but it is not a mystical escape from the exigencies of history and time. Quite to the contrary, it can be understood as a celebration of mankind’s best efforts to live in love and in the pursuit of the good. Figures who have little of the conventional hagiographies in them, such as Piccarda, the Emperor Justinian, the unforgettable Cunizza, Francis, Dominic, Cacciaguida, Benedict, Bernard and, of course, Beatrice, together dramatize Dante’s daring vision that in the most distant reaches of the universe lies man’s true home. For the exiled poet, who is reminded until the end of the bitter experiences awaiting him in the world of history, such a grand vision is the strongest assertion of man’s divine call. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, Foligno: Johann Numeister and Evangelista, 1472. Critical editions: Divina Commedia, edited by Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Quaglio, 3 vols., Milan: Garzanti, 1988; La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, rev. ed., 4 vols., Florence: Le Lettere, 1994; Commedia, edited by Chiavacci Leonardi and Anna Maria, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1991–1997; Dantis Alagherii Comedia, edited by Federico Sanguineti, Florence: Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2001. Translations: The Divine Comedy, translated by John D. Sinclair, 3 vols., London: J. Lane, 1939–1948; The Divine Comedy, translated by Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–1975; Inferno. Purgatory. Paradise, 3 vols., translated by Anthony Esolen, New York: The Modern Library, 2002–2004; Inferno, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander, New York-London: Doubleday, 2000; Purgatorio, translated by Robert and Jean Hollander, New York-London: Doubleday, 2003

Further Reading Auerbach, Eric, Dante Poet of the Secular World, translated by Ralph Manheim, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961.

DANTE ALIGHIERI Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Boyde, Patrick, Dante Philomythes and Philosopher: Man in the Cosmos, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Brandeis, Irma, The Ladder of Vision: A Study of Dante’s ‘‘Comedy,’’ London: Chatto and Windus, 1960. Cachey, Theodore J., Jr. (editor), Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 1995. Cestaro, Gary, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame, 2003. Charity, Alan C., Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Cornish, Alison, Reading Dante’s Stars, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Freccero, John, Dante, The Poetics of Conversion, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Ginsberg, Warren, Dante’s Esthetics of Being, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Hawkins, Peter S., Dante’s Testaments: Essays in Scriptural Imagination, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Hollander, Robert, Allegory in Dante’s ‘‘Commedia,’’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Mazzeo, Joseph, Structure and Thought in the Paradiso, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante’s Vision and the Circle of Knowledge, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Moevs, Christian, The Metaphysics of Dante’s Comedy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pertile, Lino, La Punta del Disio: Semantica del desiderio nella Commedia, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005. Raffa, Guy P., Divine Dialectic: Dante’s Incarnational Poetry, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Singleton, Charles S., Dante Studies 1. Commedia: Elements of Structure, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954.

COMMENTARIES In the history of Western literature, few other texts have drawn as widespread scholarly interest as has the Comedia. The tradition of commentaries and erudite glosses on the poem has become a substantial chapter of Italian literary history, which in Italy has come to be known as la fortuna di Dante. Such a tradition begins with the poet himself, who

penned the epistle to Cangrande della Scala. Scholars have periodically entertained doubts about Dante’s authorship of this letter, which was written as an introduction to Paradiso and makes a number of key claims about the deeper meaning and structure of the poem. It points out the poem’s polysemous allegory by focusing on the lyrical reflection on Exodus in Psalm 113: ‘‘in exitu Israel de Aegypto’’ (when Israel went out of Egypt); it places the poem within the visionary-contemplative tradition of St. Bernard, Richard of St. Victor, and St. Augustine; it addresses the poem’s rhetorical status—both its ‘‘comical’’ style/genre and its metaphoricity; and it assigns the poem to the branch of philosophy known as ethics. In effect, the epistle faces the encyclopedic facets of the poem and, in many ways, crystallizes the shape of further debates. The barest outline of the commentary tradition in the years immediately following Dante’s death bears the mark of the epistle’s critical influence. Beginning with the glosses by the poet’s son, Jacopo Alighieri (1322), with their emphasis on the various levels of style (tragic, comical, elegiac) and genre, through the comments by Graziolo de’ Bambaglioni (1324), with their stress on the poem’s moral allegory, the debts to the epistle are evident. In the fourteenth century, two commentaries are particularly noteworthy, the ones by Guido da Pisa and Giovanni Boccaccio. The Expositiones et Glose Super Comediam Dantis (known as Commentary on Dante’s Inferno) by a Carmelite monk, Guido da Pisa, was written in 1333. Guido, who may have met Dante in Pisa, both acknowledges the poem’s theological, visionary allegory and pays close attention to its rhetorical form. The special importance of the commentary, however, depends on the fact that Guido, deeply knowledgeable in medieval philosophy, theology, and literature, knows and refers to all of Dante’s works in an effort to capture a global view of the poet’s convictions. In exegetical terms, moreover, a new perspective is developed for the accessus to the poem: Guido da Pisa treats the self of the poet as a central thematic element of the narrative, and he gives a radical turn to the question of poetic theology. He understands better than any other critic that for Dante poetry can do what theology cannot do. Guido’s insights, which were to influence Francesco de Buti’s glosses, show traces of the comments by Jacopo Alighieri and Jacopo della Lana. Guido da Pisa’s brilliant commentary touches a problematical core of Dante’s poem in a way that Boccaccio’s commentary does not. In the public 559

DANTE ALIGHIERI lectures he gives in the church of Santo Stefano in Badia, Florence, starting on Oct. 23, 1373 (they break off at Inferno VII), Boccaccio considers Dante a poet and, hence, a theologian. The public occasion and the large audience signal the recognition of Dante as both a popular poet and a classic. More substantively, Boccaccio’s insights, which flow into and shape the humanistic thrust of Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary, retrieve Pietro di Dante’s reading (1340). More than Pietro does, both Boccaccio and Benvenuto insert concrete references to the life and history of Dante’s times: papacy and empire, the crisis of the cities, and the devastation caused by civil wars. By the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth century, thanks to Leonardo Bruni’s biography of Dante, the world of Dante is viewed essentially in the political terms of Florence’s cultural prestige. At the court of the Medici in the later part of the fifteenth century, the Comedia came to enjoy a renewed prestige and a renewed centrality in intellectual debates. In the context of Ficino’s Neoplatonic discourse, Cristoforo Landino’s commentary (1481) platonizes Dante. Landino discards the Aristotelian universe of reference (to which Benvenuto da Imola subscribes) and brackets the scholastic system of doctrine and the four levels of exegesis in favor of a generalized philosophicalorphic allegory. Nonetheless, this commentary opens Dante’s poem to the fierce quarrels that characterize the intellectual life of the Renaissance. The impact of Aristotle’s Poetics on all literary arguments and the concern with the questione della lingua account, first, for the Aristotelian reaction by the Florentine Academy (instituted in 1540) and, second, for the emergence of linguistic discussions on the poem. The annotation by Trifone Gabriele (1525–1540) and the commentary by his disciple Bernardino Daniello (1568), Ludovico Castelvetro (1570), especially the commentaries by Jacopo Mazzoni, and above all, Benedetto Varchi, mark a shift in the history of the reception of the poem. For Varchi, the unifying principle of the poem resides in philosophy rather than theology. Such philosophy includes Plato, but it is eminently embodied by Aristotle. Dante is viewed as the thinker who harmonizes disparate philosophical traditions (Aristotle, Aquinas, Avicenna, Galen, Averroes, etc.). It was not until the beginning of the eighteenth century that, thanks to Giambattista Vico, the direction in the interpretation of the poem changed. In reaction to the neoclassical theories of Gian 560

Vincenzo Gravina, Vico, the philosopher of the poetic imagination, casts Dante as a sublime poet who grasps the extent to which all rational practices are encroached upon by the poet’s visions. His poetry is both history and divination. Indeed, it is the foundation of all knowledge. Such a view shapes Francesco De Sanctis’ Romantic reading of the poem, which is said to convey the spiritual form of life. This theory, which downplays the importance of theological and philosophical discourses, was harshly contested by the positivist commentators and philologists of the later part of the nineteenth century, such as Giovanni Andrea Scartazzini (1874), Giuseppe Vandelli (1903), and, in the twentieth century by Michele Barbi. With the twentieth century, however, we reach a time in which Dante commentaries flourish both in Italy and abroad. In Italy, the works by Siro A. Chimenz (1962), Emilio Pasquini-Enzo Quaglio (1982), and Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (1991–2001) are truly extraordinary. In Germany, Hermann Gmelin’s commentary (1954) brings together with rare acumen the literary, theological, and scientific conspectus of Dante’s culture, while in France Andre´ Pezard’s commentary (1965) and subsequent translation of the Comedia succeed in reproposing to the attention of the reader the poem in all its energy and inventiveness. In the United States, finally, the translation and commentary of Charles Singleton have become the point of departure for a number of ongoing commentaries, notably by Robert Durling, Ronald Martinez, and Robert Hollander. By drawing on the exegetical labors of many and on the existing annotations of past scholars (H.W. Longfellow, C.H. Grandgent, Dorothy Sayers, John Sinclair, Hermann Gmelin etc.), they contribute to making the Comedia a vital classic for years to come. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Select Commentaries Landino, Cristoforo, Comento sopra la Comedia, 1481, edited by Paolo Procaccioli, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Daniello da Lucca, Bernardino, L’espositione di Benardino Daniello da Lucca sopra la Comedia di Dante, 1568, edited by Robert Hollander and Jeffrey Schnapp, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1989. Boccaccio, Giovanni, Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante, edited by Giorgio Padoan, Milan: Mondadori, 1965. Da Pisa, Guido, Guido Da Pisa’s Expositiones et Glose super Comedian Dantis or Commentary on Dante’s Inferno, edited by Vincenzo Cioffari, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974.

DANTE ALIGHIERI Alighieri, Pietro, Comentum super poema Comedie Dantis: A Critical Edition of the Third and Final Draft of Pietro Alighieri’s Commentary On Dante’s The Divine Comedy, critical edition by Massimiliano Chiamenti, Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2002.

Further Reading Baranski, Zygmunt G., ‘‘Reflecting on Dante in America: 1949–1990,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 8 (1990): 58–86. Dartmouth Dante Project, edited by Robert Hollander, 1999, telnet: library.dartmouth.edu. Guerri, Domenico, Il commento del Boccaccio a Dante. Limiti della sua autenticita` e questioni critiche che n’emergono, Bari: Laterza, 1926. Hollander, Robert, ‘‘Dante and His Commentators,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Jenaro-MacLennan, L., The Trecento Commentaries on the Divina Commedia and the Epistle to Cangrande, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974. Mazzoni, Francesco, ‘‘Guido da Pisa interprete di Dante e la sua fortuna presso il Boccaccio,’’ in Studi Danteschi, 35 (1958): 20–128. Mazzotta, Giuseppe (editor), Critical Essays on Dante, Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1991.

CONVIVIO, CA. 1304–1307 Treatise by Dante Alighieri

Written in the early years of Dante’s exile and left unfinished, Convivio (The Banquet) is a book of philosophy, specifically of ethics or moral philosophy. It is organized as a commentary on Dante’s own doctrinal poems written during the period of his philosophical training soon after the death of Beatrice. The 30 months during which he attended the Franciscan and Dominican schools in Florence is not, after all, fruitless or remote. Dante recalls Beatrice’s death as well as those years of philosophical study as he embarks on a philosophicalpoetic path of thought: his writing a major opus, originally conceived in 14 books. He himself recalls that death, his philosophical training, and the predicament of his exile for three interrelated reasons.

One is personal: He aspires to a role possibly as an advisor to the emperor. One is intellectual: He intends to provide a comprehensive framework of meaning for a philosophy of life. The third is existential: He plans to bring new light to his own life, which is disanchored from his homeland and drifting. Subjectivity and philosophy (hardly what the neo-Aristotelians of all stripes indulged in) are the two foci of his philosophical project. At the very start, Dante retrieves Aristotle’s Metaphysics as the historical foundation of his philosophical investigations. The opening sentence stresses a peculiar trait of Aristotle’s impulse to philosophize: As the ‘‘philosopher’’ says at the beginning of the First Philosophy, ‘‘all men naturally desire to know’’ (Convivio I, i, 1). The implied erotics of knowledge lead Dante to invest philosophy with feminine attributes and to devise her feminine personification (in the wake of Boethius’ Lady Philosophy). It accounts for the love and quest of wisdom permeating Dante’s rhetoric. More fundamentally, the principle of desire for knowledge ends up illustrating Dante’s overarching purpose: the needed yoking together of intellect and will, virtue and knowledge, philosophy and poetry, self and world, which neo-Aristotelian metaphysics invariably forgets and which he steadily pursues. In the context of redefinition of the philosophy of the schoolmen, the reasons for Dante’s retrieval of two authors, St. Augustine and Boethius, can be grasped. Their autobiographical works laid the groundwork for the representation of his ‘‘self.’’ The Confessiones and the De consolatione philosophiae, from which Dante’s thinking springs, cast the self as a norm of conduct. Dante also acknowledges his debt to Cicero’s De Amicitia. At the death of Beatrice, Dante had read these books in the persuasion that philosophy provides consolation for the finiteness of life and the grief at the loss of the beloved. Convivio, however, proceeds to bracket the shrine of death his grief had erected and makes life the horizon of his thinking: Ethics, as a matter of fact, is the art of living. Violating the traditional medieval rank ordering of the arts and sciences that culminates in metaphysics, Dante defines ethics as the proper goal of all knowledge. The discussion of the moral and intellectual virtues—nobility, magnanimity, justice, prudence, knowledge and counsel—which is scattered throughout, never neglects the question of the subject. Dante’s defense of the Italian language as the apt medium for philosophical thinking, the deployment 561

DANTE ALIGHIERI of his own doctrinal poems, such as ‘‘Voi chi’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’’ (You who understanding move the third sky), which opens Convivio II, references to his exile, the differentiation between the allegory of poets and of theologians and the consequent self-commentaries on the poems are all elements contributing to the view of philosophy not as an enclosed function of the intellect and an already achieved field of knowledge, but rather as an unveiling of and a making explicit the ambiguities of poetic language and language as such. Dante’s ongoing, relentless self-questioning edges toward self-knowledge but, unsurprisingly given the fragmentary quality of the text, never attains it. This hybrid characteristic of Convivio—its very radicality in linking together the polarities of self and philosophy, poetry and hermeneutics, philosophy and science, and, finally, philosophy and politics— may actually account for the ultimately inevitable incompleteness of the treatise. The artifice of blending diverse modes and cultural traditions was the distinctive trait of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Convivio pushes for four books the synthesis of styles of thought available in the Consolatione even further. But the Boethian synthesis could not have been duplicated on account of a contradiction inherent in the conception of Convivio. The contradiction in Convivio is highly productive and it can be quickly made intelligible. The treatise is written as a vindication of the luminosity of reason and, generally, the dignity of philosophy. The text’s unfolding is governed by the assumption that everything can be explained (angels, immortality, the heavens, doctrinal allegories, etc.). So thorough is Dante’s commitment to the epistemological power of philosophy in its secular extension that Convivio has often been defined as ‘‘Pelagian,’’ from the teachings of Pelagius, who held that human beings are morally free to do right or wrong and can reach truth entirely on their own and without any supernatural aid. (The view was specifically condemned by Etienne Tempier in 1279.) But the Convivio is not a Pelagian text. It preserves the dignity and autonomy of philosophy and it steadily acknowledges its role as a stepping stone to theology. The asserted value of a general philosophical-ethical discourse jars, however, with Dante’s explicit focus on the historicity of the self. The notion of the self, who is on the way in his quest for knowledge, makes all the claims of general knowledge problematical. The historicity of the self, with which the treatise begins, ends up in Book IV as a discussion of history and politics. In 562

defending the authority of the philosophers’ knowledge, Dante turns to the history of the Roman Empire and its centrality in world history. It also turns to the traditional allegorical interpretation of the Aeneid. Aeneas’ voyage from Troy to the shores of Latium figures, so are we reminded, the stages in everyman’s journey of life, from birth to maturity. In effect, the philosophical allegory of the Virgilian poem (which echoes the allegories of Bernard Silvester) runs the risk of dissolving the particularities of poetry into a generalized form of discourse: Making promises supposedly valid for all, the generalized allegorical interpretation of the Roman epic eschews the contingencies of the text as well as the particularities of each individual life. Thus, Dante grasps that his reflections, rooted in the historicity of his exile and his unique predicament, have reached an impasse. He stops his project and he cannot but turn to another rhetorical mode, one that combines the dimension of subjectivity, history, politics, etc. That mode is found in the poetry of the Comedia. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, Florence: F. Bonaccorsi, 1490. Critical editions: Il Convivio, edited by Giovanni Busnelli and G. Vandelli, in Opere di Dante, 2nd ed., Florence: Le Monnier, 1964; Convivio, edited by Cesare Vasoli, in La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome I, part 2, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1988; edited by Franca Brambilla Ageno, 3 vols., Florence: Le Lettere, 1995. Translations: The Banquet, translated by Christopher Ryan, Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1989; Il Convivio, translated by Richard H. Lansing, New York: Garland, 1990.

Further Reading Ascoli, Albert R., ‘‘The Unfinished Author: Dante’s Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Corti, Maria, La felicita` mentale: nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Gilson, Etienne, Dante and Philosophy, translated by D. Moore, New York: Harper Torchbook, 1963. Leo, Ulrich, ‘‘The Unfinished Convivio and Dante’s Rereading of the Aeneid,’’ in Medieval Studies, 13 (1951): 41–64. Mazzeo, Joseph, Medieval Cultural Tradition in Dante’s Comedy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960. Nardi, Bruno, Saggi di filosofia dantesca, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967.

DANTE ALIGHIERI

DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA, CA. 1304–1305 Latin Treatise by Dante Alighieri

Written while in exile, this unfinished Latin treatise on behalf of the Italian vernacular turns to a historical analysis of language, its origin in God’s gift to Adam in the Garden of Eden, its vicissitudes crystallized by Nimrod’s building of the Tower of Babel, its mutability in time and differences in space. Dante’s focus, however, falls first on the specificity of ‘‘our own language’’: the languages of Italy, France, and Spain. Their common origin lingers in the word amor (love), as the poets of those countries (Giraut de Bornelh, Thibaut of Champagne, and Guido Guinizelli) make clear. Second, Dante draws the map of the 14 major dialect areas of Italy with the aim of ‘‘hunting’’ for the ‘‘panther’’ of Italy’s ‘‘illustrious’’ vernacular in the forest of the dialects. In this pursuit of language and art, the pride of place in Dante’s construction of the vernacular is given to the Sicilians on account of the ‘‘weighty poems’’ written by the poets in the court of Frederick II. But the new language Dante envisions eschews specific regional dialects. Its qualities—‘‘illustrious,’’ ‘‘cardinal,’’ ‘‘aulic,’’ and ‘‘curial’’ (DVE I, XVI, 6)—are drawn from all dialects and they signal Dante’s deeper purpose: the formation of a language that could be used in the emperor’s hall and in the courts of law, a language that would cast the light of glory on its speakers and would act as a hinge for all other cultural activities. If Book 1 avowedly drafts a grammar for the Italian language, Book 2 comes forth as a short and yet pithy treatise on poetic art. From this perspective, its antecedents are identifiable with Boncompagno da Signa, Guido Fava, and, to some extent, Horace and the medieval treatises of poetics by Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland. But Dante does not argue his case in merely speculative terms. Quite to the contrary, the thrust of De vulgari eloquentia is practical. He chooses the canzone (song) as the most exalted poetic form in the vernacular because of the sweet harmony it

conveys. Poetry, in fact, is defined as a ‘‘rhetorical fiction fashioned by music,’’ (DVE II, iv): the definition casts poetry as an art of making (fictio), which follows rhetorical rules and brings out the music inherent in language. The formulation seals the divorce between music and poetry that had emerged with the poetry of the Sicilians and acknowledges poetic language’s own musical powers. Further, the canzone’s high, tragic style (as opposed to the elegiac and low), its lexicon, themes (love, virtue, and arms), stanza, verse forms (with a preference for a combination of lines with seven and 11 syllables), and rhyme patterns are discussed. Throughout, Dante exemplifies his choice with citations of poems taken from Provenc¸al, French, and Italian tradition (Guido Guinizelli, Cino da Pistoia, Guido Cavalcanti, Dante himself, as well as Bertran de Born, Arnaud Daniel and Giraut de Bornelh). They are recognized as models of truly great art by which Dante reaffirms his faith in the power of language at a time when the drama of his exile unavoidably seemed to envelop his life in solitude without a future. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, edited by Iacopo Cobinelli, Paris: J. Corbon, 1577. Critical edition: De vulgari eloquentia, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, in La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome 2, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1979. Translation: De vulgari eloquentia, edited and translated by Steven Botterill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Further Reading Ascoli, Albert R., ‘‘‘Neminem ante nos’: History and Authority in the De Vulgari eloquentia,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 8 (1990): 186–231. Ascoli, Albert R., ‘‘The Unfinished Author: Dante’s Rhetoric of Authority in Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, edited by Rachel Jacoff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Corti, Maria, Dante a un nuovo crocevia, Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, ‘‘Inferno: The Language of Fraud in Lower Hell,’’ in Patterns in Dante: Nine Literary Essays, edited by Cormac O Cuilleanain and Jennifer Petrie, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005. Menocal, Maria Rosa, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1994. Pagani, Ileana, La teoria linguistica di Dante: De Vulgari eloquentia, discussioni, scelte, proposte, Naples: Liguori, 1982. Shapiro, Marianne, De vulgari eloquentia: Dante’s Book of Exile, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990.

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DANTE ALIGHIERI

MONARCHIA, CA. 1317 Latin Treatise by Dante Alighieri

Throughout his life, Dante displays a persistent involvement with the ‘‘political.’’ His earlier burgeoning career as a city official and, later during the years of his exile, his epistles to the Italian cardinals and to Henry VII of Luxembourg show his resolve to participate and impart a direction to the conduct of the two public and religious institutions, church and empire. The ‘‘political’’ for Dante, quite clearly, is never the domain of mere theoretical speculation. Much less is it simply the area where the ideal models of the body politic and the mystical body are displaced into practice. He is all too aware that in such transposition of models of order into the reality of history the ‘‘political’’ turns into the site where theology, politics, speech, and action intermingle and become confused, where technically distinct fields of power (that of the church and the empire) get blurred. Such a blurring of disciplines results in outright confusion: the donation of Constantine, which eventually Lorenzo Valla will unmask as a forgery, is for Dante an illegal operation by which the emperor alienates the lands of the empire to the church. Monarchia (Monarchy), written at the height of the church’s bondage to French imperial policies, which is also both a time of crisis for the Holy Roman Empire and one of Dante’s deepening disappointment with the factionalism rampant in the Italian cities, seeks to reverse the all too real confusion between the empire’s and the church’s orbits of jurisdiction and power. Over the three books that compose it, Monarchia presents three interrelated arguments that Dante, with the voice and authority of a moral philosopher steeped into the technicalities of medieval dialectics and jurisprudence, marshals. By tracing, following the method of logic, the classical philosophical question of the relation of the many to the one, he argues for the necessity of one world government for the well-being of the whole mankind. He exemplifies the feasibility of such a project by turning to the history of the Roman Empire, under whose providential 564

universal jurisdiction the Incarnation took place, and peace and justice reigned on Earth. Finally, by refuting the claims of the supreme authority of the church in all affairs of life that had been advanced by Boniface VIII’s bull Unam Sanctam (1302) and by the hierocrats, Dante maintains the principle of equality and separateness of empire and church. The authority of both descends directly from God: The empire, ruled by human reason and in the light of philosophy, was established to lead mankind to temporal beatitude; the church, founded on divine revelation, must lead mankind to the goal of eternal happiness. Monarchia’s central thesis of the complementary and yet separate nature of the empire and the church (which Thomas Aquinas and his disciples such as John of Paris and, in Florence, Remigio de’ Girolami had articulated) is based on the distinction and ordering between philosophy and theology. But Dante does not espouse the Averroist doctrine of the ‘‘one single intellect in all man’’ to which he refers (Mon. I, iv). A Dominican friar, Guido Vernani, wrote his De reprobatione Monarchiae in 1329 exactly on the ground that Dante follows Averroes’ doctrine. The refutation may have to do with Vernani’s desire to take his distance from Averroes and from the charges of Averroism to which the Dominicans were liable. For Dante, the empire does not simply realize the unity of the possible intellect nor is it only a rational entity (which is the premise of the Averroistic theory). The construction of the empire also requires, as Virgil and St. Augustine grasp, whom Dante lavishly cites in this treatise, the exercise of the will. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, De Monarchia libri tres, in A. Alciato De formula romanii imperii, Basel: G. Oporino, 1559. Critical editions: Monarchia, edited by Bruno Nardi, in La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome 2, MilanNaples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1979. Translations: Monarchy and Three Political Letters, translated by Donald Nicholl and Colin Hardie, 1947, Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, 1979; Monarchy, edited and translated by Prue Shaw, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Dante’s Monarchia, translated by Richard Kay, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1998.

Further Reading Davis, Charles Till, Dante and the Idea of Rome, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957.

DANTE ALIGHIERI Morghen, Raffaello, Dante profeta: tra la storia e l’eterno, Milan: Jaca Book, 1983. Nardi, Bruno, Dal Convivio alla Commedia: sei saggi danteschi, Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1960. Passerin d’Entreves, A., Dante as a Political Thinker, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Vasoli, Cesare, La filosofia medievale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961.

VITA NOVA, CA. 1294 Lyric Poems by Dante Alighieri

In the history of literature, rarely, if ever, does a first book establish its author as an unimpeachably major, original voice. The Vita Nova (New Life), Dante’s first book, is an exception. This astonishing autobiographical tale presents Dante as both protagonist and author who in the past fell in love with Beatrice and wrote poetry about that love, and who now simultaneously reflects on his love and on his growth as a poet. The work bears, in the delicate relationships that sustain the double thematic focus of the narrative, the sure signs of an authentic masterpiece. It is consciously cast as a first book, as a beginner’s work in every sense, the beginning of love and of poetry. From a formal viewpoint, the Vita Nova begins ambiguously, in the sense that it begins twice, both at the end and at the beginning of the narrative. At the start, it gives itself as a ‘‘book of memory,’’ as a retrospective account of an original love experience whose outcome could not be known and whose implications only later could be drawn. The author transcribes the ciphers of his memory in the desire to make sense of his past experience. The transcription, which can be called a self-hermeneutics, gets going quite self-consciously with the phrase ‘‘incipit vita nova,’’ as the protagonist casts his gaze on his childhood, which is when at the age of 9 he first saw Beatrice. Nine years later, he sees her again and discovers the wondrous world of love. At the beginning there is love, and at first Dante’s love is a disorienting experience that triggers deliriums and morbid fantasies as the lover is touched and

absorbed by the apparition of this young woman who does not seem to belong to the world of reality but to the realm of the imaginary. Both the poetry and the hermeneutics of those past events stem from this love. In the past, the young lover withdraws into himself and begins to write poetry in the effort to grasp the depth of Beatrice’s enigmatic appearance—of which the number nine is a symbolic sign—as well as the vast extent of his passion for her. The 31 poems that make up the lyrical substance of the Vita Nova recount the inner revelations this love brings: In this confessional self-analysis (with shadows of St. Augustine’s Confessiones) the lover exposes his dreams, grief, obsessive love thoughts and fantasies, sense of being an absolute object to mocking women, his straying from love, fear of being unacknowledged by Beatrice, who denies him her greetings, joy at seeing her, excitement at finding the right words for celebrating his love, dread in the face of death, a shattered world at the death of Beatrice, etc. But there are poems that are not merely narratives of states of mind or exposures of one’s being. Some poems are themselves events, such as when he discovers ‘‘praise’’ as the genuine language of his love for Beatrice (Ch. XIX). Poems, thus, become occurrences, which create a space where the lover’s experiences become intelligible and where love and poetry both share in and unveil their reciprocal secrets. The narrative of the lover’s sentimental education and the poet’s apprenticeship in the art of poetry presents the protagonist as a character who at the start knows very little about either, but slowly grows in his understanding. He does not know if the love he feels is a physical impulse, as the physician Dante da Maiano writes to him, or a rhetorical way of speaking, or the sign of a divine election and a special grace. Gradually, the lover receives a final revelation when, after Beatrice’s death, he has a vision of her sitting at the foot of God’s majesty. At this point, all the disappointments he had suffered, the betrayals of her memory he had perpetrated, and the illusions and simulations under which he had frequently sought shelter vanish. His visionary experience (Ch. XLI) yields to the resolution and hope to write about Beatrice as has never been written in rhyme of any woman: ‘‘spero di dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d’alcuna’’ (I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman). The Vita Nova, which had begun as a book of memory and as the interrogation of the past, turns at the end into an open-ended promise of a future 565

DANTE ALIGHIERI book that will lead to unpredictable places of thought. It ends with the project for a new beginning along the path of visionary poetry. This specifically poetic dimension—which mirrors, triggers and is in turn impelled by the love apprenticeship— brings to a climax a quest into the secrets of poetry that had started at the very beginning. At the inception of the story the lover, who understood love in its objective content of a physical phenomenon, writes his first sonnet about a frightening dream in which love appears to cannibalize the lover’s heart. The love dream is also the dream of poetry. Dante sends his poem out and enters the circle of the city’s poets. Guido Cavalcanti, to whom the Vita Nova will be dedicated and who is acknowledged as Dante’s ‘‘first friend,’’ responds urging the lover to abandon the meanders of deceptive passions and to turn to the clarity of intellectual ideas. Dante da Maiano, who is a physician, answers with a sonnet that resembles a clinical analysis of Dante’s pathology and an imbalance of humors. In effect, from the very start the Vita Nova stages a specifically poetic drama, which to some extent is independent from, and yet sheds light on the lover’s quandary. The conflict the poet faces is clear: To the pair of poetry and love, his correspondents juxtapose the pair of philosophy and friendship. This conflict is dramatized by the rhetorical structure of the text: a mixture of poetry and commentary in the tradition of texts, such as Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae. Dante’s prose commentary on his love and on his poetry signals his will to reduce the two experiences within the parameters of rational sense. As chapter XXV of the Vita Nova states, the practice of poetry must be grounded in the poet’s full consciousness of his intentions. But Dante’s last two paragraphs of his text widen the rational focus of Guido Cavalcanti’s rational understanding of poetry. The grieving lover/poet plunges into a visionary experience of the dead Beatrice sitting in glory. A new beginning opens up for the lover and for the poet: He discovers that love is an experience that, because it is unwilled, is more profound than any philosophical friendship; he reaches the concomitant conclusion that visionary poetry is a mode capable of opening up spaces of the imagination unsuspected by the rational analysis of the philosophers.

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From this standpoint, the Vita Nova can be understood as a retrospective summary of Dante’s poetic experiences as a young man. He represents his love for Beatrice by variously adopting the styles of the Provenc¸al poets, the Sicilian poets, Guittone d’Arezzo, and Guinizzelli. He dialogues with Cavalcanti, who is his privileged interlocutor, and the other poets of the Sweet New Style. But he realizes that if Beatrice is to be a unique, irreplaceable figure of love, the poetry that sings of her must also be a unique form of poetry. The adumbration of a great book to come, the Comedia, could not have been more eloquently stated. The Vita Nova can be rightly called the first great novel of the ongoing, unending process of education in modern literature. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: editio princeps, edited by Niccolo` Carducci, Florence: B. Sermartelli, 1576. Critical editions: Vita Nuova, edited by Domenico De Robertis, La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, vol. 5, tome 1, part 1, 1–247, Milan-Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1974; Vita Nova, edited by Guglielmo Gorni, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1996. Translations: Dante’s Vita Nuova, translated by Mark Musa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973.

Further Reading Boyde, Patrick, Dante’s Style in His Lyric Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Colombo, Manuela, Dai mistici a Dante: Il linguaggio dell’ineffabilita`, Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1987. De Robertis, Domenico, Il libro della ‘‘Vita Nuova,’’ Florence: Sansoni, 1961. Durling, Robert M., and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante’s ‘‘Rime Petrose,’’ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Gorni, Guglielmo, Dante Prima della Commedia, Fiesole: Cadmo, 1994. Harrison, Robert Pogue, The Body of Beatrice, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, ‘‘The Language of Poetry in the Vita Nuova,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 1.1 (1983): 3–14. Singleton, Charles S., An Essay on the ‘‘Vita Nuova,’’ Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949. Wehle, Winfried, Dichtung u¨ber Dichtung: Dantes Vita nuova, die Aufhebung des Minnesangs im Epos, Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1986.

LORENZO DA PONTE

THE DAUGHTER OF IORIO See La Figlia di Iorio (Work by Gabriele D’Annunzio)

LORENZO DA PONTE (1749–1838) The fame of Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose works were set to music by some of the greatest musicians of his time, is tied to the numerous librettos written during his stay in Vienna (1784–1790). He wrote his three masterpieces for Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Il dissoluto punito ossia Don Giovanni (The Punished Libertine or Don Giovanni, 1787) and Cosı` fan tutte (Women Are Like That, 1790). After the failure of his first libretto of the Viennese period, Il ricco di un giorno (Rich Man for a Day, 1783), which was set to music by Antonio Salieri (1750–1825) and performed on 6 December 1784, Da Ponte waited a year before he wrote the Il burbero di buon cuore (The Gruff One of Good Heart, 1786), a bourgeois comedy after Goldoni’s Le bourru bienfaisant (1771), in which Da Ponte did away with the distinction between serious and comic characters to create a more realistic art. In this phase of his career, Da Ponte’s works were revisions of famous works. He skillfully translated the melodramatic pie`ces originally composed for the theater: for instance, Il finto cieco (The False Blind, 1786), a comedy of errors, in which the protagonist Sempronio discovers the deceptions of his promised bride, Elisa. The comic element makes use of traditional mechanisms from the farcical theater. The Demogorgone (1786) is a traditional piece, in which the protagonist, Demogorgone, is a ridiculous, hypocritical character who despises women. Gli equivoci (The Misunderstandings, 1786) has a political theme that Da Ponte would develop in his greatest librettos: the conflict between masters and servants. In this case, Da Ponte

expressed an ideology that motivated the French Revolution. The librettos of Da Ponte are quite diverse in plot and content. The comic opera is the most prevalent genre in his works, but he also wrote pastoral comedy and plays with bourgeois subjects. An example is the playful play L’arbore di Diana (The Tree of Diana), performed on 1 October 1787. The protagonist of the work is the goddess Diana, who, by the end of the play, falls in love with Endimione and loses her chastity. Da Ponte makes the refusal of chastity a central motif, celebrating the hedonist spirit of the Viennese court of Joseph II. In January 8, 1788, he composed the libretto Axur re d’Ormus (Axur, King of Ormus), based on Beaumarchais’ play, Tarare (1787) and set to music by Salieri. The opera is set in a fantastic eastern locale. In this work, which was destined for the courts of Europe, he tempers the polemical tone of the original French play from which it was derived. Da Ponte’s masterpieces are his collaborations with Mozart, in which the themes of Eros and social pretensions are fundamental. His librettos reflect his sensibility, the sensibility of a libertine and adventurer in the eighteenth-century manner (as, for instance, Giacomo Casanova). Le nozze di Figaro plays down the political themes central to the comedy of Beaumarchais and concentrates on the attempted seduction of Susan by the Count of Almaviva and the conquest of the countess by Cherubino. Da Ponte reduced the number of characters, eliminated the third act of the French comedy, and raised the importance of Figaro’s role.

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LORENZO DA PONTE The libretto became a game of seduction, in which the protagonists indulge in a series of disguises and equivocations before the happy ending: the marriage of Figaro and the restoration of peace between the Count of Almaviva and the countess. The return of order does not succeed in convincing the audience, however. It appears provisional and does not subdue or dispel the erotic forces that propelled characters. The opera Don Giovanni was performed with great success in Prague on 29 October 1787. This was Da Ponte’s most important libretto. He did not limit himself to the treatments of Tirso de Molina (1584–1648) or of Molie`re, but also called upon Il convitato di pietra (The Guest of Stone, 1787) of Giovanni Bertati (1735–1815). Da Ponte created nonetheless a highly original work. He introduced sweeping stylistic themes, notably enhanced by Mozart’s music. Written in two acts, the libretto features Don Giovanni, himself seduced by the continuous search for the next love conquest. By his side is the servant Leporello, who ‘‘catalogs’’ Giovanni’s conquests; characters include his betrayed wife, Donna Elvira; Donna Anna, who tries to seduce him and who kills his father; Don Ottavio; and the peasants, Masetto and Zerlina. All suffer from his seductive charms, and when Giovanni dies, dragged to hell by the ghost of the commander, one understands that none of the characters can continue to live as before. In Enten Eller (Either/Or, 1941) the philosopher Kirkegaard sees Don Giovanni as the emblem of the desire to dedicate life to the conquest of women and the satisfaction of carnal desires. In Cosı` fan tutte, the theme of eros and seduction remain paramount. In Naples, two sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, love Guglielmo and Ferrando. They bet with Don Alfonso that their fiance´es can never betray them. Don Alfonso organizes a trick with the help of the maid, Despina: Guglielmo and Ferrando pretend to leave Naples only to present themselves again disguised as two Albanian soldiers. They each succeed in charming Fiordiligi and Dorabella and, after a false marriage, they reveal their true identities. The seduction discloses the weakness of reason and the uncontrollable strength of passions: No woman can resist and Da Ponte ironically jokes about the pretensions of eternal love. Da Ponte’s works show a constant drive to experiment. He changed his way of writing according to different circumstances and, above all, in accordance with the different musicians with whom he collaborated. Besides Martin y Soler, he achieved 568

his most innovative results in his collaborations with Mozart. He freed himself of the rigid classicist mode of distinguishing characters as either comic or tragic figures, creating a realistic opera built around characters who can be both comic and tragic. Da Ponte did away with the formal distinctions encoded within the work of earlier librettists, such as Pietro Metastasio, who were limited by the alternation of recitatives, aria, and orchestral accompaniment. This allowed him to create genuine characters, skilled in reciting comedies full of pretence and ambiguity, where the theme of love and seduction serves as the actual protagonist. During the years he spent in the United States, Da Ponte became an important and intensely active teacher of Italian literature and culture and eventually became a professor of Italian at Columbia College. In 1832, he organized and promoted an opera season for the company of James Montresor, which performed operas by Gioacchino Rossini and Lorenzo Bellini. The following year he dedicated himself to the creation of an Italian opera house in New York City, where his masterpieces by Mozart were performed. His artistic activity is detailed in full in Memories (Memoirs, 1823–1827).

Biography Born in Ce´neda (now Vittorio Veneto), 10 March 1749; birth name Emanuele Conegliano, of Jewish descent. August 29, 1763, he was baptised after his father’s conversion to Christianity and assumed the name of the bishop that baptized him (Da Ponte). Studied (1764–1767) in the seminar of Ce´neda and Portogruaro. March 27, 1773, entered a seminary. In 1774, taught rhetoric in Treviso. Returned to Venice in 1776; banished from the seminary and from the schools of Veneto for his libertine behaviour; in 1779, he was tried for seducing a woman. Between 1779 and 1780, lived in Dresden and Gorizia; arrived in Vienna, for the first time, in 1779. At the end of 1781, settled in Vienna, where he stayed until 1791. In 1783, met Mozart and became poet of the imperial theater. In 1792, traveled to Paris, then to London. Arrived in New York, where he devoted himself to commerce and teaching, in 1805. In 1825, became teacher of Italian at the Columbia College. Died in New York City, 17 August 1838. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Librettos

STEFANO D’ARRIGO Selected Works Collections Tre libretti per Mozart, edited by P. Lecaldano, Milan: 1956. Memorie e altri scritti, edited by Cesare Pagnini, Milan: Longanesi, 1971. Memorie: I libretti mozartiani, edited by Giuseppe Armani, Milan: Garzanti, 1990. Libretti viennesi, edited by Lorenzo Della Cha`, Parma: Guanda, 1999.

Librettos Il ricco di un giorno, 1783. Le nozze di Figaro, 1786. Il burbero di buon cuore, 1786. Il finto cieco, 1786. Una cosa rara, o sia bellezza ed onesta`, 1786. Gli equivoci, 1786. Demogorgone, 1786. L’arbore di Diana, 1787. Don Giovanni, 1787. Axur re d’Ormus, 1788. Cosı` fan tutte, 1790.

Plays Il Mezenzio, 1834; as Il Mezenzio: tragedia nuovissima in cinque atti, edited by Lorenzo della Cha, 2000.

Letters Lettere di Lorenzo da Ponte a Giacomo Casanova, 1791–1795, edited by Giampaolo Zagonel, 1988. Lettere, epistole in versi, dedicatorie e lettere ai fratelli, edited by Giampaolo Zagonel, 1995.

Other Storia compendiosa della vita di Lorenzo Da Ponte scritta da lui medesimo, 1807. Memorie di Lorenzo Da Ponte da Ceneda, 4 vols., 1823–1827; 3 vols., 1829–1830; as Memoirs of Lorenzo Da Ponte, translated by Elisabeth Abbott, 1959; rpt. edited by Arthur Livingston, 2000. Saggio di traduzione libera di ‘‘Gil Blas,’’ edited by Lorenzo Della Cha`, 2002.

Further Reading Brizi, Bruno, Il ritorno di Lorenzo Da Ponte, Vittorio Veneto: Citta` di Vittorio Veneto, 1993. Du Mont, Mary, The Mozart-Da Ponte Operas: An Annotated Bibliography, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Fitzlyon, April, The Libertines Librettist, London: John Calder, 1955. Fitzlyon, April, Lorenzo Da Ponte: A Biography of Mozart’s Librettist, New York: Riverrun Press, 1982. Garlick, Richard C., Italy and the Italians in Washington’s Time, New York: Arno Press, 1933. Goldin, Daniela, ‘‘Mozart, Da Ponte e il linguaggio dell’opera buffa,’’ in La vera Fenice: Librettisti e libretti tra Sette e Ottocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart’s Librettist, New York: Universe Books, 1985. Hodges, Sheila, Lorenzo Da Ponte: The Life and Times of Mozart’s Librettist, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Lanapoppi, Aleramo, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Realta` e leggenda nella vita del librettista di Mozart, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Macchia, Giovanni, Vita, avventure e morte di Don Giovanni, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Mandel, Oscar (editor), The Theatre of Don Juan: A Collection of Plays and Views, 1630–1963, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1963. Nicastro, Guido, Letteratura e musica, Rovito (Cosenza): Marra, 1992. Nicastro, Guido, Sogni e favole io fingo, Cosenza: Rubbettino, 2004. Pirrotta, Nino, Don Giovanni in musica, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Rescigno, Eduardo, Da Ponte: poeta e libertino tra Mozart e il nuovo mondo, Milan: Bompiani, 1989. Russo, Joseph Louis, Lorenzo Da Ponte: Poet and Adventurer, New York: Columbia University Press, 1922. Spedicato, Paolo, La sindrome di Sherazade: Intertestualita` lavoro in Lorenzo Da Ponte, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000.

STEFANO D’ARRIGO (1919–1992) The journalist and art critic Stefano D’Arrigo is best known in contemporary Italian literature for one work, the massive and expansive Horcynus Orca, described by Italo Calvino as the Italian Ulysses (I libri degli altri, 1991). Although it was published only in 1975, the book had a long gestation. Already in 1950, in a letter to his wife, Jutta

Bruto, D’Arrigo announced that he intended to write an important literary work. The theme of the hard life of Sicilian fishermen (the ‘‘ulissidi’’ or descendants of Ulysses, as he calls them), which would be central to this project, also inspired his collection of poetry Codice siciliano (Sicilian Code, 1957). Between 1956 and 1957, he wrote 569

STEFANO D’ARRIGO the first draft, entitled La testa del delfino (The Dolphin’s Head). This novel, still unpublished, is characterized by a stylistic pastiche of Sicilian dialects, cultivated Italian, and neologisms that form a kind of ‘‘hyper-language.’’ It is the symbolic and epic story of the young seaman ‘Ndrja Cambrı`a who, over eight days in autumn 1943, returns to his birthplace in Sicily. On his way home, he meets strange creatures and Signor Cama, who shows him a book on cetaceans similar to the one Herman Melville describes in chapter 32 of Moby Dick (1851). After a mythical encounter with his father, ‘Ndrja returns to his group of fishermen, impoverished by the war. He dreams of buying a new ship, and he works for that purpose, but is killed by an English sentry while rowing into the port at night. At the heart of the protagonist’s experience is the apocalyptic, endless duel between the Orca—a symbol of Death—and the dolphins, the fere (beasts). La testa del delfino was the beginning of a complex work of rewriting on which D’Arrigo labored for nearly 20 years. In 1959, Elio Vittorini, fascinated by the text, asked him to publish it in Il Menabo`, the journal he edited with Calvino, and indeed, two chapters appeared in 1960 with the title ‘‘I giorni della fera’’ (The Days of the Beast). In 1961, D’Arrigo began editing the proofs of the novel to be published by Einaudi as I fatti della fera (The Facts of the Beast), but this ‘‘editing’’ would last a lifetime. Working up to 14 hours a day, he tried to re-create the particular language spoken in Messina during his childhood, and even when the novel was published in 1975, the author was unhappy with it. In its final form, it is divided into three sections: the first describes the sailor ‘Ndrja’s voyage from Naples to the Paese delle Femmine in Calabria; the second focuses the protagonist’s encounter in Sicily with his father and his father’s poetic tale about Carybdis; the third is imbued by the haunting presence of the murderous monster, the Orca, found in the Straight of Messina, and climaxes with ‘Ndrja’s long monologue in front of the fearful dying Orca and with his preparations for the regatta and his eventual death. The vast narrative structure in a sophisticated style (very long sentences, alternating direct and indirect discourse, flashbacks and digressions) reflects the constant movement of the sea generated by the tides and the streams. In ‘Ndrja’s monologue, the protagonist appears as the Messiah who redeems mankind from the monster, re-establishing communion with God. 570

In 1985, D’Arrigo published his second novel, Cima delle nobildonne (Peak of the Noblewomen). Less ambitious in its structure, it is the story of a group of doctors who, while preparing an exhibition on the human placenta, discover that the murderous instinct is genetic in human beings. Here, the domain of the mythical meets with that of science. Oneiric passages alternate with inner monologues, and ancient Egyptian practices intertwine with modern medical techniques. Also the result of a tormented and difficult production, Cima delle nobildonne confirmed D’Arrigo’s image as a controversial writer. Indeed, critics remain divided about D’Arrigo’s work, and his masterpiece in particular. For some, Horcynus Orca is exorbitant in its structure and requires specialized readers in dialectology and anthropology. For others, the work exalts the metatemporal motifs of classical journeys, of water and of death itself, in the Mediterranean Sea, which evokes by definition the realm of myth.

Biography Born in Alı` Terme (Messina), 15 October 1919. After his birth, his father, Giuseppe, immigrates to the United States to work. Graduates from the University of Messina with a thesis on Ho¨lderlin, 1942. During the war, serves in the Italian Army in northern Italy, then in Palermo. Moves to Rome in 1946, where he works as an art critic and journalist for newspapers and journals such as Tempo, Il giornale d’Italia, Vie Nuove. Marries Jutta Brutto, January 1948. Codice siciliano is awarded the Crotone literary prize by Giuseppe Ungaretti and Carlo Emilio Gadda, 1958; two unpublished chapters of La testa del delfino are awarded the Premio Cino del Duca by Elio Vittorini, 1959; stars as the judge in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accattone, 1961; writes a theater adaptation of Horcynus Orca, staged by Roberto Guicciardini at the Festival di Taormina, 1989. Died in Rome, 2 May 1992. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Fiction Horcynus Orca, 1975. Cima delle nobildonne, 1985. I fatti della fera, edited by Andrea Cedola and Siriana Sgavicchia, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘Codice siciliano,’’ 1957.

CHIARO DAVANZATI Further Reading Alfano, Guido, Gli effetti della guerra. Su Horcynus Orca di Stefano d’Arrigo, Rome: Luca Sossella, 2000. Calvino, Italo, I libri degli altri: lettere 1947–1981, edited by Giovanni Tesio, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Contini, Gianfranco, Schedario di scrittori italiani moderni e contemporanei, Florence: Sansoni, 1978. Gatta, Francesca (editor), Il mare di sangue pestato. Studi su Stefano D’Arrigo, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 2002. Giordano, Enrico, Horcynus Orca: il viaggio e la morte, Naples: E.S.I., 1984.

Giordano, Enrico, Cima delle nobildonne o della metafora infinita. Saggio sull’ultimo D’Arrigo, Salerno: Edisud, 1989. Gramigna, Giuliano, Interventi sulla narrativa italiana contemporanea, 1973–1975, Treviso: Matteo, 1976. Marabini, Claudio, Lettura di D’Arrigo, Milan: Mondadori, 1977. Pedulla`, Walter, Miti, finzioni e buone maniere di fine millennio, Milan: Rusconi, 1983. Titone, Virgilio, ‘‘Il populismo e D’Arrigo,’’ in Saggi di letteratura italiana contemporanea, Palermo: Novecento, 1998.

CHIARO DAVANZATI (CA. 1235–1303/1304) After Guittone D’Arezzo, Chiaro Davanzati is the most productive Italian poet of the thirteenth century. In the Vatican Codex 3793, which, as far as we know, has preserved the majority of his works, we find a total of 61 canzoni and over 120 sonnets, to which may be added another 18 sonnets of uncertain attribution. His productivity makes him the most representative Florentine poet prior to the advent of the dolce stil novo (the Sweet New Style) and Dante. Despite his prolific writing and a certain notoriety during his lifetime, Davanzati seems to have had little or no influence on the following generations of poets. If Dante, or any of the stilnovisti, read his work, corresponded with him, or knew him personally, they certainly made no mention of him. Critical tradition has distinguished three phases in Davanzati’s varied and vast thematic repertory. His poetic development is, first and foremost, influenced by the lessons of the Provenc¸al troubadours, and the scuola siciliana (the Sicilian school of poetry), through which he became interested in the tradition of the love song; secondly, by Guittone D’Arezzo, who most likely inspired his treatment of political and moral themes (though he was never a follower of the friar from Arezzo); lastly, Davanzati’s verse has been likened to the early love language of the stilnovisti. Furthermore, the textual restoration of Davanzati’s poetic production has allowed us to better understand the limits of Guittone D’Arezzo’s debt on this versatile poet. To

Guittone’s stylistic virtuosity, Davanzati offers a formally less complex lyric mode; and to Guittone’s didactic sententiousness and spiritual urgings, he responds with a more modern, lay vision that is better suited to the Florentine cultural establishment. Indeed, as a result, Chiaro Davanzati, who is well-versed in the love poetry and models pursued at the court of Frederick II in Sicily, who is attracted by the emerging new voices of the Tuscan stilnovo, and who also aims at diffusing Guittone’s harsh doctrinarian preaching, shows innovative skills in handling all of these poetic influences and traditional motifs. Davanzati’s most famous compositions include his serventese ‘‘Ai dolze e gaia terra fiorentina’’ (Oh sweet and happy Florentine land), and a group of sonnets where he makes extensive use of animal metaphors. ‘‘Ai dolze e gaia terra fiorentina,’’ which was written in 1267 in praise of Florence at a time when the Guelphs had made an offer to Charles of Anjou, King of Naples and an ally of the pope, to assume the signoria of the city. In this song, reminiscent of Guittone D’Arezzo’s ‘‘O dolce terra aretina’’ (O sweet land of Arezzo), and in ‘‘Ahi lasso, or e` stagion de doler tanto’’ (Alas, now is the season of great suffering), on the Montaperti defeat, the poet evokes the glory of Florentine history, from its Roman origins blessed by the will of God, to its reputation as a powerful bearer of freedom and honesty, only to conclude that this is the past and that the present historical reality is 571

CHIARO DAVANZATI sadly conflictual. For Davanzati, Florence is now debased, dishonest and disgraced. This violent invective is truly directed to the heated political climate and the bloody fights between Guelphs and Ghibellines for the control of the city. Instead, the sonnets inspired by medieval bestiaries introduce the reader to a zoological lore, with fabulous animals endowed with magical virtues and powers. Davanzati draws his motifs and images from various collections of bestiaries and from medieval encyclopedic literature, such as the fourth-century Physiologus (a Latin version of a Greek original that is work of a popular theological type, describing animals in an allegorical fashion), and from the troubadour Rigaut de Berbezilh. Notably, in the last phase of his poetic experimentation, Davanzati’s preferences remind us of the Bolognese Guido Guinizzelli, a seminal poet of the dolce stil novo, and of troubadours such as Guilhem de Montanhagol. For example, in the sonnet ‘‘Non me ne maraviglio, donna fina’’ (It does not surprise me, sweet lady), Davanzati not only exalts the beauty and virtue of his lady but also portrays his beloved as an angelic being—a theme brought to fruition by the subsequent generation of Florentine love poets. A controversial sonnet, ‘‘Di penne di paone’’ (The Peacock’s Feathers), which accuses the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca of plagiarizing Giacomo da Lentini, has commonly been ascribed to him. Chiaro Davanzati’s canzoniere, preserved in a single manuscript, is coherent and unified. Aside from his brief ventures into political poetry and his technical experimentations with new verse forms, Davanzati is considered a traditional poet, in adherence to the Provenc¸al-Sicilian school of love poetry.

Biography Although there has been some confusion in identifying Chiaro Davanzati with certainty due to the

presence in Florence in the second half of the thirteenth century of two individuals by the same name, scholars such as Gianfranco Contini, Giacomo Debenedetti, and Frede Jensen claim that he is a certain Clarus F. Davanzati Banbakai from the quarter of San Frediano. He probably had two sons, Lapo and Bartolo, and a daughter, Bionda. In 1260, he fought at the Battle of Montaperti, where the Florentines suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of the Siennese army. In 1294, Davanzati becomes captain of Or San Michele. He corresponded with Monte Andrea, Dante da Maiano and another Dante of uncertain identification who could be the young Alighieri. We know that Davanzati was still alive in August of 1303, but died before May of 1304. PAOLO A. GIORDANO

Selected Works Collections Rime, critical edition by Aldo Menichetti, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1965. Canzoni e sonetti, edited by Aldo Menechetti, Turin: Einaudi, 2004.

Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1955. De Lollis, Cesare, ‘‘Sul canzoniere di Chiaro Davanzati,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 1 (1898): 27–117. Goldin, Frederick, German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1973. Jensen, Frede (editor), Tuscan Poetry of the Duecento, New York: Garland Publishing, 1994. Mascetta-Caracci, Corrado, La poesia politica di Chiaro Davanzati, Naples: Tipografia delgi Artigianelli, 1925. Palmieri, Ruggero, La poesia politica di Chiaro Davanzati, Ravenna: F. Lavagna, 1913. Salinari, Carlo (editor), La poesia lirica del duecento, Turin: UTET, 1968.

THE DAY See Il Giorno (Work by Giuseppe Parini) 572

MASSIMO TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO

MASSIMO TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO (1798–1866) As a scholar and a writer, Massimo Taparelli D’Azeglio was deeply attracted to the European historical novel as a form that called upon philology and philosophy as well as narrative to represent the history of a country and a culture. In particular, D’Azeglio felt indebted to the works of Walter Scott and to Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827, 1840–1842). D’Azeglio came of age under the influence of scholars and historians like the Turinese liberal politician Cesare Balbo (1789–1853), author of the important essay Sommario della storia d’Italia (Summary of Italian History, 1846), and the Neapolitan Neo-Guelf exiled patriot Carlo Troya (1784–1858), the author of Storia d’Italia nel medioevo (History of Italy during the Middle Ages, 1815) and Del Veltro allegorico in Dante (On the Allegorical Hound in Dante, 1826). Like many of his models, D’Azeglio considered the Middle Ages an important period in the formation of Italian culture. Thus, D’Azeglio’s first and most famous novel, Ettore Fieramosca o la Disfida di Barletta (Ettore Fieramosca, or The Challenge of Barletta, 1833), written during the Risorgimento when Italy was geographically divided, is concerned with demonstrating the profound spiritual and moral unity of the Italians. It is important to note that D’Azeglio, an accomplished landscape painter, had already made the Barletta episode the subject of an important painting before he wrote the novel. D’Azeglio was looking for an episode that could assume the status of myth for his readers. He found his central episode in the documented disfida between 13 Italian knights and 13 French knights that took place in Barletta in 1503, when France and Spain were warring over Naples. A French soldier insulted the Italian knights who served in the Spanish army, accusing them of cowardice. The Italians took offence at this insult to their honour, a reaction that D’Azeglio interprets as a sign of their deep spiritual unity. The Italian knights are led by Ettore Fieramosca, who is represented as a romantic hero, bold, patriotic, loyal, incorruptible, full of love for his friends and for his horse Airone. Fieramosca is also engaged in an unhappy love

affair with Ginevra, the wife of an Italian fighting for the French. Ginevra is ravished by the infamous Duke Valentino (Cesare Borgia) and dies soon after, tormented by her suspicions that her lover has been unfaithful. Devastated by her death, Fieramosca commits suicide. The novel is filled with vivid and detailed descriptions of places and characters, but also with grotesque and comic passages that tend to muffle the dramatic force of certain sequences. The novel’s various characters are independent and autonomous: among them, the absent-minded, idiosyncratic and easygoing Fanfulla da Lodi; the immoral mercenary Brancaleone, husband to Ginevra; the pompous, scornful and boastful leader of the French knights, Guy de la Mothe. The dynamic interweaving of the novel’s various stories creates the effect of alternating montage, reminiscent of the double plotting of Shakespearean drama. D’Azeglio’s second novel, Niccolo` de’ Lapi ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni (Niccolo` dei Lapi, or the Palleschi and the Piagnoni, 1841), is set in the sixteenth century and concerns the Florentine resistance to Spanish forces. In the mid-1850s, D’Azeglio was writing a third novel, La Lega Lombarda (The Lombard League), which he left unfinished due to his political appointments, including prime minister of Piedmont in 1849. He decided to give up writing, having now the opportunity to act more directly in the making of history. His principal aims were to obtain peace with Austria, to reach an agreement with England and France, and to defend the Constitution. He resigned in 1852, but returned to political life again in 1859, when he opposed Cavour’s idea that Rome should be the capital of a united Italy. In 1863, he began to write an autobiography, entitled I miei ricordi (Things I Remember), that was published posthumously in 1867. These memoirs, written in the Manzonian style of I promessi sposi, not only show the inner life of the author as a moderate liberal, convinced of the necessity of the cooperation of all the nations, but also are a rich source of historical information from the early Risorgimento period. D’Azeglio summed up his views on cultural 573

MASSIMO TAPARELLI D’AZEGLIO and political reforms in his essay Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (The Last Cases of Romagna, 1846), in which he opposed Mazzini’s revolutionary republicanism and suggests unification through peaceful means.

Historical Novels

Biography

Other

Born in Turin on 24 October 1798, of a noble family of French origin. During the French occupation of Piedmont, he was in Florence, where he was educated, returning to Turin in 1805 after Napoleon obliged the aristocracy to swear an oath of allegiance. He began to study painting and to associate with liberal groups. Enrolled at the University of Turin in 1816, but his university career ended in 1822 when he enlisted as a civil guard of the city. He served as a lieutenant in the regiment Piemonte Reale during the First War of Independence in 1848. In 1831, he married Giulia, the eldest daughter of Alessandro Manzoni. After Giulia’s death in 1834, he remarried. Appointed prime minister, 7 May 1849. Resigned in 1852, and was replaced by Camillo Cavour. Died in Cannero (Novara) on 15 January 1886. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Autobiography Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere letterarie, edited by Alberto Maria Ghisalberti, 2 vols., Milan: Mursia, 1966.

Ettore Fieramosca o la Disfida di Barletta, 1833; as Ettore Fieramosca, or The Challenge of Barletta, translated by C. Edwards Lester, 1854. Niccolo` de’ Lapi ovvero i Palleschi e i Piagnoni, 1841; as Niccolo` dei Lapi, translated by H. Hallet, 1850.

Gli ultimi casi di Romagna, 1848. I miei ricordi, 1867; as Things I Remember, translated by E. R. Vincent, 1966.

Further Reading Bertone, Virginia (editor), Massimo d’Azeglio e l’invenzione del paesaggio istoriato, Turin: GAM, 2002. Columni Camerino, Marinella, ‘‘Il narratore dimezzato. Legittimazioni del racconto nel romanzo storico italiano,’’ in Storie su storie. Indagine sui romanzi storici (1814–1840), edited by Enrica Villari et al., Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985. Corgnati, Martina (editor), Massimo d’Azeglio pittore, Milan: Mazzotta, 1999. Ghisalberti, Alberto M., ‘‘Introduction to Massimo D’Azeglio,’’ in Tutte le opere letterarie, vol. 1, Milan: Mursia, 1966. Marshall, Ronald, Massimo D’Azeglio: An Artist in Politics, 1798–1866, London: Oxford University Press, 1966. Quazza, Romolo, Pio IX e Massimo D’Azeglio nelle vicende romane del 1847, Modena: STEM, 1954. Romagnoli, Sergio, Manzoni e is uoi colleghi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Tenca, Carlo, Saggi critici, di una storia della letteratura italiana e altri saggi, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Tessari, Roberto, ‘‘Il Risorgimento e la crisi di meta` secolo,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

EDMONDO DE AMICIS (1846–1908) Edmondo De Amicis began his literary career in 1866 while serving in the Piedmontese Army during the Third War of Independence and fighting in the Battle of Custoza. The young De Amicis wrote a series of ironic Bozzetti di vita militare (Sketches from Military Life, 1868), in which he mixed vivid and fascinating descriptions of military life with passages addressing the ‘‘ethical’’ aim of the Risorgimento. The sketches, which appeared to great 574

acclaim in the Florentine review Italia militare, were collected later that year in a book entitled La vita militare (Military Life). This first book displays all the hallmarks of De Amicis’ distinctive style: his precise descriptions of places and characters and, above all, his ‘‘didactic’’ vision of literature as a means for educating his readers. In 1870, De Amicis began to write a series of entertaining and informative travel reports for the newspaper La Nazione.

EDMONDO DE AMICIS These pieces were highly popular and immediately collected into individual volumes: Spagna (Spain and the Spaniards, 1873), Olanda (Holland and Its People, 1874), Ricordi di Londra (Recollections of London, 1874), Ricordi di Parigi (Studies of Paris, 1875), Marocco (Morocco and Its People and Places, 1876), Costantinopoli (Constantinople, 1878), Sull’ Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889). On the Ocean, which is now considered one of his best works, is the detailed chronicle of a journey to the United States De Amicis took with Italian emigrants. Reflecting his conversion to socialism, it offers a sympathetic treatment of the terrible conditions the immigrants faced. During the 1870s, De Amicis not only wrote nonfiction, but creative works and literary essays as well: a collection of Novelle (Short Stories, 1872), a book of Poesie (Poems, 1880), and literary essays, Ritratti letterari (Literary Portraits, 1881). It was during this period that De Amicis read Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (probably in a French translation), who thereafter becomes one of his literary models. When De Amicis visited London in 1873 he saw and described himself as a sort of Pip, the young and naı¨ve protagonist of Great Expectations. Wandering in the labyrinth of the metropolis without a word of English, he eventually finds himself in the poorest slums, a dark urban landscape he describes in the same dark tones of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend. In 1878, De Amicis began to write what became his most popular book: Cuore: Storia di un anno scolastico, scritta da un alunno di terza di una scuola municipale d’Italia (Heart: Story of a School Year, Written by a Third Year Italian Pupil, 1886). The story takes the form of a journal of one school year written by a boy—Enrico—who is in his third year of the elementary school. The boyish point of view infuses the entire narrative with a feeling of astonishment and almost painful good nature. Enrico, a normal boy in a normal school, is a representative figure according to the naturalist aesthetic of Zola’s new roman experimental. With the simple, Manichean outlook of the young, Enrico describes his class as a small society composed of positive and negative heroes whose moral characters are correlated to their physical qualities: The narrator himself is a quiet middleclass boy, who is lazy at first and learns the value of work during the year; Garrone, the symbol of the simple and genuine goodness of the lower classes; Franti, the sinner and the outcast, who scorns everything and is finally expelled from the school; the gentle aristocrat Derossi; the snobbish and formal Nobis; the envious Votini; and the teacher Perboni

who is supposedly a model for the students. In fact, all the social classes are represented. The novel’s interpersonal dynamics reflect a somewhat ingenuous philanthropic hope for conflict-free harmony among all social classes. De Amici, who joined the newly established Socialist Party in 1891, was a reformist intent on advancing his conciliatory view in the post-Risorgimento Italy of Umberto I (1878–1900). The language of the novel aspires to a transparency advocated in the sustained argument of L’idioma gentile (The Noble Idiom, 1905) a work indebted to Manzoni’s views on the language question. The pages of the young boy’s journal are interspersed with notes and letters written by his father, mother and sister, which narratively help specify the boy’s life and feelings and put them into a larger context. Moreover, the narrative is complicated by nine stories that appear within the journal, stories dictated every month to the class by the teacher: stories of hard life as ‘‘Il piccolo patriota padovano’’ (The little paduan patriot); ‘‘Il piccolo scrivano fiorentino’’ (The Little Fiorentine Copyist); ‘‘L’infermiere di Tata’’ (Tata’s Nurse); ‘‘Sangue romagnolo’’ (Blood of Romagna); ‘‘Valore civile’’ (Civil Value); ‘‘Dagli Apennini alle Ande’’ (From the Apennines to the Andes); and ‘‘Naufragio’’ (Shipwreck). The leading character of every story is always a boy of the same age as the young students, coming from a different region of the new Regno d’Italia: Their actions are acts of self-denial and heroism, performed in defence of their country, their family, or of absolute values as honesty, sense of duty, obedience, respect and unselfishness. The structure of the narrative thus has a strong choral resonance and texture: Every concept, feeling and idea introduced and discussed in the pages of the boy’s journal is taken up and discussed from a different level perspective in the family letters and in the teacher’s stories. There are many passages of exhortation in which the young boys are called, in a hyperbolic tone, to act as sons of the heroes who died for the Italian Unification. Some of the stories told by the schoolmaster describe the heroes of the Risorgimento (King Vittorio Emanuele, Cavour, Mazzini, Garibaldi). These exemplary stories reflect De Amicis’ own moderate liberal beliefs in the policies supported by Cavour: a free church in a free state. The book in fact lacks any religious, Catholic dimension. We can note once again the deep influence of the Dickens style on De Amicis’ use of sentimentality and dramatic effects for didactic purposes. Cuore is an ideological work aimed at promoting the values 575

EDMONDO DE AMICIS of the new kingdom and the political vision of Cavour. The book was precisely what a unified Italy was waiting for: It was published in 1886 and in only three years it ran to 98 editions. The protagonist of the book may be said to be not a character but the idea of schooling itself, a significant subject in a country where the rate of illiteracy was one of the highest in Europe. The first letter Enrico’s father writes in the novel in fact ends with a powerful vision in which all the children of the world go to school in an ‘‘immense movement to learn.’’ De Amicis’ succeeding novels confirm his interest in the school as a privileged setting: Il romanzo di un maestro (The Romance of a Schoolmaster, 1890), which presents the school this time from the point of view of an instructor; a collection of short stories, Fra scuola e casa (Between School and Home, 1892); Amore e ginnastica (Love and Gymnastics, 1892), a tale that presents school in a realistic and mocking manner; and the unfinished Primo Maggio (First of May), written in 1893, clearly inspired by David Copperfield and Hard Times. The novel’s hero, Alberto Bianchini, is a middle-class schoolmaster in Turin who is writing a book on the exploitation of factory children. But he is wounded and killed on the first of May by the carabinieri during an uprising. DeAmicis’ final years are a time of reflection: In 1899, he publishes his autobiographical Memorie (Memoirs), the heart of which is the story of his son Furio’s suicide. His son’s death was a blow to the man whose patriotic educational zeal had made him the educator of an entire country.

Biography Born in the town of Oneglia (now Imperia) in 1846. His family moved to Cuneo in 1848; studied in the Collegio Candellero in Turin, 1861, and in the Military Academy in Modena, 1863–1866. Took part in the Third War of Independence, in the campaign against Austria, 1866. Collaborated to create La Nazione, 1870. Moved to Turin in 1875 to marry. He had two sons. He died in Bordighera (Imperia) March 11, 1908. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 2 vols., edited by Antonio Baldini, Milan: Garzanti, 1948.

576

Opere scelte, edited by Folco Portinari and Giusi Baldissone, Milan: Mondadori, 1996.

Fiction Bozzetti di vita militare, 1868; as Military Life in Italy, translated by W. C. Cady, 1882. Novelle, 1872. Cuore, 1886; as Heart: A School Boy’s Journal, translated by Isabel Hapgood, 1922. Il re delle bambole, 1890. Amore e ginnastica, 1892; edited by Italo Calvino, 1971. Primo Maggio 1893. La carrozza di tutti, 1899.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1880.

Travel Writings Spagna, 1873; as Spain and the Spaniards, translated by Stanley Rhoads Yarnall, 1895. Olanda, 1874; as Holland and Its People, translated by Caroline Tilton, 1890. Ricordi di Londra, 1874. Ricordi di Parigi, 1875; as Studies of Paris, translated by W. W. Cady, 1887. Marocco, 1876; as Morocco and Its People and Places, translated by Maria Hornor Lansdale, 1897. Costantinopoli, 1878; as Constantinople, translated by Stephen Parkin, 2005. Sull’Oceano, 1889.

Other Gli effetti psicologici del vino, 1881. Ritratti letterari, 1881. Memorie, 1899. L’idioma gentile, 1905; new rev. ed., 1906. Nel giardino della follia, 1920.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Bacchetti, Flavia, I viaggi ‘‘en touriste’’ di De Amicis. Raccontare ai borghesi, Tirrenia: Del Cerro, 2001. Bigazzi, Roberto, I colori del vero, Pisa: Nistri-lischi, 1975. Brambilla, Antonio, De Amicis, paragrafi eterodossi, Modena: Mucchi, 1992. Contorbia, Franco (editor), Edmondo De Amicis, Atti del convegno nazionale di studi, Imperia 30 aprile-3 maggio 1981, Milan: Garzanti, 1985. Danna, Bianca, Dal taccuino alla lanterna magica: De Amicis reporter e scrittore di viaggi, Florence: Olschki, 2000. Marini, Carlo, Cuore nella letteratura per l’infanzia, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2004. Praz, Mario, Gusto Neoclassico, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996. Santagata, Marco, Quella celeste naturalezza, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento, Florence: Sansoni, 1999. Tosto, Eugenio, Edmondo De Amicis e la lingua italiana, Florence: Olschki, 2003.

GIACOMO DEBENEDETTI

GIACOMO DEBENEDETTI (1901–1967) A literary critic of immense knowledge, defined by Gianfranco Contini as ‘‘the last writer-critic in our literary history’’ (La letteratura italiana, 1974), Giacomo Debenedetti belongs to that lineage of eminent intellectuals that includes Sainte-Beuve, Emilio Cecchi, and Roberto Longhi. His rich critical thought brought together the influences of several generations, from idealism to Marxism, from anthropology to psychoanalysis, and cannot be defined in terms of a single critical method. In fact, his method, if so it can be called, consists in naturally adopting the point of view of the most important cultural tendencies of Europe, especially in the sciences and philosophy. His controlled style of writing, his critical depth, and his militant passion rank Debenedetti among the first in the production of twentieth-century literary prose. The narrative clarity and the underlying tragic vocation of his writing are other characteristics that set Debenedetti apart in the landscape of modern criticism. The long parabola of his Saggi critici (Critical Essays, 1929), of which he published also a second and third series in 1945 and 1959 respectively, begins with Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benedetto Croce. Debenedetti felt a cold admiration toward D’Annunzio, even though he did not share his poetics. On the other hand, in spite of being closely involved with Croce’s thought, he analyzed his works quite critically, as he perceived in them a distance from their subject and from the flow of life as a result of the philosopher’s pretended objectivity. Debenedetti was also opposed to Carlo Michelstaedter’s rejection of life as well as to Giovanni Boine’s complex modernism. The authors for whom he felt affinity were especially Marcel Proust and Umberto Saba, on the common ground of the ‘‘internal chronicle’’ that constitutes the strategy through which the two authors recount modernity, in a play of memories and shadows, as if the inquiry into the life of the works and of their authors entailed also a personal question of life, a research for a narrative possibility beyond style. Furthermore, during the period of the German military occupation in 1944, Debenedetti’s meditation on the issues of freedom and tyranny led him both to the study of Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies and to a personal militancy in the partisan Resistance.

The problems of modernity, on the other hand, are repeatedly investigated in the works of Luigi Pirandello and Italo Svevo. According to Debenedetti, Svevo’s loyalty to the novel (although he criticized the writer for the unresolved psychic formation of the Jewish soul of his characters), and the originality of Pirandello’s ‘‘characters on strike’’ (‘‘sciopero dei personaggi’’) are experiences that can renew the present from a gnoseological point of view and preserve the form of the novel in its relation with the nineteenth century and, therefore, with history, against the metaliterary tensions of the experimental research, particularly intense in the second half of the twentieth century. Not by chance, the most nostalgic evidence of his struggle with a cultural moment that changes the laws of the art of making images, from James Joyce and Alain Robbe-Grillet to Samuel Beckett and Michelangelo Antonioni, is the essay ‘‘Commemorazione provvisoria del personaggio-uomo’’ (A Provisional Commemoration of the Character-Man, 1965), published in the journal Paragone, where Debenedetti definitely took leave from what he considered a disloyal attitude of the present toward literature, ‘‘in un mondo abbandonato anche dal demonio’’ (in a world abandoned even by the devil). However, Debenedetti’s stylistically sophisticated criticism cannot be confined to the category of what Edoardo Sanguineti called the ‘‘critical tale’’ (‘‘Il ‘racconto critico’ di Debenedetti,’’ 1969). Indeed, he was also a great speaker and educator, as demonstrated by his university seminars collected in the posthumous volumes on twentieth-century fiction and poetry. His comparative perspective, grounded in his Jewish cosmopolitan culture, led him to translate his beloved Proust, among others. His identity as critic-narrator was complemented by a series of short works including the collection Amedeo e altri racconti (Amedeo and Other Tales, 1926), and culminating with the testimonial on the raid of SS Obersturmbannfu¨hrer Herbert Kappler on the ghetto of Rome as a result of which more than 1,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps. 16 ottobre 1943 (October 16, 1943, 1945) is the account of that event, in which the documentary details combine with an effective style capable of 577

GIACOMO DEBENEDETTI describing the horror of such a discreet, ‘‘quasi umano’’ (almost human) job; indeed, German brutality was merely a technique, never a perversion. Otto ebrei (Eight Jews, 1944), written in September 1944, is also based on historical events and addressed the question of anti-Semitism and Jewishness. Accused of being responsible for the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine, in which the Nazis murdered in cold blood 335 civilians as a reprisal against partisan actions, a police officer justifies himself by declaring that he deleted eight Jews from an initial list of victims. Debenedetti demonstrates the officer’s false pietism and criticizes, as Theodor W. Adorno did in the same years, the slogans and techniques of persuasion of which the officer is still prey even after the war. Finally, Debenedetti claims for the Jews both freedom and the ‘‘onore di soffrire’’ (honor of suffering).

Biography

Amedeo e altri racconti, 1926. Otto ebrei, 1944; as Eight Jews, translated by Estelle Gilson, 2001. 16 ottobre 1943, 1945; as The Sixteenth of October 1943, translated by Judith Woolf, 1996; as October 16, 1943, translated together with Eight Jews by Estelle Gilson, 2001.

Essays Saggi critici, 1929; expanded edition, 1952. Saggi critici: nuova serie, 1945; expanded edition, 1955. Saggi critici: terza serie, 1959. Intermezzo, 1963. Il personaggio-uomo, 1970. Il romanzo del Novecento, 1971. Tommaseo, 1973. Poesia italiana del Novecento, 1974. Verga e il Naturalismo, 1976. Pascoli: la ‘‘rivoluzione inconsapevole,’’ 1979. Rileggere Proust e altri saggi proustiani, 1982. Al cinema, edited by Lino Micciche´, 1983. Quaderni di Montaigne, 1986. Italiani del Novecento, 1995.

Translations

Born in Biella (Vercelli), on 25 July 1901. Received a degree in law in 1921 and in literature in 1927 with a thesis on D’Annunzio. Founded the journal Primo tempo, 1922–1923. Worked for many periodicals, including Solaria, Circoli and Il Meridiano di Roma, and publishers, such as Il Saggiatore. After 1932 worked for the cinema and wrote scripts and reviews. Married Maria Renata Orengo, 1930, with whom he had two children, Elisa, 1933, and Antonio, 1937. During the war participated actively in the partisan Resistance. Taught at the University of Messina, 1950–1958; then at the University of Rome, 1958. Died in Rome on 20 January 1967. STEFANO TOMASSINI

Selected Works Collections Opere di Giacomo Debenedetti, edited by Cesare Garboli and Renata Debenedetti, 4 vols., Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1969–1973. Saggi, edited by Alfonso Berardinelli, Milan: Mondadori, 1999.

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Fiction

George Eliot, Il mulino sulla Floss, 1940. Marcel Proust, Un amore di Swann, 1948. Katherine Mansfield, Felicita`: Qualcosa di infantile ma di molto naturale, 1959. Henry Miller, Il tempo degli assassini, 1966.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Giacomo Debenedetti: il libertino devoto,’’ in Giacomo Debenedetti, Saggi, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Giacomo Debenedetti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I critici, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Contini, Gianfranco, La letteratura italiana: OttoNovecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Debenedetti, Antonio, Giacomino, Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Giacomo Debenedetti,’’ in Enciclopedia europea, vol. 3, Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Garboli, Cesare (editor), Giacomo Debenedetti 1901–1967, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1968. Jona, Emilio, and Vanni Scheiwiller (editors), Giacomo Debenedetti: l’arte del leggere, Milan: Scheiwiller, 2001. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Introduction to Giacomo Debenedetti, Poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1974. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Il ‘racconto critico’ di Debenedetti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I critici, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Tordi, Rosita (editor), Il Novecento di Debenedetti, Milan: Fondazione Alberto e Arnoldo Mondadori, 1991.

DECADENTISMO

DECADENTISMO Decadentismo can be seen as a proper literary movement only during the 1880s in France; apart from this historical framing, the term can be used to define both a particular taste that spread throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century, and a historiographical category that has enjoyed a long-term critical success, especially in Italy. Therefore, the notion of Decadentismo must be perceived as a cultural and historiographical category, rather than an epistemological one. Whereas it has affinities with Futurism, the psychological novel, and writers such as Pirandello, literary Decadentismo is defined by two complementary perspectives: the presence of a particular taste and topical structures usually referred to as ‘‘decadent’’ within a literary work or poetic; and, conversely, the historical reasons and modes of the critical reading of a work or poetic as decadent. Italian Decadentismo is basically an imported phenomenon: The influence of contemporary European artistic experiences (mainly French) acted on the basis of Italian Romantic tradition, thus developing trends that were similar to the foreign poetics. The Italian tradition lacked the conditions either to produce a self-autonomous movement or to fully absorb an imported one. Romanticism had been strongly oriented by the ‘‘practical’’ need to support the process of national unification: The historical-political novel and patriotic poetry were not an ideal ground to nurture those Romantic components that elsewhere evolved into decadent modes. In this sense, the principle of the autonomy of art, which was at the core of decadent ideology, was incompatible with the idea of a moral and social function of art, which was at the basis of Italian Romanticism. Decadent atmospheres and topics (exoticism and Byzantium, neurosis and illness, melancholy and death drive, morbid sensuality and the femme fatale) as well as certain stylistic devices (musicality, free verse, neo-Stilnovo, synesthesia) inspired reservations about the immorality and the obscurity of decadent works. This moral prejudice strongly affected most critics who, faithful to the ideal of a sanita` italiana (Italian soundness), expected transparency and clarity from the work of art, which had to be classically rational and comprehensible for the masses. Consequently,

Decadentismo lost much of the polemical and revolutionary e´lan that characterized its European fin-de-sie`cle counterparts. The first Italian avant-garde movement, which came in the wake of unification, is found between 1860 and 1870 in Milan, the only industrial metropolis with the ideal characteristics and geographical position to bridge Italy with the great European capitals. Milan was also the centre of the editorial industry, and could provide a consistent, wide audience. Thus, the spreading of the decadent taste passed mainly through literary journals, which regularly offered translations of foreign authors and artistic debates. A leading role was played by Fanfulla della domenica, Domenica letteraria, Capitan Fracassa, Ariel, and La tribuna. As a result, the professional man of letters emerged for the first time as a powerful figure (molded after the French model); but with him came the strained relations between artists and readers. In this sense, the Milanese Scapigliatura is the first example of the breach of the artist with bourgeois society. The Italian term decadenza first appeared in the writings of the Scapigliati, a composite and looseknit group of writers, artists, and journalists who rejected patriotic oratory and sought inspiration in contemporary European authors (Gautier, Hoffmann, Baudelaire), as well as graveyard poetry and Impressionist paintings. Their defence of ‘‘sick’’ and ‘‘decadent’’ art appeared in the journal Il figaro, founded by Emilio Praga and Arrigo Boito in 1864. The Scapigliati, however, did not develop an independent and organic poetic, but rather a repertory of topics and a new taste, which widened the spectrum of the available artistic attitudes. At this time, Decadentismo is viewed as a degeneration of Romanticism. Among the first critics to address decadent and symbolist writers were Vittorio Pica, who introduced the notion of Decadentismo in several articles written for La gazzetta letteraria (Turin), Enrico Panzacchi, and Arturo Graf. In the 1890s, two important publications, which condemned decadent poetics and works, achieved an unusual success and were translated into Italian respectively in 1893–1894 and 1899: Max Nordau’s Entartung (Degeneration, 1892–1893), a Lombrosian 579

DECADENTISMO case study of ‘‘degenerate’’ fin-de-sie`cle artists, and Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1897), which attacked aestheticism. The French symbolists were the main target of these attacks, since they did not allow any compromises between ‘‘aristocratic’’ and ‘‘popular’’ art, a distinction that animated all Italian debates about literature. Meanwhile, the propulsive centre of decadent taste moved to Rome, which in 1871, after centuries of immobility and provincialism, had become a busy capital and the meeting place for aristocrats, bourgeois intellectuals, artists, and journalists. During the 1880s the myth of ‘‘Byzantine’’ Rome was born: a corrupt and decaying city, the perfect backdrop for an adventurous decadent hero, as in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889). Some journals and their editors also played an important role in promoting the new taste: Cronaca bizantina (1882–1886) edited by Angelo Sommaruga (1857–1941), and Convito (1895–1896) founded by Adolfo De Bosis (1863–1924). The young D’Annunzio was a tireless collaborator of both journals, which enlisted among others Enrico Nencioni (1837–1896), Contessa Lara (1849–1896), Edoardo Scarfoglio (1860–1917), Giulio Salvadori (1862–1928), and Panzacchi (1840–1904). The history of these editorial enterprises exemplifies the evolution of the Byzantine current in Italy. For example, Cronaca bizantina imported the Parnassian taste and writers such as Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, The´odore de Banville. It was inspired by Baudelaire, Flaubert, and their exotic atmospheres. Eventually, due primarily to the influence of D’Annunzio, English aestheticism (Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites) became the main literary trend in Convito. Apart from the Roman Byzantine group, there are quite a few writers difficult to label, and commonly associated either with Scapigliatura, Verismo, generic fin-de-sie`cle trends, or indeed with Decadentismo. Among those who contributed to the dissolution of the nineteenth-century novel are Edoardo Calandra (1852–1911), Camillo Boito (1836–1914), and Luigi Gualdo (1847–1898), whose main novel was entitled Decadenza (Decadence, 1892). These novelists study pathological states of mind and psychological diseases (typical of Scapigliatura); others, such as Carlo Dossi (1849–1910), Giovanni Faldella (1846–1928), and Achille Giovanni Cagna (1847– 1931), are mostly concerned with the regeneration of literary style and language. On the other hand, poets such as Domenico Gnoli (1838–1915), Giovanni Camerana (1845–1905), Arturo Graf (1848– 1913), Remigio Zena (1850–1917), and Vittoria 580

Aganoor Pompilij (1855–1910), either reacted to Dannunzian aestheticism by seeking inspiration in the European symbolists, or applied a sort of ‘‘poetica della sincerita`’’ (poetics of sincerity) that anticipated some registers and metric forms of Crepuscolarismo. In other words, they are decadents in a knowingly minor key. By this time, a rupture between the artist and bourgeois society, i.e., between the writer and his audience, was widely acknowledged. While a content middle class still believed in the myths of scientific positivism and progress, fin-de-sie`cle intellectuals foreshadowed the oncoming crisis: They were to found the ultimate portrait of the decadent artist in a novel by Huysmans, A rebours (1884), and in a play by Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Axel (1890). Both works portray the retreat of the artist in an ivory tower in order to cherish his art and neurosis. At the opposite pole, there is Rimbaud, whose personal frustrations and impossibility of social interaction led to escapism, exoticism, loss of control, and a death drive. Isolation from a materialist society easily evolved into mystical and irrational withdrawal, generating comforting personal myths. The most emblematic outcomes, as shown by Carlo Salinari in Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano (1960), overlap with the most important writers of the time: the Superman in D’Annunzio, the fanciullino (or child-like poetic sensibility) in Pascoli, and the saint in Fogazzaro. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Benedetto Croce became the spokesperson for the moralistic vision of Decadentismo, by interpreting the phenomenon as an expression of the general crisis of modern institutions. In Croce’s perspective, it was purely a ‘‘spiritual condition.’’ The critic acknowledged, in contemporary literature, the presence of a ‘‘spiritual subtlety’’ but also a lack of clarity and sincerity: Decadentismo was nothing more than ‘‘the great industry of the void’’ (‘‘Di un carattere della piu` recente letteratura italiana,’’ 1907). Subsequent discussions were indebted to Croce’s strong argument, and mainly focussed on the contents and the moral aspects of decadent works. In the first historical study of Decadentismo, Walter Binni claimed the originality of decadent poetics against Croce’s moralistic polemics. For Binni, Decadentismo was distinctly separate from the generic notion of ‘‘decadence’’ (La poetica del decadentismo italiano, 1936). The term defined the historical period following Romanticism and naturalism, and, by resuming some aspects of Romantic poetics, it produced symbolism and the ideal of art for art’s sake. A few years before, Mario Praz’s La

´ SPEDES ALBA DE CE carne, la morte e il diavlo nella letteratura romantica (1930) elegantly analysed decadent imagination, topical structures, and neuroses—even if the only Italian writer taken into serious consideration was D’Annunzio. After World War II, Binni’s perspective prevails and Decadentismo is viewed as the first document of the twentieth century’s ‘‘literature of crisis.’’ Current usage and interpretations are inclined to employ the term on a morally neutral ground, even though the negative labels stemming from Croce have yet to vanish. Decadentismo should be considered a historiographical concept—a concept that defines a group of writers, artists, and their works better understood within the more suitable category of Modernism. SIMONA MICALI Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia, Turin: Paravia, 1973. Binni, Walter, La poetica del decadentismo italiano, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Bobbio, Norberto, La filosofia del Decadentismo, Turin: Chiantore, 1944. Ceserani, Remo, ‘‘Letteratura e cultura di fine secolo e del primo Novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana—Tra l’Otto e il Novecento, vol. 8, edited by E. Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1999. Constable, Liz et alia (editors), Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Di un carattere della piu` recente letteratura italiana,’’ in Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 4, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Flora, Francesco, Dal romanticismo al futurismo, Milan: Mondadori, 1925.

Ghidetti, Enrico, Malattia, coscienza e destino: Per una mitografia del Decadentismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993. Gilman, Richard, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975. Gioanola, Elio, Il decadentismo, Rome: Studium, 1972. Graf, Arturo, La crisi letteraria, Turin: Loescher, 1888. Leone de Castris, Arcangelo, Il Decadentismo italiano (Svevo, Pirandello, D’Annunzio), Bari: De Donato, 1974. Luka´cs, Georg, ‘‘Healthy or Sick Art?’’ in Writer and Critic, London: Merlin Press, 1978. Luperini, Romano, Letteratura e ideologia nel primo Novecento italiano, Pisa: Pacini, 1973. Marcazzan, Mario, ‘‘Dal Romanticismo al Decadentismo,’’ in G. Grana (editor), Letteratura italiana—Le correnti, Milan: Marzorati, 1956. Nordau, Max, Degeneration, 1892–1893, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Panzacchi, Enrico, ‘‘I decadenti,’’ in Lettere ed arti, 9 February 1889. Pica, Vittorio, Letteratura d’eccezione, 1st ed. 1899, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1987. Praz, Mario, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, 1st ed. 1930, Florence: Sansoni, 1948. Salinari, Carlo, Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano: D’Annunzio, Pascoli, Fogazzaro e Pirandello, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960. Scarano, Emanuella, Dalla ‘‘Cronaca bizantina’’ al ‘‘Convito,’’ Florence: Vallecchi, 1970. Scrivano, Riccardo, Il decadentismo e la critica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Somigli, Luca, and Mario Moroni, Italian Modernism, Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Sormani, Elsa, Bizantini e decadenti nell’Italia umbertina, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1971. Spackman, Barbara, Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989. Tolstoy, Leo, What Is Art?, 1st ed. 1897, New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1960.

ALBA DE CE´SPEDES (1911–1997) Novelist and poet, Alba de Ce´spedes began her career as a journalist for Il messaggero in the early 1930s. She published her first collection of short stories, L’anima degli altri (The Soul of Others) and a novel, Io, suo padre: Romanzo sportivo (I, His Father: A Sports Novel) in 1935. The latter, which portrays the transfer of allegiance of a

boxing champion son from his father to the new Italian Fascist state, was chosen to represent Italian literature at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. A second collection of short stories, Concerto (Concert), appeared in 1937. These earlier works pay lip service to Fascist rhetoric, reflecting the ideological pressure placed by the regime’s expectations on 581

´ SPEDES ALBA DE CE women who, like de Ce´spedes, wished to establish themselves as writers and journalists. Beginning with Nessuno torna indietro (There’s No Turning Back, 1938), de Ce´spedes’ works focus on women and often have feminist implications, though they are written in a style that, while spare and unadorned, verges on romantic melodrama, and may recall that of popular fiction. Her female protagonists struggle with the paradoxes they experience as they attempt to affirm their identity and autonomy under Fascism and, later, corrupt Italian postwar governments and a culture that was still largely gender-biased and discriminatory. Nessuno torna indietro is the story of the lives of eight young women of different backgrounds and social classes housed in Rome in 1934–1936 at the Pensione Grimaldi, run by Catholic nuns. In the boarding house, away from their families, these women are free to share their dreams and goals with one another and to forge intimate, even illicit relationships as they pursue (with one exception) a university education that was supposedly encouraged by the state. However, the boarding house becomes the space where the female protagonists construct their own personal histories and identities away from the usual constraints of Fascist engineering politics. The novel explores the themes of female friendships among women from different classes and geographical areas and the contradictory expectations faced by women on the path either to emancipation or conformity. Nessuno torna indietro was translated into 24 languages and brought the author worldwide recognition. For its allusions to contraception, abortion, and female homosexuality, it was banned in late 1940 because it did not reflect Fascist morality. Within one year, another of her works, the short story collection entitled Fuga (The Flight, 1940), was censored. De Ce´spedes also collaborated to the screenplay of the rather tame cinematic adaptation of the novel directed by Alessandro Blasetti in 1943. During the Republic of Salo` and the German occupation of Italy (1943–1945), de Ce´spedes worked for Radio partigiana in Bari under the code name of Clorinda and was imprisoned for these activities. In 1944, she founded the literary magazine Mercurio, which published works by contemporary writers, among others Alberto Moravia, Eugenio Montale and Elio Vittorini. After World War II, de Ce´spedes’ novels, due in part to their highly readable, straightforward and unpretentious style, continued to garner critical acclaim at home and abroad through their translations into many languages. de Ce´spedes portrays a 582

large variety of female types who struggle to overcome the paradoxes imposed upon them and their own contradictory aspirations as they seek autonomy and self-awareness. In her works, one finds an array of psychological and unidealized portraits of women and their means of dealing with society. Her experiences during wartime inspired Dalla parte di lei (The Best of Husbands, 1949), a memoir of a disappointed and frustrated woman, Alessandra, who is driven to kill her husband. The novel is a probing inquiry of the rights of women within matrimonial boundaries and a compelling analysis of the social motivations that brought the protagonist to commit murder. De Ce´spedes also wrote a theatrical adaptation. In the 1950s, the author established her residence in Paris, but she continued to write primarily in Italian. In Quaderno proibito (The Secret, 1952), Valeria, a housewife, fails in her attempt to escape from her traditional role as mother and wife. She has two grown and self-centered children, Riccardo and Mirella, and a career-oriented husband who works in a bank. Valeria, instead, works in an office and dreams of eloping with Guido, her manager. In the end she burns her diary, symbol and record of her revolt, and resumes the expected role of housewife and mother. Quaderno proibito was adapted as a play in 1962 and a television drama in 1980. Valeria’s attempt to express herself through writing is unsuccessful, however, in the novel Prima e dopo (Between Then and Now, 1955). The female protagonist, who participated in the Resistance (an event that changed her life) decides to become a writer after the war. The female characters in Prima e dopo aspire to live on their own terms in spite of family expectations, but they also recognize that life might be easier with a husband who pays the bills. Il remorse (Remorse, 1963) is an epistolary novel in which three women exchange letters concerning their experiences in both the private and public spheres. One of them, Francesca, accepts the solitude imposed upon a woman who aspires to be a writer, and she chooses to leave her husband in order to continue her artistic career. This novel, a compelling critical portrait of the postwar intelligentsia and Italian political scene, reminds us of Simone De Beauvoir’s depiction of the leftist intellectuals in Les Mandarins. In her final novels, de Ce´spedes takes on a more critical view of female attempts at empowerment through cunning and deception. La bambalona (La Bambolona, 1969), set in Rome, is the story of a bachelor attorney with a roving eye for beautiful women. He courts a 17-year-old student who

´ SPEDES ALBA DE CE skillfully manipulates him by withholding affection and feigning pregnancy. However, this portrayal of corruption and greed as well as the protagonist’s resistance to her seducer still combines gender and social issues provocatively. The film La bambalona, directed by Franco Giraldi, with Ugo Tognazzi and Isabelli Rei, was released the same year. De Ce´spedes’ last novel, Nel buio della notte (In the Darkness of the Night, 1973), tells the story of a series of drug-related events that happen to diverse characters one night in Paris. In the 1950s and 1960s, de Ce´spedes collaborated on several screenplays, most notably Michelangelo Antonioni’s Le amiche (1955). Although well known to the Italian reading public, de Ce´spedes’ novels received little, if any, critical attention from the 1970s to the 1990s, and they were commonly dismissed as popular romances or melodramas. Alba de Ce´spedes is now recognized as a female intellectual and writer whose works provide a valuable commentary on the interplay of gender and the Italian cultural and political life.

Biography Born in Rome on March 11, 1911. Daughter of the Cuban ambassador to Italy and granddaughter of the first president of the Cuban Republic. Journalist for the Il messaggero 1934–1935. Radio announcer for Radio partigiana after 1943. Founded Mercurio, the first journal of politics, arts and sciences to be published after the liberation in 1944. Married the diplomat Francesco Bounous on April 18, 1945. After Mercurio ceased publication in 1948, she continued to write for Epoca and La stampa. Resided primarily in Paris after 1950. Served as the first woman president of Confederation internationale d’auteurs litte´raires (CIAL) in the 1970s. She died in Paris on November 14, 1997. She donated her archives to Archivi Riuniti delle Donne di Milano. Her novels have been translated into over 35 languages. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS Selected Works Novels Io, suo padre: Romanzo sportivo, 1935. Nessuno torna indietro, 1938; as There’s No Turning Back, translated by Jan Noble, 1941. Dalla parte di lei, 1949; as The Best of Husbands, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1952.

Quaderno proibito, 1952; as The Secret, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1957; rpt. 1958. Prima e dopo, 1955; as Between Then and Now, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1959; rpt. 1960. Il remorse, 1963; as Remorse, translated by William Weaver, 1967. La bambalona, 1967; as La Bambalona, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1969. Nel buio della notte, 1976.

Short Stories ‘‘L’anima degli altri,’’ 1935. ‘‘Concerto,’’ 1937. ‘‘Fuga,’’ 1941. ‘‘Invito a pranzo,’’ 1955.

Poetry ‘‘Prigionie: Liriche,’’ 1936. ‘‘Chanson des filles de mai,’’ 1968.

Further Reading Benco, Silvio, ‘‘Una romanziera,’’ in Il piccolo della sera, 15 December 1938, p. 3. Bianchini, Angela, ‘‘Alba, romanzi in battaglia,’’ in La stampa, 19 November 1997, p. 21. Carroli, Piera, Esperienza e narrazione nella scrittura di Alba de Ce´spedes, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. De Giovanni, Neria, and Assunta Mana Parsani, Femminile a confronto: Tre realta` della narrativa contemporanea: Alba de Ce´spedes, Fausta Cialente, Gianna Manzini, Rome-Bari: Lacaita, 1984. Gala, Candelas, ‘‘Identity and Writing: A Lacanian reading of Alba de Ce´spedes’ Quaderno proibito and Dacia Maraini’s Donna in Guerra,’’ in Forum Italicum, 37, no. 1 (2003): 147–160. Gallucci, Carole, ‘‘Alba de Ce´spedes’s There’s No Turning Back: Challenging the New Women’s Future,’’ in Mothers of Invention: Women. Italian Fascism and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Gallucci, Carole, and Ellen Nerenberg (editors), Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Ce´spedes, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Lombardi, Giancarlo, Rooms With a View: Feminist Diary Fiction: 1952–1999, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Merry, Bruce, Women In Italian Literature. Four Studies Based on the Work of Grazia Deledda, Alba de Ce´spedes, Natalia Ginzburg and Dacia Maraini, Townsville, Australia: James Cook University Press, 1990. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini, and Alba De Ce´spedes,’’ in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture, 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–34. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, Politics of the Visible: Writing Women, Culture, and Fascism, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Zancan, Marina (editor), Scrittrici intellettuali del Novecento: Alba de Ce´spedes, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

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EDUARDO DE FILIPPO

ANDREA DE CHIRICO See Alberto Savinio

ANTONIO DE CURTIS See Toto`

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO (1900–1984) Eduardo De Filippo, one of the twentieth century’s greatest playwrights, was also an original interpreter of his plays and a cinema actor as well. His plays mirrored the historical-social condition of Italy from the 1920s through the rise of Fascism and through World War II into the second postwar period and the economic recovery. De Filippo mastered the art of comedy from his natural father, the actor-author Eduardo Scarpetta (1853–1925), who encouraged him to perform at an early age. De Filippo learned to write by recopying the texts of his father’s comedies, an exercise that helped him assimilate the techniques of drama. Unlike his brother Peppino (1903–1980), who bitterly denounced his father in his autobiography Una famiglia difficile (A Difficult Family, 1977), he defended Scarpetta’s behavior. The staging of Miseria e nobilta` (Poverty and Nobility) in 1953, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Scarpetta’s birth, confirmed Eduardo’s affection for his father. Indeed the fame of Scarpetta perhaps rests on this 1888 drama, written in both dialect and Italian, in which he is still casting his well-known character of the empty-headed Felice, now living in squalor and destitution. 584

Like many actors’ children, he started acting at the age of 4 in his father’s work La geisha at the Teatro Valle in Rome. In 1913, he made his official debut in Babilonia (Babylon), a musical review by Rocco Galdieri. Under Scarpetta’s guidance, he learned the skills of improvised action and dialogue, and how to interact with other actors. His great success as a performer might have helped his greatness as a writer, as it did Raffaele Viviani (1888–1950) and Peppino De Filippo. His first one-act play, Farmacia di turno (The Pharmacy, 1931) was written for his half-brother Vincenzo Scarpetta (1876–1952), but it was not approved by the manager, who thought it inappropriate for the company’s repertoire. The play appeared too heavily influenced by the early Viviani’s dramaturgy: Situations and characters followed or alternated one another without being related to a single plot, a looseness that often allowed minor characters to take on central roles. This play, like many from this early period, underwent several rewritings and revisions. His first three-act comedy was Uomo e galantuomo (Man and Gentleman, 1933), the original title of which was Ho fatto il

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO guaio? Riparero` (Have I Made Trouble? I Will Make Amends, 1926). De Filippo, while perceiving the limits of the old repertoire, from this point on kept working in a traditional vein. Nevertheless, he was attracted by the art theater of Salvatore Di Giacomo, Roberto Bracco and Raffaele Viviani, from which he would stray definitively afterward. His first plays, Ditegli sempre di sı` (Always Say Yes, 1927) and Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me? (Who’s Happier than Me?, 1932), were modeled after his father’s dramatic techniques. He overcame the contents, form, and style of his father’s plays, but did not repudiate them. The original adaptation of Scarpetta’s comedy Cani e gatti (Dogs and Cats) confirmed that. In Ditegli sempre di sı` the protagonist is a madman obsessed with words. In Uomo e galantuomo, the madness is simulated by the protagonist, while in Ditegli sempre di sı` it is real. The very fact that insanity is not immediately recognized, but mistaken for sanity, produces a series of misunderstandings. The confusion between sanity and insanity, already a theme in the dialect, the grotesque, and the Pirandellian theater, has a long tradition in the history of the Neapolitan theater, from Antonio Petito to contemporary authors. De Filippo was influenced by Scarpetta’s ’O miedeco d’ ’e pazze (The Madmen’s Doctor, 1947), especially in the character of Luigi Strada, who is mad for the theater and is finally considered mad indeed. In Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me the theme of cuckoldry was approached in a completely original manner: The play dramatizes the impossibility of protecting oneself from fate and unforeseen events. Vincenzo, the protagonist, thinks he can protect his life against risk, but finally recognizes the unequivocal unfaithfulness of his wife. Vincenzo is a dreamer like other ‘‘bitter’’ characters of De Filippo’s dramaturgy: Luca in Natale in casa Cupiello (The Nativity Scene, 1943), Gennaro Jovine in Napoli milionaria! (Millionaire Naples!, 1945), Pasquale Lojacono in Questi fantasmi! (Oh These Ghosts!, 1946). In these characters, the comic and tragic fuse in a manner valued and often imitated by succeeding playwrights. The character of Ferdinando Quagliuolo in Non ti pago (I Won’t Pay You, 1940) represents the most obvious example of the ‘‘Eduardian hero,’’ a tragic character in a comic context. The play revolves around the clash between two characters, the lucky Mario Bertolini and the unlucky Ferdinando, who happens to be the manager of a lottery office, an inveterate gambler. Bertolini is his employee, a player as well, but a fortunate one. With his winnings, he is able to

close the social gap that separates him from his employer and aspire to become his son-in-law. Bertolini wins after playing numbers given to him by Ferdinando’s father in a dream, but the latter does not want to pay him, rebelling against the injustice of fortune. The play was described by the author himself as filled with comedy and, at the same time, with tragedy. Notwithstanding these examples, the ironic, playful, and comic features of De Filippo’s theater should not be underestimated. It has roots in the variety show, a very successful genre of those years (the 1930s) when De Filippo, along with Peppino and their sister Titina (1898–1963), created La Ribalta Gaia (The Gay Footlights), which met with great acclaim. He was the coauthor of Pulcinella principe in sogno (Punch Prince in Dream) by Mario Mangini, called Kokasse, and wrote the one-act play Sik Sik, l’artefice magico (Sik Sik, The Masterful Magician, 1930). These two works confirmed De Filippo’s interest in the tradition and the mask of Pulcinella, a stock character from commedia dell’arte (who became the English Punch), which frequently appeared in his subsequent plays. In this early play and others, especially in the later, more dramatic texts, Pulcinella plays an autonomous, incontestable role, as evidenced by Sabato, domenica e lunedı` (Saturday, Sunday, Monday, 1959), one of his most successful plays dealing with uneasiness within a family. Sik Sik, l’artefice magico was De Filippo’s first great comic success. The figure of the mesmerizer, drawn from Viviani’s one-act play ’Mmiez ’a Ferrovia (At the Railway Station, 1918), is a charlatan who pretends he can hypnotize his partner, who is also his wife, so that she can foretell the future. Her prophecies, obviously, are bogus. This becomes obvious when Sik Sik is shown to be a dreamer whose job is his reason for living. He speaks to the audience, which does not answer, while his two ‘‘stooges,’’ Raffaele and Nicola, answer. The play also shows, with Napoli milionaria! and Filumena Marturano (1946), the human and leprous world of suffering Naples. Following a series of successes, in 1931, Eduardo, together with Peppino and Titina, established the company Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo. The company’s repertoire regularly included plays by Peppino and Titina, Ernesto Murolo, Luigi Antonelli, F. M. Martini, and Ugo Betti. However, he was faced, as other theater actors and authors were, with censorship under the Fascist regime, which had adopted a xenophobic policy limiting the dialects companies could use. It 585

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO was particularly hard to attract critical attention to the texts of the comic actors who preferred dialect and social satire. In protest, De Filippo wrote an open letter to fellow playwright and editor Luigi Antonelli, which was published in Il Giornale d’Italia on 19 March 1939, affirming that the dialectic theater deserved to be written about and published; if not, he argued, it would soon disappear. In those years, De Filippo continued to write one-act plays, among which was one of his most successful works, Natale in casa Cupiello (Christmas in the Cupiello Household, 1931), subsequently developed in three acts (1934), in which a sentimental triangle unfolds. Eduardo’s great success was also sustained by the admiration of Luigi Pirandello, who granted the De Filippos the right to translate his Liola` (1917) into the Neapolitan dialect in 1933. They also produced his 1918 Il berretto a sonagli (Cap and Bells) and, some years later L’abito nuovo (The New Suit), taken from Pirandello’s short story of that title and adapted into three acts by Eduardo. Pirandello’s respect and fellowship confirmed De Filippo’s theatrical successes, which had been secured by frequent performances of comedies like Sik-Sik, Ditegli sempre di sı`, Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me? and Natale in casa Cupiello. Italy’s participation in World War II marked a turning point in De Filippo’s dramatic work. He completed the Cantata dei giorni pari (Cantata of the Even-numbered Days, 1959), serene texts recalling the days of his youth, and began the Cantata dei giorni dispari (Cantata of the Odd-numbered Days, 1951–1966), which were comedies that described the sufferings brought on by the war. Influenced by the regime’s censorship of dialect theater, De Filippo wrote two works in those years: Uno coi capelli bianchi (A White-haired Man, 1938), in which the character of Battista Grossi is a malignant and arrogant householder, and Io, l’erede (The Heir, 1942), perhaps De Filippo’s most ‘‘Pirandellian’’ play. Io, l’erede, a story about inheritance with a bourgeois setting and low comedy elements, is written more in the Italian language than dialect. Of all Neapolitan playwrights, Eduardo was the only one who took his place among the European dramatists because he drew his inspiration from multiple sources. His works are set in his native city, and depict a wide spectrum of characters mainly from a lower-middle class background. Compared to his brother Peppino, he undertook a more safe and determined course. Compared to 586

Viviani, he offered more social certainties, fewer contentious themes and a more direct message. He did so by providing the audience with a varied theatrical idiom, a mixture of dialect and Italian. This coincided with his determination to adhere to spoken language and to escape from literary language. Compared to his contemporaries, he overcame most stock subjects. After the break with his brother Peppino in 1944, due to artistic differences, Eduardo formed another company with Titina, Il Teatro di Eduardo (1945). For many years the two brothers had played memorable zanni: one the shrewd servant type, the other the blundering fool. Eduardo remained largely faithful to the vernacular, and with his new company staged two unforgettable plays: Napoli milionaria! and Questi fantasmi!, the latter less successful than the former. Napoli milionaria! presented through the experiences of one family the sufferings and dilemmas of occupied Naples. Gennaro, played by Eduardo himself, is initially viewed with contempt by his own family, but after being captured and taken to Germany as part of a slave labour camp, returns to Naples as the judge of the degeneration and opportunism of his family who, in order to survive, yields to corruption and forgets its values of honesty and respect. At the end of Act III, Gennaro recited the last line, which became famous: ‘‘ha da passa` ‘a nuttata’’ (the night must pass). Questi fantasmi! follows the fortunes of Pasquale Lojacono, a pathetic, impoverished husband and father, who may or may not know that his wife is being unfaithful to him. He rents a house believed to be haunted to make the money indispensable to the dignity he craves. De Filippo’s social denunciation continued with the extraordinary success of Filumena Marturano, played by his sister Titina and even performed before Pope Pio XII. This play represented the desire and hope of starting anew: Filumena, a ‘‘kept woman,’’ tries to form a family and to give her three sons a father. Once again, the theme of the family is central. The following plays include Le bugie con le gambe lunghe (Lies Don’t Travel Far, 1948), La grande magia (Grand Magic, 1948), Le voci di dentro (Inner Voices, 1948), which belong to the fantastic, and La paura numero uno (The Number One Fear, 1950). These works reflected new trends in the European theater, especially the theater of the absurd. De Filippo almost completely gave up the Neapolitan dialect in the work that followed; he confronted fiction and realism, illusion and truth,

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO as seen in the comedy De Pretore Vincenzo (1957). Here the protagonist is a foundling who becomes a thief, but makes an agreement with Saint Joseph: If he steals only from the rich, he will be under the saint’s protection. Regardless, he is shot by one of his victims and, in his dying delirium, De Pretore protests but is nevertheless welcomed in Heaven. He dies with the aid of Ninuccia, a poor girl who always loved him. The play’s fantastic element contrasts to the realistic language of Il Sindaco del Rione Sanita` (The Local Authority, 1960), in which De Filippo dealt with the thorny problem of the Neapolitan Camorra. In the play, Antonio Barracano, the mayor, is a strong man in touch with his community who makes decisions and acts on them, serving as a father figure of sorts. The drama revolves around the conflict between Antonio’s sense of what justice should be and with what justice is, which essentially becomes a justice of his own. In the 1950s, Eduardo devoted himself to the cinema, as an actor, director and also wrote several screenplays. Among his credits: Napoli Milionaria (1950), Filumena Marturano (1951), Ragazza da marito (1952), Questi fantasmi (1954), and Vittorio De Sica’s L’oro di Napoli (1954). He assigned his profits to the reconstruction of the Teatro San Ferdinando, called ‘‘Il Teatro di Eduardo.’’ In 1954, draped in the garb of Pulcinella, he inaugurated the San Ferdinando, with a farce by Antonio Petito, Palummella zompa e vola (Palummella Leaps and Flies). The symbolism of play, the dedication to the traditions of Naples were unmistakable. By the mid-1970s, high taxes forced him to sell the theater and to concentrate on cinema and television. After his retirement from the stage in 1981, his son Luca formed the Compagnia di Teatro Luca De Filippo, whose first production was Vincenzo Scarpetta’s La donna e` mobile, directed by Eduardo. In the early 1960s, De Filippo composed L’arte della commedia (The Art Of Comedy, 1965), which, like Goldoni’s Il teatro comico (The Comic Theatre, 1750) and Pirandello’s Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters In Search of an Author, 1921), was a text of reflecting on the art of theater. Here, as in Uomo e galantuomo, Eduardo addressed the old question of the relationship between theater and power. In 1981, De Filippo gave a series of theater lectures at the University of Rome ‘‘La Sapienza,’’ later published as Lezioni di teatro in 1986. Reviewing his career as an actor and playwright, he stressed the importance of texts and of

their preservation. He discussed his work in a charming, antiacademic language, which was made more poignant by his interpretative power and his peculiar silences and pauses. Eduardo’s own life was lived completely in theater. Eduardo continued the old tradition of Neapolitan popular comedy, but the theatrical figures he created were more universal than the traditional masks. He defined humor as the bitter side of laughter originating not from everyday life, but from the disappointments of man, who by nature is an optimist. He succeeded in developing roles that turn to advantage the inherent weaknesses of commedia dell’arte, and in forging a form of theater that holds a mirror to the lives of contemporary audiences. Eduardo’s art is deeply rooted in human suffering, rather than in the virtuosity of performance and verbal dexterity.

Biography Born in Naples on 24 May 1900, the natural son of Eduardo Scarpetta and Luisa De Filippo. Selftaught. Debuted in the company of his father playing his comedies, 1904; wrote his first comedy: Uomo e galantuomo, 1922; joined the ‘‘Molinari’’ company, together with his brother Peppino and his sister Titina, 1929; with them founded the Compagnia del Teatro umoristico ‘‘I De Filippo,’’ 1931; married Thea Prandi, with whom had two children, Luca and Luisella, 1954; awarded the Feltrinelli prize by the Accademia dei Lincei, 1972; at the Old Vic in London, Sabato, Domenica e Lunedı` was staged by Franco Zeffirelli, with Laurence Olivier, 1973; after the death of Prandi, became attached to Isabella Quarantotti, married in 1977; honorary degrees from the University of Birmingham (1977) and the University of Rome (1980); retired from the stage, 1981; appointed senator for life, 1981. Died in Rome, 31 October 1984. ANTONIA LEZZA See also: Commedia dell’arte Selected Works Collections I capolavori di Eduardo, 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Cantata dei giorni dispari, edited by Anna Barsotti, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1951–1966. Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Anna Barsotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. Teatro, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Milan: CDE, 1985.

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EDUARDO DE FILIPPO Four Plays (The Local Authority, Grand Magic, Filumena Marturano, Napoli milionaria), translated by Carlo Ardito, London: Methuen, 1992. Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Theater Neapolitan Style: Five One-act Plays (Gennareniello, So Long Fifth Floor, The Part of Hamlet, Dead People Aren’t Scary), translated and introduced by Mimi Gisolfi D’Aponte, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004. Teatro. Cantata dei giorni dispari, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

Plays Ditegli sempre di sı`, 1927. Sik Sik, l’artefice magico, 1930; as Sik-Sik, The Masterful Magician, translated by Robert G. Bender, in Italian Quarterly, 11 (1967). Farmacia di turno, 1931. Chi e` cchiu` felice ’e me?, 1932. Uomo e galantuomo, 1933. Uno coi capelli bianchi, 1938. Non ti pago, 1940. Io, l’erede, 1942. Natale in casa Cupiello, 1943; as The Nativity Scene, translated by Anthony Molino and Paul Feinberg, in Twentieth-Century Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, 1995. Napoli milionaria!, 1945. Questi fantasmi!, 1946; as Oh These Ghosts!, translated by Marguerita Carra` and Louise H. Warner, in Tulane Drama Review, 8, 1964. Filumena Marturano, 1946; as Filumena Marturano, translated by Eric Bentley, in The Genius of the Italian Theatre, 1964; as Filumena, translated by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, 1978. Le bugie con le gambe lunghe, 1948. La grande magia, 1948. Le voci di dentro, 1948; as The Inner Voices, translated by N.F. Simpson, 1983. La paura numero uno, 1950. De Pretore Vincenzo, 1957. Sabato, domenica e lunedı`, 1959; as Saturday, Sunday, Monday, translated by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, 1974. Il Sindaco del Rione Sanita`, 1960. L’arte della commedia, 1965. Tre adattamenti teatrali: Sogno di una notte di mezza sbornia, La monaca fauza, Cani e gatti, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Il paese di Pulcinella,’’ 1951. ‘‘’O canisto,’’ 1971. ‘‘Le poesie di Eduardo,’’ 1975; rpt. 1989. ‘‘’O penziero e altre poesie di Eduardo,’’ 1985; as Bare Thoughts: Poems, translated by Frank Palescandolo, 2002.

Other Colloquio con Pirandello, 1937. Lettera al Ministro dello Spettacolo, 1961. Lezioni di teatro, 1986. Serata d’onore, 2000.

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Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Eduardo negli anni Trenta: abiti vecchi e nuovi,’’ in Rasoi. Teatri napoletani del Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Barsotti, Anna, Eduardo drammaturgo (fra mondo del teatro e teatro del mondo), Rome: Bulzoni, 1988; 1995. Barsotti, Anna, Introduzione a Eduardo, Bari: Laterza, 1992. Barsotti, Anna, Eduardo, Turin: Einaudi, 2003 (with videotape Eduardo racconta Eduardo, edited by Maurizio Giammusso and Nello Pepe). Bender, Robert G., ‘‘Pulcinella, Pirandello, and Other Influences on De Filippo’s Dramaturgy,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 12 (1968): 39–71. De Filippo, Peppino, Una famiglia difficile, Naples: Marotta, 1977. Di Franco, Fiorenza, Il teatro di Eduardo, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Esposito, Edoardo, Repe`res culturels dans le the´aˆtre ´ ditions Universid’Eduardo De Filippo, Toulouse: E taires du Sud, 2002. Fiorino, Tonia, and Franco Carmelo Greco (editors), Eduardo 2000, Naples: ESI, 2000. Frascani, Federico, Eduardo segreto, Naples: Edizioni del Delfino, 1982. Frascani, Federico, Ricordando Eduardo, Naples: Colonnese, 2000. Giammattei, Emma, Eduardo De Filippo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Giammusso, Maurizio, Vita di Eduardo, Rome: Elleu, 2004. Greco, Franco Carmelo (editor), Eduardo e Napoli. Eduardo e l’Europa, Naples: ESI, 1993. Lezza, Antonia, ‘‘Lo spazio (dei testi),’’ in Eduardo De Filippo scrittore, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Tonia Fiorino, Naples: Dante & Descartes, 2004. Lombardo, Agostino, Eduardo e Shakespeare, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Mignone, Mario B., Eduardo De Filippo, Boston: Twayne, 1984. Ottai, Antonella, Come a concerto. Il Teatro Umoristico nelle scene degli anni Trenta, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi, Turin: UTET, 2003. Quarantotti De Filippo, Isabella (editor), Eduardo. Polemiche, pensieri, pagine inedite, Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Quarenghi, Paola, Lo spettatore col binocolo. Eduardo De Filippo dalla scena allo schermo, Rome: Kappa, 1995. Scafoglio, Domenico, and Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, Pulcinella. Il mito e la storia, Milan: Leonardo, 1990. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Eduardo De Filippo e Dario Fo,’’ in Uomini di scena, uomini di libro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Viviani, Vittorio, ‘‘Eduardo De Filippo,’’ in Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida, 1969; enlarged edition, 1992.

EDUARDO DE FILIPPO

FILUMENA MARTURANO, 1946 Play by Eduardo De Filippo

Filumena Marturano, a comedy in three acts based on a news item, was De Filippo’s tribute to his sister Titina. For the first time, he gave up his role as main protagonist. The drama centers on Filumena Marturano, a former prostitute who lives with Domenico Soriano, whose pastry shop she runs. Having learned that Domenico has decided to marry the young Diana, she pretends to be dying and gets married in extremis. Filumena later reveals the motive for her deception: to give a surname to her three children, whose existence she has always concealed. When a furious Domenico decides to undo the imposed marriage, Filumena refuses to tell him which of the three boys is his own son. Domenico finally yields to her and chooses to celebrate their wedding and recognize all three boys as his legitimate children. The play is dominated by the character of Filumena, who embodies woman in her different roles as prostitute, lover, wife, and mother. She is proud and ironic, cunning and brave. Unlike the heroines of Raffaele Viviani’s theater, Filumena is singleminded in pursuing her goal: the establishment of a real ‘‘family.’’ She loves Domenico; she is in some ways a tragic character, but unlike other female characters of Southern Italian dramaturgy, she never adopts a melodramatic tone. In fact, the key phrase of the text ‘‘’E figlie so’ ffiglie’’ (Children are children), pronounced by Filumena and repeated by Domenico as his closing line, must be ‘‘said’’ in the right tone. The comedy was first performed on 7 November 1946 at the Teatro Politeama in Naples. It opened to critical acclaim, but was poorly received by the general audience. In 1951, De Filippo made a film version that starred Titinia in the title role. In 1964, Vittorio De Sica turned the play into a film, Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage, Italian-Style),

with Sofia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni: It was a commercial success, but De Filippo himself did not like it. On the occasion of the centenary of Eduardo’s birth, in the year 2000, the Compagnia degli Ipocriti presented a new staging of the play directed by Cristina Pezzoli, which was well-received. Unforgettable in the roles of Filumena and Domenico were Isa Danieli and Antonio Casagrande. The stage designed by Bruno Buonincontri and the music by Pasquale Scialo` were exceptionally good. Filumena Marturano is, indeed, one of the most widely translated Italian comedies and one of the most widely performed abroad. ANTONIA LEZZA Editions First edition: Filumena Marturano, in I capolavori di Eduardo, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Other editions: in Cantata dei giorni dispari, Turin: Einaudi, 1951; in Cantata dei giorni dispari, edited by Anna Barsotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1995.

Translations As Filumena Marturano in The Genius of the Italian Theatre, edited and translated by Eric Bentley, New York: American Library, Mentor, 1964; in Masterpieces of Modern Italian Theatre, edited by Robert W. Corrigan, translated by Eric Bentley, New York: First Collier Books, 1967; as Filumena, translated by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall, London: French, 1978; in Four Plays, translated by Carlo Ardito, London: Methuen, 1992.

Further Reading Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Nota storico-critica a Filumena Marturano,’’ in E. De Filippo, Cantata dei giorni dispari, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘La Filumena della Pezzoli: interni in esterno,’’ in Il Castello di Elsinore, 41 (2001): 53–56. De Miro D’Ajeta, Barbara, La figura della donna nel teatro di Eduardo De Filippo, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Frascani, Federico, Eduardo segreto, Naples: Edizioni del Delfino, 1982. Ottai, Antonella (editor), Eduardo, l’arte del Teatro in televisione, Rome: Rai Eri, 2000. Valoroso, Antonella, ‘‘Quante storie per donna Filomena. Filumena Maturano fra teatro, cinema e mito,’’ in Eduardo De Filippo scrittore, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Tonia Fiorino, Naples: Dante & Descartes, 2004.

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EDUARDO DE FILIPPO

NATALE IN CASA CUPIELLO, 1943 Play by Eduardo De Filippo

Natale in casa Cupiello (The Nativity Scene) has the most complex compositional history of any of Eduardo De Filippo’s plays. Written in 1931 as a one-act play, it became a two-act comedy around 1932–1933 and was fully developed in 1943 with the addition of the third act. The play was written during a period when Eduardo had given up variety theater and invented a new author-actor’s way of playwriting that allowed for improvisation performance. On Christmas Day 1931, the newly founded company Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo staged Eduardo’s one-act play at the Cinema Kursaal In Naples. Their engagement, originally scheduled for one week, was extended until May 1932. The play’s main character is Luca Cupiello, whose annual preparation of the Nativity scene is met with indifference by his wife Concetta and his son Tommasino, who, out of spite, always says he does not like the crib. Domestic peace is broken by the daughter Ninuccia, who tells her mother that she has decided to leave her husband Nicolino for Vittorio, and to send him a parting letter. Concetta, in despair, manages to get the letter from her daughter but it falls into the hands of Luca. Oblivious to its contents, Luca gives the letter to his son-in-law, who then learns about his wife’s adultery. During Christmas Eve dinner, the two rivals (Nicolino and Vittorio) quarrel violently. Nicolino abandons his wife, and Luca, realizing the situation, collapses. In his final delirium, Luca mistakes Vittorio for his son-in-law and, paradoxically, brings about the two lovers’ reconciliation. Tommasino finally concedes that he likes the crib. Natale in casa Cupiello is one of De Filippo’s few early works that features a bedroom setting, foreshadowing the famous scene of Napoli milionaria! (Millionaire Naples, 1945), in which Gennario Jovine fakes his own death to save his wife Amalia from trafficking charges. The main setting of the play, however, is the dining room where the Christmas dinner takes place. The crib itself symbolises Luca Cupiello’s isolation, loneliness and will. 590

Each of the three acts represents a stage in Luca’s existential journey, which is condensed in a few, meaningful days: the day before Christmas Eve, Christmas Eve, and the three days after Christmas. The first and the third act form the prologue and the epilogue of the microtragedy of the antihero, Luca Cupiello, who until his death holds on tenaciously to the family ritual of the crib. In the play, the crib has a distinct symbolic value: To Luca, it is a refuge from his family’s anxieties and troubles, but to others it is a way to keep him from learning or confronting uncomfortable truths. The famous line concerning the crib at the end of Act 3— ‘‘Tommasi’, te piace o’ Presebbio’’ (Tommasi’, do you like the crib?)—symbolises the generation gap between Luca and his son. The utopian ideology of the father, who loves the crib, is set against the realism of the son, who loves ‘‘ ’a zuppa ’e latte’’ (a bowl of milk for dunking). The family remains the focus of Eduardo’s compassionate vision, and the family ties are singled out as the only thread of very lonely individuals: ‘‘Vi dovete voler bene’’ (You must love one another), utters a dying Luca. Natale in casa Cupiello has been hugely successful and has been widely broadcast for television and radio. Its success is primarily due to De Filippo’s unique way of describing unhappy things with a sad smile, of presenting disappointment and pain through a veil of comedy. ANTONIA LEZZA Editions First edition: ‘‘Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in Il Dramma, 397–398 (1943): 72–86. Other editions: Natale in casa Cupiello, Turin: Einaudi, 1950; in Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Anna Barsotti, Turin: Einaudi, 1998; in Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, edited by Nicola De Blasi and Paola Quarenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Translations: The Nativity Scene, translated by Anthony Molino and Paul Feinberg, in Twentieth-Century of Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Natale in casa Cupiello’’ di Eduardo De Filippo,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Nota storico-critica a Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in E. De Filippo, Cantata dei giorni pari, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. De Blasi, Nicola, ‘‘Nota filologico-linguistica a Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in E. De Filippo, Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

GRAZIA DELEDDA De Matteis, Stefano, ‘‘Storia di Natale,’’ in Lo specchio della vita. Napoli: antropologia della citta` del teatro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Puglisi, Angelo, In casa Cupiello. Eduardo critico del populismo, Rome: Donzelli, 2001.

Quarenghi, Paola, Lo spettatore col binocolo. Eduardo De Filippo dalla scena allo schermo, Rome: Kappa, 1995. Quarenghi, Paola, ‘‘Nota storico-critica a Natale in casa Cupiello,’’ in E. De Filippo, Teatro. Cantata dei giorni pari, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

GRAZIA DELEDDA (1871–1936) Grazia Deledda was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1926. She was the second Italian to receive this honour after Giosue` Carducci, who had been given the prize in 1906, and the second woman after the Swedish Selma Lagerlo¨f, who had received the Nobel in 1909. According to Henrick Schu¨ck, member of the Swedish Academy who spoke about Deledda’s works on this occasion, her great merit was having discovered her own native island of Sardinia and making it known in her writings (Discorso ufficiale alla consegna del Nobel, 1959). She described the ancient traditions of her people and endowed her characters with a simple, primitive way of thinking that made them seem at once realistic characters and Old Testament figures. Similarly, she portrayed nature with a majesty and grandeur that reflected the feelings and habits of the Sardinian people. Finally, according to Schu¨ck, Deledda’s writing was sad but not pessimistic. Her work expressed a fundamental faith in life and in the triumph of good over evil. These were also the reasons that made her works very popular in her time. She published no fewer than 50 works of fiction as well as poems, plays, and essays. They primarily revolve around the transgression of some ancestral codes and develop the conflicts that ensue. While the public read her books with enthusiasm, contemporary critics oscillated between appreciation and condemnation of her work and were mainly concerned with placing Deledda within one of the literary currents of the time: verismo and decadentismo. Among her admirers, we find Luigi Capuana, Giovanni Verga, G.A. Borgese, and D.H. Lawrence. It is for instance Capuana’s positive review of her novel Anime oneste (Honest People, 1885) that ensured her fame. And it is D.H. Lawrence’s foreword to the 1923 English edition of La madre (The Mother, 1920) that seals her narrative boundaries. Indeed he highlights Deledda’s

vivid representation of ‘‘an island of rigid conventions, the rigid conventional of barbarians, and at the same time, the fierce violence of their instinctive passions.’’ After World War II new studies on Deledda appeared that looked at her work not only from a literary and mythical perspective, but also from an ethnic, anthropological, philosophical and psychoanalytic point of view. As a result of a strong interest in women writers that began in the 1970s, there arose a new appreciation of Deledda’s struggle to assert herself as a woman writer within a patriarchal society. Her letters were published, which proved very useful in studying her development as a prolific and important novelist. Deledda, who only attended elementary school, was mainly self-taught. At 12 she was already writing poetry, and at 16 she began her long series of publications with the short story ‘‘Sangue sardo’’ (Sardinian Blood, 1888). She persevered in her writing, despite the disapproval of her family, which thought it scandalous that a young woman should write passionate love stories. Most of her early stories were published in the review L’ultima moda and were later collected in Nell’azzurro (In the Blue, 1890) The main themes present in Deledda’s novels—many of which were serialized in periodicals such as Nuova Antologia and L’Illustrazione Italiana—are summed up in her last, largely autobiographical work Cosima (1937), published posthumously. In this book, written while she was dying of cancer, Deledda remembers her childhood, adolescence, and youth. She celebrates art, love, and, in particular, her own life as a woman and an artist. The novel begins with a description of Cosima’s house, built by her father to house his seven children, with its simple, traditional rooms, its rough, archaic objects and furniture, and its beautiful view of Nuoro’s landscape. This is the place of safety and comfort that Deledda 591

GRAZIA DELEDDA abandoned in her later years, when she moved to Rome, but to which she always returned in her memories and in her books. In the same way, she fondly describes the ritual festivities of Nuoro, which combined Christian with pagan elements, and their legends about fairies, giants and lost treasures, and the mountainous landscapes around her house. Similarly detailed descriptions are commonly found in her novels on Sardinian life, amongst which the most famous are Elias Portolu (1903), Cenere (Ashes, 1904) and Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind, 1913). The first pages of Cosima not only introduce the main points of the book, but also recapitulate the themes of previous novels, which have much more than regional interest, even if they depict the archaic society of early twentieth-century Sardinia, with the intensity of the best Italian veristi. For example, the scene in which 5-year-old Cosima emerges at dawn from her house to announce the birth of a baby brother to the neighbourhood represents the need of all of Deledda’s characters to grow, mature, learn the secrets of sexuality, and find their own individuality apart and away from the protective and suffocating enclosure of their family home. Cosima’s admiration for the carved furniture in the guest room and for the artistic cups and plates kept in a special cupboard, her curiosity about her brother’s books, and her ecstatic contemplation of her beloved mountains from one of the windows, show her sensitivity to art and nature and her need to explore, learn, taste, and experience life. In contrast to these enthusiastic descriptions is the scene in which Cosima’s father takes her to see her mother and the newborn baby. The baby’s face is red and he is ready to cry, while the mother, pale and prematurely old, shows her usual impassive, almost enigmatic countenance. The mother, who is much younger than her husband and had married him out of duty, appears crushed by having to bear and rear one child after the other. Two different models of life for both men and women appear constantly in Deledda’s fiction. One model involves the self-sacrificing individual who respects the traditional familial roles in Sardinian patriarchal society, looks out for the family’s interests and marries according to prescribed economic and class conventions rather than out of personal feeling. The other model is the creative individual who leaves behind the traditional family life and moves to new lands. Individual sacrifice for the good of the family and community account for the many loveless marriages between young women and wealthy husbands, for instance in 592

Colombi e sparvieri (Doves and Hawks, 1912) and L’incendio nell’oliveto (The Fire in the Olive Grove, 1918). It is seen also in the old men and women who let themselves die to save and protect the family to which they belong: Efix, the old servant, in Canne al vento, and the mother of the young priest led into sin, in La madre. Another recurrent theme in Deledda’s fiction is the close, incestuous ties that develop among the members of the family. In the tightly knit Sardinian family, where women stay mostly indoors, parents establish strong bonds with their children and girls look up to the boys and men of their family as models of love and desire. Such incestuous love is felt by Elias Portolu for his sister-in-law, by Ananias for his mother Olı´ in Cenere, and by Noemi for her nephew Giacinto in Canne al vento. Cosima not only idealizes her father and her uncle Sebastiano, but admires her older brothers Santus and Andrea. The former is cool, refined, ascetic, effeminate, and completely devoted to his studies, but later becomes an alcoholic and a tramp; the latter is primitive, rough, sensual, violent, and as a young shepherd he takes his little sister Cosima with him on horseback. When she grows up, he watches jealously over her and encourages her to become a writer. These two types of men recur in Deledda’s novels and represent two sides of her personality, the creative and intellectual, the one who yearns for freedom and feels the need to escape and the one tied to Sardinian traditions, forever guilty for leaving family and friends behind. Finally, Deledda often represents the progressive decline of the Sardinian middle and lower classes toward the end of the nineteenth century. Laws were passed by a new Italian government largely unaware of Sardinian economy and society. These laws, which privatized lands, deprived shepherds and peasants of their previous rights of grazing and gleaning on the large common lands. The rich bourgeois who could afford to buy land invested in large estates, which they did not know how to cultivate. As a result many of the shepherds, reduced to poverty, took to brigandage out of despair. Deledda often portrayed landowners who lose their lands and shepherds who became servants. She introduced the figure of the bandit, to whom she gave a romantic aura and whom she presented as a free and courageous man. The theme of impoverishment is seen for instance in L’edera (The Ivy, 1906), in which the noble family Decherchi are near ruin, and in Canne al vento, where the Pintor ladies are reduced to extreme poverty. The figure of the bandit is fully developed

GRAZIA DELEDDA in Marianna Sirca (Marianna Sirca, 1915), in which Marianna develops a passion for the handsome Simone, who becomes a bandit to help his starving family. While Cosima manages to assert herself as a woman and a writer, to marry and leave her native island (as Deledda did), other novels show characters who fight in vain against their destiny and the force of tradition. They are sacrificed to the laws and economic needs of the family and to the class structure of Sardinian society. In Colombi e sparvieri, Jorgj Nieddu, an impecunious student in the village of Oronou, is unjustly accused of having stolen the treasure of his fiance´e’s grandfather. He becomes partially paralysed, a symptom of his emotional paralysis and entrapment in the past. He is rescued by the miraculous appearance of Mariana, a foreign woman born in Switzerland, who brings Jorgj precious gifts, shares his passion for poetry, and reminds him of the splendour of nature. Unlike Mariana, who is a free spirit, a creature of the light who is not tied to the conventions of the village, Jorgj’s ex-fiance´e Columba remains in the darkness of her house and though still in love with Jorgj, obeys her family and marries a rich widower. Her wedding cart became her funeral cart. She lies tired and silent with her grandfather’s black chest, in which his treasure was kept, which becomes her coffin. Far more tragic is L’incendio nell’uliveto, in which the young and beautiful Annarosa, a creature of nature connected with images of freedom, light, water and fertility, is in love with Gioele, a lower-class student and troubadour who plays the guitar and writes poems. However, Annarosa cannot escape from the dark house of her grandmother, Agostina, the matriarch of the family, and is destined to marry her wealthy relative, Stefano, in order to save the family property. In vain are Annarosa’s true feelings toward Gioele and Stefano’s love for Annarosa’s stepmother revealed by Juanniccu, Agostina’s son, a simpleton and an alcoholic, who is the only one who understands people’s hidden feelings and speaks on their behalf. In the end the values of tradition triumph, represented by the paralysed grandmother, who, like a domestic idol, sits motionless on her chair and watches over the domestic hearth. Indeed, in Deledda’s works the tensions between the old and the new, between tradition and change, usually are resolved by the triumph of old values. Her characters are alienated beings, at odds with ancestral laws. At best, they escape in conventional religion. Love, often violent, leads to self-punishment and isolation. However, it is the

clash between these different ways of life and the passions felt by all the characters that make her books always modern and fascinating.

Biography Born in Nuoro, 27 September 1871; father, Giovanni Antonio Deledda, was a landowner; mother, Francesca Cambosu, much younger than her husband. Of Deledda’s siblings (five sisters and two brothers) two of the sisters died prematurely, while one of her brothers became an alcoholic and the other ended up in prison for theft. Deledda only attended elementary school, as was customary for girls at the time. At 12 she was already writing poetry. She assiduously corresponded with publishers and scholars to ensure that her writings would be published. In 1899, she went to Cagliari and met Palmiro Madesani, an employee of the Office of Financial Administration. Married Madesani, 1900. Left Sardinia and settled with him in Rome, 1902. They had two sons, Sardus born in 1900 and Francesco in 1903. In Rome, Deledda divided her time between caring for her family and her literary work. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1926. Died of breast cancer in Rome on 15 August 1936. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI KATZ See also: Decadentismo Verismo Selected Works Collections Romanzi e novelle, 5 vols., edited by Emilio Cecchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1941–1969. Opere scelte, 2 vols., edited by Eurialo de Michelis, Milan: Mondadori, 1964. Romanzi e novelle, edited by Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Romanzi sardi, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Mondadori, 1981.

Fiction Nell’azzurro, 1890. Amore regale, 1891. Amori fatali, 1892. Anime oneste, 1895. La via del male, 1896. Il vecchio della montagna, 1900. Dopo il divorzio, 1902; rpt. as Naufraghi in porto, 1920; as After the Divorce, translated by Susan Ashe, 1985. La regina delle tenebre, 1902. Elias Portolu, 1903; as Elias Portolu, translated by Martha King, 1992. Cenere, 1904; as Ashes, translated by Janice M. Kozma, 2004.

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GRAZIA DELEDDA L’edera, 1906. Il nostro padrone, 1910. Sino al confine, 1911. Colombi e sparvieri, 1912. Chiaroscuro, 1912; as Chiaroscuro and Other Stories, translated by Martha King, 1994. Canne al vento, 1913; as Reeds in the Wind, translated by Martha King, 1999. Le colpe altrui, 1914. Marianna Sirca, 1915. Il fanciullo nascosto, 1916. L’incendio nell’oliveto, 1918. La madre, 1920; as The Woman and the Priest, or, The Mother, translated by Mary G. Steegman, Forward by D. H. Lawrence, 1923; rpt. 1928 and 1987. Cattive compagne, 1921. Il dio dei viventi, 1922. Il flauto nel bosco, 1923. I vecchi e i fanciulli, 1928. Il dono di Natale, 1930. La vigna sul mare, 1932. La chiesa della solitudine, 1936; as The Church of Solitude, translated by E. Ann Matter, 2002. Cosima, 1937; as Cosima, translated by Martha King, 1988.

Poetry ‘‘Paesaggi sardi,’’ 1896.

Plays Odio vince, 1912. La grazia, 1921 (with G. Guastalla and V. Michetti). A sinistra, 1924.

Children’s Books Giaffah, 1899. I tre talismani, 1899.

Other Versi e prose giovanili, edited by Antonio Scano, 1938. Lettere di Grazia Deledda a Marino Moretti (1913–1923), 1959. Grazia Deledda, premio Nobel per la letteratura 1926, edited by Francesco Di Pilla, 1966. Lettere inedite di Grazia Deledda ad Arturo Giordano, direttore della Rivista letteraria, edited by Neria De Giovanni, 2004.

Further Reading Balducci, Carolyn, A Self-Made Woman, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Branca, Remo (editor), Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi Deleddiani, Nuoro, 30 settembre 1972, Cagliari: Fossataro, 1974. Capuana, Luigi, ‘‘Grazia Deledda,’’ in Gli ismi contemporanei, 1878; rpt. Milan: Fabbri, 1973. Collu, Ugo (editor), Grazia Deledda nelle culture contemporanee, 2 vols., Nuoro: Consorzio per la pubblica lettura ‘‘Salvatore Satta,’’ 1992. De Giovanni, Neria, Il peso dell’eros. Mito ed Eros nella Sardegna di Grazia Deledda, Alghero: Nemapress, 2001. Dolfi, Anna, Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Dolfi, Anna, et al. (editors), Grazia Deledda: Biografia e romanzo, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1987.

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Gunzberg, Lynn M., ‘‘Ruralism, Folklore, and Grazia Deledda’s Novels,’’ in Modern Language Review, 13, no. 3 (1983): 112–122. Heyer-Caput, Margherita, ‘‘Per svelare Il segreto dell’uomo solitario di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Quaderni d’italianistica, 22, no. 2 (2001): 121–138. King, Martha, Grazia Deledda: A Legendary Life, Leicester, UK: Troubador, 2005. Lawrence, D.H., foreword to Grazia Deledda, The Mother, translated by Mary G. Steegman, London-DedalusNew York: Hippocrene, 1987. Lombardi, Olga, Invito alla lettura di Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Olla, Gianni, Scenari sardi: Grazia Deledda tra cinema e televisione, Cagliari: Aipsa, 2001. Pellegrino, Angelo (editor), Metafora e biografia nell’opera di Grazia Deledda, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. Rasy, Elisabetta, Ritratti di signora, Milan: Rizzoli, 1995. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘La scoperta dell’identita` femminile nel romanzo Cosima di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Rivista di Studi italiani, 12, no. 1 (1994): 55–73. Schu¨ck, Henrick, ‘‘Discorso ufficiale alla consegna del Nobel,’’ in Onoranze a Grazia Deledda, edited by Mario Ciusa Romagna, Cagliari: Societa` Poligrafica Sarda, 1959. Tanda, Nicola, Dal mito dell’isola all’isola del mito: Deledda e dintorni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Testaferri, Ada, ‘‘Infrazione all’Eros proibito come processo d’individuazione in La Madre di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Donna. Women in Italian Culture, Toronto: Dovehouse, 1989. Zambon, Patrizia, ‘‘Leggere per scrivere. La formazione autodidattica delle scrittrici tra Otto e Novecento: Neera, Ada Negri, Grazia Deledda, Sibilla Aleramo,’’ in Studi Novecenteschi 16, no. 38 (1989): 287–324.

CANNE AL VENTO, 1913 Novel by Grazia Deledda

Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind), considered by critics as one of Deledda’s best works, was the novel dearest to her heart. The story, set in Sardinia at the time of the Libyan War of 1912, contains many of the themes common to Deledda’s writing: the poverty of the island and the decay of its noble families, forbidden (incestuous) love with its attendant guilt and punishment, and detailed descriptions of Sardinian landscapes, religious festivals

GRAZIA DELEDDA and folklore. The novel takes place in the town of Galte in the region of Baronia afflicted by malaria and floods. It tells the story of the old and faithful servant Efix, a tenant farmer, who looks after the Pintor ladies, decayed noble women, as atonement for his past sins. Many years before he had fallen in love with Lia Pintor and helped her run away from her tyrannical father. In self-defence he killed the father who was pursuing them. Efix’s trials and tribulations are mingled with the stories of Noemi and Giacinto. Noemi, the youngest and most attractive of the Pintor ladies, is locked in disdainful isolation by her poverty and the disgrace of Lia’s escape. She is tormented by the guilt of her forbidden love for her nephew Giacinto, Lia’s son, who is also attracted to her. He is, moreover, a thief and a forger who falsified his Aunt Ester’s signature to borrow money from an usurer. His crime caused the death of his oldest aunt, Ruth, which forced the Pintor ladies into complete poverty. In the end, Noemi’s marriage to her wealthy cousin Predu and Giacinto’s imminent marriage to the young peasant Grixenda put an end to their sinful love and restored the fortunes of the Pintor family, leaving Efix to die in peace. The multiple symbolisms of the ‘‘reeds’’ (canne) of the title render the many meanings of the novel. The reeds have a maternal quality in the first chapter. They watch over the already very swollen river and put Efix to sleep by whispering a prayer that comes from the earth. At the end of the book, the reeds, broken by the wind, represent human beings destroyed by a fate they cannot control. This sense of loss and need for a nurturing mother pervade the entire narrative. As Neria De Giovanni pointed out, Noemi’s love for Giacinto echoes the forbidden love of Efix for Lia and is of a narcissistic nature (Come leggere Canne al vento di Grazia Deledda, 1993). Noemi recognizes herself in Giacinto when he embraces her and in a vision sees herself both lying at the bottom of a spring and leaning forward to drink from it. The vision symbolizes her desire to return to the womb and to be breast-fed by her mother. The novel’s loving descriptions of Sardinian landscapes and festivals is an expression of Deledda’s longing for her mother country and for her childhood. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI KATZ Editions First edition: Canne al vento, Milan: Treves, 1913. Critical editions: in Opere scelte, edited by Eurialo De Michelis, Milan: Mondadori, 1964; in Romanzi

e novelle, edited by Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Translation: Reeds in the Wind, translated by Martha King, New York: Italica Press, 1999.

Further Reading Agus, Serafino, Ipotesi di lettura di Grazia Deledda, Dolianova: Grafica del Parteolla, 1999. De Giovanni, Neria, Come leggere Canne al vento di Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1993. Fuller, Peter J., ‘‘Regional Identity in Sardinian Writing of the Twentieth Century: The Work of Grazia Deledda and Giuseppe Dessı`,’’ in The Italianist, 20 (2000): 58–97. Gioanola, Elio, ‘‘Trasgressione e colpa nei romanzi sardi di Grazia Deledda,’’ in Metafora e biografia nell’opera di Grazia Deledda, edited by Angelo Pellegrino, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. Massaiu, Mario, Sardegnamara: una donna un canto, Milan: IPL, 1983. Sole, Leonardo, ‘‘La semiosi iconica di Grazia Deledda. L’immagine e il suono,’’ in Grazia Deledda nella cultura contemporanea, edited by Ugo Collu, vol. 1, Nuoro: Consorzio per la pubblica lettura ‘‘Salvatore Satta,’’ 1992.

CENERE, 1904 Novel by Grazia Deledda

Cenere (Ashes) was written by Grazia Deledda in 1903 in Rome, at the beginning of the most prolific period of her career (19 novels published between 1902 and 1925), and was first serialized in Nuova Antologia before its publication the following year. Like most of Deledda’s novels, Cenere is set in Sardinia at the turn of the century, and deals with the archaic laws of family and society, with guilt, punishment and redemption and most especially with the ambivalent feelings of a son toward his mother. The novel tells the story of Anania, an illegitimate child abandoned by his mother, Olı`, because of her extreme poverty. Brought up by his father, a miller in Nuoro, he becomes a handsome and spoiled youth and a brilliant student. He is expected to marry the beautiful daughter of Carbone, the miller’s boss, who is paying for his education in Cagliari and Rome. What seems to be the story of Anania’s successful ascent into the middle class, where he will attain a lawyer’s position and a 595

GRAZIA DELEDDA happy marriage with a girl of good family, turns into tragedy when Anania cannot overcome his haunting desire to find his mother and to rescue her from her life of prostitution. Anania’s obsession stems from his longing for the beautiful woman he remembers and his anger at having been left by her and dishonored by her life of sin. When he finally meets her, prematurely old, haggard and sick, in his native village of Fonni, he treats her with great harshness. He wants to lock her up to prevent her from prostituting herself, but only succeeds in driving her to suicide. Olı`, wanting to free herself and her son from the past, cuts her throat and leaves Anania to contemplate the amulet she had given him as a parting gift: a little cloth bag filled with ashes and a stone. Anania, feeling that the amulet puts him in touch with himself, hopes to be reborn from those ashes. Some critics give particular attention to the realism of the story, such as its account of the crumbling houses of Fonni and the miserable people who frequent Anania’s mill as well as its descriptions of traditional Sardinian life. Other critics however, give more importance to the mythical, psychological and psychoanalytic elements in the novel. For instance, Anna Dolfi (Grazia Deledda, 1979) stresses the incest motif that typifies most of Deledda’s characters and Janice Kozma (Grazia Deledda and the Pathology of Arrested Maturation, 2002) points out the arrested adolescence of Deledda’s young men. In fact, Anania is emotionally aloof, lost in his fantasies and not caring for the women who love him, searching obsessively for his mother. He suffers from an unresolved Oedipal attachment and vainly hopes to recapture his union with his mother. Only her violent death brings him out of his world of dreams, compelling him to face reality and assume his responsibilities within the community. As is customary in ancient religions, a victim is sacrificed so that society may

be redeemed for its sins and life could begin anew. The ‘‘ashes’’ in the title symbolise death as well as expiation. In 1916, Febo Mari directed a 30-minute film adapted from Cenere, starring the famous Eleonora Duse in the role of Rosalia, the self-sacrificing mother. Cenere is the only cinematic performance of Duse, who is also credited for the screenplay. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI-KATZ Editions First edition: Cenere, Rome: Ripamonti and Colombo, 1904. Critical editions: in Romanzi e novelle, vol. 2, edited by Emilio Cecchi, Verona: Mondadori, 1945; in Romanzi sardi, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Translations: as Ashes, translated by Helen Colvill, New York: John Lane, 1908; as Ashes, translated by Janice M. Kosma, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘La tecnica e la struttura del romanzo deleddiano,’’ in Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi Deleddiani, Nuoro 30 settembre 1972, edited by Remo Branca, Cagliari: Fossataro, 1974. Dolfi, Anna, Grazia Deledda, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Kozma, Janice, Grazia Deledda’s Eternal Adolescents: The Pathology of Arrested Maturation, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. Migiel, Marilyn, ‘‘The Devil and the Phoenix: a Reading of Grazia Deledda’s Cenere,’’ in Stanford Italian Review, 5, no. 1 (1985): 55–73. Piano, Maria Giovanna, Onora la madre: autorita` femminile nella narrativa di Grazia Deledda, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998. Piromalli, Antonio, Grazia Deledda, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Taboo and Transgression in Grazia Deledda,’’ in Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994, London: Athlone, 1995.

ANTONIO DELFINI (1907–1963) Irregular, anarchic, and bizarre are some of the adjectives frequently used to define Antonio Delfini. Indeed, his works cannot be easily categorized in any of the mainstream movements or schools 596

of the twentieth century, as his eclectic and multiple interests materialized into a variety of writings belonging to different genres and not easily classified according to a particular label. His

ANTONIO DELFINI collection La Rosina perduta (The Lost Rosina, 1957) is emblematic, and includes short stories, memories, dialogues, calembours, documents, radio talks, and ‘‘automatic’’ texts, all written in different moments of his life. Delfini is anomalous according to various points of view. He was mainly self-taught, which gave him absolute freedom but also a sort of isolation because he did not belong to any school of thought, and he was seen as a literary dilettante. He was an anomaly because he was in perpetual conflict with the literary establishment, an eternal rebel against any literary convention or intellectual system. He was also an anomaly because he was an aristocrat from Modena, a small city in the Emilia Romagna region, therefore provincial with regard to the Italian intellectual capitals of the time. Yet it is difficult to separate in his biography the real from the character ‘‘Antonio Delfini’’ whom he himself helped create, a dandy, a giovinsignore of another era, always undecided on the position and the role to assume. In his youth, he first supported Fascism, then he became critical of the regime and antiFascist. He was monarchic at the referendum in 1946, and then published a Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista (Manifesto for a Conservative Communist Party, 1951) in which he proclaimed the need for a conservative politics for administrating land, but a Communist approach to industry. The turning point in his literary career was a brief sojourn in Paris in 1932 where he had contact with the surrealist movement; once back in Modena he experimented with ‘‘automatic writing.’’ Yet his version of surrealism represented a personal interpretation of the movement, and his automatic writing, which generated Il fanalino della Battimonda (The Lamp of Battimonda, 1940), was rather heterodox. For the surrealists, automatic writing was a mechanical form of thinking that replaced human thought; for Delfini, it was instead a way to become aware of his thinking and of his writing, freeing it from preconstituted literary schemes. Moreover, Il fanalino della Battimonda lacked the oneiric dimension typical of surrealism. Nonetheless this experiment was pivotal in Delfini’s work. It was not only the opportunity for a spontaneous writing out of the conventional literary forms, but it also created characters and narratives that returned in other Delfini works, in particular in the stories of Il ricordo della Basca (The Memory of Basca, 1938). Delfini had previously made a concession to the establishment with the poetic prose of Ritorno in citta´ (Return to the City, 1931). But the lyrical

scheme fashionable at the time did not apply to this irreverent writer. It was in the short stories of Il ricordo della Basca that Delfini expressed his real narrative vein. The collection was first published in 1938, and then reissued in 1956 with a long introduction by the author on the source of inspiration for the stories, a half-fictitious autobiographical narration that can be considered a story in itself. The last edition (1982) included the first chapter of an uncompleted historical novel entitled ‘‘Il 10 giugno 1918’’ (The 10th of June, 1918). In Il ricordo della Basca a few themes recur, including provincial life, the idealized woman, the romantic encounter, and the city of Modena. In Delfini’s treatment of these themes emerged his isolation from contemporary reality, his absence from the historical present. In his stories there was no present; there existed only the memory of the past and the dream of the future. Hence, the core of the narration, the traumatic event was not within the story; it was evoked either in memory or in dream, leaving space for details, for that which appeared futile and insignificant. The structure was not linear, progressive; it was circular, although it returned full circle but to a different point. Similar motifs also appeared in Delfini’s poetic works. If Poesie del quaderno n. 1 (Poems From Notebook No. 1, 1932) were mainly influenced by the models of the time, particularly crepuscular poetry, re-elaborating the usual themes of nostalgia and melancholy, a distinctive, rebellious, and subversive vein already surfaced in the paradoxical, nonconformist nuances of his work. His distinctive characteristics became evident in Poesie della fine del mondo (Poetry from the End of the World, 1961), a collection of ‘‘mala poesia’’ (bad poetry) according to the author himself. It was ‘‘bad poetry’’ because it lacked lyricism and delicacy, and it was full of invectives, maledictions, curses directed at a consumerist society of notaries, attorneys and politicians; at the beloved woman, now only a prostitute; and at the city of Parma that gave birth to that woman. Delfini’s unreciprocated, heartbreaking love for the mysterious Luisa B from Parma was not only documented in 39 love letters published after his death, but also in Modena 1831 citta` della Chartreuse (Modena 1831 City of the Chartreuse, 1962), a fictitious historical essay in which Delfini tried to demonstrate that the qualities Stendhal attributed to Parma were actually to be referred to Modena. After his death, due to Cesare Garboli, Delfini’s works have received renewed attention and appreciation. 597

ANTONIO DELFINI

Biography

Fiction

Born in Modena on June 10, 1907, in one of the richest and oldest families of Modena. Father died in 1908. Abandoned regular school after the second year of high school; self-taught. Joined the Fascist Party and participated in the March on Rome, 1922. Friend of future editor Ugo Guandalini with whom he published the review L’Ariete-Riforma in 1927, and Lo spettatore Italiano in 1928–1929. In spring 1932, traveled to Paris with Mario Pannunzio. In 1933, founded the magazine Oggi with Pannunzio, Eurialo De Michelis, and Guglielmo Serafini. In spring 1935, the Modena house was sold and mother and sister moved to villa of Cavezzo. Delfini moved to Florence. With Pannunzio, founded Caratteri in 1935. Contributed short stories and articles to Letteratura, Rivoluzione, La riforma letteraria, Corrente, Il selvaggio, Campo di Marte. Had a daughter, Giovanna, with Donatella Carena. In 1946, moved to Viareggio where he lived until 1953. In 1953, upon request of Pier Paolo Pasolini, was candidate for Popular Unity Party. In 1953, founded Il Liberale. He then wandered with no fixed abode between Rome and Milan, stopping in Modena and Parma, and sometimes in Viareggio. Awarded the International Prize for Free Press in Lugano for Misa Bovetti e altre cronache, 1960; and the Viareggio Prize for I racconti, 1964. Died of heart failure on February 23, 1963, in Modena. BARBARA GARBIN Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Poesie del quaderno n. 1,’’ 1932. ‘‘Poesie della fine del mondo,’’ 1961.

Ritorno in citta`, 1931. Il ricordo della Basca, 1938; revised as I racconti, 1963; new edition as Il ricordo della Basca, 1982. Il fanalino della Battimonda, 1940. La Rosina perduta, 1957. Misa Bovetti e altre cronache, 1960. Modena 1831 citta` della Chartreuse, 1962.

Other Tabella delle piu` significative opere della letteratura italiana uscite fra le due Grandi Guerre, 1918–1940 (with the pseudonym Franco Franchini), 1943. Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista in Italia, 1951. Diari 1927–1961, edited by Giovanna Delfini and Natalia Ginzburg, 1982. Note di uno sconosciuto, inediti e altri scritti, 1990. Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista e altri scritti, edited by Cesare Garboli, 1997.

Letters Lettere d’amore, edited by Giacinto Spagnoletti, 1963.

Edited L’Almanacco del Pesce d’Oro 1960 (with Ennio Flaiano and Gaio Fratini), 1959.

Further Reading Casari, Umberto, Antonio Delfini e altri intellettuali nella societa` modenese del Novecento, Verona: Fiorini, 2003. Cenati, Giuliano, ‘‘Antonio Delfini cronachista immaginario,’’ Acme (Milan), 53, no. 2 (2000): 183–214. Palazzi, Andrea, and Marco Belpoliti, Antonio Delfini, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1994. Palazzi, Andrea, and Cinzia Pollicelli, Antonio Delfini, Modena 1907–1963: immagini e documenti, Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1983. Pollicelli, Cinzia (editor), Antonio Delfini: testimonianze e saggi, Modena: Mucchi, 1990. Somigli, Luca, ‘‘Antonio Delfini tra nostalgia e satira,’’ in Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 14, no. 1 (2001): 20–35. Ungarelli, Giulio, Antonio Delfini fra memoria e sogno. Prove di lettura, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973.

DANIELE DEL GIUDICE (1949–) Along with Andrea De Carlo, Daniele Del Giudice is considered one of Italo Calvino’s most prominent disciples. Calvino, who launched their careers by writing an editorial note for the cover of their 598

first novels, recognized his literary legacy in their work. However, unlike De Carlo, who has been very prolific, Del Giudice has published few novels and short stories. He came to prominence with Lo

DANIELE DEL GIUDICE stadio di Wimbledon (Wimbledon Court, 1983), his debut novel, which takes up Calvino’s theme of visibilita` (visibility), or the quest for knowledge. The young unnamed protagonist tries to reconstruct the figure of a mysterious writer who left a small number of literary works—Roberto Bazlen (1902–1965), an eccentric Triestine intellectual of Jewish origins with a wide range of interests (including psychoanalysis) and a friend of Musil, Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale. The protagonist’s search starts in Trieste and ends in London. He does not find the answer to his question in the rare manuscripts he comes across but in meetings with a very close friend of Bazlen’s. By reconstructing Bazlen’s (literary) identity, the young man also finds himself. A similar quest for knowledge is at the heart of Del Giudice’s second novel, Atlante occidentale (Lines of Light, 1985), which focuses on the complex relationship between a famous writer and a young scientist. The names of the two protagonists Brahe and Epstein evoke other artists and scientists. As they gradually come to understand that their own approach to reality is too exclusive (their only shared interest is a passion for flying), they become aware of their complementarity, and, in accordance with Democritus’ theory of atoms, explore reality and its possible worlds. Del Giudice was a passionate traveler. Taccuino australe (Southern Notebook), an account of his journey over Patagonia to Antarctica, was published in 1997 as a six-part newspaper serial in Il corriere della sera and Frankfurter Allgemeine. Del Giudice’s other passion, flying, is the leitmotiv of Staccando l’ombra da terra (Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore, 1994), his first collection of short stories. The protagonists are less agents in the stories than observers or (in)direct witnesses. Their remoteness is counterbalanced by a subtle use of the familiar pronoun ‘‘tu’’ with which the narrator addresses himself, the protagonist, the other characters and the reader, sometimes simultaneously. The central theme of Staccando l’ombra da terra is death. This is probably most strikingly exemplified in ‘‘Unreported inbound Palermo’’ (in English in the original), a story that recreates the last minutes of the DC9 Alitalia crash on 27 June 1980 near the Sicilian island of Ustica, in which all passengers and crew members perished. ‘‘Unreported inbound Palermo’’ served as a basis for I-Tigi. Canto per Ustica (I-Tigi: Song for Ustica, 2001), a theater performance in which Del Giudice collaborated with the actor and playwright Marco Paolini. The performance piece alternates short textual fragments with

interludes, reconstructing both the disaster itself and the search for the true cause of the disaster. This truth was revealed only a decade later, thwarting the authorities’ attempt to conceal the fact that the plane was shot down during a NATO secret military exercise. Nel museo di Reims (In the Museum of Reims, 1983) questions the distinction between truth and lies in a different way. Set in the fine arts museum of Reims, the narrative consists of a dialogue between a young woman and a former pilot whose eyesight is deteriorating. The young woman proposes to describe the paintings to him, while in fact she is making things up. The pilot, who has seen the paintings she describes, knows she is deceiving him. Yet he plays along, which she senses in turn, so that the deceit is one they both participate in. Nereo Rotelli’s drawings, which play on a disconnection between form and content, are an integral part of the work, although they do not seem to relate to the text in any specific way. Critics have found it difficult to classify Nel museo di Reims as a novel or as a (long) short story. Critics do generally agree, however, that the short story is better suited to Del Giudice’s imagination. His work, Mania (Mania, 1997), a collection of short stories, has been widely praised for its stylistic qualities. Each of the six stories revolves around one ‘‘mania,’’ one obsession that inevitably leads to a surprising death. In the first story, ‘‘L’orecchio assoluto’’ (Perfect Pitch), the victim dies but not at the hands of his potential murderer. In ‘‘Evil Live,’’ a death occurs during a fight but the reader cannot be certain on what level of the story the character actually dies: It could be a virtual death since the characters are communicating via e-mail. A number of Calvino’s elements can be found in this collection, such as references to the theory of atoms, to mind mapping and the meaning of words (what Calvino called esattezza). These elements prove indeed to be constants in Del Giudice’s literary writings.

Biography Born in Rome, 11 July 1949. In the 1970s, worked with the alternative theater group of Grotowsky and the Nuova Scena. Since 1998, coordinator of Fondamenta. Venezia, citta` dei lettori, an annual literary event. He teaches Italian literature at the University of Venice. Contributed to various newspapers and journals, particularly Il corriere della sera. Has written on Zweig, Svevo, Stevenson, and Primo Levi. In 2002, the composer Alessandro Melchiorre adapted Del Giudice’s Atlante occidentale 599

DANIELE DEL GIUDICE into a radio play for RaiTre. He is a licensed pilot. He now lives mainly in Venice. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Fiction Lo stadio di Wimbledon, 1983. Atlante occidentale, 1985; as Lines of Light, translated by Norman MacAfee and Luigi Fontanella, 1998. Nel museo di Reims, 1988. Staccando l’ombra da terra, 1994; as Takeoff, translated by Joseph Farrell; rpt. as Takeoff: The Pilot’s Lore, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1997. Mania, 1997.

Other I-Tigi. Canto per Ustica (with Marco Paolini), 2001. Nel segno della parola, edited by Ivano Dionigi, 2005.

Further Reading Ammirati, Maria Pia, Il vizio di scrivere: Letture su Busi, De Carlo, Del Giudice, Pazzi, Tabucchi, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 1991. Camerino, Marinella Colummi, ‘‘Daniele Del Giudice: Narrazione del luogo, percezione della spazio,’’ in South Carolina Review, 14, no. 1 (1999): 61–81. Dolfi, Anna, and Peter Brand, ‘‘Daniele Del Giudice: Planimetry of Sight/Vision in Three Books,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘Le invasioni: una rivisitazione,’’ in Narrativa, 23 (2002): 167–176. Pireddu, Nicoletta, ‘‘Towards a Poet(h)ics of Techne: Primo Levi and Daniele Del Giudice,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 19 (2001): 189–214. Ricci, Franco, ‘‘Atlante occidentale: Daniele Del Giudice’s New Atlantis,’’ in Mosaic, 23, no. 1 (1990): 45–53. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo del ritorno. Dal romanzo medio degli anni sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990.

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA (1503–1556) Despite his prominent political and ecclesiastical career, Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa owes his fame to his literary works, which, thanks to his innate, exacting sensibility, he chooses not to publish during his lifetime. Della Casa’s writing is published by his secretary Erasmo Gemini and by his beloved nephew Annibale Rucellai. As a result, the dating and authenticity of many works is problematic, and some critics have recently called into question the attribution of large parts of his literary production. The first Venetian edition of Rime e prose (Lyric Poems and Prose, 1558) includes the Rime, the Orazione [...] scritta a Carlo V imperadore intorno alla restitutione della citta` di Piacenza (Oration [...] for Charles V, Emperor, in the Event of the Restoration of the City of Piacenza) and the Galateo (Galateo, A Renaissance Treatise on Manners). There follow various other publications, leading finally to the publication of his Opere in Naples in 1733; these six volumes represent the most complete collection of the author’s work. Among the works of Della Casa, the Galateo acquires, from the moment of its publication, unparalleled fame and fortune. The treatise is accompanied by works that explore the potentials of 600

various literary genres: composed in Latin and in the vernacular, in verse and in prose, these various endeavors are consistently approached with originality and a passion for experimentation. His vernacular works reflect the influence of classical literature; his didactic ones, the burlesque, creating a network of erudite references whose principal sources can be traced to the Ciceronian model, the humanistic rediscovery of the classics, and the Petrarchism of Pietro Bembo. Bembo is most likely the intermediary between Della Casa and the literary circle of Alvise Cornaro, a Venetian man of letters. The works produced by Cornaro’s group reflect a different yet analogous epicurean strategy, also markedly Petrarchist. Della Casa’s relationship with the Florentine Giovan Battista Gelli, author of the dialogues I capricci del bottaio (The Cooper’s Caprices, 1546) and the Circe (1549), is marked by a pedagogical spirit that is both shrewd and anticonformist. Some of Della Casa’s compositions, written during the unconventional period of his youth spent at the Accademia dei Vignaioli and inspired by the playful rhyming doggerel verse of Francesco Berni, have burlesque tones. These works include Sopra il

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA nome suo (On His Name), Del martello (On Hammers), Della stizza (On Anger), Del bacio (On the Kiss), and Sopra il forno (On the Oven), a metaphor for the female sexual organ. However, the first three were attributed to Mauro and published in Capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia et altri authori (1537); the others were instead published in Terze rime de M. Giovanni Della Casa di M. Bino et d’altri (1538). Most likely written between 1532 and 1537, these compositions are eventually repudiated by the author, who, referring to his years of bohemian life defines himself a poetuzzo di dozzina (a little poet of little importance) (‘‘Lettera di Casotti,’’ in Opere, 1733). The irreverence of these early works risks compromising the author’s prospects for an ecclesiastical career, and as a result they are definitively excluded from the body of the Rime. His lexical experimentation with a humble, allusive language and his exploration of the grotesque and subjects of low register exert an influence on later writings, from the vivid scenes that punctuate the Galateo to the everyday style that characterizes it. In spite of the presence of an undercurrent of dissent, the sixteenth century is above all the century of tutors and of the counterrevolution of the nobility. Didactic literature becomes ever more literary and specialized, a profound change from the preceding century; these changes lead to the elaboration of codes of secular behavior. Della Casa’s works are frequently marked by a distinctly didactic vein, with various connotations and ends. The didactic style often takes the form of an educational discourse addressed, for example, to the ‘‘young man’’ of the Galateo, to the ‘‘children’’ of the unfinished Trattato delle tre lingue, greca latina e toscana (Treatise on Three Languages, Greek, Latin, and Tuscan, 1728), or to the ‘‘adolescents’’ of An uxor sit ducenda (On Whether to Command One’s Wife). This last, an early misogynistic treatise in dialogue form, was first published in Naples in 1733. It explores one of the classic themes of Latin and Greek treatise writing, a theme investigated by Petrarch in An ducenda uxor et qualis (1362), and touched upon in markedly misogynist vernacular works like the Corbaccio (ca. 1356) by Boccaccio. These treatises for and against the female sex at times bear the author’s signature, thus revealing their purely rhetorical nature. Fully versed in the works of his illustrious predecessors, Della Casa’s An uxor sit ducenda adopts a thoroughly new approach to the theme, choosing a pleasing and subtly ironic tone and a conversational, facetious style. He concludes that marriage is a hindrance to those who intend to launch a

public career or engage in literary studies, according to a logic that favors the pre-eminence of the public over the private. This logic has important personal consequences for the author. On 12 March 1537, a week after the date deliberately given for the manuscript’s conclusion, Della Casa definitively embarks upon his ecclesiastical career and is named clergyman of the Camera Apostolica. The treatise thus takes the tone of a leave-taking and constitutes a retraction of the reckless life conducted in his youth. Its sporadic misogyny recalls the cruelty of certain of his early rhymes that describe the castrating power of the female figure; it also anticipates, however, some of the themes that will appear in the Galateo, such as the exaltation of friendship in contraposition to love. In more general terms, Della Casa begins to delineate the theme of the correct rapport between the Renaissance-era individual and his community by explaining certain rules of social interaction. The Trattato degli uffici communi (Treatise on Common Duty, 1559) is the vernacular translation of De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos. This work, inspired by Cicero’s De officiis, was probably written between 1537 and 1543 during the years of Della Casa’s most intense political engagement, although it was published for the first time in 1564. It attempts to furnish the reader with practical instructions on the correct way of commanding and serving and thus to harmoniously develop power relations. The treatise also brings to light the new values of bourgeois society, such as the functional differentiation of roles and the affirmation of the medium of money, an intervention against the ancient feudal systems. The Rime, published posthumously in Venice in 1558, consists of 70 sonnets and four canzoni. Benedetto Croce considers Della Casa’s Rime the most beautiful canzoniere of the sixteenth century, and Carlo Dionisotti calls it the most significant poetry to emerge between Ariosto and Tasso. In the Rime, there appear compositions of varying nature and inspiration. The poems in Latin are accompanied by poetry in the vernacular, written in the same years, in an attempt to equalize the Italian language and the expressive possibilities of Latin. Between echoes of vernacular poets (Jacopo Sannazaro, Giusto de’ Conti, Ludovico Ariosto, Lorenzo de’ Medici) and elegant classical influences, Della Casa uses stylistic elements, themes, and Petrarchan resonances to express a profound subjective restlessness, without abdicating rigorous formal elegance. The rhythm of Renaissance meter shatters in the face of expressive urgency, a 601

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA technique that anticipates important developments in Baroque literature. Over time, critical discussion of the Rime lingers ever more often on the sense of the crisis of an author defeated in his political and ecclesiastical career. To the Petrarchan model there is opposed the majesty of Pietro Bembo, of whom Della Casa is a favorite student. The influence of the former can be felt in the stylistic and lexical choices of the latter, and the axis of the work displaces itself toward less elegiac themes such as fame, ambition, and virtue. Della Casa also dedicates Petri Bembi Vita (Life of Pietro Bembo, 1564) to Bembo, and the biography of the master becomes a literary expedient by which to introduce themes of a markedly autobiographic nature. Another current of Della Casa’s work is represented by the oratory. This includes the Orazione seconda per la Lega (The Second Oration for the Lega), composed during a mission as papal nuncio to Venice to convince the Republic to adhere to the alliance with the Farnese family and Henry II of France against Charles V; another example is the Orazione [...] scritta a Carlo V imperadore intorno alla restitutione della citta` di Piacenza, written after the failure of the previous project in the hopes of restoring the ties between Rome and France. These works are practically contemporary, dated 1547–1548 and 1548 respectively, and probably represent literary transpositions of speeches that were actually delivered. The classical stylistic elements of Ciceronian oratory are used, translated into the vernacular. Beyond the rhetorical exercise there emerges the author’s evident desire for political success: the reason of state and Della Casa’s personal political ends are veiled behind artificial moral precepts that frequently contradict one another. The didactic vein becomes manifest in his masterpiece, the Galateo, composed between 1551 and 1554. The work addresses itself to the youth of the upper classes, to whom it intends to furnish the necessary means for obtaining success. In the spirit of modernity, Della Casa describes morality as merely a reflection of society, an instrument to safeguard its insurmountable social hierarchies. The same didactic intent animates the Lettere (Letters, 1728–1729) to Annibale and Pandolfo Rucellai, written in affable, familiar tones. The eminently literary character of the correspondence is made evident by the lack of missives received in response to Della Casa’s letters, and by the asymmetry between the sender and the receiver. Notwithstanding this fact, the last letter, composed when Annibale had already declared his own autonomy, veers 602

toward a less rhetorical, more eloquent style. The Oratio funebris, written for the death of Prevesa, is also worthy of note, as is the Dissertatio adversus Paulum Vergerium (Discourse Against Paolo Vergerio), written by Della Casa after 1553 in order to prove himself innocent of the accusations waged against him by Paolo Vergerio, bishop of Capodistria, during his fight against the heretics. In the same years he composes the Gaspari Contareni Vita (1564), a laudatory biography of his friend, Gaspare Contarini, patrician and man of letters. In this work, Della Casa delineates the multifaceted personality of a diplomat dedicated to the cause of Rome, consistent with his own ideals and the political action as a defender of the papacy against heretics and protests.

Biography Born in Florence or in the Mugello, 28 June 1503; studied in Florence with Ubaldino Bandinelli, and later in Bologna, where he entered the Goliardic circles and met Pietro Bembo. Moved to Rome in 1534, where he frequented the Accademia dei Vignaioli, through which he met Francesco Berni and Agnolo Firenzuola. On the recommendation of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, his protector, embarked on an ecclesiastical career as cleric of the Camera Apostolica; took orders in 1551. In 1554, Farnese, by then Pope Paolo III, named him archbishop of Benevento and sent him as papal nuncio to Venice. In this period, Della Casa played an intensely repressive role as a representative of the tribunal of the Inquisition in Veneto and styled the Catalogo dei libri proibiti (of which he would later be a victim). The new Pope Giulio III did not grant him his favor; withdrew to a private life in Venice, and moved to the Abbey of Nervesa, near Treviso, 1553. Paolo IV Carafa called him to Rome to serve as secretary of state, but did not make him cardinal, 1555. Died 14 November 1556 in Montepulciano or Rome. ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI Selected Works Collections Capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia et altri autori, Venice: Curtio Navo`, 1537. Tutte le opere del Bernia in terza rima, nuovamente con somma diligentia stampate, Venice: Curtio Navo`, 1538; as Terze rime de M. Giovanni Della Casa di M. Bino et d’altri; as Fifteen Fourteeners, edited and translated by Rudolf B. Gottfried, Bloomington: Gottfried,

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA 1979; as Giovanni Della Casa’s Poem Book: Ioannis Casae carminum liber, edited and translated by John B. Van Sickle, Tempe, AZ: Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999. Rime e prose, Venice: Nicolo` Bevilacqua, 1558 (includes Rime, Orazione [...] scritta a Carlo V imperadore intorno alla restitutione della citta` di Piacenza, Galateo). Latina Monimenta, Florence: Giunta, 1564 (includes Petri Bembi vita, De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos, Gaspari Contareni Vita). Latina monimenta, Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1567. Prose, edited by Gilles Me´nage, Paris: Tomaso Iolly, 1667 (includes Orazione seconda per la Lega). Opere, 5 vols., Venice: Pasinello, 1728–1729 (includes letters to Annibale and Pandolfo Rucellai). Opere, 6 vols., Naples, 1733 (includes An Uxor sit ducenda); edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, Milan-Rome: Rizzoli, 1937. Prose scelte e annotate, edited by Severino Ferrari, Florence: Sansoni, 1900. Rime, edited by Daniele Ponchiroli, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Prose di Giovanni della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del Comportamento; edited by Arnaldo Di Benedetto, Turin: UTET, 1970. Rime. Appendice: Frammento sulle lingue, edited by Roberto Fedi, Milan: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1993. Rime, edited by Giuliano Tanturli, Milan: Fondazione Pietro Bembo, 2001. Rime, edited by Stefano Carrai, Turin: Einaudi, 2003.

Bullock, W. L., ‘‘The Lyric Innovations of G. Della Casa,’’ in PLMA, vol. 41 (1926): 82–90. Caretti, Lanfranco, ‘‘Della Casa, uomo politico e scrittore,’’ in Filologia e critica: Studi di letteratura italiana, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1955. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte: considerazioni teorico-storiche, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Dionisotti, Carlo (editor), Pietro Bembo, Prose e rime, Turin: UTET, 1960. Romei, Danilo, Berni e i berneschi del Cinquecento, Florence: Edizioni Centro 2P, 1984. Santosuosso, Antonio, The Bibliography of Giovanni Della Casa: Books, Readers and Critics, 1537–1975, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Santosuosso, Antonio, Vita di Giovanni Della Casa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Sole, Antonino, Cognizione del reale e letteratura in Giovanni Della Casa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981.

GALATEO, 1558 Treatise by Giovanni Della Casa

Treatises Galateo, 1558; as Galateo, a Renaissance Treatise on Manners, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986; as Galateo of Manners and Behaviours, translated by Robert Peterson, Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1997. Trattato degli uffici communi, 1559 (vernacular edition of De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos). An uxor sit ducenda, 1564.

Letters Lettere, 1728–1729. Lettere di Monsig. Giovanni della Casa arcivescovo di Benevento a Carlo Gualteruzzi da Fano cavate da un manoscritto originale barberino e pubblicate la prima volta per la stampa da Luigi Maria Rezzi, 1824. Corrispondenza Giovanni Della Casa-Carlo Gualteruzzi, edited by Ornella Moroni, 1987.

Other Petri Bembi Vita, 1564. Orazioni scelte del secolo XVI, 1897. A Vittorio Cian i suoi scolari dell’Universita` di Pisa, Pisa: Mariotti, 1909 (includes Istruzione al Cardinale Scipione Rebida, legato a Carlo V e Filippo II per indurli alla pace con Enrico II, scritta in nome di Paolo IV ).

Further Reading Barbarisi, Gennaro, and Claudia Berra (editors), Per Giovanni Della Casa, Bologna: Cisalpino, 1997. Braudel, Fernand, Me´diterrane´e et le monde me´diterrane´en a` l’e´poque de Philippe II, Paris: Colin, 1949.

The Galateo was composed between 1551 and 1554, first in Venice and later at the Abbey of Nervesa sul Montello (Treviso), to which Della Casa retired after having failed to attain the purple robes of cardinal. However, the treatise was only published posthumously in 1558 in Venice in the volume Rime e prose, and according to some critics its abrupt ending suggests that it is incomplete. The Galateo presents itself as a series of lessons furnished by an ‘‘old idiot,’’ an illiterate man, to a young disciple, in whom is probably concealed the figure of the author’s nephew, Annibale Rucellai. The work is dedicated to and titled for the bishop of Aquino, Galeazzo Florimonte (in Latin Galatheus), who suggested that Della Casa compose a treatise on good manners. This literary fictional framework serves as a background for 30 chapters, in which the author reviews examples (mostly practical) of behaviors that are acceptable or contemptible. In the spirit of modernity, the author examines for the first time minute, ordinary actions and modes of behavior, such as dress, conversation, ceremonies, witticisms, education, behavior at the table, and bodily expressions, from yawning to singing. The exposition follows the ascending canonical model, from behaviors that 603

GIOVANNI DELLA CASA offend the body to those against morals and reason. Good manners have profoundly ethical implications, because they are equivalent or analogous to virtues, but they also reflect the fate of individuals and can lead to fortune. The rules enumerated by Della Casa are immediately understandable and usable and represent an original contribution to the didactic literature of the day: His treatise is no longer addressed to the closed world of the court, as is the Cortegiano of Baldassarre Castiglione, but rather to a wider community, a sort of cheerful company regulated by a harmonious collective life. The social openness of the discourse is reflected in the literary expedient of the old illiterate man who teaches the young ignorant man, a paradigm of the transmission between classes of savoir-faire, a valuable instrument of affirmation in the world of social competition. The rules are marked by the Renaissance ideal of measure, which lies at the base of concepts of good and beauty; they are equivalent, in practical terms, to fare le cose mezzanamente, (doing things with measure) against the excesses of individualism, greediness, and the affectation of the ceremonious. From the world of ideas, morality is transported into the everyday life of the streets: The humanist ideal of perfection gives way instead to the abomination of boredom and the minimalism of the ‘‘standard of repugnance’’ (Norbert Elias, La Civilisation des moeurs, 1973). Among the reasons for the Galateo’s success is its agile and varied style, in which there alternate low and high registers, philosophical considerations and sketches. The treatise was composed in a lighthearted and private key: a pleasing colloquial style, elegantly fluid, which restored Tuscany’s linguistic primacy. The discourse is enlivened by vivid caricature-like portraits, which stigmatize, by means of hyperbole, certain reprehensible behaviors. The cultured substratum is hidden under a veil of modesty and irony, which ably uses the playful mask of the ‘‘old idiot.’’ Thanks to this expedient, Della Casa is able to give a new perspective to the conversation, establishing a dynamic of alienation between narrator and author. Aside from stylistic license, this perspective also explains a certain structural weakness and the imprecision of certain discursive junctions, which seem to ignore the canonical rules of dialectics and rhetoric. The work is above all indebted to Cicero’s De officiis for its general foundation, and to Boccaccio’s Decameron, to which the author often implicitly refers, especially with reference to the frame 604

and to the so-called novelle cortesi, the novellas that deal with good manners. The Florentine writer is a master also of style for his attempt to reassemble the fracture between the oral and the written. The work’s fortune was immediate and proverbial: The Galateo entered rapidly into collective tradition and became the foundation for a revived literary genre. The treatise was edited 38 times before the end of the century and already in the sixteenth century was translated into numerous European languages. Benedetto Croce considers it a fundamental book that Italy gave to the rest of the world, while Giacomo Leopardi connects it to the Decameron. Norbert Elias, Giovanni Della Casa, and Niccolo` Machiavelli are among the protagonists of the process of civilization that is the background for the state-making process of the first modern age, founded on the dialectic between civil reason and political reason, authority and moderation. ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI Editions First edition: in Rime et prose, Venice: Nicolo` Bevilacqua, 1558. Critical editions: in Opere: Baldassar Castiglione, Giovanni Della Casa, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, MilanRome: Rizzoli, 1937; as Galateo, ovvero de’ costumi, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan: Mursia, 1971; as Galateo, overo De’ costumi, edited by Emanuela Scarza, Modena: Panini, 1990; as Galateo, edited by Gennaro Barbarisi, Venice: Barbarisi, 1991; edited by Carlo Ossola, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Translations: as Galateo, translated by Robert Peterson, London: Raufe Newbery, 1576; as Galateo; or, A Treatise on Politeness and Delicacy of Manners: From the Italian of Monsig. Giovanni de la Casa...also, The Honours of the Table, with the Whole Art of Carving, Illustrated with a Variety of Cuts, Baltimore, MD: G. Hill, 1811; as Galateo, A Renaissance Treatise on Manners, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Kenneth R. Bartlett, Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1986; as Galateo of Manners and Behaviours, translated by Robert Peterson, Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1997.

Further Reading Berger, Harry, The Absence of Grace, Sprezzatura and Suspicion in Two Renaissance Courtesy Books, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Bertelli, Sergio, and Giuliano Crifo` (editors), Rituale, cerimoniale, etichetta, Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Cortini, Maria Antonietta, Et in udendo il silentio: Una lettura del Galateo, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte: considerazioni teorico-storiche, Bari: Laterza, 1929.

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA Elias, Norbert, La Civilisation des moeurs, Paris: ColmannLe´vy, 1973. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Montanari Massimo (editors), Storia dell’alimentazione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997. Garin, Eugenio, Il pensiero pedagogico dell’Umanesimo, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Leopardi, Giacomo, Crestomazia italiana, Milan: Stella, 1827.

Macchia, Giovanni, ‘‘L’amara scienza,’’ in Saggi italiani, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Ossola, Carlo (editor), ‘‘Introduzione’’ to G. Della Casa, in Galateo, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Tinivella, Giovanni, Il Galateo di Mons. Giovanni della Casa e il suo significato filosofico- pedagogico nell’eta` del Rinascimento, con la riproduzione del testo, Milan: Hoepli, 1949.

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA (1535–1615) Giambattista Della Porta was a scientist and man of letters who wrote a great number of studies on magnetism, astrology, zoology, botany, and above all alchemy and magic. Particularly important are his studies and experiments in optics: He created a system of lenses for the camera obscura that can be considered a prototype for the camera. He was also a pioneer in the use of several lenses working together. He declared himself the inventor of the telescope, engaging in controversy with the much better known Italian physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Among the many who supported him was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler. In his research, Della Porta was always attracted to unusual and prodigious facts. His peculiar approach to science resulted in a series of works that Luisa Muraro has called ‘‘scienza dell’esagerazione’’ or exaggeration science (Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, 1978). In line with his philosophical thought and alchemic activity, Della Porta considered nature as a harmonious balance between heavenly and earthly forces, between the cosmos and microcosm. These beliefs caused problems with the church. The Accademia dei Segreti, founded by Della Porta to discuss the secrets of nature, was suppressed by the Roman Inquisition in 1578. In one of his major works, Magiae naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium (Natural Magic, or on the Miracles of Nature), published in 1558 in four volumes and then re-edited in 1589, he describes astonishing natural manifestations as phenomena that are controlled by a rational order and thus can be influenced and manipulated by philosophical

thought. These views strongly influenced his literary production, and in fact his texts are frequently imbued with a Neoplatonic conception of the world. He was certainly in contact with Giordano Bruno, and although it cannot be proven that he ever had direct relations with Marsilio Ficino’s Neoplatonic Academy (even though he did have connections with the Florentine cultural environment), there are convergences and similarities in their philosophical thought. In 1610, Della Porta also took part in the reconstitution of the Accademia dei Lincei, and in 1611 he established in Naples the Accademia degli Oziosi, another literary society. In literature, the name of Della Porta is associated mostly with an interesting and extensive series of comedies, of which only 14 of 29 survive. Most of these works were written between 1589 and 1614, but they were never staged because they were prohibited by the Inquisition. Although often hailed as a brilliant playwright, Della Porta is also accused of being disorganized and coarse, probably because his comedies cannot be classified within a well-codified genre and because of their compromises with the conventions of the Commedia dell’arte. Moreover, his comic plots (generally limited in invention and often borrowed from Plautus or from the novelistic tradition) rely more on stage effects and mechanisms than on dramatic logic. It has therefore been easy to dismiss the comedies, in line with the opinion of the author himself, who defined them as youthful games. While they may be not quite as interesting as Della Porta’s works on physics and magic, they reflect a relationship between the two aspects of Della Porta’s literary and 605

GIAMBATTISTA DELLA PORTA scientific production. For example, La fantesca (The Maid, 1592) is a very complicated play, involving equivocations, misunderstandings, and disguises, whose plot developments cannot be understood apart from an alchemical theory of feelings. The comedy does not denounce certain social classes or cast an ironic eye upon them, as do similar works of the same period; instead their attention is focused upon the sentiments of the protagonist. La fantesca is the story of Essandro, a young boy who courts Cleria when he is dressed as a man, but disguised as a girl and pretending to be Cleria’s maid, he plays the role of messenger and mediator between Cleria and Essandro, that is, himself. The complicated plots in Della Porta’s theater are also enhanced by the extraordinary eloquence of his characters, especially the women. In the Tuscan tradition of the time, female characters were generally given very small parts. That said, the passions and their alchemy are the real hinge of the plays, and as such the characters’ rhetorical skills are used to further express this central theme. Among the comedies, the best known is probably L’Olimpia (Olympia, 1589). It has many of the characteristics of La fantesca, relying as it does on equivocations and disguises: Teodosio and his son Eugenio, after a long period of imprisonment by the Turks, are engaged to impersonate themselves in their house. Della Porta is also the author of a few tragedies, including La Penelope (1591) and Il Georgio (1611), a play on a religious subject, but these are considered less interesting than his comic work. The interest of Della Porta’s comedies in fact lies not only in the influence they exerted on the tradition of the Commedia dell’arte and even on Molie`re and Goldoni, but also in his skill in mixing the style and the techniques of the Commedia dell’arte with the structures of literary comedy and with models from the Roman tradition. This blending of different genres, already tried during the sixteenth century by other dramatists, was the way chosen by many contemporary playwrights to renew the dramaturgy and the theatrical techniques of the time.

Biography Born in Naples on November 15, 1535, to a noble family. Traveled widely in Italy, France, and Spain, but remained firmly rooted in Naples. Little is known about his education, but was probably self-taught. The Inquisition examined him and forced him to disband his Accademia dei Segreti, 1578. Cardinal Luigi d’Este invited Della Porta to 606

join his household in Rome, where he wrote several comedies, 1579. Moved to Venice, to Ferrara, and, in 1581, back to Naples. Joined the Jesuit order, 1585. In 1592, further publications of his works were prohibited, even though the restriction seems not to have included his literary works; the ban was lifted in 1598. Member of the Accademia dei Lincei, 1610. Died in Naples on February 4, 1615. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Le commedie, edited by Vincenzo Spampanato, 2 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1910–1911. Teatro, edited by Raffaele Sirri, 2 vols., Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1980–1985. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giovan Battista Della Porta, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996–.

Plays L’Olimpia, 1589. La Penelope, 1591. La fantesca, 1592. La trappolaria, 1596. La carbonaria, 1601. La Cintia, 1601. Gli duoi fratelli rivali, 1601; as The Two Rival Brothers, translated by Louise G. Clubb, 1980. La sorella, 1604; as The Sister, translated by Donald Beecher and Bruno Ferraro, 2005. La turca, 1606. Lo Astrologo, 1606. Il Moro, 1607. La chiapparina, 1609. La furiosa, 1609. Il Georgio, 1611. I duo fratelli simili, 1614. La tabernaria, 1616.

Treatises Magiae naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium, 4 vols., 1558; expanded edition, 20 vols., 1589. De furtivis literarum notis, vulgo` De ziferis, 1563. L’arte del ricordare, 1566. De humana physiognomonia, 1586. De refractione optices parte, 1593. Coelestis physiognomonia, 1603; critical edition by Alfonso Paolella, 1996. De distillatione, 1608. De aeris transmutationaibus, 1610; critical edition by Alfonso Paolella, 2000.

Further Reading Balbiani, Laura, La Magia naturalis di Giovan Battista Della Porta: lingua, cultura e scienza in Europa all’inizio dell’eta` moderna, New York: Lang, 2001. Borsellino, Nino, Introduction to Commedie del Cinquecento, vol. 1, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962.

FEDERICO DELLA VALLE Clubb, Louise G., Giambattista Della Porta, Dramatist, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. De Martino, Ernesto (editor), Magia e civilta`, Milan: Garzanti, 1962. Magli, Patrizia, Il volto e l’anima, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Montanile, Milena (editor), L’Edizione nazionale del teatro e l’opera di G.B. Della Porta: atti del convegno, Salerno, 23 maggio 2002, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2004.

Muraro, Luisa, Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘Dal Candelaio di Giordano Bruno a Lo Astrologo di Giovan Battista Della Porta,’’ in Teatri barocchi: Tragedie, commedie, pastorali nella drammaturgia europea fra ‘500 e ‘600, edited by Silvia Carandini, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Rosen, Edward, The Naming of the Telescope, New York: Henry Schuman, 1947.

FEDERICO DELLA VALLE (CA. 1560–1628) The literary activity of Federico Della Valle, considered to be the greatest Italian tragedian of the seventeenth century, is summed up by the four plays that he wrote for the courtly theater, as the rest of his production was limited to a few verses composed for royal weddings and other official events or to honor prelates and members of the nobility, and to some occasional orations. Indeed, even his theatrical works were in fact completely forgotten for about three centuries, and were rediscovered only in 1929 by Benedetto Croce. Della Valle’s first tragicomedy Adelonda di Frigia (Adelonda of Phrygia), staged in 1595 but published posthumously in 1629, is a reworking in blank verse of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris. Along with the later tragedies Judit (Judith) and Ester (Esther), based on biblical subjects and published together in 1627, and La Reina di Scozia (The Queen of Scotland, 1628) assured him a pre-eminent position as a beloved dramatist of the Counter-Reformation. Della Valle’s importance lies in his cleverness in fulfilling the needs of the courts of this period. Throughout the sixteenth century the production of new tragedies had been in a profound crisis, but Della Valle, who interpreted the reform and theoretical ideas formulated by Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio in his Discorso ovvero lettera intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie (On the Composition of Comedies and Tragedies, 1554), was able to adapt the genre to the tastes of the Baroque period. He restored some of the characteristics of classical Roman tragedy, and chose Seneca in particular as his model. As a result, his tragedies are all

characterized by an almost morbid insistence on cruel scenes, blood, violence and sometimes, as in Judit, by an atmosphere of turbid sensuality. As Ester in the eponymous tragedy, Judit is a heroine viewed as an instrument of divine ineluctable forces. The contemplation of death is a central motif, in accordance to the guidelines of Baroque tragic theater as a whole. Indeed, death is analyzed in its different manifestations: the glorifying death, as well as the redeeming or sacrificial death, according to the principle that the more the scene insists on it, showing it in great detail, the stronger the cathartic effect will be. Certain other themes can be easily recognized in Della Valle’s tragic production: the observation of any situation from a religious perspective and human beings often pitted against the inscrutable powers of divine will; the precariousness of life; and generally the absence of feelings of hope and trust. Moreover, this sense of the precariousness of individual life is related to another motif, that of power and its demands, which is expressed in the conflict between the individual and politics or the superior interests of the reason of state. This particular point relates Della Valle to his contemporaries in two ways: On the one hand, Baroque culture (tragedies written for the courts) often dealt with these same matters; on the other, tragedies show direct or indirect references to the facts of the period. For example, La Reina di Scozia, originally written in 1591 and redrafted in 1595 before its definite version of 1628, stages the final hours of Mary Stuart before being beheaded in 1587 upon orders by 607

FEDERICO DELLA VALLE Elizabeth I. The last day in prison of the Catholic Queen of Scots is represented as a preparation to martyrdom, in which Mary’s fragile humanity is brought out to great effect. Through the alternation of seven-syllable and 11-syllable live, Della Valle captures the progression of the queen’s emotions, offering a psychological portrayal of the inner dynamics at work between the historical milieu and Christian faith. Della Valle’s tragedies often focus on women protagonists. The plots are most commonly structured around the figure of the oxymoron, in which two characters embody the opposite forces that govern them and over which they have no control. There is often little psychological introspection and the unfolding of the events is rather driven by this opposition. However, in their climactic scenes, characters are choreographed on the stage in a very visual way. Both La Reina di Scozia and Judit are overtly connected with the paintings of the times, another element that stresses how Della Valle belonged to Baroque culture, which emphasizes the visual arts. Della Valle’s theater is predominantly spectacular, and the author sometimes appears to take pleasure in exposing the suffering bodies of his heroines, while simultaneously idealizing their beauty. The signs of such a strong pictorial influence can also be traced in the selection of tragic themes, such as the sensual eroticism that inspires the plot of Judit: The scene, when the minister of the Assyrian general Holofernes spies on the naked Judit, is clearly indebted to the iconography of the biblical story of ‘‘Susan at the bath,’’ with its exotic setting, Oriental furniture and ornaments. The heroine, who will seduce and kill Holofernes in order to save her village, becomes the instrument of a positive strength and of a divine plan of redemption.

Biography Little is known about Federico Della Valle’s life, and even the dates of birth and death are uncertain. Born in Langhe, near Asti, ca. 1560. From 1587 spent several years in Turin, but despite the fact that he served Duchess Caterina of Savoy, wife of Carlo Emanuele I, he never became a true courtier.

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Moved to Milan, where he was employed by the Spanish governor, 1608. Died probably in Milan, in 1628. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Prose, edited by Luigi Firpo, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1964. Tragedie, edited by Andrea Gareffi, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Opere, edited by Maria Gabriella Stassi, Turin: UTET, 1995. Opere, edited by Matteo Durante, 2 vols., Messina: Sicania, 2000–2005.

Tragedies Ester et Judit, 1627. La Reina di Scozia, 1628. Adelonda di Frigia (1595), 1629.

Orations Nelle essequie di Filippo III, 1621. Nelle essequie della Duchessa di Feria, 1623.

Further Reading Bianchi, Alessandro, ‘‘Il dolore che uccide e la femminilita` pericolosa nell’’Adelonda di Frigia’ di Federico Della Valle,’’ in Lettere Italiane, 54, no. 2 (2002): 242–261. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Le tragedie di Federigo della Valle di Asti,’’ in La critica, 27 (1929): 377–397. Croce, Franco, Federico della Valle, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1965. Doglio, Federico, Teatro tragico italiano, Parma: Guanda, 1972. Doglio, Federico (editor), Il teatro e la Bibbia, Roma: Garamond, 1995. Gasparini, Giammaria (editor), La tragedia classica dalle origini al Maffei, Turin: UTET, 1963. Phillips, James E., Images of a Queen: Mary Stuart in Sixteenth Century Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. Raffaelli, Sergio, Semantica tragica di Federico Della Valle, Padua: Liviana, 1973. Raffaelli, Sergio, Aspetti della lingua e dello stile in Federico Della Valle, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Sanguineti White, Laura, Dal detto alla figura. Le tragedie di Federico Della Valle, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Tessari, Roberto, ‘‘La Iudit di Della Valle: pitture di ‘sperati diletti,’’’ in Teatro barocchi, edited by Silvia Carandini, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000.

ERRI DE LUCA

ERRI DE LUCA (1950–) An outsider in contemporary Italian literature, Erri De Luca has deliberately kept his distance from the literary scene, with which he feels little or no affinity. Unlike many of his colleagues who combine their literary activity with a teaching post in secondary education or at the university, he divided his time until his retirement between writing and various forms of manual labor, including working for car manufacturer Fiat, as a bricklayer, and as a truck driver. De Luca is self-taught in various languages, among them Yiddish and Hebrew, which he learned in order to read the Old Testament in the original (an activity that he does daily for about an hour). Although he is not a religious man, since 1994 he has shared his reading experience by translating several books of the Bible into Italian. For him, the translation of sacred texts requires a strictly literal rendering of the words into the target language, without overlaying his interpretation upon it. He has also written several essays based on his work on the Bible, including Una nuvola come tappeto (A Cloud as Carpet, 1991), widely acclaimed for its innovative approach by laymen and scholars alike, and Nocciolo d’oliva (Olive Pit, 2002). De Luca ended his formal education as a result of the political situation at the end of the 1960s. Feeling that it was his duty to participate actively in the workers’ struggle for better working conditions, the so-called operaismo, he joined the leftwing movement Lotta continua in 1968. This experience is central to his current literary activity. For instance, he has regularly participated in the ongoing debate on the imprisonment of the historic leader of Lotta continua, Adriano Sofri, with articles that have been controversial. Aceto, arcobaleno (Vinegar, Rainbow, 1992), a collection of short stories, also draws upon De Luca’s political past. As the main characters look back on the events of the 1960s and 1970s and try to establish the role that they played, one of them declares that he feels no regrets for the murders he committed since he cannot undo the harm. De Luca strongly believes in the irreversibility of actions or deeds and the irrelevance of regret. At best, one can only learn lessons for the future from one’s experiences. The theme of the intertwining of personal life and the larger canvas of historical events is central to many

of De Luca’s works of fiction, including the novel Tu, mio (Sea of Memory, 1998), the protagonist of which is an adolescent who decides to avenge the innocent victims of the Holocaust. However, he does not immediately realize the impact of history on individual existences because he lacks the means to understand it. These means are offered to him by an old fisherman and a Jewish girl with whom he falls in love, and consist of words and stories, as well as signs and traces signaling the unspoken, imprints of what is no longer there. The most striking example is a scar left by a fish bite that assumes the form of the first letter of the Hebrew word for ‘‘sign’’ and ‘‘father’’ and brings to life the girl’s father and his story. The mark thus unites two temporal dimensions, present and past, and must be read on a metonymic and metaphoric level. Reading signs is not the only way in which questions are resolved in De Luca’s fiction. The characters—and with them the reader—have to interpret the silence of the protagonists who are affected by an incapacity to communicate, often epitomized by a physical speech defect. Whereas in his poetry De Luca occasionally venerates the mother figure, as in the poem that opens the collection of short stories Il contrario di uno (The Opposite of One, 2003), in the fiction the protagonists’ relationship with their parents is usually highly problematic and a symptom of a greater existential incommunicability and solitude. In his first novel, the autobiographical Non ora, non qui (Not Here, Not Now, 1989), the mother silences the already silent son whenever he tries to reach out for her. No contact seems possible during mortal life, and it is only a visual sign, a photograph, that can bring back the woman after her death. His dense and highly refined style is as cryptic as the content of the novels, while their epigraphs and titles are selected with great care. The deciphering process could be compared to the reading of a text in Hebrew, whose written form lacks symbols for vowels. His 2005 work, Sulla traccia di Nives (On Nives’ Trail, 2005), is a dialogue between Nives Meroi (1961–), the well-known Italian alpinist who climbs with no oxygen equipment in order to maintain and develop a pure relationship with nature, and 609

ERRI DE LUCA the author, a passionate alpinist himself. Their conversation, barely interrupted by short fragments, does not focus so much on Meroi’s astonishing achievements as on her passion for climbing, on the challenges and difficulties of the pure form of alpinism to which she adheres, and on life in general. Her thoughts alternate with Erri De Luca’s own observations, in a fragmented and autobiographical text that, like many of the author’s works, crosses and blurs genre boundaries and defies simple definitions.

Biography Born in Naples in 1950 in a middle-class family. Studied classics at secondary school. Abandoned school to join the left-wing movement Lotta continua, 1968. Involved in the occupation of the Fiat Mirafiori factory in Turin, as a result of which he lost his job at Fiat, 1980. Held several manual jobs in Italy, France, and Africa, where he spent some time as a volunteer in Tanzania and contracted malaria. During the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, he volunteered to drive goods into the Bosnian war zone. Works for Il Manifesto and other newspapers. Currently resides in Rome. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Fiction Non ora non qui, 1989. Aceto, arcobaleno, 1992. I colpi dei sensi, 1993. In alto e sinistra, 1994. Tu, mio, 1998; as Sea of Memory, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, 1999. Tre cavalli, 1999; as Three Horses, translated by Michael Moore, 2003. Montedidio, 2001; as God’s Mountain, translated by Michael Moore, 2002. Il contrario di uno, 2003. Morso di luna nuova: Racconto per voci in tre stanze, 2005. Sulle tracce di Nives, 2005.

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Poetry ‘‘Opera sull’acqua e altre poesie,’’ 2002. ‘‘Solo andata. Righe che vanno troppo spesso a capo,’’ 2005.

Theater L’ultimo viaggio di Sinbad, 2003.

Nonfiction Una nuvola come tappeto, 1991. Alzaia, 1997. Come noi coi fantasmi: lettere sull’anno sessantottesimo del secolo tra due che erano giovani in tempo, with Angelo Bolaffi, 1998. Un papavero rosso all’occhiello senza coglierne il fiore, 2000. Altre prove di risposta, 2000. Lettere da una citta` bruciata, 2002. Nocciolo d’oliva, 2002. Mestieri all’aria aperta: pastori e pescatori nell’Antico e nel Nuovo Testamento, 2004.

Translations Esodo/Nomi, 1994. Giona/Iona`, 1995. Kohe`let/Ecclesiaste, 1996. Libro di Rut, 1999. Vita di Sansone: dal libro Giudici/Shoftı`m, capitoli 13, 14, 15, 16, 2002. Vita di Noe`/No`ah: il salvagente: dal libro Genesi/Bereshit, 2004.

Further Reading Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Narrare Napoli, anni Cinquanta: Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca,’’ in Narrativa, 24 (2003): 159–172. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘Il silenzio in Erri De Luca: spazio e tempo differiti,’’ in Nuove tendenze della letteratura italiana, edited by Marie-He´le`ne Caspar, Paris: Universite´ Paris X-Nanterre, 1996. Scuderi, Attilio, Erri De Luca, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2002. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘Struck by Silence: A Reading of Erri de Luca’s I colpi dei sensi,’’ in Italica, 78, no. 3 (2001): 367–386. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘A Balanced Displacement: Images of Vision and Silence in Erri De Luca’s Non ora, non qui,’’ in Forum Italicum, 35, no. 2 (2001): 383–402. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘Embodying the Past: Vocal Transubstantiation in Erri De Luca’s Tu, Mio,’’ in The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, edited by Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Swennen Ruthenberg, Myriam (editor), Scrivere sulla polvere: saggi su Erri De Luca, Pisa: ETS, 2005.

EMILIO DE MARCHI

EMILIO DE MARCHI (1851–1901) The conflict between writing as a vocational mission and the emerging trends in the cultural industry divided the intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century. In his novels, published first as serials in the literary magazines and daily newspapers for which he wrote throughout his life, Milanese Emilio De Marchi tried to reconcile an educational message with the successful structure of the feuilleton. Among his best known works, Il cappello del prete (The Priest’s Hat, 1888) utilizes the techniques of popular fiction and of the burgeoning mystery novels to hold the reader’s interest. Set in Naples, it tells the story of the murder of Father Cirillo committed by a petty aristocrat, the Baron of Santafusca, who seems beyond reproach. However, racked with remorse, he confesses to the crime before killing himself. This novel is also important in Italian publishing history, as its publication was preceded by a sophisticated and unprecedented advertising campaign in which huge posters featuring an enormous mysterious hat were plastered all over Milan. De Marchi’s narratives focus on poor individuals who are unable to realize their dreams and end up defeated in a depraved society. The works of Alessandro Manzoni and the literary tradition of Lombardy form the background of Demetrio Pianelli (1890), set in a bleak, cruel Milan soaked in rain and injustice. Cesarino Pianelli, a clerk, steals money from his office to provide his beloved wife, the beautiful but vain Beatrice, with the lively social life that he wants her to live. Unable to put the money back, he saves his honor by hanging himself and leaving his family in the care of his half-brother Demetrio. A clerk himself, dedicated to work, decency and humility, soon Demetrio falls in love with Beatrice and ruins himself to save her and her children. Just as he starts packing his humble things to leave Milan forever, Beatrice marries a rich farmer. The themes of the femme fatale, honor, and suicide enabled De Marchi to keep his audience eagerly reading, especially when the novel was first serialized as La bella pigotta (The Beautiful Doll) in the magazine L’Italia in 1888. However, the general atmosphere pervading the novel is one of grayness and unspoken despair, and the protagonist loses everything in spite—or more likely because—of his goodness.

Another doomed figure is the title character of Arabella (1893), the story of Beatrice’s daughter and Demetrio’s niece. Tormented by the memory and pain of her father’s suicide, Arabella decides to become a nun and rescue Cesarino’s lost soul, but the financial distress of her mother’s new family forces her to marry the debauched Lorenzo, son of the ruthless businessman Tonino Maccagno, who shows her an ambiguous fatherly love. Arabella, too, is the victim of another man’s crime: She first loses the baby that she is expecting and then dies as a consequence of Maccagno’s actions. Even more than in Demetrio Pianelli, in Arabella De Marchi’s descriptions of minor characters demonstrate the influence of the theater in Milanese dialectic of his times. In 1894, De Marchi serialized Redivivo (Reborn), which he later rejected (it would be published in a volume only posthumously in 1909). The novel, however, is important because it inspired Luigi Pirandello’s Il fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904). He then returned to the theme of the hapless victim with Giacomo l’idealista (Giacomo the Idealist, 1897), the protagonist of which is an intellectual, a philosopher who believes in the strength and power of the ideal. Soon life provides him with the real when his fiance´e, raped by a nobleman and pregnant as a result, dies from the shame and pain. Giacomo’s failed beliefs and betrayed hopes reflect those of contemporary Italian intellectuals. It is not a coincidence that throughout De Marchi’s main novels, and in Giacomo l’idealista in particular, the voice of the narrator is overtly present, commenting on the events and guiding the reader. As much as De Marchi’s narrative is pessimistic and hopeless, his educational and pedagogical writings are full of nineteenth-century optimism and trust in progress, and their aim is the education and improvement of the lower classes. Among other activities, he directed between 1898 and 1900 the series La buona parola for the Vallardi publishing house, in which he published anonymous pamphlets such as Bestemmie, canzonacce e parolaccie (Curses, Obscene Songs, Swearwords, 1899) or Quella maledetta osteria (That Damned Tavern, 1899) intended to be an effective daily helping guide for the people. The moderately conservative De 611

EMILIO DE MARCHI Marchi did not believe much in rebellion and revolution, but rather in changing human beings first so that society would change as a consequence. Of his poetic production, the posthumously published collection of poetic prose pieces Milanin Milanon (1902) is a loving homage paid to his city, in its way a response to the contemporary trend of morbid and controversial explorations of the city’s dark side such as Paolo Valera’s Il ventre di Milano (The Underbelly of Milan, 1888). Instead of exhibiting the criminal and the exotic, what predominates here is a sense of nostalgia for the old Milan, the city of little streets and little people, now hiding their rags and their pains under the new and shining facade of the metropolis built in the name of progress.

Demetrio Pianelli, 1890. Arabella, 1893. Giacomo l’idealista, 1897. Col fuoco non si scherza, 1901. Redivivo, 1909.

Short Stories ‘‘Sotto gli alberi,’’ 1882. ‘‘Storie di ogni colore,’’ 1885. ‘‘Racconti,’’ 1889. ‘‘Nuove storie di ogni colore,’’ 1895.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1875. ‘‘Sonetti,’’ 1877. ‘‘Vecchie cadenze e nuove,’’ 1899. ‘‘Milanin Milanon,’’ 1902.

Plays Oggi si recita in casa dello zio Emilio, 1910.

Biography

Essays

Born in Milan in 31 July 1851 to a lower middleclass family, soon in financial distress because of the father’s death in 1860. Degree in literature from the Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria of Milan, 1874, after which he became a teacher. Cofounded the literary magazine La Vita Nuova, 1877. Married Lina Martelli, 1880, with whom he had two children, Cesarina and Marco. Taught stylistics at the Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria, 1896– 1900. Died on 6 February 1901 in Milan, after a long illness. TERESA ZOPPELLO Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere, edited and introduced by Giansiro Ferrata, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1959

Novels Il cappello del prete, 1888.

Lettere e letterati del secolo XVIII, 1882. La letteratura, 1883. Carlo Maria Maggi, 1885. L’eta` preziosa, 1888.

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, Emilio De Marchi, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1946. Briganti, Alessandra, Introduzione a De Marchi, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992. Lacchini, Angelo, Rileggendo il Demetrio: il laboratorio narrativo di Emilio De Marchi, Pesaro: Metauro, 2002. Madrignani, Carlo A., ‘‘L’eredita` manzoniana (Rovani-De Marchi-De Amicis),’’ in La Letteratura italiana. Storia e testi, vol. 8, Il secondo Ottocento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975. Monteverdi, Mario, Emilio De Marchi romanziere, Milan: Gastaldi, 1963. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Emilio De Marchi romanziere popolare, Milan: Edizioni di Comunita´, 1971. Trotta, Nicoletta (editor), Emilio De Marchi, (1851–1901): documenti, immagini, manoscritti, Milan: Biblioteca Trivulziana, 2001.

FEDERICO DE ROBERTO (1861–1927) Federico De Roberto presented a series of recurrent themes throughout his narrative, first among them Sicily, which serves as a nearly mythical landscape populated by noblemen and common people. 612

Drawing his characters from the nobility of the city of Catania, who live a life of ease while they exercise corrupt power, De Roberto gave life to a gallery of puppet-like characters, crushed by their lack

FEDERICO DE ROBERTO of will, in a world in which traditional values are undergoing a devastating crisis. This dissolute and corrupt society already emerges in the short stories collected in La sorte (Fate, 1887). In ‘‘La disdetta’’ (The Misfortune), for example, the princess of Roccasciano dissipates her fortune and her life gambling at cards. She is surrounded by grotesque characters from all social stations, from greedy priests and penniless nobles, to parasites and hysterical women through whom De Roberto paints the portrait of a rapidly decaying world. However, not even the popular characters are immune from the general corruption, as in the case of Alfio Balsamo, the protagonist of ‘‘Ragazzinaccio’’ (Bad Old Boy), and the author does not display any sentimentality in the representation of common people. Much of De Roberto’s fiction contains references to the events of his own life. In particular, the frequent representation of the machine as a monster is a theme that alludes to the death of De Roberto’s father, also named Federico, in a train accident in Piacenza. An examination of the author’s unpublished correspondence, starting with the letters to his lovers Renata Ribera and Pia Vigada, confirms the close connection between this tragic event and elements in his work, and the loss of the father is thematized in, among other works, the story Il paradiso perduto (Paradise Lost), from L’albero della scienza (The Tree of Science, 1890). An obsessive fear of the lost father torments the writer as much as the suffocating presence of his mother. Catania, a patrician and business-like city, is also viewed as a mechanical monstrosity, very far from the writer’s beloved Milan, where he involved himself in intrigues and extemporaneous love affairs and which, after he was forced to leave it to return to Catania, was often seen through the lens of nostalgia. His unpublished Giornale di bordo (Log Book) faithfully records the stages of an erotic relationship in Milan that totally consumed De Roberto’s psychic energies. De Roberto was what might be called a heretical realist, who filled his pages with his obsessions and nightmares, and created works that are quite removed from the presumed realism traditionally attributed to his art. Indeed, his peculiarly eclectic and experimental writing was influenced not only by the masters of the realist tradition, from Gustave Flaubert to Emile Zola, but also by the music of Richard Wagner and by the psychological fiction of his friend, the French novelist Paul Bourget. His first novel, Ermanno Raeli (1889), largely autobiographical, displays many of these diverse elements.

The central theme is love, treated from a psychological perspective. The main character is the young, refined Ermanno who tries to seduce the beautiful Massimiliana. The story ends with the man’s tragic suicide, the logical result of an inability to live life: Ermanno thus represents the model of the inept, a figure destined to enjoy great fortune in decadent narrative. Additional decadent motifs are found in short stories such as ‘‘Donato del Piano’’ from the collection Documenti umani (Human Documents, 1888), which details the psychological workings of an unknown person who commits suicide. Full of references to the Wagnerian movement and to the music of the German composer, it demonstrates De Roberto’s fascination with the art that he placed above all form of artistic expressions. De Roberto’s versatility is also demonstrated by his ability to produce several works of quality that are very different from each other. The most famous example of this versatility is to be found in the two collections Processi verbali (Verbal Processes, 1890) and L’albero della scienza, both published the same year but representative of completely different styles. In the first, a realistic influence prevails, made explicit in the preface where the author discusses the impersonality of art, an aesthetic canon derived from Giovanni Verga and according to which the writer’s voice disappears and the characters act as if they have a life of their own. Impersonality also requires that a story have a dialogical structure similar to that of a play, and indeed in this collection De Roberto pushes to its extreme consequence the quest for objectivity, with stories such as ‘‘Il rosario’’ (The Rosary) or ‘‘I vecchi’’ (The Old Men) that assume the form of pure dialogue. In Processi verbali, De Roberto makes it clear that this form of realism is incompatible with the psychological analysis of characters, for which the presence of the writer is crucial. This analysis is, on the contrary, central to L’albero della scienza, a series of psychological studies on the themes of love and erotic obsessions in which De Roberto, oscillating between Bourget and Gabriele D’Annunzio, approaches the subject of femininity by observing the sensual as well as the emotional complexity of women. Adriana, published only in 1998, is another extraordinary example of this approach, in which the feminine world is described as explosive and erotic, while the male world is often grotesque and populated with improbable rakish figures. De Roberto’s masterpiece is the historical novel I Vicere´ (The Viceroys), published in Milan in 613

FEDERICO DE ROBERTO 1894, which deals with the vicissitudes of the Uzedas, a noble family from Catania and the last descendents of an ancient, rapacious Spanish line of nobility who came to Sicily in the fifteenth century. Set in 1855 and 1882, the time of the narrative witnessed the transition from the Bourbon ruling to the Italian unification, throughout which the Uzedas are only concerned with how to adapt themselves to the new political reality. In fact, the expected changes will turn out to be more an illusion than reality. In the Sicily portrayed by De Roberto nothing ever changes, the nobility continue to exercise its ancient privileges over those beneath it, and public and private affairs intertwine continuously. Conflicts over power and family wealth explode among the many characters in the novel, and the starting point of the action, its persistent leitmotiv and essential characteristic, is the desire to dominate. Everything happens through complex political maneuvers that allow the Uzeda family to install itself within the new liberal regime. All the characters have strong eccentric personalities, fed by the old conviction that they are superior to the masses. Their superiority echoes and parodies the contemporary doctrine of the superman put forward by Friedrich Nietzsche and which De Roberto knew well, as demonstrated by an article published in the newspaper Il corriere della sera on 25 February 1899, Il superuomo (The Superman) that became part of the collection of essays Il colore del tempo (The Colour of Time, 1900). Inspired by real facts and events, and in particular by the political rise of the Marquis of St. Giuliano, an illustrious politician from Catania whose opportunism had been denounced by De Roberto in numerous articles from 1882 and after whom the character of Prince Consalvo is patterned, I Vicere´ is a polycentric novel based on the mixed presence of many conflicting situations, but its homogeneous theme is the representation of a dark reality marked on the one hand by the profound crisis of traditional values and on the other by the inability of the Risorgimento to live up to its promises. The writer projects this crisis into the new century, but also attempts to harness the perspective of science to infuse art with dynamism and to oppose it against the static condition of tradition. This polyphony of accents is unified, however, by the consistent style of the novel. Somber descriptions of macabre settings, vicious parodies, and a bitter anticlericalism alternate with expressive elements and ironic portraits of a world empty of ideals. Time flows in a linear way and the writer follows 614

the existential stories of the numerous characters. In fact, De Roberto had planned a sequel to I Vicere`, a novel set in Rome that denounced the intrigues and opportunism of Italian politics at the end of the nineteenth century, seen through the life of the reactionary Prince Consalvo (who at the conclusion of I Vicere` was elected to Parliament). It remained incomplete and was published only posthumously in 1929 as L’imperio (The Command). In an 1894 interview with Ugo Ojetti published in Alla scoperta dei letterati (Discovering the Literati, 1895), De Roberto had defined the theater as an inferior form of art, but the perspective of greater public success led him to try his hand at composing some plays later in his life. His first attempt, a libretto for Giacomo Puccini in collaboration with Verga and based on the latter’s play La Lupa (The She-wolf, 1896), failed (it was published in 1919). It was followed by La tormenta (The Storm, 1918), the theatrical version of his own novel Spasimo (Anguish, 1897) and other plays that however had limited success.

Biography Born on 16 January 1861 in Naples; his father was a Neapolitan officer in the Bourbon army, his mother, donna Marianna degli Asmundo, belonged to the lower nobility. After the death of his father, his family moved to Catania, 1870. Enrolled at the university to study natural sciences, 1879, but never took his degree, preferring the activity of writer, journalist, and essayist. Made his de´but with an article dedicated to the music of Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini. Founded the literary magazine Don Chisciotte, 1881–1883. Edited the series Semprevivi for the publisher Giannotta, through which he met Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, who become close friends. Traveled to Milan, where Verga introduced him to Marco Praga, Arrigo Boito, and other writers, 1890. Had an affair with Renata Ribera, the wife of a lawyer in Milan. Moved to Rome, 1908, then returned to Catania, 1913, to assist his ailing mother. Collaborated with numerous periodicals, including La domenica letteraria, Il Capitan cortese, Nuova Antologia, Il corriere della sera and Giornale d’Italia. Lived in Catania until his death on 26 July 1927. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Verismo

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS Selected Works Collections Teatro (Il rosario, Il cane della favola, La strada maestra, La tormenta), edited by Natale Tedesco, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Romanzi, novelle e saggi, edited by Carlo Alberto Madrignani, Milan: Mondadori, 1984.

Novels Ermanno Raeli, 1889. L’illusione, 1891. I Vicere´, 1894; as The Viceroys, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1962. Spasimo, 1897. L’imperio, 1929.

Short Stories ‘‘La sorte,’’ 1887. ‘‘Documenti umani,’’ 1888. ‘‘Processi verbali,’’ 1889. ‘‘L’albero della scienza,’’ 1890. ‘‘La messa di nozze. Un sogno. La bella morte,’’ 1911. ‘‘La ‘Cocotte,’’’ 1920. ‘‘Ironie,’’ 1920. ‘‘Adriana: un racconto inedito e altri ‘‘studi di donna,’’ edited by Rosario Castelli, 1998.

Plays La tormenta, in Secolo XX, January–March, 1918. La lupa, with Giovanni Verga, 1919.

Poetry ‘‘Enceladoz,’’ 1887.

Essays Giosue` Carducci e Mario Rapisardi. Polemica, 1881. Arabeschi, 1883. La morte dell’amore, 1892. Il colore del tempo, 1900. L’arte, 1901. Catania, 1907. Al rombo del cannone, 1919. All’ombra dell’ulivo, 1920. Cronache per il Fanfulla, edited by Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri, 1973.

Letters Lettere a donna Marianna degli Asmundo, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 1978.

Federico De Roberto a Luigi Albertini: lettere del critico al direttore del Corriere della sera, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 1979.

Further Reading Borri, Giancarlo, Invito alla lettura di Federico De Roberto, Milan: Mursia, 1987. Brancati, Vitaliano, De Roberto e dintorni, edited by Rita Verdirame, Catania: Tringale, 1988. Branciforte, Francesco (editor), Gli inganni del romanzo: I vicere´ tra storia e finzione letteraria, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1998. Cavalli Pasini, Annamaria, De Roberto, Palermo: Palumbo, 1996. Cincotta, Vincent J., Federico De Roberto commediografo: dalle lettere all’amico Sabatino Lopez, Catania: Tringale, 1980. De Nola, Jean Paul, Federico de Roberto et la France, Paris: Didier, 1975. Di Grado, Antonio, Federico De Roberto e la ‘‘scuola antropologica’’: positivismo, verismo, leopardismo, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1982. Di Grado, Antonio, La vita, le carte, i turbamenti di Federico De Roberto, gentiluomo, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1998. Grana, Gianni, ‘‘I vicere´’’ e la patologia del reale: discussione e analisi storica delle strutture del romanzo, Milan: Marzorati, 1982. Madrignani, Carlo Alberto, Illusione e realta` nell’opera di Federico De Roberto. Saggio su ideologia e tecniche narrative, Bari: De Donato, 1972. Nemiz, Andrea, Capuana, Verga, De Roberto: fotografi, Palermo: Edikronos, 1982. Ojetti, Ugo, Alla scoperta dei letterati, Milan: Dumolard, 1895. Sarno, Emilia, I romanzi di Federico De Roberto tra primo e secondo sperimentalismo, Salerno: Ripostes, 1985. Sipala, Paolo Mario, Introduzione a De Roberto, Rome: Laterza, 1988. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Federico de Roberto e il verismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Stasi, Beatrice, Apologie della letteratura: Leopardi tra De Roberto e Pirandello, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Tedesco, Natale, La norma del negativo: De Roberto e il realismo analitico, Palermo: Sellerio, 1981. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Federico De Roberto, Palermo: Palumbo, 1984. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, Federico De Roberto, Catania: C. U.E.C.M., 1988.

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS (1817–1883) Francesco De Sanctis has long been recognized as Italy’s greatest literary critic and historian of literature. However, since he wrote during the turbulent

years of the making of the Italian nation-state, and the rise of the ‘‘historical school’’ in the postRisorgimento period, his posthumous recognition is 615

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS indebted to Benedetto Croce, who placed him in the pantheon of the maestri of criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century. De Sanctis’ adaptation of Hegelian aesthetic to the Italian tradition, his capacity to interpret the mind and spirit of the authors he dealt with, his emphasis on form as autonomous yet inseparable from content in poetry, as well as his conviction that Italian literature and society are inextricably connected and reflect the moral history of the Italian people, show a range and depth that has been unequaled in succeeding generations. De Sanctis grew up amongst the debates on Romanticism in a country still divided in small states and under foreign occupation. His formative years in Naples were under the influence of the French encyclopaedists and the German idealists. He set himself free from the grammatical purismo of his teacher Basilio Puoti and from the cultural purism of Antonio Cesari and Pietro Giordani, who discarded neologisms and foreign borrowings— though of the latter he retained the fierce anticlericalism. He argued against the dry normative literariness of a belated neoclassicism in favor of a ‘‘philosophical grammar,’’ and developed a notion of the proprieta` or specificity of style. Thus, rhetoric was conceived as a ‘‘relation among things’’ and style as bound to the ‘‘situation’’ of what he called the ‘‘world’’ of a given author. A sympathizer of Giuseppe Mazzini’s democratic ideals, he participated in the insurrection against the Bourbons in 1848. After the rebellion was crushed he moved to Cosenza for a year, during which period he wrote on Giacomo Leopardi and Friedrich Schiller. In 1850, he was arrested and held without trial for two and a half years. During this time he read Saint-Simon, Goethe, Karl Rosenkranz, translated Hegel’s Logic, develops a secular faith, and began to envision a dialectical historicism, which will be applied to his interpretation of literature as social process. Released in 1853 and condemned to exile to the United States, he escaped to Turin, where he joined a growing cadre of exiled patriots, among them Bernardo Spaventa and Camillo De Meis. Here he began an intense collaboration with journals and newspapers, publishing some of the articles later collected as Saggi critici (Critical Essays, 1866). During these years he focused primarily on nineteenth-century authors and investigates the connections between literary form and sociocultural context. In 1856, De Sanctis moved to Zurich, where he taught Italian literature at the Polytechnic Institute. 616

The years in Switzerland are crucial. He met other political expatriates (Jacob Moleschott, Gianbattista Passerini, Paolo Ceroni), Friedrich T. Vischer and Jakob Burckhardt, and he was introduced to new thinkers (Edgar Quinet, PierreJoseph Proudhon, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heinrich Heine). In this European milieu, De Sanctis began to understand the crisis of liberal culture and moves toward a more materialist, or in his words a ‘‘realist,’’ conception of literary poetics. During this period, he wrote on Petrarca, Ariosto, Manzoni, Leopardi, and planned a book on Dante (which he never completes), fascinated by the dynamic coexistence of poetry and poetics in the Comedia. His magisterial studies on Petrarca, which are essential to understanding De Sanctis’ aesthetic theory, were later published as Saggio critico sul Petrarca (Critical Essay on Petrarch, 1869). In 1860, De Sanctis returned to Naples, shortly before Giuseppe Garibaldi entered the city. He is credited to have convinced the great liberator not to go to Rome, and to wait for the arrival of the new king, Victor Emanuel II. A year later, he was nominated Minister of Education and was the first to propose a mandatory general education for all citizens of the reign. In post-United Italy, De Sanctis ran into opposition with a series of prime ministers for championing a secular, somewhat leftist yet democratic political ideology. For example, in 1867, he signed the Manifesto dell’opposizione parlamentare (Manifesto of the Parliamentary Opposition); in 1869, he supported the unsuccessful repeal of the mill tax, which had devastating economic effects; and in 1870, he favored the annexation of Rome, which then became the capital of the kingdom. As he states in his memoirs, La giovinezza (Youth), posthumously published in 1889, there were two pages to his own life, one political, one literary. De Sanctis, the tireless critic, contributed important reviews on two literary histories: Luigi Settembrini’s Lezioni di letteratura italiana (Lessons on Italian Literature, 1866–1872) and Cesare Cantu`’s Storia universale (Universal History, 1838– 1847), which distanced him from the ‘‘Ghibelline’’ position of the former and the ‘‘Catholic’’ ideology of the latter. In 1868, he began writing for the Neapolitan publisher Morano his celebrated Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871), designed for high schools in an effort to provide a unitary, organic view of the development of national literature. Appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS Naples, De Sanctis taught and published four key texts on Alessandro Manzoni, whom, against his earlier admiration, he now saw as a detached and calculating artist. He also assembled various writings for his Nuovi saggi critici (New Critical Essays, 1872) and saw the Storia della letteratura italiana through a second edition (1873). In 1876, he resumed his work on Leopardi, whom he considered to be the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenthcentury, indeed a major European voice. De Sanctis’ theory of literature was new and complex. He dismissed previous literary histories of the likes of Girolamo Tiraboschi, Camillo Ugoni and Giuseppe Maffei, as chiacchiere or idle talk. He believed that a history of Italian literature would have to be a history of Italy. Noteworthy efforts by such contemporaries as Paolo Emiliani Giudici and Francesco Ambrosoli were labeled mere compilations, because they drew distinctions between form and content, the beautiful and the ugly, or otherwise showed moralizing biases. For De Sanctis, the relevance and morality of content are external to literature, which has in itself its end and value. He opposed critical approaches that centered solely on the author’s style, that were descriptive and strictly linguistic, formalistic and aesthetically idealizing. Yet he believed that a judgment must be passed. The critic ought to ask: given specific contexts, dominant ideas and particular artistic inclinations, in what ways is this material worked upon by the poet, in what ways is that specific reality transmuted into poetry? Thus arises the notion of form-content, the dialectical relationship between the materials and the emotions that are the substrate pre-existing the conception of the work. The work of art is autonomous, independent of any contingent factors, and yet rooted in its sociohistorical context. Consequently, the artwork is not defined solely by its ‘‘content,’’ which would imply that its form is ancillary and instrumental; nor is the artwork mere ‘‘form,’’ with its subject matter abstracted from a concrete reality and in a sense made irrelevant. Within this perspective, De Sanctis identifies artists who fit his supreme synthesis, and differentiates between true ‘‘poets’’ (the ‘‘man’’ is enwrapped indissolubly into the created work) and ‘‘artists’’ (form dominates and the relationship to reality is aestheticized). In Storia della letteratura italiana, as well as in the specific critical essays, we learn that Dante, Ariosto, Niccolo´ Machiavelli, Giuseppe Parini, and Leopardi are poets, whereas Petrarca, Angelo Poliziano, Francesco Guicciardini,

Giovanbattista Marino, and Manzoni are artists. In the same vein, De Sanctis observes that form is the guiding factor in lifting the artwork above the man and the sociohistorical milieu that produced it: ‘‘Gli Dei d’Omero sono morti: l’Iliade e` rimasta. Puo´ morire l’Italia, ed ogni memoria di Guelfi e Ghibellini: rimarra` la Divina Commedia. Il contenuto e` sottoposto a tutte le vicende della storia; nasce e muore: la forma e` immortale.’’ (Homer’s Gods are dead, yet the Iliad remains. Italy can die, and with it all memory of Guelphs and Ghibellines, but the Divine Comedy will remain. Content is subject to all the vicissitudes of history: It comes to life and it dies, but Form is immortal) (Saggi critici, 1866). Here the critic departs from his Hegelian roots, as for the philosopher, art must be ultimately overcome into a higher form of consciousness. At the same time, however, focusing on the content-become-form is the only path the critic must travel in order to grasp the true implications of those materials (ideas, symbols, concrete events), which were natural and abstract before they were molded into an artistic whole. De Sanctis does not believe in authorial intentions, since that phrase was employed at the time by hermeneutic interpretations; he would rather look into the author’s ‘‘world,’’ in a sense attributing to individual artists the catalyst role of interacting forces and values: Through a particular work of art we are ushered into a historical epoch. In this idea of a transcendent ‘‘form’’ in which the classical concepts of form/content are synthesized, De Sanctis’ Hegelianism represents a sort of deep structure or, better yet, the underlying dynamic of La storia della letteratura italiana. As he draws a complete picture of eight centuries of Italian literature, De Sanctis poses for the first time difficult questions, which have besieged critics and historians ever since: Why has there been no major theater in Italy? How and why was the chivalric epic ‘‘imported’’? What is the meaning of the excessive formalism of the Baroque? How can a country possess a world literature and a provincial society? In providing a ‘‘living’’ literary history, teleological though it may be, Francesco De Sanctis has shaped an immortal form of critical thinking.

Biography Born in Morra Irpina (Avellino), 28 March 1817, son of Alessandro and Maria Agnese Manzi, both small landowners. In 1826, he is sent to Naples to live with his uncle Carlo Maria, and by 1833 he 617

FRANCESCO DE SANCTIS completes his secondary education. He soon begins to teach as an instructor at his uncle’s school, where one day he meets Giacomo Leopardi. Between 1841 and 1848 he is employed in different schools, studying and teaching literature, aesthetics, drama theory, history of criticism. In February 1848, he joins the uprisings for independence; in 1850, is arrested and jailed for 30 months in Castel dell’Ovo. Exiled in 1853, he lives in Turin, where he finds a job as a teacher at an all-girls college. From 1856 to 1859 he teaches at the Zurich Polytechnic. Back in Naples by 1860, for brief periods he is governor of Avellino, member of a commission to restructure the University of Naples. In 1961, is elected to the Parliament, and appointed to the Ministry of Education. Though not re-elected in 1865, his political activity continued with interruptions through the years; in 1863, he marries Maria Testa-Arenaprimo. In 1868, he begins work on his Storia della letteratura italiana. In 1871, he is appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of Naples, retiring in 1880. He dies in Naples on 29 December 1883. PETER CARRAVETTA See also: Literary History Selected Works Collections Opere complete, edited by Nino Cortese, 14 vols., Naples: Morano, 1930–1940. Opere complete, edited by Carlo Muscetta, 23 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1951–1993. Opere, edited by Niccolo` Gallo, Milan: Ricciardi, 1961.

Critical Writing Saggi critici, 1866; 2nd ed. 1869; 3rd ed. 1874; edited by Luigi Russo, 3 vols., 1965. Saggio critico sul Petrarca, 1869. Storia della letteratura italiana, 1870–1871; edited by Nicola Gallo, 1971; as History of Italian Literature, translated by Joan Redfern, 2 vols., 1931; rpt. 1959. Nuovi saggi critici, 1872; rev. ed. 1879. Studio su Giacomo Leopardi, edited by R. Bonari, 1885. La letteratura italiana del secolo XIX, preface by Benedetto Croce, 1897.

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Scritti vari inediti o rari, preface by Benedetto Croce, 1898. Two Essays: Giuseppe Parini, Ugo Foscolo, edited with introduction and notes by Piero Rebora, 1920. De Sanctis on Dante, edited and translated by Joseph Rossi and Alfred Galpin, 1957. L’arte, la scienza e la vita: Nuovi saggi critici, conferenze e scritti vari, edited by Maria Teresa Lanza, 1972. Purismo, illuminismo, storicismo, edited by Attilio Marinari, 2 vols., 1975.

Other Un viaggio elettorale, 1876; edited by Aldo Marinari, 1983. La giovinezza di Francesco De Sanctis, edited by Pasquale Villari, 1889; edited by Aldo Marinari, 1983.

Further Reading Antonetti, Pierre, Francesco De Sanctis: Son e´volution intellectuelle, son esthe´tique et sa critique, Aix-en-Provence: Publication des Annales de la Faculte´ des Lettres, 1963. Barbuto, Gennaro Maria, Ambivalenze del moderno: De Sanctis e le tradizioni politiche italiane, Naples: Liguori, 2000. Corece, Elena and Alda, Francesco De Sanctis, Turin: UTET, 1964. Croce, Benedetto, Gli scritti di Francesco De Sanctis e la loro varia fortuna, Bari: Laterza, 1917. Dell’Aquila, Michele, and Nicola Longo, Il ‘‘ritorno’’ di De Sanctis: Storia, ideologia, mistificazione, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Della Terza, Dante, Tradizione e innovazione: Studi su De Sanctis, Croce e Pirandello, Naples: Liguori, 1999. Landucci, Sergio, Cultura e ideologia in Francesco De Sanctis, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. Luciani, Paola, L’estetica applicata di Francesco De Sanctis, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Mack Smith, Denis, ‘‘Francesco De Sanctis: The Politics of a Literary Critic,’’ in Society and Politics in the Age of the Risorgimento, edited by John A. Davis and Paul Ginsborg, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Marinari, Aldo (editor), Francesco De Sanctis: Un secolo dopo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale del Centenario—1983, Bari: Laterza, 1985. Muscetta, Carlo, Francesco De Sanctis, Bari: Laterza, 1978. Romagnoli, Sergio, Per una storia della critica italiana: Dal De Sanctis al Novecento, Florence: Le Lettere, 1993. Tedeschi Muscetta, Marcella (editor), Per leggere De Sanctis, Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Valitutti, Salvatore, La riforma di Francesco De Sanctis, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1988. Wellek, Rene´, ‘‘Francesco De Sanctis,’’ in History of Modern Criticism, vol. 3, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965.

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS (1917–1997) Unlike many up-and-coming filmmakers of his time, Giuseppe De Santis’ cinematic career began when his name was already well-known and under the auspices of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), one of the most influential cultural forces in postwar Italy. Namely he had experience, authority, and a talent that had matured in years of apprenticeship, in particular with Luchino Visconti. He also relied on a team of the most gifted collaborators (Cesare Zavattini, Umberto Barbaro, Carlo Lizzani, Mario Serandrei, Gianni Di Venanzo). De Santis conceived of cinema as a means of giving voice to the lower classes, workers, peasants, and the humble—people at the margins of society, victims of exploitation. With his debut as director of Caccia tragica (Tragic Pursuit, 1947), a story about the struggle of peasants to regain control of land devastated by the war, he became a significant force in the neorealist movement, distinguishing himself as a staunch filmmaker who would create a populist version of cinema with the scope of changing and shaping society. With his second film; Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) he achieved world recognition with a nomination for an Academy Award for best original story in 1950. Riso amaro was also the fifth most profitable film released in Italy in the 1949–1950 season and was distributed internationally, including to the former Socialist bloc. Its commercial success surpassed even Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa` (Paisan, 1946). The film’s melodramatic aspects and the physical glamour of the young actress, Silvana Mangano, overshadowed the political messages of the film, which were dismissed by dogmatic critics and by the moralistic judgments of the Vatican. Mangano’s provocative sensuality and her rise to stardom have contributed to the misleading association between her role in De Santis’ film and that performed by the so-called maggiorate fisiche (naturally endowed actresses), which marked the return to the diva, the femme fatale of Italian cinema in the 1950s. The rice farm worker Silvana becomes a prototype of the diabolical seductress who destroys any man who falls prey to her charm. She loves American movies and dances the boogie-woogie, but behind her story there is the one of the many women slaving all day long in the

knee-deep water of the rice fields of Northern Italy, with small wages and a poor life. De Santis’ condemnation of injustices is clearer with Non c’ e` pace tra gli ulivi (No Peace Among the Olive Trees, 1950) and Roma ore 11 (Rome, 11 O’clock, 1952). When the two films were released right-wing critics carried out a defamatory campaign against De Santis, and for the latter film the Parliament proposed investigating possible illegal funds from enemy Communist countries. De Santis’ position would worsen during the apogee of the Cold War when the Italian film industry created an unofficial blacklist, following the model of the House Committee for Un-American Activities for Hollywood artists suspected of Communist association. The newly reconstructed Italian film industry depended on state funding that demanded a more optimistic type of film with milder sociopolitical criticisms. In this hostile milieu, De Santis opted for Un marito per Anna Zaccheo (A Husband for Anna Zaccheo, 1953) and Giorni d’amore (Days of Love, 1954), two love stories instead of his projects on the peasants’ land occupation in Southern Italy and on the massacre of unarmed peasants by Salvatore Giuliano’s gang at Portella della Ginestra in Sicily in 1947. In 1956, he made Uomini e lupi (Men and Wolves), a cinematic fable on mythological figures of a vanishing rural world, but in order to continue his films on Southern Italian underdevelopment and unemployment he went to the former Yugoslavia to film; Cesta Duga Godinu Dana/La strada lunga un anno (The One-Year Long Road, 1958), which ironically received an Academy Award nomination as a Yugoslavian film. His return to filmmaking in Italy produced La garconnie`re (The Love Nest, 1960) and Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire (A Respected Professional with a Bright Future, 1972), which marked De Santis’ retirement from cinema. The new international collaboration between the ex-USSR and the USA allowed De Santis to film in the Ukraine, Italiani, brava gente (March On or Die, 1964), on the army sent by Benito Mussolini to invade Russia as Hitler’s ally. De Santis’ films fall within the two main categories of postwar Italian cinema. In one the 619

GIUSEPPE DE SANTIS attempt to document everyday life or past events dominates, in the other, adept showmanship seeks to dramatize reality. Although closer to the second category, De Santis’ films never give up the ideal of cinema as a vehicle for and an expression of social and political loyalty. His final goal was to create cinematic spectacles that would prompt or propose forms of social behavior based on human and class solidarity by denouncing inequities. His artistic and sociopolitical concerns were integral to his effort to heighten the artistic awareness of the uneducated masses. In his films, he tried to develop simple passions using uncomplicated metaphors to stimulate the spectators’ reaction. His dream was to create a national cinema that could introduce elements of higher culture in a popular media to fill the cultural vacuum left by elitist Italian traditional culture and also to limit the American cultural hegemony. De Santis did not compromise his principles or political agenda even during the 1960s when it became hard for him to find producers willing to finance his populist stories. The audience, once accustomed to realist stories on hunger or on how to secure temporary jobs, wanted films on the new problems of a modern nation with rising living standards. And De Santis tried to make films in the new spaghetti western style under the pseudonym Joe Santos but refused the producers’ demand that he use his real name. He wanted his name to remain associated with a genuine neorealist narrative style that had at one time attracted a mass audience with moving plots, epic breadth, and popular themes. In spite of this contribution, he is often remembered as one of the first postwar directors to have restored the star system in the Italian film industry. His films are plagued by criticisms of his heterodoxic approach to neorealism, which juxtaposed committed political subject matter, flamboyant eroticism, and a Baroque decadent style combined with a Hollywood-inspired mise-en-sce`ne. Nonetheless they show an outstanding technical ability and a passion for formalized beauty and sensuality. For De Santis, neorealism was the result of a specific historical moment, the Resistance, in which the working class entered as protagonist of its own destiny to win freedom and to demand the right to its own aspirations. These historical events captured by various directors changed cinema, making it no longer a medium for the middle class but a medium of the people. He also focused on the role of the medium itself as a mean of mass communication and as repository of collective imagination. 620

De Santis’ project was to continue this type of cinema and to create a national cinema in which the transfiguration of reality was more than the simple reproduction of facts and events. His films feature common people in conflict with the power structure, and the story lines are embellished with continual intertextual references to pop culture and literary sources, features that make his films the most self-conscious works of neorealism.

Biography Born in Fondi (Latina), a small town in the southern part of the Latium region, on 11 February 1917. At the age of 17 was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Rome. A year later attended the Liceo Classico Giulio Cesare. After graduation, enrolled at the University of Rome to study humanities and then, without finishing his degree, enrolled in the Italian film school, Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, where he studied with professors Umberto Barbaro, Luigi Chiarini, and German critic Rudolf Arnheim. Graduated in 1942 with a short film La gatta based on a story that he had written. That same year, with the help of Gianni Puccini, started to write film reviews and became one of the promoters of the renewal of Italian cinema. In his writings for the prestigious journal Cinema, he called for realism not as a passive obeisance to a static and objective truth but as a creative force. The experience with the journal culminated in the making of Ossessione (1942), directed by Luchino Visconti, one of the leaders of the group, as one of his assistant directors. In 1944, joined the Resistance fight against Nazi-Fascism and after liberation, worked as assistant director on the first films on the Italian Resistance with Aldo Vergano, Il sole sorge ancora (1946) and Scalo merci (1943), started by Roberto Rossellini and finished by Marcello Pagliero under the new title Desiderio. In 1944, shot two documentary films on the Resistance: Giorni di gloria and La nostra guerra. The former is a collaboration among Marcello Pagliero, Luchino Visconti, Mario Serandei, and De Santis with the commentary written by critic Umberto Barbaro. The latter consists of three episodes that recount the trial of Pietro Caruso, police chief of Rome during the German occupation, and his subsequent trial and execution along with Pietro Roch, his collaborator. It ends with the reconstruction of Italy by the progressive forces. In the 1980s, taught film directing at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. In 1989, his first tour in the United States of America. In the summer of

VITTORIO DE SICA 1990 taught filmmaking at Middlebury College. Died of a heart attack in a Roman hospital on 16 May 1997. ANTONIO VITTI Selected Works Films Caccia tragica, 1947. Riso amaro (Bitter Rice), 1949. Non c’e` pace tra gli ulivi, 1950. Roma ore 11, 1952. Un marito per Anna Zaccheo, 1953. Giorni d’amore, 1954. Uomini e lupi, 1956. La strada lunga un anno, 1958. La garconnie`re, 1960. Italiani brava gente (March On or Die), 1964. Un apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire, 1972.

Screenplays Caccia tragica. Un inizio strepitoso, edited by Marco Grossi and Virginio Palazzo, Fondi: Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, 2000. Non c’e` pace tra gli ulivi. Un neorealismo postmoderno, edited by Vito Zagarrio, Rome: Scuola Nazionale di Cinema—Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, Quaderni della Cineteca, 2002. Riso amaro nel fuoco delle polemiche, edited by Marco Grossi and Virginio Palazzo, Fondi: Quaderni dell’Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, 2003.

Giorni d’amore. Un film di Giuseppe De Santis tra impegno e commedia, edited by Giovanni Spagnoletti and Marco Grossi, Turin: Lindau—Associazione Giuseppe De Santis, 2004.

Further Reading Camerino, Vincenzo, Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis, Lecce: Elle Edizione, 1987. Farassino, Alberto, Giuseppe De Santis, Milano: Moizzi Editore, 1978. Giampiero, Cleopazzo, Il neorealismo di Giuseppe De Santis, Galantina: Editrice Salentina, 1980. Grossi, Marco, and Giovanni Spagnoletti (editors), Dossier: Giuseppe De Santis— l’escluso, in Close-Up, Anno 1 – n. 2—settembre 1997. Cinema di Venezia. Lizzani, Carlo, Riso amaro: un film diretto da Giuseppe De Santis, Roma: Edizioni Officina, 1978. Marcus, Millicent, De Santis’ ‘‘Bitter Rice’’: A Neorealist Hybrid, in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, NJ: University Press, 1986. Masi, Stefano, Giuseppe De Santis, Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Micciche´, Lino, De Santis e la ‘‘trilogia della terra,’’ in La ragione e lo sguardo, Cosenza: Lerici, 1979. Parisi, Antonio, Il cinema di Giuseppe De Santis tra passione e ideologia, Roma: Cadmo Editore, 1983. Vitti, Antonio, Giuseppe De Santis and Postwar Italian Cinema, Toronto: UPT, 1996. Wagner, Jean, Giuseppe De Santis, Dossiers du cine´ma, in Cine´astes II, Bruxelles: Casterman, 1971.

VITTORIO DE SICA (1902–1974) Vittorio De Sica is among the most internationally known of Italian filmmakers, as well as an actor of some esteem. He directed 28 feature-length films, winning Academy Awards for Sciuscia´ (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948), La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, 1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of Finzi Continis, 1970). His groundbreaking postwar films were part of a new cinematic style called neorealism, which was to influence every generation of filmmaker to come. De Sica’s work as a director was the latter part of an illustrious career that started with acting when he was just 15. He began in the theater,

establishing a reputation as the Italian Maurice Chevalier, and went on to appear in 150 movies, mostly sentimental comedies in which he usually played the Latin lover. Mario Camerini made him a star when he cast the young actor in his comedy, Gli uomini che mascalzoni... (Men What Rascals, 1932). De Sica played the role of a chauffeur who, in order to impress his girlfriend, poses as the owner of his boss’s automobile, and his suave rendition of Cesare Bixio’s song, ‘‘Parlami d’amore Mariu`’’ marks a defining moment in Italian cinema. Along with his costar, Assia Noris (Camerini’s wife), he appeared in two more of Camerini’s films: Il signor Max (Mr. Max, 1937) and I grandi magazzini (Department Stores, 1939). These romantic 621

VITTORIO DE SICA comedies mostly captured the euphoria of the period preceding World War II (1931–1937). Nevertheless, the sociological undercurrents of Camerini’s work suggested how moral integrity mostly belonged to the working classes, who are betrayed by the hypocrisies and greed of the upper classes. On screen in the 1950s, De Sica remained faithful to his role of the elegant enchanter. His performances as Maresciallo Carotenuto in Luigi Comencini’s comedies Pane, amore e fantasia (Bread, Love and Dreams, 1953), Pane, amore e gelosia (Bread, Love and Jealousy, 1954), with Gina Lollobrigida, brought him renewed success as an accomplished comedian at this later stage in his life. De Sica the actor appeared in numerous films indiscriminately, accepting all kinds of new roles in an effort to fund his own films and to repay his considerable gambling debts. De Sica’s comedic roots, and his collaboration with Camerini, influenced his directorial debut with Rose scarlatte (Red Roses, 1940), which was followed by Maddalena...zero in condotta (Maddalena Zero for Conduct, 1940), Teresa Venerdı` (1941), and Un garabaldino al convento (A Garibaldine at the Convent, 1942), comedies about the coming of age of young girls using the double identity plot. His acting experience also inspired his directorial techniques. At the beginning, he chose to work with amateur rather than professional actors (a practice often adopted by the neorealist filmmakers), whom he shaped and molded to fit his production needs. For instance, his casting of Enzo Stajola for the role of the young Bruno in Ladri di biciclette was determined by the boy’s particular physical attributes—namely, his interesting and expressive face—as well as his ability to keep up with the long, swift strides of Lamberto Maggiorana, who played the boy’s father. A distinctive trait of Ladri di biciclette is that illusion of reality in which all of the film’s events seem to obey the law of chance, and the actions of the characters seem spontaneous and true. This deliberately manufactured effect was achieved through a carefully constructed mise en sce`ne as well as thorough attention to the script. These are among the hallmarks of De Sica’s neorealism. De Sica, along with Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti, is considered one of the founding fathers of that innovative cinematic style. The term ‘‘neorealism’’ was first used in reference to the Russian social realism of the 1920s, a definition applied primarily to the aesthetic of literature and cinema. ‘‘Neorealism’’ soon appealed to European 622

artists from different fields (especially theater) who saw how far the new style broke ideologically and linguistically with tradition. Through the use of natural settings and the application of current social content, Italian filmmakers were attempting to revive a national consciousness and inspire a sense of national solidarity. What they offered was an ethical aesthetic that portrayed in a realistic way the life of the oppressed and downtrodden, finally giving them a voice. But neorealism never had a formal program or cultural manifesto. Instead, it was interpreted differently by various filmmakers. Rossellini exploited the style’s minimalist aesthetics to undermine sentimentality, letting facts and events speak for themselves. Visconti understood reality as history and culture. For his part, De Sica transposed everyday reality into the realm of poetry. He used the neorealist style to express, above all, the emotional lives of his characters. As a result he was accused of overpopularizing and romanticizing this stripped-down aesthetic. And yet his characters disclose a deep pessimism toward human solidarity, emphasizing the loneliness of man in a society where institutions are either absent or failing them. After fighting strenuously against social injustice, they simply resign themselves to their destiny. Ironically, De Sica’s cinema provoked Marxist critics, who thought his characters lacked class consciousness, as well as Christian Democrats who attacked his ‘‘Communist’’ ideology. De Sica was a true Humanist who believed in the right of every man to achieve freedom and personal dignity. Any introduction to De Sica’s directorial career usually begins with his encounter with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini in 1935, on the set of Camerini’s Daro` un milione (I’ll Give a Million). Their artistic collaboration was one of the most fertile and successful in the history of cinema. Zavattini’s strong personality, distinct writing style, and theoretical approach to neorealism greatly influenced the creative process of the films he scripted for De Sica, and often belittled the director’s own contributions to the storyline. Yet it was De Sica’s interpretative expertise and masterful miseen-sce`ne for which the duo would ultimately be recognized. I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1943) is the first film in which Zavattini’s name is credited. Produced during the final years of the Fascist regime, the film transgressed the limits, stylistically and thematically, of the typically entertaining cinema produced under Fascism. In it, De Sica focuses on the problems of the couple and

VITTORIO DE SICA reveals a family crisis that ends with the mother’s separation from her son and the father’s suicide. Prico`, the protagonist of the film, is the first of De Sica’s child icons (followed by Pasquale and Giuseppe in Sciuscia´, and Bruno in Ladri di biciclette) who, innocent yet experienced, observes the decay and corruption of the adult world. Prico`’s burden is a self-imposed loneliness, the result of others’ inability to understand him. Such incomprehension between adult and child is a recurring theme in De Sica’s cinema. Unlike the well-established ‘‘telefoni bianchi’’ genre of the prewar period, I bambini ci guardano penetrates the high walls of middle-class conformity, shattering the Fascist ideal of the perfect Italian family. De Sica, relying on an objective camera, lets Prico`’s eyes do the talking, doing away with traditional discursive narrative cinema. In the years between 1946 and 1948, De Sica made two more films with Zavattini, both revolving around very young protagonists: Giuseppe and Pasquale in Sciuscia`; Bruno in Ladri di biciclette. These films epitomize the director’s bitter statement that little had changed in postwar Italy for the oppressed (among whom children played an important role as victims and rescuers of adults). Sciuscia` expresses a commonly shared feeling of disillusionment caused by the realization that the Americanled liberation of the country and the fall of Fascism did not transform Italy overnight: Dreams were incompatible with certain social conditions. Indeed the country continued to rely on an authoritarian penal code, and suffered from moral decay within the family and throughout society. De Sica’s idea for Sciuscia` was inspired by Scimmietta and Capellone, two real-life shoeshine boys, who, after work, spent part of their earnings riding horses in Villa Borghese in Rome. For De Sica, these children were the true measure of the country’s economic and moral demise. They had to grow up fast; they were compelled to support their families; they befriended and exploited American soldiers and favored the black market, thus effectively renouncing their childhood. Scimmietta and Capellone were transformed by Zavattini into two Roman shoe shiners who manage to save enough money to buy a white horse called Bersagliere. After getting tangled up in a robbery, they land in prison where their loyalty is tested by manipulative police officers (representing corrupt adult society), until the two boys manage to escape. Pasquale, realizing that Giuseppe has taken the horse, chases his friend down and accidentally causes his death. In the final scene, with Giuseppe weeping over his friend’s

body, the horse wanders away in the morning fog. De Sica’s elaborate mise en sce`ne, editing, and dramatic symbolism highlight the physical and moral entrapment of the two boys. Each shot includes a host of visual information. Low-angle tracking shots follow the galloping Bersagliere, and underline the boys’ freedom and moral superiority. Perhaps because of its melodramatic and convoluted structure, excessive symbolism, and mannered characters, Sciuscia` fails to reach the poetic level of De Sica’s subsequent films. Critics unanimously consider Ladri di biciclette De Sica’s masterpiece. The story of the attacchino (someone who glues advertising posters to city walls), whose bicycle is stolen and who wanders through Rome with his young son in search of it, is well-known around the world. But Ladri di biciclette is more than a touching human drama; it is a biting comment on an Italian society left desolate by the war. The camera mostly focuses on a new kind of protagonist—the streets of Rome and those who populate them—and in so doing presents the country’s economic status as one of the movie’s main themes. The desolation of the soul, we see, corresponds to the dilapidation of the city. This film did more than any other film to popularize Italian neorealism worldwide. Usually considered as the anomaly of neorealism, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951), an adaptation of Zavattini’s successful novel, Toto´ il buono, shocked critics and audiences alike with its rich surrealist imagery. It was through the use of allegory, metaphor, symbol, and fable that Zavattini and De Sica effectively accused Italy’s political elite of abuse of power. Its main character, Toto`, is a foundling raised by an old lady, Lolotta, endowed with magical powers. After her death he joins the poor people living in the outskirts of Milan. Mobbi and Brambi are two rich men who decide to buy this land occupied by a community of tramps. When they discover that the land is rich in oil they decide to evict their tenants. The tramps have nearly surrendered to a legally enforced eviction when the dead Lolotta descends from the sky to present her adoptive son with a miraculous dove that will allow him and his friends to remain on the land. But angels then take back the dove to re-establish order. When the police arrest the tramps, Lolotta again sends the dove to them, which sets them free. Because the message is sociological, this fantastical film remains nevertheless firmly rooted in neorealist terrain. The poor remain spiritually pure even as they are deprived of everything. They defend themselves against eager 623

VITTORIO DE SICA modern despots with imagination and poetry. The final escape of the tramps on broomsticks taken from the street cleaners of Piazza Duomo—to a place where ‘‘Good morning, really means good morning!’’—reinforces both the utopic and realistic features of the work. Umberto D. (1952), the last of De Sica’s neorealist films, written entirely by Zavattini, puts into practice his idea that the simplest story, portrayed realistically, can produce forceful drama. Umberto D. is centered on the banal daily existence of the retired (and impoverished) pensioner, Umberto Domenico Ferrari (played by a Florentine professor, Carlo Battisti), his dog Flick, and his interaction with the young maid, Maria. Alienation, aging, and poverty are treated matter-of-factly; indeed, Umberto, overwhelmed by his miserable solitude, cannot appreciate the desperation of others (like Maria who will soon lose her job). Again, De Sica shows us that men are unable to fulfill their humanitarian obligations even—especially—when they themselves are victims of such disinterest. The human desolation in Umberto D. is enhanced by a camera that pauses to record the slightest gestures, common objects, and simple aspects of everyday life. Such a technique respects, at its best, the ‘‘cinematographic duration’’ advocated by Cesare Zavattini. In his notion of realism, cinematographic narrative time and real time must coincide, minimizing dramatization and allowing the viewer to reflect upon the ‘‘reality’’ he is watching. Maria, for example, is shown washing dishes, and the camera stays with her for the entire duration of the act, and, in so doing, captures her desperation and misery more profoundly than any spectacular or dramatic sequence might. This formal rigor is accomplished with deep focus shots, calibrated camera angles, and tracking shots, and with the use of studio sets where the environment can be better controlled. As in Ladri di biciclette and Sciuscia`, De Sica underlined the emergence of a new middle class and the ambiguous morality fueled mostly by the desire to belong to that social class. To take one example, Umberto’s landlady fires the maid because she’s pregnant by an unknown soldier, but then rents Umberto’s room to prostitutes when he is not there. Unlike Ladri di biciclette, in which a note of optimism was struck by the young boy who represented Italy’s future, in Umberto D. everyone is doomed. The old man carries his bourgeois desperation and solitude with him wherever he goes. De Sica dedicated the movie to his father, a representative of the Italian bourgeoisie who felt the need to 624

uphold the de´cor of their class even in times of destitution. The neorealist phenomenon was short-lived, linked inextricably to the events of the war and its immediate aftermath. As Italy regained some degree of normalcy, film artists recognized the need to evolve their cinematic language. But it was a fitful transition for De Sica: both Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife, 1953) and Il tetto (The Roof, 1956) attempted to revive his early neorealist style, but were commercial failures. It took De Sica four years to recapture his strong artistic voice. In 1960, he directed La ciociara (Two Women). Sophia Loren, who won an Academy Award for her performance, played the leading role of Cesira, a young widow who in 1943 abandons her shop in Rome to take shelter from the bombs. She goes with her 13-year-old daughter, Rosetta, to the mountain of Ciociarı`a. Less poetic than Ladri di biciclette and Sciuscia`, more melodramatic than the novel by Alberto Moravia from which it was adapted, the film offers some indelible scenes, like the freeze-frame close-up of Rosetta’s face after she and her mother had been raped by Moroccan soldiers. De Sica’s last success was an adaptation of Giorgio Bassani’s autobiographical novel Il giardino dei Finzi Contini. It tells the story of how a wealthy Jewish family from Ferrara, during the years just before the war, chose to align with the Fascists, only to become victims of Italy’s racial laws. The film fails to fully capture the dream-like atmosphere of Bassani’s fiction as it centers on the emotional turmoil of the adolescent protagonist in a period overshadowed by the impending war. But Il giardino dei Finzi Contini remains nevertheless a significant contribution to the cinematic repertoire as one rare film that faced the topic of Judaism in Italy. Toward the end of his life, the reality of Italy had improved, and De Sica found it difficult to reach the poetic heights or provide the penetrating social analysis of his neorealist films. After Il giardino dei Finzi Contini, he directed four more films, including Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973) and Il viaggio (The Voyage, 1974), his last work starring Sophia Loren and Richard Burton. On the other hand, Una breve vacanza is one of De Sica’s most cherished films, and attests to his lifelong commitment to represent the simple lives and dreams of the socially emarginated. It tells the story of a working-class woman, played by Florinda Bolkan, whose internment in a sanatorium is the only vacation she ever had.

VITTORIO DE SICA

Biography Born in Sora (Frosinone) 7 July 1901. Spent childhood in Naples. Began working as office clerk to support his family. Fascinated by acting very early in life and made his cinematic debut at age 16 in L’affare Clemenceau by Edoardo Bencivenga. Joined Tatiana Pavlova’s stage company in 1923; worked as actor in three films director by Mario Camerini (1932–1939); married Giuditta Rissone, 1933. Debuted as film director with Rose scarlatte (1940); started the long collaboration with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini with I bambini ci guardano (1943); first directorial successes were Sciuscia` and Ladri di biciclette, both winners of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, in 1946 and 1949 respectively. After the commercial flop of Umberto D., returned to directing lighter works and to acting. Luigi Comencini directed him in Pane, amore e fantasia and its sequels, (1953–1954); Roberto Rossellini directed him in Il generale della Rovere (1958). La ciociara (1960), Ieri, oggi e domani (1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (1971) all won Academy Awards for Best Foreign Film. Divorced Giuditta Rissone in 1968. Married Maria Mercader that same year, with whom he had two children: Manuel and Christian. Died following the removal of a cyst from his lung at Neully (France) on November 13, 1974. GIOVANNA DE LUCA Selected Works Acting Roles Il processo Cle´manceu, 1917. La bellezza del mondo, 1927. La compagnia dei matti, 1928. La vecchia signora, 1932. Due cuori felici, 1932. Gli uomini, che mascalzoni, 1932. La segretaria per tutti, 1933. Un cattivo soggetto, 1933. La canzone del sole, 1933. Il signore desidera?, 1933. Tempo Massimo, 1934. Lisetta, 1934. Amo te sola, 1935. Daro´ un milione, 1935. Lohengrin, 1936. Non ti conosco piu´, 1936. Ma non e` una cosa seria, 1936. L’uomo che sorride, 1936. Questi ragazzi, 1937. Il signor Max, 1937. Napoli d’altri tempi, 1938. La mazurka di papa`, 1938. Hanno rapito un uomo, 1938.

Partire, 1938. L’orologio a cucu´, 1938. Le due madri, 1938. Castelli in aria, 1939. Ai vostri ordini, signora!, 1939. Grandi magazzini, 1939. Finisce sempre cosı`, 1939. Manon Lescaut, 1940. Pazza di gioia, 1940. La peccatrice, 1940. L’avventuriera del piano di sopra, 1941. La guardia del corpo, 1942. Se io fossi onesto, 1942. I nostri sogni, 1943. Nessuno torna indietro, 1943. L’ippocampo, 1943. Non sono superstizioso...ma!, 1944. Lo sbaglio di essere vivo, 1945. Il mondo vuole cosı`, 1945. Roma citta´ libera, 1946. Abbasso la ricchezza!, 1946. Sperduti nel buio, 1947. Natale al campo 119, 1947. Lo sconosciuto di San Marino, 1948. Cuore, 1948. Domani e` troppo tardi, 1950. Carriera bella presenza offresi..., 1951. Buongiorno, elefante!, 1952. Altri tempi, 1952. I gioielli di Madame de..., 1953. Pane, amore e fantasia, 1953. Villa Borghese, 1953. Cento anni d’amore, 1954. Tempi nostri, 1954. Pane amore e gelosia, 1954. Peccato che sia una canaglia, 1954. Il matrimonio, 1954. Gran varieta´, 1954. Il letto, 1954. Vergine moderna, 1954. L’allegro squadrone, 1954. La bella mugnaia, 1955. Gli ultimi cinque minuti, 1955. Il segno di Venere, 1955. Racconti romani, 1955. Il bigamo, 1955. Mio figlio Nerone, 1956. Tempo di villeggiatura, 1956. Montecarlo-The Montecarlo Story, 1956. I giorni piu´ belli, 1956. Noi siamo le colonne..., 1956. Il medico e lo stregone, 1957. Toto`, Vittorio e la dottoressa, 1957. Casino` de Paris-Casino de Paris, 1957. Padre e figli, 1957. I colpevoli, 1957. La donna che venne dal mare-Danae, 1957. Souvenir dI´talie, 1957. Vacanze a Ischia, 1957. Il conte Max, 1957. Amore e chiacchiere, 1957. Domenica e`sempre domenica, 1958. Ballerina e buon Dio, 1958. Pezzo, capopezzo e cannone-Kanonen Serenade, 1958.

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VITTORIO DE SICA La ragazza di San Pietro, 1958. Anna di Brooklyn, 1958. Gli zitelloni, 1958. Nel blu dipinto di blu, 1959. Pane, amore e Andalusia, 1959. La prima notte, 1959. Il nemico di mia moglie, 1959. Policarpo, ufficiale di scrittura, 1959. Vacanze d’inverno, 1959. Il moralista, 1959. Il generale della Rovere, 1959. Il mondo dei miracoli, 1959. Uomini e nobiluomini, 1959. Ferdinando I, re di Napoli, 1959. Gastone, 1960. Le tre ‘‘eccetera’’ del colonnello, 1960. Le pillole di Ercole, 1960. Napoleone di Austerlitz, 1960. La sposa bella, 1960. Un amore a Roma, 1960. La miliardaria (The Millionaires), 1961. La baia di Napoli (It Started in Naples), 1961. Gli attendenti, 1961. Le meraviglie di Aladino, 1961. L’onorata societa`, 1961. I celebri amori di Enrico IV (Vive Henry IV, vive l’amour!), 1961. La Fayette, una spada per due bandiere (La Fayette), 1961. Eva, 1962. Le avventure e gli amori di Moll Flanders, 1966. Gli altri, gli altri e noi, 1967. Un italiano in America, 1967. Colpo grosso alla napoletana (The Biggest Bundle of Them All), 1968. Caroline Cherie (Caroline Che`rie), 1968. L’uomo venuto dal Kremlino (The Shoes of the Fisherman), 1968. Se e` martedı`, deve essere il Belgio (If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Belgium), 1969. Una su 13 (12+1), 1969. Cose di ‘‘Cosa nostra,’’ 1970. Trastevere, 1971. Io non vedo, tu non parli, lui non sente, 1971. L’odore delle belve (L’odeur des fauves), 1971. Grande slalom per una rapina (Snowjob), 1972. Ettore lo fusto, 1972. Siamo tutti in liberta´ provvisoria, 1972. Storia de fratelli e de cortelli, 1973. Il delitto Matteotti, 1973. Viaggia ragazza, viaggia, hai la musica nelle vene, 1974. Dracula cerca sangue di vergine e...morı` di sete!!! (Blood for Dracula), 1974. Intorno, 1974. C’eravamo tanto amati, 1974.

I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, based on the novel Prico´ by Giulio Viola), 1943. La porta del cielo (Gate of Heaven), 1944. Sciuscia` (Shoeshine), 1946. Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, based on Luigi Bartolini’s novel), 1948. Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, based on the novel Toto` il buono by Cesare Zavattini), 1951. Umberto D., 1952. Stazione Termini (Indiscretion of an American Wife), 1953. L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, based on Giuseppe Marotta’s novel), 1954. Il tetto (The Roof), 1956. La ciociara (Two Women, adapted from Alberto Moravia’s novel), 1960. Il giudizio universale (The Last Judgement), 1961. Boccaccio 70 (Segment La riffa), 1962. I sequestrati di Altona (The Condemned of Altona, based on Jean Paul Sartre’s play), 1962. Il boom, 1963. Ieri, oggi e domani (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), 1963. Matrimonio all’italiana (Marriage Italian Style, based on the play Filumena Marturano by Eduardo De Filippo), 1964. Un mondo nuovo (Un monde nouveau), 1965. Caccia alla volpe (After the Fox, based on Neil Simon’s play), 1966. Le streghe (segment Una sera come le altre), 1967. Woman Seven Times, 1967. Amanti (A Place for Lovers, based on Brunello Rondi’s play), 1968. I girasoli (Sunflowers), 1970. Il giardino dei Finzi Contini (The Garden of the FinziContinis, based on Giorgio Bassani’s novel), 1970. Le coppie (segment Il leone), 1970. Lo chiameremo Andrea (We’ll Call Him Andrew), 1972. Una breve vacanza (A Brief vacation), 1973. Il viaggio (The Voyage, based on Luigi Pirandello’s short story), 1974.

Screenplays Zavattini, Cesare, Umberto D.: Dal soggetto alla sceneggiatura, Milan-Rome: Fratelli Bocca Editori, 1953. Il tetto, edited by Michele Gandin, Bologna: Cappelli, 1956. Il giardino universale, edited by Alberto Bevilacqua, Caltanissetta-Rome: Sciascia, 1961. Bicycle Thieves (with Cesare Zavattini), London-New York: Lorrimer, 1968. Miracle in Milan, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968. Ladri di biciclette, edited by Ernesto Laura, Padua: Radar, 1969.

Other La porta del cielo: memorie 1901–1952, 2004.

Films

Further Readings

Rose scarlatte (based on the play Due dozzine di rose scarlatte by Aldo Di Benedetti), 1940. Maddalena...zero in condotta (Maddalena, Zero for Conduct, based on the play Magda´r Kicsapja´ by La´slo´ Ka´da´r), 1940. Teresa Venerdı´ (based on the novel Pe´ntek Re´zi by Rudolf To¨ro¨k), 1941. Un garibaldino al convento, 1942.

Agel, Henri, Vittorio De Sica, Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1964. Apra`, Adriano, and Patrizia Pistagnes (editors), ‘‘Vittorio De Sica (1901–1974),’’ in I Favolosi anni trenta. Cinema italiano 1929–1944, Milan: Electa, 1979. Argentieri, Mino, and Valentina Fortichiari (editors), Cesare Zavattini: Opere, Cinema, Diario cinematografico, Neorealismo ecc., Milan: Bompiani, 2002.

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VITTORIO DE SICA Aristarco, Guido, Antologia di ‘‘Cinema Nuovo,’’ 1952–58, vol. 1, Rimini-Florence: Guaraldi, 1975. Bazin, Andre´, ‘‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Neorealism and the Italian School of Liberation, Vittorio De Sica: Metteur en Sce`ne, Umberto D: A Great Work,’’ in What Is Cinema? Volume II, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. Bolzoni, Francesco, Quando De Sica era Mr. Brown, Turin: Edizioni ERI, 1985. Calderon, Orio (editor), Vittorio De Sica, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1975. Cardullo, Bert, Vittorio De Sica: Director, Actor, Screenwriter, Jefferson: Mac Farland, 2002. Carpi, Fabio, ‘‘L’elegia populista di Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Cinema italiano del dopoguerra, Milan: Schwartz, 1958. Curle, Howard, and Stephen Snyder (editors), Vittorio De Sica: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2000. Leprohon, Pierre, Vittorio De Sica, Seghers: Paris, 1966. Micciche`, Lino, ‘‘De Sica e il neorealismo,’’ in La ragione e lo sguardo. Saggi e note sul cinema, Cosenza: Lerici, 1979. Micciche`, Lino (editor), De Sica: autore, regista, attore, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Micciche´, Lino, Sciuscia´ di Vittorio De Sica. Letture, Documenti, Testimonianze, Turin: Lindau, 1994. Mida, Massimo, ‘‘Vittorio De Sica in quattro dimensioni,’’ in Compagni di viaggio. Colloqui con i maestri del cinema italiano, Turin: Eri, 1988. Moscati, Italo, Vittorio De Sica: vitalita`, passione e talento in un’Italia dolceamara, Rome: Ediesse and Rai-ERI, 2003. Oldrini, Guido, ‘‘Profilo di De Sica neorealista,’’ in Gli autori e la critica. Fatti e misfatti nel mondo del cinema, Bari: Dedalo, 1991. Pecori, Franco, Vittorio De Sica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Sala, Giuseppe, ‘‘Vittorio De Sica,’’ in Desolazione e speranza nel cinema italiano d’oggi, CaltanissettaRome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1963. Zavattini, Cesare, Diario cinematografico, Milan: Bompiani, 1979.

LADRI DI BICICLETTE, 1948 Film by Vittorio De Sica

When first released in 1948, critics and intellectuals all over the world praised Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief) as a cinematographic masterpiece.

But the Christian Democrats, then in power, along with the Catholic press, condemned the film, calling it an offence to the morality and religion of Italians. Angelo Rizzoli, the producer, and some of the film’s Italian distributors withdrew the film from the Italian theaters, but the impact of Ladri di biciclette on worldwide cinema could merely be delayed. The film soon enjoyed great success abroad, then later in Italy in the 1960s, and is consistently ranked as one of the best films ever made. The story takes place in Rome just after World War II. The opening scene portrays a group of men outside an unemployment office clamoring for work. After two years of joblessness, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) is finally called for a job putting up advertisements, a job for which he is required to own a bicycle. To pay for it, his wife (Lianella Carell) pawns their only set of linens. The bike, then, signifies much more than common transportation—it represents the family’s primary source of income, its lifeline to society, its path into an uncertain future. When it is stolen the first day of Ricci’s new job, it becomes absolutely necessary to find it. The body of the film presents Ricci’s search, assisted by his capricious young son, Bruno (Enzo Stajola). Together they walk the streets of Rome, from Porta Portese to the Stadio Olimpico, during which the relationships between father and son, between church and society, between the individual and the state, and between social classes are revealed. When Ricci, desperate from the fruitless search, impulsively decides to steal a bike, the act represents his moral breakdown and, by extension, the moral corruption of society at large. It is young Bruno’s horrified reaction, and his instinctual rescue—both physical and emotional—of his father that serves to restore the family’s moral stature, illuminate the moral bankruptcy of postwar Italy, and provide a note of optimism to an otherwise dismal conclusion. The famous last scene shows father and son, hand in hand, walking toward a future in which only their love for one another, shared experience, and hard-earned understanding are sure. Freely adapted from the novel by Luigi Bartolini, Ladri di biciclette reinforced a collaboration between director Vittorio De Sica and screenwriter Cesare Zavattini, which began in the early 1940s with I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us) and continued until Una breve vacanza (A Brief Vacation, 1973). The film has been described by the French critic Andre´ Bazin as one of the purest expressions of neorealism 627

VITTORIO DE SICA (What Is Cinema?, vol. 2, 1971). Like other neorealist films, its treatment of the postwar period was meant to reawaken a shell-shocked Italian public. On-location shooting, and the use of nonprofessional actors, hallmarks of neorealist cinema, are exemplified by Ladri di biciclette. But the film’s most distinctive attribute is the careful organization of the sequence of actions, so as to give the impression of a casual unfolding of events. Formally, this was realized by including cinematic ‘‘dead time,’’ which is the use of digression and the elimination of delineated cause-effect relationships. The emphasis on a limited time frame (three days) and the deliberately constructed mise-en-scene leave the viewer with the impression that the movie’s events are fluid yet random or accidental, an illusion emphasized by skillful editing. Through the camera’s ‘‘stalking’’ (pedinamento) of the characters (a neorealist technique suggested by Zavattini to give a more faithful representation of the interaction between man and his environment) the spectator enters in their phenomenological worlds and, like them, becomes emotionally susceptible to the sudden change of the events. Through form, then, De Sica created a perfect aesthetic illusion of reality that was to influence all cinema to come. The core of the film is defined by the father-son relationship. De Sica, by inverting their social roles, emphasizes the sense of alienation and loss of the adult man in postwar society and, consequentially, his altered role in the traditional patriarchal Italian family. Bruno is the only wage earner during his father’s unemployment (he works at a gas station). Ironically, it is the child who reassures the father, directs him during the search, and supports Ricci at the most humiliating moment of his life when he is caught with the stolen bike. Bruno also represents Ricci’s only hope for a better future. This strong relationship is reinforced visually by their placement among a disinterested crowd. Descriptive long and medium shots show the isolation of the characters among the throngs of people at Porta Portese, at the bus station, in the thief’s

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neighborhood, and outside the stadium. De Sica neither believes in human solidarity (especially among members of the same class) nor in the supporting presence of the state, as emblemized by Ricci’s futile report of the theft at the police station and the equally useless intervention of the policeman once Ricci finds the thief. Ricci’s dream of a better life is doomed (like so many others), and it is the long, slow upward tilt of the camera at the pawn shop where packages of linen are stored as high up as the eye can see that illustrates this terrible fact most acutely. De Sica suggests, therefore, that Ricci’s case is in the hands of fate, and that only the instinctive love for a son (and for family) can compensate for the broken equilibrium in society and the flawed nature of mankind. GIOVANNA DE LUCA

Further Readings Alonge, Giame, Vittorio De Sica: Ladri di biciclette, Turin: Lindau, 1997. Baldelli, Pio, ‘‘Ancora qualche parola a proposito di Ladri di biciclette,’’ in Rivista del cinema italiano, nos. 5–6 (May-June 1954): 15–30. Bazin, Andre´, What is Cinema?, edited and translated by Hugh Gray, vol. 2, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1971. Carancini, Gaetano, ‘‘Ricci, Bruno e la bicicletta,’’ in Cinema, 15 June 1949, pp. 495–497. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Ladri di biciclette,’’ in Dieci inverni 1947– 1957, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Laura, Ernesto (editor), Ladri di biciclette, Padua: Radar, 1967. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves: Casting Shadow on a Visionary City,’’ in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Thompson, Kristin, ‘‘Realism in the Cinema: Bicycle Thieves,’’ in Breaking the Glass Armor. Neoformalist Film Analysis, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Tomasulo, Frank, ‘‘Bicycle Thieves: A Re-Reading,’’ in Cinema Journal, vol. 21, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 2–13.

GIUSEPPE DESSI`

GIUSEPPE DESSI` (1909–1977) More than any other writer except Grazia Deledda, Giuseppe Dessı` recounted Sardinia, its people, and their feelings, affections, hopes, and fears. In his prose, the island is constantly recalled as a place of myth and of history, as a memorial, legendary microcosm: It is a metaphor for a world that arduously attempts to promote mutual respect, justice, solidarity between people, family affections, even in the midst of stormy events that bring pain and civil and moral disorder. Dessı` communicated the anxiety and the urgency of conserving such values, fruit of an age-old wisdom, in the hopes that the recollections of this distant civilization might be an exemplar for modern development, a possible social model adapted to human aspirations and happiness. Dessı`’s characters as a result seem to be losers in the prevailing context of historical irrationality, but in reality they are not losers in terms of their conscience, which suggests instead a dream of a civil, firm, serene society. The themes of self-respect and respect for others, of self-determination, of sacred affection, of passion for nature and love for culture, of the mysterious sense of life and its religiosity, are first articulated in the anthropological knowledge buried deep in the island long ago. All of these motifs are already present in Dessı`’s first novel, San Silvano (The House at San Silvano, 1939), product of a literary period devoted to narrative lyricism, but which contains distinct characteristics. One such characteristic is its Proustian mould, rendered unique by the author’s existential (and not simply literary) form of engagement. In his successive works, Dessı` was in fact never again able to transmit such engagement. Another peculiar characteristic is the dimension of memory, which, besides giving an elegiac tone to the narrative thread, makes explicit a refined cultural awareness, via which the events narrated are not only persuasive for their lyricism, but also for their ethical, conscious counterpoint that is well-contextualized in the history of the Sardinian setting. Finally, the magical presence of the island landscape is alive, along with the feelings of a familiar microcosm deeply rooted in emotion and nostalgia, communicated with true poetic effectiveness. Dessı` (and not only in San Silvano) avoids portraying Sardinia in a stereotypical, folkloristic manner. His island is

rather jealous of its traditions and its troubled history, symbol not of a picturesque universe, but a radical way of living, marked by a sense of interiority, a profoundly affective measure of human relationships, a suffered ethical experience. In San Silvano, the writer demonstrates a noteworthy talent for narrative harmony, the capacity to make the narrative material swell with his delicate descriptive touch. Memory is activated: a memory of the soul, a fantastic motor that does not renounce a strong, coherent representative structure. The originality of the writing style of San Silvano and Dessı`’s intense concern with memory are considerable creative achievements in his next narrative as well: the novel Michele Boschino (Michele Boschino, 1942), which is subdivided into two parts; the ancient and patriarchal theater of I passeri (Sparrows, 1955), originally published in Il ponte in 1953, is a work in which the prominence of neorealism causes the author to engage more directly in the treatment of political themes; Introduzione alla vita di Giacomo Sgarbo (Introduction to the Life of Giacomo Sgarbo, 1959), a theoretical and personal ordering of the Proustian theme of the return to a life before fantastic existence; or finally, the passionate portrait of life and Sardinian environments of Paese d’ombre (The Forests of Norbio, 1972). This powerful portrayal of peasant life, essentially traditional in its diegetic structure, loosens a central knot of Dessı`’s narrative with its radical treatment of two moments: lyrical memory and the reality of a country in its historical becoming. These two threads find an effective junction in the character of the protagonist, Angelo Uras. The poor son of peasants, Uras rises on the social ladder to become mayor and entrepreneur, a symbol of the possibility of individual, familial, and collective liberation in a community oppressed by ancient and modern exploitation. Several theatrical texts are worthy of note: the collection Racconti drammatici (Dramatic Tales, 1959), and the dramas La trincea (The Trench, 1962) and Eleonora d’Arborea (Eleonora d’Arborea, 1964). The latter, reissued in 1995, is a historical drama, with lyrical passages in which the powerful portrait of Eleonora d’Arborea emerges distinctly. She is a noble, tragic figure of fourteenth-century 629

GIUSEPPE DESSI` Sardinia, who attempted to bring political and juridical unity to the Sardinian territory. The unfinished La scelta (The Choice) was published posthumously in 1978.

Biography Born in Villacidro in the province of Cagliari, 7 August 1909; father, Francesco, was a career officer, and his continual changes of residence prevented Giuseppe from following a regular academic career. He was forced to follow a difficult program of autodidacticism in his literary and philosophical studies, and to live his existence as a ‘‘continental’’ Sardinian, marked by a painful, nostalgic sense of up-rootedness. Graduated from high school Dottori di Cagliari in 1929–1930, thanks to attentions of Delio Cantimori, and graduated from University of Pisa with a degree in literature and a thesis on Manzoni. In the 1930s, contributed to the important journals Solaria and Letteratura and began career as teacher, reaching later the role of superintendent of schools. Established himself in Rome at the Accademia dei Lincei in that capacity in 1954. In the 1950s and 1960s, contributed to Il Ponte, La Stampa, Rinascita, L’Approdo, Il resto del carlino, L’Unita`. His literary work, completed in a solitary, secluded position with respect to the current fashions, was awarded important prizes, including the Salento prize for I passeri in 1955; the Bagutta for Il disertore in 1962; and the Strega for Paese d’ombre in 1972. Married to Luigia Babini, with whom he had one son. Contracted a grave illness in 1964; died in Rome, 6 July 1977. GIORGIO TAFFON Selected Works Fiction San Silvano, 1939; as The House at San Silvano, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1966. Michele Boschino, 1942.

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Racconti vecchi e nuovi, 1945. I passeri, 1955. L’isola dell’Angelo e altri racconti, 1957. La ballerina di carta, 1957. Introduzione alla vita di Giacomo Sgarbo, 1959. Racconti drammatici, 1959. Il disertore, 1962; as The Deserter, translated by Virginia Hathaway, 1962. Lei era l’acqua, 1966. Paese d’ombre, 1972; as The Forests of Norbio, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1975. La scelta, 1978, edited by Anna Dolfi.

Plays La trincea, 1962. Eleonora d’Arborea, 1964; revised ed. 1995.

Children’s Books Storia del principe Lui, 1949.

Other Scoperta della Sardegna, 1965. I diari (1926–1931), edited by Franca Lipari, 1993. I diari (1932–1948), edited by Franca Lipari, 1999. Lettere 1931–1977, edited by Marzia Stedile, 2002.

Further Reading Debenedetti, Giacomo, ‘‘Dessı` e il golfo mistico,’’ in Intermezzo, Milan: Mondadori, 1963. Dell’Aquila, Michele, I margini della scrittura, Fasano di Brindisi: Schena Editore, 1994. Dolfi, Anna, La parola e il tempo. Saggio su Giuseppe Dessı`, Florence: Vallecchi, 1977. Dolfi, Anna (editor), Una giornata per Giuseppe Dessı`, Rome: Bulzoni, 2005. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Giuseppe Dessı` a teatro,’’ in Quaderni del Teatro di Sardegna, 1 (1998): 7–43. Tanda, Nicola, Letteratura e lingue in Sardegna, Cagliari: Edes, 1984. Tanda, Nicola, Introduction to Giuseppe Dessı`, Eleonora d’Arborea, Sassari: Edes, 1995. Tondo, Michele, ‘‘Giuseppe Dessı`,’’ in Sondaggi e letture di contemporanei, Lecce: Milella, 1974. Varese, Claudio, ‘‘Giuseppe Dessı`,’’ in Occasioni e valori della letteratura contemporanea, Bologna: Cappelli, 1967.

DETECTIVE FICTION

DETECTIVE FICTION The emergence of a specifically Italian detective fiction in the 1930s was the result of a long gestation, over which Anglo-American and French models had a crucial influence. Historians have traced structural and thematic elements of detective fiction—urban settings, the theme of crime and punishment, and even certain primitive forms of detection—in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury popular literature. The production of authors such as Matilde Serao or Carolina Invernizio has been related to the genre, and Luca Crovi has defined Emilio De Marchi’s 1887 novel Il cappello del prete (The Priest’s Hat) as ‘‘the true founder of what would become the Italian school of detective fiction’’ (Tutti i colori del giallo, 2002). However, in the works of these authors the process of detection is secondary to the more traditional adventurous and romantic twists of popular fiction, while it takes center stage in the earliest examples of mysteries, from Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) to Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887). A similar wavering between the feuilleton and the mystery is evident in works published at the beginning of the century, from Salvatore Farina’s Il segreto del nevaio (The Secret of the Snow-field, 1909), to the adventures of the various pulp heroes patterned on characters like Nick Carter or Joe Petrosino, quite popular in the 1910s and 1920s. In the same period, the increasing success of Anglo-American and French mystery authors in translation (Conan Doyle, Emile Gaboriau) resulted in the establishment of several dedicated series. Mondadori’s I libri gialli (The Yellow Books), thus named after the color of the book covers, was launched on 15 September 1929, and was immediately successful thanks to a careful selection of the major figures in international detective fiction. Quickly, the term giallo came to be identified with the genre, and to be used, as both a noun and an adjective, as a synonym for ‘‘mystery’’ or ‘‘detective novel,’’ especially in its classical form of puzzle-narrative. Il sette bello (The Seven of Diamonds, 1931) by Alessandro Varaldo (1876–1953) is considered the first example of classical detective fiction by an Italian writer. In his history of the genre, Loris Rambelli has noted that Varaldo’s novels already present certain features

peculiar to early Italian mysteries: a moderate amount of violence, the occasional retrieval of situations typical of the feuilleton, and a certain irony that foregrounds the ludic and conventional elements of the genre (Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano, 1979). In fact, many of the earliest writers of Italian detective fiction tread, and often quite consciously step over, the fine line between imitation and parody, as in the case of the Futurist Luciano Folgore (1888–1966), whose La trappola colorata (The Coloured Trap, 1934) is a devastating lampoon of the genre. The giallo also enjoyed great success as a theatrical and radio genre. Several well-known playwrights worked for both media, including Luigi Chiarelli (1884–1947), author of L’anello di Teodosio (Theodosius’s Ring, 1929), a radio drama that predates the ‘‘official’’ birth of Italian detective fiction; the Futurist Bruno Corra (1892–1976), and the populist politician Guglielmo Giannini (1891–1960). Among the novelists of the 1930s, two stand out for the quality and quantity of their production. Augusto De Angelis (1888–1944), the creator of the Inspector Carlo De Vincenzi, published 16 detective novels in a remarkable burst of creativity between 1935 and 1943. His fiction is characterized by an unusual degree of sophistication—in the course of his investigations De Vincenzi is fond of quoting Freud, certainly not an author dear to the Fascist authorities—and by great attention for the psychology and the motivations of the characters. Often set in interiors surrounded by a somber and crepuscular Milan, De Angelis’ novels deal with crime and punishment as a complex phenomenon and eschew the schematism of popular fiction or of the edicts of the Fascist regime. Ezio D’Errico (1892–1972), whose first giallo, Qualcuno ha bussato alla porta (Someone Knocked on the Door, 1936), chose instead a foreign setting, Paris, for the adventures of his Inspector Emilio Richard. Strongly influenced by Georges Simenon, D’Errico emphasizes the human and everyday nature of crime. Like Simenon’s Maigret, Richard moves in a petit bourgeois and lower-class world of small-time criminals and personal dramas, and he bases his investigative method more on his understanding of human nature and of what he calls the ‘‘environment’’ than on the iron-clad logic of the Holmesian sleuth. 631

DETECTIVE FICTION Initially, homemade detective fiction benefited from the autarchic policies of the Fascist government, which in 1931 enacted legislation requiring publishers to reserve at least 15% of any of their series to Italian authors. By the mid-1930s, however, detective fiction was the object of attacks by critics, generally hostile to popular fiction, and by Fascist censors, who considered the genre dangerous as a glorification of and incitement to crime, as a denial of the regime’s official image of a crime-free society, and finally as the vehicle, through translation, for representations of alternative forms of investigative and judicial systems. In 1937, the Ministry for Popular Culture (MinCulPop) dictated a series of restrictions, including the mandatory apprehension and punishment of the culprit who must not be an Italian character, thus severely limiting the narrative options for Italian novelists. In 1941, the MinCulPop prohibited the publication of detective fiction without the authorization from the ministry, and further ordered the pulping of any such novels still in stock in 1943. While some gialli managed to slip through censorship, these events and the war marked the end of the first phase of Italian detective fiction. In the postwar period, the great novelty for Italian audiences was the American hard-boiled school—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, to name only the best-known authors—which introduced a more violent, realistic and morally ambiguous form of detective fiction. The late 1940s and 1950s were in general a difficult period for Italian giallisti, and the few who still worked in the genre often had to hide behind American-sounding pseudonyms. Such was the case of Franco Cannarozzo (1921–1990), a prolific writer whose multifaceted production, begun in 1946, is scattered under over a dozen of pen names. His ‘‘psychological’’ thrillers, as Loris Rambelli calls them (Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano, 1979), contributed to the renewal of the conventions of classical detective fiction. In the 1970s, as Franco Enna, the pseudonym by which he is best known, Cannarozzo traded the foreign locales of his previous production for the more realistic setting of Rome in the powerful Mamma lupara (Mother Shotgun, 1972) and in the series dedicated to the Inspector Sartori. In the 1950s, other authors attempted to work within subgenres of the giallo, with mixed results, from the semicomic adventures of the two tramps Tre Soldi e Boero, created by Giuseppe Ciabattini (1882–1962), to the forays into the underworld in the novels of Sergio Donati (1933–). Curiously, however, the best-known examples of 632

postwar detective fiction come from two authors for whom the genre serves mainly as a formal structure and who cannot be strictly defined giallisti. With Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1946), Carlo Emilio Gadda represents, with his characteristic linguistic impasto, the moral ambiguities of the Italian bourgeoisie under Fascism, and, undermining the conventions of the genre, closes the novel before the climatic moment of the solution. Leonardo Sciascia’s first giallo, Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl/Mafia Vendetta, 1963), uses the structure of popular fiction to denounce the pervasive presence of the mafia in Italian social and political life and to reflect on the construction and manipulation of truth in a mediatic society. The author who reinvented the Italian detective novel, however, was Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911– 1969), who in the 1960s returned to the genre in which he had debuted before the war. Set in Milan, Venere privata (Private Venus, 1966) introduces Duca Lamberti, a cynical and disenchanted physician expelled from the profession who makes a living as a consultant for the police. Influenced by the American noir, the novels in the Lamberti series present a morally shady and violent metropolis in which no one—including the detective— can escape the corrupting influence of modernity. The realism of Scerbanenco’s novels both established Italian cities as legitimate settings for detective fiction and demonstrated the effectiveness of the genre as a reflection of the dysfunctions of the contemporary world. Indeed, Scerbanenco paved the way for a type of detective fiction rooted in the reality of specific Italian environments: as Massimo Carloni has demonstrated in his L’Italia in giallo (1994), a strong regional identity remains one of the main characteristics of the contemporary giallo. By the 1970s, then, a specifically Italian detective fiction returned to be practicable, if not always popular. The success of Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s ironic portrayal of the bourgeoisie of Turin in La donna della Domenica (Sunday’s Woman, 1972) and of Umberto Eco’s neo-Gothic atmospheres and metaliterary playfulness in the medieval thriller Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) is only the more evident sign of a much more pervasive phenomenon. Among the many authors to emerge in the 1970s, one of the most influential is Loriano Macchiavelli (1930–), best known for the series featuring the questurino (cop) Sarti Antonio, begun in 1974 with Le piste dell’attentato (The Trail of the Terrorist Attack).

DETECTIVE FICTION In his novels, Macchiavelli traces the transformations of his city, Bologna, and often sets his mysteries against the background of contemporary political events (he is also the author of novels on unsolved real-life mysteries such as the bombing of the Bologna train station in 1980). Furthermore, Macchiavelli has been involved in numerous initiatives to promote Italian detective fiction, including the formation of the ‘‘Gruppo 13’’ in 1991, which has played an important role in making Bologna a sort of capital of the contemporary giallo. In the 1970s and 1980s, the process of consolidation and expansion of the genre continued, with, among others, the gritty procedurals of Antonio Perria (1924–2004), the classical stories of detection of Renato Olivieri (1925–), the Neapolitan hard-boiled novels of Attilio Veraldi (1925–1999), or the mysteries set in ancient Rome of Danila Comastri Montanari (1948–). At the same time, the genre began to find critical recognition in Italy, with the appearance of historical (e.g., Rambelli) and theoretical (e.g., Eco) studies. After its advent in 1954, television gradually displaced the theater and the radio as the main medium of mass entertainment, and inherited the tradition of high-quality popular detective fiction that had characterized its predecessors. In 1959, Giallo Club, a quiz show centered on the solution of a televised crime, introduced the character of Ezechiele Sheridan, a lieutenant of the San Francisco police interpreted by Ubaldo Lay, who starred in numerous serials throughout the 1960s as well as in a series of novels and commercials, perhaps the first example of television spinoffs in Italy. The success of the adventures of Lieutenant Sheridan inspired the creation of numerous other series, often adapted from literary sources, all characterized by a very high production value and by the presence of some of the best film and theater actors of the period: Le inchieste del commissario Maigret (The Investigations of Inspector Maigret, 1964), starring Gino Cervi); Nero Wolfe (1969), with Dino Buazzelli as the detective created by Rex Stout; I racconti di padre Brown (The Tales of Father Brown, 1970), with the popular comedian Renato Rascel as G. K. Chesterton’s investigating priest; Il commissario De Vincenzi (1973), starring Paolo Stoppa. This tradition of television detective fiction continues throughout the 1980s, especially thanks to La piovra (The Octopus) with Michele Placido, a complex story about the conflict between the state and the mafia developed over ten serials broadcast between 1984 and 2001. The newfound status of the genre in the 1990s has

translated into a flourishing of television giallo: among the many examples, Un commissario a Roma (An Inspector in Rome, 1993) and Il maresciallo Rocca (Marshall Rocca, 1996) stand out for the excellence of their protagonists, respectively Nino Manfredi and Gigi Proietti. The publication, in 1994, of La forma dell’acqua (The Shape of Water) by the Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri (1925–) was a true turning point for Italian detective fiction. The spectacular and for the most part unexpected success of this and the later adventures of the police inspector Salvo Montalbano— which regularly top the best-seller charts, a truly unprecedented feat for an Italian popular author— has demonstrated once and for all the maturity and viability of the genre. Camilleri’s novels are characterized by tightly constructed plots, vivid characters, a strong sense of irony, and a language that mixes with great expressive results Italian and dialect. Camilleri also rejects expected Sicilian themes such as the mafia in favor of narratives that highlight a variety of social and political problems. The success of his novels, which have also been adapted for television with Luca Zingaretti as Montalbano, has opened the floodgates for other giallisti: the 1990s were characterized by a veritable boom of the genre, in all its permutations and with a particular preference for the subgenres of the noir and of historical detective fiction. In the new generation of mystery authors, the best-known is Carlo Lucarelli (1960–), a versatile writer who debuted with a series of novels set between the twilight years of the Fascist regime and the immediate postwar period (the Fascist ventennium and the Resistance provide the background to works by several contemporary giallisti, such as Lucio Trevisan (1945–), Marcello Fois (1960–), Leonardo Gori (1957–), demonstrating that, in a period of intense revisionism, fiction has a crucial role to play in the debate on historical memory). Of Lucarelli’s novels on contemporary Italy, Almost Blue (1997), the story of the hunt for a serial killer by Grazia, a policewoman, with the help of the blind Simone, stands out for its original representation of Bologna as a mysterious and nocturnal city, and for the complex and sophisticated narrative structure. The recourse to the conventions and structures of detective fiction by many contemporary writers makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish between popular and ‘‘literary’’ narrative, and indeed, some of the most interesting figures in late twentiethcentury literature such as the so-called Cannibali have openly acknowledged their debt to genre literature. This is not merely the result of a more general 633

DETECTIVE FICTION ‘‘postmodern’’ tendency to blur the boundaries between high and low culture. Rather, writing about crime enables writers to represent figures and experiences marginalized or repressed in contemporary society: As a result, the giallo has become perhaps the most politically committed and socially critical genre in the Italian literary landscape. Massimo Carlotto (1956–), one of the more remarkable authors of the Italian noir whose first novel, La verita` dell’Alligatore (The Alligator’s Truth, 1995), is based on his own controversial conviction, has summarized this perspective by arguing that the task of genre literature in general is precisely that of ‘‘narrating reality,’’ and of doing so in real time—a sentiment shared by many of its practitioners. LUCA SOMIGLI Further Reading Bacchereti, Elisabetta, Carlo Lucarelli, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2004. Brunetti, Bruno, Augusto De Angelis: Uno studio in giallo, Bari: Edizioni Graphis, 1994. Capecchi, Giovanni, Andrea Camilleri, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2000. Carloni, Massimo, L’Italia in giallo: Geografia e storia del giallo italiano contemporaneo, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1994. Carloni, Massimo, and Roberto Pirani, Loriano Macchiavelli: Un romanziere una citta`, Pontassieve (Florence): Pirani Bibliografica Editore, 2004.

Carlotto, Massimo, ‘‘I miei racconti radiografia della realta`,’’ interview with Sebastiano Giulisano, in Avvenimenti, no. 29 (2002): 30–31. Cremante, Renzo (editor), Le figure del delitto: Il libro poliziesco in Italia dalle origini ad oggi, Bologna: Graphis, 1989. Crotti, Ilaria, La ‘‘detection’’ della scrittura: Modello poliziesco edattualizzazioni allotropiche nel romanzo del Novecento, Padua: Antenore, 1982. Crovi, Luca, Tutti i colori del giallo: Il giallo italiano da de Marchi a Scerbanenco a Camilleri, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Eco, Umberto, and T. A. Sebeok (editors), The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Milanesi, Claudio (editor), Subvertir les re`gles: Le roman policier Italien et latino-ame´ricain, Cahiers d’etudes romanes, n.s. 9 (2003). Padovani, Gisella, Franco Enna: Esperienze culturali e itinerari creativi di un maestro del ‘‘giallo’’ italiano, Enna: Papiro, 1995. Pirani, Roberto, Dizionario bibliografico del giallo: Collane e periodici gialli in Italia, 1895–1999, Pontassieve: Pirani Bibliografica Editore, 2000. Quazzolo, Paolo, Delitti in palcoscenico. La commedia poliziesca italiana dal 1927 al 1954, Pasian di Prato (Udine): Campanotto, 2001. Rambelli, Loris, Storia del ‘giallo’ italiano, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Il romanzo poliziesco italiano da Gadda al Gruppo 13, special issue of Narrativa, 2 (1992). Tani, Stefano, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of The Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Trent’anni di giallo italiano, special issue of Narrativa, 26 (2004).

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO (1860–1934) Salvatore Di Giacomo was a poet, playwright, critic, musicologist, historiographer, and journalist. He first began writing for La Gazzetta letteraria of Turin, for which he worked both as a reporter and a short story writer. He went on to found the fortnightly Il Fantasio (1881) and contributed to the daily Il Pungolo. In 1881, he published his Sonetti (Sonnets, 1884) and, in March 1885, published the verse and music of ‘‘Marechiare’’ (1885), a bestseller, and, afterwards, ‘‘Era de maggio’’ (It Was May, 1885). He was soon valued as a refined poet who was also close to folk culture. The Sonetti, for example, written when music was flourishing in Naples, 634

became songs that met with great success. Among his musician collaborators were Pasquale Mario Costa, Enrico De Leva, Francesco Paolo Tosti and, then, Vincenzo Valente, Eduardo Di Capua, E. A. Mario, Gennaro and Jacopo Napoli. The year 1886 was important for his poetic activity. Di Giacomo published a collection of poems, ’O funneco verde (The Green Blind Alley, 1886), containing 15 sonnets, which, as Francesco Gaeta observes in his study, Salvatore Di Giacomo (1911), was meant as a reply to accusations by Neapolitan intellectuals that his poetry was ‘‘sentimental and tender’’ and did not reflect the people’s noisy,

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO cheerful, and teasing soul. Indeed, Di Giacomo’s writings, above all his poetry and drama, provoked lively debate, especially among the artists congregating at the Strasburgo Beerhouse in Piazza Municipio and in the cultural circles that gravitated to aristocratic Naples and the philosopher Benedetto Croce, who is a constant cultural reference for Di Giacomo. In 1907, Di Giacomo’s first complete collection of poems, Poesie (Poems), was published, with notes by Benedetto Croce and glossary by Francesco Gaeta. Croce himself regarded Di Giacomo as a cultured and refined writer and especially appreciated his first short stories that, Croce remarked, seemed to be inspired by Hoffmann or Erckmann-Chatrian. His first collection of short stories, Minuetto (Minuet, 1883), was a commercial success. Ten years later, he published another collection, Pipa e boccale (Pipe and Jug, 1893), with the subtitle, Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Stories). These stories concern extraordinary facts, the most original of which are of a scientific, especially medical nature. Scientific discoveries and research were, to Di Giacomo, synonyms of wonder and extraordinariness. Di Giacomo’s literary interest in blending magic and scientism represented an important importation of European fiction into Southern Italian culture of the late nineteenth century. The critics hailed Di Giacomo’s short stories as precious documents through which French culture from Maupassant to Baudelaire, Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers and Zola entered Neapolitan literature. Di Giacomo was strongly interested in European culture; he studied French and, in 1886, published his first translation from French, Suor Filomena, by J. De Goncourt, with a preface by E´mile Zola. Indeed, the figure of Suor Filomena was adumbrated in a short story by Di Giacomo, ‘‘Suor Carmelina,’’ and in a tale by Axel Munthe, ‘‘Soeur Philome`ne,’’ in which the heroine, offering her help to the victims of Naples’ 1884 cholera outbreak, dies in that terrible epidemic. Even in his children’s stories Perlina e Gobetta (1899) and La piccola ladra (The Little Thief, 1899), he betrayed a strong attraction to the fantastic, in the manner of Carlo Collodi and Edmondo De Amicis, the most popular writers of children’s books of the time. Di Giacomo was also an admirer of Giovanni Verga, with whom he conducted an intense correspondence. The themes of his stories are: death, existential defeat, and characters’ psychological mood. As a short story writer, Di Giacomo has not been sufficiently valued, while the artistic appeal of his poetry has been acknowledged since his

debut. Attracted to the theater since childhood, in 1887 he published a comic opera in verse, La Fiera (The Fair), with music by Nicola D’Arienzo. This work was greeted with great enthusiasm and was valued for its melodic structure and correct harmony. At the same time that La Fiera was enjoying its triumph at the Teatro Nuovo, Di Giacomo’s revue Na passiata pe Napule e pe fora (A Walk Through Naples and Outside, 1886) was enjoying an acclaimed run at the little Neapolitan theater La Fenice. Its libretto was written by Di Giacomo, in collaboration with Carlo Abeniacar and Ferdinando Russo, and set to music by D’Arienzo. These triumphs confirmed his versatility. Indeed, Di Giacomo’s entire literary production is marked by its double registers of song/folk music; short story/report; drama/opera. His three-act play Mala vita (Crime Life, 1889), then entitled ‘O voto (The Vow, 1894), adapted from the short story contained in the collection Rosa Bellavita (1888), illustrates his way of mixing genres (short story and drama). In his most important plays, ‘O mese mariano (The Month of Mary, 1900) and Assunta Spina (1910), the chorus has a central function and the protagonists are realized dramatically more in the comments of other characters than in the peculiarities of their psychology. ‘O mese mariano, inspired by the short story ‘‘Senza vederlo’’ (Without Seeing Him, 1884) dramatizes the story of a mother who, in a surge of love and remorse, goes to The Poor People’s Home to see her son Peppino. The play was staged for the first time at the Teatro San Ferdinando on 24 January 1900. Assunta Spina (1910), played by Adelina Magnetti, was staged first at the Teatro Nuovo in 1909. The most important Italian playwrights attended the first night, among them Marco Praga and the critic Renato Simoni. Theater historian Vittorio Viviani tells us that the premiere of Assunta Spina (with the appearance of Francesca Bertini, the future diva of the silent cinema) caused such an uproar that Di Giacomo was accused of depicting Naples as a city with no social evolution at a time when the local working class was organizing three memorable strikes (Storia del teatro napoletano, 1969). Assunta is an enigmatic woman whose lover, Michele Boccadifuoco, is imprisoned in Avellino, far from Naples. Assunta accepts a proposal by the chancellor Funelli, but ends up becoming attached to him. Assunta learns from Michele that Funelli is married and has two children. Feeling betrayed, Michele stabs Funelli, while Assunta charges herself with the murder. A study of 635

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO Neapolitan mores, the play, which uses a literary and never burlesque or banal language (the Neapolitan dialect) and whose characters are wellrealized, gives a predominant role to the chorus. Assunta Spina was a defining moment in the history of Neapolitan theater, and, as Andrea Bisicchia has argued in the introduction to his 1986 edition of the play, it can be considered a manifesto for the teatro d’arte (art theater). The influence of Salvatore Di Giacomo and his lyrical realism upon Eduardo De Filippo was decisive. Eduardo’s first major success as a young actor was performing as Tittariello in Assunta Spina with the Magnetti-Altieri Company at the Teatro Nuovo in 1909. Di Giacomo helped adapt a film from this play, directed by Gustavo Serena. It premiered at the Cinema Olympia of Rome on 29 October 1915, starring Francesca Bertini in the title role. Di Giacomo focused his attention on the city’s subproletariat. His dialect dramas are colorful studies of an old Naples, filled with criminals, beggars, prostitutes, and all sorts of degenerates. However, his naturalistic approach is somewhat tempered by a lyrical, compassionate vein. At the core of Di Giacomo’s work are ancient Naples and the figures of the recent past, who are upset and overwhelmed by modernity. From these preoccupations comes his predilection for art: Vincenzo Gemito: La vita e l’opera (Vincenzo Gemito: Life and Works, 1905) and Domenico Morelli, pittore (Domenico Morelli, Painter, 1905); and his interest in the fair, fascinating, and pleasure-loving eighteenth century (his studies on Casanova). Naples, his hometown, played a predominant role in his life and formation. In 1909, he supervised the publication of Napoli, a collection of scholarly writings illustrated by 190 photographs, many of which were taken by Di Giacomo himself. The city fascinated and charmed him, but often oppressed him, too. He often expressed his dissatisfaction with the reality surrounding him and with the profiteering and vain journalistic and literary world, against which he often complained bitterly. In his private life, Di Giacomo showed a neurasthenic streak, not without a touch of masochism, as in his Lettere a Elisa (Letters to Elisa, 1973), whose complexity was noticed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who greatly esteemed Di Giacomo’s poetry.

Biography Born in Naples on 13 March 1860, son of Francesco Saverio, pediatrician, and Patricia Buongiorno, music teacher at the San Pietro a Maiella 636

Conservatory. After his father’s death from cholera in 1884, a recurring theme in his writings, his family suffered financially. Gave up medical studies, devoted self to journalist activity, writing for Il Corriere del Mattino, La Gazzetta letteraria, Capitan Fracassa, Pro Patria, Il Pungolo. In 1882, wrote his first song, Uocchie de suonno (Eyes Clogged with Sleep). As manager of the Lucchesi Palli theater and music section of the National Library of Naples, devoted self to publishing and scholarly studies. In 1916, married, after a long engagement, Elisa Avigliano. In 1929, appointed academician of Italy. Died in Naples, on 5 April 1934. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Collections Teatro, Lanciano: Carabba, 1910 (including ‘O voto, ‘A San Francisco, ‘O mese mariano, Assunta Spina, Quand l’amour meurt); enlarged edition, 1920 (including ‘O voto, ‘A San Francisco, ‘O mese mariano, Assunta Spina, Quand l’amour meurt, L’abbe´ Pe`ru). Le poesie e le novelle. Il teatro e le cronache, edited by Francesco Flora and Mario Vinciguerra, Milan: Mondadori, 1967. Poesie e prose, edited by Elena Croce and Lanfranco Orsini, Milan: Mondadori, 1995; selections as The Naples of Salvatore Di Giacomo: Poems and a Play, translated by Frank J. Palescandolo, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum Filibrary Series, 2000. Love Poems, translated by Frank J. Palescandolo, TorontoBuffalo: Guernica, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Sonetti,’’ 1884. ‘‘‘O funneco verde,’’ 1886. ‘‘Canzoni napoletane,’’ 1891. ‘‘Fantasia,’’ 1898. ‘‘Napoli illustrata,’’ 1900. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1907; enlarged edition, 1909; revised edition, 1927; as The Monastery and other Poems, translated by William De La Fald, 1914. ‘‘Canzoni e Ariette nove,’’ 1916.

Short Stories ‘‘Minuetto,’’ 1883. ‘‘Nennella,’’ 1884. ‘‘Mattinate napoletane,’’ 1886. ‘‘Rosa Bellavita,’’ 1888. ‘‘Pipa e boccale: Racconti fantastici,’’ 1893. ‘‘La piccola ladra,’’ 1899. ‘‘Perlina e Gobetta: Racconto fantastico,’’ 1899; revised edition, 1921. ‘‘Nella vita,’’ 1903. ‘‘L’ignoto. Novelle,’’ 1920.

Theater Na passiata pe Napule e pe fora, 1886. La fiera, 1887. Mala vita. Scene popolari napoletane, 1889.

SALVATORE DI GIACOMO ‘O voto, 1894. ‘O mese mariano, 1900. Rosaura rapita, 1904. Settecento, 1907. Assunta Spina, 1910; edited by Andrea Bisicchia, 1986.

Translations by Salvatore Di Giacomo. Girardin, F., ‘‘Il racconto interrotto,’’ Il salotto, 1 (1885). De Goncourt, Edmond, Suor Filomena, Naples: Bideri, 1892. Casanova, Giacomo, Historia della mia fuga dalle prigioni dei Piombi, Milan: Alfieri & Lacroix, 1911.

Essays Cronaca del Teatro San Carlino. Contributo alla storia della scena dialettale, 1891; revised edition, 1918. La prostituzione in Napoli nei secoli XV–XVIII, 1899. Napoli d’oggi, 1900. Poesia dialettale napoletana, 1900. Il quarantotto: notizie, aneddoti, curiosita` intorno al 15 maggio 1848, 1903. Domenico Morelli, pittore, 1905. Vincenzo Gemito. La vita, l’opera, 1905; revised edition, 1923. Napoli: figure e paesi, 1909. Luci ed ombre napoletane, 1914. La storia del Teatro San Carlino, 1918. Catalogo generale delle opere musicali teoriche e pratiche di autori vissuti sino ai primi decenni del secolo XIX esistenti nelle biblioteche e negli archivi pubblici e privati d’Italia, 1918. Maestri di cappella, musici e istrumenti al Tesoro di San Gennaro nei secoli XVII e XVIII, 1920; revised edition, 1990. Edoardo Dalbono, 1921. Casanova a Napoli, 1922. Il Conservatorio di Sant’Onofrio a Capuana e quello di S. Maria della Pieta` dei Turchini, 1924. Il Conservatorio dei poveri di Gesu` Cristo e quello di Santa Maria di Loreto, 1928.

Letters Lettere a Elisa, 1973.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, and Carlo Alberto Madrignani, Cultura, narrativa e teatro nell’eta` del Positivismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975; 1996. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Due poeti dialettali: Pascarella e Di Giacomo,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 4, Il Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Salvatore Di Giacomo,’’ (1903), in La Letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1915. Gaeta, Francesco, Salvatore Di Giacomo, Florence: Quattrini, 1911; rpt. in Prose, Bari: Laterza, 1928. Iermano, Toni, Il melanconico in dormiveglia. Salvatore Di Giacomo, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Infusino, Gianni, Lettere da Napoli, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Studi su Salvatore Di Giacomo, Naples: Liguori, 2003. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘La poesia dialettale del Novecento,’’ in Passione e ideologia, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Gli uomini colti e la cultura popolare,’’ in Scritti corsari, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Piscopo, Ugo, Salvatore Di Giacomo. Dialetto, impressionismo, anti-scetticismo, Naples: Cassitto, 1984. Schlitzer, Franco, Salvatore di Giacomo. Ricerche e note bibliografiche, Florence: Sansoni, 1966. Viviani, Vittorio, Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida, 1969.

` DIALOGUES WITH LEUCO See Dialoghi con Leuco` (Work by Cesare Pavese)

DIALOGUES See Ragionamenti (Work by Pietro Aretino) 637

LUDOVICO DOLCE

DISCOURSES See Discorsi Sopra la prima deca di tito Livio (Work by Niccolo` Machiaveli)

THE DIVINE COMEDY See Comedia (Work by Dante Alighieri)

LUDOVICO DOLCE (1508–1568) The life of Ludovico Dolce is scantily documented. Few chronological records survive other than the dates of publication of his works: Some sparse information can be derived from his letters, which depict an unhappy life harassed by illness and imprisonment. Dolce was a member of the Accademia della Fratta (Fratta Academy) of Rovigo, where he had as an interlocutor Girolamo Ruscelli, with whom he engaged in a long literary controversy. He was also a member of the Accademia dei Pellegrini (Pilgrims’ Academy) of Venice, which had among its members of distinction Anton Francesco Doni and Francesco Sansovino. Dolce was what may be termed ‘‘an all-purpose’’ man of letters, not particularly original in his own compositions but rather versatile in popularizing the works of major authors. Notwithstanding his own narrow limits as a writer, of which he was well aware, he endeavoured to exploit in full his cultural training in a recently instituted craft, that of the poligrafo or publisher’s editor. In fact, with the birth of printing, which was particularly flourishing in Venice, the necessity was felt of a new type of man of letters, as pioneered by Pietro Aretino, that would 638

dedicate himself to the preparation, care and correction of the works of other authors intended for publication. In this capacity, Dolce prepared a great number of translations, rewritings, redactions, together with compositions of his own. He carried out the greatest part of this intense activity in the workshop of Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, but he collaborated also with other printers, all Venetians, whose names show how broadly interconnected was the network of his intellectual relations. Intending to promulgate humanistic culture among the nonspecialized public, he translated Euripides into the vernacular (availing himself of extant Latin versions), Seneca, Ovid, and Oratio; he edited and annotated Italian classics, as, for example, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, to which he added a well-received Apologia (Apology, 1535), and Boccaccio’s Decameron, with explanatory notes for the more difficult words (1541), both printed by Matteo Pasini and Francesco Bindoni; Dante’s Commedia, to which he appended the adjective Divina (divine), thereby modifying definitively the title of the work (1555) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (1557). Instead, these works were printed by Gabriel Giolito

LUDOVICO DOLCE de’ Ferrari. Dolce coedited, for the same printer, the successful miscellany Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi auttori (Various Rhymes by Many Excellent Authors, 1545–1560), and in imitation of the Prose della volgar lingua (Prose on Vernacular Eloquence) by Pietro Bembo he wrote a grammar of literary Italian with the title of Osservationi nella volgar lingua...in quattro libri (Observations on Vernacular Tongue...in four books, 1550). His treatise Dialogo della pittura intitolato l’Aretino (Aretino: a Dialogue on Painting, 1557) not only gives a documentary evidence of the style informing art criticism in the sixteenth century, but also offers a tentative interpretation of Renaissance Venetian painting. Aretino, acting as Dolce’s mouthpiece, reports that in his Dialogo the superiority of Raphael over Michelangelo is asserted, and an enthusiastic portrait of Titian is given, the latter being considered as the only modern painter capable of combining dexterity in drawing with skill in the use of colour. Besides his work of an erudite figure, Dolce also composed rhymes in the style of Petrarch, such as Il sogno di Parnaso (The Dream of Parnassus, 1532) and epic poems like Il Palmerino (Palmerino, 1561), and Primaleone, figliuolo di Palmerino (Primaleone, Palmerino’s Son, 1562), which were printed by Giovanni Battista Sessa; and Le imprese del Conte Orlando (Count Roland’s Enterprises, 1572), published posthumously by Giolito. Moreover, Dolce tried his hand at playwriting. The tragedies he wrote were inspired by or summarized from the plays of Seneca and of other classical authors. They were published collectively again by Giolito in Tragedie: Giocasta, Medea, Didone, Ifigenia, Thieste, Hecuba e Marianna (Tragedies, 1560). Marianna is certainly the most original of them. Based on the Antiquitates judaeorum (Jewish Antiquities: XV, 3, 8–9) by the Greek historian Flavius Josephus, it recounts the Senecan tale of the wicked deeds perpetrated by the tyrant Herod the Great, caused by his jealousy of his wife Mariamne, whom he eventually butchered with her sons. The tragedy was staged in Venice with great success in 1565, the first time in Sebastiano Erizzo’s Palace, with no props, and a second time with a memorable setting in the duke of Ferrara’s palace. All of Dolce’s tragedies were marked by an ethical and pedagogical intent and once published were favourably received because of their flair for easygoing romance. Dolce’s comedies in prose and verse are, however, of a better quality. Il ragazzo (The Boy, 1541) and La Fabritia (Fabritia, 1549) are drawn from

common life events. The Boy, printed several times during the sixteenth century although it is unknown if it was ever performed, borrows its language and structure from Aretino, with echoes from Boccaccio, Machiavelli’s Clizia and Plautus. The others, notably Il capitano (The Captain, 1545), Il marito (The Husband, 1545), Il roffiano (The Pander, 1551), are essentially adapted or derived directly from Plautus. But they succeed in adding a tone of lively urbanity to contemporary erudite comedy.

Biography Born in Venice, in 1508, from a noble family that had fallen into decline. His father, Fantino, was a public officer under the Doge Leonardo Loredan. After his father’s death, Dolce went to study letters in Padua. When he returned to Venice, he began to work as editor and proofreader with the famous Venetian printer Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari, with whom he remained until his death. It is not known when and whom he married, but he had two sons, a boy and a girl. He died in Venice in 1568, and was buried in the church of San Luca Evangelista. PAOLA VENTRONE Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Il sogno di Parnaso, con alcune altre rime d’amore,’’ 1532. ‘‘Il Palmerino,’’ 1561. ‘‘Primaleone, Figliuolo di Palmerino,’’ 1562. ‘‘Le prime imprese del Conte Orlando,’’ 1572.

Treatises Dialogo della pittura intitolato l’Aretino, 1557; edited by Guido Battelli, 1910; as Aretino: a Dialogue on Painting, translated by W. Brown, 1970 (Facsimile of first edition, 1770). Dialogo di M. Lodouico Dolce, nel quale si ragiona del modo di accrescere, et conseruar la memoria, 1562; edited by Andrea Torre, 2001. Dialogo nel quale si ragiona della qualita`, diversita` e proprieta` dei colori, 1565; facsimile reprint, 1985.

Plays Il ragazzo, 1541; edited by Ireneo Sanesi, 1912. Il apitano, 1545. Didone, 1547; edited by Stefano Tomassini, 1996. La Fabritia, 1549. Giocasta, 1549. Le comedie di M. Lodouico Dolce. Cioe` Il ragazzo, Il capitano, Il marito, La Fabritia, Il roffiano, 1560. Le Tragedie di Seneca, tradotte da m. Lodouico Dolce, 1560. Marianna, 1565. Le tragedie di M. Lodouico Dolce. Cioe`, Giocasta, Didone, Thieste, Medea, Ifigenia, Hecuba, 1566.

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LUDOVICO DOLCE Other Orlando furioso di messer Lodouico Ariosto con la giunta, 1535. Il Petrarca, corretto da M. Lodovico Dolce, et alla sua integrita` ridotto, 1547. Il Decamerone di M. Giovanni Boccaccio; aggiuntoui separatamente un indice copiosissimo di uocaboli e delle materie composto da messer Lodouico Dolce, 1552. Le trasformationi di m. Lodouico Dolce, 1553 (from Ovidius’ Metamorphoses); Reprint of the 1568 ed. published by Francesco Sansovino in Venice; edited by Stephen Orgel, 1979. Il Petrarca nouissimamente reuisto, e corretto da messer Lodouico Dolce. Con alcuni dottiss. auertimenti di m. Giulio Camillo, et indici del Dolce de’ concetti e delle parole, che nel poeta si trouano, et in ultimo de gli epitteti; et vn vtile raccoglimento delle desinenze delle rime di tutto il canzoniere di esso poeta, 1554. La Diuina Comedia di Dante, di nuouo alla sua vera lettione ridotta [...] Con argomenti, et allegorie per ciascun Canto, & Apostille ne margine, edited by Lodovico Dolce, 1555. Le prose di M. Pietro Bembo, nelle quali si ragiona della volgar lingua, [...] Diuise in tre libri, et reuiste con somma diligenza da M. Lodouico Dolce, 1556. I dilettevoli Sermoni, altrimente Satire, e le morali Epistole di Horatio [...] insieme con la Poetica [...] Ridotte da Lodovico Dolce [...] in versi sciolti volgari, 1559.

Le Orationi di Marco Tullio Cicerone, tradotte da M. Lodouico Dolce [...] Con la uita dell’autore, con un breue discorso in materia di Rhetorica, et con le sue tauole per ciascuna parte, 1562. Il cortegiano del conte Baldessar Castiglione nuouamente con diligenza reuisto per M. Lodouico Dolce, secondo l’esemplare del proprio autore, 1564.

Further Reading Bertini, Ferruccio, ‘‘Le commedie plautine di Ludovico Dolce,’’ in Studi umanistici piceni, 17 (1997): 21–31. Gatto, Gaetano, L’ ‘‘Amphitruo’’ di Plauto e le imitazioni di Ludovico Dolce e Molie`re, Catania: Tipografia S. Monachini, 1921. Neuschafer, Anne, ‘‘Dall’Amphitruo al Marito: una commedia plautina ‘in abito moderno’ di Ludovico Dolce,’’ in Studi umanistici piceni, 17 (1997): 113–124. Neuschafer, Anne, ‘‘Ma vorrei sol dipingervi il mio core, E haver un stile che vi fosse grato’’: le commedie e le tragedie di Lodovico Dolce in lingua volgare, Venice: Centro tedesco di studi veneziani, 2001. Roskill, Mark W., Dolce’s ‘Aretino’ and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, Toronto-Buffalo-London: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Terpening, Ronnie H., Lodovico Dolce: Renaissance Man of Letters, Toronto-London: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

DOLCE STIL NOVO Much, if not most, of our understanding of the history of thirteenth-century poetry comes from Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and, more specifically, from the Vita Nuova, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Comedia. The earliest manuscripts containing the poetry of the duecento—Vatican Lat. 3793, Laurentian Rediano 9, and Banco Rari 217 (Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale)—present the lyrics of the various poets, ordered by metrical form (canzoni first, then ballate and sonnets), and give us some rough indications of groupings by ‘‘school’’ or poetic inclination. For example, the large and influential Vatican codex begins with the poets who were active at the imperial court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen (1194–1250) in Sicily and proceeds up the Italian peninsula with the verses of Bonagiunta da Lucca, Guittone d’Arezzo, Chiaro Davanzati, and other Tuscan poets of the mid- to late-thirteenth century (including one canzone by Dante, ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’’ ). The major codices for the poets of the 640

Dolce stil novo are the following: Vatican Chigiano L. VIII.305 (mid-fourteenth century), Vatican Barberiniano Lat. 3953 (1325–1335), and Escorial Cod. Latino e.III.23 (first third of the fourteenth century). Because of his poetic and critical pre-eminence, Dante’s pronouncements on earlier poets and poetry (his own included, as demonstrated by the inclusion of the incipit of some of his own canzoni in the Comedia) have become, rightly or wrongly, canonical. Nevertheless, his discussion of the Sicilian poets in his unfinished treatise on language and prosody, De vulgari eloquentia, recognizes their primacy in and contributions to the literary tradition. It is in the Comedia, however, that Dante offers the reader the well-known overview of thirteenthcentury Italian lyric poetry, as expressed in Canto 24 of the Purgatorio through the words of the Lucchese poet Bonagiunta (thirteenth century), who recognizes and identifies Dante as the author

DOLCE STIL NOVO of the first canzone in the Vita Nuova, ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’’: Ma dı` s’ i’ veggio qui colui che fore trasse le nove rime, cominciando Donne ch’ avete intelletto d’ amore. But, tell me if I see here the one who brought forth the new poems, beginning ‘‘Ladies who have intelligence of Love.’’

In his response to these words, Dante, as it were, provides the definition of his distinctive poetic voice by describing his sublime inspiration: E io a lui: I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’ e’ ditta dentro vo significando. I said to him: I am one who, when Love breathes into me, takes note and then sets forth what he in that way dictates within me.

Bonagiunta’s reaction to and commentary on what Dante says provide both the solution to and the problem of the ‘‘mystery’’ of the Dolce stil novo, for it is here, in these verses, that we find for the first—and only—time the famous three words: O frate, issa vegg’ io, diss’ elli, il nodo che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’ i’ odo! Io veggio ben come le vostre penne di retro al dittator sen vanno strette, che de le nostre certo non avvenne; e qual piu` a gradire oltre si mette, non vede piu` da l’ uno a l’ altro stilo. My brother, now I see, he said, the knot that held the Notary and Guittone and me back from the sweet new style I hear! Now, I see very clearly how your pens follow directly after the one who dictates to you—this, certainly, did not happen with us; and whoever examines the two styles cannot see the difference between the two styles more clearly than this.

On the basis of this passage some critics argue that Bonagiunta is identifying a group of poets consisting of the following: Guido Guinizzelli (ca. 1230–1276), Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1259–1300), Lapo Gianni (late thirteenth–early fourteenth), Gianni degli Alfani (ca. thirteenth–fourteenth), Dino Frescobaldi (ca. 1271–ca. 1316), Cino da Pistoia (ca. 1270–ca. 1336/1337), and Dante himself. Other scholars, however, prefer to read the passage in Purgatorio as a definition that Dante gives of his own particular poetics. On the one hand, then, the Dolce stil novo would indicate a ‘‘school of poets’’ and, on the other hand, a single poet, whose virtuosity and subject matter would far surpass all of the others. However this may be, we

may see in the words Dante puts into his character Bonagiunta’s mouth a retrospective ordering of thirteenth-century poetic production whereby Bonagiunta’s poetry and that of Giacomo da Lentini (the ‘‘Notary’’) and Guittone d’Arezzo are distinct, both stylistically and thematically, from the lyrics of this new ‘‘school.’’ Equally clear from this passage is the recognition both of Dante’s canzone, ‘‘Donne ch’avete,’’ as marking a major turning point in Dante’s poetic itinerary and of the new conception of the personified figure of Love as the ‘‘dittator’’ (the one who dictates). The identity of Love, not as Cupid, but as the Holy Spirit who provides the inspiration for a higher, more refined amorous poetry, then sets the stage for the theologizing of love and the woman, ideas that began with the poetics of praise of Guido Guinizzelli and that were elaborated and refined by Dante first in the Vita Nuova and then, in a definitive manner, in the Comedia. For his key role in the transformation and renewal of the Italian lyric tradition, Guido Guinizzelli was recognized by Dante as the ‘‘Father’’ of the Dolce stil novo (Vita Nuova 20 and Purgatorio 26:94–99). In many of his poems he engages in great and extensive praise of the lady’s divine beauty and miraculous qualities, and these will become the primary characteristics of the Stil Nuovo, such as the sonnets ‘‘Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare’’ (I truly wish to praise my lady) and ‘‘Vedut’ ho la lucente stella diana’’ (I have seen the bright morning star). In his doctrinal canzone, ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Love always has its home in the noble heart), Guinizzelli attempts— unsuccessfully—to resolve the difficult questions concerning the nature of human nobility (‘‘gentilezza’’), the role of the woman in the amorous relationship, and the purpose and meaning of earthly love. Despite his failure to reconcile human affection for woman and divine love for God, Guinizzelli clearly indicated a new direction in amorous poetry. One of the most distinctive poetic voices of the Dolce stil novo is the Florentine Guido Cavalcanti, whom Dante calls his ‘‘first friend’’ in the Vita Nuova, and who was an active participant in the factional strife that plagued his native city. Except for a few compositions—‘‘Avete ’n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura’’ (You resemble the flowers and the green foliage)—his lyrics do not follow the Guinizzellian model. Cavalcanti is obsessed with the psychology of love, and his poems represent and dramatize the inner struggle of the soul afflicted by contrasting emotions, personified as ‘‘spiritelli’’ (little spirits). The anguish and potentially tragic consequences of 641

DOLCE STIL NOVO love may be seen in sonnets such as ‘‘Li mie’ foll’occhi, che prima guardaro’’ (My foolish eyes that first looked upon), ‘‘Tu m’hai sı` piena di dolor la mente’’ (You have so filled my mind with sorrow), and ‘‘Voi, che per li occhi mi passaste ’l core’’ (You who because of my eyes pierced my heart). The intentionally asymmetrical rhyme scheme (ABBB BAAA CDD DCC) of one remarkable sonnet, ‘‘L’anima mia vilment’ e` sbigotita’’ (My soul suffers harsh anguish), marks a new development in the history of the form in its mirroring of the emotional disequilibrium and disordered state of the poet-lover’s existence brought about by love. Cavalcanti’s doctrinal canzone, ‘‘Donna me prega—per ch’io voglio dire’’ (A lady asks me, for which I desire to speak), is structured along the lines of a philosophical and scientific treatise and is intended to be a sort of scientific proof (a ‘‘natural dimostramento’’) that defines the origin, nature, and effects of love. The exact meaning and sources of the canzone are still the subject of much debate. Another major exponent of the Dolce stil novo is Cino da Pistoia, who was a good friend of Dante and a celebrated jurist and teacher of law. His lyric production is the largest of the stilnovisti and reflects virtually all of their major themes, images, and concepts. The sonnet ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’ (The sweet greeting blesses me completely) plays on the notion of the ‘‘saluto salutifero’’ (the blessing that confers blessedness) and the miraculous qualities of the lady, just as the sonnet ‘‘Vedete, donne, bella creatura’’ (Ladies, behold the beautiful creature) focuses on the beauty of the woman that then reflects on those around her. In sonnets such as ‘‘Deh, non mi domandar perche´ sospiri’’ (Please, don’t ask me why I sigh) we see how the background of political events and exile conditions the intensely personal, almost confessional nature of the amorous lament. There is also a spatial orientation that underlines the power of a particular place to evoke a mood and generate ideas. Cino’s contribution to the development of lyric poetry lies both in his harmonizing of various themes and concepts and in his objective psychological realism. For these reasons, he is generally considered to be the bridge linking the ‘‘Sweet New Style’’ and Petrarch. The minor members of the Dolce stil novo reflect in diverse ways certain of its aspects: Dino Frescobaldi and Gianni degli Alfani followed the Cavalcantian tragic manner, and Lapo Gianni wrote highly refined ballate, which, reverting to the older tradition, earned the admiration of Dante (De vulgari eloquentia 1.13.4). 642

As the consummate poet of the Dolce stil novo, Dante announces his adherence to the Guinizzellian model when, in the Vita Nuova, he notes that his poetry, beginning with the canzone ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore,’’ will have as its new subject the praise of Beatrice. His sonnet ‘‘Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare’’ (So noble and gracious seems) best summarizes the essence of the Dolce stil novo and, more particularly, of Dante’s own special contribution to the lyric tradition, with its flowing musical quality combined with the lofty theme of praise: Beatrice descends from Heaven to work miracles on Earth. The three words in the designation Dolce stil novo refer to the originality in concept and manner—the ‘‘newness’’ of the initiative (‘‘novo’’)—to the transformations wrought in the poetic style in terms of new themes and content (Stil), and to the audibly and intellectually pleasing quality of the verses (Dolce). The identifying traits of the Dolce stil novo are: 1) the theme of praise that transcends secular adoration of woman; 2) the presentation of the lady who has both the appearance and the role of an angel (to lead the poet to spiritual salvation); 3) the conception of love as a force that may bestow either supreme happiness and beatitude (Guinizzelli, Dante, Cino) or unbearable anguish and death (Cavalcanti, Gianni degli Alfani). In short, the poets of the Dolce stil novo radically changed the lyric tradition, by freeing poetry thematically from the events of daily life, by elevating it linguistically above the common parlance, and by forging a new poetic language based on those terms central to their new understanding of love and infusing the conventional vocabulary of love poetry with new life and meaning, words such as dolce, spirito, spirare, gentile, salute, virtu`, onesta`, mercede, valore, soave, and so on. Although each poet has his own special language and attitudes, together they represent with their refined lyricism, richness of poetic techniques, acute awareness and investigation of human psychology, and profound spiritual sensitivity, a major and decisive event in the history of Italian literature. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ Further Reading Alighieri, Dante, Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri, edited and translated by Robert S. Haller, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.

DANILO DOLCI Bertelli, Italo, La poesia di Guido Guinizzelli e la poetica del ‘‘dolce stil nuovo,’’ Florence: Le Monnier, 1983. Bertoni, Giulio, Il Duecento, Milan: Vallardi, 1910; 3rd ed. 1939; rpt. 1954, 1973. Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Genesi di un concetto storiografico: ‘dolce stil novo,’ ’’ in Giiornale storico della letteratura italiana, 132 (1955): 333–371. Corti, Maria, La felicita` mentale: Nuove prospettive per Cavalcanti e Dante, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric, New York: Harper & Row, 1968, 2nd ed., 1977. Favati, Guido, Inchiesta sul Dolce stil nuovo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1975. Gorni, Guglielmo, Il nodo della lingua e il verbo d’amore: studi su Dante e altri duecentisti, Florence: Olschki, 1981. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Marti, Mario, Storia dello Stil Nuovo, 2 vols., Lecce: Milella, 1973. Pasquini, Emilio, and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Lo stilnovo e la poesia religiosa, Bari: Laterza, 1971. Pertile, Lino, ‘‘Il nodo di Bonagiunta, le penne di Dante e il Dolce Stil Novo,’’ in Lettere italiane, 46 (1994): 44–75.

Petrocchi, Giorgio, ‘‘Il Dolce stil nuovo,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Poeti del Dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Rimatori del dolce stil novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. Russell, Rinaldina, Tre versanti della poesia stilnovistica, Bari: Adriatica, 1973. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Il ‘dolce stil nuovo,’’’ in Il Trecento: Storia letteraria d’Italia, 2nd ed., Milan: Vallardi, 1955. Shaw, James E., Guido Cavalcanti’s Theory of Love: The ‘‘Canzone d’Amore’’ and Other Related Problems, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1949. Valency, Maurice J., In Praise of Love. An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance, New York: Macmillan, 1958. Vallone, Aldo, Dante, Milan: Vallardi, 1971.

DANILO DOLCI (1924–1997) Danilo Dolci—social reformer, educationalist, antimafia activist, apostle of nonviolence, poet, visionary, critic of technological society—dramatized in his life related dilemmas that have tormented revolutionaries for centuries. Should reform of the structures of society have priority over reform of the inner life of the individual, and will the one produce the other? In his early life, in the 1950s and 1960s, Dolci campaigned for the reform of society, but later he dedicated himself to educational work and to efforts for individual enlightenment. In both phases, his actions and writings had the same reforming focus. Although he was born in Sesana, in modern Slovenia, Dolci worked all his life in Sicily, which he first visited in 1942 to further his studies in architecture. He discovered instead both the rich culture and the human poverty of the island. Between 1950–1952, he worked in Nomadelfia, a community for children orphaned by war, and when he went back to Sicily in 1952, he went as a committed social reformer. In October that year, in Trappeto, near Palermo, he saw a child die of hunger. This tragedy, to which he returned obsessively in his lectures and

writings, set the course of his life. To galvanize the authorities into action, he undertook the first of many hunger strikes. Dolci’s field of activity was the hinterland around Palermo. He devoted himself to active nonviolence in an area where violence from bandits and the mafia was commonplace. He set up a nursery for the children of the poor in Borgo, moved in 1958 to Partinico, where he established the Centro studi e iniziative per la piena occupazione, (Center for Study and Initiatives for Full Employment). He organized mass hunger strikes, marches, and civil disobedience to bring pressure to bear on local and national government. Dolci viewed banditry, then endemic to the area, as a result of poverty and considered the mafia to be one of the causes of both. The famous bandit Salvatore Giuliano (1922–1950) was active in the region at that time, and Dolci knew members of his gang. The lack of water represented an obstacle for agriculture, and in 1955, Dolci went on another hunger strike to give life to a campaign for the construction of a dam at San Giuseppe Iato. It was only in 1962, after sustained protests, that building 643

DANILO DOLCI work began. Dolci regarded this as his finest achievement, not only for its economic impact but for its validation of his methods and outlook. He believed that it gave the peasants proof that change was possible, that unity was essential and that peaceful action could be effective. His activism, however, enraged the authorities—political, judicial, ecclesiastical and criminal. A sciopero in rovescia (reverse strike) in 1956, when groups worked unpaid to restore a road in the countryside, was disrupted by the police, and Dolci spent two months in jail awaiting trial, at which he was acquitted. In 1965, Dolci denounced in a press conference the local mafia boss, Frank ‘‘Tre dita’’ (Three Fingers) Coppola, and his political ally, the minister, Bernardo Mattarella. For this act, he received a suspended jail sentence for defamation. By now, Dolci was an internationally known figure, who drew respectful tributes from men of the caliber of Jean Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Aldous Huxley, who referred to him as ‘‘a new Gandhi, a modern St. Francis’’ (‘‘Introduction’’ to D. Dolci, To Feed the Hungry, 1959). He also attracted the idealistic young from Europe and America to work alongside him. Although viewed by some as a secular saint, he was neither malleable nor accommodating, and there were several bitter splits among his followers. Perhaps his awareness of being an outsider in Sicily, forced to listen as the only means of integrating himself into a culture that he knew was not his, determined the centrality of the maieutic approach to his subsequent philosophy and conditioned the nature of his writing. His first works, like Banditi a Partinico (Bandits in Partinico, 1955) were inquiries into social conditions. The most successful was probably Spreco (Waste, 1960), where he created quasi-short stories that allowed local people to give voice and shape to their experiences. With Inventare il futuro (Inventing the Future, 1968), he changed direction to offer a vision rather than a description of the status quo. In 1970, he produced his finest book of poetry, Il limone lunare (The Lunar Lemon), with poems that were not manifestos in verse but brittle expressions of lived life. Danilo Dolci’s own interests shifted progressively toward education and the development of maieutics, a post-Socratic method of questioning and probing aimed at bringing out wisdom concealed in some depths of the mind. He faded from the public eye, and became an increasingly acerbic critic of technological society, criticizing ‘‘dominion’’ as the root of evil, questioning mass communication and denouncing the failure of science to 644

produce a more fulfilled humankind. Almost his last book was an ‘‘outline manifesto,’’ Comunicare, legge della vita (Communicating, the Law of Life, 1995).

Biography Born 28 June 1924 in Sesana, near Trieste, of an Italian father and Slav mother. Studies architecture in Milan. Arrested 1943 for anti-Fascist activity. 1950, leaves university to help in Nomadelfia, a community in Fossoli, Emilia Romagna, established by don Zeno Saltini, which gave shelter to war orphans. 1953, moves to Sicily. 1954, first book on Sicily, Fare presto (e bene) perche` si muore. 1954, marries the widow Vincenzina who has five children: fathers five children of his own with her. 1955, hunger strike to open campaign for dam on river Iato. 1956, ‘reverse strike’ in Partinico, to repair path in countryside around. 1962, project to build dam approved. 1964, leaves Vincenzina to live with Swedish journalist, Hellen Norman, by whom he has two more children. 1965, at press conference in Rome, denounces prominent politicians for mafia collusion. 1968, moves his activities to Belice after earthquake. 1970, encourages self-management of irrigation and fruit-growing work by peasants themselves. 1974, opening of Centro di Mirto, an experimental school. 1979, addresses UNESCO on education for next decades. During the 1980s and 1990s essentially private years, dedicated to seminars and writing. Died in Palermo, 30 December 1997. JOSEPH FARRELL See also: Questione meridionale Selected Works Social and Investigative Writing Fare presto (e bene) perche` si muore, 1954. Banditi a Partinico, 1955; as The Outlaws of Palermo, translated by R. Munroe, 1960; as Outlaws, translated by R. Munroe, 1961. Inchiesta a Palermo, 1956; as To Feed the Hungry, translated by P. D. Cummins, 1959, with introduction by Aldous Huxley; rpt. as Report from Palermo, 1959; rpt. as Poverty in Sicily, 1966. Spreco, 1960; as Waste, translated by R. Munroe, 1963. Conversazioni, 1962. Racconti siciliani, 1963. Chi gioca solo, 1966; as The Man Who Plays Alone, translated by Antonia Cowan, 1968. Ai piu` giovani, 1967; as For the Young, translated by Antonia Cowan, 1967. Inventare il futuro, 1968.

ANTON FRANCESCO DONI Chissa` se i pesci piangono: Documenti di un’esperienza educativa, 1973. Esperienze e riflessioni, 1974. Il dio della zecche, 1985. Nessi fra esperienza, etica e politica, 1992. Gente semplice, 1993. La legge come germe musicale, 1994. La comunicazione di massa non esiste, 1995. Comunicare, legge della vita: Bozza di manifesto, 1995. La struttura maieutica e l’evolversi, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1956. ‘‘Il limone lunare,’’ 1970. ‘‘Non sentite l’odore del fumo?,’’ 1971. ‘‘Poema umano,’’ 1974. ‘‘Creatura di creature: Poesie 1949–1978,’’ 1979, as Creature of Creatures, translated by Justin Vitiello, 1980; rpt. as The World Is a Creature, 1984. ‘‘Da bocca a bocca,’’ 1981; as From Mouth to Mouth, translated by Justin Vitiello, 1983. ‘‘Occhi ancora rimangono aperti,’’ 1987.

Anthologies of Selected Writing A New World in the Making, translated by Antonia Cowan, 1965.

Sicilian Lives, translated by Justin Vitiello, 1982.

Further Reading Barone, Giuseppe, Chi tace e` complice, Naples: Libreria Dante & Descartes, 2000. Capitini, Aldo, Danilo Dolci e noi, Manduria: Lacaita, 1958. Chemello, Adriana, La parola maieutica: Impegno civile e ricerca poetica nell’opera di daniclo Dolci, Florence: Vallecchi, 1988. Costantino, Salvatore (editor), Raccontare Danilo Dolci: L’immaginazione sociologica, il sottosviluppo, la costruzione della societa` civile, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2003. Fontanelli, Giuseppe, Danilo Dolci, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. Huxley, Aldous, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Danilo Dolci, To Feed the Hungry, translated by P. D. Cummins, London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959. MacNeish, James, Fire Under the Ashes, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965. Mangione, Jerre, A Passion for Sicilians: The World Around Danilo Dolci, New York: Morrow, 1968. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Conversazioni con Danilo Dolci, Milan: Mondadori, 1977.

ANTON FRANCESCO DONI (1513–1574) Anton Francesco Doni is a many-sided figure. A writer, musician, painter, and publisher, he is also commonly considered the first Italian bibliographer, thanks to his two ‘‘librarie’’—La libraria del Doni fiorentino (The Book-Collection of Doni of Florence, 1550) and La seconda libraria (The Second Book Collection, 1551)—in which he lists, not always accurately, an extraordinary number of manuscripts or printed texts in the vernacular or translated into Italian, without neglecting musical publications, and, in the second volume, the works of academic writers. Judged harshly by literary critics—in his 1824 essay ‘‘Italian Periodical Literature,’’ Ugo Foscolo defined him as ‘‘a compound of ignorance, arrogance, and profligacy...the greatest, if not the most ancient among the patriarchs of venal literature,’’ and in his 1952 Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, Natalino Sapegno placed him along with Pietro Aretino among the ‘‘adventurers of the pen’’—and perhaps considered with the greatest interest by musicologists, he is the

typical exponent of a quasijournalistic literature that is not without interest, wit, and vivacity. A Humanist intellectual with a myriad of interests, he was the author of a series of works, including volumes of letters, that form a cross-section of the culture of his age, and are rich in anecdotes and judgments on the arts and artists of the time. In a letter of 1543 to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese published in Tre Libri di lettere (Three Books of Letters, 1552), he describes himself not only as a writer, but also as ‘‘sonatore, cantore e dipintore’’ (performer, singer, and painter), and he was indeed in touch with numerous artists (his portrait may have been painted by Tintoretto himself ). His writings are not easy to classify. Consider for instance the subtitle of La zucca (The Pumpkin, 1552) that lists ‘‘chiacchiere, filastrocche, frappe, chimere, castelli in aria, [...] novelle, cicalecci, parabole, baie, proverbi, motti, umori ed altre giravolte e storie’’ (chitchat, rhymes, frapperies, chimeras, castles in the air, [...] tales, chatters, parables, jests, proverbs, 645

ANTON FRANCESCO DONI jokes, humor, and other twists and stories). He treated the most diverse themes and used the most assorted literary genres, from the theater, for instance with the comedy Lo stufaiolo (The Ovenworker, 1585), written after 1550, to the academic dialogue on the arts and philosophy, with Dialogo della musica (Dialogue on Music, 1544), Disegno (Drawing, 1549), and I mondi (The Worlds, 1552– 1553), to the written polemic with Il terremoto (The Earthquake, 1556), a ferocious attack against Pietro Aretino. In a letter of 7 February 1553 to the sculptor Giovan Angelo Fiorentino, Doni himself declared that he wrote ‘‘per non passar la vita malinconica piu` tosto che cercar fama, con cio` sia di che di tutte le cose che hanno fine terreno mi fo beffe, e ridomene come sono le mie carte’’ (in order not to spend my melancholic life seeking fame, as I laugh at all earthly things, as I do in my writings) (I mondi, vol. 2, 1553). I marmi (The Marbles, 1552) is considered to be among his greatest works: It is a series of dialogues on various themes set on the steps (the marbles) of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence. One chapter perhaps makes a reference to the poetic and musical activities of the Accademia Fiorentina, of which Doni was the secretary, and is interesting evidence of the practice of improvising poems and musical passages. Music is, in fact, a constant of the author’s entire literary output, and also of his activity as a publisher. His writings are scattered with references to it and with lively representations of the musical life of his time, attesting to the role of music in the intellectual circles of the time. Moreover, he is certainly the first to include musical editions in a printed bibliography. Doni’s most interesting work in this field is the Dialogo della musica, which is not a treatise, but a dialogue over the course of two evenings that features as its protagonists musicians and writers, some of them from real life, like the two well-known composers Perissone Cambio and Girolamo Parabosco, and Girolamo Gottifredi, secretary of the Accademia Ortolana, to which Doni belonged. In the course of their conversations, they offer judgments about ancient and new musicians, tell stories, as in Boccaccio’s Decameron (1373), and sing and play music. The most significant aspect of the Dialogo della musica is that it actually contains the music performed on the first and second evenings, 28 madrigals in all, by various composers, among whom are Doni himself and Adriano Willaert, Cipriano de Rore, Jacob Arcadelt, as well as Cambio and Parabosco. 646

In his variegated oeuvre, Doni also touched upon philosophical and political themes. For example, in I mondi, he includes a dialogue between two academicians, Il Savio (the wise man) and Il Pazzo (the madman), to whom Jove and Momus send the vision of a new world. The ideal city they describe is ruled by a communitarian utopia perhaps indebted to Thomas More, in which people are treated as ‘‘equals,’’ the fields are fertile and well-cultivated and all goods are shared equally. While always maintaining his light and satiric tone, Doni gives voice to a critique of his contemporary society and to the desire for peace and the greatest possible degree of social justice.

Biography Born in Florence on 16 May 1513, in a family of humble origins that, however, claimed as one of its ancestors the poet Salvino Doni, a contemporary and possibly friend of Dante. First a priest and then a friar, was expelled from the Monastero dei Servi in unclear circumstances and left Florence, 1540; wandered through Northern Italy, settling in Piacenza, 1543, where he studied law. Turned to literary studies and became part of the circle that founded the Accademia Ortolana; organized musical performances. Moved to Venice, 1544, where he entered in contact with the publisher Girolamo Scotto. Returned to Florence, 1545; elected official recorder, 1546, then secretary, of the Accademia Fiorentina. Published several texts connected to his activity as ‘‘ducal printer’’ for Cosimo I de’ Medici, 1546–1548, for whom he probably had compiled a manuscript collection of ten madrigals for publication. His publishing venture was not successful and he returned to Venice, 1549, where he was member of a little-known Accademia Pellegrina. After years of wandering, he retired in a hermitage in Monselice, near Padua. Died in Monselice in 1574. ANNA TEDESCO Selected Works Collections Scritti, Milan: Istituto editoriale italiano, 1916. Scritti scelti di Pietro Aretino e di Anton Francesco Doni, edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Turin: Utet, 1951. Le novelle, vol. 1, La moral filosofia, Trattati, edited by Patrizia Pellizzari, Rome: Salerno, 2002; vol. 2, La zucca, edited by Elena Pierazzo, Rome: Salerno, 2003.

CARLO DOSSI Dialogues Dialogo della musica, 1544; edited by Giovan Francesco Malipiero, 1965. Gli spiriti folletti, 1546. Disegno, 1549. I marmi, 1552; edited by Ezio Chio`boli, 2 vols., 1928. I mondi, 2 vols., 1552–1553.

Plays Lo stufaiolo, 1585.

Letters Lettere, 1544; expanded, 1545. Lettere del Doni. Libro secondo, 1547. Tre libri di pistolotti amorosi, 1552. Tre libri di lettere, 1552.

Other La libraria del Doni fiorentino, 1550; as La libraria, edited by Vanni Bramanti, 1972. La seconda libraria, 1551. La zucca, 1552; edited by Elena Pierazzo, 2003. La moral filosofia, 1552. Il terremoto, 1556. Umori e sentenze, edited by Vincenza Giri and Giorgio Masi, 1988.

Further Reading Cameron, Allan, ‘‘Doni’s Satirical Utopia,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 10, no. 4 (1996): 462–473.

Candela, Giuseppe, Manierismo e condizioni della scrittura in Anton Francesco Doni, New York: Lang, 1993. Delfino, Carla, ‘‘Tematica del Doni,’’ in Italianistica, 8 (1979): 227–245. Foscolo, Ugo, ‘‘Italian Periodical Literature,’’ in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, vol. 11, part 2, Saggi di letteratura italiana, edited by Cesare Foligno, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Grendler, Paul F., Critics of the Italian World, 1530–1560: Anton Francesco Doni, Niccolo` Franco and Ortensio Lando, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969. Haar, James, ‘‘Notes on the Dialogo Della Musica of Antonfrancesco Doni,’’ in Music and Letters, 47, no. 3 (1966): 198–224. Haar, James, ‘‘A Gift of Madrigals to Cosimo I; The Ms. Florence, Bibl. Naz. Centrale, Magl. XIX, 130,’’ in The Science and Art of Renaissance Music, edited by Paul Corneilson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Monterosso Vacchelli, Anna Maria, L’opera musicale di Antonfrancesco Doni, Cremona: Athenaeum Cremonense, 1969. Ricottini Marsili-Libelli, Cecilia, Anton Francesco Doni scrittore e stampatore: bibliografia delle opere e della critica e annali tipografici, Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1960. Rivoletti, Christian, Le metamorfosi dell’utopia: Anton Francesco Doni e l’immaginario utopico di meta` Cinquecento, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2003. Sapegno, Natalino, Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Cinquecento, Seicento, Settecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1952.

CARLO DOSSI (1849–1910) In 1868, the appearance of L’altrieri. Nero su bianco (The Other Day: Black on White) marked the ‘‘official’’ debut of Carlo Dossi, one of the most eccentric novelists of the second half of the nineteenth century in Italy. The author, at the time barely 19 years old, had already written two volumes of stories (one in collaboration with Luigi Perelli) and founded, also with Perelli, the journal La palestra letteraria artistica scientifica (1867–1870). The young protagonist of L’altrieri recounts his infancy and his adolescence in the first person, moments of his life close to the time of the narration. The act of remembering is identified with the material act of composition, with white space subsumed to the black of writing: black on white,

just as the subtitle suggests. This first novel by Dossi (one that represents his most transgressive side) is characterized on a highly creative linguistic and stylistic mode by the intellectual inventiveness of the Scapigliatura movement. Dossi’s expressionistic resistance is effected through a mix of voices in dialect (essentially Lombard or in accord with Lombardisms), elevated or obsolete terms, Latinate modules, and neologisms. It was followed by Vita di Alberto Pisani (The Life of Alberto Pisani, 1870), a sort of parody of Romantic autobiography. The narrative strategies at work (in particular that of digression) recall one of Dossi’s preferred authors, Lawrence Sterne. The continuity of the plot is interrupted by an inverted chapter order (with the fourth chapter appearing before the first 647

CARLO DOSSI three), by brief stories that, fragmented within the main story, suspend the linearity of the narrative, and by frequent intrusions of the narrating voice. This voice directs the reader’s attention not only toward the story but also to the author’s writing strategies. As the protagonist grows, he nourishes his fervid sensibility with omnivorous readings. Encountering Claudia Salis at the theater, he decides to write a book for her; she reads it and communicates her desire to meet the author. Upon presenting himself at the appointment and discovering that Claudia is dead, Alberto takes her body and kills himself over it with the shot of a pistol. To understand this book profoundly it is opportune first of all to reflect on the title of the first edition, Vita di Alberto Pisani scritta da Carlo Dossi (Life of Alberto Pisani Written by Carlo Dossi). Keeping in mind the fact that Carlo Dossi, is the pseudonym of Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi it becomes evident that the author doubles his identity in order to recount his own life. The ambivalence of the ties that unite the narrator to his double are complicated when Carlo Dossi cedes the beginning of the narration to Alberto Pisani who, with the pseudonym Guido Etelre`di, or the name of the narrating voice of L’altrieri, is presented as the author of the stories interpolated in the first story. Alberto Pisani’s style is fed by plurilinguistic Expressionism (Lombardisms and other dialects, personal forms, cultured or exceptional voices, Latinisms, etc.), and invites the reader to participate in the narrative. The style recalls, like a distorting mirror, the caricature of the Romantic mythologies on which Alberto syntonizes his existence and his artistic vocation. The complex play of doubles and metanarrative schemes in which ties to Flegeljahre, by the German writer Jean Paul, are recognizable, prevents the melodramatic suicide of Alberto from being fully tragic; it is instead the replica of a cultural archetype that can no longer be staged except in a distorting, humorous perspective. Carlo Dossi continues to play with autobiographic ‘‘fiction’’ via various genres and expressive registers, hiding himself, masking himself, revealing himself, doubling himself. Not by chance his later works, like the ‘‘elegy’’ Elvira (1872) and the ‘‘sermon’’ Il regno dei cieli (The Kingdom of Heaven, 1873), are published anonymously. Furthermore, he attributes his Cenno critico (Critical Note) on Giuseppe Rovani’s Giovinezza di Giulio Cesare (Julius Cesar’s Youth), also written in 1873) to his friend Luigi Perelli (who he also cites as editor of the Vita di Alberto Pisani), without 648

counting on the fact that he would reverse this position in Goccie d’inchiostro (Drops of Ink, 1880), this time, signing the stories of Alberto Pisani as Carlo Dossi. In 1905, the comedy written in Milanese dialect, Ona famiglia de cilapponi (A Family of Silly People) appears signed with the acronym Pisper, derived from the fusion of two half-identities, that of (Alberto) Pisani and that of (Luigi) Perelli. In the diary-notebook titled the Note azzurre (Blue Notes), published posthumously in 1912, Dossi uses the third person to designate himself, at times not citing his full name, but using a simple ‘‘D.’’ Then Dossi plans a cycle of Ritratti umani (Human Portraits), including amongst other titles the 12 prose works Dal calamajo di un medico (From the Pen of a Doctor, 1873), which attempt to offer a portrait of the contemporary society via the pen of a doctor-narrator. The misogynist polemical La desinenza in A, (The Ending in A, 1878), another work in this cycle, creates a desecrating gallery of multiple women portrayed in a ferocious satire. The setting in the theatrical genre is not only part of the external structure (the work is subdivided into three acts of ten scenes each) but also responsible for the prevalent dialogical structure of certain stories. The forms of the short story and the novel coexist with the theater. Dossi’s texts make use of the theories and the figurative practices of painter William Hogarth, one characteristic that confirms the composite nature of his work. Music also frequently appears in his compositions, in the form of such terms as ‘‘symphony,’’ ‘‘overture,’’ and ‘‘intermezzo,’’ in the depiction of an orchestra that the author-demiurge uses as a metaphor for the relationship with his literary production and with his readers, in the insertion of a real musical text. The paradoxical innovations of punctuation and accents are rhythmic and musical indications that constrain the reader to slow the ‘‘recitation’’ of the work (according to the specifications contained in the Ma`rgine that act as a preface to the second edition in 1884). After the first edition of La desinenza in A, during the 1880s Dossi produces only one new work, I mattoidi (The Odd Fellows, 1884), an inventory, pitiless and cruelly humorous, of the grotesque projects presented for ‘‘L’altare della patria’’ (The altar of the homeland), the monument for King Vittorio Emanuele II. At this point, having entered the orbit of the ingenious manager of the cultural industry, Angelo Sommaruga, and having thus at least apparently disposed himself to confront a decidedly more vast public of readers, Dossi

CARLO DOSSI dedicates himself to the editorial task of reworking his texts. This editorial work includes writing prefaces or afterwards in which he recounts himself, negating and multiplying himself at the same time. In 1887, Dossi leaves the world of literature by publishing, in an extremely refined typographic form, Amori (Love Stories). The work is a delicate and ironic survey of women he loved, organized along an itinerary modeled on the hierarchical scheme of the Dantean heavens.

Biography Carlo Alberto Pisani Dossi (in art, Carlo Dossi) was born in Zenevredo near Pavia on 27 March 1949 to an upper-middle class family. Classical studies in Milan and later studies of jurisprudence at the University of Pavia, from which he graduated in 1871. Moved to Rome in 1872, having won a competition for a place with the minister of foreign affairs, resigning, however, the next year. Returned to service in 1877, and in 1878 was named head of the Cabinet of Francesco Crispi’s government, becoming the leader’s right-hand man. Left his literary vocation entirely to dedicate himself to his new duties. Appointed undersecretary of state for foreign affairs. Accepted post as consul in Colombia. Before departing for Bogota` married Carlotta Borsani, with whom had three children. Stayed in Colombia briefly. In 1895, received nomination as minister in Athens. Returned to Italy in 1896 following Crispi’s demise after the Italian army defeat at Adua. Dedicated the last years of life to the construction of a magnificent villa Dosso Pisani in Cardina (Como) and to his passion for archeology. Died in Cardina, on 16 November 1910. ANTONIO SACCONE See also: Scapigliatura Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by G. P. Lucini and P. Levi, 5 vols., Milan: Treves, 1909–1927.

Opere scelte, edited by Foldo Portinari, Turin: Utet, 2004.

Fiction Giannetto prego` un dı` la mamma che il lasciasse andare a scuola (with Luigi Perelli), 1866. Per me si va tra la perduta gente, 1867. L’altrieri. Nero su bianco, 1868. Vita di Alberto Pisani, 1870. Elvira, 1872. Il regno dei cieli, 1873. Ritratti Umani. Dal calamaio di un me´dico, 1873. La colonia felice, 1874. La desinenza in A, 1878. Goccie d’inchiostro, 1880. Ritratti umani. Campionario (with Luigi Perelli), 1885. Amori, 1887. Autodiagnosiu quotidiana, edited by L. Barile, 1984. Due racconyti giovanili. Con un racconto di Luigi Perelli, edited by P. Montefoschi, 1994.

Plays Ona famiglia de cilapponi, giavanada in 5 att con musega de Pisper (Pisani-Perelli), 1905.

Nonfiction I mattoidi, 1884. Fricassea critica, 1906. Note azzurre, 1912. Rovaniana, edited by G. Nicodemi, 1946. Note azzurre, edited by Dante Isella, 1964.

Further Reading Avellini, L. (editor), La critica e Dossi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1978. Caputo, Francesco, Sintassi e dialogo nella narrativa di Carlo Dossi, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2000. Isella, Dante, La lingua e lo stile di Carlo Dossi, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1958. Isella, Dante, I lombardi in rivolta, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Isella, Dante, L’idillio di Meulan, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Lucini, Gian Piero, L’ora topica di Carlo Dossi. Saggio di critica integrale (1911), edited by T. Grandi, Milan: Ceschina, 1973. Saccone, Antonio, Carlo Dossi. La scrittura del margine, Naples: Liguori, 1995. Scannapieco, A., In tristia hilaris, in hilaritate tristis, Abano Terme: Francisci, 1984. Serri, M., Carlo Dossi e il ‘‘racconto,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1975. Spera, Francesco, Il principio della antiletteratura, Naples: Liguori, 1976.

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FRANCESCA DURANTI

FRANCESCA DURANTI (1935–) Francesca Duranti’s fiction examines the relationship between life and art; her protagonists are often involved in the literary world, and their artistic endeavors serve as a journey of self-discovery. Although her texts are rarely overtly feminist or political in theme, they do explore female experiences and their impact on female subjectivity. Duranti, a translator as well as novelist, employs a number of genres in her works, including the autobiographical bildungsroman, the thriller, the romance narrative, the psychological drama, and even metafiction that addresses the creation of her own literary production. Duranti’s earlier works are clearly based in her own life story. La bambina (The Child, 1976), although written in the third person, describes the childhood and adolescence of the author herself. Although the time period examined in the novel includes disturbing events such as World War II and the occupation and subsequent liberation of Italy, the narrator’s perspective is rooted in the more daily experiences of the young protagonist, Francesca Rossi, and her relationships with diverse family members. La casa sul lago della luna (The House on Moon Lake, 1984), Duranti’s third novel, moves away from the realm of autobiography to explore issues of artistic creation and self-discovery. Its lyric prose, fascinating narrative, and intriguing characters won the novel international acclaim and literary awards, including the Martinafranca and the Bagutta prizes. Its protagonist, Fabrizio Garrone, a penurious translator, finds financial and artistic success when he translates a little-known novel by a Viennese writer, Fritz Oberhofer, called La casa sul lago della luna. However, when Fabrizio attempts a commissioned biography of the author, he finds himself creating an imaginary love interest for Oberhofer. The line between reality and fantasy becomes increasingly blurred as the supposed granddaughter of the fictional woman enters the text and completely destabilizes both narrative and protagonist. Duranti takes on many themes familiar to the women’s movement in Effetti personali (Personal Effects, 1988). In this novel, the female protagonist undertakes a voyage of discovery after being abandoned by her husband of ten years. Valentina takes 650

up journalism and travels to an unspecified Eastern European country to write the life story of a famous novelist. Along the way, her evolving relationships with her mother, her lover (a poet), and her former husband serve as the vehicle for her own growth. The relationship between art and life— between a writer and her literary production—is explored in the novel Ultima stesura (Final Draft, 1991). The narrator, Teodora Francia, analyses eight of her short stories through the lenses of her own life story, which mirrors Duranti’s own. In the process of personal and literary analysis, Teodora examines how her own work reveals the tension between artistic creation and finding one’s place in the ‘‘real world.’’ Sogni mancini (Left-Handed Dreams, 1996) is a more lighthearted look at the creative process. Here New York University history professor Marina Satriano, newly arrived in Italy to care for her ailing mother, records her dreams in an attempt to work through a confused sense of identity. Many of these dreams are rooted in memories of meals, and the book’s format is divided into eight chapters, each corresponding to a specific dish. The novel, then, becomes part of a feminist tradition that uses domestic imagery and ritual as a means of defining and celebrating female culture. In 2003, Duranti reimagines the story of her great-grandmother’s life in L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria (The Last Journey of the Canaria, 2003), a novel that won the Premio Rapallo-Carige. Her ancestor believed that her husband, a sea captain, had not perished when his ship, the Canaria, was lost at sea, but rather had been stranded on some island in the Atlantic Ocean. Duranti creates a rich and compassionate inner life for her greatgrandmother, who spent her long adult life waiting for her missing husband. In the novel, the author also intertwines her family’s personal story with that of Italy’s political and cultural history. Other novels include Piazza mia bella piazza (Public Square, My Beautiful Public Square, 1978), which describes the breakup of Duranti’s second marriage after her husband refused to support her artistic aspirations; and Lieto fine (Happy Ending, 1987), which reimagines a traditional fairy tale narrative through its use of irony and a nonconventional ending. In Progetto Burlamacchi (1994), Duranti

FRANCESCA DURANTI examines the impact of historical events on the present day, as a computer science teacher in Lucca proposes a reworking of Tuscany’s past. Il comune senso delle proporzioni (The Common Sense of Proportions, 2000) is a thriller set in New York City that revises the genre’s conventions to examine the female protagonist’s existential crisis.

Biography Born 2 January 1935 in Genova, nee´ Rossi. Married Enrico Magnani, 1956. Separated from Magnani, 1960. Law degree from University of Pisa, 1960. Divorced from her second husband, Massimo Duranti, 1976. Has two children, Gregorio Magnani and Maddalena Duranti. La casa sul lago della luna awarded the Premio Martinafranca, 1984, and the Premio Bagutta, 1985. Effetti personali awarded the Premio Basilicata and Premio Hemingway, 1988, and the Premio Campiello, 1989. Sogni mancini awarded the Premio Rapallo, 1997. L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria awarded the Premio RapalloCarige, 2004. Her novels have been translated into 18 languages. LAURA SALSINI Selected Works Fiction La bambina, 1976. Piazza mia bella piazza, 1978. La casa sul lago della luna, 1984; as The House on Moon Lake, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1986.

Lieto fine, 1987; as Happy Ending, translated by Annapaola Cancogni, 1991. Effetti personali, 1988; as Personal Effects, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1993. Ultima stesura, 1991. Progetto Burlamacchi, 1994. Sogni mancini, 1996; as Left-handed Dreams, 2000. Il comune senso delle proporzioni: piccolo thriller da viaggio, 2000. L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria, 2003.

Further Reading Giobbi, Giuliana, ‘‘Know the Past: Know Thyself. Literary Pursuits and Quest for Identity in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and in F. Duranti’s Effetti personali,’’ in Journal of European Studies, 24 (1994): 41–54. Kozma, Jan, ‘‘Bio-fictive Conversations and the Uncentered Woman in Francesca Duranti’s Novels,’’ in Italianist, 16 (1996): 176–190. Lucamante, Stefania, ‘‘La geometria nel romanzo: I ‘grafici narrativi’ di Francesca Duranti,’’ in Forum Italicum, 29, no. 2 (1995): 313–323. Smith, Shirley, ‘‘Francesca Duranti and Metafiction,’’ in Quaderni d’italianistica, 18, no. 1 (1997): 101–111. Spunta, Marina, ‘‘A Balanced Language: Spoken and Dialogic Style in the Narrative of Francesca Duranti,’’ in The Modern Language Review, 95, no. 2 (2000): 374–388. Vinall, W. Shirley, ‘‘Francesca Duranti: Reflections and Inventions,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘The Split Self or Female Creativity: Francesca Duranti,’’ in Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative, Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Seductions and Brazen Depictions: Two Recent Novels from Italy,’’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 28, no. 4 (1992): 349–362.

BERNARDO DOVIZI See Il Bibbiena

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ELEONORA DUSE

ELEONORA DUSE (1858–1924) As an actress, Eleonora Duse occupies a central position in the history of modern Italian and world theater. She developed a radically new style based on introspection and nuance whose influence extends to contemporary acting methods (Lee Strasberg was one of her keenest admirers). In addition to her acting, Duse’s profound impact on twentieth-century literary, theatrical, and social culture is due to her original and forceful approach to texts, her self-transformation into a diva with a mystique and international cult following of unprecedented proportions (among intellectual elites and popular audiences alike), and her intense, inspiring correspondence with writers and performers. As early as 1879, Duse began to be noticed for the subtlety and modernity of her acting. Although small and fragile-looking (and eventually debilitated by a chronic illness of the lungs), in her role as Vittorio Alfieri’s Electra she appeared on a par with the illustrious prima attrice, Giacinta Pezzana (who was also her teacher). Witnesses and critics largely agree on the main characteristics of Duse’s acting. She increasingly disregarded traditional acting typologies and even authors’ stylistic recommendations, and radically refashioned characters, as if they were emanations of her own inner being. She transformed them in her own image and made them new. This process is often referred to as interiorization. It had the uncanny effect of making Duse’s acting seem entirely natural, spontaneous, devoid of artifice and rhetoric, and at the same time artful, complex, meditated, and profound. Duse’s shunning of makeup, her preference for simple, ample and unrevealing costumes, her elimination of traditional theatrical poses and emphatic gestures contributed to the calculated effect of naturalness. She avoided grand entrances and occasionally placed herself in a corner at the back of the stage. Instead of imposingly striding toward the proscenium she tended to shuffle unassumingly. In place of stereotyped, recognizable gestures, Duse crafted her own language of barely perceptible body movements, subtle tremors of the hands, quivering of the lips and eyelids, blushing and, especially, pauses of silence and immobility. All demanded a new, concentrated, nearly spellbound attention by the spectator. She fascinated and inspired writers 652

as different as James Joyce, George Bernard Shaw, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sibilla Aleramo, Anton Chekhov and Hugo von Hoffmansthal, as well as at least two generations of actresses. In contrast to her rival Sarah Bernhardt, who excelled in sexually charged femme fatale roles and exploited the potential of luxurious, extravagant dress and makeup (as well as the erotic tension of the body artfully displayed), Duse, who studied Bernhardt carefully, sought to generate an effect of mystical spirituality and interiority even when interpreting rather vulgar characters, such as Zola’s The´re`se Raquin. Once penetrated and disclosed in her innermost intimate being and suffering, even Raquin became sublime in Duse’s hands. Increasingly, the impression she made through her acting was of reaching into and disclosing a dark area of the soul and consciousness. Her gestures, especially the silent dialogue of her face and hands, appeared to emerge from the depths of the unconscious itself. This quality developed all the more clearly when she was able to choose her repertory (Ibsen especially was her favorite) without the usual burden of financial and commercial constraints. Yet, she relentlessly experimented even with the most predictable characters that the crowds demanded of her again and again, for example the hugely popular Marguerite Gautier in Dumas’ The Lady of the Camelias. Duse always acted in Italian, even in France; her ability to communicate across languages through her expressions became legendary. The most familiar characters became new and strange through Duse’s modern interpretation—she gave them an unprecedented sense of depth and an ambiguity that occasionally shocked some spectators who saw her as the epitome of the modern hysterical and neurotic woman. Even when in charge of her own company and in a position to ask dramatists such as Dumas, Boito and D’Annunzio to write for her (from 1886 she effectively acted as her own producer as well as director and stage manager), Duse never quite abandoned the older commercial repertory, mostly because her financial position was always precarious and, in the D’Annunzio period, disastrous. A further, even deeper limit was her attachment to her own stardom. Duse declined to perform in any

ELEONORA DUSE work that she could not entirely control and that did not have a single, prominent female lead role. From the traditional Italian canon, she singled out Carlo Goldoni’s La locandiera (which intrigued her for the ambiguous, metatheatrical quality of Mirandolina’s character) and Pamela nubile, and she enthusiastically accepted to do Giovanni Verga’s controversial verista play, Cavalleria rusticana (her interpretation of Verga’s Santuzza was especially celebrated). On the other hand, she turned down Luigi Pirandello’s La vita che ti diedi, which he had written under her spell, but involved two female leads. Duse never stopped developing her characters. Responding to developments in her own life and in the cultural milieu, she transformed her interpretations through the years. For example, her Hedda Gabler went from a woman obsessed with motherhood as a palpable nightmare in 1898 to a more abstract, symbolic, and demonic character in 1904– 1905. Rather than behaving as ‘‘an actor,’’ she effectively was more like ‘‘an author’’ in her own right. It is not surprising therefore that Pirandello—the writer of Six Characters in Search of an Author—was obsessed by her while she instead resisted his modernism, which threatened to make her interpretive, analytical work redundant. Eager to contribute to the advent of a new theater, she was not content to shine in her best-loved roles by Dumas or Sardou, but, as her letters show, actively sought and encouraged the creation of new texts, though not always with the desired results. Just as her characters became for her an integral, personal and intimate part of her emotional life, so did some of her authors in whose work she saw promise—Arrigo Boito and especially Gabriele D’Annunzio. Boito (poet, dramatist, opera composer, and brilliant librettist of—among others— Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff ), became her mentor and principal interlocutor in the late 1880s and early 1890s, initiating her to Dante and Shakespeare and dialoguing with her about her art and the theater. Hundreds of letters testify to her extraordinary expressiveness and originality as a writer—albeit limited to the private sphere. Unfortunately the drama that Boito eventually wrote for her in 1898, Antonio e Cleopatra (an adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy) was not up to her expectations and was a near failure. That in 1891 she decided to premiere A Doll’s House in Italy despite Boito’s objections to Ibsen is a measure of her disappointment and desire to move on. Nora was one of her most thrilling and memorable creations, and the play became one of her most cherished and

performed, as well as an inspiration for the Italian feminist movement, as testified by Sibilla Aleramo’s autobiographical novel Una donna. Duse was almost singly responsible for first inspiring D’Annunzio to write for the theater, and she played a key role in bringing his plays to the stage. Even though most of his dramatic texts turned out ironically not to be suited for her, they owed a lot to her (as did much of his other writing) in stylistic as well as poetic and dramatic terms. Ambiguity, interiorization, the disclosing of the characters’ unconscious and their dramatic inner turmoil were essential components of D’Annunzio’s theater. However, the overwritten, overwrought texts from Sogno d’un mattino di primavera to Francesca da Rimini made the actress’s work almost impossible. Most critics agree that D’Annunzio’s plays—with the exception of La figlia di Iorio—are made to be read rather than performed. Duse had to reinvent her acting style, her inflection and even her body language to bring the texts to life, but the results were painful to watch. Viewers remarked that the actress seemed paralyzed, deprived of her powers. The text had taken over the actress’ space and voice. When Duse in 1921 decided to resurrect La citta` morta, she made extensive cuts and even rewrote parts of the text (as she also did with other plays, replacing entire sentences with her own more concise lines). Duse’s and D’Annunzio’s love story became the basis for D’Annunzio’s Il fuoco (1900) which so inverted ‘‘the truth’’ (making the actress seem the passive receptacle of the writer’s outpouring of dramatic genius) that Duse, although intrigued by its aesthetic value, eventually ended the relationship with considerable bitterness, humiliated by the scandal and gossip that followed the novel’s publication. D’Annunzio, on the other hand, kept writing for her and always kept a cast of a marble head of Duse on his desk. In contrast to her triumph in 1896 (when she was honored at the White House), Duse’s 1902–1903 American tour with three D’Annunzio plays was a critical and financial disaster. Before her death in Pittsburgh while on tour in 1924, however, she obtained her biggest American triumph with—among other plays—the edited version of La citta` morta. Not only did Duse survive her relationship with D’Annunzio, but she went on after 1904 to yet another creative and experimental phase of her work. In 1906, she did Rosmersholm in Florence with Edward Gordon Craig, collaborating with him on the spare, daringly modern and avant-garde production design. In 1907–1909, she triumphantly toured Russia and other European countries, presenting 653

ELEONORA DUSE among other plays her memorable The Lady from the Sea. Feeling too ill, however, to go back on tour, and—at 51—too old for most of her usual roles, Duse was not seen on the stage from 1909 to 1921. Even so, her life was very active, even restless, and as nomadic as ever; she read voraciously in literature and philosophy, she forged friendships with many women (including young actresses and writers) and she kept corresponding with a wide network of artists and intellectuals while constantly searching for a playwright who could create new roles for her. In 1914, after years of planning and fund-raising, she was finally able to fulfill an old dream and inaugurated a library, cultural center, and refuge for actresses in Rome. Duse’s work before her return to the stage included codirecting and starring with Febo Mari in the 1916 silent film adaptation of Grazia Deledda’s novel Cenere (Ashes), which are the only surviving moving images of Duse, as well as plans for several other films. In exploring the new medium, Duse— an avid filmgoer—did not rely on theatrical devices, but rather experimented with film’s expressive possibilities, using shot-framing, point of view, lighting, painterly composition, editing and the compression of time to distill the gist of Deledda’s novel as she saw it. Her acting was understated, taking advantage to great effect of her natural silver hair and of simple motions like veiling and unveiling her face, seen mostly in profile. In 1921, when Duse finally returned to the stage with The Lady From the Sea in Turin (then ravaged by strikes and violence prior to the Fascist rise to power), she received a standing ovation after each act. The young Luchino Visconti saw her that evening and said he suddenly understood what true acting was all about. Yet her Rome opening in 1922 of Tommaso Gallarati Scotti’s allegorical modernist drama Cosı` sia (Thy Will Be Done)—a new play handpicked by Duse as a ‘‘prayer for Italy’’ and the inauguration of a new phase in her career, was booed by the same audience that had recently protested and shut down Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. While Mussolini repeatedly contacted her and even met with her seeking to enlist her help in creating a Fascist theater, Duse declined, and instead started planning to leave Italy and go on the American tour that was to be her last.

Biography Born in Vigevano on 3 October 1858, Eleonora Duse leads a nomadic life with her parents, who 654

are traveling actors, and starts acting as a child. In 1879, she has her first important roles (Shakespeare, Alfieri, Zola, Sardou) at the Naples Teatro dei Fiorentini. She has an affair with the journalist Martino Cafiero and has a child from him who dies in infancy. In 1881, she marries Tebaldo Checchi, an actor. 1882, performs in La signora delle camelie in Florence; her daughter Enrichetta is born. Enrichetta will be educated in boarding schools and never allowed to go on tour with her mother or see her on the stage. Following Duse’s instructions, after her mother’s death, she destroys most of D’Annunzio’s letters to the actress. 1884, she performs in Verga’s Cavalleria rusticana in Turin, and La locandiera in Trieste. Duse meets Arrigo Boito, with whom she has a relationship for about ten years that he insists on keeping secret though promising to marry her and ‘‘free her’’ from the stage. 1888, she performs in Boito’s Antonio e Cleopatra in Milan. 1889, goes to Egypt on tour, later begins her several series of tours through Europe, Russia, and the United States. After separating from her husband, she starts her own company, the Compagnia drammatica della citta` di Roma, with Flavio Ando`. 1891, performs in Casa di bambola; 1893, in Heimat. In 1894, she meets D’Annunzio, starting a stormy relationship and partnership that will last nine years. 1898, performs in Hedda Gabler in Florence; 1901, in Francesca da Rimini in Rome; 1904, in Maeterlinck’s Monna Vanna in Milan; 1906, in Rosmersholm in Florence. She leaves the stage from 1909 to 1921. Starts the Libreria delle attrici in Rome in 1914. Stars in and directs the film Cenere in 1916. During the war, she keeps a correspondence with several soldiers at the front and works on a project to bring theater to the war zone. Returns to the stage in 1921 with The Lady of the Sea in Turin. Dies in Pittsburgh on 21 April, 1924. LUCIA RE

Selected Works Letters Carteggio d’Annunzio-Duse, edited by Piero Nardi, 1975. Eleonora Duse e Arrigo Boito: Lettere d’amore, edited by Raul Radice, 1979.

Other ‘‘Frammento autobiografico,’’ in Biblioteca Teatrale, 1996.

ELEONORA DUSE Further Reading Bassnett, Susan, ‘‘Eleonora Duse,’’ in John Stokes et al., Bernhardt, Terry, Duse: The Actress in Her Time, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Cara, Antonio, Cenere di Grazia Deledda nelle figurazioni di Eleonora Duse, Nuoro: Istituto Superiore Etnografico, 1984. Divina Eleonora: Eleonora Duse nella vita e nell’arte, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Guerrieri, Gerardo, Eleonora Duse: Nove saggi, edited by Lina Vito, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993.

Pontiero, Giovanni, Eleonora Duse: In Life and Art, Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986. Re, Lucia, ‘‘D’Annunzio, Duse, Wilde, Bernhardt: Author and Actress Between Decadence and Modernity,’’ in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture Between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2004. Sheehy, Helen, Eleonora Duse: A Biography, New York: Knopf, 2003. Weaver, William, Duse: A Biography, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1984.

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E 8½ See Otto e mezzo (Work by Federico Fellini)

THE EARTH TREMBLES See La Terra Trema (Work by Luchino Visconti)

UMBERTO ECO (1932–) theory. In an original argument, Eco maintained that the workings of scholastic philosophy had much in common with structuralism, an approach to literature that was popular at the time in Europe. His next major essay, Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (The Open Work, 1962) earned him renown and a succe´s de scandale by famously negative reviews from Eugenio Montale and Claude Le´vi-Strauss and set

One of the most prolific and influential of all essayists and novelists in the postwar period, Umberto Eco began what might have been an ordinary academic career with the publication of his dissertation, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso (The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 1956), a work that not only foretold his vocation as a novelist of the Italian Middle Ages but also marks a step in the development of his mature postmodern literary 657

UMBERTO ECO up a much debated dichotomy of ‘‘open’’ or avantgarde works, such as Joyce’s Ulysses, Calder’s mobiles, or Luciano Berio’s music, as opposed to traditionally ‘‘closed’’ works of art. This important work of theory established Eco as Italy’s most distinguished interpreter of James Joyce (in fact a good deal of the book was devoted to the Irish novelist and was eventually published separately in English as The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce in 1989). Thus, when Eco began writing what are aggressively postmodern works of fiction, he had a very clear notion of the boundaries of literary modernism. Eco then proceeded to a number of collections of essays dealing with popular culture, embracing critical theories that he felt were capable of addressing an aspect of contemporary culture most traditional Italian intellectuals generally ignored. He reached bestseller status with Diario minimo (Misreadings, 1963), witty parodies that treated such various topics as Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, Roland Barthes. His cosmopolitan interest in everything from comic books to linguistic theory then produced a number of seminal books in what Eco himself calls his presemiotic period. Apocalittici e integrati: communicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura massa (Apocalypse Postponed, 1964) offered a brilliant analysis of two approaches to popular culture: The traditional European intellectual was defined as an ‘‘apocalyptic’’ and was generally opposed to the very notion of ‘‘popular’’ culture, while ‘‘integrated’’ intellectuals, often from the Anglo-Saxon tradition, embraced this phenomenon. This work produced often-anthologized essays on comics, such as Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Superman, and Terry and the Pirates. Another subsequent collection, Il superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare (The Superman of the Masses: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Popular Novel, 1976), contained his single most famous essay on Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale, and its celebrated hero. Such works led Eco toward the methodology of semiotics, which he hoped would become a master discipline encompassing every form of human culture from bathroom graffiti to grand opera, from cartoons to film, without the theoretical need to divide culture into higher and lower forms. With Trattato di semiotica generale (A Theory of Semiotics, 1975), he championed the work of American philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1839–1914), preferring his use of the term ‘‘semiotics’’ over the ‘‘semiology’’ of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland 658

Barthes. Eco embraced semiotics because it pointed toward a cultural theory that was neither purely literary nor devoted only to the analysis of highculture phenomena; and, like Barthes, Eco enjoyed writing about all sorts of subjects deriving from popular culture. He also believed semiotics could counter the Marxist tendency to condemn all forms of popular culture as merely part of the consumer society. In particular, Eco’s treatise emphasizes Peirce’s concept of unlimited semiosis, a theory that demonstrated how signification operated by a circularity of references from one sign to another and not to objective referents in reality, subjective mental states, or Platonic universals. Peirce’s unlimited semiosis also provided a firm theoretical basis for Eco’s own theories about the ‘‘open’’ work and would be influential in his future novels. Finally, Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (The Reader in the Story, 1976) began the definition of the Model Reader, something every author must construct, a textual strategy establishing semantic correlations between the Model Reader, the Text, and the Author. Like other postmodern writers, Eco assumed that a text had many levels of meaning and that few of them were exhausted by the ‘‘intention’’ of the Author. Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) and its subsequent Postille al Nome della rosa (Postscript to ‘‘The Name of the Rose,’’ 1983) combined all of Eco’s intellectual interests—the Middle Ages, popular culture, the detective novel, semiotics, literary theory—and won numerous literary prizes (including the prestigious Strega Prize), selling tens of millions of copies around the globe. It established the popularity of the postmodern novel in Italy and was widely regarded abroad as one of the best expressions of such a literary form. In his influential postscript to the work, Eco underlined the concepts of pastiche, parody, and revisiting the literary past as the essential concepts of postmodern: Books always speak of other books. For the mass-market reader, Eco provided a ‘‘whodunit’’ indebted to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, a medieval monk-detective figure named William of Baskerville, who attempts to solve a series of brutal murders in a forbidding monastery with a labyrinth-like library holding all sorts of mysterious and dangerous books. For the academic critic or intellectual, this ‘‘whodunit’’ was filled with arcane historical references, Latin quotations, medieval philosophy, and anachronistic references to modern critical theory, semiotics, science, and literature.

UMBERTO ECO Eco’s next two novels could not hope to equal the popularity of his first work, but they are no less postmodernist in their reliance upon pastiche, and they combine learned forms of literary theory and arcane information on the past with the conventions of the mass-market thriller, adventure story, or detective novel. In Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1988), Eco recounted the adventures of a group of friends working for publishers in Milan (a situation not unlike his own biography); they stumble upon what they think is a plot to take over the world that stretches back to the Templars, the Rosicrucians, and other apocalyptic fanatics. In the process, Eco also satirized the literary theory of deconstructionism and attacked the overinterpretation and paranoid views of critics who believe anything can be related to everything without regard for the standards of ordinary logic: Their motto would be ‘‘tout se tient’’ (everything is connected). This novel thus anticipates two theoretical books Eco published subsequently on the subject of interpretation: I limiti dell’interpretazione (The Limits of Interpretation, 1989) and the Tanner lectures Eco delivered at Cambridge University, published as Interpretation and Overinterpretation (1992). In these works, Eco demonstrated that in fact contemporary theories of deconstruction are actually forms of secondcentury hermetic theory and discussed what he called ‘‘hermetic drift’’ or the uncontrolled ability to shift from meaning to meaning and from a connection to another. In his second novel, a secret document supposedly proving the existence of this diabolic plot is revealed to be nothing more than an ancient laundry list! Eco’s third novel, L’isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before, 1994) may best be read against the backdrop of Eco’s Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1992–1993 and published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994). It is a tour de force of erudition about the seventeenth century, in which Eco juxtaposed the often foolish philosophical mistakes (as well as the many startling discoveries) made during the Baroque period by such scientists and literary figures as Kepler, Galileo, Tesauro, Donne, and Marino with many postmodernist theoretical concepts in the works of such thinkers as Barthes, Harold Bloom, Foucault, Peirce, and Derrida. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods reconsiders and revises, in some respects, Eco’s early negative views of such popular figures as Ian Fleming in the light of his own experience as a novelist. Baudolino (2000) returns to the Middle Ages that established Eco’s fame in Il nome della rosa. In

it Eco recounted the picaresque adventures of Baudolino (the namesake of the patron saint of his hometown of Alessandria in Piedmont) during the Third Crusade, who witnessed the sacking of Constantinople and the search for the legendary land of Prester John. Following earlier practice, this novel, too, has links to Eco’s theoretical essays: discussions of the semiotics of falsity found in a number of critical essays. Eco invented a nonerudite narrator who recounts his life story to Nicetas Choniates, a Byzantine historian, as well as his own particular form of language that demonstrated once again his prowess as a manipulator of language. His most recent novel, La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2004) returns to a topic identified with Eco’s earliest essays on popular culture: comic strips and the popular culture of his youth. In a profusely illustrated text that recalls memories from his youth (advertising posters, comic strips, movies), Eco created a narrator who has forgotten everything about his life and must reconstruct these lost memories by consulting his schoolbooks, the magazines he read as a child, and anything else he can find to rekindle his memory. Eco’s fiction embodies the idea of the medieval palimpsest: His novels represent entertaining pastiches of other literary works or critical theories revised with irony and assembled with originality by a master craftsman. Though his novels and those of Italo Calvino, Italian narrative has entered the mainstream of contemporary postmodern fiction.

Biography Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria, 15 January 1932. An early activist in the Gioventu´ Italiana di Azione Cattolica, Eco became disillusioned with the conservative bent of the church around 1954 at about the same time he completed his university studies at Torino in philosophy, where he encountered the teachings of Nicola Abbagnano, Giovanni Getto, and Luigi Pareyson, the last of whom was most influential on his future career and with whom he did his thesis on Aquinas. Thereafter Eco worked for Italian state television (the RAI), one of the sources of his interest in popular culture, and for the Bompiani publishing house in Milan, where he would eventually become an important editor and bestselling author. After being appointed to a Chair of Visual Communication at the Faculty of Architecture in the University of Florence, Eco moved to the University of Bologna in 1971, where he occupied the first chair of 659

UMBERTO ECO semiotics in Italy within DAMS (Discipline dell’Arte, della Musica e dello Spettacolo) and remains today as one of that institution’s most famous scholars and lecturers. It was with the publication of his first novel, Il nome della rosa (1980), that Eco became internationally famous, surpassing the sales figures of any previous Italian literary work in the tens of millions of copies and enjoying translations in virtually every language in the world. Eco continues to work at the University of Bologna— since 1999, he has served as president of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici there—and remains a central force in contemporary Italian culture, combining polemical essays in magazines, numerous appearances on the media, scholarly articles in learned journals, editorial work in major Italian presses, and the writing of fiction. He has received numerous literary awards, including the Premio Strega (1981), the Prix Medicis Etranger (1982 and 2002), and the Austrian State Award for European Literature (2002), as well as more than 30 honorary doctorates from prestigious universities in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, Montre´al, Jerusalem, and Bloomington (Indiana). PETER BONDANELLA Selected Works Criticism Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, 1956; as The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas translated by Hugh Bredin, 1988. Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee, 1962; as The Open Work translated by Anna Cancogni, 1989. Diario minimo, 1963; as Misreadings translated by William Weaver, 1993. Apocalittici e integrati: communicazioni di massa e teorie della cultura massa, 1964; as Apocalypse Postponed translated by Robert Lumley, 1994. Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975; as A Theory of Semiotics, 1976. Il superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare, 1976; partially translated in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 1979. Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi, 1976; partially translated in The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, 1979. The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, 1982; translated by Ellen Esrock. Postille al ‘‘Nome della rosa,’’ 1983; as Postscript to ‘‘The Name of the Rose,’’ translated by William Weaver, 1984. I limiti dell’interpretazione, 1989; as Limits of Interpretations, 1990; translated by Martin McLaughlin, 2004. Interpretation and Overinterpretation, 1992. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, 1994. Sulla letteratura, 2002; as On Literature, translated by Martin McLaughlin, 2004.

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Fiction Il nome della rosa, 1980; as The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver, 1983. Il pendolo di Foucault, 1988; as Foucault’s Pendulum, translated by William Weaver, 1994. L’isola del giorno prima, 1994; as The Island of the Day Before, translated by William Weaver, 1995. Baudolino, 2000; as Baudolino, translated by William Weaver, 2002. La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana, 2004; as The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, translated by Geoff Brock, 2005.

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Bouchard, Norma, and Veronica Pravadelli (editors), Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation, New York: Peter Lang, 1988. Caesar, Michael, Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction, Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 1999. Cannon, JoAnn, Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989. Capozzi, Rocco (editor), Reading Eco, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Forchetti, Franco, Il segno e la rosa: I segreti della narrativa di Umberto Eco, Rome: Castelvecchi, 2005. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, Review of Opera aperta, Paese sera, 20 January 1967; reprinted in Conversazioni con Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, edited by Paolo Caruso, Milan: Mursia, 1969. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Opere aperte,’’ in Auto da fe´, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966. Musarra, Franco, Bart Van den Bossche, et al. (editors), Eco in Fabula, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2002. Petitot, Jean, and Paolo Fabbri (editors), Nel nome del senso: intorno all’opera di Umberto Eco, Milan: Sansoni, 2001. Ross, Charlotte, and Rochelle Sibley (editors), Illuminating Eco: On the Boundaries of Interpretation, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004.

IL NOME DELLA ROSA, 1980 Novel by Umberto Eco

When Eco published his first work of prose fiction—a novel with a medieval setting—no one could have imagined its unparalleled international

UMBERTO ECO success. Critical approval of Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose) grew with the award of the prestigious Premio Strega in 1981, but the book’s popularity abroad with tens of millions of copies sold in over 30 languages amazed even its author. In 1986, French director Jacques Annaud turned it into a film starring Sean Connery, and in less than a decade Eco became not merely an esteemed intellectual, semiotician, and academic but also Italy’s most famous literary figure. Indeed, on the dust jacket of the first Italian edition, Eco identified three very different target audiences for his book: the readers of best sellers who were attracted to complex plots; attentive readers interested in analogies between the present and the Middle Ages; and the sophisticated readers who rightly saw Il nome della rosa as a palimpsest of other books. Eco thus attempted to unite theory and practice with a novel that served both as entertainment and as a postmodernist manifesto. In so doing, he consciously rejected the older modernist suspicion of ‘‘popularity’’ that equated it with ‘‘lack of value’’—a view he himself shared when he was a member of the avant-garde Gruppo 63 and that had earlier caused him to dismiss such novelists as Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giorgio Bassani, and Carlo Cassola. Eco set his novel in a northern Italian monastery in late November 1327. A Franciscan, William of Baskerville, and his Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, reach the abbey sent by Louis IV of Bavaria to initiate negotiations between Pope John XXII and a group of Franciscans critical of the Church’s tolerance toward accumulated wealth and its neglect of the poverty of Christ. Upon his arrival, William is confronted by a number of violent deaths—two suicides and five murders—and the abbey is destroyed by a conflagration at the end of the book. Thus this novel embraces the traditional and popular genre of the detective story: William replaces Sherlock Holmes, Adso becomes his Watson (and is the naive narrative voice that recounts the story from the vantage point of his old age), and Holmes’ adversary Moriarty, the ‘‘Napoleon of crime,’’ is replaced by Jorge of Burgos, an old Spanish monk who is behind the evil doings in the monastery. In the course of William’s investigations of the Aedificium (the main structure of the monastery) and of its gigantic library built in the form of a Piranesi-like labyrinth (with secret passages, booby traps, and dark secrets), the reader learns about the church history

of the period, particularly the heretical movements, as well as a wealth of information about what might have been contained in such a monastic library in the early fourteenth century. Eco defined postmodern literature in a postscript to the novel as ‘‘ironia, gioco metalinguistico, enunciazione al quadrato’’ (irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared) (Postille a ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ 1983). He applied this aesthetic principle to his treatment of literary tradition in the novel, aiming at bridging the gap between the erudite, academic reader and the avid consumer of best-selling pulp fiction and detective stories. As mentioned above, William seems to be a medieval thinker modeled anachronistically on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, but unlike Holmes (whose Victorian universe was the essence of order and precision), he uncovers chaos and lack of meaning. William solves the mystery behind the monastery’s crime entirely by accident and is himself responsible for burning down the monastery, losing in the process the only existing manuscript copy of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy. Comedy, as the reactionary Jorge of Burgos shows by concealing the existence of the manuscript, is a subversive force; it is mankind’s best weapon against intolerance, bigotry, and oppression. William’s intellectual stance (one shared by his creator Eco), on the other hand, accepts diversity and tolerance of controversial ideas. Il nome della rosa thus makes a convincing argument for intellectual freedom. PETER BONDANELLA Editions First Edition: Il nome della rosa, Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Translation: as The Name of the Rose, translated by William Weaver, San Diego: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1983.

Further Reading Capozzi, Rocco, Lettura, interpretazione e interstualita`: Esercizi di commento a ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ Perugia: Guerra, 2001. Coletti, Theresa, Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs, and Modern Theory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Eco, Umberto, Postille a ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ Milan: Bompiani, 1983. Giovannoli, Renato (editor), Saggi su ‘‘Il nome della rosa,’’ Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Haft, Adele, Jane G. White, and Robert J. White (editors). The Key to the Name of the Rose, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999.

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UMBERTO ECO Inge, Thomas M. (editor), Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco’s ‘‘The Name of the Rose,’’ Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988. Pischedda, Bruno, Come leggere ‘‘Il nome della rosa’’ di Umberto Eco, Milan: Mursia, 1994.

Puletti, Ruggero, ‘‘Il nome della rosa’’: Struttura, forme e temi, Manduria: P. Lacaita, 1995. Testi, Marco, Il romanzo del passato: Medioevo e invenzione in tre autori contemporanei, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992.

ENLIGHTENMENT The Enlightenment is a European cultural movement that spread in Italy during the second half of the eighteenth century. The roots of this movement, whose literary ramifications are as relevant as its philosophical and scientific ones, lie in English and French culture. Enlightenment culture claims as its forebears the experimental philosophy of Francis Bacon; the most advanced scientific research of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (from Galileo Galilei to Isaac Newton); English empiricism; modern French culture (represented prominently by Voltaire, a diffuser of the knowledge of the English Enlightenment, by Montesquieu the novelist and political thinker, and by the practice and ideology of the Encyclope´die [1751–1772] of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond D’Alembert, which was quickly translated and printed in Italy); and the popularization of the notion of sensisme (the doctrine that reduces all the contents of knowledge and consciousness to sense impressions), such as those of John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The features of this movement reveal a close interrelation among scientific, literary, artistic, and philosophical cultures; a particular concern for the question of education; and a specific attention to technological processes, skilled labor, the processes of production, and legal and economic problems. This culture also took a particular interest in the useful and practical aspects of a modern society that its proponents saw as developing only insofar as it could free itself from the shackles of prejudice, from the overbearing influence of preconstituted authority, and from the practice of imitating rigid traditional models. At the same time, great value was attached to experience, which was filtered by an exercise of the critical faculties, and by judgment freed from deference to usurping authority. In Italy, the diffusion of this culture coincided with a 662

tendency toward the secularization of culture and the acquisition of bourgeois characteristics. In La decadenza italiana nella storia europea (1971), Guido Quazza argued that it is not feasible to present the Italian eighteenth century as a continuous series of developments; rather he considered the beginning of the 1750s (after the peace of Aquisgrana in 1748) as an emblematic watershed. This juncture saw the emergence of intellectuals working toward a precise analysis of their situation (both economic and social) and acting as the bearers of a mandate that was widely representative of groups (and of the forces related to them), which could be realized in reforms accomplished by rulers. Antonio Genovesi’s Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienze (Discourse on the True End of Letters and the Sciences; 1753) can be taken as a manifesto of the new Enlightenment culture. It is not only an exaltation of reason as the highest power possessed by humankind but claims for reason a role of transforming reality and removing prejudices and obstacles to ‘‘true knowledge.’’ The figure of the traditional intellectual is contrasted to that of the new intellectual, who will share his culture with others, socializing and animating it, taking the needs of society as its point departure and then embodying this culture in institutions that will improve the social fabric. This picture is one in which science assumes an important role and that asserts the value of new scholastic and scientific institutions that will act at various levels, from primary education to discussions among the highly educated. Although Italy remained an underdeveloped country during this period, its relations with great European powers—and the relatively long period of peace after Aquisgrana—fostered the convergence of the desire for reform of some rulers sensitive to

ENLIGHTENMENT Enlightenment principles with the interest in renewal on the part of intellectual groups tied to widespread tendencies of Enlightenment culture. The politics of reform, especially reform of the state (in both the administrative and economic sense) and its laws and legal institutions began to surface in various states, in particular in Lombardy, Tuscany, the duchies of Parma and Piacenza, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. This movement toward reform was eased by the decrease in the jurisdictional control exercised by the Church. As a philosopher and an economist, Genovesi set up the programmatic strands of the new Enlightenment culture: faith in progress toward which humankind tends and that the intellectual promotes with the weapons of reason; an awareness of the close ties between intellectual activity, the mechanical arts, thought and technology, and the material well-being of humanity; a conviction that the modern cultural revolution is a European phenomenon; the affirmation of a secular and scientific culture that asserts control over nature based on the methodology of experience; the abandonment of the old professional concept of the ‘‘philosopher’’ and the assertion that it applies to everyone working in the realm of modern ‘‘reason,’’ promoter of progress, struggling against the obscurities of the past in order to spread of ‘‘light.’’ An important contribution by the Milanese Pietro Verri published in the first volume of short-lived but highly influential periodical Il Caffe`, ‘‘Pensieri sopra lo spirito della letteratura d’Italia’’ (Thoughts on the Spirit of Italy’s Literature, 1764–1765), reinforces the correlation between culture and civil society, rationality and sensibility, cultural activity and politics, along with a new relation between power and intellectual life. The work of the Italian illuministi is marked by the strong presence of writings on economic problems characterized by the close links between theoretical reflection and the response to concrete situations. Their works are more ‘‘militant’’ than ‘‘theoretical,’’ including Cesare Beccaria’s lectures on the Elementi di economia politica (The Elements of Political Economy, 1769–1770), Pietro Verri’s Meditazioni di economia politica (Meditations on Political Economy, 1771), the writings of Alfonso Longo on trusts and Gian Rinaldo Carli on the free trade, and Giambattista Vasco’s Felicita` pubblica considerata nei coltivatori di terre proprie (Public Happiness Considered for Those Who Cultivate Their Own Land, 1769). Tuscan economists reflected particularly on the subject of agriculture

and on the social foundations of the economy of states. Among them are included Giammaria Ortes on the national economy; Genovesi’s influential Lezioni di commercio o sia dell’economia civile (Lectures on Commerce or Civil Economy, 1757–1758), which combined an international approach with a free-market domestic agenda favoring middle-class productivity; and Ferdinando Galiani’s fundamental treatises Della moneta (On Currency, 1751) and Dialogues sur le commerce de ble´ (Dialogues on the Commerce of Wheat, 1770). These figures share a deep need to conduct concrete analyses and identify links between economic policy, and the political social sciences. The consideration of legal problems also provides a new definition of law and justice in relation to public well-being, sustaining a polemic against repressive legislation, torture, and the death penalty and in favor of a system of crime prevention. A fundamental point of reference for reformist movements became the treatise of Cesare Beccaria, Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crimes and Punishments, 1764), which had a vast resonance throughout Europe and was soon translated into French. The problem of education, considered by Beccaria the most effective means to prevent crime, is at the center of the Neapolitan Gaetano Filangieri’s Scienza della legislazione (The Science of Legislation, 1780–1785), in which legal problems expand into a vast consideration of civil and social relations, confronting questions of property, divisions between the social classes, civil and penal legislation, religion, and public education and including a plan of national education to close the gap between the people and the elite. Indeed several projects addressed enlightened absolute monarchs. These projects concerned the education of the lower classes and of the lower- and middle-class bourgeoisie, as well as the universities, where up-to-date methodologies were advanced to reflect on the modern problems of the state. The history of the academies—with the polemic aimed against the worldly and frivolous customs of the Arcadia—also registers a rise of activity in agreement with the political reformers. Among them were the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Parma, supported by the French minister Guillaume Dutillot; the academies of agriculture; and the Florentine Societa` dei Georgofili, in which landowners from various states sponsored studies intended to provide information on new farming techniques. For an anti-academic spirit focusing on contemporary life, we enlist the Accademia dei Pugni, which began meeting in the Verri household (1761) and 663

ENLIGHTENMENT gathered those who would be the principal collaborators on Il Caffe`, the periodical established by the leading group of the Lombard Enlightenment (Pietro and Alessandro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, Gian Rinaldo Carli, Giovan Battista Biffi, Luigi Lambertenghi, Alfonso Longo, Pietro Secchi, and Giuseppe Visconti, among others). Il Caffe` advocated the Europeanization of Italian culture, and its very name served (in opposition to the salon) as an indication of a freer exchange of classes and ideas. And it was precisely a new journalism of opinion, based on English models (Addison’s The Spectator), that became one of the fundamental genres of the Enlightenment: Carlo Denina’s Parlamento Ottaviano (Lucca, 1769), Gasparo Gozzi’s writings for Gazzetta Veneta (1760–1761) and Osservatore Veneto (1761–1762), Giuseppe Baretti’s La frusta letteraria (Venice, 1763–1765), and Giornale Enciclopedico (Venice, 1774–1797), published by Elisabetta Caminer Turra, Giovanni Scola, and Alberto Foris. Along journals, the nonerudite pamphlets aimed at reaching a wide public, engaging in polemical theses written in a clear, modern style. The notion of literature, and the literary output of those years, was strongly influenced by the programs of this movement, with results and attitudes that varied according to the degree of their authors’ openness to embrace the new. For example, in his ‘‘Dei difetti della letteratura’’ (On the Defects of Literature), published in the second volume of Il Caffe` (1765–66), Alessandro Verri highlighted the need for a literature able to express things, ideas, and sentiments without pedantry. Culture should form men ‘‘amabili’’ (lovable), ‘‘buoni’’ (good), ‘‘dolci’’ (gentle), ‘‘semplici’’ (simple), and ‘‘di maniere. . .urbane e naturali’’ (of urbane and natural manners). This is a far cry from the traditional man of letters who always was ‘‘impacchettato in se stesso’’ (wrapped up in himself). Also Giuseppe Parini undertook a defense of a poetry of substance. In his Discorso sopra la poesia (Discourse on Poetry, 1761), he referred to the ‘‘spirito filosofico, che quasi genio felice sorto a dominare la letteratura di questo secolo’’ (philosophical spirit, which, like some happy genie, fated to dominate the literature of this century), which illuminated all of Europe ‘‘dissipando le dense tenebre de’ pregiudizi autorizzati dalla lunga eta` e dalle venerande barbe de’ nostri maggiori’’ (by dissipating the dense shadows of prejudices authorized by the age and venerable beards of our elders). By this he meant a poetry based on a balance between the ‘‘utile’’ (useful) and the ‘‘dilettevole’’ (delightful), rich in moral 664

purpose of ‘‘vantaggio considerevole della societa`’’ (considerable advantage of society). Such poetry, motivated by civic intentions, had a following in the literary culture of the early nineteenth century, as well as in that of Romanticism (consider the journal Il Conciliatore and the work of Alessandro Manzoni). Characteristics linked with the intellectual milieu of the Enlightenment—even though they were developed mainly at the level of literary polemic— may be found in the work of the Mantuan Jesuit Saverio Bettinelli, and, despite some conservative leanings on a number of issues, in Giuseppe Baretti’s stinging satire of current frivolous books. In particular, the gradual reform of ‘‘comedy’’ in support of a ‘‘serious genre,’’ or even of a ‘‘third genre’’ that was to be neither tragedy nor classical comedy, was influenced by the theoretical premises of Lessing and Diderot. Circumstances and characters of everyday life might be represented with dignity and naturalness: These are the same issues at the core of Carlo Goldoni’s reform of the theater, a reform accompanied by an increase in serious content and the development of characters who are more individually portrayed within social contexts. Furthermore, reflections of Enlightenment culture of varying depths may also be detected in the come´die larmoyante (tearful comedy) of Giovanni De Gamerra (1743–1803) and Camillo Federici (1749–1802), in the novels of the Venetian Pietro Chiari (1711–1785) and Antonio Piazza (1742–1825), in travel literature, and in several didactic, philosophical, and scientific poems. The reforming culture of the Enlightenment in Italy, as distinct from that of the French, which has more radical themes and achievements, provided years of polemical vitality in the collaboration between enlightened rulers and intellectuals and varied according to the different national contexts in which this collaboration was expressed. It formed the foundation for the development of society, history, and culture in the years to come. ELVIO GUAGNINI Further Reading Binni, Walter, ‘‘Il Settecento letterario,’’ in Il Settecento, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 6, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Garzanti, 1968. Branca, Vittore (editor), Sensibilita` e razionalita` nel Settecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Carpanetto, Dino, and Giuseppe Ricuperati, Italy in the Age of Reason, 1685–1789, London-New York: Longman’s, 1987.

EPIC Casini, Paolo, Introduzione all’Illuminismo. Da Newton a Rousseau, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Cerruti, Marco, ‘‘Il Settecento,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, vol. 4, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: UTET, 1992. Cerruti, Marco, La guerra e i Lumi, Turin: The´le`me, 2000. Cochrane, E. W., Tradition and Enlightenment in Tuscan Academies, 1690–1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Folena, Gianfranco, L’italiano in Europa. Esperienze linguistiche nel Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Francovich, Carlo, Storia della Massomeria in Italia dalle origini alla Rivoluzione francese, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Fubini, Mario (editor), La cultura dell’Illuminismo in Italia, Turin: Eri, 1964. Guagnini, Elvio, L’eta` dell’Illuminismo e l’eta` napoleonica, Palermo: Palumbo, 1979; reprinted, 1997. Lezioni sull’Illuminismo, Atti del seminario di studi organizzato dalla Provincia di Reggio Emilia, October 1978– February 1979, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Malato, Enrico (editor), Il Settecento. Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 6: Rome: Salerno, 1998. Moravia, Sergio, Filosofia e scienze umane nell’eta` dei Lumi, Florence: Sansoni, 1982. Muscetta, Carlo (editor), Il Settecento, in Letteratura italiana, 2 volumes, Bari-Roma: Laterza, 1974. Petronio, Giuseppe, Profilo di un’eta`: l’Illuminismo, Palermo: Palumbo, 1972.

Postigliola, Armando (editor), Un decennio di storiografia italiana sul secolo XVIII, Rome: L’officina tipografica, 1995. Quazza, Guido, La decadenza italiana nella storia europea, Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Romagnoli, Sergio (editor), Illuministi settentrionali, Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Santucci, Antonio, Interpretazioni dell’Illuminismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979. Scalia, Gianni, L’Illuminismo. Storia della critica, Palermo: Palumbo, 1966. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, Classicismo e Illuminismo nell’Ottocento, Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1965. Venturi, Franco, Italy and the Enlightenment: Studies in a Cosmopolitan Century, London: Longman, 1972. Venturi, Franco, Settecento riformatore, 5 volumes, Turin: Einaudi, 1969–1990. Venturi, Franco, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. Venturi, Franco, et al. (editors), Illuministi italiani, 7 volumes, Milan-Naples, Ricciardi, 1965–1971. Woolf, Stuart J., A History of Italy 1700–1860: The Social Constraints and Political Change, London: Methuen, 1979. Woolf, Stuart J., ‘‘Le riforme e l’autorita`: Illuminismo e dispotismo (1750–1790),’’ in Storia d’Italia. Dal primo Settecento all’Unita`, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1973.

EPIC In Italy, the epic is a genre with a tortuous history. Caught between an imitation of the classics and medieval French models, between a culturally high diffusion and a popular circulation, between prose and verse, between conflicting definitions in opposition to novel and romance, epic is a hybrid genre, and its codification can only be achieved through processes of approximation and distinction. Throughout the centuries, texts with different generic features have deserved the definition of ‘‘epic.’’ Therefore, no one has ever attempted a comprehensive critical treatment of these texts, despite the monumental work by Pio Rajna (now collected in Scritti di filologia, 1998, and Due scritti inediti, 2004) and the repeated pleas by Carlo Dionisotti (now collected in Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, 2003). In particular, some time- and placespecific instances of ‘‘epic’’ have been neglected by Italian literary studies. This has been the case for

the Franco-Italian production or for the cantari and poemi cavallereschi, frequently considered subgenres. The parable of the Italian epic can be traced from the Middle Ages up through the sixteenth century, with sporadic instances in modern Italian literature. The development of the epic genre in Italy has been historically associated with the flourishing of the epic-chivalric poem during the Renaissance. The triumph of the genre with the works of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso has monopolized critical attention and reduced the phenomenon of the epic to a very limited stretch of time between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In a global reconsideration of the history of Italian literature, it is possible to follow a chronological development of the epic through shifting definitions of the term and different cultural moments. The standard definition as the poetry of the ‘‘common past of a 665

EPIC people’’ is inherently connected to the concept of national identity. Thus, it cannot be applied to the situation of the Italian peninsula, where communities were not formed and represented in national, or nationalistic, terms until the movement for unification in the nineteenth century. Equally problematic is the definition of the epic in opposition to the novel or to romance (both romanzo in Italian). This distinction shows all its limitations in the Italian tradition, which often resorts to hybrid definitions such as ‘‘poesia epico-cavalleresca’’ (epic-chivalric poetry) or ‘‘romanzo cavalleresco’’ (chivalric romance), as epic and romance (or romanzo) mix and coexist in the Golden Age of the Italian epic tradition. If the decline of the epic has been connected, for explanatory purposes, to the rise of romance (Vinaver) or of the novel (Bakhtin), the Italian case shows that generic boundaries are extremely permeable and can be traced only by approximation. In the case of the epic, we can suggest ‘‘cycle’’ and ‘‘genealogy’’ as useful key terms for a possible definition. Epic production is always cyclical, insofar as it always presupposes the knowledge of other instances of the same narration; for the same reason, it is always genealogical both in form and in content. During the medieval period, the epic production in the Italian peninsula assumed peculiar qualities in comparison to the French or even to the Spanish tradition, and there was a tendency toward the adaptation of French legends and texts to specific regional contexts. The clearest example of this is the production in Franco-Italian, or franco-veneto, the linguistic medium found in texts from northern Italy, especially in and around the so-called ‘‘Trevisan March,’’ written between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The geographic area involved in this production comprises towns like Treviso, Padua, Venice, Verona, Mantua, and Ferrara. This linguistic form was not used in oral communication, and it cannot be considered a language or a dialect; rather, it is a formal construction, a written language, based on the written and oral French of the time and influenced by northern Italian dialects. The themes of this literary production were taken from Old French chansons de geste, in particular from the Carolingian cycle, recounting the deeds of Charlemagne and his knights. The study of these texts acquired vitality mainly during the 1980s, after centuries of neglect. The nationalistic character of literary criticism, especially during the nineteenth century, had marginalized these poems because they were written in a hybrid form and did not appear adaptable to any 666

national identity, either Italian or French. The process of rediscovery of the Franco-Italian production went hand-in-hand with a study of the adaptation of the French ‘‘originals’’ to the different northern Italian context. In particular, a very productive line of research, including the work of Henning Krauss (Epica feudale e pubblico borghese, 1980) and of Alberto Limentani, Marco Infurna, and Francesco Zambon (L’‘‘Entre´e d’Espagne’’ e i signori d’Italia, 1992), identified these poems with the emergence of a bourgeois public, as opposed to the feudal character of the Old French chansons de geste. The most interesting examples of this tradition were the Entre´e d’Espagne (Entrance into Spain) and the texts of the Carolingian cycle collected in the Manuscript Marciano XIII: Bueve de Han(s)tone, Berta de li grant pie´ (Big-Footed Berta), Karleto, Berte, Milun et Rolandin, Ogier li Danois (Ogier the Dane), and Macaire. The manuscript, copied around the middle of the fourteenth century, featured a series of epic cycles connected to the Carolingian matter. For this manuscript in particular, critics such as Krauss and Limentani claimed a bourgeois origin, linking its themes to the new values of an emerging anti-aristocratic view. Critics like Juliann Vitullo (The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy, 2000), on the other hand, tried to reconnect these cycles to their Old French counterparts and retraced similar patterns in the evolution of the genre in both cultural areas. The Entre´e d’Espagne, on the other hand, was the product of a clerical or courtly environment. Written between 1320 and 1340 by an anonymous writer from Padua, the poem recounts the adventures of Charlemagne’s knights and army before the events narrated in the Chanson de Roland and the campaign of Spain in particular. The main protagonist, Roland, is represented as the pious Christian knight. The text is incomplete, due to lacunae in the manuscript, and is followed by a continuation, titled Prise de Pampelune (Capture of Pamplona) by modern commentators. The last two extant poems that critics linked to the development of Franco-Italian epic were the Guerra d’Attila (Attila’s War) and the Aquilon de Bavie`re. Both have named authors, a fact that marked the distance of these two texts from the anonymous production, both in the Venetian March and across the peninsula. Nicola di Giovanni da Casola, a notary from Bologna, wrote the Guerra d’Attila between 1358 and 1368 and worked within the cultural orbit of the Este court. Nicola was probably the first to connect the Carolingian cycle with the encomiastic praise of the Este family, and he

EPIC paved the way for the future enterprises of Boiardo and Ariosto. The prose Aquilon de Bavie`re by Raffaele da Verona, composed according to the author himself between 1379 and 1407, consisted of seven books of adventures and encompassed different genres, languages, and meters. As a hybrid, the Aquilon de Bavie`re serves as a clear example of coexistence and collision of epic and novel. Since the classical distinction between the Iliad and the Odyssey, an alternative archetype of epic can be found in the narrative of a journey of self-discovery. According to this definition, Dante Alighieri’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305– 1321) can often be defined as an epic text. If we accept this formulation, it is possible to claim that the three most important authors of the Italian Middle Ages, Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, all contributed to the history of the epic genre. Petrarch (1304–1374), with the incomplete poem Africa (begun in 1338), followed the Latin Virgilian model. The selection of the theme—the second Punic war—and of the meter and language (Latin exameters) situated this work in ideal continuity with the classical past. Boccaccio’s epic poem, the Teseida (The Book of Theseus, 1339–1341), was in stark contrast with Africa; an experimental poem, it combined classical models with the Arthurian and popular tradition. At this stage in the development of Italian ‘‘epic culture,’’ when Italy was not yet a unified nationstate, there existed already two clear traditions in place: an epic production in verse, mostly widespread in the north, centered on the French Carolingian tradition; and a prose production, circulating throughout the peninsula, more focused on the adventures of the Arthurian heroes. Among these texts, produced between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, one could mention the Tavola ritonda (The Round Table), the Tristano Panciatichiano, the Tristano Riccardiano, and the Tristano corsiniano. In Tuscany, however, there were the first signs of a very popular and rich tradition, which continued to attract readers and listeners throughout the early modern period: the cantari and poemi cavallereschi. Tuscany saw the invention of a new metric form, called ottava rima (a stanza with rhyme scheme ABABABCC), and the new form lent itself immediately to epic and chivalric themes. Boccaccio himself may have been the inventor of the meter, since he used it in the Filostrato (1335–1336), a poem based on the French Roman de Troie, recounting the story of Troilus and Cressida. The introduction of octaves in the contemporary popular cantari, however, is of uncertain

attribution. At first, the ottava was used for Arthurian poems, and among the famous canterini, the Florentine Antonio Pucci (ca. 1310–1388) had a position of prestige. Andrea da Barberino (ca. 1370–ca. 1432) seemed to couple in his work the form of Tuscan rewritings of French epic (prose) and the matter of the Franco-Italian works (Carolingian themes). Given the scarcity of Carolingian texts belonging to the fourteenth century, Andrea’s work functioned as a pivotal turning point in the transition from Franco-Italian texts to the Italian Renaissance epic. His work presented itself as an effort at collecting and systematizing the epic production on the Carolingian cycle. His corpus includes I Reali di Francia, L’Aspramonte, I Nerbonesi, Guerrin Meschino, Ugone d’Alvernia, and Aiolfo del Barbicone. Along with Andrea’s prose texts, the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the increased popularity of the cantari, poems in octaves of variable length. Because of their hybrid nature, the cantari posed a further challenge to the stability of the definition of the epic. They were precariously positioned between low and high culture, between novella and epic poem; they were unstable texts, often anonymous and transmitted orally; they told the stories of the knights and ladies of the cycle of Charlemagne but also were centered on Arthurian, magical, or religious topics. Their wide circulation spanned the eras of manuscript and early print, and the incunabula became the privileged means of transmission of these texts. The most famous cantari focused on certain characters of the Carolingian saga, either known through the French predecessors or of Italian invention: the Cantari di Rinaldo retold the adventures of one of Charlemagne’s most famous knights and emphasized the traits that approximated him to the rebel baron tradition. The Spagna (Spain), which circulated also in prose versions, collected the adventures of the knights against the Moors. Along with characters like Fierabraccia, Mambrino, and Ogieri il Danese, the cantari featured female warriors and queens as their eponymous protagonists: Ancroia, Rovenza, and Bradiamonte were among the heroines who marked the centrality of the woman warrior to this genre. In the epic cantari, the monstrous, the grotesque, and the foreign ‘‘other’’ took a central place, as happened also in the better-known works of the Florentine Luigi Pulci (1432–1484) who, along with his brother Luca (1431–1470), worked in close connection with the House of the Medici, and with Lorenzo il Magnifico in particular. The Morgante (first 667

EPIC published in 1481 then, with the addition of five cantari, in 1483) and the Ciriffo Calvaneo (unfinished and continued by Bernardo Giambullari) both connected the epic cycle of Charlemagne to the destiny of the Florentine state and belonged at least in part to the history of dynastic epic. Their plots shared significant elements with the contemporary Latin poem by the humanist Ugolino Verino (1438–1516), the Carlias, also written for the Medici and completed in 1480. Pulci’s poems, however, can be considered a form of anti-epic, at least insofar as they prominently featured anti-epic heroes, like the converted giant Morgante or the half-giant Margutte. Not unlike his heroes, Pulci found himself at a crossroads in the landscape of Italian culture. His major poem coupled the dynastic needs of his patrons, who were not officially princes, and the heterodox tendencies of his own interpretation of the tradition. The instances of parody in the Morgante revived some popular aspects of the cantari tradition and brought them to the level of the learned poem. This experiment, however, remained isolated, and the Italian epic production, in the works of Boiardo and Ariosto, decisively followed the path of the dynastic poem. The encomiastic intent of these Tuscan poems connected them to analogous cultural trends of the Este court in Ferrara. The northern counterpart of Ugolino Verino’s Carlias was the Borsias by Tito Vespasiano Strozzi (1424–1505), written in honor of the Duke of Ferrara Borso d’Este. The combination of the two French traditions, the Carolingian and the Arthurian cycles, already developed by the cantari, was raised to the level of learned culture in the city of Ferrara. The lords of the town, the Este, gave impulse to epic production, imparting to it a specific feature: The epic poem became dynastic. The connection between the Este and the epic poem, also demonstrated by the presence of many such texts in the catalogues of their libraries, reached full maturity in the works of Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto. In addition to introducing the theme of love within the epic Carolingian adventures, Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Inamoramento de Orlando, better known by its later title Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483), established the characters of Ruggiero and Bradamante as the future founders of the Este dynasty. Ariosto followed this path when, a few years after Boiardo’s death, he started working on the continuation (‘‘la gionta’’) of his predecessor’s unfinished poem. Before Ariosto’s successful endeavor, other poets had tried to capitalize on 668

Boiardo’s fame: Niccolo` degli Agostini, in various installments (1505, 1514, 1521); Raffaele Valcieco da Verona, who continued Agostini’s continuation (1514); and Pierfrancesco de’ Conti da Camerino (1516). These serial products fully participated in the epic principle of cyclical development and testify both to an extraordinary diffusion of Boiardo’s poem and to the vitality of the genre at this stage. After Boiardo, the epic-chivalric poem fully emerged from anonymity; Francesco Cieco da Ferrara (died ca. 1506) or Evangelista Fossa stand as examples of the new epic author. Cieco’s poem, the Mambriano (1509), fully absorbed the lesson of Boiardo and originally re-elaborated its most advanced generic and structural solutions. Boiardo’s poem and the subsequent production have been completely overshadowed, within the critical debate, by the extraordinary fame of Ariosto’s poem, the Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1516). Its linguistic mastery, its impeccable use of the entrelacement technique, its regeneration of epic themes and motifs made it an acclaimed masterpiece, an instant classic. This exceptional success gave rise to one of the first literary debates in early modern Italy: the debate over the heroic poem, in which intellectuals such as Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573) and Giovan Battista Nicolucci, called Pigna (1529–1575), claimed that the new authors, such as Boiardo and Ariosto, had founded a new genre. This new text form, called romanzo, gained independence from the classical epic models and established its own authority. The new theorization was part of a critical movement that sought to create an agonistic dichotomy between the two newly created genres, epic and romance. Trying to recover the Homeric epic model in opposition to the chivalric novelty, for instance, Gian Giorgio Trissino wrote La Italia liberata da’ Gothi (Italy Freed from the Goths, 1547–1548), which resulted in a total failure. Following Ariosto in a less constrained organization of facts and characters, Bernardo Tasso (1493–1569) wrote his poem Amadigi (1560). Both Giraldi Cinzio, author of the Ercole (Hercules, 1557), and Luigi Alamanni (1495–1556), with the Girone il cortese (Girone the Courtly, 1548) and the Avarchide (1570) demonstrate the flourishing of this hybrid genre in the intellectual circles. In the debate over epos and romance, Torquato Tasso assumed the position of champion of a renewed Christian and historical epos. He strove to restore Aristotelian unity to the core of the epic poem and, by choosing the crusade as the topic of

EPIC his poem, he attempted the refoundation of the epic on the basis of Christian orthodoxy, as opposed to the thematically and formally free poem imposed as a model by Ariosto. Tasso’s solution, however, was tormented, and his continuous and manic rewritings of the poem serve as a sign of the profound crisis of the genre, precisely at the moment when it seemed to have acquired a stable identity. Tasso’s final solution for the epic, his poem Gerusalemme Conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered), published in 1593 and considered by the author superior to his Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580), marked, in a way, the death of the epic poem. From that moment, the epic was written only in the form of parody—among the most important examples, Teofilo Folengo’s Maccheronee, in particular the Baldus (1518), Alessandro Tassoni’s La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622), and Lorenzo Lippi’s Il Malmantile racquistato (Malmantile Reconquered, 1676). Giambattista Marino’s L’Adone (Adonis, 1623) represented one of the most poignant signs of crisis of the epic genre, featuring a hero who refused power for love and an extreme example of generic hybridism. After a long silence, the last experiment in epic production was Tommaso Grossi’s I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards at the First Crusade, 1826), a failed attempt to revive a genre that, through various developments, had disappeared from the Italian cultural scene several centuries before. ELEONORA STOPPINO Further Reading Allaire, Gloria, Andrea da Barberino and the Language of Chivalry, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Ascoli, Albert Russell, Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony: Crisis and Evasion in the Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Ascoli, Albert Russell, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Sergio Zatti, The Quest for Epic and Romance, translated by Sarah Hill and Dennis Looney, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Bakhtin, Mikail, The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Carol Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bradley-Cromey, Nancy, Authority and Autonomy in L’Entre´e d’Espagne, New York: Garland, 1993. Cabani, Maria Cristina, Le forme del cantare epico-cavalleresco, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1988. Cervigni, Dino (editor), The Italian Epic and Its International Context, Annali d’Italianistica, 12(1994).

Delcorno Branca, Daniela, I romanzi italiani di Tristano e la Tavola ritonda, Florence: Olschki, 1968. Delcorno Branca, Daniela, Il romanzo cavalleresco medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Delcorno Branca, Daniela, Tristano e Lancillotto in Italia: studi di letteratura arturiana, Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Dionisotti, Carlo, Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi, edited by Giuseppe Anceschi and Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Durling, Robert M., The Figure of the Poet in Renaissance Epic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Everson, Jane, The Italian Romance Epic in the Age of Humanism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Fichter, Andrew, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Holtus, Gu¨nther, Henning Krauss, and Peter Wunderli (editors), Testi, cotesti e contesti del franco-italiano, Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Krauss, Henning, Epica feudale e pubblico borghese: per la storia poetica di Carlomagno in Italia, Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1980. Limentani, Alberto, L‘‘‘Entre´e d’Espagne’’ e i signori d’Italia, edited by Marco Infurna and Francesco Zambon, Padua: Antenore, 1992. Limentani, Alberto (editor), Dal Roman de Palamede´s ai Cantari di Febus-el-Forte: testi francesi e italiani del due e trecento, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1962. Limentani, Alberto, and Marco Infurna (editors), L’epica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Quint, David, ‘‘The Boat of Romance and Renaissance Epic,’’ in Romance: Generic Transformations from Chre´tien de Troyes to Cervantes, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1985: 178–202. Quint, David, Epic and Empire. Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Rajna, Pio, Le origini dell’epopea francese, Florence: Sansoni, 1884. Rajna, Pio, Scritti di filologia e linguistica italiana e romanza, edited by Guido Lucchini, 3 vols., Rome: Salerno, 1998. Rajna, Pio, Due scritti inediti: Le leggende epiche dei Longobardi, Storia del romanzo cavalleresco in Italia, edited by Patrizia Gasparini, Rome: Salerno, 2004. Rozsnyo´i, Zsuzsanna, Dopo Ariosto. Tecniche narrative e discorsive nei poemi post-ariosteschi, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Sherberg, Michael, Rinaldo: Character and Intertext in Ariosto and Tasso, Stanford: Anma Libri, 1993. Villoresi, Marco, La letteratura cavalleresca. Dai cicli medievali all’Ariosto, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Villoresi, Marco, La fabbrica dei cavalieri: cantari, poemi, romanzi in prosa fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Rome: Salerno, 2005. Vinaver, Eugene, The Rise of Romance, Oxford: Clarendon Press-Oxford University Press, 1971.

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EPIC Vitullo, Juliann, The Chivalric Epic in Medieval Italy, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Zatti, Sergio, Il Furioso tra epos e romanzo, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1990.

Zatti, Sergio, L’ombra del Tasso. Epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1996. Zatti, Sergio, The Quest for Epic and Romance, translated by Sarah Hill and Dennis Looney, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Zatti, Sergio, L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano. Saggio sulla Gerusalemme liberata, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983.

EPISTOLARY NOVEL In Italy, the epistolary novel as a literary genre has not enjoyed the same popularity as it has in other European countries, such as, for example, England, France, and Germany. Not only has Italian literature produced a smaller number of novels written in the letter form, but it also began producing them later. As a result of this limited production, Italian literary criticism has focused more on specific works or authors rather than on the genre per se, while a larger number of studies on the epistolary novel appeared in France and in the Englishspeaking countries during the past two decades. More critical attention has been devoted in Italy, instead, to the study of literary correspondences, especially to those exchanged during the Renaissance and the nineteenth century. In the mid-eighteenth century, following the success reception in Italy of the epistolary works of Samuel Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Venetian Abbot Pietro Chiari (1771–1785) wrote several novels in the letter form, including La viaggiatrice (The Woman Traveler, 1760) and La donna che non si trova (The Woman Who Cannot Be Found, 1768). Chiari created a narrative of entertainment, infused with melodramatic tones, sentimental cliche´s, and realistic representations of daily life. His novels were very popular, especially among female readers, whom some critics would later identify as being a pivotal element in the rise and affirmation of the modern novel. The genre developed fully during the nineteenth century, and the history of the Italian epistolary novel traditionally begins with Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, partial ed. 1798), an autobiographical work in which the author described the political and amorous disappointments of a young patriot, who in the end commits suicide as a means of 670

liberation from the misery of a life in exile. During Foscolo’s lifetime, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis enjoyed great popularity, especially among young readers, some of whom emulated the protagonist’s suicide, seen as a sublimation of their patriotic and sentimental ideals. The novel also provided a literary model for many writers of the nineteenth century, at a time when this narrative genre was still being experimented in Italy. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Ippolito Nievo, Camillo Boito, and Matilde Serao, among others, all recognized the influence that Foscolo had on their work. Writers such as Angelica Bartolomei Palli (1798–1875) emulated Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis both at the thematic and structural level. In her Eleonora (1876), which is narrated with overriding romantic tones, Palli adopted Foscolo’s patriotic message, delivered this time by a female character. After the Unification in 1861, with the development of a national postal service, the letter became a common means of communication. A plethora of manuals on how to write letters were published; among them was Giuseppe Picci’s Guida alla studio delle Belle Lettere e al comporre con un manuale dello stile epistolare (Manual to the Study of Letters and to Composition in the Epistolary Style, 1883). Both journalism and literature featured the letter as a narrative strategy. Some critics regard the historical and social affirmation of the postal service as a driving force in the creation of epistolary fiction. Three late-nineteenth-century authors used the letter in their fiction: Giovanni Verga, Marchesa Colombi, and Serao. Verga’s Storia di una capinera (The Story of a Blackcap, 1871) speaks against forced religious vocations. Set amid the world of nuns and convents, a popular theme in epistolary fiction, it became Verga’s most popular work.

EPISTOLARY NOVEL The epistolary fiction published in the second half of the nineteenth century is embedded in sentimental and popular literary tradition. Marchesa Colombi’s Prima morire (To Die First, 1887), which was influenced by the French feuilletton and initially cowritten with Igino Ugo Tarchetti, tells the story of an illicit passion between Eva, an upper-middle-class married woman, and a young musician. The letters reveal the secret aspirations and virtues of the female protagonist, as well as the constraints dictated by social norms of female respectability. The sentimental discourse is also the framework for Serao’s Fior di passione (Passion Flower, 1888), Gli amanti (The Lovers, 1894), Lettere d’amore (Love Letters, 1901), Novelle sentimentali (Sentimental Stories, 1902), and Ella non rispose (She Did Not Answer, 1914), all revolving around the love intrigues of bourgeois women who engage in adulterous relationships in order to escape the dullness and emotional constraints imposed by their social and marital obligations. Serao’s and Marchesa Colombi’s epistolary fiction was connected to their work as journalists. Most of their novels first appeared in newspapers and did not differ stylistically from their journalistic writings. Both authors used similar narrative strategies in their fiction and journalism, including the letter, to enhance their relationship with their audience, on whom fame and livelihood ultimately depended. Benedetto Croce criticized Serao’s later literary production, including her letter fiction, for he found that the author’s intentional objectives undermined artistic accomplishment. More recently, scholars of popular fiction have expressed more positive evaluations of Serao’s sentimental fiction. Twentieth-century Italian writers also adopted the letter form. If in the nineteenth-century the letter was a symbol for communication, a vehicle through which the protagonist could express his or her inner realities, the twentieth-century epistolary novel conveyed the impossibility of such communication. With the exception of Guido Piovene’s Lettere di una novizia (Confession of a Novice, 1941), still rooted in tradition and thematically influenced by Verga’s narrative of convent life, the letter, as a literary strategy, signified fragmentation and miscommunication. Starting with the publication of Il rimorso (Regret, 1963) by Alba de Ce´spedes, indeed the letter form expressed a rupture rather than a bridge of communication. As theorized by Roland Barthes in the 1970s, it appeared to be a mere simulation, the expression of yet another lexicon in the modern vocabulary for affective solitude. Il rimorso, comprised of letters sent by Francesca,

the protagonist, to a friend, as well as by several other interlocutors, emerged as a fragmented narrative. The novel describes the impossibility for the characters to truly communicate in spite of the intense epistolary exchange. De Ce´spedes’s adoption of a traditional genre suggested a meditation on the role of literature and of the writer in society in connection to contemporary debates on literary experimentation and the future of Italian literature beyond neo-Realism. Later noteworthy Italian novels that made extensive use of the device include Natalia Ginzburg’s Caro Michele (Dear Michele, 1973) and La citta` e la casa (The City and the House, 1984). Both works constituted an exploration of the human condition in contemporary society, viewed from the perspective of a dysfunctional middle-class family. Through their correspondence, the characters attempt to create a communication they can never achieve in real life. Thus the letters become surrogates for genuine relationships and disclose Ginzburg’s pessimistic view of the state of the family unit in Italy, faced by social unrest and terrorism. Another novel in which the letter is a strategy signifying rupture and displacement was Lettera alla madre (Letter to My Mother, 1988) by Edith Bruck (1932–), a fictional translation of the author’s own experience of deportation to Nazi concentration camps. By using the device of a posthumous letter, Bruck developed a narrative based on a dialogue with an absent interlocutor (her mother), deceased in Auschwitz; she engaged in experimental techniques, addressing the question of self-identity in relation to her Holocaust experience. Namely, Bruck asked herself, and her readers, about the role Holocaust survivors and writers ought to play in society. Lettera alla madre also represents an example of experimentation with the literary conventions of Holocaust testimony, usually recorded as memoirs. Dacia Maraini has also produced epistolary novels. Her Lettere a Marina (Letters to Marina, 1981) and Dolce per se´ (Sweet for Itself, 1997) are rooted in the feminist poetics and activism of the 1970s and 1980s. Maraini aimed at creating alternative readings of the amorous discourse, a central theme in traditional epistolary fiction, by addressing respectively a lesbian relationship and a friendship between an older woman and a young girl. Despite the predominance of female authorship in recent Italian letter fiction and the traditional assumption that this genre is best suited to women, however, the epistolary novel has not exclusively pertained to women’s writings. For example, 671

EPISTOLARY NOVEL Antonio Tabucchi adopted the letter form in his Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi (It Is Getting Later and Later, 2001). Composed of 18 letters, written by different characters seemingly connected by a common sense of regret for past mistakes and lost opportunities, Tabucchi’s novel emerged as a narrative with multiple voices. Each letter/voice is in fact presented like a disconnected piece in the puzzle of human solitude, echoing Jacques Derrida’s claim that a letter may never arrive at its destination, and that this ‘‘is not a misfortune, that’s life, living life, beaten down, tragedy, but the still surviving life’’ (La carte postale, 1980). Tabucchi’s postmodern approach to the epistolary novel provides a recent interpretation of the genre, as a kaleidoscopic representation of the feeble relationship that modern individuals engage with collective and personal history. Often considered a literary device belonging exclusively to the past, the epistolary genre has provided Italian writers with a viable narrative form for the expression of their poetics. GABRIELLA ROMANI Further Reading Altman, Janet Gurkin, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1982. Barthes, Roland, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1977. Beebee, Thomas, Epistolary Fiction in Europe: 1500–1800, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Bisutti, Donatella, ‘‘L’artificio della lettera,’’ Letteratura italiana contemporanea, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, appendix 6, Rome: Lucarini, 1979.

Derrida, Jacques, La Carte postale: de Socrate a` Freud et au-dela`, Paris: Flammarion, 1980. Di Fazio, Margherita, La lettera e il romanzo: Esempi di comunicazione epistolare nella narrativa, Roma: Nuova Amica Editrice, 1996. Duyfhuizen, Bernard, ‘‘Epistolary Narratives of Transmission and Transgression,’’ Comparative Literature, 37:1 (1985): 1–26. Favret, Mary, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Gagliardi, Elena, ‘‘Il rimorso di Alba De Ce´spedes: Ipotesi sul romanzo epistolare del Novecento,’’ Il lettore di provincia, 30:105(1999): 3–24. Gilroy, Amanda, and W. M. Verhoeven (editors), Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, Charlottesville-London: University Press of Virginia, 2000. Kany, Charles, The Beginning of the Epistolary Novel in France, Italy, and Spain, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1939. Kauffman, Linda, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Kauffman, Linda, Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction, Chicago-London: Chicago University Press, 1992. Madrignagni, Carlo A., All’origine del romanzo in Italia: Il ‘‘celebre Abate Chiari,’’ Naples: Liguori, 2000. Moretti, Franco, Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800–1900, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Perry, Ruth, Women, Letters, and the Novel, New York: AMS, 1980. Rousset, Jean, Forme and signification: Essais sur les structures litteraires de Corneille a` Claudelle, Paris: J. Corti, 1962. Versini, Laurent, Le roman e´pistolaire, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1979. Zaczek, Barbara Maria, Censored Sentiments: Letters and Censorship in Epistolary Novels and Conduct Material, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1997.

EDOARDO ERBA (1954–) Edoardo Erba is among the few playwrights of the new generation who is successfully performed outside Italy. Thanks to his apprenticeship in the media that are at the heart of the communication circuit, Erba brings a flexible and light rhythm to his dialogues. In his first play, Maratona di New York (Marathon, 1994), which premiered in Parma in 1993, Erba managed to stress the accelerations and pauses of two runners, Mario and Steve, who 672

transform jogging into a mutual confession of impulses and resentments, until the physical training begins to yield metaphysical results. Their relationship is not clear, similarly their personal traits, and identities, which progressively become confused. Finally even a brotherhood between them is suggested. The actors themselves get physically tired from the actual effort on stage, groping with the hypernaturalism of the performance and the

EDOARDO ERBA constant running. Some links could be especially drawn with Dino Buzzati for the shared treatment of ordinary themes progressively diluted in a surreal and fantastic dimension, prompting uncertainty between strange experience and magical hypothesis. The dryness and jazzy rhythm of the cues recall Harold Pinter’s and David Mamet’s work. Kafka and Du¨rrenmatt are brought to mind by the fatal slipping away of the characters’ destination, substituted by rarefied atmospheres. Erba’s ability to construct an alternating series of fast and slow paced lines also characterizes Curva cieca (Blind Bend, 1993), a play about Achille Varzi, the car racing champion who lived during the Fascist period. Varzi, in the cliche´ theme of cars and girls (and drugs) was overwhelmed by his love for a fatal Valkyrie. The same rhythm and colloquial style, marked by infrequent apertures to personal intimacy, is present in La notte di Picasso (Night of Picasso, 1993), staged in Rome in 1990. The play is set in a psychiatric ward, which is realistically evoked by a long corridor propped up on stage. The action unfolds around the neurotic interplay between two characters, Nero and Lorenzo, who obsessively play with a tape recorder, while spying on a roommate and dreaming about a film project. Cinematographic mythomanias, pervasive fairy tales, and phallic exhibitions turn the Beckett cue into a pathological Kammerspiel. In the late Romantic tradition, illness and sanity are indistinguishable. Political tension, uncommon in contemporary Italian theater, and ethical tendencies underlie Erba’s apologues, largely based on contemporary history, such as Venditori (Salesmen, 2002), which was staged in 1999 and addressed the issue of the loss of jobs through burlesque use of the marketing lingo. In Senza Hitler (Without Hitler, 2002), a surreal hypothesis on a different European scenario, the dictator never goes beyond his career as a wall painter. In De´ja` vu (2002), Erba incorporates themes like the denouncement of the present risk of an atomic Apocalypse with an intricate revival of the myth of Oedipus. A mature businesswoman and an ambitious young man find out, during episodic yet intense intercourse, that they are mother and son. Margaret is the widow of a man who died in a car accident; Andrea discovers that he was the unintentional cause of Margaret’s husband’s death, who also was his unknown father. In the hallucinatory finale, with fireworks and explosions, special effects for a new Sodom and Gomorra, the two lovers enter a graveyard. I muratori (The Masons, 2004) stages the encounter between a group of

blue-collar workers and Miss Giulia, a character borrowed from the play of Strindberg, an exchange of linguistic and ideological misunderstandings; an existential drama from the perspective of a disenchanted working class. Edoardo Erba’s work has been performed at various festivals, including the Venice Biennale in 1984 for the play Stella polare (The Pole-Star). He also writes dramas and situation comedies for radio and television.

Biography Edoardo Erba was born in Pavia, 11 March 1954. He attended the University of Pavia and graduated in Italian literature with a dissertation on the poetry of Cesare Pavese, 1977; after a year in the army (1977), he taught Italian language in high schools, including two years in the prison of Lodi (Milan), 1978–1986. Erba translated thrillers for Mondadori in Milan, where he moved in 1982; studied at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, 1982–1984; and graduated in dramaturgy, 1984. In 1986 he began to work as a screenwriter in television for children fiction, 1986. Erba married Silvia Feraudi in 1987; they were divorced and he moved to Rome in 1992. He met the actress Maria Amelia Monti, 1994; they have two children, Marianna (1996) and Leonardo (1999). Erba is cofounder of the Teatro Civile, a cultural association that produced plays based on the acts of Silvio Berlusconi’s trials, 1992. He was awarded the Candoni Prize and Fringe Festival Edinburgh award for Maratona di New York, 1992, 1994; the Riccione Prize for Vizio di famiglia, 1993; and the the Idi (Istituto del Dramma Italiano) Prize for Il capodanno del secolo, 1995. PAOLO PUPPA Selected works Collections Maratona di New York e altri testi, Milan: Ubulibri, 2002 (includes Buone notizie, Venditori, De´ja` vu, Senza Hitler).

Plays La notte di Picasso, 1993. Curva cieca, 1993. Maratona di New York, 1994; as Marathon, translated by Colin Teevan, 1999. Vizio di famiglia, 1995. Muratori, 2004.

Other Una Topolino alle Mille Miglia, 2004.

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EDOARDO ERBA Further Reading De Matteis, Tiberia, Autori in scena: Sei drammaturgie italiane contemporanee, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Di Giammarco, Rodolfo, ‘‘Fiato. Grinta. Corsa. Sudore. Freddo. Incubo. Morte,’’ in E. Erba, Maratona di New York, Milan: Ricordi, 1994. Guardamagna, Dante, Preface to E. Erba, Vizio di Famiglia, Milan: Ricordi, 1994. Laura, Ernesto G., in E. Erba, Muratori. Rassegna di nuova dramaturgia: Inediti, Successi e Opere Prime, Palermo: Kal’s Art Contemporanea, 2004.

Pesce, Maria Dolores, ‘‘Maratona di New York e altri testi,’’ Ariel, 1(2003): 254–258. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Edoardo Erba con leggerezza nel mistero del quotidiano,’’ in E. Erba, Maratona di New York e altri testi, Milan: Ubulibri, 2002. Terruzzi, Giorgio, Preface to E. Erba, Curva cieca, Milan: Ricordi, 1993.

LUCIANO ERBA (1922–) In his anthology of twentieth-century poetry, Luciano Anceschi classifies Luciano Erba as belonging to the ‘‘Linea lombarda’’ (an association, Erba claims, that never particularly convinced him). Reserved and discreet by nature, Erba tries not to act as someone breaking from the poetry that preceded him. To him, poetry’s adversarial role is best kept by poets who are most cautious in the face of innovation; thus, he remains equally distant from experimentalism as from the Ermetismo school of ‘‘obscure’’ poetry. In so doing, he serves as a link between the more objective, less Orphean forms of Hermeticism and the anecdotal realism of the postwar period, developed in Lombardy in direct contrast to poets such as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Roversi, Maria Luisa Spaziani, and Andrea Zanzotto. From their very first experience with literature, these poets refused all attempts to define themselves in regional terms. Erba’s poetry proves that language can be renewed without sensational breaks but simply by way of small syntactic changes that eventually revitalize it. He has always refused manifestos, movements such as neo-Realism and neo-avant-garde, which appear not too particularly innovative to him. He acknowledges Vittorio Sereni as his inspiring teacher and an important reference point for the writers of his generation, while admitting that he was also influenced by Eugenio Montale and Giorgio Caproni. His poetry began with La linea K (Line K) published in 1951. The K, absent from the Italian alphabet, points to a nonexistent

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reality. In the following collections, Il bel paese (The Beautiful Country, 1955), which makes ironic allusions to Lombardy as it was in the past, and Il male minore (The Lesser Evil, 1960), Erba moved ‘‘between almost unreal puppets which are actually means of regretted images of the good past time in Gozzano style’’ (Romano, Luperini, ‘‘La poesia postermetica fra continuita` e dissolvimento,’’ 1981). These early poems are characterized by disenchantment; life appears ‘‘perduta per disattenzione’’ (lost through carelessness), and ‘‘l’ignoranza e` il male minore’’ (ignorance is the least of the problems) (Il male minore, 1960). Later on Erba focused his attention on autobiographical fragments, as in Il prato piu` verde (The Greener Meadow, 1977) and Il nastro di Moebius (The Moebius’s Strip, 1980), which contains all of his previous poems. The background remains that of a typically Lombardy landscape conceived as an essential moment of internal narration. Nevertheless, the poet’s geography is international, and Western cities like Milan, London, New York, and Paris alternate with exotic places like Sasebo (Japan) and Quelpart (Korea). His most defining poetic traits are a peculiar type of visual perception and an antirhetorical stance. Erba’s is a poetry of anecdotal objectivism, composed in a sort of minimal mode or through a touch of ironic mannerism (pictorial more than literary) mixed with an existential and somewhat tragic tone. He avoids the dangers of high language and works on the details of circumstantial existence The poet’s relationship with objects stems not from a

LUCIANO ERBA voluntary act but rather from a state of ‘‘passive waiting’’ that precedes the instant in which that very object chooses to reveal itself in its bareness, in its inner poetry. But in order to be able to catch the smallest things, the artist must to be free and receptive and use his body and mind as catalysts; thus something that was once lost and fragmented suddenly comes back to life. The poems collected in L’ippopotamo (The Hippopotamus, 1989) are marked by a blinding pessimism that leaves no room for joy, and even less for life, a kind of a cosmic restlessness reminiscent of Leopardi’s bleakness of tone. In Nella terra di mezzo (In the Middle Ground, 2000), published when Erba was close to 80, the poet reflected once again on his own life: ‘‘Questi ultimi anni avuti in premio / hanno a volte il gusto un poco sfatto / di certe scatolette di tonno’’ (These last years given as a reward / Have at times a cheap taste / like certain tins of tuna) (‘‘Questi ultimi anni’’). Signalling the point of equilibrium between possibilities, Erba’s latest poems, collected as L’altra meta` (The Other Half, 2004), continue to ponder on the delicate ironies of human life. Erba’s poetry is ultimately located at the boundary between indeterminate states (geographical, socio-historical, metaphysical). As Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo reminds us, Erba acts as a mediator in the passage between a more objective Hermeticism to a certain Lombard post war anecdotal realism (‘‘Luciano Erba,’’ 1978). Luciano Erba has produced one of the most original bodies of work in contemporary Italian poetry. Erba’s literary production also includes numerous critical essays, among them Magia e invenzione (Magic and Invention, 1967), which contains 13 studies on Cyrano de Bergerac and other contemporary French writers. In the opening essay, written on the occasion of the third centennial of de Bergerac’s death (1619–1655), Erba seemed somewhat perplexed by the critics’ silence about Cyrano’s ties to Italian Renaissance naturalism. He is also known for his translations of Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Francis Ponge, and other French and English poets. He edited with Piero Chiara Quarta generazione (The Fourth Generation, 1954), an anthology of postwar Italian poets.

to Switzerland after the 1943 armistice and stayed there until the end of the war. He graduated in 1947 from the Cattolica University in French literature and initially taught in high schools, only later becoming a professor at the Cattolica in Milan. Thanks to a scholarship, Erba lived in Paris from 1947 to 1950 and in the United States from 1963 to 1966. He contributed to several literary magazines, among them Il Verri, La fiera letteraria, and The Western Review. Erba received the Viareggio Prize in 1980 for Il prato piu` verde and Il nastro di Moebius. Il tranviere metafisic received the Bagutta Prize in 1988. L’ippopotamo won the MontaleLibrex Prize in 1989. L’ipotesi circense won the P.E.N. Club award in 1995. In 2002, Erba was awarded the Carducci and the Mondello prizes for his career. Luciano Erba lives in Milan.

Biography

Other

Luciano Erba was born in Milan on 18 September 1922. Though he has lived most of his life in his hometown, there have been extended periods spent abroad. During World War II, Erba went

MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Collections Poesie (1951–2001), Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Linea K,’’ 1951. ‘‘Il bel paese,’’ 1955. ‘‘Ippogrammi e metaippogrammidi Giovanola,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il prete di Ratana`,’’ 1959. ‘‘Il male minore,’’ 1960. ‘‘Il prato piu` verde,’’ 1977; as The Greener Meadow: Selected Poems, translated by Peter Robinson, 2006. ‘‘Il nastro di Moebius,’’ 1980. ‘‘Il cerchio aperto,’’ 1983. ‘‘Il tramviere metafisico,’’ 1987. ‘‘L’ippopotamo,’’ 1989; as The Hippopotamus, translated by Ann Snodgrass, 2003. ‘‘Come quando in Crimea,’’ 1992. ‘‘Soltanto segni,’’ 1992. ‘‘Verso Quasar,’’ 1992. ‘‘Variar del verde,’’ 1993. ‘‘L’ipotesi circense,’’ 1995. ‘‘Capodanno a Milano,’’ 1996. ‘‘Milano Sud-Ovest,’’ 1997. ‘‘Negli spazi intermedi,’’ 1998. ‘‘Nella terra di mezzo,’’ 2000. ‘‘L’altra meta`,’’ 2004.

Short Stories ‘‘Franc¸oise,’’ 1982. Quarta generazione, 1954 (with Piero Chiara). Magia e invenzione: Note e ricerche su Cyrano de Bergerac e altri autori del primo Seicento francese, 1967; reprinted, 2000. Si passano le stagioni: una scelta personale di autografi e inediti, 2002.

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LUCIANO ERBA Further Reading Agosti, Stefano, ‘‘Consuntivo su Erba,’’ in Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Anceschi, Luciano, Linea lombarda: Sei poeti, Varese: Libreria Magenta Editrice, 1952. Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Ultime tendenze,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Di Benedetto, Alfredo, ‘‘Lettura in due tempi di Luciano Erba,’’ in Stile e Linguaggio: Saggi di analisi letteraria, Rome: Bonacci, 1974. Feldman, Ruth, and Brian Swann (editors), Italian Poetry Today: Currents and Trends, St. Paul, MN: New Rivers Press, 1979. Fortini, Franco, I poeti del novecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1977.

Luperini, Romano, ‘‘La poesia postermetica fra continuita` e dissolvimento,’’ in Il novecento, Turin: Loescher, 1981. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Luciano Erba,’’ in Poeti italiani del 900, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Motta, Umberto, Il canto strozzato: Poesia italiana del novecento, Novara: Interlinea, 1995. Pappalardo La Rosa, Franco, Il filo e il labirinto: Gatto, Caproni, Erba, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1997. Prandi, Stefano, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in L. Erba, Poesie (1951– 2001), Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Ramat, Silvio (editor), Omaggio a Luciano Erba, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Poesia italiana del 900, Turin: Einaudi, 1993.

EYES SHUT See Con gli occhi chiusi (Work by Federigo Tozzi)

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F DIEGO FABBRI (1911–1980) Fabbri’s poetic ideology, moral dilemmas can only lead to recognizing the truth of Providence, in a Manzonian sense. After his early plays, conceived only for male actors, Fabbri wrote Gli assenti (The Absent Ones, 1938) in collaboration with Guido Chiesa. This play takes the form of an inquiry that investigates generational disenchantment and general restlessness with the present. His drama borders on the chronicle in works such as in Miraggi (Mirages), composed in 1937 but revised in 1945, the story of the longings of two orphans. However, Fabbri’s realism and his Christian faith powerfully conjoin in the 1940s when Fabbri, along with Orazio Costa, Vito Pandolfi, and Gerardo Guerrieri, envision a theater capable of fulfilling a moral and social mission, signed the Manifesto per un teatro del popolo (Manifesto for a People’s Theatre) on 8 August 1943, just a few days after Benito Mussolini’s fall from power. This project brought together the revolutionary branches of the young theater culture of Rome, both Catholic and Marxist. Between 1946 and 1948, Fabbri wrote several works focusing on the intimacy of private relationships and on everyday redemption, themes that dramatized his view of love as a sacred mystery. These were the themes of such plays as the successful Paludi (Marshes, 1942), a re-elaboration of Il nodo; Orbite (Orbits, 1941), about the crisis in a couple’s relationship; La libreria del sole (The Bookshop of the Sun, 1943), a story of a lost, then found vocation; Rancore (The Grudge, 1950)

A playwright of deep religious feeling, Diego Fabbri started writing plays in his native Forlı` for parish recreation centers and amateur dramatic societies. After World War II, when Catholic intellectuals debated the pedagogical and didactic potential of drama, Fabbri honed and perfected his writing skills in the professional theater. He often adopted the so-called retorica del processo (rhetoric of the trial), that is, a structure in which a judicial procedure becomes a metaphor for the relationship between God and the contemporary ‘‘new man.’’ Thus, it has always been easy to recognize the ideological and religious import of his theatrical productions. His plays are characterized by a strong moral conviction that makes the nature of his works a probing inquiry into modern Christianity. This is already evident in I fiori del dolore (The Flowers of Grief, 1931), written when the author was only 19. In this intimate play, which is set in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution, love—embodied by two young people who trust in God—triumphs over evil, represented by the ‘‘orda comunista’’ (communist horde). Fabbri’s other recurrent themes include defeat and the sins of the fathers, as in Ritorno (Return, 1933); intentional loss and rejected redemption, as in I loro peccati (Their Sins, 1935); and Il nodo (The Knot, 1936), which was censored by the Fascists because of its pessimism. In this ‘‘sacerdotal,’’ deliberately nonaesthetic theater, which contains hints of the popular themes and structures typical of neorealism, the struggle between love and desire turns into a real conflict. According to 677

DIEGO FABBRI and finally Inquisizione (The Inquisition, 1950), a play characterized by a religious Humanism in the style of Franc¸ois Mauriac and Paul Claudel. His characters, too, move between two figures: the priest, a tempted and restless hero, and the woman, a protesting temptress. As Puppa remarks, ‘‘Fabbri’s universe is populated by creatures that smell of church, by languid countenances, by bodies hindered by secular clothes underneath which one can discern the priestly gown’’ (Itinerari nella drammaturgia del Novecento, 1987). Nevertheless, Fabbri also presented a less conformist vision of the family in Il seduttore (The Seducer, 1951), which the religious movement Azione Cattolica strongly criticized. Between 1953 and 1954, Fabbri responded to such criticism with the farce La bugiarda (The Lying Woman, 1956), in which a woman succeeds in keeping her husband’s love as well as her lover’s through lies. The play enjoyed great success in France. Fabbri’s family dramas include Processo de famiglia (The Family Trial, 1953), dealing with the case of a child who, though initially wanted, was later abandoned. In 1955, on 2 March, he staged Processo a Gesu` (Between Two Thieves), a play he had started in 1952, at Piccolo Teatro of Milan, directed by Orazio Costa. In this work, the trial is no longer of inferential nature but becomes part of the structure of the plot: The search for Jesus’ innocence is accompanied by the primordial existence of the characters (judges, magistrates, and lawyers) on the stage. Their inviolability dramatically opposes the dispersive and destructuring ideologies of modern thought, such as psychoanalysis and Marxism. Fabbri’s negative view of the contemporary world did not protect him from being censured by the traditionalist Alleanza Cattolica, which denounced the play before the Holy Office on 13 January 1956, arguing that it represented an offence against religion and an incitement to class hatred. Contemporary Christian themes are also at the center of Veglia d’armi (The Armed Wake, 1956), which Luchino Visconti staged after Il seduttore. The motif of the theater within the theater is found in Figli d’arte (Born into the Profession, 1959) and in Fabbri’s posthumous play Al Dio ignoto (To an Unknown God, 1980). In 1961, Pope John XXIII opened the Second Vatican Council, a turning point for which Fabbri had hoped and perhaps even foreshadowed for his audiences; in the same year, he wrote Ritratto d’ignoto (Portrait of an Unknown Man, 1962), which emphasizes the need for a Christian evangelization of souls given the unknowability of being. Fabbri was also very active 678

as a theater reviewer and as author of screenplays for film and television, including serials for the Italian broadcasting corporation RAI. Among his radio works, the most important is Trasmissione interrotta (Interrupted Broadcast, 1951), in which the radio itself becomes a character that helps an accused man broadcast his appeals to all those who could testify to his innocence. The limitations of Fabbri’s drama, which now appears outdated, must be acknowledged. His national-popular aesthetics of representation, through which he debated the spiritual problems of his age, never result in true invention, in a new form of theatricality. Fabbri’s religious convictions never seem troubled by crises or second thoughts.

Biography Born in Forlı` on 2 July 1911. Worked for the local newspaper Il Momento and for the publishing house Stella in Bagnocavallo, 1920–1930. Degree in economics at the University of Bologna, 1936. Married Giuliana Facciani, 29 December 1937, with whom he had seven children. Worked for the Roman publishing house A.V.E., 1939. Secretarygeneral of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, 1940–1950. Codirector, with Vincenzo Cardarelli, of La fiera letteraria, 1949–1967. Founded the Sindacato nazionale degli autori drammatici, 1945. Directed the Teatro La Cometa in Rome, 1960–1962. Head of the Confe´de´ration Internationale des Socie´te´s des Auteurs et des Compositeurs, 1973–1975. Assumed the directorship of the journal Il dramma, 1997. Awarded the Feltrinelli prize for theater, 1977. As a screenwriter, collaborated with numerous directors including De Sica, Blasetti, Germi, Clair, Rossellini, Antonioni, Bun˜uel. Died in Riccione on 14 August 1980. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Religion and Literature Selected Works Collections Teatro, 3 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1959–1964. Tutto il teatro di Diego Fabbri, 2 vols., Milan: Rusconi, 1984.

Plays I fiori del dolore, 1931. Ritorno, 1933. I loro peccati, 1935. Il nodo, 1936. Il fanciullo sconosciuto, 1936. Gli assenti, with Guido Chiesa, 1938.

GIOVANNI FALDELLA Orbite, 1941. Paludi, 1942. La libreria del sole, 1943. Miraggi, 1945. Inquisizione, 1950. Rancore, 1950. Il seduttore, 1951. Trasmissione interrotta (radio play), 1951. Processo di famiglia, 1953. Processo a Gesu`, 1955; as Between Two Thieves, translated and adapted by Warner LeRoy, 1959. La bugiarda, 1956. Veglia d’armi, 1956. Delirio, 1958. Figli d’arte, 1959. Lo scoiattolo, 1961. Ritratto d’ignoto, 1962. Il confidente, 1964. L’avvenimento, 1968. L’avventuriero, 1968. Non e` per scherzo che ti ho amato, 1971. Il cedro del Libano, 1972. Il vizio assurdo: drama e dibattito, with Davide Lajolo, 1974. Al Dio ignoto, 1980.

Librettos La leggenda del ritorno, 1966, music by Renzo Rossellini. L’avventuriero, 1967, music by Renzo Rossellini.

Further Reading Alessio, Antonio, Il teatro di Diego Fabbri, Savona: Sabatelli, 1970.

Cappelletti, Dante, ‘‘La ‘segreta’ realta` della vita nella divina mania del teatro,’’ in Diego Fabbri, Tutto il teatro, vol. 1, Milan: Rusconi, 1984. Cappello, Giovanni, Invito alla lettura di Diego Fabbri, Milan: Mursia, 1979. De Feo, Sandro, ‘‘Diego Fabbri: Il seduttore, La bugiarda, Ritratto di ignoto,’’ in In cerca di teatro, edited by Luciano Lucignani, vol. 2, Milan: Longanesi, 1972. Diego Fabbri, special issue of Sipario, 45, no. 502 (1990). Doglio, Federico and Wanda Raspolini (editors), Atti del Convegno internazionale Diego Fabbri, Rome: Il ventaglio, 1986. Lotti, Renato, Diego Fabbri: il giuoco della verita`, Rome: Rari nantes, 1989. Marchi, Giovanni, ‘‘Il teatro di Diego Fabbri,’’ in Nuova antologia, 507 (1969): 228–251. Pandolfi, Vito, Il teatro italiano del dopoguerra, Parma: Guanda, 1956. Pullini, Giorgio, Cinquant’anni di teatro in Italia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Itinerari nella drammaturgia del Novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 2, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Ronfani, Ugo, ‘‘Diego Fabbri o la verita` della parola recitata,’’ in Diego Fabbri, Tutto il teatro, vol. 1, Milan: Rusconi, 1984. Torresani, Sergio, ‘‘Diego Fabbri,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 43, Rome: Treccani, 1993. Veneziano, Gian Mario, ‘‘Ugo Betti, Diego Fabbri: tentativi di teatro religioso,’’ in La letteratura in scena: Il teatro del Novecento, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1985.

GIOVANNI FALDELLA (1846–1928) Giovanni Faldella is considered the most important figure in the Turin Scapigliatura, the nineteenth-century literary movement. A writer and politician who, in his later years, crowned his quiet political career as an enlightened conservative with a Senate appointment, Faldella became first known as a creative journalist. He wrote travel diaries such as Un viaggio a Roma senza vedere il Papa (A Journey to Rome Without Seeing the Pope, 1880), in which his extremely inventive language overshadows the actual subject matter. In fiction, he made his debut with two novellas, Il male dell’arte (The Evil of Art, 1874), the story of an artist posing as an extreme aesthete, and Rovine (Ruins, 1879), inspired by the premature death of a Scapigliato friend.

As he himself said ironically at the end of the collection of articles published in Gazzetta Piemontese and entitled A Vienna: Gita col Lapis (To Vienna: A Trip with a Pencil, 1874), his style consists in tormenting ‘‘il dizionario come un cadavere, con la disperazione di dargli vita mediante il canto’’ (the dictionary as a corpse, desperately trying to give it life through song). Faldella mixes styles and genres, from the pathetic to the comic, invents words, and uses lexical deformations and linguistic oddities of all kinds, to the extent that Gianfranco Contini considers him a ‘‘rappresentante di quella eterna ‘funzione Gadda’ che va da Rabelais al Joyce di Finnegan’s Wake’’ (representative of that eternal ‘Gadda function’ that goes from Rabelais to the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake) (Racconti della 679

GIOVANNI FALDELLA scapigliatura, 1953). Faldella always uses language extravagantly and expressively. He incorporates the Piedmontese dialect, and mixes it with Latinisms and technical terms. Indeed, in his stylistic deformations there is no anxiety, no hint of social criticism. On the contrary, Faldella’s expressive genius favours bucolic settings, the natural dimension of which is not naive, but filtered through the experience of positivism and literary verismo. Faldella is thus a transgressor in form, but a conservative in content. In his collection of country sketches called Figurine (Figurines, 1875) the writer reaches the peak of his linguistic experimentalism. However, the choice of subject matter, country life, suggests his detachment from the Scapigliati, who privileged modern metropolitan life. The Figurine are the protagonists of village tales in which Faldella exalts the simplicity of life in the provinces of Piedmont. From this stem lively sketches, such as the one in which a lovesick countryman emigrates, makes his fortune, and returns to his village bringing wealth and work, or the one about the electoral battle in a hamlet. Faldella’s precocious integration into the cultural industry favoured the progressive fossilization of the qualities of his style. Throughout his works, a linguistically acrobatic register can be perceived together with a more normal, middle-brow register that follows in the footsteps of the journalistic literature of his time. Faldella’s two trilogies, Un serpe (A Snake, 1881–1884) and Capricci per pianoforte (Piano Whims, 1887–1894), are set within a naturalistic context. However, the poetics of naturalism, founded on the construction of characters and the study of the social environment, is overturned by Faldella, who favours the ironic dimension, does not observe the rules of verisimilitude, and rather makes use of amplifications and digressions in order to give free rein to his exuberant linguistic inventions. His most noteworthy literary product, linked to his experience in Rome the year after his election to Parliament, is Roma borghese: Assaggiature (Bourgeois Rome: Samplings, 1882), which illustrates aspects of bourgeois (as opposed to clerical) Roman life immediately after Italian unification. Full of brilliant lexical innovations, this text is permeated with an ironic and affectionate impatience for his exile in the Eternal City. In Una serenata ai morti (A Serenade for the Dead, 1884), he reinvents the ‘‘fantastic macabre’’ of the Scapigliati. The novella Madonna di fuoco e Madonna di neve (The Fire Madonna and the Snow Madonna, 1888) is an amusing caricature of two 680

common women at war over the same man. Later Faldella published a strongly antisocialist historical novel, Sant’Isidoro: Commentarii di guerra rustica (Saint Isidore: Commentaries on a Rustic War, 1909), that can be considered his political and literary testament, and with which his original and creative phase comes to an end. Through the vicissitudes of two village lovers, a young lawyer and the daughter of a sharecropper, Faldella brings together many of the serious problems that afflicted postunification Italy: the agricultural crisis, the uncertainty of the ruling class, the careerism of the new bourgeois. However, he tries to overcome the historical disappointment that had followed the grandiose hopes of the Risorgimento through the utopia of science as a remedy against all evils and through the myth of the colonies and the empire. Faldella was and continues to be the object of very diverse critical assessments. Among his defenders, Giosue` Carducci admired his tension toward linguistic and literary renewal, although he held some reservations regarding his stylistic recklessness. While recognizing his originality, the intellectuals closer to the legacy of Alessandro Manzoni saw his experimentalism with suspicion and were substantially unable to understand it. His style, which could have effectively opposed the language of Manzoni, remains halfway between local colour and aestheticism and finally lacks ideological coherence.

Biography Born in Saluggia (province of Vercelli), 26 April 1846, the son of a doctor. Obtains law degree at the University of Turin, 1868; meets Salvatore Farina, Giuseppe Giacosa, Arrigo Boito, Giovanni Camerana; founds the literary review Il Velocipede, for which he writes under the pseudonym of Spartivento, 1869; contributes to numerous newspapers and periodicals in Rome, Piedmont, and Florence, including Il Fanfulla, Rivista Minima, La Gazzetta Piemontese, and writes under various pseudonyms; returns to Saluggia, 1871; works as a lawyer and begins political career as a provincial councillor; elected to the Lower House for the Left, 1881; moves toward increasingly more conservative and monarchist positions; appointed to the Senate, 1896; resigns as senator, 1908. Dies in Saluggia on 14 April 1928. ANDREA BOSELLO

ORIANA FALLACI Selected Works

Roma borghese: Assaggiature, 1882. A Parigi, viaggio di Geronimo e comp, 1887.

Fiction Il male dell’arte, 1874. Un amore in composta, 1874. Figurine, 1875; edited by Giansiro Ferrata, 1962. Le conquiste del male. Il male dell’arte. Variazioni sul tema, 1876. Rovine. Degna di morire. La laurea dell’amore, 1879. Un serpe, 3 vols. (Idillio a tavola, 1881; Un consulto medico, 1882; La giustizia del mondo, 1884). Amore architetto, 1884. Una serenata ai morti, 1884. Le litaniae della mamma, 1886. Capricci per pianoforte, 3 vols. (Tota Nerina, 1887; La contessa De Ritz, 1891; Nemesi, 1894). Madonna di fuoco e Madonna di neve, 1888. Sant’Isidoro: commentarii di guerra rustica, 1909; edited by Giorgio Luti, 1972.

Other A Vienna: Gita col lapis, 1874. Un viaggio a Roma senza vedere il Papa, 1880; edited by Gaetano Mariani, 1962. Salita a Montecitorio, 5 vols. (Il paese di Montecitorio: Guida alpina; I pezzi grossi: Scarpellate; Caporioni: Profili; Dai fratelli Bandiera alla dissidenza: Cronaca; I partiti: Osservazioni), 1878–1882.

Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Racconti della scapigliatura, Turin: Einaudi, 1953. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Giovanni Faldella,’’ in Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 5, Bari: Laterza, 1939. Del Principe, David, Rebellion, Death and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della Scapigliatura, CaltanissettaRome: Sciascia, 1967. Ragazzini, Giorgio, Giovanni Faldella: Viaggiatore e giornalista, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1976. Rosa, Giovanna, La narrativa degli Scapigliati, Bari: Laterza, 1997. Sarasso, Terenzio, Giovanni Faldella scapigliato vercellese, Vercelli: La Sesia, 1959. Scotti Morgana, Silvia, La lingua di Giovanni Faldella, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Spera, Francesco, Il principio dell’antiletteratura, Dossi, Faldella, Imbriani, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Tesio, Giovanni, Piemonte letterario dell’Otto-Novecento: da Giovanni Faldella a Primo Levi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991.

ORIANA FALLACI (1930–2006) Fallaci challenges at least three major cultural divides: that between the literary and the journalistic or documentary; that between the ‘‘high’’ literary culture and the popular; and that between the literary (understood as disinterested, self-transcending creation) and projection of the author’s autobiographical persona. Even before Tom Wolfe and others were championing the New Journalism, Fallaci was applying novelistic techniques, including self-dramatization, in her reportage volumes I sette peccati di Hollywood (Hollywood’s Seven Deadly Sins, 1958) and Il sesso inutile: viaggio intorno alla donna (The Useless Sex, 1961). This was to be developed into an existential drama of indecision in Se il sole muore (If the Sun Dies, 1965), about the pros and cons of space exploration, cast as a debate between Oriana and her father in Florence, and, more impressively, in her Vietnam testimony,

Niente e cosı` sia (Nothing and So Be It, 1969). These works are structured largely around the quasidramatic form of the interview, and Fallaci has published two volumes of straight interviews (several of them sharply adversarial, some of them warmly sympathetic): the celebrity interviews of Gli antipatici (Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, 1963); and the political interviews of Intervista con la storia (Interview with History, 1974, extended and revised, 1977), each carrying a partly different selection in the Italian and English versions. Each interview is prefaced by a fascinating introductory portrait. This is a literary microgenre that comprises some of Fallaci’s best writing. The earlier Penelope alla guerra (Penelope at the War, 1962) is fictional but captures aspects of the New York scene in 1957, with Queen Elizabeth’s visit and the panic caused by the appearance of the 681

ORIANA FALLACI first artificial satellite, the Russian Sputnik, and weaves experiences from Oriana’s own girlhood in wartime Florence into those of her androgynous heroine Gio, who searches New York for her lost love Richard (who also turns out to be androgynous). The (somewhat melodramatically contrived) uncanny theme in this novel reveals itself in a domineering mother figure and an overwhelming polymorphously oriented supermale and drives Gio back to Florence, her identity threatened, to reconstitute herself by writing the novel that we are reading. This ambiguously gendered and not unworthily experimental psychodrama did not fit in with the experimentalism current in the novel-writing of the time, and Fallaci has always been remarkable in going her own way in inventing new novelistic forms. The brief but intense Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Letter to a Child Never Born, 1975), originally conceived as a reportage on the abortion debate, turned into a quasiautobiographical (often taken too straightforwardly as autobiographical) dialogue with the child in the womb, addressed throughout in the second person, who, right at the end of the text, turns out to have died at the text’s opening. The narrative of a death in the womb thus turns out to have been a death in the womb of narrative, in a reversal of the mother’s life-denying discourse, which, rather than having caused the death of the fetus has itself been caused by the death of the fetus, which has acted as the lifedenying toxin. That this enigmatic text could have been read as a rejection (or a defence) of abortion is an object lesson in the freedom of (mis)reading. The single mother-to-be, a successful but socially vulnerable career woman, is the site of convergence of all the conflicting societal discourses on childbearing. All these discourses are persuasively relayed in the text in a variety of modes, including scientific photoreportage, dreams, and memories recounted to the presumed child as fairy tales, and are finally recapitulated in a dream in which the mother is on trial accused of murdering her child, and all the actors— father, friend, mother’s parents, male and female doctors—appear and speak for or against her. Their hung verdict is then confirmed by the child himself, who finds her both guilty and not guilty. It is when the mother awakes from this nightmare that she learns that the fetus has been dead from an early stage and that she too may be dying. The considerable originality in presenting the child as a mental and verbal construct, and the emotional urgency conveyed by the rhythms of the speaking voice, won Fallaci a mass readership, 682

but were dismissed by the intelligentsia as self-dramatization by the author and stylistic kitsch. The same reactions greeted the far more straightforwardly biographical and autobiographical Un uomo (A Man, 1979), in which Fallaci, in her own person as both recollecting narrator and as a figure within the narrative, addresses her dead partner, the Greek freedom fighter Alekos Panagoulis, retelling the story of his capture and confinement and of his political activity after his release, culminating in what she interprets as the staged car accident that kills him. Here, too, in this parodistic inversion of the action thriller, as in Lettera a un bambino mai nato, the Fallaci-narrator presents herself as being duped by her other: only at Alekos’ funeral, proleptically presented at the start of the narrative, does she realize that his death resulting from an apparent vocation for self-destruction is really his triumph, and that the million-and-a-half mourners are no longer a mindless herd, but have realized their power as citizens to achieve political justice and freedom. Fallaci’s most ambitious docufiction, InsciAllah (InshAllah, 1990) opens with the massive truck bombs that destroy the United States and French military headquarters in Beirut on 23 October 1983 and then novelistically tracks the existential trajectories of a heterogeneous array of Italian peacekeepers in their relations with significant others as they daily expect a similar attack against themselves. Through a multiplicity of dialects, Fallaci constructs a composite Italianness set in implicit contrast to the dark unknowable heart of Shiite Islam. Fallaci’s other ‘‘Other’’ is homoeroticism, which she sublimates in the Italian, Martino, and demonises in the Amal militia leader, Rashid. Chaos is metanarratively plotted as necessity, and the narrator’s ‘‘little Iliad’’ climaxes in the frightful Christmas battle between Christians and Shiites, to end counterfactually with the Shiite commander, Rashid, blowing up the vessel carrying the departing Italian troops and the rape and butchery of the French nuns left behind. This counterfactual ending now reads like a prophecy of civilizational conflict subsequently symbolized in the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, an event that prompted Fallaci into penning the astoundingly vituperative invective of La rabbia e l’orgoglio (The Rage and the Pride, 2001), mustering all her histrionic skills of direct address, self-dramatization, colloquial eloquence, and selective evidence to denounce and vilify Islamic militants, and, explicitly enough, Islam as a whole, as the enemy of human civilization,

ORIANA FALLACI dedicated to returning the world to religious barbarism. How civilization can deal with this return of the repressed within the Western world (as in Fallaci) and within the Islamic world has yet to be seen.

Se il sole muore, 1965; as If the Sun Dies, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1966. Niente e cosı` sia, 1969; as Nothing and Amen, 1972, and as Nothing and So Be It, translated by Isabel Quigley, 1972. La rabbia e l’orgoglio, 2001; as The Rage and the Pride, version by Oriana Fallaci, 2002.

Biography

Fiction

Born in Florence, 29 June 1930; inherited a fierce libertarianism from her socialist father and anarchist mother, and from the age of 13 played an active part in the Florentine Resistance—an experience whose memory figures in many of her works. Inspired by reading Jack London, the young Oriana aspired to be a writer. Her journalist uncle Bruno Fallaci recommended a medical career as providing the experience of life necessary to a writer, but she soon abandoned the medical course to start as a reporter in Florence. Worked for the Christian Democrat Il mattino dell’Italia centrale, 1946–1952, when she rebelled against the newspaper’s political bias. Joined the illustrated weekly L’europeo in 1956, basing herself in Milan, and specialized in reporting on and interviewing celebrities. In 1968, she wrote frontline reportages on the Vietnam War, even going on a dive-bombing raid, and was also gunned down in Mexico City while reporting a mass demonstration. These experiences led her to report on many other conflict situations, from the India-Pakistan conflict to Beirut to the first Gulf War, and to interview the world’s leading political personalities. One of these was the Greek freedom fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, when he was released from solitary confinement in 1973. Panagoulis and Fallaci became partners until his death in a suspicious car accident in 1976. Diagnosed with cancer, 1990. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, elicited from Fallaci, who has had an apartment in Manhattan since the 1970s, a sensational blast against Islam, first in a massive article in Il corriere della sera then in a volume, both titled La rabbia e l’orgoglio, 2001. Her best-selling volumes have established Fallaci, both inside and outside Italy, as the most uncompromising of the adversaries of Islam. Passed away in Florence on 15 September 2006. JOHN GATT-RUTTER Selected Works Reportage I sette peccati di Hollywood, 1958. Il sesso inutile: viaggio intorno alla donna, 1961; as The Useless Sex, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1964.

Penelope alla guerra, 1962; as Penelope at the War, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1966. Un uomo, 1979; as A Man, translated by William Weaver, 1980; rpt. 1981. InsciAllah, 1990; as InshAllah, translated by Oriana Fallaci, from a translation by James Marcus, 1992.

Interviews Gli antipatici, 1963; as Limelighters, translated by Pamela Swinglehurst, 1967; as Egotists: Sixteen Surprising Interviews, translated by Oriana Fallaci, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Pamela Swinglehurst, 1968. Intervista con la storia, 1974; extended and revised, 1977; a different selection as Interview with History, translated by John Shepley, 1976. Oriana Fallaci intervista Oriana Fallaci, 2004.

Other Quel giorno sulla luna, edited for school students by Alberto Pozzolini, 1970. Lettera a un bambino mai nato, 1975, revised 1993; audio recording ‘‘Oriana Fallaci legge Lettera a un bambino mai nato,’’ 1993; as Letter to a Child Never Born, translated by John Shepley, 1975; rpt. 1976; revised translation, 1982. La forza della ragione, 2003.

Further Reading Arico`, Santo L., ‘‘Oriana Fallaci’s Journalistic Novel: Niente e cosı` sia,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers In Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by S. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Arico`, Santo L., Oriana Fallaci: The Woman and the Myth, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Il grande continente del dolore,’’ in L’europeo, 5 December 1975: 6–7. Crimi, Bruno, ‘‘Oriana Fallaci, in arte Liala,’’ in Panorama, 19 May 1980, p. 169. Gatt-Rutter, John, Oriana Fallaci: The Rhetoric of Freedom, Oxford-Washington, DC: Berg, 1996. Gatt-Rutter, John, ‘‘How many birds to shoot? Facts and fallacies in the reportage narratives of Oriana Fallaci,’’ in Convivio (Brisbane), 3, no. 2 (October 1997): 119–126. Gatt-Rutter, John, ‘‘Narrative ‘You’ and ‘I’ in the Opening of Oriana Fallaci’s Un uomo,’’ in Essays in Modern Italian and French Literature: In Recollection of Tom O’Neill, edited by Alastair Hurst and Tony Pagliaro, Melbourne: Spunti e Ricerche, La Trobe University, 2004. Gorlier, Claudio, ‘‘Insciallah, un romanzo popolare per raccontare il Caos,’’ in La stampa—Tuttolibri, 11 August 1990, p. 5. Maglie, Maria Giovanna, Oriana: Incontri e passioni di una grande italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

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ORIANA FALLACI Medail, Cesare, ‘‘I perche´ di un best-seller in libreria,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 22 March 1976, p. 3. Milani, Marisa, ‘‘La lingua ‘effimera’ di Oriana Fallaci,’’ in La Battana, 8, no. 25 (1971): 23–49. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin, ‘‘Designing Mothers: Images of Motherhood in Novels by Aleramo, Morante, Maraini and Fallaci,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 325–340. Rosa, Giovanna, ‘‘Il nome di Oriana,’’ in Pubblico 1982: Produzione letteraria e mercato culturale, edited by

Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Milano Libri Edizioni, 1982; rpt. in V. Spinazzola (editor), Il successo letterario, Milan: Unicopli, 1985. Turoldo, Davide Maria, ‘‘Viaggio nel vulcano Insciallah,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 2 August 1990, p. 5. Zangrandi, Silvia, A servizio della realta`: Il reportage narrativo dalla Fallaci a Severgnigni, Milan: Unicopli, 2003.

FAMILY SAYINGS See Lessico famigliare (Work by Natalia Ginzburg)

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE There is some confusion in the usage of the term ‘‘fantastic’’ in literary criticism. A number of critics, especially from the English-speaking countries, use it in connection with such terms as ‘‘fancy,’’ ‘‘imagination,’’ ‘‘fiction,’’ and go so far as to identify ‘‘fantastic’’ with ‘‘fictional’’ and to consider all creative literature a product of ‘‘fantasy’’ and therefore ‘‘fantastic.’’ Other critics, mainly based in France and especially after the publication of Tzvetan Todorov’s Introduction a` la litte´rature fantastique (1970), tended to restrict the term to a specific kind of text, produced in a particular historical period: the Romantic and post-Romantic times in the nineteenth century, first in Germany and France, then in other countries. The German and French practitioners of fantastic literature, although drawing from themes and procedures of the British eighteenth-century tradition of the Gothic novel, were aware of breaking new ground. The novelty of the stories that E. T. A. Hoffmann called Nachtstu¨cke (noctural pieces) or Phantasiestu¨cke (pieces of fantasy) and their French imitators The´ophile Gautier, Charles Nodier, and Guy de Maupassant called re´cits fantastiques (fantastic narratives), consisted 684

in the insertion of elements of supernatural origin (prodigies, apparitions, unexplainable events) in a perfectly natural, everyday world, thus engendering a reaction of fear and uneasiness, which Sigmund Freud would later name the experience of the Unheimliche, or the uncanny. Among the early practitioners of the fantastic, of which there are no prominent Italian writers, and even those who, in the late 1860s, started to imitate the French models, appeared not to have contributed in an original and notable way to the development of the genre. Such is the case of Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, who published his first collection of Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales) in 1869, and the brothers Arrigo and Camillo Boito, all belonging to the bohemian movement of the Scapigliatura in Milan. Arrigo was also a composer and a librettist for Verdi’s operas, while Camillo was an architect and a professor of fine arts. In 1992, Italo Calvino was asked to compile a collection of Racconti fantastici dell’Ottocento (Fantastic Tales of the Nineteenth Century). He decided to leave out the Italians, who seemed to him inferior to their European or American counterparts.

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Of the belated arrival of fantastic literature in Italy, there have been various explanations, the most popular being that Italy, like all other Mediterranean countries, from ancient Greece to modern Spain and France, was a sunlit and joyful nation. Northern ghosts could not inhabit their soil; the fantastic went against their ge´nie national (national genius), and even when writers attempted it, it was only an unfortunate imitation of Northern imagery. Heinrich Heine exclaimed in 1835: ‘‘und franzo¨sische Gespenster! Welch ein Widerspruch in den Worten!’’ (and French ghosts! What a contradiction in terms!) (‘‘Die Romantische Schule,’’ 1935). In a 1914 essay on Arrigo Boito, Benedetto Croce wrote: L’anima italiana tende, naturalmente, al definito e all’armonico. Bene invase e corse l’Italia, dopo il 1815, una nordica cavalcata di spettri, di vergini morenti, di angelidemoni, di disperati e cupi bestemmiatori, e si udirono scricchiolii di scheletri, e sospiri e pianti e sghignazzate di folli e deliri di febbricitanti. Ma tutto cio` fu moda e non poesia The Italian soul leans naturally toward the definite and harmonious. It is true that after 1815, Italy was invaded by a Northern cavalcade of ghosts, dying virgins, angeldemons, desperate and gloomy blasphemers and one could hear the creaking of skeletons, the sighing, weeping and guffaws of fools and delirious cries of feverish people. But all that was simply fashion, not poetry (La letteratura della Nuova Italia, 1947)

H. P. Lovecraft explained in 1927: ‘‘in the Latin races there is a touch of basic rationality which denies, to their strangest superstitions, many of the overtones of glamour so characteristic of our own forest-born and ice-fostered whisperings’’ (Supernatural Horror in Literature, 1927). Ethnic explanations of this kind do not pass a critical scrutiny. Ghosts, haunted houses, and supernatural events abound in the ancient and classical cultures of the Mediterranean, as attested to by Herodotus or Pliny. From those very cultures come sources of experience for the uncanny, or even, according to some scholars who believe in ethnic differences, a special type of Mediterranean fantastic, as opposed to the Northern one. Scholars who support this theory either mention the haunting presence of the god Pan in the Greek pastoral landscape, or the theory of melancholy (black humor) elaborated by the Greek medical school, or the torments inflicted to the early Christian fathers by noontide demons and desert temptations. Indeed the fantastic mode in literature does not belong exclusively to any specific cultural area (there are Northern or Southern ghosts in French

literature, in Russian literature, etc.), and in Italy, the belated arrival of the fantastic was accompanied by the inclusion of fantastic themes in Italian operas by Gaetano Donizetti (Lucia di Lammermoor, 1835), Giuseppe Verdi (Macbeth, 1847), Arrigo Boito (Mefistofele, 1875), Alfredo Catalani (Loreley, 1890), Antonio Smareglia (La falena, 1890), and Pietro Mascagni (Guglielmo Ratcliff, 1895). During the twentieth century, moreover, the dearth of good Italian fantastic literature has given way to a strong and original tradition of texts belonging to the genre. There is a striking difference between nineteenth-century Italian fantastic literature and that of the twentieth century: The first tends to be derivative, and is based on foreign models, while the second, even though appearing after the great age of fantastic literature in other countries, tends to be original and capable of creating new forms and exploiting new themes. The dependence of nineteenth-century Italian fantastic on foreign models is exemplified by the case of Tarchetti, who desperately tried to make a living by writing pieces for literary and musical journals and by translating novels. Melancholic by character, experimental in many of his works, Tarchetti (1839–1869) is the author of an antiwar novel, Una nobile follia (A Noble Folly, 1867), and Fosca (1869) on a morbid love affair between a young man and an emaciated, skeletal woman. In his tales, he uses many of the most common themes of the fantastic, depending heavily on his models: One story, published in Rivista minima in 1865 with the title of ‘‘Il mortale immortale (dall’inglese)’’ (The Mortal Immortal, from English) and later republished in Emporio pittoresco (1868) as ‘‘L’elixir dell’immortalita` (imitazione dall’inglese)’’ (The Elixir of Immortality, Imitation from English), was in reality an almost word-by-word translation of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s ‘‘The Mortal Immortal’’ (1833). ‘‘Un osso di morto’’ (A Dead Man’s Bone, 1869) takes its inspiration from a famous story by The´ophile Gautier, ‘‘Le pied de Momie’’ (The Mummy’s Foot, 1840), and is remarkable for its use of the typical fantastic device of the mediating object: A ghost comes at night to recover a missing bone from his skeleton that was stolen and taken home by an employee of a medical school. The following morning, when the man is asking himself if the visit from the ghost was a dream, he realizes that the bone has disappeared. Another story, ‘‘Uno spirito in un lampone’’ (A Spirit in a Raspberry, 1869), draws from ‘‘Le bourgmestre en bouteille’’ (The Burgomaster in a Bottle, 1862) by the Alsatian writers E´mile 685

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian; and ‘‘I fatali’’ (The Fated, 1869) derives from The´ophile Gautier’s ‘‘Jettatura’’ (‘‘The Evil Eye,’’ 1856), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s ‘‘Prinzessin Brambilla’’ (1820), and Petrus Borel’s ‘‘Madame Putip-her’’ (1839). Largely dependent on French models are also Luigi Gualdo’s Novelle (1868), while those written by the Neapolitan poet Salvatore di Giacomo recapture, in a vein of entertainment, the atmosphere of German social life, as it is shown already from the title: ‘‘Pipa e boccale’’ (Pipe and Tankard, 1893). Of some interest are Luigi Capuana’s ‘‘Storia fosca’’ (A Grim Story, 1883), Remigio Zena’s ‘‘Confessione postuma’’ (Posthumous Confession, 1897), and Antonio Fogazzaro’s opening pages of Malombra (The Woman, 1881). Though not numerous, the stories written by the brothers Arrigo and Camillo Boito are considered by many to be masterpieces of the genre. They are deftly written, dotted with well-chosen details, and show good insights into the social life of the time. Arrigo’s ‘‘L’alfier nero’’ (The Black Bishop, 1867) centers on a game of chess played in a luxurious Swiss hotel between an American professional player and an inexperienced black gentleman of Caribbean origin, who surprisingly wins, thus symbolically representing the fierce confrontation taking place at the time between white British colonists and black insurgents in Jamaica. ‘‘Il pugno chiuso’’ (The Clenched Fist, 1870) takes place in a Poland ravaged by poverty, contagious illnesses, and hatred of the Jews. In Camillo’s ‘‘Un corpo’’ (A Corpse, 1870), which is set in Vienna, a romantic painter and an anatomist search for the secret of feminine beauty in the corpse of a woman who had mysteriously died. As to the influence of the fantastic mode on Italian literature of the twentieth century, there are a number of Italian writers who were attracted to and made use of it. Alberto Savinio (1891–1952), a writer and painter (like his brother Giorgio De Chirico), was fully immersed in the culture of the French and European avant-garde and loosely connected with Andre´ Breton’s movement of surrealism. From an early age, he was acquainted with psychoanalysis and the writings of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. In his novel La casa ispirata (The Inspired House, 1925), the old fantastic theme of the haunted house takes a new form; the ghosts ( fantoˆmes) of popular superstition become projections of the psychic life of the characters and their unconscious fantasies ( fantasmes). In Savinio’s works, the fantastic is largely modified by the theories of Freud and psychoanalysis. 686

Tommaso Landolfi (1908–1979) is probably the most productive, articulate and self-critical practitioner of fantastic literature in Italy during the past century. His first collections of short stories, entitled Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue Concerning the Chief World Systems, 1937), Il Mar delle Blatte e altre storie (The Sea of the Cockroaches and Other Stories, 1939), and La spada (The Sword, 1942) contain perfect examples of fantastic stories on the model of the classical authors of the nineteenth century. The same can be said of his three novels from the same period: La pietra lunare (The Moonstone, 1939), Racconto d’autunno (Autumn Story, 1947), and Cancroregina (Cancerqueen, 1950). After these literary beginnings, which remind us of the Argentinean writer Julio Corta´zar, Landolfi experiments with autobiographical and metafictional narratives. The fantastic dimension, sometimes reduced to a linguistic quirk, others completely interiorized, or even combined with other dimensions, continues to be present in later novels and collections of short stories: Ombre (Shadows, 1954), In societa` (In Society, 1962), Racconti impossibili (Impossible Tales, 1966), Un paniere di chiocciole (A Basket of Snails, 1968), which contains ‘‘Parole in agitazione’’ (Words in Commotion), Le labrene (The Labrenas, 1974), A caso (At Random, 1975), Del meno (Less, 1978), and Il gioco della torre (The Game of the Tower, 1987). Landolfi has skillfully renovated the Italian tradition of the fantastic, to which he returns with a kind of obsession, and takes it to the extreme. Primo Levi (1919–1987) perceptively analyzed what he considered to be the flaws and faults of the world in which we live, not only in his famous memoirs of survival from a Nazi concentration camp, but also in some of his short stories assembled in Storie naturali (Natural Stories, 1966), Vizio di forma (Defect of Form, 1971), and Lilı´t (1981). In these stories, viewed through the lens of science fiction, Levi discloses the faults in the order of things as observed in everyday life, the behavior of human beings, and the rational laws that govern nature. Thus, the fantastic continues to have a strong moral and cognitive motivation. Antonio Tabucchi (1943–) has often resorted to the fantastic mode, by writing such stories as ‘‘I pomeriggi del sabato’’ (Saturday Afternoons) in Il gioco del rovescio (Letter from Casablanca, 1983), ‘‘Gli incanti’’ (Spells) and ‘‘Anywhere Out of the World’’ (1985) in Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, 1985). He has also introduced fantastic themes in his novels Notturno indiano (Indian

FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Nocturne, 1984) Requiem, uma alucinac¸ao, written in Portuguese (Requiem: A Hallucination, 1991), and Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi, romanzo in forma di lettere (It Is Always Becoming Later: A Novel in Form of Letters, 2001). Tabucchi is a postmodern writer, ironic and nostalgic, who draws from the fantastic in order to question the ontological basis of our experience and place in the world. Typically postmodern, for instance, is ‘‘Anywhere Out of the World,’’ with uncanny telephone calls to and from another world, and with Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris functioning as a subtext. Among the many Italian writers who practiced the fantastic, Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) wrote metaphysical stories that attracted the attention of Jorge Luis Borges. Some were collected in Tragico quotidiano (Everyday Tragedy, 1905) and Pilota cieco (Blind Pilot, 1906). Italo Svevo (1861–1928) wrote at least two stories that borrow on the fantastic: ‘‘Lo specifico del dottor Menghi’’ (‘‘Doctor Menghi’s Remedy,’’ before 1904) and ‘‘Il malocchio’’ (The Evil Eye), which was left incomplete. In his Novelle, Luigi Pirandello relies on strange, absurd, paradoxical incidents as well as real encounters with the supernatural. His last collection, Una giornata (One Day, 1937), introduces elements of the surreal and the fantastic. Also, Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), who launched the movement called realismo magico, emphasized the metaphysical and the irrational, leading to the surreal stories of Quasi d’amore (Almost of Love, 1926). Besides writing realistic stories on the life of the Italian (especially Roman) middle or lower classes, in I sogni del pigro (The Dreams of the Lazy One, 1940), Alberto Moravia explores the realms of the improbable and the strange. Dino Buzzati’s works rely on the imitation or remake of texts rooted in the tradition of the gothic, the fantastic, stories of vampires, and allegorical tales. His models remain Hoffmann, Poe, Oscar Wilde, and especially Kafka. Giorgio Manganelli, a connoisseur of the gothic and fantastic tradition spanning from Poe to Lovecraft, wrote fantastic stories assembled in Hilarotragoedia (1964) and Centuria (1979). He was also close to Borges and his idea of literary fiction. Italo Calvino’s interest in the fantastic enticed him into collecting the Racconti italiani dell’Ottocento (Fantastic Tales, 1983); however, none of his novels can be truly considered to be fantastic. The neorealist Anna Maria Ortese published a fantastic story, ‘‘L’infanta sepolta’’ (The Buried Infant, 1948), where she animates an in-animated object, and the collection In

sonno e in veglia (Sleeping and Waking, 1987), which comprises two stories on haunted houses: ‘‘Sulla terrazza sterminata’’ (On the Boundless Terrace) and ‘‘La casa del bosco’’ (The House in the Woods). In her last novel, Alonso e i visionari (Alonso and the Visionaries, 1996), Ortese includes elements of the fantastic, though other narrative modes prevail. Carlo Sgorlon experimented with the fantastic in La notte del ragno mannaro (The Night of the Were-Spider, 1990). Writers such as Federigo Tozzi, Arturo Loria, Elsa Morante, and Goffredo Parise, and others, have been influenced by the general fantastic trend, away from the spectacular, and toward more psychologically driven writing. REMO CESERANI Further Reading Albertazzi, Silvia, Il punto su: La letteratura fantastica, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1993. Amigoni, Ferdinando, Fantasmi nel Novecento, Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 2004. Bellotto, Silvia, Metamorfosi del fantastico: Immaginazione e linguaggio nel racconto surreale italiano del Novecento, Bologna: Pendragon, 2003. Bonifazi, Neuro, Teoria del fantastico e il racconto fantastico in Italia: Tarchetti- Pirandello-Buzzati, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Borges, Jorge Luis (editor), Giovanni Papini, Lo specchio che fugge, Parma: F. M. Ricci, 1975. Borges, Jorge Luis (with Silvina Ocampo and A. Bioy Casares), Antologı´a de la literatura fanta´stica, Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamerica, 1980; as The Book of Fantasy, New York: Viking, 1988. Caillois, Roger, Au coeur du fantastique, Paris: Gallimard, 1963. Caillois, Roger, Les de´mons du midi, Saint-Cle´ment-LaRivie`re: Fata Morgana, 1991. Calvino, Italo (editor), Racconti fantastici dell’Ottocento, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Definizioni di territori: Il fantastico,’’ and ‘‘Il fantastico nella letteratura italiana,’’ in Saggi 1945–1985, edited by Mario Barenghi, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Ceserani, Remo, et alia, La narrazione fantastica, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1983. Ceserani, Remo, Il fantastico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Italia magica: Racconti surreali novecenteschi scelti e presentati da Gianfranco Contini, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. Corsaro, Antonio (editor), ‘‘Profili del fantastico italiano del Novecento,’’ in Stazione di Posta, special issue, nos. 51–52 (1993). Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1947. D’Arcangelo, Lucio (editor), Enciclopedia fantastica italiana: Ventisette racconti da Leopardi a Moravia, Milan: Mondadori, 1993.

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FANTASTIC AND LITERATURE Desideri, Giovannella, ‘‘Il fantastico,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Storia e Geografia, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Di Fazio, Margherita, ‘‘Nei territori del ‘fantastico,’’’ in Interrogare la finzione: Testi narrativi ed esperienze di lettura, Rome: Edizioni associate, 2002. Farnetti, Monica, Il giuoco del maligno: Il racconto fantastico nella letteratura italiana tra Otto e Novecento, Florence: Vallecchi, 1988. Farnetti, Monica (editor), Racconti fantastici di scrittori veristi, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Farnetti, Monica, L’irruzione del vedere nel pensare: Saggi sul fantastico, Pasian di Prato: Campanotto, 1996. Finne´, Jacques (editor), L’Italie fantastique: De Boccaccio a` Landolfi, Verviers: Ge´rard, 2000. Finzi, Gilberto (editor), Racconti neri della Scapigliatura, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Freud, Sigmund, ‘‘Das Unheimliche,’’ in special issue of Imago, vol. 5, nos. 5–6 (1917–1919); as The Uncanny, New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Galletti, Marina (editor), Le soglie del fantastico, Rome: Lithos, 1996. Ghidetti, Enrico, Il sogno della ragione: Dal racconto fantastico al romanzo popolare, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984. Ghidetti, Enrico, and Leonardo Lattarulo (editors), Notturno italiano: Racconti fantastici del Novecento, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984. Guarnieri Corazzo, Adriana, ‘‘Fantasmi, allucinazioni e seduttrici soprannaturali nell’opera italiana del secondo Ottocento,’’ in Desiderio e trasgressione nella letteratura fantastica, edited by Michela Vanon Alliata, Venice: Marsilio, 2002.

Guidi, Oretta, Sul fantastico e dintorni. Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del Novecento: Palazzeschi, Svevo, Landolfi, Moravia, Pisolini, Levi, Calvino, Perugina: Guerra, 2003. Heine, Heinrich, ‘‘Die romanische Schule,’’ in Sa¨mtliche Schriften, vol. 3, edited by K. Po¨rnbacher, Mu¨nchen: Carl Hanser, 1971. Lazzarin, Stefano, ‘‘‘Centuria’: Le sorti del fantastico nel Novecento,’’ in Studi novecenteschi, 24 (1997): 99–145. Lazzarin, Stefano, Il modo fantastico, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000. Lovecraft, H. P., Supernatural Horror in Literature, (1st ed. 1927), edited by E. F. Bleiler, New York: Dover Publications, 1973. Pellini, Pierluigi, Il quadro animato: Tematiche artistiche e letteratura fantastica, Milan: Edizioni dell’Arco, 2001. Pilo, Gianni, and Sebastiano Fusco (editors), Fantasmi italiani, Rome: Newton Compton, 1994. Reim, Riccardo (editor), Da uno spiraglio: Racconti neri e fantastici dell’Ottocento italiano, Rome: Newton Compton, 1992. Roda, Vittorio, I fantasmi della ragione: Fantastico, scienza e fantascienza nella letteratura italiana fra Otto e Novecento, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Todorov, Tzvetan, Introduction a` la litte´rature fantastique, Paris: Seuil, 1970; as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. Venuti, Lawrence, ‘‘Dissidence,’’ in Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London-New York: Routledge, 1995.

SALVATORE FARINA (1846–1918) A prolific novelist, Salvatore Farina enjoyed great popularity in his lifetime, to the point that many critics referred to him as the ‘‘Italian Charles Dickens.’’ His novels and short stories portray aspects of the family life of the lower middle classes in Northern Italy, often with a consolatory happy ending. Indeed, as Farina himself wrote in a letter to his friend, the political journalist Ferdinando Petruccelli della Gattina (1815–1890), the aim of his work was that of ennobling and exalting the family as the fulcrum of society. The titles of his novels are in themselves eloquent and denote the tone of the books, which alternate between Romantic idealism and naturalism, thus changing in part the characteristics of both: his Romanticism is less passionate and his naturalism less forceful. 688

Among Farina’s narrative works, one of the most successful is Il tesoro di Donnina (Donnina’s Treasure, 1873), an intimate portrait of a petit bourgeois milieu centred on a series of love stories depicted with charm and equilibrium. Farina’s style is simple and lively, if, at times, somewhat careless. A good observer, he succeeds in capturing scenes and figures effectively and often with a fine sense of humour, although occasionally a sentimental vein somewhat diminishes the overall effect. In Mio figlio! (My Son!, 1877–1881), some of Farina’s weaknesses are less apparent and it undoubtedly represents his most authentic achievement. The novel consists of a series of recollections of the quiet, close-knit family of a young lawyer. In the first chapters, everything seems monotonous,

SALVATORE FARINA the characters hardly animated, their personalities merely sketched. Yet, the flowing, light prose is to some extent a harbinger of the narrative to come in the new century, as it reacts to the by now hackneyed romantic conventions and shows a distinctive awareness of the humble facts of daily life. The trilogy La mia giornata (My Day, 1910–1915), an autobiographical work, comprises in one book the whole day of an entire life. It is a nostalgic collection of the writer’s personal memories, the only survivor of a group of friends, for whom nothing remains except for reliving through simple prose his own grief. It also bears witness to the cultural climate of the time and to the generation of artists, writers, and musicians who had animated the scapigliatura, all of whom Farina knew even though he kept his distance from them. To their themes and linguistic experimentalism, he preferred the ‘‘sentimental’’ fiction that made him a favourite among readers of the period. In Dall’alba al meriggio (From Dawn to Noon, 1910), Farina recalls his childhood in Sardinia, the frightening cholera epidemic that struck Sassari, the death of his mother, and his father’s decision to let his own children choose their new mother. Later, the family moves to Piedmont, where he spends his reckless youth. In Care ombre (Dear Shadows, 1913), he re-evokes numerous friends and literary figures, including Giovanni Verga, Eugenio Torelli Viollier, the first director of the newspaper Il Corriere della sera, which Farina contributed to founding in 1876, and his dear friend Igino Ugo Tarchetti, whose unfinished novel Fosca (1869) he completed. Of particular interest are the lucid analyses of emotions and the powerful and effective descriptions of people. Farina is considered one of the most notable events in the literary fashion of 1870s and 1980s, as Gaetano Mariani puts it in his Storia della Scapigliatura (1967), because of the enormous success of his works among both critics and readers. Indeed, his fame rests on the skillful interweaving of his journalistic vocation with the new forms of popular narrative in the Italian novel of the period.

Biography Salvatore Farina was born in Sorso, in the Sassari province, on 10 January 1846. He attended the faculty of law in Pavia and Turin, where he moved with his family after many years spent in Sardinia with his father who, as a king’s procurator, was often forced to move. He was a great

sportsman and more passionate about billiards than about his law studies. In 1868, he obtained his degree in Turin. He then moved to Milan after his marriage with a poor widow, with whom he had two children. He only left the city for occasional trips. In Milan, he met some of the most important figures of the cultural world of Lombardy: Giovanni Verga, who in 1881 dedicated to him the introductory letter to the short story ‘‘L’amante del Gramigna,’’ Edmondo De Amicis, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Igino Ugo Tarchetti. He worked extensively as a journalist and novelist. He contributed to the journals Nuova Antologia, directed the Gazzetta Musicale and the Rivista Minima. In spite of a form of amnesia, which lasted for more than 15 years, his literary production was abundant and successful. He died in Milan on 15 December 1918. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Fiction Cuore e blasone, 1864. Due amori, 1869. Un segreto, 1869. Frutti proibiti, 1870. Il romanzo di un vedovo, 1871. Il tesoro di Donnina, 1873. Fante di picche, 1874. Amore bendato, 1875. Capelli biondi, 1876. Dalla spuma del mare, 1876. Un tiranno ai bagni di mare: tre scene dal vivo, 1876. Oro nascosto. Scene di vita borghese, 1878. Mio figlio!, 1879–1881. L’intermezzo e la pagina nera, 1879. Il marito di Laurina, 1879. Fra le corde di un contrabbasso, 1879. Il Signor Io, 1882. Amore ha cent’occhi, 1883. Si muore: Caporal Silvestro, 1884. L’ultima battaglia di prete Agostino, 1886. Pe’ belli occhi della gloria, 1887. Per la vita e per la morte, 1891. Piu` forte dell’amore, 1891. Vivere per amare, 1893. Amore bugiardo, 1893. Carta bollata, 1894. Il numero tredici, 1895. Madonnina bianca (vanitas): Narrazione, 1897. Fino alla morte, 1902. Il segreto del nevaio, 1909. La mia giornata, vols. 3 (Dall’alba al meriggio, 1910; Care ombre, 1913; Dal meriggio al tramonto, 1915). Il libro degli amori, 1911. Il secondo libro degli amori, 1912. Il libro dei paesi incantati, 1914.

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SALVATORE FARINA Further Reading Adamo, Sergia, ‘‘Le lettere di Salvatore Farina ad Angelo de Gubernatis,’’ La grotta della vipera, 83 (1998): 5–22. Balestrazzi, Agostino, Il romanzo di Salvatore Farina, Pavia: Istituto Tecnico Bellani, 1933. Croce, Benedetto, in Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Dendi, Vittoria, Un romanziere dimenticato, Salvatore Farina. Pisa: Officina arti grafiche Folcheto, 1921.

Manca, Dino (editor), Salvatore Farina: la figura e il ruolo a 150 anni dalla nascita. Sassari: EDES, 2001. Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della Scapigliatura, CaltanissettaRome: Sciascia, 1967. Pischedda, Bruno, Il feuilleton umoristico di Salvatore Farina, Naples: Liguori, 1997. Zimbone, Croce, Luigi Capuana, Salvatore Farina, Arturo Graf, Ada Negri: segnalazioni critiche, Catania: Greco, 1981.

FASCISM AND LITERATURE Although the actual dates for Italian Fascism are rarely contested (1922–1943), the study of Fascism and culture, of which the relation between Fascism and literature is part, posits different historical parameters. Recent critical studies illustrate the improbability that Fascist cultural practices, however variegated, emerge ex novo at the beginning of the regime. The thrust of the recent scholarship on Italian Futurism, for example, explores that movement as ‘‘proto-Fascist’’ in nature, a sort of organic precursor to the ideological rhetoric of the regime. Indeed, we can consider the movement of Fascism, particularly in its beginnings, as the organic completion of certain ideological premises of Futurism, in its self-presentation as an avant-garde, in the myth of youth, in its bold interventionism, in its exasperated relationship with the masses, and in the identification of politics and spectacle. Fascism wished to move forward to a new world order and backward to reclaim the mythopoetic bases of Italy’s glorious and imperial past. This dual movement also mirrors language during the regime, which is also often contradictory in nature, as Barbara Spackman illustrated by way of an explication of Benito Mussolini’s political speeches in her Fascist Virilities (1996). The epistemological bases for Fascism antedate its taking political shape in Italy and endure after the fall of the regime on 25 July 1943, when the Duce was voted out of office by the Grand Council and arrested. The study of the ways in which cultural representations and ideology imbricate one with the other has expanded the understanding of how Fascist ideology operates. Much scholarship on ideology has focused on its nature and conception: It is either rationally conceived 690

and put into operation, as Zeev Sternhell and others believe, or it is formed and performed according to more psychosocial tenets. Critics of Marxist tendency have occupied the latter position, and have provided richer answers to the related questions of dominance and hegemony as they relate to cultural representations. Because Fascism lacked a coherent cultural program, its effect, or rather the degree to which Italian intellectual life was affected by it, is a topic of some scholarly debate. In Making of the Fascist Self (1997), political theorist Mabel Berezin, for example, wisely questioned the degree to which the state can project meaning or cultural identity onto its citizenry. Such prudence, however, would deny the state’s open attempts to do just that. In assessing the incursion of the political into cultural practices, what is required, Robert Dombroski observed in L’esistenza ubbidiente (1984), is precision as regards the terms of the imaginary and its malleability by rhetoric and cultural interpellation. Interpellation itself is not a rigid practice and, like the imaginary, subject to historical circumstance and change. And the studies of Mario Isnenghi (L’educazione dell’italiano, 1979) and Sergio Luzzatto (Il corpo del duce, 1998) have shown clearly how it is often into the Italian intellectual periphery that the regime’s teachings penetrate more fully, with the mobilization of schools and with the mythologization and deification of the Duce. What makes a cultural expression or practitioner Fascist? Is it the writer’s relationship to the regime? Is it the degree to which Fascist values and ideology are detectible in the text? Is it the writer’s intention with regard to representing that

FASCISM AND LITERATURE ideology? The economic relation between Fascism and cultural practitioners, for example, offers some tangible (and not solely discursive) evidence on the relation of the Fascist state to cultural expression. The Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop) supported various projects and subsidized many playwrights, novelists, and practitioners of the plastic and performing arts during the ventennio, as the 20-year period of Fascism in Italy is known. This does not mean, however, that all cultural expressions born of this economic support were Fascist in nature. In fact, in recent years and with the opening to the public of the archives of the MinCulPop, there is evidence to the contrary. However, state subsidy of cultural undertakings demonstrates an interest on the part of the state in using them to foster acceptance and adherence to the type of society envisioned even by Fascism. The complexity of these issues can be better understood by analyzing the specific literary production of the period. Well before the march on Rome on 28 October 1922 and the taking of political power by the Fascists, Italian poetry was bent on fomenting a different, though related, revolution. The poetic revolution theorized, endorsed, and advanced by the Futurists beginning in 1909 presages in some ways the political upheaval that would result in the collapse of the Giovanni Giolitti government and in Mussolini’s taking power. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s radical sloganeer, clamored for the fiery death of many accepted social conventions, a holocaust that could bring about a new, modern, and ‘‘Futurist’’ society. Numerous manifestoes and performance pieces attest to the Futurists’ iconoclasm, but Italian poetry and poetic language took the brunt of Futurist fury. But not all poetry from approximately 1910 until the end of World War II took as its aim the glorification of violence and power and the destruction of poetic convention or the legacy of Italian lyric poetry. On the contrary, one could see in the works of Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Umberto Saba—the putative ‘‘Hermetic’’ poets—a reaction against such maneuvers. Montale’s early poems, especially in his collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1926), quietly desist from the furor over denominating and being, both evident tendencies in Futurist poems. This is not to suggest that Montale is an apologist for traditional poetic expression; poetry needs renewal and rejuvenation, it simply need not be violent or destructive. As regards prose fiction, the critical tradition on the relation between Fascism and literature usually takes as its starting point Gabriele D’Annunzio,

seen in this sense as a ‘‘proto-Fascist,’’ especially in his role as inventor of new strategies of communication, of gestures, and phonic expressions. For their interest in and promotion of nationalist ideals, as well as their cultivation of a godlike hero, D’Annunzio’s prose writings and his protocolonialist dramaturgy, from Piu` che l’amore (More than Love, 1906) to La nave (The Ship, 1908), can be seen as prefatory to the heightened imperialism characteristic of the consolidated regime (1929– 1943). The decadent heroes of D’Annunzio’s oeuvre seek an unrecoverable mythic past, a theme Fascism was not indifferent to in its reclamation of the ‘‘new’’ Italian empire, something largely achieved through its colonial efforts as well as its architectural innovation in urban planning. In addition to nationalistic inclinations, D’Annunzio’s novels feature also Ubermenschlich (Superman-like) figures, especially evident in Le vergini delle rocce (The Maidens of the Rocks, 1895). Its protagonist, Claudio Cantelmo, intends to choose one consort from the mythic triad of Anatolia, Massimilia, and Violante. To return the favor of his choice, the young woman will give birth to his superhuman son. In addition to the plot inspired by Nietzsche and tinged with Wagner, D’Annunzio’s language is at once antisocial, democratic, and antipopulist. Indeed, the author’s oratorical style would influence the Duce’s own political addresses. If D’Annunzio’s works provided literary antecedents to Fascism, his life, too, was mined as a stunningly vivid embodiment of things only imagined in literature. The second decade of the twentieth century particularly brings this to light, as in the wake of the war with Turkey that led to the conquest of Lybia (1911–1912), D’Annunzio wrote the screenplay for Giovanni Pastrone’s epic silent film, Cabiria (1914). Pastrone’s classic masterpiece tells the story of the Second Punic War in various episodes set around the Mediterranean, underscoring Italian colonial expansion. But nothing brings D’Annunzio closer to actual politics than his occupation, following the end of World War I, of Fiume, the spit of land past Istria long sought after by Irredentists wishing to unite the entire Italian peninsula. The poet and his fellow men conquered the city between 1919 and 1920 in what has been viewed as a rehearsal for Mussolini’s ‘‘March on Rome.’’ The dispute with Yugoslavia over Fiume was only settled in 1924. Not far from Fiume, in his native Trieste, Italo Svevo offered a different narrative for this period. Born Ettore Schmitz, Svevo’s choice of pen name (both Italian and Swabian) indicates his incomplete 691

FASCISM AND LITERATURE sense of cultural allegiance. Not surprisingly, his works are not the paeans to nationalism that are D’Annunzio’s, telling rather the story of inetti (inept) protagonists who are a far cry from exceptional Ubermenschen. Zeno Cosini, the protagonist of La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923), offers an excellent, early literary portrait of a neurotic in search of a cure. The failure of the middle class to guard against the ‘‘moral sickness’’ of Fascism is surely one of the more classic interpretations available of the rise of the movement in the postwar years. La coscienza di Zeno concludes with an apocalyptic vision of an explosion that will end the world and out of which a new, healthy (which is to say not neurotically paralyzed) world can emerge. Though this vision is vaguely reminiscent of the Futurists’ cries for purgative violence and warfare, it is radically muted and solemn in tone. At the end of the 1920s, Alberto Moravia relates the story of the Ardengo family in Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929), a remarkable portrait of bourgeois apathy. Though Moravia’s characters suffer more from moral than political lethargy, the author’s critique of contemporary Roman society is exemplary. The widow Mariagrazia Ardengo, mother of Michele and Carla, has hidden for years her liaison with Leo Merumeci, a wealthy family friend. The once affluent Ardengos are down on their economic luck and mortgage their villa to Leo. Carla ultimately accepts Leo’s advances, driving Michele to buy a gun and attempt to avenge his sister’s honor. But Michele, like Svevo’s Zeno, botches most of what he tries to accomplish and the novel ends with the ‘‘respectable’’ suturing of upper-class convention: the engagement of Leo and Carla. The apathy of these ‘‘indifferent’’ characters has been seen as a sort of ante litteram existentialism, but also as the precursor to the illness and deviance portrayed in Moravia’s later novel Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951), which depicts the breakdown of Fascist bourgeois identity and the contradictory legacy of Mussolini’s regime. The writings of Alba de Ce´spedes tell a different tale, not only for the way they voice women’s concerns, but also for the role that Fascist censorship played in their publication. Although the majority of her novels follow the fall of the regime, de Ce´spedes’ Nessuno torna indietro (There’s no Turning Back, 1938) is set in Rome of 1934–1936 and portrays the lives of eight young women, who board together in a religious institution. Through her characters, de Ce´spedes traces the many ways 692

in which the regime sought to instrumentalize sex and gender in the interests of sham consensus. Despite that it fell afoul of Fascist censorship, the novel was a bestseller, and within two years of publication was into its 19th edition. During the Fascist period, the leading figure in the theater was Luigi Pirandello, who received financial support from the regime. To say that the tension between the real and the fictional is an allegory for politics under Fascism would be reductive in the extreme and would miss the existential underpinnings (and enduring qualities) of Pirandello’s drama. The writer’s equivocal adherence to the regime in 1924, in the wake of the Matteotti murder, is motivated by the emphasis placed on the imperviousness of faith to any rational proof in his mythical dramaturgy, and the marked emphasis on the subject’s right to believe against all evidence. Nonetheless, there are sure instances of Pirandello distancing himself from Fascism—for instance in La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1928) and La favola del figlio cambiato (The Fable of the Changed Child, 1934), and in the allegorical story ‘‘C’e` qualcuno che ride’’ (Someone’s Laughing)— which mark the progressive rupture between the Sicilian writer and Fascism. Just as Pirandello had been followed by young colleagues such as Massimo Bontempelli and Corrado Alvaro when he joined the Fascist party and broke off his relations with liberal intellectuals, so did his gradual estrangement anticipate a more general process among writers and artists. The case for the state’s explicit intervention into the workings of a performance to achieve a designated end, the glorification of the state itself, is much clearer in the case of a spectacle like 18BL: Teatro di masse per masse (Theater of the Masses for the Masses), staged in Florence’s Cascine Park in April 1934. This avant-garde pageant, which drew its title from the first truck mass-produced by Fiat, celebrated the Italian armed forces and was staged outdoors in something not unlike a military parade. Though the reviews were mixed, the aim of the spectacle was clearly to create support for the increased modernization and mechanization of the armed forces as well as underscore the need for the military in Italy’s colonial campaigns. In three acts, ‘‘18BL’’ narrates the history of Italy even before the first year of the regime (as 1922 was known): Act I celebrates the Italian efforts during World War I; Act II introduces the first years of Fascism; and Act III highlights the regime’s plans to drain the Pontine Marshes and to force national

FASCISM AND LITERATURE regeneration. In any case, the propaganda machine turned more toward new media, from the radio to the cinema to the large open-air parades, than to old literary genres, which are considered of little influence on and marginal to the formation of consensus. The response on the part of the more disparaged genres, that is the novel and drama, occurred along three perspectives. First was the formation of a lively high-bourgeois alliance, on the Hungarian model, between escapist fiction and boulevard theater, exemplified by the works of the Jewish writer Aldo De Benedetti (1892–1970), famous at the time for his popular Due dozzine di rose scarlatte (Two Dozen Red Roses, 1936). Second was the development of alternative models, such as the American society praised in the anthology Americana, which Elio Vittorini published in 1941 in an edition that was immediately seized by the censors. Finally came the surge of minimalist productions and depressing repertoires in the university theaters of the Gioventu` Universitaria Fascista (or GUF), occasioned by the anguish and terror of the looming military defeat and the collapse of the regime in 1943. The promulgation of the racial laws in 1938, which resulted among other things in the expulsion of Jews, both students and teachers, from the schools and from the most prestigious professions, provoked a kind of trauma in intellectual circles that, with the disappearance of any real consensus, paved the way to the counteroffensive of the Resistance a few years later. ELLEN NERENBERG Further Reading Adamson, Walter, ‘‘Modernism and Fascism: The Politics of Culture in Italy, 1903–1922,’’ in American Historical Review, 95, no. 2 (1990): 359–390. Belardelli, Giovanni, Il Ventennio degli intellettuali. Cultura, politica, ideologia nell’Italia fascista, Rome-Bari: 2005. Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Berezin, Mabel, Making of the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1997. Cannistraro, Philip V., La fabbrica del consenso: Fascismo e mass media, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1975. Capristo, Annalisa, L’espulsione degli ebrei dalle accademie italiane, Turin: Zamorani, 2002. De Felice, Renzo, Interpretations of Fascism, translated by Brenda Huff, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977. De Felice, Renzo (editor), Futurismo, cultura, e politica, Turin: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988.

De Grazia, Victoria, The Culture of Consent: The Organization of Mass Leisure in Fascist Italy, New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Dombroski, Robert, L’esistenza ubbidiente: Letterati italiani sotto il fascismo, Naples: Guida Editori, 1984. Fascism and Culture, special issues of Modernism and Modernity, 2, no. 3 (1995) and 3, no. 1 (1996). Forgacs, David (editor), Rethinking Italian Fascism: Capitalism, Populism, Culture, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986. Gallucci, Carole and Ellen Nerenberg (editors), Writing Beyond Fascism: Cultural Resistance in the Life and Works of Alba de Ce´spedes, Cranbury, NJ: FairleighDickinson University Press, 2000. Golsan, Richard (editor), Fascism, Aesthetics and Culture, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992. Isnenghi, Mario, L’educazione dell’italiano: il fascismo e l’organizzazione della cultura, Bologna: Cappelli, 1979. Laclau, Ernesto, ‘‘Fascism and Ideology,’’ in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, and Populism. London: Verso, 1977. Luti, Giorgio, Cronache letterarie tra le due guerre 1920/40, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Luzzatto, Sergio, Il corpo del duce: un cadavere tra immaginazione, storia e memoria, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Meldolesi, Claudio, ‘‘Atti di fede e polemiche al tramonto dei teatri del guf,’’ in Biblioteca teatrale, 21–22 (1978): 91–159. Parlare fascista: Lingua del fascismo, politica linguistica del fascismo, special issue of Movimento operaio e socialista, 7, no. 1 (1984). Pedulla`, Gianfranco, Il mercato delle ide´e: Giovanni Gentile e la Casa editrice Sansoni, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1986. Pedulla`, Gianfranco, Il teatro italiano nel tempo del fascismo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Pickering-Iazzi, Robin (editor), Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘La commedia italiana tra rose scarlatte e littoriali,’’ in Il teatro dei testi. La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Salaris, Claudia, Artecrazia: L’avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo. Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992. Sarfatti, Michele, Mussolini contro gli ebrei: cronaca dell’elaborazione delle leggi del 1938, Turin: Zamorani, 1994. Scarpellini, Emanuela, Organizzazione teatrale e politica del teatro nell’Italia fascista, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1989. Schnapp, Jeffrey, Staging Fascism: 18BL and the Theater of the Masses for the Masses, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Spackman, Barbara, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Sternhell, Zeev, Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France, translated by David Maisel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Sternhell, Zeev, Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, translated by David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.

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FASHION AND LITERATURE

FASHION AND LITERATURE Since the mid-1980s, fashion has become a multidisciplinary field of enquiry that has seen the publication of scholarly work from a variety of disciplines in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Beginning with the classical study Die Mode (1905), by Georg Simmel, fashion has been considered as a manifestation of the ‘‘newness’’ and modernity typically associated with the nineteenth century, the period of the triumph of capitalism. The textile industry, for example, was at the core of both the industrial revolution and colonialism, as well as of the struggle for independence from colonial rule, as in the case of India. We would, however, do well to expand the notion of the modern and the new in order to see how fashion manifested itself in the very early stages of capitalism, a period of deep social and economic transformations. Indeed, fashion lends itself as a signal of such transformations in the sphere not only of the economy, but also those of the world order and culture. In recent years, studies on the relationship between fashion and literature, such as those on authors like Henry James or Honore´ De Balzac and others that focus mainly on French or AngloAmerican writers, are gradually appearing. Although the vestimentary description is part and parcel of the description of the characters in the fiction, we do not yet have either a systematic study that addresses methodological issues regarding the general approach to fashion and literature, or any work in which Italian literature is represented. Even the recently published Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion (2004) does not contain a specific entry on this topic, listing only a number of authors (mainly French) whose writings had a bearing on fashion and modernity, such as Baudelaire, and clothing, appearance, class, taste, and social performance (Balzac, Proust, Mallarme´), whose work is relevant for an understanding of the worldly meanings of clothing in shaping identity, gender, and social class in the new urban space as well as the myriad of micro social spaces as the salon, the opera, or the department store. In the volume the reader finds entries on ‘‘fashion and music’’ or ‘‘fashion and cinema,’’ but not ‘‘fashion and literature.’’ Yet, interestingly enough, Italian literature, although unrepresented in the study on the subject as 694

a whole, can offer insights into understanding the formation of a discourse on fashion and dress during crucial phases in history. Indeed, if we view literary production and its links with visual and material culture through the lens of fashion, we arrive at a new understanding of the relationship between worldliness and the dressed body, as well as the personal and political intricacies embedded in their constant interplay. From such a perspective, it is possible to study the history of culture, while at the same time unpacking the intricacies of that culture in its relation to politics and aesthetics. However, in the case of Italy, interest in fashion does not develop in the nineteenth century, but much earlier, in the early modern period in which we can trace an awareness and theory of clothing of the dressed body that is inscribed in a system of both production and signification that only later would be called ‘‘fashion.’’ The term moda (fashion), in fact, first appears in the Italian lexicon with the publication of Agostino Lampugnani’s La carrozza da nolo (The Rented Carriage, 1645). If moda as a word does not appear to mean ‘‘la cosa degli habiti,’’ as Cesare Vecellio calls it in his Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Old and Modern Clothing of the all World, 1590), the term still has a central role in the economy, culture, and politics of European Renaissance courts and cities. Recent studies on consumption, luxury, the fashion industry, costume, and Italian conduct literature have offered a broader historical span and perspective in the analysis of fashion during the early stages of capitalism and show how fashion, appearance, and dress are not solely contemporary concerns. Fashion as a manifestation of ‘‘newness’’ and desire to ‘‘change’’ manifests itself during the early stages of capitalism in Europe, especially with the expansion and growth of urbanization in the Italian communes. It was in the Middle Ages that, with the gradual development of trade and production of cloth and luxury textiles, the tensions engendered by the ongoing economic and social transformation can be identified. With the gradual development of urban life, it was not only aristocrats who showed concern with their appearance in dress, but also and especially the merging mercantile classes.

FASHION AND LITERATURE These economic, social and cultural transformations engendered two opposite and yet complementary forces that sought to regulate social life, appearances, issues of morality, and decorum. On the one hand, the gradual and steady growth in availability of luxury goods like textiles and jewels, as well as the formation of an urban entrepreneurial middle class who could afford to dress in princely attire; on the other the moralists and state legislators who tried via the sumptuary laws and sermons to control the social body, class mobility, the desire for luxury goods, and any changes in dress, class and gender codes. The main concerns that drove the regulations emanated by local government or the church were of a class, gender, and economic nature. These laws, however, never completely succeeded in creating the order they aimed to establish or maintain. Not only were they not always observed literally, they were also at times creatively interpreted by women in such a way that new styles were invented. This was the case of Nicolosa Sanuti during the fifteenth century, who wrote a letter in response to the Bolognese sumptuary legislations in which she affirms that female dress and ornamentation do not diminish her virtue, but illustrate it. If not yet moda, clothing and dress were very much present as social, moral, political, and economic concerns. Luxurious attire and fabric, especially trains, were furiously condemned in the sermons of medieval preachers such as San Bernardino da Siena as being the earthly manifestation of the devil’s temptations. The texts of this type of legislation that was emanated in Italy and Europe have only recently begun to be studied. Together with the preachers’ sermons and epistolary reactions, as in the case of Sanuti and others, it can constitute an important historical and literary patrimony whose impact will inevitably re-envision the space and borders of the literary canon. In this light, canonical and classical literary texts could be fruitfully reread through the lens of fashion, revealing the social, political, and cultural transformation of the society in and for which it was written. Indeed, the first attempt in the West to theorize dress as an alteration and manipulation of the body was Baldassar Castiglione’s Libro del cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). Castigione’s text is key to an understanding of fashion as a system of signification that works in conjunction with other rhetorical systems such as language. More precisely, clothing in Castiglione’s book is treated as a language and a translation that functions within the rhetoric of words and images and

gives form to a poetics and politics of the dressed self. Reading fashion in Castiglione’s text as the emblematic representation of the Italian bella figura would be limiting ourselves to a sort of stereotypical interpretation. It needs to be emphasized that although clothing plays only a small part in Castiglione’s treatise, it is through its links to language, art, management of the body, and love that, according to Castiglione, clothing becomes a semiotic device and system of signification. In this way, Castiglione’s treatise on conduct and manners can be viewed as a book on method that can be deployed not solely for an understanding of the Italian High Renaissance cultural production, but also to understand the mechanisms regulating dress, appearance, gender, and class in any given social and cultural space. The dynamics described in texts such as Castiglione’s illustrate, in fact, the twofold component of fashion, as was indicated by Roland Barthes in his Le Syste`me de la mode (1967) as being at one and the same time both system and process, institution and individual act, practice and discourse. Literary texts can beautifully represent such mechanisms where fashion acts both as a structure imposed from above or by an elite, and as an event, as Barthes called the personal use of clothing. The figure of the dandy and its different typologies, as in Charles Baudelaire, Thomas Carlyle, and in some instances for Gabriele D’Annunzio, could be interpreted as one of these individual acts that react against and resist the uniformity of fashion. Both fashion and literature deal with issues of translation from one language to another, from image to text. Dress as a material object acquires and enters into a system of signification and a process of communication via its narrative and linguistic articulation. It is through narrative that clothing is somehow spoken and whose aesthetic and ideological charge can communicate meaning/s. Again in the Italian cinquecento, one could think of how a volume like Vecellio’s Habiti antichi e moderni di tutto il mondo combines image and text, and how its interaction and articulation offers several insights to both the scholar of fashion and the scholar of literature. In offering a sort of encyclopedia of how dress works locally and globally, Vecellio also shows how the different languages of dress are translated into geographic and localized practices. He aimed to include in his costume books all the territories—from Europe to the newly discovered American continent. If in the Early Modern period in Italy a number of intellectuals wrote admiringly on what was to 695

FASHION AND LITERATURE become known as fashion, it is beginning with the Enlightenment that writers approach the topic in a far more critical vein. One of these is Giuseppe Parini. Fashion as a sort of both tyrannical and frivolous goddess appears in his Il giorno (1763, 1765, 1801), a text that bears a dedication to fashion. The author depicts the giovin signore, the protagonist, as a spineless aristocrat who is also a fashion victim. The text offers an eloquent and not so glamorous picture of the Milanese aristocracy and wealthy bourgeoisie’s capricious obsession with creating a distinctive taste. Fashion, in Parini’s text, means not just clothes, but furniture, ornaments, cosmetics, and make-up as well as the rituals associated with the toilette, the organization of time and space within noble houses, and fashionable Milanese salons. Parini aimed at showing the waste in time and luxury of a class mainly interested in appearance and social performance as opposed to the need of constructing a laborious bourgeoisie interested in social causes and justice. During the years of the Fascist regime (1922– 1943) language and its rhetorical organization assumed a very important role in conveying the meanings of fashion and its impact on nationalism and the construction of national identity. It is interesting to note the attempt to systematize the language and culture of Italian fashion, for political and propagandistic aims, made by Cesare Meano’s Commentario Dizionario della moda (Commentary Dictionary of Fashion, 1936), commissioned by the Ente Moda. Meano’s text takes as one of its main references the corpus of Italian literature spanning from Dante to Boccaccio, Firenzuola, Pascoli, Carducci, Leopardi, and others in order to make ‘‘visible’’ connections between the creation of an Italian fashion and the tradition of high culture and literature. Meano also eclectically tries to combine elements of popular culture, at the very early stages in Italy then, with those of high culture. Fashion and clothing become in the literary text imbricated in the creation of a discourse on subjectivities, their psyche as well as the social and political world to which they are inherent. One might think, for instance, on how key the description of clothing, uniforms, and dress are in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958). Through them the reader gathers a strong sense of the sartorial competence and expertise in etiquette of the aristocratic author. In addition, dress and uniforms, and even the rustling of women’s gowns, play an important part in the narrative of Il gattopardo and act as a clue to 696

the political and social transformations occurring in the complex process of Italy’s unification. The character of Don Calogero Sedara, epitomizing the new aspiring petit bourgeoisie eager to imitate the modes of dress and manners and therefore the culture of the fading aristocracy, is almost frozen in the act of entering Salina’s palace, described in the novel as being overdressed, and also to have wrongly chosen a local tailor instead of going to London as the aristocrats did for their suits. In Don Calogero’s clumsy manners and his imperfectly cut suit, Tomasi di Lampedusa aims at showing the nouveau riche’s lack of taste that money cannot buy. Another example that can illustrate the relationship between dress, worldliness, and the Italian version of the figure of the dandy is D’Annunzio’s prose. In novels such as Il piacere (The Child of Pleasure, 1889), as well as the letters and articles he published in several newspapers describing the cronaca mondana, D’Annunzio’s fascination with male and female clothing comes to the fore. In his journalistic writings, D’Annunzio painstakingly describes the clothes worn on each occasion (theater, wedding, races) focusing on details of color, fabric, ornamentation, and accessories, as well as on the manners that accompany the social display and their public performance. The description of fabrics and fur are used, for instance, in order to highlight the sensuality or the emotions they provoke on the wearer and the viewers on various occasions. The abundance of French and English terms in D’Annunzio’s descriptions testifies not only to the snobbish attitude of the author, but also of the hegemony of French and English tailoring for the aristocracy and the wealthy middle class. D’Annunzio’s decadent aesthetics epitomize the interaction between fashion and personal use of clothing and their imaginary charge. However, it was Giacomo Leopardi’s Dialogo tra la moda e la morte (‘‘Dialogue Between Fashion and Death,’’ 1824) that early on linked fashion to history. Leopardi’s text, in fact, with its witticisms, went furthest in problematizing the relationship between fashion and modernity and its apparent celebration of life and light. By recognizing its incredible power and the hold it had on people’s lives, Leopardi illustrated fashion’s inherent irrationality. At the same time, similarly to Parini, he extended the notion of fashion beyond clothes to body decoration, tattooing, and piercing. Literature too has its fashions, and here Leopardi quotes the case of Petrarch, considered to be the most in vogue by his contemporaries. Much more, however, is

FASHION AND LITERATURE happening in Leopardi’s dialogue in terms of philosophical investigation and his critique of nineteenth-century historicism and its celebration of progress: He exemplifies his critique through the lens of fashion. In linking fashion and death, he draws attention to the sense of their nonlinear time and narrative that questions the very notion of progress. This is why, in the section dedicated to fashion in his Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcade Project, 1932), Walter Benjamin uses Leopardi’s dialogue as one of the subtexts in his own project to debunk the quasireligious theories of progress and to elaborate analytical tools with which to see through the ‘‘glittering phantasmagoria’’ of capitalist society in full bloom. The use of clothing and fashion in contemporary Italian literature is so massive and all-pervasive as to make it impossible to give anything like a full list. Suffice it to say that many examples like that of Carla, one of the central characters in Alberto Moravia’s novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference, 1929), where the description of the length of her skirt and other details about her suggest her modernity and transgression (of both dress and behavior), could be cited. Among others, writer Clara Sereni (1946–) has mentioned in her journalistic writings how important the creation of an alternative language, such as that of dress and house decoration, has been for women throughout history. In her latest novel Le Merendanze (The Snackdances, 2004), she makes references to the girls’ game of ‘‘giocare a signore,’’ an activity that often bonds female friends together and always involves dressing up. Food also plays a major role in symbolizing human relationships. In conclusion, both the differences and the points of contact in fashioning dress and appearance as well as their history can reveal the specific mechanisms and their narratives of identity regulating a specific culture. Generally speaking, however, Italian authors have dealt more with the theoretical facets of the dressed body that interacted with the worldliness around them as well as remaining more elitist in their literary genre. Whereas French literature has offered a vivid representation of the social world and the psyche of the characters in the form of a very popular form: the novel. Fashion is a unique key with which to open doors onto the social, cultural, and political transformation of a given space (both public and private) at a given historical time whose rhetorical organization is richly embedded in the practices of the literary. EUGENIA PAULICELLI

Further Reading Barthes, Roland, Mythologie, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957; as Mythologies, New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. Barthes, Roland, Le Syste`me de la mode, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967; as The Fashion System, New York: Hill and Wang, 1983. Belfanti, Marco, and Fabio Giusberti (editors), Storia d’Italia: La moda, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Boucher, Francois, and Philippe Bruneau (editors), Le Vetement chez Balzac, Paris: Extraits de la Comedie Humane l’Institut Francais de la Mode, 2001. Bourdieau, Pierre, Distinction: A social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984. Calefato, Patrizia, The Clothed Body, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004. Carter, Michael, Fashion Classics: From Carlyle to Barthes, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2003. Davanzo Poli, Doretta, Abiti antichi e moderni dei veneziani, Venice: Neri Pozza, 2002. Entwistle, Joan, The Fashioned Body, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002. Hollander, Anne, Seeing Through Clothes, Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1993. Jones, Ann Rosalind, and Peter Stallybrass (editors), Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, ‘‘‘Heralds of a Well-Instructed Mind’: Nicolosa Sanuti’s Defense of Women and their Clothes,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 13 (1999): Kovesi Killerby, Catherine, Sumptuary Law in Italy, 1200– 1500, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Lehmann, Ulrich, Tigersprung: Fashion and Modernity, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. Muzzarelli, Giuseppina, Guardaroba Medievale: Vesti e societa dal XIII al XVI secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Fashion: Nation and Narration,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Performing the Gendered Self in Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier and the Discourse on Fashion,’’ in Annalecta Husserliana, (2001): 237–248. Paulicelli, Eugenia, Fashion under Fascism: Beyond the Black Shirt, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘The Rhetoric and Politics of Appearance in the Italian Cinquecento,’’ in Medusa’s Gaze: Essays on Gender, Literature, and Aesthetics in the Italian Renaissance in Honor of Robert Rodini, edited by Jane Tylus, Paul Ferrara, and Eugenio Giusti, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera Press, 2004. Purdy, Daniel L. (editor), The Rise of Fashion, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Schneider, Jane, and Annette Wiener (editors), Cloth and the Human Experience, Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution, 1989. Steele, Valerie, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History, Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998. Steele, Valerie, and J. Eicher (editors), Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, New York: Scribner, 2004. Wilson, Elizabeth, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity, London: Virago, 1985.

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CASSANDRA FEDELE (1465–1558) Widely celebrated by her quattrocento peers for her extraordinary intellect and erudition, Cassandra Fedele stands out today as one of the few women who actively vied for a career as a professional Humanist. Skilled in Latin rhetoric, classical literature, and moral philosophy, Fedele operated outside the traditional enclaves reserved for literati of her gender—the court or the cloister—and competed alongside male Humanists in the public arena. By the age of 23, she had lectured before the University of Padua, secured an invitation to join the Aragonese court of Queen Isabella of Spain, and established epistolary ties to some of the most powerful luminaries of her day. Though her book Ordo scientiarum (The Order of the Sciences) and reputed Latin poetry have vanished without a trace, Fedele’s acclaimed Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto (Oration for Bertucio Lamberto) was published three times within her own lifetime, in Modena (1487), Venice (1488), and Nuremberg (1489). Like her early modern contemporary Laura Cereta (1469–1499), Fedele struggled with the limitations placed on female eloquence and, while her works are largely conventional products of a competent, albeit imitative Humanist, her entrance into the male-dominated world of letters nonetheless represents a singular chapter in the history of Renaissance culture. Little extraliterary material has surfaced pertaining to the life of Cassandra Fedele. Her collected works, presumably only an exemplary fraction of her original output, survive in a single posthumous volume edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini in 1636: Clarissimae Feminae Cassandrae Fedelis venetae. Epistolae et orationes (The Letters and Orations of the Illustrious Venetian Woman Cassandra Fedele). The edition contains 123 letters penned by Fedele and a handful of her distinguished admirers between 1487 and 1498, as well as three of her public orations. Part artist’s portfolio, part idealized autobiography, Cassandra’s epistolario paints the portrait of an ambitious courtier publicizing her professional abilities and connections. Her correspondents included prominent local Humanists such as Giovanni Aurelio Augurello, Bonifacio Bembo, and Niccolo` Leonico Tomeo, famed intellectuals from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florentine circle such as 698

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Angelo Poliziano, chancellor Bartolomeo Scala and his daughter Alessandra, as well as Beatrice d’Este and Lodovico Il Moro, Francesco Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua, Eleonora of Aragon, duchess of Ferrara, Beatrice, queen of Hungary, King Louis XII of France, and other royal personages. Perhaps as a result of Tomasini’s editorial license, the volume lacks any of the devotional poems, amorous verses, and affectionate letters to friends and family that abound in the works of her female contemporaries. In their place we find epistles praising and soliciting patrons for their support and scholars for their recognition—in substance the same sort of material contained in the letterbooks of her male peers. However, her self-consciously mannered style, deferential affectations, and frequent use of diminutives to convey humility and chastity set Fedele apart from other Humanists, betraying the unique challenges faced by an author circumscribed by her gender. Despite her uncommonly long life, Fedele’s career as a Humanist was short-lived. As a child she was schooled by her father, Angelo. By the age of 12 she was already an accomplished Latinist, and, with her father’s support, began to study Greek, rhetoric, philosophy, history, and theology. By 16, she appeared before groups of skeptical male intellectuals eager to test the young girl’s abilities. Now a local celebrity, she publicly engaged in philosophical debates with eminent Humanists associated with the University of Padua, many of whom maintained close epistolary contact with Fedele during the years that followed. The climax of these scholarly exchanges came with the speech delivered before the University of Padua’s academic senate in honor of her cousin Bertucio’s moral and intellectual achievements, the Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto. Already in print the same year it was composed, the oration inaugurated an ephemeral career destined to last no more than a decade. Fedele’s encomium evinced many of the signature elements found in her letters and later orations. By and large it was a conventional example of humanistic epideictic, written in Ciceronian Latin and replete with classical references. It falls

CASSANDRA FEDELE under the rubric of moral philosophy and, in true Renaissance fashion, extolled the power of human reason, eloquence, and philosophical inquiry. The novelty, needless to say, lay in the orator’s gender. As perhaps the first woman ever to step up to the university’s podium, Fedele was eager to secure the goodwill of a male audience and dispel any misogynistic misgivings. Keenly aware of the association of female eloquence with moral laxity, Cassandra began with a self-conscious justification of her gendered presence. She assumed an apologetic tone, repeatedly stressed her virginal temerity and, with extreme deference, begged that her venerable interlocutors excuse the failings of her ‘‘weak’’ female mind. Nevertheless, for all of her alleged modesty, Fedele boldly forged ahead, in effect demonstrating a strength of intellect that her affected words seemed to deny. The publication of the Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto and her ensuing international fame opened up windows of opportunities. Shortly thereafter, doge Agostino Barbarigo invited Fedele to speak before the Venetian Senate on the topic of education. In this second oration, De laudibus literarum (In Praise of Letters), Fedele again sung the praises of man’s rational faculty and the study of the liberal arts, this time, however, momentarily breaking away from hackneyed Humanist arguments to introduce the topic of female learning. As her reputation spread beyond Venice, so too did the prospects of finding patronage. Angelo Poliziano, who personally visited her home in 1491, recommended her to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Queen Isabella of Castile repeatedly entreated Fedele to join her Spanish court. However, unable to travel because of the threat of war or, as some would have it, forbidden by the doge to leave and deprive Venice of one of its most valued ornaments, Fedele’s career soon ground to a halt. Cassandra’s marriage to Giammaria Mapelli around 1497–1499 coincided with the end of her literary activity as we know it. Save for letters requesting monetary assistance addressed to popes Leo X (1521) and Paul III (1547), no mature work by Fedele survives. She waited in obscurity until 1556 when, at the age of 91, the Venetian doge finally beckoned her back into the spotlight to deliver a celebratory oration welcoming the queen of Poland, published by Tomasini as Pro adventu Serenissimae sarmaticae reginae (For the Arrival of Her Majesty of Poland). Standing once more in front of the Venetian Senate, Cassandra Fedele brought her incomparable career as a female Humanist to a close.

Biography Born in Venice to Barbara Leoni and Angelo Fedele, 1465; learned Latin from her father and soon acquired a prodigious command of classical languages and literature; at the age of 12, was sent to further her studies under the Servite monk and Humanist Gasparino Borro; at 22, addressed the academic senate of the University of Padua; some time after her first celebrated speech, Fedele spoke before the Venetian Doge and Senate extolling the benefits of higher education in De laudibus literarum. Corresponded with several prominent local Humanists, intellectuals from Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Florentine circle and numerous European rulers, 1487–1498. Married the physician Giammaria Mapelli, ca. 1497–1499); the union produced no children; after a five-year stay in Crete, returned with her husband to Venice only to lose most of her worldly possessions during a storm at sea and, later that same year, became a widow, ca. 1520; now destitute, she wrote an unanswered letter to Pope Leo X asking for help, 1521; after decades of poverty and poor health, Pope Paul III responded to Fedele’s plea for assistance by naming her the prioress of the orphanage of San Domenico di Castello in Venice, 1547; at the bequest of the doge Francesco Venier, at the age of 91 she delivered what would be her last public speech—an oration welcoming the queen of Poland, Bona Sforza, to Venice in 1556. Died March 24, 1558, and was given a state funeral by the Venetian Republic. SARA ELENA DIAZ Selected Works Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto, 1487. De laudibus literarum (ca. 1488), in Clarissimae feminae Cassandrae Fidelis, venetae. Epistolae et orationes, edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini, 1636. Pro adventu Serenissimae sarmaticae reginae (1556), in Clarissimae feminae Cassandrae Fidelis, venetae. Epistolae et orationes, edited by Jacopo Filippo Tomasini, 1636. Letters and Orations, edited and translated by Diana Robin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Further Reading Cavazzana, Cesira, Cassandra Fedele: erudita veneziana del Rinascimento, Venice: Tipografia Orfanotrofio di A. Pellizzato, 1907. Jardine, Lisa, ‘‘O Decus Italiae Virgo, or The Myth of the Learned Lady in the Renaissance,’’ in The Historical Journal, 28, no. 4 (1985): 799–819. King, Margaret L., ‘‘Book-Lined Cells: Women and Humanism in the Early Italian Renaissance,’’ in Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited

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CASSANDRA FEDELE by Patricia H. Labalme, New York: New York University Press, 1980. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy: Humanists and University Scholars,’’ in Beyond their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, edited by Patricia H. Labalme, New York: New York University Press, 1980. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Cassandra Fedele (1465–1499),’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook,

edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Robin, Diana, ‘‘Cassandra Fedele’s Epistolae (1488–1521): Biography as Effacement,’’ in The Rhetorics of LifeWriting in Early Modern Europe. Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, edited by Thomas Mayer and Daniel Woolf, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

FEELING FOR TIME See Sentimento del tempo (Work by Giuseppe Ungaretti)

FEDERICO FELLINI (1920–1993) After developing early skills as a cartoonist and sketch artist in provincial Rimini, his hometown, the young Fellini moved to Rome in 1939 and began work on the humor magazine Marc’Aurelio, a periodical with an enormous circulation that included many journalists working in the cinema. By writing comic gags, cartoons, serial narratives, and humorous vignettes for this popular magazine, Fellini was introduced to the social circles of Italian cinema and attracted a wide following for his humorous sketches. He also began to write similar material for the national radio network. He also published his first book, a brief narrative entitled Il mio amico Pasqualino (My Friend Pasqualino, 1943) that reflects a precocious reading of Franz Kafka long before that author was popular in Italy. In 1943, he married the actress Giulietta Masina, began scriptwriting in earnest, and befriended Roberto Rossellini, who hired Fellini as one of his scriptwriters for Roma citta` aperta (Open City, 1945), the international hit that announced the birth of Italian neorealism in the cinema and won for Fellini his first of many Oscar nominations (this one for best script). While he wrote a number of 700

important scripts, such as Il cammino della speranza (The Path of Hope, 1950) for Pietro Germi, Senza pieta` (Without Pity, 1948) for Alberto Lattuada, and Persiane chiuse (Drawn Shutters, 1951) for Luigi Comencini, his scripts for Rossellini are most important to the history of the Italian cinema. These include: Paisa` (Paisan, 1946), perhaps the purest example of Italian neorealism, for which he wrote the monastery sequence; Il miracolo (The Miracle, 1948), a controversial work on the meaning of sainthood, in which Fellini made his debut as an actor, and which was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that prohibited censorship of cinematic works on religious grounds; and Europa ’51 (Europe ’51, 1952), one of the first films in postwar Italy that began to move beyond the documentary realism of the neorealist period toward a concern with psychological problems and existentialist themes. Fellini began his career as film director in collaboration with Lattuada on Luci del varieta` (Variety Lights, 1951), initiating a trilogy of works dealing with provincial life including Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) and I vitelloni (I Vitelloni, 1953),

FEDERICO FELLINI his first critically and commercially successful work. These films make up what may be called a ‘‘trilogy of character,’’ since they move beyond the neorealist protagonist defined by his or her economic or social environment and toward characters that are idiosyncratic rather than stereotypical and are formed more by their fantasies and daydreams than by their class or economic condition. In them, Fellini delights in showing how his protagonists wear a social mask that may be torn away at crucial moments in their lives to reveal their true, usually defective personalities underneath. I vitelloni was particularly important to the early films of other younger directors: Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) owes a direct debt to it, as does Lina Wertmu¨ller’s I basilischi (The Lizards, 1963). Fellini reached international fame with a subsequent trilogy of grace, or salvation, treating the fate of innocence in a cruel and unsentimental world: La strada (La Strada, 1954); Il bidone (Il Bidone, 1955); and Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1957). In La strada, Fellini employs an unforgettable performance by Giulietta Masina in an exploration of the meaning of love: a circus strongman (Anthony Quinn) fails to realize just how crucial the slightly daft Gelsomina is to his life until she dies, leaving him filled with remorse. Masina continues her masterful performances (earning her the title ‘‘the female Charlie Chaplin’’) in Le notti di Cabiria, where she portrays a plucky prostitute who never loses hope. This film inspired not only a very successful American musical, Sweet Charity, but also a film by Bob Fosse of the same name. La strada and Le notti di Cabiria aroused the ire of leftist critics in Italy (led by Marxist ideologue Guido Aristarco), who failed to understand that Fellini employed religious notions of conversion and grace for purely secular purposes. The polemical debates that ensued became known as the ‘‘crisis of neorealism,’’ since Fellini was attacked for betraying the principles of a movement for which he had written some of the greatest scripts, while his defenders viewed his departures from what they felt was socialist realism to be a natural development in his creative development. Decades after these films first appeared and the polemics are now footnotes to film history, Fellini’s trilogy of grace may be seen as outstanding examples of how Christian existentialist thought helped to shape the director’s worldview, although imagery and emotions, rather than philosophical arguments, were always Fellini’s trademark. In an abrupt shift in style and perspective, Fellini’s next feature film La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita,

1959) seemed to deny the very hope of changing one’s life that lay at the optimistic center of his second trilogy. La dolce vita also began his lifelong collaboration with actor Marcello Mastroianni and broke all European box-office records. Its very title became synonymous everywhere and in numerous languages with the society life depicted by Rome’s gossip-column photographers, or paparazzi, another word Fellini contributed to the English language. Compared by critics to the sweeping vision of Dante’s Comedy, the film still today has iconic status, and numerous sequences (especially the celebrated Trevi Fountain scene where Anita Ekberg wades into the water with Mastroianni) are constantly recalled in popular culture. Fellini’s vision of the world as devoid of meaningful beliefs and dominated by public relations and society photographers seems even more apt today than when it appeared. Fellini left behind any connection with Italian neorealism with La dolce vita’s Baroque imagery, picaresque plot structure, hundreds of protagonists, exotic sets constructed in the studio, and fanciful costumes. Film critics regard Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963) as Fellini’s masterpiece. It cast Mastroianni as a film director very much like Fellini. The high modernist aesthetics of Otto e mezzo became emblematic of the very notion of free, uninhibited artistic creativity to which European art film directors aspired, and it is no accident that this work has attracted the admiration and even imitation of numerous directors. In the wake of this film’s enduring critical success, Fellini’s name would become firmly linked to the vogue of the postwar European art film, even though he was one of the few non-American directors who could be counted upon by his producers to make money at the box office. When the popularity of that particular form of cinema waned, so, too, did Fellini’s critical reputation and commercial success. After Otto e mezzo, Fellini’s films move more and more toward a private fantasy world of his own invention. Beginning with Le tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (The Temptations of Doctor Antonio, 1962), one episode in Boccaccio ’70, and continuing with Toby Dammit (1968), one episode in Tre passi nel delirio (Spirits of the Dead), and Fellini Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon, 1969), the director combined a dream-like cinematic language with original uses of color photography. In Fellini Satyricon, he showed a particular talent for exploiting Italy’s most accomplished set designers in his oneiric version of the Latin classic by Petronius. Roma (Fellini’s Roma, 1971) provided a personal 701

FEDERICO FELLINI portrait of the Eternal City, including much autobiographical material; and it contains a number of unforgettable sequences, most notably an over-thetop ecclesiastical fashion parade. La dolce vita, Fellini Satyricon, and Roma may be seen as another trilogy in Fellini’s long career, this one dedicated to the mythology of Rome. Amarcord (Amarcord, 1973) created a nostalgic portrait of Fellini’s provincial adolescence during the Fascist ventennium. Nevertheless, its grotesque caricature of the kind of conformity that produced Fascism in Italy stands as one of the most trenchant indictments of that period, far more successful than many ideological attacks from a Marxist perspective, a point of view that was typical of other directors of the same period (Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci). Amarcord was Fellini’s last boxoffice hit and unanimously critically acclaimed work. The films he produced from that time until his death met with increasingly hostile resistance with both audiences and critics, although at the same time his cinema became the object of serious study in the academic world. Eventually, even Fellini had difficulty finding financing for his work. The sumptuous Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, 1976), a neglected masterpiece, disappointed simple-minded viewers who expected pornography about the archetypal Latin Lover instead of a brooding, melancholy meditation on the meaning of sex and death. La citta` delle donne (The City of Women, 1980) was condemned by feminist critics even though the director himself accepted the crucial feminist objection to his films—that they projected his male fantasies upon female figures. Fellini believed that this was the film in which he employed the language of dreams most successfully. E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On, 1983) tackled an unusual subject in Fellini’s cinema, grand opera, and offered a humorous portrait of opera singers on an ocean voyage on a ship of fools. Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred, 1985) shows Fellini as a determined critic of commercial television and the imbecilic audiences for quiz shows and nonsense that it has created. The most successful of his late films, Intervista (Interview, 1987), returns to the subjects treated in Otto e mezzo: Fellini himself stars in this film about the nature of creativity in filmmaking. Fellini’s final feature film, La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, 1989), once again offers a critique of mass media. Fellini’s mature cinematic style treats a variety of postmodern topics: the relationship of music and creativity, the role of television in contemporary life, the nature of artistic creativity, and the growing homogenization of popular culture. 702

During the last years of his life, Fellini made three television commercials for Barilla pasta, Campari Soda, and the Banco di Roma. They are extraordinary lessons in cinematography and reveal not only his genius but also his grasp of popular culture. He also exhibited his sketches and cartoons, many of which were taken from his private dream notebooks, thus uncovering the source of much of his artistic creativity, the unconscious. Fellini received numerous honors during his lifetime. He garnered 23 nominations for Oscars in various categories (eight of which were successful); a special fifth Oscar for his career achievement (1993); the Golden Lion Career Award from the Venice Film Festival (1985), as well as a special lifetime achievement award in that same year from the Lincoln Center; and dozens of prizes from the world’s most prestigious film festivals. In 1992, a poll of international film directors conducted by Sight and Sound magazine ranked Fellini as the most significant film director of all time and cited two of Fellini’s works (La strada, Otto e mezzo) in a list of 10 masterpieces that had the most profound influence upon them and the history of the cinema. Fellini’s funeral in Rome was a national event, with throngs of people in attendance. Thousands filed by his coffin in the huge Studio 5 of his beloved Cinecitta`, renamed Studio Fellini in his honor. The Fondazione Federico Fellini has been established in Rimini to support the study and further dissemination of his work with a journal, Federico Fellini Amarcord. Fellini’s death was rightly seen by Italians as the end of a great era of artistic creativity in their national cinema. His works have influenced such very different directors as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Greenaway, Ettore Scola, Lina Wertmu¨ller, Giuseppe Tornatore, Franc¸ois Trauffaut, Bob Fosse, Woody Allen, Nanni Moretti, and Spike Jonze. Film directors have always admired his works more than film critics, although during his long career Fellini had as his supporters some of the most distinguished essayists on the cinema, including Andre´ Bazin, Tullio Kezich, and numerous other seminal writers on the European art cinema. During his long professional career, Federico Fellini’s name came to be synonymous with cinematic creativity itself.

Biography Born in Rimini to Urbano Fellini, a traveling salesman, and Ida Barbiani, of middle-class extraction,

FEDERICO FELLINI 20 January 1920. Moved to Rome in 1939 to work as a journalist for several magazines, especially Marc’Aurelio, and begins scriptwriting. Marries actress Giulietta Masina 30 October 1943; their only child dies in 1945 after living only a few weeks. Begins film direction in 1951 and wins his first Oscar for La strada in 1956; subsequent Oscars awarded for Le notti di Cabiria (1957), Otto e mezzo (1964); and Amarcord (1974); with a fifth Oscar for his entire career (1993). Died of complications from a stroke in Rome, 31 October 1993. PETER BONDANELLA Selected Works Films Luci del varieta` (Variety Lights), 1951. Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), 1952. I vitelloni (I Vitelloni, The Young and the Passionate, The Spivs), 1953. La strada (La Strada), 1954. Il bidone (Il Bidone, The Swindle), 1955. Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria), 1957. La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita), 1959. Otto e mezzo (8½), 1963. Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits), 1965. Fellini Satyricon (Fellini’s Satyricon, based on Petronius), 1969. I clowns (The Clowns), 1970. Roma (Fellini’s Roma), 1972. Amarcord (Amarcord), 1973. Casanova (Fellini’s Casanova, based on Giacomo Casanova’s Storie della mia vita), 1976. Prova d’orchestra (Orchestra Rehearsal), 1979. La citta` delle donne (City of Women), 1980. E la nave va (And the Ship Sails On), 1983. Ginger e Fred (Ginger and Fred), 1985. Intervista (Interview), 1988. La voce della luna (The Voice of the Moon, based on the novel Il poema dei lunatici by Ermanno Cavazzoni), 1990.

Screenplays Le notti di Cabiria (with Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli), Bologna: Cappelli, 1957. Quattro film: I Vitelloni, La dolce vita, 8½, Giulietta degli spiriti, Turin: Einaudi, 1963. Fellini-Satyricon, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969. Fellini Tv: Block-notes di un regista, I clowns, Roma, Bologna: Cappelli, 1972. Il Casanova di Fellini (with Bernardino Zapponi), Turin: Einaudi, 1976; as Fellini’s Casanova, translated by Claudia Cremasco, 1997. Il primo Fellini: Lo sceicco bianco, I Vitelloni, La strada, Il bidone, edited by Renzo Renzi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1979. Prova d’orchestra, Milan: Garzanti, 1980. La citta` delle donne, Milan: Garzanti, 1980. E la nave va, Milan: Longanesi, 1983. Moraldo in the City & A Journey with Anita, edited and translated by John C. Stubbs, Urbana-Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

Ginger and Fred, Milan: Garzanti, 1986. ‘‘8½’’: Federico Fellini, Director, edited by Charles Affron, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. ‘‘La Strada’’: Federico Fellini, Director, edited by Peter Bondanella and Manuela Gieri, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. La voce della luna, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

Writings La mia Rimini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1967. Fare un film, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Block-notes di un regista, Milan: Longanesi, 1987.

Further Reading Bertozzi, Marco (editor), BiblioFellini, vols. 3, Rimini: Fondazione Federico Fellini, 2002–2004. Bondanella, Peter (editor), Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Bondanella, Peter, The Cinema of Federico Fellini, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992; as Il cinema di Federico Fellini, Rimini: Guaraldi Editore, 1994. Bondanella, Peter, and Cristina Degli-Esposti, (editors), Perspectives on Federico Fellini, New York: Macmillan, 1993. Burke, Frank, and Marguerite R. Waller (editors), Federico Fellini: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Constantini, Costanzo (editor), Conversations with Fellini, San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996. Grazzini, Giovanni (editor), Federico Fellini: Intervista sul cinema, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1983. Kezich, Tullio, Federico: Fellini, la vita e i film, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002. Rohdie, Sam, Fellini Lexicon, London: British Film Institute, 2002. Verdone, Mario, Federico Fellini, Milan: Editrice Il Castoro, 1994.

OTTO E MEZZO, 1963 A Film by Federico Fellini

Otto e mezzo (8½) is the benchmark film by Federico Fellini, the work that justifies his status as a master and continues to reward the spectator after numerous screenings. Besides a host of awards (including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1987), a panel of professionals from 18 European nations named Otto e mezzo the best European film ever 703

FEDERICO FELLINI made. The film occupies an important role in the director’s complete works, not only because of its autobiographical links to Fellini’s own life but also because it focuses upon the very nature of artistic creation in the cinema. Otto e mezzo explores a personal fantasy world that deals self-reflexively with cinema itself. Fellini’s black and white photography created by Gianni Di Venanzo, one of the greatest directors of photography, is an expressionistic black and white that captures the essence of the irrational quality of the dream state. The protagonist, a film director named Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni), has obvious affinities to Fellini himself. The film’s narrative focuses upon the complex fantasy life of Anselmi, who is in the midst of a crisis of inspiration and creativity, not unlike one Fellini himself experienced at the beginning of work on the film. Fellini has described the gestation of Otto e mezzo as a series of false starts, culminating in his writing of a letter to his producer to call off the entire project even while actors had been selected and crew members were constructing the sets. At that precise moment, one of the crew invited Fellini to share a bottle of champagne to celebrate the creation of what he predicts will become a ‘‘master piece.’’ Embarrassed by his insecurity and the responsibility of putting all these men out of work, Fellini thought of himself as a ship’s captain abandoning his crew. Suddenly, the inspiration came to him in a flash: The film would focus upon a director who no longer knows what film he is making. Otto e mezzo contains approximately 40 major episodes, numerous sequences, and more than 53 main characters (not counting the minor figures, including the entire crew shooting the film that appears in the film’s celebrated ending). Otto e mezzo was shot almost entirely inside a studio on huge and imaginative sets and combines innumerable episodes with a strict control of the overall narrative. Fellini avoids the traditional seamless storyline of the classic Hollywood film, his visual images held together by dream and fantasy sequences. The result is one of the most convincing stream-ofconsciousness narratives ever created, a storyline controlled by the subjective perspective of its director-protagonist that jumps quickly from the ‘‘real’’ world of a spa, where Guido has gone to take the cure for a failing inspiration to his dreams, to waking fantasies, and to memories of his past back to his childhood, an infancy characterized by a strict

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Catholic upbringing and a repression of sexual desire. It is most certainly not a film based upon improvisation: Only an ironclad script, as scriptwriter Tullio Pinelli once described it, could have brought such magnificent artistic order out of such a chaotic mix of diverse materials. The film Guido seems unable to make is a science fiction film about the launching of a rocket ship from earth after a thermonuclear holocaust destroys civilization. A huge rocket-launching pad that seems to have no purpose provides a concrete metaphor of Guido’s creative impasse. During the many encounters at the spa resort Guido has with his producer, his potential actors, and his production staff, he also finds time for a tryst with his mistress Carla (Sandro Milo), a marital crisis with his estranged wife (Anouk Aime´e), and a number of embarrassing exchanges with a French intellectual named Daumier (Jean Rougeul), who mercilessly attacks Guido for his artistic confusion, his puerile symbolism, his ideological incoherence, and his lack of any intellectual structure in the film Guido has proposed to make. In Otto e mezzo, Fellini makes no pronouncements, presents no theories about art, and avoids the heavy intellectualizing about the nature of the cinema that characterizes so much academic discussion in recent years. For Fellini, the cinema is a visual medium whose emotive power moves through light, not words. The unforgettable carousel that concludes Otto e mezzo is the perfect modernist image for Fellini’s major preoccupation: free artistic creativity. PETER BONDANELLA

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, The Films of Federico Fellini, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Boyer, Deena, The Two Hundred Days of ‘‘8½,’’ New York: Garland, 1978. Fellini, Federico, ‘‘8½’’ di Federico Fellini, edited by Camilla Cederna, Bologna: Cappelli, 1975. Fellini, Federico, ‘‘8½’’: Federico Fellini, Director, edited by Charles Affron, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987. Perry, Ted, Filmguide to ‘‘8½,’’ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. Sesti, Mario, and Andrea Crozzoli (editors), ‘‘8½’’: Il viaggio di Fellini—Fotografie di Gideon Bachmann, Pordenone: Cinemazero, 2003.

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM The year 1970 is considered the foundational year of Italian neofeminism. In Rome that year, Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, and Elvira Banotti gave life to Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt) and Serena Castaldi created the group Anabasi in Milan. At the time there already existed groups such as Demau in Milan, founded by Daniela Pellegrini and Lia Cigarini in 1965 (the group’s name was formed by abbreviating ‘‘demistificatione autoritarismo patriarcale’’ (‘‘demystification of patriarchal authoritarianism’’); in Trentino, Il Cerchio Spezzato (The Broken Circle); and the group based in Turin, Collettivo delle Compagne (Collective of Women Comrades) of the Comunicazioni Rivoluzionarie (Revolutionary Communications). Indeed, in 1970, the idea of self-awareness was imposed: feminist practice aimed to change women’s relationships with the world, beginning with the self and with personal relationships between women, a practice already promoted by certain groups in the United States (Anabasi published some texts from the American movement in 1972 in Donna e` bello). The radical wing thus attempted to underline its novelty, while another type of feminism remained tied to the left (old and new) to the movements of 1968 and resulting social struggles. Nevertheless, beyond relationships of discontinuity/ continuity with those political situations, one cannot set aside the general climate of the end of the 1970s, which saw the emergence of a new, rebellious subject. This new subject’s ex novo birth was also perceived with respect to preceding history, including both female participation in the anti-Fascist Resistance and organizations like the Unione Donne Italiane (UDI) tied to the Communist Party, and the more distant history of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism. Achievement of rights was considered not only insufficient but misleading with respect to the objectives of feminine freedom. This is a drastic judgment compared with the emancipationists of the past, although these figures will be revisited, thanks to the discovery of complex links between requests for equality and perception of difference, which exist in feminism from the beginning. In 1974, Carla Lonzi (1931–1982) published Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel), the first

book of Italian feminism. Her work opened a breach in the ‘‘Marxist blackmail’’ of women and in the patriarchal foundation of politics, fully aware that ‘‘between woman and man is the basic difference in humanity.’’ The next step for feminism, strictly correlated to this first, involved the role that women develop in sexual relationships. The vaginal woman, complementary to man, is opposed to the clitoral woman, sexually and culturally autonomous. Self-awareness, which is at the heart of Rivolta Femminile throughout its history, considers to be inseparable life and thought, experience and writing, public and private, awareness of self and elaboration of a new vision of the world: The subject of the moment is understood without theoretical mediations that condition its meaning. For Carla Lonzi ‘‘the blockage must be forced one by one: This is the necessary passage for the birth of individuality, the presupposition for any change’’ (Marta Lonzi, Anna Jaquinta, and Carla Lonzi, La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo, 1978). This point was made forcefully when Rivolta Femminile clarified its position in the feminist movement, taking an anti-ideological stance that refuted the short cuts of traditional politics, even when practiced by women, and considered individual self-awareness (necessary in order to live authentically) the true testing ground. Thus Lonzi’s diary, Taci, anzi parla (Be Quiet, No, Speak, 1979) can be read as a nonideological philosophical treatise, and as a drama of feminine awareness in the world. Vai pure (Go Ahead, 1980), which explains her romantic relationship with Pietro Consagra, shows the clash of two cultures: that of the woman who ‘‘vive se stessa nel rapporto’’ (lives herself within the relationship) but wants the ‘‘qualita` del suo sentire’’ (quality of her feeling) to be recognized, and that of man, whose life is centered around social productivity and his needs, demanding the privilege of being accompanied and encouraged by his female partner. Departing from the need to be more directly effective and to be recognized at the social and cultural level, some feminists of the Collettivo di via Cherubini (formed in 1972 to promote comparisons between self-knowledge groups), and in particular those of Group 4 (of which Lia Cigarini was 705

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM part), make the ‘‘pratica di fare tra donne’’ (practice of doing among women) central to their project. Thus in 1975 the Libreria delle donne (Women’s Bookstore) is born in Milan, with Luisa Muraro (1940–) as its primary point of reference. It becomes a place where the ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ (the theory that advocates ‘‘thinking sexual difference’’) was elaborated and from which such thought radiated, as in the magazine Sottosopra. At the same time that theories ‘‘reassuring on the topic of a ‘feminine difference,’’’ were affirmed, and selfknowledge, still central for Rivolta Femminile, was set aside, the ‘‘Pratica dell’inconscio’’ (‘‘Unconscious Practice’’) was being developed (Lea Melandri, Una visceralita` indicibile, 2000). Psychoanalytic practice between women is used as a revolutionary tool for treating sexuality and relationships, maternity, and lesbianism (in connection with the group Politique et Psycanalyse). At this point in feminist practice, it seems necessary to dig deep into the life of the individual in order to see what transpires and remains unsaid, and to deepen the relationship between unconscious and conscience without, however, isolating personal affairs from the rest of existence. Between 1976 and 1977, the group Sessualita` e Scrittura (Sexuality and Writing) is born around this belief, primarily at the initiative of Lea Melandri (1941–). Melandri had already taken part in the antiauthoritarian pedagogical experiment that developed around the magazine L’erba voglio directed by Elvio Fachinelli, and later the project of the so-called ‘‘150 Hours.’’ In this last, thanks to the recognition of workers’ right to 150 hours of instruction, feminist intellectuals offer courses for women workers and housewives on the themes of the body, health, the family, and working conditions, creating a profitable exchange of knowledge and experience. In 1977, Melandri wrote L’infamia originaria: Facciamola finita con il cuore e la politica (Original Infamy: Let’s Cut out Heart and Politics), one of the most important texts of Italian feminism. The text, as the subtitle explains, seeks to cut out the swing between heart (and the search for an absolute, dual fusion) and politics, symptom of an ‘‘original’’ action that neatly separated nature and culture, mind and body, personal and political. The search for a nonliterary, nonpsychoanalytical language with which to speak of interiority, of the body, of sexuality, of dreams, brings Melandri to direct interest toward ‘‘scritture d’esperienza’’ (writing about experience) as a way to get closer to oneself, different from literature as ‘‘forma del raccontare di se´’’ (a form of recounting oneself). 706

The original event of the sexes marks the lives of women and men in different ways: It is an underground world of dreams, drives, and images, preserved in its intimacy and far from the historical scene that connotes the imaginary. Nostalgia for these origins brings the daughter to dream of a harmonious reassembling with the other, a dream of love; the son, instead, establishes a relationship of domination over the sex that for him represents the place of origin. These nagging theoretical meditations and the need to again go over the feminist past (its history, its languages) bring Melandri to create, in collaboration with others, the Libera Universita` delle Donne di Milano (Free University of Women in Milan) and the journal Lapis: Percorsi della riflessione femminile (1987–1997); and, on a more personal level, to encounter the writing of Sibilla Aleramo. There is significant theoretical support for feminism that privileges social practice in some texts, above all in La coscienza di sfruttata (Awareness of Exploitation, 1972), born of the group Il Cerchio Spezzato. They sustain that through this awareness of exploitation, woman is able to identify in capitalism the final contradiction of that patriarchal system that relegated her to her caste, in which she lives ‘‘equal conditions across all classes, and maximum dispersion in all the classes,’’ excluded from the world and excluded from herself (Ferri Abba` et al., La coscienza di sfruttata, 1972). Maria Rosa Dalla Costa’s Potere femminile e sovversione sociale (Feminine Power and Social Subversion, 1973) conducts an in-depth analysis of domestic work as production and reproduction of the workforce, a theme taken up by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli (1946–), who in Disoccupata con onore (Unemployed with Honor, 1975) gives voice to the women of the south. Chiara Saraceno’s Dalla parte della donna (On Women’s Side, 1971) recognizes in the family the site of the specific contradiction lived by women and defines female existence in terms of social roles. In 1973, together with Laura Balbo (who is the president), Franca Bimbi, Marina Piazza, Simonetta Piccone Stella, Renate Siebert, Silvia Vegetti Finzi, and others found the Gruppo di Ricerca sulla Famiglia e la Condizione Femminile or Griff (Research Group on the Family and the Female Condition). Instead, the Gruppo Femminista per una Medicina delle Donne (Feminist Group for a Women’s Medicine) focused its analysis on the reproductive role of the female body and, with the pamphlet Anticoncezionali dalla parte della donna (Contraceptives on Women’s Side) responded to the need to know one’s own body and control

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM fertility. With the help of the Movimento di Liberazione della Donna or MLD (Women’s Liberation Movement), born in the Radical Party, antiviolence centers were established. There then emerged Piu` donne che uomini, published in Sottosopra (More Women Than Men, 1983), and Non credere di avere dei diritti (Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, 1987) collectively signed by the Libreria delle donne, which are amongst the most important theoretical texts of the Italian feminist movement and also amongst the most discussed. The philosophy of difference, inspired by the theoretical work of Luce Irigaray, considers being sexed differently to be an original, unavoidable fact, as a ‘‘common symbolic [that] allows the individuation of a feminine place in which, and only in which, differentiating between women makes sense and lends richness’’ (Adriana Cavarero, ‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale,’’ 1987). One of the work’s main novelties and primary points of discussion is the affirmation of the theory of ‘‘affidamento’’ (entrustment), which refutes the egalitarian feminist convictions and ‘‘the social poverty of the feminine condition.’’ In fact, having ascertained that ‘‘feminine will to social existence fails for lack of an adequate and symbolic mediation,’’ they elaborate a new project that consists in ‘‘practicing inequality between women and entrusting herself to one like herself, in order to measure herself in the world.’’ The figure of the ‘‘symbolic mother’’ is central, redefining the mother-daughter relationship beyond the sphere of the ‘‘natural’’ and the individual: She is the origin, mediation, and horizon of sexual thought; she legitimates sexual difference and creates the conditions that allow conflicts provoked by inequality to transform them into conquests of freedom, thanks to the social pact stated between generations, between ‘‘the woman who wants and the woman who knows.’’ The Libreria delle donne defined itself as the ‘‘generation of female freedom,’’ and from this point of view reread the history of feminism from 1966 to 1986, giving an image of progress. In the introduction to the 1990 American edition of Non credere di avere dei diritti, Teresa De Lauretis defines ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ as original and audacious, but also identifies some contradictory or debatable points, including the definition of a unified subject, which fails to recognize racial difference or lesbianism; or that of an unbalanced maternal on the symbolic level, an image that works to the detriment of imaginary contents. On the other hand, Emma Baeri (1942–) has recently

underlined the paradox of thought that uses a lexicon taken from economics, refuting emancipationism, and hypothesizes a ‘‘feudal’’ model of relationships among women. In Piu` donne che uomini, there recur ‘‘words unfamiliar to our ears at the time: a significant dual rapport, unequal because it is formulated on mother/daughter relationships, and on the refinement of a desire to win in corporate society through the conquest of a visible ease, of which trust, an inevitably feudal word, was the means and the ends.’’ This represents the failure, on one hand, of the revolutionary tie instituted by neofeminism between politics and sexuality, and, on the other, of the original tie between feminism and democracy, in the disavowal of 200 years of struggle that began with the De´claration des droits de la femme et de la Citoyenne by Olympe de Gouges, in 1791 (Emma Baeri, Noi, utopia delle donne di ieri, memoria delle donne di domani, 2001). At the end of the 1970s and in the next decade, another change occurred. From the first phase of feminism, characterized by processes of coming of awareness and of wide-ranging theoretical reflection, as well as by significant political results (one might think of the fight for the legalization of abortion and for the penalization of those who commit sexual violence), a new phase was reached, defined as ‘‘femminismo diffuso’’ or defused feminism. It seems that the thought elaborated in the previous unrest is not oriented toward the development of new theories, but to the needs for critical conscience, memory, and transmission, needs that favor the birth or consolidation of instruments like publishing houses (from the largest, La Tartaruga, which publishes both essays and literary works, to the very small, such as Beatrix V.T., with its art books); periodicals, with many based in Rome, like Effe, Legendaria (originally connected to Noi donne), Orsaminore, Reti, and Quotidiano donna; political places: from the Roman center DWF to the Milanese Centro Studi Storici per il Movimento di Liberazione delle Donne in Italia (Center for Historical Studies of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Italy) founded by Elvira Badaracco; from Turin’s Produrre e Riprodurre (Produce and Reproduce) to the Centro Donna del Comune (Center for Women of the Commune) in Venice, to the Centro Studi Condizione della Donna (Center for Studies of the Condition of Women) in Naples. In Rome, in 1979, the Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf (Virginia Woolf Cultural Center) opened, a separatist space open to all, directed toward critical reflection on the dominant culture and the diffusion of feminist ideas with particular attention to 707

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM relationships between generations, but also introducing the figure of the teacher. In 1988, as Alessandra Bocchetti remarked, the ‘‘rift, which showed itself between a politics understood as a place of selfformation and self-promotion and a politics, instead, that believed in the changing powers of feminine subjectivity, manifests itself’’ clearly (Cosa vuole una donna, 1995). Monographic courses were substituted by research groups led by women whose theoretical work aimed to a ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ in a flexible space and open to various specializations, working closely with the Libreria delle donne and in dialectic with the Communists. Thus, Bocchetti explained the rift that will bring her to preside over the Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf B, while the Group A, with Francesca Molfino, proceeded along the original line of investigating women’s relationship with culture, taking as referent the body and as mode of knowledge separatism. In Bologna, a group of intellectuals with various skills, active within and outside of the university, united in the form of the Associazione Orlando, seeking to evidence in its name the value of metamorphosis. In 1984, it gave life to the Centro di Documentazione, Ricerca e Iniziativa delle Donne (Women’s Documentation, Research, and Initiative Center), a public women’s institution, tied by custom to the commune and presided over by Raffaella Lamberti. The center, taking Hannah Arendt’s concept that politics must deal with the issues of cohabiting among different groups as its own, defined itself as a space open to hospitality and to communication in all its forms (including virtual and mediatic). It focused on individual subjectivity and skills, but since the individual exists in oscillation between individuality and collectivity, it constructed an international network, both to promote exchanges between different feminist groups and to ‘‘visit difficult places,’’ where bloody conflicts are underway, and thus the very roots of survival and of convivial, collective life are in question. New issues and new cognitive demands born in neofeminism provoke the development of a sector of study that—moving from criticism to the epistemological foundations of the disciplines—brings concepts, methods, and interpretative paradigms into discussion and occupies itself with subjects neglected or treated without attention to difference. This began first in the separate spheres of women and, from the 1980s, within institutions, first and foremost in the universities, although there was a certain difficulty in institutionalizing these studies. In Anglo-Saxon terms, these are called women’s 708

studies, and they sustain that the feminist point of view constitutes a theoretical form of criticism and an alternative institution of knowledge. Rosi Braidotti (1954–) contributed definitively to the birth of this field of study, practically speaking, tied as she is to a strong engagement in the area of generational transmission, and with her reflections on the internationalism of woman as nomadic subject and (in our societies characterized by a series of foreign subcultures), a migrant one. Alongside the philosophical community Diotima, which elaborated the Pensiero della differenza, there appeared various other societies in Italy. The Societa` Italiana delle Storiche (Italian Association of Women Historians) was born in 1989, with two magazines at its back: DWF (an interdisciplinary publication) and Memoria: Rivista di storia delle donne that refers to women’s history in its subtitle. It was preceded by two significant conferences: In the first, the category of patronage was proposed as an instrument for the analysis of the power inequalities existent between the two sexes, revealing the inadequacy of the schema man-oppressor/woman-oppressed; in the second, participants took stock of Italian women’s production in various disciplinary contexts, from anthropology to economics, from psychoanalysis to social sciences. The Societa` deals primarily with the topic of the subjectivity of the historian and the relationship between the political practice of ‘‘partire da se´’’ (starting with oneself) and the methods of historiography. Amongst the women historians who have introduced important problematics into the feminist debate, several should be noted. Gianna Pomata defined the history of women as a ‘‘questione di confine’’ (question of borders) and analyzed the relationship between women and the disciplines of history and medicine; Luisa Passerini worked on subjectivity and memory in relation to political history; Annarita Buttafuoco and Anna Rossi-Doria studied emancipationism and suffragism with the emergence of the concept of feminine citizenship. This concept was confronted by the philosopher Maria Luisa Boccia in the context of neofeminism and the relationship between political and sexual rights. Adriana Cavarero (1947–) is notable in the philosophical realm for her original role as founder of the Diotima community, from which she distanced herself in 1990. As a scholar of Hannah Arendt, she brings to light the categories of birth, uniqueness, action, and narration. As a theorist of a sexual pensiero della differenza aimed at the deconstruction of Western texts, she counterposes the abstract

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM philosophical subject and the fragmented postmodern subject with the corporeal and sexed concreteness of the human being in her uniqueness and in her relationships; she confronts philosophically the themes of the body, of narration, of voice. As she writes in Corpo in figure (Stately Bodies, 1995), since antiquity, politics has driven the body away from its foundational categories but has figured its own order via the metaphor of the body. Pregnant examples include Sophocles’ Antigone, with the threatening figure of a body buried alive by the polis outside of its walls, and, passing into modernity, Shakespeare’s Ophelia, with her nonpolitical body substantiated by the water in which she drowns. In terms of narration, she responds to an insuppressible human need to recount and listen to stories (Who am I? Who are you?), contributing to the radical re-edification of ethics and politics. Vocal expression is also relational, communicating beyond the logocentric system of the word, and also communicating other things. Only in recent years has the theoretical contribution of lesbianism to feminism become visible. Three important moments are notable in a historical reconstruction of this past: Gli anni Settanta: Uscire Fuori! (The 1970s: Come Out!), referring to the monthly publication Fuori and to the organization of lesbians as such first within the homosexual movement, finally arriving at a separatist philosophy; Anni ’80: Dalla costola del femminismo (The 1980s: From the Rib of Feminism), indicating the emergence from clandestinity, the Carta dei diritti della Donna Lesbica (Bill of Rights of Lesbian Woman); Anni ’90: La settimana lesbica e il ritorno in piazza (The 1990s: The Lesbian Week and the Return to the Piazza), noting the moment when Arci Lesbica is born in 1996 and one talks of the new lesbian. This condition fuori campo, as outsider, finds its best expression in the thought of Teresa De Lauretis (1938–), a scholar of feminist writing and founder of the publishing house Estro. De Lauretis developed such key concepts as that of the ‘‘Eccentric Subject,’’ a form of subjectivity constructed via multiple practices of identification and difference (of race, ethnicity, class, age, and religion), and a conception of identity as a process of continual disidentification. Lesbianism, defined as ‘‘perverse desire’’ in a literal sense (taking another path), constitutes an autonomous space that, on the feminist horizon, invests the sociosymbolic sphere as well as the sexual one. It can thus realize a conception of queer, of revindicated nonnormality. Taking into account the fact that ‘‘if feminist lesbianism subsumes sexuality in

gender, queer subsumes gender in a broadened notion of sexuality, since it considers the production of hetero/homosexuality primary’’ (Liana Borghi, ‘‘Insegnare il queer,’’ 2000). An important theoretical contribution comes from the reflection on rights, based not on a logic of identity but based on many differences that characterize the actual world. Being subject to the law means in fact revindicating sexual autonomy without implying material and symbolic exclusion, allowing visibility and freedom of expression, access to resources and to power. Sexual discrimination, like other forms of discrimination, is a political problem: In this sense, the rights of lesbians are human rights, equal to those of migrants and the poor. This way of thinking has also stimulated a renewed discussion of the feminine and the masculine, demonstrating that gender is performance, masking. Analyzing and interpreting the apparatuses of technological and ideological production and the codes of representation, which create a large part of the social imagery, is also an important part of subjectivity, a necessary practice for marginal subjects, lesbian or otherwise. These practices are nourished by literature and nourish literature via both critical rereadings of the canon and other noncanonical works, and by way of new writings. The relationship with the theater, however, bears particular consideration, since it is marked by the status of actresses as protagonists. On the stage, the sex of actors and actresses and the sex of the character do not necessarily coincide, and gender is evidenced as a construct, while the ‘‘fare come se si fosse un’altra persona’’ (acting as if one were another person) implies a continuous process of disidentification and return to oneself in what becomes both a physical and mental nomadism (Laura Mariani, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette e l’arte del travestimento, 1996). The actress is historically a figure on the margins, ‘‘donna simile a donna’’ (a woman similar to a woman), who in practice pursues the overcoming of the body/mind dualism. She thus contributes to the elaboration of another language, both because of the centrality of her body and voice, and for the symbolic and experimental nature of the language of the stage. Various experiences favor theoretical reflection due to the transitive nature and the density of theatrical writing (somewhere between philosophy, literature, and words destined to become ‘‘incarnate’’ on the stage): from the pilot work of Dacia Maraini and the Teatro La Maddalena in Rome, to the Teatro del Guerriero in Bologna, to the research associations later formed in the context of 709

FEMINIST THEORY AND CRITICISM the theater. Thanks to the transitive nature and the density of theatrical writing (somewhere between philosophy, literature, and words destined to become ‘‘incarnate’’ on the stage), He´le`ne Cixous is an important point of reference, writer for Ariane Mnouchkine at The´aˆtre du Soleil. In the context of feminist film studies, which investigate the relationship between representation and sexual difference, Giuliana Bruno and Maria Nadotti’s Off Screen (1988) provokes a lively exchange with the United States. Cinema is a form of art and of consumerism that is founded on the pleasure of looking, but who is the subject of this gaze, and who is the dark object of desire? Since the gaze, in a patriarchal society, is constructed as masculine and active, while the object of the gaze is feminine and passive, the female observer is inclined to dress up, exploring her own forms of identity and those of others in a voyage on and off the cinematic screen. This interdependence, already identified by Lonzi regarding the visual arts, is present in the everyday proliferation of images of women produced by men. Giuliana Bruno took up and developed these themes in Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (1993), a theoretical investigation at the margin of various disciplines that seeks the lost and forgotten films of Elvira Notari, a pioneer of silent cinema. Bruno thus confirms the importance of these bridge-figures, figures who cross different cultures, to Italian feminism; she illuminates the individual roads that flourished in feminism, together with the renewed need for politics. In conclusion, as Rosy Braidotti remarks, ‘‘if the only constant at the dawn of the third millennium is change, then the challenge lies in thinking about processes, rather than concepts’’ (In metamorfosi, 2003). ANNA LAURA MARIANI See also: Women’s History, Lesbian and Gay Writing Further Reading Abba`, Luisa, et al., La coscienza di sfruttata, Milan: Mazzotta, 1972. Baeri, Emma, ‘‘Noi, utopia delle donne di ieri, memoria delle donne di domani,’’ in Inventari della memoria: L’esperienza del Coordinamento per l’Autodeterminazione della Donna a Catania (1980–1985), edited by E. Baeri and Sara Fichera, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2001. Bocchetti, Alessandra, Cosa vuole una donna: Storia, politica, teoria. Scritti 1981/1995, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1995. Boccia, Maria Luisa, La differenza politica: Donne e cittadinanza, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2002.

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Borghi, Liana, ‘‘Insegnare il queer: Marginalita`, resistenza, trasgressione,’’ in Pro/posizioni: Interventi alla prima universita` gay e lesbica, edited by Gigi Malaroda and Massimo Piccione, Florence: Edifir, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi, Soggetto nomade: Femminismo e crisi della modernita`, Rome: Donzelli, 1994; as Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Braidotti, Rosi, In metamorfosi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003; as Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, edited and translated by Maria Nadotti, Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Bruno, Giuliana, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map: Cultural Theory and the City Films of Elvira Notari, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti (editors), Off Screen: Women and Film in Italy, London and New York: Routledge, 1988. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti (editors), Immagini allo schermo: La spettatrice e il cinema, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Buttafuoco, Annarita, Questioni di cittadinanza: Donne e diritti sociali nell’Italia liberale, Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani, 1995. Calabro`, Anna Rita, and Laura Grasso (editors), Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso: Ricerca e documentazione nell’area lombarda, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Cavarero, Adriana, ‘‘Per una teoria della differenza sessuale,’’ in Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987. Cavarero, Adriana, Corpo in figure: Filosofia e politica della corporeita`, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1995; as Stately Bodies: Literature, Philosophy, and the Question of Gender, translated by Robert De Lucca and Deanna Shemek, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Cavarero, Adriana, Tu che mi guardi, tu che mi racconti: Filosofia della narrazione, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1997; as Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, translated by Paul A. Kottman, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Cavarero, Adriana, A piu` voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003; as For more than one voice: towards a philosophy of vocal expression, translated by Paul Kottman, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, Disoccupata con onore, Milan: Mazzotta, 1975. Dalla Costa, Maria Rosa, Potere femminile e sovversione sociale, Padua: Marsilio, 1972. Danna, Daniela, ‘‘Cronache recenti di lesbiche in movimento,’’ in I Quaderni Viola n. 4 (e l’ultima chiuda la porta), Milan: Nuove Edizioni Internazionali, 1995. De Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. De Lauretis, Teresa, ‘‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness,’’ in Feminist Studies, 16, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 115–150. Diotima, Il pensiero della differenza sessuale, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987.

BEPPE FENOGLIO Ferrante, Lucia, Maura Palazzi, and Gianna Pomata (editors), Ragnatele di rapporti: Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1988. Fraire, Manuela (editor), Lessico politico delle donne: Teorie del femminismo (1978), Milan: Fondazione Badaracco and Franco Angeli, 2002. Kreyder, Laura, et al., Lapis: Sezione aurea di una rivista, Rome: Manifestolibri, 1998. Lamberti, Raffaella, ‘‘Antigone nella citta`,’’ in Scuola di politica Hannah Arendt, Antigone nella citta`: Emozioni e politica, Bologna: Pitagora Editrice, 1998. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From the Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women Writing 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Libreria delle Donne di Milano, ‘‘Piu` donne che uomini,’’ in Sottosopra, 1983; as ‘‘More Women than Men,’’ in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, Oxford and Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Libreria delle Donne di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della liberta` femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987; as Sexual Difference. A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, translated by Patricia Cicogna and Teresa De Lauretis, Introductory Essay by Teresa De Lauretis, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Lonzi, Carla, Sputiamo su Hegel. La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1974. Lonzi, Carla, Taci, anzi parla: Diario di una femminista, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978. Lonzi, Carla, Vai pure: Dialogo con Pietro Consagra, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1980. Lonzi, Marta, Anna Jaquinta, and Carla Lonzi, La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo: Secondo manifesto di Rivolta Femminile «io dico io», Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1978.

Marcuzzo, Maria Cristina, and Anna Rossi-Doria (editors), La ricerca delle donne: Studi femministi in Italia, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987. Mariani, Laura, Sarah Bernhardt, Colette e l’arte del travestimento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Melandri, Lea, Come nasce il sogno d’amore, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988. Melandri, Lea, L’infamia originaria: Facciamola finita con il cuore e la politica, Milan: Edizioni L’Erba Voglio, 1977; rpt. 1997. Melandri, Lea, Una visceralita` indicibile: La pratica dell’inconscio nel movimento delle donne degli anni Settanta, Milan: Fondazione Badaracco and Franco Angeli, 2000. ‘‘Il movimento femminista negli anni ’70,’’ in Memoria: Rivista di storia delle donne, nos. 19–20 (1987), special issue. Muraro, Luisa, L’ordine simbolico della madre, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1991. Palazzi, Maura, and Ilaria Porciani, Storiche di ieri e di oggi: Dalle autrici dell’Ottocento alle riviste di storia delle donne, Rome: Viella, 2004. Passerini, Luisa, Storie di donne e femministe, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Pomata, Gianna, ‘‘La storia delle donne: Una questione di confine,’’ in Il Mondo Contemporaneo, vol. 10, Gli strumenti della ricerca, tomo 2, edited by Nicola Tranfaglia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983. Ribero, Aida, and Ferdinanda Vigliani (editors), 100 titoli: Guida ragionata al femminismo degli anni Settanta, Ferrara: Luciana Tufani editrice, 1998. Rossi-Doria, Anna (editor), La liberta` delle donne: Voci della tradizione politica suffragista, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990. Saraceno, Chiara, Dalla parte della donna, Bari: De Donato, 1971. Straub, Kristina, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-century Players and Sexual Ideology, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.

BEPPE FENOGLIO (1922–1963) Beppe Fenoglio is considered the most successful and engaging writer among those who were inspired by the Resistance. Writing in the tradition of epics and the realistic novella, he faithfully portrays the historical and local realities of his native region, the Langhe hillside in Piedmont. His work, produced in the 15 years prior to his premature death in 1963, includes 40 short stories and six novels, as well as several translations and abridgements from classics of Anglo-American literature, including a much-praised version of Coleridge’s

The Ballad of the Ancient Mariner. As Mark Pietralunga poignantly remarks, Fenoglio’s lifelong professional involvement with English becomes a means of ‘‘revivifying the semantic and phonological aspects of an ‘anemic’ Italian language’’ (Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature, 1986). Fenoglio’s first published volume, I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba, 1952), a collection of short stories originally called Racconti della guerra civile (Tales of the Civil War), is structured in 12 stories, 711

BEPPE FENOGLIO partitioned in two thematic halves: six on the Resistance and six on peasant life in the Langhe countryside in Piedmont and postwar urban life. This structure is reminiscent of the 12-book, two-part Virgil’s The Aeneid. Several intertextual links with classic epics have been found in Fenoglio’s Resistance narratives, oftentimes in passages describing the heroic death of young partisans. However, he often parodies epics in order to denounce the shortcomings and presumptuousness of both sides involved in the Italian civil war (1943–1945). The title story, which begins with ‘‘Two thousand men took Alba on October 10 and two hundred lost it on November 2 in the year 1944,’’ exemplifies Fenoglio’s ironic rendering of the Resistance: While he recounts the historical facts, he lends ironic prominence to the symmetry in the number of partisans involved in the deed’s beginning and end. This story is a carnivalized (‘‘carnival’’ is repeatedly mentioned) epic: Fenoglio’s partisans are unprepared for the hardship of warfare. After the city’s conquest, the partisans revert to childish behavior, and their sloppy military practices (such as playing cards in the watch post) allow for an easy entrance of the Fascist troops into the city after only 23 days. The partisans are then dispersed: Just 10% of them go back to their bands on the hills to continue the fight against the Fascists. This story features protagonists and antagonists, partisans and Fascists, as groups (with a third group represented by Alba’s ordinary people, as bystanders), while individualized characters will emerge in the following stories. As in Boccaccio’s Decameron, these stories all start with a description of the well-known landscape, weather, daily gestures; then the out-of-the-ordinary war fact is narrated: the kidnapping of a Fascist officer by the partisans, who are in turn surprised by the Fascist cavalry; the execution of a Fascist by partisans; the execution of a partisan (thief ) by other partisans; the execution of partisans by Fascists. These stories on the Resistance present several combinatory possibilities of mutual killing among the groups involved in the civil war. There are a few exceptions, such as Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul (The Initiation of Raoul the Partisan), a miniaturized version of the later autobiographical novel with Johnny as protagonist. The first story in the second half of the book, ‘‘Ettore va al lavoro’’ (Ettore Goes to Work), is drawn from the first chapters of an early ‘‘neoveristic’’ (Fenoglio’s term) novel, La paga del sabato (Saturday Is Payday), published posthumously in 1969. Ettore is a former partisan who, after the 712

war, is unable to adapt to his workday routine as a clerk in a chocolate factory. He suffers from mental addiction to war actions. Having kept his gun from wartime, he turns to some kind of illegal smuggling, letting his mother believe he is not at risk. Peacetime stories such as this expose psychological reactions—either subjugation or rebellion— to overpowering parental ties both in the city and in the countryside alike, as a source of the immature behavior of the Italian males. They counteract the tragicomic Resistance events of the earlier stories, with all their absurd cruelties. In La malora (Ruin, 1954) Fenoglio is influenced by Giovanni Verga’s verismo and its blend of dialect and literary Italian. The short novel, set in the Langhe at the beginning of the twentieth century, focuses on the peasants’ struggles as well as on their ruinous obsession for the roba (goods or property). While lexicon and similes are rigorously drawn, like in Verga, from the peasants’ experiences, Fenoglio innovates the genre by introducing a first-person narrator, Agostino. A character by the same name is also featured in the eighth story of the 1952 collection, ‘‘Quell’antica ragazza’’ (That Ancient Girl). Even if Agostino is somewhat selfless, his love for a girl is sacrificed to the patriarchal mentality of family land acquisition. A particularly poignant effect is achieved by having Agostino endure this injustice without his being able to term it as such, as he tells his story and does not question the root cause of his suffering. The title refers to the gradual, yet unavoidable, ruin incurred by Agostino’s family, who owns a little piece of land: First the elder brother is drafted in the army and becomes an alcoholic upon his return, while the family contracts crushing debts and Agostino is sent to work at a sharecropper’s farm; then the father dies (an event proleptically presented in the novel’s prologue); and finally the younger brother dies of tuberculosis while studying to become a priest. Fenoglio wrote numerous short stories on life in the Langhe, but with a first-person narrator altogether different from Agostino. Such a first-person, nameless narrator appears for the first time in the last story of the 1952 collection, ‘‘Pioggia e la sposa’’ (Rain and the Bride). He is a more savvy, city-dweller type, who, remembering his childhood and adolescence, recounts memorable and less memorable facts that occurred in the circle of his countryside acquaintances and relatives. Fenoglio, who published some of these stories in literary journals, had intended to assemble them in book form under the title Racconti del parentado (Tales of the Kinsfolk).

BEPPE FENOGLIO Out of the several Resistance fiction projects Fenoglio undertook during the 1950s, only the novel Primavera di bellezza (Spring of Beauty, 1959) was published during his lifetime. Partly autobiographical, it recounts in the third person the adventures of a young man called Johnny (a nickname he was given in high school by his English language teacher) from the days he served in the army (first in Piedmont and then in Rome where he was transferred the day after the Allies landed in Sicily on 10 July 1943), to the fateful weeks following the armistice (8 September 1943). The central chapters are devoted to the absurd predicament of the Italian soldiers in Rome on and after September 8, the climax of a long-standing crisis in the Fascist government, which constitutes the novel’s main theme: the disastrous condition in which Mussolini’s reckless war efforts had plunged the Italian army. Fenoglio gives a vividly realistic cross-section of the Italian garrison, which for many respects works as a metaphor of the Italian nation under the Fascist regime. After four years at war, the young men preparing to become officers are both morally and physically in rags. Hence the irony of the novel’s title, a quotation from the famous Fascist song ‘‘Giovinezza,’’ where bellezza (beauty) is made to rhyme with giovinezza (youth). Throughout the many unpleasant facts of military life in disarray, Johnny maintains a dignified attitude, but his remarks and memories (flashbacks from the days in school) reveal a raging, wellthought-out anti-Fascist sentiment. A few days after the armistice, as German troops swarm into Rome, Johnny deserts, however reluctantly, and manages to return to Piedmont by train. A few miles from home, he is intercepted by a group of deserters who have started a counterarmy of their own. Johnny joins them, transitioning directly from the royal army to underground warfare, embracing his new life as a rebel, the only way of keeping his manly dignity intact. Just when the band’s members decide to disband and go back into hiding after the Germans have proven more numerous and powerful than expected, Johnny proposes to lay a final ambush to the last track of a German convoy, and dies in the attack. In an unrevised novel originally written in the late 1950s, L’imboscata (The Ambush, 1992), Fenoglio creates a new partisan character, Milton, tougher, less snobbish and sentimental than Johnny. In the short novel Una questione privata (A Private Matter, 1963), Milton is a partisan in love, whose thoughts and memories (flashbacks) of war are intercut with those of Fulvia, a character

inspired by a girl Fenoglio loved during his high school days. Eventually he abandons his political struggles to ascertain whether Fulvia is having an affair with friend and fellow partisan Giorgio. Italo Calvino singled out Una questione privata as ‘‘the crowning of a whole generation’s efforts to portray the Resistance,’’ the book where one could find ‘‘the Resistance just as it was’’ (Presentazione, 1964). Although Fenoglio’s literary reputation as Resistance writer is chiefly dependent on his posthumously published novel Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan, 1968), Calvino’s homage to his recently deceased friend and fellow writer comes as an overdue vindication of the author’s literary legacy. In the postwar period, Fenoglio’s problematic view of the Resistance is seen as harmful to the Italian Communist Party’s political cause, and consequently attracted many unsympathetic reviewers. During the 1970s and 1980s, as more manuscripts were discovered and published, the philological debate among scholars such as Maria Corti and Edoardo Saccone (which aimed at dating Fenoglio’s works) somehow marginalized the study of the complex aspects of the author’s work. In the 1990s, Dante Isella’s revised edition of the Romanzi e racconti settled all philological disputes, and Lorenzo Mondo’s discovery of the earliest versions of the Resistance stories, Appunti partigiani (Partisans Notebooks, 1994) corroborated and completed Isella’s scholarly endeavor. Since then the literary debate on Beppe Fenoglio has bloomed and is still thriving.

Biography Born in Alba (Cuneo), 1 March 1922. Attended the Liceo Classico, 1932–1940; studied humanities at the Universita` di Torino, 1940–1942; drafted in the army, January 1943, and will never finish his degree; was in a garrison in Rome on armistice day, 8 September 1943; deserted shortly after, and managed to go back home; joined the partisans on the hills, January 1944–1945; acted as liaison officer between the partisans and the Allied forces during the last two months prior to the liberation, 1945; voted for the monarchy at the 1946 referendum; returned to live with his family in Alba and remained unemployed until he was hired as commercial translator by a local winery, 1947; kept this job for the rest of his life. Under pseudonym Giovanni Federico Biamonti, published the first Resistance story ‘‘Il trucco’’ in the journal Pesci 713

BEPPE FENOGLIO rossi, 1949; began a decade of intense creativity publishing with Einaudi, Garzanti, Edinidustria, and in literary journals such as Itinerari, Nuovi argomenti, Il caffe`, La fiera letteraria, Paragone; won the Prato prize for Primavera di bellezza, 1959; married, with civil rights, Luciana Bombardi, 1960; a daughter is born, 1962; awarded the Alpi Apuane prize for the short story ‘‘Ma il mio amore e` Paco,’’ 1962. He was diagnosed with lung cancer, and died in Turin, 18 February 1963. FEDERICA BRUNORI DEIGAN See also: Literature of Resistance Selected Works Collections Opere, 3 vols., critical edition directed by Maria Corti, 1978. Romanzi e racconti, edited by Dante Isella, 1992; revised edition, 2001. Appunti partigiani, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, 1994.

Fiction I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba, 1952; as The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba, translated by John Shepley, 2002. La malora, 1954; as Ruin, translated by John Shepley, 1992. Primavera di bellezza, 1959. Un giorno di fuoco, romanzo e altri racconti, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, 1963. Una questione privata, 1963; as A Private Matter, translated by Maria Grazia Di Paolo, 1988. Il partigiano Johnny, 1968; as Johnny the Partisan, translated by Stuart Hood, 1995. La paga del sabato, 1969. Racconti partigiani, 1976. L’affare dell’anima e altri racconti, 1978. Una crociera agli antipodi, 1980; as Una crociera agli antipodi e altri racconti fantastici, edited by Luca Bufano, 2003. L’imboscata, 1992.

Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Presentazione,’’ in Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Turin: Einaudi, 1964. De Nicola, Francesco, Introduzione a Fenoglio, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1989. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, Beppe Fenoglio, Florence: Le Monnier, 1981. Innocenti, Orsetta, La biblioteca inglese di Fenoglio: Percorsi romanzeschi in ‘‘Una questione privata,’’ Roma: Vecchiarelli, 2001. Ioli, Giovanna, Beppe Fenoglio oggi, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Isella, Dante, ‘‘Itinerario fenogliano,’’ in Beppe Fenoglio, Romanzi e racconti, Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1992. Lagorio, Gina, Fenoglio, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Lajolo, Davide, Fenoglio, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Menzio, Pino (editor), Beppe Fenoglio, 1922–1997: Atti del Convegno, Alba, 15 marzo 1997, Milan: Electa, 1997. Milanini, Claudio, ‘‘Beppe Fenoglio: Lettere ritrovate e carte neglette,’’ in Belfagor, 57, nos. 4–6 (2002): 619–622. Pedulla`, Gabriele, La strada piu` lunga: Sulle tracce di Beppe Fenoglio, Roma: Donzelli, 2001. Pietralunga, Mark, Beppe Fenoglio and English Literature: A Study of the Writer as Translator, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Rondini, Andrea, ‘‘Dallo splendido isolamento al successo problematico: Fenoglio e la critica dell’ultimo decennio,’’ in Testo, 24, no. 45 (2003): 103–125. Saccone, Edoardo, Fenoglio: I testi, l’opera, Torino: Einaudi, 1986. Soletti, Elisabetta, Beppe Fenoglio, Milano: Mursia, 1987.

IL PARTIGIANO JOHNNY, 1968 Novel by Beppe Fenoglio

Translations Samuel Taylor Coleridge, La ballata del vecchio marinaio, in Itinerari, 1955, in book form, 1964. Kenneth Graham, Il vento nei salici, edited by John Meddemmen, 1982. Quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Mark Pietralunga, 2000.

Other La voce nella tempesta: Da ‘‘Cime tempestose’’ di Emily Bronte¨, edited by Francesco De Nicola, 1974. Lettere 1940–1962, edited by Luca Bufano, 2002.

Further Reading Bigazzi, Roberto, Fenoglio: Personaggi e narratori, Roma: Salerno Editrice, 1983. Bufano, Luca, Fenoglio e il racconto breve, Ravenna: Longo, 1999.

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Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan) was found in two unassembled Italian versions and one partial English version among the writer’s papers at the time of his death in 1963. All editions are posthumous, resulting from philological work. According to Dante Isella’s chronology, the English version was written in 1955 or early 1956, and the Italian ones in 1956–1958. Il partigiano Johnny was initially conceived as a sequel to Primavera di bellezza (Spring of Beauty, 1959) in which the same main character, Johnny, is featured. Fenoglio worked simultaneously on the two books, but since he eventually decided to have Johnny die in Primavera di

BEPPE FENOGLIO bellezza, the manuscripts on Johnny and the partisan war were left unfinished. Johnny is a young man from a lower middleclass family of Alba, in Piedmont, who deserts the army after the armistice on 8 September 1943, spends some time in hiding, and eventually decides to join the armed Resistance against the newly formed Republic of Salo` (1943–1945). At first, he joins the Garibaldini, or the Red Communist bands, and then the Badogliani, or Azzurri, loyal to the king. In the section entitled ‘‘La citta`’’ (The City), Fenoglio recounts the partisan conquest of Alba in a longer version than in the title story of I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba (The Twentythree Days of the City of Alba, 1952). Prior to the city’s conquest, which turns out to be a major setback for the partisans, Johnny expresses his dissent with the decision of the Azzurri’s commander, Nord, to go along with the Red partisans’ plan to conquer the city. Johnny criticizes all partisans, Red and Azzurri alike, for their attempts at mimicking a regular army in their strategy as well as in their course of action. Johnny believes that the anti-Fascist fight should be carried out with killand-run ambushes. Being one of the few who go back to the hills after the fall of Alba, Johnny survives both battles and the ordeals of the clandestine life during the winter 1944–1945. He dies in the Battle of Valdivilla, the last victory of the Fascists at the end of February, two months prior to the end of the war. In the English version of the novel, Johnny does not die in battle and ends up working as a liaison officer between the partisans and the Allied forces. The novel is largely autobiographical and reflects the events of local and national history. Critic Giovanni Falaschi considers Il partigiano Johnny as the most realistic of the Resistance novels (La resistenza armata nella letteratura italiana, 1976), and historian Claudio Pavone, among others, has used it as a source in his study on the Resistance (Una guerra civile, 1991). However, Johnny is a carefully crafted fictional character, the protagonist of a tragic bildungsroman narrated in the third person. Fenoglio enriches his character dimension by inserting the English language (adjectives, adverbs, or even whole incidental sentences) in the midst of Johnny’s refined Italian. Thus, Johnny is portrayed with a learned and sophisticated mind, as well as a fascination with the Anglo-American culture. After the November 1944 announcement by General Alexander, which asked the Italian partisans to stop fighting, go into

hiding, and wait for the spring offensive, Johnny has to confront his own motivation for remaining involved with the guerrillas. He discovers that he is driven not only by his deeply felt anti-Fascism, but also by his personal challenge to fate, a kind of contest with destiny and death, a perpetual testing of his survival instinct. In 2000, Guido Chiesa, who had produced with Davide Ferrario a compelling documentary on the Resistance (Materiale resistente, 1995), directed a film based on Fenoglio’s novel. FEDERICA BRUNORI DEIGAN Editions First edition: Il partigiano Johnny, edited by Lorenzo Mondo, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Critical edition: Il partigiano Johnny, edited by Maria Antonietta Grignani, in Opere, vol. 1, part 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Third edition: Il partigiano Johnny, in Romanzi e racconti, edited by Dante Isella, Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1992. Translations: Johnny the Partisan, translated by Stuart Hood, London: Quartet Books, 1995.

Further Reading Alfano, Giancarlo, ‘‘Presente assoluto e campo della scrittura nel Partigiano Johnny,’’ in Testo, 24, no. 45 (2003): 9–38. Beccaria, Gian Luigi, La guerra e gli asfodeli: Romanzo e vocazione epica di Beppe Fenoglio, Milan: Serra e Riva, 1984. Bessi, Rossella, ‘‘Fenoglio e l’epica classica,’’ in Inventario, new series, 20, nos. 5–6 (1982): 169–189. Bufano, Luca, Beppe Fenoglio e la narrativa partigiana, Roma: Fandango, 2000. Casadei, Alberto, ‘‘Dagli Appunti partigiani al Partigiano Johnny,’’ Testo, 24, no. 45 (2003): 39–54. Cooke, Philip, Fenoglio’s Binoculars, Johnny’s Eyes, New York: Peter Lang, 2000. De Nicola, Francesco, Come leggere ‘‘Il partigiano Johnny’’ di Beppe Fenoglio, Milan: Mursia, 1985. Falaschi, Giovanni, La resistenza armata nella letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Fenocchio, Gabriella, ‘‘Tempo, natura e simboli nel Partigiano Johnny,’’ in Filologia e critica, 9, no. 3 (1984): 407–442. Isella, Dante, ‘‘La lingua del Partigiano Johnny,’’ in Beppe Fenoglio, Romanzi e racconti, Turin: Einaudi- Gallimard, 1992. Manetti, Andrea, ‘‘La vita e il suo rovescio: Dal partigiano Johnny al prigioniero Fenoglio,’’ in Lettere italiane, 52, no. 3 (2000): 400–428. Negri, Piero, et al. (editors), Il partigiano Fenoglio: Uno scrittore nella guerra civile, Roma: Fandango Libri, 2000. Pavone, Claudio, Una guerra civile: Saggio sulla moralita` nella Resistenza, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991.

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FERRARA

FERRARA The cultural history of Ferrara—founded in the sixth century AD on the right bank of the Po delta and ruled by the Estensi from the end of the twelfth century onward—began in 1391, when Alberto V d’Este established the university with the permission of Pope Boniface IX. But it was especially during the years of Leonello d’Este (1441–1450) that Ferrara became a center of Humanism able to compete with the most famous courts of the time—particularly in the fields of art, architecture, urban design, entertainment, and music—by transforming itself into a city laboratory on a European level and an emblem of the innovation produced by the Italian Renaissance. Under Leonello, who was tutored by the great Humanist Guarino da Verona, there began a policy of prestige and magnificence through the transmission of culture that coincides with the leadership assumed by the university during the years of teaching by Guarino (1429–1460), whose private school claimed pupils from all over Italy and Europe. Guarino was the architect of an innovative pedagogy designed to form the new ruling class intellectually, as well as ethically and morally, with Greek and Latin texts playing a determining role in his ideals. The authors most often read, translated, and commented upon were Plato, Aristotle, Lucian, Plutarch, Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Terence. Later, with the beginning of the theatrical experimentation promoted by Duke Ercole I, Plautus would be performed, in an utterly original manner, in the vernacular rather than in Latin, as the traditional schemes of Humanist erudition required. Along with Guarino, other learned teachers were Giovanni Aurispa and Angelo Decembrio, who received decisive support by the development of the most important court library of the period (the first inventory was taken in 1436). Along with classical authors, the shelves were filled with chivalric stories/histories belonging to medieval romance, which indicate a specific literary choice and determine the taste and the direction of the Ferrarese imagination that would culminate in Ludovico Ariosto. Within a code of behavior that placed the prince at the center of every artistic and cultural manifestation, the library assumed an emblematic role as the representation of power. The city became 716

an obligatory destination for intellectuals and artists, among whom were Leon Battista Alberti, Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, and Andrea Mantegna. There was a profusion of astrological, medical, and philosophical studies; Latin poetry flourished with Tito Vespasiano Strozzi; and, later, between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was the vernacular poetry of Antonio Tebaldeo. The 20 years of rule by Borso (1450–1471), who was less refined than his brother Leonello, are marked not so much by literary culture as by two great artistic undertakings conceived as a further confirmation of the image of power: the sumptuous Bible illustrated by Taddeo Crivelli and Franco de’ Rossi, and the staggering profane cycle of frescoes of the months in the hall of honor in the Palazzo Schifanoia, a work that involved the entire Ferrarese school of painting of the second half of the fifteenth century. These were the years of Cosme` Tura, Franscesco del Cossa, and Ercole de’ Roberti, but above all of the architect Biagio Rossetti, who, under a commission from Ercole I (1471–1505), achieved a development of roads and buildings (known as Addizione Erculea) that concretized the model of the new urban design of the Renaissance. Ercole I strengthened the project of politics nourished by culture, assuring his own celebration and the values of court through a venue of great resonance such as the theater. From 1486 on, the staging of Plautus and court festivals occurred repeatedly. Along with these performances, there were also inquiries into the space and the form of the theater through the interpretation of Vitruvius, culminating in the treatise Spectacula (On Spectacles, after 1501) by Pellegrino Prisciani (ca. 1435– 1518), a lecturer at the Studium Urbis, an archivist, the duke’s librarian, an astrologist, a poet, and a philosopher. The staging of Plautus marked the beginning of a modern theatricality that includes the performance of Niccolo` da Correggio’s Favola di Cefalo (The Fable of Cephalus, 1487) and the composition of the comedy Timone by Matteo Maria Boiardo on the occasion of the marriage of Alfonso d’Este and Anna Sforza in 1491. Above all, we owe to Boiardo the invention of the ‘‘romance’’ canon—nourished by the court library,

FERRARA humanistic ideals, and the reading of stories in French—first with the collection of poems Amoroum libri, and then with Orlando Innamorato. In the climate of cultural centrality that had by now been acquired under Ercole I, a new generation of intellectuals and poets took shape in Ferrara: Celio Calcagnini (1479–1541), a scholar of rhetoric, Giglio Gregorio Giraldi (1479–1552), an expert on mythology engaged in the controversy on the relation between the ancients and the moderns, as well as Ludovico Ariosto, who will undertake the majority of his intellectual work under the later duchy of Alfonso I (1505–1534), realizing the great undertaking of Orlando Furioso. The city’s fortunes changed radically during the years of Ercole II (1534–1559), which were marked by the religious debate. His French wife Renata, in fact, a staunch Calvinist, makes the court into a center of Protestant propaganda, compromising the already delicate relations with the church. The climate of ‘‘closeness’’ that followed was also reflected in culture, which was already far from the Renaissance utopia, but in reality, it is all of Italian civilization that was changing. The academies replaced the courts in cultural production and, with their role of political amplification at an end, theatrical performances unfolded in the enclosure of private palaces. No one, however, followed the path of comedy pointed out by Ariosto. Instead, a new genre was born—the pastoral fable— that characterized Ferrara’s entire culture in the second half of the sixteenth century. Its creator was Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573), who was also the author of Senecan tragedies that introduce horror onto the stage with a moralistic intent. But tragedy does not enjoy success, and the new Ferrarese theater blossomed only with the pastoral, which, after Giraldi Cinzio’s Egle (1545), influenced various texts, before culminating in Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590). Under Ercole II, the Jewish community, present at least since 1275, consolidated itself: They were ‘‘learned merchants’’—among whom were intellectual academicians, doctors, jurists, and printers— who brought to Ferrara the culture of their countries of origin. Among the printers, the name Abraham Usque stands out; he published a famous Biblia en lengua espan˜ola (Spanish-Language Bible, 1555) that spread rapidly in the Sephardic world. In 1556, the rare privilege of opening a Jewish ‘‘university’’ was granted; the university was patronized by Salomone da Riva, who encouraged the exchange of ideas even with Christians. The

ghetto of Ferrara began to compete with the much more famous ones in Prague and other Italian cities. Jewish culture left an indelible mark that can still be felt in contemporary Ferrara through the labor of intellectuals, scientists, and writers (for example, Giorgio Bassani in the twentieth century), despite the deportations and the extermination suffered during World War II. Today, traces of this culture are preserved in the synagogue and in a small museum, and in a quiet cemetery that is defined as a ‘‘place for the soul.’’ The poet Torquato Tasso dominated the period of Alfonso II (1559–1597), the last duke of Ferrara, whose court became a haven for unorthodox religious figures such as Vittoria Colonna. But the Gerusalemme liberata represents the final stage of a cultural identity that was by then on the path to dissolution, despite the efforts to exalt power through spectacular forms and astonishing, grandiose musicals (especially theme tournaments with choreographic exhibitions and colossal settings). These were also the years when the commedia dell’arte made its appearance in Ferrara. Alfonso II died childless, and with the consequent ceding of Ferrara to the sovereignty of the church in 1598, the city entered a long period of obscurity. The classicism and mythology that had dominated the Estense civilization now earn Ferrara the accusation of paganism. The ‘‘places of delight’’ (Edenic, fantastical gardens) that represented its clearest symbol were progressively destroyed, and the Schifanoia frescoes were covered up in the eighteenth century by a layer of whitewash that damaged them almost irreparably. They were partially restored during the nineteenth century and masterfully interpreted in 1922 by Aby Warburg, who identified in them the astrological iconography of ancient Greece filtered through the succeeding Arabic, Indian, and Latin traditions, using a method of inquiry that initiates modern iconology. With the end of the duchy, and the shattering of the organic connection between the intellectual and the court, Ferrara’s cultural life closed in upon itself. The only relation with the past seemed to survive in the intense theatrical and musical activity that animated the various theaters built beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century in correspondence with the emergence of melodrama. Otherwise, few distinct personalities emerged within the general scene, and not all of these are easily ascribed to their experience of the city: There is, for instance, the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), Ferrarese by birth but culturally tied to the Roman 717

FERRARA circles of the mid-seventeenth century; similarly, a century later it is only the youthful formation of the poet Vincenzo Monti (that can be attributed to Ferrara), before his move to Rome in 1778. Bartoli’s work, in particular the Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu` (The History of the Society of Jesus, 1673), represents, however, a model for the Ferrarese literati of the seventeenth century, when there emerged a learned, historical commitment to the conservation of the city’s memory (Girolamo Baruffaldi, Cesare Barotti, Cesare Cittadella, Antonio Frizzi). There was a renewed awareness of Ferrara’s Renaissance civilization, which was opposed to the obscurity of the ecclesiastical dominion, and cultural institutions were created and consolidated, beginning with the university, which in 1753 was endowed with an opulent library. Moreover, the Teatro Comunale, designed by Antonio Foschini with the participation of Cosimo Morelli, opened in 1798. After the brief revolutionary and Napoleonic surge, the intellectual climate changed and, during the years before unification, the Accademia delle Scienze and the Civica Pinacoteca at the Palazzo Diamanti were founded, while public education was increased. But throughout the entire nineteenth century literary activity was almost nonexistent, and the university was reduced to a small number of departments. The Ferrarese twentieth century is defined by two peculiarities: the political oppression, between the two world wars, of local Fascism, which extended into the definition of cultural questions as well; and the emigration of intellectuals and artists toward the major centers of production, Rome and Milan. An important example is the memorable exhibition in 1933 of Ferrara’s Renaissance painting. But even more emblematic is the daily Corriere Padano, founded by the powerful Fascist leader Italo Balbo, with its terza pagina sought after by the best Italian, and not merely local, intellectual talents (Giorgio Bassani, Michelangelo Antonioni, Giuseppe Dessı`, Natalino Sapegno, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Mario Soldati, Guido Aristarco, Luciano Anceschi, and many others). It is a page on culture that, during the years when Fascism reigned, paradoxically assumed the aspect of a place for the diffusion of innovative ideas, allowing the formation of the young intellectuals that will later be engaged in the democratic and anti-Fascist fight during the Resistance and the immediate postwar period. The tendency to escape from the provincial city—obligatory for the many youths who became involved with the cinema—was also a necessary step for writers and artists who only in circles of 718

ample breadth could give an impetus to their cultural activity. This was the case of the Futurist poet Corrado Govoni and of the ‘‘metaphysical’’ painters and writers Giorgio De Chirico, Filippo De Pisis, Alberto Savinio, and Carlo Carra`. Intellectuals such as Lanfranco Caretti, Claudio Varese, and Guido Fink ‘‘emigrated’’ to fill important university chairs elsewhere. But there was also Giorgio Bassani, whose literary activity remained tied indissolubly to the memory of his city, to its characters and settings, such as in the cycle of stories and novels Il romanzo di Ferrara (1956–1974). Just as the theater characterized the Ferrara of the Estensi, the main cultural manifestation of twentieth-century Ferrara was the cinema, to which the city contributed right from its beginnings: critics and theorists (Guido Aristarco and Guido Fink), directors (Michelangelo Antonioni, Florestano Vancini, Folco Quilici), and a production house for documentaries and short films established in 1949. Today, Ferrara abounds in cultural events and institutions, which are at times unable to achieve a dialogue or intellectual coordination. The Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, created in the 1980s under the leadership of Amedeo Quondam, is emblematic, as an outpost in the Po Valley of the Center for the Study of the ‘‘Europe of the Courts’’ that brings together important scholars from various disciplines. The vast legacy produced in the course of 15 years (international conferences, books, a journal, archives supported by computer functionality) now appears caught between economic difficulties and a provincial mindset. From a similar perspective, we note the demise of a literary festival organized by the poet and novelist Roberto Pazzi, which attracts writers of international fame who are open to dialogue with the city and with the students. This is a truly ‘‘metaphysical’’ climate, in a city that harbors a university with eight schools and a population of more than 16,000 students, equal to approximately 12% of the city’s inhabitants. Ferrara’s policy of supporting ‘‘grand events’’ is tied above all to art exhibitions and an intense program of theater and music organized by the Teatro Comunale and by Ferrara Musica, an association that relies on the prestigious collaboration of the Maestro Claudio Abbado. But perhaps the image of contemporary Ferrara is that which Roberto Pazzi entrusts ironically to the pages of the novel La citta` volante (The Flying City, 1999): a city that remains suspended in the air, creating disquiet for citizens and administrators. DANIELE SERAGNOLI

MARSILIO FICINO Further Reading Bassi, Carlo, Perche´ Ferrara e` bella. Guida alla comprensione della citta`, Ferrara: Corbo, 1994. Bellonci, Maria, Lucrezia Borgia. La sua vita e i suoi tempi, Milan: Mondadori, 1939. Bertoni, Giulio, La biblioteca estense e la cultura ferrarese ai tempi del duca Ercole I (1471–1505), Turin: Loescher, 1903. Bertoni, Giulio, Guarino da Verona fra letterati e cortigiani a Ferrara, Ge´ne`ve: Olschki, 1921. Bocchi, Francesca, editor, Storia illustrata di Ferrara, 4 vols., Repubblica di San Marino: AIEP Editore, 1987–1989. Castelli, Patrizia, editor, La rinascita del sapere. Libri e maestri dello Studio ferrarese, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Chiappini, Alessandra, ‘‘Immagini di vita ferrarese nel secolo XVII,’’ in La chiesa di San Giovanni Battista e la cultura ferrarese del Seicento, Milan: Electa, 1981. Chiappini, Luciano, Gli Estensi, Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1967; rpt. Ferrara: Corbo, 2001. Cruciani, Fabrizio, et al., ‘‘La sperimentazione a Ferrara negli anni di Ercole I e Ludovico Ariosto,’’ in Teatro e Storia, 16 (1994): 131–217. Fabbri, Paolo, editor, I teatri di Ferrara. Commedia, opera e ballo nel Sei e Settecento, 2 vols., Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2002. Folli, Anna, editor, Vent’anni di cultura ferrarese: 1925– 1945. Antologia del ‘‘Corriere Padano,’’ Bologna: Patron, 1978. Gundersheimer, Werner L., Ferrara: The Style of a Renaissance Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973. Lockwood, Lewis, Music in Renaissance Ferrara, 1400– 1505: The Creation of a Musical Center in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Moretti, Walter, editor, Storia di Ferrara, 7: Il Rinascimento. La letteratura, Ferrara: Corbo, 1994.

Papagno, Giuseppe, and Amedeo Quondam, editors, La corte e lo spazio. Ferrara estense, vols. 3, Rome: Bulzoni, 1982. Prosperi, Adriano, editor, Storia di Ferrara: Il Rinascimento. Situazioni e personaggi, vol. 6, Ferrara: Corbo, 2000. Segre, Renata, ‘‘La formazione di una comunita` marrana: i portoghesi a Ferrara,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Annali 11. Gli ebrei in Italia, 1: Dall’alto Medioevo all’eta` dei ghetti, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1996. Seragnoli, Daniele, and Barbara Di Pascale, ‘‘Il teatro a Ferrara da Ercole II alla Devoluzione estense (1534– 1598): linee e tendenze,’’ in Le stagioni del teatro. Le sedi storiche dello spettacolo in Emilia-Romagna, edited by Lidia Bortolotti, Bologna: Grafis, 1995. Varese, Ranieri, editor, Atlante di Schifanoia, Modena: Panini, 1989. Venturi, Gianni, editor, Torquato Tasso e la cultura estense, Atti del convegno di studi, Ferrara, 1995, Florence: Olschki, 1999. Venturi, Gianni, editor, L’eta` di Alfonso I e la pittura del Dosso, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi, Ferrara, 9–12 dicembre 1998, Modena: Panini, 2004. Waage Petersen, Lene, Marianne Pade, and Daniela Quaranta, editors, La corte di Ferrara e il suo mecenatismo, 1441–1598. The Court of Ferrara & its Patronage, Atti del Convegno internazionale, Copenhagen, maggio 1987, Modena: Panini, 1990. Warburg, Aby, ‘‘Arte italiana e astrologia internazionale nel Palazzo Schifanoia di Ferrara,’’ in La rinascita del paganesimo antico. Contributi alla storia della cultura, edited by Gertrud Bing, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1966. Zevi, Bruno, Saper vedere la citta`. Ferrara di Biagio Rossetti, la prima citta` moderna europea, Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Zorzi, Ludovico, ‘‘Ferrara: il sipario ducale,’’ in Zorzi, Ludovico, Il teatro e la citta`. Saggi sulla scena italiana, Torino: Einaudi, 1977.

MARSILIO FICINO (1433–1499) One of the most influential thinkers of his age, Marsilio Ficino was the prime mover in the Renaissance revival of Platonism, initially in Florence and subsequently throughout Italy and much of Europe. In the first half of the fifteenth century, there had been some interest in Plato from Humanists active in Florence, Milan, and Rome, and this received impetus from the presence of Byzantine emigre´s on Italian soil both before and after the Council of Union (1438–1439). Ficino’s achievement is nonetheless remarkable in that, by 1469, he had made the first Latin translation of the complete corpus of Plato’s writings. The translations

were to be later revised, with prefaces for each dialogue, and were printed in 1484 (a date selected for its propitious astrological significance) as the Platonis Opera Omnia (Complete Works of Plato). Ficino held a firm conviction in a prisca theologia or ‘‘ancient theology,’’ that is, the notion that all faiths have a single matrix and that pre-Christian thinkers (including Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, and above all Plato) had received a revelation equivalent to that of Moses. Such beliefs led him to translate into Latin 14 Greek Hermetic texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, as well as various other Greek texts, including the Orphic Hymns, 719

MARSILIO FICINO Hesiod’s Theogony, Pythagorean works, and the Chaldean oracles. Trismegistus’ collection entitled Pimander (ca. 1463–1464) was dedicated to Cosimo de’ Medici under whose patronage Ficino had begun to study Greek in the late 1450s and who had provided him with Greek manuscripts of Plato. In addition to Latin translations of Greek philosophical, Hermetic, and literary texts, Ficino was an important force behind volgarizzamenti (‘‘vernacularizations’’) of Latin and Greek works in Florence in the 1460s. The Pimander, for example, was rapidly rendered into the vernacular by the merchant copyist and bibliophile, Tommaso Benci. Ficino also showed a keen interest in the vernacular, writing letters and other treatises in it, and making vernacularizations of his own Latin works. In 1468, he made an elegant vernacular version of Dante’s Monarchia (Dante’s thesis that temporal authority should be concentrated in a single secular ruler had especial resonance for the Medici regime at a time of conflict with the papacy under Paul II); the proemio celebrates Dante as a philosopho poeticho (poetic philosopher) who drank in deep draughts of Platonism through the cup furnished by Virgil’s Aeneid. In the 1470s, moreover, Ficino also addressed a wide vernacular audience in important apologetic texts, the De Christiana religione (On Christian Religion, 1474) and the De raptu Paulis (On the Rapture of Paul, 1476), which were composed in Latin and quickly made into vernacular versions. Ficino’s apologetics stressed the complementarity between religion and philosophy, and attempted to establish Plato as the primary philosophical authority for Christendom. In this decade, too, Ficino composed several independent philosophical works, including his masterpiece, the 18book Theologia platonica de immortalitate animarum (Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the Soul, 1469–1474), which sets out a cosmology, metaphysics, and anthropology in which the human soul occupies the central place within the universe. In the 1480s, Ficino turned to Plotinus and—again for the first time in the West—he completed Latin translations of the Enneads in 1492, accompanied by an extensive commentary and notes. In 1489, he published the De vita coelitus comparanda (Three Books of Life), a three-book treatise on health replete with medical, pharmacological, and astrological lore; Book III deals with scholarly melancholy and raises heterodox issues concerning demonology and talismanic magic. In the final few years of his life, Ficino composed an important treatise on light and the sun, De sole et lumine (On the Sun and Light, 1493), translated and commented upon the works of 720

the Christian Platonist, the Pseudo-Dionysius (dedicated in 1492), and published translations of Neoplatonists (1499). His prolific output also included technical treatises in the vernacular on astrology and the plague, and he had a lifelong interest in musical theory and practice (contemporaries attest to his skill at improvising orphic hymns). As this overview suggests, as a thinker, Ficino is notable for the diversity of his intellectual interests, which are marked not only by Platonic, Hermetic, and Neoplatonic sources, but also by Aristotle, Arab, and medieval writers on medicine, astrology, and magic, and scholastic theologians (especially Thomas Aquinas). Translator, scholar, commentator, magus, mythographer, musician, physician, philosopher, and theologian, he does not fit easily into pre-established categories: He was influenced by the Humanists’ engagement with original texts and Greek culture, and he was patronized by four generations of the Medici family, but he maintained his autonomy from both the Humanist movement and the political world (his relationship with Lorenzo de’ Medici was not without tensions, especially in 1465–1466 and 1478–1480). The view that Ficino set up a so-called ‘‘Platonic Academy’’ at his house in Careggi and that this formed the center of Florentine intellectual life is now disputed by critics such as James Hankins (‘‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy,’’ 1991). Indeed, his attempt to re-establish the Christian religion with a renewed emphasis upon Plato was controversial at a time when Aristotle still dominated the intellectual world of Italian universities (Ficino viewed Aristotle and Plato as being in accord with one another, but with Aristotle serving as a propaedeutic for Platonic philosophy). Hankins has rightly spoken of Ficino as promoting a counterculture and of the Platonists as being an ‘‘embattled minority’’ within Florence (Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 1990, vol. 1). In spite of this, he came to exercise a powerful influence over intellectual and cultural life, both in Florence and outside. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Ficino is, for example, a notable presence in the work of philosophers, cosmologists, and scientists (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler), theologians and Humanists (Thomas More, Erasmus, John Colet), artists and architects (Botticelli, Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, Du¨rer), and musicians. Several factors help to explain Ficino’s attraction and popularity: his innovation in making all of Plato and Neoplatonic commentators available for the first time; the patriotic zeal with which fellow Florentines celebrated

MARSILIO FICINO and popularized this latest innovation in the recovery of the ancient world; his engagement with the vernacular and attempts to reach out to a wider readership of merchants and politicians; his originality and capacity for synthesis (notable in the Theologia platonica); his cultivation of a Europewide correspondence with pupils, associates, and admirers; and his use of the printing press. As far as Italian literature is concerned, his most influential work was the De amore (On Love, 1469), a highly original commentary on Plato’s Symposium cast in the form of a literary dialogue in the villa of Lorenzo de’ Medici and with Ficino’s friends and patrons as the participants. Here, Ficino developed doctrines such as Platonic love—the belief that corporeal beauty was the first step in a movement toward the divine and that mutual affection between human beings (regardless of sex) was preparatory for properly spiritual love—and the Two Venuses—cosmological powers that pass sparks of beauty into matter and use these forms to awaken human eyes and activate the twin powers of the human soul to understand and procreate. Ficino also prepared a vernacular version of this work known as El libro dell’amore (Book of Love). In the 1470s and 1480s, Ficino’s presence is already marked in Florentine vernacular literature and literary criticism. Angelo Poliziano makes use of Ficinian classificatory schemes in his unfinished vernacular epyllion, the Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici (Stanze for the Joust of Giuliano de’ Medici, 1476). Lorenzo de’ Medici composes poetic works of philosophical inspiration such as L’altercazione (The Supreme Good, 1474), which refashions two letters by Ficino; and his philosophy of love in his Comento de’ miei sonetti (Commentary on My Own Sonnets) owes much to Ficino’s contemporary interpretation of Platonic doctrine. Ficino appears as a character in Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldolese Disputations, 1474), which adapts his ideas not only in Books I–II on the relative merits of will and intellect but also in the exegesis of Virgil’s Aeneid found in Books III–IV. Landino also makes close use of Ficino in his celebrated Dante commentary, the Comento sopra la Comedia (Commentary on the Comedy, 1481): The prologue adopts Ficinian ideas on poetic fury in its sections on poetic theory and incorporates one of Ficino’s own Latin letters, written in extravagant praise of Dante (the letter is accompanied by a vernacular translation, possibly by Ficino himself); the main body of the commentary also draws upon Ficinian teachings for purposes of doctrinal

compilation and exegesis. The most notable verse popularization of Ficino’s love theory is found in Girolamo Benivieni’s Canzona d’amore (Love Song, 1486), which later received a polemical commentary by Pico della Mirandola. The sixteenth century in Italy sees the popularizing of Ficinian Platonism outside Florence and its emergence as a courtly vogue. For example, popular works such as Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505) and Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore (The Philosophy of Love, 1535) summarized and extended in dialogue form the role Ficino attributed to love as the means to divine understanding. And much of Book IV of Baldasar Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, 1428) is given over to an elegant popularization of the Platonic notion that human love is the viaticum to the divine.

Biography Born in Figline, Valdarno, 19 October 1433. The son of Cosimo de’ Medici’s physician; studied at the University of Florence without completing a degree. Cosimo de’ Medici gave him a house in Florence and a small farm at Careggi (Florence) in 1462, and provided him with manuscripts of Plato and Plotinus; was ordained a priest in 1473 and elected a canon of the Cathedral of Florence in 1487. Died at Careggi (Florence), 1 October 1499. SIMON A. GILSON See also: Neoplatonism Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, 2 vols., Basle: Heinrich Petri, 1576; edited by Mario Sancipriano, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959; 1983. Supplementum Ficinianum, edited by Paul Oskar Kristeller, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1937; reprint 1973.

Treatises Theologia platonica, 1469–1474; as Platonic Theology, translated by Michael J. B. Allen and John Warden, Latin text edited by James Hankins, 2001. Commentatium in Philebum (ca. 1469); as The Philebus Commentary, edited by Michael J. B. Allen, 1975; 1979; 2000. De amore, 1469; as Commentaire sur le Banquet de Platon, edited by Raymond Marcel, 1978; as Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, translated by Jayne Sears, 2nd rev. ed., 1985. De vita coelitus comparanda (Liber De Vita/De Triplici Vita), 1489; as The Book of Life, translated by Charles

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MARSILIO FICINO Boer, 1980; as Three Books on Life, edited and translated by Carol V. Kaske and John R. Clark, 1989. Marsilio Ficino and the Phaedran Charioteer, edited by Michael J. B. Allen, 1981. Icastes: Marsilio Ficino’s Interpretation of Plato’s Sophist, edited and translated by Michael J. B. Allen, 1989. Nuptial Arithmetic: Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on the Fatal Number in Book VIII of the Republic, edited by Michael J. B. Allen, 1994.

Letters Le Lettere I. Epistolarum familiarum liber I, edited by Sebastiano Gentile, 1990; as The Letters of Marsilio Ficino, 7 vols., London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975– 2003.

Works in Vernacular Vernacular version of Dante’s Monarchia, as ‘‘La versione ficiniana della Monarchia,’’ edited by Prue Shaw, in Studi danteschi, 51 (1978): 298–408. El Libro dell’Amore, edited by Sandra Niccoli, 1987.

Further Reading Allen, Michael J. B., The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of His Phaedrus Commentary, Its Sources and Genesis, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1984. Allen, Michael J. B., Valery Rees, and Martin Davies (editors), Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002. Eisenbichler, Konrad, and Olga Zorzi Pugliese (editors), Ficino and Renaissance Platonism, Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1986. Field, Arthur, The Origins of the Platonic Academy of Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘‘Ficino e i Medici all’avvento di Lorenzo il Magnifico,’’ in Rinascimento, 2nd series/24 (1984): 3–52. Fubini, Riccardo, ‘‘Ancora su Ficino e i Medici,’’ in Rinascimento, 2nd series/27 (1987): 275–292.

Garfagnini, Gian Carlo (editor), Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone. Studi e documenti, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1986. Gentile, Sebastiano, ‘‘In margine all’Epistola De divino furore di Marsilio Ficino,’’ in Rinascimento, 23 (1983): 33–77. Gentile, Sebastiano, ‘‘Ficino e il platonismo di Lorenzo,’’ in Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, edited by Bernardo Toscani, New York: Lang, 1993. Gilson, Simon A., ‘‘Plato, the platonici, and Marsilio Ficino in Cristoforo Landino’s Comento sopra la Comedia,’’ in The Italianist, 23 (2003): 5–53. Hankins, James, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Leiden-New York: E.J. Brill, 1990. Hankins, James, ‘‘The Myth of the Platonic Academy,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991): 429–475. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘‘Marsilio Ficino as a Man of Letters and the Glosses Attributed to Him in the Caetani Codex of Dante,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 36 (1983): 1–47. Nelson, John Charles, Renaissance Theory of Love: The Context of Giordano Bruno’s ‘‘Eroici Furori,’’ New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Raffini, Christine, Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassarre Castiglione: Philosophical, Aesthetic and Political Approaches in Renaissance Platonism, New York: Lang, 1998. Robb, Nesca, Neoplatonism of the Italian Renaissance, 1935; rpt. New York: Octagon, 1968. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘Note sul volgarizzamento ficiniano della Monarchia,’’ in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca, vol. 3, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘Ficino, Marsilio,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 47, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1997. Vasoli, Cesare, Quasi sit Deus. Studi su Marsilio Ficino, Lecce: Conti, 1999. Walker, D. P., Natural and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, London: Warburg Institute, 1958.

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Considered as a distinct and full-fledged theoretical pursuit, Italian film theory began in the mid-1960s, aligned with parallel European endeavors, and under the influence of French structuralism and semiotics, Italian literary criticism, and national discussions around Marxism and the arts. Yet, a critical reflection on the film medium, singled out for its new artistic and communicative endowments, started in Italy in the silent period in a climate dominated by the aesthetic theories of 722

Benedetto Croce. It is important to consider the main traits of this earlier genealogy to grasp the later developments of a specific Italian approach to film theory. Since the turn of the twentieth century, early examples of Italian film criticism focused on the threats that films and mass moviegoing allegedly represented for traditional artistic and sociocultural hierarchies, for the survival of Italian theater and for the education of ordinary citizens. Inside and

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM outside the emerging film industry, several cultural authorities and critics, from Giovanni Papini and Gualtiero Fabbri to Michele Mastropaolo and Arnaldo Monti, expressed both concern and interest for a number of issues related to the novelty of the film medium: unprecedented photographic realism, sensationalist immediacy, vast interclass popularity, mounting claims of artistic excellence and legitimacy, and extraordinary educational opportunities. Implicit in these early writings was an idealist, Crocean emphasis on the unique poetic autonomy of art as opposed to any other human practice. Between the 1910s and the 1920s, the growing praise of the expressivity of cinema muto (silent cinema) led to the acceptance of its artistic ambitions. Yet, such expressivity was not articulated as pure vision, but as a combination of visual motifs with music and silence. This ‘‘musical analogy,’’ as David Bordwell aptly defined the critical tendency to stress films’ formal structure and nonrepresentational qualities, aligned a number of major exponents of Italian theater and literature (‘‘The Musical Analogy,’’ 1980). Film and art critic Ricciotto Canudo (1877– 1923), born in Italy but educated and active in France, had included cinema among the most important arts in a famous essay titled La naissance d’un sixie`me Art (The Birth of a Sixth Art, 1911). Deeply influenced by Wagnerian theories of ‘‘total and synthetic art,’’ Canudo wrote about cinema as ‘‘painting and a Sculpture developing in Time [which] as in music and poetry [...] realize themselves by transforming air into rhythm for the duration of their execution.’’ Although still underestimated, Canudo’s influence on contemporaneous Italian film criticism, beginning with Gabriele D’Annunzio, was remarkable. On the eve of the release of Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), D’Annunzio published an essay-interview where he exposed a prototheory of film form. Describing the contemporary crisis of theater as a ‘‘crisis of the word,’’ D’Annunzio defined cinema as ‘‘a silent art, deep and musical like silence,’’ the realm of fantastic transfigurations and surprising metamorphoses that could visually articulate melodic waves and fascinate even the masses’ simplest minds (Del cinematografo considerato come uno strumento di liberazione e come arte di trasfigurazione, 1914). To epitomize his position, D’Annunzio coined the key expression arte muta, or silent art, which by 1915, together with teatro muto, scena muta, or dramma muto, was already commonly used to describe and designate films’ suggestive

musicality. This is most evident in two widely known public inquiries about films’ artistry conducted in 1913 by the Florentine daily newspaper Il Nuovo Giornale and the Turinese periodical La Vita Cinematografica as well as Piero Antonio Gariazzo’s theoretical treatise on film, significantly titled Il teatro muto (Silent Theatre, 1919). In the following years, Canudo and D’Annunzio’s position was furthered by musicologist Sebastiano Arturo Luciani. From his publications in 1913 to his last in 1942, Luciani was concerned with cinema’s artistic predicament, which he lucidly located in films’ antimimetic capacity to combine imaginary subject matters, mute yet eloquent acting styles, and musical rhythm. By 1916, he had started describing films with such complex locutions as ‘‘dramma mimico musicale moderno’’ (modern pantomimic musical drama). Through a symbolist vocabulary and common Wagnerian references, Luciani emphasized cinema’s unprecedented synthesis of musical rhythm and well-choreographed mise-en-sce`ne. The films that most emblematically captured this aesthetic discourse were operatic melodramas of patrician love and betrayal featuring Italian film divas. Termed dannunziano, for its explicit resonance with D’Annunzio’s literary works, this form of cinema embodied the tropes of musical transfigurations, pantomimic metamorphoses, and artistic evocativeness widely envisioned, by Luciani and others, as pure cinematic expressivity. Contemporary and analogous to Luciani’s earliest antirealism was Futurism’s fascination with cinema’s multisensorial antimimesis. Although cinema came quite late among the professed interests of the Italian avant-garde—especially due to F. M. Marinetti’s prejudices against photography—the movement developed a keen attraction to the musicality of moving pictures, defined by the succession and nonrealistic images, colors, and intertitles. In Il primo manifesto per la cinematografia futurista (The First Manifesto of Futurist Cinema, 1916), Futurists praised cinema’s fantastic transfigurations of reality (‘‘polyexpressive symphonies’’) and endorsed rhythmical and metaphorical editing, asynchronous musical (and noise) accompaniments, and abstract and unreal representations of the world and the human body. The only critic in tune with Futurists’ idea of cinema, working both on the threshold of the Italian avant-garde movement and within the established industrial cinema apparatus, was Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890– 1960), a multitalented artist and critic whose interests spanned from archeology to photography, 723

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM cinema, art, and theater. His major contribution to proto-Italian film theory came at the dawn of cinema’s transition to sound. In his 1929 Il film sonoro (Sound Film), Bragaglia polemically argued that if theater had the advantage and the curse of the spoken word, cinema had the aesthetic prerogative of visually reproducing music and songs—not just plain dialogue. Sound cinema’s verbose and ‘‘gross immediacy’’ contrasted with silent movies’ speechless and universal magic and compromised their artistic musicality and dream-like allure. Several proto film theorists shared this logophobic position; among them was Luigi Pirandello. In his novel Si gira! (Shoot!, 1915), which was later retitled Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1925), Pirandello had already spoken of cinema’s power to depersonalize characters, forcing them into an unsettling loss of corporeality. The late 1920s’ introduction of sound enhanced his formulation of cinema’s unique film poetics. Expanding on distinctions already articulated by Luciani and Bragaglia, Pirandello lucidly distinguished between film parlato (spoken cinema), paired to vulgar canned theater, and film sonoro (sound cinema) uniquely endowed with cinemelografia, or the ‘‘visual language of music’’ (‘‘Se il film parlante abolira` il teatro,’’ 1929). Hailing the inclusion of spoken and sung words as detrimental—they turned the most universal medium into a national form of theatrical melodrama—Pirandello praised silent film as a modern hymn, cryptic, but popular; aphasic, but eloquent. In the following decades, instead of fading away, the artistic praise for silent film poetics was renewed. It continued in the very personal work of Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1910–1987), who, like Canudo, but differently from Luciani, included cinema among the figurative arts. But it also resurfaced in works that appeared as late as the mid1960s. For instance, film critic Roberto Paolella defaulted to a rhetoric of pantomime, plasticity, and rhythm when wishing that the latest technical developments in music reproduction could rescue films’ sound score from the banality of everyday conversation and move it toward the musical intensities and symbolist poetry of silent cinema. The long dure´e of this Crocean critical strand should not eclipse the fact that in the 1930s another theoretical impetus, as politicized as the times required, began to emerge among Italian film critics and prototheorists, in correspondence with national literary debates around realism. 724

Under the influence of Soviet, German (Neue Sachlichkeit), and American new poetics, Italian theorists, but also novelists, filmmakers, writers, and critics, endeavored to articulate an Italian dimension to cinematic realism. That was a difficult challenge for a country fraught with the question whether a ‘‘national’’ reality was there to be captured (not just visually, but also aurally and linguistically) or somehow invented. The well-rehearsed election of vision (including ‘‘mute or musical vision’’) as privileged ground of direct aesthetic signification, at the expense of synchronized dialogue, continued in postwar realist theorizations. This time, however, Crocean notions of artistry founded on authorial aesthetic sensibility gave way to a celebration of the photographic immediacy of film. The latter was a critical taboo just a few decades earlier. The positions of two notable Marxist theorists, both arguing against Luciani’s position, need to be mentioned. Umberto Barbaro’s sophisticated notion of cinematic realism, while still embedded in the theoretical densities of Soviet montage (a silent film theoretical enterprise), and Luigi Chiarini’s concept of specifico filmico (film specificity) and pure film, looked at films’ indexical visual regime as the cipher of cinema’s structuring of reality at the expense of sound and words. The critical disregard for the serious problems posed in Italy by the encounter between cinema and orality, begun in the 1930s, lasted longer than the Fascist regime. Although the peculiar problematic of audiovisual address and communication for a nation of 100 dialects did not enter into a fullfledged discussion of film aesthetics, the question was nevertheless addressed by a few enlightened filmmakers. After World War II, Italian leftist film critics and poetically conscious directors made and kept yearning for a cinema capable of showing what for years the regime had intended to hide. Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa` (Paisan, 1946) revealed to all Italians the struggles of the liberation, but it did so by playing out the nation’s impressive diversity of geohistorical contexts and dialects. Likewise, Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948) turned the daily and antique destitution of Sicilian fishermen, whose vernacular culture and idioms could hardly be nationalized, into a subtitled political allegory. Never divorced from historical and contemporary political commitments, debates during neorealism, particularly between 1948 and 1955, revolved around cinema’s poetic nature and mission. Rather than outlining theoretical positions, as

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM they would be understood a few decades later, these reflections took the form of prescriptions of what cinema should have been, rather than speculations on films’ innermost nature. Neorealism’s chief practitioner-theorist, Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989), argued for a cinema that dismissed any obligation to fiction, scripts, and conventional genres, celebrated everyday reality and its antispectacular protagonists as the preferred means toward achieving national and interpersonal knowledge. Against this idea of cinema as simple ‘‘shadowing of reality,’’ Guido Aristarco (1918–1996), from the pages of the film periodical Cinema Nuovo, insisted on cinema’s poetic mediation, its capacity to reconstruct and shape reality, not just reflect it as is. Inspired by Gramsci and Luka´cs, whose works had recently begun to circulate, Aristarco’s famous defense of Visconti’s Senso (1954), formulated as ‘‘the passage from neorealism to realism,’’ recovered the plotting of narratives and the invention of characters as cinematic devices suitable to interpret critically the reality of history. These Italian debates, however, did not entertain a dialogue with contemporary reflections on realism developed by Andre´ Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer. In the postwar period, things had begun to change. A number of specialized film periodicals began to appear (La Rivista del Cinema Italiano, Cinema Nuovo, and Filmcritica), not to mention Guido Aristarco’s crucial works, L’arte del film (Film as Art, 1950) and Storia delle teoriche del cinema (A History of Film Theories, 1951). These venues of film criticism prepared the way for the ever more serious understanding of cinema as a cultural phenomenon and for its 1960s promotion to an academic discipline. Once taught in universities, film studies witnessed the emergence of a specific technical terminology and a more systematic internationalization of questions and debates. The emergence of semiotics, as a theory of the modes of production of signs and meanings, occurred in Italy in the context of an early embracing (and later critique) of structuralism and within a pervasive, but methodologically underutilized, Marxism. Furthermore, and differently from the neighboring French cultural context, at the time of the publication of Christian Metz’s Le cine´ma: Langue ou langage? (1964) and Roland Barthes’ Ele´ments de se´miologie (1968), Italian intellectuals were likely to be reading Marx, Hegel, Gramsci, and Luka´cs, but not Freud, Bachelard, Bataille, or Breton. In the long run, this resulted in Italian scholars overlooking the further developments of psychoanalytic film theory, which were inspiring,

for instance, formulations of cinematic apparatus and gender difference on film, or, in connection with the Marxist analyses of Louis Althusser, studies of cinema’s ideological regime. Within a semiotic epistemology, Metz’s question whether cinema could be paired to a linguistic system or simply to a nonsystematic, self-regulating discourse—the latter being Metz’s final contention— spurred a number of contributions. Particularly intense and articulate were the debates emerging at the international conferences on film language, held in Pesaro during the Mostra del Nuovo Cinema in 1965, 1966, and 1967. Indeed, the equation of cinema with a specific language had already begun in Italy with the anti-Crocean work of Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968), engaged in rejecting Croce’s equation of art with lyric intuition and culminating in the notion of filmic verisimilitude (Il verosimile filmico, 1954). At the Pesaro meetings, however, Italian film theorists plugged into international debates in a more systematic fashion. Gianfranco Bettetini concurred with Metz that cinema lacked the double articulation of natural languages (the meaningful matching of units of sense, or morphemes, with units of sounds, or phonemes), but still contended that films presented their own form of iconic articulation. A similar position was shared by Umberto Garroni, who problematized the Metzian framework by positing a cinematic normative, although nonlinguistic, dimension. Relying more on Pierce than de Saussure, Umberto Eco argued for the binary, and thus digital nature of the iconic code, concluding with a triply articulated cinematic code (figures, semes, and cinemorphs) operating within the single shot. Also, by adding the figure of the interpretant to sign and object (not to mention the translation from hypostatized entities to functional positions), Eco’s triadic model allowed for a semiotic discussion of ideology, rooted in the historical determination of semiotic production, transmission, and interpretation. This passage was in tune with the increasingly politicized Italian context. Initially, in fact, film semiotics were welcomed as anti-idealist, scientific enterprises aimed at revealing and describing the most elementary formal components of filmic signification. Soon, however, recognizing the tautological idealism of the structuralist-informed semiotic project—positing a priori the structure it sought to expose—and in a post-1968 climate progressively more sensitive to issues of ideology, Italian semiotics focused also on the historically specific and thus ideologically prone and materially 725

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM defined operations of sign and meaning production. Together with Bettetini, who distinguished between the material and signifying fabrication of the film text, Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (1976) best embodied this sensibility in which signification and communication are described as historically and socially dependable, and thus intrinsically connected. A similar opening to reality and history was present in the unique and complex contributions of writer, public intellectual, and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975), who argued for the ideological self-evidence of filmic representations of reality, while still positing their semiotic encoding. Through its rhetorical transparency, cinema, as the language of actions (‘‘the written language of reality’’), communicates universally—differently from written or spoken systems. His early film works, from Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) to La ricotta (1963), had accordingly emphasized cinema’s unique intimacy with life, by exploring the changes that modernity brought to the primeval culture and lives of a dying breed of Italy’s lumpenproletariat. His Gramscian attention to oral language, theorized in a famous 1969 essay Il cinema e la lingua orale (Cinema and Oral Language), was a refreshing departure from the traditional critical emphasis on vision—one that was to be more systematically explored by Gian Piero Brunetta (Forma e parola nel cinema, 1970). In the 1970s and 1980s, a large number of Italian practitioners made use of semiotics, narratology, and theories of enunciation in close contact with similar endeavors throughout Europe and North America. If narratology influenced the work of Roberto Campari, theories on the gaze and filmic point of view informed Elena Dagrada’s and Lorenzo Cuccu’s contributions. In the same years, enunciation, understood as the set of specific operations constituting a signifying act, were discussed by Bettetini in terms of an immanent, that is textual, conversation, and by Francesco Casetti in terms of a semiotic-pragmatic approach resulting in a whole inventory of textually constructed spectatorial positions. What Italian scholars hardly ever engaged with was the confluence of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Marxism that instead one would find in the writings of Jean-Luis Comolli and Jean Narboni, and of the group of scholars who emerged around the British periodical Screen (Peter Wollen, Paul Willemen, Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath, and Ben Brewster) and in their continuous reference to the theories of Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, 726

Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, and Louis Althusser. Italian scholars rarely engaged with the French and Anglo-American contributions to feminist film theory (with the exception of Teresa de Lauretis and Giuliana Bruno, both working in the United States), cognitive film theory, cultural studies, and phenomenology—although regarding the latter, Giorgio Tinazzi and Edoardo Bruno addressed the issue of cinematic experience. The degree of absence of any of these references in several studies on the notion of modernity in film (e.g., Giorgio De Vincenti, Il concetto di modernita` nel cinema, 1993) is rather impressive. Instead a retooling of film criticism emerged in Italy. Implicitly following Tinazzi, who had argued for the importance of semiotics for film criticism, Italian film theory has slowly morphed into a sophisticated combination of textual analysis and cultural criticism, perhaps best exemplified by Maurizio Grande’s magnificent analysis of Italian comedy (Abiti nuziali e biglietti di banca, 1986) and recently explored by Lorenzo Pellizzari. Notable exceptions have been Lucilla Albano’s psychoanalytically informed work on the cinematic apparatus (La caverna dei giganti, 1992), Ruggero Eugeni’s study of the hypnosis as a textual, enunciative, and cultural metaphor for the cinematic expression (La relazione d’incanto, 2002), and Francesco Casetti’s semiopragmatic approach to the modernity of the figure of the spectator—not just filmic, but also televisual; both inside and outside the text (Communicative Negotiations in Cinema and Television, 2003). In general, the mid-1980s’ explosion of interest in early cinema and the crucial (yet still unexamined) role of film archives as powerful centers of scholarship, in close alliance with university centers and study programs, have produced a remarkable array of historical studies nearly eclipsing theoretical approaches. Dominant, although not exclusive, has been a philological approach to the film text(s), related to issues of censorship and representation, authorship, genres, color, and verbal signs (i.e., intertitles). Preferred venues for these explorations have been the periodicals Fotogenia, Cinegrafie, Cine´ma & Cie, and the proceedings of the Udine International Film Conferences. In a country where most film scholars and critics still openly admit their leftist political stance, these explorations have been the closest thing to a Marxist film criticism, understood as a mode of analysis interested in the materiality of film production encompassing such practices as screenwriting, art direction, music scoring, etc.

FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Likewise, it may be a surprise that the often Marxist-inspired fabric of Anglo-American cultural studies has attracted in Italy suspicion of excessive methodological eclecticism. Instead, Italian film historians and critics, while openly declaring themselves leftist intellectuals, have readily embraced the work of David Bordwell, perhaps the most established and successful American maitre a` penser of film studies of the last three decades. His combination of idealist textual autarchy and newly renovated attention to the philological materiality of the film text has perhaps prevented the recognition of the cognitive and ideologically agnostic impetus of his remarkable scholarship. Perhaps ironically, therefore, the never-fading Crocean heritage of Italian film theory has continuously informed Italian film theory’s unique conceptual path, despite the various influences of international scholarship and despite itself. GIORGIO BERTELLINI Further Reading Albano, Lucilla, La caverna dei giganti: scritti sull’evoluzione del dispositivo cinematografico, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1992. Aristarco, Guido, Storia delle teoriche del film, Turin: Einaudi, 1951. Barbaro, Umberto, Il film e il risarcimento marxista dell’arte, edited by Lorenzo Quaglietti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1960. Barbaro, Umberto, Servitu` e grandezza del cinema, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1961. Bettetini, Gianfranco, Cinema: lingua e scrittura, Milan: Bompiani, 1968; as The Language and Technique of the Film, The Hague: Mouton, 1973. Bettetini, Gianfranco, Produzione del senso e messa in scena, Milan: Bompiani, 1975. Bordwell, David, ‘‘The Musical Analogy,’’ in ‘‘Cinema Sound,’’ edited by Rick Altman, Yale French Studies, no. 60 (1980): 141–156. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Il film sonoro, Milan: Edizioni Corbaccio, 1929. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Forma e parola nel cinema, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Bruno, Edoardo, Film altro reale, Milan: Il Formichiere, 1978. Bruno, Giuliana, and Maria Nadotti (editors), Off Screen: Women & Film in Italy, New York: Routledge, 1988. Canudo, Ricciotto, ‘‘Naissance d’un sixie`me Art: Essai sur le Cine´matographe,’’ in Les Entretiens idealists, 25 October 1911; now in French Film Theory and Criticism: A History/Anthology,1907–1939. Volume I: 1907–1929, edited by Richard Abel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988. Casetti, Francesco, Dentro lo sguardo: Il film e il suo spettatore, Milan: Bompiani, 1986; as Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Casetti, Francesco, Communicative Negotiations in Cinema and Television, Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2003. Casetti, Francesco, L’occhio del Novecento: Cinema, esperienza, modernita`, Milan: Bompiani, 2005. Chiarini, Luigi, Il film nella battaglia delle idee, Milan and Rome: Bocca, 1954. Chiarini, Luigi, Arte e tecnica del film, Bari: Laterza, 1962. Dagrada, Elena, ‘‘Subjectivite´ et camera subjective,’’ in Actes Se´miotiques, 41 (1987): 24–29. Dagrada, Elena, La rappresentazione dello sguardo nel cinema delle origini in Europa: nascita della soggettiva, Bologna: CLUEB, 1998. D’Annunzio, Gabriele, ‘‘Del cinematografo considerato come uno strumento di liberazione e come arte di trasfigurazione,’’ in Il Corriere della Sera, 28 February 1914; now in Giovanni Pastrone: Gli anni d’oro del cinema a Torino, edited by Paolo Cherchi Usai Turin: UTET, 1986. De Lauretis, Teresa, ‘‘Semiotics, Theory, and Social Practice: A Critical History of Italian Semiotics,’’ in Cine´Tracts, 2, no. 1 (1978): 1–14. Della Volpe, Galvano, Il verosimile filmico e altri scritti di estetica, Rome: Edizioni di Filmcritica, 1954. De Vincenti, Giorgio, Il concetto di modernita` nel cinema, Parma: Pratiche, 1993. Eco, Umberto, La struttura assente, Milan: Bompiani, 1968. Eugeni, Ruggero, La relazione d’incanto: Studi su cinema e ipnosi, Milan: Vita & Pensiero, 2002. Gariazzo, Piero Antonio, Il teatro muto, Turin: Lattes, 1919. Garroni, Emilio, Semiotica ed estetica, Bari: Laterza, 1968. Grande, Maurizio, Abiti nuziali e biglietti di banca, Rome: Bulzoni, 1986. Luciani, Sebastiano Arturo, Verso una nuova arte. Il cinematografo, Rome: Casa Editrice Ausonia, 1920. Luciani, Sabastiano, L’Antiteatro: il Cinematografo come arte, Rome: La Voce Editrice, 1928. Luciani, Sebastiano, Il cinema e le arti, Siena: Ticci Editore, 1942. Paolella, Roberto, Storia del cinema muto, Naples: Giannini, 1956. Paolella, Roberto, Storia del cinema sonoro (1926–1939), Naples: Giannini, 1966. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Il cinema di poesia’’ and ‘‘Il cinema e la lingua orale,’’ in Empirismo Eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 1972; as ‘‘The Cinema of Poetry’’ and ‘‘Cinema and Oral Language,’’ in Heretical Empiricism, edited by Louise K. Barnett, translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. Pellizzari, Lorenzo, Critica alla critica: contributi a una storia della critica cinematografica Italiana, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1999. Pirandello, Luigi, Si gira..., Milan: Treves, 1915; as Shoot! (Si Gira). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, New York: Dutton, 1926. Pirandello, Luigi, ‘‘Se il film parlante abolira` il teatro,’’ in Il Corriere della Sera, 16 June 1929; now in Pirandello e il cinema. Con una raccolta completa degli scritti teorici e creativi, edited by Francesco Ca`llari, Venice: Marsilio, 1991; as ‘‘Pirandello Views the ‘Talkies,’’’ in The New York Times Magazine, 28 July 1929, Section 5, pp. 1–2.

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FILM THEORY AND CRITICISM Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico, Cinema arte figurativa, Turin: Einaudi, 1952. Tinazzi, Giorgio, La copia originale, Venice: Marsilio, 1983.

Zavattini, Cesare, Zavattini: Sequences from a Cinematic Life, translated by William Weaver, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

IL FIORE (CA. 1280–1320) An Italian version (in 232 sonnets) of the Old French Roman de la rose (Romance of the Rose), Il Fiore was composed sometime between 1280 to 1320 and is contained in a single manuscript: Codex H. 438 of the Bibliothe`que Universitaire (Montpellier, France). The identity of its author— referred to as ‘‘Durante’’ twice in the poem (sonnets 82 and 202)—is still an open question, although Dante Alighieri is a prime candidate. Composed in the thirteenth century by two poets (Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun), the allegorical Roman de la rose was very popular in Italy, as may be seen in the numerous manuscripts of the poem in Italian libraries. Significant differences exist between the Rose and the Fiore, not least of which is length: The 21,750 verses of the Old French text are reduced to the 3,245 verses of the Italian sonnets. While the journey of the Lover in the Italian text also culminates in the highly erotic description of the ‘‘plucking’’ of the flower, the Fiore makes no distinction between the first part of the Rose, written in the refined courtly verse of Guillaume de Lorris, and the second part composed in the didactic style of Jean de Meun. The Italian version also abandons the original courtly and didactic focus of the story in favor of a more relaxed comic style; indeed, the choice of the sonnet as the narrative vehicle suggests the author’s intent both to dissociate his work from the French text and to place it within a distinctively Italian poetic tradition. By eliminating Jean’s digressions, the author of the Fiore is able to concentrate on the art of love as highlighted in the first part of the Rose and to redirect the poem toward this end. This would, in effect, re-establish Guillaume’s intent in the text: Guillaume states that ‘‘it is the Romance of the Rose, in which the whole art of love is contained’’ (‘‘ce est li Romanz de la Rose, / ou l’art d’Amors est tote enclose,’’ vv. 37–38). The Italian author is also able to achieve Jean’s 728

principal objective, that of defining the Romance of the Rose as a ‘‘mirror for lovers’’ (Le Mirouer aus Amoureus, v. 10,651)—an encyclopedia for lovers. A summary of the content of Il Fiore is in order. In sonnet 1, Lover (Amante), while gazing at a flower in the Garden of Love is wounded by the God of Love. After pledging fealty to the God of Love, Lover tries to pick the flower in the garden of Jealousy (Gelosia), but is opposed by Resistance (Schifo) (sonnets 2–8). In sonnets 9–10, Reason (Ragione) tries to intervene, but Lover does not listen. Sonnets 11–12 contain the first dialogue with the Friend (Amico) who urges Lover to the quest. Then Mercy (Pieta`) and Sincerity (Franchezza) convince Resistance to allow Lover into the garden. Once there, he finally kisses the flower, but because of this offense he is banished from the garden of Jealousy (13–21). Chastity (Castita`) asks Jealousy to take strong precautions; then a fortified castle is built where Chastity and Jealousy imprison Fair Welcome (Bellacoglienza) under the surveillance of the Old Woman (La Vecchia). Resistance, Modesty (Vergogna), Fear (Paura), and Bad Mouth (Mala Bocca) guard the doors of the castle (22–32). In sonnets 33–34, we see Lover’s suffering, then Reason tries in vain to dissuade Lover from pursuing his amorous quest (35–46). Friend returns to the scene and advises Lover on the trickery of love: In order to conquer the Flower he must either use hypocrisy with Bad Mouth or follow the road of Extravagance (Troppo-Donare) controlled by Wealth (Ricchezza) (47–72). However, Wealth refuses Lover (73–76). The God of Love wants to reward Lover for his one-year resistance to all of his obstacles and summons the Barons of Love, Forced Abstinence (Costretta Astinenza), and False Seeming (Falsembiante) (77–81). Together they plan their strategy to conquer the castle (82–87). At this point, False Seeming appears dressed as a Dominican friar; he introduces himself and,

IL FIORE in a demonstration of ecclesiastical hypocrisy, assures faithfulness to the God of Love (88–127). False Seeming and Forced Abstinence betray and kill Bad Mouth (128–136). Once inside the castle, Lover strikes a deal with the Old Woman to convince Fair Welcome to yield (137–143). Then the Old Woman delivers a long monologue evoking her youthful errors, urging women to use deceit to betray and profit from men as well as to have several lovers simultaneously (144–197). Fair Welcome receives Lover, but the opposition mounted once again by Resistance requires a new strategy (194–205). The army of the God of Love attacks the castle, and amid battles and combats, there is large-scale slaughter, which continues until the God of Love calls a truce (206–214). Venus intervenes, setting fire to the castle and routing the enemy (215–225). Lady Courtesy persuades Fair Welcome to receive Lover (226–227), and Lover deflowers the Flower (228–230). Lover thanks his benefactors and rejoices at the successful accomplishment of his mission in the face of many obstacles (231–232). The author of Il Fiore demonstrates his indebtedness to the Old French poem and, at the same time, shows his independence: He removes the doctrinal passages and transforms the remainder into more accessible imagery, thus rewriting the text in a more popular vein that will be comprehensible to a different and wider audience. These actions might be interpreted as a form of rebellion against French literary conventions and, as such, would be intended to help the nascent Italian literary tradition assume its own (non-French) identity, despite the number of gallicisms in the text. The question of Il Fiore’s literary and/or historical intent remains unknown, although some critics have argued that its goal was merely to amuse and entertain. It discloses the work of a sophisticated author, one who evokes the metaphors, symbols, and erotic subject matter of the courtly tradition, as portrayed in the Romance of the Rose, but who also rewrites the poem using his own strategies and a new poetic style and vernacular. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ Editions First edition: Il Fiore, poe`me italien du XIIIe sie`cle, en CCXXXII sonnets, imite´ du Roman de la Rose par Durante, edited by Ferdinand Castets, Paris: Maisonneuve et Cie, 1881. Other editions: Il Fiore e il Detto d’Amore, edited by E. G. Parodi, Florence: Bemporad, 1921; Il Fiore e il detto d’amore attribuiti a Dante Alighieri. Testo del XIII secolo, edited by Guido Mazzoni, Florence: Alinari,

1923; Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, 3 vols., edited by Fe´lix Lecoy, Paris: Champion, 1965–1970; ‘‘Il Fiore’’ e ‘‘Il Detto d’Amore,’’ edited by Claudio Marchiori, Genoa: Tilgher, 1983; Dante Alighieri, Il Fiore e il Detto d’Amore attribuibili a Dante Alighieri, edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1984; Dante, Il Fiore— Detto d’Amore, edited by Luca Carlo Rossi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Translations: Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, translated by Charles Dahlberg, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995; as The Fiore and the Detto d’Amore. A Late 13th-Century Italian Translation of the Roman de la Rose, Attributable to Dante Alighieri, translated with an introduction and notes by Christopher Kleinhenz and Santa Casciani, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000; Dante Alighieri, Il Fiore (The Flower), with introduction, translation and commentary by John Took, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.

Further Reading Baranski, Zygmunt G., ‘‘Il Fiore e la tradizione delle translationes,’’ in Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 5–6 (1995): 31–41. Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Patrick Boyde (editors), The ‘‘Fiore’’ in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Baranski, Zygmunt G., Patrick Boyde, and Lino Pertile (editors), Letture classensi 22: Lettura del ‘‘Fiore,’’ Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1993. Bernardo, Aldo S., ‘‘Sex and Salvation in the Middle Ages: From the Romance of the Rose to the Divine Comedy,’’ in Italica, 67 (1990): 305–318. Brownlee, Kevin, ‘‘The Practice of Cultural Authority: Italian Responses to French Cultural Dominance in Il Tesoretto, Il Fiore, and the Commedia,’’ in Forum for Modern Language Studies, 33 (1997): 258–269. Brownlee, Kevin, and Sylvia Huot (editors), Rethinking the ‘‘Romance of the Rose’’: Text, Image, Reception, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Cassata, Letterio, ‘‘Sul testo del Fiore,’’ in Studi danteschi, 58 (1986): 187–237. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Un nodo della cultura medievale: la serie Roman de la Rose—Fiore—Divina Commedia,’’ in Lettere italiane, 25 (1973): 162–189. Dragonetti, Roger, ‘‘Specchi d’amore: il Romanzo della Rosa e il Fiore,’’ in Paragone, 374 (1981): 3–22. Huot, Sylvia, The Romance of the Rose and Its Medieval Readers: Interpretation, Reception, Manuscript Transmission, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Sebastio, Leonardo, Strutture narrative e dinamiche culturali in Dante e nel ‘‘Fiore,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1990. Took, John, ‘‘Towards an Interpretation of the Fiore,’’ in Speculum, 54 (1979): 500–527. Took, John, ‘‘Dante and the Roman de la Rose,’’ in Italian Studies, 37 (1982): 1–25. Vallone, Aldo, ‘‘Il Fiore come opera di Dante,’’ in Studi danteschi, 56 (1984): 141–167. Vanossi, Luigi, Dante e il ‘‘Roman de la Rose’’: saggio sul ‘‘Fiore,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1979.

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AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA

AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA (1493–1543) Known for his refined, almost decadent style and lifelong quest for balanced rhetorical elegance with popular parlance, Agnolo Firenzuola bears the distinction of being one of Italy’s foremost Humanists who wrote exclusively in the vernacular. He began his literary career by inserting himself into the much-debated contestation over the future of the Italian language, the questione della lingua, taking a polemical stance against the inclusion of Greek letters into the Latin alphabet proposed by Gian Giorgio Trissino. In the Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana (Expulsion of the New Letters Uselessly Added to the Tuscan Language, 1524), his only work published within his own lifetime, Firenzuola ironically refuted Gian Giorgio Trissino’s complicated orthographic reforms and pushed for grammatical and lexical simplicity. At the same time, the aspiring author introduced an element that remained a constant in all of his works—the quest to forge a closer relationship between the spoken and written word. Not entirely satisfied with Pietro Bembo’s finite Petrarchan and Boccaccian repertoire, Firenzuola aimed at expanding the national language with vocabulary culled from popular usage. Often called a minor Humanist, Firenzuola experimented with each of the major genres of the Renaissance literary canon. His next endeavor, the Ragionamenti (Discussions, 1552), written in 1525, was closely modeled after Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350–1352) and Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani (1505). Inspired by his love for a wise and virtuous lady known by the senhal Costanza Amaretta (Bitter Constance), the work united formal dialogues and short narratives or novelle. Of the projected six days, each intended to include six stories narrated by a noble group of three men and three women, Firenzuola completed only one full day and fragments of the second. In substance it was an amalgam fusing narrative tales to a Neoplatonic treatise on love. Poetry, comic and licentious escapades, and philosophical discussions shared the stage. However, having done away with Boccaccio’s cornice—the framing pretense for the whole—structural problems prevented Firenzuola from carrying the work to fruition. 730

After experimenting with burlesque verse in the style of Francesco Berni and penning in 1525 a treatise in defense of women addressed to Claudio Tolomei, the Epistole in lode delle donne (Epistles in Praise of Women), which was published posthumously in 1548, Firenzuola tried his hand at translating a Latin classic. His chosen material, Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, retitled Dell’asino d’oro (The Golden Ass, 1550), reflected his interests in stylistic innovation. Firenzuola transformed the second century original into an autobiographical narrative presented under the loose guise of allegory. He was attracted to more than just the content, as the sensuality of Apuleius’ ‘‘decadent’’ Latin style provided the model for his increasingly elegant and richly ornate vernacular prose. Echoes of Angelo Poliziano also resonated throughout the work and became even more frequent in his later endeavors. Most importantly, it is here that Firenzuola strove to maintain continuity between narrative and reflection. However, Firenzuola was ravaged by a virulent strain of syphilis and once again failed to complete the work, stopping short right before the final and most philosophically challenging chapter. His sole effort during the remainder of his Roman convalescence were tortured verses dealing with his malady, Intorno la sua malattia (Regarding his Infirmity, 1533), which, due to the frank treatment of his acute physical ailments, differed greatly from the contemporary vogue for poetry describing the anguish suffered by victims of love sickness. It was eventually published in his Rime (Poems, 1549). Back once more in his native Tuscany in the idyllic quiet of Prato, Firenzuola’s health was finally restored. Situated outside of Florence, he found renewed inspiration in the small salons of Prato’s cultured yet provincial mercantile bourgeoisie. In true Humanist form, Firenzuola opened the bucolic Accademia dell’Addiaccio (1540)—a literary society rooted in pastoral poetry that in some ways anticipated the seventeenth-century Roman Arcadia. He composed two plays, the Trinuzia (The Triple Marriage, 1549) and the Lucidi (1549) based on the Menaechmi of Plautus. The pie`ces, reprinted several times after his death, by and

AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA large conform to Renaissance standards for theatrical production while still displaying stylistic originality. Addressed to the city’s noble caste, the characters interact using plebeian speech rendered all the livelier by the regional dialect of Prato’s countryside. Thus, the spoken language of familiar popular usage breaks into the formally contrived comedies and attains the linguistic synthesis Firenzuola had originally envisioned in the Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana. The confluence of artificial elegance, vivacious narrative, and vernacular spontaneity found its most harmonious expression in his masterpiece, La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (The First [Italian] Version of the Discourse of the Animals, 1548). This collection of fables written around 1540–1541 was again a loose adaptation into the Tuscan language, this time of the Indian Pan˜ciatantra, which he knew through a Spanish intermediary, Giovanni da Capua’s Exemplario contra los engan˜os y peligros del mundo (1493). The philosopher Tiabono presents a series of 25 animal fables and four novelle that are logically interconnected to one another and invested with a strong didactic charge. The protagonists are transformed into the narrators, alternating between surprisingly moral and highly entertaining burlesque tales. Ironic, hedonistic and ingeniously elegant, the work nonetheless stands as a monument to Firenzuola’s search for verbal simplicity based on contemporary usage. Due, in part, to the lessons learned while translating Dell’asino d’oro, the structural difficulties presented by the Boccaccian model in the Ragionamenti were now surpassed. Popular narrative and aulic rhetorical sophistication fluidly converged into his refined prose. During this period he also composed several Rime, which were published posthumously by his brother Gerolamo in 1549. Today, the Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Dialogue on the Beauty of Women, 1548) has become a favorite amongst art, cultural, and literary historians for its insights into cinquecento aesthetic criteria and gendered society. Part of a tradition of Platonic treatises establishing the ideals for perfect female beauty and grace, the dialogue disseminated the elite philosophical arguments dear to Latin Humanists to a new popular audience. The colloquial exchange between the protagonist, Celso, and his female interlocutors—women closely modeled after known citizens of Prato— articulated Firenzuola’s novel, almost egalitarian approach to Neoplatonic love as well as to the dialogic structure of philosophical disquisition.

Biography Originally baptized with the names Michelangelo and Gerolamo, Agnolo was born in Florence to the notary Bastiano Giovannini da Firenzuola and Lucrezia Braccesi, September 28, 1493; spent infancy in Florence and through his grandfather Alessandro Braccesi was introduced into the Florentine humanistic circles of the times; at 16, began his studies of jurisprudence at Siena, later completed at Perugia, 1516; took holy orders as a Vallambrosian monk and transferred to Rome, 1517; served as an advocate for his order in Rome and was influenced by the literary circles of popes Leo X and Clement VII, 1518–1522; during his Roman period, mingled with literati like Bembo, Molza, Aretino, and Della Casa and frequented the woman he identified as Costanza Amaretta (‘‘Bitter Constance’’); motivated by the as of yet unidentified lady, abandoned his ecclesiastical charge and dedicated himself entirely to literature; following the death of Costanza (1525), contracted a crippling form of syphilis and withdrew from his Vallabrosian vows, 1526; following the death of Clement VII, left Rome and returned to Tuscany, 1534; assumed the monastic cloth again and settled in Prato as the abbot of San Salvatore a Vaiano, 1538; due to his improved health and a new love for a lady named Selvaggia (roughly translated as ‘‘Wild Woman’’), resumed his literary activities and founded the Accademia dell’Addiaccio, 1540; during these years, composed numerous works, but his good fortune did not last long—once more impoverished, sick, and alone, died in Prato on June 27, 1543. SARA ELENA DIAZ See also: Novella Selected Works Collections Prose di M. Agnolo Firenzuola fiorentino, vols. 2, Florence: Bernardo Giunti, 1548. Le novelle, edited by Eugenio Ragni, Milan: Salerno, 1971. Opere, edited by Delmo Maestri, Turin: Utet, 1977.

Fiction La prima veste dei discorsi degli animali, 1548. Ragionamenti, partial 1548; 1552.

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 1549.

Treatises Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana, 1524. Epistole in lode delle donne, 1548.

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AGNOLO FIRENZUOLA Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne, 1548; as On the Beauty of Women, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray, 1992.

Plays Trinuzia, 1549. I Lucidi, 1549.

Translations Apuleius, Dell’asino d’oro, 1550.

Further Reading Bettella, Patrizia, ‘‘Discourse of Resistance: The Parody of Feminine Beauty in Berni, Doni and Firenzuola,’’ in MLN, 113, no. 1 (1998): 192–203. Cerreta, Florindo, ‘‘Una canzone del Firenzuola e una vecchia teoria sulla paternita` degli Ingannati,’’ in Bibliofilia, 73 (1971): 151–163. Maestri, Delmo, ‘‘Le rime di Agnolo Firenzuola: proposta di ordinamento del testo e valutazione critica,’’ in Italianistica, 3 (1974): 78–96.

Maniscalco, Silvana, ‘‘Criteri e sensibilita` di Agnolo Firenzuola, traduttore di Apuleio,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 82 (1978): 88–109. Murray, Jacqueline, ‘‘Agnolo Firenzuola on Female Sexuality and Women’s Equality,’’ in The Sixteenth Century Journal, 22, no. 2 (1991): 199–213. Riviello, Tonia Caterina, Agnolo Firenzuola: The Androgynous Vision, Rome: Bulzoni, 1986. Rogers, Mary, ‘‘The Decorum of Women’s Beauty: Trissino, Firenzuola, Luigini and the Representation of Women in Sixteenth-Century Painting,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 2, no. 1 (1988): 47–88. Scarci, Manuela, ‘‘Imitation and Subversion of Models in Agnolo Firenzuola’s I Ragionamenti,’’ in The Italian Novella: A Book of Essays, New York: Routledge, 2003. Scuderi, Ermanno, ‘‘Firenzuola e il suo ideale di bellezza femminile,’’ in Scrittori irregolari, Bologna, 1977. Thompson, Patricia, ‘‘Firenzuola, Surrey and Watson,’’ in Renaissance News, 18, no. 4 (1965): 295–298.

ENNIO FLAIANO (1910–1972) A versatile intellectual, Ennio Flaiano, who trained as an architect, worked first as a journalist, then as a film and theater critic. In 1939, he wrote film and theater reviews for Oggi, a weekly magazine. He also contributed to other magazines like Documento, Cine Illustrato, Mediterraneo, Star, Domenica, Il Mondo. His career as a scriptwriter, which started with Pastor Angelicus (1942), a documentary film on the life of Pope Pius XII, directed by Romolo Marcellini, paralleled, with equal success, his career as a writer. His first and only novel, Tempo di uccidere (The Short Cut), published in 1947, was described by many critics as ‘‘prophetic.’’ It was inspired by his own experiences as a young lieutenant during the Fascist campaign in Africa in 1935. Narrated from the protagonist’s point of view, the story takes place during the Italian campaign in Abyssinia. The protagonist, bothered by a toothache, leaves the front line in search of a dentist. While taking a short cut through a sinister valley, he loses his way and meets a native woman bathing in a stream. They spend a few days together, during which the woman, who apparently has fallen in love with him, devotes herself to him. One night he fires at what he imagines is an animal; the 732

bullet ricochets, hits the woman, and gravely wounds her. Uncertain of what to do or how to find help, he decides to shoot her while she lies sleeping. His crime will remain unpunished, but nonetheless it haunts the young lieutenant. Tempo di uccidere (which has been translated into English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swedish, and Czech), dramatizes both the officer’s efforts to evade his responsibility for the crime and his misgivings about the violence perpetrated against other populations and cultures. Giuliano Montaldo based his film, Tempo di uccidere (Time To Kill, 1990), on the novel. Tempo di uccidere was followed by Diario notturno e altri scritti (Night Diary and Other Writings, 1956) and Una e una notte (One and One Night, 1959), two collections of satirical short stories. Un marziano a Roma (A Martian in Rome, 1960), Flaiano’s most important theatrical piece, which first appeared as an article in Il Mondo (November 2, 1954) and was later included in Diario notturno e altri scritti, tells the story of an alien in Rome, venerated first as a Messiah and then compelled to live by his wits. Flaiano shows his deep love-and-hate relationship with Rome, the

ENNIO FLAIANO caput mundi. The fascinating but tempting city, to which he moved in 1922, is depicted in a much more unforgiving light in the script of Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959). After the fiasco of the first representation of Un marziano a Roma at the Teatro Lirico of Milan in November 1960, Flaiano, showing his resilient sense of humor, affirmed that the play was the most interesting failure of the 1960s. Il gioco e il massacro (The Game and the Massacre, 1970) and Le ombre bianche (The White Shadows, 1972) are among his most important subsequent narrative works. While his articles, which focus with ‘‘indiscreet lenses’’ on contemporary society, continued to appear in the pages of L’Europeo, La Voce Repubblicana e Il Corriere della Sera, Flaiano started to write screenplays. From the 1940s onward, he wrote or coauthored more than 60 screenplays. Among these were Roma citta` libera (Rome, Free City, 1946) directed by Marcello Pagliero, Guardie e ladri (Cops and Robbers, 1951) directed by Mario Monicelli, La romana (Woman of Rome, 1954) directed by Luigi Zampa, Le notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria, 1957) and La dolce vita by Federico Fellini, La notte (1961) by Michelangelo Antonioni, and many others. Although Flaiano wrote for many directors, his longest, most intense and most fruitful collaboration was with Fellini, with whom he worked on many films from Luci del varieta` (Variety Lights, uncredited, 1950) to Giulietta degli spiriti (Juliet of the Spirits, 1965). Unarguably Flaiano’s lucid irony and his unforgiving satire contributed significantly to the success of many of Fellini’s films, from Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik, 1952) to La strada (The Road, 1954) to what many consider Fellini’s masterpiece Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963). Today, Flaiano is regarded as one of the writers (along with Sergio Amidei and Cesare Zavattini) who contributed significantly to the birth and development of neorealism in Italy. Despite the quantity and versatility of his work, Flaiano did not receive the recognition he deserved in his own lifetime. One of the most important intellectuals of twentieth-century Italy, he has often been left out of the official cultural histories of his era. One reason for this neglect was his audacity in challenging the established literary modes of the time. Language can be an extremely subversive tool, and this was the way Flaiano used it. Indeed, he used the Italian language, as Maria Corti states in her preface to Flaiano’s collected works (1988), in an idiosyncratic and antitraditional way: He always employed literary genres in a transgressive fashion. Another reason for his

marginalization was his political orientation. At a time in which Italian culture was all too frequently in the hands of either the Christian Democrats or the Communists, an intellectual such as Flaiano (who often proposed a terza via) was considered an outsider. Today his journalistic articles, his prose, and his theatrical works speak to audiences of all ages and cultures. Flaiano once wrote that the worst thing that can happen to a genius is to be understood in his own time. His point was welltaken. The time for recognizing Ennio Flaiano’s many contributions to film has finally come.

Biography Born in Pescara, March 5, 1910. Trained as an architect (never obtained a degree). Entered the circle of the Roman journal L’Occidente, 1933– 1934. Lieutenant in the Italian campaign in Africa, 1935. After returning to Italy from Ethiopia, met Rosetta Rota, 1936; they wed in 1940. Winner of several literary awards, including the Strega prize for Tempo di uccidere (1947) and the Campiello prize for Il gioco e il massacro (1970). Among cinema awards, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, received Oscar nominations for Best Story and Screenplay for La strada (1954) and I vitelloni (1957). Along with Fellini, Pinelli, and Brunello Rondi, was nominated for Best Story and Screenplay for La dolce vita (1959), and 8½ (1963). Died in Rome November 20, 1972. Many of his works appeared posthumously. In 1973, the city of Pescara founded the ‘‘Premi Internazionali Flaiano’’ for outstanding achievement in literature, theater, television, and cinema. DANIELA ORLANDI Selected Works Collections Opere di Ennio Flaiano, edited by Giulio Cattaneo e Sergio Pautasso, vols. 10, Milan: Rizzoli, 1973–1983. Opere, edited by Maria Corti and Anna Longoni, vols. 2, Milan: Bompiani, 1988–1989.

Fiction Tempo di uccidere, 1947; as The Short Cut, translated by Stuart Hood, 1950. Diario notturno e altri scritti, 1956. Una e una notte, 1959. Il gioco e il massacro, 1970. Le ombre bianche, 1972. La solitudine del satiro, 1973; as The Via Veneto Papers, translated by John Satriano, 1992.

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ENNIO FLAIANO Autobiografia del blu di Prussia, 1974. Diario degli errori, edited by Gemma Giammattei, 1976. Storie inedite per film mai fatti, edited by Francesca Pino Pongolini, 1984. Frasario essenziale per passare inosservati in societa`, 1986. La notte porta consiglio e altri racconti cinematografici, edited by Diana Ru¨esch, 2001.

Plays Un marziano a Roma, 1960; expanded as Un marziano a Roma e altre farse, 1971.

Essays Lettere d’amore al cinema, edited by Cristina Bragaglia, 1978. Un film alla settimana: 55 critiche da Cine illustrato (1939– 1940), edited by Tullio Kezich, 1988. Nuove lettere d’amore al cinema, edited by Guido Fink, 1990. L’occhiale indiscreto, edited by Anna Longoni, 1995. Lo spettatore addormentato, edited by Simona Costa, 1996.

Screenplays Le notti di Cabiria, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, 1957; rpt. 1981. La dolce vita, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, 1963; rpt. 1981. I vitelloni e La strada: soggetto e sceneggiatura, with Federico Fellini and Tullio Pinelli, 1989. Progetto Proust: una sceneggiatura per La recherche du temps perdu, edited by Maria Sepa, 1989. Luci del varieta`, with Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, and Tullio Pinelli, 1994.

Other L’uovo di Marx: epigrammi, satire, occasioni, edited by Anna Longoni and Vanni Scheiwiller, 1987. Soltanto le parole: lettere di e a Ennio Flaiano, 1933–1972, edited by Anna Longoni and Diana Ru¨esch, 1995.

Further Reading Bertelli, Gian Carlo, and Pier Marco De Santi (editors), Omaggio a Flaiano, Pisa: Giardini, 1986. Catalano, Ettore, L’esperienza del teatro: Savinio e Flaiano critici teatrali e altri interventi sul teatro meridionale, Bari: Levante, 1984. Esposito, Vittoriano, Vita e pensiero di Ennio Flaiano, Cerchio: Polla, 1993. Flaiano satirico: Convegno di studio: Pescara, 30–31 maggio 1997, Pescara: Ediars, 1997. Marchetti, Antonio, Pescara. Ennio Flaiano e la citta` parallela, Milan: Unicopli, 2004. Mesirca, Margherita, Le mille e una storie impossibili: indagine intorno ai racconti lunghi di Ennio Flaiano, Ravenna: Longo, 2003. Palermo, Antonio, and Emma Giammattei, Solitudine del moralista. Alvano e Flaiano, Naples: Liguori, 1986. Russo, Giovanni, Oh Flaiano!, Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano, 2001. Sergiacomo, Lucilla, Invito alla lettura di Ennio Flaiano, Milan: Mursia, 1996. Il teatro di Flaiano: convegno di studi: Pescara, 6–7 ottobre 1995, Pescara: Ediars, 1995. Tempo di uccidere: atti del convegno nazionale, Pescara, 27– 28 maggio 1994, Pescara: Ediars, 1994.

FLORENCE Florence was founded by the Romans in 187 AD, during the work to extend the Via Cassia. A walled city, Florentia consisted of two main roads, four towered gates, a central square, the Curia, and the Temple of the Capitoline Triad (Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva). The city had public works such as the Capitoline Baths, the Baths of Capaccio, the sewage system, and the Temple of Isis, but was not a relevant cultural and political center. Its distance from the center of political power was crucial for the internal life of the new city and its cultural relationship with Rome. Soon, some Etruscan noble families moved to Florence, taking part in the rule of the city. Commercial activity was strong, and merchants introduced to Florence Christianity and the Oriental cults of the deacon Lorenzo and 734

the Palestinian saint Felicita. The Longobards conquered northern and central Italy in the sixth century, and Florence fell under their domination. In the eighth century, Florence was integrated into the feudal system as a county of the Holy Roman Empire. By the year 1000, it also became a center in the cultural and philosophical struggle to eliminate secular interference in ecclesiastical affairs and to assert the independence of the papacy from imperial power. One of the leading figures in this debate was St. Giovanni Gualberto, the son of a Florentine knight. From now on, the conflict between the two factions, the propapal Guelphs and the proimperial Ghibellines, deeply marked the cultural history of the city. In 1055, Florence played host to a council between Emperor Henry III

FLORENCE and 120 bishops. Later, it became further embroiled in the struggle for investitures because Matilda, countess of Tuscany, was a supporter of the ideas of St. Gualberto, as well as of the most influential of the reformers, Ildebrando di Sovana, then Pope Gregory VII. She thus found herself in contrast with the emperor. After the episode of Canossa, Henry IV’s victory in 1081 led to the deposition of the countess, abandoned by all the Tuscan cities except Florence. After Countess Matilda’s death (1114), Florence constituted a commune, with three dominant social groups: the nobles, grouped into consorterie, the rising merchants, and the knights. The river Arno became an infrastructure within the city as a communications route, and a source of energy and of water for industries. In 1180, 35 towers were documented in Florence, but there were many more. With a population of 30,000 inhabitants, the commune experienced a period of peace and the city continued to expand, becoming an international economic center. New religious orders—the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and the Augustinians— established themselves in Florence, playing a leading role in its cultural life. The construction of the new cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore began in 1294. In 1250, the merchants and the artisans managed to usurp the power of the Ghibelline nobles. The Societas militum, an organization of the nobility, was abolished in the hope of allaying the arrogance of the aristocracy and of preventing it from returning to power. In 1255, construction began on the Palazzo del Popolo, now the Bargello, to house the Councils of the Commune. At the battle of Montaperti (1260), the Florentines were defeated by the Sienese. The city was covered with rubble, and palaces, houses, and towers were demolished. The Ghibelline leaders, fearing the people, accepted the services of Clemente IV as peacemaker. The pope favored the Guelphs, who thus succeeded in reconquering power and reintroduced the institutions abrogated by the Ghibellines. Two new parties began to shape up among the people: the Magnati or entrepreneurs (the noble Guelphs and the repatriated Ghibellines, owners of houses and lands) and the Popolani or workers (merchant and artisans organized in guilds). Soon the Magnati were prohibited from taking part in the political life. The confused social and political situation was discussed by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), who had had a part in the civil life as a magistrate and a Priore (a type of governor). His position was strongly against the secular power of papacy, considering

the science of government unrelated to the pope’s authority. The secular power of the pope, in Dante’s view, was the origin of the corruption of the church. Following the example of Christ and of St. Francis of Assisi, the church should not own material property, and the authority of the pope should be only spiritual. In Dante’s opinion, the history of Florence had been too violent and sanguinary: As he wrote at the beginning of canto 36 of the Inferno, ‘‘Godi, Fiorenza, poi / che se’ sı` grande / che per mare e per terra batti l’ali / e per lo ’nferno tuo nome si spande!’’ (Be joyous, Florence, you are great indeed / for over sea and land you beat your wings / through every part of Hell your name extends!). After his exile, it was clear to him that the most important values for Florence should have been unity, harmony, understandings and peace. Dante’s stil nuovo is mainly a kind of poetry in which it is Love that speaks. Many passages in his Divina Commedia are a sad call to Florence to change its life. A totally renewed Florence could be a cultural model for the whole of Italy, in the same way the Florentine dialect is the ‘‘noble language’’ to be used in the country. By the end of the thirteenth century, Florentine culture was flourishing. In the art of Giotto (1267– 1337), Christ is not the metaphysical symbol of the Byzantine iconography, but the perfect model of man: exposed to obscurity and evil, leading a life of modesty and humility, based on his soul and heart, on the human community. In this perspective, as the philosopher Paolo Rossi points out, a distinguishing sign of the spirit of the city was the intense cultural and philosophical debate about the nature of power and Christianity, the identity and mission of Catholicism, the ethics of life, the foundation of secularism, the position of man in history (Storia e filosofia: saggi sulla storiografia filosofica, 1974). Dante’s reflections were the basis for the analysis of other Florentine historians in the mid-fourteenth century such as Dino Compagni (ca. 1255–1324) and Giovanni Villani (ca. 1280–1348). The entire literary and philosophical oeuvre of Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374), the son to a Florentine exiled in Arezzo, is dedicated to showing how human strength should aim at obtaining peace, equilibrium, and love. In spite of Dante’s reflections, the city decided to construct great buildings, symbols of arrogance, wealth, and power, such as the new cathedral and the Palazzo della Signoria, both designed by Arnolfo di Cambio (ca. 1245–ca. 1310). The contrasts between the popolo minuto (middle and lowermiddle classes) and the popolo grasso (wealthy 735

FLORENCE merchants) were accentuated. In 1378, new guilds were formed to represent the most humble activities. The rivalry between two noble families led to the formation of two antagonistic factions, the Neri (Black), led by the Donati family and closer to the landowning aristocracy and the papacy, and the Bianchi (White), led by the Cerchi family and closer to the petty aristocracy and the middle classes. The pope sent Charles of Valois, brother to the king of France, to broker a peace. He openly favored the Neri, arresting the Bianchi leaders and forcing those who were close to them, including Dante Alighieri, into exile. During the fourteenth century, internal strife and wars were aggravated by famine and epidemics, particularly by the deadly plague of 1348. This is the background to Decameron, by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), in which a number of Florentine young men and women live in the hills to save themselves from the plague and decide to tell each other stories to amuse themselves. Boccaccio’s influential lesson is that men—like the Florentine philosopher Guido Cavalcanti (ca. 1258–1300), described in the sixth story of the ninth day—should live in the light of Reason, Understanding, and Tolerance. In the fifteenth century, an oligarchic regime was established by the merchants. The faction excluded from power joined arms with the people and found a leader in Giovanni de’ Medici, establishing the Signoria. During the Medici rule, following Dante’s example, Florentine intellectuals studied the works of Plato and Aristotle, and Latin and Greek poetry, art, and philosophy. Thus, the city became the center in which Humanism was forged. The human being was considered the ultimate end, eager for rational knowledge and for the affirmation of dominion over nature and history. Literary culture, the sciences, and the arts came to the forefront, and Florence gave Europe an entirely new cultural period. Between 1420 and 1446, artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Masaccio (ca. 1401–1428), and Donatello (ca. 1386–1466) created a number of masterpieces, making Florence the Renaissance city idealized by the Humanists. After the death of Lorenzo il Magnifico (1449– 1492), the republican regime was re-established. The citizens were inflamed by the sermons of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola (1452– 1498) announcing the end of the world, the coming of a judging Christ, and the eternal damnation of the Florentines because of their sinful life. Savonarola ruled Florence for four years, but was then condemned as a heretic and—on the order of Pope 736

Alexander VI—burned at the stake in the Piazza della Signoria on May 23, 1498. The Medici returned, and Michelangelo (1475–1564) sculpted his ‘‘David,’’ to be placed in front of the Palazzo della Signoria as the guardian of Florentine freedom. The elevation to the papal throne first of Giovanni de’ Medici in 1512 (Leo X), and then of Giulio (Clemente VII), reinforced the Medici Signoria. When news of the sack of Rome in 1527 arrived, the people rebelled and proclaimed their freedom: This was the last desperate attempt to reinstate the republican government. On August 12, 1530, after an 11-month siege, the armies of the emperor and the pope entered Florence. Alessandro de’ Medici was declared head of the state and duke of the Florentine Republic. During the sixteenth century, the Neoplatonic ideology and the Renaissance aesthetic were replaced by Machiavelli’s instrumental and empirical conception of power and of the modern state. A writer, scholar, and diplomat, Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469– 1527) dedicated his influential masterwork Il Principe (The Prince, 1513) to Lorenzo de’ Medici. It was—in the author’s own words—a sort of handbook to teach how to maintain power in a complex society like that of Florence, mainly based on the careful study of Greek and Latin political and military history. Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574), painter, architect, writer, and art historian, designed the Palazzo degli Uffizi in 1560. After the discovery of the New World, however, trade and manufacturing declined, eventually followed by banking. Florence remained an important city, but its territory was small, and it could certainly not compete with the great and powerful centralized states. From the late sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, the new Florentine form of the opera lirica, combining music, drama, and poetry, was developed through the discussions of the members of the Camerata de’ Bardi or Camerata Fiorentina, a group of intellectuals and musicians that included Vincenzo Galilei (ca. 1525–1591), author of the book La musica antica e la moderna (Ancient and Modern Music, 1581), and through the compositions of Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), Giulio Caccini (ca. 1550–1618), and Giovanni Battista Lulli (1632–1687). Numerous academies of literature and science came into being, soon transforming literary and cultural work into a bureaucratic and conventional routine. The Accademia della Crusca was founded in 1582. Its principal labor was the compilation of the Vocabolario degli Academici della Crusca (Dictionary of the Members of

FLORENCE the Accademia della Crusca), the first edition of which appeared in 1612. The Teatro della Pergola, designed by Ferdinando Tacca, opened in 1651 as a place to present the productions inspired by the Accademia degli Immobili. Of great importance for the sciences was the Accademia del Cimento, founded by Leopoldo de’ Medici in 1657, with the Galileian motto ‘‘provando e riprovando’’ (trying and trying again). After the death of Grand Duke Gian Gastone, Florence was assigned to Francis I Duke of Lorraine, of the French-Austrian dynasty. With its remarkable history, its genius loci, its unique environment, and its spirit and culture, Florence—especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—was of great importance and inspiration for an endless number of international artists and writers, among them painters such as J. M. W. Turner, and authors such as G. W. F. Goethe, who wrote about the ‘‘immortal city,’’ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who came to Florence to study Dante and translate into English his Divina Commedia, and wrote in Florence his famous six sonnets on the Divine Comedy, John Ruskin, who dedicated his Mornings in Florence to the city, and E. M. Forster, whose novel A Room with a View is set in Florence. The critic and collector Bernard Berenson lived in his famous villa, I Tatti, which became an international cultural institution. Contemporary writers such as David Leavitt have also dedicated a number of stories and novels to the city. After the Wars of Independence, Tuscany joined the newly unified Kingdom of Italy under Savoy rule, and Florence was the capital of the new nation for five years (1865–1870). The historical city center underwent intensive urban renovation, which completely destroyed the Old Market and the Jewish quarter. During the nineteenth century, Florence rediscovered its cultural origins and its spirit—the spirit of Dante and Giotto—and enjoyed a cultural revival. The school of painters known as Macchiaioli, with its interest in everyday life and the inner life of people, was founded in 1855. In 1819, Giovan Pietro Vieusseux founded the famous Gabinetto di lettura (library) and, in 1821, the review Antologia, and, with Gino Capponi (1792–1876), the Archivio storico italiano, the first issue of which appeared in 1842. Other cultural institutions date to the same period: the Conservatory L. Boccherini, the Caffe´ giubbe rosse, which soon became one of the meeting places of the intellectuals, and the Dante Society. The poetical works of Giosue Carducci (1835–1907) aimed to present an original

synthesis of European romantic sensibility and the Latin tradition in light of the peculiar spiritual life of Tuscany, based on the heritage of its criticism and of the three great masters, the so-called tre corone (three crowns): Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. However, when the capital was transferred to Rome on February 3, 1871, Florence went through a process of economic and cultural degradation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of original and important literary reviews emerged: Leonardo, Il Regno, Hermes, La Voce, Lacerba, and Vita Nuova. Through the lively debate carried out in these journals, Florence became one of the main sites of the new avant-garde and modernist culture that called into question the principles of nineteenth-century positivist thought. Until World War I, however, the city’s problems accumulated without intervention from the public authorities. In 1928, the Orchestra Stabile of Florence was founded, thus giving birth to the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, the most famous Italian festival of classical music, opera, and ballet. After World War II, important literary reviews such as Il Ponte, Societa`, Letteratura, and Paragone were again crucial to the intellectual life of the city, which was the center of a profound and original cultural quest based on the search for the popular and democratic roots of the city. Its major figures were authors such as Mario Luzi (1914–2004) and Vasco Pratolini (1913–1991), the author of Metello (1955), in which the powerful description of the general strike of 1902 becomes a symbol of the critical spirit of Florence that lives in the popular classes, and of the contemporary life of the city. STEFANO ADAMI Further Reading Adamson, Walter L., Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1993. Ballini, Pier Luigi, Fiorentini del Novecento, Florence: Polistampa, 2001. Becker, Marvin, Florence in Transition, I: The Decline of the Commune, II: Studies in the Rise of the Territorial State, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965. Boutier, Jean, Sandro Landi, and Olivier Rouchon (editors), Florence et la Toscane, XIVe-XIXe sie`cles. Les dynamiques d’un E´tat italien, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2004. Brucker, Gene A., Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Brucker, Gene A., The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.

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FLORENCE Bruni, Leonardo, History of the Florentine People, edited by James Hankins, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Burke, James, Changing Patrons: Social Identity and the Visual Arts in Renaissance Florence, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Capretti, Enrico, I Medici mecenati a Firenze: da mercanti a signori, Florence: Polistampa, 2004. Cochraine, Eric, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1527– 1800), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. Cohn, Samuel Kline, Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Connell, William J., and Andrea Zorzi (editors), Florentine Tuscany. Structures and Practices of Power, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Desideri, Laura, Il Vieusseux. Storia di un Gabinetto di lettura. 1819–2000. Cronologia Saggi Testimonianze, Florence: Polistampa, 2001.

Doren, Alfred, Le arti fiorentine, Florence: Le Monnier, 1939. Kent, Dale, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Kent, Dale V., Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance: The Patron’s Oeuvre, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Lanuzza, Stefano, Firenze degli scrittori del Novecento, Naples: A. Guida, 2001. Moretti, Italo, La Toscana di Arnolfo. Storia, arte, architettura, urbanistica, paesaggi, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Rossi, Paolo, Storia e filosofia: saggi sulla storiografia filosofica, Einaudi: Torino, 1974. Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434–1494), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Silvano, Giovanni, ‘‘Vivere’’ Civile e ‘‘Governo Misto’’ a Firenze nel Primo Cinquecento, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1985. Stephens, John, The Fall of the Florentine Republic, 1512– 1530, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

DARIO FO (1926–) Dario Fo’s theater unfolds in some area midway between a contemporary political-social Wasteland and a timeless fantasy Wonderland. If the themes of many of his plays are taken from the headlines and disputes of the day, as actor-author, Fo is deeply rooted in the traditions of Italian theater. His first debt is to the figure of the fabulatore (storyteller) of Lake Maggiore, where he grew up. The storytellers’ improvised tales, interwoven with irony, whimsy, wit, and satire, start with incidents and places familiar to the hearers but take flight into realms beyond reality and realism. At least in retrospect, he assessed these tales as teaching him the very essence of popular culture: They were independent of any hegemonic culture, and expressed the people’s viewpoint toward society and its values. The cultivation of popular culture, the search for the anger underneath mockery, and the developments of storytelling theater are among the principal and enduring aspects of his work in all phases of his development. In Fo, in keeping with an Italian theater dominated by the actor-author, writing and performance go hand in hand. He began his career by scripting and performing monologues, Poer nano (Poor Wretch, 1950), in which great historical figures such as Christopher Columbus or Goliath are 738

ridiculed and debunked. These pieces were broadcast on radio then recited on stage. Social and political satire was a dominant element of the cabaret-style revues Il dito nell’occhio (A Poke in the Eye, 1954) and I sani dal legare (Madhouse for the Sane, 1955), which he cowrote and staged in subsequent years with actors Franco Parenti and Giustino Durano. After an interval working in cinema, he returned to theater with two programs of one-act farces, Ladri, manichini e donne nude (Thieves, Mannequins, and Nude Women, 1958). By then, he had met and married the actress Franca Rame, who had theater in her blood in a way he had not and who was to appear with him in virtually all his subsequent work. Farce has always been his preferred genre, and initially, but mistakenly, his work was taken as the Italian equivalent of the absurd farce then being produced by Euge`ne Ionesco or Samuel Beckett. Fo harked back to older, more popular forms of French and Italian farce, but rejected any hierarchy in theater that left farce as unworthy of consideration. He has always eschewed all elitist theater-work, and throughout his life has molded and adapted traditional farce to his own ends. While Fo himself views his career as one seamless whole, the phases of his output are as distinct

DARIO FO as they were for Pablo Picasso. The term ‘‘bourgeois period’’ conventionally used to describe the 1959–1967 span may not be the happiest, but it designates the years when Fo attained great success with his work in the big, commercial theaters of Italy. He wrote and staged a play a year, usually opening in the Odeon, Milan, before touring. These plays were comedies rather than farces, generally staged with the support of songs and music composed by Fiorenzo Carpi. The musical aspect of Fo’s creativity has been lost in translation, but songs were integral to his theater, not only in this period. In addition, throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Fo wrote and recorded songs that had the same vitality and lighthearted whimsicality as the work of such French chansonniers as Juliette Greco. The zest and serendipity of his bourgeois period may have gulled the middle-class audiences that flocked to applaud his plays, but it did not deceive the censors, who applied the red pencil liberally to the advance copies of the scripts that all playwrights were then required to submit. These plays were bourgeois only in the venues in which they were staged, for Fo used conventional forms, as did George Bernard Shaw, to insinuate radical messages. The satire in the first of the comedies, Gli arcangeli non giocano a flipper (Archangels Don’t Play Pinball, 1959), is against the stifling senselessness of bureaucracy rather than against any hard political target. The characters are the rootless, urban youth who made their appearance in the years of Italy’s ‘‘economic miracle.’’ Lanky meets Angela and is deceived into believing her to be a wealthy Albanian while she is in fact the local prostitute. Due to official misunderstandings, Lanky is registered by the officialdom as a bloodhound, and has to take on the lifestyle of a dog. Their success in this and subsequent plays led to Fo and Rame being invited in 1962 to present the TV show, Canzonissima, a variety show that combined a song contest with the performance of sketches. Fo’s sketches carried too high a level of political polemic for the board of directors, and when they refused to allow him to broadcast a piece on the building industry during a national strike, he and Rame walked off the set. Something of his bitterness over the episode may be seen in Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe (Isabella, Three Caravels, and a Con-man, 1963), dealing at one level with the historical relations between Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, and at another dramatizing the contemporary predicament of the left-wing intellectual

entrapped by the wiles of the corridors of power. The structure is the familiar play-within-a-play, where an actor is about to be decapitated but granted provisional pardon to perform a play— on Columbus—while waiting for the confirmation of his release. In a double bluff, the pardon does not arrive, and the actor is decapitated. Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (Seventh: Steal a Little Less, 1964) was an angry farce on corruption in public life, with a purely contemporary setting. In a cemetery, a female gravedigger, Enea, believes she is in contact with the occupant of a coffin, who reveals details of various swindles carried on by the management. Enea, disguised as a prostitute and a nun to seize documents to prove the corruption, ends up in a madhouse run by nuns. The convent-asylum was a metaphor previously used by Fo to designate an Italy run by a clerical-political establishment. The work was rewritten and revived in 1992 as a one-woman play by Franca Rame at a time when Italy was in the ferment of renewal induced by the Milanese magistrates’ anticorruption drive and when reality had caught up with Fo’s fantasy. However much the piece seemed on both occasions the response to an immediate crisis in public life, the structure, with the seemingly naive Enea taking the role of ‘‘lord of misrule’’ and the emergence of the deus ex machina figure from the coffin to right wrongs, are strongly reminiscent of the topsy-turvy tradition of carnival. Fo’s position in official theater was becoming untenable, and in the turbulent year 1968, he broke with bourgeois theater to become il giullare del proletariato (the jester of the proletariat). Nothing is more typical of the complexity of Fo than the mixture of tradition and modernity in his break. The giullare was a figure from pre-Renaissance street theater, an entertainer, the equivalent of a jester or a fool. Fo declared his new drama would be at the service of the proletarian revolution, performed in venues where the working-class audiences he sought to attract would feel more at home, but however contemporary his political aims, his theatrical model was taken from Italy’s past. Other Marxist-leaning companies set up in that year were purely agitprop troupes, but for him the medium mattered as much as the message. In politics, he was revolutionary, but his theater remained traditional and popular. He admired the Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakowsky, and in 1994, published an anthology of his works with linking material of his own, but his idols were Jean-Baptiste Poquelin Molie`re and Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzzante), the actor-author of sixteenth-century Venice, some 739

DARIO FO of whose work, highly rewritten, he staged as Dario Fo incontra Ruzante (Dario Fo Meets Ruzante, 1993). The new company was a cooperative, Nuova Scena, and the first production was a large-scale pageant, Grande pantomima con bandiere, pupazzi piccoli e medi (Grand Pantomime with Flags, Large and Medium Puppets, 1969), in which actors wore masks that alluded to commedia dell’arte. The stage was dominated by a big-bellied, grotesque puppet from which emerge figures representing such forces as the Bourgeoisie, Capital, and the Military. The new move galvanized Fo into producing at top speed several scripts that were staged by sections of the troupe, but to the astonishment of his colleagues he announced that in 1969 he would be touring on his own, assuming the role of the giullare in Mistero buffo (Comic Mysteries), a collage of sketches of medieval inspiration. For him, there was no contradiction. The revolutionary activist must know his roots as well as his destination. Other problems were, however, emerging. Nuova Scena was close to the Communist Party, but Fo’s sympathy for the new extraparliamentary left groups was increasing, so in 1969 he made a second break to form another co-operative, Collettivo Teatrale la Comune. The new troupe, although as dedicated to touring as its predecessor, found a permanent base in the Capannone, an ex-industrial workshop in a Milan suburb. Here in 1970, Fo premiered Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Accidental Death of an Anarchist), his most celebrated and successful work. The play was conceived as an exercise of ‘‘counterinformation’’ at a time when press and public accepted that anarchists were responsible for a bombing atrocity in 1969 in Milan that was later shown to have been perpetrated by neo-Fascist cells. Immediately after the bombing, an anarchist, Pino Pinelli, was arrested for interrogation but died in custody. Fo’s approach to the dramatization of this police-political plot was bold and innovative. He eschewed angry denunciation in favor of wild farce, where a madman with a talent for disguise, in many ways a Harlequin in modern dress, infiltrates the police station and conducts his own inquiry into the death of the anarchist. No other work of Fo’s merged so deftly laughter with anger, or used traditional forms so successfully to probe modern dilemmas. This company too was driven with internal dissension, and by 1973 broke apart. Fo’s commitment to radical theater and causes was undimmed, but took new forms. With various followers, he 740

took Milan’s Palazzina Liberty as his new base. His writing entered a new phase with an interest in social affairs rather than strictly political questions. The question of drug use was at the heart of La marijuana della mamma e` la piu` bella, (Mum’s Marijuana is the Best, 1976), but it was the role of women in society that became the central concern. He wrote, or cowrote, several pieces on this theme for performance by Franca Rame. His creativity was unflagging, and in 1997, he was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. The official citation stated that he ‘‘emulates the jesters of the Middle Ages in scourging authority and upholding the dignity of the downtrodden.’’

Biography Born 24 March 1926 at Sangiano (Varese), on Lake Maggiore. 1943, called up by Republic of Salo`, Mussolini’s puppet Fascist state. 1944, deserts. 1945, student of art and architecture in Milan. 1951, his first monologues broadcast on radio. 1952, theater debut with monologues. 1953, forms ParentiFo-Durano company to put on satirical revues. 1954, marries Franca Rame. 1955 son, Jacopo, born. 1956, his only film, Lo svitato, released, but with little success. 1958, Fo-Rame company formed. 1960, Aveva due pistole con gli occhi bianchi e neri, opening work of so-called bourgeois period. 1962, presents TV show, Canzonissima: walks off when refused permission for a political sketch. 1968, forms theatrical cooperative, Nuova Scena. 1969, second cooperative, La Comune. 1973, breakup of La Comune. 1974, takeover of Palazzina Liberty as theater and company base. 1977, return to TV with retrospective of seven plays. 1978, directs Igor Stravinsky’s The Story of a Soldier for La Scala in Milan. 1981, L’opera dello sghignazzo, musical work inspired by Jon Gay’s Beggar’s Opera performed in Turin. 1985, Hellequin, Harlekin, Arlecchino performed at Venice’s Biennale. 1990, directs Molie`re’s Le malade imaginaire at the Come´die Francaise. 1992, directs Il barbiere di Siviglia in the Netherlands, first of several Rossini operas he will direct. 1995, suffers a stroke, which affects his memory and sight. 2003, directs Il viaggio a Reims, an opera inspired by Rossini. 2004, Il teatro in Italia, TV history of Italian theater. 2005, series of TV programs on artists, including Giotto and Caravaggio, and theatrical figures, including the Saroti family of mask-makers; directs Rossini’s La Gazzetta for Pesaro festival. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1997. JOSEPH FARRELL

DARIO FO Selected Works Collections Compagni senza censura, 2 vols., Milan: Mazzotta, 1970– 1973. Teatro comico, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Le commedie, vols. 13, Turin: Einaudi, 1974–1998. Other Plays, edited by Stuart Hood, 1991. Plays: One, London: Methuen, 1992 (Mistero buffo, translated by Ed Emery; Accidental Death of an Anarchist, translated by Ed Emery; Trumpets and Raspberries, translated by R. C. McAvoy and A-M Giugni; The Virtuous Burglar, translated by Joe Farrell; One Was Nude and One Wore Tails, translated by Ed Emery). Plays: Two, London: Methuen, 1994 (Can’t Pay? Won’t Pay!, translated by Lino Pertile, adapted by Bill Colvill and Robert Walker); (Elizabeth, almost by chance a woman, translated by Gillian Hanna); (The Open Couple, translated by Stuart Hood).

Plays Poer nano, 1950. Il dito nell’occhio (produced 1953), 1954. I sani da legare (produced 1954), 1955. Ladri, manichini e donne nude, 1958. Comica finale, includes La Marcolfa, I tre bravi, Un morto da vendere, Quando sarai povero sarai re (produced 1958), 1962. Gli arcangeli non giocano a flipper (produced 1959), 1959; as Archangels Don’t Play Pinball, translated by R. C. McAvoy and Anna-Maria Giugni, 1986; translated by Ron Jenkins, 1989. Aveva due pistole con gli occhi bianchi e neri (produced 1960), 1966. Chi ruba un piede e` fortunato im amore (produced 1961), 1966. Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe (produced 1963), 1963. Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (produced 1964). Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (produced 1964), 1966. La colpa e` sempre del diavolo (produced 1965), 1965. La signora e` da buttare (produced 1967), 1967. Grande pantomima con bandiere, pupazzi piccoli e medi (produced 1968), 1969. Mistero buffo (produced 1969), 1969; as Mistero buffo, translated by Ed Emery, 1988. L’operaio conosce 300 parole il padrone 1000 per questo lui e` il padrone (produced 1969), 1969. Legami pure che tanto io spacco tutto lo stesso (produced 1969), 1969. Vorrei morire anche stasera anche se dovessi pensare che non e` servito a niente (produced 1970), 1970. Morte accidentale di un anarchico (produced 1970), 1970; rev. eds., 1973, 1988, 2004; as Accidental Death of an Anarchist, translated by Gavin Richards, 1980; by Suzanne Cowan, 1980; by John Lahr, 1983; by Richard Nelson, 1984; by Alan Cumming and Tim Supple, 1991; by Ed Emery, 1992; by Simon Nye, 2003. Tutti insieme! Tutti uniti! Ma scusa, quello non e` il padrone? (produced 1971), 1972. Fedayn (produced 1972), 1972. Ordine per Dioooooooo (produced 1972), 1972. Pum, pum! Chi e`? La polizia! (produced 1972), 1970. Guerra del popolo in Cile (produced 1973), 1974.

Non si paga, non si paga! 1974; as We Can’t Pay? We Won’t Pay!, translated by Lino Pertile, 1978; translated by Ron Jenkins, 2001. Il Fanfani rapito (produced 1975), 1975. La marijuana della mamma e` la piu` bella (produced 1976), 1976. Storia della tigre (produced 1977), 1980; as Story of a Tiger, translated by Ron Jenkins, 1988. Clacson, trombette e pernacchi (produced 1981), 1980: as Trumpets and Raspberries, translated by R. C. McAvoy and Anna-Marie Giugni, 1984; as About Face, translated by Ron Jenkins, 1989. Il fabulazzo osceno (produced 1982), 1982. Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (produced 1983), 1983; as Open Couple—Very Open, translated by Stuart Hood, 1990. Quasi per caso una donna: Elisabetta (produced 1984), 1984; as Elizabeth, translated by Gillian Hanna, 1987; as Elizabeth: Almost by Chance A Woman, translated by Gillian Hanna, 1987. Il ratto della Francesca (produced 1986), 1986: as Abducting Diana, translated by Rupert Lowe, 1994. Parti femminili: Una coppia aperta and Una giornata qualunque (produced 1986), 1987; the latter as An Ordinary Day, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1990. Il Papa e la strega (produced 1989), 1989; as The Pope and the Witch, translated by Ed Emery, 1992. Zitti, stiamo precipitando (produced 1990), 1990. Parliamo di donne: L’eroina and Grasso e` bello (produced 1991), 1992. Johan Padan ala descoverta de la Americhe (produced 1991), 1992; as Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas, translated by Ron Jenkins, 2001. Dario Fo incontra Ruzante, 1993. Mamma! I sanculotti! (produced 1993). Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire, (produced 1994), 1994. La Bibbia dei villani (produced 1996), 1996. Il diavolo con le zinne (produced 1997), 1998: as The Devil in Drag, translated by Ed Emery, 1999. Marino Libero! Marino e` innocente! (produced 1998), 1998. Lu Santo Jullare Francesco (produced 1999), 1999. L’anomalo bicefalo (produced 2004), 2004.

Other Ballate e canzoni, 1976. Il teatro politico di Dario Fo, 1977. Dario Fo parla di Dario Fo, 1977. Il teatro dell’occhio, 1985. Manuale minimo dell’attore, 1987; as Tricks of the Trade, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1987. Dialogo provocatorio sul comico, il tragico, la follia e la ragione, conversation with Luigi Allegri, 1990. Toto`: Manuale dell’attore comico, 1990; 1995. Fabulazzo, 1991. Pupazzi con rabbia e sentimento: La vita e l’arte di Dario Fo e Franca Rame, edited by Enzo Colombo and Orazio Piaccini, 1998. Vladimir Majakovkij: Messaggi ai posteri selezionati e condivisi da Dario Fo, 1999. La vera storia di Ravenna, 1999. Il paese dei mezarat, 2002. Il tempio degli uomini liberi, Il Duomo di Modena, 2004.

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DARIO FO Further Reading Allegri, Luigi, Dario Fo: Dialogo provocatorio sul comico, il tragico, la follia e la ragione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Behan, Tom, Dario Fo: Revolutionary Theatre, London: Pluto, 2000. Binni, Lanfranco, Attento te...! Il teatro politico di Dario Fo, Verona: Bertani, 1975. Cairns, Christopher, Dario Fo e la pittura scenica’’: Arte, Teatro, Regie 1977–1997, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000. Catalfamo, Antonio, Dario Fo: ‘‘Il nuovo nella tradizione,’’ Bologna: Libreria Antiquaria Palmaverde, 2004. De Pasquale, Elena, Il segreto del giullare: La dimensione testuale nel teatro di Dario Fo, Naples: Liguori, 1999. Farrell, Joseph, Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution, London: Methuen, 2001. Farrell, Joseph, and Antonio Scuderi (editors), Stage, Text, and Tradition, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Hirst, David L., Dario Fo and Franca Rame, London: Macmillan, 1989. Jenkins, Ron, Dario Fo & Franca Rame: Artful Laughter, New York: Aperture, 2001. Meldolesi, Claudio, Su un comico in rivolta: Dario Fo, il bufalo, il bambino, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Mitchell, Tony, Dario Fo: The People’s Court Jester, London: Methuen, 1999. Nepoti, Roberto, and Marina Cappa, Dario Fo, Rome: Gremese, 1997. Pizza, Marisa, Il gesto, la parolo, l’azione: Poetica, drammaturgia e storia dei monologhi di Dario Fo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1996. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro di Dario Fo: Dalla scena alla piazza, Venice: Marsilio, 1978. Scuderi, Antonio, Dario Fo and Popular Performance, New York: Legas, 1998. Soriani, Simone, ‘‘Testo ed imagine nel Johan Padan di Dario Fo,’’ in Letteratura ed arte, 2 (2004): 243–260. Valentini, Chiara, La storia di Dario Fo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977; new edition, 1997.

MISTERO BUFFO, 1969 Play by Dario Fo

Mistero buffo (Comic Mysteries), which was premiered in rudimentary form in October 1969 but was later much expanded and developed, consists of a series of one-man sketches and monologues of 742

broadly medieval inspiration, written, or rewritten, and performed by Dario Fo. There are also a number of scenes, originally played by Franca Rame, featuring the Virgin Mary at the Passion of Christ. Some material is drawn from the Apocryphal Gospels, other is of Italian origin, while other scenes were found in Slovakia, Poland, or Croatia. There has been much debate over the exact nature of Fo’s intervention in, or indeed invention of, pieces that are presented as updated but authentic medieval work. Fo’s own comments on the question have frequently been mischievous, and it seems that many of the sketches are totally his own work. The first performance was given during the most militantly political phase of Fo’s career. In 1968, he established a theatrical cooperative, the Nuova Scena, to perform political drama to popular audiences in an ‘‘alternative circuit’’ of venues. ‘‘Eravamo stufi di essere i giullari della borghesia . . . cosı` abbiamo deciso di diventare i giullari del proletariato.’’ (We were tired of being the giullari of the bourgeoisie . . . so we decided to become the giullari of the proletariat, cited in Chiara Valentini, La storia di Dario Fo, 1977). Attention at the time focused on the politically motivated wish to perform ‘‘for the proletariat,’’ and not on the artistic urge to take the medieval giullare as his model. The term has no standard English equivalent, but ‘‘jester’’ is a reasonable approximation, provided it refers to popular street entertainers, not to ‘‘court jesters.’’ In the cooperative’s second season, Fo startled his comrades by announcing that he would not be offering a play on a contemporary theme, as he had done in the 1968 season, but would take on the giullare role by performing alone with medieval pieces. His stated aim was to demonstrate the vitality and continuity of popular culture, and the centrality of history for a revolutionary movement. He believed that ordinary people in the Middle Ages, as distinct from the hegemonic ecclesiastical institutions, had used religious themes, or mystery and morality plays, to express a perhaps inchoate revolt against injustice. The individual pieces that make up Mistero buffo are preceded by a prologue in which Fo addresses the audience to explain the nature and purpose of the sketches, but also to point to parallels between the situation then and now. Frequently, they contain biting satires on contemporary politicians and churchmen. The mixture of laughter and anger—Fo’s ideal combination—is strong in the satire on the medieval pope, Bonifacio VIII (Boniface VIII), which focuses on his inhumanity and love of pomp. Christ on his way to Calvary meets the pope bedecked in grand vestments, but kicks

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO him on the backside for having betrayed the Gospel message of poverty. In his prologue, Fo speaks not only of the historical figure, the object of Dante’s bile, but uses the opportunity to mock the power and wealth of the contemporary church, and to satirize the current occupant of the throne of St. Peter, John Paul II. Another constituent piece, Nascita del giullare (The Birth of the Jester), can be viewed as a manifesto for Fo’s theater. The protagonist is a farmer who, after seeing his land stolen and his wife raped by a local aristocrat, is prevented from killing himself by a stranger, who turns out to be Christ himself. Christ bestows on him the jester’s gift of storytelling and charges him to give voice to the rage of the downtrodden against injustice. Other sketches feature episodes from the Bible: Le nozze di Cana (The Marriage Feast at Cana) and Resurrezione di Lazzaro (The Raising of Lazarus), or popular legends associated with Christ such as Moralita` del cieco e dello storpio (The Blind Man and the Cripple). Christ may be stripped of his divinity, but Fo attacks only excess or deviation from Gospel teaching, not doctrine. In the Lazarus play, people gather not for an uplifting, spiritual religious event but for an entertaining show, something akin to a hypnotist’s display. The cemetery attendant and various costermongers exploit the gathering of the crowd for easy profit. In an internal prologue to the miracle at Cana, a puritanical archangel and a jolly drunk vie over the value of wine. Christ himself is a relaxed hedonist, an exponent of liberation through enjoyment. Fo makes of the legend of the blind man and the cripple an explicitly political parable. The cripple refuses healing since that would compel him to find work and thus be liable to exploitation, while the blind man whose sight is restored revels in the beauty of creation.

When it was shown on Italian television in 1977, Mistero buffo was denounced by the Vatican as the most sacrilegious work in the history of the broadcast media. Fo retorted that his aim was to revive popular culture and that his only targets were power and privilege. Whatever the politics of the play, it provided Fo with the ideal vehicle to display his superb histrionic gifts. JOSEPH FARRELL Editions First Edition: Mistero buffo, in Compagni sena censura, vol. 2, Milan: Mazzotta, 1970. Other editions: Mistero buffo: Giullarata popolare, Verona: Bertani, 1974; in Le commedie di Dario Fo, vol. 7, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Translation: as Mistero buffo: Comic Mysteries, translated by Ed Emery, edited by Stuart Hood, London: Methuen, 1988.

Further Reading Jenkins, Ron, ‘‘Clowns, Politics and Miracles: The Epic Satire of Dario Fo,’’ in Drama Review, 30 (Spring 1986): 172–179. Maeder, Costantino, ‘‘Mistero buffo: Negating Textual Certainty, the Individual and Time,’’ in Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition, edited by Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Mitchell, Tony, ‘‘Dario Fo’s Mistero buffo: Popular Theatre, the Giullari and the Grotesque,’’ in Theatre Quarterly, 7, (Autumn, 1979): 1–10. Piccolo, Pina, ‘‘Dario Fo’s giullarate: Dialogic Parables in the Service of the Oppressed,’’ Italica, 65 (1988): 131–143. Scuderi, Antonio, Dario Fo and Popular Performance, New York: Legas, 1998. Soriani, Simone, ‘‘Mistero Buffo di Dario Fo e la cultura popolare tra Medioevo e Rinascimento,’’ in Quaderni medievali, 56 (December 2003): 102–138. Straniero, Michele, Giullari & Fo, Rome: Lato Side, 1978.

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO (1842–1911) Antonio Fogazzaro, whose novels were at once popular and controversial during his lifetime, wrote during a period of historical and cultural transition. His work was anchored in the themes and forms of late European Romanticism and he

was receptive to Decadentism, in which erotic languor and gothic unconventionality coexist. His lacerating, ethical vision of the suffering of contemporary man contributed to his conception of the artist as a prophet and spiritual guide for the 743

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO people. His poetic debut revealed a passionate poet who preferred stories of love and sacrifice featuring a romantic hero. Miranda (Miranda, 1874), a poem in four parts, tells the story of the tormented passion of the poet Enrico for the woman of the title, whose overwhelming love will lead to her death. The poem presents a theme that will recur throughout Fogazzaro’s works: Eros as a disruptive force that needs to be controlled by reason. Fogazzaro was thus suspicious of the excesses exalted by the Romantics and by the members of the Scapigliatura. His love stories are often sad and often do not end happily. In Miranda, the protagonist, a somewhat autobiographical figure, is a narcissistic poet completely absorbed in a vain dream of literary glory. He is the first in a long line of failed artists in Fogazzaro’s poetry and fiction. After Miranda, Fogazzaro turned his attention to the theme of existence unredeemed by religious faith. His religious upbringing, nurtured by the teachings of his beloved uncle Don Giuseppe Fogazzaro, led him down the path trod before him by Alessandro Manzoni and Ippolito Nievo. His characters are torn between carnal sensuality and spiritual anxiety. His positive characters are able to sublimate their feelings and attain some understanding or rapport with the divine. If, however, they succumb to their sensuality, they lose themselves. Love either overcomes his protagonists, for which they are condemned, or it ennobles them through religiously motivated sacrifices. As early as his first poems, this struggle between earthly and divine love takes place against a romantic landscape that itself becomes a protagonist. Nature, in particular the fertile world of the Alpine lakes, is not only a theatrical backdrop against which his characters move like actors; it shares and is animated by the profound passions of humanities, its torments, anxieties, and joys. A telling example is the title poem of Valsolda (1876), his second collection of verses in varying metres, named after the valley where Fogazzaro himself once lived and where he set some of his fictional works. Fogazzaro came to the novel quite late in his career, with Malombra (The Woman), published in 1881. He had collected the preparatory material for the novel as early as 1872, the year in which he also wrote his essay Dell’avvenire del romanzo in Italia (On the Future of the Novel in Italy). In this essay, Fogazzaro argues that the novel is the artistic expression of modernity since it represents the life of the times in all its shades and colours. This does not mean, however, that Fogazzaro’s 744

beliefs were similar to those of veristi writers like Giovanni Verga or Luigi Capuana. On the contrary, he did not view art as a simple mimesis of reality, but as a mix of probable and fantastic elements. Contrary to what the naturalists believe, nature is saturated with spiritual and mystical forces; it does not condition, but reflects humanity. In Malombra, Fogazzaro creates a composite style that alternates dialect and Italian and describes settings in a lyrical prose. The novel has strong musical suggestions (Fogazzaro was a lover of Richard Wagner and music was his favourite art) and an oneiric and funereal atmosphere derived, along with the motifs of spiritualism and ghosts, from late Romanticism. Giovanni Verga, in an admiring letter to Fogazzaro dated 27 September 1881, defined Malombra as ‘‘una delle piu` alte e piu` artistiche concezioni romantiche’’ (one of the highest and most artistic romantic conceptions) (Lettere sparse, 1979). However, the novel is much more than a romantic tale. Its protagonist, Marina Malombra, is obsessed by the idea that she is the reincarnation of one of her ancestors, Cecilia, who died in a dreary mansion on the banks of Lake Lugano. Fogazzaro presents the disturbing mystery of a soul devastated by folly, but also explores the humble world of the less important characters, such as the sensual writer Corrado Silla, author of mystic tales, who is overcome by the sinister attraction of Marina; or don Innocenzo and Edith Steinegge, whose religious sentiments make them positive figures. Malombra is far from the popular and tragic world of Verga’s I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree), also published in 1881, but Fogazzaro was by no means out of step with his times. Malombra is an important achievement in the genre of the psychological novel. This is confirmed by Daniele Cortis (1885), in which the protagonist is divided between political passion and his love for Elena Santa Giulia, and by Il mistero del poeta (The Mystery of the Poet, 1888), the story of a loving relationship between a poet and a married woman, Violet Yves. In this period, Fogazzaro also became fascinated by the theories of Charles Darwin. His Catholicism became increasingly open to modern thought, so much so that when in 1907 Pope Pius X condemned religious modernism in the encyclical De modernistarum doctrinis, Fogazzaro’s novel, Il Santo (The Saint, 1905), was also censured. Il Santo concludes the cycle begun with his greatest success, Piccolo mondo antico (The Little World of the Past, 1895), in which he attempted to depict postRisorgimento Italian society seen through the

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO experiences of the Maironi family. Around the two emblematic figures of the nobleman Franco Maironi and his wife, the bourgeois Luisa Rigey, there revolves a large cast of characters who at times assume the role of a sort of chorus, counterpointing the main narrative, and at others, as in the case of Lucia’s Uncle Piero, becoming true coprotagonists. In the second volume of the trilogy, Piccolo mondo moderno (The Man of the World, 1901), the protagonist, Piero Maironi, finally renounces earthly love and dedicates himself to a religious life. This second novel expands on Fogazzaro’s typical motifs: The protagonist is torn between his aspiration toward the divine and the attractions of the world of the flesh, especially erotic love. A few months after finishing Piccolo mondo moderno, Fogazzaro, solicited by Giuseppe Giacosa, tried to write for the theater. In 1902, his Garofolo rosso was staged at the Manzoni Theatre in Milan, but it was a failure. It was published in 1903 along with other plays in the volume Scene (Scenes). Unable to write acceptable dramatic works, he quickly returned to the final section of his trilogy. In Il Santo, Piero Maironi intends to evangelize the contemporary world, but, as always happens with Fogazzaro’s characters, he fails. The reigning social order is never seriously challenged and the renewal that he, like his author, calls for never takes place. In the end, Fogazzaro’s characters are fanciful figures, unable to integrate into everyday life. Social order always triumphs, while justice is postponed to a future known only to divine providence, and possibly only to be found in the next world. This pessimistic vision is confirmed in his last novel, Leila (1910). Its protagonist Massimo Alberti, a disciple and follower of Piero Maironi, yearns to return to orthodox Catholicism. However, he is involved in a bitter campaign against the hypocrisy of those of shallow faith and even launches violent attacks against clerical bigotry, represented by don Tita. His love for Leila is finally realized, but society remains largely unregenerate. The virtues are still to be found only in that ‘‘piccolo mondo’’ (little world) of simple people, while the unscrupulous bourgeoisie continue to be obsessed with business and wealth. Fogazzaro’s last novel is in part spoiled by its many ideological appeals, which occasionally transform it into a sort of novel-essay in which Fogazzaro, without idealizing the past and tradition, severely criticizes certain degenerative features of modern life.

Biography Born in Vicenza on 25 March 1842. His father was a member of Parliament. Guided by Father Giacomo Zanella, enrolled at the high school in Vicenza, 1856; received high school diploma in classics, 1858; enrolled at the University of Padua to study law, but due to his precarious health returned to Valsolda and dedicated himself to literary activity. Moved to Turin, 1860; completed his studies and received his degree in law, 1864. Met the noblewoman, Margherita Lampertico di Valmanara, in Milan, 1865; married Margherita, 1866. In Milan, befriended Arrigo Boito and frequented the circles of the Scapigliatura. Returned to Vicenza, 1869. Between 1870 and 1881, his three children were born and his activity as a writer intensified. Death of his father, 1891. The deaths of his beloved uncle Don Giuseppe in 1901 and of his sister Ina pained him deeply. Following the publication of Il Santo clashed with the Catholic Church, 1905. In 1907, the novel was condemned and the writer acquiesced to the wishes of the church. He died in Vicenza on 7 March 1911. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Decadentismo Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1931–1945. Racconti, edited by Floriano Romboli, Milan: Mursia, 1992.

Poetry ‘‘Miranda,’’ 1874. ‘‘Valsolda,’’ 1876.

Novels Malombra, 1881; as The Woman, translated by F. Thorold Dickson, 1907. Daniele Cortis, 1885; translated by J. R. Tilton, 1887. Il mistero del poeta, 1888. Piccolo mondo antico, 1895; as The Little World of the Past, translated by W. J. Strachan, 1962. Piccolo mondo moderno, 1901; as The Man of the World, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1907. Il Santo, 1905; as The Saint, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1906, rpt. as The Sinner, 1907. Leila, 1910; as Leila, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1911.

Short Stories ‘‘Fedele e altri racconti,’’ 1887.

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ANTONIO FOGAZZARO Plays Scene, 1903.

Essays Dell’avvenire del romanzo in Italia, 1872. Discorsi, 1898. Scienza e dolore, 1898. Ascensioni umane, 1899. Il dolore nell’arte, 1901.

Letters Lettere scelte, edited by Tommaso Gallarati Scotti, 1940. Corrispondenza Fogazzaro-Bonomelli, edited by Carlo Marcora, 1968. Lettere a un fuoriuscito, edited by Tommaso Franco, 1988. Carteggio, 1904–1910 (with Brizio Casciola), edited by Paolo Marangon, 1996. Carteggio (1869–1909) (with Paolo Lioy), edited by Ornella Jovane, 2000. Carteggio: un dialogo sulla santita` e il peccato (1903–1910) (with Henri Bremond), edited by Federica Ranzato Santin, 2000. Carteggio, 1885–1910 (with Ellen Starbuck), edited by Luciano Morbiato, 2000.

Further Reading Abrugiati, Luigia, Il volo del gabbiano. Fenomenologia dell’inettitudine tra Ottocento e Novecento, Lanciano: Carabba, 1982. Balducci, Ernesto, Antonio Fogazzaro, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1952. Briosi, Sandro, Il rifiuto inutile, Milan: Celuc, 1971. Caronti, Luigi, Fogazzaro, Subiaco e Il santo, Cinisello Balsamo: Edizioni Paoline, 1989. Cavallini, Giorgio, La dinamica della narrativa di Fogazzaro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Cavalluzzi, Raffaele, Fogazzaro: i romanzi. Contraddizioni e forme di una passione azzurra, Bari: Graphis, 2000. Crupi, Vincenzo, Fra il cielo e l’inferno: ascensioni nell’ultimo Fogazzaro, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2004. De Rienzo, Giorgio, Fogazzaro e l’esperienza della realta`, Milan: Silva, 1967. Dolfi, Anna, Del romanzesco e del romanzo. Modelli di narrativa italiana tra Otto e Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Gallarati-Scotti, Tommaso, The Life of Antonio Fogazzaro, 1922, rpt. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1972. Ghidetti, Enrico, Le idee e le virtu` di Antonio Fogazzaro, Padua: Liviana, 1974. Ghidetti, Enrico, Malattia, coscienza e destino: per una litografia del decadentismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993. Hall, Robert A., Antonio Fogazzaro e la crisi dell’Italia moderna, New York: Linguistica, 1967. Hall, Robert A., Antonio Fogazzaro, Boston: Twayne, 1978. Marangon, Paolo, Il modernismo di Antonio Fogazzaro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Nardi, Piero, Antonio Fogazzaro, Milan: Mondadori, 1938. Piccioni, Donatella, and Leone Piccioni, Antonio Fogazzaro, Turin: Utet, 1970.

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Piromalli, Antonio, Miti e arte in Fogazzaro, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Piromalli, Antonio, Introduzione a Fogazzaro, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Romboli, Floriano, Fogazzaro, Palermo: Palumbo, 2000. Tombatore, Gaetano, Fogazzaro, Messina: Principato, 1938. Verga, Giovanni, Lettere sparse, edited by Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri, Rome: Bulzoni, 1980. Wittman, Laura, ‘‘Omnes velut aqua dilabimur: Antonio Fogazzaro, The Saint, and Catholic Modernism,’’ in Italian Modernism, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

PICCOLO MONDO ANTICO, 1895 Novel by Antonio Fogazzaro

Piccolo mondo antico (The Little World of the Past) is Fogazzaro’s masterpiece, a most successful novel with public and critics alike. The first draft was completed around 1884, but the author spent many years revising it, a circumstance that confirms the centrality of the work in Fogazzaro’s own opinion. Divided into three parts, it tells the bittersweet story of Franco Maironi, a fervent Catholic and a rebellious nobleman searching for justice, and Luisa Rigey, a member of the bourgeoisie and a patriot. These husband and wife protagonists are inspired by Fogazzaro’s own parents. Their love story takes place against the enchanting Alpine backdrop of Valsolda, and the historical context is that of the Risorgimento during the 1850s. The public and historical dimension thus continually intertwines with the private lives of the protagonists. In spite of the opposition of Maironi’s family, the two lovers marry, thus observing all social demands but also bringing about a classic me´saillance of their classes, and reinforce their bond after they lose their little daughter at about the time when the conflict between Austria and Piedmont breaks out (1859–1860). Though revolving around a love affair, scrutinised in all its daily details and with frequent recourse to minute portraits of scenes of married life,

ANTONIO FOGAZZARO the novel has powerful symbolic implications. Franco and Luisa Maironi become the symbols of the two social classes that, according to Fogazzaro, represent the best that Italy can express and the engine of national unification. Franco is an aristocrat, but has nothing in common with the hypocritical nobility colluding with foreigners and represented in the novel by his resentful grandmother, the Marchioness Orsola. Indeed, his difference is conveyed by his condition as amateur poet and musician and as candid lover of art and nature, considered as the work of the supreme divine artist. In the name of these differences, he does not hesitate to break class prejudices toward his marriage to Luisa and in this sense he is a positive character. Luisa is an energetic bourgeois and thus represents the new rising social class, ready to fight in order to affirm itself, but which also needs to forge an alliance with the aristocracy in order to form the new managerial class. Luisa has more practical sense than her husband and is firmly anchored to the bourgeois values of the family. However, from the Catholic point of view of the author, she has a weak point: She does not believe in God. Thus, when the couple must address the crucial existential questions brought about by the death of their daughter, their value system is overturned: It is Franco, the believer, who shows himself to be more energetic and decisive and joins the fight for national freedom, enrolling in the army of Piedmont, while Luisa looks for consolation in the practise of spiritualism. In the alternating registers of the novel, from the tragic to the comic, from the moralistic to the elegiac, the reader perceives the sentiments of a generation that has passed through the tumultuous historical events of the Risorgimento, to which they now look with a mixture of nostalgia and regret. Piccolo mondo antico was adapted to the screen in 1941 by Mario Soldati, with Alida Valli as Luisa and Massimo Serato in

the romantic lead. The film became a legend and was viewed by some as a forerunner of neorealism. ALFREDO SGROI Editions First edition: Piccolo mondo antico, Milan: Galli, 1895. Other editions: in Tutte le opere, vol. 5, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1931; edited by Angela Gorini Santoli, Milano: Mursia, 1983; with introduction by Luigi Baldacci, Milano: Garzanti, 1984. Translation: as The Little World of the Past, translated by W. J. Strachan, London: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Further Reading Arlandi, Gian Franco, ‘‘Arte e cultura tra ‘antico’ e ‘moderno’ in Fogazzaro: Un’analisi di semiotica estetica,’’ in Antonio Fogazzaro, edited by Attilio Agnoletto, Enzo Noe` Giraldi and Carlo Marcora, Milan: Angeli, 1984. Cavallini, Giorgio, La dinamica della narrativa di Fogazzaro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Cavalluzzi, Raffaele, Fogazzaro: i romanzi. Contraddizioni e forme di una passione azzurra, Bari: Graphis, 2000. De Rienzo, Giorgio, Invito alla lettura di Fogazzaro, Milan: Mursia, 1983 Futre Pinheiro, Marı´lia, Piccolo mondo antico: appunti sulle donne, gli amori, i costumi, il mondo reale nel romanzo antico, edited by Patrizia Liviabella Furiani and Antonio M. Scarcella, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1989. Giudici, Paolo, I romanzi di Antonio Fogazzaro e altri saggi, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1969. Montanari, Fausto, ‘‘La morte in Piccolo mondo antico,’’ in Studium, 24 (1968): 808–812. Morbiato, Luciano, ‘‘Dalle ambiguita` drammatiche di Fogazzaro ai dagherrotipi parlanti di Soldati,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 6 (1988): 80–97. Roso, Corrado, ‘‘Fogazzaro e il dubbio di Luisa in Piccolo mondo antico,’’ Confronto letterario, 10, no. 19 (1993): 3–15. Travi, Ernesto, ‘‘La Valsolda nella opere di Antonio Fogazzaro,’’ in Antonio Fogazzaro, edited by Attilio Agnoletto, Enzo Noe` Giraldi and Carlo Marcora, Milan: Angeli, 1984.

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TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI)

TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI) (1491–1544) Girolamo Folengo, better known by his monastic name Teofilo and by his pseudonym Merlin Cocai, is one of the most eccentric and enigmatic figures of the early Italian Renaissance. He was a Benedectine friar, but expressed evangelical ideas in his writings. Though an intellectual trained in the classics, he dedicated all his talents to perfecting an imaginary language and writing parodies of epic and love poetry. Despite these contradictions, Folengo represents the spiritual liveliness and creative vein of fifteenth-century Italy. His literary activity gave European culture a new linguistic and thematic model: macaronic Latin poetry. Folengo’s literary production can be divided into three linguistic categories: macaronic, vernacular, and Latin. Macaronic Latin is a peculiar fusion of Latin and Italian words. It retains the structure and grammar of the Latin language as well as its metrical rules, but for the vocabulary it uses words borrowed from the vernacular language or freely coined (more or less Latin) neologisms (Joseph Ijsewijn and Dirk Sacre`, Companion to Neolatin Studies, 1998). Folengo invented neither macaronic language nor macaronic poetry, but rather came to know of them during his years in Padua (1513– 1514). Macaronic Latin was originally devised by university students for jokes, mockeries, and even used in literary works such as Tifi Odasi’s Macheronea (1490). Folengo, however, gave this jargon a literary dignity and an international celebrity thanks to his macaronic works, which include Baldus (1552), Zanitonella (1552), Moscheis (The Battle of the Flies, 1552), and Epigrammata (Epigrams, 1552). Folengo published the first versions of these works between 1517 and 1521, and continued to revise them until his death, producing four editions of his macaronic poetry. First published in 1517, Baldus is a mock-heroic epic poem divided, in its fourth and final version, into 25 books. It begins with the love between Baldus’ noble parents and the hero’s birth and childhood in the peasant village of Cipada, where he is raised by locals. Baldus’ youth concludes with 748

his imprisonment and liberation, thanks to his friends’ jokes. The epic begins in book XI, when a battle takes place in Mantua and Baldus embarks on a series of picaresque adventures during which he meets his father, who lives like a hermit on an island (which turns out to be a whale) and gives his son the mission of fighting witches. After a sequence of battles, Baldus and his friends are given the weapons of the ancient heroes and begin their trip to Hell with the intention of defeating evil. Despite their success, after entering the cave of fantasy, they are led into a pumpkin by a jester, where their journey, and the poem, ends. The use of hexameters and some intertextual elements recall the model of Virgil’s Aeneid, yet the number of books and the combination of models (hagiographic tale, chanson de geste, Arthurian romances, and so on) make Baldus a parody of the epic conventions. Folengo rebels against the idealized pastoral worlds that were the convention in the Italian literary tradition. The epic model was also present in his Moscheis, a parody in three books (its first edition of 1521, entitled Moschaea, also had a prologue) written in elegiac couplets. The poem tells the story of a war between flies and ants. Treating the low subject with high language and style, it thus anticipates seventeenth-century Italian and European mock-heroic poetry. However, Folengo’s macaronic work does not always belong to the genre of epic. He also wrote the Zanitonella, a collection of love poems that includes 18 compositions in its last and most famous version. The subject is Tonello’s passion for his beloved Zanina, from their first meeting (which took place, naturally, on a spring day) to their breakup when, rejected and desperate, Tonello forgets his pain with wine and goes back to work. Both characters, as revealed by their names, are peasants and their mentality (along with the development of the plot) is in contrast with the chosen model, which is a combination of Petrarchan and classical topoi (particularly Virgilian eclogues). The use of vernacular and Latin metrical forms (e.g., the ‘‘sonolegı`a,’’ which fused sonnet and elegy), the

TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI) presence of eclogues, and even the title, structured on the model of Laevius’ Protesilaodamia, reflect Folengo’s intent: the fusion of the classical tradition with vernacular and even popular literature. Love and other motifs like the seasons, contemporary history, places of interest, and friendship were also subjects of the Epigrammata, whose thematic variety reflects their metrical diversity. While composing his macaronic works, Folengo also wrote four vernacular poems: Orlandino (1526), Caos del Triperuno (Chaos of the Triperuno, 1527), Umanita` del Figliuolo di Dio (The Humanity of the Son of God, 1533), and Palermitana, written around 1540 and unpublished in his lifetime. These works document the author’s spiritual experience and temporary intolerance of monastic life, as they combined literary forms with strong religious sentiment, which often bordered on heterodoxy. The Orlandino, a burlesque account of the birth and early years of Roland, was particularly interesting for its religious implications. Written in Italian octaves and divided into eight sections (capitoli), it was at first sight a parody of heroic vernacular poetry. In fact, it is a religious work, which criticizes the secular power of the Church of Rome and the corruption of the clergy. Thus, it documents the religious crisis that led Folengo to write his Caos del Triperuno, an unusual work that mixes verse and prose, and fuses Latin, Italian, and macaronic language. Retracting the heretical ideas he had expressed elsewhere, the author here finally confesses his faith. In order to confirm his renewed orthodoxy and to return to monastic life, Folengo also composed Umanita` del Figliolo di Dio and the Palermitana. The first work is a poem about the history of salvation divided into 10 books and written in Italian octaves. Dedicated to the Benedictine Order, it articulates Folengo’s revolutionary position on religious topics such as the personal reading of the Gospel. The subject of Palermitana, a long poem divided into two books composed respectively of 30 and 18 cantos all written in terza rima, is Christ’s essence and role in the salvation of mankind. The same religious fervor inspired two of Folengo’s Latin works: the poem Hagiomachia (Hagiomachia, ca. 1540), a collection of lives of 18 martyrs written in hexameters, and Atto della Pinta (Pinta’s Act, ca. 1540), his only play and the first Italian example of a Spanish dramatic genre called auto sacramental. Written in liturgical Latin, it is a short allegorical play dealing with the history of redemption from Adam to Christ. Folengo’s subject

matter, however, always combined the sacred and the profane. During the composition of these doctrinal poems, he continuously revised his macaronic works and developed others in Latin. The Varium poema (1533), for instance, is a collection of 68 Latin poems treating various subjects in varying metrical forms. In this collection, Folengo combined religious poems and profane compositions such as eulogies and epigrams inspired by contemporary history. The Latin work that better portrays Folengo’s eclectic literary activity, however, is Janus (1533), a short allegorical poem whose theme is the good use of time. In this work, Folengo looked back at his literary activity and condemned his macaronic works. Above all, he rejected his Baldus, the reading of which he considered a waste of time, and generally condemned theological studies and their pointless discussions. The irony was evident, as Janus was printed at a time of intense theological speculation and literary creativity. Just a few years later, between 1539 and 1540, Folengo printed the third edition of the Baldus and other macaronic works. Humanistic and liturgical Latin, dialects, and vernaculars were all used in Folengo’s multilingual work as a complex parody of the Italian debate over language. Thanks to his artistic irony and philological precision, however, Folengo reached a European public and became a direct source for poets like Franc¸ois Rabelais and a model for worldwide Neo-Latin literature.

Biography Born in Mantua, 8 November 1491. Entered the Benedictine Order in the Monastery of Santa Eufemia, Brescia, 1508; took his vows in 1509. Moved to San Benedetto Po, near Mantua, center of the Cassinese Congregation, 1512. Lived in the Monastery of Santa Giustina, Padua, 1513–1514. Moved to Cesena and traveled to Venice, 1517. Moved to Pomposa, near Ferrara, and to Parma, 1521–1522. Expelled from the congregation for obscure reasons, 1525. Lived in Venice, in communication with the cultural group of Aretino, 1527–1530. Went on pilgrimage with his brother Giambattista. Stayed in San Pietro Capolla, near Naples, as a hermit. Was in touch with Neapolitan Humanists, 1530. In an attempt to return to the congregation, went to Venice and published religious works, 1533. Readmitted to the congregation, lived in Brescia, 1534. Moved to Sicily, where he wrote both poetry and plays, 1539–1542. Prior of Santa Croce in 749

TEOFILO FOLENGO (MERLIN COCAI) Campese (Vicenza), 1542. Died in Santa Croce, 1544. MATTEO SORANZO See also: Heroic-Comic Poetry Selected Works Collections Le opere maccheroniche, edited by Attilio Portioli, 3 vols., Mantua: Mondovi, 1889. Opere italiane, edited by Umberto Renda, Bari: Laterza, 1911–1914. Opere, edited by Carlo Cordie´, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1977. Macaronee Minori. Zanitonella, Moschede, Epigrammi, edited by Massimo Zaggia, Turin: Einaudi, 1987.

Poetry ‘‘Orlandino,’’ 1526. ‘‘Caos del Triperuno,’’ 1527. ‘‘La umanita` del Figliuolo di Dio,’’ 1533; critical edition by Simona Gatti Ravedati, 2000. ‘‘Pomiliones,’’ in Ioan. Bapti. Chrysogoni Folengii Dialogi, quos Pomiliones vocat. Theophili Folengi varium poema, et Ianus, 1533. ‘‘Janus,’’ in Ioan. Bapti. Chrysogoni Folengii Dialogi, quos Pomiliones vocat. Theophili Folengi varium poema, et Ianus, 1533. ‘‘Varium poema,’’ in Ioan. Bapti. Chrysogoni Folengii Dialogi, quos Pomiliones vocat. Theophili Folengi varium poema, et Ianus, 1533; critical edition by Cesare Federico Goffis, 1958. ‘‘Palermitana’’ (ca. 1540). ‘‘Hagiomachia’’ (ca. 1540). ‘‘Zanitonella,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552. ‘‘Baldus,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552. ‘‘Moscheis,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552.

‘‘Epigrammata,’’ in Merlini Cocaii poetae mantuani Macaronicorum poemata, 1552.

Morality Play Atto della Pinta (ca. 1540); critical edition by Maria di Venuta, 1994.

Further Reading Bernardi Perini, Giorgio, Scritti folenghiani, Padua: Imprimatur, 2000. Bernardi Perini, Giorgio, and Claudio Marangoni (editors), Teofilo Folengo nel quinto centenario della nascita, 1491–1991, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Bonora, Ettore, Le Maccheronee di Teofilo Folengo, Venice: Neri Pozza Editore, 1956. Bonora, Ettore, and M. Chiesa (editors), Cultura letteraria e tradizione popolare in Teofilo Folengo, 1979. Capata, Alessandro, Semper truffare paratus: genere e ideologia nel Baldus di Folengo, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Chiesa, Mario, Il Parnaso e la zucca: testi e studi folenghiani, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’orso, 1995. Goffis, Cesare Federico, Roma, Lutero e la poliglossia folenghiana, Bologna: Patron, 1995. Gulizia, Stefano, ‘‘La discesa agli inferi: Sette episodi dal ‘Ribaldo’ (libri XXI e XXIV del Baldus),’’ in Quaderni Folenghiani, 3 (2000–2001): 29–55. Ijsewijn, Josef, and Dirk Sacre`, Companion to Neolatin Studies. Part II, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1998. Lazzerini, Lucia, ‘‘Baldus di Teofilo Folengo (Merlin Cocai),’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Pozzi, Mario, ‘‘Teofilo Folengo e le resistenze alla toscanizzazione letteraria,’’ in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 155 (1985): 178–203. Scalabrini, Massimo, L’incarnazione del macaronico: percorsi nel comico folenghiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Baldus, la fantasia e l’espressionismo,’’ in Strumenti critici, 7, no. 3 (1992): 315–326. Soons, Alan, ‘‘The celebration of the Rustic Virtues in the Works of Teofilo Folengo,’’ in Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1 (1971): 119–129.

´ RE DA SAN GIMIGNANO FOLGO (1265–1275–BEFORE 1332) Giacomo di Michele, nicknamed ‘‘Folgo´re’’ (splendor) perhaps by himself in the commiato to the Sonetti de’ mesi (Sonnets of the Months), is renowned for his vivid depictions of the lifestyles of 750

privileged Tuscans. Hovering between a kind of realist representation of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century communal state, and a romanticized imagery of knighthood and the feudal court,

´ RE DA SAN GIMIGNANO FOLGO Folgo´re reports on the exquisite sights, smells, tastes, sounds, and activities that filled the days and evenings of a certain sector of the aristocracy and the popolo grasso, the wealthy merchant class. What remains of Folgo´re da San Gimignano’s opus consists of 32 sonnets that were likely composed between 1295 and 1317. Five sonnets describing the armoring of a young knight, Sonetti per l’armamento di un cavaliere (Sonnets for the Armoring of a Knight), are apparently the first of his literary production, followed by four sonnets that critique the Ghibellines and their rule (Folgo´re was a staunch White Guelph); one sonnet lamenting the end of courtesy; and two corone or ‘‘wreaths’’ of poems, which comprise eight sonnets organized around the days of the week, Sonetti de la semana (Sonnets of the Week), and 14 around the months of the year (Sonetti de’ mesi). Folgo´re’s best known poems, the Sonetti de’ mesi, could be considered poetry of plazer and/or souhait—the celebration of worldly pleasures and ideals. Folgo´re seems to have so delighted in describing the life of luxury that his Mesi are prone to flights of fancy, hyperbole, and excess. Words such as tutto and tutti (all) and expressions such as il piu` (the most) or di piu` (more than) are frequent in these sonnets, and the members of the brigata (company) of knights are described as more gallant than Lancelot or more healthy than any fish in any river, lake, or sea. The two quatrains of each sonnet in the Mesi generally paint a picturesque or decadent scene, and begin with the expression of a wish offered by Folgo´re to the brigata. The two tercets, on the other hand, provide a more general reflection on the places and activities previously portrayed. Besides hunting, jousting, feasting, dancing, singing, gambling, and engaging in amorous pursuits, these well-to-do men indulge in great frivolity all year round: jingling their purses of gold to annoy all those who begrudge them (in the sonnet on February), eating and drinking as much as they want (July and October, respectively), and throwing snowballs at young women in the square (January). Nature, too, seems to contribute to making the knights happy, giving them, for example, all the tastiest fruits of summer (June). This depiction of such a hedonistic and dazzling utopia or Eden prompted the jester-poet Cenne dalla Chitarra (died 1322–1336) to write an extended, parodic enueg (a poem that lists annoying things) of the Mesi, using precisely the same form, rhyme scheme, meter, and themes of Folgo´re’s sonnets, but bemoaning the dreadfulness of each month, such as hunting in February’s frozen valleys when big bears are all

around and one’s shoes fall apart. In the past, the brigata of Folgo´re’s Mesi was thought to have been the club of spendthrifts that Dante mentions in canto XXIX of the Inferno, but scholars have since shown that the central figure of Folgo´re’s company of knights, Niccolo` di Nigi of Siena, is not the same Niccolo` that headed up Dante’s brigata. Of Folgo´re’s other poems, the Sonetti de la semana, written to guide knights and noblemen in the proper activities for each day of the week, are the next best known. Tuesday, for example, is for studying the art of battle; Thursday is for jousting; and Sunday is for one’s beloved. The Semana is dedicated to Carlo di Messer Guerra Cavicciuoli, the condottiere of San Gimignano who led the battle against Volterra in which Folgo´re participated in 1308. Unlike the highly materialistic and sensual focus of the two corone, the five Sonetti per l’armamento di un cavaliere allegorically delineate the necessary attributes of a young knight-to-be: Bravery, Humility, Discretion, and Joy. The sonnets are a nostalgic evocation of the character and deeds of courtly life a century before, permeated with elements of what it is to be a privileged citizen in current urban society. Folgo´re anticipates the decline of such feudal ideals that would begin with Boccaccio’s brigata only a few decades later. Wistful for ‘‘Cortesia cortesia cortesia...’’ (Courtesy, courtesy, courtesy), but ferociously critical and disparaging, Folgo´re’s political sonnets mourn the loss of Guelph power to the Ghibellines. In the furious ‘‘Eo no ti lodo, Dio, e non ti adoro’’ (I Praise Thee Not, Oh God, nor Do I Adore Thee), Folgo´re laments the current state of Tuscan affairs with an exasperation equal only to his tirade against priests in the sonnet on the month of March, and against the avaricious throughout his poetry. All 32 of Folgo´re’s sonnets use the same metric: ABBA ABBA CDC DCD. The lexicon of the poems is wide and rich, drawing from such fields as flora, fauna, precious stones, couture, places, landscapes, meteorological phenomena, cuisine, and military and hunting equipment and practices. Folgo´re’s poetry is, arguably, more one of ‘‘ornamentalism’’ than of symbolism, as Michelangelo Picone has noted in Il giuoco della vita bella (1988). As such, the language has somewhat more in common with the poesia giocosa than it does with the abstractions of the dolce stil novo, even though Folgo´re’s attempts to portray an exalted world of beauty and harmony does recall the stilnovisti’s efforts to sing the sublimity of the beloved. Folgo´re’s verses are, on the one hand, an oneiric, stylized vision of 751

´ RE DA SAN GIMIGNANO FOLGO life as a game. On the other, they may perhaps be championing the importance of playfulness, joy, and generosity in any life.

I sonetti dei mesi ed i componenti. La brigata in una cronaca perugina del Trecento, edited by Ubaldo Morandi, Siena: Edizioni Cantagalli, 1991.

Further Reading

Biography There is little information about Folgo´re’s life. Born to a ‘‘Michele’’ ca. 1265–1275 in San Gimignano near Siena, Folgo´re was a public servant and knight who fought under Count Orsello in the battle against Pistoia in 1305, and under Carlo Cavicciuoli in the battle against Volterra in 1308. In 1317 (the year of King Robert of Naples’ peace with the Ghibellines of Pisa), he wrote two political sonnets in memory of the Guelphs’ loss at Montecatini in 1316. He had two children. Died before 1332. ARIELLE SAIBER Selected Works Collections I sonneti, edited by Ferdinando Neri, Turin: UTET, 1925; as A Wreath for Saint Gemignano, edited and translated by Richard Aldington, New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1945. Sonetti, edited by Giovanni Caravaggi, Turin: Einaudi, 1965.

Bertelli, Italo, Esperienze poetiche del Duecento e del primo Trecento: Studi sul ‘‘dolce stil nuovo’’ e sulla letteratura dell’eta` comunale, Milan: Bignami, 1980. Brugnolo, Furio, Il Canzoniere di Nicolo` de’ Rossi, Padua: Antenore, 1974. Caravaggi, Giovanni, Folgore da S. Gimignano, Milan: Ceschina, 1960. Ciccuto, Marcello, ‘‘Lo spazio di Folgore,’’ in Il restauro dell’ ‘‘Intelligenza’’e altri studi dugenteschi, Pisa: Giardino, 1985. Contini, Gianfranco, Poeti del Duecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Marti, Mario, Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, Milan: Rizzoli, 1956. Masse`ra, Aldo Francesco, Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli, Bari: Laterza, 1920. Picone, Michelangelo (editor), Il giuoco della vita bella: Folgore da San Gimignano, studi e testi, San Gimignano: Comune di San Gimignano, 1988. Quaglio, Antonio Enzo, La poesia realistica e la prosa del Duecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1971. Suitner, Franco, La poesia satirica e giocosa nell’eta` dei comuni, Padua: Antenore, 1983. Vitale, Maurizio, Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, Turin: UTET, 1956.

LUCIANO FOLGORE (1888–1966) Luciano Folgore (the pseudonym under which Omero Vecchi published most of his works) is considered, after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, one of the most important representatives of Italian Futurism. He was an active promoter of the movement until the beginning of World War I through his involvement in the organization of Futurist events in Rome and throughout Italy, as well as through his cultivation of close ties with other artists of international importance (Giacomo Balla, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso). Folgore always maintained a certain autonomy of thought, not so much to express polemical intentions, but rather to play the role of moderator between the diverging opinions that divided Italian artists, even those within 752

the Futurist movement itself. In spite of the fact that he was among the first members of the movement, his writings only partially follow its poetics, which are much less organic and compact than is generally believed. With the collection of poems Il canto dei motori (The Song of the Engines, 1912), the first of his three Futurist works, Folgore adhered to the more moderate line of Marinetti’s aesthetics, aiming at recovering a certain lyrical dimension and developing the analogical procedures inherited from the symbolist movement, not to mention from Marinetti’s own French beginnings. Interspersed on this post-Impressionist background were verses of social criticism and elements taken from the Italian

LUCIANO FOLGORE literary tradition, such as images from Gabriele D’Annunzio, a declamatory vigor that recalls Giosue` Carducci, Giovanni Pascoli’s human civil sense, and even some distant echoes of Alessandro Manzoni. Critics thus underlined the substantial continuity of thought with respect to his previous phase: Although in some sections technological progress is enthusiastically celebrated, in the general design of the collection one finds the alternation of heterogeneous, and at times irreconcilable, themes that express the artist’s interior struggle between exuberant vitality and melancholic introspection. Already in his next work, Ponti sull’oceano (Bridges over the Ocean, 1914), the poet further distances himself from the avant-garde, freeing himself from Futurist influence with the following collection, Citta` veloce (Fast City, 1919). Here the definition of a strongly personalized style is solidified. Folgore himself defines this style as ‘‘lirismo sintetico’’ (synthetic lyricism), derived from the maturation of the Futurist experience in light of an intentionally modest intimacy directed at objects from everyday life (the affinity with metaphysical painting is evident). Language is reduced to the essential: Going beyond the abolition of grammar, syntax, adverbs, and adjectives— which is customary for the Futurists—Folgore even eliminates verbs, which Marinetti was still using, even if only in the infinitive form. The dynamic role of prepositions became fundamental, as they served as a bridge between different dimensions. These verses intend to represent reality and human emotions through expressions unmediated by the subject, since the exclusive use of the noun would open the way to analogical parallelisms that are the basis of the collective imagination. It is only by way of this network of associations shared by all human beings that it is possible to arrive at the understanding of reality. Therefore, the poet himself becomes a simple vehicle for the interpretation of emotions, while at the same time his writings assume an impersonal character. Here every psychological impulse is overcome, while communication is freed from cultural legacies and from emotional conditioning, thus allowing the poet to experiment with an automated form of writing. This technique eliminates the influence of reason over expression in order to reproduce on paper the involuntary flow of thoughts, and to implement the instinctive fusion between physical experience and literary transfiguration. The direct interaction with the outside world, then, is of primary importance for artistic creation, and the reader contributes, as

well, by way of the imagination, which is stimulated by the almost cinematic editing of images and which bestows new meanings upon the text. In reaction to the horrors of World War I, even Folgore acknowledged the need for the ‘‘return to order’’ that was felt throughout European culture. After the moderate experimentalism of synthetic lyricism—which reflected the existential drama of contemporary society—his style and themes evolved, with abrupt breaks as they moved toward more contemplative attitudes and a ‘‘nonprofessional’’ conception of poetic writing. For these reasons, Folgore became a fundamental model for the avant-garde, in which the young Giuseppe Ungaretti also participated. Therefore, a progressive detachment from reality, analyzed exclusively through the lens of irony, took place, while the technical virtuosity became increasingly refined over the years. The most significant expression of this new poetics is represented by the parodies of poets and short-story writers—most importantly in Poeti allo specchio (Poets in the Mirror, 1926) and in Novellieri allo specchio (Novelists in the Mirror, 1935)—where the poet commits himself to a careful assimilation of the style of others in order to then reproduce it from a grotesque perspective. This creates a sympathetic relationship with the imitated author, and as a consequence the parody is able to expose the hidden truth behind the words. Although this production was appreciated by readers and critics alike, his fiction, moralizing works, and texts for children were received negatively, as they seemed to represent the closing off of the author into an attitude of disengagement from reality. Here, in fact, the aesthetics of the marvelous, elaborated after the example of the fantastic literature of the Renaissance, is used in an exclusively recreational context in which the works cannot—and do not intend to—exercise any other function except that of simple entertainment.

Biography Born Omero Vecchi in Rome on June 18, 1888, the son of Aristide Vecchi, a white-collar worker, and Maria Crema; obtained a professional diploma as commercial surveyor and accountant, 1907; began volunteer work in accounting with the Revenue Office of Rome, 1908; became a member to the Futurist movement, 1909; married Carla Giannarelli, 1910; endorsed numerous Futurist manifestoes, 1910–1911; began to collaborate with the literary 753

LUCIANO FOLGORE journals Lacerba, La Tribuna illustrata, and La voce and to work in the editorial office of Il travaso delle idee, 1913; organized meetings between Futurist authors and sympathizers of the movement, 1914; enlisted as lieutenant of artillery, 1916; declared ineligible for active duty and assigned to antiaircraft defense in Venice, 1917; disassociated himself from the Futurist movement, collaborating with Avanscoperta and with numerous other journals, 1920; his wife Carla died, 1922; began to host a humoristic show on Italian radio entitled Il grammofono della verita`, October 1924; began to collaborate with La Stampa, 1926, and with Gazzetta del Popolo, 1928; began a relationship with Valentina Scalzi, 1946, whom he then married in 1962. Died in Rome on May 24, 1966. GIADA VIVIANI See also: Futurism

‘‘Graffa, l’impermeabile,’’ 1923. ‘‘Nuda ma dipinta,’’ 1924. ‘‘Mia cugina la luna,’’ 1926.

Children’s Books Mamma voglio l’arcobaleno: poesie per bambini grandi e piccini, 1947. Gli animali parlanti, 1953. La favola della volpe, 1953. L’albero di Natale, 1955. E` arrivato un bastimento...: fiabe per bambini grandi e piccini, 1960. Stelle di carta d’argento: fiabe per bambini grandi e piccini, 1960.

Play Esculapio al neon: favola teatrale e musicale, 1964.

Other Poeti controluce, 1922. Poeti allo specchio, 1926. Novellieri allo specchio, 1935. Le strade del Signore: raccolta di massime, pensieri, immagini, similitudini, 1945.

Letters Carteggio futurista (with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti), edited by Francesco Muzzioli, 1987.

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Hora prima,’’ 1908. ‘‘Fiammeggiando l’aurora,’’ 1910. ‘‘Canto dei motori,’’ 1912. ‘‘Ponti sull’oceano,’’ 1914. ‘‘Citta` veloce,’’ 1919. ‘‘Musa vagabonda... gioconda e qualche volta profonda,’’ 1927. ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1930. ‘‘Il libro degli epigrammi,’’ 1932. ‘‘Favolette e strambotti,’’ 1934. ‘‘Poesie scelte,’’ 1940.

Novels La trappola colorata, 1934. La citta` dei girasoli, 1935.

Short Stories

Further Reading Biondi, Raffaello, ‘‘Ricordo di Luciano Folgore,’’ in Carovana, 18 (1968): 197–200. Manacorda, Giuliano, ‘‘Luciano Folgore,’’ in Studi romani, 29, nos. 3–4 (1981): 354–371. Nerucci, Anna Maria, ‘‘Luciano Folgore, poeta futurista: Il canto dei motori,’’ in Cristallo, 34, no. 1 (1992): 63–78. Papini, Pietro, Luciano Folgore, figura e poesia, Rome: Il Premio, 1967. Saccone, Antonio, Marinetti e il futurismo, Naples: Liguori, 1984. Salaris, Claudia, Luciano Folgore e le avanguardie. Con lettere e inediti futuristi, Scandicci: La Nuova Italia, 1997. Verdone, Mario, Il futurismo, Rome: Newton, 1994.

‘‘Crepapelle: risate,’’ 1919.

FOLK LITERATURE See Popular Culture and Literature

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MODERATA FONTE (MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI)

MODERATA FONTE (MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI) (1555–1592) Moderata Fonte (pseudo. Modesta Pozzo) is a Venetian writer recently recovered to the literary tradition. She penned the best treatise on women’s worth in early modern Italy, Il merito delle donne (The Worth of Women, 1600), and one of the most intriguing chivalric romances of the Renaissance, I tredici canti del Floridoro (The Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro, 1581). Il merito delle donne is an argumentative, at times hilarious text on the position of women in the Italian society of the late sixteenth century. Published as a response to a misogynist treatise by the Paduan Giuseppe Passi, I difetti donneschi (The Defects of Women, 1598), although written independently, Fonte’s book takes an approach different from Lucrezia Marinella’s equally polemical feminist text, La nobilta` et l’eccellenza delle donne (On the Nobility and Excellence of Women, 1600). Rather than arguing, like Marinella, for the inner nobility of women, an angle often used by men when writing benevolently of this sex, Fonte concentrates instead on women’s natural inner worth. Women, she writes, are part of the natural system, just like men, and they too, likewise, have a place in the social structure. Using a dialogue among seven women representing various aspects of the Venetian social order (some of the women are married and some are unmarried or widows; some are young and some are old), Fonte sets up lively arguments and counterarguments centering on the various rationales as to why women have been historically oppressed or dismissed. Since there is no man present at the conversation, which takes place in a woman’s house, the exchange is without inhibitions. Fonte touches expansively on women’s issues, such as marriage, and on women’s sometimes friendly and sometimes adversarial relationship with the men in their family, such as their brothers, husbands, and fathers. The emphasis is on the limitations that culture places on the female sex and on the weaknesses of the very men called upon by society to determine the well-being of the women in their households. Why women are unjustly treated when they too—just like men—are made in the image of God, these female discussants ask why women

have to find themselves bereft of the kind of lives that their families’ wealth and status can afford them, just because their fathers did not provide a dowry and their brothers carelessly used the dotal money for their personal business transactions? No matter how pacifying the attitude of somen of the women in this gathering, the general understanding is that men are hardly worth their highly regarded place in society. Men squander the family patrimony on prostitutes, some of the women argue, are prone to violent deeds, and shamelessly betray even their own mothers. The reader is repeatedly offered the chance to sympathize with women and understand that only male jealousy limits and castigates this sex. The point had already been made by the Paduan writer Giulia Bigolina, who in Urania (ca. 1554), written 40 years earlier and containing what may be today the first treatise written in Italian on women’s worth, had argued forcefully along the same lines. But here the sheer amount of pages dedicated to the subject makes the logic of the argument inescapable. In highlighting, through religious and mythological examples, the dignity that women carry naturally, Fonte ends explaining not only the necessary social role women should have in early modern Italian society but rewrites the myth of creation itself. As for I tredici canti del Floridoro, even though it was published incomplete, this chivalric romance represents the first sustained effort on the part of a woman writer to pen—starting from scratch—a Renaissance epic along the lines of the bestseller of the genre, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532). The task was not easy, since women were supposed to have no clear sense of what jousts, military skirmishes, or even myths of dynastic foundations entailed. The main character in Floridoro is the woman warrior, Risamante, who goes out in the world to fight for her right to her own kingdom in far away Armenia, which she would have inherited, together with her twin sister, had not her father forgotten her very existence after she had been kidnapped as a child. Although many typical elements of chivalric romances are present in this text, such as love at 755

MODERATA FONTE (MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI) first sight, enchanted castles, and wildly beautiful women, Fonte’s main interest is in delineating the heroic spinsterhood of Risamante. Traits such as chastity, honesty, and autonomy in women were also highlighted in Il merito delle donne, but here they are fully embodied in a realistically drawn female character. Unlike most chivalric romances of the period, there are no seduction scenes in Floridoro, no wicked witches, no sexualized enchantresses, and no pictorial Petrarchan representations of women in various states of disrobing. Men, it turns out, are themselves erotic objects of desire, like the youthful Floridoro of the title. They are also inconstant in their choices and moody in their attitudes, traits that usually characterize the women penned by male authors. But they are also faithful in marriage, constant in love, and honest in their behavior— exactly the way women like them in real life and idealistically portray them sometimes in literature.

Biography Born in Venice, 15 June 1555. Orphaned of both parents as a toddler, was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cecilia de’ Mazzi. Studied in a convent until nine and then at home with her older brother Leonardo. Later on she went to live with her aunt and uncle Nicolo` Doglioni, who furthered her studies and sponsored her career as a Venetian enfant prodige. Married Filippo Zorzi, a lawyer, 15 February 1583; had four children. Died giving birth to her fourth child in Venice, 2 November 1592; buried in the cemetery of the Church of the Frari. VALERIA FINUCCI Selected Works Tredici canti del Floridoro, 1581; modern critical edition by Valeria Finucci, 1995; as Floridoro, a Romance, translated by V. Finucci and Julia Kisacky, 2006. La passione di Christo, 1582. La resurretione di Giesu` Christo Nostro Signore, 1592.

Il merito delle donne, 1600; modern critical edition by Adriana Chemello, 1988; as The Worth of Women, translated by Virginia Cox, 1997.

Further Reading Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella,’’ in Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del XVI secolo, edited by Marina Zancan, Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘Gioco e dissimulazione in Moderata Fonte,’’ in Moderata Fonte, Il merito delle donne, edited by A. Chemello, Venice: Eidos, 1988. Collina, Beatrice, ‘‘Moderata Fonte e Il merito delle donne,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 142–164. Conti Odorisio, Ginevra, Donna e societa` nel Seicento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘The Single Self: Feminist Thought and the Marriage Market in Early Modern Venice,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 48, no. 3 (1995): 513–581. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘Moderata Fonte and The Worth of Women,’’ in Moderata Fonte, The Worth of Women, edited and translated by Virginia Cox, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘Women as Readers and Writers of Chivalric Poetry in Early Modern Italy,’’ in Sguardi sull’Italia, edited by Gino Bedani et al., Exeter: Society for Italian Studies, 1997. Finucci, Valeria, ‘‘Moderata Fonte e il romanzo cavalleresco al femminile,’’ in Tredici canti del Floridoro, edited by Valeria Finucci, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Finucci, Valeria, ‘‘When the Mirror Lies: Sisterhood Reconsidered in Moderata Fonte’s Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro,’’ in Sisters and Brothers in the Early Modern World: Thicker Than Water, edited by Naomi Miller and Naomi Yavneh, Aldershot: Ashgate, (2006): 116–128. Kolski, Stephen, ‘‘Wells of Knowledge: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne,’’ in Italianist, 13 (1993): 57–96. Kolski, Stephen, ‘‘Moderata Fonte’s Tredici Canti del Floridoro: Women in a Man’s Genre,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 17 (1999): 165–184. Labalme, Patricia, ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: Three Early Modern Feminists,’’ in Archivio Veneto, 117 (1981): 81–109. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘A Woman’s Discourse in the Italian Renaissance: Moderata Fonte’s Il merito delle donne,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 165–181. Zanette, Emilio, ‘‘Bianca Capello e la sua poetessa,’’ in Nuova antologia, 88 (1953): 455–468.

CULTURE OF FOOD At its origins, gastronomic literature was closely connected to other disciplines, such as medicine, agriculture, and even alchemy; the earliest writings on 756

these subjects often include theoretical discourses, practical suggestions, and even recipes. Italy was fundamental in generating a literature of food that

CULTURE OF FOOD flourished in its own right, until France established its ascendancy in the field in the seventeenth century. As the literature of gastronomy developed, the initial, practical questions about the composition of a wholesome diet gave way ever more to an aesthetic founded on the concept of good taste and driven by a quest for pleasure. The earliest works devoted entirely to gastronomy date back well into the fourteenth century, with the anonymous Liber de coquina (Cookbook), Libro della cocina (Cookbook), and the Libro per cuoco (Book for the Cook). The first is attributed to an author thought to have been a member of the Anjevin court of Naples; the second and third to a Tuscan and a Venetian author, respectively. These works begin to formulate a culture specific to food, a culture expressed in Italian (rather than Latin), which thus has a wider appeal. They result from collaborations between compilers and cooks, as the former enunciate in written form the practical knowledge of the latter, who were often nearly illiterate. The first classic Italian cookbook, however, returns to the Latin language. Entitled Liber de arte coquinaria (The Art of Cooking), it is written by Mastro Martino da Como, cook to the patriarch of Aquileia. The work comprises a collection of recipes laid out according to a strictly rational method, and its detailed directions implicitly evince a specialized and abstract knowledge of cookery. It is believed to be the outcome of a secret collaboration with the Humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421–1481), better known as Platina. In his De onesta voluptate et valetudine (On Right Pleasure and Good Health, 1474), Platina acknowledges his debt to the famous cook; he undertakes studies of nutrition and introduces maxims regarding the ethics of the pleasures of the table, drawing on a classical ideal of moderation, a concept also informed by a bourgeois ideology. The approach to food is balanced, measured and rational, in contraposition to the excesses of the Middle Ages and the banquet. Literature, too, becomes a vehicle for the culture of food. Exemplary are works such as De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam (Concerning Fifty Courtesies at Table) by Bonvesin de la Riva (thirteenth-fourteenth century), Saporetto (A Little Taste) by Simone Prudenzani d’Orvieto (fourteenth century), and especially Baldus by Teofilo Folengo, whose Toscolana edition dated 1521 contains not only a great many scattered disquisitions, but also the Doctrinae cosinandi vigenti (Concerning Current Cooking Instructions), 20 recipes conceived for an imaginary banquet of the gods. Especially noteworthy in the Renaissance, however, is

the revival of the classic culture of antiquity concurrently with Bacchic poetry. The Canzone di Bacco (Song of Bacchus, 1490) by Lorenzo il Magnifico, for example, was probably intended to be sung during the masked carnival pageants that paraded through the streets of Florence. The poem exalts life and love and is tempered by subtle shades of melancholy. Another example is the dithyramb Bacco in Toscana (Bacchus in Tuscany, 1666) by Francesco Redi, initially conceived as a simple toast for the Accademia della Crusca. The proposer of the toast considers the wines then in existence and proclaims that of Montepulciano superior. The toast in verses becomes a literary topos proper, often created in masterful style. Food is a recurring subject in the works of Giulio Cesare Croce (1550– 1609) as well, as is evident in Le sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (The Very Subtle Wiles of Bertoldo, 1606), where gastronomy becomes a sardonic lens through which to read the historical drama of hunger and social inequality. Cookery books flourish during the sixteenth century. They become technical, often written by food carvers, and are intended to be used in the service of the courts or by court officials acting in various administrative capacities. They bridge the gap between the literary culture of nobility and the fundamentally practical know-how acquired in the kitchens. Thus abstract considerations and discussions concerning organization are interspersed with sections devoted to recipes proper and to the jocular divertissements of the banquet, including games, dances, and other forms of entertainment. In 1549, Cristoforo Messisburgo (ca. 1490–1548), steward to Cardinal Ippolito d’Este of Ferrara and considered the founder of the Italian tradition of haute cuisine, writes Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generale (Banquets, Food Composition, and Overall Presentation), a tripartite treatise on the court’s kitchen. He begins with general information about the organization of the banquet, and then enters into a description of court events, including a section on entertainment and a large body of recipes. La singolar dottrina (The Special Doctrine, 1560), by the cook and food carver Domenico Romoli (better known as Panunto), also discusses the planning of court banquets, spectacular mise-en-sce`nes ritualized in minute detail and enacted by a staff organized according to rigorously codified roles. Romoli illustrates the recipes with attention to the nutritional and curative properties of foods. But the summa is Opera dell’arte di cucinare (On the Art of Cooking, 1570) by Bartolomeo Scappi, who served as chef to Popes 757

CULTURE OF FOOD Paul III and Pius V. Scappi demonstrates a refined taste for the technical and vividly illustrates his tasks in the kitchen. He creates a deep sense of his ethical and aesthetic commitment in the kitchen, suggesting that the person and the role of chef should converge in one ideal figure. At about the same time, there appear monographs that focus on more specific aspects of culinary practice. Examples are Dell’Insalata (Concerning Salad, 1572) by Costanzo Felici, a medical and anecdotal discussion about different herbs; Il trinciante (The Carver, 1581) by Vincenzo Cervio, a work written in caption style, intended to illustrate the utensils and motions used in artistic food carving and display at the banquet; and Li tre trattati (Three Treatises, 1639) by Mattia Giegher, who devotes an entire book to the figurative folding of napkins and tablecloths into artistic forms. Ritualized codification affects table manners, too, as is evidenced by the proliferation of caption-style works intended to guide the comportment of guests at the table. Exemplary in this regard is Il galateo (A Renaissance CourtesyBook, 1558) by Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa. Table manners are only part of the ground covered in Il galateo, but they are treated at such great length in different chapters that the book became synonymous with etiquette at the table. The figure of the cook returns to the limelight with L’arte di ben cucinare (The Art of Fine Cooking, 1662) by Bartolomeo Stefani, a Bolognese cook at the Gonzaga court. Stefani’s work is transitional between the grand tradition of aristocratic gastronomic literature and the burgeoning bourgeois tradition. It takes into account everyday recipes, with particular attention to the home and its economics, but also includes a section devoted to princely banquets, such as a description of a banquet offered by the Gonzagas for Christina, Queen of Sweden. The anonymous Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi (The Piedmontese Cook Perfected in Paris, 1776) is the first cookbook to acknowledge the rise of French cuisine, which tends to privilege recipes subdivided into sections on basic preparation and finishing touches. French influence is particularly evident in the language of cooking, and the heavy influx of Gallicisms and borrowed terms means that gastronomic vocabulary is accessible only to a circle of cognoscenti. A new cuisine is promoted, informed by an Enlightenment conception that seeks to refine the excesses of the Baroque; there is, too, a return to nature, to plain flavors and simplicity, in a bourgeois spirit of thrift, ease of preparation, and utility. The same cosmopolitanism permeates L’Apicio moderno (Modern Apicius, 1790) by Francesco Leonardi, the 758

first encyclopedic treatment of gastronomy, which treats history and nutrition and provides a corpus of recipes that span geographically from Russia to Turkey, as well as regional specialties. Many translations of French books appeared during the eighteenth century, but there also appeared numerous recipe books devoted to regional traditions. These books are often written by women (frequently under fictitious names) and are intended for a nonprofessional bourgeois readership with a predilection for ‘‘natural’’ flavors, a readership that is money-conscious and concerned with simplifying the ceremonial arts of service and preparation. In the late eighteenth century, a new breed of cookbook literature popular among bourgeois housewives develops in the form of the pamphlet, the almanac, and the magazine, with detailed recipes intended for the amateur. Ippolito Cavalcanti’s Cucina casereccia in dialetto napoletano (Home Cooking in the Neapolitan Dialect) addresses a bourgeois audience and is placed in appendix to his aristocratic Cucina teorico-pratica (Cooking: Theory and Practice, 1839). The book is bipartite not only in structure but also linguistically, and the aristocratic section foreshadows the learned style and digressive amateurish approach of Artusi, without his power of synthesis. In parallel to this bourgeois democratization of gastronomic literature, the literature of good manners develops prescriptions for the humbler classes—as in L’arte di convitare spiegata al popolo (The Art of Entertaining at Table, 1850) by Giovanni Rajberti. This work diverges from the traditional style of prescriptive etiquette, whereby class distinctions are the means for organizing conviviality at the table. The two hegemonic traditions of cookbook literature in Italy—rooted in the Po Valley region and the RomeTuscany region—find synthesis in Pellegrino Artusi, born in Forlimpopoli (Forlı`) but raised in Tuscany. La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (The Science and Art of Fine Eating, 1891) creates a new framework for Italian gastronomy even at the level of language, rejecting dialect and Gallicisms in order to forge, instead, a terminology specific to Italy. The rise of Fascism renews the drive to exalt the cuisine of Italy proper, and publications inspired by the country’s regional cuisines and intended in large part for a female readership blossom. The regime uses these publications as a means of autarchic propaganda; accordingly, the lexicon is further purified of Gallicisms. A creative effort in the same vein appears in the glossary to La cucina futurista (The Futurist Cookbook, 1932) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Futurist gastronomy becomes an active means for achieving aesthetic renewal, and

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) semantic and sensorial experiments work against tradition and foreign contamination. In the postwar period, the culture of food returns to the ancient split between practice and theory, professionalism and amateurism, but it does so in renewed forms: On the one hand, there emerge magazines and recipe books written by women, as well as countless reprints of Il talismano della felicita` (The Talisman of Happiness, 1929) by Ada Boni, and Le ricette regionali italiane (Regional Italian Recipes, 1967) by Anna Gosetti della Salda; on the other hand, a more abstract knowledge finds voice in magazines such as Il gastronomo (The Gastronomer) founded by Luigi Veronelli in 1956, and La gola (Gluttony), which from 1982 to 1993, collects contributions of esteemed Italian intellectuals. Veronelli, in particular, revolutionizes the discipline by freeing it of the scientific technicality of enology, creating a profession with a language of its own. Gastronomy, in this conception, has the potential to contribute to the edification of a better world, and craftsmanship receives its due recognition. Another prominent figure, an author bound to Luigi Veronelli by a 10-year professional fellowship, is Luigi Carnacina: The course of his career, which took him from tavern scullery boy to palace director, yields manuals of historic standing, such as La cucina rustica regionale (Regional Rustic Cooking, 1966) and Mangiare e bere all’italiana (Eating and Drinking Italian Style, 1965). The recipes represent a general knowledge of human relations and of the naturalness of foods, and the vivid depiction of the food carver offers a vantage point from which to reconsider the cook’s modus operandi. These developments result in the emergence of gastronomic critique in such areas as journalism and book publishing at large, and also in the institution of universities devoted to the science of cooking.

ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI See also: Pellegrino Artusi, Giovanni Della Casa Further Reading Benporat, Claudio, Storia della gastronomia Italiana, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Camporesi, Piero, Introduction to Pellegrino Artusi, La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Capatti, Alberto, and Massimo Montanari, La cucina italiana: Storia di una cultura, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999. Carnacina, Luigi, A la carte, Bra: Slow Food Editore, 2001. Di Benedetto, Arnaldo (editor), Prose di Giovanni della Casa e altri trattatisti cinquecenteschi del comportamento, Turin: UTET, 1970. Faccioli, Emilio, L’arte della cucina in Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, and Massimo Montanari (editors), Storia dell’alimentazione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997. Lo Russo, Giuseppe, L’antigastronomo, Florence: Coppini, 1998. Martino, Maestro, The Art of Cooking: The First Modern Cookery Book, edited by Luigi Ballerini, translated by Jeremy Parzen, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Montanari, Massimo, Il Convivio: Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola dall’Antichita` al Medioevo, RomeBari: Laterza, 1989. Montanari, Massimo, Nuovo Convivio: Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Montanari, Massimo, Il Convivio oggi: Storia e cultura dei piaceri della tavola nell’eta` contemporanea, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1992. Platina, On Right Pleasure and Good Health, edited by Mary Ella Milhan, Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. Redon, Odile, The Medieval Kitchen: Recipes from France and Italy, translated by Edward Schneider, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Salaris, Claudia, Cibo futurista, Rome: Stampa AlternativaNuovi Equilibri, 2000.

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) (1917–1994) Poet, literary critic, journalist, novelist, and translator Franco Lattes, better known as Franco Fortini, was among Italy’s most eminent intellectuals

during the postwar years. Though at the time of his death many Italian newspapers remembered him for his political engagement and critical writings, 759

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) he was also a significant figure in Italian literature due to his poetic activity, which reflected an unusual cultural and ideological background. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Fortini joined the Waldensian church in 1939 and developed an acute sense of history and personal responsibility. Actively involved in the Italian Resistance, he joined the clandestine Socialism Party (PSI) and later became a prominent voice of the new left. In his debut as a poet, Fortini entered a cultural scene dominated by irrational philosophical thinkers and Hermetic poets. Refusing to adhere to the cultural trend of his time, he collaborated with Giacomo Noventa, a poet and critic whose magazine, La riforma letteraria, attacked the linguistic and thematic obscurity of Hermetic poetry. This attitude was documented by his first major book of poetry, Foglio di via e altri versi (Deportation Papers and Other Verses, 1946), which includes poems written between 1938 and 1945. The dominant theme of the collection is the relationship between personal biography and history during the years of Fascism and the Italian Resistance. This relationship is about the experience of otherness, as in the poem ‘‘La citta` nemica’’ (The Enemy City), a tragic portrayal of the poet’s condition: ‘‘Quando nei volti vili della citta` nemica / leggo la morte seconda, / e tutto, anche ricordare, e` vano’’ (When on the sordid faces of the enemy city / I read the signs of second death, / and all, even remembrance, is in vain). Elsewhere, this relationship could be an experience of selfrealization, as in the poem ‘‘Italia 1942’’ (Italy 1942), which begins with the poet’s declaration that he is in love with his country: ‘‘Ora m’accorgo d’amarti / Italia, di salutarti / necessaria prigione’’ (Now I realize I love you, / Italy, and salute you, / inevitable prison). The poet’s mission is to remember and to speak on behalf of those who cannot speak, namely his dead comrades and his father, to whom Fortini addresses the poem ‘‘Lettera’’ (Letter): ‘‘Ma quello che tu non dici devo io dirlo per te’’ (But that which you do not say I must say for you). The poems of Poesia e errore (Poetry and Error, 1959) and the cultural-political essays assembled in Dieci inverni (Ten Winters, 1957) demonstrate Fortini’s intense study of Marx, Gramsci, and Lu`kacs, and his first attempts at translating poets such as Paul E´luard and Bertold Brecht. Indeed, translating remained a constant in Fortini’s life, and in 1982, he collected his best works in Il ladro di ciliege e altre versioni di poesia (The Cherry Thief and Other Poetic Translations, 1982). On the other 760

hand, the title Poesia e errore refers to the poet’s own intellectual itinerary between 1937 and 1957 as well as to the ambiguity of his hopes. The depressing reality of Cold War Europe in the years of the reconstruction was the subject of poems like ‘‘Agro inverno’’ (Sharp Winter). In a metaphoric winter, the poet and his generation are victims of their regrets and doomed to extinction: ‘‘Non abbiamo saputo cosa fare per noi / della verde vita e dei fiori amorosi. / Per questo la scure e` alla radice dei cuori / e come stecchi saremo arsi’’ (We did not know what to do / with the green life and the loving flowers. / That is why the axe is at the root of our hearts / and like dry twigs we shall be burned). The disillusionment of Fortini’s generation is the theme of the section ‘‘I destini generali,’’ which includes, among others, ‘‘American Renaissance,’’ a remembrance of literary historian Francis Otto Matthiessen’s suicide and a meditation on his generation’s surrender to the troubled history of postwar Europe. In the early 1960s, most Italian Marxists turned to the Socialist left and then to the politics of the centro sinistra. Experimentalism and Neoavantgarde dominated the artistic scene. Fortini’s beliefs were thus culturally and artistically isolated. He decided to work in partnership with the journal Officina and continued his critical examination of the Marxist cultural tradition. His solitary speculation culminated in the writings collected in Verifica dei poteri (Testing the Powers, 1965), which documented his attempt to combine a Marxist idea of history with a theological notion of redemption, modeled on Walter Benjamin’s writings. Fortini did not accept the radical positions assumed by the Neoavant-garde regarding the language of the middle class and Italian literary tradition. Una volta per sempre (Once and for All, 1963) exemplifies Fortini’s artistic creed. This collection includes the enigmatic ‘‘La poesia delle rose’’ (The Poem of the Roses), an allegory of how the poetic form hopelessly tries to represent the transcendence of history. ‘‘La poesia delle rose,’’ as Thomas E. Peterson explains in The Ethical Muse of Franco Fortini (1997), is ‘‘written in a fusion of acid irony and high lyric style’’ and ‘‘recommends itself to two levels of interpretation: the ideological and the heuristic. As an ideological poem, the text retained the signs of a humanistic and classical orientation—that of civic poetry— even if it distorted the semantic clarity and didacticism of that mode. [...] Conversely, in its redemptive or heuristic character, the work presented a veiled narrative enacted by various mythic figures.’’

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) ‘‘La poesia delle rose’’ inaugurated the poetics of allegory and parable that characterized Fortini’s subsequent works. In Questo muro: 1962–1972 (This Wall, 1973), the title makes reference to the allegorical wall that divided Dante and Beatrice in the last cantos of Dante’s Purgatorio. This metaphor is also present in Fortini’s other writings and is constantly connected with the barrier between the individual and reality. In Questo muro, Fortini meditated on the history of student protests of 1968 and the war in Vietnam, thus expressing the contrast between the urgency of the present and his personal utopian perspective. This existential condition is suggested through the use of allegory in ‘‘Il seme’’ (The Seed): ‘‘Tutti i fiori non sono che scene ironiche. / Ormai la piaga non si chiudera`. / Con tale vergogna scendero`/ i seminterrati delle cliniche/ e con rancore./ Non ancora e` luglio/ non ancora scaldato asciutto assoluto/ il seme’’ (The flowers are all just scenes of irony. / The wound now will never heal. / With this shame I shall go down / into the basements of the clinics, / and with resentment. / It is not yet July / not yet warmed the seed is dry / absolute). In the 1970s, Fortini’s literary production paid constant attention to the historical context of Italy, to the emergence of terrorism, and to the world. Questioni di frontiera (Border Issues, 1977) is a gathering of Fortini’s essays on the crisis of the USSR, the situation of China, and the politics of the superpowers. The title of the collection, Paesaggio con serpente: versi 1973–1983 (Landscape with Serpent: Verses 1973–1983, 1984), refers to Nicolas Poussin’s painting Landscape with a Snake Killed by a Snake and introduces the menacing atmosphere and the tragic sense of history that pervades the entire work. Here Fortini expresses the interdependence of world history and personal biography, a theme most evident in ‘‘Come si e` stretto il mondo...’’ (How the World Has Shrunk...): ‘‘Oltre il nero dell’orto l’Asia / e i suoi deserti. Piu` in la` colorata di luci / al vento si piega South Kensington’’ (Beyond the black patch of the garden, Asia/ and its deserts. Further beyond with coloured lights/ South Kensington leans with the wind). ‘‘Il Nido’’ (The Nest) is an effective representation of the illusion fostered by the mass media: ‘‘La illusione ha deserto le scene. / Minimi popoli sono bruciati nei diodi’’ (The illusion has deserted the stage. / Puny peoples are burned in the diodes). In Poesia e Errore one can find the poem ‘‘Weltgeschichtlich,’’ which, for Fortini, means ‘‘from the point of view of a world history.’’ This point of

view was constantly present in Fortini’s production and tragically emerged in his last book of poems, Composita Solvantur (Loose Works, 1994), especially in the section titled ‘‘Sette canzonette del Golfo’’ (Seven Songs for the Gulf), thus named to honour the casualties of the Gulf War in 1991. The theme is developed through seven examples of pastiche that imitate eminent representatives from the Italian literary tradition. ‘‘Lontano lontano’’ (Far Far Away), for instance, thematically and formally imitates the chorus of Alessandro Manzoni’s tragedy Adelchi (1882). In Manzoni’s chorus, the Italian population was portrayed as the impotent spectator of the war between the Franks and the Longobards. In Fortini’s version, the impotent spectator is the poet himself, who hopelessly tries to imagine the faraway massacre and bitterly acknowledges the end of his civic and moral mission: ‘‘Potrei sotto il capo dei corpi riversi / posare un mio fitto volume di versi? / Non credo. Cessiamo la mesta ironia./ Mettiamo una maglia, che il sole va via’’ (Could I put a book of poems under the corpses’ heads? / I don’t think so. Let’s stop the sad irony. / Let’s put on a sweater, the sun’s about to set).

Biography Born in Florence on September 10, 1917. Graduated in law and then art history (with a thesis on Rosso Fiorentino) at the University of Florence. Collaborated with Giacomo Noventa and his literary journal La riforma letteraria, 1938–1939. Baptized in the Waldensian Church, 1939. Joined the Italian Army as an officer, 1941. After the armistice (September 8, 1943), moved to Switzerland where he joined the Socialist Party. Joined the Italian Resistance in the Valdossola region, 1944. Moved to Milan. Worked for Olivetti, 1948–1953. Worked for the Socialist newspaper Avanti! (1946–1947), and the journal Il Politecnico (1945–1947) with Elio Vittorini. Alternated literary and political activity, also wrote for Officina, Menabo`, Il corriere della sera, Il manifesto, Il messaggero, and Sole 24 ore. In 1957, one year after the Russian invasion of Hungary, left the Socialist Party. Taught in secondary schools, 1964–1972. Appointed professor of literary criticism at the University of Siena, 1971–1989. Awarded the prestigious Montale-Guggenheim for poetry, 1985. Died on November 28, 1994. MATTEO SORANZO 761

FRANCO FORTINI (FRANCO LATTES) Selected Works

Translations Il ladro di ciliege e altre versioni di poesia, 1982. Breve secondo Novecento: trentasei moderni, 1996.

Collections Una volta per sempre: poesie 1938–1973, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Paesaggio con serpente: poesie 1973–1983, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Summer Is Not All: Selected Poems, translated by Paul Lawton, Manchester: Carcanet, 1992. Saggi ed epigrammi, edited by Luca Lenzini, Milan: Mondadori, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Foglio di via e altri versi,’’ 1946. ‘‘Poesia e errore,’’ 1959. ‘‘Una volta per sempre,’’ 1963. ‘‘L’ospite ingrato. Testi e note per versi ironici,’’ 1966. ‘‘Questo muro: 1962–1972,’’ 1973. ‘‘Paesaggio con serpente: versi 1973–1983,’’ 1984. ‘‘Versi primi e distanti, 1937–1957,’’ 1987. ‘‘Composita Solvantur,’’ 1994. ‘‘Poesie inedite,’’ edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, 1997.

Fiction Agonia di Natale, 1948; rpt. as Giovanni e le mani, 1972.

Essays Dieci inverni, 1957. Sere in Valdossola, 1963. Verifica dei poteri, 1965. I cani del Sinai, 1967. Questioni di frontiera, 1977. Insistenze: cinquanta scritti 1976–1984, 1985. Extrema ratio: note per un buon uso delle rovine, 1990.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, Fortini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Luperini, Romano, La lotta mentale: per un profilo di Franco Fortini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1986. Luperini, Romano, Tradizione, traduzione, societa`: saggi per Franco Fortini, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1989. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Su Fortini critico e teorico della letteratura,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 134–141. Magrini, Giacomo, ‘‘Fortini traduttore,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 163–173. Mazzoni, Guido, Forme e solitudine: un’idea della poesia contemporanea, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2002. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, La tradizione del Novecento. Da D’Annunzio a Montale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975. Niccolucci, Rossella, ‘‘‘Letterati di questa restaurazione.’ Fortini nella pubblicista corrente,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 278–289. Passananti, Erminia, Poem of the Roses: Linguistic Expressionism in the Poetry of Franco Fortini, Leicester: Troubador, 2004. Peterson, Thomas E., The Ethical Muse of Franco Fortini, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Polacco, Marina, ‘‘Fortini e i destini generali. Lirica e ‘Grande Politica’ fino a Composita Solvantur,’’ in Allegoria, 8, nos. 21–22 (1996): 42–61. Zancan, Marina, and Maurizio Gusso, ‘‘Fortini, Franco,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura Italiana, Torino: UTET, 1986.

UGO FOSCOLO (1778–1827) Ugo Foscolo’s literary parabola outlines a trajectory that is crucial to Italian culture as it moves from the neoclassical tenets of the late eighteenth century to the Romantic questions of the early nineteenth century. Foscolo’s writings are a response to the education the Italian writer had received in the years he had spent between Venice and Padua, yet they are also forerunners of a different attitude toward aesthetic as well as political issues. In fact, Foscolo’s literary endeavors cannot be separated from the times of their expression, times that can be identified with the Napoleonic period: Significantly, the end of that era marks the end of the most productive period of Foscolo’s 762

literary career, as in his London exile in vain he attempted at the completion of the projects planned before the Congress of Vienna (1815). Furthermore, Napoleon is a prominent figure in the early writings of the Italian poet-soldier, remaining a cumbersome presence even when he is relegated to the background after the Treaty of Campoformio in 1797, which handed Venice and most of its territory to Austria after a short-lived municipality. The enthusiasm with which Foscolo welcomed Napoleon’s military campaign in Italy in 1796 soon left room to the disillusion, which was at once political and existential: The dialectic between the need of illusions and the threat of delusion is

UGO FOSCOLO a constant motif in Foscolo’s main works, especially in the epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798; 1802; 1817), in the long poem Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807), in the few but intense sonnets, and in the fragments of Le Grazie (The Graces). However, Foscolo’s motives may be traced in the first works as well, like the tragedy Tieste (Thyestes, 1797), inspired by classical tradition and the tragic characters in the works by Vittorio Alfieri and often modeled on the lyrical examples offered by Vincenzo Monti. The political motif of the tyrant and the need to murder him is one motif that soon Foscolo abandoned, turning the homicide of the tyrant as antagonist into the suicide of the hero. In Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo throws the magmatic questions of his own existence, caught in the ambiguity of the practical need for political engagement (hence his enrollment in the French army) and the disappointment before the recognition of the impossibility of the independence and unification of Italy through the support of Napoleon’s military intervention. Behind Ortis’ dilemma, uncertain between a life of exile or the choice of suicide, there is Foscolo’s own desperation, strengthened by the hero’s unhappiness because of the impossible love for Teresa, the woman destined to marry the mediocre Odoardo. The political and the sentimental delusions alternate and intersect, inevitably leading the hero to the final decision of suicide. Considering the relevance of contemporary politics in the novel, it is important to remark that often Ortis discusses his own political theories through the readings of the works by thinkers such as Niccolo` Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well as through readings of classical authors such as Plutarch. On the one hand, Ortis believes that history is the best teacher for humankind, thus inviting his own contemporaries to learn from the experience of the past and to model their own lives according to those great examples. On the other, Ortis does not believe, as Rousseau does, in the natural goodness of humankind, aligning rather with Hobbes’ concept of the bellum omnium contra omnes (struggle of everyone against everyone else). This is the first step toward the elaboration of a conception of the history of ideas that stresses the very historicity of the approach: Ideas are not valid as such, but according to the historical period in which they were conceived. It follows that they are not applicable to any period, but rather that they must be taken into consideration while elaborating new conceptions, more suitable for one’s own times. In other

words, by attributing this theoretical political thinking to Ortis, Foscolo is offering his own character the conclusions he has reached at least after 1811. However, Ortis is not as explicit as his author in embracing monarchy over republic, as Foscolo does at least since 1815: The preoccupation in the novel is about the tyranny that Bonaparte would like to impose upon Italy and indeed all over Europe. In this respect, Foscolo re-evaluates Dante’s political views, looking at Machiavelli’s construction of Il principe as an impossible ideal: Ortis does dream of a balance among the political forces of a nation, granted by the rule of a leader who is above them, hierarchy that in turn would enable both parties and central authority to maintain the good government of the country. While writing his novel, by 1806, Foscolo also composed his most important poems: the 12 sonnets and the two odes, besides the carme entitled Dei sepolcri. The two odes ‘‘A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo’’ (To Luigia Pallavicini Fallen from a Horse) and ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ (To the Restored Friend) are the most relevant contributions in the neoclassical tradition, as the very choice of the poetic form confirms. The genesis of the two odes is in the best eighteenth-century tradition: The first was published in 1799 as homage to the convalescent noblewoman of the title after the accident occurred while horse-riding, whereas the second salutes Antonietta Fagnani Arese’s health recovery. Thus, they may be read one next to the other, as they respectively treat the sadness for the loss of health and the threat of the disappearance of beauty, and the joy for the recovered health and the return of beauty in the gracious appearance of the lady. It is implicit progression that leads Foscolo to highlight in the second ode the mythical model implicit in the actual event depicted. Furthermore, in these occasional poems it is possible to trace the debt to the poetry of Giuseppe Parini (the most important Italian author of odi), augmented in the second ode, while Foscolo leaves behind the literary apprenticeship on Vincenzo Monti’s poetry. This choice of Parini’s model is not only a stylistic one, as Foscolo admires also the moral tension in the works of that Milanese poet. In the sonnets, the poet revisits the Petrarchan tradition, taking advantage of its recent developments in Alfieri’s poems, but also looking at the Renaissance examples offered by Giovanni Della Casa or Michelangelo Buonarroti. In writing sonnets, Foscolo confirms his desire to adhere to tradition, to keep in line with the culture that neoclassicism intended to revive. The innovative elements affect 763

UGO FOSCOLO both the stylistic expression of the form of the sonnet and the content. There is the necessity to open quatrains and tercets to a syntactical fluidity, so that the coincidence of sentence and strophe is no longer felt as a natural condition of the sonnet. This communication among the several strophes, in turn, carries semantic weight at least in some circumstances, as in first verse of the sonnet ‘‘A Zacinto’’ (To Zacynthos), ‘‘Ne´ piu` mai tocchero` le sacre sponde’’ (Never more I will touch the sacred banks), in which the syntax links the two quatrains and the first tercet in a long sentence, the fluidity of which is remarked by the rhymes evoking sea water and waves. By the same token, in ‘‘Forse perche´ della fatal quı¨ete’’ (Perhaps because of the fatal quiet) of the sonnet ‘‘Alla sera’’ (To the Evening), the two quatrains present a parallel syntactic structure highlighting their connection. From a thematic viewpoint, the sonnet confirms many motives that Foscolo is elaborating in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis in those first years of the nineteenth century. Both ‘‘A Zacinto’’ and ‘‘Alla sera’’ insist on motives dear to Foscolo. The former elaborates on exile from one’s homeland, with tones that from existential considerations reach the mythical dimension in the final comparison of the poet’s destiny to that of Ulysses. The latter, by focusing on a specific moment of the day, expands the reflection to a metaphysical level without ever betraying an approach that privileges immanence and even a materialistic perspective. In the sonnet ‘‘In morte del fratello Giovanni’’ (On the Death of His Brother Giovanni), dedicated to his brother who died after committing suicide, ‘‘Un dı`, s’io non andro` sempre fuggendo’’ (One day, if I will not be always fleeing) is an occasion to reflect on the value of the tomb in the realm of family affections. The poem ends with another bitter consideration on the poet’s own condition of exile. If these are the three most famous sonnets, in the others that Foscolo writes there is as well a strong presence of the self, often those sonnets being occasions for a self-portrait, according to a tradition that finds once again in Alfieri the most recent model. Foscolo soon abandoned the structure of the sonnet and embraced a longer form, one that may be reminiscent of the Pindaric ode, that is, of the ode in which the Greek poet aimed at linking myth and tradition to moral and political questions. Furthermore, as Foscolo explains in the letter to the Abbe´ Guillon, the connections among the several parts of the argument must be kept implicit, confiding in the readers’ ability to reconstruct the logic supporting poetry, but leaving the transitions out 764

of the poetic context. The occasion for such experiment was offered by the extension of the French Edict of St. Cloud (1804) to the territory of the Cisalpine Republic in 1806. It is in reaction to this law that Foscolo wrote Dei sepolcri, a poem that, however, takes a wider significance in the treatment of the subject and in the context of Foscolo’s poetics. Of course, the theme of the tombs was also a popular motif in eighteenth-century Europe, and Foscolo is well aware of his predecessors: not only his friend Ippolito Pindemonte, to whom the poem is dedicated, but more importantly Edward Young and Thomas Gray. The poem’s pivotal idea is that funeral rituals are a means whereby the history of the living transmits the memory of the dead ones, who do not survive in any other way. While writing Dei sepolcri, Foscolo also engaged the difficult task of Homeric translation: The Esperimento di traduzione della Iliade di Omero (The Experiment of Translation from the Iliad of Homer, 1807) tackles the translation of the first book of Homer’s epic poem. Later, in 1813, Foscolo completed the translation of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, which intended to temper the passion of Ortis: In the Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico (Notice about Didimo Chierico), published as appendix to the translation, the author points out the mature character of Didimo, implicitly alluding to the youthful attitude of Jacopo. Furthermore, in 1809, Foscolo wrote one of his most important critical essays: Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura (On the Origin and Function of Literature), the inaugural speech of the course held at the University of Pavia. The apostrophe concluding the discourse, ‘‘O Italiani, io vi esorto alle storie’’ (Italians, I exhort you to history), was interpreted as an invitation to the Risorgimento, to the action in that political upheaval that led to the unification of Italy and that, according to the Italian patriots followers of Foscolo, started already in the literary and linguistic concerns of the intellectuals of the time. However, this essay clarifies the writer’s teoria delle illusioni (theory of illusions), as it is elaborated in both the novel and Dei sepolcri. Here again Foscolo betrays his eighteenth-century education, as he formulates a theory of the language, within the context of illusions, that looks back at the tenets of sensistic philosophy, especially in the formulations proposed by E´tienne Bennot de Condillac in his La logique (1780). In particular, Foscolo notices the affinity between the linguistic theories of the French philosopher and Giambattista Vico. Moving from these philosophical premises, Foscolo elaborates his own conception of poetry as a process toward the

UGO FOSCOLO perfection of the ability to think and the means to embellish thought and make it eternal. Given the awareness of the material dimension of the world, poetry assumes the role of comforting humankind; also, together with historians, poets help in the development of civilization. These essential qualities of poetry were present in classical Greece, which justifies why that poetry is at the foundation of Western civilization. In the period preceding his exile, Foscolo wrote two more tragedies, Ajace (Ajax, 1811) and Ricciarda (Ricciarda, 1813), in which the patriotic motif prevails over the Greek context of the former and the medieval atmospheres of the latter. It is not by chance that the Austrian censorship forbade the performance of Ajace staged in Venice in 1797. More importantly, Foscolo attended at the composition of Le Grazie, the unfinished poem that occupied the remaining creative activity of the years to come. The remaining fragments of Le Grazie were mostly written in the years 1812–1813, when Foscolo resided in Florence, although he must have thought of this poem since his commentary on Callimacus’ (and Catullus’) La chioma di Berenice (The Locks of Berenice, 1803), published in Milan with fragments of the translation of a supposedly ancient Greek text dedicated to the three Graces. The work continued less intensely until 1815 and then only sporadically in the years of the London exile. The most important testimony of this period of activity is the Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces, included in a volume of Outline Engravings and Descriptions of the Woburn Abbey Marbles, published in London in 1822 and reproducing Canova’s ‘‘Le tre Grazie,’’ which had been purchased by the duke of Bedford. It is difficult to reconstruct the plan of the poem, as sometimes the fragments even exclude one another; yet, they are all pervaded by a stylistic unity. One may reconstruct a broad project of elaboration of an ancient ritual dedicated to the Graces, which in turn becomes an allegory of the process of civilization of humankind through the arts. Certainly Foscolo’s intentions shifted from the initial one long poem to the articulation of the project into three different poems, one for each Grace. The poem on the Graces is also a reflection on the notion of grace and on its necessary ingredients, harmony, and passions. In the decade Foscolo spent in England, besides working on the completion of Le Grazie and the translation of the Iliad, the poet left the pen to the critic. He is a militant critic in many of his essays, in which he discusses the current literary panorama in

Italy: An essay like ‘‘Della nuova scuola drammatica italiana’’ (On the New Italian Dramatic School, 1826–1827) offers a survey of the most prominent figures of the past half-century, at the end of which and according to a line of evolution Foscolo places his own work. Here he attacks Alessandro Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1819) for its untruthful representation of the Venetian Doge and Republican Senate. But the most important critical works revolve around the figure of Dante, seen through the philosophy of Vico as a primitive, and therefore universal, poet: Perhaps the most relevant of these essays is Discorso sul testo della Divina Commedia (Discourse on the Text of the Divine Comedy, 1825), in which he elaborates a quite modern reading of that poem as incomplete, hence work in progress as much as his own Le Grazie and the translation of the Iliad. Foscolo enriches his critical perspective with a clear identification with the medieval poet and exile. Although Foscolo also wrote Essays on Petrarch (1821) and Discorso storico sul testo del Decameron (Discourse on the Text of the Decameron, 1825), he is willing to assign them a more limited role vis-a`-vis Dante.

Biography Born at Zacynthos, Greek island in the Jonian Sea, 6 February 1778. His father died, 1788; moved to Venice, 1793; published first poems, 1796; enrolled in Bologna, in the Cisalpine Republic, and published the ode ‘‘A Bonaparte liberatore,’’ 1797; published the first edition of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis in Bologna, 1798; lived in Milan where he had a love affair with Antonietta Fagnani Arese, 1801– 1804; brother Giovanni commits suicide, December 1801; published the second edition of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1802; published the definitive edition of his Poesie, 1803; had a love affair with Fanny Hamilton, with whom he had a daughter Floriana, while he enrolled in the French army in northern France, 1804–1806; published Dei sepolcri, 1807; nominated professor at the University of Pavia, 1808; his tragedy Ajace was performed at La Scala in Milan and censored, 1811; moved to Florence, where he had love relationships with Cornelia Martinetti and Quirina Mocenni Magiotti and met Luisa Stolberg, countess of Albany, and worked on Le Grazie, 1812; rented the villa of Bellosguardo in Florence, published his translation of Lawrence Sterne’s Viaggio Sentimentale, and wrote the tragedy Ricciarda, 1813; 765

UGO FOSCOLO went in exile near Zurich, in Switzerland, 1815– 1816; moved to London, 1816; published the definitive edition of Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1817; his mother died in Venice, 1817; pursued by his creditors, moved to Turnham Green, near Chiswick, where he underwent two surgeries because of dropsy, 1827. Died in Turnham Green, 10 September 1827; his tomb was translated into the church of Santa Croce, 1871. ERNESTO LIVORNI Selected Works Collections Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1933–, 23 vols. Opere, edited by Luigi Baldacci, Bari: Laterza, 1962. Opere, edited by Franco Gavazzeni, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1974–1981, 2 vols.; Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1994–

Fasano, Pino, Stratigrafie foscoliane, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Festa, Nicoletta, Foscolo critico, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1953. Fubini, Mario, Ugo Foscolo: Saggi studi, note, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1928; rpt. 1978. Fubini, Mario, Foscolo minore, Rome: Tumminelli, 1949. Gentili, Sandro, I codici autobiografici di Ugo Foscolo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Goffis, Cesare Federico, Nuovi studi foscoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1958. Manacorda, Giuseppe, Studi foscoliani, Bari: Laterza, 1921. Matteo, Sante, Textual Exile: The Reader in Sterne and Foscolo, New York: Peter Lang, 1985. Orelli, Giorgio, Foscolo e la danzatrice: Un episodio delle Grazie, Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Ramat, Raffaello, Itinerario ritmico foscoliano, Citta` di Castello: Macri, 1946. Scotti, Mario, Foscolo fra erudizione e poesia, Rome: Bonacci, 1973. Scotti, Mario, Foscoliana, Modena: Mucchi, 1997. Vallone, Aldo, ‘‘Le Grazie’’ nella storia della poesia foscoliana: Testi, interpretazione, antologia della critica, Naples: Liguori, 1977. Varese, Claudio, Foscolo, sternismo, tempo e persona, Ravenna: Longo, 1982.

Poetry ‘‘Dei sepolcri,’’ 1807. ‘‘Liriche scelte: I sepolcri e Le Grazie,’’ edited by Severino Ferrari, 1908; rpt. 1957. ‘‘Le Grazie,’’ critical edition by Sandro Orlando, 1974.

Fiction Storia vera di due amanti infelici, 1798; as Vera storia di due amanti infelici, ossia, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, attributed to Angelo Sassoli, edited by Pino Fasano, 1999. Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, 1802; rev. ed. 1917; critical edition by Giovanni Gambarin, in Edizione nazionale delle opere di Ugo Foscolo, vol. 4, 1955; as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, translated by Douglas RadcliffUmstead, 1970; as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: On Tombs, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2002.

Further Reading Binni, Walter, Ugo Foscolo: Storia e poesia, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Bosisio, Paolo, ‘‘La rappresentazione dell’Aiace e la tecnica teatrale foscoliana,’’ in La parola e la scena: Studi sul teatro italiano tra settecento e novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Cambon, Glauco, Ugo Foscolo, Poet of Exile, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Catalano, Ettore, La spada e le opinioni: Il teatro di Ugo Foscolo, Foggia: Bastogi, 1983. Catalano, Ettore, Le trame occulte: L’Ajace e la Ricciarda nel percorso teatrale di Ugo Foscolo, Bari: Laterza, 2002. De Sanctis, Francesco, Saggi critici, edited by Luigi Russo, vol. 3m Bari: Laterza, 1952. Di Benedetto, Vincenzo, Lo scrittoio di Ugo Foscolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Donadoni, Eugenio, Ugo Foscolo pensatore, critico, poeta, 1st ed. 1927, Palermo: Sandron, 1964.

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‘‘DEI SEPOLCRI,’’ 1807 Poem by Ugo Foscolo

‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ (On Sepulchres) is a long poem in which Foscolo elaborates his own poetics of illusions and, within it, of the tomb, according to the broad philosophy exposed in Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis. The immediate historical invitation to such a poetic reflection was offered by the Edict of St. Cloud, which was promulgated by Napoleon in France in 1804 and was extended to the Cisalpine Republic in 1806. The decree forbade burial within the city, thus the interment of the bodies of famous people inside churches, and also enforced uniformity in graves. Foscolo called his poem carme, a Latinism evoking ceremonial and prophetic connotations. ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ is dedicated to the poet and friend Ippolito Pindemonte (1753–1828), who discussed the social and philosophical implications of such legislation while writing a sepulchral poem entitled

UGO FOSCOLO ‘‘Dei cimiteri,’’ which he abandoned upon learning of Foscolo’s carme. From a literary viewpoint, the ‘‘graveyard’’ motif is a well-known one in eighteenth-century European poetry, and Foscolo takes full advantage of the abundance of texts on cemeteries and tombs and of their translations into Italian, but he also enlivens the motif with a new ethical and ideological vigor, making ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ one of the most important poems of the nineteenth century and a manifesto of Italian Risorgimento. Among the most important influences, we enlist Edward Young’s Nights Thoughts and Thomas Gray’s Elegia sopra un cimitero di campagna, translated into Italian by Melchiorre Cesarotti. Foscolo embraced the longer form of the Pindaric ode in order to combine the lyrical mode, apt to convey the private dimension of the topic of the tombs, with an epic one, aiming at expanding the motif to the recognition of the sepulchral ritual as necessary for civilization. The ode, then, becomes the vehicle through which the modern poet, just like the Greek poet, aspires at embodying myth in the historical process, offering tradition itself as the model for the correct formulation of ethical and political concerns. Foscolo developed the reasons behind such a stylistic choice in the letter to the Abbe´ Guillon, in which he explains that the poem is composed of a series of medallions, that is, sections that are logically independent from one another. ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’ may be divided into four main parts: The first two set the argument in theoretical terms, focusing especially on the importance of the tombs in the realm of private affections and on the historical reconstruction of such necessity through crucial moments of the development of civilization, whereas the last two parts decidedly move to the sphere of collectivity and present three main contemporary examples revealing the cultural importance of the tomb: the tombs of the great Italians in the Church of Santa Croce in Florence, the vision of the Greek soldiers at the Battle of Marathon, and the tombs of the Trojans in Troy (with the closing prophecy of Cassandra). The four parts are marked by essential statements, which point out almost in aphoristic form the focus of each new part: Namely, the remembrance of the dead may inspire the living to noble deeds (egregie cose). ERNESTO LIVORNI Editions Critical edition: ‘‘Dei sepolcri’’, in Poesie e carmi, edited by Francesco Pagliai, Gianfranco Folena, and Mario Scotti, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, vol. 1, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1985.

Translations: as On Sepulchres: An Ode to Ippolito Pindemonte, translated by Thomas G. Bergin, illustrated by Deane Keller, Bethany, CT: Bethany Press, 1971.

Further Reading Amoretti, Giovanni Giuseppe, ‘‘La madre, la morte e il tiranno nella poesia foscoliana: Contributo psicanalitico all’interpretazione dell’Ortis e Dei sepolcri,’’ in ‘Poesia e psicanalisi’: ‘Foscolo e Leopardi’, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Fubini, Mario, Lettura della poesia foscoliana, Milano: Marzorati, 1954. Gamberini, Spartaco, Analisi dei ‘‘Sepolcri’’ foscoliani, Messina: D’Anna, 1982. Getto, Giovanni, La composizione dei ‘‘Sepolcri’’ di Ugo Foscolo, Florence: Olschki, 1977. Macrı`, Oreste, Semantica e metrica dei ‘‘Sepolcri’’ del Foscolo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. O’Neill, Tom, Of Virgin Muses and of Love: A Study of Foscolo’s ‘‘Dei sepolcri,’’ Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1981. Ramat, Raffaello, Itinerario ritmico foscoliano, Citta` di Castello: Macri, 1946.

ULTIME LETTERE DI JACOPO ORTIS, 1798; 1802; 1817 Epistolary Novel by Ugo Foscolo

Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis) went through three different editions. The novel was first published in 1798 by the editor Marsigli, who commissioned a modest writer, Angelo Sassoli, to complete the novel without the author’s permission, who had in the meantime enrolled in the French army, and under a different title (Storia di due amanti infelici). Foscolo did not recognize this edition and in 1802 published a new one, which bore the final title and presented substantial changes in the plot and in the letters included. After the Zurich edition in 1816 (with the wrong indication of place and date: London, 1814), the definitive edition is published in London in 1817, shortly after Foscolo’s arrival in the British capital, where he spent the 10 years of his exile. 767

UGO FOSCOLO In Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, Foscolo elaborates on a number of topics that are essential to the understanding of his own personality as well as the culture of his period. First of all, for he who had enthusiastically welcomed Napoleon’s military campaign in Italy, the Treaty of Campoformio was an unbearable disappointment. Jacopo Ortis exists because of this delusion, and his own vicissitudes are but an attempt at overcoming that sense of desperation before the loss of independence of the Venetian Republic and the recognition of the impossibility of the unification of Italy. Ortis’ political faith is briefly consoled by the appearance of love for Teresa, in turn destined to marry Odoardo in order to save the financial situation of her family. Ortis’ letters are addressed to his friend Lorenzo Alderani, who posthumously decides to publish them: Thus Lorenzo, as editor, becomes the link between the hero’s voice and the readers. Furthermore, many of Jacopo’s letters are elaborations of letters Foscolo himself wrote to his several women in Venice, Milan, and Florence: Antonietta Fagnani Arese, Eleonora Nencini, and Isabella Roncioni. Divided into two parts, with the second one following the protagonist in his journey throughout Northern Italy—which Ortis undertakes in a vain attempt at finding solace to the unhappiness caused by politics and love story, before his return to the Euganean Hills to commit suicide—the novel presents a number of motives that are either dictated by the culture of the period or characteristic of Foscolo’s poetics. The very choice of writing an epistolary novel is a tribute to the most fashionable genre of the eighteenth century, as Foscolo’s own Nota bibliografica published in appendix to the 1816 Zurich edition confirms. In that essay, the author discusses Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, although claiming that he had not read the German novel while writing his own, and Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se, while referring to several epistolary novels of the British tradition (especially Samuel Richardson), in order to remark the novelty of his own work. Other aspects that confirm Foscolo’s attention and concern for the issues affecting his own period are even more exquisitely aesthetic: in particular, the distinction between picturesque and sublime (the letter from Ventimiglia is quite telling in this respect), but also the consideration of other arts, especially the figurative arts and music, often raised by the insertion of the interest the characters themselves reveal in painting (Teresa is depicted painting her portrait) and music (Teresa again is shown playing the harp). 768

Jacopo’s suicide can be considered an homage to Vittorio Alfieri’s tragic heroes and heroines. The very spirit of the statement behind Ortis’ decisive action is ascribable to Alfieri’s characters: They all choose suicide as the ultimate rebellion to the world and the society in which they live in order to affirm their own identity and independence. It is not by chance that Ortis in Florence would like to meet Alfieri, who in that period is residing in the Tuscan city; by the same token, in Milan, he visits Giuseppe Parini, the eighteenth-century Italian poet who in his works paid particular attention to social issues (for the same reason, he is remembered in Dei sepolcri). A great role as literary influence is also played by Dante Alighieri and Francesco Petrarca: The several quotations from their works and the pilgrimages to Petrarch’s house at Arqua` at the beginning of the novel and to Dante’s tomb toward the end remark the equal importance of the two models. The topics debated in the novel are several and vary from political theories to aesthetic considerations. But perhaps the crucial concept that pervades Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis is that of the necessity of the tomb as a reminder of the examples of the dead ones for those who still live. ERNESTO LIVORNI Editions Critical editions: Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, edited by Giovanni Gambarin, in Edizione Nazionale delle Opere, vol. 4, Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1955; rpt. 1970; as Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis: Poesie e carmi, edited by Mario Puppo, Milan: Rusconi, 1987; edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, Milan: Bompiani, 1990; edited by Giuseppe Nicoletti, Florence: Giunti, 1997. Translations: as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, translated by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970; as Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis: On Tombs, translated by J. G. Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2002.

Further Reading Amoretti, Giovanni Giuseppe, ‘‘La madre, la morte e il tiranno nella poesia foscoliana. Contributo psicanalitico all’interpretazione dell’Ortis e dei Sepolcri,’’ in Poesia e psicanalisi: Foscolo e Leopardi, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Fubini, Mario, Lettura dell’ ‘‘Ortis,’’ Milan: Marzorati, 1947. Fubini, Mario, Ortis e Didimo: Ricerche e interpretazioni foscoliane, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963. Goffis, Cesare Federico, ‘‘Edizioni dell’Ortis,’’ in Nuovi studi foscoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1958. Grabher, Carlo, ‘‘La figura di Odoardo e un motivo fondamentale dell’Ortis,’’ in Interpretazioni foscoliane, Florence: Sansoni, 1948.

FOTOROMANZO Manacorda, Giorgio, Materialismo e masochismo: Il ‘‘Werther,’’ Foscolo e Leopardi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Nicoletti, Giuseppe, Il ‘‘metodo’’ dell’ ‘‘Ortis’’ e altri studi foscoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978.

Terzoli, Maria Antonietta, Le prime lettere di Jacopo Ortis: Un giallo editoriale tra politica e censura, Rome: Salerno, 2004.

FOTOROMANZO Created in the post-World War II period, the fotoromanzo was for decades one of the most popular made-in-Italy products in the world. Within a few years, this innovative means of creation of sentimental stories through photographic sequences and written dialogues and captions, spread from Italy to France, Mediterranean Africa, Turkey, and even Latin America, where it became one of the sources of the still flourishing soap operas known as telenovelas. The date of birth of the fotoromanzo is disputed. On June 29, 1946, the small publisher Universo, owned by the brothers Del Duca, published the first issue of Grand Hotel, an inexpensive weekly magazine that included love stories in cartoon strips, elegantly drawn by Walter Molino, who created an array of glamorous heroines and fabulous heroes, facing tribulations that owed much to the nineteenth-century feuilleton. Almost a year later, in May 1947, the Milanese Mondadori launched Bolero Film, produced by Luciano Pedrocchi, Franco Cancellieri, and Damiano Damiani. Its very first issue featured Catene, by Pedrocchi and Damiani, a complex love story between a governess and her rich and noble employer. Its novelty was in the substitution of the drawn strips with photographs of real actors, with balloons of dialogues inserted in the frames. Shortly thereafter, another Milanese publisher Rizzoli launched Sogno, also a magazine of stories illustrated with photographs, and finally Grand Hotel, in its turn, followed the lead of its competitors and also replaced drawings with pictures. For decades these three major publications, and many minor others, sold millions of copies, achieving a unique success in the publishing industry. The 1950s were the golden age of the fotoromanzo. The number of publications multiplied and diversified, with a growing attention to the emerging industry of celebrities of Cinecitta`. Future film stars such as Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Virna

Lisi, and the TV presenter Mike Bongiorno all started working in fotoromanzi. In the 1960s, the publisher Lancio promoted a new kind of fotoromanzo, in monthly issues with complete and original stories. Characterized by good graphics and good quality images as well as by new and original topics in the stories, these new fotoromanzi, which became thus distinct from the fumetto, were directed to younger and less provincial readers. The gradual decline of the genre began in the 1970s, not only because of the increased costs of production that resulted in expensive and less competitive magazines, but above all because of the sudden explosion of private television channels, which targeted the same audience. At the beginning, the fotoromanzo was not exclusively devoted to a female readership, but rather was a form of entertainment for a varied audience including peasants, blue-collar workers, and day laborers who either were illiterate or semiliterate or did not have access to leisure activities such as cinema. As Alberto Abruzzese has pointed out, the fotoromanzo succeeded in so far as it filled a void left by both the high culture of literature and the mass culture of cinema, which required a combination of social behavior, standards of living, and technology that were not homogeneously spread across the country. As a ‘‘visual, miniaturizable and movable storytelling,’’ the fotoromanzo was able to reach those social groups and geographical areas that other media could not reach, achieving its success by combining the strengths of the image and that of narration (‘‘Fotoromanzo,’’ 1989). If what attracted this new readership to the fotoromanzo could be explained as the desire for entertainment not available elsewhere, it is striking that the genre could maintain its success for so long in spite of its repetitiveness and stereotypical formulas. Yet, this renewed success was precisely the result of 769

FOTOROMANZO the readers’ previous knowledge of what would happen in each issue, as they purposely sought and expected the recurrence of an unchanging recipe. Rather than diversion and estrangement, the fotoromanzo relied on identification with the reader, a process facilitated by the standardization of story lines culminating with the final triumph of love, the conventional happy ending that guaranteed ultimate gratification without frustration. Also, the centrality of female characters facilitated the process of identification for the female readership that eventually came to constitute the majority of the public of the fotoromanzo. Furthermore, within the limits of these conventions, the readership also found enjoyment in being creatively involved in the narration. The iconic and verbal apparatuses jointly worked to provide just enough information for the reader to maintain an active, creative role: The text supplied only the information that the images lacked, while the images nourished the imagination of the reader by barely revealing the essential details. The success of the fotoromanzo was such that, though condemned for its content (either too culturally superficial or morally reprehensible) it was adopted by both the Communist Party and the Catholic magazine La famiglia cristiana to reach a wider and more diverse audience. As Anna Bravo has shown in her monograph Il fotoromanzo (2003), then, this form of popular entertainment represented a fundamental stage in the process of modernization of postwar Italy. By mirroring the social changes and contradictions and the desire for

freedom and social mobility of postwar Italian society, it offers an original instrument to understand the cultural reality of twentieth-century Italy. BARBARA GARBIN Further Reading Abruzzese, Alberto, ‘‘Fotoromanzo,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Storia e Geografia, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Anelli, Maria Teresa, et al., Fotoromanzo: fascino e pregiudizio, Rome: Savelli Editori, 1979. Balbi, Rosellina, ‘‘La magia dei fotoromanzi,’’ in Nord e Sud, 38 (1963): 52–61. Balbi, Rosellina, ‘‘L’esilio della realta`,’’ in Nord e Sud, 39 (1963): 72–81. Bravo, Anna, Il fotoromanzo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Detti, Ermanno, Le carte rosa: storia del fotoromanzo e della narrativa popolare, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990. Finucci Gallo, Patrizia, Il pudore dei sentimenti, Bologna: Pendragon, 1993. Gargiulo, Giuseppe, Cultura popolare e cultura di massa nel fotoromanzo ‘‘rosa,’’ Messina and Florence: D’Anna, 1977. Saibene, Roberto, ‘‘Le strutture del fotoromanzo,’’ in Pubblico 1979: Produzione letteraria e mercato culturale, edited by Vincenzo Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Schimming, Ulrike, Fotoromane. Analyse eines Massenmediums, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2002. Sullerot, Evelyne, ‘‘I fotoromanzi,’’ in La paraletteratura. Il melodramma, il romanzo popolare, il fotoromanzo, il romanzo poliziesco, il fumetto, edited by Noel Arnaud, Francis Lacassin, and Jean Tortel, Naples: Liguori, 1977.

BIANCAMARIA FRABOTTA (1946–) Poet and professor of Italian literature at La Sapienza University in Rome, Biancamaria Frabotta’s work is often self-referential and primarily devoted to the study of women writers. Her early left-wing political activism was expressed in poetry that gave a voice to the revolutionary generation that came of age in the late 1960s. Over time her body of work became less declamatory, more introspective and prone to ironic self-criticism; it transcended specific issues in favor of a broader 770

analysis of the human experience, including themes such as personal memory, conjugal love, spiritual commitment, the relationships between the individual and the environment, and travel. Frabotta has dedicated her academic career to promoting the importance of women in modern Italian literature, and to the historical investigation of the feminist movement. Particularly Donne in poesia (Women in Poetry, 1976), Letteratura al femminile (Feminine Literature, 1980), and Femminismo

BIANCAMARIA FRABOTTA e lotta di classe 1970–1973 (Feminism and Class Struggle 1970–1973, 1975) laid the groundwork for women’s studies in Italy. Also, her early poems denounced a male-dominated literary world and a society that accepted the emancipation of women only reluctantly. Frabotta’s involvement in the students’ movement of 1968 and her active participation in feminist collectives is reflected in the poems of Affeminata (Effeminate, 1976). Frabotta’s initial ideological works contributed to a gender-based writing not opposed to mainstream male literature but, rather, evolving parallel to it. Her innovative style added a new dimension to women’s literature by introducing the wholly independent female character whose identity is defined according to contemporary terms of individual and psychological liberation. For example, in her introduction to Donne in poesia, a collection of poems by Italian women writers from the postwar era through the 1970s, she writes that the purpose of the anthology is not to separate female literature from mainstream literature, but to show that it exists as part of it. With the essays she edited in Letteratura al femminile, Frabotta extended her argument on behalf of female literature by considering women’s contribution to the novel form. Her second collection of poetry, the critically acclaimed Il rumore bianco (The White Noise, 1982), attests to Frabotta’s urgency to write in 1968, the year of protest par excellence. As the avant-garde poet Antonio Porta shows in his introduction to the volume, the act of writing allowed Frabotta to distance herself from the social and ideological turmoil of the time to find, in the intermediary space of poetry, an observation point to reflect on what was happening. The poems in Il rumore bianco convey a collective feeling of disorientation and confusion, while presenting diverse examples of youth in a dialectical play of images. In her most personal poetry, Frabotta describes the difficult task of establishing her artistic configuration among the social chaos of those years, and sees herself as a poet with a fragmented identity. Her metaphorical, measured language is especially effective when she employs irony. The state of confusion of Frabotta’s generation is also highlighted in the novel, Velocita` di fuga (Escape Velocity), which was written at the end of 1970 but published only in 1989. The novel examines the dynamics of gradual self-awareness in a 25-year-old woman. Her name is never revealed, emphasizing her search for a definite identity. The protagonist is a bright student of letters who at

night fantasizes about liberating herself from the trappings of love and role-playing by writing imaginary letters to great women writers. Her uneasiness with pre-established feminine roles is revealed by the conflicted relationship with her mother Elvira, whom she criticizes, but does not challenge. Furthermore, her boyfriend Eugenio keeps her entangled in a sterile world by imposing his chauvinistic intellectual superiority. As in Il rumore bianco, the author also plays with opposites in Velocita` di fuga. A recurrent trope is that of stasis versus movement, metaphorically represented by an ambivalent character who cannot decide between a passive acceptance of her status and an active desire to react. Her journey leads not to a destination but, in itself, represents an action toward change. Frabotta’s stylistic shifts between first-person narrative and diaristic entries emphasize the undefined personality of the female protagonist. In La viandanza (Wayfaring, 1995), the poems continue to focus on the journey of a woman. But it is not a voyage toward a void as in Velocita` di fuga. The protagonist (the author herself ) departs from her past only to return to it with the experiences accumulated during her voyage through life, her wanderings depicted in melancholic tones. She describes the wayfaring as ‘‘un continuo ritorno a una nuova partenza’’ (continuous return to a new departure). Such a tone is, however, interrupted by self-ironic statements that describe her poetic persona as a traveler who would rather encounter the familiar than adventure into new territories. During her journey, the poet meets those she loved the most: her parents. In the poem ‘‘Vento in Bures’’ (Wind in Bures), a visit to an unknown tomb in the cemetery of Bures near Paris evokes the burial of her own father, months earlier, in a cemetery near Rome. Her imaginary dialogue with him asserts a reassuring contact between the living and the dead. The poem ‘‘La viandanza’’ is instead dedicated to Frabotta’s mother, who was born in Civitavecchia. Juxtaposing the past splendor of the Roman town with that of a contemporary polluted city, the poet acknowledges the impossibility of returning to the idealized place of childhood. Here her words are flexible and free from the strict formal decorum of early works. The rhythmic patterns, the use of foreign words, the multiple semantic and syntactic ambivalences, all emphasize the expansion and strength of Frabotta’s language. As the poet suggests in ‘‘La viandanza,’’ an ideal equilibrium can be found through the connection with others in the precarious voyage of the human existence. 771

BIANCAMARIA FRABOTTA Trittico dell’obbedienza (Triptych of Obedience, 1996), a collection of three one-act plays and Frabotta’s only theatrical work, is distinguished by linguistic clarity and poetic language. Its three independent acts are entitled ‘‘La passione dell’obbedienza’’ (The Passion of Obedience), ‘‘Il mulo sardo lo inganni una volta sola’’ (You Can Fool a Sardinian Mule Just Once), ‘‘Bruna, o tutte le ore in agguato’’ (Bruna, or All the Hours Lying in Wait). These plays are linked thematically by the act of spiritual, professional, and intellectual obedience. Women and their emotions are protagonists. They move between blurred lines of reality and imagination, truth and representation. In the first act, the intellectual love between Abelard and Eloı¨se takes place in the Middle Ages. Through the letters that Abelard writes to his beloved, their liaison is unveiled, as well as the spiritual call that made them reject their son. Different linguistic styles, such as the low language used by the drunken beggar fool and the austere tone employed by the Abbess, echo the author’s awareness of verisimilitude in the theater. The protagonist of the second act is a psychoanalyst, who re-enacts her patient’s psychological life—a reversal of roles. In the third act, Bruna, an actress who lives a fractured life caught between reality and imagination, happens to rescue Salvo, a suicidal, self-involved individual. The winning power of the imaginary world versus the real one is at the center of Frabotta’s theatrical piece. In her most recent work, La pianta del pane (The Bread Plant, 2003), Frabotta’s language remains formally decorous. The plant of the title refers to the foundation of the past on which the present is built, and the work develops the awareness that to return to one’s origins is impossible. These poems express hard-won maturity after a journey in search of truth, identity, and change.

Biography Born in Rome on 11 June 1946. Attended the lyceum ‘‘Pino Albertelli.’’ In 1969, graduated in letters and philosophy at the Roman University La Sapienza with a dissertation on Carlo Cattaneo that wins the Carlo Cattaneo award in Lugano. In the same year, begins academic career on the faculty of letters and philosophy at the University La Sapienza in Rome. In 1970, marries the writer Renzo Paris. In the 1970s, takes part in the Roman feminist movement. From 1974 to 1990, works for the newspaper Il manifesto. In the late 1970s, works 772

for Terzo Programma (national radio). In 1981, cofounds, with Rossana Rossanda and Manuela Fraire, the political and cultural journal L’Orsaminore. From 1985–1990, writes for the weekly magazine L’espresso. In 1991, directs her one-act play, Bruna o tutte le ore in agguato, and the monologue, Controcanto al chiuso, at the Teatro Beat 72 in Rome. From 1989–1991, edits the journal, Poesia. In 1992, directs her one-act play, Il mulo sardo lo inganni una volta sola, at the Colosseo Theatre in Rome. In 1993, wins the Calliope prize for the poem Senz’eco and marries the Italian physicist Brunello Tirozzi. Since 1994, works with the painter Giulia Napoleone on etchings and copper engravings on paper and art books. In 1993 and 1994, is a member of the jury for the Citta` di Recanati prize for New Trends in Songwriting. In 1994, participates in the Festival of Poetry ItalyUSA. In 1995, awarded the Montale prize for La Viandanza. From 1998 to 1999, authors radio dramas for Terzo Programma. In 2003, La pianta del pane wins the Lericipeia prize, the Giuseppe Dessı` prize, and Comune di Trabia prize. Since 2004, has been a jury member of the International Poetry Prize named after Pier Paolo Pasolini. GIOVANNA De LUCA See also: Feminist Theory and Criticism Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Affeminata,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il rumore bianco,’’ 1982. ‘‘La gelosia e` quello che e`,’’ 1984. ‘‘L’altra poesia,’’ 1985. ‘‘Appunti di volo e altre poesie,’’ 1985. ‘‘La viandanza,’’ 1995; as High Tide, translated by Gillian Allnutt et al., 1998. ‘‘Terra contigua,’’ 1999. ‘‘La pianta del pane,’’ 2003. ‘‘Gli eterni lavori,’’ 2005.

Visual Poetry Esorcismo al chiaro di luna, dialogue with three voices dedicated to Sylvia Plath, 1989. Ne resta uno, 16 haikus with six etchings by Giulia Napoleone, 1996. Il messo, in Sopravvivenza del bianco, with six copper/iron engravings in black by Giulia Napoleone, 1997.

Fiction Velocita` di fuga, 1989.

Theater Controcanto al chiuso, 1991. Trittico dell’obbedienza, 1996.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI Critical Essays Carlo Cattaneo, 1971. Donne in poesia, antologia della poesia femminile in Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi, 1976; as Italian Women Poets, translated by Corrado Federici, 2002. Letteratura al femminile, itinerari di lettura a proposito di donne, storia, poesia, romanzo, 1980. Femminismo e lotta di classe in Italia, 1970–1973: analisi, documenti e prospettive, 1975. Giorgio Caproni, il poeta del disincanto, 1993. Poeti della malinconia, 2001. Arcipelago Malinconia; Parole e scenari dell’interiorita`, 2001.

Translations Ana Blandiana, Un tempo gli alberi avevano gli occhi, 2004 (with Bruno Mazzoni).

Further Reading Bevilacqua, Alberto, ‘‘Come in Schonberg,’’ in Poesie d’amore, edited by Francesca Pansa, Roma: Newton Compton, 1986. Franco, Cordelli, ‘‘Biancamaria Frabotta,’’ in Il pubblico della poesia, Cosenza: Lerici, 1975.

Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Biancamaria Frabotta,’’ in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1995, edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Jewell, Keala Jane, ‘‘Frabotta’s Elegies: Theory and Practice,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 116, no. 1 (January 2001): 177–192 (Italian issue). Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Niva, Lorenzini, La poesia italiana del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. O’Brian, Catherine, Italian Women Poets of the Twentieth Century, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996. Porta, Antonio, ‘‘Biancamaria Frabotta,’’ in Poesia degli Anni Settanta, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. Re, Lucia, ‘‘Language, Gender and Sexuality in the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde,’’ Modern Language Notes, 119, no. 1 (January 2004): 135–173 (Italian issue). Sartini-Blum, Cinzia, ‘‘Beyond ‘the End of the Journey’: Frabotta’s Writing from Fuga to Viandanza,’’ in Italian Culture, 20, nos. 1–2 (2001): 25–43. Zecchi, Barbara, ‘‘Il corpo femminile trampolino tra scrittura e volo. Enif, Robert e Biancamaria Frabotta: settant’anni verso il tempo delle donne,’’ in Italica, 69, no. 4 (1992): 505–518.

FRANCIS OF ASSISI (CA. 1181/1182–1226) Francis was a mystic, founder of the Franciscan Order, and the first Italian poet. His conversion from a leisurely young age to poverty and prayer shaped his life and works, as well as his writing fame. In comparison to the voluminous literary apparatus about him, the so-called Franciscan Legenda, Francis’ own writings have often been overlooked. It was not until the 1970s that scholars rediscovered the importance of understanding Francis and Franciscanism in light of what he had written. Very few originals of Francis’ writings remain: One is a small piece of parchment written on both sides; it contains the ‘‘Benedictio fratri Leoni data’’ (Blessing of Brother Leo) on one side and the ‘‘Laudes Dei altissimi’’ (Praises of God) on the other. A brief ‘‘Epistola ad fratrem Leonem’’ (Letter to Brother Leo), the so-called Chartula, which explains Francis’ interpretation of Christian life, testifies to Francis’ lack of formal education: It contains spelling and grammatical

mistakes. This is the only text by Francis to have come down to us in his own handwriting; the others were possibly dictated by him or rewritten by his followers and, despite Francis’ injunction that his words be copied without modifications, they were often embellished and modified. Luke Wadding’s edition of Francis’ writings, the Opuscola Beati Francisci Assisiensis (1623), is a milestone in Franciscan philology; it remained the only edition until the twentieth century, when four more appeared. In 1976, Kajetan Esser published the critical edition of Francis’ works, which is the result of an analysis of 181 manuscripts and reflects modern philological and scholarly criteria. The chronology of Francis’ writings is extremely difficult to establish. The three-volume edition by Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short, Francis of Assisi: Early Documents (1999–2001), which includes writings by and about Francis, makes a cautious attempt at 773

FRANCIS OF ASSISI dating Francis’ own writings. This is the chronology followed here. Francis’ Latin writings include prayers, commentaries, letters, and two versions of the Order’s Rule: the earlier version of the letter ‘‘Epistola ad fideles [recensio brevis]’’ (Earlier Exhortation to the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, 1209–1215), the later version of the letter ‘‘Epistola ad fideles [recensio ampla]’’ (Later Admonition to the Brothers and Sisters of Penance, ca. 1220), ‘‘Epistola ad clericos’’ (Exhortations to the Clergy, 1219– 1220 ), ‘‘Epistola ad custodes I’’ (First Letter to the Custodian, 1220), ‘‘Epistola ad populorum rectores’’ (A Letter to the Rulers of the Peoples, 1220), ‘‘De religiosa habitatione in eremis’’ (Rule for Hermitages, 1217–1221), ‘‘Regula non bullata’’ (Earlier Rule Without Papal Seal, 1209/10–1221), ‘‘Epistola ad quendam ministrum’’ (Letter to a Minister, 1221–1223), ‘‘Regula bullata’’ (Later Rule With Papal Seal, 1223), ‘‘Epistola ad Antonium’’ (A Letter to Brother Anthony of Padua, ca. 1223), ‘‘Laudes Dei altissimi’’ (The Praises of God, 1224), ‘‘Benedictio fratri Leoni data’’ (A Blessing for Brother Leo, 1224), ‘‘Epistola toti Ordini missa’’ (Letter to the Entire Order, 1225–1226), ‘‘Epistola ad fratrem Leonem’’ (A Letter to Brother Leo, 1224–1226), and ‘‘Testamentum’’ (The Testament, 1226). There are also numerous undated texts: ‘‘Verba sanctae admonitionis’’ (The Admonitions), ‘‘Exhortatio ad laudem Dei’’ (Exhortations to the Praise of God), ‘‘Officium passionis Domini’’ (Office of the Passion), ‘‘Oratio super Pater Noster’’ (A Prayer Inspired by the Our Father), ‘‘Laudes ad omnes horas’’ (Praises to Be Said at All Hours), ‘‘Salutatio beate Marie Virginis’’ (A Salutation of the Blessed Virgin Mary), ‘‘Salutatio virtutum’’ (A Salutation of the Virtues). Francis wrote few texts in the vernacular. Besides the ‘‘Preghiera davanti al Crocifisso’’ (The Prayer before the Crucifix, 1205–1206) and the ‘‘Parole di esortazione alle ‘poverelle’ di San Damiano’’ (Canticle of Exhortation for the Ladies of San Damiano, 1225), Francis is renowned as the author of a single poetic text and is acknowledged as the first literary author in Italian vernacular. His ‘‘Cantico di frate Sole’’ (Canticle of Brother Sun, 1224) begins the Italian poetic canon and is anthologized as the first text of the Italian literary tradition, a prototype for subsequent religious poetry. Gianfranco Contini dates the beginning of Italian literature from Francis’ poem. Alessandro D’Ancona goes a step further than Contini and names the ‘‘Cantico’’ ‘‘the most ancient spiritual 774

poem’’ (Studi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, 1891) in any vernacular language, thereby placing it in an international perspective. Likewise, Adolfo Oxilia widens the scope of the poem’s initial importance and defines it as ‘‘the first great page of Western civilization: a code of spiritual values, but also of aesthetic values’’ (Il Cantico di frate sole, 1984). Given its archaicity, the text poses numerous philological questions. The first concerns its title. Although the more traditional editorial titles are ‘‘Canticum creaturarum,’’ ‘‘Canticum de creaturis’’ (The Canticle of Creatures), ‘‘Laudes creaturarum,’’ ‘‘Laudes de creaturis’’ (The Praises of Creatures), the majority of contemporary critics agree that ‘‘Canticum fratris solis’’ (The Canticle of Brother Sun) is the authentic title Francis gave his poem and the one his companions used to refer to it. The most authoritative critical edition is by Vittore Branca, who restored the text to its original vernacular form by freeing it of all Umbrian connotations (Il cantico di frate sole. Studio delle fonti e testo critico, 1950). The structure of the poem is highly symbolic. It consists of 14 laisses (a laisse is a stanzaic or verse paragraph), comprising a total of 33 lines. Oxilia identifies the number symbolism and establishes the correspondence with the 14 Stations of the Cross and with the traditional age of Christ at death (Il Cantico di frate sole, 1984). Number symbolism holds also from a thematic point of view because the poem is divided into three sections: The first five laisses concern the heavens, the middle four laisses the earth, and the last five laisses human beings. Such thematic division creates a perfectly symmetrical structure, which matches the typically medieval sense of order as representing closeness to divinity. Such sequential and numerological order, however, bears no correspondence to the three episodes which, according to hagiographic sources, originated the composition of the text. Despite the numerous critical perspectives from which the ‘‘Cantico’’ can be viewed (as prayer, as first poem of the Italian literary canon, as song of thankfulness), its thematic stress remains on nature and on nature’s status as God’s creation. Creatures punctuate Canticum fratris solis, which insists that all created things owe their origin and existence to God, regardless of their material, ethereal, or simply conceptual presence in the cosmos. Sun, moon, wind, earth, fire, water, death, and the people-who-forgive are those evoked in the poem. Their subordination to God represents the creature-Creator relationship that shapes the poem’s theological background. The

FRANCIS OF ASSISI all-encompassing scope of the ‘‘Cantico’’ attempts to include every substantial element that exists in the universe. This feature closely imitates the subject matter of the two biblical texts of the Old Testament, which are considered the philologically accredited sources of the ‘‘Cantico,’’ namely Psalm 148 and the Psalm of the Three Young Men in the Furnace, also known as the Psalm of Daniel (Dan. 3:52–90 in the Vulgate; this passage is not contained in the King James Version). Both inspirational texts are lyrical, prayerful, praising compositions, and both have a litanic scansion obtained through frequent repetition of a refrain—and in this they resemble the Franciscan poem. The ‘‘Cantico’’ distances itself from its sources by means of a few distinctive features, which make it peculiarly Franciscan: its paucity of creatures mentioned, the passive grammatical diathesis of the refrain, the addition of the attribute brother or sister before the name of each creature, the commenting adjectives surrounding the names of creatures, and the complete absence of animals among them. This is the most striking characteristic of the poem, considering the absolute passion Francis displays for animals in the texts of the Legenda. The anaphorical repetition Laudato si’, mi’ Signore (May you be praised my Lord) is an invitation to praise God, similar to the refrain in the biblical sources. But, in Francis’ poem, a certain ambiguity about the identity of the praising entity stems from the repeated use of the preposition per, as in Laudato si’, mi’ Signore, per sora luna (May you be praised my Lord, by / through / through Sister Moon). This preposition is a philological impasse, and its meaning has been the subject of much speculation. In Francis’ time, per may acquire a multiplicity of signifiers. Since it follows the passive form, it may stand for the modern Italian da (by) thereby making the creatures evoked into the bearers of God’s praise. But it is plausible that per could also mean for, as it would in modern Italian; in this case the performers of the act of praise would be human beings, who thank and praise God for all creation. Another possible meaning of this polysemic preposition implies a movement through the creatures, and in this case per would be translated as through or by means of; the creatures would be the agents of the human beings’ praise of God. The dispute over the meaning of the preposition undoubtedly underscores the hermeneutical significance of its referent. Whatever the precise semantic meaning that may be assigned to it, per maintains a mediating function; it stands as a dynamic link between

the two entities located syntactically on each side of it and is invested with the crucial role of evincing the existing ties between God and creatures. As such it stresses the Franciscan theology of nature’s total dependence on divinity. The anaphorical repetition of the refrain Laudato si’, mi’ Signore issues an imperative command to give praise to God. Francis makes the recipient of the praising action clear, while leaving freedom of interpretation concerning the identity of the praisers, whether they may be human beings singing, reciting, or reading the ‘‘Cantico,’’ or human beings praising God by other means, or the various creatures listed in the poem. The refrain changes this prayerful poem into a prayer within the prayer. The metaprayerful message it carries within itself changes the ‘‘Cantico’’ into a specific type of prayer, the praise. The insistent repetition of the refrain establishes a litanic cadence and strongly contributes to the musicality of this Franciscan psalm, which was conceived by the author as a text to be sung. Although the melody has been lost, the ‘‘Cantico’’ was clearly intended for public singing. According to the Legenda, Francis created this song and gave it to his friars to accompany their preaching activity. He wanted the friars to gather a group of people around them, preach to them, and then sing the Canticum fratris solis. Besides melodious sound, the concept of music in the ‘‘Cantico’’ includes the recovery of natural harmony. Nature as the mediating element between human being and God acquires the privileged status of sacrament, being the tangible sign of divine presence in the cosmos. Pleasant sound and harmonious perception of nature find unification in the ‘‘Cantico’’ through music, which to the medieval mind was both melodic singing and natural order as reflection of divine perfection. In this poem, Francis revisits nature, describing its beauty, its sacramentality, and its harmony. In the purified vision of the Saint, creation speaks of God as it spoke to human beings at the initial stages of salvation history in Genesis. The ‘‘Cantico’’ can be interpreted, not only thematically, but also rhetorically as a revisiting of the natural world in light of Christian redemption; the poem is a reacquisition of the biblical myth of creation in light of Christ’s incarnation. The Franciscan theological insistence on nature as the Second Book of God’s revelation after the Bible can be clearly perceived in this first Franciscan poem of the thirteenth century. As a character of numerous hagiographic portrayals, Francis has been depicted as the most 775

FRANCIS OF ASSISI distinguished supporter of poverty, purity, and reconciliation. Since shortly after his death in the thirteenth century, biographers writing about his actions and miracles described his love for nature, his unrelenting dedication to poverty, and his devotion to the Passion of Christ, which culminated in the gift of the stigmata, the five signs of Christ’s Passion that appeared on Francis’ own body. Dante Alighieri offers a brief narrative of Francis’ mystical accomplishments in the Divina Commedia (Paradiso XI), and depicts an unforgettable image of Francis in just 75 lines. After a description of his place of birth, the account focuses on his conversion, his mystical marriage to Lady Poverty, the foundation of the Franciscan Order, the visit to the Holy Land, the stigmata, and his death. Dante’s poetic language shapes a picture of the saint of Assisi as both heroic and humble, which are two (only apparently contradictory) qualities of his personality and sainthood. Francis’ exemplary human experience has also inspired such different films as Mario Corsi’s Frate Sole (1918), Giulio Antamoro’s Frate Francesco (1926–1927), Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950), Michael Curtiz’s Francesco d’Assisi (1960), Franco Zeffirelli’s Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna (1972), Liliana Cavani’s Francesco di Assisi (1966) and Francesco (1989). Cavani’s cinematic treatments divest the figure of the saint from all legendary inscriptions and focus on the apostolic agere (to act) of the new man, a symbol of the interpenetration of the historical and the spiritual.

Biography Francis was born in Assisi, ca. 1181/1182, the son of a wealthy cloth merchant and a Provenc¸al woman. After a carefree youth, Francis converted to a life of prayer and repentance, the result of a physical disease and incarceration as a prisoner of war. He rejected his father’s riches, renounced his inheritance, and joined the poor outside Assisi’s city walls. His radical life change brought him to the foundation of three new religious orders, the Franciscan Order, the Poor Clares, and the Third Order of Francis, all three connected by the same theology of poverty and simplicity that governed his converted life. The allegory of his mystical marriage with Lady Poverty was depicted in art and literature by innumerable artists as a typical Franciscan trait. At the end of his life, Francis was granted the gift of the stigmata, the signs of Christ’s crucifixion on his body, the first of several 776

mystics to receive the same gift. He was publicly acclaimed as a saint during his lifetime and, shortly after his death at the Portiuncula, near Assisi, on October 3, 1226, he was officially canonized by Pope Gregory IX (1228). ALESSANDRO VETTORI Selected Works Opuscola Beati Francisci Assisiensis, edited by Luke Wadding, 1623. Analecta Franciscana sive chronica variaque aliadocumenta ad historiam fratrum minorum spectantia..., 12 vols. Ad Claras Aquas prope Florentiam, Ex Typ. Collegii s. Bonaventurae, 1926–1941; in particular Vol. 10, Legendae s. Francisci Assisiensis saeculis xiii et xiv conscriptae. ‘‘The Canticle of the Sun,’’ trans. Joseph Tusiani, in The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, edited by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Scritti francescani. Scritti e biografie di San Francesco. Cronache e altre testimonianze del primo secolo francescano. Scritti e biografie di Santa Chiara d’Assisi, edited by Feliciano Olgiati et al., Padua: Edizioni Messaggero, 1990; as Francis of Assisi: Early Documents, edited by Regis J. Armstrong, J. A. Wayne Hellman, and William J. Short, Vol. 1, The Saint, New York: New City Press, 1999; Vol. 2, The Founder, New York: New City Press, 2000; Vol. 3, The Prophet, New York: New City Press, 2001. Francesco d’Assisi. Scritti. Testo latino e traduzione italiana, edited by Aristide Cabassi, Padua: Editrici Francescane, 2002.

Further Reading Branca, Vittore, Il cantico di frate sole. Studio delle fonti e testo critico, Florence: Olschki, 1950. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura italiana delle origini, Florence: Sansoni, 1976. Cunningham, Lawrence, Saint Francis of Assisi, Boston: Twaine, 1976. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Studi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan: Fratelli Tre`ves, 1891. Doyle, Eric, St. Francis and the Song of Brotherhood, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980. Erikson, Joan Mowat, Saint Francis & His Four Ladies, New York: Norton & Co., 1970. Frugoni, Chiara, Francesco e l’invenzione delle stimmate. Una storia per parole e immagini fino a Bonaventura e Giotto, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Francesco d’Assisi e il Cantico di frate sole,’’ in Letteratura religiosa dal Due al Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. House, Adrian, Francis of Assisi, New York: Paulist Press, 2000. Jeffrey, David L., ‘‘Franciscan Spirituality and the Growth of Vernacular Culture,’’ in By Things Seen: Reference and Recognition in Medieval Thought, edited by David L. Jeffrey, Ottawa, Canada: University of Ottawa Press, 1979.

VERONICA FRANCO Leclerc, Eloi, Le cantique des cre´atures ou les symboles de l’union. Une analyse de Saint Franc¸ois d’Assise, Paris: Fayard, 1970. Le Goff, Jacques, Saint Francis of Assisi, translated by Christine Rhone, New York: Routledge, 2003. Oxilia, Adolfo, Il Cantico di frate sole, Florence: Nardini, 1984. Pagliaro, Antonino, ‘‘Il cantico di frate sole,’’ in Saggi di critica semantica, Messina: D’Anna, 1953. Petrocchi, Giorgio (editor), Francesco d’Assisi. Gli scritti e la leggenda, Milan: Rusconi, 1983.

Sabatier, Paul, Life of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Louise Seymour Houghton, New York: Scribner’s, 1894. Sorrell, Roger D., Saint Francis of Assisi and Nature, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1988. Spitzer, Leo, ‘‘Nuove considerazioni sul ‘Cantico di frate sole,’’’ in Studi italiani, edited by Claudio Scarpati, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1976. Vettori, Alessandro, Poets of Divine Love. Franciscan Mystical Poetry of the Thirteenth Century, New York: Fordham University Press, 2004.

VERONICA FRANCO (1546–1591) Veronica Franco is the epitome of the successful and gifted cortigiana onesta (honest courtesan) of the Italian Renaissance. In a society that limits women’s lives on the basis of class, station, economics, education, and gender, the figure of the elevated, cultured prostitute stands out as a unique phenomenon. Operating at the margins of high society, such ‘‘honored courtesans’’ are expected to charm, entertain, converse, and seduce by appropriating the language, dress, and behavior of the upper classes. They appear to be ladies, but they also grant full erotic satisfaction to their patrons. Having achieved upward mobility because of their looks, cultivation, sophistication, and intelligence, these women find prestige, wealth, and a measure of societal respect. No longer relegated to the bedroom, the courtesan affirms herself in the salon. For a time, Veronica Franco is the most celebrated courtesan of Venice. Famed for both beauty and wit, she is a recognized figure among the Venetian literati, openly declaring her love of learning and the study of the liberal arts. In her youth, Franco is mistress of patricians, correspondent of kings and cardinals, and friend of poets, painters, and intellectuals. More than a professional accomplishment, her gift for writing is deeply personal and satisfying. Unlike most women writers of her day, Franco is confident of her literary abilities. She openly publishes her poetry, the Terze rime (ca. 1575), and an epistolary volume, the Lettere familiari (Familiar Letters, 1580). Nor is she loathe to seek recognition for her talent, as attested in a wellknown anecdote in Michel Montaigne’s Journal

de voyage en Italie en 1580 et 1581. The Frenchman notes unexpectedly receiving the gift of her epistolary from ‘‘a Venetian gentlewoman,’’ Signora Veronica Franca. The courtesan’s books serve a practical as well as artistic role, bearing witness to Franco’s exceptionality and ingratiating her to celebrated or powerful men. Indeed, the Terze rime are dedicated to the duke of Mantua and the Lettere familiari to Cardinal Luigi D’Este while letters are addressed to two notable recipients: the king of France, Henry III, with whom she briefly shared her favors, and the famous artist Jacopo Tintoretto, who painted her portrait. An autobiographical element is present in both Franco’s poetry and epistolary. As the book’s protagonist, Franco the subject is idealistically rendered. Much of this constructed identity is indebted to the literary and philosophical discourse of her time, but it also displays a unique interpretation of the models utilized. In many ways, Franco employs literature to paint herself verbally in becoming colors. These self-portraits are intended to seduce the reader into accepting an image that is part reality, part invention. For her strategy to succeed, Franco needs to appeal to the taste of her contemporaries who still admired an imitative discourse and demanded adherence to recognized cultural models. Franco owes much to ancient classics and to the Italian canon; she reworks Horace, Ovid’s Heroides, the pastoral, Francesco Petrarca and sixteenth-century Petrarchism, as well as popularizations of Neoplatonic discourse. Similarly, her letters borrow their title, structure, and tone from Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares and Senecan prose. 777

VERONICA FRANCO Franco was clearly a cultured individual at a time when only 12% of Venetian women were even literate, according to historian Paul Grendler (Schooling in Renaissance Italy, 1989). Franco’s book of lyrics consists of 25 long poems known as capitoli, written in terza rima, the rhyme scheme originally devised by Dante Alighieri for the Divina Commedia. The sixteenth century used capitoli primarily for epistolary or burlesque verse. Franco’s choice of meter sets her apart from the majority of women poets in her day, who tended to produce sonnets in the style of Petrarca or Pietro Bembo. Besides adopting the capitolo for satire and communication, Franco also uses terza rima for amatory, patriotic, militant, and pastoral themes. As Marilyn Migiel has pointed out, Franco’s main theme is the relations between the sexes (Veronica Franco, 1994). In keeping with this theme, the Terze rime are organized as a lyric exchange, taking advantage of the capitolo’s communicative function. The volume is initially structured as a succession of dialogues in verse, in which male and female voices alternate. According to the book’s designations, seven of the 25 capitoli are penned by an anonymous male hand. These poems by the ‘‘uncertain author’’ have been historically attributed to patrician Marco Venier but could have been composed by Franco herself. The collection’s first capitolo is addressed to ‘‘Veronica’’ by the unknown male admirer. The most elaborate compliments, metaphors, and similes in praise of the courtesan are contained in the seven male-authored poems, a technique that allows Franco as subject to be concurrently modest and unparalleled. The dual representation of ‘‘Veronica’’ within the verse results in a doubling of the lyric persona, as perceived through two differing lenses. The subject fashioned in the male-authored poems is hyperbolically conventional, modeled on canonical tropes. Shifting between courtly lady, cruel beloved, and desired beauty, this Veronica can be as miraculously spiritual as Dante’s Beatrice, as unattainable as Petrarca’s Laura, or as wise as Leone Ebreo’s Sophia. The persona emerging from the male-authored capitoli is heir to a long line of exemplary feminine archetypes derived from the Italian canon. In the seven capitoli attributed to the uncertain male author, the rendering of ‘‘Veronica’’ is complicated by her acknowledged sexuality. Eschewing the frustrated gaze typical of the Petrarchan lover, for one, the unknown author pictures his lady as a ‘‘Venus abed,’’ promising the sensual delights of profane, not sacred, love. Unlike the archetypal cruel beloved, ‘‘Veronica’s’’ unapproachability is 778

not due to chastity but to her dedication to poetry. This portrayal of the courtesan as a devoted artist is at the heart of Franco’s self-construction: For example, in Letter 17, she rejects an admirer’s suit, requesting him to turn to her beloved intellectual pursuits in order to win her. In capitolo 13, an unnamed detractor (probably Maffio Venier) is challenged to a literary duel in which she would exchange pen for sword and compose in either Venetian dialect (Venier’s forte) or literary Italian. This image of Veronica as duelist reinforces the author’s inherent challenge to constricting gender definitions when she engages in the prevalently masculine domain of art and writing. In her poetry, Franco emerges as a transgressive figure whose beauty is explicitly sexual, as befits the representation of a courtesan, and whose talent is concurrently conventional and nonconformist. Shunning traditional sexual codes that require feminine passivity, modesty, chastity, and distance, Franco subverts them by proposing self-assurance, passion, and availability instead. Through the centuries, Franco’s literary works have been seen as utilitarian instruments of public propaganda through which she can fashion a desirable self-image to attract clients and mask the sordid realities of a courtesan’s existence. As evidence in support of this interpretation of Franco’s motivation, the Terze rime’s ‘‘male-authored’’ capitoli are clearly adulatory, canonizing the subject Veronica as an exemplary creature. Franco’s declaredly self-authored poems capitalize on the uncertain author’s image-making while adding to the subject Veronica’s qualities, suggesting a new definition of feminine literary selfhood. For example, in response to the Petrarchan construction in the first capitolo of Veronica as the donna crudel (cruel beloved), she represents herself as a perceptive individual open to virtue, valor, and wisdom; her heart cannot be had for the asking. Yet, she adds coyly, Apollo serves Venus—that is, art serves sexual love—and she is a devotee of both gods. Franco, unlike other women writers of her century, openly acknowledges her sexuality. Indeed capitolo 16 operates as a defense of her profession. In the Terze rime, Franco accepts and embellishes the Neoplatonic belief that beauty is an absolute good, although she disassociates it from chastity and stresses her belief that courtesans are the very embodiment of such beauty. The author’s values negate her society’s long-held belief in the superiority of the male sex, based on men’s greater nobility, intellect, and morality; its insistence on female decorum and chastity; and its rejection of sexual

VERONICA FRANCO pleasure, proposed as a natural predisposition. In the Terze rime, the female subject is ennobled and cleansed of negative connotations associated with prostitution, in a fictional universe where Christian morality is redefined and courtesans are reinvented as pagan goddesses. Moreover, the entire female sex is defended against male abuse of power. Capitolo 16 is Franco’s salvo in the battle of the sexes, in which she takes the feminine side in the ongoing querelle des femmes, the international debate on the status and worthiness of women. Clearly derived from classical epistolography, Franco’s published letters also function as instruments for self-fashioning and persuasion. In 1538, Pietro Aretino issues the first volume of his popular epistolary, beginning a new cultural trend: the production of letters as literary artifacts. As is the case for poetry, letter writing was an area of literature that invites female participation since it does not require scholarly learning and is composed in the vernacular. The Lettere familiari were Franco’s intellectual calling card, distributed to discerning recipients, like Montaigne. Consisting of 50 letters, most lacking a designated addressee, the brief volume highlights its rhetorical genesis, suggesting that it be interpreted as literary invention, written to demonstrate Franco’s craftsmanship. Her epistolary eloquence leans toward gravity, sententiousness, and dignity, in keeping with its Ciceronian and Senecan models, whereas the verse exhibits lightness, wit, and a colloquial style typical of the capitolo. As a work of art, the Lettere familiari’s very title challenges the Ciceronian model, inviting direct comparison with Epistulae ad familiares, which was the primary instructional text of the Latin curriculum of the day. Franco’s identification of a mere handful of addressees (a cardinal, a king, a great artist, and a notable patrician family) is suggestive in itself, for the author receives validation through the merits of her addressees, who, in turn, gild her reputation through their association. Franco defies stereotyping, stretches the female boundaries, and revises preconceptions about her sex and profession. But a somewhat different subject emerges in the epistolary: The author takes on the role of moralist, imparting the lessons of a devout sage, in sharp contrast to the banter, witty repartee, and suggestive connotations found in the Terze rime. It is from the contents of a handful of letters that critics and biographers developed the image of Franco as a redeemed sinner who underwent an edifying conversion later in life, although hard evidence for such a transformation is flimsy.

In Letter 22, possibly her most famous epistle, Franco seeks to dissuade a mother from the ‘‘evil’’ intent of introducing a daughter into the demimonde of elite prostitution, emphasizing the degradation and dehumanization of a courtesan’s life. However, concerns with worldly degradation and eternal salvation are secondary in the epistolary. As in Terze rime, Veronica Franco’s concern is the literary construction of a positive, culturally endorsable identity.

Biography Born in Venice in 1546 to a merchant family. Married young to Paolo Panizza, a doctor. Left husband and began career as an ‘‘honest courtesan.’’ In 1564, had the first of six children, among them sons Enea and Achilletto. Listed in the anonymous Catalogo di tutte le principali et piu` honorate cortegiane working in Venice. Active in Venetian cultural life, including Domenico Venier’s celebrated literary salon. In 1574, received King Henry III of France and Poland during his official state visit. In 1575, edited a collection of poems in honor of deceased Count Estor Martinengo but also entered into a scandalous public polemic with an anonymous satirist, later identified as patrician Maffio Venier. In 1575 or 1576, published Terze rime. An epistolary collection, the Lettere familiari, appeared in 1580. In October of that year Franco was tried by the Inquisition based on accusations of using diabolical invocations and practicing black magic; proceedings were quickly suspended. Died in Venice, in July 1591, of fever. FIORA A. BASSANESE See also: Petrarchism Selected Works Collections Lettere, edited by Stefano Bianchi, Rome: Salerno, 1998. Poems and Selected Letters, edited and translated by Ann Rosalind Jones and Margaret F. Rosenthal, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘Rime di diversi eccellentissimi autori nella morte dell’Illustre Sign.’’ Estor Martinengo, Conte di Malpaga, edited by Signora Veronica Franco, 1575. ‘‘Terze rime al Serenissimo Signor Duca di Mantova et di Monferrato,’’ ca. 1575. ‘‘Rime: Gaspara Stampa e Veronica Franco,’’ edited by Abdelkader Salza, 1913.

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VERONICA FRANCO Letters Lettere familiari a diversi della S. Veronica Franca all’illustr. e reverendissimo Monsignor Luigi d’Este Cardinale, 1580.

Further Reading Adler, Sara Maria, ‘‘Veronica Franco’s Petrarchan Terze Rime: Subverting the Master’s Plan,’’ in Italica, 65, no. 3 (1988): 213–233. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Selling the Self; or, The Epistolary Production of Renaissance Courtesans,’’ in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Veronica Franco’s Poetics of Redemption,’’ in From Rome to Eternity. Catholicism and the Arts in Italy, ca. 1550–1650, edited by Pamela M. Jones and Thomas Worcester, Leiden-BostonCologne: Brill, 2002. Diberti-Leigh, Marcella, Vittoria Franco: Donna, poetessa, cortigiana del Rinascimento, Ivrea: Priuli & Verlucca, 1988. Doglio, Maria Luisa, Lettera e donna: scrittura epistolare al femminile tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Graf, Arturo, ‘‘Una cortigiana fra mille,’’ in Attraverso il Cinquecento, Turin: Loescher, 1888. Grendler, Paul F., Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning 1500–1600, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Jones, Ann Rosalind, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘‘Bad Press, Modern Editors versus Early Modern Women Poets (Tullia d’Aragona,

Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco),’’ in Strong Voices, Weak History. Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, edited by Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Lawner, Lynne, Lives of the Courtesans: Portraits of the Renaissance, New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Masson, Georgiana, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. Migiel, Marilyn, ‘‘Veronica Franco,’’ in Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Montaigne, Michel, The Complete Works of Montaigne, translated by Donald M. Frame, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1948–1957. Phillippy, Patricia, ‘‘‘Altera Dido’: The Model of Ovid’s Heroides in the Poems of Gaspara Stampa and Veronica Franco,’’ Italica, 69, no. 1 (1992): 1–18. Robin, Diane, ‘‘Courtesans, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco,’’ in Italian Women and the City: Essays, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, Madison, NJ, and London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Press, 2003. Rosenthal, Margaret F., ‘‘Epistolary Self-portraiture in Veronica Franco’s Terze Rime,’’ in Writing the Female Voice. Essays on Epistolary Literature, edited by Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989. Rosenthal, Margaret F., The Honest Courtesan: Veronica Franco, Citizen and Writer in Sixteenth-Century Venice, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Zorzi, Alvise, Cortigiana Veneziana: Veronica Franco e i suoi poeti, Milan: Camunia, 1986.

FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN (1194–1250) Stupor quoque mundi et immutator mirabilis (wonder of the world and ingenious innovator), as he was labeled upon his death by the chronicler Matthew of Paris, Frederick II is a towering figure in the first half of the European twelfth century. The son of the Emperor Henry the Sixth and of Constance of Hauteville, last heir of the Norman dynasty, Frederick of Hohenstaufen reunited the crown of the Kingdom of Sicily with German imperial power, thus effecting the return of the seat of 780

the (Holy) Roman Empire to Italy after several centuries. A multifaceted personality, Frederick was a lawmaker, the author of a treatise on falconry, and a poet in his own right. Tolerant in matters of religion, and patron of the arts, Frederick II made Sicily an active crossroads of cultural exchange among Hebrew, Latin, and Arab civilizations. Intellectuals working at his court include the astrologer Michael Scot (more a promoter of the translation of Averroes’ and Avicenna’s works

FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN rather than the necromancer he was later depicted as being), Theodore of Antioch (the translator of an Arabic treatise on falconry that serves as the source for Frederick’s treatise), and the mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (to whom Europe owes the introduction of the Arabic numerical system). It is around this emperor that a group of vernacular poets and notaries also gathered to form the so-called Sicilian School. As functionaries of Frederick’s itinerant and polyglot court (the Magna Curia), these writers represent the first example of the poet-notary, the politically involved, lay intellectual who will dominate Italian vernacular culture until the age of Petrarch. Dante, still the most authoritative voice on early Italian literary history, acknowledges the essential role that Frederick played in shaping both the politics and the poetics of his time. In On vernacular eloquence I.12.2–4, he praises Frederick and his ‘‘well-born’’ son Manfred for having brought together at their court a group of intellectuals who were the first to write secular love poetry in the vernacular—a tradition of which Dante considered himself a part. The complete endorsement of this Latin treatise is later qualified in the Comedia where Frederick’s soul is included among the heretics (Inferno X.119, but see also XIII.58–78, XXIII.64–66, XXVI.119, Purgatorio III.107–132, XVI.117, and Paradiso III.109–120). Dante’s shift from enthusiastic praise of Frederick (as cultural promoter) to eventual condemnation (on religious grounds) reflects the controversial character of the emperor’s presence in the history of Italian culture. Dante’s treatment, however, appears balanced when read against the background of the split judgment provided by Frederick’s contemporaries, who either hailed the emperor as the new Messiah, or railed against him as the Antichrist, according to their Ghibelline or Guelph allegiance, respectively. Frederick himself appears to have lent support to these rumors by having himself portrayed as a Christ/Antichrist figure seated in Judgment on the gate of Capua (Fengler and Stephany). As a lawmaker and state reformer, Frederick’s activity expressed itself primarily in the administration of the Kingdom of Sicily. In Melfi, in 1231, he promulgated the Constitutiones Regni Siciliae (The Constitutions of the Kingdom of Sicily). Drafted with the help of jurisconsults from the universities of Bologna and Paris, this code of law was designed to recuperate foundational elements of Justinian’s law by secularizing and centralizing the administration of the state. Frederick’s interest in modernizing the juridical system of the empire was also

mirrored in his promotion of legal studies in the universities of Salerno and of Naples (founded in 1224). His activity of reorganization was not limited to the realm of the law; Frederick took particular care in implementing a massive fortification program (especially in Apulia, where the magnificent Castel del Monte still stands), carefully organized farming and the construction of domus solaciorum (homes for recreation) that made his kingdom a rich and greatly admired model for contemporary rulers. De arte venandi cum avibus (The Art of Hunting with Birds, 1248) is a massive Latin treatise on the sport of falconry that is comprised of 1,384 dense chapters. Frederick worked on this project until his death, and the text we now possess is the result of several additions by his son Manfred. Aristotelian in inspiration, the treatise ‘‘is a synthesis of theory and practice’’ (Anna Laura Trombetti Budriesi, editor, De arte venandi cum avibus, 2002) that relies on previous literature as well as on the direct experience the author had developed in his lifelong practice of the art. The goal of the work is twofold: On the one hand, it is a practical manual, containing advice on how to capture, train, and use birds of prey in hunting; on the other, it strives to raise the ‘‘mechanical art’’ of venery to the level of ‘‘natural science,’’ an instrument of knowledge and understanding of the nature of birds. An ethical and political dimension is also present in the treatise: addressed to the nobility, the class for which hunting with birds of prey was a status symbol. It sketched a portrait of the perfect artifex (the falconer) as a man of disinterested diligence and rigid bodily and mental discipline. The De arte may be read as a manual for the education of the perfect court functionary, even of a ruler (Franco Cardini, ‘‘Federico II e il De arte venandi cum avibus,’’ 1986). Of Frederick’s literary activity, only three poetic compositions that are generally accepted as authentic remain: the two canzoni, ‘‘De la mia dis¨ıanza’’ (Of My Desire), and ‘‘Poi ch’a voi piace, amore’’ (Since This Is Your Will, Love)—both characterized by the marked use of the Provencal structural artifice of coblas capfinidas (the repetition of a word from the last line of a stanza in the first line of the next one)—and the sonnet ‘‘Misura, providenza e meritanza’’ (Measure, Foresight, and Merit), which deals with the topic of nobility and wealth. Beyond their poetic merits, which have been variously judged, these compositions bear witness to Frederick’s involvement as practitioner as well as initiator of the Sicilian School. Thematically and stylistically they are close to the 781

FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN experiments of the acknowledged caposcuola, Jacopo da Lentini. Of particular interest is the sonnet, because it addresses the same topic for which Dante invokes (and eventually dismisses) Frederick’s authority in Convivio IV. While it is not the source for Dante’s oft-quoted sententia (actually of Aristotelian origin), the poem is witness to the intertwining of sociopolitical and literary issues in the pronouncements of this emperor-poet.

Biography Born in Jesi on December 26, 1194. King of Sicily and Naples in 1198; Holy Roman Emperor, 1220; King of Jerusalem in 1227. In 1209, marries Constance of Aragon (daughter of Alphonso II); in 1225, Isabel Yolanda of Brienne (daughter of John, count of Brienne, and King of Jerusalem); in 1235, Isabel of England (sister of Henry III). Of his children, the most important are his two sons: Henry, German king, and Conrad, who will occupy the throne of Sicily after him; as well as his two illegitimate sons: Enzio, King of Sardinia, and Manfred, regent of Sicily first for Conrad and then for Conrad’s son, Conradin. Excommunicated three times for his opposition to papal policies, leads a diplomatic rather than military crusade in 1228. Having crossed over to the Holy Land with a small army, negotiates with the sultan, Malik-al-Kamil, an advantageous treaty, through which the Christians recover Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Saint John of Acre (1229). Issues the Constitutions of Melfi (1231). In the 20 crucial years of his reign in Italy, wages repeated wars against the Lombard communes of various fortune: in 1237, defeats the Lombard League at Cortenuova; in 1248, his armies suffer a decisive blow at the siege of Parma. Retreats to the South, having isolated himself from his closest aides (in particular, Pier de le Vigne); dies in Castelfiorentino di Lucera on December 13, 1250. Buried in the cathedral church in Palermo. SIMONE MARCHESI Selected Works Letters and Political Documents Huillard-Bre´holles, Jean Louis Alphonse, Historia diplomatica Frederici II, Paris: Plon, 1852–1891 (a 12-volume collection of charters and other materials). The Liber Augustalis; or, Constitutions of Melfi, promulgated by the Emperor Frederick II for the Kingdom of Sicily in 1231, edited and translated by James M. Powell, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971.

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Treatise The art of Falconry being the ‘‘De arte venandi cum avibus’’ of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, edited and translated by Casey A. Wood and F. Marjorie Fyfe, Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943. De arte venandi cum avibus, edited by Anna Laura Trombetti Budriesi, Bari: Laterza, 2002.

Poems ‘‘Le rime della scuola siciliana. Introduzione, testo critico e note,’’ edited by Bruno Panvini, Florence: Olschki, 1962, vol. I. ‘‘Poeti italiani della corte di Federico II,’’ edited by Bruno Panvini, Naples: Liguori, 1994. ‘‘Rime,’’ edited by Letterio Cassata, Rome: Quiritta, 2001.

Further Reading Abulafia, David, Frederick II: a Medieval Emperor, London: Penguin Press, 1988. Antonelli, Roberto, ‘‘Politica e volgare: Guglielmo IX, Enrico II, Federico II,’’ in Seminario romanzo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Atti del convegno su Dante e la Magna Curia, A cura del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani. Palermo, Catania, Messina, 7–11 novembre 1965. Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 1967. Bocassini, Daniela, Il volo della mente. Falconeria, e Sofia nel mondo mediterraneo: Islam, Federico II, Dante, Ravenna: Longo, 2003. Cardini, Franco, Castel del Monte, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. ———, ‘‘Federico II e il De arte venandi cum avibus,’’ in Sergio Gensini (editor), Politica e cultura nell’Italia di Federico Secondo, Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1986. Federico II e le nuove culture, Atti del XXXI Convegno storico internazionale (Todi 1994), Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sul basso medioevo, 1995. Federico II e le scienze, edited by Pierre Toubert and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Palermo: Sellerio, 1994. Fengler, Christie K., and William A. Stephany, ‘‘The Capuan Gate and Pier della Vigna,’’ in Dante Studies, 99 (1981): 145–157. Intellectual life at the court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen, edited by William Tronzo, Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1994. Kantorowicz, Ernest H., Frederick the Second, New York: R. R. Smith, 1931. ———, The King’s Two Bodies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Monteverdi, Angelo, ‘‘Federico II poeta,’’ in Atti del convegno internazionale di studi federiciani, Palermo: Renna, 1952. ———, ‘‘L’opera poetica di Federico II imperatore,’’ in Studi e saggi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954. Nel segno di Federico II. Unita` politica e pluralita` culturale del Mezzogiorno, Atti del convegno internazionale di studi della Fondazione Napoli Novantanove, edited by M. Del Treppo, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1989. Willemsen, Carl Arnold, Bibliografia federiciana. Fonti e letteratura storica su Federico II e gli ultimi Svevi. Bari: Societa` di Storia Patria, 1982.

FRENCH INFLUENCES

FRENCH INFLUENCES Italian literary language was born between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries, about two centuries after its Neo-Latin counterparts in France and Spain. Latin culture in Italy in fact resisted the influence of the Germanic element for longer, and ecclesiastical Latin was prominent for a long time. This phenomenon explains the learned origins of Italian literary culture, which in the Middle Ages produced masterpieces of European importance including works by Dante, Petrarca, and Boccaccio. However, as a result Italy was indebted to the new Romance cultures, first and foremost to France and its two great cultural regions: the North, cradle of epic poetry, in Langue d’oil, and Provence, birthplace of courtly lyric poetry, in Langue d’oc. Among the French cycles of the chansons de geste, the Cycle de Charlemagne is particularly significant, as is the Chanson de Roland by the anonymous Turoldus (eleventh century) and the Matie`re de Bretagne, the cycle of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, most importantly elaborated by the poet Chre´tien de Troyes (active 1160–1190). In Italy, the poems and romances related to these cycles are re-elaborated in the Franco-Veneto language in works by Minocchio da Padova (late thirteenth century) and Niccolo` da Verona (fourteenth century). A manuscript of Turoldus’ work (Manuscrit de Venise) is held at the Marciana Library of Venice (the fundamental version is the Manuscrit d’Oxford). The Matie`re de Bretagne, whose written tradition is recorded by Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1100–ca. 1155) in Historia Regum Britanniae (ca. 1136), was re-elaborated by the Anglo-French writer Robert Wace (late twelfth century) into a romance, a large repertory of legends and fables interwoven with elements from Celtic mythology. Such romances, vulgarized in Italy in a Frenchified vernacular, were, as Erich Auerbach notes in Mimesis (1946), the delights of the aristocracy. Indeed, in Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), in Inferno V, Francesca da Rimini was reading a Breton romance when her familiar tragedy precipitated. The influence of the French epic endured in Italy, culminating, during the Renaissance, in Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483/ 1495), which fuses the Carolingian and the Breton

cycle, and in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532). French courtly poetry shapes learned Italian poetry from the time of its origins in the Sicilian School of Poetry, at the court of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1194–1250), and in the Tuscan lyric of the Dolce Stil Novo, led by Guido Guinizzelli and Dante. The cultured, aristocratic and Hermetic (trobar clus) Provenc¸al poetic language theorized by Andre´ le Chapelain (late twelfth century) is spread by French troubadours who lived in Italy, such as Bernard de Ventadour (ca. 1145–ca. 1195), Bertrand de Born (ca. 1140–ca. 1215), and Jaufre´ Rudel (mid-twelfth century). This tradition continues on the threshold of Humanism in the work of Francesco Petrarca, and re-emerges in the Petrarchism of the Renaissance and the writing of Torquato Tasso. The scientific encyclopedia Li Livres dou Tre´sor (The Books of the Treasure, ca. 1265) by Brunetto Latini, teacher of Dante, is written in langue d’oil. Latini was influenced by the great French allegorical and didactic poem Le Roman de la Rose (1235– 1305) by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung. Marco Polo’s Divisament dou Monde, or its alternative title Il Milione, dictated to Rustichello da Pisa in 1298, is also composed in langue d’oil. Other genres show evidence of French influence. The fabliaux (from fable in the vernacular of Picardy) are one of the sources of Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373) characterized as they are by a strong realism and by a range of descriptions of customs. The dramatic scenes that in Italy developed into the medieval sacra rappresentazione (mystery play) derive from the French tropes of the ninth century, chanted commentaries on liturgical texts. The most ancient French example of this genre is Le Jeu d’Adam (twelfth century), by an anonymous writer. Miracles and Myste`res flourished in France in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and influenced Italian culture up to Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose numerous borrowings from French literature are well-known. The Age classique of Louis XIV had long-lasting repercussions for Italian literature, which in the seventeenth century was extraneous to the European cultural scene. Rene´ Descartes’ Le Discours de la 783

FRENCH INFLUENCES me´thode (1637), Franc¸ois La Rochefoucauld’s Les Maximes (1665), Jean La Bruye`re’s Les Caracte`res de The´ophraste (1688), Janse´nius’ Augustinus (1640), the theologians of Port-Royal, the famous seventeenth-century preachers Jacques-Benigne Bossuet and Louis Bourdaloue, Jean de La Fontaine’s Les Fables (1668–1694), the French theater of that century, and Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art poe´tique (1674) are fundamental French contributions to Italian culture. The e´sprit classique and the will to systematize affected the works of great writers (Alessandro Manzoni in particular) and the debate on literary theory up to the twentieth century. The age of Arcadia, opposed to the Baroque style, was mostly in tune with French Cartesianism, which inspired the Italian poetics of the early eighteenth century. Ludovico Antonio Muratori inherited the principle of ‘‘Reason’’ from French Classicism, as did Gian Vincenzo Gravina and Antonio Conti. The Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia (1710–1740) published in Venice by Apostolo Zeno, author of a reform of melodrama that (following the example of Corneille and Racine) paved the way for the works of Pietro Metastasio, was one of the many learned Italian periodicals that took as their model the Parisian Le Journal des Savans, founded in 1665. French comic models, especially Molie`re’s, are evident in works by Jacopo Nelli (1673–1767), Girolamo Gigli (1660– 1722), and Scipione Maffei (1675–1755). Carlo Goldoni’s reform must be understood in this context of simplified, renewed taste. French influence is particularly evident in the works written by Goldoni during his exile in Paris: Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Well Meaning Crouch, 1771) and L’Avare fastueux (The Ostentatious Miser, 1772). His Me´moires (1787) are also in French. During the eighteenth century, the gallant tale in verses in imitation of the French model became popular and had many followers such as Giambattista Casti (1724–1803). It was above all the culture of the Enlightenment that brought Italy into the wake of French culture. The French influence upon the poetics of sensism, through Etienne Condillac, is remarkable. It had followers among the Italian exponents of the Enlightenment, particularly in Neapolitan and Lombard circles, in the journal Il Caffe` (1764– 1766) with Cesare Beccaria and Pietro Verri, the author of the Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain, 1773), and eventually influenced Giacomo Leopardi in the nineteenth century. The rationalist and Cartesian France of Voltaire, Montesquieu, 784

Diderot, Helve´tius, the pre-Romantic Rousseau, the authors of the famous Encyclope´die, and the French language itself became spokesmen in Italy for a new culture. Indeed, in his Misogallo (The Anti-Frenchman, 1814), Vittorio Alfieri polemically attacks the spread of ‘‘gallicisms.’’ However, it is important to recall that in Italy both the French tongue and the more progressive wing of French culture have been the vehicle of free communication in other periods as well, such as during Fascism. This influence is documented by the most important reviews of the early twentieth century such as La voce and Solaria. Massimo Bontempelli published the first issues of the review 900 in French in 1926, while Elio Vittorini founded Il Politecnico (1945–1947) in tune with Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of engagement. Jacobin theater, inspired by the French Revolution, was particularly important between 1796 and 1800. In terms of the quality of his plays, Camillo Federici (1749–1802) was its principal proponent, although he was more versed in the genre of the come´die larmoyante that had been initiated by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chausse´e in France in the eighteenth century. Jacobin theater gave birth to patriotic theater, to Risorgimento literature, and more recently offered ideological suggestions for new interpretations of Marxist, Gobettian, and Gramscian inspiration. Born out of the Querelle des The´aˆtres of the eighteenth century, it inspired a modern moralizing project, developing new ways to involve the audience through feˆtes (inspired by Rousseau’s utopia in his 1758 Lettre a` D’Alembert sur les spectacles). More recent examples of this tendency in France include Romain Rolland and his The´aˆtre du Peuple (1903), Jacques Copeau, creator of the anticonventional The´aˆtre du Vieux Colombier (1913), whose pedagogic program would inspire Silvio D’Amico’s Accademia d’arte drammatica in 1935, and Firmin Ge´mier, founder of the The´aˆtre National Populaire (1920) that became well-known due to Jean Vilar (1912–1971). The exchanges between France and Italy during the Romantic period are significant. Madame de Stae¨l acted as intermediary in her essay Sull’utilita` delle traduzioni (On the Usefulness of Translations, 1816), published by the journal Biblioteca italiana, which gave rise to the polemic between classicists and Romantics. Both countries were involved in theorizing Romanticism and reciprocal influences abound: between Ermes Visconti (1784– 1841) and Stendhal, between Manzoni, with the Lettre a` M. Ch*** sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu

FRENCH INFLUENCES dans la trage´die (Letter to M. Ch*** on the Unity of Time and Space in Tragedy, 1823) and Victor Hugo, with his Pre´face de Cromwell (1827), between the periodicals Le Globe (1824–1832) and Il Conciliatore (1818–1819). Hyppolite-Adolphe Taine’s literary theory, inspired by positivism and absorbed into French naturalism by Auguste Comte, exerted its influence on verismo through the Goncourt brothers, E´mile Zola, and Gustave Flaubert. Indeed, the influence of French realism was felt not only by writers such as Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana, but also in a wide sector of Italian narrative literature. The same phenomenon occurred in poetry, but in an antinaturalistic direction. Jules Laforgue, author of Moralite´s le´gendaires (1887), influenced Sergio Corazzini, Guido Gozzano, and all of the crepuscolari poets in his ironic poetry that corrodes Romantic elements. Milanese Scapigliatura did not examine the forms of French Decadentism in depth. In Italy, the apre`s Baudelaire that characterized European culture as a whole was carefully investigated between 1914 and 1916, when all of modern French poetry and literature, including Ste´phane Mallarme´, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Claudel, Charles Pe´guy, and Guillaume Apollinaire, came together in the journal La voce, edited by Giuseppe De Robertis. The poetry of Dino Campana, Camillo Sbarbaro, Arturo Onofri, Vincenzo Cardarelli, and Giuseppe Ungaretti must be understood within the context of this journal. La Ronda (1919–1923), founded by Cardarelli, Emilio Cecchi, and Bruno Barilli, drew from Paul Vale´ry the idea of technical and formal perfection that shaped most of Italian modernism. In it, the French sources are innumerable: It will suffice to mention the influence of surrealism on Massimo Bontempelli, Tommaso Landolfi, and Arturo Loria, on the metaphysical tales of Dino Buzzati, on the symbolism of Nicola Lisi, on the metaphysical and French-speaking Alberto Savinio. The postmodern period in France altered the ‘‘historical’’ reasons of Sartrean engagement, dissolving the forms of the novel a` la Balzac. A degre´ ze´ro de l’e´criture reveals, with Roland Barthes (who thus titles a famous essay of 1953), the linguistic elements of an antihistoricist communication. ´ mile Benveniste, and Algirdas Roman Jakobson, E Greimas were its theorists. In 1960, Philippe Sollers founded the group ‘‘Tel Quel,’’ which numbered poets such as Marcelin Pleynet, Jean-Pierre Faye, Denis Roche, and Jean Thibaudet (it dissolved in 1983). A similar group, ‘‘I Novissimi,’’ was founded

in Italy in 1961, with Alfredo Giuliani, Edoardo Sanguineti, and Antonio Porta (whose poetics are close to that of Faye). In the same period, le nouveau roman, whose initiator was Alain Robbe-Grillet, experimented with new ways of writing in which the visual element (e´cole du regard ) is dominant. Indeed, the collaboration of Robbe-Grillet with Alain Resnais and the affinity between the nouveau roman and the cinematographic nouvelle vague is well-known. The Italian neoavant-garde, which followed Artaud in theater, elaborated a disintegrated narrative language; Renato Barilli, Alberto Arbasino, Elio Pagliarani, and Giorgio Manganelli engaged different experimental forms with clear affinities to their French models. The fiction factory of Georges Pe´rec and the OuLiPo (founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau) influenced Umberto Eco and, afterwards, Stefano Benni and Stefano Bartezzaghi. The experimental Italian novel reached into the early 1990s. A recomposition of forms into a subjective heterogeneity characterizes current literary tendencies in both France and Italy. PAOLA MARTINUZZI Further Reading Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis, Berne: Francke, 1946. Bedarida, Henri and Paul Hazard, L’influence franc¸aise en Italie au dix-huitie`me sie`cle, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1934. Bessie`re, Jean and Manfred Schmelling (eds.), Litte´rature, modernite´, reflexivite´, Paris: Champion, 2002. Dugast-Portes, Francine, Le Nouveau Roman. Une ce´sure dans l’histoire du re´cit, Paris: Nathan, 2001. Galateria, Daria, Entre nous: incontri di scrittori italiani e francesi del Novecento, Palermo: Sellerio, 2002. Guille´n, Claudio, Entre lo uno y lo diverso. Introduccio´n a lo`a literatura comparada, Barcelona: Crı´tica, 1985. Hazard, Paul, La Re´volution franc¸aise et les lettres italiennes, 1789–1815, Paris: Hachette, 1910. Lelie`vre, Rene´e, Le the´aˆtre dramatique italien en France. 1855–1940, Paris: Colin, 1959. Mangoni, Luisa, Una crisi fine secolo: la cultura italiana e la Francia fra Otto e Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Milza, Pierre, Franc¸ais et italien a` la fine du XIXe sie`cle, ´ cole franc¸aise de Rome, 1981. Rome: E ´ mile Zola’s Pagano, Tullio, Experimental Fictions: From E Naturalism to Giovanni Verga’s Verism, Madison (NJ): Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Press, 1999. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘La coreografia dell’ordine,’’ in Lo spettacolo nella Rivoluzione francese, edited by Paolo Bosisio, Rome: Bulzoni, 1989. Starobinski, Jean, 1789, Les emble`mes de la raison, Paris: Flammarion, 1973.

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RENATO FUCINI

RENATO FUCINI (1843–1921) Renato Fucini’s career began with the publication of a collection of delicate poetical sketches of everyday life in the Pisan dialect, Cento poesie in vernacolo pisano (One Hundred Poems in the Pisan Vernacular, 1872), under the nom de plume Neri Tanfucio, an anagram of his own name. It was appreciated by the critics and intellectuals of the time, including Giuseppe Mazzini, and in literary circles as an original product of wit and a clear sign of interest for popular culture, even though the book did not seem to be related to any particular literary school. His style was close to the medieval and Renaissance Tuscan tradition of the novella, which—from the amusing stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron (1348–1353) to the anonymous Renaissance Tuscan story La novella del grasso legnaiuolo (The Story of the Fat Wood-Seller, 1480) to Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s Historia de duobus amantibus (History of Two Lovers, 1476)—celebrated the passion for every aspect of human life and the love for clever sentences and the wit of the popular burla (joke). Recognizing Fucini’s ability in writing vivid sketches that reveal the truth about a character, a case, or a situation with the minimalistic style of the school of painting known as macchiaioli, the periodical La Rassegna Settimanale hired the writer as a contributor and he published a number of stories then collected in Le veglie di Neri: paesi e figure della campagna toscana (Neri’s Wakes. Towns and Figures of the Tuscan Countryside, 1882). The stories, set in the marshes of the Maremma where Fucini had spent his childhood, describe the microcosm of a country village with its characters and typical activities such as hunting, and the life and destinies of the poor, subjected to the local landowners and the new middle class. The tone is passionate and moving, and uses the register of melancholy, of private memories, and of pity and compassion in recollecting past events and figures. Fucini’s position is opposed to the main literary currents of his age, in particular verismo. As Toni Iermano has pointed out, in Fucini’s works there is ‘‘no clear social criticism,’’ no interest for naturalistic impersonality, no theoretical attention for the ‘‘objective descriptions of human life and of its laws, forms, and forces’’ (Esploratori 786

delle nuove Italie, 2002). Indeed, what predominates in both his more melodramatic and sorrowful stories such as the celebrated ‘‘Il Matto delle giuncaie’’ (The Madman of the Rushes) or ‘‘Vanno in Maremma’’ (They Are Going to Maremma) to the more humorous sketches such as ‘‘La fatta’’ (The Dropping) is the writer’s passion and sadness for human destiny, but also a philosophical acceptance of it, with a delicate, profound interest for the expressive and spiritual worlds of the individuals. A romantic regret for bygone traditions and an ethical impulse are also at the heart of Fucini’s literary project, as in his travel book dedicated to Naples and its community, Napoli ad occhio nudo (Naples to the Naked Eye, 1878). In later years, he continued to cultivate the narrative representation of the vanishing way of life of the Tuscan countryside, publishing two further collections, All’aria aperta: scene e macchiette della campagna toscana (In the Open Air: Scene and Sketches from the Tuscan Countryside, 1897) and Nella campagna toscana (In the Tuscan Countryside, 1908), while a final volume of short stories and recollections, Acqua Passata: storielle e aneddoti della mia vita (Water under the Bridge: Stories and Anecdotes of My Life), appeared posthumously in 1921. As a school inspector, he was also very interested in education and wrote several children’s books and textbooks.

Biography Born in the rural village of Monterotondo Marittimo (Grosseto), in Maremma, where his father served as a municipal doctor, 8 April 1843. Enrolled at the University of Pisa, School of Agriculture, 1859; graduated in 1863. First worked as a civil engineer in Florence and then for the Ministry of Education, acting as a school inspector. In 1901, he began working at the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence and was elected member of the Accademia della Crusca. Died in Empoli (Florence), on 25 February 1921. STEFANO ADAMI

FUMETTI Selected Works

Further Reading

Collections Tutti gli scritti, Milan: Trevisini, 1956.

Poetry ‘‘Cento poesie in vernacolo pisano,’’ 1872.

Fiction Le veglie di Neri: paesi e figure della campagna toscana, 1884. All’aria aperta: scene e macchiette della campagna toscana, 1897. Nella campagna toscana, 1908. Acqua passata: storielle e aneddoti della mia vita, 1921. Foglie al vento: novelle, ricordi e altri scritti, 1922. Il ciuco di Melesecche: storielline in prosa e in versi, 1922.

Other Napoli a occhio nudo, 1878. Taccuino di viaggio, 2003.

Adami, Giacomo (editor), Omaggio a Renato Fucini: atti del Convegno di studi Renato Fucini nel centocinquantenario della nascita, Pisa: Goliardica, 1995. Borri, Teresa, Renato Fucini: la vita e le opere, Pescara: Attraverso l’Abruzzo, 1976. Fabiani, Vittorio, A spasso col Fucini, Empoli: Caparrini, 1956. Giusti, Mariangela (editor), Un convegno a Monterotondo in onore di Renato Fucini, Monterotondo Marittimo (Grosseto): Adver Agency, 1993. Iermano, Toni, Esploratori delle nuove Italie. Identita` regionali e spazio narrativo nella letteratura del secondo Ottocento, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Matucci, Elisabetta, and Paola Barbadori Lande (editors), I macchiaioli di Renato Fucini, Florence: Pananti, 1985. Sbrocchi, Leonard, Renato Fucini: l’uomo e l’opera, Florence: D’Anna, 1977. Vettori, Vittorio, ‘‘Renato Fucini,’’ in Letteratura italiana: i minori, vol. 4, Milan: Marzorati, 1962.

FUMETTI In order to outline a history of comics—or fumetti as the medium is known in Italy after the characteristic word balloons that resemble puffs of smoke ( fumo)—it is necessary to remark first on the difficulties of defining both the parameters of the genre and its origins. The term ‘‘comics’’ describes a narrative constituted by the interaction of images in sequential order, usually integrated by a text incorporated directly into the image: a minimal definition that, however, should be open to any number of innovations and variations. The fundamental characteristics of the medium, such as the use of word balloons, the conventions establishing the spatial and temporal relations among the separate panels, the creation of recurring characters, etc., become codified by the beginning of the twentieth century, and a long-standing tradition has associated the birth of comics with the apparition of the character ‘‘Yellow Kid’’ in R. F. Outcault’s series of newspaper cartoons Hogan’s Alley in 1895. However, since the 1970s, numerous historians, from David Kunzle in the United States to Alfredo Castelli in Italy, have challenged this perspective, by suggesting that the Yellow Kid is an important stage in a long process of evolution that

had begun at least two centuries before and possibly even earlier. In Italy, it is possible to identify a number of cultural products in between classical comics and older forms of popular illustrated narrative that have affected in important ways the development of the medium. Thanks to the innovations in printing and in the technology for the reproduction of images, throughout the nineteenth century publishers experimented with publications for children and adolescents, both books and periodicals, in which illustrations had a crucial role. Among them, Il novellino (1899) was the first to present to its Italian audience examples of American comic strips, including, in 1904, a Yellow Kid cartoon. The first giornalino (little newspaper), as such publications came to be known, to include foreign and Italian comic strips on a regular basis, however, was the famous Corriere dei piccoli (The Children’s Courier), founded in 1908 as the counterpart for children of the prestigious newspaper Il corriere della sera. The characteristic feature of the comics of the Corriere dei piccoli, imitated by its competitors, was the rejection of the balloons in favor of often precious and affected rhymed couplets of octosyllabic verses at the foot of the 787

FUMETTI individual panels, thus both attenuating the sometimes caustic humor of the original, in the case of translations, and perpetuating the separation and relative independence of text and images. Furthermore, while in the United States comic strips appeared in newspapers and from their inception they addressed the general public, in Italy instead they were associated with children—an association that still plagues the medium—and often characterized by a pedagogical intent. The work of the Italian illustrators who devoted themselves to these early comics often displays the influence of contemporary artistic modernism, from art nouveau in the case of Antonio Rubino (1880–1964) to Futurism in that of Sto, pseudonym of the versatile Sergio Tofano (1886–1973), best known for his work for the theater, who in 1917 created Il signor Bonaventura, one of the most enduring and beloved characters of the Corriere dei piccoli. By the late 1910s, the educational and propagandistic potential of the fumetti became evident, with magazines like the nationalist periodical for the army La tradotta (The Troop-train) or the socialist Cuore (Heart), founded in 1920 and closed by the Fascist authorities in 1923. As with cinema and the radio, the regime quickly took advantage of the expressive possibilities of comics with Il giornale dei Balilla, named after the Fascist youth organization (retitled Il Balilla after 1925, when it became a supplement of the Fascist daily Il popolo d’Italia). In addition to the established Corriere dei piccoli, the major competitor of Il Balilla for the minds and hearts of young Italians was the Catholic Il giornalino (1924), a remarkably long-lived publication sold not only at newsstands but also directly through the parishes, and strengthened by the unofficial imprimatur of the church. These three periodicals, like their more or less successful competitors, were often characterized by a fundamentally traditionalist ideology that foregrounded family values, obedience to one’s elders or superiors, and, especially in the case of Il Balilla, patriotism and loyalty to the ‘‘Fascist revolution.’’ 1932 constituted a turning point with the publication of two magazines featuring fully developed comics that consistently use balloons and internal captions rather than the external texts typical of their predecessors. The first, Jumbo, presented mostly English material, often Italianicized (a practice that remained widespread well into the 1940s), so that, for instance, Walter Booth’s Rob the Rover received a Fascist makeover, becoming Lucio l’avanguardista. Its good sales demonstrated the appeal of adventure comics for an audience that had 788

yet to be recognized by publishers, namely young adults. On 31 December 1932 the Florentine publisher Nerbini launched Topolino (Mickey Mouse), under the direction of Collodi Nipote (Paolo Lorenzini, 1875–1958), subsequently acquired by Mondadori in 1935 (since 1988, all Disney publications are managed directly by Walt Disney Company Italia). In addition to stories of various Disney characters, Topolino introduced several American adventure strips as well as some of the best work by Italian authors before the war, such as the western Kit Carson (1937) by Rino Albertarelli (1908– 1974), and one of the first examples of science fiction featuring Italian characters and settings, the series Saturno contro la terra (Saturn Versus the Earth, 1937), coauthored by Cesare Zavattini (1902–1989) with Federico Pedrocchi (1907–1945) and the artist Giovanni Scolari (1882–1956). The continued success of Topolino, which since 1949 features only Disney characters, is indeed remarkable, especially if compared to the relative disinterest in Disney comics in the United States after the heyday of Carl Barks’ Donald Duck between the 1940s and the 1960s. Since the 1950s, the American stories have been supplemented with an increasingly sophisticated Italian production that has resulted in the formation of a sort of Italian Disney ‘‘school’’ whose comics have been distributed in numerous countries, including the United States itself. The comic book that most captured the imagination of readers in the 1930s, however, was Nerbini’s L’avventuroso (The Adventurous, 1934), which published most of the major series of the ‘‘classical age’’ of American comics, from Lee Falk and Phil Davis’ Mandrake to Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon, to name only a few. These and other early masters of American adventure strips—Hal Foster, Burne Hogarth—had a lasting influence on Italian artists and writers of the period, although with significant differences due to the distinctive context in which their stories appeared: Working in installments of a certain number of pages, Italian comics creators were in fact free of some of the restrictions imposed by the newspaper comic strip on their American colleagues, and they were thus able to develop specific compositional and narrative strategies. But the cultural influence of American comics was more profound: As Giulio Cuccolini has suggested, by presenting heroes that often escaped the stiflingly nationalist and provincial cultural atmosphere of the Fascist regime, they influenced the youth in a way that is comparable to American literature at the level of high culture. Il vittorioso

FUMETTI (The Victorious, 1937), the Catholic answer to L’avventuroso, never quite matched the sales of its rival, but was equally important because it featured almost exclusively Italian material and formed the testing ground for a whole generation of artists and writers, such as Caesar (Kurt Caesar, 1906– 1974), who, with Romano il legionario (Romano the Legionnaire, 1938), produced one of the most blatant and popular examples of comics as Fascist propaganda; Benito Jacovitti (1923–1997), the creator of a plethora of humorous and surrealistic characters such as the chamomile-drinking cowboy Cocco Bill (1957); and Walter Molino (1915–1997), who abandoned comics after 1941 and became one of the best-known illustrators in Italy with his covers for the weekly La domenica del corriere. As it did with other forms of popular culture, the Fascist regime sought to control the production of comics, first by encouraging the publication of stories that glorified the nation, its history, and its policies (such as the colonial conquest of Ethiopia), then by forbidding the publication of foreign material in 1939 (with the exception of Disney stories, until the entry of the United States into World War II in 1942). The transition to the postwar period is marked by a series of resumptions and discontinuities. American comics reappeared, often in the revived version of prewar periodicals (Il vittorioso, L’intrepido), and some Italian characters survived the political transformations of the country. During this period numerous and cheaply produced publications appeared, often short-lived, in the most diverse genres: comedy, masked heroes, science fiction, war, exotic adventure, mystery, and, most popular of all, western. In the late 1940s and 1950s, two trends are notable: the beginning of the crisis of the traditional giornalino featuring multiple stories and characters (by the early 1970s many closed or were transformed into youth publications also featuring articles on music, sports, etc.) and the emergence of single-character or single-genre comic books, in a variety of sizes and formats; a reduced interest for American characters matched by the increased popularity of Italian comics, usually set in exotic and foreign locales. The great success story of this period is Tex, the longestrunning, single-character comic book in Italian history and a veritable cultural institution, which was created in 1948 by the writer Gianluigi Bonelli (1908–2001) and the artist Aurelio Galleppini (1917–1994), who often signed his work as Galep. Tex rose above its competitors in the overcrowded field of western comics by offering creative and complex stories, illustrated with great realism and

dynamism by Galleppini. Significantly, Tex anticipated Hollywood in rethinking the American myth of ‘‘the conquest of the West.’’ Bonelli was also the creator of numerous other characters, including Il vendicatore dell’ovest, Hondo, El Kid (illustrated by Dino Battaglia), and Davy Crockett. In the 1960s, the cultural status and the relationship of the medium with its audience undergoes a series of major transformations. During the 1950s, educators and pedagogues increasingly saw comics as a threat to the social and scholastic maturation of young readers, and a number of bills were unsuccessfully introduced in Parliament in order to censor fumetti. Publishers responded by adopting a self-imposed code of conduct (not unlike that of the ‘‘Comic Code Authority’’ in the United States), which was indicated by the insignia ‘‘GM’’ (Garanzia morale, ‘‘Pledge of Morality’’). The debate reignited in 1962 with the appearance of Diabolik, written by Angela and Luciana Giussani. Diabolik, which featured a master criminal a` la Fantomas or Rocamble as the eponymous ‘‘hero,’’ initiated a fundamentally Italian genre, the fumetto nero (dark comics). With the publication in 1964 of Kriminal and Satanik, two series written by Max Bunker (Luciano Secchi, 1939–) and drawn by Magnus (Roberto Raviola, 1939–1996), the original theme of crime was supplemented by violence (bordering on sadism), explicit sexual situations, and a penchant for the macabre. The erotic element was cultivated by the second major current of popular comics that emerged during the 1960s: pornographic or ‘‘sexy’’ fumetti for adults. At the same time, the medium is recognized as a mainstream cultural expression. Fans and collectors research the history of comics, and promote fan clubs and publications, which are often remarkable for their philological rigor. Sociologists, psychologists, semioticians, and art and literary historians initiate a serious critical debate, with numerous public initiatives: exhibitions, seminars, conferences, and works such as Umberto Eco’s essays on Superman and Peanuts in Apocalittici e integrati (1964). In 1962, Giovanni Gandini founded Linus, the first comics magazine intended for a mature reader. Besides American strips (notably, Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts), it featured material by Italian authors and critical essays by contributors such as Oreste Del Buono, Elio Vittorini, and Eco. Linus and its less fortunate imitations (Sgt. Kirk, Eureka, Il Mago) signal the emancipation of comics from the ghetto of purely escapist and entertaining literature for children. The 1960s are also a decade marked by experimentation and the 789

FUMETTI birth of the fumetto d’autore (auteur comics). In 1965, Valentina, the most famous character created by Guido Crepax (1933–2003), made her debut in Linus, and soon became the protagonist of a series of oneiric, surrealistic, and erotic stories. Crepax breaks with many of the conventions of the medium and develops a fluid and psychedelic style (at times self-complacently Baroque), which is influenced by contemporary art. In 1969, he published L’astronave pirata (The Pirate Starship) and La casa matta (The Mad House), which marks the appearance of a new character, Bianca. For publisher Franco Maria Ricci, he also adapted Histoire d’O and SacherMasoch’s La venere in pelliccia (Venus in Furs). In 1967, Hugo Pratt (1927–1995) creates Una ballata del mare salato (A Ballad of the Salt Sea), first published in Sgt. Kirk, where he introduces his most popular character: Corto Maltese, wanderer and adventurer, protagonist of magical and nostalgic stories set around World War I. Free of any false moralism or hypocrisy, Valentina and Corto Maltese reflect the nonconformist and critical temper of the countercultural movements of the 1960s. The more radical phenomenon of American ‘‘underground comix’’ finds its counterpart in Italy in a series of satirical and visionary magazines of the 1970s, which mix comics, cartoons, and other types of texts and illustrations: Cannibale (Cannibal, 1977), Il male (Evil, 1978), and Frigidaire (1980) established Tanino Liberatore (1953–), Filippo Sco`zzari (1946–), Stefano Tamburini (1955–1986), and Andrea Pazienza (1956–1988) as symbols of the young generation of 1977. Especially Pazienza’s characters (Pentothal, Zanardi) represented their anxieties and dysfunctions. Popular comics also find new expressions. Max Bunker and Magnus’ Alan Ford (1969), about a ragtag group of secret agents whose comical adventures display a cutting satirical edge, is one of the enduring successes of the 1960s. In the 1970s, new characters are imported from the United States (Marvel superheroes, most notably); new periodicals are founded, including more mature versions of the giornalini (e.g., Lanciostory, 1975); more complex types of popular comics are launched, such as the poetic and realistic western series Ken Parker, created by writer Giancarlo Berardi (1949–) and artist Ivo Milazzo (1947–) in 1977. A new generation of Italian auteurs emerge. Among them, Milo Manara (1945–), best known for his ironic and erotic tales, and for his collaborations with Hugo Pratt and with Federico Fellini; Vittorio Giardino (1946–), the creator of Max Friedman, protagonist of stories of espionage set against the 790

political background of the 1940s; Lorenzo Mattotti (1954–), known for his original pictorial style poised between Expressionism and abstraction. In the 1980s, however, the market undergoes a decline, resulting in a drastic cut in publications, particularly the ones for younger readers. The launching of new and more sophisticated magazines for adults (Orient Express, 1982; Comic Art, 1984) does not compensate for the losses. In 1986, the publishing house Bonelli produced the phenomenal Dylan Dog by Tiziano Sclavi (1953–), a black-and-white horror series with profoundly humane characters, inventive plots, and rich intertextual and metaliterary references. Dylan Dog is an investigator of the paranormal, accompanied in his adventures by a sidekick who looks remarkably like Groucho Marx. The extraordinary critical and popular success of the series is in great part responsible for the renewed interest in the medium during the 1990s, when publications in the most varied formats and for the most diverse audiences appear. At the same time, public initiatives (such as comics fairs and prizes) as well as the consolidation of a critical tradition with specialized journals, such as the veteran Fumo di china (Ink Smoke, 1978), have established the cultural legitimacy of the fumetti. At the beginning of the new century, the most significant phenomenon is perhaps the more extensive involvement with comics by well-known writers. If the publication of Dino Buzzati’s Poema a fumetti (Comic Book Poem) was viewed in 1969 as a kind of literary stunt, Eco’s La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (Queen Loana’s Mysterious Flame, 2004) was not. Today, the collaboration of successful novelists such as Carlo Lucarelli, Valerio Evangelisti, and Nicolo` Ammaniti with artists Onofrio Catacchio (1964–), Francesco Mattioli (1973–), and Davide Fabbri attests to the versatility and the newfound status of the fumetti. LUCA SOMIGLI

Further Reading Barbieri, Daniele, I linguaggi del fumetto, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Becciu`, Leonardo, Il fumetto in Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Bertieri, Claudio, Fumetti all’italiana: Le fiabe a quadretti 1908–1945, Rome: Comic Art, 1989. Bertusi, Daniele, Tiziano Sclavi, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2000. Beseghi, Emy, and Antonio Faeti (editors), La scala a chiocciola. Paura, horror, finzioni: dal romanzo gotico a Dylan Dog, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1993.

FUTURISM Bono, Gianni, Guida al fumetto italiano, 1994, 2nd ed., Milan: Epierre, 2003. Boschi, Luca, Frigo, valvole e balloons: Viaggio in vent’anni di fumetto italiano d’autore, Rome: Theoria, 1997. Brancato, Sergio, Fumetti: Guida ai comics nel sistema dei media, Roma: Datanews, 1994. Carabba, Claudio, Il fascismo a fumetti, Rimini: Guaraldi, 1973. Castelli, Alfredo, Aspettando Yellow Kid: Il fumetto prima dell’industria del fumetto, Lucca: Museo Italiano del Fumetto, 2004. Cuccolini, Giulio C., ‘‘Profilo storico-critico del fumetto in Italia,’’ in Enciclopedia mondiale del fumetto, edited by Maurice Horn and Luciano Secchi, Milan: Editoriale Corno, 1978. Eco, Umberto, Apocalittici e integrati, Milan: Bompiani, 1964. Faeti, Antonio, La freccia di Ulceda: Di fumetti e altro, Rome: Comic Art, 1990.

Faeti, Antonio, Manifesti di Mattotti, Milan: Nuages, 2002. Favari, Pietro, Le nuvole parlanti: Un secolo di fumetti tra arte e mass media, Bari: Dedalo, 1996. Fossati, Franco, Fumetti, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Kunzle, David, History of the Comic Strip, 2 vols., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973 and 1990. Laterza, Rossella and Marisa Vinella, Le donne di carta: Personaggi femminili nella storia del fumetto, Bari: Dedalo, 1980. Sco`zzari, Filippo, Prima pagare poi ricordare. Da «Cannibale» a «Frigidaire»: Storia di un manipolo di ragazzi geniali, Rome: Castelvecchi, 1997. Sessa, Maurizio, La bottega delle nuvole: La storia del fumetto da Nerbini ai disegnatori toscani, Florence: Edizioni Medicea, 1995. Spinazzola, Vittorio, L’immaginazione divertente: Il giallo il rosa il porno il fumetto, Milan: Rizzoli, 1995.

FUTURISM Futurism was founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) in 1909 as a literary movement, only to expand soon after to include other arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theater, photography, cinema, and, to a certain degree, politics. The inaugural mapping of Futurism as a literary movement appeared in Marinetti’s manifesto, Fondazione e manifesto del Futurismo (The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism), published, in French, on 20 February 1909 in Le Figaro. Futurist aesthetics has its roots in the anticonformism and irrationalism that permeated literature, the arts (symbolism, Impressionism, cubism), and philosophy (Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Benedetto Croce) at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as in the new developments in science and technology. In a literary sense, the sources of these thematics can be found in the nineteenth century, in the works of the poe`tes maudits (damned poets) and various decadents, especially the likes of Jules Laforgue and Emile Verhaeren. Soon after the publication of Marinetti’s founding manifesto, other more specific manifestos appeared before his technical manifesto: Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Painters, 1910), Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, 1910), Manifesto dei drammaturghi

futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights, 1911), and Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 1912). With its desire to reject tradition and all its representatives in favor of a more modern and technological modus vivendi and ars operandi, Futurism figures as the first twentieth-century avantgarde of the Western world, and it subsequently influenced most other European movements, from Russian Futurism to dadaism, and surrealism, to name a few. In addition, the iconoclastic declaration of aggressiveness and defiance of Marinetti’s original manifesto had a curious side-effect: It seemed to launch a trend of manifesto writing that expanded beyond the Italian movement to these other European avant-gardes, many of whom eventually perpetuated their own genres of manifesto writing in the decades to follow. The main themes of Futurism, as outlined in Marinetti’s founding manifesto, included anarchical vitalism, love for danger, rebellion against passe´isme or passatismo (love for the past), the destruction of academies and museums, the achievements of the technological civilization, the machine as a symbol of the new aesthetics, speed, contempt of women, and violence as an expression of vital impulse. According to Marinetti, the various developments 791

FUTURISM of technology produced profound changes in both the physical world and the human psyche. The world acquired a new dimension in speed that, in its various manifestations—trains, automobiles, airplanes, telegraph, telephone—revolutionized the traditional way of life, as well as the aesthetic perception of it. Marinetti encapsulated his new aesthetic principle, the ‘‘bellezza della velocita`’’ (beauty of speed) when he declared that ‘‘un automobile ruggente [...] e` piu` bello della Vittoria di Samotracia’’ (a roaring car [...] is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973). Marinetti, consequently, raised technology to a symbol of unmitigated vitalism. The Futurist aesthetics of speed reflected the poetic perception of a chaotic universe, which allowed the writer to express simultaneously the complexity of the whole by means of verbal syntheses. Chaos was elevated to the status of a poetic principle and paradoxically incorporated into a carefully thought-out system based on the concept of simultaneity. Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) and the other Futurist painters, for instance, defined during this period their goal as ‘‘la simultaneita` degli stati d’animo nell’opera d’arte. [...] Il che significa simultaneita` d’ambiente, e quindi dislocazione e smembramento degli oggetti, sparpagliamento e fusione dei dettagli, liberati dalla logica comune e indipendenti gli uni dagli altri’’ (the simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art. [...] This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973). Simultaneity therefore is creation. Robert Delauney espoused a similar concept, which later was quoted by Guillaume Apollinaire: ‘‘The simultaneity of colors through simultaneous contrasts and through all the (uneven) quantities that emanate from the colors, in accordance with the way they are expressed within the movement represented—that is the only reality one can construct’’ (Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902– 1918, 1971). Delauney underscores the importance of colors, the artist’s primary medium of expression. In applying this concept of simultaneity to poetic invention, one shifts the emphasis to words and how they relate to each other. The result is thus a series of lines (or verse), often short and abrupt, that do not necessarily follow any discursive or logical unity. These lines may consist of disconnected sentences, mere phrases, or single words, if not mere parts thereof. 792

The Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912) was the first specific articulation of the literary aesthetics of Futurism. It was followed by several other ‘‘technical’’ declarations, among them Risposta alle obiezioni (Answer to the Objections, 1912), Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza fili—Parole in liberta` (Destruction of Syntax—Wireless Imagination—Words in Freedom, 1913), and Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilita` numerica (Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914). The Futurists advocated the destruction of traditional poetic language regulated by the laws of causality in favor of a new language based on intuition. Most significant are the rejection of the pronoun I and the use of verbs only in the infinitive form. The elements superimposed on language by a logical structure (conjunctions, adverbs, adjectives, verbal conjugations, and punctuation) were then eliminated, and the reduction of language to its essential parts (substantives and verbs in the infinitive) thereby provided the poet with a code system capable of bridging the gap between perception and expression. This new poetic language consisted of parole in liberta` or words in freedom related to each other by analogy, according to the principle of ‘‘Immaginazione senza fili’’ (wireless imagination), that is, without the aid of syntactical connecting ‘‘wires.’’ The juxtaposition of parole in liberta` generated a ‘‘catena di analogie’’ (chain of analogies) that usurped the function that was proper to syntax, as it connected by simultaneous intuition what was once connected by means of a logical process. Freed hence from the prison of traditional syntax, the words in freedom were supposed to communicate immediately the physical qualities of the object (its color, weight, odor, dynamism). The ‘‘distruzione della sintassi’’ (destruction of syntax) was followed by the ‘‘rivoluzione tipografica’’ (typographical revolution) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973), as words in freedom were visually emphasized by the use of different fonts and inks. The creation of tables of words in freedom followed, where words were no longer arranged in a linear succession but composed figuratively in order to form a picture, thereby constituting the first examples of concrete poetry. Along with literature, painting and sculpture proved equally significant in the early years of Futurism. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra`, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini authored two important proclamations on painting, La pittura futurista. Manifesto tecnico (Futurist

FUTURISM Painting. Technical Manifesto, 1910) and Les exposants au public (The Exhibitors to the Public, 1912), while Boccioni composed his Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista. Paintings such as The City Rises (Boccioni, 1910), Memories of the Night (Russolo, 1911), Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (Carra`, 1912), and Self Portrait (Severini, 1912) all tried to convey in some manner the tenets espoused in the manifestos, though one clearly notices the influence of cubism as well as a sprinkling of neoimpressionism. With regard to sculpture, the two pieces that best exemplify the Futurist aesthetic are surely Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and Balla’s Boccioni’s Fist—Lines of Force (1915). Futurism, a particularly urban-based movement, glorified the industrial cities of the north— Turin, Genoa, Milan—and scorned museum cities, especially Venice, Florence, and Rome. In this sense, then, architecture proved to be an exciting Futurist enterprise, though short-lived, as Antonio Sant’Elia, its main exponent, died in battle in 1916. He was much more a theorist than a practitioner and his drawings were exhibited in 1914 with the group Nuove Tendenze, of which he was a founder. This exhibition proved important for a number of reasons: first, it demonstrated how Sant’Elia’s architectural concepts were consonant with the Futurist aesthetic; second, it completed the list of disciplines (e.g., literature, painting, sculpture) to which architecture had yet to be added (it had remained, so to speak, a vacant field); third, the exhibition came with its own ‘‘manifesto,’’ Sant’Elia having composed his theoretical Messaggio, which Marinetti eventually re-edited into the manifesto L’architettura futurista (Futurist Architecture, 1914). The headquarters of Futurism were in Milan, where several years before the birth of the movement Marinetti had already established a journal, Poesia (1905–1909), and, soon afterwards, a publishing house under the imprint Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, financed by Marinetti himself. The aim of Poesia was to acquaint the Italian public with contemporary poetry outside of Italy, especially symbolism. ‘‘Edizioni Futuriste di Poesie,’’ in turn, was dedicated to the publication of Futurist works and manifestos. Some of the poets who subscribed to Futurism in the initial years (1909–1915) include: Luciano Folgore (1888–1966), Corrado Govoni (1884–1965), Paolo Buzzi (1874–1956), Francesco Cangiullo (1888–1986), Enrico Cavacchioli (1885–1954), and Auro D’Alba (1888– 1965). Most of them were represented in the first

anthology of Futurist poetry, I poeti futuristi (The Futurist Poets, 1912). Three other writers, Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), Ardengo Soffici (1879–1965), and Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974), also major theorists and practitioners of what was to be considered Florentine Futurism associated with the Florentine magazine Lacerba (1913– 1915), and gave their support to Futurism in the early years of the movement (1909–1915), only to disavow it publicly: Palazzeschi in 1914 in a Dichiarazione (Declaration) in La Voce, and the three together with a critical piece in Lacerba, Futurismo e Marinettismo (Futurism and Marinettism, 1915). If it is easy to establish the birth date of Futurism, 1909, with Marinetti’s first manifesto, it is much more difficult to determine the date of its death. It is certain that the decline of the first, truly revolutionary, phase of Futurism coincided with the Futurists’ involvement with the interventionist movement and their participation in World War I. After the war, the original group disintegrated, and a new generation of poets assembled around Marinetti. The poetry that appeared in the anthology I nuovi poeti futuristi (New Futurist Poets, 1925) is, for the most part, a simulationrepetition of the earlier Futurist aesthetics. The movement lost its force as a countercultural phenomenon in this later stage, and, although Futurist works continued to appear until the early 1940s (its most notable results were theatrical texts, the so-called Futurist ‘‘syntheses’’), Futurism a´ la Marinetti was co-opted by the Fascist regime. The early proponents of the movement saw in Futurism the possibility of again bestowing upon Italy its former primary role in the Western world, making it once again both a political and cultural power, with its new aesthetic as both a way of life as well as a new mode of cultural productions. The authors of the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Boccioni, Carra`, Russolo, Balla, Severini) perhaps best summarized the movement’s philosophy early on. According to them, through the exaltation and creation of a modern and contemporary, technological society, early twentieth-century Italy was to become the capital of Western culture. In order to do so, it also had to detach itself emotionally from its past, abandon the ‘‘vile pigrizia’’ (foul laziness) of those who depend on tradition and replace it with what Futurists considered living art, accomplished through the ‘‘tangibili miracoli della vita contemporanea’’ (tangible miracles of contemporary life) (Apollonio, Futurist Manifestos, 1973). The impact of Futurism in its first stage was especially felt not only in all of Europe but also in 793

FUTURISM other parts of the world, such as North America, Latin America, Japan, and China. Subsequent avant-garde movements, including, in part, the Italian Gruppo ‘63 and the more recent experiments in concrete and visual poetry, are indebted to Futurism. ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI See also: F.T. Marinetti Further Reading Apollinaire, Guillaume, Apollinaire on Art: Essays and Reviews, 1902–1918, edited by Leroy C. Breunig, New York: The Viking Press, 1971. Apollonio, Umbro (editor), Futurist Manifestos, New York: Viking, 1973. Berghaus, Gu¨nter, The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings: 1899–1909, Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995. Berghaus, Gu¨nter, Italian Futurist Theatre 1909–1944, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Bohn, Willard, The Other Futurism. Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

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Crispolti, Enrico, Storia e critica del Futurismo, Bari: Laterza, 1986. De Maria, Luciano and Laura Biondi (editors), Marinetti e il futurismo, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Drudi Gambillo, Maria and Teresa Fiore (editors), Archivi del futurismo, 2 vols., Rome: De Luca, 1958–1962. Godoli, Ezio (editor), Il dizionario del futurismo, 2 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 2001. Martin, Marianne, Futurist Art and Theory 1909–1915, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. I nuovi poeti futuristi, Rome: Poesia, 1925. Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. I poeti futuristi, Milan: Poesia, 1912. Salaris, Claudia, Storia del futurismo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1985. Somigli, Luca, Legitimizing the Artist. Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Tisdall, Caroline, and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Verdone, Mario (editor), Teatro italiano d’avanguardia: drammi e sintesi futuristi, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1970. Verdone, Mario, II movimento futurista, Rome: Lucarini, 1986. White, John J., Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant Garde, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

G CARLO EMILIO GADDA (1893–1973) he occasionally accomplished within a single sentence. This trait, present in most of the author’s texts, is easily discerned in the short stories of Disegni milanesi (Milanese Drawings), the subtitle for the 1944 collection L’Adalgisa. Milan emerges as the subject of L’Adalgisa’s sketches, which are not stories, precisely, for Gadda’s preference for the fragment can be seen not only in this work but in the later masterworks as well from Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana; 1957) to La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief, 1963), where inconclusiveness and incompletion have been well documented. The sketches celebrate ‘‘la Milano che dispare’’ (the Milan that is disappearing); the city’s history; its urban plan, architecture, customs, inhabitants; their foibles and their Lombard dialect. Throughout the ten sketches, Gadda obviously rejoiced in the Lombard idiom, amply demonstrated by the lengthy notes that accompany each story. As Gian Paolo Biasin has detailed in his 1997 essay ‘‘Of Bards, Lombards, and Longobards,’’ the linguistic and etymological work Gadda does in L’Adalgisa is taken up again in his nonfiction meditations on language, especially in the essays Come lavoro (How I Work), Le belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle tecniche (Belles Lettres and Their Technical Contribution), and Lingua letteraria e lingua dell’uso (Literary Language and Language of Use), all collected in I viaggi la morte (Travels, Death, 1958). As in the later works, where accumulation and chaotic enumeration

Carlo Emilio Gadda’s contribution to Italian literature can be classified as ‘‘modernist,’’ thus aligning the author with other European writers like James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Robert Musil. This denomination owes in no small part to Gadda’s linguistic adventurousness; to the stylistic characteristics of pluralism, fragmentation, and accumulation; and to the convergence of philosophy, science, and the history of ideas and consciousness, which bear testimony to twentieth-century developments in European culture, to the waxing of machine culture, and the waning of an understanding of society and culture based on a humanist’s perception. Before authoring some of the most widely received and acclaimed narrative texts in Italian literature, Gadda trained and worked as an engineer. The apprenticeships for these twin careers make constant appearance throughout his corpus, wherein the author’s technical expertise of the physical world comes together with his profound philological interest. Much has been said of the author’s ‘‘plurilinguism,’’ as critic Gianfranco Contini described his work and that of other linguistically experimental authors (La letteratura italiana, 1974). ‘‘Plurilinguistic’’ also describes the many different Italian regional dialects found in Gadda’s oeuvre, but it should also be understood in a wider context that features a range of formal genres that spans, for example, the grotesque, low comic, and the most exalted; his prose is characterized by virtuosic leaps between these two poles, something 795

CARLO EMILIO GADDA would figure prominently, so too in L’Adalgisa, so that their Lombard names will not be forgotten, Gaddus the narrator reads from the social registry (or telephone directory) of Milan. The collection showcases an engineer’s attention to structural detail, something evident in careful linguistic analysis of the dialect, both in direct and indirect discourse, but also in the sketches’ very composition, particularly the author’s footnotes (at least one of which, concerning the crowning of Napoleon as King of Italy in 1805 in Milan’s cathedral, is five pages in length). The notes, which could be looked on as fragmentary analyses in their own right, play an essential intertextual role: Not only do they emphasize the omnipresence of Gadda/Gaddus, but they also provide information about characters in the sketches that is otherwise unknowable. Stylistically, then, the Gaddian corpus depends on the fragment and its relation to other fragments, which, multiplied and integrated, became his epistemological foundation. In discussing multiplicity, Italo Calvino observed that the multiplication of possibility (known also as accumulation or chaotic enumeration) was the author’s attempt to represent a world that is ‘‘a knot, a tangled skein of yarn’’ (Lezioni americane, 1988). In addition to serving as the author’s stylistic trope, fragmentary multiplicity also figured thematically. Gadda’s explorations of such philosophers as Leibniz and Spinoza may have imposed upon him the need (or predilection for) deep processes of rational thought, but the author’s characters do not always enjoy the same systematic, surety of Dasein, or being-in-the-world. On the contrary, thematically, Gadda’s characters seem caught in the jaws of the dilemma of modernity: The world’s previous (philosophical, geopolitical, aesthetic, socio-cultural) unity is shattered and cannot be pieced together again. Some of the author’s characters laugh it off, but the oeuvre’s most memorable protagonists—Ingravallo in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana, Gonzalo of La cognizione del dolore—instead give way to violent, desperate rage. Themes that would manifest themselves in more elaborate fashion in the mature works can be seen in Gadda’s earliest writings from the 1920s and 1930s, specifically, in his first published collection of short stories, La Madonna dei filosofi (Philosophers’ Madonna, 1931). An interest in Freud and in psychoanalysis infuses the short story that lends its name to the title of the collection with the sort of self-awareness and irony that also characterized Italo Svevo’s work. The neurotic engineer, 796

Baronfo, finds comfort in much the same way that Boethius does, in the allegorical (and feminized) figure of Philosophy in his Consolatio philosophiae. And if, in La Madonna dei filosofi, there is need for comfort, it is owed to the presence of sorrow, woven here, as elsewhere in Gadda’s work, from parts both autobiographical and fictional. The young Maria Ripamonti’s fiance´ dies in battle, not unlike Gadda’s beloved brother, Enrico, a pilot who was killed in World War I; her life, much like that of the author, is haunted by this absence, which will always be grieved and never resolved. And while the linguistic embroidering for which Gadda would become so well known is here only muted, La Madonna dei filosofi presents ‘‘studi imperfetti’’ (imperfect studies), as Contini noted, which privilege the fragmented and incomplete, a formal choice, not to mention an ethical and philosophical position that Gadda would later embrace fully (La letteratura italiana, 1974). In La cognizione del dolore, mourning and melancholy form two cardinal axes in Gadda’s work. Indeed, the bereavement present in La Madonna dei filosofi (and that the author would make use of once more in his subsequent, more elaborate narratives) matches the elegiac tone set by parts of Il castello di Udine (The Castle at Udine, 1934). This collection of writings divided into four roughly equal parts (‘‘Il castello di Udine,’’ ‘‘Crociera mediterranea,’’ ‘‘Polemiche e pace,’’ and ‘‘Polemiche e pace nel direttissimo’’) predicates on the terse ‘‘Io non fui e non sono un umile fante, ma un soldato d’Italia’’ (I was and am not a simple foot soldier, but a soldier of Italy). And the lost and longed-for object of desire is not only Gadda’s fallen brother but also the evanescing, tragicomic world of the proper Lombard bourgeoisie. As Federica Pedriali has detailed, the mourning of Enrico is attested to by its long evolution in Gadda’s poetry (there are 23 poems in all), vastly underrepresented in Gadda scholarship due to the fact that they were not available for study until the early 1990s (‘‘The Mark of Cain,’’ 1997). The word most closely associated with Enrico is ‘‘sorriso’’ (smile), which hovers in the poems as it does in ‘‘La sala di basalte’’ (The Basalt Room): Un’ombra passa sul ponte.... / Come le ombre di quelli / Che sono passati sopra la terra / Avevano nel viso una luce / E un sorriso’’ (A shadow passes on the bridge.... / like the shadows of those who have passed over the earth / They had a light in their faces / And a smile). Gadda’s literary expression featured more polyvalence than linguistic registers alone. The appearance

CARLO EMILIO GADDA of wide and varied languages (literary and otherwise) corresponded to the ways in which Gadda’s works defy monovalent interpretation. Indeed, in both Quer pasticciaccio de via Merulana and La cognizione del dolore, the works for which he is best known and appreciated, polyvalence is crucial to both the form of the novels as well as their content. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana is set in 1927 and tells the story of Don Ciccio Ingravallo’s investigation of two crimes that happen within days of each other at the same address in Rome: Via Merulana 219. The first crime is the theft of some costume jewelry from the Venetian Countess Menecacci. The second is the vicious garotting murder of Liliana Balducci, a proper Roman signora who happens to be a friend of the detective’s. As L’Adalgisa did of Milan, Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana makes a subject out of the city of Rome, which seethes with life and explodes with excess, linguistic and otherwise. The fragment, which elsewhere in Gadda’s work has a more felicitous, humorous status, does not enjoy a similar fate in the novel. The detective knows he should approach the crimes rationally, but, in a failure of positivism that thrives elsewhere in Gadda’s works, Ingravallo finds he cannot. As he says to himself at the second crime scene, ‘‘La ragione gli diceva che i due delitti non avevano niente in commune...La ragione gli diceva di studiare separatemente i due casi di ‘palparli’ a fondo ma ognuno per se`’’ (Reason told him that the crimes had nothing to do with each other. Reason told him to study each one separately, massage them in depth but each one independent of the other). But reason cedes to chance or, as Ingravallo notes ‘‘L’ambo non esce cosı` di rado alla ruota di Napoli’’ (The double zero doesn’t come up so rarely in the Naples lottery), and the detective’s feeling is that he should pursue the crimes as related occurrences. In the first version, which Gadda published in installments in Letteratura in late 1946 and 1947, produces an unmistakable murderer and, therefore, a conclusion. However, in the decade that it took for Gadda to transform the shorter work into a novel, the suture that makes the gap between reason and chance disintegrated and, in the Garzanti version of 1957, Ingravallo is able to solve only the lesser of the two crimes and Liliana Balducci’s murderer is, at novel’s end, still unrevealed. In a 1973 interview with Dacia Maraini in E tu chi eri?, Gadda stated that, for him, the novel was complete. When Maraini asked if he meant literarily complete,

Gadda agreed, saying, ‘‘Il poliziotto capisce chi e` l’assassino e questo basta’’ (The police officer understands who the killer is and this is sufficient). The scream of rage, frustration, and sorrow that concludes Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana resurfaces in Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore. Set in the South American country Maradagal, the novel tells the story of Don Gonzalo de Pirobutirro, the rageful scion of a financially failing, fading aristocratic family. La cognizione del dolore also has a curious publication history in which a conclusion was added well after initial publication, making possible multiple interpretations. And the shocking murder of a mother, here the generous and innocuous Senora Elisabetta, is staged once more. The rage, pathos, and grotesque humor evident elsewhere in Gadda’s corpus visit the author’s 1967 essay-pamphlet (it is a hybrid genre), Eros e Priapo: Da furore a cenere (Eros and Priapus: From Fury to Ash, 1967). Thirty years after Fascism, Gadda made of Benito Mussolini a grotesque, larger-thanlife buffoon he lampooned with all the considerable late-career talent he could muster. As Peter Hainsworth shows, in Eros e Priapo Gadda ‘‘oscillates between analysis of Fascism as an objective phenomenon and a mode of writing which is contaminated with at least some of the features he lays at Mussolini’s door’’ (‘‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Gadda,’’ 1997). Carlo Emilio Gadda’s oeuvre offers examples of quintessentially twentieth-century themes and problems. The author’s texts all show an ironic dismay at the disintegration of the tenets (social, ethical, philosophical, and scientific) upon which the world, and particularly the embourgeoised, Milanese world of Gadda’s upbringing, was founded.

Biography Carlo Emilio Gadda was born on 18 November 1893 in Milan to Adele Lehr and Francesco Ippolito Gadda. He studied at Milan’s prestigious Parini high school and Istituto Tecnico Superiore. In 1915, Gadda enlisted in the army and fought in Adamello, Isonzo, and Tonale. He was taken as a prisoner of war by the Germans, which would serve as the basis for his Giornale di Guerra e prigionia. His brother Enrico’s death in combat was a loss he mourned for the rest of his life. After finishing his degree, Gadda worked as an electrical engineer in Italy and, from 1922–1924, in Argentina. 797

CARLO EMILIO GADDA Returning to Italy, he went to Rome, where he worked as an engineer for a private company from 1925 until 1931; in this period his literary career began with the Apologia manzoniana (1924), followed by contributions to the journal Solaria. In 1932 Gadda worked in the Vatican, where he remained until 1934. During this period, he published several collections of short stories and, after his mother’s death in 1936, he began writing novels, beginning the first draft of La cognizione del dolore. Gadda moved to Florence in 1940, where he made contact with influential scholars and writers and began writing the first sections of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, which appeared in serialized form in Letteratura in late 1946 and early 1947. He was awarded the Viareggio prize for Novelle dal ducato in fiamme in 1953. In the second half of the decade, he revised the serialized version of Quer pasticciaccio brutto and presented it to Garzanti Editors in Milan, who published it in 1957. Gadda moved to Rome in 1950, where he lived until his death on May 21, 1973. ELLEN NERENBERG Selected Works Collections Opere, 5 volumes, edited by Dante Isella, Milan: Garzanti, 1988–1993. Romanzi e racconti I, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella and Raffaella Rodondi, Milan: Garzanti, 1988. Romanzi e racconti II, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella and Raffaella Rodondi. Milan: Garzanti, 1989. Saggi Giornali Favole I, edited by Liliana Orlando, Clelia Martignoni, and Dante Isella. Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Saggi Giornali Favole II, edited by Claudio Vela, Gianmarco Gaspari, Giorgio Pinotti, Franco Gavazzeni, Dante Isella, and Maria Antonietta Terzoli, Milan: Garzanti, 1992. Scritti Vari e postumi, edited by Andrea Silvestri, Claudio Vela, Dante Isella, Paola Italia, and Giorgio Pinotti, Milan: Garzanti, 1993.

Fiction La Madonna dei filosofi, 1931. Il castello di Udine, 1934; revised edition, 1955. Le meraviglie d’Italia, 1939; revised edition, 1964. L’Adalgisa: Disegni milanesi, 1944. Il primo libro delle favole, 1952. Novelle dal ducato in fiamme, 1953. I sogni e la folgore, 1955. Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, 1957; as That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, translated by William Weaver, 1966. I viaggi la morte, 1958. Accoppiamenti giudiziosi, 1963.

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La cognizione del dolore, 1963; revised edition 1970; as Acquainted with Grief, translated by William Weaver, 1969. Eros e priapo (da furore a cenere), 1967.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1993.

Theater Gonnella buffone, 1955.

Other L’ingegner Fantasia: Lettera a Ugo Betti 1919–1930, edited by Giulio Ungarelli, 1984.

Further Reading Amigoni, Ferdinando, La piu` semplice macchina. Lettura freudiana del ‘Pasticciaccio,’ Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Andreini, Alba, Studi e testi gaddiani, Palermo: Sellerio, 1988. Baker, Margaret, ‘‘The Women Characters of Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ in Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Mirna Cicioni and Nicole Prunster, Providence: Berg, 1993. Bertone, Manuela, Il romanzo come sistema. Molteplicita` e differenza in Carlo Emilio Gadda, Rome: Riuniti, 1993. Bertone, Manuela, and Robert Dombroski (editors), Carlo Emilio Gadda, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Biasin, Gian Paolo, ‘‘Of Bards, Lombards and Longobards,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Bouchard, Norma, Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writings of the 1930s, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. Calvino, Italo, Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Milan: Garzanti, 1988; as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, translated by Patrick Creagh, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Carlino, Marcello, Aldo Mastropasqua, and Francesco Muzzioli (editors), Gadda, progettualita` e scrittura, Rome: Riuniti, 1987. Ceccaroni, Arnaldo, ‘‘Per una lettura del ‘Pasticciaccio’ di Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Lingua e stile, 5:1 (April 1970): 57–85. Contini, Gianfranco, La letteratura italiana, FlorenceMilan: Sansoni-Accademia, 1974. Dombroski, Robert S., Creative Entanglements: Gadda and the Baroque, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Ritratto di Gadda, Bari: Laterza, 1987. Gioanola, Elio, Carlo Emilio Gadda: topazi e altre gioie familiari, Milan: Jaca Books, 2004. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Fascism and Anti Fascism in Gadda,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Lucchini, Guido, L’istinto della combinazione. Le origini del romanzo in Carlo Emilio Gadda, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988. Maraini, Dacia, E tu chi eri? Milan: Bompiani, 1973.

CARLO EMILIO GADDA Pedriali, Federica, ‘‘The Mark of Cain: Mourning and Dissimulation in Gadda,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Roscioni, Gian Carlo, La disarmonia prestabilita, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Sbragia, Albert, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Terzoli, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Problemi di metodo in margine alle poesie di Gadda,’’ Strumenti critici, 9 May 1994: 287–308. Ungarelli, Giulio (editor), Gadda al microfono, Turin: Eri, 1974. Zublena, Paolo, ‘‘Il linguaggio tecnico-scientifico nel Gadda narratore,’’ Lingua e Stile, 34:2 (June 1999): 253–283.

LA COGNIZIONE DEL DOLORE, 1963 Novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Gadda initially published La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief) as a novel composed of two parts. A third and final part existed at the time of publication, but Gadda, to use the words of his translator, William Weaver, in the latter’s introduction, was either ‘‘unwilling’’ or ‘‘unable’’ to include it for publication. Gadda revised the third section and published the novel entire in 1970 (one year after, one notes, the section had already appeared as the novel’s conclusion in English translation). In view of its publication history, La cognizione del dolore emerges as a work of two separate moments and with correspondingly separate conclusions. Gadda began work on La cognizione del dolore after the death of his mother in 1936 and, in fact, the novel centers on the troubled and turbulent relationship between mother and son. La cognizione del dolore, first published in installments in Letteratura between 1938 and 1940, tells the story of Don Gonzalo de Pirobutirro, an anguished, youngish man who lives with his mother, Senora Elisabetta, in their ancestral villa in a fictitious,

hazily South American country, Maradagal, vaguely inspired by Gadda’s sojourn in Argentina in 1922–1923. Though his illness is never named, Don Gonzalo suffers clearly from a psychological disturbance that may be only a sort of homespun nervous breakdown or neurasthenia but may also be a disease whose etiology resembles some form of clinical depression. Gonzalo’s condition may also bring him close to the figure of the female hysteric, complicating the novel’s family romance and, ultimately, the matricide with which it is resolved. His mother is the only other inhabitant of the villa, and she appears as afraid of her son’s frequent tirades as she is of the nocturnal marauders whose raids on nearby villas underscore the need for the presence of the Nistitu`os provinciales de vigilancia para la noche (The Provincial Institute for Night Watchmen), which is always referred to, in both the Italian and English publications, in Gadda’s bowdlerized Spanish. Don Gonzalo is the proverbial angry young man and has been used as a window into Gadda’s ‘‘rage.’’ Indeed, the wordless howl Don Ciccio lets loose at the end of the unfinished and irresolvable crime of Liliana’s murder in Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana matures into Gonzalo’s irrepressible spleen, which he vents over the series of several chapters that give expression to his conversation with the good doctor of Pastrufazio, the fictitious town in Maradagal where the novel’s action is set. Gonzalo rages at everyone and no one and at everything: his mother, her peasant maid, modern capitalism that has depleted and devastated the family fortune and has made Gonzalo’s erudition both obsolete and foolish, the lack of education of the colonials, the Nistituos, the son of the tenant—no one or thing is spared his wrath, which, in the first two sections of the novel (those published in 1963), takes the shape of verbal abuse. The murder of Senora Elisabetta in the last section, added after 1969, could be seen as Gonzalo’s rage transformed into physical expression, but she could indeed have been the victim of the incredible thieves who have provided the need for the Nistituos’s night watchmen. Like Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana, La cognizione del dolore was written and rewritten over a period of 30 significant years in the cultural history of Italy, as it embraced, rejected, and ultimately repressed Fascism. There is no unequivocal (nor timely) critique of Fascism in Gadda’s oeuvre, though some critics such as Peter Hainsworth see the engagement between the thieves and the 799

CARLO EMILIO GADDA watchmen, pervasive in the novel and invisible to the reader, as reference to the ways in which Fascism worked in Italy: It is real and explicit enough to be feared but also interstitial enough to elude detection. ELLEN NERENBERG Editions First Edition Appeared serially in Letteratura, 1938–1940; La cognizione del dolore del dolore, Turin: Einaudi, 1963; revised edition 1970.

QUER PASTICCIACCIO BRUTTO DE VIA MERULANA, 1957 Novel by Carlo Emilio Gadda

Other Editions Opere. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 1, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella, and Raffaella Rodondi. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.

Translations As Acquainted with Grief, translated by William Weaver, New York: George Braziller, 1969 (includes third section, unpublished in Italian until 1970).

Further Reading Bertone, Manuela, ‘‘Murderous Desires: Gaddian Matricides from Novella seconda to La cognizione del dolore,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. De Ortega, Galli Gloria, ‘‘Pasticciaccio argentino o Carlo Emilio Gadda in Argentina,’’ Esperienze Letterarie, 23 (Winter 1998): 41–52. Di Spigno, Stelvio, ‘‘Conoscenza e realta` nella cognizione del dolore del dolore di Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, Sezione Romanza, 42 (January 2000): 269–280. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘Overcoming Oedipus: Self and Society in La cognizione del dolore,’’ Modern Language Notes, 99 (Winter 1984): 125–143. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Gadda,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Nevrosi e crisi dell’identita` sociale nella Cognizione del dolore,’’ Problemi, 60 (Winter 1981): 66–73. Pedriali, Federica G., ‘‘La bibbia illustrata dell’ingegnere. Osservazioni per un bestiario gaddiano,’’ Modern Language Notes, 117 (January 2002): 194–206. Pierangeli, Fabio, ‘‘Gadda, il medico, La cognizione del dolore,’’ Campi Immaginabili, 13–15:1–3 (1995): 155–174. Rebaudengo, Maurizio, ‘‘Il crinale della tenebra: Lettura de La cognizione del dolore,’’ L’anello che non tiene, 5 (Spring 1993): 59–81. Sbragia, Albert, ‘‘Fear of Periphery: Colonialism, Class, and the South American Outbacks in Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Modern Language Notes, 111 (January 1996): 38–57.

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Carlo Emilio Gadda first published Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana) in installments in the literary journal Letteratura in late 1946 and early the following year and, after a decade and significant revision, as a novel in 1957. Like Gadda’s La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief), which he started in 1936, published in installments in 1938–1940, published in novel form in 1963, and then substantially revised for its reprinting in 1970, the two versions of Quer pasticciaccio are markedly distinct, and its transformation into novel form helps to reveal a Gadda firmly entrenched in a postmodernist aesthetic of inconclusivity. Quer pasticciaccio follows inspector Don Ciccio Ingravallo as he makes his way through a labyrinthine (or, as critic Robert Dombroski might say, ‘‘baroque’’ or ‘‘grotesque’’) Rome in pursuit of the perpetrators of two crimes that happen within days of each other in 1927 in Via Merulana No. 219. For Don Ciccio, the two crimes—the brutal murder of a Roman matriarch Ingravallo knew and the theft of some unimportant jewels—however distinct in appearance, must be related because of their proximity in time and space. The failure of this logic to cohere and deliver a conclusive ending places Gadda’s project in the realm of other European modernists, such as Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf, who insisted on the ultimate inexplicability of social reality. This inexplicability does not translate into unrepresentability but, rather, an insistence on a partial and perspectival representation of reality. In the 1946–1947 version of the novel, Signora Balducci’s killer is revealed, and a conclusion is patent. In the version of a decade later, however, the novel closes with the recovery of stolen (fake) jewels but with Liliana Balducci’s killer still unapprehended. At the novel’s end, in the hinterland of

GALILEO GALILEI Rome he is sure houses the killer thief, Don Ciccio emits his remarkable howl, reminiscent of the wordless pain depicted in Edvard Munch’s painting ‘‘The Scream.’’ Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana is acclaimed for its linguistic virtuosity, which, combined with its lack of resolution, has made it a modernist masterpiece. Gadda mined the capital for the dialect treasures brought from the countryside of surrounding Latium, from Rome’s San Giovanni quarter in which the crimes take place, from Don Ciccio’s native Molise, and other regions of the peninsula. Like Joyce, Gadda gamboled from one lexical register to another, often within one paragraph, sometimes within one sentence. The admixture of linguistic and literary styles, sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque, sometimes solemn, evokes Dante. The multiplicity of interpretations of the two crimes in Via Merulana corresponds to the proliferation of styles, linguistic registers, and dialects. Linguistic polyvalence undergirds the novel’s polysemy, which seeks to express the often inchoate multiplicity of modern subjectivity and society. ELLEN NERENBERG Editions First Edition Appeared serially (except for one part) in Letteratura, 1946–1947; Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana. Milan: Garzanti, 1957.

Other Editions Opere. Romanzi e racconti, vol. 1, edited by Giorgio Pinotti, Dante Isella, and Raffaella Rodondi. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.

Translation As That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, translated by William Weaver, New York: George Braziller, 1966.

Further Reading Alessandri, Luca, ‘‘L’autore nel Pasticciaccio,’’ Lingua e Stile, 31:1(March 1996): 79–99. Bignamini, Mauro, ‘‘Un requiem per il romanzo giallo: Sul finale del ‘Pasticciaccio,’’’ Strumenti Critici, 20:2 (May 2005): 247–264. Ceccaroni, Arnaldo, ‘‘Per una lettura del ‘Pasticciaccio’ di Carlo Emilio Gadda,’’ Lingua e stile, 5:1 (April 1970): 57–85. De Lucca, Robert, ‘‘A Translator’s View of Gadda’s Language: The Pasticciaccio,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 23:1 (2002): 133–161. Dombroski, Robert, ‘‘Gadda and the Baroque,’’ in Carlo Emilio Gadda: Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Manuela Bertone and Robert Dombroski. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Marchesini, Manuela, ‘‘Literature as the Experience of Boundary Crossing: Gadda’s Descent to Hell and the Solution to That Awful Mess of Via Merulana,’’ Modern Language Notes, 119 (Jan 2004): 109–134. Pedriali, Federica G., ‘‘Gli occhi del Lazio: Symmetries of Closure in Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio,’’ Italica. 78:2 (Summer 2001): 176–192. Pedriali, Federica G., ‘‘Of Saints and Toes: Baroque Connectives in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio (with a Manzonian Intertext),’’ Forum Italicum, 35:2 (Fall 2001): 351–367. Rushing, Robert A., ‘‘‘La sua tragica incompiutezza’: Anxiety, Mis-Recognition and Ending in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,’’ Modern Language Notes, 116 (Jan. 2001): 130–149. Van der Linde, Gerhard, ‘‘The Body in the Labyrinth: Detection, Rationality and the Feminine in Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,’’ American Journal of Italian Studies, 21 (1998): 26–40.

GALILEO GALILEI (1564–1642) Galileo’s appointment in 1592 to the prestigious post in mathematics at the University of Padua, once a stronghold of Aristotelian thought, signaled the beginning of what this scientist, as well as many of his biographers, would regard as the most productive phase of his long career. It was in the Veneto, in the orbit of the learned and well-connected Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, the powerful Servite friar

Paolo Sarpi, and the amiable patrician statesman Giovan Francesco Sagredo, that Galileo undertook significant work in optics and catoptrics, magnetism, tidal theory, mechanics, and instrumentation. Though his financial situation was somewhat precarious in Padua—like many of his colleagues, he was obliged to undertake private tutoring in addition to his university lectures and 801

GALILEO GALILEI to host students in his home—Galileo enjoyed more intellectual liberty here than in his eventual role as mathematician and philosopher to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany. Certain of his conjectures regarding tidal theory and the law of the fall, as well as a letter he wrote to Johannes Kepler in 1597, suggest that he began to support Copernicanism in Padua in the mid-1590s, though perhaps not in any systematic fashion. The dramatic appearance of a new star in 1604 seemed to offer strong evidence against Aristotelian conventions regarding an immutable world beyond the moon. Though he was not the author of a dialogue written in Paduan dialect and concerning the nova—one where two plainspoken peasants ridiculed the traditional philosophical position, explained parallax in a series of risible earthly demonstrations, and made favorable references to the Copernican viewpoint—Galileo was certainly associated with this text, and like many lettered men in the region, he remained attached to and conversant with this dialect literature throughout his life. The tenor of Galileo’s few extant writings about the nova is neo-Stoic, being modeled on Seneca’s Natural Questions and Cicero’s On the Nature of Gods, and these texts promote a cosmos characterized by a single medium and animated by endless cycles of rarefaction and condensation. While consonant with a Copernican world system and sometimes associated with it, these features were most noteworthy for their sharp departure from the Aristotelian model of a remote and unchanging superlunary region entirely without analogy with that beneath the moon. It is significant that Galileo’s early and erroneous explanation of the aurora borealis also emerged in the context of neo-Stoic physics; in 1600 Bernardo Davanzati offered a detailed summary of this hypothesis in the course of his commentary on Tacitus’s Annals. Between 1605 and 1607, Galileo observed and showed to others the ashen light reflected onto the moon by the rough surface of the earth at the very beginning and end of each lunar cycle, inferring from this phenomenon—depicted in several paintings by his close friend Lodovico Cigoli—that the surface of our globe differed little from those of other bodies in space, and that the earth was in all likelihood mobile. In this period Galileo was also engaged in more studies of motion and hydrostatics and involved with additional work in magnetism. The sudden emergence of the Dutch telescope in September 1608 is something of a puzzle: As early 802

as the 1570s, inferior perspective devices based on reflection, rather than refraction, had been developed and subsequently abandoned in Italy and in England. Paolo Sarpi’s and Galileo’s participation in these largely unsuccessful experiments may explain either their apparent indifference to the rumor of the Dutch telescope or their misunderstanding of the components of the new invention. By spring or summer 1609, Galileo was making celestial observations with the aid of a refracting telescope at least three times more powerful than the Dutch prototype, and by November he had developed an instrument that magnified 20 times. In his Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger, 1610), he described the moon’s newly revealed peaks and valleys in terms of their terrestrial analogues—comparing the crater Albategnius, for example, to Bohemia—used the shadows cast by a particular lunar mountain to calculate the average height of such formations, and disclosed countless new stars in several constellations and in the Milky Way. Most startling, both for his audience and for Galileo himself, was his chance discovery of four satellites orbiting about Jupiter: Their orbital movements were presented in a series of schematic diagrams at the end of the Sidereus Nuncius, and the existence of moons about another celestial body strongly suggested to him, if not to all readers, that the earth was neither unique nor central nor motionless. The years that followed this publication were characterized by intense scientific activity and a certain public prominence, some of which was given over to deflecting the popular criticism of those who inferred, for example, on the basis of his reference to Bohemia in the Sidereus Nuncius, that he supported the very problematic notion of extraterrestrial life. By the end of 1610, Galileo had interpreted the moonlike phases of Venus as a confirmation of Copernican claims, and he had some notion of the sunspots by spring 1611, though his systematic study of the phenomena appears to date only to early 1612, when he was staying at the villa of the prominent Florentine nobleman Filippo Salviati. This period of intense observation of the sun and of Jupiter’s satellites, occasionally punctuated by Galileo’s amusing excurses on the work of the great poet of Paduan dialect, Angelo Beolco—better known as Il Ruzzante—resulted in the publication of the Istoria e dimostrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (Letters on the Sunspots, 1613). This work offered excellent engravings and geometrical discussions of the path

GALILEO GALILEI and speed of the spots newly visible on the sun’s body, attacked the Jesuit astronomer Christoph Scheiner’s insistence on ‘‘solar stars,’’ and ridiculed the Aristotelian notion of the immutable heavens. Galileo’s membership in the Accademia della Crusca, then publishing its first lexicon, and in the first scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei, bears witness to his considerable stature among and contact with a variety of scholars. Galileo’s next work, his Lettera a madama Cristina di Lorena (Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina), circulated widely in manuscript but remained unpublished for several decades, for in several brilliant pages he showed how a Scriptural passage— the warrior Joshua’s plea for a longer day, ‘‘Sun, stand thou still at Gideon’’—was compatible with a heliocentric universe and incompatible with a geocentric one. In late 1614, a Dominican preacher in Florence criticized Galileo and his followers, and in early 1615 another member of that order sent another one of his manuscript letters to the Inquisition in Rome. His meeting in February 1616 with Cardinal Bellarmino was soon followed by an edict formally prohibiting works that attempted to reconcile Scripture and the hypothesis of a mobile earth and placing Copernicus’s De Revolutionibus on the Index until problematic passages could be deleted. Though Galileo had devoted himself as a young man to a traditional problem for readers of Dante—the site and size of Hell—and was especially delighted by the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace among the ancients, and by that of Francesco Petrarch and Francesco Berni among the moderns, in this period he turned with new attention to a comparison of Lodovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso and made notes elaborating, for the most part, the triumph of the former author over the latter. This effort did not result in a publication, for a new controversy had developed, after the emergence of three comets in the fall of 1618. In his Il saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623) Galileo did not enroll the comets as evidence of Copernicanism and offered no detailed explanation of their nature but attacked instead the various flaws in the arguments of the Jesuit astronomer Orazio Grassi, especially the latter’s support for the Tychonic world system. Il saggiatore is valuable above all for its presentation of questions regarding parallax and telescopic magnification, for its pithy methodological statements, and for its display of caustic wit. The synthesis of Galileo’s decades of astronomical observations, speculation, and revision, the Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo,

tolemaico e copernicano (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican), promised in 1610 in the Sidereus Nuncius, was at last published in Florence in 1632. Set in a Venetian villa and animated by three speakers—the scholarly and rather solemn Salviati, the affable dilettante Sagredo, and the persistent Aristotelian Simplicio—the Dialogo takes place over the course of four leisurely days. Beginning with traditional cosmological arguments about the motions, substance, and final purpose of celestial and terrestrial bodies, the speakers move to experimental and logical evidence for the earth’s diurnal and annual movements, and as Simplicio grows increasingly embattled, Salviati and Sagredo discuss the particulars of the orbits and telescopic appearance of the other planets; draw on the emergent science of magnetism as well as upon observations of the new stars of 1572 and 1604, the fixed stars, the moon spots, and the sunspots; and conclude with an ample discussion of Galileo’s theory of tides. The Dialogo moves steadily toward its unstated goal of establishing the superiority of the Copernican world system over its Ptolemaic predecessor, incorporating calculations, diagrams, rhetorical flourishes, observational data, and amusing anecdotes in the exchanges of the three men. The work cannot be said, however, to present Copernicanism as a mere hypothesis, or both systems as equally plausible, or the three speakers as independent and wellmatched representatives of different philosophies, for Sagredo soon adopts Salviati’s view, while Simplicio’s arguments are constantly paired with the bumbling assertions of other Aristotelians, and he is reduced to silence by the final pages of the Dialogo. Soon summoned to Rome for an encounter much more menacing than that of 1616, Galileo was forced to recant on June 22, 1633. A period of depression and ill-health followed, and while Galileo was under house arrest in Arcetri, his best-loved child, Suor Maria Celeste, died in a nearby convent. He had some slight satisfaction in seeing both a Latin translation of his Dialogo published in Strasbourg in 1635 and the Italian original and Latin translation of his Lettera a madama Cristina in Strasbourg the following year. He had also returned to his research, and his Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attinenti alla meccanica ed i movimenti locali (Two New Sciences Pertaining to Mechanics and Local Motions) was published in Leyden in 1638. Like the Dialogo, this work is set in Venice—in the 803

GALILEO GALILEI Republic’s busy Arsenal, rather than in a peaceful villa—and it also involves the exchanges of Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio. Though significantly less light-hearted in tone than the Dialogo, it moves briskly through timely military problems involving projectiles and examines notions of impact and resistance, the principal of the balance, and uniformly accelerated or natural motion. While its discussion of scale, an outgrowth of early modern meditations on colossal bones and the outsized remains of fossilized trees, bears crucially on recent efforts to fashion structures and machines of immense size, some investigations within the Discorsi, as for example those of the speed of light and of musical intervals, appear to have been pursued in a setting mercifully remote from the backdrop of the Thirty Years’ War, and for no practical ends. The examination of the philosophical notions of condensation, rarefaction, and the void, while raised in connection with the very real problem of explosives and fuel, also allows Galileo the opportunity of a covert attack on his old enemy Orazio Grassi for the latter’s facile equation of atomism with a godless determinism. The true fight, as Galileo’s dedication and several asides suggest, was for the reestablishment of his scientific and ethical reputation, and despite the burden of illness and old age, the stricture of house arrest, and his renunciation of cosmological issues, the victory was his. In 1638, though bedridden and almost completely blind, Galileo was visited by John Milton, who would recall in his Areopagitica ‘‘the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought,’’ and who would commemorate ‘‘the Tuscan artist,’’ his celestial discoveries, and his telescope in both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, suggesting the extraordinary reach and range of the astronomer’s achievement and the permanent legacy he left to scientists and humanists alike. Galileo’s last years were marked both by ill health and by industry; with the help of Vincenzio Viviani, his last student and one of his first biographers, he was able to continue his correspondence, assess and improve upon new astronomical and mechanical hypotheses, and even develop a mechanism for a pendulum clock. In the last months of his life he dictated the beginnings of another dialogic encounter of Salviati, Sagredo, and Simplicio, this one having to do with two Euclidean notions of ratios. Galileo’s literary interests comprised annotations on Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, a capitolo 804

in terza rima, six sonnets, two canzoni, and a draft for a comedy. That his views of the moderns underwent some evolution as he aged is suggested by the fact that his Dialogo contains no explicit references to his beloved Ariosto but rather a citation of Gerusalemme Liberata XII: 36 during a discussion of the observable effects of impetus on masses of water and an allusion to Tasso as ‘‘the sacred poet.’’ Galileo wrote in Italian in order to promote the new sciences with a lay reading audience; his prose style, while influenced by Baroque rhetoric and discursiveness, is dynamic in its argumentation and relentless in its ridicule of his enemies, particularly the Aristotelians. As the most scandalous case of the Counter-Reformation, Galileo’s life and scientific achievements have inspired several theatrical and cinematic adaptations, most notably by Bertold Brecht (1943), Liliana Cavani (1968; denied distribution due to Vatican intervention), and Joseph Losey (1974).

Biography Galileo Galilei was born in Pisa, 15 February 1564, the eldest of six or seven children of the merchant, musician, and music theorist Vincenzo Galilei and Giulia Ammannati. After a childhood in Pisa, Florence, and the Camaldolese Monastery at Vallombrosa, he began courses in medicine at the University of Pisa, 1581; having much more interest in studying perspective and mathematics in private lessons, he left the university without a degree, 1585. He taught mathematics for the next three years in Florence, Siena, and Vallombrosa, 1586– 1589; he held the chair of mathematics at the University of Pisa, 1589–1592, a position he soon exchanged for a more prestigious post in the same discipline at the University of Padua, 1592–1610. Galileo conducted research on the matter of light and the telescopic lenses, 1609–1611; he was appointed as mathematician and philosopher at the court of the Grand Duke Cosimo II of Tuscany, 1610. He was officially admonished by the Inquisition, 1616. He was summoned to Rome by a special commission under the direct control of the pope, 1632; his trial and abjuration took place in 1633. Galileo had three illegitimate children: Virginia (born in 1600), Livia (born in 1601), and Andrea (born in 1606). Galileo Galilei died in Arcetri (Florence), 8 January 1642. EILEEN ADAIR REEVES

` MBARA VERONICA GA Selected Works Collections Opere di Galileo Galilei nobile fiorentino, 13 vols., Milan: Societa` Tipografica de’ Classici Italiani, 1808–1811. Opere, edited by Antonio Favaro et alia, 20 vols., 1890–1909; reprint edited by Giorgio Abetti, et al., Florence: Barbera, 1964–1966. Discoveries and Opinions of Galileo: Including The Starry Messenger, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, and Excerpts from Letters on the Sunspots and the Assayer, edited and translated by Stillman Drake, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.

Writings Sidereus Nuncius, edited by Maria Timpanaro Cardini, 1948; edited by Andrea Battistini, 1993; as The Starry Messenger, translated by Stillman Drake, 1957; as Sidereus Nuncius or the Sidereal Messenger, translated by Albert van Helden, 1989. Il saggiatore, edited by Libero Sosio, 1992; Galilei, Galileo and Orazio Grassi, The Controversy on the Comets of 1618, translated by Stillman Drake and C. D. O’Malley, 1960. Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, edited by Libero Sosio, 1970; edited by Ferdinando Flora, 1997; as Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, translated by Stillman Drake, 1953; as Galileo on the World Systems, translated and abridged by Maurice A. Finocchiaro, 1997. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze, edited by Adriano Carugo and Ludovico Geymonat, 1958; as Two New Sciences, translated by Stillman Drake, 1974.

Further Reading Biagioli, Mario, Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. Blackwell, Richard J., Galileo, Bellarmine, and the Bible, Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1991. Dear, Peter, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. Drake, Stillman, Galileo at Work: His Scientific Biography, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. (editor), The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History, Berkeley, CA: The University of California Press, 1989. Machamer, Peter (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Paschini, Pio, Vita e opere di Galileo Galilei, 2 vols., Vatican City: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum, 1964. Redondi, Pietro, Galileo eretico, Turin: Einaudi, 1983; as Galileo Heretic, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Reeves, Eileen Adair, Painting the Heavens: Art and Science in the Age of Galileo, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Renn, Ju¨rgen (editor), Galileo in Context, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Santillana, Giorgio de, The Crime of Galileo, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1955. Shea, William, Galileo’s Intellectual Revolution: Middle Period, 1610–1632, New York: Science History Publications, 1977.

` MBARA (1485–1550) VERONICA GA Left to govern her husband’s feudal territories after his death, Veronica Ga`mbara led an exceptional life in dangerous times of religious and political turmoil. She judiciously leveraged her artistic gifts and connections to defend a family and state precariously sandwiched between French, Venetian, and imperial forces in the advent of the Catholic Reformation; and, though she wrote with little regard for lasting fame (memoria posteritatis), she was nonetheless destined for celebrity. Born into an illustrious line of learned women—her paternal grandmother was the Humanist Ginevra Nogarolla, sister of Isotta Nogarolla, and her maternal aunt was none other than the remarkable Emilia

Pio of Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528)—Veronica achieved a virtually unequalled poetic and epistolary fame of her own. Although one of her first biographers would claim that she obtained a university degree in philosophy, she most probably received a classical education from private tutors similar to that of her brothers. Outside of one late Horatian-styled Latin ode in celebration of Emperor Charles V, Veronica’s poetic and epistolary corpus makes exclusive use of the vernacular. Like many educated women of her station, in her youth poetry served as a form of aristocratic diversion. Her earliest 805

` MBARA VERONICA GA surviving works abound with the amorous Petrarchan conceits that occupy so much of the Italian Renaissance imagination. She sang of a heart made captive by the tyranny of love; of the torment, conflict, and exquisite agony caused by Amor’s cruel game; and of the hopeless desperation afflicting her embattled soul. More than the secret expression of a real ill-fated love affair, Veronica’s thematic repertoire essentially conforms to the aesthetic norms established for poetry by Pietro Bembo. Her verses circulated openly from hand to hand, and her talents soon gained the attention of society’s most illustrious minds. By 1502 she had initiated epistolary contact with Bembo himself (as evinced in a letter he addressed to her two years later), and by 1504 she was already intimately corresponding with the noted humanist Gian Giorgio Trissino. That same year, one of her earliest poems, ‘‘Or passata e` la speranza’’ (Now Hope Has Died, 1504), appeared in print along with other frottole set to music by composer Bartolomeo Tromboncino, a favorite of the Gonzaga court. The piece represents an anomaly in Ga`mbara’s literary production primarily because it can be located chronologically. Deviating from the contemporary vogue for autorepresentation through print, Ga`mbara never wrote with an eye toward publishing her epistles or deigned to order her scattered rhymes into a unitary Petrarchan-styled canzoniere. Few autographs survive, and most of her works lack the place and date of composition. An assortment of her poems was printed posthumously in Venice in the Rime di diversi eccellenti autori bresciani (Poems by Several Excellent Authors from Brescia, 1554), as well as in the earliest volume dedicated exclusively to female poetry, the Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtuosissime donne (Several Poems by Some Very Noble and Virtuous Women, 1559), though many more remained hidden within unpublished collections. Felice Rizzardi, the first editor to attempt to unite her poetry for print, amassed a total of 42 examples and resolved the chronological challenge by ordering her poems thematically in Rime e lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara (The Poems and Letters of Veronica Ga`mbara, 1759). Matters were further confounded by the problem of misattribution— seven of her works originally appeared in print under the name of her contemporary and correspondent, Vittoria Colonna, who, in turn, received the credit for two of Ga`mbara’s. Ironically, she was also identified as the author of a poem composed by an unlikely source, Veronica Franco. 806

The modern critical edition by Alan Bullock currently attributes 67 sonnets, madrigals, ballads, and stanze to Ga`mbara’s own hand. Although they address a vast array of political, religious, and encomiastic subjects, she is best known for the sequence dedicated to her consort Giberto’s eyes. Adapting Bembo’s neo-Platonic sublimation of love as the means between humankind and God, Ga`mbara invested her husband’s angelicized eyes with the same divine power traditionally attributed to the donna-angelo of male Petrarchan poets. In the madrigal ‘‘Occhi lucenti e belli’’ (Beautiful lucent eyes), they are described as proud, humble, blessed, serene, and dear, the source of both her life and death, of hope and fear; again, in ‘‘Dal veder voi, occhi lucenti e chiari’’ (To see you, to gaze into your serene and clear eyes), they figure as the source of all her happiness. She ran to them for repose in ‘‘Vero albergo d’amor’’ (True home of love), and agonized over their absence in ‘‘Se piu` stanno a parir quei duo bei lumi’’ (If those two bright lights delay in appearing). Undoubtedly laden with Petrarchan artifice, Ga`mbara’s poems nonetheless convey an earnest love and admiration for her Lord of Correggio, a man destined to be taken away from her after ten years of happy marriage. His death brought on a period of intense mourning—from that day forth she donned only the black of widowhood, insisting that her whole court, including the horses, dress accordingly as well. The doors to her palace were inscribed with Dido’s plaint over the death of Sichaeus as a permanent reminder of her irreparable loss: ‘‘ille meos, primus qui me sibi iunxit, amores / abstulit; ille habeat secum servetque sepulchro’’ (He, who first linked me to himself, has taken away my heart: / may he keep it with him, and guard it in the grave). Vowing never to remarry again, Ga`mbara lamented her cruel fortune and the annihilation of her former happiness in a sonnet entitled ‘‘Quel nodo in cui la mia beata sorte’’ (That knot in which my blessed fate). Left to manage the affairs of her deceased beloved, she then dedicated her talents to the subject of governance. In her youth Ga`mbara began to correspond with important figures from the highest echelons of European society (her earliest known epistle, dated February 1, 1503, is addressed to Isabella d’Este, wife of Francesco Gonzaga of Mantova), only to abruptly cut off all communication during her marriage. As a widow, the mature author resumed her epistolary activity, nurturing ties to powerful magnates capable of granting privileges, advancing her

` MBARA VERONICA GA family, and safeguarding her feudal lands. Her chancery letters display an ability to ceremoniously combine ambassadorial formalities with practical requests. They exhibit a strong tendency toward moral reflection and an overriding concern for peace and religious unity, elements also present in the political and encomiastic poems addressed to Charles V and Pope Paul III, such as ‘‘Vincere i cor piu` saggi’’ (To win over the wisest hearts) and ‘‘Quella felice stella’’ (That happy star), dedicated to the young emperor. ‘‘Tu che di Pietro il glorioso manto’’ (You who with the glorious mantle of Peter) is a call to triumph against the Protestant enemy directed toward the pontiff. Ga`mbara also engaged in both polished and spontaneous forms of ‘‘civil conversation’’ with literary friends and close acquaintances. They vary in register from the intimate, ironic, and often colloquial letters sent to her friend Ludovico Rossi to the respectfully affectionate exchanges with her poetic mentor Pietro Bembo. She maintained ties to Venice through Ludovico Dolce and with the ‘‘scourge of princes’’ Pietro Aretino (a contact she kept perhaps out of fear of incurring his wrathful pen). Her epistolary is lamentably full of lacunae—out of approximately 150 extant correspondences, only one letter survives to Bernardo Tasso, two to Trissino, ten to Bembo, and eleven to Aretino, while the letters that presumably passed between her and Vittoria Colonna are entirely missing. Despite the losses, however, their esteem for her is manifest in their own works. Bernardo Tasso praised her gentle and sonorous poetry in his Amadigi di Gaula (1560). Ludovico Ariosto, who visited her home in Correggio in 1531, paid tribute to the hostess in his Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532) the following year by depicting her as especially pleasing to Apollo and the Muses. Aretino sang of her ‘‘gloriose fatiche’’ (glorious labors) in the prologue to the second edition of his La Cortigiana (The Courtesan, 1534) and honors the poetess in 1537 by printing the verses written by her in celebration of his lover Angela Tornibeni da Padova. After their first meeting in Brescia in 1504, Bembo affectionately referred to her as Berenice—the same name assigned to the most virtuous female interlocutor of his fictional dialogue, Gli Asolani (1505). First hailing her as a ‘‘Ver unica—Vergine veramente unica e sola,’’ a truly unique and singular maiden, later as a woman whose genius he would never tire of praising (‘‘ingegno a cui lodar son roco’’), Bembo encouraged Veronica as she evolved from a young

Pertrarchan sonneteer into her maturity as a militant poet of the Catholic faith. It was an honor she repaid with a lifetime of devotion and with two moving eulogies upon his death: ‘‘Or che sei tornata, anima felice’’ (Now that you have returned, o happy soul) and ‘‘Riser gli spiriti angelici e celesti’’ (The angelic and celestial spirits rejoiced).

Biography Veronica Ga`mbara was born in Pratalboino (Brescia) to Count Gianfrancesco and Alda Pio di Carpi, November 30, 1485. She was educated in Latin and gained attention at an early age for her poetry. In 1502, she initiated epistolary contact with Pietro Bembo. She married (condottiere) Giberto X, lord of Correggio, 1508; they had two sons, Ippolito (baptized January 27, 1510) and Girolamo (baptized February 17, 1511). Returning to Brescia for her father’s funeral, she became trapped, with her mother and children, within the city while a Venetian-led rebellion laid siege; they were freed a few weeks later when French troops subdued the insurgents, February 1512. She accompanied her husband to Bologna for the historic meeting between Pope Leo X and France’s new regent, King Francis I, and formed a friendship with the latter, 1515. Giberto died August 26, 1518, Veronica also cared for his two daughters from a previous marriage and governed the Correggio territories. She secured advantageous military and ecclesiastical charges for her sons, arranged profitable marriages for Giberto’s daughters, and consolidated the interests of her late husband’s feudal territories. Dismayed by the factionalism that plagued Italy, she aligned with the imperial cause and sought the favor of the Hapsburg emperor, Charles V, receiving the official investiture of the Correggio lands for her sons in 1520. In 1526, she called her citiens to arms to defend against an incursion led by Fabrizio Maramaldo. In light of her brother Uberto’s recent appointment to the governorship of Bologna by Pope Clement VII, Veronica sent her 17-year-old son Girolamo to his uncle to advance his ecclesiastical career while obtaining a position for her firstborn, Ippolito, in the imperial army, 1528. Later that year in Bologna, she met Charles V and Clement VII, celebrated her brother Brunoro’s marriage to Virginia Pallavicini, and solidified her friendships with the literati. She returned to Correggio to host a two-day imperial visit by Charles V and Manfred III, March 23, 1530. Alfonso d’Avalos, Marquis of Vasto, marched 807

` MBARA VERONICA GA 8,000 Spanish troops through Correggio, devastating her lands and resources, June 29 through November 25, 1531. During Avalos’s march, she hosted Ludovico Ariosto and exchanged letters with Vittoria Colonna; she overcame an invasion led by Galeotto Pico and rallied her people during the pestilence, 1538. Veronica Ga`mbara died and was buried alongside her husband in the Correggio mausoleum of the church of San Domenico, June 13, 1550. SARA E. DI´AZ

Selected Works Collections Rime e lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara, edited by Felice Rizzardi, Brescia: Rizzardi, 1759. Le Rime, edited by Alan Bullock, Florence: Olschki and Perth: The University of Western Australia, 1995.

Letters Cataloghi delle lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara, preceduti da un saggio critico. Con lettere inedite, edited by Fernando Manzotti, 1950.

Further Reading Bozzetti, Cesare, Pietro Gibellini, and Ennio Sandal (eds.), Veronica Ga`mbara e la poesia del suo tempo nell’Italia settentrionale, Florence: Olschki, 1989. Chimenti, Antonia, Veronica Ga`mbara, gentildonna del Rinascimento: un intreccio di poesia e storia, Reggio Emilia: Magis Books, 1995. De Courten, Clementina, Veronica Ga`mbara. Una gentildonna del Cinquecento, Milan: EST, 1934. Finzi, Riccardo, Umanita` di Veronica Ga`mbara, Reggio Emilia: Arti Grafiche Emiliane, 1950. Jaffe, Irma, and Gernando Colombardo, Shining Eyes, Cruel Fortune: The Lives and Loves of Italian Renaissance Women Poets, New York: Fordham University Press, 2002. Pizzagalli, Daniela, La signora della poesia: vita e passioni di Veronica Ga`mbara, artista del Rinascimento, Milan: Rizzoli, 2004. Poss, Richard, ‘‘Veronica Ga`mbara: A Renaissance Gentildonna,’’ in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Russell, Rinaldina, Italian Women Writers: a Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Stortoni, Laura Anna (editor), Women Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Courtly Ladies and Courtesans, translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie, New York: Italica Press, 1997.

CESARE GARBOLI (1928–2004) Garboli claimed for himself the right not to be labeled as a literary critic. In him, a restive intolerance of presumed aesthetic and cultural values imbued with objectivity and detachment was combined with the awareness that the ideological and pedagogical function of the critic, particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, had lost both its institutional legitimacy and the reality of dialectical vision. He made a cutting diagnosis of the bourgeois abstraction of culture in La stanza separata (The Separate Room, 1969), a collection of essays, short polemics, and articles that is his first book, published when he was already a successful journalist of art and literature. Ever since his professional debut at the beginning of the 1950s, Garboli had distinguished himself for the breadth of his interests and for a fine narrative sensibility that made use ‘‘di un’immaginazione 808

ribollente come un fiume in piena, simile a quella dei profeti e degli indovini’’ (of an imagination bubbling like a swollen river, like that of the prophets and the diviners), as he wrote in Pianura proibita (Forbidden Plane, 2002). In this work, he confessed to not possessing the novelist’s unquestioned faith in his own imagination as a value. At the same time, the historian’s inquisitorial intentions, which place an emphasis more on the judicial inquiry into facts than on the rhetorical organization of the historical discourse, generated his mistrust. The rhetorical nature of literature was, instead, what drove his interest in books: their always being at the service of something else. He further wrote in Pianura proibita: ‘‘scrivere senza una finalita`, utilitaria, e` oggi da imbecilli’’ (to write today without a political, utilitarian end, is imbecilic), because if it is true that culture belongs to action, and that it is a

CESARE GARBOLI factory and not a garden, it is equally true that ‘‘diventa utile soltanto in tempi di barbarie’’ (it becomes useful only in times of barbarism). Garboli turned his own hermeneutic reading toward texts that were familiar to him in search not of the intoxication of what is expressed but of what remains outside of the work, of that energy that in the entropic process of literary creation had been dispersed, bereft of an opportunity to be realized. The twentieth century taught that ‘‘si scrive quando la gioia o il desiderio di vivere non basta [...] quando e perche´ si e` malati’’ (one writes when the pleasure or the desire of living is not enough [...] when and because one is sick), as in the case of Natalia Ginzburg, the eternal Ragazza (Girl), as he called her in his preface to her Opere (Works, 1986), who lived the impact with the Other in the contrasting terms ‘‘di sfida e di scommessa verso il mondo, e di paura e di regressione verso la tana’’ (of challenge and gambling toward the world, and of fear and regression toward a refuge) (Pianura proibita). But the movement of this mysterious infection that only artistic creativity can heal leaves traces of histories, messages, fragments of experience, details of events, that flutter in a no-man’s land at whose extremities arise two incommensurable realities that must be kept separate: the author’s work and the contours of the author’s life. Literature and life are like two cities between which there spreads a chaotic desert of water, where no point is privileged or necessary, a place that exists only at the moment in which someone traverses it. Through archival papers, notebooks, secret and confidential notes, rejected variants, and forgotten drafts, the anti-Crocean Garboli reconstructed, in Antonio Delfini’s Diari 1927–1961 (Diaries: 1927– 1961, 1982), in Penna Papers (1984), in Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli (Thirty Family Poems by Giovanni Pascoli, 1990), and in Matilde Manzoni’s unpublished Journal (1992), a level of competing reality, an autonomous and indiscreet map that is beyond genres. Not only a metaphor of this potential realm, the theater is the subject of numerous articles written by Garboli between 1972 and 1978 in national dailies, and of wellknown translations, especially of Molie`re and Shakespeare. ‘‘Non si entra in Molie`re senza consequenze’’ (You do not delve into Molie`re without consequences), he wrote in ‘‘L’Attore’’ (The Actor), a piece published in Falbalas: Immagini del Novecento (Falbalas: Images of the Twentieth Century, 1990). Tartuffe, in particular, rediscovered in 1962–1963 by the director Roger Planchon, who subjected the texts to a rigorous Brechtian

historicization, seemed to Garboli not a character but an archetype, ‘‘il modello dei metodi di comportamento del potere, quando il potere non nasce dal privilegio ma dalla frustrazione (dal nulla, dallo zero sociale). Questo potere ha bisogno per esistere di consensi occulti e di opinioni intoccabili. Tre secoli fa aveva bisogno delle religione; oggi, non puo` fare a meno della cultura’’ (the model of the behavioral methods of power, when power is born not from privilege but from frustration [from the nothing, from the social zero]. In order to exist, this power needs hidden consensuses and untouchable opinions. Three centuries ago it needed religion; today, it cannot do without culture), as he described it in Un po’ prima del piombo (Just Before the Bullet, 1998). For Garboli, Tartuffe is a servile character who challenges the servant–master dichotomy until he succumbs before the impossible task of finding a solution halfway between the barren intelligence of servants and the blind privilege of masters’ passions. The scathing adjective ‘‘servile’’ returns in the title of a small volume collecting essays, presentations, and introductions, Scritti servili (Servile Writings, 1989). He explained the implications of the title to Corrado Stajano in an interview that appeared in Il corriere della sera (6 March 1989): ‘‘Accetto le committenze proprio per non avere a che fare con quella che viene chiamata creativita`. Se penso di scrivere veramente quello che sento, ho paura [...] Non ho voglia di tirare fuori me stesso. Quando mi occupo degli altri sono protetto dagli schermi’’ (I accept commissions precisely in order not to have anything do with what is called creativity. If I think of truly writing what I feel, I’m frightened [...] I have no desire to draw myself out. When I concern myself with others, I’m protected by screens): This is the paradox of the critic whose creativity lay in reading the work of art already written in experience.

Biography Cesare Garboli was born in Viareggio, Lucca, on 17 December 1928. A pupil of Roberto Longhi, he interrupted his university studies while writing his graduation thesis with Natalino Sapegno. At the beginning of the 1950s, he became editor of the Enciclopedia dello spettacolo and entered the intellectual circuit of the journals Officina and Paragone. At first Garboli concerned himself with Dante, Penna, Montale, and Leopardi, later centering his interests on Ginzburg, Morante, Delfini, Soldati, and Pascoli. He was awarded the Viareggio 809

CESARE GARBOLI Prize for La stanza separate, 1969. He worked as militant theater critic for Il Mondo, Il corriere della sera, and L’Unita`, 1972–1978. He taught at the University of Rome, the University of Macerata, and the Polytechnical Institute of Zurich. Garboli died on 11 April 2004 in Rome. NOEMI BILLI Selected Works Essays La stanza separata, 1969. Penna papers, 1984; expanded, 1996. Scritti servili, 1989. Cento libri per due secoli di letteratura, with Giorgio Manganelli, 1989. Falbalas. Immagini del Novecento, 1990. Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli, 1990. Il gioco segreto: nove immagini di Elsa Morante, 1995. Penna, Montale e il desiderio, 1996. Un po’ prima del piombo, 1998. Ricordi tristi e civili, 2001. Pianura proibita, 2002. Storie di seduzione, 2005.

Edited Works Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, le Rime, i versi della Vita Nuova e le canzoni del Convivio, 1954. Giacomo Leopardi, Canti, with Niccolo` Gallo, 1959. Giacomo Debenedetti, Opere, 1968. Ennio Flaiano, Autobiografia del Blu di Prussia, 1974. Niccolo` Gallo, Scritti letterari, with Ottavio Cecchi, and Gian Carlo Roscioni, 1975. Antonio Delfini, Diari: 1927–1961, with Natalia Ginzburg, 1982. Giovanni Pascoli, Poesie famigliari, 1985. Natalia Ginzburg, Opere, 1986. Elsa Morante, Opere, with Carlo Cecchi, 2 vols., 1988–1990. Mario Soldati, Racconti autobiografici, 1991. Mario Soldati, Romanzi brevi, 1992.

Matilde Manzoni, Journal, 1992. Bernard Berenson and Roberto Longhi, Lettere e scartafacci, 1912–1957, with Cristina Montagnani, 1993. Franc¸ois Auguste Rene´ de Chateubriand, Memorie d’oltretomba, 1995. Roberto Benigni, E l’alluce fu: monologhi e gag, 1996. Antonio Delfini, Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista e altri scritti, 1997. Goffredo Parise, L’odore del sangue, with Giacomo Magrini, 1997. Natalia Ginzburg, E’ difficile parlare di se´: conversazioni a piu` voci condotta da Marino Sinibaldi, with Lisa Ginzburg, 1999.

Translations Teatro francese del grande secolo, 1960. Molie`re, Tartufo, 1974. Harold Pinter, Terra di nessuno, 1976. Molie`re, La Principessa d’Elide, Tartufo o l’Impostore, Don Giovanni o Il festino di Pietro, Il borghese gentiluomo, Il malato immaginario, 1976. Pierre de Marivaux, Le false confidenze, 1986. Molie`re, La scuola delle mogli, 1988. William Shakespeare, Misura per misura, 1992. Anonymous, La famosa attrice, 1997. Franc¸ois Auguste Rene´ de Chateubriand, Di Buonaparte e dei Borboni, with Graziella Giordano, 2000.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Garboli, critico controvoglia,’’ Il Foglio quotidiano, 149 (2005), 4. Dego, Giuliano, ‘‘Tags and Trappings,’’ TLS, 4561 (1990), 914. Ferrara, Luigi, ‘‘Cesare Garboli, l’indovino della critica,’’ Silarus, 45:239–240 (2005), 45–46. Gambaro, Fabio, ‘‘Cesare Garboli: ’Un Monde sans perspectives,’’’ Magazine Litte´raire, 407 (2002,), 40–42. Itine´raire de Roger Planchon 1953–1964, Paris: L’Arche, 1970. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Cesare Garboli interpreta La fameuse come´dienne,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 1–2 (1998), 316–344.

THE GARDEN OF THE FINZI-CONTINIS See Il Giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Work by Giorgio Bassani)

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ALFONSO GATTO

ALFONSO GATTO (1909–1976) Within the context of Italian Hermetic poetry, Alfonso Gatto is significant for his ability to reinterpret the Hermetic ‘‘canon’’ with an inventive, surrealist freedom. This unique style distinguishes him from the more typically metaphysical branch of Hermeticism. Beginning in his earliest works, Gatto’s surrealism is extremely controlled, attenuating his propensity for courageous linguistic invention by making recourse to the music and the harmony of traditional Italian Melic poetry. His verses are marked by an effortless cantabile; although written in a basic language, his poetry is founded on a few theme words and a restricted choice of analogous meanings, which are both unrealistic and often inclined to an immediate intimism. In his early poetry, in particular, personal sentiment rooted in memories of youth and his childhood home, Salerno, allows for the flourishing of images connected to family life, in particular his relationship with his mother. These elements often prevent his first collections from achieving balance. Instead there are contradictions between the free, abstract games of his surrealist imagination and the concrete descriptions and psychology of a sentimental world that is more immediately singable. Gatto’s entire poetic oeuvre is based on his gift for song, in fact. In his work, the poem-song assumes a form that is sign of order and harmony, which can then confront chaos, violence, and the arbitrary nature of history and power. The poet, however, failed to fully reach the only truly modern conclusion: that of a poetry that can cross the nonsense of existence and of the world, using expressive and linguistic instruments that reinvent reality. These subjects and formal characteristics are already present in Gatto’s first collection, Isola. Prose e versi (Isle. Prose and Poems, 1932), which includes lyric and prose poems. The collection helped to establish the canon of Italian Hermetic poetry in the 1930s through its use of a rarefied language, entrusted to indefinite, allusive temporal categories, and with sudden semantic strokes that express elements of his personal life and of nature. It is poetry staged in the interior dimension of absence, of uprooting, typical of many contemporary southern poets who tend to a mythical revocation of their

distant childhood via impressionistic memory and a strongly analogous, metaphoric word. If on the one hand, the hidden presence of Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio is evident in Gatto’s impressionism and his musicality (along with the regional, dialectical influence of Salvatore Di Giacomo), on the other, the presence of Salvatore Quasimodo, the young Mario Luzi, Libero De Libero (representatives of a specific type of Hermeticism) is evident in his use of analogy and the tendency to create what some critics (including Giansiro Ferrata) have called an ‘‘idyllic surrealism.’’ In Isola. Prose e versi, Gatto’s most original and definitive formal solutions are identifiable in his use of rhyme and of enjambements. Rhyme contributes to the invention of analogies that are connected more by phonetics than semantics, in the creation of a surrealist, illogical fugal composition. The enjambements accelerate the meaning of the composition and multiply the images, distorting metrical and the musical rhythms (generally entrusted to the sonnet and to the hendecasyllable), with respect to the construction and the syntactic stressing of the sentences: ‘‘Tremo d’esile vena per lontane / arie di suono, mi lusingo in volto. Come alleviate toccano le vane / solitudini il cielo vuoto, ascolto’’ (I tremble of a weak vein for distant / airs of sound, I delude myself. As a relief they touch the vain / solitudes the empty sky, I listen; from ‘‘Notte,’’ in Isola). Such formal choices, courageously selected to create a ‘‘liberating’’ poetic with respect to the formal elements of Hermeticism, brought Gatto toward a kind of incompleteness, an imaginative indeterminacy, as if his verse sought an indefinable, uninterpretable meaning. The second collection, Morto ai paesi. Poesie (Dead to the Birthplaces: Poems, 1937), is without a doubt one of the central works of Hermetic poetry: In it, there converge poems from the years 1933–1937, which offer greater balance than is found in the imaginative energy—liberating, unbridled, elusive—that characterizes Isola. Prose e versi. One discovers in the components of this collection a more concrete existential experience, a greater objectification of the poetic ‘‘I,’’ no longer or not only consisting in a pure, autonomous poetic voice but shaded in mystery, in the living multiplicity of the 811

ALFONSO GATTO universe itself, beyond its pure, natural facts: ‘‘Immagine d’aria / la luna morta odora / sfinita in pendio. / Eternamente ferma / torna al pallido volto / che l’alba consuma e profila / in un gelido picco di sole’’ (Image of air / the dead moon smells / lost in its rise. / Eternally still / it returns to the pale face / that the sunrise consumes and outlines / in a cold peak of sun; from ‘‘Luna d’alba,’’ in Morto ai paesi). Such a character reelaborates in a symbolic key the world of domestic fondness, not forgetting the lesson of Giovanni Pascoli, but nevertheless changing the living presence of creatures, the sea, the earth, the night, death, into symbols weighty with arcane meaning. The same idyllic framing of images, present in Isola. Prose e versi, is dramatized in the conflict between the self and history, for which the themes of death and of evil become an evermore constant reference. In particular, that which was for many Hermetic poets the existential crux, historical and political, of ‘‘absence,’’ the strong point of their poetics, is developed in Morto ai paesi. Poesie with affirmative certainty. The collection conceives of death both as a zeroing, no longer nostalgic or mythical experience of the past, and as an openness to new ‘‘waits,’’ driven, in the young, anxious poetic generation of poets, by the historical times and by political and social asphyxiation. In the 1940s, Gatto began to distance himself from other poets in the Hermetic vein. In 1943, Vallecchi published Poesie (Poems), a text that recapitulates, with many variations, a 15-year period of poetic writing, subdivided into two sections: La memoria felice (The Happy Memory) and Arie e ricordi (Melodies and Memories). The collection also contains compositions from the years 1937– 1941. In particular, in Arie e ricordi Gatto dedicated himself to the ‘‘canzonetta,’’ constructed in singing hendecasyllables, which express a world of private feeling. But with the onset of the war and his engagement fighting in the Resistance, the poet was led evermore toward mythopoetical experiences. In particular, there is the collection Il capo sulla neve (The Head on the Snow, 1949), in which the verse is more proselike and narrative, in confronting themes of horror, of hate, of violence: There remains at base his lyric vein, so that his work can neither be wholly identified as an engaged literature nor one of condemnation. Other collections to recall include Osteria flegrea (Flegrea Tavern, 1962) and La storia delle vittime. Poesie della Resistenza (Story of Victims: Poems of the Resistance, 1966). In the latter, the poet returned to the period of the Resistance, demonstrating a notable capacity to combine autobiography, 812

lyric, civic engagement, and historical passion. In Osteria flegrea, the theme of death is rendered reassuring by the recollection of the mother, feeding Gatto’s poetic vein in the archaic vision of the homeland and its familiar, eternal sun. Over the years, Alfonso Gatto, entrusting himself to carefully controlled expressive instruments against formal, youthful libertarianism, was able to offer other valuable proofs of his tale-weaving and melodic talents. Consistent with his being a painter, as well as a talented art critic, he sketched many compositions as though they were landscapes and still lifes in the form of words. As a writer of prose, he should be remembered in particular for La sposa bambina (The Bride Child, 1943), an impressionistic representation of the provincial, infantile world; in Carlomagno nella grotta (Charlemagne in the Cave, 1962), he confronted burning southern questions, at times in an essayistic form, sometimes returning to a newly Hermetic expository style.

Biography Born in Salerno, 27 July 1909, Alfonso Gatto was the descendant of a family of modest shipowners in Calabria. He completed high school in Salerno and enrolled in the department of Lettere in Naples, interrupting his studies before finishing, however. He tried various professions and suffered various economic difficulties. In 1934, he moved to Milan, where he met a group of innovative artists led by the architect Edoardo Persico, director of Casabella. In Milan, Gatto met artists, men of letters, and poets, who stimulated his creativity and collaborated on various projects that flourished around the Cafe´ Craja, where many young artists and writers met. Arrested in 1936 for political reasons, as an adversary of Fascism, he spent six months in the prison of San Vittore. He contributed to various literary journals (including Circoli, Letteratura, and La Ronda). With Vasco Pratolini, he directed Campo di Marte from 1938 to 1939, an important Florentine journal that was central in the debate on Italian Hermetic poetry. This experience pushed Gatto’s poetry to maturity, deepening the dialectic between innovation and tradition. He participated as fighter in the Resistance, and enrolled, after the Liberation, in the Communist Party. He contributed to Rinascita, directed the daily Milano sera, and served on the editorial staff for Unita`. He left the party in 1951 and chose Rome shortly afterward as his residence. He continued in the journalistic profession, living his engagement as a writer,

GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI expressing his artistic passion, and winning, among other prizes, the Bautta Prize in 1956 and the Viareggio Prize in 1966. He married Jole Turco, with whom he had two daughters. Gatto died in auto accident in Ortobello (Grosseto), on 8 March 1976. GIORGIO TAFFON Selected Works Collections Tutte le poesie, Milan: Mondadori, 2005.

Poetry ‘‘Isola. Prose e versi,’’ 1932. ‘‘Morto ai paesi. Poesie,’’ 1937. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1943. ‘‘Il capo sulla neve,’’ 1949. ‘‘Osteria flegrea,’’ 1962. ‘‘La storia delle vittime. Poesie della resistenza,’’ 1966. ‘‘Poesie (1929–1969),’’ 1972. ‘‘Poesie di Alfonso Gatto,’’ 1998.

Fiction La sposa bambina, 1943. Carlomagno nella grotta, 1962.

Theater Il duello, 1944.

Further Reading Alfonso Gatto, special issue of La fiera letteraria (25 December 1955). Borraro, Pino, and Francesco D’Episcopo (editors), Stratigrafia di un poeta: Alfonso Gatto. Atti del convegno nazionale di studi su Alfonso Gatto (Salerno-MaioriAmalfi, 8–9–10 April 1978), Galatina: Congedo, 1980. Ferrata, Giansiro, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto: ‘Morto ai paesi,’’’ Letteratura, 3(1937), 162. Gioanola, Elio, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto,’’ in Letteratura italiana contemporanea, vol. 2, Rome: Lucarini, 1980. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), ‘‘Alfonso Gatto,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Isola, di Alfonso Gatto,’’ Pegaso, 5 (1933), 634. Muscetta, Carlo, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto poeta,’’ Primato, 1 (1942), 15–17. Pento, Bortolo, Alfonso Gatto, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Perilli, Plinio, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto: un trobadore del Novecento,’’ Poesia, 12 (1999), 41–43. Pozzi, Giovanni, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto,’’ in La poesia italiana del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Ramat, Silvio, ‘‘Gatto, Alfonso,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Turin: Utet, 1986. Ramat, Silvio, ‘‘Introduction to Alfondo Gatto,’’ Tutte le poesie, Milan: Mondadori, 2005. Tedesco, Natale, ‘‘Alfonso Gatto un veggente nelle grotte del Sud,’’ in Interventi sulla letteratura italiana. L’occhio e la memoria, Palermo: Lombardi, 1993.

GAY WRITING See Lesbian and Gay Writing

GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI (1498–1563) Giovan Battista Gelli stands out among the Italian literati for his unusual social position: He remained a shoemaker all his life and designated another craftsman as a reader for his solemn funeral eulogy. It is still debatable whether this decision indicated resignation to unbridgeable social divides or an

expression of working-class pride. Notwithstanding this aspect of his personality, Gelli was not a champion of revolutionary e´lan or ideals; patience and submission to rulers are the social qualities he praised in his works. Learning represented for him a self-fulfilling activity, devoid of social ambition 813

GIOVAN BATTISTA GELLI and political and religious engagement. He considered the intellectual vocation as an education of the mind apt to lead to spiritual refinement. Therefore, Gelli did not promote a literary model of plebeian roughness, whereas authors such as Luigi Pulci, Pietro Aretino, and Teofilo Folengo—who, unlike Gelli, did not belong to the laboring class—represented the most sordid aspects of their inferiors, not without a certain patronizing attitude. Gelli, however, should not be depicted as a naı¨ve selfmade man, content with the literary notions he had acquired, and incapable, or rather unwilling, to question any hierarchical power. His Catholicism, for instance, did not hinder him from expressing opinions on religious matters in his works. He reproached the corruption of the clergy and never rejected the neo-Platonic appreciation of beauty. In politics, though loyal to the Medicis, Gelli maintained overt contacts with personages of the anti-Medicean circle of the Orti Oricellari, such as Benedetto Varchi, often aspiring to broker their reconciliation with the Grand Duke. Early on, Gelli developed a cult for Dante and devoted all his spare time to studying the poet’s works under the guidance of excellent teachers such as Francesco Verino. In 1553, Cosimo I appointed him as Public Commentator of the Comedia (ca. 1305–1321). For the Florentine shoemaker, this nomination represented a platform from which to express both his veneration for Dante and his deeply felt convictions of the value of Florentine culture and language. Apart from the epistolary, several public speeches (including some to the Accademia fiorentina), some translations from Latin, and a mediocre poetical production, Gelli’s literary reputation is based on his philosophical dialogues, his commentaries on Dante and Petrarch, his intervention in the debate on the questione della lingua, and, most importantly, his comedies. La sporta (The Bag, 1543) takes the topic of the avaricious character who finds a pot of gold from Plautus’s Aulalaria but incorporates elements of contemporary satire. I capricci del bottaio (A Barrel Maker’s Caprices, 1546) is formed of ten dialogues between a cooper and his soul, in which, behind the colloquial and humorous tone, the author discussed serious topics. The word capricci should be read not as mere ‘‘whims’’ but more as ‘‘caprichos,’’ in the sense of nocturnal or seminocturnal images. This play indeed represents an essay of moral philosophy explained in simple form. In 1554, the Inquisition placed I capricci del bottaio on the Index for its satirical content, although the author was not prosecuted. In La Circe (Circe, 1549), the sorceress 814

grants Ulysses the boon to turn back into human those of his companions whom she had transformed into animals, provided that they want to be changed back. Inspired by Plutarch’s Gryllus (The Cricket), Gelli’s work is a reflection on the human condition and the opposition between appetites and intellect. The portrayal of the conditions of humanity reaches the tone of existentialistic lamentation, which turns into dissimulated protest against social injustice when the play describes the more humble layers of society. As a result, La Circe was prohibited in Spain in 1559 and in Italy in 1560. Finally, Lo errore (The Error, 1556), modeled after Niccolo` Machiavelli’s La Clizia (1525), unfolds the psychological dynamics within a family in which the elderly father falls in love with a neighbor. The comedy highlights the necessity of respecting family decorum by praising the savvy role of the main character’s wife, who ruins her husband’s plans but also preserves his dignity by hiding this misadventure. Finally, the play Polifila (1566) is no longer attributed to Gelli. Gelli’s public lectures on Dante attest to his skillful approach to difficult subjects with erudition and common sense in the best Florentine tradition of Franco Sacchetti and Matteo Palmieri. Although he often showed more enthusiasm for the text than for critical enquiry, many of his intuitions are still valid now. As for the debate on the questione della lingua, Gelli defended the superiority of the contemporary learned Florentine dialect against Pietro Bembo’s defense of the language of Boccaccio and Petrarch. His linguistic position is specifically recounted in Trattatello sopra l’origine di Firenze (Essay on the Origin of Florence), written around 1540, and in Uno dialogo di Giovan Battista Gelli sopra la difficolta` di ordinare detta lingua (A Dialogue by Giovan Battista Gelli on the Difficulties of Regulating Our Language), published in Pier Francesco Giambullari’s De la lingua che si parla e scrive in Firenze (On the Language Spoken and Written in Florence, 1551).

Biography Giovan Battista Gelli was born in Florence to the wine-seller Carlo, 12 August 1498, and lived all his life in Florence, working as a shoemaker. His wife’s name was Maria, and not Pentasilea as commonly stated, the latter being his sister. Neither the date of his marriage nor the birth dates of their two daughters, Alessandra and Marietta, are known. Under Cosimo de’ Medici’s protection, Gelli assumed the public office of Magistrato delle Arti Minori, 1534.

GENOA He was a member of the Collegio dei Dodici Buonomini, 1539, and was admitted to the Accademia degli Umidi (later called Accademia fiorentina), 1540. He was appointed Console of the Accademia, 1548, and Public Commentator of Dante’s Comedia, 1553–1563. Gelli died in Florence, 24 July 1563, and was buried in the church of Santa Maria Novella. BERNARDO PICICHE` See also: Questione della lingua Selected Works Opere, edited by Delmo Maestri, Turin: UTET, 1976.

Plays La sporta, 1543. I capricci del bottaio, 1546. La Circe, 1549. Lo errore, 1556.

Essays Trattatello sopra ll’origine di Firenze (ca. 1540), edited by Alessandro D’Alessandro in Atti e memorie della Accademia toscana di scienze e lettere La Colombaria, 44 (1979), 59–122.

Tutte le lezioni di Giovanbattista Gelli fatte da lui nell’Accademia fiorentina, 1551. Uno dialogo di Giovan Battista Gelli sopra la difficolta` di ordinare detta lingua, 1551. Letture sulla Commedia, 7 vols., 1551–1561. Letture edite ed inedite sopra la Commedia di Dante, edited by Carlo Negroni, 1887.

Further Reading De Gaetano, Armand, Giambattista Gelli and the Florentine Academy: The Rebellion against Latin, Florence: Olschki, 1976. Ghigo Bezzola, Rosa, ‘‘Un autore ‘capriccioso’ italiano e la sua fortuna nella Francia del Cinquecento: G. Gelli,’’ Studi di Letteratura Francese, 19 (1992), 251–264. Maestri, Delmo, ‘‘Le commedie di G. Gelli e la Polifila,’’ Lettere italiane, 30 (1978), 185–192. Mazzacurati Giancarlo, ‘‘Un itinerario della mente in Dante,’’ Filologia e Letteratura, 15 (1969), 49–94. Montu, Angelo, Gelliana: appunti per una fortuna francese di Giovan Battista Gelli, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1973. Pozzi, Mario, I trattatisti del Cinquecento, Milan: Ricciardi, 1978. Rhodes, Dennis E., ‘‘An Edition of the Circe of G. Gelli,’’ Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, 67 (1992), 236–237. Singleton, Charles S. (editor), Canti carnascialeschi del rinascimento, Bari: Laterza, 1936.

GENOA First a commune and then an aristocratic republic, the port city of Genoa became a financial powerhouse during the epoch of Carlo V and Filippo II and then an industrial center from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1970s. Documented by landscape painters and photographers, the layers of Genoa’s urban and architectural history (from the Roman, to the Baroque, to Art Nouveau, to the restructurings of the past decades) have conditioned the city’s literary image. Early travelers described the city as a stone amphitheater that rises suddenly from the water, framed by mountains assaulted by construction on their slopes (humanity’s challenge to nature). They illuminated the contrast between the sumptuous aristocratic palaces and the labyrinth of tall, narrow alleys and dwelled on the plays of light and shadow these created. In varying combinations, these are

the recurrent images of the city found in Petrarch’s Itinerario in Terrasanta (Itinerary in the Holy Land, 1358), where he coins the adjective ‘‘superba,’’ to describe the city, and in Rubens’s Palazzi antichi di Genova, raccolti e disegnati (Ancient Palaces of Genoa, Collected and Drawn, 1622), which offers the emblem of a new Baroque city. Often fascinated by nature, foreign writers who visited Genoa and her rivieras in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Byron, Shelley, Stendhal, Dumas, Dickens, Flaubert, Twain, Ibanez, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Pound) placed particular emphasis on the contradiction between ancient splendor and recent decadence. In 1853, Jules Michelet described the city in his diary as dominated by the money of a few capitalists, while the population supported socialism. In a letter of 14 May 1909 to Louise Kautzki, Rosa Luxembourg also underlined 815

GENOA the city’s contradictions, by then blue-collar and industrial. For Guido Piovene, in Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy, 1957), Genoa remained ‘‘misteriosa’’ (mysterious), and provoked the ‘‘fantasia di ‘retroscena clandestini’’’ (image of ‘clandestine backstage areas’) and of a ‘‘speciale teatralita`’’ (a special theatricality) that had ‘‘qualche cosa di occulto’’ (something of the occult). Literature that invokes Genoa is strictly tied to images of an autochthonous city (in language and dialect), of the ruling classes (those of the mercantile commune, of the aristocratic republic, of the bourgeois-Risorgimental ones), of the concrete problems of life in the city, of the city’s strong municipal character, of its self-referentiality (somewhere between apologetic and denigrating). The verses of the Anonymous Genovese of the thirteenth century propose a patriotic municipal myth of a mercantile, maritime city, portrayed by Dante in his invective against the Genovese (Inferno, XXXIII, vv. 151–157), ‘‘diversi / d’ogni costume e pien d’ogni magagna’’ (different in every custom and full of every imperfection) and destined to be ‘‘dispersi’’ (scattered) over the earth. Two stories in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373) have Genoese merchants as protagonists, upsetting the stereotype of greed (I, 8) and proposing exemplars of virtue, courage, and feminine intelligence (II, 9). Described by Simonetta, the landscape of ‘‘aspra Liguria’’ (severe Liguria) lives again, mythologized, in the Stanze (1494) by Angelo Poliziano (I, 51): ‘‘si sente il fer Nettuno e irato fremere’’ (one hears Neptune tremble irately). In Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), Genoa is celebrated in the figure of Andrea Doria (XV, 30– 36). In the figure of Federico Fregoso, one of the interlocutors of the Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), Baldassare Castiglione proposed an ideal portrait of nobility. In his Novelle (1554/73), Matteo Bandello (1553– 1554) exulted the spirit of adventure of Magnolo Lercaro (II, 14) and the generosity of Luchino Vivaldi (II, 26). Genoa’s subjection to Spain provoked the writings of Oberto Foglietta (Dialogo della Repubblica; Dialogue of the Republic, 1559), Giovanni Botero (Della ragion di stato; On the Reason of the State, 1589), Ansaldo Ceba` (Il cittadino di Repubblica; The Citizen of Republic, 1615), and Tommaso Campanella (Aforismi politici; Political Aphorisms, 1614). Giavanbattista Marino and Gabriello Chiabrera found protection and an audience in the seventeenth-century aristocracy. The primary writers of the period, Gianvincenzo Imperiale 816

(1582–1648) and Antongiulio Brignole-Sale (1605– 1665), in fact belonged to powerful families. Aristocratic life is masked in chivalrous terms in Baroque proto-novels from Liguria. Popular games and alleys suited for ambushes form the background of the picaresque episodes of the Travagliuse ammure de Ciullo e Perna (Labored Loves of Ciullo and Perna, 1614) by the Neapolitan Giulio Cesare Cortese. The setting for the adventures of Antonio Piazza’s L’Attrice (The Actress, 1777– 1778) is instead bourgeois and popular, as are the settings for comedies written in dialect (imitations and reductions of Molie`re and Goldoni) by Steva de Franchi (1714–1785). In A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo (To Luigia Pallavicini Fallen from a Horse, 1800), Ugo Foscolo transformed the ‘‘petrosa riva’’ (rocky shore) of Sestri into a mythological form: ‘‘il re dell’onde / dolente ancor d’Ippolito / surse per le profonde / vie dal tirreno talamo’’ (the king of the waves / still suffering over Ippolito / rose through the depths / from his Tyrrhenian nuptial bed). Jacopo Ortis wrote some of his Ultime Lettere (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1801–1802) from Liguria, which is captured above all in the descriptions of landscapes: ‘‘Strade alpestri, montagne orride dirupate’’ (Alpine roads, horrible steep mountains). The encounter with his Venetian compatriot also happens in Pietra Ligure. Genoa of the period of the carbonari and of Giuseppe Mazzini is at the center of Lorenzo Benoni (1853) by Giovanni Ruffini and of Misteri di Genova (Mysteries of Genoa, 1850–1870), a feuilleton by Antongiulio Barrili (1836–1908), who mixed love and politics in his scripts. The juxtaposition between the old popular neighborhoods and bourgeois urbanization becomes a narrative structure in La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf, 1892) by Remigio Zena (1850–1917). A stop on the maritime itineraries of the nineteenth century, the port, with its freighters and commercial agencies, appears in the story ‘‘Dagli appennini alle Ande’’ (From the Apennines to the Alps) in Cuore (Heart, 1886) and in Sull’Oceano (On the Ocean, 1889) by Edmondo De Amicis (1846–1908), while the trilogy Capricci per pianoforte (Capriccios for Piano, 1887–1891) by the Piedmontese Giovanni Faldella (1846–1928) captures the growing industry that generates illegal emigration and prostitution. Nationalist Genoa is the subject of the interventionist discourses of Gabriele D’Annunzio (1914–1915); Angela (1923) by Umberto Fracchia (1889–1930) recounts the dawning Fascism; the petty bourgeois is mirrored in the dialect theater of Gilberto Govi (1855–1966).

GENOA As a stage for commemorations of the partisan fight, Genova symbolizes the disasters of the bellicose tragedy in La luna e i falo` (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950) by Cesare Pavese and offers a realistic backdrop for the existential discomfort in Sei stato felice, Giovanni (You Have Been Happy, Giovanni, 1952) and Il buio e il miele (The Dark and the Honey, 1969) by Giovanni Arpino; to fantastical and adventurous plots by Mario Sodati (Regione Regina; Queen Region, 1987); and the means for brief evasions of the factory in Memoriale (Memorial, 1962) by Paolo Volponi. Antonio Tabucchi sets Il filo dell’orizzonte (The Edge of the Horizon, 1996), a story of the ‘‘years of lead,’’ in Genova, and this period is also evoked in Armi e bagagli (Arms and Baggage, 1987) by Enrico Fenzi and Una rabbia gridata (A Shouted Rage, 1955) by Luigi Fenga. Industrial Genoa, a city that attracts southern emigrants, and one divided between its bourgeois center and working-class suburbs, between whiteand blue-collar workers, lives on in the novels of Vincenzo Guerrazzi. In L’aiutante di S. Presidente operaio (The Helper of S., President, Worker, 2004), Guerrazzi formulated a bitter, grotesque metaphor of Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Italy. In La regina disadorna (The Queen Disadorns, 1998) and Vite senza fine (Lives without End, 1999), Maurizio Maggiani and Ernesto Franco respectively create mythical and fablelike images of the city at the beginning of the twentieth century. In principio erano le mutande (In the Beginning There Was Underwear, 1992) by Rosanna Campo recounts the precarious bohemianism of students in the ‘‘sbando’’ (chaos) between extracomunitari (noncitizens), drug addicts, prostitutes, and retirees. In Il verbale (2000), Marco Berisso traces the labyrinthical itinerary of the search for a mysterious girl. Genoa is a city of poetic suggestions: In the works of Heine, Claudel, and Vale´ry, it is difficult to distinguish between diaristic form and lyrical expression. The futurist Marinetti, instead, became the cantor of industrial Genoa in Distruzione (Destruction, 1911): ‘‘le Gru colossali si trasformano / in Kanguri fantastici di bronzo’’ (the colossal Cranes transform / into fantastical bronze Kangaroos). Fablelike, fantastical in Dino Campana’s Canti Orfici (Orphean Cantos, 1914), for Camillo Sbarbaro Genoa is the ideal place for flaˆnerie: It is both a place of sensuality, of sensual pleasure and is intimately linked to religious sentiment. Furthermore, in Eugenio Montale, who remembered his own youth in Quaderno Genovese (Genovese Notebook, 1883), the Ligurian landscape of Ossi di

seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925) and the civic foreshortening of Occasioni (Occasions, 1939) produced impromptu revelations; in the stores of La farfalla di Dinard (Dinard’s Butterfly, 1956–1973) and in his Diari (Diaries, 1973), the poet’s memories of places and people come into play. For Giorgio Caproni, the city is a place of memory, as synthesized in ‘‘Litania’’ (Litany) from Il seme del piangere (The Seed of Tears, 1959): ‘‘citta` dell’anima,’’ (city of soul) but also ‘‘degli amori in salita’’ (of uphill loves), an occasion for reflecting on contemporary anguish. Caproni also traduced Le silence de Geˆnes (The Silence of Geˆnes, 1962) by Fre´nuad. Discovered through the works of poets, the Ligurian city became an emotional pole for Eugenio De Signoribus (1947–) in the ‘‘Tavole genovesi’’ from Principio del giorno (Beginning of the Day, 2000). Themes and motives taken up in the popular realm by singer-songwriters (Gino Paoli, Luigi Tenco, Umberto Bindi) include the city of alleys and of prostitutes (Via del Campo, Bocca di rosa) of Fabrizio De Andre´ (1940–1999); nostalgia for the other in the work of the Piedmontese Paolo Conte (Genova per noi); through to the evocation of the death of Carlo Giuliani during the G8 in 2002 in Piazza Alimonda (last myth of the city’s topography) by the Modenese Francesco Guccini in the album Ritratti (Portraits, 2004). FRANCO VAZZOLER Further Reading Baiardo, Enrico, L’identita` nascosta. Genova nella cultura del secondo Novecento, Genoa: Erga, 1999. Baratono, Pierangelo, Genova a lume di naso, Genova: Libreria Editrice Moderna, 1925. Beniscelli, Alberto, Vittorio Coletti, and Lorenzo Co`veri, ‘‘La Liguria,’’ in L’italiano nelle regioni, edited by Francesco Bruni, Turin: Utet, 1992. Bertone, Giorgio, ‘‘Paesaggio e letteratura: il paradigma ligure,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall‘‘Unita` a oggi. LaLiguria, edited by Antonio Gibelli and Paride Rugafiori, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Bo, Carlo, Echi di Genova, Turin: ERI Edizioni Rai, 1966. Cattanei, Giovanni, La liguria e la poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Silva, 1966. Clerici, Luca, Il viaggioatore meravigliato. Italiani in Italia 1714–1996, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1999. Croce, Franco et al. (editors), La letteratura ligure, 5 vols., Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1988–1992. Fantoni Minella, Giorgio, Genova dei viaggiatori e dei poeti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2004. De Guglielmi, Ada, Liguria, Brescia: La Scuola, 1987. De Nicola, Francesco, and Roberto Trovato, Parole e scene di un secolo in Liguria, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2002.

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GENOA Dossena, Giampaolo, I luoghi letterari (paesaggi,opere e personaggi). Italia settentrionale, Milan: Sugar, 1972. Marcenaro, Giuseppe (editor), Viaggio in Liguria, Genova: Consiglio regionale della Liguria, 1974. Merlanti, Federica, Genova fra le righe. La citta` nelle pagine di narratori italiani fra ’800 e ’900, Genoa: Marietti 1820; reprinted, 2000. Montale, Eugenio, and Cesare Fera, Genua urbs maritima, Genoa: Italsider, 1968. Petti Balbi, Giovanna, Genova medievale vista dai contemporanei, Genoa: Sagep, 1978. Poleggi, Ennio, and Paolo Vevini, Le citta` nella storia d’Italia. Genova, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1981.

Quaini, Massimo, ‘‘La liguria invisibile,’’ in Storia d’Italia. Le regioni dall‘‘Unita` a oggi. LaLiguria, edited by Antonio Gibelli and Paride Rugafiori, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Liguria,’’ in Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, edited by Walter Binni and Natalino Sapegno, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Toso, Fiorenzo (editor), La letteratura genovese e ligure. Profilo storico e antologia, 6 vols., Genoa: Marietti, 1989–1991. Varaldo, Alessandro, Genova sentimentale, Genoa: Libreria Editrice moderna, 1913. Verdino, Stefano (editor), Genova in versi e l’entroterra ligure. Poesia del Novecento, 2 vols., Ventimiglia: Filolobiblon Edizioni, 2003.

GENRES Literary genres were the subject of great debate in the twentieth century. Whether affirmed or negated, the identity of these genres followed the waves of the avant-gardes and the successive returns to order, waves that characterized the century in more than simply literary terms. The result in the twentyfirst century is that of a more or less peaceful coexistence of two opposite tendencies: that of affirming and redefining genres in theoretical terms and that of post- and neo-avant-garde writing that negates and mixes them freely, often with positive results. Italian literature plays a determining role in the first great, systematic negation of genre through the work of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Futurism. One must also take into account, however, the corrosive action exercised by the historical avant-gardes at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in France. Marinetti is the product of French symbolism, of Gustave Kahn and Alfred Jarry, and of those artists who bring literary writing to abandon mimesis and fight against metric form and traditional codes. However, Italian literature remained for centuries the most accredited depositary of the written canon, at least until the birth of the modern novel around the middle of the seventeenth century. The heredity of Plato and, above all, of Aristotle, which passed through Latin culture and was revisited in the medieval period, was handed down until then without significant transgressions with respect to genre. In order to better understand the historic 818

progression of the theory of genres, a brief overview is necessary. Traditionally, literary genres have been classified as rhetorical categories, in which works are codified according to their formal characteristics and their contents. Plato himself used these criteria in several of his dialogues (Ion, Menexenus, Gorgias, The Republic, Phaedrus), proposing the first classification known to us. Serious content distinguishes the epic and the tragic; witty content, comedy, and iambic poetry. Mimetic and dramatic form is characteristic of tragedy and comedy, while narrative form characterizes lyric and epic. All artistic genres are marked by mimesis and by the passionate involvement of the public, while the subject determines a hierarchy of values. In the first position come hymns to gods and heroes; in the second, epic poems; finally, drama, judged by Plato to be the corruptor of souls because it encourages emotional involvement. Aristotle’s Poetics asserts itself as the overturning of Platonic theory by introducing the concept of catharsis, which is capable of sublimating passions and creates a neat bipartition between the dramatic and the narrative. The former is considered a perfect form of poetry. Aristotle’s followers, the peripatetic philosophers, thus fixed genres and their norms, prohibiting the mixing of different poetic forms and codifying metric, contents, and styles. This classifying effort passed from the Hellenist world into Roman culture and became the subject of study in the schools. Here were born Horace’s

GENRES Ars poetica and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. In the medieval period, attempts were made to maintain the distinctions formulated by the Greeks, but such attempts had to take into account genres born in the new Western culture. Furthermore, Aristotle’s Poetics was lost for a few centuries, and the rise of the chansons de gestes, the mystery plays, and the visiones required the search for new codifications. The Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BC), falsely attributed to Cicero, dictates the new canon of genres: Tragedy is characterized by sublime language and its fatal ending; comedy has a humble language and a happy ending; elegy expresses feelings, most prevalently painful ones. In De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305), Dante Alighieri once again took up ancient distinctions based on content, respecting the tripartite division in high, medium, and low genres. He further proceeded with the proposal of a common language for Italians, identified in the vernacular as ‘‘illustre’’ (illustrious), ‘‘cardinale’’ (cardinal), ‘‘aulico’’ (elevated), and ‘‘curiale’’ (courtly), already used by the great poets. The reappearance of Aristotle’s Poetics, translated into Latin in 1498 by Giorgio Valla (1447–1500), then in 1536 translated into Italian by Alessandro de’ Pazzi (1483–1530), provided an enormous incentive to Renaissance treatise writing, which was already oriented toward the codification of every aspect of knowledge within the laws of each discipline. In tragedy, Giulio Cesare Scaligero (1484– 1558) introduced the unity of time in Poetices libri septem (Seven Books of Poetics, 1561), and Ludovico Castelvetro (ca.1505–1571), author of a vernacular version of Aristotle’s Poetics (1507), added the unity of place. Thus were born the ‘‘three Aristotelian unities,’’ only one of which, the unity of action, can really be called Aristotelian. The bipartite division (dramatic and narrative) is substituted with a tripartite division: epic, dramatic, and lyric. In an incessant attempt to codify and define, pastoral drama, tragicomedy, the chivalric poem, and melodrama were added to the traditional genres, and a sort of Italian genre tyranny reigned in Europe until the eighteenth century. However, there was no lack of alternative voices: in De gl’heroici furori (The Heroic Frenzies, 1585) Giordano Bruno argued that there are as many genres as there are poets; Gian Vincenzo Gravina, in Ragion poetica (Poetic Reason, 1708), exalted invention and poetic imagination and reexamined the forgotten Dante. Lodovico Antonio Muratori, in Della perfetta poesia (On Perfect Poetry, 1706), opposed the Baroque proliferation of styles in the name of the ideals

of simplicity, clarity and ethics. Finally, Giovan Battista Vico treated genres as instruments of historical interpretation in La scienza nuova (The New Science, 1725). The Enlightenment and Romanticism reopened the discussion on genre statutes. Voltaire proposed a new theory of epic poetry in Essay sur la poe´sie e´pique (1726). Denis Diderot reflected variously on theater and on dramatic art in the Encyclope´die, in the Discours sur la poe´sie dramatique (1758), and in the Paradoxe sur le come´dien, written in 1773 but published posthumously in 1830, then reprinted throughout the world and considered one of the primary sources of Bertold Brecht’s concept of the theater of estrangement. Diderot’s reform, which preceded and introduced Carlo Goldoni’s, used tableaux vivants to propose a dramatization of situations. Under this reform, all was conducted professionally and studied in its typically social and cultural elements. He eliminated from acting the sensibility and the emotional participation of both actor and spectator. Diderot even invented a third form of performance, between comedy and tragedy, a bourgeois drama that renders comedy serious and tragedy domestic, bringing characters’ conditions—more than their personalities—onstage. In the formulation of his theories, he used centuries of reflections on theater, including the most recent ones, such as those expressed by Luigi Riccoboni in Dell’arte rappresentativa (On the Art of Performance, 1728), a work obsessed with the theme of the ethical reform of comedy. The Romantics once again took up the distinction between epic and dramatic poetry, deepening, with Friedrich von Schlegel, the philosophical reflections on ancient sources. Goethe named lyric, epic, and drama as the only literary genres directly suggested by nature. In his Aesthetik (1823), Hegel explained the origins of the three traditional classical genres and analyzed their dissolution. Romanticism tended to pull down the tripartition of the unities, considered (mistakenly) to be Aristotelian. Alessandro Manzoni intervened on the subject in his Lettre a` Monsieur Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps, de lieu et d’action dans la trage´die (Letter to M. Cauvet on the Unity of Time, Space and Action in Tragedy, 1823), taking a position against the unities, above all those of time and place. He aligned himself instead with Schlegel in his choice of the founding values of the tragic genre: the respect for historic veracity as the guarantor of moral validity and the unity of action understood as the capacity of the writer to collect the interpretative nexuses of the various actions. Francesco De 819

GENRES Sanctis, recalling Vico, traced the history of literary genres as evolution and cyclical change. Positivism ratified their existence as biological organisms of literature, as Ferdinand Brunetie`re, who inspired Italian supporters of the historic method such as Alessandro D’Ancona and Pio Rajna, argued in L’e´volution des genres dans l’histoire de la litte´rature (1890). At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, Benedetto Croce instead refuted the existence of literary genres. All Italian critics of the idealist mold followed him, supported also by the American philosopher John Dewey, author of Art as Experience (1934), in spite of the fact that an important publisher, Vallardi, printed a monumental Storia dei generi letterari italiani (History of Italian Literary Genres), of which the first volume, by Adolfo Albertazzi on the novel, dated to 1902, while the last two, dedicated to the lyric, appeared as late as 1950. However, the explosion of the avant-garde accompanied this dissolution of borders. Not only in literature were the boundaries between genres struck down, but all artistic manifestations tended to mix and annul. From free verse to parole in liberta` (words in freedom), from Futurist simultaneity to aeropoesia (aeropoetry), through contemporary reinterpretations of the most ancient forms of visual poetry, the beginning of the twentieth century did away with tradition. Poetry returned to its nature, that of an event that must be set in motion and made to happen in its original theatricality and its simultaneity. The novel broke down, renouncing narrativity, and proposed rather the stream of consciousness, the nonnovel, and the antinovel. At the same time, theater rejected the model of bourgeois drama to create events that embrace all artistic forms: improvisation, performance, happening, and finally synthetic theater, that completely refused the immersion of the spectators and roused their intelligence, calling them to creative and not simply interpretative cooperation. The Futurist synthesis was no longer a theatrical genre but rather an artistic form like any other. Successive artistic and literary avant-gardes followed the disintegrating action of genres, proposing ever new forms of abstraction. The birth of new critical methodologies (sociology, structuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics) brought works and interpretative languages to meet ever more often, in a reciprocal exchange of genres, of functions, and of interpretations. At the end of the 1970s, the formal rediscussion of genres informed philosophical research, as in 820

¨ esthetische Theorie, and Theodor W. Adorno’s A taxonomical work, as in Paul Hernadi’s What Is Literature? (1978), oscillating among characterizations based on thematic elements (for example, pastoral poetry, bildungsroman, and so on), on formal characteristics (for example, sonnet or canzone), or on the type of communication (for example, interior monologue or dialogue). In reality, the structural analysis of narrative continued to have great paradigmatic value. The French group of the Nouvelle critique, which included Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Tzvetan Todorov, and Ge´rard Genette, proposed such analyses at the end of the 1970s, on the heels of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale (1928), which enjoyed a rediscovery and diffusion in Western Europe in the 1960s, and of the narratology of Mikhail Bakhtin. The analysis of narrative proposed narratological theories, without concern for distinguishing the story as a narrative genre of ‘‘story-telling.’’ Such work created theories and analyses of all of the techniques present in novels, short stories, and ‘‘simple forms’’ such as myths and legends already defined by Andre´ Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930), then taken up by Northrop Frye in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). The concept of genre intermingled with that of ‘‘mode,’’ already present in Frye, as a way of organizing the imaginary, a place in which experiences of the world are represented and connected, culturally speaking, with the rhythms of the seasons. Rather than destroying genres, the late-twentieth-century debate consolidated them and brought their identities into view, including those longest ignored. Academic publications in Italy teemed with research on theories and histories of literary genres, and school manuals were often organized according to them. New genres or modes not frequently identified by analyses and literary theories were brought to light in the course of these studies. News reporting, dialogue, parody, and utopian literature were considered alongside the short story and the novel, drama and the lyric, poetry and satire, in new perspectives that valued the methodologies of twentieth-century criticism. The role of the avant-garde was never adequately underlined, including, in particular, the importance of Futurism, not only for its destruction of but also its identification of new genres and literary modes. With the birth of deconstruction, emphasis was placed on the work of the public as a postmodern practice. Speed, assumed as a model by Futurism, realized the process of disruption of literary and artistic genres begun in France in the second half of

GENRES the nineteenth century. Hence, the abandonment of the principle of mimesis on the one hand and the need, on the other, to put into effect the interferences and simultaneities of a visual-tactile-acousticolfactory nature led to the creation of texts that are in reality events, dynamic objects that require the active collaboration of the public, anticipating to a certain extent the theories articulated by Umberto Eco in Lector in fabula (The Role of the Reader, 1979). To be fully realized, such texts must be made to happen, rather than read, seen, or heard. From Futurism to Surrealism, from Dadaism to all the other abstract movements of the twentieth century, the theatrical genre was redesigned, becoming distinct from a generic ‘‘theatrical literature’’ in numerous ways. No longer simply defined according to the material treated or to the tragic or happy nature of the ending, it was also classified according to the new forms assumed. The ‘‘serata futurista’’ (Futurist evening) was a theatrical canvas with its own rules, less improvised that the Futurists themselves declared; the ‘‘sintesi teatrale’’ (theatrical synthesis) is a representation of objects that can be based on an ancient model of seventeenthand eighteenth-century tableaux vivants for the primacy conferred on the image in movement; the ‘‘poesia non umana dei tecnicismi’’ (nonhuman poem of technicalities) or the ‘‘aeropoema’’ are poetry for the theater with their own rules, completely different from both traditional theater and from poetry. Verbal-visual poetry is now particularly widespread, although there are not yet sufficient theoretical studies that define the fluid space of writing in which words exist together with images. Futurist visual poetry is not born out of nothing: A marginal tradition, infrequently visited and infrequently reproduced in part due to technical difficulties, drives Futurists to the technopaegnia (Greek pattern poems), the carmina figurata (illustrated poems), the calligrams and the poems shaped to form an image. From Simmias of Rhodes (fourth– third century BC), Dosiadas of Crete, Theocritus and other Alexandrine poets, who invented compositions in the form of altars and of bagpipes, this tradition led to Christian poets, such as Porfirius Ottantianus (fourth century), Venantius Fortunatus (sixth century), Rabanus Maurus (ninth century), who accentuated the graphic, geometric aspect of writing. The poetic word in this case seeks, in its very form, full adherence to the religious significance of the work. As a result, in these poets there is a proliferation of serpentines, acrostics, and carmina figurata. In fact, over the course of the

centuries, many authors have tried their hand at these expressive forms; in 1532 Franc¸ois Rabelais composed various calligrams, including one in the shape of a bottle written in praise of wine. It can therefore be said that from Theocritus to Marinetti, to Apollinaire, passing by way of the experiments of Les Mots dans la peinture (Words in Painting) or of La parola dipinta (The Painted Word), to quote the titles of the studies by Michel Butor (1969) and Giovanni Pozzi (1981), the avant-garde has been driven by the paradox that it has found its materials in a long-standing, if minor, literary tradition. If today visual poetry is considered in effect a genre— albeit one still predominantly studied by its producers, artists, and poets—this is in part because of Futurism, which brought to evidence and into practice its specific characteristics. In the absence of new, convincing methodological proposals on the part of scholars, the ‘‘militant’’ theoretical statements of the artists remain among the most important documents, not simply from a historiographic point of view, but also from a Hermeneutic one. In the end, such statements constitute their own genre: One might think of the theories of Vincenzo Accame (Il segno poetico, 1977) or Lamberto Pignotti (Figure scritture, 1987), to give a few contemporary examples. This type of document dates back as another avant-garde genre, the poetic manifesto, whose specific codification began with symbolism and Ste´phane Mallarme´ but was perfected in the paroxysm of manifesto writing with Futurism. From Marinetti’s first manifesto of 1909, to the last, including that written with Fillia on Futurist cooking, the oratory structure based on the ancient model is evident, in particular from the Institutio oratoria by Quintilian, with many rhetorically distinguishable parts, such as the inventio, the dispositio, the elocutio, the actio, and the memoria. Following this, Dadaism, Surrealism, and the other avant-gardes of the twentieth century have taken up and confirmed its importance. New modes of communication influence, in interesting ways, the formal statutes of genres, even inventing new ones, such as instant text messaging. Online short stories and novels, for example, transform addressees, space, time, and structural form. The short story recalls its origins in the oral tradition when, on the Internet, it appears next to urban stories born in the daily news; the novel becomes once again a serial novel, now on a Web page instead of in a newspaper; poetry is read in festivals and theaters, proposing itself anew as a primordial event in which all the senses and the other arts come into play, as in ancient times and in Futurism. 821

GENRES These new communicative genres call for a new reading of genre itself in terms of performance, dramatization, poetry slam. The Internet, in this variegated panorama of interpretations, was first a perturbing element, then a force for change. If studies of these transformations are still lacking, this certainly is due to the fact that, as always, reality is faster and more complex than its theoretical formulations. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE Further Reading Accame, Vincenzo, Il segno poetico: materiali e riferimenti per una storia della ricerca poetico-visuale e interdisciplinare, Samedan: Munt Press, 1977. ¨ esthetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Adorno, Theodor W., A Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. Agosti, Stefano, Il testo poetico. Teoria e pratica d’analisi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Anceschi, Luciano, Gli specchi della poesia, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Le forme del testo, 2 vols., Letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Bagni, Paolo, Genere, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1997. Baldissone, Giusi, Gli occhi della letteratura. Miti, figure, generi, Novara: Interlinea, 1999. Barthes, Roland (editor), L’analyse structurale du re´cit, special issue of Communications, 8 (1966). Bigazzi, Roberto, Le risorse del romanzo. Componenti di genere nella narrativa moderna, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1996. Bologna, Corrado, Flatus vocis. Metafisica e antropologia della voce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992.

Brioschi, Franco, and Corrado Di Girolamo (editors), Manuale di letteratura italiana. Storia per generi e problemi, 4 vols., Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993–1996. Butor, Michel, Les Mots dans la peinture, Gene`ve: E¨ditions d’Art Albert Skira, 1969. Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo, Antropologia della scrittura, Turin: Loescher, 1981. Carlson, Marvin, Theories of the Theatre. An Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984. Cavarero, Adriana, A piu` voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003. Ceserani Remo, Raccontare la letteratura, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1990. Frye, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957. Fubini, Mario, Critica e poesia. Saggi e discorsi di teoria letteraria, Bari: Laterza, 1956. Hernadi, Paul, What is Literature? Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978. Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word, London and New York: Methuen, 1982. Pignotti, Lamberto, Figure scritture. Su certi segni delle arti e dei mass-media, Udine: Campanotto, 1987. Pozzi, Giovanni, La parola dipinta, Milan: Adelphi, 1981. Propp, Vladimir, Morphology of the Folktale, Bloomington: Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 1958. Raimondi, Ezio, and Luciano Bottoni (editors), Teoria della letteratura, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1975. Segre, Cesare, Avviamento all’analisi del testo letterario, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Segre, Cesare, Le strutture e il tempo. Narrazione, poesia, modelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Todorov, Tzvetan (editor), The´orie de la litte´rature, Paris: Seuil, 1966.

GIOVANNI GENTILE (1875–1944) Giovanni Gentile was a major figure in Italian idealist philosophy, as well as an educator, critic, and politician who became a prominent figure during in the Fascist Party, especially in the 1920s, as a Minister of Education of Benito Mussolini’s government. He is sometimes called the ‘‘philosopher of Fascism,’’ in recognition of his attempts to justify the dictatorship philosophically. Born in Sicily, Gentile wanted to complete his education in a city that could offer him future possibilities and moved to Pisa, where he studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore, at that time one of the best universities 822

in Italy. At the Scuola Normale Superiore, which had been reformed immediately after Italian unification by Ministers of Education Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883) and Carlo Matteucci (1811–1868), Gentile assimilated the foundations of Italian postunification culture, a mixture of positivism, erudition, and civil engagement. He was particularly influenced by Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914) and Donato Jaja (1839–1914), two of his professors, as well as by the works of Bertrando Spaventa (1817–1883), the central figure of nineteenth-century Italian Hegelianism. This environment did not prevent him

GIOVANNI GENTILE from developing an original and independent thought. He often engaged in controversy with many of the intellectuals of the period in his opposition to positivism and historical materialism. He soon developed a polemical and biting style in his reviews and articles, which often did not allow him room for any compromise. Gentile’s position matured during the years he spent in Florence to complete his education after 1897. There he also met the philosopher Felice Tocco (1845–1911) and the historian Pasquale Villari (1826–1917). From a philosophical point of view, Gentile’s attualismo (actual idealism) shows the strong influence of Hegel, reinterpreted according to a peculiar and radically idealistic perspective. Gentile, writing against current philosophical ideas, articulated his philosophical idealism while criticizing historical materialism in his La filosofia di Marx (Marx’s Philosophy, 1899) and dissecting positivism in discussions with Villari and in his critique of Antonio Rosmini in Rosmini e Gioberti (1898). The restoration of the Hegelian dialectic, which he theorized in his La riforma della dialettica hegeliana (The Reform of the Hegelian Dialectic, 1913), was probably in his mind a sort of ‘‘third way’’ that allowed him to keep his distance from these two philosophical poles of the Italian cultural establishment. He considered idealism as the only true philosophy, born with Plato and yet to complete its development. For Gentile, it was still possible to find traces of realism in Kant, while Hegel himself considered thought in an abstract way, as an ‘‘idea’’ or as ‘‘spirit.’’ Hegel’s logic shows a series of categories that are not ‘‘thinking’’ but ‘‘thought;’’ thus the real subject is not included in the dialectical act of thinking. Therefore, according to Gentile, it is necessary to reform Hegel’s dialectic by shifting from the pure being or the ‘‘idea’’ to the concrete act of thinking; in other words, to make the living subjectivity of the ego, not a generic spirit, the foundation of idealist thought. Gentile’s philosophy, which posits the ego as a pure act that establishes itself, distinguishes between a subjective moment (which is the thinking act itself) from an objective one (which is what ‘‘thought’’ is). What is ‘‘thought’’ has to be identified with nature, history, or even god, all of which, being ‘‘objects,’’ do not exist by themselves but only in the thoughts that conceive and establish them. Therefore, everything is ‘‘act,’’ and everything exists only in the actuality of the thinking act: For this reason Gentile’s philosophy is called attualismo (actualism). This thinking act characterizes all empirical egos that, by virtue of being empirical, are also different and opposed to

one another. However, as mere thinking egos, they can be considered as constituting a universal Ego. This universal Ego is immanent in all the empiric ones and does not exist as a separate being. In this way, Gentile opposed his idealism both to materialism and to religious spiritualism, as it is ‘‘absolute’’ because of its radical ‘‘immanence’’ (while Hegel’s idealism still had traces of transcendence). Gentile articulated his philosophical theory in his Teoria generale del conoscere dello spirito come atto puro (The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, 1916) and Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (The System of Logic as Theory of Cognition, 1917–1921), in two volumes. Both works were the result of a long gestation and had already been outlined in 1899, while the author was writing La filosofia di Marx. In the same period Gentile met Benedetto Croce, who was nine years older and was already a wellknown intellectual. Their friendship lasted until 1924, when it ended as a result of Gentile’s adherence to Fascism. Since the early 1900s Gentile and Croce had collaborated on La critica, which they founded in 1902, making it one of the most important literary reviews of the period, and frequently discussed their philosophical thoughts, deeply influencing one another. The end of their friendship was underlined by the publication of two manifestos in 1925. To rally Italian intellectuals to a Fascist commitment to the country, Gentile drafted the Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti (Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals), issued after the first congress of Fascist culture in Bologna and signed by, among others, Ugo Spirito, Luigi Pirandello, Ardengo Soffici, and Margherita Sarfatti. A few days later Croce responded with the Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti, in which he expressed his opposition to Fascism much more clearly than he had ever done before. Gentile explained his embrace of Fascism on philosophical grounds, above all through his adaptation of Hegel’s concept of the ‘‘ethical state.’’ The state, in his mind, had to be considered a synthesis of will (authority) and freedom. Gentile advocated an authoritarian and ‘‘ethical state’’ that should represent the universal being of the empirical egos without compromising public and private interests, as, argued, happens in a democracy. From this perspective, it is not difficult to see the connections of this political position to the philosophy of attualismo— the state itself must be considered as a universal Ego incarnate—but its proximity to the principles of totalitarianism. As Gentile declared, everything is in the state, and nothing is out of the state, which also means that only by submitting to the ethical 823

GIOVANNI GENTILE state can people attain a true freedom, equal for all. Those who refuse to submit are simply acting on egoistic interests. Gentile’s identification of ethical state and universal ego led him to justify violence, as well as a sort of political mysticism. However, his support of Fascism not only reflected his philosophical thought but was also the result of personal experience. Gentile’s family belonged to the Sicilian middle class, which historically had played a mediating role between the aristocracy and rural classes, and which, fearing social disorder, was always on the side of the established authorities. Gentile had a very strong sense of the state and its institutions, to which he always remained loyal. Therefore, after the downfall of the Fascist regime and the Italian armistice on September 8, 1943, he decided to embrace the Fascist Social Republic of Salo` to save his honor and integrity. As a politician, Gentile’s fame is linked to his role in the first Fascist government as Minister of Education and to the school reform that he planned and implemented, thus bringing to fruition several years of speculation on pedagogy. Gentile had always been interested in this matter. As early as 1900 he had published L’insegnamento della filosofia nei licei (The Teaching of Philosophy in the High Schools), written just after he had begun to teach and later developed into Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica (Summary of Pedagogy as a Philosophical Science, 1913–1914). Gentile’s educational system was based on principles partly related to his ‘‘actualism’’ and partly to direct experience. If reality, history, and nature are nothing but an act of thinking, then the cornerstone of education must be the act itself: The educational experience is both teaching and learning at the same time, as the teacher sums up in himself the empirical subjectivities of the students and elevates them to the universal Ego. In practical terms, Gentile refused any general didactic method and criticized the separation of form and content, arguing that a subject cannot be considered as abstract knowledge to be apprehended in isolation from other subjects. Gentile’s pedagogy, characterized by a moral foundation like much of his thought, aimed at forming students rather than at imparting knowledge. For this reason, his system also favored classical over scientific studies. From this perspective, his ideas were in perfect accord with the needs of Fascism, which aimed at shaping society according to its principles. In spite of this, Gentile created a rigid structure in which philosophical education, the foundation of the whole system, was the privilege of an elite. The teaching of the Catholic 824

religion, considered as a connection between art and philosophy, also played an important role. One of Gentile’s most important achievements was the publication of the first edition of the Enciclopedia italiana (1936), which Institute he directed from 1925, when the Institute itself was created, until 1943. Despite the objections and the difficulties raised by both Fascists and anti-Fascists, he tried to involve the largest number of intellectuals in this project, aiming as much as possible at keeping the Institute and the encyclopedia above political factions.

Biography Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano (Trapani) on May 29, 1875. He earned a degree in philosophy from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, 1897. He was cofounder of the journal La critica with Benedetto Croce, 1902. He became a professor at the University of Palermo, 1906; a professor at the University of Pisa, 1914; and then a professor at the University of Rome, 1917. He founded the Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 1920. Gentile was elected Senator, 1922, and appointed Minister of Education in the first Fascist government, 1922–1924. He carried out extensive reform of Italian schools and directed the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. He became director of the Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana (Treccani), 1925. He served as President of the Supreme Council of Public Education, 1926–1928, and was a member of the Fascist Grand Council, 1925–1929; thereafter his political influence steadily declined. In 1943 he supported the Social Republic of Salo`. Gentile was killed in mysterious circumstances (most likely a political execution) on April 15, 1944 in Florence. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Opere complete, Florence: Sansoni, 1955–. Il pensiero politico-pedagogico di Giovanni Gentile, edited by Dario Faucci, Florence: Le Monnier, 1972. Opere filosofiche, edited by Eugenio Garin, Milan: Garzanti, 1991.

Philosophical and Pedagogical Writing Rosmini e Gioberti, 1898. La filosofia di Marx, 1899. L’insegnamento della filosofia nei licei, 1900. La scuola primaria di Stato, 1907. La riforma della dialettica hegeliana, 1913.

GERMAN INFLUENCES Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica, 2 vols., 1913–1914. I fondamenti della filosofia del diritto, 1916. Teoria generale dello spirito come atto puro, 1916; as The Theory of Mind as Pure Act, translated by H. Wildon Carr, 1922. Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere, 2 vols., 1917– 1921. Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, 4 vols., 1917–1923. La riforma dell’educazione, 1920; as The Reform of Education, translated by Dino Bigongiari, 1922. Che cosa e` il fascismo; discorsi e polemiche, 1925. Origini e dottrina del fascismo, 1929; as Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, translated by A. James Gregor, 2002. La filosofia dell’arte, 1931; as The Philosophy of Art, translated by Giovanni Gullace, 1972. Economia ed etica, 1934. La mia religione, 1943. Genesi e struttura della societa`, 1946; as Genesis and Structure of Society, translated by Henry S. Harris, 1960. Discorsi parlamentari, 2004.

Critical Essays Studi vichiani, 1915. Studi sul Rinascimento, 1923. Dante e Manzoni, 1923. Poesia e filosofia in Giacomo Leopardi, 1939.

Letters Carteggio Gentile-Jaja, edited by Maria Sandirocco, 2 vols., 1969. Carteggio Gentile-D’Ancona, edited by Carlo Bonomo, 1973. Lettere a Benedetto Croce, edited by Simona Giannantoni, 5 vols., 1972–1990.

Giovanni Gentile e il Senato. Carteggio (1895–1944), edited by Fortunato Pintor, 2004.

Further Reading Agosti, Vittorio, Filosofia e religione nell’attualismo gentiliano, Brescia: Paideia, 1977. Coli, Daniela, Giovanni Gentile, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Colombo, Katia, La pedagogia filosofica di Giovanni Gentile, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Di Giovanni, Piero (editor), Giovanni Gentile. La filosofia italiana tra idealismo e anti-idealismo, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003. Di Lello, et al. (editors), Giovanni Gentile: Il pensiero dell’Italia, Rome: Pantheon, 2004. Gaeta, Maria Ida (editor), Giovanni Gentile: la filosofia, la politica, l’organizzazione della cultura, Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Gregor, A. James, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2001. Harris, Henry S., The Social Philosophy of Giovanni Gentile, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1960. Moss, E. M., Mussolini’s Fascist Philosopher: Giovanni Gentile Reconsidered, New York: Peter Lang, 2004. Natoli, Salvatore, Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1989. Pellegrino, Paolo, L’estetica del neoidealismo italiano, Galatina (Lecce): Congedo, 1996. Petrillo, Francesco, Diritto e volonta` dello Stato nel pensiero di Giovanni Gentile, Turin: Giappichelli, 1997. Raschini, Maria Adelaide, Gentile e il neoidealismo, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Romano, Sergio, Giovanni Gentile. Un filosofo al potere negli anni del regime, Milan: Rizzoli, 2004. Turi, Gabriele, Giovanni Gentile, Florence: Giunti, 1995.

GERMAN INFLUENCES There has never been any lack of exchange or contact between Italian culture and the culture of Germanic countries, but for a long period what can be considered their common ground was dominated by Latin as the language of culture. Up to the fifteenth century, not much of what was being produced in German gained any attention in Italy. Likewise, while Petrarch and Boccaccio were known to some extent, it cannot be said that Italian literary production, which was already showing the first signs of the Renaissance sophistication and splendor to come, received ‘‘due’’ attention in Germany (although contacts between artists occurred:

Albrecht Du¨rer was in Venice twice). The interests and the general atmosphere in the two countries were, in fact, too different; and, from a cultural and literary point of view, sixteenth-century Germany still remained medieval in many respects. Only the passage through the Reformation led to fresh prospects, which are generally linked to the poet Martin Opitz (1597–1639), and to borrowing forms and contents from the Italian and French Renaissance. The fashion of Petrarchism, the names of Ludovico Ariosto and Torquato Tasso, and the elegance of the Baroque all reached Germany and other states of Germanic culture together (earlier on in Holland 825

GERMAN INFLUENCES and a little later in Sweden). On the other hand, at the end of the seventeenth century it was a German, Leibniz, whose name as a philosopher was on everyone’s lips, even though he was considered more the representative of a universal literary republic rather than of a specifically German culture, as Benedetto Croce put it (‘‘Cultura germanica in Italia nell’eta` del Risorgimento,’’ 1927). If during the seventeenth century Italy’s prestige in Europe tended to decline, the excellence achieved in culture and the arts rendered it immune to foreign influences, and, indeed, Italian forms of poetry were adopted elsewhere. Not until later, and in the case of Germany mainly from the Romantic age onward, would the flow be reversed. Moreover, the German language was little known and valued: Pietro Metastasio, for instance, did not bother to learn it despite his long stay in Vienna. During the seventeenth century, however, a few scholars and men of letters—starting with Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola (1753–1798), author of Idea della poesia alemanna (An Idea of German Literature, 1779) and Idea della bella letteratura alemanna (An Idea of Fine German Literature, 1784), which contains translations of Salomon Gessner’s Idyllen (1756– 1772)—took a different course and translated directly from the German, making their readers acquainted with Christoph Martin Wieland, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), which achieved immediate success throughout Europe, was translated into Italian, and its influence is evident in the structure of Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime letteere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1798), Vincenzo Monti’s works, and in some of Giacomo Leopardi’s poems. During the nineteenth century, Goethe’s Faust (Part I, 1808; Part II, 1832) met with the same success. Arrigo Boito drew freely on it for his Mefistofele (Mephistopheles, 1868) and Giovanni Prati for his Armando (1868), as did Enrico Thovez and Arturo Graf. However, rather than being seen as a product of the German tradition, Goethe soon came to represent the eternal ideal of poetry, alongside Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare. At a different level of critical recognition, Friedrich Schiller’s plays also become popular (Don Carlos, in the translation by Andrea Maffei, was admired by Carlo Cattaneo), and his themes were taken up in opera by Gioacchino Rossini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Giuseppe Verdi, while his idealistic drive was appreciated by Giuseppe Mazzini. Giovanni Berchet, with his translations of Gottfried August 826

Bu¨rger, brought Italy the Romantic ballad, whose exponents were Luigi Carrer, Francesco Dall’Ongaro, and Aleardo Aleardi. Of great significance were figures such as Novalis, the poet-philosopher, in some respects close to Leopardi, who nevertheless seems not to have known him; Heinrich von Kleist, whose theatrical works would be better appreciated later on; the Grimm brothers, with their studies of language and folklore (their Fables were translated throughout Europe); August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, writers and critics who, together with Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, spread Romanticism and were well loved in Italy, particularly by the Liberals (Francesco De Sanctis and the brothers Silvio and Bertrando Spaventa were among the first translators of Hegel). It was once again the Romantic vein of his works that made Heinrich Heine famous in Italy: He inspired Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Giacomo Zanella, Antonio Fogazzaro, and, most importantly, Giosue` Carducci, who reinterpreted his ironic and rebellious spirit. In the Odi barbare (Barbaric Odes, 1893), Carducci also drew upon August von Platen, developing his historical and classical interests, and translated him, as well as Klopstock, Uhland, Herder, and Ho¨lderlin. The end of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of new themes and names that influenced European literature in different ways, notably Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. In Italy, Gabriele D’Annunzio took it upon himself to interpret, or rather misinterpret, them, in particular in the novels Il trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894) and Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900), transforming whatever was grandiose and tragic in them into a totally sensual decadentism. The irrational element of Nietzsche’s message can be noticed in early twentieth-century journals such as Il Leonardo and Lacerba. On a different level, Nietzsche’s psychology was used as a resource by Umberto Saba, who also proved to be highly sensitive to the teachings of Sigmund Freud in the poems of Il piccolo Berto (Little Berto, 1929–1931) and above all in his prose works. Indeed, Freud would influence in different ways the whole of twentieth-century literature, from the sceptic Italo Svevo of La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923) to Alberto Moravia, and his interpretations of the unconscious became a vital part of all reflections on humankind. The complex tangle of the human soul returns time and again in the narrative and drama of Luigi Pirandello, who attended Lipps’s courses in atomistic psychology in Germany and subsequently completed his studies by graduating

GERMAN INFLUENCES in philology in Bonn in 1891. The spiritualist and humorous framework of his works (the Germanisms of which have often been critiqued, as in the case of Svevo) is reminiscent of Hoffmann and Heine. The young generation of Triestine intellectuals frequently had the University of Vienna as their reference point (for instance Carlo Michelstaedter, a scholar of Hebbel and Ibsen), when they did not demonstrate their debt to German culture in other ways, as in the case of Scipio Sla`taper, who graduated in Florence with a thesis on Ibsen. German symbolism, connected in various ways to its French counterpart and represented mainly by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, and Rainer Maria Rilke, influenced the Florentine Hermetics, who also introduced expressionist authors such as Georg Trakl and Gottfried Benn. An important mediating role was played by the translation of Leone Traverso. In the period between the two world wars, and despite the limits imposed by Nazi and Fascist directives, the works of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Arthur Schnitzler, Erich Maria Remarque, and the authors of the Neue Sachlichkeit (including, among others, Alfred Do¨blin) enjoyed considerable attention. Their skilled detailed analysis contributed to bringing traditional Italian prose more up to date. On the contrary, the mesmerizing works of Franz Kafka and Robert Musil would become better known after World War II. In the context of broader and freer cultural exchange following the war, it becomes more difficult to establish which authors really exerted an active influence. In the field of criticism, particular recognition is due to Leo Spitzer’s and Eric Auerbach’s stylistics and to the philosophical thought of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, while in the field of creative writing there was a boom in translations. Moreover, because literature was being consumed far more rapidly than before, in the end one has to rely on more transitory evidence: the awarding of significant literary prizes, social and political events (the ‘‘two Germanies’’ and their literary representations), the incidence on or coincidence of literary research with the suggestions from mass media, entertainment, and in particular cinema. Hermann Hesse won the Nobel Prize in 1946, but his narrative became most widely read in the 1960s and 1970s, when his mystical and irrational writings attracted the student generation of 1968. The theater of Berthold Brecht was influential in the immediate postwar period, and his lyric poetry was translated by Franco Fortini. In the 1970s it would enjoy a comeback thanks to the

vicissitudes of criticism, with the rediscovery of Walter Benjamin’s writings and the theories of the Frankfurt School. Other authors who were widely discussed between the 1950s and 1960s include Heinrich Bo¨ll (Nobel prize winner in 1972), Gu¨nther Grass, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger. In 1963 Rolf Hochhuth’s play Der Stellvertreter (The Vicar) created a scandal for its representation of the Vatican position on the Holocaust. In later years it would be the turn of Peter Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Christa Wolf in fiction, and in poetry, necessarily a more elitist domain, of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan. EDOARDO ESPOSITO Further Reading Azzolini, Margherita, Giosue Carducci und die deutsche Literatur, Tubingen: J. C. Mohr, 1910. Bach, Giovanni, ‘‘La letteratura tedesca in Francesco De Sanctis,’’ in Studi e ricordi desanctisiani, Avellino: Tipografia Pergola, 1935. Beller, Manfred, Le metamorfosi di Mignon: l’emigrazione poetica dei tedeschi in Italia da Goethe a oggi, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Le traduzioni preromantiche,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1949. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Leopardi wertheriano e l’Omero di Ugo Foscolo,’’ in Me´langes d’histoire litte´raire, ge´ne´rale et compare´e, offerts a` Fernand Baldensperger, Paris: Campion, 1930. Cantarutti, Giulia, Stefano Ferrari, and Paola Maria Filippi (eds.), Il Settecento tedesco in Italia: gli italiani e l’immagine della cultura tedesca nel XVIII secolo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Cecchini, Laudomia, La ballata romantica in Italia, Turin: Paravia, 1901. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Cultura germanica in Italia nell’eta` del Risorgimento,’’ in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1927. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Goethe e la critica italiana,’’ in Goethe, 3rd. revised edition, Bari: Laterza, 1939. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Per la storia del pensiero tedesco in Italia,’’ in Aneddoti di varia letteratura, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1942. Esposito, Edoardo (editor), Le letterature straniere nell’Italia dell’entre-deux-guerres, Lecce: Pensa MultiMedia, 2004. Galletti, Alfredo, ‘‘Richard Wagner e Gabriele D’Annunzio,’’ in Teorie di critici ed opere di poeti, L’Aquila: Vecchioni, 1930. Giovannetti, Paolo, Nordiche superstizioni. La ballata romantica italiana, Venice: Marsilio, 1999. Hazard, Paul, ‘‘L’invasion des litte´ratures du Nord en Italie,’’ in Revue de litte´rature compare´e, 1(1921), 30–67. La¨mmert, Eberhard, and Giorgio Cusatelli (editors), Avantgarde, Modernita¨t, Katastrophe: letteratura, arte e scienza fra Germania e Italia nel primo ’900, Florence: Olschki, 1995.

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GERMAN INFLUENCES Natali, Giulio, ‘‘Appunti su la cultura tedesca in Italia e italiana nei paesi tedeschi nel sec. XVIII,’’ Rivista d’Italia, 31(1928), 416–428. Rubino, L. Mario, I mille demoni della modernita`. L’immagine della Germania e la ricezione della narrativa tedesca contemporanea in Italia fra le due guerre, Palermo: Flaccovio, 2002.

Santoli, Vittorio, ‘‘La letteratura italiana, la tedesca e le nordiche,’’ in Letterature comparate, edited by Antonio Viscardi et al., Milan: Marzorati, 1960. Tortarolo, Edoardo, La ragione interpretata: la mediazione culturale tra Italia e Germania nell’eta` dell’Illuminismo, Rome: Carocci, 2003.

PIETRO GERMI (1914–1974) Pietro Germi was one of Italian cinema’s most popular directors at a time when Italy had the third-largest movie-going public in the world and, most likely, the highest ratio of movie theaters to population. An aesthetically accomplished master of commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian-style), he was, above all, an eclectic craftsman possessed of great technical skills. Often dismissed as a genre director using commercial, Hollywood-style scenarios, Germi experimented with various genres and achieved remarkable results in each: from the politically engaged Western, In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law, 1948), to the traditional melodrama in Il ferroviere (The Railroad Man, 1955); from the detective story of Un maledetto imbroglio (The Facts of Murder, 1959) to his comic-satiric masterpiece Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce ItalianStyle, 1961). Throughout his career, Germi explored the ambiguities and complexities of a nation that, soon after World War II, was undergoing an irreversible transformation from a rural to an industrial society—a transformation that changed the face of the country while altering its identity. Germi successfully wed refined narration and mass communication, popular entertainment and social critique, romantic tragedy and corrosive humor, sarcasm and idealism. He aimed to incorporate postwar neo-Realistic trends into mainstream cinema, thus attracting wide audiences to socially committed films. The populist lyricism of Germi’s early films and the grotesque melancholy of his mature comedies sprang from his unwillingness to accept the world as it is. While in Italy shooting Avanti! (1972), Billy Wilder asked to meet Pietro Germi because he considered him the European filmmaker with whom he had the most in common. Like Germi’s, Wilder’s critical reputation has fluctuated. 828

Germi’s cinematic career began under the auspices of Alessandro Blasetti, the most influential director of his day. In 1941, he made a cameo appearance in Blasetti’s La corona di ferro (The Iron Crown). Germi’s directorial debut, however, came only at the end of the war with Il testimone (The Witness, 1945), a courtroom drama. His next two films marked him as a neo-Realist: Gioventu` perduta (Lost Youth, 1947), which explores criminality among the young, relies on the conventions of popular American genres (gangster movies and film noir). The main character, Marcello, recalls Alan Ladd’s role as a hired killer in Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942). In nome della legge, the first courageous Italian film to be made about the Sicilian Mafia, revisits the frontier setting of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). These legendary American films were released in Italy just before Germi began production on his own films. Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope, 1950) tells the story of a group of Sicilian sulfur miners who cross the Italian peninsula in the hope of emigrating illegally to France. This film can be considered the director’s most original contribution to postwar Italian cinema. It is a kind of stylized adaptation of the classical plots of Ford’s films of the 1940s, particularly The Grapes of Wrath. Germi was a superb visual storyteller who combined the elements of the Russian school (considerable compositional and editing skills) with the social themes of Italian neo-Realism (nonprofessional actors, authentic locations, true stories). At the same time, he was adept at attracting a mass audience with moving plots, epic breadth, and popular themes. During the 1950s Germi directed some of his least critically acclaimed films: La citta` si difende (Four Ways Out, 1951); Il brigante di Tacca del

PIETRO GERMI Lupo (The Brigand of Tacca del Lupo, 1952); La presidentessa (The Chief Judge’s Wife, 1952); and Gelosia, (Jealousy, 1953). As a social democrat, he also came to be known as an artist at odds with the ideological Left. Germi was openly antiCommunist. By the end of the decade, he had released three stunning films in which he also played the leading role. Il ferroviere (1956), L’uomo di paglia (The Straw Man, 1958), and Un maledetto imbroglio are notable for Germi’s exploration of the psychological drama of the family. Germi also worked as an actor in films by Damiano Damiani, Mauro Bolognini, and Martin Ritt. Itwas in this period that his maturation as an actor and director breathed life into his solid, robust films, which with remarkable assurance reworked the melodrama and film noir, but which, more importantly, again spotlighted his power to analyze, through the cinema, the deep structures of Italian society, like the family, the petit bourgeoisie, and the suburbs. His recitative dramatic style was made up of simple but impeccable gestures; his power of telling stories to any spectator with fluid camera work, unbroken rhythm, and emotionally rich narration was augmented in these years—when an unexpected transformation radically altered his style—by his dramatic classicism. To the great surprise of his critics, who would have never expected from a dramatic director such brilliant comedies as Divorzio all’italiana, Sedotta e abbandonata (Seduced and Abandoned, 1962) and Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians, 1965), Germi visually translated the stories of Italians, who were once accustomed to problems like hunger or the invention of elaborate schemes to secure temporary jobs but who must now find new solutions to difficult problems in a modern and wealthy nation. In Divorzio all’italiana, the use of a barbaric law concerning an honor killing is the occasion for an irreverent satire of the backwardness of Southern Italy but also for a disillusioned reflection on its sentiments and mores. The film, which predated the legal institution of civil divorce in Italy, shows the clumsy attempts of a Siclian nobleman, Fernando Cefalu` (Fefe` to his friends) to divorce his wife Rosalia in order to marry his beloved cousin Angela. He schemes for Rosalia to commit an act of infidelity so that he can murder her, an obligatory honor killing. Sedotta e abbandonata takes the use of grotesque faces (as in the drawings of Goya, which Germi adored) and the tendency to stress narrative rhythm and paradox to an extreme. The plot centers on a courageous Sicilian girl, Agnese, who dares to break the

traditional code of silence or omerta` after she is seduced by her suitor, who then refuses to marry her because she is no longer a virgin. In the end, individual rebellion is defeated, and the honorable Sicilian moral code forces Agnese to marry against her will. Germi’s next comedy, Signore e signori, directs the same corrosive humor of the Sicilian comedies toward the society of the North. It also perfects the use of the traveling shot and the zoom in original combinations, thanks to which his visual style acquired a dynamism, akin to that of a swift bird of prey, which surveyed the entire community of a small town in order to reveal its secrets and miseries. These films were box office hits both because they were funny and because they represented individuals destroyed by opposing social values. Germi adopted a sophisticated comedic style: contrast-lighting enhanced by the use of deep blacks and blinding whites, fast cutting, and a mobile camera. Despite his undeniable success and some recognition on the international scene after Divorzio all’italiana won the Academy Award for the best screenplay, the last years of the director’s life were unsatisfying. L’immorale, (The Climax, 1966), Serafino (1968), Le castagne sono buone (Chestnuts Are Good, 1970), and Alfredo, Alfredo (1972) no longer show his extraordinary satiric panache. Only his last film, Amici miei (My Friends, 1974), directed by Mario Monicelli, was successful enough to prompt a sequel. Germi was too ill to direct it himself and died on the first day of shooting. For years Pietro Germi’s name seemed to have vanished. It was only at the end of the 1990s that his films were restored by Cineteca Nazionale and Cinema Forever-Mediaset and that retrospectives of his work (particularly the 1999 New York Film Festival) contributed to his revival and recognition as one of the most original and influential directors of Italian cinema. Otar Ioseliani and Billy Wilder, two extremely different artists, both loved Germi’s films. Today, Daniele Luchetti, Gabriele Muccino, and Paolo Virzı` can most closely be identified with his extraordinary comic legacy.

Biography Pietro Germi was born in Genoa to Giovanni and Armellina Castiglione, 14 September 1914. His father, who died when Pietro was 10, was a hotel porter; his mother was illiterate. Germi attended the Liceo Nautico, where he studied to become a naval officer, 1931–1934; he applied to the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Italian film 829

PIETRO GERMI school) in Rome and was turned down, 1937; he reapplied and was admitted under the sponsorship of Alessandro Blasetti. Germi married Anna Maria Bancio, 1940; their daughter Linda was born, 1945. He was divorced from his first wife in 1954, and married Olga D’Ajello, 1966. Germi produced for RAI television the series I giorni della signorina Giulia (Ms. Giulia’s Days), adapted from short stories by Piero Chiara, 1969. He was awarded numerous prizes, including Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Il cammino della speranza, 1950; an Academy Award for Divorzio all’italiana, 1961; the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Signore e signori, 1965; and a film retrospective at the New York Film Festival, 1999. Germi died of cirrhosis in Rome, 5 December 1974. MARIO SESTI Selected Works Films Il testimone, 1945. Gioventu` perduta (Lost Youth), 1947. In nome della legge (In the Name of the Law), 1949. Il cammino della speranza (Path of Hope), 1950. La citta` si difende (Four Ways Out), 1951. La presidentessa, 1952. Il brigante di Tacca del Lupo, 1952. Gelosia, 1953. Amori di mezzo secolo (second episode), 1953. Il ferroviere (The Railroad Man), 1955. L’uomo di paglia, 1957.

Divorzio all’italiana (Divorce, Italian Style), 1961. Sedotta e abandonata (Seduced and Abandoned), 1963. Signore e signori (The Birds, the Bees and the Italians), 1965. L’immorale (The Climax), 1966. Serafino (Serafino), 1968. Le castagne sono buone, 1970. Alfredo Alfredo (Alfredo Alfredo), 1972.

Screenplays L’uomo di paglia, edited by Fausto Montesanti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1958. Divorzio all’italiana, edited by Giorgio Moscon, Roma: F. M. Edizioni, 1961. Sedotta e abbandonata, edited by Giacomo Gambetti, Bologna: Cappelli, 1964. Pietro Germi, et al., Finche` divorzio non vi separi (original treatment of Alfredo Alfredo), Rome: Tipografia C. Corvo, 1971.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, Massimo Armenzoni, and Patrizia Pistagnesi (editors), Pietro Germi: Ritratto di un regista all’antica, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1989. Buache, Freddy (editor), Hommage a` Pietro Germi, Locarno: Cine´mateque Suisse, 1976. Caldiron, Orio, Pietro Germi: Le cine`ma frontalier, Rome: Gremese International, 1995. Positif (special issue on Germi), 406(1994). Sesti, Mario, Tutto il cinema di Pietro Germi, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997. Sesti, Mario (editor), Pietro Germi: The Latin Loner, Milan: Edizioni Olivares, 1999. Sesti, Mario (editor), Signore e signori: Pietro Germi, Siena: Gli Ori, 2004. Vigano, Aldo (editor), I film di Pietro Germi, Genoa: AgisSNCCI, 1994.

GIACOMINO DA VERONA (MID- TO LATE-THIRTEENTH CENTURY) The De Ierusalem celesti (The Heavenly Jerusalem) and De Babilonia civitate infernali (Babylon Infernal City) are the only extant works definitively attributed to the Franciscan cleric Giacomino da Verona. Written in monorhythmic alexandrine quatrains, the De Ierusalem celesti deals with the joys reserved for the blessed in Paradise, while the De Babilonia civitate infernali describes the torments awaiting the unrepentant in the infernal 830

city. In both metric style and content, Giacomino’s eschatological poems closely approximate Bonvesin de la Riva’s more refined Libro delle tre Scritture (Book of the Three Scriptures, ca. 1274), and together they represent two of the finest examples of late medieval didactic poetry written in a northern Italian vernacular. Though attempts to trace any direct link to Dante have been tenuous at best, both authors of these allegorical visions

GIACOMINO DA VERONA have long been grouped among his so-called precursors. The material for the diptych is culled by and large from Revelations, often cited by Giacomino himself, as well as from sermons and the Franciscan literature of the period. Certain verses also bear a stylistic resemblance to a vernacular piece entitled Della caducita` della vita umana (The Frailty of Human Life), which, coincidentally, rests alongside the works of Giacomino and Bonvesin in their oldest manuscript edition (Marciano it. 4744). Giacomino therefore belongs to an established tradition of didactic religious poetry then popular in northern Italy. What distinguishes his work from that of his contemporaries, however, is his quasi-mimetic eye for realism—a charming, almost naı¨ve tendency to transpose concrete elements from quotidian life into his fantastical vision of the afterlife. The damned suffer from extreme cold and heat; they are attacked by animals, subjected to the beatings of their cruel master Beelzebub, and, in short, suffer a fate that would differ from a peasant’s daily toil only in the severity of degree. Thus, the De Babilonia civitate infernali preys on the common fears shared by its humble audience, twisting their mundane trials and tribulations into hyperbolic eternal punishments. In contrast to this monstrous caricature stands the fablelike heavenly court of the De Ierusalem celesti. Here, a familiar urban landscape becomes regally bejeweled with the most coveted objects of the popular imaginary. The majestic city is surrounded by impenetrable walls adorned with precious stones, metals, and jewels and guarded by an angel brandishing a fiery sword. The streets and the piazzas are lined with silver and crystal; the homes sumptuously decked in marble and rich colors; and their security is guaranteed by the divine prince, Christ the Lord. Situated within the walls lies a resplendent park that closely resembles the gardens of Earthly Paradise found in other examples of courtly, popular, and Christian medieval literature. Trees, flowers, and fruit bloom perennially; birdsong and rich odors fill the air; and a chivalrous entourage of martyrs, prophets, and virgins strolls, sings, and pays homage to the enthroned Christ and his exalted Lady, the Virgin Mary. In true courtly fashion, she receives magnificent steeds and palfreys as gifts and is crowned with a noble garland. Scored to the polyphonic music of an ineffably perfect angelic choir, the poem concludes with an invitation to pray to the Virgin so that she may intercede on the listener’s behalf and grant him a seat among the blessed.

Many of the most salient features of the De Ierusalem celesti and De Babilonia civitate infernali serve as functions of Giacomino’s edifying mission. The use of the Veronese vernacular and the frequent admonitions to listen attentively suggest that the pieces were originally intended to be read before an unlettered audience. The language, orality, and easily identifiable images would have invited recognition and facilitated the reception of the moral lessons contained therein. Though the De Ierusalem celesti is presented as a somewhat static reenactment of apocalyptic and liturgical scenes, the De Babilonia civitate infernali manages to both instruct and entertain with its grotesque yet spirited spectacles and tragic-comic dialogues. Inventive allegory and symbolic figures aim toward transmitting the same truths contained within the Scriptures and add authority to Giacomino’s humble creation. Most tellingly, Giacomino prefaced the first poem with a defensive note against any supercilious theologians who might object to his brand of popular representation, admonishing them to look beyond the poverty of his work and instead heed the truth-value of his exempla. Though clearly aware of the disdain he could incur, Giacomino nonetheless opted to lead his simple flock down the easiest path to salvation. Finally, a notable fact is that Giacomino, like Bonvesin, omitted any mention of Purgatory. Since Purgatory had gained official recognition at the Council of Lyons in 1274, one can only wonder if Giacomino predated or rather willfully ignored the papal amendment.

Biography All that is known of Giacomino’s life comes from the one autobiographical reference contained within the Babilonia infernali: ‘‘Iacomino da Verona de l’Orden de Minori’’ (Giacomino of Verona of the Order of the Friars Minor); no trace of his name has been found in Wadding’s annals of the Franciscan Order, leading to the conclusion that Giacomino never carried out any public or ecclesiastical charges. The closest approximate date that can be given comes from the philological study of the earliest Venetian codex containing his work (Marciano it. 4744), dating back to the late 1200s. It is therefore assumed that Giacomino was active during the last half of the thirteenth century. No information survives pertaining to his birth or death. SARA ELENA DI´AZ 831

GIACOMINO DA VERONA Selected Works La Gerusalemme celeste e la Babilonia infernale, secondo la lezione dei quattro codici conosciuti, edited by Emilio Barana, Verona: La Tipografica Veronese, 1921; as The ‘‘De Jerusalem celesti’’ and the ‘‘De Babilonia infernali’’ of Fra Giacomino da Verona, edited by Esther Isopel May, London: Milford, 1930.

Further Reading Avogaro, Carlo, L’opera di Giacomino da Verona nella storia letteraria del secolo XIII, Verona: Franchini, 1901. Barbiero, Daniel, ‘‘Giacomino da Verona’s De Ierusalem: An Interpretation,’’ The Georgetown Journal of Languages and Linguistics, 1:4 (1990), 391–400.

Cerroni, Monica, ‘‘Tipologia dell’allegoria e dinamiche del vero in Giacomino da Verona e Bonvesin de la Riva,’’ Strumenti critici, 15:1(2000), 53–74. D’Agige, Franco, Frate Giacomino da Verona, c. 1260: francescano precursore di Dante Alighieri, Milan: Lanzani, 1919. Rossi, Aldo, ‘‘Poesia didattica e poesia popolare del Nord,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Russo, Luigi, Ritratti e disegni storici, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1953. Schrage, Marco, Giacomino da Verona: Himmel und Ho¨lle in der fru¨hen italienischen Literatur, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Lang, 2003. Stefanini, Ruggero, ‘‘Una congettura a Giacomino da Verona (51),’’ Romance Philology, 23 (1969), 300–03.

GIACOMINO PUGLIESE (FL. 1220–1240) Giacomino Pugliese was a rhymer of the so-called Sicilian School of Poetry, which flourished under Emperor Frederick II of Swabia. His full name is attested in the important Italian canzoniere (songbook) of Vatican City (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Lat. 3793), which attributes eight poems to him; and in that of Florence (Biblioteca MediceoLaurenziana, Redi 9), which contains a single poem ascribed to ‘‘Giacomo Pulliese.’’ Three of his poems contain his first diminutive name, Giacomino, as an internal signature. The interpretation of Pugliese as a simple toponym for Apuliense, or ‘‘from Southern continental Italy,’’ gave rise to the identification of Giacomino with Giacomo di Morra from Campania, who covered important charges on behalf of Frederick II in Treviso, Spoleto, and Ancona from 1239 to 1245 and who was probably the dedicatee, together with Corraduccio da Sterleto, of a Provenc¸al grammar (Donat proensal) written by Uc Faidit. According to Gianfranco Contini, however, the epithet ‘‘Pugliese’’ should be interpreted as a family name, which was ‘‘very widespread in all Southern Italy, Sicily included’’ (Poeti del Duecento, 1960). For instance, one ‘‘Iacobus Apuliense de Cathania’’ is known to have died as a prisoner to the Angevins between 1299 and 1303, but he can hardly be identified with our poet, whose work had circulated already in the 1230s. The earliest testimony of a Sicilian poem is a copy of the initial four 832

stanzas of Giacomino’s song ‘‘Resplendiente stella de albur’’ (Shining Star of Dawn), discovered in 1991 at the bottom of a legal document (Landfriede) issued by German King Henry VII and dated 1234–1235 (Giuseppina Brunetti, Il frammento inedito, 2000). This circumstance has been connected with a political encounter occurred two years before (spring 1232) in Aquileia, Friuli, between Henry VII’s court and that of his father Frederick II, both poets in their own right. Giacomino actually mentions Germany and the town of Aquileia in the envoy of his ‘‘Lontano amore’’ (Distant Love): ‘‘de Lamagna infino in Aghulea’’ (l. 31). His extant corpus consists of seven love songs or canzoni (one of which, ‘‘La dolce ciera,’’ is attributed to Pier delle Vigne in two manuscripts) and one discordo, an heterostrophic poem. Giacomino’s metrical structures are less articulated than those of other Sicilian poets and possibly reflect an original link with music (Francesco Carapezza, ‘‘Un ‘genere’ cantato,’’ 1999). Three of his songs display a plain octosyllabic pattern with a typically troubadour rhyme scheme: 8 a b, a b; c d c d (c) (or c d d c). Each stanza of ‘‘Donna di voi mi lamento’’ (Lady, It Is of You I Complain) is furthermore concluded with a short refrain line (amore), characteristic of musical genres. Another two metrical patterns, those of ‘‘Lontano amore’’ and ‘‘Resplendiente,’’

GIACOMINO PUGLIESE consist of two monometric blocks with that same type of rhyme scheme (respectively 10 a b, a b; 11 c c b, and 5 a b, a b; 10 c d, d c). The presence of decasyllables, an unusual and perhaps archaic type of line in Italian poetry, is also noteworthy. Such structural indications are corroborated by a rare and explicit reference to musical performance found in Giacomino’s only discordo, ‘‘Donna per vostro amore’’ (Lady, for Your Love): ‘‘isto caribo / ben distribo’’ (I accurately compose this caribo [name of a dance]) and ‘‘lo stormento / vo sonando / e cantando’’ (I play the instrument and sing). According to Aurelio Roncaglia, ‘‘it is possible, then, that the old minstrel unity of poet-musician-performer survives and reoccurs in him’’ (‘‘Sul ‘divorzio tra musica e poesia,’’’ 1978). Finally, the precocious and isolated circulation of one of his songs in a Germanic area could have been favored by melodic transmission. Giacomino Pugliese shows a distinct preference for a simple style, which has been associated with Old Provenc¸al trobar leu (literally, ‘‘easy composition’’). Accordingly, his themes are quite removed from the analytical reflections and lyrical purity of a Giacomo da Lentini or a Guido delle Colonne, and he usually resorts to expressive direct speech effects. The key words of his songbook are rimembranza (recollection) and fallanza (infidelity), two topical situations of medieval courtly romance in its most realistic acceptation. Otherwise, Giacomino’s most aulic and rhetorically ambitious piece is a lament for the death of the beloved, ‘‘Morte, perche´ m’hai fatta sı` gran guerra’’ (Death, Why Have You Warred Against Me So), the oldest Italian example of its kind, together with Pier delle Vigne’s ‘‘Amando con fin core e con speranza.’’ His literary relationship with other early poets of the Sicilian school, such as Giacomo da Lentini, Rinaldo d’Aquino, and Emperor Frederick II himself, is certified by a close net of intertextuality. An interesting episode of his reception are the two extant poems by Tuscan rhymer Compagnetto da Prato, which probably constitute a melodic imitation of Giacomino’s ‘‘Quando vegio rinverdire’’ (When I See Green Growth).

Biography Giacomo Pugliese was born in southern Italy, at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. He belonged to the courtly entourage of Emperor Frederick II of Swabia (1220–1250) and possibly followed him to Aquileia on the occasion

of a political encounter with German King Henry VII, 1232. The place and date of his death are unknown. FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA See also: Sicilian School of Poetry Selected Works Collections ‘‘Giacomino Pugliese e le sue rime,’’ in Gennaro Maria Monti, Studi letterari, Citta` di Castello: Il Solco, 1924. Le poesie di Giacomino Pugliese, edited by Margherita Santangelo, Palermo: Boccone del Povero, 1937. Bruno Panvini, Le rime della scuola siciliana: Introduzione, testo critico, note, vol. 1, Florence: Olschki, 1962. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. The Poetry of the Sicilian School, edited and translated by Frede Jensen, New York: Garland, 1986. Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO), edited by Silvio d’Arco Avalle, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1992. Bruno Panvini, Poeti italiani della corte di Federico II, Naples: Liguori, 1994.

Further Reading Bertoni, Giulio, ‘‘Il pianto di Giacomino Pugliese per la donna amata,’’ in Studi su vecchie e nuove poesie e prose d’amore e di romanzi, Modena: Orlandini, 1921. Brugnolo, Furio, ‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol 1, Rome: Salerno, 1995. Brunetti, Giuseppina, Il frammento inedito ‘‘Resplendiente stella de albur’’ di Giacomino Pugliese e la poesia italiana delle origini, Tu¨bingen: Niemeyer, 2000. Brunetti, Giuseppina, ‘‘Il libro di Giacomino e i canzonieri individuali: Diffusione delle forme e tradizione della Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ in Dai Siciliani ai Siculotoscani. Lingua, metro e stile per la definizione del canone, Atti del Convegno di Lecce (21–23 April 1998), edited by Rosario Coluccia and Riccardo LGualdo, Galatina (Lecce): Congedo, 1999. Brunetti, Giuseppina, ‘‘Giacomino Pugliese,’’ in Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, vol. 54, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000. Carapezza, Francesco, ‘‘Un ‘genere’ cantato della Scuola poetica siciliana?’’ Nuova rivista di letteratura italiana, 2(1999): 321–354. Contini, Gianfranco, Poeti del Duecento, vol. 1/1, Testi arcaici. Scuola siciliana. Poesia cortese, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960; reprinted, 1995. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Cultura e poesia dei Siciliani,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Roncaglia, Aurelio, ‘‘Sul ‘divorzio tra musica e poesia’ nel Duecento italiano,’’ in L’Ars nova italiana nel Trecento,

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GIACOMINO PUGLIESE vol. 4, edited by Agostino Ziino, Certaldo: Centro di Studi sul Medioevo, 1978. Schulze, Joachim, ‘‘Giacomino Pugliese und Gaucelm Faidit.’’ Cultura neolatina, 63(2003):57–72.

Spitzer, Leo, ‘‘Un passo di una canzone di Giacomino Pugliese,’’ Cultura neolatina, 10(1955): 143–146. Tuulio (Tallgren), O. J., ‘‘Una canzone di Giacomino Pugliese,’’ Aevum, 9(1935): 261–280.

GIACOMO DA LENTINI (FL. 1220–1242) Acknowledged founder of the Italian lyric tradition, Giacomo (or Iacopo) da Lentini was an imperial notary and scribe under Frederick II Hohenstaufen of Swabia (1194–1250), King of Sicily from 1198 and Emperor from 1220, who played a major role in the constitution of the so-called Sicilian School of Poetry. Giacomo’s notarial activity is certified by a set of five liens and deeds dating from December 1232 to September 1233 and drawn up in Southern Italian cities of San Severo (Puglia), Policoro (Basilicata), Catania, Messina, and perhaps Palermo (Sicily), during a journey of the imperial court, and by another deed of May 1240 from Messina, which bears his autograph signature: ‘‘Jacobus de Lentino domini Imperatoris notarius testor.’’ It is simply by his professional epithet of ‘‘il Notaro’’ (the notary), which is found in one of his poems (‘‘Meravigliosamente,’’ l. 62) and which preceeds his proper name in the rubrics of the extant manuscripts, that Giacomo is called by later poets such as Chiaro Davanzati and Dante Alighieri. Aurelio Roncaglia (‘‘Angelica figura,’’ 1995) put forward the hypothesis that the poet took part in a journey to Sardinia on the occasion of the wedding of Frederick’s son, Enzo, with Adelasia of Torres and Gallura, in 1238. Nothing else is known of his biography, although it has been inferred that he belonged to a family of Norman origins from the opulent feud of Lentini, in Eastern Sicily and that he was acquainted with Berardo di Castanea, renowned archbishop of Messina (1213–1252). One might also assume that Giacomo was trained as a notary at the University of Bologna or at the Studium of Naples, founded by Frederick II in 1224. The beginning of his poetical activity, traditionally set in the early 1230s, has been convincingly antedated by at least a decade after the finding of a lyric fragment by Giacomino Pugliese, another rhymer of the Sicilian school, transcribed at the bottom of a legal document of 1234–1235. 834

Giacomo da Lentini is responsible for the systematic transposition of Old Provenc¸al lyric models into an Italian vernacular. In spite of the evidence of an anonymous poem dating back to the end of the twelfth century (Alfredo Stussi, ‘‘Versi d’amore,’’ 1999), which certifies the existence of Italian poetry prior to the Sicilian School, Giacomo must be considered the real initiator of a poetical tradition. His literary and chronological primacy is corroborated by the quantity of his extant poems (some 39 pieces) and by the fact that they inaugurate the most substantial collection of Old Italian poetry: Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Lat. 3793 (= MS V), copied in Florence before the end of the thirteenth century, which preserves around 1,000 poems arranged in a rough chronological order. The other two principal testimonies of his work, both older than MS V, are Florence, Biblioteca Mediceo-Laurenziana, Redi 9 (= MS L), copied at least by two scribes, one from Pisa and one from Florence; and Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Banco Rari 217 (= MS P), copied and illuminated in Western Tuscany (Lucca or Pistoia). Other interesting, although lesser, testimonies of Giacomo’s poetry are the so-called Memoriali Bolognesi (Bolognese Records) of 1288, 1300, and 1310, in which some notaries transcribed from memory two initial fragments of his canzoni and two complete sonnets. The idiom of the Sicilian poets, a cultivated Kunstsprache (literary language) based on the Sicilian vernacular of that time and rich in Latin and Provenc¸al forms, underwent a typical alteration, or ‘‘Tuscanization,’’ in the common lost source of MSS V, L, and P. Nevertheless, some original linguistic features were preserved by Tuscan scribes or can be inferred from the versification. Giacomo’s corpus consists of 16 canzoni, one discordo, and 22 sonnets (plus two of dubious authenticity). In comparison with the courtly

GIACOMO DA LENTINI Provenc¸al canso (song) from which they derive, the greater part of his canzoni display a structural refinement that has been related to the alleged separation of poetry and music in the Sicilian school. A telling example is the poetical translation of a plain decasyllabic song attributable to troubadour Folquet de Marselha (fl. 1178–1195), ‘‘A vos, midonz, voill retrair’en chantan.’’ For his Italian rendering, ‘‘Madonna, dir vo voglio’’ (My Lady, I Wish to Tell You), Giacomo employed a long and elaborated stanza of seven-syllable and hendecasyllabic lines subdivided into two metrical units: The first one, later called fronte, is further divided into two symmetrical piedi (here with rhyme scheme a b a C, d b d C), and the second one, later called sirma, is further divided into two symmetrical volte (here with rhyme scheme e e f [f]G, h h i [i] G). This structural typology of four-part stanza establishes itself as a model for Italian canzone. However, a number of Giacomo’s stanza poems, called canzonette due to their less elevated style, repeat simpler isometric schemes borrowed from Old French and Provenc¸al repertories, perhaps because they were originally intended for a musical performance (as it is probably the case for his only discordo, composed of a sequence of different metrical patterns). Giacomo’s metrical creativity resulted in the invention of the sonnet, the most successful and long-lasting form of European versification. This unchangeable pattern of 14 hendecasyllabic lines (metrically and syntactically divided into an octet and a sextet, usually connected by the repetition of a thematic word) has been formally interpreted as an isolated stanza of canzone, but the intellectual process that led to the appearance of the first ‘‘closed form’’ of Romance versification still remains unexplained, though some critics put forward intriguing interpretations based on medieval numerology. An interesting purpose served by the newborn metrical genre was that of poetical correspondence: Three of Giacomo’s sonnets were written as responses to Abate di Tivoli (identified with the abbot of a famous monastery in Latium, or with one Gualtiero from Rome, acquainted with Pope Innocent IV) and to Jacopo Mostacci and Pier delle Vigne, both high-ranking poets of the imperial court. Apart from his inventive elaboration of formal structures and metrical genres, the comparison with preexistent lyric models reveals a significant uniqueness of themes in Giacomo’s work. Unlike the troubadours, who incorporated contemporary events and characters (especially in a genre called sirventes and even within their courtly love songs),

this Sicilian poet concentrated on the effects of love on the thoughts and behavior of the lyric ‘‘I.’’ This process of interiorization implies a shift in focus from the beloved madonna to the loving subject, who performs in an abstract world of sublimated characters and feelings. Furio Brugnolo (‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ 1995) has singled out two dominant themes in Giacomo’s poems: the image of the lady imprinted within the lover’s heart, and the paradoxical description of love’s incommunicability. Both are effectively combined, for instance, in the second stanza of ‘‘Meravigliosamente’’ (Wonderfully), which can be considered the manifesto of Giacomo’s innovative intentions: ‘‘In cor par ch’eo vi porti, / pinta come parete, / e non pare difore. / O Deo, co’ mi par forte, / non so se lo sapete, / con’ v’amo di bon core; / ch’eo son sı` vergognoso / ca pur vi guardo ascoso / e non vi mostro amore’’ (It seems that I carry you inside of my heart, like a painted wall which can’t be seen from outside. Oh God, how hard it is—I wonder if you know it—to love you with a good heart; I am so bashful that I hiddenly look upon you and I don’t show you my love). Giacomo’s figural representation of abstract concepts is enhanced by the frequent use of naturalistic metaphores (drawn from bestiary and lapidary traditions) in order to explain the lover’s states of mind. His visuality is deeply connected with the physical genesis of love, asserted by the medieval tradition: As the poet himself claimed in one of his most famous sonnets (‘‘Amor e` desio che ven da core’’), it is the eyes that first generate love, which is then nurtured by the heart (‘‘e li occhi in prima generan l’amore / e lo core li da` nutricamento’’). Another sonnet, ‘‘Lo viso e son diviso da lo viso’’ (I See It and Yet Am Separated from What I See), is based on the obsessive repetition of the word viso and plays with its double function of noun (face, sight, vision) and verb (I see). The interest for natural science, a hallmark of Frederick II’s anticlerical court, is displayed in many of Giacomo’s sonnets, where the analysis of love is carried out by means of impressive scientific similitudes. Giacomo’s rhetorical skill and literary consciousness stand out in the harmonious relations between syntax and meter; in a manneristic recourse to internal rhymes, perfect rhymes, alliteration; and in the suggestive references to Old French romanesque tradition. As Furio Brugnolo remarks, ‘‘an equally strong and definite personality is not found at the beginning of any other lyric tradition in vernacular of the Middle Ages’’ (‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ 1995). The importance of 835

GIACOMO DA LENTINI Giacomo da Lentini is attested by the imitation of his stylistic manners in the work of contemporary rhymers (especially Frederick II and his son Enzo, Guido and Odo delle Colonne, and Percivalle Doria). Giacomo’s work later influenced Bonagiunta Orbicciani da Lucca, a true Tuscan epigon of the Sicilian poet, and was eventually subsumed by Guido Guinizzelli da Bologna, the precursor of the stil novo school of poetry.

Biography Giacomo da Lentini was probably born in Lentini (Sicily) at the end of the twelfth or beginning of the thirteenth century. He studied as a notary (presumably in Bologna or Naples) in the late 1220s; followed the imperial court of Frederick II of Swabia during a journey from Puglia to Sicily, 1232– 1233; and perhaps accompanied Frederick’s son Enzo to Sardinia on the occasion of his wedding with Adelasia of Torres and Gallura, 1238. Giacomo da Lentini exchanged sonnets with Abate di Tivoli, Jacopo Mostacci, and Pier delle Vigne, probably 1241–1242. The place and date of his death are unknown. FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA See also: Sicilian School of Poetry; Frederick II of Hohenstaufen Selected Works Collections Ernest F. Langley, The Poetry of Giacomo da Lentino, Sicilian Poet of the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1915. Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 1/1, Testi arcaici. Scuola siciliana. Poesia cortese, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1960 (reprint 1995). Bruno Panvini, Le rime della scuola siciliana, vol. 1, Introduzione, testo critico, note, Florence: Olschki, 1962. Poesie, critical edition by Roberto Antonelli, vol. 1, Introduzione, testo, apparato, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. The Poetry of the Sicilian School, edited and translated by Frede Jensen, New York: Garland, 1986. Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (CLPIO), edited by Silvio d’Arco Avalle, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1992. Bruno Panvini, Poeti italiani della corte di Federico II, Naples: Liguori, 1994.

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Further Reading Antonelli, Roberto, ‘‘Dal Notaro a Guinizzelli,’’ in Da Guido Guinizzelli a Dante: Nuove prospettive sulla lirica del Duecento, Atti del Convegno di studi (PadovaMonselice, 10–12 May 2002), edited by Furio Brugnolo and Gianfelice Peron, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 2004. Antonelli, Roberto, ‘‘Rima equivoca e tradizione rimica nella poesia di Giacomo da Lentini,’’ Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 13 (1977): 20–126. Arque´s, Rossend (editor), La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini: Scienza e filosofia nel XIII secolo in Sicilia e nel Mediterraneo occidentale, Atti del Convegno tenutosi all’Universita` Autonoma di Barcellona (16–18, 23–24 October 1997), Palermo: Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 2000. Brugnolo, Furio, ‘‘La Scuola poetica siciliana,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by Enrico Malato, vol. 1, Rome: Salerno, 1995. Brugnolo, Furio, ‘‘I siciliani e l’arte dell’imitazione: Giacomo da Lentini, Rinaldo d’Aquino e Iacopo Mostacci ‘traduttori’ dal provenzale,’’ La parola del testo, 3 (1999): 45–74. Coluccia, Rosario, and Riccardo Gualdo (editors), Dai Siciliani ai Siculo-toscani: Lingua, metro e stile per la definizione del canone, Atti del Convegno di Lecce (21–23 April 1998), Galatina (Lecce): Congedo, 1999. Crespo, Roberto, ‘‘Lettura di Chi non avesse mai veduto foco di Giacomo da Lentini,’’ Medioevo romanzo, 12 (1987): 353–362. Damiani, Rolando, ‘‘La replicazione del viso amato in due sonetti di Giacomo da Lentini,’’ in Miscellanea di studi in onore di Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Dal Medioevo al Petrarca, Florence: Olschki 1983. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Cultura e poesia dei Siciliani,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, directed by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 1, Le origini e il Duecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Katainen, Viena Louise, Simile and Other Figures of Comparison in the Poetry of Giacomo da Lentini (fl. 1230–50), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Mancini, Mario, La figura nel cuore fra cortesia e mistica: Dai Siciliani allo Stilnuovo, Naples: ESI, 1988. Monteverdi, Angelo, Cento e Duecent:. Nuovi saggi su lingua e letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Rome: Ateneo, 1971. Roncaglia, Aurelio, ‘‘Angelica figura,’’ Cultura neolatina, 55 (1995): 41–65. Stussi, Alfredo, ‘‘Versi d’amore in volgare tra la fine del secolo XII e l’inizio del XIII,’’ Cultura neolatina, 59 (1999): 1–69. Vanasco, Rocco R., La poesia di Giacomo da Lentini: Analisi strutturali, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1979.

GIUSEPPE GIACOSA

GIUSEPPE GIACOSA (1847–1906) The playwright Giuseppe Giacosa can be considered, along with Giovanni Verga, the leading representative of Italian ‘‘Verist’’ theater, although his production cannot be entirely identified with the Naturalist movement. Living at a time when the theater was undergoing a rapid transformation, he composed works that ranged from drama in verse of medieval inspiration to historical drama, from the romantic-bourgeois to the realistic play. The first phase of his activity is composed of a series of works of medieval taste. The one-act play in Martellian verse Una partita a scacchi (A Game of Chess, 1873), Giacosa’s first work, is taken from an episode from a French popular ballad and offered the audience legendary atmospheres between the fairy tale and the idyll. The play, which centers on a chess match between the young page Fernando and the beautiful Jolanda, in spite of its simplicity, obtained immediate and lasting success. Less fortunate was his second attempt, Il trionfo dell’amore (Love’s Triumph, 1875), a work inspired by Carlo Gozzi’s Turandot (1762) but set, rather than in a fantastical China, in Piedmont during the Middle Ages. Giacosa completed what was defined as the ‘‘medieval trilogy’’ with Il fratello d’armi (Brother in Arms), first performed in 1877. A second and related genre practiced by Giacosa was the historical play, examples of which are, among others, Il marito amante della moglie (The Husband, Lover of His Wife, 1877), which is set in the eighteenth century and also written in Martellian verse; Il conte rosso (The Red Count, 1880), a drama centered around the figure of Amadeus VII of Savoy, written in hendecasyllables; and La signora di Challant (The Lady of Challant, 1891), a story of love and violence. I diritti dell’anima (The Rights of the Heart, 1894), characterized by Nordic symbolism, was evidently influenced by Henrik Ibsen’s works. As in A Doll’s House (1879), the central theme is the disenchantment of a young wife toward a husband praised for too long. The new sense of awareness of the woman, in a society that evolves rapidly, leads her to earn her own independence, which she no longer is able to renounce even after her

husband’s repentance. The most interesting works in Giacosa’s production, however, are those tied to Naturalism. The movement toward this poetics, which began to mature by 1880, provoked a series of profound changes at the dramaturgical and stylistic level: Verse was abandoned in favor of a modest and everyday prose language, and complex events gave way to linear storylines without coups de the´aˆtre. At the center of Giacosa’s interest was now the study of contemporary society, of which he highlighted the decadence of the bourgeois class and the evils it hid. A significant work, in this sense, is L’onorevole Ercole Mallardi (The Honorable Ercole Mallardi, 1885), which is a disillusioned denunciation of the corruption in the political world of the late nineteenth century. The protagonist, a dishonest man, unscrupulously uses politics for personal gain, often deceiving his wife Vittoria who, in her naivety, represents the other side of a corrupt and decadent society. But the most accomplished result of Giacosa’a naturalist production is certainly Tristi amori (Sad Loves, 1888), which, along with Come le foglie (Like Falling Leaves, 1900), constitutes his masterpiece. Presented for the first time at the Teatro Valle in Rome, Tristi amori was rejected by the public, which could not accept the detailed realism that permeated the work. It was successful a few months later in Turin, thanks to Eleonora Duse’s performance. The plot, following the most typical of late-nineteenth-century canons, narrates a conjugal betrayal: The solution, however, presented a series of innovations. The husband, once the affair has been discovered, allows his wife to choose between staying with him or fleeing with her lover. The woman, held back by her maternal duties, decides to stay at the side of a man who at this point can no longer love her, if only to provide a future for her daughter. With this work, the transition from lateRomantic dramaturgy to bourgeois naturalist theater is completed. The previous representation of the marital couple, as for instance in Achille Torelli’s I mariti (Husbands, 1867), was replaced by the tempestuous triangle ‘‘her-him-lover,’’ which introduced new themes and elements such as a greater

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GIUSEPPE GIACOSA awareness of female roles and the concepts of money and of honor, around which the mechanism of the storyline revolved. Come le foglie, first presented at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan, is a play that is still frequently produced today. Here the author represented the decline of a rich industrialist’s family stricken with economic hardships. But while the father, Giovanni Rosani, and the daughter, Nennele, resist in the face of financial difficulty, the stepmother, Giulia, and the son, Tommy, in the hopes of maintaining their lifestyle, give in to compromise. The title, thoughtfully chosen and meaningful, contains the moral of the story: As the leaves that, in the face of the autumn wind, fall irreparably, Giulia and Tommy, in the face of the family’s economic disaster, let themselves be dragged down, abandoning themselves at first to corruption and then deciding to leave for good. But, like the robust branches of a tree that hold fast against the fury of the winter to generate a new flowering, Giovanni and Nennele roll up their sleeves and perform humble jobs, thereby reestablishing the economic fortunes of the family. Come le foglie is a work that is constructed by skilful dramaturgical writing, where unexpressed passions dominate, silence is full of meaning, and situations at times bordering on the melodramatic create an atmosphere that brings Chekhov to mind. Particularly successful are the scenes in which two characters express the delicate relationships, full of sweetness that binds together the two siblings, the father and the daughter, or Nennele and her future husband Massimo. Giacosa’s last theatrical piece, Il piu` forte (The Strongest Man, 1904), signals once again the return to social themes and to a critique of bourgeois society. In this case, a son, educated according to a strict morality, condemns his unscrupulous businessman father and, in separating himself from him, reproaches him for having raised his son in comfort and luxury, therefore denying him of the highest good: a conscience. Much appreciated by his contemporaries, Giacosa was later remembered uniquely for the softened tones that grouped him with much of the lesser literature of the time. Recent critics have reassessed his historical significance, highlighting the particular ways in which he represented the crisis of the late nineteenth century as well as his capacity to exalt, by detailed realism, the action on the stage, thereby carrying out an authentic break with the Italian theatrical tradition. Furthermore, Giacosa is now perhaps best known as the librettist, with Luigi Illica (1857–1919), of several operas 838

by Giacomo Puccini, including La bohe`me (1896), Tosca (1900), and Madama Butterfly (1904). Taken, as was then customary, from preexisting works, the three librettos constitute some of the best examples of a genre that did not always produce results of great quality. In dividing the work with Illica, Giacosa versified the text, elaborated the lyrical situations, handled the logical succession of the scenes, and placed emphasis on literary refinements. Illica’s role was to outline the scenario and develop the storyline in all its details. Critics have always recognized the great talent of the two authors, above all in their capacity to adapt brilliantly to the constant requests of Puccini, who demanded continuous modifications in function of his musical sensibility. While difficult to judge independently from the music, these librettos present an excellent dramaturgical system, rapidity of action, a calibrated succession of scenes, and a description of characters that is all but conventional.

Biography Giuseppe Giacosa was born in Colleretto Parella (today Colleretto Giacosa) in the province of Turin on October 21, 1847, of a bourgeois family. After obtaining a degree in law in Turin in 1868, he practiced for some time in his father’s studio, but his first successes in 1871 as a playwright induced him to follow a career in the theater. He married his cousin Maria Bertola, 1877, and moved to Turin, where he taught at the Accademia di Belle Arti. He traveled to Sicily and southern Italy, 1876, then to France and Germany, 1878. He moved to Milan, 1888, where he was named director and instructor at the Accademia dei Filodrammatici as well as teacher of dramatic literature and acting at the Conservatory. He resigned from the Academy, 1889, and from the Conservatory, 1892. He became director of the Societa` Italiana degli Autori, 1895. He collaborated with the Gazzetta piemontese, Gazzetta letteraria, and Il corriere della sera and was director, since its foundation in 1900, of Lettura. He maintained friendships with numerous writers of his time, from Fogazzaro to Verga, from Boito to Zola, and was a friend of Eleonora Duse (who called him ‘‘Pin’’ in her correspondence) and Sarah Bernhardt, with whom in 1891 he took a trip to the United States on the occasion of the production of his play La signora di Challant. Giacosa died of cardiac arrest in Colleretto Parella on September 1, 1906. PAOLO QUAZZOLO

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI Selected Works Collections Teatro, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1949. Three Plays (The Stronger, Like Falling Leaves, Sacred Ground), translated by Edith and Allan Updegraff, Boston: Litte, Brown, 1916.

Plays Una partita a scacchi, 1873. I figli del marchese Arturo, 1873. Intrighi eleganti, 1874. Il trionfo d’amore, 1875. Sorprese notturne, 1875. Teresa, 1875. Acquazzoni di montagna, 1876. Il marito amante della moglie, 1877. Il fratello d’armi, 1877. Il Conte Rosso, 1880. La zampa del gatto, 1883. La sirena, 1883. L’onorevole Ercole Mallardi, 1885. Resa a discrezione, 1886. Tristi amori, 1888. La signora di Challant, 1891. Diritti dell’anima, 1894. Come le foglie, 1900. Il piu` forte, 1904.

Librettos La bohe`me, with Luigi Illica, 1896. Tosca, with Luigi Illica, 1900. Madama Butterfly, with Luigi Illica, 1904. Puccini Librettos, translated by William Weaver, 1966.

Short Stories ‘‘Novelle e paesi valdostani,’’ 1896.

Essays Conferenze e discorsi, 1909.

Other Castelli valdostani e canavesi, 1898. Genti e cose della montagna. Impressioni d’America, 1899.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto (editor), Materiali per Giocosa, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1998. Barsotti, Anna, Giuseppe Giacosa, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Donelli, Delfina, Giuseppe Giocosa, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1948. Doroni, Stefano, Dall’androne medievale al tinello borghese: teatro di Giuseppe Giocosa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Ferrone, Siro (editor), Teatro dell’Italia unita, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Gedda, Lido, Giuseppe Giocosa: commediografo e narratore, Turin: Trauber, 2000. Gotta, Salvator, Tre maestri: Fogazzaro, Giacosa, Gozzano, Milan: Mondatori, 1975. Nardi, Piero, Vita e tempo di Giuseppe Giacosa, Milan: Mondatori, 1949. Pellini, Pierluigi, ‘‘L’ultimo Giacosa: Intertestualita` e ricezione,’’ Otto/Novecento, 19:3–4(1995), 41–73. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Una partita a scacchi di Giacosa,’’ in Il neogotico in Italia nel XIX e nel XX secolo, edited by Rossana Bossaglia, vol. 2, Milan: Mazzotta, 1989.

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI (1495–1555) Grammarian, literato, and historian, born and educated in Florence, Pierfrancesco was the son of the poet Bernardo Giambullari (Florence, 1450–1529), whose canti carnascialeschi and religious poems were marked by a whimsical facility with language. Bernardo ensured that his young boy received a thorough humanist education that included not only Latin and Greek but also Hebrew and, some say, Chaldean. The talented boy inherited his father’s interest in the Tuscan language but soon shied away from literature and poetry, preferring to dedicate himself, instead, to the study of language and to history.

Pierfrancesco first appeared in print in 1539 with a long and detailed description of the festivities for the wedding of Duke Cosimo I of Florence and Eleonora di Toledo—the Apparato et feste nelle noze dello illustrissimo Signor duca di Firenze & della duchessa, sua consorte (Scenery and Festivities for the Wedding of the Most Illustrious Lord Duke of Florence and the Duchess, His Consort). Commissioned by the duke for clearly political and propagandist purposes, the work stands at the vanguard of a new genre—the narrative description of royal entries and celebrations—that would flourish throughout Europe in the sixteenth and 839

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI seventeenth centuries. In describing and interpreting the ephemeral structures, decorations, inscriptions, songs, music, and even movements that went into the celebration, Giambullari set a standard that would be followed in later descriptions of princely weddings in Florence and abroad. Giambullari’s fame, however, did not rest on his chronicle of ducal festivities but on his writings on the Tuscan language, its origins, and its grammar. A founding member of the Accademia degli Umidi (1540), he remained one of its major players even after the academy was absorbed into Cosimo’s cultural program and transformed into the Accademia Fiorentina (1541). Within the Academy, Giambullari prospered as a scholar and made important connections with fellow literati. He thus became one of the major players in Florentine cultural circles and one of the most productive, as well. As a Florentine academician, Giambullari readily and willingly took up the challenge of defending and advancing Florentine language and culture. Arguing against Pietro Bembo and his disciples, Giambullari sought to validate not only contemporary Florentine language but also Dante’s Divina Commedia. Already in 1538 he had begun working on a commentary of the Commedia that, however, did not go beyond the first canto of the Inferno. His efforts eventually produced a curious volume, De ’l sito, fo´rma, & misu´re de´llo Infe´rno di Da´nte (On the Location, Form and Size of Dante’s Inferno, 1544), of interest both for its commentary on Dante and for Giambullari’s innovative orthography and use of accents. It also produced a number of lectures (lezioni) on the Commedia delivered within the context of the Accademia (1541–1548), some of which were soon published first by Anton Francesco Doni in a variorum edition (Lettioni d’academici fiorentini sopra Dante, libro primo, 1547, which also included lezioni by Francesco Verini, Giovan Battista Gelli, Giovanni Strozzi, Cosimo Bartoli, Giovan Battista da Cerreto and Mario Tanci), and then in a solo edition by Lorenzo Torrentino, the duke’s and the Accademia’s official printer (Lezzioni ... lette nella Accademia fiorentina, 1551). Giambullari’s reputation as a Dante commentator was such that his colleague and friend Giovan Battista Gelli often referred to him in his own lezioni and commentary as the ‘‘moderno espositore’’ (the modern commentator). Giambullari’s interest in the Florentine language also produced other important works. The first was a short treatise, ‘‘Osservazioni per la pronunzia fiorentina (A gli amatori della lingua fiorentina)’’ (Observations on Florentine Pronunciation—To 840

the Lovers of the Florentine Language) that he published under the pseudonym No´ri Dortela´ta as a preface to his coedition (together with Cosimo Bartoli) of Marsilio Ficino’s Sopra lo amore o ver’ Convito di Platone (On Love, That Is the Convivium of Plato, 1544). With his work on Ficino, Giambullari continued the Florentine Christian neo-Platonic tradition and made himself one of its most ardent supporters in the mid-cinquecento. Two years later his dialogue Il Gello sull’origine della lingua fiorentina (Gello, or on the Origin of the Florentine Language, 1546) argued that the Florentine language derived not from Latin but from Aramaic by way of Etruscan—a theory that clearly went hand-in-hand with the regime’s efforts to validate the Etruscan history of the region and thereby distance itself, somewhat, from Rome and its Latin heritage. The theory and its supporters, the ‘‘Aramei,’’ quickly attracted the derision of many a more serious linguist. Five years later Giambullari published his De la lingua che si parla e scrive in Firenze (On the Language That Is Spoken and Written in Florence, 1522), the first descriptive grammar of Tuscan ever written by a Florentine. His efforts garnered much wider success and support than his Gello and its unusual theories. Composed in 1546–1548, the De la lingua was prefaced by a Ragionamento by Giovan Battista Gelli between himself and Cosimo Bartoli, both colleagues and supporters of Giambullari, on the difficulties inherent in trying to draw up a Tuscan grammar. One of the major characteristics of this language book is that it was clearly addressed not to fellow intellectuals or scholars but to a public of foreigners or young readers, very much like its young dedicatee, the 11-year-old heir to the duchy, Francesco de’ Medici (half-Spanish through his mother, Eleonora di Toledo). Fundamental to all three of Giambullari’s works on language was his belief in the central position of contemporary, living Florentine in any discussion on a national Italian idiom. While he was prepared to accept the authority of the great writers of the fourteenth century, he was also keen to balance their example with current Florentine practice. For Giambullari, as for most members of the Accademia Fiorentina, a balance had to be struck between respect for the models and recognition of current use. Although Giambullari did compose some poems in his youth, he never published them. A few of his canti carnascialeschi were published posthumously in Benedetto Varchi’s Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascheaate [sic] o canti carnascialeschi andati per

PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI Firenze dal tempo del magnifico Lorenzo vecchio de Medici ... infino a questo anno presente 1559 (1559), while some of his other poetry was published only in 1820 as a nuptial gift booklet. In his last years Giambullari turned his attention to history and began writing a Storia d’Europa (History of Europe) that, however, remained unfinished at his death. Though incomplete and covering only the years 800–913 CE, the work was published posthumously (1566) and enjoyed many editions until the early twentieth century. It is the first history by a Florentine to look beyond Italy and take a wider, European perspective. Although Giambullari was an important and influential intellectual of his time, there is no complete edition of his works, and only his description of the 1539 wedding celebrations is currently available in English.

Biography Pier Francesco Giambullari was born in 1495 in Florence, the son of the poet Bernardo Giambullari and Lucrezia degli Stefani. He received a thorough humanist education and in 1511 became secretary to Alfonsina Orsini, widow of Piero di Lorenzo de’ Medici; thanks to her patronage he was appointed rector of the parish church in Careggi (1515) and chaplain of S. Maria della Compagnia di Libbiano in Volterra (1515?), both good renumerative posts. Leo X provided him with a lucrative benefice in Spain. He was promoted from canon supernumerary (pre-1515) to canon regular (1527) of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence. In 1540 he became a member of the Accademia degli Umidi (quickly restructured as the Accademia Fiorentina) and held various important positions in it. In 1541–1548 Giambullari gave a number of public lectures on Dante’s Divina Commedia. Together with Benedetto Varchi, he was a member of the committee appointed by Duke Cosimo I to draw up a grammar of the Florentine language. In 1549–1550 he helped with the final linguistic revisions to Vasari’s Vite in preparation for its publication. From at least 1550 he was the ‘‘Custode’’ of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (he was, in fact, its first ‘‘custode’’). He died in Florence on 24 August 1555 and was buried in Santa Maria Novella with all the honors of the Accademia Fiorentina and a eulogy pronounced by Cosimo Bartoli. KONRAD EISENBICHLER See also: Questione della lingua

Selected Works Grammatical Writings Il Gello, Florence: Anton Francesco Doni, 1546. Origine della lingua fiorentina, altrimenti il Gello, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1549, in 8 . Lezzioni ... lette nella Accademia fiorentina, Florence: [Lorenzo Torrentino], 1551, in 8 . De la lingua che si parla & scrive in Firenze. Et uno dialogo di Giovan Batista Gelli sopra la difficulta` dello ordinare detta lingua, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1551, in 8 . In difesa della lingva fiorentina, et di Dante. Con le regole da far bella et nvmerosa la prosa ... Florence: [L. Torrentino], 1556, in 8 . Regole della lingua fiorentina, Ilaria Bonomi, editor, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1986.

History Historia dell’Europa. ... nella quale ordinatamente si trattano le cose successe in questa parte del mondo dall’anno DCCC fino al 913, Venice: Francesco [De Franceschi] senese, 1566, in 4 ; Della istoria d’Europa; Aurelio Gotti, editor, Florence: Le Monnier, 1888.

Other De ’l sito, fo´rma, & misu´re de´llo Infe´rno di Da´nte, Florence: No´ri Dortela´ta, 1544. Saggio di poesie inedite di Pier Francesco Giambullari. Pubblicate per le fauste nozze del sig. cav. Francesco Arrighi gia` Griffoli colla nobile donzella sig. Teresa Ricasoli, Domenico Moreni, editor, Florence: Stamperia Magheri, 1820. ‘‘Commento inedito al canto I dell’Inferno,’’ in Michele Barbi, Della fortuna di Dante nel sec. XVI, Pisa: Nistri, 1890. Personificazione delle citta` paesi e fiumi di Toscana festeggianti le nozze di Cosimo I ed Eleonora di Toledo, Ubaldo Angeli, editor, Prato: G. Salvi, 1898.

Edited Works Ficino, Marsilio, Sopra lo amore o ver’ Convito di Platone, Fire´nze: N. Dortela´ta, 1544.

Further Reading Bonomi, Ilaria, ‘‘Giambullari e Varchi grammatici nell’ambiente linguistico fiorentino,’’ in La Crusca nella tradizione letteraria e linguistica italiana, Florence: Presso l’Accademia [della Crusca], 1985. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Pier Francesco Giambullari,’’ in Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento, vol. 2, 2nd ed. Bari: Laterza, 1958. D’Alessandro, Alessandro, ‘‘Il Gello di Pierfrancesco Giambullari. Mito e ideologia nel principato di Cosimo I,’’ in La nascita della Toscana, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1980. D’Alessandro, Alessandro, ‘‘Il mito dell’origine ‘aramea’ di Firenze in un trattatello di Giambattista Gelli,’’ Archivio storico italiano, 138:3 (1980): 339–389. Fiorelli, Piero, ‘‘Pier Francesco Giambullari e la riforma dell’alfabeto,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 14 (1956): 177–210.

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PIER FRANCESCO GIAMBULLARI Padley, G. A., Grammatical Theory in Western Europe, 1500–1700, vol. 2, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985–1988. Pignatti, Franco, ‘‘Giambullari, Pierfrancesco,’’ Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 54, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000.

Valacca, Clemente, La vita e le opere di Messer Pierfrancesco Giambullari, Bitonto: N. Garofalo, 1898. Vasoli, Cesare, ‘‘A proposito della Storia d’Europa del Giambullari,’’ Nuova rivista storica, 77 (1993): 624–639. Vitale, Maurizio, La questione della lingua, Palermo: Palumbo, 1978.

NATALIA GINZBURG (1916–1991) In her unsentimental regard for unremarkable people with their ordinary stories and baffled feelings, Natalia Ginzburg has often been compared to Chekhov, ‘‘my numen,’’ as she once called him. Calvino placed her in the tradition of Jane Austen, Maupassant, and Katherine Mansfield but also remarked her strong affinity to the Italian women of ‘‘il nostro verismo, Deledda, Percoto’’ (our verismo, Deledda, Percoto) in her depictions of provincial life (‘‘E` stato cosı` di Natalia Ginzburg,’’ Saggi, 1995). Although she lived through the most politically convulsive and morally challenging period in modern Italian history, she interpreted her time, as they did theirs, through the unheroic drama of commonplace, if often anguished, personal relations. Born in Sicily, Ginzburg was raised in Turin by a family of Socialist convictions that were never compromised nor abandoned when the Fascists came to power. Her first husband, Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish Marxist political activist who helped found Einaudi Press, was imprisoned, then forced into exile for his anti-Fascist activities; he returned to Rome in 1944, where he was again imprisoned and died after being tortured. Ginzburg joined him in exile in the Abruzzi, where life was governed by the traditional rhythms of rural Italian culture. The knowledge gained in this period of exile helps explain the special character of Ginzburg’s literary modernism. Her own familial and cultural traditions were urban and intellectual. Carlo Levi and Cesare Pavese were both models and mentors for her early writings, and Alberto Moravia’s novel Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference, 1929) was an important early influence. She was an editor at Einaudi, for whom she also worked as a translator, producing an admired translation of Marcel Proust, whose epic on human remembrance was to affect her own understanding of the treacherous, 842

yet potentially redemptive powers of memory and its inseparable partner, forgetting. Despite her wide acquaintance with the community and culture of a politically sophisticated intellectual elite, her imaginative writings are imbued with a fatalism that typically prevails in more traditional societies. She concluded ‘‘Inverno in Abruzzo’’ (Winter in the Abruzzi, 1944), her account of her life in exile, by asserting that human life is governed by ‘‘by ancient, unchangeable laws, according to an invariable and ancient rhythm.’’ Her fictional characters struggle in vain to escape or deny their subjugation to these implacable laws. They complain of a boredom they are helpless to dispel, lacking the spiritual and intellectual resources to enliven their confined and barren existence. Nor can love redeem the monotony and emptiness of their lives. When they love, their love is as hopeless as it is obsessive. They often fall in love with people who are thought to be ugly, a feeling they actually share, so that their love seems a mask for self-loathing. This is the erotic perversity that afflicts the narrator of E` stato cosı` (The Dry Heart, 1947) who marries a man who physically repels her. The matter-of-factness of the title is powerless to contain the explosive violence barely suppressed in the demand that set offs her narrative: ‘‘Dimmi la verita`.’’ Because her abrupt demand for the truth about her husband’s feelings for another woman (also ugly) is ignored, the narrator shoots him between the eyes. For all the surface quiet of their lives, Ginsburg’s characters are intimate with emotional and often physical violence, although more often as its victims rather than its agents. They find themselves on the periphery of life despite their efforts to conform to the dictates of convention, which seems to guarantee them a secure place in the social and moral world.

NATALIA GINZBURG In ‘‘Ritratto d’un Amico’’ (Portrait of a Friend, 1957), her admiring yet clear-eyed tribute to Pavese, Ginzburg claimed that Pavese was mistaken in his refusal to love ‘‘the daily current of existence, which flows evenly and apparently without secrets.’’ She seemed determined to avoid and at the same time explore the consequences of Pavese’s mistake. Her narratives rarely deviate from the daily current of existence and its surface calm. Her grip on the quotidian, however, is slackened by the relentless, impersonal forces that propel her story and her syntax along its fated, often disastrous course. This narrative technique puts inordinate pressure on her endings to arrest the fluidity of life so that its meaning as well as its depth might be, if only momentarily, arrested. Ginzburg’s art flowered in her endings as much as in the continuous, desperate tread of her narration. Sometimes this moment is purely negative, an acknowledgment of the final oblivion that awaits all living things, as in the mournful ending of La strada che va in citta` (The Road to the City, 1942) or the letter of the disconsolate homosexual that concludes Caro Michele (Dear Michael, 1973). The power of these endings derives from the tragic understatement of Ginsburg’s style. Her language is direct, even austere, in its idiomatic simplicity. Although not immune to comedy, her fiction is generally without humor, since most of her narrators lack the necessary distance and self-confidence to make fun either of life or of themselves. A vibrant exception is Lessico Famigliare (Family Sayings, 1963), her novelized memoir of her family, which achieves much of its humorous impiety by fondly reproducing the regional dialect and characteristic expressions that defined her father and mother. Although generally forswearing the highly rhetorical and ornate style associated in her mind with Fascist oratory and propaganda, Ginzburg did allow her characters, who would ordinarily be incapable of tragic poetic expression, their singular moments of lyrical outcry. Famiglia (Family, 1977) concludes with a poetic tour de force that recreates the final moments of a dying man; his darkening consciousness is fitfully illuminated by a single memory of being cradled in his mother’s arms in a crowded train station: ‘‘Why on earth his memory should have squandered and destroyed so many days and so many events, and yet preserved that moment so accurately, bringing it safely through the years, tempest, ruins he did not know... he had retained a whole pile of random detailed impressions, that were hazy, but light as a feather. He had kept the memory of voices, mud, umbrellas, people, the night.’’

These poetic fragments can be read as surviving remnants of Ginzburg’s first literary efforts as an aspiring poet. She soon discovered that her gift was for storytelling, not lyric utterance. Her first major work, La strada che va in citta´, which appeared under the pseudonym Alessandra Tornimparti to protect her against the racial laws then in force, articulated her major preoccupations in a form and language distinctly her own. It was a language and form that initially was conditioned by the limits and possibilities of first person narrative and by her growing appreciation, as she relates in ‘‘Il mio mestiere’’ (My Vocation, 1949), that women’s knowledge of the world was distinct from men’s, an early confirmation of the feminist strains in her work. In these initial works, Ginzburg struggled to solve ‘‘the autobiographical problem’’ of writing from herself without writing about herself. Her characters, as she freely and often admitted, were drawn partly from her own feelings toward the world and partly from people she knew well or had attentively observed. She demonstrated her virtuosity in exploiting the expressive possibilities of first-person narration in works whose narrators are not, like the confused or distraught females who narrate La stada che va in citta` and E` stato cosı`, at the center of the stories they tell. Valentino (1957), the story of a scapegrace brother told from the indulgent perspective of his adoring sister, is the triumph of this use of a first-person narrator who remains peripheral to the human drama she recounts, contenting herself with the role of supporting player and moral chorus. In the 1960s Ginsburg began to explore and exploit the properties of first-person narratives with more subtlety and daring. A stay in London, where her second husband, Gabriele Baldini, held a post as director of the Italian Cultural Institute, introduced her to the idiosyncratic novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett, which consist almost entirely of dialogue. The fruit of this encounter is the polyphonic Le voci della sera (Voices in the Evening, 1961), whose narrator Elsa is at once an historian chronicling the fate of her town during the Fascist and postwar era and an elegist of her own doomed love affair. This technically meticulous experiment in camouflaging, then exposing, her narrator’s damaged life was followed by the utterly original Lessico famigliare, an exercise in personal memory for which she devised a new autobiographical form that mimicked the novel in its arrangement of incidents and in the surface objectivity of its narration. The result is a triumph of impersonal personal 843

NATALIA GINZBURG narration in which Ginzburg felt she had written ‘‘in stato di assoluta liberta`’’ (in a state of total freedom) and produced a work of ‘‘pura memoria’’ (pure memory) (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). It was also during this period that she started writing plays, beginning with Ti ho sposato per allegria (I Married You for the Fun of It, 1966), filmed in 1967 by Luciano Salce and starring Monica Vitti, and L’inserzione (The Advertisement, 1968). L’inserzione, the only one of her plays to be translated into English, was first produced in England at the National Theater in London with Joan Plowright in the lead and Laurence Olivier as director. She confessed in a playbill note to that production that she approached theater with a certain repugnance, fearful that she would forfeit the intimacy of the author/reader relationship. Despite her self-described malaise, she continued to write plays, including Fragola e panna (Strawberry and Cream, 1966) and La segretaria (The Secretary, 1966), first performed under the direction of Luciano Salce with Adriana Asti in the title role at the Stabile di Torino in 1965; and La parrucca (The Wig, 1973), a monologue in which a ruined wig becomes a comic, but unnerving, symbol of the emotional violence rampant in the monologuist’s disintegrating life. Ginzburg had become expert in using the monologue to dramatize the emotional isolation of her characters, who in their clamoring for attention cannot seem to hear any other voice but their own. Soon she began experimenting more directly with the intersubjective play of voices intrinsic to drama. L’intervista (The Interview, 1988), whose premier at the Piccolo Teatro di Milano with Giulia Lazzarini was dedicated to the director Luca Coppola, who was murdered that year, is Ginzburg’s most ironic interrogation of the drama’s dialogic form. It is also the play in which her debt to Carlo Goldoni’s theatricality is inventively acknowledged. A series of scheduled interviews, each accorded a separate act, fail to take place because the interviewee forgot or could not keep his appointment. The unofficial and unguarded conversations with the family members and servant of the absent celebrity form the unglamorous but richly emotional heart of the drama. The milieu and the social types are familiar from Ginzburg’s fiction— the provincial, comfortably bourgeois family; the servant class that ministers to their needs and vanities; the weak-willed and indecisive intellectual—which only highlights the productive difference, even tension, between Ginzburg’s ventriloquizing in her first-person and epistolary narratives and 844

the vocal and more public dramas of the theater. Her last play, commissioned by Giorgio Pressburger in 1991, was the short, devastating, Il cormorano (The Cormorant), whose title is a late and unforgettable echo of her beloved Chekhov’s The Sea-Gull. In the oil-drenched wings of the cormorant, Ginzburg offers an abject but potent symbol for the emotional and moral incapacities of her adulterous protagonists, but also for the historical debacles and spiritual futility that plague modern life on the brink of the new millennium. Ginzburg, who often protested that her limited formal education disqualified her as an authoritative woman of letters, nevertheless wrote widely on literary and moral questions. Le piccole virtu` (The Little Virtues, 1962) is an ironic title for a collection of personal topical and moral essays that demonstrate Ginzburg’s motivating love of the great virtues—especially magnanimity of feeling and generosity of imagination—that morally inspired her apparently modest portraits of everyday life. Her final writings, which attest to the continuing strength of her own literary virtues, show a willingness to explore new forms and embrace more public subjects. She was to demonstrate the still relevant virtues of the epistolary form to coordinate diverse, often incompatible points of view in Caro Michele and La citta` e la casa (The City and the House, 1984), her final novel. Her skills as a creator of novelistic character animate her collective biography of the Manzoni family. Her last work, Serena Cruz, o la vera giustizia (Serena Cruz, or True Justice, 1990), which addresses the legal and moral questions raised by a controversial adoption case, is yet another departure, a work that is part reportage, part political tract, part humanist manifesto. The case spoke passionately to Ginzburg’s obsession with families, how they are formed, sustained, and dissolved. Despite the growing pessimism of her literary work, the provocative subtitle of ‘‘o la vera guistizia’’ proclaims the moral idealism never despaired of by the author, who had survived the death and depredations of Fascism and the spiritual malaise of Italy’s postwar prosperity.

Biography Natalia Ginzburg was born as Levi in Palermo, July 14, 1916. In 1935, she enrolled in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Turin but dropped out. In 1938, she married Leone Ginzburg, editor and anti-Fascist political activist; in 1939 their son Carlo was born. From 1940 to 1943, Ginzburg

NATALIA GINZBURG accompanied her husband to Pizzoli, a remote village in the southern region of Abruzzi, where he was imprisoned. Their daughter Alessandra was born there. In November 1943–1945, she was living in hiding in Rome with her children. On February 5, 1944, her husband died from torture wounds inflicted by the Gestapo in Regina Coeli prison. In 1950, Ginzburg married Gabriele Baldini, professor of Anglo-American literature, musicologist, and critic. In 1952, Tutti i nostri ieri was awarded the Veillon Prize. In 1957, Ginzburg was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Valentino; in 1964, she won the Strega Prize for Lessico famigliare. In 1968, Ginzburg won the Marzotto Prize for European Drama for L’inserzione, and in 1969, she won the Milan Club Degli Editori Award. Her second husband died in Rome from hepatitis in June 1969. In 1983, Ginzburg was elected to Parliament as member of the Independent Left Party, representing Turin. In 1984, she won the Bagutta Award for La famiglia Manzoni and in 1985, she was awarded the Ernest Hemingway Prize. On October 7, 1991, Ginzburg died of cancer in Rome. MARIA DIBATTISTA Selected Works

La famiglia Manzoni, 1983; as The Manzoni Family, translated by Marie Evans, 1987. La citta` e la casa, 1984; as The City and the House, translated by Dick Davis, 1986; reprinted, 1987.

Theater Ti ho sposato per allegria, 1966. Fragola e panna, 1966. La segretaria, 1966. Paese di mare e altre commedie, 1973. L’inserzione, 1968; as The Advertisement, translated by Henry Reed, 1969. La poltrona, 1987. L’intervista, 1988.

Essays Le piccole virtu´, 1962; as The Little Virtues, translated by Dick Davis, 1986. Mai devi domandarmi, 1970; as Never Must You Ask Me, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1970. Vita immaginaria, 1974 Serena Cruz, o la vera giustizia, 1990. Non possiamo saperlo: Saggi 1973–1990, edited by Domenico Scarpa, 2001.

Translations Marcel Proust, La strada di Swan, 2 vols., 1946. Gustave Flaubert, La signora Bovary, 1983; reprinted, 2001.

Edited Works Mario Soldati, La carta del cielo: Racconti, 1980. Antonio Delfini, Diari, 1927–1961 (with Giovanna Delfini), 1982.

Interviews Collections Opere raccolte e ordinate dall’autore, Prefazione by Cesare Garboli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1987. Teatro, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

Fiction La strada che va in citta`, 1942 (as Alessandra Tornimparti); reprinted in 1945; as The Road to the City, translated by Francis Frenaye, 1949; reprinted in 1952 and 1990. E` stato cosi, 1947; as The Dry Heart, translated by Francis Frenaye, 1949. Tutti i nostri ieri, 1952; as All Our Yesterdays, translated by Angus Davidson, 1985. Valentino, 1957; as Valentino, translated by Avril Baroni, 1987. La madre, 1957. Sagittario, 1957; as Sagittarius, translated by Avril Baroni, 1987 Le voci della sera, 1961; as Voices in the Evening, translated by D. M. Low, 1963. Lessico famigliare, 1963; as Family Sayings, translated by D. M. Low, 1967; revised, 1984; as The Things We Used to Say, translated by Judith Woolf, 1997. Paese di mare, 1973. Caro Michele, 1973; as No Way, translated by Sheila Cudahy, 1974; as Dear Michael, translated by Sheila Cudahy, 1975. Famiglia, 1977; as Family, translated by Beryl Stockman, 1988. Borghesia, 1977; as Borghesia, translated by Beryl Stockman, 1988.

` difficile parlare di se´, edited by Cesare Garboli and Lisa E Ginzburg, 1999; as It’s Hard to Talk About Yourself, translated by Louise Quirke, 2003.

Further Reading Borrelli, Clara, Notizie di Natalia Ginzburg, Naples: L’Orientale, 2002. Bullock, Alan, Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World, New York: Berg-St. Martin’s Press, 1991. ` stato cosı` di Natalia Ginzburg, in Saggi Calvino, Italo, E 1945–1985, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Contemporary Literary Criticism, special issues dedicated to Ginzburg, 5 (1976); 11 (1979); 54 (1989). Del Greco Lobner, Corinna. ‘‘A Lexicon for Both Sexes: Natalia Ginzburg and the Family Saga,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Prefazione’’ in N. Ginzburg, Opere, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1987. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, et al. (editor), Natalia Ginzburg: La narratrice e i suoi testi, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1986. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Dialoghi di Natalia,’’ Studi linguistici italiani, 23(1997): 255–267. Jeannet, Angela M., and Giuliana Sanguineti Katz (editors), Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

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NATALIA GINZBURG Marchionne Picchione, Luciana, Natalia Ginzburg, Florence: Il Castoro, 1978. O’Healy, Anne-Marie, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family,’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 9 (1986): 21–36. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Due Narratori,’’ in Il Secondo Mestiere Prose 1920–1979, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Picarazzi, Teresa, Maternal Desire: Natalia Ginzburg’s Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London-Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg: una lingua per la scena,’’ in La passione teatrale. Tradizioni, prospettive e spreco nel teatro italiano: Otto e Novecento. Studi per Alessandro D’Amico, edited by Alessandro Tinterri, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Salmagundi, special issue on Ginzburg, 96(Fall 1992): 54–167. Taviani, Fernando, ‘‘Tutti i cinghiali hanno detto di sı`,’’ Teatro e storia, 1(1992): 137–153. Weinstein, Jen, ‘‘Il maschio assente nell’opera narrativa e teatrale di Natalia Ginzburg,’’ in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Ada Testaferri, Toronto: Dove House, 1989.

LE VOCI DELLA SERA, 1961 Novel by Natalia Ginzburg

Le voci della sera (Voices in the Evening), Natalia Ginzburg’s second novel, was the first to be published under her own name. It bears all the signature traits of her mature fiction—modest in its narrative scope; spare but vividly colloquial in its language; concerned with ordinary, even drab characters; yet structurally and emotionally complex in interweaving fragmented memories into the tattered fabric of an emotionally desolate present. As in much of Ginzburg’s fiction, the social and moral toll of Italy’s Fascist past is not represented on a monumental scale but registered in the everyday occurrences of life in a provincial Italian town. This novel marks the first time Ginzburg wrote about the provincial places of her own childhood she once considered ‘‘una paternita` inaccettabile,’’ or ‘‘an unacceptable patrimony,’’ without shame or 846

repugnance (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). The novel is narrated by Elsa, the daughter of a middleclass family who shows little inclination to criticize or escape the traditional society into which she has been born. Elsa writes with easy, if sardonic familiarity about three well-established families, including her own, tracing their fortunes from the rise of Fascism, through the war, into the years of postwar prosperity. We learn who are the Fascist sympathizers, who the resistors, who profit from the war, who survive and why, who marry, happily or unhappily. These facts are recounted with no more moral or even emotional emphasis than reports of a dinner party to which one was not invited. Ginsburg’s manipulation of Elsa as both a detached observer and a self-protective narrator of her own life was partly inspired by her encounter with the fiction of Ivy Compton-Burnett, whose novelistic dialogue,‘‘pervicace e maligno’’ (obstinate and malignant), Ginzburg admired and adapted to her own idiosyncratic experiments with first person narratives (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). The ‘‘voices’’ of the novel are those that reverberate through Elsa’s consciousness, often muting her own. Thus she begins the novel virtually silent, listening uncomplainingly to her mother’s medley of complaints and gossip. She is similarly impassive in recording the village chatter, the ‘‘voices of spite and insult’’ that surround her. Her narrative is shadowed by a brief but telling anecdote about a cousin who had a beautiful voice, went to America to sing, and lost her voice in a fire. The loss of voice, whether it is gradual or traumatic, is a catastrophe Elsa tries ironically to forestall through her own self-effacing narration. Elsa overcomes her reticence halfway through her narrative. She finally reveals her name and suddenly shifts from the past to the present tense to recount her own clandestine love affair and brief engagement. Her story emerges within the communal ‘‘frame’’ she has assembled out of provincial convention and the shards of social memory, but by then she cannot, as her lover remarks, step out of it to experience or enjoy an independent life. Her entrapment is signaled by the novel’s ending, which reabsorbs Elsa’s identity and voice within static structures of recurrence. Elsa concludes the novel by transcribing, in the indefinite present tense, her mother’s insistent chatter, chatter that at once ignores and finalizes her daughter’s emotional extinction. MARIA DIBATTISTA

NATALIA GINZBURG Editions First edition: Le voci della sera, Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Critical edition: Le voci della sera, edited by Alan Bullock, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1982. Translation: as Voices in the Evening, translated by D. M. Low, New York: Dutton, 1963.

Further Reading Bullock, Alan, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and Ivy Compton-Burnett: Creative Composition and Domestic Regression in Le voci della sera,’’ Rivista di Letterature Moderne e Comparate, 30 (1977): 203–226. Carle, Barbara, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg’s Narrative Voci della sera,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 14: 2 (Autumn 1993): 239–254. Fontanella, Luigi, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg Between Fiction and Memory: A Reading of Le voci della sera and Lessico Famigliare,’’ in Natalia Ginzburg: A Voice of the Twentieth Century, edited by Angela Jeannet and Guiliana Sanguinetti Katz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Garboli, Cesare, Prefazione, in N. Ginzburg, Opere, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1987. Picarazzi, Teresa, Maternal Desire: Natalia Ginzburg’s Mothers, Daughters, and Sisters, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London-Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002.

LESSICO FAMIGLIARE, 1963 Novel by Natalia Ginzburg

In Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings), a personal and highly idiosyncratic history of her own family during the Fascist era and its postwar aftermath, Natalia Ginzburg reinvented the memoir as a novelized collective autobiography. In her preface, she declared that not a person, place, or incident in the book had been invented but then insisted that the book be read ‘‘senza chiedergli nulla di piu`, ne´ di meno, di quello che un romanzo puo` dare’’ (without asking either more or less of it than a novel can give). What the novel form gave Ginsburg was the freedom to select those sayings and incidents that, however trivial or fragmentary, nevertheless constituted a ‘‘romanzo di pura, nuda, scoperta and dichiarata memoria’’ (a novel of pure, naked,

discovered and professed memory) (‘‘Nota,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1986). This freedom was often negatively exercised. Her narrative is full of gaps attributable less to faulty memory than to deliberate authorial omissions. The most discontinuous, inscrutable presence is Ginzburg herself. Details of her courtship and marriage to Leone Ginsburg, their shared exile in the Abruzzi, the birth of their children, and his eventual death by torture are reported rather than dramatized. Only when her narrative approaches those intimates of her adult life outside her immediate family do her personal recollections become more expansive and detailed, culminating in her complex portrait of Cesare Pavese. Dominating the family and this memoir is the opinionated, often despotic voice of Ginzburg’s father, Giuseppe Levi. He is given the first and last words of the book—his first a thundering command for civility, his last a protest against his wife’s oft-told tales of the past (precisely the kind of anecdotes and sayings of which the book itself is made). He confers authority on the family’s ‘‘lexicon,’’ which is their special language for reality, for the past, and for each other. It is vocabulary assembled from words and idioms native to the father’s Triestine and the mother’s Milanese dialects but adapted to the family’s private meanings. Their private language at once announces and disguises the tensions between ‘‘the incommunicable worlds’’ of Ginzburg’s father, an ethnic but not religious Jew who is anti-Modernist in his artistic tastes, and her mother, raised Catholic, who loves Proust and never tires of repeating the droll anecdotes that the father dismisses as scherzettini (little jokes). Their different but married idioms knit the Levi family together in a shared family code that unites them when the ties of affection become frayed by temperamental differences and the tragic accidents of history. The violence and pain of modern Italian history are not so much kept in the background as absorbed into the durable rhythm of the family’s daily life. Catastrophes are recalled through a single gesture: Thus Ginzburg revealed that the fall of France would always be linked in her mind to cherries that Pavese, on his visits, ‘‘would make us taste on his arrival, pulling them one by one from his pocket with a parsimonious and grudging hand.’’ This novelistic way of remembering seems to defeat the impersonal verdicts of history. Lessico Famigliare ends with a return to a past that is at once within and outside of history. Its concluding pages anthologize the characteristic expressions of 847

NATALIA GINZBURG the father and mother in dialogue with each other. Their comic duet is a tour de force of tribal memory and indomitable character that affirms as it resurrects a life now vanished. MARIA DIBATTISTA Editions First Edition Lessico famigliare, Turin: Einaudi, 1963.

Other Editions Lessico famigliare, edited by Cesare Garboli, Milan: Mondadori, 1972.

Translations As Family Sayings, translated by D. M. Low, London: Hogarth, 1967; revised edition, Manchester: Carcanet, 1984. As The Things We Used to Say, translated by Judith Woolf, Manchester: Carcanet, 1997.

Further Reading Barani,Valeria, ‘‘Il ‘latino’ polifonico della famiglia Levi nel ‘Lessico famigliare’ di Natalia Ginzburg,’’ Otto/Novecento, 6 (1990): 147–157. Bullock, Alan, Natalia Ginzburg: Human Relationships in a Changing World, New York: Berg-St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Del Greco Lobner, Corinna, ‘‘A Lexicon for Both Sexes: Natalia Ginzburg and the Family Saga,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in N. Ginzburg, Lessico famigliare, Milan: Mondadori, 1972. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Lessico famigliare, crudele con dolcezza,’’ in Secondo Mestiere Prose 1920–1979, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. O’Healy, Anne-Marie, ‘‘Natalia Ginzburg and the Family,’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 9 (1986): 21–36. Sodi, Risa, ‘‘A Family Grammar: Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico Famigliare,’’ Entralogos, 1 (1987): 106–114. Woolf, Judith, ‘‘Silent Witness: Memory and Omission in Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings,’’ Cambridge Quarterly, 25:3 (1996): 243–262.

GIOACCHINO DA FIORE (CA. 1135–1202) Also known as Joachim di Fiore or Joachim da Flora, the Cistercian monk, then abbot at Corazzo, and famous biblical exegete, Joachim lived in his native Calabria all his life. His innovative biblical scholarship and his wisdom brought him the respect and admiration of popes and kings, who consulted him on spiritual and political matters. The gift of prophecy attributed to his theological investigations would grant him a legendary aura after his death. Some of Joachim’s doctrines may have developed as a consequence of his frequent contacts with Greek monks, who lived in great numbers in the eastern portion of twelfth-century Calabria, and also with Islam, which was highly represented in southern Italy at the time. Believing that the Cistercian Order could not fulfill his desire for an austere hermitical life, Joachim founded a new order at St. John of Fiore, in the Calabrian mountains of Sila. The Florensian Order was approved by Pope Celestine III in 1196 and spread over the next three centuries, until most monks rejoined the Cistercian Order in 1505. After 848

Joachim’s death, a considerable controversy arose about the orthodoxy of his spiritual and theological pronouncements. He was considered by some a prophet and by some a teacher of false doctrine. In the late thirteenth century, his ideas were embraced by the Spiritual Franciscans and were disseminated rapidly by them through northern Italy. In 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council condemned Joachim for his doctrine on the Trinity. Joachim’s controversial deployment of biblical texts to understand and predict human history is expressed in three major works, Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteri Testamenti (Book of the Concordance between the Old and the New Testaments, 1182–1200), Expositio in Apocalypsim (Exposition of the Apocalypse, 1182–1200), and Psalterium decem cordarum (Psaltery of Ten Strings, 1182– 1200). These three commentaries aim at the same exegetical purpose and develop similar arguments. Themes and concepts are cross-referenced among the three different works, which, in the intentions of the author, constitute a trilogy. In the Concordia

GIOACCHINO DA FIORE the treatment is historical, in Expositio exegetical, and in Psalterium theological. Joachim’s study theorizes a spiritual perception of history. He creatively combined a close exegetical study of biblical texts with figural and numerical symbolism, while placing his analysis on a historical background and prophesying future occurrences. His investigation of the Bible was intended to establish a series of parallel readings of the Old Testament, the New Testament, and human history. People, events, and periods in the Old Testament have correspondences in people, events, and periods in the New Testament and in the final age of human history, which Joachim prophetically announced as an age of peace and reconciliation. The Concordia was conceived and written first and contains a philosophy of history. It begins by establishing an elaborate and fanciful parallel between the Old and New Testaments and states that all corresponding elements in the two parts of the biblical narrative prefigure the third and final age of the Spirit, which is yet to come. History is divided into three overlapping epochs, corresponding to the three persons of the Trinity. The age of the Father has faith, the age of the Son knowledge, and the age of the Spirit contemplation as their chief qualities, respectively. The age of the Father spanned from Adam to Christ, and human beings live a carnal life; the age of the Son stretched from King Uzziah (first millennium before Christ) to 1260, between the flesh and the spirit; the third age is from the time of St Benedict (sixth century AD) to the end of the world, and human beings live a spiritual life. The Expositio summarizes some of the same ideas and then analyzes in greater detail the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, which Joachim considered the key to interpreting all Scripture. It explains the prophetic symbolism of the Apocalypse and forecasts things yet to come. The Psalterium clarifies Joachim’s theory on the Trinity. The musical instrument known as lyre or psalter serves as allegorical representation of the Trinity. The body of the instrument represents the Father, the psalm sung on it represents the Son, the melody produced by both instrument and psalm represents the Spirit. The treatise is accordingly divided into three books, one for each Person of the Trinity. A correspondence with the three historical stages created in the previous two works is maintained. It has been suggested that, through the Saracen culture of southern Italy at the time, Joachim felt the influence of Averroistic tendencies, which put

forth vague dreams of a universal religion, a future age of the spirit in which all separating forms and partial dogmas would disappear. Many books attributed to Joachim are expositions of his prophecies, and it is mostly on these that Joachim’s fame rested for some generations. The ensemble of spurious Joachite literature, known as pseudo-Joachite, contributed to Joachim’s popularity and helped spread the notions truly deriving from his canonical works. Joachim’s general spiritual and theological framework came to be known later as the Eternal Gospel.

Biography Gioacchino da Fiore, or Joachim, was born around the year 1135 in Celico, near Cosenza, in the southern Italian region of Calabria, which was then a very composite and complex region under Norman rule. His father was a notary at the court of Roger II of Sicily. After training to become a notary himself, he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and spent time wandering in the Palestine desert, possibly around the year 1158. Upon his return to Calabria, he was ordained and became a monk in the Cistercian monastery at Corazzo, where he professed in 1168. In 1178 he became abbot but neglected the leadership of the monastery to dedicate himself to biblical exegesis. He left Corazzo for Casamari, where he wrote his commentaries. He died in San Giovanni in Fiore, Calabria, on March 30, 1202. ALESSANDRO VETTORI Selected Works Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti (written between 1182 and 1200), 1519. Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteris Testamenti, edited by E. Randolph Daniel, 1983. Expositio magni prophete Abbatis Ioachim in Apocalipsim (written between 1182 and 1200), 1527. Expositio in Apocalypsim (written between 1182 and 1200), 1964. Psalterium decem cordarum (written between 1182 and 1200), 1527. Il salterio a dieci corde, 2004.

Further Reading Buonaiuti, Ernest, Gioacchino da Fiore, Rome, Collezione Meridionale Editrice, 1931. McGinn, Bernard, The Calabrian Abbot. Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought, New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1985.

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GIOACCHINO DA FIORE Napolillo, Vincenzo, Gioacchino da Fiore: le fonti biografiche e le lettere, Cosenza: Progetto 2000. Reeves, Marjorie, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969. Reeves, Marjorie, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future, New York, Harper & Row, 1977. Reeves, Marjorie, ‘‘The Originality and Influence of Joachim of Fiore,’’ Traditio 36 (1980): 269–316.

Storia e messaggio in Gioacchino da Fiore: Atti del I Congresso internazionale di studi gioachimiti, S. Giovanni in Fiore, Abbazia Florense (19–23 September 1979), S. Giovanni in Fiore: Centro di studi gioachimiti, 1980. Troncalli, Fabio, Gioacchino da Fiore: la vita, il pensiero, le opere, Rome: Citta` Nuova, 2002. West, Delno (editor), Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, 2 vols., New York: Burt Franklin, 1975.

VINCENZO GIOBERTI (1801–1852) Vincenzo Gioberti was a Turinese philosopher, theologian, and statesman whose impressive quantity of works elucidates a philosophy of pantheistic ontologism mixed with traditionalism and a nationalistic political agenda that made him the theoretician of the neo-Guelph movement. Gioberti wrote articles under the pen name of ‘‘Demofilo’’ for Giovine Italia (Young Italy), the political sect of his contemporary revolutionary thinker Giuseppe Mazzini. Although both Gioberti and Mazzini recognized at a young age the seriousness of their country’s decline, Gioberti, unlike Mazzini, saw amelioration in systematic and moderate steps. Arrested and exiled on suspicion of political intrigues in 1833, Gioberti would spend the next fifteen years abroad articulating his plan for Italy’s recovery through the publication of numerous philosophical and political works. His most influential work, Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (1843; On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians) appeared to many to be the answer to Italy’s problems. Dedicated to Silvio Pellico, the book is divided into two parts, ‘‘Del primato italiano rispetto all’azione’’ (On Italian Primacy with Respect to Action) and ‘‘Del primato italiano rispetto al pensiero’’ (On Italian Primacy with Respect to Thought), which elaborate reasons for Italy’s early primacy in Europe and its subsequent demise, and propose a plan for its revival. An ordained priest, Gioberti not only preached moral salvation through Christianity,

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but suggested that Italy’s political redemption lay in the Church’s ability to govern. As the providentially chosen home of Catholicism and the Papacy, Gioberti claimed Italy has a mission to be a model for all nations in the materialization of the divine in history. To remove Italy from its condition of political insignificance, Gioberti offered a solution to Italian unification in the formation of a federation of Italian states under the guidance of the Pope, in whose Church Gioberti saw the source of moral and social values, and backed by the military force of Piedmont. Del primato morale e civile degli italiani experienced great popularity, making Gioberti the leading theoretician of the ‘‘neo-Guelph’’ movement. Some heavy criticism, however, prompted Gioberti to publish a new edition in 1845 preceded by an introduction of 559 pages called the ‘‘Prolegomeni del Primato’’ (Prolegomena of the Primacy). Gioberti’s conception of the Church brought him into conflict with the Jesuits, against whom he wrote the invective Gesuita moderno (The Modern Jesuit, 1846) and the subsequent Apologia del libro intitolato il Gesuita moderno (Apology of the Book Entitled The Modern Jesuit, 1848). Gioberti saw an important role for the cleric in the unfolding of Italy’s political destiny. Clerics, he believed, should modernize themselves and know how to evaluate the social forces at work in the world with political realism; they must always be able to control and guide the fickle public opinion toward progress.

VINCENZO GIOBERTI Gioberti’s return to his native Turin in May 1848 was triumphant, garnering much attention from both Piedmont and Rome. After traveling to Milan to oppose Mazzini, whose republican sympathies he no longer shared, he founded a society advocating a federated Italy, this time with the King of Piedmont and not the Pope as its leader. His plans unrealized, Gioberti retreated to Paris in 1849, where he saw all of his volumes placed on the Index of Prohibited Books before his death in 1852. In his last works, such as the Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia (On the Civil Renewal of Italy, 1851) and the philosophical treatise Della protologia (1857), Gioberti drastically modified a number of the ideas advanced in Del primato morale e civile degli italiani and demonstrated pantheistic inclinations. Gioberti’s orientation toward pantheism, particularly evident in the posthumously published Della protologia, recalls ideas of both Giordano Bruno and Giambattista Vico and relies on the Platonic tradition emphasizing ontology, or the science of being. Gioberti asserted that the primum cognitum of man is the idea of ‘‘Being,’’ which is nothing other than God Himself. Ens creat existentias, or ‘‘being creates existing things,’’ is the basis of the theory of creation which he calls Esse universale (Universal Being). The ‘‘Entity’’ is the divine beginning in which reality originates but from which it is separated and distant. Despite this distance, the relationship between Entity and existing things is dynamic and reveals itself in the unfolding of history. History, therefore, is the stage for the interplay between the Entity and existing creation. In Del bello (On Beauty, 1841), Gioberti further asserted the important role of literature and art in this philosophy of history. Although most of Gioberti’s theories were dreams too impractical to realize at the height of the nineteenth century, the power of his writing and the passion of his convictions secure his place as one of Italy’s nation-builders. The complete works of Gioberti were published in thirty-five volumes in Naples in 1877. ERIN M. MCCARTHY

Biography Born in Turin on April 5, 1801; studied theology at University of Torino, obtained doctorate; ordained

priest in 1825; court chaplain and professor in the theological college, 1826–1833; wrote under the pen-name ‘‘Demofilo’’ in Mazzini’s Giovine Italia, printed in Marseilles; arrested for political ideas, 1833; exiled and moved to Paris, 1833–1834; lived in Brussels, 1834–1845; returned to Italy to actively participate in the political upheaval, May 1848; became minister, president of the Parliament, and Prime Minister from December 13, 1848 to February 19, 1849; after the failure of his neoGuelph political movement in Piedmont, went to France, May 1849; died in Paris of a heart attack on October 26, 1852. Selected Works Collections Epistolario, edited by Giovanni Gentile and Gustavo Balsamo-Crivelli, 11 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1927. Opere edite e inedite, Milan: Bocca-Padua:Cedam, 1938– 1971. Scritti letterari, edited by Ernesto Travi, Milan: Marzorati, 1971.

Philosophical Writings

Teorica del soprannaturale, 1838; 2nd edition, with replies to critics, 1850. Introduzione allo studio della filosofia, 1840. Lettere sugli errori politico-religiosi di Lamennais, 1840. Del bello, 1841. Del buono, 1841. Errori filosofici di Antonio Rosmini, 1842. Del primato morale e civile degli italiani, 1843; new edition, 1845. Gesuita moderno, 1846. Apologia del libro intitolato il Gesuita moderno, 1848. Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia, 1851. Della riforma Cattolica della Chiesa, 1856. Filosofia della Rivelazione, 1856. Della protologia, 1857.

Further Reading Freschi, Renato, L’azione politica di Gioberti, Milan: A. Corticelli, 1935 Gentile, Giovanni, Rosmini e Gioberti: saggio storico sulla filosofia italiana del Risorgimento, Florence: Sansoni, 1955. Giusso, Lorenzo, ‘‘Il Cahier de Philosophie di Vincenzo Gioberti: Rinascita,’’ Italica, 26, No. 2 (June 1949): 151–160 Holland, Rupert Sargent, Builders of a United Italy, New York: H. Holt & Company, 1908. Muste`, Marcello, La scienza ideale: filosofia e politica in Vincenzo Gioberti, Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro): Rubbettino, 2000.

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VINCENZO GIOBERTI Portale, Vincenzo, Vincenzo Gioberti e l’ontologismo, Cosenza: Pellegrini, 1968. Rossi, Joseph, ‘‘The Piedmontese Moderates and America,’’ Italica, 43, No. 1, (March 1966): 1–31. Rumi, Giorgio, Gioberti, Bologna: Il mulino, 1999.

Salomone, A. William, ‘‘Statescraft and Ideology in the Risorgimento. Reflections on the Italian National Revolution,’’ Italica, 38, No. 3 (September 1961): 163–194.

PIETRO GIORDANI (1774–1848) Critic and essayist Pietro Giordani played a notable role in the unfolding of the intellectual life of Italian Romanticism. Because of his radical commitment to the life of the mind, he has come to incarnate the figure of the ‘‘engaged man of letters,’’ and, from this viewpoint, in his work and posture one can perceive the distant echo of the French ide´ologues (Diderot, Rousseau). Like his transalpine colleagues, Giordani wrote about literature, politics, art, and theology, and he did so with the aim of reaching a wider public, opening up and debating the moral questions of the time, and educating the young to a modern and somewhat liberal sense of contemporary reality. The signs of his view of literature as part of a larger civic-intellectual conversation were visible from the start of his career. An early political-poetic work was his Panegirico alla sacra maesta` di Napoleone il grande (Panegyric to His Sacred Majesty Napoleon the Great, 1808) written at the heyday of the growing myth of the French general-emperor. More in the moderate style of Vincenzo Monti rather than of Ugo Foscolo (who by this time, had experienced disillusionment with Napoleon’s handling of Venetian independence), Giordani’s panegyric was applauded by the academicians. He wrote it in Cesena, read it to the city’s academy, and was rewarded for it by the vice-king Eugenio with a teaching position in the same institution. His tenure lasted from 1810 to 1815. Giordani’s intellectual curiosity led him to other domains of the cultural debates of the time. He composed a Panegirico ad Antonio Casanova (Panegyric of Antonio Canova, 1808), which triggered a friendship with the sculptor (who at this

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time was himself rumored to be involved with a member of the Bonaparte family, Paolina). Giordani’s poem centers essentially on the neoclassical style and beauty of Canova’s art, which he, much like Giacomo Leopardi, fully endorsed and admired. The poem, however, also shows that Giordani’s inspiration stemmed from the close ties of friendship he had forged with the sculptor. The way he understood friendship provides a sort of key to his character: It was his means of expressing his sentimental exuberance, and he would write about friends the way others have written about love passions. Soon after this phase, Giordani’s fortunes shifted. In 1815, while the government of the Papal States was seated in Bologna, he lost his position as pro-secretary of the academy that the viceroy Eugenio had conferred upon him. He moved to Milan, where, thanks to his popularity as an elegant prose writer, he became codirector of the influential Biblioteca italiana (1816–1840). The ‘‘Proemio’’ (Introduction) to the inaugural issue is entirely his own, and it contains the fundamental articles of liberal-moderate intellectual vision he was to develop later in life. In 1817, Giordani, thanks to a small inheritance he obtained at his father’s death, left his position at the Biblioteca italiana and returned to Piacenza, where he promoted the foundation of the ‘‘Societa` di lettura’’ as well as the institution of a kindergarten. It was in this context that his modern moral-educational principles began to be articulated with clarity: He fought an intense campaign against schoolteachers who inflicted physical punishment on children in public schools (1819); he advised and guided young

PIETRO GIORDANI men and women in their studies and encouraged their intellectual growth. Among these young men there was Leopardi, and their relationship turned for a time into a significant collaboration. In 1818 Giordani traveled to Recanati to meet the young and still obscure poet. He was drawn to him by their shared interest in philology, which for Leopardi, however, was more than an exercise in erudition and which he managed to absorb into the new and yet classical lyrics he had been shaping. The meeting with the poet signaled Giordani’s decision to act as a promoter of Italian letters. Accordingly, he wrote the preface to a book of poetry composed in honor of the bishop Antonio Loschi. It happened, however, that some phrases in the preface were viewed as disrespectful toward the Duchess Maria Luisa, and Giordani was thus forced to move to Florence. The seven years he spent there were the happiest of his life: He became a member of the Gabinetto Vieusseux and a contributor to the Antologia, and two distinguished intellectuals, Gino Capponi and Pietro Colletta, welcomed him in their circle. Above all, in Florence he renewed his contacts with Leopardi and met Alessandro Manzoni. Giordani found Manzoni’s moderate-liberal esthetics to his liking, and he admired I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842) without reservation. Giordani’s liberal leanings forced him to leave Florence in November 1830. He moved to Parma, where he lived till his death. He wrote many letters that established him as the supreme arbiter of Italian literature at this time. In short, Giordani’s life displayed the variety and scope of his intellectual power. He lived it as an aristocrat of the mind; as an apostle of history, music, literature, painting, science, sculpture, and Italian culture across the ages; and as a moral conscience at a time when men of letters felt hemmed in by various sorts of political tyranny. As an essay writer on many subjects, he was peerless in mixing together eloquence, passion, and a colorful style adorning his practical objectives. Among his many works still worth remembering are the oration Per le tre legazioni riacquistate dal sommo pontefice Pio Settimo (About the Three Legations Regained by the Pope Pius VII, 1815); the essay ‘‘Sul discorso di madama di Stae¨l. Lettera di un italiano ai compilatori della ‘Biblioteca italiana’’’ (On Mme. De Stae¨l’s Discourse: The Letter of an Italian to the Editors of the Biblioteca italiana, 1816), one of the first salvos in the debate on Romanticism that followed Mme. De Stae¨l’s famous letter in the first

issue of the journal; and L’istruzione a un giovane italiano per l’arte di scrivere (Instruction Given to a Young Italian about the Art of Writing, 1821), possibly written for Leopardi and important in determining the ideal that he was looking to find in himself and to promote in others.

Biography Pietro Giordani was born in Piacenza in a well-todo family, on January 1, 1774. After his graduation, due to an unhappy love experience, he entered a Benedectine monastery in Saint Sisto, Piacenza, 1797, where he remained for three years. Afterward, turned off by the demands of monastic life, he left before receiving the sacred orders, 1800; this experience remained fundamental and accounts in large measure for his anticlerical verbal violence and posture. He was employed in the Napoleonic public administration, 1800–1804. He was a substitute for the chair of eloquence at the University of Bologna, 1804, and taught at the academy of Cesena, 1810–1815. His father died, 1817. He moved to Piacenza, 1818. and was exiled to Florence, 1824. His books were placed on the Index by the Church, 1825. He moved to Parma, 1830. Giordani died in Parma, on September 2, 1848. MARIA C. PASTORE PASSARO Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Antonio Gusalli, 14 vols., Milan: Sanvito, 1854–1863. Prose e Poesie, Florence: Societa` Editrice Toscana, 1924.

Poetry ‘‘Panegirico alla sacra maesta` di Napoleone il grande,’’ 1808. ‘‘Panegirico ad Antonio Casanova,’’ 1808. ‘‘Per le tre legazioni riacquistate dal sommo pontefice Pio Settimo,’’ 1815.

Critical Writing L’istruzione a un giovane italiano per l’arte di scrivere, 1821. Alcune prose di Pietro Giordani, 1824. Nuove prose, 1830. Di quattro affresco del Parmigianino e di tutti quelli del Correggio in Parma, 1846. Frammento inedito: Il peccato impossibile, edited by William Spaggiari, 1985.

Letters Lettere, edited by Giovanni Ferretti, 2 vols., 1937. Carteggio Giordani-Vieusseux: 1825–1847, edited by Laura Melosi, 1997.

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PIETRO GIORDANI Carteggio. Pietro Giordani, Antonio Canova, Giovanni Battista Sartori, edited by Matteo Ceppi and Claudio Giambonini, 2004.

Other Arte della perfezion cristiana del cardinale Sforza-Pallavicino, con discorso sulla vita e sulle opere dell’autore, di Pietro Giordani, 1820. Studi filosofici di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Pietro Pellegrini and Pietro Giordani, 1845.

Further Reading Capasso, Gaetano, La giovinezza di Pietro Giordani da Carteggi e documenti inediti, Turin: Roux Frassati, 1896. Cecioni, Gabriele, Lingua e cultura nel pensiero di Pietro Giordani, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.

Facchini, Cesare, La scuola letteraria Bolognese e L’Antologia: a proposito di alcune Lettere inedite del Giordani, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1887. Ferni, Stefano, Bibliografia delle lettere a stampa di Pietro Giordani, Florence: Olschki, 1923. Ferretti, Giovanni, Pietro Giordani sino ai quaranta anni, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e letteratura, 1952. Forlini, Giovanni, Bibliografia di Pietro Giordani: le opere e la critica, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Melosi, Laura, In toga e in camicia: scritti e carteggi di Pietro Giordani, Lucca: Fazzi, 2002. Panizza, Giorgio (editor), Giordani letterato, Piacenza: Tipografia Le. Co., 1996. Pietro Giordani nel II centenario della nascita: atti del Convegno di studi, Piacenza, 16–18 marzo 1974, Piacenza: Cassa di Risparmio, 1974. Schippisi, Ranieri, Capitoli giordaniani, Piacenza: Tipografia Le. Co., 1992. Tissoni, Roberto, Giordani Leopardi 1998, Piacenza: Tipografia Le. Co., 2000.

DOMENICO DI GIOVANNI See Il Burchiello

PAOLO GIOVIO (1483–1552) Among the cinquecento polymaths, Paolo Giovio is traditionally best known for the experimental quality of his style and the wide array of his works, which range from accurate exercises of ekphrasis to historiography, from a gallery of biographical portraits to epistolography. Yet, despite some stylistic evidence that seems to anticipate Mannerism or the Baroque, it would be impossible to discuss Giovio’s linguistic results without considering his firm loyalty to the experience of the Renaissance courts. In the Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose (Dialogue on Military and Amorous Undertakings), published posthumously in 1555 and the most successful among Giovio’s vernacular works, he made it clear that he was not bound to use the Tuscan idiom, and he wanted ‘‘in tutti i modi esser libero di parlare alla cortigiana’’ 854

(to be completely free to speak the courtly language). On the other hand, the career of this disciple of philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) was framed by the rise and the maturation of a new literary genre, the collection of familiar letters. In this field, an influential model was offered by Pietro Aretino’s Libro primo de le lettere (First Book of Letters), first published in Venice by Francesco Marcolini in 1538, and the Piacevoli discorsi (Pleasant Discourses, 1547) of Andrea Calmo (ca. 1510–1571), characterized by a considerable use of linguistic elements drawn from dialects. A new paradigm of literature arose from the intersection between the two genres of the letter and of the ragguaglio (the narrative of an imaginary journey) and from the use and ostensible adoption of dialect.

PAOLO GIOVIO In the hands of Giovio, this amounted to the integration into the realm of literature of the rhetoric of the naturale, beyond what had already been practiced by the Paduan actor-playwright Angelo Beolco (Il Ruzzante). Giovio’s strategy was to imitate the freedom and mutability of an improvised oral conversation. Even when the writer became ‘‘Tuscan’’ in the mimetic effort to conform to the language of some of his addressees, such as Giorgio Vasari, Benedetto Varchi, Piero Vettori, or the Duke Cosimo I, behind every line there lurked an expert narrator, an ‘‘uomo archicima d’arte di non arte’’ (overskillful man of the art which does not betray artifice; Lettere in volgare, 1560, nos. 253, 258), searching for pointed language and a wellchosen word. Giovio’s departure from Rome in 1549 as a result of his strained relationship with Pope Paul III was a bitter one. Indeed, he had to reposition himself on a new intellectual landscape, determined by the events of the Council of Trent (1545–1563). In the collection Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Writings in Praise of Men Famous for Their Martial Virtue, 1551), Giovio allotted a sizeable amount of space to the political leaders of his time: Charles V, above all, but also Cosimo I, his new protector, as well as Andrea Doria, Ferrante Gonzaga, Barbarossa, and even Suleiman the Magnificent. The same broad horizon characterizes the Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV (Forty-Five Books on the History of His Times, 1550–1552), published by Lorenzo Torrentino, the same official printer of Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (The History of Italy, 1561). This is a work for which, as he stated in his introduction, the author expected to be praised ‘‘da altre e piu` remote nazioni’’ (by other and more remote nations). In both cases, Giovio painted his historical canvas starting from the ‘‘infinite nove di varii colori, fatte a cangiante’’ (infinite news of various colours, always becoming), as in the memorable description of the battle of Frosinone, where ‘‘le piche de’ pazi rompeno spesso el disegno de li savii cameranti’’ (the swords of the mad men break the designs of wise counselors). After Vittorio Cian’s pioneering studies, published in 1890–1891, Giovio’s value as a historian became a disputed issue, until the recent Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of SixteenthCentury Italy (1997) by T. C. Price Zimmermann and Tra Mantova e la Sicilia nel Cinquecento (2003) by Massimo Zaggia. The long-standing negative opinion of Giovio’s historical works was effectively dispelled by Benedetto Croce with his essay ‘‘La grandiosa aneddotica storica di Paolo Giovio’’

(1958). Indeed, the writer’s eclectic curiosity is now viewed as positive, although ‘‘cold and detached,’’ to use the words of Carlo Dionisotti, who underlines the more progressive stance of Guicciardini and the historiography in vernacular and consequently blames Giovio for a lack of ‘‘tragic participation’’ (Discorso sull’Umanesimo italiano, 1967). Giovio’s works have seen a revival of interest, first with the new edition of his works edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero (Opera, 1956– 1958) and more recently with the publication of new critical and biographical works, including essays in Guido Arbizzoni’s Un nodo di parole e di cose (2002) and Tommaso Casini’s Ritratti parlanti (2004). The real cornerstone in Giovio’s bibliography, however, remains Gianfranco Folena’s extensive study ‘‘L’espressionismo epistolare di Paolo Giovio’’ (1991). Folena wrote in the wake of an important reassessment of the genre of the ‘‘familiar letter’’ in the Renaissance and used Gianfranco Contini’s notion of ‘‘expressionism’’ as a key to approach Giovio’s multifaceted writing.

Biography Paolo Giovio was born in Como, in 1483; he trained as a physician in Padua and Pavia, where he graduateed in 1507, then practised medicine, first in his native city and then in Milan before moving to Rome ca. 1512, under the protection of Leo X, who appointed him university professor, and of Clemente VII, to whom Giovio was personal doctor. In 1528, he became bishop of Nocera; in 1531, he published the Commentarii delle cose dei Turchi and worked for the collection of Elogia, conceived for the Museo in Como. After 1547, Giovio wrote against the politics of Pope Paul III to Cardinal Alessandro Farnese; in 1548, he moved to Florence and to the court of Cosimo I, to whom Giovio dedicated his Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hiberniae et Orchaddum and the Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV. Paolo Giovio died in Florence on 3 August 1552. STEFANO GULIZIA Selected Works Collections Pauli Iovii Opera, 2 vols., edited by Giuseppe Guido Ferrero, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato– Libreria, 1956–1958. Ritratti degli uomini illustri, edited by Carlo Caruso, Palermo: Sellerio, 1999.

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PAOLO GIOVIO Scritti d’arte: lessico ed ecfrasi, edited by Sonia Maffei, Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1999.

Latin Works Elogia veris clarorum virorum imaginibus apposita, 1546. Descriptio Britanniae, Scotiae, Hyberniae, et Orchaddum, 1548. Illustrium virorum vitae, 1549. Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium, 1551. Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV, 1550–1552.

Works in the Vernacular Commentario de le cose de Turchi, 1538. Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose, 1555. Lettere volgari, 1560.

Further Reading Chabod, Federico, ‘‘Paolo Giovio,’’ in Scritti sul Rinascimento, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Cian, Vittorio, ‘‘Gioviana,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 17 (1891): 277–357.

Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘La grandiosa aneddotica storica di Paolo Giovio,’’ in Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1958. Del Ben, Andrea, ‘‘‘Io credo vorria qualche presente’: revisioni nell’opera di Paolo Giovio,’’ Aevum, 75:3 (2001): 695–704. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Discorso sull’Umanesimo italiano,’’ in Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Ferrero, Giuseppe Guido, ‘‘Per una nuova edizione delle lettere di Paolo Giovio,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 113 (1939): 225–255. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘L’espressionismo epistolare di Paolo Giovio,’’ in Il linguaggio del caos. Studi sul plurilinguismo rinascimentale, Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1991. Michelucci, Lara, Giovio in Parnaso: tra collezione di forme e storia universale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2004. Travi, Ernesto, ‘‘Giovio, gli Orti Oricellari e Machiavelli,’’ Testo, 4:5 (1983): 53–61. Zimmermann, T. C. Price, Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-century Italy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

GIAMBATTISTA GIRALDI, (‘‘IL CINZIO’’) (1504–1573) Dramatist and novelliere Giambattista Giraldi, known as ‘‘Il Cinzio,’’ the Italianized version of Cynthius, a name he had assumed in his youth in honor of a woman, was a very prolific man of letters culturally and socially rooted in the court of Ferrara, where he created most of his works. Giraldi wrote in almost all the genres typical of his time but earned a special renown for his work in the cultivated and erudite tradition. He wrote both verse and prose, in Italian and Latin, using the latter language especially for those works relating to the classical tradition, in particular his early collection of poems, Poematia (Poems, 1536). He wrote his two best-known theoretical works in Italian: Lettera ovvero discorso sopra il comporre le satire adatte alle scene (Letter or Discourse on the Composition of Satires Suitable for Stages, 1545), published as an appendix to the satirical drama Egle; and the Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie (Discourses about the Composition of Novels, Comedies and Tragedies, 1554). 856

Arguably Della Valle’s most famous work is the tragedy Orbecche (1543), performed for the first time in 1541 in Ferrara in the author’s house and in the presence of the duke. The tragedy tells the story of Orbecche, King Sulmon’s daughter, whose father, not knowing that she is already married and the mother of two sons, intends to give her in marriage to another king. Upon discovering the truth, Sulmon decides to kill Orbecche’s husband and sons and to offer their remains to her at her new wedding. In desperation, Orbecche kills her father and commits suicide. Orbecche, generally considered the first modern tragedy, became an important model for later tragedians. It represents a perfect synthesis of Giraldi’s theoretical speculations on the genre, which had been stimulated by the debate provoked by the publication of several editions of Aristotle’s Poetics in the 1640s. Giraldi proposed a moderate restoration of the three unities, limiting them, however, to time and space in order to make Aristotle’s ideas more congruent with the masterpieces of Italian literature. Seneca,

GIAMBATTISTA GIRALDI (‘‘IL CINZIO’’) whose vivid sense of cruelty and horridness made him more compatible with the taste of the times, remained Giraldi’s most important influence and model. Giraldi can be considered a forerunner of the Baroque tragedy, and indeed his reform had a profound influence not only on future Italian tragedians but also on the playwrights of Elizabethan England. The emphasis he placed on tragedy in his theoretical writings on drama was important because it legitimized and helped codify the moral function of the theater in society in educating and improving the spectators. This notion corresponds more or less with an adaptation of the Aristotelian idea of catharsis: According to Giraldi, the more the events of the tragedy are horrible, cruel, and painful, the more effectively the cathartic effect can be achieved. In his analysis of the theater, Giraldi considered not only the texts of comedy and tragedy but also the technical problems specifically related to staging them, recognizing that it was better to have a wellperformed bad drama than a good text performed by bad actors. These beliefs show that Giraldi worked also as a ‘‘corago’’ (stage director and producer), assuming a very modern position, which in the same period can only be compared to that of Leone de’ Sommi (1527–1592). As noted previously, Orbecche is the first and best-known of Giraldi’s tragedies, but other plays, such as Didone (Dido, 1583), written in 1541, or Epitia (1583), written after 1563 and the source for Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, are important for the new elements they added to the playwright’s repertoire: a plot based on fabulous characters and events rather than on historical figures and situations; a drama with a happy ending. In fact, Giraldi theorized the possibility of a form of tragedy with a positive outcome that he called tragedia mista. Bringing together the cathartic effect of tragedy with the pleasure of seeing virtue rewarded, the tragedia mista anticipates the tragicomedy. Giraldi is also well known for Egle, a ‘‘satyr play’’ that became the model for the ‘‘pastorale ferrarese.’’ Even though it can be considered as a revival of Hellenic satire and was mostly based on the style of Euripides, it represented a first step in the development of a new genre, a pastoral in which the plot is no longer the result of the capricious game of moody gods but represents the benevolent plan of a merciful God. In the field of fiction, Giraldi’s anthology of short stories Degli Hecatommithi (The Hundred Stories, 1565) is especially remarkable for one of its tales, ‘‘Il Moro di Venezia’’ (The Moor of Venice), which later served

as the source of Shakespeare’s Othello. These stories, however, belong squarely to the tradition of the novella and were not nearly as innovative as Giraldi’s theatrical works. As in his tragedies, Giraldi applied the principles he had defined in his Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie and sought to strike a compromise between the Aristotelian unities and the Italian literary tradition.

Biography Giambattista Giraldi, ‘‘Il Cinzio,’’ was born in Ferrara in 1504 to an aristocratic family. In Ferrara, he studied under Celio Calcagnini and Niccolo` Leoniceno and earned a degree in arts and medicine from the University of Ferrara, 1530. He taught philosophy at the University of Ferrara, 1534–1541, then rhetoric, 1541–1558. He served as secretary to Duke Ercole II D’Este, 1542–1558, and to Duke Alfonso II D’Este, 1558–1560. He left Ferrara for the University of Mondovı`, 1562, then for the University of Turin, 1566. Giraldi Cinzio died in Ferrara on December 30, 1573. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Tragedie, Venice: Giulio Cesare Cagnacini, 1583. Scritti critici, edited by Camillo Guerrieri Crocetti, Milan: Marzorati, 1973.

Poetry ‘‘Poematia,’’ 1536.

Plays Didone (1541); in Tragedie, 1583. Cleopatra (1542); in Tragedie, 1583. Orbecche, 1543. Altile (1543); in Tragedie, 1583. Egle, 1545. Antivalomeni (1548); in Tragedie, 1583. Selene, (1551); in Tragedie, 1583. Eufimia (1554); in Tragedie, 1583. Arrenopia (1562–1563); in Tragedie, 1583. Epitia (after 1563); in Tragedie, 1583.

Novel Degli Hecatommithi, 1565.

Treatises Lettera ovvero discorso sopra il comporre le satire adatte alle scene, 1545. Orationes, 1554. Discorsi intorno al comporre dei romanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie, 1554. Discorsi intorno a quello che si conviene a giovin nobile e ben creato nel servire un gran Principe, 1569.

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GIAMBATTISTA GIRALDI (‘‘IL CINZIO’’) Commentario sulle cose di Ferrara e de’ principi d’Este, 1597. Dialoghi della vita civile, 1608.

Letters Carteggio, edited by Susanna Villari, 1996.

Further Reading Ariani, Marco, Tra classicismo e manierismo. Il teatro tragico del Cinquecento, Florence: Olschki, 1974. Attolini, Giovanni, Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1988. Bonora, Ettore, ‘‘La teoria del teatro negli scrittori del Cinquecento,’’ in Retorica e invenzione, Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. Carandini, Silvia (ed.), Teatri barocchi: tragedie, commedie, pastorali nella drammaturgia europea fra ’500 e ’600, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000.

Cremante, Renzo (ed.), Teatro del Cinquecento, vol. 1, La tragedia, Milan: Ricciardi-Mondadori, 1997. Horne, P. R., The Tragedies of Giambattista Cinthio Giraldi, London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Lucas, Corinne, De l’horreur au ‘‘lieto fine’’: Le controˆle du discours tragique dans le the´aˆtre de Giraldi Cinzio, Rome: Bonacci, 1984. Mastrocola, Paola, L’idea del tragico. Teorie della tragedia nel Cinquecento, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998. Morrison, Mary, The Tragedies of G.-B. Giraldi Cinthio: The Transformation of Narrative Source into Stage Play, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997. Osborn, Peggy, G. Giraldi’s ‘‘Altile’’: The Birth of a New Dramatic Genre in Renaissance Ferrara, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Weinberg, Bernard (ed.), Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, 4 vols., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1970–1974.

GIOVANNI GIUDICI (1924–) Giovanni Giudici is one of the greatest living Italian poets. His cultural background is rooted in both Catholicism and Marxism, and he has had extensive experience as a journalist and translator. Fundamentally extraneous to the hermeticist lineage of twentieth-century poetry, Giudici is closer to the tradition of crepuscolarismo, from which he inherited the impulse to speak of his own existence and to use poetry as an instrument in the construction of his own autobiography. His earliest works draw their inspiration from the places of his youth and the discomfort of a repressive Catholic education. Starting with these reflections on that education, his poetry increasingly became an act of critical knowledge of industrial society, aimed at defining the role of the intellectual who questions himself regarding the lack of certainties for contemporary human beings. With the collection La vita in versi (Life in Verses, 1965), he represented his personal life ironically, as a flow of memories, public tragedies, and private dramas constructed with a direct rhythm, which became speech and nonlyrical song. Full of attention for small everyday things, it is ‘‘una sorta di romanzo in versi in cui il quotidiano si sciorina davanti al lettore in un’ampia gamma di microeventi’’ (a sort of novel in verse in which the commonplace is displayed before the reader in a wide 858

range of micro-events). In the book there resonate ‘‘i grandi temi del mistero della morte, l’amore, il dolore, le emozioni profonde, il male di vivere’’ (the great themes of the mystery of death, love, pain and profound emotions, the mal-de-vivre), as Giuseppe Leonelli has written (‘‘La poesia del primo e secondo novecento,’’ 2000). The condition of the contemporary human being takes shape in a pained, nearly theatrical self-analysing monologue. Giudici created an ‘‘I’’-character, a sort of double, within whom simmers, in an atmosphere of bitterness and impotence, Catholic, anarchist, and socialist elements. Giudici’s strength lies in his will to recount his biography at a historical moment when the economic boom seems to reduce the individual—including even the poet, a member of a frightened and frustrated middle class—to the mere social figure of the ‘‘salaried worker.’’ Thus, this autobiography coincides with the biography of the ‘‘umile e umiliato membro del nuovo ceto italiano anni settanta con le sue frustrazioni, lamentele, velleita` e arti della sopravvivenza’’ (humble and humiliated member of the new Italian middle class of the 1970s, with its frustrations, grievances, aspirations and survival skills), as Alfonso Berardinelli has remarked (‘‘La musa umile,’’ 1983). Meanwhile, the narrating ‘‘I’’ is turned precisely into a theatrical mask or character. Giudici attempted an analysis of this multiplicity in

GIOVANNI GIUDICI Autobiologia (Autobiology, 1969). Here he surveyed the places and emblematic gestures of a dismembered life, observed with cruelty. Words are dried up, verses are terse, language is emptied of any emotions since the poet, in his search for the miserable remains of his own self, offered neither solutions nor consolation. Rather, by freeing himself from his dramatic backdrop, he always managed to temper his subjectivity, injured by the unsustainable petit-bourgeois daily life, with the comic mode. After Autobiologia, Giudici’s poetry returned to a ‘‘high’’ lyrical dimension. In the collection Salutz (1986), he experimented with new expressive possibilities, going back to the structures of the medieval tradition. Salutz constitutes his most unexpected and unpredictable book. Compared to his previous works, it is a thoroughly alternative kind of poetry, a courtly world reinvented purely for the purpose of playing with words and verse, as if Giudici wanted to display all his linguistic skills in order to free himself from the autobiographical and quotidian dimension. In the collections from Quanto spera di campare Giovanni (How Long Giovanni Hopes to Live, 1993), to Eresia della sera (Evening Heresy, 1999), Giudici reached an extremely sophisticated synthesis between the two poles of his poetical production, recuperating and fusing together twentieth-century experiences with the stil novo and Provencal traditions. The result of this encounter between the poetry of the everyday, of the helpless nakedness of the real that erases lyricism, and the noble tradition of Italian verse is a surprising comical poetry, sometimes characterized by sharp irony. The fundamental element of Giudici’s poetry remains the tension in each recollection of his life, grasped in its exemplary meaning. Through a direct and inexorable discourse, figures, facts, and typical moments of a life offered as meditation on the state of things become a rigorous will to understand the world, to act within it and to resist it with dignity. Historical events, such as the invasion of Prague (summer of 1968) or the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) and the end of Communism, are mere examples, not significant in themselves, but as instruments through which it is possible to illuminate the story of any individual human being. The poet’s task is to read such an exemplary meaning and to reveal the truth, however bitter and unpleasant it may be for the reader, especially as far as it regards the vanquished. In any case, Giudici is well aware of the fact that poetry is unarmed, incapable

of affecting the present or of escaping into utopia. Paradoxically, its last task is merely analysing its own impotence.

Biography Giovanni Giudici was born on 26 June 1924 in Le Grazie (La Spezia). His family moved to Rome, 1933, and he enrolled in the Faculty of Medicine, University of Rome, in 1941, switching to the Faculty of Literature in 1942. He graduated in French language and literature, with a dissertation on Anatole France, 1945. Giudici married Marina Bernardi in 1952. He moved to Ivrea to work for Olivetti as a copywriter, 1956, and then moved to Milan, 1958. He has enjoyed friendship with Franco Fortini, Vittorio Sereni, Elio Vittorini, Giacomo Noventa. He has been active as translator from French, Spanish, English, Russian, and Czech and collaborates to numerous periodicals (Menabo`, Rinascita, Comunita`, Aut-Aut, Paragone). Giudici won the Librex Guggenheim-Eugenio Montale for Salutz; the Pushkin Prize from the Soviet Literary Fund for his translation of Evgenii Onegin, 1987; and the Premio Bagutta, 1992. Giudici lives between La Serra di Lerici and Milan. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Poesie 1953–1990, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. I versi della vita, edited by Rodolfo Zucco, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘Fiorı` d’improvviso,’’ 1953. ‘‘La stazione di Pisa e altre poesie,’’ 1955. ‘‘L’intelligenza col nemico,’’ 1957. ‘‘L’educazione cattolica,’’ 1963. ‘‘La vita in versi,’’ 1965. ‘‘Omaggio a Praga,’’ 1968. ‘‘Autobiologia,’’ 1969. ‘‘O Beatrice,’’ 1972. ‘‘Il male dei creditori,’’ 1977. ‘‘Il ristorante dei morti,’’ 1981. ‘‘Lume dei tuoi misteri,’’ 1984. ‘‘Salutz,’’ 1986. ‘‘Prove del teatro,’’ 1989. ‘‘Scarabattole,’’ 1989. ‘‘Quanto spera di campare Giovanni,’’ 1993. ‘‘Empie stelle,’’ 1996. ‘‘Eresia della sera,’’ 1999.

Fiction Frau Doktor, 1989.

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GIOVANNI GIUDICI Play Il paradiso: perche` mi vinse il lume d’esta stella. Satura drammatica, 1991.

Essays La letteratura verso Hiroshima e altri scritti, 1976. La dama non cercata. Poetica e letteratura, 1985. Andare in Cina a piedi. Racconto sulla poesia, 1992. Per forza e per amore, 1996.

Translations Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, 1959. Robert Frost, Conoscenza della notte e altre poesie, 1965. J. Crowe Ramsom, Le donne e i cavalieri, 1971. Aleksandr Sergeevic Puskin, Eugenio Onieghin, 1975. Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus e altre poesie, 1976. Addio, proibito piagere e altri versi tradotti (1955–1980), 1982. Ignacio De Loyola, Esercizi spirituali, 1984. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, La rima del vecchio marinaio, 1987. A una casa non sua. Nuovi versi tradotti (1955–1995), 1997.

Edited Works Umberto Saba, Poesie scelte, 1976.

Further Reading Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La musa umile,’’ in Il critico senza mestiere, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983. Bertoni, Alberto, Una distratta venerazione: La poesia metrica di Giovanni Giudici, Bologna: Book, 2001. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Giudici ‘nuovo’ e ‘vecchio,’ in Tempi della poesia: Il secondo Novecento da Montale a Porta, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Leonelli, Giuseppe, ‘‘La poesia del pieno e secondo novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 9, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Morando, Simona, Vita con le parole: La poesia di Giovanni Giudici, Pasian di Prato (Udine): Campanotto, 2001. Neri, Laura, Vittorio Sereni, Andrea Zanzotto, Giovanni Giudici: Un’indagine retorica, Bergamo: Sestante, 2000. Raboni, Giovanni, Poesia degli anni sessanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Ramat, Silvio, Storia della poesia italiana del novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Sereni, Vittorio, Scritture private con Fortini e Giudici, Bocca di Magra: Edizioni Capannina, 1995.

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI (1809–1850) Best known as a political satirist, Giuseppe Giusti began his literary career in 1833 when he was charged by the police for the anti-Austrian views expressed in his first poem, ‘‘La guigliottina a vapore’’ (The Steam Guillotine). The poem, a witty description of how the invention leads to an increased number of beheadings in China, was a kind of manifesto against the corrupt Tuscan rule of these years. In Florence, where he was living and working, Giusti made the acquaintance of the Marquis Gino Capponi, a liberal activist during the Risorgimento who played a leading role in the city’s cultural life. Through Capponi, Giusti became a member of the Gabinetto Vieusseux, a circle noted for its interest in new cultural developments and intense literary exchanges. In 1845 he went to Milan to meet Alessandro Manzoni, who showed a hearty appreciation of Giusti’s poetry and was instrumental in shifting his initial republican propensities to moderate politics. The visit to the famous Lombard author inspired one of Giusti’s best poems, ‘‘Sant’Ambrogio’’ (In Sant’Ambrogio’s, 1846), which gives an indignant description of 860

how he and Manzoni entered the Milanese Church of Sant’Ambrogio and found it full of Austrian soldiers. Giusti’s first feeling is one of surprise and repugnance at the sight of soldiers, symbol of the foreign domination. At the conclusion of the poem, however, he hears the Austrian soldiers sing a melancholy religious anthem and identifies with them as part of a human, Christian fraternity. In 1844, the first unauthorised collection of his poetry was published by Cesare Correnti in Lugano under the title of Poesie tratte da una stampa a penna (Poems). The same year, Giusti himself published a collection, Versi (Poems), which was posthumously published in 1852 as Versi editi ed inediti (Published and Unpublished Poems). Versi is a book of poetical sketches in which Giusti ironically and indignantly reviewed the historical events of his age as well as his own personal memories. He used narrative stanza forms like the terzina and the ottava rima that were popular in the oral tradition in composing short poetic lines with a strong cadence, like the quinario sdrucciolo. Giusti was trying to create a new poetical language that

GIUSEPPE GIUSTI combined the language and tone of oral poetry with the poetic language of popular, cantabile songs of the traditional Italian opera buffa. Many of the verses he called scherzi are capricious and comical caricatures that capture, in pungent colloquial Tuscan, the foolish and pompous action, the contradiction between public solemn and ideal sayings and everyday immoral conduct of satirical characters. ‘‘Il brindisi di Girella’’ (Girella’s Toast, ca. 1835–1840), dedicated to Talleyrand, targets profiteers and cunning politicians who are ready to change their minds to maintain their power; ‘‘Delenda Carthago’’ (Delenda Carthago, 1841) expresses the Italian patriot’s intolerance for the Germans; ‘‘Il genio umanitario’’ (The Humanitarian Genius, 1843) is a caricature of the philanthropic and humanitarian ideology popular among the upper classes; ‘‘Il re Travicello’’ (King Log, 1841), one of his most celebrated sketches, is a satire on the talkative, cowardly and servile Italian populace, ruled by inept kings and leaders. Based on the famous fable by Aesop about frogs who, upon requesting a king of Jupiter, are sent a log instead, the poem makes fun of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Leopold II. ‘‘La chiocciola’’ (The Snail, 1840–1841), a poetic satire without any specific political reference, is an ode to a humble creature that lives in peace and serenity. The snail is viewed as an exemplary social model whose modest existence represents the virtues of modesty, love for the home, and pride. In a different vein, ‘‘Gingillino’’ (The Trifler, 1844–1845) is a vigorous poem in which Giusti represented the vileness of treasury officials. Giusti’s poems offer a complex and disillusioned representation of the behavior of the middle classes, split between the ethical ideals of the Risorgimento and the conservativism and compromises of their everyday life. Every human figure is shown to be, in reality, a puppet, less a character than a grotesque version of a psychosocial and metahistorical type. In certain respects, these secondary characters seem to live the quiet life, obsessed with propriety, that was denounced three centuries earlier by the Renaissance political thinker and historian Francesco Guicciardini. In his final satiric works, Giusti concentrated on openly political polemics like those of the Tuscan historical novelist Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi writing againt democratic extremists. Besides his poetry, Giusti also left a journal of the political events in Tuscany between the years 1845–1849, which he titled Cronaca dei fatti di Toscana (A Chronicle of the Facts of Tuscany) but which was published posthumously under the

title Memorie inedite (Unedited Memories, 1890). Pursuing his interest in popular culture and oral tradition, Giusti supervised a collection of popular Tuscan sayings, Raccolta dei proverbi toscani con illustrazioni (A Collection of Tuscan Proverbs, with Illustrations, 1848), in which he analysed more than 3,000 proverbs. Giusti was also an acute literary critic, devoting most of his scholarship to the work of two influential writers, Giuseppe Parini and Dante Alighieri. In 1846, Giusti published an essay on the life and works of Parini as well as a philological edition of his poetry. In Postille alla Divina Commedia (Notes to the Divine Comedy, 1846), Giusti emphasised Dante’s fight for the institution of a moral state in Italy and his interest in the spiritual life of the lower classes.

Biography Giuseppe Giusti was born in Monsummano Val di Nievole (Pistoia), 12 May 1809. He attended a number of schools, including the Seminary in Pistoia and the Collegio dei Nobili in Lucca, then studied law at the University of Pisa, 1826–1834. Alleged by the police to be the leader of a student riot in a theater in Pisa, 1832, he moved to Florence, where, during the 1830s and 1840s, he wrote many of his works. In 1844 he traveled to Rome and Naples; in 1845 he visited Milan and met Manzoni. Between the years 1847 and 1849 he was involved in politics and served as a Civic Guard, then as a deputy in the Tuscan Legislative Assembly. He supported the return of Leopold II but was disappointed when the Grand Duke returned to Florence supported by the Austrian Army. He withdrew from public life in 1849 and retired to his friend Gino Capponi’s house. Giuseppe Giusti died of consumption in Capponi’s house, in Florence, 31 March 1850. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections Poesie, 2 vols., edited by Nunzio Sabbatucci, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Tutte le opere, Florence: Barabba, 1968. Opere, edited by Nunzio Sabbatucci, Turin: UTET, 1976.

Poetry ‘‘Versi,’’ 1844. ‘‘Versi editi ed inediti,’’ 1852.

Other Cronaca dei fatti di Toscana, 1845–1849.

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GIUSEPPE GIUSTI Postille alla Divina Commedia, 1846. Versi e prose di Parini, 1846. Raccolta dei proverbi toscani con illustrazioni, 1848. Memorie inedite di Giuseppe Giusti (1845–1849), 1890, edited by Ferdinando Martini. Epistolario, 5 vols., 1932, edited by Ferdinando Martini.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Giuseppe Giusti e la societa` fiorentina,’’ Paragone, 126 (1960): 3–26. Bossi, Maurizio, and M. Branca (editors), Giuseppe Giusti. Il tempo e i luoghi, Florence: Olschki, 1999.

Binni, Walter, ‘‘Giuseppe Giusti scrittore,’’ in Critici e poeti dal Cinquecento al Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia 1969. Calducci, Marino, La morte di re Carnevale. Studio sulla fisionomia poetica dell’opera di Giuseppe Giusti, Florence: Le Lettere, 1989. Finzi, Gilberto, ‘‘Giuseppe Giusti rivoltato,’’ Belfagor, 36 (1991), 399–410. Luti, Giorgio, Cronache dei fatti di Toscana. Storia e letteratura tra Ottocento e Novecento, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Vigliero, Lami, and Vincenzo Monti, Maturita`: poesie in prosa da Monti a Carducci, Florence: Sansoni, 1992.

PIERO GOBETTI (1901–1926) In common with many militant Italian intellectuals of the first decades of the twentieth century, Piero Gobetti sought ways to bring post-Risorgimento Italy out of the state of crisis into which it had fallen. Along with Giuseppe Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Benedetto Croce, and Giovanni Gentile, to name but the most prominent, Gobetti was convinced that Italy was in urgent need of cultural reform, which was to precede or at least accompany political reform. It was politics that took its lead from culture, not culture from politics. What he did not have in common with his fellow intellectuals of the time was age. Gobetti, in fact, was in his late teens and early twenties when he founded and edited two of Italy’s most influential cultural reviews: Energie nove (1918–1920) and La rivoluzione liberale (1922–1925). He also collaborated with L’Ordine nuovo, another Turin-based review, edited by Antonio Gramsci, writing a series of theater reviews. Memorable among these is a fourpart study on the return to the stage of the actress Eleanora Duse in 1921. A voracious reader, of an almost uncontainable intellectual curiosity and energy, Gobetti drew inspiration from those intellectuals who had acted as cultural organizers in the early twentieth century. As well as Papini and Prezzolini and the La voce group based in Florence, Gobetti found inspiration in the work of Croce and Gentile, especially from their review La critica, and from Gaetano Salvemini’s L’unita`. As Gobetti saw it, the crisis in postRisorgimento Italy was that of absence of political dynamism. The Liberal governments that had run 862

the nation in various, but hardly differing, formats since unification now gave the impression of holding power for power’s sake. Gone was any vision of what a future society should look like, gone was a sense of mission, gone was any sense of progress and growth. In its place was a parliamentary regime that sought to govern through short-term compromises and backdoor deals. The figure that represented this utterly corrupt form of government was Giovanni Giolitti, an evergreen of Italian politics in the first decades of the twentieth century. Indeed, the corrupt state into which Italian liberalism had fallen laid the foundations for the coming of Fascism, a phenomenon that Gobetti famously labeled in his 1922 article ‘‘Elogio della ghigliottina’’ (In Praise of the Guillotine) the ‘‘autobiography of the nation.’’ Gobetti was such a staunch opponent of the regime that he was singled out for special attention by Benito Mussolini himself. As well as closing down his reviews, the regime was also responsible for a beating inflicted on Gobetti, the repercussions of which led him to an early death in 1926. A great part of Gobetti’s intellectual activity was taken by his search for dynamism within the area of liberalism. To some extent he found it in the past, in what he termed the ‘‘forgotten figures’’ of the Piedmont Risorgimento, such as Vittorio Alfieri. But in the present Gobetti was at something of a loss, given the poor state of liberalism in Italy. His solution to the quandary—locating instances of political dynamism in the Workers’ Councils movement in the Turin car factories and in the Russian Revolution—was by far the most

PIERO GOBETTI controversial part of his intellectual life. For some, on the Liberal side, Gobetti’s championing of two left-wing phenomena was tantamount to betrayal; for others, on the left, this was the sign that the enlightened Liberal intellectual must inevitably recognize that the future was in socialism and that the days of liberalism were numbered. Although Gobetti certainly recognized the novelty represented by the new protagonists on the social scene—Bolsheviks in Russia and the workers’ movement in Turin—he was always very careful to underline that they were both elites who were far more advanced than the masses. In fact, the whole question of the role of intellectual elites and their impact on civil society had been the subject of a wide-ranging debate in the early decades of the twentieth century. In this, Gobetti followed the lead that had been supplied by the likes of Vilfredo Pareto and Gaetano Mosca. It was in the wake of Pareto and Mosca that he felt the need to differentiate between the leadership of the Factory Council movement, which he admired greatly as a new ruling class in nuce, and the mass of followers, for which he had little time. It was this that enabled him to make his most controversial claim: that both the Factory Council movement and the Russian Revolution were not socialist, but liberal in nature insofar as they both worked to enlarge the reach of liberty. Although the protagonists themselves may well not have realized it, they were doing what liberal elites had been doing for centuries. For Gobetti, it was impossible to admit that any movement that contributed to the spread of personal and political liberty was anything other than liberal in nature. Rather than being examples of socialist ideology in action, Gobetti saw the Russian Revolution and the Factory Councils movement as spurs to political action that would lead, not to the result the protagonists themselves imagined, but to the formation of new, dynamic and forward-looking ruling classes. In Turin, what the Consigli di Fabbrica were showing was not how to create propitious conditions for a socialist revolution in Italy but how to run a factory in a more efficient manner. In other words, they were learning to be the new generation of managers, a new dynamic bourgeoisie that Italy had never had before but had sorely lacked. Revolutions, Gobetti thought, never go the way they are planned to go. But what the initial impetus for social action does is to give its protagonists something to work for, something to aim at, something at which to direct their energy. The end result was not determined by what the

protagonists imagined it would be but by what history deemed feasible at any given time. Like Salvemini, Gobetti was a practical thinker and had little time for anything that resembled a utopic scenario. His greatest critique of Italian intellectuals such as Gabriele D’Annunzio was that they lived in an ivory tower world with little idea of what real historical conditions were like. Indeed, the adjective ‘‘bookish’’ is employed by Gobetti on more than one occasion to mark the distance between intellectuals and the real concerns of civil society. This is the reason why literature is largely absent from the reviews he edited. Gobetti, however, was responsible for the discovery of the poet Eugenio Montale and for a number of translations of works from French and Russian (a language he had learned in order to study the Russian Revolution). But for the most part, his concern for literary questions was confined to the latter part of his young life when he founded the review Il baretti, which became a kind of literary forum. But in the wake of the strict censorship that had made continued publication of his political reviews impossible, Gobetti began to use the literary texts as a pretext to send coded messages to his anti-Fascist readership. In general, literature remained something of a danger area, as it tended to lead attention away from what he considered the real and practical tasks of the committed intellectual. Gobetti was an immensely productive writer of articles, essays, and letters. Since his early death, his attempt to supplement liberal ideology with the best of socialist thought has been of crucial importance for future generations. Carlo Rosselli’s Giustizia e liberta` group in the 1930s, as well as the Partito d’azione in the 1940s, owe a great debt of gratitude to Gobetti. As a champion of a workingclass revolution based on liberal-democratic principles, Gobetti has become a reference point for the Italian left, ever more anxious to underscore its liberal credentials without losing sight of its socialist origins.

Biography Piero Gobetti was born in Turin, 9 June 1901, the only son of a Giovanni Battista and Angela Canuto, who had come to the city from the surrounding countryside ten years earlier to open a grocery store. He attended Liceo Gioberti in Turin, where he received his diploma, 1918; he intended to enroll in army to fight in World War I, but the armistice signed on 4 November brought war to an end, 1918. He enrolled in the Faculty of Law, Turin 863

PIERO GOBETTI University, graduating with a thesis on Vittorio Alfieri, 1922. Gobetti founded Energie nove, 1918, and joined the Turin group of ‘‘unitari,’’ followers of Gaetano Salvemini, 1919; he represented the Turin group at the first congress. Gobetti collaborated with a number of newspapers and magazines of the period; he was a theater critic for the Communist review L’Ordine nuovo, edited by Antonio Gramsci, 1921. He abandoned Energie nove, 1920. Gobetti founded La rivoluzione liberale, 1922. He married Ada Prospero, whom he had met at the Liceo Gioberti, 1923. Gobetti was beaten up by Fascist thugs, September 1924. Two consecutive numbers of La rivoluzione liberale were seized by Fascist authorities in 1925. His son Paolo was born in 1925. Gobetti founded Il baretti, 1926, then went into exile in France, leaving his wife Ada and son in Turin, 1926. He died in Paris, 15 February 1926, and is buried in the Pe`re Lachaise cemetery. Ada joined the Resistance movement; her Diario partigiano (1972) was published four years after her death. After fighting as a partisan in the Resistance, Paolo Gobetti dedicated himself to preserving the memory of the anti-Fascist struggle, founding the Archivio Nazionale Cinematografico della Resistenza in Turin, 1966. DAVID WARD Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 3 vols., 1960–1974, vol. I, Scritti politici, edited by Paolo Spriano, 1969; vol. II, Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, edited by P. Spriano, 1969; vol. III, Scritti di critica teatrale, edited by Carla Gobetti and G. Guazzotti, 1974.

Political Writings Risorgimento senza eroi: Studi sul pensiero piemontese nel Risorgimento, 1926; reprinted as Risorgimento senza eroi e altri scritti storici, 1969.

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La rivoluzione liberale: Saggio sulla lotta politica in Italia, 1949; new edition, 1995. Nella tua breve esistenza: Lettere 1918–1926, edited by Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, 1991. Con animo liberale: Piero Gobetti e i liberali. Carteggi 1918– 1926, edited by Bartolo Gariglio, 1997. Carteggio di Piero Gobetti, 1918–1922, edited by Ersilia Alessandrone Perona, 2003.

Other La frusta teatrale, 1923. La filosofia politica di Vittorio Alfieri, 1923. Paradosso dello spirito russo e altri scritti sulla letteratura russa, 1976.

Further Reading Bagnoli, Paolo Rosselli, Gobetti e la rivoluzione democratica: Uomini e idee tra liberalismo e socialismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996. Basso, Lelio, and Luigi Anderlini (editors), Le riviste di Piero Gobetti, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Bobbio, Norberto, Italia fedele: Il mondo di Gobetti, Florence: Passigli, 1986. Cabella, Alberto, Elogio della liberta`: Biografia di Piero Gobetti, Turin: Il Punto, 1998. Cabella, Alberto, and Oscar Mazzoleni (editors), Gobetti tra riforma e rivoluzione, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1999. Gariglio, Bartolo, Progettare il postfascismo: Gobetti e i cattolici (1919–1926), Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003. Gervasoni, Marco, L’intellettuale come eroe: Piero Gobetti e le culture del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2000. Morra Di Lavriano, Umberto, Vita di Piero Gobetti, Turin: Utet, 1984. Panze`, Valentina (editor), Cent’anni: Piero Gobetti nella storia d’Italia. Atti del Convegno di Studi, Torino 8–9 Novembre 2001, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Prezzolini, Giuseppe (editor), Gobetti e la voce, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Roberts, David, ‘‘Frustrated Liberals: De Ruggiero, Gobetti and the Challenge of Socialism,’’ The Canadian Journal of History, 17:1 (April, 1982): 59–86. Spadolini, Giovanni, Gobetti, un’eredita`, Florence: Passigli, 1981. Spriano, Paolo, Gramsci e Gobetti: Introduzione alla vita e alle opere, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Urbinati, Nadia (editor), On Liberal Revolution, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

CARLO GOLDONI

CARLO GOLDONI (1707–1793) ‘‘My life offers nothing interesting; but it may be that, after some time has passed, a collection of my works may be discovered in some corner of an old library. And that will give rise to curiosity about who this singular man was—a man who proposed the reform of his country’s theater, who brought to the stage and through the presses one hundred and fifty comedies, in verse, in prose, comedies of character and of plot, and who saw, in his lifetime, eighteen editions of his plays.’’ These reflections from the Prefazione (Preface) to his autobiography seem to suggest on Carlo Goldoni’s part the need to illustrate a life of the dramatist that is much more interesting than the life of the man. His Me´moires (Memoirs, 1784) present us with the image of a serene character, devoted to the creation of theatrical works crowned by success with the public and in print, who does not correspond to the dramatist’s complex personality, or to his tormented history in the realm of eighteenth-century theatrical life. One thing, however, is certain: He proposed a reform that effectively revolutionized the texts, scenes, and the lives of actors in an important way for Italian dramaturgy, which also witnessed the end of a golden age of fame and European success for the commedia dell’arte. Indeed, when Goldoni began to write comedies, the situation of the acting companies and their repertory was in decline: By then the stories had been repeated ad infinitum, the performers relied on their craft, and the comic scenes became more and more scurrilous in their attempt to attract the attention of a public that was more and more easily bored. Venice, in particular, offered itself as a privileged place of observation because it boasted a large number of theaters in competition with one another (the Teatro di San Cassiano, owned by the Tron family, specializing in musical plays; the Teatro di San Luca or San Salvador, owned by Vendramin, and today known as the Teatro Goldoni, specializing in musical plays and comedy; the Teatro di San Moise´, owned by Giustinian, specializing in musical theater, ballet, and comedy; the Teatro di San Samuele, owned by Grimani, specializing in opera buffa, comedy, and tragedy; the Teatro di Sant’Angelo, owned by Marcello and Cappello, specializing

in music and comedy beginning in the 1740s; and the Teatro di San Giovanni Grisostomo, owned by Grimani, specializing in musical plays) and whose impresarios were particularly anxious for any new play to attract spectators. Goldoni, who was born into this setting, seemed attracted to it ever since his youthful flight on a boat of comic actors, a flight that was later pardoned by his father, a doctor, who wanted to launch Goldoni in the same profession. After the failure of this plan, the young Goldoni pursued his studies of jurisprudence and later became a lawyer. He began to practice, but by this point he had been composing comedies for some time, although they were still tied to the technique of the canovaccio (rough scenarios), that is, partly written and partly entrusted to the inventiveness of the actors, as in Momolo cortesan (Momolo the Courtesan, 1738). One important text is La donna di garbo (A Lady of Charm, 1742), which preceded his move to Pisa, where he intensified his activity as a dramatist; among other things, he wrote a comedy destined to become famous, Il servitore di due padroni (The Servant of Two Masters, 1745) and then decided to abandon the legal profession in order to pursue the activity more suited to him. Thus in 1748 he was once again in Venice after signing a contract with Girolamo Medebac, the impresario of the Teatro Sant’Angelo. Goldoni’s first idea was to moralize the theater by reestablishing an exemplary function for human behavior. The central reflection for his poetics occurred, however, in 1750, a fundamental year for the Reform, inaugurated with the composition of 16 new comedies. Among these figures, Il teatro comico (The Comic Theater, 1750), which, aside from being an important and successful example of the ‘‘play within the play’’ (representing the rehearsals of a company of actors before opening night), served above all as the manifesto of the ‘‘new’’ theater. Goldoni here confronted problems of various kinds—from plot to thematics, from character to performance, from verse to music. The central point is the conflict between commedia dell’arte and commedia riformata. The deeper significance is in fact the contrast between an old and a new mode of conceiving of the theater. The text had to 865

CARLO GOLDONI be entirely written, and the actors needed to learn the script offered to them by the author; the masks had to be progressively reduced until they disappeared, in order to leave room for characters who reflect the ‘‘world,’’ in which the spectators could see themselves reflected; the dialogue should preferably be in prose and not in verse, and music should not belong to the comic genre. This ‘‘revolution’’ in reality did not turn out to be as drastic as it might seem. Goldoni himself asserted that the process of revision should take place in successive stages and without traumatic changes; he himself continued to insert some masks into his texts and to write libretti for music, not to mention comedies in verse. The core of innovative progress consisted essentially in the revisitation of traditional characters who were realized and called upon to embody contemporary typologies, real social classes, and conflicts that were forcefully present in contemporary Venetian society. One of the clearest examples is illustrated by Mario Baratto, who showed the process of adhering to reality by a well-known stock character, Pantalone, which Goldoni revitalized in the figure of the eighteenth-century Venetian merchant, the true backbone of the Republic’s economy, at least until the last third of the century (‘‘‘Mondo’ e ‘teatro’ nella poetica di Goldoni,’’ 1964). In the ensuing years the mercantile class in fact suffered a regression that would strongly influence Venice’s progressive decline. This process was captured lucidly in comedies such as La buona moglie (The Good Wife, 1749), La famiglia dell’antiquario (The Antiquarian’s Family, 1750), I Rusteghi (The Boors, 1760), La trilogia della villeggiatura (The Holiday Trilogy, 1762), and Sior Todero brontolon (Mr. Todero the Grouch, 1762), in a span of time that ended with Goldoni’s departure for France. However, the Goldonian view of reality takes in not only the bourgeoisie but also the nobility, a mirror of indolence and the inability to worry about anything except one’s own interests, almost always reduced to mere caprice. This is what appears in comedies such as La putta onorata (The Honorable Girl, 1749), La serva amorosa (The Loving Maid, 1752), or La locanderia (Mirandolina, 1753), in which alongside the positive figure of the merchant there appear or alternate figures of enterprising and honorable women. This is equally the case with the portrayal of the lower classes: the gondolier protagonists of the Bettina cycle, the poor families who inhabit the small squares of Venice, the families of fishermen in 866

Chioggia. Thus arise masterpieces like Il campiello (The Public Square, 1756) and Le baruffe chiozzote (Squabbles in Chioggia, 1762). Another essential component of Goldoni’s plays is the excavation of sentiments and human emotions, as one comedy magisterially demonstrates, Gl’innamorati (The Lovers, 1759), rightly considered one of his masterpieces for its power to capture all the nuances of its two protagonists’ souls. Important examples in this area came from the comedies with female protagonists, in which the relation of the ‘‘world,’’ the ‘‘theater,’’ and the actors’ abilities mix harmoniously, producing figures like those of La serva amorosa or La cameriera brillante (The Brilliant Waitress, 1753), which, among other things, produced the ascendancy of the leading character of the servetta or young servant. The productions tied to ‘‘high models’’ also deserve a brief mention because Goldoni used historical and famous figures, such as Il Molie`re (Molie`re, 1751), Terenzio (Terence, 1754), and Torquato Tasso (Torquato Tasso, 1755), in pursuit of an integration into the dramaturgical, and in a larger sense, literary, tradition that he always clung to tenaciously. The titles cited therefore reveal the richness of the Goldonian repertory, which ranges from character comedies, such as La vedova scaltra (The Artful Widow, 1748), Il filosofo inglese (The English Philosopher, 1753), La buona madre (The Good Mother, 1760) to ensemble comedies, such as La bottega del caffe` (The Coffee-House, 1750), I Rusteghi, and La casa nova (The Superior Residence, 1760). The fashions of the day also attracted the author, especially if the public responded positively: One thinks of the taste for orientalism in La sposa persiana (The Persian Wife, 1753) and in L’impresario delle Smirne (The Impresario from Smyrna, 1760), which inspired the composition of comedies that are little seen today but that enjoyed an enormous success among his contemporaries, or the allure exercised by plots of famous novels, which give rise to the cycle of Pamela (1760). One of the themes that recent criticism emphasizes is the autobiographical within Goldoni’s theatrical oeuvre. We know in fact that Goldoni, during the century in which autobiography was officially codified as a genre, left us his Me´moires, supporting a mode that involved the majority of eighteenth-century writers in Europe. All writing about the self assumes particular characteristics; Goldoni’s, which he drafted in French during his

CARLO GOLDONI Parisian period, is subdivided into three distinct parts: his youthful adventures up to his choice to become exclusively a dramatist; a description of the plots and successes of his comedies; and finally his life in France at the court of Versailles as the tutor of Italian. The peculiarity of this work is the author’s almost total silence about any kind of disappointments he had suffered, his avoidance of any consideration of a France preparing to behead her sovereign, and his focus on his own theatrical production instead. Thus it is the comedies that provide us with autobiographical clues ‘‘officially’’ avoided by the dramatist. Among these we should mention, for example, L’avvocato veneziano (The Venetian Lawyer, 1748), which refers directly to the profession Goldoni practiced at different times, or Il giocatore (The Gambler, 1751), which illuminates another peculiar aspect of his life. Sometimes it is chance meetings that furnish the comedies with their characters: In I due gemelli veneziani (The Venetian Twins, 1748), for example, there appears the figure of a hypocrite, Pancrazio, who is very close to a Dominican friar whom the author knew at the time of his flight as a young man; in Le baruffe chiozzotte, the character of the adjutant at the Cancelleria reflects a position that Goldoni himself held at one time in that city. Other hypotheses have been formulated by critics or directors, as in the case of L’avventuriere onorato (The Honorable Adventurer, 1751), which might allude to an interlude as a spy on the author’s part. Certainly the comedy with the greatest autobiographical resonance is Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale (One of the Last Nights of Carnival, 1792), which is, as the author himself says, ‘‘an allegory.’’ Indeed, behind the figure of the cloth designer Anzoletto, who leaves Venice for Russia, is clearly Goldoni, who left Venice for Paris, hoping for a return that never takes place, while his designs offer themselves as metaphors for scenes, and the figure of the fiance´e, Domenica, likely alludes to the commedia riformata, in contrast to the old and ridiculous Madame Gatteau, who is associated with the commedia dell’arte. His departure from Venice was a sad moment for the great dramatist, who in the preceding years suffered many disappointments in Venice. In fact, from the beginning of his career he was never lacking in opponents and even detractors of his theater; we know, for example, of numerous disputes between Goldoni and another Venetian dramatist (and novelist), the abbot Giuseppe Chiari (1711–1785), who often mocked his adversary by writing

parodies of his comedies. His other hardened enemy was Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), whose brother Gasparo, a well-known contributor to one of the first ‘‘gazettes’’ to be distributed in the eighteenth century, Venice’s Giornale de’ letterati, showed himself to be a sincere admirer of ‘‘reformed’’ comedy. Carlo Gozzi disparaged anyone who, like Goldoni, resorted to theatrical writing as a trade to survive; Gozzi was still tied to the conception of the superiority of the intellectual, who could support himself free of all conditions. Indeed he boasted of never receiving a penny from the impresarios or acting companies for whom he composed several comedies. Gozzi aimed at restoring the ‘‘high’’ tradition of the commedia dell’arte and the dimension of the fantastic of the early seventeenth century: his fiabe teatrali, or theatrical fables, met with enormous success. This took place around the years 1758–1759, in a period of crisis for Goldoni (a crisis not unrelated to this event). Goldoni even distanced himself from Venice for some time in order to work in Rome. But the controversy did not die down when he returned, because the public seemed truly seduced by the stagings of Gozzi’s plays. In the meantime Goldoni received an invitation to work with the Come´die Italienne in Paris. At first he did not seem inclined to accept the position, despite the unmistakable appeal of a cultural circle from which he received many accolades (even Voltaire wrote some verses in his honor); on the other hand, Goldoni also wanted to receive economic recognition in his own country. To this end he beseeched the government of Venice, justifying his request for a pension with his by-now firmly established fame that had contributed to the prestige of his city. Waiting for this recognition proved vain. Goldoni felt himself to be a Venetian before all else, and his pain at leaving was truly felt, while any hope for a quick return was dashed. His departure marked the dissolution of the company that had worked for him and for the impresario Antonio Vendramin, to whom Goldoni had been tied since 1753, after the break with Medebac. Leaving Venice in April of 1762, he arrived in Paris the following August. Working with the Come´die Italienne proved to be more demanding than he imagined—the French actors were accustomed to canovacci and not to texts that are entirely written. Out of these difficulties emerged different works, such as the series of French scripts that seem to be a return to the past: the Trilogia di Zelinda e Lindoro (The Trilogy of Zelinda and Lindoro, 1773), born years before as 867

CARLO GOLDONI the Trilogy of Arlequin and Camille, and Gli amanti timidi o sia L’imbroglio dei due ritratti (The Timid Lovers, or The Affair of the Two Portraits, 1765) are amusing portraits quite far from the last Venetian season. However, in 1764, Goldoni created Il ventaglio (The Fan), in which the idea of the fan that passes from hand to hand creates a brilliant comedy, lively and rich in suggestions that anticipate a much more modern ambience. His last work, when he was practicing his profession as a master of Italian at Versailles and enjoying a court pension, belongs to the vein of the comedy of manners: Le Bourru bienfaisant (The Well-Meaning Crouch, 1771) and L’avare fasteux (The Ostentatious Miser, 1772) mark the final investigation into the character of the Venetian merchant, who reaches the end of his long career on stage. This character’s true crisis is marked by Trilogia della villeggiatura: In these three comedies the enterprising exponent of the bourgeois class stopped investing his profits in commerce (the engine of Venice’s great prosperity) and began to imitate the nobles in their habit of staying outside the city and investing in real estate but causing a regression in the city’s economic process. We are confronted with an arc of decline that is also lucidly observed in another of Goldoni’s masterpieces, I Rusteghi, in which four grumpy old men refuse any compromise with the progression and the evolution of customs and lock themselves in a blind social and linguistic conservatism that will shortly prove its sterility. Goldoni’s last years were occupied with the composition of his autobiography, which he dedicated to Louis XVI. He died at the height of the French Revolution, deprived of his royal pension. Goldoni’s critical reception, understood as an amalgam of interpretations and stage productions, has enjoyed and still enjoys great success. Naturally the reception of his vast ouevre has changed over the course of the years and the centuries: Thus we may recognize some texts of undisputed value that form a kind of ‘‘reduced’’ repertory, in which the so-called masterpieces have a place and are constantly revived on stage: Il servitore di due padroni, La locandieria, Il campiello, Le baruffe chiozzote, Gli’innamorati. One thinks of certain female figures wisely portrayed in La putta onorata or La serva amorosa, of the rediscovery of Il teatro comico that appears to be only theoretical but that in reality can be successfully staged, and of the reconsideration of Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale for more than its autobiographical elements. There are also sporadic revivals of minor texts, such as Il filosofo inglese or L’apatista (The Apathetic, 1758), on 868

which Franco Fido dwelled in his Le inquietudini di Goldoni. Nor should we forget the great importance of the Venetian author in the realm of his triple linguistic practice—in Italian, French, and above all in dialect. Linguistic expression was employed in all of its potential because it could reflect character and setting: Sometimes it appeared as more conservative, sometimes more modern, in order to mark, for example, generational or class conflicts.

Biography Carlo Goldoni was born in Venice, 25 February 1707. He studied medicine until 1720. After a flight to Chioggia (from Rimini, where he studied philosophy at a Dominican college) in 1721, he moved to Pavia at the Collegio Ghislieri; he was expelled in 1725 for writing a satire of the women of the city. Goldoni became the adjutant of the podesta` in Chioggia in 1728. After the death of his father in 1731, he practiced law in Venice; and, after a flight to Milan, he returned to Venice, along with theatermanager Giuseppe Imer. Goldoni moved with the theatrical company of the Teatro San Samuele and in Genoa met and married Nicoletta Conio in 1736. In 1742, he fled Venice because of debts. During the years 1745–1748, Goldoni practiced law in Pisa and was admitted to the local Arcadian colony. He composed important comedies, among which, for the actor Antonio Sacchi, is Il servitore di due padroni, and later accepted the offer of the theatrical manager Girolamo Medebac and returned to Venice as the in-house author of the Sant’Angelo theater in 1750. Goldoni wrote 16 comedies and launched the ‘‘reform’’ of the theater. In 1753, because of disputes with Medebac, who published some of his comedies without authorization, Goldoni moved to the Teatro San Luca of Antonio Vendramin, where he remained until 1762, with an interruption during the years 1758–1759, when he was in Rome. In 1762, disappointed by the indifference of the Venetian republic to his work, he went to Paris to direct the Come´die Italienne. In 1765 he was named master of Italian at Versailles for the sons of Louis XVI. In 1765 he obtained a court pension, which was taken away in 1792 by the Legislative Assembly. Carlo Goldoni died in poverty on 6 February 1793. ANGELA GUIDOTTI See also: Commedia dell’arte

CARLO GOLDONI Selected Works Collections The Comedies of Carlo Goldoni, translated by Helen Zimmern, London: D. Hott, 1892. Tutte le opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, 14 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956. Opere, edited by Filippo Zampieri, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954. Opere, edited by Gianfranco Folena, Milan: Mursia, 1969. Three Comedies (Mine Hostess, The Boors, The Fan), translated by Clifford Bax et al., London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. Four Comedies (The Venetian Twins, Artful Widow, Mirandolina, The Superior Residence), translated by Frederick Davies, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. Edizione Nazionale Goldoniana, edited by Sergio Romagnoli, Venice: Marsilio, 1993.

Plays Momolo cortesan, 1738. La donna di garbo, 1742. Il servitore di due padroni, 1745; as The Servant of Two Masters, translated by Edward J. Dent, 1928; translated by Frederick H. Davies, 1965; as A Servant to Two Masters, translated by Gwenda Pandolfi, 1999; as The Servant of Two Masters, translated by Dorothy Louise, 2003. L’avvocato veneziano, 1748. I due gemelli veneziani, 1748; as The Venetian Twins (with Mirandolina), translated by Ranjit Bolt, 1993. La vedova scaltra, 1748. La buona moglie, 1749. La putta onorata, 1749. La bottega del caffe`, 1750; as The Coffee House, translated by Jeremy Parzen, 1998. La famiglia dell’antiquario, 1750. Il teatro comico, 1750; as The Comic Theatre, translated by John W. Miller, 1969. L’avventuriere onorato, 1751. Il giocatore, 1751. Il Molie`re, 1751. La serva amorosa, 1752. La cameriera brillante, 1753. Il filosofo inglese, 1753. La locandieria, 1753; as Mirandolina, translated by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, 1924; as Mirandolina (with The Housekeeper), translated by Robert David MacDonald, 1994. La sposa persiana, 1753. Terenzio, 1754. Torquato Tasso, 1755. Il campiello, 1756; as Il campiello, a Venetian comedy, translated by Susanna Graham-Jones and Biel Bryden, 1976. L’apatista, 1758. Gl’innamorati, 1759. La buona madre, 1760. La casa nova, 1760. L’impresario delle Smirne, 1760. La Pamela, 1760. I Rusteghi, 1760. Sior Todero brontolon, 1762.

Le baruffe chiozzote, 1762. La trilogia della villeggiatura, 1762. Una delle ultime sere di Carnovale, 1762. Il ventaglio, 1764; as The Fan, translated by Frederick Davies, 1968. Gli amanti timidi o sia L’imbroglio dei due ritratti, 1765. Le bourru bienfaisant (Il burbero benefico), 1771. L’avare fasteux, 1772. Trilogia di Zelinda e Lindoro, 1773.

Other I Me´moires, 1784; as Memoirs of Carlo Goldoni Written by Himself, translated by John Black, edited by W. A. Drake, 1926; reprinted, 1976.

Further Reading Alberti, Carmelo, La scena veneziana nell’eta` di Goldoni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Alberti, Carmelo, and Ginette Herry (editors), Carlo Goldoni: Tra Libro e scena, Venice: Il Cardo Editore, 1996. Angelini, Franca, Vita di Goldoni, Rome: Laterza, 1993. Anglani, Bartolo, Goldoni, il mercato, la scena, l’utopia, Naples: Liguori, 1983. Baratto, Mario, ‘‘‘Mondo’ e ‘teatro’ nella poetica di Goldoni,’’ in Tre studi sul teatro, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1964. Borsellino, Nino (editor), L’interpretazione goldoniana: Critica e messinscena, Rome: Officina, 1982. Bosisio, Paolo, Il teatro di Goldoni sulle scene italiane del Novecento, Milan: Electa, 1992. Crotti, Ilaria, Libro, mondo, teatro: Saggi Goldoniani, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Emery, Ted, Goldoni as Librettist: Theatrical Reform and the ‘‘drammi giocosi per musica,’’ New York: Peter Lang, 1991. Farrell, Joseph (editor), Carlo Goldoni and Eighteenth-Century Theatre, Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1997. Fido, Franco, Le inquietudini di Goldoni, Genoa: Costa and Nolan, 1995. Fido, Franco, Nuova guida a Goldoni: Teatro e societa` nel Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Folena, Gianfranco, L’Italiano in Europa: Esperienze linguistiche del Settecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Folena, Gianfranco, Vocabolario del Veneziano di Carlo Goldoni, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1993. Guidotti, Angela, Goldoni par lui-meme, Alessandria: Dell’Orso, 1992. Gu¨nsberg, Maggie, Playing with Gender: The Comedies of Goldoni, Leeds, U.K.: Northern Universities Press, 2001. Holme, Timothy, A Servant of Many Masters: The Life and Times of Carlo Goldoni, London: Jupiter, 1976. Joly, Jacques, L’altro Goldoni, Pisa: ETS, 1989. Jonard, Norbert, Goldoni, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Mangini, Nicola, Bibliografia goldoniana (1908–1957), Rome-Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1961. Padoan, Giorgio, ‘‘L’esordio di Goldoni: la conquista della moralita`,’’ Lettere Italiane, (1983): 29–60. Petroni, Giuseppe, Il punto su Goldoni, Bari: Laterza, 1986. Pietropaolo, Domenico (editor), Goldoni and the Musical Theatre, New York: Legas, 1995.

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CARLO GOLDONI Riedt, Heinz, Carlo Goldoni, New York: Ungar, 1974. Ringger, Kurt, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, Commedie, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Stewart Pamela, Goldoni fra letteratura e teatro, Florence: Olschki, 1989.

IL CAMPIELLO, 1756 Il campiello (The Public Square) inaugurated a new trend in Goldoni’s production because it combines a text in dialect and in verse together with a lowerclass setting. In particular, the verse does not belong to the tradition of the theatrical genre (the martelliano or double heptasyllablic line) but is rather a free sequence of hendecasyllables and heptasyllabic lines, with the possible presence of rhyme (internal as well)—in short, a musical use of the word that evokes the arias of the melodrama (Goldoni also boasted a considerable production of librettos as well). The lower-class setting is immediately referred to by the title, which indicates a typical piazza in Venice onto which look the dwellings of ordinary people (for example, a woman who sells hotcakes or a girl who is a seamstress) captured at a particular time of the year: the last days of carnival, in which joy is mixed with melancholy, because the end of the festival is near. It is in this context that the comedy opens, with a first act enlivened by the squabbles between old women and those who are younger: Jealousy winds its way through, but so does the desire for fun and play, in the open, as a comforting moment of life in common. Estranged from this is Gasparina, who, after her mother’s death, has been raised by a rich uncle: Her condition makes her feel superior to the girls of the lower classes, by whose carefree nature she is surely attracted. For this reason she elicits their envy, a cause of her insecurity, which translates into a severe speech defect (putting the letter ‘‘z’’ in place of ‘‘s’’). Into the midst of these small stories of skirmishes, marriage plans, loves, and hopes comes the figure of the Cavaliere, a penniless Neapolitan nobleman, who is curious about the reality 870

of the campiello and decides to amuse himself in Venice during the carnival. He occupies the comedy’s estranged perspective, the one who observes ‘‘from outside,’’ like the thinker Isidore in Le baruffe chiozzote (Squabbles in Chioggia, 1762). He is the kingpin of the plot: He is attracted by Gasparina and begins to court her; later, to win over everyone’s sympathies he agrees to serve as a witness at the marriage of one of the girls, and when a scuffle breaks out, he threatens to resort to the sword. The comedy ends with the recognition of the noble ancestors of Gasparina herself, whose uncle and tutor, also Neapolitan, reveals the story of his origins and his niece to the suitor who by marrying her will come into possession, among other things, of a considerable dowry. The girl’s final departure from Venice and the campiello is an aching farewell that seems to predict Goldoni’s own and testifies to the author’s deep attachment to his city. Il campiello retains, within an original setting like that of the piazza and of lower-class characters, a series of elements still tied to the commedia dell’arte: for example, the story that leads to the final recognition and to the marriage of Gasparina with the penniless noble swordsman. It is a work of the highest quality, thanks to the continual alternation of joy and melancholy, of youthful freedom from worry and the real problems of people whose existence concedes little to them. This comedy is the first of Goldoni’s great plays in dialect. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First edition: Il campiello, in Commedie di Carlo Goldoni, vol. 5, Venice: Pitte`ri, 1758. Critical edition: in Tutte le opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 6, Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956. Translation: as Il campiello, a Venetian Comedy, translated by Susanna Graham-Jones and Biel Bryden, London: Heinemann Educational for the National Theatre, 1976.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Le strutture del Carnevale in Goldoni,’’ in L’interpretazione goldoniana: Critica e messinscena, edited by Nino Borsellino, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1982. Bosisio, Paolo, Il teatro di Goldoni sulle scene italiane del Novecento, Milan: Electa, 1992. Lunari, Luigi, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, Il campiello, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, Il campiello, Turin: Einaudi 1988. Ringger, Kurt, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ to C. Goldoni, Commedie, Turin: Einaudi, 1979.

CARLO GOLDONI

LA LOCANDIERA, 1753 Comedy by Carlo Goldoni

La locandiera (Mirandolina) is one of the most famous and most represented of Goldoni’s comedies, thanks to the success of the character of the female protagonist. The action unfolds at an inn owned by Mirandolina, an expert at making men fall in love with her. From the rich Count of Albafiorita to the penniless Marquis of Forlimpopoli, no one seems able to resist her, except for the Cavaliere di Ripafratta, a great despiser of women. For this reason, the seductress enacts a subtle design that consists at first of agreement and complicity with her misogynist guest, then of turmoil and desperation when he declares his desire to leave the inn, and finally of impassibility and coldness once she realizes she has conquered him. Thus, in the span of a single day, the cunning young girl reduces the Cavaliere to his knees: once he unmasks his passion in public, she decides not to follow him, however, and instead to marry Fabrizio, the waiter at the inn. La locandiera is a complex work, which has lent itself over the course of time to many interpretations, both literary and theatrical. The image that the author intended to give of the protagonist is anything but flattering. Faithful to his idea of the theater as a mirror of reality and hence also as an observation of his own experiences, Goldoni declared in his prefatory ‘‘L’autore a chi legge’’ (A Note from the Author to the Reader) that men must beware of certain women who are particularly cunning, so as not to fall into ruin. Indeed, he claimed ‘‘not to have depicted elsewhere a more tempting and more dangerous woman than this one.’’ One might think that the Cavaliere falls a little too quickly; but his misogyny is precisely the reason he falls so quickly: As a ‘‘despiser of women,’’ he succumbs more easily, since ‘‘disparaging without knowing them, and not knowing their arts and where they ground the hope for their triumphs, he believed that his aversion would suffice to protect him, and he offered his bare chest to the blows of his enemy.’’ It is therefore necessary to defend oneself from these ‘‘enchanting Sirens,’’ of whose arts the

author himself confessed to have been at times a victim. This self-analysis has been progressively refuted by criticism, which shows instead how Mirandolina embodies a certain bourgeois wisdom: First she puts her inventiveness to the test before the obtuse character of the misogynist; later, however, once she unmasks his superficiality and hence his illusions, she grasps that it is impossible for her to move from the bourgeois class to the nobility and decides with economic prudence to marry someone of her own station. Beyond, however, this ‘‘reversal’’ of perspective, what makes the comedy rich and pleasurable is the author’s notable power to create a character full of nuances and shadings; he brings out her turmoil as well, her contradictions, and praises her intelligence, thanks especially to the introduction of two actresses, Ortensia and Deianira, who represent an inferior mode of performing, tied to the ill-fated commonplaces and fictions of the old comedies, compared to the vivacity of the world brought onto the stage. The various actresses who from 1800 onward have included this female character into their repertoires (from Adelaide Ristori to Tatiana Pavlova, from Irma Grammatica to Eleonora Duse) have contributed substantially to the comedy’s success. In this period, Goldoni was inspired by Maddalena Marliani, who joined Medebac’s company in the role of the servetta (servant), in the footsteps of her husband Giuseppe Marliani, known as Brighella. He noticed how Marliani’s Colombina was colored with various nuances, which convinced him to make her a protagonist, thus compromising his relationship with the leading actress Teodora Medebac–who was responsible for the interruption of the reruns after the comedy’s opening night and for its substitution with Pamela, a character more suited to exploit the interpretive gifts of the impresario’s wife. La locandiera became important not only to the actresses but also to directors (Luchino Visconti’s 1953 production with set design by Piero Tosi remains famous). Indeed, the calibration of scenic time is perfect: Everything takes place in an interior, the inn, which represents an unstable microcosm in which various characters come together with their stories in such a way as to condense the events by bringing out the essential traits that make possible their progressive evolution. Thanks to the dialogue and use of gesture as well, the characters all turn out to be important. Gesture is supported by the original use of objects: the handkerchief, the little glass bottles, the iron that Mirandolina 871

CARLO GOLDONI handles nervously when she must make her final decisions. Goldoni showed a sensitivity to the minute elements of the stage, which anticipated certain innovations of much more recent drama. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First Edition La locandiera, in Commedie, vol. 2, Florence: Paperini, 1755.

Critical Edition In Teatro, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 4, Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956.

Translations As Mirandolina, translated by Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory, London: Putnam’s Sons, 1924. As Mine Hostess in Three Comedies, translated by C. Bax, London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979. As Mirandolina in Four Comedies, translated by Frederick Davies, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968. As Mirandolina, translated by Robert David MacDonald, London: Oberon, 1994.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, ‘‘Approcci goldoniani: Il sistema di Mirandolina,’’ in Goldoni dalla commedia dell’Arte al dramma borghese, Milan: Garzanti, 2004. Anglani, Bartolo, Goldoni: Il mercato, la scena, l’utopia, Naples: Liguori, 1983. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, La locandiera, Turin: Einaudi, 1971. Lunari, Luigi, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, La locandiera, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Marelli, Cesare, ‘‘La seduzione tra ‘intingoletti’ e aporie: Rilettura de ‘La locandiera,’’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 2 (1993): 205–212. Momo, Arnaldo, La carriera delle maschere nel teatro di Goldoni, Chiari, Gozzi, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Strehler, Giorgio, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in C. Goldoni, La locandiera, Milan: Mondatori, 2002.

I RUSTEGHI, 1760 Comedy by Carlo Goldoni

I Rusteghi (The Boors) opens the phase of Goldoni’s critique of Venice’s mercantile society in the second half of the eighteenth century; in particular, 872

he revealed the uneasiness of one who, though belonging to the bourgeois class, perceived with clarity the state of its impending crisis. However, as always happens in Goldoni’s works, the dramatic context is softened by the irony of the argument, the play of the dialogue, and the revisitation of stock masks that are revitalized thanks to the use of the Venetian dialect. The author himself outlined the typology of his protagonists in the prefatory notes of the comedy entitled ‘‘L’autore a chi legge’’: ‘‘Rusteghi in the Venetian language is not the same as rustici in the Tuscan tongue. In Venice we mean by a rustego a bitter, boorish man, an enemy of civilization, culture, and conversation.’’ This specification serves to distinguish this character from the mask of the old miser and grouch of the commedia dell’arte and also from the old crab of the French theater between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To the four main characters of this play, in fact, the author applied his idea of the relation between world and theater and also modified traditional characterization with the observation of Venetian reality from different points of view—the sociological, the political, and the linguistic. At the same time, the four mature reactionaries oppose themselves to the new generations, universalizing the motif of the conflict between the old and the young; in this mode, from the microcosm of the bourgeoisie of the old Venetian republic, the picture broadens to represent much wider misunderstandings and atmospheres. Canciano, Simone, and Maurizio recognize their leader in Lunardo, who decides to marry off his daughter Lucietta without even letting her meet her future husband (Filippetto). A coalition of wives headed by Signora Felice is able to play a joke on the four old men by successfully allowing a meeting between the engaged young man and woman. At the end, the rustics resign themselves to and accept the situation. This is a comedy of ‘‘involuntary’’ formation because the four rustics do not love the theater, are enemies of the author, and prevent the women in the house from going outside because they are against the wastefulness of the carnival, though they are voluptuaries behind closed doors. Thus Signora Felice brings the theater into the house, with plenty of disguise. It is therefore a thin plot for an ensemble comedy that relies on atmospherics and verbal disputes. On these occasions, the old men always express themselves through conservative ideas and expressions, while the young people and the wives try to counter them. Later on, Lunardo is distinguished for his tenacious expressive attachment

CORRADO GOVONI to formulas and phrases that denote his being ‘‘closed’’ to the external world and any form of innovation. The comedy is constructed with great mastery and experience of dramatic time: The action takes place in half a day, and the protagonist is quadrupled without becoming boring, creating instead a sort of counterpoint to the lines of one thanks to the comments of another. Often the characters are defined by their linguistic expressions: from ‘‘vegnimo a dir el merito’’ (we speak the reason why) to ‘‘figurarse’’ (just imagine), and still others like the persistent use of the adjective serrao (closed) to indicate how doors and windows must always be found, so that no ‘‘incursions’’ from the external world are possible. But we should remember that the comedy’s happy ending is only fictitious: The rusteghi resign themselves to the deception but do not change their general attitude. The positive upshot is momentary and tied to that particular event. On the other hand, the situation of the Venetian republic ends up mirroring this domestic panorama: In 1762, in fact, all possible reforms of an innovative nature were rejected, and decline became irreversible.

Editions First edition: I Rusteghi, in C. Goldoni, Le commedie, vol. 3, Venice: Pasquali, 1762. Critical edition: In Opere, edited by Giuseppe Ortolani, vol. 7, Milan: Mondadori, 1935–1956. Translation: As The Boors in Three Comedies, translated by C. Bax, London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Further Reading Alberti, Carmelo, ‘‘I rusteghi e dintorni,’’ in I quattro rusteghi, Programma di sala, Venice: Teatro La Fenice, 1987–1988 Season. Baratto, Mario, Tre saggi sul teatro, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1957. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ to C. Goldoni, I rusteghi, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Puppa, Paolo, Cesco Baseggio: Ritratto dell’attore da vecchio, Verona: Cierre, 2003. Savvioli, Aggeo, ‘‘Vent’anni di messinscena goldoniana,’’ in L’interpretazione goldoniana: Critica e messinscena, edited by Nino Borsellino, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1982.

ANGELA GUIDOTTI

CORRADO GOVONI (1884–1965) The poetics of Govoni’s early verse show the influence of both Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio. The rich verbal material of the sonnets that form his initial collection, Le fiale (The Phials, 1903), is strongly determined by the D’Annunzio of La Chimera (Chimera, 1890) and of the Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893). However, these texts also attempt to overcome decadent poetic elements, both on the linguistic level through ‘‘low’’ lexical insertions and in the preference of the ‘‘I’’ for simple and normal reality. This antidecadent attitude derived from Pascoli but was also influenced by the prosaicness of Crepuscolarismo. The crepuscular theme, with its air of melancholic and spiritual weariness, breaks out in Armonia in grigio et in silenzio (Harmony in Grey

and Silence, 1903). The everyday quality and the unassuming character of the landscapes and objects described, reminiscent of Impressionist paintings, were from this point on recurrent features of Govoni’s poetry. In contrast to other crepuscular poets, such as Guido Gozzano and Sergio Corazzini, Govoni did not fall back on sentimentality or on the description of the intimate world of the subject. In Armonia in grigio et in silenzio, as well as in subsequent collections such as Fuochi d’artifizio (Fireworks, 1905) and in Gli aborti (Miscarriages, 1907), the influence of symbolism and French Decadence (Paul Verlaine in particular) is evident, although it is filtered through a reading of Franco-Belgian poets such as Georges Raymond, Costantin Rodenbach, and Maurice Maeterlinck. 873

CORRADO GOVONI The first product of Govoni’s engagement with the Futurist movement was the volume Poesie elettriche (Electric Poems, 1911). His next book, Rarefazioni e parole in liberta` (Rarefactions and Words in Freedom, 1915), was divided into two parts: The first presented a series of experiments in visual poetry, while the second featured applications of the poetical techniques suggested by F. M. Marinetti in the Manifesto della letteratura futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912). In both instances, however, the Futurist method provided Govoni a pretext for his eclectic analogical imagery. These works were often illustrated by the poet’s own sketches or drawings, which constituted an integral part of his verse. The most important work of these years was undoubtedly L’inaugurazione della primavera (The Inauguration of Spring, 1915), poems in which the poet endowed natural phenomena and daily objects with an original ‘‘sensitive’’ (one could almost say ‘‘animistic’’) content. An example is ‘‘La primavera del mare’’ (The Springtime of the Sea), greeted with enthusiasm by Eugenio Montale: ‘‘trovo meraviglie di poesia nuova e autentica. Costui e` grande!’’ (I find marvellous poetry, which is new and authentic. Govoni is great!) (Il secondo mestiere, 1996). The structure of the poetic discourse in Govoni is mainly paratactic, and often the author accumulated images in long sequences, as in ‘‘Le cose che fanno la domenica’’ (The Things They Do on Sunday). The path from Le fiale to L’inaugurazione della primavera also represents a personal and progressive ‘‘metrical liberation’’ in Govoni’s poetics. In Le fiale the regular hendecasyllable alternates with hypometric and hypermetric verses, often with noncanonical stresses. Later this metric irregularity would displease Govoni, who began to alter numerous poems with the ultimately unsuccessful intention of regularizing their meter. In Armonia in grigio et in silenzio, rhyme is maintained, but the structure of the stanzas is irregular. Finally, in the Futurist collections, the poems are mostly undivided, polymetric, and only partially rhymed. The affirmation of parole in liberta` (free verse) in early twentieth-century Italy is also unquestionably due to the formal results of Govoni’s poetry. In the period between the two World Wars, Govoni continued to pursue these stylistic experiments. While his works from this period time were characterized by a remarkable search for a freer poetic language, they did not reflect the lyrical experiments carried out in those years by younger Italian poets. The changes introduced by Govoni in his poetry were not, then, necessarily a sign of a greater 874

originality. The moment of the most intense retreat into his inner world was represented by the poems of Aladino (Aladdin, 1946), dedicated to his son, who was among those executed by the Germans at the Fosse Ardeatine in 1944. The collection includes the moving lament ‘‘Dialogo dell’angelo e del giovine morto’’ (Dialogue of the Angel and the Dead Boy). Besides his poetic activity, Govoni was also a prose writer and a playwright. His most important novels, Anche l’ ombra e` sole (Even the Shadow Is Sun, 1920) and La strada sull’acqua (The Road on the Water, 1923), were written between 1918 and 1926, a period in which he almost entirely abandoned poetry. He also published a few collections of short stories, including Piccolo veleno color di rosa (Little Rose-Coloured Poison, 1921) and Bomboniera (Bonbonnie`re, 1929), while in La santa verde (The Green Saint, 1919) he produced a volume of remarkable lyrical prose or poemetti in prosa. The theatrical texts published during his lifetime belong to the Futurist period and include La neve (Snow, 1914), considered closer to D’Annunzio’s La fiaccola sotto il moggio (The Light under the Bushel, 1905) than to genuine avant-garde drama, and the short play Caccia all’usignuolo (Hunting the Nightingale), published in 1915 in the collection Teatro futurista (Futurist Theatre), edited by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Carlo Corra, and Emilio Settimelli. The passage from his brief engagement with Futurism to the recovery of the traditional structures of the wellmade comedy is also evident in the philosophical inclinations of his quasi-allegorical dialogue and his recourse to elementary symbolist typology. In particular, there is the sign of his contact with Eleanora Duse in a 1921 production, now missing, of Selvaggio padrone (Savage Master), which later became Il pane degli angeli (The Bread of the Angels, 1940), a work whose expressionist echoes are attributable to Rosso di San Secondo and whose erotic tension fuels a debate between spirit and matter. Govoni’s interest in the theatre persisted during the period between the wars, with a predilection for religious themes, as in La vernice del presepe di Natale (The Varnish of the Nativity Scene, 1939). Some of Govoni’s lyric works influenced contemporary poets, in particular Giuseppe Ungaretti and Montale. The young Montale was fascinated by the analogical equivalences in Govoni, and so it is quite correct to speak of a form of ‘‘govonismo montaliano’’ in Quaderno genovese and in some other poems that mimic Govoni’s musical

CORRADO GOVONI procedures, of which only ‘‘Corno inglese’’ (French Horn), published in Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), survives. Govoni’s presence can also be perceived in Le occasioni (Occasions, 1939), in which the ‘‘simple objects’’ of crepuscolarismo (the bucket that knocks against the well, the mirrors in the room, the weathervane) are transformed by Montale into presences with a strong symbolic and metaphysical character.

Biography Corrado Govoni was born at Ta`mara (Ferrara), on 20 October 1884, to a family of well-to-do farmers, Govoni had no normal scholastic education. In 1895 he went to a private boarding school run by the Salesian Order in Ferrara, where he remained for a short period, after which he devoted himself to agriculture. In 1903 he moved to Florence, where he came in contact with the main literary circles of the time and befriended Sergio Corazzini, Aldo Palazzeschi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and several other intellectuals and men of letters. He collaborated in many periodicals such as Poesia, La Riviera ligure, Lacerba, La Voce. In 1914 he moved to Milan, but he was unable to find a job and was obliged to return to Ferrara, where he found employment at the Municipal Archives. In 1919 he left Ferrara for good and moved to Rome, where he practiced various professions: vice-director of the book section of the Societa` Italiana Autori ed Editori (SIAE) and head of ministerial protocol after World War II. In 1944 his son Aladino was killed at the Fosse Ardeatine near Rome. Govoni died at Lido dei Pini (Rome) on 20 October 1965. DIRK VANDEN BERGHE See also: Futurism Selected Works Collections Poesie (1903–1959), edited by Giovanni Ravegnani, Milan: Mondadori, 1961. Teatro, edited by Anna Folli, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984.

Poetry ‘‘Armonia in grigio et in silenzio,’’ 1903. ‘‘Le fiale,’’ 1903. ‘‘Fuochi d’artifizio,’’ 1905. ‘‘Gli aborti,’’ 1907. ‘‘Poesie elettriche,’’ 1911. ‘‘Rarefazioni e parole in liberta`,’’ 1915. ‘‘Inaugurazione della primavera,’’ 1915; revised, 1920.

‘‘La santa verde,’’ 1919. ‘‘Brindisi alla notte,’’ 1924. ‘‘Il quaderno dei sogni e delle stelle,’’ 1924. ‘‘Il flauto magico,’’ 1932. ‘‘Canzoni a bocca chiusa,’’ 1938 ‘‘Pellegrino d’amore,’’ 1941. ‘‘Govonigiotto,’’ 1943. ‘‘Aladino,’’ 1946 ‘‘Patria d’alto volo,’’ 1953. ‘‘Preghiera al trifoglio,’’ 1953. ‘‘Manoscritto nella bottiglia,’’ 1954. ‘‘Stradario della primavera,’’ 1958. ‘‘La ronda di notte,’’ 1966.

Fiction Anche l’ombra e` sole, 1920. Piccolo veleno color di rosa, 1921. La terra contro il cielo, 1921. La strada sull’acqua, 1923. La cicala e la formica, 1925. Il volo d’amore, 1926. Bomboniera, 1929. La maschera che piange, 1930.

Plays La neve, 1914. La caccia all’usignuolo, 1915. La madonnina dei pastori, 1939. La vernice del presepe di Natale, 1939. Il pane degli angeli, 1940.

Letters Lettere a F. T. Marinetti, 1990.

Further Reading Berardi, Quirino, Govoni, un poeta crepuscolare, Modena: Teic, 1979. Blasucci, Luigi, ‘‘Montale, Govoni e l’oggetto povero’’ (1990), in Gli oggetti di Montale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Corrado Govoni e l’ambiente letterario ferrarese del primo Novecento, Ferrara: Accademia delle Scienze di Ferrara, 1985. Curi, Fausto, Corrado Govoni, Milan: Mursia, 1964. Folli, Anna (editor), Corrado Govoni: Atti delle giornate di studio, Ferrara, 5–7 maggio 1983, Bologna: Cappelli, 1984. Gargiulo, Alfredo, ‘‘Gozzano, Govoni,’’ in Letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. Livi, Franc¸ois, Dai simbolisti ai crepuscolari, Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libreria, 1974. Livi, Franc¸ois, Tra crepuscolarismo e futurismo: Govoni e Palazzeschi, Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libreria, 1980. Mariani, Gaetano, ‘‘Crepuscolari e futuristi,’’ in La vita sospesa, Naples: Liguori, 1978. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Corrado Govoni,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘La morte di Corrado Govoni poeta fanciullo della natura,’’ in Il secondo mestiere. Prose 1920–1974, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Pietropaoli, Antonio, Poesie in liberta`: Govoni, Palazzeschi, Soffici, Naples: Guida, 2003.

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GUIDO GOZZANO

GUIDO GOZZANO (1883–1916) ‘‘Gozzano entro` nel pubblico come poi non avvenne piu` ad alcun poeta: familiarmente, con le mani in tasca’’ (Gozzano appeared in public as no other poet would do: in a familiar way, with his hands in his pockets): With these words, Eugenio Montale appraised the unique position of Guido Gozzano (Sulla poesia, 1976). Turning Gabriele D’Annunzio’s aristocratic myth of the sublime artist and superman on its head, the self-effacing Gozzano proclaimed in his ironic and sing-song verses his shame at being a poet and proceeded to turn all the postromantic cultural refuse cluttering the minds of the fin de sie`cle bourgeoisie into poetry. Writing for the public of newspapers and fashion magazines, Gozzano consciously set himself at the center of the sphere of mass cultural consumption, creating an artistic product for a modern time devoid of aura. Although somewhat reluctant to admit it, he collaborated with the burgeoning film industry that in the second decade of the twentieth century had one of its main centers in Turin. Notwithstanding these extraliterary interests, Gozzano’s importance is tied to his two collections of poems, La via del rifugio (The Road to the Refuge, 1907) and I colloqui (The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems, 1911). Already from 1903 Gozzano had started publishing in various literary magazines, but his first collection constitutes the true start of his career. By the time of La via del rifugio, Gozzano had appropriated and subverted the various conventional poetic languages of his day: the lyricism of D’Annunzio; the domestic sentimentalism of Giovanni Pascoli; the critique of positivist materialism pursued by the poet Arturo Graf, whose philosophical vein finds its reflection in Gozzano’s poems, but with irony and understatement. The collection comprises 30 poems, all composed after 1905. The metrical form most used is the sonnet, but Gozzano introduced new meters, such as couplets of nine- and seven-syllable lines with an internal rhyme, stylistic innovations that give a lightness, an easiness, a ‘‘coraggiosa allegria’’ (courageous happiness) to his poetry, as Alvaro Valentini showed (I piaceri di Gozzano, 1978). In these early compositions, the personal story of the new poetic ‘‘I’’ is firmly introduced. In a radical 876

and surprising move, the subjectivity of the poet is put at a distance, objectified and playfully transformed into a character. Comforted by the melody of a popular nursery rhyme—‘‘Trenta quaranta / tutto il Mondo canta’’ (Thirty forty / the whole World is singing)—that makes a light entertaining game of the World and Fate, the poet announced, eyes closed, lying on the grass: ‘‘e vedo un quadrifoglio / che non raccogliero`’’ (and I see a four-leaf clover / that I will not pick). Thus, from the opening lines, ‘‘La via del rifugio’’ (the eponymous poem opening the collection) articulates a paradigmatic existential stance: renunciation and retreat. And yet, as always in Gozzano’s poetry, irony colors every statement. While expressing pessimism and detachment, the poet’s voice, modulated on the rhythm of children’s rhymes, infuses a contagious playfulness into his grim meditation, as in ‘‘L’avvocato’’ (The Lawyer): ‘‘Ma dunque esisto? O strano! / vive tra il Tutto e il Niente / questa cosa vivente/ detta guidogozzano’’ (But then do I exist? How weird! / between All and Nothing lives / this living thing / called guidogozzano). The use of the folk narrative tradition, of its iterative models for memorization—the very same lines or slight variations often return within the same poem and between different ones—as well as the use of dialogue, are the most original features of Gozzano’s poetry, further indicating its closeness to oral literature and popular cultural consumption. The contamination of genres, already undertaken by D’Annunzio, is crucial to Gozzano’s work. As Pier Paolo Pasolini acutely observed in Descrizioni di descrizioni (1999): ‘‘La poesia di Gozzano e` tutta narrativa . . . se non e` una vera storia che egli racconta, e` comunque una ‘scena’ di vita reale. . . . Gozzano e` il piu` dantesco dei poeti italiani. E cio` appunto perche´ egli non e` un lirico ma un narratore’’ (Gozzano’s poetry is completely narrative . . . if not a story, it is a real life ‘scene’ that he unfolds . . . Gozzano is the most Dantesque of all Italian poets. And this precisely because he is not a lyric poet but a narrator). The sitting room of ‘‘L’amica di nonna Speranza’’ (The Friend of Grandmother Hope) with ‘‘Loreto impagliato e il busto d’Alfieri, di Napoleone, / i fiori in cornice (le buone cose di pessimo gusto!)’’ (The stuffed parrot and the bust

GUIDO GOZZANO of Alfieri and Napoleon, / the framed flowers [the good things in awful taste!]), the visit to the dusty attic with the homely Signorina Felicita, or the dialogue between the child and the ‘‘Cocotte’’ in the eponymous poem of I colloqui, open up theatrical scenarios that unfold with novelistic verve and remain indelibly in the reader’s mind. Alongside the mundane situation and the social cliche´, Gozzano put on the stage his poetic self, and, as in a Baroque Trauerspiel (mourning play), dramatized his own temporality: ‘‘Socchiudo gli occhi, estranio / ai casi della vita. / Sento fra le mie dita / la forma del mio cranio’’ (With eyes closed, estranged / from life’s events / I feel through my finger / the shape of my skull). Conscious of the implacable movement of time, detached from life and from his self, the subjectivity of the poet becomes the site of the story of otherness and dissolution in ways that will not be again pursued within the Italian lyrical tradition. Indeed, in La via del rifugio there is no ‘‘road’’ to the refuge. Gozzano has been staying, as he would stay throughout his poetic production, in a place of estrangement and negation on the side of the road, as in ‘‘Nemesis’’: ‘‘Ne´ voglio piu`, ne´ posso. / Piu` scaltro degli scaltri / dal margine d’un fosso / guardo passare gli altri’’ (I don’t want anymore, nor can I. / More cunning than the cunning / at the edge of a ditch / I watch the others go by). Thus the evils of time, sickness, and death, and the falsity of social conventions dominate the reflection of the poet, and yet he warned: ‘‘Da tempo ho ucciso il tarlo della malinconia. / Inganno la tristezza / con qualche bella favola’’ (Ages ago I killed the worm of melancholy / I trick sadness / with some beautiful fable). Poetry itself is the path, the act of distancing time, the illusion that returns to the first illusion, that childhood dream—‘‘le antiche stampe . . . il minareto e tre colonne infrante’’ (the old engravings . . . the minaret and three broken columns)—the poet used to feed upon. The period spanning 1907 to 1911 was the most productive and difficult in Gozzano’s life: His tuberculosis worsened, his mother was paralyzed, and yet he also started his collaboration with cinema and wrote fables, which he would publish as a collection entitled I tre talisman (The Three Talismans, 1914). He also wrote the poems that would converge into I colloqui. Here the meter is further perfected with the acquisition, in ‘‘Cocotte’’ and ‘‘La signorina Felicita ovvero la Felicita`,’’ of the narrative sestine. Unlike its predecessor, this collection is divided in three sections that, through the titles, hint to a narrative unfolding. As Gozzano

himself suggested, it can be read as an ascent from an unhealthy sensual sadness to a serene idealism or as a more secular novelistic Bildung. The collection is opened and closed by two poems both titled ‘‘I colloqui’’: The first one reiterates the detachment of La via del rifugio, and in the last one the poet, made ‘‘healthy’’ again, decided that ‘‘meglio e` tacere, dileguare in pace’’ (it is better to be silent, disappear in peace). Notwithstanding the expressed desire to be silent, in another poem, ‘‘Pioggia d’Agosto’’ (August Rain), the poet declared he would write again with a voice celebrating nature. Here Gozzano seemed to anticipate the didactic poem ‘‘Epistole Entomologiche’’ (Entomological Letters). The aim of the project—heavily indebted to the Belgian writer, Maurice Maeterlinck—was to sing, through the observation of the lives of various butterflies, of the oneness of the human spirit with Nature’s endless transformations. Possibly because his health worsened or because his irony rejected this assertive terrain, Gozzano never finished the poem. And yet, some of the poems, like the ‘‘Acherontia Atropos,’’ which knocks at dusk on the window of the family room, truly embody Gozzano’s art, an art akin to the butterfly, light, entertaining, gracious, mundane, and yet, without seeming so, a severe harbinger of the imminent passing of the season. A debt yet to be explored is the one with the poet Amalia Guglielminetti, likely muse of the ‘‘Epistole Entomologiche.’’ Beyond the biographical reality of their short romantic involvement, the dialogue Gozzano entertained with this other—a woman, Sister, Lover, Friend—is central to understanding his subject torn between renunciation and the desire to be other. Collected posthumously and still awaiting a critical edition are the short stories Gozzano published throughout his life in various journals and newspapers. These pieces, like the stories inspired by the trip he took to India in 1912 and published after his death under the title Verso la cuna del mondo (Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind, 1917), are of uneven quality, a fact that may be explained by the journalistic occasion of their composition. After the avant-garde’s critique of the cynical poet alienated from the world of action and the misunderstanding of idealist criticism that cast his poetry under the deforming label of ‘‘crepuscolare’’ (twilight), Gozzano has been the object of a reappraisal that started with Montale and continued with critics like Edoardo Sanguineti, Marziano Guglielminetti, and Luca Lenzini. An understanding 877

GUIDO GOZZANO of Gozzano is crucial for a rereading of Italian twentieth-century literature within the frame of the Modernist movement, for which the ironic poet Gozzano may turn out to be a crucial interpreter and a unique protagonist.

Biography Guido Gozzano was born in Turin, 19 December 1883. He enrolled in 1904 in the law faculty in Turin but never concluded his studies. He published poems, prose, and reviews in magazines and journals. In 1907, the year of publication of La via del rifugio, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He had a short-lived relationship with the poet Amalia Guglielminetti. In 1909 his mother was paralyzed. In 1911, Gozzano published I colloqui and started a collaboration with the Catholic journal Il Momento. In the same years, he wrote various scripts for the cinema. In 1912, he traveled to India. He was excused from military service at the start of the war in 1915. Gozzano died in Turin on 9 August 1916. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Collections Poesie e prose, edited by Alberto De Marchi, Milan: Garzanti, 1961. Tutte le poesie, edited by Andrea Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. I sandali della diva: Tutte le novelle, edited by Giuliana Nuvoli, Milan: Serra e Riva, 1983.

Poetry ‘‘La via del rifugio,’’ 1907. ‘‘I colloqui,’’ 1911; as The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems, translated by Michael Palma, 1981; as The Colloquies and Selected Letters, translated by J. G. Nichols, 1987.

Further Reading Carnero, Roberto, Guido Gozzano esotico, Anzio: De Rubeis, 1996. Ciccarelli, Andrea, ‘‘Tra le file dei vili: Il viaggio mancato di Gozzano,’’ Modern Language Notes, 114:1(1999), 106–125. Contorbia, Franco, Il sofista subalpino, Cuneo: L’Arciere, 1980. Cudini, Piero, ‘‘Prefazione,’’ to Un Natale a Ceylon e altri racconti indiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Della Coletta, Cristina, ‘‘Transtextual Patterns: Guido Gozzano between Epic and Elegy in ‘Goa: La Dourada,’’’ in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, edited by Luca Somigli and Mario Moroni, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Di Biagi, Flaminio, Sotto l’arco di Tito: Le ‘‘Farfalle’’di Gozzano, Trento: La Finestra, 1999. Gambacorti, Irene, Storie di cinema e letteratura. Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2003. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Guido Gozzano,’’ in Poeti del Novecento e altre cose, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Tutte le poesie, edited by Andrea Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Introduzione a Gozzano, Bari: Laterza, 1993. Lenzini, Luca, Gozzano, Palermo: Palumbo, 1992. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Gozzano dopo trent’anni,’’ in Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Guido Gozzano, Poesie,’’ in Descrizioni di descrizioni: Saggi sulla letteratura e l’arte, vol.2, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Guido Gozzano: Indagini e letture, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Serra, Renato, ‘‘Le lettere,’’ in Scritti letterari morali e politici, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Savoca, Giuseppe, Tra testo e fantasma: Analisi di poesia da Gozzano a Montale, Rome: Bonacci, 1985. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Una semiotica della ri-lettura: Guido Gozzano, Aldo Palazzeschi, Italo Calvino, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2003. Valentini, Alvaro, I piaceri di Gozzano, Rome: Argileto, 1978.

Fiction I tre talismani, 1914. La principessa si sposa, 1917. L’altare del passato, 1918. L’ultima traccia, 1919.

Travel Literature and Other Verso la cuna del mondo: Lettere dall’India (1912–1913), 1917; as Journey toward the Cradle of Mankind, translated by David Marinelli, 1996. Nell’Oriente favoloso: Lettere dall’India, 2004. San Francesco d’Assisi, 1997.

Letters Lettere d’amore di Guido Gozzano e Amalia Guglielminetti, 1951. Lettere a Carlo Vallini, 1971.

878

I COLLOQUI, 1911 Poems by Guido Gozzano

Between 1907 and 1910, Guido Gozzano composed his second collection of poems in a state of therapeutic isolation because of his tuberculosis.

GUIDO GOZZANO I colloqui (The Colloquies) is a slim volume containing 24 poems. The working title for the collection had been I canti dell’attesa (The Songs of Waiting), and the projected ordering was comprised of four parts. The third section, ‘‘Il riscatto’’ (The Redemption), however, was never realized, leaving the final volume in three parts: ‘‘Il giovenile errore’’ (The Youthful Error), ‘‘Alle soglie’’ (On the Thresholds), and ‘‘Il reduce’’ (The Survivor). A study of the notebooks used for I colloqui reveals Gozzano’s writing process. The poet worked simultaneously, often on the same page, on more than one poem at a time, setting in motion a system of internal quotations and a symphonic effect of assonances and refrains that came to characterize the collection. This strategy of self-quotation allowed Gozzano to distance and contemplate, as if through a screen, his poetic and existential experience. The thematic counterpart to this rhetorical device is the ongoing de´doublements of the lyrical subject into others: the ‘‘brother,’’ ‘‘spettro ideale di me’’ (my ideal spectre) in the eponymous poem, the sick self and the healthy one, and the ‘‘gelido, consapevole di se´’’ (cold, self-conscious) alter-ego of the poem ‘‘Toto` Meru`meni.’’ Quotation, montage, and contamination also constitute the way Gozzano approached literary tradition. The many echoes of Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi, already recuperated though the filter of Pascoli or D’Annunzio, are further distilled through rhythmic or phonic commonplaces voided of any emotional investment, an aesthetic inspired, as in ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’ by the ‘‘Bellezza riposata dei solai / dove il rifiuto secolare dorme!’’ (Quiet beauty of attics / where centuries-old rubbish sleeps!). In a similarly corrosive appropriation, Gozzano chose a variety of traditional meters— sestina, novenario, terza rima—and undermined their lyrical quality by the everyday ‘‘colloquiality’’ of the language. Indeed, it is this conversational tone evoked in the title and the orality pervading the poems that lend formal and structural coherence to the collection. Despite the poet’s intention that I colloqui be read as a story of sin and reconquered spiritual health, the various compositions are only loosely connected with the three section headings. Even if the single poems—like the one about the homely Signorina Felicita in the dusty attic or the child’s encounter with the ‘‘Cocotte’’ living next door— are narrative in structure, the comprehensive unfolding of the collection is strongly antinarrative. The temporality of I colloqui is frozen in a recurrent

staging of a moment of displacement, of belatedness, the moment in which life, literature, and his present and past selves are bypassed. The fixity of time in Gozzano’s text evokes the conventionality of the photographic cliche´. In fact, photos appear frequently in the collection as scorned and yet deeply loved samples of archived life, proof of a past existence and a defense against life’s assaults. In this sense, all the poems express a disengagement from life: ‘‘Giova guarire? Giova che si viva?’’ (What good is healing? What good is living?; ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’). The dominant attitude is one of disenchanted contemplation of past, present, and future, all equally distanced, lost, consumed, as in ‘‘Paolo e Virginia’’: ‘‘La patria perduta / che non conobbi mai, che riconosco’’ (The lost homeland / that I never knew, that I recognize). The new century of technological innovations and political and cultural upheavals disappears in Gozzano under a heap of ‘‘ciarpame/ reietto, cosı` caro alla mia Musa!’’ (forgotten rubbish so dear to my Muse; ‘‘La signorina Felicita’’). For this reason, criticism has spoken of Gozzano as a poet on the cusp of modernism. And yet his first critic, Renato Serra, recognized Gozzano’s momentous contribution in his gesture of ‘‘renewal through impoverishment’’ (Review of I colloqui, 1965). Impoverished by the poet’s irony, literary models, meters, and ideals appear as poor as the poet in authentic experiences, emotions, and interpretation. The modernist crisis staged by Gozzano is not the impossibility of representing reality but rather the impossibility of living in and through representations. The outlook is consistently ironic and cynical and yet, in the last lines of the collection, a remnant of a lyrical world resists the corrosion of irony. There, the image of the child, in a concluding figure of de´doublement, leaves literature behind: ‘‘il fanciullo . . . (che) lasciava la pagina ribelle / per seppellir le rondini insepolte, / per dare un’erba alle zampine delle / disperate cetonie capovolte . . . .’’ (The child . . . [who] abandoned the rebellious page / to bury the unburied swallows / to give a blade of grass / to desperate upturned beetles; ‘‘I colloqui’’), offering a glimpse of authenticity that symbolically embodies the gesture performed by I colloqui as a whole. The childish act of piety, both an inauguration and a burial, foreshadows in images from the animal world another burial: the death of the figure of the poet as it had previously been understood. GIULIANA MINGHELLI 879

GUIDO GOZZANO Editions First edition: I colloqui. Liriche di Guido Gozzano, Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1911. Other editions: I colloqui e altre poesie, in Opere di Guido Gozzano, vol. 2, Milan: Treves, 1935; in Opere, edited by Carlo Calcaterra and Alberto de Marchi, Milan: Garzanti, 1948; in Poesie e prose, edited by Alberto de Marchi, Milan: Garzanti, 1968; in Poesie, edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973; in Tutte le poesie, critical edition by Andrea Rocca, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Translations: as The Man I Pretend to Be: The Colloquies and Selected Poems, translated by Michael Palma, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; as The Colloquies and Selected Letters, translated by J. G. Nichols, Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1987.

Further Reading Lenzini, Luca, ‘‘Il libro di passato. Sull’istanza narrativa dei Colloqui,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 12:30 (1985), 275–307. Longhi, Silvia, ‘‘Il tutto e le parti nel sistema di un canzoniere,’’ Strumenti critici, 39–40 (1979), 265–300. Lorenzini, Niva, ‘‘I colloqui di Guido Gozzano,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, vol. 4, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Marra, Monica, ‘‘Guido Gozzano tra ‘polifonia’ ed emotivita`,’’ Lingua e stile, 24:2 (1989), 307–327. Rocca, Andrea, ‘‘Fra le carte di Guido Gozzano: materiali autografi per I colloqui,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 35 (1977), 395–471. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Poesia e tecnica di Gozzano,’’ in Guido Gozzano. Indagini e letture, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Serra, Renato, Review of I colloqui, in Ezio Raimondi, Il lettore di provincia: Renato Serra, Florence: Le Monnier, 1964.

CARLO GOZZI (1720–1806) A playwright who took an active part in the cultural life of eighteenth-century Venice, Carlo Gozzi owed his fortune to a cycle of theatrical Fiabe (Fables) that combine the spectacles of the old commedia dell’arte companies with a renewed taste for the ‘‘marvelous.’’ Gozzi was the last genial defender of the traditional Italian theater against the theatrical reform of Goldoni. Coming from a noble, but not rich, family, Gozzi was self-taught and so studied the ‘‘irregulars’’ Luigi Pulci, Il Burchiello, and Francesco Berni. His youthful compositions have remained unpublished: Berlinghieri, Don Chisciotte, Gonella, and La filosofia morale (Moral Philosophy). His Saggio di novelle (Presentation of Short Stories, 1747) may date to this period. A supporter of a stylistic variety, invective, and satire, he was among the founders, together with his brother Gasparo, of the Accademia dei Granelleschi (1747). His aptitude for satirizing customs, characters, and cultural ‘‘novelties’’ is evident in La tartana degli influssi per l’anno bisestile (The Tartan of Influences for Leap Year, 1756). The satire, written in various meters, attacks the culture and politics of the Enlightenment, as well as the literature that supports it. Its two main characters, recognizably drawn after Pietro Chiari and Carlo Goldoni, are depicted as awkward duelists and verbose men of letters 880

engaged in a controversy over the so-called reform of the theater. Goldoni’s reply, All’illustrissimo signor avvocato Giuseppe Alcaini (To the Most Illustrious Lawyer Giuseppe Alcaini, 1757) ignited the famous controversy that ensued. Gozzi responded with La scrittura contestativa al taglio della tartana (The Writing Protesting against Cutting the Tartan, 1758), which Goldoni then answered with La tavola rotonda (The Round Table, 1758). Gozzi answered back with I sudori d’Imeneo (The Labors of Hymen, 1759). At this stage the controversy centered on a prose work, which was censored and only published later, called Il teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino (The Comic Theater at the Pilgrim’s Tavern, 1805). Goldoni was portrayed as a ‘‘mostro, o chimera’’ (‘‘monster, or chimera’’) with four faces that impersonated the stock comic characters of the maschera: lovers, historical figures, and realistic characters. Gozzi criticized Goldoni’s La putta onorata (The Honored Whore, 1749) and the Buona moglie (The Good Wife, 1749) for portraying the nobles as grotesques, having servants speak like noblemen, and depriving the maschera stock comic characters of their magic. In the same year Gozzi began writing La Marfisa bizzarra (The Bizarre Marfisa, 1772), in which the heroine of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s chivalric romance transforms herself into a capricious lady. The paladin

CARLO GOZZI Dodone, a figure for the author, delivers judgment on characters and events, while Goldoni and Chiari, represented as knights, are again portrayed as confused. La Marfisa bizzarra renewed the form of the mock epic poem in the tradition of Berni and Giuseppe Parini, whom Gozzi explicitly mentions in his preface. When Antonio Sacchi, the famous Truffaldino of Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni (Servant of Two Masters, 1746), returned to Venice, Gozzi received him by writing Canto ditirambico de’ partigiani del Sacchi Truffaldino (A Dithyramb Poem of the Partisans of Sacchi Truffaldino, 1761). He began to make notations of scenes and ideas that eventually led to L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love of the Three Oranges), the first of ten scenic Fiabe dedicated to Sacchi, which premie`red in 1761 at the San Samuele Theater. Written with little dialogue, the fables recount how the sad prince Tartaglia is bound by a spell. His life depends on finding the three oranges that are also being sought by Morgana and her helper, the awkward magician Celio (both caricatures of Chiari and Goldoni). Thanks to the loyal Truffaldino, the prince will find salvation and happiness in his marriage to Ninetta. The plot, which allowed Gozzi to stage spectacular visual tricks, was inspired by a novella by Giambattista Basile, which blends folklore, allegory, and parody. Aware of having helped create a new genre, Gozzi turned from overt satire and began writing extended dialogues. Again drawing from Basile and from an eighteenth-century French short story based on Eastern tales, he wrote Il corvo (The Crow, 1761), the story of Millo, a spellbound, melancholic King of Frattombrosa, and Annilla, the daughter of a necromancer and the only person able to save his life. Then came Il re cervo (The Stag King, 1762), which recounts the love between Deramo, King of Serendippo, and Angela, the daughter of Pantaloon. Their love is opposed by Tartaglia, the first minister, and tested when a spell put on the king turns him into the stag of the title. Both works develop the roles and define the figurative and poetic value of the maschera stock comic characters. With the success of Turandot (1762), which minimizes the coups de the´aˆtre in telling the exotic love story between the beautiful and badtempered princess of China and the bold and unknown prince of the Tartars, determined to marry her at the risk of his own life, Sacchi moved to the more spacious Sant’Angelo theater. There, in October of the same year, he staged La donna serpente (The Snake Lady), in which a fairy princess falls in love with a mortal, defying the laws of her magic

world. She must make her spouse curse her and force him to undertake difficult tests to win her back. The fairy tale motif of the search for happiness was the key to the success of his subsequent works: Zobeide (1763), I pitocchi fortunati (The Lucky Beggars, 1764), Il mostro turchino (The Blue Monster, 1764), and L’augellino belverde (The Green Bird, 1765). The Fiabe conclude with Zeim re de’ geni (Zeim King of the Spirits, 1765), in which the ‘‘marvelous’’ again becomes the means to penetrate and change reality. With the cycle of tales at an end and Goldoni and Chiari having left Venice in 1762, Gozzi devoted himself to the fascinating and spectacular stories of the Spanish writers Pedro Calderon de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, and Juan de Matos Fragoso. The tragicomedies followed, among them La donna vendicativa (The Vindictive Woman, 1767), La caduta di donna Elvira (The Fall of Donna Elvira, 1768), Le due notti affannose (Two Troubled Nights, 1771), La malia nella voce (The Enchanting Voice, 1774), and Il moro di corpo bianco (The Moor with the White Body, 1775). These works are set in exotic environments and portray exceptional happenings. In 1771 significant changes took place in Sacchi’s troupe, which moved to the San Luca theater. Darbes, the maschera Pantaloon, left. Teodora Ricci, the troupe’s first woman, arrived and started a muchtalked-about relationship with Gozzi that lasted six years. Gozzi now wrote for Ricci, beginning with La donna innamorata di vero (The Woman in Love with Truth, 1771), a comedy with intreccio bizzarro (bizarre intrigue) that did not achieve its expected success. He then wrote La principessa filosofa (The Princess Philosopher, 1772), without maschera characters, and, most important of all, Le droghe d’amore (The Potions of Love, 1777), which caused a scandal because it caricatured, in the figure of Don Adonis, a lover of Teodora Ricci, who was forced to leave Venice. Ricci also left, but Gozzi would later compose one last comedy for her, L’amore assottiglia il cervello (Love Makes the Brain Thin, 1782). In the meantime, Gozzi decided to publish his own works. He first published the Fiabe, followed by Opere (1772–1774), a collection of his tragicomedies that included the famous Ragionamento ingenuo (Naı¨ve Reasoning) that argued against the prevailing drame larmoyant. Then came a second complete edition, Opere edite e inedite (1801–1804 and 1805). Finally he wrote his Memorie inutili (Useless Memoirs, 1797–1798), in response to libelous remarks by Teodora Ricci’s lover. Without minimizing the controversial events of his own life, he spoke up for the idea, so dear to the romantics, 881

CARLO GOZZI of dramatic art as a disinterested and ‘‘useless’’ activity. The ‘‘fortune’’ of Gozzi’s reputation, which has rested on the reception of his Fiabe, is emblematic and paradoxical. In Italy he was attacked by Giuseppe Baretti, Pietro Napoli Signorelli, and Francesco Albergati Capacelli, even though the latter imitated him. In the early nineteenth century, Ugo Foscolo and Niccolo` Tommaseo continued to criticize him, while outside Italy his Fiabe enjoyed extraordinary success. Translated into German (1777–1779), they fascinated the Sturm und Drang romantics, who saw in his works the triumph of spectacle and the mixing of exotic elements with a ‘‘popular’’ vocation. Lessing, the Schlegels (Friedrich compared him to Shakespeare), Tieck, Goethe (who staged Turandot in a translation by Schiller in 1802), and Hoffmann continued to value him. He enjoyed a similar success in France, where Madame de Stae¨l, Philare`te Chasles, and Alfred de Musset preferred him to Goldoni. Despite the late Italian recovery by Francesco De Sanctis and, subsequently, by Benedetto Croce, his most enthusiastic supporters remained Wagner and Schopenhauer. In the twentieth century, the Russian directors of formalist tastes preferred him to Stanislavskij’s realism. Vsevolod Mejerchol’d named the magazine Ljubov’k trem apel’sinam (1914–1916) after L’amore delle tre melarance. Evgenij Vachtangov staged a historic Turandot in Moscow (1922), and Aleksa`ndr Blok named another magazine after L’augellino, Zele¨naja pticˇka (1922), shortly before ideologues overthrew their judgments of Gozzi, whom they regarded as a reactionary aristocrat.

Biography Carlo Gozzi was born in Venice on December 13, 1720, the son of Count Iacopo Antonio and Angela Tiepolo, into a family of ten children. His studies were irregular, with the family in financial straits. Between 1740 and 1744 he was a volunteer in the Venetian army in Dalmatia. He wrote theater pieces for the company of Antonio Sacchi, first working at the San Samuele theater (1761) and then at the Sant’ Angelo (1762) and finally at the San Luca theater (1771). Between 1771 and 1776 he had a relationship with the actress Teodora Ricci, to whom he dedicated numerous comedies. Between 1772 and 1774 he published the eight volumes of the Colombani edition of his Opere; two more were published with the publishers Foglierini (1787) and Curti Vitto (1792). He prepared a 882

second extended edition of 14 volumes for Zanardi (1801–1804) to which a fifteenth was added in 1805, with nontheatrical works. Carlo Gozzi died in Venice on April 4, 1806. ROBERTO CUPPONE See also: Commedia dell’arte Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Venice: Colombani, 1772–1774. Opere edite e inedite, 15 vols., Venice: Zanardi, 1801–1805. Opere: Teatro e polemiche teatrali, edited by Giuseppe Petronio, Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Five Tales for the Theatre (The Raven, The King Stag, Turandot, The Serpent Woman, The Green Bird), edited and translated by Albert Bermel and Ted Emery, Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Fiabe teatrali, edited by Alberto Beniscelli, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Novelle, edited by Ricciarda Ricorda, Venice: Marsilio, 2001.

Plays L’amore delle tre melarance (produced 1761), 1772–1774; as The Love of the Three Oranges, translated by John Louis Di Gaetani, 1988. Il corvo (produced 1761), 1772–1774. La donna serpente (produced 1762), 1772–1774; as The Snake Lady, translated by John Louis Di Gaetani, 1988. Il re cervo (produced 1762), 1772–1774; as The King Stag, translated by Carl Wildman, 1958. Turandot (produced 1762), 1772–1774; as Calaf: A Rejected Drama, translated by Chrysalia, 1826; as Turandot, Princess of China, translated from the German of Schiller by Archer T. Gurney, 1836; as Turandot, translated by John Louis Di Gaetani, 1988. Zobeide (produced 1763), 1772–1774. Il mostro turchino (produced 1764), 1772–1774; as The Blue Monster, translated by Edward Joseph Dent, 1951. I pitocchi fortunati (produced 1764), 1772–1774. L’augellino belverde (produced 1765), 1772–1774; as The Green Bird, translated and adapted by John D. Mitchell, 1985. Zeim re de’ geni (produced 1765), 1772–1774. La donna vendicativa (produced 1767), 1772–1774. La caduta di donna Elvira (produced 1768), 1772–1774. Il pubblico segreto (produced 1769), 1772–1774. La donna innamorata di vero (produced 1771), 1772–1774. Le due notti affannose (produced 1771), 1772–1774. La principessa filosofa (produced 1772), 1801–1803. I due fratelli nemici (produced 1773), 1801–1803. La malia nella voce (produced 1774), 1801–1803. Il moro di corpo bianco (produced 1775), 1801–1803. Le droghe d’amore (produced 1777), 1801–1803. Il metafisico (produced 1778), 1801–1803. Bianca contessa di Melfi (produced 1779), 1801–1803. L’amore assottiglia il cervello (produced 1782), 1801–1803. Cimene Pardo (produced 1786), 1801–1803. La figlia dell’aria (produced 1786), 1801–1803.

GASPARO GOZZI Essays Saggio di novelle, 1747. La tartana degli influssi per l’anno bisestile, 1756. La scrittura contestativa al taglio della tartana, 1758. I sudori d’Imeneo, 1759. La Marfisa bizzarra, 1772. Ragionamento ingenuo, 1772–1774. Memorie inutili, 1797; as The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, translated by John Addington Symonds, 2 vols., 1890; as Useless Memoirs, translated by John Addington Symonds, 1962. Il teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino, 1805.

Further Reading Alberti, Carmelo (editor), Carlo Gozzi scrittore di teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1996. Beniscelli, Alberto, La finzione del fiabesco. Studi sul teatro di Carlo Gozzi, Casale Monferrato: Marietti, 1986. Bosisio, Paolo, Carlo Gozzi e Goldoni. Una polemica letteraria con versi inediti e rari, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Il carattere delle fiabe di Carlo Gozzi,’’ in La letteratura italiana del Settecento, Bari: Laterza, 1949.

De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, Naples: Morano, 1870–1871. Di Gaetani, John Louis, Carlo Gozzi: A Life in the 18th Century Venetian Theatre, an Afterlife in Opera, London: Jefferson, 2000. Guthmu¨ller, Bodo, and Wolfgang Osthoff (editors), Carlo Gozzi, Letteratura e musica. Atti del convegno internazionale, Venezia 11–12 ottobre 1995, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Luciani, Ge´rard, Carlo Gozzi ou l’enchanteur de´senchante´, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires, 2001. Ricco`, Laura, ‘‘Parrebbe un romanzo.’’ Polemiche editoriali e linguaggi teatrali ai tempi di Goldoni, Chiari, Gozzi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Rusack, Hedwig Hoffmann, Gozzi in Germany: A Survey of the Rise and Decline of the Gozzi Vogue in Germany and Austria, with Especial Reference to the German Romanticists, New York: Columbia University Germanic Studies, 1930. Starobinski, Jean, ‘‘Ironie et me´lancolie: Gozzi, Hoffmann, Kierkegaard,’’ in Sensibilita` e razionalita` nel Settecento, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 1, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Taviani, Ferdinando, and Mirella Schino (editors), Carlo Gozzi, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2000.

GASPARO GOZZI (1713–1786) Gasparo Gozzi, journalist and writer, played a leading role in the cultural debates of eighteenthcentury Venice. Although known as a poet, essayist, translator, and theatrical impresario, he is most remembered as the founder and manager of three periodicals, La gazzetta veneta, L’osservatore Veneto, and Il sognatore italiano. The older brother of the famous dramatist Carlo Gozzi, Gasparo served his apprenticeship in a literary salon. Between 1731 and 1735, Antonio Sforza and the brothers Niccolo` and Anton Federico Seghezzi urged him toward Arcadian poetry, while his wife Luisa Bergalli, a poet and playwright, directed him toward Petrarch. He served as editor of Antonio Sforza’s Rime (Rhymes, 1736), for which he wrote a biographical essay. He went on to write letters, sonnets, and farcical verses, but the main work of this period involved a collaboration with the Venetian publisher Francesco Storti. His editorial work also included the ten-volume Poesie

drammatiche (Dramatic Poems, 1744) of Venetian librettist and critic Apostolo Zeno. In 1747, Gozzi, with his brother Carlo and other noblemen, founded the Accademia dei Granelleschi. He took the leading role in moderating the literary controversies, especially those revolving around Carlo Goldoni, then raging in Venetian cultural circles. One important work in this line is his Giudizio degli antichi poeti sopra la moderna censura di Dante attribuita ingiustamente a Virgilio (Judgment of the Ancient Poets on the Modern Censure of Dante Unjustly Attributed to Virgil, 1758), which became known as Difesa di Dante (Defense of Dante), in which Gozzi offered the first proto-romantic reading of Dante’s poetry in its historical context. Gozzi made his debut as a playwright at the San Samuele theater with adaptations of two tragedies by Hilaire-Bernard de Requeleyne Longepierre: Elettra (1743) and Medea (1746). His 883

GASPARO GOZZI passion for the theater and hope of profits led to his acquiring, with Bergalli’s help, the Sant’Angelo theater. But the verbose, moralistic French dramas, adapted from Voltaire and Destouches, that he staged failed to attract the Venetian public. Girolamo Medebach took over the company in 1748 and made Goldoni the company’s playwright. Gozzi’s Edipo (Oedipus, 1749) won Goldoni’s approval, however. Gozzi then tried his hand at melodrama with L’isola d’amore (The Island of Love), which premiered in 1752 at the San Moise` theater, and I tre matrimoni (The Three Marriages), staged at the San Samuele theater in 1756. He also created new adaptations of Voltaire’s Zaira (1749) and Marianna (1751). When the theatrical controversy between Goldoni and Pietro Chiari was at its height, Gozzi took aim at Chiari and so earned the sympathy of Goldoni, who dedicated the comedy L’impostore (The Impostor) to him. Finally, Gozzi wrote three ‘‘scenic representations’’ for the San Giovanni Crisostomo theater: Marco Polo (premie`re 1755) and Costantinopoli (Constantinople, premie`re 1755), better known as Enrico Dandolo, both of which take famous Venetians as their subject; and Antiochia (premie`re Antioch, 1758). This ‘‘historical’’ trilogy marked the end of his active work in the theater. He afterward became a trustee of the published work of Molie`re and translated the dramatic poem La morte di Adamo (The Death of Adam) by Friedrick Klopstock, which appeared in didactic journal/novel Il mondo morale. Gozzi went on to publish two volumes of Lettere diverse (Miscellaneous Letters, 1750–1752), with the significant title page that indicated that they were serious, facetious, capricious, letters, dealing with various moral points, and Sermoni (Sermons, 1763), a series of satires in verse. These works announced Gozzi’s new phase as a journalist. With financial help he began his first newspaper, the La gazzetta veneta (1760–1762), modeled on Addison and Steele’s The Spectator and The Tatler, in which Gozzi commented on Venetian customs, social types, and morality. His didactic moralism led him to create a second periodical, Il mondo morale (1760–1761), in which he combined elements of the newspaper and the novel to create a kind of moral novel in installments. The lack of success of these ventures did not prevent him from starting a third, more explicitly journalistic paper, L’osservatore veneto (1761–1762), in which he wrote more as a reporter or ‘‘observer’’ of reality. The 18 anonymous numbers of Il sognatore italiano (1768), a strongly anti-Enlightenment and conservative 884

paper, are also attributed to him. Gozzi’s attitudes toward Venice and Italian literature were quite mixed: He defended Venetian history but was disillusioned by its institutions; he loved the highest examples of Italian literary genius but was always drawn to the literary novelties coming from France.

Biography Gasparo Gozzi was born in Venice on December 4, 1713, the first of 11 children. He went to college in Murano and attended courses on mathematics and law in Venice. In 1738 he married Luisa Bergalli, with whom he had five children. He moved to Visinale, near Pordenone (1739) for financial reasons. Back in Venice, he was appointed to transcribe the catalog of the Library of San Marco (1754). Following a relationship with Marianna Mastraca, he lived alone for a short period. In 1762 he was made superintendent for prints and literary subjects at the Studio of Padua; in 1764 he was the superintendent for prints in Venice. He made the acquaintance of Caterina Dolfin, a noblewoman who stood by him in his final years. Between 1770 and 1775 he was involved in the reform of the Venetian school system: He elaborated a reform for the University of Padua and a project for lay public schools to replace those run by the Jesuits. The death of his wife (1779) and his own hypochondria led to a failed suicide attempt. In 1780 he married Sara Cenet, whom he had met in the house of Marianna Mastraca and who had served as his housekeeper since 1757. He moved to Padua, where he died on December 27, 1786. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Collections Opere in versi e in prosa, 6 vols., Venice: Occhi, 1758. Opere in versi e in prosa, 12 vols., edited by A. Salmistro, 1794. Opere, edited by A. Dalmistro, Padua: Tipografia della Minerva, 1818. Scritti di G. Gozzi con giunta d’inediti e rari, 3 vols., edited by Niccolo` Tommaseo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1849. Prose scelte e sermoni, edited by P. Pompati, Milan: Vallardi, 1914. Scritti scelti, edited by Nicola Mangini, Turin: UTET, 1960.

Plays Edipo, 1749. Constantinopoli (Enrico Dandolo), (produced 1755), 1758. Antiochia (premie`re 1758).

ARTURO GRAF Poetry ‘‘Favole esopiane,’’ 1748. ‘‘Rime piacevoli d’un moderno autore,’’ 1751. ‘‘Sermoni,’’ 1763.

Edited Works Antonio Sforza, Rime, 1736. Iacopo Nardi, Il segretario principiante, 1740. Apostolo Zeno, Poesie drammatiche, 10 vols., 1744. Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia, 1757. Giuseppe Baretti, Poesie piacevoli, 1764.

Translations Voltaire, Marianna, 1751. Teatro comico francese, 1754. Jean-Franc¸ois Marmontel, Novelle morali, 1762.

Other Della letteratura veneziana, 1752 (with Marco Foscarini). Lettere diverse, 1750–1752; edited by Fabio Soldini, 1999. Giudizio degli antihi poeti sopra la moderna censura di Dante attribuita ingiustamente a Virgilio, 1758.

Further Reading Amato, Marco, ‘‘‘Un libro cominciato e non finito’: l’attivita` giornalistica di Gasparo Gozzi,’’ Studi settecenteschi, 15 (1995): 163–234. Capaci, Bruno, ‘‘Lo stomaco di carta. Bagni termali e patologie mondane nelle lettere di Caterina Dolfin e Gasparo Gozzi,’’ Intersezioni, 16:2 (1996): 291–307. Crotti, Ilaria, and Ricciarda Ricorda (editors), Gasparo Gozzi: il lavoro di un intellettuale nel Settecento veneziano. Atti del convegno (Venezia-Pordenone 4–6 dicembre 1886), Padua: Antenore, 1989. Fido, Franco, ‘‘Gasparo Gozzi e la ricerca della felicita`,’’ Yearbook of Italian Studies, 8 (1989): 20–31. Ricco`, Laura,‘‘Parrebbe un romanzo.’’ Polemiche editoriali e linguaggi teatrali ai tempi di Goldoni, Chiari, Gozzi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Ricorda, Ricciarda, ‘‘Gasparo e Carlo Gozzi,’’ in Il ‘‘Mondo vivo.’’ Aspetti del romanzo, del teatro e del giornalismo nel Settecento italiano, edited by Ilaria Crotti, Piermario Vescovo, and Ricciarda Ricorda, Padua: Antenore, 2001.

ARTURO GRAF (1848–1913) Influential literary critic and poet, Arturo Graf is an interesting example of a turn-of-the-century intellectual. His heterogeneous cultural background provided the context for his poetic and critical perspective, a diversity evident in a childhood spent in Athens, Trieste, and Bralia in Romania. Graf’s most notable works were collections of verse that illustrate the predominant poetic taste of that period. The French Symbolists and German Romantics play an important role in his poetic achievements, although his poetry is often enriched by Positivist reasoning and ironic posture. His lyrics reflect a strong subjective perspective; even his declaration of poetics, entitled Prometeo nella poesia (Prometheus in Poetry, 1880), which was released after his first major book of verses, Poesie e novelle di gioventu` (Poems and Tales of Youth, 1876), is a clear defense of such subjectivism. In other critical writings, especially Dello spirito poetico dei nostri tempi (On the Poetic Spirit of Our Times, 1877), Graf believed that poetry was not threatened by scientific developments but that it could incorporate them as well. Thus the dynamics between science and the arts was symbiotic in nature, not antagonistic. His best-known collection of

lyrics, Medusa (1880), relies primarily on images taken from s symbolist repertory. It was then followed by Dopo il tramonto (After the Sunset, 1890), Le Danaidi (Danaides, 1897), Morgana (1901), Poemetti drammatici (Dramatic Poems, 1905), and Le rime della selva (Rhymes of the Wood, 1906), which became theater dialogues. Graf’s poetry shows a pessimistic perspective that owes much to Giacomo Leopardi. Indeed Leopardi’s central role in defining Graf’s poetics is also confirmed in his seminal article ‘‘Una sorgente di pessimismo del Leopardi’’ (A Source of Leopardi’s Pessimism), published in the journal Nuova antologia in 1890. Furthermore, Graf’s verse is often melancholy in tone, existentially unsettled. This is especially true in Le rime della selva, addressed ‘‘alle Ombre, ai Silenzi, all’Anima occulta della Selva Nera’’ (to Shadows, to Silence, to the Hidden Soul of the Black Wood). Critics such as Benedetto Croce have not failed to remark that Graf’s poetic production has little relevance to his theoretical thinking. Graf’s partially autobiographic novel, Il riscatto (Redemption, 1901), reflects the author’s personal tragedies (his brother Ottone’s suicide), which 885

ARTURO GRAF brought him closer to religion, as the subsequent Ecco Homo (1908), a collection of aphorisms and parables, also attests. In pleasant prose style, Il riscatto recounts the life of protagonist Aurelio Agolanti from early childhood into his thirties. The character struggles with an uncertain future and the burden of his family legacy, when his discovery of his real parents unveils a dynasty whereby young men between the ages of 30 and 35 are struck by an irresistible suicidal tendency. According to his father’s will (his father committed suicide), Aurelio was adopted by relatives in order to conceal these family roots. A series of events alerts him to the truth, however, and compels him to face his terrible destiny. He unsuccessfully tries to avoid this destiny by means of science: He reads Ribot’s and Galten’s works on psychological and physical inheritance and undergoes several hypnosis sessions. Helpless and alone, he finally accepts fate when suddenly a woman named Viviana saves him: The power of love seems to defeat both science and fate. Graf ended his novel emphatically paraphrasing Virgil’s famous verse Omnia vincit amor (Love wins all). Graf’s other essential production was critical, connected contemporary intellectual issues; and he founded, with Rodolfo Renier and Francesco Novati, the prestigious Giornale storico della letteratura italiana in 1883. Works such as his inaugural lecture at the University of Turin Di una trattazione scientifica della storia letteraria (On a Scientific Treatment of Literary History, 1877) and La bancarotta della scienza (The Bankruptcy of Science, 1895) display the prominent role of Positivism in his cultural framework. His most enduring contributions were, however, erudite historical works, in particular those that reflect his interest in medieval culture: Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del Medio Evo (Rome in the Memory and Imagination of the Middle Ages, 1882), Miti leggende e superstizioni nel Medio Evo (Myths, Legends, and Superstitions in the Middle Ages, 1892–1893), as well as L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Anglomania and the English Influence in Italy in the 18th Century, 1911). In these works, Graf paid close attention to historical detail, but such a focus on the particular also limited these essays, along with analysis that was too narrowly scientific. In spite of his Positivistic ideas, a wider perspective was present in his most literary works, Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi (1898), and Preraffaelliti, simbolisti ed esteti (Pre-Raphaelites, Symbolists and Aesthetes, 1897). 886

Biography Arturo Graf was born in Athens (Greece), on January 19, 1848, the son of a German father and an Italian mother. He moved to Italy, 1851, but was forced to leave Trieste because of family setbacks after the death of his father, 1855. After spending his childhood in Bralia (Romania), he moved to Naples, where Antonio Labriola influenced his philosophical and ideological (Marxist) thinking, 1863. He met Michail Bakunin in Naples, 1868. He obtained a law degree from the University of Naples, 1870. Graf was hospitalized in Vienna because of an ophthalmic desease, 1873. He obtained qualification as a teacher in Rome, 1875, and began to teach at the University of Turin, 1876. He wrote articles for Critica sociale and Nuova antologia, 1880. He was appointed professor of Italian literature at the University of Turin, 1882–1907. Along with Novati and Renier, he cofounded the Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 1883. He married Sofia Loescher Rauchenegger, 1893. Graf’s brother Ottone committed suicide, 1894. Graf died in Turin on May 30, 1913. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Poesie, edited by Ferdinando Neri, forward by Vittorio Cian, Turin: Chiantore, 1922. Opere critiche, 4 vols., Turin: Chiantoe, 1925–1927.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie e novelle di gioventu`,’’ 1876. ‘‘Medusa,’’ 1880. ‘‘Dopo il tramonto,’’ 1890. ‘‘Le Danaidi,’’ 1897. ‘‘Morgana,’’ 1901. ‘‘Poemetti drammatici,’’ 1905. ‘‘Le rime della selva,’’ 1906. ‘‘Poesie (1893–1906),’’ 1915.

Fiction Il riscatto, 1901. Ecce Homo, 1908.

Critical Writing Dell’epica neolatina primitiva, 1876. Dello spirito poetico dei nostri tempi, 1877. Di una trattazione scientifica della storia letteraria, 1877. Provenza e Italia, 1877. Storia letteraria e comparazione, 1877. Studi drammatici, 1878. La leggenda del paradiso terrestre, 1878. Prometeo nella poesia, 1880. La leggenda dell’amore, 1881.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del Medio Evo, 1882. Cavalieri ed animali, 1884. L’insegnamento classico nelle scuole secondarie, 1887. Attraverso il Cinquecento, 1888. La crisi letteraria, 1888. Il diavolo, 1889; as Story of the Devil, translated by Edward Noble Stone, 1931. Questioni di critica, 1889. I precursori del barone di Mu¨nchausen, 1890. Una sorgente di pessimismo del Leopardi, 1890. Miti, leggende e superstizioni nel Medio Evo, 1892–1893. Il tramonto delle leggende, 1892. La bancarotta della scienza, 1895. Preraffaelliti, simbolisti ed esteti, 1897. Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi, 1898. Il canto XXVIII del Purgatorio, 1902. Victor Hugo cent’anni dalla nascita, 1902. Per una fede (con un saggio sul Santo di Antonio Fogazzaro), 1906. Per la nostra cultura. Un discorso e tre saggi, 1907. L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII, 1911.

Other Lettere a un amico triestino, edited by Baccio Ziliotto, 1951. Lettere a Vittorio Cian, 1996. Confessioni di un maestro: scritti su cultura e insegnamento con lettere inedite, edited by Stefania Signorini, 2002.

Further Reading Allasia, Clara (editor), Arturo Graf militante, Turin: Scriptorium, 1998.

Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Arturo Graf,’’ in Poeti minori dell’Ottocento, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1958. Borghese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Arturo Graf,’’ in Studi di letterature moderne, Milan: Treves, 1915. Calcaterra, Carlo, ‘‘Il sentimento del mistero nella poesia di Arturo Graf,’’ in Studi critici, Asti: Taglieri and Raspi, 1911. Cesareo, Giovanni Alfredo, Critica militante, Messina: Trimarchi, 1907. Cian, Vittorio, Arturo Graf, Turin: Bocca, 1918. Cian, Vittorio, ‘‘Graf nel primo centenario della nascita’’ (1948), in Scritti di erudizione e di storia letteraria, Siena: Maia, 1951. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1914. De Liguori, Girolamo, I baratri della ragione. Arturo Graf e la cultura del secondo Ottocento, Manduria: P. Lacaita, 1986. Defendi, Adrienne S., ‘‘Arturo Graf ’s Medusa: Toward a Demystification of Myth,’’ Italica, 77:1 (2000), 26–44. Farinelli, Arturo, Critici del mio tempo, Galatina: Tipografia Vergine, 1946. Lonardi, Gilberto, Arturo Graf, il lavoro perduto, la rima, Padua: Marsilio, 1971. Momigliano, Attilio, ‘‘Graf critico,’’ in Ultimi studi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1954. Morandi, Maria, Arturo Graf, Rome: Mondadori, 1921. Petrocchi, Giorgio, Scrittori piemontesi del secondo Ottocento, Turin: Silva, 1948. Pirandello, Luigi, Saggi, poesie e scritti vari, Milan: Mondadori, 1977. Raimondi, Ezio, Anatomie secentesche, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1966. Renier, Rodolfo, Arturo Graf, Turin: Paravia, 1913.

ANTONIO GRAMSCI (1891–1937) Widely acknowledged as one of the most innovative and influential Italian Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century, Antonio Gramsci was introduced to socialism between 1908 and 1911 by his brother Gennaro, a trade union official and a member of the PSI or Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party). At that time, he also became familiar with the contributors of the journal La Voce, which included the neo-idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce and the radical politician and historian Gaetano Salvemini. Yet, the young Gramsci’s interest lay more in Sardinian nationalism, and it was only in 1913, after he had relocated to Turin to

further his studies, that he joined the PSI and began contributing essays on cultural topics and commentaries on national and international events to the socialist journals Avanti! and Il grido del popolo. In 1915, despite the prospect of a promising career as a scholar of glottology and linguistics, Gramsci left the university and engaged in militant activism. Convinced that the agency of the proletariat could change historical course, he became involved in educational activities for working classes, delivering lectures on the writings of Karl Marx, the Paris Commune, and other topics relevant to the socialist struggle. 887

ANTONIO GRAMSCI It was this same belief in the agency of the proletariat that led Gramsci to support Italy’s intervention in World War I. Contrary to the majority of the members of the PSI, who remained resolutely neutral, Gramsci saw in the conflict an occasion to widen the socialist cause by way of the mass mobilization of the proletariat. The victory of the Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 and the establishment of ‘‘soviets,’’ that is, associations of workers, peasants, and soldiers, increased Gramsci’s confidence that the demise of capitalism could occur via the people’s will. Therefore, he endorsed the methods and objectives of the Russian leaderships, writing approvingly of the Russian revolution in ‘‘La rivoluzione contro il Capitale’’ (The Revolution Against Capital ), published in Avanti! (24 November 1917), and editing a volume of essays, La citta` futura (Future City, 1917–1918), which stressed the importance of the social and political activity of the proletariat. The periodical L’ordine nuovo, which Gramsci cofounded in 1919 with Angelo Tasca, Umberto Terracini, and Palmiro Togliatti, took the socialist struggle one step further and was conceived as the forum for a successful revolution in Italy. With the post–World War I crisis that befell Italy in 1918, a wave of riots in the northern and central regions of the country rapidly developed into high levels of militancy during the ‘‘Biennio Rosso’’ (Two Red Years) 1919–1920. The experience of the Russian ‘‘soviets’’ prompted Gramsci to endorse the ‘‘Consigli di Fabbrica‘‘ (Factory Councils) that had been formed as the foundation of a new worker-run state, but since the PSI and the socialist trade union organizations did not back the activities of the workers, Gramsci voiced a harsh critique of the official positions of the party. By January 15, 1921, the ideological fracture between the reformist and the revolutionary wings of the Italian left widened, and Gramsci and other members of the party succeeded in creating the PCd’I (Partito Comunista d’Italia), a section of the Communist International under the leadership of the General Secretary Amadeo Bordiga. Meanwhile, the social tensions of the Biennio Rosso had provided much impetus to the growth of the Fascist movement, which claimed the ability to restore national order from the chaos caused by the recent workers’ agitation. Unlike many of the members of the PSI and PCd’I, Gramsci realized the danger of Fascism almost immediately and thought that the only way to counter its strength was to seize power by way of an alliance between working-class 888

parties and the bourgeois opposition to Fascism. In 1924, L’unita` was founded, following Gramsci’s directions, and, in the same year, he became the general secretary of the PCd’I and was elected to the House of Deputies. Rome was rocked by the assassination of the reformist Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti that had occurred on June 10, 1924. The implication of Fascist extremists in the crime was clear, and a strong reaction ensued. Once again, Gramsci sought to ally the PCd’I with the opposition in order to defeat Benito Mussolini, but his proposed compromise failed. Despite parliamentary immunity, following the passing of special Fascist laws, on November 8, 1926, Gramsci was arrested in Lyons (France) and in 1928 sentenced to 20 years in the prison of Turi, near Bari. He would die on April 27, 1937, at the age of 46, his prison term having expired just five days earlier. Despite his increasingly failing health, Gramsci’s prison years were marked by a most extraordinary intellectual activity that is recorded in his copious prison writings. Gramsci’s preprison writings for Avanti!, La citta` futura, L’ordine nuovo, and Il grido del popolo document his early thoughts on national and international events, the function of intellectuals, the role of culture, and the responsibility of leftist parties in the creation of a revolutionary consciousness. The drama reviews that he wrote between 1916 and 1920 for Avanti!, generally known as Le cronache teatrali (Theater Chronicles), are especially noteworthy. Gramsci examined drama from the perspective of its writers, actors, public, and performances, and considered it as a privileged site for the perpetuation but also the subversion of dominant hegemonic forces. Among the playwrights he criticized was Dario Niccodemi, in whose work he saw a facile resolution of social contradiction and a means to reproduce and maintain the bourgeois status quo. Gramsci was also very critical of the use of drama as propaganda, which he located in works where myths of duty, virtue, and honor were at the service of nationalist war rhetoric. By contrast, he praised the work of Ibsen. In ‘‘La morale e il costume’’ (Morals and Customs), published on March 22, 1917, he hailed A Doll’s House as the embodiment of the positive social function of theater as well as a play that provided an alternative to the subjection of women that was part of the cultural fabric of the bourgeoisie. Gramsci’s early drama reviews reveal the influence of Neapolitan critic Francesco De Sanctis, whose Saggi critici (Critical Essays, 1869)

ANTONIO GRAMSCI and Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871) were well known to him. De Sanctis’s criticism was permeated by sociopolitical commitment and moral concerns; thus Gramsci could translate it into Marxian terms, while challenging Croce’s assessment of De Sanctis as a precursor of his own idealist aesthetics. Gramsci’s fame rests, however, on Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1975) and Lettere dal carcere (Prison Letters, 1947). Announced in a letter of March 19, 1927, to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, Quaderni del carcere is a collection of over 30 ‘‘prison notebooks‘‘ written between 1929 and 1935, mostly in the prison of Turi. These writings were made public in a thematic edition, published by Einaudi between 1949 to 1951. While this edition had the merit of arranging Gramsci’s reflections by subjects, it did not account for the developments in his argumentation and therefore was superseded by the critical edition prepared by Valentino Gerratana in 1975. In Quaderni del carcere, Gramsci further elaborated his own interpretation of Marxist theory, while developing the concepts of egemonia (hegemony), blocco storico (historic bloc), intellettuale organico (organic intellectual), intellettuale tradizionale (traditional intellectual), letteratura nazional-popolare (nationalpopular literature), and societa` civile (civil society). Influenced by the revival of idealist thought carried out by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, Gramsci placed, at the center of Marxist inquiry, the power of human creativity and agency to effect social change. As a result, he questioned deterministic forms of Marxism, whereby the overthrow of the bourgeois order would occur as a result of capitalism’s internal contradictions, and revised the relationship between superstructural formations and the productive forces of the base from one of reflection into one of reciprocity. Among the many corollaries of this revision was Gramsci’s relentless emphasis on the importance of culture in organizing and forming the intellectual and moral collective will and his belief in the necessity of bridging the gap between theory and praxis, abstract epistemic systems and empirical sociopolitical reality. In addition to rethinking some of the fundamental tenets of traditional Marxism, Gramsci also created a synthesis of the international context of Marxist inquiry and the specificity of the European and especially Italian situation, where local class structures and political and economic systems

required different ideological models. While the thought of Lenin remained of fundamental importance for his work, Gramsci was convinced that the Marxist revolutionary strategy for the West had to be distinct from the one adopted in the Soviet Union. The structures of capitalist societies, he argued, required the undermining of egemonia, or the organization of consent to the prevailing bourgeois order by way of institutions of societa` civile, before the overthrow of the political state could occur. Hence, Gramsci studied the work of bourgeois intellectuals and developed counterhegemonic tactics that could be applicable to the revolutionary struggle of the subalterns. His writings subverted the figure of the traditional intellectual, that is the humanist, idealistically and illusorily autonomous social forces who had emerged in the separation between intellectuals and popular masses during the Renaissance and who were, for Gramsci, chiefly responsible for the lack of a ‘‘national-popular‘‘ literature in modern Italy. To the concept of the intellettuale tradizionale, Gramsci preferred that of the intellettuale organico. Rooted in the material, historical process of his time and defined according to his organic function as advocate of the popular masses, this new intellectual would articulate the spontaneous and fragmentary needs of the subaltern in a mature class-consciousness while countering existing hegemonies by creating and shaping alternative ones. The definition of intellectual activity in terms of its organic function also allowed Gramsci to widen the definition of the intellectual to encompass not only traditional figures of writers, philosophers, and artists but also of all those who were the voice of subaltern groups. With regards to the specificity of the Italian situation, Gramsci devoted much energy to examining the questione meridionale or Southern Question. Acquainted from his childhood in Sardinia with the plight of the Southern Italians as well as familiar, ever since his youth, with the work on the topic by Gaetano Salvemini, the author of La questione meridionale (The Southern Question, 1898– 1899) and other essays later collected in Scritti sulla questione meridionale (Writings on the Southern Question, 1896–1955), Gramsci was convinced that the moderate agrarian reforms introduced by the bourgeois-democratic state had not eliminated the destitute conditions of the Southern peasantry. In the social unrest that he witnessed in the industrialized city of Turin, Gramsci saw the occasion to overthrow the industrial-agrarian bloc, or blocco 889

ANTONIO GRAMSCI storico, created by Northern industrialists and the Southern landowners to the detriment of the subalterns, by way of an alliance between urban workers and Southern peasants. After the revolutionary moment, this alliance could introduce significant changes not only in the urban centers but also in the South where cooperatives could be created, land socialized, and the agricultural process made more productive through mechanization and rationalization. His reflections on the specificity of the Italian situation also led him to interpret the Risorgimento, the political and cultural struggle that led to the unification of the Italian peninsula in 1861, as a social revolution that was thwarted by a coalition between moderate liberals and the existing feudal order. The endemic disorder that ensued after Italy’s failed revolution also explained, for Gramsci, the bourgeoisie’s attempt at countering class unrest by supporting the rise of Fascism. Gramsci’s revision of nineteenth-century history proved to be extremely influential in post– World War II historiography and provided an alternative interpretation to Croce’s account of Risorgimento as the great achievements of Italian liberalism. In addition to Quaderni del carcere, while in prison Gramsci authored about 500 letters addressed to friends and members of the Schucht and Gramsci family. More than half of these letters were written to Tania Schucht, who provided him with moral and physical support during his imprisonment. Chiefly responsible for the popularity of Gramsci with the general Italian reader, the letters were made public in 1947, albeit in an edition censored by PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti and Felice Platone. Ranked as the most important example of epistolary writing in twentieth-century Italian culture, they provide insights into the physical and psychological pain endured by Gramsci as a confined human being and contain important reflections on political and cultural theory. Even though Gramsci’s writings were scarcely available to non-Italian readers before the 1960s, their scope and reach have acquired a worldwide resonance. While the teleological assumptions that inspired much of Gramscian writings have been subject to questioning with the new epistemic changes brought about by discourses of postmodernism and poststructuralism that followed the historical crisis of Marxism, Antonio Gramsci’s works continue to be a fundamental point of reference for political and cultural theorists, philosophers, historians, and literary critics. 890

Biography Antonio Gramsci was born in Ales, January 2, 1891. He studied at Liceo Dettori of Cagliari, 1908–1911. He was a correspondent for L’unione sarda. He studied further at the Facolta` di Lettere e Filosofia, University of Turin, in 1911–1915; joined the Italian Socialist Party, 1913; collaborated on Il grido del popolo and Avanti! 1915–1917; became editor-inchief of Il grido del popolo and founder of the Club di vita morale, 1917. Gramsci edited La citta` futura, 1917–1918 and cofounded L’ordine nuovo, 1919. He was a founding member of Partito Comunista d’Italia and founded Istituto di cultura proletaria, 1921. As a representative of PCd’I for Comintern of the Third International, he traveled to Moscow, where he discussed socialist revolutionary strategies with Lenin and met his future wife, Julka Schucht, 1922. He relocated to Vienna, 1923, and proposed the creation of a new workers’ paper, L’unita`, 1923. Gramsci was elected to House of Deputies, April 1924, and returned to Italy, May 1924. He became General Secretary of the PCI, 1924. His son Delio was born, September 1924. He traveled to Moscow for Comintern meeting, March 1925, and addressed Parliament and confronted Mussolini’s legislation, May 1925. Gramsci attended Lyons Congress, 1926. His son Giuliano was born, August 1926. He was arrested, November 1926, and sentenced to five years detention in Ustica (Sicily), 1927. He was tried in Rome and sentenced to 20 years, four months, and five days in the prison of Turi (Bari), 1928. He began Quaderni del carcere, 1929. Gramsci was transferred to a clinic at Formia, 1933, then transferred to Quisisana clinic in Rome, 1935; he died of cerebral hemorrhage, April 27, 1936. NORMA BOUCHARD See also: Communism Selected Works Political Writing Lettere dal carcere, edited by Palmiro Togliatti and Felice Platone, 1947; edited by Sergio Caprioglio and Elsa Fubini, 1965; as Letters from Prison, selected and translated by Lynne Lawner, 1973; as Gramsci’s Prison Letters, edited and translated by Hamish Henderson, 1988; as Letters from Prison, edited by Frank Rosengarten and translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 2 vols., 1994. Quaderni del carcere, 6 vols., 1949–1951; edited by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols., 1975; as Prison Notebooks, vol. 1, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, 1992; as Further Selections from the Prison

ANTONIO GRAMSCI Notebooks, edited and translated by Derek Boothman, 1995; as Prison Notebooks, vol. 2, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, 1996. L’Ordine Nuovo, 1919–1920, 1954. Scritti giovanili, 1914–1918, 1958. Sotto la Mole, 1916–1920, 1960. Duemila pagine di Gramsci, vol 1. Nel tempo della lotta (1914–1916), vol. 2, Lettere edite e inedite (1912– 1937), edited by Niccolo` Gallo and Giansiro Ferrata,1964. Socialismo e fascismo: L’Ordine Nuovo, 1921–1922, 1966. Scritti 1915–1921, edited by Sergio Caprioglio, 1968. La costruzione del partito comunista, 1923–1926, 1971. Per la verita`: Scritti 1913–1926, edited by Renzo Martinelli, 1974. Cronache torinesi: 1913–1917, edited Sergio Caprioglio, 1980. La citta` futura: 1917–18, edited Sergio Caprioglio, 1982. Il nostro Marx: 1918–20, edited Sergio Caprioglio, 1984. La nostra citta` futura: Scritti torinesi (1911–1922), edited by Angelo D’Orsi, 2004.

Selected English Translations The Modern Prince and Other Writings, edited and translated by Louis Marks, 1957. Selections from Political Writings: 1910–1920, edited by Quintin Hoare and translated by John Matthews, 1977. Selections from Political Writings: 1921–1926, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare, 1978. Antonio Gramsci Pre-Prison Writings, edited by Charles Bellamy and translated by Virginia Cox, 1994.

Further Reading Bellamy, Richard, and Darrow Schecter (editors), Gramsci and the Italian State, Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993. Cavalcanti, Pedro, and Paul Piccone (editors), History, Philosophy and Culture in the Young Gramsci, Saint Louis, MO: Telos Press, 1975. Clark, Martin, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution That Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Davico Bonino, Guido, Gramsci e il teatro, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Fiori, Giuseppe, Vita di Antonio Gramsci, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Holub, Renate, Antonio Gramsci: Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, London: Routledge, 1992. Joll, James, Gramsci, Harmondsworth, U.K., and New York: Penguin Books, 1978. Nemeth, Thomas, Gramsci’s Philosophy: A Critical Study, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1980. Orru`, Eugenio (editor), Omaggio a Gramsci, Cagliari: Tema, 1994. Salvadori, Massimo L., Gramsci e il problema storico della democrazia, Turin: Einaudi, 1970, 1973. Spriano, Paolo, Introduzione a L’Ordine Nuovo (1919– 1920), in La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste, vol. 6, Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Spriano, Paolo, Torino operaia e socialista: Da De Amicis a Gramsci, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. S¸tipc¸evic´, Niksa, Gramsci e i problemi letterari, Milan: Mursia, 1968, 1974.

QUADERNI DEL CARCERE, 1975 Prison Notebooks by Antonio Gramsci

After his arrest in 1926, Antonio Gramsci was sentenced to a period of five years of detention in the island of Ustica. In a letter of March 19, 1927, to his sister-in-law Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci declared his desire to do something fu¨r ewig (for eternity) and outlined a plan for his writings while in prison. Between February 1929 and August 1935, he filled 33 notebooks containing about 3,000 pages. After his death, these notebooks were saved for posterity by one of Gramsci’s cellmates, Gustavo Trombetta, and by Tatiana Schucht, who numbered and sent them to Moscow to some of the members of the Communist Party of Italy. In the first page of Notebook 1, Gramsci provided a list of the 16 major topics that he intended to examine. These topics encompassed a wide array of historical and sociological subjects, ranging from the development of the Italian bourgeoisie and the Catholic Action Party to observations on Italian emigration, Americanism, and Fordism. However, since Gramsci’s plan was to examine the role of culture in processes of class domination and subordination, his list also included discussions of linguistics, folklore, popular literature, and canonical artworks. Gramsci addressed many of the topics that he listed but often could not develop his notes into finite arguments, and his writing must be considered as a series of comments and reflections at various stages of their completion. The open structure of the work is rendered more complex by Gramsci’s frequent use of code words so as to circumvent Fascist censorship. Between 1948 and 1951, at the height of the cold war, six volumes of Gramsci’s notebooks were published as Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) by Einaudi. Edited under the supervision of Palmiro Togliatti, the historical leader of the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), and Felice Platone, these volumes followed a thematic ordering. Such ordering sought to reinforce the links between

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ANTONIO GRAMSCI Gamsci’s thoughts and the indigenous Italian intellectual and cultural tradition while providing a theoretical framework for interpretation. While this edition made Gramsci’s thoughts more accessible, the substantial editing sacrificed the integrity of the original text. These six volumes were superseded by the critical edition of the notebooks published in 1975, once again by Einaudi. This edition is philologically more accurate, even though Valentino Gerratana, the editor, could not escape the cultural influence of the PCI, particularly strong in the early 1970s. Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere address a variety of political and cultural themes that have proven to be extremely influential to historians, political scientists, literary critics, and scholars of popular culture and cultural studies. Among political themes, Gramsci discusses the national and international contexts of the socialist struggle and the organization of capitalism in the United States with the rationalization of labor and private life introduced by Taylor’s and Ford’s models of production. Much attention is also given to bourgeois and socialist forms of journalism. Topics related to Italian history, especially of the Risorgimento and the questione meridionale, are also analyzed at great lengths. Themes of cultural history encompass discussions of folklore, which Gramsci considered to be the subversive and revolutionary cultural production of the subaltern class, music, architecture, and melodrama. Numerous pages are also devoted to popular literature, including detective fiction, the serial novel, and the opera. Gramsci also devoted much attention to questions of language and literature and discussed works by Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Niccolo` Machiavelli, Ugo Foscolo, Luigi Pirandello, Luigi Capuana, Alfredo Oriani, and the futurists. Gramsci’s understanding of literature runs counter to the neoidealist aesthetic of Croce, whereby artistic creation is the translation of an individual’s intuition or vision while matters of form remain subordinated to the practical need of the individual and, like creation, essentially divorced from history. By contrast, for Gramsci, a strict relationship existed between form and content, material and cultural practices. Hence, since both the artistic vision and its means of formal expressions are historicized, Gramsci praised Dante’s canto X of Inferno (the heretics in the Sixth Circle) for its dialectical effects in transforming the world of social and historical experience in both structure and language, and Pirandello’s theater for breaking with the tradition of bourgeois culture and promoting working-class 892

consciousness. By contrast, he criticized those writers whose works reproduced the values of the hegemonic groups, such as the futurists and the many offspring of the nineteenth-century reactionary novelist Father Bresciani (Giovanni Papini, Ugo Ojetti, Curzio Malaparte, Giuseppe Prezzolini, and Ardengo Soffici). Gramsci’s departure from Croce’s neo-idealist aesthetics explains his revisitation of Neapolitan critic Francesco De Sanctis, in whose work he located the militancy and social commitment necessary for a counterhegemonic cultural struggle capable of leading to an alternative social order. NORMA BOUCHARD Editions First Editions Il materialismo storico e la filosofia di Benedetto Croce, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Gli intellettuali e l’organizzazione della cultura, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Il Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Note sul Machiavelli, sulla politica e sullo stato moderno, Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Passato e presente, Turin: Einaudi, 1951.

Critical Edition Quaderni del carcere, edited by Valentino Gerratana, 4 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1975.

Translations As Selection from the Prison Notebooks, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, New York: International Publishers, 1971. As Selections from Cultural Writings, translated by William Boelhower and edited by David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. As Prison Notebooks, Vol, 1, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg and Antonio Callari, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. As Further Selections from the Prison Notebooks, translated and edited by Derek Boothman, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1995. As Prison Notebooks, Vol. 2, translated by Joseph A. Buttigieg, New York: Columbia University Press, 1996.

Further Reading Adamson, Walter L., Hegemony and Revolution: A Study of Antonio Gramsci’s Political and Cultural Theory, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Bocock, Robert, Hegemony, London: Tavistock, 1986. Boelhower, William, ‘‘Antonio Gramsci’s Sociology of Literature,‘‘ Contemporary Literature, 22:4 (1981): 574–599. Buttigieg, Joseph, ‘‘Gramsci on Civil Society,‘‘ Boundary 2, 22:3 (1995): 1–32.

GIAN VINCENZO GRAVINA Buttigieg, Joseph, ‘‘Gramsci’s Method,’’ Boundary 2, 17:2 (1990): 60–81. Cochran, Terry, ‘‘Culture in Its Sociohistorical Dimension,’’ Boundary 2, 21:2 (1994): 139–178. Crehan, Kate A. F., Gramsci, Culture and Anthropology, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Davis, John A. (editor), Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution, London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979. Dombroski, Robert S., Antonio Gramsci, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Femia, Joseph, Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Ghosh, Peter, ‘‘Gramscian Hegemony: An Absolutely Historicist Approach,’’ History of European Ideas, 27:1 (2001): 1–43. Lucente, Gregory, ‘‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Notes on Gramsci’s Theory of Literature and Culture,’’ Forum Italicum, 23:1–2 (1989): 168–177. Mouffe, Chantal (editor), Gramsci and Marxist Theory, London-Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979.

GIAN VINCENZO GRAVINA (1664–1718) Gian Vincenzo Gravina was one of the most complex and lively intellectual figures of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and his activity as a literary theorist and jurist can be considered as one of the best results of the Neapolitan cultural milieu in which he was formed. From the example of masters such as Gregorio Caloprese, Serafino Biscardi, and Gregorio Messere, he acquired the antidogmatic and progressive spirit that characterized his entire intellectual path. These aspects of his personality found expression early in his life with Hydra Mystica (Mystic Hydra), published under the pseudonym Priscus Censorinus Photisticus in 1691. In this brief text, Gravina violently attacked Jesuit morals as well as the Aristotelianism still rampant in the Baroque age. All of his following works were devoted to the project of cultivating a cultural model capable of renewing Italian cultural institutions. His research followed two main directions, the first of which was juristic thought. His most important work in this field is Origines juris civilis (The Origins of Civil Law), published in Leipzig in 1708 and widely circulated in eighteenth-century Europe. The merit of this work consists in tracing the history of law in the context of the cyclical evolutions and involutions of social institutions. Gravina posited the agreement among citizens and the respect for civil liberties as the basis for the state. A consequence of this formulation was the complete condemnation of tyranny, always judged as unconstitutional. One of the salient aspects of Gravina’s work, his interweaving of erudition and theoretical clarity,

characterizes also his second field of interest, the nature and function of literature. The work that best synthesized the author’s thought and that had great impact on the culture of the period was Della ragione poetica (On Poetic Reason, 1708), divided into two books. The first considers the theoretical foundations of his thought and provides a critical analysis of classical literature, with particular attention to Homer. The second focuses on poetry written in the vernacular, of which Dante’s work is considered to be the greatest example. Gravina’s theoretical assumption was that God has given everyone the seeds of rational truth. Not everyone, however, has the capability to accessing these truths in their abstract form. Therefore, the work of the poet consists in translating them into a form that is concrete and thus accessible to all. In this perspective, great poets such as Dante and Homer are a bridge between God and human beings, and their function of mediation is the more effective the greater the content of truth of their works and their ability of affecting readers with the images they create. This theoretical perspective also explains Gravina’s polemic with the Baroque, which reduced poetry to a purely intellectual game incapable of depicting reality and emptied of any rational content. In the last phase of his thought, Gravina became progressively more interested in the theater as the form that most easily adapted to his ideal of art as a civilizing instrument for the masses. In 1715 he wrote Della tragedia (On Tragedy), which deals with the theoretical aspects of tragedy while criticizing the theatrical productions of authors such as 893

GIAN VINCENZO GRAVINA Torquato Tasso and Battista Guarino. In support of his own theses, Gravina had already published the volume Di Vincenzo Gravina tragedie cinque (Five Tragedies by Vincenzo Gravina, 1712), a collection of tragedies on classic subjects, Palamede, Andromeda, Appio Claudio, Papiniano, and Servio Tullio. In spite of the disappointing quality of these works, they provide a useful example of the evolution of the author’s thought. The strongest theme running through the plays is the clash between the tyrant and the intellectual, a high and noble figure who acts as a channel of communication between God and humanity and who ends up fatally defeated. While the tragedies clearly depict the themes that were dear to Gravina, they also testify to the increasing pessimism, in his later years, of an author who had always oriented his long career under the banner of intellectual reform. Gravina’s aesthetic theories enjoyed the support of many eighteenth-century intellectuals, including Voltaire (who, however, expressed serious reservations about his tragedies). The first author to dedicate a systematic study to his thought was Antonio Conti in ‘‘Dissertazione sopra la Ragione Poetica del Gravina’’ (Dissertation on the Poetic Reason of Gravina, 1751), and it was through his meditation that the teachings of Gravina came to influence the classicism of authors such as Ugo Foscolo. Following Conti’s study, Francesco De Sanctis harshly criticized Gravina for reducing poetry to simple ornamentation of rational truths (Storia della letteratura italiana, 1870), while Benedetto Croce considered his proposals antiquated in their connection to a utilitarian vision of poetry (Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, 1910). Authors such as Hugh Quigley (Italy and the Rise of a New School of Criticism in the 18th Century, 1921) and John George Robertson (Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century, 1923) mitigated the position of Croce by showing how the author provided a link between sixteenthcentury poetics and modern aesthetics, and his importance in this respect has been re-reinforced by more recent studies such as those of Amedeo Quondam in Cultura e ideologia di Gianvincenzo Gravina (1968) and Filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del Gravina (1970).

Biography Gian Vincenzo Gravina was born in Roggiano, near Cosenza, on February 18, 1664, to a well-todo family. He conducted his early studies under the tutelage of his cousin, Gregorio Caloprese. He 894

moved to Naples, 1680, where he studied with Serafino Biscardi, a distinguished jurist who directed him toward juristic historiography, and with Gregorio Messere, chair of Greek at the University of Naples. Gravina moved to Rome as an agent to Francesco Pignatelli, then bishop of Taranto, 1689. He became a professor of civil law, 1699, then of canon law, 1703, at the Collegio Romano della Sapienza. He was among the founders of the Arcadia with the title of Opico Erimanteo Bione Crateo, 1690. The relationship between Gravina and other members of the accademia, led by Giovan Mario Crescimbeni, soon became tense. Gravina and his followers left the Arcadia, 1711, and formed the Accademia dei Quirini, 1714, which dissolved soon after the death of its founder. Gravina died in Rome on January 6, 1718. MATTIA BEGALI See also: Arcadia (Accademia); Neoclassicism Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, edited by J. Moscov, 3 vols., Naples: Raimondi, 1756–1757. Scritti critici e teorici, edited by Amedeo Quondam, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1973.

Essays Hydra Mystica, 1691; edited by Fabrizio Lomonaco, 2002. Delle antiche favole, 1696. Opuscola, 1696. Origines juris civilis, 1708. Della tragedia, 1715. Della ragione poetica, 1708; edited by Giuseppe Izzi, 1991.

Tragedies Di Vincenzo Gravina tragedie cinque, 1712.

Further Reading Carena, Tiziana, Critica della ragion poetica di Gian Vincenzo Gravina: l’immaginazione, la fantasia, il delirio e la verosomiglianza, Milan: Mimesis, 2001. Croce, Benedetto, Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, Bari: Laterza, 1910. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, 2 vols., Naples: Morano, 1870. Ghisalberti, Carlo, Gian Vincenzo Gravina giurista e storico, Milan: Giuffre`, 1962. Lo Bianco, Rosalba, Gian Vincenzo Gravina e l’estetica del delirio, Palermo: Centro internazionale studi di estetica, 2001. Nikitinski, Oleg, Gian Vincenzo Gravina nel contesto dell’umanesimo europeo: per una rivalutazione dell’immagine di Gravina, Naples: Vivarium, 2004. Piccolomini, Manfredi, Il pensiero estetico di Gianvincenzo Gravina, Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1984.

ANTON FRANCESCO GRAZZINI (‘‘IL LASCA’’) Quigley, Hugh, Italy and the Rise of a New School of Criticism in the 18th Century, Perth: Munro & Scott, 1921. Quondam, Amedeo, Cultura e ideologia di Gianvincenzo Gravina, Milan: Mursia, 1968. Quondam, Amedeo, Filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del Gravina. Documenti per un capitolo della cultura filosofica di fine Seicento, Naples: Guida, 1970.

Robertson, John George, Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923. Ulivi, Ferruccio, ‘‘La cultura del primo settecento e G. V. Gravina,’’ in Settecento Neoclassico, Pisa: NistriLischi, 1957.

ANTON FRANCESCO GRAZZINI (‘‘IL LASCA’’) (1503–1584) Grazzini is an important representative of the sixteenth-century popular literature that opposed itself to the classicizing taste of the age and to the refined artistic ideals of Pietro Bembo. An independent and rebellious figure, he participated passionately in the debates over the questione della lingua, asserting a pronounced Florentine literary identity. He promoted the knowledge of and publication of works by popular Tuscan authors, as well as the use of the spoken language. To defend these ideals, he founded, along with several others, the Accademia degli Umidi (1540). The pseudonyms of the academy members were to be connected with water; Grazzini settled on ‘‘Lasca’’ (a fresh water fish), by which he was already known and which he kept for the rest of his life. His opposition to the classicizing tendencies subsequently adopted by the Academy, which transformed itself in 1541 into the Accademia Fiorentina, led to his expulsion for 20 years (1547–1566). His poor relations with contemporary men of letters and academicians made it difficult to circulate his works, many of which were published posthumously in the eighteenth century. Of his vast and varied literary productions, many texts have been lost, and others seem incomplete and of uncertain date. Known for his plays and above all for his stories, he wrote sonnets, songs, ballads, carnival songs, eclogues, madrigals, capitoli, epitaphs, and letters. In 1584, he tried his hand as well at an unfinished playful poem, La guerra dei mostri (The War of the Monsters), in octaves, whose target, the monsters, are the literary enemies of the Umidi. His Rime appeared, during his life, in occasional publications, such as those for the death of Michelangelo and of Benedetto Varchi. The complete

collection of Rime (Poems, 1741–1742) was published only in the eighteenth-century edition by the Accademia della Crusca, which Il Lasca, in 1582, helped to found. This edition suffers from the inspection of the ecclesiastical authorities, who censured and manipulated some of the texts. These compositions bear the explicit influence of the anti-Petrarchist and colorful burlesque poetry of Francesco Berni, of whom Grazzini declared himself a great admirer. He made his debut as a playwright in 1541 with the staging of the three-act farce Il Frate (The Friar). Attributed to Machiavelli and published in 1769, Il Frate was recognized to be the work of Grazzini only at the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1540 and 1566 he composed the comedies: La Gelosia (Jealousy, 1551), performed in Florence during the carnival of 1550 and built around a prank thought up by a servant at the expense of his old master; and La Spiritata (The Possessed Woman, 1561), a comedy that had great success and was performed in Bologna in 1560. The protagonist is a young woman who pretends to be possessed in order to extort from an old miser the money necessary to marry his son. The old man is forced to consent to the marriage in order to recover the 3,000 scudi of which he has been robbed. La Strega (The Witch), La Sibilla (The Sibyl), La Pinzochera (The Go-Between), and I Parentadi (The Kinships), which were published together in a Venetian edition of the comedies in 1582, and L’Arzigogolo (The Quibble), published in 1750, were not staged during his lifetime. They are comedies built around the theme of intrigue-deception, in which the author is able to create original comicburlesque situations, supported by the liveliness of 895

ANTON FRANCESCO GRAZZINI (‘‘IL LASCA’’) the dialogue and the expressive realism of spoken language. As a comedian, Grazzini, although he never broke with the Plautine and Terentian tradition, had decisive intentions of renewal with respect to the classical model and showed a great interest in and openness toward the world of masks. His most important work is the Le Cene (The Suppers, 1756), written between 1549 and his death. The initial project of an organic collection of some 30 novelle remains incomplete—the first posthumous edition contains only 22 of them. The model is explicitly the Decameron, from which he derived the same ‘‘frame’’: Five young men and five women decide to tell stories to one another, on three successive days, while waiting for dinner (hence the title), with ten stories each night. To make ‘‘allegramente passar il tempo’’ (the time pass happily) forms the principal objective declared by the author, who thus reveals his characteristics, but also his own limits. The ideological and civil engagement that animates much of the work of contemporary ‘‘court’’ writers is absent in Le Cene of Grazzini, who is a stranger to political passion and any ethical preoccupation. His predilection for comic themes answers the need for pure entertainment. The stories are built around the dominant theme of the prank or hoax, united with elements of violence, cruelty, and horror, which are described with pitiless realism. The initially playful mechanism of the prank approaches tragic consequences; the comic element is interwoven with the dramatic, rich with bloody overtones. Doctors, astrologists, pedagogues, betrayed husbands and wives, unfaithful spouses, country priests, artisans, merchants— the characters of Le Cene inhabit the panorama of city life in which the streets, palaces, churches, piazzas, and neighborhoods of Florence are recognizable. Within this closed petit-bourgeois world move the mocked and the hoaxers, who are portrayed sympathetically for the ingenuity of their cunning and with no pity for the victims. Despite superficial analogies, the influence of the Decameron is restricted to the formal expedient of the frame and the thematic flavor of the prank. Grazzini’s language is the lively and popular version of spoken Florentine, intentionally distant from the golden style of Boccaccio, who was taken up as a model by many storytellers of the sixteenth century.

Biography Anton Francesco Grazzini was born in Florence on March 22, 1503. His father was a notary. He did 896

not pursue a course of regular studies. He himself declared that he did not care for the classics and did not know Latin. He had a specialty goods shop. His long life unfolded entirely within the city of Florence, which he left only for brief holidays. He was one of the founders of the Accademia degli Umidi in 1540. He was elected chancellor in 1541. He was expelled from the Accademia in 1547 and was readmitted only in 1566. He helped to found the Accademia della Crusca in 1582. Grazzini died in Florence on February 18, 1584, and is buried in the church of San Pietro Maggiore. DANIELE VIANELLO Selected Works Collections Teatro, edited by Giovanni Grazzini, Bari: Laterza, 1953. Opere, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1974.

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 2 vols., 1741–1742; as Le rime burlesche edite e inedite, edited by Carlo Verzone, 1882.

Plays Il Frate (1541); in Commedie, terzine ed altre opere edite ed inedite di N. Macchiavelli, 1769. La Gelosia, 1551. La Spiritata, 1561. La Strega, 1582. La Sibilla, 1582. La Pinzochera, 1582. I Parentadi, 1582. L’Arzigogolo, 1750.

Short Stories ‘‘Le Cene,’’ 1756; edited by E. Mazzali, 1989; as The Story of Doctor Manente: Being the Tenth and Last Story from the Suppers of Anton Francesco Grazzini, called il Lasca, translated by D. H. Lawrence, 1929.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Struttura e tecnica delle novelle del Grazzini,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 138 (1961): 497–521. Cottino-Jones, Marga, ‘‘‘L’invenzione e il mondo’ de ‘Le cene’ del Lasca,’’ in Il dir novellando: modello e deviazioni, Rome: Salerno, 1994. Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘La structure de la ‘beffa’ dans les Cene d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini,’’ in Formes et significations de la ‘‘beffa’’ dans la litte´rature italienne de la Renaissance, edited by Andre´ Rochon, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1972. Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘Re´e´critures et e´criture dans les deux commentaires burlesques d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini,’’ Re´e´critures et e´criture dans les deux commentaires, parodies, variations dans la litte´rature de la Renaissnace, 1 (1983): 185–223.

TOMMASO GROSSI Plaisance, Michel, ‘‘Une repre´sentation burlesque du Parnasse dans le ‘Piangirida’ d’Antonfrancesco Grazzini,’’ Chroniques italiennes, 63–64 (2000): 209–215. Rodini, Robert J., Anton Francesco Grazzini Poet, Dramatist and Novelliere (1503–1584), Madison-London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970. Spalanca, Carmelo, Anton Francesco Grazzini e la cultura del suo tempo, Palermo: Manfredi, 1981.

Spalanca, Carmelo, ‘‘Le ‘Rime’ di Anton Francesco Grazzini e la cultura del suo tempo,’’ in Il Rinascimento. Aspetti e problemi attuali, edited by Vittorio Branca et al., Florence: Olschki, 1982. Trovato, Roberto, Anton Francesco Grazzini: un commediografo fra tradizione e modernita`, Genova: La Quercia, 1996.

TOMMASO GROSSI (1790–1853) Like a wolf in search of food that comes down from snow-covered mountains, so Griso, setting off toward Monza, ‘‘leva il muso, fiutando il vento infido’’ (raises his snout, sniffing a treacherous wind). In the eleventh chapter of I promessi Sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842), improving the zoomorphic simile with a poetic verse, Alessandro Manzoni declared that he had drawn it from I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards in the First Crusade, 1826) while going through the papers of its author, Tommaso Grossi, in virtue of their fraternal friendship. The success prophesied at the time by Manzoni for Grossi’s heroic poem was also due, in an indirect fashion, to the libretto of the same title that Temistocle Solera drew from it in 1843 for the opera set to music by Giuseppe Verdi. Concerning this deep friendship, Grossi’s later confirmation sounds more contrite and deferential: In 1834, he ‘‘candidamente’’ (ingenuously) offered to Manzoni,‘‘colla riverenza d’un discepolo, [...] coll’amore d’un fratello’’ (with a disciple’s reverence, [...] with a brother’s love), his novel Marco Visconti. In 1816, in the shadow of Carlo Porta, Grossi developed his first experiences of dialectal poetry in various registers. La pioggia d’oro (The Golden Rain, 1816), which is against the excessive use of mythology, has a satirical flavor, as does Prineide (The Priniad, 1816), in which the reference to the lynching of the minister Prina is a pretext for an anti-Austrain polemic. La fuggitiva (The Fugitive, 1816), a woman’s sad tale of love and death, set against the backdrop of the Russian campaign, is sentimental in tone. Transposing a similar plot into Italian but situating it now at the time of Barbarossa, Grossi inaugurated the romantic fortune of the verse tale with Ildegonda (1820), on the model of Gottfried Bu¨rger’s Lenore. His last effort in

dialect was ‘‘In morte di Carlo Porta’’ (On the Death of Carlo Porta), sestets composed in 1821, when Grossi edited the first complete edition of Porta’s Poesie edite in dialetto milanese (Published Poems in Milanese Dialect), prefaced by a moving commemoration. However, his most successful and ambitious projects gravitated toward the orbit of Manzoni: the poem I Lombardi alla prima crociata, in 15 cantos in octaves, and the novel Marco Visconti, whose subtitle is Storia del Trecento cavata dalle cronache di quel tempo (A Story of the Fourteenth Century Drawn from the Chronicles of the Day). In Marco Visconti, even the lakeside landscape of Bellagio, Lecco, and Bellano (which was Grossi’s native landscape) is interpreted through Manzoni. Here, ‘‘a mezza costa’’ (halfway up the hillside), rises the small village of Limonta, ‘‘una terricciola presso che ascosa fra i castagni’’ (a hamlet practically hidden by the chestnut trees), just as ‘‘E` Pesacrenico una terricciola, sulla riva sinistra dell’Adda’’ (Pesacrenico is a hamlet on the left bank of the Adda). As for characters, the count Oldrado del Balzo, learned like Don Ferrante and timid like Don Abbondio, is also thoroughly Manzonian. Marco Visconti aspires to the tragic charisma of the Innominato, although to a less austere degree since he is still tormented by love and jealousy. While the topos of a blocked marriage is at the core of the plot, Grossi’s two betrothed, Bice del Balzo and Ottorino Visconi, are very far from Renzo and Lucia and are meant for a quite different fate. Ottorino is a graceful knight; Bice is a fairhaired damsel who has inherited her pathos-filled weakness from La fuggitiva and Ildegonda. One faint Manzonian echo, to be found in her death scene, is perhaps Ermengarda from Adelchi (1822). 897

TOMMASO GROSSI The minor figures are satellites of the protagonists: Lauretta, Bice’s maid and confidante, and Lupo, Ottorino’s squire. Making his knight the champion of daring deeds, Grossi got to the heart of the chronicle of 1329, which shapes the plot. The fall of Ludwig the Bavarian and the papal schism are the context in which Marco hatches his plan to make himself lord of Milan by discrediting his nephew Azzone with the emperor. It is a subtle maneuver that contrasts with his image as a valorous leader, and its guilt falls on the evil adviser Lodrisio and on the perfidious henchman Pelagrua. In this way, the moral scheme appears simplified: good on the one side, evil on the other. Marco rises above both spheres, trembling with rage and capable of sublime emotions; always titanic, even in the delirium of his amorous passion, when in the beauty of the 16-year-old Bice he contemplates the image of Ermelinda, her mother, and his unforgotten first love. His belated conversion, through the grace of Ermelinda, does not manage to reestablish justice and order: Bice dies of languishing exhaustion, Ottorino goes crusading, and the wicked go unpunished, allowing the author cautious reflections on the long-term workings of Providence. Edifying and liberating, the end is in harmony with the lyrical and pathos-filled vein that emerges in the novel when the grief of the old boatman at the death of his son is represented or when the jongleur Tremacoldo sings the verses of ‘‘Rondinella pellegrina’’ (The Little Pilgrim Swallow). Upon Bice’s death there returns the theme of female love, passionate, fragile, and doomed, and celebrated by Grossi in his verse tales. This is a crucial motif of his sensibility that goes back to his sentimental inclination, diverted in the satirical results of his early work in dialect. After driving his most challenging effort, his sensibility also abounds in his last tale of desperate love, Ulrico e Lidia (Ulrich and Lydia, 1837). The fourteenth-century story of Marco Visconti that disappointed Manzoni because it did not glow with ‘‘lo spirito d’azione’’ (the spirit of action) remains an indispensable document, precisely as a ‘‘meloromanzo’’ (melonovel) of a culture and a taste, as Folco Portinari called it (Le parabole del reale, 1976). It holds, in its pages, the spirit of the age.

Biography Tommaso Grossi was born in Bellano, a Lombard village near Lecco, on January 23, 1790. His uncle, a canon in Treviglio, provided for his education 898

and would have had him become an ecclesiastic. Having given proof of his exuberant temperament with an adventurous flight from Lecco’s seminary, Grossi began other studies, and in 1810 he obtained a degree in jurisprudence at the University of Pavia. Moving to Milan in order to practice, he came into contact with the city’s literary circles and entered into friendship with Carlo Porta. When the anonymous Prineide came out in 1916, and the Austrian police suspected Porta of being the author, Grossi claimed responsibility, suffering a fine and two days of confinement in January 1817. In 1822, he moved into the home of Alessandro Manzoni, and there he conceived his works of greatest range; then, as though to declare his richest creative period finished, he concentrated more on his profession as a notary, though he maintained his literary relationships. He married Giovannina Alfieri, with whom he had two daughters, in 1838. He wrote a document proclaiming the popular desire to annex Lombardy to Piedmont and composed a brief poem to celebrate the Cinque Giornate, June 1848. On the return of the Austrians, he was therefore forced to flee to Switzerland and lived in Lugano for a short time. Grossi died in Milan on December 10, 1853. EMMA GRIMALDI See also: Historical Novel Selected Works Collections Opere complete, Naples: Rossi, 1851. L’arcadia all’incanto. Scritti inediti, edited by Adriano, Bozzoli Milan and Varese: Istituto editoriale Cisalpino, 1971. Opere poetiche, edited by Raffaele Sirri, Naples: Rossi, 1972. Poesie milanesi, edited by Aurelio Sargenti, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1988.

Novels Marco Visconti, 1834. Ulrico e Lidia, 1837.

Poetry ‘‘La pioggia d’oro,’’ in Poesie di Tommaso Grossi, Carl’Alfonso Pellizzone, Francesco Bellati, Giuseppe Zanoja, 1816. ‘‘La fuggitiva,’’ in Poesie di Tommaso Grossi, Carl’Alfonso Pellizzone, Francesco Bellati, Giuseppe Zanoja, 1816. ‘‘Prineide’’ (1816); edited by Umberto Gualdoni, 1996. ‘‘Ildegonda,’’ 1820. ‘‘I Lombardi alla prima crociata,’’ 1826.

Edited Work Carlo Porta, Poesie edite in dialetto milanese, 1821.

GIOVANNI GUARESCHI Further Reading Borrelli, Clara, ‘‘L’antitassismo di Tommaso Grossi ne I Lombardi alla prima crociata,’’ Annali Istituto Universitario Orientale, Napoli, 38:2 (1996), 271–285. Cenni, Alessandro, C’era una volta I lombardi: Tommaso Grossi e il suo tempo, Milan: Viennepierre, 1999. Chandler, S. Bernard, ‘‘La religione in alcuni romanzi del Settecento e nei romanzi storici di Tommaso Grossi e Massimo D’Azeglio,’’ Esperienze Letterarie, 17:1 (1992), 16–37. De Sanctis, Francesco, ‘‘Tommaso Grossi e la maniera romantica,’’ in La scuola cattolico-liberale e il romanticismo a Napoli, edited by Carlo Muscetta and Giorgio Candeloro, Turin: Einaudi, 1953.

Macchia, Giovanni, ‘‘Origini europee del Romanticismo,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Spegno, vol. 7, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Manzoni/Grossi, 2 vols., Milan: Casa del Manzoni, Centro nazionale studi manzoniani, 1991. Orioli, Giovanni, ‘‘Teorici e critici romantici,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Spegno, vol. 7, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Portinari, Folco, Le parabole del reale. Romanzi italiani dell’800, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Romagnoli, Sergio, Manzoni e i suoi colleghi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984.

GROTTESCO See Teatro grottesco

TOMMASO GUARDATI See Masuccio Salernitano

GIOVANNI GUARESCHI (1908–1968) In 1989, the weekly book review supplement of the newspaper La Stampa of Turin received about 10,000 responses to its survey for the best book of the twentieth century. Somewhat surprisingly, the winner was Don Camillo (The Little World of Don Camillo, 1948), the first volume of Giovanni Guareschi’s cycle Mondo piccolo (The Little World). However, while the author enjoys the status of a modern classic among readers, critics remain

for the most part indifferent to his works. His continued success is also due to the tireless efforts of his son and daughter Alberto and Carlotta Guareschi, who have been able to bring the paradigmatic author of the popular Italy of the 1940s and 1950s to new generations of readers. An indefatigable and inventive author, Guareschi wrote regularly for over 30 years for numerous publications, including the humorous biweekly Il Bertoldo 899

GIOVANNI GUARESCHI (1936–1943), of which he was also the editor-inchief, and Candido, which he cofounded with Giovanni Mosca in 1945. He obtained his best results in the genre of the short story, of which he wrote 346 (his corpus is one of the largest of the twentieth century), while his novels such as Il destino si chiama Clotilde (Duncan & Clotilda, 1942) and Il marito in collegio (School for Husbands, 1944), published during the war and addressed to a lower-middle-class readership eager for amusement, are overall disappointing. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Il destino si chiama Clotilde is the ‘‘digression’’ in which the author described a fantastic Latin America that is in fact a sharp parody of peaceless totalitarian Europe. Guareschi’s antagonistic temperament and his penchant for allegory and thinly disguised autobiography are evident in La scoperta di Milano (The Discovery of Milan, 1941), in which the city is considered from the point of view of Giovannino and Margherita, a young couple from the provinces, and assumes a surreal and fantastic atmosphere that recalls the works of Guareschi’s friend Cesare Zavattini, who was responsible for introducing him into mainstream journalism after their common apprenticeship in the vital but narrow circle of journalism in Parma. In La scoperta di Milano, the guardian angel Camillo also makes an appearance, foreshadowing the parish priest of the same name in Guareschi’s more successful fiction. However, it was the experience of the war and prison, recalled in Diario clandestino: 1943–1945 (My Secret Diary, 1943–1945, 1949), that marked a sharp break in the work of Guareschi, who at last began to give shape to the fantasies destined to become the Mondo piccolo. The village in Guareschi’s heart, placed in generic terms between the river Po and the Apennines, is characterized by a series of typical and recurrent traits: the church tower, the square, the working-class Communist club, the inns, the workshops of the craftsmen, the foggy climate of the Bassa (the region between the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia). Caught, like much of Italy in the postwar period, in the transition between agriculture and industry, it is a virtual village that could easily be placed anywhere on the map. The main characters of the cycle are Don Camillo, the priest; his archrival but, in the end, also closest friend Peppone, the rabid anticlerical mayor; and the crucifix in the church, through which Christ speaks to Don Camillo and the author can express his religious faith. By deploying these simple elements and characters in innumerable configurations, Guareschi created a 900

narrative formula that could be used over and over, with overwhelming success. The popularity of the cycle was enhanced by the fortunate series of films starring Fernandel as the priest and Gino Cervi as the mayor, begun in 1952 with Julien Duvivier’s Don Camillo. Sociological criticism has criticized the Don Camillo cycle for its supposed politically opportunistic attitude, but perhaps all that Guareschi had in mind was to articulate a parable on the superior importance of the general interest and the common good, for which it was necessary to reconcile the devil and the holy water, the dominant cultures of Communism and Catholicism: In the end, both Don Camillo and Peppone are good Christians who express a tradition of solidarity inherent to the peasant world that they inhabit. In any case, it is difficult to divorce the characters of Guareschi’s Mondo piccolo from the salient political questions of the postwar period and from the disorientation experienced by the Catholic world faced with growing Communism.

Biography Giovannino Guareschi was born into a family of traders in Roccabianca, in the province of Parma, on 1 May 1908. He began very early to publish articles and drawings in the local newspapers. Upon completion of his military service, he went to Milan to work with the editorial staff of the satirical weekly Il Bertoldo, 1938. His journalisticliterary collaborations increased, while his collaboration with the radio was suspended in October 1943, for offences to Mussolini. Guareschi married Ennia and was drafted, 1943; after 8 September 1943, he was captured by the Germans in Alessandria and sent to concentration camps in Poland and then in Germany; he was freed, early 1945. He founded and edited, with Giovanni Mosca, the periodical Candido, a satirical journal published by Rizzoli, 1945. He took part in the promonarchy election campaign during the referendum, 1946. Although he campaigned against left-wing parties in 1948, he did not support the Christian Democrats, either. He was sentenced to 405 days in prison for publishing in Candido letters attributed to De Gasperi, 1954. He moved to Le Roncole in the province of Parma, where he set up a village cafe´ next to Giuseppe Verdi’s birthplace. Guareschi died of a heart attack in Cervia (Ravenna) on 22 July 1968. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA

BATTISTA GUARINI Selected Works Collections The Don Camillo Omnibus, London: Gollancz, 1974. Tutto Don Camillo: mondo piccolo, edited by Carlotta and Alberto Guareschi, 3 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1998.

Mondo Candido 1946–1948, 1991. Mondo Candido 1948–1951, 1992. Chi sogna nuovi gerani?: autobiografia, edited by Carlotta and Alberto Guareschi, 1993. Mondo Candido 1951–1953, 1997. Mondo Candido 1953–1958, 2003.

Novels La scoperta di Milano, 1941. Il destino si chiama Clotilde, 1942; as Duncan & Clotilda, translated by L. K. Conrad, 1968. Il marito in collegio, 1944; as School for Husbands, 1968. La favola di Natale, 1945. Il compagno Don Camillo, 1963; as Comrade Don Camillo, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1964.

Short Stories ‘‘Don Camillo’’, 1948; as The Little World of Don Camillo translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge, 1951. ‘‘Lo Zibaldino,’’ 1948. ‘‘Don Camillo e il suo gregge,’’ 1952; as Don Camillo and His Flock, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1952. ‘‘Corrierino delle famiglie,’’ 1954; as My Home, Sweet Home, translated by Joseph Green, 1966. ‘‘La calda estate di Gigino Pestifero,’’ 1967. ‘‘Vita in famiglia,’’ 1968; as The Family Guareschi. Chronicles of the Past and Present, translated by L. K. Conrad, 1970. ‘‘Don Camillo e i giovani d’oggi,’’ 1969; as Don Camillo Meets the Flower Children, translated by L. K. Conrad, 1969. ‘‘L’anno di Don Camillo,’’ 1986. ‘‘Ciao, Don Camillo,’’ 1996.

Nonfiction Italia provvisoria, 1947. Diario clandestino: 1943–1945, 1949; as My Secret Diary, 1943–1945, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1958.

Further Reading Baricco, Alessandro, ‘‘Il che e` bello e istruttivo,’’ in Giovanni Guareschi, Lo zibaldino. Storie assortite vecchie e nuove, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Gnocchi, Alessandro, Don Camillo & Peppone: l’invenzione del vero, Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Gnocchi, Alessandro, Giovannino Guareschi, una storia italiana, Milan: Rizzoli, 1998. Gualazzini, Beppe, Guareschi, Milan: Editoriale Nuova, 1981. Guareschi, Carlotta, and Alberto Guareschi (editors), Fantasie della bionda. Scene da un romanzo all’antica, Milan: Rizzoli, 1993. Guareschi, Carlotta, and Alberto Guareschi, Milano’36’43: Guareschi e il ‘‘ Bertoldo, ’’ Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Lugaresi, Giovanni, Le lampade e la luce: Guareschi: fede e umanita`, Milan: Rizzoli, 1996. Perry, Alan R., ‘‘Giovannino’s Secret Weapon: The German Lager and Guareschi’s Use of Reason as Humor,’’ Italian Quarterly, 39:153–154 (2002), 39–53. Vene`, Gian Franco, Don Camillo, Peppone e il compromesso storico, Milao: Sugar Co, 1977. Vene`, Gian Franco, L’ ideologia piccolo borghese: riformismo e tentazioni conservatrici di una non classe nell’Italia repubblicana: 1945–1980, Venice: Marsilio, 1980.

BATTISTA GUARINI (1538–1612) A courtier, diplomat, playwright, essayist, and professor of rhetoric, Battista Guarini, who is often associated with the origins of opera, is the exemplary figure of the literate courtier, even more than Baldassare Castiglione, but he also has a sinister reputation as a father figure. All three perspectives on this complex figure require reconsideration. Guarini is best known as a pastoral dramatist because of his masterpiece Il Pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590), which brought him immediate recognition throughout Europe; inspired great composers such as Luzzasco Luzzaschi (ca. 1545– 1607), Carlo Luigi Pietragrua (ca. 1665–ca.1740), Antonio Salieri (1750–1825), and Joseph Haydn

(1732–1809); and offered a pattern for future libretto writers. Guarini’s own scholarly observations on his masterpiece represent the best critical definition of the new genre of tragicomedy, which paved the way for the development of opera. This transition was made possible by Guarini’s attention to possible musical accompaniments and chorographical renderings for his text despite the difficulties of staging it (length being not the least obstacle). Tragicomedy is the fusion of comedy, because of the happy ending, and tragedy, because of the high social rank of the characters (even the shepherd Mirtillo is finally recognized as the son of the high priest Montano). Because such a plot clashes 901

BATTISTA GUARINI with the traditional Aristotelian distinction of the categories of comedy, tragedy, and epic poem, Guarini needed to defend the new genre against the direct and indirect attacks of purists such as Jason de Nores (ca. 1530–1590). In Il Verrato (1588), Il verato secondo (Part Two of Verato, 1593), and the Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1603), he contended that tragicomedy does not contradict, but interprets, Aristotle, who never explicitly denied the possibility of mixed genres. Although authors before him had adopted the form of tragicomedy (for instance, Fernando de Rojas, in whose works the tragic element prevail, and Giambattista Giraldi, ‘‘Il Cinzio’’), his observations offer the new genre a theoretical framework and literary legitimacy. Il Pastor fido was written between 1580 and 1583 and first published in 1590, with the definitive edition appearing in 1602. It was first represented in Crema in 1596 and in Mantua in 1598. The tragicomedy consists of a prologue and five acts in hendecasyllables intertwined with lines of seven syllables. Like Aminta (1580), Torquato Tasso’s earlier pastoral drama, Il Pastor fido evokes an idealized Arcadia, but Guarini, in tune with but also shaping baroque taste, added a sense of inquietude to Tasso’s drama and further elaborated the plot. The single love story in Aminta turns into a complex tangle involving two major couples, Amarilli and Mirtillo and Silvio and Dorinda, continuous coups de the´aˆtre, and a joyful ending after coming close to tragedy. The ostentation of Counter-Reformation morality clumsily hides the sensuality that pervades the drama. After enjoying great success for at least two centuries, Il Pastor fido was forgotten, if not downright reviled as futile courtly entertainment. Detractors nonetheless recognized that Guarini’s versification and mastery of poetic techniques reach sublime peaks in this work. The second common view of Guarini regards his supposed courtesan servility and results from a long critical tradition, especially popular in the nineteenth century. However, the author was a courtier by default, not vocation. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not embrace religious vows to take advantage of ecclesiastical benefits, nor could he rely on a conspicuous personal income to maintain his large family with the decorum his aristocratic stock required. He thus gravitated for most of his life around the court (mainly Ferrara) because he needed it to survive, but his letters and literary works, including the most courtly or entertaining, always include complaints about the humiliating 902

status of the courtier. Indeed, Guarini repeatedly showed his longing for the freedom needed to pursue philosophical studies and more than once tried to abandon his courtly roles. A servile nature will display itself at any moment and with any authority. Guarini, by contrast, tossed his barbs not only at the court but also at the authority of the Aristotelians who had rejected the genre of tragicomedy. Finally, Guarini’s bad reputation as a parent is related to the legal controversy with his son Alessandro for control of the dowry of Alessandro’s wife. Battista’s claim was not unusual for his time. Alessandro’s wish for emancipation was outside the norm, and Guarini’s disappointment was genuine. Letters show him acting as careful father, burdened by the responsibility of raising numerous children alone after his wife’s premature death. Guarini is not a one-book author. He wrote lyrics in the best Petrarchian form, and the quality of his Rime (Poems, 1598) is far greater than its reputation. In particular, his madrigals are remarkable for their daring metrical structure. Conjectures are also frequently made about his alleged inferiority complex toward Tasso, and indeed the mutual declarations of admiration may have been dictated by courtesy or opportunism. Although Guarini claimed to consider poetry less appealing than philosophy and mocked those who write only verse, he too sought poetical recognition, and as a result he may have felt anxious when faced with Tasso’s talent. Nevertheless, reasons for jealousy could have emerged from both sides, and Tasso may have envied Guarino’s greater success at court, not only as a courtier, but also as an artist. Guarini’s scholarly contributions are impressive. In addition to literary theory, his competence extended to political and diplomatic matters, as demonstrated by the Discorso sopra le cose di Polonia (Speech on the Events of Poland), an incisive account of his unsuccessful mission to Poland in 1574–1576, which remained unpublished until 1928. Il Segretario (The Office of Secretary, 1593), dedicated to Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, is presented as an essay on the art of writing letters but is in fact a careful analysis of the secretarial role and an attempt to cast dignity on the profession. Guarini also authored a comedy, presented in 1608 and published posthumously in 1613. The plot of the Idropica (The Hydropic) is modeled after classical comedies, with the usual presence of couples whose love is impeded by an imposed marriage. After a machination full of humorous consequences, the lovers win their battle. Guarino’s rich correspondence, which remains partially

BATTISTA GUARINI unpublished in archives in Modena, is fundamental to understanding his personality and his intellectual dimension (particularly interesting in this respect are the letters exchanged with Annibal Caro). Although Guarini’s fame has experienced different fortunes through the centuries, his crucial role in the development of European taste is undeniable.

Biography

Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Marzio Guglielminetti, Turin: UTET, 1971. Opuscula, edited by Luigi Piacente, Bari: Adriatica, 1995.

Plays Il Pastor fido, 1590; definitive edition, 1602; as The Faithfull Sheperd, translated by Richard Fanshawe, 1647. Idropica, 1613.

Poems

Born in Ferrara on 10 December 1538, Battista Guarini was the son of Francesco, a descendent of the humanist Guarino Veronese, and Orsina Macchiavelli. He studied with his granduncle Alessandro, secretary of the Duke of Este, and completed his education at the University of Padua, where he studied law and philosophy. Returning to Ferrara, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and poetics, 1577. He married Taddea Bendidio, who died prematurely, leaving him with several children. He was enrolled in the register as ducal courtier in 1567, a role that he tried more than once to quit. He undertook many diplomatic missions in the name of the Duke of Ferrara, traveling to Turin, Venice, Florence, Rome, and Poland. After the death of Il Pigna (1575) and with Tasso reduced to live in S. Anna (1579), Guarini became the official court poet. He was a member of several academies, including the Eterei of Padua, the Innominati of Parma, the Gelati of Bologna, and the Umoristi of Rome. He left the court of Ferrara in 1588, alternating sojourns in his country estate ‘‘La Guarina’’ and periods at other courts (Florence, Urbino, and Rome). His domestic life was troubled by the long quarrel with his son Alessandro and by the tragedy of his daughter Anna, a renowned virtuoso singer, murdered in 1598 by her husband with the complicity of her brother Girolamo. Guarini died in Venice, on 7 October 1612. BERNARDO PICICHE`

‘‘Rime,’’ 1598.

Treatises Discorso sopra le cose di Polonia, ca. 1576; edited by C. Zaghi in Il corriere padano, 11 March 1928. Il Verrato, 1588. Il verato secondo, 1593. Il Segretario, 1593. Compendio della poesia tragicomica, 1603.

Further Reading Dalla Valle, Daniela, Pastorale barocca. Forme e contenuti dal Pastor Fido al dramma pastorale francese, Ravenna: Longo, 1973. Gareffi, Andrea (editor), La questione del Pastor fido, Manziana (Rome): Vecchiarelli, 1997. Kahn, Victoria, ‘‘The Passions and the Interests in Early Modern Europe: The Case of Guarini’s Il Pastor fido,’’ in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Perella, Nicolas James, The Critical Fortune of Battista Guarini’s ‘‘Il pastor fido,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1973, Pompilio, Angelo, Guarini, la musica, i musicisti, Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1997. Rossi, Massimiliano, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (eds.), L’arme e gli amori: Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in late Renaissance Florence, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Sampson, Lisa, ‘‘The Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Pastor fido and Representations of Courtly Identity,’’ Modern Language Review, 98:1 (2003), 65–83. Scarpati, Claudio, ‘‘Poetica e retorica in Battista Guarini,’’ in Studi sul Cinquecento italiano, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1982.

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STEFANO GUAZZO

STEFANO GUAZZO (1530–1593) Born in Casale Monferrato, Stefano Guazzo lived the greater part of his life in the service of the Gonzaga family. Even though he spent long periods in Mantua and in France as ambassador, he never completely lost contact with Casale, actively contributing to the cultural life of his birthplace. This strong bond to his place of origin reveals itself not only in his minor works such as the collection, Lettere volgari di diversi gentilhuomini del Monferrato (Vernacular Letters of Several Gentlemen of Monferrato, 1566) or the Dialoghi piacevoli (Pleasant Dialogues, 1586), but also in the text commonly considered his masterpiece, La civil conversatione (The Civil Conversation, 1574), a manual of conduct that is distinctly placed in the tradition of Renaissance-style treatise writing. Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortigiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528) is clearly its model, not only in the division of the work into four books but also in the choice of the form of the dialogue. Despite these similarities, however, there are many ways in which the author distinguished himself from the model set forth by Il Cortigiano. The setting chosen by Guazzo for his work is not the court at Urbino but rather the private residences of two gentlemen, the doctor Annibale Magnocavallo and Guglielmo Guazzo, brother of the author. Guglielmo, saddened by the artificiality of court life, tends to seclude himself in his room and to spend a lot of time alone. At the beginning of the dialogue, Annibale convinces him to break free from his dangerous isolation. It is clear that the conversation extolled by the doctor is not like that of Castiglione’s book, a theatrical performance. Rather, it becomes an exercise for both a physical and psychological return to balance. Many pages of the first book are dedicated to confirming this hypothesis, demonstrating how man is by nature gregarious and needs to share himself with others. Conversation, or social interaction, is also emphasized by Christianity as a driving force that encourages an open and trusting attitude toward others. Another important aspect of the work is the realization that both scientific and literary activities are based entirely on the comparison of

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different opinions. Through conversation, passive, book-based knowledge is transformed into practical and active knowledge. From these assumptions came Guazzo’s praise of religious councils, and local academies and political bodies, in which truth is the result of a collective effort of debate. The horizon of the treatise widens in the following books as Guazzo established a distinct phenomenology of conversation. The author, through the character of Annibale, described with attention to detail the relationships that tie people both in their public life (for example: young/old, noble/plebian, citizen/foreigner) and in private life (husband/wife, father/son, master/servant). Civil conversation, a model of behavior inspired by the value of moderation, is indicated here as an important means of guaranteeing the cohesion of society. La civil conversatione considers a reality that is much more variegated than that of Castiglione. This change in perspective is important to understand Guazzo’s ideal audience: no longer the world of the court, now in decline, but the emerging bourgeoisie and the small nobility of the provinces. It is to these classes that Guazzo wanted to convey the ethic-aesthetic values of the Renaissance, communicating with them on a prudent, commonsense level. Guazzo wrote in a didactic but easily understandable style, enriched with well-known proverbs and quotes taken from the classics (above all Plutarch) or from collections of aphorisms and anecdotes such as Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Apophthegmata (1531). By virtue of its clarity and simplicity, Guazzo’s work had a great impact on European culture, becoming a classic of treatise writing of the ancien re´gime. After the expanded edition of 1579, 43 Italian editions were published by the middle of the seventeenth century, as well as translations into Latin, French, and German, and it reached English Tudor culture through George Pettie’s translation. Numerous allusions to Guazzo, both implicit and explicit, are present in the works of Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser, and Robert Greene. The French translation inspired Montaigne to revise his Essais in 1582. In Germany the work was translated into Latin in 1585 and published by

TONINO GUERRA Cologne-based Coggeman with a strongly antiProtestant slant. Gauzzo’s influence in Germany would be long lasting, at least until the publication of Umgang mit Manschen by the illuminist Adolph von Knigge in 1788. After centuries of oblivion, La civil conversatione has once again become an object of study in the contexts of classicism and the birth of modern morals. Scholars have today at their disposal the monumental edition of Amedeo Quondam, which includes a solid body of commentary and indices.

Biography Stefano Guazzo was born in Casale Monferrato (Alessandria) in 1530; his father Giovanni was an officer of the Gonzagas. He studied law in Pavia and soon entered the service of the Gonzagas, following Ludovico Gonzaga to France, 1554. He returned to Casale and founded the Accademia degli Illustri, ca. 1562. He was again in France on a mission for Carlo IX, 1563. He married Francesca Da Ponte, 1566; they had two children, Olimpia and Giovanni Antonio. He moved to Olivola, a villa near Casale, in the early 1570s. Francesca died, 1575, and Guazzo married a Bartolomea, 1580, who died six years later. In old age, he was tormented by crises of depression and hypochondria. He moved with his son Giovanni Antonio to Pavia, where he was decorated with many honors and accepted into the Accademia degli Affidati, 1585. Guazzo died in Pavia on 6 December 1593 and was buried in the church of S. Tommaso de’ Predicatori. MATTIA BEGALI See also: Courts and Patronage

Selected Works Treatises La civil conversazione, 1574; expanded, 1579; critical edition by Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols., 1993; as The Civile Conversation of Mr. Steven Guazzo, translated by George Pettie, 2 vols., 1581; reprinted, 1967. Dialoghi piacevoli, 1586.

Letters Lettere, 1591,

Edited Works Lettere volgari di diversi gentilhuomini del Monferrato, 1566. La Ghirlanda della contessa Angela Maria Beccaria, 1595.

Further Reading Auernheimer, Richard, Gemeinschaft und Gespra¨ch; Stefano Guazzos Begriff der conservatione civile, Munich: Fink, 1973. Bonfatti, Emilio, La ‘‘Civil conversazione‘‘ in Germania: letteratura del comportamento da Stefano Guazzo a Adolph Knigge, 1574–1788, Udine: Del Bianco, 1979. Doglio, Maria Luisa, ‘‘Il segretario tra corte e accademia: i ‘Dialoghi piacevoli’ di Stefano Guazzo,’’ in Il segretario ed il principe: studi sulla letteratura italiana del Rinascimento, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993. Ferrari, Daniela (editor), Stefano Guazzo e Casale Monferrato tra Cinque e Seicento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Girardi, Raffaele, ‘‘La nuova sprezzatura dei moderni: Civil conversazione e Pellegrini Ingegni,’’ in La societa` del dialogo: retorica e ideologia nella letteratura conviviale del Cinquecento, Bari: Adriatica, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, ‘‘Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo’s Civile Conversazione and Castiglione’s Courtier,’’ Yearbook of Italian Studies, 1 (1971), 178–198. Lievsay, John, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renassaince, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Ossola, Carlo, Dal ‘‘Cortegiano‘‘ all‘‘‘Uomo di mondo‘‘: storia di un libro e di un modello sociale, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Patrizi, Giorgio (editor), Stefano Guazzo e la Civil conversazione, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1990.

TONINO GUERRA (1920–) Tonino Guerra does not fit easily into any single category; he is an extremely versatile creative artist, at once a poet, a prose fiction writer, a screenwriter, a painter, and a visionary activist and ecologist. Known primarily for his collaboration with many of Italy’s most renowned film directors, he has also

been recognized as a dialect poet of great stature. Guerra has always drawn on his Romagnol origins in creating his art, yet he also has a universal perspective that brings him out of the local and into the global arena of shared human concerns, emotions, and quandaries. 905

TONINO GUERRA During World War II, Guerra was deported to a concentration camp in Germany, where he began to compose, orally, dialect poems for the enjoyment and encouragement of his fellow prisoners, many of whom were, like him, from peasant families of the Emilia-Romagna region. Upon release from the camp and the end of the war, Guerra published at his own expense his first book of verse, I scarabo´cc (Scribblings, 1946), which was graced with an introduction by the eminent critic Carlo Bo. This first volume was followed by the collection La s-ciupte`da (The Gunshot, 1950) and by the volume Lunario (Almanac, 1954). When these poems, along with others, were published in 1972 under the title I bu (The Oxen) and with an introduction by Gianfranco Contini and standard Italian translations by Roberto Roversi, they were greeted with positive and widespread critical response. Guerra painted a peasant world that was fast disappearing in these early poems. While evoking the realities of the poor, the old, and the disenfranchised, they also reveal Guerra’s visually acute imaginative powers as well as his penchant for the carnal and the magical elements of human experience. Always there is a sense of the transience of life and the hovering inevitability of death, but this is tempered by the poet’s warm embrace of sexuality, companionship, and natural beauty. Guerra also wrote some early prose works: the short novel La storia di Fortunato (Fortunato’s Story, 1952) and Dopo i leoni (After the Lions, 1956). His major activity after the early 1950s was, however, screenwriting. After teaching secondary school in his native region for many years, Guerra moved to Rome, the center of Italian filmmaking, and he collaborated for years with some of the most eminent directors: Fellini, Antonioni, Rosi, the Taviani brothers, Angelopoulos, and Tarkovskij among them. His poetic sensibility and acute visual imagination come through strongly in his film work, especially in films such as Fellini’s Amarcord and Tarkovskij’s Nostalghia. Guerra’s collaboration with Fellini and Antonioni was especially intense; he and Fellini shared roots in Romagna, while Antonioni’s painterly style and existentially conditioned view of human experience were very close to Guerra’s own sensibilities. He accompanied Antonioni to the United States when the director was filming Zabriskie Point in 1969, but Guerra’s stay was cut short due to a familial crisis that resulted in a nervous breakdown. Guerra had returned to prose writing with the novel L’equilibrio (Equilibrium, 1967), and in 1969 he wrote a very ‘‘Antonioni-esque’’ portrait of modern 906

alienation and angst entitled L’uomo parallelo (The Parallel Man). In the late 1960s and into the mid1970s he cowrote, with fellow screenwriter and prose fiction author Luigi Malerba, the very successful Millemosche (Thousandfly) stories, about a so-named tramp of the year 1000, published collectively as Storie dell’anno Mille (Stories from the Year One Thousand, 1973). From the early 1950s to today, Guerra is best known, however, as having played an essential role in shaping the Italian cinema, and he is now recognized as Italy’s greatest living screenwriter. By the early 1980s, Guerra was spending more and more time back in Santarcangelo di Romagna, his home town. He made a definitive move back to Romagna in the mid-1980s and soon settled into the little town of Pennabilli, high in the Apennines. He writes his prose fiction and most film scripts in standard Italian, but he needed to be in his beloved region in order to be inspired as a dialect poet. Throughout the 1980s he wrote a great deal of dialect poetry, resulting in, among other volumes, the trilogy E’mel (Il miele in standard Italian, meaning Honey, 1981), La capanna (The Hut, 1985), Il viaggio (The Journey, 1986), and the volume Il libro delle chiese abbandonate (The Book of Abandoned Churches, 1988). His more recent poetry, like his early verse, received accolades from the critical establishment; the trilogy is perhaps the culmination of his poetic powers, evoking a peasant world that comes vividly alive for the reader while at the same time it is gradually fading away due to modernization. This world lives in the language of its people, and in the customs and ways of daily living that Guerra so beautifully captures in his poems. There is no easy sentimentality in these poems, nor is there simple nostalgia. Complex inner emotions as well as externally conditioned styles of life are put on the page in Guerra’s always lyrical yet straightforward, sometimes even harsh, voice. Since the 1980s Guerra has continued to publish dialect poetry and prose fiction, and he has collaborated with established and younger film directors. His generous activism and magical fantasy came together in a series of civic projects dedicated to saving the natural beauties of his region and encouraging the artistic creativity of others. An artist who always uses many media for the expression of his visions, Guerra began to paint and draw more and more, and he did a number of posters on which he mixed messages of an ecological kind with opinions on how to preserve local traditions with advice about how to organize artistic events for the citizens of the area. In and around Santarcangelo

TONINO GUERRA he stimulated and oversaw projects such as the creation of a ‘‘garden of lost flowers,’’ the preservation of tiny churches scattered through the Romagnol hills, the placement in his hometown of tile plaques produced in Santarcangelo that record the sayings and poems of local folk, and the distribution of benches around the steep streets so that citizens could rest and contemplate the beauties of their town. Tonino Guerra is a ‘‘force of nature,’’ a genuine national treasure, and one of contemporary Italy’s most multifaceted and unforgettable poets, a word that applies to him in its fullest sense.

Biography Tonino Guerra was born in Santarcangelo di Romagna (Forlı`) of peasant parents, 16 March 1920. In 1943, he was sent to a German war camp in Troisdorf, where he began to compose dialect poetry. He earned a degree at the University of Urbino with a thesis on dialect poetry, 1946, then taught in secondary schools in Savignano sul Rubicone until moving to Rome in 1953, where he began his career as a screenwriter. Guerra traveled to the United States with Antonioni, 1969; he traveled often to Russia in the 1970s and 1980s. He moved back to Romagna in the mid-1980s, eventually settling in Pennabilli. He has been awarded many prizes, among which are the ‘‘Gozzano’’ and the ‘‘Pasolini’’ prizes for poetry. Guerra has been honored internationally on many occasions for his essential contributions to Italian cinema. REBECCA WEST Selected Works Poetry ‘‘I scarabo´cc,’’ 1946. ‘‘La s-ciupte`da,’’ 1950. ‘‘Lunario,’’ 1954. ‘‘I bu: Poesie romagnole,’’ translated into standard Italian by Roberto Roversi, 1972. ‘‘Il miele: Poema,’’ 1981. ‘‘La capanna,’’ 1985. ‘‘Il viaggio,’’ 1986. ‘‘L’albero dell’acqua: Dedicato soprattutto a Ezra Pound,’’ edited by Luca Cesari, 1992. ‘‘E’ caval d’Ulisse,’’ 1996.

Fiction La storia di Fortunato, 1952. Dopo i leoni, 1956. L’equilibrio, 1967; as Equilibrium, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1969. L’uomo parallelo, 1969.

Il cannocchiale e altri testi, with Lucile Laks, 1972. Storie dell’anno Mille, with Luigi Malerba, 1973. I cento uccelli, 1974. Il polverone: Storie per una notte quieta, 1978. I guardatori della luna, 1981. L’aquilone: Una favola del nostro tempo, with Michelangelo Antonioni, 1982. Il leone dalla barba bianca, with Michail Romadin, 1983. La pioggia tiepida, 1984. Il libro delle chiese abbandonate, 1988. L’orto d’Eliseo, 1989. Il vecchio con un piede in Oriente, 1990. Il profilo del conte, 1990. Cenere, 1990. Piove sul diluvio, edited by Ennio Grassi, 1997.

Screenplays L’assassino, with Elio Petri, Milan, 1962. Michelangelo Antonioni, Screenplays, 1963. Il deserto rosso, with Michelangelo Antonioni, edited by Carlo Di Carlo, 1964. Uomini contro, with Francesco Rosi and Raffaele La Capria, 1970. Zabriskie Point, with M. Antonioni et al., 1970. Amarcord, with Federico Fellini, 1973; as Amarcord: Portrait of a Town, translated by Nina Roots, 1974. Federico Fellini, Casanova, lyrics by T. Guerra and Andrea Zanzotto, 1976. E la nave va, with F. Fellini, 1983. Identificazione di una donna, with M. Antonioni and Gerard Brach, edited by Aldo Tassone, 1983. Ginger e Fred, 1986. Good Morning, Babylon, with Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, 1987. Cadaveri eccellenti, with Francesco Rosi and Lino Jannuzzi, 1992. Tre fratelli: Sceneggiatura dell’omonimo film di Francesco Rosi, with Francesco Rosi, 1999.

Other Dizionario fantastico, 2000.

Translations Haller, Hermann W. (editor), The Hidden Italy: A Bilingual Edition of Italian Dialect Poetry, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Abandoned Places (Il miele, La capanna, Il viaggio, Il libro delle chiese abbandonate), translated by Adria Bernardi, Toronto: Guernica Press, 1999.

Further Reading Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Antonio Guerra,’’ in I contemporanei, vol. 5, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Excursus continuo su Tonino Guerra,’’ in T. Guerra, I bu: Poesie romagnole, Milan: Rizzoli, 1972. Corti, Maria, ‘‘L’asola cucita,’’ Panorama, 16 April 1989, 21–22. Isella, Dante, ‘‘Postfazione a Tonino Guerra,’’ in T. Guerra, Il viaggio, Rimini: Maggioli Editore, 1986. Lingua, dialetto, poesia: Atti del Seminario popolare su Tonino Guerra e la poesia dialettale romagnola, Ravenna: Girasole, 1976. Migliorati, Silvia, ‘‘Tonino Guerra fra cinema e poesia,’’ Autografo, 12 (1987): 29–51.

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TONINO GUERRA Saccani, Rossana, ‘‘Materiali poetici di Tonino Guerra,’’ Autografo, 4:10 (1987): 107–119. Tassone, Aldo, ‘‘Entretien avec Tonino Guerra,’’ La Revue du cine´ma: Image et son, 279 (December 1973): 67–82. Tonino Guerra, Rimini: Maggioli Editore, 1985.

West, Rebecca, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to T. Guerra, Abandoned Places, translated by Adria Bernardi, Toronto: Guernica Press, 1999. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Tonino Guerra and the Space of the Screenwriter,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 6 (1988): 162–178.

FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERRAZZI (1804–1873) Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi was a writer—storyteller, essayist, dramatist, and polemicist—as well as a patriot. As a young man, his acquaintance with George Gordon, Lord Byron, whom he met while a student in Pisa, was formative, as was his acquaintance with Anne Radcliffe. He distanced himself, however, from Walter Scott, emphasizing the difference of his own work; Guerrazzi’s work was to be centered on society, concentrating on ordinary people and the notion of the city and religious and political ideas, rather than on character, which he saw as the driving force of Scott’s work. After a debut as a dramatist and an essayist, Guerrazzi dedicated himself to the historical novel, developing patriotic themes and combining historical events, political polemic, and a defense of nationalistic sentiment. This appears clearly in his novel La battaglia di Benevento (The Battle of Benevento, 1827), in which allegory serves to veil, through the reevocation of the conflict between Manfred of Swabia, the son of Frederick II, and Charles of Anjou, an intense polemic against the papacy’s marriage of temporal and spiritual power. La battaglia di Benevento presents itself as a grand and rhetorical epic novel, which is also interlaced with stories of love and betrayal and told from a Ghibelline and nationalistic perspective: a novel rich in Byronic ideas, dark histories, and sarcastic impulses. Other historical novels by Guerrazzi have a similar format. The most famous, L’assedio di Firenze (The Siege of Florence, 1836), published under the pseudonym of Anselmo Gualandi, praises the valor of the Florentine people, who are betrayed by Clement VII, and emphasizes the commitment and vigor of the resistance of the city’s best citizens. Other novels include La duchessa di San Giuliano, 908

which later became Veronica Cybo, duchessa di San Giuliano (Veronica Cybo, Duchess of San Giuliano, 1837), an intense, sensational story of vengeance motivated by love; Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano (Isabella Orsini, Duchess of Bracciano, 1844), Beatrice Cenci (1854), which develops motifs drawn from a well-known judicial incident of the sixteenth century, also rich in passion and violence; and Lo assedio di Roma (The Siege of Rome, 1863), a narrative that feeds on antipapal political polemic. Using documents collected within the context and environment of the story’s protagonist, Guerrazzi wrote Pasquale Paolo ossia La rotta di Pontenuovo. Racconto coˆrso del secolo XVIII (Pasquale Paolo, or the Rout of Pontenuovo: A Corsican Tale of the Eighteenth Century, 1864), which is dedicated to Giuseppe Garibaldi: a critical, passionate, and polemical portrait of the Corsican hero and a tale, in the genre of fictionalized history, of the anti-French struggle of the island patriots. Guerrazzi also authored satirical writings, such as the political and moral fable in the form of a short story, La Serpicina (The Little Serpent), written in 1830 but published only in 1847; the political and moral satirical novel L’asino (The Donkey, 1857), which is both apocalyptic and humorous, and which tells of a dream in prison relating to universal judgment, in which the moral superiority of animals to humans is apparent; biographical writings, including Pasquale Sottocorno (1858), dedicated to a hero and an episode of the cinque giornate (five days) in Milan; and novels that reveal a psychological sociological interest, such as Il buco nel muro (The Hole in the Wall, 1862). Guerrazzi also wrote numerous autobiographical works, from Note autobiografiche (Autobiographical Notes, published posthumously in 1899) to Memorie

FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERRAZZI (Memoirs, 1848), Apologia (1851), and Orazione a difesa (A Speech in My Defense, 1853). Guerrazzi was one of the most important exponents of the democratic current of the Risorgimento. Readers and critics have been impressed by the humorous elements of his work but have responded negatively to the rhetorical tone, the polemical impetus, a certain taste for gloomy and macabre tones, and the lack of organic structure in his works. His style is often viewed as excessively literary, and critics have commented on a lack of balance between the various elements of ideology and style. His letters, on the other hand, being more natural and incisive, have met with greater favor. Guerrazzi’s works are not currently widely appreciated, though they had considerable resonance in the first decades of his career. It was a resonance perhaps, as Gaetano Trombatore noted, disproportionate to what his works might actually offer of interest and originality (Memorialisti dell’Ottocento, 1953). Nor have critics been kind to Guerrazi, beginning with Francesco De Sanctis’s harsh criticism of the novel Beatrice Cenci (Saggi critici, 1952). Other interpretations try to understand the reason for Guerrazzi’s positive reception, being a writer who ‘‘lampeggia, tuona, tempesta, urla’’ (flashes, thunders, storms, and shouts) and ‘‘mescola la Bibbia, Byron, Swift’’ (mixes together the Bible, Byron, and Swift) (Felice Momiliano, editor, Pagine vive, 1921). There are those too who have praised that part of Guerrazzi’s work in the tradition of Laurence Sterne, which seems so distant from Byronism and which lacks the grandiloquence and lyricism that nevertheless served him well in his polemical writings.

Biography Francesco Domenico Guerazzi was born in Livorno on 12 August 1804. He attended the Barnabite college. Having run away from home, he reconciled with his father—a wood engraver— and studied law in Pisa, graduating in 1824. His funeral elegy in 1830 for a general of the Napoleonic army, Cosimo del Fante, earned him a relatively long confinement in Montelpulciano. For his close relations with Giuseppe Mazzini (he was affiliated with La Giovine Italia), he was again confined to the prison of Portoferraio in the wake of the discovery of correspondence among conspirators. After the promulgation of the Constitution, in 1848, Guerazzi was chosen as a representative. He became minister of the Interior in the Giuseppe Montanelli government. After the flight of the

Grand Duke, in February 1849, he was a member— along with Mazzini and Montanelli—of the triumvirate that remained in power until March 1849; at the end of March 1849 he became the head of the executive power and remained dictator until 11 April. Upon the return of the Grand Duke, who was favored by the moderates, Guerrazzi was imprisoned, accused of rebellion, and after the trial his jail sentence was commuted to exile in Corsica. Having fled from Corsica in 1846, he came to Pisa and Turin, and then to Genoa, where he lived from 1857 to 1862; he was reelected as a representative in 1860 and remained in Parliament until 1870; an antimoderate, he moved from the radicals to the republicans. His companion during his later years was Maria Papadopulo; after 1870, he lived at his farm in Cecina until his death on 23 September 1873. ELVIO GUANINI See also: Historical Novel Selected Works Collections Scritti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1847. Scritti politici, Turin: Casa Editrice di M. Guigoni, 1862. Scritti letterari, Turin: Casa Editrice di M.Guigoni, 1862. Scritti scelti, edited by Arrigo Cajumi, Turin: UTET, 1955; reprinted in 1966.

Fiction I Bianchi e i Neri, 1827. La battaglia di Benevento, 1827; as Manfred, or the Battle of Benevento, translated by Luigi Monti, 1875. L’assedio di Firenze, 1836. Veronica Cybo, duchessa di San Giuliano, 1837. Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano, 1844; as Isabella Orsini, translated by Luigi Monti, 1859. La Serpicina, 1847. Beatrice Cenci, 1854; as Beatrice Cenci, translated by Mrs. Watts Sherman, 1858; translated by Charles Alexander Scott, 1858. L’asino, 1857. La torre di Nonza, 1857. Pasquale Sottocorno, 1858. Storia di un moscone, 1858. Il buco nel muro, 1862. Lo assedio di Roma, 1863. Pasquale Paolo ossia La rotta di Pontenuovo. Racconto coˆrso del secolo XVIII, 1864. Il secolo che muore, 1885.

Letters Lettere, 1880–1882. Lettere, edited by Ferdinando Martini, 1891. Lettere famigliari, 1924.

Other Memorie, 1848. Apologia, 1851.

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FRANCESCO DOMENICO GUERRAZZI Orazione a difesa, 1853. Note autobiografiche e poema, 1899.

Further Reading Borlenghi, Aldo, Narratori dell’Ottocento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1961. Colummi Camerino, Marinella, ‘‘Il narratore dimezzato. Legittimazione del racconto storico italiano,’’ in Storie su storie. Indagine sui romanzi storici (1814–1840), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985. Croce, Benedetto, Letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1929. De Sanctis, Francesco, Saggi critici, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1952. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi: Studi e documenti, Florence: Societa` Anomina ‘‘La Voce,’’ 1924. Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi nella storia politica e culturale del Rinascimento. Convegno di Studi promosso da Regione Toscana, Leghorn-Florence, 16–18 November 1973, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1975. Fucini, Renato, Acqua passata, Florence: La Voce, 1921.

Guastalla, Rosolino, La vita e le opere di Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi (1804–1835), Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1903. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Lopez Celly, Furio, Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi nell’arte e nella vita, Milan-Rome: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1918. Martini, Ferdinando, Due dell’estrema: il Guerrazzi e il Brofferio-Carteggi inediti (1859–1866), Florence: Le Monnier, 1920. Momigliano, Felice (editor), Pagine vive, Milan: Caddeo, 1921. Rabizzani, Giovanni, Sterne in Italia, Rome: Formiggini, 1920. Ragonese, Gaetano, Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi, in Letteratura italiana, I minori, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1964. Tommaseo, Niccolo`, Dizionario d’estetica, Milan: Fortunato Perelli, 1860. Toschi, Luca, L’epistolario di Francesco Domencio Guerrazzi: con il catalogo delle lettere edite e inedite, Florence: Olschki, 1979. Trombatore Gaetano, Memorialisti dell’Ottocento, vol. 1, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1953.

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI (1881–1941) In 1907 two collections of poems hit the Turinese literary scene simultaneously: Amalia Guglielminetti’s Le vergini folli (The Crazed Virgins) and Guido Gozzano’s La via del rifugio (The Road to the Refuge). Guglielminetti, who had already published Voci di giovinezza (Voices of Youth, 1903), received critical attention and public notoriety far overshadowing Gozzano’s. Saluted as the ‘‘Saffo dalla chioma di viola’’ (purple-haired Saffo) by the influential critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (‘‘Una poetessa,’’ 1910); compared to the Renaissance poet Gaspara Stampa; genuinely admired by Gozzano himself, who learned her sonnets by heart; Guglielminetti, through her poetry, gives voice to a new woman subject in Italian literature. Like Sibilla Aleramo’s novel Una donna (A Woman, 1906), Le vergini folli unveils a world still in search of expression. The poem follows the wanderings of a young woman poet in the silent cloisters of girlhood, through what Gozzano called ‘‘I gironi di quell’inferno luminoso che si chiama verginita`’’ (The circles of that bright hell called virginity) (Lettere d’amore, 1951). The poet unravels a possible path of salvation—of identity, 910

health, and dignity—for the silent maidens. But the garden is a prison no woman can leave. The desired entrance to the house of life is barred by a stern and pitiless ‘‘Lord.’’ Guglielminetti poignantly represents the knot that binds woman to a deified male figure before whom ‘‘l’indoma si ammansi, e la superba / si faccia schiava . . . nuocendo a se`, come nemica acerba’’ (the rebellious is domesticated, and the proud / makes herself slave . . . harming herself as a bitter enemy). Waiting is the only existential dimension the poet gains for herself and the young maidens, an unsettling Purgatory without guarantee of salvation, where darkness and perdition loom. As if following a foretold and ironic destiny, Amalia Guglielminetti is mostly remembered in the history of Italian literature for her love story with Guido Gozzano, chronicled in the following collection of poems, Seduzioni (Seductions, 1909). This is an unfair destiny, because her poetry, although not formally innovative and often yielding to a conventional literary pathos, lucidly expresses the lacerating tension between a vital openness to life and a desire that enslaves. In Seduzioni, the

AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI dialogue with an elusive and cruel lover turns into a pained solitude that the poetic celebration of the sensory seduction of ‘‘rare gems,’’ ‘‘silks,’’ and ‘‘fiery chalices,’’ borrowed from the D’Annunzian boudoir, can do little to dispel. Despite her search to articulate woman’s specificity, Guglielminetti remained indifferent to the rising feminist movement. So even if Seduzioni concludes by stating the collective plight of women—‘‘Io non volli cantar, volli parlare / e dir cose di me, di tante donne / cui tanti desideri urgon l’insonne / cuore e lascian con le labbra amare’’ (I didn’t want to sing but speak / and tell things about myself and many women / whose desires push the sleepless / heart and leave bitter mouths)—the dominating image is the one of the poet beckoning to her frozen image in a mirror as ‘‘colei che va sola’’ (the one who goes alone). Daniela Curti described well the ambiguity of Guglielminetti’s artistic career. On the one hand, she transgressed with her poetic voice ‘‘la saggezza d’antiche norme’’ (the wisdom of ancient norms), which seeks to define and limit woman’s experience; and on the other, she gradually adapted to society’s ‘‘leggiadri schermi’’ (graceful screens) for the exceptional woman: from the femme poe`te to the femme fatale to the Fascist ‘‘modern woman’’ (‘‘Quella che va sola,’’ 1988). Revealing of this ambiguity is Guglielminetti’s choice of poetic meters. At a time when verse was being progressively freed from formal restraint, she elected the tercet and the sonnet for women’s doomed aspirations and frail dreams. Guglielminetti abandoned poetry with her 1913 collection of short stories I volti dell’amore (The Faces of Love) and thereafter wrote rather conventional stories and novels centered on love intrigues in high-society settings. Through the 1920s and 1930s, she participated in Italian cultural life as journalist; founder of a literary magazine, also called Seduzioni; and as a writer of children’s stories and successfully performed plays. A mysteriously fated mixture of ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ make the figure of Amalia Guglieminetti emblematic of the cultural climate at the beginning of the last century in Italy. Her poetry at the same time negates the contemporary misogynist discourse of Cesare Lombroso and Otto Weininger, ambiguously flirts with D’Annunzian style, and inspires the new poetry of Gozzano. For these reasons, her work occupies an important crossroads from which to attempt an understanding not only of the challenging position of the woman writer but her centrality to that complex phenomenon that is literary and cultural modernity.

Biography Amalia Guglielminetti was born into an industrialist family in Turin, 4 April 1881. In 1907, she started an epistolary exchange with Guido Gozzano that turned into a tormented love affair and then friendship. She attended the First Women’s Congress in Rome in 1908. From 1908, she contributed verses, stories, and articles to newspapers and magazines like La stampa and L’illustrazione italiana. She had a liaison with the writer Pitigrilli (Dino Segre). Guglielminetti was founder and director of the literary magazine Le seduzioni (1926– 1928). In 1934, she traveled to Egypt. Guglielminetti died 4 December 1941 after a fall while on the way to a bomb shelter. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Le voci di giovinezza,’’ 1903.v ‘‘Vergini folli,’’ 1907. ‘‘Seduzioni,’’ 1909. ‘‘L’insonne,’’ 1913. ‘‘I serpenti di Medusa,’’ 1934.

Fiction I volti dell’amore, 1913. Gli occhi cerchiati d’azzurro, 1918. Le ore inutili, 1919. La reginetta Chiomadoro, 1923. La rivincita del maschio, 1923. Quando avevo un amante, 1924.

Plays L’amante ignoto, 1911. Nei e cicisbei, 1926. Il baro dell’amore, 1926.

Epistolary Lettere d’amore di Guido Gozzano e Amalia Guglielminetti, 1951.

Further Reading Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Una poetessa,’’ in La vita e il libro, Turin: Bocca, 1910. Calcaterra, Carlo, ‘‘Gozzano-Guglielminetti,’’ Il ponte, 7 (August 1951): 875–894. Curti, Daniela, ‘‘Le paure di Guido: Il carteggio Guglielminetti-Gozzano,’’ in Memoria, 8, 1983: 114–120. Curti, Daniela, ‘‘Quella che va sola: Amalia Guglielminetti,’’ in Svelamento, edited by Marina Zancan and Annamaria Buttafuoco, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1988. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Amalia: La rivincita della femmina, Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1987. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Dalla donna fatale alla donna emancipata, Nuoro: Ilisso, 1993.

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AMALIA GUGLIELMINETTI Morandini, Giuliana, ‘‘I volti dell’amore,’’ in La voce che e` in lei, Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Piromalli, Antonio, ‘‘Amalia Guglielminetti,’’ in Novecento, Milan: Marzorati, 1982.

Turoff, Barbara, ‘‘Amalia Guglielminetti,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994. Zaccaro, Vanna, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Le seduzioni, Bari: Palomar Edizioni, 2001.

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI (1483–1540) Francesco Guicciardini was a Florentine statesman who became a key figure in the administration of the Medici popes Leo X (Giovanni de’ Medici) and Clement VII (Giuliano de’ Medici), including an appointment as Lieutenant General of the Papal Armies opposing the forces of Charles V that sacked Rome in 1527. He lived in a period of political decline for Italian principalities such as the Papal States, which were increasingly little more than pawns in the battle for political hegemony between the consolidated monarchies of France and Spain during the conflict that would later be known as the Italian Wars of 1494–1534. Guicciardini recounted the events that he witnessed first hand as a high papal minister in the Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561). His political and philosophical outlook was conditioned by the precarious and tumultuous political and social climate of his day. In his writings (none of which were published during his lifetime), he often presented a sense of the manner in which the events in Italy were beyond the control of any individual. His histories and his Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections, 1576), a miscellaneous work in the tradition of Tuscan mercantile maxims written in three different redactions, are part of a larger current of Renaissance treatise writing in which authors attempted to interpret and represent the nature of the reality they experienced. Guicciardini’s individual analysis was undertaken with an eye on preserving his personal interests by using his intellectual abilities. Unlike his compatriot Niccolo` Machiavelli, Guicciardini’s works and worldview evidence skepticism toward grand designs and universal solutions in the face of an unpredictable and constantly dynamic reality. Guicciardini was born into an aristocratic merchant family proud of its tradition of public service in the Florentine republic. His godfather was the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. His ancestors had held 912

important posts throughout the history of the Florentine republic, and Guicciardini’s worldview was very much influenced by the presumption of service from his elite class. The family also had a multinational textile business with outlets in northern Europe that would remain active until the end of the sixteenth century. However, as the thirdborn son in a large family, Francesco did not have a secure claim on his family patrimony. Yet he demonstrated an ambitious character at an early age. In the Accusatoria (Accusation, 1527), he confessed that his schoolmates nicknamed him Alcibiades, after the infamous Athenian. In 1498 Guicciardini began legal studies in Florence, transferring to Ferrara and Padua before receiving a law degree in Pisa in 1505. One possibility for Francesco was to become a prelate. However, when he considered pursuing an ecclesiastical career, with an eye to perhaps becoming a cardinal, his father, Piero di Jacopo Guicciardini, a quiet follower of the disgraced reformist friar Girolamo Savonarola, opposed the decision, an early indication of the contrasting opinions about the Church that would resurface in Guicciardini’s later writings. In 1507 he married Maria di Alamanno di Averardo Salviati in a private ceremony despite the reservations of his father, who had hoped for a marriage into a family less openly aligned with the pro-Medici line in Florentine republican politics. In 1508 Guicciardini began the Storie fiorentine (The History of Florence, 1508–1509), written in the style of civic histories and covering the period from the Ciompi revolt of 1378 to the Battle of Agnadello in 1509. Despite his relative youth, he was quickly honored with important appointments representing the Florentine republic in neighboring cities. In 1511 he was offered a Florentine ambassadorship to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, which he accepted after

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI initial reservations about leaving his legal practice. He recounted his impressions of Spain and the Spaniards in the Diario del viaggio in Spagna (Diary of the Trip to Spain, 1512). In Spain Guicciardini gained exposure to Ferdinand of Aragon, one of the most astute leaders in Europe in a period when the Castillian court was receiving fresh dispatches from the Americas and had interests in several European countries, including Italy. The experience provided Guicciardini with a political schooling comparable to Niccolo` Machiavelli’s period with Cesare Borgia. Yet, given the distances involved, his relations with the Florentine chancery were sporadic, and he received ambiguous instructions, increasing his misgivings about popular governments and preparing his rapprochement with the pro-Medici forces in Florence. Guicciardini wrote a number of treatises during his stay in Spain, including the Relazione di Spagna (Report on Spain, 1514), and also began his first composition of the Ricordi, a collection of aphorisms in which he would delineate his opinions on themes from personal conduct to political and religious affiliation. In Spain Guicciardini began to delve into political treatises with a work on governmental theory, the Discorso di Logron˜o (1512), in which he voiced fears about the instability of the Florentine republic and Italian peninsular autonomy and expressed ideas about how government should be controlled by persons of standing, such as those of his own aristocratic class. The Florentine republic fell in 1512, after Spanish forces savagely sacked Prato, and the Medici reentered Florence. When the Medici cardinal Giovanni became Pope Leo X, succeeding Julius II in 1513, Florentine prestige increased, because the Medici now controlled both Florence and the Papal States. Upon returning to Florence, Guicciardini was able to ingratiate himself with the ruling family and wrote the Discorso nel modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa dei Medici (Discourse on How to Ensure the State to the House of the Medici, 1515). In 1516 the head of the Medici clan, Pope Leo X, appointed Guicciardini papal governor of Modena, and his governorship would be extended to Parma, Reggio, and eventually the entire Romagna region. The author apparently handled his responsibilities with great competence in a time of general ineptitude and corruption among rulers and governors, earning the esteem and continued patronage of his Medici employers. In 1521 Guicciardini became commissioner general in Leo X’s Papal Army in an alliance with Charles V of Spain against Francis I of France.

Around this time he also began the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze (Dialogue on the Government of Florence, 1522), another work of political theory. This was also the period of the Guicciardin–Machiavelli correspondence, known by the reference to the practical jokes they played at the expense of the friars who hosted Machiavelli in the repubblica degli zoccoli (republic of clogs) letters of May 1521. Machiavelli and Guicciardini would develop a lasting friendship while both composed important works in history and political science. Guicciardini’s Considerazioni sopra i Discorsi del Macchiavelli (Considerations on the Discourses of Machiavelli, 1530) were written as a response to Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on Livy, 1513–1517). Just as papal fortunes improved in the war against the French, Leo X died suddenly, leaving Guicciardini as the commander of an army that could receive no more orders until the election of a new pope. Despite this tenuous political situation, he saved Parma from a French siege related in the Relazione della difesa di Parma (Report on the Defense of Parma, 1521). Clement VII, another Medici pope and Guicciardini benefactor, succeeded Leo’s short-lived successor, Hadrian VI, in 1523, and Guicciardini remained in his position as president of the Romagna region, an indication of his abilities as a papal governor. Convinced that Charles V’s defeat of French forces at Pavia in 1525 forecast an end to peninsular self-determination, he urged the pope to form a league with Spain’s potential rivals Venice, France, and England and, as the papal league army’s Lieutenant General, advocated a quick attack on Milan in order to drive Charles V’s imperial forces from Italy and free Francesco Sforza, then besieged in his Milanese fortress. However, the commander of the Venetian army allied with the pope, Francesco Maria della Rovere, the Duke of Urbino, did not follow Guicciardini’s counsel and thus received much of the blame for the papal league’s defeats in Storia d’Italia. In late 1526 German mercenaries, the infamous landsknechts, arrived in support of Charles V’s imperial army in Italy. The papal forces suffered the loss of their most feared and capable military leader, Giovanni de’ Medici, known as Giovanni dalle Bande Nere, killed in a skirmish. In the opening months of 1527, imperial commanders Frundsburg and Borbone joined forces, moving to sack Rome on May 6. Many historians have referred to the absolute military, political, cultural, and psychological low in the Italian peninsula after the Sack of Rome, wherein many notable figures of the time were 913

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI directly involved. Baldassare Castiglione was the pope’s ambassador to Charles V’s court in Madrid. Benvenuto Cellini was among those besieged with Clement VII in Castel Sant’Angelo. Guicciardini was the pope’s political advisor. With the pope trapped and negotiating his own ransom, the Medici fell into disgrace in Florence, and Florentine republicans installed a third and final republic. As the political situation in Florence turned against him, Guicciardini retired to the Tuscan countryside, where he compiled extracts of Savonarola’s sermons, the Estratti savonaroliani (Savonarolian Extracts, 1528), to determine whether the 1527 Sack of Rome was the verification of the Dominican friar’s prophesies about divine retribution against Italy and her rulers, including the pope. Guicciardini also composed three orations, the Consolatoria, Accusatoria, Defensoria (Consolation, Accusation, Defense, 1527), works that express the essence of his cultural background as a Florentine aristocrat at a time of peninsular and personal crisis. The very idea of composing opposing speeches is an exercise from classical and legal culture and a foundation of humanist education. In the first oration, the Consolatoria, Guicciardini assumed the voice of a friend who tries philosophical arguments to convince the disgraced former Lieutenant General to accept and understand the damage to his status and reputation after the Sack of Rome. In the Accusatoria, he voiced the position of a vengeful prosecutor as Guicciardini imagined himself called before the Quarantia, a judicial body that during the last Florentine republic purged the city of Medici supporters. In the final oration, the Defensoria, Guicciardini offered an insight into his capacity as an advisor and legal counselor by completing the rhetorical exercise of taking opposite sides of a case, standard in classical authors like Thucydides and Livy, by defending himself from the strident charges laid in the Accusatoria. In 1528–1529 Guicciardini also began his second Florentine history, the unfinished Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs, 1528–1531), a work in the style of Renaissance civic histories. He also updated his earlier collection of Ricordi into a redaction, now known as the B version, that expanded the earlier maxims to include further insight into human nature and history. When the more radical arrabbiati (angry) faction took power in Florence on 17 April 1529, Guicciardini was faced with possible arrest. In June of 1529 Pope Clement VII and Emperor Charles V came to terms with the Treaty 914

of Barcelona. Part of the deal brokered by Clement was a return of the Medici to Florence, terms that were unacceptable to the republican government. On 12 October 1529, imperial forces began a siege of Florence. Guicciardini was summoned before a republican court on December of 1529; he was sentenced to exile in absentia on 17 March 1530, and his goods were confiscated. The last Florentine republic fell to Spanish imperial forces after Ferruccio Ferrucci’s heroic resistance when the city gates were treacherously opened on 12 August 1530. Guicciardini was sent back to Florence by Clement VII to organize the transfer of power to the Medici, an important step in the establishment of a Medici duchy in the city. In this period he composed the last, or C, redaction of the Ricordi, in which he revised some of the aphorisms from the earlier version to reflect his experiences as the defeated Lieutenant General of the papal league that had allowed the Sack of Rome. Written in crypto-Savonarolian tones, the ricordo C28 reveals a sense of guilt about his decision to serve the Medici popes despite his own misgivings about temporal power for the papacy because of the advantage of his personal self-interest, his particulare. Literary historian and educational reformer Francesco De Sanctis, in ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini’’ (1869), made this ricordo the center of Guicciardini’s critical reputation for later generations. For De Sanctis, writing in the romantic moment of Italy’s national unification in the Risorgimento, Guicciardini’s particulare explained why Italy came to suffer and even deserved foreign domination in the sixteenth century and why Guicciardini’s legacy posed a threat to the ethical fiber of a newly united Italy. After the fall of Florence in 1530 Guicciardini had hoped to oversee the installation of the sort of proaristocratic republic that he had theorized in the Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, but the city had seen its last republic. Clement sent Guicciardini back to Bologna as governor and appointed Baccio Valori to the presidency of the entire Romagna region, a decision that Guicciardini took as an indication of his loss of favor in the papal court. When Clement died and Paul III was elected new pope in 1534, Guicciardini’s career as a papal governor seems to have ended. In 1535 Guicciardini abandoned the Cose fiorentine and began the Commentari della luogotenenza (Commentary on the Lieutenantship), about his experiences as Lieutenant General in the papal armies. This work would eventually form Chapters XVI and XVII of his

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI masterpiece, the Storia d’Italia. Guicciardini’s final history expands the focus of his earlier Storie fiorentine and Cose fiorentine to produce a work that fused the influence of his personal experience as papal administrator with the models from classical historians like Thucydides and his earlier attempts at Florentine civic histories. In the Storia d’Italia, Guicciardini made extensive use of his access to primary materials and portrayed the crisis of Italy from the years of the invasion of King Charles VIII of France in 1494 to the death of Pope Paul III in 1534 in a wider European context, making it an important example of early modern historiography. In 1535 Guicciardini defended Duke Alexander de’ Medici against Florentine expatriates in an imperial court but was excluded from Florentine government after Alexander’s assassination in 1537. He rejected further papal appointment in the Romagna, having retired to work on the Storia d’Italia. He suffered a stroke in July of 1539, recovered temporarily, but succumbed on 22 May 1540, leaving the last books (XVI–XX) of his masterpiece unedited.

Biography Francesco Guicciardini was born 6 March 1483 in Florence. He attended university, studying law, at Florence 1498–1505 before transferring to Ferrara 1501–1502, and then Padua 1502–1505, obtaining a degree from the University of Pisa in 1505. Public announcement was made of his marriage to Maria di Alamanno di Averardo Salviati in 1508. He was a member of a diplomatic delegation to Spain for the Republic of Florence 1512; he returned to Florence and was appointed to positions in the Medici-controlled Florentine government, 1514. Guicciardini became Papal Governor of Modena, 1516; Papal Governor of Reggio; Lieutenant General of papal forces, papal President of Romagna, 1524; and Lieutenant General of papal armies, 1526. After the Sack of Rome by the forces of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, 1527, the Florentine republic sentenced Guicciardini to exile, 1528. He defended Duke Alexander III from accusations from Florentine exiles, 1535. Guicciardini suffered a stroke in 1539 and died in Florence, 22 May 1540. CARLO CELLI See also: Historiography

Selected Works Collections Opere inedite, edited by Giuseppe Canestrini, 10 vols., Florence: Barbera, 1857–1867. Carteggi, edited by Roberto Palmarocchi and Pier Giorgio Ricci, 17 vols., Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano, 1938– 1972. Opere, edited by Costantino Panigada and Roberto Palmarocchi, 9 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1929–1936. Opere, edited by Emanuella Lugnani Scarano, 3 vols., Turin: UTET, 1970–1981.

Political and Philosophical Treatises Relazione di Spagna, 1514. Discorso nel modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa dei Medici, 1515.Relazione della difesa di Parma, 1521. Dialogo del reggimento di Firenze, 1522; as Dialogue on the Government of Florence, translated by Alison Brown, 1994.

Historical Writing Storie fiorentine, 1508–1509; as The History of Florence, translated by Mario Domandi, 1970. Cose fiorentine, 1528–1531. Storia d’Italia, 1561; as The History of Italy, edited and translated by Sidney Alexander, 1968. Commentari della luogotenenza, 1535.

Other Discorso di Logron˜o, 1512; as Francesco Guicciardini’s Discorso di Logrogno, translated by Athanasios Moulakis, 1998. Diario del viaggio in Spagna, 1512. Consolatoria, 1527. Accusatoria, 1527. Defensoria, 1527. Estratti savonaroliani, 1528. Considerazioni sopra i Discorsi del Macchiavelli, 1530. Ricordi, 1576; as Maxims and Reflections, translated Mario Domandi, 1972.

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, Francesco Guicciardini, Boston: Twayne, 1976. Bruni, Francesco, La citta` divisa: le parti e il bene comune da Dante a Guicciardini, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Cadoni, Giorgio, Un governo immaginato: l’universo politico di Francesco Guicciardini, Rome: Jouvance, 1999. Chabod, Frederico, ‘‘Francesco Guicciardini,’’ in Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1933. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. De Caprariis, Vittorio, Francesco Guicciardini: dalla politica alla storia, Bari: Laterza, 1950. De Sanctis, Francesco, ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini,’’ in Saggi critici, Naples: Morano, 1869. Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in 16th Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

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FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI Jacobelli, Jader, Machiavelli e/o Guicciardini: alle radici del realismo politico, Milan: Mursia, 1998. Luciani, Vincent, Francesco Guicciardini and His European Reputation, New York: K.Otto, 1936. Lugnani Scarano, Emanuella, La ragione e le cose: tre studi su Guicciardini, Pisa: ETS, 1980. Moulakis, Athanasios, Republican realism in Renaissance Florence: Francesco Guicciardini’s Discorso di Logrogno, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Pocock, John Greville Agard, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Quatela, Antonio, Invito alla lettura di Francesco Guicciardini, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Ridolfi, Roberto, Vita di Francesco Guicciardini, Rome: Belardetti, 1960; as The Life of Francesco Guicciardini, translated by Cecil Grayson, London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1967. Sasso, Gennaro, Per Francesco Guicciardini quattro studi, Roma: Istituto italiano storico per il medioevo, 1984.

RICORDI, 1576 Aphorisms and sayings by Francesco Guicciardini

First published in 1576 with the title Consigli et Avvertimenti (Counsels and Warnings), the Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections) are collections of aphorisms and maxims composed by Renaissance historian and statesman Francesco Guicciardini over the course of his adult life. The keeping of personal notebooks was an established genre in Tuscan literature, and Guicciardini’s Ricordi offers the essence of Guicciardini’s historical and political thinking. Its intended readership was a private and familial audience of aristocrats in the tradition of Tuscan mercantile culture. If Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince, 1532) was a guidebook for rulers interested in attaining and expanding their power, then Guicciardini’s Ricordi offered advice for the members of his elite aristocratic class. Many of the topics were the same, but the aim was not necessarily the conquest and preservation of power but the maintenance of social status and wealth. In fact, throughout the Ricordi Guicciardini seemed to have been aware that he was living during the twilight of Florentine republicanism and that his mission was to transmit the fruit of his experience 916

to a readership of his progeny in posterity. Guicciardini’s advice was for survival through discretion with a focus on individual utility rather than grand design. The fatalistic tone of his advice may have been driven by his reduced expectations, but he still offered a rich assortment of opinions on a wide array of subjects from the validity of classical examples to insights on ambition, friendship, religion, reputation, and simulation. Guicciardini’s aim was for his wise man, the savio, to be ever vigilant and use his discretion in order to prevent and predict the vicissitudes of fortune. Despite the perceptive advice he offers, the Ricordi are permeated with examples of how reason may be undermined by irrational or unpredictable forces as part of Guicciardini’s realistic worldview. The Ricordi presented an editorial challenge because the author produced successive versions of his observations about human nature and history throughout his life. Critics and literary historians eventually agreed on three redactions. The A version contains entries written as early as 1512, during Guicciardini’s period as Florentine ambassador to Spain, and continuing into the 1520s, during Guicciardini’s appointments as papal governor in Romagna for Leo X. The B version of 1528 was written in the aftermath of Guicciardini’s tenure as Lieutenant General of Clement VII’s Papal League against the forces of Charles V, which sacked Rome in 1527. The final C version of 1530 was written after the denouement of Guicciardini’s career as a papal governor and advisor and in the period of the 1530 siege of Florence by the troops of Charles V. The three redactions of the Ricordi evidence a progression in Guicciardini’s thinking and opinions as he reacted to the events of his life. His final historical work, the Storia d’Italia (1561), is less provincial than his earlier histories, Storie fiorentine (The History of Florence, 1508– 1509) and Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs, 1528–1531), which have a decidedly civic focus. In a similar manner, in the later versions of the Ricordi, Guicciardini became less partisan and more practical and reserved. When he offered opinions and advice in the final C version of the Ricordi, his views on the same subjects from the earlier A or B versions had been transformed due to the intervening events in his life and in Italian history, such as the 1527 Sack of Rome and the 1530 siege of Florence. In fact, Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia took much of its worldview and sense of observational detachment from the moral truths exposed and expounded in the final C redaction of the Ricordi.

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI As a result of the interpretation of the C28 Ricordo by Risorgimento-era critic Francesco De Sanctis (‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini,’’ 1869), Guicciardini became equated with his self-interest, his particulare, for stating that he decided to serve the Medici popes, Leo X and Clement VII, against his conscience and only to further his personal status and wealth. With the dissemination of editions of the Ricordi during the idealistic moment of Italian unification in the nineteenth century, Guicciardini became emblematic of the moral decay of the Italian Renaissance and an explanation for the successive foreign domination of the peninsula. This interpretation of Guicciardini’s writings has diminished among contemporary critics more willing to understand that the author’s often cynical attitudes are evidence that he lived in a time of great chaos and uncertainty. In fact, his discerning eye for the brutal realities of life is a telling testament to the experiences of his generation. The themes he explored would influence subsequent authors interested in the fine mix between personal and political themes. CARLO CELLI Editions First edition: Consigli et Avvertimenti, edited by J. Corbinelli, Paris: Morel, 1576. Critical edition: Ricordi, edited by Raffaele Spongano, Florence: Sansoni, 1951. Translations: as Maxims and Reflections, translated Mario Domandi, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972; in Guicciardini on Diplomacy: Selections from the Ricordi, edited G. R. Berridge, Leicester: Centre for the Study of Diplomacy, University of Leicester, 1998.

Further Reading De Sanctis, Francesco, ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini,’’ in Saggi critici, Naples: Morano, 1869. Forni, Pier Massimo, ‘‘Teoresi e forma del precetto nei Ricordi del Guicciardini,’’ Annali d’italianistica, 2 (1984): 123–130. Fubini, Mario, ‘‘Le quattro redazioni dei ‘Ricordi’ del Guicciardini,’’ in Studi sulla letteratura del Rinascimento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1971. Holmes, Olivia, ‘‘Reading Order in Discord: Guicciardini’s Ricordi,’’ Italica, 76:3 (1999): 314–344. Lugnani Scarano, Emanuella, La ragione e le cose: tre studi su Guicciardini, Pisa: ETS, 1980. Palumbo, Matteo, Gli orizzonti della verita`: saggio su Guicciardini, Naples: Liguori, 1984. Sasso, Gennaro, Per Francesco Guicciardini quattro studi, Rome: Istituto italiano storico per il medioevo, 1984. Tanturli, Giuliano, ‘‘Quante sono le redazioni dei ‘Ricordi’ di Francesco Guicciardini?’’ Studi di Filologia Italiana, 56 (1998): 229–270.

STORIA D’ITALIA, 1561 Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia (History of Italy) covers the period in Italian history from the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici in 1492 to the election of Pope Paul III in 1534. The work begins with a description of the years preceding the reign of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence as a period of idyllic prosperity followed by the invasion of King Charles VIII of France in 1494, which led to the period known as the Italian Wars conducted between France and Spain in Italy and including tragic events such as the 1527 Sack of Rome. The Storia d’Italia ends with a description of the years after the siege of Florence in 1530, another event indicative of the definitive end of the previous era. Guicciardini presented his history according to classical models with a division of the events in 20 books featuring opposing speeches by political figures and an emphasis on politics and foreign affairs. He also offered interesting digressions on divine will, ambition, psychological portraits, the role of fortune, historical studies on the legitimacy of the papacy, and even the arrival of venereal disease and the discovery of the Americas. Guicciardini’s descriptions of the Borgia papacy and of religious reformer Girolamo Savonarola would earn sections of the text a place on the papal index of prohibited books, as early Italian editions were subject to censorship. Along with his exhaustive details of events, much of the commentary and ideological gist in the Storia d’Italia has been identified in an earlier form in Guicciardini’s Ricordi (Maxims and Reflections, 1576), collections of sayings and aphorisms that Guicciardini compiled throughout his adult life. Guicciardini had written histories before with the Storie fiorentine (The History of Florence, 1508–1509) and the Cose fiorentine (Florentine Affairs, 1528–1531), as well as the Commentari della luogotenenza (Commentary on the Lieutenantship, 1535), a narrative of his administration of the papal armies. But when his career in the service of the Medici popes Leo X and Clement VII came to a close in the mid-1530s, Guicciardini began to consider recent history within a peninsular and even European context rather than through the 917

FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI civic focus of his earlier works. For his composition of the Storia d’Italia between 1537 and 1540, Guicciardini relied on histories written by previous Florentine civic functionaries. He then made a direct and exhaustive study of archival documents and primary sources of information to arrive at his version of events and studied the work of contemporary historians, being particularly influenced by classical models such as Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Thus the Storia d’Italia came out of the tradition of civic and humanist writings in which the function of history was to provide readers with didactic lessons. But Guicciardini’s work has a wider scope and includes psychological examinations, which are the result of his more detailed, critical methodology incorporating the Italian historical experience into a larger European framework. Critics have noted that the Storia d’Italia focuses on the efforts of individuals who attempted to mold events to their own will but were inevitably confronted by a reality that was larger than their own perceptions. CARLO CELLI Editions First Editions Historia d’Italia, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1561 (censored, first 16 books only). Dell’Historia d’Italia, Venice: Gabriele Giolito, 1564 (censored, first publication of full 20 book text). La historia d’Italia, Geneva: Stoer, 1621.

Critical Editions La storia d’Italia sugli originali manoscritti, edited by Alessandro Gherardi, 4 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1919– 1920.

Storia d’Italia, edited by Silvana Seidel Menchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

Translations As History of Italy and History of Florence, edited by John R. Hale, translated by Cecil Grayson, New York: Washington Square Press, 1964. As The History of Italy, edited and translated by Sidney Alexander, New York: McMillan, 1968.

Further Reading Albertini, Rudolf von, Firenze dalla repubblica al principato: storia e coscienza politica, translated by C. Cristofolini. Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Barbuto, Gennaro Maria, La politica dopo la tempesta: ordine e crisi nel pensiero di Francesco Guicciardini, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Barucci, Guglielmo, I segni e la storia: modelli tacitiani nella Storia d’Italia del Guicciardini, Milan: LED, 2004. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. De Frede, Carlo, L’impresa di Napoli di Carlo VIII: commento ai primi due libri della Storia d’Italia del Guicciardini, Naples: De Simone, 1982. Di Maria, Salvatore, ‘‘Divine Order, Fate, Fortune and Human Action in Guicciardini’s Storia d’Italia,’’ Forum Italicum, 28:1 (1994): 22–40. Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in 16th Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Lugnani Scarano, Emanuella, La ragione e le cose: tre studi su Guicciardini, Pisa: ETS, 1980. Palumbo, Matteo, ‘‘I discorsi contrapposti nella Storia d’Italia di Francesco Guicciardini,’’ MLN, 106:1 (1991): 15–37. Phillips, Mark, Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian’s Craft, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977. Sasso, Gennaro, Per Francesco Guicciardini quattro studi, Roma: Istituto italiano storico per il medioevo, 1984.

MARGHERITA GUIDACCI (1921–1992) Margherita Guidacci’s restless work as a poet, translator, teacher, and essayist spans from the end of World War II to the time of her death in 1992. Despite the positive early response of important critics such as Giacomo Debenedetti and Giuseppe De Robertis, her figure has remained at the margins of mainstream Italian criticism. She was 918

one of the first writers who dared to abandon the example of the great Italian Hermetic masters and foster her own lyrical voice, one of existentialist and religious inspiration. However, her aloof voice cannot be labeled as countercurrent, as contemporary events and personal vicissitudes do intertwine in her writing. Her first collection of

MARGHERITA GUIDACCI poems, La sabbia e l’Angelo (The Sand and the Angel), was written during the dramatic years of World War II and published in 1946. Comprising three sections whose dominant theme is death and whose key note is of a religious nature, the book attests to the dialectical mode of Guidacci’s verses in relation to themes such as life and death, hope and dejection, transience and eternity. While the lyrics are dense with fresh memories of the despair and horror caused by the war, they are also tempered by a sentiment of optimism and comfort. Her style and language provide support to this dialectical attitude with the use of the oxymoron, already seen in the title, along with the image of the water cycle. As the poet later stated about her first book in an interview with Giacinto Spagnoletti in his La poesia che parla di se` (1996), for her, language is not a magic combination of sounds but rather a dramatic combination of meanings. She explained further that the three most important components of her writing are the quest for knowledge; the desire to communicate with the reader, which translates into a refusal of a fragmented style; and a necessity of simplicity and concreteness of language. In most of Guidacci’s lyrics, and especially in this first volume, the communicative aspect has been an act of interpretation by the poet of the message left by the war dead. The epitaph is in fact a favored form in this collection. Creative writing and translation remained equally important to Guidacci throughout her career. Her deep and vast knowledge of biblical texts as well as classical and modern works shaped her oeuvre. During the 1940s and 1950s she translated John Donne’s Sermons (1946) and a volume of English mystery plays, Sacre rappresentazioni inglesi (1950), along with numerous Anglo-American authors such as Conrad, Eliot, Gissing, Joyce, Pound, and Twain, among others. In most of Guidacci’s recurring images and themes, such as grass and rain, stones and sea, wind and sand, land and sky, light and darkness, one can find echoes of the authors she skillfully translated. As for her poetry, the decade of the 1950s was prolific, as evidenced by the publication of several collections such as La morte del ricco (The Death of the Rich Man, 1954), Giorno dei Santi (All Saints’ Day, 1957), and Paglia e polvere (Straw and Dust, 1961). La morte del ricco is once again a book of religious inspiration in which the evangelic parable of Lazarus and Dives as well as Guidacci’s recent translations provide the stimulation for an oratory, a sacred representation retelling the well-known evangelic parable in which characters—a priest, Dives’s mistress and servants,

Lazarus’s children, and others—perform their own monologues. Although set within an ancient context, the lyrics focus on the theme of death, as in the author’s first collection, and Dives represents both history, refusing redemption, and ideology, refusing the miracle. During the 1960s Guidacci suffered from physical and mental problems that resulted in both her permanent residence in a mental hospital and her poetic silence. This experience provided the setting and the themes for one of her most accomplished and acclaimed collections, Neurosuite (1970), published soon after another minor work, Un cammino incerto (An Uncertain Path, 1970). It is in Neurosuite, in such themes as a shipwreck or waiting to leave a prison, that one senses most strongly the influence of Emily Dickinson, an author whom Guidacci translated and greatly admired. She described the condition of the mentally ill patients whom she met at the hospital and the striking empathy she felt for them. This is certainly the book in which the dark, anguished side of human existence was most notably explored. From within an environment of alienation, where body and reason are set apart, Guidacci reached for hope and faith once more in the book’s final passages. Of her writings published in the 1970s, the most significant are Terra senza orologi (Land Without Clocks, 1973), Taccuino slavo (Slavic Notebook, 1976), and Il vuoto e le forme (The Void and the Shapes, 1977), which, while using stylistic and rhetorical devices already present in the previous collection (for instance, the oxymoron, foregrounded in the title Il vuoto e le forme), she also presents new personal experiences and addresses contemporary historical events such as her journey to Croatia and the revolt against General Pinochet in Chile. Outstanding among her numerous publications of the 1980s is L’altare di Isenheim (The Isenheim Altar, 1980), based on the homonymous polyptych by the sixteenth-century German artist Mathis Gru¨newald. Framed by a prologue and Guidacci’s farewell to her recently deceased husband, the book comprises three sections interpreting the main subjects of each of the painting’s panels, the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection. In his introduction to L’altare di Isenheim, Raffaele Crovi stated that this book, along with others of its decade, can be read as a reconsecration of life through a meditation on death. Il buio e lo splendore (The Darkness and the Splendor, 1989), her last volume aside from the posthumous Anelli del Tempo (Rings of Time, 1993), deserves special 919

MARGHERITA GUIDACCI attention as well, as it confirms her predilection for a dramatic and choral poetic voice. Homogeneous, rich, and compact, Guidacci’s work documents a continuing reflection upon the duplicity of human existence, life and death, and the poet’s special role as an interpreter and translator of the human experience.

‘‘L’orologio di Bologna,’’ 1981. ‘‘Inno alla gioia,’’ 1983. ‘‘La via crucis dell’umanita`,’’ 1984. ‘‘Liber Fulguralis,’’ 1986. ‘‘Poesie per poeti,’’ 1987. ‘‘Una breve misura,’’ 1988. ‘‘Il buio e lo splendore,’’ 1989. ‘‘Anelli del tempo,’’ 1993.

Essays

Biography Margherita Guidacci was born in Florence, April 25, 1921. Her father died, 1931. She graduated from the University of Florence in 1943 with a dissertation on Giuseppe Ungaretti’s poetry under the supervision of Domenico De Robertis. She traveled to England and Ireland, 1947. She married the sociologist Luca Pinna, 1949. They moved to Rome, 1957. Guidacci taught English language and literature at Liceo Scientifico Cavour, 1965–1975. She traveled in Jugoslavia, 1972. She obtained the libera docenza in English language and literature, 1972, and taught Anglo-American literature at the University of Macerata, 1975–1981. Pinna died, 1977. Guidacci was awarded the Biella Poesia prize for Il vuoto e le forme, 1978. She taught AngloAmerican literature and language at the Istituto Universitario di Magistero ‘‘SS. Maria Assunta,’’ 1981. She traveled to the United States, 1986. She was awarded the Premio Caserta for her complete works, 1987. Guidacci died of a stroke in Rome, on June 19, 1992. LODOVICA GUIDARELLI Selected Works Collections Landscape with Ruins: Selected Poetry, translated by Ruth Feldman, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992. In the Eastern Sky: Selected Poems, translated by Catherine O’Brien, Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1993. Le poesie, edited by Maura del Serra, Florence: Le Lettere, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘La sabbia e l’Angelo,’’ 1946. ‘‘Morte del ricco: un oratorio,’’ 1954. ‘‘Giorno dei Santi,’’ 1957. ‘‘Paglia e polvere,’’ 1961. ‘‘Un cammino incerto,’’ 1970. ‘‘Neurosuite,’’ 1970. ‘‘Terra senza orologi,’’ 1973. ‘‘Quindici poesie e sette disegni,’’ with Giuseppe Banchieri, 1973. ‘‘Taccuino slavo,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il vuoto e le forme,’’ 1977. ‘‘L’altare di Isenheim,’’ 1980. ‘‘Brevi e lunghe,’’ 1980.

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Studi su Eliot, Milano, 1975. Studi su poeti e narratori americani, 1978. ‘‘Northangerland’’ e altri studi brontiani, 1988.

Other Prose e interviste, edited by Ilaria Rabatti, 1999. La voce dell’acqua: quaderno di traduzioni, edited by Giancarlo Battaglia and Ilaria Rabatti, 2002.

Translations John Donne, Sermoni, 1946. Emily Dickinson, Poesie, 1947. Sacre rappresentazioni inglesi, 1950. Gorge Gissing, Sulla riva dello Jonio, 1957. Ezra Pound, Patria mia, 1958. Ezra Pound, A lume spento (1908–1952), with Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1958. Ezra Pound, Le ‘‘Trachinie’’ di Sofocle, 1958. Archibald MacLeish, New York, 1958. Joseph Conrad, Destino, 1961. Emily Dickinson, Poesie e lettere, 1961. Mark Twain, Vita sul Mississipi, 1962. John Paul II, Il sapore del pane, 1979. Elizabeth Bishop, L’arte di perdere, 1982. Oscar Wilde, Il Principe Felice e altre bellissime Fiabe, 1989.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Nuove poesie di Margherita Guidacci,’’ L’Approdo Letterario, 71–72 (1975), 43–52. Crovi, Raffaele, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Margherita Guidacci, L’altare di Isenheim, Milan: Rusconi, 1980. Feldman, Ruth, ‘‘La poesia di Margherita Guidacci,’’ Studium, 90:6 (1994), 903–912. Le foglie di Sibilla. Scritti su Margherita Guidacci, Rome: Studium, 2005. Frattini, Alberto, ‘‘Margherita Guidacci: Realta`, trascendenza, mistero nel cuore della poesia,’’ Il Veltro, 43:5– 6 (1999), 603–612. Frattini, Alberto, and Marcella Uffreduzzi, eds., Poeti a Roma (1945–1980), Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Ghilardi, Margherita, ed., Per Margherita Guidacci, Florence: Le Lettere, 2001. Harwell, Margherita, ‘‘La poesia di Margherita Guidacci: Origini e sviluppo,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989), 354–381. Harwell Pieracci, Margherita, ‘‘L’opera di Margherita Guidacci,’’ in Un cristiano senza chiesa e altri saggi, Rome: Studium, 1991. Manescalchi, Franco, ‘‘Condizione esistenziale ed ‘etica cristiana’ nell’opera di Margherita Guidacci (Lettura di Neurosuite),’’ in Etica cristiana e scrittori del Novecento, edited by Florinda M. Iannace, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum, 1993. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, La poesia che parla di se´, SalernoRome: Rispostes, 1996.

ARMANDA GUIDUCCI

ARMANDA GUIDUCCI (1923–1992) An extraordinarily multifaceted individual, Armanda Guiducci was a central figure in postwar Italian culture. Formed as a philosopher in the school of Antonio Banfi and in the intellectual tradition of the Italian Left, she became a social and cultural activist. As a Marxist critic, she argued in favor of ‘‘deprovincialization’’ and the internationalization of Italian letters, a belief she put into practice as cofounder and editor of the journal Ragionamenti. Guiducci’s literary studies reflected her ideological stance: Her acclaimed academic studies of Cesare Pavese’s opus are grounded in their common belief in the social value of literature. Similarly, she shared the intellectual curiosity of Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci. For Guiducci, the exploration of individual writers evolved into an elaborate analysis of the collective cultural experience of an historical period. To her expertise in philosophy and literature, she later added anthropology, ethnology, sociology, and psychoanalysis: All of these played an important role in her own writing. Her work sought to diffuse information, foster social awareness, and question the hegemony of institutions and traditions. Guiducci is best known for her feminist writings, in which the personal is rendered paradigmatic and, thereby, political. Starting in the 1970s, she committed her knowledge and skills to the cause of women’s liberation from social, political, and individual exploitation. Fully engaging in the debates over women’s issues that shook Italy, Guiducci wrote a series of polemical and thought-provoking books, published by Rizzoli. The first, La mela e il serpente (The Apple and the Serpent, 1974) is an innovative ‘‘novel,’’ told in the first person. The narrator explores her life through the biological aspects of gender, including menstruation and pregnancy. Searching for identity, the protagonist uncovers the barriers facing women because of their biological make-up and comes to an understanding of her experience as the descendent of Eve. By describing the physical journey into femaleness, the author criticized the developmental model for women espoused by society. Drawing on psychoanalysis and cultural anthropology, Guiducci included forays into the character’s unconscious and into dream states to show the symbolic

power and depth of social conditioning. The significance of this novel and its paradigmatic message was clearly understood at the time of publication, garnering extensive press coverage. Other feminist texts followed quickly, most notably Due donne da buttare (Two Disposable Women, 1976), La donna non e` gente (Women Are Not People, 1977), and Donna e serva (Woman and Servant, 1983). All examine gender definition through social history and present the protagonists as everywoman, bearers of a universal message about the female condition. Guiducci’s most critically analyzed work, Due donne da buttare, was written in a confessional style, structured on patriarchy’s antithetical division of women into Madonnas or whores. The two protagonists, who recount their lives in the first person, are a middle-aged housewife and a young prostitute. Rather than moral opposites, the two emerge as equal victims of misogyny. They both suffer economic, emotional, and sexual exploitation and respond with dependency and mental instability. The housewife’s home is a prison affording few satisfactions and requiring considerable selfabnegation motivated by guilt; she represents centuries of denigrated homemakers (which Guiducci also depicted in her Donna e serva, a study of female isolation in the private sphere). Stellina, the call girl, views herself as meat to be bought and consumed. Both women are controlled by the men in their lives, who possess the money and manipulate love. As a Marxist, Guiducci viewed sexual relations in economic, as well as biological and cultural, terms. In capitalist societies, men control women by controlling money and work. Whereas the confessions of Due donne da buttare describe modern urban life, La donna non e` gente explores peasant culture, little changed through time. Basing her writing on actual interviews, Guiducci acted as an intermediary, allowing uneducated women to break the code of silence and speak of their powerlessness. Stylistically, Armanda Guiducci’s feminist works are intricate and difficult to categorize, eluding genre classification. Called a novel, for example, La mela e il serpente is actually a hybrid that blends statistics, historical information, sociological data, 921

ARMANDA GUIDUCCI confession, and psychological narrative, thus challenging the demarcations separating author and narrator. Donna e serva goes beyond sociology and anthropology into current events, religion, Marxist theory, and psychiatry. What is well defined is the representation of women as the second sex, subject to subordination and oppression. On the other hand, Guiducci’s poetry is intimate and simple. The collection Poesie per un uomo (Poems for a Man, 1965) focuses on the theme of erotic love, while A colpi di silenzio (With Silent Blows, 1982) adds an element of human fragility motivated by the poet’s own experience with death. In a subjective way, the verse takes on some of the themes present in her prose: the universal biological experience of femaleness, gender differences leading to miscommunication, maternity, sexual passion, and the difficulties of aging.

Biography Armanda Guiducci was born in Naples, 1923. She moved to northern Italy to study, receiving a degree in philosophy from University of Milan. A committed and influential leftist, she became a cultural and political activist in the postwar period. In the 1950s, she engaged in prolific careers as a journalist, literary critic, and creative writer, contributing articles on cultural and intellectual issues. In 1955, with Franco Fortini, Luciano Amodio, Sergio Caprioglio, and Roberto Guiducci, Guiducci cofounded Ragionamenti, dedicated to political and literary topics. She became a regular contributor to L’Avanti!, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, and was the editor and writer for avant-garde periodicals including Tempi Moderni and Opinione. Guiducci was director of programming for Swiss television and director of the socialist Circolo Turati of Milan. In 1967, her most famous critical work, Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo, appeared. She won the Cittadella Prize for Poesie per un uomo, 1965, and the Pisa Prize for A colpi di silenzio, 1982. Guiducci died of cancer in 1992 in Milan. FIORA A. BASSANESE

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Selected Works Fictional Prose La mela e il serpente, 1974. Due donne da buttare, 1976. A testa in giu`, 1984. Virginia e l’angelo, 1991.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie per un uomo,’’ 1965. ‘‘A colpi di silenzio,’’ 1979.

Literary Criticism Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo, 1967. Il mito Pavese, 1967. Invito alla lettura di Pavese, 1972.

Socio-Historical Essays La donna non e` gente, 1977. All’ombra di Kali, 1979. Donna e serva, 1983. Perdute nella storia: Storia delle donne dal I al VI secolo D. C., 1989. Medioevo inquieto: Storia delle donne dall’VIII al XV secolo D.C., 1990.

Further Reading Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Armanda Guiducci.’’ in Italian Women Writers, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Armanda Guiducci’s Disposable Women,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Ghezzo, Flora, ‘‘Armanda Guiducci,’’ in The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, ‘‘Gender and Genre in Italian Feminist Literature in the Seventies,’’ Italica, 65:4(1988): 293–307. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Verso l’identita`: ipotesi sul romanzo femminista degli anni settanta,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Wood, Sharon, Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994, London: Athlone, 1995.

GUIDO GUINIZZELLI

GUIDO GUINIZZELLI (CA. 1230–1276) Much of Guido’s fame as a poet depends on the praise and historical contextualization given him and his works by Dante Alighieri, who mentioned him in the Vita Nuova, the Convivio, the De vulgari eloquentia, and the Divina Commedia. Through these references Guido emerged as the most important poet between the Sicilian-Tuscan school and Dante. In his treatise on vernacular eloquence, Dante cited Guido as an outstanding practitioner of illustrious poetry, mentioning three of his canzoni: ‘‘Madonna, il fino amor ched eo vo porto’’ (My lady, the noble love that I have for you), ‘‘Tegno di folle ‘mpres’, a lo ver dire’’ (I consider him foolish, to tell the truth), and especially the doctrinal ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Love always has its home in the noble heart), to which Dante also referred in the Convivio in the discussion of the concept of nobility. In canto 11 of the Purgatorio Dante refers to Guido as the first major figure in the line of poetic succession, the one who would be followed—and whose fame would be eclipsed—by Guido Cavalcanti (who in turn, it is noted, would be succeeded by another poet, probably Dante himself ). Finally, it is in Purgatorio 26, on the terrace of the lustful, that Dante the Pilgrim meets Guido Guinizzelli, whom he acknowledges as his poetic ‘‘father’’: ‘‘il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre’’ (vv. 97–99: the father of me and of the others—those, my betters— who ever used sweet, gracious rhymes of love). This great praise of the older poet from Bologna complements Dante’s earlier recognition of Guido as the ‘‘wise man’’ (‘‘saggio’’) in the sonnet in Chapter 20 of the Vita Nuova, ‘‘L’amor e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa’’ (Love and the noble heart are one and the same), which obviously takes its lead from his mentor’s canzone, ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore.’’ At this particular point in the Vita Nuova Dante was consciously moving away from a selfcentered preoccupation with the sorrow and pain of love to a more elevated conception of love that would then be the subject of his love lyrics. It was here that he recognized the dramatic change in the poetic tradition of the thirteenth century that Guido Guinizzelli announced in his verse and that critics would eventually term the ‘‘poetics of

praise,’’ that is, poetry no longer concerned with personal suffering but dedicated to extolling the beautiful, indeed the divine and miraculous qualities of the beloved. Guido’s poetry—five canzoni and fifteen sonnets, plus a couple of fragments—is contained, for the most part, in the major early manuscript collections of verse: two codices in the Vatican (Lat. 3793 and Chigi L.VIII.305) and two in Florence (Rediano 9 in the Laurentian Library and Banco Rari 217 in the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale). The authenticity of a few other poems is in question. A good two-thirds of Guido’s poetic production followed the various models of the Sicilian-Tuscan school; indeed, Guido was an early adherent of Guittone d’Arezzo, to whom he addressed the sonnet, ‘‘O caro padre mio’’ (O my dear father), and whose sententious style can be observed in Guido’s canzone ‘‘Tegno di folle ‘mpres,’ a lo ver dire.’’ Similarly, some sonnets are didactic in tone, as ‘‘Pur a pensar mi par gran meraviglia’’ (For me it’s a great wonder simply to think). Other poems reflect the themes and language of the earlier Sicilian and Provenc¸al love poetry, such as ‘‘Donna, l’amor mi sforza’’ (My lady, love urges me) and ‘‘Madonna, il fino amor ched eo vo porto.’’ Guido also composed a couple of sonnets in the comic style, one of which, ‘‘Volvol te levi, vecchia rabbiosa’’ (May a whirlwind carry you off, you meddlesome old hag), conforms to the generic characteristics of the vituperium. At some point in his career Guido changed his poetic style and composed lyrics that varied greatly from those of his predecessors in style, theme, and conception. For this changeover he was reprimanded by Bonagiunta Orbicciani da Lucca who, in a well-known tenzone (sonnet exchange), accused him of having ‘‘mutata la mainera / de li piacenti ditti dell’amore / de la forma dell’esser la` dov’era’’ (changed the manner of the pleasing songs of love from their earlier forms). In his response, ‘‘Om ch’e` saggio non corre leggero’’ (A wise man does not run rapidly), Guido gently criticized the older, more traditionally minded poet. It is for his key role in the transformation and renewal of the Italian lyric tradition, that Guido 923

GUIDO GUINIZZELLI Guinizzelli has been recognized as the father of the dolce stil novo, the poetic school that flourished in the last quarter of the thirteenth century and drew some of its imagery from natural philosophy and its inspiration from religious mysticism. The primary characteristics of stilnovismo may be found in Guido’s praise of the divine beauty and miraculous qualities of his lady, as the first eight verses of the following sonnet demonstrate: Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare ed asembrarli la rosa e lo giglio: piu` che stella diana splende e pare, e cio` ch’e` lassu` bello a lei somiglio. Verde river’ a lei rasembro e l’are, tutti color di fior’, giano e vermiglio, oro ed azzurro e ricche gioi per dare: medesmo Amor per lei rafina meglio. (I truly wish to praise my lady and to compare her to the rose and lily: More than the morning star she shines and comes into view, and all that is beautiful in the heavens I compare to her. I compare her to the verdant river bank and the gentle breeze, all colors of flowers, yellow and red, gold, and blue and precious stones worthy of being given: Through her even Love achieves greater perfection)

In his doctrinal canzone, ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Love always has its home in the noble heart), Guinizzelli attempted to resolve the difficult questions concerning the nature of human nobility (gentilezza), the role of the woman in the amorous relationship and the purpose and meaning of earthly love. Contrary to traditional wisdom, gentilezza is not determined by a person’s wealth, or family, or any other external circumstance; rather, nobility is the consequence of one’s innate qualities. Therefore, the capacity or disposition to love purely and nobly is reserved for those to whom Nature has endowed with the ‘‘cor gentil’’ (noble heart). No longer a passive object of desire, Guinizzelli’s lady is an active force, who assumes in the elaborate system of analogies of the canzone ‘‘Al cor gentil’’ a power and status equal to that of God. In this manner the woman is responsible for activating in her admirer that inborn potentiality to love; indeed, Guinizzelli’s woman becomes a true ‘‘donna angelicata’’ (angelicized woman), similar to the angelic intelligences who move the eternal spheres. Given the philosophical pretensions and the numerous metaphysical parallels and analogies of the canzone, Guinizzelli was probably intending to ennoble human love by transforming it into a sort of secular caritas, a project that, however, proved to be too ambitious, for he concluded the poem on a humorous note. In the last strophe of 924

the canzone, Guido imagined that, after death, he was being judged by God, who rebuked him for having dared to use Him as a term of comparison for a vain, earthly love (‘‘vano amor’’): Donna, Deo mi dira`: ‘‘Che presumisti?’’ sı¨ando l’alma mia a lui davanti; ‘‘Lo ciel passasti, e ’nfin a me venisti, e desti in vano amor Me per semblanti: ch’a Me conve`n la laude, e a la Reina del regname degno, per cui cessa onne fraude.’’ Dir Li poro`: ‘‘Tenne d’angel sembianza che fosse del Tuo regno: non me fu fallo, s’in lei posi amanza.’’ (My lady, God will ask me, when my soul stands before Him, ‘‘What presumption is yours?’’ You passed through the heavens and came to My presence and used Me as a comparison for a vain love. All praise belongs to Me and to the Queen of this worthy realm, through whom all fraud ceases.’’ I will be able to answer Him: ‘‘She looked like an angel from Your kingdom: it was not my fault that I loved her.’’)

Despite his failure to reconcile human affection for woman and divine love for God, Guido Guinizzelli clearly indicated a new direction in love poetry, one that would be pursued by poets such as Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and especially Dante. Indeed, it would be to this model that Dante would eventually turn in the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia, where Beatrice became his personal bearer of spiritual salvation (‘‘salute’’), thus fulfilling the lofty, but unrealized aspirations of Guido Guinizzelli and representing the supreme achievement of the dolce stil novo.

Biography Guido Guinizzelli was born in Bologna of the Magnani family, ca. 1230. His grandfather was Magnano, who served as prosecutor for the Commune of Bologna. Similarly, his father, Guinizzello di Magnano, was employed by the Commune as a judge; he also served as a member of the Council of the People and later as podesta` of Narni. The first of six children, Guido was, like his father, a judge in Bologna. He married Beatrice della Fratta in 1272, and their son, Guiduccio, was born the following year. Guido’s political allegiance was with the Ghibelline faction, headed by the Lambertazzi family. In 1274, as a result of increasing hostilities between the Ghibellines and their Guelf opponents, headed by the Geremei family, and the victory of the latter, Guido and his brothers (Giacomo and Uberto) were exiled. Guido and his

GUITTONE D’AREZZO family took refuge in Monselice (near Padua), where he died two years later, sometime before November 14, 1276. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ See also: Dolce stil novo Selected Works Collections Rimatori del Dolce Stil Novo, edited by Luigi di Benedetto, Bari: Laterza, 1939. La poesia lirica del Duecento, edited by Carlo Salinari, Turin: UTET, 1951. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti del dolce stil nuovo, edited by Mario Marti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli, edited and translated by Robert R. Edwards, New York: Garland, 1987.

Selected Translations German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An Anthology and a History, edited and translated by Frederick Goldin, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973. The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani, New York: Baroque Press, 1974. Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, The Early Italian Poets (1861), edited by Sally Purcell, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Wilhelm, James J., Lyrics of the Middle Ages, New York: Garland, 1990.

Further Reading Barolini, Teodolinda, Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Bertelli, Italo, La poesia di Guido Guinizzelli e la poetica del ‘‘Dolce stil nuovo,’’ Florence: Le Monnier, 1983. Bertelli, Italo, Poeti del Dolce stil nuovo: Guido Guinizzelli e Lapo Gianni, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1963. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Il canto di Guido Guinizzelli,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 154 (1977): 481–508. Folena, Gianfranco (editor), Per Guido Guinizzelli: Il Comune di Monselice (1276–1976), Padua: Antenore, 1980. Ker, W. P., ‘‘Dante, Guido Guinizelli and Arnaut Daniel,’’ Modern Language Review, 4 (1909): 145–152; reprinted in Form and Style in Poetry, London: Macmillan, 1929. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Marti, Mario, Storia dello stil nuovo, 2 vols., Lecce: Milella, 1973. Moleta, Vincent, Guinizelli in Dante, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1980. Russell, Rinaldina, Tre versanti della poesia stilnovistica, Bari: Adriatica, 1973. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘‘A Note on Guinizelli’s ‘Al cor gentil,’’’ Modern Philology, 12 (1914): 325–330. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, ‘‘Guinizelli Praised and Corrected,’’ in The Invention of the Sonnet and Other Studies in Italian Literature, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1959.

GUITTONE D’AREZZO (CA. 1230/35–1294) Very little is known about Guittone—possibly a nickname for the common first name Guido— from sources other than his own, or other people’s, literary works. The central event of his life, the one around which all of his writings are organized, appears to have been the religious conversion that coincided with the complete rejection of the considerable body of love poetry that had till then been the basis of his fame. Around 1265, in fact, Guittone joined the Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae (Soldiers of the Blessed Virgin Mary), a newly formed religious order popularly known, as a sly commentary on their moderate and tolerant rule, as the Frati Gaudenti (the Jovial Friars). At this time, Guittone composed an 86-line canzone or ode,

‘‘Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare’’ (Now We Shall See Whether I Am Still Able to Sing), in which he vehemently retracts and stigmatizes as reprobate and corrupting all poetry inspired by Amore, the god of love, especially the poetry he himself had written up to that point. This palinode, composed in the same highly wrought style and complicated rhyme schemes that had characterized Guittone’s earlier production, also functioned as a manifesto of his new poetry, which would now be devoted to the praise of God and the teaching of Christian values. As a consequence, the three oldest manuscripts that transmit his work (along with the work of the other poets of the Duecento)—Vaticano Latino 3793, Laurenziano Rediano 9, and Palatino 418 (now 925

GUITTONE D’AREZZO Banco rari 217)—all divide his poetic production into two groups, attributing his texts either to ‘‘Guittone’’ or to ‘‘Frate Guittone,’’ almost as if they had been written by two different people. The structure of the Laurenziano Rediano manuscript is particularly emblematic in this respect. Copied in all probability in the last decade of the thirteenth century in an environment close to Guittone, the codex opens with a group of 41 epistolary texts, 35 by the friar, followed by 434 poems, 232 by the poet from Arezzo, metrically subdivided into canzoni and sonnets. The section containing the canzoni begins with the above-mentioned manifesto followed by 23 other texts, all listed under the friar’s name. There follow, symmetrically, 24 love songs attributed to Guittone and finally 76 poems by other authors. In the sonnet section, the order is reversed: The texts attributed to Guittone precede the ones attributed to Frate Guittone. This arrangement creates a somewhat circular structure in which the religious experience encloses, but also orients, the interpretation of the older preconversion lyrical production. The image that emerges, then, from this manuscript is that of an emblematic Christian life, with a conversion that has its illustrious models in Paul and Augustine. The passionate moral teachings of the converted friar, conveyed by both the letters and the poetry, as well as their repeated condemnations of a sinful past, encourage a reading in autobiographical terms of all of his work, including the poems written before he joined the Milites. The love poetry attributed to Guittone is thus retrospectively stripped of its original literary autonomy, becoming a mere testimony to an earlier erotically errant version of the self and reinforcing by contrast the sincerity of both his conversion and the moral preaching of the friar. The implicit goodness of the fully embraced Christian doctrine, coupled with Frate Guittone’s undisputed poetical mastery, guarantees the moral and literary authority of his teaching. Furthermore, the religious texts establish a continuous dialogue with the older poems, not only through the repeated palinodes, but also by means of a high quotient of intertextuality. Although the Laurenziano manuscript was neither compiled nor ordered by the poet’s own hand, it may well have been copied from a previous authorial redaction. Two independent sources, a polemical sonnet by Guido Cavalcanti addressed to the friar and an incidental remark made by Dante commentator Benvenuto da Imola, explicitly mention a volume assembled by Guittone. Whether or not, in the last years of his life, the poet personally 926

prepared a ‘‘book’’ in which he collected and ordered his production in a form similar to that transmitted by Laurenziano Rediano 9 is still an object of debate among scholars. Undisputed, however, is the fact that, toward the end of Guittone’s life, his poetry must have presented itself as roughly divisible into two parts: one dealing, like most contemporary lyric poetry, with erotic themes; the other engaged with moral and religious issues, often set in direct opposition to and with the declared intent of making amends for the love poetry. How Guittone’s immediate posterity reacted to his legacy is epitomized by Dante’s repeated and systematic condemnations of his poetry, a critique that would exert a powerful negative influence on its subsequent reception. This devaluation lasted well into the twentieth century, and Guittone was for a long time considered either as a passive imitator of Provenc¸al modes or at best a clumsy precursor of Dante’s own moral and political vein. While an accurate assessment of all that Dante learned from Guittone is still to come, the advances in Guittonian scholarship have been enormous, as the essays presented at the conference organized in 1994 to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death show (Michelangelo Picone, ‘‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante,’’ 1995). Guittone’s lyric poetry seems to have been finally rescued from Dante’s wholesale condemnation and placed in the context of its direct predecessors and models, namely the Provenc¸al troubadours and the poets of the so-called Sicilian School. Several commentators tend to read Guittone’s early production, at least partially, as an ironic treatment, from a realistic, bourgeois point of view, of the fashionable love poetry of his day. While northern Italy and the court of Treviso were becoming the main center for the diffusion and revitalization of Occitan lyric poetry, especially at the hands of Uc de Saint Circ, compiler of most of the Provenc¸al vidas and the razos, and while the poets of Emperor Frederick II’s Magna Curia had recently proposed the translation and adaptation of selected Provenc¸al modules into the Sicilian vernacular, Guittone’s early production seems to take off in a different direction. Far from being an abstract idealization of the behavioral dynamics of the court, with the poet praising an unattainable lady, the source of his inspiration, who grants her favors only in terms of protection and patronage, as was still the case with the Sicilians, Guittone’s Madonna is instead a credible real, live, woman equally skilled in the language of deceit that constitutes the courtly love lyric. Instead of attempting

GUITTONE D’AREZZO to revitalize the conventions of a genre, possibly adapting it to a new social environment, Guittone operated within the same linguistic and stylistic parameters but willfully exaggerated those conventions or offered parodies of their cliche´s in order to demonstrate the ultimate falsity of that language. In a spirit akin to that of the Roman de la Rose, the rituals of courtly love, in the more down-to-earth context of Italian communal society, are exposed as an elegant pantomime that disguises its real aim, the actual seduction of the lady. This parodic attitude is especially evident in the first 86 love sonnets transcribed under Guittone’s name in the Laurenziano manuscript. Thanks to the presence of formal and semantic interconnective devices, the texts may be read as a single sequence in which a character, a poet called Guittone, enters into open debate with the lady whom he is courting. The textual exchange becomes similar to a theatrical representation with overtly comic tones, especially since the suitor’s real intentions are eventually revealed, though in the end he is unsuccessful in obtaining the lady’s favors. Guittone also seemed to adopt a similar stance in several of his canzoni, revealing an author whose ultimate goal was a radical critique of the conventions of the genre from a literary and intellectual viewpoint. Scholars such as Vincent Moleta have tried to show how Guittone’s early poetry progressively succeeds in freeing itself from stereotyped courtly modes and already contains in nuce the moral preoccupations that will eventually lead to his religious conversion (The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo, 1976). In this view, the political texts in particular evince the young Guittone’s sincere and original ethical disposition. The famous canzone, ‘‘Ahi lasso! or e` stagion de doler tanto’’ (Alas, Now Is the Season for Great Lamentation), deploring the Florentine defeat at Montaperti (1260), is indeed a powerful example of sirventes, the troubadour term for a polemical political text, while another ode, ‘‘Gente noiosa e villana’’ (A Noisome and Abject People), lamenting the poet’s self-imposed exile from Arezzo where his lady still dwells, fuses themes typical of a ‘‘distance song’’ with harsh criticism of the city’s moral and civic decadence. A thorough and balanced treatment of Guittone’s poetry and his literary accomplishment has yet to appear. It can hardly be expected until the long-awaited critical edition of his poetry that takes into account all of the developments in Guittonian scholarship becomes available. Until such time, the most philologically reliable texts remain

those established by Silvio D’Arco Avalle for the Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (1992).

Biography Guitttone d’Arezzo was born, possibly in Arezzo, between 1230 and 1235. He was probably in exile outside Tuscany, 1257–1259. He joined Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae around 1265. He was in Bologna as a representative of the Milites, 1285. A donation for the construction of a Florentine monastery was registered under his name in Arezzo, 7 September 1293. Guittone died, according to a Bolognese obituary, 21 August 1294. ANTONELLO BORRA Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Sonetti e canzoni di diuersi antichi autori toscani in dieci libri raccolte. Di Dante Alaghieri libri quattro. Di M. Cino da Pistoia libro uno. Di Guido Caualcanti libro uno. Di Dante da Maiano libro uno. Di fra Guittone d’Arezzo libro uno. Di diuerse canzoni e sonetti senza nome d’autore. Libro uno,’’ 1527. ‘‘Le rime di Guittone d’Arezzo, edited by Francesco Egidi, 1940; selections in German and Italian Lyrics of the Middle Ages,’ translated by Frederick Goldin, 1973; and ‘The Age of Dante: An Anthology of Early Italian Poetry, translated by Joseph Tusiani,’’ 1974. ‘‘Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini,’’ edited by Silvio D’Arco Avalle, 1992.

Letters Le lettere di Guittone d’Arezzo, edited by Claude Margueron, 1990.

Further Reading Borra, Antonello, Guittone d’Arezzo e le maschere del poeta: La lirica cortese tra ironia e palinodia, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Borsa, Paolo, ‘‘La tenzone tra Guido Guinizzelli e frate Guittone d’Arezzo,’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 65:(2002), 47–88. Holmes, Olivia, ‘‘S’ eo varro` quanto valer gia` soglio’’: The Construction of Authenticity in the Canzoniere of Frate Guittone and Guittone d’Arezzo (Ms Laurenziano-Rediano 9),’’ Modern Philology, 95 (1997), 170–199. Leonardi, Lino, ‘‘Il canzoniere Laurenziano: Struttura, contenuto e fonti di una raccolta d’autore,’’ in I canzonieri della lirica italiana delle Origini: Studi critici, vol. 4, edited by Lino Leonardi, Florence: SISMEL, 2001. Leporatti, Roberto, ‘‘Il ’libro’ di Guittone e la ‘Vita Nova,’’’ Nuova Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 4(2001): 41–150.

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GUITTONE D’AREZZO Margueron, Claude, Recherches sur Guittone d’Arezzo, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966. Moleta, Vincent, The Early Poetry of Guittone d’Arezzo, London: The Modern Humanities Research Association, 1976. Picone, Michelangelo (editor), Guittone d’Arezzo nel settimo centenario della morte: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Arezzo, Florence: Cesati Editore, 1995. Picone, Michelangelo, ‘‘Guittone, Guinizzelli e Dante,’’ Alighieri: Rassegna Bibliografica Dantesca, 18 (2001): 5–19.

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Poli, Andrea, ‘‘Una scheda provenzale per Guittone: Le canzoni XX, ‘Ahi lasso, che li boni e li malvagi’ e XLIX, ‘Altra fiata aggio gia` donne parlato,’’’ Filologia e critica, 25 (2000): 95–108. Storey, H. Wayne, ‘‘Sulle orme di Guittone: I programmi grafico-visivi del codice Banco Rari 217,’’ in Studi vari di lingua e letteratura italiana in onore di Giuseppe Velli, edited by Claudia Berra, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Tartaro, Achille, Il manifesto di Guittone e altri studi tra Due e Quattrocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974.

H HALCYON See Alcyone (Work by Gabriele D’Annunzio)

HARD LABOR See Lavorare stanca (Work by Cesare Pavese)

HERMETICISM essential language representing the universal, tragic condition of human beings. The term Hermeticism was first applied to this poetic movement, in a derogatory way, by Francesco Flora in his La poesia ermetica (1936). In this book, Flora, a critic of Crocean legacy, condemns Giuseppe Ungaretti, among others, for the obscurity of his writing: a style that he defines as hermetic.

In twentieth-century Italian literature, the term ermetismo (Hermeticism) indicates a poetic movement that flourished mainly in Florence, with branches in Milan and Rome, roughly between 1930 and 1950. This movement developed thanks to the activity of poets, critics, and translators who promoted a type of poetry that excluded explicit political references, and was characterized by an

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HERMETICISM The label was soon pre-empted by those very poets and critics who were damned as Hermetics, and it assumed a positive connotation. Ermetismo, as a term of identity, in fact, enabled the Hermetic poets to synthesize and to explain the theoretical and spiritual foundation of their work. This is apparent, for example, in Carlo Bo’s Letteratura come vita (1938), a work, however, that is not meant to be read as a programmatic manifesto like those of other avant-garde literary movements, but rather as a document assessing a common itinerary and taste. According to Bo, what unites the Hermetic poets is a shared appreciation of the spiritual value of literature, intended as a supreme truth reflected in the essential nature of life itself. Poetry, in short, is the highest expression of the human soul. Because of its apparent detachment from contingent social and historical facts, Hermeticism has not had an easy reception in Italy. From the beginning of the Fascist regime, Hermetics became the target of opposing factions. Some interpreted their political disengagement as a neutral position of aesthetes that the regime could safely ignore; others saw it as an indirect way—and the only possible way, at the time—of declaring an anti-Fascist stance. This can be seen, for example, in the polemics of Luigi Russo, Mario Morandi, and Giuseppe Villaroel in Donato Valli’s Storia degli ermetici (1978) and in Marco Fioravanti’s La critica e gli ermetici (1978). After World War II, with the emergence of a neorealist trend in Italy, in which activism in literature was considered essential, the Hermetics were criticized for their lack of engagement. And even later—for example in the 1960s, with the formation of the neoavant-garde—their contributions were often belittled or ignored. It is significant that, in his introduction to the anthology Poesia del novecento (1969), Edoardo Sanguineti, speaking of the poet Mario Luzi, declares, with him ‘‘si ha il senso pieno di essere giunti a una stazione terminale, e si volta pagina con assoluta tranquillita`’’ (one has the sense of having arrived at a terminal point, so that it is possible to turn over to a new leaf with absolute calm). Although Hermetics espoused common literary aims, they did not perceive themselves as an organized school. This is probably why various critics, including Silvio Ramat, Ruggero Jacobbi, Mario Petrucciani, Sergio Pautasso, and Luciano Anceschi, define Hermeticism and identify its representatives by different criteria. Anceschi, for example, in his introduction to Lirici nuovi (1942) recognizes three distinct generations of Hermetics. According to him, the first generation is composed 930

of such poets as Ungaretti, Montale, and Sergio Solmi; the second by exponents such as Salvatore Quasimodo, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Sandro Penna, and Alfonso Gatto; and, finally, the third by representatives of the Florentine circle (Mario Luzi), and of the Milanese circle (Vittorio Sereni). Despite Anceschi’s assertion, it is clear that within this subdivision, further nuances exist. For example, even if Montale, in such works as Le occasioni (The Occasions, 1939) displays the Hermetic trait of a concentrated and difficult language, his poetry is significantly different from that of Ungaretti, one of the poets with whom he is grouped. Unlike Ungaretti, Montale never carries the symbolist influence to the extremes. The drive that leads Montale toward an irrational side of existence is always controlled by a rational restraint. In addition to the poets mentioned above, many others contributed to the formation and diffusion of the Hermetic spirit. Some critics, including Bo and Oreste Macrı`, were directly involved with the movement. Others, such as Anceschi, Contini, and Alfredo Gargiulo, followed and supported the activities of the group. Moreover, prestigious literary journals, including Solaria and Letteratura, published Hermetic pieces. And other well-known journals, because of their prevailing philosophical line, ended up as virtual organs of the movement itself: in Florence, Frontespizio and Campo di Marte (this latter became the most militant Hermetic journal), and in Milan, Corrente. Among representative Hermetic poets, Salvatore Quasimodo, Mario Luzi, and Vittorio Sereni have emerged as distinctive voices: Quasimodo, for his rich style and the recovery of classical elements; Luzi for his linguistic sophistication, along with his idiosyncratic Catholicism; and, finally, Sereni for his sober tone and his moral intent. The Sicilian Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968) made his de´but as a poet in Florence in 1930 by publishing three poems in Solaria: ‘‘Albero’’ (Tree), ‘‘Prima volta’’ (First Time), and ‘‘Angeli’’ (Angels). He went on to write numerous renowned works in the Hermetic style: Acque e terre (Waters and Lands, 1930); Oboe sommerso (Oboe Under Water, 1932); Odore di eucalyptus e altri versi (Essence of Eucalyptus and Other Poems, 1933); Erato e Apollion (Aerato and Apollyon, 1936), and Poesie (Poems, 1938). Recurrent themes are his sense of estrangement as an anonymous sojourner in modern society, and his nostalgic longing to recover a mythical lost childhood: a childhood that harks back to an ideal, classical Sicily. Quasimodo’s employment of frequent analogies, elliptical

HERMETICISM forms, sophisticated words, and mystical motifs— all hallmarks of Hermetic verse—clearly identifies him as a member of the movement. The works that Quasimodo wrote after World War II mark a different phase in his poetic career. They manifest a belief in progressive ideologies and an interest in social issues that were absent in the poet’s earlier production. Mario Luzi (1914–2005), like Quasimodo, lived and worked in Florence. His poetry collections achieve some of the most coherent and refined results of the movement. Being particularly inspired by French Catholic thought and by Orphic poetry, he often creates rarefied atmospheres in his work. His blurring of real referents evokes suggestive spiritual and metaphysical dimensions. Luzi initially made himself known in 1935, through his poetic collection La barca (The Boat). Then he consolidated his reputation with Avvento notturno (Night Advent, 1942), Un brindisi (A Toast, 1946), Quaderno gotico (Gothic Notebook, 1947), Primizie del deserto (First Fruits of the Desert, 1952), Dal fondo delle campagne (From the Depths of the Countryside, 1965), Su fondamenti invisibili (On Invisible Foundations, 1971), and other works. His most characteristic production is that published between the 1940s and the 1960s. In these poems, poetic personae placed in imaginary worlds yearn to overcome different obstacles, in an attempt to give real substance to an otherwise vain existence. Vittorio Sereni (1913–1983), born in Luino, had contacts with the Hermetics in Florence, but he developed as a poet chiefly in the Milanese milieu, where he had the opportunity to work with the philosopher Antonio Banfi, and meet artists and writers associated with the journal Corrente. His first volume of poems, Frontiera (Boundary), appeared in 1941; his second, Diario d’Algeria (Diary of Algeria), in 1947. This second book reveals the profound impact of war and captivity on Sereni. In Diario d’Algeria, the faded and elegiac landscapes of the soul that are presented in Frontiera are noticeably absent. In their place, one encounters references to history, and a sense of bewilderment and loss: The poetic personae feel powerless, swept along in the tide of relentless events that they cannot change. In 1965, after a few years of silence, the poet published Gli strumenti umani (Human Instruments). This book, which expresses the inability of individuals to control the mechanisms of a neocapitalist society, marks Sereni’s definite closure with the Hermetic experience.

Despite a decidedly mixed critical reception, Hermeticism—as represented in the works of Quasimodo, Luzi, Sereni and others—marks a milestone in the history of Italian literature. The Hermetic movement revives and solidifies certain nineteenth-century symbolist traits, notably an ascetic vocabulary and an emphasis on the noumenal aspect of human existence. It also responds to the most recent philosophical debates of phenomenology and existentialism. In the sociopolitical context, Hermeticism implicitly rejects Fascist ideology, and—in keeping with its antimodern and antimaterialistic spirit—rejects the taste of an evolving mass culture. PAOLA SICA Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano (editor), Lirici nuovi: antologia, Milan: Hoepli, 1942; enlarged edition: Milan: Mursia, 1964. Bo, Carlo, Letteratura come vita (1938), edited by Sergio Pautasso, Milan: Rizzoli, 1994. Contini, Gianfranco, Esercizi di lettura sopra autori contemporanei con un’appendice su testi non contemporanei, Florence: Parenti, 1939; enlarged edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Dolfi, Anna, Terza generazione: ermetismo e oltre, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Fioravanti, Marco, La critica e gli ermetici, Bologna: Cappelli, 1978. Flora, Francesco, La poesia ermetica, Bari: Laterza, 1936. Jacobbi, Ruggero, Campo di Marte trent’anni dopo: 1938– 1968, Florence: Vallecchi, 1969. Jones, Frederic J., Modern Italian Lyric, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986. Macrı`, Oreste, Teoria letteraria delle generazioni, edited by Anna Dolfi, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1995. Mattesini, Francesco (editor), Dai solariani agli ermetici: studi sulla letteratura italiana degli anni ’20 e ’30, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1989. Pautasso, Sergio, Ermetismo, Milan: Editrice bibliografica, 1996. Petrucciani, Mario, Poetica dell’ermetismo italiano, Turin: Loescher, 1955. Pieri, Marzio, Interdizioni postermetiche: invenzione e deriva di una poesia italiana novecentesca, Trento: La finestra, 2003. Ramat, Silvio, L’ermetismo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Sanguineti, Edoardo (editor), Poesia del novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Stasi, Beatrice, Ermetismo, Milan: La Nuova Italia, 2000. Strazzeri, Marcello, Profilo ideologico dell’ermetismo italiano, Lecce: Milella, 1977. Valli, Donato, Storia degli ermetici, Brescia: La scuola, 1978.

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HEROIC-COMIC POETRY

HEROIC-COMIC POETRY The intricacy of the connections between imitation, ludic translations, and plot-making in the epic tradition suggests taking a fresh look at heroic-comic poetry in the first two decades of the seventeenth century. Writers such as Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635), Francesco Bracciolini (1566–1645), and Lorenzo Lippi (1606–1665) should be credited as the ‘‘creators’’ of a new type of poetry that parodies the high style of epic by applying it to everyday and trivial themes. Like their Greek predecessor, the pseudo-Homeric Batracomiomachia (Battle of the Mice and Frogs), they contrive to make us wonder at their ability of manipulating the plot, and insist on the parallel between the dramatic intrigue and the unleashing of violence in peasant villages. Although introduced by Francesco Bracciolini, the term ‘‘heroic-comic’’ has its rhetorical genesis in the preface to La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622), where Alessandro Tassoni presents his work as a new type of poem in mixed forms. Tassoni’s aim is to surprise his audience, because ‘‘inventar fuori della strada comune una sorte di poema, che piaccia ugualmente ai dotti e agli idioti e porga loro diletto, non e` cosa ordinaria’’ (it is not ordinary to invent, off the beaten path, a sort of poem which might appeal to the learned and to the ignorant and bring them delight). Yet, an alternative genealogy for the rise of the heroic-comic poem is to be found in an almost neglected treatise on rhetoric, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de’ Greci, de’ Latini, e de’ Toscani (Argument of the Academician Aldeano on the Playful Poetry of the Greeks, the Latins, and the Tuscans, 1634), by Niccolo` Villani (1590–1636), which alludes to Giovanni Della Casa’s parody of Ariosto. According to Villani, Della Casa comically applied himself to the Orlando Furioso and systematically transformed the first lines of each canto. This cannot be a coincidence. Della Casa understood the value of the narrator’s introduction and the importance of Ariosto’s octave stanza in the transition from the heroic poem to the mock heroic. Giancarlo Mazzacurati, in ‘‘Varieta` e digressione. Il laboratorio ariostesco nella trasmissione dei ‘generi’’’ (1996), has convincingly described the role of 932

Ariosto as a ‘‘laboratory’’ for the transmission of literary genres, and this is true also for the heroiccomic. Moreover, Villani’s story on Della Casa—if it is not entirely invented by its author—has a further, less obvious implication. It suggests that the new poetical form, traditionally linked to the Seicento, in fact has its origin in the very heart of the Renaissance. As is clear from recent studies such as Maria Cristina Cabani’s La pianella di Scarpinello: Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico (1999), the heroiccomic tradition is centered on the Renaissance idea that new epics are composed out of scraps from earlier literature. According to Villani’s work, Virgil’s Aeneid is reputed to have been translated into the language of Norcia, Ovid’s Metamorphoses into that of Bergamo, and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580) into the Bolognese dialect. The canon of ancient and modern classics strictly follows that established by Henri Estienne’s Parodiae morales (Moral Parodies, 1575), from which comes also some of the literary terminology, such as ‘‘mutare’’ (how to change words), and ‘‘rivoltare’’ or ‘‘travolgere’’ (how to turn a text). At the end of his treatise, Villani describes the new typology of poetry as hilaroepica or eroicocomica, thus repeating, with a little variation, the adjective eroicomico that appears in the preface of Tassoni’s La secchia rapita. This early heroic-comic criticism provides the broad context in which can be located L’Eneide travestita (The Aeneid Disguised, 1634), by Giovan Battista Lalli (1572–1637). In the prefatory Autore al lettore (The Author to the Reader), Lalli is clearly aware that his Virgilian experiment is not just a parody, but rather ‘‘un discrivere con modo parafrastico la sostanza dell’original sentimento dell’autore’’ (a paraphrastic way to describe the substance of the author’s original intent). For this reason, and even if we account for Villani’s specific interest in the background of Lalli’s ‘‘travestimento,’’ the heroic-comic tradition must also be understood in the context of the study of Virgil during the Renaissance. These traditions share important elements such as the epic technique of ekphrasis (the use of written language for highly visual scenes), and the imitative strategy of the

HEROIC-COMIC POETRY ‘‘centone’’ or pastiche, which will find its acme in the Baroque with the prodigious Metametrica (Metametrics, 1663) of Juan Caramuel, bishop of Vigevano (1606–1682). Finally, the heroic-comic is located at the intersection between the picaresque protonovel, which includes texts like Leon Battista Alberti’s Momus (1540) and the ancient Life of Aesop, and the macaronic tradition. Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus, published in its first version in 1517, is clearly a model for Tassoni and the other heroic-comic writers for both its experimental epic and its language. However, Folengo is a crucial figure also because of Orlandino (1526), an Italian attempt at heroiccomic that exploits both the possibilities of the Carolingian epic and of the octave stanza, fashioned in the manner of Ariosto. In fact, even though some elements of low style are already present in Boiardo, it is especially Ariosto that feeds heroic-comic experimentalism. Indeed, the heroic-comic tradition expands its eclectic imitation from style to the characters and the plot itself. The only thing that sets Tassoni aside from Tasso is the fact that his subject is no longer heroic but laughable. In light of this eclecticism, it thus is not quite important or easy to trace a distinction between heroic and burlesque poems. Bracciolini can easily pass from the serious Della croce racquistata (The Reconquered Cross, 1605) to the parodic Lo scherno degli dei (The Mockery of the Gods, 1618). Likewise, Il conquisto di Granata (The Conquest of Granada, 1650), an epic poem written by Girolamo Graziani (1604–1675), is not very different, even in the title, from Lippi’s comic Il Malmantile racquistato (Malmantile Reconquered, 1676). The difference between Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and the heroic-comic L’Asino (The Donkey, 1652), written by Carlo de’ Dottori (1618– 1686), is a matter of an inner transformation within the Italian epic. Another source of influence for heroic-comic poetry is Marinismo. Despite his criticism of Marino’s ‘‘modern’’ style, too obscure and richly ornamented, Tassoni describes the form of L’Adone (Adonis, 1623) in his own La secchia rapita as a new epic in progress. In fact, Marino’s keen understanding of the rules of marketing stands out as one of the more powerful experiences of the post-Tasso generations. Moreover, his artful flexibility became a model for heroic-comic writers for its constant varietas, that is, its contamination of different genres, seen as necessary to avoid the passive imitation of the predecessors. The heroic-comic writers thus develop an already expanding tradition. They

accept the playful component of the epic, already exploited as a source by Marino’s antiheroic Adone. However, Tassoni, who was accused of provincialism, offered more corrections and norms to his generic models than any of his Italian ancestors. With him, we have a crucial change of direction for the epic. The seemingly narrow focus on ‘‘provincial’’ life in his La secchia rapita serves as an antidote to the utopian pretentiousness of the Renaissance epic poem. Given what is known of the reception of Tassoni, at least three conclusions can be drawn. First, heroic-comic poems display a similarity with some works within the realm of ‘‘serious epic.’’ A good example would be Lo stato rustico (The Rustic State, 1611), written by Gianvincenzo Imperia`l (1570–1645), which dislocates the epic geography by idealizing a premodern Arcadian landscape. Second, Tassoni’s heroiccomic intuition allows the reuse of low and highly mimetic genres, which had previously been exiled from the epic tradition. Finally, Tassoni’s linguistic experimentalism preserves oddities of vocabulary otherwise poorly transmitted in the Italian epic, as one can see in book 12, where Tassoni imitates Ruzante’s Paduan jargon. This comedic strategy had already been observed by an Aristotelian critic, Emanuele Tesauro. As he notes in the Trattato de’ ridicoli (Treatise on Ridiculous People) in his Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Spyglass, 1654), there are the ‘‘ridicoli’’ who ‘‘con parole oneste e nobili coprono concetti servili’’ (conceal servile notions behind honest and noble words) and those who on the contrary ‘‘con parole servili o poco oneste significano onesti concetti’’ (signify honest concepts with servile or not so honest words). Likewise, Tassoni uses the low Paduan dialect of Ruzante to counter the degradation of epic language and the shift in rhetorical strategies initiated by his poem. STEFANO GULIZIA Further Reading Bertoni, Clotilde, Percorsi europei dell’eroicomico. Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1997. Cabani, Maria Cristina, La pianella di Scarpinello: Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1999. Capata, Alessandro, Semper truffare paratus: Genere e ideologia nel Baldus di Folengo, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 2000. Daniele, Antonio, ‘‘Di alcuni caratteri della poesia eroicomica. Dal Tassoni al Dottori, e oltre,’’ in Carlo De’ Dottori. Lingua, cultura e aneddoti, Padua: Antenore, 1987.

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HEROIC-COMIC POETRY Dawson, C.M., ‘‘Spοudaiοgέlοiοn: Random Thoughts on Occasional Poems,’’ in Yale Classical Studies, 19 (1966): 39–76. Feo, Michele, ‘‘Dal pius agricola al villano empio e bestiale (A proposito di una infedelta` virgiliana del Caro),’’ in Maia, 20 (1968): 89–136, 206–223. Gorni, Guglielmo, and Silvia Longhi, ‘‘La parodia,’’ in Letteratura Italiana Einaudi, vol. 5, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Il poema eroicomico, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 2001. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Varieta` e digressione. Il laboratorio ariostesco nella trasmissione dei ‘generi,’’’ in Rinascimenti in transito, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1996. Quint, David, ‘‘Francesco Bracciolini as a Reader of Ariosto and Tasso,’’ in L’arme e gli amori. Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence, edited by Massimiliano Rossi and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi, Florence: Olschki, 2004.

Rossi, Massimiliano, and Fiorella Gioffredi Superbi (editors), L’arme e gli amori. Ariosto, Tasso and Guarini in Late Renaissance Florence, Florence: Olschki, 2004. Sangirardi, Giuseppe, Boiardismo ariostesco. Presenza e trattamento dell’ ‘Orlando Innamorato’ nel ’Furioso’. Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1993. Scalabrini, Massimo, L’incarnazione del macaronico. Percorsi nel comico folenghiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Tassoni, Alessandro, La secchia rapita e scritti poetici, edited by Pietro Puliatti, Modena: Panini, 1989. Tesauro, Emanuele, Canocchiale aristotelico, Turin: Sinibaldo, 1564. Valesio, Paolo, ‘‘Origini narrative: dal macaronico al cosmico,’’ in La novella, la voce, il libro. Dal ‘‘cantare’’ trecentesco alla penna narratrice barocca, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Villani, Niccolo`, Ragionamento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocosa de’ Greci, de’ Latini, e de’ Toscani, Venice: Pinelli, 1634.

HISPANO LATIN-AMERICAN INFLUENCES Cultural relations between Italy and Spain date back to the Middle Ages. Scholarly debate continues on the role that Arab civilization (mediated by the Spanish presence in Italy) played in the development of the theme of the idealized woman in Italian literature. Literary scholars suggest that this influence led to the formation of such mythical literary figures as Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura. It has been ascertained that a noted legend from Islamic literature (which entered the European cultural patrimony in the thirteenth century via the court of Alfonso X the Wise in Toledo) influenced the writing of the Comedia (ca. 1305–1321), in particular the scenes of the ascension of Dante and Beatrice. During the fifteenth century, there was a literary prolongation of the Iberian peninsula on Italian soil, an extension effected by the presence of the court of Alfonso the Magnanimous in Naples. The intense literary exchange between the two countries that began during that period remained largely uninterrupted to the present day. Alfonso’s court contributed to the circulation of the poetry of the cancioneros in Venice, Milan, Modena, and Rome, while the romances were present in collections and compilations of poetry from Spain. 934

A large number of Spanish literary works were diffused in Italy after the expulsion of the Jews by the Catholic kings Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon in 1492, given that many authors were conversos of Jewish origin. This literary dissemination gradually increased during the sixteenth century; it included chivalric works, sentimental novels, historical texts (primarily printed in Venice), and the works of Antonio de Guevara, whose influences on utopian writers in the Renaissance (Anton Francesco Doni, Francesco Patrizi, and Tommaso Garzoni) has been noted. The fortune of such chivalric works led to the composition of poems in octaves including Bernardo Tasso’s Amadigi di Gaula (1560), inspired by the Amadı´s de Gaula (1508) by Garci Rodrı´guez de Montalvo, and Ludovico Dolce’s Il Palmerino (1561) and Primaleone (1562), inspired by the Spanish originals, Palmerı´n de Oliva (1511) and Primaleo´n (1512), by anonymous authors. During these years, an Italian culture often convinced of its own superiority accepted Juan de Valde´s as a master. His Dia´logo de la lengua (censored in 1549 by the CounterReformation and finally published in 1737) offered a perspective on Spanish cultural values that diverged from the dominant view, exalting instead

HISPANO LATIN-AMERICAN INFLUENCES popular literature and proverbs. In the same period, the diffusion of works on theological morality by Martı´n de Azpilcueta, Diego de Estrella, and Luis de Granada, and later of Santa Teresa de ´ vila and San Juan de la Cruz, was also important. A While this phenomenon has been little studied, it undoubtedly had a strong influence on spirituality in the era of the Counter-Reformation. In the meantime, the existence of the Americas began to register in cultured circles, specifically thanks to texts by Spanish chroniclers. New geographic discoveries and the conquest of the American territories slightly marred the myth of antiquity as a model. In the seventeenth century, concettismo and acuteness developed in parallel in Italy and in Spain. An interesting case in this regard is the reappropriation by Giovanbattista Marino of sonnets by Lope de Vega, who was originally inspired by Torquato Tasso. With regard to theater, on the other hand, it was no longer the Italian companies that traveled to Spain, but the other way around. Influences of Spanish theater are evident in Giacinto Andrea Cicognini’s Il convitato di pietra (The Guest of Stone, 1671). A rewriting of El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra (1630) commonly attributed to Tirso de Molina (by others to the actor, company manager, and writer Andre´s de Claramonte), this is probably the first Italian version of the myth of Don Juan. Spanish culture was especially present in Italy during the first half of the seventeenth century, even though several works were translated initially into Italian from French, as, for example, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quijote (Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615). This was decisive in the genesis of the genre of the heroic-comic poem, such as La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622) by Alessandro Tassoni (1656–1635) and l’Asino (The Ass, 1652) by Carlo Dottori (1618–1686). Generally, however, the idea of the primogeniture of the classics impeded Italians from fully appreciating the innovative elements offered by Spanish literature. The War of Spanish Succession (1700–1714), which ended the long presence of the Spanish in Italy, marked a new era in the relationship between the two countries, although contacts did not end, due in part to the efforts of intellectuals such as Pietro Napoli Signorelli (1731–1815). Spanish literature was present above all in the theater. Apostolo Zeno, Pietro Metastasio, and Carlo Gozzi were particularly influenced by Lope de Vega, Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca, and Agustı´n Moreto. In Don Giovanni Tenorio (1736), Carlo Goldoni eliminated the

stone dinner guest, substituting it with a miraculous bolt of lightning and thus rewriting the myth in a version consistent with his conception of realism. Don Quijote continued to be the best-known Spanish work in Italy, although it was valued primarily for its comic and burlesque qualities. Socrate immaginario (Imaginary Socrates, 1775) by Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787) and Giambattista Lorenzi (1721–1807) is considered the librettist masterpiece of Neapolitan comic opera, and was set to music by Giovanni Paisiello. Don Chisciotti e Sanchu Panza (Don Quijote and Sancho Panza, 1787), a work in octaves composed in Sicilian by Giovanni Meli (1740–1815), was more faithful to the spirit of Cervantes. In 1767, Charles III expelled the Jesuits from Spain and from all the territories under Spanish domination. Many of these, for the most part men of letters, came to Italy, where they contributed to the cultural relationship between the two countries. If for a time Spain was seen in terms of its domination of part of the peninsula in the seventeenth century, the Risorgimento instead propounded the exemplary image of the Spanish resistance to Napoleon. Furthermore, some Romantics such as Giovanni Berchet and Pietro Monti became interested in popular genres like the romances, considered proof of the irrepressible Spanish patriotism. These romances, together with the theatrical works, thus entered the Italians’ understanding of Spanish literature alongside Cervantes’ novel, now so widely recognized that it influenced even the narrative structure of Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827–1840/1842). In the nineteenth century, Spanish Romantic theater also inspired the librettos for three lyric operas by Giuseppe Verdi: Il Trovatore (1853), Simon Boccanegra (1857), and La forza del ´ lvaro destino (1862), which are reworkings of Don A o la fuerza del sino (1835) by Duque de Rivas, of El trovador (1836), and of Simo´n Bocanegra (1843) by Antonio Garcı´a Gutie´rrez. At the end of the century, the theatrical work Juan Jose´ (1895) by Joaquı´n Dicenta enjoyed singular success; it was translated into Italian (1906) and into many dialects (an unusual occurrence). In the first decades of the twentieth century, a new season of critical studies of Spanish literature began. Benedetto Croce, one of the leaders of this trend, conducted extremely important studies on the presence of Spain in Italy, but his criticism of Spanish literature was guided by antiquated, intolerant criteria that gave way to commonplaces successively repeated for decades in literary manuals. 935

HISPANO LATIN-AMERICAN INFLUENCES A result of this renewed interest, however, was a new wave of studies of Cervantes, echoes of which are present in the works of Luigi Pirandello, who abundantly cites the Don Quijote in L’umorismo (On Humor, 1908), and who draws upon the Spanish writer for his contraposition between the eternity of the character and the transience of the author. The theme of the character who rebels and criticizes his author, present in Pirandello and in Miguel de Unamuno, is also typically Cervantian. In poetry, the great writers of the Spanish Baroque, Caldero´n and Luis de Go´ngora, were the objects of a new cult. Giuseppe Ungaretti translated Go´ngora in Da Go´ngora a Mallarme´ (From Go´ngora to Mallarme´, 1948), and explained, in Go´ngora al lume d’oggi (Go´ngora Today, 1951), how the re-evaluation of the Baroque was connected to the rise of Hermeticism. With this reconsideration of the Baroque, the poetry of Federico Garcı´a Lorca enjoyed immense and unparalleled success, thanks to Elio Vittorini, Carlo Bo, and Oreste Macrı`. The poets Raffaele Carrieri, Ferruccio Masini, Vittorio Bodini, and Bartolo Cattafi were initially inspired by Garcı´a Lorca. Later, Antonio Machado, Juan Ramo´n Jime´nez, and Jorge Guille´n also entered the Italian literary scene. Latin American literature, long considered an offshoot of Spanish literature, also garnered interest by the early twentieth century. In the second half of the century in particular, Latin American novelists such as Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez, Mario Benedetti, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jorge Luis Borges, ´ ngel Asturias, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Miguel A ´ lvaro Mutis, and Corta´zar, Carlos Fuentes, A others, impressed readers with their original stylistic combinations, and with their unhinging of the traditional enunciative function and of the criteria of verisimilitude. Some of their fiction inspired our master filmmakers, from Federico Fellini (a great admirer of Borges) to Michelangelo Antonioni, who based his most popular film Blow Up (1966) on Corta´zar’s short story ‘‘Las babas del diablo,’’ to Francesco Rosi, whose 1987 Cronaca di una morte annunciata stylishly revisits Ma´rquez’s homonymous novel. The writings of the founders of the new Latin American poetry also had global resonance, including work by Ce´sar Vallejo, Vicente Huidobro, Gabriela Mistral, Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. Salvatore Quasimodo translated Neruda, whose poetry began to be known and strongly appreciated by the 1950s thanks to Dario Puccini and Giuseppe Bellini. Borges’ influence on Italian narrative in the past decades is perhaps the most wide-ranging and prolific. Italo Calvino even 936

enumerated the various elements of his profound interest for the Argentine author (besides that for chivalric literature and for Cervantes): short writing, the fantastic, the combinatory potential of the text, the presence of space-time infinity. Critics have also studied the influence of Borges on Umberto Eco, Leonardo Sciascia, Antonio Tabucchi, Claudio Magris, and in the younger generation, Paola Capriolo and Laura Pariani, whose La straduzione (Stranslation) appeared in 2004. Declared instances of intertextuality include Alberto Arbasino’s Il principe costante (The Constant Prince, 1972), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Caldero´n (1973), and Dacia Maraini’s Suor Juana (1980), works inspired, respectively, by Caldero´n’s El prı´ncipe constante (1629) and La vida es suen˜o (1635), and by Respuesta a Sor Filotea (1691) by the Mexican Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz. Andrea Camilleri has, on more than one occasion, recognized the influence of Manuel Va´zquez Montalba´n on the structure of some of his novels. Indeed Montalbano, the name of the famous protagonist of his detective fiction, is a name widely diffused in Sicily but also an act of homage to the Spanish writer. Fabrizia Ramondino’s novel Guerra d’infanzia e di Spagna (War of Childhood and of Spain, 2001) shares with some novels by Ana Marı´a Matute (in particular Primera memoria, 1960) both its setting, the island of Majorca during the Civil War, and its dominant theme, the child’s sensory experience. Along with Latin-American literature, the Spanish novel also began to regain popularity in Italy in the 1990s, and important authors such as Carmen Martı´n Gaite, Juan Jose´ Milla´s, Javier Marı´as, Arturo Pe´rez Reverte, Antonio Mun˜oz Molina have been well-received in Italy. In the last decades, Spanish and Latin American studies have flourished in the universities, although much still remains to be done to fill in the gaps in what is available in Italian libraries and bookstores. Furthermore, Spanish and Latin American culture, including that of the pre-Colombian peoples, have recently been widely diffused at the level of popular culture. To name only a few examples, the films of Luis Bun˜uel and Pedro Almodo´var, the play ¡Ay, Carmela! (1987) by Jose´ Sanchı´s Sinisterra, the theatrical adaptation of Javier Tomeo’s Amado monstruo (1985), and theatrical and cinematic adaptations of the Chilean story by Luis Sepu´lveda, Historia de una gaviota y del gato que le ensen˜o´ a volar (1996) have all enjoyed great success. Cinema, theater, dance, painting, and music have thus become fashionable, and have presented commercial opportunities (which do not always avoid

HISTORICAL NOVEL stereotypes), while in Italian universities Spanish has been for some time the second most studied language after English. LUIGI CONTADINI Further Reading Bardi, Ubaldo, ‘‘La visione culturale dell’Iberoamericana nella letteratura italiana del primo novecento,’’ in Silarus, 45, no. 241 (2005): 70–77. Bellini, Giuseppe, Storia delle relazioni letterarie tra l’Italia e l’America di lingua spagnola, Milan: Cisalpino/ Goliardica, 1977. Bertini, Giovanni Maria, Cesare Acutis, and Pablo Luis ´ vila, La romanza spagnola in Italia, Turin: GiappiA chelli, 1970. Buxo, Jose´ Pascual, Ungaretti y Go´ngora, Me´xico: Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1978. Convegno internazionale sul tema Italia e Spagna nella cultura del ’700: Roma, 3–5 dicembre 1990, Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1992.

Corti, Maria, ‘‘La Commedia di Dante e l’oltretomba islamico,’’ in Belfagor, 50 (1995): 301–314. Cro, Stelio, ‘‘Pirandello lettore di Don Quijote,’’ in Teatro Contemporaneo, 13 (1986): 1–20. ´ . Lozano and Juan A. Rı´os Gime´nez, Enrique, Miguel A ˜ (editors), Espanoles en Italia e italianos en Espan˜a, Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1996. Menarini, Piero, ‘‘Il dramma romantico spagnolo in musica,’’ in La questione romantica, 11 (2001): 43–71. Meregalli, Franco, Presenza della letteratura spagnola in Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1974. Meyran, Daniel (editor), Italie, Amerique Latine. Influences Reciproques, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Paoli, Roberto, Borges e gli scrittori italiani, Naples: Liguori, 1997. Profeti, Maria Grazia, ‘‘Importare letteratura: Italia e Spagna,’’ in Belfagor, 41, no. 4 (1986): 365–379. Puccini, Dario, Segno del presente: studi di letteratura spagnola, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1992. Puccini, Dario, and Sau´l Yurkievich (directors), Storia della civilita` letteraria ispanoamericana, 2 vols., Turin: Utet, 2000. Savoca, Monica, Go´ngora nel Novecento in Italia (e in Ungaretti) tra critica e traduzioni, Florence: Olschki, 2004.

HISTORICAL NOVEL Georg Luka´cs’ fundamental idea about the spread of the historical novel during the age that saw the rooting in the collective European consciousness of the profound conviction that each man is the protagonist of history (The Historical Novel, 1963) found its confirmation, on the Italian cultural scene, between the 1820s and the achievement of national unity. Beginning at least in 1802, with Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis), Ugo Foscolo already proved to be aware that it is the sociohistorical context that determines all human destiny. From his encounter with the Hegelian thesis that politics is the ‘‘Fate of the Moderns,’’ Foscolo’s young alter ego draws, as the sole lesson historically permitted to him, only the extreme warning, before an unknown death, to write and testify to the tragedy of his own time: a tragedy of the decay of illusions, of a disenchantment that kills. On the other hand, in the wake of the success of Walter Scott, as well as the idealist thrust of Romantic theorists such as Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852), Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851), and Ludovico Di Breme (1754–1828), the writers of the

early Risorgimento began to harbor convictions of great openness to the new working possibilities now offered to literature. Proposing to write a ‘‘libro per tutti’’ (book for all), as Vittorio Spinazzola put it in his 1983 essay of the same title, Alessandro Manzoni, with I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840– 1842), gambled on the considerable growth of the audience, the consumers of the literary product, which, with the fading of the age-old niches of the court and the academy, could now be identified with the social entity, romantically called the ‘‘popolo’’ (people). This ‘‘popolo’’ in fact coincided with the bourgeoisie, an intermediary band between the opposing extremes of the ‘‘Parigini’’ (Parisians) and the ‘‘Ottentotti’’ (Hottentots), to quote Berchet’s Lettera semiseria di Giovanni Crisostomo al suo figliolo (A Semi-Serious Letter by Giovanni Crisostomo to His Son, 1816). If the new subject/ protagonist of history is identified with the bourgeoisie, it follows that progressive intellectuals look to the bourgeoisie as the most suitable audience for a new campaign of propaganda intended to solicit a sense of national dignity and pride. 937

HISTORICAL NOVEL An art form endowed with a power of persuasion unknown to other literary genres (and inferior only to that of opera), and self-defined as a mixed composition of history and invention, the new bourgeois epic strategically chose to become a ‘‘national/popular’’ genre. Not, to be sure, in the sense sketched out by Antonio Gramsci, but rather in its search for exemplary glimpses and figures, in relation to the emergence of a collective identity and consciousness. Anything that can turn a ‘‘volgo disperso’’ (scattered populace) into a people and a nation and serve as a warning and omen for a future redemption, was sought out in the ancient chronicles that witness to the permanent state of crisis of Italian history and society. We can thus understand why in Ettore Fieramosca (1833) by Massimo D’Azeglio (1798–1866) a culminating moment of great resonance in the collective memory should be a minor episode of the war between France and Spain for the kingdom of Naples evoked by Guicciardini in Book V of his Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561): the tournament held in Barletta, in February 1503, between 13 French knights and 13 Italian knights. To these 13 brave men, who came from different regions (Ettore Fieramosca from Capua, Fanfulla from Lodi, Riccio from Parma, and so on) but are ‘‘tutti figli d’Italia ugualmente’’ (all equally sons of Italy), belonged the task of redeeming the national pride, while praising the value of unity against foreign oppression. And while microhistory easily supports the patriotic epic, invention can indulge in pathos and sentiment, with the impossible love between Ettore and Ginevra of Monreale, who is betrayed and killed by Cesare Borgia. The same name, Ginevra, a veritable senhal full of suggestions from Arthurian epic, seals the fate of the natural daughter of Bernabo` Visconti, who is loved by Palamede de’ Bianchi, against the backdrop of family feuding in Lombardy at the end of the fourteenth century in Il castello di Trezzo (The Castle of Trezzo, 1827) by Giambattista Bazzoni (1803–1850), which shares its year of publication with the first version of I promessi sposi, as well as with Sibilla Odaleta by Carlo Varese (1792–1866). The two works by Bazzoni and Varese enjoyed considerable success, although hardly as much as Ettore Fieramosca, which D’Azeglio, Manzoni’s son-in-law, had written in the lively circle of the Morone district of Milan, one of whose regular visitors is Tommaso Grossi, who converted to the historical novel—his Marco Visconti is from 1834—after practicing the genres of the verse tale and epic poetry in octaves, and having developed, 938

even earlier, in the orbit of Carlo Porta, a solid experience with poetry in dialect. However, the success of Ettore Fieramosca remained surprising enough to convince D’Azeglio, until then predominantly devoted to painting, to embrace fully the role of novelist. It is a commitment that the Turinese nobleman tried to uphold; he published his second novel Niccolo` de’ Lapi, ovvero I Palleschi e i Piagnoni (Niccolo` dei Lapi, or the Last Days of the Florentine Republic, 1841) after eight years, which he spent documenting the events of Florentine history between 1529 and 1530. Within the perspective of an enlightened conservatism, D’Azeglio thus came to treat the same historical material that in an entirely different perspective—of fiery democratic rebellion, and in the mode of the ‘‘Ghibelline Gothic’’ novel—inspired Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804–1873) to write L’assedio di Firenze (The Siege of Florence), published pseudonymously in Paris in 1836, but begun in the jail of Portoferraio, where the novelist, an active member in the secret societies of the Carboneria and the ‘‘Giovine Italia,’’ was imprisoned in 1832. With demagogic fervor, he intended his novel as a ‘‘poema epico popolare’’ (popular epic poem), in which the protagonist is the Florentine people rallying around Francesco Ferrucci, while a series of historical figures, from Machiavelli to Michelangelo, intervene to praise republican and anticlerical ideas. Warmly praised by Giuseppe Mazzini, L’assedio di Firenze somewhat softens the Gothic tones with which Guerrazzi imbues his first and most famous novel, La battaglia di Benevento (The Battle of Benevento, 1827), structuring the end of the Swabian dynasty as a series of crimes and betrayals. But compared to the monotonous patriotism of Ettore Fieramosca, the web of ideological references was already becoming complicated. Indeed, to speak of a ‘‘Ghibelline Gothic’’ for the work of the republican Guerrazzi entails the opposite reference to a ‘‘Guelph Gothic’’ of Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895), who is entirely devoted to the praise of Catholicism and neo-Guelphism, to the point of defending the Inquisition. Cantu`’s predilection for an oleographic and simplified Middle Ages perfectly suits the Gothic’s wide use of stereotypes, in a novel like Margherita Pusterla (1838), which starts with a warning that attests to the suitability of the book only for a reader able to ‘‘spasimare’’ (languish). This is a clear sign of the prevalence of fantastical escape, compared to an ideal commitment that various ideological subtleties are in danger of shattering, and was more than sufficient to ignite the

HISTORICAL NOVEL dissociation in Manzoni between historical truth and novelistic invention, to the point of inducing him, in 1845, to declare the end Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione (Of the Historical Novel, and, in General, of Mixed Compositions of History and Invention), in the face of the exhaustion of the pedagogical charge that had been for him the primary ethical reason for the novel form. An unusual man of letters like Giuseppe Rovani (1818–1874) also became convinced of a progressive ‘‘erosion’’ or loss of meaning. In the years surrounding Manzoni’s palinode, Rovani passed through the experience of the historical novel with a strong Romantic imprint, and later, after a decade of silence, offered a new typology with his I cento anni (A Hundred Years), first serialized in 1857–1858. This typology is one in which a century of history unravels until the present day, in a crowded series of frames animated by invented figures and historical personalities, reexperienced through the memory of an aged narrator and tied together in a quick-moving plot that, beginning from a topical contrivance, such as the theft of a will, does not hesitate to avail itself of discoveries and twists worthy of the best feuilleton. Contemporary history substitutes for that of distant centuries; it is no longer an omniscient narrator, extraneous to the horizon of the plot, who translates it into a story, but a voice from within that articulates itself in unison with the voices of the other characters. And if the arc of historical time is that of time experienced and recounted, a double self can fill the two roles of narrator and protagonist, as occurs with Ippolito Nievo (1831– 1861) in Confessioni d’ un italiano (The Castle of Fratta), published posthumously in 1867. In the work’s constitutive double-ness of meanings, historico-political memory and autobiographical vocation, the new ideological and cultural climate makes the second dominant, as demonstrated by the editorial change of the title to Confessioni di un ottuagenario (Confessions of an Octogenarian). More closely, it is interesting to note how in the continuous play of mirrors between Carlo Altoviti the narrator and Carlino the protagonist, it is precisely through the autobiographical form, a formal solution antithetical to the demiurgic omniscience of the Romantic school, that Nievo reclaims the truest substance of the historical novel: the indissoluble connection between history and destiny. His protagonist/ narrator, born a ‘‘Venetian’’ and not far from dying an ‘‘Italian,’’ can actually say that ‘‘nulla sarebbe di strano o degno di essere narrato’’ (there would be nothing strange or worthy of

being narrated) if his life did not reflect the universal change ‘‘a cavalcione di questi due secoli’’ (straddling these two centuries). The decline of the historical novel in postunification Italy was related in great part to the fading of the ideal motivations that had determined its success, while in the new canon of verismo, it is critical attention to the ways in which unification was realized that determined, in subsequent decades, another mode of joining history and invention. While in Southern Italy the historical novel of the Romantic school was ideally addressed to those called to make history, the reconstruction of past incidents, meant to deny any substantial progress in history, now gives voice, especially in the regions of the South, to the profound discontent of those who had to suffer from history, while sacrificing to it their hopes and ideals. Opening the way to the ‘‘romanzo antistorico’’ (antihistorical novel), as Spinazzola has called it (1990), is Giovanni Verga, who in Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889) mercilessly destroys the apologetic myth of the self-made man, who is organic to the age of nascent industrialism. Verga’s sober pessimism widens into tones of bitter polemical sarcasm in the work of his friend and disciple Federico De Roberto (1861–1927), who in the vast fresco of I Vicere` (The Viceroys, 1894) resorts to the mode of the family saga, through the arc of three generations, in order to show how, in any epochal revolution, only the exterior forms of political bargaining change, but not the substance of power, or the identity of its perpetual holders. Much of De Roberto’s teaching seems to pass into that late fruit of the ‘‘antihistorical novel,’’ Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958) by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), the moral of which has long seemed to be enclosed in the cynical admonition to ‘‘cambiare tutto per non cambiare nulla’’ (change everything to keep everything the same); in fact, this moral is much more than clever opportunism, as it feeds on the aristocratic disenchantment for the advent of hyenas and vultures where there were once tigers and leopards. The perfect meeting point of De Roberto and Lampedusa, in the continuity of a Sicilian line, is certainly Luigi Pirandello, with his I vecchi e i giovani (The Old and the Young), which he himself calls an ‘‘amarissimo e popoloso romanzo’’ (bitter and populous novel). Set against the backdrop of the bloodily repressed civil revolts and political and financial scandals between 1892 and 1894, it deals with an atmosphere of sordid disintegration, divided equally between Rome, ‘‘cloaca fangosa del patriottismo’’ (muddy cesspool of patriotism) 939

HISTORICAL NOVEL and Sicily, which is treated ‘‘come terra di conquista’’ (as a conquered land) by the national rulers, from whom it has suffered nothing ‘‘altro che la miseria e l’abbandono’’ (other than misery and abandonment). Written with an eye turned to recent social history, the novel was first published in 1909 installments in Rassegna contemporanea, and it is interesting to note that, while it echoes certain forms of the finest journalism, the ideological thrust of a final conviction of the modes of history, is connected, in Pirandello, with stylistic-formal solutions intentionally patterned after a Manzonian form of discourse. Humor becomes a legitimate result of the irony of the ‘‘gran Lombardo’’ (great Lombard), whose pessimistic core is too often misunderstood by many of his followers, who are unable to lift the veil of his apparent bonhomie. Less problematic, though consistent with a clear literary program, is the Manzonianism of Riccardo Bacchelli (1891–1985), who evokes in Il diavolo al Pontelungo (The Devil at Pontelungo, 1927) the presence of Bakunin in Emilia, amid the attempts at insurrection between 1873 and 1876, while in the broad trilogy Il mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po)—Dio ti salvi (God Save You, 1938), La misera viene in barca (Misery Comes to a Boat, 1939), and Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo (Nothing New Under the Sun, 1940)—boldly weaves together public and private affairs between the retreat from Russia and the battle of Vittorio Veneto. In fact, the soldier Lazzaro Scacerni escapes from the Napoleonic disaster, while in the victorious epilogue of the Great War, his namesake descendent dies. A constant center of symbolic reference, the river mill against the flat backdrop of the Po Valley clearly alludes to the passing of time that grinds down events and destinies. We must return to 1898, however, and to Piedmont, where the reckoning with history seems less urgent than in Sicily, to capture the experience of Edoardo Calandra (1852–1911), who in La bufera (The Storm, 1898) takes up a tale of loves and disappearances set against the backdrop of the Revolution, in a nostalgic pretext to elegize a tiny world shaken by grand events. Calandra’s discreet lineage continues, thanks to common Piedmontese memory, through Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere (The Dust Roads of Monferrato, 1987), a lyrical saga of a peasant family between the battle of Marengo and the battle of Lissa. That fabled phoenix, the ‘‘mixed composition’’ can re-emerge, therefore, surprisingly, from its ashes, perhaps revamping itself as a ‘‘metanovel’’ in the learned eclecticism of Umberto Eco, with Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) and Baudolino 940

(2002), to the point of legitimizing the idea that only as a historical novel does the novel truly exist. EMMA GRIMALDI Further Reading Allegri, Marco, ‘‘Le Confessioni d’un Italiano di Ippolito Nievo,’’ in Letteratura Italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Le Opere, vol. 3, Dall’Ottocento al Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Arslan, Antonia, and Patrizia Zambon, Romanzo storico, d’appendice, di consumo: guida bibliografica 1960, Milan: UNICOPLI, 1983. Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo. Saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia, Rome: Samona` e Savelli, 1965. Baldi, Guido, Giuseppe Rovani e il problema del romanzo nell’Ottocento, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Bertacchini, Renato, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento, Rome: Studium, 1961. Bruscagli, Riccardo, and Roberta Turchi (editors), Teorie del romanzo nel primo Ottocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. Burke, Peter, ‘‘L’histoire dans un genre neuf: ’I Promessi Sposi’ come storia sociale,’’ in Il romanzo, edited by Franco Moretti, vol. 4, Temi, luoghi, eroi, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, 6 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1914–1940. De Castris, Arcangelo Leone, La polemica sul romanzo storico, Bari: Cressati, 1959. Della Colletta, Cristina, Plotting the Past: Metamorphoses of Historical Narrative in Modern Italian Fiction, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. Ganeri, Margherita, Il romanzo storico in Italia: il dibattito critico dalle origini al postmoderno, Lecce: P. Manni, 1999. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Grimaldi, Emma, ‘‘La ragione e i mostri. I Vicere` cent’anni dopo,’’ in Gli inganni del romanzo. I Vicere` tra storia e finzione letteraria, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1998. Luka˘cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell, Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Marini, Quinto, ‘‘La letteratura del pieno Romanticismo e del Risorgimento,’’ in Storia della Letteratura Italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno Editrice, Petrocchi, Giorgio, Il romanzo storico nell’800 italiano, Turin: E.R.I., 1967. Portinari, Folco, Le parabole del reale. Romanzi italiani dell’800, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Romagnoli, Sergio, Ottocento tra letteratura e storia, Padua: Liviana, 1961. Romagnoli, Sergio, Manzoni e i suoi colleghi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Salinari, Carlo, ‘‘I vecchi e i giovani,’’ in Il romanzo di Pirandello, edited by Enzo Lauretta, Palermo: Palumbo, 1976. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Il libro per tutti. Saggio sui ‘‘Promessi Sposi,’’ Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Il romanzo antistorico, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990. Villari, Enrica et al., Storie su Storie. Indagine sui romanzi storici (1814–1840), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1985.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

HISTORIOGRAPHY Historiography is the study of how history is written, and it is essentially concerned with the variety of conceptions about the past that a given culture manifests. Historiography is interested in when, where, and why a certain idea of history began to circulate, whether and how this impacted on other distinct practices of society, and finally how it was articulated, how it was written. Because by the time it acquired the status of an independent discipline, writers of history had related it to just about all aspects of our social and psychic experience, it soon became clear that history could be understood, at one end of the spectrum, as a general philosophy of life, and on the other as a specific and rigorous mode of inquiry about a specific object or activity. Literary historiography would therefore be concerned with the time, the reason, and the manner a certain idea about literature emerged and how it was understood by the critics and historians of a particular epoch, who spontaneously would also evaluate their predecessors. As Herbert Butterfield observes, ‘‘the history of historiography is more than a mere branch of the history of thought, more than the mere study of individual thinkers. It comprises the story of establishments and institutions, the policies of governments and teaching bodies, and the results of co-operative endeavour’’ (Man on His Past, 1960). The origins of historiography can be traced back to Herodotus (495–425 BC), whose aim in writing about the Persian War was to make sure that the great exploits of the Greeks, as well as the barbarians, would not be forgotten. This is the beginning of the dialectic between the single event and its possible universal sense. The more ‘‘archaeological’’ Thucydides (ca. 471–400 BC) believed that history and politics were intrinsically connected, and raised the problem of a history of the present in which the historian is eyewitness to or participant in the event described. He also sought a distinction between immediate causes and underlying causes. Straddling the Greek and Roman world, Polybius (198–117 BC) seeks on a more pragmatic level a universal view, and abides by the advice of historians who believe that the actual training for a life in politics is the study of history. Writing history soon became a genre, and the Romans, Livy (59

BC–17 AD), Plutarch (ca. 45–125 AD), and Lucian (125–200 AD), who developed new styles of recording and recounting past events, elaborated the notion that history could indeed represent a body of knowledge from which one can derive practical norms and social understanding. It is the ideology of historia magistra vitae (history as teacher of life), which further separated the field from both philosophy and poetry. In this context, the Roman Annales Maximi, which included a register of official events, became the model for the High Middle Ages (for instance, during the Carolingian period). In the ensuing centuries, historical thinking and writing were greatly influenced by Christianity, which introduced novel approaches to the overarching relevance of temporality, causality and finality. While Origen (195–254) developed an allegorical hermeneutics, Saint Augustine’s providential Neoplatonic view of history set the stage for a tripartite subdivision of time into ortus (ante legem) or prior to the law, procursus (sub lege) or time when laws are in effect, and finis (sub gloria) or end of time in God’s glory. Events in short were seen as typical, as exempla, and there was no principle of verification of the sources. Against universal and hegemonic providential history, there slowly emerges, in the later Middle Ages, a competing conception aspiring to validate the middle period of human life here on Earth. This more empirical narration took the shape of Chronicles, which mostly told of the deeds and valor of the royal houses and nobility. Along with this there occurs a growth of biographies of illustrious figures, which emphasized the civic more than their religious relevance. Giovanni Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium (The Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, 1363–1375) and De casibus virorum illustrium (The Fates of Illustrious Men, 1355– 1374), Vespasiano Da Bisticci’s De Viris Illustribus (The Lives of Illustrious Men, 1489) and other collections by Filippo Villani (1325–ca. 1407– 1409), or Francesco Matarazzo (1443–1518) are significant not only because they offer a veritable encyclopedia of people worthy of being remembered, but also because they draw attention to the lives not only of artists but of public servants, polymaths, political leaders, and aristocrats, in 941

HISTORIOGRAPHY short, the key players of the emerging process of secularization of European society. During the quattrocento, with the revaluation and publication of the writings by the ancient authors, a new set of questions arose that spurred a major philosophical turn with respect to the Middle Ages. Significant in this context is Sicco Polenton’s Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae Libri XVIII (Illustrious Latin Writers, ca. 1437), a bulky compendium of Latin literature that attempted the first historical periodization by introducing the distinction between classic, medieval, and humanistic periods, the latter also known as Aevo Modernus (The Modern Age). Polenton also reintroduced that critical practice of comparing present-day writers with their ancient models. At this time, a tendency developed aimed at hierarchizing the work of writers, and at evidencing continuities in style and a certain unity of intention. The humanistic period was interested in original sources, in witness accounts of any one given event, in translations, and in treatises and laws that marked changes in the evolving and constituting of civil society. Key contributions to general historiography are made by Leonardo Bruni (1369– 1444), Flavio Biondo (1388–1463), and Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457). Bruni’s Historiae florentini populi (History of the Florentine People, 1405) exhibits a critical capacity to compare and contrast facts and relations in a diachronic sense, and attempts to explain history without any reference to supernatural forces (other than ‘‘nature’s gift’’ to the Florentines). Biondo is credited with having begun the tradition of erudite history, stressing the necessity to be more descriptive and direct while focusing on the sources themselves. Lorenzo Valla is generally considered the founding father of Western historiography. His De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (The Falsely Believed and Forged Donation of Constantine, 1440) employs an analytical method later identified with comparative historical linguistics. Valla raises the question of authority and legitimacy in history, and makes of historiography a tool in challenging the hegemony of the church. It will soon appear evident, for instance to Niccolo´ Machiavelli (1469– 1527), that history writing can serve political ends. It is in fact no accident that Machiavelli makes recourse to Livy as a model. But in his case, politics precedes history and philology. Roman history becomes his paradigm in order to illustrate how to defy the uncontrollable forces of necessity or fortuna, seeking a deeper law of causation. Perhaps it is true, as modern thinkers from Friedrich 942

Nietzsche to Michel Foucault have observed, that the engine of social change, and thus of history, is power. Nevertheless, for Machiavelli, the actions of individuals are considered less for their individuality or specificity, or how they show their virtu´, and more in terms of collective interactions. Machiavelli’s contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) does not look into the past actions of political figures but at the elements of causation in the fact itself. In his Storia d’Italia (History of Italy, 1561–1564), more emphasis is placed on the individual’s ‘‘particular’’ way of being; history turns pragmatic, aiming at the discovery of an all-embracing principle. Rather than political history, Guicciardini engages in historical politics, stressing that humankind’s essential trait is to seek one’s own personal interest. He attests to the Humanist tendency to remove all external forces from an understanding of the historical process (such as spiritual interventions or philosophical a priori conditions), and to explain the reasons ‘‘why’’ events occur by identifying interconnections among the competing interests of various figures. But unlike Machiavelli, he does not think that fortuna can be subsumed or built into the equation: No real logic of history exists; it is naı¨ve to believe that history can be magistra vitae. With print culture solidly established, and following upon the impact of the New World and the Reformation, the shifting political, religious, and geohistorical panorama of the second half of the cinquecento and of the first decades of the seventeenth century is witness to a renewed attention to the texts themselves. Paolo Sarpi (1562–1623), author of Istoria del Concilio di Trento (History of the Council of Trent, 1619), consolidates a by now highly specialized field: religious-political history, while Ferdinando Ughelli’s Italia sacra (Sacred Italy, 1643–1662) offers the first thorough account of the church in Italy. In the field of poetics, growing reflection on the nature and function of the arts led some to eschew history and make of literature a world apart from the realities of the day. Although some late Renaissance treatise writers, such as Jacopo Mazzoni (1548–1598), Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1632), and Scipione Errico (1592–1670), favored a heteronomous approach to art, there was also emerging a generation of writers of ars poeticae who tended toward an early form of the autonomy of art, and at worst tended toward normative manuals. Here we enlist, among others, Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675), Girolamo Aleandri (1574–1629), Francesco

HISTORIOGRAPHY Frugoni (1620–1687), and Giovan Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728), a founding member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia and author of Istoria della volgar poesia (A History of Poetry in the Vernacular, 1699). Crescimbeni privileges the lyric art form, therefore, in his history of Italian literature (the first of its kind), he singles out that specific tradition, at the expense, for instance, of Dante’s Expressionist poetic, unexemplary for such pre-Enlightenment rationality. Not so with Gian Vincenzo Gravina (1664–1718), another founder of Arcadia, whose Della ragion poetica (The Logic of Poetry, 1708) signals a turning point for literary history. Gravina defines poetry as an imaginative referent of knowledge with the capacity to trigger civic renewal, thus recognizing the intrinsic sociohistoricity of art. The eighteenth century saw in fact a large segment of the cultured population champion the idea of literature as unrelated to anything but fantasy, whereas others were beginning to question the ‘‘truth’’ in art, against a growing scientific and travel literature, and the widening gap between theologians and natural philosophers. We also witness the emergence of a different kind of historiographic consciousness, one that can be summarized as a split between an erudite camp (stressing what counts as a source and what the ramifications of a ‘‘history’’ might be) and a philosophical one (focused on the role of reason and its effects). With the latter goes the universal belief in emancipation and progress in society, specifically reflected in the British and French production of the times. In his anticlerical Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (A Secular History of the Kingdom of Naples, 1723), Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), rejects previous arguments about the legitimization of ecclesiastical jurisdictions, and focuses instead on secular institutions, the relationship between juridical forces, and their relevance in historical process. A practicing lawyer, Giannone studies how and why constitutions are drawn, and sets up a theoretical defense for a separation of powers between state and church. His Istoria gained him European fame, but he was excommunicated and his work was placed on the Index in 1724. The greatest historical undertaking of the century was the vast collection of Rerum italicarum scriptores ab anno Christi 500–1500 (Historians of Italy, 1723–1738) by Lodovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), whose relevance in the debate about aesthetics and poetics is also attested by his Della perfetta poesia (On Perfection in Poetry, 1706), in which he argues against the idea that poetry has supernatural origins. In particular, Muratori

championed the notion of the verisimile introducing the distinction between what is real or probable in poetry versus what is real or probable in nature. An adversary of Cartesianism and of John Locke, a severe critic of church corruption and temporal ambitions, an enemy of the backward-looking academies, Muratori’s lasting fame rests with three monumental works: the Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, which became a model for erudite sources and philological rigor; the Antiquitates italicae medii aevi (Medieval Italian Archaeology, 1738–1743), covering various aspects of Italian life in the Middle Ages; and the Annali d’Italia (The Annals of Italy, 1740–1750), a year-to-year chronicle of Italian history from the fifth century to the present day. Muratori’s treatment of the Middle Ages prepares the ground for the reappraisal of that period during European Romanticism. His work compiles a network of data, documents, manuscripts, letters, registers, diplomatic exchanges, and juridical information, offering to a contemporary researcher intriguing and heterogeneous materials: It could be read as a ‘‘collective history’’ a` la Fernand Braudel. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the other intellectual giant in early eighteenth-century Italian historical thought, did not have the erudition of Muratori but had a stronger sense of historical patterns of development. His major achievement was in conceiving a theory of history within which facts find their own justification and interrelatedness, while subject to some distinct extrahistorical mechanism. In Principi di scienza nuova (Principles of a New Science, 1732), he argued that the past unfolds through cyclic corsi and ricorsi, manifests a triadic breakdown in ages of gods, heroes, and men, and comprises a notion of decline and return to the origins after the third period. This occurs not in a universal progressive movement (which is what many illuminists wanted to believe). For Vico, the peoples who make up ‘‘nations’’ go through these cycles at different rates of change while retaining a recognizable identity. Historians and philosophers should bear in mind the dialectic between what humans can know and create (social institutions) and what is ontologically out of their capacity to know or interfere with (nature and providence). Thus, individual and society, myth and science, existence and history are all dynamically interconnected from a primitive age of sense, through a period of imagination, to one of reason. But what makes Vico relevant to the twentieth century is his claim that poetry can be, and has been, a source of knowledge for historians as well as for sociologists and anthropologists. 943

HISTORIOGRAPHY In the North, the Milanese philosopher and reformer Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) achieved international recognition with his influential opuscule on the penal code, Dei delitti e delle pene (Of Crime and Punishment, 1764), which criticized the system of justice and called for radical changes in the law and ethics according to the times. The Turinese Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789) expressed the new possibilities of a critique of literature untrammeled by servitude to patrons, as he distanced himself from collectors, antiquarians, philanthropists and court writers. In his polemical essay Dissertation upon Italian Poetry (1753), he sets out to prove, against Voltaire, the continuity and integrity of Italian literature. Baretti preferred writers who espoused sensismo, and treasured self-awareness against the oppressive demands of existence and rationality. The Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731– 1794), director of the Estense library in Modena, is the author of a milestone, Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1772–1782; enlarged ed. 1794), which signals the transition from mere compilation to a work based on factual research. Assimilating the lesson of Muratori and Gravina, Tiraboschi insisted that truth and precision are the first qualities required of a historian. His understanding of literature is broad and embraces all aspects of culture available in written form, paying more attention to literariness rather than to the author’s personality. Important for later historians is the work of Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823), who took part in the Neapolitan revolution of 1799. In his Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (Historical Essay on the Neapolitan Revolution, 1801), which relies on Machiavelli’s historiography by making history ancilla to politics, he criticizes the Jacobins for having promoted a revolution that did not mirror local conditions. Cuoco lays the foundation for an understanding of ‘‘passive’’ versus ‘‘active’’ revolution, a concept that would be widely useful during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With the fall of Napoleon, the sociopolitical dynamics in Europe changed. Rising against the restoration, the strongest political force is nationalism. Historical writing reflects the several ways in which Italian culture started rethinking itself, as documented, for instance, in the Milanese journal Il Conciliatore (1818–1819), which addressed the question of truth and history, the relationship between culture and national identity (necessary if a discourse on national unity were to gain ground), and hosted the debate between Romantics and classicists. For the ensuing four decades, critics and historians alike 944

introduced and took positions on a new vocabulary, which sought to redefine the concepts of origin, destiny, freedom, independence, tradition, and the link between the state and nation-building. The age of the Risorgimento fostered federalist currents in Italian historiography. The Turinese philosopher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852) represented the Catholic liberal strand of history writing. His Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (On the Moral and Civil Superiority of the Italians, 1843) entertained a vision of modern bourgeois societies reconciled under the leadership of the Roman pontiff, and supported by the military power of Piedmont. Just as politically committed but with more secular convictions was Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869), author of a history of civilization of Lombardy in which he collects documentary evidence from agriculture, labor relations, use of language, and general customs over time. On the witness-participant side of history writing (he was one of the leaders of the Cinque giornate), Cattaneo’s L’insurrection de Milan en 1848 (The Insurrection of Milan, Italian ed. 1849) recounts the tragic five-day battle to free the city, and a novel conception of history that anticipates modern theories: the city as the ideal principle of Italian histories. For some other intellectuals the issue of national independence was pervasive. Literature and history were only a component of this scenario, but a crucial part owing to their power of symbolization and construction of belief systems. There were historians and historiographers, however, who centered on literature and then essayed to understand the larger worldview or the reality that is given outside of the text. Among the authors who wrote histories of Italian literature, we enlist Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895), the liberal moralist author of a 34-volume Storia universale (Universal History, 1838–1847), in which he attributes the development of the arts and sciences to the supremacy of the Catholic Church. In his Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1865), Cantu` argued that national literature should be interpreted against the backdrop of the relentless struggle between Guelphs and Ghibellines, an engine of history that in different guises has pitted bourgeoisie and church against aristocrats and nobles for centuries. Literary critics need to focus on the ‘‘content’’ of the texts, while historians can read the society in question right through the literature. For Cantu`, history remains magistra vita; thus, in order to achieve national unity the above antagonism must be overcome. A position shared

HISTORIOGRAPHY by Giuseppe Ferrari (1811–1876) in his Histoire de re´volutions d’Italie (History of Italian Revolutions, 1856–1858). Writing from a Ghibelline viewpoint was Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876), whose Lezioni di letteratura italiana (Lectures on Italian Literature, 1869–1872) argued for criteria of analysis based on how pagan, noble, and antichurch writers were; he thus finds in literature the trustworthy expression of Italian society. Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883), perhaps the most important Italian cultural critic of the postunification period, stood against the erudition of the previous century and the assumptions of the democratic school (Mazzini). Hegelian by formation, he believed that the idea is embedded in reality, and that one finds the origin and purpose of literature in history. Literature is a living organism that changes through history because it both makes history and is conditioned by it. In his seminal Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1872), De Sanctis illustrates the dialectic between representative writers and their epoch, identifying an expressionistic and socially committed trunk, and an impressionistic and selfabsorbed lyrical canon. After the annexation of Rome in 1870, historians must contend with the growing influence of positivism, the Hegelians, the materialists, and the spiritualists. Noteworthy is the establishment of a scuola storica (historical school), which viewed literature strictly in positivistic context and continued to assemble archival materials for a more global and heterogeneous history of Italy. On the other hand, with the expanding influence of the sciences there also grew the danger of adopting a scientific model a` la Hyppolite Taine, and applying it to literary and cultural memory. During the first half of the twentieth century, four major currents in historical studies emerged around distinct groups or schools: the one believing in the primacy of the juridical-economic sphere, the idealist-historicist currents, the Catholic school, and the Marxist-Socialist camp. But what dominated was idealism. Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) had an immense influence in Italian culture, especially in history, literature, aesthetics, and politics. Before his 1902 Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistics), the Neapolitan liberal philosopher had subsumed history under the general category of art, but after his rejection of all positive modes of thought and the completion of his fourfold system of the spirit (aesthetics, logic,

economics, and ethics), he gave history a greater relevance. Originally referred to as ‘‘absolute historicism,’’ Croce espoused a view according to which truth evolved through the historical process, inasmuch as history is the only immanent reality. In his Teoria e storia della storiografia (Theory and History of Historiography, 1917), he argues that history, knowledge, and time are all coterminous, that the distinction between chronicle or pseudohistory and history resides in the latter possessing a unity that, raised to the understanding (conoscenza) of the eternal present, reveals itself ‘‘to be at one with philosophy, which in its turn, is nothing else but the thought of the eternal present.’’ Thus, history coincides with the act of thinking itself, therefore philosophy, ‘‘is nothing other than the methodological instance of historiography, the explanation of the constitutive categories of historical judgments, that is, of the working concepts of historical interpretation.’’ The rise and consolidation of Fascism produced a further revision of Croce’s ideas: In 1928, he publishes Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915 (History of Italy from 1871 to 1915), in 1932 Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (History of Europe in the XIX Century) and with his summa, reiterating his liberal views, La Storia (History as the Story of Liberty, 1938), he reaches the paradoxical conclusion that history consists in what we say or think as historical, that the overall preoccupation of the historian seeking to understand the past entails investigating how the spirit, through human interaction, has constantly attempted to become free, how that has driven all other changes in values. On the broader front of juridical and economic history, two authoritative figures combated Croce: Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), a leading antiFascist, and Gioacchino Volpe (1876–1971), whose influential Il medioevo (The Middle Ages, 1927) singled out in economics the driving force of social mobility and privileged comparative philological research. In the period immediately following World War II, Italian culture opened up to foreign discourses, and idealism underwent much revisions at the hands of general historians such as Delio Cantimori, Walter Maturi, Adolfo Omodeo, Federico Chabod, and Giuseppe Galasso, with much attention going to the reinterpretation of the Risorgimento, the thorny issue on what the ‘‘origins of Italy’’ might mean, and the inclusion of popular culture in the historian’s syntheses. Very evident is the surge in Marxist criticism, with the added stimulus provided by the publication of the writings of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) in 945

HISTORIOGRAPHY the early 1950s, which develops more integrative models of analysis and begs the question of revisionism in history writing. A Marxist historiography requires now that scholars take into account the more material and social dimension of artworks, the dialectics of class, the author’s worldview, questions of influence and circulation, the previously unthematized role of the intellectual as an interclass strategic group, and the presence of the lower or popular classes in the shaping of a nation and of a politics. But there is also the influence of the French Annales school. New studies appear by Emilio Sereni (1907–1977), with his La questione agraria nella rinascita nazionale italiana (History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape, 1946); Giorgio Candeloro (1909–1988), historian of religious movements and of a monumental 10volume Storia dell’Italia Moderna (History of Modern Italy, 1956–1986); Rosario Romeo (1924–1987), author of Risorgimento e capitalismo (Capitalism and the Risorgimento, 1959) and books on industrialization; and Ruggiero Romano (1923–2002), a specialist in Latin America who sought to contextualize Italy and Europe in a world perspective, coedited the 17-volume Annali d’Italia (Annals of Italy), and lamented the dearth of studies on Italian colonialism. Among the historians of Fascism (of which there are three currents, the Marxist, the Radical, and the Liberal), we must not forget the pioneering work of Renzo De Felice (1929–1996), whose eight-volume ‘‘revisionist’’ biography of Mussolini has become a canonical reference point. In philosophy, we recall the work of Eugenio Garin (1909–2004), whose Storia della filosofia italiana (History of Italian Philosophy, 1966) put the history of ideas back into the reality of a documentable Italian world, while rendering obsolete Giovanni Gentile’s nationalistic and immanent history of Italian thinking. Finally, in literary studies, there is the 10-volume critical history and anthology assembled by Remo Ceserani and Lidia De Federicis, Il materiale e l’immaginario (Imagination and Material Culture, 1980–1985), in which the arts and culture of Italy are placed in a network of relations with other fields and in a European and Mediterranean context; and Giuseppe Petronio’s L’attivita` letteraria in Italia (Literature and Society in Italy, 1979), with its emphasis on writers as ‘‘real’’ agents endowed with ideas that do have an effect on the society in which they live and interact. PETER CARRAVETTA See also: Literary History 946

Further Reading Baroni, Giorgio (editor), Storia della critica letteraria, Milan: UTET, 1997. Braudel, Fernand, On History, translated by Sarah Matthews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Breisach, Ernst, Historiography, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Butterfield, Herbert, Man on his Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960. Canfora, Luciano, Teorie e tecnica della storiografia classica, Bari: Laterza, 1974. Cecchi, Ottavio, and Enrico Ghidetti (editors), Fare storia della letteratura, Rome: Editori Riunti, 1986. Chabod, Federico, Lezioni di metodo storico, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Cochrane, Eric, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981. Croce, Benedetto, Teoria e storia della storiografia, Bari: Laterza, 1917; rpt. 1973. Croce, Benedetto, History as the Story of Liberty, translated by Sylvia Sprigge, Chicago: Gateway Edition, 1941; rpt. 1970. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turino: Einaudi, 1967. Galasso, Giuseppe, L’Italia come problema storiografico, Turin: Utet, 1979. Getto, Giovanni, Storia delle storie letterarie, Florence: Sansoni, 1942; rpt. 1969. Hay, Denys, Annalists & Historians: Western Historiography from the VIII to the XVIII Century, London: Metheun, 1977. Kelley, Donald (editor), Versions of History from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. Leduc, Jean, Les Historiens et le temps, Paris: Seuil, 1999. Lefebvre, Georges, La Naissance de l’historiographie moderne, Paris: Flammarion, 1971. Le Goff, Jacques (editor), La Nouvelle histoire, Paris: RetzCepl, 1979. Lucchini, Guido, Le origini della scuola storica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Momigliano, Arnaldo, Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1977. Petronio, Giuseppe, L’attivita` letteraria in Italia, Palermo: Palumbo, 1979. Petronio, Giuseppe (editor), Teoria e realta` della storiografia letteraria, Bari: Laterza, 1981. Romano, Ruggiero, La storiografia italiana oggi, Milan: L’Espresso Strumenti, 1978. Sinopoli, Franca, Storiografia e comparazione: Le origini della storia comparata della letteratura in Europa tra Settecento e Ottocento, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1996. Vivarelli, Roberto, Storia e Storiografia: Approssimazioni per lo studio dell’eta` contemporanea, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004.

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE

HISTORY OF ITALY See Storia d’Italia (Work by Francesco Guicciardini)

HISTORY: A NOVEL See La Storia (Work by Elsa Morante)

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE Holocaust literature is a genre that developed out of testimonies by survivors and fictive works by authors who sought to explore the defining event of the twentieth century through imaginative writings. As a genre, Holocaust literature is relatively new, defined as such within the emerging field of Holocaust studies in the 1960s. The term ‘‘Holocaust’’ itself to refer to the massacre of European Jewry is problematic, as its Greek origin refers to burnt sacrifice, thus producing an inappropriate image of Christian redemption or martyrdom for victims. The term has been widely adopted beginning in the 1960s and is still the most commonly used term. ‘‘Shoah’’ is often preferred instead, which in Hebrew means ‘‘catastrophe.’’ Besides the documentation of events experienced by individuals, the mission of Holocaust literature is also that of the memory and commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Literary criticism on these texts often focuses on the function of commemoration, trauma and its aftermath, the role of fiction in Holocaust writings, and the inadequacy of language to express unimaginable events. As the noted literary critic Lawrence Langer remarks in

Art from the Ashes (1995), ‘‘The challenge of this literature is to discover and accept the twisted features of the unfamiliar without searching for words, like ‘‘suffering,’’ to shape what we see into more congenial facades.’’ In 1994, Anna Brava and Daniela Jalla published a book entitled Una misura onesta (An Honest Measure) that collected data about Italian Holocaust survivors, what they had written about their experiences, and biographical information about them up until 1993. Since then many more accounts have been either presented or published. Early testimonies by Primo Levi, Giuliana Tedeschi, and Bruno Piazza were not widely read; it was only after the republication of Se questo e` un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz) by Einaudi in 1958 (after their initial refusal of the manuscript in 1946) that any significant attention was paid to Italian testimonies. The Bravo and Jalla study of 1994 was the first major study to come out on Italian survivors. Italy has been notably well-represented in this genre due to the work of Primo Levi (1919–1987), who is among the most well-known Holocaust writers in the world. His works appear in virtually 947

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE every anthology or study devoted to the subject and have been translated into many languages. Elie Wiesel’s (1928–) evocative testimony Night, published in 1960, and Levi’s 1947 Se questo e´ un uomo are the two most widely read Holocaust testimonies in the world. In Se questo e` un uomo, Levi explores the morally ravaged world of Auschwitz and the effects of dehumanization on the human spirit in his philosophically and ethically profound text. Levi went on to write La tregua (The Reawakening, 1963), in which he recounts his long, arduous, and adventuresome journey home. In this text, Levi engages important themes of the restoration of self, and his physical journey becomes a metaphor for the psychological process of reintegration into society and what that means for a Holocaust survivor. In his other works, such as his collections of science fiction stories, and his semiautobiographical work Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975), Levi often engages the topic of the Holocaust. Levi spent much of his life involved in Holocaust education, visiting schools and speaking to children about his experiences. He wrote about the Holocaust in essays, poetry that is both beautiful and devastating, short stories, and theater, and in a novel about Jewish partisans, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?, 1982). In 1986, he published a collection of essays, I sommersi e I salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), in which he confronts complex issues such as collaboration, bystander complicity, and survivor guilt. Another Italian survivor, Bruno Piazza of Trieste (1889–1946), wrote his testimony right after the war and died a few months afterward. His moving work, Perche´ gli altri dimenticano (Why Others Forget) was published posthumously in 1956. Piazza offers one of the few accounts of a concentration camp on Italian soil, the Risiera di San Sabba, located outside Trieste. He begins his narrative with his imprisonment there, followed by a short stay in a local prison, and finally his deportation to Auschwitz. In the description of the deportation itself, Piazza painstakingly describes each railway station still in Italy that the train passes, hoping that the prisoners will somehow be stopped and rescued by partisans. This rescue never comes. Piazza’s text offers a freshness of perspective largely due to his terse prose style that communicates a strong emotional immediacy, and the fact that he wrote his narrative right after the war. Along with a detailed chronology, Piazza’s testimony renders an account of the damage and outrage to the human spirit by the univers concentrationnaire. 948

An area of Holocaust literature that has received more attention in the past few years is that of women’s testimonies. In his introduction to Liana Millu’s Il fumo di Birkenau (Smoke Over Birkenau), Primo Levi calls it ‘‘one of the most powerful European testimonies to come from the women’s lager at Auschwitz–Birkenau and by far the most affecting among Italian accounts,’’ and calls the camp experience much more difficult for women than for men. Millu (1914–2005), originally from Genoa, published her testimony in 1986. Differences in camp experiences due to sex are also highlighted in the work of Giuliana Tedeschi. Originally from Turin, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1944 along with her husband and mother-in-law, who were both killed there. Her first testimony, Questo povero corpo (This Poor Body) was published in 1946, and her second, C’e´ un punto sulla terra: una donna nel Lager di Birkenau (There is a Place on Earth: A Woman at Birkenau) was published in 1988. Tedeschi writes vividly about not only her own experiences in the camp but about those around her. Her gripping yet lyrical style recounts the effects of the loss of children and family on the other women and on herself. In 1995, Tedeschi elaborated these themes in an essay entitled Memoria di donne e bambini nei lager nazisti (Memory of Women and Children in the Nazi Camps), in which she discusses the fatal consequences of pregnancy and childbearing in the camps, the removal of femininity from the prisoners, and other hardships endured by women prisoners. The concept of fiction representing the Holocaust has been controversial because of the potential of using the Holocaust in a melodramatic and exploitative way that distorts its history and its significance. Roberto Benigni’s film La vita e` bella (Life is Beautiful, 1997), for example, has been at the center of many debates regarding this issue. Nonetheless, fictive writing can be evocative and tell a haunting story. Cynthia Ozick’s The Shawl (1980) is an excellent example of fiction written by a nonsurvivor that forcefully depicts the damaged world of the survivor; as Levi said about one of his own fictive works about the Holocaust in his essay Itinerario di uno scrittore ebreo (Itinerary of a Jewish Writer), it is ‘‘immaginario ma plausibile’’ (imaginary but plausible). One excellent example of powerful Italian fictional writing about the Holocaust is found in the work of Giorgio Bassani (1916–2000). An early short story of Bassani’s, ‘‘Una lapide in Via Mazzini’’ (A Plaque on Via Mazzini), published as part

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE of his collection Cinque storie ferraresi (Five Stories of Ferrara, 1956) speaks in forceful terms of the precariousness of Jewish existence in Italy and the culpability of Fascism in the Holocaust. Written in 1952, the story recounts the return of Geo Josz, a concentration camp survivor, who arrives in his hometown only to discover his name listed on the plaque of local Jews killed during the Holocaust. During the course of Geo’s ambivalent and at times hostile reception by his town, we are made to realize that for the town it was easier to commemorate its deported Jews on a plaque than to deal with its Fascist past in the form of a survivor who did not want the townspeople to forget their Fascism and its relation to his fate. In this story, Bassani directly confronts the issues of Fascism, collaboration and guilt apparently well ahead of his time. Bassani’s 1962 novel, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Contini), examines the losses and hardships that the Jewish community of Ferrara experienced due to the racial laws and the antiSemitism of the community. He also explores another aspect of the crisis of Jewish communities at the time: the relationship of Italian national identity to Jewish cultural identity. The Jewish community in Italy is the oldest in Europe, established under the Romans around 200 BCE. Since then the community has survived despite strict anti-Semitic measures in intervening centuries, usually proposed by the Catholic Church. Unlike most other Jews in Europe combating similar prejudices and exclusions, Jews in Italy usually spoke the dialect of the region or town in which they were living. This ensured a much faster integration into mainstream Italian society upon the abolition of the ghettos in the nineteenth century. The unification in Italy (1870) was closely linked to Jewish emancipation from the ghettos. As a result, many Italian Jews were fierce patriots, and Jewish cultural identity in Italy became strongly intertwined with the newly forming Italian national identity. Growing anti-Semitism in Italy in the 1930s under Fascism, however, severely challenged this linked identity. In his novel, Bassani demonstrates two schools of thought regarding Jewish cultural identity: one represented by the Finzi Contini family who is (as it turns out, rightfully so) skeptical of the safety of Jews in Italy under Fascism. Instead, Giorgio’s family wants desperately to believe in a continued smooth integration, even despite strong evidence to the contrary: the oppressive, marginalizing effects of Fascism and the racial laws. This debate between the two groups is tragically resolved at the end of the novel by the roundup of the Jewish

community by Italian officials and the subsequent deportation to their deaths. The Holocaust literature that has grown out of the Italian experience needs to be seen against a complicated political and historical backdrop. One example of an autobiographical work that looks carefully at the relationship between the Catholic Church, Fascism and the fate of Italy’s Jews is Rosetta Loy’s La parola ebreo (First Words, 1997). Loy writes of her childhood growing up caught between the Catholic Church and Fascism, of growing state- and church-generated anti-Semitism, the bystander complicity of her own family and other Italians who passively stood by, and the ultimate fate of her Jewish neighbors. The Holocaust in Italy is a topic that has recently been the focus of intense scrutiny because of its close relation to and interdependence with the Fascist era. Italy was to some degree a perpetrator and collaborator in the Holocaust and at the same time a victim of Nazi aggression after 1943. Prevailing beliefs regarding the role of Fascism in the Holocaust and Italy’s status as a victim have been challenged in recent debates. To what degree was Italy and Fascism responsible for the Holocaust and therefore for the Italian survivors and victims in whose name Holocaust literature has been written? Some of the persistent myths regarding Italian Fascism have been that Mussolini was not interested in promoting official anti-Semitism until asked to do so by Hitler, very few Italian Fascists carried out the deportation of Italian Jews after the German occupation of 1943, and that Italians in general turned a blind eye to anti-Semitic measures. New research has shown these myths to be untrue: Almost half the deportations were carried out by Italians and not by Germans. Because of the racial laws of 1938–1939, the Fascist regime kept records of Jews that made deportations much easier for the Nazi and Fascist officials who carried out these actions. The racial laws were among the most strict and oppressive anti-Semitic legislation in Europe, and most Italian Jews were forced to comply. Even the myth of a Mussolini who only came up with anti-Semitic legislation due to pressure from Hitler has been thoroughly debunked by historians such as Giorgio Fabre. Robert Gordon has analyzed the tensions regarding Italy’s Fascist past and the identity of the perpetrators in the Holocaust that became obvious in debates regarding the new legislation for Il giorno della memoria (The Day of Memory), enacted in 2001, and in the very language of the referendum itself. 949

HOLOCAUST LITERATURE This increased interest in wartime Italy has occurred at the same time as a resurgence of interest in survivor stories. As a result, more and more survivor testimonies and accounts are being heard in Italy. This corresponds to a worldwide increase in survivor testimonies in recent years, as many survivors are coming to the end of their lives and wish to leave a record behind of their individual experiences. NANCY HARROWITZ Further Reading Bravo, Anna, and Daniela Jalla, Una misura onesta, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994. Deaglio, Enrico, La banalita` del bene. Storia di Giorgio Perlasca, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1991. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Otto ebrei, Rome: Editrice Atlantica, 1944. De Felice, Renzo, Storia degli ebrei italiani sotto il fascismo, Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Fabre, Giorgio, Mussolini razzista. Milan: Garzanti, 2005. Fabre, Giorgio, Hitler’s Contract: How Mussolini Became the Fuhrer’s Publisher: the History of the Italian Edition of Mein Kampf, US Enigma Books Network, 2006. Farrell, Joseph (editor), The Austere Humanist, OxfordNew York: Peter Lang, 2004. Fleischmann, Luigi, Un ragazzo ebreo nelle retrovie, Florence: La Giuntina, 1999.

Gordon, Robert S.C., Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Gordon, Robert S.C. ‘‘The Holocaust in Italian Collective Memory: Il giorno della memoria, 27 January 2001,’’ in Modern Italy, 11, no. 2 (June 2006): 167–189. Kremer, Roberta (editor), Memory and Mastery: Primo Levi as Writer and Witness, Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. Langer, Lawrence, Art From the Ashes; A Holocaust Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Levi, Primo, ‘‘Itinerario di uno scrittore ebreo,’’ in Opere, vol. 2, edited by M. Belpoliti, Milan: Einaudi, 1997. Loy, Rosetta, La parola ebreo, Milan: Einaudi, 1997. Millu, Liana, Il fumo di Birkenau, Florence: La Giuntina, 1986; as Smoke over Birkenau, translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988. Millu, Liana, I ponti di Schwerin, Genoa: Le Mani, 1998. Modigliani, Piero, I nazisti a Roma. Dal diario di un ebreo, Rome: Citta` Nuova, 1984. Morpurgo-Fano, Letizia, Diario. Ricordi di Prigionia (10.9.43–27.4.45), Trieste: Tip. Leghissa, 1966. Navarro, Amalia, Siamo ancora vive!, Padua: Messaggero, 2002. Sarfatti, Michele, Gli ebrei nell’Italia fascista. Vicende, identita`, persecuzione, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Stille, Alexander, Benevolence and Betrayal. New York: Summit Books, 1991. Zimmerman, Joshua D. (editor), Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi Rule, 1922–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Zuccotti, Susan, The Italians and the Holocaust, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.

HUMAN INSTRUMENTS See Gli strumenti umani (Work by Vittorio Sereni)

HUMANISM The term ‘‘Humanism’’ indicates the fifteenthcentury movement of thought that places man and human experience at the core of its investigation. In reaction to medieval speculative thought, the 950

philosophical and scientific goals of Humanism were essentially practical, aiming at moral and civic education as a premise to construct a Christian ideal society. Covering a core period from the

HUMANISM mid-fourteenth century to the early decades of the sixteenth century, Humanism greatly influenced the formation of modern thought. An essential trait of this movement was the recovery of pagan and Christian antiquity, on which the Humanists based their program of educational reform. Although Humanism brought innovation in many fields, from education to statecraft, art, and theology, and had a broader scope than education, in the late fourteenth century the term ‘‘Humanist’’ denoted just the professional rhetoricians and grammarians who taught classical texts with a philological approach. This limited meaning resurfaced in the nineteenth century, when the German pedagogist Immanuel Niethammer coined the term ‘‘Humanism’’ to designate a pedagogical theory that privileged classical studies in scholastic curricula. The historical and political conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth century favored a philosophical reorientation toward practical issues. The political context of the Italian city-states encouraged the formation of a professional category of civil servants and teachers able to fulfill the rhetorical exigencies of a ruling class that used cultural prestige to reinforce its political power. The crisis that the Italian communal civilization underwent during the fourteenth century conditioned the passage from a Heaven-oriented to a man-centered culture. Famines, wars, and epidemics, culminating with the devastating Black Death of 1348, plagued Europe through the fourteenth century, and led to questioning medieval faith in the capacity of scientific knowledge to explain and control natural phenomena. As a result, a tendency to abandon abstract speculation in favor of practical wisdom prevailed and paved the way to Humanism. Ever since the publication of Jacob Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1860), scholars have debated the character and scope of Humanism. It is possible to distinguish two main approaches: one stressing the continuity of Humanism with medieval culture; the other focusing on its innovative traits. Among those who stressed the continuity with the Middle Ages are Augustin Renaudet (Humanisme et renaissance, 1958) and Giuseppe Toffanin (La fine dell’umanesimo, 1920), who attributed an essential religious meaning to Humanism and saw in it an attempt to reconcile classical culture and patristic theology. Reacting against a too abstract and broad definition of this movement, historians like Paul Oskar Kristeller claimed that Humanists represented an evolution of medieval grammarians and rhetoricians, whose highest accomplishment

was the educational curriculum of studia humanitatis based on classical literature. In Kristeller’s view, although their program included the study of moral philosophy, the Humanists did not produce original philosophical thought (Renaissance Thought and its Sources, 1979). Hans Baron’s notion of ‘‘Civic Humanism’’ was an important contribution to the understanding of the impact of political and historical factors on the development of Humanism (The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, 1955). The term referred to the politically committed movement that flourished in Florence in the early fourteenth century, and had in chancellors Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370–1444) its most representative figures. In Baron’s view, the need to defend the Florentine republic from the expansionistic politics of the papacy and the visconti of Milan gave origin to a culture that celebrated the ideals of republicanism and freedom. Scholars such as Eugenio Garin (L’Umanesimo italiano, 1952) and Ernesto Grassi (La filosofia dell’umanesimo, 1988) focused on the centrality of the philosophy of man in Humanist thought. They argued that the Humanists acquired a sense of history unknown to the Middle Ages and, in their opposition to medieval dogmatism, elaborated a form of critical thinking that anticipated modernity. In the Humanists’ critique of Scholasticism, these scholars saw the end of the medieval trust in the human capacity of explaining transcendent reality. In their view, the originality of Humanism is in the shift from metaphysics to ethics and politics, from logic to poetry, and in the asserted superiority of metaphorical language over logical discourse in conveying practical truths and in inspiring love for virtue. This changed vision of man and the world determined in their view the nature and the goals of Humanism. A relatively more recent approach, like that of Charles Trinkaus, suggests the necessity to combine different historiographical methodologies to gain a comprehensive view of Humanism (In Our Image and Likeness, 1970). The origin of the Humanist movement can be traced back to the revival of classical culture that originally took place in France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and continued with the Paduan Humanists Lovato dei Lovati (1241–1309) and his disciple Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). Around these figures, jurists, notaries, and literati formed a circle dedicated to the study of classical Latin authors and to the collection of ancient manuscripts. A culture centered on the investigation of natural and moral sciences reached its full 951

HUMANISM maturity by elaborating original goals and methods. Although these goals were common to the majority of Humanists, it would be misleading to consider Humanism a homogeneous movement. Rather, it developed through different phases, with a variety of different opinions openly debated and represented in all genres of literature. The Humanist orientation toward moral philosophy was already visible in the works of the two major Italian intellectuals of the fourteenth century: Francesco Petrarca (1304–1374) and Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375), who already saw in classical ethics the underpinning of Christian society. At the turn of the fifteenth century, Florentine civic Humanism bloomed, giving a crucial contribution to the recovery of both classical and Christian antiquity. In this period, following ancient models, the Humanists retrieved the genres of historical narrative, biography, dialogue, and oration, and undertook a major effort to make ancient Greek texts available in Latin. Translation became a main activity for Humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439), Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459), and Matteo Palmieri (1406– 1475), who drew the profile of the perfect citizen in his Della vita civile (On Civil Life, 1431–1438). Theoretical treatises and discussions on translation animated the correspondences of authors such as Bruni and Manetti. In parallel, a passionate hunt for manuscripts in the monasteries of Europe and Italy developed, and antiquarians and Humanists such as Niccolo` Niccoli (1363–1437) and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) began to collect them in libraries. The exaltation of virtue, the recovery of antiquity, and the construction of an ideal city built on pagan and Christian civic ideals were central themes debated in this period, already present in Petrarch’s and Boccaccio’s works. Parallel to literary Humanism, an artistic movement seeking scientific and cultural foundations flourished in Florence. Following in the footsteps of Giotto (1267–1337), Masaccio (1401–1428), and Donatello (1386–1466), artists such as Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446), Leon Battista Alberti (1406– 1472), and Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) invented and developed the technique of perspective, promoting a new artistic sensibility centered on the rational representation of reality. In Northern Italy, Guarino Veronese (1370– 1460), Vittorino Ramboldini, better known as Vittorino da Feltre (1378–1446), and Francesco Filelfo (1398–1481), realized a program of Humanist educational reform along the lines indicated in the groundwork of Petrarch and Boccaccio. The 952

Humanist curriculum was a transformation of the medieval system of liberal arts based on the traditional division of trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and quatrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). It included literary studies, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy, and concentrated on the study of classical texts in their original languages. Following an ideal of universal development of mind and body, it also integrated physical and intellectual education. Ancient historians, philosophers, poets, and medieval auctores previously known only in epitomes or through inaccurately copied manuscripts, constituted the main rhetorical models of Humanist education. Although the Humanists criticized scholastic Aristotelianism, they continued to teach Aristotle in the universities, particularly politics and ethics, along with Plato and the Neoplatonists. Their curriculum became the model of education in Europe during the Renaissance and the following centuries. If Florence was the heart of artistic and civic Humanism, and Padua and Ferrara the centers of education, Rome was the cradle of antiquarian and archeological Humanism as evidenced by the works of Flavio Biondo (1392–1463). Biondo authored two major works, the Italia Illustrata (Italy Illustrated, 1531), a geographical and historical description of the Italian provinces written between 1448 and 1453, and Historiarum ab inclinatione Romani imperii decades (Decades of History from the Decline of the Roman Empire, 1531), presenting a chronology from the fall of the Roman Empire until Flavio’s own time. Noteworthy are also his Roma instaurata (Rome Restored, 1531), a catalogue of Rome’s architectural treasures written in 1446, and his Roma triumphans (Rome Triumphant, 1531), written in 1456–1459, which studies the institutions and customs of ancient Rome. Erudite and versatile, Biondo tended to proceed by the encyclopedic accumulation of documents and materials rather than attempt to reproduce the ancient ideal of formal perfection. In a famous controversy with Leonardo Bruni, synthesized in his De verbis Romanae locutionis (On the Words of Roman Speech, 1435) Biondo affirmed the unity of the Latin spoken in Rome, and argued that the vernacular originated from the linguistic corruption caused by the barbaric invasions. Crucial for the recovery of ancient texts was the arrival in Italy of Byzantine scholars such as Manuel Chrysoloras (ca. 1355–1415), called by Salutati to teach Greek at the Studio Fiorentino in 1397. During the Council of Florence (1439– 1445), convoked to reunify the Greek and the

HUMANISM Roman Church, more Byzantine scholars came to Italy, including Bessarion (1403–1472) and Giorgio Gemisto Pletone (1355–1452). Together with Italian Humanists like Giovanni Aurispa (1369–1459), these scholars brought many untranslated Greek codices from Constantinople, enriching the Italian libraries. Other pre-eminent Greek scholars such as John Argyropoulus (ca. 1393–1487) also moved to Italy after Constantinople fell in the hands of the Turks in 1453. Humanism reached its peak with the critical works of Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457), the artistic rationalization of Leon Battista Alberti, and the philology of Angelo Ambrogini, called Poliziano (1454–1494). In the second half of the quattrocento, the progressive affirmation of the Signorie in Central and Northern Italy caused a turn in the evolution of Humanism, connecting it to the courts and bending it toward speculative thought. Typical of this phase was the revival of Platonism and Neoplatonism, particularly in the two major philosophical centers of Naples, with Giovanni Pontano (1429–1503), and Florence, with Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). The tendency to a synchretistic reconciliation of heterogeneous philosophical and religious sources, including mysticism and esoterism, characterized the works of this period, like Ficino’s translation of the Corpus Hermeticus (Hermetic Writings, 1471) and the cabalistic studies of Pico della Mirandola. The celebration of the dignity of man, exalting the divine potentiality of the human in his task of ‘‘completing’’ the divine work of creation was a central theme of this period. Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, 1452), and Pico’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486) are the two main treatises on this theme. The second half of the quattrocento saw the progressive affirmation of vernacular Humanism with the poetry of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449– 1492) and Poliziano, and with the prose of Alberti and Jacopo Sannazzaro (1457–1530). By the end of the fifteenth century, Humanism spread through Europe. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Thomas More (1478– 1535), Franc¸ois Rabelais (ca. 1490–1533), and Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540), assimilated and cultivated the legacy of Italian Humanism. Through these authors, and particularly through Erasmus, Humanism influenced both Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Humanists set their goals within a framework of Christian values. Following the Aristotelian view

that ethics was the underpinning of politics and economics, they considered the pursuit of virtue and the construction of a just and free society two necessary steps toward fulfilling their ideal of Christianity. The cultivation of virtue and the building of the ideal Christian city were at the basis of the Humanists’ focus on moral philosophy and their pedagogical interest in finding models of virtue in classical sources. The exigency of moral rebirth ran parallel to the desire for religious reform, determining the simultaneous recovery of ancient Christian and pagan authors. Since the Humanists took the theology and ecclesiology of the early fathers as their models, an additional and autonomous study of ancient thought was necessary to understand the patristic texts, imbued of classical culture. Furthermore, ancient poets and philosophers were valuable to Christian thought because, even before revelation, they had intuited natural and moral truths, achieving excellence in these fields. Humanist and medieval approaches to classical texts differed radically. Humanists preserved a glorious past from oblivion by restoring it to its authenticity and using it to mold their present. They acquired a ‘‘sense of history’’ and, with it, the consciousness that any text and any language is a historical product subject to critical interpretation, valid according to its time and place. The authors ceased to be auctoritates conveying eternal truths and became historical figures belonging to given cultural and linguistic contexts. The Humanist critique of Scholasticism began with Petrarch’s invectives and culminated with Lorenzo Valla’s Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis (Encomium of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 1457), works that challenged the Scholastic claim that knowledge of transcendent reality was possible. In Scholasticism, by starting from indemonstrable premises, logic guaranteed scientific reliability to the deductive process and gave validity to its conclusions. The Humanists argued on the contrary that when premises are indemonstrable, as in the case of faith, logical inference is fallacious and leads to aporias. Only metaphorical language is able to comprehend and express moral and natural truths, which for the Humanists were the only attainable ones. Indeed, not reason but folly can arguably speak of God, as in Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Moriae encomium (Praise of Folly, 1511). Rhetoric, understood as the art of communicating wisdom, became ancillary to moral philosophy and determined the pre-eminence of poetry over demonstrative rationality. Rhetorical studies reached a climax with the works of Valla, who adopted Quintilian’s definition 953

HUMANISM of rhetoric as the art of speech founded on grammar in opposition to Poggio Bracciolini, who supported Ciceronian persuasive rhetoric. Valla’s method of textual analysis applied the principles of Quintilian rhetoric to the critical revision of both secular and sacred literature. It relied on a normative doctrine of speaking and writing (grammatica methodica), and on the study of the spoken and literary usage of language (grammatica historica). He illustrated his philological methodology in his Elegantiae linguae latinae (Elegances of the Latin Language, 1471), the first Humanist Latin grammar textbook, and in his In Novum Testamentum ex diversorum utriusque linguae codicum collatione adnotationes (Annotations on the New Testament Collected from Various Codices in Each Language, 1449), published by Erasmus in 1505. Both these texts had a great influence on European Humanism and critically contributed to the formation of Humanist theology, which with Valla became the science of biblical exegesis that uses philology as a means of investigation. The Humanists extended their critique of the medieval world to theology and ecclesiastical institutions. They felt that the medieval secularized church no longer reflected the evangelical principles of the proto-Christian Church. Although Christians, the Humanists shared a general tendency toward anticlericalism and a criticism of medieval ecclesiology. Valla’s Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis can be considered as the manifesto of Humanist theology. In this speech, delivered to commemorate Aquinas in Santa Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome, the author attacked the two major ecclesiastical institutions of the Middle Ages: Scholasticism and the secular church. The church based its claim to temporal power on the Donation of Constantine, a document with which the Roman Emperor Constantine had supposedly transferred the dominion of part of his imperial territory to Pope Sylvester I in 313. By applying his critical methodology, Valla demonstrated that the donation was a forgery and attacked the very foundation of the secular power of the church. Humanist criticism of ecclesiastic institutions also involved monasticism, born as an early reaction to a church corrupted by temporal power. In withdrawing from society to escape the corruption of the world, however, not even monasticism fulfilled the Christian evangelical mission, which, for the Humanists, demanded an active presence in the civic community. SUSANNA BARSELLA

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Further Reading Baron, Hans, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955. Billanovich, Giuseppe, La tradizione del testo di Livio e le origini dell’Umanesimo, Padua: Antenore, 1981. Black, Robert, Humanism and Education in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Tradition and Innovation in Latin Schools from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by Samuel G. Chetwynd Middlemore, 2 vols., London: Kegan Paul, 1878. Camporeale, Salvatore I., Lorenzo Valla. Umanesimo, Riforma e Controriforma, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. Cassirer, Ernst, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, translated by Mario Domandi, New York: Dover, 1963. Celenza, Christian, The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Fubini, Riccardo, Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Garin, Eugenio, L’Umanesimo italiano, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1952. Garin, Eugenio, Il ritorno dei filosofi antichi, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1983. Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, London: Duckworth, 1986. Grassi, Ernesto, La filosofia dell’umanesimo: un problema epocale, edited by Lino Rossi, Naples: Tempi moderni, 1988. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Renaissance Thought and its Sources, New York: Columbia University Press, 1979. Panofsky, Erwin, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1960. Rabil, Albert (editor), Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vols., Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Renaudet, Augustin, Humanisme et renaissance, Geneva: Droz, 1958. Rico, Francisco, Il sogno dell’umanesimo: da Petrarca a Erasmo, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Stinger, Charles L., Humanism and the Church Fathers. Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1439) and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977. Toffanin, Giuseppe, La fine dell’umanesimo, Milan: Bocca, 1920. Trinkaus, Charles, In Our Image and Likeness. Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., London: Constable, 1970. Trinkaus, Charles, The Scope of Renaissance Humanism, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1983. Vasoli, Cesare, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968. Witt, Ronald G., In the Footsteps of the Ancients. The Origins of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003.

I IACOPONE DA TODI (CA. 1230/1236–1306) liturgical context, the vernacular replaced Latin as its principal language. Before Iacopone, most collections of laude were coauthored by anonymous writers or written collectively by brotherhoods known as laudesi, while the literary value of the approximately 200 extant laudari, the collections of laude, in Latin or in the vernacular, remains negligible. Iacopone’s Laude is the first singleauthored collection of this poetic form. With Iacopone, the predominantly popular and folkloric genre of lauda achieved a valuable literary status; thanks to his poetic skills, the lauda acquired respectability and prestige, which it had never enjoyed before, when it was simply the expression of popular devotional practices. Iacopone transformed the lauda into a highly complex poetic genre, which deals with numerous religious topics and loses its specificity as simply a song of praise. The lauda became a supple poetic form, which is apt to express numerous subjects. Iacopone’s poems display a wide range of topics and styles; they feature invocations; petitions; thankful songs to God; didactic, edifying poems; virulent and satirical attacks on the poet’s enemies; irreverent and pugnacious diatribes against the corrupt papacy and clergy; poetic renderings of theological and doctrinal issues; as well as prayerful addresses to God. Within the genre of lauda, Iacopone experimented with numerous poetic forms. Some of his poems may be classified as tensos or debate poems, others as dramatic dialogues, some as litanies, others as prayers. Although he operated at the dawn of

Also known as Jacopo de’ Benedetti or Jacopo da Tuderto (the spelling of Iacopone’s name was traditionally Jacopone; in recent years, however, criticism in the English language has opted for the spelling ‘‘Iacopone’’), Iacopone was a Franciscan friar of the third generation of the order, a mystic, and a poet. He wrote 100 poems in the vernacular, which were later assembled by an editor and given the title Laude (Lauds). The Bonaccorsi edition, the editio princeps, appeared in Florence in 1490 and, through the centuries, was used as the canonical edition by generations of Iacopone’s readers. In the last half century two critical editions of the laude have appeared, one by Franca Ageno (1953) and one by Franco Mancini (1974). Besides the 100 laude of the collection, the Stabat Mater dolorosa (The Suffering Mother Stood), a Latin liturgical sequence, has been unconvincingly attributed to him. Similarly doubtful is the attribution of two Latin prose works, the Tractatus (Treatise), which deals with the amorous encounter of God and the human soul, and a collection of religious aphorisms known as Dicta (Sayings). Iacopone was a most prolific author of laude, a religious poetic form. By the thirteenth century, the lauda was a well-established poetic genre and a popular form of prayer. The Latin lauda had its roots in liturgy, since it derived from the Gospel acclamation, the Hallelujah, during Mass. As early as the ninth century, the lauda indicated a religious song of praise to Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the saints. As the lauda gradually acquired independence from the 955

IACOPONE DA TODI Italian vernacular poetry, the poet used rare linguistic techniques and complex rhetorical structures. His poetic sophistication transpired through the usage of noteworthy tropes; he employed specific figures of speech such as epanadiplosis, which indicates the repetition of a word or expression at the beginning and at the end of each verse. Iacopone uniquely combined mystical drive and poetic sensitivity. His literary endeavors reflected his postconversion impetus toward the spiritual realm, which permeated his entire intellectual development, as poet as well as human being. He has been reputed by some to have reached the highest poetic accomplishments in medieval Italian after Dante Alighieri. Critical approaches to his production suffered from a controversy between those who believed he was a rough and uncouth author, whose work was primitively unadorned, and those who attributed to him profound poetic taste and sublime inventiveness. Alessandro D’Ancona named Iacopone a ‘‘fool of God,’’ a minstrel or ioculator Domini, on the basis of the poet’s alleged rejection of culture in favor of a thorough acceptance of poverty and simplicity, two typically Franciscan virtues. In the wake of St. Paul’s formulation of an irreconcilable opposition of scientia and charitas, according to this critical perspective, it is claimed that Iacopone sided unwaveringly against knowledge acquired through learning and in defense of unembellished love. Subsequent generations of critics discarded this notion of an ‘‘ignorant’’ Iacopone and emphasized the poet’s deep doctrinal knowledge and poetic virtuosity. Although he adopted an inelegant and rustic attitude, Iacopone drew from an excellent educational background in both poetics and theology; he also studied and practiced law and was certainly well read and knowledgeable in the arts of the curriculum. From the formal point of view, Iacopone broke away from the Provenc¸al tradition of courtly love, which his contemporary Italian poets were following. Most laude of his collection are a lyrical exploration of his inner life. Iacopone used poetry as an instrument of spiritual growth and testimony for his mystical accomplishments. Several laude are structured in the form of dialogue or diatribe between two opposing entities: body and soul, soul and Christ, angels and soul, sinner and God. The dialogue suits the tension between the two parties involved particularly well. Iacopone’s uncompromising attitude provided his poetic texts with a dichotomic split between what is divinely acceptable and what is humanly contemptible. This 956

morally induced division operates at various levels: between poverty and wealth, body and soul, physical realm and spiritual realm, Christ and Satan. Iacopone’s excessive hatred for the worldly and corporeal dimension has raised some doubts about his Christian orthodoxy, particularly in relation to the Incarnation. His refutation of the body inspired him to list requests to God for diseases in Lauda 48 (numbering follows the Bonaccorsi edition). Iacopone’s achieved asceticism also caused his unequivocal opposition to the Roman Curia, which he deemed excessively worldly and impure. In Lauda 54 he rejoiced at the election of the mystical Pietro da Morrone as Pope Celestine V, but he prophetically also announced the impossibility of Celestine’s task to withstand the intricacies of the papal court and his desire to abdicate. Celestine’s successor, Pope Boniface VIII, was Iacopone’s personal and public archenemy. After being caught in the struggle between the pope and the Spiritual Franciscans, Iacopone fought against the papal troops at Palestrina and, after his party’s defeat, was excommunicated and taken prisoner. His imprisonment in the papal jail for five years prompted Lauda 55, which may be considered the first prison poem of modern times. In Laude 56, 57, 58, Iacopone addressed Pope Boniface directly in the form of an epistle and accused him of hypocrisy, corruption, heresy, and of having been elected to the Holy See illegitimately. He also pled for forgiveness and clemency, in order to be readmitted into the Church and to be freed from jail. The majority of Iacopone’s laude express the love of Christ and describe Christian mysteries, particularly the Incarnation and Passion. The famous Lauda 93, ‘‘Donna de Paradiso’’ (Lady of Paradise) has been regarded by critics as the first literary seed of Italian theatrical performance in the vernacular. Lauda 93 narrates Christ’s Passion and crucifixion. Because of the four characters’ interacting in its dialogic text, it has been staged innumerable times and has served as a much-needed instrument of spiritual elevation and instruction for illiterate Christians. Those who are unable to read the biblical text can more easily understand a theatrical representation of its contents. Lauda 93 is a unique example of its kind in Iacopone’s collection and does not seem to fit the rest of his production, even though its focus on Mary’s lament over the death of her son made critics associate this poem with other Marian poems in the collection, such as Laude 1 and 2.

IACOPONE DA TODI At times Iacopone’s poetry becomes doctrinal and instructive, to the detriment of its poetic quality; at other times, Iacopone’s realism expresses itself polemically against the hypocrisy of his fellow Christians. His polemic particularly targeted those Franciscan friars who, according to him, had betrayed Francis’s teaching and particularly the virtue of poverty. Iacopone’s mysticism poetically expressed the conceptual cluster behind apophatic theology. Since nothing can be articulated about God and his goodness, the mystic concentrates on the affirmation of what God is not, according to a Christian tradition going back to Dionysius the Areopagite. Iacopone’s recurrent reference to nichilitate accounted for this theological tradition. The ineffability the poet faced when dealing with a poetic rendition of an encounter with divinity was circumvented by means of various tropes and by a recourse to music, the privileged medium to account for an encounter with God. Several laude evoke the presence of God by repetition of the word Amore (Love), which gives the poetic text the scansion of a litany and transforms it into a singable prayer. In the hands of Iacopone, language became a malleable medium that, in the most sublimely lyrical texts, stresses the signifier over the signified; the poet’s original creation of words created an enchanting, almost spellbinding attraction. The resulting effect works on two levels: From a spiritual point of view, the language is bent to accommodate the ineffable experience of accounting for the presence of divinity; from a poetic point of view, the referent is secondary to sound and melody, which make Iacopone’s poetry closer to musical texts and therefore to the origins of lyrical poetry.

Biography Information on Iacopone’s life is scarce and typically inserted in a legendary and hagiographic context or simply drawn from his own dubiously reliable poetic production. Most critics have fallen prey to the temptation of reconstructing the salient facts of his life through those poetic texts of the Laude that appear to be autobiographical. Most of the unconfirmed information on his life before and after conversion comes from a late-fourteenthcentury legendary biography, known as La Franceschina. Iacopone was born in Todi, in the central Italian region of Umbria, to a wealthy family of the lesser nobility. According to most biographical accounts, he spent his youth among the comforts

and luxury that his privileged social and economic status afforded him. He studied jurisprudence, possibly at Bologna, and became an attorney; his title ‘‘messer’’ (sir) testifies to his professional position. He also led a very carefree moral existence, enjoying all the pleasures his youth dispensed him. In his mid-thirties, he married a woman of a neighboring town, Monna Vanna of the Counts of Coldimezzo, who belonged to a higher social rank. The couple enjoyed a pleasurable life of luxury and comforts. Vanna’s death during a party in 1268 caused Iacopone’s profound psychological and moral crisis. While preparing her body for burial, Iacopone discovered (as recorded by hagiographic accounts) that, although she conformed to the lifestyle her husband enjoyed, she had been wearing a cilicium, an instrument of self-mortification on her flesh. Messer Jacopo de’ Benedetti converted, joined the Franciscan Tertiaries, and became known by the nickname ‘‘Iacopone.’’ For the next ten years, Iacopone led the life of a penitent beggar (bizzocone), until he was admitted into the Franciscan Order of Friars Minor in 1278. After siding with the radical faction of the Franciscan Spirituals, who believed in the uncompromising application of the rule of poverty, in 1297 Iacopone signed the Longhezza Manifesto, which denied validity to the election of Pope Boniface VIII to the papal seat, and fought with the Colonna family against Boniface’s troops at Palestrina; after his party was defeated in 1298, he was excommunicated and imprisoned in the papal jail for five years. During his imprisonment he composed most of his poetic texts and, when he was released in 1303 at the death of Boniface, he withdrew to the Convent of Collazzone, where he died on Christmas Eve of the year 1306. Although he was never canonized, Iacopone is popularly acclaimed as Blessed. ALESSANDRO VETTORI See also: Religion and Literature Selected Works Laude, Florence, Francesco Bonaccorsi, 1490. Laudi, Trattato e Detti, edited by Franca Ageno, Florence: Le Monnier, 1953. Le laude, edited by Luigi Fallacara, Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1955. Laude, edited by Franco Mancini, Bari: Laterza, 1974. Le laude, ristampa integrale della prima edizione (1490), edited by Giovanni Papini, Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1923.

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IACOPONE DA TODI Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura italiana delle origini, Florence: Sansoni, 1970. D’Ancona, Alessandro, ‘‘Jacopone da Todi, il giullare di Dio del secolo XIII,’’ in Studi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan: Fratelli Tre`ves, 1891. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Jacopone da Todi: Il giullare di Dio del sec. XIII, Todi: Atanor, 1914. Fleming, John V., An Introduction to the Franciscan Literature of the Middle Ages, Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1977. Fortini, Arnaldo, La lauda in Assisi e le origini del teatro italiano, Assisi: Edizioni Assisi, 1961. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Francesco d’Assisi e il Cantico di frate sole,’’ in Letteratura religiosa dal Due al Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Katainen, Louise V., ‘‘Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic: A Review of the History of the Criticism,’’ Mystics Quarterly, 22:2 (June 1996): 46–57. Moleta, Vincent, ‘‘Dialogues and Dramatic Poems in the Laudario Iacoponico,’’ Italian Studies. An Annual Review, 30 (1975): 7–29.

Papini, Giovanni, Jacopone da Todi, Todi: Res Tudertinae, 1980. Pasquini, Emilio, ‘‘La lauda’’ in Il Duecento: Dalle origini a Dante, vol. 1, edited by Emilio Pasquini and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Peck, George T., The Fool of God: Jacopone da Todi, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1980. Richardson, Brian, ‘‘The First Edition of Iacopone’s Laude (Florence, 1490) and the Development of Vernacular Philology,’’ Italian Studies. An Annual Review, 47 (1992): 26–40. Sapegno, Natalino, Frate Jacopone, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. Underhill, Evelyn, Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic, 1228–1306: A Spiritual Biography, with a Selection from the Spiritual Songs, London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1919. Valesio, Paolo, ‘‘‘O entenebrata luce ch’en me luce’: La letteratura del silenzio,’’ in Del silenzio: Percorsi, suggestioni, interpretazioni, edited by Giovannella Fusco Girard and Anna Maria Tango, Salerno: Ripostes, 1992.

IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELER See Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Work by Italo Calvino)

IF THIS IS A MAN See Se questo e` un uomo (Work by Primo Levi)

ILLUMINISMO See Enlightenment 958

VITTORIO IMBRIANI

VITTORIO IMBRIANI (1840–1886) Vittorio Imbriani began his literary career in 1860 as an editor of the newspaper La patria and contributor to L’Italia, La nuova patria, and Il giornale napoletano della domenica. Having fought with Garibaldi as a young man, Imbirani eventually became a conservative and a fervent monarchist, skeptical of republican and democratic solutions. He came to believe that the ruling middle class, having won the civil wars of the Risorgimento, had within few years betrayed their national ideals. In his opinion, the middle classes were defined by an empty materialism and a clear incapacity for assuming their responsibilities. In his literary essay ‘‘Dell’organismo poetico e della poesia popolare italiana’’ (On the Poetic Organism and the Popular Italian Poetry, 1866), he supported research into folklore and oral tradition as source of artistic value. He himself produced remarkable studies in this field, publishing Canti popolari delle province meridionali (Songs of the Southern Provinces, 1871–1872), a collection of southern Italian popular songs; a book of Tuscan tales, La novellaja fiorentina (Florentine Short Stories, 1871), and a book on the Lombardian oral tradition, La novellaja milanese (Milanese Short Stories, 1872). He published an important study of the Milanese poet and critic Giovanni Berchet, Giovanni Berchet e il Romanticismo (Giovanni Berchet and Romanticism, 1868), which argues for Berchet as the most influential advocate for a profound moral renewal of Italy. Another important study is Il gran Basile: studio biografico e bibliografico (The Great Basile: A Biographical and Bibliographical Study, 1875), in which he considered Basile, the Neapolitan baroque writer of novella and the author of Lo cunto de li cunti (The Story of Stories, 1634), as one of his masters. Basile’s influence is apparent in the ornate and eccentric diction of Imbriani’s tales, in his Latinisms, archaisms, dialect, mannerisms, and play on words. In these years, Imbriani also published a number of original short stories, characterized by a parodic, decidedly anti-Manzonian prose. Imbriani’s prose style led the critic Gianfranco Contini to link Imbriani’s pastiches with the northern Italian literary movement of the Scapigliatura, especially as exemplified in the work of Carlo Dossi and Giovanni Faldella (Letteratura dell’Italia Unita,

1968). Among Imbriani’s best-known fiction is the satirical story Le tre maruzze: novella trojana da non mostrarsi alle signore (The Three Maruzzas: A Trojan Novella Not to Be Shown to the Ladies, 1875), in which Troy is in fact the city of Naples, and La novella del vicomburio (The Novella of the Vicomburio, 1877). Imbriani’s conception of literature was based on his interpretation of Hegel, whom he had studied as a young man in Berlin. He assimilated the philosophy of Hegel as he had the work of Francesco De Sanctis while a student in Zurich. Imbriani held an elitist view of literature, a fact that is demonstrated in the way he chose to produce his books in numbered editions that circulated only among a few intellectual friends. For example, only 28 copies were printed of Le tre maruzze, seven on fine red paper, seven on green, seven in purple, seven in blue, and all without the author’s name. The first edition of La novella del vicomburio appeared in 90 copies, 70 of them on grey paper. Imbriani adopts a fierce tone in his descriptions of the middle class. The narrator of his short stories typically addresses a ‘‘common’’ listener with whom the narrator enters into a frank dialogue conducted in friendly, cultivated, or quarrelsome tones. Imbriani adopted an ironic attitude toward the moral themes of his stories: married life, the ‘‘normal’’ extramarital affair, the problems of the feminine condition, and the relationships between the sexes in a decaying urban environment, degraded by misrule and unsolved social problems. The narrator is a gossipy polemicist who organizes his story around a number of familiar linguistic acts and rhetorical forms—questions, clauses, confirmations, exhortations, pauses, exclamations—that give it a theatrical texture. Imbriani’s most famous novel, Dio ne scampi dagli Orsenigo (God Save Us from the Orsenigos, 1876), which is sum of these themes and narrative devices, is a further expression of his aggressive satire of the Italian nobility.

Biography Vittorio Imbriani was born in Naples, 27 October 1840, son of Paolo Emilio, a liberal and a patriot, and Carlotta Poerio, sister to the poet Alessandro. He studied at the University of Zurich, where in 959

VITTORIO IMBRIANI 1858 he attended Francesco De Sanctis’s lectures. Imbriani served as a volunteer in the Second Independence War, 1859; he fought with Garibaldi and was caught by the Austrians in Croatia, 1866. He was Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Naples and was elected Consigliere provinciale (Provincial Councillor) in Pomigliano D’Arco. He served as editor-in-chief of La patria, 1866–1867. Imbriani died in Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples), 1 January 1887. STEFANO ADAMI Selected Works Collections I romanzi, edited by Fabio Pusterla, Milan: Guanda, 1992. Racconti e prose 1863–1876, edited by Fabio Pusterla, Milan: Guanda, 1992. Racconti e prose 1877–1866, edited by Fabio Pusterla, Milan: Guanda, 1994.

Fiction La novellaja fiorentina, 1871. La novellaja milanese, 1872. Mastr’Impicca, 1874. Le tre maruzze, novella troiana da non mostrarsi alle signore, 1875. La novella del vicomburio, 1877. Merope IV: Sogni e fantasie di Quattr’Asterischi, 1867. Dio ne scampi dagli Orsenigo, 1876.

Nonfiction La religione dell’ateo, 1870. Canti popolari delle province meridionali, 2 vols., 1871–1872 (with A. Casetti). Paralipomeni alla novellaia milanese, 1873. La pulce, saggio di zoologia letteraria, 1875. Il gran Basile: studio biografico e bibliografico, 1875. Sulle canzoni pietrose di Dante, 1882. Studi danteschi, 1891.

Further Reading Cenati, Giuliano, Torniamo a Bomba, i guizzi narrativi di Vittorio Imbriani, Milan: LED, 2004. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura dell’Italia unita. 1861–1968, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Croce, Benedetto, Studi letterari e bizzarrie satiriche, Bari: Laterza, 1907. Franzese, Rosa, and Emma Giammattei (editors), Studi su Vittorio Imbriani, Naples: Guida, 1990. Giammattei, Emma (editor), Vittorio Imbriani nel centenario della morte, Pomigliano d’Arco (Naples): Biblioteca Comunale, 1996. Giglio, Raffaele, ‘‘Il giornalismo di Vittorio Imbriani,’’ in Studi in onore di Gioacchino Paparelli, edited by Luigi Reina, Salerno: Laveglia, 1988. Palermo, Antonio, Ottocento italiano: l’idea civile della letteratura, Naples: Liguori, 2000. Tordi, Rosita, Irregolari e isolati del secondo ottocento, Bologna: Calderoni, 1978.

INDEX LIBRORUM PROHIBITORUM See Censorship

INDIAN NOCTURNE See Notturno indiano (Work by Antonio Tabucchi)

960

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO

INFLUENCES See Anglo-American Influences, French Influences, German Influences, Hispano-Latin American Influences, Russian Influences

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO (1851–1916) During the era of national unification, Italian society was plagued by mass illiteracy. As a result, the public was unable to evaluate political ideologies critically and readily accepted tendentious historical representations. It was in this social context that the first truly popular Italian novels appeared, presenting points of view that had previously been censured or consciously ignored. One of the most prolific authors of the period was Carolina Invernizio. With over 120 novels to her credit, she was an acclaimed master of the serialized story (romanzo d’appendice). In Florence, a cultural center where popular literature coexisted with the high culture promoted in the salons of an intellectual elite, Invernizio made her debut. Here Salani published Invernizio’s first novel, Rina o l’angelo delle Alpi (Rina, or the Angel of the Alps, 1877). An epic about a foundling who is really the daughter of a baron, Rina was an instant success. The period immediately after the unification of Italy was rich in historically and socially important events, but Invernizio chose not to represent them in her works. She did not take a clear political stance, and yet her social and historical novels reflect the sentiments, passions, and morality of the public more accurately than most other contemporary literary work. Her apolitical novels are dark stories about infamous crimes, dazzling redemptions, and lifeless characters with an aura of sanctity. In fact, her sensationalist narratives have a somewhat didactic purpose. Invernizio’s novels promote the

ideals of the conservative middle class. The reader can cross the border between reality and fantasy without being tempted to rebel or bring about change. Instead, Invernizio encouraged solid loyalty to the ideology and morality of the institutions and the government in power. Invernizio told stories about noblemen as well as middle-class, proletarian, and subproletarian families. In her fiction, little girl orphans, dressmakers, and working women enter the world of ‘‘ladies’’ through wise and honorable conduct. Invernizio created a universe of exhausting vicissitudes, betrayal, and revenge in which the coups de the´aˆtre follow one another closely, the dialogues are often confused, and the ending is not always happy and reassuring. However, she overcame the problem of me´salliance without introducing the theme of divine revenge, a common means to justify a rearrangement of the traditional social order. The main characters in the novels are women, consistently represented either as virtuous heroines or perverse corruptors. The principal role of male protagonist is foil to the heroine. He proves to be essential for the development of the plot but not for its resolution. Conceived according to a fixed typology, the male protagonist is frequently characterized as an unreliable husband, incapable of moral strength. As a brother, he is often an illegitimate son who is far removed, altogether missing, or habitually preoccupied with his personal problems. His aid always comes at the last minute. As a 961

CAROLINA INVERNIZIO friend, he is generally obsessed with old wounds and betrayals for which he plans a horrible revenge. Thus, he is more of a source of trouble than of help and support. For instance, in Invernizio’s most famous novel, Il bacio d’una morta (The Kiss of a Dead Woman, 1889), the angelic Clara is betrayed by her husband, the Earl Rambaldi, who is in thrall to the satanic dancer Nara. Rambaldi decides to poison Clara and flee with his lover to Paris, bringing with him the innocent daughter Lilia. Clara is lying in the cemetery chapel when her illegitimate brother Alfonso arrives. Once banished, he has been freed thanks to the secret intervention of his sister. In a rare case of initiative for a male character, Alfonso demands that the coffin be opened. His doing so reveals that the incompetent earl has mistaken the dose of poison, and Clara is still alive. The story ends with the reunion of mother and daughter and the absolution of the unfaithful husband. The novel’s plot is centered and develops around the female characters. The one significant exception is the contribution of a solicitor, an old family friend. Yet even his broader poetic function is to personify the established authority, not to allow for a stong male presence in the work. These novels, which enjoyed a great success in Latin America, where they were brought by Italian immigrants, reduce everything to a set of norms clearly identified with the predetermined social order, the peace of the hearth, the rejoined family, and the love of children. Cheap dreams, perhaps, a mass drug, as the cruellest critics of every age (from Antonio Gramsci to the actor Paolo Poli, who in 1969 dedicated a polemical show to her) dismiss them. Yet Carolina Invernizio’s works were created with the undeniable conviction that a novel, in Giovanni Papini’s words, ‘‘si scrive per divertire e si legge per divertirsi’’ (is written to amuse and read to delight), that is, with the aim of gratifying those who seek such diversion in them (‘‘Carolina Invernizio,’’ 1918).

Biography Carolina Invernizio was born in Voghera (Pavia) on March 28, 1851. The daughter of a high government official, she lived in Florence for a long time. This was where in 1881 she married the lieutenant of the Bersaglieri, Marcello Quinterno. With him she had her only daughter, Marcella. In 1877 Carolina Invernizio published her first novel, Rina o 962

l’angelo delle Alpi. She also wrote stories published in various collections. She died in Cuneo on November 27, 1916. ANNA BOGO See also: Rromanzo rosa Selected Works Collection Romanzi del peccato, della perdizione e del delitto, Milan: Accademia, 1971.

Fiction Un autore drammatico, 1876. Rina o l’angelo delle Alpi, 1877. Satanella ovvero La mano della morta, 3 vols., 1888. Il bacio d’una morta. Romanzo storico-sociale, 1889. La guantaia di Torino, 2 vols., 1891. Storia d’una sartina, 1892. L’orfanella di Collegno, 2 vols., 1893. La vendetta d’una pazza (serial end of Il bacio d’una morta), 1894. La sepolta viva, 2 vols., 1896. La peccatrice, 1897. Cuor di madre, 2 vols., 1897. Il delitto di una madre, 1898. Vendetta di operaio, 1900. Il figlio dell’anarchico, 2 vols., 1901. Cuore d’operaio, 1902 Torino misteriosa, 3 vols., 1903–1904. Le avvelenatrici, 1904. Il treno della morte, 1905. La rediviva, 1906. La felicita` nel delitto, 1907. La via del peccato, 1908. Nina la poliziotta dilettante, 1909. Lara, l’avventuriera, 1910. La maschera bianca, 1911. La figlia del morto, 1913. L’avventuriero, 1914. L’orfana di Trieste, 1915. Morta d’amore, 1916.

Children’s Books I sette capelli d’oro della fata Gusmara, 1909. Spazzacamino, 1912.

Further Reading Arslan Veronese, Antonia, Dame, droghe e galline: romanzo popolare e romanzo di consumo tra 800 e 900, Padua: Cleup, 1977. Bianchini, Angela, Il romanzo d’appendice, Turin: Eri, 1969. Cantelmo, Andrea, Carolina Invernizio e il romanzo d’appendice, Florence: Atheneum, 1992. Davico Bonino, Guido Ioli, and Giovanna Ioli (editors), Carolina Invernizio. Il romanzo popolare, Turin: Gruppo Editoriale Forma, 1983.

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE Eco, Umberto, et al., Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Eco, Umberto, Il Superuomo dii massa, Milan: Cooperativa Scrittori, 1976. Fedi, Roberto, Introduction to Carolina Invernizio, Il bacio d’una morta, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950.

Papini, Giovanni, ‘‘Carolina Invernizio,’’ in Testimonianze. Saggi non critici. Nuova serie dei ‘‘24 cervelli,’’ Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1918. Zaccaria, Giuseppe, Il romanzo d’appendice. Aspetti della narrativa popolare nei secoli XIX e XX, Turin: Paravia, 1977.

ITALIAN-AMERICAN LITERATURE Traditionally, Italian-American prose begins with Peppino (1885), by Luigi Ventura (1845–1912), published first in French, then in English (1886), and with I misteri di Mulberry (The Mysteries of Mulberry, 1893), by Bernardino Ciambelli (1862–1931), written in Italian. English was not at the outset the lingua franca, though much of what has since been classified as Italian-American writing does appear mainly in that language. The themes of this early literature included immigration, family, the working class, and ethnic identity. Political themes also recur in some narratives: For instance, in The Story of Antonio (1911), Antonio Arrighi (1837–1920) uses Italy’s failed 1848–1849 revolution as backdrop to an Italian political exile’s struggles to begin anew in America. As these writers passed from one generation to the next, other issues arose: race, Mafia, gender, and interethnic relations. A significant amount of Italian-American fiction is autobiographical, and it includes Pascal D’Angelo (1894–1932) and Constantine Panunzio (1884–1964). In his Son of Italy (1924), D’Angelo recounted the trials and tribulations of striving for the American dream, becoming the poet no one thought he could be. Panunzio’s The Soul of an Immigrant (1921) tells similar tales, underscoring the challenges for survival. To some degree, both books became yardsticks for their contemporary fiction writers. In subsequent decades, Garibaldi LaPolla (1888–1954), with The Grand Gennaro (1934), told the story of a payback from an incident that occurred many years before; Jo Pagano (1906–1982) and Mari Tomasi (1907–1965) also produced significant works. Pagano’s The Golden Wedding (1943) celebrates a couple’s fiftieth wedding anniversary

and reminisces of a time long past; Tomasi’s Like Lesser Gods (1949), in turn, commemorates the travails of northern Italian granite workers in Vermont. The outstanding works from this era are the classics of Italian-American fiction: In 1938 John Fante (1909–1983) published Wait until Spring, Bandini, a coming-of-age novel that recounts Arturo Bandini’s family’s life in Colorado and that is the first of a long series narrative works; Jerre Mangione (1909–1998) made his mark with his novelized autobiography, Mount Allegro (1942). But the one novel that truly captivated the largest reading audience in the United States was Christ in Concrete (1939), by Pietro di Donato (1911–1992). Based on the author’s father’s tragic death on a construction site, the novel documents the travails of the dead man’s family. A smash hit, this novel trumped John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as first selection of the Book of the Month Club. Even though the 1950s did not witness any smash hits, they introduced authors who went on to publish well-respected novels. Two names that appear for the first time in this period and continue to stand out are Ben Morreale (1924–) and Mario Puzo (1920–1999). Morreale’s The Seventh Saracen (1958) recounts a Sicilian American’s trip to Sicily in search of his ancestors in order to make some sense of his life. Puzo’s critically acclaimed The Dark Arena (1955) tells of an Italian-American soldier’s return to Germany, where he had spent part of World War II, in search of a new life that he could not find in the United States. Many new writers appeared in the 1960s, while others returned with second and third novels or short-story collections. Among them were Di 963

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE Donato’s Three Circles of Light (1960) and Mangione’s Life Sentences for Everybody (1965) and Night Search (1965). This is also the decade of Marion Benasutti (1908–1992), author of No Steady Job for Papa (1966); Raymond de Capite (1924–), who released The Coming of Fabrizze (1960); Ben Piazza (1934–1991) with The Exact and Very Strange Truth (1964); and George Cuomo (1929–). Another significant author was Octavia Waldo (1929–), whose A Cup of the Sun (1961) recounts the conflicts between old world and new world through the perspective of gender. But the decade belonged to Mario Puzo with his second critically successful novel, The Fortunate Pilgrim (1964), and his classic The Godfather (1969). Contemporary fiction proves equally productive and often boasts an impressive aesthetic quality. Umbertina (1979), by Helen Barolini’s (1928–), solidifies the woman’s voice, while her later collection of stories, More Italian Hours, and Other Stories (2001), underscores the variety of her themes. Tina De Rosa’s modernist narrative Paper Fish (1980) is a coming-of-age novel set in Chicago’s Little Italy. Another midwesterner faithful to his geographical roots, Tony Ardizzone (1949–), proves prolific with both collections and novels, especially Taking It Home (1996) and In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (1999). Many first books have appeared during this period: Rachel Guido de Vries’s Tender Warriors (1986), Mary Bucci Bush’s A Place of Light (1990), Anthony Valerio’s The Mediterranean Runs through Brooklyn (1982), Chuck Wachtel’s Joe, The Engineer (1986), Fred Misurella (1940–) with Short Time (1996), and Louisa Ermelino (1947–) with Joey Dee Gets Wise (1991). An unusual debut is that of Giose Rimanelli (1925–), who wrote his first work in English, having already achieved success in Italian. His Benedetta in Guysterland (1993) is a masterful, postmodern tour de force that examines Italian-American culture through a Mafia-like parodic perspective, leaving the reader ever wondering about the reality of the storyline. Four novelists, at this time, stand out for a variety of reasons: Rita Ciresi (1960–), Don Delillo (1936–), Carole Maso (1955–), and Lisa Scottoline (1955–), all of whom enjoy great popular success. Ciresi’s prose explores Italian Americana through a comedic, gendered lens, as her last novel, Sometimes I Dream in Italian (2001), testifies. Scottoline, in turn, offers up the Italian-American female sleuth as lawyer, exploring in her latest case, Killer Smile (2004), the internment of Italian-Americans during World War II. Maso, conversely, relies on a more lyrical, sensual rhetoric, beginning with Ghost 964

Dance (1986), a woman’s search for her sexual and ethnic identity. Delillo, with White Noise (1984), has produced one of contemporary America’s fictional masterpieces. While, on most occasions, he relegates his italianita` to the background, such secondary status is vindicated in Underworld (1997). As far as the poetic production is concerned, Pascal D’Angelo (1894–1934), a self-described ‘‘pick and shovel poet,’’ represents one of the firstgeneration figures to overcome the trials and tribulations of immigrant life. Learning English on his own, his poetry (mostly in free verse) combines the lofty with the mundane in a swirl of images contrasting the idealized with the harsh reality of daily life. The poetry of Emanuale Carnevali (1897– 1944), which exhibits the free spirit of a modern experimental poet, articulates his headlong collision with his adopted culture. Unable to overcome the daily travails of immigration, Carnevali returned to Italy after less than a decade. From coal mining to radical politics (for example, the Lawrence textile strike of 1912), Arturo Giovannitti (1884–1959) was considered in his time to be the greatest Italian-American poet. Arrows in the Gale (1914) laments the exploitation of immigrants and the injustices placed upon the working class. His poetry was written in free verse, in long rhythmic prose paragraphs, accompanied by an impelling, austere, realistic style. However, John Ciardi (1916–1986) was the first to achieve national prominence. Not explicitly Italian American, Ciardi’s early poems nevertheless exhibit sentiments readily associated with his italianita`. His first collection, Homeward to America (1940), set up the dichotomy of the Old and New Worlds, where America is now home. His Italian heritage is reflected in his translation of Dante’s Divina Commedia, which excels for its lyrical quality in English. With close to 50 books of poetry, criticism, and translations, Ciardi has made an indelible mark on American literature. Vincent Ferrini (1913–) honed his literary skills at a young age while also working as an instructor of literature for the Works Project Administration from 1935–1940. He has been a prolific writer since 1941, and his poetry is steeped in the social issues related to industrialization. He figures as the logical successor to Giovannitti. Like Ciardi, Henry Rago (1915–1969) was one of the first to break into mainstream literary America. Having published in Poetry when he was 16, he later went on to edit the prestigious journal. Another poetic voice of the pre-World War II era was Elda Tanasso (1917–1977), who published in

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE Voices, Lyric, Columbia Poetry, and New English Weekly. Both award-winning poets, Felix Stefanile (1920–) and Lewis Turco (1934–) are children of immigrants who have sunk their roots in the American literary soil. From River Full of Craft (1956) to The Country of Absence (2000), Stefanile’s poetry has consistently sung the highs and lows of the human condition in venues such as the Saturday Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and The Formalist. Stefanile was at the forefront of the New Formalist movement in American poetry, as was his editorially mercurial magazine, Sparrow (1954– 2000), dedicated in its last decade to the sonnet. Like other talented poets of Italian descent such as Jonathan Galassi, Michael Palma, or Stephen Sartarelli, Stefanile also translated numerous Italian poets into English, including Cecco Angiolieri, the Futurists, and Umberto Saba. With a dozen poetry books to his name, Lewis Turco is among the most prolific of first-generation, Americanborn poets. Though not explicitly on Italianate topics, ‘‘The Ice House’’ may be considered a metaphor for the disappearing Italian America that the poet knew as a child. Turco has also written books of literary criticism as well as works of fiction such as Dialogue (1989). Other members of this generation are John Tagliabue (1923–) and Gerard Malanga (1943–). Whereas Tagliabue periodically invests his poetry with imagery of his Italian American-ness, similarly to Stefanile, Malanga is much more reserved with respect to an explicit ethnic repertoire. Like Turco, Malanga engages in poetry of oppositional veneration. The migratory experience of Joseph Tusiani (1923–) is unlike that of his predecessors, as he moved to the United States as an adult with an Italian university education. His polycultural experiences contributed to a poetry that mediates the rhetorical extravagance of Italy and the linguistic economy of the United States. With the vast linguistic inventory of someone who consistently writes in four different languages—English, Italian, Latin, and his native dialect—Tusiani exhibits a vast thematic repertoire from the culturally specific immigrant experience to the more general motifs of solitude and nostalgia. Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–), Gregory Corso (1930–2001), Philip Lamantia (1927–2005), and Diane di Prima (1934–) are four poets who originated from the Beat Generation. Ferlinghetti is the more readily recognized. His poem ‘‘The Old Italians Dying’’ (1976) is a swan song to the old Italian neighborhood of San Francisco’s North

Beach. Furthermore, his City Lights Publishing has been instrumental in getting out not only his fellow Beat Italian Americans but also numerous Italian poets in English translation. Diane di Prima is one of the most prolific writers of the nonconformist generation. ‘‘Backyard’’ and ‘‘April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa,’’ both in the anthology of Italian-American women writers The Dreambook (1987), stand out as examples of reconciliation of an ideological and formalistic avant-gardist attitude with her Italian heritage. Di Prima embraces wholeheartedly an historic Italian anarchy, be that anarchy specifically Italian-American, as in ‘‘April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa,’’ or more universal, as in ‘‘Rant’’ (1968), a creative/ideological manifesto. Poets of the later generation, whom we may label ‘‘baby boomers,’’ include David Citino (1947–) and W. S. Di Piero (1947–), the latter also a translator. To this generation belongs also Paul Vangelisti (1945–), celebrated poet, novelist, publisher, and translator, whose editorial successes include Red Hill Press and Sun & Moon Publishers. Like some of her predecessors, Maria Mazziotti Gillan (1940–) is also involved in publishing as editor of Footwork: The Patterson Literary Review. Her self-reflexivity as an Italian-American female is apparent from her earliest collection, Flowers from the Tree of Night (1980), to her latest, Where I Come From: New and Selected Poems (1994). Another Italian-American writer who reflects with sensitivity on the issues of gender and prejudice is Daniela Gioseffi (1941–) in books such as the anthologies Women on War (1988), which won the American Book Award in 1990, and On Prejudice: A Global Perspective (1993). Gioseffi writes spiritual poetry, in the tradition of Whitman, and exhibits an impressive breadth of reading and eloquence. Be it Eggs in the Lake (1979) or her later poetry collection, Going On (2000), her work is accompanied by a compelling amount of unreservedness for the things she holds dearly, social and political commitments that date back to the civil rights movement. Considered by the magazine Esquire one of the ‘‘Best of the New Generation,’’ Dana Gioia (1950–) is a poet of great sophistication and elegance, as well as a critic, translator, editor, and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Work and money seem to occupy a good part of his earlier poetry, where the initial desire to succeed financially transforms itself into a burden. A major participant in the New Formalist movement, Gioia once stated that while ‘‘many American poets reject 965

ITALIAN‐AMERICAN LITERATURE European influences as distractions from the search for a native voice, most Italian-American poets view Europe—sometimes in its Modernistic aspects and sometimes in its older traditions—as a potential source of strength’’ (‘‘What Is Italian-American Poetry?’’ 1991). Along with Ciardi and Gioia, Jay Parini (1948–), also a novelist, critic, and radio commentator, is one of the most prominent American poets of Italian origin. His poetry exhibits an immense erudition and familiarity with the master poets. Yet, his themes are very much drawn from everyday life and transcend any specific ethnic or racial context. Be it on the hard work of the mine workers, the praises of family elders, the desire to delve into one’s ancestry, any American reader of Parini’s can readily identify with his poetry and, at the same time, marvel at his craft. Identified with the Bread Loaf School and editor of the Columbia Anthology of Poetry (1993), Parini has been involved in the mainstream of American letters like very few other Italian Americans. He is a true cultural broker, contributing to the greater history of American literature and its contemporary canon. Among others, younger writers of note include Mary Jo Bona (1959–), Peter Covino (1963–), Carolyn Guinzio (1964–), and Gerry LaFemina (1968–). Furthermore, the more technically conscious and, at times, wistful poets such as the wellknown feminist scholar Sandra Gilbert (1943–) and Diane Raptosh (1955–) also deserve notice for their attempt to reconcile the ethnic with the general cultural milieu. Likewise, the religious poetry of Peggy Rizza Ellsberg (1910–1987) must be mentioned for a more encompassing view of ItalianAmerican poetry. In a different vein, Rose Romano (1947–) has earned her own place in the history of the genre both for her own austere creative work and her unselfish editorial activity dedicated to giving voice to the Italian-American lesbian, female, and gay voices that remained otherwise silent. In conclusion, writers of Italian descent in the United States often consider themselves too American to be ethnic. This is, perhaps, the most intriguing aspect of all and proves how the national literary scene is, indeed, a conglomeration of different voices. This entails a pluralistic process of artistic invention and interpretation which, by its very

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nature, cannot exclude the individual (artist and reader/viewer), who has found an ars poetica that does not violate the several components of his or her identity, thus (re)creating, ideologically speaking, a diverse repertoire of signs. ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI Further Reading Barolini, Helen (editor), The Dream Book: An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women, New York: Schoken, 1985. Bona, Mary Jo, Claiming a Tradition: Italian American Women Writers, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. D’Acierno, Pellegrino (editor), The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, New York: Garland, 1999. Gardaphe`, Fred. L., Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Gioia, Dana, ‘‘What Is Italian-American Poetry?’’ in Poetry Pilot, December 1991, 3–10. Giordano, Paolo A., and Anthony Julian Tamburri (editors), Beyond the Margin: Readings in Italian Americana, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Giunta, Edvige, Writing with An Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors, New York: Palgrave, 2002. Green, Rose Basile, The Italian-American Novel: A Document of the Interaction between Two Cultures, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1974. LaGumina, Salvatore J., et al. (editors), The Italian American Experience: An Encyclopedia, New York: Garland Publishing, 2000. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, A Semiotic of Ethnicity. In (Re) cognition of the Italian/American Writer, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaphe´ (editors), From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1991, 2nd revised edition, 2000. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, et al. (editors), Italian/American Literature and Film: A Select Bibliography, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1997. Verdicchio, Pasquale, Bound by Distance: Rethinking Nationalism through the Italian Diaspora, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. Vitiello, Justin, Poetics and Literature of the Sicilian Diaspora: Studies in Oral History and Story-Telling, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993.

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE With reference to Italian, the label ‘‘history of the language’’ may designate either the evolution from Latin into Italian or the changes within Italian itself, from the origins to the present day. In the case of the evolution from Latin into Italian, we can say that Italian derives from Latin or even that it is Latin as used in Italy today. Of course we consider Latin and Italian to be different languages, but this depends mainly on our assumptions—on our looking at them as standard languages and considering them synchronically, as structures endowed with their own vocabulary, grammar, phonology, and clearly distinct from each other. But if we analyze individual examples of these languages we may find that, particularly for certain periods and areas, it is almost impossible to decide whether a text is in Latin or in Italian. Frequently collections of Early Italian texts begin with documents for which it is difficult to say if they are in Latin or in Italian, such as the Indovinello veronese (Veronese Riddle), penned at the beginning of the ninth century (or possibly earlier) on a page of a prayer book prepared in the seventh or eighth century and now preserved in the Chapter Library at Verona. The text says: ‘‘se pareba boves alba pratalia araba & albo versorio teneba & negro semen seminaba’’ (He was driving oxen, ploughing white meadows and holding a white plough and sowing black seed. This is one of the many possible interpretations). The riddle is apparently about oxen and ploughing and sowing, and the solution is the quill used for writing, leaving ink traces on the page. Linguistically, certain features are clearly Latin (b instead of v in the imperfect endings of pareba, araba, teneba, seminaba; the consonant endings in boves and semen; the voiceless t instead of d in pratalia). Others are, equally clearly, vernacular (the dropping of the consonantal endings in the -ba instead of –bat suffixes; the endings in –o instead of –um in albo, versorio, negro; the pronoun se instead of sibi). In a way, it is not the words that dictate our choice to interpret them as belonging to one language or another, but instead it is our assumptions about the language being used that determine our interpretation of individual expressions. So, paradoxically, in order to decide whether a text is in

Latin or in Italian, the crucial question seems to be: Which language did speakers think they were using? And the answer, not unreasonably, implies that the choice depends on their competence, that is, on the options available to them, and not on what we mean by Latin and Italian. The earliest dated text that is unequivocally in the vernacular, is included in a legal document in Latin, from Montecassino, of the year 960, which quotes some witnesses stating: ‘‘Sao ko kelle terre, per kelle fini que ki contene, trenta anni le possette parte S(an)c(t)i Benedicti’’ (I know that those lands, through those boundaries which are contained here, the party of St. Benedict owned them for thirty years). We have to remember that this document, although it refers to an oral statement, belongs to a written tradition, and it has been reliably suggested for instance that the letters –nt in kontene and trenta corresponded then, as they do today in Campania, to the sounds [nd]; besides, we do not know how long the opposition between Latin and vernacular had been valid: For instance, in the graffiti at Pompei, in the first century AD, one finds parallel indications of Latin –nt and –nd being pronounced respectively [nd] and [nn] as they are today in the equivalent words, in the same region. In what period did Latin stop being a mother tongue, being replaced by the vernacular, in speech, and later also in writing (with the consequence that literacy offered a choice between two different idioms, i.e., Latin and vernacular)? Scholars traditionally answered: between the sixth and the seventh centuries, for speech, and later, at times that varied according to the different literary traditions, for writing. But in recent decades linguists have become increasingly aware of the difficulty of giving the question a theoretically satisfactory formulation. If we concentrate on the transformation of Latin into the vernacular, we need to consider, in Italy, about 15 idioms, linked to the regions (Liguria, Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto, Emilia, Tuscany, Marche, Umbria, Abruzzi, Latium, Campania, Molise, Lucania, Puglia, Calabria, Sicily, Sardinia), each fragmented into countless local dialects (Gerhard Rohlfs, Grammatica storica 967

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 1966–1969). These regional idioms, although they derive from Latin, have changed so much as to become reciprocally unintelligible. For instance, the Latin filius (son) may appear as [‘fio], [‘fi( )o], [‘fi( )ju], [‘fijjo], [‘fi( )u], and the like, and [fi( ‘ )lo], [‘fj( )l], [‘fjfl], and so on. The change from Latin into Late Latin and then into the vernacular obviously affects the phonological system. In Latin there were ten vowel phonemes, that is, those indicated by the five letters i, e, a, o, u, each of which could correspond to a long or short phoneme: pilum (hair), pilum (javelin); uenit (he or she comes), uenit (he or she came); malum (bad), malum (apple); colo (I cultivate), colo (I filter); putet (he or she may think), putet (he or she smells). In Late Latin/Proto Romance, vowel length is no longer a phonemic choice but is determined by syllable structure: In a stressed syllable the vowel must be short if the syllable is checked (that is, if it ends in a consonant) and long if the syllable is free (that is, if it ends in a vowel). At the same time, if the vowel is short it becomes more open, and the opposition between open and closed es and os becomes distinctive or phonological. Here are some examples, with reference to Tuscan: pilum>p[e]lo, ventum>v[]nto, venam>v[e]na, octo>[
]tto, solem>s[o]le, rumpo>r[o]mpo. The most notable consonsant changes concern assimilation (as in pt>tt: ruptum>rotto; ct>tt: actum>atto); voicing (as in stratam>strada, ripam>riva, acu>ago); and palatalization (as R in vicinum, with velar [k] >vicino, with palatal [t ], medium>mezzo, maiorem>maggiore). Important changes take place in morphology and syntax: The Latin system of six case endings (nominative, accusative, genitive, and so on) is reduced to one (lupus, lupum, lupi and so on > lupo), and syntactic relations (subject, object) are manifested by word order rather morphological endings: l’uomo (subject) vede il lupo (object) ¼ lupum (accusative) homo (nominative) videt, as against il lupo (subject) vede l’uomo (object) ¼ hominem (accusative) lupus (nominative) videt. Certain structures, such as those represented by Italian faccio bere il vino a Cesare (‘‘I make Caesar drink the wine’’) are Romance innovations not available in Latin. One could imagine a Late Latin equivalent facio Caesarem bibere vinum, but a dative Caesari for the subject of the infinitive bibere would be out of the question. At the same time the semantic system evolves, so that in domus>duomo the meaning changes from 968

‘‘house’’ to ‘‘temple,’’ in casa>casa it changes from ‘‘hut’’ to ‘‘house,’’ in mulier>moglie it changes from ‘‘woman’’ to ‘‘wife.’’ Then, passing to the transformations within Italian itself, we note that from the earliest stages to the present day the language has remained considerably stable, certainly more so than for French, English or German. This follows from Italian having been used mainly as a written language, based on the literary form of Florentine, particularly as represented by the vernacular works of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio in the fourteenth century. Another factor is ‘‘Tuscanization’’: Other vernaculars, such as Venetian, were influenced by Tuscan, from the beginning, in their written versions; and in some cases, such as that of the Sicilian School (which, according to a tradition going back to Dante, marked the beginning of Italian literature), were preserved in manuscripts prepared by Tuscan copyists. As for the evolution within Italian itself, we have to consider the question of periodization. For other European languages periodization is fairly straightforward, with an Old, a Middle, and a Modern phase. For Italian these classifications are less well established. This paradoxically depends on what can be described as the precocious, and at the same time the late development of the language. Precocious, because Italian was the first language in Europe to acquire, in the late thirteenth and during the fourteenth century, a shape that was to survive, basically unchanged, to the present. The use of Italian has also been self-conscious and accompanied from the start by explicit discussions on the idiom most suitable as a literary language. Dante, in the De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1305), produced a treatise on linguistics and poetics putting forward the notion of ‘‘illustrious vernacular,’’ which foreshadows what could be called, in modern terms, the ‘‘standard language,’’ that is, a supraregional literary variety. In the first half of the fifteenth century the ‘‘language question’’ (questione della lingua) came to the fore, and contrasting ideals were discussed. The line that prevailed was that of Pietro Bembo, who in his Prose (1525) proposed a model based on Florentine literary usage of the fourteenth century as exemplified by Petrarch for poetry and Boccaccio for prose. Different models proposed modern Tuscan (Niccolo` Machiavelli) or a supraregional ‘‘Italian’’ variety (Baldassare Castiglione), also called cortegiana as it was exemplified by the usage of the courts (such as those of Mantua, Ferrara, Urbino, or Rome). It must be remarked that, however heated the disagreements, these

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE distinctions were mainly questions of style and detail. Linguistically, all the proposals were based on some variety of literary Tuscan. In fact, from the beginning of the sixteenth century, we have dialect productions that present themselves explicitly as being on a ‘‘lower’’ level, contrasted with the ‘‘higher’’ variety of standard Italian. Similar considerations apply to the discussion between Alessandro Manzoni (who favored a model based on contemporary colloquial educated Florentine) and the eminent philologist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (who preferred a literary language based on the tradition of written Italian). The choice was in fact between varieties of standard Italian, clearly distinct from the other languages, which were the dialects. We stated above that one could also say that the development of Italian was late, because it was only in 1861 that a unified kingdom of Italy was proclaimed and that Italian was recognized as the language of the new state. It is true that the speech used by most Italians was then, and was to remain for a long time, as it was before, the dialect—effectively languages different from region to region (Martin Maiden and Mair Parry, editors, The Dialects of Italy, 1997; Manlio Cortelazzo et al., editors, I dialetti italiani, 2002). We have contrasted spoken and written Italian, but the distinction is less straightforward than it seems. In a sense this is a choice between two media, one spoken and one written. In another, the dialects are typically spoken, and Italian is typically a written language, but this does not imply that a dialect expression cannot be ‘‘transcribed’’ or that an Italian expression cannot be ‘‘pronounced.’’ Besides, speech and writing also refer to different genres and literary devices. Literary works may include ‘‘narrative’’ sections (nearer to ordinary written texts) and sections of dialogue, nearer to speech; and plays normally consist mainly of ‘‘speech.’’ On the other hand, it has been observed that ‘‘speech’’ may refer to ‘‘speech proper’’ (as one might hear it in everyday life) or to speech as it is stylized in a play or as it is ‘‘read out’’ in more formal circumstance. There is, however, little doubt that after unification Italian became employed on a much larger scale than before in all spheres of public life, parliament, law, bureaucracy, education, army, journalism, and the like, and this applies both to the spoken and the written medium. Besides, the language used in the area of literature, novels, poetry, and so on gradually changed,

acquiring a more colloquial tone, nearer to an everyday register, which would have been more difficult to achieve before the turn of the nineteenth century. In particular, poets like Giovanni Pascoli and Guido Gozzano and prose writers such as Benedetto Croce appear to have marked the way which the Italian literary language was to follow during the twentieth century—it was still highly literary but getting gradually nearer to the level of educated usage and abandoning the recherche´, puristic, and archaizing preferences of the Italian literary tradition. This direction is recognizable among more modern writers, in authors such as Italo Calvino, Alberto Arbasino, Umberto Eco, who have adopted an unaffected, fluent sort of Italian characterized by features that need not be specified regionally or expressionistically—a sort of linguistically ordinary, everyday, average type of Italian that has only recently become available. It may be useful to list some examples of the phenomena we are referring to. Concerning phonology and spelling: In medieval manuscripts and in printed texts until the modern period, spellings such as spatio instead of spazio, acto and apto instead of atto were common; not to speak of the use of u/v and i/j, of the conventions governing the use of the apostrophe (un amico but un’amica; qual e` and not qual’e`), which have become standardized only recently and still not consistently. Concerning morphology, the first person singular of the imperfect (io faceva instead of io facevo) was prevalent in the past, and it remained such, in writing, until the mid-nineteenth century. Pronominal forms such as eglino side by side with essi were to be found in puristic texts until recently. As for syntax: An interesting example of historical evolution was offered by the so-called law of Tobler-Mussafia (identified by Alfred Tobler for Old French and by Adolfo Mussafia for Old Italian; it is linked to facts studied by Jacob Wackernagel for the early stages of the Indo-European languages). Until about the end of the fourteenth century, it was exceptional (if not outright impossible) to begin a sentence in Italian with a weak pronoun: The clitic had to come after and not in front of the verb: not Mi vide but Videmi (he or she saw me), not Si dice but Dicesi (it is said). This rule is not compulsory any longer, but owing to the archaistic preferences of the Italian literary tradition it remained prevalent until the end of the nineteenth century and was frequently respected even after the beginning of the twentieth. It is still 969

HISTORY OF THE ITALIAN LANGUAGE followed in formulaic expressions such as locasi or affittasi (to rent) to be seen on notices outside Italian boardinghouses. For Lexis, in Italian, as in most modern languages of culture, it has been estimated that over half of the vocabulary, if we include scientific terminology, was introduced during the twentieth century. But if we consider the basic vocabulary, consisting of the most common and frequent words, we find that 87 percent were in use at the end of the fourteenth century, about 10 percent were introduced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the remaining 3 percent in the following centuries. It is useful to keep this in mind also when we consider the penetration of Anglicisms, which is frequently considered a very dangerous development. This seems, however, to be a worry more of a cultural and ideological than of a linguistic nature. One can observe that, first, the question concerns not just Italian but most cultures affected by modern technological developments; second, what is involved is mainly technical terminology: the number of Anglicisms that entered ordinary usage is fairly limited, and phenomena affecting the basic syntactic structures are extremely hard to find; and third, as for the supposedly damaging consequences of these borrowings, one may note

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that English, which has been voracious in its absorptions from other languages, does not seem to have been weakened by the promiscuity of its contacts. GIULIO LEPSCHY Further Reading Bruni, Francesco, L’italiano: Elementi di storia della lingua e della cultura italiana, Turin: UTET, 1984. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Storia della lingua italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989–2003. Cortelazzo, Manlio, et al. (editors), I dialetti italiani: Storia struttura uso, Turin: UTET, 2002. De Mauro, Tullio, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Bari: Laterza, 1963. Maiden, Martin, A Linguistic History of Italian, London: Longman, 1995. Maiden, Martin, and Mair Parry (editors), The Dialects of Italy, London: Routledge, 1997. Marazzini, Claudio, La lingua italiana: Profilo storico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994; 2nd ed., 1998. Migliorini, Bruno, Storia della lingua italiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1960; as The Italian Language, abridged, recast and revised by T. Gwynfor Griffith, London: Faber, 1966; 2nd ed., 1984. Rohlfs, Gerhard, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1966–1969. Serianni, Luca, and Pietro Trifone (editors), Storia della lingua italiana, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1993–1994.

J FLEUR JAEGGY (1940–) often ingenious play of reflections, memories, and resemblances face each other in a dialogue against the ‘‘regno dei fatti’’ (realm of facts), in which the only, albeit impossible, reward is equivalence, ‘‘la cancellatura dei tracciati, l’origine perfetta’’ (The erasure of outlines, the perfect origin). Isolation is also at the core of her next novel, Le statue d’acqua (Statues of Water, 1980), in which a man lives confined in an Amsterdam basement, outside time, surrounded by statues, an exile to life. As in previous works, the writing cannot escape the constant temptation of a stony lyricism. At the same time, the dissociation of images and the masterful montage of sentences that recalls theatrical writing (and indeed the characters are introduced at the beginning under the heading ‘‘dramatis personae’’) are meant to evoke the sense of a ceremony of solitude, a veritable apologue of renunciation. This first group of writings is traversed by a series of themes and actions translated in the body of the texts into powerful metaphors such as the double, embroidery (present especially in Le statue d’acqua), and contagion, in accordance with a Mitteleuropean literary tradition that amalgamates different literary experiences, from Robert Walser and Georg Bu¨chner to Lewis Carroll and Virginia Woolf, among others. In I beati anni del castigo (Sweet Days of Discipline, 1989), Jaeggy revisits her experiences in a Swiss boarding school. This is perhaps her bestknown novel, the story of the tough initiation to discipline of the protagonist, a 14-year-old girl, and Fre´de´rique, a mysterious adolescent, set in the

In one of his 1996 essays entitled Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy, Giovanni Pozzi introduced the writer’s complex biography and literary profile by describing her as ‘‘an author with a German last name and a French first name, and who is nevertheless neither German nor French, but Swiss, although she has nothing in common with the literature in Italian Switzerland (and little in common with Italian literature of Italy).’’ Indeed the complex cultural and linguistic reality of Italianspeaking Switzerland has long comprised an intense literary dialogue with Italy proper, particularly during the twentieth century. The themes that characterize Jaeggy’s works, who has now moved from Lugano to Milan, were already evident in her extraordinary de´but novel Il dito in bocca (The Finger in Mouth, 1969), in which she described, against the background of a motionless lake landscape, the impossibility ‘‘di vivere nel mondo’’ (of living in the world) on the part of the young protagonist Lung. These themes include difficult affective relations; the narrative perspective of ‘‘inazione’’ (inaction), since, as Jaeggy states at the end of the novel, ‘‘fare e` un modo di dire’’ (doing is a way of saying); the precariousness and the dissolution of gender identities; and the aphoristic vocation of her writing. Her second novel, L’angelo custode (The Guardian Angel, 1971), revolves around the theme of the double and of the resemblance between the two protagonists, Jane and Rachel, two sisters in selfimposed exile from the world. In an incessant and 971

FLEUR JAEGGY Bausler Institut, a girls’ boarding school in Appenzeller. The novel describes also the protagonist’s desire to enter into the world, but through a subterranean, sacrificial course in which the word indicates the moment of disorder, of loss. La paura del cielo (Last Vanities, 1994) is a collection of seven short stories set in Northern landscapes, which unfold fiercely between the glorification of the power of vanitas and the narration of the sudden dynamics of catastrophes. As Pozzi has remarked, gravestones and cut flowers—for instance, anemones, the flowers born of Adonis’ blood in the story ‘‘I gemelli’’ (The Twins)—here become symbols of the existential revolt against ‘‘the impenetrable sky that provides a terrifying backdrop to the fable-like plot’’ (Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy, 1996). Jaeggy’s most recent novel Proleterka (S. S. Proleterka, 2001) takes its title from the name of a Yugoslavian ship that carried passengers from Venice to Greece, and is stylistically her most accomplished work. The systematic use of parataxis and the mosaic-like progression of the sentences suggest a more symbolic, as well as temporal or existential, brevitas, in which the lyrical temptations of the early novels unfolds now without song. Rather than merely written down, the necessary, authentically Italian words appear sculpted with objective care, recalling Gertrude Stein’s obsessive mastery, even in the quotation camouflaged in the phrase ‘‘Ombre nella sala da pranzo’’ (Shadows in the dining room) that seems to allude to the title of a famous novel by the American writer, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (1933). Proleterka narrates the progressive estrangement of familial relations in an irrevocable experience of evil, which is destined, like the ship, to move southward, toward Hades, finally reaching ‘‘un silenzio d’ombra’’ (a shadow silence).

Biography Born in Zurich on 31 July 1940, resided first in Rome, then, since 1968, in Milan. Her theatrical work Un tram che si chiama Tallulah was performed at the Spoleto Festival, 1975. Awarded the Bagutta prize for I beati anni del castigo, 1990;

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the Moravia prize for La paura del cielo, 1994, and the Viareggio-Re`paci prize, 2002. Married to the writer Roberto Calasso. Currently lives in Milan. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Novels Il dito in bocca, 1969. L’angelo custode, 1971. Le statue d’acqua, 1980. I beati anni del castigo, 1989; as Sweet Days of Discipline, translated by Tim Parks, 1991. Proleterka, 2001; as S.S. Proleterka, translated by Alastair McEwen, 2003.

Short Stories ‘‘La paura del cielo,’’ 1994; as Last Vanities, translated by Tim Parks, 1998.

Translations Marcel Schwob, Vite immaginarie, 1972. Thomas de Quincey, Gli ultimi giorni di Immanuel Kant, 1983.

Further Reading Boyers, Robert, ‘‘Discipline and Punish,’’ in The New Republic, 23 November 1998: 38–41. Ciccarelli, Andrea, ‘‘Frontier, Exile, and Migration in the Contemporary Italian Novel,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Novel, edited by Andrea Ciccarelli and Peter Bondanella, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Fajen, Robert, ‘‘Die Schrecken des Idylls, u¨ber Fleur Jaeggys La Paura del Cielo,’’ in Erzalhen in der Romania am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts, Sonderbruck: Peter Lang, 2001. Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Jaeggy: Lo stile di una scrittrice che guarda il mondo con gelida innocenza,’’ in La Repubblica, 3 March 2002: 40–41. Montesano, Giuseppe, ‘‘La vita perduta: appunti su Fleur Jaeggy,’’ in La Rivista dei Libri, 13, no. 3 (2003): 10–12. Parmeggiani, Francesca, ‘‘Resisting Identity: Fleur Jaeggy’s Life Stories,’’ in Forum Italicum, 38, no. 1 (2004): 166–186. Pozzi, Giovanni, ‘‘Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy,’’ in Alternatim, Milan: Adelphi, 1996. Serkowska, Hanna, ‘‘Sette puntate di vuoto: La paura del cielo di Fleur Jaeggy,’’ in Spunti e Ricerche, 18 (2003): 41–52.

PIERO JAHIER

PIERO JAHIER (1884–1966) Piero Jahier was both novelist and poet and also made a substantial contribution to Italian literary journalism of the first half of the twentieth century. His religious background—he was born into a Genoese Waldensian family—was a constant inspiration in all his work. The reforming ideology of La Voce, of which he was editor from 1911–1913, combined with a strongly autobiographical tendency, were the hallmarks of Jahier’s most relevant literary production. From his first forays into publication it was clear that his work would not be limited to a merely literary approach: His early contributions to La Voce combined personal reflection and family experiences linked with a religious subject: ‘‘Quel che rimane di Calvino’’ (What Remains of Calvin, 1909), ‘‘I Valdesi nelle Valli’’ (The Waldensians in the Valleys, 1910), ‘‘I protestanti in Italia’’ (The Protestants in Italy, 1910). Jahier’s autobiographic concerns also characterize his first literary work, Resultanze in merito alla vita e al carattere di Gino Bianchi con un allegato (Outcomes Relating to the Life and Character of Gino Bianchi, along with an Attachment, 1915). The Resultanze presents a main character derived from Jahier’s own experience as a railway clerk. Jahier’s decision to call his character Gino Bianchi also emphasizes the author’s intention to mix fictional elements with personal experience—Gino Bianchi was Jahier’s nom de plume during his contribution to La Voce. Jahier’s investigation of Gino Bianchi’s life examined both his employment and private life. The work is essentially a satirical inquiry into Italian bureaucracy based on the loyal civil servant ‘‘Bianchi Geom. Comm. Gino.’’ Written in a lively style, Jahier integrates prose and poetry with consummate mastery, deliberately creating a fragmentary discontinuity, as was advocated at the time by many of the authors who wrote for Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce. The alternation of different expressive forms defines the nature of the text. A perfectly measured medley of officialese works to gloss the dull chronicle of the character’s life. The hypotaxis is never overdone; on the contrary, the accumulation of subordinate clauses always achieves its logical limit of expression. Thus, the syntax may appear distorted but never loses its sense. The stylistic panache of the Resultanze, along

with its irony, does not, however, exclude consideration of those themes that became constant elements of Jahier’s literary work: the economic straits that led Gino Bianchi’s family into poverty; the effort to continue his studies, economic difficulties; and the determination to gain an education, as is poetically highlighted by the ‘‘Canzone dello spostato’’ (The Song of the Displaced): ‘‘Ho rimosso di non averlo pagato...Ho rimosso di aver anteposto alla risolatura le poesie di Verlaine’’ (I repressed the fact that I did not pay...I repressed that I chose Verlaine’s poetry instead of shoes). Jahier repeats this topos in his novel Ragazzo (Boy, 1919) with the episode of the gymnasium guy who sells papers in order to buy Giacomo Lepardi’s Canti (1831). In this second work, Jahier reflects specifically on his own life, recollecting some crucial events including his father’s suicide, his brother’s return home, family subsistence, and the central role of his mother. Ragazzo, considered Jahier’s most coherent work, is divided into five chapters: ‘‘La morte del padre’’ (The Death of the Father), ‘‘La famiglia povera’’ (The Poor Family), ‘‘Avventura settimanale’’ (The Weekly Adventure), ‘‘Il guadagno’’ (The Earnings), and ‘‘Il paese’’ (The Village). In this work, a sincere lyricism, but untouched by nostalgia, prevails over any irony. Jahier does not merely recall the past but, as it were, relives the unfolding events, seen entirely from the boy’s perspective. The result is an episodic bildungsroman—it is no surprise that Jahier wrote and published the chapters in a literary journal as independent works. The following year Jahier published his war journal: Con me e con gli Alpini (With Me and with the Alpine Troops, 1920). It was an account of his experience as a volunteer during World War I, and an idealization of the sense of brotherhood among soldiers. The authenticity of a ‘‘primitive’’ nature as well as the concrete virtues of the mountain people struck Jahier’s imagination deeply. According to his point of view, this joyful genuineness was the most suitable antidote to the army’s coercive discipline and methods. The trenches also provided Jahier with material for an ideological and educational feature: The paper L’Astico, giornale delle trincee was born in this context. It ran to 39 issues, from February 14, 973

PIERO JAHIER 1918, to November 10, 1919. Gaetano Salvemini’s thought was its most important reference. Critics have noted a close relationship with Lacerba’s radical ideology of war at that time. Jahier knew Lacerba and, between 1914 and 1915, he was an active contributor with ‘‘Allegri Italiani’’ (Joyful Italians), ‘‘Mio popolo’’ (My People), ‘‘Pane’’ (Bread), and ‘‘Wir mu¨ssen’’ (We Must). If the first text is clearly a satire that fitted perfectly with the ideological position of Lacerba, the others (‘‘Mio popolo’’ could even be read as a palinode of the ‘‘Allegri Italiani’’) did not praise the war either according to the perspective of Futurism or that of Giovanni Papini. Certainly the L’Astico gave Jahier the opportunity to analyze beliefs already expressed in the poem-preamble to Con me a con gli Alpini, ‘‘Dichiarazione’’ (Declaration). But it was evident that Jahier’s celebration of war was a defense of his mountain people that did not avoid transparent populism and mystical hints. The experience of Il Nuovo Contadino, giornale del popolo agricoltore (1919) made the question still more complicated. The final result of both these experiences showed how Jahier tried to think about his deep beliefs: The idea of war as a revolution of people facing the Germans became simply an attempt at cooperation among different social classes, including the middle class. Jahier also made an important contribution to the field of literature with his translations; above all, with his translations of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad. Jahier’s translations anticipated the pivotal work of Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Jahier translated French and Chinese authors as well: Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Molie`re and, most importantly, Paul Louis Charles Claudel, Lin-Yu.T’Ang (from English into Italian), and Chin P’ing Mei, romanzo cinese del sec. XVI (Chin P’ing Mei, Novel of the 16th Century). As far as Jahier’s poetry is concerned, he has not been served well by the Vallecchi edition of 1964, which is completely lacking in philological apparatus. Poesie (Collected Poems) is a kind of collage of verses that were part of Jahier’s three main works and seem to suffer from decontextualization. However, Jahier himself authorized this volume and it should therefore be considered the author’s final poetic testament.

Unione Cristiana Apostolica Battista, 1877. Moved to Florence, 1895. Jahier’s father committed suicide, 1897. Attended the Scuola di Teologia Valdese in Florence, 1902. Hired as a railway clerk of Societa` Adriatica, 1905. Contributor of La Voce, 1909. Married Pochat Corday, 1910. Obtained a law degree from the University of Urbino and later the professional qualification as a French teacher from the University of Turin, 1911. Built his famous ‘‘casa rossa’’ in Campo di Marte with Giuseppe Prezzolini as his neighbor, but they never got along, 1911. Manager of La Voce bookstore in Florence and later editor-in-chief of the literary journal, 1911–1913. Contributor to Lacerba and La Riviera Ligure, 1914–1916. Joined the army, fighting at Caporetto in World War I, 1915. Rejected Benito Mussolini’s offer to be the editorin-chief of Il popolo d’Italia. Returned to his previous work as a railway clerk and promoted a cultural club with a clear political aim, 1919. Commemoration of patriot Cesare Battisti, who was executed (1916) by the Austrians in Trento, 1922. Commemoration of Socialist martyr Giacomo Matteotti, 1924. Kept under surveillance by the regime police in Bologna because of his anti-Fascist activities and his political experience with Italia libera, 1927. Joined the Resistance fight and returned to Florence after the liberation, 1945. His wife died, 1945. Awarded the Vallombrosa prize for poetry (ex aequo with Luigi Fallacara), 1962. Awarded the Premio della Critica Emilio Cecchi for Poesie, 1965. Died in Florence, on November 19, 1966. As a posthumous award, he received the Libri dell’Anno della Scuola Italiana prize for Ragazzo and Con me e con gli Alpini, 1967. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Ragazzo e prime poesie, Florence: Vallecchi, 1939. Opere, 3 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1964–1967. Poesie in versi e in prosa, edited by Paolo Briganti, Turin: Einaudi, 1981.

Fiction Resultanze in merito alla vita e al carattere di Gino Bianchi, 1915. Ragazzo, 1919. Con me e con gli Alpini, 1920.

Biography

Articles

Born in Genova, on April 11, 1884. Joined the Evangelical Church after his theological studies in Geneva, 1871. Rebaptized as a servant of the

‘‘Quel che rimane di Calvino,’’ 1909. ‘‘I Valdesi nelle Valli,’’ 1910. ‘‘I protestanti in Italia,’’ 1910. ‘‘Allegri Italiani,’’ 1914–1915.

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BENIAMINO JOPPOLO ‘‘Mio popolo,’’ 1914–1915. ‘‘Pane,’’ 1914–1915. ‘‘Wir mu¨ssen,’’ 1914–1915.

Other 1918: L’Astico, giornale di trincea; 1919, Il nuovo contadino, edited by Mario Isnenghi, Padua: ‘‘Il rinoceronte,’’ 1964. Paul Claudel en Italie: avec la correspondance Paul Claudel– Piero Jahier, 1975.

Further Reading Alicata, Mario, Scritti letterari, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. Benevento, Aurelio, Primo Novecento: saggi su Giovanni Boine e Piero Jahier, Naples: Loffredo, 1986. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Jahier e Sbarbaro,’’ in L’Approdo Letterario (April–June 1968): 3–20. Boine, Giovanni, Il peccato e le altre opere, Parma: Guanda, 1971. Briganti, Paolo, Jahier, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976.

Cadioli, Alberto, Le muse e le sirene. Gli scrittori e l’industria culturale del primo Novecento in Italia, Milan: Iulm, 1990. Gargiulo, Alfredo, Letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. Giordano, Alberto, Invito alla lettura di Piero Jahier, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Isnenghi, Mario, Giornali di trincea, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Macrı`, Oreste, Caratteri e figure della poesia italiana contemporanea, Florence: Vallecchi, 1956. Pancrazi, Pietro, Ragguagli di Parnaso, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Petrocchi D’Aura, Francesca, Studi su Piero Jahier, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1988. Scheiwiller, Vanni (editor), Con Claudel (1913–1955), Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1964. Testa, Antonio, Jahier, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Tilgher, Adriano, Ricognizioni, Rome: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1924.

JERUSALEM DELIVERED See Gerusalemme liberata (Work by Torquato Tasso)

JOHNNY THE PARTISAN See Il Partigiano Johnny (Work by Beppe Fenoglio)

BENIAMINO JOPPOLO (1906–1963) A complex and multifaceted artist—novelist, poet, playwright, and painter—Beniamino Joppolo stands out in the landscape of twentieth-century Italian literature for his original approach to and

adaptation of the poetics of the European avantgardes of his times. His first work, the collection of poems I canti dei sensi e dell’idea (Songs of the Senses and of Thought, 1929), is a late example of 975

BENIAMINO JOPPOLO symbolism, while his first and still best-known work of fiction, the volume of short stories C’e´ sempre un piffero ossesso (There Is Always a Possessed Fife, 1937), is an experimental text in the spirit of surrealism. Among his novels, La giostra di Michele Civa (The Carousel of Michele Civa, 1945) is considered his best effort, a work that reflects in critical fashion the dominant ideas of his cultural environment. The protagonist, Michele Civa, is a young Sicilian who volunteers in the air force to improve the indigent state of his family. The fundamental event of the novel is his homecoming, as Joppolo makes use of one of the recurrent themes in twentieth-century Italian fiction, the experiences of war veterans. What sets apart La giostra di Michele Civa from other examples of the genre is the rapidity and essentiality of the descriptions, as the author creates a narrative that overcomes traditional forms and conventions. Although Joppolo never fully rejected the tradition of verismo, his move to Milan in 1937, his collaboration to the journal Corrente (1938–1940), and his frequent visits to Paris determined his cultural and ideological emancipation from Sicilian realism. Examples of this dual heritage are the stories of ordinary life told through the use of surrealistic forms in the collection La nuvola verde e altri racconti (The Green Cloud and Other Tales, 1983). Many critics consider Joppolo’s theatrical works as the most significant results of his intellectual enterprise. In the one-act play Il cammino (The Journey, 1942), he tells the story of a supposed adultery, once again balancing naturalism and surrealism, and already presenting several of the fundamental aspects of his dramatic production. Attempting to circumvent Fascist censorship, in the plot he reached a sort of narrative ambiguity that gave him the opportunity to speak about political and social conflicts through the symbolic interaction of his characters, who act out plots and mysterious moods recalling Dino Buzzati’s early plays. Paolo Grassi, the founder with Giorgio Strehler of the Piccolo Teatro of Milan, first staged Il cammino in 1942 with Strehler and Franco Parenti in the main roles. The play Domani parleremo di te (Tomorrow We’ll Speak about You, 1943) brings together the ambiguity of paradox and the plausibility of humor. The absurd dialogue of the stock masks of comedy serves as the pretext to analyse fashionable allegories and incomprehensible cultural hostilities. In Sulla collina (On the Hill, 1943), for instance, the irrational ‘‘Signora,’’ who chooses to bury herself because she is certain of the day and hour of her death, attests to Joppolo’s 976

ongoing interest in avant-garde drama, imbued with elements of Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo’s narrative lyricism. After World War II, Joppolo pursued his artistic interests in new venues, including the figurative arts, and in 1947 was one of the founders, with Lucio Fontana, of the ‘‘Movimento spaziale,’’ a form of abstract and conceptual art. Among his later works for the stage, I carabinieri (The Carabinieri, 1959) and Le acque (The Waters, 1961) are acclaimed as his most mature, in which he manages to merge a strongly liberal and libertarian eccentricity with a crystalline formal structure. I carabinieri is the story of two farmers, Leonardo and Michelangelo Lapenna, who enlist to fight in the war when they are promised the freedom to do what they want. A meditation on violence and power, it enjoyed critical success both in Italy and abroad, and was performed in Paris, Vienna, and other European cities. In 1962, Roberto Rossellini, who admired Joppolo’s ability of creating dramas devoid of any realistic archetypes but firmly set in ordinary circumstances, chose I carabinieri for his only foray into stage directing. In 1963, Jean-Luc Godard directed a screen adaptation, Les Carabiniers. Indebted to Expressionist theater, Le acque combines two separate one-act plays entitled L’acqua si diverte ad uccidere (Water Enjoys Killing) and L’acqua si diverte a farti morire di sete (Water Enjoys Killing You of Thirst). Joppolo’s growing isolation on the Italian literary scene, which had never fully understood or accepted his experimentalism, is the subject of his last work of fiction, La doppia storia (The Double Story), which appeared posthumously in 1968.

Biography Born in Patti (Messina), on 31 July 1906. Graduated in political science at the University of Florence, 1929. Arrested for anti-Fascism and sent to confinement, 1934; moved to Milan, 1935. Married the painter Carla Rossi, 1942; they had two children. Enlisted in the army, 1942; founded, with Lucio Fontana, ‘‘Il movimento spaziale,’’ 1947. Founded, with Jacques Audiberti, the philosophical movement ‘‘Abumanesimo,’’ 1950. Held exhibitions in Milan, Venice, Copenhagen, and Paris. Moved to Paris after being banned from the Milanese Piccolo Teatro by Giorgio Strehler and Paolo Grassi, who had previously supported him, 1954. Died in Paris on 2 October 1963. ANNA SICA

JOURNALISM Selected Works

L’abumanesimo, 1951. L’arte da Poussin a l’abumanesimo, 1954.

Collections Teatro, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘I canti dei sensi e dell’idea,’’ 1929.

Fiction C’e` sempre un piffero ossesso, 1937. Tutto a vuoto, 1945. La giostra di Michele Civa, 1945. Un cane ucciso, 1949. La doppia storia, 1968. Gli angoli della diserzione, 1982. La nuvola verde e altri racconti, edited by Natale Tedesco, 1983. Il ritorno di Leone, 1993.

Plays L’ultima stazione, 1941. Il cammino, 1942. Ritorno di solitudine, 1942. Sulla collina, 1943. Domani parleremo di te (1943), in Teatro, 1989. I carabinieri, in Filmcritica no. 90, 1959. Le acque, in Teatro siciliano, edited by Achille Mango, 1961.

Nonfiction Giacomo Manzu`, 1946. Antonio Calderara, 1948.

Further Reading Abumanesimo: Audiberti, Joppolo, Rome: Bulzoni; Paris: Nizet, 1984. Beniamino Joppolo tra segno e scrittura: (1946–1954), Palermo: Sellerio, 1984. Fontanella, Luigi, ‘‘Joppolo e il surrealismo: i racconti di C’e` sempre un piffero ossesso,’’ in La parola aleatoria, Florence: Le Lettere, 1992. Joppolo, Giovanni, Beniamino Joppolo: la figura e l’opera, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 2004. Meldolesi, Claudio, Fondamenti del teatro italiano: la generazione dei registi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Perrone, Domenica, L’esistenzialismo narrativo di Joppolo tra ipotesi surrealista e scrittura espressionistica, Palermo: Stampatori Tipolitografi Associati, 1982. Perrone, Domenica (editor), Beniamino Joppolo e lo sperimentalismo siciliano contemporaneo, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1989. Romano, Massimo, ‘‘Beniamino Joppolo,’’ in Gli eredi di Verga, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, Randazzo: Comune, 1984. Samec-Luciani, Annette, ‘‘La religione di Joppolo secondo Gesu` (1948),’’ in Gradiva, 6, no. 1 (1994–1995): 23–31. Tedesco, Natale, Il cielo di carta: teatro siciliano da Verga a Joppolo, Naples: Guida, 1989.

JOURNALISM Italian journalism originated in Venice, where the newborn press became a profitable industry, facilitated by the existence of a public system of education and a tradition granting wide latitude to freedom of thought. Of the 803 periodicals in the eighteenth century, 240, or 30%, were published in the Venetian republic, 20% in the duchy of Milan, and 13% in the pontifical state. The first Italian newspaper, however, the Giornale de’ letterati, was founded in Rome in 1668. From the very beginning, there was a difference between news journalism and cultural journalism, of greater interest for educated citizens. There was no shortage of intermediary forms combining culture and news, such as Pallade veneta (1687–1688) or Galleria di Minerva (1696–1717), but until the mid-nineteenth century interest in news developed slowly. For all the differences in their relations with power and

with readers, what prevailed in the periodicals of this early period was the cultural and political debate: The tumultuous and passionate years of the French Revolution saw the birth of well over 150 newspapers, which expounded ideas rather than facts, and in which indeed facts were subordinated to propagandistic demands. However, some newspapers such as the Gazzetta di Milano, an organ of the Austrian government, anticipated the modern newspaper by publishing news stories (always deferential to the ‘‘voice of the master’’), short fiction, and correspondence. Even today, Italian newspapers reserve a considerable amount of space for culture. For all of its value in the popularization as well as the elaboration of culture, the so-called terza pagina (articles on culture used to be printed on page 3) was slow to have an impact on journalism as a genre, and rather found itself part of the 977

JOURNALISM genre without influencing its development. Only in the twentieth century have successful writers— Giovanni Verga, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Curzio Malaparte, Matilde Serao, Alberto Moravia, Dino Buzzati, Giovanni Arpino, Oriana Fallaci, Goffredo Parise, and Alessandro Baricco, to name only a few—become special correspondents and described unusual events or distant places with works endowed with literary value. A parallel development, as in France, is that of the serialized novel published in installments and aimed at a popular audience (or presumed as such), a genre that boasts prestigious authors. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the newspaper assumed its modern form and drew particular attention from those in power. Article 28 of the Albertine Statute of 1848 recognized the freedom of the press, but was concerned with disciplining it. On the other hand, Article 21 of the Republican Constitution of 1947, drafted in the climate of recovered freedom, proclaimed: ‘‘La stampa non puo` essere soggetta ad autorizzazioni o censure’’ (the press may not be subjected to authorizations or censorship). But threats to freedom of the press are always impending, and do not require legal censorship in order to be carried out. In 1859, Bettino Ricasoli (1809–1880), who two years later would become prime minister, launched La nazione in Florence. Having founded La patria in 1847, Ricasoli was familiar with the effectiveness of the press and had a precise political aim: speeding up the union of Tuscany and Piedmont. In the meantime, the culture of news was developing. On 25 January 1853, the first news agency was born, founded by Guglielmo Stefani (1819–1861), with the backing of another powerful figure, Camillo Cavour. However, the first newspaper that developed a culture of news and gave ample space to local events was Il secolo, founded in 1866 in Milan by the brothers Raffaele (1829–1875) and Edoardo Sonzogno (1836–1920), owners of a publishing house dating back to 1818. Its director was Teodoro Moneta (1833–1918), a former follower of Garibaldi who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1907. Other newspapers emerged in the wake of Il secolo: in Turin, the Gazzetta piemontese, an eighteenth-century newspaper, was revived in 1867 and renamed La stampa in 1895; on 5 March 1876, Eugenio Torelli Viollier (1842–1900) founded Il corriere della sera, which joined the other eight dailies then published in Milan, including Il pungolo, the most popular, edited by the Triestine Leone Fortis (1824–1896). Il corriere della sera offered an independent treatment of the news: Its first 978

leading article was entitled ‘‘Pubblico, vogliamo parlarti chiaro’’ (To the Public—We Will Speak Clearly to You). Nevertheless, the newspaper was slow to grow because it had insufficient resources (30,000 lire), until a group of industrialists, led by Benigno Crespi and including Pirelli and De Angeli, acquired ownership in 1882 with an investment of 100,000 lire, and the situation changed. La stampa would also be taken over by an entrepreneur, Alfredo Frassati. This highlights a characteristic of Italian journalism, the retention of ownership by entrepreneurial groups with dominant interests in various sectors of publishing, to which the politics of the newspapers are subordinated, thus compromising their independence. At most, the newspaper becomes the center of publishing enterprises. Thus, after Luigi Albertini (1871–1941) assumed the editorship of Il corriere della sera in 1900 (he would hold it until 1921), he developed a number of side publications such as La domenica del corriere, launched in 1899 and closed in 1989, and the Corriere dei piccoli, founded in 1908, which lasted until 1995 and had among its editors writers such as Silvio Spaventa Filippi (1871–1931) and Giovanni Mosca (1908–1983). Beginning respectively in 1901 and 1903, La lettura and Il romanzo mensile came to replace the serial novel. In the meantime, newspapers with local circulation emerged: In 1873, there were 55 dailies in Italy that printed as a whole almost 800,000 copies for a population of about 28,150,000. This is a small number, but at that time illiteracy exceeded 70%. Within two years of its creation in 1878, Il messaggero, the Roman newspaper edited by Luigi Cesana, achieved a circulation of 35,000 copies, thanks to its low price (5 cents) and to the participation of readers, who were invited to provide news for a compensation of a half-lira. La tribuna, another newspaper of Rome, was founded in 1883 through the initiative of the Venetian industrialist Alessandro Rossi. Other important dailies included: in Trieste, Il piccolo (1881); in Bologna, Il resto del carlino (1885), to which poets such as Giosue` Carducci and Giovanni Pascoli contributed; in Genoa, Il secolo XIX (1875), owned by the industrialist Ferdinando Maria Perrone, the proprietor of the Ansaldo shipyards; in Venice, the liberal-democratic Gazzettino (1887), founded, owned, and directed by Giampietro Talamini until his death in 1934, and its competitor, the Gazzetta di Venezia, edited after 1922 by Gino Damerini (1881–1967); in Naples, Il mattino (1892), edited by Edoardo Scarfoglio (1860–1917) who invited contributions by writers

JOURNALISM such as Gabriele D’Annunzio and Matilde Serao, the latter author of the important mosconi, a series of pieces on the daily life of Naples. In 1901, supported by the influential politician Sidney Sonnino (1847–1922), the monarchical-liberal Giornale d’Italia began publication under the editorship of Alberto Bergamini (1871–1962), the inventor of the terza pagina, which Il corriere della sera adopted only three years later. Bergamini left the editorship when the Italian press was enslaved by Fascism. The newspaper, the mouthpiece for conservative groups, survived until 1976. The foundation of Il sole, an economics newspaper, in 1865 by Pietro Bagiola Bellini, and the Gazzetta dello sport in 1896 marked the birth of specialized newspapers. 1896 was also the founding year of the first party daily, the socialist Avanti!. In political periodicals, coverage of events was integrated with theoretical reflection, as in Critica sociale, founded by the Socialist leader Filippo Turati (1857–1932) in Milan in 1891, and suppressed by Fascism in 1926, and in the weekly L’unita`, founded in 1911 by Gaetano Salvemini (1873–1957), who edited it almost uninterruptedly until its closing on 30 December 1920. Its contributors included the philosopher Benedetto Croce. The newspaper resumed in 1924 as the official organ of the Communist Party of Italy, and was directed by Antonio Gramsci, also the editor of the weekly of cultural politics L’ordine nuovo (1919– 1925). Women’s press deserves special attention. Its origins can be traced back to the eighteenth century with the Florentine journal La toelette (1770); La donna galante ed erudita (1786–1788), a fashion magazine published in Venice that also offered models of clothes to make oneself; and the Milanese Giornale delle dame e delle mode di Francia (1786). In the second half of the nineteenth century, with the rise of the feminist movements, women’s press took a different turn. In addition to the bitterly anticlerical periodical La donna (1868–1890), directed by Guadalberta Alaide Beccari, one must remark the success in the Catholic camp of Cordelia (1881–1918), Margherita (1878–1921), and La donna e la famiglia (1862–1902), which enjoyed a large circulation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and in the Socialist camp of La difesa delle lavoratrici, founded on 7 January 1912 by Anna Kuliscioff (1857–1925) and suppressed by Fascism in 1925. During the Fascist regime, the women’s press propagandized the image of the prolific woman devoted to her family: the magazines then in vogue were Rakam (1930), Annabella (1933), Grazia (founded in 1927 with the title Sovrana),

and Gioia (1937), all of which continue in some form to this writing. World War I was a test bed for censorship and propaganda, and government press agencies had the exclusive management of news, while correspondents were forbidden access to war zones. After the war, when the conditions develop for the advent of Fascism, the press played a decisive role. Indeed, Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) came out of journalism, having served as editor of Avanti! from 1 December 1912 until 20 October 1914, when he came in sharp conflict with the neutralist positions of the Socialist Party, which he himself had supported until then, and wrote an article entitled ‘‘Dalla neutralita` assoluta alla neutralita` attiva ed operante’’ (From Absolute Neutrality to Active and Efficient Neutrality) in favor of Italy’s intervention. He then founded a new newspaper, Il popolo d’Italia, which began publication on 15 November and which, thanks to the mediation of Filippo Naldi, the director of Il resto del carlino and a trusted friend of the minister of the interior, the Marquis Antonino di San Giuliano, enjoyed the financial support of a group of industrialists, including Agnelli, the Perrone brothers, and Parodi. Given this background, Mussolini was well-versed in using the press to manage public opinion. On 28 October 1922, with the march on Rome, he took power and on 30 October he ceded the editorship of Il popolo d’Italia to his brother Arnaldo, who held it until his death in December 1931. Immediately, in three articles published in November, Mussolini showed his intention of subjecting the newspaper to Fascism, a regime that allowed no alternatives or electoral tests. The operation is facilitated by the fact that the major Italian newspapers are the property of industrialists, bankers, or landowners. On the one hand, Mussolini proceeded with the promulgation of a set of restrictive provisions: A decree of July 1923 ordered prefects to dismiss editors of newspapers for expressing positions contrary to the policy of the government, for instigation of class hatred, and for disparagement of the nation, the royal family, the pope, the institutions, and friendly powers. On the other hand, Fascist paramilitary violence against nonaligned newspapers continued and, most importantly, Fascists achieved the majority in the administrative boards of newspapers. The story of Il secolo is a typical example: In 1923, ownership was acquired by Senator Borletti, a financier and owner of SNIA, ‘‘Rinascente,’’ and countless other companies, and by Cesare Goldmann, the president of the Societa` di Credito 979

JOURNALISM Commerciale. As a result of the new disposition, the nationalist Senator Giuseppe Bevione, more palatable to the government, was appointed editor, and a newspaper that had always taken positions on the moderate left radically changed its course. Likewise, all of the large Italian newspapers changed editors in this period: In 1923, Olindo Malagodi (1870–1934), the editor of the La tribuna, resigned, while at La stampa Frassati withdrew from ownership in November 1925, his shares passing to the Agnellis: The new editor was a Fascist, Andrea Torre. A few days later, Luigi Albertini, the editor of Il corriere della sera, resigned. On 10 October 1928, Mussolini said, pretending not to notice the contradiction: ‘‘Il giornalismo italiano e` libero perche` serve soltanto una causa e un Regime’’ (Italian journalism is free because it serves only one cause and one Regime). The objective had been achieved. The editor-in-chief of every newspaper had to be a member of the Fascist party and, before being printed, newspapers were subjected to government control. The regime founded the ‘‘Ordine dei Giornalisti,’’ whose members also had to be members of the Fascist party, and created the governmental ‘‘Ufficio Stampa’’ (transformed in 1937 into the Ministry of Popular Culture), which controlled all publications and issued ‘‘ordini di stampa’’ (press orders) and ‘‘veline’’ (press releases), which imparted regulations on the content of articles, their page layouts, and even their titles. Fascist magazines such as Roma fascista, Milizia fascista, Critica fascista, La rivista illustrate del Popolo d’Italia, and Lavoro fascista began to gain ground. The most important was Gerarchia, an official magazine founded in 1922 by Mussolini, with a select group of collaborators that included the historians Gioacchino Volpe and Arrigo Solmi, the painter and poet Ardengo Soffici, and the art scholar Margherita Sarfatti, who was also the Duce’s lover. The anti-Semitic and racist La difesa della razza, edited by Telesio Interlandi (1894–1965), and with the young Giorgio Almirante (1914–1988) as assistant editor, was created in 1938 and ceased publication in 1943. A leading figure in Italian journalism in these years was Leo Longanesi (1905–1957), who founded various periodicals: L’italiano in 1926, Omnibus, the first illustrated Italian weekly magazine, in 1937, and Il borghese in 1950. Longanesi was Fascist in his own way, but often swam against the current fostering a kind of internal opposition. Indeed, a need for innovation was felt by many within Fascism, and especially by the younger generation, which on the threshold of World War II gathered around the magazine Primato, founded 980

by the minister Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959) with the aim of bringing together all of the currents of Italian culture regardless of their ideological differences. To this context belonged also Indro Montanelli (1909–2001), a fine writer as well as a great journalist, who began to distance himself from Fascism in 1937. Another victim of the Fascist purges was Mario Missiroli (1886–1974), who only after the liberation of Rome was able to resume his work at Il messaggero, of which he became editor in 1946, later moving on to direct Il corriere della sera in 1952. The Italian press enjoyed new vitality at the end of the war and of the Fascist dictatorship: In 1945– 1946, the number of dailies rose from 80 to 150, reversing the previous trend. Perhaps the most characteristic element was the development of the weeklies, which better satisfied the need of the popular masses for agreeable, and at times slightly gossipy, information. The most successful weekly continued to be La domenica del corriere, which reached 930,000 copies in 1957, but the most authoritative in its genre was L’europeo, edited by Arrigo Benedetti (1910–1976), who had previously directed with Mario Pannunzio (1910–1968) Oggi from 1939 to its suppression in 1941 (Pannunzio, in his turn, created Il mondo, a liberal and progressive weekly, in 1949). When L’europeo was bought by the Milanese publisher Angelo Rizzoli in 1953, Benedetti resigned and founded L’espresso with capital from an innovative entrepreneur, Adriano Olivetti. L’espresso began publication in 1955. During the 1970s, L’espresso came into competition with Panorama, the political magazine of the Mondadori group, which had been founded as a monthly in 1962 and transformed into a weekly in 1967. But other weeklies had a wide circulation as well: the resurrected Oggi (which in the 1970s also reached 900,000 copies), edited by Edilio Rusconi (1916–1996), who also founded Gente in 1957; Tempo (400,000 copies in the 1970s); Epoca (300,000 copies). A particular case was that of Candido (1945–1957), founded and edited by Giovanni Guareschi, who skillfully played a part in political debate using irony rather than invective. As for the dailies, the most important events of the second half of the twentieth century are in April 1956: the birth of Il giorno, edited by Gaetano Baldacci, through the initiative of Enrico Mattei, president of ENI, the state oil agency, and in 1976 the foundation of La repubblica, edited by Eugenio Scalfari (1924–). Meanwhile, a class of cultured and competent journalists was taking shape, and most of them added extensive literary productions

JOURNALISM to their journalistic activities. It includes Enzo Biagi (1920–), Alberto Ronchey, Piero Ottone (1924–), Igor Man, Mario Pirani, and Sandro Curzi (1930–). Their approach does not much differ from that of the younger generation, for whom they became an example of professionalism. That younger generation includes Lucia Annunziata (1950–), Paolo Mieli (1949–), Giuliano Ferrara (1951–), Marcello Veneziani (1955–), Curzio Maltese (1959–), Gianni Riotta (1954–), Beppe Severgnini (1956–), to name only a few. Riotta and Severgnini deserve particular mention for their books as well as the quality of their articles. Riotta, as of this writing at Il corriere della sera after being coeditor of La stampa, is the author of Cambio di Stagione (Change of Season, 1991), his first work, for which he won the Premio Bergamo and the Grinzane Cavour, Ultima dea (The Last Goddess, 1994), Principe delle nuvole (Prince of the Clouds, 1997), and NY: Undici settembre (New York, September 11, 2001), an acute political analysis of the attack on the World Trade Center and its consequences. Severgnini, who is also at Il corriere della sera after working for Montanelli’s La voce, is the author of about 15 works, including L’inglese. Lezioni Semiserie (English: Semi-Serious Lectures, 1992), an amusing and original analysis that moves from the language to the character not of English speakers, but of Italians who use English, Un italiano in America (An Italian in America, 1995), an introduction to the American way of life, and the witty Manuale dell’uomo domestico (Manual of the Domestic Man, 2002). The years of global protest at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s fostered the foundation of the periodicals of the extraparliamentary left, in particular Il manifesto, created by a group of intellectuals from the Communist Party (Lucio Magri, Rossana Rossanda, Aldo Natoli, Massimo Caprara, and Luigi Pintor) and Lotta continua. Both founded as weeklies in 1969, they became dailies, respectively, in 1971 and 1972. This provoked, almost as a backlash, the birth in June 1974 of Il giornale nuovo (later renamed simply Il giornale), a daily of the moderate right, directed by Montanelli, who left the editorship of Il corriere della sera. Coming into conflict with the publisher Silvio Berlusconi when he went into politics, Montanelli left Il giornale and created La voce (1994), the expression of a liberal and anticonformist right, which however lasted only a year. Reflecting the changed political reality of the 1990s, La padania, directed at first by the secretary of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, was the answer to the new political demands of the separatist movement.

The major problem of the decade between the mid-1990s and the beginning of the new century was that of the ‘‘conflict of interests,’’ that is, the relationship between political and economic power on the one hand and information in general, and, more particularly, television news on the other. The best example is the competition between Carlo De Benedetti and Silvio Berlusconi. The former is at the head of an entrepreneurial complex that numbers more than 10,000 employees, and owns the weekly L’espresso and the daily La repubblica, the flagship publications of a group that includes 15 local newspapers and several local radio stations; the latter is, as of 2005, the prime minister, the leader of the ‘‘Forza Italia’’ party, and of the majority coalition, the richest man in Italy; he controls Mediaset, the most important private Italian group in the communications and television media sector, and one of the largest in the world. But, as we have seen, the problem is not new in the history of the media in Italy. BRUNO ROSADA See also: Literary Journals Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Il giornalista. Appunti sulla fisiologia di un mestiere difficile,’’ in Storia d’italia: annali, vol. 4, Intellettuali e potere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Berengo, Marino (editor), Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Cassero, Riccardo, Le veline del duce. Come il fascismo controllava la stampa, Milan: Sperling e Kupfer, 2004. Castronovo, Valerio, La stampa italiana dall’unita` al fascismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1973. Castronovo, Valerio, and Nicola Tranfaglia (editors), Storia della stampa italiana, 7 vols., Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1976–2002. De Felice, Renzo (editor), I giornali giacobini italiani, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Farinelli, Giuseppe, et al., Storia del Giornalismo italiano. Dalle origini ai giorni nostri, Turin: Utet, 1997. Gozzini, Giovanni, Storia del giornalismo, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000. Hallin, Daniel C., and Paolo Mancini, Modelli di giornalismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004. Infelise, Mario, L’editoria veneziana nel ‘700, Milan: F. Angeli, 1989. Infelise, Mario, Prima dei giornali. Alle origini della pubblica informazione, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2002. Isnenghi, Mario, Giornali e giornalisti. Esame critico della stampa quotidiana in Italia, Rome: Savelli, 1975. Isnenghi, Mario, Intellettuali militanti e intellettuali funzionari. Appunti sulla cultura fascista, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Janni, Paolo (editor), Italy at the Millennium: Economy, Politics, Literature, and Journalism, Washington: Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, 2001.

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JOURNALISM Lumley, Robert, ‘‘Peculiarities of the Italian Newspaper,’’ in Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Lumley, Robert, Italian Journalism: A Critical Anthology, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Murialdi, Paolo, La stampa italiana del dopoguerra: 1943– 1972, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1973. Murialdi, Paolo, Storia del giornalismo italiano: dalle prime gazzette ai telegiornali, Turin: Gutenberg, 1986. Murialdi, Paolo, La stampa italiana dalla liberazione alla crisi di fine secolo, Bari: Laterza, 1995.

Mussolini, Benito, Scritti e discorsi, 14 vols., Milan: Hoepli, 1914–1939. Papuzzi, Alberto, Letteratura e giornalismo, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1998. Roncarolo, Franca, ‘‘Crisis in the Mirror: Old and New Elements in Italian Political Communication,’’ in Political Journalism: New Challenges, New Practices, edited by Raymond Kuhn and Erik Neveu, London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Spriano, Paolo, ‘‘L’informazione nell’Italia unita,’’ in Storia d’Italia, vol. 1, I documenti, edited by Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973.

LITERARY JOURNALS The first Italian literary journals began to appear in the seventeenth century. Following the French pattern of erudite journalism directed at a public of intellectuals, such as the Journal des Savants (1665– 1792), they published mainly abstracts of studies relating to philosophy and science. One of the most important periodicals of this type is the Giornale de’ letterati (1668–1681), founded in Rome by the cleric Francesco Nazzari. Periodicals attained a larger audience in the eighteenth century when other disciplines in addition to those of an exclusively theoretical-scientific nature also came forward, such as economy, law, and pedagogy. The contributors now belonged to the category of professional, secular intellectuals rather than to the clergy. The journals of this period are either influenced by the English Spectator, directed by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, or by the French Encyclopedie of Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert. The periodicals of the first type, which include Giuseppe Baretti’s La Frusta letteraria (1763–1765) and Gasparo Gozzi’s L’osservatorio veneto (1761–1762), are characterized by an ironical view of social and cultural events. A second category includes the Giornale enciclopedico (1774–1789) directed by Domenico Caminer, and then continued by his daughter Elisabetta (1751– 1796) under the title Nuovo giornale enciclopedico (1790–1796). The Milanese Il caffe` (1764–1766), founded by Pietro and Alessandro Verri, was named after the characteristic and fashionable space of male interaction of the cafe´. Having elements of both types of journals, it was also the first 982

periodical in which editors and authors treated social problems against the background of the universal values advanced by culture. Such attitude occurs frequently in the later historical development of the Italian cultural press, which in the nineteenth and twentieth century often expressed the view of the intellectuals who, as a pressure group, wanted to have political influence. The intention of influencing public opinion by means of periodicals is evident in the culture of the early nineteenth century, although it should be pointed out that the circulation of these periodicals was limited. Indeed, a few hundred copies were often sufficient to reach the small number of intellectuals who gave shape to the cultural life of the nation. During the Restoration, the Austrian regime attempted to curb patriotic activity in Lombardy by founding a periodical that encouraged mainly erudite studies, the Biblioteca italiana (1816–1859), initially directed by Giuseppe Acerbi, Pietro Giordani, and Vincenzo Monti. Giordani and Monti became quickly aware of the intentions of the Austrian authorities and left the editorship. As other liberal-minded contributors distanced themselves from the journal and went on to found Il conciliatore in 1818, Biblioteca italiana became the symbol of the conservative, neoclassical cultural tendency. As its name implies, Il conciliatore was characterized by a spirit of ‘‘reconciliation’’ or ‘‘unification’’ among different tendencies (for instance, technicalscientific and literary knowledge, Catholicism and laicism, Enlightenment and Romanticism). However, the Austrian authorities could not tolerate its

LITERARY JOURNALS patriotic-liberal spirit, and the periodical was suspended in 1819. Il conciliatore marks an important phase in the resistance to the classical and conservative tendencies of Italian culture, and begins to open the way to interdisciplinary and comparative studies. In Florence, Tuscan liberals gathered around L’antologia (1821–1833), founded by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux and Gino Capponi. Their initial intention was to publish only extracts from important European cultural periodicals in Italian translation, but eventually L’antologia began to feature original studies, especially on economics, statistics and history, as well as contributions on literature. Ultimately, the censorship of the grand duchy of Tuscany found L’antologia too liberal and suppressed it in 1833. With Il politecnico (1839–1844 and 1860–1865), Carlo Cattaneo created in Milan a mainly didactical and popular journal that focused on the social, economic, and technical problems of Lombardy, and only occasionally dealt with literature. Its aim was to stimulate a greater participation of the population in cultural and social life, thus continuing the rational and enlightened attitude in a period that was ideologically characterized by the neospiritualism of Romanticism. The same democratic intention of Il politecnico can be found in Il crepuscolo (1850–1859), directed by Carlo Tenca. Both periodicals show an internal evolution toward a more liberal ideology, such as was personified by the politician Camillo Cavour. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Rassegna settimanale (1878–1782), by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, contributed to the development of verismo through its inquiries into the difficult social situation of Southern Italy. Eclectically literary were on the other hand Cronaca bizantina (1881–1885), founded by Angelo Sommaruga, Il convito (1895–1907), directed by Adolfo De Bosis and closely influenced by Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Il Marzocco (1896–1932), founded by Angiolo and Adolfo Orvieto. The most important Italian periodicals in the first decades of the twentieth century were seldom exclusively literary, and more generally aimed at contributing to political and cultural life. Many were published in Florence, where intellectual activity flourished after Italian unification. Among the Florentine periodicals, Leonardo (1903–1907), Hermes (1904–1906), and Il regno (1903–1906) had a number of common characteristics: Their editors all were hostile to positivism, and they were the cultural expression of a new generation of intellectuals characterized by a subjective, antidemocratic,

and idealistic attitude. This gained them the sympathy of the philosopher Benedetto Croce (himself the founder of the influential La critica in 1903 and its director until its closing in 1944), who saw the editors of Leonardo as allies in his struggle for a new idealism in philosophy and culture. Leonardo, founded by Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini, contributed to get Italy acquainted with the pragmatism of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce. On the other hand, Hermes, directed by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, was almost exclusively a literary journal closely allied to symbolism. The nationalistic and reactionary Enrico Corradini was the founder of Il regno, an almost exclusively political periodical that he directed until 1905, when he was replaced by Alderico Campodonico. The periodical that, with its diverse cultural platform, unified young Italian intellectuals, however, was La voce (1908–1916), the journal of ‘‘militant idealism,’’ as its subtitle suggested. Its founder, Giuseppe Prezzolini, was influenced by Croce as well as by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Concrete information on cultural and social problems took a central place in the periodical and, since Prezzolini identified contemporary literature with decadentism a` la D’Annunzio, he rejected contributions on literary subjects. After 1912, pressure to recognize literature again as a privileged intellectual activity increased, and from 1914 onwards, under the directorship of Giuseppe De Robertis, La voce became an exclusively literary periodical. The literature published in De Robertis’ new La voce, sometimes called Voce ‘‘bianca’’ because of the white color of its covers, did not want anything to do with discredited naturalism and symbolism, and thus also rejected the dominant literary genre of the nineteenth century, the novel. For the authors of La voce, only autobiographical and often fragmentary and nonnarrative prose writing was credible. If Prezzolini’s La voce was a cultural instrument with an organizational and pedagogical aim, on the contrary, Lacerba (1913–1915), founded by his discontented collaborators Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici, wanted to emphasize the individual, intuitive, and irrational aspects of art and culture. The name of the periodical recalls the title of a fourteenth-century didactic poem by Cecco d’Ascoli, ‘‘L’Acerba’’ (The Sour One), in which the author expresses his disapproval for the allegorical dimension of Dante’s Commedia. The twentieth-century periodical also represents a certain typical Tuscan mentality of cynicism and derision. As an avant-garde periodical that continued the 983

LITERARY JOURNALS activism of Leonardo, Lacerba was receptive to the project of the Futurist movement, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. However, the collaboration between the Futurists and the group of Lacerba was short-lived, because, in spite of their desire to provoke, the Florentine authors Papini, Soffici, and Palazzeschi advocated the centuries-old humanistic idea of the artist. The central role of Florence in the culture of periodicals at the start of the twentieth century was challenged by La ronda (1919–1923), published in Rome by Vincenzo Cardarelli and Emilio Cecchi. With La ronda, Cardarelli wanted to engage a figurative ‘‘patrol’’ (ronda) against the irrationalistic attitude of many contemporary intellectuals. La ronda went back to the cult of creative literature as the most appropriate form of expression for the modern man of letters. Its contributors advocated a more classical style, of which Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali was considered as the leading example. In spite of its consciousness of the novelty of its project, however, La ronda continued the autobiographical fragmentism of La voce and Lacerba. A similar withdrawal of the intellectuals from literature can be found in Il Baretti (1924– 1928), published in Turin by Piero Gobetti. Less political than Gobetti’s previous periodicals Energie nuove (1918–1920) and La rivoluzione liberale (1922–1925), Il Baretti was named after the eighteenth-century author Giuseppe Baretti, who was taken as a model of independent and free speech. Consequently, in an ‘‘enlightened’’ way, Il Baretti considered the conscious work of the man of letters as a basis for a freer and more coherent culture and society. Il Baretti, in contrast to La ronda, was also strongly interested in the new developments in the European literatures. Under the Fascist dictatorial regime, the more militant expressions of culture could only survive as long as they did not trespass the ideological boundaries of Fascism. This was the case with the movements of Stracitta` and Strapaese. The former saw city life as central to modern culture, while the latter glorified the countryside. Stracitta` can be identified with the periodical 900 (1926–1929), founded by Massimo Bontempelli and initially published in French as a sign of international spirit (under pressure from the regime, it eventually had to add Italian, which became its sole language in 1928). In general, 900 emphasized the need for art to engage with the various aspects of industrialized society. Furthermore, 900 contributed to a return to the novel in a time when nonnarrative artistic prose was highly 984

acclaimed. The Strapaese counterpart of 900 was Il selvaggio (1927–1943), founded by the Tuscan author and artist Mino Maccari, which in a way continued the anarchic tendency of Lacerba. In this sense, Maccari and his contributors represented the so-called ‘‘left wing’’ of Fascism. In the Florence of the 1920s and 1930s, the memory of the avant-garde before World War I was still alive. In a spirit of openness toward other European cultures, Alberto Carocci founded Solaria in 1926 and directed it until its demise in 1934 (but the final issues appeared in 1936). The name of the periodical refers to a utopian society such as that described in Tommaso Campanella’s La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun, 1692). The utopia of the solariani consisted in the hope for a freer and more humane society that would take as its starting point the values put forward by literature, and its project descended from the emphasis on the ethical responsibility of the writer that had characterized La voce ‘‘bianca’’ and Il Baretti. On the other hand, the care shown by the contributors for the stylistic aspects of their work indicates a connection with the Roman La ronda. Furthermore, Solaria wanted to hold on to the nonconformist spirit of Lacerba, even though its contributors did not consider themselves as a new avant-garde. This eclectic project, inspired by the example of the French Nouvelle revue franc¸aise (1909–1943), had as its main purpose the discovery of a third way between literary tradition and innovation whereby the concern for form would coincide with new themes, such as introspection or the evocation of remote memories. Because of the tension between the writers who believed in ‘‘pure’’ literature (and who constituted the majority of the contributors) and the intellectuals who were more interested in social debate, Solaria finally broke into two separate journals. Under the guidance of Alessandro Bonsanti, Letteratura (1937–1947) continued the creative-literary work of Solaria, while Carocci took a more philosophical direction with La riforma letteraria (1936– 1939). In the name of the universal human values of which literature is a vehicle, the Hermetics, a poetic group active especially in Florence, and a number of socially engaged authors united for a short time in the periodical Campo di Marte (1938–1939), of which the novelist Vasco Pratolini and the poet Alfonso Gatto became the editors-in-chief. The Hermetics rejected any political engagement, convinced as they were that the core of life lies in the inner wanderings of the human being rather in the practical dimension of daily life. For the Hermetics, religious conviction

LITERARY JOURNALS should inform this existential odyssey rather than lead it, and it was precisely in opposition to the more militant Catholicism of the Florentine Frontespizio (1929–1940) that Carlo Bo, a critic of Christian inspiration, published in 1938 the essay Letteratura come vita (Literature as Life), which can be considered a manifesto of Hermeticism. At the outbreak of World War II, Fascism tried to co-opt the authors who had kept their distance from the regime. For this reason, Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai founded Primato (1940–1943), which suggested from its very title that the ‘‘primacy’’ of culture would serve as a basis for the political success of Italy. Bottai’s appeal was met with an overwhelming response, and almost all Italian writers of the time, as well as historians and philosophers, made their contribution. Significantly, Primato was also open to cultural movements such as the existentialism and Hermeticism that Fascist ideology had been unable to absorb. Another call for unity among intellectuals was launched after the war. With Il Politecnico (1945– 1947), Elio Vittorini wanted to create a democratic forum. Its title refers to the periodical of the same name founded by Cattaneo in 1839, and indeed Vittorini aimed at resuming its tradition by establishing a direct contact with social reality through a sequence of inquiries. At the same time, the periodical opened up to young writers and to new cultural tendencies. Soon the project came into collision with the politics of the Italian Communist Party. The party secretary of the time, Palmiro Togliatti, reproached Vittorini’s attitude as too generally cultural and not contributing to the creation of an Italian national-popular literature. According to Vittorini, however, culture had by its very nature a progressive function, and he strongly rejected any use of it as a tool of propaganda. Officina (1955–1959), founded by Francesco Leonetti, Roberto Roversi, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, was critical of both direct political engagement and of total political abstinence. Officina preferred an experimental literature that introduced stylistic innovations without breaking completely with tradition. Social engagement remained a necessity, but did not require a downright militant attitude within a political party, as the most important task was harmonizing ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘ideology.’’ Officina was succeeded by Vittorini’s new periodical Il menabo` di letteratura (1959–1967), which originated in the industrial city Milan, and was intended as a means of reflection on the role of literature in a technological society. The title (the menabo` is the

layout of a newspaper page) refers to the particular way in which written language makes its appearance in modern society. Its thematic issues on the relation between literature and industry published in 1961 and 1962 are typical of the cultural approach of the periodical as a whole. In Milan, the philosopher and literary critic Luciano Anceschi founded Il Verri in 1956. From the beginning, the periodical has attentively followed recent cultural developments, and it contributed to the diffusion of phenomenology, structuralism, and semiology in Italy. Taking the French periodical Tel Quel as a model, Anceschi made the choice for a scientifically oriented culture in which technical abilities have precedence and the ideological attitude is neutral. In 1961, Anceschi published I novissimi. Poesie per gli anni ‘60 (Novissimi. Poetry for the Sixties), an anthology of poets who contributed to Il Verri. Thus the neoavantgarde was born. In 1963, several authors and contributors to Il Verri organized themselves as the movement known as Gruppo 63, but only in 1967 were they able to have an official journal with the launch of Quindici. During the upheavals of 1968, however, the editors had a disagreement over the question of whether they should continue their literary activity or let literature be entirely ‘‘politicized,’’ and as a result Quindici came to an end. More generally, with the movement of 1968 literary periodicals came under pressure, and risked being replaced by political publications with cultural sections such as Piergiorgio Bellocchio’s Quaderni Piacentini (1962–1985): The opinion was that intellectuals ought not to behave like exclusively cultural specialists but that they should become political militants in the struggle for a more ‘‘direct’’ democracy. In the 1970s, minor literary periodicals appeared, mostly dedicated to poetry. In 1979, a number of intellectuals under the guidance of Nanni Balestrini founded Alfabeta, a publication that sustained a general literary and political debate until 1988. Besides ex-militants of the neoavantgarde, its contributors included also semioticians such as Maria Corti and Umberto Eco or philosophers such as Pier Aldo Rovatti. After Alfabeta, general literary and political-cultural periodicals seem to have lost their attractiveness as a tool of expression for the general viewpoint of intellectuals. These publications have been replaced on the one hand by more specialized periodicals, and on the other by popularizing newspapers and magazines. DIRK VANDEN BERGHE 985

LITERARY JOURNALS Further Reading Basso, Lelio, and Luigi Anderlini (editors), Le riviste di Piero Gobetti, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Berengo, Marino (editor), Giornali veneziani del Settecento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Bossaglia, Rossana, et al. (editors), Alfabeta 1979–1988. Antologia della rivista, Milan: Bompiani, 1996. Branca, Vittore (editor), Il Conciliatore. Foglio scientificoletterario, Florence: Le Monnier, 1948–1954. Briosi, Sandro, Il problema della letteratura in «Solaria», Milan: Mursia, 1976. Carpi, Umberto, La Voce. Letteratura e primato degli intellettuali, Bari: De Donato, 1975. Cassieri, Giuseppe (editor), ‘‘La Ronda’’ 1919–23, Turin: ERI, 1969. Castronovo, Valerio, Giuseppe Ricupati, and Carlo Capra (editors), La stampa italiana dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1976. Falqui, Enrico (editor), Antologia della rivista ‘‘900,’’ Lucugnano: Edizioni dell’ ‘‘Albero,’’ 1958. Ferretti, Gian Carlo (editor), Officina. Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni cinquanta, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Fiaccarini Marchi, Daria (editor), Il Menabo` (1959–1967), Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1973. Forti, Marco, and Sergio Pautasso (editors), Il Politecnico: antologia critica, Milan: Lerici, 1960. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Che cos’e` stato ‘‘Il Politecnico,’’ in Dieci inverni, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957. Frigessi Castelnuovo, Delia (editor), La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste. ‘‘Leonardo,’’ ‘‘Hermes,’’ ‘‘Il Regno,’’ 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Infelise, Mario, L’editoria veneziana nel ‘700, Milan: F. Angeli, 1989. Jacobbi, Ruggero (editor), ‘‘Campo di Marte’’ trent’anni dopo (1938–68), Florence: Vallecchi, 1969.

Mangoni, Luisa (editor), Primato, 1940–1943, Bari: De Donato, 1977. Mangoni, Luisa, ‘‘Le riviste del Novecento,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Oddone, Enrico (editor), La Biblioteca italiana, Treviso: Canova, 1955. Panicali, Anna, Le riviste del periodo fascista, MessinaFlorence: D’Anna, 1978. Prezzolini, Giuseppe (editor), La Voce 1908–1914. Cronaca, antologia e fortuna di una rivista, Milan: Rusconi, 1974. Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico (editor), ‘‘Il Selvaggio’’ di Mino Maccari, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1955. Ricuperati, Giuseppe, ‘‘Periodici eruditi, riviste e giornali di varia umanita` dalle origini a meta` Ottocento,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 1, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Romagnoli, Sergio, and Gianni Francioni (editors), Il Caffe`, 1764–66, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1993. Romano, Angelo (editor), La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste. ‘‘La Voce’’ 1908–1914, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Ruesch, Diana, and Bruno SOMALVICO (editors), La Voce e l’Europa, Rome: Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1982. Scalia, Gianni (editor), La cultura italiana del ‘900 attraverso le riviste. ‘‘Lacerba,’’ ‘‘La Voce’’ 1914–1916, Turin: Einaudi, 1961. Siciliano, Enzo (editor), Antologia di ‘‘Solaria,’’ Milan: Lerici, 1958. Zancan, Marina, Il progetto Politecnico: cronaca e strutture di una rivista, Venice: Marsilio, 1984. Zazo, Emiliano (editor), Antologia della Antologia (1821–32): rassegna di una rivista, Milan: Bompiani, 1946.

FRANCESCO JOVINE (1902–1950) Neorealist writer Francesco Jovine’s entire production is characterized by a single concern known as the questione del Mezzogiorno (the Southern Question). In Jovine’s fiction, predominantly set in his native Molise and influenced by nineteenth-century verismo, this topic deals with the increasing gap between Northern and Southern Italy and the continued underdevelopment of the South after the unification in 1861. His first published book, Un uomo provvisorio (A Temporary Man, 1934), which received a mixed reception, recounts the story of a young doctor 986

who relocates to a big city in order to become a specialist, only to discover loneliness and indifference. Eventually he recaptures his sense of purpose in life, by returning to his hometown. This novel reflects the author’s wavering attitude between rejection and acceptance of the literary tendencies that were fashionable at the time: namely, the diatribe between calligrafi and contenutisti, that is, writers primarily interested in stylistic devices as against those who privileged a poetics of facts. This is also true of Jovine’s next novel, Ragazza sola (A Lonely Girl), which was issued in installments in

FRANCESCO JOVINE the journal I diritti della scuola between 1936 and 1937. Only with subsequent novels did Jovine’s critical perspective on the failures and social consequences of the Risorgimento become the subject of his literary work. His was an engaged account of the life and contingencies presiding over the working class of Italy’s South. Jovine, who joined the Communist Party (PCI) in 1948 and actively participated in the cultural and political debates that marked the immediate postwar years, depicts a world without any chance of social development, attacking the values upheld by the high-ranking leaders of Risorgimento. For this reason, a later novel, Signora Ava (Seeds in the Wind, 1942), attracted great critical attention and was considered Jovine’s first major literary achievement as well as a salient example of realistic fiction. Its title refers not to the novel’s protagonists but to a figure in a popular Southern song whose words Jovine quotes as an epigraph at the beginning of the book. The gist of the quotation is that the social context of the Italian South should remain identical to that of the past. The story unfolds in the final years of the Bourbon ruling and the beginnings of the unification in Jovine’s own region of Molise. The world of Don Matteo Tridone, a priest ‘‘dannato senza remissione’’ (damned without any hope of grace) and Don Carlo de Risio, ‘‘un dottore fisico’’ (a physician), as well as that of Pietro Veleno and the other peasants who died while working, establishes a gallery of characters who belong to an immutable social hierarchy. Detailed attention to social and linguistic differences links Jovine’s Signora Ava to the influence of the Italian veristi, particularly Giovanni Verga and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. Signora Ava is commonly viewed as an exemplary neorealistic narrative, along with the works of Corrado Alvaro, Carlo Levi, and Vitalino Brancati. Much of the historical research that Jovine included in the novel was later published in the periodical Belfagor with the title ‘‘Del brigantaggio merdionale’’ (On the Southern Brigandage, 1970). Jovine’s sociohistorical interests connected to his homeland were also strengthened by his journalistic activity for the paper Il Giornale d’Italia. A collection of articles dating back to 1941, which further explored the questione meridionale, appeared after Jovine’s death as Viaggio nel Molise (Travels in Molise, 1967). Jovine’s negative judgment of the aftermath of Risorgimento went hand in hand with his historical and philosophical interests as

well as his incipient Marxism and opposition to Fascism. Indeed a specific discussion of the role of Fascism in Molise became the subject of a collection of short stories, L’impero in provincia (The Empire in the Provinces, 1945). Jovine’s focus on the South of Italy and Molise, which was apparent since his first collections of short stories, Il ladro di galline (Chicken Thief, 1940); and Il pastore sepolto (The Buried Shepherd, 1945), is fully displayed in his last and best-known novel, Le terre del Sacramento (The Estate in Abruzzi), posthumously published in 1950. An emblematic work set in Molise in 1921–1922, at the time of the rise of the Fascist movement, it is deeply influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s thought regarding the social rebirth of the working class and the Italian Southern question. Jovine’s world of underprivileged people, who are unable to escape from their unchangeable future, is depicted with compelling epic coloring. Le terre del Sacramento recounts the peasants’ struggle for land through the main character Luca Marano, the son of peasants, who breaks the social chain and gains an education in order to raise the people of his village above their present subsistence. A rebellion against the local Fascist authority provides the last part of the book. The rebellion ends tragically with the death of Marano; however, this exemplary figure gives the peasants the strength to endure oppressive power. Jovine’s assertion is a declaration of human dignity embodied by the peasants through their passive resistance. It offers hope for the ethical rebirth and social transformation of a world long forgotten after the Fascist debacle.

Biography Born in Guardialfiera (Campobasso), on 9 October 1902. Moved to the Collegio Vescovile of Larino, 1911. Attended the Istituto Magistrale of Velletri where he gained his professional qualification as a schoolteacher, 1918. Started his training as a primary schoolteacher, 1919. Moved to Rome for his national service, 1922. After a period in Campobasso and Guardialfiera, returned to Rome and obtained a degree in philosophy from the University of Rome, 1925. Contributor to Primato, Oggi, L’Italia letteraria, 1927–1950. Married Dina Bertoni, 1928. After joining the ‘‘Alleanza della cultura’’ promoted by Emilio Sereni and influenced by Marxist ideology, Jovine worked in Italian schools in Northern Africa, 1937. After his stay in Tunisia and Cairo, moved back to Rome where he later 987

FRANCESCO JOVINE became a teaching assistant to professor Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, 1940. Joined the Resistance fight, 1943; enlisted in the Italian Communist Party, 1948. Correspondent of Il Giornale d’Italia, 1941–1945. Awarded the Viareggio prize for Le terre del Sacramento, 1950 (ex aequo with Carlo Bernari). Died in Rome, on 30 April 1950 of a heart attack. The ‘‘Francesco Jovine’’ prize for journalism was established in 1966. DIEGO BERTELLI See also: Neorealism Selected Works Collections Racconti, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Commedie inedite e cronache teatrali, edited by Francesco D’Episcopo, Ravenna: Longo, 1983. Scritti critici, edited by Patrizia Guida, Lecce: Milella, 2004.

Fiction Un uomo provvisorio, 1934. Ragazza sola, 1936–1937. Ladro di galline, 1940. Signora Ava, 1942; as Seeds of Time, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1946. Il pastore sepolto, 1945. L’impero in provincia: cronache italiane dei tempi moderni, 1945. Tutti i miei peccati, 1948. Le terre del Sacramento, 1950; as The Estate in Abbruzzi, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1952.

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Theater Il burattinaio metafisico, 1933. Giorni che rinasceranno, 1948.

Essays Viaggio nel Molise, edited by N. Perazzelli, 1967. ‘‘Del brigantaggio merdionale,’’ 1970.

Further Reading Balbo, Pier Paolo, Molise: un paesaggio letterario, Rome: Gangemi, 2002. Carducci, Nicola, Invito alla lettura di Francesco Jovine, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Cecchi, Emilio, Di giorno in giorno, Milan: Garzanti, 1954. D’Episcopo, Francesco (editor), Francesco Jovine scrittore molisano, Naples: Esi, 1994. D’Episcopo, Francesco, ‘‘L’effetto Pirandello nella narrativa di Francesco Jovine: ‘Ragazza sola,’’’ in Critica letteraria, 24, 90 (1996): 171–185. D’Episcopo, Francesco, Invito a Francesco Jovine uomo e scrittore: la vita e le opere, Ferrazzano: E. Nocera, 2001. Giardini, Gino, Francesco Jovine, Milan: Marzorati, 1967. Guida, Patrizia (editor), Francesco Jovine: scritti critici, Lecce: Micella, 2004. Litwan-Kunz, Monica, Francesco Jovine: mito e realta` nel Meridione, Berne: H. Lang, and Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1973. Mauro, Walter, Francesco Jovine, Carlo Bernari, Vasco Pratolini, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Muscetta, Carlo, Letteratura militante, Florence: Parenti, 1953. Procaccini, Alfonso, Francesco Jovine: The Quest for Realism, New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Ragni, Eugenio, Jovine, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972.

L RAFFAELE LA CAPRIA (1922–) natural surroundings. Using the metaphor of porosity, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin had similarly argued that the physical structure of the city, the fact that it is built on tuff, a porous rock formed by the consolidation of volcanic ash, which is visible especially in the hills of Posillipo, helps to explain its cultural specificity (One-way Street and Other Writings, 1979). In L’occhio di Napoli (The Eye of Naples, 1994), La Capria gave an explanation of the fascinating ‘‘interpenetration’’ of different architectural styles, both among themselves and with the surrounding natural landscape, that is most disconcerting to a foreign eye. Unlike other Mediterranean cities, Naples does not display classical artistic forms characterized by a ‘‘regular,’’ normative beauty. The city is instead a site of chaotic artistic forms, where the arabesque of medieval Arabic-Byzantine art meets the ornate forms of the Baroque. In L’armonia perduta: una fantasia sulla storia di Napoli (The Lost Harmony; A Fantasy on the History of Naples, 1986), La Capria attempted to retrace the history of the city and singled out the loss of the Neapolitan identity in the failed revolution of 1799, when the ruling class was executed under the eyes of the mocking populace. According to La Capria, the formation of the napoletanita` (Neapolitaness) resulted afterward, in the absence of a real ruling class, when the middle class took over trying to domesticate the lower classes. In this attempt, the city lost connection with the present,

Neapolitan novelist and critic Raffaele La Capria was among a group of young intellectuals who between 1946 and 1948 left Naples for Rome. Among them were Francesco Rosi, Antonio Ghirelli, Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, and Achille Millo. They had attended the same educational institutions, the Liceo Umberto and the University of Naples, and were close friends. In the 1980s the playwright Eduardo De Filippo called them the generation of the Fuitevenne (Neapolitan dialect for ‘‘Go away!’’), underscoring the fact that they had to leave the city of Naples in order to operate successfully in their fields. Later in his career, La Capria collaborated with one of his old friends, the filmmaker Francesco Rosi, in the seminal film Le mani sulla citta` (Hands over the City, 1963), a work that still remains one of the most powerful and courageous visual manifestos of political corruption: the denunciation of laurismo (Achille Lauro, as mayor of the city) and the housing speculation in the late 1950s. The critic Goffredo Fofi argued that La Capria had been writing constantly the same novel with the same two recurrent characters, himself and Naples (Strade maestre, 1966). In fact, the city of Naples continues to be at the core of La Capria’s narrative inspiration, and he himself has stated many times that distance provided the necessary objectivity for him to write about the city in a way that would otherwise have resulted in a partial and biased account. According to La Capria, the mental image of Naples is inseparable from its 989

RAFFAELE LA CAPRIA isolating itself and creating a representation of its inexistent identity that is still perpetrated in the repetition of its dialect and its worn-out popular stereotypes. La Capria writes from the privileged perspective of the upper-middle class, to which he belongs, looking at it with the gaze of the insider and of the outsider that is at the same time complicit and critical. In the autobiographical Ferito a morte (The Mortal Wound, 1961), he depicted the young bourgeoisie of the Neapolitan Yacht Club, fixed in an eternal state of adolescence, and the myth of the bella giornata (beautiful day), focusing on their responses to critical issues of cultural change, with a sharp eye, as Anna Maria Ortese had done in the last story (‘‘Il silenzio della ragione’’) of Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Bay Is Not Naples, 1953). Ferito a morte has been defined as one of the most beautiful novels of the post–World War II era, a bildungsroman that documents the city’s transition from the devastation of the war to the economic boom of the 1960s. Its complex formal style is indebted to surrealist, existentialist, and hermetic models (Breton, Camus, Moravia, and Montale) and the nouveau roman. The precision and clarity of La Capria’s prose, which carefully avoids any sentimentalism, conveys a well-crafted harmony and linearity while concealing a state of hidden uneasiness. His textual strategies erode the classical structure of the novel with the montage of images through stream of consciousness, the juxtaposition of different points of view, and the simultaneous description of multiple spaces.

Biography Raffaele La Capria was born in Naples, 3 October 1922. He served in the military in 1943 and met William Weaver, who was enrolled with the Allied Forces, 1944. He founded the literary journal Sud with Pasquale Prunas, Luigi Compagnone, Anna Maria Ortese, and Gianni Scognamiglio, 1945. In 1947 he received a law degree at the University of Naples and traveled to Paris and London. La Capria moved to Rome, 1949. He married Fiore Pucci, 1953. He attended the International Seminar of Literature at Harvard University, where he met Henry Kissinger, Lee Strasberg, and Allen Tate, in 1957. La Capria separated from his wife and began a relationship with the actress Ilaria Occhini, 1961. He was awarded the Strega Prize for Ferito a

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morte, 1961. He wrote the screenplay of Le mani sulla citta` with Francesco Rosi, 1963 and wrote the screenplay of Identikit, directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1974. His Amore e psyche was a finalist for the Campiello Prize, 1973. La Capria translated Jean Paul Sartre’s Huis clos as Porte chiuse for Patroni Griffi, 1978. He wrote the screenplay of Carlo Levi’s Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli with Francesco Rosi, 1979 and the screenplay of Beppe Fenoglio’s Una questione privata with Paolo Virzı`, 1982. He translated Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral for Patroni Griffi, 1984. He was awarded the Capri Prize for Capri e non piu` Capri, 1991, and the Campiello Prize for his career, 2001. The University of Caen organized an international symposium on La Capria, 2001. Antonio Piccolo read and provided a commentary of Ferito a morte on Radio Tre, 2001. La Capria was awarded the Chiara Prize for his career, 2001. PATRIZIA LA TRECCHIA

Selected Works Collections Tre romanzi in una giornata, Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

Fiction Un giorno d’impazienza, 1952; as A Day of Impatience, translated by William Weaver, 1954. Ferito a morte, 1961; as The Mortal Wound, translated by Marguerite Waldman, 1964. Amore e psyche, 1973; as This Has Nothing to Do with Me, translated by Kathrine Jason, 1991. Colapesce, 1974. False partenze: frammenti per una biografia letteraria, 1974. Fiori giapponesi, 1979. La neve del Vesuvio, 1988.

Critical Essays Variazioni sopra una nota sola, 1977. L’armonia perduta: una fantasia sulla storia di Napoli, 1986. Una visita a una centrale nucleare, 1987. Letteratura e salti mortali, 1990. Capri e non piu` Capri, 1991; as Capri and No Longer Capri, translated by Elisabeth Petroff and Richard Pioli, 2001. L’occhio di Napoli, 1994. L’apprendista scrittore, 1996. La mosca nella bottiglia: elogio del senso comune, 1996. Il sentimento della letteratura, 1997. Neapolitan Graffiti: come eravamo, 1998. Ultimi viaggi nell’Italia perduta, 1999. Lo stile dell’anatra, 2001. Letteratura e liberta`: conversazioni con Emanuele Trevi, 2002. Me visto da lui stesso, 2002.

GINA LAGORIO Cinquant’anni di false partenze ovvero l’apprendista scrittore, 2002. Guappo e gli altri animali, 2003.

Further Reading Benjamin, Walter, ‘‘Naples,’’ in One-way Street and Other Writings, London and New York: Verso, 1979. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La mosca nella bottiglia,’’ in La forma del saggio: definizione e attualita` di un genere letterario, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. De Seta, Cesare, ‘‘Confessioni di uno scrittore ‘‘non’’ napoletano,’’ in Cronache napoletane, edited by Piero Antonio Toma, Naples: Eurocomp, 2000. Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Narrare Napoli, anni Cinquanta: Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca,’’ Narrativa, 24 (January 2003): 159–172. Fofi, Goffredo, ‘‘Raffaele La Capria,’’ in Strade maestre: ritratti di scrittori italiani, Rome: Donzelli, 1996. Fofi, Goffredo, and Alfonso Berardinelli, Il romanzo involontario di Raffaele La Capria, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Grossi, Paolo (editor), Raffaele La Capria: letteratura, senso comune e passione civile. Atti del convegno

internazionale dell’Universita` di Caen: 18–19 maggio 2001, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Jeuland-Meynaud, Maryse, ‘‘Ferito a morte,’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 50 (1976): 131–158. Lamberti, Luigi, and Pina Lamberti Sorrentino, ‘‘Raffaele La Capria. Il romanzo della bella giornata,’’ in Napoli salvata dai suoi scrittori, Naples: Tempolungo, 1999. Manica, Raffaele, ‘‘Gli sguardi di La Capria,’’ in La prosa nascosta: narrazioni del Novecento italiano, Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano Editore, 2002. Mele, Angelo, ‘‘La Capria e il realismo,’’ Nostro Tempo, 11 (1962): 47–52. Pampaloni, Geno, et al., 9 modi di leggere Ferito a morte, Naples: Fausto Fiorentino, 1997. Perrella, Silvio (editor), ‘‘Gli anni Cinquanta a Napoli, andirivieni letterari,’’ in Napoli 1950–59: il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia, edited by Angela Tecce, Ferrara: Civiche Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, 2000. Storini, Monica Cristina, ‘‘I ‘libri non riusciti’: Polimorfia del romanzo nella scrittura di Raffaele La Capria,’’ Cristallo: Rassegna di Varia Umanita`, 45:1 (April 2003), 60–77. Terrile, Cristina, ‘‘Ferito a morte nel romanzo italiano del Novecento,’’ Narrativa, 24 (January 2003): 173–194.

GINA LAGORIO (1922–2005) Gina Lagorio’s strong ties to her native region of Piedmont played an important role in her artistic and critical production. The hard and stark landscape of the Langhe hills in southern Piedmont, where her family had worked the soil for generations, instilled in her a ‘‘geographical courage’’ that had a direct influence on her decision to become a writer. She inherited a deep sense of history from fellow Piedmontese writer, Beppe Fenoglio, to whom she dedicated a number of critical studies. With Cesare Pavese and Fenoglio, she shared a concrete faithfulness and deep attachment to the Langhe that surfaces as a dominant theme in all her works. Another important point of reference and inspiration in Lagorio’s writings was the severe and rocky coastal landscape of Liguria, where she lived as a young girl and where she raised her family. Her indebtedness to this region was also reflected in her critical works on the Ligurian poets Camillo Sbarbaro and Antonio Barile. From these two

literary and biographical backgrounds, there emerged a central tenet of her works: the theme of feminine indomitability as many of her female characters search for self-identity, maturity, and autonomy. Apart from her teaching duties at a local high school in Savona and her contributions to leading Italian literary journals, Lagorio began her distinguished creative writing career in the 1960s. Her first works included Le novelle di Simonetta (Simonetta’s Tales, 1960), a collection of children’s stories written for her first daughter; Il Polline (Pollen, 1966), a collection of short stories dedicated to the peasant women of the Langhe who had taught her ‘‘to breathe Piedmont’’ in a special way; and Un ciclone chiamata Titti (A Cyclone Called Titti, 1969), an autobiographical piece in which she explored the theme of positive motherhood. This first period came to an end with the death of her husband and the publication of Approssimato 991

GINA LAGORIO per difetto (Connected by Default, 1971), an autobiographical novel that captures artistically the events related to this tragic experience. In 1974 Lagorio settled in Milan, attracted by the vitality of the city’s cultural life. Shortly thereafter, she wrote her bestselling novel La spiaggia del lupo (The Beach of the Wolf, 1977), the story of a young woman from a town along the Ligurian riviera who struggles against the code of bourgeois respectability and discovers a new awareness of female independence and sexual freedom. In 1979 Lagorio returned artistically to Piedmont with the novel Fuori scena (Offstage). It is the story of a successful stage actress who, during a period of professional and personal crisis, leaves Rome in order to seek shelter and salvation in the ‘‘village of clear air’’ (Cherasco), the land of her roots, the place where she finds validity in a more natural setting. In 1983 Lagorio won the Flaiano prize for the play Raccontami quella di Flic (Tell Me the One about Flic), which would later appear in the collection Freddo al cuore (Cold at Heart, 1989). The following year she received the prestigious Viareggio Prize for her novel Tosca dei gatti (Tosca of the Cats, 1983). Set in a small seaside town in Liguria, the novel delineates the everyday gestures and words of a humble, aging, and lonely caretaker of an apartment complex, who succeeds in giving some sense to her bleak existence by communicating her maternal instinct and affections to her cats. Liguria reappears as the backdrop of Lagorio’s next novel, Golfo del Paradiso (The Gulf of Paradise, 1987). It is a fictional portrayal of the isolated and uncompromising painter Oscar Saccorotti, whose ‘‘genuine relationship with objects, people, and art’’ represented ‘‘a model of existence and a possible victory against confusion’’ for the author. Lagorio’s commitment to women’s rights led to her election in 1987 to the Italian parliament, where she served as a member of the nonaligned left for five years. During these years of intense political activity, she published the notebooks of her travels to the then Soviet Union in 1977 and 1988, Russia oltre l’Urss (Russia beyond the Soviet Union, 1989) and completed the novel Tra le mura stellate (Between the Starry Walls, 1991), considered by its author to be the ‘‘summa of her experience and the result of a long search into, and meditation on, the history of Cherasco’’ (Blelloch, ‘‘Gina Lagorio,’’ in Italian Women

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Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, 1994, p. 193). In her later works, Lagorio continued to turn to memory and the past, not as a form of nostalgic retreat but as a source of strength for the present. Her historical novel Il bastardo ovvero gli amori, i travagli e le lacrime di Don Emanuel di Savoia (The Bastard, or the Loves, Labors, and Tears of Don Emanuel of Savoy, 1996) is the story of the illegitimate son of Charles Emanuel I, ‘‘the Great,’’ the Duke of Savoy. Here Lagorio explored the question of young Emanuel’s ‘‘diversity,’’ his homosexuality, which resulted in painful marginalization. Lagorio’s book Raccontiamoci com’e` andata (Let’s Tell Each Other How It Went, 2003) is, as its subtitle suggests, a personal remembrance of her late husband, Emilio Lagorio, and of the Resistance movement in the city of Savona. It was a testament to her husband’s commitment to public duty and a reminder of how much the present can learn from the ideals and passions of the antiFascist movement. Lagorio’s final novel, Capita (It Happens, 2005), was sent to her publisher three weeks before her death. It is a story about her illness but, above all, it is a book full of curiosity and passion.

Biography Gina Lagorio was born in Bra, in the province of Cuneo, 1922. She studied at the University of Turin, where she earned a degree in English literature, 1943. She married Emilio Lagorio, 1945. Gina Lagorio taught Italian literature and history in Savona, 1954–1974. She moved to Milan and began working as a consultant for Garzanti Publishers, 1974. She was elected a member of the Chamber of Deputies, then of the Senate, as an Independent in the Italian Communist Party, 1987–1992. She contributed to numerous literary and cultural magazines, including Il ponte, Letterature moderne, Uomini e libri, and Paragone; she collaborated with RAI broadcasting on numerous cultural projects. She was awarded the Flaiano Prize, Pescara, 1983; Rapallo Prize, 1987; Viareggio Prize, 1994; Grinzane-Cavour Prize, TurinAlba, 1997; and Flamalgal Prize, Cuneo and Imperia, 2001. Lagorio died in Milan on 17 July 2005, after a long illness. MARK PIETRALUNGA

CRISTOFORO LANDINO Selected Works Fiction Le novelle di Simonetta, 1963. Attila re degli Unni, 1964. Il Polline, 1966. Un ciclone chiamata Titti, 1969. Approssimato per difetto, 1971. Qualcosa nell’aria: Racconti, 1975. La spiaggia del lupo, 1977. Fuori scena, 1979. Tosca dei gatti, 1983. Golfo del Paradiso, 1987. Freddo al cuore, 1989. Tra le mura stellate, 1991. Il silenzio, 1993. Il bastardo ovvero Gli amori, i travagli e le lacrime di Don Emanuel di Savoia, 1996. Inventario, 1998. L’arcadia americana, 1999. Elogio della zucca, 2000. Capita, 2005.

Nonfiction Fenoglio, 1970. Sui racconti di Sbarbaro, 1973.

Sbarbaro: un modo spoglio di esistere, 1981. Penelope senza tela: argomenti e testi, edited by Franco Mollia, 1984. Russia oltre l’URSS, 1989. La stella di Cherasco, 1990. Il decalogo di Kieslowski, 1992. Raccontiamo com’e` andata: Memoria di Emilio Lagorio e della Resistenza a Savona, 2003.

Further Reading Blelloch, Paola, ‘‘Gina Lagorio,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Felici, Lucio, ‘‘Gina Lagorio,’’ Otto/Novecento, 4 (1980), 121–147. Frassica, Pietro, ‘‘Gina Lagorio and Tosca’s Solitude,’’ Italica, 65:4 (1988), 329–343. Maffia, Dante, Forme espressive e radici nella narrative di Gina Lagorio, Acireale: Lunarionuovo, 1985. Mollia, Franco, ‘‘La piaga c’ho nel core,’’ Lettore di Provincia, 29:101 (1998), 27–45. Pietralunga, Mark, ‘‘Gina Lagorio and the Courage of Women,’’ in Santo L. Arico` (ed.), Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1990.

CRISTOFORO LANDINO (1424–1498) Poet, professor, militant critic, and philosopher, Cristoforo Landino contributed the theory of vernacular humanism to fifteenth-century culture and renewed Italian literary studies with scholarly perspective. Landino’s theoretical and literary writings offered a model of poetry, style, and language to a generation of writers such as Lorenzo Il Magnifico, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and other protagonists of the early Renaissance. The cultural and literary model he outlined represented the answer of Florentine culture to the crisis of the fifteenth century and an alternative to Lorenzo Valla’s scientific philology. Landino started his intellectual journey as a neoLatin poet. Most of his youthful production was gathered in a collection of Latin elegies, entitled Xandra, which he began in 1443 and constantly revised until 1458. The first version of the book, dedicated to Leon Battista Alberti, documents the features of Landino’s earliest poetry: the imitation

of classical motifs, an idyllic and descriptive vein, and a conception of love and female characters that followed the example of Latin elegy. Changes in the second version of Xandra are shown by the poems collected in the second part, which he wrote as an answer to contemporary literary tendencies such as the erotic neo-Latin poetry of Siena. Dedicated entirely to a single female character, Landino combined motifs from Petrarch and Propertius and fused modern sensibility and rhetorical patterns with ancient metrics and language. Further changes in the third version (dedicated to Piero de’ Medici) were concentrated in the poems found in the last part of the book. Adjusting to the new Florentine scene dominated by the oligarchic regime of the Medicis, Landino’s lyrics reflected political and historical themes, blending elegiac patterns with the model of Virgil. Only in 1475–1476 would Landino return to poetry, writing poems about neo-Platonic subjects connected to his philosophical engagement. 993

CRISTOFORO LANDINO In fact, once he became a professor at the Studio Fiorentino, succeeding Carlo Marsuppini, he worked mostly as a literary critic and a philosopher. As a teacher, Landino did not forget his literary and poetic debut. In his approach to the humanities, he rejected the tradition of civic humanism, which considered study as a step toward political and social life. He also rejected Lorenzo Valla’s reformist philological reasoning, which approached the literary text as a historical source that was to be framed and interpreted within its original context. Rather, he supported a contemplative and literary approach to studies based on the neo-Platonist theory of poetry as a source of knowledge and civilization. In his classes, he adopted creative techniques, such as translating from the vernacular to Latin, which encouraged his pupils to pursue artistic activities. His method of literary analysis was stylistic and rhetorical: It evaluated the text as a model of style and doctrine, something that was useful to writers of the period. Furthermore, he paid constant attention to emerging Tuscan writers, thus demonstrating his vocation for critical activity despite his didactic commitments. The most representative document of Landino’s method was the Prolusione petrarchesca (Introduction to Petrarch, 1467), a discourse he delivered as the first official lecturer of Petrarch in Florence. It attests to Landino’s attempt to renew Italian literature in a humanistic light and is also indicative of his patriotic convictions. Other didactic activities included his commentaries of the Latin poets Horace, Virgil, and Persius. Landino developed his conception of poetry while engaged in a dialogue with the influential Platonist thinker Marsilio Ficino and his academy. This encounter produced an intense philosophical activity, which began with the treatise De nobilitate animae (On the Nobility of the Soul, ca. 1471), also known as De Anima (On the Soul), and concluded with De vera nobilitate (On True Nobility, ca. 1487). In his dialogues, Landino discussed problems such as the immortality and dignity of humankind, combined with the Platonic heritage and Latin philosophical works. His approach to the philosophical text discarded Scholasticism and adopted a rhetorical method of analysis. In his expositions, he made use of the rhetorical form of the disputatio. Landino’s theoretical activity culminated in the Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldulensian Disputations, ca. 1480), a philosophical dialogue in four books, and a literary turning point

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evidenced by his subsequent writings. In this work, the author imagined four days of Platonizing conversations between Lorenzo de’ Medici, Leon Battista Alberti, Marsilio Ficino, and Donato Acciaiuoli, outlining an ideal figure of the intellectual suitable for the court of Florence in the age of the Medici. The intellectual’s task, in this new historical context, was the education and counselling of the prince whose activity could be inspired by philosophical principles. Poetry was no longer merely an instrument of knowledge and civilization but was also the source for models of humanity representing philosophical and moral principles. Hence, Landino was forced to develop a philosophical approach to the literary text and a new method of analysis that combined stylistic and doctrinal knowledge with literary techniques such as the allegory. This method was applied to his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid (1488) and developed in the third and fourth books of the Disputationes Camaldulenses. Landino continued to practice the method defined and tested in the Disputationes Camaldulenses in his Comento sopra la Comedia (Commentary on the Divine Comedy, 1481), which is considered the masterpiece of his critical activity and the most important document of vernacular Italian humanism. The commentary is based on a wide knowledge of theology and astrology along with an extraordinary proficiency in the Tuscan vernacular. Dante’s text is explained and linguistically altered so it can be completely understood by his contemporaries. Landino, however, refused the heritage of scientific philology and ignored the textual tradition of manuscripts documenting Dante’s work. Alternatively, he approached Dante’s poetry on a neo-Platonic theoretical basis and in humanistic terms. With this synthesis of Christian religion and pagan culture, doctrine, and poetry, he interpreted the Comedia as the allegory of humanity’s ascent from earth to heaven, from materiality to spirituality. The great success of his commentary not only demonstrates Landino’s influence on the reception of Dante throughout the sixteenth century but also attests to the presence of an alternative idea of poetry, study, and humanities in early Renaissance Italy. His philosophical and humanistic solution to the crisis of the fifteenth century did not survive Pietro Bembo’s reformation of Italian poetry and language. However, the model of humanity Landino identified in Dante’s Comedia endured.

TOMMASO LANDOLFI

Biography

Commentaries

Cristoforo Landino was born in Florence, 1424. He did early studies in classics, law, and poetics with Carlo Marsuppini and Leon Battista Alberti. He took part in the literary competition Certame Coronario, 1441. He moved to Rome, 1446. Landino was appointed to the chair of poetics and oratory at the Studio Fiorentino, 1458. He defined his cultural program in the inaugural lecture on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, 1467. He devoted himself to teaching, philosophical speculation, and literary criticism, 1468–1498. Landino died in Borgo alla collina (Arezzo), 1498. MATTEO SORANZO Selected Works Collections Cristophori Landini Carmina Omnia, ex codicibus manuscriptis, edited by Alessandro Perosa, Florence: Olschki, 1939. Scritti critici e teorici, edited by Roberto Cardini, 2 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1974.

Poetry ‘‘Xandra,’’ 1458.

Philosophical Treatises De nobilitate animae, ca. 1471; books 1 and 2, edited by Alessandro Paoli in Annali delle Universita` toscane, 34 (1915) and new series 1 (1916); book 3, edited by Giovanni Gentile in Annali delle Universita` toscane, new series 2(1917). Disputationes Camaldulenses, ca. 1480; critical edition by Peter Lohe, 1980. De vera nobilitate, ca. 1487; critical edition by Maria Teresa Liaci, 1970.

Comento sopra la Comedia, 1481; critical edition by Paolo Procaccioli, 2001.

Further Reading Cardini, Roberto, La critica del Landino, Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Cardini, Roberto, ‘‘Landino e Dante,’’ Rinascimento, 30 (1990), 175–190. Cardini, Roberto, ‘‘Landino e Lorenzo,’’ Lettere Italiane, 45:3 (1993), 361–375. Di Cesare, Mario A., ‘‘Cristoforo Landino on the Name and Nature of Poetry: The Critic as Hero,’’ The Chaucer Review, 21:2 (1986), 155–181. Di Cesare, Mario A., ‘‘Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses,’’ in The Early Renaissance: Virgil and the Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony L. Pellegrini, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1985. Ecker, Ute (editor), Cristoforo Landino. Index, Hildesheim: Olms, 1998. Giannantonio, Pompeo, Cristoforo Landino e l’Umanesimo volgare, Naples: Liguori, 1971. Gilson, Simon A., Dante and Renaissance Florence, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kallendorf, Craig, ‘‘Cristoforo Landino’s Aeneid and the Humanist Critical Tradition,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 36:4 (1983), 519–546. Ludwig, Walther, ‘‘The Beginnings of Catullan Neo-Latin Poetry,’’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis, edited by Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard J. Schoeck, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991. Murgatroyd, Paul, ‘‘Landino’s Xandra 3.3 and Its Ancient Latin Models,’’ Renaissance Studies, 11:2 (1997), 57–60. McNair, Bruce G., ‘‘Cristoforo Landino’s De Anima and His Platonic Sources,’’ Rinascimento, 32 (1992), 227–245. Procaccioli, Paolo, Filologia ed esegesi dantesca nel Quattrocento: l’Inferno nel Comento sopra la Comedia di Cristoforo Landino, Florence: Olschki, 1989.

TOMMASO LANDOLFI (1908–1979) Tommaso Landolfi was Italy’s master of literary horror in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. Critics have variously characterized Landolfi’s works (novels, short stories, plays, and poetry) as fantastic, surreal, magical, or grotesque. His flowing, elegant prose style is marked by a difficult lexicon that combines somewhat jarringly

with subjects like degeneration and death. The cultural milieu within which the writer began his career in the 1930s was, loosely, Hermeticism and the Florentine literary journal associated with it, Campo di Marte. The Hermetic trend favored difficult, enigmatic language and sometimes arcane symbolism, which harked back to earlier lyric 995

TOMMASO LANDOLFI traditions, especially medieval ones. This poetic strategy allowed authors to distance themselves from official political efforts (including censorship) to establish a ‘‘Fascist art.’’ Landolfi was himself a notorious recluse (with a penchant, though, for gaming). The 1930s were also years of heated debate over Italian national identity, over whether ‘‘Italianness’’ derived from traditional agricultural, small-town values or from Italy’s great urban civilization, linked to ancient Rome. Landolfi was able to sidestep this cultural debate by writing of ‘‘other worlds’’ of the imagination—a move that linked his name to magical realism. For example, in the short story ‘‘Il mar delle blatte’’ (The Sea of Cockroaches), first published in Letteratura in 1938 and then collected in the volume of the same title, the sea is afloat with cockroaches. Undoubtedly, Landolfi favored shocking distancing mechanisms in his writing, along with the theme of death as the final detachment from the world. Yet it would be a mistake to limit one’s reading of his corpus to existential matters. Landolfi’s horror stories, with their extreme representations and their nineteenth-century aura, create an anticonventional vision of modern social realities as themselves monstrous. This view had an important effect on subsequent generations of Italian writers, especially Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia. By the same token, Landolfi’s writing was less in vogue in the two decades following World War II when neo-Realist aesthetic norms were predominant. Avant-garde critics were instrumental in a rebirth of critical interest in Landolfi in the late 1960s, shortly before his death. His many translations from Russian literature (Gogol, Lermontov, and Pushkin) were another important literary legacy. Landolfi’s narrative works use one of a variety of psychological devices. The fictions often enter into the mind of a phobic maniac (insects abound) on the verge of murder or some other ferocious act. Since a madman or, in some cases, a madwoman would not be thinking about how to explain the madness while going about his or her deeds, Landolfi, by depicting their inner world, left his reader in the dark about the actual causes and the effects of derangement. Landolfi thus produced puzzles and conundrums, and he did so with superb timing and buildup—as well as few tight endings. The theme of obsession and its forms of expression in words and deeds were his strong suit, and his creations set out to be shocking and freakish. As befits this subject matter, his narratives are predominantly nonlinear when not 996

truly fragmentary. The representation of reality is filtered through the fundamental instability of the speaking, writing subject. Supernatural elements such as specters and ghosts are frequent in his stories, as are elements drawn from science fiction. In the novella Cancroregina (Cancerqueen, 1950), a man leaves earth in a spaceship and begins to experience paranoid thoughts that lead him to murder his companion, wrap him up, and eject him from the ship. The body gets caught in the ship’s slipstream and follows it endlessly as the narrator begins to hallucinate, seeing bugs around him and in his orifices. The device of increasing madness also governs the narration in the long story Le labrene (The Geckos, 1974), in which the narrator, who pathologically dreads geckos, becomes paralyzed with fear when one drops on him from the ceiling. He remains sentient though others believe he is dead and entomb him. The narrator recounts his tale of horror all too convincingly. In other narratives, repulsive men prey on the innocent, usually women or children, including their own offspring, then recount their fantasies in disturbing detail. In yet other stories, Landolfi crafted surreal situations, for instance in a group of stories with animal narrators or protagonists such as a diabolical monkey in Le due zittelle (The Two Old Maids, 1946). Comic elements are rare, but irony abounds, as in ‘‘La moglie di Gogol’’ (Gogol’s Wife), a story published in the 1954 volume Ombre (Shadows) in which the Russian novelist keeps a blow-up doll (his so-called wife) as an erotic toy until one day it bursts. The early novel La pietra lunare (The Moonstone, 1939) features a kinder narrator, a young poet, Giovancarlo Scarabozzo, who falls in love with an otherwordly being. He meets a young seamstress and family friend, Guru´, and notices to his dismay that she has cloven goat feet. No one else confirms the veracity of his perception, however. Guru´, who becomes his lover, hails from a local aristocratic family that has degenerated into poverty and takes its revenge on the townsfolk in acts of sadism. Her home is a corner of a ruined castle separate from the town. Set in the provinces and satirizing petit-bourgeois life, the novel takes off in an even more bizarre direction when the goat-woman draws the hero out of the village on a moonlit night to nearby rocky mountains where she couples with a ram and gains goat legs. She is one of a race of were-goats and other were-animals who inhabit a moonlike realm and who come out with the full moon

TOMMASO LANDOLFI to interact with ferocious bandits who seem to hark back to Gothic romance. The bandits are in fact specters from the past. The novel ends with the narrator’s uncertainty: Were the night’s events a dream or indeed did he travel to another world? Among subsequent works, the novel Racconto d’autunno (An Autumn Story, 1947) stands out as an exemplary text. It too is set in a rural mountainous area, which has utterly resisted the growing ‘‘norm’’ of urbanization in modernity. In a remote castle, a young soldier during World War II encounters two beings that shatter all norms of the world he had heretofore inhabited. Even the physical constraints of reality are loosed in an ancient, enchanted place when a frightening specter seems to come to life. The novel takes the themes of La pietra lunare to an extreme when incest and sadomasochism are normalized by a degenerate aristocratic family relegated to the remote castlelodge. The discoveries of the hero (including a sexual dungeon) defy his understanding. The plot thickens when a seemingly unhinged young woman reveals herself to him after the protagonist has followed for several days the signs of her fleeting, hidden presence among the secret passageways and rooms of the dusty, dank manor. She is Lucia, the spitting image of her mother, seen by the soldier in a portrait. The decrepit old father who lives with his daughter and two enormous dogs has been treating his daughter as a wife after the woman’s death, leading young Lucia to near-madness and a belief that she possesses magical powers that once belonged to her unearthly, beautiful, and cruel mother. Landolfi gives Lucia a dual character not only as the double of her mother but as a hybrid Medusa with snaky black locks who communes with animals but also tortures them. This communing, or knowledge, seems to derive from Lucia’s isolation in this remote area, separated from all humans except for her incestuous father. Her powers of perception have grown to monstrous proportions. Part of Lucia’s madness is a factor of disease, her inherited epilepsy, but Landolfi also suggested that taking her mother’s place has left a hole in her own identity. This lack leads to the blockage of self-awareness. Landolfi used a narrative of violence in order to portray misdirection in identity formation, which has unexpected results: abnormal female powers and horror. A similar narrative strategy appears in Landolfi’s fascinating, multiple quasi-autobiographic works,

La biere du pecheur (The Sinner’s Coffin, or The Fisherman’s Beer, 1953; the title, written without accents, is intentionally ambiguous), Rien va (Nothing Goes, 1963), and Des mois (About Myselves, 1967), in which we learn of a marriage to a virtual child-woman and of an addiction to gambling, as well as, and perhaps more importantly, of his theories of language and writing. Central to these is in fact the notion that the ‘‘hole’’ or lack that is the ‘‘I’’ is susceptible to moments of loss of control and is bereft of a calming sense of selfawareness. While Landolfi’s fundamental literary strategy was to write darkly about inscrutable things such as violent transgressions that go beyond the realm of comprehension, other questions are crucial. The root meaning of ‘‘enigma’’ is the Greek ainigma, meaning literally to speak darkly. Ainigma is also the root for the word ‘‘allegory.’’ This semantic connection is crucial in reading Landolfi. Are his narratives to be read as ‘‘about’’ something else? The issue of allegory and historical allusion is not clear-cut in his works, and this is part of their fascination. Horror is never reined in or put under control, and no myth of stabilization or circumscription of the fearful is put forward. Specters are not exorcised. It follows that human beings in their collectivities—be they families, villages, or nations—are abandoned, each on their own in a narrative of fear without resolution. Perhaps loneliness was the greatest horror in a world in the grasp of extremes, in the world of mid-twentieth-century Europe.

Biography Tommaso Landolfi was born in Pico Farnese (Frosinone), 9 August 1908, the descendant of an ancient, aristocratic Lombard family. His mother died in childbirth when Tommaso was one and a half years old. He was educated in Prato at the Collegio Cicognini. In 1929 he published his first short story, ‘‘Maria Giuseppa,’’ in the magazine Vigilie letterarie, which he coedited with Renato Poggioli. In June 1942 he was imprisoned for a month in Florence, where he had joined the anti-Fascist Giubbe rosse group. The family home in Pico Farnese was taken over first by the Germans and then by the Allies from the fall of 1943 until May of 1944. In 1956 Landolfi married at the age of 48 and fathered two children. In 1971, he suffered a heart attack, and 997

TOMMASO LANDOLFI in 1973 he developed cancer. He was awarded the Premio Strega in 1975 in recognition of his literary career and won the Viareggio Prize for Il tradimento, 1977. Landolfi died in Rome, 8 July 1979. KEALA JEWELL Selected Works Collections Racconti, Florence: Vallecchi, 1961. Opere I (1937–1959), edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991. Opere II (1960–1971), edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1992.

Landolfi, Idolina, and Ernestina Pellegrini (editors), Gli altrove di Landolfi: atti del Convegno di studi, Firenze 4–5 dicembre, 2001, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. McLoughlin, Michael, ‘‘Landolfi’s Phobias: Fear and the Fantastic in the Stories of Tommaso Landolfi,’’ Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 10:2 (1997), 44–71. Macrı´, Oreste, Tommaso Landolfi: Narratore poeta critico artefice della lingua, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Pandini, Giancarlo, Landolfi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Tommaso Landolfi,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol.2, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Tarquini, Tarcisio (editor), Landolfi, libro per libro, Alatri: Hetea, 1988.

Fiction Dialogo dei massimi sistemi, 1937. Il mar delle blatte e altre storie, 1939. La pietra lunare, 1939. Le due zittelle, 1946. Racconto d’autunno, 1947; as An Autumn Story, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, 1989. Cancroregina, 1950; as Cancerqueen, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1971. La biere du pecheur, 1953. Ottavio di Saint-Vincent, 1958. Rien va, 1963. Ombre, 1964. Un amore del nostro tempo, 1965. Des mois, 1967. Le labrene, 1974. A caso, 1975.

Poetry ‘‘Viola di morte,’’ 1972. ‘‘Il tradimento,’’ 1977.

Theater Landolfo VI di Benevento, 1959. Scene dalla vita di Cagliostro, 1963.

Other Un paniere di chiocciole, 1968.

Further Reading Capek-Habekovic, Romana, Tommaso Landolfi’s Grotesque Images, New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Carlino, Marcello, Landolfi e il fantastico, Rome: Lithos Editrice, 1998. Fontanella, Luigi (editor), Omaggio a Tommaso Landolfi, special issue of Gradiva, 3 (1989). Landolfi, Idolina (editor), La liquida vertigine: atti delle Giornate di studio su Tommaso Landolfi, Prato, Convitto Nazionale Cicognini, 5–6 febbraio, 1999, Florence: Olschki, 2002. Landolfi, Idolina (editor), Le lunazioni del cuore: Saggi su Tommaso Landolfi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996.

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RACCONTO D’AUTUNNO, 1947 Novel by Tommaso Landolfi

Tommaso Landolfi’s Racconto d’autunno (An Autumn Story, 1947) presents a puzzling set of contradictions. The narrative unfolds over a few weeks of what seems to be the late autumn of 1943 (though no precise temporal or geographical markers are supplied), the season that followed a great upheaval: Mussolini’s removal from power in July and the subsequent armistice between Italy and the Allies on 8 September. With Hitler’s support, Mussolini was quickly restored to power, but only in Northern Italy, as the Republic of Salo`. In Central and Southern Italy, the populace and Italian military came under Allied domination when, precisely in the autumn of 1943, the invasion of Italy began in earnest. In Nazi/Fascist-controlled areas of the country, soldiers had to make a dramatic choice either to join Fascist groupings or to join the Resistance. What resulted has been called a civil war. In the plot of Landolfi’s novel, the protagonist has already made his decision to resist Fascism but one day finds himself cut off from his comrades at arms. At that point, his adventures begin. The location of the action is signaled only by the letter ‘‘P.,’’ a probable reference to Pico Farnese, Landolfi’s birthplace and home (commandeered first by

TOMMASO LANDOLFI the Germans and then by the Allies), near the Gustav line. Landolfi’s hero retreats into a remote valley. Famished, exhausted, and alone, he comes across a decrepit, secluded manor guarded by ferocious dogs and attempts entry in order to gain protection and sustenance. Landolfi rather quickly sets aside the war story and transforms the narrative into an eerie, obsessive tale of the soldier’s encounter with seemingly demented, certainly tormented denizens of the uncanny abode. An ancient, impoverished aristocrat at first appears to live alone in the crumbling seventeenth-century hunting lodge, replete with secret passages, hidden rooms, and a dungeon. Curious noises in the night cause the protagonist to undertake a prolonged search for an unidentified presence within the labyrinthine space. He falls in love with a woman painted in a portrait and subsequently is led to believe he has unearthed her comely ghost. It turns out that the aristocratic beauty was the wife of the old man and that his daughter, her double, has been secreted on the premises. She does her father’s bidding now as a surrogate wife, enacting with him rites of resurrection and reenacting what had been a cruel, sadistic relationship. The questions Landolfi pressed upon his readers are legion. The young woman, Lucia, evinces witchlike traits, as she seems to hear the ‘‘voices’’ of animals and inanimate things. She possesses knowledge of the supernatural that is no match for the soldier’s rational explorations of the castle world. When the soldier becomes entrapped and paralyzed by obsessions, Lucia cautiously seeks him out and reveals herself to him–her only hope to extract herself from the chains of a decadent, ferocious, incestuous aristocracy lost to modernity. The story Lucia tells remains incoherent for protagonist and reader alike, since she suffers from lapses of epilepsy and her knowledge of the world is tragically incomplete. At the end of the novel, Lucia is shot not by the Germans but by Allied

Moroccan troops fighting alongside the ‘‘Free French’’ during the campaign to gain Rome. Readers and critics have wondered how the war narrative, the ‘‘Gothic’’ tale, and the love story can possibly be read and understood together. Indeed, critical opinion is distinctly divided between readers who view the Resistance setting as a pretext for an experiment in the grotesque genre and those who would read the theme of an excruciating pursuit of knowledge in this novel as indivisible from the context of cultural and political disorientation and tragedy of the autumn of 1943. It is this enigma that lends Racconto d’autunno its power. KAELA JEWELL Editions First edition: Racconto d’autunno, Florence: Vallecchi, 1947. Critical edition: Edited by Idolina Landolfi, Milan: Adelphi, 1995. Translation: As An Autumn Story, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1989.

Further Reading Amigoni, Ferdinando, ‘‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi,’’ Italica, 77:1 (2000): 69–80. Carbone, Rocco, ‘‘La dimora violata: Tommaso Landolfi e Racconto d’autunno,’’ Chroniques italiennes, 47–48 (1996): 67–77. Carlino, Marcello, ‘‘Tommaso Landolfi,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura Italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 11, Milan: Motta, 1999. Cecchini, Leonardo, Parlare per le notti: il fantastico nell’opera di Tommaso Landolfi, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press and University of Copenhagen, 2001. De Robertis, Giuseppe, ‘‘Landolfi liberato,’’ Tempo, 15–22 November 1947, p. 11. Landolfi, Idolina, ‘‘Nota al testo,’’ in Tommaso Landolfi, Racconto d’autunno, Milan: Adelphi, 1995. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, ‘‘Racconto d’autunno,’’ in Scrittori di un secolo, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Tarquini, Tarciso (editor), Landolfi libro per libro, Alatri: Hetea, 1988.

IL LASCA See Anton Francesco Grazzini (Il Lasca)

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LITERATURE IN LATIN

THE LAST LETTERS OF JACOPO ORTIS See Le Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Work by Ugo Foscolo)

THE LATE MATTIA PASCAL See Il Fu Mattia Pascal (Work by Luigi Pirandello)

LITERATURE IN LATIN The populations of the Roman Empire stopped speaking Latin around the time of the fall of Rome—a phenomenon that, naturally, happened also in Italy, where the language split into different regional dialects. Nevertheless, Latin in both spoken and written forms survived for many centuries and remained the vehicle of culture for the upper classes up to the sixteenth century throughout Europe. If, on the one hand, the diffusion of the vernaculars in daily communication was relatively fast, on the other, the status of such languages for literary production remained marginal for a long time. During the Middle Ages, Latin was still known as gramatica, as Dante himself used to call it, making a distinction between it and the variety of local dialects. For this reason, it should not be surprising that the wide majority of extant written texts until the 1300s are in Latin, a language that retained a large range of uses: theology, philosophy (St. Thomas Aquinas and the whole patristic tradition are outstanding examples), chronicles, codes of laws, acts of chancellery, and even treatises of medicine and astrology, as well both holy (liturgical hymns, sequenzas) and secular 1000

poetry (the goliardic poems of the clerici vagantes). There are enormous differences among these uses: Pier delle Vigne’s language, for instance, is extremely refined, while Aquinas’s Latin is simpler in its structure and rich with colloquialisms. The figure of Dante in this context assumes a crucial role, as he was the first to theorize the potential of emerging dialects in literary uses in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305), written in Latin to awaken the interest of a highly educated public, and then to put his theory into practice with the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). During the fourteenth century, all the official acts were written in Latin, and a central subject for students was grammar, which meant Latin. As much as they may be recognized as crucial from a historical perspective, works in the vernacular like Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373) and Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374) did not change much in the linguistic scene of the time, nor did their authors mean to change it. Boccaccio wrote his doctrinal works such as the Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, ca. 1350–1360) in Latin, and

LITERATURE IN LATIN Petrarch believed that he would be remembered for his Africa (ca. 1338–1374), an enormous historical poem written in hexameters. Indeed, he spoke Latin fluently, wrote letters in Latin, and probably even thought in that language: Even the annotations at the margins of the manuscripts of his Canzoniere (not by coincidence named Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), were in Latin. In his conception, the vernacular could be used in poetry for specific stylistic purposes, without challenging the intrinsic superiority of Latin. Petrarch’s use of the language was extremely refined and elegant, and Cicero was his model. During the so-called preHumanism, a similar approach was followed by Lovato Lovati (ca. 1240–1309) and Albertino Mussato (1261–1329) in Padua and by Giovanni del Virgilio (ca. 1300–ca. 1327) in Bologna and continued later in Florence by Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), Leonardo Bruni (d. 1444), and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459). After the midfifteenth century, writers in their works harked back to the language of the time of Augustus, purifying it from formal constructs and vocabulary imported from medieval Latin, and as a result the renewed language of highly educated people became again completely distinct from that spoken in the chancelleries and schools. In that century, Latin was thus used in the scientific, philosophical, and literary fields. However, there was a new approach to ancient works, as texts were compared to each other and studied to establish a version that closely matched the original Latin: Thus philology was born. After Petrarch, many humanists searched through libraries all over Europe for unknown texts and authors who had been forgotten. Their commitment led to the rediscovery of such works as Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Meawhile, Greek language and its literature also began to arouse renewed interest among intellectuals. During Humanism, the dominant genre was the treatise, normally on philosophical and literary topics, with the Platonic dialogue as its model. The genre reflected the spirit of the time, the active process of the transmission of culture. Among the large number of writers and works, Giannozzo Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man, 1452), and Lorenzo Valla’s De voluptate (On Pleasure, 1430) and his best-known work De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, 1440) are considered as perfect examples. Furthermore, Valla’s treatise is also an excellent philological study, which led the author to prove the

falsity of the famous document on which the Church founded its temporal power. Examples of the genre proliferated throughout the quattrocento, including Leon Battista Alberti’s Profugiorum ab aerumna (Flight from Hardship, 1441–1442), a treatise on the peace of the soul in which the author argued that men must have such calm even during adversities, and De re aedificatoria (Ten Books of Architecture, 1485), an architectural treatise; Giovanni Pontano’s De fortuna (On Fortune, 1460) and De principe (On the Prince, 1468), a manual of politics that recalled the classical ideal of the wise men of government; Pico della Mirandola’s Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486), a treatise on human beings and their intermediate position between material and spiritual beings; and Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldulensian Disputations, 1480), on the advantages of contemplative life versus active life. However, other genres were also practiced, nor was Latin limited to the works of philosophers. The artist Piero della Francesca wrote De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective in Painting, 1482), in which he theorized the discovery of perspective and its rules. Angelo Polizano, mostly remembered for his verses in the vulgar tongue, wrote a Miscellanea (Miscellany, 1489) of philological researches, as well as lyrics in Latin modeled on classical Latin and Greek. The epistolary production remained in Latin as well, even for private purposes: Examples include the correspondence of figures such as Paolo Cortesi or Laura Cereta. In this context, the memoir, a genre between the treatise and the historiographic work, arose and enjoyed great popularity. Enea Silvio Piccolomini dominated this field with his Commentarii rerum memorabilium (Commentaries, 1462), which presented his personal reflections, autobiographical memories, and a political analysis of the time. In the sixteenth century the vernacular began to impose itself on the cultural scene. The revival of classical Latin had produced at that point a language that was extremely different from the one spoken in everyday life by normal people and was limited to few aristocrats. Indeed, classical Latin became a dead language, and the vernacular took its place, being used in an increasing number of city statutes, in court acts, and of course in literature, a field in which vernacular production soon surpassed that in Latin. Nevertheless, the question of the recognition of the formal dignity of the new language provoked a major debate, the questione della lingua, which found a conclusion satisfactory to most in Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua 1001

LITERATURE IN LATIN (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525), in which he proposed Petrarch as the ideal linguistic and stylistic model for poetry and Boccaccio for prose. However, the process of recognition of the vernacular was neither rapid nor homogeneous. The great majority of works printed in the cinquecento were still in Latin, the language in which students in schools were taught and lectures in universities were given. Moreover, Latin was the language of the Church well into the twentieth century, when with the second Vatican Council (1962–1965) other languages were allowed for the liturgy. In the second half of the sixteenth and in the seventeenth century, Latin remained also the language of science, for instance in the case of Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius (The Starry Messenger, 1610), even as its usage declined in literature, in which Petrarch’s style became the tradition to be imitated. The only literary area in which Latin still had a crucial role was in the works written in a mixture of both Latin and vulgar, the so-called Macaronic, which reached a remarkable quality with works such as Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (1552). Structured as a chivalrous poem, it created a new language that applied Latin morphology to vernacular expressions. In this context, the mixture of low standards and elevated style achieved a completely original artistic effect, and it did not in any way suggest merely a poor knowledge of classical texts. By the eighteenth century, Latin had been almost completely abandoned, even in a scientific context. However, the language of the period can no longer be called vernacular, as it was Italian in most respects. The last among the major Italian writers that composed verses in Latin—and in a completely Italian linguistic context—was Giovanni Pascoli, whose Latin production includes 32 short poems collected with the title of Carmina (Poems, 1914) and several fragments. The language that he used was obscure, tense, and complex, and it is impossible to find any sort of similarity with Petrarch or other classical models. VALERIO VICARI

1002

Further Reading Barrigan, Joseph R., ‘‘Early Neo-Latin Tragedy in Italy,’’ in Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Lovaniensis: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Louvain, 23–28 August 1971, edited by Jozef IJsewijn et al., Munich: Fink; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1971. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Storia della lingua italiana, 10 vols., Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989–2004. Canfora, Davide, ‘‘La produzione latina del cinquecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 10, La tradizione dei testi, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Coppini, Donatella, and Paolo Viti, ‘‘La produzione latina dell’eta` umanistica,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 10, La tradizione dei testi, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Feo, Michele, ‘‘Tradizione latina,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 5, Le questioni, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Ferroni, Giulio, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 1, Dalle origini al Quattrocento, Milan: Elemond, 1991. Fogazza, Donatella, ‘‘Les Carmina de Giovanni Pascoli,’’ ´ tudes Classiques, 60:3 (1992), 263–267. Les E Formentin, Vittorio, ‘‘La ‘crisi‘ linguistica del Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 3, Il Quattrocento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1996. Garin, Eugenio, ‘‘Coluccio Salutati e la cultura umanistica agli inizi del Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 3, Milan: Garzanti, 1966. Garin, Eugenio (editor), Prosatori latini del Quattrocento, Naples: Ricciardi, 1952. Garin, Eugenio, L’Umanesimo italiano, Bari: Laterza, 1947. IJsewijn, Jozef, Companion to Neo-Latin Studies, Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1977. Il Petrarca latino e le origini dell’Umanesimo, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Migliorini, Bruno, Storia della lingua italiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1937. Paoli, Ugo Enrico, Prose e poesie latine di scrittori italiani, Florence: Le Monnier, 1926. Rizzo, Silvia, ‘‘Il latino dell’Umanesimo,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 5, Le questioni, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Tateo, Francesco (editor), La prosa dell’umanesimo, Roma: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2004.

BRUNETTO LATINI

BRUNETTO LATINI (CA. 1220–1294) The importance of Brunetto Latini’s writings resides largely in the ways in which they advance a renewed perspective on ethical, rhetorical, and political issues in the context of the Italian commune. A politically active Florentine Guelf, he was the author of translations of three orations by Cicero, a poem de amicitia (on friendship) addressed to Rustico Filippi entitled Il Favolello (The Little Fable) written in the mid-1260s, and some lyric poems including ‘‘S’eo son distretto inamoratamente’’ (If I Am Hard Constrained by Love). He drafted many legal texts and is credited with introducing the rules of the ars dictandi and the Roman cursus, originally developed in an imperial context, into the style of the Chancery of the Florentine Commune. The three works for which he is most rightly remembered today—Li Livres dou Tre´sor (The Books of the Treasure), usually simply called Tre´sor; the Tesoretto (Little Treasure); and the Rettorica (Rhetoric)—concern themselves largely with the formation and instruction of the citizen of the contemporary Italian city-state as the emerging governing class. All three are products of his time of exile between 1260 and 1266 (although some have argued that the Tesoretto could have been written or expanded upon his return to Florence) and represent his political thought as it matures consequent to his loss of a direct political role in Florence as well as his injection of contemporary French learning into an Italian political context. All three are deeply influenced by intellectual trends he encountered in France. Both the Tre´sor and the Tesoretto present themselves as encyclopedic compendia of all manner of knowledge, and all three are couched in the context of service to republican concerns. The Rettorica transforms Cicero’s civic perspective into a lively reflection on the place of rhetoric in the Italian cityrepublics. Indeed, Giovanni Villani in his Cronica (VIII, 10), first published in 1537–1554, famously remembered Brunetto in this context as a civic ‘‘philosopher’’ and a perfect master of rhetoric: ‘‘It was he who commented upon Cicero’s Rhetoric, and wrote a good and useful book called the Tesoro, and the Tesoretto, and the Chiave del Tesoro, and many other books of philosophy, and

of virtues and vices; [...] it was he who was the initiator and the teacher in refining the Florentines, making them aware of the way to speak well and in knowing how to guide and rule our republic according to politics.’’ The Rettorica, the first of his major works written in exile, perhaps in 1260, is an Italian translation and commentary of the first 17 chapters of Cicero’s De Inventione. It places special emphasis on the role the eloquent and wise orator has in civilizing and forming communities. The commentary itself draws on a broad range of classical and medieval authorities and argues that eloquence, far from being mere ornamentation of speech, requires the orator to be a man of a vast culture as the one who civilizes society, an argument that foreshadows the civic importance of the Tre´sor and Tesoretto. The Rettorica’s most significant addition to the original of Cicero, however, is the enlargement of the area susceptible to the rules governing rhetoric to include not only courts and essentially legal disputes but also the contemporary civic realms of embassies and communal political deliberations. Latini even suggested that letters and love poetry are to be governed by rhetoric, which means that they also are to be seen as aspects of civic life and of the citizen qua citizen. The Tre´sor, written in French because of the beauty of the language and its greater diffusion, is an encyclopedic attempt at providing a handbook of all that is knowable and useful for the citizen in the civic context envisioned in the Rettorica. It is primarily a compendium drawn from biblical, medieval, and classical materials, organized into three books of culminating importance leading toward the proper mode of civic governance. The first book contains a summary of theology, biblical, classical, and contemporary history, as well as natural history broadly understood as including anatomy, zoology, geography, and cosmology; the second includes a translation of a Latin abbreviation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and appends a treatise on the virtues and vices; the third is a treatise on rhetoric, which repeats much of the material in the Rettorica, together with a logically subsequent treatise on politics, understood as the art of governing cities and, as such, the highest of the 1003

BRUNETTO LATINI sciences. The Tre´sor’s significance in no small part lies in its progression from history, to virtues and vices, and finally to rhetoric and politics, thus placing this wealth of knowledge in the context of consciously civic practice. Written in an easy clear style, the book is not so much an erudite work for the scholar as one for the practical use of the citizen. The Tesoretto, a scribal name for a work that calls itself the Tesoro (75, 113), is an unfinished allegorical first-person poem of 2,944 verses, which is cast in the tradition of Cicero’s Somnium Scipionis, Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae, and their medieval descendants such as Le Roman de la Rose and Alain de Lille’s works. It was probably written concurrently with the Tre´sor. It is the narrative of the formation of the ‘‘citizen’’ rendered ingeniously as the admittedly fictional history of Brunetto himself, whose education during his political exile in the encyclopedic culture delineated by the Tre´sor is presented in terms that make him an everyman-citizen. Following a prologue and dedication, the poem begins with Brunetto learning of his exile in 1260 while he was traveling through southern France on his return from an embassy to Spain. Despondent, he turns off the main road leading back to Italy and wanders into a forest, where he encounters Nature personified, who instructs him on the working of natural phenomena and then sends him off through a desert on a further allegorical journey, where he encounters personifications of Virtues and of Love; he falls prey to the power of love and is aided by Ovid as the master of love-lore. He subsequently goes to Montpellier, where he makes his confession and expatiates on the vices, before finding himself again in the forest. He eventually climbs Mount Olympus and meets Ptolemy, who is about to tell him about the four elements when the poem breaks off. Its first-person historical narrative style had a large influence on Dante; indeed, Dante’s heavy use of the poem in the Commedia suggests that Brunetto himself held a major if relatively unexamined position as an inspiration of Dante’s own masterpiece. Because of Dante’s early critiques of Brunetto and his work, the mass of criticism addresses not so much Brunetto’s contributions to Italian literature or even to the Commedia as Dante’s apparent rejection of him as a model, in spite of Francesco Mazzoni’s pioneering work on his importance in the entry on the author for the Enciclopedia dantesca (1971). In the De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante dismissed the style of his lyric poems as ‘‘municipal’’—that is, not the illustrious vernacular. 1004

He also suggested that Brunetto was guilty of sodomy when he condemned him in Inferno XV, a judgment that has been at the center of much of Brunetto’s subsequent reception. There is no clear external confirmation of Dante’s suggestion that Brunetto was a sodomite, and the fact that he was married and had a daughter and two sons has suggested to some critics that he could not have therefore been a sodomite of the type we would label as homosexual. There have consequently been a number of speculations that sodomy as understood today was not the sin in question; however, these arguments fail ultimately to convince most readers.

Biography Brunetto Latini was born in Florence ca. 1220. He served with the embassy to Alfonso X of Castile and was exiled in France after the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. He returned from exile after the Battle of Benevento in 1266. He was dettatore of Florence, 1267; chancellor, 1272–1274; console dell’arte dei notai, 1275; guarantor for the Guelfs of the peace of Cardinal Latino, 1280; president of the league of Florence, Genoa, and Lucca against Pisa, 1284; and Prior, 1287. Latini died in Florence in 1294. FRANK ORDIWAY Works Treatises Rettorica, ca. 1260; edited by Francesco Maggini, 1915. Li Livres dou Tre´sor, mid-1260s; edited by Francis J. Carmody, 1948; as The Book of the Treasure—Li Livres dou Tresor, translated by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin, 1993. Il Tesoretto, mid-1260s; edited by Giovanni Pozzi in Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 2, 1960; as The Little Treasure, translated by Julia Bolton Holloway, 1981.

Poetry ‘‘Il Favolello,’’ mid-1260s; edited by Giovanni Pozzi in Poeti del Duecento, edited by Gianfranco Contini, vol. 2, 1960.

Translation L’Ethica d’Aristotile ridotta in compendio da ser Brunetto Latini. Et altre traduttioni, & scritti di quei tempi, 1568.

Further Reading Alessio, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Brunetto Latini e Cicerone (e i dettatori),’’ Italia medievale e umanistica, 22(1979), 123–169.

GAVINO LEDDA Armour, Peter, ‘‘Dante’s Brunetto: The Paternal Paterine?’’ Italian Studies, 38 (1983), 1–38. Armour, Peter, ‘‘The Love of Two Florentines: Brunetto Latini and Bondie Dietaiuti,’’ Lectura Dantis, 9 (1991), 11–33. Ceva, Bianca, Brunetto Latini, l’uomo e l’opera, Milan: Ricciardi, 1965. Ciccuto, Marcello, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Il Tesoretto, Milan: Rizzoli, 1985. Davis, Charles Till, ‘‘Brunetto Latini and Dante,’’ Studi Medievali, 8 (1967), 421–450. Holloway, Julia Bolton, Brunetto Latini: An Analytic Bibliography, London: Grant & Cutler, 1986. Holloway, Julia Bolton, Twice-Told Tales: Brunetto Latini and Dante Alighieri, New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

Kay, Richard, Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays on Inferno XV, Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978. Maggini, Franceso, La Rettorica italiana di Brunetto Latini, Florence: Istituto di studi superiori pratici e di perfezionamento—Sezione di filosofia e filologia, 1912. Mazzoni, Francesco, ‘‘Brunetto Latini,’’ in Enciclopedia dantesca, vol. 3, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1971. Najemi, John M., ‘‘Brunetto Latini’s ‘Politica,’’’ Dante Studies, 112 (1994), 33–51. Segre, Cesare, Lingua, stile e societa`; studi sulla storia della prosa Italiana, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963. Sundby, Thor S., Della vita e delle opere di Brunetto Latini, translated by Rodolfo Renier, Florence: Le Monnier, 1884.

FRANCO LATTES See Franco Fortini

GAVINO LEDDA (1938–) Sardinian writer Gavino Ledda is a representative figure of Italian literature of the 1970s. Following the narrative path initiated by Giuseppe Dessı`, and Salvatore Satta, also from Sardinia, Ledda became an overnight success in 1975 when he published his autobiographical novel Padre Padrone (The Education of a Shepherd, 1975). Mixing chronicle with a spontaneous autobiographical narrative, Ledda recounted the first 18 years of his life and how he evolved from an illiterate shepherd to a professor of Romance philology. When he was 6 years old, his father forced him to leave the school in their village Siligo, near Sassari, after only two months, because he was needed to look after the flock in Baddhevru`stana. Subsequently, Ledda spent his youth in a peculiar world inhabited by few people, all shepherds: his friend Nicolau, Thiu (which means ‘‘uncle’’ in the Sardinian dialect) Pulinari, Thiu Ziromine,

and Thiu Costantinu. Other characters are Thiu Giommaria Ledda, Thiu Jombattista, and Don Peppe. Important to Ledda’s childhood and adolescence were his faithful dog Rusigabedra and Thiu Juanne, who has an almost magical role as ‘‘a storyteller’’ who relates tales about family ancestors. Finally there is Gavino’s own family, his mother and siblings, Filippo and Vittoria (called ‘‘the teacher,’’ since she was the only one to have been to school) who from 1949 onward kept him company as he tended the sheepfold. But the central figure in Ledda’s young life was his father, a daunting figure embodying the force of tradition and his own character. He imposed his will on the family, especially his elder son, purely to show his authority, not his affection. He claimed the right to treat his son in such a manner in order to fulfil his duty as a father. And it is here that the two clashed. Despite his docility as a young 1005

GAVINO LEDDA child, Gavino became rebellious once he reached adolescence, mainly because he wanted to study. His father never managed to subdue this passion, and Gavino decided to join the army in order to get an education. Motivated by newly found values of freedom, awareness, and human dignity, Ledda eventually freed himself from his father’s oppression. He never denigrated, however, the role of his father. In an interview released years after the publication of the book, Ledda made it clear that he would not have been able to complete his cultural and emotional maturation if he had not been able to forgive his father. Padre Padrone brought attention to the Sardinian dialect, which is fully independent of Italian. It is the most conservative among the neoLatin languages. This conservatism is reflected in the society as a whole, as Ledda showed in the difficult relationship between father and son, but also in his description of the archaic and patriarchal society in which he grew up and which still persists. In this deeply conservative society, life is closely related to work, and work primarily means the farm chores undertaken by an entire family for their entire life, from early childhood to death. The relationships within the family are marked by an age-old hierarchy: The man commands the woman; the father his children; the old are often given an almost mystical role, as if they were priests appointed to preserve tradition from the subversions of modernity. As Vincenzo Commerci noted, Padre Padrone expresses indeed ‘‘the refusal of a chronically irremovable culture’’ (Gavino Ledda, l’irruzione della prassi nell’arte, 1986). The struggle against poverty and ignorance and the commitment to preserve Sardinian culture remain the focus of Ledda’s subsequent fiction and essays. In Sos Attentura`dos (Their Elopement, 1977), for example, Ledda recounted the love story of Gı`oiosi, who is rich, and Elena, who is poor. Their love is strongly opposed by his parents, who would never consent to their son’s marriage to a poor girl. The two then decide to organize an attentura (an elopement), which would present their families with an accomplished fact. Then followed, among others, Le canne amiche del mare (Reeds, Friends of the Sea, 1978) and a collection of short stories entitled I cimenti dell’agnello (The Lamb’s Trials, 1995). In 1991, Ledda published Aurum tellus, which responded to Karl Popper’s views on language (‘‘Language Is a Jail’’). Here he interpreted language not as a cage but as a freedom (including dead and living languages, 1006

dialects, signs, and images) to reach what he called ‘‘truth.’’ As a philologist at the University of Sassari, Ledda spent many years working on the creation of a language for narration ad andatura di natura (with the rhythm of nature). In the same way, in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s cinematic adaptation of Padre Padrone (1977), utopia assumes a concrete dimension as the Sardinian shepherd reaches the almost unattainable goal of surviving the tyrannical tribal strictures imposed upon him since birth and succeeds in returning to his island, where he lives ad andatura di natura. The film interweaves fact and fiction in its presence of the real Gavino Ledda in the closing scene.

Biography Gavino Ledda was born in Siligo (Sassari) on 30 December 1938. In 1958, he enrolled as a volunteer in the Italian army, becoming a sergeant and a radio technician in Rome. In April 1962 he left the army. Having passed the examinations for a high school diploma in Ozieri (Sardinia), he enrolled in Rome University in 1964 and was awarded a degree in Italian literature in December 1969. He published Padre Padrone, which was awarded the Viareggio Prize, 1975. He directed the film Ybris (for TV) and won the New Cinema Prize at the Venice Film Festival, 1984. Ledda is a professor of romance philology at the University of Sassari. He is married and lives in Siligo. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Fiction Padre padrone: L’educazione di un pastore, 1975, translated by George Salmanazar, 1998. Lingua di falce, 1977. Sos Attentura`dos, 1977. Le canne amiche del mare, 1978. I cimenti dell’agnello, 1995; enlarged edition, 2000. Padre Padrone, e, Recanto, 1998.

Other Aurum Tellus, 1991.

Further Reading Argentieri, Mino, ‘‘Una tragedia ottimista,’’ in Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Padre Padrone, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. Brigaglia, Manlio, Gavino Ledda dopo ‘‘Padre Padrone’’: il libro, il film, la Sardegna, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1978.

LEONARDO DA VINCI Commerci, Vincenzo, Gavino Ledda, l’irruzione della prassi nell’arte, Catanzaro: Rubettino Editore, 1986. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Il romanzo del novecento italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1986. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Profili critici del novecento, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998.

Reina, Luigi, Scenario novecento, Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1993. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno: Dal romanzo medio degli anni Sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni Ottanta. Milan: Mursia, 1990.

LEONARDO DA VINCI (1452–1519) Celebrated as the epitome of the Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci was a painter, scholar, anatomist, sculptor, architect, engineer, inventor, musician, and writer—a man whose genius covered the span of human knowledge in his time. His innovations in painting deeply influenced the development of Italian art, and masterpieces like the mural Ultima cena (The Last Supper, 1495–1497) in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, the two versions of the Vergine delle rocce (The Virgin of the Rocks, 1483–1485/1506–1508), and the amazing portrait of Mona Lisa (La Gioconda, 1500–1510/after 1513) are now celebrated around the world. Moreover, Leonardo’s scientific intuition led him to anticipate many of the achievements of modern science, and his writings reveal extensive scientific research in addition to his exploration of the arts. Although he defined himself as a homo sanza littere (a man without literary education), Leonardo could write, count, and read the vernacular as well as the Latin of Mass from an early age. In his thirties he decided to improve his scientific knowledge while he also studied Latin and grammar. In Milan he became close friends with the Franciscan mathematician Luca Pacioli (ca. 1445–1517), who was particularly interested in Euclid and introduced Leonardo to higher-level mathematics and geometry. Already acquainted with Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, Leonardo da Vinci was mainly interested in ‘‘natural philosophy’’ (filosofia naturale). Most of his research was focused on natural phenomena, and he tested his countless discoveries through mathematical and geometrical calculations. Hence, he rightfully declared that, ‘‘non mi legga chi non e` matematico’’ (whoever is not a mathematician must not read me).

In the context of his far-reaching and innovative research, it may appear paradoxical that Leonardo did not occupy a prominent role in the field of science and philosophy up until the early twentieth century. Still, this can be explained by the fact that his writings were not systematic to begin with, and many of his manuscripts, bequeathed to Francesco Melzi in Leonardo’s will (1519), were dismembered, dispersed, and partly lost. Leonardo experimented with and developed certain ideas over lengthy periods of time and used to take notes about the same subject in different notebooks and albums, some of which were unknown until recent years. It is extremely difficult to organize his notes chronologically. A passage on a particular topic can be repeated many times with slight changes and even contradictions in different manuscripts or in side notes, often added at different times. Citations from other authors and a record of contemporary events, professional notes, private accounts, and memoranda appear side by side in Leonardo’s notebooks. His writings were never thoroughly organized, but very often his notes on a particular subject appeared as if the author kept an underlying coherent structure in mind while recording his observations. Leonardo tended to synthesize his notes as much as possible, and his writing is often incomplete. Even though at certain points the text appears to be addressing a possible outside reader, Leonardo was obviously writing mainly for himself. In his notebooks and on individual sheets of paper the treatment of a topic was generally developed in just a few lines and rarely exceeded a page in length. The style was sharp and apodictic. The author offered only synthetic definitions because the proof and explanation to his claims was meant to be based on mathematical and scientific 1007

LEONARDO DA VINCI grounds. It appears that Leonardo was more successful in illustrating his ideas through images, as drawing was a dominant means of communication for him. The loss and damage of texts, interpolations of different texts, and Leonardo’s characteristic mirror-image writing (from right to left) have caused enormous trouble for scholars trying to read his works. For this reason it is impossible to offer a comprehensive survey of his writings. Still, one can refer to studies on Leonardo written in the period from the late nineteenth century to the present day, some of which transcribe selected original texts. Moreover, the recent major editions of his manuscripts can be particularly helpful in this endeavor. Leonardo’s ‘‘literary’’ works (that is, fragments not related to painting, anatomy, and mechanics) have been classified by Augusto Marinoni (1952; 1974) according to their content. The Pensieri (Thoughts) are mostly about general science and moral life. The Favole (Tales), on the other hand, are short texts in which the protagonists are animals. In addition, the Indovinelli (Riddles) are what Leonardo himself called Profezie (Prophecies). Then follow his Facezie (Jokes), personal letters, narrative passages, and Proemi (Poems) to works he never wrote. The latter reveal various projects of a literary nature. Although none of his literary attempts are complete, and some remain at the stage of an outline, it is evident that Leonardo da Vinci was versed in all of the literary forms of contemporary scientific writing, including the treatise, the discorso, the dialogue, and the epistle. His works were first cited by Luca Pacioli in 1498. In the dedication of his treatise De divina proportione (Of Divine Proportion, 1509), Pacioli claimed that Leonardo already finished the Libro de pictura et movimenti umani (Book about Painting and Human Movement) and was completing another inextimabile (inestimable) one del moto locale (on local motion). Then, around 1504, Leonardo himself created a list of the books he owned (in Madrid II), many of which he noted down by author and title. Fifty of them, however, were classified only by size and are most probably his own works. Among them, two books remain an exception as they have a specific designation as Libro di mia vocaboli (Book of My Words) and a book on horses schizzati pel cartone [della Battaglia di Anghiari] (sketched for the cartoon [of the Battle of Anghiari]). 1008

In 1517, in Leonardo’s studio in Cloux, Cardinal Louis of Aragon saw the artist’s studies in anatomy, hydraulics, and engineering, written in the volgare (old Italian vernacular), and affirmed that, if they had been popularized, they would have been useful and extremely pleasant reading. The best-known written work by Leonardo is the Trattato della pittura (Treatise on Painting), first published in Paris in 1651. Yet, notwithstanding Pacioli’s claims, it seems that this work was never written by Leonardo himself in the form in which we know it today. In fact, the coherent text is a posthumous compilation by Melzi or another member of the Vincian circle, such as the anonymous painter referred to in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1568), who allegedly intended to publish a series of Leonardo’s writings about painting. Although the author of the compilation cannot be identified, a careful reading of Leonardo’s heterogeneous notes on the subject allows one to identify a number of passages copied by an amanuensis in a codex acquired by the Urbino court and presently located in the Vatican library (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270). Thus, the Trattato della pittura as we know it today is a literal but incomplete compilation of 18 Leonardesque fragments, seven of which were listed in the codex. It is plausible that Leonardo intended the treatise to consist of three different sections, a theoretical, a practical, and a didactic one. The first section would include a definition of painting as an art and a science as well as the paragone (comparison) with the other arts, meant to demonstrate its preeminence over sculpture, poetry, and music. A discussion about linear, aerial, and chromatic perspective; an analysis of light and shadow; and a theory of colors were also likely components of the first part of the Trattato. The second section would have discussed drawing and color in the larger context of painting in addition to the study of the human figure from an anatomical point of view, including a subsection on man’s physical and psychological motions. An examination of the other natural elements would also be presented in this second part. Thus, the structure of the Earth and its components, namely the atmosphere, air, wind, water, rivers, lakes, sea, fog, and clouds, as well as the universe as a whole and the forces that act in it would have been introduced after the examination of the human figure. This subsection would, then, have been followed by comments about the composition of

LEONARDO DA VINCI one or more figures in relationship with the natural elements. Finally, the last section could have offered a number of precetti (suggestions) for the reader. Yet, it is not clear whether they were to be placed in the beginning, scattered throughout the text, or used as a conclusion. The chronology of the various parts of the Trattato della pittura is uncertain as well. The book Pacioli cited as completed in 1498 must have included notes from about 1490. More fragments were added to it in the following years until 1515, when Leonardo most probably decided to discuss anatomy separately. Similarly, while the paragone is accepted as having been written in the beginning of Leonardo’s Milanese stay, a number of other elements were developed or modified later. On the whole, Leonardo’s project seem to have been conceived as a sort of encyclopedic work related to the art of painting and the rivalry between writers and painters. In his notes he argued against the classification of the fine arts as a part of the lower artes mechanicae (mechanical arts) and sought to provide a truly scientific grounding for them. According to Leonardo, a painter has to apply his knowledge of mathematics, optics, and anatomy, among other fields, in the delineation of various figures and their environment. Hence, painting is filosofia (philosophy), that is, a science and a ‘‘liberal’ art like poetry and music. Yet, painting is superior to these arts as it also offers the best representation of the different aspects of nature, which Leonardo also considered to be the main purpose of figurative art. Finally, the author opposed new science and traditional conceptions of scientific knowledge. Thus, enough is known about Leonardo’s Trattato for it to be considered an important key for a better understanding of the master. Clearly, the study of Leonardo da Vinci’s works would remain incomplete if due attention were not paid to his writings as well as his art. Leonardo was particularly influential in the Italian literary and esthetic culture of the early twentieth century. His works had an impact on the Symbolist movement, beginning with Angelo Conti’s studies, and thus played a role in the formation of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s concept of beauty. Moreover, from 1903 to 1907 Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini published an important literary magazine called Leonardo whose focus was the prominence of intellectual energy.

Biography Leonardo was born on April 15, 1452, in Vinci (Florence). The illegitimate son of a lawyer, Piero, and a peasant woman, he was brought up by his father in Florence. In 1469, he was admitted to the workshop of Verrocchio, and from 1475 on he developed an independent activity as painter and sculptor. Some of his early works are the Annunciazione (1475–1478), the portrait of Ginevra Benci (1475–1478), and the unfinished Adorazione dei Magi. Between 1478 and 1482, he wrote a number of literary works and produced his first technological designs. From then on, he recorded his studies in science and engineering in notebooks, comprising some 13,000 pages of notes and drawings, which he never published nor otherwise distributed. In about 1482, Leonardo worked as a painter, sculptor, engineer, and architect for Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan. In Milan he painted the Virgine delle rocce and also created the model for an equestrian monument to Francesco Sforza (1483–1493). On a brief trip back to Florence in 1495, he worked on the new Grand Council Room of the Palazzo Vecchio. Then, from 1495 to 1497, his main project was the mural Ultima cena in the Sala delle Asse in the Castello Sforzesco (1498). In Milan he set up an ideal Vincian Academy (1490–1498), for whose students he probably created his original notes and sketches about painting, later collected in the famous Trattato della pittura and serving as illustrations to the De divina proportione by Luca Pacioli (1498). In 1500, he returned to Florence and stopped in Mantua and Venice on the way. Then, Leonardo became Cesare Borgia’s military architect in Romagna (1502–1503). In Florence, he worked in the service of the Republic, developing projects for the canalization of the Arno River and the decoration of the Grand Council Room in the Palazzo Vecchio. He was also sent on a mission to Piombino as a military architect. Between 1506 and 1508, he moved continuously between Florence and Milan, while working for the French governor of Milan as an architect and painter. In the period of 1500–1510 he painted La Battaglia di Anghiari (1503–1504), a second Virgine delle rocce, and perhaps the Mona Lisa. While in Milan, he drafted a plan for the canalization of the Adda River (1510–1515). He was a guest of the Melzi family in Vaprio d’Adda shortly before going to Florence on his way to Rome, where he moved on September 25, 1513. Up until 1516, Leonardo worked in the service consecutively of

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LEONARDO DA VINCI Giuliano de’ Medici, the pope’s brother, and Lorenzo de’ Medici, the pope’s nephew. He made trips to Parma (1514), Florence (1515), and Milan (1515). When Francis I of France regained control of Milan, Leonardo was commissioned to create a mechanical lion that was shipped from Florence to Lyon in 1515. In 1517, still the service of Francis I, he moved to France, to the manor house Cloux (Clos Luce´) next to the Royal Castle at Amboise, where he died on May 2, 1519. MARIA AGNESE CHIARI MORETTO WIEL Selected Works Libro de pictura et movimenti umani, ca. 1509. Libro di mia vocaboli, ca. 1509. Trattato della pittura, 1651; edited by Ettore Camesasca, 2000. Codex Atlanticus, Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana; as Leonardo da Vinci, Il codice atlantico della Biblioteca Ambrosiana a Milano, edited by Augusto Marinoni, 24 vols., 1974–1980. Codex Leicester, Seattle, Bill Gates Collection; as The Codex Hammer (i.e., the Codex Leicester), edited by Carlo Pedretti, 1987. Codices Madrid I and II, Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional; as The Manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci at the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid, edited by Ladislao Reti, 5 vols., 1974. Codex Arundel, London, British Museum; as I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo da Vinci. Il codice Arundel 263, 4 vols., 1923–1930. Codex Forster, London, Victoria and Albert Museum; as Leonardo da Vinci, il Codice Forster del Victoria and Albert Museum di Londra, edited by Augusto Marinoni, 3 vols., 1992. Mss. A–I, Paris, Institut de France; as Leonardo da Vinci, I manoscritti dell’Institut de France, edited by Augusto Marinoni, 12 vols., 1986–1990. Windsor, Royal Library; Leonardo da Vinci. Corpus of the Anatomical Studies in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen at Windsor Castle, edited by Kenneth D. Keele and Carlo Pedretti, 3 vols., 1978–1980. Windsor, Royal Library; Carlo Pedretti, The Drawings and Miscellaneous Papers of Leonardo da Vinci at Windsor

Castle, vol. 1, Landscape, Plants and Water Studies; vol. 2, Horses and Other Animals, 1982–1987. Trattato della pittura, 1651; Libro di pittura, edited by Carlo Pedretti and Carlo Vecce, 2 vols., 1995; as Treatise on Painting (Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270), translated and annotated by Philip A. McMahon, 2 vols., 1956; as Treatise on Painting, translated by John Francis Rigaud, 2002. Prophecies and Other Literary Writings, translated by J. G. Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2002.

Further Reading Clark, Kenneth, Leonardo da Vinci, Baltimore: Penguin, 1973. Ferrero, Leo, Leonardo o dell’arte, prefazione di Paul Vale´ry, Turin: Buratti, 1929. Kemp, Martin, Leonardo, New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kemp, Martin, Leonardo on Painting: An Anthology of Writings by Leonardo da Vinci with a Selection of Documents Relating to His Career as an Artist, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Koestler-Grack, Rachel A., Leonardo da Vinci: Artist, Inventor and Renaissance Man, Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2005. Marinoni, Augusto, Leonardo da Vinci. Scritti letterari, Milan: Rizzoli 1974; reprinted, 1987. Nicholl, Charles, Leonardo da Vinci. Flights of the Mind: A Biography, New York: Viking Penguin, 2004. Pacioli, Luca, De divina proportione, Venice: Paganino da Paganini, 1509. Parr, Adrian, Exploring the Work of Leonardo da Vinci within the Context of Contemporary Philosophical Thought and Art: From Bergson to Deleuze, New York: Mellen Press, 2004. Pedretti, Carlo, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci. A Commentary to Jean Paul Richter’s Edition, London: Phaidon, 1977. Richter, Jean Paul, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 2nd edition, London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1939 (first published 1883). Ricorda, Ricciarda (editor), Leonardo pittore-Angelo Conti, Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1990. Scarpati, Claudio, Leonardo scrittore, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2001. Zo¨llner, Frank, Leonardo da Vinci, 1452–1519. The Complete Paintings and Drawings, Cologne and London: Taschen, 2003.

LEONE EBREO (CA. 1460/65–after 1521) The physician, philosopher, and poet Jehudah Abrabanel, known as Leone Ebreo, is the author of Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues on Love, 1535), 1010

the most important treatise on love after Marsilio Ficino’s seminal De amore (On Love, 1484) and one of the most influential philosophical works

LEONE EBREO of the Italian Renaissance. Ficino’s original interpretation of Plato’s Symposium initiated a literary and philosophical genre commonly called trattati d’amore (treatises on love), which became extremely popular in sixteenth-century Italy, primarily in the northern and central regions of the peninsula. Leone Ebreo’s book is a compelling and unique example of this genre. Dialoghi d’amore soon acquired an indisputable authority and was frequently cited in many other trattati d’amore, even though the complexity of its philosophical message, based on a fascinating amalgam of Neoplatonic philosophy, Jewish mysticism, and Christian theology, was poorly understood during the Renaissance. Rather than discussing its multifaceted view of love, many authors of trattati d’amore used the Dialoghi d’amore as a trove of poetic, and general, references to the love experience. In the prologue of Don Quixote, Cervantes wrote that the Dialoghi d’amore is one of the two fundamental treatises on love, the other being Cristo´bal de Fonseca’s Tratato del amor de Dios, a religious analysis of love that echoes Ficino and Leone Hebreo’s thought. Dialoghi d’amore still awaits a comprehensive analysis. Leone Ebreo’s oeuvre is composed of two works, the Dialoghi d’amore and five poems in Hebrew. Particularly famous are an elegiac poem on Fate and Telunah ‘al ha-zeman (A Complaint Against Time), probably composed around 1503–1504. In the former, Leone Ebreo sketched an autobiography as a progressive disclosure of divine will. It details the vicissitudes of the philosopher and his family from Portugal to Italy and dwells on his love for his son Isaac, whom fate took away from his father. This elegy could be read as a penitential psalm, but in its second part it turns into a poetic dialogue with his son, whom the philosopher invited to pursue a life of religious piety in accordance with the Jewish law. Destiny is portrayed as an overwhelming force springing from God’s unfathomable love. Leone Ebreo is primarily remembered for his Dialoghi d’amore, whose composition occupied him for a long period of time, probably from his first stay in Naples in 1492, where he became acquainted with Ficino’s work and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, who thought very highly of him. A thorny critical debate concerns the original language of the Dialoghi d’amore, although it is a fact that this essential text of the Renaissance was first known through its Italian edition published in Rome by Antonio Blado d’Assola, 1535, on which all subsequent European translations were based (first French translation in 1551; first Spanish printed translation in 1584, although

Garcilaso Inga de la Vega’s prestigious and enduring version came out in 1590). The Dialoghi d’amore is a conversation between Filone (Lover), who expresses the author’s opinions, and Sofia (Wisdom), a lady who questions her male interlocutor on the nature and meaning of love. The treatise is divided into three books, which thematically and structurally are not equally balanced. The first two books have a similar three-part construction. The first book tackles the distinction between love and desire; the nature of divine love, which corresponds to the highest buono (good); and finally human love, with special focus on the relationship between passions and reason. Unlike most trattati d’amore, Leone Ebreo’s treatise does not despise physical love but rather offers a moving defense of marriage as a reflection of divine love. At the end of book one, Filone contends that ‘‘negli uomini si truovano due sorti di ragioni: l’una chiamata ordenaria e l’altra estraordinaria. L’intento de la prima e` reggere e conservare l’uomo in vita onesta . . .Ma de la ragione estraordinaria l’intento suo e` conseguire la cosa amata’’ (every human being has two sorts of reasons: one is called ordinary and the other [is called] extraordinary. The goal of the first one is to keep and preserve a human being’s honest life . . . But the goal of the extraordinary reason is to attain the object of his love; Dialoghi d’amore, edited by Santino Caramella, 57). The beloved, Filone added, is nobler than the lover, because the beloved is the lover’s goal, and ‘‘il fine e` piu` nobile che quello che e` per il fine’’ (the goal is nobler than the lover for whom he [the beloved] is the goal). The second book analyzes the presence of love in the three areas of the cosmos, the ‘‘inferior’’ world; the celestial world, which is examined through a fascinating and complex examination of Greek mythology, also in its connections with astrology; and the angelic world. The third and last book has two sections. The first is dedicated to the theory of ‘‘spirit,’’ which means both soul and intellect, whereas the second section deals with five possible origins of love and takes up almost half of the entire treatise. In this long chapter, Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy converse with Jewish theology and Greek mythology. For instance, in his discussion of the possible origins of love, the author first examined the myth of the androgynous expressed by Aristophanes in the Symposium and then the biblical narration of the birth of Adam and Eve. This was the core of Leone Ebreo’s vision of love. For Leone Ebreo, the universal essence of love was a desire directed at something. 1011

LEONE EBREO The author defined the word bello (beautiful) as buono con bellezza (good with beauty). Beauty is a form of grace that, by pleasing the soul, compels the subject to love. In one of the most inspired pages of his book, Leone Ebreo held that, when he created the universe in the likeness of his perfect beauty, God felt love for his creation. Unlike most authors of trattati d’amore, Leone Ebreo contended that the goal of love is not the lover’s pursuit for a beauty that he, the lover, does not have. The universal goal of love is in fact the perfection of the beloved.

Biography Leone Ebreo was born in Lisbon between 1460 and 1465, son of Isaac Abrabanel, a descendant of one of the noblest Jewish families who played an influential role in Portuguese society. He studied the Kabala, Talmudic literature, and ancient and medieval philosophy and at the age of 20 became a well-respected physician. In 1483 first Isaac and then his family took refuge in Seville, where Leone Ebreo worked as physician for eight years. Still in Seville, in 1491 he married and had a child. In 1492, the Jews were expelled from Spain. Leone Ebreo sent his baby to an aunt in Portugal, and the rest of the family immigrated to Naples. In Naples, Leone Ebreo may have become acquainted with Christian neo-Platonic thought, above all Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. In 1495, he was forced to move to Genoa, where he probably began working on the Dialoghi d’amore. In 1501, he returned to Naples with a second child, who died at the age of five in 1504. Because of the changed political situation, he was compelled to move again, this time to Venice. In 1521, he returned to Naples where he regained great respect as physician. The

last biographical information regards an infamous decision of the Neapolitan authorities, which ordered that the Jews wear a yellow beret as they were forced to do in Venice. Leone Ebreo was part of the Jewish delegation that successfully voiced their protest to the Viceroy of Naples. He probably died a few years before the publication of Dialoghi d’amore in 1535. ARMANDO MAGGI Selected Works Dialogi d’amore di maestro Leone medico hebreo, edited by Mariano Lenzi, Rome: Blado d’Assola, 1535. Dialoghi di amore composti per Leone Medico Hebreo, Venice: Manuzio, 1541 (this edition contains several arbitrary interventions and was the basis of three additional editions in 1545, 1549, and 1552). Dialoghi d’amore, critical edition by Santino Caramella, 1929; as Leo Hebraeus, The Philosophy of Love, translated by F. Friedeberg-Seeley and Jean H. Barnes, 1937.

Further Reading Ariani, Marco, Imago fabulosa: mito e allegoria nei ‘‘Dialoghi d’amore’’ di Leone Ebreo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Damiens, Suzanne, Amour et intellect chez Le´on l’He´breu, Toulouse: Privat, 1971. Garin, Eugenio, Storia della filosofia italiana, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Perry, T. Anthony, ‘‘Dialogue and Doctrine in Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore,’’ PMLA, 88(1973), 1173– 1179. Pflaum, Heinz, Die Idee der Liebe. Leone Ebreo, Tu¨bingen: Mohr, 1926. Saitta, Giuseppe, Filosofia italiana e umanesimo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1928. Soria Olmedo, Andre´s, Los Dialoghi d’amore de Leo´n Hebreo, Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1984.

SERGIO LEONE (1929–1989) In the 1960s Europe witnessed a flourishing of cinematic modernism, a brand of filmmaking that revolutionized film narrative and challenged Hollywood’s hegemony. Italian directors tried to counterfeit American production by investigating 1012

further the notion of realism as well as by developing strong and idiosyncratic authorial voices, as seen in the work of filmmakers such as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Theirs were the most convincing voices

SERGIO LEONE of a cinema that cannot be described according to genre conventions and is in constant pursuit of the transgression of specific generic codes; it developed suddenly, became intensely exploited, and was swiftly exhausted. Most often it targeted a limited audience and was consequently fairly precarious. At the time, Sergio Leone became the leading director of a fairly popular interpretation of Italian cinema that produced comedies, horror films, peplum epics (costume dramas), and Westerns. Both comedy ‘‘Italian style’’ and Sergio Leone’s Westerns were successful with broad audiences and had a long-lasting and beneficial effect on Italian and world cinema. Sergio Leone came to life in the world of cinema, as the son of Roberto Roberti (Vincenzo Leone), one of the most acclaimed Italian metteurs en sce`ne of the silent era, and Bice Valerian (Edvige Valcarenghi), a well-known actress. Curiously enough, in 1913 Leone’s father directed the first Italian Western, La vampire indienne (The Indian Vampire), and his mother was cast as the female lead. Moreover, Leone came to life at a time when world cinema was being revolutionized by the advent of sound, and the Italian intelligentsia was riveted by vibrating discussions on the nature of the new medium. This was a telling detail in the life and work of a filmmaker who would revolutionize one of the most established film genres, the Western; who would contribute to cinematic Modernism; and who would also anticipate the boom of cinematic Postmodernism. Sergio Leone experienced a long apprenticeship, one which consisted of over 50 collaborations in directing, such as Vittorio De Sica’s neo-Realist masterpiece Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief, 1948)—in which he also starred as an extra as one of the German seminarians who walked by Porta Portese during a rainstorm. Other films by Alessandro Blasetti, Carmine Gallone, Mario Camerini, and Mario Soldati, as well as by American directors William Wyler, Raoul Walsh, and Fred Zinnemann during the so-called Hollywoodon-the-Tiber years at Cinecitta` studios, are included as well. Many directors influenced his work— among others, Akira Kurosawa, Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang, and John Ford—as Leone constructed an extremely coherent and essential opus of merely eight films—including the uncredited Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (The Last Days of Pompei, 1959)—and of numerous commercials produced between 1976 and 1983. In a small and yet extremely interesting body of works, Leone identified his route in filmmaking by visiting a single narrative

form, the epic, and constructing a sort of shared artistic realm where images and feelings of our past, present, and future merged and created narratives that forever defeated death and conquered the time and space of eternity, as noted by Marcello Garofalo in his Tutto il cinema di Sergio Leone (1999). Unquestionably, from his first film to his last and unrealized project, to be titled Leningrado, Sergio Leone revisited the epic genre at times disguised as a peplum, as a Western, or as a thriller. What possibility intrigued Leone was the fact that epic was the genre that most effectively dealt with time, and time was after all the very essence of the medium. Leone’s work was thus an endless reflection on cinema itself and its own language, and this is why the past time and the far-off place that are eventually ‘‘revisited’’ assume the substance and the form of the myth, since our own postmodern time is only made of an eternal present. Such a personal conception of time, grounded on the notion of dilation, when he cuts back and forth in action, came to characterize Leone’s idiosyncratic style, and this served as the guiding principle in the construction of his unforgettable and breathtaking images accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s memorable musical scores (often composed before the shooting), and integral parts of the films’ inner texture. Leone’s first directorial experience was a ‘‘peplum,’’ Il colosso di Rodi (The Colossus of Rhodes, 1960). The film was largely indebted to Hollywood historical epics and particularly to Mervyn Le Roy’s Quo vadis? (1951) and Cecile B. De Mille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), notwithstanding a far more ingenuous approach to the subject matter. Yet, the mythological narrative proved an unsuitable genre for him to perfect his own personal style. Soon after, while Italian directors were primarily concerned with a renegotiation of cinematic realism, Sergio Leone chose instead to make Westerns (or ‘‘spaghetti Westerns,’’ as they are often nicknamed), all set in America and often shot in English. Leone displayed a preference for the past and a total lack of interest in the historical present; with his aggressive style of montage, highly influenced by the Russian school and Sergei Eisenstein, he developed a most evidently modernist cinema based on duration. Leone’s revolutionary notion of time became the trademark of all his major films, even though his cinema exploited other traditions generally founded on a swift tempo: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), Per qualche dollaro in piu` (A Few Dollars 1013

SERGIO LEONE More, 1965), Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, 1966), C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West, 1968), and C’era una volta in America (Once Upon a Time in America, 1984). Indeed, when swift and fast action occurred in Leone’s films, it was only a provocation, excessive, unreal, and contrary to conventional narrative logic. Thus, the appearance of the Man with No Name at the incipit of Per un pugno di dollari—a film he signed as ‘‘Bob Robertson’’ meaning ‘‘the son of Roberto Roberti’’—not only signalled a revolutionary step in the transformation of the Western but also marked the beginning of an important stage in the development of world cinema, one that we normally refer to as ‘‘postmodern.’’ Per un pugno di dollari was the first of the ‘‘spaghetti Western’’ cycle. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961), it featured the Man with No Name (played by Clint Eastwood) as a gun for hire who played off two rival gangs, the Baxters and the Rojos, in a corrupt Mexican border town, where the only booming economy was the undertaking business. With great irony and numerous jokes, highly dramatic close-ups, a wealth of Christian imagery (including Eastwood’s death and resurrection), and a caustic sense of death and landscape, Per un pugno di dollari provided the stencil for Leone’s subsequent works and for copycat Westerns, which established the Clint Eastwood persona and revitalized the genre. Within two years, the film had grossed over two billion lire in Italy alone and had sold surprisingly well in the United States. The success of Per un pugno di dollari was spell-binding. Leone, who had faked that the film was a Hollywood production and had dared to cast the relatively unknown Eastwood in the main role, went on to surpass in profits John Sturges’s famous western The Magnificent Seven, enlisting the most celebrated studio stars. Leone’s (anti)hero has nothing of the noble generosity of the classical cowboy. A cynical killer, he remains a mysteriously ambiguous figure who performs for money and whose double moral standards more closely remind us of George Stevens’s Shane (1953). Following Per un pugno di dollari came Per qualche dollaro in piu`, a more parodic and better scored, edited, and acted film in which the unforgettable Gian Maria Volonte´ played the villain. The story unfolds around a psychotic killer/bandit named Indio (Klaus Kinski appeared as a hunchback) and a bounty hunter (Eastwood) who teams up with an ex-rebel officer and avenging angel 1014

(played by Lee van Cleef) in order to frame Indio. Images of violence become commonplace in Leone’s next film, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, now available in a newly restored version that extends the classic English edition by nearly 20 minutes. Propelled by Ennio Morricone’s unforgettable whistle musical score, the film opened with three prologues, and thus soon constructed its three mythical parts: the Good (Clint Eastwood), who is a con man with no name; the Bad (Lee van Cleef ), who is a coldblooded bounty hunter ironically named Angel Eyes; and the Ugly (Eli Wallach), who is Tuco, a Mexican bandit with a killer grin and a lust for life and death. Against the backdrop of the American Civil War, the three fight each other for loot of gold buried in a graveyard. Here one can find a thematic structure and a stylistic construction that made the film quite similar to the previous two works. In like manner, Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo is characterized by a cult of individualism and friendship and by the rivalry among men as a cement of their own existence as well as by a vague form of romanticism. In Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Leone became famous for editing extreme wide-angle shots together with extreme close-ups and for his creative use of deep focus and mobile camera work. Sergio Leone’s next revisitation of the mythical American West came with C’era una volta il West, a film of epical proportions, one of the director’s best. The script, coauthored by Dario Argento and Bernardo Bertolucci, combined the tale of the obsessed Harmonica (Charles Bronson), with a biting and bitter critique of capitalism, embodied by a fight over water rights. Leone cast Henry Fonda against type as the contemptible, cold-eyed killer Frank and voluptuous Claudia Cardinale as Jill McBain, who embodies the moral center and Mediterranean earth mother in an otherwise violently male and amoral Western universe. C’era una volta il West, shot in Techniscope, relies once again on the instrumental music score by Ennio Morricone (partly inspired by John Cage) and a monumental sense of the American landscape, flawlessly recreated in Spain. Leone’s next film, Giu` la testa (Duck, You Sucker, 1971), set in Mexico in 1913–1914, is a transitional work but certainly one filled with unprecedented political implications (the disenchantment of the 1960s): Violence bestows more violence, and rebellion triggers assassinations and endless deaths. Leone’s brief and yet enticing filmography closes with yet another masterpiece, C’era una volta in America. Released in 1984, the

LEONE EBREO film is a hallucinatory epic that encompasses half a century of American history. The director’s cut was originally 219 minutes but was edited down to 135 minutes and noticeably simplified in its narrative structure by the American producers. A restored version is now available and displays Leone’s sophisticated time structure and complex narrative development. The film is a saga centered on a group of Jewish gangsters in New York. It opens in the 1920s and finds its pivotal moments in three time frames as it traces the relationship between the brutal and maliciously ambitious Max (Michael Woods) and his best friend Noodles (Robert De Niro) as they go from childhood pranks to the world of crime. In its operatic ambitions, the film became a stunning and intimately nostalgic swan song, for Leone’s life in the cinema as well. If the American Western had tried to create an epic image of the past in order to glorify the American way of life in the present, as Lino Micciche` reminded us, Sergio Leone’s films demystify the Western frontier, aesthetically and thematically, giving a revolutionary contribution to the development of world cinema and to the shaping of the popular forms of cultural discourse.

Biography Sergio Leone was born in Rome on 3 January 1929. The son of a film director and an actress, Leone was around the movies from an early age. His first appearance on a film set was in 1948, as an extra in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette. Between 1945 and 1959 he collaborated as an assistant director and occasionally as an actor in the making of nearly 50 films before making his directorial debut in 1960 with Il colosso di Rodi. In the 1970s he codirected (with Nanny Loy, Elio Petri, Luchino Visconti, and others) a documentary on the 1969 terrorist bombing in Piazza Fontana in Milan, entitled 12 dicembre o Document on Tullio Pinelli. Between 1976 and 1983, Leone directed a number of commercials, including two for Renault. He also produced numerous films directed by others.

Leone died of a heart attack in Rome on 30 April 1989. MANUELA GIERI Selected Works Films Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (based on Bulwer Lytton’s novel), 1959; (uncredited), directed by Mario Bonnard. Il colosso di Rodi, 1960. Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars), 1964. Per qualche dollaro in piu` (A Few Dollars More), 1965. Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, The Bad and the Ugly), 1966. C’era una volta il West (Once Upon a Time in the West), 1968. Giu` la testa (Duck, You Sucker), 1971. C’era una volta in America (Once Upona Time in America), 1984.

Screenplays Giu` la testa, in Franco Ferrini, ‘‘L’antiwestern e il casoLeone,’’ Bianco e Nero, nos. 9–10 (September– October, 1971). Per un pugno di dollari, edited by Luca Verdone, Bologna: Cappelli, 1979.

Further Reading Cumbow, Robert C., Once Upon a Time: The Films of Sergio Leone, Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1985. De Fornari, Oreste, Sergio Leone, Florence: Moizzi, 1977. Donati, Roberto, Sergio Leone: America e nostalgia, Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2004. Frayling, Christopher, Sergio Leone: Something to Do with Death, London and New York: Faber and Faber, 2000. Frayling, Christopher, Spaghetti Westerns, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Garofalo, Marcello, Tutto il cinema di Sergio Leone, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1999. Mininni, Francesco, Sergio Leone, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1989. Ortoli, Philippe, Sergio Leone. Une Amerique de le´gendes, ´ ditions L’Harmattan, 1994. Paris, E Pugliese, Roberto (editor), Sergio Leone, Venice: Edizioni Circuito Cinema, 1989. Staig, Laurence, and Tony Williams, Italian Western (The Opera of Violence), London: Futura Publications, 1975.

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FRANCESCO LEONETTI

FRANCESCO LEONETTI (1924–) One of the most original and versatile intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, Francesco Leonetti has been, from time to time, a poet, critic, narrator, founder of literary and political journals, political theoretician, director, actor, and teacher. His cultural journey represents one of the most crucial experiences of our time, and his pivotal contribution to the redefinition of the role of culture in modern Italy has been repeatedly acknowledged. After graduating in philosophy with a dissertation on Tommaso Campanella, Leonetti began to work in two different libraries, the Biblioteca Malatestiana in Cesena and the Archiginnasio in Bologna. This experience proved to be decisive for his intellectual growth, as it provided him with a vast, although at times perhaps inorganic, cultural background, which deeply affected his art and his approach to literature. His poetry, for instance, clearly shows signs of his considerable erudition (Dante, Carducci, Leopardi), along with his attempt to reconcile the Italian literary tradition with the need for a new and more updated literary language. His first major poetical work, La cantica (The Canto, 1959) is a telling example of Leonetti’s literary research, a daring effort to combine ideology and form and to redefine the role of the artist/ intellectual in modern society. To fully understand Leonetti’s impact on Italian culture, one needs to discuss his contribution to journals such as Officina and Il Menabo`. Published from 1955 to 1959, Officina represents the first factual attempt to renew the Italian literary landscape and question both the Hermetic and neo-Realist canons. Leonetti, together with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Roberto Roversi, and Franco Fortini, was deeply committed to the exploration of new languages and styles (the so-called neosperimentalismo) and, following Pasolini’s theoretical suggestions, devoted himself to the exploitation of a more colloquial and ‘‘low’’ language, where poetry and prose meet. In addition to a number of poems such as ‘‘La disperata fatica’’ (The Desperate Effort, 1956) and ‘‘La messa di mezzogiorno’’ (The Midday Mass, 1956), Leonetti contributed to the journal crucial critical essays such as ‘‘Il decadentismo come problema contemporaneo’’ (Decadentism as a Contemporary Problem, 1956) 1016

and ‘‘Proposizioni per una teoria della letteratura’’ (Propositions for a Theory of Literature, 1957), in which he addressed, respectively, the relationship with tradition and the urgency for a new theory of literature. In 1960, he began his collaboration with Elio Vittorini’s Il Menabo`. Vittorini, whom he had first met in 1956, became for him a decisive point of reference. Indeed, it was during the Menabo` years, and under Vittorini’s knowledgeable supervision, that he familiarized himself with thinkers such as Claude Le´vi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, and Ferdinand de Saussure and with the new theoretical approaches of structuralism, semiotics, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In this context, one should also mention the fruitless effort to create an international edition of the journal (Gulliver), the purpose of which was to establish a network with the leading European intellectuals of the period. The product of all these theoretical influences is an original and audacious blend of Marxism and structuralism through which Leonetti attempted to reconcile his ideological commitments with an alternative way of tackling the linguistic/literary experience. The writer’s restless effort produced both theoretical and practical results. Among the former, particularly significant are some of the essays published in Il Menabo`, such as ‘‘La negazione in letteratura’’ (Negotiation in Literature, 1964) and, more importantly, ‘‘L’eversione costruita’’ (The Constructed Subversion, 1965). The practical results include a series of experimental novels, Conoscenza per errore (Knowing through Mistakes, 1961), L’incompleto (The Incomplete, 1964), and Il tappeto volante (The Flying Carpet, 1967), which are among the most interesting works of his literary production. Conoscenza per errore, Leonetti’s first major narrative endeavor, tells the story of Giacomo, a young man who, after finishing high school, begins a journey through post-Fascist Italy and gains a better sense of his self and his place in the world through a series of intellectual and erotic encounters. Due to its experimental character, this work can be considered as a sort of anticipation of the poetics of the Italian neo-avant-garde and, more precisely, of Gruppo 63. In this regard, it should be

FRANCESCO LEONETTI noted that, although Leonetti has never considered himself a member of the group, it is nevertheless possible to establish a literary kinship between him and writers such as Edoardo Sanguineti and Nanni Balestrini on the basis of their common artistic and ideological goals. L’incompleto is probably the author’s best fictional effort, and critic Walter Pedulla` has identified in it the influence of two great figures of French culture, Blanchot and Barthes (La letteratura del benessere, 1973). The novel, centered on the figure of Ernesto, a Marxist intellectual, is an example of experimental fiction in which the author employed an original narrative technique constantly shifting from the third to the first person. Furthermore, it perfectly embodies Leonetti’s main concern with literature and with the possibility of combining art and ideology. Indeed, through Ernesto, Leonetti analyzed the relationship between the intellectual and the world of consumption and its myths, which he was ultimately unable to accept. In 1967 a new phase of Leonetti’s intellectual career began. He founded, with Roberto Di Marco, Gianni Scalia, and Arnaldo Pomodoro, Che fare. The journal, the official voice of the militant New Left, marked the author’s transition to a more direct political and revolutionary involvement, during which he left behind the abstract and theoretical principles of literature and devoted himself entirely to politics. Although the second part of Leonetti’s life is still rich with literary and political endeavors, including the collaboration with two other important journals, Alfabeta and Campo, however, his most fruitful contributions to Italian literature and culture in general took place in the 1960s. Despite the consistent number of publications of the subsequent years, among which one can still find interesting pieces such as the novel Campo di battaglia (Battlefield, 1981), the poems of Palla di filo (Thread Ball, 1986), and the humorous and provocative autobiography La voce del corvo: Una vita 1940–2001 (The Voice of the Crow: A Life, 2001), none of them match the power and theoretical audacity of the works composed in the early years of his literary practice, during which Leonetti gave a critical contribution to the renewal of the Italian cultural scene and the redefinition of the role of the artist.

the Universita` di Bologna, 1945. He married Gabriella Amaniera, 1945. He worked at the Biblioteca Malatestiana of Cesena and at the Archiginnasio of Bologna, 1946–1961. He became a cofounder, with Pier Paolo Pasolini, of Officina, 1955–1959; and, with Premio Marzocco, of La cantica, 1959. Leonetti collaborated with Il Menabo`, 1960–1967. He moved to Milan, 1963, and worked as an actor in Pasolini’s Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, Uccellacci e Uccellini, Edipo Re, Capriccio all’italiana, 1964– 1968. He was cofounder of Che fare, 1967–1975. He directed the film Processo politico, 1970, and taught aesthetics at the Accademia delle Belle Arti di Brera in Milan, 1971–1995. He was director of Alfabeta, 1979–1988, and of Campo, 1990–1996. Leonetti lives in Milan. PAOLO CHIRUMBOLO Selected Works Fiction Fumo, fuoco e dispetto, 1956. Conoscenza per errore, 1961. L’incompleto, 1964. Il tappeto volante, 1967. Irati e sereni, 1974. Campo di battaglia, 1981. Piedi in cerca di cibo, 1995. I piccolissimi e la circe, 1998. Le storie furiose, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Sopra una perduta estate,’’ 1942. ‘‘Poemi,’’ 1952. ‘‘Arlecchinata,’’ 1955. ‘‘La cantica,’’ 1959. ‘‘Percorso logico del 1960–75,’’ 1976. ‘‘Palla di filo,’’ 1986. ‘‘In uno scacco: (nel settantotto),’’ 1979. ‘‘Le scritte sconfinate,’’ 1994. ‘‘La freccia,’’ 2001.

Autobiography La vita e gli amici (in pezzi), 1992. La voce del corvo: Una vita 1940–2001, 2001.

Essays Un lavoro mentale, 1976. Il leone e la volpe: dialogo nell’inverno ‘94, with Paolo Volponi, 1994.

Further Reading

Biography Francesco Leonetti was born in Cosenza on 27 January 1924. He graduated in philosophy from

Ferretti, Gian Carlo (editor), ‘‘ Officina’’: Cultura, letteratura e politica negli anni cinquanta, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Golino, Enzo, Letteratura e classi sociali, Bari: Laterza, 1976.

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FRANCESCO LEONETTI Muzzioli, Francesco, ‘‘Una proposta di strutturalismo italiano: Leonetti tra Barthes e Blanchot (1963–1966),’’ Quaderni di critica, 2 (1974), 93–111. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura del benessere, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973.

Piemontese, Felice, ‘‘Francesco Leonetti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Piscopo, Ugo, ‘‘Francesco Leonetti,’’ in Novecento. I Contemporanei, vol. 9, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1979.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (1798–1837) It was not until the 1950s that Giacomo Leopardi finally gained the recognition that he deserved. Walter Binni’s La nuova poetica leopardiana (1947), Cesare Luporini’s Leopardi progressivo (1947), and Natalino Sapegno’s Leopardi (1948) all came to challenge Benedetto Croce’s established narrow interpretation of the greatest Italian poet after Dante in his Poesia e non poesia (1923). Leopardi, in fact, was much more than a poet, but even the value of his poetry had been, for almost a century, limited to a fraction of it. The literary taste of the first half of the twentieth century was ruled by Croce with his philosophy of distinti, the separation, that is, of human faculties, whereby intellect operates independently from imagination and cannot cooperate with it. Only Leopardi’s short lyric poems, the idylls, Croce ruled, were worthy of the name of poetry; the rest of his poetical production was labeled as philosophical poetry and was thus nonpoetry. Croce’s attitude not only discarded a large part of Leopardi’s work, it actually misunderstood even the part he wanted to save. None of Leopardi’s poetry, in fact, is devoid of philosophical thought, not even the idylls that Croce extolled as pure poetry. Ironically, during his lifetime Leopardi’s fame lay more in his linguistics and philological accomplishments than in his poetry: his erudite editions and translations of the Greek, Latin, and Italian classics. Already in 1816 his translation of the first book of the Odyssey and the second of the Aeneid attracted the attention of the editor Antonio Stella, for whom he was to do many editions. In the debates of the time on classicism and romanticism, Leopardi’s early allegiance was with the former. As Leopardi stated in his 1818 ‘‘Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica’’ (‘‘Essay of an Italian on Romantic Poetry’’), Italian literature (the direct heir of the classical languages) should 1018

remain faithful to its origin and hold the classics as its unsurpassable models, rather than imitating the European literatures, as the romantics preached. This philosophical poet developed his pessimistic thought out of a life that came from his upbringing in the backward and reactionary town of Recanati. Giacomo, the firstborn of Count Monaldo Leopardi and Marchesa Adelaide Antici, constantly complained about the ‘‘prison’’ of Recanati. The family, one of the oldest in town, lived in its most important palace and had to endure the ‘‘offense,’’ as Monaldo called it, of the invasion of the French republican army in 1796 and a few years later the arrival of Napoleon himself, who rode through the town on a horse. Count Monaldo, as the story goes, proudly refused to see him. If Monaldo was a political reactionary, Adelaide was a religious bigot, who raised her children with the iron rod of religious fanaticism and harsh discipline. Her coldness was proverbial and the consequences, especially on the very sensitive Giacomo, devastating. At 22 Giacomo described her in these words: Io ho conosciuto intimamente una madre di famiglia che non era punto superstiziosa, ma saldissima ed esattissima nella credenza cristiana e negli esercizi della religione. Questa non solamente non compiangeva quei genitori che perdevano i loro figli bambini, ma gl’invidiava intimamente e sinceramente, perche´ questi erano volati al paradiso senza pericoli, e avevano liberato i genitori dall’incomodo di mantenerli I have known intimately a mother who, though not superstitious, was steadfast in her Christian faith and in her religious practices. Not only did she not feel sorry for those parents who lost their children early, but she envied them intimately and sincerely, because their little ones had flown to heaven without dangers, and had freed their parents from the burden of supporting them (Zibaldone, 1898).

GIACOMO LEOPARDI Giacomo found his outlet and relief in the family library, which was to become his sanctuary. His dissatisfaction with the ignorance and narrowmindedness of the people of Recanati and his knowledge, which soon surpassed that of his preceptors, made him a recluse, and in the family library, he spent his seven years of ‘‘studio matto e disperatissimo’’ (desperate and maddening study), as he wrote to his friend, the humanist and patriot Pietro Giordani, in a letter dated 2 March 1918: ‘‘mi sono rovinato infelicemente e senza rimedio per tutta la vita’’ (I ruined myself unhappily and without remedy for life). And not only was his health damaged but also his appearance, ‘‘che e` la sola a cui guardano i piu`’’ (which is the only thing that counts for the majority). Within a few years Giacomo acquired an incredible knowledge of Latin and Greek and read voraciously all he could find. His first exercise in erudition was a Storia dell’astronomia (History of Astronomy, 1813), which he compiled by consulting hundreds of volumes and dedicated to his father; it was followed, two years later, by his Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (Essay on the Popular Errors of the Ancients, 1815), where both his attraction to the intellectual accomplishments of the Enlightenment in fighting superstition and his fascination with the happy errors and illusions of the primitives were evident. He was to return to the theme and give it poetic form in ‘‘Alla primavera o Delle favole antiche’’ (On Spring, or On the Fables of the Ancients, 1822) and ‘‘L’Inno ai Patriarchi’’ (Hymn to the Patriarchs, 1822), where the poet’s longing for a lost era is revealed. In a famous page of the Zibaldone, Leopardi explained his spiritual and intellectual development: ‘‘Nella carriera poetica il mio spirito ha percorso lo stesso stadio che lo spirito umano in generale. Da principio il mio forte era la fantasia, e i miei versi erano pieni d’immagini’’ (In the poetical career my spirit followed the same path as the human spirit in general. At the beginning my strength was fantasy, and my verses were filled with images), just as it is with children and as it was with the ancients. The radical change, he continued, took place in 1819 when a temporary blindness deprived him from reading: ‘‘Cominciai ...a riflettere profondamente sopra le cose...a divenire filosofo di professione’’ (I began...to reflect in depth over everything...to became a philosopher by profession). His imagination weakened, and he turned from naı¨ve poetry to sentimental, a` la Schiller. In his era, Leopardi argues,

naı¨ve poetry is no longer possible since humanity has realized the split between the self and the outside reality. Thus the great poetry of the classics, especially his beloved Greeks, could no longer be reproduced. Poetry could only be sentimental, because ‘‘il sentimentale e` fondato e sgorga dalla filosofia, dell’esperienza, dalla cognizione dell’uomo e delle cose, in comma, dal vero, laddove era della primitiva essenza della poesia essere ispirata al falso’’ (the sentimental springs forth from philosophy, experience, from man’s knowledge of man and things, in short, from the true, whereas the essence of primitive poetry was to be inspired by falshood). Through his constraining upbringing, his solitude, his voracious reading, Giacomo began living a life of imagination, in which he could create for himself pleasures and joys he could never experience in reality. The love for women, especially, became for him the search of the ‘‘woman who cannot be found.’’ The reading of Rousseau helped him in elaborating his theory: Pleasure consists in desiring the beloved object, not in its fruition, which will necessarily bring about disillusionment. Reality cannot stand up to imagination. His first love poem, ‘‘Il primo amore’’ (The First Love, 1817) closes with praise of the image over reality ‘‘Spira nel pensier mio la bella imago. . . e sol di lei m’appago’’ (the beautiful image breathes in my thought . . . and I find enjoyment only in it), and six years later the more mature poem ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ (To His Woman, 1823) reiterated and developed his belief that the desired woman is a Platonic idea which the poet alone enjoys. Never, in fact, did Leopardi experience a reciprocated love, and women remained to him either the ‘‘bestie femmine’’ (feminine beasts) of Rome, ‘‘frivole, dissipate e piene di ipocrisia’’ (frivolous, dissipated and full of hypocrisy) or angels, ideal beings, created by his imagination. Still in his operetta morale ‘‘Dialogo di Tasso e del suo genio familiare’’ (Dialogue of Tasso and His Familiar Genie), when asked by his familiar genie whether it is sweeter for him to see or to think of his beloved, Tasso (the alter ego of the poet) admits that in presence she appears to him as a woman and in his thought as a goddess. All the women who inspired his poetry were inaccessible, thus coveted. For a century his pessimistic philosophy was seen as the consequence of his physical and psychological sufferings; and Croce greatly contributed to this interpretation. Already in 1953, however, Romano Amerio realized that, whereas his personal condition might have initially 1019

GIACOMO LEOPARDI prompted Leopardi’s pessimistic disposition, his philosophical conclusions were the results of a profound and broad theoretical speculation nourished by French materialism and sensationalism (‘‘L’ultrafilosofia di Giacomo Leopardi’’). Philosophers such as Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Pierre Jean George Cabanis, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Paul Henri (Baron) D’Holbach, Denis Diderot, and the Marquis De Sade contributed to Leopardi’s elaboration of his own philosophy; and also John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, and among the classics, his beloved Lucretius. He defended the theoretical soundness of his ideas with a moving letter written in French to the Swiss philologist M. De Sinner, where he appealed to his readers to challenge and destroy his observations and reasoning rather than accusing his maladies for them. His friendship with Pietro Giordani brought him to the liberal and antipapal ideas of the Risorgimento, so much feared by his father. It inspired him to write in 1818 his political canzoni, ‘‘All’Italia’’ (To Italy) and ‘‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’’ (On the Monument to Dante), which, though still imbued with scholastic rhetoric, made him known outside Recanati and inspired Italian patriots to political action. The atmosphere of the prison of Recanati had become unbearable. At 20, Giacomo had never left the house by himself or had a penny in his pocket. He had to ask his father for any book he wanted to buy and could not convince his parents to let him leave Recanati and find work in a real city. His attempt to escape failed—the passport he requested in secret to leave the Papal States was sent to his father, rather than to him, and Giacomo fell into a deep depression. An affliction in his eyes that made reading impossible worsened his mental state. He called this spiritual crisis his ‘‘philosophical conversion,’’ and he recorded it in his diary, the Zibaldone, where he continued to write and analyze his reflections on an incredible variety of topics: philology, religion, poetry, ethics, and politics. In the letters to Giordani he poured out his frustrations and sufferings of this period, and in the blackest state of mind he began to write his finest poetry: the first idylls. It would always happen this way: From desperation and suffering his most beautiful poems will be born. His hatred for the prison of Recanati, his longing for a big city and great spaces, were nurtured by his vivid imagination and were therefore doomed to disappointment. It is, in fact, the limit, the impediment that brings pleasure, since it stimulates the creativity of the imagination, as his most 1020

famous poem ‘‘L’infinito’’ demonstrates. When Giacomo finally left Recanati in the company of his uncle, Marquis Carlo Antici, and arrived in the big city of Rome, his disenchantment was immediate. He was disappointed by the ignorance of the so-called learned men, especially of the clergy; by the superficiality and vanity of women; and by the selfishness of everybody. Although the learned Romans claimed to know literature and archaeology, he wrote to his father on 9 December 1822, the so-called men of letters did not even know Greek and Latin, ‘‘senza la perfetta cognizione delle quali lingue, Ella ben vede che cosa possa essere lo studio dell’antichita`’’ (without which, as you well see, the knowledge of antiquities is practically impossible). And on 6 December he wrote to his brother Carlo that the vastness of the city, too, upset him, because in it he felt ignored, lost: ‘‘L’attirare gli occhi degli altri in una gran citta` e` impresa disperata’’ (To attract the others’ eyes in a big city is a desperate task). He soon began looking back to the familiar environment of Recanati, where at least he felt loved and respected. His ambition and intense need of recognition could not be satisfied because in a large city there is such abundance of beauty, doctrine, or nobility ‘‘che non se ne fa caso veruno’’ (that nobody pays any attention to them). ‘‘L’indifferenza, quell’orribile passione, anzi spassione, dell’uomo, ha . . . la sua principal sede nelle grandi citta`’’ (Indifference, that horrible passion, or better, non-passion of man reigns in large societies). In another letter to Carlo (25 November 1822), he revealed his loneliness and strong need of love: ‘‘Amami, per Dio. Ho bisogno d’amore, amore, amore, fuoco, entusiasmo, vita: il mondo non mi par fatto per me; ho trovato il diavolo piu` brutto assai di quello che si dipinge’’ (Love me, for God’s sake. I need love, love, love, fire, enthusiasm, life: the world does not seem made for me: I found the devil much worse than it was depicted). In the same years Shelley and Chateaubriand had totally different impressions of the great city and found inspiration from the ruins, landscapes, and the atmosphere. This was not the case with Leopardi, who could love places only if enriched by his own remembrances, thus with the meaning he himself would create for them. After five months in Rome, he returned to Recanati, even more deluded and unhappy, and devoted the next two years to the writing of his Operette morali (Moral Essays and Dialogues, 1827), the most philosophical of his poetical works, or ‘‘poetry in prose,’’ as he described it in a letter to his father. On its foundation there is the

GIACOMO LEOPARDI constant struggle between reality and illusions and the ever-frustrated human search for infinite pleasure. What happened in Rome would recur later on in Milan and then in Florence. Giacomo would never fit with the environment around him. Only the first few months in Bologna with the short-lived friendship with the Countess Teresa Carniani Malvezzi and a brief period in Pisa brought him some illusion of happiness. His complete mistrust in men and disbelief in the social role of literature isolated him even from the Florentine liberal group of La Nuova Antologia that had invited him to contribute his ferocious social and intellectual criticism to the new journal. What could they gain from one who could never believe in the happiness of the many? To Giordani he wrote on 14 July 1828, ‘‘umilmente domando se la felicita` de’ popoli si puo` dare senza la felicita` degl’individui. I quail sono condannati alla infelicita` dalla natura, e non dagli uomini ne´ dal caso’’ (I humbly ask whether the happiness of the people could be given without that of the individuals; who are condemned to unhappiness by nature and not by men or chance). By age 20, Leopardi’s philosophy was established and was never to change. Founded in the rationalistic thought of the French tradition, it did not share its optimistic faith in reason. Reason, in fact, discovers that the world is only matter, that there is neither a transcendent principle governing nature nor a soul surviving the death of the body. Humanity is part of nature and undergoes the same process of creation, destruction, and, eventually, extinction, as any other species of plants or animals. Only our presumptuousness and vanity make us forget what Nicolaus Copernicus long time ago had revealed, namely that we are not the center of the universe. Nature, in the ‘‘Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese’’ (Dialogue Between Nature and the Icelander) rhetorically asked the Icelander: Immaginavi tu forse che il mondo fosse fatto per causa vostra? Ora sappi che nelle fatture, negli ordini e nelle operazioni mie...sempre ebbi ed ho l’intenzione a tutt’altro che alla felicita` degli uomini o all’infelicita`. Quando io vi offendo in qualunque modo e con qual si sia mezzo, io non me n’avveggo.... E finalmente, se anche mi avvenisse di estinguere tutta la vostra specie, io non me avvedrei Did you think by any chance that the world was made for you alone? Now let me tell you that my works, laws and operations...my purpose was not, and is not, the happiness or unhappiness of men. When I harm you in any way and by whatever means, I don’t notice it....

Finally, even if I happened to wipe out the entire species, I wouldn’t notice it.

If this was Leopardi’s theoretical philosophy, his ethics were founded in his theory of pleasure, which he described as never present, but either past or future. In the past, pleasure exists as remembrance of an old, faraway experience that becomes pleasurable as remembered, and precisely because of its distance and vagueness, as in the poems ‘‘Alla luna’’ (To the Moon), and ‘‘Le rimembranze’’ (Remembrances). Imagination fills in the gaps and creates a pleasurable experience, thus an illusion, a fiction. In the future, pleasure exists as hope of things to come, thus still in the work of the imagination, as poems like ‘‘Il sabato del villaggio’’ (The Village Saturday) and ‘‘A Silvia’’ (To Silvia) clearly demonstrate. Vagueness, variety, infinity are the qualities beloved by the Romantics, but in Leopardi the emphasis was more on the indefinite that allows one to supplement what is missing than on the overwhelming emotion. If humans are only one of the many species in nature destined to extinction, our revenge over nature is our ability to delude ourselves, to create fables, to write poetry. Illusions are in fact that which makes it possible for humanity to go on living, and fortunately, even the most skeptical of us survive because nature allows us to forget the truth and delude ourselves. However, as Leopardi stated in his last work, Pensieri (Thoughts, 1831), fortunately for humans, ‘‘gli uomini sono miseri per necessita`, e risoluti di credersi miseri per accidente’’ (men are miserable by necessity, yet determined to think themselves miserable by accident). A cynical view of society derived from such harsh philosophy. Hobbes was right in his belief homo homini lupus: ‘‘l’uomo e` quasi sempre tanto malvagio quanto gli bisogna. Se si conduce dirittamente, si puo` giudicare che la malvagita` non gli e` necessaria’’ (man is almost always as wicked as he needs to be. If he acts honestly, it means that he does not need wickedness). Leopardi’s Pensieri, modeled after those of Montaigne and Pascal, were aphoristic commentaries on men and society. If his canti, that is poetry, were created through the dialectics of reality and illusion, the Pensieri are sheer prose where illusion no longer has any part, and they present humanity and society without redeeming features: ‘‘Il genere umano...si divide in due parti: gli uni usano prepotenza ,e gli altri la soffrono. Ne´ legge, ne´ forza alcuna, ne´ progresso di filosofia ne´ di civilta` potendo impedire che uomo nato o da nascere non sia o degli uni o degli altri’’ 1021

GIACOMO LEOPARDI (The human race...is split in two camps: the bullies and the bullied. Neither law nor force of any kind, nor advancement in civilization or philosophy, can prevent men now or in the future from belonging to one of these two camps), a notion that carries clear echoes of Machiavelli’s thought. If Leopardi’s philosophy was not given enough credit until very recently, it was not only because of its bleakness and incoherence, the ‘‘sentimental mess’’ described by Benedetto Croce (Poesia e non poesia, 1923). There was a more serious reason. The great construction of Western philosophy that had started with Aristotle and was completed by Hegel tended to identify philosophical with systematic thought. At the basis of such a frame of mind was the faith in the readability of the world, thus in the existence of stable and fixed principles by which phenomena could be explained. Only recent scholars (Antonio Prete, Emanuele Severino, Elio Gioanola, Sergio Givone) familiar with Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Sigmund Freud could find in Leopardi’s asystematic thought the trait of a modern philosophical approach that was far ahead of its time. But Leopardi’s contribution to modernity (and even postmodernity) goes even farther and is to be found in his discovery of the cognitive power of imagination. Dismantling the barrier between poetry and philosophy, imagination and reason, he saw them both working together not only in the creation of art, but also in the discovery of scientific truth. What writers like Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco and scientists like Ilya Prigogine and Rita Levi Montalcini are saying now, Leopardi had already intuited almost two centuries ago.

Biography The son of Count Monaldo and Marchesa Adelaide Antici, Giacomo Leopardi was born in the small town of Recanati in the Marche region, part of the Papal States, 28 June 1798. His education and that of his siblings were entrusted to private tutors from the clergy, but Giacomo soon continued on his own, learning the classical and the modern languages, Hebrew, and the sciences in the family library. Seven years of ‘‘desperate and mad study’’ ruined his health forever. Only in November 1821 was he able to leave home for Rome with his uncle, Carlo Antici. Five months later, disappointed by the large city, he returned to Recanati, where he wrote his philosophical dialogues. In 1825, feeling constrained in Recanati 1022

again, he was able to go to Milan at the invitation of the editor Antonio Stella, who assigned him a critical translation of Cicero’s works. On his way to Milan, he stopped in Bologna, where he had his first pleasant stay among friends and scholars who respected and admired him and where he found the people hospitable and generous. When in Milan, instead, the impersonality and coldness of the big city caused him to fall once again into the depression he had experienced in Rome. After convincing Stella he could also do his work away from Milan, he quickly returned to Bologna, where he experienced for the first time the intense intellectual company of a woman, Countess Teresa Carniani Malvezzi. In 1827, he moved to Florence, where he met Antonio Ranieri, who was to become his constant companion until his death. After a brief happy stay in Pisa, he returned to Florence, where he had an amorous interlude with Fanny Targioni Tozzetti for whom he wrote the poems ‘‘Il pensiero dominante’’ and ‘‘Aspasia.’’ In 1833, Ranieri and Leopardi moved to Naples and in 1836, to flee from the cholera epidemic, to a villa on the slope of Mount Vesuvius, where he wrote his last two poems and died 14 June 1837. DANIELA BINI Selected Works Collections Opere di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Antonio Ranieri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1845. Scritti letterari, 2 vols., edited by Giovanni Mestica, Florence: Le Monnier, 1899. Puerili e abbozzi vari, edited by Alessandro Donati, Bari: Laterza, 1921. Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, 5 vols., edited by Francesco Flora, Verona: Mondadori, 1947, 1968–1973. Tutte le opere, edited by Walter Binni, Milan: Sansoni, 1969. ‘‘Entro dipinta gabbia.’’ Tutti gli scritti inediti, rari e editi 1809–1810 di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Maria Corti, Milan: Bompiani, 1972. Correspondance Selections, translated by Prue Shaw, Leeds, U.K.: Northern University Press, 1998. Selected Poems with Excerpts from the Poets’ Journals, Letters and Notes, translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Anne Paolucci, London: Griffon House, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Canzoni sull’Italia e sul Monumento di Dante,’’ 1818. ‘‘Canzone ad Angelo Mai,’’ 1820. ‘‘Canzoni,’’ 1824. ‘‘Il sogno’’/ ‘‘Elegia,’’ 1825. ‘‘Idilli e volgarizzamenti di alcuni versi morali dal greco,’’ 1825; 1826. ‘‘Versi,’’ 1826.

GIACOMO LEOPARDI ‘‘Canti,’’ 1831; new edition, 1835; as Selected Poems, translated by Eamon Grennan, 1997; as Leopardi’s Canti, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1998. ‘‘Paralipomeni alla Batracomiomachia,’’ 1842; as The War of the Mice and the Crabs, translated by Ernesto Caserta, 1976.

Prose Operette morali, 1827, as Essays and Dialogues, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, 1982. Pensieri, vol. 2 of Opere Minori approvate di Giacomo Leopardi, 1831; as Pensieri, translated by William Simone Di Piero, 1981. Studi filologici, 1845. Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi, 1815; 1846. Storia dell’astronomia, 1813; in Opere Inedite di G. Leopardi, 1878–1880. Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura di Giacomo Leopardi, 1897; as Zibaldone di pensieri, 1898. ‘‘Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica,’’ in Scritti vari inediti di Giacomo Leopardi dalle carte napoletane, 1906. Lettere, edited by Francesco Moroncini, 1934–1941; edited by Francesco Flora, 1947; as Epistolario, 1998. Dialogo del primo amore e prose autobiografiche, 1981. Dissertazioni filosofiche, 1983. Appunti e ricordi, 2000.

Further Reading Alcorn, John, ‘‘Giacomo Leopardi’s Art and Science of Emotion in Memory and Anticipation,’’ MLN, 111:1 (January 1996), 89–122. Amerio, Romano, ‘‘‘L’ultrafilosofia’ di Giacomo Leopardi,’’ Filosofia, July 1953, 451–485. Barricelli, Gian P., Giacomo Leopardi, Boston: Twayne, 1986. Bigongiari, Piero, Leopardi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1962. Bini, Daniela, A Fragrance from the desert: Poetry and Philosophy in Giacomo Leopardi, Gainsville: Univerity Press of Florida, 1983. Binni, Walter, La nuova poetica leopardiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Binni, Walter, La protesta di Leopardi, Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Biral, Bruno, La posizione storica di Giacomo Leopardi, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Bonadeo, Alfredo, ‘‘Death in Leopardi’s Prose,’’ Italian Quarterly, 18:70 (Fall 1974), 3–19. Brioschi, Franco, La poesia senza nome. Saggio su Leopardi, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Carrera, Alessandro (editor), Giacomo Leopardi: poeta e filosofo, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 1999. Carsaniga, Giovanni, Giacomo Leopardi: The Unheeded Voice, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Casale, Ottavio, A Leopardi Reader, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981. Cecchetti, Giovanni (editor), Giacomo Leopardi, Forum Italicum. Leopardi Supplement 1990. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia e non poesia, Bari: Laterza, 1923. Damiani, Rolando, L’impero della ragione: studi leopardiani, Ravenna: Longo, 1994.

De Feo, Italo, Leopardi. L’uomo e l’opera, Verona: Mondadori, 1972. Della Terza, Dante, Saggi su Giacomo Leopardi, Rome: Edizioni dell’Atenea, 2005. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Saggio sul Leopardi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Ferruci, Carlo, Leopardi filosofo e le ragioni della poesia, Venice: Marsilio, 1987. Ferrucci, Carlo (editor), Leopardi e il pensiero moderno, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989. Frattini, Alberto, Giacomo Leopardi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969. Frattini, Alberto, Giancarlo Galeazzi, and Sergio Sconocchia (editors), Ripensando Leopardi: l’eredita` del poeta e del filosofo alle soglie del terzo millennio, Rome: Studium, 2001. Galimberti, Cesare, Linguaggio del vero in Leopardi, Florence: Olschki, 1959. Gioanola, Elio, Leopardi, la malinconia, Milan: Jaca Book, 1995. Givone, Sergio, ‘‘Uno sguardo dal nulla,’’ Paradosso, 5 (1993), 29–46. Luporini, Cesare, ‘‘Leopardi progressivo,’’ in Filosofi vecchi e nuovi, Florence: Sansoni, 1947. Negri, Antonio, Lenta ginestra. Saggio sull’ontologia di Giacomo Leopardi, Milan: Sugar Co Edizioni, 1987. Origo, Iris, Leopardi: A Study in Solitude, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1953. Perella, Nicholas, Night and the Sublime in Giacomo Leopardi, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Prete, Antonio, Il pensiero poetante, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Ranieri, Antonio, Sette anni di sodalizio con Giacomo Leopardi, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Rigoni, Mario Andrea, Saggi sul pensiero leopardiano, Naples: Liquori, 1985. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Leopardi,’’ in Disegno storico della letteratura italiana, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1948. Severino, Emanuele, Il nulla e la poesia. Alla fine dell’eta` della tecnica: Leopardi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. Speciale, Emilio (editor), Giacomo Leopardi, estetica e poesia, Ravenna: Longo, 1992. Whitfield, John Humphreys, Giacomo Leopardi, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954. Williams, Pamela, ‘‘Leopardi in the English Speaking World: A Bibliography,’’ Italian Studies, 18 (1988), 41–59.

CANTI, 1831, 1835 Poems by Giacomo Leopardi

Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti were first published in Florence by Guglielmo Patti in 1831. Four years later, the first complete edition of Leopardi’s 1023

GIACOMO LEOPARDI poems, edited by the author, was published in Naples in 1835 by Saverio Starita. Only ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ (The Setting of the Moon) and ‘‘La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto’’ (The Broom, or The Flower of the Wasteland) were not included, because the poet wrote them in Naples just before his death in 1837. They appeared in the Le Monnier edition, published in Florence in 1845, edited by Antonio Ranieri. It was Leopardi who gave his poems the name Canti to call attention to their musical qualities. Leopardi called his first phase of poetical composition idyllic, where imagination reigns and feeds past memories and future hopes. It would be interrupted by the prosaic phase of the Operette morali; then briefly return with his canti pisani (in Pisa), ‘‘Risorgimento’’ (Resurgence) and ‘‘A Silvia’’ (To Sylvia); cease again with the so-called Aspasia cycle (with the delusion of his love for Fanny Targioni Tozzetti); and pick up once more in the final moment in Naples with ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ and ‘‘La ginestra.’’ Leopardi repeated over and over in his Zibaldone and letters that in the moment of desperation man is rescued by the return of illusions that keep him alive and hoping. This parabola was clearly evident in his poetical production, where idyllic moments and poems were followed either by the ironical and caustic prose of the Operette morali and I pensieri or by the negative and desperate tone of poems such as ‘‘Aspasia,’’ ‘‘Amore e morte’’ (Love and Death), and ‘‘A se stesso’’ (To Himself ). ‘‘All’Italia’’ (‘‘To Italy’’), written in 1818 and published the following year, is considered Leopardi’s patriotic appeal to the Italians to liberate their country from the foreigners. It expresses, however, even more the poet’s longing for the world of the ancients when the Greek youth defending their land against the Persians, ‘‘parea ch’a danza, e non a morte andasse...o a splendido convito’’ (seemed to go to a dance or to a splendid banquet, not to death). Together with the cult of the ancients Leopardi, just as Foscolo did in his Dei sepolcri, was also celebrating the greatness of the poets, here Simonides, who keep alive the memory of glorious deeds. The first group of canzoni, ‘‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’’ (On the Monument to Dante), ‘‘Ad Angelo Mai’’ (To Angelo Mai), and ‘‘Bruto Minore’’ (Brutus the Younger), in fact have in common the social call to the Italians to rescue their land politically and even more, culturally, since Italy is the direct 1024

heiress of the great civilizations of the Greeks and the Romans, which must be models and stimuli for present actions. In ‘‘Alla Primavera’’ (To Spring) and ‘‘Inno ai Patriarchi’’ (Hymn to the Patriarchs), however, Leopardi recognized that the world of the glorious illusions of the ancients was long gone. Nature, who to the ancients seemed a caring mother and companion, to the reasoning modern person has finally appeared as a mechanistic force senselessly creating and destroying. In these first poetical compositions Leopardi’s language was still imbued with classical images, and his richly rhetorical style mimicked that of his beloved classics. In Recanati, Leopardi composed his most famous poems, those he called idylls, beginning with ‘‘L’infinito’’ (The Infinite), his true masterpiece. He wrote it in 1819, and it was first published in the Milan journal Nuovo Ricoglitore in 1825. It is a meta-poem in that its theme and inspirational force are the fictional power of the poet that can overcome and defeat the limit and finiteness (finitude) of reality. Its brevity yet complex structure makes its message more powerful: Semantics, syntax, and rhythm are working together. The centrifugal force rests on the verb mi fingo placed at the center of the poem and of the line, and whose meaning is even closer etymologically to the Latin word and the English ‘‘fiction.’’ Space and time are the main agents in the poem, in their finite form; the physical limit of the siepe (hedge) that blocks the physical eye and the senses triggers the flight of the imagination that can create infinity of time and space— something that nature cannot do. One of the hardest poems to recite because of its complex syntax and complete absence of rhyme, it nevertheless creates with its meter a rhythm that evokes the very infinity of its theme. The idylls Leopardi wrote in these early years find all their inspiration in a familiar landscape, from a physical sensation that triggered by opposition the poet’s inspiration. The natural calm of moonlight shining over the familiar roofs or the song of an artisan coming home in the evening after ‘‘il dı` di festa’’ (the evening of the holiday) caused the poet to reflect on the passing of time and precariousness of life. Yet the memory of the past, as in ‘‘Le ricordanze’’ (The Remembrances), and the hope for the future sweeten the sorrow of those reflections. In ‘‘A Silvia,’’ written in Pisa in 1828 (published in 1931), the poet lamented the death of the young woman friend, the end of hope

GIACOMO LEOPARDI brought about by mature age. The first half of the poem was constructed on past memories conveyed by the poetical use of the imperfect. It loses much in the English translation. Pleasure exists only in the remembrance of the past or in the hope for the future, thus in humanity’s fictional power, in our ability to create illusions. If Silvia died before seeing her illusions deluded, the poet’s hope dies with the passing of years. Silvia and Hope become one and the same in the moving end of the poem, where Giacomo exclaims: ‘‘Ahi, come, / Come passata sei, / cara compagna dell’eta` mia nova, / Mia lacrimata speme!’’ (Alas, how quickly you passed, dear companion of my youth, my lamented hope). ‘‘Il sabato del villaggio’’ (The Village Saturday) exemplifies this theme by stating that pleasure is in the eve of the holiday, thus in expectation and hope, and not in the holiday itself. The moon is a steady presence in Leopardi’s poems. As with woman, it is the unresponsive, unreachable, cold, and ideal object of desire. Thus she is the perfect object of poetry, distant, vague, indefinite, unknowable. Though unreachable, with her peaceful presence she is a constant companion to the restless soul of the poet and his sleepless nights, as in ‘‘Alla luna’’ (To the Moon) and ‘‘La vita solitaria’’ (The Solitary Life), or the silent interlocutor in the philosophical poem ‘‘Canto notturno di un pastore errante nell’Asia’’ (Night Song of a Shepherd Wandering in Asia). Present but unmoving, she is identified with youth in her final appearance in ‘‘Il tramonto della luna’’ (The Setting of the Moon). In her light, objects around lose their definite contours and acquire vaghi aspetti (vague shapes) and deceiving appearances, just as life when colored by youth. But if the moon will continue to color the world with her nocturnal light, ‘‘la vita mortal, poi che la bella giovinezza sparı`, non si colora d’altra luce giammai, ne´ d’altra aurora’’ (mortal life, once youth has gone, will not be colored by any other light or dawn). Leopardi spent his last two years in a villa on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. The memory of the destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum inspired him to write ‘‘La ginestra.’’ In it, the frailty and precariousness of humanity are rendered more dramatic by presumptuousness: ‘‘Caggiono i regni intanto, / Passan genti e linguaggi: ella non vede: / E l’uom d’eternita` s’arroga il vanto’’ (Kingdoms change, people and languages pass: nature does not see: and man claims to be eternal). How much

wiser is the broom that grows in this deserted land, that does not pride itself on its strength, but humbly endures the harshness of its life—a stupendous metaphor of Leopardi’s final poetry, a poetry no longer of illusions but of nothingness. DANIELA BINI Editions First Edition Canti del conte Giacomo Leopardi, Florence: Guglielmo Patti, 1831. Enlarged edition, Naples: Saverio Starita, 1835; including ‘‘La ginestra, o il fiore del deserto’’ and ‘‘Il tramonto della luna,’’ edited by Antonio Ranieri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1845.

Critical Editions Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Francesco Moroncini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1927. In Scrittori d’Italia, vol. 4, edited by Leone Ginzburg, Bari: Laterza, 1938. In vol. 1 of Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, Poesie e prose, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Achille Tartaro, Bari: Laterza, 1978. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Domenico De Robertis, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Emilio Peruzzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1998.

Translations As Translations from Leopardi, by Robert Calverley Trevelyan, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1941. As Canti, translated by John Humphreys Whitfield, Naples: G. Scalabrini, 1962. As Selected Prose and Poetry, translated and edited by Iris Origo and John Heath-Stubbs, New York: New American Library, 1966. As The War of the Mice and the Crabs, translated and edited by Ernesto G. Caserta, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976. As Canti, bilingual edition, translated by Ghanshyan Singh, Recanati: Centro Nazionale Studi Leopardiani, 1990. As The Canti: With a Selection of His Prose, translated by John Gordon Nichols, Manchester: Carcanet, 1994. As Canti; selected and edited by Franco Fortini, translated by Paul Lawton, Dublin: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 1996. As Selected Poems, translated by Eamon Grennan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. As Leopardi’s Canti, translated by Joseph Tusiani, Fasano (Brindisi): Schena, 1998. As Thoughts and The Broom or The Flower of the Desert, translated by John Gordon Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2002.

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GIACOMO LEOPARDI Further Reading Blasucci, Luigi, Leopardi e i segnali dell’infinito, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985. Brose, Margaret, Leopardi Sublime, translated by Elisabetta Bertoli, Bologna: Re Enzo, 1998. Campailla, Sergio, Fingere l’infinito: l’ascolto dei Canti di Giacomo Leopardi, Rome: Il Veltro, 2003. Dolfi, Anna, Leopardi tra negazione e utopia. Indagini e ricerche sui ‘‘Canti,’’ Padua: Liviana, 1973. Ferrucci, Carlo, Un’estetica radicale: Leopardi, Rome: Lithos, 1999. Folin, Alberto, Leopardi e la notte chiara, Venice: Marsilio, 1993. Fontanella, Luigi (editor), Leopardiana, special issue of Gradiva, 8–9 (1990–1991). Girardi, Antonio, Lingua e pensiero nei Canti di Leopardi, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Givone, Sergio, ‘‘Uno sguardo dal nulla,’’ Paradosso, 5 (1993), 29–46. Maglione, Armando, Lectura leopardiana: i quarantuno canti e i nuovi credenti, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Pelosi, Pietro, I fiumi del tempo, i luoghi dell’anima: tempo e spazio nei Canti leopardiani, Napoli: Federico & Ardia, 1996. Singh, Ghanshyam, Leopardi and the Theory of Poetry, Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1964. Verna, Anthony, ‘‘The Memory of Poetry and the Poetry of Memory: Notes on the Meaning of Remembrance in Leopardi’s Canti,’’ Semiotics as a Bridge between the Humanities and the Sciences, edited by Paul Perron, New York: LEGAS, 2000.

OPERETTE MORALI, 1827 Essays by Giacomo Leopardi

To his friend Antonio Stella, who preferred to publish the Operette moral del conte Giacomo Leopardi (The Moral Essays of Count Giacomo Leopardi) separately for fear of the censorship, Leopardi wrote that he would rather keep them in his drawer than see fragmented a work he considered whole. Many of the letters Leopardi wrote between March and June 1826 return to this work in which ‘‘consiste il frutto della mia vita finora passata, e io l’ho piu` caro dei mei 1026

occhi’’ (in which the fruit of all my past life is concentrated, and it is more dear to me than my eyes) (Lettere, 1947). But Stella was right, and the book was poorly received by the critics. There was a second edition in 1834 with additions and corrections, published in Florence by Guglielmo Piatti. Leopardi made another attempt at publication with the Neapolitan publisher Saverio Starita in 1835, but this was short lived because of local censorship, and the complete posthumous edition by Antonio Ranieri published in Florence by Le Monnier in 1845 was placed in 1850 on the Index of forbidden books by the Roman Curia. Praised for its style, the work was condemned for its negative content. It expressed in artistic form Leopardi’s materialism and atheism— the long philosophical reflections that filled so many pages of his Zibaldone. Most of the Operette morali were composed in 1824, and at their core there is always the constant struggle between illusions and reason. Leopardi himself admitted that the great satirical Greek poet Lucian was a model, but the idea of the dialogue, naturally, went back to an even-greater model, Plato, whom he praised for being a poet-philosopher. The Operette morali opens with the prelude ‘‘Storia del genere umano’’ (History of the Human Race), in which Jove sends Love, the greatest illusion, to earth to relieve humanity from the unhappiness caused by reason’s discovery of Truth. They go on to show, through a series of dialogues between mythological characters, the failure of sheer philosophical thought and the necessity of the collaboration between poetry and philosophy as in ‘‘Parini ovvero della Gloria’’ (Parini’s Discourse on Glory). The first group of operette morali, which comprises ‘‘Dialogo di un folletto e di uno gnomo’’ (Dialogue Between a Sprite and a Gnome) and ‘‘Dialogo della Terra e della Luna’’ (Dialogue Between the Earth and the Moon) exposes humanity’s presumption in considering themselves the center of the world, whereas the earth will continue its course without finality even when the human race is extinguished—a theme Leopardi developed humorously in ‘‘Copernico’’ (Copernicus). In this, the sun one morning, tired of endlessly circling the earth, refuses to rise. A solution must immediately be found to avoid the extinction of life. A crazy scientist (Copernicus) is persuaded to rescue the earth from extinction by convincing her that she must now work and

GIACOMO LEOPARDI run around the sun. Having established that suffering and boredom are necessary components of human life and are caused by reason’s discovery of its meaninglessness, the second group of operette tries to suggest ways to reduce humanity’s suffering. Since reason is its cause, in ‘‘Dialogo di Cirstoforo Colombo e di Pietro Gutierrez’’ (Dialogue Between Christopher Columbus and Pietro Gutierrez), a life filled with action and risks is certainly more pleasant than one without, because the latter brings about boredom whereas the former brings about fear but also hope. In a stormy ocean humanity fears for its life, and escaping death is thus experienced as happiness. Movement and change bring variety to life and defeat boredom, thus the praise of birds and their flight in ‘‘Elogio delgi uccelli’’ (In Praise of Birds). If the world and living species are only matter, they will perish, and new ones will be born. Even our universe will die, and another might be formed. Only matter will persist and will assume different shapes and forms. Leopardi’s materialism is presented as a philosophical essay in the ‘‘Frammento apocrifo di Stratone di Lamsaco’’ (Apocryphal Fragment of Strato of Lampsacus) and then rendered in poetic form in the sublime song of the gallo silvestro in ‘‘Cantico del Gallo Silvestre’’ (Song of the Great Wild Rooster). People will die, and so will the universe and ‘‘questo arcano mirabile e spaventoso dell’esistenza universale, innanzi di essere dichiarato ne´ inteso, si dileguera` e perderassi’’ (this stupendous and frightening mystery of universal existence, before it can be declared or understood, will vanish and be lost). Humanity’s superiority over all the other creatures rests in our ability to create sublime poetry out of the silence of the universe. The end of this operetta is a magnificent example of what Leopardi’s final poetry will be—a poetry no longer nurtured on illusions but on nothingness. If suicide might seem a reasonable way out of a life of suffering, Leopardi, with the words of Porphyry in ‘‘Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio’’ (Dialogue Between Plotinus and Porphyry), rejected it not through logic but through what he called ‘‘il senso dell’animo’’ (the feeling of the soul) and the affection and consideration for others. If, in fact, the philosopher’s task is that of discovering the truth, and though painful, declaring it to the world through his writings, the books that will help humanity to survive will not be those of the philosopher but those of the poet, as in ‘‘Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro’’

(Dialogue Between Timander and Eleander): ‘‘cioe` libri destinati a muovere la immaginazione’’ (books destined to move the imagination). At the end of his philosophical work it is the imagination that once more triumphs, the only human faculty able to create happiness through the invention of future pleasures, as in ‘‘Dialogo di un venditore di almanacchi e di un passaggere’’ (Dialogue Between an Almanac Peddler and a Passer-By). DANIELA BINI Editions First Edition Operette morali del conte Giacomo Leopardi, Milan: Antonio Stella, 1827.

Critical Editions Operette, edited by Francesco Moroncini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1929. Operette morali in Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, vol. 1, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Operette morali, edited by Cesare Galimberti, Naples: Guida, 1998.

Translations As Essays, Dialogues and Thoughts, translated by James Thomson, London: Routledge, 1905. As Essays and Dialogues, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. As The Moral Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh, New York, Columbia University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Tono e tecnica nelle Operette morali,’’ in Dal Petrarca al Leopardi, Milan: Ricciardi, 1956. Binni, Walter, Lettura delle Operette morali, Genoa: Marietti, 1987. Blasucci, Luigi, ‘‘La posizione ideologica delle Operette morali,’’ in Critica e storia letteraria, studi offerti a Mario Fubini, vol.1, Padua: Liviana Editrice, 1970. Campailla, Sergio, La vocazione di Tristano, Bologna: Patron, 1977. Cecchetti, Giovanni, Sulle ‘‘Operette morali.’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Fabio, Nicoletta, L’ ‘‘entusiasmo della ragione’’: studio sulle ‘‘Operette morali,’’ Florence: Le Lettere, 1995. Sangiardi, Giuseppe, Il libro dell’esperienza e il libro della sventura: forme della mitografia filosofica nelle Operette morali, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Severino, Emanuele, Cosa arcana e stupenda. L’Occidente e Leopardi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Vitale, Maurizio, ‘‘La lingua della prosa di G. Leopardi: le Operette morali,’’ Florence: Nuova Italia Editrice, 1992.

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GIACOMO LEOPARDI

ZIBALDONE DI PENSIERI, 1898 Intellectual diary by Giacomo Leopardi

Leopardi’s Zibaldone di pensieri, the thousands of notes he made on a variety of topics for most of his life, was first published posthumously with the title Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by the poet and scholar Giosue´ Carducci, in 1898. In 1920 it gained its current title; and since 1937, with the edition by Francesco Flora, it has also been known as Zibaldone. The first entry was made in July or August 1817; the last, on December 4, 1832, though most pages were written between 1819 and 1823, the years of Leopardi’s philosophical speculation. It is not a coincidence that the Operette morali would follow in 1824, and Pensieri would conclude it. The topics treated are innumerable, and poetry and poetics take a large part. As a young poet, Leopardi was in fact caught in a difficult impasse. If supreme poetry is only that of the ancients, who believed in the reality of illusions, it followed that in modern times, where reason triumphs, poetry can no longer live. It took Leopardi many attempts to arrive at the elaboration of a sentimental, or philosophical, poetry, the only one possible in his time. The Zibaldone was the storage of his thoughts but also his workshop, where ideas were tried out, recorded, revisited, changed, and developed. It is a unique document of thought in progress. Some paragraphs are complex and convoluted, for they mirror the movements of his mind. Often there is no continuity between paragraphs: One thought can occupy a few pages, then be completely abandoned and taken up again three months and 50 pages later. From an early age, Leopardi explored a great variety of subjects: astronomy, religion, history, ethics, and especially linguistics, philology, and poetics. There are hundreds of pages where he analyzed the use of verb forms, adverbs, and cases in Greek and Latin texts, and hundreds where he explored his own beloved Italian language. Poetry being his strongest interest, Leopardi wrote long analyses of 1028

the poetical quality of certain words. Here he elaborated his famous distinction between termini and parole, anticipating Ferdinand de Saussure’s between parole and langue. Whereas terms (termini) ‘‘determinano e definiscono la cosa da tutte le parti’’ (define and circumscribe the things from all sides), words (parole) ‘‘presentano immagini accessorie’’ (present accessory images), memories, feelings that enrich the language. Thus Leopardi insisted on the poetical quality of indefinite and vague words and expressions that stimulate the imagination to add to and enrich their meanings. The words lontano (far away) and antico (ancient) were poetic and pleasurable for Leopardi because they aroused vast, indefinite, imprecise, and indistinct ideas. He devoted many pages to his ‘‘theory of pleasure,’’ the core of his philosophy that he derived from the French sensationalists and materialists. Humanity constantly seeks pleasure but can never be satisfied by a particular one. We want an infinite pleasure. But nothing in nature is infinite or limitless, thus our constant frustration. Nature is therefore responsible for our unhappy state. Yet nature has granted us illusions (love, glory, fame) that give us temporary happiness, until reason destroys them. Nature is, in fact, a complex character in Leopardi’s philosophy. On the one hand it is personified as matrigna (stepmother), responsible for all sufferings, on the other, nature nourishes our illusions, nurtures our enthusiasm, makes us forget reason’s ills. Reason has enlightened humanity’s world, destroyed the errors of the ancients, but with truth reason also brought pain. Finally in the Zibaldone, Leopardi worked out and developed those ideas that make him our contemporary: the cognitive power of imagination, that is, the mutual contribution of the two faculties that Benedetto Croce still considered as opposite and brought Charles Percey Snow to the philosophy of the two cultures. DANIELA BINI Editions First Edition Pensieri di varia filosofia e di bella letteratura di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Giosue´ Carducci, Florence: Le Monnier, 1898.

Critical Editions Zibaldone di pensieri, edited by Valentino Piccoli, Turin: UTET, 1920.

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING Zibaldone, 2 vols., in Tutte le opere di Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan: Mondadori, 1947. Zibaldone, edited by Giuseppe Pacella, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Zibaldone, edited by Rolando Damiani, Milan: Mondadori, 1997. As Zibaldone di pensieri, selection edited by Sergio and Raffella Solmi, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Tutto e nulla: antologia dello Zibaldone di pensieri, edited by Mario Andrea Rigoni, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997.

Translation As Zibaldone. A Selection, translated by Martha King and Daniela Bini, New York: Peter Lang, 1992.

Further Reading Amerio, Romano, ‘‘‘L’ultrafilosofia’ di Giacomo Leopardi,’’ Filosofia, July 1953, 451–485. Anceschi, Luciano, Un laboratorio invisibile della poesia: le prime pagine dello ‘‘Zibaldone,’’ Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Bini, Daniela, ‘‘Giacomo Leopardi’s Ultrafilosofia,’’ Italica, 74 (Spring 1997): 52–66.

Bonadeo, Alfredo, ‘‘Il corpo e il vigore nello Zibaldone di Leopardi,’’ Italianistica, 5:1 (January–April 1976), 55–65. Capodaglio, Enrico, ‘‘Due impronte stilistiche nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi,’’ Strumenti Critici, September 1998, 321–362. Foschi, Franco (editor), Lo Zibaldone cento anni dopo. Atti del X Convegno internazionale di studi leopardiani, Florence: Olschki, 2000. Gerato, Erasmo, ‘‘Reality of Illusion and Illusion of Reality in Leopardi’s Zibaldone,’’ South Atlantic Bulletin, 41: 2 (May 1976): 117–125. Gioanola, Elio, Leopardi, la malinconia, Milan: Jaca Book, 1995. Girolami, Patrizia, L’antiteodicea. Dio, dei, religione nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Marcon, Loretta, Vita ed esistenza nello Zibaldone di Giacomo Leopardi, Rome: Stango, 2001. Verdenelli, Marcello, ‘‘Cronistoria dell’idea leopardiana di Zibaldone,’’ Il Veltro, September–December 1987, 591–621.

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING Current academic discourse groups nonnormative sexual identities in the discipline known as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) studies, which also probes the complex interactions among gender and sexual identities and—perhaps most crucially—problematizes transhistorical notions of same-sex desire as ‘‘the same’’ across centuries. Human same-sex desire has always existed and marks Italian literature from the earliest texts, but to label these instances ‘‘lesbian’’ or ‘‘gay’’ imposes a decidedly modern label on desires that carried differing personal and social meanings. This is not to say that modern LGBTQ readers cannot or should not search for medieval and early modern ancestors among expressions of same-sex desire in period texts but that genealogical endeavors of this sort must take great care to consider local constructs and the great distances between then and now. Only very recently has Italian writing begun to reflect modern ‘‘lesbian’’ and ‘‘gay’’ identities, cultural constructs often considered more Northern European and/or Anglo-American than ‘‘properly’’ Mediterranean or Italian.

And yet it is well known by now that same-sex desire (particularly, but not exclusively, male) boasts a culturally illustrious past from that Greek and Roman antiquity so central to the entire history of Italian literature. According to Plato, via Socrates and Diotima, in the Symposium (360 BCE), the highest form of love is male pederastic, the love of an older wiser man or philosopher for his beautiful adolescent charge, a love that ideally transcends the physical and transports one to pure Being. Such philosophical or pedagogical eros informs the entire sweep of Italian literature, indeed of Western letters, and is modeled on an ancient Athenian social reality that allowed adult male citizens to seek sexual gratification with any number of social underlings—adolescent boys, women, slaves, foreigners—without seriously compromising the boundaries of normal manhood. Sappho’s archaic verse (ca. 630 BCE) suggests an analogous educational setting for same-sex desire among women; other Greek and Roman texts project sexual mentorship of this sort in a military setting. This intergenerational mode that customarily featured the older partner as sexual agent has 1029

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING sometimes been referred to as ‘‘Mediterranean.’’ Contemporary queer theorists in Michel Foucault’s wake have made much of the fact that these sorts of liaisons are unintelligible under modern discursive regimes that strictly divide homosexual from heterosexual. Still, literature and social history from antiquity on offer evidence for some individuals who always preferred members of their own sex, inveterate sodomites, and sometimes long-term relationships between age-equals. Pastoral fantasy provided a textual space in antiquity for desires that played variations on the intergenerational model. Virgil’s second eclogue (37 BCE) sings of the shepherd Corydon’s yearning for the young Alexis. Virgil’s readers also recognized a familiar, if somewhat idealized, relationship (forged on Homeric types) in the Aeneid (19 BCE) 5 and 9 between the seasoned warrior Nisus and his beardless beloved Euryalus. It is certainly at least noteworthy that Dante—in what is probably the most famous text in all Italian literature, the first canto of Inferno (1305–1308)—exercised a curious sort of sexual democracy in choosing representatives of Italy’s glorious Roman past, harbingers of a future greatness presaged by the mysterious greyhound, ‘‘di quella umile Italia ... salute / per cui morı` la vergine Cammilla, / Eurialo e Turno e Niso di ferute’’ (salvation of that lowlying Italy / for which the virgin Camilla / and Euryalus, Turnus, and Nisus died of their wounds; vv. 106–108; translated by Singleton). The four names Dante posited here include one rather unflattering envoy for traditional heterosexual patriarchy, the petulant Turnus, and three selfless gender warriors, the Amazonian Camilla and the lovers Nisus and Euryalus. Could it be that, to cast Roman glory in its best light, Dante relied on two gay men and a lesbian? Of course, by Dante’s day and the rise of an Italian vernacular literary tradition in the thirteenth century, Christianity had intervened and further complicated constructions of same-sex desire around the contested category of natura and the invention of sodomia, an ill-defined subspecies of luxuria given substance by St. Peter Damian in the eleventh-century Liber gomorrhianus (Book of Gomorrah). Concern over same-sex coupling as corruption of a certain notion of human nature can be found in Plato and Aristotle, but clear moral condemnation falls to the neo-Platonist St. Paul. Paul accused women and men who burn with passion for others of their sex of having converted ‘‘natural use’’ to a use that is contra naturam (against nature). Echoed by St. Augustine 1030

and codified by the Scholastics and particularly St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa (1265–1273), sodomy as violation of a now-idealized and heterosexualized Natura informs Dante’s placement of the sodomites in Inferno 15–16. Dante’s sodomites wander through eternity in troops in the third and last subdivision of circle seven (violence) upon an arid plain of burning sand, allusive of the sin’s alleged sterility, and under a rain of scorching fire reminiscent of God’s destruction of the biblical cities on the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah. Dante’s sodomites are all men, as the sin was overwhelmingly construed as male through the Middle Ages and beyond. But at least one famous reader from Medici Florence, Cristoforo Landino (1424–1498), echoed Pauline and Scholastic definitions in his 1481 commentary and allowed that there may also be women here in the seventh circle. Most famously, Dante encountered among the sodomites his own beloved master Ser Brunetto Latini (ca. 1220/25–1293), Florentine statesman and man of letters in his own right whose protohumanist tendencies would flower among Italian writers of the following centuries. In Brunetto’s eyes, the young Dante—thoroughly sexualized as a dolce fico (sweet fig)—represents a decadent Florence’s only hope for redemption. Ancient modes of sexual desire between master and pupil loom large in this canto, where Brunetto goes on to inform us that all the members of his troop were ‘‘clerics’’ and ‘‘famous men of letters,’’ including the celebrated Latin grammarian Priscian. Nearly all of Dante’s early readers agreed that Priscian is meant to represent grammar teachers, who are almost all sodomites, mostly because they have the easy opportunity with so many young men under their control in a relatively private setting. In a somewhat baser reflection of the Platonic tradition, the grammar master as pederast becomes a commonplace in ancient, medieval, and early modern grammatical and parodic texts. Likewise, intensely homosocial parochial and monastic settings tended to make sodomites of clerics as well, a fact born out by Peter Damian’s Book of Gomorrah, whose professed aim was to counter a vice apparently well known in Italian monasteries. Umberto Eco’s best seller Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980) depicts just such a medieval environment and deploys homosexual jealousy as a central plot device. In the end, Dante structured his Inferno and condemned the sodomites as violent against nature in strict accordance with Thomist principles; but the poet then framed the sodomy episodes with elaborate

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING images from the natural world as powerful flows of water and of human attempts to counter nature’s sometimes destructive force—images that recall medieval debates over what exactly constituted ‘‘nature,’’ a mysterious, inexorable power whose precise relation to the divine remained unclear. Christian efforts to undo classical constructs of same-sex desire never entirely succeeded. The opening chapters of any standard history of Italian literature feature the extraordinary courtly lyric produced in Sicily and then in Tuscany by men ardent for a distant, often cruel, lady; but at the same time, poets such as Marino Ceccoli and Cecco Nuccoli in Perugia were pining away after beautiful young men in sonnet form. Vernacular preachers like Giordano da Pisa, Bernardino da Siena, and in the fifteenth century Girolamo Savonarola, translated the Latin fathers’ writings on sodomy into vernacular sermons pitched at a mass audience. The sodomite became something of a stock figure in the comic novella tradition and other parodic texts through the Renaissance. Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1350/52–1373) features sodomitic characters in two stories: In 1.1, the Florentine Ser Ciappelletto is a trickster, bold antihero, and walking catalogue of sin who enjoys women ‘‘come sono i cani de’ bastoni’’ (about as much as a dog enjoys being beaten with a stick) but takes great delight in young men. In 5.2, the middle-class Perugian Pietro di Vinciolo marries according to society’s demands, but his self-assured young wife refuses to keep quiet when he ignores her to indulge his penchant for young men. She insists, in the end, that he at least share. Same-sex desire is a regular feature of Boccaccio’s comic universe that makes its mark in other stories as well, such as 1.2 where the Jew Abraham visits the capital of Christendom, Rome, only to find the cardinals and prelates at the papal court steeped in lust and ‘‘non solo nella naturale ma ancora nella sogdomitica’’ (and not just natural lust but the sodomitic type as well); or 2.3, where Boccaccio flirted with male–male desire in a bedroom farce between Florentine Alessandro and the cross-dressed daughter of the King of England. In the sixteenth century, Matteo Bandello’s Porcellio would take the Scholastic tradition head on by declaring that sex with males is for him as natural as eating or drinking. Quattrocento humanists formally recuperated the Platonic dialogues on love and the possibility of desire between males as culturally prestigious. The ancient tradition of pedagogical eros, attached primarily to the grammar classroom through much of the Middle Ages, rediscovered its textual and

conceptual origins in the Renaissance. Implicit in the patriarchal humanist endeavor was a rejection of biological reproduction as common in favor of a loftier love of generation through letters, a love traditionally passed from male master to male pupil. Many Italian humanists produced homoerotic lyrics; most notable are the Greek and Latin epigrams of Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), along with his pastoral play Fabula di Orpheo (Orpheus, 1484). The Medici court in Florence— and particularly the court of Lorenzo Il Magnifico in the later fifteenth century—appears to have served as a something of matrix in this regard. Michelangelo spent his formative years there. While the precise details of whatever physical love life he may have had will remain a mystery, his sonnets to the Roman aristocratic Tommaso de’ Cavalieri (along with a couple of other young men) are filled with passionate longing, at once sexual and transcendent in the best Platonic tradition. As the great humanist Pope Leo X, Lorenzo’s son Giovanni reigned over a glorious papal court that unabashedly embraced classicism and whose erotic culture has been described as ‘‘queer’’ for the capital of Catholicism, very much in line with what Boccaccio’s Abraham had discovered there centuries earlier. Rumors of Leo’s own desire for other men have persisted in accounts of his life through the centuries. But sodomy was also a common accusation in the Renaissance mentioned at one point or another in connection with many of the most celebrated figures. In his Forbidden Friendships (1996), historian Michael J. Rocke has studied the extensive archival record left by the Ufficiali di Notte or Night Officers, a special magistracy that operated in Florence between 1432 and 1502 charged with surveillance and control of evidently widespread sexual activity between men in that city. Rocke’s analyses suggest again that most Florentine males of the period had sex with other men at some point in their lives. Comic constructions of sodomy can be found in many texts of the period: Stefano Finiguerri’s (known as il Za ) fifteenth-century vernacular parody poem ‘‘La buca di Montemorello’’ (Montemorello’s Hole); Antonio Beccadelli’s (‘‘Il Panormita’’) Latin Hermaphroditus of 1425; and, in the early sixteenth century, Antonio Vignali’s La cazzarı`a (The Book of the Prick, 1525). Pietro Aretino and his circle were particularly virulent and inventive when it came to hurling sodomitic invective in rhyme and meter. The title character of Aretino’s popular play Il marescalco (The Marescalco, 1533) prefers men and resists marriage until he can no longer hold out against social demands; 1031

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING the play’s ‘‘Some-Like-It-Hot’’ resolution allows him to wed his handsome page cross-dressed as blushing bride. Cross-dressing on stage afforded playwrights opportunity to test social norms of gender and sexuality, particularly with the rise of the commedia dell’arte in the following centuries. The manifold intrigue of Flaminio Scala’s Il finto marito (The False Husband, 1618), for instance, turns on layers of drag and what might be called a lesbian wedding. Cross-dressing also served Ludovico Ariosto in his sly, prurient probing of the complex relations among body parts, gender, and desire in cantos 22 and 25 of the Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532). The deft virgin-at-arms Bradamante—magnificent in full armor atop her mighty steed, direct descendant of Virgil’s and Dante’s Camilla—is taken for a man by the lovely princess Fiordispina, who immediately falls in lust. Ariosto inherited the ‘‘lesbian’’ impasse from Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato (1482/83; 1495), which left the two impassioned women without the apparently obligatory phallic means to resolve their desire: ‘‘Che´ gratugia a gratugia poco acquista’’ (one grate against another doesn’t get you much; 3.9.11.8). But Ariosto’s Fiordispina is not the least put off when she discovers the cruel trick ‘‘nature’’ has played. Ariosto eventually furnished the requisite body parts and a heterosexualized outcome, but not before a truly remarkable bedroom scene with many an ironic turn on the missing phallus. Later in the cinquecento, amid the more stringent atmosphere imposed by Counter-Reformation morality, Torquato Tasso orientalized same-sex desire as infidel other between Lord Solimano and his suggestively named page Lesbino in the epic Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581). Pedagogical, humanist, clerical, pastoral, chivalric, and comic constructions of sodomitic desire all flourished side-by-side through the Renaissance and well beyond. The figure of the humanist pedant as sodomite shows up again in Ariosto’s Satires, particularly the sixth (1524–1525), which is dedicated to the great Venetian man of letters Pietro Bembo—‘‘Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti’’ (Few humanists are without that vice; 6.25)—and in his incomplete comedy I studenti (The Students, 1519; completed and renamed by his brother Gabriele under the title La scolastica); and again in the anonymous Sienese farce Gli ingannati (The Deceived, 1538). Nearly 100 years later, around 1631, the libertine priest Antonio Rocco (1596–1653) composed the Alcibiade fanciullo a 1032

scola (Alcibiades the Schoolboy), an unrepentant defense of pedagogical eros that draws on libertine philosophies of nature as an all-embracing and benevolent mother. Around this same time in the mountains northwest of Florence, Sister Benedetta Carlini, once abbess of the Theatine monastery at Pescia, was serving a sentence for having been caught in a lesbian affair with another nun, a rare documented instance of same-sex desire among women studied by historian Judith C. Brown (Immodest Acts, 1986). Lesbian lovemaking, again between two nuns, would be briefly inscribed with amusement in the following century by Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) in book one of his Histoire de ma vie (The Story of My Life, 1798). Eighteenthcentury penal and confessional codes—including the otherwise enlightened Cesare Beccaria— continued to take sodomy as a serious infringement of natural law and prescribed sometimes harsh punishments. In the nineteenth century, the modern Italian nation state took form, at least nominally, while the larger (northern) European imagination cast Italy as either locus classicus of high cultural achievement in arts and letters and thus land of exquisite aesthetic experience, or a precultural paradise where ‘‘primitive’’ urges could be explored without fussy social restraint. This latter fantasy attached mostly to the south and the islands, and in particular the isle of Capri, host to distinguished artist scholars who might today be considered ‘‘sex tourists,’’ as well as a group of cosmopolitan lesbians of the sort described by Compton Mackenzie’s 1928 Extraordinary Women. By this time, the writings of German and English sexologists that distinguished ‘‘homosexuals’’ from ‘‘heterosexuals’’ and labeled the former ‘‘sexual inverts’’ (souls trapped in the body of the opposite sex) had made their way into Italian clinical writing as well. Radclyffe Hall’s classic lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness (1928) was translated into Italian as Il pozzo della solitudine in 1930. But for many years before and through the Fascist era, less fretful lesbian characters appeared in a variety of serial pulp novels, as well as texts like Guido da Verona’s parodic revision of Alessandro Manzoni’s canonical I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827–1840/42), where the Monaca di Monza—again, a nun—takes more than a spiritual interest in the lovely young Lucia. Earlier in the century, Sibilla Aleramo (1876– 1960), a leading figure of Italian and European feminism, had lightly inscribed lesbian experience in Il passaggio (The Passage, 1919), a reflection of her real-life relationship with Lina Poletti. Aleramo’s

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING description of desire in this book is more lyric idyll than real-life experience, cast in a fantasy space outside of history and society. This might fairly describe the nature of gay male characters as well in several twentieth-century Italian texts often called ‘‘novels,’’ but in fact more poetic or pastoral when it comes to the portrayal of same-sex desire. Works like Filippo de Pisis’s Ver-Vert (1919–1926), Giovanni Comisso’s Gioco d’infanzia (Childhood Game, 1931–1932), Umberto Saba’s Ernesto (1975), and Pier Pasolini’s Amado mio (My Beloved, 1982) mostly fail to represent gay desire as an integral component of social or individual character of the sort normally associated with the bourgeois novel, a genre that Italy came to rather late and only incompletely in any case. To underscore the point, some of these writers (like Saba) were better known as poets. Pasolini’s hymns to beautiful youths in his prose works are in many ways indistinguishable from similar moments in his verse. For Pasolini, fascination with young men formed part of his mythologization of the working class as an antidote to the oppressions of consumer culture, as well as an increasingly scandalous element of his life as a public intellectual, right up to his brutal murder by a Roman hustler in 1975. As we have seen, the insistence of pastoral fantasy as relatively hospitable to gay desire has ancient roots that never quite let go. Risorgimento patriot Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876) passed part of his long years in Bourbon prisons writing a homoerotic tale of love between Greek youths entitled I neoplatonici (The Neo-Platonics, 1851–1859). Settembrini’s work was discovered only after his death and published in 1977, just as Saba’s Ernesto, written in 1953, had to await the author’s death and 1975 to come to print. A reflection of the author’s own somewhat tortured experience, Ernesto tells the story of a middle class adolescent in turn-of-the-century Trieste whose sexual initiation with/by an older working-class man both recalls and reconfigures ancient intergenerational models within a modern urban social context. Sandro Penna (1906–1977), one of Italy’s most accomplished and celebrated twentieth-century poets, also described erotic enchantment with young men, often sailors, as a mode of quasi–other worldly transcendence. Conversely, many of the lesbian and gay characters found in twentieth-century Italian fiction, by gay and straight writers alike, represent homosexuality as a pathological or corrupt condition often emblematic of bourgeois decadence or Fascist perversion, as in Cesare Pavese’s Tra donne sole (Among Women Only, 1949), Vasco Pratolini’s

Cronache dei poveri amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers, 1947), and Alberto Moravia’s Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951). One notable exception to this trend is Giorgio Bassani’s Gli occhiali d’oro (The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles, 1958), where the protagonist’s homosexuality constitutes an element of authentic personhood decimated by middle-class conformity and the onslaught of Fascist bigotry. Homosexual initiation as loss of purity and innocence is also a common thread among works as varied as Moravia’s Agostino (1944), Elsa Morante’s L’isola di arturo (Arturo’s Island, 1957), and even Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s Ragazzo di Trastevere (The Boy from Trastevere, 1955). Carlo Coccioli’s postwar novels struggle to come to terms with homosexual desire and Catholic faith, a theme also taken up by novelist Giovanni Testori. On a somewhat different note, the novels of Alberto Arbasino from the 1960s and 1970s are filled with gay characters, mostly well-traveled and well-heeled intellectual snobs. The late 1960s and 1970s witnessed the rise of a lesbian and gay rights movement in Italy, whose history has now begun to be written (in particular by Gianni Rossi Barilli). Theoretical writing of the period on lesbian feminism centered around the Libreria delle Donne in Milan. Most typical of the somewhat utopian leftist thinking that informed the early movement is Mario Mieli’s Elementi di critica omosessuale (Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, 1982), which has recently been republished and become the object of scholarly interest. Two well-regarded gay male novelists emerged in the 1980s and 1990s: Pier Vittorio Tondelli and Aldo Busi. Many of Busi’s ironic, rhetorically dense narratives have been translated into English. Homosexuality is in general merely one more element in his characters’ arsenal of iconoclastic tricks aimed at a repressive society that would impose behavioral norms. Tondelli produced four major books before his death from AIDS in 1991, all four of which contain gay characters. His most mature and final novel, Camere separate (Separate Rooms, 1989), offers an exceptionally nuanced and elaborate meditation on gay male selfhood, sex, love, death, and the writer’s vocation. The current generation of openly lesbian and gay writers includes Matteo B. Bianchi with Generations of Love (1999) and Margherita Giacobino with Casalinghe all’inferno (Housewives in Hell, 1996). Gay bookstores exist in several Italian cities (particularly noteworthy is the Libreria Babele in Milan); gay characters in TV and film are now rather commonplace. Giovanni Dall’Orto, 1033

LESBIAN AND GAY WRITING an independent journalist, activist, and historian in Milan, has been researching and writing on lesbian and gay Italian history and literature for nearly 20 years. And LGBTQ studies has begun to find its niche in the Italian academy as well, with scholars such as sociologist Daniela Danna in Milan, literary historian Francesco Gnerre in Rome, and queer theorist Marco Pustianaz in Vercelli. GARY P. CESTARO

Further Reading Ahern, John, ‘‘Troping the Fig: Inferno XV, 66,’’ Lectura dantis, 6 (Spring 1990), 80–91. Aldrich, Robert, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy, London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Barilli, Gianni Rossi, Il movimento gay in Italia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999. Barkan, Leonard, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Borghi, Liana, ‘‘Insegnare il queer: Marginalita`, resistenza, trasgressione,’’ in Pro/posizioni: Interventi alla prima universita` gay e lesbica, edited by Gigi Malaroda and Massimo Piccione, Florence: Edifir, 2000. Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Botterill, Steven, ‘‘Autobiography and Artifice in the Medieval Lyric: The Case of Cecco Nuccoli.’’ Italian Studies, 46 (1991), 37–57. Brown, Judith C., Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Camille, Michael, ‘‘The Pose of the Queer: Dante’s Gaze, Brunetto Latini’s Body,’’ in Queering the Middle Ages, edited by Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Cestaro, Gary P., Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Cestaro, Gary, ‘‘Queering Nature, Queering Gender,’’ in Dante for the New Millenium, edited by Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, New York: Fordham University Press, 2003. Dall’Orto, Giovanni, La gaya scienza, at www. giovannidallorto.com

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Danna, Daniela, Amiche, compagne, amanti. Storia dell’amore tra donne, Milan: Mondadori, 1994. Duncan, Derek, ‘‘Italian Literature,’’ in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Claude J. Summers. New York: H. Holt, 1995. Duncan, Derek, Reading & Writing Italian Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference, Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2006. Giacobino, Margherita, Orgoglio & Privilegio: viaggio eroico nella letteratura lesbica, Milan: Il Dito e La Luna, 2003. Gnerre, Francesco, L’eroe negato: il personaggio omosessuale nella narrativa italiana contemporanea, Milan: Gammalibri, 1981. Gnerre, Francesco, L’eroe negato: omosessualita` e letteratura nel Novecento italiano, Milan: Baldini&Castoldi, 2000. Holsinger, Bruce, ‘‘Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy,’’ in Premodern Sexualities, edited by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, New York: Routledge, 1996. Jordan, Mark D., The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Makowski, John F., ‘‘Nisus and Euryalus: A Platonic Relationship,’’ The Classical Journal, 85:1(October/November 1989), 1–15. Mieli, Mario, Elementi di critica omosessuale, edited by Gianni Rossi Barilli and Paola Mieli, Turin: Einaudi, 1977; reprinted, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002; as Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, translated by David Fernbach, London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980. Pequigney, Joseph, ‘‘Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.’’ Representations, 36(Fall 1991), 22–42. Pustianaz, Marco, ‘‘Transitive Gender and Queer Performance in the Novels of Mario Mieli and Vittorio Pescatori,’’ in Queer Italia: Same-Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, edited by Gary P. Cestaro, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Rocke, Michael J., Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Saslow, James M., The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Stewart, Alan, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Vignali, Antonio, The Book of the Prick, edited and translated by Ian Frederick Moulton, New York: Routledge, 2003.

CARLO LEVI

CARLO LEVI (1902–1975) Carlo Levi first made his name as a writer with the publication of the novel Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), his muchtranslated account of the period of time he spent in southern Italy, where he had been confined by the Italian Fascist regime. Although now best known as a novelist, during his life Levi was also extremely active as a painter, a political activist, and a writer of travelogues. Levi’s themes were those of an Italian liberal socialist intellectual: namely, autonomy, creativity, and growth. Of these, perhaps the key question for Levi was that of autonomy, at both a personal and political level. Levi was of Jewish origins, although one would hardly know it through his writings. Indeed, of all the Jewish Italian writers of the twentieth century, Levi was the one who made fewest references to Italian-Jewish culture. Rather, Levi is best seen as an example of the extent to which an Italian-Jewish intellectual had been perfectly integrated into the social and cultural fabric of the post-Risorgimento nation. Levi had a rather complicated relationship with the Italian literary tradition. His writings bear little resemblance to the established forms of the literary canon. The genre into which his two novels and travel writing fall most easily is that of autobiography, the two novels recounting respectively Levi’s personal experience in the Italian South in the mid1930s and in Rome in the immediate postwar years. Yet, as autobiographies these texts are anachronistic insofar as they are highly subjective, impressionistic writings devoid of any clear chronology. Levi, in fact, has few antecedents in the Italian literary tradition. It is no surprise that one of his favorite writers was the English author Laurence Sterne, whose own antinovel Tristram Shandy is itself an illustration of a nonconventional approach to time. Levi first came to the public eye and to the attention of the Fascist Secret Services as a painter and political activist. In the early 1920s Levi became increasingly involved in the Italian antiFascist movement and came under the sway of Liberal leader Piero Gobetti. By far the most crucial figure in Levi’s intellectual and political formation, Gobetti was a precocious Italian cultural organizer and editor of two important magazines, Energie nuove and Rivoluzione liberale, who died at

the age of 24 as a result of injuries he had suffered after being beaten up by Fascist thugs. Levi met Gobetti when they were both in their late teens and made his debut as a writer with a number of articles for the magazines his friend edited. Gobetti’s influence over Levi was enormous and was to accompany him all his life. Levi’s first articles, in fact, one on the Liberal politician Antonio Salandra and another on the city of Turin, are little more than reiterations in both style and content of Gobetti’s analysis of the state of Italian society in the immediate post–World War I years. Levi at once identified himself with the intransigence and with the intellectual and personal rigor that Gobetti exemplified. Indeed, the issues with which Gobetti grappled in his life as a cultural organizer were those that underlay Levi’s later writings, both as a journalist and as a novelist. What drew Levi to Gobetti was the latter’s attempt to develop a new and enlightened form of Italian liberalism free of dogma and preconceived ideas, as well as being receptive to the political dynamism of the worker’s movement, especially in Turin, Italy’s industrial heartland. Gobetti’s aim to give birth to a new liberalism was a polemical response to what he (and Levi with him) saw as the crisis of traditional Italian liberalism, which had in the opening decades of the twentieth century lost its way. Like Gobetti, Levi developed a staunchly anti-Fascist stance, becoming one of the leaders in Turin of the Giustizia e liberta` (Justice and Liberty) group in the years following Gobetti’s death. It was in this period that Levi further developed his political thought, writing important articles for the group’s journals that dealt with the themes that would be at the very center of his future political and intellectual life: namely, federalism and the reform of the state. For Levi, autonomy was the starting point for all effective political action, whether at a personal level or at the public level of a reform of the state that opened the way to local and autonomous self-government. Levi was arrested twice for his anti-Fascist activities. After his second arrest in 1935, he was sentenced to a period of exile in Aliano. Although he initially dreaded the prospect, the eight months he spent in the forgotten area of Lucania were perhaps the crucial experience of his entire life. In his 1035

CARLO LEVI encounters with the peasant culture of the area, which he recounted in his first novel Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, Levi found an alternative to what he considered the corrupt course of mainstream history, which had led the Western world to the disasters of Fascism, Nazism, war, and the Holocaust. The novel takes the form of a series of vignettes that recount Levi’s encounters with the inhabitants of the village to which he had been confined. What emerges is a wonderfully positive picture of the peasants, whom Levi considered potentially new and creative agents on the political and social scene (in much the same way that Gobetti and he had welcomed the emergence of the working class in Turin during the Factory Council movement), and an awfully negative picture of the southern bourgeoisie—doctors, lawyers, local administrators—guilty of opportunism, ineptitude, and thorough corruption. In the thirst for power and prestige of this debased local bourgeoisie, Levi found the basis of what he was to call eternal Italian Fascism. By this, he meant the propensity of a badly educated and amorphous middle class to follow whomever was in power in order to preserve their own privileges and further their status. This was Levi’s version of Gobetti’s wellknown definition of Fascism as the autobiography of the nation. Levi was unique among Italian intellectuals insofar as he attempted to understand peasant culture on its own terms and not as an inferior version of a dominant model. Although Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli was Levi’s first published novel, it was not his first piece of writing. In fact, as World War II was breaking out, Levi wrote the manuscript for a short philosophical book that would be published only in 1946 under the title Paura della liberta` (Of Fear and Freedom). This book is crucial for an understanding of Levi’s deep-seated critique of Western history but also as a prism through which to read Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli. Paura della liberta` is, like almost all Levi’s early writing, a disjointed text that meanders across many fields. At its heart is Levi’s perception of the need for humankind to go back to its origins in order to initiate a new historical course. For Levi, history was not a never-ending story of progress. There are times, he thought, when history could go wrong and when a rupture with the past was in order. The Europe of the late 1930s and 1940s was just one such moment. It was in the return to a primordial condition, which Levi termed the original indeterminate state, that humankind could recharge its batteries and begin a new, alternative, more dynamic and creative course of history. What 1036

Levi saw in the peasant civilization of Lucania was just such an alternative, either long forgotten by Italian intellectuals or regarded as backward. Levi’s second novel, L’orologio (The Watch, 1950), also has a strong autobiographical slant, this time dealing with Levi’s activity as editor of the anti-Fascist newspaper L’Italia libera. In common with Levi’s previous novel, L’orologio takes the form of a meandering narrative that does little to preserve the unity of time and packs into the five days and nights over which it is set an impossibly rich number of events. Time, for Levi, was lived at its most authentic not as clock or linear time but in the manner of Giambattista Vico’s corsi and ricorsi as a cyclical process that opens up the way to regeneration. Telling of the hopes held by Levi and his fellow activists in the Partito d’azione that a new, regenerated Italy could be born after the disasters of Fascism and World War II, L’orologio is set in the final days of the short-lived government headed by the anti-Fascist Ferruccio Parri. It was in the government of this latter that Levi lay his hopes for any regeneration of the nation, and it was in the wake of its demise that those hopes also collapsed. If the novel can be read as an account of the failure of the political project of the Partito d’azione, its final scenes, which see the central character Carlo (Levi himself) emerge regenerated from a trip to the chaotic but energizing back streets of Naples, can also be read as Levi’s affirmation that even if a political project aimed at regeneration has failed, a personal project of regeneration is nonetheless still possible. During the 25 years between the publication of L’orologio and his death, Levi dedicated himself to journalistic activity, political militancy, and travel. Between 1955 and 1964, Levi published four travelogues: Le parole sono pietre (Words Are Stones, 1955), about Sicily; Il futuro ha un cuore antico: Viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica (The Future Has an Ancient Heart: Journey to the Soviet Union, 1956), about the Soviet Union; La doppia notte dei tigli (The Linden Trees, 1959), about both sides of the then divided Germany; and Tutto il miele e` finito (All the Honey Is Finished, 1964), about Sardinia. In all of these writings the theme of regeneration comes to the fore. Disappointed in the failure of a national rebirth, in the form of the democratic revolution that had seemed to be imminent in the immediate postwar years, Levi devoted his intellectual and political life to seeking out and publicizing possible new instances of regeneration. Some of these he found on his travels both around Italy and abroad. In Sicily, he

CARLO LEVI found comfort in the example of the trade unionist Salvatore Carnevale and his mother and in what he saw in the then German Democratic Republic. But it was in the Soviet Union that Levi himself seemed to undergo another personal rebirth. Transported back into the time of his infancy in Turin, Levi’s impression of time was warped, as the sights and tastes he had of Moscow and Kiev took on the form of replays of his own infancy in Piemonte. In the same way, Levi’s enthusiasm for the peasant movement of southern Italy, the student protests of 1968, and the struggles for national liberation abroad that marked the 1960s and 1970s had its origin in his desire to find the sparks of potential new beginnings. Indeed, in his travels and in his writings it was to this search that Levi dedicated the last years of his life.

Biography Carlo Levi was born in Turin, 29 November 1902, the son of Ercole and Annetta Treves. He received his degree in medicine from the University of Turin, 1924; until 1928 he worked as an assistant in the university’s medical clinic. He met Piero Gobetti and wrote first articles for Rivoluzione liberale, 1918. He abandoned the medical profession to dedicate himself to painting, 1928. He became increasingly involved in the Italian anti-Fascist movement and became a founding member of the Turin group of Giustizia e liberta`. His first arrest for anti-Fascist activity was in 1934. He had a second arrest and was sentenced to three years’ exile in southern Italy, 1935. He was released from exile following an amnesty, 1936. His daughter Anna, whose mother was Paola Olivetti, wife of Adriano Olivetti, was born in 1937. He lived in various locations in France and wrote Paura della liberta`. He returned to Italy and joined the antiFascist Resistance movement in Florence, 1941. He wrote Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli while in hiding in Nazi-occupied Florence, 1944. He met Linuccia Saba, daughter of the poet Umberto Saba, who became his lifelong companion. He was editor of Nazione del popolo, the clandestine newspaper of the local Comitato di liberazione nazionale (Committee of National Liberation), 1944–1945; and, in Rome, of L’Italia libera, the newspaper of the Partito d’azione, 1945–1946. He was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Le parole sono pietre, 1956. Levi was elected to the Italian Senate as member of the Independent Left group, 1963–1972. He was founder of Federazione Italiana Lavoratori Emigrati e Famiglie (Italian Federation of Workers,

Emigrants and Families), 1967. He underwent two eye operations, 1973, and while convalescing wrote Quaderno a cancelli (Gated Notebook), published posthumously in 1979. Carlo Levi died in Rome, 4 January 1975; he was buried in Aliano, the town where he had spent his period of political exile. DAVID WARD Selected Works Collections Il coraggio dei miti (Scritti contemporanei, 1922–74), edited by Gigliola De Donato, 1975. Le mille patrie: Uomini, fatti, paesi d’Italia, edited by G. De Donato, 2000. Opere scelte 1926–1974, edited by Salvatore Abita and Pia Vivarelli, 2001. Lo specchio: Scritti di critica d’arte, edited by Pia Vivarelli, 2001. Prima e dopo le parole: Scritti e discorsi sulla letteratura, edited by Rosalba Galvagno, 2001. Roma fuggitiva: Una citta` e i suoi dintorni, edited by G. De Donato, 2002. Le tracce della memoria, edited by Maria Pagliara, 2002. Il pianeta senza confine: Prose di viaggio, edited by Vanna Vaccaro, 2003. Carlo Levi: Discorsi parlamentari, 2003. Un dolente amore per la vita: Conversazioni radiofoniche e interviste, edited by Luigi M. Lombardi and Letizia Bindi, 2003. Le ragioni dei topi: Storie di animali, edited by G. De Donato, 2004.

Fiction Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, 1945; as Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1947; 1963. L’orologio, 1950; as The Watch, 1951; 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie inedite 1934–1946,’’ 1990. ‘‘Noi esistiamo: Poesie inedite,’’ 1991.

Other Paura della liberta`, 1946, as Of Fear and Freedom, translated by Adolphe Gourevitch, 1950. Le parole sono pietre, 1955; as Words Are Stones: Impressions of Sicily, translated by Angus Davidson, 1958. Il futuro ha un cuore antico: Viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica, 1956. La doppia notte dei tigli, 1959; as The Linden Trees, translated by Joseph M. Bernstein, 1962. Tutto il miele e` finito, 1964. Scritti politici, edited by David Bidussa, 2001.

Further Reading Bidussa, David, ‘‘Prima di Eboli: La riflessione civile e politica di Carlo Levi negli anni del fascismo e dei totalitarismi,’’ in Carlo Levi, Scritti politici, Turin: Einaudi, 2001.

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CARLO LEVI De Donato, Gigliola, Saggio su Carlo Levi, Bari: De Donato, 1974. De Donato, Gigliola, and Sergio D’Amaro, Un torinese del sud: Carlo Levi. Una biografia, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2001. Ward, David, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943– 1946. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘‘Actionists,’’ Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Ward, David, Carlo Levi: Gli Italiani e la paura della liberta`, Milan: Nuova Italia/Rizzoli, 2002.

` CRISTO SI E FERMATO A EBOLI, 1945 Novel by Carlo Levi

Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ stopped at Eboli) is Carlo Levi’s first, best, and most successful novel. Published in 1945, it tells of the eight months Levi spent in a small, isolated village in southern Italy. As an active member of the Giustizia e liberta` (Justice and Liberty) anti-Fascist group, he had been arrested in a sweep, along with many other of his fellow anti-Fascists in Turin, and confined by the Fascist authorities to a period of exile in the Italian South. Although the events of the novel cover a period of eight months between 1935 and 1936, the novel itself was written in 1944, while Levi, again very prominent in the anti-Fascist struggle, was living a clandestine life in Nazi-occupied Florence. In 1939, Levi had written Paura della liberta` (Of Fear and Freedom), in which he sought to analyze the crisis of European civilization that had brought the continent to the twin disasters of Fascism and World War II. His concept of the end of civilization relies on cyclical epistemological processes, from Vico to Hegel to Spengler. Indeed, Paura della liberta` is very much an indictment of the West and of civilization in general, which Levi saw not as a monument of all that is best in human endeavors but as a stage in history that had run its course, that was now in its death 1038

throes, and for that very reason was all the more dangerous. In many ways, Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli is akin to a book of Levi’s memories of the period he spent in southern Italy filtered through two lenses: first, that of the ten years that separated the experience itself from his account of it and, second, that of his reflections on the state of humanity and the need for a new beginning to which he had given voice in Paura della liberta`. Most notable about Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli is its depiction of the lives and customs of southern Italian peasants. In the immediate wake of unification in 1860, the South had been perceived by intellectuals and politicians alike as an albatross around the nation’s neck. Southerners were often described as devils, the South itself likened to Africa, a part of the new nation that shared none of the civilization of the modern North. Levi was one of the few Italian intellectuals to have attempted to understand peasant culture on its own terms and not simply as an inferior version of the so-called civilized culture Levi had come to distrust. In other words, peasant culture with all its reliance on magic, superstition, and the irrational represented a viable alternative model to what Levi considered the disaster of Western civilization. It is for this reason that the book concludes with Levi’s proposal that the South administer itself autonomously in a way consonant with its inhabitants’ actual needs and not follow administrative models imported from the North. This was a controversial view of the Italian South that went against the grain of the way Italian intellectuals, including the majority of Southern intellectuals themselves, had described the region. In fact, the initial critical reception of the book was almost unanimously hostile. Critics accused Levi of being a romantic and having invented a poetic world of the southern peasant that had little or nothing to do with social reality. In more recent years, however, Levi’s novel has been reassessed as being one of the few genuine attempts to understand the South on its own terms. Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli has been translated into many languages, has gone through numerous editions, and was made into a film in 1979 by director Francesco Rosi, starring Gian Maria Volonte` as Carlo Levi. DAVID WARD Editions First edition: Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, Turin: Einaudi, 1945.

PRIMO LEVI Other: Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, edited by Peter M. Brown, London: Harrap, 1965; 1969. Translations: Christ Stopped at Eboli: The Story of a Year, translated by Frances Frenaye, New York: Farrar, Straus & Co., 1947; reprinted, 1963.

Further Reading Barani, Valeria, and Maria Chiara Grignani (editors), Carlo Levi, L’invenzione della verita`: Testi e intertesti per ‘‘Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli,’’ Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1998.

De Donato, Gigliola, Carlo Levi: Il tempo e la durata in ‘‘Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli,’’ Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 1999. De Donato, Gigliola, Le parole del reale: Ricerche sulla prosa di Carlo Levi, Bari: Dedalo, 1998. De Donato, Gigliola, Saggio su Carlo Levi, Bari: De Donato, 1974. Ward, David, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943– 1946. Benedetto Croce and the Liberals, Carlo Levi and the ‘‘Actionists,’’ Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Ward, David, Carlo Levi: Gli Italiani e la paura della liberta`, Milan: Nuova Italia/Rizzoli, 2002.

PRIMO LEVI (1919–1987) With the growing awareness in the second half of the twentieth century of the importance of the Holocaust for that century’s history, the written testimonies of those who survived it gained increasing recognition. Throughout this process, visible not only in the world of professional historians but relevant to a wider, one could say global, audience of readers, Primo Levi became a major, universally recognized, icon in so-called Holocaust literature. The word ‘‘literature’’ itself ought to be understood here as synonymous for written testimony, without suggesting an esthetic value. However, within the circle of witnesses providing a written account of their experience, a few are also unanimously recognized as ‘‘writers,’’ literary figures in their own right, enhancing the strictly testimonial part of their writing with what is generally considered as lasting ‘‘literary’’ quality. Esthetics, and literary esthetics, more specifically, were tools, in Levi’s case, for highly effective and cogent communication. Levi was one of those authors whose career as a writer and whose constant efforts to communicate content considered incommunicable by others, are a proof of the fact that literature has lost none of its original power. Prisoner at the labor camp—a chemical plant for research on synthetic rubber— of Buna Monowitz, near Auschwitz, Primo started writing his memoir Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is A Man, 1947) immediately upon return to his hometown Turin in 1945. After a first painful refusal on the part of Turin’s leading publisher Einaudi, Se questo e` un uomo became, in Italy and

abroad, one of the most powerful and influential literary testimonies of the Nazi concentration camps, a deeply analytic account of the underlying mindset of those who reinvented genocide in the age of technology. At the same time, though, Se questo e` un uomo, with its alternating narrative and reflective chapters, its diary-like composition, its keen selection and ordering of highly emblematic episodes, its deliberate language and rhetoric of constraint, its highly effective use of irony and understatement, is as much a classic of twentiethcentury Italian literature as it is a deeply unsettling documentary record. Levi’s subsequent literary work, while exploring various other topics and genres, intermittently returned, in novels, short stories, and essays, to the Buna Monowitz experience and its consequences. Sometimes remembering new episodes, or reconstructing adventurous homecomings, or creating fictional utopias or dystopias, or reflecting on new waves of negationism or historical revisionism, or in his poetry deploying profound pessimism, the Holocaust is more or less always present in each of Levi’s subsequent books. There is no straightforward development of Levi’s literary activity after Se questo e` un uomo. Short stories, such as ‘‘Mnemagoghi’’ on some refined techniques of recalling past experiences through rare perfumes, are reminiscent of a prewar atmosphere and a certain literary taste, characteristic of the mainly Turin-based movement of Decadentismo. That Levi was already interested in writing before deportation was signaled by the 1039

PRIMO LEVI author himself. Friends also commented on his talent for storytelling. As far as life after deportation is concerned, he usually emphasized his professional career as a chemical engineer specializing in enamel coatings. But here too, as in ‘‘La misura della bellezza’’ (The Measure of Beauty), his first moves and occasional mishaps on the chemical work floor found their way into short stories, not to be published, however, until 1966 under the pseudonym Damiano Malabaila and with the Plinian title Storie naturali (The Mirror Maker). In the wake of Auschwitz, Einaudi published La tregua (The Truce, 1963), an account of the author’s nine-month-long journey home via Belarus, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, and Austria. The events told were, in Levi’s own words, ‘‘veri, ma filtrati’’ (‘‘true, but filtered’’). As he later confided to Philip Roth, at a time when he could see for himself a future as a writer, this novel became his first attempt to loosen the ties with the Auschwitz issue (A Man Saved by His Skills, in Marco Belpoliti, editor, Primo Levi, 1997). Full of memories of the camp and flashbacks to momentous episodes of the recent past, La tregua also explicitly confronts the future: A bunch of repressed human beings faces normality again as a group, in spite of their contrasting characters and aspirations. The book’s message is contradictory: Truce, not peace, will be the principal state of affairs for times to come. Some may read in the line ‘‘guerra e` sempre’’ (war, always), pronounced by one of the main characters, the Greek Mordo Nahum, as a reference to the Cold War, others as a more general, philosophical statement on life after Auschwitz. In the process of considering himself more and more as a ‘‘writer,’’ the Holocaust witness and the engineer discovered the epic drive of what can be considered as Levi’s first novel, or at least his first long narrative. This narrative vein, however, remained largely unexplored during the next 20 years. His time divided between the factory hours of the chemist, now in charge of a whole company, and the nighttime writing of the author, Levi’s fractured life was mirrored in the literary form he employed: Until 1982 he almost exclusively published short stories. Alongside these, Levi continued to prepare and adapt Se questo e` un uomo for new audiences: a radiophonic play first broadcast in Canada (1962); then presented for RAI, the Italian National Television, in 1964; later adapted for stage by Pieralberto Marchesini in 1966 (Teatro Stabile di Torino, directed by Gianfranco De Bosio). A special edition for schools (1973) and numerous translations carefully overseen by Levi followed. 1040

Levi’s collections of short stories are impressive: After Storie naturali, he published Vizio di forma (Flaw, 1971) and Lilı´t e altri racconti (Lilith and Other Tales, 1981). Inspiration for these stories was still widely sought in his labor camp experience, but some subsets took up a proper identity and thematic unity, especially those displaying various forms of fantastic inspiration or influence from science fiction. Here too an ambivalence emerged. On the one hand, Levi appeared optimistic with respect to scientific and technological progress (the same optimism the reader encounters in his reviews of new scientific discoveries); on the other, he made it clear that scientists and technicians may develop strange ideas and need guidance or restraint. This sense of irreversible and potentially apocalyptic developments of scientific research is found in those stories where such research, gone astray, meets the irrational aspirations of a superior race such as the Third Reich. The spectral shadows of the concentration camps victims are still silently drifting between the lines of such stories. The most immediate explanation for the predominance of short stories and for the fragmented way in which Levi’s literary creativity expressed itself in these years is the pressure stemming from his work as a professional chemist. Until 1977, Levi never fully retired from his post as executive director, and later consultant, of Societa` Industriale Vernici Affini (SIVA), located in Settimo Torinese. But the long aftermath of Se questo e` un uomo and La tregua, with marked autobiographical contents, did not make it easy for Levi to find his literary voice. In one case, however, a prodigious match between inspirational unity and a certain degree of fragmentation was reached in Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table, 1975). Twenty-one chapters, each entrusted to an element of Dmitri Mendeleyev’s periodic table, unveil various episodes of Primo Levi’s own life. Different in style and tone, these distinct stories grow into the prismatic unity of a multifaceted allegory: Levi affectionately caricatured his Piedmontese ancestors’ social isolation; passionately recalled the chemistry institute of Turin University; solemnly paid tribute to his friend Sandro, assassinated by the Fascists of the Salo` regime; gravely disclosed his original fascination of scientific interest; respectfully re-created the trail of Rodmund, the mineral seeker; mockingly remembered professional anecdotes, small-mindedness as well as courage; eerily revealed the unexpected death of Dr. Mu¨ller, a former camp official, now a business contact. Playing freely with

PRIMO LEVI chemical elements, juggling as it were, without even aiming at a one-to-one allegorical relationship between the single element and its narrative, the author established science as the protean common denominator for all stages of his life. The periodic system, in this sense, is a symbol for science, but a multiple symbol: for science as alphabet, Bible, comforter, lifesaver, livelihood, dream, alike. Science and technology as a paradigm for life crystallize in Levi’s next work, La chiave a stella (The Monkey’s Wrench, 1978), which tells the story of an industrial rigger, Libertino Faussone; or rather lets Faussone recount his story by means of his own uncultured, harsh language (a mixture of Piedmontese dialect and jargon). As an independent foreman, Faussone travels the world to where his technical skills and leadership guide his steps. The innovating stylistic factor in La chiave a stella lies in the use of the spoken language; in the dialogue between men dealing with challenging technical problems, while struggling with dams and bridges. Similar to the wandering survivor of La tregua, but not in search of the shortest way home, the nomadic Faussone enhances the level of a traditional adventure story by means of his archetypal examples of human activity and craft. In this book, which lacks any reference to Judaism, the nonreligious Levi rediscovered the sanctity of human labor, the reenactment as it were of God’s creation of the world (Cesare Segre, ‘‘Primo Levi et la conception he´braı¨que du travail manuel,’’ 2002). At this point in Levi’s literary career, a certain pattern emerged of the wandering male protagonist, changing places as circumstances or duties evolve, adapting his ethics according to Mordo Nahum’s cynicism but with more room for solidarity, crafty and daring but not fearless. Such a protagonist survives the labor camp—his ‘‘university,’’ as Levi calls it—never stops learning, mingles with people of all walks of life during his odyssey in Central and Eastern Europe on his long way homeward, and can make himself useful and survive, with or without war. In his last fictional text, Se non ora, quando? (If Not Now, When?, 1982), a band of mostly Jewish people, young and old, good and bad, civilians and deserters, roam in the European war zone from the summer of 1943 to the winter of 1945. What many critics view as Levi’s only fully fledged novel, Se non ora, quando? recreates the atmosphere of self-regulatory chaos of La tregua. It ends with most of them arriving in Italy and preparing for travel to Palestine with the help of American Zionists. This novel may be

considered Levi’s political testament in fiction, summarized in Mendel’s—the group’s leader and Levi’s declared alter ego—catchphrase about Abram’s house with the four doors, one for each wall, open to the world. Nationalism, initially earmarking the other as other, then excluding and eliminating him, was the antagonistic notion par excellence in Levi’s political beliefs. What, paradoxically, keeps the rambling group of oppressed and partisans together are, precisely, their different political views, their common refusal to homologize. In one of his last interviews in 1986, with Milvia Spadi, in answer to a question on declining values in the contemporary world, Levi emphasized the importance of political values, that is the importance for every person to safeguard his or her own senso politico (‘‘Capire e far capire,’’ in Marco Belpoliti, editor, Primo Levi, 1997). Levi’s last and most striking book I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1986), which was published one year before his suicide, became his moral, philosophical, and political testament, the ultimate reflection on what the concentration camp meant for him: The Lager is a miniature totalitarian state, made possible by what he terms the ‘‘deificazione dello stato’’ (deification of the state). Not a poetry enthusiast himself, Levi composed many poems after 1943, some of which are collected in the books L’osteria di Brema (The Bremen Tavern, 1975) and Ad ora incerta (Collected Poems, 1984). In the first collection, with numerous references to Auschwitz and its aftermath, one poem is dedicated to Adolf Eichmann. Levi’s poems are a telling expression of his nihilistic philosophy: ‘‘il mondo era uno sbaglio di Dio/ Io uno sbaglio del mondo’’ (the world might be one of God’s mistakes / Myself a mistake of the world) (February 11, 1946). Levi also edited an anthology of favorite authors and thinkers entitled La ricerca delle radici (The Search for Roots, 1981); and L’altrui mestiere (Other People’s Trades, 1985), which contains a selection of articles published in Italian newspapers.

Biography Primo Levi was born in Turin, 31 July 1919. His father, Cesare, was an engineer. The family were only superficially observant Jews. In 1934, Levi attended the Liceo D’Azeglio in Turin. His favorite hobby was mountaineering. In 1937, he enrolled as a chemistry student at Turin University, one year before racial laws prohibited first enrollment for Jewish students. In 1941, he graduated and began 1041

PRIMO LEVI his initial professional activity. In 1943 Levi became a prisoner at Carpi-Fo`ssoli concentration camp; he was sent to Auschwitz when Nazis took over the camp from Fascists in February 1944. In January 1945 Levi was in the camp hospital for scarlet fever when the camp was liberated by the Red Army. From January to October 1945, he journeyed through Eastern Europe. In 1947 Levi married Lucia Morpurgo and started an engineering career for SIVA. His daughter Lisa was born in 1948, and his son Renzo was born in 1957. Levi was awarded the Campiello Prize for La tregua in 1963. In 1965 he visited Auschwitz. In 1967 he was awarded the Bagutta Prize for Storie naturali. Levi took early retirement as a chemist in 1975. In 1978 he won the Strega Prize for La chiave a stella. In 1982 Levi made a second visit to Auschwitz and a first visit to the Birkenau monument; he made a public anti-Israel stand after the invasion of Lebanon and the slaughter of civilians in the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camp. In 1982 he won the Viareggio Prize for Se non ora, quando? In 1983 he started translating for Einaudi Publisher (Kafka, Le´vi-Strauss). Levi made a conference tour of the United States in 1985. In 1986 he took a public stand on the responsibility of the scientist. In 1987 he took a public stand against revisionistic views, resurfacing in Germany, concerning the historical truth of the Shoah. In 1987 he underwent prostate surgery. Levi committed suicide in his home in Turin, 11 April 1987. WALTER GEERTS See also: Holocaust Literature Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti with an introduction by Daniele Del Giudice, 2 vol., Turin: Einaudi, 1988; 1997. Collected Poems, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, London: Faber and Faber, 1988; 1992.

Novels/Memoirs Se questo e` un uomo, 1947; enlarged edition 1958; as Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1961; as If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1996. La tregua, 1963; 1972; as The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1965; as The Truce, translated by Stuart Woolf, 1996. La chiave a stella, 1978; as The Monkey’s Wrench, translated by William Weaver, 1986. Se non ora, quando? 1982; as If Not Now, When? translated by William Weaver, 1986; 2000.

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I sommersi e i salvati, 1986; as The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1988; 1989.

Short Stories ‘‘Storie naturali,’’ 1966; as The Mirror Maker, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1989. ‘‘Vizio di forma,’’ 1971. ‘‘Il sistema periodico,’’ 1975; as The Periodic Table, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1984; 1996. ‘‘Lilı´t e altri racconti,’’ 1981; as Moments of Reprieve, translated by Ruth Feldman, 1985; 2002.

Poetry ‘‘L’osteria di Brema,’’ 1975. ‘‘Ad ora incerta,’’ 1984.

Other La ricerca delle radici, 1981; as The Search for Roots, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 2001. L’altrui mestiere, 1985; as Other People’s Trades, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1989.

Further Reading Angier, Carole, The Double Bond: Primo Levi. A Biography, London: Penguin and Viking, 2002. Belpoliti, Marco (editor), Primo Levi: Conversazioni e interviste 1963–1987, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Belpoliti, Marco, Primo Levi, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Cavaglion, Alberto (editor), Primo Levi: Il presente del passato. Giornate internazionali di studio, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1991. Cicioni, Mirna, Primo Levi: Bridges of Knowledge, Oxford and Washington, DC: Berg, 1995. Emmett, Lucy, Rewriting the Holocaust: Intertextuality in the Works of Primo Levi, Exeter: University of Exeter, 2001. Farrell, Joseph (editor), Primo Levi: The Austere Humanist, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004. Geerts, Walter, and Jean Samuel (editors), Primo Levi: Le Double Lien. Science et Litte´rature, Paris: Ramsay, 2002. Gordon, Robert, Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Homer, Frederic D., Primo Levi and the Politics of Survival, Columbia-London: University of Missouri Press, 2001. Kelly, Judith, Primo Levi: Recording and Reconstruction in the Testimonial Literature, Market Harborough, Leicestershire: Troubador, 2001. Neiger, Ada (editor), Primo Levi: Il mestiere di raccontare, il dovere di ricordare. Atti del convegno di Trento, Fossombrone (PS): Metauro, 1998. Pugliese, Stanislao G. (editor), The Legacy of Primo Levi, New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2005. Ross, Charlotte, Representations of Science, Literature, Technology and Society in the Works of Primo Levi, Coventry: University of Warwick, 2004. Santagostino, Giuseppina (editor), Shoah, memoire et e´criture: Primo Levi et le dialogue des savoirs, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Primo Levi et la conception he´braı¨que du travail manuel,’’ in Primo Levi: Le Double Lien. Science et Litte´rature, edited by Walter Geerts and Jean Samuel, Paris: Ramsay, 2002. Thomson, Ian, Primo Levi, London: Hutchinson, 2002.

PRIMO LEVI

LA TREGUA, 1963 Novel/Memoir by Primo Levi

While revising Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is a Man) for republication by Einaudi in 1958, Primo Levi was prompted to look again at the events surrounding his deportation and to reconsider them from a writer’s rather than from a witness’s viewpoint. La tregua (The Truce), which was written between December 1961 and November 1962, is a picaresque account of his tortuous, nine-monthslong journey back to Turin after the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. The first two chapters, entitled ‘‘Il disgelo’’ (The Thaw) and ‘‘Il Campo Grande’’ (The Main Camp), revisit the occurrences of January 1945 already addressed in ‘‘Storia di dieci giorni’’ (The Tale of Ten Days), the concluding chapter of his earlier memoir. But a change in tone has taken place. Levi’s chronicle, which depicts the daily life of a turbulent pack of human beings assembled at the refugee camp of Katowice in June 1945, is bursting with vitality. There are petty criminals and academics alike, coming from heterogeneous backgrounds and obey to diverse moral and social standards. The journey back home proves to be an extraordinary experience of spiritual rebirth, hope, and underlying courage. Select portraits of survivors introduce the reader to a reality in its most threatening guise: The world seems to have reverted to primeval chaos. Yet Levi’s discourse is fashioned by a strong belief in humanity. For example, the young Henek is described as a ‘‘giovane carnivoro pronto, sagace, feroce e prudente’’ (a young carnivore, agile and smart, ferocious and shrewd), while the mature Mordo Nahum, called Il greco (The Greek), embodies a kind of post-Auschwitz cynicism rather than ancient Greek philosophy. The infernal machine that Levi experienced at Auschwitz can now only be occasionally overcome during short and fragile periods of ‘‘truce.’’ Upon publication, the author discarded his original working title of Vento alto (High Wind), because it evoked high expectations for the world to come and did not reflect the experiential human condition, which he compared to the Lager. The concluding lines of La tregua underlie a recurrent

sogno entro un altro sogno (dream within a dream) that haunted Levi upon his return to Turin: The initial ‘‘internal’’ dream of peace is exceeded by the ‘‘external’’ dream, in which the brutal dawn command of Auschwitz, Wstawa`c´ (get up), still resounds, ‘‘e nulla era vero all’infuori del Lager’’ (and nothing was true outside the Lager). Thus, Levi’s humanistic logic is cast in a shadow of profound pessimism; at the same time, he strove for a political allegory of the future. In fact, the first description of organized life in the post-Auschwitz era illustrates the Katowice refugee camp as a political fairyland. Levi recounted his farewell to The Greek with an explicit reference to international politics: Greece was one of the founding countries of the United Nations, so Mordo Nahum was able to return home; Levi had to stay behind since Italy joined in 1955. The allusion to the United Nations underlines the author’s shift from personal suffering toward an international concern for the future. The United Nations appears to be the official model of the joyously unstructured Katowice camp, where family-like harmony is restored by keeping away all hierarchical structures. Even a cook, in the land of plenty as it were, can assume the reins of government. Nationalism is criticized and opposed to cultural exchange: In Slutsk, another halt of the refugees, the Hungarian band ‘‘attacca con l’inno nazionale sovietico, quello ungherese e la Hatikva` (in onore del forte nucleo di ungheresi ebrei)’’ (begins with the Soviet national anthem, then the Hungarian and the Hatikva`, in honor of the large group of Hungarian Jews). Primo Levi’s compulsion to enact the past, a gesture that compensates for a sentiment of loss and guilt, is above all defined by a profound moral insight. The Lager continues to haunt the survivor from the space of the unconscious; however, Levi felt impelled by an obscure imperative to metamorphose his experience into storytelling itself and bear witness to the atrocities involved in a systematic dehumanization of millions of victims. In 1997, director Francesco Rosi released an epical adaptation of this chaotic aftermath of World War II, starring John Turturro as Levi. Working under tremendous restraints, Rosi was able to create a moving film that captures that very moment when civilization existed only through its scattered fragments of friendship, hope, and laughter. WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: La tregua, Turin: Einaudi, 1963.

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PRIMO LEVI Other editions: in Opere, edited by Marco Belpoliti, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Translations: as The Reawakening, translated by Stuart Woolf, Boston: Little and Brown, 1965; reprinted, New YorkToronto: Simon & Schuster, 1995; as The Truce, translated by Stuart Woolf, London: Vintage, 1996.

Further Reading Anissimov, Myriam, Primo Levi ou la trage´die d’un optimisme, Paris: E`ditions Jean-Claude Lattes, 1996. Belpoliti, Marco, and Robert Gordon (editors), The Voice of Memory: Interviews 1961–1987, New York: New Press, 2001. Bobbio, Norberto, ‘‘La voce dell’indecifrabile: Primo Levi nell’inferno dei degradati,’’ La stampa, 10 April 1997, 1, 25. Brombert, Victor, ‘‘Primo Levi and the Canto of Ulysses,’’ in In Praise of Antiheroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. Calcagno, Giorgio, and Gabriella Poli (editors), Echi di una voce perduta: Incontri, interviste, conversazioni con Primo Levi, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Camon, Ferdinando, Conversazione con Primo Levi, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Ferrero, Ernesto (editor), Primo Levi: Un’ antologia della critica, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Rudolph, Anthony, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s War Against Oblivion, London: Menard Press, 1990.

` UN SE QUESTO E UOMO, 1947 Novel/Memoir by Primo Levi

In spite of Primo Levi’s eagerness to see the memoir of his year of camp labor at the BunaMonowitz chemical plant published as soon as possible, Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is A Man) did not reach its first readers until 1947. Feverishly written immediately upon homecoming, several months after the liberation of the Nazi camp by Soviet troops, Levi’s book was initially turned down by the Turin publishing house Einaudi. Subsequently, Levi’s one-time Resistance comrade and publisher Franco Antonicelli agreed to publish but discarded the title proposed by the author: I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and The Saved). Significantly 1044

enough, Levi would use the rejected title in 1986 for another influential book, containing his concluding thoughts on the Shoah. Einaudi eventually published a revised edition of the work in 1958 following a revival of interest in the subject after an exhibition on the Resistance and the deportation, organized in Turin in 1955 to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the camps. Meanwhile, Se questo e` un uomo had been translated into 15 languages and had developed into one of the major written testimonies of the Holocaust in world literature. For the author, this first book, and the experience it discloses, would remain as a constant reference during his 40 years of literary activity. The deep moral urge moving the storyteller (Levi used to quote Coleridge’s character of the Ancient Mariner) is established by the introductory poem, biblical in style: It is inspired by Deuteronomy 6:4–9 and solemnly exhorts the reader to meditate on the story and pass it on to posterity. With the exception of the grave warning for the ever-present danger of xenophobia, which is expressed in the Preface, the voice heard in Se questo e` un uomo is dispassionate, restrained, detached. It may be compared with the clinical scientists’ voice explaining the variety of reactions, often destructive and unforeseeable, that can be observed in humans and in their history. Acknowledging that his fortuna (luck) had been not to reach Auschwitz until 1944, Levi’s subtle irony emerges in the chapters where, for example, he depicted Auschwitz as a huge financial marketplace granting only short-term credit. Other chapters, such as ‘‘Al di qua del bene e del male’’ (This Side of Good and Evil), disclose that, beyond his status of historical witness, Levi was a master of the modern grotesque. The overall structure of the book is chronological. The opening chapter describes the journey by train from the Italian Fascist prison camp in Fossoli to Auschwitz. The book ends on January 27, 1945, when Primo Levi and his French friend Charles disposed of the dead body of a fellow prisoner while Red Army troops entered the camp. In between, 15 chapters give detailed insight into the methods the Nazis used to deprive prisoners of their humanity, to make them reach the fondo (rock bottom). Levi termed this complete loss of human dignity as the ‘‘demotition of man.’’ Often effective, at times this systematic degradation encounters physical resistance, which is immediately suppressed as in ‘‘L’ultimo’’ (The Last One). More often, it is moral or symbolic resistence, a more effective remedy to preserve some degree of humanity, essential for survival. Even mud can be used for daily washing, as Steinlauf informs his

LIALA (AMALIANA CAMBIASI NEGRETTI) younger camp mate Primo Levi. Knowledge also can be helpful in maintaining moral, and/or physical, integrity as shown in the emblematic and anecdotal chapters ‘‘L’esame di chimica’’ (The Chemistry Examination) and ‘‘Il Canto di Ulisse’’ (The Canto of Ulysses). In the latter, Dante’s high moral lesson in Inferno XXVI (intellectual courage as exemplified in Ulysses) is scaled down to teaching basic Italian to Jean Samuel (Pikolo), a young French fellow prisoner. Other chapters are less narrative in tone and more imbued with reflective memory: mostly so in ‘‘I sommersi e i salvati,’’ with its controversial theory of the gray zone, where guilt affects even the survivors since the drowned can no longer speak for themselves. Namely, as Levi argues, ‘‘la mala novella di quanto, ad Auschwitz, e` bastato animo all’uomo di fare all’uomo’’ (the evil tidings of what man’s presumption made of man in Auschwitz). WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: Se questo e` un uomo, Turin: Francesco De Silva, 1947; enlarged edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1958.

Critical edition: in Opere, vol. 1, edited by Marco Belpoliti, Turin: Einaudi, 1988; 1997. Translations: as Survival in Auschwitz, translated by Stuart Woolf, New York: MacMillan, 1961; reprinted, New York: Summit Books, 1986; as If This Is a Man, translated by Stuart Woolf, London: Vintage, 1996.

Further Reading Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Un libro sui campi della morte,’’ in Riga 13: Primo Levi, edited by Marco Belpoliti, Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 1997. Cavaglion, Alberto, Primo Levi e ‘‘Se questo e` un uomo,’’ Turin: Loescher, 1993. Cavaglion, Alberto, ‘‘Il termitaio,’’ in Primo Levi: Un’ antologia della critica, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Feinstein, Wiley, The Civilization of the Holocaust in Italy : Poets, Artists, Saints, Anti-semites, Madison, NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2003. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Primo Levi in the Tower of Babel,’’ in Primo Levi as Witness, edited by Pietro Frassica, Fiesole: Casalini Libri, 1990. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Lettura di Se questo e` un uomo,’’ in Primo Levi: Un’ antologia della critica, edited by Ernesto Ferrero, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Woolf, Judith, The Memory of the Offence: Primo Levi’s ‘‘If This Is a Man,’’ Market Harborough, U.K., and Woodstock, VT,: University Texts, 1995.

LIALA (AMALIA CAMBIASI NEGRETTI) (1897–1995) A village on the banks of Lake Como often appears in the landscapes of Liala’s autobiographical novels, most notably in Voci dal mio passato (Voices from My Past, 1949), Ombre di fiori sul mio cammino (Shadows of Flowers on My Way, 1950), and Diario vagabondo (Wandering Diary, 1977). In fact, this was the birthplace of Amalia Liana Negretti, better known by her pen name, Liala. One of the most prolific and successful Italian writers of popular romantic fiction (romanzo rosa), Liala had a conventional childhood and adolescence very much in keeping with the customs of her time. Moreover, she made a good marriage according to the social standards of her class but then encountered the love of her life. These events marked her deeply both as a woman and

as an author. After the death of her lover, Liala discovered the therapeutic effect of writing. She recorded her memories and shared her sorrow with millions of sympathetic female readers. In 1931 her first novel, Signorsı` (Yes Sir, 1931), was published by Mondadori. The book was such a success that Gabriele D’Annunzio coined the pen name Liala for the author, a pseudonym that became synonymous with romance. Over 80 of her novels, short stories, and tales have been serialized and published by various magazines. Sometimes collected in volumes by different publishing houses, today these works are hard to date. Even though Sonzogno acquired Liala’s copyrights in 1934—rather early in her career—it is difficult to pinpoint the first edition of many of Liala’s works. Furthermore, the difficulty 1045

LIALA (AMALIANA CAMBIASI NEGRETTI) was compounded by the destruction of the author’s archives during the bombings of World War II. Critics have long considered Liala’s writings as minor literature. Yet her works reflect a number of the literary tendencies of her time as well as political and historic events of great importance. Because of her great male characters and emotional writing style, she became the female symbol of Fascist culture in Italy. As the political situation in Italy changed and became uncertain, Liala set her novels in no particular historical period or time. This allowed her to keep the values, ideals, and type of society she had been presenting to the public all along without appearing to be making a political statement. Indeed, there was a drop in the popularity of Liala’s novels in the postwar period because the public was focused mainly on the reconstruction of the country. This dip lasted a short while. A few years later, women—who had become active agents in the reconstruction of Italy—sought an escape from reality in the trite but reassuring image of an angel of the hearth. No one responded to this need better than Liala, whose female characters already were exemplary models of traditional conduct. What is most astonishing in Liala’s success is the disconnection between the aspirations of her female readers, reflected by her characters, and the opportunities offered in actual life. As if enclosed in an ivory tower, Liala denied the everyday reality in which she could not find a place for herself. In her novels she asserted rather questionable moral truths, dispensed deserved prizes and right punishments—always according to her own criteria—and set rather superficial virtues and sentiments as a model. Thus, her narratives touch upon the absurd and can appear ostentatious and even irritating. Liala wrote about a society in which social class and economic well-being determine the characters’ moral values and behavior. Thus, if one is born in a well-to-do family, one is also virtuous by nature and has the moral right to enjoy and benefit from the best in this world. Those who have only limited means, on the other hand, have no redeeming features and no means of reforming. Their destiny is decided ahead of time and the punishment they receive is often extreme. For example, Coralla Kroon, the main character in Una notte a Castelguelfo (A Night in Castelguelfo, 1953), is a 16-year-old girl condemned by society because her family works in a theater. Even though Coralla is determined to guard her innocence until her marriage with the noble lieutenant Lauro Luis, the hypocrisy of the dramatic profession dishonors her irreversibly. Certain that her 1046

hopes and dreams of love will fail to come true, she eventually chooses to be with a man whom she does not love. The sinful aura of the theater has not left her unmarked, and her aspirations for a life of moral rectitude and social acceptance appear to be futile, even arrogant. At last, Coralla decides to resolve the situation in which she finds herself. She drowns herself in a lake whose waters close over her much like the curtain at the end of the final act of a play. Yet even the death of the reprobate cannot atone for her guilt. In the universe created by Liala, women’s nature is to act as dispensers of peace and serenity. Hence, when they commit a sin, their crime is double—against society and against nature. In this context, Coralla’s suicide confirms her fault and even makes it stand out, regardless of whether the sin was the result of a conscious choice. However, this moral resolution appears rather perplexing, given the fact that Liala herself had a forbidden love affair. In the context of Liala’s works, the story of Coralla Kroon is hardly unique. The author’s first novel, Signorsı`, has a similar plot. The protagonist is the sweet girl Beba, who is condemned despite her brave inner struggle. Beba has the corrupt blood of her mother flowing though her veins and cannot avoid sinning. Her only way out of this deadlock is suicide. On the other hand, in Il peccato di Guenda (Guenda’s Sin, 1964) the crowd rushes to defend the handsome Faliero Dubensshouting, ‘‘No, non va in gabbia un galantuomo!’’ (No, a gentleman can’t be put in jail!). At this point in the novel, Faliero is in love with his sister-in-law Danila and has already killed his wife Guenda, guilty of infidelity. Still the earl is released. Liala’s fictional world was embellished further by the setting she chose for her novels. The novel often takes place in a military setting, providing Liala the opportunity to parade snow white or deep blue navy and air force uniforms and her characters the opportunity to talk of integrity and heroism. Other novels take place in a pastoral world of limpid lakes and sunshine. The women of these novels have perfect complexions, thick and shiny hair, and fine hands, while the men are muscular and pure and resolute in character. This ideal reality was represented in Liala’s works during the very period when poverty, emigration, civil war, or even terrorism troubled the rest of the population. Therefore, the popularity of Liala’s novels can plausibly be explained as a form of escapism. Nowadays Liala’s books continue to seduce. In them everyone always settles down happily, and everything goes right.

LIBRARIES

Biography Liala was born in Carate di Lario (Como), on March 31, 1897. Still very young, she married Marquis Pompeo Cambiasi, with whom she had two daughters, Primavera and Serenella. Later she fell in love with Marquis Vittorio Centurione Scotto, a marine pilot, and decided to leave her husband and face an inevitable scandal. In September 1926 her lover died tragically in an accident. He sunk in Lake Varese with his aircraft during a training session before the Schneider Cup. This led Liala to start writing in order to overcome her great sorrow. Eventually she reconciled with her husband and chose to lead a quiet life in her country house La Cucciola, near Varese. Liala died in Varese on April 15, 1995. ANNA BOGO See also: Romanzo rosa

Ombre di fiori sul mio cammino, 1950. Bisbigli nel piccolo mondo, 1951. La meravigliosa infedele, 1952. Una notte a Castelguelfo, 1953. Per ritrovare quel bacio, 1954. Le creature dell’alba, 1955. Un altare per il mio sogno, 1956. Una carezza e le strade del mondo, 1957. L’azzurro della vetrata, 1958. Sottovoce, o mia Niny, 1959. Passione lontana, 1960. La finestra aperta sulla notte, 1961. Belle nubi solitarie, 1962. Il vento inclina la fiammella, 1963. Il peccato di Guenda, 1964. Un gesto, una parola, un silenzio, 1966. Sognai di essere tuo, 1967. Una pagina d’amore, 1970. Good-bye sirena, 1975. Non crescono fiori per Abigail, 1976. Diario vagabondo, 1977. Frantumi di arcobaleno, 1985.

Further Reading

Selected Works Fiction Signorsı`, 1931. Peregrino del ciel . . ., 1934. Sotto le stelle, before 1943. La casa delle lodole, before 1943. Settecorna (sequence to Signorsı`), after 1943. Il tempo dell’aurora (sequence to Sotto le stelle), post-1943. Dormire e non sognare, 1944. Lalla che torna (sequence to Dormire e non sognare), 1945. Il velo sulla fronte (sequence to Lalla che torna), 1946. Fiaccanuvole, 1947. Donna delizia, 1948. Voci dal mio passato, 1949.

Busi, Aldo, L’amore e` una budella gentile: Flirt con Liala, Milan: Leonardo Editore, 1991. Carrano, Patrizia, ‘‘La leggenda di Liala,’’ in Firmato donna: Una donna, un secolo, edited by Sandra Petrignani, Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1986. Eco, Umberto, et al., Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Gastaldi, Mario, Dizionario delle scrittrici italiane contemporanee, Milan: Gastaldi, 1957. Gregoricchio, Francesca, Liala, Milan: Gammalibri, 1981. Rosa, Giovanna, ‘‘Lo specchio di Liala,’’ in Il successo letterario, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: UNICOPLI, 1985. Surghi, Laura, Evasione e conformismo nella narrativa rosa, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1977.

LIBRARIES The network of historic and archival libraries in Italy is an impressive one and is the equivalent of the country’s artistic heritage for bibliographic materials. However, in spite of this theoretical acknowledgment, two perspectives and two objects must be considered, the book and the act of reading per se. In Italy, public libraries have overlooked the book as an entity in and of itself, designating the

library as a resource center for information and cultural services. Instead, archival libraries have focused their attention on the preservation, restoration, photographic reproduction, and digital imaging of manuscripts and old texts. To the archivist, these materials are relics, excluded not only from reading, which is seen as an ‘‘inferior’’ function, but also from other forms of social function, 1047

LIBRARIES including those of reference and study. The historical roots of this duality can be found, on the one hand, in the virtually unlimited richness of Italy’s book heritage, and, on the other, in the difficult nature of defining the more complex tasks for a sector that has been assimilated to public administration. The mapping of Italian historic libraries reflects the decentralization that characterized preunification Italy, a landscape replete with an extraordinary number of cultural centers. As a result, the large national and government-run libraries inherited the collections of the great royal libraries: from the Biblioteca Reale of Turin (1837), to the Estense of Modena (1764), to the Palatina of Parma (1769), to the Laurenziana of Florence (1571), and, moving backward in time, to the Marciana of Venice (1536), the first Italian civic library. Unlike the other libraries, the Marciana did not belong to a prince but was a public institution as well, conceived as a heritage library belonging, theoretically, to all citizens. Indeed it was the product of the Europeistic insight of a Greek humanist, Cardinal Basil Bessarion (ca. 1403–1472), its first benefactor, who in 1468 donated his library made of some 600 Greek and Latin manuscripts to the republic of Venice. The Vatican’s library (1450), established by Pope Nicholas V, belongs to the category of a ruler’s library, even if it was designed to meet wider interests. The examples of rich and complex libraries, however, also include some smaller cultural centers with brilliant and uninterrupted traditions. This perspective, which seems to exclude any possibility of centralization, is captured similarly in the anomalous Italian situation that allowed for the coexistence of two Biblioteche Nazionali, one housed in Rome (1876) and the other in Florence (1885; previously named Maglabechiana, and established in 1747), both entrusted with the function of documentation and coordination, as well as with the more general task of acquiring and saving entire libraries. Indeed, contributions to the establishment of a national library heritage came not only from the collections existing in ancient capitals but also from the monasteries of suppressed religious orders, from confraternities, schools, hospitals, military institutions, academies, and universities—in other words, the local libraries that merged chaotically into state institutions and municipal departments that as early as the Napoleonic era had the function of collecting this cultural heritage. Thus, local institutions often became the only cultural reality on the territory, especially when, after World War II, it became even more urgent 1048

to train or retrain the masses to read. From the very beginning, then, the dualism of state libraries and civic libraries did not reflect any sort of difference in their collections. Whoever explores Italy’s libraries should take into account both types and search through civic as well as national or state libraries, or vice versa: Treasures are to be found hiding in both. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Italy found a place among the modern nations as the country endowed, paradoxically, with the most solid book heritage and at the same time the highest number of illiterate citizens. This kind of relationship between quantity and quality explains why Italian libraries aimed at reaching unrealistic standards and were overcome by conflicting tasks: preservation and reading, development and paternalistic didacticism. In an ideal situation, the distinction between archival and public access libraries is helpful, as it indicates institutional objectives that are parallel but never converging. The archival library is defined as a so-called introverted institution, given that its objective is to establish the procedures required in the protection and development of its own heritage. However, even in this situation, a library should not fall short of the essential requirement for carrying out the research appropriate to its own tradition and the composition of its collection. For this reason, an archival library where research is not carried out is considered an anomaly, as it does not carry out its function of valorization. Ninety percent of Italian libraries are anomalous. In archival libraries, the interface of research is primarily teaching, as the Biblioteca Ambrosiana of Milan has shown since the early 1990s in exhibitions of its miniatures, prepared with great attention to the presentation of the material to the public. However, the Ambrosiana was from its inception a library of modern design, founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo in 1609, and is a private institution, as indeed are the great ecclesiastic libraries from the national monuments of Cassini, Farfa, and Casamari, to name a few, to the Capitolare of Verona, the fifth-century gem that was passed on from Roman antiquity to the medieval era. In monumental public libraries, however, teaching remains a sore spot because a credible didactic project assumes not only an internal differentiation of functions but also, and above all, the preexistence of permanent structures to be aligned with successful exhibitions and with the never-ending work of cataloging. The work of cataloging in the field of incunabuli and old texts, for

LIBRETTO example, has produced enviable databases, such as the Indice generale degli incunaboli (IGI) and the Indice del Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (SBN). Another outcome of the cooperation among the large historic Italian libraries is the census of sixteenth-century editions, the Censimento delle Edizioni italiane del XVI secolo (EDIT 16). Moreover, librarian training, which has traditionally been based on humanistic subjects and philology and only recently on computer science, seems also to be facing a double challenge. Neither the act of studying nor cataloging can automatically result in development. It comes as no surprise that some libraries that have a museum or a picture gallery should hire an art historian who would take on specific tasks of preservation, study, and development of either the ‘‘container’’ (the library) or of the ‘‘content’’ (the books). Examples include Michelangelo’s Laurenziana, the Marciana library of Michelangelo’s pupil Sansovino, the Malatestiana of Cesena (1454) by Matteo Nuti, or the Palatina of Parma, which houses the Museo Bodoni. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Further Reading

Annuario delle biblioteche italiane, 5 vols., Rome: Palombi, 1949–1981. Apollonj, Ettore (editor), Cento biblioteche italiane, Rome: Palombi, 1964. Barone, Giulia, and Armando Petrucci, Primo: non leggere. Biblioteche e pubblica lettura in Italia dal 1861 ai nostri giorni, Milan: Mazzotta, 1976. Biblioteche d’Italia: le biblioteche pubbliche statali, Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1996. Bottasso, Enzo, Storia della biblioteca in Italia, Milan: Bibliografica, 1984. Crinelli, Lorenzo (editor), Treasures from the Italian Libraries, London: Thames & Hudson, 1997. Eco, Umberto, De bibliotheca, Milan: Comune di Milano, 1981. Guida all’Italia del libro, Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1998. Le biblioteche d’Italia, Rome: La meridiana, 1990. Le edizioni italiane del XVI secolo: censimento nazionale, Rome: ICCU, 1986–. Indice generale degli incunaboli delle biblioteche d’Italia, 6 vols., Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1943–1965. Petrucciani, Alberto, and Paolo Traniello (editors), La storia delle biblioteche: temi, esperienze di ricerca, problemi storiografici, Rome: Associazione italiana biblioteche, 2003. Traniello, Paolo, Legislazione delle biblioteche in Italia, Rome: Carocci, 1999. Traniello, Paolo, Storia delle biblioteche in Italia: dall’Unita` a oggi, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002.

Annuario delle biblioteche ecclesiastiche italiane, Milan: Bibliografica, 1990–1995.

LIBRETTO The libretto is the written text that, with a musical accompaniment, constitutes opera. For this reason, its effectiveness always depends on its relationship to the music. As a literary genre the libretto emerged in the Italian courts of the sixteenth century, when theatrical performances, including works in prose and musical intermezzi, were organized. This changed along with changes in literary fashion. In the 1570s, the Camerata dei Bardi, a cultural association aimed at bringing Greek tragedy back to life by means of the creation of a musical theater, was founded in Florence. The musical theater that they envisioned had to be based on mythological themes, expressed in literary

compositions in verse and to be set to music. Euridice (1600) by Ottavio Rinuccini (1564–1621), a member of the Camerata, is considered to be the first libretto in the history of opera. It presents the typical characteristics of this genre: the alternation of arias and recitatives, a mythological theme, and verse composition. The metrical system, seven-syllable lines, and free rhyme (the rhyming couplet is used more frequently) are derived from the pastoral fables and remained unaltered throughout the seventeenth century. Arias, however, can be composed of various types of verses, due mainly to the work of Gabriello Chiabrera (1552–1638). At the start of the seventeenth century, 1049

LIBRETTO libretto production spread to many Italian cities, first among them Venice, the capital of theaters and of the great impresarios, where Andromeda by Benedetto Ferrari (ca. 1597/1604–1681) was staged in 1637. At that point, the form of the libretto was clearly defined: It was divided into three acts and several scenes, usually of the mythological genre. However, the characters, often taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were greatly changed to appear more realistic. They usually respected the unity of time and action, while the plot was a mixture of comic and tragic themes. The individual scenes, at first unlinked, started to be connected, and more and more frequently the scene changes were marked by the aria. The themes of chivalry and heroism were also given ample space, especially in Venice. In the final decades of the seventeenth century, the librettists of several cities, such as Naples, also drew inspiration from the Spanish commedies of Calderon and the French tragedies of Corneille and Racine. In the eighteenth century, choruses became fewer and the arias multiplied, becoming the most important element. The dominance of the aria over the recitative followed the requirements of the performance, as the audiences appreciated the sung parts above all. For this reason, the libretto was considered by the writers themselves as a minor genre of scarce literary dignity. Famous librettos have been set to music by different musicians in different epochs, in a continual process of ‘‘remake.’’ In the meantime, the Accademia dell’Arcadia spread throughout Italy, influencing many librettists, starting with Scipione Maffei (1675– 1755), who collaborated with Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). A significant reform was begun by Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), who in his 36 operas reduced the number of arias, confining them to the beginning or the end of the scenes. He also theorized the seriousness of drama for music, while the comic component became exclusive to the so-called comic opera. In libretto writing, certain essential rules were now applied: The number of characters was reduced, as were the arias; literary dignity was claimed for the text; and parallels with reality were sought. Thus, the composition of the librettos required greater attention to versification and the construction of characters that obey rational principles. Fantastic subjects were abandoned, and Zeno made an effort to eliminate the supernatural elements that abounded in the libretto composition of his time. The result was librettos like Gli inganni felici (The Happy Deception, 1695). Librettists have a fundamental role also in comic opera, 1050

which became increasingly popular by the middle of the century. In their works, satire was used to attack popular social figures, the aristocracy and above all, the ridiculous poseurs who mistook pretence for reality. In this context, the most famous libretto was Socrate immaginario (The Imaginary Socrates, 1775) by Giambattista Lorenzi (1719–1807), the ridiculous story of Tammaro, who becomes mad after reading too many books by ancient philosophers. Initially the librettos were handwritten, then printed on the occasion of the staging of a particular opera. In the introduction, the librettist explained his personal poetics, and the impresario listed the names of the performers. These publications were usually given as gifts to the most important guests, while the general public could buy them at the theater. The librettists did not limit themselves to written composition but participated in staging the performance. One of the main centers in which they worked was the court of Vienna between 1650 and 1740. Francesco Sbarra (1611– 1668), Nicolo` Minato (1620–post-1698), Silvio Stampiglia (1664–1725), Pietro Pariati (1665– 1733), Zeno, and Metastasio all lived and worked there at various times. On a stylistic level, the poetics of Arcadia suggested formal regularity of the verses and clarity of language. Da capo arias thus assumed great importance, since in them characters express their feelings in rational terms. Furthermore, the use of the septenary was reaffirmed with Metastasio, although a diversified metre remained prevalent, as the libretto production of Carlo Goldoni confirmed. Libretto writing in the eighteenth century was in fact characterized by a sort of scheme, especially following Metastasio’s reform, and the authors composed their works while rigidly respecting the codified rules. The same themes were repeated with monotony: At the center there is nearly always a virtuous man who triumphs after overcoming obstacles and conflicts. In the contrast between passion and reason, the latter is always victorious and attains the final prize. Language itself is crystallized, and the job of the librettist is only to produce a variation on a theme that has already been prepared. A further reform was made by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714–1795), whose ideas would influence the language of the librettos in the nineteenth century. In a letter of 6 September 1783 to Vittorio Alfieri, he stated that it is necessary to create works that will strike the spirit of the audience, unveiling the passions felt by the protagonists of the work. Furthermore, he rejected imaginary characters and

LIBRETTO the ‘‘deus ex machina’’ and believed that respect for the unity of action is indispensable. His reform was put into practice with works such as Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Euridice, 1762) and Alcesti (Alcestes, 1767), set to music by Christoph von Gluck. Calzabigi also questioned the ideas of Metastasio and suppressed the use of ‘‘dry recitative’’ and of da capo arias. In the 1769 introduction to Alcesti he reaffirmed the importance of the libretto, arguing that the task of the music ought to be that of serving poetry and that the fundamental ideal should be a ‘‘beautiful simplicity.’’ According to Calzabigi, the genre of the libretto has high poetical dignity that reaches back to Greek tragedy, in which choruses are similar to arias. Metastasio’s successor at the Viennese Court was another celebrated librettist, Giovan Battista Casti (1724–1803), a longtime rival of Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838). Da Ponte’s fame is tied to the fact that the numerous librettos written during his stay in the Austrian capital between 1784 and 1790 were set to music by some of the greatest musicians of his time, in particular Mozart, for whom he wrote his three masterpieces: Le nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro, 1786), Il dissoluto punito ossia Don Giovanni (The Punished Libertine, or Don Giovanni, 1787), and Cosı` fan tutte (Women Are Like That, 1790). Later in life, he moved to the United States, where he eventually became professor of Italian at Columbia University, thus playing a crucial role in the diffusion of both Italian culture and opera in the New World. Casti arrived in Vienna in 1783 and wrote Teodoro in Venezia (King Theodore in Venice, 1784), based on chapter 26 of Voltaire’s Candide. The work, staged at the Burgtheater of Vienna on 23 August 1784, was a resounding success. Da Ponte, a relentless detractor of Casti, attempted to ignore the merits of the libretto. In effect, Casti abandoned the traditional canons of style in favor of new lexical choices and started a radical reform of the comic opera. He satirized the theatrical world in Prima la musica e poi le parole (First the Music and Then the Words, 1786), which continues a tradition that includes Metastasio’s L’impresario delle Canarie (The Impresario of the Canary Islands, 1724) and Calzabigi’s Opera seria (Serious Opera, 1769). Through the character of Tonina, Casti expressed his contemptuous criticisms of the banality of the repertoire of serious opera, celebrating the triumph of comic opera and claiming the dignity of the work of the writer, who must not give in to the arrogance of the musicians.

In spite of these attempts, the next generation of librettists criticized eighteenth-century production for its excessive schematicism and its poverty of language. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the role of the librettist had been further diminished, and often he was little more than a mere reviser of dramas composed by others. This is for example the case of Gaetano Rossi (1774–1855), who defined himself not as a poet but as a word-monger. One of the most productive librettists of the period was Francesco Maria Piave (1810–1876), author of 60 texts, almost all set to music by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901). The writing process followed a simple pattern: Once the story of the opera was agreed upon, the librettists composed the script, organizing it in isometric verses, favoring lines with an even number of syllables (six to ten) and simpler linguistic expression. Musicians like Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868) and Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) used librettos of scarce value by now. A further change was made after national unification, when libretto writing entered a period of profound crisis. From this period, there are few works worth remembering, the most important of which is Mefistofele (Mephistopheles, 1868) by Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), who also worked intensively as a librettist for other musicians. Based on Goethe’s Faust, Mefistofele is an attempt to change the genre of libretto composition. The prologue in prose takes place on a stage where a critic, a spectator, and the author meet. This is then followed by a brief prologue in Heaven, in which Mephistopheles and God bet on the salvation of Faustus. The novelty of this work is the considerable number of protagonists, made greater by the presence of ‘‘choruses.’’ The language is very varied, according to the dramatic situations. In effect, it passes from the elevated to the common in the ostentatious display of a desirable language, expressed in lines of differing rhythm and metre. The work that the poet set himself had the fundamental aim of giving literary dignity back to the genre of libretto composition. He opposed the domination of music and believed it to be indispensable to rebalance the relationship between music and the literary text in order to create a new operatic theater in which music and language become one in a harmonious way on the basis of an analogous dignity. In order to attain this new musical dramaturgy, Boito believed the fusion of the tradition of Greek tragedy with the typical themes of medieval theatre to be indispensable. 1051

LIBRETTO A new phase seemed to begin with realism, thanks to Cavalleria Rusticana (1889), the libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci set to music by Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945), which tells the story of a crime of passion and honor in Sicily (the subject is taken from a short story by Giovanni Verga). However, such hopes for renewal were short lived, and Gabriele D’Annunzio declared opera an ‘‘exhausted genre’’ in an article in the periodical Galleria of 1 March 1887, although he eventually wrote the libretto for Mascagni’s Parisina in 1913. Among the librettists active at the end of the nineteenth century, perhaps the most prolific and critically recognized was Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824–1893), author of 85 texts, including that for Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida (1870). ALFREDO SGROI See also: Lorenzo Da Ponte; Opera Further Reading Aloisi, Giovanna, Stefania Cuffaro, and Maria Teresa Iovinelli (editors), Libretti per musica della Biblioteca del Burcardo, Rome: SIAE, 1993. Baldacci, Luigi, Libretti d’opera e altri saggi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1974. Baldacci, Luigi, La musica in italiano: libretti d’opera dell’Ottocento, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Berrong, Richard M., Grammar and Translation for the Italian Libretto, New York: Excalibur, 1996. Black, John, The Italian Romantic Libretto. A Study of Salvadore Cammarano, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984.

Calzabigi, Ranieri, Scritti teatrali e letterari, 2 vols., edited by Anna Laura Bellina, Rome: Salerno, 1994. Dace, Wallace, Opera as Dramatic Poetry, New York: Vantage Press, 1993. Fabbri, Paolo, Il secolo cantante. Per una storia del libretto d’opera nel Seicento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Ferro, Donatella, L’America nei libretti italiani del Settecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Freeman, Robert S., ‘‘Apostolo Zeno’s Reform of the libretto,’’ Journal of the American Musicological Society, 21 (1968), 321–341. Gallarati, Paolo, Musica e maschera. Il Libretto italiano del Settecento, Turin: EDT, 1984. Goldin, Daniela, La vera fenice. Librettisti e libretti tra Sette e Ottocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Kimbell, D. R. B., Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Malipiero, Gian Francesco, L’armonioso labirinto: teatro da musica: 1913–1970, edited by Marzio Pieri, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Mioli, Piero, Invito all’ascolto di Gioacchino Rossini, Milan: Mursia, 1986. Nicastro, Guido, Letteratura e musica. Libretti d’opera e altro teatro, Cosenza: Marra, 1992. Nicastro, Guido, Sogni e favole io fingo: gli inganni e i disinganni del teatro tra Settecento e Novecento, Cosenza: Rubbettino, 2004. Portinari, Folco, Pari siamo! Io la lingua, egli il pugnale. Storia del melodramma ottocentesco attraverso i suoi libretti, Turin: EDT, 1981. Sartori, Claudio, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800: catalogo analitico con 16 indici, 7 vols., Cuneo: Bertola e Locatelli, 1990. Sgroi, Alfredo, ‘‘Aspetti e itinerari della drammaturgia di G. B. Casti: tra eros e impegno civile,’’ Ariel, 40 (1999), 47–71. Smith, Patrik John, The Tenth Muse: A Historical Study of the Opera Libretto, New York: Knopf, 1970.

A LIFE See Una Vita (Work by Italo Svevo)

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LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY The relation between the two terms that appear in the title of this entry, ‘‘linguistics’’ and ‘‘philology,’’ needs to be clarified. Depending on the contexts, they may either be used as synonyms or sharply contrasted to each other. The aspects that allow them to be used almost interchangeably are those that, in both cases, refer to the linguistic expression of texts. This is reinforced by denominations traditional in our cultural tradition; comparative philology (and in Italian glottologia) is an old-fashioned, but in some cases still current, designation of a discipline that is nowadays prevalently called linguistics, or historical linguistics. On the other hand, the two terms may also designate different perspectives, and even separate disciplines, ‘‘linguistics’’ being concerned with the study of ‘‘language’’ (traditionally from a diachronic viewpoint, that is, concentrating on language change; but during the twentieth century mainly from a synchronic viewpoint); ‘‘philology’’ being concerned with the study of ‘‘texts.’’ If we accept this dichotomy, we can say that linguistics aims at generalizations, at identifying those laws or rules of a general nature that lie behind our language ability, our capacity to produce and understand sentences or utterances; philology concentrates on the analysis and understanding of individual linguistic expressions. Linguistics tries to show what languages share with each other, what certain data have in common with different data; individual facts are interesting just because they are examples of ‘‘general’’ rules, concrete illustrations of abstract laws. Philology instead tries to illustrate what characterizes a fact in its ‘‘specificity,’’ making it peculiarly ‘‘different’’ from similar ones and stressing its uniqueness. It is useful to keep in mind that in Englishspeaking universities sometimes ‘‘linguistics’’ and ‘‘philology’’ are used approximately as synonyms, but that prevalently ‘‘linguistics’’ tends to refer to a more ‘‘modern’’ perspective, both in the sense of concentrating on contemporary language and of making use of more recent theories and methods, while ‘‘philology’’ tends to refer to a more traditional perspective, both in the sense of concentrating on earlier stages of the language and of having

recourse to long-established methods and techniques. In particular philology, concentrating on texts, aims at establishing their transmission and constitution, stressing different aspects, such as the ‘‘ecdotic,’’ concerned with the criteria for editing texts; the ‘‘Hermeneutic,’’ concerning their ideological and cultural interpretation; and finally the ‘‘exegetic,’’ aiming, at a more literal level, with their word-for-word clarification. There is an area in which it is normally accepted that linguistics and philology must go hand in hand and inevitably overlap—even if their perspectives remain different—and this is the study of early texts. In the university curriculum of Italian studies there used to be a section devoted to the study of the Early Italian texts or Testi Italiani Antichi. During the last two or three decades of the last century the interest moved away from linguistic and philological studies in general, and from pretwentieth century topics in particular. This is in itself an interesting phenomenon, which has affected all modern languages, and its nature and consequences deserve to be understood and analyzed better. As far as Italian is concerned, the implications are particularly relevant, for reasons that are specific to the Italian linguistic and cultural development. It is normally said that Italian, like the other Romance languages, derives from Latin. This is true, as a first approximation, but it is also misleading. In Italy, spoken Latin developed during the early Middle Ages into a large number of local varieties, which can be grouped into a score of regional vernaculars, with a rich written documentation from about the eleventh century. These regional varieties, usually called dialects (Piedmontese, Ligurian, Lombard, Venetian, Tuscan, Umbrian, Neapolitan, Sicilian—to mention a few) are the origin of the idioms still spoken today in their respective Italian regions. They are in effect different Romance languages and not dialects of Italian. They are different grammatically, syntactically, and lexically and are generally thought to be reciprocally unintelligible. Reciprocal intelligibility is of course not a clear-cut yes-or-no feature, but there is little doubt that, say, Neapolitan and Milanese are as different (or as reciprocally 1053

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY unintelligible) as, say, Spanish and French. Phonological development may render words that have the same etymology (that is, derive from the same Latin word) unrecognizable: The word for ‘‘Sunday,’’ from the Latin Dominica (itself derived from Dominus ‘‘Lord’’: Dominica dies ‘‘the day of the Lord’’), Italian domenica, is rummeneca in Neapolitan, dmandga in Bolognese, domenega in Venetian. Not to speak of the cases in which the etymology differs according to the dialect: The word for ‘‘chair,’’ Italian sedia, in Venetian is carega (Latin cathedra, from the Greek kathedra, which is also at the root of the English ‘‘chair,’’ through Old French and Anglo-Norman); the word for ‘‘to break,’’ Italian rompere, in Venetian is sbregar (from a Germanic root that is also the source of ‘‘break’’). To which variety do the Italian forms that I have quoted (contrasting them with the dialect ones) belong? They are recognizably Tuscan. But why do we call them ‘‘Italian’’ and consider them as belonging to a national language rather than to a regional dialect? These may appear simple, straightforward questions—but it is enough to try to give a clear-cut answer to realize that the questions are in fact ill defined and elusive. The distinction between language and dialect is not a linguistic but a sociopolitical one. As the Yiddish specialist Max Weinreich once stated, a language is a dialect that has an army and a navy. Typically, imperial and national powers have languages, while communities that are subordinate to higher, more powerful ones are thought to have dialects. If one looks at the way in which these terms are used, one finds that a language may not imply the existence of subordinate dialects, but a dialect always implies the presence of a superordinate language. For English it is common to talk about dialects of English (often referring to different accents, rather than regional varieties, lexically and grammatically distinct from standard English). For Italian it is less common to talk about dialects of Italian; and by Italian dialects one generally means, as we said, regional idioms that are different from the Italian language. This distinction is, however, fairly modern. The term ‘‘dialect’’ is based on the Greek dialektos, which means both ‘‘speech’’ and also the different idioms (Attic, Aeolic, Doric, and so on) accepted as belonging to Greek; the literary language of the Hellenistic period was called koine, a feminine (dialektos being feminine) of the adjective koinos, meaning ‘‘common.’’ The Latin form dialectus was far less common, since the Romans did not put a premium 1054

on the notion of language variation. It was in fact through the Italian humanists, in the second half of the fifteenth century, that the word and the notion of dialect were introduced into European national cultures. In Italy in particular the prestige of the Greek dialects was seen as a relevant parallel in the discussions, in the sixteenth-century questione della lingua, concerning the different varieties of Italian and their literary validity. In this context we need to consider also the notion of ‘‘standard.’’ The English word indicates a recognized level (a model, size, quality, or norm), and from the nineteenth century it has also been used with reference to language (as in ‘‘standard English’’). In Italian it is a remarkably modern borrowing to which purists prefer the term norma. But the notion is ancient, in fact inseparable from that of ‘‘literary language,’’ and in some ways from certain aspects of the modern linguistic concepts of langue in Saussure, of ‘‘grammaticality’’ in Chomsky, and indeed of Latin as grammatica in the Middle Ages. Dante, in the De vulgari eloquentia, elaborated the notion of illustre vulgare (a Latin neuter form, ‘‘illustrious vernacular’’), which does not correspond to any of the individual local dialects but has those features of regularity, uniformity, and abstraction that we attribute to a koine or to a ‘‘standard.’’ Similar ideals are central in the Renaissance discussions designated as questione della lingua, which concern the variety of Italian most suitable to be adopted as a literary language, such as the lingua cortegiana, the idiom used by the intellectuals and administrators in the main Italian courts; or, in the form that actually prevailed, literary Tuscan as used by the great writers of the trecento, represented, in particular, for prose by Boccaccio’s Decameron and for poetry by Petrarch’s Canzoniere. This ideal of a model based on the Tuscan trecento literary language was codified by Pietro Bembo in his 1525 Prose, a work that had a crucial importance in determining the history of Italian. Similarly the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca, published in 1612, the first important dictionary of a national language, was based on a canon of authors deemed to be linguistically ‘‘pure,’’ in particular those of the Tuscan trecento. During the nineteenth century Alessandro Manzoni took a more radical, progressive position, suggesting that the model for standard Italian, the national language of the recently constituted Italian state, had to be based not on an archaic, literary canon but on the living language, used in

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY everyday life by a real community of people. The only possible model, he suggested, was educated Florentine. But the problem was intractable. The Italian state, proclaimed after unification in 1861, was constituted of a large number of regions, which had a different history, inhabited by largely illiterate communities of speakers of diverging dialects. As was pointed out by Graziadio Ascoli, the greatest Italian comparative philologist of the time, a realistic solution could not be found in adopting an idiom (spoken contemporary Florentine) that was effectively a foreign language for the vast majority of Italians but rather in adopting educational policies that reduced illiteracy and in creating conditions that allowed people to learn, alongside their native dialects, the written and spoken forms of the national language. This is what gradually happened during the twentieth century, on the one hand with the reduction of illiteracy and on the other with the spread of spoken Italian throughout the country, thanks to the mass media, radio, and particularly television. For the first time in the history of Italy, Italians became native speakers of their national language, Italian (rather than their local dialect) became their mother tongue. This had important consequences not only for the cultural complexion of the country but also from the viewpoint of the standard. The gap between written and spoken Italian diminished, owing to a converging movement on both sides: Written Italian became less formal, and the rules of the accepted written norm grew more inclusive, accepting many previously spurned colloquialisms; and the spoken standard found a better balance, distancing itself both from the rigidity of the traditional models adhered to in the past and from the demotic awkwardness of ‘‘popular Italian,’’ described as the usage of speakers who were not fully in command of the national standard. These developments are obviously reflected also in the current bibliography, in both the areas mentioned above of linguistics and philology. For linguistics, apart from the standard comprehensive treatments of historical grammar (Rohlfs, 1966– 1969; Castellani, 2000), we have synthetic descriptive and historical presentations (Lepschy & Lepschy, 1977; Maiden, 1995) and good reference grammars: in English, Maiden and Robustelli (2000); in Italian, Renzi et al. (3 vols., 1988–1995) from a generativist perspective; and the traditional, balanced, reliable, and serviceable Serianni and Castelvecchi (1988). For the history of the language there are excellent discussions in Migliorini

(1960), Bruni (1987), Serianni and Trifone (1993– 1994), and Marazzini (1994). For philology the best introduction, synthetic and yet comprehensive, is Stussi (1994). In the context of both perspectives, it is worth remembering the discussions, which concern the very nature of both disciplines, about the preferable way of presenting texts and particularly the literary classics. It has been observed that it is a common experience that editions of Dante’s Comedy (in Italian Comedia, with one m; Dante did use the word in the poem—although of course this was not a ‘‘title’’: Titles in the modern sense are a later creation) and of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (also a later title—Petrarch used a Latin designation: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, fragments of his vernacular writings) look at first sight very different. Dante seems more modern than Petrarch. This is, of course, misleading and is due only to the fact that Dante’s Comedy is traditionally known in a ‘‘modernized’’ version, critically as reliable as it can be, but following modern spelling conventions, as long as they do not affect textual and linguistic (as against transcription) matters. For Petrarch, current editions often follow Gianfranco Contini’s critical text, which keeps nearer to some fourteenthcentury spelling habits (apart from the fact that for Petrarch’s poems, but not for Dante, we have autographs). The reader might believe that Petrarch wrote, for example, gratia, ringratia, philosophia, extremo, and et, where Dante used grazia, ringrazia, filosofia, estremo, and e, when the choice depends in fact on the criteria adopted by modern editors. These problems are inevitably somewhat different when we are dealing, from the second half of the quattrocento, with editions of printed texts. Textual bibliography (see Conor Fahy, Saggi di bibliografia testuale, 1988) is a discipline that points out that in the Renaissance (and later too) each individual copy of a book consists of sheets that may represent earlier or later stages in the process of correcting or modifying the text and that therefore each copy of a book must be treated, as happens with manuscripts, as a unique individual witness. But of course modern readers expect to be offered texts adapted to modern conventions of spelling and punctuation. Here are a couple of examples. At the beginning of Bembo’s Prose della vulgar lingua, the book that is recognized as having established the standard for literary Italian, in the Venetian first edition of 1525 (the princeps, as philologists traditionally call it), we read: ‘‘Se la natura, Monsignor M. Giulio, delle 1055

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY mundane cose producitrice, et de suoi doni sopra esse dispensatrice, si come ha la voce a gli huomini et la dispositione a parlar data; cosi anchora data loro hauesse necessita di parlare d’una maniera medesima in tutti; ella senza dubbio di molta fatica scemati n’haurebbe et alleuiati, che ci soprasta.’’ In a standard modern edition, by the most authoritative twentieth-century expert on Bembo, Carlo Dionisotti, this passage appears as: ‘‘Se la natura, Monsignor messer Giulio, delle mundane cose producitrice e de’ suoi doni sopra esse dispensatrice, sı` come ha la voce agli uomini e la disposizione a parlar data, cosı` ancora data loro avesse necessita` di parlare d’una maniera medesima in tutti, ella senza dubbio di molta fatica scemati ci avrebbe e alleviati, che ci soprasta`’’ (Bembo, Prose e rime, 1966). Dionisotti’s edition is based on the 1549 text published posthumously by Torrentino in Florence, which incorporates Bembo’s corrections. The only textually relevant change is ci haurebbe for n’haurebbe, which in any case conforms with the observation by Bembo himself that ‘‘si vede la Ci, in vece della Ne, comunemente usarsi da’ prosatori [...] Da’ poeti ella non cosı` comunemente si vede usata’’ (Bembo, Prose e rime, 1966). What immediately strikes the modern reader is a host of spelling differences, such as ‘‘&’’ for ‘‘e,’’ ‘‘u’’ for ‘‘v’’ (hauesse for avesse), ‘‘t’’ for ‘‘z’’ (dispositione for disposizione), the presence or absence of ‘‘h’’ (anchora for ancora, haurebbe for avrebbe), the use of accent marks and apostrophes (sı` for si, necessita for necessita` ). In some cases, the 1549 edition modifies the 1525: As well as ci replacing n[e], we find soprasta` replacing ‘‘soprasta.’’ One assumes that the modern edition would have introduced the accent on soprasta` anyway, as part of the spelling modernization, as it does for necessita`, which has no accent both in the 1515 and in the 1549 edition. We note also that the modern edition tacitly expands the abbreviation M. and prints messer. This may appear innocuous enough, until one realizes that the habit of tacitly expanding abbreviations is fraught with dangers. For instance, in a well-known early Italian text, the Formula di confessione umbra (1075–1080), the traditional reading of Me accuso (Dionisotti and Grayson, Early Italian Texts, 1972), is changed in Castellani (I piu` antichi testi italiani, 1980) to M(iserere) Acc(usome), which overcomes the transgression of Tobler and Mussafia’s law. Obviously for a reader to evaluate this hypothesis it is important for the reading of the manuscript 1056

M. Acc. to be preserved and not tacitly expanded into Me accuso. Another example: Il libro del Cortegiano, del Conte Baldesar Castiglione, to quote the title of the first edition published in Venice in 1528, opens with these words: ‘‘Fra me stesso lungamente ho dubitato Messer Alphonso carisimo, qual di due cose piu difficil mi fosse o il negarui quel, che con tanta instantia piu uolte m’hauete richiesto, o il farlo.’’ The Cortegiano must be one of the most accurately studied texts of the Italian Renaissance. It is editorially extremely difficult, full of inconsistencies, due to different reasons. There are many important modern editions but not a single one enjoying undisputed authority that a modern reader can use with full confidence. Amedeo Quondam, an eminent Renaissance expert and a major Castiglione specialist, published a fully annotated two-volume Mondadori edition in 2002, in which the opening reads as follows: ‘‘Fra me stesso lungamente ho dubitato, messer Alfonso carissimo, quale di due cose piu` difficile mi fosse: o il negarvi quello che con tanta istanza piu` volte mi avete richiesto, o il farlo.’’ It is instructive to compare the two versions: Quondam’s edition opts for a consistent modernization, which makes the text more legible for present-day readers. The criteria are of course fully explained and justified in the introduction. They are more radical than those used for Bembo’s passage. The changes could be ordered according to their relative weight: Some are purely graphic spelling conventions, such as ‘‘u’’ for ‘‘v’’ (negarui for negarvi, uolte for volte, hauete for avete), or the absence of accent marks (piu for piu` ), which do not appear to have further implications. Others, also belonging to spelling and without phonological relevance, may have implications of a stylistic or cultural nature, such as ‘‘ph’’ for ‘‘f,’’ or the presence versus absence of ‘‘h’’ (Alphonso for Alfonso, hauete for avete). In some cases the reader may wonder whether phonological implications are present or not: Instantia for istanza is likely to be purely a spelling Latinism, but what the intended pronunciation was supposed to be is not obvious (istanza, instanza, instanzia, instantia, or other alternatives). Even more uncertain would be the case of certain elisions or truncations (qual for quale, difficil for difficile), which obviously do not pose textual problems but could certainly be relevant from a linguistic viewpoint, even if they alternate in the text in what appears to be free variation. In both passages, the punctuation is modern: It is treated as if it did not belong to

LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY the original text but to the modern editor’s interpretation of it. This appears almost inevitable when the original punctuation criteria are so different as to be unintelligible to the modern reader. On the other hand, the nearer in time the text is to us, the more one expects the original punctuation to be preserved. The results may be inconsistent, as when we find a secondary clause preceded and followed by semicolons, as in Bembo’s passage quoted above (‘‘; cosi anchora [...] in tutti;’’), which in the modern edition become two commas (‘‘, cosı` ancora [...] in tutti,’’). But when the two semicolons are used with the same function in Leopardi’s Operette morali (1827), we expect them to be preserved in a modern edition (1940), for instance in the ‘‘Elogio degli uccell’’: ‘‘Amelio filosofo solitario stando [...]; scosso dal cantare degli uccelli [...] e lasciato il leggere; [...] scrisse le cose che seguono.’’ These choices are inevitably linked, as Quondam himself states in his introduction to Castiglione, to prevailing attitudes and to the current discussion on modernizing the classics. There is of course a distinction between an ‘‘edition’’ that is only modernized in ‘‘spelling’’ and ‘‘punctuation’’ and a ‘‘version’’ or a ‘‘translation’’ into modern Italian. But this distinction is not a clear-cut separation, rather a question of degrees along a scale that at one end presents the original as belonging to an altogether different language and culture and at the other manipulates it at the risk of obliterating its peculiarity and treating it as if it belonged to our own intellectual world. The manner of ‘‘editing’’ a text shares the same nature as that of ‘‘translating’’ and faces similar conflicting choices, between pulling readers toward the text, making them aware of its distance and foreignness, and pulling the text toward the readers, making it as transparent and understandable as possible. It is a choice, as we have seen, that involves both a ‘‘linguistic’’ and a ‘‘philological’’ aspect. GIULIO LEPSCHY Further Reading Ascoli, Graziadio, ‘‘Proemio,’’ Archivio Glottologico Italiano, 1 (1873), v–lxi. Battaglia, Salvatore (editor), Grande dizionario della lingua italiana, 21 vols., Turin: UTET, 1967–2002. Battisti, Carlo, and Giovanni Alessio, Dizionario etimologico italiano, 5 vols., Florence: Barbera, 1950–1957. Bembo, Pietro, Prose della vulgar lingua. L’editio princeps del 1525 riscontrata con l’autografo Vaticano latino

3210, critical edition by Claudio Vela, Bologna: CLUEB, 2001. Bembo, Pietro, Prose e rime, edited by Carlo Dionisotti, 2nd revised edition, Turin: UTET, 1966. Bruni, Francesco, L’italiano: Elementi di storia della lingua e della cultura italiana, Turin: UTET, 1984. Bruni, Francesco (editor), L’italiano nelle regioni: Lingua nazionale e identita` regionali, Turin: UTET, 1992. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Storia della lingua italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989–2003. Bruni, Francesco (editor), L’italiano nelle regioni: Testi e documenti, Turin: UTET, 1994. Castellani, Arrigo, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana, vol. 1, Introduzione, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000. Castellani, Arrigo, I piu` antichi testi italiani: Edizione e commento, 2nd revised edition, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1980. Castiglione, Baldassarre, Il Cortigiano, edited by Amedeo Quondam, 2 vols., Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 2000. Cortelazzo, Manlio, and Paolo Zolli, Il nuovo etimologico. DELI–Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, 2nd ed., by Manlio Cortelazzo and Michele A. Cortelazzo, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999. De Mauro, Tullio, Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, 6 vols., Turin: UTET, 1999. De Mauro, Tullio, Grande dizionario italiano dell’uso, vol. 7, Nuove parole italiane dell’uso, 2003. De Mauro, Tullio, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Bari: Laterza, 1963. Dionisotti, Carlo, and Cecil Grayson (editors), Early Italian Texts, 2nd ed., Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Fahy, Conor, Saggi di bibliografia testuale, Padua: Antenore, 1988. Leopardi, Giacomo, Operette morali, Milan: Stella, 1827. Leopardi, Giacomo, Tutte le opere, edited by Francesco Flora, vol. I, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Lepschy, Anna Laura, and Giulio Lepschy, The Italian Language Today, London: Hutchinson, 1977; new edition, London: Routledge, 1991. Lepschy, Giulio, Mother Tongues and Other Reflections on the Italian Language, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Maiden, Martin, A Linguistic History of Italian, London: Longman, 1995. Maiden, Martin, and Mair Parry (editors), The Dialects of Italy, London: Routledge, 1997. Maiden, Martin, and Cecilia Robustelli, A Reference Grammar of Modern Italian, London: Arnold, 2000. Marazzini, Claudio, La lingua italian: Profilo storico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994; 2nd edition, 1998. Migliorini, Bruno, Storia della lingua italiana, Florence: Sansoni, 1960; as The Italian Language, abridged, recast, and revised by T. Gwynfor Griffith, London: Faber, 1966; 2nd edition, 1984. Morgana, Silvia, Mario Piotti, and Massimo Prada (editors), Prose della volgar lingua di Pietro Bembo, Gargnano del Garda (4–7 ottobre 2000), Quaderni di Acme, 46, Milan: Cisalpino, 2001. Pfister, Max, LEI: Lessico etimologico italiano, Wiesbaden: L. Reichert, 1979. Renzi, Lorenzo (editor), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol. 1, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988; vol. 2, Lorenzo Renzi and Giampaolo Salvi (editors), 1991; vol. 3, Lorenzo Renzi, Giampaolo Salvi, and Anna Cardinaletti, (editors), 1995.

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LINGUISTICS AND PHILOLOGY Rohlfs, Gerhard, Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi dialetti, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1966–1969. Serianni, Luca, with Alberto Castelvecchi, Grammatica italiana: Italiano comune e lingua letteraria. Suoni forme costrutti, Turin: UTET, 1988.

Serianni, Luca, and Pietro Trifone (editors), Storia della ligua italiana, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1993–1994. Stussi, Alfredo (editor), Fondamenti di critica testuale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998. Stussi, Alfredo, Introduzione agli studi di filologia italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994.

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM In the first decades of the sixteenth century, there began to take shape in Italian culture an idea of literature as a discipline standing on its own, as a language endowed with its own functions and rules, along with a desire to establish a canon of literary language that might compensate, with its rigid laws and exemplary uniqueness, for the absence of a national identity, which the great European monarchies had already achieved. Once established, the prescribed norms also functioned as a parameter for the judgment of texts, whose value turned out to be proportional to their greater or lesser adherence to the recommended precepts; hence, under the common banner of modernity, there emerged in equal measure a new conception of literature as a selfsufficient rhetorical practice and the notion of literary criticism as an autonomous exercise of reading. The treatise in the form of a dialogue is the form most suited for a reflection on the literature that came out of the fertile encounter of the various positions of intellectuals engaged in identifying laws and models of reference: Pietro Bembo’s Prose della vulgar lingua (Prose in the Vernacular Tongue, 1525) is exemplary in this sense. The imaginary conversation among Giuliano de’Medici, Ercole Strozzi, Federico Fregoso, and Carlo Bembo (a transparent spokesman for his brother Pietro) codified the humanistic principle of imitatio as well as the ideals of ‘‘harmony’’ and ‘‘equilibrium’’ that make up Renaissance classicism in art and aimed at consecrating the literary dignity of the vernacular. Petrarch and Boccaccio were chosen as archetypes of stylistic perfection in poetry and prose, with the significant omission of Dante, considered illsuited owing to the multilingual choices he adopted in the Comedia. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the numerous translations of and commentaries on 1058

Aristotle’s Poetics inspired reflection on the question of genres (a question already raised in the 1540s by Sperone Speroni). The Aristotelian idea of art as imitation and the realm of the ‘‘plausible’’ and the norm of the three unities (of time, place, and action) were at the core of the sixteenth-century debate on the heroic poem and later of the debate that juxtaposed Ariosto and Tasso’s poetics. Critics such as the Ferrarese Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573) and Il Pigna (Giovan Battista Nicolucci, 1530–1575), upholders of the value of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and its fictional variety, clashed with Tasso himself and Camillo Pellegrino (1527– 1603), who championed the ‘‘modern’’ heroic poem and its locuzione artificiosa (artificial idiom). Although partly thwarted by the repressive thrusts of the Counter-Reformation and by the persistence of an idea of poetry still bound to classical models, Baroque culture—anti-Aristotelian, transgressive, ingenious, and experimental—permeated all the genres and artistic forms of the seventeenth century, not to mention the literary theory and criticism called upon to elaborate new rules and parameters of judgment. Giovanbattista Marino (1569–1625), the poet of the ‘‘marvelous,’’ a modern figure of the intellectual, attentive to public taste and convinced that his own success depended on the fluctuations of the book market, became his own sponsor, encouraging the proliferation of ‘‘Marinist’’ criticism, provoking scandals and polemics on the proper way of creating poetry, and, finally, becoming the enthusiastic exegete of the innovative substance of his own productions. Battista Guarini (1538–1612) was also at the center of a lively debate arising around his Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590). The label ‘‘tragicomedy,’’ elaborated by Guarini himself, emphasizes a desire to mix the two genres of the

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM classical theater and hence to transgress the rigid taxonomy of literary forms. To the attacks of one professor of the Paduan Studium, Giasone De Nores (1530–1590), a strict Aristotelian who polemically drafted a Discorso (1586) and an Apologia (1590), Guarini responded with Verato (1588), Verato secondo (1592), and Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1602), which, taken together, constitute an important work of Baroque poetics. Both as an author and as a critic, Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1635), on the other hand, opted for a provocative desecration of tradition: Although La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622) is a parodic translation of the chivalric poem, he included in his Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca (Thoughts on Petrarch’s Rhymes, 1609) a sharp critique of Petrarchism and through it the Aretine poet’s untouchable monumentality. But it was Emanuele Tesauro (1592– 1675) who most completely theorized the new art. In his treatise Il cannochiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope, 1654)—a title that provocatively brings together the present and the past, Galilean experimentation and Aristotle’s rigid rationalism—the metaphor, the concept, the marvel (a key word of the aesthetics of Marinism), become so many elements of a philosophy of knowledge that entrusts to observation and experience the possibility of grasping hitherto-unseen relations between things. By the end of the century, however, through the work of the Accademia dell’Arcadia, a strongly negative judgment was laid upon the Baroque and its leading figures. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did the richness and originality of Baroque literature come to be fully recognized, particularly in Luciano Anceschi’s Barocco e Novecento (1960) and in Giovanni Getto’s Barocco in prosa e poesia (1969). As the cultural climate shifted toward the Enlightenment, literary criticism of the 1700s began to undertake entirely different paths, owing in part to its new rationalistic approach. Between 1698 and 1711, Giovan Mario Crescimbeni (1663–1728), one of the founders of the Roman Academy, published the Istoria della vulgar poesia (History of Vernacular Poetry) and five volumes of Commentari intorno alla storia della vulgar poesia (Commentaries on the History of Vernacular Poetry), in which he returned to Petrarch and developed the classical line of poetics that had been ‘‘interrupted’’ by the ‘‘acutezze’’ (witticisms, subtleties) of the ingenious seventeenth-century poets. The great historian Ludovico

Antonio Muratori (1672–1750) as well, beginning with Della perfetta poesia italiana (On Perfect Italian Poetry, 1706) up to Della forza della fantasia umana (On the Power of Human Imagination, 1745) and Dei pregi dell’eloquenza popolare (On the Values of Popular Eloquence, 1750), worked toward a redefinition of taste, which is now measured on the basis of values of ‘‘prudence’’ and ‘‘right reason.’’ Literary art, according to Muratori, must banish all excess in diction, rely on the trustworthiness of ‘‘documents’’ for judgment, and develop a critical sensibility capable of grasping the creative essence of literature. Gian Vincenzo Gravina’s treatise Della ragion pratica (Of Practical Reason, 1708) harks back to the idea of poetry as essentially a product of the imagination, a ‘‘fable’’ that can communicate, through the pleasure of fiction, the values of civil life. For Gravina, the greatest artificers of fictitious worlds, pregnant with history in which ‘‘passion’’ coexists with ‘‘reason,’’ were Homer and (with some reservations) Dante, both of whose rhetorical structures Gravina, a member of the Arcadia, studied with particular attention. For Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), poetry, along with myth, belonged to the primitive age of humanity, a primal form of knowledge that is structured through images and feeds on intuitions but that offers materials from which the primal phases of the history of humanity can be reconstructed. Philosophy and philology were the privileged instruments with which Vico, in La scienza nuova (The New Science, 1744), critically retraced the ages of poetry, from Homer to Dante up through his own day, which he considered a world without poetry but which, because of the cyclical nature of historical recurrences, is susceptible of once again recovering the ‘‘heroic’’ imagination of the ancients. The priority that the eighteenth century assigned to the meticulous search for documents and dates and to the evolutionary processes of culture, led to the birth of a new genre of criticism, the history of literature. The most important is certainly La storia della letteratura italiana (The History of Italian Literature, 1772–1782) by Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), in which erudition and an attention to historical context allowed him to reconstruct a broad and articulate picture of Italian letters. In the second half of the century, Naples and Milan became the centers of the Italian Enlightenment. Particularly in the Lombard capital, there arose a critica militante, or militant criticism, which championed the unavoidable connection of culture with 1059

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM civil commitment and of the communicative aspects of literary language. To reach a broader audience, critics turned to the periodical or the gazette as the privileged instrument for an increased dissemination of ideas and to establish a closer relationship between literary production and the discourse it generates. Inspired by the Parisian encyclopaedists, who used to gather at a cafe´ called Procope, Pietro and Alessando Verri, along with Cesare Beccaria, members of the combative Accademia dei Pugni, established the newspaper Il Caffe`, a significant title that alludes to the socializing dimensions of cultural activity, no longer relegated to stuffy enclosed spaces of academies, but rather accessible to bustling city life. In its pages they battled linguistic purism because they were convinced of the primacy of ‘‘things’’ over ‘‘words.’’ Around the same time, Giuseppe Baretti founded the Frusta letteraria, in which, under the name of Aristarco Scannabue, he polemicized against the Italian poetic tradition (from Dante to the Arcadia), and with the editors of Il Caffe`, to whose faith in Enlightenment he contrasted a critical sensibility already steeped in preromantic ideas. Emblematic in this regard is his Discours sur Shakespeare et monsieur de Voltaire (Discourse on Shakespeare and Monsieur Voltaire, 1777), in which he held that the author’s excess of rationalism in Candide showed his incomprehension of Shakespeare’s poetry, considered the absolute model of creative freedom. The primacy accorded to the theater as a literary form particularly suited for a wider exchange of culture was at the root of the flowering of eighteenthcentury dramaturgy and, consequently, of the criticism and history of the theater. In the first half of the century, Scipione Maffei (1675–1755), a versatile intellectual and author of a Discorso storico sul teatro italiano (Historical Perspective on the Italian Theater, 1723), written as a preface to a collection of Italian tragedies, was particularly keen at pointing out that the Italian drama had developed its own specific set of values and was in no way inferior to that of the French. In the second half of the century, the polemical librettist Ranieri de’ Calzabigi (1714– 1795) drew attention to the quality of scenes, to style, and to the impact of the incidents represented on the audience. A member of the Arcadia, Calzabigi satirized melodrama in his L’opera seria (1769), fiercely criticized Metastasio, but was appreciative of Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedies. The figure of the professional critic was born in the nineteenth century and found in Ugo Foscolo 1060

(1778–1827) its most complete prototype. During his London exile, Foscolo published Essays on Petrarch (1821–1823), A Parallel between Dante and Petrarch (1823), Discorso critico sul testo del Decameron (A Critical Discourse on the Text of the Decameron, 1825), and Discorso sul testo della Commedia di Dante (A Discourse on the Text of Dante’s Commedia, 1825), in which philological competence and poetic experience, in the light of an idea of poetry as a language of the self but also as a product of the times, introduced a historical perspective and allowed him to offer intelligent interpretations of the classics of the Italian tradition. Sociohistorical factors and an e´lite literary tradition confer on Italian romanticism characteristics that in a sense are distant from the disquieting core of transalpine literature. Initially a marginal participant to the political and industrial revolution that convulsed the European states, Italy experienced the pre-Risorgimento birth pangs that engaged intellectuals of diverse origins in the formation of a national consciousness able to support the stirrings for independence. There took shape, then, a ‘‘positive’’ Romanticism, which was civil and patriotic, and that rediscovered, after the Enlightenment’s disparagement of it, the meaning of history, nation, and people—values that found fecund expression in all of the literary genres of the early nineteenth century. Criticism was therefore also reformed in the name of an idea of art freed from norms and models and as the product of the free expression of ‘‘genius.’’ Literary language sought to recount both the passions of the self and the suggestive scenes of the past and aimed at the representation of the ‘‘true’’ just as much as on the ‘‘beautiful.’’ Reflection on literature was freed from the traps of erudition and pedantry and was prepared to seek in literary texts the intensity of the ‘‘feeling’’ or the pedagogical function of their message. The need for a wider circulation of ideas was reflected in the proliferation of journals, which became the preferred vehicle for the critical enterprise, and in the role played by the nascent newspaper industry. It was in the pages of the Biblioteca italiana of January 1816 that the Romanticism versus Classicism debate erupted. An article by Madame de Stae¨l, Sulla maniera e l’utilita` delle traduzioni (On the Manner and Usefulness of Translations), exhorted the Italian literati to break free from the shackles of their tradition and open themselves to European Romanticism. Pietro Giordani and Giacomo Leopardi—to name only the most prominent intellectuals—took up the defense of the arguments for Classicism, whereas

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM the Romantics rallied around the journal Il Conciliatore, which was founded by Luigi Porro and Federico Confalonieri, and for which Alessandro Manzoni was a kind of e´minence grise. At the same time, Pietro Borsieri, Ludovico Di Breme, Giovanni Berchet, Ermes Visconti, and Silvio Pellico all agreed on the connection between literature and civilization and between a people’s language and history. They also felt, almost as a consequence, that literature should be ‘‘useful,’’ and that it should reach a much broader, middle-class readership. Above all, as Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852) stated in his Programma of Il Conciliatore (1818), they shared an idea of a literary criticism that ‘‘dall’intima conoscenza dell’umano cuore, e delle nostre varie facolta` intellettuali, desume le leggi e il metodo con che procedere sia nel comporre le varie opere sia nel giudicarle’’ (from an intimate knowledge of the human heart, and of our various intellectual faculties, deduces the laws and method with which to proceed in composing different works and in judging them). Popularizers of a broad conception of ‘‘modernity,’’ the Romantics supported the novel (a genre that is practically absent in the Italian eighteenth century) and favored the transformation of classical tragedy into historical drama. After a year in existence, Il Conciliatore was suppressed by the Austrian censors, but literary criticism continued in various ways to accompany the events of the Italian struggle toward unification. Exiled intellectuals like Giuseppe Mazzini, neo-Guelfs like Antonio Rosmini and Vincenzo Gioberti, federalists like Carlo Cattaneo (founder of Il Politecnico), and Mazzinians like Carlo Tenca (editor of Rivista Europea) studied foreign literature, began to reread the Italian classics (especially Dante), spread knowledge of contemporary writers like Foscolo and Manzoni, and promoted popular poetry and the rustic novel; they were always moved by the programmatic intention to spread a conception of literature anchored in history and working toward political action. In the second half of the century, with the advent of Italian unity, the political and historical climate changed, and as a result culture in general and criticism in particular entered a new stage. The debate on the novel, which went from being historical to being the story of contemporary life, grew larger, and literary histories proliferated: In 1865 Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895) published his Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature) followed by Luigi Settembrini’s Lezioni di Letteratura italiana (Lectures on Italian Literature,

1866–1872), and Francesco De Sanctis’s Storia della letteratura italiana (A History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871). Influenced by the climate of Neapolitan Hegelianism, De Sanctis elaborated a notion of art as ‘‘life,’’ developing a concept of ‘‘form’’ in which content must have its organic development and for which texts are therefore ‘‘living organisms’’ immersed in their contexts, documents of the spirit of an age. By the same token, fictional characters, far from being abstract incarnations of ‘‘types,’’ are read as so many ‘‘individuals,’’ mature products of ‘‘artistic creation.’’ Thus De Sanctis’s historical examination of literary eras proceeded through value judgments—the ‘‘poet’’ is only one who realizes a perfect fusion of form and content—employing a lively prose able to recount the vicissitudes through which authors and their characters, in the course of time, constructed the ‘‘soul’’ of the nation. Attentive as well to contemporary culture, De Sanctis followed with interest the diffusion throughout Italy of positivist theories, to which he devoted La scienza e la vita (Science and Life, 1872), Il principio delrealismo (The Principle of Realism, 1876), Studio sopra E´mile Zola (A Study of E´mile Zola, 1878), and Il darwinismo nell’arte (Darwinism in Art, 1883). The critical approach of Giosue´ Carducci (1835– 1907) is of an entirely different kind. His Dello svolgimento della letteratura nazionale (On the Development of National Literature, 1873–1874) is more an analysis of individual texts than an organic and complete picture of literary history. Convinced that the critic must possess a solid classicist culture and a knowledge of European literature and must be at once philosopher, historian, and artist, Carducci approached works (he preferred poetry and the minor works of the greatest authors) armed with philological tools and metrical expertise: He studied Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and especially Parini. The so-called historical school was tied to Carducci. Promoted by the spread of positivism and by the faith in science that positivism defends, uninterested in critical judgment and engaged in the scrupulous search for documents to be sifted through with philological rigor, this school counted among its best practitioners Arturo Graf (1848– 1913), Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914), and Pio Rajna (1847–1930), the latter famous to this day for his fundamental study on Le fonti dell’ ‘‘Orlando furioso’’ (The Sources of ‘‘Orlando Furioso,’’ 1876). 1061

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM Luigi Capuana’s connection with Positivism was of a different kind. A theoretician of the method of ‘‘impersonality,’’ a careful reader of French literature, a supporter of the ‘‘revolution’’ effected by his friend Giovanni Verga within the novel form, his writings of literary criticism, from Studii sulla letteratura contemporanea (Studies of Contemporary Literature, 1880) to Gli ‘‘ismi’’ contemporanei (Contemporary ‘‘Isms,’’ 1898) allowed him to retrace the trajectory of Italian verismo. Furthermore, as the theater critic of La nazione, Capuana consistently devoted himself to the renewal of the Italian theater, pointing first to Dumas fils, then to Henri Becque as role models. Between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the aesthetics of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), deeply rooted in both philology and philosophy, challenged the primacy of positivism in the critical realm. Through the journal La Critica, founded in 1903, and works such as Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Aesthetics as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, 1902), Breviario di estetica (Essence of Aesthetics, 1912), Aesthetica in nuce (Aesthetics in a Nutshell, 1929), and La Poesia (Poetry, 1936), the philosopher promoted his idealist conception of poetry as ‘‘pure intuition,’’ which is realized without mediation in ‘‘expression,’’ thus ushering an autonomous and absolute ‘‘form’’ freed from history. That poetry is ‘‘beautiful’’ which does not present ‘‘extraneous’’ elements within it—such as references to philosophy or politics. The latter, according to Croce, would immediately turn poetry into non poesia (nonpoetry) by polluting the compact harmony of the aesthetic form. On this basis he rejected literary histories in favor of monograph studies, which have no use for the notion of genre (they would be contrary to the individual value of the work of art), as well as that of poetics (as it would be an exercise of reflection, incompatible with the intuitive substance of the poetic word). Croce applied his aesthetic theory in a series of essays on postunification literature, later collected in the six-volume Letteratura della Nuova Italia (The Literature of the New Italy, 1914–1940), as well as in different studies of Dante and Ariosto, of baroque culture, of Manzoni, and of popular poetry. In the history of Italian culture, Croce rapidly achieved monumental stature and became an interlocutor whom, whether in agreement or disagreement, it was difficult to ignore. While Renato Serra, Giovanni Boine, and Giuseppe De Robertis clarified their 1062

own methods of reading by debating, in the pages of the Florentine journal La Voce, with Croce and certain of his ideas on literature, critics of the stature of Alfredo Gargiulo, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Attilio Momigliano, Natalino Sapegno, Luigi Russo, Walter Binni, Giacomo Devoto, Mario Fubini, and Francesco Flora departed from Croce’s teachings in order to restore the connections between literature and history or the significance of poetics or the value of style. Journals played an essential role in critical debate in the years after World War I (La Ronda, Il selvaggio, Solaria, 900, to name a few), but it was the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1948–1951) that offered an unprecedented interpretive perspective on Italian literature. Beginning from the definition of the mediating function that the ‘‘organic’’ intellectual must perform within a social class, Gramsci retraced the story of Italian intellectuals, who in his view were historically separated from society and disconnected from the masses. His call for a national-popular literature was the call for a wider circulation of culture, for the people’s participation in culture—through intellectuals—that can lead the proletariat to political hegemony. Hence his interest in the theater and its educative function and in serial literature, which responds to the reading needs of those who are less learned; hence, finally, the need to connect the critique of ideology with aesthetic evaluation. Gramsci’s legacy includes the birth of the sociology of literature and Marxist criticism. The first school was promoted in Italy at the end of the 1960s by Robert Escarpit and focused in particular on the circuits of production and transmission of the literary text (publishers, audience, marketing), whereas Marxist criticism combined the teaching of Gramsci with Luka´cs’s theory of ‘‘reflection.’’ Academic critics like Giuseppe Petronio (1909–2003), Carlo Salinari (1919–1977), and Carlo Muscetta (1912–2004) studied, among others, Leopardi, Verga, the Decadent School, and contemporary literature, focusing their arguments on the relations between structure and superstructure, between literature and society. One strand that rejected the traditional line of Gramscian Marxism is represented by the ‘‘New Left.’’ Key figures in this camp are Alberto Asor Rosa (1933–), who, in his 1965 Scrittori e popolo, critiqued the ‘‘populism’’ of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italian literature; and Franco Fortini (1917–1994), who distanced himself from the cultural policy of Communist orthodoxy while seeking

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM to align criticism with the ‘‘negative dialectics’’ of the Frankfurt school. In the second half of the twentieth century, in an effort to confer scientific status to literary analysis, the dominant concern in critique revolved around the problem of ‘‘method.’’ Disciplines as diverse as linguistics, psychoanalysis, and Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology contributed to the proliferation of various approaches to reading and of the theoretical discourses required for their foundation. The critical activity of several scholars can be traced directly to linguistic-philological studies: Salvatore Battaglia (1904–1971); Vittore Branca (1913–2004), to whom we owe a critical edition of the Decameron; Giorgio Petrocchi (1921–1989), the editor of Dante’s Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata (1966–1967); Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (1936–), a master of structuralist criticism; and, finally, Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990), who, by combining philology and stylistic criticism, introduced the criticism of variants in his 1970 Varianti e altra linguistica but is also known as militant critic and historian of literature particularly alert to the ‘‘expressionistic’’ strand of the Italian tradition. On another front, we owe the first applications of psychoanalysis to literary texts to Giacomo Debenedetti (1901–1967). With his absorbing style, in numerous essays as well as in Il romanzo del Novecento (The Twentieth-Century Novel, 1971), Poesia italiana del Novecento (Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, 1974), Verga e il naturalismo (Verga and Naturalism, 1976), among others, Debenedetti told a ‘‘critical story’’ dense in illuminating digressions and wide-ranging cultural references and proceeded toward a systematic excavation of texts in search of signs, clues, and traces that may clarify their deepest meanings. It is to his example that we can attribute the principal merit of the most recent Italian psychoanalytic criticism, which privileges works and their hidden meanings. This is the perspective of Francesco Orlando (1934–) in his 1998 L’intimita` e la storia, a reading of Giuseppe Tomansi di Lampedusa’s novel Il gattopardo. But at the same time, for other critics the borders between psychoanalytic criticism and symbolic criticism turn hazy, as demonstrated, for example, by the rich critical activity of Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti (1929–). One scholar capable of approaching literary texts according to the most varied perspectives, from the anthropological to the symbolic and the Hermeneutic, has been Ezio Raimondi (1924–), whose Metafora e storia (Metaphor and History,

1970) and Il romanzo senza idillio (The Anti-Lyric Novel, 1974) are exemplary. On the other hand, the research of Carlo Dionisotti (1908–1988) is alien to any methodological infatuation and is positivistically inspired by a scrupulous analysis of facts. With his Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (A Geography and History of Italian Literature, 1967), he successfully offered new historiographic criteria, though he remained practically peerless. The aesthetics of Luciano Anceschi (1911–1995), founder of the journal Il Verri and a member of the avant-garde Gruppo 63, are tied to Husserl’s phenomenology. From Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte (The Autonomy and Heteronomy of Art, 1936) to Il caos, il metodo (Chaos and Method, 1981), a key part of his interpretations is ‘‘hearing,’’ making oneself available, free of value judgments, to the particularities of literary phenomena and poetics. Anceschi combated the idealism and historicism of Croce and his followers, and theorized the notion of literary ‘‘institutions.’’ During the 1960s, there was an intensive undertaking to translate foreign critical texts and methodologies, and the theories of Russian formalism, French structuralism, and American semiotics appeared almost contemporaneously on the Italian book market, offering to experts a rich range of theoretic proposals and investigative tools capable of interacting and permitting articulate and innovative readings of literary messages. Maria Corti, Cesare Segre, D’Arco Silvio Avalle, and Umberto Eco established an Italian semiotics with their studies of the poetic and narrative text in broader cultural horizons, which then included popular literature. Although in his 1974 Le strutture e il tempo, Cesare Segre (1928–), influenced by Jurij Lotman’s study of cultural systems, read semiological models in the light of their historical contexts, Umberto Eco (1932–), with Lector in fabula (The Role of the Reader, 1979), offered acute and original analyses of the function of the reader in the text. In I limiti dell’interpretazione (The Limits of Interpretation, 1990), Eco also worked in the field of reception studies begun by the school of Konstanz, pointing out, to the proponents of ‘‘deconstructionism’’ and those who go too far in a ‘‘creative’’ relation with texts (both results of the ‘‘postmodern’’ that, in the critical realm, places ‘‘method’’ and its scientific status in doubt), the implicit dangers of an unreliable reading. Among the crowded ranks of writer-critics who offer important contributions to the history of Italian literary criticism, we should mention Eugenio 1063

HISTORY OF LITERARY CRITICISM Montale and his sensibility as a reader of contemporaneity (without him, Italian culture would have ignored Italo Svevo); Pier Paolo Pasolini, a ‘‘militant’’ critic of the review Officina, who is supported, in his provocative intuitions, by the fertile dichotomy that provides the title for his work Passione e ideologia (Passion and Ideology, 1960); and Italo Calvino, who, with Una pietra sopra (The Uses of Literature, 1980) and Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988), was committed to tackling the complexity of contemporary culture and its languages and to investigating the ways in which literature may still be connected to society. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE See also: Literary History Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana, vol. 4, L’interpretazione, Turin: Einaudi, 1985.

Baldacci, Luigi, I critici italiani del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. Baroni, Giorgio (editor), Storia della critica letteraria in Italia, Turin: Utet, 1997. Borsellino, Nino, Critica e storia. Rendiconti di fine secolo, Rome: Kepos, 1993. Carravetta, Peter, ‘‘Italian Theory and Criticism,’’ in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Casadei, Alberto, La critica letteraria del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Corti, Maria, and Segre, Cesare (editors), I metodi attuali della critica in Italia, Turin: ERI, 1970. Getto, Giovanni, Storia delle storie letterarie (1942), Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, La critica letteraria in Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, Bari: Laterza, 1991. Leonelli, Giuseppe, La critica letteraria in Italia 1945–1994, Milan: Garzanti, 1994. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Profili di critici del Novecento, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Muzzioli, Francesco, Le teorie della critica letteraria, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1994. Russo, Luigi, La critica letteraria contemporanea, Bari: Laterza, 1942–1943.

LITERARY HISTORY Even though no one can cast doubt on the historical nature of literature, literary history is a genre in crisis since the nineteenth century. For a long time, the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870) by Francesco De Sanctis (1817–1883) was considered the model of such a history, ‘‘a novel of formation’’ that proved a lasting stimulus to future historians because of the tasks it posed for the critic. There seemed to be two ways to get beyond De Sanctis: The first was to make literary research genetic and no longer teleological, entrusting it to a staff of specialists rather than to a single person; the second was to return to the spirit of the ten-volume Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1787–1794) by Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794), which presented a model of literary history that was erudite, precise, and interdisciplinary. What was literary history before De Sanctis? From Giusto Fontanini (1666–1736), whose Della eloquenza italiana (On Italian Eloquence, 1706) is the 1064

first critical bibliography of Italian literature, to Tiraboschi, it was a matter of imposing biobibliographies that are still used in bibliographic and philological research. To these national bibliographies, we should add local and regional documentation, which would become topics of great interest again in the 1900s. On the other hand, Romantic historiography (from Luigi Settembrini, to Emiliani Giudici, to Cesare Cantu`) holds that literary quality is a distinct cultural function and places literature at the center of a rhetoricalpolitical design that covers both secularism and Catholicism. De Sanctis’s work envisions historiography as a political and, at the same time, didactic project. In contrast to other voices of the romantic school, however, De Sanctis recognized the need for the critic’s or theorist’s own self-examination in analyzing the formal nature of the literary work and its interaction with the powers of history. Without this preliminary clarification, he would not have left his

LITERARY HISTORY mark. However, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), who placed De Sanctis at the origin of his aesthetics, was the first to reject the model of a chronological history and suggested a type of literary historiography understood as a successive collection of essays written by an author and interpreter of the texts. This interpreter would not aspire to an organic explanation of the literary phenomena he surveys. This was the line that would be taken by Attilio Momigliano (1883–1952) and Francesco Flora (1891–1962), who both died at the end of the World War II but whose work endured until the 1970s because of their essaylike freshness. The fact of the matter is that, apart from Croce, De Sanctis’s lesson passed into the Marxism of Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), and that Marxism leaves its mark on a large part of subsequent Italian literary criticism, its principles unintentionally reflected in the most apolitical criticism. Only in Italy would literary history become a trend, an ‘‘ism’’ among the other ‘‘isms’’: that is, the ‘‘historicism’’ that is still a generic basis of the historical-literary studies at Italian universities, even where it has been reformulated in the form of aesthetics of reception and sociology of the literary imagination. This historicism has also been accompanied by the rediscovery of comparatism and of the positivist methodology of source finding (from Francesco D’Ovidio to Pio Rajna). Unlike De Sanctis or Croce, Gramsci had aimed (in the cultural tradition of liberal Italy) at a literary criticism relevant to political-social debates. All of this would not have been possible if De Sanctis’s work had not contained romantic vision of the literature-nation connection. Similarly, the suggestions that come from the perspectives outlined by Gramsci would be filtered through the rereading of De Sanctis. The return to De Sanctis attributed to Gramsci became the program of a generation of critics including Luigi Russo, Walter Binni, Carlo Muscetta, and Natalino Sapegno. Only afterward would Gramsci’s work become known in its detail, but we can say that Gramsci’s philosophy owes its fortune to it quasi-aphoristic form, which makes it even today stimulating and accessible. The asystemic nature of Gramsci’s works established a new materialistic, though antidogmatic, method. Gramsci exemplified the problem literature’s nonconformity presented to any systematic history, on which, however, Italian historicism embarked with great energy. One important link in this historical project was the legacy of an undoubtedly conservative culture, which, nevertheless, was the guardian of a

patrimony of taste, of a strong formal feeling, and of an unfailing ability to judge. One can also find these traits in the new literary history projected by Sapegno and Emilio Cecchi. One should also note Gianfranco Contini’s effort to bring together linguistic analysis and judgment about historicalstylistic values. However, in his La letteratura italiana: storia e testi (Italian Literature: History and Texts, 1970–1980), Carlo Muscetta, a fervent follower of De Sanctis, showed a growing sensitivity toward the text and, at the same time, an increasing intolerance for comments on literature unsupported by specific examples. He inserted in his historical account an anthology of the most representative texts. Alberto Asor Rosa (1933–) challenges the formula of De Sanctis with a polemical (and mythological) return to Tiraboschi’s interdisciplinary idea. Asor Rosa also expands on the notions parsimoniously provided by Carlo Dionisotti (1908– 1998), in his Geografia e storia della letteratura itlaiana (Geography and History of Italian Literature. 1967), that literary history should be reinstituted on a geographical basis. Actually, Dionisotti did not mean to introduce into literary research ‘‘localism’’ or ‘‘regionalism,’’ which, in fact, were pursued by Walter Binni and by the Sapegno, with their Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia (Literary History of the Regions of Italy, 1968). Instead, Dionisotti advocated a mode of literary criticism determined not so much by abstract aesthetic principles as by the cultural context in which works appear, including information on their editing and publication. The extent to which this perspective could be assimilated to a general literary history can be evaluated by looking at the thick volumes on Italian literature, which copiously offer material on the institutional frameworks of literary production. In the background of this project is the shadow of Gramsci. The editor’s personality and his most ideologically committed collaborators stand in this shadow in their attempt to preserve the political mission of literary research. On the other hand, in the Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana (History of Italian Literary Civilization, 1990), edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti (1929–), history unfolds through a continuous narration of events reconstructing the evolution of a national literature: ‘‘the term history does not, in our case, mean anything other than the tale of the events of Italian Literature laid out in chronological order. It does not allude in any way to political or social history.’’ The history of the language, which charts developments in ‘‘style,’’ and 1065

LITERARY HISTORY the secondary literature, that is the history of literary criticism, are allowed to stand. Another solution was offered by Enrico Malato’s Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1994), which opts for the concept of national ‘‘literary space’’ rather than for terms like ‘‘culture’’ or ‘‘civilization.’’ Malato’s history was based on the assumption that literature ‘‘is the privileged space where the culture, if not the very civilisation, of a nation is expressed.’’ The literary space is silhouetted against the historical backdrop in which production, reception, and transmission of the text take place. Accepting the assumption that the relationship between historicity and literary word is in a state of crisis, Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla` stressed the need to consider the differences that characterize the literary phenomenon in its own context: ‘‘Literature is the brightest star in a dense constellation consisting of what takes place before, alongside, and after it’’ (Storia generale della letteratura italiana, 2004). The term ‘‘general’’ preceding ‘‘history’’ evokes the spirit of the 1700s, when the idea of the specificity of the literary text originated in annalistic work and erudite documentation. The recovery of interdisciplinarity and interest in minor writers characterizes the methodical doubt of today’s literary historiography. We should bear in mind that literary histories are different not so much in the ‘‘canonical’’ writers they consider but in their treatment of ‘‘minor’’ writers, their quotation of extraliterary texts, or their references to examples drawn from other arts. These volumes covering various authors sometimes contain contributions on a highly specialized level that do not do justice to the tradition of the ‘‘literary history’’ genre, which is, by its very nature, a work of synthesis and not of analysis, aimed at teaching and not at research, and consequently entrusted to the commitment and talent of a single expert. Inspired by complex principles and directed to the experience of reading, Giulio Ferroni’s literary history is essentially based on theory and sociology of literature: ‘‘from the institutional data to the material elements of the production of literature, from the forms of organisation of the intellectuals to the characteristics of the cultural centres, from the methods of transference of the texts to the definitions of genres and codes’’ (Storia della letteratura italiana, 1991). Even in this last effort to be objective, literary history cannot give up the utopia connected to a unitary point of view. If one does not wish to subscribe to skeptical relativism, one must humbly recognize the value of 1066

reciprocal transcendence among the separate dimensions of history-life/literature-fiction. In conclusion, the most important histories of Italian literature on the market appeal to different users and audiences: for university students, Ferroni; for teachers, Ba`rberi Squarotti; for militant teachers, Muscetta; for militant critics, Asor Rosa; for publishers, the updated version of CecchiSapegno; for librarians and philologists, Malato; and, for readers with fewer elementary instructional tools, Borsellino-Pedulla`. Only taken together do all these works, which do not always adhere each to its respective programmatic aims, supply an idea and a method for a global study of Italian literature. The widespread feeling that literary histories have lost their credibility persists, perhaps because of the proliferation of histories and anthologies of Italian literature that again prompts the question posed by Ruggero Bonghi (1826–1895) in his essay Perche´ la letteratura itlaiana non sia popolare in Italia (Why Italian Literature Is Not Popular in Italy, 1873) initially published in the Florentine journal Spettatore in 1855. Bonghi attacked elitist academic literary histories, favoring a Manzonian ‘‘popular language.’’ One provoking solution to the crisis affecting literary criticism and history has been put forward by Vittore Branca (1913–2004), who advocated combining criticism, philology, and literary history: to tell the history of Italian literature backwards, not, that is, from its origins to the 1900s, but from contemporary literature (which, in theory, is better known to the public) back to the first books in the vulgar language, unknown to the masses and not comprehensible without historical-critical mediation. Whether this represents a radical application of a genetic research or a deconstruction of De Sanctis’s scheme or, yet again, a desperate didactic plan that developed as a result of the dispersion of knowledge that seems to have taken place in the Italian schools and universities, Branca’s idea is yet to be put into practice. However, the question is this: Who in Italy would be willing to study even European and American literatures backward? ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, Turin: Utet, 1990.

LITERARY PRIZES Bettini, Filippo, and Mirko Bevilacqua, Marxismo e critica letteraria in Italia, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1978. Binni, Walter, Poetica, critica e storia letteraria, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1976. Binni, Walter, and Natalino Sapegno (editors), Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Borsellino, Nino, and Walter Pedulla` (editors), Storia generale della letteratura italiana, Milan: Motta, 2004. Cecchi, Emilio, and Natalino Sapegno (eds.), Storia della letteratura italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Cecchi, Ottavio, and Enrico Ghidetti (eds.), Fare storia della letteratura, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1986. Ceserani, Remo, Raccontare la letteratura, Turin: BollatiBoringhieri, 1990. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, Naples: Morano, 1870. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967.

Esposito, Enzo (editor), Il minore nella storiografia letteraria, Ravenna: Longo, 1984. Ferroni, Giulio, Storia della letteratura italiana. Dalle origini al Quattrocento, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Getto, Giovanni, Storia delle storie letterarie (1942), Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Malato, Enrico (editor), Storia della letteratura italiana, Rome, Salerno, 1995. Muscetta, Carlo (editor), La letteratura italiana: storia e testi, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1970. Pazzaglia, Mario (editor), Letteratura e storia della letteratura, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1978. Petronio, Giuseppe (editor), Storiografia letteraria in Italia e in Germania. Tradizioni e problemi attuali, Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1990. Petronio, Giuseppe (editor), Teorie e realta` della storiografia letteraria. Guida storica e critica, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1981.

LITERARY PRIZES There are almost 2,000 literary prizes given in Italy. Their very number indicates the extent to which the literary prize represents a promotional vehicle for literature in which public and private bodies, municipalities, and council offices for culture believe they can invest without hesitation. It is necessary to return to the roots of this institution to understand the conception of the literary honor such prizes represent, the relationship between writer and public that they reflect, and the critical judgment and social expectations they express. Precedents in the history of Italian literature include the famous Certame coronario (Crowning Contest), organized in October 1441 in Florence, which had friendship as its theme, the promotion of vernacular literature as its purpose, and a silver crown of laurel as its prize. However, the jury, presided over by humanists like Leon Battista Alberti, decided not to award rhymers who spoke the vulgate and to uphold the priority of the Latin language. This did not prevent rejected poems from having great success as manuscripts (for printing had still not been invented). In the early nineteenth century a prize was also established by the Accademia della Crusca. In its modern shape, the Italian literary prizes were established later than in other European countries. Academic awards had lost public interest,

and prizes were sponsored by critics, writers, and readers outside official institutions. Financing came from private venues, banks, industrialists, and government agencies: Their guiding goal was commercial. The most important Italian prizes today are, chronologically, the Bagutta (Milan, 1927) and the Viareggio, created by Leonida Re`paci and some other writers and critics in 1929 in order to frequent, as the Calabrian writer himself jokingly asserted, the salons and to meet the most beautiful girls in Versilia. Rome’s Strega Prize, sponsored since 1947 by the eponymous liqueur, is the award linked to the dolce vita of the postwar period. The Bancarella, promoted by the booksellers of Pontremoli, is the most popular prize. However, since 1952, winners have been best sellers, like the UFO-archaeology by Peter Kolosimo which, in the 1960s, made the purists and the Catholics turn up their noses. The most recent is the Campiello, established by the Catholic industrialists in the Venetian area in 1962 with the aim of countering the hegemony of the Marxist literary culture. Among prizes awarded to authors rather than to single works of literature, one should mention the Antonio Feltrinelli, awarded by the Accademia dei Lincei (Rome, 1952), and the most recent award, Nonino (Udine, 1977). For the novice writers, the 1067

LITERARY PRIZES most prestigious is the Grinzane Cavour (Cuneo, 1982). Finally, the prize awarded to works of translation, extremely important in Italy, where readers prefer foreign novels and poems to Italian ones, is the Monselice award (Padua, 1951). In general, the most prestigious literary prizes, which are important from the commercial point of view, are controlled by publishing lobbies, that is, by a system consisting of publishers, members of the editorial staff, literary critics, television journalists, and so on. These juries can operate to the detriment of new writers, and their judgment is questionable in any case. However, this does not mean that good writers cannot win a prize. Still, prize winners will themselves become members of the jury for that, or other, literary prizes and will be subjected to all the pressures of their position to play the game of reciprocal favors. Reading through the correspondence and investigating the archives of the 1900s, the concern with prizes exceeded the amount of the award in money terms. Prizes represent literary glory and can be seen as a symptom of an identity crisis of the Italian writers, which is disquieting, enduring, and difficult to interpret. According to several first-hand accounts, sometimes the awards are so egregiously corporate that members of the panel who voted in good faith resign or refuse other prizes awarded to

them. This happened with Elio Vittorini (tacitly) in 1942 in the case of a prize awarded by the Accademia d’Italia and with Alessandro Baricco in the case of the Viareggio Award in 1993. Thus there has been a shift in media recognition from the books themselves to the disputes among jury members. However, these same authors, who are now contesting the merit and fairness of awards, owe a lot of their own literary success to the blurb advertising a particular prize at the right moment in their career. This is because the blurb has an irresistible appeal for the public seeking assurance of ‘‘quality.’’ Distributors single out prize winners from their unsold stock, and booksellers who have no other way of promoting their wares display the book with the blurb in the shop window. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Further Reading Bellonci, Maria, Come un racconto gli anni del premio Strega, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Bruschi, Max, ‘‘I premi letterari,’’ in Il Novecento. Scenari di fine secolo 2, edited by Nino Borsellino and Lucio Felici, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Martignoni, Maria Pia (editor), Catalogo dei premi letterari italiani, Milan: Bibliografica, 1999. Tani, Cinzia, Premiopoli, Milan: Mondadori, 1987.

LITTLE WORLD OF THE PAST See Piccolo mondo antico (Work by Antonio Fogazzaro)

LITURGICAL DRAMA Liturgical drama is a complex and elusive entity that has received many and controversial interpretations, especially with regard to its origins. Even 1068

its definition, although commonly entered in ordinary works and handbooks on the history of the theater, is under dispute, because not all scholars

LITURGICAL DRAMA agree on the assumption that the dramatic events with which it is concerned actually belong to the liturgical repertoire. For this reason, Italian historiography prefers to define it as dramatic liturgy, or Latin church drama, or Latin religious drama. The generic definition ‘‘liturgical drama’’ refers to the adjuncts of the Catholic Church liturgy in the form of alternating song and visible action, which appeared in the Western Church around the middle of the tenth century and was performed by clerics until the sixteenth century, when it was suppressed following the reform of the Roman breviary after the Council of Trent. The plays, based on biblical texts or other religious elements, were chanted in a plainsong style, in unison, based on neumatic notation; they were in Latin, but there are also some later examples that present a number of vernacular inclusions. So far, no conclusive theory about the origin of liturgical drama has been formulated. A theory generally supported by such scholars as Young, Donovan, Smoldon, and others assumes that it developed from the phenomenon of trope singing, in consideration of the fact that the earliest testimonies, all of them coming from cathedral and monastic churches, were found in manuscript collections of tropes (known as tropers). According to this hypothesis, liturgical drama descended from the expansion and dramatization of a trope sung before the Introitus of the Easter morning Mass in order to celebrate the mystery of the Resurrection. Conversely, some other scholars, such as Hardison, Drumbl, and McGee, convincingly maintain that the play originated as an additional ceremony formed out of the processional before the Mass and that only later on it was included in the trope repertoire. The simplest version of a liturgical drama is to be found in a troper belonging to St. Gall Monastery (ms. 484), which is attributed to the monk Tutilone. It represents in the form of a dialogue the encounter of the three Marys with the angel near Christ’s tomb and the annunciation of Christ’s resurrection. The text starts with the angel’s question: ‘‘Quem quaeritis in sepulcro, Christicolae?’’ followed by the women’s answer: ‘‘Iesum Nazarenum crucifixum, o Caelicolae.’’ Angel: ‘‘Non est hic, surrexit sicut predixerat. Ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchre.’’ ‘‘Alleluia’’ (Angel: ‘‘Whom are you seeking in the sepulchre, O followers of Christ?’’; Women: ‘‘Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O celestial one.’’ Angel: ‘‘He is not here; he has risen, just as he foretold. Go, announce that he has risen from the sepulchre.’’ ‘‘Alleluia!’’). This ceremony,

named Visitatio Sepulchri (Visit to the Sepulchre), underwent several levels of literary elaboration and soon spread all over Europe: At least 400 manuscripts have reached us. One of the oldest known testimonials, the Regularis concordia of St. Ethelwold from Winchester, circa 965–975, prepared for the Benedictine monasteries of England, reports that the three Marys and the angel were played by deacons and subdeacons, the former wearing copes and carrying censers replete with incense, the latter wearing albs and holding palms. Usually the acting was performed in the choir near the high altar, which was symbolically meant to represent Christ’s sepulchre, or in front of a masonry aedicule purposely built in the likeness of the sepulchre, as can still be found at Aquileia Cathedral, or also on a transitory framework, which was dismantled after the ceremony. During the tenth century the Visitatio Sepulchri was moved from the Introitus of the Easter morning Mass to the end of Easter matins, before the Te Deum, where there was room enough for it to be modified and enlarged with the addition of other characters and episodes—such as, for example, the Unguentarius (the merchant who sold to the three Marys the ointments for Christ’s body) or the Peregrinus (the Journey to Emmaus)—according to the liturgical requirements of individual churches. On the model of the Easter ‘‘Quem quaeritis?’’ in about the eleventh or twelfth century, a new text was created, the ‘‘Quem quaeritis in presepe pastores, dicite?’’, called the Officium pastorum, which introduced Christmas Mass, soon followed by other dramatizations of different episodes of the Christmas season, like the Officium Stellae or Ordo ad representandum Herodem or Ordo Rachelis (The Magi Play and The Slaughter of the Innocents) or like the Ordo Prophetarum (Procession of the Prophets). Moreover, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries new texts appeared on subjects different from the Easter and Christmas cycles, taken from the Old Testament, such as the Ludus Danielis (twelfth century: The Play of the Prophet Daniel) from Beauvais Cathedral, or taken from hagiographic sources, such as the four dramas on the miracles of St. Nicholas from Fleury-sur-Loire (twelfth or thirteenth century), and others (almost the complete corpus of liturgical dramas can be read in the two volumes edited by Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church, 1933). In Italy, liturgical drama is widely represented from North to South, usually in forms that were well known all over Europe, and it is attested in monastic as well as episcopal churches: 1069

LITURGICAL DRAMA In Nonantola Convent, some eleventh-century tropers conserve the Visitatio sepulchri and an Ascension service, the only one known in Italy; two versions of Visitatio sepulchri with a different textual elaboration belong to the cathedral of Cividale; and a twelfth-century Sicilian manuscript contains a detailed Officium sepulchri, an Officium de Peregrino, and a play about the Magi and Herod, just to give a few examples. Conversely, as regards the European background, of special interest are the Passione (The Passion Play) of the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino and the corpus of the ceremonies celebrated by the Church of Padua. The Monte Cassino Passion Play belongs to the twelfth century and is the earliest known dramatization of this subject, which was rarely acted in the Latin theater. Although parts of its first and last scenes are missing, the text extends from Judas’s betrayal to the Crucifixion and ends with the first verses of a Planctus Mariae (Mary’s Grief ) in the vernacular, a genre that was widely developed during the following centuries, the most renowned example being Jacopone da Todi’s Donna de Paradiso, from the mid-thirteenth century. On the other hand, the Paduan Corpus, preserved in three fourteenth-century manuscripts, is a rare testimony of the ritual celebrations that were performed throughout the whole liturgical year in the city of Padua. All performances, from the Annunciation to the Nativity and the Slaughter of the Innocents, from the Purification to the Resurrection and to Pentecost, together with their musical annotations, are described with full details concerning their stage setting and the vocal scores. Thus, the Corpus presents an exceptionally complete documentation of medieval Latin drama. PAOLA VENTRONE

Further Reading Brandt, Alvin G., Drama Handbook for Churches, New York: Seabury Press, 1964; reprint Spiritual Theater International, 2002. Chambers, Edmund, The Mediaeval Stage, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903. De Bartholomaeis, Vincenzo, Le origini della poesia drammatica italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1924. Donovan, Richard B., Liturgical Drama in Medieval Spain, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1958. Drumbl, Johann, Quem quaeritis. Teatro sacro dell’alto medioevo, Rome: Bulzoni 1981. Hardison, O. B., Jr., Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. Harris, John Wesley, Medieval Theatre in Context: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Inguanez, D. M., Un dramma della Passione del secolo XII, Montecassino: Badia di Montecassino, 1939. Kurvers, Robert G. A., Ad faciendum ‘‘Peregrinum’’: A Study of the Liturgical Elements in the Latin ‘‘Peregrinus’’ Plays in the Middle Ages, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. McGee, Timothy J., ‘‘The Liturgical Placements of the Quem quaeritis Dialogue,’’ Journal of the American Musicological Society, 29(Spring 1976), 1–29. Ogden, Dunbar H., The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church, Newark: University of Delaware Press; London and Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002. Smoldon, William L., The Music of the Medieval Church Dramas, edited by Cynthia Bourgeault, London, New York, and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980. Sticca, Sandro, The Latin Passion Play: Its Origins and Development, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1970. Sticca, Sandro, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages, Athens, GA, and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Tydeman, William (editor), The Medieval European Stage, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Vecchi, Giuseppe, Uffici drammatici padovani, Florence: Olschki, 1954. Young, Karl, The Drama of the Medieval Church, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933; reprinted, 1951.

See also: Sacra rappresentazione

FRANCO LOI (1930–) One of the strongest dialect poets of the late twentieth century, Franco Loi has described his commitment as a writer in a statement of poetics 1070

entitled Attorno alla poesia (On Poetry) with these words: ‘‘Per me la poesia non e` solo un fatto letterario, ma un modo di essere dell’uomo e un modo

FRANCO LOI di affrontare la realta` [...] forse l’unica istanza di resistenza al processo in atto di disgregazione dell’uomo e della societa` civile’’ (For me, poetry is not only a literary phenomenon, but a way of being for man, a way of confronting reality [...] perhaps the sole instance of resistance to the ongoing process of the disintegration of man and civil society; in Maria Ida Gaeta and Gabriella Sica’s La parola ritrovata, 1995). The statement helps us to understand Loi’s hunger for essentials, his need to restore dignity to an injured and marginalized humanity, to oppose the violence of power and the tyranny of institutions, and not to rely on lazy, conventional, and worn-out words. Hence his choice of dialect as a way of being and a way of seeing things, as a language of energy, emotions, passions, intense orality, sound, movement, thought, and rhythm. Loi found within himself the Milanese dialect, albeit in a considerably personalized and mixed form. It is the language in which he thinks and which, in addition to offering great expressive potential and vividness, has a dramatic nature; it comes from the theater (and indeed, Loi has worked in the theater, especially in collaboration Dario Fo and Franco Parenti). Already in his early collections I cart (Papers, 1973) and, particularly, Stro`legh (Astrologer, 1975), what emerges most forcefully, along with orality and the epic-narrative and popular dimension, are the dramatic gesture and the staging of monologues. As for themes, the prevailing ones are tied to political passion, to social and war experiences, and to the memories of the years spent as a child on the outskirts of Milan, as well as to the hopes and subsequent political disillusionments of the postwar period. Above all, Loi wants to give a voice, within a hallucinatory and tragic setting, to the common folks, to the Milanese working and artisanal class, and to the excluded. Furthermore, the personal and social intersect; the past and the present alternate; and the antibourgeois thrust, the anarchist, libertarian, and anticlerical perspectives are conspicuous. Thus, the poet distances himself from the socialist myth of an inevitably bright future, in the name of a kind of permanent revolution. In Teater (Theater, 1978) as well, Loi showed solidarity with the poor and abandoned himself to the memory of personal experiences. Here, then, are the strongly expressionistic images of the ‘‘sbrindellati, in camisa nera della grama Milan’’ (men in tatters, in the black shirts of poor Milan) or the scabrous and grotesque images of Piazza Loreto, where the faces of the hanged Fascists swing and sway like ‘‘inguri a

coll’’ (watermelons hanging by their stalk). At the same time, the poet looked to the living present, which is marked by an enslaved humanity, by false hedonism, and by unbridled consumerism. He contrasted to this spreading hypocrisy the power of love and the joy of harmony and communion. Later, his vision became lighter and more full of wonder in L’aria (The Air, 1981). This title, in fact, alludes to the void, to the fragility of knowledge, to the agonizing tenuousness of life, and, at the same time, to the space of rebirth. Together with the poems that reconstruct the end of a time full of idealisms and hopes, we find poems ‘‘d’amore, di riflessione e di solitudine’’ (of love, of reflection, of solitude) and lyrics inspired by the death of his friend and teacher, Giulio Trasanna, and of his father. The collections Lu¨nn (Moons, 1982), whose lunar title and wrenching nocturnal backdrops confirm a progressive weakening of expressionism in the direction of a lyrical tone, elegiac, and increasingly private, and Bach (1986) offer up once again the theme of death, of whom the poet called himself the son. Moreover, mort (death) is a key word in Umber (Shadow, 1992), in which words obsessively recur that refer to the semantic field of consumption, devitalization, and dust. In the memorialnarrative poem ‘‘L’angel’’ (The Angel, 1981) as well, the sole certainty is the awareness that ‘‘se`m fjo¨ del nient’’ (we are children of nothingness), of the void. In order to have any hope, there is nothing left but to make a choice of humility, to become angels, accepting both the good and bad to be found within and outside of ourselves, and giving ‘‘un post al Diu’’ (a place to God) and to love. The latter is the only hope for a world that has reached its winter and for a stifling civilization, as the poems of Verna (Winter, 1997) demonstrate beautifully. The word, however, also means ‘‘slave’’ in Latin and recalls, by echoing the monastery of La Verna, the stigmata of Saint Francis and of Amur del temp (The Love of Time, 1999), in which there also returns the theme of air as freedom, lightness, and excess. Isman (2002) ends with a celebration of life’s beauty, and its poems, like those of the collection Aquabella (2004), sound like further evidence of the ethical tension, of the religious spirit infusing Loi’s poetry—with religion taken as an inner sense of oneness with the universe and of oneness with others. Franco Loi is the last representative of the grand literary tradition in the Milanese dialect, perhaps the last ever, since dialects are dying out. Often true poets are poets precisely in a dead language: 1071

FRANCO LOI A language of the heart rather than of reality becomes their dialect. Loi exploits this status of language in order to contaminate it with expressive contributions of different origins invented by other languages: It is thus that he secures an inventive freedom that would not be possible with the pure imitation of objective speech.

Biography

Poetry

Franco Loi was born on January 21, 1930, in Genoa; his father was from Sardinia, his mother from Parma. He moved to Milan, 1937, and lived through the experience of the war and the Resistance in the working-class district of Casoretto. After the war, his political militancy on the left was passionate. He completed his studies of economics and business at Milan’s Bocconi University. He worked until 1950 at the Scalo Merci, then from 1955 at the advertising office and in public relations for the department store La Rinascente, and finally, after 1962, in the press office of the publisher Mondadori. Since the early 1980s, he has intensified his collaboration with newspapers and periodicals, especially with the cultural supplement of Sole-24 Ore, and, recently, of L’avvenire. He was awarded the Nonino Prize for Liber, 1990. Loi lives in Milan. ANTONIO D’ISIDORO Selected Works Collections Alice, 1999. Amur del temp, 1999. Aquabella, 2004. Arbur, 1994. Aria de la memoria, 2005. Bach, 1986. El Vent, 2000. I cart, 1973. Isman, 2002. L’aria, 1981.

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Liber, 1988. Lu¨nn, 1982. Memoria, 1991. Poesie: antologia personale, Rome: Fondazione Piazzola, 1992. Poesie d’amore, 1974. Stro`legh, 1975. Teater, 1978. Umber, 1992. Verna, 1997. ‘‘L’angel,’’ 1981; expanded, 1994.

Short Stories ‘‘L’ampiezza del cielo,’’ 2001.

Essays Diario breve. Scritti sulla poesia e sulla letteratura, 1995. Milano: lo sguardo di Delio Tessa, 2003.

Further Reading Brevini, Franco, Le parole perdute: dialetti e poesia nel nostro secolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Brevini, Franco (editor), La poesia in dialetto: storia e testi dalle origini al Novecento, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Fortini, Franco, Nuovi saggi italiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Gaeta, Maria Ida, and Gabriella Sica (editors), La parola ritrovata: ultime tendenze della poesia italiana, Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Lollini, Massimo, ‘‘Il dialetto come lingua della poesia: Aspetti della poesia neo-dialettale in Pasolini, Zanzotto e Loi,’’ Nemla Italian Studies, 16 (1992), 67–84. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Piccini, Daniele, Con rigore e passione: viaggio fra le letture del nostro tempo, Sant’Elpidio a Mare: L’albatro, 2001. Raboni, Giovanni, Poesia degli anni sessanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Sicari, Giovanna, Milano nei passi di Franco Loi, Milan: Unicopli, 2002. Tolve, Antonello, ‘‘Una conversazione con Franco Loi,’’ Sı`larus, 45:238 (March 2005), 22–28. Zagarrio, Giuseppe, Febbre, furore e fiele: repertorio della poesia italiana contemporanea, 1970–1980, Milan: Mursia, 1983.

ROBERTO LONGHI

ROBERTO LONGHI (1890–1970) An influential art historian and critic in the formalist tradition, Roberto Longhi is a unique figure in twentieth-century Italian culture. Early on, his subtle prose style attracted the attention of such prominent critics as Emilio Cecchi, who had been involved with him in numerous cultural initiatives. Cecchi was the first to suggest that Longhi be understood in relation to the literary milieu of La ronda (1919–1923), the Roman journal founded as a reactionary response to Futurism, and to the work of music critic and composer Bruno Barilli (1880– 1952): ‘‘Mi fosse consentita una immagine,’’ he writes, ‘‘ricorderei le incrostazioni della salsedine e degli acidi marini che irritano e macchiano il cristallo della conchiglia piu` gentile di tinte’’ (If I were allowed to conjure up a picture, I would recall the encrustation of sea salts and acids that irritate and stain the crystal of the most delicately tinted seashell; ‘‘Roberto Longhi scrittore,’’ 1928). In thus combining literary with art criticism, Longhi’s writing belongs to the tradition of prosa d’arte, a style of firmly founded on classicist principles that influenced many other writers of his generation, from Pier Paolo Pasolini to Giovanni Testori. However, Cecchi also remarked on the anomalies and eccentricities of Longhi’s style, such as the effect of his lexical erudition. Indeed, Longhi has also been compared to Gabriele D’Annunzio in his verbal gifts. Longhi wrote seminal essays on many artists, most notably on Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca, and also worked with film critic Umberto Barbaro on documentaries. Longhi felt that Benedetto Croce had subjected the visual arts to the principles of literary criticism, thus ignoring their technical dimensions. Through the works Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) in particular but also of Conrad Fiedler (1841–1895), Adolf Hildebrand (1847–1921), Heinrich Wo¨lfflin (1864–1945), and Alois Riegl (1858– 1905), Longhi came to know and be influenced by the Vienna School. However, what distinguished his vision was his awareness of the tradition of Italian art, which he interpreted through its moments of crisis. Caravaggio in particular, the subject of Longhi’s constant rediscoveries in important monographs, exemplified his Hermeneutical method.

Mindful of the practices of the avant-garde, Longhi’s method conceived of the work as a crossroads of diverging tensions within European, national, regional, and local traditions. This method finds an exemplary application in Officina ferrarese (The Workshop of Ferrara, 1934), which was dedicated to the ‘‘metaphysicians’’ of the Este duchy in the Renaissance. At the same time, Longhi took care that the critical text reflected and transcribed in verbal terms the genesis and coherence of the visual work. He found correlations between the works of Giovanni da Milano and Orcagna, Masaccio and Masolino, Moron and Titian, Caravaggio and the Cavalier d’Arpino, Derain and Morandi, or, finally, Ce´zanne, Seurat, and Carra`. In essence, his art criticism was intertextual in comparing works and analyzing their techniques in a historical-critical context. The critic’s task was to reconstruct, through language, the processes by which the work of art came into being. As a result of this method, art and literature were treated as intersecting subjects. Longhi’s method is still of great interest both for its theoretical aspects and for the social responsibility with which he imbued the practice of art history and criticism. In the essay ‘‘Critica d’arte’’ (Art Criticism), published in the first issue of the journal Paragone, which he founded in 1950, Longhi explained: l’opera d’arte non sta mai da sola: e` sempre un rapporto [...] che da` necessita` alla risposta critica. Risposta che non involge soltanto il nesso tra opera e opere, ma tra opera e mondo, socialita`, economia, religione, politica e quant’altro [...] si puo` cercare in essa, purche´ sia l’opera ad avvertirci che bisogna ancora trovarlo, perche´ ancora qualcosa manca al suo pieno intendimento. ...the work of art never stands alone: it is always a relationship [...], which necessitates a critical response. This response involves not only the links between work and works, but between work and world, social relations, economy, religion and anything else [...] may be found in it, as long as the work tells that its meaning must be sought, because something is still missing for its full understanding.

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ROBERTO LONGHI

Biography Roberto Longhi was born in Alba (Cuneo) on 28 December 1890. He completed his university studies at the University of Turin, with a dissertation on Caravaggio, 1911, then moved to Rome with a scholarship to the postgraduate program directed by Adolfo Venturi, 1912. His first contact with Bernard Berenson dates back to 1912; in that same year, he began writing for the journal La voce, contributing a study entitled ‘‘Rinascimento fantastico’’ and becoming involved in a heated debate in favor of Futurism in this journal and in L’Arte. He taught history of art in secondary schools in Rome, 1913–1914. With his friend Alessandro Contini-Bonaccossi, Longhi visited the major European collections, building up his own collection, 1920–1922. He married Lucia Lopresti, who wrote under the pseudonym of Anna Banti, 1924. He was coeditor of Vita artistica, with Emilio Cecchi, 1927. He became a professor of art history at the University of Bologna, 1934; he moved to the University of Florence, 1949. With Anna Banti, he foundedthe journal Paragone, 1950. Longhi died in Florence on 3 June 1970. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works Collections Edizione delle opere complete di Roberto Longhi, 14 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1956–1991. Three Studies, Riverdale on Hudson, NY: Stanley MossSheep Meadow Books, 1995.

Art Criticism Scultura futurista: Boccioni, 1914. Piero dei Franceschi e lo sviluppo della pittura veneziana, 1914. Gentileschi, padre e figlia, 1916. Piero della Francesca, 1927; as Piero della Francesca, translated by David Tabbat, 2002. Officina ferrarese, 1934.

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Carlo Carra`, 1937. Ampliamenti nell’Officina ferrarese, 1940. Fatti di Masolino e di Masaccio, 1941. Viatico per cinque secoli di pittura veneziana, 1946. Il Caravaggio, 1952. Giovanni Serodine, 1954. Il Correggio e la Camera di San Paolo a Parma, 1956. Caravaggio, 1962. Da Cimabue a Morandi. Saggi di storia della pittura italiana, edited by Gianfranco Contini, 1974. Nove secoli d’arte a Bologna, 1987. Il palazzo non finito: saggi inediti 1910–1926, edited by Francesco Frangi and Cristina Montagnani, 1995.

Letters Lettere e scartafacci, 1912–1957, with Bernard Berenson, edited by Cesare Garboli and Cristina Montagnani, 1993. Il carteggio Longhi-Pallucchini. Le prime Biennali del dopoguerra, 1948–1956, edited by Maria Cristina Bandera, 1999.

Further Reading Boschetto, Antonio, Bibliografia di Roberto Longhi, Florence: Sansoni, 1973. Boschetto, Antonio (editor), La collezione Roberto Longhi, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. Casu, Mario, Schede di italianistica attinenti al figurativo, Sassari: Libreria Dessi Editrice, 1981. Causa, Stefano, Il sale nella ferita: antico e moderno nell’officina di Longhi, Naples: Arte Tipografica, 2001. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Roberto Longhi scrittore’’ (1928), in Roberto Longhi, Da Cimabue a Morandi. Saggi di storia della pittura italiana, edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1974. Marchesini, Alberto, ‘‘Longhi e Pasolini tra fulgurazione figurativa e fuga dalla citazione,’’ Autografo, 26(1992), 3–31. Montagnani, Cristina, Glossario longhiano. Saggio sulla lingua e lo stile di Roberto Longhi, Pisa: Pacini, 1989. Previtali, Giovanni (ed.), L’arte di scrivere sull’arte. Roberto Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982. Raimondi, Ezio, Barocco moderno: Roberto Longhi e Carlo Emilio Gadda, edited by Jonathan Sisco, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Spadoni, Claudio (editor), Da Renoir a De Stae¨l: Roberto Longhi e il moderno, Milan: Mazzotta, 2003.

CARLA LONZI

CARLA LONZI (1931–1982) Carla Lonzi, art critic and writer, was one of the proponents of Italian feminism in the 1970s, but her thought surpasses this delimited context and gives life to a concrete utopia of enduring vitality. She composed political texts of unusual efficacy and a diary of 1,300 pages, the product of six years of poetic self-analysis. The titles of her works suggest their essence: Sputiamo su Hegel (Let’s Spit on Hegel, 1974) or Taci, anzi parla: Diario di una femminista (Be Quiet, No, Speak: Diary of a Feminist, 1979) underline the fact that theoretical thinking does not precede action: It becomes action. Her career was characterized by radical shifts made necessary by her loyalty to her own reasoning, which was marked by an intimate correspondence between life and thought, public and private. Lonzi came to feminist engagement through her work in the figurative arts, first as a historian (see, for example, her thesis, Rapporti tra la scena e le arti figurative dalla fine dell’800; The Relationship Between Scenes and Figurative Arts from the End of the Nineteenth Century) and then as an art critic. She placed her bets on artists ‘‘senza curriculum, senza opere, quasi’’ (without resume´s, without artwork, almost), who later became central in understanding the 1960s, as she herself declared in presenting the show Identite´ italienne at the Beaubourg in Paris in 1981 (Marta Lonzi and Anna Jaquinta, Vita di Carla Lonzi, 1990). The nature of this engagement can be understood through Autoritratto (Self-Portrait, 1969), a montage of recorded conversations with 14 artists in a text marked by her distinctive writing style. Carla Lonzi put the artists in the foreground (not their art) and their relationships with critics and followers; she criticized both the role of the critic, who in critiquing enters into a position of power, and the artist’s dependence on a spectator, a passive subject, and a ‘‘female’’ one. In July 1970, the Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile, also signed by Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti, marked the birth of the group of the same name. Commencing with a citation of the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges, the document poses fundamental questions in a series of 60 enunciations, from the affirmation of the

difference between the sexes to the criticism of the patriarchal institutions and masculine culture, which consider man the absolute subject and woman his complement. The feminist revolution took on selfawareness (autocoscienza) as its political practice, privileging life experience and separate relationships between women in order to advance a new vision of the world. To create the space for a different kind of thought, Lonzi wrote Sputiamo su Hegel. The criticism of the masculine culture was in fact indispensable to the project of ‘‘exiting oneself,’’ and it was Hegel who conferred philosophical and ethical dignity on the difference between the sexes, sanctioning their disparity by linking the masculine to transcendence and the feminine to immanence, the ‘‘human’’ principle to man and the ‘‘divine’’ to woman. As a result, this latter must create her transcendence and her way of existing in history, without subordinating herself either to the struggle between other subjects or to the search for emancipation through work. From this derived one of Lonzi’s challenges: She expressed simultaneously the aspiration to make her mark on the world and her need ‘‘not to betray herself.’’ Her approach to the theme of maternity was also original. In Sputiamo su Hegel, she characterized maternity as the ‘‘momento in cui, ripercorrendo le tappe iniziali della vita in simbiosi emotive col figlio, la donna si disaccultura. La maternita` e` il suo ‘viaggio’’’ (moment in which, re-traversing the initial stages of life in emotional symbiosis with her child, woman de-cultures. Maternity is a woman’s true ‘journey’). At the base of the conflict between the sexes and of the social contract, Lonzi placed sexuality: In La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale (The Clitoral Woman and the Vaginal Woman, 1974) she denounced man’s universalizing of the connection between pleasure and fecundity as his first act of violence. She countered the vaginal women, complementary in coitus, with the clitoral one, who recognizes in the clitoris her own pleasure and begins to acknowledge herself as an autonomous subject. This concept also explains Lonzi’s position during the battles for abortion rights, because these social struggles implicitly assume the 1075

CARLA LONZI dominant sexual model and operate according to traditional political modalities. Self-awareness and the search for autenticita` (authenticity) remained of central importance for her, whether the relationships between women are realized at the personal level or in small structured groups. These ideals also guided her in relating to herself and were made manifest in her writing, Lonzi’s principal activity. From these stemmed the exceptional nature of her Diario di una femminista, which exists in an intimate dialectic with her political texts; in it, the complex nexus between thought and lived experience can be unpacked over the course of time, revealing her choice to exist only in self-awareness. Her feminism revealed a substantial vitality: It was not limited to the foundational phase of the movement, nor to its ideological premises. It existed rather in the complexity (biographical and theoretical) brought to light by Marta Lonzi and Anna Jaquinta. There remains to consider her return to the theater in a search for antecedents, a return that caused her to declare of Molie`re’s Femmes savantes: ‘‘Armande sono io!’’ (I am Armande!).

Biography Carla Lonzi was born in Florence, 6 March 1931. From the ages of 9 to 13, she studied in a boarding school run by nuns; she graduated from the University in Florence under the direction of Roberto Longhi, 1956. Lonzi married Mario Lena, chemist and Communist trade unionist, 1958; their son Battista was born, 1959. As an art critic, she curated important shows, among which were Artisti americani—Nevelson, Tobey, Hultberg, Borduas, Rothko, Kline at Galleria Notizie, Turin, 1963. She became involved with the sculptor Pietro Consagra, 1963. Sputiamo su Hegel was the first in a series of libretti verdi (little green books) published by Scritti di Rivolta Femminile; Vai pure: Dialogo con Pietro Consagra inaugurated the series

‘‘Prototipi.’’ Her work has been translated in Argentina, Germany, and Spain. Carla Lonzi died of cancer in Milan, 2 August 1982. ANNA LAURA MARIANI See also: Feminist Theory and Criticism Selected Works Rousseau: I maestri del colore, 1965. Seurat: I maestri del colore, 1966. Autoritratto, 1969. Sputiamo su Hegel–La donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale e altri scritti, 1974; as Let’s Spit on Hegel, translated by Veronica Newman in Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, edited by Paola Bono and Sandra Kemp, 1991 (excerpt). ` gia` politica, 1977. Itinerari di riflessioni, in E Mito della proposta culturale, in La presenza dell’uomo nel femminismo: Secondo Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile «io dico io», 1978. Taci, anzi parla: Diario di una femminista, 1979. Vai pure: Dialogo con Pietro Consagra, 1980. Scacco ragionato: Poesie dal ’58 al ’63, 1985. Armande sono io!, 1992. Rapporti tra la scena e le arti figurative dalla fine dell’800, 1995.

Further Reading Boccia, Maria Luisa, L’io in rivolta: Vissuto e pensiero di Carla Lonzi, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990. Calabro`, Anna Rita, and Laura Grasso (editors), Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso: Ricerca e documentazione nell’area lombarda, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983. Causse, Miche`le, and Maryvonne Lapouge, Ecrits: Voix d’Italie, Paris: Editions des Femmes, 1977. Libreria delle donne di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti, Turino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987. Lonzi, Marta, and Anna Jaquinta, Vita di Carla Lonzi, Milan: Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, 1990. Melandri, Lea, Una visceralita` indicibile: La pratica dell’inconscio nel movimento delle donne degli anni Settanta, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000. 100 titoli: Guida ragionata al femminismo degli anni Settanta, Ferrara: Luciana Tufani Editrice, 1998.

CARLO LORENZINI See Carlo Collodi 1076

ROSETTA LOY

ROSETTA LOY (1931–) A struggle between two opposing projects is at the heart of the twentieth century: the project of totalitarian regimes to destroy cultures and their memory and literature’s project to be the custodian of that memory’s survival. Few writers have more consistently chosen to be a witness to that struggle and to honor that memory than Rosetta Loy. Proust inspired her with a passion for the painstaking and unsentimental evocation of the past. She admired the richness of nineteenth-century narratives, first of all Tolstoy’s War and Peace, whose wide-ranging vision included all the facets of life. She found congenial Natalia Ginzburg’s probing of the secrets and silences that hide inside that fascinating entity, the family. In La bicicletta (The Bicycle, 1974), her first novel, four adolescents of the upper bourgeoisie come of age as the events of World War II bring to an end their lives of innocent ease in years marked by the constancy of the changing seasons. Family as a protective place and history as a painful awakening to awareness would remain intertwining elements in all of Loy’s fiction. With Le strade di polvere (The Dust Roads of Monferrato, 1987), Loy created an ambitious fresco. A patriarchal farming family in the Italian Piedmont struggles, prospers, grows, and declines during almost a century, from the time of the Napoleonic wars to the late 1800s when Italy became a nation. The narration often abruptly chooses the present tense so that the discrete episodes, the characters, and their passions, acquire an uncanny sense of actuality. The writer’s grasp of every detail of life, sounds, colors, smells, and fleeting sensations gives the story immediacy and great intensity. Even dreams and fantastic situations have the concreteness of lived experience. Every moment in the existence of each family member is given attention and weight: births and deaths, loves and hates, adventures and solitudes. Yet there are gaps in the flow of events, areas of darkness and silence that the reader must fill and interpret. Ultimately, that present akin to eternity inspires a profound sense of regret because it reveals the fragility and elusiveness of everything; life and happiness are here and gone.

A personal dimension inevitably enters any fictional world, and that is especially true of Loy’s work. Memory for her has not been an innocent realm from which we are excluded and that we may contemplate wistfully from a distance. Memory has been a witness to our common history’s luminous and dark moments. It carries with it the awareness of acts performed or left undone, of thoughts and words that bear a heavy burden of responsibility. Whereas the events narrated in Le strade di polvere take place in a time that only the power of writing can make present and alive, the stories Loy wrote in the 1990s speak of the traumatic period around World War II. Hers has been a descent under the surface of a past that her characters remember in flashes, incompletely and anxiously. In her fictional works, personal remembrance and societal memory appear in large fragments of astonishing vividness. Her characters are most often very young. Life for them is a mystery that is slowly being unveiled, and love is a new experience. They must live their coming of age in the midst of a cruel war that sets friends and family members against each other. Gestures and words, loves and rejections mark the lives of those who were then children or adolescents and must cope with confused remembrances. But Loy’s writing is also filled with human compassion and the world’s lightness and beauty, although these are fragile and often tainted with guilt. Loy has mentioned her debt to Primo Levi’s work, particularly I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved, 1987), which confirmed for her the necessity of being a witness to the past. Only the effort to retrieve and speak the truth as one saw it is worthy of literature. In a text that is part essay and part autobiography, La parola ebreo (First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy, 1997), she evoked the puzzling blindness of a privileged Catholic upbringing and the importance of language. For Rosetta Loy writing, which is discipline, freedom, and responsibility, has been a life work and a joy in spite of the darkness of her vision. The metaphor she borrowed from Sylvia Plath for the title of her most recent novel (Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria, 2004), which contrasts the 1077

ROSETTA LOY darkness of the tree of memory with the blue of the air, tells us as much.

Biography Rosetta Loy was born in Rome, May 15, 1931, of Roman and Piedmontese ancestry. She studied journalism at the Pro Deo University. Loy has won numerous prizes for her fiction, among them the prestigious Viareggio for La bicicletta in 1974 and Le strade di polvere in 1988 and the Premio Bagutta for Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria in 2004. She writes for several newspapers and periodicals, such as Il corriere della sera and Paragone. Her novels have been translated into ten languages. She has four children, three daughters and one son. She lives in Rome. ANGELA M. JEANNET

Selected Works Fiction La bicicletta, 1974; reprinted 1989. La porta dell’acqua, 1976; as The Water Door, translated by Gregory Conti, 2003. L’estate di Letuque´, 1982. All’insaputa della notte, 1984, reprinted 1990. Le strade di polvere, 1987; as The Dust Roads of Monferrato, translated by William Weaver, 1991. Sogni d’inverno, 1992, reprinted 1995. Cioccolata da Hanselmann, 1995; as Hot Chocolate at Hanselmann’s, translated by Gregory Conti, 2003. Ahi, Paloma, 2000. Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria, 2004.

Other La parola ebreo, 1997; as First Words: A Childhood in Fascist Italy, translated by Gregory Conti, 2000.

Further Reading Actis-Grosso, Maurice, ‘‘La colpa degli innocenti. Una psicanalisi romanzesca: Cioccolata da Hanselmann e La parola ebreo di Rosetta Loy,’’ Narrativa, 16 (1999), 35–62. Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Alla ricerca del passato: L’estate di Letuque´ di Rosetta Loy,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 2 (1990), 194–199. Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Le donne e il femminismo di Rosetta Loy: La bicicletta,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 3 (1991), 160–166. Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Tempo e strategie narrative ne Le strade di polvere di Rosetta Loy,’’ Quaderni d’ Italianistica, 13:1 (1992), 71–83. Figliola, Arthur, ‘‘Space and Its Role as a Medium for Human Interaction in Rosetta Loy’s Strade di Polvere,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 6 (1994), 248–252. Gambaro, Fabio, ‘‘Rosetta Loy: la tentation autobiographique,’’ Magazine Litteraire, 404 (2001), 98–103. Minghelli, Giuliana, ‘‘What’s in a Word? Rosetta Loy’s Search for History in Childhood,’’ MLN, 116( 2001), 162–176. Nedderman, Stefania, ‘‘Trascolorare: Metamorphoses in Rosetta Loy’s Le strade di polvere,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti and Gabriella Brooke, Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Parisi, Luciano, ‘‘I collage di Rosetta Loy,’’ Romance Studies, 22(2004), 75–82. Pompei Karagoz, Claudia, ‘‘L’ottica inconscia del desiderio familiare in ‘Cioccolata da Hanselmann’ di Rosetta Loy,’’ L’anello che non tiene, 11–12 (Spring–Fall 1999–2000), 49–62. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘Personal (Hi)Stories,’’ Journal of Literary Studies/Tydskrif vir Literatuurwetenskap, 14 (1998), 253–269. Wetzel, Hermann-H., ‘‘Rosetta Loy: Sogni d’inverno,’’ Italienisch: Zeitschrift fur Italienische Sprache und Literatur, 17 (1995), 32–40. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Rosetta Loy: The Paradox of the Past,’’ The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

GIAN PIETRO LUCINI (1867–1914) The idea of Gian Pietro Lucini as the primo dei moderni (first of the Moderns) was suggested in his introduction to the anthology Poesia italiana del Novecento (1969) by Edoardo Sanguineti, who regarded him as the sole and real alternative in early twentieth-century poetry who could overcome 1078

both the influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s poetics as well as the regressive, lower-middle-class cynicism of Giovanni Pascoli. This decisive reevaluation of Gian Pietro Lucini, supported by a generous selection of his poems in Sanguineti’s anthology, was accompanied, in the same period, by the

GIAN PIETRO LUCINI rediscovery of the poetic landscape of Symbolism and Futurism, facilitated, among others, by the studies of Glauco Viazzi. This attempt to place Lucini at the center of the Italian avant-garde brought new editions of his works to be published; and, as a result, he was read again. Many literary critics, such as Alberto Arbasino, felt that Lucini’s project of poetic renewal was so overproductive, heavy-handed, and, at the same time, incomplete that its full appreciation could only be postponed, perhaps indefinitely (‘‘Agony milanese,’’ 1977). Interestingly enough, in 1913 in Moscow, Anatoliy Lunacharsky had already suggested, in an article entitled ‘‘I Futuristi,’’ that ‘‘the greatest Italian artist in Europe’’ was not Filippo Tommaso Marinetti but Lucini. In other words, the debate on the poet’s contribution to the culture of the avant-garde in Italy is a long-standing one and has accompanied the changing fortunes on his literary production. Lucini debuted in 1888 with the novel Spirito ribelle (Rebel Spirit), indebted to naturalism, which he later turned into the social novel Gian Pietro da Core: Storia dell’evoluzione dell’Idea (Gian Pietro da Core: History of the Evolution of Idea, 1895). The main subject of the novel, as Glauco Viazzi has noted, is ‘‘the human couple (which immediately assumed religious-philosophical meaning from a gnostic-libertarian perspective) in relation to society and history’’ (‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini e il simbolismo,’’ 1979). His first collections of poetry were Il libro delle Figurazioni Ideali (The Book of the Ideal Figurations, 1894) and Il libro delle Imagini terrene (The Book of Earthly Images, 1898), central texts in Italian poetic symbolism. In 1898, he also wrote a series of poems in verso libero (free verse) that are perhaps his best work, I drami delle maschere (The Tragedies of the Masques), collected posthumously in 1973, a volume in which a crowd of Fantocci (puppets) act as symbols of the multiformity of the world of phenomena and refer to a Self as the ultimate collection of a plurality of subjects. This was followed by La prima ora della Accademia (The First Hour of the Academy, 1902), a sort of ideological dramatic poem on class struggle and individual conflicts, and La solita canzone del Melibeo (Melibeo’s Same Old Song, 1910), a private and intimate poem on the phenomenology of love. The common element to all these works is the central paradigmatic pattern of the theatrum mundi, because, for Lucini, only artifice and simulation can reveal the dichotomy between signifier and signified, between culture and life, according to the allegorical and

evocative model of Jules Laforgue and the lesson of the French symbolists. Perhaps his best known work, Revolverate (Gunshots, 1909), published in Marinetti’s literary series of Poesia, is a bitter countermelody between civil engagement and satire, the latter directed ‘‘in particular at his perpetual negative idols: the throne, the altar and the army,’’ as Sanguineti has written (Introduction, 1969). Instead, Nuove Revolverate (New Gunshots), published in 1970 as Le antitesi e le perversita` (Antitheses and Perversions), is a composite construction built from the most obsessive images, such as blood, tears, coitus, and incest. Lucini’s works of poetic prose mixed with verse, such as Le Nottole ed i Vasi (The Noctules and Vases, 1912) and the posthumous La piccola Chelidonio (Little Chelidonio, 1922) display a genuine art nouveau inspiration and mannered alexandrine verses. Profoundly republican and antimonarchic and close to individualist anarchism, Lucini rejected both idealism and positivism. With Futurism, too, he engaged simply in a temporary alliance rather than become an affiliate of the group or, even less, to depend on its poetics. His scornful isolation produced many contentious political and literary works. In Antidannunziana: D’annunzio al vaglio della critica (Anti-D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio Scrutinized by the Critics, 1914), the poet is the object of a merciless and amused ‘‘total criticism.’’ The second section, D’Annunzio al vaglio dell’humorismo (D’Annunzio Scrutinized by Humorism), was published posthumously by Edoardo Sanguineti in 1989. Finally, he wrote with Innocenzo Cappa an important theatrical work, Il Tempio della Gloria (The Temple of the Glory, 1913), which deals with contemporary Russian history, focusing especially on social and political matters.

Biography Gian Pietro Lucini was born in Milan on 30 September 1867. His father, Ferdinando Augusto, was a committed Garibaldino and republican. He graduated in law at the University of Pavia, 1892. He eloped with Giuditta Cattaneo, 1893. His father died, 1895. Lucini had suffered from bone tuberculosis since childhood and spent most of his life in isolation with his wife. He moved from Lake Como to the Italian Riviera and stayed in Milan sporadically. He traveled throughout Italy and met numerous intellectuals, among them Ugo Ojetti, in 1898. A convinced republican and pacifist, at 1079

GIAN PIETRO LUCINI the beginning of World War I he was incriminated. He invested a great part of his father’s inheritance and founded the Galli publishing house. Lucini died in Villa di Breglia, Plesio (Como) on 13 July 1914. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Collections Revolverate e Nuove Revolverate, edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Scritti critici, edited by Luciana Martinelli, Bari: De Donato, 1971.

Novels Spirito ribelle, 1888. Gian Pietro da Core: Storia dell’evoluzione dell’Idea, 1895.

Poetry ‘‘Il libro delle Figurazioni ideali,’’ 1894. ‘‘Il libro delle Imagini terrene,’’ 1898. ‘‘Il monologo di Rosaura,’’ 1898. ‘‘Il monologo di Fiorindo,’’ 1898. ‘‘I monologhi di Pierrot,’’ 1898. ‘‘La prima ora della Academia,’’ 1902. ‘‘Carme di angoscia e di speranza in commemorazione del 28 decembre 1908,’’ 1909. ‘‘Revolverate,’’ 1909. ‘‘La solita canzone del Melibeo,’’ 1910. ‘‘Le Nottole ed i Vasi,’’ 1912. ‘‘Poesie scelte,’’ 1917. ‘‘La piccola Chelidonio,’’ edited by Carlo Linati, 1922. ‘‘La Gnosi di Melibeo,’’ edited by Terenzio Grandi, 1930. ‘‘Parade,’’ edited by Tommaso Grandi, 1967. ‘‘Le antitesi e le perversita`,’’ edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1970. ‘‘Prose e canzoni amare,’’ edited by Isabella Ghidetti, 1971. ‘‘I drami delle maschere,’’ edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1973.

Plays Il Tempio della Gloria, 1913, with Innocenzo Cappa.

Essays Il verso libero: proposta, 1908. L’ora topica di Carlo Dossi, 1911. Antidannunziana: D’annunzio al vaglio della critica, 1914. Libri e cose scritte, edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1971. Per una poetica del simbolismo, edited by Glauco Viazzi, 1971. D’Annunzio al vaglio dell’humorismo, edited by Edoardo Sanguineti, 1989.

1080

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia, Milan: Marzorati, 1962. Arbasino, Alberto, ‘‘Agony Milanese,’’ in Certi romanzi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. Baldassarri, Rita, Lucini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Dall’anima al sottosuolo: problemi della letteratura dell’Ottocento da Leopardi a Lucini, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Capoferri, Federica, ‘‘‘In sull’ambiguo giuoco della parola’: Maschera e persona storica nelle Revolverate di Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ Gradiva, 18 (2000), 34–50. Civolani, Eva, La sovversione estetica: Arte e pensiero libertario tra Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Ele`uthera, 2000. Cordie`, Carlo, ‘‘Appunti su Gian Pietro Lucini e la Russia,’’ Filologia e letteratura, 14 (1968), 37–88. De Maria, Luciano, La nascita dell’avanguardia. Saggi sul futurismo italiano, Venice: Marsilio, 1986. De Michelis, Cesare G., ‘‘Panorama della letteratura russa in Italia,’’ in I russi e l’Italia, edited by Vittorio Strada, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1995. Ghidetti, Isabella, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Jacobbi, Ruggero, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in L’avventura del Novecento, edited by Anna Dolfi, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Lunacirsky, Anatoliy, ‘‘I Futuristi’’ (1913) in La rivoluzione proletaria e la cultura borghese, Milan: Mazzotta, 1972. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Poesia italiana del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in Antologia della poesia italiana, edited by Carlo Ossola and Cesare Segre, vol. 3, Ottocento-Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Valli, Donato, ‘‘Anarchia e aristocrazia: intervento su Lucini,’’ in Anarchia e misticismo nella poesia italiana del primo Novecento, Lecce: Milella, 1973. Viazzi, Glauco, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini e il simbolismo,’’ in Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1979. Viazzi, Glauco, ‘‘Le inedite ‘Armonie sinfoniche’ di Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ Lettere italiane, 22(1970), 500–548. Viazzi, Glauco, Studi e documenti per il Lucini, Naples: Guida, 1972. Villa, Edoardo, ‘‘Gian Pietro Lucini,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, Turin: Utet, 1973. Viola, Gianni, Eugenio, Gli anni del futurismo: la poesia italiana nell’eta` delle avanguardie, Rome: Studium, 1990. Viola, Gianni, Eugenio, L’utopia futurista: Contributo alla storia delle avanguardie, Ravenna: Longo, 1994.

EMILIO LUSSU

EMILIO LUSSU (1890–1975) During the course of his exile in Paris (1929–1943), the Sardinian writer and politician Emilio Lussu wrote texts of great relevance to our historical knowledge of World War I. As an interventionist, he fought in the Great War and was one of the few intellectuals to record their experiences. His works were published in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian only after the fall of Fascism in 1945. La catena (The Chain, 1929), Marcia su Roma e dintorni (The March on Rome and Thereabouts, 1933), and Un anno sull’altipiano (Sardinian Brigade, 1938) form a trilogy of autobiographical stories written in the first person; among their common themes are the hard years of the Fascist regime and the horrors of World War I. Set in 1926, La catena points out in the title the chain of events that the protagonist has to face. The book recalls the Fascist aggression he suffers in his own home in Cagliari: He shoots for self-defence, killing one of the aggressors. He is thus condemned to the confinement in the Sicilian island of Lipari. In Marcia su Roma e dintorni, the protagonist recounts Italian political life from 1919 to 1929, in particular the consolidation of Fascism in Sardinia. He also describes his escape from Lipari along with Francesco Fausto Nitti and Carlo Rosselli on a motorboat to Paris, where they founded the Giustizia e Liberta` political movement. Lussu signed the movement’s Quaderni under the pseudonym Tirreno. Un anno sull’altipiano met with greatest success the public and critical eye. The book tells the experiences of an infantry officer of the Brigata Sassari during the war against the Austrians on the Asiago plateau from 1916 to 1917: absurd trench warfare, where sometimes it is impossible to recognize the enemy, and innocent victims fall. Episodes of violence perpetrated by superiors, but also of solidarity among soldiers, are told in a fluent and colloquial style. There is also a psychological reflection on the innumerable characters: officers, soldiers, shepherds, farmers, and citizens are described with their vices and their virtues. The author approached their dramatic vicissitudes and their sometimes tragic destinies with great sincerity. The book is the fruit of a new and more conscious

point of view toward the war. At first, Lussu was declaredly interventionist, then he repudiated it after his personal experience on the front line. As a matter of fact, he was recognized as a valiant soldier; but afterward, he assumed a precise antiFascist position and was among the founders of the democratic Partito Sardo d’Azione in 1921. This party promoted the recovery of the Sardinian proletarian classes. Lussus’s narrative prose, pervaded by sad irony, is characterized by a wise modulation of tones. These works are considered firm opposition to the Fascist regime and against an absurd and cruel war. Based on Lussu’s eyewitness memoirs, Francesco Rosi made a powerful antiwar film, Uomini contro, in 1970. Alain Cuny starred as the fanatical general who orders his troops into a hopeless battle. Gian Maria Volonte` was the anarchist who is ordered to kill any soldiers who refuse to fight. Lussu’s books are mainly political memoirs, but he also wrote essays. In Teoria dell’insurrezione (Enter Mussolini, 1936) he thought that the fall of Fascism was possible only through the proletarian revolution, which he identified as the Resistance. In Diplomazia clandestina (1956), he wrote about his exile in France, during which he maintained his contacts with the Allies against the Fascist dictatorship. He supported the revolution in Sardinia, seen as the first step to the liberation from the oppressors. Even though he did not succeed in his intents, this activity attests to the forceful presence of an opposition to Fascism at the time. After Carlo Rosselli’s death, Lussu inherited the leadership of Giustizia e Liberta`, which grew as the revolutionary wing of the new Partito d’Azione, founded in 1943. After the party was dissolved in 1946, he became a minister during Parri’s and De Gasperi’s governments and, in 1947, he entered the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI). Sul Partito d’azione e gli altri (Concerning the Partito d’Azione and Others, 1968) analyzes the politics of the postwar era. Essere a sinistra (Being a Leftist, 1976) and Discorsi parlamentari (Parliamentary Speeches, 1986) are collections of Lussu’s speeches as a militant socialist member of Parliament and address issues such as the defence of the Democratic Republic and the political and social progress of Sardinia. 1081

EMILIO LUSSU

Biography

Nonfiction

Emilio Lussu was born in Armungia (Cagliari), 4 November 1890. He earned his degree in law at the University of Cagliari, 1914; fought in World War I; and founded Partito Sardo d’Azione, 1920. In 1926, after Giacomo Matteotti’s murder, Lussu was condemned to five years of confinement in Lipari; he escaped to Paris with Carlo Rosselli and Francesco Fausto Nitti, 1929, with whom he founded the anti-Fascist movement Giustizia e Liberta` and the homonymous review. He was in a sanatorium in Switzerland, 1936–1937; here he wrote Un anno sull’altipiano e Teoria dell’insurrezione. Lussu met Joyce Salvadori and married, 1943. He fought in the Spanish war but in 1943 came back to Italy and was among the leaders of the Resistance. His son Giovanni was born in 1944. Lussu was a minister during Parri’s and De Gasperi’s governments, 1945, and a deputy of the Assemblea Costituente, 1946, as well as senator for the first three legislatures. He joined the Partito Socialista Italiano, 1947, and in 1964 was one of the founders of the Partito Socialista di Unita` Proletaria. Emilio Lussu died in Rome, 5 March 1975. GABRIELLA VESCHI Selected Works Fiction La catena, 1929. Marcia su Roma e dintorni, 1933; as An Autobiographical Account by a Leading Sardinian Republican Politician of Resistance to Sardiania from 1918–1930, translated by Roy W. Davis, 1992. Un anno sull’altipiano, 1938; as Sardinian Brigade, 1939, translated by Marion Rawson, 2000. Il cinghiale del diavolo, 1968; as Il cinghiale del diavolo e altri scritti sulla Sardegna, 1976.

Teoria dell’insurrezione, 1936; as Enter Mussolini: Observations and Adventures of an Antifascist, translated by Marion Rawson, 1979. La ricostruzione dello Stato, 1943. Diplomazia clandestina, 1956. Sul Partito d’azione e gli altri: Note critiche, 1968. Essere a sinistra: Democrazia, autonomia e socialismo in cinquant’anni di lotta, 1976. Per l’Italia dall’esilio, edited by Manlio Brigaglia, 1976; as Road to Exile, the Story of a Sardinian Patriot, translated by Graham Rawson, 1936. La difesa di Roma, edited by Gian Giacomo Ortu and Luisa Maria Plaisant, 1987. Discorsi parlamentari, 1986.

Letters Lettere a Carlo Rosselli e altri scritti di Giustizia e Liberta`, edited by Manlio Brigaglia, 1979.

Further Reading Antonicelli, Franco, ‘‘Presentazione e note,’’ in E. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Asor Rosa, Alberto, ‘‘Note introduttive,’’ in E. Lussu, Il cinghiale del diavolo, Nuoro: Ilisso, 2004. Brigaglia, Manlio, Emilio Lussu e Giustizia e Liberta`, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1976. Della Corte, Carlo, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in E. Lussu, Un anno sull’altipiano, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. De Luna, Giovanni, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in E. Lussu, Marcia su Roma e dintorni, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Fiori, Giuseppe, Il cavaliere dei Rossomori: Vita di Emilio Lussu, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Lussu, Joyce, Fronti e frontiere, Milan: Mursia, 1969. Lussu, Joyce, L’olivastro e l’innesto, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 1982. Nitti, Francesco Fausto, Escape: The Personal Narrative of a Political Prisoner Who Was Rescued from Lipari, the Fascist ‘‘Devil’s Island,’’ New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1930. Orru`, Eugenio, and Nereide Rudas (editors), L’uomo dell’altipiano: Riflessioni, testimonianze, memorie su Emilio Lussu, Cagliari: Tema, 2003.

MARIO LUZI (1914–2005) The literary production of Mario Luzi, one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century, proceeded uninterrupted for more than 70 years, and his works range from poetry to theater, prose, essay writing, and translations. His first poem, ‘‘Sera 1082

d’aprile’’ (April Evening), was published in Il feroce on July 7, 1931. At just over 20 years of age, Luzi contributed to the Florentine reviews Il frontespizio and Campo di Marte and lived the cultural climate of poetic

MARIO LUZI Hermeticism. In 1935, he published his first work, La barca (The Boat), in which there prevails the idea of immanent Providence. The religious theme transforms the poetry’s amorous dimension: Traditional amorousness, such as the contemplation of feminine beauty and anticipation of the encounter, expand to embrace the wider theme of religious charity. In Avvento notturno (Nocturnal Advent, 1940), the work most characterized by the influence of Hermetic poetry, there prevails instead the theme of absence, the principal reason for the subject’s search: He follows the traces of a repressed presence that left a mark on his affective memory, on his vision of spaces, on his hearing of words. The theme of epiphanies began to appear in Luzi’s poetry; these epiphanies were iconographic structures that, from the depths of consciousness, became evident in the present, flashes of another universe that sometimes broke the barrier of the opacity of the real. The figure of the mother without milk that dominates the poetic rhythm of Un brindisi (A Toast, 1946) is the tragic symbol of the war that, together with hate and desperation, induced the complete moral and physical disintegration of the individual. Humans could not escape pain. And yet hope did not abandon the poet. Faith in the word was born in Luzi from literary recovery of the Christian hermeneutic, for which the verbum was the enigmatic nucleus to dissolve, since it contains the hidden value of kerigma, of revelation. All of Luzi’s works recollect the biblical principal of life as vanitas vanitatum (vanity of the vain) and the necessity of seeking meaning nevertheless, through the discovery of alterity and the community of creatures. Quaderno gotico (Gothic Notebook, 1947), published at the end of World War II, represents the liberation of love and the force of life rediscovered after the metaphorical frost and the darkness of the years of war. From that darkness arose the persona vittoriosa, il corpo incorrotto (victorious person, with an uncorrupted body), and thus was born the theme of rebirth and liberation. Primizie del deserto (Firstlings of the Desert, 1952) instead registers the presence of Heraclitian and Parmenidean thought in reality, as eternal change: Life is magma, and humanity is humbly constrained to descend into this magma in search of the most profound meaning of existence. The idea of individual pride that sometimes appeared in the Hermetic attitude dissolved in the face of the breaking in of the voice of phenomena. Luzi thus rendered honor to truth with his

poetry, dense with existential meaning, and full of interest in time, space, figures, and objects. Onore del vero (Honor for the Truth, 1957) is the most mature and perfect culmination of the themes already present in Primizie del deserto. In this text, as Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti wrote, ‘‘on the one hand Luzi’s poetry transfers physical facts into notions of a metaphysical event; on the other, it becomes into a meditation on these notions, a presa di coscienza of the event, testimony of this’’ (Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, 1961). Nel magma (In the Magma, 1963) signalled a dramatic gnoseological and linguistic shift in Luzi’s poetry. The work takes the form of a trial, intended as judicial procedure to which the narrating ‘‘I’’ subjects itself, in Dantean style, a procedure in which he also compares himself to others. It also recounts the untiring journey of the pilgrim who finds, in the collective nature of the present, the aim of his teleological quest. For this reason the space is defined by places of passage, of union, and diaspora, such as the halls of hotels, offices, cafe´s, and clinics. The poet traverses history and is immersed in it in his attempt to grasp il giusto della vita or the just in life (thus is titled the volume that collects Luzi’s poetry up until 1960), the sense of being nell’opera del mondo (in the work of the world), the title assigned to the second volume of Tutte le poesie (Complete Poems), published by Garzanti in 1979. Dal fondo delle campagne (From the Bottom of the Country, 1965) collects texts contemporary to Nel magma and constitutes, on a stylistic level, the passage from a lyric of the subject to a choral poetry. Beginning with Su fondamenti invisibili (On Invisible Foundations, 1971), the subject is shattered, transforming itself from undivided centrality into a device that records voices that often cannot express themselves. Luzi traveled the path from the individual to the multiple, nel corpo oscuro della metamorfosi (in the dark body of metamorphosis), to cite the title of one of his compositions. As a consequence the points of reference of his poetics change: No longer do they depart from the l’immobilita` del mutamento (the immobility of change) but rather from the untiring movement of everything, the rhythm of systole and diastole that marks the alternation of life and death, the creazione continua (continual creation). Thus is born an idea of poetry that critics have defined as ‘‘agonizing,’’ intended in the double sense of fight between death and life, loss and growth, and at the same time a presentiment of the end, a last 1083

MARIO LUZI resistance to the prevalence of nothingness. The poetry is ever more enquiring, doubtful, and the word becomes intermittent, isolated in the silence of incapacity to signify, finally recuperated through questioning. In works such as Al fuoco della controversia (In the Flames of Controversy, 1978), Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti (For the Baptism of Our Fragments, 1985), and Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare (Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song, 1990), there prevails the image of a disintegrated and disintegrating society constituted at the gnoseological and linguistic level by fragments, sentences (intended as broken discourse) that underline the enigmatic nature of the real and nostalgia for lost harmony. Luzi had the courage and the humility to defer ethical judgment on history. In this distance, he found the foundations of his faith, projected in a providential future, utopian and eschatological. In Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini, 1994), Luzi assumed the figure of the great Sienese painter as he completes his voyage of return from France to his homeland. Simone Martini is configured as a model witness, a scribe between heaven and earth who rediscovers the harmony of the world incarnated by nature and by woman. Nature records the continual return of life after death; woman represents the inherent concept of fecundity, of returning hope. And nature, in its dialectical rapport with the history of man, is the dominant theme of Sotto specie umana (Under Human Species, 1999). In verses attributed to Lorenzo Malagugini, the poetry aspires ‘‘a un discorso che fosse voce della molteplicita` (e simultaneita`) del vivente e fosse dalla stessa condiviso’’ (to a discourse that was the voice of the multiplicity [and simultaneity] of the living, and was shared by them). In 2003, the Poesie ritrovate (Rediscovered Poems) were published, poems written before his first volume appeared in 1935. These poems constitute the beginning of the poet’s career and are the point of departure for Luzi’s journey in contemporary Italian poetry. Corresponding to the poetic experience is Luzi’s dramaturgical writing. In 1947, he elaborated the text of Pietra oscura (Dark Stone), not published until 1994, and performed in 1998. But it was with Libro di Ipazia (Book of Ipazia, 1978) that Luzi’s theater gained fame. Once again the writer privileged the theme of change, describing, between the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, the conflict between the grecita` morente 1084

e il cristianesimo trionfante (dying Hellenism and triumphal Christianity) in the cities of Alexandria and Cirene. Rosales (1983) was inspired instead by the assassination of Leon Trotsky at the hand of the presumed killer Don Giovanni Rosales; it is a modern reformulation of a Don Giovanni as assassin, persecutor, and victim of his own destiny, who will nevertheless manage to redeem himself through the discovery of love as caritas. Hystrio (1987), in which the history of the Bulgarian dictator Zhivkov is perhaps embedded, is at once a metaphor for the relationship between fiction and truth in the contemporary world, and a study of the ambiguous fascination of power. The Corale della citta` di Palermo per Santa Rosalia (Choral of the City of Palermo for Saint Rosalia, 1989) departs stylistically and thematically from Luzi’s previous works. Written by Luzi on the suggestion of the then mayor of Palermo, Leoluca Orlando, it recounts the Palermitan plague of 1625, the discovery of the bones of Rosalia in the caves of Mount Pellegrino, and of her assumption to patron saint of the city. There returns the theme of the death– life relationship and of the discovery of the divine in the human. In Il Purgatorio: La notte lava la mente (Purgatory: Night Washes the Mind, 1990), Luzi dramatized the Dantean canticle, confirming an ethical and stylistic adherence to a poetic model that interprets the complexity of the real and uses the multiple language of social reality. The works of his last years were ever more oriented toward religious and social problematics. These include La Passione: Via Crucis (The Passion: The Way of the Cross, 1999) composed on the occasion of the celebration of the Via Crucis conducted by Pope John Paul II, in which Christ is configured as a sublime synthesis of the relationship between destiny of death and promise of salvation; Opus Florentinum (Florentine Work, 2002); and Il fiore del dolore (The Flower of Pain, 2003); dedicated to the figure of Don Giuseppe Puglisi, a priest assassinated by the Sicilian Mafia for his fight against crime. Luzi’s long poetic activity was also accompanied by critical and theoretical reflections on literature and the study of beloved authors. L’opium chre´tien (The Christian Opium, 1938) is a monograph on Mauriac, on whom Luzi wrote his thesis, while Un’illusione platonica e altri saggi (A Platonic Illusion and Other Essays, 1942) is a collection of writings on various themes and authors. In 1949 Luzi published L’inferno e il limbo (Hell and Limbo), reprinted numerous times, in which he suggested that two poetic lineages emerge in Italian

MARIO LUZI poetry: the Dantesque, with its choral, realistic word and the Petrarchan, centered around the memorial nucleus of subjectivity. In 1952, he published Studio su Mallarme´ (Study on Mallarme´), a fundamental contribution to knowledge of the French poet. In the period of the triumph of neo-Realism, Luzi, faithful to his idea of poetry, collected under the title of Tutto in questione (Everything in Question, 1965), writings that appeared in the review La chimera. These works contest the idea of literature as a mere reflection of the world and advance the possibility of an avant-garde expression of the neurosis of modern man. Later essays, such as Vicissitudine e forma (Vicissitude and Form, 1974), Discorso naturale (Natural Discourse, 1984), and Vero e verso (Truth and Verse, 2002) constitute the summa of Luzian speculation on artistic creation and on the role of literature in society. His translations were also numerous, from Charles Du Bos to Coleridge, Racine, and Shakespeare.

fuoco della controversia, 1978, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1980–1997. He won the Alcide De Gasperi prize, 1982. He taught at the University of Florence, 1981. He traveled again to America, accompanied by Allen Mandelbaum. Luzi won the Mondello prize, 1985; the Librex Guggenheim, 1986; the European Prize for Culture, 1991; and the Viareggio-Versilia, 1995. He received the Legion of Honor of the French Republic, 1997, and was elected to the Accademia della Crusca, 2003. Mario Luzi died in Florence, 28 February 2005. ALFREDO LUZI Selected Works Collections Tutte le poesie, Milan: Garzanti, 1979; as After Many Years, selected poems translated by Catherine O’Brien, Dublin: Dedalus Press, 1990. Teatro, Milan: Garzanti, 1993.

Poetry

Biography Mario Luzi was born in Castello (Sesto Fiorentino), 20 October 1914. He studied Lettere at the University of Florence and graduated with degree in French literature, 1932–1936. Luzi began contributing to Il frontespizio and other literary magazines, 1935. He married Elena Monaci, 1942, and had one son, Gianni, 1943. He taught at the Liceo Scientifico in Florence, 1945. He met Cristina Campo, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas, 1947. Luzi won the Saint Vincent prize with L’inferno e il limbo, 1949, and the Carducci prize for Primizie del deserto, 1952. He was a lecturer in French literature at the University of Florence, 1955. He won the Marzotto prize for Onore del vero, 1957. Luzi was invited by Carlo Bo, President of the University of Urbino, to teach courses in French literature, 1962. He traveled in the Soviet Union, 1966. He contributed to Il corriere della sera, 1967. Luzi traveled in India, Hungary, and Romania, 1968–1970. He won the Fiuggi prize for Su fondamenti invisibili, 1971. He taught comparative literature at the University of Urbino, 1972– 1981. In 1974, he traveled in the United States, holding a series of lectures in various American universities, and began to contribute to Il giornale. He traveled to Ireland for a cycle of lectures at Trinity College and at the Institute of Italian Culture, 1977. Luzi won the Viareggio Prize with Al

‘‘La barca,’’ 1935. ‘‘Avvento notturno,’’ 1940. ‘‘Un brindisi,’’ 1946. ‘‘Quaderno gotico,’’ 1947; as Gothic Notebook, translated by Carlo L. Golino, in Italian Quarterly, vol. 6 (1948). ‘‘Primizie del deserto,’’ 1952. ‘‘Onore del vero,’’ 1957. ‘‘Il giusto della vita,’’ 1960. ‘‘Nel magma,’’ 1963; enlarged edition, 1966. ‘‘Dal fondo delle campagne,’’ 1965; enlarged edition, 1969. ‘‘Su fondamenti invisibili,’’ 1971. ‘‘Al fuoco della controversia,’’ 1978. ‘‘Per il battesimo dei nostri frammenti,’’ 1985; as For the Baptism of Our Fragments, translated by Luigi Ballerini, 1992. ‘‘Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare,’’ 1990; as Phrases and Passages of a Salutary Song, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 1999. ‘‘Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini,’’ 1994; as Earthly and Heavenly Journey of Simone Martini, translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 2003. ‘‘L’opera poetica,’’ 1998. ‘‘Sotto specie umana,’’ 1999. ‘‘Poesie ritrovate,’’ 2003. ‘‘Dottrina dell’estremo principiante,’’ 2004.

Plays Libro di Ipazia, 1978. Rosales, 1983. Hystrio, 1987. Corale della citta` di Palermo per Santa Rosalia, 1989. Il Purgatorio: La notte lava la mente, 1990. Pietra oscura, 1994. Felicita` turbate, 1995. Ceneri e ardori, 1997. La passione: Via Crucis, 1999.

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MARIO LUZI Opus Florentinum, 2002. Il fiore del dolore, 2003.

Letters Una ‘‘purissima e antica amicizia’’: Lettere di Mario Luzi a Leone Traverso 1936–1966, 2003.

Prose Biografia a Ebe, 1942. Trame, 1982.

Further Reading

Essays L’opium chre´tien, 1939. Un’illusione platonica e altri saggi, 1942. L’inferno e il limbo, 1949. Studio su Mallarme´, 1952; reprinted, 1987. Aspetti della generazione napoleonica e altri saggi di letteratura francese, 1956. Tutto in questione, 1965. Vicissitudine e forma, 1974. Discorso naturale, 1984. Vero e verso, 2002. Le scintille del ‘‘Tempo’’: Dieci anni di critica luziana, 2003.

Translations Charles Du Bos, Vita e letteratura, 1943. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poesie e prose, 1977. Jean Racine, Andromaca, 1980. Jorge Guille´n, La fuente, 1961. William Shaskespeare, Riccardo II, 1966. Francamente (versi dal francese), 1980. La cordigliera delle Ande e altri versi tradotti, 1983.

Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1961. Fontana, Giovanni, Il fuoco della creazione incessante: Studi sulla poesia di Mario Luzi, Lecce: Manni, 2002. Luzi, Alfredo, La vicissitudine sospesa, Florence:Vallecchi, 1968. Marchi, Marco, Mario Luzi, Milan: Mursia, 1998. Mariani, Gaetano, Il lungo viaggio verso la luce: Itinerario poetico di Mario Luzi, Padua: Liviana, 1982. Panicali, Anna, Saggio su Mario Luzi, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Pautasso, Sergio, Storia di una poesia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1981. Quiriconi, Giancarlo, Il fuoco e la metamorfosi: La scommessa totale di Mario Luzi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1982. Rizzoli, Luisa, and Giorgio Morelli, Mario Luzi: La poesia, il teatro, la prosa, la saggistica, le traduzioni, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Scarpati, Claudio, Mario Luzi, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Verdino, Stefano (editor), Mario Luzi: L’opera poetica, Milan: Mondatori, 1998. Verdino, Stefano (editor), Mario Luzi cantore della luce, Assisi: Cittadella Editrice, 2003.

LYRIC POETRY Characterized as an invention of the mythical Orpheus, lyric poetry is defined in Aristotle’s Poetics as a genre that subjectively expresses the poet’s feelings. Originally, it was accompanied by the lyre and other chorded instruments. Personal poetry appeared in Ionia and in the Greek isles beginning early in the seventh century BCE. Choral poetry was accompanied by dances and religious songs that marked the salient moments of existence: birth, marriage, death, and moments involving work or social calamity. The choral, ceremonial origins of Greek poetry require the poet to have knowledge of music and dance as well as of meter. The innovations resulting from the appearance around 600 BCE of Sappho and of Alcaeus are not limited to the island of Lesbos. Their poetry is personal, but the fame of the two poets exceeded these boundaries quickly, changing the very function of poetry. Innovation became even more 1086

evident with Anacreon, who sought interlocutors and protectors wherever he could find them (in Samos, in Athens, in Thessalonia), contributing importantly to the concept of poetry as a nomadic profession no longer tied to local rites. Under his influence, poetry became capable of a cosmopolitan style and a heterogeneous language made up of many dialects. The poet became a professional artist, and new importance was assigned to the writing of the text and, in the transition from oral performance to writing, to refined expression. When Greek lyric lost its ties to choruses, music, and dances, it went further in the search for rhetorical figures with greater visual intensity, choosing the path of symbolism and becoming a space of absence, a gap that the gaze must fill. The exercise of the gaze in lyric poetry relegates listening to a secondary function. This happened in the passage from Greek to Latin lyric poetry, which

LYRIC POETRY from an infinite number of metrical forms chose instead a limited number of possibilities. This new poetry was thus codified above all through writing, while all gestures, mimicry, and sonority were subtracted from it. Latin poetic production was of a more private nature with respect to the Greek and is destined to a more reserved circulation, often simply from sender to addressee. This was the case of Catullus, inspired by Sappho, but also of Propertius and Ovid, in whose poetry themes and meter have the intimate quality of an emotional outlet or of inner contemplation. Horace alone confronted various topics in the four books of Carmina, including some of a civic nature. The public reading of these texts had a very restricted reach, at its widest including Maecenas’s artistic coterie in the Augustan royal palace. Although Greek lyric is essentially choral and its myth of origin is that of Orpheus, Latin lyric became a forum for individual expression and lost its popular character. Over the course of history, poetry has frequently been surrounded by dancing, music, singing (one might think of the Provenc¸al troubadors, for example, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries). These poetic forms, set to music, can become spectacle, entertainment, or exquisite games with visual enigmas, as in Greek lyric (Ipsis). In the trobar clus, of which Arnault Daniel is a master, poetry is also a secret message. Furthermore, rhythmical music with the lute (me´los) is a remnant of both the popular and cultured origins of the form, in the various forms of canc¸on, alba, sirvente´s, tenson, planh, pastore`la, and romanc¸a. A sort of competition began between the visual arts and the art of the lyric word, a contest won by poetry because, paradoxically, it is more visual. Such a lyric triumph occurred in the thirteenthcentury Sicilian court of Frederick II and then in the stilnovistic circle. Of fundamental importance is the theory of Love at the heart of the Sicilian school: Love is a feeling born in the heart but ignited by sight, as Rinaldo D’Aquino suggested in his ‘‘Amor e` uno desio che ven da core’’ (Love is a desire that comes from the heart). Stilnovismo, which developed in Bologna and Florence from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fourteenth century, enriched lyric poetry with new themes and forms, while making use of previous poetic experiences, including the Provenc¸al and Sicilian traditions and that of Guittone d’Arezzo and his followers. Guido Guinizzelli wrote the manifesto of stilnovismo, the canzone ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre Amore’’ (Love always returns to

the gentle heart), articulating concepts such as the nobility of the soul as opposed to nobility of origins; the gentilezza inherent to the feeling of love; and the function of the woman-angel and of Love in the process of ennobling the soul. In De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305), Dante Alighieri theorized the forms of this new poetry in the vernacular. His Vita Nova (New Life, ca. 1294), written before the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), represents the highest form of stilnovismo. Petrarch also learned from stilnovistic lyric: It would be impossible for posterity—which he explicitly addressed—to understand the sight and the vision of Laura without the sight and vision of Beatrice or to make sense of the images of the Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374) without the epiphanies and dreams of the Vita Nova. Amongst the ‘‘dualities’’ found in the poetry of the Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium Fragmenta), it is important to underline that of presence/absence, fundamental in the texts that speak of his love for Laura. Exemplary in these terms are the two canzoni ‘‘Chiare, fresche, e dolci acque’’ (Clear, fresh, sweet water) and ‘‘Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte’’ (From thought to thought, from mountain to mountain). Both typical canzoni of absence, the first is entirely founded on the flux of memory; the second is a renunciation that is compensated by substitutive images that appear in nature. In both, vision entirely replaces sight, in line with Andreas Capellanus’s theories of courtly love and anticipating the solutions offered by neo-Platonism. Petrarch’s ‘‘fragments’’ represent something more than Catullus’ nugae; They comprise an intimate poetic diary in which to seek gratification in the playful, fantastic, psychological sense of the term. This search brought the poet to discover the mechanisms through which poetry can compensate for absence or solitude. Modern lyric, conscious of its restorative, gratifying function, was born in the Canzoniere. The Mannerist lyrics of the sixteenth century, including those by Torquato Tasso, demonstrate the codifying power of this poetic path. All of the poetry by Pietro Bembo, Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco, Luigi Tansillo, and Celio Magno sings in absence and evokes presences by way of substitutive images. Colonna constructed entire sonnets using scattered verses of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. This is the model proposed by Bembo, followed by Stampa, and facilitated by the circulation of Petrarchan rhyme-books. The lack of a true Aristotelian codification of 1087

LYRIC POETRY lyric poetry incited sixteenth-century scholars to fill the gap with specific treatises. In Arte poetica (Art of Poetry, 1563), Antonio Minturno (ca. 1500– 1574) proposed substituting the Aristotelian bipartition (epic and dramatic poetry) with a tripartite scheme that includes lyric poetry, which ‘‘dilettevolmente si fa con versi d’armonia vestiti e ornati, che volentieri e di lor natura con musica e col ballo s’accompagnano’’ (one creates pleasingly with ornate, harmonious verses, that willingly and by nature can be accompanied with music and dance). In his Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, 1601), Battista Guarini (1538– 1612) codified the lyric as the poetry of the ‘‘I.’’ Tasso also adhered to the model, although he varied it in the almost 2,000 poems of his Rime (Poems, 1591), so that, compared to Bembo and the contemporary women poets, his metrical style follows the more innovative line of Giovanni Della Casa. Tasso’s mannerist style arrives at the threshold of Baroque concettismo, but the occasions, themes, and amorous lexicon remain the same. Tasso infused this repertory with artistic originality, evoking atmospheres and colors different from those of Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Nevertheless, lyric poetry is codified as a gaze that interrogates the world, in search of the object that has been loved and lost, and seeking to make it reappear. From this moment, dreams and apparitions erupt into lyric poetry. Even a declared anti-Petrarchan poet, Giovanbattista Marino (who however admired the stilnovisti, Giovanni Pontano, Luigi Tansillo, and Torquato Tasso), participated in part in the Petrarchan tradition. Marino’s poetry, both that of the Lira (Lyre, 1608) and that of La Galeria (The Gallery, 1619), is poetry of substitution. The feminine bodies torn to pieces by the poet’s pen by way of metaphors and synesthesia displace the reader so thoroughly that the referential function itself becomes an abstraction. Baroque techniques accentuate a tendency that by now seems to be constant in poetry of sentiment and of private occasions. The Enlightenment and Romanticism swept away redundancies of concetti (concepts) and of forms, but lyric poets maintained the same evocative tendency. In Italian poetry, one thinks of Leopardi’s Canti (Songs, 1831), but this is a truly European phenomenon: Keats and Shelley in the English tradition, Lamartine and De Vigny in the French; Heine in the German; and so on. Even from a technical and formal perspective, memories and expectations fill the space of absence in Leopardi’s lyrics. While in Petrarch only woman and love represented the object removed and 1088

substituted by poetry, in Leopardi all of reality, existence itself, became part of the game. Leopardian syllogisms drive the poem to a bifurcation between sight and vision, in which the reader has no choice: All that sight offers to him is closed, limited, disappointing; all that that leads to vision is open, infinite, gratifying, given the transgressive nature of the eye, as Jean Starobinski remarked in L’Oeil vivant (1961). The descriptive or contemplative function in lyric poetry allows the poet to project him- or herself on images of the external world. The poet appropriates the object through the poetic gaze and delivers it to a memory destined to last longer than the experience that occasioned it, as for example in Ugo Foscolo’s sonnets ‘‘Alla sera,’’ (To The Evening, 1803) and ‘‘A Zacinto’’ (To Zacinto, 1803), or, in the twentieth century, in Eugenio Montale. It is precisely for the use and the excess of this function at the turn of the last century that the Crepuscular poets Sergio Corazzini, Marino Moretti, Corrado Govoni, and especially Guido Gozzano deserve attention. Gozzano, author of La via del rifugio (The Road to Shelter, 1907) and I colloqui (The Colloquies, 1911), appropriates all of the canons, ironically and creatively recycling all poetic forms codified until Romanticism. He is thus the most important poet of the group, capable of indicating the only future by then possible for poetry: the avant-garde, Futurism. The descriptive and evocative functions of lyric poetry became ever-more mixed, becoming apparently indistinguishable, for instance in Charles Baudelaire, Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Arthur Rimbaud, and Ste´phane Mallarme´. From the moment when poetry took the path of symbolism, the two functions were interlaced, the presence of the eye became overwhelming, and the lyric became the poetry of sight. The symbolic nature of language allowed lyric poetry to fix a point beyond the apparent object of speech, beyond the referent, beyond the occasion. But symbolism conferred a more clear awareness of the polyvalence of words and images, an awareness that allowed poets to transform every object into something that reveals something else, something beyond the phenomenon. The definitive loss of mimesis is characteristic of all contemporary poetry, as is the increase in the metaphorical dimension of the lyric message. The result is semantic dispersion and the foregrounding in the synesthesia of the primary senses (hearing and seeing) rather than the secondary ones. This is most evident in the poetic balancing acts of the avant-garde.

LYRIC POETRY In this sense, the founder of the modern lyric was Charles Baudelaire with Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Rimbaud attributed colors to the sounds of vowels, and his Bateau ivre (1871) breaks the moorings to see beyond the limits of experience, even while concluding that there is nothing more to see in the world than that that can be presented by a paper boat pushed into a puddle by the hand of a child. In these poets, the importance of the multiplication of sight and of vision, achieved artificially through drug use, should not be underrated. Mallarme´, Pascoli, and D’Annunzio can also be considered part of this tradition. Lyric poetry approaches its own congenital paradox: As it says what is not said, the unsayable, the ideal poetry would be that which is silent, blank. Pascoli and D’Annunzio were masters of this symbolist art in Italy in profoundly different ways. In the Myricae (Tamerisks, 1891) and in the poetics of ‘‘Il fanciullino’’ (The Child), Pascoli recalled not only Virgil but also Gozzano and his meta-poetry. D’Annunzio, on the other hand, approached international Decadentism and its culture of the superman, of aesthetic hedonism. Pascoli’s Poemetti (Little Poems, 1897), Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs of Castelvecchio, 1903), Poemi conviviali (Convivial Poems, 1904), and Odi e inni (Odes and Hymns, 1906), together with D’Annunzio’s Poema paradisiaco (Heavenly Poem, 1893) and Laudi (Lauds, 1903–1904), demonstrate the great technical capability of the Italian lyric on the eve of the avantgarde. In understanding the process of abstraction, it is necessary to take into account that painting also discovered new paths, abandoning, with Impressionism, traditional artistic routes. It left the academies and sought, en plein air, to represent a reality that could be reconstructed by the eye of the spectator. On the other hand, the invention of photography and of cinema increased the visibility of the world and, at the same time, its visionary potential. If abstraction becomes a means of knowledge in general and in the arts in particular, literature cannot avoid revolution. The first avant-garde to call for it was Futurism. With Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his group, poetry exploded syntactically and words were set free: It became visual, designed itself in graphic elements, etched itself on materials never before encountered (tin or fibers made from casein). Marinetti pushed the paradox that would characterize all of the twentieth-century avant-gardes: To better represent reality, it was necessary to renounce realism as a mistaken imitation of reality. From here, the

doors to Dadaism, Surrealism, and abstraction in general were opened. The unbounded imagination of the Futurists made possible an absolute freedom of the image, implying a typographical revolution as well. The Futurist book became a provocative object, made of new, experimental materials. Futurist writing was a calligram, following Guillaume Apollinaire’s experiments, or a lithographic procedure like that used for boxes of cookies, for instance in Tullio d’Albisola and Bruno Munari’s L’anguria lirica (Lyric Watermelon, 1934). Gian Pietro Lucini and Aldo Palazzeschi took their first steps with Futurism but then distanced themselves from it. Dino Campana, in the Canti orfici (Orphic Songs, 1914), established himself in an antiliterary, visionary perspective not far from Futurism. After Marinetti, nothing remained unchanged. Apollinaire, E´luard, Breton; Picasso and Braque; then Ungaretti, Montale, Sanguineti, and the neo-avant-garde: All these figures owed something to Futurism. Interferences between poetry and the other visual arts were multiplied. The explosion of the gaze permitted the synesthetic exchange of the senses, allowed for the spread of the lyric toward its vocation of second sight, of visual magic. Hermeticism is also tied to this process of abstraction. The paradox is even more accentuated: On the one hand, poetry sought an increase of vision, while on the other it concealed its meanings, making obscurity an aesthetic principle and taking care to express rather than communicate. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, and in part Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale participated in this trend. Their poetry does not take into account the addressee, unless it does so by way of the specular double of the poet (Montale’s tu). An original technique in Montale is that of the occasione, the occasion through which the poet constructs the poetic object beginning with a photograph, a strange name, an object that falls in the field of vision. The immobility of the point of view finds as its correlative an emptiness in which can be perceived flashes, wonders, salvific occasions. The essence of the occasion is in its double value, simultaneously etymological, literal, denotative on the one hand, and symbolic, connotative, philosophical on the other. It is the typical progression of abstract art that exceeds Eliot’s definition (accepted by Montale) of ‘‘objective correlative.’’ The increasingly more prosaic themes of lyric poetry are at times mixed with an expressionistic recuperation of dialects, as in Andrea Zanzotto. 1089

LYRIC POETRY Today, in a cultural climate of renewed interest in lyric poetry as event, one witnesses the curious editorial phenomenon whereby lyric poetry has become a literary form that many practice, few read, and very few acquire. Publishers tend not to publish poetry, unless the texts are classics. Poetry, which exited the book with the avant-gardes and the neo-avant-gardes, is no longer able to reenter into it. Instead, it manifests itself in more dynamic forms: literary festivals, theatrical events, and mass-media metamorphoses. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE Further Reading Archivio delle similitudini, Hildesheim, Zu¨rich, and New York: G. Olms Verlag, 1994. Archivio tematico della lirica italiana, Hildesheim, Zu¨rich, and New York: G. Olms Verlag, 1991. Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana, 9 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1992–1999. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, 6 vols, Turin: Utet, 1990–1993. Beltrami, Pietro, Gli strumenti della poesia. Guida alla metrica italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996.

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Cucchi, Maurizio (editor), Dizionario della poesia italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi (editors), Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento (1945–1995), Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Frabotta, Biancamaria (editor), Donne in poesia. Antologia della poesia femminile in Italia, Rome: Savelli, 1976. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, Essais de se´miotique poe´tique, Paris: Larousse, 1972. Lavezzi, Gianfranca, Manuale di metrica italiana, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1996. Lorenzini, Niva, La poesia italiana del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Lorenzini, Niva, Il presente della poesia. 1960–1990, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Pozzi, Giovanni, La parola dipinta, Milan: Adelphi, 1981. Sanguineti, Edoardo (editor), Poesia del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Santagata, Marco et al. (editors), Incipitario unificato della poesia italiana, 4 vols., Modena: Panini, 1988–1996. Segre, Cesare, and Carlo Ossola (editors), Antologia della poesia italiana, 8 vols., Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997–1999. Sica, Gabriella, Scrivere in versi. Metrica e poesia, Parma: Pratiche, 1996. Starobinski, Jean, L’Œil vivant, Paris: Gallimard, 1961. Zumthor, Paul, Introduction a` la poe´sie orale, Paris: Seuil, 1983.

M ` MACHIAVELLI (1469–1527) NICCOLO Niccolo` Machiavelli was one of the most important political and literary figures of the period between the end of the fifteenth and the first half of the sixteenth centuries. His role in the history of historiography is fundamental, thanks to his novel accounts of missions and official travels and his critical reconstruction of the history of Florence. Machiavelli participated in the humanistic tradition of the study and analysis of the classics, and his analyses renewed the significance of the ancient texts. He paid close attention to ancient Rome, in fact, as a model of impartiality and democracy not found in the contemporary world. By commenting on and rethinking works of ancient history, in particular the writings of Titus Livy, he compared contemporary events to classical ones; the latter become exemplary models of behavior for those who must conquer and maintain power. Machiavelli was also a great man of letters: His first comedy, La mandragola (The Mandrake, 1518), is a work of great originality with respect to ancient theater and also demonstrates the necessity of revising classical themes. His poetry, almost always tied to occasional themes of composition, reflects his absorption of the fifteenth-century Florentine literary activity that flourished at the court of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who promoted both a renewal and a refinement of vernacular lyric. Machiavelli was born in Florence in 1469, the period of the reign of Lorenzo il Magnifico, and turned to political life after the death of Girolamo Savonarola. Savonarola guided Florence following

the restoration of the republic when Piero de’ Medici (who succeeded Lorenzo in 1492) fled following the arrival of Charles VIII in Italy. Disliked by the local oligarchy and by the church for its support of the artisan bourgeois, the Dominican friar died at the stake in 1498. Machiavelli did not demonstrate particular sympathies for the preacher, whom he considered to be an able manipulator of consciences in his addresses to the faithful. Yet he did occasionally go to listen to the friar in order to record, for example, accounts of the event for some friend, uncovering the hidden messages behind the rhetorical frills of Savonarola’s preaching. Further, a certain type of moralism that appears in Machiavelli’s works (as it does in the works of other Florentine writers between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries) reveals characteristics that go beyond the position of Horace in Ars Poetica on the necessity of ammaestrare divertendo (teaching by entertaining), or the idea of the utile dulci that pushes the recipient of the work to reflect on his mode of behavior. The Favola di Belfagor arcidiavolo (Fable of Belfagor, Arch-Devil, 1518), for example, is an amusing story written during the period of his exile on his farm in Albergaccio. Using the theme of misogyny, he created a pitiless satire on the customs of his contemporary Florence. The story, which depicts women so terrible that they make even devils flee, is well-documented in the short-story traditions of both the West and the East. Machiavelli’s version revitalizes the well-known tale by setting it in a city where all are 1091

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO prey to an irrepressible desire to get rich and to ‘‘appear’’ in society, even at the cost of ruining themselves by going into debt. His literary production on the whole seems influenced by such denunciations and by moralizing intent. Two theatrical works, La mandragola and La Clizia (1525), are significant in this sense. The former depicts a world populated by negative characters. These include a young man, enamored of a married woman, who offers money to the person who can help him obtain her deceptively; a priest willing to accept payment to support a clandestine abortion, and who uses sacred arguments to justify adultery; a ‘‘parassita’’ (‘‘parasite’’) modeled in part on Plautus’ Pseudolus, plotter of tricks, determined to re-establish the logical order when things are disordered by fate (which made a wise woman marry a stupid man); a member of the Florentine bourgeois who, although a man of the law, so yearns for a son that he helps to orchestrate his own betrayal; a mother willing to be complicit in her daughter’s betrayal of her husband; and finally, an honest and scrupulous woman who, realizing she has been tricked, decides to ‘‘accept’’ the life that fate and the vileness of others has dealt her. Although many factors tied to the political thought of the author and his particular condition in exile contribute to the work’s creation, the ‘‘black’’ atmosphere of La mandragola inevitably points to Machiavelli’s absolute contempt for spreading corruption. In La Clizia, on the other hand, moralism is manifest in autobiographical form: Machiavelli, although married, was attracted to a young singer, Barbara Raffacani Salutati, for whom he wrote musical intermezzos to insert in the staging of La mandragola. When Jacopo Falconetto, called Il Fornaciaio, asked him to write a comedy to celebrate his return to Florence after a period of exile, Machiavelli composed a work that appears superficially to be the rewriting of Plautus’ Casina. It is the story of a father and son who rival one another in contending for the love of a young girl. Although Plautus focuses on the comic nature of the skirmishes between the two men and their servants (who are involved by their masters in the intrigue), Machiavelli instead reads, in the love of Nicomaco for the young Clizia, his own attraction for the singer. His is thus at times a melancholy text that reflects on the themes of old age and the moralistic repression of desire. After the final trick, in fact, the protagonist returns to the role of faithful husband and to his wife Sofronia, the true author of familial unity. The comic and the tragic are also elements in many of Machiavelli’s poems, whether extemporaneous (as the famous strambotto ‘‘Io rido, e ‘l rider 1092

mio non passa dentro’’ [I laugh, and my laughter does not pass inside]) or tied to current events (such as his incarceration after the fall of the republic in 1512 and his subsequent return to the Medici, who relieve him of public responsibility after accusing him of betrayal). Machiavelli’s close friend Pier Soderini is named gonfalonier of the city in 1502; he thus participated in a series of diplomatic missions in Italy and abroad, missions that have significant effects on his political thought and his writings. For example, he closely followed the war against Pisa (which rebelled against Florence) and completed two missions with the ‘‘Duke Valentino’’ Cesare Borgia, son of Pope Alexander VI. Struck by Borgia’s political unscrupulousness, Machiavelli wrote, amongst various accounts of his travels, Il modo che tenne il Duca Valentino per ammazar Vitellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo, il Signor Paolo e il Duca di Gravina Orsini in Senigaglia (The Way in Which the Duke Valentino Killed Vitellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo, Signor Paolo and the Duke of Gravina Orsini in Senisgaglia, 1503) and Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati (The Way to Deal With the People of Valdichiana who Rebelled, 1503). In spite of their specific contexts, these works more generally register the development of the author’s ideas about human behavior and human judgment. Machiavelli also witnessed the fall of the powerful Borgia, a decline precipitated by the death of his father (who was his protector) and an illness that prevented him from closely following the state of affairs in Romagna. In the meantime, the author concerned himself with the problem of the military, arguing that because of the unreliability of mercenary troops, the state should instead adopt a citizens’ army. In 1506, he instituted an ordinanza (ordinance), the enrollment of men from the Florentine countryside. He also dedicated several chapters of Il Principe Del Modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, 1532) (The Prince, 1503) to this problem and, sometime later, an entire treatise. However, events precipitated when the French, allies of the republic, were defeated at Ravenna by the Holy League led by Pope Giulio II; at this time, the Medici could re-enter Florence and the ‘‘secretary’’ was dismissed. During this period of isolation, he continued to consider political problems by writing Il Principe and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy, 1531), works closely connected both thematically and in their time of composition. His goal, at least in the case of the former, was practical, for he sought to return to public life by initiating contact

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO with the Medici. For this reason he dedicated Il Principe to Lorenzo de’ Medici. Notwithstanding its scant success amongst Machiavelli’s contemporaries, the 26 chapters of the treatise are the most noteworthy and perhaps most innovative of the author’s works. His study of the various structures of principalities and the ways in which a prince might maintain control over them was approached with an entirely new point of view with respect to behavioral manuals for good rulers of state, widely diffused in the fifteenth century. The central idea is the education of the prince himself, his culture, his morality, his irreproachability. Although driven by the desire for abstraction and the idea of articulating a true theory of power, Machiavelli combined examples from ancient times with the realities of his own period. He was inspired by flesh-and-blood cases (like that of Cesare Borgia) and approached the argument by inserting some ‘‘revolutionary’’ ideas into an orderly, sequential context. To govern, he suggested, one must assume a new concept of virtu` (virtue), not consistent with its current meaning, but rather signifying the capacity to elaborate solutions that are not simply moral ones, a concept mediated by the virtus of ancient writers, Sallust in particular. In this new concept of political morality, religion becomes an instrument in the hands of the ruler. Human ‘‘virtue’’ has one ‘‘enemy’’ that it must constantly confront, Fortuna (Fortune), which can either be favorable or can harm inexorably, as in the case of the Duke Valentino. Machiavelli’s revolutionary contribution with respect to the traditional depiction of blind Fortune is also noteworthy. Instead of perpetuating the image of a blind Fortune that can never be opposed, he formulates a continual ‘‘confrontation’’ with Fortune. Il Principe was, not surprisingly, placed on the Church Index and Machiavelli’s heirs attempted in vain to republish the work, even in less controversial versions. Yet not even the proposal of making strategic ‘‘cuts’’ changed the censors’ opinion. In successive centuries, Machiavelli and ‘‘Machiavellism’’ circulated in Europe with varying success, and above all with erroneous interpretations. A close example is the ‘‘Machiavellian villain’’ of Elizabethan theater, who becomes a suitable catalyzer of the action since he requires little motivation, being a self-starting principle of malevolence. Aside from the resolutions he proposed, the author sought to signal the need to reflect on power and its maintenance, reflections that should set aside reasoning not strictly tied to the political strategies meant to secure and protect the state.

These concepts were drafted by Machiavelli in sixteenth-century Florentine vernacular, thanks to the position he took regarding the ‘‘Questione della lingua.’’ He also wrote the brief Discorso o Dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua (Discourse or Dialogue on Our Language, 1524) on the subject, a work that critics now agree in attributing to him, and one via which he fully entered the vivid debate on the choice of a vernacular. He sided with contemporary Florentine language, against Pietro Bembo’s ultimately triumphal position that sustains the use of the language of Boccaccio for prose and of Petrarch for poetry. His style, dry and rich with tension, is founded on the ‘‘dilemma-based’’ method, the proposal of two opposite versions of the problem under scrutiny. Il Principe was written between July and December of 1513 in a pause from writing another fundamental work, the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. In the Discorsi, the author vindicates the need to imitate the ancients in everything from art to politics. The environment in which he worked in an official capacity as secretary was a republican one, similar to that of the Orti Oricellari, and the effects of such a context can be felt in his work. The Orti were the gardens of the palazzo Rucellai where Florentine aristocrats and passing intellectuals gathered to discuss history and classical literature. Machiavelli’s participation in this circle endangered him several years later when, in 1522, an anti-Medicean conspiracy was discovered to have initiated in the group. He managed to exonerate himself, however. In the history of criticism, debate has focused around a need to justify whether or not two analytic perspectives as different as those engaged in Il Principe and the Discorsi can be explained by taking into account the era in which the author confronted these topics. The central problem is that of the direction, rather than the typology of power, whether republican or monarchic. At times the ruling classes themselves seemed uncertain about whether to establish a republican oligarchy or an absolutist state. The preoccupation of the man of politics and the historian was primarily the method needed to secure the state, not its configuration. Thus concrete questions surface most frequently. For example, there is the problem of enlistment, discussed in Il Principe, in the Discorsi, and in a specific treatise in dialogue form, Dell’arte della guerra (On the Art of War, 1521). Machiavelli’s primary concern was that of constantly linking military activity to the civic life of the state, for which war should be understood as an instrument of security and stability. The comparison with 1093

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO ancient Rome in this case led to pessimistic reflections on the realization of such a model because of particular political conditions in the sixteenth century. Nevertheless, he ceased to diligently sustain his thesis of a necessary recourse to a state’s own military. Machiavelli was appointed by the Studio Fiorentino to write a history of Florence for the sum of 100 florins for two years, and this assignment stimulated his reconsideration of the historic events of his city as a pretext for a more general reflection on theory. This was possible (in 1519) thanks to his having again taken up some ‘‘public’’ activity as the observer of specific facts of a political nature. He traveled to Lucca, for example, and from this trip came two works of a historical and political bent: Delle cose di Lucca (On the Things of Lucca), composed in the summer of 1520, is an analysis of the electoral system in force in the city, rich with both positive and critical observations; and La vita di Castruccio Castracani (Life of Castruccio Castracani, 1932), an ancient, famous condottiere from Lucca (1281–1328). He seems, then, to have once again taken up the much-desired involvement in public life. It was a period of renewed activism for Machiavelli, who subsequently went to Carpi to find a new preacher for Florence. On this trip he stopped in Modena to stay with his friend Francesco Guicciardini, then governor of the city, at the orders of the pope. In the following years he concluded the Istorie fiorentine (Florentine Histories) and turned them in officially in 1525 to Pope Clement VII, the former Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici. It is a notably original work because he abandoned the idea of a history focused only on diplomatic and military facts that would exalt the conduct of the princes; on the contrary, he meticulously followed Florence’s civil struggles, making evident the thoughtless behavior of the heads of state. He lacked, however, a full awareness of the truthfulness of his sources, and thus often the examples from antiquity are narrated without having been accurately verified. Overall, nevertheless, it is a work of great depth, particularly in the clearness of the comments on that which is recounted. The author’s general situation thus seemed to improve. His second comedy, La Clizia, was performed on a set designed by Bastiano da Sangallo. In 1525, his interdiction from public office was revoked, and the pope allowed him new assignments, entrusting him on various military and diplomatic missions. He at last received an official appointment as superintendent and chancellor of the Procuratori alle Mura for the defense of 1094

Florence. However, times once again were stormy: Papacy and empire clashed and the former, in this encounter, suffered the worse fate. Clement VII was forced to witness the sack of Rome by the Lanzichenecchi in 1527. The city required a long time to recover, and the Medici declined when the family was expelled from Florence in favor of a republican regime. This was yet another disappointment for Machiavelli because the new government chose not to trust those who were officially engaged under Medicean power. He died shortly afterwards, in the same year that Rome was sacked, having just found out about his most recent exclusion from public office. Machiavelli’s epistolary is key to a reconstruction of his life and person. Many of the letters he wrote to friends and acquaintances have been preserved, and they are vibrant missives that create a literary patrimony and not just a documentary one. Among his familiari those written to his friend Francesco Vettori, the Florentine ambassador to Rome between 1513 and 1515, are worthy of note. These letters contain much autobiographical information regarding the composition of Il Principe as well as portraits of daily life in his residence at Albergaccio. At times his reflections are quite subtle and touch on fundamental points of Machiavellian theoretical speculation, such as the relationship between virtu` and Fortune, or between saviezza (wisdom) and madness. His correspondence with Guicciardini in the last years of his life is full of historical and political reflections, as well as vivid accounts of jokes played on him or by him on and with other friends. Machiavelli was capable of passing from a serious tone to irony with great narrative dexterity, rendering some of the letters true satirical novellas. These missives, then, allow scholars to follow the evolution of the internal Machiavellian dialectic and frequently constitute a kind of expressive synthesis of his career. The affirmation he added to the end of a letter to Guicciardini, dated 21 October 1525, might be taken as a significant autocommentary. He speaks in this epistle of Guicciardini’s holdings, the political situation in the main zones of the peninsula, the occasion of the theatrical restaging of La mandragola, and some judgments on the tormented political times in which they live. These are the concluding sentences: ‘‘Comincio ora a scrivere di nuovo, e mi sfogo accusando i principi, che hanno fatto tutti ogni cosa per condurci qui. Valete. Niccolo` Machiavelli comico, historico e tragico’’ (I am beginning to write again, and I vent my anger by accusing princes, who have done all they can to

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO conduct us here. Stay well. Niccolo` Machiavelli comic, historian, and tragedian). The allusion to a new writing project almost certainly refers to his new engagements after the delivery of the Istorie fiorentine to Pope Clement VII. The triple self-definition with which he closes appears to be a lapidary formula for his own complex personality, whereby the ‘‘tragic,’’ left until last, seems to emphasize his strongest and most authentic attribute.

Biography Born in Florence 3 May 1469 to Bernardo, a notary, and Bartolomea Nelli. Received humanistic education, learning Latin but not Greek. Translated numerous works including Lucretian’s De rerum natura and Terance’s Andria. After the death of Girolamo Savonarola in 1498, named secretary of the second chancellery and then first chancellor. Married Marietta Corsini in 1501, and had seven children. Completed many missions in Italy and abroad for the Florentine republic, for which his friend Pier Soderini is gonfalonier for life. In 1507, nominated chancellor of the nine officials of the Florentine military. In 1512, Giovanni de’ Medici with the help of the Spanish reconquered the city. Soderini fled, and Machiavelli was imprisoned. Freed during amnesty, he retreated to a farm outside of Florence. Wrote many works there, including Il Principe, La mandragola, and the Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio. In 1520, nominated that same year chancellor of the Procuratori delle Mura. In 1527, Rome is sacked and the Florentine republic restored. Weakened physically and disappointed at the new and inevitable distance from public life, died in Florence, 21 June 1527. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Selected Works Collections The Chief Works and Others, translated by Allan H. Gilbert, 3 vols., Durham: Duke University Press, 1965; rpt. 1989. Tutte le opere, edited by Mario Martelli, Florence: Sansoni, 1971. The Portable Machiavelli, translated by Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa, New York: Viking Penguin, 1979. Opere, edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: EinaudiGallimard, 1997.

Political and Historical Writings Il Principe, 1503; as The Prince, edited and translated by Peter Bondanella, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Il modo che tenne il Duca Valentino, 1503. Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valdichiana ribellati, 1503. Dell’arte della guerra, 1521; as Art of War, translated by Ellis Farnework, New York: Da Capo, 1990; as Art of War, edited and translated by Christopher Lynch, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003. Istorie fiorentine, 1525; as Florentine Histories translated by Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., 1988. Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, 1531; as The Discourses, edited by Bernard Crich, translated by Leslie J. Walker, 1970; as The Discourses, translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, New York: Oxford, 1997. Delle cose di Lucca (composed 1920). La vita di Castruccio Castracani, 1932.

Theater La mandragola, 1518; as Mandragola, edited and translated by Eric Haywood, 2002. La Clizia, 1525; as Clizia in The Comedies of Machiavelli, 1985.

Poetry ‘‘Capitoli,’’ 1498–1512. ‘‘Rime varie,’’ 1502–1513. ‘‘Canti carnascialeschi,’’ 1508–1509.

Other Favola di Belfagor arcidiavolo, 1518. Discorso o dialogo intorno alla nostra lingua, 1524.

Further Reading Barchiesi, Marino, ‘‘Plauto e il metateatro antico,’’ in Il Verri, 31 (1969): 113–130. Bertelli, Sergio, and Piero Innocenti, (editors) Bibliografia machiavelliana, Verona: Valdonega, 1979. Chabod, Federico, Scritti su Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1964; rpt. 1982. Chiappelli, Fredi, Nuovi studi sul linguaggio del Machiavelli, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. De Grazia, Sebastian, Machiavelli in Hell, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Del Lucchese, Filippo, Tumulti e ‘‘indignatio’’: conflitto, diritto e moltitudine in Machiavelli e Spinosa, Milan: Ghibli, 2004. Dionisotti, Carlo, Machiavellerie, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Gilbert, Felix, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Su alcune soluzioni tipologiche ed espressive della ‘Mandragola,’’’ in Lettere Italiane, 2 (1982): 1157–1175. Guidotti, Angela, Introduzione in N. Machiavelli, Delle cose di Lucca, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 1992; rpt. 2003. Inglese, Giorgio, ‘‘Mandragola di Niccolo` Machiavelli,’’ in Letteratura italiana Einaudi. Le opere, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Najemy, John M., Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Parel, Anthony J. (editor), The Political Calculus: Essays on Machiavelli’s Philosophy, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1972.

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` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO Parel, Anthony J., The Machiavellian Cosmos, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992. Praz, Mario, The Flaming Heart, New York: Norton, 1973. Raimondi, Ezio, Politica e commedia: Dal Beroaldo al Machiavelli, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972. Rebhorn, Wayne A., Foxes and Lions: Machiavelli’s Confidence Men, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Ruffo Fiore, Silvia, Niccolo` Machiavelli: An Annotated Bibliography of Modern Criticism and Scholarship, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990. Sasso, Gennaro, Niccolo` Machiavelli: Storia del suo pensiero politico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1954; rpt. 1980. Sullivan, Vickie B., The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli: Essays on the Literary Works, New HavenLondon: Yale University Press, 2000. Viroli, Maurizio, Machiavelli, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Whelan, Frederic, Hume and Machiavelli: Political Realism and Liberal Thought, Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004.

DISCORSI SOPRA LA PRIMA DECA DI TITO LIVIO, 1531 Treatise by Niccolo` Machiavelli

Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livy) is a commentary on the first 10 books of Livy’s History; it is subdivided into three books, composed, respectively, of 60, 33, and 49 chapters. The Discorsi examine the political life that develops between structures of the state under various methods of governance, and consider both ancient and contemporary examples. The first book treats the constitution and legislation of a state; the second, relationships with other states and possible territorial annexations; the third, heterogeneous questions ranging from the necessities that assure a government’s stability, to the problem of the military, to the evolution of the state organism from its rise to its eventual decline. 1096

One of the most complex critical problems related to this work is that of the time of its composition: It was published posthumously in 1531 (as was Il Principe), but the draft of the work had been considered to date back to the same years as Il Principe. The most diffused thesis places that draft between 1513 and 1519. According to this theory, around the end of the eighteenth chapter of the first book, Machiavelli’s subject compelled him to pose the contingent problem of delineating the figure of a prince, a figure capable of adopting new instruments to govern his state and of improving the fortunes of Italy. Thus, it is suggested, he interrupted the draft of the Discorsi in December of 1513 in order to dedicate himself to the well-known treatise. The hypothesis is also borne out by the author’s affirmation, in the second chapter of Il Principe, that he had written a work that provided a comprehensive view of the republican regimes. Scholars therefore claim unanimously that the Discorsi preceded Il Principe, conceptually speaking. The author dedicated the work to his friends Zanobi Buondelmonti and Cosimo Rucellai, patron of the intellectual meetings that took place in the gardens of his villa (the Orti Oricellari). Machiavelli was a regular participant (and one considered by the group to be a true maestro) beginning in 1516. This context is fundamental to understanding the connection between the Discorsi and the political debate that developed in Florence in the years of the work’s composition. The conversations were driven by an interest in analyzing the mechanisms required to regulate the institutions of a state, using republican Rome as primary model. For this reason, the circle did not have an easy existence, and in 1522 it was dissolved when an anti-Medicean conspiracy was discovered. The guiding idea was that Classical history could be engaged to justify a largely democratic base, fed by enthusiasm for the republican virtues of Rome. In this way, the Discorsi acquired a strong theoretical value, a value evident in the prologue to the first book, which emphasizes the immutability of human nature and the utility of examples. Machiavelli continually compared the experience of modernity with the lessons of antiquity; in accordance with the pessimistic view of human nature that accompanies all of Machiavelli’s disquisitions, good laws can be adopted as a remedy for the malignita` (malevolence) of man. In spite of significant overlap between the two works, nevertheless some variants are to be found

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO with regard to the attitude assumed in Il Principe. The relationship between man and Fortune is not explained here as existing in a sort of balance (as emerges in the twenty-fifth chapter of the treatise): Only occasione (chance) determines victory or defeat. The Discorsi delineate with particular clarity the concept of an immanent Fortune, set in the midst of other natural forces far from every form of transcendence. The work also broadens the concept of imitation, no longer limiting it to the arts and literature, but extending it to include history as well. Here is born the value attributed to the esempio (example) that has been the subject of much critical discussion on the question of whether it is possible to establish, with precision, Machiavelli’s methods. In this case, as in the question of the time of the work’s composition, there is still lively debate among scholars. Some opt to attribute the author with an inductive method, the study of examples from which a general rule can be deduced; others claim he used a deductive method, choosing single cases that sustain a preordained theoretical thesis. It seems probable that Machiavelli at times verified that which he has deduced from a single contemporary case using many examples learned through his historical studies. He thus often sustained, over the course of the treatise, the need to recall ancient history as a model to imitate: He analyzed selected episodes, extracting them, in a manner of speaking, from their context, in order to derive the general rule. Paradoxically one might claim that his examples both suggest and presuppose the rules, demonstrating the originality of Machiavellian thought. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First edition: Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio, Rome: Antonio Blado, 1531, and Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1531. Critical editions: in Tutte le opere storiche e letterarie, edited by Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella, Florence: Barbe´ra, 1929; in Tutte le opere, edited by Mario Martelli, Florence: Sansoni, 1971; edited by Corrado Vivanti, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Translations: in The Historical, Political, and Diplomatic Writing of Niccolo` Machiavelli, translated by Christian E. Detmold, Boston and New York: Houghton, 1891; in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, translated by Allan Gilbert, Durham: University Press Duke, 1965; as Discourses, edited by Bernard Crich, translated by Leslie J. Walker, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970; as Discourses on Livy, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov, Chicago:

Chicago University Press, 1996; as Discourses, translated by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Further Reading Chabod, Federico, Scritti su Machiavelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1964; rpt. 1982. Godorecci, Barbara, After Machiavelli (‘‘Re-writing’’ and the ‘‘Hermeneutic Attitude’’), Purdue: Indiana University Press, 1993. Ho¨rnquist, Mikael, Machiavelli and Empire, CambridgeNew York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Mansfield, Harvey Claffin, Machiavelli’s New Modes and Orders, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979. Procacci, Giuliano, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Le opere, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1969. Sasso, Gennaro, Machiavelli e gli antichi e altri saggi, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1987.

IL PRINCIPE, 1532 Treatise by Niccolo` Machiavelli

Machiavelli wrote Il Principe (The Prince) from an uncomfortable position, politically speaking. Shortly before beginning this work, the Medici were restored to power and he was prohibited from engaging in political life in Florence; the republican regime in which he participated as a key player, as secretary of the second chancellery, or of foreign affairs, had crumbled. After spending 15 days in prison, he was freed thanks to an amnesty, but was also suspended for an indeterminate time from all office. Pursuant to this forced exile he retired to his farm outside of Florence, called the ‘‘Albergaccio,’’ where he meditated on the possibility of a re-entry into political affairs. To this end, he decided to embark upon writing a brief dissertation on the characteristics of a principality and of the person appointed to maintain it. He dedicates the work to Lorenzo of Piero de’ Medici, Duke of Urbino, appointed by Pope Leo X (former Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici) to rule the city of Florence. The treatise met a tepid reception and failed to achieve the effect most desired by its author. Nevertheless, it is an innovative work of great 1097

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO depth, well-known in the context of traditional treatise-writing (which originated in the medieval and humanistic periods). Il Principe considered the tasks of the ruler of a state, and both the discussions of the work and plagiarisms of it began from the moment the treatise circulated in manuscript form (from 1513, the probable date of its first draft). Il Principe, or De principatibus (as the author titled it), was plagiarized in 1523 by Agostino Nifo, who in his De regnandi peritia (The Art of Reigning) transcribed Machiavelli’s work into Latin only to flatten the contents in the final part, which he authored himself. On the other hand, the history of the ‘‘fortune’’ of this treatise spans centuries. Soon after its publication it faced the censorship of the Counter-Reformation, and subsequently proceeded on a path of praise and confutation that have not yet ended. This controversy is not surprising; one need only examine the work to recognize its significance and its revolutionary potential. Il Principe can be subdivided into three unequal parts. From Chapter 1 to Chapter 11, the author presents the typologies of principalities, with special attention to those that interest him most, that is, principalities newly acquired by arms or by fortune. In the third chapter, he reflects on the use of force as a medicina forte (strong medicine), but most significant are his analyses in Chapters 6 and 7 of the figure of Cesare Borgia. Machiavelli met Borgia personally on an official diplomatic mission and was particularly struck by the speed and ferocity with which the Duke Valentino had his political adversaries killed. Here he delineates the concepts of virtu` (virtue), Fortuna (Fortune), and occasione (chance), further analyzed in the second part of the work, composed of Chapters 12 through 24. In this section, the author proposes characteristics of the prince who, having acquired a new principality, must now maintain it. His treatment is pragmatic, departing from the presupposition that he need not pursue the figure of an ideal prince, but rather proceed in the characterization of his concrete image. To this end, he must unite contingent facts with universal laws of political action taken from past models. For example, in Chapter 15 he cites necessary talents, such as the use of cruelty, parsimony, and religion for instrumental ends (in case it becomes necessary to demonstrate himself Godfearing). Examples provided link Classical, Roman, and also Greek antiquity, as well as biblical times, to his present day. In Chapter 18, he sustains that it is necessary for the prince to have 1098

human gifts as well as savage ones; such qualities are exemplified in the force of the lion and the shrewdness of the fox, but above all in the image of the centaur, the perfect symbiosis between animal swiftness and human intellect. The two concluding chapters, 25 and 26, constitute a sort of ‘‘autonomous’’ corollary: In the first of these, Machiavelli returns to the concept of Fortuna as unknowable fate, but which man is called to confront. It is in fact necessary to seek equilibrium between human will and destiny. He thus compares Fortune to an impetuous river that breaks the dams and sweeps everything away. Thus it is necessary to forestall certain events by protecting oneself, for example, with an adequate military (the problem of a nonmercenary military constantly preoccupies the author). He speaks of the difficulty in Chapter 12 and later returns to the subject in the Discorsi and in Dell’arte della guerra. He elaborates the image of the woman whom one must ‘‘battere e urtare’’ (beat and strike) in order to ‘‘dominarla’’ (dominate her). She is thus the ‘‘amica dei giovani, perche´ sono meno rispettivi, piu` feroci, e con piu` audacia la comandano’’ (friend of the young, because they are less respectful, more ferocious, and they command her with greater audacity). Machiavelli then proposes the necessity of being impetuous in confronting events, as a possible opposition to a negative world. The work’s strong pessimism seems to diminish in the last chapter, with the exhortation to the Medici house to take to heart the events in Italy and to assume the task of unification. The conclusion, however, is mournful: The author in fact cites a few verses of Petrarch’s ‘‘Canzone all’Italia’’ in which he sings the praises of the ‘‘antico valore’’ (ancient value) not yet realized in the Italian race. From the point of view of the rigors of historical methodology, Machiavelli used sources without fully investigating their reliability. Yet Il Principe undoubtedly constitutes a move ahead in terms of analyzing and reflecting on facts. For the first time, a political method with foundations in reality was proposed, and an investigation was conducted not abstractly or generically, but rather founded on real occurrences and on the need to use the lessons furnished by experience. Il Principe refutes the scholastic and religious dogmatism of the medieval tradition. Important also is the valorization of man’s capacity to understand his world without making recourse to revealed truths. In Machiavelli is born an art of a politics that, even when constrained by the inscrutability of fate (Cesare Borgia

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO was subdued by the illness that leads to his death), indicates the most opportune means to achieving the security of the state. From this point of view, Machiavelli’s speculative innovation in dealing with this subject comprises also his lexicon and the power of his vocabulary. For example, the concept of virtu` is intended to be utterly distinct from religious implications; the ruina (ruin) corresponds to the total destruction of his own aspirations; prudenza (prudence) to his capacity to lucidly manage a given situation. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Editions First edition: Il principe, Rome: Antonio Blado, 1532, and Florence: Bernardo Giunta, 1532. Critical edition: in Tutte le opere storiche e letterarie, edited by Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella, Florence: Barbe`ra, 1929; as De principatibus, edited by Giorgio Inglese, Rome: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1994. Translations: in The Historical, Political and Diplomatic Writings of Niccolo` Machiavelli, translated by Christian E. Detmold, Boston and New York: Houghton, 1891; in The Chief Works and Others, translated by Allan Gilbert, Durham: Duke University Press, 1965; as The Prince and Other Political Writings, edited and translated by Bruce Penman, London: Dent, 1981; as The Prince, translated by Harvey C. Mansfield, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985, rpt. 1998; edited and translated by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988; edited and translated by Peter Bondanella, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, La forma tragica del ‘‘Principe’’ e altri saggi su Machiavelli, Florence: Olschki, 1960. Chabod, Federico, Introduzione e note al Principe, first ed. 1924, new ed. edited by Luigi Firpo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Chiappelli, Fredi, Studi sul linguaggio di Machiavelli, Florence: Le Monnier, 1952. Coyle, Martin (editor), Niccolo` Machiavelli’s ‘‘Il Principe’’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, Manchester, UK, and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995. Firpo, Luigi, Saggio su Machiavelli politico, Alpignano: Tallone, 1969. Gilbert, Allan H., Machiavelli’s ‘‘Prince’’ and its Forerunners, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1938. Richardson, Brian, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Il Principe, Manchester, UK: Manchester University PressNew York: Vanni, 1979. Sasso, Gennaro, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Il Principe, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963.

LA MANDRAGOLA, 1518 Comedy by Niccolo` Machiavelli

La mandragola (The Mandrake) is a comedy whose title alludes to an herb supposed to have medicinal qualities, an herb reputed to cure various maladies, including sterility. It was written by Machiavelli around 1518 while in exile on his farm called Albergaccio, and is comprised of a prologue in verse and five acts. The plot is centered on a case of sterility: Nicia, a noted Florentine lawyer, wants to have children, but his wife Lucrezia seems unable to bear them. He turns to a hanger-on, Ligurio, for help; Ligurio decides to satisfy his desires together with those of the young Callimaco, who heard so much about the beautiful Lucrezia while studying in Paris that he fell in love with her and will do anything to have her. Ligurio must thus organize a complex hoax that progressively involves the stupid husband, an opportunistic priest, and the honest Lucrezia. He makes Nicia believe, using the complicit Callimaco as his mouthpiece, that thanks to a decoction of mandrake his wife will become pregnant, but that the first to lie with her will surely die. To convince Lucrezia, the schemers involve her mother, Sostrata, who is willing to support the hoax in the hopes that maternity will strengthen the social and economic position of her daughter. They also engage a confessor, Brother Timoteo, who is willing to be involved in the adultery for money. Lucrezia’s concerns are dispelled by the religious man, who makes recourse to the rhetorical art of preaching and uses blasphemous citations of biblical episodes to demonstrate the legality of conjugal betrayal when the goal is procreation. Once practical problems linked to capturing a young vagabond (who must, of course, be Callimaco) are resolved, thanks to a series of disguises, the story reaches its conclusion: Lucrezia accepts the new stato delle cose (state of things) made possible by the foolishness of her husband, the cunning of the servant, the corruption of the priest, and fate, all converging to make Nicia happy. Machiavelli’s mastery of all of the theatrical components makes this comedy a masterpiece. The plot is 1099

` MACHIAVELLI NICCOLO original and novel, since it concludes neither with the traditional discovery of the trick nor with the coming to awareness of the tricked. The dialogue is essential and aptly balanced between comedy and drama (Machiavelli had translated Terence’s Andria, thus learning the strategy of a theatrical language that must appear spontaneous even when deliberately constructed). The characters also represent an innovation, since they are renewed by the sixteenthcentury context and the author’s political thought. Ligurio is neither the servant nor the scrounger of Plautian comedy, but rather the lucid inventor of a complex plan with almost ethical ends. He maintains that it is unjust that a woman ‘‘savia e atta a governare un regno’’ (wise and qualified to govern a kingdom) should be subject to a fool. The priest is a typological innovation in the theatrical context, a figure rooted in contemporary society rather than in the tradition of fourteenth-century short story writing. All of the characters, in fact, have long engaged critics, thanks to the complexity of their personalities. Their original dispositions inevitably provoke multiple readings, from the allegorical to the autobiographical, from the anthropological to the political. An erotic component underlies the text, exemplified in the minor character of a woman caught in conversation with Brother Timoteo when Ligurio and Nicia come to visit him. She alludes to the ‘‘desires’’ of the deceased husband to whom she was constrained to be subordinate, and laments ‘‘tutto quello impalare’’ (all the impaling) of the Turks in their raids, a hint of the prevailing atmosphere in the work. The articulation of space and time constitutes a novelty: Between the fourth and fifth acts, an entire night passes, while all the scenes are essential to the plot. Numerous contemporary performances of the work met with enormous success, which was registered in the chronicles of the time: A Venetian performance of 1522 was interrupted because of the excessive crowd. After fading into oblivion of a moralistic vein, the work was once again frequently performed in the last century, and now figures in the repertory of theaters and directors, both Italian and non-Italian. ANGELA GUIDOTTI

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Editions First edition: Comedia di Callimaco et di Lucretia, Florence, 1518. Critical editions: La mandragola di Niccolo` Machiavelli per la prima volta restituita alla sua integrita`, edited by Roberto Ridolfi, Florence: Olschki, 1965; as La Mandragola, edited by Giorgio Inglese, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Translations: as Mandragola, translated by Mera J. Flaumenhaft, Prospect Heights, NJ: Waveland Press, 1981; in The Comedies of Machiavelli, bilingual edition, translated by David Sices and James B. Atkinson, Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1985; in Ariosto’s The Supposes, Machiavelli’s The Mandrake, Intronati’s The Deceived: Three Renaissance Comedies, edited by Christopher Cairns, translated and introduced by Jennifer Lorch et al., Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1996; as The Mandrake, edited and translated by Eric Haywood, Dublin: UCD Foundation for Italian Studies, 2002.

Further Reading Blasucci, Luigi, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Opere letterarie, Turin: Utet, 1989. Davico Bonino, Guido, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, Teatro (Andria, Mandragola, Clizia), Turino: Einaudi, 2003. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Appunti sulla ‘Mandragola,’’’ in Belfagor, 39 (1984): 621–644. Fido, Franco, ‘‘Machiavelli 1469–1969: Politica e teatro nel badalucco di messer Nicia,’’ (1969), in La metamorfosi del Centauro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Una perfetta macchina drammaturgia, la ‘Mandragola,’’’ in Il modello e la trasgressione, commedie del primo Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Ligurio, Nicomaco, Niccolo`,’’ in Scenografie di pensieri (il teatro del Rinascimento fra progetto e sperimentazione), Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2002. Padoan, Giorgio, La commedia rinascimentale veneta, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982. Parronchi, Alessandro, ‘‘La prima rappresentazione della ‘Mandragola’: Il modello-l’apparato-l’allegoria,’’ in La bibliofilia, 64 (1962): 37–86. Ridolfi, Roberto, Studi sulle commedie del Machiavelli, Pisa: Nistri-Listri, 1968. Stauble, Antonio, Introduction to N. Machiavelli, La mandragola, Florence: Cesati, 2004. Vanossi, Luigi, ‘‘Situazione e sviluppo del teatro machiavelliano,’’ in Lingua e strutture del teatro italiano del Rinascimento, Quaderni del Circolo Filologico Linguistico Padovano, no. 2, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Vescovo, Pier Mario, Da Ruzante a Calmo, Padua: Antenore, 1996.

SCIPIONE MAFFEI

SCIPIONE MAFFEI (1675–1755) Francesco Scipione Maffei was one of the most versatile figures in the cultural environment of the Italian Enlightenment. A dramatist, archaeologist, and scholar, his fame in Italian literature stems from the role that he played in the reform of tragedy experimented in the early eighteenth century in the Venetian theaters, although he achieved his most remarkable outcomes in other fields. He was involved in the erudite culture and society of his times, which he tried to modernize in several ways. For example, in 1710 he wrote a pamphlet entitled Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca (On the Science Called Chivalry), in which he attacked caste prejudices, which was followed by numerous other works on the same subject such as the epistle De fabula equestris ordinis Costantiniani (The Fable of the Constantinian Order, 1712), and Arte magica annichilata (Magic Annihilated, 1754), all written in Latin. Until 1732, when be began a series of journeys that took him throughout Europe, he devoted himself both to erudite works and to the study of Italian drama, trying to raise it from its current state of decadence. In the early eighteenth century, several men of letters converged on a platform for an ideal theater, which would join together both the practical needs of the stage and the literary expectations of the well-educated public. Maffei had a very important role in this debate as a result of his close collaboration with the theater company of Lelio Riccoboni for which, according to Riccoboni’s memoirs, he acted in an advisory role, suggesting which works to represent in the Venetian theaters; indeed his 1723 anthology of tragedies, Teatro italiano o sia scelta di tragedia per uso sulla scena (Italian Theatre, or Works for Use on the Stage) gives an indication of the recommendations he gave the famous actor. Their collaboration culminated on June 12, 1713, with the staging in Modena of Maffei’s trage´die larmoyante Merope (1714). The tragedy was such a triumph that its author believed that he had overcome the much better-known French works with a single stroke, although it seems more likely that its success was due above all to its author’s close connection with Riccoboni’s

work on the stage, a conclusion supported by the fact that after their cooperation ended, neither the author nor the actor again achieved the same success. The plot of the play relates the sorrows of Queen Merope, whose husband and sons were killed by Polifonte, who now wants to marry her. She has managed only to save one of her sons, Cresfonte, who was hidden when he was a baby. When he returns, unaware of his true identity, Merope herself tries to kill him because she believes that he has killed her son. In the end, Cresfonte revenges his father killing Polifonte and saving his mother from a forced wedding. Maffei’s Merope is important because it brought to the Italian dramaturgy of the period fame on a European scale as a result of positive critical reviews by Voltaire and Lessing, and also because it represented the basic element in a project to develop erudite tragedy into a form of professional theater—a project that, it can be said, was accomplished on the one hand by Carlo Goldoni in the way in which he considered the work for the stage, and on the other hand by Vittorio Alfieri through his tragedies. Maffei also played a significant role in the theoretical debate on theater. In 1752, the Dominican friar Daniele Concina published De spectaculis theatralibus (On Theatre Shows), in three volumes, in which he accused theater of being an immoral activity. Maffei answered with his own treatise, De’ teatri antichi e moderni (On Ancient and Modern Theatres, 1753), in which he defended theater, its history, and its role in literature, and which was approved and applauded by Pope Benedict XIV himself. A true polymath, Maffei produced works in numerous other fields, including history with Italia diplomatica (Diplomatic Italy, 1727) and Verona illustrata (Illustrated Verona, 1732), which brought him vast fame; science, with Della formazione dei fulmini (On the Formation of Lightning, 1747); pedagogy, with Parere sul miglior ordinamento della R. Universita` di Torino (Opinion on the Best Organization for the Royal University of Turin, 1718); and politics, with Consiglio politico presentato al governo veneto (Political Advice Offered to the Government of the Veneto, 1736).

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Biography Born in Verona to a noble family on 1 June 1675. Educated at Jesuit colleges in Parma and Rome. Fought in the battle of Donauworth with his brother Alessandro, a general in the Bavarian army, 1704. Moved to Padua, 1709, where in association with Apostolo Zeno he founded the Giornale de’ letterati italiani, 1710. Moved to Turin, where for some time he studied at the Biblioteca Reale, 1710. After years in Northern Italy to complete historical studies, in 1732 moved to the south of France for archaeological research and then to Paris. Traveled to London, 1736, and from there to Oxford, where he obtained the degree of doctor. Died in Verona on 11 February 1755. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Collections Opere drammatiche e poesie varie, edited by Antonio Avena, Bari: Laterza, 1928.

Plays Merope, 1714. Le cerimonie, 1728. Raguet, 1747.

Treatises Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca, 1710. De fabula equestris ordinis Costantiniani, 1712. Parere sul miglior ordinamento della R. Universita` di Torino, 1718.

Italia diplomatica, 1727. Verona illustrata, 1732. Consiglio politico presentato al governo veneto, 1736. Della formazione dei fulmini, 1747. Arte magica dileguata, 1749. De’ teatri antichi e moderni, 1753. Arte magica annichilata, 1754.

Edited Works Teatro italiano o sia scelta di tragedia per uso sulla scena, 1723.

Letters Epistolario, 1700–1755, edited by Celestino Garibotto, 2 vols., 1955.

Further Reading Gasparini, Giammaria (editor), La tragedia classica dalle origini al Maffei, Turin: UTET, 1976. Marchi, Gian Paolo, Un italiano in Europa: Scipione Maffei tra passione antiquaria e impegno civile, Verona: Libreria universitaria editrice, 1992. Mattioda, Enrico, Teorie della tragedia nel Settecento, Modena: Mucchi, 1994. Tessari, Roberto, Teatro e spettacolo nel Settecento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1995. Riccoboni, Lelio, Discorso della commedia all’improvviso e scenari inediti, edited by Irene Mamczarz, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1973. Ringger, Kurt, ‘‘La Merope e il ’furor d’affetto’: La tragedia di Scipione Maffeli rivisitata,’’ in MLN, 92, no. 1 (1997): 38–62. Romagnani, Gian Paolo (editor), Scipione Maffei nell’Europa del Settecento, Verona: Cierre, 1998. Salsano, Roberto, Capitoli alfieriani: Merope e dintorni, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Silvestri, Giuseppe, Scipione Maffei europeo del Settecento, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1968.

MAFIA VENDETTA See Il Giorno della civetta (Work by Leonardo Sciascia)

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MAFIA

MAFIA The word ‘‘mafia’’ first appears in its modern sense in 1863 in the title of a dialect play by Gaspare Mosca and Giuseppe Rizzotto, I mafiusi di la Vicaria (The Mafiosi of the Vicaria), the name of the Palermo prison. The term gained rapid acceptance, and was employed routinely in the journalism and official reports into Sicilian life that appeared in the years following unification. Many disparate forces have contributed to the creation of the Sicilian mafia. The description of the individual mafioso as a ‘‘man of honor’’ is a reference to a specifically Mediterranean culture. The history of Sicily is a history of conquests by foreign forces, leading to a condition of alienation in which law and the state are objects of distrust among a people who have lost all sense of kinship with institutions of power. The tendency in such circumstances to retreat into trusted family circles is expressed in the use of the term famiglia to denote the basic unit of mafia association. The notion of omerta`, identified as fundamental to mafia power by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino in their magisterial inquiry into Sicilian mores undertaken in 1876, carries the etymological meaning ‘‘manliness,’’ but denotes the refusal to collaborate with police or judiciary. Noting that no government in Sicily had attained the ‘‘monopoly of violence’’ that is conventionally viewed as the prime attribute of the state, the two men referred to the existence of an industria della violenza (industry of violence) in Sicily. The threat of violence is central to mafia power, even if the recourse to actual violence varies from age to age. There is little consensus on the mafia’s origin and history, or indeed on most matters relating to it. It can be asserted, however, that while the mafia as an organization emerged in mid-nineteenth century, its cultural origins are as old as the history of Sicily. Although it later expanded, the native habitat of the mafia was a triangle in western Sicily bounded by Palermo, Trapani, and Agrigento. It is conventional to see the first emergence, or prehistory, of the body in the convergence of interest between a propertied class in the citrus groves around Palermo in search of protection from the prevailing lawlessness, and a criminal group prepared to offer services, including violence. The

picciotti, the rank and file, came from the impoverished urban and rural underclass, but the leaders came from those privileged groups that would elsewhere have been the pillars of society. In 1838, the procurator general of Palermo, Pietro Cala` Ulloa, identified the leaders of these sette (sects) as being ‘‘qui un possidente, la` un arciprete’’ (here a landowner, there a priest) (Joseph Farrell, Understanding the Mafia, 1997). The assassination in 1893 of Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo, governor of the Bank of Sicily, the first of history’s ‘‘excellent corpses,’’ or murders of distinguished servants of the Italian state, contained all the elements of later mafia criminality. Notarbartolo was an honest man caught up in financial and political intrigues between two leading politicians, Antonio di Rudinı` and Francesco Crispi. Corruption, or omerta`, in political, police, and judicial circles impeded the course of justice. Three separate trials in Milan, Bologna, and Florence ended in the acquittal of the accused, Raffaele Palizzolo, a member of Parliament. An outlook later called sicilianismo, a complex mixture of victim mentality, Sicilian nationalism, and opportunistic bad faith that was beneficial to later mafiosi, made its first appearance at the trial, and some of Sicily’s most eminent intellectuals, including the folklorist Giuseppe Pitre` (1841–1916), came to the defence of the accused. The mafia was allowed to thrive under the Liberal government, but was suppressed by Benito Mussolini and his prefetto di ferro (iron prefect), Cesare Mori (1872–1942). It re-emerged with the liberation in controversial circumstances, perhaps while the Allies were concerned with the defeat of Fascism, perhaps with the active connivance of the Americans who saw the mafia as an anti-Communist bulwark. Always flexible, the mafia transmogrified, approximately in the late 1950s, from a rural to an essentially urban body that was de facto allied to the ruling Christian Democratic Party. This political protection frustrated the work of investigators, and made it easy for the mafia to engage in such activities as controlling tenders for public works, and exacting a pizzo (protection money). With the rise of the drug trade, the mafia, without losing contact with its roots, metamorphosed again 1103

MAFIA into a globalized multinational, with links to sister organizations in the United States and with drug growers in such countries as Colombia. The mafia can be defined as a form of organized crime, following codes and employing methods dictated by its own traditions, and operating simultaneously as a state and an antistate. The myth of the ‘‘golden age’’ of a benevolent mafia can be discounted. The mafia is of its essence parasitical, a ‘‘blackleg’’ body that exploits enterprise, aids property and power. It is no accident that in the 1950s the mafia allied itself with landowning interests to thwart governmental land-reform programs, or that peasant and trade union leaders have been among its targets. The main aim of mafia crime is self-enrichment and self-advancement, while the central difference between mafia and other forms of criminality lies in the relationship of complicity and connivance that, in its efforts to embed itself in governmental agencies, the mafia will seek to establish with political power. It was long believed that the mafia was a culture with no fixed organization, but the revelations of the pentito (repentant mafioso) Tommaso Buscetta (1928–2000) have compelled commentators to rewrite history. There is now a consensus that the mafia has, and has always had, a hierarchical structure with welldefined initiation rites. In spite of political connivance and the failures of the state, the history of resistance to the mafia is coterminous with the history of the mafia itself, but it was only in 1963 that the Italian Parliament set up an official commission, the Antimafia, to investigate the subject. Successive commissions introduced new laws, usually in response to

particular atrocities. The level of violence reached unprecedented levels in the 1990s, when the Corleone gang under Toto` Riina assumed overall control, but at that time the mafia met the determined opposition of a new breed of magistrate, led by Giovanni Falcone (1939–1992) and Paolo Borsellino (1941–1992), both of whom were involved in the 1986 maxitrial of 474 mafiosi, but both of whom died as mafia victims. The full commitment of the Italian state to eliminate the mafia died with them, and mafia power is still strong in Sicily. JOSEPH FARRELL Further Reading Biagi, Enzo, Il boss e` solo, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Blok, Anton, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974. Dickie, John, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004. Farrell, Joseph, Understanding the Mafia, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Franchetti, Leopoldo, and Sidney Sonnino, Inchiesta in Sicilia, new edition, Florence: Vallecchi, 1974. Gambetta, Diego, La mafia siciliana, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Hobsbawm, Eric, Primitive Rebels, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959. Hobsbawm, Eric, Bandits, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Lupo, Salvatore, Storia della Mafia: Dalle origin ai giorni nostri, Rome: Donzelli, 1993. Pezzino, Paolo, Una certa reciprocita`, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Pezzino, Paolo, Mafia: Industria della violenza, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995. Santino, Umberto, La cosa e il nome, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, 2000.

CARLO MARIA MAGGI (1630–1699) Together with Giovan Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) and before Carlo Porta (1775–1821), Milanese poet and dramatist Carlo Maria Maggi was the most notable forerunner of that Linea Lombarda (Lombard line) of the realist tradition that includes, with different linguistic registers, Alessandro Manzoni and Niccolo` Tommaseo, Carlo Pisani Dossi and Delio Tessa, and Carlo Emilio Gadda and Giovanni 1104

Testori. At the same time, Maggi was also a representative of the late poetics of the Italian Baroque and was well-aware of the forthcoming developments of Arcadian Petrarchism. Most famous for his dialect plays, Maggi was introduced to the theater by the Jesuits in Brera and was brought up in the Lombard capital during the decline and relative reactionary turn of the political-administrative

CARLO MARIA MAGGI order resulting from the Spanish domination. He found his main (though not exclusive) literary instrument in the local dialect, which he adopted especially for his theatrical production. This precise linguistic choice witnesses to his disenchantment and to his consciousness of the contemporary crisis, but is also a call to social reconstruction, and favors a popular kind of theater closer to improvisation comedy than to classical sixteenth-century drama. Indeed, the expressive, natural, and direct power of dialect in Maggi’s theater manages to render human beings and their habits as seen through the mirror of truth, thus endowing them with an exemplary function not devoid of a certain nostalgia for ‘‘the personal myth of a lost state of nature,’’ as critic Dante Isella notes (Introduction, 1994). It is precisely this lost state that Maggi sought to recall with the society he represented on the stage. The ‘‘middle’’ values that characterize his theater are expressed through the good-natured and wise distance of humour, and turn the conceptualism of the Baroque into the everyday practices of one’s fellow human beings, the humble people that Manzoni would also represent, thus finally producing a ‘‘bourgeois poetry’’ that already looks forward to the great theater of Carlo Goldoni. This poetic lesson would soon acquire a spiritual dimension in the erudite and hagiographic biography written by his friend Ludovico Antonio Muratori and published in 1700. In his first verse comedy, Il manco male (The Lesser Evil), written in 1694 and staged in 1695, Maggi adopted not only the Milanese dialect but also a sort of grotesque and heavy macaronic Latin. Il manco male is the story of a rich widow besieged by 10 suitors who decides to enter into the Widows’ College in order not to lose her freedom. In the end, only one wedding will be celebrated: that between two loyal servants. Thus, monastic isolation, the ‘‘lesser evil’’ of the title, brings together Christian ethics and a popular sentiment of the sacred in a profound distrust for human beings and their history. On the contrary, the theatrical dynamic in Maggi’s most popular comedy I consigli di Meneghino (Meneghino’s Advice), represented during the carnival season in 1697, is completely based on wordplay. Its weak plot concerns the archetypal Milanese character of Meneghin Tandœuggia, a no-nonsense servant and God-fearing man of the people who, however, is not above pointing out, through his witty and sharp use of language, why and how people often believe wrongly that they are good Christians.

Maggi wrote his dialect plays mostly in his later years—indeed, Isella has rightly called him ‘‘a conformist as a young man and innovator as an old man’’ (Introduction, 1964). These works were preceded by a widespread production of libretti for the Milanese opera; most of them were never published and a few were later destroyed by the author. Recently, critics such as Roberta Carpani have remarked upon the ‘‘local character’’ of these texts, and on their ‘‘temporary departure from the Venetian opera repertoire’’ for a new comical context of allusions and innuendos that could be understood only by local spectators (‘‘La storia sanata,’’ 1995). However, this specificity also prevented their more widespread diffusion. Maggi was a fertile and multilingual author. He composed lyrics according to the demands of the Jesuit-led cultural policy. With his Rime varie (Miscellaneous Verses, 1688), which attracted the praise of Muratori, he produced a poetry that, as the faithful transcription of a truth already given, is programmatically distant from the subversive richness of the poetics of the Baroque (he would later reject this poetic production and revise it through the use of dialect). Resorting to a careful and controlled rhetorical repertoire, Maggi replaced the ‘‘ingenious’’ figures of the Baroque with ‘‘pathetic’’ ones, while the intellectual relationship between the ‘‘wit’’ of the author and that of the reader was substituted by a correspondence of emotions. Pierantonio Frare has observed that ‘‘on the basis of the Christian rhetoric outlined by St. Augustine, Maggi re-establishes the link between sapientia and eloquentia, and thus aim at reconverting the reader’’ (‘‘La sincerita` degli affetti,’’ 1998).

Biography Born in Milan on May 3, 1630, the son of a rich merchant in gold and silk. Educated by the Jesuits in Brera. Studied civil and canon law at the University of Bologna, 1647–1650. Married Anna Maria Monticelli, with whom he had 11 children, 1656. Appointed member of the secretary of Senate of Milan, 1661; in this period, he wrote a great number of consulte, i.e., written counsels about Senate issues, which were all lost. Taught Latin and Greek at the Scuole Palatine, 1664. Member of Arcadia and of the Accademia della Crusca. Supervisor at the University of Pavia, 1676–1689. Died in Milan on April 22, 1699. STEFANO TOMASSINI 1105

CARLO MARIA MAGGI Selected Works Collections Rime varie di Carlo Maria Maggi, sacre, morali, eroiche, edited by Ludovico Antonio Muratori, 4 vols., Milan: Giuseppe Malatesta, 1700. Comedie e rime in lingua milanese del signor segretario Carlo Maria Maggi, 2 vols., Milan: Giuseppe Pandolfo Malatesta, 1701. Il teatro milanese, 2 vols., edited by Dante Isella, Turin: Einaudi, 1964. Le rime milanesi, edited by Dante Isella, Parma: Guanda, 1994.

Poetry ‘‘Rime varie,’’ 1688.

Plays Il manco male, 1695. Il Barone di Birbanza, 1697. I consigli di Meneghino, 1697. Il falso filosofo, 1698. Il Concorso de’ Meneghini, ca. 1699.

Libretti Ippolita, 1670. Augusto in Egitto, 1673.

Further Reading Carpani, Roberta, ‘‘La storia sanata. Il libretto di Trionfo d’Augusto in Egitto di Carlo Maria Maggi,’’ in La scena della gloria. Drammaturgia e spettacolo a Milano in eta` spagnola, edited by Annamaria Cascetta and Roberta Carpani, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1995.

Carpani, Roberta, Drammaturgia del comico. I libretti per musica di Carlo Maria Maggi nei ‘‘theatri di Lombardia,’’ Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1998. De Marchi, Emilio, Carlo Maria Maggi: Saggio critico, Milan: Vallardi, 1930. Frare, Pierantonio, ‘‘La sincerita` degli affetti: sulle Rime varie di Carlo Maria Maggi,’’ in Testo, 19 (1998): 45–74. Giannessi, Ferdinando, ‘‘La letteratura dialettale e la cultura,’’ in Storia di Milano, vol. 11, Il declino spagnolo (1630–1706), Rome: Fondazione Treccani degli Alfieri, 1958. Isella, Dante, Introduction to Carlo Maria Maggi, Il teatro milanese, 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1964. Isella, Dante, Introduction to Carlo Maria Maggi, Le rime milanesi, Parma: Guanda, 1994. Medici, Luigi, and Gian Antonio Maggi (editors), Carlo Maria Maggi poeta meneghino, Milan: La Famiglia Meneghina, 1930. Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, Vita di Carlo Maria Maggi, Milan: Giuseppe Pandolfo Malatesta, 1700. Petrella, Antonio, ‘‘Carlo Maria Maggi’s Theory of Comedy,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 12 (1969): 223–237. Pierce, Glenn Palen, The ‘‘Caratterista’’ and Comic Reform from Maggi to Goldoni, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1986. Sirch, Licia, ‘‘‘Qui si recita un’opra cantata.’ La partitura manoscritta del Trionpho di Cesare,’’ in La scena della gloria. Drammaturgia e spettacolo a Milano in eta` spagnola, edited by Annamaria Cascetta and Roberta Carpani, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1995. Zardin, Danilo, ‘‘Carlo Maria Maggi e la tradizione culturale milanese tra Sei e Settecento,’’ in Annali di Storia moderna e contemporanea, 3 (1997): 9–50.

VALERIO MAGRELLI (1957–) Along with his research activity and translations in the field of French literature, Valerio Magrelli is a poet in the post neoavant-garde environment at the end of the 1970s, even though his first collection, Ora serrata retinae, appeared in 1980 and was republished in 1996 along with his next two collections in the volume Poesie e altre poesie (1980– 1992). The title, Ora serrata retinae—a medical term that indicates the uneven margin of the retina beyond which the eye becomes capable of perception—brings to mind vision as a pivotal element of the poetic investigation. Among the five senses, in fact, Magrelli seems to have a preference 1106

for eyesight that, so to speak, has dilated beyond measure: ‘‘La mente... si ricopre di palpebre,’’ ‘‘la mano diventa pupilla’’ (The mind...covers itself with eyelids, the hand becomes pupil). The lyric voice takes a direct part in a poetic dialogue with reality that is not necessarily understood as an external entity, thereby turning out to be part of the same speaking entity, as well: ‘‘A volte mi scopro... oggetto tra gli oggetti,’’ he confesses, ‘‘inavvertitamente / sono arrivato alla fine / ad illustrarmi’’ (At times I discover myself... an object among objects, inadvertently / I arrived at the end / to make myself known). The expression ‘‘ora serrata retinae,’’ therefore, acts as both a perceptive

VALERIO MAGRELLI medium and as an object of perception, becoming the single anatomic unity in which the body of the poet is examined minutely in a study similar to the plastic ones of body art in the 1960s. From this point of view Magrelli’s poetic investigation assumes the appearance of an obscure alchemistic manipulation of natural elements rather than a chirurgic operation: He does not examine the material of the body, but its interaction and mutation at the point of contact with the lyric self: ‘‘La prima gemmazione dello spirito / e` dunque nella lacrima, / parola trasparente e lenta. / Secondo questa elementare alchimia / veramente il pensiero si fa sostanza / come una pietra o un braccio’’ (The first budding of the spirit / is therefore in the teardrop, / the word, transparent and slow. / According to this elementary alchemy / truly the thought becomes substance / like a stone or an arm). Extremely refined on its own, this interaction between body and mind assumes an apparently simple formal appearance because of the quotidian nature of many images and because of the choice of a free verse with strict rhythmic schemes. Yet it reveals itself to be highly controlled even in the most elementary lexical unities. The frequent alliterations are noticeable, as in this example, emblematic for its meaning and significance: ‘‘Preferisco venire dal silenzio / per parlare. Preparare la parola / con cura’’ (I prefer to come from silence / in order to speak. To prepare the word / with care). The incisive reiteration of the initial labial consonant is a choice that should raise the tone of the discourse, which otherwise remains at a middle level, thanks to the direct recourse to the essay form either with connections like ‘‘well’’ and ‘‘therefore,’’ or with a technical lexicon (‘‘logismografia’’). If in this collection a confrontation between the lyric self and the body-object is highlighted, in Nature venature (The Veins of Nature, 1987) a more radical clash is witnessed, revealed by the numerous terms that underline a spatial distance (abyss, cleft, lesion) that can also be temporal to the breaking into of memory, both personal and collective (with historical-literary quotations that fragment the form). The subjective self, moreover, now opens itself to new auditory perceptions, and the eyes, first capable of animating ‘‘la natura delle cose’’ (the nature of objects), now seem to impoverish them: ‘‘La sala da pranzo e` deserta / fissata da uno sguardo’’ (The lunch room is deserted / fixed by a look). The images are no longer flashing on the retina, but instead they are fixed, perhaps in the form of a drawing: ‘‘guardala...la moneta... sopra cui distingui / il volto...Il profilo sta fermo...

miracolosamente trattenuto / trattiene in se´ l’immagine’’ (look at it...the coin...on which you distinguish / the face....The profile is still...miraculously held / it holds in itself the image). The same elements that characterize Nature venature come through also in Esercizi di tiptologia (The Contagion of Matter, 1992). They are marked, however, by a heightened uneasiness. The self in Ora serrata retinae blends into the carnal material in an interactive and dynamic exchange as in ‘‘Io abito il mio cervello / come un tranquillo possidente le sue terre.... Il mio cervello abita in me / come un tranquillo possidente le sue terre’’ (I inhabit my brain / like a peaceful landowner does his land....My brain lives in me / like a peaceful landowner on his land). It is imprisoned in foreign forms, fallen in a covering that is a shroud. Didascalie per la lettura di un giornale (Captions for the Reading of a Newspaper) followed in 1999: The daily newspaper, symbol of reality and reflection of a world already broken up into news, exactly for its nature becomes the ideal object of a poetic venture that, in the passing from the ‘‘human’’ anatomy to the social one, unites with tragic nature an irony nourished by cynicism (Esteri), by a Hermetic dimension (Rebus), or even by a dignified one (citing in Latin). In the more recent Nel condominio di carne (In the Condominium of Flesh, 2003), however, the poet abandons poetry for prose, amplifying one of the main themes of his entire production: the ‘‘sensazione di incertezza, anzi, di inaffidabilita` rispetto al corpo’’ (sensation of uncertainty, or better, of unreliability with respect to the body), a body still ‘‘teatro della mutazione’’ (theater of mutation) but also ‘‘organismo infestato da pensieri’’ and ‘‘forma mutante tra le forme’’ (organism infested with thoughts, mutating form among forms) more and more divided from the lyric self. The self and the body are no longer the ‘‘tranquillo possidente’’ (tranquil landowner) cited earlier: The flesh has become an apartment house, the self its tenant. At the mutation of one, the migration of the other ends up reciprocating.

Biography Born in Rome on January 10, 1957; in 1984, earned a degree in philosophy from ‘‘La Sapienza’’ University in Rome with a dissertation in French literature; was researcher in French studies in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures 1107

VALERIO MAGRELLI at the Universita` di Pisa in 1990, and in French literature in the Department of Arabic, Islamic, and Mediterranean Studies at the Universita` di Napoli, L’Orientale, in 2004; from 2005 to the present Magrelli teaches at the Universita` di Cassino. Between 1987 and 1993, directed with Giuseppe Conte the poetry series ‘‘La Fenice’’ for Guanda publishing house, and since 1993 the trilingual series of the Writers Translated by Writers collection by Einaudi, an initiative for which in 1996 he was given by the president of the republic the National Award for Translation. He has received several awards, among them the Mondello prize for Ora serrata retinae, 1980; the Viareggio prize for Nature venature, 1987; the Montale award for Esercizi di tiptologia, 1992; and the Salzburg award for Poesie e altre poesie (1980–1992), 1996. In 2002, the Accademia dei Lincei conferred upon him the Antonio Feltrinelli award for Italian poetry. In 2004, he received the Thermes di Saint-Vincent (12th Edition) Literary Prize of French Studies; he collaborates with the cultural section of Il Messaggero, L’Unita`, and Diario; has translated texts by Ste`phane Mallarme´, Paul Vale´ry, Alfred Jarry, Rene´ Char, and Francis Ponge; his poetry has been translated into English, French, and Spanish; married in 1998 and has two children. LORENZA MIRETTI Selected Works Poetry Ora serrata retinae, 1980; as Nearsights: Selected poems, edited and translated by Anthony Molino, 1991. ‘‘Nature venature,’’ 1987. Esercizi di tiptologia, 1992; as Contagion of Matter, translated by Anthony Molino, 2000. Poesie (1980–1992) e altre poesie, 1996. ‘‘Didascalie per la lettura,’’ 1999.

Prose Nel condominio di carne, 2000.

Translations Paul Vale´ry, L’idea fissa o due uomini in mare, 1985. Claude Debussy, Il signor Croche antidilettante, 1986. Paul Verlaine, La buona canzone, 1986.

Other Profilo del Dada, 1990. La casa del pensiero: Introduzione all’opera di Joseph Joubert (1754–1824), 1995. Ultime tendenze della poesia italiana, 1995. Vedere vedersi: Modelli e circuiti visivi nell’opera di Paul Vale´ry, 2002.

Further Reading Bompiani, Ginevra, ‘‘I poeti degli anni Ottanta,’’ in Il verri (June 1989): 101–105. Bonito, Vitaniello, Il gelo e lo sguardo, Bologna: CLUB, 1996. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi (editors), Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1995, Milano: Mondatori, 1996. Inglese, Mario, Valerio Magrelli: Poesia come ricognizione, Ravenna: Longo, 2004. Lisa, Tommaso, Scrittori del riconoscimento: Su Ora serrata retinae di Valerio Magrelli, Rome: Bulzoni, 2005. Lorenzini, Niva, Il presente della poesia. 1960–1990, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Lorenzini, Niva (editor), Poesia del novecento italiano: Dal secondo dopoguerra ad oggi, Rome: Carrocci, 2003. Mattei, Piera, ‘‘Valerio Magrelli e la tiptologia del miope,’’ in L’abbraccio, gli inferi, edited by Fabio Pierangeli, Rome: Nuova Cultura, 1995. Pagnanelli, Remo, ‘‘Su Valerio Magrelli,’’ in Studi critici: Poesia e poeti italiani del secondo Novecento, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Porta, Antonio (editor), ‘‘Altre nature morte,’’ in Poesia degli anni Settanta, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979. Vicentini, Maria Isabella, Colloqui sulla poesia: Le ultime tendenze, Turin: Nuova ERI, 1991. Villanata, G. M., ‘‘Il vaso infranto: Poetica e ‘poetica della traduzione’ nel piu` recente Magrelli,’’ in Testo a fronte, 11 (October 1994): 77–82.

CLAUDIO MAGRIS (1939–) A Germanist, critic, essayist, narrator, translator, and playwright, Claudio Magris matured in an environment—the city of Trieste—rich in cultural stimuli. The world of his childhood and adolescence 1108

was in reality a border, a frontier, a city on the boundary between the Western World and Eastern Europe, a region for years dominated by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, yet full of diverse

CLAUDIO MAGRIS cultural influences: Jewish and Greek, Slavic and German, and, naturally, Italian. A city in which, extraordinarily, all of these cultures were able to coexist, often generated peculiar and innovative experiences. Along with the atmosphere of this multiethnic and multicultural city, the years of study at the university in Turin as well as his apprenticeship in Germany contributed to the intellectual development of the author, and guided him toward the study and the recovery of twentiethcentury Central European and Scandinavian literature, in which he identified a sort of metaphor for the crisis of contemporary civilization. Right from his first essay, Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna (The Hapsburg Myth in Modern Austrian Literature, 1963), the result of the elaboration of his university thesis, the author contributed to the diffusion, in Italy and abroad, of the ‘‘Hapsburg myth’’ and above all of the literature tied to the world and times of the AustroHungarian Empire. In a later study, Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale (Far from Where. Joseph Roth and the Eastern Jewish Tradition, 1971), Magris reconstructs the cultural history of Eastern Europe, focusing on Jewish writers, of whom he brings into particular focus the ambiguity of the diaspora, both a tragedy and a privilege to the uprooted immigrant for whom it is impossible to find a destination that will save him. Dietro le parole (Behind the Words, 1978) collects articles and prefaces in which the scholar deals with issues such as the comparison between classicism and avant-garde, or with the anarchist reactionary theater interpreted as a source of all nationalistic and Fascistic movements between the two World Wars, demonstrating his versatility as a critic. The collection of brief essays Itaca e oltre (Ithaca and Beyond, 1982) investigates the two antithetical directions of the voyage— physical, cultural, political—that is, nostos, the return, and escape, through the analysis of several great authors such as Italo Svevo—who became in a certain sense Trieste’s symbolic writer—Robert Musil, Henrik Ibsen, Gustave Flaubert, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. In this essay collection, the critical interpretation is harmoniously intertwined with autobiographical testimony and with political reflection. Finally, Utopia e disincanto (Utopia and Disenchantment, 1999), collects a wide selection of Magris’ essay production from 1974 to 1998. Through widely diverse texts, the current historical condition, the turning point of the end of the millennium, the role of the

intellectual today, and the concept of border are analyzed. Once again, great writers have a fundamental role in the critical discourse, from Goethe to Mann, from Dostoyevsky to Primo Levi and many others. With Illazioni su una sciabola (Inferences from a Sabre, 1984), a novella in which he narrates the epos of the Cossacks in Carnia during the last year of World War II, Magris crosses the dividing line between essay and narrative, offering an original form of writing in which narrative elements, historical discourse, and autobiographical references coexist. This technique is brought to perfection in the novel Danubio (Danube, 1986), which critics consider among his best works. Translated into 20 languages, it is variously defined as a survey, a travel story, and a narration with an autobiographical background, or as an essayistic investigation in which the author, following the course of the Danube River, crosses the Central European and Balkan world, depicting its numerous multicultural aspects, traditions, and historical vicissitudes as well as its natural and urban landscapes. Along its winding path, the river represents the multiplicity of spaces and of life, allowing for the evocation of a variety of figures—from Sissi (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) to Martin Heidegger, from Georg Luka´cs to Franz Kafka, from Louis Ferdinand Ce´line to Josef Mengele—who form a kind of cultural grid through which to interpret the complex reality of the Central European world. As Ernestina Pellegrini wrote, ‘‘With Danubio, Magris narrated in an extraordinarily complex literary form, which however offers itself to the reader with the freshness and agility of a ship’s log, his own revisiting as a sentimental traveler of the appointed places of his critical research’’ (Epica sull’acqua. L’opera letteraria di Claudio Magris, 1997). Un altro mare (A Different Sea, 1991) is the story of Enrico, a friend of the poet and philosopher Carlo Michelstaedter, who on the eve of World War I decides to abandon his city, Gorizia, and to embark for South America where he disappears in anonymity and solitude. Returning to his homeland after the fall of the Hapsburg Empire, Enrico must face a new historical reality. The narration, conducted in a dry and penetrating style, recounts the story of a love for life, which pessimistically, comes to the impossibility of living. If Danubio embraces an enormously vast geographic and cultural area, Microcosmi (Microcosms, 1999) guides us to the discovery of circumscribed lands that abound with very detailed 1109

CLAUDIO MAGRIS descriptions of the landscape and with stories of minimal existences, of which both animals and men were protagonists—coffee shop regulars and island inhabitants, the bear of Snow Mountain and the stray dog in the lagoon. Among the diverse themes that run through the work are the relationship between the landscape and the sense of time, identity and its uncertainty, and the continuous crossing of borders of every kind. Among the most recent works, the novel Alla cieca (Blindly, 2005) must be mentioned. In this work, Magris, through the story of numerous men, narrates the figure of the eternal rebel, at the mercy of the upheavals of history but also of his dreams of justice. History, myth, and memory are intertwined in a sort of voyage in time that travels the painful pathways of the soul in order to find a sense to history. Magris, lastly, has worked for the theater both as a translator (Ibsen, Schnitzler, Kleist, Buchner) and as a playwright. Among his theatrical works are Stadelmann (1988), the story of the last days of the life of Goethe’s servant, an ignorant and crude man who lives alone and forgotten by everyone in the squalid hospice of the poor in Jena, where he ages in the shadow of the memory of his master, and Le voci (The Voices, 1996), a monologue in which a man on the edge of madness listens to messages from female voices recorded on answering machines. Several of his shorter works, such as Illazioni su una sciabola and La mostra (The Exhibition, 2001) have recently been adapted for the stage.

Biography Born in Trieste on April 10, 1939; after his early education in his native city, he studied at the University of Turin where, in 1966, he graduated with a degree in German language and literature with a dissertation entitled Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, published the following year; after an apprenticeship at the Universita` di Freiburg, became professor of German literature at the University of Turin, 1970–1978; later moved to the University of Trieste, where he still teaches; collaborates with Il corriere della sera and with numerous other newspapers and specialized journals; awarded the Strega prize for Microcosmi, 1998; married the writer Marisa Madieri, who died in 1996, and with whom he had two children. Lives in Trieste. PAOLO QUAZZOLO 1110

Selected Works Novels Illazioni su una sciabola, 1984; as Inferences from a Sabre, translated by Mark Thompson, 1990. Danubio, 1986; as Danube, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1989. Un altro mare, 1991; as A Different Sea, translated by M. S. Spurr, 1995. Microcosmi, 1997; as Microcosms, translated by Ian Halliday, 1999. Alla cieca, 2005.

Short Stories ‘‘Il Conde,’’ 1993. ‘‘La mostra,’’ 2001.

Essays Il mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, 1963. Wilhelm Heinse, 1968. Tre studi su Hoffmann, 1969. Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraicoorientale, 1971. Dietro le parole, 1978. Itaca e oltre, 1982. Trieste. Un’identita` di frontiera, with Angelo Ara, 1982. L’anello di Clarisse: grande stile e nichilismo nella letteratura moderna, 1984. Utopia e disincanto. Saggi 1974–1998, 1999. L’infinito viaggiare, 2005.

Plays Stadelmann, 1988. Le voci, 1996.

Further Reading Avirovic, Ljiljana, and John Dodds (editors), Umberto Eco, Claudio Magris autori e traduttori a confronto. Atti del Convegno internazionale, Trieste, 27–28 November 1989, Udine: Campanotto, 1993. Cattaruzza, Claudio (editor), Dedica a Claudio Magris, Pordenone: Associazione provinciale per la prosa, 1999. De la Rica, Alvaro (editor), Estudio sobre Claudio Magris, Pamplona: EUNSA Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2000. Dupre´, Natalie, ‘‘Saggismo ed utopia in Danubio di Claudio Magris,’’ in Narrativa, 20–21 (2001): 217–227. Governatori, Licia, Claudio Magris: l’Ulisse contemporaneo, protagonista di una straordinaria avventura dello spirito: la sua opera dal 1963 al 1986, Milan: Sabaini, 1988. Governatori, Licia, Claudio Magris: l’opera saggistica e narrativa, Trieste: LINT, 1999. Lubrani, Stefania, Ritratto: Claudio Magris, Pescara: Tracce, 2001. Pellegrini, Ernestina, Epica sull’acqua: l’opera letteraria di Claudio Magris, Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 1997. Polezzi, Loredana, ‘‘Different Journeys along the River: Claudio Magris’s Danubio and Its Translation,’’ in Modern Language Review, 93, no. 3 (1998): 678–694. Trentini, Daria, ‘‘L’idea di Mitteleuropa nell’opera di Claudio Magris,’’ in Il Veltro, 46, no. 5–6 (2002): 539–553.

CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT)

CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) (1898–1957) Kurt Erich Suckert, a novelist and essayist who after 1925 assumed the pseudonym of Curzio Malaparte, is one of the most controversial and contradictory figures in modern Italian literature, known as much for his ideological militancy as for his writing. His unusual family background (his father was German) was also the basis for the construction of a unique self, as he constantly asserted his Italian essence by placing himself at the head of the currents of ‘‘magic realism’’ and then of the Strapaese movement. The key to his success, however, stems in his unusual combination of provincialism and worldliness (at times he even wrote his texts directly in French). Malaparte wore a variety of masks, often simultaneously: He was a soldier, a correspondent for the leading newspapers of his day, a Machiavellian confidant, perhaps a spy, a man of the world, a cynical moralist. Although he made his debut as an actor only in 1956, a year before his death, many of his actions are in fact theatrical, including the acceptance of his Italian Communist Party membership card directly from the hands of party secretary Palmiro Togliatti, and his conversion in extremis to the Catholic faith. After all, he maintained that at the root of genuine irony there always lies the attitude of the actor, participating in the lives of others while also winking at the public. The first mask worn by Malaparte, a young and ardent republican, is that of the santo maledetto (damned saint). The ‘‘damned saints’’ were the veterans of World War I, for the most part peasants or individuals from the lowest social classes, excluded from the Italian Risorgimento and marginalized by official society. Fighting in the trenches cemented the social conscience of these men, who were compelled by the password Viva Caporetto to bring an end to the conservative revolution initiated by the Great War. According to Malaparte, Fascism, unlike the Russian Revolution, favored an individual rather than collective rebellion. In Viva Caporetto! (Long Live Caporetto!), published in 1921 and immediately reissued

as La rivolta dei santi maledetti (The Rebellion of the Damned Saints), he wrote: Il fenomeno fascista mi ha dato ragione. Sono uno fra i pochi, uno fra i pochi rivoluzionari, che abbia sentito fin dal principio il fascismo non solo come una rivolta individualistica, ma come una rivoluzione diretta a liberare il popolo italiano dalla tirannia delle categorie politiche ed economiche The Fascist phenomenon proved that I was right. I am one of the few people, one of the few revolutionaries, who right from the beginning saw Fascism not only as an individualistic rebellion, but as a revolution directed at freeing the Italian people from political and economic categories.

Malaparte fought bravely in the war on the western front beside young people sent to the slaughter, and was himself injured in a gas attack. But by 1919 he was in Versailles in charge of the press office for the Italian mission, a role that allowed him a privileged view of the underhanded dealings of political history. He never abandoned the role of subtle geopolitical expert, ironically volunteering both as an advisor for the powerful and as a consultant for ordinary people who wished to understand the goings-on behind the scenes. In fact, the book Technique du coup d’e´tat (Coup d’e´tat: Technique of Revolution, 1931) is inspired by the lesson taught by another of what he would later call ‘‘maledetti toscani’’ (damned Tuscans), Niccolo` Machiavelli. As the author himself admitted on the occasion of the first Italian edition in 1948, the book would give him ‘‘gloria, quella povera cosa che e` la gloria’’ (glory, that cheap thing that is glory), but he would later come to hate it because it marked the origin of his isolation. In the 1920s, he had become an important figure in Fascist intellectual circles (he joined the party in September 1922), but after Mussolini’s rise to power he found himself increasingly relegated to the antibourgeois fringe of Fascism, and in particular to the Strapaese movement. This current included figures such as the journalist and publisher Leo Longanesi (1905–1957) and the painter Mino

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CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) Maccari (1898–1989), founder and director of the satirical journal Il selvaggio. Malaparte’s intention was to defend what he perceived as the true, revolutionary spirit of Fascism, which he identified with the people of the Italian heartland and in particular of his native Tuscany. As a consequence of his increasingly critical positions and of the publication of Technique du coup d’e´tat (immediately banned in Italy) he was arrested for anti-Fascist activities in 1933 and condemned to five years of confinement or internal exile, although he was subsequently pardoned thanks to the intercession of Count Galeazzo Ciano. He continued to work as a journalist, and in 1937 founded the journal Prospettive, which, unlike Il selvaggio, was open to European influences and reported from the war fronts of France, Croatia, and Russia during World War II. His masterpieces in fact originated in his experience at war: the novels Kaputt (1944) and La pelle (The Skin, 1949), constitute a sort of trilogy together with the posthumous and unfinished Mamma marcia (Rotten Mother, 1959). In his descriptions of the disasters of the war, Malaparte refers back to the gloomy style of Francisco Goya on the one hand, and on the other, to the grotesque gothic of Pieter Bruegel and of Hieronymus Bosch, by indulging with moralistic condescension in detailed description of the aberrations of conflict and the anatomy of horror. In Malaparte, historical characters become grotesque masks of the danse macabre that seems to trace its sinister spirals on the whole map of civilized Europe. Eastern Europe appears as a borderland between a refined civilization and a primitive culture of death only just touched by Christianity. La pelle, which treats the chaos and brutality of war, is set in Naples just after its liberation by the Anglo-American forces. References to real facts and places appear accidental, because of the emblematic and practically allegorical aim of the narration (in fact the town council of Naples asked for the writer Curzio Malaparte to be banned, and requested an official apology for having cast infamy on the city). But Naples had a whole civilization behind it, as Italy did: Here lies the root of the failure of Malaparte’s generation, nurtured by the cultural and political myths of Benito Mussolini, the self-appointed defender of the civilizing mission of Italians in the world in compensation for the incomplete Risorgimento, whose true aims he betrayed. Malaparte concludes that Italy cannot civilize anyone, nor can it be civilized. After all, war is nobler than hunger, and it is better to fight 1112

to avoid death than to fight to live. The shadow of the defeat of the fatherland, expressed by the author with aristocratic pietas, is also central, as is the dishonour that reached its peak with the armistice of 8 September 1943. Both praised and reviled, Malaparte’s war novels belong to the era of the European political novel. In an almost prophetic way, he expressed his disappointment with populism, which he had initially championed, during the last days of his illness. These final days were spent in Peking in contact with a peasant country that was advancing forcefully onto the historical scene, no longer centered on Europe. The result was the posthumous volume Io, in Russia e in Cina (Me, in Russia and in China, 1958). Malaparte’s evolution from a Fascist writer to a doubtful intellectual can be understood by visiting Villa Malaparte in Capri, the house that he designed in 1936, putting into practice the principles of rationalism. Looking beyond the two decades of Fascism, its architecture opens up existential horizons, and for this reason Jean-Luc Godard used it as the set of Le Me´pris (1963), the film based on Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo (Contempt, 1954). The charges of ambivalence and opportunism leveled against him, together with his wavering between populism and dandyism, do not so much discredit him from the vantage point afforded by historical distance. Rather, they appear as the sign of a biographically strong but ideologically weak individual. To justify this contradiction, unacceptable in the century of strong ideologies, Malaparte pushed ‘‘magic realism’’ to its extreme consequences. Behind reality and history, there is no ideology, but instead a primitive essence of being that resists all desecrations. In contrast to his one-time associate Massimo Bontempelli, a firm supporter of the modernist movement, Malaparte intended to test the power of ‘‘magic realism.’’ He thus urged the form beyond the limits of good prose and safe bourgeois environments, into the context of violence and cruelty expressed in the collective madness of totalitarianism and of war. However, Malaparte’s heart remained in Tuscany, where he set his only film Cristo proibito (The Forbidden Christ, 1950), and which he described in a 1968 interview to Giampaolo Martelli as ‘‘una regione d’Italia dove la natura e` magra, severa, essenziale, nuda. L’Italia di Giotto, di Masaccio, di Piero della Francesca: povera d’alberi, di acque, nuda di messe, una distesa ondeggiante di crete, dove vive un popolo pieno di una profonda morale’’ (a region of Italy where nature is scant, austere, parsimonious, bare.

CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) The Italy of Giotto, of Masaccio, of Piero della Francesca: lacking in trees, lacking in water, without crops, a rolling expanse of clay, where there lives a population full of profound morals).

Opere scelte, edited by Luigi Martellini, Milan: Mondadori, 1997.

Biography

Fiction

Born in Prato on 9 June 1898, the son of Erwin and Evelina Perelli. Completed secondary school at the prestigious boarding school Cicognini in Prato, where D’Annunzio was also a student, and became a sympathizer of the Republican Party. At the outbreak of the war, left for France with a legion of volunteers, 1914. Enrolled in the Italian army, 1915, and served on the frontline throughout the war, participating in the disastrous rout of Caporetto, 1917. As a journalist, followed the works of the Versailles Peace Conference, 1919. Left the Republican Party to join the Fascist Party, 1922. Founded the journal La conquista dello Stato, 1924; coedited 900 with Massimo Bontempelli, 1926; edited L’Italia letteraria, 1929–1931. The publication in installments of the satirical Don Camale`o was suspended by Fascist censorship, 1928; editor of the newspaper Il Mattino of Naples, and then of La Stampa of Turin, 1929. Arrested and condemned to five years of internment in Lipari, 1933. Released, rejoined the editorial staff of Il corriere della sera, 1934. Founded the journal Prospettive, 1937. In East Africa as a correspondent, 1939. Called to arms, served on the French front, June, 1940. Afterwards, wrote reports on the war operations in the Balkans and on the Russian front. The contents of his articles caused his arrest by the Gestapo and he was handed over to the Italian police. After Mussolini’s fall, he was arrested by order of the Badoglio government. Served as a liaison officer in Badoglio’s army with the Anglo-American command, 1943–1945. After the war, became involved in theater and cinema and continued traveling to Latin America, Russia, and China. Died in Rome on 19 July 1957 of lung cancer. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works Collections Opere complete di Curzio Malaparte, edited by Enrico Falqui, 10 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1957. L’arcitaliano e tutte le altre poesie, edited by Enrico Falqui, Florence: Vallecchi, 1963. Malaparte, edited by Edda Suckert Ronchi, 12 vols., Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1991–1996.

Poetry ‘‘L’arcitaliano,’’ 1928. ‘‘Il battibecco: inni satire epigrammi,’’ 1949. Avventure di un capitano di sventura, 1927. Sodoma e Gomorra, 1931. Fughe in prigione, 1936. Sangue, 1937. Donna come me, 1940. Il sole e` cieco, 1947. Kaputt, 1944; as Kaputt, translated by Cesare Foligno, 1946. Don Camale`o, 1946. La pelle, 1949; as The Skin, translated by David Moore, 1952. Mamma marcia, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1959. Il ballo al Cemlino e altri inediti di romanzo, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1971.

Plays Das Kapital, 1949. Du coˆte´ de chez Proust, in Das Kapital, 1949.

Nonfiction Viva Caporetto!, 1921; rpt. as La rivolta dei santi maledetti, 1921; expanded, 1923. L’Europa vivente: teoria storica del Sindacalismo nazionale, 1923. Italia barbara, 1925. Technique du coup d’e´tat, translated by Juliette Bertrand, 1931; as Coup d’e´tat: Technique of Revolution, translated by Sylvia Saunders, 1932; first Italian edition as Tecnica del colpo di Stato, 1948. Le bonhomme Le´nine, translated by Juliette Bertrand, 1932; first Italian edition as Lenin buonanima, 1962. Il Volga nasce in Europa, 1943; as The Volga Rises in Europe, translated by David Moore, 1957. Maledetti toscani, 1956. Io, in Russia e Cina, 1958. Benedetti italiani, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1961. Viaggi fra i terremoti, edited by Enrico Falqui, 1963. Diario di uno straniero a Parigi, 1966. Muss: Ritratto di un dittatore. Il grande imbecille, edited by Giuseppe Pardini, 1999.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, and Vittoria Baroncelli (editors), Curzio Malaparte: il narratore, il politologo, il cittadino di Prato e dell’Europa, Naples: CUEN, 2000. Biondi, Marino, Scrittori e miti totalitari: Malaparte, Pratolini, Silone, Florence: Polistampa, 2002. Cavallo, Luigi, Soffici e Malaparte: vento d’Europa a strapaese, Poggio a Caiano: Comune di Poggio a Caiano, 1999. Di Biase, Carmine, Curzio Malaparte: la rivolta del santo maledetto, Naples: CUEN, 1999. Grana, Gianni, Curzio Malaparte, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Grana, Gianni, and Vittoria Baroncelli (editors), Malaparte scrittore d’Europa, Prato: Marzorati, 1992.

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CURZIO MALAPARTE (KURT ERICH SUCKERT) Guerri, Giordano Bruno, L’arcitaliano. Vita di Curzio Malaparte, Milan: Bompiani, 1980. Guerri, Giordano Bruno, Il Malaparte illustrato, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Hope, William, Curzio Malaparte: The Narrative Contract Strained, Market Harborough: Troubadour, 2000. Martelli, Giampaolo, Curzio Malaparte, Turin: Borla, 1968. Martellini, Luigi, Invito alla lettura di Curzio Malaparte, Milan: Mursia, 1977. McDonough, Michael (editor), Malaparte: A House Like Me, New York: Clarkson Potter, 1999. Pardini, Giuseppe, Curzio Malaparte: Biografia politica, Minal and Trento: Luni Editrice, 1998. Talamona, Marida, Casa Malaparte, Milan: CLUP, 1990.

LA PELLE, 1949 Novel by Curzio Malaparte

The first chapter of La pelle (The Skin) foreshadows elements that give the work coherence, beginning with the ambiguous moral character of the pseudo-autobiographic narrator, Malaparte (after 8 September 1943, the writer, like the narrator, joined the new Italian army as an officer under Marshall Badoglio). The character Malaparte assumes the role of interpreter and mediator between languages that cannot communicate, an incommunicability that is not only linguistic (although English and French alternate with Italian throughout the novel) but first and foremost conceptual. Even a reacquired democratic freedom is not enough to bring together the ‘‘conquerors’’ and the ‘‘vanquished.’’ The antithesis is triggered rather by the difference between a modern American mentality, based on genuinely Christian principles, and the irreducible heritage of older civilizations, founded on pre-Christian cults of fertility and orgiastic rites. Set in Naples in October 1943, the novel describes the chaos and desolation of a city ravaged by war and social pestilence. The freedom brought by the American army to an ancient city (a city that survived modernization apparently unchanged) expresses itself in the form of anarchy and madness, opening a Pandora’s box of unfulfilled desires and a renewed thirst for life. The scenes of the ‘‘plague’’ (La peste was the original title of the 1114

book, discarded after the publication of Albert Camus’ novel of the same title) and of the rampant corruption are observed by the Europeanized American officers with amusement, while the common soldiers, and in particular the AfricanAmerican troops, are sucked into the magma that seems to devour any residual certainty about the war, including the conviction that a losing population is also a submissive one. On the contrary, the winners literally become the slaves of the defeated, as in the market of the black soldiers who are at the center of a paradoxical and anachronistic Neapolitan slave trade. Not even the landscape, dominated by the threatening Vesuvius and free of tourist cliche´s, escapes the universal squalor. The representation of the wickedness of nature directly recalls the pessimism of Giacomo Leopardi’s La ginestra (The Ginestra, 1836) and expresses Malaparte’s contempt for the faith in human progress. In fact, the choice of Naples as setting for a modern ‘‘plague’’ of great symbolic value is not due only to the historical reality of its liberation: More importantly, the author was wellaware that he was referring to one of the privileged subjects of Italian prose, by authors ranging from Giovanni Boccaccio to Alessandro Manzoni. This tension, however, is fleeting, as behind the tradition there lies the brutal reality of war and conquest, with its grotesque deviations from the norms of human rights, trampled by the conflict like a corpse by a tank, crushed like a ‘‘bandiera di pelle umana’’ (‘‘flag of human skin’’). This scene was conveyed in its unprecedented violence by Liliana Cavani’s cinematic adaptation of the novel in 1981, with Marcello Mastroianni in the role of the protagonist. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Editions First edition: La pelle, Milano: Aria d’Italia, 1949. Other editions: La pelle, expanded edition by Enrico Falqui, Florence: Vallecchi, 1960; edited by Luigi Martellini in Curzio Malaparte, Opere scelte, Milan: Mondadori, 1997. Translation: as The Skin, translated by David Moore, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, Introduction to Curzio Malaparte, La pelle, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘‘La pelle’ di Curzio Malaparte,’’ in Di giorno in giorno: Note di letteratura contemporanea (1945–1954), Milan: Garzanti, 1954.

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) Covino, Sandra, ‘‘La pelle di Malaparte: i procedimenti della prosa e il modello dannunziano,’’ in South Carolina Review, 14, no. 2 (1999): 215–259. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Il mito di Babele in La pelle di Curzio Malaparte: Pathos, veggenza, e l’invenzione nel racconto cinematografico,’’ in Rivista di studi italiani, 19, no. 2 (2001): 219–232.

Pardini, Giuseppe, Curzio Malaparte: Biografia politica, pref. Francesco Perfetti, Milan-Trento: Luni Editrice, 1998. Parente, Luigi, ‘‘Una citta` contro. La polemica NapoliMalaparte nel secondo dopoguerra,’’ in Italia contemporanea, 215 (1999): 303–324.

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) (1927–) Malerba is the pen name of Luigi Bonardi, who began to publish fiction in the 1960s after having collaborated on many film scripts from 1950 on in Rome, the center of Italian filmmaking to which he moved in that year. A supremely humorous and inventive writer, Malerba might fairly be called a ‘‘psychosomatic’’ author in the sense that the rational mind and the unruly body form a complex unity in his creation of verbal worlds in which illogical logic and other oxymora, as well as the somatic realm, reign supreme. Malerba’s fiction contests common sense and complacency, and is characterized by the writer’s questioning stance vis-a`-vis power structures, so-called ‘‘reality,’’ and the givens of both life and art. Malerba’s first fictional work, La scoperta dell’alfabeto (The Discovery of the Alphabet) appeared in 1963, the same year in which the neoavant-garde group known as the Gruppo 63 had its first meeting of writers and critics in Palermo. The volume is a collection of short stories whose protagonists are peasants from the plains around Parma (Malerba’s region of origin) and whose temporal setting is World War II. It might seem that Malerba’s choice of setting and characters in these stories would align them with certain neorealist techniques and thematics, but his tales move far from the tenets of any recognizable realism, into the estranging elements inherent in life and so wittily used by Malerba throughout his career. In the first story, which gives the volume its title, Ambanelli, an old peasant, wants to learn to read and write, but he soon puts into question the logic of the alphabet. Using the technique of estrangement a` la Brecht, Malerba challenges a basic given of language, which is itself allied with the structures of

power that control and shape society. With the astuteness of a practical man who doubts anything that seems to be without purpose or reason, Ambanelli, whose name suggests ‘‘ambivalence’’ or ‘‘ambiguity,’’ asks the boss’ son, who is giving him reading lessons, why the letters are in the order they are. The boy can only respond that it is for convenience’s sake, but Ambanelli is not satisfied, and maintains his view of the alphabet as ‘‘illogical.’’ Nonetheless, he learns enough to be able to write his name and to recognize 100 or so words, which he greets as old friends when he sees them in print. This story is, in retrospect, emblematic of what will become one of the most Malerbian of qualities, the putting into question of the very instrument of his art: language itself. In fact, Malerba is an author of works that contain many more questions than answers, and he always seeks to create a certain sense of unease in his readers, who are forced to rethink ‘‘common sense’’ and many givens of everyday life, such as the alphabet. As critic Maria Corti noted, Malerba’s most typical protagonists do not appear in his first book (Il viaggio testuale, 1978). It is only in his second and in some subsequent works that a type of protagonist is born who will become recurrent: the neurotic, even psychotic, visionary who has a very peculiar view of reality and a very particular mode of self-expression. Malerba first creates such a protagonist in his debut novel, Il serpente (The Serpent, 1966). He tells a very confounding story, which is a sort of mystery tale made up of bizarre occurrences, as recounted from the first-person paranoic perspective of the main character. This man ostensibly has a love affair with a woman named Miriam, for example, but she may well be 1115

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) a figment of his imagination. He asserts specific facts about his wife, only to proclaim later that he never had a wife. The novel ends up negating all of its own assertions, and we are left with a book that has consumed itself, just as the protagonist maintains that he has consumed Miriam in a cannibalistic act motivated by his overpowering desire to possess her completely. Malerba’s second novel, Salto mortale (What Is This Buzzing, Do You Hear It Too?, 1968), has as protagonist one ‘‘Giuseppe called Giuseppe,’’ who believes that he has discovered a murder, which he himself may or may not have committed. Again using the giallo or mystery story mode, Malerba constructs a labyrinthine world of multiple ‘‘Giuseppes’’ and a woman whose name constantly transforms from one rosebased appellation to another. In these and other early novels and stories, Malerba uses a number of estranging techniques that keep realism at bay: repetition of words and phrases; excessive use of the interrogative form; extensive digressions; constant shifts from indirect to direct discourse. An extreme example of estrangement is a talking phallus as protagonist in the novel, Il protagonista (The Protagonist, 1973). Humor is also employed, but it is of the sort that renders readers uneasy, just like the author himself, who has stated that he often writes in a state of great uneasiness. During the 1970s, Malerba was very prolific, writing a number of collections of short stories, novels, and books for children. His diverse interests are evident in the range of themes he uses in these works: ancient China in Le rose imperiali (The Imperial Roses, 1974); the Middle Ages in Il pataffio (Mish Mash, 1978) and Storie dell’anno Mille (Stories of the Year One Thousand, 1973), which he wrote with Tonino Guerra; bourgeois life in contemporary Rome in Dopo il pescecane (After the Shark, 1979); children’s classics in Pinocchio con gli stivali (Pinocchio’s Boots, 1977). From the early novels and short stories written during the 1960s when Malerba, like many other Italian authors, was deeply involved in neoavantgarde and neoexperimental techniques, and from the eclectic works of the 1970s, the writer moved in the 1980s toward an explicit consolidation of his abiding interest in dreams, as well as in politics. Diario di un sognatore (Diary of a Dreamer, 1981) and Il pianeta azzurro (The Blue Planet, 1986) are, respectively, a record of the author’s dreams as dreamed over a year, and a prescient novel about contemporary political corruption a` la Tangentopoli, the scandals of which hit Italy shortly after the 1116

book appeared. In the 1990s, Malerba displayed a strong interest in writing historically based fiction in which, however, his penchant for contestation, the interrogation of givens, and the exploration of the strangeness of the real continued. Novels such as Il fuoco greco (Greek Fire, 1990) and Itaca per sempre (Ithaca forever, 1997) reveal Malerba’s historical bent; both books make extensive use of historical sources, albeit heavily fictionalized. In 1996, a collection of essays concerning the role of the intellectual and of the writer in modern society appeared under the title Che vergogna scrivere (How Shameful to Write); the short pieces included in this volume are among some of the most acute observations on the decline of the intelligentsia’s leadership role across time, as art and the life of the mind have been pushed more and more to the margins of Western society. Always an enthusiastic voyager, Malerba published volumes in which his curiosity about and affection for foreign travel are displayed, in lively essays and personal anecdotes: Il viaggiatore sedentario (The Sedentary Traveler, 1993) and Citta` e dintorni (Cities and Surroundings) are examples of this side of Malerba’s ever active and inquisitive intelligence. His most recent work includes Il circolo di Granada (The Circle of Granada, 2002), a novel set in nineteenth-century Spain; La composizione del sogno (The Composition of the Dream, 2002), which gathers together his writings on dreams, one of his topics of abiding interest; and Ti saluto filosofia (I Greet You, Philosophy, 2004), a collection of essayistic stories in which Malerba’s disconcerting comic sensibility is joined to his deeply philosophical bent. Luigi Malerba is one of contemporary Italy’s most prolific and accomplished writers of prose fiction. He has never stopped exploring new modes of expression, and interrogating the strangeness of reality, be it in the realm of dream life, in past history, or in contemporary social and political life. His combination of serious ratiocination and carnal exuberance is unique in modern Italian letters, and his mastery of the craft of narrative prose puts him in the forefront of Italy’s pantheon of great prose masters. Malerba has written books for children as well, and his contribution to Italian cinema, as a screenwriter and occasionally as a director, is also important. Like Ennio Flaiano, he epitomizes the interchangeability of the work of a writer with that of the screenwriter, although he contributed primarily to the cinematic adaptations of Alberto Lattuada, and the erotic comedies of Pasquale Festa Campanile. Both the dream-like

LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) qualities associated with film, as well as cinema’s materiality certainly must hold tremendous appeal for Malerba, who is equally attracted to the abstractions of the oneiric and the concreteness of material and corporeal reality. Writing often for journals and newspapers, he has enlivened the daily reading life of thousands, and he has always been a generous respondent in interviews and colloquia with academic scholars and students of Italian literature, thus providing his readers with many direct insights into his creativity. In his travels, he has brought knowledge about Italian letters to audiences in many European venues, as well as to American and Asian publics. Always inventive and often disconcerting in their challenge to complacency, Malerba’s books stimulate, entertain, and provoke thought, and have been rightly honored with many prizes in recognition of their excellence. Luigi Malerba is a modern classic. His works are widely translated around the world.

Biography Born 11 November 1927 in Berceto (Parma). Studied law at the University of Parma and received his undergraduate degree there in 1950; moved to Rome, 1950; cowrote and directed (with Antonio Marchi) the film Donne e soldati (Women and Soldiers), 1955; he ran an advertising firm that carried out the first research in Italy on subliminal advertising, 1959–1963; married Anna Lapenna, 1962; has two children, Pietro and Anna; cofounded the Cooperativa Scrittori (Writers’ Cooperative), 1973. Has been awarded numerous literary prizes, among which the Me´dicis for Salto mortale, the Mondello for Il pianeta azzurro, the Grinzane Cavour for Testa d’argento, the Flaiano for Il fuoco greco, and the Viareggio for Le pietre volanti. Extensive travels to America, Western Europe, and Asia throughout his adult life. Divides his time between Rome and his farm on the outskirts of Orvieto. REBECCA WEST Selected Works Fiction La scoperta dell’alfabeto, 1963. Il serpente, 1966; as The Serpent, translated by William Weaver, 1968. Salto mortale, 1968; as What Is This Buzzing, Do You Hear It Too?, translated by William Weaver, 1969. Il protagonista, 1973.

Storie dell’anno Mille (with Tonino Guerra), 1973. Le rose imperiali, 1974. Mozziconi, 1975. Pinocchio con gli stivali, 1977. Storiette, 1977. Il pataffio, 1978. Dopo il pescecane, 1979. La storia e la gloria, 1979. Le galline pensierose, 1980. Diario di un sognatore, 1981. C’era una volta la citta` di Luni, 1982. Storiette tascabili, 1984. Il pianeta azzurro, 1986. Testa d’argento, 1988. I cani di Gerusalemme (with Fabio Carpi), 1988. Il fuoco greco, 1990. Le pietre volanti, 1992. Le maschere, 1995. La mia donna ideale, 1996. Itaca per sempre, 1997. Avventure, 1997. La superficie di Eliane, 1999. Il circolo di Granada, 2002.

Other Le parole abbandonate: Un repertorio dialettale emiliano, 1977. Cina Cina, 1985. Il viaggiatore sedentario, 1993. Che vergogna scrivere, 1996. Interviste impossibili, 1997. Citta` e dintorni, 2001. La composizione del sogno, 2002. Ti saluto filosofia, 2004.

Films Donne e soldati (with Antonio Marchi), 1955. Corrida, 1966.

Screenplays Il cappotto, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1952. La lupa, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1953. La spiaggia, dir. Alberto Lattuada, 1954. Dove vai tutta nuda, dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1969. Come perdere una moglie e trovare un’ amante, dir. Pasquale Festa Campanile, 1978.

Further Reading Almansi, Guido, La ragion comica, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986. Ballerini, Rosalaura, Malerba e la topografia del vuoto, Chieti: Vecchio Faggio, 1988. Cannon, JoAnn, Postmodern Italian Fiction: The Crisis of Reason in Calvino, Eco, Sciascia, Malerba, LondonToronto: Associated University Presses, 1989. Colonna, Marco, et al. (editors), Luigi Malerba, ManduriaBari-Rome: Lacaita Editore, 1994. Corti, Maria, Il viaggio testuale: Le ideologie e le strutture semiotiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Luigi Malerba: Una scomessa con il reale,’’ in Autografo, 13 (1988): 3–21. Gemelli, Monica, and Felice Piemontese (editors), L’invenzione della realta`: Conversazioni su letteratura e altro, Naples: Guida Editore, 1994. Guglielmi, Angelo, ‘‘Il serpente,’’ in Vero e Falso, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968.

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LUIGI MALERBA (LUIGI BONARDI) Heyer-Caput, Margherita, Per una letteratura della riflessione: Elementi filosofico-scientifici nell’opera di Luigi Malerba, Berne-Stuttgart-Vienna: Edizioni Paul Haupt, 1994. Mauri, Paolo, Malerba, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977. Muzzioli, Francesco, Malerba: La materialita` dell’immaginazione, Rome: Bagatto, 1988. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura del benessere, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973. Petrignani, Sandra, Fantasia e fantastico, Milan: Camunia, 1985.

Schneider, Marilyn, ‘‘To Know is to Eat: A Reading of Il serpente,’’ in Yale Italian Studies, 2 (Winter 1978): 71–84. Trevisan, Elisabetta, Violenza e immaginazione nella prosa di Luigi Malerba, New York-Ottawa-Toronto: Legas, 1996. West, Rebecca, ‘‘The Poetics of Plenitude: Malerba’s Diario di un sognatore,’’ in Italica, 3 (Autumn 1985): 201–213. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Come One, Come All: Malerba’s Diffuse Fictions,’’ in The Lion and The Unicorn, 10 (1986): 95–110.

MAN OF SMOKE See Il Codice di Perela` (Work by Aldo Palazzeschi)

THE MANDRAKE See La Mandragola (Work by Niccolo` Machiavelli)

GIANNOZZO MANETTI (1396–1459) Giannozzo Manetti was a Florentine merchant and diplomat and a prestigious Humanist of the early quattrocento. Renowned for his vast and eclectic culture, he made contributions chiefly in the fields of translation, oration, and ethical writing. He was the initiator of Hebrew studies, and his translations of the Psalms from the original text rather than from the Vulgate set the basis for the development of Humanist Biblical exegesis. A significant part of Manetti’s literary production consists of orations written during his political and diplomatic career in 1118

Florence between the 1430s and 1440s. Among the most significant ones, delivered in vernacular but published in Latin, are the orations to Siena and Venice, those to Alfonso of Aragon and Nicholas V, the Oratio ad Federicum imperatorem (Oration to the Emperor Frederick, 1452), and the funeral oration to Leonardo Bruni (1444), all of which show Manetti’s support of the oligarchy of the Florentine republic. His conservative political views rest on the idea that the earthly city should reflect heavenly order, and that only an efficiently

GIANNOZZO MANETTI organized government can guarantee the peace. Manetti extends to the practical realm the Humanist idea that if man was created in the image of God, through free will he ‘‘makes’’ himself in His likeness. Similarly, by applying the same concept to the city, man builds the earthly city in the image of the divine, and the arts are the instruments to realize this design. Thus, the Humanist notion that man is the ‘‘knot’’ tying Earth and Heaven finds in Manetti a political equivalent. While serving as a public official and ambassador of the Florentine republic, Manetti wrote historical works of Humanist inspiration such as De illustribus longaevis (On Illustrious Old Men, 1439), describing the lives of men of great longevity from biblical, pagan, and Christian sources, as well as the Vita Socratis et Senecae (Lives of Socrates and Seneca, 1440), and the Chronicon pistoriensis (History of Pistoia, 1446). Also notable are his biographies of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio written in 1440, in which Manetti abandons the binary model followed by Leonardo Bruni to include Boccaccio, whom he praises for having introduced the study of Greek to Italy. He is the first to bring together the ‘‘Three Florentine Crowns.’’ His biographies present ideal Humanist models and offer good illustration of Manetti’s style of composition, based on an accumulation of heterogeneous sources. Among Manetti’s literary works worthy of mention are his Dialogus consolatorius (Consoling Dialogue), on the death of his son Antonio, and the Dialogus in symposio (Dialogue at a Banquet, 1448). Set 100 years after the Decameron, the Dialogus in symposio discusses the moral implications of two tales, Bruni’s Latin translation of Boccaccio’s novella of Tancredi and Ghismonda (Decameron IV,1), and Bruni’s complementary story of Seleucus and Anthiocus, based on classical sources and written in vernacular. While Bruni combined these two stories to illustrate the moral superiority of classical over contemporary models from a multifaceted Humanist perspective, Manetti brings the dialogue back to the Augustinian model, where an arbiter evaluates two opposite views on a moral issue, thus submitting classical ethics to Christian doctrine. Manetti’s most famous work is the De dignitate et excellentia hominis (On the Dignity and Excellence of Man), written in 1452 and first printed in 1532. On the occasion of Manetti’s ambassadorship to Naples in 1452, King Alfonso of Aragon, probably dissatisfied with a previous work by his secretary and historian Bartolomeo Facio (ca. 1400–1457), asked him to write on the same topic. In the traditional genre of a response to Pope

Innocent III’s De contemptu mundi (On the Contempt of this World) of the late twelfth century, Manetti’s De dignitate et excellentia hominis illustrates better than any other contemporary treatise the Humanist idea of man as carrying on the divine work of Creation. Although it assembles a number of heterogeneous sources, from Lactantius to Cicero to Philo the Jew, the originality of De dignitate et excellentia hominis consists in the fact that the arts are considered the instrument through which man participates in perfecting divine Creation. Although the theology of incomplete creation is present in patristic exegesis, the role that Manetti attributes to art and humankind reveals his learned Humanist formation. The treatise was condemned by the Inquisition in 1584. In 1453, Pope Nicholas V nominated Manetti apostolic secretary and commissioned from him a new translation of the Bible. A pioneer in Hebrew studies and Biblical scholarship, from 1455 to 1458 he translated the Psalms and the New Testament and wrote his Apologeticus (Apologue) in defense of his philological method of translation. Manetti’s biblical exegesis relies on the application of philological textual criticism to the Scriptures. He argues that the biblical translator must seek the middle way between translation ad verbum (according to verbal expression) and ad sensum (according to the meaning). In 1455, Manetti wrote a biography of Pope Nicholas V, illustrating the pontiff’s Humanist views in redesigning Roman architecture and the Vatican Library. He collaborated with the pope on the library project by significantly contributing to the collections of Greek and Hebrew texts, illustrating in Adversus Iudeos et gentes pro catholica fide (Against Jewish and Pagans for the Catholic Faith, 1454) his belief that Judaic and pagan traditions are both valuable to Christianity. His translations also include Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, and Magna Moralia.

Biography Born in Florence on 5 May 1396 to a Florentine family of bankers and merchants, Manetti remained in the mercantile profession all his life, but he also cultivated the studia humanitatis, studying Greek with Ambrogio Traversari and, from 1442, Hebrew with Immanuel Ben Abraham of San Miniato. His wealth and fame led to a diplomatic career in Florence and a career as apostolic secretary in Rome. A supporter of the Medici, served Florence as vicar of Pescia (1440), Scarperia (1452–1453), and as captain of Pistoia (1446–1447). Elected several 1119

GIANNOZZO MANETTI times in the most important councils of the commune, such as the Eight of Security (1440–1441) and the Ten of War (1453). His fame as a Humanist led the Florentines to send him as ambassador on diplomatic missions to popes Eugenius IV and Nicholas V (1441–1453), to King Alfonso of Aragon (1443–1451), and to Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, lord of Rimini (1448). Charged with heavy taxes, in 1450 accepted the offer of Pope Nicholas V to work on a new translation of the Bible. The hostility of powerful Florentines such as Luca Pitti and Niccolo` Soderini prevented his return to Florence after the death of Pope Nicholas V in 1455. Then moved to Naples, to the court of Alfonso of Aragon and, after his death in 1458, of his son Ferdinand. In this same year accepted appointment as apostolic secretary to the newly elected Pope Pius II. Died in Naples on 26 October 1459. SUSANNA BARSELLA Selected Works Collections Giannozzo Manetti: das Corpus der Orationes, edited by Heinz Willi Wittschier, Ko¨ln: Bo¨hlau, 1968. Biographical Writings, edited and translated by Stefano U. Baldassarri and Rolf Bagemihl, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Historical Treatises De illustribus longaevis, 1439; edited by Hans Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 1955. Vita Socratis et Senecae, 1440; critical edition by Alfonso De Petris, 1979. Chronicon pistoriensis, 1446; edited by Ludovico A. Muratori, 1731.

Humanistic Treatises Dialogus consolatorius, 1438; edited by Alfonso De Petris, 1983.

Dialogus in symposio, 1448. De dignitate et excellentia hominis (1452), 1532; critical edition by Elizabeth Riley Leonard, 1975; as On the Dignity of Man, translated by Bernard Murchland in Two Views of Man, 1966. Adversus Iudeos et gentes pro catholica fide (1454); edited by Hans Baron in The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 1955. Apologeticus (1455–1458); edited by Alfonso De Pretis, 1981.

Biographies Specimen historiae litterariae florentinae saeculi decimitertii, ac decimiquarti sive vitae Dantis, Petrarchae ac Boccaccii (1440); first edition, 1747; edited by Stefano U. Baldassarri, 2003. De vita ac gestis Nicolai quinti summi Pontificis (1455); first edition, 1734; critical edition by Anna Modigliani, 2005.

Further Reading Badaloni, Nicola, ‘‘Filosofia della mente e filosofia delle arti in Giannozzo Manetti,’’ in Critica storica, 2 (1963): 395–450. Botley, Paul, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti and Desiderius Erasmus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Dro¨ge, Christopher, Giannozzo Manetti als Denker und Hebraist, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1987. Gentile, Giovanni, Il pensiero italiano del Rinascimento, Florence: Sansoni, 1940. Marsh, David, ‘‘Boccaccio in the Quattrocento: Manetti’s Dialogus in Symposio,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 33, no. 3 (1980): 337–350. Smith, Christine, and Joseph O’Connor, ‘‘What Do Athens and Jerusalem Have to Do with Rome? Giannozzo Manetti on the Library of Nicholas V,’’ in Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy Struever, edited by J. Marino and M.W. Schlitt, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2001. Trinkaus, Charles, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols., London: Constable, 1970.

GIUSEPPE MANFRIDI (1956–) Giuseppe Manfridi is the most published and represented playwright of his generation in Italy today. His writing skills have often won him participation as a screenwriter and actor in feature 1120

films, such as Ricky Tognazzi’s Vite strozzate (Stifled Lives, 1996), Simona Izzo’s I maniaci sentimentali (The Sentimental Maniacs, 1996) and Camere da letto (Bedrooms, 1997). He also wrote

GIUSEPPE MANFRIDI the Italian dialogue for Clerks by Kevin Smith, Lisbon Story by Wim Wenders, and Leaving Las Vegas by Mike Figgis. Manfridi employs prosaic forms in a sophisticated metric structure, modulating his tempos in long and lyrical monologues, as in Vis a vis (produced in 2002), a terrible curse against God, commissioned by stage director Walter Manfre`. With astonishing adaptability, in Giacomo il prepotente (Giacomo, the Arrogant, 1989), commissioned in 1987 by the Compagnia Stabile di Genova for the 150th anniversary of Leopardi’s death and directed by Piero Maccarinelli, he revives the ceremonial language of the early nineteenth century to stage the last days of Giacomo Leopardi, while he is dying at Torre del Greco. In the first and third acts, the poet trails stench from his decaying body and dirty linen. In Act II, set back in Recanati, Leopardi’s birth town, his sister Paolina confronts her maid Lucella who was sent over by Giacomo to take away his last writings. The linguistic and social distance between the two women is apparent: Paolina (who is so obsessively drawn to her brother that she masturbates on stage) speaks a controlled, refined Italian, in sharp contrast with the vernacular of the sanguine servant. All the while, Paolina’s and Giacomo’s domineering mother looms in the background. The competitive humanity gravitating around the world of popular sport is a theme dear to the playwright. Manfridi depicts the obsession of groups at the fringe of society, where the boundaries between petit-bourgeois and proletarian classes disturbingly blur. In Teppisti! (Vandals!, 1996), written in hendecasyllables, a couple of young football fans are quickly pulled into the infectious violence of the stadium. In Ultra` (Hooligans, 1996), directed by Sergio Rubini in 1985, a young man from the city slums hears on TV that his football idol will be transferred to another team. He then calls the television station to express his disappointment. He protests in slang and curses, and is soon ignored by the program host. Manfridi’s female characters are affected by neurotic obsessions and psychological frailties. In Anima bianca (White Soul), which premiered in Rome in 1986 under the direction of Maccarinelli, Manfridi limits the play’s vocabulary to 350 words. The linguistic quiver of one of the characters, the masseur, wields power over Betta, the protagonist, who knows only 300 words and therefore is highly limited in her speech. In Corpo d’altri (Someone Else’s Body, 1992), the widow of an admiral (who died of cancer of the throat) insists on smoking his

pipe and tells a blind woman of her disturbing identification with her late husband. In this play, the two women are traveling on a ship reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s ghostly salons. Manfridi draws from classic characters as well: grieving shadows possessed by the fire of vengeance as in Elettra (Elektra, 1993); or the frantic anarchist dominated by Rodin in La sposa di Parigi (The Parisian Bride, 1993), where the bride is Camille Claudel; and Beatrice Cenci in the morbid L. Cenci (1993). In this courtroom play, as though materializing out of Gothic and Artaudian reveries, Beatrice is introduced by her stepmother Lucrezia, whose mysterious death is at center stage. But pathologies and neuroses affect male characters as well. In Ti amo, Maria! (I Love You, Maria!, 1990), a former lover walls off his beloved in a bizarre space by an active elevator. The lost woman is confined to listening to the up and down motion, until the plot reaches the suicidal ending of the protagonist. And in Zozo`s (Zozo`s, 1994), where Manfridi cites Arthur Copi and Joe Orton, a young man literally stuck in coitus with a complaisant lady finds out she is his mother, and, in delirium, ends up suffocating her. This play premiered in Rome in 1989 with Carlo Delle Piane and Anna Bonaiuto in the main roles, and was staged in London under the direction of Peter Hall in 2000. No less remarkable is Manfridi’s work for the radio. In addition to having hosted several classical music programs, he produced Storie del ghetto di Venezia (Stories of the Ghetto in Venice, 1988), a six-part documentary; and Gli italiani di Shakespeare (The Shakespeare Italians), broadcast by RadioTre in 1995. Manfridi is not only a skilled actor—his monologue Il fazzoletto di Dostoevskij (The Dostoevskji’s Handkerchief) opened in July 2003 at the Todi Festival with him in the title role—but also a translator and adaptor for the most advanced European theatrical writing. He has translated Steven Berkoff, in collaboration with Carlotta Clerici.

Biography Born in Rome, 7 March 1956. Received a degree in humanities at the University of Rome with a thesis on Angelo Maria Ripellino, 1979; married Carlotta Clerici, daughter of the well-known sports journalist Gianni Clerici, 1990; had two children, Lorenzo (1999) and Gabriele (2001); divorced, 1993; married Paola Conte, 1998; won several awards, including the IDI (Istituto del Dramma Italiano) for Anima Bianca, 1983; the Taormina Arte award 1121

GIUSEPPE MANFRIDI and IDI for Giacomo, il prepotente, 1989; the Riccione-Ater Paolo Bignami for Ti amo, Maria!, 1989. In 2002, Manfridi and other playwrights, including Edoardo Erba, Raffaella Battaglini, Alessandro Trigona Occhipinti, founded the Teatro Civile in Rome. PAOLO PUPPA Selected Works Collections Teatro dell’eccesso. Tre commedie degli anni Novanta: Ti amo, Maria!, Cerimonie per un addio, Zozo`s, Rome: Gremese, 1990.

Plays Giacomo il prepotente, 1989. Zozo`s, 1990; as Cuckoos, translated by Colin Teevan, 2000. Stringiti a me stringimi a te, 1990. Corpo d’altri, 1992. Elettra, L. Cenci, La sposa di Parigi, 1993. Teppisti! - Ultra`, 1996. I venexiani: Il giovane Casanova e la storia di MM, 2003.

Translations Steven Berkoff, Alla greca, Decadenze, 1991 (with Carlotta Clerici).

Steven Berkoff, Il Natale di Harry, Acapulco, East-West, 1993 (with Carlotta Clerici).

Further Reading Ariani, Marco, and Giorgio Taffon, Scritture per la scena, Rome: Carocci, 2001. D’Achille, Paolo, Appunti sulla lingua del teatro italiano dal dopoguerra a oggi: Brusati, Fabbri, Manfridi, Rome: Aracne, 2002. De Matteis, Tiberia, Autori in scena: Sei drammaturgie italiane contemporanee, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Di Giammarco, Rodolfo (editor), ‘‘Manfridi in parole,’’ in G. Manfridi, Teatro dell’eccesso. Tre commedie degli anni Novanta: Ti amo, Maria!, Cerimonie per un addio, Zozo`s, Rome: Gremese, 1990. Giovanardi, Claudio, ‘‘Manfridi, il teatro dell’anarchia,’’ in G. Manfridi, L. Cenci, Palermo: Teatro Stabile di Palermo, 2001. Puppa, Paolo, Preface to G. Manfridi, Corpo d’altri, Milan: Ricordi, 1992. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Per una scena prepotente,’’ in G. Manfridi, Giacomo, il prepotente, Bologna: Clueb, 2003. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Tre donne in furore tra il linguaggio e la storia,’’ in G. Manfridi, Elettra. L. Cenci. La sposa di Parigi, Milan: Ricordi, 1993. Ronfani, Ugo, Preface to G. Manfridi, Stringiti a me stringimi a te, Milan: Ricordi, 1990. Ronfani, Ugo, La questione teatrale, Milan: Ricordi, 1992. Tognazzi, Ricky, Preface to G. Manfridi, Teppisti!–Ultra`, Milan: Ricordi, 1996.

GIORGIO MANGANELLI (1922–1990) Giorgio Manganelli is, along with Carlo Emilio Gadda and Alberto Arbasino, the central figure of one of the most prodigious and complex linguistic adventures of Italian literature in the second half of the twentieth century. The best definition is perhaps the one given by Alfredo Giuliani, who considers him a ‘‘scalpitante poeta della prosa’’ (pounding poet of prose) (Allegorie del teologo burlone, 1988). His work, resistant to any genre distinction, is a vast metaphoric space governed by the law of untruth, that is, of artifice and allegory. His narrations are produced by endless lexical series, collected and arranged in a plurality of texts in which the words are always, as Mattia Cavadini has written, ‘‘generators of possibilities, never of 1122

truth’’ (La luce nera, 1997). Manganelli’s oeuvre is like a huge linguistic machine, in which the author deploys a superb rhetorical inventiveness and literature becomes the key to explore the abyss, the limits of creation, and the boundaries of finitude. His first work, Hilarotragoedia (Hilarotragedy), completed in January 1961 but published only in 1964, centers on the themes of death and suicide. With great formal rigor and almost without emotion, Manganelli writes what Giuliani has defined a ‘‘capziosa autobiografia in forma di trattatello blasfemo’’ (captious autobiography in the form of a little blasphemous treatise) (Allegorie del teologo burlone, 1988). He plays with language so as to multiply in the reader the effects of disconcertment

GIORGIO MANGANELLI and fear. The genre of the treatise, with its strict humanistic tradition, is here contaminated by a thoughtful irony, which is absolutely new and personal. Amidst premises, glosses, and notes, as well as narrative passages, the author compiles a theoretical-practical handbook on the different definitions of death and on the classification of anxieties, especially as a result of his sessions of analysis with the Jungian therapist Ernest Bernhard. The exhibited practical aim of the work, its concrete use for the reader, underlines the exemplary function that writing should assume, in Manganelli’s view, when it reflects the events of an individual outside the egotistic deceits of the self. Indeed, the book opens with the individual’s farewell to the world and moves on in a sort of descent to Hell, with substantial quotations from Dante, in a progressive disintegration of the body. The conclusive image of the universe is that of a chasm in which the sacrificial nature of each destiny can be perceived. The infernal theme would be taken up again 21 years later in Dall’inferno (From Hell, 1985), in which Manganelli, a translator of Poe and a reader of Maturin and De Quincey, sharpens his visions by using all the rhetorical devices of the fantastic genre. This results in the final symbolic vision of a journey that leads, after trials and difficulties, to perfect contemplation and fuller meaningfulness. Meanwhile, in 1969 Manganelli published Nuovo commento (New Commentary), a sarcastic farewell to universal knowledge. In it, the erudite note-taker is confined by the very structure he would like to lay bare in the labyrinth of the text. But the commentary in this text is also a device for highlighting the contradictions of every form of institution, and therefore, through all that it can dismantle and reveal, it hints at a liberation from tensions and conflicts in language and the word. An important phenomenon of this period is that of the rewritings of classic texts, such as Arbasino’s SuperEliogabalo (Super-Helogabalus, 1969), Edoardo Sanguineti’s Il giuoco del Satyricon (The Satyricon Game, 1970), and Luca Ronconi’s version of Orlando Furioso (1969). Manganelli’s contribution is characterized by a personal loyalty to rhetoric as an exercise rather than a set of rules, with the aim of conscientiously trying out all the plausible directions that the reader will then be asked to share in the composition of the text. Among several works of this kind, the rewriting of Carlo Collodi’s masterpiece as Pinocchio: un libro parallelo (Pinocchio: a Parallel Book, 1977) is particularly important. Here Manganelli succeeds in allowing the topography of the original novel to produce a never-ending

challenge between the protagonist’s humanity and the metamorphic and nocturnal vocation of the matter of which the puppet is made. Manganelli is also the author of short satirical articles that would eventually be collected in Lunario dell’orfano sannita (Almanac of the Samnite Orphan, 1973), in which the reality of mass society and the places of civic life are irremediably dissected through the lens of disenchantment, and unexpected archaic remnants are traced in an open comical contrast with modernity. All along, Manganelli proves to be a skeptical observer, aware of the relationships that are necessary to someone who attacks the institutions and the consolidated hierarchies. In the last volume published during his lifetime, Encomio del tiranno (In Praise of the Tyrant, 1990), he remains loyal to a kind of literature that shows off its artificial and false nature. Between October 1975 and February 1976 Manganelli traveled to India on behalf of the magazine Il Mondo. The resulting reportage, collected posthumously in Esperimento con l’India (Experiment with India, 1992), is a crucial pilgrimage, also from the personal point of view, in which the writer discovered those primary symbols that are to be found in his later works. The following year he published Sconclusione (Disconclusion, 1976). Here, the theme of catastrophe is accompanied by that of the circle, which refers to the victory over formlessness and chaos, in a dense conversion to gnostic language and with, at the centre of the book, the theme of light and its philosophical implications. The image of the catastrophic rains, depicted in the last few pages, seems to carry out a design that, however, does not appear redemptive, as the flow of incessant prose is made up of a series of hypotheses, without even a punctuation mark. With Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume (One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, 1979), Manganelli delivers a number of fantastic short stories, almost the preliminary stage of metanovels, which share the same length and a common motive: the narration of a heroic itinerary leading, after fatal trials, flights, and chases, to transformation and to the attainment of regality, which, in esoteric thought, is completeness and the end of the metamorphoses. As critics have often stressed, Manganelli’s reader is asked to become an instrument of language, so that author and reader can perform together the obscure task toward the place of mystery and the sacred, in which pure and impure can no longer be distinguished. Among the works published posthumously, La palude definitiva (The Last Marsh, 1991) is one of 1123

GIORGIO MANGANELLI the most remarkable in Manganelli’s oeuvre as a whole. In it, a slanderous accusation forces the protagonist to flee, on the back of an improbable horse, toward the centre of an immense marsh. The narration of the extremely detailed observation of the marsh consolidates in the narrating subject the idea that he is part of a dyarchy, whose achievement represents his final damnation. Language is all that is left to the reader’s final contemplation, as Giorgio Agamben has suggested, pointing to a real political logic of the Baroque in Manganelli. Since ‘‘l’essere e` sempre l’essere della lingua, cosı` la lingua e`, per Manganelli, sempre la lingua dell’essere sempre la lingua dell’essere’’ (being is always the being of language, then language is, for Manganelli, always the language of being), in a vortex in which one can no longer distinguish between spirit and matter, nature and history, sleep and waking (‘‘Araldica e politica,’’ 2000). Manganelli’s work as literary critic is welldocumented in La letteratura come menzogna (Literature as Lie, 1967), in which the author carries out a series of personal readings, according to what Giulio Ferroni has called ‘‘a violently unilateral criticism’’ (Giorgio Manganelli, 1988). Supported only by the resources of language, this strategy is thus free from any objectifying and totalizing obsession, and is close to the critical experience of Edmund Wilson or William Empson (his admitted masters, albeit so very different from one another) but also counterpointed by the careful reading of Vladimir Nabokov. This critical enterprise pays particular attention to the structures and the devices with which texts are composed, to their explicit dynamics and underground developments, according to the lesson of Viktor Shklovsky and his school. But beyond the critical exercise, one can perceive an idea of literature and a practice of reading as a pursuit of the solution to conflicts, after the descent into darkness and the experience of the opposite and nocturnal side of matter, to which literature and reading must always lead. For Manganelli, therefore, literature is neither a treatment nor a cure, but a lie, which opposes the lies without music and enigmas of common sense and of the ordinary. It is a rage and a wound that speaks of the repressed and which, through language, is partially able to compensate for it.

Biography Born on 15 November 1922 in Milan. Degree in political sciences at the University of Pavia, 1124

November 1945, with the dissertation Contributo critico allo studio delle dottrine politiche del ’600. Taught high school for a few years. Left Milan for Rome in 1953, where he taught English literature at the university until 1971. Joined the meetings of Gruppo 63. Consultant with the publishers Einaudi, Mondadori and Adelphi and contributor to various newspapers and magazines such as Tempo presente, Il Giorno, Il Mondo, L’Espresso, La Stampa, Il corriere della sera, F.M.R., and Il Messaggero. Awarded the Viareggio prize, 1978. Died in Rome on 28 May 1990. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Neo-Avant-Garde Selected Works Fiction Hilarotragoedia, 1964. Nuovo commento, 1969. Agli de`i ulteriori, 1972. Sconclusione, 1976. Pinocchio: un libro parallelo, 1977. Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume, 1979; as One Hundred Ouroboric Novels, translated by Henry Martin, 2005. Amore, 1981. Discorso dell’ombra e dello stemma, o del lettore e dello scrittore considerati come dementi, 1982. Dall’inferno, 1985. Tutti gli errori, 1986; as All the Errors, translated by Henry Martin, 1990. Rumori o voci, 1987. Encomio del tiranno. Scritto all’unico scopo di fare dei soldi, 1990. La palude definitiva, edited by Ebe Flamini, 1991. Il presepio, edited by Ebe Flamini, 1992. La notte, edited by Salvatore S. Nigro, 1996.

Plays A e B, 1975. Il personaggio, edited by Luca Scarlini, 2002. Tragedie da leggere. Tutto il teatro, edited by Luca Scarlini, 2005.

Critical Essays La letteratura come menzogna, 1967. Lunario dell’orfano sannita, 1973. Angosce di stile, 1981. Laboriose inezie, 1986. Salons, 1986. Improvvisi per macchina da scrivere, 1989. Il rumore sottile della prosa, 1994. Contributo critico allo studio delle dottrine politiche del ’600 italiano, edited by Paolo Napoli, 1999. De America: Saggi e divagazioni sulla cultura statunitense, edited by Luca Scarlini, 1999. Il vescovo e il ciarlatano. Inconscio, casi clinici, psicologia del profondo. Scritti 1969–1987, edited by Emanuele Trevi, 2001.

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE UFO e altri oggetti non identificati: 1972–1990, edited by Graziella Pulce, 2003.

Travel Writing Cina e altri orienti, 1974. Esperimento con l’India, edited by Ebe Flamini, 1992.

Other Antologia privata, 1989. La penombra mentale: Interviste e conversazioni 1965–1990, edited by Roberto Deidier, 2001.

Further Reading Agamben, Giorgio, ‘‘Araldica e politica,’’ in Le foglie messaggere: Scritti in onore di Giorgio Manganelli, edited by Viola Papetti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2000. Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: dalla nascita del ‘‘Verri’’ alla fine di ‘‘Quindici,’’ Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Bricchi, Mariarosa, Manganelli e la menzogna, Novara: Interlinea, 2002.

Cavadini, Mattia, La luce nera: teoria e prassi nella scrittura di Giorgio Manganelli, Milan: Bompiani, 1997. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Giorgio Manganelli,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 9, Milan: Marzorati, 1988. Galliano, Gianfranco, Letteratura e cultura in Giorgio Manganelli, Florence: Firenze Libri, 1986. Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Allegorie del teologo burlone,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. I Contemporanei, vol. 9, Milan: Marzorati, 1988. Lucente, Gregory L., Beautiful Fables: Self-consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Menechella, Graziella, Il felice vanverare: ironia e parodia nell’opera narrativa di Giorgio Manganelli, Ravenna: Longo, 2002. Pulce, Graziella, Bibliografia degli scritti di Giorgio Manganelli, Florence: Titivillus; Grosseto: Biblioteca Comunale Chelliana, 1996. Pulce, Graziella, Giorgio Manganelli: figure e sistema, Grassina: Le Monnier universita`, 2004. Terni, Paolo, Giorgio Manganelli, ascoltatore maniacale, Palermo: Sellerio, 2001.

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE The age of Italian mannerist and Baroque literature has no precise beginning nor end date. It is usually thought to have its origin in the years around the Sack of Rome in 1527 that concluded the High Renaissance, and to have endured into the late decades of the seventeenth century. After 1527, the cinquecento was marked by the final phase of the wars of Italy, the consolidation of Spanish power on the peninsula, the emergence of the system of old regime absolutist states, a succession of grave agricultural, industrial, financial, and fiscal crises, and the establishment of the Counter-Reformation. Moreover, cultural life in Italy was deeply affected by the expansion of European trade networks, propelled by the forces of colonialism and imperialism to the rest of the globe, as well as by the growing challenge from the Ottoman Turks in the Mediterranean. The seicento saw the continuation—punctuated by wars and civil unrest—of the old regime system, despite steadily increasing cultural internationalization, the dramatic weakening of Spanish hegemony and the rise of French influence, continuous military pressure from the expanding Ottoman Empire, and the definitive economic marginalization of the early modern Italian states within Europe.

Today the history, the significance, and even the existence of mannerism or of the Baroque as a literary and aesthetic movement remain open to debate among scholars. The term ‘‘maniera’’ was widely used, from the second half of the sixteenth century on, to indicate aesthetic products that deviated from the classicizing tenets of the High Renaissance. But exactly what this meant was, and is, a matter of dispute. It seems preferable to consider mannerism and Baroque as related to aesthetic aspects of the same early modern cultural trajectory of the old regime, while recognizing that there were also other divergent contemporary aesthetic trends. In the field of literature, what is certain is that new and compelling literary paradigms arose in Italy in the sixteenth century in response to changing conditions of literary production, ranging from (among others) the growth of the absolutist courts to the reconstitution of the Roman Inquisition to the rapid development of the publishing industry. Without a doubt early modern Italy exported a vastly greater number of cultural products, including literary works, to the rest of Europe than ever before. Although by the early 1600s no longer in the European vanguard, 1125

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE Italy’s literary traditions occupied a central and highly influential position well into the century. Italian cultural products, including literature, set the international standard of the age because their values—thanks to the prestigious achievements of antiquity and the Renaissance—were identified across Europe with those of culture itself. Humanism was gradually replaced in the cinquecento by a new international literary culture— which may be called ‘‘classicism’’—that actively revised, recirculated, and recycled an encyclopedic repertory of ancient and Renaissance texts, mythologies, epigrams, figures, symbols, codes, topoi, and the like. With a seemingly infinite number of potential themes and forms from which to work, classicism appeared able to interpret the experience of the present in all of its complexity. Emblem literature, one of the exemplary products of classicism, is—in its syncretic blend of image and text, antiquity and modernity—in this sense indicative of a far larger phenomenon. The inexhaustible textual network of classicism merged poetry, drama, narrative fiction, and literary theory into a universe of writing that would at a later date come to be known as ‘‘literature.’’ The repertory of classicism formed, in short, the cultural capital of early modernity. To write and to read meant to take possession of this repertory, to probe its limits and to reuse it creatively, thus generating fresh value for it. This was far from a static process, and could produce surprising results in Neo-Latin or in the vernacular: Indeed, much Baroque literature was devoted to corroding, warping, and distorting the classicist repertory to the breaking point. Nevertheless, its presence conferred continuity to the literary culture of Italy over a very long period of time. The early modern metamorphosis of Humanism into classicism had a second crucial consequence. After the long dominance of literary and textual models, visual and musical arts became the most important paradigms of aesthetic activity. The shift toward visual and musical modes of representation in Italy, with their inherent sensuality, transformed Italian literature as well between the cinquecento and seicento. Literary works such as Giovanbattista Marino’s Adone (Adonis, 1623) attempted to replicate by linguistic means the spectacular new visual and aural effects of the other arts. Countless lyrics were composed in order to be set to music, and of course the newly invented opera depended upon poetic texts in the form of the libretto. The wide public appeal of early modern theater was due in no small part to its visual and aural components, allowing texts to be ‘‘seen’’ and ‘‘heard.’’ 1126

Formerly restricted to courts or festivals, the theater developed in several new directions in the sixteenth century in Italy. Professional traveling theater troupes first appeared by 1545, and the first professional theaters were built not long afterward. Humanist comedies imitating those of antiquity (commedia erudita) continued to be popular, but plays in this genre were given progressively more complex plots, often involving a search for identity, such as identical twins separated by fate at birth and the like. These ranged from Pietro Aretino’s Il marescalco (The Stablemaster, 1533) and Gl’ingannati (The Deceived, 1537), written in Siena by members of the Accademia degli Intronati in 1531, to Giordano Bruno’s Il candelaio (The Candle-bearer, 1582) and Giovanni Battista della Porta’s La fantesca (The Maid, 1592). Triple plots with numerous complications became increasingly common in comedies of this sort, such as Annibale Caro’s Gli straccioni (The Scruffy Scoundrels, 1582), written in 1544, calling into question the importance of the ‘‘unity of action’’ for such works. In the meantime, popular profane comic theater in a variety of dialects began to become codified as commedia dell’arte. At first limited chiefly to the carnival season, the Arte plays were improvised on the spot by actors working with a rudimentary script (canovaccio) relying on temporary stages, stock characters and repartees, sight gags and stunts, comic masks, and slapstick routines. Each mask represented a different and readily identifiable set of regional, socioeconomic, and psychological traits: Harlequin the servant-clown was from Bergamo, the miserly old paterfamilias Pantaloon was from Venice, the pedantic Doctor Graziano was from Bologna, and so on. Some actresses, such as the famed Isabella Andreini of the Compagnia de’ Gelosi, were allowed to take the stage in the commedia dell’arte. Comedy was certainly not the only genre, however, to find favor with the public. Of the many theatrical experiments with pastoral, the most successful by far were Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Giovan Battista Guarini’s equally renowned Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590), both of which set the standard for all of Europe, and which were the only two Italian dramas of the age to attain the universality of Shakespeare, Caldero´n, or Molie`re. Finally, Italy witnessed in these years a renewed interest in tragedy—with works such as Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio’s Orbecche (1543), Sperone Speroni’s Canace (1546), and Tasso’s Il re Torrismondo (King Torrismondo, 1587)—which would later have important resonances for other European national theatrical traditions.

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE The comic theater continued to develop in the seventeenth century in accordance with the new Baroque aesthetic of wonder (meraviglia). Spectators, once they had paid to enter professionally run theaters, found familiar social hierarchies weakened or gone: The only important distinction was between performers and public. The experience of theatergoing thus became a discovery of an unknown ‘‘other’’ social world. The most prominent seventeenth-century Italian comic playwright, Giovan Battista Andreini, wrote a series of dazzling ‘‘new comedies’’ (commedie nuove) for his troupe, the Compagnia dei Fedeli, pushing theatrical concepts to extremes of illusionism in such works as Amor nello specchio (Love in the Mirror, 1622)— starring his company’s two leading actresses, Virginia Ramponi and Virginia Rotari, as lovers—and Le due comedie in comedia (The Two Comedies within the Comedy, 1623), featuring a double play-within-a-play. New ‘‘Arte’’ masks and zany stock plots appeared in the course of the seicento, and highly advanced stage technologies and theatrical designs were developed throughout the peninsula. The last part of the century, however, saw the appeal of the ‘‘Arte’’ diminish for the paying public, although troupes of Italian actors continued to be invited to perform abroad. Carlo Maria Maggi made a case against the ‘‘Arte’’ with his comedies, in which he exclusively used his native Milanese dialect to enhance the work’s reality-effect, rather than cultivate the extreme artificiality of earlier Baroque comic theater. Serious theater—influenced by developments in Spain during its cultural Siglo de Oro—also flourished, with writers such as Giovanni Andrea Cicognini embracing the new technology and aesthetic of extreme theatrical spectacle. Tragedies such as Federico della Valle’s Iudit, published in 1627 but written toward the beginning of the century, and Carlo de’ Dottori’s Aristodemo (1657), were among the finest to appear in Italy before the late eighteenth century, but had only limited success with the public. Petrarchan lyric poetry was practiced far and wide in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Under the influence of Bembo’s theory and practice, collections of Petrarchan sonnets offered a set of normative social, moral, and even spiritual ideals for aristocrats, courtiers, and those who aspired to their standards. Petrarchini, or pocket editions of Petrarchan sonnets, were commonplace throughout the age. Despite geographical and linguistic differences, Giovanni della Casa, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Vittoria Colonna, and Gaspara Stampa were among the many who produced

collections of Petrarchan poetry. But this was not the only direction for lyric verse. Tasso’s output of lyric poetry, including madrigals, sonnets, odes, and other encomiastic verse published between 1567 and 1593, while drawing on and revising the Petrarchan tradition, explored the growing bond between poem and song. Marino’s Rime appeared in 1602, and his La Lira (The Lyre) was published between 1608 and 1614, founding the lyric tradition of baroque ‘‘wit’’ or ‘‘conceit’’ in Italy to which many poets subsequently subscribed, such as Tommaso Stigliani (1573–1651) and Ciro di Pers (1599– 1663). Among those who were not followers of Marino’s worldly and sensual work, two must be mentioned: Gabriello Chiabrera, a tireless and influential experimenter with metrics and musicality, and the imprisoned philosopher Tommaso Campanella, who published his path-breaking collection of sonnets, odes, elegies, and canzoni in 1622 under the pseudonym of Settimontano Squilla. The development of the epic took at least two divergent paths in early modern Italy after 1527. One was the continuing popularity, influenced by Ludovico Ariosto, of the chivalric romance (including mock-epic parodies of it). The other was the ‘‘heroic’’ epic, whose most original proponent was Tasso. His Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580) was the most important poetic text to appear in Italy in the second half of the sixteenth century, and a great success across Europe. Tasso was the pivotal figure linking the earlier and later literary practices of Old Regime Italy. A gifted poet, he was also one of the most acute critical minds of the century, and his works on poetics represent one of the finest achievements of cinquecento literary criticism. However, he was drawn to chivalric and narrative verse as well, and after various test runs he completed and published his masterpiece while still imprisoned in Ferrara. Although his poem tells the story of the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099, the extreme linguistic, psychological, and ideological tensions in the text generate a density and complexity that make impossible any univocal orthodox reading. Indeed, the Gerusalemme liberata seems quite close—in its labyrinthine portrayal of a wholly contradictory and undecipherable reality—to the modern novel. Tasso’s epic signals a definitive rupture with the literary tradition of the Renaissance and looks forward to the innovations of the seventeenth century and beyond. Marino’s gigantic, controversial, and highly influential ‘‘epic’’ poem Adone looms over the rest of the seicento. This ‘‘poem of peace’’ narrates the love of Venus for 1127

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE the antihero Adonis through a dizzying—and virtually plotless—whirl of analogies, digressions, descriptions, images, motifs, allusions, metaphors, and the like, celebrating the delights of the senses in pointed opposition to the chivalric poetic tradition. In deconstructing the epic, Marino’s poem also anticipates the development of new narrative forms such as the novel. Many kinds of narrative prose, such as the literary fairy tale, the autobiography, and the novel, did in fact first appear in the early modern period. The Neapolitan courtier Giovan Battista Basile authored the Cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales), published posthumously in 1634–1636, the first collection of literary fairy tales in Europe. Written in vivid Neapolitan dialect, its 50 tales recount for the first time the adventures of many of the classic fairy tale characters later to become known to the European reading public as Cinderella, Puss ’n Boots, Rapunzel and so on. In seventeenth-century Venice, the novel flourished in the circles of the Accademia degli Incogniti, represented by writers such as Ferrante Pallavicino (1616–1644), Giovan Francesco Loredan (1606–1661), Francesco Pona (1595–1655), Antonio Rocco (1596–1653), and Girolamo Brusoni (ca. 1614–ca. 1686), and the successful novelists of Genoa (the other center of novel production) included Anton Giulio Brignole Sale (1605–1665) and Giovanni Ambrogio Marini (1594–1650). The artist Benvenuto Cellini and the physicianphilosopher Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576) were among the first to write their autobiographies, offering a blend of fact and fiction as seamless as that found in those of our own era. Other prose genres, such as the novella and the dialogue, evolved in step with the aesthetics of the age. Publishers took the ancient prose form of the letter and transformed it into a newly marketable product by printing collections of letters by famous writers: Aretino (1538), Bembo (1548), Tasso (1588), and Marino (posthumously, 1627) were among those whose letters were issued in volumes. The vogue for Tacitus and Seneca inspired many in the seicento to adopt a tersely laconic prose that was an antidote to flowery Ciceronianism and Marinism. Among others, the Bolognese noble Virgilio Malvezzi (1595–1654) was known across Europe for the concise vigor of his writing, as well as his acute analyses of contemporary social and political life. Galileo Galilei, the Florentine scientist, penned the great prose dialogue entitled Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Dialogue of the Two World Systems, 1632) and the sparkling Il Saggiatore (The Assayer, 1623). 1128

The art of treatise-writing was practiced from antiquity onward. With the progressive penetration of Italian culture by print technology in the sixteenth century, fresh impetus was given to this art. New markets and new publics were discovered by publishers and authors for works—ranging from the erudite to the popular—on a seemingly infinite variety of subjects, from botany to human sexuality to voyages of discovery. Among the most influential Italian treatises of the age were those dealing with good manners, in particular Baldessarre Castiglione’s Il Libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528), Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558), and Stefano Guazzo’s La civil conversazione (The Civil Conversation, 1574). These were so widely translated and reprinted across the continent that they can be considered among the very first pan-European books. The language of politeness and manners (buona creanza) was defined by Castiglione, della Casa, and Guazzo for several successive generations of European (and American) elites. With the ‘‘rediscovery’’ of Aristotle’s Poetics toward mid-cinquecento, literary criticism and theory underwent a boom. As print culture expanded and previously unknown experimental forms of writing began to appear, such as tragicomedy, critics and theorists expended more and more energy on the establishment of rules for each genre. Heated literary debates took place in universities and academies, as well as in print. Ludovico Castelvetro’s commentary on the Poetics, Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata e sposta (Aristotle’s Poetics Translated and Explained, 1570), which would become the authoritative source of the doctrine of the unity of time, place, and action, was the single most important critical work of mannerism, but others—such as Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio— also made significant contributions to the field. The key concepts of the Baroque aesthetic, such as ‘‘conceit’’ (concetto), ‘‘wit’’ (acutezza, ingegno), and ‘‘wonder’’ (meraviglia), were not fully developed in seicento literary theory until the publication of Emanuele Tesauro’s epochal Il Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Spyglass) in 1654. This extraordinary treatise—inspired by the textual machine of Marino’s Adone and the work of the brilliant Spanish moralist Baltasar Gracia´n—developed a theory of metaphor as a universal language of images and as a supreme intellectual act, at once an artifice and an epistemologically privileged mode of access to truth. Although the locus of political and social power, the old regime courts were not the only place in

MANNERISM AND BAROQUE which cultural interchange occurred in Italy. Starting in the middle years of the cinquecento, a large number of academies were founded across the peninsula, providing places in which new cultural, literary, and artistic ideas and practices could be discussed by the elites. Members’ works in verse and prose were subjected to (often extensive) criticism and revision by fellow academics, and debates on literary themes and topics were common. In Venice, the libertine Accademia degli Incogniti, one of the cornerstones of the Republic of Letters in the central decades of the seventeenth century, had a membership list that read like a ‘‘who’s who’’ of contemporary writers and intellectuals, including prestigious foreign intellectuals. In Florence, the Accademia della Crusca produced in 1612 the first modern dictionary of a European language, the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca. Many other academies were far more modest, but the Italian fashion soon spread throughout Europe, leading to the foundation of (among others) the Acade´mie Franc¸aise in Paris (1634) and the Royal Society in London (1660). Thus the institutions of mannerist and Baroque Italy affected the development of culture and science in Europe far beyond the end of the seventeenth century and deep into modernity itself. JON SNYDER Further Reading Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Battistini, Andrea, Il Barocco: cultura, miti, immagini, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Blanco, Mercedes, Les Rhe´toriques de la pointe: Baltasar Gracia´n et le conceptisme en Europe, Gene`ve: Slatkine, 1992. Bolzoni, Lina, La stanza della memoria: modelli letterari e iconografi dell’eta` della stampa, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Botteri, Inge, ‘Galateo’ e Galatei: la creanza e l’instituzione [sic] della societa` nella trattatistica italiana tra Antico regime e stato liberale, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Burke, Peter, The Fortunes of the ‘Courtier’: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano,’ Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995. I capricci di Proteo: percorsi e linguaggi del Barocco: atti del Convegno internazionale di Lecce, 23–26 ottobre 2000, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2002. Costanzo, Mario, Critica e poetica del primo Seicento, 3 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1969–1971. Della Volpe, Gaetano, Poetica del Cinquecento. La ‘Poetica’ aristotelica nei commenti essenziali degli ultimi umanisti italiani, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Dooley, Brendan (editor), Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings, New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.

Ferrone, Siro, Attori mercanti corsari. La Commedia dell’Arte in Europa tra Cinque e Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. ˆ ge de l’e´loquence: rhe´torique et ‘res Fumaroli, Marc, L’A literaria’ de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique, Geneva: Droz; Paris: Champion, 1980. Getto, Giovanni, Il Barocco letterario in Italia, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000. Guaragnella, Pasquale, Tra antichi e moderni: morale e retorica nel Seicento italiano, Lecce: Argo, 2003. Heller, Wendy, Emblems of Eloquence: Opera and Women’s Voices in Seventeenth-Century Venice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Hersant, Yves, La Me´taphore baroque: d’Aristote a` Tesauro, ´ ditions du Seuil, 2001. Paris: E Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: the Canonization of ‘Orlando furioso,’ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. Kenseth, Joy (editor), The Age of the Marvelous, Hanover, N.H.: Hood Museum of Art, 1991. Ku¨pper, Joachim, and Friedrich Wolfzettel (editors), Diskurse des Barock: dezentrierte oder rezentrierte Welt?, Munich: W. Fink, 2000. Malato, Enrico, La fine del Cinquecento e il Seicento, vol. 5 of Storia della letteratura italiana, Rome: Salerno Editore, 1997. Maravall, Jose´ Antonio, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, translated by Terry Cochran, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Marino, John A. (editor), Early Modern Italy, 1550–1796, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Morandini, Giuliana (editor), Sospiri e palpiti: scrittrici italiane del Seicento, Genoa: Marietti, 2001. Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido, Anatomia del Barocco, Palermo: Aesthetica, 1987. Ossola, Carlo (editor), L’anima in Barocco: testi del Seicento italiano, Turin: Scriptorium, 1995. Parker, Alexander, ‘‘‘Concept’ and ‘Conceit’: An Aspect of Comparative Literary History,’’ in Modern Language Review, 77, no. 4 (1982): 21–35. Pozzi, Mario (editor), Trattatisti del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1978. Praz, Mario, Studi sul concettismo, Milan: La Cultura, 1934. Praz, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione al Barocco,’’ in Bellezza e bizzarria, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960. Quondam, Amedeo (editor), Rinascimento e Classicismo: materiali per l’analisi del sistema culturale di Antico regime, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘Questo povero Cortegiano’: Castiglione, il Libro, la Storia, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Raimondi, Ezio, Trattatisti e narratori del Seicento, Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1960. Raimondi, Ezio, Letteratura barocca: studi sul Seicento italiano, Florence: Olschki, 1961. Richards, Kenneth, and Laura Richards, The Commedia dell’Arte: A Documentary History, Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Rosand, Ellen, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Schu¨tze, Sebastian (editor), Estetica barocca. Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma 6–9 marzo 2002, Rome: Campisano Editore, 2004.

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MANNERISM AND BAROQUE Snyder, Jon R., Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Snyder, Jon R., L’estetica del Barocco, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. ´ va, Barocco etico-retorico nella letteratura italiana, Vı´gh, E Szeged: JATE Press, 2001.

Weinberg, Bernard, History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Weinberg, Bernard, Trattati di poetica e di retorica, 4 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1970–1974. Zatti, Sergio, L’ombra del Tasso: epica e romanzo nel Cinquecento, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 1996.

GIANNA MANZINI (1896–1974) By the late 1920s, the Italian literary scene had left behind the lyrical fragment championed by the avant-garde journal La voce (1908–1916), but was still indulging in the search for the contained perfection of prosa d’arte (art prose) and remained curiously indifferent to the great modern novelists emerging in its midst. Gianna Manzini’s Tempo innamorato (Time in Love, 1928) was greeted as a first, promising embodiment of a new Italian novel. Both traditionalists and innovators recognized the originality of her contribution (Emilio Cecchi praised the formal tension while Giansiro Ferrata hailed it as avant-garde), a fact that indicates, as Giacomo Debenedetti would later observe, how Manzini’s novel, starting from its evocative title, became emblematic of the aspirations and compromises of an entire literary and historical season (La Manzini, l’anima e la danza, 1963). Manzini’s work grew out of the experience of the literary journal Solaria (1926–1934). There, together with other solariani like Carlo Emilio Gadda and Elio Vittorini, she productively confronted the examples of Italo Svevo, Federigo Tozzi, and, notwithstanding the provincialism fostered by the Fascist regime, the great European modernists: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Because of its cosmopolitanism, Solaria represented both a laboratory of narrative innovation and a moral opposition to the regime. As for Tempo innamorato, traditional novelistic structure is dissolved. Much space is given to lyrical impressions, characters’ recollections, and the speculative flashbacks of an ambiguous narrator who erratically enters the story as if to visit with her characters. The evanescent plot is organized around the opposition (reminiscent of Svevo’s novel Senilita`) between healthy and sick 1130

characters: The self-denying, inept Clementina, defined by ‘‘una bruttezza quasi contagiosa’’ (an almost contagious ugliness), is abandoned by her husband, the mediocre Ugo, for the sunny Rita, ‘‘una di quelle creature che fanno pensare giovine il mondo’’ (one of those creatures that make the world seem young). Rita is the heart of the novel— she is the only character to act. Eventually she abandons Ugo and her younger child to pursue a new lover. It is for her that time comes to a stop, and ‘‘mantiene per lei, in un attimo tutte le promesse: e` innamorato’’ (instantly fulfills its promises for her: it has fallen in love). But Manzini knows that there is a flaw in this ‘‘perfect’’ temporality. Rita is one of those creatures ‘‘che trattengono il tempo, lo ingannano, lo stregano, lo innamorano. ...tutte salve, senza ferite, senza segni...finiscono col somigliare i frutti o gli uccelli imbalsamati’’ (that hold time, trick it, bewitch it, seduce it.... Safe, without wounds or marks, they end up resembling embalmed fruit or birds). Imprisoned within a biological destiny or a past that weighs on their narrative future, Manzini’s characters are threatened by this dehumanizing fate, similar to that of Pirandello’s masks in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921). Thus, the ‘‘time in love’’ ends up being not an affirmation but a negation of life. Rita confesses: ‘‘si fa strada in me una necessita` di compromettermi con la vita e paura di non potere’’ (there grows in me a necessity to compromise with life and the fear of not being able to). Each enclosed in their story of solitude, the characters of Tempo innamorato hover in the existential and narrative exile of this time outside time. But the one who truly succeeds in ‘‘tricking, bewitching, enamouring’’ time through a work of stylistic seduction—literally by

GIANNA MANZINI bracketing it through the use of parentheses—is the writer herself. ‘‘Sometimes one feels the same sense of reassured marvel as when seeing an acrobat land safely after holding one’s breath for five minutes,’’ Gadda wrote in a review of the stylistic virtuosity that characterizes Manzini’s writing (L’ultimo libro di Gianna Manzini, 1932). Pulled between the persistence of the lyric fragment and an openness to the narrative lessons of modernism, Manzini opts for a novel that paradoxically aspires to unfold as ‘‘un libro intero scritto su una pagina sola, lampante’’ (a whole book written on one single page, crystal clear) (Ritratto in piedi, 1970). Not a poem, but a poem in prose that relies on verbal visualization; a work of digging, as Giuseppe De Robertis writes, ‘‘dentro le immagini...quasi pensando per immagini’’ (inside the images...almost thinking through them) (L’arte della Manzini, 1941). This concentration of writing is captured in a figure that recurs throughout Manzini’s production: the portrait. Manzini knew very well that her dazzling virtuosity, often criticized as affected and Baroque, was (to borrow from one of her own titles), an ambiguous valzer del diavolo (waltz with the devil). The most original aspect of her later production is her self-analysis of her work as a writer. In Lettera all’editore (Letter to the Editor, 1945), the author/ narrator searches for a mirroring in the characters that yields metanarrative reflections on her own art: ‘‘Avvenimenti e cose straordinarie gli davan sicurezza, mentre la vita usuale lo sbalestrava: sicche´ lo portavo in me come il riflesso d’un mio difetto’’ (Extraordinary events and things gave him a sense of security, while everyday life confused him: hence I carried him within me as the reflection of my own flaw). The author, with some complacency, comes to question her artistic ethos. From this moment, the tutelary deities presiding over Manzini’s artistic world (her mother and father) become central characters in her search for a sense of natural measure. In the essay Forte come un leone (Strong as a Lion, 1944), the memory of a conversation with her father unveils the poetry hidden in the most worn and everyday language. The recuperation of a linear narrative and an increasing stylistic sobriety characterize Manzini’s masterpiece La sparviera (The She-Hawk, 1956), a reflection on art and death. But it is in Ritratto in piedi (Standing Portrait), suspended between the memory of her father and autobiography, that the author faces the challenge of time and the need to discipline language in the pursuit of cognitive truth.

The unspoken is no longer situated, as in her early work, in an unfathomable beyond, but within the writer’s childhood and relation with her father. Unlike the crazed horse that at the novel’s opening stumbles on the bridge of Santa Trinita`, the narrator wins through the unconscious resistance to speaking of the past. By telling the story of her anarchist father, ostracized by the family and persecuted to death under Mussolini, Manzini comes to terms with her personal guilt and her historical amnesia. Ritratto in piedi, and her last work Sulla soglia (On the Threshold, 1973), a dream narrative of a final encounter with the mother, are powerful confessions that leave little space for silence or even reticence. In an essay of Forte come un leone, La lezione della Woolf (Woolf’s Lesson), Manzini recognized her debt to the British modernist writer. But the question of her participation in literary modernism remains open and unsettled. If her negation of time, even at a subjective level, seems far from her modernist models, the way her writer’s consciousness invests all natural and everyday objects with a second, deeper life, constitutes a powerful actualization of the modernist stream of consciousness. Perhaps it is in her stories of animals and plants— Boscovivo (Living Woods, 1932), Venti racconti (Twenty Stories, 1941), Animali sacri e profani, (Animals Sacred and Profane, 1953)— that she reveals her core poetics. Inspired by the lesson learned from her parents, ‘‘di giungere al cuore delle cose senza guastarle’’ (of reaching the heart of things without harming them), as Manzini writes in Lettera all’editore, she realizes that it is a moral commitment not only to express but to understand.

Biography Born in Pistoia on 24 March 1896. She grew up in a broken family: Her mother was forced to separate from her husband, Giuseppe Manzini, a prominent anarchist, who died in 1925. She studied literature at the University of Florence with Giuseppe De Robertis, graduated with a dissertation on Pietro Aretino. From 1929 to 1932 she contributed to the literary journal Solaria. Moved to Rome in 1933 after breaking up with her husband, the journalist Bruno Fallaci. In 1945, directed the journal Prosa. Winner of several literary awards, including the Premio Soroptimist for Il valzer del diavolo, 1953; the Viareggio prize for La sparviera, 1956; the Marzotto prize for Un’altra cosa, 1961; the Napoli prize for Allegro con disperazione, 1968; the 1131

GIANNA MANZINI Campiello and Strega prizes for Ritratto in piedi, 1971. Died in Rome on 31 August 1974. GIULIANA MINGHELLI Selected Works Novels Tempo innamorato, 1928. Lettera all’editore, 1945. Il valzer del diavolo, 1947. La sparviera, 1956. Un’altra cosa, 1961. Allegro con disperazione, 1965. Ritratto in piedi, 1970.

Short Stories ‘‘Incontro col falco,’’ 1929. ‘‘Boscovivo,’’ 1932; selections: ‘‘A Cypress’’ and ‘‘The Fable of the Olive Tree,’’ translated by Martha King in Italian Environmental Literature, 2003. ‘‘Un filo di brezza,’’ 1936. ‘‘Rive remote,’’ 1940; selection: ‘‘Discordance,’’ translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi in Unspeakable Women, 1993. ‘‘Venti racconti,’’ 1941. ‘‘Ho visto il tuo cuore,’’ 1947. ‘‘Animali sacri e profani,’’ 1953. ‘‘Cara prigione,’’ 1958. ‘‘Arca di Noe`,’’ 1960. ‘‘Il cielo addosso,’’ 1963. ‘‘Sulla soglia,’’ 1973.

Essays Forte come un leone, 1944. Album di ritratti, 1964. ‘‘Domenikos Theotokopoulos, detto El Greco,’’ in L’opera completa del Greco, 1969.

Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Gianna Manzini, Tempo inamorato,’’ in Pegaso, 1 (January 1929): 116–117. Debenedetti, Giacomo, ‘‘La Manzini, l’anima e la danza,’’ in Intermezzo, Milan: Mondadori, 1963. De Robertis, Giuseppe, ‘‘L’arte della Manzini,’’ in G. Manzini, Venti racconti, Milan: Mondadori, 1941. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, Solaria e la narrativa italiana intorno al 1930, Ravenna: Longo, 1973. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, Gianna Manzini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Ferrata, Giansiro, ‘‘Gianna Manzini, Tempo inamorato,’’ in Solaria, 3, nos. 9–10 (September-October 1928): 72–73. Forti, Marco (editor), Gianna Manzini tra letteratura e vita, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘L’ultimo libro di Gianna Manzini,’’ in Il Tevere, 10 October 1932, p. 3. Ghilardi, Margherita, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Autoritratto involontario, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1996. Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna, ‘‘Gianna Manzini’s Poetics of Verbal Visualization,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Il libro di cui si parla (Tempo innamorato),’’ in La fiera letteraria, 5, August 1928, p. 2. Nozzoli, Anna, ‘‘Gianna Manzini: metafora e realta` del personaggio femminile,’’ in Tabu` e coscienza: La condizione femminile nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Panareo, Enzo, Invito alla lettura di Gianna Manzini, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Un bestiario celeste nella gabbia d’oro della Manzini,’’ in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Paulicelli, Eugenia, ‘‘Fashion Writing under the Fascist Regime: An Italian Dictionary and Commentary of Fashion by Cesare Meano, and Short Stories by Gianna Manzini and Alba de Cespedes,’’ in Fashion Theory, 8, no. 1 (2004): 3–34. Sanvitale, Francesca, Gianna Manzini tra letteratura e vita, Milan: Mondadori, 1985.

Further Reading Ballaro, Beverly, ‘‘Gianna Manzini,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russel, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994.

ALESSANDRO MANZONI (1785–1873) Alessandro Manzoni is a towering figure in nineteenth-century European literature. According to some critics, though not all (note, for instance, the negative opinions of Antonio Gramsci and Alberto Moravia), his I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1827, 1132

1840–1842), ranks with Tolstoy’s War and Peace as one of the greatest historical novels ever written. In this long and complex narrative, Manzoni recounts the story of two young peasants, thereby revolutionizing classical expectations that the poor be

ALESSANDRO MANZONI portrayed in only the most humble roles. He also evokes seventeenth-century Lombardy with a degree of historical accuracy seldom if ever before attempted in a novel. In these ways, among others, Manzoni takes a major role in transforming the possibilities of the genre. Published first in 1827, his compelling mixture of invention and historical research immediately wins popular acclaim in Italy of the Risorgimento, as it also garners praise abroad from the likes of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Alphonse de Lamartine. Yet Manzoni’s work on the volume does not end with this publication. In the years between its first appearance and its final, revised form, published in installments between 1840– 1842, Manzoni rewrites his novel in a language closer to the Florentine dialect as it was spoken by the educated classes. In this form, he reaches a broader audience. Equally important, he supports Italy’s developing national identity by helping to forge its language. In these years, Manzoni continues to ponder issues of truth that had long been important to him, and questions the power of the novel to deal with them. Without condemning his own work explicitly, he concludes that the historical novel is inherently flawed, and turns his attention elsewhere. For the last 30 years of his life, he writes works of history, philosophy, and linguistics rather than fiction. From the first, Manzoni believes that literature should, in good Horatian fashion, teach and delight. At its best, it can awaken readers to concrete historical and political issues, and convey a message of love, courage, and compassion. Manzoni’s earliest poetry, with its neoclassical forms, philosophical proclivities, and deist beliefs, does not reveal the historical and religiously inclined Italian Romanticism Manzoni eventually espouses. But this is only an early stage in a long and wide-ranging intellectual and spiritual quest. His inquisitive mind soon turns from impassioned readings of Voltaire and the Encyclopedists, to encounters with the poetic works of Giuseppe Parini, Vittorio Alfieri, and, above all, the historical work of Lodovico Muratori and Giambattista Vico. Though his education begins in Milan, it gains its distinctive direction during his five-year stay in Paris (1805–1810) with his mother, Giulia Beccaria, daughter of the famous Italian jurist, Cesare Beccaria. An eccentric and fascinating woman whom his father, Count Pietro, had met when she was only 20 years old (as the biography of the Manzoni family by Natalia Ginzburg attests), she had left for Paris to join her lover, Carlo Imbonati, after a few unhappy years of marriage. When the young

Manzoni reunites with her in Paris many years later, he enters into a cultivated and revolutionary intellectual circle, including Madame de Condorcet and the French ideologues, Antoine Destutt de Tracy, and Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, as well as the young historian, Claude Fauriel, who would later play an important role in the reception (and translation) of his works in France. But it is only when Manzoni’s intellect is galvanized by an ethical commitment that he begins to produce the works for which he is best known. This transformation occurs through a dramatic return to Catholicism. Whether it is influenced by the young woman, Henriette Blondel, whom he marries in 1808, or his long readings of Blaise Pascal, his correspondence suggests that it happens in a sudden religious conversion at the Church of Saint Roch. From this point forward, Manzoni crafts a literary oeuvre inspired by a moral philosopher’s interest in exploring and judging the actions of human beings. Thomist in its leanings, Manzoni’s faith goes hand in hand with logic and rationality, and easily joins forces with his intensifying interest in history. Only a historical orientation can, in his view, produce a concrete and disciplined literature, one close to the particulars of the everyday, and to its ongoing tests of human character. It can also open literature to something beyond the pat love stories or mythological themes common in his day, allowing it to portray a new range of subjects and ideas. When Manzoni leaves Paris to return to Milan, he brings with him a solid knowledge of French language and literature, a powerful commitment to Catholicism, and also an interest in new modes of historical writing gleaned from Fauriel and Franc¸ois Guizot. In Manzoni’s hands, these tendencies begin to forge an Italian Romanticism completely his own. The first evidence comes when Manzoni publishes his religious poems, the Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns, 1815), marking his definitive break with the neoclassical tradition of his youth. His conversion had opened up a rich anthology of biblical themes, and he set out to compose a cycle of 12 hymns celebrating the main Christian holy days. The first one, ‘‘La Resurrezione’’ (The Resurrection), was written in 1812, and five others were completed over the following decade. In these odes, he tries to ‘‘bring back to religion those great, noble and human sentiments which flow naturally from it’’ (Lettera inedita di Alessandro Manzoni al Fauriel, 1967). Praised by Goethe more than Italian critics, the poems reconcile Christianity with ideas of freedom, equality and, at times, with 1133

ALESSANDRO MANZONI particularized descriptions of everyday life through which the future author of I promessi sposi can already be heard. The Inni Sacri, but especially ‘‘La Pentecoste’’ (The Pentecost, 1822), whose finale provides a review of various nations, professions and social classes, gathered in the equality of a divine yet human world, completes the complex and controversial process of Manzoni’s long initiation into Catholicism as they gesture toward his ongoing interest in the historical and political world. Indeed, during these same years, he wrote two specifically historical poems: ‘‘Marzo 1812’’ (March 1812), whose portrait of a Lombard in servitude made it one of the most popular patriotic lyrics of the Risorgimento, and ‘‘Il cinque maggio’’ (The Fifth of May), in which he reflects on the ambiguous legacy of the life and recent death of Napoleon. This last was particularly well-received by Goethe, if not by all who read it. He quickly had ¨ ber Kunst it translated and published in his journal U und Alterthum. In this era of enormous productivity, between 1820 and 1822, Manzoni’s historical dramas appear. Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1820) and Adelchi (Adelchi, 1822), along with a series of contemporary essays, reveal the power that history will have in Manzoni’s aesthetics. History appeals for several reasons. First, it conforms to his orientation toward a truth anchored in the concreteness of historical fact and the norms of Christian belief. Second, it allows him to highlight the themes of equality and justice, especially important during this period of Italian nation-building, the Risorgimento. Finally, it allows him to replace the classical ‘‘unities’’ with plots that are more particularized, more verosimili or ‘‘real,’’ and more apt to engage readers. Plots mixing history and invention, and the carefully articulated ethical and aesthetic beliefs that support them, pave the way for the historical novel to follow. Manzoni’s first published tragedy, Il conte di Carmagnola, presents, for instance, a wellresearched story of a fifteenth-century soldier of fortune. In it, he offers a new view of a historical figure and a new conception of drama itself, founded not on the classical unities, but on the reality of the past. He even provides historical notes to his play, prefacing the whole with words that clarify his new emphasis: ‘‘I place before the tragedy some historical information about the characters and facts that are its subject, thinking that whoever decides to read a composition mixing invented and historical truth wants to be able... to 1134

discover what real events lie behind it.’’ In an essay known as the Lettre a` M. Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu dans la trage´die (Letter to M. Chauvet, 1920) and originally written in response to a Paris review of the play, Manzoni states that in refuting the classical unities, he makes a place for history. In the reality of the past, he finds individual characters and acts of will. These are preferable to the antiquated rules of art and the false universality they pretend to impose. If such historical tastes set Manzoni apart from most other European Romantics, the context for his thinking is anything but parochial. It develops through readings and contacts extensive for Italians at the time. He appreciates a number of contemporary French authors—Victor Hugo, Mme de Stae¨l and Lamartine, as well as historians such as Guizot and Augustin Thie´rry. He also displays lively pleasure in the works of Shakespeare and Goethe. He favors Shakespeare for his organic historicism and, often, his Christian themes, and looks to Goethe as the one modern playwright able to follow in Shakespeare’s footsteps. In Sir Walter Scott, Manzoni discovers the first great examples of the historical novel, a genre he would soon develop himself, albeit in a somewhat different direction. Indeed, with an eye trained on Shakespeare and Goethe more than on any of his Italian precursors, Manzoni offers his tragic dramas to the Italian and European public. Though Italy and France are not enthused with Il conte di Carmagnola, Goethe is. This fact perhaps accounts for Manzoni’s second attempt at historical tragedy, the Adelchi, which dramatizes the conflict between a Lombard King and Charlemagne. Here Manzoni is, if anything, yet more preoccupied with history than before. Rather than giving his readers mere historical notes to the drama, he produces the Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Essay on Some Aspects of Longobard History in Italy), a detailed description of Charlemagne’s eighth-century conquest of the Lombards, joined to a commentary on justice, political oppression, and individual free will. If these early tragedies demonstrate Manzoni’s intense commitment to history and his distance from the classical unities, they also reveal his rejection of Romantic imagination. For Manzoni at this critical point in his career, history remains the best and least arbitrary social basis for literary art and conforms to religious truth as well. If his Lettre a` M. Chauvet defends the view that historical poetry can reconcile poetry, historical truth, and social

ALESSANDRO MANZONI responsibility, another letter addressed to Cesare Taparelli d’Azeglio, Sul romanticismo (On Romanticism, 1823), establishes an important broadening and clarification. One part of this essay rejects mythology as idolatry, and criticizes the imitation of classical texts as well as the neoclassical rules. But another provides a vision of Italian Romanticism that draws together literally all his works beginning with the Inni sacri, and looks clearly to the future. Here he affirms the primacy of historical and moral truth, the need to create literature for the general population, and the importance of Christian inspiration for poetry. He states succinctly ‘‘that poetry and literature in general should propose for themselves the useful as their purpose, the true as subject matter and the interesting as means.’’ Closely interwoven with Manzoni’s views of historical truth is his animating conviction about the unity and power of Catholic belief. His most eloquent written defense of his views, Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (A Vindication of Catholic Morality), is published first in 1819, but in definitive edition only in 1855. A work of Christian apologetics difficult to accept in the nineteenth century, it deepens his understanding of time and eternity, as well as of moral action. Its tenets join those articulated in his dramas and essays and come to life most effectively in the individual characters and actions of I promessi sposi. As early as 1821, in the midst of Manzoni’s creative and critical efforts to develop and rationalize his distinctive conceptions of poetry, he begins to draft the first published version of his historical novel. His religious inspiration sparks the plot and fires the individual portraits of characters and events, and in case the reader might miss the meaning of the whole, both of the main characters, Renzo and Lucia, provide at the end their views of what they have learned in the course of their long and troubled separation. Their entire story is, of course, a vast human trial. But it never risks devolving into allegory, thanks at least in part to Manzoni’s historical sense, with his taste for the real, everyday world of the past. Indeed, the specific period between 1628 and 1631 in Lombardy is its inspiration, as Manzoni explains to Fauriel, in a letter of 1822: The memoirs that have come down to us from that period give a picture of a very extraordinary state of society: the most arbitrary government combined with feudal and popular anarchy; legislation that is astounding, both in its aims and its results; a profound, ferocious, pretentious ignorance; classes with opposed interests and maxims; some little-known anecdotes

preserved in trustworthy documents...finally a plague which gives rein to the most consummate and shameless excesses, to the most absurd prejudices and to the most touching virtues, etc, etc.... That is the stuff to fill a canvas...

Fill a canvas he does, with fictional figures as well as a wealth of historical details. His story of two good peasants, Renzo and Lucia, whose marriage by Don Abbondio is interrupted by the local nobleman who wants to seduce Lucia, ends hundreds of pages—and countless episodes—later. The characters created—not only Renzo and Lucia, but also the entire cast of minor supporting actors, such as Don Abbondio, Perpetua, the Conte Zio, Fra Cristoforo, Don Rodrigo, the Monaca di Monza, l’Innominato—weave a web of complex human relations within a well-researched historical period. The public responds immediately. Unlike the cool reception that greets Manzoni’s tragic dramas, the novel is embraced with warmth and enthusiasm when first published in 1827. Not that a few critics do not find elements of concern: the question of the historical novel as a genre, and this particular novel’s unity, its historical accuracy, and the nature and political valence of its religious belief. But the popular response is immediate—and positive. Nine editions are sold out in the first six months, including one published at the author’s expense with illustrations by Francesco Gonin. Regardless of this success, Manzoni is not satisfied. For the next 20 years, he continues to paint and repaint his canvas, both in its broad lines and the details of its language. No sooner is the first version of the book completed than Manzoni travels to Florence, determined to ‘‘rinse his clothes in the Arno,’’ that is, transform his artistic language into the dialect that he believes can at last draw his country together linguistically and forge its nationhood. He also alters the plot, eliminates long digressions, and carefully balances history with invention. But in 1828, at nearly the same time he begins these revisions, Manzoni also starts drafting, as a letter intended for Goethe, Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione (On the Historical Novel and in General on Works in Which History Is Mixed with Fiction), a serious rethinking and eventual rejection of the historical novel as a genre. As critics point out, the historical novel, with its focus on a national past and its choice of characters from the middle and lower classes, has a renewed capacity for strong and well-substantiated political and social statements. It also expands the potential 1135

ALESSANDRO MANZONI of the novel as a genre, replacing longer episodic stories with more concise plots, concrete descriptions, and dialogue. All of this Manzoni accomplishes, largely due to his apprenticeship with the historical tragedy. But in his view, the genre has serious difficulties, indeed ultimately damning ones. As Manzoni reflects upon the historical novel, he develops a belief that literature mixing history and invention must in fact work on two separate planes: one reflecting verifiable fact and another corresponding to an ideal plane of truth. The first would be the ground of historical discourse—within or outside the historical novel. The second would be the ground of invention. For, according to his discussion in Del romanzo storico, invention ‘‘finds’’ an innate idea whose origin is God. Though this may solve a philosophical problem, ridding the poetic of arbitrary subjectivity, it does not support the historical novel as a genre. It creates an intrinsic division within it. In this essay, Manzoni traces the relationship of the historical novel to earlier narrative forms, such as the epic and historical tragedy—but also determines that the relationship between history and invention is ultimately untenable. Though he does not directly condemn his own work, he is convinced that the historical novel cannot continue to be written. Like epics of the past (Virgil’s Aeneid and Tasso’s Orlando Furioso), his I promessi sposi occupies a genre destined to die, even though the individual work may survive. Manzoni’s novel not only survives; it flourishes. It represents the nationalist spirit of his day in its careful tracing of Lombard history, its focus on humble peasants, and its clear condemnation of corrupt uses of power. It also brings to readers a story based on history rather than simple romance, in which long sections are given to meticulous historical narration. It similarly reinforces Christian belief through its complex history of good as well as evil, of forgiveness and hope. At the same time, its insightful characterization and lively dialogue set the agenda for a range of novels and histories that continue to this day. As Manzoni takes time to revise and reflect, his public impatiently awaits more novels. What he publishes in 1842, Storia della colonna infame (The Column of Infamy), does not fulfill their expectations. Though a beautifully drafted history of the plague years, and even novelistic in some ways, this indictment of the judges who falsely condemned some men accused of spreading the disease disappoints contemporary readers. It would have to await the twentieth century for a 1136

full appreciation and literary progeny in works such as Alexander Solzhenitzyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Manzoni’s life closes with a series of personal tragedies (including the death of two wives and five of his seven children) but also with productivity and fame. Though his later essays, dialogues, and historical narratives never attain the popularity of I promessi sposi, they contribute dramatically to the building of the Italian nation and to the development of its language. In 1868, he accepts the presidency of a commission studying the question of the Italian language and eventually publishes his Dell’unita` della lingua e dei mezzi di diffonderla (On the Unification of the Language and its Means of Diffusion, 1868) as well as a number of shorter essays and letters. In all of these he establishes his belief in the importance of a single national language, and discusses this within the context of more general linguistic principles, some still important today. Recognized as a great writer and a national figure, Manzoni receives visits from William Gladstone, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Newman, Pedro II of Brazil, and Honore´ de Balzac, among others. He sees Italy emerging as a nation and its language beginning the long process of unification for which he had worked. If in his revised 1842 novel he completes an artistic and ethical quest, in his poetry, his historical tragedies, and in his essays, he contributes to an ongoing tradition of works joining history and invention, and of critics—from Georg Lukacs to Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg—who calculate the consequences. When Manzoni dies in 1873, Italy’s greatest writer of the age inspires its greatest musician, Giuseppe Verdi, to dedicate to him a Messa da Requiem, which was performed in the Milanese Church of San Marco in May 1874.

Biography Born in Milan, 7 March 1785, to Count Pietro and Giulia Beccaria. Studied in the religious schools of the Padri Somaschi at Merate (Milan), 1791–1796, and Lugano, 1796–1798; parents separated, 1792; moved to Paris with his mother and her lover, Carlo Imbonati, a wealthy merchant banker, 1805; married Henriette Blondel, the younger daughter of a Swiss banker, 1808; converts to Catholicism, 1810. Lived a quiet life near Milan, with his wife and seven children. Wrote religious poetry, historical dramas, and numerous essays before publishing I promessi sposi, 1827; wife died, 1833; married Teresa Borri, 1837; King Victor Emmanuel II assigns him a

ALESSANDRO MANZONI life pension, 1859; named senator of the kingdom, 1860; wife Teresa died, 1861; granted Roman citizenship, 1872. Died in Milan, 22 May 1873. SANDRA BERMANN See also: Romanticism Selected Works Collections Opere poetiche, preface by J. W. Goethe, Jena: Frommann, 1827. Tutte le opere, edited by Alberti Chiari and Fausto Ghisalberti, 7 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1954–1990. Teatro, edited by Giuseppe Altieri, Padua: RADAR, 1967. Tutte le lettere, edited by Giuseppe Altieri, Milan: Adelphi, 1986. Tutte le poesie, edited by Gilberto Lonardi, Venice: Marsilio, 1987.

Poetry ‘‘Inni sacri,’’ 1815; edited by Franco Gavazzeni, 1997; as The Sacred Hymns and the Napoleonic Ode, translated by Joel Foote Bingham, 1904.

Fiction I promessi sposi, 1827; revised edition, 1840–1842 (includes Storia della colonna infame); as The Betrothed, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1951; as The Betrothed and, History of the Column of Infamy, translated by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds, 1997.

Plays Il conte di carmagnola, 1820. Adelchi, 1822 (includes Discorso su alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia). The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis, edited and translated by Federica Brunori Deigan, 2004.

Other Osservazionie sulla morale cattolica, 1819; revised edition 1855. Lettre a` M. Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu dans la trage´die, 1820. Discorso su alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia, 1822. Sul romanticismo, 1823; as ‘‘Letter on Romanticism,’’ translated by Joseph Luzzi, in PMLA, 119 (March 2004): 299–316. Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione, 1828; as On the Historical Novel, translated by Sandra Bermann, 1984. Storia della colonna infame, 1842; as The Column of Infamy, translated by Kenelm Foster and Jane Grigson, 1964. Dell’unita` della lingua e dei mezzi di diffonderla, 1868. Lettera inedita di Alessandro Manzoni al Fauriel (1 aprile 1817), Naples: A. Morra, 1967.

Further Reading Barricelli, Gian Piero, Alessandro Manzoni, Boston: Twayne, 1976. Caretti, Lanfranco, Manzoni e la critica, Bari: Laterza, 1969.

Carsaniga, Giovanni, ‘‘Manzoni and His Twenty-five readers,’’ in The Shared Horizon, edited by T. O’Neill, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1990. Chandler, S. B., Alessandro Manzoni: The Story of a Spiritual Quest, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974. Colquhoun, Archibald, Manzoni and His Times: A Biography of the Author of ‘‘The Betrothed,’’ London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1954. Colummi Camerino, Marinella, Idillio e propaganda nella letteratura sociale del Risorgimento, Naples: Liguori, 1975. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘Apologia manzoniana,’’ in Solaria, 1 (1927). Ginzburg, Natalia, La famiglia Manzoni, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ‘‘Scritti critici di Goethe sul Manzoni,’’ in La Lucia del Manzoni, ed altre note critiche, edited by Piero Fossi, Florence: Sansoni, 1937. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Isella, Dante, I Lombardi in rivolta: Da Carlo Maria Maggi a Carlo Emilio Gadda, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Leone De Castris, Arcangelo, La polemica sul romanzo storico, Bari: Laterza, 1959. Leri, Clara, Oscura prosa rimata: Studi sugli Inni sacri manzoniani, Pisa: Pacini, 1989. Leri, Clara, Manzoni e la ‘‘litte´rature universelle,’’ Milan: Centro Nazionale Studi Manzoniani, 2002. Luka´cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by H. and S. Mitchell, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Mazzocca, Fernando, L’officina dei Promessi Sposi, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Negri, Renzo, Manzoni diverso, Milan: Marzorati, 1976. Raimondi, Ezio, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. Reynolds, Barbara, The Linguistic Writings of Alessandro Manzoni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950. Sala di Felice, Elena (editor), Il punto su Manzoni, RomeBari: Laterza, 1989.

I PROMESSI SPOSI (1827/1840–1842) Novel by Alessandro Manzoni

Since its publication in 1827, Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) has been recognized as one of the most important Italian novels of the nineteenth century and as a central 1137

ALESSANDRO MANZONI text of European literature. Though some critics, such as Antonio Gramsci and Alberto Moravia, find it has serious weaknesses, others, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Georg Lukac´s, argue for its greatness. Its meticulous historical research and compelling characterizations portray the particular circumstances of early seventeenth-century Lombardy. Christian in its structure of beliefs, it remains open to the social conditions and existential choices defining human lives. Its scope is epic. With its precise, evocative, yet accessible language, Manzoni’s story has lived on for generations, embedded by now in the fabric of Italy’s national life. This complex novel grew out of Manzoni’s readings in Italian history, particularly the Historiae patriae (Milanese Histories, 1641–1643) of Giuseppe Ripamonti (1577–1643), a priest and a professor of rhetoric at the seminary in Milan, as well as the economic writings of Melchiorre Gioia (1767–1829), a follower of Locke and Condillac. From these Manzoni develops a keen sense of seventeenth-century Lombardy under the Spanish occupation of the Thirty Years War. Beginning his research in 1821, while still at work on his tragedies, he finds the first hint of his plot in a historical document of the Spanish governor of Lombardy. Manzoni frames the story of two young people of the peasant class—Lucia, a modest and devout young woman, and Renzo, a peasant, but also a silk weaver and worker. By his choice of protagonists, Manzoni immediately challenges Aristotelian expectations that heroic figures emerge from the nobility, and that characters of the lower classes be relegated to the comic. He also underscores the new and important place that the working classes will take in literature as well as in everyday life. A first draft of the book, entitled Fermo e Lucia, appears in 1823. But its many digressions, and occasionally stark divisions between invented plot, history, and authorial commentary, lead Manzoni to revise. A new, better calibrated novel, published in 1827, takes the title I promessi sposi: Storia milanese del secolo XVII scoperta e rifatta da Alessandro Manzoni (The Betrothed: A Milanese Story from the Seventeenth-century Discovered and Rewritten by Alessandro Manzoni). It recalls a venerable technique. Like Miguel de Cervantes, with his humorous asides to the reader, or Daniel Defoe, with his description of the London plague, Manzoni pretends to update and retell an earlier story, this one found in a seventeenth-century manuscript. Though the novel is an immediate success, he rewrites it yet again, recasting its language into 1138

the chosen Tuscan, in order to reach a broader audience and begin developing an Italian national language. The final version appears between 1840 and 1842. Its overall plot is simple: Renzo and Lucia, betrothed at the start of the novel, are prevented from marrying by the local Spanish noble, Don Rodrigo, who takes a liking to Lucia and wagers that he can seduce her. After a series of adventures, including kidnappings, imprisonments, a riot in the city of Milan, and the experience of the plague of 1631, the betrothed reunite and marry. In a certain sense, the interrupted marriage is precisely what permits the complex articulation of the plot. The variety of episodes allows Manzoni to explore a range of historical and geographic situations that together portray an era. They also provide opportunities to disclose distinct examples of the human spirit enmeshed in history, faced with the choices that create their meanings. There are Renzo and Lucia, two worthy peasants whose separate adventures trace their characters: Renzo, the active hero, naı¨ve but intelligent and determined, who makes his way, sometimes awkwardly but ultimately successfully, through complex historical situations; Lucia, the modest, spiritually luminous heroine whose quiet strength allows her to survive and even transform her feudal predators. Beyond the central figures, there are minor ones, including the priest Don Abbondio, whose fears leave him no resources to resist Don Rodrigo’s threats. Fra Cristoforo’s courage proposes a counterexample of strength, passion, and humility. Sister Gertrude, the nun of Monza, reveals a life distorted by the inhumanity of her parents. Don Rodrigo, the local Spanish noble who sets in motion the long series of adventures, and dies unrepentant, finds his double in the novel’s most threatening figure, the Innominato, whose evil life is finally transfigured through the presence of Lucia and a turn to God. Less prominent, yet equally important to the texture of the plot, are figures such as faithful Agnese, Lucia’s mother; Perpetua, the humorous housekeeper of Don Abbondio; and Azzeccagarbugli, the pompous, cowardly lawyer consulted by Renzo. Such characters draw in the seventeenth-century world of oppressors and oppressed—the Italian nobility, the foreign Spanish invaders, and the humble people, those buffeted by the great winds of history, without much power to escape or change it. Written in the early years of the Risorgimento, Manzoni’s novel speaks of feudal hierarchies, political fragmentation, and victimization to foreign

ALESSANDRO MANZONI powers—political issues that, though set in the seventeenth century, reach to his own day. As Georg Luka´cs puts it, ‘‘Without ever departing from the concrete framework of time, place, and the age and class-conditioned psychology of the times, the story of Manzoni’s lovers grows into the tragedy of the Italian people as a whole’’ (The Historical Novel, 1983). In a more recent work, Franco Moretti indicates the role of historical novels such as Manzoni’s in building national unities—often by revealing but then abolishing implicit spatial and temporal heterogeneities (Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800– 1900, 1997). Through characters such as Renzo, whose episodic story spans rural to urban spaces, but also through Lucia, who serenely triumphs over the feudal order of the past, the novel helps develop that ‘‘imagined community’’ that takes political form as a nation state some 20 years after the book’s publication, due in part to its unifying cultural effects. In Manzoni’s efforts to join history and invention, Sir Walter Scott is often cited as the primary influence. Indeed, Manzoni agreed that he might never have thought of writing a historical novel had it not been for Scott’s well-known efforts to combine history with invention. And like Scott, Manzoni uses the travels of hero and heroine to evoke a socioeconomic past as well as steps toward the future (indeed, as Moretti points out, he develops a double plot in I promessi sposi—leading toward the past in the figure of Lucia and the future through Renzo). But equally important—here as elsewhere in Manzoni’s oeuvre—is Shakespeare, whose ability to portray the many facets of human feeling and the complexity of motivation he particularly admired. Manzoni had already experimented with the portrayal of character through personal and political history in the tragedies. But the novel form, with its potential for dramatic dialogue, for lyric description, and the interweaving of plot and history, allows for more varied registers of language and thought. Here, his art discloses neither a providential pattern nor a simple admiration for the oppressed, the people. It is rather a ‘‘thick description,’’ an anthropological inquiry emphasizing the role of human choice as individual lives collide with greater historical forces. Though Manzoni soon turns from the historical novel to history itself (publishing the Storia della colonna infame in 1842), he leaves for posterity a stunning example of the genre. In Italy, I promessi sposi quickly becomes a classic, entering the daily lives of the populous as well as the critical life of

European Romanticism. For those who read it today, its characters and their world seem no less vivid and compelling, though perhaps even more strikingly Italian, than they did to the eager readers of the mid-nineteenth century. SANDRA BERMANN Editions First editions: I promessi sposi, Milan: Ferrario, 1827; includes Storia della colonna infame, Milan: Guglielmi and Redaelli, 1840–1842. Critical editions: I promessi sposi, edited by Luigi Russo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1935; edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1940; edited by Attilio Momigliano, Florence: Sansoni, 1951; edited by Giovanni Getto, Florence: Sansoni, 1964; with Storia della colonna infame, edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Milan: Mursia, 1984; edited by Angelo Stella, and Cesare Repossi, Turin: Einaudi-Paris: Gallimard, 1995; with Storia della colonna infame, edited by Salvatore Silvano Nigro, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Translations: The Betrothed Lovers, translated by Charles Swan, Pisa: Niccolo Capurro, 1828; The Betrothed, translated by Daniel J. Connor, New York: Macmillan, 1924, rpt. 1940; The Betrothed: A Tale of XVII Century Milan, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, New York-London: Dent, 1956; The Betrothed, translated by Bruce Penham, London: Penguin, 1972; The Betrothed; and, History of the Column of Infamy, edited by David Forgacs and Matthew Reynolds, London: J.M. Dent, 1997.

Further Reading Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Prospettive sui ‘‘Promessi sposi,’’ Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1991. Chiari, Alberto, Rileggendo il Manzoni, Rome: Ateneo, 1967. De Benedetto, Vincenzo, Guida ai Promessi Sposi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1999. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘Apologia manzoniana,’’ in Solaria, 1 (1927). Luka´cs, Georg, The Historical Novel, translated by H. and S. Mitchell, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Mazzocca, Fernando, Quale Manzoni? Vicende figurative de Promessi Sposi, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1985. Moravia, Alberto, Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1966. Moretti, Franco, Atlante del romanzo europeo 1800–1900, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Pupino, Angelo R.,‘‘Il vero solo e bello’’: Manzoni tra retorica e logica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1982. Puppo, Mario, Poesia e verita`: Interpretazioni manzoniane, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1979. Raimondi, Ezio, Il romanzo senza idillio: Saggio sui ‘‘Promessi sposi,’’ Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Russo, Luigi, Dal Manzoni al Gattopardo, Florence: Sansoni, 1981.

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ALESSANDRO MANZONI Spongano, Raffaele, Le prime interpretazioni dei ‘‘Promessi sposi,’’ Bologna: Patron, 1967. Wellek, Rene´, A History of Modern Criticism 1750–1950, vol. 2, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

TRAGEDIES Alessandro Manzoni’s two dramatic tragedies, Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1819) and Adelchi (Adelchi, 1822) usher in a new era of nineteenth-century Italian drama, establishing Manzoni as the undisputed leader of Italian Romanticism. His deliberate turn toward history, viewed from a Christian perspective, not only takes the theater of his day in a new direction, but also marks an important transformation in his own development. Written in the wake of the Inni sacri, the tragedies reveal his growing power as a writer, and his moral insight into the human condition. True, the tragedies could not be called great stage successes. In fact, the opening of Carmagnola in Florence in 1828 elicited primarily laughter and yawns, according to Giovan Battista Niccolini, while the opening performance of Adelchi in Turin 1843 was also poorly received, according to Angelo Brofferio (Guido Davico Bonino, Nota introduttiva a Adelchi, 1888). Yet Manzoni claimed that he did not write his tragedies for performance, but rather for solitary reading. Although their critical reception was mixed, they were in fact appreciated by some of the most discerning voices of the time, especially Goethe, who commented on their great depth and lyrical beauty. Manzoni begins Il conte di Carmagnola in January 1816, completing it only in August 1819, while drafting his fifth sacred hymn, ‘‘La Pentecoste,’’ and the first part of Osservazione sulla morale cattolica. Adelchi follows soon after, in 1822. Not surprisingly, moral concerns remain central to both dramas. But so does an aspiration to achieve ‘‘something new,’’ something inspired in part by Shakespeare—who was then known in Italy only through written texts (later in the century his plays were staged by the likes of Tommaso Salvini, Adelaide Ristori, and Ernesto Rossi). But the novelty Manzoni sought was also foreshadowed by 1140

Goethe, by Schiller, and by his own increasing interest in the role that history might play in an art that would deliver the true. In his preface to Il conte di Carmagnola, Manzoni specifically rejects the neoclassical ‘‘unities’’ of action and time, pointing out their false premises, and noting that the most important English and Spanish playwrights never abide by them, and that audiences never need them. He also highlights important innovations: his use of the chorus to provide the poet’s own perspective (the chorus being, in the wake of August Wilhelm Schlegel, the means for the poet to speak directly, and on behalf of all humanity), and the new role he gives to history. In this case he focuses on the historical life of Carmagnola, a mercenary soldier of the fifteenth century. To ensure that his reader appreciates the historical origins of the plot, Manzoni offers prefatory historical notes and divides his dramatis personae into ‘‘historical’’ and ‘‘ideal.’’ The drama portrays events occurring between 1426 and 1432, when Carmagnola, who had originally acted as a mercenary soldier in the ranks of Filippo Maria Visconti, is appointed commanderin-chief of Venetian forces. At first, he wins victories against Milan. But subsequent defeats lead to suspicions, accusations, and eventually execution. Examining the historical record, Manzoni rejects the view that Carmagnola was in fact guilty, believing him innocent but betrayed. In a long monologue of the drama, Marco, a Venetian senator, opposes his devotion to his country to his friendship with Carmagnola, whom he will betray. This tragedy vividly portrays an unjust state, manipulating individuals at will. As the plotline takes the reader over six years of action, Carmagnola’s situation and character gradually come into focus. If the first two acts portray his military prowess, the third reveals the growing suspicions surrounding him, and Act IV the manipulated agreement of his friend, Marco, not to warn him of the plan to lure him to Venice to arrest him. In the final act, Carmagnola is condemned to death. Carmagnola’s predicament—the just man in an unjust world—promotes reflection about Italy in the fifteenth century, and on history more generally. Above all, it casts light on the human spirit as it deals with a world that is fundamentally flawed. The climax of the play occurs after Carmagnola is betrayed by the Venetian senate and condemned. Alone in his cell, he contemplates his past and present state. Unable to seek justice in the earthly present, he seeks it in the eternal judgment of

ALESSANDRO MANZONI God. Speaking to his wife, his daughter, and his lieutenant Gonzaga, he reasserts his innocence and counsels forgiveness. As the drama closes, we observe the somewhat mechanical metamorphosis of the protagonist from a miles laico into a miles Dei, ready to proclaim God’s metaphysical justice. Though the play received only mixed reviews in Italy, its innovative use of history, its lyric chorus, and its accessible language building complex and moving characters, added much to Manzoni’s reputation as a leading Romantic, a reputation that grows through his historical system, described in the Lettre a` M. Chauvet and put into practice again in his second attempt at tragedy. The plot of Adelchi is set in Italy in 773–774, when Pope Adrian I asked Charlemagne’s help in warding off the invasion of the Longobard king, Desiderius, whose daughter, Ermengarda, had been married to and then rejected by Charlemagne. So concerned is Manzoni with the audience’s understanding of this complex history that he again provides prefatory historical notes, and eventually, a long essay, Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Essay on Some Aspects of Longobard History in Italy). The tragedy follows the military campaign of Carlo (Charlemagne) against Desiderius and his noble, courageous, and loyal son, Adelchi, who fights at his father’s side in a war he believes to be unjust and doomed to be lost. In the course of it, Desiderius is indeed defeated, Ermengarda falls into delirium and dies, while Adelchi, who had argued from the first against his father’s invasion of papal lands, is betrayed and mortally wounded. Carried before Desiderius and Carlo, he seeks a promise that his father will not be harmed, and then prepares to die. Evoking a number of romantic heroes, but above all the figure of Christ, Adelchi awaits the eternal, having been betrayed by a worldly friend. Like Carmagnola, he learns that justice is not possible in historical reality, where force holds sway and power has the last word. In Adelchi, as well as in Il conte di Carmagnola, Manzoni’s focus on historical truth joins his rational, yet compassionate portrayal of the limits of human action to right an unjust world. His modern diction and moving psychological insights make the revelations of Adelchi and Ermengarda in the two choruses devoted to them in Acts II and IV some of Manzoni’s greatest lyric passages. The first, known as Italy’s chorus, describes society suffering under superior forces, evoking the plight of Italy in the early years of the Risorgimento. The second provides insight into private tragedy, where respite is found only in death. Read in the context

of the play, they support Manzoni’s creation of lasting characters. Adelchi is often compared to Corneille’s Polyeucte or Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and Ermengarda to Racine’s Phe`dre or Athalie. In particular, Ermengarda’s delirious monologue in Act IV, with its public and almost operatic confession of her sins before the nuns of the convent of San Salvadore in Brescia, makes her the most moving of all of Manzoni’s heroines. A mixture of Lucia and Gertrude, a wife and daughter of kings, Ermengarda describes her consuming passion for Carlo, mingled with a plea to an elusive and ultimately mute God, in a language that hovers between dream and magical invocation. Such a figure remains, in the end, distinctly Manzoni’s own, revealing his probing depictions of the human soul in its encounters with history and hopes for happiness and earthly justice. In later years, Manzoni’s pessimism lessens, but his intense interest in the private and political trials offered by historical circumstances only grows, finding new expression in the historical novel. SANDRA BERMANN Editions First edition: Il conte di Carmagnola, Milan: Vincenzo Ferrario, 1820; Adelchi, Milan: Ferrario, 1822. Critical editions: Adelchi, tragedia storica, edited by Giorgio Derzero, Turin: Paravia, 1947; Adelchi, edited by Aurelia Accame Bobbio, Rome: Signorelli, 1965; Adelchi, edited by Luigi Russo, Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1967; Adelchi, edited by Isabella Becherucci, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1998. Il conte di Carmagnola, edited by Alberto Chiari, Florence: Le Monnier, 1947; Tragedie: Il Conte di Carmagnola e Adelchi, edited by Fausto Ghisalberti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1954; Tragedie, edited by Guido Bollati, Turino: Einaudi, 1965. Translations: The Count of Carmagnola and Adelchis, edited and translated by Federica Brunori Deigan, Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Further Reading Accame Bobbio, Aurelia, Storia dell’Adelchi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1963. Bene, Carmelo, and Giuseppe Di Leva, L’Adelchi, o della volgarit‘ di politico, Milan: Longanesi, 1984. Bosisio, Paolo, ‘‘Il Manzoni drammaturgo dal ‘Carmagnola’ all’‘Adelchi,’’’ in Otto/Novecento, 2 (1986): 5–37. Davico Bonino, Guido, Nota introduttiva a Adelchi, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. De Sanctis, Francesco, Manzoni, Turin: Einaudi, 1955. Getto, Giovani, Manzoni europeo, Milan: Mursia, 1971.

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ALESSANDRO MANZONI Lonardi, Gilberto (editor), Introduzione a ‘Il conte di Carmagnola,’ Venice: Marsilio, 1989. Lonardi, Gilberto, Ermengarda e il pirata: Manzoni, drama epico, melodrama, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991.

Molinari, Cesare, ‘‘La (s)fortuna teatrale di Manzoni,’’ Biblioteca teatrale, 1 (1986): 77–93. Raimondi, Ezio, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

DACIA MARAINI (1936–) Dacia Maraini, novelist, playwright, poet, critic and activist, is the most internationally acclaimed feminist Italian writer today. In her works, Maraini observes and critiques social realities and has produced a body of work chronicling women’s experiences and struggles in postwar Italy to redefine family and gender relationships that impeded women’s ability to effect personal and social change. Maraini made her literary debut in 1962 with the novel La vacanza: l’adolescenza di una donna oggetto (The Holiday: The Adolescence of a Woman as Object). This novel was followed by L’et‘ del malessere (The Age of Malaise, 1963), A memoria (Memory, 1967) and a collection of short stories, Mio marito (My Husband, 1968). Maraini in this first phase experiments with different narrative techniques associated with stream of consciousness and the existential novel. Maraini’s female protagonists are alienated from their past, from society, and from other women primarily because of their gender. Their attempts at self-understanding and revolt against oppressive environments are misguided, reinforce negative stereotypes of women as rapacious manipulators and sexually insatiable beings and are ultimately self-destructive. In her novels published in the 1970s and early 1980s, at the height of the feminist movement in Italy, Maraini links themes of women’s objectification, exploitation, and alienation to feminist goals of personal liberation, autonomy, and the expression and validation of sexual difference. In Donna in Guerra (Woman at War, 1975) and Il treno per Helsinki (The Train, 1984). Maraini’s protagonists offer resistance to their isolation and oppression and develop progressively into more self-assertive, politically aware female subjects through their participation in contemporary political life and a productive confrontation and break with their past. In Il treno per Helsinki, Armida Bianchi, a playwright, suffers a traumatic miscarriage and a divorce from a traditional-type 1142

marriage. She then becomes romantically involved with Miele, a student revolutionary and modernday Don Juan and joins him and a group of young politically committed friends who travel by train to the 1968 Youth Festival held in Finland. Il treno per Helsinki is a portrait of a generation of young idealists who learn to come to terms with the misogynist underpinnings of interpersonal relationships and face the limitations and failures of their own theories and actions. Love between women is the subject of her 1981 epistolary novel, Lettere a Marina (Letters to Marina), a theme treated before in some of her short stories and plays. The role of violence perpetrated against women for centuries by social, family, and legal systems is central to the historical reportage novel Isolina: La donna tagliata a pezzi (Isolina, 1985), La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (The Silent Duchess, 1990), and later novels. Isolina is based on Maraini’s own investigative research into the murder of Isolina Canuti, whose mutilated body was thrown into the Adige River by her lover, an army officer. Although Isolina’s death was probably the result of a botched backalley abortion, the court ruled the death a suicide motivated by Isolina’s need to hide her shameful condition. Maraini demonstrates how justice in this case was secondary to protecting the reputation of the military and ensuring patriarchal control over women’s sexuality. Violence against women used to ensure the erasure of their experiences from history, and memory informs the fictional thriller detective novel Voci (Voices, 1994). Michela Canova, a radio journalist investigating the murder of her neighbor, finds out that this is another story of family sexual abuse and murder. In the short story collection Buio (Darkness, 1999), Maraini concentrates on family abuse against disempowered children. Maraini believes that the theater is the place best suited to instruct the public on specific political and social issues such as poverty and homelessness.

DACIA MARAINI In the 1960s she cofounded several theaters, including the Teatroggi, La Compagnia del Porcospino with her companion, the writer Alberto Moravia. In 1969, she founded the Compagnia Blu, a group of actors who staged plays for the working classes in Centocelle, one of the poorer neighborhoods of Rome. In her more than 30 plays, Maraini foregrounds themes of continued violence against women motivated by male desire to control their sexuality and the role of sexual difference in women’s social and personal inequality. In 1973, she established La Maddalena, the first theatrical group composed exclusively of women, which operated until 1990. Maraini, the playwright, retraces the history of the repression and the silencing of women’s voices through symbolic re-enactments in contemporary women’s lives. For example, in Zena (1975), she juxtaposes the witchcraft trial of the title character in 1512 with a modern Zena’s frustrated attempts to bring to justice the young men who raped her. Also in I sogni di Clitennestra (Clytemnestra’s Dreams, 1981) and Don Juan (1976), the author places literary and mythical figures in contemporary contexts. Agamemnon becomes an emigrant worker, while Clytemnestra’s unfaithfulness is depicted through the troubled relationship with her children, who are determined to frame her as a dutiful, self-sacrificing wife and mother. Maraini’s Don Juan turns into a Communist who convinces Elvira to kill her father, a Fascist general. In Donna Lionora, giacobina (Lady Leonor, Jacobin, 1981), the story of Leonora Pimentel, a Portuguese librarian who was imprisoned and guillotined in Naples in 1799 for her support of Jacobin ideas, Maraini foregrounds the generational conflict between women through Leonora’s confrontation with the daughter of her husband’s mistress. In other plays as well—among them Maria Stuarda (1981), Suor Juana (1980), and Veronica Franco (1992)—she stages women’s oppressive history and their spaces of revolt, while they challenge the restrictions imposed upon their participation in public life and artistic independence. Maraini’s involvement with the film industry also reflects her commitment to expressing women’s concerns in public forums. In 1973, Teresa la ladra, directed by Carlo Di Palma (Antonioni’s former cinematographer), and starring Monica Vitti in the title role, was based on Memorie di una ladra (Memoirs of a Female Thief, 1972). It is the story of Teresa Numa, who happened to recount her life as a petty swindler, forger, and prostitute to Maraini herself. Although Teresa is quite proud of being an outsider, in the course of her narration she

acknowledges her cooperation with the same social structures that exploited and condemned her to prison. The theme of prostitution is revisited in Storia di Piera (Piera’s Story, 1980), the account of actress Piera degli Esposti’s dysfunctional childhood and close relationship with her mother. This compelling novel was adapted into a film by Marco Ferreri in 1983, starring Hannah Schygulla, Isabelle Huppert, and Marcello Mastroianni. Several of Maraini’s other fictional works (including Voci, La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a, Donna in guerra and L’eta` del malessere) have been made into successful films. In addition, she has experimented with the medium by directing Mio padre amore mio (My Father, My Love, 1978), La bella addormentata nel bosco (Sleeping Beauty, 1978), and Giochi di latte (Milk Games, 1979). These films, which do not rely on dialogue, block the female character in a viewing position that defies and challenges the classical specular gaze. Maraini’s poetic works—Crudelta` di aria aperta (Cruelty in the Open Air, 1966), Donne mie (My Women, 1974), Mangiami pure (Devour Me Too, 1978), and Dimenticato di dimenticare (Forgetting to Forget, 1982)—address such controversial issues as adultery as a means of self-expression, competition among women and the difficulty in establishing solidarity, a daughter’s narcissistic bond for her father. In later collections, she confronts the realities of cultural feminism, with its victories and defeats, in Viaggiando con passo di volpe (Walking with the Tread of a Fox, 1991) and in Occhi di Medusa (Medusa’s Eyes, 1992). Maraini’s writing argues for women’s need to define and express their sexual difference in order to overcome constricted models and develop a critical awareness. Among the numerous critical essays authored by Maraini, Cercando Emma (Searching for Emma, 1993) investigates at length the representation and reception of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. In her more recent work, Nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (The Boat to Kobe: My Mother’s Japanese Diaries, 2001), Maraini (who spent the first eight years of her life in Japan) discusses the development of her own political and gender consciousness in familial settings and reiterates the importance of writing as a means of self-analysis and self-expression.

Biography Born in Florence, on 13 November 1936 to Fosco Maraini, a famous ethnologist, and Topazia, a painter. Family resided in Japan until 1947. 1143

DACIA MARAINI Interned in a concentration camp from 1943–1946. Returned to the maternal family residence in Bagheria (Palermo) in 1947. Moved to Rome in 1954 with her father after her parents divorced. Came into contact with prominent writers, such as Albert Moravia, who became her companion for many years, and members of the neoavantgarde movement Gruppo 63. Collaborated on journals, particularly Nuovi argomenti and Il mondo. Became involved in the feminist movement as a writer, political activist, and TV commentator. Has published over 40 plays, several poetry collections, and her novels have won numerous prizes. Among them, the Fomentor prize for L’eta` del malesssere, 1963; the Fregene and Rapallo awards for Isolina, 1985; the Supercampiello and the Book of the Year Award for La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a in 1990; the Rapallo Carige, Scanno, and Joppolo awards for Bagheria, 1993; the Naples, Sibilla Aleramo, Bancarella, and Mathilde Canossa awards for Voci, 1995–1996; and the Strega prize for Buio, 1999. Her books have been translated into over 20 languages. Maraini resides in Rome. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS Selected Works Novels La vacanza, 1962; as The Holiday, translated by Stuart Hood, 1966. L’eta` del malessere, 1963; as The Age of Malaise, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1963. A memoria, 1967. Memorie di una ladra, 1972; as Memoirs of a Female Thief, translated by Nina Rootes, 1974. Donna in guerra, 1975; Woman at War, translated by Maria Benetti and Elspeth Spottiswood, 1994. Storia di Piera, 1980. Lettere a Marina, 1981; as Letters to Marina, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, 1987. Il treno per Helsinki, 1984; as The Train, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, 1988. Isolina: La donna tagliata a pezzi, 1985; as Isolina, translated by Peter Owen, 1993. La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a, 1990; The Silent Duchess, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, 1992. Voci, 1994; as Voices, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, 1997. Dolce per se´, 1997; as The Violin, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, 2001. Colomba, 2004.

Short Stories ‘‘Mio marito,’’ 1968; as My Husband, translated by Vera Golino, 2004.

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Buio, 1999; as Darkness, translated by Martha King, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Crudelta` all’aria aperta,’’ 1966. ‘‘Donne mie,’’ 1974. ‘‘Mangiami pure,’’ 1978; as Devour Me Too, translated by Genni Donati Gunn, 1987. ‘‘Dimenticato di dimenticare,’’ 1982. Viaggiando con passo di volpe: Poesie 1983–1991, 1991. ‘‘Se amando troppo,’’ 1988. ‘‘Occhi di Medusa,’’ 1992.

Theater Cuore di mamma, 1969. Il ricatto a teatro e altre commedie, 1970. Viva l’Italia, 1973. Zena, 1975. Don Juan, 1976. Dialogo di una prostituta con un suo cliente, 1978; as Only Prostitutes Marry in May: Four Plays, edited by Rhoda Helfman Kaufman, 1994. Suor Juana, 1980. Maria Stuarda, 1981. I sogni di Clitennestra e altre commedie, 1981 (includes I sogni di Clitennestra; Due donne di provincia; Donna Lionora, giacobina; Maria Stuarda). Lezioni d’amore e altre commedie, 1982. Stravaganza, 1987. Erzbeth Bathory, madre sanguinata, 1991. Veronica, meretrice e scrittora, 1992. La casa tra due palme, 1995. Maria Stuarda e altre commedie, 2001 Memorie di una cameriera, 2001.

Essays and Interviews E tu chi eri? Interviste sull’infanzia, 1973. Il bambino Alberto, 1986. La bionda, la bruna e l’asino: Con gli occhi di oggi sugli anni settanta e ottanta, 1987. Bagheria, 1993; as Bagheria, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, 1994. Cercando Emma: Gustave Flaubert and Madame Bovary, 1993; as Searching for Emma, translated by Vincent Bertolini, 1998. Un clandestine a bordo: Le donne, la maternita` negata, il corpo sognato, 1996; as A Stowaway on Board, translated by Giovana Bellesio and Victoria Polletti, 2000. La nave per Kobe, 2001.

Films L’amore coniugale, 1970. Aborto: Parlano le donne, 1976. Mio padre amore mio, 1976. La bella addormentata nel bosco, 1978. Giochi di latte, 1979. Lo scialle azzurro, 1980. Ritratti di donne africane, 1986.

Further Reading Camaiti Hostert, Anna, ‘‘Afterword,’’ in Dacia Maraini, The Silent Duchess, New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 1998.

DACIA MARAINI Cattaruzza, Claudio, Dedica a Dacia Maraini. Pordenone: ACP, 2000. Dagnino, Pauline, ‘‘Fra Madre e Marito: The Mother/ Daughter Relationship in Dacia Maraini’s Lettere a Marina,’’ in Visions and Revisions: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Mirna Cicioni and Nicole Prunster, Providence: Berg, 1993. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Rodica, and Ada Testaferri (editors), The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000. Frabotta, Biancamaria (editor), Italian Women Poets, Turin-Buffalo: Guernica, 2002. Golini, Vera, ‘‘Italian Women in Search of Identity in Dacia Maraini’s Novels,’’ in International Women’s Writing: New Landscapes of Identity, edited by A. E. Brown and M. E. Gooze´. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. Golini, Vera, ‘‘The Life and Prose Works of Dacia Maraini,’’ in Dacia Maraini, My Husband, Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2004. ´ ine, ‘‘Filming Female ‘Autobiography’’’: Maraini, Healy, A Ferreri, and Piera’s Own Story, in Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices, edited by Giovanna MiceliJeffries, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, ‘‘The Subject’s Seduction: The Experience of Don Juan in Italian Feminist Fictions,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 382–393. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Marotti, Maria Ornella, and Gabriella Brooke (editors), Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Merry, Bruce, Dacia Maraini and Her Place in Contemporary Italian Literature, London: Berg, 1994. Picchietti, Virginia, Relational Spaces: Daughterhood, Motherhood and Sisterhood in Dacia Maraini’s Writings and Films, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Picchione, John, ‘‘Poesia al femminile’’: Rabbia, gioco, terapia,’’ in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Ada Testaferri, Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Rutter, Itala, ‘‘Feminist Theory as Practice: Italian Feminism and the Work of Teresa de Lauretis and Dacia Maraini,’’ in Womens’ Studies International Forum, 13, no. 6 (1990): 565–575. Sumeli Weinberg, M. Grazia, ‘‘La forza della negativita` la dialettica del soggetto parlante nella Lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a di Dacia Maraini,’’ in OttoNovecento, 19, nos. 3–4 (1995): 177–186. Sumeli Weinberg, M. Grazia, ‘‘Rethinking Sexual Difference: The Supremacy of Alterity in Dacia Maraini’s Voci,’’ in Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 12, no. 2 (1999): 20–36. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Women and Theater in Italy: Natalia Ginzburg, Franca Rame and Dacia Maraini,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 5 (1993): 343–348. Wood, Sharon, Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994, London: Athlone, 1995.

DONNA IN GUERRA, 1975 Novel by Dacia Maraini

Dacia Maraini’s Donna in guerra (Woman at War) represents a marked change in the writer’s fictional portrayals of fragmented and alienated female selves unable to resist oppressive patriarchal structures. Here Maraini exploits a variety of literary genres to trace the progressive coming to consciousness of her female protagonists as they take control of their bodies and minds, which become sites of resistance capable of expressing female desire. Donna in guerra is set against the backdrop of political upheavals in the late 1960s and early 1970s and traces several months in the life of an elementary school teacher, Vannina, and her mechanic husband, Giacinto. Written in diary form, Vannina’s narrative begins on the vacation island of Addis where she encounters a series of individuals who act as catalysts for her own transformation. The island’s inhabitants, both natives and foreigners, provide a microcosm of male domination, women’s subservience, and societal violence perpetrated against women. Originally confined to her cabin, where she attends to cleaning and cooking while her husband goes fishing, Vannina eventually ventures out to do her laundry. She meets Toto and Giottino, two Sicilian women, whose Laundromat and salacious gossip of nocturnal sexual escapades on the island, however true, signify the imaginative, yet disempowered reactions of women who are excluded from political and social spheres. Vannina and Giacinto then encounter the adherents to the ‘‘People’s Liberation Front,’’ a group advocating the advancement of the working class. In the families of these progressive members, however, the women must listen to stories of rape and sexual prowess. Among these new acquaintances is Vittorio, an abusive, chauvinistic student who acts as the spokesman for the ‘‘People’s Liberation Front.’’ His beautiful girlfriend Suna, a wealthy bisexual cripple who preaches female emancipation, befriends Vannina. Together they travel to

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DACIA MARAINI Naples, where Suna interviews women involved in lavoro nero (work done at home for meager wages). Thus, Vannina becomes increasingly aware of sexism and gender blindness within the leftist political groups as she is herself attacked by two men in Naples and eventually raped by her husband who reclaims her former ‘‘natural’’ complacent self. Although Suna is not able to overcome dependent behavioral patterns and dies from an accidental fall, she comes back in a dream to pass on her crutches to Vannina. Suna’s appearance inspires Vannina to re-evaluate her relationship with her traditional husband and finally abort her unwanted pregnancy. Vannina’s diary charts her development from a submissive housewife to a politically aware woman who defies conventional definitions of womanhood. Vannina and Suna, working together despite their differences, search for autonomy and selfrealization away from the patriarchal strictures that have informed women’s acceptance of and compliance with the manipulations carried upon them by historical boundaries. Donna in guerra is a powerful literary document of the feminist movement. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS Editions First edition: Donna in Guerra, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Translations: as Woman at War, translated by Maria Benetti and Elspeth Spottiswood, England: Lighthouse Books, 1984; rpt. New York: Italica Press, 1988.

Further Reading Coburn, Melissa, ‘‘Calling a Spade a Spade: Uses and Abuses of Violent Language in Donna in Guerra,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 11 (2000): 161–166. Diaconescu-Blumenfeld, Rodica, and Ada Testaferri (editors), The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000. Gala, Candelas, ‘‘Identity and Writing: A Lacanian reading of Alba de Ce´spedes’ Quaderno Proibito and Dacia Maraini’s Donna in Guerra,’’ in Forum Italicum, 37, no. 1 (2003): 147–160. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, ‘‘From Margins to Mainstream,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Merry, Bruce, Dacia Maraini and her Place in Contemporary Italian Literature, London: Berg, 1994. Panizza, Letizia, and Sharon Wood (editors), A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Tamburri, Anthony, ‘‘Dacia Maraini’s Donna in Guerra: Victory or Defeat?’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.

LA LUNGA VITA DI MARIANNA UCRI`A, 1990 Novel by Dacia Maraini

In La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a (The Silent Duchess), Dacia Maraini places the story of the emancipation of a female protagonist from constricting familial, social, and cultural patriarchal mores portrayed in Donna in guerra and Il treno per Helsinki in a historical framework. The main character, Marianna, is a Sicilian aristocrat who lived in the early eighteenth century. Maraini claims this protagonist was inspired by a portrait of a female ancestor in the family house in Bagheria who was painted with her writing tablet in front of her. Since Marianna is a deaf-mute, her father allows her to learn to read and write in order to communicate, and it is the medium of reading and writing that will prepare her own intellectual and sexual rebirth. Most of the events in the novel reflect the typical means of sexual, psychological, and economic repression of women. Marianna Ucrı`a is married to her maternal uncle, 30 years her senior, at age 13. This was the same uncle whose rape of her as a young child caused her condition. The prescribed and circumscribed fate of women is also portrayed in the characters of Marianna’s sisters, daughters, and mother who, if not destined to marriage and endless childbirth, are sent to convents. Maraini adapts the classical myth of the rape of Philomela by Tereus who has her tongue cut out to keep her from telling the story. Yet, unlike Philomela, Marianna is unable to avenge herself since she has no memory of the event. JoAnn Cannon calls attention to how the first scene of the novel, where the child Marianna accompanies

MARCHESA COLOMBI (MARIA ANTONIETTA TORRIANI) her father to a public hanging of a juvenile thief whom he is supposed to comfort, functions both as a metaphor of the violence and betrayal inflicted upon the trusting young girl by her father and a screen memory that shelters her from remembering her father’s betrayal (‘‘Rewriting the Female Destiny,’’ 1995). Although her father had hoped this violent encounter would reverse Marianna’s muteness, it is in the end Marianna’s knowledge, derived from her exposure to the writings of Enlightenment philosophers and her ability to read and write, that restores her memory. Hence the narrative symbolizes the passage of women from what the author has called the female ‘‘prehistoric state’’ marked by amnesia and aphasis to their historical state where they can reflect upon their past and find the words to describe it. Although Marianna’s speech is never restored after the death of her husband, she refuses to remarry or to withdraw into a state of drugged silence and resignation. Marianna will eventually engage in her first satisfying sexual relationship with a much younger servant. At the end of the novel, the protagonist goes against the wishes of her eldest son and embarks on her new ‘‘long’’ life in which she will explore actively new places, ideas, her sexuality, and female difference. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS

Editions First edition: La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a, Milan: Rizzoli, 1990. Translations: as The Silent Duchess, translated by Dick Kitto and Elspeth Spottiswood, London: Peter Owen, 1992; rpt. with afterward by Anna CamaitiHostert, New York: Feminist Press, 1998.

Further Reading Anderlini, Serena, ‘‘Prolegomena for a Feminist Dramaturgy of the Feminine: An Interview with Dacia Maraini,’’ in Diacritics, 21, nos. 2–3 (1991): 148–160; translated from ‘‘Prolegomeni per una drammaturgia del femminile: Intervista a Dacia Maraini,’’ in Leggere Donna, 31 (1991). Brooke, Gabriella, ‘‘Sicilian Philomelas: Marianna Ucrı`a and the Muted Women of Her Time,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti and Gabriella Brooke, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999. Cannon, JoAnn, ‘‘Rewriting the Female Destiny: Dacia Maraini’s La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a,’’ in Symposium, 49, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 136–145. Marotti, Maria Ornella, ‘‘‘La lunga vita di Marianna Ucrı`a’: A Feminist Revisiting of the Eighteenth Century,’’ in The Pleasure of Writing: Critical Essays on Dacia Maraini, edited by Rodica Diaconescu-Blumenfeld and Ada Testaferri, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2000. Sumeli-Weinberg, Grazia, Invito alla lettura di Dacia Maraini, Pretoria: University of South Africa, 1993.

MARCHESA COLOMBI (MARIA ANTONIETTA TORRIANI) (1840–1920) Marchesa Colombi, pen name of Maria Antonietta Torriani, began her literary career in the late 1860s as a journalist and literary contributor for the moderate Piedmontese periodical, Passatempo, later named Giornale delle donne, and for La donna, the liberal and often controversial newspaper founded by Gualberta Alaide Beccari. At that time, she was already living in Milan among the progressive intellectuals who gravitated around the main cultural venues of the city, as for example the literary salon held by Teresa Krammer. It was during those years that she met and collaborated with Anna Maria Mozzoni with whom she traveled in 1871 to Genoa, Florence, and Bologna for a

series of conferences promoting the cause of female education and emancipation. Though moderate compared to Mozzoni, who had recently translated into Italian John Stuart Mill’s The Subjugation of Women and who supported women’s legal equality, Maria Antonietta Torriani became very active both in her writings and public appearances advocating women’s right to higher education. In 1870, speaking at the inauguration of the experimental female high school Agnesi in Milan, where she was asked to teach literature, Torriani took her first public stand in favor of women’s education, which the author saw as an essential component in the process of national modernization. Given 1147

MARCHESA COLOMBI (MARIA ANTONIETTA TORRIANI) women’s high rate of illiteracy (81% in 1861), Torriani identified in education a main vehicle for the advancement not only of the Italian female population, but also of Italian society at large. The author of the best selling conduct book, La gente per bene (Good Society, 1877), from 1875 Torriani adopted the pseudonym of Marchesa Colombi, a name drawn from Paolo Ferrari’s popular play, La satira e Parini (1856). Her conduct book, initially published by Giornale delle donne as a Christmas gift for subscribers, enjoyed enormous commercial success for that time (27 re-editions in 20 years), and marked the beginning of a genre: conduct books for a middle-class female readership, which became very popular in the second half of the nineteenth century. The decade 1878– 1888 represents the most prolific and original period for her literary production. The novels and short stories written during this time, including In risaia (In the Rice-Fields, 1878) and Un matrimonio in provincia (A Small-Town Marriage, 1885), portray the muffled life of provincial Italy, where women’s desolate conditions are presented as emblematic of larger social problems. The protagonist of In risaia, Nanna, provides a vivid representation of the plights of poverty and spinsterhood. Written in the vein of verismo, this novel narrates the story of a young peasant girl living around Novara, who, as a result of a sickness contracted in the rice fields, loses her hair and struggles to marry. Compared by contemporary critics to Giovanni Verga’s Sicilian sketch Nedda (1874), this novel represents the writer’s first literary success. Both thematically and linguistically, Marchesa Colombi’s narrative responds to the author’s imperative to create a literature aimed at representing and improving the life of women—a literature that was supposed to entertain and, at the same time, educate her readers. The didactic purpose of her fiction is clearly stated in the preface to Serate d’inverno (Winter Evenings, 1879), in which she laments the lack of meaningful and formative experiences for those girls who, living in the province, find themselves without escape, even at the imaginative level, from the tedious daily routine of life. While producing fiction, Marchesa Colombi remained very active in journalism, as she collaborated with some of the main periodicals of the time. Beginning with 1876, she ran the column Lettera aperta alle signore (Open Letter to the Ladies) in Il corriere della sera. She also wrote two dramas: La creola (The Creole, 1880), with music by Gaetano Coronaro, first staged in Vicenza, and 1148

Il violino di Cremona (The Violin from Cremona, 1882), with music by Giulio Litta, performed at La Scala in Milan. After 1889, she mainly wrote literature for children and, with the exception of a few contributions to newspaper columns, she kept a very low public profile. On 1 March 1905, Marchesa Colombi wrote an article for the daily La stampa, titled La padrona (The Mistress). It was a polemical response to Matilde Serao’s La serva (The Servant), an article published a week earlier in the same newspaper, in which the Neapolitan writer denigrated the whole category of maids. Serao’s analysis was a scathing attack on the Italian female domestic workers at a time of national social unrest. Marchesa Colombi replied in their defense, commenting upon the harsh conditions in which employees were often forced to work. After she moved to Turin in 1901, she held a salon for emerging artists, attended also by prominent figures such as Edmondo De Amicis, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Arrigo Boito. Soon after her death, her work as writer and journalist fell into oblivion; and it was only in 1973, when Natalia Ginzburg championed with Einaudi the reprint of Un matrimonio in provincia that Marchesa Colombi’s literary merit began to gain critical recognition.

Biography Born in Novara, 1 January 1840 to a lower middleclass family. Lost father, Luigi Torriani, 1841; and mother, Carolina Imperatori, 1854; lived with stepfather, Martino Moschini, until 1865; studied in a convent to obtain a diploma as governess, 1866– 1868; moved to Milan in 1868 with the help of Eugenio Torelli-Vollier, the founder of Il corriere della sera, whom she married in 1875; traveled to Genoa, Florence, and Bologna in 1871, where she met Giosue` Carducci and Enrico Panzacchi; exchanged letters for a year with Carducci, who dedicated to her the poem ‘‘Autunno romantico’’; wrote for periodicals Giornale delle donne, La donna, Vita intima, L’illustrazione Italiana, Fanfulla, Il pungolo della domenica, La nazione, Nuova antologia, Cronaca bizantina, and Il corriere della sera. Her niece, Eva Benetti, who lived with her, committed suicide, 1886; separated from husband, 1887; moved to Turin, 1901; traveled extensively around Europe until the break of WWI. Died in Turin, 24 March 1920. GABRIELLA ROMANI

BIAGIO MARIN Selected Works Fiction La gente per bene, 1877. In risaia, 1878; as In the Rice-Fields and Other Stories, translated by Astor Willmott, 1887. Dopo il caffe`, 1878. Serate d’inverno, 1879. Il tramonto di un ideale, 1882; as The Wane of an Ideal, translated by Clara Bell, 1885. Un matrimonio in provincia, 1885; as A Small-Town Marriage, translated by Paula Spurlin Paige, 2001. Prima morire, 1887. Cara speranza, 1888. Le gioie degli altri, 1900.

Plays La creola, 1880. Il violino di Verona, 1882.

Further Reading Barbarulli, Clotilde, and Luciana Brandi, L’arma di cristallo: Sui discorsi trionfanti, l’ironia della Marchesa Colombi, Ferrara: Tufani, 1998.

Benatti, Silvia, and Roberto Cicala (editors), La Marchesa Colombi: La scrittrice e il suo tempo, Novara: Interlinea, 2001. Cometto, Maria Teresa, La Marchesa Colombi: La prima giornalista del Corriere della sera, Turin: B.L.U. Editoriale, 1996. Genevois, Emmanuelle, ‘‘Bibliographie des oeuvres de la Marchesa Colombi-Maria Antonietta Torriani-Amelia Lorrit-Torelli-Viollier,’’ in Chroniques italiennes, 12, no. 46 (1996): 71–95. Ginzburg, Natalia, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Marchesa Colombi, Un matrimonio in provincia, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Pastore, Anna, ‘‘Maria Antonietta Torriani Marchesa Colombi,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 16, no. 5 (1992): 81–104. Vittori, Maria Vittoria, ‘‘La Marchesa Colombi,’’ in Le scrittrici dell’Ottocento: Da Eleonora da Fonseca a Matilde Serao, edited by Francesca Sanvitale, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995. Zambon, Patrizia, ‘‘I racconti di Natale nella narrativa dell’ultimo Ottocento: Marchesa Colombi, Emilio De Marchi, Contessa Lara, Grazia Deledda,’’ in Scrittore e lettore nella societa` di massa, edited by Giuseppe Petronio, Elvio Guagnini and Ulrich Schulz-Buschhaus, Trieste: Lint, 1991.

MARIA ANTONIETTA TORRIANI TORELLI-VIOLLIER See Marchesa Colombi

BIAGIO MARIN (1891–1985) Biagio Marin is, along with the better-known Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba, a significant representative of the remarkable intellectual environment of the early twentieth century in Venezia Giulia, a region culturally and politically between two countries, Italy and Austria. Like his contemporaries, Marin was born and raised in two languages and two cultures, German and Italian, and he spent

his youth traveling and residing in both Italy and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He studied in Gorizia, Vienna, Florence, and Rome, where he was taught by Giovanni Gentile and graduated in philosophy. His upbringing made him wellacquainted with German literary and philosophical Romanticism, particularly the works of Goethe, Heine, Lenau, and Rilke. 1149

BIAGIO MARIN His studies with Gentile formed his philosophical perspective along the line of Benedetto Croce’s idealism. Nevertheless, as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo has remarked, culture and history seem to be set aside in Marin’s poetry by the search for an immobile and atemporal ‘‘naturalness,’’ which materializes in the images and forms of his native Grado (Poeti italiani del novecento, 1978). A small island between the mouths of the rivers Tagliamento and Isonzo, on the northeastern coast of Italy, Grado at the end of the nineteenth century was a small and isolated town of fishermen with their own traditions, culture, and language. The images of his childhood and daily life on the island became the recurrent theme in Marin’s poetry, and the local dialect was soon adopted as the most pertinent language for his poetic message. Indeed, after a few unpublished literary attempts in German and in Italian, Marin turned to his dialect as the most appropriate linguistic tool for his poems, as he perceived it as deeply entwined with the island and his own biography. The language of Grado is in fact unique: As a result of the segregation of the island, it remained uncontaminated and preserved its archaic gravity and roughness, which distinguishes it from the other more melodic Venetian vernaculars. In his first collection, Fiuri de tapo (Flowers of the Dunes, 1912), Marin impressionistically evokes scenes and moments of daily life in Grado. Places, people, and above all the sea dominate his poetry and shape his poetic evocations. Autobiographical memories and concrete and recognizable elements of the island are evoked in his verses, following the model of Giovanni Pascoli, to whom also the title of the collection alludes (‘‘flowers of the dune’’ is a synonym for the Pascolian term ‘‘myricae,’’ or tamarisks). The same vein continues in his works of the 1920s, such as Cansone picole (Small Songs, 1927). In the 1940s, the poet was intensely touched by the dramatic events of the war: His only son died in Slovenia in 1943 and he himself actively participated in the National Committees of Liberation. In his poetry, he opted for more political and civic topics and for the more ‘‘universal’’ Italian language, returning to dialect in the following decade, when his rhythm of production became frenetic and intense (he published almost a collection of poetry a year until his death). While some readers were perplexed by the apparent repetitiveness of these works, for Marin’s more acute critics it is precisely in this uniformity that the essence of his poetry can be found. According to Carlo Bo, this so-called monotony reveals the intention of 1150

penetrating reality, first to dominate it and then transcend it (Omaggio al poeta Biagio Marin, 1962). And Pier Paolo Pasolini suggested that Marin’s repetitiveness is to be explained as the attempt to identify the poet’s self with Grado, and Grado with the cosmos; hence, ‘‘Grado’’ evolves from the physical to the psychological dimension, proceeding from reality to the world of memories and dreams (Passione e ideologia, 1960). In other words, Marin gradually stripped his poetry of the patent allusions to contingency and temporality, and resolved autobiographical elements into more absolute and eternal components. His poetry aimed to develop from the transitory and ephemeral to the eternal and immutable, from the particular and contingent to the universal and absolute, as he himself explained in his Discorso sulla poesia (Discourse on Poetry), published as an appendix to the collection Tra sera e note (Evening and Notes, 1968): ‘‘l’operazione del poetare comporta il trasporto del particolare sul piano dell’universale, per mezzo della sintesi estetica: comporta la trasformazione della contingenza, che e` sempre fluente, incerta tra l’essere e il non essere, in forme ferme, in cristalli immutabili, il trasporto dal temporale all’eterno’’ (poetry implies changing the particular into the universal, by means of the aesthetic synthesis: It implies transforming contingency, which is always flowing, uncertain between being and nonbeing, into firm forms, into immutable crystals; it implies shifting from the temporal to the eternal). For this purpose, Marin’s poetry worked by means of reduction, simplification, and repetition. Thus, his lexicon became more and more essential and spare, characterized by a handful of words and images referring to the indispensable objects and sentiments of daily life. Likewise, his metrical forms were simplified to regular stanzas of four lines of hendecasyllables, pentasyllables or seven-syllable verses, with a rhyme scheme ABAB: the typical forms of popular folk poetry, characteristically repetitive and therefore motionless and timeless.

Biography Born in Grado (Gorizia) on June 29, 1891. Studied in Gorizia, and then in a German-language gymnasium, 1900–1909; further study at Royal Superior School in Pisino (Istria); studied in Florence in 1911, where he met the group of intellectuals gathered around the journal La Voce, including Scipio Sla`taper, Carlo and Giani Stu`paric, Virgilio Giotti, and Carlo Michelstaedter, all from the Giulia

BIAGIO MARIN region; studied philosophy in Vienna, 1912–1914; moved back to Florence, 1914; married Giuseppina Marini, 1915, and had four children; military duty with the Austrian Army, 1915–1917; withdrew from the Austrian army due to tuberculosis, then enrolled in the Italian army, 1917–1918; graduated in philosophy in Rome with Giovanni Gentile, 1918; after 1919, taught philosophy and pedagogy in Gorizia, at an educational institute; school inspector until 1923 in the area of Gradisca (Gorizia); director of the ‘‘Azienda balneare e di cura,’’ a health resort in Grado, 1923–1937; taught literature, philosophy, and history in Trieste, 1938–1941; librarian in Trieste for the Assicurazioni Generali, 1941–1956; death of his son Falco in Slovenia, July 25, 1943; joined the Resistance (Comitato Nazionale di Liberazione) in Trieste, 1945; president of CNL, April 27, 1945; returned to Grado, 1968. Death of his wife Pina, 1978. Died in Grado on December 24, 1985. BARBARA GARBIN Selected Works Collections I canti de l’isola: 1912–1969, Trieste: Cassa di Risparmio di Trieste, 1970. I canti de l’isola: 1970–1981, Trieste: LINT, 1981. Poesie, edited by Claudio Magris and Edda Serra, Milan: Garzanti, 1991.

Poetry ‘‘Fiuri de tapo,’’ 1912. ‘‘La ghirlanda de gno suore,’’ 1922. ‘‘Cansone picole,’’ 1927. ‘‘Le litanie de la Madona,’’ 1949. ‘‘Senere colde,’’ 1953. ‘‘Tristessa de la sera,’’ 1957. ‘‘L’estadela de San Martin,’’ 1958. ‘‘El fogo de ponent: 1958–1959,’’ 1959. ‘‘Solita`e,’’ 1961. ‘‘12 poesie,’’ edited by Giovanni Battista Pighi, 1962. ‘‘Elegie istriane,’’ 1963. ‘‘Il non tempo del mare,’’ 1964. ‘‘Dopo la longa istae,’’ 1965. ‘‘La poesia e` un dono,’’ 1966. ‘‘El mar de l’eterno,’’ 1967. ‘‘Tra sera e note,’’ 1968. ‘‘Quanto piu` moro,’’ 1969. ‘‘El picolo nı`o,’’ 1969. ‘‘A sol calao,’’ 1974. ‘‘Pan de pura farina,’’ 1976. ‘‘El critoleo del corpo fracassao: litanie a la memoria di Pier Paolo Pasolini,’’ 1976. ‘‘Nel silenzio piu` teso,’’ 1980. ‘‘E anche el vento tase,’’ 1982.

L’isola/The Island, bilingual edition by Edda Serra, translated by Gerald Parks, 1982. La vose de la sera, 1985.

Essays L’isola d’oro, 1934; reprinted as Grado, l’isola d’oro, 1955. Gorizia, 1940; reprinted as Gorizia. La citta` mutilata, 1956. Umanita` di Scipio Sla`taper, 1961. I delfini di Scipio Sla`taper, 1965. Strade e rive di Trieste, 1967. Parola e poesia, 1984. Gabbiano reale. Prose rare e inedite, edited by Elvio Guagnini, 1991.

Letters Un dialogo. Scelta di lettere 1967–1981, edited by Elvio Guagnini, 1982. Fame di Dio: lettere e ricordi, edited by Fulvio Panzeri, 1987. Lettere a Elena Lokar, edited by Remo Faccani, 2003.

Other La pace lontana. Diari 1941–1950, edited by Ilenia Marin, 2005.

Further Reading Baroni, Giorgio, Umberto Saba e dintorni, Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1984. Bo, Carlo, Omaggio al poeta Biagio Marin, Trieste: Circolo della cultura e delle Arti, 1962. Borsetto, Luciana, ‘‘La poetica di Biagio Marin,’’ in La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 78 (1974): 456–466. Brevini, Franco, L’orologio di Noventa. Lingua, dialetto, letteratura, Milan: Guerini, 1992. Camuffo, Pericle, Biagio Marin, la poesia, i filosofi: tracce per una interpretazione, Monfalcone: Edizioni della Laguna, 2000. De Simone, Anna, L’isola Marin: biografia di un poeta, Turin: Liviana, 1992. Fido, Franco, ‘‘La fatta ininterrotta: per una storia della poesia di Biagio Marin,’’ in Problemi, 95 (1992): 228– 246. Guagnini, Elvio, Note novecentesche, Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1979. Guagnini, Elvio, ‘‘Biagio Marin nella cultura letteraria italiana del Novecento,’’ in Quaderni Veneti, 14 (1996): 111–123. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Moretti, Vito (editor), La lingua e il sogno. Scrittori in dialetto dell’Italia del primo Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Passione e ideologia: 1948–1958, Milan: Garzanti, 1960. Pellegrini, Ernestina, Trieste dentro Trieste, Florence: Vallecchi, 1985. Serra, Edda (editor), Poesia e fortuna di Biagio Marin: antologia della critica, Gorizia: Provincia, 1981. Serra, Edda (editor), Leggere poesia: Biagio Marin, Grado: Centro Studi Biagio Marin, 1990. Vercesi, Matteo, ‘‘La lingua si fa eterna: il dialetto di Biagio Marin fra documentazione linguistica e creazione,’’ in Quaderni Veneti, 38 (2003): 151–172.

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LUCREZIA MARINELLA

LUCREZIA MARINELLA (1571–1653) In the seventeenth century, there was a small but active subculture of educated women writers in Venice, one of the most significant of whom was the poet and polemist Lucrezia Marinella. Her dedication to literary activity and her compositions in virtually all genres available to a writer at the time make her one of the most prolific and talented female writers of her century. In 1600, Marinella published her most compelling work, La nobilta` et eccellenza delle donne, co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli huomini (The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men), which is the most learned vindication of women yet penned by a woman author. Not only did it illuminate her fictional literature, but it also took an important stand on women’s issues, portraying women as independent figures and deeming them equal, if not superior, in nobility and value to their male counterparts. Marinella wrote her work as a response to I donneschi difetti (The Defects of Women, 1598), by Giuseppe Passi (1569–ca. 1620), a treatise warning his fellow man about the dangers of becoming involved with women. For the record, Passi would later tone down the deeply misogynist character of his controversial work and also composed a treatise on I difetti degli uomini (The Defects of Men, 1603). Marinella refuted Passi’s generalizations and attacked his arguments, offering examples from history to support her point of view and incorporating the same sources employed by her opponent in order to challenge his theories. In addition to its stated purpose of countering I donneschi difetti, Marinella’s treatise fulfills another important function for her twenty-first century readers, for it illustrates the techniques that she employs in her fictional works, thereby providing an important interpretive key. Furthermore, in subsequent editions (1601; 1620), she enlarged her refutation of Passi to comprise an entire tradition of misogynist writings from Giovanni Boccaccio to her day (Torquato Tasso). In all of her fictional literature, Marinella created strong female figures, yet avoided making bold universal statements about either gender. She instead categorized her characters as positive or negative, depending on how they uphold or stray from her Christian beliefs. Thus, by confronting Passi’s 1152

arguments, she addressed the concerns of his culture. Once society’s preconceived ideas about women had been dismantled, she filled the void with new categories. Her female heroine of Arcadia felice (Happy Arcadia, 1605), a pastoral drama written in poetry and prose, disguises herself as a man and excels in all activities stereotypically associated with men. The female warriors of L’Enrico, overo Bisantio acquistato (Henry, or the Conquest of Bysantium, 1635), a heroic poem celebrating the defeat of Bysantium by the Venetian Enrico Dandolo during the twelfth-century Crusades, are not required to change religion, marry, give up their independence, or sacrifice their beliefs or value system in order to become heroines of her epic. Her allegorical poem Amore innamorato, et impazzato (Love in Love and in Madness, 1598) allows the strong and noble Ersilia to pursue her own spiritual path, while her La Colomba sacra (The Holy Colomba, 1595) gives Colomba the ultimate power to choose her own martyrdom. In all cases, Marinella created independent and honorable figures who act as perfect role models for the women of her day, both as literary and life examples to emulate. Her women characters do not need to be converted, as do their male counterparts, because they are already noble and dignified, quietly exhorting her female readers to take pride in their own strength and nobility. Marinella was unswervingly consistent in incorporating the key ideas of her treatise into all of the literary forms she used, and her work promoted an active debate that was to continue for at least 50 years after its publication. As is demonstrated by Passi’s revisions of his own work, the results of her writing were immediate and did provoke change. Although she had a prolific literary career and enjoyed success during her lifetime, Marinella was all but forgotten after her death and her works were rediscovered only toward the end of the twentieth century. Today, although the most important implications of her works may be literary, the focus of scholarship remains biographical. Marinella has emerged as an important literary figure, and critical editions of her works have been published or are in progress. Particularly impressive are Franc¸oise Lavocat’s philological notes to her edition of

LUCREZIA MARINELLA Arcadia felice (1998) and Letizia Panizza’s thorough introduction to Anne Dunhill’s 1999 translation of La nobilta` e l’eccellenza delle donne co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli huomini. The increased availability of Lucrezia Marinella’s literary production attests to the influential role that she had on her cultural milieu as well as the literary canon.

Biography Born in 1571 in Venice, daughter of a noted physician. Encouraged by her father and brother at an early age, studied and wrote, composing epics, pastorals, poems, religious works, and treatises. Married Girolamo Vacca, about whom little is known, 1625; had two children, Antonio and Paolina. Died at the age of 82 on 9 October 1653 of quartan fever. CHRISTINE M. RISTAINO Selected Works Poetry La Colomba sacra, 1595. Vita del serafico et glorioso San Francesco d’Assisi, 1597. Amore innamorato, et impazzato, 1598. La vita di Maria Vergine imperatrice dell’universo, 1602. Rime sacre, 1603. Arcadia felice, 1605; critical edition by Franc¸oise Lavocat, 1998. Vita di Santa Giustina in ottava rima, 1606. Vite de’ dodeci heroi di Christo, et de ’Quatro Evangelisti, 1617. De’ gesti heroici e della vita meravigliosa della serafica Santa Caterina da Siena, 1624. L’Enrico, overo Bisantio acquistato, 1635. Holocausto d’amore della vergine Santa Giustina, 1648.

Treatises La nobilta` et eccellenza delle donne, co’ diffetti et mancamenti de gli huomini, 1600; as The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, translated by Anne Dunhill, 1999. Essortationi alle donne et a gl’altri se a loro saranno a grado, 1645.

Further Reading Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘La donna, il modello, l’immaginario: Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinella,’’ in Nel cerchio della luna, edited by Marina Zancan, Venice: Marsilio, 1983. Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘Lucrezia Marinella,’’ in Le stanze ritrovate. Antologia di scrittrici venete dal quattrocento al novecento, edited by Antonia Arslan, Adriana Chemello, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio, Milan: Eidos, 1991. Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘Il ‘genere femminile’ tesse la sua ‘tela.’ Moderata Fonte e Lucrezia Marinelli,’’ in Miscellanea di studi, edited by Renata Cibin et al., Venice: Multigraf, 1993. Chemello, Adriana, ‘‘The Rhetoric of Eulogy in Marinella’s La nobilta` e I’eccellenza delle donne,’’ in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza, Oxford: Leganda, 2000. Conti Odorisio, Ginevra, Donna e societa` nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Angela Tarabotti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Jordan, Constance, ‘‘Renaissance Women Defending Women: Arguments against Patriarchy,’’ in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Kolsky, Stephen, ‘‘Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella, Giuseppe Passi: An Early Seventeenth-Century Feminist Controversy,’’ in The Modern Language Review, 96, no. 4 (2001): 973–989. Labalme, Patricia, ‘‘Venetian Women on Women: The Early Modern Feminists,’’ in Archivio veneto, 117 (1981): 81–109. Lavocat, Franc¸oise, introduction to Lucrezia Marinella, Arcadia felice, Florence: Olschki, 1998. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Lucrezia Marinella,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russel, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Moderata Fonte, Lucrezia Marinella and Their ‘t’ Work,’’ in Italian Culture, 12 (1994): 201–214. Panizza, Letizia, introduction to Lucrezia Marinella, The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men, edited by Anne Dunhill, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

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FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI

FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI (1876–1944) Best known as the founder of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was a poet, novelist, playwright, propagandist, and cultural organizer who, with his tireless activity of promotion of Italian modern art, became one of the most visible public figures of the first half of the twentieth century. Marinetti was born Emilio Carlo Angelo (he would go under different names in his youth, signing, however, all of his works as Filippo Tommaso) in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father practiced law. His mother Amalia Grolli, daughter of a professor of literature, taught him to appreciate the Italian classics, but his education was mostly in French, first at the Jesuit college Saint Franc¸ois Xavier in Alexandria, then briefly at the Sorbonne, where he obtained a ‘‘baccalaure´at-Lettres’’ in 1894. In spite of his later nationalism, which led him to proclaim the superiority of love for the homeland over any other value, Marinetti thus began to write under the influence of modern French literature, almost naturally choosing French for his earliest poetic efforts, including those published in Papyrus, the magazine he founded and practically singlehandedly produced while still in school in 1894. After leaving Egypt, Marinetti settled in Milan, frequently traveling to Paris where he came in contact with many of the leading figures of the literary milieu. His production of this period was profoundly influenced by the poetics of the symbolist movement and in particular by the free-verse poetry promoted by Gustav Kahn. Indeed, in Marinetti’s advocacy of the liberation of the poetic word from the shackles of versification one can see the kernel of the later rejection of all formal constraints with futurist parole in liberta` (words in freedom). Marinetti’s poetic debut occurred in 1898, when his ‘‘Les Vieux Marins’’ (The Old Sailors) appeared in the Anthologie-Revue de France et d’Italie, on whose editorial board he later served until its demise in 1900. His first volume of poetry, La coˆnquete des e´toiles (The Conquest of the Stars, 1902), is an allegorical epic about the struggle between the Sea, which represents energy and dynamism, and the Stars. Steeped in the poetic tradition of 1154

symbolism and decadentism, the book is characterized by an exuberance of metaphors and a hyperbolic language and style behind which, however, it is easy to recognize a number of themes and concerns that would remain constant throughout the poet’s career: the notion of conflict as a driving and creative force; the unresolved tension between art and life; the stars as metaphor for the forces of tradition. These themes are further developed in Destruction (1904), in which the symbols of a still ambiguously seen modernity (cities, factories, tramways) make their appearance. Eroticized as a female figure, the modern city is also at the center of Marinetti’s third and last pre-Futurist poetic collection, La ville charnelle (The Carnal City, 1908), notable mostly because a few of its poems—and in particular ‘‘A mon Pe´gase’’ (To My Pegasus), the subject of which, in spite of the classical reference in the title, is a motorcar— already announce the celebration of modernity that was to characterize Futurism. In 1905, Marinetti also turned to the stage with the play Le Roi Bombance (King Revelry), a hypertrophic satire of contemporary politics and materialism that was produced only in 1909, the same year when he published his second play, Poupe´es electriques (Electrical Puppets), in which the conventions of bourgeois drama are undermined through the introduction of the figure of the artificial human being. Meanwhile, Marinetti had also established a reputation as a cultural liaison between French and Italy with public readings of poetry, informative articles on contemporary literature and art and book reviews for periodicals such as La Vogue, La Revue Blanche, and La Plume, and polemical pamphlets such as Les Dieux s’ent vont, D’Annunzio reste (The Gods Depart, D’Annunzio Remains, 1908). His most important contribution in this respect was the international journal Poesia, which he founded in 1905 and directed and financed until the foundation of Futurism drew his attention elsewhere and he closed it in 1910. Elegant and ambitious, Poesia not only published many of the major figures of fin de sie`cle symbolism

FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI as well as the young Italian poets who would constitute the core of the Futurist movement (Corrado Govoni, Aldo Palazzeschi, Paolo Buzzi), but it also provided Marinetti with a forum in which to refine his considerable skills at cultural promotion. Futurism was officially launched with the publication of Marinetti’s manifesto Le Futurisme on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. While short on specific poetic prescriptions, it articulated a series of principles that would orient the movement for the rest of its history, and which can be summarized in terms of the opposition between the positive values of speed, rebellion, and struggle and the negative values of stasis, the cultural tradition, and conventional moral values. It is in this context that the often-quoted principles of war as ‘‘sola igiene del mondo’’ (the world’s only hygiene) and of ‘‘disprezzo della donna’’ (scorn of women) must be understood. Futurism was thus opposed to what Marinetti dubbed passe´isme (love for the past). From the beginning, one of the crucial elements of Futurism was the intention of healing the breach between art and life that had characterized late nineteenth-century aestheticism, and its political and philosophical sources included anarchism, Sorelian syndicalism, Bergsonian thought, and Italian nationalism. The initial group of poets was soon joined by artists, musicians, architects, and in the manifestoes written or simply inspired by him, Marinetti pursued relentlessly the interdisciplinary mission of Futurism: Perfecting the genre of the manifesto as both a polemical weapon and a statement of intent, he and his fellow Futurists appropriated for the movement every domain of artistic or social activity, from music and sculpture to politics and cuisine. Furthermore, thanks to the substantial fortune inherited upon his father’s death in 1907, Marinetti was able to finance Futurism for much of its life, and especially in its early years he traveled extensively in Italy and abroad to promote Futurist artists and writers, and to establish connections with other avant-garde groups, thus earning the nickname caffeina d’Europa (caffeine of Europe). Marinetti’s first work labeled as ‘‘Futurist’’ is the novel Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist, 1909), which, however, is rather a transitional work more indebted, stylistically and thematically, to symbolism and the narrative of exotic adventure than to the avant-garde. Marinetti weaves into the story of the heroic African prince Mafarka-el-Bar a number of autobiographical elements, and the hero’s quest to return the body of his dead brother to their mother Magamal reflects the author’s own

grief at the death of his brother Leone in 1895, followed by that of his heartbroken mother in 1902. The element that justifies the ‘‘Futurist’’ label is the conclusion of the novel, in which Mafarka dies giving life to his ‘‘son’’ Gazurmah, a flying machine that represents the future of a humanity freed from anxiety over death and corruption. The theme of flight returns in Le monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Monoplane, 1912), Marinetti’s last major work in French and his first openly political and nationalist poem. However, unlike his fellow painters and musicians, Marinetti had not yet developed a specifically Futurist style. This came with a series of technical manifestoes published over a two-year span: Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912), Risposta alle obiezioni (Answer to Objections, 1912), issued as a clarification of the previous manifesto, Distruzione della sintassi Immaginazione senza fili Parole in liberta` (Destruction of Syntax Wireless Imagination Words in Freedom, 1913), and Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilita` numerica (Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and Numeric Sensibility, 1914). In these texts, Marinetti theorized parole in liberta` as a means of breaking with traditional writing and of articulating through language the dynamism and energy of the universe. Based on such principles as the rejection of syntax in favor of a freer form of words association, the abolition of the ‘‘I,’’ the use of techniques like analogy and onomatopoeia, and the valorization of the iconic dimension of the written word, paroliberismo has been criticized as a return to a form of crude and unproblematic mimeticism, but it can also be interpreted as the result of a profound awareness of the semiotic nature of human experience and the need to develop instruments capable of bridging the fracture between language and phenomena. The most famous examples of parole in liberta` include the book Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), based on Marinetti’s experience of the siege of Adrianople as a war correspondent during the First Balkan War; the ‘‘free-word tables’’ published in Les mots en liberte´ futuriste (Futurist Words in Freedom, 1919), in which Marinetti’s experimentalism with techniques such as collage prefigures visual poetry; and the ‘‘explosive novel’’ 8 anime in una bomba (8 Souls in a Bomb, 1919). The first decade of the movement was certainly also its most creative. For the stage, in 1915 Marinetti devised what he called teatro sintetico (synthetic theater) and in 1921 the teatro della sorpresa (theater of surprise), based on alogic and irrational situations 1155

FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI and on the direct involvement of the audience (variety theater, to which Marinetti dedicated a manifesto in 1913, was very influential in this respect). With the manifesto Il tattilismo (Tactilism, 1921), he even proposed a new form of art based on tactile sensations. At the outbreak of World War I, Marinetti, like many Futurists, was an advocate of intervention, and when Italy entered the conflict he volunteered for service. This did not stop his literary production, although works of this period such as Come si seducono le donne (How to Seduce Women, 1916), and the novel L’isola dei baci (The Island of Kisses, 1918) are examples of the fundamentally escapist erotic-sentimental narrative that he was to practice quite successfully in the 1920s, characterized by a minimal amount of experimentalism, a degree of autobiographism, and a playful tone of worldly irony—among them, L’alcova d’acciaio (The Steel Alcove, 1921), based on his experiences during the war, and Gli amori futuristi (Futurist Loves, 1922), expanded and retitled Novelle con le labbra tinte (Stories with Painted Lips) in 1930, the most original feature of which are the alternative endings provided to the various stories. After the war, Marinetti sought to raise the political profile of Futurism, which had issued political manifestoes as early as 1909, but he also worked closely with Benito Mussolini and participated in the first rally of the Fascist movement. In 1920, the two had a brief split over what the poet perceived to be the passe´iste character of Fascism, but after Mussolini took power Marinetti eventually reconciled his rather libertarian political platform with that of the new regime in the name of the supreme value of nationalism. The gradual withdrawal of Futurism from politics was marked by two works: the novel Gli indomabili (The Untameables, 1922), an allegorical narrative in which, as Luciano De Maria pointed out in his introduction to Teoria e invenzione futurista (1968), Marinetti represents the failure of his utopian political project and returns to endow art with a consolatory function; and Futurismo e Fascismo (Futurism and Fascism, 1924), in which the poet attempts to position Futurism as a precursor of Fascism but also accepts its marginalization in the domain of art. After being appointed a member of the Accademia d’Italia in 1929, Marinetti became increasingly integrated in the cultural establishment. He continued to pursue poetic experimentation with aeropoetry, theorized in the 1931 manifesto Aeropoesia (Aeropoetry), as well as with poems celebrating Italian technologies and inventions, such 1156

as Il poema del vestito di latte (The Poem of the Dress Made of Milk, 1937), on the development of a particular fiber made from casein. During World War II, he devoted himself to the celebration of the Italian war effort—the title of his 1942 Canto eroi e macchine della Guerra mussoliniana (I Sing the Heroes and Machines of Mussolini’s War) is quite indicative of both the subject and the tone of these late works—but he also turned to autobiography, leaving a number of unfinished memoirs such as La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista (The Great Milan, Traditional and Futurist) and Una sensibilita` italiana nata in Egitto (An Italian Sensibility Born in Egypt) for posthumous publication. Because of his support for the Fascist regime, Marinetti was critically neglected in the postwar period, until the renewed interest in experimental writing with the Neoavanguardia in the 1960s. While his role as a founding father of the European avantgarde is generally acknowledged, the implications of the more misogynistic and bellicose aspects of his rhetoric still make him a controversial figure in the current debate on modernism.

Biography Born in Alexandria, Egypt, 22 December 1876. Studied at the Jesuit college Saint Franc¸ois Xavier in Alexandria, then completed secondary school in Paris, 1894; the family moved back to Milan, 1894; death of his brother Leone, 1895; studied law first at the University of Pavia then at the University of Genoa, 1894–1899 (graduated but never practiced); death of his mother, Amalia Grolli, 1902; death of his father Enrico, 1907; first serata futurista (futurist soire´e) in Trieste, 10 January 1910; tried and condemned for obscenity after publication of Italian translation of Mafarka il futurista, 1910; war correspondent for L’intransigeant in Libya, 1911, and on the front of the Bulgarian-Turkish war, 1912; volunteer on the Austrian front, 1915–1918; medal for military value for the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, 1918; participates in the first Fascist rally in Piazza San Sepolcro, Milan, 23 March 1919; married Benedetta Cappa, 1923; signed Giovanni Gentile’s Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti, 1925; birth of daughter Vittoria, 1927; birth of daughter Ala, 1928; appointed to the Accademia d’Italia, 1929; birth of daughter Luce, 1932; volunteer in the war in Ethiopia, 1935; volunteer on the Russian front, 1942. Died of heart failure in Bellagio, 2 December 1944. LUCA SOMIGLI

FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI See also: Futurism Selected Works Collections Teatro, edited by Giovanni Calendoli, 3 vols., Rome: Vito Bianco Editore, 1960. Teoria e invenzione futurista, edited by Luciano De Maria, Milan: Mondadori, 1968. Manifesti, proclaimi, interventi e documenti teorici del futurismo 1909–1944, 4 vols., edited by Luciano Caruso, Florence: SPES, 1990. F. T. Marinetti. Selected Poems and Related Prose, edited by Luce Marinetti, with an essay by Paolo Valesio, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘La conqueˆte des e´toiles: Poe`me e´pique,’’ 1902. ‘‘Destruction: Poe`mes lyriques,’’ 1904. ‘‘La ville charnelle,’’ 1908. ‘‘La bataille de Tripoli (26 octobre 1911), ve´cue et chante´e par F. T. Marinetti,’’ 1912. ‘‘Le monoplan du Pape. Roman politique en vers libres,’’ 1912. ‘‘Zang Tumb Tuum,’’ 1914. ‘‘Les mots en liberte´ futuristes,’’ 1919. ‘‘8 anime in una bomba: Romanzo esplosivo,’’ 1919. ‘‘Spagna veloce e toro futurista,’’ 1931. ‘‘Poemi simultanei futuristi,’’ 1933. ‘‘L’aeropoema del Golfo della Spezia,’’ 1935. ‘‘Il poema del vestito di latte: Parole in liberta` futuriste,’’ 1937. ‘‘Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi,’’ 1940. ‘‘Canto eroi e macchine della Guerra mussoliniana,’’ 1942. ‘‘Quarto d’ora di poesia della X Mas (Musica di sentimenti),’’ edited by Benedetta Marinetti, 1945. ‘‘Poesie a Beny,’’ 1971.

Plays Le Roi Bombance: Trage´die satirique en 4 actes, en prose, 1905. Poupe´es electriques: Drame en trois actes avec une pre´face sur le futurisme, 1909. Il tamburo di fuoco: Dramma africano, 1922.

Fiction Mafarka le futuriste: Roman africain, 1909; as Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, translated by Carol Diethe and Steve Cox, 1998. Come si seducono le donne, 1916; enlarged edition as Come si seducono le donne e si tradiscono gli uomini, 1920. L’isola dei baci: Romanzo erotico-sociale, 1918. Un ventre di donna: Romanzo chirurgico (with Enif Robert), 1919. L’alcova d’acciaio: Romanzo vissuto, 1921. Gli amori futuristi: Programmi di vita con varianti a scelta, 1922; enlarged edition as Novelle con le labbra tinte: Simultaneita` e programmi di vita con varianti a scelta, 1930. Gli indomabili, 1922; as The Untameables, translated by Jeremy Parzen, 1994. Futurismo e Fascismo, 1924. Scatole d’amore in conserva, 1927.

Nonfiction Les Dieux s’en vont, d’Annunzio reste, 1908. Le Futurisme, 1911. Manifesti del futurismo, 1914; 1922. Guerra sola igiene del mondo, 1915. Democrazia futurista: Dinamismo politico, 1919. Al di la` del comunismo, 1920. Primo dizionario aereo italiano (with Fedele Azari), 1929. Marinetti e il futurismo, 1929. Futurismo e novecentismo, 1930. La cucina futurista (with Fillia), 1932; as The Futurist Cookbook, translated by Suzanne Brill, 1989. Il fascino dell’Egitto, 1933. La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista / Una sensibilita` italiana nata in Egitto, edited by Luciano De Maria, 1969. Taccuini 1915–1921, edited by Alberto Bertoni, 1987. Firenze Biondazzurra sposerebbe futurista morigerato (with Alberto Viviani), edited by Paolo Perrone Burali d’Arezzo, 1992.

Further Reading Baldissone, Giusi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Milan: Mursia, 1986. Berghaus, Gunther, The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings 1899–1909, Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 1995. Blum, Cinzia, The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Briosi, Sandro, Marinetti e il futurismo, Lecce: Milella, 1986. Calvesi, Maurizio, Marinetti e il futurismo, Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 1994. Curi, Fausto, Tra mimesi e metafora: Studi su Marinetti e il futurismo, Bologna: Pendragon, 1995. Gozzi, Maria Luisa, ‘‘Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,’’ in Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 264, edited by Rocco Capozzi and Luca Somigli, Detroit-Washington-London: Gale Research Inc., 2002. Ha¨rma¨nmaa, Marja, Un patriota che sfido` la decadenza: F. T. Marinetti e l’idea dell’uomo nuovo fascista, 1929–1944, Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2000. Lista, Giovanni, F. T. Marinetti: L’anarchiste du futurisme, Paris: Se´guier, 1995. Mariani, Gaetano, Il primo Marinetti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1970. Perloff, Marjorie, The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Saccone, Antonio, Marinetti e il futurismo: Materiali per lo studio della letteratura italiana, Naples: Liguori, 1984. Salaris, Claudia, Marinetti: Arte e vita futurista, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997. Somigli, Luca, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Spackman, Barbara, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

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MARINISTI In a passage of his incomplete novel Le guerre di Parnaso (The Wars of Parnassus), an apologetic allegory of the freedom to compose poetry against every normative form of Aristotelian classicism composed in 1643, Scipione Errico writes: ‘‘Eravi di piu` tra questi il Cavallier Gio. Battista Marino, il quale oltra che con la dolcezza de’ suoi componimenti gran moltitudine di parteggiani tirava, ne affettava anco maggiore con l’accortezza dell’astuto ingegno’’ (Also among these was the Chevalier Giovan Battista Marino, who besides drawing great multitudes of supporters to his side with the sweetness of his compositions, attracted even more with the sagacity of his astute genius). This description strongly suggests the awareness of the existence of an Italian literary movement, an organic avant-garde that developed within a European context and that for the first time represented a break with tradition. The style and poetic ideology of the novel expressly follow the most discussed poet of the century, Giovanbattista Marino, whose work exemplifies a profound and radical renewal of taste. This bond brought the closest and most sincere admirers of Marino, especially Claudio Achillini (1574–1640) and Girolamo Preti (1582– 1626), both of Bologna, to staunchly defend his poetic credo and in particular the Adone (Adonis, 1623), in what was a long and often ferocious polemic. Twentieth-century critics have in part overturned the terms of the relationship between, for example, Achillini and Marino, making evident instead Marino’s debt to the former. Moreover, Benedetto Croce, who, generalizing, recognized among Marino’s followers two principal compositional tendencies, the lasciva (sensual) and the concettosa (ingenious), had already suggested that they obtained ‘‘results, artistic and nonartistic, that Marino only sometimes and partially achieved’’ (Sensualismo e ingegnosita` nella lirica del seicento, 1911). ‘‘Marinist’’ as a synonymic extension of parteggiani and as a poetic school was consecrated in the literary canon by the 1910 collection Lirici marinisti edited by Croce, who attributed the coining of the noun to Tommaso Stigliani (1573–1651), at first an early Marinist and later a fierce opponent. The term was used over time with a negative 1158

connotation by artists from Pietro Metastasio to Giuseppe Parini to Giosue` Carducci. Giacomo Jori has remarked that, beginning with the legacy of Torquato Tasso, in Italian academies and as an alternative to the new ‘‘poetry of natural affections of Chiabrera, that looks to the progress of musicians and foreign poets,’’ the refoundation of the modern in poetry throughout the seventeenth century implies ‘‘the widening of the thematic canon, welcoming ignored subjects or subjects confined to ‘minor’ registers, like the burlesque’’ (Poesia lirica ‘marinista’ e ‘antimarinista’ tra classicismo e Barocco, 1997). From a new sense of time that subverts the hierarchies of the world to an unprecedented plurality of horizons to the details of a daily existence inhabited by objects and figures outside of history, the themes of Marinist poetry transgress every habitual selection of taste. From the reformulation of the range of amorous possibilities, including lesbian love and hermaphroditism and more generally the rethinking of the portrayal of women in poetry, to the themes of the transience of life, emblematized in the privileged figuration of the clock and the macabre spectacle of death, the instability of desire finds its true essence in the illumination of the shadowy side of objects and situations. A hidden sense is reached through hyperbole in those very things whose meaning appears now uncertain and relative, since, as Hugo Friedrich has noted, ‘‘in Baroque poetry language says much more than that which the object would demand’’ (Epoche della lirica italiana, 1976). The perception of such an object cannot be exhausted in the easy pleasure of a neutralizing ‘‘poetics of marvels’’ as is exemplified by a too famous, and too little understood, verse of a sonnet by Marino, the ‘‘Fischiata XXXIII’’ of La Murtoleide (The Murtoleide, 1619), today more accurately read by Marzio Pieri (Fischiata XXXIII. Un sonetto di Giambattista Marino, 1992). Such complexity is also evident in themes tied to blood and to ecstatic bodies, the bodies of saints or anatomists, in which, in the words of Marino Niola, ‘‘there flower the restless ciphers of modernity that attempt to reveal the truth of man in the form of the body’’ (Il corpo mirabile, 1997). Life now appears as absolute imminence, and the

MARINISTI matrix of this poetry relates back exclusively to the singularity of experimented and testable concepts, rather than to foundations that are unchangeable over the course of time. The Marinists’ poetic credo, both mediated by classical examples, as in Girolamo Fontanella of Reggio (1612–1644) or in Bernardo Morando of Genoa (1589–1656), and in the more extreme and conceit-filled works of Giuseppe Artale of Catania (1628–1679) and of Giacomo Lubrano of Naples (1619–1693), seems to operate outside of more established poetic hierarchies, along a horizontal plane of thematic equality. It functions according to a modality of composition on the surface, a modality that is alternative to the metaphysics of verticality imposed by Pietro Bembo’s Petrarchism. The twentieth-century evaluation of this experience runs parallel to the estimation of the literary Baroque, a judgment much less favorable in Italy than in other European countries. Having gotten past the aesthetic prejudice of Benedetto Croce on the ‘‘silence of great poetry’’ in the Baroque period, on the idleness of formal experimentalism, or on the theoretical void that supposedly underlie its contemplation of sensuality, more recent criticism has finally come to accept the notion of disorder as a necessary moment in the process of change. With the recognition of the cognitive value of the system of the senses and of pleasure, of the rejection of the rules and, in short, of the resistance to the idea of poetry as science, it finally becomes clear that this phase of experimentation was not simply a period of bizarre and whimsical stylistic variations, or of useless reveries on a consolidated, recognized poetic tradition. Instead, it should be understood as a true subversion of order, a subversion through which poetry allows one to enter into a new relationship with the world, and into a dialogue between things and words, making these ever more mobile and open. As Carlo Ossola has written, this subversion articulates a new ‘‘map of the ‘ties of meanings’ that compensates for the loosening of the order of things,’’ in the face of the ‘‘widening towards immensity’’ of the space of the world, with ‘‘the searching of the Heavens by Galileo, the examination of the souls with the Tridentine council, that eventually brings us to the ‘abysses’ of Pascal, to the internal continents of consciousness and dreams’’ (L’anima in Barocco, 1995). According to Marzio Pieri, Marino’s truest and most calculated ‘‘distinguishing tactic’’ was the ‘‘extroversion of mannerism,’’ his capacity to render subterranean reality (that same reality that writers like Giordano Bruno or Tommaso Campanella

investigated) in a poetic practice constructed of forms that broke with the past (Marino e i marinisti, a Napoli di nuovo, 1990). Thus, the ample lyric repertory of the Marinists includes, not without minor contributions or more ordinary types of imitations, an identical ‘‘anxiety and gnoseological enthusiasm tinged with the ‘pleasures’ and the formal decorum of the Adone,’’ according to the principle ‘‘that style is always a ‘way of being,’ a gnoseological projection that does not coincide with the absolute of aesthetic value,’’ as Carlo Calcaterra underlined in his revolutionary reading of the Baroque muse (Il Parnaso in rivolta, 1940). This plurality of voices and souls, of horizons and perspectives, in which the excellent often received the same credit as the mediocre, demonstrates that the multitude can defend freedom in poetry, and perhaps not only in poetry. This idea is finally and significantly confirmed at the end of the warlike fiction staged in Scipione Errico’s Le guerre di Parnaso: ‘‘il Consiglio, per non mostrarsi parziale con alcuno, determino` che ciascuno il titolo di poeta tenesse, e se ne stasse in Parnaso; e cio` assai giudiziosamente fu fatto, perche´ essendo essi in gran moltitudine, e giovanetti arditi, potevano fortemente difendere la liberta` di Parnaso’’ (the Council, in order to not show partiality, determined that each should keep the title of poet and should remain in Parnassus; and so judiciously it was done, because being in a great multitude, and being ardent youths, they could strongly defend the freedom of Parnassus). In the end, this multitude of registers and this widening of techniques and forms open the Marinist laboratory to an objective contiguity with the aesthetic avantgardes of the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as with certain serial and neo-Baroque practices of the system of contemporary performance. STEFANO TOMASSINI Further Reading Bonito, Vitaniello, L’occhio del tempo. L’orologio barocco fra scienza, letteratura ed emblematica, Bologna: Clueb, 1995. Calcaterra, Carlo, Il Parnaso in rivolta, Milan: Mondadori, 1940. Croce, Benedetto (editor), Lirici marinisti, Bari: Laterza, 1910. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Sensualismo e ingegnosita` nella lirica del seicento,’’ in Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del seicento, Bari: Laterza, 1911. Croce, Benedetto, Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1928. Croce, Franco, Tre momenti del barocco letterario italiano, Florence: Sansoni, 1966.

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MARINISTI Elwert, Wilhelm Theodor, La poesia lirica italiana del Seicento. Studi sullo stile barocco, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Friedrich, Hugo, Epoche della lirica italiana, vol. 3, Il Seicento, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Getto, Giovanni, Barocco in prosa e in poesia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Getto, Giovanni (editor), Lirici marinisti, Turin: Tea, 1990. Jori, Giacomo, ‘‘Poesia lirica ’marinista’ e ’antimarinista’ tra classicismo e Barocco. Gabriello Chiabrera,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 5, Rome: Salerno, 1997. Malagoli, Luigi, Seicento italiano e modernita`, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970.

Massano, Riccardo, ‘‘Marinismo,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, vol. 3, Turin: Utet, 1986. Ndalianis, Angela, Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004. Niola, Marino, Il corpo mirabile. Miracolo, sangue, estasi nella Napoli barocca, Rome: Meltemi, 1997. Ossola, Carlo (editor), L’anima in Barocco. Testi del Seicento italiano, Turin: Scriptorium, 1995. Pieri, Marzio, Marino e i marinisti, a Napoli di nuovo, Naples: Guida, 1990. Pieri, Marzio, Fischiata XXXIII. Un sonetto di Giambattista Marino, Parma: Pratiche, 1992. Praz, Mario, Studi sul concettismo, Milan: La cultura, 1934.

GIOVANBATTISTA MARINO (1569–1625) In the spring of 1602, Giovanbattista Marino personally attended to the printing of the first two parts of the Rime (Rhymes) from the press of Giovan Battista Ciotti in Venice. The success of the poems was immediate, and Marino’s return to Rome was a literary and social triumph, which not only guaranteed him a position in the court of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini, but also distinguished him as the most prominent writer of the Accademia degli Umoristi. The first part of the Rime is dedicated to Melchiorre Crescenzi, offered by Marino as ‘‘un mazzetto di fiori di poesia, gia` da me questi anni addietro co`lti negli orti delle Muse ed ora con rustico ma nuovo ordine, in questo volume raccolti e messi insieme’’ (a bouquet of flowers of poems, already by me in these past years cultivated in the gardens of the Muses, and now with a rustic but new order, in this volume gathered and presented together) (Lettere, 1627). The ‘‘bouquet’’ is carefully gathered, and is composed exclusively of sonnets, subdivided into eight sections according to theme: amorous poems, maritime and sylvan poems, heroic and funereal poems, moral and sacred poems, as well as a miscellaneous section. The second part of the Rime, dedicated to Tommaso Melchiorri, consists instead of madrigals and canzoni, and lacks any sort of thematic organization. Marino’s Rime exhibit a persistent Petrarchan influence, filtered through the petrarchismo of authors such as Pietro Bembo, Giulio Cesare Capaccio, Angelo Di Costanzo, 1160

Ascanio Pignatelli, and Luigi Tansillo. This Petrarchism is revealed not only in Marino’s stylistic mode, what Ottavio Besomi has called ‘‘plurality’’ (Ricerche intorno alla ‘‘Lira’’ di G.B. Marino, 1969), but also through his thematic focus. Appropriating the oppositional dialectics of the relationship between lover and beloved, Marino employs oxymoronic topoi like that of fire and ice and life and death. He avails himself of the lyric characterization of the woman, and love is personified through her countenance, her eyes, and her wavy hair. Marino derived an additional series of images from Torquato Tasso, such as the domestic beloved who cooks, sews, and tends the garden, the mole that adorns her cheek, and the exquisite objects that she uses. Marino thus conservatively draws upon the lessons learned from Petrarch and the ‘‘suggestions’’ proffered by Tasso in order to fashion a less Baroque, slightly more traditional lyric woman. In 1608, Marino accompanied Cardinal Aldobrandini to the Savoy court of Carlo Emanuel I in Turin where he published the Ritratto del Serenissimo don Carlo Emanuello duca di Savoia (Portrait of the Most Serene Carlo Emanuel Duke of Savoy), a eulogy in sestinas, extolling the virtues of the duke, which ingratiated the poet to him. In the same year, while ducal poet Gaspare Murtola (d. 1624) was occupied with the publication of his poem La Creazione del mondo (The Creation of the World, 1608) in Venice, he and Marino engaged in

GIOVANBATTISTA MARINO a literary duel in which Marino dubbed his poetic jabs fischiate (jeers), while Murtola called his responses risate (laughs). Masterfully, Marino laid bare and ridiculed his opponent’s lack of poetic talent and when, as a result, Murtola’s favor in court greatly diminished, he vainly attempted to end Marino’s life with a pistol in the streets of Turin in broad daylight. Their poetic exchange, titled La Murtoleide fischiate del cavalier Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola (The Murtoleide, Cavalier Marino’s Jeers, with the Marineide, Murtola’s Laughs) was not published until 11 years later, in 1619. In 1608, Marino reissued his Rime with the title La lira (The Lyre), to which in 1614 he added a third section of 408 poems divided into: Amori (Loves), Lodi (Praises), Lagrime (Tears), Divozioni (Devotions) and Capricci (Whims). If on the one hand Marino’s poetic mastery seemed to keep apace of his ‘‘shameless and ostentatious’’ use of the erotic genre, as Giorgio Fulco has written (Giovan Battista Marino, 1997), to the point that the beloved herself becomes an object of parody, on the other hand Marino’s lyric production was also guided by what Besomi has called a ‘‘shrewd sense of good taste’’ that allowed him to avoid poetic excesses that could make him seem abstruse (Ricerche intorno alla ‘‘Lira’’ di G. B. Marino, 1969). Judging from the dates of the respective letters of dedication, the Dicerie sacre (Sacred Sounds) were printed from the ducal presses of Turin only 14 days after the publication of the 1614 edition of La lira. The Dicerie sacre is a prose work divided into three parts, dedicated respectively to painting, music and the sky. Although presented in the form of a sermon, the exempla employed by Marino are mythological in nature, while patristic citations are relatively scarce, mostly vague and indirect, so that critic Giovanni Pozzi in his edition has characterized the work as betraying its author’s ‘‘inexperience’’ with respect to the ‘‘theological bibliography.’’ The most striking element of this work, however, is that each diceria is governed by only one thematic metaphor, a rhetorical choice that follows the model of the Selva di concetti scritturali (Wood of Writerly Concepts, 1594) by Giulio Cesare Capaccio (1552–1634). Furthermore, under the heading of his chosen metaphor, Marino made expressive linguistic selections according to a word’s sonorous and graphical impact, rather than to its exact meaning. In linguistic terms, Marino was experimenting with the word’s value as grapheme and phoneme, and the sound of the signifier was equally as important as its significance.

In April of 1615, Marino left Piedmont, traveling to the French court of Maria de’ Medici, widow of Henry IV. With astute calculation, the former poet of the Savoy court synchronized his visit with the printing in Lyon of his latest work, ‘‘Il tempio’’ (The Temple), a poem on architecture in sestinas dedicated to Maria de’ Medici herself. The Epitalami (Epithalamia, 1616) is a collection celebrating the nuptials of aristocratic families, such as ‘‘La Francia consolata’’ (France Consoled), composed both in hendecasyllable and septenarii, for the wedding of Luigi XIII with Anna of Austria and ‘‘Il balletto delle muse’’ (The Dance of the Muses), on the union of Alfonso III of Este with Isabella of Savoy. Some, such as ‘‘Le fatiche di Ercole’’ (The Labours of Hercules) for the matrimony of Ercole Pepoli and Vittoria Cibo have a conspicuous erotic component. The literary sources for the writing of these poems include classical authors such as Catullus and Statius as well as later Latin writers such as the fourth-century poet Claudian. In 1619, Marino published La Galeria (The Gallery), immediately reissued in a second edition in 1620 because of the large number of misprints. The volume is divided into two sections, Pitture (Paintings) and Sculture (Sculptures), in turn divided into smaller groups, although the poet showed a clear preference for the Pitture, by far the largest of the two. Using primarily madrigals, but also some sonnets, Marino dramatized the close relationship between art and poetry by gathering in his literary gallery the drawings of a select group of artists, and placing his poetry alongside, thus illustrating in verse the object of art, and interweaving pictura and poe¨sis according to the conventions of his times, as well as to his own personal artistic preferences. At the beginning of 1620, Marino also personally oversaw the printing of La Sampogna (The Bagpipe) in Paris. Dedicated to Prince Thomas of Savoy, this work is divided into eight mythological idylls and four pastorals. The content of the idylls is the result of the author’s reworking and translation, according to the seventeenth-century precepts of the latter, of the works of earlier authors, both ancient and modern. For instance, the ‘‘Prosperina’’ is based on the model of Claudian’s De Raptu Proserpinae while one of Erasmus’ Colloquia is the archetype for ‘‘La disputa amorosa’’ (The Debate on Love). While Marino looked at Ovid, Nonnus, and Sappho for thematic inspiration, his prosodic models were rather his contemporaries Gabriello Chiabrera, Giovan Vincenzo Imperia`l, Cesare Rinaldi, and Ottavio Rinuccini. In her 1161

GIOVANBATTISTA MARINO 1993 edition of the work, critic Vania De Malde´ summarily characterized the Sampogna as a work of ‘‘moderate barocchismo, experimental more along the lines of metric and prosodic research, rather than of literary, rhetorical, or linguistic research.’’ Published in 1623, L’Adone (Adonis) was an immediate success, quickly becoming Marino’s most acclaimed work. Marino had worked on his masterpiece for over 20 years, and its earliest nucleus, the poem ‘‘I sospiri di Ergasto’’ (Ergasto’s Sighs), dates back to before 1600. L’Adone, divided into 20 cantos in octaves, tells the story of the love between Venus and Adonis, who is then killed out of jealousy by Mars. Venus tributes her lover a lavish funeral, at the end of which Adonis’ heart is transformed into a flower. However, the rather slender mythical tale offers the author the opportunity for innumerable digressions, descriptions and mythological tales, in a veritable encyclopedic poem which is, not by coincidence, the longest in Italian literature. In 1627, two years after Marino’s death, the Venetian publisher Giacomo Scaglia issued a volume of his Lettere (Letters), expanded in later editions. Although the entire epistolary corpus does not exhibit, according to its modern editor Marziano Guglielminetti, the ‘‘authentic version of the human and stylistic experiences’’ of Marino (1966), it can nevertheless be argued that, on the whole, it conveys the image of a courtesan poet intent on his pursuit of the higher positions in the hierarchy of courtly life, and of a cultivator of friendships, clever and resolute in obtaining, occupying, and defending his primacy. The themes of the Lettere range from Murtola’s assault on the poet to his distress as a result of the typographical mutilation of his works, from the description of his incarceration in Turin to the ebullient narration of his voyage to France. It is to a letter, written in 1605, that we also owe the first account of Marino’s La Strage de gl’Innocenti (The Slaughter of the Innocents), possibly composed in its majority before 1610. It was only in 1632, however, that Marino’s nephew, Francesco Chiaro, published this biblically inspired composition in Naples. The sacred poem is divided into two cantos, which are each further divided into two books. The first canto narrates the sequence of events preceding the massacre: the devil foresees the birth of Christ, and deciding to oppose it, sends Cruelty to Herod, who, after seeing it in a dream, awakes and gathers the council of the satraps. Pity then beseeches God to intervene, and an angel 1162

visits the house of Sleep, in search of Vision, inviting her to alert Joseph, who receives the warning and flees to Egypt with Mary and the baby Christ. The second canto is dedicated to the massacre and the assumption of the infant souls into Paradise. To discern the most essential elements of Marino’s poetics, it is important to consider how he evaluates and esteems his relationships with other writers; how he positions himself between contemporary rules of literary convention on the one hand, and public taste on the other; and finally, the weight of the concept of meraviglia, cardinal not only to seventeenth-century culture, but also to the critical fortune of Marino. For the poet, consorting with other writers afforded an extensive repertory of thematic, linguistic, and metrical-stylistic inspirations. In the letter that serves as preface to the third part of La lira of 1614, Marino gives an account of how all the ancient and modern poets have participated in the process of imitation. He explains that the imitator must be creative and imitate like the bees, thus using a simile rich in its historical density, retraceable through Petrarch’s Rerum familiarium libri (Letters on Familiar Matters, 1325–1366) back to Seneca’s Epistulae morales ad Lucilium. Marino further notes in a letter that the adept imitator must ‘‘saper ritingere d’altro colore il drappo della spoglia rubata, acciocche´ non sia con facilita` riconosciuto’’ (know how to dye the cloth of his stolen spoils another color, so that it is not so easily recognizable) (Lettere, 1627). Marino dealt again with the question of imitation in his celebrated letter of 1616 to Claudio Achillini, in which, after cataloging all the conceivable circumstances under which he may chance upon the company of other writers, Marino confesses a key element to his compositional process: during a reading, he would cull, catch, and clip snippets which he would then record for later use, in a zibaldone, a sort of personal notebook. Marino demonstrated a refined flexibility in his capacity to negotiate the balance between contemporary literary convention and the preference of the public for whom he wrote. In a 1624 letter addressed to Girolamo Preti, he declared that ‘‘la vera regola [...] e` saper rompere le regole a tempo e luogo, accomodandosi al costume corrente e al gusto del secolo’’ (the real rule [...] is knowing how to break the rules at the right time, in the right place, in order to adapt oneself to the current customs and tastes of the century) (Lettere, 1627). The third key component in Marino’s poetics is the concept of meraviglia, which is also a

GIOVANBATTISTA MARINO characteristic element of Baroque poetry. The term, employed by the poet himself in the famous verse of ‘‘Fischiata,’’ XXXIII of the Murtoleide ‘‘E` del poeta il fin la meraviglia’’ (The aim of the poet is wonder) became determinant in shaping the literary criticism of his works. It is in part upon a reading of this and other passages that critics of stature of Francesco De Sanctis, Benedetto Croce, Giovanni Getto, and Alberto Asor Rosa have disparaged the poetic value of Marino’s works on the grounds that his poetry is void of content because he employs words strictly for the pleasure and marvel of the word; that he displays a defective sense of imagination and sentiment; and finally, that he affects an overly superficial aesthetics, composed solely of sensuality and opulence, but lacking in substance. Asor Rosa in particular considered Marino a servile figure, an intelligent and entertaining enchanter, and nothing more. In the last 50 years, however, the critical climate has changed, and the work of critics such as Ottavio Besomi, Paolo Cherchi, Giorgio Fulco, Francesco Guardiani, and Marzio Pieri have led to a re-evaluation of Marino’s writings, restoring him to a central position in the poetic canon. This new course of criticism rests on a firm foundation of modern editions of the principal works of Marino; on an analysis of the chronological stylistic development of Marino; and finally, on a systematic research of Marino’s literary sources.

Biography Born on October 14, 1569, in Naples, the son of Giovan Francesco Marino, a lawyer. Dedicated self to the study of letters. Became a member of the Accademia delgi Svegliati, and studied literature under Giovan Battista Manso and Ascanio Pignatelli, 1588; during this time met Tasso. Joined the following of Prince Matteo di Capua and benefited from his expansive library, 1596. Incarcerated, the first time (1598) for allegedly raping a young woman, who subsequently died from an attempted abortion, and the second, after a trip to Rome for the Jubilee of 1600, for having falsified the court documents of a homicide. Manso bought the promising poet’s freedom, and Marino fled to Rome. Following the success of the Rime, entered the service of Cardinal Pietro Aldobrandini and became the leading writer for the Accademia degli Umoristi, 1602. As a result of Paolo V’s election to the papal throne in 1605, Aldobrandini returned to his assigned diocese in Ravenna, and

Marino followed his patron. In 1608, Aldobrandini and Marino went to Turin; on January 11, 1609, became Cavaliere of the Sts. Maurizio and Lazzaro. On February 1, 1609, Murtola attempted to end Marino’s life. In April 1611, Duke Carlo Emanuel incarcerated Marino and sequestered his writings; the incarceration lasted 14 months. In April 1615, accepted an invitation to relocate to Paris, at the court of Maria de’ Medici. In April of 1623, left France and returned to Rome, where he was the driving force of the Umoristi. Between April and May 1624, Marino departed for Naples, intent on finding a residence adequate for his personal library and private collection of art, and was appointed prince of the Accademia degli Oziosi. Died in Naples, on March 24, 1625. BORIS BUIA See also: Mannerism and Baroque Selected Works Collections Opere scelte di Giovan Battista Marino e dei Marinisti, edited by Giovanni Getto, Turin: UTET, 1962. Opere di Giambattista Marino, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Milan: Rizzoli, 1967.

Poetry Rime, 2 vols., 1602; as La lira, 1608; expanded, 1614; Rime amorose, edited by Ottavio Besomi, and Alessandro Martini, 1987; Rime marittime, edited by Ottavio Besomi et al., 1988; Rime boscherecce, edited by Janina Hauser-Jakubowicz, 1991; Rime lugubri, edited by Vincenzo Guercio, 1999; Rime eroiche, edited by Ottavio Besomi et al., 2002. ‘‘Ritratto del Serenissimo don Carlo Emanuello duca di Savoia,’’ 1608. ‘‘Il tempio,’’ 1615; edited by Gian Piero Marangoni in Il tempio. La sferza, 1995. ‘‘Epitalami,’’ 1616. ‘‘La sferza,’’ 1616; edited by Gian Piero Marangoni in Il tempio. La sferza, 1995. ‘‘La Murtoleide fischiate del cavalier Marino con la Marineide risate del Murtola,’’ 1619. ‘‘La Galeria,’’ 1620; edited by Marzio Pieri, 2 vols., 1979. ‘‘La Sampogna,’’ 1620; edited by Vania De Malde´, 1993. ‘‘L’Adone,’’ 1623; edited by Giovanni Pozzi, 1976; edited by Marzio Pieri, 2 vols., 1975–1977; as Adonis, edited and translated by Harold Martin Priest, 1967. ‘‘La Strage de gl’Innocenti,’’ 1632; edited by Giovanni Pozzi in Dicerie sacre e La Strage de gl’Innocenti, 1960.

Prose Dicerie sacre, 1614; edited by Giovanni Pozzi in Dicerie sacre e La Strage de gl’Innocenti, 1960.

Letters Lettere, 1627; edited by Marziano Guglielminetti, 1966.

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GIOVANBATTISTA MARINO Further Reading Besomi, Ottavio, Ricerche intorno alla ‘‘Lira’’ di G.B. Marino, Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1969. Besomi, Ottavio, Janina Hauser, and Giovanni Sopranzi, Giovan Battista Marino: La lira, Hildesheim, Zurich and New York: Olms, 1991. Borzelli, Angelo, Storia della vita e delle opere di Giovan Battista Marino, Naples: Tipografia Artigianelli, 1927. Cherchi, Paolo, La metamorfosi dell’Adone, Ravenna: Longo, 1996. Croce, Benedetto, Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1928. Croce, Benedetto, Nuovi saggi sulla letteratura italiana del ‘600, Bari: Laterza, 1931. De Sanctis, Francesco, Storia della letteratura italiana, Naples: Morano, 1870–1871. Fulco, Giorgio, ‘‘Giovan Battista Marino,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 5, La fine del cinquecento e il seicento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno, 1997. Giambonini, Francesco, Bibliografia delle opere a stampa di Giambattista Marino, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 2000. Guardiani, Francesco (editor), The Sense of Marino: Literature, Fine Arts and Music of the Italian Baroque, Ottawa and New York: Legas, 1994. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Tecnica e invenzione nell’opera di Giambattista Marino, Messina and Florence: D’Anna, 1964. Mirollo, James V., The Poet of the Marvelous: Giambattista Marino, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Pedrojetta, Guido, ‘‘Marino e la meraviglia,’’ in Interpretazione e meraviglia, edited by Giuseppe Galli, Pisa: Giardini, 1994. Pieri, Marzio, Fischiata XXXIII: un sonetto di Giambattista Marino, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1992. Rima, Beatrice, Lo specchio e il suo enigma: vita di un tema intorno a Tasso e Marino, Padua: Antenore, 1991. Serianni, Luca, ‘‘La lingua del seicento: espansione del modello unitario, resistenze ed esperimenti centrifughi,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 5, La fine del cinquecento e il seicento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1997. Viola, Gianni Eugenio, Il verso di Narciso, Rome: Cadmo Editore, 1978.

L’ADONE, 1623 Poem by Giovanbattista Marino

Repeatedly polished throughout the author’s lifetime, L’Adone (Adonis) was published in Paris by Oliviero di Varano in quarto grande. The work is composed of 20 cantos in ottava rima, and is an exemplary instance of how Giovanbattista Marino 1164

broke with the literary tradition regarding genre. Instead of writing an epic of war or heroic conquest, he wrote an epic-length poem of peace about the love between Venus and Adonis. As a result of a vengeful arrow shot by angered Love, Venus becomes enamored with the sleeping Adonis and leads him to her palace, where she initiates him into the knowledge of the five senses by frolicking with him in five gardens. Venus and Adonis are married by Mercury in the final garden, the garden of touch, where they also consummate their nuptials. The fisherman Fileno then narrates his life’s story to the newlyweds, and also establishes the poetic canon of classical and Italian authors. Venus proceeds with the initiation of Adonis’ intellect as the two ascend together to the sky of the moon, the planet of Mercury, and the sky of Venus herself. After their return to Cyprus, a jealous Mars makes claims to Venus, which the newly married Adonis is impotent to thwart. Instead, Adonis retreats and ends up underground as the prisoner of the sorceress Falsirena, where he drinks a magic potion that transforms him into a parrot. Adonis eventually becomes reunited with Venus, and the elements of sensual and intellectual knowledge reappear as the goddess reads his palm while disguised as a gypsy. As the prize for winning a beauty contest, Adonis becomes the king of Cyprus, a position that he delegates to Astreo in order to rekindle his relations with Venus who, however, must depart for Cythera, but as a consolation she permits Adonis to go on a hunt. Mars and Diana conspire the demise of Adonis, who encounters a vicious wild boar. Trying to defend himself, Adonis unknowingly shoots it with an arrow forged by Love, and the enamored beast pursues him, mortally wounding him with a kiss to his tender side. Venus arrives in time for Adonis’ last breath, and celebratory games in his honor follow upon his death. Mythological appropriations and permutations aside, L’Adone exhibits an array of poetic innovation and contraposition: There is no cornice in which to contextualize the poem, and the narrative time sequence of a year is proficiently compressed into 22 days. The protagonists, who according to conventions would be the initiators of action, may be divided into three classifications on the basis of their agency in the poem: Venus and Adonis reveal a relatively passive nature; in opposition to their passivity, are the exploits of Mars and the wild boar; Love and Mercury act as deus ex machina. Although eroticism pervades the entire poem, Adonis paradoxically exemplifies

NINO MARTOGLIO hagiographical and Christological qualities: Although his virility is manifest in his consummated marriage to Venus, he is also compared to a ‘‘vergine [...] semplice e pura’’ (a virgin girl [...] simple and pure) (III.126–127). Marino employs a sort of symmetry throughout L’Adone, a quasi-correspondence between particular episodes, which emerges, in the end, as asymmetrical, yet at the same time generates a metanarrative continuity. Giovanni Pozzi is among the critics who have most clearly elucidated the narrative maneuvers of Marino in L’Adone, defining the poet in his 1976 edition of the work as a ‘‘magician of reversals’’ for whom ‘‘the equivalent to everything is also the opposite.’’ Consonant with Pozzi’s explication, Paolo Cherchi perceives ‘‘a law of relativity that resides in the structural machinations of the poem: [...] that which comes after not only supplants that which came before, but devaluates and modulates it’’ (La metamorfosi dell’Adone, 1996). This same complexity is also retraceable on a linguistic level, as the studies of several critics, and in particular Carmela Colombo (Cultura e tradizione nell’Adone di G. B. Marino, 1967), have brought to light a lexicological universe constructed of specific languages associated with the worlds of anatomy, chiromancy, fencing, equitation, jousting, music, and dance. Marino culled from his travels French and Spanish foreignisms, as well as phrases in Neapolitan and Piedmont dialect, while his literary influences lent Latinisms and terms from the Tuscan jargon. Particularly interesting among this composite semantic corpus, however, are the lexical creations of Marino himself.

Editions First edition: L’Adone, Paris: Oliviero di Varano, 1623. Critical editions: L’Adone, edited by Giovanni Pozzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1976; edited by Marzio Pieri, 2 vols., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975–1977; edited by Giovanni Pozzi, 2 vols., Milan: Adelphi, 1988. Translations: as Adonis, edited and translated by Harold Martin Priest, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Further Reading Besomi, Ottavio, Esplorazioni secentesche, Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1975. Cherchi, Paolo, La metamorfosi dell’Adone, Ravenna: Longo, 1996. Colombo, Carmela, Cultura e tradizione nell’Adone di G. B. Marino, Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1967. Giambonini, Francesco, ‘‘Il compasso e lo squadro nelle architetture del Marino,’’ in Strumenti critici, 25 (1974): 323–344. Guardiani, Francesco, La meravigliosa retorica dell’Adone di G.B. Marino, Florence: Olschki, 1989. Guardiani, Francesco (editor), Lectura Marini: L’Adone letto e commentato, Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1989. Martini, Alessandro, ‘‘L’Adone di Giovanbattista Marino,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, vol. 2, Dal cinquecento al settecento, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1993. Peters, Susanna N., ‘‘The Anatomical Machine: A Representation of the Microcosm in the Adone of G.B. Marino,’’ in MLN, 88, no. 1 (1973): 95–110. Rigoni, Mario Andrea, ‘‘L’ Adone del Marino come poema di emblemi,’’ in Lettere Italiane, 29 (1977): 3–16. Zatti, Sergio, ‘‘Intertestualita` e transcodificazione nell’ ’Adone,’’’ in Riscrittura intertestualita` trascodificazione, edited by Emanuella Scarano and Donatella Diamanti, Pisa: Tipografia Editrice Pisana, 1992.

BRENDA K. HEDRICK

NINO MARTOGLIO (1870–1921) Playwright, poet, journalist, and theater director, Nino Martoglio was the founder of the modern dialect Sicilian theater. He worked with prominent actors such as Angelo Musco, Giovanni Grasso, and Giacinta Pezzana, and encouraged both Pirandello and Rosso di San Secondo to stage their

plays. One of his earliest performances was in a one-act play he had written, I civitoti in pretura (The Civitoti in the Police-Station, 1903), a savory satire on the way in which justice is administered in Catania. The comedy derives its humor from the opposition between the judges who speak the 1165

NINO MARTOGLIO Italian language and the uneducated people who express themselves in dialect or in an Italian contaminated by dialectic elements. Martoglio’s Compagnia Drammatica Siciliana, which he founded in 1901, remained active until 1907. Its repertoire included dialect works by Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, but also Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose famous tragedy, La figlia di Iorio (The Daughter of Jorio, 1904), he staged on September 17, 1904. Of equal importance was Martoglio’s intense collaboration with Pirandello, which began in 1907. In the same year, he started his artistic association with the versatile Angelo Musco. However, in his many letters to Pirandello, Martoglio frequently complained about the excessive histrionics of Musco, a gifted dialect actor whom Silvio D’Amico defined as ‘‘un mimo di proporzioni epiche’’ (a mime of epic dimensions) (Il tramonto del grande attore, 1929). Particularly, Martoglio had reservations about the staging of his San Giuvanni decullatu (St. John Beheaded, 1908), by Musco, at the town theater of Piacenza on January 12, 1908. Later this play was translated into Venetian, Tuscan, and Spanish and had thousands of runs. The protagonist is Mastru Austinu Miciaciu, devoted to St. John. He asks the saint for a miracle: to make his petulant wife Lona’s tongue fall out. He also has problems with his daughter Serafina, who is in love with Ciccinu, but Mastru Austinu has promised her in marriage to Orazio. At the end, Serafina and Ciccinu get married, Orazio is forced to abandon his plans of marriage, and Lona bites her tongue and, to the joy of her husband, is finally silenced. This comedy, one of the most amusing and famous of its time, was made into a film by Amleto Palermi in 1940, featuring Toto` and Titina De Filippo in the lead roles. In Annata ricca, massaru cuntentu (A Rich Harvest Makes the Farmer Happy, 1914), which takes its title from a popular Sicilian saying, Michelangiulu, an old man, is married to the young and beautiful Grazia, who is really Marianu’s lover. He in turn becomes the lover of Pina, the daughter of Michelangiulu. The story is held together by many hilarious misunderstandings that are set in a sunny and rural Sicily. It contrasts the generosity of the young protagonists to the avarice of the old massaru. In L’aria del continente (The Air of the North, 1915), Martoglio developed an idea that, as some letters of the time witness, was suggested to him by Pirandello. The play concerns the ironic story of Don Cola Duscio, who, after a surgical operation in the continente, that is, peninsular Italy, 1166

returns to Sicily in the company of a beautiful chanteuse (Milla). Don Cola wants to appear very modern and so endures many betrayals in order to show that he has acquired the same habits as the continentals, despising the feeling of jealousy typical of his fellow townsmen. But Cola takes up his old habits again once he discovers that Milla is in fact an orphan from Sicily and he violently chases the woman away. ‘U riffanti (The Fortune Teller, 1916) has a similar popular setting; it represents the story of Mastru Delfu Trafulari, who is a veterinarian, a dentist, a barber, but above all is into magic and numbers. By this point in his career, the characteristic lines of Martoglio’s art were defined: a preference for realistic stories of country life, from which he chooses characters of different social conditions, preferring the folk. He remained, however, a popular and comic artist. From 1913 to 1915, Nino Martoglio turned to film direction; he is primarily known for Sperduti nel buio (Lost in Darkness, 1914), based on Roberto Bracco’s 1901 play. Yet, he judged the new art negatively, considering it harmful to the theater. Martoglio even wrote an amusing parody of the cinema world in his play L’arte di Giufa` (The Art of Giufa`, 1916).

Biography Born in Belpasso (Catania), December 3, 1870, son of the journalist Luigi and the elementary school teacher Vincenza Zappala` Aradas. From his youth revealed a restless character, switching from the classical to technical school. Began his journalism career in the 1890s and had a notable success with the popular political-literary periodical D’Artagnan. Established the Compagnia Drammatica Siciliana, 1901; left Catania after an unhappy love affair and settled in Rome, 1904. Subsequently married Elvira Schiavazzi in October 1905. By then well-known as a poet, having published some collections of poetry in Sicilian dialect that met with success. Began his collaboration with Angelo Musco, 1907–1908. Founded the Teatro Minimo in Rome, 1910; established the Compagnia Drammatica del Teatro Mediterraneo, 1918. Published over 200 articles in the most authoritative national magazines and newspapers, including Nuova antologia and Il corriere della sera. Between 1913–1915, worked for the cinema studio Cines in Rome. Accidental death in Catania on September 15, 1921. ALFREDO SGROI

PAOLA MASINO Selected Works

Sperduti nel buio, 1914. Teresa Raquin, 1915.

Collections

Letters

Teatro, Messina-Florence: G. D’Anna, 1973.

Poetry ‘‘O scuru o scuru,’’ 1896. ‘‘Atristimunianza,’’ 1899. ‘‘Centona,’’ 1899; rpt. with a preface by Luigi Pirandello, 1924; Centona: poesie siciliane, 1978; as The poetry of Nino Martoglio: Selections from ‘‘Centona,’’ edited and translated by Gaetano Cipolla, 1993.

Plays ‘‘I civitoti in pretura,’’ 1903. ‘‘Nica,’’ 1903. ‘‘Capitan Blanco’’ (’U paliu), 1906. San Giuvanni decullatu, 1908. Capitan Seniu, 1912. Annata ricca, massaru cuntentu, 1914; Italian version by Andrea Bisicchia, 2000. L’aria del continente, 1915. L’arte di Giufa`, 1916. ‘U riffanti, 1916; edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 1994. ‘A vilanza (with Luigi Pirandello), 1917.

Films Il romanzo, 1913. Capitan Blanco, 1914.

Pirandello-Martoglio: carteggio inedito, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, Milan: Pan, 1979.

Further Reading Banna Ventorino, Lia, Il D’Artagnan di Nino Martoglio: un capitolo del giornalismo militante catanese (1889– 1904), Catania: Giannotta, 1974. Caruso Tribalto, Carmela, Nino Martoglio: poeta d’amore, Siracusa: Ediprint, 1994. Correnti, Santi, Martoglio inedito: un ignoto canzoniere italiano della Catania ‘‘fin de sie`cle,’’ Catania: CUECM, 1993. D’Amico, Silvio, Il tramonto del grande attore, Milan: Mondadori, 1929. Scuderi, Antonio, The Dialect Poetry of Nino Martoglio: Sociolinguistic Issues in a Literary Context, New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Zappulla, Enzo, Nino Martoglio Capocomico, Catania: CUECM, 1985. Zappulla, Enzo, and Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, Martoglio: cineasta, Rome: Editalia, 1995. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, Nino Martoglio, CaltanissettaRome: Sciascia, 1985.

PAOLA MASINO (1908–1989) One of the leading figures of Italian literary modernism in the 1930s, Paola Masino was a writer, a poet, and an eclectic intellectual. Cosmopolitan and refined, she divided her time between Paris, Rome, and Venice and, together with her companion Massimo Bontempelli, occupied the center of a constellation of cultural luminaries—artists, musicians, and writers. The best artists of the day (among them Filippo De Pisis, Giorgio De Chirico, Achille Funi, and Alexander Calder) immortalized her in their paintings. Masino’s intense and short-lived literary career was at its height between 1931 and 1945 when, at a very young age, she published respectively her first fiction, Decadenza della morte (The Decadence of Death), and her most famous novel, Nascita e morte della massaia (The Birth and Death of the Housewife). After the end of World War II, neorealism, a mode of literary production far from

Masino’s surreal sensibilities, came to dominate the nation’s cultural climate. Masino was marginalized and, as a result, devoted herself to editing Bontempelli’s works, while her own publications declined considerably. However, she did not renounce her own artistic vocation altogether, as L’album di vestiti (The Album of Dresses), an unfinished autobiographical work, and the copious 12 unpublished notebooks recently discovered in Masino’s archive attest. With originality, Masino reinterpreted the realismo magico (magical realism) that Bontempelli had outlined in the pages of the journal Novecento, adding an emphasis on grotesque and metaphysical features to it. Her literary activity was characterized both by a commitment to eternal, absolute values and by a refusal of the contingent and the realistic. As she writes in one of her notebooks published by Francesca Bernardini Napoletano 1167

PAOLA MASINO and Marinella Mascia Galateria, ‘‘L’arte dev’essere tutta ineluttabile, tutta universale: ecco perche´ deve scaturire da universali e ineluttabili pensieri’’ (Art must be entirely ineluctable, entirely universal: That is why it must spring forth from universal and ineluctable thoughts) (Scrittici e intellettuali del Novecento, 2001). Paradoxically, it was precisely through allegorical tales that the author carried out a keen investigation of the social and political aspects of women’s lives, blending psychoanalysis, surrealism, and satire. Masino’s early novel, Monte Ignoso (Mount Ignoso, 1931) is a tragic tale of madness and evil, motherhood and sexuality. Emma, the protagonist, represents a sort of archetypical mother who lives with her little daughter in a state of perfect symbiosis. However, her well-being is threatened by nightly hallucinations (figures from paintings hanging in a gallery torment and overcome her) and by dark sexual fantasies. Eventually, Emma’s hallucinations infect her daughter and cause her death. The strong mother-daughter bond is thus abruptly broken, and Emma is forced to flee her village, only to die at her husband’s hand. Intertwining Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, the Bible, and Freud’s theories of the ‘‘uncanny’’ in a strikingly personal way, Masino mercilessly exhibits maternal pathology and patriarchal violence alike, countering some of the most cherished and widespread cultural and political myths of the Fascist era. While Monte Ignoso is forcefully dream-like and surreal, Masino’s next novel, Periferia (Periphery, 1933) settles for a more realistic style, veering toward the grotesque. A dark tale, Periferia explores familial and social ties in order to expose their senselessness. In this novel, Masino adopts the point of view of a group of children and adolescents who grow up on the outskirts of Fascist Rome, in the neighborhood known as Pannosa. Their games are cruel, at times even brutal, revealing a sharp awareness of the evils and madness of existence. For Masino, even childhood is marked by sin. The author’s exploration of female psychology and the sociopolitical implications of gender culminates in her most complex novel, Nascita e morte della massaia. A masterpiece of the surreal and the grotesque, the novel satirizes the role of women under Fascist rule. Masino examines one woman’s coming of age and her impossible quest for social equality. While, as a young girl, the protagonist denies the ugly realities that surround her by hiding in a trunk filled with dust and spiders’ webs (a sort 1168

of pre-Oedipal space), as an adult she turns into a model housewife, obsessed with order and cleanliness. This novel was judged defeatist and cynical by the Fascist censors since it challenges the regime’s cultural assumptions on gender. Indeed, Nascita e morte della massaia depicts procreation as a woman’s loss of identity rather than a defining sacred event, and the protagonist’s metamorphosis into an efficient domestic machine leads not to conjugal harmony but instead to sterility, madness, and death.

Biography Born in Pisa on 20 May 1908, Masino was introduced to literature at a very young age, encouraged by her father. In 1924, she wrote her first play, Le tre Marie, and presented it to Luigi Pirandello, thus initiating a long friendship with the playwright. In 1927, she started a relationship with Massimo Bontempelli, one of the protagonists of literary modernism in Italy and a man 30 years her senior. Together, they lived between Paris and Rome. In 1938, after Bontempelli’s break with the Fascist party, they moved to Venice, in a sort of voluntary exile. Masino wrote for various literary reviews and newspapers, including Novecento, La gazzetta del popolo, and Il tempo. She also translated a number of works from French and wrote librettos. Two of these were set to music by Franco Mannino: Vivı` (premie`re, Teatro San Carlo in Naples on 28 March 1957), and Luisilla (premie`re, Teatro Massimo in Palermo on 28 February 1969). Died in Rome on 27 July 1989. FLORA GHEZZO Selected Works Collections Poesie, Milan: Bompiani, 1947.

Fiction Decadenza della morte, 1931. Monte Ignoso, 1931. Periferia, 1933. Racconto grosso e altri, 1941. Nascita e morte della massaia, 1945. Memoria d’Irene, 1945. Colloquio di notte, 1994.

Librettos Vivı`, 1957. Luisilla, 1969. Il ritratto di Dorian Gray, 1974.

LUCIO MASTRONARDI Autobiographical Writing Io, Massimo e gli altri. Autobiografia di una donna del secolo, 1995.

Edited Work Massimo Bontempelli, Racconti e romanzi, 1961.

Further Reading Airoldi, Fulvia, ‘‘La terra e la discesa: L’immaginario di Paola Masino,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 24, no. 3 (2000): 161–186. Ghezzo, Flora Maria, ‘‘Fiamme e follia, ovvero la morte della madre arcaica in Monte Ignoso di Paola Masino,’’ in Esperienze letterarie, 3 (2003): 33–56.

Manetti, Beatrice, Una carriera a` rebours. I quaderni di appunti di Paola Masino, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001. Napoletano, Bernardini Francesca, and Marinella Mascia Galateria (editors), Scrittici e intellettuali del Novecento: Paola Masino, Milan: Mondadori, 2001. Re, Lucia, ‘‘Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,’’ in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Rorandelli, Tristana, ‘‘Nascita e morte della massaia di Paola Masino e la questione del corpo femminile,’’ in Forum Italicum, 37, no. 1 (2003): 70–102. Rozier, Louise, Il mito e l’allegoria nella narrativa di Paola Masino, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004.

LUCIO MASTRONARDI (1930–1979) Lucio Mastronardi began his career in 1955 with the publication of four short satirical stories describing the social life of his hometown, Vigevano. His cultural and ideological choices were accelerated by his meeting Elio Vittorini, who deeply appreciated his style and encouraged him to send him some writings. In 1958, Mastronardi sent Vittorini the draft of Il calzolaio di Vigevano (The Shoe-maker of Vigevano), the first novel of what was to be the Vigevano trilogy. Set between the two world wars during the rise of Fascism, the novel recounts the stories of shoemakers, centering on a shoemaker nicknamed Micca and his obsessive search for money. The book was published in 1959 in Il Menabo`, the literary review Vittorini edited with Italo Calvino. The novel displays a free and easy use of dialect, a measured irony and sober solidarity in his treatment of characters and their obsessions, the awkward plans of their life and work. The last traces of neorealism have been eliminated in the Gothic registers of these caricatures of a parochial Lombard town in which everyone judges and condemns each other. In a letter to Vittorini, Mastronardi identified his literary perspective as reflecting ‘‘il mare della soggettivita`’’ (the sea of subjectivity) in opposition to the literary point of view that Calvino called ‘‘il mare dell’oggettivita`’’ (the sea of the objectivity) (Una pietra sopra, 1980). Mastronardi soon published another novel, the heart of his trilogy, called Il maestro di Vigevano

(The Schoolmaster of Vigevano, 1962). It tells the story of a poor schoolmaster, Antonio Mombelli, and his vain attempts to hold out against his wife Ada’s lust for money and social success. They have a son, Rino, who witnesses their quarrels. Mombelli believes in a life based on dignity and modesty, while his wife believes the world has changed and that the money is the only real value. Her models and heroes are the industrialists, not writers or scholars. Mombelli’s wife finally convinces him to leave his post to start a shoe factory. The venture fails when Mombelli’s naı¨ve boasts of his wife’s cleverness in avoiding taxes leads to charges against them. Meanwhile, Ada confesses that she had often betrayed him and that Rino is not his son. Returning to his old post in the school, Mombelli sees his son imprisoned for violent and obscene assault of an old homosexual. The story concludes with the suggestion that Mombelli will marry a colleague, joining his own meager income with hers. The satire on respectability and petit bourgeois restlessness, the stinging depiction of the stifling educational system is expressed through an oral style drawing on the idioms of Lombardian speech. The tragic-comic tale was a huge success and a popular film directed by Elio Petri in 1963, with Alberto Sordi in the leading role. In 1964, Mastronardi published the final volume of the trilogy, Il meridionale di Vigevano (The Southerner of Vigevano). The protagonist, a feared post office clerk who came from Southern Italy to 1169

LUCIO MASTRONARDI Vigevano to work, lives alone in a bleak room in a pension. He is representative of the many immigrants who came to Vigevano and, working hard, surpassed the locals in riches. Pietro, the protagonist of Mastronardi’s last novel, A casa tua ridono (They Are Laughing at Your Home, 1971), is the son to a self-made man who has become an industrialist. Pietro, however, lacks his father’s strong character and is deeply confused and uncertain about everything. Moreover, he fears that his son is a homosexual. In trying to understand his son, Pietro remembers his own childhood. These memories leave him desiring to be a child again or to be dead. Mastronardi’s last book, L’assicuratore (The Insurer, 1975), is a collection of short stories previously published in literary reviews and newspapers.

Biography Born in Vigevano, 28 June 1930, the son to an antiFascist school inspector who was forced to retire by the Fascists; after his graduation in Pavia, in 1948, he was the schoolmaster in charge of the prison in Vigevano, 1950–1954, then of the city elementary school, 1955. In 1968, he moved to Milan to work in the public library, then returned to Vigevano, 1975. Jailed after a quarrel with a railwayman in 1971. Married in 1973 and had a daughter, Maria, in 1975. For L’assicuratore, was awarded the D’Annunzio prize by Carlo Bo in Pescara, 1975. Mastronardi drowned himself in the Ticino River, 29 April 1979. STEFANO ADAMI

Selected Works Collections Gente di Vigevano, introduction by Giovanni Tesio, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977; rpt. with essays by Italo Calvino and Gian Carlo Ferretti, Turin: Einaudi, 1994.

Fiction Il calzolaio di Vigevano, 1959. Il maestro di Vigevano, 1962. Il meridionale di Vigevano, 1964. A casa tua ridono, 1971. L’assicuratore, 1975.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1971. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Il mare dell’oggettivita`,’’ in Una pietra sopra, discorsi di letteratura e societa`, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Grignani, Maria Antonietta (editor), Per Mastronardi. Atti del Convegno di studi su Lucio Mastronardi, Vigevano, 6–7 giugno 1981, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983. Manacorda, Giorgio, Vent’anni di pazienza. Saggi sulla letteratura italiana contemporanea, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Montale, Eugenio, Il secondo mestiere, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Pallavicini, Piersandro, and Antonella Ramazzina, Mastronardi e il suo mondo, Milan: La Vita Felice, 1999. Paparelli, Giorgio, and Carlo Scibilia, Letteratura italiana del Novecento, Naples: Conte, 1978. Sorrentino, Mimmo, Nel libro di Mastronardi, Vigevano: La Provincia Pavese, 1981. Stella, Angelo (editor), Scuola e societa` nella Vigevano dei Mastronardi, Milan: Giuffre´, 1998. Tesio, Giovanni, ‘‘L’ultimo Mastronardi. La sfida di un moralista insocievole tra demoni e clown,’’ in Lucio Mastronardi,Gente di Vigevano, Milan: Rizzoli, 1977.

MASUCCIO SALERNITANO (TOMMASO GUARDATI) (CA. 1410–1475) Masuccio’s fame rests entirely on Il novellino (The Novellino, 1476), a collection of 50 tales, divided into five themes with 10 tales apiece: deceitful doings of the clergy; pranks and jests; the lustful deceits of women; alternating tales of tragic and happy endings; and deeds of valor and virtue. Despite Boccaccio’s influence on this structure, the 1170

tales are new. Moreover, each tale is enclosed between a letter of dedication and a concluding commentary. Tales were originally sent to different dedicatees before being reimagined as a structured collection with additional framing materials. The dedicatees include prominent men and women in Naples, Salerno, and other parts of Italy. The

MASUCCIO SALERNITANO (TOMMASO GUARDATI) whole is dedicated to Hippolita Sforza, duchess of Calabria, the first novella to King Ferdinand, and the second to Prince Alfonso; yet the final tale addresses Boffilo del Giudice, an exiled Anjou supporter, thanked as ‘‘principe del mio adornito ingegno svegliare’’ (the first to arouse my sleeping intellect) and the cause of Masuccio’s literary fame. Manuscript copies circulated at court during the 1460s, but the church censor destroyed all he could until Francesco Del Tuppo saved the work by having it printed in 1476 soon after Masuccio’s death. After a dozen editions through the mid-sixteenth century, mostly at Venice, a convergence of church proscription (the Index of 1559) and linguistic influence of Pietro Bembo caused a decline in its fortune, until Luigi Settembrini’s edition (1874) brought the work to renewed attention, inspiring translations into French (1890) and English (1895) and an ongoing critical interest. The linguistic level of the framing material tends to be ‘‘higher’’ (Latinate constructions) than the more natural and dialect-colored language of the narratives. Did Masuccio intend this mixed style as entertaining to elite readers, or was he not entirely in control of it? The language has been criticized: for an awkward pomposity, an unpolished, ‘‘incorrect’’ Italian, and an incongruous combination of registers; or praised as appropriately varied to suit different functions. Giorgio Petrocchi’s publication of an earlier version of four tales (1957) made inquiry possible into Masuccio’s stylistic and linguistic development. Masuccio’s tirades against women and clergy have provoked a range of responses from critical disgust to attempts at understanding them in their cultural context. His virulent moralism is contrasted to Boccaccio’s benevolence. The boldness of some of his descriptions is praised as daring realism, or viewed, together with his grotesquerie and love of extremes, as bad taste or even psychological imbalance. The tales are set primarily in Southern Italy, but also in the North and other parts of Europe. Luigi Reina noticed that the book has a moral geography: Immoral women abound in Naples but none are from Salerno; pranks are played by wily Salernitans on foreigners, but virtuous examples come chiefly from abroad (Masuccio Salernitano, 1987). Scholars debate whether Masuccio is to be associated primarily with the court culture at Naples, as an anxious defender of aristocratic ideology, or whether his cultural formation, predating Alfonso, derived instead from mercantile Salerno, as manifest in his

choice of the novella genre. Certainly his knowledge of classics was limited—he was a friend of Humanists but not one of them—although he cites Juvenal along with Boccaccio as his literary models. Nonetheless, his contacts with the court were important to him. Masuccio explicitly values variety. His tales include extremely funny ones along with tragedies and what have been called the first horror stories. His writing has been described as proto-Baroque in its love of violent contrasts, and as nightmarishly horrifying yet haunting. His stories were wellappreciated during his lifetime; the epitaph by his friend Giovanni Pontano states that ‘‘he pleased both learned men and princes’’ (‘‘et doctis placuit principibusque viris’’). The most famous tales include the dramatic story, set in Nancy, of eloping lovers gruesomely murdered in a leper colony (XXXI), and an early version of Romeo and Juliet (XXXIII). In Masuccio’s version, the tale is set in Siena and the characters are named Mariotto and Giannozza. His influence has been traced in later Italian novellieri (Luigi Da Porto, Matteo Bandello), in England (Shakespeare), France (Rabelais), and Spain (Guzman Alfarache, Lazarillo de Tormes). Il novellino is recognized as the fifteenth-century’s most important novella collection.

Biography Born to a noble family in Salerno sometime between 1410 and 1420; grew up during an era of violent political turmoil; his father Loise Guardati was secretary to Prince Raimondo Orsini; married the noble Cristina de Pandis, who bore him three sons and two daughters. After a number of years in Naples, he served Roberto Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, from 1463 until that prince’s death in 1474. Died in Salerno in 1475. JANET LEVARIE SMARR See also: Novella Selected Works Il novellino, princeps 1476 (no known copies); as The Novellino of Masuccio, 2 vols., translated by William George Waters, 1895, rpt. 1903; as Il novellino con appendice di prosatori napoletani del ‘400, edited by Giorgio Petrocchi, 1957; selection in Italian Renaissance Tales, edited and translated by Janet Smarr, 1983; as Il Novellino: nell’edizione di Luigi Settembrini (1874), edited by Salvatore S. Nigro, 1990.

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MASUCCIO SALERNITANO (TOMMASO GUARDATI) Further Reading Borraro, Pietro, and Francesco D’Episcopo (editors), Masuccio novelliere salernitano dell’eta` aragonese. Atti del Convegno nazionale di studi su Masuccio Salernitano-Salerno, 9–10 May 1976, Galatina: Congedo, 1978. Cottino-Jones, Marga, ‘‘Il ’molto pisto e lutulente libretto’ di Masuccio Salernitano,’’ in Dir novellando: modello e deviazioni, Roma: Salerno, 1994, 45–80. Mauro, Alfredo, Per la biografia di Masuccio Salernitano, Naples: Cooperativa Tipografica Sanitaria, 1926. Moss, Howard, ‘‘Anti-feminism in the Renaissance Short Story: The Case of Masuccio Salernitano,’’ in The Cultural Heritage of the Italian Renaissance Essays in Honour of T. G. Griffith, edited by C. E. J. Griffiths and R. Hastings, Lewiston: Mellen, 1993.

Papio, Michael, Keen and Violent Remedies: Social Satire and the Grotesque in Masuccio Salernitano’s Novellino, Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Texts, 28, New York: Peter Lang, 2000. Petrocchi, Giorgio, ‘‘La prima redazione del Novellino di Masuccio,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 129, nos. 387–388 (July–December 1952): 266–317. Petrocchi, Giorgio, Stile e lingua nel Novellino di Masuccio, Messina: Edizione Universitaria, 1960. Pirovano, Donato, ‘‘Masuccio e la critica,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 173, no. 563 (1996): 392–428. Pirovano, Donato, Modi narrativi e stile del ‘‘Novellino’’ di Masuccio Salernitano, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996. Reina, Luigi, Masuccio Salernitano: Letteratura e societa` del Novellino, Salerno: Edisud, 1987; new ed. 2000.

CHIARA CONTARINI MATRAINI (1515–1604) Chiara Contarini Matraini published her first and most controversial work, Rime et prose (Poems and Prose), in 1555. It is a collection of love lyrics composed for a young lover who was presumably assassinated. Although in her choice of subject and style she is indebted to the poetic conventions of Petrarch and Pietro Bembo, her Rime proved nevertheless innovative, as she used the same discourse utilized by male authors to talk about a woman’s experience of love. Indeed, at times, she ventured into the complex syntax, conceits, poetic devices, camouflaged messages, tropes, and far-fetched metaphors associated with the poetic manner of Giovanbattista Marino. The result is that women are no longer represented as passive icons of virtue, but as endowed with the same passions customarily given to male protagonists. Like her male counterparts, Matraini’s woman must often strive to overcome the tortured bonds of love in order to assert her unfadable individuality. During her lifetime, Matraini enjoyed a great degree of literary success. She befriended prominent Humanists such as Benedetto Varchi (1503– 1565), Ludovico Dolce (1508–1568), and Lodovico Domenichi (ca. 1514–1564), who became great supporters and promoters of her work. In fact, Dolce republished Rime et prose in an anthology entitled 1172

Rime di diversi Signori napolitani e d’altri (Poems of Several Neapolitan Gentlemen and Others, 1556), while Domenichi also included a few of her poems in his Delle rime di diversi eccellentissimi autori (Poems by Several Excellent Authors, 1556). Matraini’s other literary endeavor was a translation from Latin into Italian of a work by Isocrates, the Pros Demonikon, which she entitled Oratione d’Isocrate a Demonico figliuolo d’Ipponico, circa a l’essortazion de’ costumi, che si convengono a tutti i nobilissimi giovani (Isocrate’s Oration to Demonikus, Ippolicus’ Son, on the Exhortation to Behaviour Appropriate to Young Noblemen, 1556). Subsequently, she also published three books of religious prose: Meditationi spirituali (Spiritual Meditations, 1581), Considerationi sopra i Sette Salmi Penitentiali (Considerations on the Seven Penitential Psalms, 1587), and the Breve discorso sopra la vita e laude della Beatissima Vergine e Madre del Figliuol di Dio (A Short Discourse on the Life and a Laud to the Blessed Mary, Virgin and Mother of the Son of God, 1590), which became her most widely read work. In 1595 and 1597, Matraini issued her second and third books of poems, accompanied by letters on topics of morality, theology, and literature. Although at first glance the two collections appear to

CHIARA CONTARINI MATRAINI be reprints of her 1555 Rime e prose, taken together they are actually three different projects reflecting a shift in Matraini’s own view of life. In her early lyrics, she focuses on an earthly passion interrupted by the death of the beloved, and the religious poems merely function as a consolatory conclusion; in the 1595 and 1597 versions, she searches for a kind of spiritual love that leads to salvation. In this new perspective, the death of the young lover is the defining event that triggers the poet’s religious conversion and ascent toward God. Over a period of 40 years, Matraini revisited her youthful love experience, ultimately substituting God for man as the subject of her desire. One could argue that such a change was motivated by her new focus on spirituality, perhaps even inspired by her stable relationship with the judge Cesare Coccapani, rather than the memory of her tragic love for Bartolomeo Graziani, which inspired Rime et prose. In 1602, Matraini published her last meditational work, four Dialoghi spirituali (Spiritual Dialogues) accompanied by a handful of new poems. Although her stylistic accomplishments were recognized by later commentators, Matraini’s literary production was generally neglected after her death, and it was only in 1953 that Luigi Baldacci’s article Chiara Matraini, poetessa lucchese del XVI secolo revived interest in her life and works. In 1989, Giovanna Rabitti supervised an important critical edition of Matraini’s poems and some of her prose. As new studies continue to shift focus from mere biographical reconstruction to critical interpretations of Matraini’s body of work, she is now viewed as possessing thematic and stylistic individuality, thus attesting to her importance in the history and development of women’s literature.

Biography Born in Lucca on June 4, 1515, the daughter of Benedetto and Agata Serantoni. When her father died a year after her birth, her uncle, Rodolfo, became her legal guardian. Her family, originally from Borgo di Matraia, had arrived in Lucca in the mid-fourteenth century. They were weavers by trade, but as their family rose in stature, they abandoned their family business. Had one brother, Luiso. Married Vincenzo Contarini and received a dowry of 300 scudi from her uncle, 1530. Her brother and uncle participated in the failed straccioni rebellion in Lucca, 1531. Birth of her son Federigo, 1533. Began to write, 1542. A local chronicle detailed a scandalous affair with Bartolomeo

Graziani, a prominent married man and son of historian Gherardo Sergiusti, 1547. It was rumored that Graziani was murdered as a result of this affair. Husband’s death, 1555. Met and established an intense friendship with judge Cesare Coccapani, 1560. Spent time in Genoa, 1562–1565, and around this time, with the aid of Coccapani, participated in a legal battle with her son Federigo, who would not give back his mother’s dowry money. Returned to Lucca in 1576 and began to reconstruct her image, making plans to build an altar and chapel at Santa Maria Forisportam, and commissioning a portrait of herself as Sibyl for the chapel (the painting is today at the Museum of Villa Guinigi in Lucca). Died in Lucca in 1604 and is buried in the church of Santa Maria Forisportam. CHRISTINE M. RISTAINO Selected Works Rime e prose, 1555. Oratione d’Isocrate a Demonico figliuolo d’Ipponico, circa a l’essortazion de’ costumi, che si convengono a tutti i nobilissimi giovani, 1556. Meditazioni spirituali, 1581. Considerationi sopra i Sette Salmi Penitentiali, 1587. Breve discorso sopra la vita e laude della Beatissima Vergine e Madre del Figliuol di Dio, 1590. Lettere della Signora Chiara Matraini, gentildonna lucchese, con la prima, e seconda parte delle sue rime, 1595; revised as Lettere di Madonna Chiara Matraini, gentildonna lucchese, con la prima, e seconda parte delle sue rime. Con una lettera in difesa delle lettere, e delle arme, 1597; as Rime e lettere, critical edition by Giovanna Rabitti, 1989. Dialoghi spirituali, 1602.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Chiara Matraini, poetessa lucchese del XVI secolo,’’ in Paragone-Letteratura, 42 (1953): 53–67. Bullock, Alan, and Gabriella Palange, ‘‘Per una edizione critica delle opere di Chiara Matraini,’’ in Studi in onore di Raffaele Spongano, edited by Emilio Pasquini, Bologna: Massimiliano Boni Editore, 1980. Colli, Grazia, ‘‘Memoria petrarchesca in un sonetto di Chiara Matraini,’’ in Il lettore di provincia, 18, no. 70 (1987): 37–42. Costa-Zalessow, Natalia, Scrittrici italiane dal XIII al XX secolo. Testi e critica, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Lorenzi, Daniela A., ‘‘Chiara Matraini: Mannerism Under a Petrarchan Veil,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 9 (1997): 244–248. Maclachlan, Elaine, ‘‘The Conversion of Chiara Matraini: The 1597 Rewriting of the Rime of 1555,’’ in NEMLA Italian Studies, 16 (1992): 21–32. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘Chiara Matraini: Petrarchist or Anti-Petrarchist? The Dilemma of a Woman Poet,’’

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CHIARA CONTARINI MATRAINI in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Ada Tagliaferri, Toronto: Dovehouse Editions, 1989. Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘Linee per il ritratto di Chiara Matraini,’’ in Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 22 (1981): 141–165. Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘La metafora e l’esistenza nella poesia di Chiara Matraini,’’ in Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 27 (1983): 109–145.

Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘Inediti Vaticani di Chiara Matraini,’’ in Studi di filologia e critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti, vol. 1, Rome: Salerno, 1985. Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘Chiara Matraini (1515–1604),’’ in Italian Women Writers, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Russell, Rinaldina, ‘‘Chiara Matraini nella tradizione lirica femminile,’’ in Forum Italicum, 33, no. 1 (1999): 415–427.

MAXIMS AND REFLECTIONS OF A RENAISSANCE STATESMAN See Ricordi (Work by Francesco Guicciardini)

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI (1805–1872) Giuseppe Mazzini is considered one of the most important, if controversial, figures of nineteenthcentury Italian democratic nationalism. He devoted his life to the cause of the unification of Italy as a republic, pursuing his goals by way of the credo of ‘‘Pensiero e Azione’’ (Thought and Action), or education coupled with insurrection. However, since for Mazzini the Italian struggle for unification was part of a wider project concerning the emancipation of humanity, his political vision transcended national boundaries to extend to all oppressed people, including workers, women, serfs, and slaves. Mazzini’s republicanism was shaped by his early involvement with the Carboneria, a secret society of conspirators who sought to effect governmental reforms, and by the radical wings of French politics embodied by thinkers such as Henri de SaintSimon (1760–1825). By and large, Mazzini attributed to the intellectuals and the middle class a primary role in the creation of a new political and social order. The organization that Mazzini founded in Marseilles in 1831, La Giovine Italia 1174

(Young Italy), endeavored to disseminate revolutionary programs for collective action while engaging in an open proselytizing that was facilitated by the more liberal climate of France’s July Monarchy. La Giovine Italia’s main organ of diffusion was a homonymous journal, whose direction Mazzini personally supervised with an iron hand. Mazzini’s political vision for Italy entailed the end of Austrian hegemony and the creation of a democratic republic with Rome as a capital. This vision, which forced him to live outside of Italy for most of his adult life, was informed by strong religious convictions. While he opposed the temporal power of the pope and was neither Catholic nor Protestant, he was nevertheless convinced that the state, as a political organization of the people, should be Christian since only bonds of faith could ultimately ensure political and social cohesion. Such emphasis on religion distinguished Mazzini’s program from the Socialist and liberal currents of the time. His focus on religion and his belief in private property ran counter to the materialism and economic egalitarianism pursued by

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). However, while Mazzini valued property as the tangible sign of social transformation and as a stimulus to progress, he remained fully conscious of the inequalities of a capitalistic society. This belief led him to criticize the liberalism of his times for its excessive emphasis on the individual to the detriment of society as a whole. Thus Mazzini’s vision had a far broader reach than the unification of Italy. While his focus remained on Italy, he was also a strong sympathizer with the national movements of other countries, and he conceived of a union of republican nations governed by people devoted, in their thoughts and actions, to the realization of a just future for all mankind. This vision of international cooperation was solidified in the creation of La Giovine Europa (Young Europe) in 1834, an organization that was supported by political exiles ranging from Europe and North Africa to the New World and Asia Minor. Throughout the 1830s and with the spread of uprisings that occurred in 1848, Mazzini took a very active role in the revolutionary experience. The episodes of political agitation that he fomented ended in fiascos but were generally justified by Mazzini as temporary setbacks on the path toward emancipation. Following the election of Camillo Benso, count of Cavour, as prime minister of Piedmont in 1852, the national movement was brought within the sphere of the liberal and monarchic interests of the Savoy dynasty. Mazzini’s utopian expectations that Italian patriots were ready to become martyrs for their nation, collided with the more moderate positions of the national movement during the later stages of the Risorgimento. In a relentless pursuit of his republican ideal, Mazzini tried to set up alternatives to Cavour’s program by forming the Partito d’Azione in 1853. The insurrections that he promoted, including the ill-fated expedition of Neapolitan officer Carlo Pisacane in 1856 against the Bourbons of Naples, left Mazzini increasingly isolated. He then turned to the launching of a new periodical, Pensiero e Azione, in 1858 and pursued the publication of some of his writings, including the most popular of his works, I doveri dell’uomo (The Duties of Man, 1860), where he fought a two-pronged battle against the monarchy and socialism. His paternalistic tone called upon readers to give precedence to duties toward one’s country, rather than the pursuit of claims for social equality. At the same time, however, Mazzini championed cooperation between oppressed groups and across class lines while upholding some of the ideals of social and political reformism.

Following the unification of Italy and the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, Mazzini continued his battle against the monarchy, adhering to his vision of a democratic republic until his death. The events of the Paris Commune of 1870– 1871 further strengthened his battle against revolutionary socialism and his beliefs that cooperation and coalitions among the oppressed and across classes were necessary to ensure the well-being of the country. Mazzini’s life and thought are amply recorded in the 106 volumes that he authored, where he articulated his political, social, and philosophical positions for the public or for his private correspondents. In addition, these volumes also contain Mazzini’s reflections on literary and aesthetic subjects. A gifted writer, Mazzini could have easily succeeded in a literary career. In his youth, he had been a columnist for L’indicatore genovese, taking the side of the Romanticists in the polemic that pitted them against the classicists. Since he regarded poetry as one of the best mediums to arouse the national spirit, he placed a great value on Italy’s literary tradition and his works contain numerous reflections on authors ranging from Dante and Machiavelli to Alessandro Manzoni, Vittorio Alfieri, and Ugo Foscolo, whose epistolary novel, Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), Mazzini claimed to have greatly admired as a young, adolescent reader. Mazzini’s cultural horizon, however, extended far beyond the Italian tradition to comprise French, German, English, and Slavic literatures. Questioning nineteenth-century descriptive typologies of national literatures, Mazzini argued that national differentiations were not determined by geography, climates, and ethnicity, but were due to the existence of specific political, social, and civic institutions. His interest in a European culture, suggested in essays such as Sopra alcune tendenze della letteratura europea nel secolo XIX (On Some Trends in Nineteenth Century European Literature, 1829) and D’una letteratura europea (On a European literature, 1829), led him to critique the excessive cult of national individualism of Italian Romanticists while championing the unifying role and function of literature across national boundaries and diversities. Equally significant was his understanding of music, put forth in Filosofia della musica (Philosophy of Music, 1836) as the bearer of a universal language of humanity that other arts would then develop and translate into their specific forms and genres. Among the works that Mazzini published during his lifetime are Scritti letterari di un italiano 1175

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI vivente (Literary Writings of a Living Italian, 1847), Prose politiche (Political Writings, 1848), and Scritti editi ed inediti (Edited and Unedited Writings, 1861–1871) as well as his extensive collection of public and private correspondence. Mazzini’s legacy has generated a number of conflicting interpretations. The reception in England, Mazzini’s main country of residence during his life, was generally sympathetic while, in the rest of Europe, Mazzini’s brand of republicanism met the critique of Louis Blanc, Pierre Proudhon, and especially Karl Marx. In Italy, he was the source of both division and inspiration, the latter becoming increasingly limited in the later years of his life. The transformation of Mazzini into an icon of the Risorgimento occurred after his death and was part of an attempt at nation-building and state formation to establish consensus and heal the nation’s divisions.

Romans, after the departure of Pius IX, had proclaimed the Roman Republic in January 1849. He became one of the republic’s leaders and was appointed to the Triumvirate. After the fall of the Roman Republic on July 3, 1849, returned to London and by 1858 founded the newspaper Pensiero ed azione. During 1859 and 1860, returned to Italy and played a role in Garibaldi’s expedition of I Mille. After the unification remained a republican and declined a post in the Italian Parliament in Turin and, along with Garibaldi, continued to organize uprisings to wrest Venice and Rome from Austrian and Papal control respectively. These activities led to his expulsion from Switzerland in 1869. After a few months in England, he sailed for Sicily but was arrested at sea and jailed in Gaeta on August 1870. In October, he was given clemency and relocated to Pisa where he died on March 10, 1872. NORMA BOUCHARD

Biography Born in Genoa on June 22, 1805, into a middleclass family. A precocious and brilliant student, at the age of 14, Mazzini entered the University of Genoa to pursue studies in jurisprudence and by 1829 joined the Carboneria. His involvement with this secret society and his support of the liberal and constitutional revolutions of 1830 led to his arrest and subsequent imprisonment for six months in Savona (1830–1831). When given the choice of confinement to a remote town or exile, chose the latter and in February 1831, left for Marseilles where he established La Giovine Italia. In August 1831, he left for Switzerland from where he encouraged direct popular action in revolutionary uprisings and social agitation in Sardinia (1833) and in Savoy (1834). In April 1834, he formed La Giovine Europa but in 1836 the increasing suspicion of the Swiss authorities forced him to leave the country. In 1837, he arrived in London, from where he was able to maintain his contacts with radicals and revolutionaries all over Europe. Opened an evening school for the children of the workers. From his London exile, he continued to promote nationalist sentiments and revolutionary activities. His eagerness to act led him to support the ill-fated uprising organized by Attilio and Emilio Bandiera, who were captured and executed in 1844; departed for Milan in 1848, when the Milanese expelled the Austrians and established a provisional government. After Austrian control over Lombardy was re-established with the battle of Custoza on July 25, 1848, he looked toward Rome where the 1176

See also: Risorgimento Selected Works Collections Scritti editi e inediti, Edizione Nazionale, 100 vols., Imola: Galeati, 1906–1943. Protocollo della Giovine Italia (Congrega Centrale di Francia), Edizione Nazionale, 6 vols., Imola: Galeati, 1916–1922. Selected Writings, edited by Nagendranath Gangulee, London: Drummon, 1945; rpt. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974. Indici, Edizione Nazionale, 3 vols., Imola: Galeati, 1961– 1974. Zibaldone giovanile, Edizione Nazionale, Imola: Galeati, 1963–1998.

Political Writing Prose politiche, 1848. I doveri dell’uomo, 1860; as The Duties of Man and other Essays, translated by Ella Noyes, L. Martineau, and Thomas Okey, 1924.

Literary Writing Dell’amor patrio di Dante, 1826–1827. Del romanzo in generale ed anche dei ‘‘Promessi Sposi’’ d’Alessandro Manzoni, 1828. Sopra alcune tendenze della letteratura europea nel secolo XIX, 1829. D’una letteratura europea, 1829. Del dramma storico, 1831–1832. Scritti letterari di un italiano vivente, 3 vols., 1847.

Other Filosofia della musica, 1836. Scritti editi ed inediti, 1861–1871. Mazzini’s Letters, translated by Alice de Rosen Jervis, 1930.

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI Further Reading Chiarle, Aldo, Giovine Italia: Storia-documenti 1831–1857, Florence: Salvini, 2001. Della Peruta, Franco, Giuseppe Mazzini e i democratici, Naples: Ricciardi, 1969. Delzell, Charles F., The Unification of Italy, 1859–1861: Cavour, Mazzini, or Garibaldi? New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965. Grisi, Francesco, Mazzini, Milan: Rusconi, 1995. Hales, Edward Elton Young, Mazzini and the Secret Societies, London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1956. Mack Smith, Denis, Mazzini, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Mastello, Salvo, Mazzini scrittore politico in inglese— Democracy in Europe 1840–1855, Florence: Olschki, 2004.

Morelli, Emilia, Mazzini: Quasi una biografia, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1984. Roberts, William, Prophet in exile: Joseph Mazzini in England, 1837–1868, New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Salvemini, Gaetano, Mazzini, London: Jonathan Cape, 1956. Santonastaso, Giuseppe, Giuseppe Mazzini, Naples: Centro Napoletano di Studi Mazziniani, 1971. Saponaro, Michele, Mazzini, Milan: Garzanti, 1945. Sarti, Roland, Mazzini: A Life for the Religion of Politics, Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997. Scioscioli, Massimo, Giuseppe Mazzini: I principi e la politica, Naples: Guida, 1995. Stringfellow, Barr, Mazzini: Portrait of an Exile, New York: H. Holt and Company, 1935.

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI (1449–1492) Head of the Florentine family that came to prominence in the thirteenth century, Lorenzo de’ Medici inherited the oligarchic regime founded by Cosimo I, who by the end of the fifteenth century controlled the Tuscan city by means of a republican constitution. Lorenzo’s literary career was formed following the paths opened to him by familial and civic traditions, in connection with the politics of the state, which he directed from a young age. Recent critics such as Mario Martelli (Studi laurenziani, 1965) and Paolo Orvieto (Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1976) have challenged the labels of dilettantism and eclecticism long attached to him. In fact, each of his works should be considered on its own terms, not in relationship with others: His polymorphism is distributed over time, and each phase of his production overcomes the preceding one. Cultural and political motives explain his successive abandonment of different poetic procedures. As Orvieto writes in the introduction to his 1992 edition of Lorenzo’s works, ‘‘he was a great cultural manager, and it was from this ambition that all of his poetic choices seem to rise.’’ Three major phases can be identified over the course of his production. First, language and forms are tied to the protofifteenth-century literature dear to the oligarchy; successively, the attempt to connect his poetry to the philosophy of Marsilio Ficino led him to find a more classical tone, a tone that cancels comic

realism (that limited his work to an exclusively local circle) from the Florentine cultural scene; finally, there was the return to a popular literature, effected through the use of more universal forms and tied to the religious tradition of the Dominican order. A number of works composed in his youth can be assigned to the first phase, including the poems Simposio (Symposium), Uccellagione di starne (Hunting for Partridges), La Nencia da Barberino (Nencia from Barberino), and also the eclogues Corinto (Corinth) and Apollo e Pan (Apollo and Pan), as well as the two short stories Giacoppo (Jacob) and Ginevra (Guinevere). Mario Martelli dates the Simposio, also called I Beoni (The Boozers) between the second half of 1466 and December of 1469 (or possibly even between August of 1466 and August of 1467), although he does not exclude later revisions, characteristic of all of Lorenzo’s work. It is an early poetic work that situates him in the comic-realist Florentine culture. The parody of Plato’s Symposium gives the poem a satirical tone, which contrasts with Ficino’s Neoplatonism. The expressionism of the language is similar, within Dantesque metrical and rhetorical forms, to that of Luigi Pulci or Burchiello. The Simposio is composed of eight cantos in tercets, each with a hundred verses (the final one is incomplete). Writing in the first person, the poet recounts 1177

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI how, while returning from a brief trip to the countryside, he encountered a large group of drunks near one of the doors of the city of Florence. The group is going to drink at the home of a man who has just opened a cask of wine. Two of them become guide (guides) who introduce the group, and the members of this brigata (brigade) or setta (sect) of drunkards are successively named and crudely described. With the Uccellagione di starne, as with La Nencia da Barberino, there is the problem of multiple authorship, as collaborative writing is certainly a practice of Lorenzo’s group. There exist two significantly different versions of the former. The date of the work is also problematic (set by some between 1472 and 1474, by others assigned to the years immediately preceding 1470). The short poem recounts, in 45 octaves, a joyous hunt of a brigata of friends (the brigata, in fact, that of Lorenzo’s youthful friends). While decidedly rooted in the traditional, realist vein, it does not lack more erudite elements. La Nencia da Barberino is one of the most notable works attributable to Lorenzo, in part because it has been (and continues to be) the object of a highly disputed critical questione nenciale (Nencial question) that seeks to define its paternity, editing praxis, and date of composition (a proposed date is the early 1470s). La Nencia da Barberino exists today in four different editions, from the longest of 49/51 octaves, to the shortest of only 12. At the end of a long and well-documented discussion, Rossella Bessi in her 1982 edition of the poem cautiously avoids expressing a preference for either text, opting instead to identify the progressive elaboration of an initial nucleus, albeit impossible to single out and attribute to any particular author (Lorenzo, Luigi Pulci, or perhaps Poliziano). Such a solution is supported by Paolo Orvieto, for whom the ‘‘origin of the archetype [...] is more a genre than a single text,’’ as for the cantari (Tutte le opera, 1992). An imaginary, rough shepherd describes, according to an upended courtly code, the quality and beauties of his loved one—the theme of the vanto (boast) is in evidence—to whom are offered rustic doni (gifts). The rustic themes of vanto and doni are present also in the Corinto, which follows another generic vein, that of the eclogue or the pastoral in tercets. The title Innamoramento di Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzo de’ Medici in Love), with which the text most likely circulated in the fifteenth century, authorizes an autobiographical interpretation. Under the guise of the rough Corinto, there would thus be the young Lorenzo, and behind the 1178

nymph Galatea, the 15-year-old Lucrezia Donati. The early date of the work (1464–1465), as well as the date of the Apollo e Pan (from approximately the same epoch) places the composition of the two eclogues in the wake of Bernardo Pulci’s translation of the Virgilian Bucolics, although these works are in a comic vein, evident in the trisyllabic rhymes. In the second, Apollo and Pan meet to play their instruments on Mount Pinto. Autobiographical echoes are evident in the verses in which Pan sings of the unhappy love of the shepherd Dafni for the unwilling nymph. Two novellas have been handed down in signed manuscripts, but only the Giacoppo is complete. Both written in the spicciolata (in dribs and drabs) Boccaccian tradition of the beginning of the fifteenth century, they reflect opposite registers: the Ginevra is tragic, while the Giacoppo, comic. The first seems to be a close-up look at Lorenzo’s encounter and falling in love with his beloved, and the young protagonist, Luigi, might be his alter ego. The dating has divided critics: Some place its composition in Lorenzo’s youth, in the case of the Ginevra, thus linking the work to his love for Lucrezia Donati, while others such as Martelli in his Studi laurenziani (1965) connect it to a later period, and to his conflicts with the Franciscan order (as the second epilogue leads us to understand). The love triangle, treated comically through the structure of the beffa (joke), puts the tricked husband on center stage. But the figure of the friar, knowing mediator of adulterous loves, is the truly original figure of the work, insofar as he is a precursor to Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Fra Timoteo. The De Summo Bono (On the Maximum Good), also known as Altercazione (Altercation) was begun, according to Martelli, in 1474 and continued in the last years of Lorenzo’s life (Studi laurenziani, 1965). A pastoral-philosophical work, it marks the passage between the first and second phases of Lorenzo’s production. The problem of the ‘‘sommo bene’’ with which Lorenzo enters the philosophical debate was at the center of discussions in those years, for instance in Cristoforo Landino’s Disputationes Camaldulenses (Camaldulensian Disputations, 1480). The short poem in tercets is subdivided into six chapters. It begins with the description of an amena valle (pleasant valley) in which Lauro, the first person narrator-writer, hides from the aspra civile tempesta (harsh civil storm). Thus begins the dialogue with the shepherd Alpheo, although, contrary to the bucolic tradition, the citizen exalts the country life, while the shepherd demonstrates its difficulty. He concludes

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI with an affirmation of general human misery. At this point, Marsilio (Ficino) enters the scene, to explain that no real good can depend on the consent of fortune, nor on nature’s gifts. Only the gifts of the soul are real, although even among these a hierarchy is established, with the contemplation of celestial things at the apex. But as long as it is enclosed in its bodily prison, the soul cannot benefit from the absolute good that it will attain only after death, in the contemplation of God. This can develop through the intellect or through longing (ambrosia and the nectar of Plato), and the second way is superior to the first. Love is the mainspring of blessedness, and the discussion concludes with an exaltation of the reciprocal love between creator and creature. Lauro’s oration to God occupies the entire final chapter. The massive participation of the character Ficino in De Summo Bono is proportional to the presence of his thought. Nevertheless, the question of the pre-eminence of love on the intellect is a significant theme in Lorenzo’s work, settled in the epistle De felicitate (On Happiness, 1473) by Ficino. The Comento de’ miei sonetti (The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent, 1480–1492) is also part of this second phase, an evident manifestation of the interpenetration of poetry and philosophy. Poetic classicism emerges also in the Ambra, or Descriptio hiemis (Description of Winter), a mythical etiological celebration of Poggio a Caiano, the site of the new Medicean villa of the same name. The dating generally proposed for this poem in 28 octaves, post-1486, has been anticipated by Rossella Bessi in her edition of the poem (1986) to a period before 1485. The two Stanze (Stanzas) or Selve (Silvae) are probably of the same period, both formed of a series of octaves (the first, 141; the second, 30) that close with a canzone. This work has long been considered a random collection of thoughts, although Raffaella Castagnola, in her critical edition (1986), discerns an ideal trajectory, ‘‘an ascending amorous path’’ according to the canons of Ficinian philosophy. The Canzoniere instead crosses all three phases of Lorenzo’s production. The preparation of a libro delle rime (book of poems), begun by Lorenzo around 1474–1475, continued until the end of his life, but remained incomplete. The composition of the poems began at least as early as June 1465, when he fell in love with Lucrezia Donati. The senhals Diana and Sole (Sun) refer to her, and the various poems, with few exceptions, are dedicated to this love. The progression of the love diary thus follows the Petrarchan model. Under the impetus of the Raccolta

aragonese (Aragonese Collection), an anthology of Tuscan poetry prepared in collaboration with Poliziano and sent as a gift to Prince Federico d’Aragona in 1477, the model of the stilnovisti is added to that of Petrarch. Twenty-nine canzoni a ballo are attributed to Lorenzo. Their main themes are love laments, invitations to love, or the flight of time, which pushes one to enjoy life. The works’ chronology is difficult to establish because of its occasional nature (jousts or city balls, for Calendimaggio or Carnevale). The Canzone carnascialesche (Carnevalesque Songs) and the famous Canzona di Bacco e Arianna (Song of Bacchus and Ariadne) are specifically dedicated to Carnevale, the latter for the celebration of 1491. Behind the pagan narration interwoven with scriptural references, appears the usual message: carpe diem. The Rappresentazione di Giovanni e Paolo (Representation of John and Paul) dates to the same year and the same Carnevale. The work is the fulcrum of the last phase of Lorenzo’s production, a return to popular forms and religious themes. The presence of Girolamo Savonarola in San Marco is not unconnected to this choice, which is in turn related to the literary orientation of his mother Lucrezia Tornabuoni. The theme of power as a burden and as service (as in Constantine’s speech when he leaves the empire) recurs in this work, in which there are also numerous comparisons with the Bible. The Laude (Lauds) belong in the same phase of Lorenzo’s literary career, and in these appear specific connections to works of Savonarola of the same time. With the exception of a laud in honor of Mary, the common theme is that of penitence.

Biography Born in Florence on 1 January 1449 to Piero di Cosimo and Lucrezia Tornabuoni. Entrusted, from 1454, to the care of a private instructor, Gentile Becchi. Took courses on poetry and eloquence with Cristoforo Landino at the Studio Fiorentino, 1460. Introduced by Argiropulo to the study of Greek philosophy, 1461. Began studies at the Accademia di Careggi, founded by Cosimo and presided over by Marsilio Ficino, 1462. Death of Cosimo il Vecchio, 1464. Sent by his father to Milan for the wedding of Ippolita Sforza to Alfonso d’Aragona, then to Rome to the court of Paul III and to Naples to the court of Ferdinando d’Aragona. Fell in love with Lucrezia Donati, who married Niccolo` Ardinghelli, 1465. On 4 February 1469, won joust in Piazza Santa Croce; on 4 June 1469, married 1179

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI Clarice Orsini, with whom he had three sons, Piero, Giovanni, and Giuliano, and two daughters, Maddalena and Lucrezia; 2 December 1469, his father died, and he took over political and familial responsibilities together with younger brother Giuliano. Rebellion and sack of Volterra, 1471. Sent Raccolta Aragonese to Prince Federico d’Aragona, 1477. Pazzi conspiracy and death of brother Giuliano, 26 April 1478. Sistus IV excommunicated Lorenzo and launched interdiction against Florence, 1 June 1478. Trip to Naples to discuss peace with Ferdinando, 1479–1480. Death of mother Lucrezia Tornabuoni, 1482. Died in Florence (Careggi) in the night between 8 and 9 April 1492. MARINA MARIETTI Selected Works Collections Lorenzo de’ Medici: Selected Poems and Prose, edited by Jon Thiem, translated by Jon Thiem et al., University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Tutte le opere, edited by Paolo Orvieto, 2 vols., Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1992. Opere, edited by Tiziano Zanato, Turin Einaudi, 1992.

Poetry ‘‘Corinto,’’ 1464–1465. ‘‘Apollo e Pan,’’ 1464–1465. ‘‘Canzoniere,’’ 1465–1492; critical edition by Tiziano Zanato, 1991. ‘‘Simposio,’’ 1466–1469; critical edition by Mario Martelli, 1966. ‘‘La Nencia da Barberino,’’ early 1470s; critical edition by Rossella Bessi, 1982. ‘‘Uccellagione di starne,’’ 1470–1474. ‘‘De Summo Bono,’’ 1474–1492. ‘‘Comento de’ miei sonetti,’’ 1480–1492; critical edition by Tiziano Zanato, 1991; as The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent, translated by James Wyatt Cook, 1995. ‘‘Ambra (Descriptio hiemis),’’ before 1485; critical edition by Rossella Bessi, 1986. ‘‘Selve,’’ before 1485; critical edition by Raffaella Castagnola, 1986. ‘‘Canzona di Bacco e Arianna,’’ 1491. ‘‘Rappresentazione di Giovanni e Paolo,’’ 1491. ‘‘Laude,’’ 1491–1492. ‘‘Canzone carnascialesche,’’ uncertain.

Further Reading Bullard, Melissa Meriam, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Image and Anxiety, Politics and Finance, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Carew-Reid, Nicole, Les feˆtes florentines au temps de Lorenzo il Magnifico, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Chastel, Andre´, Art et humanisme a` Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique, Paris: P.U.F., 1961. Cloulas, Ivan, Laurent le Magnifique, Paris: Fayard, 1982. De Roover, Raymond, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank (1397–1494), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo (editor), Lorenzo de’ Medici: studi, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo (editor), Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Kent, Francis William, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Mallett, Michale E., and N. Mann (editors), Lorenzo the Magnificent: Culture and Politics, London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1996. Martelli, Mario, Studi laurenziani, Florence: Olschki, 1965. Martelli, Mario, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento. Il filtro degli anni Sessanta, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Orvieto, Paolo, Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Orvieto, Paolo, ‘‘Lorenzo de’ Medici e l’Umanesimo toscano del secondo Quattrocento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 3, Il Quattrocento, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1996. Rochon, Andre´, La jeunesse de Laurent de Me´dicis (1449– 1478), Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. Rubinstein, Nicolai, The Government of Florence under the Medici (1434 to 1494), Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Toscani, Bernard (editor), Lorenzo de’ Medici: New Perspectives, New York: Peter Lang, 1993.

COMENTO DE’ MIEI SONETTI, 1480–1492 Poems and Commentary by Lorenzo de’ Medici

Fiction Giacoppo (uncertain). Ginevra (uncertain).

Letters Lettere, edited by Riccardo Fubini et al., 11 vols., 1977–2004.

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The Comento de’ miei sonetti (The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent) is a lyric collection with prose commentary in the style of Dante’s Vita Nova (New Life, ca. 1294), or the

LORENZO DE’ MEDICI Convivio (The Banquet, ca. 1304–1307), both models claimed by the author. In 1480, after his return from Naples, Lorenzo had the idea of recounting the story of his love for Lucrezia Donati in the Dantesque manner: He decided to choose the most appropriate sonnets, from all the lyrics he had thus far composed, and to insert them in a prose commentary. The draft of the prose sections continued in nonlinear fashion until just before his death, with frequent revisions and insertions of new compositions (the last sonnet was written in 1483). From a metric perspective, Lorenzo seems to have chosen the path of uniformity. Not only does he collect only one type of composition, the sonnet, which he considers superior to all others, as he says in the Proemio (Prologue), but their form is almost rigorously the same, characterized by quatrains in rima incrociata (crossed rhyme; ABBA ABBA) and tercets of three rhyme words (in a majority of cases, CDE CDE), a preference of Cavalcantian and Petrarchan origin. Lacking an epilogue, and thus most likely incomplete, the last version of the Comento is composed of a long Proemio, 41 sonnets connected by prose of unequal length (in only one case is prose absent), and two Argumenti (Topics). The first of these Argumenti explains the occasion of the first four sonnets, the death of Simonetta Cattaneo (the impetus for the entire work); the second introduces the sonnets to follow, poems that evoke the new life to which Simonetta’s death was a prelude. In this sense, and because of the philosophical content of the prose, the Comento follows the model of the Convivio more closely than that of the Vita Nova. The work, a meditation on amorous passion rather than the narration of a love story, has a unitary form that draws on the Neoplatonic doctrine of love as a progressive freeing of the soul. Lorenzo escapes the rigidity of Ficino’s style, however, as is evident in the Proemio. The prologue is one of the most important texts of Lorenzo’s production and of the entire fifteenth century in Florence. He writes the introduction in order to forestall accusations of thoughtlessness that might be leveled against his use of prose commentary to explicate a ‘‘light’’ topic, amorous passion, and his choice to compose in the vernacular rather than Latin. In formulating his argument, Lorenzo creates a theory of love and a defense of the materna lingua (mother tongue), ideas that are original at least in part. Proceeding from a Platonic position (love as an appetite from beauty) and from stilnovistic theory (love and gentilezza coincide), he moves toward a naturalistic notion of love, arriving

finally at a concept of the sentiment as consolation for life’s toils. At this point the prologue makes reference to Sonnet 10, on which the comment specifies how lo amoroso raggio (the amorous ray) offers relief to the poet, a man of politics persecuted by frequent insidie (snares). Speaking of the vernacular, Lorenzo enumerates the four conditions that give language dignity and perfection: its capacity to express concepts and sentiments; harmony; the quality of the works; and their diffusion. The Florentine vernacular respects the first two conditions amply, and is well on its way to the third; the fourth—which depends largely on fortune, that is, ‘‘dal successo delle cose del mondo [...] che facci universale [...] quello che naturalmente e` proprio o d’una citta` o d’una provincia sola’’ (on the success of worldly things [...] that make things naturally belonging to only one city or province universal)—can be aided by the ingegno (intelligence) and forza (strength) of buoni cittadini (good citizens). Lorenzo’s concept of language is thus a political and literary one that connects him to Leon Battista Alberti and Niccolo` Machiavelli. MARINA MARIETTI Editions First edition: Poesie volgari, nuovamente stampate, di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Venice: in casa de’ figliuoli di Aldo, 1554. Critical edition: Comento de’ miei sonetti, edited by Tiziano Zanato, Florence: Olschki, 1991. Translation: The Autobiography of Lorenzo de’ Medici the Magnificent, Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1995.

Further Reading Kennedy, William J., ‘‘Petrarchan Figurations of Death in Lorenzo de’ Medici’s Sonnets and Comento,’’ in Life and Death in Fifteenth-Century Florence, edited by Marcel Tetel, Ronald G. Witt, and Rona Goffen, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘L’avventurosa storia del ’Comento,’’’ in Studi laurenziani, Florence: Olschki, 1965, pp. 51–133 [cap. III]. Martelli, Mario, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento. Il filtro degli anni Sessanta, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Storia e funzione della poesia lirica nel Comento di Lorenzo de’ Medici,’’ in MLN, 104, no. 1 (1989): 48–67. Tanturli, Giuliano, ‘‘Sul Comento di Lorenzo de’ Medici: A proposito di un recente saggio,’’ in Studi Medievali, 23, no. 1 (1982): 339–359. Zanato, Tiziano, Saggio sul Comento di Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence: Olschki, 1979.

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GIOVANNI MELI

GIOVANNI MELI (1740–1815) Giovanni Meli is commonly considered one of the most important dialect poets of eighteenth-century Italy. In fact, he was an anarchic figure, whose stylistic experiments are not always easy to place within traditional categories. He occasionally composed poetry in Italian and he was appreciated by the well-known libertine Giovan Battista Casti, who met him when passing through Palermo in 1791, as letters collected in Casti’s Epistolario (Correspondence, 1984), demonstrate. The exaltation of nature and other traditional themes of bucolic poetry coexist in his works with a sensitive awareness of the European (in particular French) Enlightenment. Although Meli’s view of the world left no room for a materialist perspective, he welcomed the sensism of E´tienne Bonnot de Condillac, the openmindedness of Voltaire, and the vision of nature’s innocence derived from Rousseau. However, Meli was not merely a pasticheur: The diverse cultural influences that he brought together, at times with a superficial and amateurish style, are framed by his own conception of art as an instrument for evading reality. Poetry helped him to enter the ‘‘gallant’’ world of eighteenth-century Palermo, but once there, he seemed anxious to escape into yet other worlds. His best poetry entails a rewriting of traditional fairy tales and mythological stories. Significantly, the closer he got to the themes of the illuminists with works such as Riflessione sul meccanismo della natura in rapporto alla conservazione e riparazione degli individui (Reflections on the Mechanisms of Nature for the Preservation and Repair of Individuals, 1777), the more his uncertain philosophical vocation showed all its limitations. He found the elegy and poetic celebrations of Arcadian myths the most congenial literary forms, but he also showed great polemical energy in writing satire. He was not above resorting to vile language, as when he clashed with the forger Giuseppe Vella (the tale is told by Leonardo Sciascia in Il Consiglio d’Egitto, 1963). The two poles of Meli’s poetic world are the elegy, exemplified by La fata galanti (The Gallant Fairy, 1759), a poem in eight stanzas of differing metres, and carnivalesque, popular poetry like ‘‘Ditirammu’’ (Dityramb, 1787), a polymetric 1182

poem published in Poesie siciliane (Sicilian Poems, 1787–1789) that celebrates the virtues of wine and the joy of drunkenness. The echoes of Virgil and Theocritus in his poetry are indicative of Meli’s restless temperament, which however remains firmly rooted in the Sicilian world, far from the ideals of the French Revolution. Indeed, at the core of his works, for all their variety, lies the skeptical soul of a Sicilian who does not believe in any form of social regeneration. This explains the eclecticism of Meli’s oeuvre, which uses many diverse forms of artistic expression without favoring any particular one. La Buccolica (The Bucolic, 1787–1789), with its Vergilian title, is a celebration of myth that poetically incorporates diverse forms: sonnets, odes, idylls, and eclogues. Here, as in other works, Meli’s hedonism is laced with a vein of melancholia, which, however, doesn’t trouble his playful poems exalting female beauty. Meli’s most famous work, also published in Poesie siciliane, is the heroic-comic poem Don Chisciotti e Sanciu Panza (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza), a revisitation of the famous novel by Cervantes. Meli does not limit himself to re-presenting the picaresque adventures of the famous characters in the usual metre of the epic Italian poem, hendecasyllabic octaves. Rather, in his interpretation, Sancio is the more positive figure, while Don Chisciotti, represented as a utopian dreamer who wishes to remake the world, reviving the virtues of the past and ensuring that justice triumphs, lives a deluded dream with no possibility of success. To this dream, Sancio opposes his own wisdom, a disenchanted vision of reality that runs counter to the enthusiasm of his master. In retelling Cervantes’ story, Meli invented episodes and gave free rein to his linguistic virtuosity. He displayed all the resources of his repertoire, achieving a style that at times recalls Bernesque satire. The poem’s comic register thus coexists with the bitter perspective of Sancio, who believes that nothing can really change in the world.

Biography Born in Palermo on 6 March 1740. Studied in the Jesuit College, 1749–1755. Studied medicine at the

GIOVANNI MELI Accademia in Palermo, 1759–1764. Admitted to the academy of the Galante conversazione, 1761. Transferred to Cinisi, where he remained until 1772. In 1781, began a relationship with Marianna Maniaci, wife of one of his friends, who bore him two children. Appointed as professor of chemistry at the Accademia degli Studi, 1787. Involved in the debate on the forgeries perpetrated by the Abbot Giuseppe Vella, 1790–1793. When the French Revolution broke out and the Napoleonic forces invaded Italy, Meli joined the antirevolutionary side. Died in Palermo, on 20 December 1815. ALFREDO SGROI Selected Works Collections Poesie siciliane, Palermo: Solli, 5 vols., 1787–1789; second expanded edition, 7 vols., Palermo: Interollo, 1814. Poesie, edited by Lorenzo Marinese, Milan: Mondadori, 1964. Opere, edited by Giorgio Santangelo, Milan: Rizzoli, 1965. Le cantate, edited by Giuseppe Cusimano, Catania: Societa` di storia patria per la Sicilia orientale, 1976. Moral Fables and Other Poems: A Bilingual (Sicilian/English) Anthology, edited and translated by Gaetano Cipolla, Brooklyn, NY: Legas, 1995.

Poetry ‘‘La fata galanti,’’ 1759. ‘‘Elegii,’’ in Poesie siciliane, 1787–1789. ‘‘La Buccolica,’’ in Poesie siciliane, 1787–1789. ‘‘Don Chisciotti e Sanciu Panza,’’ in Poesie siciliane, 1787–1789; edited by Salvatore Zarcone, 2004; as Don

Chisciotti and Sanciu Panza, translated by Gaetano Cipolla, 1986. ‘‘Favuli morali,’’ in Poesie siciliane, second edition, 1814; as Moral Fables, translated by Gaetano Cipolla, 1988.

Essay Riflessione sul meccanismo della natura in rapporto alla conservazione e riparazione degli individui, 1777.

Letters Lettere, edited by Giovanna Micali, 1919.

Further Reading Casti, Giovan Battista, Epistolario, edited by Nino Fallico, Viterbo: Amministrazione provinciale di Viterbo, 1984. Cesareo, Giovanni Alfredo, La vita e l’arte di Giovanni Meli, Palermo: Sandron, 1924. Cuchetti, Gino, Meli e Parini, Palermo: ESA, 1967. Etna, Giacomo, Giovanni Meli, Rome: La Navicella, 1963. Ganci Battaglia, Giuseppe Giovanni Meli vate di Sicilia, Rome: Malato, 1978. Imbornone, Ferdinando, Sicilia, Brescia: La Scuola, 1987. Mineo, Nicolo`, Cultura e letteratura del Settecento e Illuminismo in Italia, Catania: Quaderni del dipartimento di filologia moderna, 2001. Rizzo, Ada, Giovanni Meli: Il poeta e l’uomo, Palermo: Ila Palma, 1989. Santangelo, Giorgio, La siepe Sicilia, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1985. Sciascia, Leonardo, Il Consiglio d’Egitto, Turin: Einaudi, 1963. Sole, Antonino, Studi e letture: Saggi su Meli, Leopardi, Capuana e Pirandello, Palermo: Palumbo, 1998. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Letteratura siciliana al femminile, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1984.

MEN AND NOT MEN See Uomini e no (Work by Elio Vittorini)

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LUIGI MENEGHELLO

LUIGI MENEGHELLO (1922–) Luigi Meneghello is among the most authoritative experimental writers in the second half of the twentieth century. His use of dialect, first as a subjective vehicle of memory, then increasingly as an objective tool for ‘‘translating’’ reality, is at once antirhetorical, popular, and refined. Meneghello discovered that he was a writer, or rather, as he defines himself, ‘‘someone who writes books,’’ almost 16 years after arriving at the University of Reading (UK), where he taught from 1947 to 1980. His first work was Libera nos a Malo (Free us from Evil, 1963), a title that alludes to the phrase from the Lord’s Prayer and plays on the name of his birthplace, Malo. The following year he publishes I piccoli maestri (The Outlaws, 1964), a tormented book radically modified in its second edition per via di levare (with some cuts) in 1976, con pochi ritocchi (slightly retouched) in 1986, with una piccola rettifica (a small rectification) in 1990. It is eventually translated into various languages and inspires a film directed by Daniele Luchetti in 1998. In the book, Meneghello returns to the Asiago upland after the war and recounts his experience fighting there as a partisan in the Resistance. He relives the story of a group of adolescent friends, middle-class students, who after September 8, 1943, undertook an apprenticeship that distinguished them from other partisans. As apprendisti italiani (Italian apprentices) they taught until they become piccoli maestri itineranti (little itinerant masters). Meneghello, who describes the Resistance fight in the Veneto region irreverently, is interested in the mixed motivations of the partisans. Meneghello’s later writings investigate the formation of Italian intellectuals. Pomo pero (Apple Pear, 1974) has three parts: Primi (First Memories), memories of childhood; Postumi (Last Things), fragments of experience; and Ur-Malo, poetical compositions in dialect. Fiori italiani (Italian Flowers, 1976) returns to the theme of memory, recounting the author’s schooling during the Fascist era. It is followed by L’acqua di Malo (The Water of Malo, 1986); Il Tremaio, note sull’interazione tra lingua e dialetto nelle scritture letterarie (The Fishing Net, Notes on the Interaction between Language and Dialect in Literary Writing, 1986) and 1184

Jura: ricerche sulla natura delle forme scritte (Jura: Research on the Nature of Written Forms, 1987), in which he combines the essay with autobiography. In Leda e la schioppa (Leda and the Shotgun, 1989), he describes his own toils as a writer trapped between feeling and expression. He finds relief in dialect, which he believes expresses original feeling. His reflections on literature and literary methods continue in Rivarotta (1989), in which Meneghello, using the restoration of a factory in the town of Rivarotta as a pretext, broadens his analysis to encompass the contemporary literary scene. Che fate quel giovane? (What Are You Doing Lad?, 1990) explores the crucial relationship between experience and writing in three different ‘‘Reasonings’’ about friendship, bicycles, and women. In Marede` Marede` (1990) he demonstrates the extraordinary expressive range of the Vicenza dialect. Meneghello then undertook to ‘‘organize’’ the work he had originally written with a somewhat naı¨f sense of occasion. The Milanese publisher Rizzoli republishes Libera nos a malo (1989), Pomo pero (1990) and Marede` Marede` (1991), and, most important of all, a two-volume edition of the Opere (1993 and 1997). In the meantime, Meneghello directly confronts the theme of his Anglo-Veneto identity. Il dispatrio (Expatriation, 1993) bears witness to a somewhat untypical Italian life, tracing his passage from the Paese dei Balocchi (Toyland) to the Paese degli Angeli (Land of the Angels) during the postwar years. He will study the theme of expatriation in depth in La materia di Reading e altri reperti (The Matter of Reading and Other Finds, 1997), where he continues to recount his English experience. The following year he returns to an old essay, written under the pseudonym of Ugo Varnai for the magazine Comunita`, between 1953 and 1954. This essay on Gerald Reitlinger’s Final Solution (1953) anticipates the Italian translation of Reitlinger’s essay in 1962, which constitutes the starting point for historical research on the Shoah in the years immediately following the war. With Promemoria: Lo sterminio degli Ebrei d’Europa (Memorandum: The extermination of the Jews in Europe, 1994), Meneghello attempts to understand an otherwise ‘‘inconceivable’’ project through its central objectives, from the destruction of the

LUIGI MENEGHELLO ghettos, to the massacres in Russia and in Poland, up to the atrocities in the extermination camps, and Auschwitz in particular as a model for a fabbrica della morte (factory of death). After the publication of Il turbo e il chiaro (The Turbid and the Clear, 1995), Cosa passava il convento (What You Got, 1996), and Le correnti sottopelle (The Currents under the Skin, 1997), Meneghello produces his most original work Le carte (The Papers), which appears in three volumes: Anni Sessanta (The Sixties, 1999), Anni Settanta (The Seventies, 2000), and Anni Ottanta (The Eighties, 2001). The ‘‘papers’’ are his notes, thousands of little sheets on which he has jotted down his projects, unfinished projects, and self-criticisms scribbled in the margin of his published works; ghiribizzi (whims) that passed through his head, experiments, fantasies, and sgorbi (scribbling). If, as Meneghello claims, his work consists of parcels of papers and the buco nero (black hole) of his head, then Le carte perhaps represents the most direct and immediate expression of his creative world and the processes that bring it into being. With Trapianti (Transplants, 2002), Meneghello begins translating classical works, even foreign ones, into dialect. Returning to the idea, already expressed in Il dispatrio, that the infantile musicality of the Malo dialect ‘‘translates’’ romantic poetry and Shakespeare better than Italian can, he translates passages of Yeats, Hopkins, Cummings, and Shakespeare. He aims at a subtle humor, since ‘‘ogni testo letterario ha parti chiare e parti oscure, non per disegno del poeta ma per la costituzione stessa delle nostre lingue e in sostanza della nostra mente; in una traduzione, mutando il registro linguistico, puo` accadere che ci si trovi ad esplorare le parti oscure’’ (each literary text has clear parts and obscure parts, not through the designs of the poet but because of the very construction of our languages and substantially of our minds; with a translation, when the linguistic register is altered it can happen that you find yourself exploring the obscure parts). The same paradoxical spirit infuses his last essay, Quaggiu` nella biosfera: Tre saggi sul lievito poetico delle scritture (Down Here in the Biosphere: Three Essays on the Poetic Ferment of Writing, 2004).

Biography He is born on February 16, 1922, in Malo (Vicenza); in 1937, he moves to Vicenza, where he attends classical high school, from which he graduates at the age of 16 largely self-taught.

After the armistice between the Allies and the Italians (September 8, 1943), he joins the partisan formations of the Partito d’Azione (Action Party). In 1945, he finishes his studies and takes a degree in philosophy at the University of Padua. In 1947, having gone to the University of Reading to study with a British Council grant, he begins teaching literature and the Italian language there (1948). He settles in Reading and marries Katia Bleier. He founds one of the most prestigious departments of Italian studies in the United Kingdom, which he directs for years. From 1980 onward he goes back and forth between London and Thiene, where he habitually lives. He receives the Piero Chiara award for his career (2001); the honoris causa degrees from the University of Turin and the University of Perugia (2003); the decoration of Grand’Ufficiale dell’Ordine al merito della Repubblica Italiana; the honorary citizenship of Vicenza and Thiene. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Collections Opere, vol. 1, edited by Francesca Caputo, Milan: Rizzoli, 1993. Opere, vol. 2, edited by Francesca Caputo, Milan: Rizzoli, 1997 Le carte, vol. 1 (Anni Sessanta), Milan: Rizzoli, 1999. Le carte, vol. 2 (Anni Settanta), Milan: Rizzoli, 2000. Le carte, vol. 3 (Anni Ottanta), Milan: Rizzoli, 2001.

Fiction Libera nos a malo, 1963. I piccoli maestri, 1964; as The Outlaws, translated by Raleigh Trevelyan, 1967. Pomo pero, 1974. Fiori italiani, 1976. L’acqua di Malo, 1986. Bau-se`te, 1988. Leda e la schioppa, 1989. Rivarotta, 1989. Marede` Marede`, 1990. Trapianti: Dall’inglese al vicentino, 2002.

Essays Il Tremaio: Note sull’interazione tra lingua e dialetto nelle scritture letterarie, 1986. Jura: Ricerche sulla natura delle forme scritte, 1987. Che fate quel giovane?, 1990. Il dispatrio, 1993. Promemoria: Lo sterminio degli Ebrei d’Europa, 1994. Il turbo e il chiaro, 1995. Cosa passava il convento, 1996. La materia di Reading e altri reperti, 1997. Le correnti sottopelle, 1997. Quaggiu` nella biosfera: Tre saggi sul lievito poetico delle scritture, 2004.

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LUIGI MENEGHELLO Further Reading Bandini, Ferdinando, Introduction to Luigi Meneghello, Pomo pero, Milan: Mondadori, 1987. Barbieri, Giuseppe, and Francesca Caputo, Per ‘‘Libera nos a malo.’’ A 40 anni dal libro di Meneghello, Vicenza: Terra Ferma, 2005. Basso, Silvia, and Antonia De Vita (editors), Del terzo muraro, nulla: Luigi Meneghello tra ricerca linguistica ed esperienza politica, Sommacampagna: Cierre, 1999. Chichiarelli, Ezio, I piccoli maestri: scheda di lettura n. 21, Milan: Unione italiana della cultura popolare, 1965.

Daniele, Antonio, Omaggio a Luigi Meneghello, Rende: Centro editoriale e librario Universita` degli studi della Calabria, 1994. Lepschy, Giulio (editor), Super Meneghello, Milan: Edizioni di Comunita`, 1983. Pellegrini, Ernestina, Nel paese di Meneghello. Un itinerario critico. Con un saggio bibliografico di Zygmunt G. Baranski, Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 1992. Pellegrini, Ernestina, Luigi Meneghello, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2002.

ALDA MERINI (1931–) Alda Merini began writing poetry at the age of 17. She attracted the attention of such established poets as Salvatore Quasimodo and Pier Paolo Pasolini, who found that linguistic and thematic elements of her poetry reflected those of Rainer Maria Rilke. In fact, in her youth, Merini preferred Rilke’s poetry along with that of Dino Campana. In 1947, Merini met Giorgio Manganelli, who would become her main poetic mentor as well as the first of her many great loves. At about this same time, early signs of her schizophrenia become evident. Shortly thereafter, several of her early compositions are included in Giovanni Spagnoletti’s anthology, Poesia italiana contemporanea 1909– 1959 (1959). Merini’s first volume of poetry, La presenza di Orfeo (The Presence of Orpheus, 1953), already demonstrates the diaristic, at times abstracted narrative impulse that will characterize her entire work. This diaristic impulse is so intense, in fact, that any separation of her creative work from her biography risks missing her greatest lyric trait. The first book brings to the foreground the theme of love, requited and unrequited. Along with the theme of madness, which she introduces later, this will dominate her literary production. Her love theme becomes part of a spiritual quest for transcendental values that are perhaps accessible by means of a passionate dedication to the experience of erotic as well as Platonic love. La presenza di Orfeo was followed in 1955 by Paura di Dio (Fear of God) and Nozze romane (Roman Wedding). In the first of these lyrics, 1186

Merini establishes the vatic nature of poetry and eerily presages the tremendous psychological difficulties that are to come. In the second, she elaborates her themes of love and spiritual quest. Most often her plea is marked by anguish and grief, and the search for God is vain: ‘‘Se tutto un infinito / ha potuto raccogliersi in un corpo / come da un corpo / di sprigionare non si puo` l’immenso?’’ (‘‘If an entire infinity / has managed to gather in a body / why from a body / can we not free immensity?’’). By this time, she has attracted the attention not only of Manganelli, Quasimodo, and Pasolini, but also of Maria Corti, who will champion Merini’s work throughout her life. The appearance of Tu sei Pietro (You Are Peter, 1961), a book Merini dedicates to her first daughter’s pediatrician, represents an apex of the love theme, which now appears in modern Ariostan guise as all too literal madness. By this time, the poetess is suffering from severe mental illness that will see her pent up in asylums for various periods over the following two decades. Tu sei Pietro marks the end of Merini’s early work and beginning of a 20-year silence. While Merini refuses to call her struggle with schizophrenia an illness, preferring instead to think of it as simply a psychological disorder, she nonetheless spends half of these 20 years in the psychiatric incarceration that is to become an almost constant theme of her later work. For Merini does return to poetry with a new, dense cadence in the early 1980s. In 1981, she publishes Le satire della Ripa (Riverbank Satires) and Le rime petrose

ALDA MERINI (Stony Poems). Then, in 1984, La terra santa (The Holy Land), edited by Maria Corti, and La terra santa e altre poesie (The Holy Land and Other Poems). Now Merini centralizes her experience in sanatoriums and likens it to such biblical events as the fall of Jericho’s walls: ‘‘Ho conosciuto Gerico / e una pozza d’acqua infettata / ci ha battezzati tutti’’ (I knew Jericho / and a pond of infected water / baptized us all). She claims the authority of madness in its amplified form, including and extending far beyond the madness of the erotic passion and unrequited love of her earlier works. Her discourse is that of the survivor, whether of madness or love. As she would later acknowledge in La pazza della porta accanto (The Mad Woman Next Door, 1995), her lyric voice is subjective: Poems surface from memory and are imprinted in her mind, for she does not adopt the ‘‘other’’ voice her schizophrenia might provide. Thus lyric is apart from any psychotic break; it is always on this side of psychosis. During this period she also published Le piu` belle poesie (The Most Beautiful Poems, 1983), Fogli bianchi (Blank Pages, 1987), and her first prose work, L’altra verita`: Diario di una diversa (The Other Truth: Diary of an Outcast Woman, 1986), which randomly records her recollections of the years spent in mental institutions. We are confronted with epiphanies, songs, apparitions, as well as with the ugliness of a place where human beings stand alone, in all of their suffering. The poet is seeking a deep, nonevident meaning for all her pain, and her texts, both poetic and prosaic, wander in near delirium from one mood to another, her dramatic swings from states of depression to others of elated euphoria. We witness her alienation from the everyday world, her physical exhaustion, her fear of death as she abandons herself to ‘‘the jungle of the senses.’’ In 1989, she continues her account (or recuperation) of her asylum experiences in Delirio amoroso (A Rage of Love), the title of which evinces Merini’s thematic insistence on love as an out-ofnormal experience and/or madness as an expression of love. In fact, her obsessive fascination with her psychiatric internments takes on the mode of a transcendental experience. By the 1990s, critics such as Giovanni Raboni, who edited the anthological collection Testamento (Testament, 1988), are finding in Merini’s copious production a talent that seems to be a force of nature. For Raboni, Merini’s poetry and prose are pieced together in an ongoing, outreaching lyric discourse that seeks to be understood in a rapture of oneness that perhaps eludes its author as often as it inspires her.

In recent years, we witness a flood of productivity on the part of this once silenced poet. She has broken all boundaries, her poetry is highly charged; her texts take on new stylistic precision and venture into daring metaphoric realms. Art, for Merini, becomes the crucible where life’s reality and literature’s fantasy are, finally, indistinguishable. Most acclaim has been received for Vuoto d’amore (Love’s Void, 1991), Fiore di poesia 1951–1997 (The Flower of Poetry, 1998), Magnificat: Un incontro con Maria (Magnificat: A Meeting with Mary, 2002), Folle, folle, folle d’amore per te (Crazy, Crazy, Crazy with Love for You, 2002), and the recent Dopo tutto anche tu (You, Too, after All, 2004). As the very titles may indicate, Merini is taking stock of her life and revisiting the theme of spirituality now in the fullest possible context of all that love and madness have shown her. In Fiore di poesia, for example, she depicts powerful portraits of dead friends, sleeping taverns along the Milanese canals, with their stagnant waters, their prostitutes and homeless, and all sorts of restless shady figures. This anthology also collects poems from La gazza ladra (The Magpie, 1991), where Merini portrays some of her favorite literary models from Sylvia Plath to Emily Dickinson, and also remembers the loves of her life. Among them, Manganelli or mio invincibile amore (my invincible love) and Michele Pierri, mio figlio sconsolato (my inconsolable son). In La poesia luogo del nulla (Poetry, Space of Nothingness, 1999), which contains a conversation with Chicca Gagliardo and Guido Spaini as well as sections of poems entitled Le Quattro poesie della vergogna (Four Shame Poems), Dediche (Dedications), and Amori (Loves), we find the self-portrait of a mature, iconoclastic woman who delights in self-display of all sorts, from the nude photos of herself on the walls of her apartment to the revelatory biographical nature of the poems she dedicates to others. Merini has journeyed through her early European influences, her life as a passionate woman, her experience of psychiatric alienation and disorder, and her stylistic inventions and refinements to arrive at a moment when her unrepentant voice sings its own liberation and authority.

Biography Born March 21, 1931, in Milan. Failed to meet admission requirements in Italian for the liceo. Attended the professional school Laura Solera Mantegazza instead. In 1947, Silvana Rovelli, a 1187

ALDA MERINI cousin of Ada Negri, submitted Merini’s poems to Angelo Romano` who passed them on to Giacinto Spagnoletti. Through Spagnoletti, she met among others David Maria Turoldo, Maria Corti, and Giorgio Manganelli, who became her great love. First signs of mental disturbance appear. In 1953, married Ettore Carniti, proprietor of a chain of bakeries. First daughter born, 1955. 1960s and 1970s spent in and out of psychiatric hospitals; two daughters born during this period. Husband died in 1981; Merini remarried in 1983 to Michele Pierri; moved to his native Taranto. 1986, in psychiatric hospital in Taranto, then returned to Milan where she currently lives. Winner of several prestigious awards, including the Ibrex Guggenheim ‘‘Eugenio Montale’’ for poetry, 1993; the Viareggio prize for Ballate non pagate, 1996, the Dessı` prize for Un incontro con Maria, 2002. BEVERLY ALLEN Selected Works Collections La presenza di Orfeo: 1953–1962, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1993. La Terra Santa Destinati a morire, La Terra Santa, Le satire della Ripa, Le rime petrose, Fogli bianchi, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1996; as The Holy Land, translated by Stephanie Jed and Pasquale Verdicchio, Toronto-Buffalo: Guernica, 2002. Fiore di poesia 1951–1997, Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

Poetry ‘‘La presenza di Orfeo,’’ 1953. ‘‘Nozze romane,’’ 1955. ‘‘Paura di Dio,’’ 1955. ‘‘Tu sei Pietro,’’ 1961. ‘‘Destinati a morire,’’ 1980. ‘‘Le rime petrose,’’ 1983. ‘‘Le satire della Ripa,’’ 1983. ‘‘Le piu` belle poesie,’’ 1983. ‘‘La Terra Santa,’’ 1984. ‘‘La Terra Santa e altre poesie,’’ 1984. ‘‘Fogli bianchi,’’ 1987. ‘‘Testamento,’’ 1988. ‘‘Delirio amoroso,’’ 1989; as A Rage of Love, translated by Pasquale Verdicchio, 1996. ‘‘Vuoto d’amore,’’ 1991. ‘‘La gazza ladra,’’ 1991. ‘‘Ipotenusa d’amore,’’ 1992. ‘‘Rime dantesche,’’ 1993. ‘‘Titano amori intorno,’’ 1994. ‘‘25 poesie autografe,’’ 1994. ‘‘Ballate non pagate,’’ 1995. ‘‘La volpe e il sipario,’’ 1997; new ed. 2004. ‘‘57 poesie,’’ 1998. ‘‘Aforismi e magie,’’ 1999. ‘‘Vanni aveva mani lievi,’’ 2000.

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‘‘Superba e` la notte 1996–1999,’’ 2000. ‘‘Le poesie di Alda Merini 1997–1999,’’ 2000. ‘‘Corpo d’amore: un incontro con Gesu`,’’ 2001. ‘‘Una poesia,’’ 2002. ‘‘Folle, folle, folle d’amore per te,’’ 2002. ‘‘Magnificat: Un incontro con Maria,’’ 2002. ‘‘Il maglio del poeta,’’ 2002. ‘‘Alla tua salute, amore mio: Poesie, aforismi,’’ 2003. ‘‘Poema di Pasqua,’’ 2003. ‘‘Dopo tutto anche tu,’’ 2003. ‘‘La carne degli angeli,’’ 2003. ‘‘Clinica dell’abbandono,’’ 2004. ‘‘Cartes (Des),’’ 2004. ‘‘Poema della croce,’’ 2004.

Prose L’altra verita`: Diario di una diversa, 1986. Il tormento delle figure, 1990. Le parole di Alda Merini, 1991. La vita facile: aforismi, 1992. La palude di Manganelli o Il monarca del re, 1992. Reato di vita: Autobiografia e poesia, 1994. La pazza della porta accanto, 1995. Lettera ai figli, 1995. La vita facile: sillabario, 1996. La vita facile, 1997. Favole, orazioni, salmi, 1998. Lettere a un racconto prose lunghe e brevi, 1999. Il ladro Giuseppe: Racconti degli anni Sessanta, 1999. Lettera a Maurizio Costanzo, 1999. L’anima innamorata, 2000.

Other Reato di vita. Autobiografia e poesia, 1994. La poesia luogo del nulla: Poesie e parole con Chicca Gagliardo e Guido Spaini, 1999. Piu` bella della poesia e` stata la mia vita, 2003.

Further Reading Biagini, Elisa, ‘‘Nella prigione della carne: Appunti sul corpo nella poesia di Alda Merini,’’ in Forum italicum, 35, no. 2 (Fall 2001): 442–456. Corti, Maria, Viaggio nel 900, Milan: Mondadori, 1984. Corti, Maria, Introduction to Alda Merini, Vuoto d’amore, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. De Marco, Giuseppe, Le stagioni dell’epifania poetica di Alda Merini, Salerno: Ripostes, 1995. Mazzoni, Francesca (editor), ‘‘Undici lettere di Alda Merini (1951–52 / 1982–1985) con un’appendice di testi dispersi o rari,’’ in Lettere e Simeone: Sugli epistolari a Oreste Macrı´, edited by Anna Dolfi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002. O’Brien, Catherine, ‘‘Alda Merini,’’ in Italian Women Poets of the Twentieth Century, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1996. Orlandi, Daniela, ‘‘La schizofrenia come forma poetica e come forma clinica nella scrittura di Alda Merini,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 11 (1999): 301–305. Parmeggiani, Francesca, ‘‘La folle poesia di Alda Merini,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 23, no. 1 (2002): 173–191.

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) Quasimodo, Salvatore, Poesia italiana del dopoguerra, Milan: Schwarz, 1958. Ricchi, Renzo, ‘‘Intervista a Alda Merini,’’ in Gradiva, 22, (2002 Fall): 131–137.

Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Introduction to La presenza di Orfeo, Milan: Schwarz, 1953. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Poesia italiana contemporanea 1909–1959, Parma: Guanda, 1959.

MERLIN COCAI See Teofilo Folengo

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) (1698–1782) Pietro Metastasio was an eighteenth-century poet of melodrama. A giant of the musical theater in Italy and in Europe, he not only established Italian as the universal language of the most widespread and popular artistic spectacle of his age, he also furnished the inspirational and expressive model for whole generations of musicians who tried their hands at Italian opera. The birth of Pietro Trapassi (known artistically as Metastasio) occurred under favorable auspices: He was baptized at the hands of the cardinal Pietro Ottoboni. The powerful cardinal, a nephew of Pope Alexander VIII, a patron of the arts in Rome between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, exercised a constant protection over Pietro, the son of a modest merchant. This protection was so constant, in fact, as to cast some doubt on the authentic paternity of the future Hapsburg court poet—whether we compare portraits of Ottoboni executed by Francesco Trevisani with one painted of Metastasio by Pompeo Batoni, or read Montesquieu’s incisive sociological-anthropological analysis in his Voyage d’Italie (1894–1896) of sexual customs, marriage, the role attributed to women in Rome at the time, and the cardinal himself. All of these circumstances entrusted the education and formation of the adolescent Pietro to Gian Vincenzo Gravina, one of the founders,

along with Ottoboni himself, of the Accademia dell’Arcadia. At Gravina’s school the young Metastasio studied not only Homer, the Greek tragedies, Cicero, Virgil, Horace and Seneca, Ariosto, and Tasso (and, in secret, Giovanbattista Marino, of whom Gravina disapproved), but, with the revival of the work of Dante Alighieri, he also discovered the ethical and political dimension of the Italian literary tradition, placed as the basis of the social function of poetry and literature, that is, for a return to the composition of tragedies. At only 14, Pietro, in his tragedy Giustino (Justin, 1718), modeled on Gian Giorgio Trissino’s L’Italia liberata dai Goti (Italy Liberated from the Goths), combined the mission of the future emperor of Byzantium, who is called to restore Italy to the Roman Imperium, with a love for Sofia, a niece of the empress Theodora. The union of individual affective desires and foundational values involving the common good and good government constitutes the center of Pietro Trapassi Metastasio’s entire dramatic ouevre, which is destined for the musical theater—from melodramas and theatrical festivals to oratorios. In Naples, he published his first work, Poesie di Pietro Metastasio (Poems by Pietro Metastasio, 1717), which along with Giustino and other compositions bears the signature of his new surname. 1189

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) Dedicated to Aurelia Gambacorta d’Este, the wife of one of the leaders of the anti-Spanish plot of Macchia in 1701, and herself an exponent of the philo-Austrian Neapolitan aristocracy, the collection lays the groundwork for the poet’s move to the city in which the Dantean dream of his teacher (the unity of Italy under the two suns of Faith and the supreme Roman authority of the Hapsburgs) seems to be realized with the viceregency established by the Hapsburg emperor Charles VI in Naples. With Gravina’s sudden death at the beginning of 1718, Metastasio, after failed attempts to launch a literary career in Rome, left for Naples in the summer of 1719. Here he put himself at the service of the nobility of the Austrian viceregency, both for theatrical festivals at the palace and for public spectacles meant to bridge the historical, cultural, and anthropological separation between the ruling classes and the people, demythologizing—in the manner of Giambattista Vico—the archaic superstitions of the rural world and propounding the civilization of social customs. This is the social function expressed by Endiminione (Endymion), Angelica (Angelica), Gli orti esperidi (The Gardens of the Hesperides, 1721), and Galatea (Galatea), operas that permit both the sharing of expectations between the commissioners and audiences of the theatrical festivals, and the integration of poetic composition and musical song. The Neapolitan school of music—from Alessandro Scarlatti to the young Niccolo` Porpora and his favorite student, the sopranist Carlo Broschi ‘‘Farinelli’’ (Metastasio’s ‘‘sweet twin’’ in Naples), from Domenico Sarro to Leo Vinci—elected Metastasio as their poet of opera seria. The social and political function of Metastasio’s poetry for music appears in the melodrama Didone abbandonata (Dido Deserted, 1724), thanks to the dramatic characterization of the Virgilian heroine, who is represented almost as a protofeminist. Staged at the Teatro San Bartolomeo, it achieved success with the singer Marianna Benti Bulgarelli, the Romanina, in the role of the protagonist, and with music by Domenico Sarro. Breaking from the traditions of Baroque opera (the theater of the marvelous, plot twists, the mixing of tragic and comic elements) and the role of the woman, who is paradoxically defeated precisely when she affirms her autonomy and independence as an individual, Didone abbandonata is the first and last of Metastasio’s melodramas in which passion is not governed by value, that is by moral virtue. In his next melodramas, both in Venice and Rome 1190

(1728–1730), and in Vienna, from Demetrio (Demetrius, 1731) to Ruggiero (Ruggiero, 1771), Metastasio clings to the aesthetic criterion expressed in the Estratto dell’arte poetica d’Aristotile e considerazioni su la medesima (An Excerpt from Aristotle’s Poetics and Some Considerations on the Same) according to which the truthful representation of characters able to affirm values like magnanimity, justice, forgiveness, patriotism (which generate a pedagogical pleasure in the spectators), is preferable to required catharsis or the purification of evil, which is provoked through terror and pity, sentiments prescribed by a mechanical interpretation of the Aristotelian conception of tragedy. Even before systematizing his aesthetic conception of melodrama in Vienna, Metastasio, from Siroe (Siroe, 1726) to Catone in Utica (Cato at Utica, 1728), Ezio (Ezio, 1728), Semiramide (Semiramis, 1729), Alessandro nell’Indie (Alexander in India, 1729), and Artaserse (Artaxerxes, 1730), employed the hedonistic-pedagogical criterion in his dramas with a happy ending (with the exception of Catone in Utica, in order to respect the historical truth of the protagonist’s sacrifice), along with admiration and emulation, which is generated in the spectators by the positive dramatizing of values/ virtue, which prevail over the contrasting passions and conflicts among human beings. In the Naples of the Austrian viceregency, Metastasio shared, along with Pietro Giannone and Giambattista Vico, the intellectual function of representing a possible moral and civil reform of customs in a city that is not dominant, which is to say deprived of its own autonomous political center; in papal Rome, he met with spirited popular approval and theatrical impresarios, who are contested by curial factions. In 1730, he came to the Vienna of Charles VI and to a court that would make him the symbol and image of a civil, social, and political life that the postfeudal organism of the empire intended to modernize and reform. Living in Vienna for the rest of his life, until 1782, he learned German to the extent of knowing the ‘‘few words needed to survive,’’ as he confesses to Charles Burney, who in September of 1772 came to visit him at his house in front of the Hofburg (The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, 1959). The production of Demetrio, the first Viennese melodrama to celebrate the naming of Charles VI, 4 November 1731, demonstrated the importance attributed to Italian, Metastasio’s poetic language, for the compositional and communicative function, both theatrical and musical, of opera seria. The entire social universe of Vienna, from

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) the court to the inhabitants of every class and social rank, was irremediably attracted by Italian verses within the rational dramatic distribution of scenes. In the decade 1731–1740, the understanding between Charles VI and his court poet assumed form in that admiration des he´ros, as the ‘‘contagion of heroism,’’ through which Metastasio introduces in the spectators the pleasure of tears and the emotion that develops virtue, both of which refer to the inspiration of the political deeds of Charles VI. In the dramas, theatrical festivals, and oratorios, we see the grandeur of existence with the resolution of suffering, pain, and passion into values meant to promote the life of every subject, his happiness, along with the public happiness and hence that of the emperor himself. Thus emerged masterpieces like Adriano in Siria (Hadrian in Syria, 1732), L’olimpiade (The Olympiad, 1733), Demofoonte (Demofonte, 1733), La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus, 1734), up until Attilo Regolo (Attilius Regulus), which in 1740 took Charles VI as the model of patriotic virtue to be emulated, with his total dedication to the common good of the people whom he ruled represented in the extreme sacrifice of the Roman consul. Attilio Regolo was staged in Dresden, 10 years later, in 1750, because in 1740 Charles VI died suddenly, leaving the task of saving the Hapsburg Empire to his daughter, Maria Theresa, in the war of the Austrian succession. After his most fertile artistic period, there followed a period of absence from Vienna because of war and epidemics, while Metastasio’s operas, together with the court Kappellmeister (Antonio Caldara, Francesco Conti, Georg Reutter, Luc’Antonio Predieri, Giuseppe Bonno), are staged in all the European cities, from the courts to the public theaters, following the deliberate choice of composers such as Vivaldi, Handel, Jommelli, Gluck, Hasse, Haydn, and Bach. Thanks to these men, and later to Mozart, Salieri, Schubert, and Beethoven, music becomes an intrinsic form of poetry, both for the attraction exercised on notes by the rhythmic-phonetic exemplarity of Metastasian poetry (a unity that dates back to the song or melos of Greek tragedy), and for the ethical, religious, dramatic, and spectacular connotation of the court poet’s opera seria, whose music underlines emotions, sentiments, and passions, accompanying them until they are dramatically transformed into positive values. Approbation, admiration, and enthusiastic judgments are expressed for Metastasio’s Italian opera by almost all of the artists, writers, and philosophers of the century.

Francesco Algarotti, an intellectual confidant of Frederick II of Prussia, is Metastasio’s correspondent, offering advice and suggestions for his poetic compositions, and always exhibiting his admiration and esteem for Italian opera. In Paris, Carlo Goldoni dedicates the French edition of his comedies to him, praising the greatness of his dramas for music. Diderot, through Luigi de Cahusac, asks him to write the entry on ‘‘melodrama’’ for the Encyclope´die, although he never does. On various occasions Voltaire expresses positive judgments, and one that possesses relevant historical-hermeneutic interest is on Metastasio’s musical dramaturgy: in the libretto of the tragedie-lirique Se´miramis, he maintains that ‘‘in La clemenza di Tito there are scenes to be compared to the most beautiful of what has been passed down to us from the Greeks, which are worthy of Corneille when he does not declaim, of Racine when he is not dull.’’ Ranieri Calzabigi, in his Dissertazione su Metastasio, introducing and editing the 1755 Parisian edition of the works of the court poet, asserts the reciprocal correspondence in Metastasio between poetry and music in developing the sense and the emotions of beauty in the public. Calzabigi, composing librettos for Gluck’s operas in Vienna during the 1760s, enters into competition with Metastasio and tries to dismantle his fame and prestige, without ever succeeding, however. For one, the role of Metastasio’s theatrical-musical praxis, his aesthetic conception, the autonomy of the poeticmusical work, cannot be diminished; but what cannot be dismissed above all is the work of a poet who represented the aesthetic-moral universe in which all the men of the time recognized themselves, during the period of reforms begun by Charles VI and developed by Maria Theresa and Joseph II. The strong moral spirit with which Metastasio informed his entire literary output makes his work not a mere continuation or derivation of the Humanism of the Italian courts between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but a new expression of the individual’s power to create in modernity, that is, of the more creative part of each human being, evoked in his melodrama by Christian values reinforced by the civil, social, and symbolic tradition of classical literature, which is called to new life in the visual arts of the seventeenth century. The Gesamtkuntswerk (total artwork), which Metastasio pursues in Italian opera through scenic stage directions that serve as true and fitting explanatory guides for the stage director, re-elaborates the mark of the painting masters who helped form him as a young 1191

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) man (Giambattista and Giandomenico Tiepolo), and is integrated almost perfectly with architects/ stage designers in European theaters in their representations of Italian opera. Theatricality as a perfect reinvention of nature—the mere imitation of which Metastasio rejected—is united with the languages of arts that pursue the same end, representing and reconstituting the space in which these arts narrate the truthful creation of the good and the beautiful. The importance of Metastasio’s work for the Enlightenment philosophes and for Rousseau himself consists in having represented, as the internal critical conscience of the ancien re´gime, the extreme limit reached by that world in guiding the universal desire for greatness and justice of the peoples and social classes of the empire, giving it form in visible and practical values—no longer deforming its nature by producing deception and self-deception.

Biography Born in Rome, 3 January 1698, to Felice and Francesca Galastri on via dei Cappellari (Campo de’ Fiori). His father is a merchant of foodstuffs. In June 1702, his mother dies suddenly. Felice Trapassi is remarried not long after to Angela Lucarelli. Pietro is educated by Gian Vincenzo Gravina, who translates his surname Trapassi into its Greek form, Metastasio; in 1724, he composes his first melodrama, Didone abbandonata, establishing himself as the most important poet for the musical theater of the day. In 1730, he moves to Vienna, and is named Poeta Cesareo (Court Poet) by Charles VI, succeeding Apostolo Zeno. In the decade 1730–1740, he composes masterpieces like Adriano in Siria and La clemenza di Tito, which give him primacy as the librettist most often put to music. He teaches singing and acting first to Maria Theresa, and then to her sons, Leopold and Joseph, future emperors. He composes dramas for music for the court of Madrid between 1751– 1756, thanks to the singer Carlo Broschi ‘‘Farinelli,’’ who is taken on at the Spanish court in the same role Metastasio held in Vienna. Up until the beginning of the 1760s, his works are represented in all the European theaters with the music of the greatest composers; the autonomy of music from Metastasio’s poetic operas attests to a continuous taste for his verses. A correspondent of the greatest artists, writers, and philosophers of the age, Metastasio, in the 1760s and 1770s, contributes to the reconciliation of Maria Theresa with the Bourbons, maintaining epistolary exchanges with intellectuals 1192

from Naples, such as Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel. Metastasio’s emotional life in Vienna is bound to the contessa Marianna Pignatelli d’Althann, from 1734 to 1755, after the death of the singer Marianna Benti Bulgarelli, who inspired his choice as the author of the melodrama. The last Marianna in Metastasio’s life, Marianna Martinez, herself a composer and singer, assists him until his death in Vienna, after a brief respiratory illness, 12 April 1782. Buried at his request in the crypt of the Michaelkirche, only several steps from his house at Kohlmarkt, where for 52 years he was a guest of the Martinez family, on the order of Charles VI. MARIO VALENTE See also: Opera Selected Works Collections Poesie del Signor Abate Pietro Metastasio, edited by Ranieri Calzabigi, 9 vols., Paris: Quillau, 1755. Poesie del Signor Abate Pietro Metastasio, 10 vols., Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1757–1768. Opere del signor abate Pietro Metastasio, edited by Giuseppe Pezzana, 12 vols., Paris: Presso la vedova He´rissant, 1780–1783. Opere di Pietro Metastasio con dissertazioni e osservazioni, 16 vols., Nizza: Societa` Tipografica, 1785. Dramas and Other Poems of the Abbe´ Pietro Metastasio, translated by John Hoole, 3 vols., London: Otridge & Son, R. Faulder, 1800. Opere, edited by Fausto Nicolini, Bari: Laterza, 1912–1914. Opere scelte, edited by Giulio Natali, Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1934. Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, 5 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1943–1954. Teatro, edited by Mario Fubini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1968. Opere, introduced by Franca Angelini, edited by Daniele Del Giudice, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1999. Drammi per musica: Il periodo italiano 1724–1730, edited by Anna Laura Bellina, vol. 1, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Drammi per musica: Il regno di Carlo VI 1730–1740, edited by Anna Laura Bellina, vol. 1., Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Drammi per musica: L’eta` teresiana 1740–1771, edited by Anna Laura Bellina, vol. 3, Venice: Marsilio, 2004.

Writings on Aesthetics Estratto dell’Arte poetica d’Aristotile e considerazioni su la medesima, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947. Dell’arte poetica, epistola di Quinto Orazio Flacco a’ Pisoni, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947. Invito a cena d’Orazio a Torquato, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947. Osservazioni sul teatro greco, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947.

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) Satira III di Giovenale, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947. Estratto dell’Arte poetica d’Aristotile, critical edition by Elisabetta Selmi, Palermo: Novecento, 1998.

Other Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio: Translations of his Principal Letters, edited by Charles Burney, 3 vols., 1796. Memorie, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947. Metodo per lo studio dell’italiano per l’arciduca Giuseppe, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 2, 1947. Lettere, 1715–1757, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 3, 1951. Lettere, 1757–1770, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 4, 1954. Lettere, 1770–1782, in P. Metastasio, Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 5, 1954. ‘‘Dieci lettere inedite di Pietro Metastasio,’’ edited by Mate Zoric, Studia romanica et anglica zagrabiensia, 21–22 (1966): 321–336.

Further Reading Accorsi, Maria Grazia, ‘‘Etica nicomachea e Poetica nei primi drammi ‘italiani’ di Metastasio,’’ in La tradizione classica nelle arti del XVIII secolo e la fortuna di Metastasio a Vienna, edited by Mario Valente and Erika Kanduth, Rome: Artemide, 2003. Binni, Walter, L’Arcadia e il Metastasio, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, edited by Percy A. Scholes, London: Oxford University Press, 1959. Calzabigi, Ranieri, Scritti teatrali e letterari, edited by Anna Laura Bellina, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1994. Giazotto, Remo, Poesia melodrammatica e pensiero critico nel Settecento, Milan: Bocca, 1952. Gronda, Giovanna, Le passioni della ragione: Studi sul Settecento, Pisa: Pacini, 1984. Joly, Jacques, Les fe´tes the´atrales de Me´tastase a la cour de Vienne (1731–1767), Clermont- Ferrand: Faculte´ des Lettres et Sciences Humaines, 1978. Muraro, Maria Teresa (editor), Metastasio e il mondo musicale, Florence: Olschki, 1986. Neville, Don, ‘‘Moral Philosophy in the Metastasian Dramas,’’ in Crosscurrents and the Mainstream of Italian Serious Opera 1730–1790. A Symposium (11–13 February 1982), edited by Don Neville, London, Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1982. Pavone, Mario Alberto, ‘‘Il panorama figurativo nella memoria critica del Metastasio,’’ in La tradizione classica nelle arti del XVIII secolo e la fortuna di Metastasio a Vienna, edited by Mario Valente and Erika Kandut, Rome: Artemide, 2003. Sala Di Felice, Elena, Metastasio: Ideologia, drammaturgia, spettacolo, Milan: Angeli, 1983. Strohm, Reinhard, L’opera italiana nel Settecento, edited by Mario Armellini, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Valente, Mario (editor), Legge Poesia e Mito: Giannone Metastasio e Vico fra ‘‘tradizione’’ e ‘‘trasgressione’’

nella Napoli degli anni Venti del Settecento, Rome: Aracne, 2001. Valente, Mario, ‘‘Pietro Metastasio e Giacomo Noventa: L’irresistibile fascino dei valori,’’ in Storia del Candore: Studi in memoria di Nino Rota nel ventesimo della scomparsa, edited by Giovanni Morelli, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Valente, Mario, L’inafferrabile felicita` e il senso del tragico ‘‘L’Olimpiade,’’, Metastasio e Cimarosa, Rome: Artemide, 2003. Valente, Mario, and Erika Kanduth (editors), La tradizione classica nelle arti del XVIII secolo e la fortuna di Metastasio a Vienna, Rome: Artemide, 2003. Vlad, Roman, ‘‘Metastasio, Salieri e la scuola viennese,’’ in La tradizione classica nelle arti del XVIII secolo e la fortuna di Metastasio a Vienna, edited by Mario Valente and Erika Kanduth, Rome: Artemide, 2003.

DIDONE ABBANDONATA, 1724 Dramma Per Musica by Pietro Metastasio

Didone abbandonata (Dido Deserted), in three acts, is the first melodrama that Pietro Metastasio completed at 26 years old, and was staged in Naples on 1 February 1724 in the public theater of San Bartolomeo by the impresarios Nicola Galtieri and Aurelio Del Po. These men signed the dedication— actually written by Metastasio himself—to Cardinal Federico d’Althann, viceroy of the kingdom of Naples, and published the drama with Francesco Ricciardi. Thus the poet displayed his harmony with the social and political world of the city in the Austrian period. Metastasio also enjoyed good relations with the Neapolitan school of music and with the composer Domenico Sarro, who composed music for Didone abbandonata with expressive felicity. In the role of Dido, the protagonist, was Marianna Benti Bulgarelli, the ‘‘Romanina.’’ The soprano, with her grand stage presence, launched the beloved poet’s first melodrama to success. Metastasio drew his inspiration for the dramatic action from Book IV of Virgil’s Aeneid, laying out 1193

PIETRO METASTASIO (PIETRO TRAPASSI) in the Argument the historical-literary and mythological events that make up the play’s back story. This allowed him the immediate contrast of Queen Dido’s passionate love, her feelings of pain, desperation, strength, and weakness, with the duty of Aeneas, who devoted himself to fulfill the will of the gods and of fate by giving a new country to his people. In the drama, the Trojan hero must therefore conquer his doubts about renouncing love and personal happiness, and the anguish of venturing into the unknown. As in the Greek tragedies of Theseus and Jason, Aeneas must also show his power to realize the grand design of the gods, abandoning the woman who has welcomed and loved him. By way of a suggestive analogy with the tragic lovers of Greek myth: Jason-Medea, Theseus-Ariadne, the tragic greatness of Metastasio’s Dido takes shape in the struggle for the recognition of her identity both as a woman, as a being who loves, and as a sovereign and independent individual. The distinction between the Metastasian (and Virgilian) Dido from Medea, who is committed to the horrible revenge of killing the children she has borne to Jason, and also with Ariadne, destined to remove from her conscience any trace of the abandonment and slight she has suffered, comes in Dido’s representation of her rights to the world, her calling upon all of society to respect them. In the Metastasian drama, the character of Dido becomes an explicit metaphor of the new civil common life, whose progress and development is informed by the supreme Roman authority of Charles VI of Hapsburg in the ancient kingdom of Naples, who with his laws favors the detachment of the people from ancestral superstitions, from the ignorance and suspicions of the peasant world—a supposed depository of atavistic, recondite truths—in its confrontations with the nobility and bourgeoisie, the new class expressed by social relations in the modern city.

Editions First edition: Didone abbandonata, Naples: Francesco Ricciardi, 1724. Other editions: Didone abbandonata, Venice: Vincenzo Rossetti, 1725; Venice: Giuseppe. Bettinelli, 1733; Madrid: Mojados, 1752; in Poesie del Signor Abate Pietro Metastasio, edited by Ranieri Calzabigi, Paris: Quillau, 1755; in Poesie del Signor Abate Pietro Metastasio, vol. 1, Turin: Stamperia Reale, 1757; in Opere del signor abate Pietro Metastasio, edited by Giuseppe Pezzana, vol. 3, Parigi: He´rissant, 1780; in Tutte le opere, edited by Bruno Brunelli, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1943; in Drammi per musica, edited by Anna Laura Bellina, vol. 1, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Translations: Dido Deserted, in Dramas and Other Poems of the Abbe´ Pietro Metastasio, translated by John Hoole, vol. 1, London: Otridge and Son, R. Faulder, 1800.

Further Reading Bono, Paola, and Maria Vittoria Tessitore, Il mito di Didone: Avventure di una regina tra secoli e culture, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Candiani, Rosy, Pietro Metastasio da poeta di teatro a ‘‘virtuoso di poesia,’’ Rome: Aracne, 1998. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Il Metastasio napoletano tra l’ ‘‘Istoria civile’’ e la ‘‘Scienza nuova,’’ in Legge Poesia e Mito: Giannone Metastasio e Vico fra ‘‘tradizione’’ e ‘‘trasgressione’’ nella Napoli. degli anni Venti del Settecento, edited by Mario Valente, Rome: Aracne, 2001. Gavazzeni, Franco, ‘‘Le disuguaglianze stilistiche della Didone,’’ in Studi metastasiani, Padua: Liviana, 1964. Gialdroni, Teresa Maria, ‘‘I primi dieci anni della ‘Didone abbandonata’ di Metastasio: Il caso di Domenico Sarro,’’ in Analecta musicologica, 30 (1998): 437–500. Giordano Gramegna, Anna, ‘‘La leggenda di Didone: Amore e tragedia,’’ in Ariel, 12 (January–April 1997): 63–77. Miggiani, Maria Giovanna, Il canto di Metastasio, introduction by Mario Valente, Bologna: Forni, 2004. Valente, Mario, ‘‘Pietro Metastasio e il senso del ’tradere,’’’ in Legge Poesia e Mito: Giannone Metastasio e Vico fra ‘‘tradizione’’e ‘‘trasgressione’’ nella Napoli degli anni Venti del Settecento, Rome: Aracne, 2001.

MARIO VALENTE

MICHELANGELO See Buonarroti 1194

CARLO MICHELSTAEDTER

CARLO MICHELSTAEDTER (1887–1910) Carlo Michelstaedter, philosopher and writer, held a prominent position as a representative of Mitteleuropean culture in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. With dramatic intensity, his work investigates the contradictions of human existence and the ontological foundations of human thought. His masterpiece, the revised dissertation entitled La persuasione e la rettorica (Persuasion and Rhetoric, 1913), as well as his poems, notes, letters, drawings, and sketches, constitute a contribution to modern Italian thought alternative to Benedetto Croce’s doctrine of neoidealism. However, because of his individualistic approach to the criticism of bourgeois culture and economy, his lack of political engagement, and his resistance to ideological dictates, his work did not find recognition immediately. Born in a Jewish family of intellectuals and patriots in the city of Gorizia, Michelstaedter in 1905 enrolled at the University of Vienna to study mathematics, but soon moved to Florence, where he pursued studies in ancient philosophy, art history, and literature at the Istituto di Studi Superiori. Readings of the Kabala, Greek, and Latin classics, as well as authors such as Giacomo Leopardi, Henrik Ibsen, and Leo Tolstoy characterized the young intellectual’s early years, while Schopenhauer, Weininger, and Nietzsche influenced his philosophizing in the pessimistic tradition. Always engaged with ontological investigations, Michelstaedter wrote his dissertation on the concepts of persuasion and rhetoric in Aristotle and Plato, although he would not live to formally defend it as he committed suicide on October 17, 1910. La persuasione e la rettorica was published posthumously, but without the important apparatus of the appendixes, and only in 1922 did the volume appear in its entirety. This work provoked a heated critical debate. Michelstaedter departed from the concepts of rettorica (rhetoric) and persuasione (persuasion) as defined in the classical tradition in order to rethink their relationship not in terms of a binary construct in which the former may lead to the latter, but rather as the embodiment of an opposition that instead leads to the ontological search for the authentic essence of human action. In his heuristic distinction between persuasion and rhetoric, the rettorica

is nothing more than language made instrumental to moral and social constructions and therefore ontologically false and based on the presumption that words can grasp reality in its essence and shape it. From this perspective, human communication guided by ideology is destined to fail because it only leads to an illusionary achievement of scientific, philosophical, or religious absolutes in a meaningless universe. Persuasione, on the contrary, is not to be understood as the art of persuasion, but rather as the tension toward relativism, which fosters the awareness of the continuous becoming of human existence that eventually ends only with death. While rhetorical practices deny the fear of death by falsely claiming the achievement of a state of truth, persuasion does not hide the human condition of finitude. This quest for an authentic existence is found only in a few great figures, all of whom reject rhetorical illusions and mold their own values. Thus, as Daniela Bini argues, ‘‘what gives value to the ethical sphere is precisely that it is outside the realm of logic. Logical explanations belong to the realm of rettorica. Persuasione can only be lived’’ (Carlo Michelstaedter and the Failure of Language, 1992). Going beyond constructed language (i.e., the language of philosophy), those who struggle to achieve persuasion combine life in the present moment with the awareness of human finitude. Those who truly reach the stage of persuasion do not fear death. For Michelstaedter the essence of life is not contingent upon pleasure or avoidance of suffering; a ‘‘persuaded’’ individual remains untouched by social conventions. Always fascinated by Ibsen’s theater, Michelstaedter became acquainted also with the poetic works of the Norwegian writer. Ibsen himself emphasizes the hypocrisy of a life constrained by lies and the individual awareness and painful struggle for authenticity, which may lead to the ultimate act of sacrifice. In 1912, Michelstaedter’s friend Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz published in one volume Il dialogo della salute (Dialogue on Health) and Poesie (Poems). The dialogue, written in 1910 while Michelstaedter was working on the dissertation, follows the Socratic model. In it, two friends, Nino and Rino, engage in a discussion over the 1195

CARLO MICHELSTAEDTER relation between life and death. The poems, dedicated to his sister Paula and Senia Argia Cassini, were composed between the time of the author’s graduation from the Staatsgymnasium in 1905 and 1910. In them, Michelstaedter, in opposition to the Hegelian notion of synthesis that resolves opposition into a predicate, stressed the impossibility of objective knowledge outside the self. The early poems, such as La scuola e` finita (School Is Over, 1905) and Senti Iolanda come e` triste il sole (Iolanda, Listen to How Sad the Sun Is, 1907), are characterized by an emphatic tone and already reveal as their structural pattern the dichotomy that was maintained in his later and more mature works. Michelstaedter’s work differs substantially from that of coeval Italian poets such as Giovanni Pascoli or Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose aestheticism he rejected. The young poet echoes instead the themes and language of Leopardi, whom he singles out, in the preface to La persuasione e le rettorica, as one of the great historical figures of persuasi, along with Christ, Plato, Parmenides, and Ibsen. In Michelstaedter’s lyrical works such as Il canto delle crisalidi (The Song of the Chrysalides, 1909), nature is a source of inspiration for metaphors of becoming and transformation. In contrast with human existence, nature approaches death with faith in regeneration. Life and death are opposed to one another, but they are also elements of a circular journey in which each is necessary to the other. The sea, a recurring metaphor of persuasione in the dissertation, becomes a symbol of life and of a condition of eternal return in Onda per onda (Wave after Wave, 1910): ‘‘Onda per onda batte sullo scoglio/ [...] monta e rimonta, or dolce or tempestosa / l’agitata marea senza riposo’’ (Wave after wave beats upon the rocks / [...] rises and rises, now sweet, now stormy / the restless tide). Some of Michelstaedter’s later poems, for example A Senia (To Senia, 1910) and All’Isonzo (To the Isonzo, 1910), were published only in 1922 in the journal Il convegno by Arangio Ruiz, who also edited the definitive edition of his friend’s verses with the volume Poesie (Poems, 1948). These poetic achievements further attest to Michelstaedter’s versatility, which resulted in a small but important body of works caught between a longing for a mythological dimension and the refusal of the rhetorical dictates of poetic language. As in his ontological meditations, the poet spans from the individual state of alienation to the expression of a collective existential condition of man, with its irreversible movement toward the end. 1196

The opposition between finite and infinite persists, and as such the dichotomy of rettorica and persuasione remains the pivotal issue in his poems as well. A greater variety of themes is to be found in Michelstaedter’s numerous letters to his family and to his closest friends, which were collected in Epistolario (Letters, 1983). Ranging in subject from love to art (he was fascinated by Leonardo’s drawings), from nature to music (he loved Beethoven), from the states of his own body to the hills surrounding Florence, the letters offer a more complex portrait of the artist and a deeper understanding of his state of mind, always bordering on depression. Another defining aspect of Michelstaedter’s artistic production is his active interest in the figurative arts. He produced several drawings and paintings characterized by the rejection of any embellishment or decorative trait. Self-portraits, portraits, drawings, caricatures, and oil paintings form a corpus that attempts, as does his entire intellectual activity, to reach the essence, the core of the condition of ‘‘persuasione’’ that he strove for in his intense life. Whether his suicide is seen as the result of mental illness or as a philosophical statement in order to achieve the essence of life and avoid the danger of falsification, Michelstaedter offered during his brief existence a clear example of a tension toward the denouncement of bourgeois dictates and constraints and toward the search for an identification of will and intellect, that is, for persuasione.

Biography Born on June 3, 1887, in Gorizia (in the AustroHungarian Empire) to a well-educated, middleclass Jewish family. Enrolled in mathematics at the University of Vienna, 1905. After a year moved to Florence and attended the Istituto di Studi Superiori; in the Tuscan capital, met Gaetano Chiavacci and Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz, who would later publish his work; befriended Nadia Baraden who committed suicide, 1907; love affair with Jolanda De Blasi strongly opposed by his family; his brother died in New York, 1909; committed suicide on October 17, 1910, in Gorizia. MARIA LAURA MOSCO Selected Works Collections Il dialogo della salute—Poesie, edited by Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz, Genoa: Formiggini, 1912.

MARIO MIELI Opere, edited by Gaetano Chiavacci, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Il dialogo della salute e altri dialoghi, edited by Sergio Campailla, Milan: Adelphi, 1988.

Philosophical Writings La persuasione e la rettorica, edited by Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz, 1913; expanded edited by E. Michelstaedter, 1922; critical edition by Sergio Campailla, 1995; as Persuasion and Rhetoric, translated by Russell Scott Valentino, Cinzia Sarti Blum, and David J. Depew, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ edited by Vladimiro Arangio Ruiz, 1948; critical edition by Sergio Campailla, 1974.

Other Opera grafica e pittorica, edited by Sergio Campailla, 1975. Epistolario, edited by Sergio Campailla, 1983.

Further Reading Bini, Daniela, Carlo Michelstaedter and the Failure of Language, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida 1992.

Brianese, Giorgio, L’arco e il destino. Interpretazione di Carlo Michelstaedter, Abano Terme: Francisici, 1985. Camerino, Giuseppe Antonio, La persuasione e i simboli: Michelstaedter e Slataper, Milan: Istituto propaganda libraria, 1993. Campailla, Sergio, Pensiero e poesia di Carlo Michelstaedter, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1973. De Leo, Daniela, Michelstaedter filosofo del frammento, Lecce: Milella, 2004. Furlan, Laura, Carlo Michelstaedter: l’essere straniero di un intellettuale moderno, Trieste: LINT, 1999. Harrison, Thomas, ‘‘Carlo Michelstaedter and the Metaphysics of Will,’’ in MLN, 106, no. 5 (1991): 1012– 1029. Muzzioli, Francesco, Michelstaedter, Lecce: Milella, 1987. Pieri, Piero, La scienza del tragico: saggio su Carlo Michelstaedter, Bologna: Cappelli, 1989. Piromalli, Antonio, Michelstaedter, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968. Pulcina, Paolo, Carlo Michelstaedter. L’estetica: l’illusioni della retorica, la ragione del suicidio, Florence: Atheneum, 2004. Stella, Vittorio, Carlo Michelstaedter, Rome: FERV, 2002. Taviani, Giovanna, Michelstaedter, Palermo: Palumbo, 2002.

MARIO MIELI (1952–1983) A controversial figure in Italian gay literature, Mario Mieli published his first book, Elementi di critica omosessuale (Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique), which was also his university thesis, with the Turinese publisher Einaudi in 1977, when he was only 25. This original book—the only one published while he was alive— revolutionized the way of thinking about homosexuality. It focused on six themes, developed in six chapters, in which Mieli dissected, through semantic and conceptual analysis, the causes and modes of heterosexual attitudes toward gay men and women. Taking to task psychoanalytical theories of homosexuality, Mieli confronts homophobic commonplaces from the point of view of the mature gay liberation movement, tracing the history of the social repression of homosexuality and insisting on the universality of homoerotic desire. He sees his homosexuality as a bridge connecting the common perception of ‘‘normality’’ to a higher and deeper dimension of existence and underscores the importance of gay emancipation within the

universal framework of human liberation. He conceives of freedom as the release of the total erotic potential of each individual. Elementi di critica omosessuale is also a thorough account of discrimination against homosexuals throughout history, from the persecutory laws under the Roman emperor Justinian, when homosexuals were decapitated, to the Middle Ages, when they were branded with a mark on their forehead, up to the French Revolution and Napoleon. Written by a provocative intellectual who urged all homosexuals to come out of their ‘‘closet’’ and engage in the struggle for sexual liberation, the book was not only the most important essay produced in Italy to come out of the homosexual liberation movement, but was a veritable turning point for Italian society as a whole, which confronted for the first time the homosexual community, long before widespread awareness of the AIDS epidemic, or of public events such as Gay Pride parades. Earlier in his life, when he was only 20, Mieli founded the theatrical group Nostra Signora dei 1197

MARIO MIELI Fiori, which staged La Traviata Norma, ovvero: vaffanculo. Ebbene si! (The Norma Traviata, That Is: Fuck Off. Well, Yes!, 1976) in Rome, Florence, and Milan. The play aimed against sexism, homophobia, and conformism. In fact, Mieli only performed, on stage as well as in life, his own anguishes and obsessions. For this eccentric young man, who loved to wear make-up and high heels, life itself was a stage whose purpose was to express his consciousness in a comprehensible way. Upon his death, two of his friends, Marc de’ Pasquali and Umberto Pasti, took upon themselves the responsibility of publishing Il risveglio dei faraoni (The Pharaohs’ Awakening, 1994), the novel that Mieli had withdrawn from his publisher just a few days before his suicide. One of the most important works in Italian gay literature, Il risveglio dei faraoni is an autobiographical story that echoes a lost diary written by Mieli during a journey to India. The novel has had a long and tormented history. His family opposed its publication because Mieli mentions precise names and facts (indeed, the pharaohs of the title are his own parents), and it circulated in only a few clandestine copies. After the death of his parents, Mieli’s sister Paola, a psychoanalyst in New York, who had always supported him, began to collect his essays, letters, and articles. In addition to preparing, with Gianni Rossi Barilli, a new edition of Elementi di critica omosessuale, she has also sponsored the publication of a posthumous volume, Oro, eros e armonia (Gold, Eros and Harmony, 2002), edited by Gianpaolo Silvestri and Antonio Veneziani. Written during Mieli’s so-called ‘‘alchemical phase,’’ the essays collected in Oro, eros e armonia theorize the importance of the revolutionary role of the body and clarify the author’s relationship with drugs, alchemy, and coprophagy. Mieli emerges here as a visionary author, farsighted in his ideas on pacifism and ecology, and fascinating because of his original and transgressive thought. This last book reconfirms the portrait of Mieli as a contradictory figure, both a refined aesthete apparently

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distant from daily preoccupations and a militant fighting for homosexual and minority rights.

Biography Born in Milan, 8 May 1952; studied at the Liceo Parini in Como where his family lived; met Fernanda Pivano, 1971; lived in London, 1971–1974; founded FUORI! (Fronte Unitario Omosessuale Rivoluzionario Italiano), 1972; founded COM (Collettivi Omosessuali Milanesi); founded the theatrical group Nostra Signora dei Fiori, 1976; graduated in philosophy, University of Milan, 1977; Elementi di critica omosessuale awarded the Triangolo Rosa prize, 1977; committed suicide in Milan, 12 March 1983. MARCELLA FARINA See also: Lesbian and Gay Writing Selected Works La Traviata Norma, ovvero: vaffanculo. Ebbene si!, 1976. Elementi di critica omosessuale, 1977; as Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique, translated by David Fernbach, 1980. Il risveglio dei Faraoni, 1994. Oro, eros e armonia, edited by Gianpaolo Silvestri and Antonio Veneziani, 2002.

Further Reading Cestaro, P. Gary (editor), Queer Italia: Same-sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, New York: Palgrave, 2004. Gnerre, Francesco, L’eroe negato: omosessualita` e letteratura nel Novecento italiano, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 2000. Mieli, Paola, and Gianni Rossi Barilli (editors), critical edition of Mario Mieli, Elementi di critica omosessuale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002 (with essays by Tim Dean, Teresa de Lauretis, David Jacobson, Christopher Lane, Claude Rabant, Simonetta Spinelli). Pustianaz, Marco, ‘‘Transitive Gender and Queer Performance in the Novels of Mario Mieli and Vittorio Pescatori,’’ in Queer Italia: Same-sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film, edited by Gary P. Cestaro, New York: Palgrave, 2004.

MIGRATION LITERATURE

MIGRATION LITERATURE The unprecedented waves of immigrants entering Italy at the end of the twentieth century are redefining Italian culture. Although data regarding migration is notoriously approximate, in broad terms, the official statistics published annually by the Caritas of Rome in Immigrazione: dossier statistico report that over 4 million people from 180 countries have tried to immigrate into Italy between 1985 and 2003. Italy’s dramatic transition from being historically a nation of ‘‘emigration’’ to a nation of ‘‘immigration’’ has made multicultural issues a most pressing concern. At the same time, the participation of immigrants in Italian society has brought to the foreground the possibility of redefining its culture. The early 1990s witnessed the appearance of the first widely circulated publications by immigrant authors about their own experience. As Graziella Parati has pointed out, most recently in Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (2005), these first texts by migrant authors were frequently written in collaboration with an Italian native speaker, either in the role of coauthor or editor. The native collaborator, ostensibly giving linguistic help to the migrant learning Italian, often acted as cultural mediator between him and an Italian readership. These texts were largely aimed at rewriting the negative stereotypes of immigrants. By telling predominantly autobiographical stories of migration, the writers endeavored to dismantle the reductive stereotype of the uneducated, illegal immigrant (clandestino or extracomunitario, or, in the more racist term, vu’ cumpra), and restore individual identity to the ever-increasing ocean of faceless immigrants. Themes of exile, entrapment, isolation, and nostalgia for home mark the texts of ‘‘first wave’’ immigration. These themes grow out of the dissonance between the image that the migrants hold of Italy and the reality that they experience. Since the mid-1990s, a different group of texts by migrant authors has emerged characterized by an enormous variety in theme, style, and genre. Whereas most works of the ‘‘first wave’’ were autobiographical in approach, works of the ‘‘second wave’’ branch into fiction, poetry, and more experimental forms. Themes in these latter works include the impossibility of returning home, the interstitial nature of identity, the limits of

language, and the problematic future of a multicultural Italy. In 1990, Pap Khouma, from Senegal, published his highly autobiographical narrative, Io venditore di elefanti: una vita per forza fra Dakar, Parigi e Milano (I Am an Elephant Salesman: A Life Forcibly Between Dakar, Paris and Milan), which became a bestseller. Edited by the well-known journalist Oreste Pivetta, the text went through eight editions in 10 years, and has entered the public school curriculum. In relating his own account of immigration, Khouma inserts the stories of other immigrants, and casts his own case as representative. The protagonist, as the text’s title makes plain, survives in Europe as a street vendor selling objects that represent Africa to the Western mind. The text relates the multiple migrations of the protagonist, Pap, and his daily dramas as he encounters the police, faces racism, searches for housing, copes with homesickness, and tries to survive economically. Pap trained as a potter in Senegal but could not find work. He leaves his homeland to work as a street vendor on the Ivory Coast, then, still in pursuit of steady employment, goes to Italy, then to Paris, returns to Italy, and then to Senegal before finally settling in Rome where in 1988 he organizes the Associazione senegalese italiana, the first cooperative of immigrants in Italy, of which he was president until 1992. His narration recounts not only his own journey, but the political path of immigration law in Italy as well, entwining the ‘‘private’’ with the ‘‘public’’ story by relating how the protagonist changes as the environment changes around him. His rewriting of his own identity has wider resonances, however, as Khouma uses this transformation to parallel the profound alterations in what it means to be ‘‘Italian.’’ Salah Methnani and Mario Fortunato’s coauthored text Immigrato (Immigrant, 1990) tells a similar, autobiographical tale of one man’s journey through the peninsula searching for work. In the process, the journey becomes one of redefining himself and at the same time, redefining the idealized image he had held of Italy. The protagonist, Salah, had studied languages at the university in Tunisia, and begins his travels to Italy as a tourist. His initial encounter with the country as 1199

MIGRATION LITERATURE the bastion of Western culture is rewritten, first by the troubling accounts of exploitation, prostitution, racism, drugs, and crime he hears from other Africans, and later by his own experiences as his money runs out and he tries to survive by working a series of odd jobs. He soon realizes that in order to get by, he must suppress how well he speaks Italian and conform to the image of the ignorant, unwashed immigrant. He finally returns to Rome where he finds steady work as a translator, and concludes his story by making a visit back to his homeland. Both Methnani’s and Khouma’s story respond directly to innovations in immigration legislation in the last decade of the twentieth century. In an attempt to decrease illegal immigration with its myriad of ensuing social problems, thousands of illegal immigrants in Italy were granted legal status in 1986 and 1990 under the Martelli law. However, as these texts attempt to highlight, this blanket ‘‘sanatoria’’ never helped to alter the fundamental inequalities, social injustices, and cultural misunderstandings that perpetuate the prejudices and discrimination faced by migrants. The wretched living conditions and uncertain lives of immigrants without legal status is the focus of Moshen Melitti’s novel Pantanella: canto lungo la strada (Pantanella: A Song Along the Road, 1992). Melitti, born in Tunisia, originally wrote the text in Arabic (it was translated into Italian by Monica Ruocco), and specifically addresses the practical difficulties of surviving in Italy. The protagonist of this novel is actually an entire community of immigrants in the heart of Rome who live in Pantanella, an abandoned pasta factory. The narrative refers to this community as ‘‘the city,’’ which is compared to a ‘‘museum’’ of multiple cultures. ‘‘The city’’ is cast as the antithesis of a modern Italian city, a paradoxical utopia in which people of all nations live peacefully side by side, though barely surviving on the margins of society and in abject poverty. ‘‘The city’’ has none of the problems that plague urban Italy: no crime, no violence, no drugs. Indeed, its only problems are those imposed from outside, from homelessness and unemployment, to longing for home. When officials decided to evict the inhabitants and burn down the factory, one of the characters, Ahmad, commits suicide by leaping from a bridge. The inability of migrants to bridge the differences between the image they hold of Italy and the reality they experience becomes an important theme in another group of ‘‘first wave’’ texts, 1200

published during the early 1990s, which confront the problems of identity construction and cultural disconnects within the wider context of Western colonialism and Orientalist attitudes. Although it contains definite autobiographical elements, La promessa di Hamadi (Hamadi’s Promise, 1991), by Saidou Moussa Ba from Senegal and Alessandro Micheletti, is a fictional narrative about two brothers who migrate to Italy. The younger, Samba, disappears and is eventually killed, and the story is dominated by the older brother’s experiences as he searches for him. This text highlights Africa’s colonial past, and compares the modern national economic crises that force African immigration to the historical forced migration through European enslavement of Africans. Also in 1991, Mohamed Bouchane, in collaboration with Carla De Girolamo and Daniele Miccione, published Chiamatemi Ali (Call me Ali), which is based on a diary he kept after migrating to Italy. A native of Morocco, Bouchane recounts the difficulties in maintaining his Muslim identity in a place that he feels has no point of reference for his religion. The mores in Italy that would allow him to integrate would require transgressing the dictates of his religion (for instance, drinking with others), and the protagonist finds an uneasy resolution in this cultural tension by diluting his difference: He attempts to assume a more easily understood identity, one that conforms more directly to the stereotypes Westerners have of Morocco. As the book’s title indicates, the protagonist nevertheless chooses an Arabic identity to mediate his incomplete integration into Italian culture. It is important to bear in mind that many immigrant authors to Italy have experience of multiple languages, multiple migrations, and often share a postcolonial Francophone history. These writers bring this cultural multiplicity to their migration to Italy. Also significant is the difference between female and male migrants who write their stories. Many women whose work has been published come to Italy in positions of privilege: They come as tourists, and do not narrate stories of lives on the street. Nassera Chohra’s autobiography, Volevo diventare bianca (I Wanted to Become White, 1993), edited by Alessandra Atti di Sarro, is one of the few texts by a woman immigrant writer. Chohra, whose mother is Algerian and whose father is from France, grew up in Marseilles and migrated to Italy as an adult, when she married an Italian and settled in Rome. Her text, written in Italian for an Italian audience, focuses on her

MIGRATION LITERATURE childhood in France and only in the story’s final chapter recounts her adult experiences in Italy as a tourist and actress. Lontano da Mogadiscio (Far From Mogadishu, 1994), by Shirin Ramzanali Fazel from Somalia, is another narrative written by a woman immigrant author who specifically addresses her text to the general Italian reader in an attempt to rewrite images held by Europeans of Somalia as a land of drought, poverty, and war. Fazel wrote from a position of privilege, having attended Italian schools and having come to Italy married and with a family. Dozens of other texts sharing similar themes and concerns could be included with those mentioned above as part of the literature of the ‘‘first wave’’ of migrant writers to Italy. Together, they endeavored mainly to educate the native Italian population about the immediate legal, practical, and personal obstacles immigrants face in order to survive in Italy on the most fundamental level. Texts published by immigrant writers from 1994 to the present do not display a common concentration on the problems of physical survival, but instead expand into a variety of themes including problems of integration, cultural displacement, impossibility of return, family, relationships, looking forward to what future Italian culture will look like. What began as a trickle of texts in the 1990s has become a flood, and the texts of the ‘‘second wave’’ number in the hundreds. Many still display a distinct autobiographical element, but this is often sublimated in favor of other issues. Because of the immense diversity in these publications, it would be impossible to highlight all representative texts. Following are rather texts that show a cross-section of the variety of issues, contexts, and nationalities of the migrant authors. Kossi Komla-Ebri came to Italy from Togo in 1974 at age 20. He completed medical studies in Bologna in 1982 and moved to Como with his wife and two children, where he practices medicine at the Ospedale Fatebenefratelli of Erba. Very involved politically over issues affecting migrants, in May 2001 Komla-Ebri became the first AfricanItalian to run for Parliament. He is codirector of El Ghibli, an online journal dedicated to the diffusion of literature by migrant authors and has published two collections of anecdotes that relate in a comic key the daily ‘‘embarrassing encounters’’ with racism, such as being pitied by a woman at the park when he takes his fair-skinned children out because she thinks he must be working as their babysitter: Imbarazzismi: quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero

(Embarascism: Daily Embarrassments in Black and White) and Nuovi Imbarazzismi: quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero...e a colori (Embarascism: Daily Embarrassments in Black and White...and in Color, 2004). Though related with a humorous tone, these experiences uncover a disturbing, latent racism that pervades all facets of Italian society and creates artificial class distinctions based on skin color. Komla-Ebri has also published a collection of short stories, All’incrocio dei sentieri (Where the Paths Cross, 2003), and the novel Neyla (2002), described by the author as a love story in which the title character symbolizes Africa. After ‘‘prostituting’’ herself to Western society, Neyla dies tragically, leaving behind a child of uncertain race. Neyla is also the first novel by an African-Italian author to be translated into English, and was published in the United States by Fairleigh Dickinson Press in 2004. Princesa (1994) by Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque was coauthored by former Red Brigade member Maurizio Jannelli, who met her in prison. Their text relates the story of a Brasilian transsexual who migrates to Italy as a prostitute, and is jailed for a murder she attempted under the influence of drugs. A raw picture of the underside of Italian society, of crime and drugs, it inspired the film Le strade di Princesa (Princesa’s Streets, 1997), directed by Stefano Consiglio. Albanian author Ron Kubati, who had published a collection of poetry in his homeland before migrating to Italy in 1991 for political reasons, is the author of the novels Va e non torna (He Leaves and Doesn’t Come Back, 2000) and M (2002), which concentrate mainly on the inability to communicate between cultures. Va e non torna tells the story of Elton, an Albanian immigrant and student of philosophy in the Puglia region who ends up acting as translator for the Albanian immigrants arriving by boat. M recasts these same issues, generalizing them by means of the author’s use of an unnamed protagonist in an unnamed place who experiences difficulties negotiating the problems of personal and professional relationships. The writings of Chinese-Italian author Bamboo Hirst resist easy classification. The daughter of a Chinese opera singer and an Italian diplomat, Hirst left China and moved to Italy by herself in 1954 at the age of 13. Over the next decade she lived in Italy, but moved to London when she married a British citizen, and lived between Milan, London, and China. Though she has resided for more than 30 years in the United Kingdom, Hirst writes in 1201

MIGRATION LITERATURE Italian. Between 1986 and 2000, she published seven texts about China, including her best-selling autobiography Inchiostro di Cina (China Ink, 1986) and her parents’ story, Passaggio a Shanghai (Passage to Shanghai, 1991). Her texts treat the themes of Western stereotypes of the Chinese, the trauma of forging a hybrid identity between East and West, and the role of women in China compared to Italy. While assuming the role of cultural interpreter and liaison between East and West, she simultaneously acknowledges the limitations of any such interpretation. In her introduction to Memorie in valigia (Memories in a Suitcase, 1997), a volume compiling the winning entries from the second-annual National Eks & Tra Immigrant Literature Award, Parati explains that the ‘‘second wave’’ literature is ‘‘marked by a preference for ventriloquism (for example, a Senegalese writer will create a Filipino protagonist).’’ Thus the issues of immigration are recounted through the fictional eyes of invented immigrants. Two highly successful examples of such literary ventriloquism include I bambini delle rose (The Children of the Roses, 1995), by Tunisian author Moshen Melliti, and Rometta e Giulieo (2001), by Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo from the Congo. Like Melliti’s Pantanella, Gangbo’s first work was a highly autobiographical novel, Verso la notte Bakonga (Towards the Bakonga Night, 1999), narrating the story of Mika, an African whose family immigrated to Italy when he was a child. As he grows up, Mika wanders through Bologna and through different occupations and relationships in an unsuccessful attempt to find some place where he belongs. These two authors’ subsequent novels both create protagonists who are second-generation Chinese immigrants to Italy, and both novels employ a love story as a metaphor for cross-cultural mis/understanding. Gangbo creates a new pair of star-crossed lovers living in modern Verona. Inverting the names of Shakespeare’s famous characters, Gangbo’s male protagonist, Giulieo, symbolizes to the extreme the cultural limbo of the second-generation immigrant. He never knew his parents, illegal immigrants who had a brief affair, and knows nothing of them, not even their names, since his mother abandoned him at a convent as soon as he was born. After leaving the convent, Giulieo finds a job as a pizza delivery boy, which is how he meets Rometta and their love story begins. Gangbo’s highly distinctive and experimental style culminates in this novel in Pirandellian confrontations between the characters and the author. Melliti’s female protagonist, Ly, is the 1202

school-aged daughter of a Chinese woman, a clothing factory worker who is also anonymous. Ly also works after school selling roses to help save enough money to pay for her father’s passage to Italy. For both authors, ventriloquism acts as a means for sublimating—and combining—cultural and individual anxieties regarding the integration of firstand second-generation immigrants into Italian society and the necessary subsequent redefinition of identity, both national and personal. Finally, an important recent phenomenon is that of collective works and anthologies. Diaspore europee & Lettere migranti (European Diasporas & Migrant Texts, 2002), edited by Armando Gnisci and Nora Moll, collects fiction and critical essays, thus bringing together in the same volume texts and scholarly analysis. Piovono storie: Romanzo collettivo (It’s Raining Stories: A Collective Novel), also published in 2002 by the Laboratorio paroleMOLEste, is, as the title hints, a ‘‘novel’’ written collectively in Turin by 80 nonprofessional writers, both native and nonnative speakers of Italian. H. MARIE ORTON

Further Reading Brusa, Carlo (editor), Immigrazione e multicultura nell’Italia di oggi, 2 vols., Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997–1999. Burns, Jennifer, ‘‘Exile within Italy: Interactions between Past and Present ’Homes’ in Texts in Italian by Migrant Writers,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 20 (2002): 369–384. Gnisci, Armando, La letteratura italiana della migrazione, Rome: Lilith, 1998. Gnisci, Armando, Creolizzare l’Europa: letteratura e migrazione, Rome: Meltemi, 2003. Gnisci, Armando, and Nora Moll (editors), Diaspore europee e lettere migranti, Rome: Edizioni interculturali, 2002. Grillo, Ralph, and Jeff Pratt (editors), The Politics of Recognizing Difference: Multiculturalism Italian-style, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Maher, Vanessa, ‘‘Immigration and Social Identities’’ in Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Matteo, Sante, and Stefano Bellucci (editors), Africa Italia. Due continenti si avvicinano, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna: Fara Editore, 1999. Parati, Graziella, ‘‘Looking Through Non-western Eyes: Immigrant Women’s Autobiographical Narratives in Italian,’’ in Writing New Identities: Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe, edited by Sidonie Smith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Parati, Graziella, Introduction to Memorie in valigia, Sant’Arcangelo di Romagna: Fara Editore, 1997.

MILAN Parati, Graziella (editor), Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1999. Parati, Graziella, Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2005.

Sangiorgi, Roberta, and Alessandro Ramberti (editors), Destini sospesi di volti in cammino, Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara Editore, 1998. Sangiorgi, Roberta, and Alessandro Ramberti (editors), Parole oltre i confini, Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara Editore, 1999.

MILAN Celtic in origin, Milan was acquired by Rome in 197 BC. An important center during the Roman era (Mediolaˆnum or Mediolanium), and after having declined as a medieval village, it began to prosper as an archiepiscopal and consular town between the tenth and eleventh centuries. It led the struggle of the Italian cities against the Emperor Frederick I (Barbarossa) at Legnano (1176), securing Italian independence in the Peace of Constance (1183), but the commune was undermined by social unrest. During the thirteenth century, the Visconti and Della Torre families fought to impose their lordship or signoria. The Viscontis prevailed, and under their dominion Milan then became the Renaissance ducal power that served as a concrete reference for the fairy-like atmosphere of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Meanwhile, Milan’s archbishopric was influential, and Carlo Borromeo (1538–1584) became a leading figure during the Counter-Reformation. Having passed through the rule of the Sforzas (Francesco Sforza ruled until the city was captured by Louis XII of France in 1498) and the domination of the Hapsburgs, which ended in 1713 with the War of the Spanish Succession, Milan saw the establishment of Austrian rule. The enlightened rule of both Hapsburg emperors (Maria Theresa and Joseph II) encouraged the flowering of enlightenment culture, which Lombard reformers such as the Verri brothers, Cesare Beccaria, and the entire group of intellectuals active around the journal Il caffe` bequeathed to Milan during the Jacobin and Romantic periods. In fact, the city that fascinated Stendhal when he visited it in 1800 as a second lieutenant in the Napoleonic army became, between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a reference point in the cultural and social field. As the capital of the

Lombard-Venetian kingdom (1815), Milan rose to become its moral capital through the intellectual conquests, passion, and knowledge of a tradition that its artists give to all Italians. Giuseppe Parini’s moral fervor, Ugo Foscolo’s political and impassioned zeal, and the work of Alessandro Manzoni himself bequeathed the legacy of a staunch Romantic creed tempered by a constant sense of classical trend. One thinks of the passion of a citizenry that spent lavishly, when the Teatro Ducale (inaugurated in 1717) was destroyed by a fire in 1776, to endow Milan with two beautiful theaters and thus to put it on par with European capitals like Vienna. These two theaters are the Regio Teatro at La Scala, inaugurated in 1776 with Antonio Salieri’s Europa riconosciuta (Europe Recognized), and the Regio Teatro alla Canobbiana, whose first curtain rose only three years later. Their construction was entrusted to the Imperial architect Giuseppe Piermarini (1734–1808), the creator of a total renewal of the city’s urban plan, along with architectural masterpieces such as Palazzo Belgioioso, Palazzo Casnedi, Palazzo Cusani, and Palazzo del Monte di Pieta`. The nineteenth century was also the golden age of the Milanese theater. The citizens who took part in the evenings of music at La Scala, inflamed by the power of the melodramas, especially those of Giuseppe Verdi, left the theater prepared to fight for their country’s independence. The romantic impulse flourished on the stage of the Teatro Filodrammatici (previously called Teatro Pattriottico). On 30 December 1800, in fact, the curtain rose for the first time on Vittorio Alfieri’s tragedy Filippo. This is the theater where the wife of Vincenzo Monti, Teresa Pickler, performed, but also the stalls of the Teatro Carcano (1803) and the Teatro Re (1813) all encourage the desire for liberation 1203

MILAN that the entire citizenry possesses and that is manifested in the Cinque Giornate (Five Days): The intellectual class, eminent among whom is the philosopher and economist Carlo Cattaneo, offers itself to lead. Less fervor appeared in the Milanese boxes when, in 1861, national unification was achieved. Indeed despite a renewed enthusiasm for the reconstruction and planning of public works, the atmosphere remained tense, often spilling out in disturbances and uprisings on the part of the common people, who were sliding into conditions of extreme poverty. The Lombard capital followed all of the vicissitudes of the newborn Italian state (from Aspromonte to the convention of September 1864), including the possibility of a national liberation from Austria, seen to be allied with Bismarck in the conflict for the duchies of Denmark. War, which was looked to as a solution to all troubles, saw Italy defeated and humiliated. The city aspired to become an example for all of Italy. Evidence of this aspiration may be found in the journal Il conciliatore (1818–1819), which is linked to the newborn patriotic movement, and Cattaneo’s Il politecnico (1839), perhaps the most relevant cultural review of the time, which gave prominence to science and technology, considered as bridges toward development and social renewal; as well as in The Teatro Milanese (1869) of Cletto Arrighi (alias Carlo Righetti, 1830–1906), which tried to impose a new vision of the world of representational art, beyond the egotism of the grande attore (star actor) and the control of the theater manager; and the foundation, in 1882, of the S.I.A. (Societa` Italiana Autori), the first organization formed for the protection of artistic talent. At the end of the century, the enthusiasm that welcomed the annexation of Rome in 1870 was accompanied by the sad episode of the disturbances of 1898, when the general Bava Beccaris did not hesitate to fire against the striking workers of the Pirelli factory. The repressive intervention that followed was extremely harsh. The beginning of the twentieth century took shape partly tied to the political ferments of the end of the nineteenth century, and partly rocked by new cultural ideas. The Scapigliatura movement’s legacy soon gave way to the subversive wave of Futurism. One voice of the scapagliato fervor was the magazine La folla (1901), founded by Paolo Valera (1850–1926), a writer and novelist born in Como whose adopted city was Milan. His novel, La folla (The Crowd, 1901), describes a postindustrial Milan that is estranged and decayed. Valera was part of the democratic scapigliati, to whom 1204

the successful dramatic author Carlo Bertolazzi (1870–1916), with his theater divided between popular atmospheres and bourgeois interiors, was also close. The poetry of Gian Pietro Lucini (1867–1914), his works teeming with symbolism and liberty, formed a bridge between Scapigliatura and Futurism. The golden age of the Futurist avant-garde occurred, nevertheless, in what might be defined as the Milanese moment of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who founded the magazine Poesia (1905) in the Lombard capital. In this period, he attracted the most livid minds in Italy: Ardengo Soffici and Aldo Palazzeschi for literature, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Carlo Carra` for painting, who signed the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of the Futurist Painters) in Milan in 1910. Although it was a radically anti-bourgeois movement, Marinetti’s Futurism seemed to find an ideal cradle in industrial Milan, which he saw as a new Paris and which the painters tied to him, like Boccioni; it also represented in the crudest and most violent aspects the chaos of its piazzas—Rissa in Galleria (1910) and Baruffa (1911), for instance. In 1915, the winds of war began to blow fiercely. Nevertheless, in the city inflamed by Gabriele D’Annunzio, a delicate voice, that of the poet and novelist Ada Negri (1870–1945), made itself heard. In her lyricism, both meditative and intimate, there is a delicate Socialist and feminist vein expressing a humble, Christian conception of existence, as in Vespertina (Vespertina, 1930) and Il dono (The Gift, 1936). But the greatest poetic voice of Milan entre-deux-guerres is that of Clemente Rebora (1885–1957). The war marked the young poet, who from his very first writings revealed a distrust of progress and grasped the disturbing side of the industrialized city, to which he juxtaposed an ideal of social health that bore the stamp of Giuseppe Parini. At the same time, however, one senses in him the loss of the Enlightenment faith in history, whose meaning he was scarcely able to understand. Poetry in dialect also reacquired a leading role during the interwar years. Long informed by the model of Carlo Porta, who was at once exemplary and stifling, dialectal poetry found new originality in the work of Delio Tessa (1886–1939). His collection L’e` el dı` di mort, alegher! (It’s the Day of the Dead, Cheer Up!, 1932) remains unknown because Tessa’s cold sensibility is not understood, a sensibility that makes him depict a colorless and icy Milan. The innovative portion of Tessa’s work resides in his unusual treatment of the themes already touched upon by the previous generation of

MILAN dialectal lyric poets. The form, intended more for the ear than for the eye, tends toward a syntactic and rhythmic fragmentation, which reflects the traumatic nature of what is represented. The Milanese dialect is for the poet a living language that captures Milan’s unharmonious chorus of bourgeoisie, lower classes, natives, and immigrants. Between 1920 and 1940, the Fascist regime did not seem to put a stop to its citizens’ cultural projects. Milan acquired, in fact, an undisputed primacy in publishing with the rise of Mondadori and Rizzoli. Il corriere della sera (established in 1876) grew into the most important national daily, becoming an example for its publication of elzeviri, third-page articles that printed the thoughts of the literati on questions of culture, politics, and contemporary life. Periodicals of undisputed prestige were published, first among which is Il convegno founded by Enzo Ferrieri (1890–1969). Ferrieri was an acute intellectual, editor, director, and cultural promoter who established the Circolo del Convegno, a place for cultural debate in which the great names of literature participate and where Italo Svevo held two important conferences on James Joyce between 1920 and 1930. Ferrieri published hitherto unpublished works of Wedekind, Mann, and Joyce, although not neglecting the Italian and specifically the Milanese coˆte´. Il convegno, along with L’esame (1922) and La fiera letteraria (1925) and 900 (1926), helped to make the city’s cultural scene less provincial, opening it up to the most innovative European currents. Ferrieri is also interested in the possible renewal of the national theater, not only devoting himself to the publication of new authors, but also paying attention to innovative trends in European productions. As a stage director he put his innovative intentions into practice by founding a small space, the Teatro del Convegno, which was unfortunately marked by fitful activity: The small theater was inaugurated in 1924 at Palazzo Litta and, only a year later, moved to the salons of via Borgospesso, the seat of the circle, where it remained until 1930. It reopened subsequently in via Belgioioso, in Palazzo Besana, from 1956 to 1960. Between the two world wars, the works and experiences of three prose writers became prominent: Carlo Linati (1878–1949), Giovan Battista Angioletti (1896–1961), and Cesare Angelini (1887–1976). Their works fully manifest the Janusface of Milanese culture, which was at once tied to its roots and attentive to the evolution of culture in Europe. But one of the greatest geniuses of Milan’s twentieth-century literature remained Carlo Emilio Gadda (1896–1973), who was inclined to construct a

system that would encompass history, in order to try to give it a meaning amidst the isolated fragments of an opus unicum that is sought for but never achieved. In his mature style, different languages and registers followed one another—including the technical, which derives from his studies of engineering—and form a complex, often dissonant polyphony. In L’Adalgisa (Adalgisa, 1944), this pastiche is contaminated by the Milanese dialect, which depicts the local bourgeoisie at the beginning of the century. The pastiche of existence is revealed in an omnivorous writing that devours everything, waging an endless struggle even as it harkens back to doubts that it will ever be resolved. With Gadda, we begin to move in a Milan wounded by World War II, a Milan that slowly, after the liberation, resumed its cultural path firmly and decisively. One example is the administration’s and populace’s support at the birth in 1947 of the Piccolo Teatro, the first stable public Italian theater. Paolo Grassi and Giorgio Strehler’s project signaled Milan’s desire to make itself into an active national cultural center. Inaugurated the evening of May 14, the Piccolo became one of the poles around which postwar Milanese intellectual life gravitated; it also gathered at La Scala, which was reconstructed after the bombardments, and rediscovered itself in the pages of Elio Vittorini’s Il politecnico. It is not by chance that the programmatic manifesto of the Piccolo Teatro appeared in the journal of this adopted Milanese (Vittorini was Sicilian). Vittorini reclaimed the name of Cattaneo’s journal, making it into the voice of the new cultural ferment, and reflecting an intellectual gesture that is difficult to imagine in another city. Vittorini the novelist is also profoundly associated with Milan, with Il garofano rosso (The Pink Carnation, 1933) and Uomini e no (Men and Not Men, 1945), in which individual experience is made to bear universal values. In the second half of the twentieth century, Milan encountered the poetry of Vittorio Sereni (1913–1983), the poetics of the object, colloquial language, and the meaning of landscape, both real and symbolic, which gives the artistic coordinates of the Linea Lombarda. This distinguishes the works of artists (Milanese by birth or adoption) such as Giorgio Orelli, Nelo Risi, Luciano Erba, and Giovanni Raboni. The latter’s work is distinguished by a poetic tending toward a high formal perfection, as in Ogni terzo pensiero (Every Third Thought, 1993). Raboni, a poet, essayist and critic, not to mention organizer of various cultural enterprises involving the city, took the work of Rebora as his guide and considered poetry an 1205

MILAN indefeasible patrimony. The Linea Lombarda, in its different generational waves, remained trapped between Hermeticism and the neoavant-garde. Represented by Gruppo 63, the latter rejected traditional lyricism. Although Gruppo 63 was born in Palermo, its Milanese spirit acquired central importance with Nanni Balestrini and Antonio Porta. A further current, a descendant of Lombardian Expressionism, is that of the dialectal lyrics of Franco Loi (1930–) and the experimentation of Giovanni Testori (1923–1993). Originally from Genova, Loi adopted the Milanese dialect and returned it to the artistic levels reached by Tessa. The Expressionism of his predecessor is reversed in works in which there shines through a violent love for life, in a balance between prayer and blasphemy, which reflects an entirely human and subjective religiosity loaded with biblical and Dantean echoes. Giovanni Testori was more inclined to follow the open path of Gadda’s experimentations. His lyricism renders a dramatic vision of human destinies, described with a jumbled language crammed with oxymorons in a predominantly dialectal color, as in I trionfi (Victories, 1965). Testori’s Milan is that of the industrial outskirts, which he expressed in a convulsed and screaming voice. A neorealist, Pasolinian dimension was already present in his debut short story ‘‘Il dio di Roserio’’ (Roserio’s God, 1954) and was developed alongside a poetics of Manzonian references: reconstructing history with unknown cases of destitute people and a humiliated, wounded humanity. Such a poetic acquires great depth when we consider that, in 1958, the tale was included in the volume Il ponte della Ghisolfa (The Ghisolfa Bridge), the first book of the cycle I segreti di Milano (The Secrets of Milan), to which the tales of La Gilda del Mac Mahon (Mac Mahon’s Gilda, 1959), the comedies La Maria Brasca (Maria Brasca, 1960) and L’Arialda (Arialda, 1961), and the novel Il fabbricone (The Factory, 1961) also belong. The Testorian neorealism of his themes is contaminated by the Baroque Expressionism of the style, which is meant to represent the tragic tensions of a world divided between predators and victims. Testori’s city hides the inferno amidst the industrial outskirts and suburbs. Among the ranks of the Lombard avantgarde are also Alberto Arbasino and Pier Giorgio Manganelli, who, far from seeking a definitive form, make themselves the bearers of writing that is open to many possibilities. The contemporary plots of literature and poetry also inevitably pass through the Milan that serves 1206

as the backdrop to the novels of Dino Buzzati (1906–1972), such as Paura alla Scala (Fear at La Scala, 1949) and Un amore (A Love Affair, 1963); through the dark, somber city of the detective stories of Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911–1969) and the acrid Milan of the debut novel of Aldo Busi (1948–), Seminario sulla gioventu´ (Seminar on Youth, 1984); and through the city as filtered through the memory of Alberto Vigevani (1919– 1999). There also emerged the delicate voice of the poetry of Alda Merini (1931–), who through psychic and spiritual upheaval constructed a terse lyricism devoid of intellectual experimentation. We should mention the rupture marked by the movement of the avant-garde and the impact of recent critical methodologies, havens for the new stylistic and narratological strategies. Using the tools of semiotics, Maria Corti (1915–2002) rediscovered the distance between the old novel and the contemporary novel. And new narrative implications may be found in the work of Giuseppe Pontiggia (1934–), in which the quest for one’s own destiny and for truth is set within a vain and hypocritical Milan, as in L’arte della fuga (The Art of the Escape, 1968), Il giocatore invisibile (The Invisible Player, 1978), and Il raggio d’ombra (The Ray of Shadow, 1988). In closing, the 1980s saw the emergence of a new phenomenon, films mainly produced on the margins of the industry: Milan became one of the centers for alternative production companies committed to an innovative idea of filmmaking. They include Maurizio Nichetti’s Bambu´ Cinema & TV (1987) and Silvio Soldini’s Monogatari (1988). From his first feature film, L’aria serena dell’ovest (1990), to L’anima divisa in due (1992) and Le acrobate (1997), Soldini portrays his own city as a cold, claustrophobic metropolis, an incubator for political turmoil and corruption. Gabriele Salvatores, a Neapolitan director working in Milan, has also had a great influence, due to his success in capturing a new section of Italian society on film. His debut with Kamikazen, ultima notte a Milano (1987), a film on cabaret performers, proved to be successful with a new generation of actor-directors. Salvatores attended the Accademia d’Arte Drammatica at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan and founded the experimental Teatro dell’Elfo in 1972. The general idea was to take up a different cultural and economic space from commercial productions. During this time, in fact, certain corporate giants emerged to fill the gap created by deregulation, among them Silvio Berlusconi’s

MILAN Fininvest (today’s Mediaset), which owned the three major private networks (Canale 5, Telequattro, Italia 1). Berlusconi built his reputation out of popular TV programming (films, soap operas, cartoons) and advertising sales, thus attracting a massive viewership and providing a range of entertainment never experienced before on the RAI’s national channels. ALBERTO BENTOGLIO Further Reading Acerboni, Giovanni, ‘‘Milano e il teatro, ovvero ‘l’ambizione di essere esemplari,’’’ in Storia d’Italia: Le regioni dall’Unita` a oggi, La Lombardia, edited by Duccio Bigazzi and Marco Meriggi, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Aghina, Guido (editor), Enciclopedia di Milano: Dalle origini ai nostri giorni, Milan: F. M. Ricci, 1997. Apollonio, Mario, Circolo dei Verri e la cultura del Settecento milanese, Milan: CELUC, 1968. Apollonio, Mario, Storia del teatro italiano, Milan: Bur, 2003. Bisicchia, Andrea, Teatro a Milano, 1968–1978: Il Pier Lombardo e altri spazi alternativi, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Borsellino, Nino, and Lucio Felici (editors), Storia della letteratura italiana: Il Novecento. Scenari di fine secolo, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Brevini, Franco, Le parole perdute: Dialetti e poesia nel nostro secolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

Calvino, Italo, Lezioni Americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Collet, Annie, Stendhal et Milan: De la vie au roman, Paris: J. Corti, 1986–1987. De Marchi, Emilio, Milanin, Milanon: Prose cadenzate milanesi e altri scritti lombardi, Milan: De Carlo, 1976. Gibellini, Pietro, ‘‘La letteratura,’’ in Storia di Milano, vol. 18, part 3, Milan: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1996. Loi, Franco, Milano: Lo sguardo di Delio Tessa, Milan: Uncopli, 2003. Ottolini, Angelo, ‘‘La vita culturale nel periodo napoleonico,’’ in Storia di Milano, vol. 13, Milan: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1959. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, edited by Luciano De Maria, Milan: Mondadori, 1969. Panicali, Anna, Elio Vittorini: la narrativa, la saggistica, le traduzioni, le riviste, l’attivita` editoriale, Milan: Mursia, 1994. Raimondi, Ezio, and Jonathan Sisco, Barocco moderno: Roberto Longhi e Carlo Emilio Gadda, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Simmie, James (editor), Innovative Cities, London: New York: Spon Press, 2001. Travi, Ernesto, ‘‘Quasi un secolo di cultura milanese,’’ in Storia di Milano, vol. 16, Milan: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1962. Vigevani, Alberto, Milano ancora ieri: Luoghi, persone, ricordi di una citta` che e` diventata metropoli, Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Viola, Gianni Eugenio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Lo spettacolo dell’arte, Palermo: L’epos, 2004. Zeri, Federico (editor), Storia dell’arte italiana: Il Novecento, vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

MIRANDOLINA See La Locandiera (Work by Carlo Goldoni)

MODESTA POZZO DE’ ZORZI See Moderata Fonte

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MARIO MONICELLI

MARIO MONICELLI (1915–) One of the most prominent directors of commedia all’italiana, Mario Monicelli’s long filming career was officially recognized with the Golden Lion award at the Venice International Film Festival in 1991. Monicelli began working independently in 1949 after having been an assistant director for several years to Augusto Genina, Pietro Germi, and others. His first film was released in 1935, I ragazzi della Via Pal (The Boys in Pal Street), based on a novel by Ferenc Molnar that was very popular in Italy at the time. In the late 1940s, he began his collaboration with Stefano Vanzina, also known as Steno, not only in making two popular films, Al diavolo la celebrita` (Forget Fame), and Toto` cerca casa (Toto` Looks for a House) but also in promoting new ideas for the film industry. Monicelli’s six codirections with Steno brought to completion his apprenticeship and launched his career. In the 1950s, he decided to start his ‘‘solo’’ experience as director, a career that spans almost 50 films and made him, as the critics often said, the best compromise between artistic cinema and box office. Monicelli’s comedies have overtones of social critique addressed against Italian bureaucracy and sympathetic to individuals who are faced with absurd situations. The director’s fame is also linked to his masterful ability in discovering new and gifted actors, such as Toto`, Vittorio Gassman, Alberto Sordi, Claudia Cardinale, and Lea Massari. The most significant feature of Monicelli’s cinema is his tendency to use comedy creatively as a means to cope with the tragedy of life. This rather Pirandellian way of approaching reality was already present in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, citta` aperta (Open City, 1945), when he included some comic sequences in his treatment of the tragedy of war. Inspired by this particular approach to life experiences, Monicelli developed his own belief that laughter could help overcome the adversities in a person’s everyday life. For Monicelli, Italians had always had the tendency to view reality as a comedy with a note of sadness and a touch of vulgarity. Monicelli’s filming experience took off when Italy was coming out of the Fascist era and when, as a result, he thought that cinema ought to play a part in influencing people’s consciousness and changing their outlook on life. Over the years, his 1208

films have evoked emotions, reflections, and reconsiderations of every aspect of the human experience, from a historical to a social point of view. Monicelli’s comedies are born out of the variety theater, which had become popular in the film productions of the postwar period. The visual was downplayed in favor of verbal humor. Monicelli’s novelty is found in his ability to analyze and criticize society by inventing a popular, regional language and proposing diversified topics for each of his films. Alternating comedy and tragedy, joy and pain, his 1959 masterpiece La grande guerra (The Great War) is considered a cinematic landmark for its controversial revisitation of Italian history. The film was awarded the Golden Lion in Venice ex-equo with Rossellini’s Il generale Della Rovere (General della Rovere, 1959), but it was blamed for showing an indecorous side of the war. Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman play the roles of two disinclined cowardly soldiers during World War I who try to avoid dangerous combat and make their best to survive at all costs, going through the hell of the trenches, in rain and mud. They end up having hilarious encounters with the enemy; yet at the crucial moment, in a pathetic gesture of heroism, they chose death to treason. Monicelli’s intention to emphasize the absurdity of the war is perfectly personified in these two antiheroic characters. La grande guerra was the first film to attempt to question Italy’s controversial participation in the Great War; a few years later Francesco Rosi’s Uomini contro (1970) demystifies the legend of unconditional Italian heroism. Monicelli’s most successful comedy, I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), with a screenplay written in collaboration with Age, Scarpelli and Suso cecchi D’Amico, relies on an exceptional cast: Toto`, Gassman, and Mastroianni playing petty thieves, but also the casualties of their inability to be truly dishonest. Monicelli created a sharp parody of the criminal genre by using different dialects (Milanese, Venetian, and Sicilian) for the protagonists of a robbery. This group of inept thieves parodies very well the American characters of a gangster film. Monicelli’s unconventional cast contributed to the popularity of the film, as the audience was not expecting such comedic roles for

MARIO MONICELLI Vittorio Gassman, a young Shakespearian actor, or Marcello Mastroianni, appearing for the first time in a comic role. Indeed, Monicelli chooses stories dealing with ‘‘human vices,’’ but does not however use a direct invective against society but rather prefers to present the comic circumstances that stress the imperfections of the human nature. His characters embody the Italian society of the 1960s and portray a nation in search of identity and values. In 1966, Monicelli directed L’armata Brancaleone (The Brancaleone Army). Its characterization recalled those in I soliti ignoti but in a different time frame: the Middle Ages. It is the story of a very unfortunate group of soldiers and knights who face complicated and funny situations. Vittorio Gassman, starring again in a comic role as Brancaleone da Norcia, is a knight dressed like a samurai and an Italian beggar. Well-received by the audience, L’armata Brancaleone is a very different type of cinematic work. Age and Scarpelli, the scriptwriters with whom Monicelli often worked, created a language defined as ‘‘macaronic,’’ which is a combination of Italian, corrupt Latin, and dialect from Ciociaria. The film’s success is also attributed to the director’s brilliant idea of portraying a shabby army in a glorious historical period. Monicelli believes that ordinary people are often caught in difficult situations and that they do not possess the resources to rise above them and improve their conditions. Instead of making them face and suffer the tragedy of the circumstances, Monicelli suggests a comic approach creating funny and bizarre rather than tragic situations for his protagonists: La ragazza con la pistola (The Girl with the Gun, 1968), starring Monica Vitti, features for the first time a female character as protagonist; Amici miei (My Friends, 1975) employs spoken Tuscan, which was never used before in that genre because it was considered too formal and unfriendly. Initially conceived by Pietro Germi, who before dying entrusted its completion to Monicelli, this film depicts an incredible portrait of the Italian society of the 1970s, which, according to Monicelli, could transform fear and suffering into laughter. This distinctive feature of Monicelli’s artistic career allowed him to be very productive even during difficult times for the Italian film industry. In fact, his works were well-received all the way to the 1980s and 1990s. Reality remains Monicelli’s most important interest and he looks at it deeply and very closely in order to find new and appealing material for his films. Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Very Petit Bourgeois, 1977), for example, is the tragicomic portrayal of a

society gone crazy. Alberto Sordi plays the role of a desperate father whose son is murdered by terrorists. This unimportant little man grows into a very angry individual who eventually becomes an executioner. This film offers a different depiction of an Italian reality in which individuals were forced to cope with an inefficient bureaucratic system. Even presently in his old age Monicelli is still looking closely at his fellow Italians, always interested in representing his people coping with new social issues. Monicelli helped the film industry immensely and contributed with his own personal genre to enrich the Italian cinematographic experience. Often defined as ‘‘the movie craftsman,’’ Monicelli has been able to blend quality cinema with popular cinema. His comedic characters have remained icons in the portrayal of Italian society over several decades and have allowed him to be remembered as the cunning director who was able to renew himself again and again.

Biography Born in Viareggio (Lucca) on 16 May 1915. His father was a journalist, a playwright, and also worked in the cinema. Because of his family’s frequent relocations, attended elementary school and junior high school in Rome and Viareggio. Degree in history and philosophy from the University of Pisa. In 1934, using a friend’s camera, shot his first short film. In 1949, lost his father and also began his sevenyear artistic association with Stefano Vanzina, alias Steno. 1958 was the year of his official debut as a director for the soon to be popular genre comedy Italian style. Awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Il generale Della Rovere, 1959. The 1960s and 1970s were his golden years, but he continued to be productive until 1990 when he was involved in a serious accident. He recovered quickly and started a new career in television. Awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for career achievement, 1991. His film, Come quando fuori piove, was shot for television in 2000. He has won numerous prizes for his long and eclectic cinematic career. He presently lives in Rome. DANIELA BISELLO ANTONUCCI Selected Works Films I ragazzi della Via Pal (based on Ferenc Molnar’s novel), 1935. Al diavolo la celebrita`, 1949 (Monicelli & Steno directors). Toto` cerca casa, 1949.

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MARIO MONICELLI ` arrivato il cavaliere!, 1950 (Monicelli & Steno directors). E Vita da cani, 1950 (Monicelli & Steno directors). Guardie e ladri (1951) (Monicelli & Steno directors). Dov’e` la liberta`...?, 1952 (Monicelli & Rossellini directors). Toto` a colori, 1952 (Monicelli & Steno directors). Toto` e le donne, 1952 (Monicelli & Steno directors). Toto` e Carolina, 1953 (Monicelli & Steno directors). Proibito (based on the novel La madre by Grazia Deledda), 1954. Un eroe dei nostri tempi, 1955. Donatella, 1956 (Monicelli & Steno directors). Il medico e lo stregone, 1957. Padre e figli, 1957. I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street), 1958. La grande guerra (The Great War), 1959. Risate di gioia (based on short stories by Alberto Moravia), 1960. Boccaccio ’70 (episode Renzo e Luciana, based on Avventura di due sposini by Italo Calvino), 1961. I compagni (The Organizer), 1963. Alta fedelta` (episode Gente moderna), 1964. Casanova ’70, 1965. L’armata Brancaleone, 1966. Le fate (episode Fata Armenia), 1966. Capriccio all’italiana (episode La bambinaia), 1968. La ragazza con la pistola, 1968. Brancaleone alle crociate, 1969. Le coppie (episode Il frigorifero), 1970. La mortadella, 1971. Vogliamo i colonnelli, 1973. Romanzo popolare, 1974. Amici miei, 1975. Caro Michele (based on Natalia Ginzburg’s novel), 1976. Signore e Signori, buonanotte, 1976. Un borghese piccolo piccolo (A Very Petit Bourgeois, adapted from Vincenzo Cerami’s novel), 1977. I nuovi mostri, 1977 (dir. with Ettore Scola and Dino Risi). Viaggio con Anita, 1978. Camera d’albergo, 1981. Il Marchese del Grillo, 1981. Amici miei II, 1982. Bertoldo, Bertoldino e Cacasenno, 1984. Le due vite di Mattia Pascal, 1985. Speriamo che sia femmina (Let’s Hope It’s a Girl), 1986. I picari, 1987. Il male oscuro, 1988. La moglie ingenua e il marito malato, 1989. Parenti serpenti, 1991.

Rossini! Rossini!, 1991. Cari fottutissimi amici, 1994. Facciamo paradiso, 1994. Amico magico: il maestro Nino Rota, 1999 (documentary). Come quando fuori piove, 2000.

Screenplays Boccaccio ’70, edited by Carlo Di Carlo and Gaio Fratini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1962. I compagni, edited by Pio Baldelli, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963. Amici miei, Milan: BUR, 1974. La grande guerra, edited by Franco Calderoni, Bologna: Cappelli, 1959; rpt. 1979. Il romanzo di Brancaleone (with Age and Scarpelli), Milan: Longanesi. I soliti ignoti, edited by Alberto Cattini, Mantua: Provincia di Mantova, 1986.

Other L’arte della commedia, edited by Lorenzo Codelli, Bari: Dedalo, 1986. Autoritratto, edited by Fabrizio Borghini, Florence: Polistampa, 2002.

Further Reading Alberighi, Manola, et al. (editors), Omaggio a Mario Monicelli, Castelfiorentino (Florence): Circolo del cinema Angelo Azzurro, 2002. Baldelli, Pino, I compagni di Mario Monicelli, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963. Borghini, Fabrizio, Mario Monicelli: cinquantanni di cinema, Pisa: Edizioni Master, 1985. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano dal 1945 agli anni ottanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1982. Codelli, Lorenzo, and Jean A. Gili, Mario Monicelli, Grenoble: Institut Culturel Italien, 1985. Cro, Stelio, ‘‘The Making of ’I Compangi,’’’ in Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 20, no. 54 (1997): 7–17. D’Amico, Masolino, La commedia all’italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. De Franceschi, Leonardo (editor), Lo sguardo eclettico: il cinema di Mario Monicelli, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Della Casa, Stefano, Mario Monicelli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1986. Sabatini, Mariano, and Oriana Maerini, Intervista a Mario Monicelli: la sostenibile leggerezza del cinema, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 2001.

EUGENIO MONTALE (1896–1981) Eugenio Montale rose to instant fame in 1925 with the publication of the first edition of his poetic work, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones). From that very moment, and up to the day of his death in 1210

1981, his work generated widespread attention. Critical and scholarly consensus confirms that Montale’s poetry is an essential point of reference, particularly in the twentieth-century Italian

EUGENIO MONTALE tradition. It is indicative that Giovanni Giudici, in ‘‘Oltre Montale,’’ (1996), playfully declares that, for the Italian poets of later generations like himself, to reckon with Montale is the simple expedient for getting rid of him. Montale, however, lays claim to scholarly attention not only as a poet, but also as a respected literary critic and translator. His criticism, for example, includes an article that marks the discovery of the novelist Italo Svevo (‘‘Omaggio a Italo Svevo,’’ L’esame, November-December, 1925), and his translations into Italian represent a major contribution for the diffusion of works by such writers as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, Czeslaw Milosz and Konstantinos Kavafis. From the very beginning of his literary career, Montale manifests the dialectical tension that typically informs his poetics. The trait is evident in the creative impulse that resulted in Ossi di seppia. This tension stems from his belief in the dichotomy of a decadent, pessimistic mainstream culture, and a vigorous, optimistic peripheral culture. On the one hand, Montale shows that the exuberant development of technology and the totalitarian ideologies of his age have a negative impact on Italian society; a society whose cultural expressions are pervaded by a sense of historical decay and existential malaise. On the other hand, he suggests that the making of poetry, with its positive, cathartic function, may lead to a historical renascence and the recovery of an existential vitality. This making of poetry, however, in Montale’s view, is to be fulfilled in a specific way. It should find inspiration in what is perceived as culturally different, nonmainstream, or lacking in either power or a claim on memory. This is why, among his major sources for inspiration, especially in his early works, women and children are prominent figures: figures who, in a traditional patriarchal system, usually occupy peripheral spaces in society but who, at the same time, gain central positions when they are ideally invested with moral value, and are thus associated with such redemptive qualities as fresh innocence and vivifying sensuality. The matrix of Montale’s poetics is disclosed in his juvenilia, which are collected in Quaderno genovese (Genoese Notebook, 1983). Montale wrote most of these early pieces—especially comments on his readings and brief poetic experimentations—between February and August 1917 in Genoa. This was the period when he was about to embark with little enthusiasm on his military service, after an unhappy time studying to become a bookkeeper in high school. In that bleak period, Montale, despising the practical way of life

recommended by his father who was an affluent merchant, was spiritually guided and encouraged to pursue his artistic endeavors by his elder sister, Marianna, who was a university student majoring in philosophy. It was then that he became a frequent visitor of public libraries and an avid reader. It was then, too, that he sought formal training in music, taking voice lessons with the operatic baritone Ernesto Sivori. In his observations on his readings in the Quaderno genovese, Montale clearly expresses his antirealist and antibourgeois stance. In his writings on music, he appears enchanted by the impressionistic works of Debussy. In his reflections on poetry, he greatly admires the French symbolists for their rebellious spirit and their radical individualism. He also shows an interest in Italian avant-garde poets—especially those who embrace crepuscular and Futurist ideals like Aldo Palazzeschi, Ardengo Soffici, and Corrado Govoni—because of their iconoclastic tone and their emphasis on the irrational side of existence. According to him, these poets’ work is valuable because it reveals the existence of a supersensible dimension: a dimension in which one can hear, as he writes in Quaderno genovese, ‘‘le piu` nascoste voci della natura’’ (the most hidden voices of nature). In his comments on philosophy, Montale enthusiastically mentions those who advocate an intuitive approach: among them, Henri Bergson, who posits that a vital drift moves an incessantly changing universe; Emile Boutroux, who exalts the inner freedom of individuals as opposed to the laws of natural necessity; and Arthur Schopenhauer, who perceives human existence as essentially flawed, and art as an activity that may possibly lead to salvation. Montale’s appreciation of an intuitive way to achieve a liberating knowledge, his lofty detachment from practical life, and his provocative and, at times, playful way of creating verse are reflected in his juvenile poems; for example, those collected in Accordi (Chords) that were published in 1922 in the journal Primo tempo and later, in 1980, in L’opera in versi (The Work in Verse). These poems are meant to register the ‘‘sensi e fantasmi di una adolescente’’ (senses and fancies of an adolescent girl) through different musical instruments. Here, a female adolescent persona often feels entrapped in a repetitively obsessive present (the time imposed on others by bourgeois men). At the same time, she feels the urge to free herself through poetic fantasy. This line, surfacing in Accordi, deepens in Ossi di seppia, appearing in 1925, when Fascism in Italy 1211

EUGENIO MONTALE was on the rise, and Montale, still living in Genoa and without a stable job, had signed the manifesto of the anti-Fascist intellectuals written by Benedetto Croce. With Ossi di seppia, Montale finds his distinctive voice. He distances himself both from the bombastic style and grand themes of the poets belonging to the old generation (Gabriele D’Annunzio) and from the enthusiastic extremes of the Italian avant-garde poets. Instead, he approaches the stony style of the Ligurians, especially the Camillo Sbarbaro of Trucioli (Shavings, 1920), whom Montale praises for his desire for redemption and for his French symbolist legacy (‘‘Camillo Sbarbaro,’’ L’azione, 10 November 1920). As in Accordi, the main poetic persona of Ossi di seppia—here, a man feeling oxymoronically as an aged child—finds himself imprisoned in a dry, shattered seascape: a place recalling the Ligurian coast where Montale used to spend his summers as a child. This persona sees hope for personal redemption in special moments, when he succeeds in fusing his fragmented and weary consciousness into an enlivening, harmonious whole. These moments occur when he can hold the reverberations of ideally unifying and rejuvenating elements that belong to what is ‘‘other’’ than himself. The strong redemptive impulse in Ossi di seppia is reinforced in works Montale wrote after moving to Florence in 1927. In many poems of these later collections—for example, Le occasioni (The occasions, 1939)—a male persona roaming in urban settings, attempts to brighten his bleak present by recognizing in it some special, redemptive signs, which he usually associates with an idealized, female figure called Clizia. Clizia, who was inspired by Irma Brandeis, a young American Italianist whom Montale met at the Gabinetto Vieussex in 1933, recalls the angelic women of the Italian medieval tradition who are figures of a Christian, transcendental entity. In Montale, however, this turning to the medieval tradition never leads him to express a belief in the existence of God, though it helps him manifest both his moral intent and his distance from Fascist history. In a wider context, these poems show an influence of the new atmosphere to which Montale was exposed. In Florence, he had the opportunity to come into contact with many literary circles, including those in which the Hermetic poets were prominent. The distance taken by the Hermetics from official history, their ethical choices, and their search for an essential poetic language liberated from showy rhetoric are reflected, although with 1212

different accents, in Montale. Montale, unlike some of the Hermetics, neither attempts to justify a poetry that is self-sufficient form, nor does he accept what he perceives as a superficial indulgence in mysticism. In one of his reviews on contemporary Italian poetry, for example, he criticizes the highly mystical parts of Salvatore Quasimodo’s poetic collection Acque e Terre (Waters and Lands, 1930). He ironically declares that young Quasimodo, who is easily comparable to the dominant ‘‘turba poetante di neo-mistici’’ (poetic throng of neo-mystics), has prepared himself to write his poems with a ‘‘fervore d’attesa quasi ascetica’’ (fervor of an almost ascetic waiting) (‘‘Acque e terre di Salvatore Quasimodo,’’ Pegaso, vol. 4, 1931). While continuing in his devotion to poetry, Montale engaged in other literary endeavors during this Florentine period. Initially, he published numerous critical articles in journals such as Pegaso, Pan, Letteratura, and Solaria. Then, in 1938, he was fired from the Gabinetto Vieusseux for refusing to join the Fascist Party. To support himself, Montale began accepting more work as a freelance translator. He translated pieces chiefly from English, French, and Spanish; and, although over time he covered a variety of genres, he concentrated more and more on narrative and dramatic literature. He translated works by John Steinbeck, Herman Melville, Miguel de Cervantes, Christopher Marlowe, and Eugene O’Neill, to mention only a few. Many of Montale’s poetic translations are collected in Quaderno di traduzioni, (Notebook of Translations, 1948). After World War II, Montale joined the Partito d’Azione (Action Party). He became the coeditor of L’Italia libera with Leo Valiani, and cofounded the bimonthly magazine Il mondo with Alessandro Bonsanti, Arturo Loria, and Eugenio Scaravelli. He also contributed to a variety of newspapers, including La nazione, Il corriere della sera, and Il corriere d’informazione. In 1948, despite his established position in Florence, Montale decided to move to Milan, when he was offered a permanent assignment as a staff journalist with the newspaper Il corriere della sera. He moved there with his companion, Drusilla Tansi, familiarly called Mosca (Fly), with whom he had been living in Florence since 1939. In Milan, Montale undertook different directions in his literary career, reflecting a more pragmatic approach to life. Although he continued to write verse, he increased his production of prose. He wrote numerous accounts on the frequent trips

EUGENIO MONTALE abroad that his new profession required. These accounts later appeared in the collection Fuori di casa (Outside, 1969). He also wrote fiction, which was then collected in Farfalla di Dinard (Dinard’s Butterfly, 1956). In much of this prose, Montale depicts scenes of a bourgeois, international society with an elegant and ironic touch. In addition to Fuori di casa and Farfalla di Dinard, Montale published many other books of prose. Among these, two are particularly relevant: Auto da fe´: cronache in due tempi (Act of Faith: Chronicles in Two Times, 1966) and Sulla poesia (On Poetry, 1976). Auto da fe´ contains articles on literature, culture, and society that Montale wrote between the 1920s and the 1960s. In many of these articles, Montale’s rejection of radical ideologies is evident, as are his loathing of mass culture and his defense of a poetry that aims at cleansing the Italian language—a language that is becoming more and more senseless and impoverished. In Sulla poesia, which collects essays written from 1927, Montale’s criticism often concentrates on the language of the texts that he explores, in an attempt to grasp the singular features of such language in relation to the writer’s existence and his literary and cultural milieu. His rejection of highly theoretical methodological approaches is clear. Equally clear is his elitist and secular position, a stance that leads him to formulate negative judgments on literature that is, in his view, either too popular or too religious. Yet he approves of a metaphysical current that he discerns in, for example, works like those by Robert Browning and Charles Baudelaire, asserting that a metaphysical dimension may exist. During the Milanese years, Montale continued to be a prolific poet, despite a hiatus between 1954 and 1964 that was only interrupted by his writing of the poem ‘‘Botta e risposta’’ (Thrust and Parry) in 1961. In these years, many of his poetic collections were published: La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things, 1956), Satura (Satura, 1970), Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972, 1973), Quaderno di quattro anni (It Depends: a Poet’s Notebook, 1977), Altri versi e poesie disperse (Other Verses and Dispersed Poems, 1981). With La bufera e altro—which contains poems written mostly between 1940 and 1954, and whose first nucleus is ‘‘Finisterre’’ (1943)—Montale exhibits an increasingly polyphonic style that culminates in his later collections. Moreover, he often reduces or annuls the redemptive power of personae and signs that, in his earlier poems, prefigure a transcendental dimension.

La bufera e altro forges a link between Montale’s earlier and later poetry. Although these poems continue to manifest a historical disappointment by reflecting the chaotic atmosphere of the years between the final phase of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War, they present alternative paths to achieve redemption. Through a variety of linguistic registers, from the colloquial to the literary, these poems introduce a personal mythology featuring old and new poetic personae that will return in later works. In La bufera e altro, for example, the angelic Clizia of Le occasioni reappears. She is still a redemptive figure, but her heavenly power is diminished by the presence of characters that embody different values. Among them, there is Volpe, or She-Fox, who was inspired by the poet Maria Luisa Spaziani, whom Montale met in 1949: a character who symbolizes the earthly, visceral side of existence. There is also Mosca, who in ‘‘Ballata scritta in una clinica’’ represents everyday life. Finally, some deceased relatives appear; one of them is Montale’s mother, whose lesson reminds him to recognize and appreciate the authenticity of some seemingly ordinary things surrounding him. In his later collections, Montale expands the realistic vein that he had adopted in La bufera e altro. Satura, for example, in the enlarged edition published in 1971 (initially, its nucleus appeared in a private publication in 1962) presents poems in a colloquial and parodic style, incorporating a variety of linguistic registers and themes. Much space is devoted to the poems in the sections Xenia I and Xenia II: poems that pay homage to Drusilla Tansi, who died in 1963. Included, too, are poems describing a history and time deprived of teleological schemes, such as ‘‘La storia’’ (History) and ‘‘Tempo e tempi’’ (Time and Times), or criticizing, from a conservative point of view, the dominant ideologies of the 1960s and the mass culture, for instance ‘‘Fine del ’68’’ (End of 1968). If one excludes Diario postumo (Posthumous Diary), published in 1991, it is apparent that the later works, Diario del ’71 e del ’72, Quaderno di quattro anni and Altri versi, deepen Satura’s track. In these late works, Montale reiterates the difficulty that he encounters as a poet in a decayed society—a society in which it is hard, if not impossible, to find and save something precious from the excess of noise and waste, as for ‘‘Il trionfo della spazzatura’’ (The Triumph of Rubbish) in Diario del ’71. At the same time, he doubts his ability to keep faith with his old certainties. He often looks 1213

EUGENIO MONTALE back on his early verse and smiles ironically at his younger self; he recovers old personae and themes, but stresses their limitations. The idealized female figure Clizia, for example, is presented again, but she lacks her sublime aura, as in ‘‘Clizia nel ‘34’’ (Clizia in 1934) in Altri versi. Here Montale seems to admit defeat. He seems to declare that poetry, in his age, has lost its cathartic power. Yet, the very fact that he continues to create verse sends the opposite message. Montale’s work won prestigious academic, civic, and literary public recognition. Through time, his fame has spread far beyond the borders of Italy, as the numerous critical studies on his work, along with the translations of his poems into different languages such as English, French, German, Danish, Greek, and Arabic, attest.

1974, respectively. Became a senator-for-life, 1967. Retired from Il corriere della sera, 1973. Was awarded the Nobel prize, 1975. Nominated a cittadino onorario of the city of Florence, 1977. Nominated an honorary member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1978. Died 12 September 1981 in Milanese hospital; honored with a state funeral in the cathedral of Milan; buried in the cemetery of San Felice a Ema, in Florence, 1981. PAOLA SICA See also: Hermeticism Selected Works Collections

Biography Born 12 October 1896 in Genoa, to a prosperous merchant family. Completed high school at the Regio Istituto Tecnico Vittorio Emanuele, 1915; began singing lessons with the operatic baritone Ernesto Sivori, 1915. Enlisted in the army, and served for three years during World War I, chiefly in Northern Italy; met numerous aspiring writers in the barracks in Parma, e.g., Francesco Meriano and Sergio Solmi, 1917–1920. Back home, began collaborating with various intellectual circles, especially in Turin and Genoa, 1920–1927. Moved to Florence, when hired by the publisher Bemporad, 1927; met Drusilla Tansi, wife of the critic Matteo Marangoni (who in 1939 became his companion and, in 1962, his wife), 1927. Became director of the Florentine cultural institution Gabinetto Vieusseux, 1929. Met Irma Brandeis, 1933. Dismissed from the Viesseux for not being a Fascist, began supporting himself as a freelance translator, 1939. Joined the Partito d’Azione and was a coeditor of L’Italia Libera; cofounded the bimonthly magazine Il mondo; became a member of the Comitato per la Cultura e per l’Arte instituted by the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, 1945. Worked for two Milanese newspapers: Il corriere della sera and Il corriere d’informazione (for the latter as a music critic), 1946. Accepted a position as staff journalist for Il corriere della sera; moved to Milan, where he stayed for the rest of his life. In his new profession traveled widely, especially in Europe, and had the opportunity to meet numerous writers and artists, 1948. Was introduced to the poet Maria Luisa Spaziani, 1949. Received honorary degrees in Milan, Cambridge, and Rome, in 1961, 1967, and 1214

L’opera in versi, edited by Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Tutte le poesie, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1984. Prose e racconti, edited by Marco Forti, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems 1920–1954, edited and translated by Jonathan Galassi, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998 (This volume contains complete versions of Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and La bufera e altro).

Poetry ‘‘Ossi di seppia,’’ 1925; as Cuttlefish Bones, translated by William Arrowsmith, 1992. ‘‘Le occasioni,’’ 1939; as The Occasions, translated by William Arrowsmith, New York, 1987. ‘‘La bufera e altro,’’ 1956; as The Storm and Other Things, translated by Charles Wright, 1978. ‘‘Satura,’’ 1970; as Satura, translated by William Arrowsmith, 1998. ‘‘Diario del ’71 e del ’72,’’ 1973. ‘‘Quaderno di quattro anni,’’ 1977; as It Depends: a Poet’s Notebook, translated by Ghanshyam Singh, 1980. ‘‘Altri versi e poesie disperse,’’ 1981. ‘‘Diario postumo,’’ edited by Annalisa Cima, 1991; as Posthumous Diary, translated by Jonathan Galassi, 2001.

Fiction Farfalla di Dinard, 1956; enlarged edition, 1960; as Butterfly of Dinard, translated by Ghanshyam Singh, 1971. Ventidue prose elvetiche, 1994.

Critical Writings Auto da fe´: cronache in due tempi, 1966. Fuori di casa, 1969. La poesia non esiste, 1971. Nel nostro tempo, 1973, as Poet in Our Time by Eugenio Montale, translated by Alastair Hamilton, 1976. Sulla poesia, 1976. Prime alla Scala, 1981. Il secondo mestiere: arte, musica, societa`, 2 vols., 1996. Il secondo mestiere: prose 1920–1979, 1996.

EUGENIO MONTALE Other Quaderno di traduzioni, 1948. Quaderno genovese, 1983.

Further Reading Autografi di Montale: Fondo dell’Universita` di Pavia, edited by Maria Corti and Maria Antonietta Grignani, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Baldissone, Giusi (editor), Muse di Montale: galleria di occasioni femminili nella poesia montaliana: con antologia, Novara: Interlinea, 1996. Becker, Jared, Eugenio Montale, Boston: Twayne, 1986. Biasin, Gian Paolo, Montale, Debussy and Modernism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Cary, Joseph, Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, New York: New York University Press, 1969; second edition, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993. Cima, Annalisa, and Cesare Segre (editors), Eugenio Montale: profilo di un autore, Milan: Mondadori, 1975. Contini, Gianfranco, Una lunga fedelta`: scritti su Eugenio Montale, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Forti, Marco, Il nome di Clizia: Eugenio Montale, vita, opere, ispiratrici, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1985. Giudici, Giovanni, ‘‘Oltre Montale,’’ in Lettere italiane, 4, no. 48 (1996): 521–526. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, Dislocazioni: epifanie e metamorfosi in Montale: Lecce: Manni, 1998. Luperini, Romano, Storia di Montale, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1986. Mercenaro, Giuseppe, Eugenio Montale, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Nascimbeni, Giulio, Eugenio Montale, Milan: Longanesi, 1986. Rebay, Luciano, ‘‘Montale, Clizia e l’America,’’ in Forum Italicum, 16, no. 3 (1982): 171–202. Sica, Paola, Modernist Forms of Rejuvenation: Eugenio Montale and T.S. Eliot, Florence: Olschki, 2003. Talbot, George, Montale’s ‘‘Mestiere Vile’’: The Elective Translations from English of the 1930s and 1940s, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1995. West, Rebecca, Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

TUTTE LE POESIE Collected Poems by Eugenio Montale

Despite their distinctive features, Eugenio Montale’s major poetic collections stem from a dominant creative impulse: the poet’s negative view of

contemporary society and his profound longing for the recovery of positive values that would enable individuals to redeem their history and enrich their existence. The major themes of Montale’s poetic works are anticipated in his early verse, including Accordi: Sensi e fantasmi di una adolescente (Chords: Senses and Fancies of an Adolescent Girl), published in the journal Primo Tempo in 1922. Accordi comprises seven poems that are presented as a musical score performed by different instruments. Among them, only the poem ‘‘Corno inglese’’ (English Horn) will be later included in Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925). In these poems, an adolescent female persona attempts to overcome a repetitive present imposed by an adult world, by seizing exceptional events that would enable her to gain the freedom she longs for. At times, she seems to achieve her intent; at other times, she does not. In ‘‘Violini’’ (Violins), for example, the bewildered persona has a sudden revelation that gives her respite: ‘‘tutto vaneggia e nella luce nuova / volere non so piu` ne´ disvolere’’ (Everything is raving, and under the new light / I do not know any longer how to want or not to want). In ‘‘Contrabbasso’’ (Counterbass), however, the same persona remains entrapped in a ‘‘susseguirsi monotono di necessita` crude’’ (a monotonous sequence of cruel necessities). Montale’s poetic collection Ossi di seppia develops the conflictual message contained in Accordi. In Ossi di seppia, the main poetic subject is a young man who feels like a ‘‘fanciullo invecchiato,’’ or an ‘‘aged child,’’ as Montale says in the eighth movement of the section Mediterraneo (Mediterranean Sea). This subject differs from the adult men who never question their lifestyle, for instance the image of ‘‘l’uomo che va sicuro’’ (the man who goes confident) in ‘‘Non chiederci la parola’’ (Do Not Ask Us for the Word). On the one hand, as an old man, this persona feels forced to follow the weary rhythms of his daily existence; on the other hand, as a young man, he sees salvation in the enlivening signs that are evoked by children and by such female characters as Esterina in the homonymous poem: Those signs that might disclose a liberating, transcendental dimension. In the poem introducing Ossi di seppia, ‘‘In limine,’’ (On the Threshold), the poetic voice addresses a ‘‘you,’’ and explains that ‘‘un rovello e` di qua dall’erto muro’’ (rage is on this side of the steep wall). Freedom may be conquered beyond the wall, by finding a ‘‘maglia rotta nella rete / che ci stringe’’ (a broken mesh in the net / that becomes tight around us). 1215

EUGENIO MONTALE The second poetic collection, Le occasioni (The Occasions), extends the thematic itinerary followed in Ossi di seppia. This work, whose initial nucleus was ‘‘La casa dei doganieri’’ (The Shorewatchers’ House, 1932), initially appeared in 1939, and then, in an expanded edition, in 1940. Le occasioni thus spans the years of the Fascist and Nazi regimes, the Spanish Civil War, and the Italian colonial conquest of Ethiopia. In Le occasioni, the main male persona, more than ever daunted by the brutality of his present historical time, attempts to concentrate his attention on sporadic signs that seem to promise peace and to give sense to his existence: Signs that, again, are often associated with female characters. One of the most recurrent female characters in this collection is Clizia. She is portrayed with heavenly traits, and recalls the angelic women of the Italian Dolce Stilnovo, beings who prefigure a transcendental entity. The most concentrated section of Le occasioni, I mottetti (Motets, 1934–1939), is composed of 20 brief poems that are inspired by the musical form of the thirteenth-century mottetto. In this section, Clizia serves as a moral guide for the poetic subject. Although Montale always remains faithful to his secular position, Clizia is frequently endowed with divine qualities, or associated with characters drawn from a Christian repertory. For example, she fights evil by bringing back Saint George and the dragon, in ‘‘Molti anni, e uno piu` duro’’ (Many Years and One Still Harder). Thus, Clizia’s positive lesson of love and morality opposes the negative messages of adult men who support wars and destruction. Through I mottetti, the poetic subject strives desperately to keep his memory of Clizia alive, or at least to keep hold of some signs of her, because, as he writes in ‘‘Lo sai: debbo riperderti’’ (You Know: I Will Lose You Again), he is convinced that if her uplifting presence vanishes, ‘‘l’inferno e` certo’’ (hell is certain). In Le occasioni, Clizia’s appearance is accompanied with a search for metric and syntactic sophistication, along with a remarkable measure of obscurity that led many critics to define the collection as Hermetic. But in La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things, 1956) all this changes. Clizia as possible savior remains the major character in the first section, Finisterre: a section that has World War II as a subtext, and that was initially published as a complete work in 1943; then, later, in an enlarged edition, in 1945. In the subsequent sections of La bufera e altro, Clizia occupies a more limited sphere of action. In the poem ‘‘L’ombra della magnolia’’ (The Shadow of the Magnolia 1216

Tree) included in the section ‘‘Silvae’’ (Woods), the poetic voice states that the chaotic historical moment that Clizia could bring to order is finished, and he bids her farewell. Moreover, in numerous other poems, she is completely absent. In her place, other characters appear, including Montale’s dead parents, Mosca, and Volpe. These new characters are often presented through a colloquial style, befitting their purpose: to teach the main poetic persona how to recognize a visceral and genuine approach to life, as, for example, in the poems dedicated to Volpe in the section ‘‘Madrigali privati’’ (Private Madrigals). Montale publishes Satura (Satura) in 1971, after several years of almost total poetic silence. With this work, whose title suggests a choking, saturated atmosphere and a mixture of styles (if one thinks of the Latin etymology), the poet reveals a more realistic and disenchanted vision of life and art. In the two sections Xenia I and Xenia II (published before as individual volumes respectively in 1966 and in 1968), Montale devotes 28 brief poems to his deceased wife Drusilla Tansi. While addressing Drusilla, who is here named Mosca, the poetic voice tenderly evokes some of her distinctive gestures and her ironic vision of poetry and of those who write it. In other parts of Satura, Montale himself examines the value of poetry critically, and he often revisits his earlier verses in parodist ways. In ‘‘La poesia’’ (The Poem), included in the section Satura I, he reveals his increased skepticism. Here poetic words originate with impetus from common objects and common situations, such as from a forno (oven) and a surgelante (fridge); then, once they have formed a poem, they even question their existence: ‘‘appena fuori / (le parole) si guardano d’attorno e hanno l’aria di dirsi: / che sto a farci?’’ (as soon as they come out/ words look around themselves and seem to say: / what are we doing here?). Montale, however, does not only question the liberating function of his poetry, but, while reinforcing his conservative bent, he is also suspicious of the alternatives proposed by the poets of the new generation, by the new ideologists, and by the supporters of mass culture. With Satura, Montale dismisses the literary and political scene that surrounds him. Yet, his relentless poetic production conveys the message that, despite its limits, poetry is worth writing, and new ideas deserve to be discussed. Later poetic collections, from Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Diary of 1971 and 1972, 1973) and Quaderno di quattro anni (It Depends: a Poet’s Notebook, 1977) to Altri versi e poesie disperse (Other Poems and

EUGENIO MONTALE Dispersed Poems, 1981), revisit the senseless world of Satura. In this world, where stable points of reference are lacking, poetry can only reflect a sense of void and dispersion. Poems assume a detached and ironic tone; they adopt a type of language that assumes forms of traditional literature, mass culture and political jargon. They also mix present facts and memories of Montale’s past in a playful way. Feminine figures appear again, for example Clizia in poems like ‘‘Clizia nel ‘34’’ (Clizia in 1934). These figures, who used to embody a possible existential and historical redemption, are now remembered in a disenchanted way, even if they are still appreciated for their appeasing attributes. As a whole, Montale’s poetic works represent a significant contribution to twentieth-century Italian literature; a contribution that from the very beginning has been recognized and promoted in many ways, including an enormous number of critical interventions. Through his works, Montale reveals his difficult relationship with a world in transition. However, despite the growing pessimism evident in his later collections, he never abandons hope for a recovery of moral responsibility. His aim is, in fact, to restore dignity to life in a world that he perceives as confused and debased. Applying one of Montale’s ironic definitions of himself to his poetic persona, one sees a snob spaesato (bewildered snob); one who remains attached to traditions even as he perceives a crisis of values that has besieged individuals and their societies. PAOLA SICA Editions First editions: Ossi di seppia, Turin: Gobetti, 1925; enlarged edition, Turin: Ribet, 1928; Le occasioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1939; second, enlarged edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1940; La bufera e altro, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1956; revised edition, Milan: Mondadori, 1957; Satura, Milan: Mondadori, 1971; Diario del ’71 e diario del ’72, Milan: Mondadori, 1973; Quaderno di quattro anni, Milan: Mondadori, 1977; Altri versi e poesie disperse, Milan: Mondadori, 1981; Diario postumo: prima parte (30 poesie), edited by Annalisa Cima, Milan:

Mondadori, 1991; enlarged edition, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Critical editions: L’opera in versi, edited by Rosanna Bettarini and Gianfranco Contini, Turin: Einaudi, 1980; Tutte le poesie, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1984. Translations: La bufera e altro as The Storm and Other Things, translated by Charles Wright, introduced by Vinio Rossi, Oberlin: Oberlin College, 1978; Quaderno di quattro anni as It Depends: a Poet’s Notebook, translated and introduced by Ghanshyam Singh, New York: New Directions, 1980; The Storm and Other Things, translated by William Arrowsmith, New York: Norton, 1985; Le occasioni as The Occasions, translated by William Arrowsmith, New York: Norton, 1987; Ossi di seppia as Cuttlefish Bones, translated by William Arrowsmith, New York: Norton, 1992; Satura as Satura: 1962–1970, translated by William Arrowsmith, preface by Claire Huffman, edited by Rosanna Warren, London-New York: Norton, 1998; Diario postumo as Posthumous Diary, translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi, New York: Turtle Point Press, 2001.

Further Reading Barile, Laura, Adorate mie larve: Montale e la poesia anglosassone, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Bonora, Ettore, Montale e altro novecento, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1989. Brook, Clodagh J., The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: Metaphor, Negation and Silence, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Cambon, Glauco, Eugenio Montale’s Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, and Romano Luperini (editors), Montale e il canone poetico del novecento, Rome: Laterza, 1998. Huffman, Claire, Montale and the Occasions of Poetry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Macrı`, Oreste, La vita della parola: studi montaliani, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Marchese, Angelo, Montale: la ricerca dell’altro, Padua: Messaggero, 2000. ´ Ceallacha´in, E´anna, Eugenio Montale: The Poetry of the O Later Years, Oxford: Legenda, 2001. Peterson, Thomas, ‘‘Montale’s Satura,’’ in The Empty Set, edited by Maurizio Godorecci, New York: Queens College Press, 1985: 47–65. Savoca, Giuseppe (editors), Concordanza di tutte le poesie di Eugenio Montale, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1987. Scrivano, Riccardo, Metafore e miti di Eugenio Montale, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997.

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VINCENZO MONTI

VINCENZO MONTI (1754–1828) Vincenzo Monti’s works were of major cultural importance in Italy during the first half of the nineteenth century: Ugo Foscolo, Alessandro Manzoni, and Giacomo Leopardi were in various measures indebted to his poetic teachings. However, the negative critique of his successors weighed upon the author, as he was accused both of ethical failings (he was extremely skillful in adapting from one political regime to another) as well as of literary faults (his poetical ability notwithstanding, Monti’s texts can at times appear rather superficial). Leopardi, although publicly devoted to Monti, described him in the Zibaldone as ‘‘un poeta dell’orecchio e dell’immaginazione, in nessun modo del cuore’’ (a poet of the ear and the imagination, but in no way of the heart). Certainly, Monti’s immense production was connected with the specific political and cultural reality in which it was created and could in some instances be described precisely as ‘‘occasional.’’ However, a more objective evaluation of his work calls for a rejection of the negative meaning of this term. His political changes of direction were evident, but this does not imply that he was devoid of a certain ideological coherence. In all phases of his activity, Monti presented himself as a ‘‘moderate follower of the Enlightenment,’’ as Sebastiano Timpanaro put it in Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano (1965), and a supporter of a reformist despotism that protects literature and the sciences. Monti’s studies at the seminary of Faenza gave him a remarkable classical cultural background, and in particular an extensive knowledge of Latin and Italian authors. This education in an ecclesiastical environment also influenced his particular preference for the marvelous and the sublime in literature. His eclectic taste shows itself clearly, starting with the Saggio di poesie (Sample of Poems, 1779), which signaled his formal admission into the cultural circles of Rome. Monti very soon revealed himself as an experienced writer of verse, and works such as ‘‘Al Principe Don Sigismondo Chigi’’ (To Prince Don Sigismondo Chigi) and ‘‘Pensieri d’amore’’ (Love Thoughts), both published in Versi (Verses, 1783), are really innovative. Monti found his inspiration in the Italian translation of Goethe’s Die Leiden des jungen Werther, 1218

and some passages are clearly free adaptations in verse of fragments taken from the epistolary novel. In ‘‘Al Principe Don Sigismondo Chigi’’ the elegiac register predominates, while ‘‘Pensieri d’amore’’ is characterized by the lyric-dramatic tone. The individual moments of the latter poem succeed one another following the line of a meditative itinerary that goes from cries of desperation to reflective moments, and finally reaches a distressing resignation on the part of the amorous poet’s ‘‘I.’’ The poem, it should be noted, strongly influenced Leopardi’s idylls. During his residence in Rome, Monti also experimented in the theater, with the intention of elaborating a modern alternative to the tragedy in the tradition of Vittorio Alfieri (his attention was drawn to the French theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth century and also to Shakespeare). His two most important plays are Aristodemo (Aristodemus), of 1786, and Caio Gracco (Caius Graccus), begun in 1788 but completed only in 1802, in which themes of a political nature such as liberty and democracy are clearly present. The political reality of the day also manifested itself in In morte di Ugo Bassville (The Penance of Hugo, 1793), also known as Bassvilliana, written in the wake of the French Revolution. The work has an epic inspiration but was not finished by Monti, who in his most ambitious narrative poems, often left incomplete, always gives evidence of a strong tendency to dispersiveness. The Bassvilliana evokes the expiation to which, in the author’s mind, the soul of the French ambassador Hugon de Bassville, a Jacobin sent to Italy in 1792, has been subjected after being killed by a ferocious crowd in Rome at the end of the same year. The episode gave Monti the occasion to express his antirevolutionary feelings. In order to give a proper description of the bloodiest scenes that de Bassville’s soul witnessed in a purifying journey that led him through areas where particularly violent episodes of the French Revolution took place, Monti often uses the language of Dante’s Commedia. Indeed, the rediscovery of Dante, an author not much appreciated throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth century, contributed to the success of the work. After the peace treaty of Tolentino (1797), Monti, who now had become a supporter of the

VINCENZO MONTI revolution, moved clandestinely to Milan, where he would remain until his death in 1828. However, with the fall of the Cisalpine Republic, he was obliged to leave for a two-year exile in Paris. During this period he continued the epic line of the Bassvilliana and in 1801 composed In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni (Upon the Death of Lorenzo Mascheroni, 1801) or Mascheroniana, a canticle on the occasion of the death of the didactic scientist and poet Lorenzo Mascheroni. More importantly, he translated Voltaire’s La pucelle d’Orle´ans, although his translation remained unpublished until 1878. The protagonist of this satiric narrative poem is Joan of Arc, who is drawn upon by Voltaire as a representative of Catholic traditionalism and French nationalism. In the translation of this clearly anticlerical work, Monti transposes the French decasyllabic metrical lines into octaves reminiscent of Ariosto, and thus combines elevated and cultivated language with a ‘‘popular’’ and realistic style. Until 1815, Monti supported the policies of Napoleon, whose triumphs he described in Il Prometeo (Prometheus, 1797), in Il bardo della Selva Nera (The Bard of the Black Forest, 1806), inspired by Ossian, and in La spada di Federico II (The Sword of Frederick II, 1806). Monti intended to laud his own era, although he could not conceive this project without recourse to mythology or to literary imagery. Indeed, he privileged classical literature as he saw it as both a comment and a prefiguration of modern history. Monti’s translation of the Iliad shows the aspiration for the ‘‘monumental’’ and for verbal emphasis typical of the whole of his poetry and is considered one of the highlights of Italian neoclassical literature. Accomplished between 1809 and 1810, the Iliade di Omero can be situated in the same context as Monti’s exaltation of Napoleonic belligerence expressed in the dedication of La spada di Federico II, in which he writes that the principal task of poetry should be the celebration of war and conflict, in short, of the heroic state of mind. Although he was not entirely ignorant of classical Greek, Monti lacked a profound knowledge of its linguistic system and cultural universe, unlike Foscolo, who also translated (initially in competition with Monti himself) some fragments of the Iliad and claimed that any high level vulgarization requires an excellent mastery of the original language. To carry out his work, Monti used a Latin translation as well as Melchiorre Cesarotti’s prose version of the poem. He held the eighteenthcentury conviction that the comprehension and

translation of a foreign poet does not require the command of the original language, as the message goes beyond the literal meaning of the words and can thus be transferred into another shape without any problem. However, the translator-interpreter requires proper expressive tools and, most of all, sensibility and power of imagination: In short, he too must be a poet. Monti’s translation of the Iliad underlines the most exalting and most spectacular moments of the narrative poem and gives it rhetorical amplification. Monti admired the Greek text for its content but he felt that it was monotonous and repetitive, lacking in ‘‘eloquence.’’ Seeing them as discordant, Monti considered his task to be the adaptation of form to content: Thus, a number of sophisticated literary elements were integrated into the original text. As for the syntax, in the Iliade di Omero the rhetorical constructions are striking, particularly in the moments of greatest pathos, and Monti endows with sustained eloquence the direct discourse of the characters. The most realistic Greek expressions are attenuated by the use of tropes: Metonymy, synecdoche, metaphor, and periphrasis transform the Homeric text, often along the lines of the illustrious Italian tradition (one can find references to Dante’s Commedia, but the text is also reminiscent of authors like Giovanni Petrarca, Ludovico Ariosto, Annibal Caro, Torquato Tasso, Giuseppe Parini, and Vittorio Alfieri). Monti prefers hypotaxis to the paratactic structures of the Greek language and he does not hesitate to insert logical connections and even actual interpolations. In all this, he positions himself at a great distance not only from the philology of Foscolo, but also from Cesarotti’s approach. While Cesarotti in his translation of Ossian had tried to amplify the Italian poetic language with models copied from the original, Monti subjects every foreign cultural expression to literary Italian. During the Restoration, Monti succeeded in maintaining his position of intellectual in the service of the regime, although he encountered some difficulties, mainly of a financial nature. Austria, to which Lombardy was subordinate, tried to promote an Italian culture valid for the entire peninsula but centerd in Milan. For a short period, Monti was the editor of the conservative cultural periodical Biblioteca italiana, and drafted the project, presented to the Istituto Lombardo, to elaborate a ‘‘national’’ Italian vocabulary, a project that was never realized. His lexicographic interests were presented in the Proposta di alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca (A Proposal 1219

VINCENZO MONTI for Some Corrections and Additions to the Vocabulary of the Crusca Academy, 1817–1826), a milestone in the debate on the questione della lingua. The new edition of the Vocabolario della Crusca, published in Verona between 1806 and 1811, was revised by Antonio Cesari in a purist way, assuming only the Florentine of the fourteenth century as model for contemporary Italian. Monti’s antipurist criticism was not only directed against Cesari, but also the Vocabolario itself, as it was compiled in the course of its long academic tradition, with little attention for the great non-Tuscan authors. In turn, Monti proposed an interregional written Italian that also takes into consideration the demands of modern technical and scientific language, agreeing in this regard with the Enlightenment ideas of Cesarotti.

regime, even though as a result he lost his pension as historiographer. He died in Milan on 13 October 1828. DIRK VANDEN BERGHE Selected Works Collections Opere, 8 vols., Bologna: Stamperia delle Muse, 1821–1828. Opera inedite e rare, Milan: Societa` degli Editori, 1832– 1834. Opere, edited by Manara Valgimigli and Carlo Muscetta, Milan: Naples, 1953. Opere scelte, edited by Gennaro Barbarisi, G. Chiodaroli and G. Bettola, 2 vols., Turin: UTET, 1971–1974. Poesie, edited by Guido Bezzola, Turin: UTET, 1969. Poesie, edited by Luca Fassinetti, Ravenna: Longo, 1998.

Poetry

Biography Born at Alfonsine (now in the province of Ravenna) 29 February 1754, Monti studied at the seminary of Faenza between 1766 and 1771. In 1771, he moved to Ferrara, where he enrolled in the faculty of law and later of medicine, but cultivated his literary interests. He did not finish his university studies. He became a member of the Accademia dell’Arcadia in 1775; in 1778, thanks to the modest financial backing of his family, he moved to Rome, where he became known as one of the leading poets of his time. In 1781, Count Luigi Braschi Onesti, the nephew of Pope Pius VI (Giovanni Angelo Braschi), took him on as a secretary. During a journey to Florence in 1782, he fell in love with Carlotta Stewart, who inspired ‘‘Al Principe Don Sigismondo Chigi’’ and ‘‘Pensieri d’amore.’’ In 1792, he married Teresa Pikler who gave him two children, Costanza (whose future husband, Giulio Perticari, probably was an important collaborator of Monti on the Proposta di alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca) and Francesco, who died at a young age. In 1797, with the help of French diplomacy, he left Rome for Milan where, from 1797 until 1799 was secretary of foreign affairs of the Cisalpine Republic, then secretary of the Directoire. After the collapse of the republic he moved to Paris, where he lived from May 1799 until February 1801. Back in Italy, he became professor of oratory at the University of Pavia, 1802–1804. In 1804, he was nominated by Napoleon ‘‘Poet of the Italian Government,’’ then, in 1805 ‘‘Historiographer of the Italic Reign.’’ From 1815 to 1828, he occasionally took the role of official poet of the Austrian 1220

‘‘Saggio di poesie,’’ 1779. ‘‘Versi,’’ 1783. ‘‘In morte di Ugo Bassville,’’ 1793; as The Penance of Hugo: A Vision on the French Revolution, translated by Henry Boyd, 1805. ‘‘Il Prometeo,’’ 1797. ‘‘In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni,’’ 1801. ‘‘Il bardo della Selva Nera,’’ 1806. ‘‘La spada di Federico II,’’ 1806. ‘‘Il mistico omaggio,’’ 1815. ‘‘Il ritorno di Astrea,’’ 1816. ‘‘Sermone sulla mitologia,’’ 1825. ‘‘Poemetti varii,’’ 1826. ‘‘La Feroniade,’’ 1832.

Plays Aristodemo, 1786; as Aristodemus: A Tragedy, translated by J. A. Favalli, 1809. Galeotto Manfredi, 1788. Caio Gracco, 1802; as Caius Gracchus: A Tragedy, translated by Lord George Russell, 1830.

Translations Satire di A. Persio Flacco, 1803. Iliade di Omero, 1810; rev. editions, 1812, 1820, and 1825. La pulcella d’Orle´ans, 1878.

Other Proposta di alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al Vocabolario della Crusca, 4 vols., 1817–1826. Epistolario, edited by Alfonso Bertoldi, 6 vols., 1928–1931. Lezioni di eloquenza e prolusioni accademiche, edited by Luca Fassinetti, 2002.

Further Reading Barbarisi, Gennaro, ‘‘Vincenzo Monti e la cultura neoclassica,’’ in Storia delle letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Garzanti, 1969. ———, ‘‘‘Iliade di Omero’ di Vincenzo Monti,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1993.

GIULIAN MORANDINI Barbarisi, Gennaro, (editor), Vincenzo Monti fra Roma e Milano, Cesena: Il Ponte Vecchio, 2001. Binni, Walter, Monti poeta del consenso, Florence: Sansoni, 1981. Bruni, Arnaldo, ‘‘Traduttori dei traduttori dall’Ottocento al Novecento,’’ in Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 3 (1994): 71–88. Chiomenti Vassalli, Donata, Vincenzo Monti, del drama dei suoi tempi, Milan: Ceschina, 1968. Dardi, Andrea, Gli scritti di Vincenzo Monti sulla lingua italiana, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1990. Fasano, Pino, ‘‘Ein Romantisch Lied. Il ‘Werther’ e la lirica italiana,’’ La rassegna della letteratura italiana, 93, nos. 1–2 (1989): 5–42.

Favaro, Francesca, Rose co`lte in Elicona: Studi sul classicismo di Vincenzo Monti, Ravenna: Longo, 2004. Leopardi, Giacomo, Zibaldone di pensieri, edited by Giuseppe Pacella, 3 vols., Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Mari, Michele, Eloquenza e letterarieta` nella ‘‘Iliade’’ di Vincenzo Monti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Mineo, Nicolo`, Vincenzo Monti. La ricerca del sublime e il tempo della rivoluzione, Pisa: Giardini, 1992. Romano, Angelo, Vincenzo Monti a Roma, Manziana (Rome): Vecchiarelli, 2001. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1965.

THE MOON AND THE BONFIRES See La Luna e i falo` (Work by Cesare Pavese)

THE MORAL ESSAYS See Operette morali (Work by Giacomo Leopardi)

GIULIAN MORANDINI (1938–) Novelist, essayist, and critic Giuliana Morandini began her literary career in the 1970s. A native of the Friuli region, bordering Austria and Slovenia, Morandini turned the experience of the frontier into one of the main themes in her writings. While dealing with geographical, cultural, and linguistic borders, she also investigated their institutional, social, and psychological implications: the boundaries

between the private and the public sphere, male and female identity, reason and insanity, dream and reality, past and present. Morandini’s early interest in the theater brought her close to Pier Paolo Pasolini (whose works she translated into German) and Samuel Beckett. With them she shared an attention to the difficulty of listening and of communicating, as her 1221

GIULIAN MORANDINI essay ... E allora mi hanno rinchiusa (And So They Shut Me Away, 1977) attests. This work, addressing the condition of women in mental hospitals, reflects the primary concerns of the rising feminist movements of those years, such as the denunciation of social exclusion and the desire to give voice to the marginalized female subject, but also the narrator’s participation as a witness to oppression and her invitation to women to become conscious of what is also excluded within themselves. To the question of the female voice in life and literature, Morandini has devoted two critical anthologies: La voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ’800 e ’900 (The Voice within Her: An Anthology of Italian Women’s Narrative between the Nineteenth and the Twentieth Century, 1980) and Sospiri e palpiti: scrittrici italiane del Seicento (Sighs and Throbs: Italian Women Writers of the Seventeenth Century, 2001). A social inquiry on psychiatric institutions, ...E allora mi hanno rinchiusa also highlights the role of memory and of confessional writing, crucial elements in Morandini’s narratives starting from I cristalli di Vienna (Bloodstains, 1978). Here Elsa, a young actress, relives her wartime childhood in a long flashback triggered by a conversation in German with another passenger as she travels by train from her native Friuli to the Austrian capital. From the fantasies of her early years and her difficult family relationships, her recollections shift to traumatic episodes of violence perpetrated by the Germans, which she witnessed in her own house and town, and ultimately merge with scenes of her own present, as she wanders through Vienna trying to recover a painful past. I cristalli di Vienna shares with Morandini’s two subsequent novels a notion of identity based upon fragmentation, discontinuity, and free associations, owing as much to Freudian psychoanalysis as to Marcel Proust’s anamnesis. Furthermore, the search of her female protagonists for their own selves takes place in urban settings that reinforce the complexity and the sense of chaos affecting the women’s inner landscapes. In Caffe` Specchi (The Cafe´ of Mirrors, 1983), Katharina, a woman of Slavic origins who grew up in Trieste, is back in the unnamed but recognizable city to apply for her son’s custody. Her anxieties and her disturbing encounters with mysterious characters, all narrated through rapidly shifting scenes and perspectives, parallel the alienating atmosphere of the city, of which Morandini emphasizes the linguistic and ethnic diversity. With its mixture of Italian, German, Slavic, and local dialects, Trieste—to which Morandini also devotes 1222

the essay Da te lontano: cultura triestina tra ’700 e ’900 (Far From You: The Culture of Trieste between the Eighteenth and the Twentieth Century, 1989)—becomes a microcosm for Central Europe, as in the works of Scipio Sla`taper, Italo Svevo, Carlo Michelstaedter, or Claudio Magris. The German setting of Angelo a Berlino (An Angel in Berlin, 1987), which completes Morandini’s Mitteleuropean trilogy, reinstates the centrality of the city and of the border as at once separation and fusion of different cultural and emotional realities. Erika’s personal drama and her family history of exile and bereavement intertwine with the tragic events of Eastern and Western Europe prior to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, in a scenario of devastation that also fosters a longing for integrity. While maintaining an interest in the cultural and political panorama of contemporary Europe, with Sogno a Herrenberg (A Dream in Herrenberg, 1991), Morandini began a deeper exploration of past European history. She exposes the violence of war and interrogates the meaning of evil through the eyes of a sixteenth-century girl captivated by the altarpiece that Jo¨rg Ratgeb completed in the chapel of Herrenberg castle in 1519 during the German peasants’ rebellions. Europe’s interaction with Middle Eastern culture is the subject of Morandini’s latest novel, Giocando a dama con la luna (Playing Checkers With the Moon, 1996), a fictional rendition of the travels of German engineer and archaeologist Karl Humann to Anatolia, leading to the excavations of the ruins of Pergamum and to the reconstruction of the altar of Zeus in the 1880s. Through an imaginary dialogue with the ancient sculptures, Karl re-examines the present, problematizing the West’s desire for conquest.

Biography Born in Udine, 1938. Has worked as editor and translator, especially from and into German. Has collaborated as a theater critic to the newspapers Il Messaggero and La Stampa. Awarded several literary prizes, including the Viareggio for ... E allora mi hanno rinchiusa (1977) and for Caffe` Specchi (1983); the Prato for I cristalli di Vienna, 1978; the Campiello for Angelo a Berlino, 1987; the Flaiano for Sogno a Herrenberg, 1991; the Ostia and Latisana for Giocando a dama con la luna, 1996. Received an honorary degree, University of Buenos Aires in 1989. Lives between Venice and Rome. NICOLETTA PIREDDU

ELSA MORANTE Selected Works Novels I cristalli di Vienna, 1978; as Bloodstains, translated by Blossom S. Kirchenbaum, 1987. Caffe` Specchi, 1983; as The Cafe´ of Mirrors, translated by Luisa Quartermaine, 1997. Angelo a Berlino, 1987. Sogno a Herrenberg, 1991. Giocando a dama con la luna, 1996.

Essays ... E allora mi hanno rinchiusa, 1977. Da te lontano: cultura triestina tra ’700 e ’900, 1989.

Anthologies La voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ’800 e ’900, 1980. Sospiri e palpiti: scrittrici italiane del Seicento, 2001.

Further Reading Brazzoduro, G., ‘‘Due note critiche (con una premessa di Elvio Guagnini),’’ in Metodi e ricerche, new series, 14, no. 2 (July-December 1995): 13–26.

Chiarini, Paolo, ‘‘Il ‘mondo tedesco’ di Giuliana Morandini,’’ in Studi germanici, new series, 37, no. 3 (1999): 529–534. Dolfi, Anna, and Maria Carla Papini (editors), Scrittori a confronto: incontri con Aldo Busi, Maria Corti, Claudio Magris, Giuliana Morandini, Roberto Pazzi, Edoardo Sanguineti, Francesca Sanvitale, Antonio Tabucchi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Gargano, A., ‘‘Dietro gli specchi di Giuliana Morandini,’’ in Giuliana Morandini, Caffe` Specchi, Genoa—Milan: Marietti, 2003. Guagnini, Elvio, ‘‘Giuliana Morandini: Outer and Inner Frontiers,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baransky and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Striuli, Giacomo, ‘‘Narrative Strategies in Giuliana Morandini’s I cristalli di Vienna,’’ in Italiana 1987, edited by Albert N. Mancini and Paolo A. Giordano, River Forest, IL: Rosary College, 1989. Valentini, Daria, ‘‘Where East Meets West: Giuliana Morandini’s Mitteleuropean Trilogy,’’ in Italian Women and the City: Essays, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: London Associated University Presses, 2003.

ELSA MORANTE (1912–1985) Elsa Morante, a romantic storyteller of epic scope, was a somewhat anomalous figure in the post-Fascist Italian literary culture that exalted the moral necessity of a laconic realism. She did not so much defy as disarm the general suspicion of poetic and rhetorical extravagances identified with Fascist oratory and art by writing novels that luxuriated in the poetic landscape descriptions and improbably romantic incidents that abounded in surreal accounts of feverish dreams and the wakeful agonies of baffled passion. She was not afraid of fantasy and invention, citing as her authority Tolstoy’s dictum that everything could be invented in the novel, except psychology. Her own psychology, while drawing on Freudian insights, was not confined to diagnosing the neuroses of her displaced and often deranged characters. For Morante, human subjectivity could discover and transform as well as respond to the facts of its own existence. The mind was for her an imaginative instrument that could elicit from discrete objects and events the reality secreted behind appearances, a reality that has no proper

existence or meaning until it had been penetrated and transformed by individual consciousness. ‘‘The richness of reality,’’ she argued in a 1959 essay originally published in Nuovi argomenti, ‘‘is inexhaustible; it renews and multiples itself with every new living creature who ventures to explore it. The multiplicity of existence would lack both significance and meaning if every being didn’t discover its own unique reality. The adventure of reality is always an other. But the novelist, like any other artist, is not content with merely exploring reality. His exploration must transform itself into a universal value: Corruptible reality must be transmuted, through his art, into an incorruptible poetic truth. This is the only justification for art: and this is its necessary realism’’ (‘‘Sul romanzo,’’ in Opere, vol. 1, 1988). This view of realism, which fascinated but also enraged her contemporaries, had two main consequences, one ideological, the other formal. Ideologically Morante’s contention that realism did not consist in the objective representation, but in the poetic transformation of reality put her in direct, 1223

ELSA MORANTE often violent opposition to both Socialist realism, and to the neorealism of her contemporaries. She provocatively labeled these schools as nonrealism and derided them as modes of evasion rather than as the objectively truthful representations they claimed to be. Formally, her championing of the individual as the only genuine discoverer of reality led her to suspect the lofty omniscience of thirdperson objective narration. All of her major novels, except La storia (History: A Novel, 1974), are firstperson narratives, and even La storia creates an ‘‘objective’’ narrator who occasionally confesses ignorance about the fate of certain characters, an admission no conventional third-person narrator, especially in a historical novel, would admit to. In strictly psychological terms, the uncompromising subjectivism of her work dramatizes the narcissistic origins of storytelling. In I tre Narcisi (The Three Narcissists), she identifies three forms of fatal selflove: the happy narcissist (the most conventional incarnation of the self-enamoured being), the furious narcissist, and the unhappy narcissist. This last, embodied in the person of Ludovica, represents for her ‘‘il mostro piu` selvatico e l’enigma piu` strano’’ (the most savage monster and the strangest mystery). Ludovica ‘‘non piace a se stessa, si giudica brutta, sgradevole, ignorante, e non dubita che anche gli altri siano della sua stessa opinione’’ (dislikes herself, thinks herself to be ugly, disagreeable, ignorant and is certain that others share her opinion). This unhappy narcissist is the central visionary figure and often indulged narrator of Morante’s major works. Morante’s unique visionary realism was incubated in childhood. An anemic child whose most cherished wish was to become a ballerina, she was without formal schooling until the age of 10; at 18 she ‘‘abandoned’’ (her own word) her family and her university studies to devote herself to writing. From 1933 to 1941, she wrote for various Italian periodicals, producing children’s tales for Il corriere dei piccoli and I diritti della scuola, but also producing anecdotal character sketches and stories for adult readers that were published in Il meridiano di Roma when the critic Giacomo Debenedetti noticed and decided to champion her work. Some of these narratives, ‘‘L’uomo dagli occhiali’’ (The Man with the Spectacles), ‘‘Il gioco segreto’’ (The Secret Game), and ‘‘La nonna’’ (The Grandmother) among others, were later collected and published as Il gioco segreto (The Secret Game, 1941). During this period Morante also kept a remarkable diary entitled Lettere ad Antonio that was published posthumously under the generic 1224

title, Diario 1938 (1989). Subtitled Libro dei sogni (Book of Dreams), Lettere ad Antonio begins with an epigraph from Dante and a two word first line— sogni erotici (erotic dreams)—that usher the reader into a netherworld where dream, fantasy, and desire assert themselves with the force and as the equal of reality. Morante inscribes in the margins of the first letter Calderon’s title/aphorism La vida es suen˜o (Life is a dream). The major novels that follow are founded on this fundamental belief in the imaginative and existential equivalence of being and dream—or most often nightmare— states. With the publication of her first major narrative, Menzogna e sortilegio (House of Liars, 1948), Morante entered into her major phase as a novelist who represents and refracts the history of modern Italy through the consciousness of a tormented and aggrieved narrator. Menzogna e sortilegio enters the world not as a self-consciously modernist work but as a startling, even perverse anachronism. Opening with a dedicatory poem (‘‘Alla favola’’) to the personified spirit of Fable, the novel is narrated by a young, traumatized girl named Elise, a first-person narrator who appears to have been born out of the nineteenth-century novel rather than out of the crucible of modern Italian society. The novel opens in a bordello that is also a crypt, an example of Morante’s ingenuity in wedding the gloomy delirium of Gothic narrative, with its dungeons and tombs, to the lurid eroticism of the naturalist novel, that late flower of nineteenth-century realism. Elise is an orphan prompted to write by the clamoring voices of familial ghosts. Writing for her is a mode of exorcism, but one that also carries with it a promise, or at least a prospect, of resurrection (anticipated in the phoenix image of the dedicatory poem). The return to life is always for Morante a return to reality, not a transcendence of it. This is the central mythos enacted in her fiction. Everyone in the novel, except Elise, succumbs to strangely innocent, but deadly illusions of the unhappy, often self-abasing narcissist in love. Elise can only emerge through her family’s catastrophic family history, one that literally leaves her abandoned in a bordello, by refusing to submit further to the rule of illusion. What is modernist about Elise’s story is the understanding that in writing about the disastrous loves and illusions of her family, she can free herself from their spell. At novel’s end she reassesses her tale and realizes that what she has been chronicling is more a comedy of ghosts than the grand tragedy of dreamers she had once been bewitched into believing.

ELSA MORANTE Morante’s next novel, L’isola del Arturo (Arturo’s Island, 1957) is another exploration of the wondrous, if captive imagination that originates in a beleaguered childhood. Yet now Morante’s first-person narrator is a young male, a biological fact that she endows with imaginative as well as social and psychological significance. The virile but diffuse eroticism of adolescence replaces the drama of adulterous passion that fueled Morante’s tribute and transformation of the nineteenth-century novel in Menzogna e sortilegio. Morante once confessed that she had, from childhood, always wished she had been born a male because she found among young boys ‘‘maggiore spirito di avventura, e quelle aspirazione all’eroico, o, magari, all’impossibile’’ (a greater spirit of adventure, greater aspirations toward the heroic, even the impossible) than among young girls (Opere, vol. 1, 1988). Arturo can thus be regarded as a fantasy projection resurrected from that childhood wish. The novel that bears his name indulges the spirit for adventure and high romantic action that the literally sequestered heroine/narrator of Menzogna e sortilegio could only enjoy as a spectator and witness. Yet Arturo is as bewitched as Elise by the enchantments of romance—the fantastic customs, the beautiful maidens and exotic places, the moral as well as physical monsters, the helpless loves and cunning treacheries, life heightened, full of danger and charged with exalted feelings. Morante revives the apparently moribund form of the adventure and romance tale, adapting it to the purposes normally served by the bildungsroman, which usually tells the more prosaic story of the cultural and emotional education of a young man or woman. Arturo’s education is almost entirely sentimental. In the course of the novel, he comes to learn of his father’s official romantic history, but also his hidden love for a criminal, a knowledge that shadows and embitters Arturo’s own experience of first love. That his first love is also his stepmother at once hastens and complicates his gradual deliverance from the spell and law imposed by the father’s almost mythic authority over him. Morante destroyed much of her writing of the next 10 years, including a romantic novel, Nerina, about a black ballerina, and Senza i conforti della religione (Without the Comforts of Religion), another of Morante’s tales of fallen idols, this time as embodied in a charismatic brother who is undone (in many senses) by a debilitating disease, a theme that will brutally resurface in Aracoeli (1982) and Lo scialle andaluso (The Andalusian Shawl, 1963). The stories of Lo scialle andaluso belong to this

period, as does a volume of poetry, Alibi (1958), whose title poem is an insistently rapturous defense of love as an idolatrous but creative power. 1968, that watershed year for student activism and revolutionary hope, saw the publication of Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by Children). In a variety of modes—satiric and typographically disordered poems, a one-act play that parodies Oedipus’ propitiatory rites at Colonus, popular songs—she celebrates the exuberant, impertinent, slangy, and experimental energies of the time. But a darker side of her historical vision surfaced in an essay inspired by a 1965 conference on the atomic bomb, a work later grouped with other of her political and literary essays and published posthumously under the title Pro o contro la bomba atomica (For and Against the Atomic Bomb, 1987). The historical world that Arturo had barely entered at the end of his bildungsroman is the subject of Morante’s next, most famous and most magnificent novel, La storia. The title summons the double meanings of storia as both novel and history, an ambiguity which the novel that follows tries at once to clarify and discredit. History may be personified by the title, but it is not regarded as transcendental force nor is it reproduced as a universal or comprehensive, intelligible narrative of mankind. The compass of Morante’s history is the limited, if brutal scope of the twentieth century. The novel’s opening, which echoes the newsreels sections of John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy, chronicle the first 40 years of the twentieth century. Morante’s chronology of the new century emphasizes not only diplomatic and political events but records discoveries concerning the structure of matter, a foundational moment for what remains for Morante first and foremost the atomic century. Morante insistently dramatizes the paradoxical, almost impossible but very real coexistence of modern scientific culture and the atavistic pretechnological mentality of the Italian peasantry and Rome’s displaced urban proletariat. It would be impossible to overstate how much Morante’s attitude toward history is suffused with a deep understanding, and a deeper distrust, of the material advances of science over nature. The narrator of her last work, Aracoeli, who sees himself as an anachronism, nevertheless foresees his end in terms of atomic holocaust. Morante’s novel concerns itself with how this history affects the lives of ordinary, if uniformly desperate Italians during the war and its immediate aftermath. Morante splits the novel’s poetic sensibility and its philosophy of history into the 1225

ELSA MORANTE characters of Useppe, an epileptic visionary who affirms the festive possibilities of existence, and David Segre, the Jewish outcast, lawgiver and prophet in whose anarchist millenarianism Morante seems to invest her hopes, however feeble, for an authentic counterideology. The prophetic and the parodic fuse in the long disquisitions David delivers to illustrate his postulate that all history is a history of fascisms, more or less disguised. This hope is savaged in Morante’s last novel, Aracoeli, a long narrative delirium in which haunting strains of her earlier work circulate in disguised and transmuted forms. The novel is narrated by Emanuele, another unhappy narcissist ‘‘incline alle visioni piu` che alle indagini’’ (more inclined to visions than inquiries). In the grip of his ‘‘convulsa innocenza’’ (hysterical innocence), Emanuele undertakes a ‘‘pellegrinaggio maniaco’’ (lunatic pilgrimage) to Andalusia where he hopes to unriddle the mystery of his family and his own bitter and bewitched nature. He is plagued by an overmastering love for his mother, Aracoeli, whose name alone suggests the divinized place she occupies in his heart and imagination. His hero is his maternal uncle, Manuel, whom he venerates as ‘‘un bandito, un rivoluzionario, e, principalmente, un comunista’’ (a bandit, a revolutionary, and above all a Communist). As he travels relentlessly, if unevenly into the past, where his mother’s family, but also the inheritances of Fascist Spain await him, he seeks to reverse the normal order of time and recapture the spiritual innocence that irradiated his mother’s fervent piety and transfigured her marriage into a paradise of carnal happiness. But another narrative emerges as he travels deep into Spain, confronting the specter and recent memories of his dead mother, one that first degrades, then demonizes her. He rebukes her for caresses that addicted him ‘‘come un vizio incurabile’’ (like an incurable vice) and for desires that led her into a brutal nightmare of promiscuity. Although he eventually reveals that it is a brain tumor, not moral viciousness that accounts for her deterioration, the novel never recovers from Aracoeli’s dethronement. The novel concludes in a fit of weeping by the novel’s self-described ‘‘superdotato e subnormal—precoce e ritardato—brutto e narciso’’ (highly gifted and subnormal, precocious and retarded, ugly and narcissus-like) narrator—Morante’s final, tortured self-projection of her own romanticizing imagination. Aracoeli is Morante’s dispirited memorial to that ‘‘fabbrica enorme di sogni’’ (enormous factory of dreams) in which her own luxurious and abject visions were manufactured. 1226

Biography 18 August 1912: Born, in Rome, daughter of Irma Poggibonsi, a schoolteacher and Franco Lo Monaco. 1936: Meets Alberto Moravia and comes into contact with Italian literati. 1939–1941: works for the weekly Oggi. 19 January to 30 July 1938: writes Diario, only published in 1989. 1941: translates Katherine Mansfield’s Scrapbook under the title Il libro degli appunti, and marries Moravia. 1948: Wins Viareggio prize for Menzogna e sortilegio; moves with Moravia to Via dell’Oca, which becomes center of Roman intellectual society. 1957 L’isola di Arturo wins Strega prize; soon after visits Russia and China. 1959: visits United States, where she meets New York painter Bill Morrow. 1962: Separates from Moravia; Morrow dies. 1982: develops hydrocephalus, a disease characterized by a buildup of cerebrospinal fluid inside the cranial cavity; increasingly confined to her bed. 1983: attempts suicide. 1985: wins Prix Me´dicis for Aracoeli. November 25, 1985: dies of a heart attack in Rome. MARIA DIBATTISTA Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Carlo Cecchi and Cesare Garboli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1988–1990.

Fiction Menzogna e sortilegio, 1948; as House of Liars, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1951. L’isola di Arturo, 1957; as Arturo’s Island, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1959; rpts. 1988 and 2002. La storia, 1974; as History: A Novel, translated by William Weaver, 1977; rpt. 2000. Aracoeli, 1982; as Aracoeli, translated by William Weaver, 1984.

Short Stories ‘‘Il gioco segreto,’’ 1941. ‘‘Le bellissime avventure di Catera´ dalla trecciolina,’’ 1941; revised as Le straordinarie avventure di Caterina, 1959. ‘‘Lo scialle andaluso,’’ 1963; rpt. 1985. ‘‘Racconti dimenticati,’’ edited by Irene Babboni and Carlo Cecchi, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Alibi,’’ 1958; new ed. with ‘‘Quaderno inedito di Narciso,’’ 2004. ‘‘Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini e altri poemi,’’ 1968.

Translations Katherine Mansfield, Il libro degli appunti, 1945. Il meglio di Katherine Mansfield (with M. Hannau), 1957.

Other ‘‘Il beato propagandista del Paradiso,’’ in Beato Angelico, 1970.

ELSA MORANTE Pro o contro la bomba atomica e altri scritti, 1987. Nota introduttiva a Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini, 1988. Diario 1938, 1989.

Further Reading Agamben, Giorgio et al., Per Elsa Morante, Milan: Linea d’Ombra Edizioni, 1993. Arico`, Santo (editor), Contemporary Women Writers in Italy: A Modern Renaissance, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Bardini, Marco, Morante Elsa: Italiana di professione, poeta, Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1999. Caesar, Michael, and Peter Hainsworth (editors), Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Il romanzo della Morante,’’ in Di giorno in giorno, Milan: Garzanti, 1954. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Gilio, Maria Rosaria, Le lusinghe di Maia nelle opere di Elsa Morante, Rome: Sovera, 2003. Jørgensen, Conni-Kay, La visione esistenziale nei romanzi di Elsa Morante, Rome: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 1999. Kalay, Grace Zlobnicki, The Theme of Childhood in Elsa Morante, University, MS: Romance Monographs, 1996. Lucamante, Stefania, Elsa Morante e l’eredita` proustiana, Fiesole (Florence): Edizioni Cadmo, 1998. Lucamante, Stefania, and Sharon Woods (editors), Under Arturo’s Star: The Cultural Legacy of Elsa Morante, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006. Ravanello, Donatella, Scrittura e follia nei romanzi di Elsa Morante, Venice: Marsilio, 1980. Rosa, Giovanna, Cattedrali di carta: Elsa Morante romanziere, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1995. Sgorlon, Carlo, Invito alla lettura di Elsa Morante, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Venturi, Gianni, Morante, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977. West, Rebecca, ‘‘Elsa Morante,’’ in Partisan Review, 53, no. 4 (Fall 1986): 649–652.

LA STORIA, 1974 Novel by Elsa Morante

In the provocative, even brash claims implied by her title, La storia (History: A Novel), Elsa Morante seemed intent on evoking and subsequently dissolving the rather strict boundary between history and fiction, the world as it is factually experienced and the world as it is imagined. This

opposition is made clear in the structural organization of the novel, which opens with an introductory section chronicling the historically decisive events of the first 40 years of the century. This historical overture is followed by nine chapters, spanning the crucial war and postwar years 1941 to 1947, which constitutes the narrative proper. The human history of La storia focuses on the luckless existence of Ida, a widowed schoolteacher who hides her Jewish ancestry and distances herself from the anarchist beliefs of her husband; her legitimate son, Nino, a modern picaro who is, successively, a Black Shirt, a partisan Resistance fighter and postwar black marketer; and Useppe, the child born of her rape from a German soldier, who will become the novel’s innocent and utopian visionary. Each year of the narrative is introduced by a chronicle of the fateful events that we commonly recognize as constituting history—the acts of nation-states, civil and world wars, diplomatic alliances and their abrogation, scientific inventions, especially the atomic bomb, that radically alter the material order of existence. Before we enter the narrative proper, Morante, with a rather daring casualness, seeks to impress her readers that in its grand movements, history is the record of the nothing new. ‘‘Non troppe novita`, nel gran mondo,’’ she writes. Modern history is repetitive, although cunning and resourceful in perpetuating the dialectic and inverse relation between power and servitude. History, which ministers to the will-to-power of the masters, is the enemy of art, which individualizes and creates. The narrator of La storia, who opposes the official narratives of power, is dedicated to representing the unremarked lives of those ordinary, suffering human beings whom history has ignored, silenced or consigned to oblivion. She is a disturbing and contradictory presence without specific gender who never explains her connections to the characters she claims to have met, much less explain how she attained such comprehensive, if incomplete knowledge of their feelings and experiences. Sometimes she seems to speak as the collective voice of the tribe, keen to represent history to the illiterates of this world to whom she dedicates her book. Although she generally observes the protocols of omniscient third-person or objective narration, she refuses to allow history to obliterate the emotional meaning, as it has the lives, of her protagonists. At times she insists on observing final rites for her characters, however despised, outcast, or alone. The most unusual as well as moving intrusion into the story is reporting from memory, at great distance in space and time, the death of a 1227

ELSA MORANTE minor character, Giovannino, whose life might have been incidental to her story, but whose death provokes this tender farewell as he curls up, consumed by fever and weak from hunger, in a frigid Russian plain for his last, restful sleep: ‘‘Buona notte, biondino’’ (Good night, my fair little one). The first readers and reviewers of the book were quick to note, some quicker to object to Morante’s apparent fatalism. The novel, in fact, raised a firestorm of ideological and artistic controversy. Morante remained relatively silent throughout the dispute that pitted such initial enthusiasts as Natalia Ginzburg against Nanni Balestrini, who along with his cosigners from ‘‘Gruppo 63,’’ wrote a castigating letter published in Il manifesto, a daily Roman organ of the far left. This letter eventually brought Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Asor Rosa, and Italo Calvino into the fray. Morante only defended her novel after a censored translation had been published in Franco’s Spain without her authorization, and then only to insist on its unequivocally antiFascist stance. But by Fascism she meant not just Franco’s regime, or Mussolini’s and Hitler’s, but history itself as a history of Fascisms. The critical opprobrium from the left was understandable given that La storia liquidates all its sympathetic, visionary, or prophetically outraged characters, thus seeming to despair of history. Hence the scandal surrounding the ambiguous, possibly menacing, defeatist conclusion to her novel, ‘‘e la storia continua’’ (‘‘and history goes on’’). Only a concluding epigraph from Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere offers some hope that history may also be germinating the seed of a more just, or simply a less evil, social future. MARIA DIBATTISTA Editions First edition: La storia, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Critical editions: in Opere, 2 vols., edited by Carlo Cecchi and Cesare Garboli, Milan: Mondadori, 1988–1990. Translations: as History: A Novel, translated by William Weaver, New York: Knopf, 1977; rpt. South Royalton, VT: Steerfork Italia, 2000.

Further Reading Bernabo`, Graziella, Come leggere ‘‘La storia’’ di Elsa Morante, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘I disarmati,’’ Il corriere della sera, 30 June 1974, p. 12. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘Allora Hugo disse alla Morante...,’’ in L’espresso, 1 September 1974, pp. 37–38. Della Coletta, Cristina, ‘‘Elsa Morante’s La storia: Fiction and Women’s History,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 5 (1993): 194–199.

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Garboli, Cesare, ‘‘Le finte lettere di Anna,’’ in Studi novecenteschi, 21, nos. 47–48 (June–December 1994): 149–174. Ginzburg, Natalia, ‘‘La storia,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 30 June 1974, p. 3. Ginzburg, Natalia, ‘‘Appunti su La storia: I personaggi di Elsa,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 21 July 1974, p. 3. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Il dibattito sulla ‘Storia’ di Elsa Morante,’’ in Belfagor 30, no. 1 (1975): 93–98. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Perche´ tante storie dopo la neoavanguardia,’’ in Rinascita, 32, no. 19 (1975): 23–24. Lucente, Gregory, ‘‘History and the Trial of Poetry: Everyday Life in Morante’s La Storia,’’ in Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘La gioia della vita, la violenza della storia,’’ in Tempo, 26 July 1974, pp. 77–78. Pupino, Angelo, Alberto Asor Rosa et alli, ‘‘‘La storia’ e` o non e` un capolavoro?’’ in La fiera letteraria, 6 and 13 October 1974, pp. 4–13.

L’ISOLA DI ARTURO, 1957 Novel by Elsa Morante

Appearing at a time when the staggeringly severe beauties of Italian neorealism were riveting international audiences, L’isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island), with its uninhibited and outsized romanticism, seemed a curious throwback to a more traditional kind of storytelling in which fantasy defies rather than succumbs to brute reality. Morante’s overheated tale of pirates, treasures, Algerian knives, dungeons, and fortresses evokes the untamed nature and feral passions of romance. An imaginative mode that flourished in European culture before the novel, with its documentary impulses, became the dominant literary form of modernity. But despite its emotional genesis in fantasy, L’isola di Arturo, which won the Strega prize and was made into a film directed by Damiano Damiani in 1962, is a novel. Its title indicates not so much a place as a narcissistic illusion that the ensuing narrative will eventually dispel. Arturo, the novel’s narrator as well as its titular hero, enjoys a seemingly enchanted existence

ELSA MORANTE on Procida, an island uncolonized by the forces of modern history. Procida is at once a paradise and a limbo populated by peasants and fisherman, convicts and children, figures of fairy tale and legend. Casual allusions to American gangster films or contemporary wars of liberation are the only indications that Morante’s fable takes place in the grim twentieth, not in an earlier swashbuckling, century. Arturo’s island paradise at once segregates him from the modern world and maroons him within a system of mythical thinking that mandates a total and irreparable division of the sexes. The monument to this sexual mythomania is the narrator’s home, called the House of the Guaglione after the young men lavishly entertained there by its original owner, who had banned women from his estate. Arturo is educated into this misogynistic tradition by his father, who inherits the property and its homosocial ideology. He is an island creature whose existence is governed by a primitive code whose primary rule is the father’s absolute authority. According to this code, women are either whores or Madonnas who preside over the elementary human rites of birth and death. Since Arturo’s mother dies in giving him birth, his masculinist paradise seems impregnable until his father remarries and brings his wife to live on the island. She will bring new life, but at the cost of old male hegemony. After its initial pages recalling the idyll of Arturo’s virile childhood, the novel proceeds to dramatize his sentimental education under the shy, but loving guidance of his stepmother. Like all sentimental educations, Arthur’s sexual and moral instruction culminates in a negative knowledge of his father’s secret and degraded love for a criminal. Armed with this knowledge that demystifies his father’s godlike status, Arturo takes leave of his island and the myths that, in entrancing his imagination, had also distorted his sense of the fully human world. L’isola di Arturo is a romantic novel in which Morante evokes the dark splendors of the mythmaking mind before

renouncing them for the sterner realities of history. It is Morante’s tribute to and demolition of the sexual mythology of Western culture that assigns moral power to the male and assigns woman dominion over the life and death, the mysteries of generation. MARIA DIBATTISTA

Editions First edition: L’isola di Arturo, Turin: Einaudi, 1957. Critical edition: in Opere, vol. 1, edited by Carlo Cecchi and Cesare Garboli, Milan: Mondadori, 1988. Translations: as Arturo’s Island, translated by Isabel Quigly, London: Collins, 1959; rpt. Manchester: Carcanet, 1988; rpt. South Royalton, VT: Steerfork Italia, 2002.

Further Reading Bardini, Marco, ‘‘Arturo tra libri e certezze assolute,’’ in Narrativa, 17 (February 2000): 89–99. Bocelli, Arnaldo, Review of L’isola di Arturo, Il mondo (Rome), 21 May 1957, p. 8. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘L’isola di Arturo,’’ in Libri nuovi e usati, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1958. Cornish, Alison, ‘‘A King and a Star: The Cosmos of Morante’s L’isola di Arturo,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 109, no. 1 (January 1994): 73–92. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Review of L’isola di Arturo, Nuovi argomenti, no. 26 (May–June 1957): 43–61. Parks, Tim, ‘‘The Experience of Separation: The Novels of Elsa Morante,’’ in PN Review, 14 (1988): 22–25. Pullini, Giorgio, Review of L’isola di Arturo, Comunita` (Milan), 49 (April–May 1957): 85–86. Ricci, Graziella, ‘‘Tra Eros e Thanatos: storia di un mito mancato,’’ in Strumenti Critici, 38 (February 1979): 126–168. Ricci, Graziella, ‘‘L’Isola di Arturo: Dalla storia al mito,’’ in Nuovi argomenti, 62 (1979): 237–275. Ruthenberg, Myriam Swennen, ‘‘Romancing the Novel: Elsa Morante’s L’Isola di Arturo,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 9 (1997): 336–341. Setti, Nadia, ‘‘L’educazione sentimentale della scrittura secondo Elsa Morante,’’ in Narrativa, 17 (February 2000): 43–59. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Jung e L’isola di Arturo,’’ in Narrativa, 17 (2000): 77–87.

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ALBERTO MORAVIA

ALBERTO MORAVIA (1907–1990) Among the Italian writers of his generation, Alberto Moravia (pseudonym of Alberto Pincherle) is the one who achieved the most fame and international notoriety. His literary debut in 1929 with the novel Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference) established him as a most talented young author. His tale of middle-class hypocrisy and amorality was enthusiastically received among literary circles. As immediately detected by critic G. A. Borgese in his much-quoted review for Il corriere della sera, Moravia had broken away from the fashionable virtuoso style of prosa d’arte (‘‘art prose’’), offering instead a dry, unadorned narrative inspired by the work of European masters such as Dostoyevsky. The novel also sparked off controversy in the Fascist press. Some hailed it as a novel exposing the failings of Italy’s liberal bourgeoisie (it should be remembered that the novel had been published by Alpes, a pro-Fascist publishing house founded by Mussolini’s brother), others saw it as an example of an amoral piece of narrative for which there should be no place in the brave new Italy of the Fascist era. Moravia’s following works were received with increasing suspicion and coldness, to the point that two of them, Le ambizioni sbagliate (The Wheel of Fortune, 1935) and L’imbroglio (The Swindle, 1937), were eventually prohibited in 1939, followed by La mascherata (The Fancy Dress Party, 1941), a fairly transparent allegory of the Fascist regime. Although Moravia was not engaged in the political debate, he was dragged into it as a result of his family ties. First, the fact that he was a cousin of the Rosselli brothers, leaders of the anti-Fascist organization Giustizia e Liberta` and eventually assassinated in 1937, meant that his whereabouts were monitored by the political police. Second, the introduction of the anti-Semitic legislation in 1938 gave his opponents one more reason to ask for his marginalization (Moravia, although Catholic, had a Jewish father). He was allowed to continue his work as a journalist, although he was often asked to use anonymity or pseudonyms. His fictional work was often censored and in 1942 his name (albeit as Pincherle not as Moravia) appeared in an official list of 900 ‘‘unwelcome authors’’ that publishers and booksellers were supposed to 1230

withdraw from circulation. During the 1930s, Moravia also became a keen travel writer, an activity that was to form a substantial part of his literary output. He traveled to China, Mexico, the United States, and Greece, reporting for national newspapers such as La gazzetta del popolo and Il corriere della sera. After the war, Moravia emerged as a most prolific, popular, and influential writer, openly supporting although never militating within the Italian Communist Party. His essays La speranza, ossia cristianesimo e comunismo (Hope, Christianity and Communism, 1945) and L’uomo come fine (Man as an End, 1946) trace his attempts to offer philosophical grounding to his literary stance. His call for individual stoicism in times of social and political turmoil can be related to the thought of French existentialists at the time. Moravia’s work as an author, critic, and travel writer regularly appeared in the pages of Italy’s national papers. In 1953, together with Alberto Carocci (Pier Paolo Pasolini was to join them in 1966), Moravia founded the journal Nuovi argomenti, which attempted to bring Communist and liberal culture together. As a fiction writer, the short novel Agostino (Agostino, 1945) is possibly one of Moravia’s most accomplished works of fiction, depicting the sexual and intellectual awakening and inhibitions of an adolescent. Moravia was also hailed as a major representative of the neorealist movement after the publication of the novel La romana (The Woman of Rome, 1947). Adopting the viewpoint and narrative voice of a prostitute, Moravia presented a vivid picture of moral apathy and corruption during the Fascist period. The novel marked the beginning of Moravia’s interest in workingclass characters that was to develop in the following years with the popular collection Racconti romani (Roman Tales, 1954) and the novel La ciociara (Two Women, 1957). At the same time, Moravia continued to publish narrative works representing stories of sensual amorality set among the Italian bourgeoisie. Among these are La disubbidienza (Luca, 1948), L’amore coniugale e altri racconti (Conjugal Love and Other Tales, 1949) and, more controversially, Il conformista (The Conformist, 1951). Set in 1930s Italy, the

ALBERTO MORAVIA latter is an attempt at a parallel between the sexual and psychological failings of the middle-class protagonist and his conversion to Fascism. Apart from the debatable results of this representation of Fascism as sexual deviance, Il conformista sparked off controversy for the negative characterization of anti-Fascism, particularly in the person of the exiled professor, who was modeled on Moravia’s cousin Carlo Rosselli. The novel was adapted for the screen by Bernardo Bertolucci in a 1970 feature film bearing the same title. The recurrence of sexual themes and episodes of moral and erotic debauchery caused Moravia’s fiction to fall under the censoring axe of the Catholic Church. His entire fictional work was put on the Index of prohibited books in 1952 although this symbolic measure had no impact on the sales nor on the popularity of the writer. In the 1960s, Moravia’s work reflected his interest in psychoanalysis and his desire to tackle wider social and literary issues. His fiction became more and more informed by his intellectual preoccupations. This development was recognized by Moravia himself, who labeled his works as romanzisaggio (‘‘essay-novels’’). The very successful novel La noia (Boredom, 1960) inaugurated a series of characters that informed Moravia’s thoughts about the role of the intellectual in modern society. The protagonist of La noia is an artist who struggles to find a meaningful relationship between his artwork and reality; he is also obsessed with the tensions created by the clash between sexual desire and the logics of rationality. A less successful example of romanzo-saggio is L’attenzione (The Lie, 1965), a tale of incest and sexual frustration structured around the double register of diary and narrative. Some critics saw in Moravia’s recurrent mixture of social critique and sexual themes an attempt to enrich his fiction with a fusion of Marxist and Freudian thought. In Io e lui (Two, a Phallic Novel, 1971), this is given narrative shape through the ironic split personality of a character endowed with a thinking penis. Moravia’s adoption of first-person narrative is another recurrent feature in his fiction. Theoretically justified by Moravia as the least hypocritical narrative position that a fiction writer can use, first-person narrative is also instrumental in the forging of his fluent, colloquial prose style. In those years he began to engage in an often polemic dialogue with the new generation of authors, critics, and radical militants. Edoardo Sanguineti, one of the leaders of Neoavanguardia (neoavantgarde movement), published a monograph on

Moravia in 1962. Sanguineti recognized the importance of Moravia’s fiction under the umbrella notion of realismo critico. He also suggested a Marxist interpretation of the ethical impasse suffered by his protagonists as exemplary of the alienation of Italy’s middle classes. When the student protest movement caught speed in the late 1960s, Moravia became a strenuous defender of the autonomy of literature as a form of knowledge. Revolutionary activists often met his thesis with scorn, and Moravia’s narrative was accused of producing a sterile and morbid critique of middle-class culture. A satirical attack came from L’espresso journalist Sergio Saviane who published a fully fledged pamphlet entitled Moravia desnudo (1976). Moving from the recently published Io e lui and Un’altra vita (Lady Godiva and Other Stories, 1973), Saviane accused Moravia of writing formulaic, erotic fiction dressed up as intellectual artwork. Despite all the polemics, Moravia’s prolific collaborations with newspapers and periodicals together with his desire to be involved in Italy’s intellectual debate, resulted in his emerging as a national maıˆtre a` penser. Countless are his contributions to the discussion of contemporary issues, not just through the medium of his writings but also through many interviews and appearances on television and radio programmes. From 1957 onward, Moravia was also film critic for the national weekly L’espresso. On another front, Moravia tried his hand as a playwright, although his production is relatively small and confined to the postwar years. It began with a theater adaptation of his La mascherata in 1954 and was to remain limited to less than a dozen works. His most controversial play is Il dio Kurt (The God Kurt, 1968). Set in a Nazi concentration camp, it presents the figure of a depraved but intellectually lucid Nazi officer who forces a Jewish inmate to stage the drama Oedipus Rex and in actual fact kill his father and have sex with his mother. Moravia’s production as a playwright never reached particular prominence among the public nor among critics, hence it is still a relatively unresearched part of his literary production. In the 1970s, Moravia made great use of the narrative viewpoint of female characters. Among the books published in this vein is Boh (The Voice of the Sex and Other Stories, 1976), a collection of 30 short stories, all narrated by different female voices. A female protagonist also dominates the plot of La vita interiore (Time of Desecration, 1978), in which Moravia represented the irrationality and split identity of a young woman who resorts 1231

ALBERTO MORAVIA to murder in order to rebel against family and social constrictions. In the 1980s, Moravia continued to publish a steady stream of novels and short stories, all rooted in the author’s by now usual themes. The protagonists’ troubled sexuality continued to dominate his fictional work. 1934 (1982), as the title suggests, is set in Fascist Italy and is not free from autobiographical echoes in its representation of the elitist but sterile anti-Fascism of its protagonist. L’uomo che guarda (The Voyeur, 1985) explores voyeurism as a form of eroticism, and Il viaggio a Roma (Journey to Rome, 1988) returns to the theme of incest. In 1984, Moravia was elected member of the European Parliament as an independent candidate in a list of the Italian Communist Party. His experiences as an MEP in Strasbourg were collected in Diario europeo (European Diary, 1982). Until his death in September 1990, Moravia continued to enjoy his position as one of Italy’s most popular intellectuals and fiction writers. He collaborated with long interviews for two biographical studies published by his friends Enzo Siciliano (1982) and Alain Elkann (1990). Moravia is also remembered for his travel books, among which the most renowned ones are Un mese in URSS (A Month in the Soviet Union, 1958), La rivoluzione culturale in Cina (The Red Book and the Great Wall, 1967), Un’idea dell’India (An Idea about India, 1962), and A quale tribu` appartieni? (Which Tribe Do You Belong To?, 1972).

Biography Born in Rome, 28 November 1907, son of wealthy architect. Autodidact. Ill with tuberculosis, was interned in a sanatorium at Cortina d’Ampezzo, 1923–1925. Worked as a journalist for several newspapers, including La stampa, La gazzetta del popolo, Il mondo, L’europeo, Il corriere della sera; travels to England, France, China, Mexico, the United States, and Greece, 1930–1937. Editor of literary journal Prospettive, 1941–1942. Married novelist Elsa Morante, 1941; lived in Anacapri, 1941–1943 and at Fondi, 1943–1945; returned to Rome, 1945. Directed literary journal Nuovi argomenti, founded with Alberto Carocci, 1953–1990; cinema critic for L’espresso, 1957–1990; visiting lecturer in United States, 1955; traveled to the Soviet Union, 1958; to India, 1962. Strega prize for I racconti, 1952; Marzotto prize for I racconti romani, 1954; Viareggio prize for La noia, 1961; separated from Morante and went to live with Dacia 1232

Maraini, 1962; founded Compagnia del Porcospino with Maraini and Enzo Siciliano in Rome, 1966; separated from Maraini, 1983; Italian representative to the European Parliament 1984–1989; married the much younger Spanish journalist Carmen Llera, 1986. Died in his house in Rome (which is now the seat of the Fondo Alberto Moravia), 26 September 1990. GUIDO BONSAVER Selected Works Collections Five Novels, 1955 (includes Mistaken Ambitions, Agostino, Luca, Conjugal Love, A Ghost at Noon). Opere: 1927–1940, edited by Francesca Serra, Milan: Bompiani, 2000. Opere: 1941–1949, edited by Simone Casini, Milan: Bompiani, 2002. Opere: 1950–1959, edited by Simone Casini, Milan: Bompiani, 2004. Teatro, edited by Nari Aline and Franco Vazzoler, 2 vols., Milan: Bompiani, 2004.

Novels Gli indifferenti, 1929; as The Indifferent Ones, translated by Aida Mastrangelo, 1932; as The Time of Indifference, translated by Angus Davidson, 1953; as The Time of Indifference, translated by Tami Calliope, 2000. Le ambizioni sbagliate, 1935; as The Wheel of Fortune, translated by Arthur Livingston, 1937. La mascherata, 1941; as The Fancy Dress Party, translated by Angus Davidson, 1952. Agostino, 1945; as Agostino, translated by Beryl de Zoete, 1947; as Two Adolescents, the Stories of Agostino and Luca, 1950. La romana, 1947; as The Woman of Rome, translated by Lidia Holland, 1949. La disubbidienza, 1948; as Disobedience, translated by Angus Davidson, 1950. Il conformista, 1951; as The Conformist, translated by Angus Davidson, 1951; as The Conformist, translated by Tami Calliope, 1999. Il disprezzo, 1954; as A Ghost at Noon, translated by Angus Davidson, 1955; as Contempt, translated by Angus Davidson, 1999. La ciociara, 1957; as Two Women, translated by Angus Davidson, 1958. La noia, 1960; as The Empty Canvas, translated by Angus Davidson, 1961; as Boredom, translated by Angus Davidson, 1999. L’attenzione, 1965; as The Lie, translated by Angus Davidson, 1966. Io e lui, 1971; as Two, a Phallic Novel, translated by Angus Davidson, 1972. La vita interiore, 1978; as Time of Desecration, translated by Angus Davidson, 1980. 1934, 1982; as 1934, translated by William Weaver, 1983. L’uomo che guarda, 1985; as The Voyeur, translated by Tim Parks, 1986.

ALBERTO MORAVIA Il viaggio a Roma, 1988; as Journey to Rome, translated by Tim Parks, 1990.

Short Stories ‘‘La bella vita,’’ 1935. ‘‘L’imbroglio: Cinque romanzi brevi,’’ 1937. ‘‘I sogni del pigro,’’ 1940. ‘‘L’amore coniugale e altri racconti,’’ 1949; as Conjugal Love and Others Tales, translated by Angus Davidson, 1951; as Bitter Honeymoon and Other Stories, 1956. ‘‘L’automa,’’ 1952; as The Fetish, translated by Angus Davidson, 1964. ‘‘Racconti romani,’’ 1954; as Roman Tales, translated by Angus Davidson, 1956. ‘‘Nuovi racconti romani,’’ 1959; as More Roman Tales, translated by Angus Davidson, 1963. ‘‘Una cosa e` una cosa,’’ 1967; as Command and I Will Obey You and Other Stories, translated by Angus Davidson, 1969. ‘‘Il paradiso,’’ 1970; as Paradise and Other Stories, translated by Angus Davidson, 1971. ‘‘Un’altra vita,’’ 1973; as Lady Godiva and Other Stories, translated by Angus Davidson, 1975. ‘‘Boh,’’ 1976; as The Voice of the Sea and Other Stories, translated by Angus Davidson, 1978. ‘‘La cosa e altri racconti,’’ 1983; as Erotic Tales, translated by Tim Parks, 1985.

Plays Beatrice Cenci, 1955; as Beatrice Cenci, translated by Angus Davidson, 1958, rpt. 1965. Il mondo e` quello che e`, 1966. Il dio Kurt, 1968. La vita e` gioco, 1969. L’angelo dell’informazione e altri testi teatrali, 1986.

Other La speranza, ossia cristianesimo e comunismo, 1945. L’uomo come fine, 1946. Un mese in URSS, 1958. Un’idea dall’India, 1962. L’uomo come fine e altri saggi, 1963; as Man as an End: A Defense of Humanism, translated by Bernard Wall, 1965. La rivoluzione culturale in Cina, 1967; as The Red Book and the GreatWall: An Impression of Mao’s China, translated by Ronald Strom, 1968. A quale tribu` appartieni?, 1972; as Which Tribe Do You Belong To?, translated by Angus Davidson, 1974. Al cinema: Centoquarantotto film d’autore, 1975. Lettere dal Sahara, 1981. Diario europeo, 1982. Vita di Moravia (with Alain Elkann), 1990; as Life of Moravia, translated by William Weaver, 2000.

Further Reading Benussi, Cristina (editor), Il punto su Moravia, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1987. Borgese, G. A., ‘‘Alberto Moravia,’’ Il corriere della sera, 21 July 1929: 3. Capozzi, Rocco, and Mario Mignone (editors), Homage to Moravia, New York: Forum Italicum, 1993. Cotrell, Jane E., Alberto Moravia, New York: Ungar, 1974. Groppali, Enrico, L’ossessione e il fantasma: Il teatro di Pasolini e Moravia, Venice: Marsilio, 1979.

Limentani, Alberto, Alberto Moravia tra esistenza e realta`, Venice: Pozza, 1962. Longobardi, Fulvio, Alberto Moravia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Paris, Renzo, Moravia: Una vita controvoglia, Florence: Giunti, 1996. Peterson, Thomas Erling, Alberto Moravia, New York: Twayne, 1996. Rebay, Luciano, Alberto Moravia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1970. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Alberto Moravia, Milan: Mursia, 1962. Saviane, Sergio, Moravia desnudo, Milan: Sugar Co, 1976. Siciliano, Enzo, Moravia, Milan: Longanesi, 1971. Siciliano, Enzo, Alberto Moravia: Vita, parole e idee di un romanziere, Milan: Bompiani, 1982. Voza, Pasquale, Moravia, Palermo: Palumbo, 1997. Wood, Sharon, Woman as Object: Language and Gender in the Work of Alberto Moravia, London: Pluto, 1990.

GLI INDIFFERENTI, 1929 Novel by Alberto Moravia

Scholars agree that Moravia’s debut novel, Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), should be considered, if not the most accomplished, certainly the most influential of his works. Italian literary production was at the time dominated by different literary styles. The so-called prosa d’arte (‘‘art prose’’) aimed at a highly sophisticated description of scenes and small events, often lacking a narrative backbone. Equally popular was the ‘‘magic realism’’ of writers such as Massimo Bontempelli, who injected elements of surrealism in their fiction. Also, a group of pro-Fascist writers called strapaesani (who opposed the internationalism of stracitta` associated with the review 900 and Bontempelli) promoted a rediscovery of vernacular, libertine literature, praising the virtues of provincial Italy. Moravia’s Gli indifferenti offered a radically new approach. Most important, the prose style of the novel avoided all the sophistications and virtuoso effects in vogue at the time. In order 1233

ALBERTO MORAVIA to describe the sterile urban atmospheres of the setting, Moravia adopted a similarly dry, ordinary language. Psychological insights and narrator’s interpolations were also minimized and replaced by an analytical, detached observation of events and characters. In brief, style and narrative technique uniquely contributed to create a powerful picture of the apathy and lack of ethical resolve among the protagonists. Critics at the time, such as G. A. Borgese and Pietro Pancrazi, immediately recognized the importance of Gli indifferenti, and its success secured Moravia’s career as a journalist and fiction writer. More varied was the response among Fascist circles. Some praised the novel as an attack against the moral failings of Italy’s urban bourgeoisie, others criticized it for its lack of a more constructive view of contemporary Italy. This mixed reaction to the novel was sometimes characterized by the presence of both positive and negative reviews within the pages of the same paper, as it happened with La libra, in which the then young writer Guido Piovene attacked Gli indifferenti as ‘‘artistically not superior to the reality it represents’’ (‘‘Su Alberto Moravia,’’ 1929), and Rome’s La tribuna. Focused on a respectable middle-class Roman family, Gli indifferenti tells of the sordid scheming of a family friend, Leo Merumeci, who has a relationship with the mother first and then with Carla, the teenage daughter. A lucid but impotent witness to the development of the situation is Michele, Carla’s brother. After a series of failed and halfhearted attempts to rebel against the brutal manners of Leo, the entire family resigns itself to the situation. Leo eventually is about to marry Carla, and Michele accepts the insistent courtship of Leo’s previous lover, Lisa. It is a claustrophobic tale of moral bankruptcy that leaves no space for redemption or any kind of optimism. This is symbolically represented in the final scene with the image of the family preparing to go to a masked party, their real miseries hidden behind a hypocritical mask of gaiety and reciprocal respect. GUIDO BONSAVER Editions First edition: Gli indifferenti, Milan: Alpes, 1929. Critical edition: in Opere 1927–1940, edited by Francesca Serra, Milan: Bompiani, 2000. Translations: as The Indifferent Ones, translated by Aida Mastrangelo, 1932; as The Time of Indifference, translated by Angus Davidson, New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1953; as The Time of Indifference, translated by Tami Calliope, 2000.

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Further Reading Basile, Bruno, ‘‘Lo specchio e la finestra negli Indifferenti di Moravia,’’ in Dal Novellino a Moravia, edited by Ezio Raimondi and Bruno Basile, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979. Battaglia, Salvatore, ‘‘La narrativa di Moravia e la defezione della realta`,’’ in Filologia e letteratura, vol. 8 (1961): 113–142. Borgese, G. A., ‘‘Alberto Moravia,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 21 July 1929: 3. Cane, Eleonora, ‘‘Il discorso indiretto libero negli Indifferenti,’’ in Sigma, vol. 16 (1967): 49–62. Carbone, Rocco, Alberto Moravia e ‘‘Gli indifferenti,’’ Turin: Loescher, 1992. Chang, Natasha, ‘‘Moravia’s Indifferent Bodies: Fascism and Feminility in Gli indifferenti,’’ in Italica, vol. 2 (2003): 209–228. Esposito, Roberto, Il sistema dell’indifferenza: Moravia e il fascismo, Bari: Dedalo, 1978. Mascia Galateria, Marinella, Come leggere ‘‘Gli indifferenti’’ di Alberto Moravia, Milan: Mursia, 1993. Pancrazi, Pietro, ‘‘Gli indifferenti,’’ in Pegaso, vol. 8 (August 1929); then in Scrittori italiani del 900, RomeBari: Laterza, 1934. Piovene, Guido, ‘‘Su Alberto Moravia,’’ in La libra, vols. 5–6 (September-October 1929): 4–7. Strappini, Lucia, Le cose e le figure negli ‘‘Indifferenti’’ di Moravia, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Tornitore, Tonino, ‘‘Gli indifferenti e la critica,’’ in Nuovi argomenti, vol. 37 (1991): 60–98.

RACCONTI ROMANI, 1954 Short Stories by Alberto Moravia

A collection of 61 short stories set among Rome’s working class and subproletariat, Racconti romani (Roman Tales) is one of Moravia’s most popular works and was winner of the prestigious Marzotto prize in 1954. Each story had been previously published on the cultural third page of Il corriere della sera, hence their relatively short length. In its entirety, the book presents a choral fresco of the Roman lower classes struggling to make ends meet and eternally embroiled in questions of money or love. The protagonist of each story narrates his or her adventure in the first person, and critics hailed Moravia’s chameleon-like capacity to produce a convincing narrative of the inner thoughts and outer deeds of such a vast repertoire of

MARTA MORAZZONI characters. Faithful to his unadorned prose style, Moravia did not attempt a total immersion in the vernacular language of his characters. In this respect, he distanced himself from the philological approach of Pier Paolo Pasolini as exemplified in the latter’s novel Ragazzi di vita (1955). Moravia’s prose adopts the odd jargon and dialect expression, but the stories remain anchored to a very modular form of colloquial Italian. This not only gives homogeneity to the entire collection, but it is also one of the ingredients behind the book’s enduring popularity and international success (it has been translated into 11 languages). In order to provide a general idea of the many and varied situations depicted in the collection, mention should be made of some of its most recurrent themes. Precarious employment is a factor determining the life of most characters in Racconti romani. They either work in menial positions such as the kitchen attendant of ‘‘Scorfani’’ (Poor Fish) and the plumber of ‘‘Mario’’ (Mario), or in temporary jobs such as the film extras of ‘‘La controfigura’’ (The Stand-in) and ‘‘Il provino’’ (The Film Test). The protagonist’s love life is often at the centre of the narrative, presented in its most squalid domestic settings such as in ‘‘Caterina’’ (Caterina), ‘‘Il pupo’’ (The Baby) and ‘‘Il godipoco’’ (Little Pleasure). Petty crime, practical jokes and swindles are also rife, as in ‘‘Il biglietto falso’’ (Counterfeits), a story of amateur counterfeiters, ‘‘La ciociara’’ (The Girl from Ciociaria), about a servant who sells her employer’s books, or ‘‘Fanatico’’ (The Fanatic), the story of a taxi driver who is threatened by three mysterious customers. Murder sometimes appears as an almost casual and fatalistically accepted fact of life, as in ‘‘Gli occhiali’’ (A Pair of Spectacles), the story of a bricklayer and petty thief who kills his landlord in a fit of rage. Mention should also be made of Moravia’s penchant for presenting a parade of

deformed, half-imbecile characters, rarely conscious and never capable of rising above the misery of their condition. In this respect, the existential pessimism, which in Moravia’s novels takes the form of problematic and apathetic middle-class characters, is here replaced by a human fauna of naı¨ve, uneducated individuals whose only goal in life is the satisfaction of their most basic needs. Characters also do not show any development in their outlook on life and are often unaware of their limitations. Exemplary in this case is the protagonist of ‘‘Amici senza soldi’’ (Friends), whose lazy ignorance allows him to blame his friends for his own poverty. In 1959, Moravia published a second, bigger collection entitled Nuovi racconti romani (More Roman Tales) containing an extra 69 short stories. GUIDO BONSAVER Editions First edition: Racconti romani, Milan: Bompiani, 1954. Critical edition: in Opere: 1950–1959, edited by Simone Casini, Milan: Bompiani, 2004. Translations: as Roman Tales, translated by Angus Davidson, London: Secker and Warburg, 1956; and New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957.

Further Reading Camillucci, Marcello, ‘‘Roma e i racconti romani di Moravia,’ in Studi romani, vol. 6 (September 1958), 546–561. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Racconti romani,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 5 March 1954: 3. Cudini, Piero, ‘‘Introduzione a Racconti romani,’’ in Moravia Alberto, Racconti 1927–1951, Milan: Bompiani, 1999. Le Blanc, James, ‘‘‘La faccia da cameriere’: An Existential Glance at Two of Moravia’s Waiters,’’ in A Homage to Alberto Moravia, edited by Rocco Capozzi and Mario Mignone, New York: Forum Italicum, 1993. Sanvitale, Francesca, ‘‘Racconti romani,’’ in Il ponte, vol. 10 (1954): 1003–1004.

MARTA MORAZZONI (1950–) Marta Morazzoni is the prize-winning author of two collections of short stories and five novels that have been very well-received by both critics and the public. Her first book of fiction, the collection of

short stories La ragazza col turbante (Girl in a Turban), was published in 1986 with great success and has since been translated into nine languages. Morazzoni’s distinguishing characteristics 1235

MARTA MORAZZONI are already in evidence in this collection: an ability to create images and scenes that capture her characters in revealing moments; the use of landscapes and interiors to reflect inner states of the soul; and a classically balanced prose. The five short stories take place in distant times and in some cases feature actual historical characters. Morazzoni’s intention, however, is not to recreate the past in the realistic manner of such nineteenth-century novelists as Alessandro Manzoni. Her historical descriptions of famous artists, kings, and emperors, of palaces and monasteries, celebrate the artistic achievements of civilization and endow the lives of her characters with an exemplary quality. Her protagonists all are on a quest for identity and selfunderstanding. Some remain trapped in the darkest reaches of their soul or caught in the flow of memories, while others triumph over death, disease, and the oppressive demands of society. The same use of history and the same search for identity can be found in L’invenzione della verita` (The Invention of Truth, 1988), in which the medieval tale of Anne Elizabeth, one of the 300 needlewomen who created the Bayeux tapestry, alternates with the story of the Victorian art historian John Ruskin’s last visit to Amiens. No attempt is made to recreate the past; the narrative represents an imaginative elaboration of known events. The book’s thematic focus is the reverence for art and for its creation, which is also the connecting link between the two characters of the story. In Il caso Courrier (The Courrier Affair, 1997) Morazzoni uses history in yet another way. Abandoning the great names of the past, she makes her narrator a talkative onlooker who witnesses the strange events that took place in 1917 in a small village in Auvergne. We are told the story of Alphonse Courrier, a successful man who seems to have everything—a beautiful wife, children, and a successful business—but who in reality is the victim of conventions. Courrier has sacrificed to appearances the only thing that mattered to him, his love for a woman both poor and ugly. When she dies in a fire, he realizes what he has lost and carefully plans his suicide. Courrier’s search for his true self culminates in a revelation that is too painful to bear and causes him to take his own life. Morazzoni’s other novels Casa materna (His Mother’s House, 1992), L’estuario (The Estuary, 1996), and Una lezione di stile (A Lesson in Style, 2002) recount stories of alienated lives that become increasingly more remote and are shattered by tragic occurrences and madness. In Casa Materna, 1236

a son tries to be accepted by his mother and looks longingly at her garden from which he is excluded. In L’estuario, Antonio spends his time on one side of a river looking with his binoculars at the apartment of his alter ego, Benedict, located on the opposite bank. The protagonist of Una lezione di stile is dazzled by the conventional life of a noble family, all appearance and no substance. Similar themes are present in Morazzoni’s most recent collection of short stories, Un incontro inatteso per il consigliere Goethe (An Unexpected Meeting for Counsellor Goethe, 2005), in which characters are locked within themselves, unable to relate to the outside world and caught in obsessive routines with which they try to control their anxiety.

Biography Born in Gallarate, in Lombardy, in 1950. Graduated in philosophy with Remo Cantoni, at the University of Milan. Awarded the Campiello prize for L’invenzione della verita` (1988), Casa materna (1992), and Il caso Courrier (1997), together with the Independent Foreign Fiction Award (United Kingdom), 2001. Teaches in a technical school in Gallarate, where she resides. GIULIANA SANGUINETI-KATZ Selected Works Novels L’invenzione della verita`, 1988; as The Invention of Truth, translated by M. J. Fitzgerald, 1993. Casa materna, 1992; as His Mother’s House, translated by Emma Rose, 1994. L’estuario, 1996. Il caso Courrier, 1997; as The Alphonse Courrier Affair, translated by Emma Rose, 2000. Una lezione di stile, 2002.

Short Stories ‘‘La ragazza col turbante,’’ 1986; as Girl in a Turban, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1988. ‘‘Un incontro inatteso per il consigliere Goethe,’’ 2005.

Further Reading De Giovanni, Neria, Carta di donna. Narratrici italiane del ‘900, Turin: Societa` Editrice Internazionale, 1996. Heyer-Caput, Margherita, ‘‘Arte e storia come ’poiesis’ al femminile ne L’invenzione della verita` di Marta Morazzoni,’’ in Italian Culture, 19, no. 1 (2001): 67–84. Heyer-Caput, Margherita, ‘‘Il concetto di ‘verita`’ nella narrazione ’al passato’ di Marta Morazzoni,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 79, no. 1 (2002): 62–79.

MARINO MORETTI Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, ‘‘Marta Morazzoni e la ricerca della liberta`,’’ in Quaderni d’Italianistica, 16, no. 2 (1995): 295–307.

Wilson, Rita, ‘‘Identita` rivelate: le speculazioni narrative di Marta Morazzoni e Francesca Duranti,’’ in Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 7, no. 2 (1994): 50–68. Wilson, Rita, Speculative Identities. Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative, Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000.

MARINO MORETTI (1885–1979) Poet and novelist Marino Moretti was gifted with a long life and a prolific muse: By conservative estimates, he left his signature on eight books of verses, 20 novels, three books of memoirs, and several hundred short stories, not to mention five volumes of correspondence exchanged with his lifelong friend Aldo Palazzeschi, 30 years of journalistic work, and the constant rewriting to which he subjected his literary production. Not a small feat for a writer who from the first programmatically made a point of having nothing to say: ‘‘Aver qualche cosa da dire, / nel mondo, a se stessi, alla gente! / Che cosa? Io non so veramente / perche´...non ho nulla da dire. // Che cosa? Io non so veramente, / ma ci son quelli che sanno. / Io no, lo confesso a mio danno / non ho da dir nulla ossia niente’’ (To have something to say, / to the world, to oneself, to the people! / About what? I would not really know, / since...I have nothing to say. // About what? I would not really know, / but there are those who do. / I do not, I admit to my dismay / I do not have anything to say) (‘‘Non ho niente da dire,’’ in Poesie di tutti i giorni, 1911). His writings were so profuse and his talents so diverse that literary historians have tried to rein in his work within the bounds of three distinct periods: the first, crepuscular period, in which Moretti’s affinities with the modes and themes of the crepuscular poets inspired one of its main figures, Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, in an article entitled ‘‘Poesia crepuscolare’’ (La stampa, 10 September 1910), to coin the term ‘‘crepuscolare’’ for Moretti’s Poesie scritte col lapis (Poems Written with a Pencil, 1910); a second period, identified roughly from the beginning of World War I to the 1960s, in which Moretti dedicated himself almost exclusively to prose; a last period, beginning in 1966, when,

authorizing the latest of numerous, elaborately reworked editions of his verses up to 1915, he added an unpublished section, Diario senza le date (Journal Without the Dates, 1911). Moretti would never again abandon his revived enthusiasm for poetry, publishing three more volumes before his death in 1979. In reality, the divisions between these different periods are not so clearly or sharply defined: Between 1905 and 1910 Moretti wrote both verse and prose; his novels, at least until the beginning of the 1930s, bear many crepuscular traits. Moretti himself, in publishing Diario senza le date, declared to have kept on writing poetry privately throughout his life. Moretti’s early poetry contains, from a formal and thematic perspective, many references and points of contact with Guido Gozzano, the most important of the crepuscolari poets: the insistence on a prosaic tone, the dialogical structure of the poems (even if, in confronting the dates, it seems likely that Moretti suggested to his friend the idea of a conversational poetry, and not vice versa). If Gozzano won recognition for rhyming ‘‘Nietzsche’’ to ‘‘camicie’’ (shirts), Moretti demonstrated his own linguistic prowess in rhyming ‘‘piove’’ (it rains) to ‘‘Beethoven’’ and ‘‘t’ami’’ (I love you) to ‘‘tegami’’ (pans). Having noted the affinities, which in fact denote both poets’ fondness for ‘‘small things of bad taste’’ attributed to crepuscular poetry, one should point out the significant differences. The father who triggers Moretti’s anxiety of influence is not D’Annunzio but Pascoli, a Pascoli read with affection and engagement, from whom Moretti inherits many rhythmic and rhyming techniques. Moretti adopted Pascoli’s seemingly facile parisyllabic lines without, however, pursuing any 1237

MARINO MORETTI symbolistic ambitions. In his poetry, the self is sunk to the point of annihilation in the humdrum of the everyday, in a gray-toned reality as in ‘‘Piove’’: ‘‘Piove. E’ mercoledı`. Sono a Cesena, / ospite della mia sorella sposa, / sposa da sei, da sette mesi appena.’’ (It rains. It is Wednesday. I’m in Cesena, / a guest of my married sister, / married just six or seven months ago). The most evident difference between Moretti and Gozzano is biographical: Gozzano, weakened by illness, stopped writing in his early 30s, while Moretti continued to find different modes of expression, setting aside crepuscolarismo to compose novels in which a newfound ethical preoccupation is strongly present. It is true that fundamental to Moretti the novelist is the poet at work, but it is also true that in novels bearing unmistakable crepuscular traits such as Il sole del sabato (Saturday Sun, 1914) and La voce di Dio (The Voice of God, 1921), one finds themes related to Giovanni Verga’s. Moretti fell under the self-imposed pressure to redefine the nature and meaning of the crepuscular poetic project, failing to move beyond an ultimately unsustainable self-consciousness. He thus turned his steps backward to the well-defined project of verismo. Moretti’s fiction often depicts the struggle of women, just like his mother, who inspired his literary education and who becomes the protagonist of his 1923 novel La madre. Subsequent novels, however, show an increasingly pessimistic approach to social issues, such as the popular La vedova Fioravanti (The Widow Fioravanti, 1941). Retrospection is not exclusive to Moretti’s second period: Already at the time of Poesie scritte col lapis, in the poem aptly entitled ‘‘Il ricordo piu` lontano’’ (The Farthest Remembrance), he even recalls his intrauterine experience: ‘‘Forse io ricordo un dolce tempo ch’ero / tutto tuo, del tuo corpo e del tuo cuore, / quando non era in te vivo pensiero / che non fosse di mia vita un bagliore’’ (Perhaps I remember a sweet time in which I was / all yours, of your body and of your heart, / when there wasn’t in you a thought / that was not a glare of my life). It is worth noting parenthetically that the artistic elaboration of an intensely affectionate relationship with the mother became, in this period, a consistent theme not only of the autobiographical writings. Nonetheless, revisiting the past became a cornerstone of his mature prose. On a thematic level, revisiting the past discloses itself in a persisting autobiographical memory; on a practical level, in an incessant reorganization and rewriting of previous works, as if Moretti wanted to impose, as a survivor, his will upon time past (Via Laura, 1931): 1238

The past is my only richness and, I shall say; my future in reverse. [...]. I will put in the past all the faith, all the hope one usually reposes in the future. [...]. I do not care about what life has in store for me. I care about what I’ve already seen and want to live again, not any longer in the manner of others, not any longer at the service of Fatality but, at last, my way.

When, in his old age, Moretti returned to poetry, he in fact took the liberty of writing in his own way, without bowing to the rules of any school, maintaining his position on the margins and resisting the imposition of any label. In ‘‘Epigono,’’ he wielded his sharp pencil against those who still considered him a crepuscular poet: ‘‘Epigono? Anche questo / e` cio` che piu` detesto / dacche´ m’han detto la cosa com’e` / offrendomi un caffe´.. / [...] Ma c’e` di peggio: ‘Poeta minore / della prima meta` del Novecento’. / Ah, no, questo poi no!’’ (An epigone? This is / something unbearable to me / since they told me the thing as it is / while buying me a coffee. / [...] But there’s worse: ‘Minor poet / of the first half of the twentieth century. / Ah, no, alas, not this!). The poet who had ‘‘nothing to say’’ was proved right by the passage of time. As Giulio Ferroni notes, Marino Moretti produced, in years full of theories and manifestos, a great poetry that deserved much more attention than it received: a poetry that finds its force properly in its indifference to becoming (Storia della letteratura italiana, 1991). Even if Moretti’s style is essentially traditional, his works disclose an admirable commitment to the art of storytelling.

Biography Born in Cesenatico (Forlı`), 18 July 1885. From early childhood, greatly influenced by his mother, who instilled a love of culture and literature. Attended middle school in Bologna and Ravenna without exceptional results; before receiving the baccalaureate transferred to the ‘‘Tommaso Salvini’’ acting school in Florence, whose director, Luigi Rasi, was a retired actor. Moved to Florence in 1900; Rasi soon realized that Marino had no future in acting and offered him a job creating textbooks for the school. Befriended fellow pupils Aldo Palazzeschi and Gabriellino D’Annunzio (the poet’s son), who provided him with financial help and access to the publishing world. Published three books of poetry 1903–1905, all subsequently repudiated. At the same time corresponded with proponents of crepuscolarismo: Corazzini, Gozzano, and Govoni. In 1910, published the collection that

MARINO MORETTI made him famous: Poesie scritte col lapis. At the outbreak of WWI was stationed in a frontline hospital, later restationed in a Roman press agency. Published many novels and short story collections for Treves and Mondadori; in the 1920s, began a collaboration with Il corriere della sera that would last until 1953, granting him economic freedom. Underwrote the anti-Fascist ‘‘Manifesto’’ drafted by Benedetto Croce. When the Accademia d’Italia selected him, in 1932, for the Mussolini prize for literature, the Duce intervened to reassign the award. In 1944, the Accademia renominated him but he refused the prize. Subsequently awarded the Accademia dei Lincei prize in 1952 and the Viareggio in 1959, among many others. During the 1960s reached the peak of his celebrity as a novelist and returned to writing poetry as well. Died 6 June 1979, in Cesenatico. GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA Selected Works Collections Tutte le novelle, Milan: Mondadori, 1959. Tutte le poesie seguite da tre idilli in prosa, 1966 (includes Diario senza le date) Milan: Mondadori, 1966.

Poems ‘‘Il poema di un’armonia,’’ 1903. ‘‘La sorgente della pace,’’ 1903. ‘‘Fraternita`,’’ 1905. ‘‘La serenata delle zanzare,’’ 1908. ‘‘Poesie scritte col lapis,’’ 1910. ‘‘Diario senza le date,’’ 1911. ‘‘Poesie di tutti i giorni,’’ 1911. ‘‘Poemetti di Marino,’’ 1913. ‘‘Il giardino dei frutti,’’ 1915. ‘‘Poesie 1905–1914,’’ 1919. ‘‘Poesie scritte col lapis,’’ 1949. ‘‘L’ultima estate,’’ 1969. ‘‘Tre anni e un giorno,’’ 1971. ‘‘Le poverazze. Diario a due voci,’’ 1973.

Fiction Il paese degli equivoci, 1907. I lestofanti, 1909. Il sole del sabato, 1917. La voce di Dio, 1921. I puri di cuore, 1923.

La madre, 1923. Il trono dei poveri, 1928. Fantasie olandesi, 1932. Via Laura. Il libro dei sorprendenti vent’anni, 1931. L’Andreana, 1935. Anna degli elefanti, 1937. Scrivere non e` necessario, 1937. La vedova Fioravanti, 1941. I coniugi Allori, 1946. Il pudore, 1950. I grilli di Pazzo Pazzi, 1951. Il libro dei miei amici, 1960.

Letters Carteggio Marino Moretti—Mario Novaro, 1907–1943, edited by Claudio Toscani, 1982. Carteggio Alfredo Panzini—Marino Moretti, edited by Claudio Toscani, 1986. Carteggio Marino Moretti—Giuseppe Prezzolini, 1920– 1977, edited by Michele Ferrario, 1995. Carteggio Antonio Baldini—Marino Moretti, 1915–1962, edited by Enzo Colombo, 1997. Marino Moretti—Aldo Palazzeschi: Carteggio, edited by Simone Magherini, 1999. Neera—Marino Moretti: Sogno borghese, corrispondenza 1910–1914, edited by Roberto Greggi and Simonetta Santucci, 2000.

Further Reading Calisesi, Giorgio, editor, Marino Moretti. Atti del convegno di studo, Cesenatico 1975, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1977. Casnati, Francesco, Marino Moretti, Milan: IPL, 1952. Ferroni, Giulio, Storia della letteratura italiana. Dall’Ottocento al Novecento, vol. 3, Milan: Einaudi, 1991. Livi, Franc¸ois, La parola crepuscolare: Corazzini, Gozzano, Moretti, Milan: IPL, 1986. Pa`tron, 1983. Pacifici, Sergio, The Modern Italian Novel from Capuana to Tozzi, Carbondale: Illinois University Press, 1973. Pampaloni, Geno, editor, Marino Moretti in verso e in prosa, Milan: Mondadori, 1979. Porcelli, Bruno, ‘‘Romanzidella mia terra’’ di Moretti: modelli, toni, strutture, Bologna: Patron, 1983. Ricci, Manuela (editor), La ‘‘Fiera Letteraria’’ per Marino Moretti, Bologna: CLUEB, 2002. Santucci, Simonetta (editor), Marino Moretti, i libri e i manoscritti, i luoghi e gli amici, Rimini: Maggioli, 1983. Simoncelli, Paolo, Ultimo premio del fascismo: Marino Moretti e l’Accademia d’Italia, Florence: Le Lettere, 2005. Toscani, Claudio, Moretti, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Zaccaria, Giuseppe, Invito alla lettura di Marino Moretti, Milan: Mursia, 1988.

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NANNI MORETTI

NANNI MORETTI (1953–) Nanni Moretti is one of contemporary Italian cinema’s most original directors. An eclectic auteur, a sponsor of new talents, and a unique actor with an inventive and audacious style of filmmaking, Moretti is recognized as one of the creative forces behind the New Italian Cinema. Beginning with his de´but shorts, La sconfitta (The Defeat, 1973), which depicted the everyday life and political struggle of a young leftist militant group, Paˆte´ di bourgeois (1973), a takeoff on Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, and Come parli frate? (What Are You Saying, Brother?, 1974) to his first feature film Io sono un autarchico (I am an Autarchic, 1976), all shot with a super 8 mm, Moretti created a counterculture cinema in a country where alternative or underground culture was a rarity. The way he distributed Io sono un autarchico shows Moretti’s managerial abilities in turning a risky venture into a success. He convinced the owner of Filmstudio Cineclub in Rome to screen the film for one night with the understanding that if it attracted a full house the owner would show it again. The film had a month-long run and became the cult film of his generation, so much that Moretti blew it up to 16 mm and was able to distribute it to other cineclubs and art houses throughout Italy. Two years later the film was purchased and broadcast on RAI-TV, the Italian national public television. Although some critics were skeptical about the cinematographic and artistic merits of Moretti’s early films—Io sono un autarchico did not receive any award at the 1977 ‘‘Giovane Cinema’’ Festival—Moretti’s casting of friends and relatives as actors, as well as his raw camera style and amateurish editing of episodic stories about his own political, social, and political milieu, immediately captured the fantasy of the young. His generation identified with his transparent approach in telling stories, his unorthodox way of producing movies outside of the film industry, as well as his egotistical, narcissistic way of making fun of the adult world. His fresh sense of humor contributed to Moretti’s success as a filmmaker. In a national cinematic tradition that had always been dominated by the commedia all’italiana (comedy Italian style), in which laughter was often chauvinistic and racist, 1240

Moretti’s moralistic, dry, unconventional humor was a staggering revelation. His ability to mix an irresistible sense of humor with dramatic sociological analysis is evident in Ecce Bombo, (1978), his first real feature-length film. When it was released, many in the young audiences identified with the defenseless characters portrayed in the film. In hindsight, Moretti’s characters seem to have foreshadowed the desperation and confusion that in the years following the film’s release led young Italians toward isolation and terrorism. The film both appalled and teased its audience, but for a large number of people his own age, Moretti’s unItalian way of washing his dirty laundry in public was provocative. The film immediately established the myth of Moretti as an eccentric new prodigy of Italian cinema. Indeed, Ecce Bombo was wellreceived at Cannes and in Berlin, and his next film, Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams, 1981), presented in competition at the Venice Film Festival, went on to win the Special Jury’s Prize. Despite receiving favorable reviews, the film did not fare well with the general public, which for the most part did not understand or enjoy the complex plot involving a director shooting a film about a strange relationship between a man who believes he is Sigmund Freud and his mother. Moretti’s next two films, Bianca (1984) and La messa e` finita (The Mass Has Ended, 1985), highlighted Moretti’s intention to undermine all the positive role models of the dominant culture: politicians, educators, religious leaders, artists, and film directors. This subversive intention would become a dominant feature of his later films. Palombella rossa (Red Lob, 1989) recounts the metaphoric story of an official of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) who suffers from temporary amnesia and is forced to reconstruct his identity as a politician and a water polo player. In Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993), Moretti uses an episodic cinematic style that mimics the written diary to confront his obsessions, his personal illness, his egoism, and his cinematic visions. Five years after Caro diario, troubled with the conflict of interest pervading Italian politics and the media business, he made Aprile (April, 1998), a mixture of biographic and political commentary. Alternating

NANNI MORETTI sequences on the distressing state of Italian politics with humorous moments that captured his anxieties about becoming a father and reflections on his inability to make a documentary about contemporary Italy, Moretti found new ways to construct a comic film. Unlike underground cinema, which often focuses on private events, he reassigned the private to the realm of commercial cinema but in a humorous and at times ridiculous way. La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room, 2001) marked a departure from his two previous films in stylistic approach, plot development, and characterization. Moretti does away with his alter ego, Michele Apicella, and with his real name as the main actor to play the role of Giovanni Sermonti, a psychoanalyst married to Paola (Laura Morante), who works in the publishing business. They have a son and a daughter and live in Ancona, a tranquil, small seacoast town on the Adriatic. Their placid middle-class life is shattered by the death of their son, Andrea, which causes the family to drift apart. The acting and the shot composition reveal Moretti’s attempt to dramatize a modern tragedy without sentimentalism or pietism. Moretti lets the audience experience the family’s grief and mourning without the comfort of religion or psychoanalysis. With his personal and yet generational stories, his sharp criticism and biting sense of humor, Moretti has been, from the very start of his career, a point of reference for anyone unsatisfied with the cultural, political, and cinematic status quo. Lines from his films have become common expressions for satirizing the Italian left or for commenting on generational mores: ‘‘Faccio cose, vedo gente’’ (I do things and meet people); ‘‘Continuiamo a farci del male’’ (Let’s keep on hurting each other); ‘‘Facciamo ordine’’ (Let’s bring order); or the famous lines from Aprile addressed to D’Alema, the leader of the Italian left: ‘‘D’Alema reagisci, rispondi, dı` qualcosa! ... dı` qualcosa di sinistra...’’ (D’Alema—react, respond—say something! ... something from a leftist point of view). In the world of cinema, Moretti is something of an anomaly, rarely giving interviews and living a very private life. He does not even consider himself a film director, but rather a film lover who makes movies when he has a story to tell. He considers his films chapters of a single book that aims to convey specific sensations rather than narrate stories. Either by way of the misfortunes of his alter ego, Michele Apicella, or by playing himself, Moretti has demolished figures entrusted with knowledge.

At the same time, by mocking film critics, directors, rationalists, priests, and dogmatic politicians, Moretti’s films play a moral role in defining people by the choices they make. His films are not realistic or simply political, but surreal interpretations of universal predicaments. His films are also full of subtle humorous spoofs on American box-office successes, on the impoverished quality of new Italian films, and on consumerism. His bittersweet sense of humor and criticism spares neither the Catholic Church, the Italian Communist Party, nor the media nor television. Moretti sees the first two as dogmatic institutions that have prevented an independent approach to personal and social problems while the media is responsible for the impoverishment of language and of analytical reasoning. His atypical way of filmmaking is also permeated by a sad and often tragic vision, marked by Moretti’s pessimism about the human ability to change. This trait is present in his film, Il caimano (The Crocodile, 2006), which addresses the hopes and disappointments of the Silvio Berlusconi years. Moretti’s films foreshadow cultural changes, challenge the bourgeois status quo, and satirize the often narcissistic intellectual left. In many ways his films stand for the new vitality and creativity of contemporary Italian cinema after Federico Fellini.

Biography Giovanni (Nanni) Moretti was born on August 19, 1953, in Brunico, in the province of Bolzano in northern Italy, where his parents, Luigi Moretti and Agata Apicella, were on summer vacation. In 1973, graduated from the Liceo Classico and sold his stamp collection to shoot, with the help of his closest friends La sconfitta and Paˆte´ de Bourgeois. Had a role in Padre padrone by Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, 1976. In 1986, with Angelo Barbagallo founded the Sacher production company, as a tribute to the director’s favorite cake, the Austrian chocolate Sacher-Sweets. Awarded a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for La messa e` finita, 1985; and the Nastro d’argento for Palombella rossa, 1990. In 2000, became one of the leaders of the Girotondi, a political movement that protested against the policies of the center-right Italian government on school reform, high cost of living, and conflict of interests, by encircling public buildings with other protesters dancing, singing, and holding hands. ANTONIO VITTI 1241

NANNI MORETTI Selected Works Films Io sono un autarchico, 1976. Ecce bombo, 1978. Sogni d’oro (Sweet Dreams), 1981. Bianca, 1984. La messa e` finita (The Mass Has Ended), 1985. Palombella rossa (Red Lob), 1989. Caro diario (Dear Diary), 1993. Aprile (April), 1998. La stanza del figlio (The Son’s Room), 2001. Il caimano, 2006.

Documentaries La cosa, 1990. Il giorno della prima di ‘‘Close Up,’’ 1996. I diari della Sacher, 2002.

Acting Roles Padre padrone, 1978, dir. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. Riso in bianco: Nanni Moretti atleta di se stesso, 1984, dir. Marco Colti. Domani accadra`, 1988, dir. Daniele Luchetti. Il portaborse, 1991, dir. Daniele Luchetti. La seconda volta, 1995, dir. Mimmo Calopresti. Tre vite e una sola morte, 1996, dir. Raul Ruitz.

De Bernardis, Flavio, Nanni Moretti, Milan: Il Castoro Cinema, 1995; rev. ed. 2001. De Gaetano, Roberto, La sincope dell’identita`: Il cinema di Nanni Moretti, Turin: Lindau, 2002. Detassis, Piera (editor), Caro Diario, Lipari (Messina): Edizioni del Centro Studi, 2002. Gili, Jean A., Nanni Moretti, Rome: Gremese, 2001. Giovannini, Memmo, Enrico Magrelli, and Mario Sesti, Nanni Moretti, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1986. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘Caro Diario and the Cinematic Body of Nanni Moretti,’’ in After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore-London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Marrone, Gaetana (editor), ‘‘New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 17 (1999). Mazierska, Ewa, and Laura Rascaroli, The Cinema of Nanni Moretti, London-New York: Wallflower Press, 2004. Nanni Moretti, Turin: Paravia Scriptorium, 1999. Sesti, Mario, Nuovo cinema italiano: gli autori, i film, le idee, Rome: Theoria, 1994. Sesti, Mario (editor), La ‘‘scuola’’ italiana: storia, strutture e immaginario di un altro cinema (1988–1996), Venice: Marsilio, 1998. Zagarrio, Vito, Cinema italiano anni novanta, Venice: Marsilio, 1998.

Further Reading Badolisani, Vincenzo, ‘‘Quando la disperazione e` un sogno frustrato,’’ in Cinema Nuovo, April 1979, pp. 48–50.

ISABELLA MORRA (CA. 1518–CA. 1545) Isabella Morra’s concise canzoniere (only 10 sonnets and three canzoni) is one of the most powerful and original poetic expressions of sixteenth-century Italian literature. Much less studied and appreciated than the other major female poets of the Italian Renaissance (Vittoria Colonna, Veronica Ga`mbara, and Gaspara Stampa), Isabella di Morra composes rime of unforgettable clarity and cohesion. Her poetics insist on a very limited range of themes, namely, the poet’s extreme isolation, the conflict between human desire and Fortuna (Fortune), and nature as the primary interlocutor of her verses. The vehemence of her openly autobiographical expression and her stern opposition against the incomprehensible laws of nature make her a great precursor of Romantic poets. What distinguishes Isabella is 1242

her reinterpretation of the mystery of human suffering and the silence of Nature as a reflection of divine will. In a handful of verses, Isabella synthesizes a dense poetic and religious evolution. However, it is unquestionable that her poetry offers itself as a symbolic self-portrait of the female condition violently oppressed by a society that denies her liberty and respect. Abandoned by her father who fled the desolate village of Valsinni in Basilicata and confined her against her will in their castle after he joined the French, Isabella found in poetry the only solace to her complete solitude. Valsinni is the prison where the poet spent her life sentence. She found an admirer in the Spanish poet Diego Sandoval de Castro who lived with his wife nearby and sent Isabella several letters and poems.

ISABELLA MORRA When this friendly connection was discovered, Isabella was stabbed to death. It is worth summarizing the editorial history of Isabella’s canzoniere. Only six years after her death (1552), in Venice Gabriele Giolito published a part of her opus, eight sonnets and one canzone in the volume Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobilissimi intelletti (Verses of Several Esteemed Neapolitan Gentlemen and Other Noble Intellects), which was edited by Ludovico Dolce. After two subsequent reprints of the same anthological book, Dolce published a new Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nuovamente raccolte et impresse (New Collection of Verses of Several Esteemed Neapolitan Gentlemen and Others, 1556), in which he inserted Isabella’s other sonnets plus three canzoni, although one of them (‘‘Signor, ch’insino a qui’’) was in fact a revised version of a previously published canzone. This is probably Isabella’s most complex and fascinating poem. Finally, Isabella’s compositions are present in Lodovico Dominichi’s Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (Several Verses of Some Highly Noble and Virtuous Women, 1559). Dominichi arranges the poems in order to echo the narrative evolution of Petrarch’s canzoniere and uses the first version of the canzone ‘‘Signor, che insino a qui.’’ In 1693 and 1695, Antonio Bulifon edited a volume by the title Rime delle signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Ga`mbara e Isabella di Morra (Verses of the Ladies Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Ga`mbara, and Isabella di Morra), which however corrected Isabella’s canzone to the Virgin Mary (‘‘Quel che piu` giorni a dietro’’). Bulifon’s book was also the model for De Gubernatis’ nineteenth-century edition (Antologia delle poetesse del secolo decimosesto, 1883). Bulifon believes that the expression Dea (Goddess) as a synonym for the Virgin Mary is inappropriate. He removes this term three times in the canzone. For example, in verse 30, ‘‘che dal deserto accolta fu tra i Dei’’ (who from the desert was received among the Gods), he writes: ‘‘Bei’’ (‘‘Beautiful’’) instead of ‘‘Dei.’’ In verse 71, ‘‘Quanto ti fu a vedere, o Dea, soave’’ (How sweet was it for you to see, o Goddess), Bulifon presents the substitution of ‘‘o Dea’’ with ‘‘o alma’’ (o Soul); and finally, he also rewrites the second part of the last verse of the poem ‘‘ch’ e` Reina del ciel, Dea degli dei’’ (She who is Queen of Heaven, Goddess of the Gods), which becomes ‘‘ch’e` Reina del ciel, madre di Dio’’ (She who is Queen of Heaven, Mother of God). Bulifon’s editorial interventions do not regard any theological inaccuracies. Given the heated debate

between Catholics and Protestants about the nature of Mary, Bulifon aimed at assuring that Isabella’s simile would not be seen as a wrong application of Catholic doctrine. In Isabella di Morra e Diego Sandoval de Castro (1929), Croce offered a new commentary on Isabella’s canzoniere. However, both Croce and De Gubernatis overlooked the Rime di diversi and based their editions on Dominichi’s book. Croce recognized this error in an article in 1939, which is now part of Aneddoti di varia letteratura. A thorny and fascinating issue is the debate over the correct sequence of the poems. The single sonnets and canzoni are narrative segments that lend themselves to different possible autobiographical accounts. As an example, Bulifon’s edition opens with the canzone ‘‘Poscia ch’al bel desir troncate hai l’ale’’ (Now that you have clipped the wings of the beautiful desire), which is Isabella’s moving and detailed autobiography. In this poem, she mentions her father’s departure, her solitary youth, and first of all Fortune’s fierce persecution. The other two openly religious canzoni follow, thus constructing a narrative text close to Baroque devotional literature with a strong emphasis on the suffering of a soul exiled in the world. The religious layer expressed by the first three longest poems would set the tone for the rest of the canzoniere. Maria Antonietta Grignani’s recent and accurate edition sees the sonnet ‘‘I fieri assalti di crudel fortuna’’ (Of the fierce assaults of cruel Fortune) as the introductory composition. Although this sonnet shares the same insistence on the cruelty of Fortune, it also mentions the solace the poet receives from the Muses, ‘‘vo procacciando con le Muse amate’’ (I keep procuring with the beloved Muses, v. 6), and thus seems to signify a more traditional Incipit. The religious canzoni are moved to the end of the canzoniere in order to stress a sense of resignation and defeat. In other words, this structure indicates that Isabella tries to embrace religion as a last resort, when she saw no positive outcome for her life. Specific historical references are absent from Isabella’s canzoniere with the exception of a possible reference to the defeat of Francis I (1544) in the sonnet ‘‘Fortuna che sollevi in alto stato’’ (Fortune, you who raise to high condition) where we read an allusion to ‘‘il mio re da te vinto e prostrato’’ (my king conquered by you and prostrate). As far as her more explicitly religious compositions are concerned, of special interest is the canzone ‘‘Signor, che insino a qui, tua gran mercede’’ (Lord, 1243

ISABELLA MORRA who until now, by your great mercy), which is an original spiritual exercise based on the poet’s contemplation of the single traits of Christ’s face. Isabella asks Jesus to grant her the possibility of sketching his face through her verses. She phrases this request through this powerful sentence: ‘‘Questa grazia, Signor, mi sia concessa / ch’io mostri col mio stil te a me stessa’’ (This grace, O Lord, concede me / so that through my style, I reveal you to myself).

Biography Born into a noble family of the region Basilicata, ca. 1518. Her father Giovan Michele Morra, lord of Favale (today Valsinni) in the province of Matera, allied with the French during war with Spain; after their defeat abandons wife Luisa and their eight children and flees to Paris (1528). The young Isabella experiences the father’s departure as an unrecoverable loss, the first blow of the ‘‘cruel Fortune,’’ and desolate Valsinni as a prison from which she could not escape. The only meaningful, and tragic, event of her life is the arrival of the Spanish nobleman Diego Sandoval de Castro, a poet himself and member of the Florentine Academy, whose wife, Antonia Caracciolo, befriends Isabella, who begins a literary correspondence with her husband. The insistent rumors about an illicit relationship with Diego move three of Isabella’s brothers and two of her uncles to murder her along with her tutor, ca. 1545. Later, Diego Sandoval is also killed. ARMANDO MAGGI Selected Works Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobilissimi intelletti, edited by Ludovico Dolce, Venice: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1552. Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nuovamente raccolte et impresse, edited by Ludovico Dolce, Venice: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1556. Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne, edited by Ludovico Dominichi, Lucca, 1559.

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Rime delle signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Ga`mbara e Isabella di Morra, edited by Antonio Bulifon, Naples, 1693. Isabella di Morra. Le rime, edited by Angelo de Gubernatis, Rome: Forzani, 1907 (De Gubernatis follows Bulifon’s edition). Bronzini, Domenico, Isabella di Morra, con l’edizione del canzoniere, Matera: Montemurro, 1975. Rime, in Benedetto Croce, Isabella di Morra e Diego Sandoval de Castro, Palermo: Sellerio, 1983. Canzoniere: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Irene Musillo Mitchell, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1998. Rime, edited by Maria Antonietta Grignani, Rome: Salerno, 2000.

Further Reading Cambria, Adele, Isabella: La triste storia di Isabella Morra. Le rime della poetessa di Valsinni, edited by Giovanni Caserta, Venusia: Osanna, 1996. Caserta, Giovanni, Isabella di Morra e la societa` meridionale del Cinquecento, Matera: Meta, 1976. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Sulle prime stampe delle rime d’Isabella di Morra,’’ in Aneddoti di varia letteratura, 4 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1953–1954. Croce, Benedetto, Isabella di Morra e Diego Sandoval de Castro, Palermo: Sellerio, 1983. De Giovanni, Neria (editor), Isabella Morra e la poesia del Rinascimento europeo, Proceedings of the conference of the Association Internationale des Critiques Litteraires held at Valsinni in 1999, Alghero: Nemapress, 2001. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Per Isabella Morra. Testi e documenti,’’ Rivista di letteratura italiana, 2, no. 3 (1984): 519–554. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Isabella Morra, Rime, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Isabella di Morra e la Basilicata, Proceedings of the conference held at Valsinni in 1975, Matera: Liantonio, 1981. Malpezzi Price, Paola, ‘‘A Sixteenth-century Woman Poet’s Pursuit of Fame: The Poetry of Isabella di Morra,’’ in The Flight of Ulysses, edited by Augustus A. Mastri, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Schiesari, Juliana, ‘‘The Gendering of Melancholia: Torquato Tasso and Isabella Morra,’’ in Refiguring Woman. Perspectives on Gender and the Italian. Renaissance, edited by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Vitelli, Franco, ‘‘Sul testo delle ‘Rime’ di Isabella di Morra,’’ in I Gaurico e il Rinascimento Meridionale, Proceedings of the conference of the Studi di Montercorvino Rotella, 10–12 April 1988, edited by A. Granese, S. Martinelli, and E. Spinelli, Salerno: Centro Studi sull’Umanesimo meridionale, 1992.

GUIDO MORSELLI

GUIDO MORSELLI (1912–1973) An outstanding writer, whose reputation is primarily posthumous, Guido Morselli was remarkably versatile. At the source of Morselli’s works (which were written in an increasingly frenetic manner between 1963 and 1973, the year he committed suicide), there is a careful and meticulous plan to make his narrative reflect the themes of the philosophical and ideological debates of his time. Morselli’s novels are a mode of fanta- or metahistory. In an exchange with his publisher (the Milanese Adelphi) that occurred between the third and fourth parts of Contropassato prossimo: Un’ipotesi retrospettiva (Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis, 1975), Morselli contests the ‘‘notorious’’ Italian prefix, fanta of Fantascienza (Science Fiction) when it is aimed only at the future. Morselli speaks of a fantastic history that presents an alternative account of things that have already happened. By attending to insignificant details, the fantastic historian can affirm the logic of a development that did not take place. In such a history, not only would the Central Empires have emerged victorious in World War I, as Contropassato prossimo imagines, but such an outcome would also have been preferable for the future of Europe. Accepting peace under the Germans, Europe would have avoided World War II, and would soon have been unified. Morselli stigmatizes the passive conception of the historical happening with a parody of the historical novel, Divertimento 1889 (Divertimento 1889, 1975), the story of a fictitious escapade in the life of King Umberto I. Furthermore, in a previous novel, Roma senza papa (Rome without Pope, 1974), a satire of trendy dogmatism in the Catholic Church, Morselli, an advocate of a secular form of religion, had called for the renewal of the Roman Church at the threshold of the third millennium. Individual and social history, even if they are laid out in parallel narratives, run not only on separate paths, but at very different speeds, as happens in Il comunista (The Communist, 1976). The contrast between the protagonist and the political organization of the Italian Communist Party foreshadows the dissolution of Communist ideology in the 1980s. The novel, written in 1964–1965,

remained in draft form for some time at the publisher’s, Rizzoli, despite a signed contract. The same novel did not have much better luck with the Turinese publisher Einaudi. Italo Calvino’s letter of rejection, dated 5 October 1965, survives in the publisher’s archives as one of the most embarrassing documents of shortsighted literary judgment. Calvino politely but candidly informed Morselli that he had turned down the novel because of its political content (Calvino, I libri degli altri, 1991): Le ho detto questo prima, come avrei potuto dirglielo prima di leggere il Suo romanzo: insomma e` chiaro che gran parte del mio giudizio e` basato su questo a-priori. Cominciando a leggerLa ho pero` provato interesse. Il Suo libro [...] mi faceva appunto rimpiangere che Lei non avesse scritto, che so?, una divagazione sul movimento operaio. I have told you this before, just as I would have been able to before reading your novel: to be honest, it is obvious that a large part of my judgment is based on this a priori. However, when I began to read it, I was really interested. Your book [...] made me regret that you had not written, let’s say, a digression on the working-class movement.

According to Calvino, one does not write a good political novel by demystifying the untouchable reality of the Italian Communist Party. It was thus not any literary imperfection that led to Morselli’s difficulties with the publishing world. It was rather the ideological prejudices shared by both the Catholic and secular cultures, cultures hostile to nonconformity and real criticism, that are to blame. Morselli’s spiritual testament is Dissipatio H. G. (Dissipatio H. G., 1977), written in 1972–1973. The novel recounts how someone contemplating suicide spends June 2, Italian Republic Day, inside a cave; when he emerges the following day, he finds the world emptied of its human population. It is a final cry for solidarity, and an unnerving denunciation of mankind as an estranged planetary species. Morselli’s own suicide at the age of 60 achieved the paradoxical effect of finding readers for his works. The literary community, made up of publishers, critics, and professors, during the 1960s and 1970s showed its intellectual limitations or bias in its belated acceptance of Morselli. 1245

GUIDO MORSELLI

Biography Guido Morselli was born in Bologna into a middleclass family on 15 August 1912. His mother died when he was 12 years old. Attended the High School Parini in Milan and then the State University in Milan, where he graduated in law. Alternated his work as a clerk with research trips to England and Scandinavia. During the war, stayed in Calabria without taking part in any major actions. In 1945, moved permanently from Milan to Varese where he built ‘‘La Santa Trinita`,’’ a detached house on the slope of Monte Rosa, in Sasso di Gavirate. Contributed sporadically to newspapers and periodicals, one of which was Il Mondo. In 1973, returned to Milan where, on 31 July of the same year, he took his own life. His library is preserved at the Civic Library in Varese. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works Collections Romanzi, edited by Elena Borsa, Sara D’Arienzo, and Paolo Fazio, Milan: Adelphi, 2002.

Fiction Roma senza Papa, 1974. Contropassato prossimo. Un’ipotesi retrospettiva, 1975; as Past Conditional: A Retrospective Hypothesis, translated by Hugh Shankland, 1989. Divertimento 1889, 1975; as Divertimento 1889, translated by Hugh Shankland, 1986. Il comunista, 1976.

Dissipatio H. G., 1977. Un dramma borghese, 1978. Incontro col comunista, 1980. Uomini e amori, edited by Paolo Fazio, 1998. Una missione fortunata e altri racconti, 1999.

Nonfiction Proust o del sentimento, 1943. Realismo e fantasia, 1947. Fede e critica, 1977. Diario, edited by Valentina Fortichiari, 1988. La felicita` non e` un lusso, edited by Valentina Fortichiari, 1994.

Further Reading Borsa, Elena, and Sara D’Arienzo (editors), Guido Morselli: i percorsi sommersi. Immagini manoscritti documenti, Novara: Interlinea, 1998. Borsa, Elena, and Sara D’Arienzo (editors), Guido Morselli: i percorsi sommersi. Inediti, immagini, documenti, Novara: Interlinea, 1999. Calvino, Italo, I libri degli altri, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Costa, Simona, Guido Morselli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981. Fortichiari, Valentina, Invito alla lettura di Guido Morselli, Milan: Mursia, 1984. Fortichiari, Valentina (editor), Guido Morselli: immagini di una vita, Milan: Rizzoli, 2001. Fortichiari, Valentina, ‘‘Introduzione e Cronologia,’’ in Romanzi, edited by Elena Borsa, Sara D’Arienzo, and Paolo Fazio, Milan: Adelphi, 2002. Lessona Fasano, Marina, Guido Morselli: un inspiegabile caso letterario, Naples: Liguori, 1998. Villani, Paola, Il caso Morselli: il registro letterario-filosofico, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1998. Vittoz, Dominique, ‘‘Guido Morselli: problemi di integrita` editoriale,’’ in Allegoria, 10 (1998): 156–166.

ENZO MOSCATO (1948–) Enzo Moscato, considered to be the spokesman of a new theater of poetry, has his ancestors not only in famous Neapolitan authors and composers, but also in Antonin Artaud, Jean Genet, the symbolist poets of the end of the nineteenth century, and in Pier Paolo Pasolini. Thanks to Moscato, the dark depths of the city come out in the open, and with mocking arrogance, conquer the center stage. The troubled family, which Eduardo De Filippo used as a metaphor of growing corruption, now becomes a 1246

rule of life. Touches of neogothic intrigue, ghosts, and gloomy expressionistic visions are present, but not as coups de the´aˆtre. Gypsies, bastards, and castrated boys populate Pie`ce Noire (Black Comedy), which was directed by Cherif in 1983, starring Marisa Fabbri. In this play, the Lady, an ex-prostitute who killed her son in an attempt to castrate him, owns a series of nocturnal rooms specializing in young transvestites. She ‘‘adopts’’ three foundlings, and initiates them to the profession. Desiderio, her

ENZO MOSCATO favorite, lives a symbiotic relationship with the Lady, and is eventually poisoned by her. Poisoning and blinding between sisters are central themes in Festa al celeste e nubile santuario (Celebration at the Celestial and Lonely Sanctuary), on stage in 1983. Love letters, as in a nineteenth-century feuilletons style, are utilized in Ragazze sole con qualche esperienza (Girls Alone with Some Experience), on stage in 1985, a slapstick comedy with continuous plot reversals and endless skits, even in the presence of real death. Bordello di mare con citta` (Brothel on the Sea, Near the City, 1987), plays with citations, in a revival of genre from the spy story to a Camorra drama. An old brothel has been converted into a health spa by Titina, the prostitute, and Assunta, the healing charlatan. In Moscato’s works, the pivot is the obsessive parade of transsexuals, with their ritual dressing up in a romantic and ridiculous vaudeville, a machinery of metamorphosis through prosthetics, in working-class condominiums and in brothels. The transsexuals choose for themselves aliases such as Hong Kong Suzy and Shanghai Lil (cheap Chinese exoticism in the Neapolitan Spanish Quarter), and Greta Garbo (the nostalgic tailor of Duncan and Coco Chanel in Pie`ce Noire). The dissolution of sexual identity leads to an inherent ambiguity of the main character, who could be indifferently a man or a woman, as well as to the multiplication of moods, of dissociated emotional instincts, while the sacred and the profane are always contaminated. The proximity between the church and the brothel, reminiscent of the suburban proximity between sitting room and prostitution house, exalts the genitalia, with women driven by dark desires and the transvestites equipped with rulers to measure the customers’ private parts. Often these individuals are disfigured by physical infirmities, in an atmosphere typical of Garcia Lorca, like the sisters’ blindness or dumbness in Festa al celeste e nubile santuario. The Eros linked to the religious theme often produces blasphemy and Black Mass liturgy, burlesque litanies as the initiation of a girl to prostitution in an ancient bacchanal in Bordello di mare con citta`. Here the religious orthodoxy is attacked by making a cardinal the unintentional killer of an aspiring child prostitute, who happens to be his niece. In the background, pop style commercials alternate between mournful flashbacks that evoke the dead and tales about bastards killed by their mothers. The anthropologically southern memory of Giambattista Basile and Ernesto De Martino evokes aching and obscene funeral cries, magic

ceremonies to foretell the future, love filters, aborted fetuses preserved in cruets, shocking nightmares of children eating their feces, and epileptic crises ending in purgative colic, in a chaotic mixture of miracles and tricks for survival. Official medicine is also ridiculed by the staging of healers, with the underlying risk of their casting a spell, and by the parodic lexical coinages reminiscent of the scientific language. Nor is the Italian language itself spared. Moscato makes a mockery of lexical difficulties, when choosing the lines for his simplest characters; he cites Raffaele Viviani more than Eduardo De Filippo. On the other hand, the koine` is decentralized in a multicolored chaos, from Venetian to Spanish, from Latin to French, with lyrical segments from Sylvia Plath to Jean Cocteau and to Baudelaire (in Pie`ce Noire), with fairy tales and animal tales, proverbs, and changes of register. This is seen in the poem Partitura (Score), on stage in 1988, where the author identifies with Leopardi’s ghost in Naples during the cholera epidemic. In Rasoi (Razors, 1992), a recital that mixes musical counterpoints with a revival of the kitsch popular song and the Neapolitan sceneggiata, the playwright exposes an irresistible inclination for the melodrama. In his 25-year theatrical career, Moscato has written tragedies, comedies, monologues, and oneact plays, beginning with Scannasurece (Mousetrap, 1982). Among his most recent work, Sull’ordine e il disordine dell’ex macello pubblico (Concerning the Order and the Disorder of the Former Public Slaughter House, 2001), on the 1799 Neapolitan Revolution; Kinder-Traum Seminar—Seminario sui bambini in sogno (Seminar on the Children in Dreams), written in 2002 as a memorial to Holocaust victims; and Hoˆtel de l’Univers—re´citchantant (Hotel of the Universe, 2003), dedicated to music in the cinema.

Biography Enzo (short for Vincenzo) Moscato was born in Naples, 20 April 1948. Graduated in philosophy at the University Federico II in Naples, 1974; taught at the high schools in Naples and in Oristano (Sardinia); theatrical debut with Carcioffola in Rome; worked as an actor with directors such as Mario Martone in Morte di un matematico napoletano (1992), Pappi Corsicato in Libera (1993), Raoul Ruiz in Le Voyage clandestin (1994), Pasquale Marrazzo in Malemare (1997), and Massimo Andrei in Mater Natura (2003); translated and adapted for the stage Anthony Burgess’ 1247

ENZO MOSCATO A Clockwork Orange, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, Eugene O’Neill’s The Sea Plays, Antonin Artaud’s La Confe´rence au Vieux Colombier; as a singer recorded traditional songs, Embargos (1994) and Canta` (2001). Won prestigious awards: in 1985 the Riccione/Ater, in 1988 the IDI, in 1988 and 1994 the UBU, in 1991 the AGIS Golden Ticket, in 1994 the International Radio Award of the Ostankino Festival (Russia), and in 2002 the Annibale Rucello and the Viviani awards. Is currently the artistic director of the Teatro Mercadante in Naples. PAOLO PUPPA Selected Works Collections L’angelico bestiario (Festa al celeste e nubile santuario, Pie`ce noire, Ragazze sole con qualche esperienza, Bordello di mare con citta`, Partitura), Milan: Ubulibri, 1991. Quadrilogia di Santarcangelo (Mal d’Hamle´, Recidiva, Lingua carne soffio, Aquarium Ardent), Milan: Ubulibri, 1999. Sull’ordine e il disordine dell’ex macello pubblico, Napoli: Suor Orsola Benincasa, La buona stampa, 2001.

Plays Rasoi, 1992. Embargos, 1994. Compleanno, 1994. Luparella, 1997. Canta`, 1999. Trianon, 1999. Arena Olimpia, 2001.

Fiction Occhi gettati e altri racconti, 2003.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Enzo Moscato e la tradizione del remoto,’’ in Misure critiche, 100–102 (1996–1997): 165–171. Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Enzo Moscato: Parole e musica in Rasoi,’’ in E. Moscato, Rasoi, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Carillo, Gennaro (editor), ‘‘Il testo raccolto: Sul pensiero teatrante di Enzo Moscato,’’ in Barba, Davide and Delia Morea (editors), ‘‘Un secolo di teatro napoletano 1900–2000,’’ Nord e Sud, 5 (2000): 123–138. De Matteis, Stefano, Lo specchio della vita. Napoli: Antropologia della citta` del teatro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Fiore, Enrico, Mar del teatro: Uno sguardo mediterraneo su vent’anni di spettacolo, Naples: Pironti, 1999. Fiore, Enrico, Il rito, l’esilio e la peste. Percorsi nel nuovo teatro napoletano: Manlio Santanelli, Annibale Ruccello, Enzo Moscato, Milan: Ubulibri, 2002. Lezza, Antonia, Rappresentazione e rappresentabilita` di un evento: Il ’99 nella letteratura teatrale contemporanea, in Augusto Placanica and Maria Rosaria Pelizzari (editors), Novantanove in idea: Linguaggi miti memorie, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2002. Libero, Luciana (editor), Dopo Eduardo: Nuova drammaturgia a Napoli, Naples: Guida, 1988. Libero, Luciana, ‘‘Effetto Napoli. Quindici anni di drammaturgia napoletana: Un riconoscimento Mancato,’’ in Sipario, 561 (1995): 75–77. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Un anno e un secolo di teatro,’’ Annuario 1999 dello spettacolo-Il Patalogo, 22 (1999): 76, 116, 130, 133, 142.

MOUNTAIN GIANTS See I Giganti della montagna (Work by Luigi Pirandello)

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LUISA MURARO

LUISA MURARO (1940–) Luisa Muraro is the leading figure of the Pensiero della differenza (the theory that advocates ‘‘thinking sexual difference’’) in Italy. Through her essays on history, linguistics, philosophy, and her animated contributions to various magazines, Muraro came to the study of the feminine mystique. She participated in the revolts of 1968, which in Italy were dominated by students, and collaborated on the project connected with the journal L’erba voglio. This publication was led by Elvio Fachinelli, who criticized the institution of the school and the authoritarianism that characterized its subjects and relationships and fought for educational reform that would go beyond the pedagogic. She joined the feminist movement, entering the Demau group, known also as ‘‘Demistificazione autoritarismo’’ (‘‘Demystification of Authoritarianism’’), the first group in Milan to organize itself independently of a political party, and which sought to discuss the problems inherent to the sexed feminine role. In 1972, the Demau group dissolved into smaller circles, which met in Via Cherubini. One cooperative of 15 women broke from the group and, in 1975, privileging the separatist practice of doing, it gave life to the historical Libreria delle Donne of Dogana Street (The Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective). The bookstore sold feminine works, but most importantly provided a context for the discussion and diffusion of the ideas and the new practices of feminism. In this context, Lia Cigarini represented a line of continuity of the pluralistic Milanese movement, while Luisa Muraro elaborated the Pensiero della differenza. Muraro edited and translated two books by Luce Irigaray (Speculum: De l’autre femme, 1975; and Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, 1978), published only the year before in France, both fundamental in the Italian elaboration of feminist theory. The books radically criticized the category of the questione femminile, or ‘‘feminine question,’’ bringing to the fore instead the question of sexual difference. Thus the female sex was rethought in terms of a dual conception of being, a concept that considers woman both an original and a primary form. In 1976, Muraro published La signora del gioco: Episodi di caccia alle streghe (The Lady of the Game: Witch-Hunt Episodes), which analyzed

witch trials that took place between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the trial of two worshipers of a feminine divinity, called Madonna Oriente or the Signora del Gioco. The work reflects the sensibility that led to the birth of women’s history, a discipline distinguished both by the characterization of the object of study and by the subjective and emotive presence of the author in its elaboration. In 1979, Muraro wrote the introduction for the Feltrinelli edition of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas, already published as the inaugural title for the Milanese feminist press La Tartaruga. Woolf, Muraro wrote, was perhaps the first to understand ‘‘that women can fight social inferiority by transforming it into a positive value of difference by means of their own separate politic.’’ (Introduzione, in V. Woolf, Le tree ghinee, 1979). She then dedicated herself to linguistics, publishing Maglia o uncinetto: Racconto linguistico-politico sulla inimicizia tra metafora e metonimia (Knitting or Crocheting: A Linguistic-Political Story on the Enmity Between Metaphor and Metonymy, 1981). Speaking, in fact, is like knitting because it requires two needles. Departing from the distinction proposed by Jacobson between metaphor as the axis of selection and metonymy as the axis of combination (both necessary in every symbolic production) and making reference to psychoanalytic thought, which gave a body and a sex to the discourse of the rational subject, Muraro redefined the complex, inherently different nature of language. Language, she argued, recognizes our being-body and beingword and connects pleasure and knowledge. There exists, then, a ‘‘sort of bridge between two seasons of subjectivity which in Maglia o uncinetto shows itself in its auroral moment and thus in all its potentiality,’’ suggested Ida Dominijanni (La parola del contatto, 2004). The year 1983 witnessed the affirmation of the Pensiero della differenza. The numero verde issue of the journal Sottosopra came out, entitled Piu` donne che uomini (More Women Than Men). Taking the conflict between the desire to win and noninvolvement as its point of departure, it interrogated the possibility of giving life and form to a feminine symbolic and to a world in which women value themselves as actors on the social stage. The 1249

LUISA MURARO same year, Muraro founded with others the Comunita` Filosofica Diotima, a research group based in Verona: Her intent was to philosophically think sexual difference, definitively interrupting the false universality and neutrality of masculine philosophical discourse. Amongst the activities of Diotima, the yearly grande seminario (great seminar) distinguished itself; several resulting books testified to its importance, beginning with Il pensiero della differenza sessuale (Thinking Sexual Difference, 1987) and Mettere al mondo il mondo (Giving Birth to the World, 1990). This intellectual path, which led to the elaboration of the theory of the symbolic mother, was reconstructed in Non credere di avere dei diritti (Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, 1987), signed by the Libreria delle Donne but written in large part by Muraro. In L’ordine simbolico della madre (The Symbolic Order of the Mother, 1991), Muraro wrote that from her criticism of the patriarchy she gained ‘‘autocoscienza ma non la capacita` di significare liberamente le grandezza femminile,’’ (self-awareness, but not the capacity to freely signify feminine greatness), encountered in the original relationship with the mother. Only this relationship manages to mediate ‘‘il nostro essere corpo insieme al nostro essere parola’’ (our being-body together with our being-word), making the creation of a new symbolic order possible. Each woman can recognize herself as different, an autonomous and active part of a structure sexed in its aspects of thought, experience, subjectivity, and relations. This last, relational form of autonomy, in fact, created a new social pact between women who practice difference and recognize female authority. Muraro chose, thus, ‘‘di sostituire l’attaccamento infantile alla madre con il saper-amarla e di considerare la lingua imparata da lei come la forma prima (archetipa) di questo sapere,’’ (to substitute infantile attachment to the mother with knowing how to love her, and to consider the language learned from her the first form (archetypal) of this knowledge), thereby privileging the reality that ‘‘exceeds’’ the dominant symbolic-social order. This explains the current phase of her studies, which began with Guglielma e Maifredo: Storia di un’eresia femminista (Guglielma e Maifredo: History of a Feminist Heresy, 1985). According to the heresy made public by Guglielma da Pirovano, which unfolded in Milan in the thirteenth century and gave rise to a new church, Guglielma incarnated the Holy Spirit; after her death, Maifreda became a vicar and administered the sacraments. 1250

Thus is proposed a relationship between God and the feminine sex without male mediation. This is the premise of the encounter of Muraro with the mystic texts lived between the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, beginning with Le Mirouer des simples ames of Marguerite Porete, who was burnt at the stake as a heretic in Paris in 1310. In creating a personal, direct relationship with God, these women conquered a freedom ‘‘connaturata all’amore’’ (‘‘deeply rooted in love’’) whose ‘‘terreno di lotta e` l’ordine simbolico’’ (‘‘battlefield is the symbolic order’’). In this way, their thinking comprises a theology in the maternal language and addresses itself to a God of women. Luisa Muraro’s original work must be considered in a panorama of thought in which other forms of feminism exist. These other approaches continue to maintain the importance of the corporeality of the feminine experience and to criticize the forms of theoretical dualism between sexuality and the symbolic.

Biography Born in Montecchio Maggiore (Vicenza), 14 June 1940, number six of 11 children; father was a Resistance fighter in the Giustizia e liberta`; groups. Graduates in philosophy of science from the Universita` Cattolica in Milan, 1965; there she learns ‘‘what is metaphysics’’ studying with professor Gustavo Bontadini, himself a student of Giovanni Gentile; marries Franco Vaiani, 1965; son Carlo is born, 1968; begins her academic career, soon interrupted by the student movement of 1968. Becomes instructor at the high school. Joins feminist group Demau, and is among the creators of the Libreria delle donne in Milan, 1975; becomes researcher in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Verona, 1976; where founds, with others, the philosophical community Diotima, 1983; director of the journal Via Dogana, 1991. Her books have been published in France, Germany, England, Spain, and the United States. LAURA MARIANI Selected Works Nonfiction La scimmia pedagogica, 1972. La Signora del gioco: Episodi di caccia alle streghe, 1976. Giambattista Della Porta mago e scienziato, 1978. ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Virginia Woolf, Le tre ghinee, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979.

LUDOVICO ANTONIO MURATORI Maglia o uncinetto: Racconto linguistico-politico sulla inimicizia tra metafora e metonimia, 1981; rpts. 1998 and 2004. Guglielma e Maifreda: Storia di una eresia femminista, 1985; rpt. 2003. L’ordine simbolico della madre, 1991. Lingua materna scienza divina: Scritti sulla filosofia mistica di Margherita Porete, 1995. La folla nel cuore, 2000, edited by Clara Jourdan. Duemilaeuna donne che cambiano l’Italia, 2000 (edited with Annarosa Buttarelli and Liliana Rampello). Le amiche di Dio: Scritti di mistica femminile, 2001, edited by Clara Jourdan. Il Dio delle donne, 2003.

Translations Luce Irigaray, Speculum: L’altra donna, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975. Luce Irigaray, Questo sesso che non e` un sesso, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978.

Further Reading Benedetti, Laura, Julia L. Hairston and Silvia M. Ross (editors), Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp (editors), Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford, UK-Cambridge, US: Blackwell, 1991.

Burke, Carolyn, Naomi Schor and Margaret Whitford (editors), Engaging with Irigaray: Feminist Philosophy and Modern European Thought, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Calabro`, Anna Rita, and Laura Grasso (editors), Dal movimento femminista al femminismo diffuso: Ricerca e documentazione nell’area lombarda, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Cigarini, Lia, La politica del desiderio, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1995. Diotima (Research Group), Il pensiero della differenza sessuale, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1987. Diotima (Research Group), Mettere al mondo il mondo: Oggetto e oggettivita` alla luce della differenza sessuale, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1990. Dominijanni, Ida, ‘‘La parola del contatto,’’ in Luisa Muraro, Maglia o uncinetto, Rome: Manifestolibri, 2004. Libreria delle donne di Milano, Non credere di avere dei diritti: La generazione della liberta` femminile nell’idea e nelle vicende di un gruppo di donne, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987; as Sexual Difference: A Theory of Social-Symbolic Practice, translated by Patricia Cicogna and Teresa de Lauretis, Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Restaino, Franco, ‘‘Il pensiero delle donne sulle donne,’’ in Nicola Abbagnano, Storia della filosofia, 4th ed., vol. 4, Turin: UTET, 1994.

LUDOVICO ANTONIO MURATORI (1672–1750) Ludovico Antonio Muratori, often considered the ‘‘father’’ of modern Italian historiography, is certainly one of the greatest and most prolific Italian historians and scholars. He began his career as a priest and librarian in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan, where he completed his first publication, Anecdota latina ex Ambrosianae Bibliothecae codicibus (Latin Anecdotes from the Codices of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 1697–1698), a collection of primary documents. In Milan, he also befriended the poet and playwright Carlo Maria Maggi, and shortly after his death both edited his poems and dedicated one of his earliest works, the Vita di Carlo Maria Maggi (Life of Carlo Maria Maggi, 1700) to him. Muratori quickly acquired a reputation for his archival work, and Rinaldo d’Este I

eventually offered him a position as librarian and keeper of the public archives of the duchy of Modena, which he accepted in 1700. In Modena, he devoted most of his time to writing, editing, and compiling ancient documents. He also developed an interest in literary criticism and began to plan a sort of ‘‘general society’’ of Italian literature, which he outlined in Primi disegni della repubblica letteraria d’Italia (First Designs of the Literary Republic of Italy, 1703), written under the pen name of Lamindo Pritanio. His interest in literature continued in the essays Della perfetta poesia italiana (On Perfect Italian Poetry, 1706) and Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le scienze e le arti (Reflections on Good taste in the Sciences and the Arts, 1708–1715), as well as with his 1251

LUDOVICO ANTONIO MURATORI Osservazioni (Observations), written for a 1711 edition of Petrarch’s poems, and his edition of the works of Lodovico Castelvetro (1727). In 1716, Muratori was named provost of Santa Maria della Pomposa in addition to his duties at the ducal library, and energetically conducted the congregation until 1733. During his time, he also worked to defend the Este family’s rights to Comacchio, contesting the claims of the papacy, and published his research on the matter in Delle antichita` estensi ed italiane (1717–1740). Between 1723 and 1738, he gathered and edited materials for Rerum italicarum scriptores (Historians of Italy), a 24-volume collection of primary documents of Italian history dating from 500 to 1500 (a 25th volume of indexes appeared posthumously in 1751). This is the first monumental example of a compilation of source documents for the study of history. It was followed by a series of 75 studies on medieval Italy, collected in the work Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi (1738–1742), on which he labored for five years. These writings are deemed of particular importance because the medieval period had heretofore been scarcely studied and had been thought to be of little interest. Muratori’s ideas about the Middle Ages revolutionized that historiographical field. His next major project, Novus thesaurus veterum inscriptionum (New Collection of Ancient Inscriptions, 1739–1743), was a significant contribution to the study of epigraphy. After publishing primarily collections of ancient documents, Muratori then began to reconstruct history from these compiled texts. The result was the 12volume Annali d’Italia dal principio dell’era volgare sino all’anno 1749 (Annals of Italy from the Beginning of the Vulgar Age to the Year 1749, 1744– 1749), the first historical study of its kind. Contemporary historians, however, considered this massive work of little interest as an objective reconstruction due to Muratori’s insistence on ecclesiastical values. In general, Muratori’s publications treat varied, and often obscure, historical subjects, and range from philosophical to theological, legal, and poetic topics. He recognized the interdependence of the arts, so much so that his ideas affected several disciplines and areas of study. His style was simple and reasoned and he insisted on clarity in his writing. He sought to reconcile theoretical problems with practical ones, treating intellectual ideas against a more realistic background. Muratori also supported extending the benefits of education and scholarly pursuit beyond a narrow intellectual and aristocratic elite to all those who 1252

desired them. He contended against prejudice, preconceived notions, ‘‘expected’’ opinions, dogmatic practices, and simple, erroneous conclusions, and disputed the belief in predictive signs and dreams, maintaining God as the only source of knowledge about the future. Instead, as he argued in Della forza della fantasia umana (On the Strength of Human Imagination, 1745), dreams are merely the active working of our imagination, which, while we sleep, created ridiculous and irrelevant ‘‘comedies.’’ Muratori’s fame became worldwide due to his discovery, in 1740, of a fragment of early Christian literature embedded in an eighth-century codex. Now named the Muratorian Canon, this document contains a list of the books of the New Testament, written in poor Latin, that probably dates back to Rome, 190 AD. Possibly written by Hyppolytus, this document qualifies and comments on certain books of the New Testament. Toward the end of his career, Muratori’s enemies spread rumors of heretical ideas in his writings. This caused him to appeal to Pope Benedict XIV, who, without officially approving of his questioned ideas, reassured him of his protection. One of his most popular works, Della pubblica felicita`, oggetto dei buoni principi (On Public Happiness, the Object of Good Principles, 1749), is a sort of manual on enlightened despotism. In this series of articles, Muratori wrote about concrete issues in many practical fields, from agricultural practices to differential taxation. Della pubblica felicita`, oggetto dei buoni principi also discusses the problems of urban life and the need for cleanliness and order. Muratori presented here his theories about the effects of air pollution and the importance of healthy, unspoiled food. These are perhaps some of his most important contributions, as he seems to foreshadow some of the worst ecological problems of the twenty-first century. Indeed, the notion of happiness as perceived in the seventeenth century through the ideals of a progressive society and the welfare of its citizens remains remarkably modern.

Biography Born in Vignola (Modena), on October 21, 1672. Studied at the Jesuit College of Modena. Degree in law and philosophy, 1694; ordained priest and named librarian of the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan where he spent five years, 1695; befriended the poet Carlo Maria Maggi, whose biography he wrote and whose poetry he edited, 1700; called by the duke of Modena to reorganize the library and

MUSIC AND LITERATURE the Estense Archives, a post he retained until his death, 1700; named provost of Santa Maria della Pomposa, 1716. Died of a prolonged illness in Modena, on January 23, 1750. BARBARA BIRD

Il cristianesimo felice nelle missioni de’ Padri della Compagnia di Gesu` nel Paraguai, 1743. Annali d’Italia dal principio dell’era volgare sino all’anno 1749, 12 vols., 1744–1749. Della forza della fantasia umana, 1745. Della pubblica felicita`, oggetto dei buoni principi, 1749.

Letters Edizione nazionale del carteggio, 1975–.

Selected Works

Edited Works

Collections Opere, edited by Giorgio Falco and Fiorenzo Forti, 2 vols., Milan: Ricciardi, 1964.

Rime varie di Carlo Maria Maggi sacre, morali, eroiche, 1700. Opere varie critiche di Lodovico Castelvetro, 1727.

Further Reading

Poetry ‘‘Rime,’’ 1699. ‘‘Poesie italiane inedite di Ludovico Antonio Muratori,’’ edited by Ada Ruschioni, 1966.

Latin Works Anecdota latina ex Ambrosianae Bibliothecae codicibus, 4 vols., 1697–1698. Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, 24 vols., 1723–1738. Antiquitates italicae Medii Aevi, 6 vols., 1738–1742. Novus thesaurus veterum inscriptionum, 4 vols., 1739–1743. De superstitione vitanda sive censura voti sanguinari, 1740.

Works in Vernacular Vita di Carlo Maria Maggi, 1700. Primi disegni della repubblica letteraria d’Italia, under the pseudonym of Lamindo Pritanio, 1703. Della perfetta poesia italiana, 1706. Riflessioni sopra il buon gusto intorno le scienze e le arti, under the pseudonym of Lamindo Pritanio, 2 vols., 1708–1715. Raccolta di tutto cio` che e` uscito fino al giorno d’oggi sulla controversia di Comacchio, 1712. Del governo della peste e delle maniere di, 1714. Delle antichita` estensi ed italiane, 2 vols., 1717–1740. La vita del Padre Paolo Segneri iuniore della Compagnia di Gesu`, 1720. Della carita` cristiana, in quanto essa e` amore del prossimo, 1723. La filosofia morale esposta e proposta ai giovani, 1735.

Andreoli, Aldo, Nel mondo di Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1972. Bertelli, Sergio, Erudizione e storia in Ludovico Antonio Muratori, Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1960. Continisio, Chiara, Il governo delle passioni: prudenza, giustizia e carita` nel pensiero politico di Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Florence: Olschki, 1999. Cottignoli, Alfredo, Muratori teorico: la revisione della Perfetta poesia e la questione del teatro, Bologna: CLUEB, 1987. Cottignoli, Alfredo, Alla luce del vero: studi sul Muratori storico, Bologna: CLUEB, 1994. De Martino, Giulio, Muratori Filosofo: ragione filosofica e coscienza storica in Lodovico Antonio Muratori, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Dupront, Alphonse, L. A. Muratori et la socie´te´ europe´enne des pre´-lumie`res: essai d’inventaire et de typologie d’apre`s l’Epistolario, Florence: Olschki, 1976. Fubini, Mario, Dal Muratori al Baretti, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Monaco, Michele, La vita, le opere, il pensiero di L. A. Muratori e la sua concezione della pubblica felicita`, Lecce: Milella, 1977. Per formare un’istoria intiera: testimoni oculari, cronisti locali, custodi di memorie private nel progetto muratoriano, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Vecchi, Alberto, L’opera religiosa del Muratori, Modena: Edizioni Paoline, 1955.

MUSIC AND LITERATURE Ever since the publication of Calvin Brown’s essay Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts in 1948, the study of the relation between music and literature has tried to establish itself as an autonomous discipline, musico-literary criticism, also called ‘‘Melopoetics,’’ and has also attempted

to define its own field of inquiry. There are three principal avenues of research: music in literature (the literary use of musical forms like the sonata or the fugue); literature in music (literary influences on music; the presence of a literary text in musical works, not only as a text to be set to music but also 1253

MUSIC AND LITERATURE as suggestive reference); and music and literature (the study of mixed genres, such as lyric opera, and of the collaboration between particular writers and musicians). In Italy, the fruitful collaboration between music and literature has been approached from multiple points of view, both by musicologists and by literary critics: as the history of poetry for music, that is, of the texts expressly created to be set to music, from the ballads of the Ars Nova of the fourteenth century to the fables of Serafino Aquilano at the height of Humanism and the opera librettos of Pietro Metastasio or of the classicist-Romantic Felice Romani, up to the canzone of the songwriters; and as the history of autonomous poetic texts set to music (consider the importance of Francesco Petrarca, Torquato Tasso, and Giovanbattista Marino for the history of the madrigal); as the history of concrete collaborative relations between writers and musicians, from Niccolo` Machiavelli and Philippe Verdelot (d. 1552) for the music of La mandragola (The Mandrake, 1518) to Arrigo Boito and Giuseppe Verdi or to Gabriele D’Annunzio and Pietro Mascagni; as for the presence of music in literature as a theme or subject consider, for instance, Giuseppe Rovani’s Cento Anni (One Hundred Years, 1868) or D’Annunzio’s Trionfo della morte (The Triumph of Death, 1894), with his references to Tristan und Isolde, or also as a source of stylistic inspiration (consider the influence of Richard Wagner and the technique of Grundthemen); as the study of the literary sources (dramas, novels) of opera librettos and their adaptation to librettos; as the analysis of the relation between word and music in specific musical works of individual artists. A further characteristic aspect of Italian literary culture is the literary ancestry of musical criticism, which is practiced professionally by writers and poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Italy, up until the sixteenth century the link between music and poetry was closely related, or at least it was in the music that has come down to us, which is to say music that has been written down. Indeed, not only was almost all of the music produced, just as in France and in other European countries, as vocal music based on a poetic text; but this music, moreover, modeled its structure on that of the poetic text being intoned. For the entire fourteenth century and up through the first decades of the fifteenth century, many composers also wrote poetic texts; we also have the very first examples of collaboration between a poet and a musician, like that of the novelliere Franco 1254

Sacchetti (ca. 1330–1400), who wrote for the most important composer of the Italian Ars Nova, Francesco Landini (ca. 1325–1397). We know that Sacchetti himself signed to each of his poetic texts the name of the musician or musicians who intoned it. Already in the fourteenth century, moreover, certain poetic forms had arisen, such as the ballad and the madrigal, which were expressly conceived as poetry for music. The union of poetry and music previously characterized the often improvised production of jongleurs and minstrels, poets-musicians who performed in piazzas and sometimes in courts, accompanying themselves on various instruments. In the Comedia (ca. 1305–1321) and his Rime (ca. 1283–1307), Dante provides evidence of the liturgical and secular musical practice of his time, making explicit reference to the practice of improvised song with instrumental accompaniment. In his De vulgari eloquentia (ca. 1304–1305; 2.10) he also stresses the connection between the accentual and metrical properties of poetry and the properties of the melody to accompany it. References to the music of the period are frequent in Tuscan short stories, beginning with Boccaccio’s Decameron (1373), in particular the sixth and seventh stories of the 10th day, on which later texts are modeled, such as the novelle by Giovanni Sercambi (1348–1424), or those in Giovanni Gherardo da Prato’s Paradiso degli Alberti (The Paradise of the Albertis, 1425). Just as in Dante’s episode of Casella in Purgatorio (II, vv. 106–119), the power of music to enchant souls and its angelic sweetness are emphasized. Beginning from the third decade of the fifteenth century, the presence of French and Flemish composers in Italy led to a development of new poeticmusical forms and, in addition, the tradition of written music began to fade, with the result that we know little about the music that was practiced in that period. The attitude of the Humanists toward music was profoundly different than that of the medieval era, which privileged music as an ars, and hence the musicus, an expert in numerical proportions, compared to the simple cantor who was ignorant of the rules. Music was regarded essentially as entertainment. The musical ideal of Humanism was not so much scientia as it was dulcedo, and can be summed up by an assertion in Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528): ‘‘I am not satisfied with a courtier if he is not also musical, and if, along with being at ease with books, he does not also know how to play various instruments; since, if we consider the matter well, no more honest and

MUSIC AND LITERATURE praiseworthy repose after labors and medicine for troubled souls can be found in leisure than this; and most of all in courts’’ (Book I, 47). Even women were given a certain degree of musical education, and although we have no evidence of female composers until the first half of the sixteenth century, we do know that some of the poetesses of the Renaissance or famous actresses such as Isabella Canali Andreini knew enough music to improvise verses, accompanying themselves on the lute and relying on a sequence of rhymes. Poetry written for music flourished in the courts, from the North to the South, from the Veneto to Ferrara and Florence and the Aragonese court of Naples. One of the most important poet-musicians was the Venetian Leonardo Giustinian (ca. 1385– 1446), appreciated in his lifetime as much for his creative gifts as for his gifts as a performer. His compositions, the so-called giustiniane, enjoyed such popularity that they were widely imitated: They are compositions in three voices, but only the highest voice is sung, while the others are left to the instruments. Indeed the court culture of the sixteenth century saw music and poetry as sisters: Poetry was the elder sister whose task was to identify the emotions, which music then highlighted and amplified. Such a relationship found its perfect expression in the madrigal, and its theorization in Pietro Bembo’s Prose della volgar lingua (Prose on Vernacular Eloquence, 1525). With the madrigal, however, the unity of poetic form and musical form was shattered; the subjection of music to poetry appears in the fact that the former expresses the concepts of the latter, but is not required to respect its form. The metric structure of the poetic text could no longer be immediately perceived, but is absorbed within the music, and the words and verses are repeated over and over again. With Bembo there also commences the Renaissance fortune of Petrarch, who is not only a supreme model of poetry but also a poet favored by madrigalists, with more than 2,000 compositions based on his work, in particular on his sonnets: The first known composer to set a Petrarchan text to music was Bartolomeo Tromboncino (ca. 1470–ca. 1535), the favorite musician of Isabella d’Este in Mantua. Next to Petrarch, a prominent place belongs to Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), and, beginning from the 1580s, to Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) and Rime, which were widely circulated among musicians even before the printed edition in 1581, through channels that are still not entirely clear. The fate of Tasso’s lyrics and of

those of his principal heirs, Battista Guarini and Giovanbattista Marino, created a publishing market parallel to madrigal lyrics that were predominantly intended for music. Moreover, pastoral fables such as Tasso’s own Aminta (1580) or Guarini’s Il Pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, 1590) influenced the emerging opera by providing not only narrative themes but also the metrical system at the core of the libretto, with the alternation of hendecasyllables for the recitative and closed strophic structures (of hendecasyllables or of measured meters) for the arias. The latter quickly made their own the metrical variety introduced into poetry by Gabriello Chiabera (1552–1638) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The most celebrated (though overvalued) instance of the relation between literature and music at the beginning of the seventeenth century was the alleged creation of opera on the part of the socalled Camerata de’ Bardi or Camerata Fiorentina. This name refers to a group of writers and musicians who, between 1573 and 1587, gathered in Florence at the house of Count Giovanni Bardi: among them was the theoretician Vincenzo Galilei (father of Galileo) and the musician Giulio Caccini. The designation ‘‘Camera Fiorentina’’ was also extended to another group of intellectuals who, after Bardi’s departure for Rome in 1592, met in the house of Jacopo Corsi, and which included the poet Ottavio Rinuccini and the musicians Emilio De’ Cavalieri, Jacopo Peri, and Caccini himself. From the circle of this second group arose the very first experiments in opera (the pastoral fable Dafne, born of the collaboration of Rinuccini, Peri, and Corsi, and later Euridice from Rinuccini and Peri, performed at the marriage of Maria de’ Medici and Henry IV of France in 1600), and this circumstance allows us to speak generically of a single Camerata fiorentina and to attribute to it the merit of having invented the opera, though almost involuntarily, since its intention was rather to revive Greek tragedy. This critical tradition is today considered misleading: The opera did not arise from a single cause, still less from a lone creative will, but rather from a complex of factors, some of which were already present in the musical practice of the period, such as the preference for melodic song and the tendency to differentiate melody and accompaniment, to which we should add Peri’s tendency toward dramatic expression, which was realized in what will later be called recitar cantando (singing acting). If the role of the Camerata must be restored to its proper dimensions, it is nevertheless true that 1255

MUSIC AND LITERATURE the opera was the privileged site of experiments, exchanges, and encounters between writers and musicians for at least three centuries. To the opening of the public theaters in Venice, beginning in 1637, and thus to the transformation of the opera from court spectacle to commercial spectacle, there corresponded a transformation of the libretto, which freed itself from its classical foundation in order to acquire the characteristics of contemporary Spanish dramaturgy (like the multiplication of plots and the uniting of the serious and the comic) and subjects that were no longer solely mythological, but also historical and heroic: Central to this transition are Accademici Incogniti in Venice and the Florentine Giacinto Cicognini, the author of the first ‘‘national-popular’’ libretto, Giasone (Jason), set to music by Francesco Cavalli in 1649. Opposing voices were soon raised against such freedom and irregularity, voices that gathered around the Arcadia movement, the librettist Apostolo Zeno (1668–1750), and later around Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), who expressed in his texts for music the dynamics between reason and passion, embodied in characters drawn from ancient history, and in elegant musical-literary forms such as the aria with a da capo. Another fundamental step in the formal evolution of the eighteenthcentury opera was represented by the playful theater of Carlo Goldoni and Baldassarre Galuppi, who created, particularly for their comic characters, arias and multisection finales, which are more suited to express dialogues and situations of conflict. Goldoni’s production of librettos was neither quantitatively nor qualitatively inferior to his production of prose, a testament as well to how the opera was, for impresarios, a much more remunerative practice than comedy. The attitude of writers toward opera is ambiguous: They almost always regarded with suspicion a genre that puts the literary component on the same plane as the musical and scenic ones, and that nullified the centrality of the text: On the other hand, many writers practiced the scorned profession of librettist. Moreover, as Renato di Benedetto notes with respect to the eighteenth century, public criticism—which can also assume the ferocious tones of satire, starting with Benedetto Marcello’s Teatro alla moda (Fashionable Theater, 1720)— existed side by side with love or interest expressed in private, as in the case of Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Poetiche e polemiche, 1988). The ‘‘question of opera’’ that occupied various eighteenth-century treatises is the critique of that split between poetry and music in which Italian writers see the cause of 1256

the decline of modern music. For them, music should aim at moving the passions of the heart and cannot exist as an autonomous form: hence the lack of interest in instrumental music, the critique of those who are excessively technically learned, the superiority of the voice to instruments, and that of the recitative to the aria, toward the goal of a truly dramatic music. These are all themes present in Enlightenment writings, such as Francesco Algarotti’s Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (An Essay on Opera, 1755) and Antonio Planelli’s Dell’opera in musica (On Opera, 1772). The Italian Romantics, unlike their German contemporaries, did not exhibit a particular interest in music, nor did there exist among Italian writers an enthusiast for Rossini comparable to Stendhal. The prevalent taste among the literati remained neoclassical, a taste to which a famous librettist like Felice Romani also adhered. On the other hand, the majority of librettists were drawn to the contemporary foreign theater and novel (first and foremost Sir Walter Scott and Victor Hugo), which is one reason why the subjects and atmospheres of European Romanticism arrived in Italy through the opera and not through literature. Of the great authors of Italian Romanticism, Giacomo Leopardi confined his thoughts on music to some passages of Zibaldone written around 1823, when he attended a performance of Gioacchino Rossini’s Donna del lago (Lady of the Lake) in Rome; Alessandro Manzoni was almost completely uninterested in music, despite his encounter with Giuseppe Verdi, arranged by Countess Clara Maffei. The dominant presence of opera in national cultural life appears instead in writers such as Giuseppe Rovani (1818–1874) and Carlo Collodi (1826–1890), in whose work themes and vocabulary derived from the contemporary theater appear frequently, and who also practice musical criticism; and, further, in the novels of Antonio Fogazzaro: Both Marina in Malombra (1881) and Franco Maironi in Piccolo mondo antico (as The Little World of the Past, 1895), are excellent pianists, and the music they play serves to depict their most hidden feelings. The case of Fogazzaro is peculiar, however, for his references to nonoperatic music and to musicians such as Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. Only at the end of the nineteenth century, with the Milanese Scapigliatura movement, did the relation between music and literature once again become fruitful: the Scapigliati saw in opera an important occasion for the renewal and deprovincialization of Italian culture, and Arrigo Boito (1842–1918) embodied the figure

MUSIC AND LITERATURE of the musician-writer, a kind of Hoffmann, hitherto foreign to Italian culture. The relation between the literary verismo of Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, and Federico De Roberto, and the musical realism of the so-called Giovane Scuola (Young School) (Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano, Puccini, Cilea, Franchetti) can be found in the plurality of styles, expressive registers, and subjects treated, as well as the quest for theatricality and chorality, which in literature tends to obscure the figure of the narrator, but which in opera leads to the expansion of the orchestra’s narrative role. An important chapter in the relationship between literature and music in the early twentieth century was the influence of Gabriele D’Annunzio, for various reasons: the intrinsic musicality of D’Annunzian verse; the musical subjects in novels like Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900) or Il Trionfo della morte; the love-hate relationship toward Wagner that reflected the attitudes prevalent among Italian writers; for his collaborative work with musicians such as in Mascagni’s Parisina (1913), Riccardo Zandonai’s Francesco da Rimini (1914) and Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Fedra (1915), the last two being among the few Italian examples of Literaturoper. D’Annunzio also played a major role in the launching of editorial initiatives like the series I classici della musica italiana, or establishing the Corporazione delle nuove musiche, both of which embodied certain musical tendencies of the twentieth century: the rediscovery of the Italian music of previous centuries, the openness to European innovations. Nevertheless, D’Annunzio was not able to mark out new paths in the musical theater; the results of his collaboration with contemporary musicians remained tied to the stylistic features of the late nineteenth century, and it was not by chance that his projects with Giacomo Puccini or Ferruccio Busoni fail. Perhaps more fruitful was his influence on symbolist drama in France and his idea of combining ballet, music, and stage design in the theater. The encounter between Futurism and music was also a failed one: In the Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi (1910), the avant-garde impulse that pushed for the disavowing, along with moonlight, of the waltz and the opera, ‘‘pesante e soffocante gozzo della nazione’’ (the heavy and suffocating gullet of the nation) did not create any artistic personality destined to leave a mark. From the 1930s on, the traditional area of exchange between writers and musicians, which is to say the opera, was exhausted: The Italian opera,

understood as a unitary artistic form, no longer exists. The influence of music on literature can now be seen in poetry, above all as a fascination with sound. A strong interest in music is present in poets such as Eugenio Montale, Giorgio Vigolo, Dino Campana and in the Canti barocchi (Baroque Songs, 1956) of Lucio Piccolo (1901–1969). On the other hand, the relation between writers and opera is especially one of personal passion for nineteenthcentury opera (as with Montale and Umberto Saba), even though various authors try their hands sporadically at the writing of theatrical texts for music: Mario Soldati, Riccardo Bacchelli, Vitaliano Brancati for Vincenzo Tommassini’s Il tenore sconfitto ovvero la presunzione punita (The Tenor Defeated, or Presumption Punished, 1950), and Eduardo De Filippo for Nino Rota’s Scuola di guida (Driving School, 1959); Alberto Savinio for Orfeo vedovo (1950), based on his own text. From 1925, Savinio was associated with Pirandello’s Teatro d’Arte in Rome, which gathered dramatists and musicians in poetics and in practice. Music is a fundamental component in Savinio’s fiction as well as in his strictly musical writings, collected in Scatola sonora (The Music Box, 1955) and in the pages dedicated to Verdi in Ascolto il tuo cuore, citta` (Listen to Your Heart, My City, 1944) or Narrate, uomini la vostra storia (Tell Your Story, Men, 1946). Interaction between literature and music in the second half of the twentieth century stand out in the collaboration of Luciano Berio (1925–2003) with Edoardo Sanguineti and Italo Calvino, in Passaggio (1963), and in La vera storia (1977–1978) and Un re in ascolto (1979–1984), respectively. In these latter two, the pre-eminence of musical structure over the poetic text is clear: Berio first creates the dramaticmusical frame, and then turns his attention to the texts, and this in spite of the fact that Calvino had provided him with a libretto for Un re in ascolto. More recently, Sanguineti himself does not shy away from working with young musicians, such as Andrea Liberovici (1962–) on Rap (1996) and on Sonetto (Sonnet). A distant echo of the close relation between music and poetry that has characterized Italian culture since the later Middle Ages can perhaps be seen in the cantautori, who emerged in the 1960s on the model of the French chansonniers: In their songs, the role of music is for the most part ancillary with respect to the text and its expressive, often political, valences. Among the most important achievements, also from the literary point of view, 1257

MUSIC AND LITERATURE is the reworking of poems by Edgar Lee Masters on the part of Fabrizio De Andre` (1940–1999) in Non al denaro, ne´ all’amore, ne´ al cielo and the antibourgeois satires of Enzo Janacci (1935–) and Giorgio Gaber (1939–2003). ANNA TEDESCO Further Reading Algarotti, Francesco, Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (1767); edited by Annalisa Bini, Lucca: Libreria musicale italiana, 1989; as An essay on the opera, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2003. Asor Rosa, Alberto (general editor), Letteratura italiana, vol. 6: Teatro, musica, tradizione dei classici, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Balsano, Maria Antonella (editor), L’Ariosto, la musica, i musicisti. Quattro studi e sette madrigali ariosteschi, Florence: Olschki, 1981. Balsano, Maria Antonella, and Thomas Walker (editors), Tasso, la musica, i musicisti, Florence: Olschki, 1988. Bernhart, Walter, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf (editors), Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field, proceedings of the First International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Graz, 1997, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999. Brown, Calvin S., Music and Literature: A comparison of the arts, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1948, 2nd ed. rev. 1987. De Angelis, Marcello, Leopardi e la musica, Milan: RicordiUnicopli, 1987. Di Benedetto, Renato, ‘‘Poetiche e polemiche,’’ in Storia dell’opera italiana, edited by Lorenzo Bianconi, and Giorgio Pestelli, Part 2, Turin: EDT, 1988; as Opera

in Theory and Practice, Image and Myth, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Favaro, Roberto, La musica nel romanzo italiano del ’900, Lucca: Ricordi, 2002. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana, Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana, Sensualita` senza carne. La musica nella vita e nell’opera di D’Annunzio, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Guarnieri Corazzol, Adriana, Musica e letteratura in Italia tra Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Sansoni, 2000. Haar, James, Essays on Italian Poetry and Music in the Renaissance, 1986. Hall, Robert A. Jr., ‘‘Music in the Works of Fogazzaro,’’ in New Looks at Italian Opera. Essays in Honor of Donald J. Grout, edited by William W. Austin, Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1968. Mellace, Raffaele, ‘‘Letteratura e musica,’’ in Il Novecento. Scenari di fine secolo, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Moestrup, Jørn et al. (editors), Letteratura italiana e musica, Atti del XIV congresso AISSLI (Odense 1991), Odense: Odense University Press, 1997. Palisca, Claude V., ‘‘The ‘Camerata Fiorentina’: A Reappraisal,’’ in Studi musicali (1972): 203–236. Pirrotta, Nino, Scelte poetiche di musicisti. Teatro, poesia e musica da Willaert a Malipiero, Venice: Marsilio, 1987. Planelli, Antonio, Dell’opera in musica (1772), edited by Francesco Degrada, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1981. Sanguineti, Edoardo, and Andrea Liberovici, Il mio amore e` come una febbre e mi rovescio, Milan: Bompiani, 1998. Taviani, Fernando, and Mirella Schino, Il segreto della Commedia dell’arte, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1982. Tedeschi, Rubens, D’Annunzio e la musica, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1988. Zumthor, Paul, Essai de poe´tique me´die´vale, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972.

MUSIC CRITICISM Two spirits have always coexisted in the history of music criticism in Italy: one ‘‘literary’’ (that is, literati and writers who write about music with varying degrees of expertise), and the other ‘‘technical,’’ or ‘‘specialist’’ (that is, musicians and musicologists who write about music with technical language and expertise). The first, literary spirit prevailed by far over the second throughout the entire nineteenth century, and has also had some noteworthy exponents during the twentieth century and up through the present day. ‘‘Specialized’’ musical criticism, on the other hand, has a young 1258

history in Italy compared to that of other European countries, a history that dates to the 1840s. Those years, in fact, saw the first specialized musical newspapers, the Gazzetta musicale di Milano (later Musica e Musicisti, 1842–1848; 1850–1862; 1866–1902), L’Italia musicale (1847– 1848; 1850–1859), and the Gazzetta musicale di Firenze (1853–1855), all connected with the principal Italian musical publishers, Casa Ricordi, Francesco Lucca, and Giovan Gualberto Guidi. In these newspapers, the pages on operatic performances, which made up most musical criticism in the daily

MUSIC CRITICISM newspapers and magazines of the age’s varied culture, were flanked for the first time by theoretical articles, careful historical inquiries, or accounts of artists and works from other countries. Moreover, these magazines marked the beginning of the transition from a system of artisanal production— in which the editor and publisher often coincided in the figure of the ‘‘manager/owner’’—that often entailed irregular publication and short duration, to an industrial system, in which editors, managers, and publishers occupied distinct positions. An example of the first type, in which the critic’s constitution was still predominantly literary, is Giacinto Battaglia (1803–1861), the founder along with Gaetano Barbieri of Teatri (1827–1831), of Barbiere di Siviglia (1842), and later of Figaro (1845–1877), and one of the most prominent figures of the Milanese journalistic scene, to whom we owe the birth of many journals such as Rivista Europea, later edited by Carlo Tenca (who also signed the introductory article of the first issue of Italia Musicale, on 7 July 1847, calling for the renewal of the arts). Many Italian music critics developed around Battaglia and the Figaro enterprise, beginning with his collaborator, Francesco Regli (1802–1866), who later created Pirata and was the author of a useful Dizionario biografico dei piu` celebri poeti e artisti melodrammatici (A Biographical Dictionary of the Most Famous Theatrical Poets and Artists, 1860), and up to Benedetto Bermani (1802–1877), one of the last editors/owners, and the guiding spirit of La fama (1842–1877), and a fierce conservative in matters of musical taste. Many such periodicals— Fama, Figaro, and Pirata for example—were also tied to theatrical companies, and Battaglia himself was also an impresario. An example of ‘‘industrial’’ journalism, on the other hand, aside from the periodicals published by Ricordi and Lucca, is Il Teatro Illustrato in Milan (1881–1892), published by Sonzogno, which inaugurated the vogue for magazines that are graphically elegant and richly illustrated. These magazines astutely combined the promotion of lyrical works belonging to the publishers themselves with the diffusion of musical culture to a wider audience. Among the first professional music critics, that is those endowed with specific musical expertise and able to use technical language, we must mention the Florentine Abramo Basevi (1818–1855), the moving force behind Gazzetta musicale di Firenze and Armonia (1856–1859), from whose pages he waged a true battle for the deprovincialization of Italian musical culture, the diffusion of instrumental music, and the reform of the melodrama. To

him we owe, among other things, his Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (A Study of the Operas of Giuseppe Verdi, 1859), which first appeared in installments in Armonia; it is not only the first analysis of the operas of the major Italian composer up through Simon Boccanegra, but also one of the first examples of a sophisticated musicological text. Beside him we must mention Alberto Mazzucato (1813–1877), a composer and maestro concertatore at La Scala, who collaborated for approximately 20 years with Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, leaving behind articles of particular interest for the history of orchestration and for analytical ideas. After 1861, thanks to the concession of freedom of the press, a proliferation of musical newspapers took place, and opinion journalism moved into the daily newspapers, into the so-called Appendici (Supplements) often entrusted to prestigious critics, such as Francesco D’Arcais (1830–1890) in Turin’s L’Opinione from 1851 on, or Filippo Filippi (1830–1887) in Milan’s Perseveranze from 1862 on. The latter is a longtime leading critic of the Milanese scene and among the first to undertake true reportage, going to Bayreuth to attend Wagner’s operas. D’Arcais, a friend of Eleonora Duse, also wrote for a long time for the Nuova Antologia (1866–1899), dealing in particular with the transformation of the Italian operatic world after the unification of Italy. By the end of the nineteenth century the first musicological periodicals emerged: Archivio musicale (1882–1884), Rivista musicale italiana (1894–1955), Il Pianoforte (1920), later La Rassegna musicale (1928), which up through the 1940s was the most influential Italian musical periodical. Its pages featured the writings of composers such as Alfredo Casella and Gian Francesco Malipiero, and musicologists such as Andrea Della Corte, Guido Pannain, Luigi Ronga, up through Massimo Mila and Fedele D’Amico, the most prominent figures in music criticism in postwar Italy. Throughout the entire nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, the literary roots of Italian music criticism remained quite solid, a proof not only of the Italian public’s lack of interest in a ‘‘technical’’ criticism, but also of the dominating presence of lyric opera (especially of Verdi) in Italian culture and the artistic debate. Many critics, even though they were not musicians, were directly involved in the theatrical world as librettists, dramatists, and impresarios. Antonio Gramsci’s assertion that opera is the only national-popular phenomenon of Italy is well-known; we may add 1259

MUSIC CRITICISM what Edoardo Sanguineti writes in a fine analysis of the relationship between Italy’s greatest operatic composer and Italian writers, namely that ‘‘it is difficult and perhaps impossible not to call ourselves, historically speaking, always, all of us, in one way or another, Verdians’’ (‘‘Il realismo di Verdi,’’ 2003). Among the writers who, during the nineteenth century, steadily practiced musical criticism and were also concerned with musical subjects in their own literary works are Carlo Collodi (1826–1890), Giuseppe Rovani (1818–1874), Leone Fortis (1824–1896), Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824–1893), and Arrigo Boito (1842–1918), all of whom, with the exception of Collodi, were also librettists (not to mention the journalistic activity of librettist Felice Romani). Collodi and Rovani both wrote for L’Italia musicale from its foundation in 1847 onward. Collodi also wrote for Florence’s Arte, and had a column in the theatrical newspaper Lo Scaramuccia, which he edited beginning in October 1853. Rovani collaborated as well on Gazzetta Musicale di Milano and was the supplement-writer of Gazzetta Ufficiale di Milano from 1853 on. In their columns, both men professed devotion to and nostalgia for the opera of Gioacchino Rossini and a certain perplexity for Verdi, but their attitudes toward the function of criticism were distinct. Collodi’s writings (correspondence or literary inventions) are witty, humorous, and polemical, and often fall into the category of fisiologie (portraits of the prima donna, the impresario, the tenor) or of the imaginary dialogue; those of Rovani, on the other hand (reviews, but also more meditative essays like the important Bellini e Meyerbeer o la musica drammatica secondo le scuole italiane e germanico-francese, which appeared in L’Italia musicale in 1856) are filled with aesthetic declarations. Emblematic of this is his declaration of how musical criticism ought to be conducted (cit. in Carlo Dossi, Rovaniana, 1946): There are people who care nothing for art in the strict sense of the word, or for the questions it provokes, or for Italian music, or Verdi, or anything else. These fine people, however, protest against our method of writing articles on the theater, and desire that a preference conceded to the noble work of genius not make us forget the singers [...] To these we should say before all else that our column is dedicated to questions of art rather than to the proverbial miseries of theatrical expediences. And when in questions of art we move to the sphere of simple execution, we desire that this be something of which art need not be ashamed.

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Collodi and Rovani, however, provided valuable evidence of opera’s penetration into Italian culture: for example, Collodi’s Macchiette (Sketches, 1880) and Rovani’s novel Cento Anni (A Hundred Years, 1868), which has a tenor, Angelo Amorevoli, as its protagonist, are pervaded by quotations from librettos, terms derived from musical terminology, comparisons with operatic situations, and openly melodramatic situations. Although with different shadings and varying degrees of prominence, Ghislanzoni, Fortis, and Boito can be included within the Scapigliatura movement (of which Rovani is a precursor), and they were among the protagonists of the querelle surrounding the renewal of lyric opera in the direction of the musical drama. These men also shared a critical attitude toward Wagner. Ghislanzoni edited L’Italia musicale and Rivista Minima, and he also wrote for the Gazzetta musicale di Milano; Fortis created and edited the newspaper Il Pungolo, and also had a regular column Le conversazioni della Domenica (Sunday Conversations) in Illustrazione italiana under the pseudonym ‘‘Doctor Veritas’’; Boito collaborated on Figaro, Il Pungolo, Perseveranza, and the Giornale della Societa` del quartetto. What made their critical activity unique was their identification of the opera as the privileged site for Italian artistic renewal, and their choice to become directly engaged in the musical arena as librettists and also (for Boito) as composers. The project of the Scapigliati, apart from the fame of Boito’s librettos for Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, did not fare well; and later, with the coming of the new century, the commitment of the intellectuals to lyric opera weakened. Opera (now perhaps more discussed than loved—consider Giacomo Puccini) nevertheless remains a crucial element of the national culture, and among the best music criticism of the twentieth century is that of two poets, Eugenio Montale and Giorgio Vigolo. Both were endowed with musical expertise (Montale is a baritone, Vigolo a pianist); the former wrote for Il corriere d’informazione from 1954 to 1967 and for Il corriere della sera, the latter for Il Mondo, the weekly managed by Mario Pannunzio from 1949 until its closing in 1966, and for various daily newspapers, and devoted himself to the composition of essays (on Stravinsky, Wagner, Toscanini, Bach) that appeared in Rassegna musicale and in other magazines. Montale’s music criticism shows the hallmarks of a professional critic, adopting the typical scheme of a review: introductory historical preface, an

MUSIC CRITICISM examination of the libretto or music in question, and an evaluation of its execution. Despite his declared predilection for ‘‘bad music,’’ for ‘‘impure, or theatrical’’ music, his attitude as an ‘‘ignorant honest man’’ in Prime alla Scala (1981), he also approaches the most recent musical tendencies with critical astuteness, for example in his correspondence from La Biennale Musica in Venice, as well as the music of the past, such as Handel and Purcell. Nevertheless, his preference for the ‘‘horrid operatic repertory, with something of a preference for the worst’’ (Satura, 1962) is a paradox that partly corresponds to the truth, to Montale’s preference for certain Verdian operas, which brings him close to Bruno Barilli and his Il paese del melodramma (1929). Indeed we owe to Barilli the creation of a cliche´ of Verdian criticism that enjoys great success throughout the twentieth century, that of Verdi the ‘‘peasant,’’ ‘‘whose breath reeks of onions,’’ of the rustic Verdi, whose Il Trovatore is his most complete success. This cliche´ is taken up by Umberto Saba, Alberto Moravia, and Alberto Savinio, but contested by a critic like Giacomo Debenedetti, who is also an occasional music reviewer for Milano sera. A cultured and passionate witness to the greatest musical period of the twentieth century (the years of the Callas-Tebaldi rivalry, of the great conductors like De Sabata, Celibidache, Karajan, or directors like Luchino Visconti) is Alberto Arbasino, a collaborator on the daily La Repubblica from its foundation in 1976, who collects in his Marescialle e libertini (2004)—that is Strauss and Stravinsky— almost 50 years of travels, notes, and musical memories with his unmistakable, cultured, light, sardonic style. An extreme ramification of literary passion for opera is embodied by Alessandro Baricco, who, after beginning his career as a music critic for Turin’s La Stampa, dedicates his first book to the musical theater of Rossini, and is also the creator of a successful television show dedicated to opera, ; L’amore e` un dardo (1993), a mangling of the verses L’amor ond’ardo from the aria of the Conte di Luna, Il balen del suo sorriso, from Il Trovatore. Additionally, Baricco, in a controversial essay entitled L’anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin (Hegel’s Soul and the Cows of Wisconsin, 1992) confronts the break between the public and ‘‘cultured’’ music that occurs in the twentieth century. Today, although Italian academic musicology has earned a prominent place in an international context, the musical debate and contemporary music are given little space in magazines and

newspapers, which attend more than anything else to worldly cultural events, like premieres at La Scala. There is also the emergence of several good popularizing magazines (Amadeus, for example) accompanied by a CD, just as the journals of the nineteenth century were accompanied by the publication of the so-called Fogli d’album (Album leaves). ANNA TEDESCO Further Reading Arbasino, Alberto, Marescialle e libertini, Milan: Adelphi, 2004. Baricco, Alessandro, L’ anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin: una riflessione su musica colta e modernita`, Milan: Garzanti, 1992. Baricco, Alessandro, Il genio in fuga, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1988; rpt. Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Barilli, Bruno, Il paese del melodramma, Lanciano: Carabba, 1929. Basevi, Abramo, Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (1859), edited by U. Piovano, Milan: Rugginenti, 2001. Boito, Arrigo, Critiche e cronache musicali di Arrigo Boito (1862–1870), edited by Raffaello De Rensis, Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1931. Boito, Arrigo, Tutti gli scritti, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1942. Capra, Marco, ‘‘Criticism—Italy: 1890–1945,’’ in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie, 2nd edition, London: Macmillan, 2001. Capra, Marco, ‘‘Verdi e la critica musicale di estrazione letteraria: il caso di Carlo Collodi,’’ in Verdi 2001. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi ‘‘Verdi 2001’’: Parma-New York-New Haven, 24 January– 1 February 2001, edited by Fabrizio Della Seta et al., vol. 1, Florence: Olschki, 2003. Collodi, Carlo, Opere, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Intermezzo, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1963. Dossi, Carlo, Rovaniana, edited by G. Nicodemi, 2 vols., Milan: Libreria Vinciana, 1946. Filippi, Filippo, Musica e musicisti, Milano: Brigola, 1876. Fortis, Leone, Conversazioni della domenica, 5 vols., Milan: Treves, 1877–1890. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Montale, Eugenio, Prime alla Scala, edited by Gianfranca Lavezzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Montale, Eugenio, Il secondo mestiere. Arte, musica, societa`, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Pestelli, Giorgio, ‘‘I Cento Anni di Rovani e l’opera italiana,’’ in: Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento: Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Regli, Francesco, Dizionario biografico dei piu` celebri poeti e artisti melodrammatici che fiorirono in Italia dal 1800 al 1860, Turin: Dalmazzo, 1860. Rosenberg, Jesse, ‘‘Abramo Basevi: A Music Critic in Search of a Context,’’ in The Musical Quarterly, 86 (2002): 630–688. Rovani, Giuseppe, Cento Anni, Milan: Redaelli, 1868.

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MUSIC CRITICISM Salvetti, Guido, ‘‘La scapigliatura milanese e il teatro d’opera,’’ in Il melodramma italiano dell’Ottocento: Studi e ricerche per Massimo Mila, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Il realismo di Verdi,’’ in Verdi 2001. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi ‘‘Verdi 2001’’: Parma-New York-New Haven, 24 January–

1 February 2001, edited by Fabrizio Della Seta et al., vol. 1, Florence: Olschki, 2003. Savinio, Alberto, Scatola sonora, Turin: Einaudi, 1955. Tordi, Rosita, Il manto di Lindoro. Rovani e il teatro d’opera, Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. Vigolo, Giorgio, Mille e una sera all’opera e al concerto, Florence: Sansoni, 1971.

ALBERTINO MUSSATO (1261–1329) Albertino Mussato was a contemporary of Dante; however, he is considered the most notable scholar working specifically in the context of ‘‘Paduan pre-Humanism,’’ a cultural movement developed around the figure of Lovato Lovati (ca. 1240– 1309) in the second half of the eleventh century. The Paduan pre-Humanists, a group that included lawyers, notaries, and law experts, sought to revitalize classical literature. In this environment, Albertino Mussato received a legal and literary education simultaneously. He was himself a notary and played an active role in the government of his city. His literary production varies from historical and philological works to religious poetry and tragedy. He composed two historical treatises: The first, the Historia Augusta de gestis Henrici VII (The Deeds of Henry VII, 1313–1315), focused on the years 1313 and 1314, the time of the descent of Emperor Henry VII in Italy; the second, De gestis italicorum post Henricum Cesarem (Italian Events after the Death of Emperor Henry VII, 1315– 1329), which covered the years between 1313 and 1329, the year of the author’s death. These works were not very significant, historically speaking: Mussato too often neglected national events to describe the vicissitudes of Padua. Nevertheless his historical reconstructions were based on facts that he witnessed, and are recounted with objectivity and accuracy. Their importance lay in the author’s intention to imitate Livy’s model, by narrating events in comparison to the history of Rome; they were modern attempts to integrate classical material. Mussato’s simulation of Livy was, however, often obscured because he was unable to recreate the classical style. The resulting texts exist more as rhetoric than genuine works of art. 1262

Mussato also composed in Latin two elegies, a group of religious poems (including five ‘‘Soliloquia’’ ), highly refined works that recall the introspective style of St. Augustine’s Confessions. He also wrote 18 verse epistles, of which the most famous is his answer to the monk Giovannino da Mantova. Giovannino believed in the superiority of theology above the sciences and poetry, and considered the latter to be in conflict with the science of God. Mussato replied that poetry had divine origins, that most classical authors were great teachers of literature, and that their lives were moral exemplars. Moses himself, he argued, like other prophets of the Bible, often talked to the people through poetry. Mussato’s best-known work is the tragedy Ecerinis (The Tragedy of Ecerinis, 1315), modeled on the plays of Seneca, who had been forgotten during the Middle Ages. His rediscovery of Seneca gave new impulse to theatrical production. The tragedy celebrates the Paduan rebellion against the former Veronese tyrant Ezzelino Romano from 1197 to 1260. It ends with the violent death of the tyrant and his family. Mussato’s adaptation of Latin theater is highly original. The characters have the same fierceness as those in Seneca, but at times Mussato exceeds in the description of their savageries (for instance, when Ezzelino discovers that he is one of the sons of Satan, he rejoices in his abominable paternity); as a result, the realism of the entire work is compromised. Ezzelino is the incarnation of tyranny, and his character thinly alludes to the contemporary Veronese leader Cangrande della Scala. Indeed, the Ecerinis sounds a warning to the citizens of Padua against Cangrande, who is attempting to take control of their city. Mussato’s drama lacks a strong dramatic

GIROLAMO MUZIO structure, and the narrative parts are lengthier than the dialogues. The work’s primary import, thus, does not lay in its artistic value, but rather in its original use of the classical inheritance.

Historical Treatises Historia Augusta de gestis Henrici VII, 1313–1315. De gestis italicorum post Henricum Cesarem, 1315–1329.

Poetry De obsidione domini Canis Grandis de Verona circa menia Pafuane civitatis, ca. 1321; critical edition by Giovanna M. Gianola, 1999.

Biography Born in Padua in 1261. In spite of great financial problems caused by his father’s death, completed his education as a notary and began practicing in 1282. Began his political activity as ambassador to Pope Boniface VIII, then to the court of the Emperor Henry VII. Appointed podesta` of Florence, 1309. At the same time, began his political and military opposition to the lord of Verona, Cangrande della Scala. Wounded in battle, 1314. Crowned as the poet and historian of Padua, 1315, the culmination of his intellectual career. During Marsilio da Carrara’s tyranny in Padua, participated in a conspiracy to depose him but the plot failed, and he was sent to Chioggia in exile. With no hope of returning to Padua, subdued by Cangrande in 1328. Died in poverty in Chioggia on 31 May 1329. VALERIO VICARI See also: Humanism Selected Works Collections Albertini Mussati Historia augusta Henrici VII caesaris & alia quae extant opera, edited by Felice Osio, Venice: Tipografia Pinelliana, 1636.

Theater Ecerinis, 1315; critical edition by Jean-Fre´de´ric Chevalier, 2000; as The Tragedy of Ecerinis, translated by Robert W. Carrubba et al., 1972; as Ecerinis, translated by Joseph R. Berrigan, 1975.

Further Reading Billanovich, Giuseppe, ‘‘Il preumanesimo padovano,’’ in Storia della cultura veneta, vol. 1, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1976. Bosoppi, Ivana, Alberto Mussato Ecerinis: Konkordanz und Frequenzwortlisten, Hildesheim and New York: OlmsWeidmann, 1997. Cieli, Susanna, ‘‘L’Historia Augusta’ di Albertino Mussato,’’ in Quaderni Veneti, 23 (1996): 35–83. Dazzi, Manlio, Il Mussato preumanista (1261–1329). L’ambiente e l’opera, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1964. Feo, Michele, ‘‘The ‘Pagan Beyond’ of Albertino Mussato,’’ in Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition: Essays in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, edited by Peter Goodman and Oswyn Murray, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Raimondi, Ezio, Metafora e storia: studi su Dante e Petrarca, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Ronconi, Giorgio, Le origini delle dispute umanistiche sulla poesia: Mussato e Petrarca, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Shaw, Michael H., ‘‘Mussato’s Use of Seneca and Statius in Ecerinis,’’ in Renaissance and Renascences in Western Literature, 2, no. 1 (1980): 1–10.

GIROLAMO MUZIO (1496–1576) Courtier, diplomat, man of letters, and preceptor of important figures of the Renaissance, Girolamo Muzio added to his name the appellative Giustinopolitano, after the city of origin of his father’s family, Giustinopoli (now Koper-Capodistria, Slovenia). Muzio belonged to the social group, common in Italy at the time, of intellectuals who found a living as courtiers.

Muzio’s nom de plume probably did not make him a sublime writer—apart from some sparks of irony, his prose seems rather flat and pedantic— but his copious production remains important for Renaissance studies, since it covers most of the crucial issues of the time. Muzio’s thoughts are not particularly original either. He was a type of intellectual who shapes his arguments by quoting 1263

GIROLAMO MUZIO the ideas of others. Yet, Muzio’s staunch polemical style can be considered a mark of originality, along with the volubility of his points of view. He advocated in his later works what he abhorred in the previous ones, in most cases without acknowledging the change of position. Muzio’s reputation was high among his contemporaries, as proved by the mention of his name in many letters, and by his being appointed as a tutor of the future duke of Urbino, and of the future great poet, Torquato Tasso. Muzio wrote both poetry and prose. His metrically impeccable canzoniere mainly describes his love for the famous courtesan Tullia D’Aragona (Rime della signora Tullia D’Aragona, 1547). The same muse inspires the dialogue Dialogo della signora Tullia D’Aragona della infinita` di amore (On the Infinite Kinds of Love, 1547), a rendition of the most common ideas on love circulating in Italy at the time. In the typical fiction of this genre from Plato onward, Muzio pretends to report a discussion held by others (Tullia and her guests). The collection of poems is Egloghe (Eclogues, 1550), divided into five books dealing with various arguments, each symbolized by a tree. In Rime diverse (Various Rhymes, 1551) Muzio presents his ideas on poetics. Although not quite a ‘‘juvenile error,’’ Muzio’s erotic production precedes his vast output of moral and religious writs. Operette Morali (Moral Essays, 1550) is a collection of essays on virtue, marriage, and obedience of the subjects, consolation for death and other common topics of life conduct. The admirer of the courtesan Tullia is apparently equally enthusiastic of the merits of virginity: Beata Vergine Incoronata (Blessed Crowned Virgin, 1567) is a biography of the Virgin Mary and of 12 saint virgins. Historia Sacra (Sacred History, 1570) is a bombastic chronicle of the history of the church from its origins to the seventh pontiff. Avvertimenti Morali (Moral Advices, 1571) is a pedagogical essay, while Lettere catholiche (Catholic Letters, 1571) collects some of Muzio’s fierce treatises against the reform and its supporters in Italy. Other works include Catholica disciplina di Principi (On the Catholic Discipline of Princes, 1561); and Instituzione di sposa eccellente (On the Perfect Wife, 1566). Muzio’s more interesting contributions are focused on behavior and language. Duello (On Duel, 1550) and Il gentilhuomo (The Gentleman, 1571) are essays in which Muzio preaches the exemplary moral duties of the upper classes. The virtue purported by Muzio is however more nobiliary than 1264

fully Catholic. For instance, Muzio opposes the use of rigid armors that do not allow kneeling in prayer. But, he claims that honor is the most important thing for a knight, which is against all the precepts of the Council of Trent, as expressed for instance by Cardinal Silvio Antoniano. Muzio participated actively in the debate about the kind of language Italians had to adopt. The posthumous collection Battaglie di Hieronimo Mutio Giustinopolitano per difesa della italica lingua (Battles of Hieronimo Mutio Giustinopolitano in Defence of the Italian language, 1582) presents Muzio’s essays on this subject. Muzio supported the adoption of Italian (Volgare) versus Latin. Muzio’s position was not uniform, however. His initial sympathies for Tuscan as a model for the Italian language turned into a profound aversion for the Tuscan pretensions and for the ideas of Varchi and Tolomei. A man of the court, Muzio embraced the position of Trissino, opting for a language as spoken in the courts of central and northern Italy. On the other hand, however, Muzio followed the humanistic principle that only the great writers must be taken as linguistic models. Nevertheless, in contradiction with his positioning for the language of the courts, Muzio considered mainly Florentine authors (Boccaccio above all) as supreme models, thus bringing back the point to Bembo’s position. Muzio was not a systematic thinker, and his inspiration was spurred by a single polemical occasion. His polemical approach was not devoid of humor. His pedantry was, instead, often overwhelming. Muzio remained so attached to the linguistic parameters he supported he did not hesitate to proclaim Dante a poor poet because of his eclectic language. However, we owe to Muzio’s obsession for the purity of the Italian language the definition of important grammar and orthographic rules of modern Italian. In spite of Muzio’s defending culture and virtue over blood as a mark of nobility, and in spite of his advocating a language easily understood by all, it seems an exaggeration to speak, as some do, of a democratic attitude. Muzio’s ideas on nobility express the principles commonly adopted by the rising court nobility against the contempt of the feudal e´lite. Muzio’s call for clarity of speech repeats what has already been recommended by Castiglione and della Casa. Muzio’s epistolary output is rich. His addressees are personalities of high political or cultural rank, such as Isabella Gonzaga, Alfonso D’Avalos, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Guidobaldo II della Rovere, King Henry III of France, Francesco I

GIROLAMO MUZIO de’Medici, Francesco Trivulzio, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and many others. Muzio considers writing letters a rhetorical art aimed at promoting the image of the writer to posterity, after the model of classical authors and Petrarch. Nevertheless, real life flows in. Particularly touching are the last letters, when an octogenarian Muzio, dismissing the consummated art of courtly nonchalance (sprezzatura), laments his poverty and the increasing needs of old age. Most of Muzio’s works have never been republished.

Biography Born in Padua (1496) to a family claiming Slovenian aristocratic descent, who changed the name from Nuzio into Muzio (sometimes Latinized as Mutio). Still young, followed his father to Capodistria-Koper, where spent some of his early years. Added the appellative ‘‘Giustinopolitano’’ to his family name. Studied law. Served as a courtier in several courts, in Italy, and abroad. A renowned teacher of illustrious children, such as the future duke of Urbino. Undertook diligently the diplomatic and courtly tasks his important masters assigned to him. Began publishing quite late, after devoting himself to his career as a courtier. The combination of courtly opportunism, personal inclination to embrace strong positions, and the historical aura turn him into an inexorable arm of the Inquisition. Denounced Massimiliano Celso Martinengo in 1551. Convinced a reluctant Giulio Camillo to dictate to him his theory on theater.

Died in poverty, a guest of his friend Ludovico Capponi in the villa La Paneretta, near Florence in 1576, at 80. BERNARDO PICICHE` Selected Works La polvere del Mutio, Milano: Antonio Borgio, 1545. Dialogo della Signora Tullia D’Aragona della infinita` d’amore, Vinegia: Giolito de Ferrari, 1547. Duello, Vinegia: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1550. Operette Morali, Vinegia: Giolito de Ferrari, 1550. Vergeriane, Vinegia: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1550. Egloghe, Vinegia: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1550. Mentite Ochiniane, Vinegia: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1551. Rime diverse, Vinegia: Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1551. De Romana ecclesia tractatus Hieronymi Mutii Iustinopolitani, Pisauri: Heredi di Bartolomeo Cesani, 1563. Beata Vergine Incoronata, Pesaro: Girolamo Concordia, 1567. Il Gentilhuomo, Venegia: Andrea Valvassori, 1571. Battaglie di Hioronimo Mutio, Vinegia: Pietro Dusinelli, 1582; as Scavuzzo, Carmelo ed. Lettere (facsimile of the volume published in Florence by Sermartelli in 1590), with an introduction by Laura Borsetto, Sala Bolognese: Forni, 1985. Borsetto added a comprehensive bibliography of Muzio’s works. Battaglie per la difesa dell’Italica lingua, Messina: Sicania, 1995.

Further Reading Anastasi, Angelo, La ‘‘Poetica’’ di Girolamo Muzio, Acireale (Catania): Tipografia Orario delle Ferrovie, 1905. Belardinelli, Guglielo, La questione della lingua; un capitolo di storia della letteratura italiana, Roma: Amadori, 1904.

MY TROUBLES BEGAN See Memoriale (Work by Paolo Volponi)

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N THE NAME OF THE ROSE See Il Nome della rosa (Work by Umberto Eco)

NAPLES with Charles III of Spain (1734), who made it the capital of an autonomous reign and fostered important architectural projects such as the Royal Palace of Portici, the Palace of Capodimonte, the Hostel of the Poor, and the Botanic Gardens. The diffusion of the culture of the Enlightenment and of the revolutionary ideals resulted in the Constitution of the Neapolitan Republic on June 1, 1799, which was suppressed by the Sanfedista reaction. In 1806, Naples was first given to Giuseppe Bonaparte, then to Gioacchino Murat, but returned under the Bourbons as apart of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies after the Congress of Vienna (1815). Afterward, it adhered to the liberal movement; and, after Garibaldi’s triumphal entry into the city on September 7, 1860, it was annexed to the Savoy Kingdom. During World War II, it was occupied by NaziFascist forces, against which it rebelled heroically in the ‘‘Four Days of Naples,’’ September 27–30, 1943, anticipating the entry of the Allied troops on October 1, 1943.

A city of art famous for its beautiful sites, its pleasant climate, and its exuberant inhabitants, Naples has been celebrated by poets and, due to its music and the ‘‘canzone napoletana’’ in particular, is well known all over the world. The original core of the city was an island, Megaride, on which the Castel dell’Ovo presently lies. During the reign of the Normans (1139), it had a remarkable economic development. With the Swabians (1187) it became a great cultural center, especially after the foundation of the university by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen (1224). With the Angevins it became the capital of the Kingdom of Naples in 1282. Under Alfonso of Aragon (1441), it was the capital of the vice-royalty, then became an important cultural and artistic center (seventeenth century), although constantly troubled by economic and social problems that led to the revolt of Masaniello in 1647. Struck by the plague of 1656, it then passed under the control of the Hapsburgs of Austria (1707–1724) and then under the Bourbon dynasty 1267

NAPLES Lying over the Gulf of Naples, dominated by Vesuvius, and facing the islands Capri, Ischia, and Procida, Naples has always been a destination for an elite tourism that reached its peak in the nineteenth century and was relaunched at the end of the 1980s by the administration of Mayor Antonio Bassolino. In this period of so-called Neapolitan Renaissance, the city enjoyed a lively cultural phase characterized by the reclamation of archaeological and artistic sites such as the old town center and of urban spaces, such as the famous Piazza del Plebiscito, with the Royal Palace and the Church of San Francesco di Paola. The city is also the seat of important cultural institutions and universities, in particular the ‘‘Federico II’’ University, which also includes the ‘‘Orientale,’’ the ‘‘Second University,’’ and the private Suor Orsola Benincasa University. Prestigious libraries and archives include the National Library, the Library of the Society of Native History, the Palatine Library, and the State Archives. Over time, the intense cultural activity that has taken place in Naples has made it one of the cultural capitals not only of Italy but of the world, a fact that reflects its openly universalistic character. A continuous line of development links the works of Humanists such as Iacopo Sannazaro and Giovanni Pontano, who was not only secretary of state but also the leader of what would become known, after his name, as Accademia Pontoniana, to that of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets such as Giulio Cesare Cortese and Torquato Tasso. Naples is also characterized by a strong and continuous philosophical tradition exemplified by figures such as Giordano Bruno and Tommaso Campanella and, most importantly, the philosophers of the so-called Southern Italy Enlightenment, namely Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the major figure in eighteenth-century Italian thought; Pietro Giannone (1676–1748), Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769); Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787); Gaetano Filangieri (1752–1788); Francesco Maria Pagano (1748–1799); Giuseppe Maria Galanti (1743–1806); and Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823). In the nineteenth century, the most important cultural contributions came from narrative, either in the tradition of urban realism of Francesco Mastriani and Salvatore Di Giacomo or in that of Neapolitan journalism, the culmination of which are the works of Matilde Serao. The great historian Francesco De Santis, whose Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870) was both a masterpiece of historiography and a crucial text in the formation of a national identity, was formed in 1268

Naples, where he also taught in the 1870s, after the end of his political career. In the first half of the twentieth century, the cultural life of the city centered on the figure of Benedetto Croce, who stimulated the concrete interests of a wide range of young scholars by giving them instruments through which to diffuse the values of their culture, in particular the famous journal La Critica (1903–1944), which was at the center of the intellectual formation of at least three generations of Italians. The narrative tradition, often concerned with the realistic exploration of the city, was continued by works such as Carlo Bernari’s Tre operai (Three Workmen, 1934), Domenico Rea’s Spaccanapoli (1947) and Gesu` fate luce (Jesus! Put On the Light, 1950), Giuseppe Marotta’s L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1947), and Anna Maria Ortese’s Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Bay Is not Naples, 1953) and merged easily with the neo-Realism of the 1950s, with authors such as Luigi Compagnone, Raffaele La Capria, Mario Pomilio, Michele Prisco, and, more recently, Erri De Luca. Contemporary Naples is represented in its contradictions by novelists such as Domenico Starnone; Giuseppe Montesano, whose allegorical and surrealistic Di questa vita menzognera (About This Deceitful Life, 2003) was awarded the Viareggio-Repaci Prize; and Diego De Silva, whose Certi bambini (Some Children, 2001) is one of the most powerful examples of fiction that explores the overwhelming presence of organized crime (the Camorra) in Neapolitan life. The province, and in particular the area of the Vesuvius, is the theme of Maria Orsini Natale’s fiction. The figurative arts in Naples can be documented throughout the centuries and through many media, including minor ones such as the handmade porcelains of Capodimonte. Its long lineage of painters includes Caravaggio (1571–1610), Battistello Caracciolo (1578–1635), Guido Reni (1575–1642), and Domenico Gargiulo, called Micco Spadaro (1609–1675), while the most important architects are Lorenzo Vaccaro (1655–1706) and Luigi Vanvitelli (1700–1773). In the nineteenth century, the school of Posillipo brought new realism to the established tradition of landscape painting, while in the twentieth century, after the Futurist period, which was particularly lively in Naples with artists such as the multitalented brothers Francesco (1884–1977) and Pasquale (1900–1975) Cangiullo, there were important examples of artistic avant-gardes, from Paolo Ricci to Mimmo Paladino, one of the members of the socalled Trans-avanguardia.

NAPLES Neapolitan theatrical life has deep roots dating back to the fifteenth century, first at the court of the Angevins then at that of the Aragonese, as Jacopo Sannazaro’s famous farces demonstrate. In addition to court theater, the fifteenth century was also characterized by the rise of sacred and popular theater, of which the most interesting examples are the dialect comedies in the meter of the frottola (in Neapolitan gliommero, or skein) of Pietro Antonio Caracciolo and the farse cavaiole of Vincenzo Braca (ca. 1566–ca. 1614). In the first half of the sixteenth century Marc’Antonio Epicuro (1472–1555) wrote pastoral plays, while the most famous storyteller was Velardiniello. The first Neapolitan company of commedia dell’arte appeared in 1575 and had among its members Silvio Fiorillo, who created the characters of Pulcinella and Capitan Matamoros. After 1592, the company had a permanent theater, the Stanza della Commedia of San Giorgio de’ Genovesi, with which began the history of permanent theaters. Other theaters included the Teatro de’ Fiorentini, the Teatro di San Bartolomeo, the Teatro Nuovo (1724), the Teatro del Fondo (1779), later called Mercadante, and many others built between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, among which, however, the Teatro San Carlo was always the most important. Naples saw a fruitful cultural season with Giambattista Basile, who composed nine dramatic eclogues in dialect, Le Muse Napolitane (The Neapolitan Muses, 1635), and a collection of 50 fairy tales, Pentamerone (The Pentameron, 1674), which has a clear theatrical structure. The golden age of the Neapolitan theater was the eighteenth century, when the librettists invented the comic opera, initially in dialect, then in Italian. However, it was in the nineteenth century that the playwrights emerged who made Neapolitan theater great: Antonio Petito (1822–1866), an actor-author with an extraordinary comic vein who contributed to the success of the mask of Pulcinella, and Eduardo Scarpetta (1853–1925), who adapted his farces and French vaudevilles to the tastes and the language of the local lower middle class. Meanwhile, the Neapolitan dialectal theater was characterized by the texts of Salvatore Di Giacomo and the comedies of intrigue of Diego Petriccione. The end of the nineteenth century was also the most successful period for the Neapolitan song, thanks to sophisticated poets and musicians such as Ferdinando Russo (1866–1927), Di Giacomo, Libero Bovio (1883– 1942), Ernesto Murolo (1875–1939), and Rocco Galdieri (1874–1923). In recent years, this tradition has been revived by several internationally renowned

artists such as Pino Daniele, Lina Sastri, and playwright Enzo Moscato. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the variety theater enjoyed great popularity with the songs of Gennaro Pasquariello (1869–1959) and Anna Fougez (1895–1966) and the comical sketches of Nicola Maldacea (1870–1945). Raffaele Viviani, the three De Filippos (Eduardo, Titina, and Peppino), and the great Toto` (Antonio De Curtis) all made their debuts in the variety theater. Another form of popular entertainment was the sceneggiata, born around the end of the nineteenth century, which alternates singing, acting, and dramatic melologue. Its plots were drawn from successful songs of the Neapolitan repertoire and articulated according to a certain number of fixed roles. Many theater companies devoted themselves nearly exclusively to it, including, among the most famous, the Marchetello-Diaz and the Maggio-CoruzzoloCiaramella companies, which repeatedly triumphed in New York among Neapolitan emigrants, and the Cafiero-Fumo company, which uninterruptedly worked from 1921 to the 1940s. Currently, its best-known interpreter is Mario Merola. Starting with the 1970s, a prominent theatrical avant-garde has developed, whose best results are the works of playwrights Annibale Ruccello, Antonio Neiwiller, Leo De Berardinis, Enzo Moscato, and Manlio Santanelli, a variegated expression of that Neapolitan dramaturgy that, since the 1980s, has lived in a complex relationship with the tradition and has been fascinated by European experiences. Ruccello’s Ferdinando (1998) and Santanelli’s Uscita d’emergenza (Emergency Exit, 1983), in particular, show that Neapolitan playwrights can go beyond Eduardo De Filippo to represent a variety of realities and create inimitable characters. However, the actor-playwright who has most represented the Neapolitan character is Massimo Troisi, who made his directorial debut with Ricomincio da tre (I’m Starting from Three, 1981) and whose films belong now to the history of cinema. The popular appeal of Troisi relied on the Pulcinella stock character and a number of improvisational routines that reflected the social experiences of young Neapolitans. Troisi learned acting on the Neapolitan stage and worked with the essential mimicry of the traditional istrioni (mimes). The beauty of his work lay in the most subtle details. In the tradition of Eduardo, he could mix dialect with high language. Troisi died prematurely of heart failure soon after filming Il postino (The Postman) in 1994. Indeed, Neapolitan cinema is another important chapter in the cultural life of the city. Already in 1269

NAPLES 1896, the performances in the most famous cafe´schantants were enriched by film projections. This initial phase, linked to a local context, was followed first by that of the combination of literature and cinema, when works by Bracco, Di Giacomo, and Serao were adapted for the screen, then by the crisis of the 1920s and postwar Realist and neo-Realist productions. Naples also fostered the work of Elvira Notari (1875–1946), Italy’s first and most prolific woman filmmaker, whose documentary style brought filming on the street life of Naples. In the long and rich list of classical Neapolitan films, the most significant are Ettore Giannini’s masterpiece Carosello napoletano (Neapolitan Carousel, 1954), perhaps the only successful Italian response to Hollywood musicals, and L’oro di Napoli (The Gold of Naples, 1954), directed by Vittorio De Sica, in which Toto` played the pazzariello. On the other hand, Francesco Rosi’s La sfida (The Challenge, 1958) and Le mani sulla citta` (Hands over the City, 1963) denounce the political complexities and intrinsic social difficulties facing the city since the end of World War II. ANTONIA LEZZA Further Reading Baffi, Giulio (editor), Il sentimento del drammatico, Naples: Guida, 1982. Barbagallo, Francesco, Napoli fine Novecento. Politici, camorristi, imprenditori, Turin: Einaudi, 1997.

Bentley, Jerry H., Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. Civilta` del Settecento a Napoli 1734–1799, Florence: Centro Di, 1980. De Crescenzo, Maria Cristina, et al. (eds.), Napoli, una citta` nel cinema, Naples: Biblioteca Universitaria di Napoli, 1995. Doria, Gino, Le strade di Napoli, Naples: Ricciardi, 1943. Ghirelli, Antonio, Napoli italiana. La storia della citta` dopo il 1860, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Giammattei, Emma, ‘‘La cultura della regione ‘napolitana’. I modelli, le forme, i temi,’’ in La Campania, Paolo Macry and Pasquale Villani (eds.), Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Giammattei, Emma, Il romanzo di Napoli. Geografia e storia letteraria nei secoli XIX e XX, Naples: Guida editori, 2003. Greco, Franco Carmelo (ed.), Pulcinella: una maschera tra gli specchi, Naples: ESI, 1990. Greco, Franco Carmelo (ed.), Teatro napoletano del Settecento. Intellettuali e citta` fra scrittura e pratica della scena, Naples: Pironti, 1981. La Capria, Raffaele, L’armonia perduta, Milan: Mondadori, 1986. Palermo, Antonio, Da Mastriani a Viviani. Per una storia della letteratura a Napoli fra Otto e Novecento, Naples: Liguori, 1972. Raso, Carlo, Guida letteraria del centro antico di Napoli, Naples: Colonnese, 1994. Raso, Carlo, Guida letteraria della citta` di Napoli, Naples: Colonnese, 1996. Scialo`, Pasquale (ed.) Sceneggiata. Rappresentazione di un genere popolare, Naples: Guida, 2002. Velardi, Claudio (ed.), La citta` porosa. Conversazioni su Napoli, Naples: Cronopio, 1992.

THE NATIVITY SCENE See Natale in casa Cupiello (Work by Eduardo De Filippo)

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NEERA (ANNA ZUCCARI)

NEERA (ANNA ZUCCARI) (1846–1918) Praised by critics such as Luigi Capuana, Benedetto Croce, and Luigi Russo, Anna Radius Zuccari (better known by her pen name Neera) was one of the most prolific and popular female writers of her time. She also entertained a rich correspondence with some of the most prominent literary and artistic personalities, among them Giovanni Verga, Marino Moretti, Vittoria Aganoor, Matilde Serao, Eleonora Duse, and Giacomo Puccini. She published novels, short stories, poetry, a comedy, sociological essays, and an autobiography; but her literary reputation rests on her popular fictional work. Her success is attested by the frequent reprints of her novels as well as their translation into German, French, English, and Slavic languages. She began to draw critical attention with her early novels, Vecchie catene (Old Chains, 1878) and Un nido (A Nest, 1880), which were admired by Capuana and most importantly by Croce, whose 1904 essay, ‘‘Neera,’’ published in La critica would ensure her literary reputation. Croce particularly praised Neera’s writing for its moral, passionate, lyrical, and meditative tone. As Neera herself wrote in Le idee di una donna (The Soul of an Artist, 1903), her youth can be summarized by three verbs: writing, reading, and reflecting. Without a mother, a sister, or close friends, she evaded the boredom and sadness of her life by creating an imaginary ‘‘mondo a parte’’ (her own world). Among her early literary influences, she enlisted books such as the One Thousand and One Nights, Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, and the poetry of Byron, Ossian, Giuseppe Giusti, and Aleardo Aleardi. Her views were molded by the idealist artistic circle of Giovanni Segantini, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, and Vittorio Pica. She also befriended Alberto Sormani, founder of the journal L’idea liberale (1892), to whom she dedicated her essay Un idealista (An Idealist, 1898). After initially publishing short stories in journals such as Il pungolo in 1875, Neera began a period of intense literary activity. Her fiction beginning with Un romanzo (A Novel, 1876), Addio! (Farewell!, 1877), and Il castigo (The Punishment, 1881) focus on the dilemma of the unhappily married woman, torn between her sense of duty and her adulterous passions, and on maternity as the primary vocation for women. Neera was harshly

criticized for depicting erotic desires and for her ambivalently conservative stand in defense of women. Neera’s mature writings expose the dilemma of the woman writer at the turn of the last century, torn between the need to assert herself and the traditional demands to conform to standards of propriety and decorum on which a woman’s reputation depended. This dilemma gave way to seemingly contradictory positions in her writing: While her theoretical statements had an open antifeminist impetus, her fictional and nonfictional narratives challenge society’s limitations of women and advocate for women a social superior role. This is at the core of Una giovinezza del secolo XIX (Portrait of a Nineteenth-Century Youth, 1919), published posthumously with a preface by Benedetto Croce. Thus, Neera’s theoretical work clearly subscribed to late nineteenth-century concepts of womanhood: A woman’s sphere was confined to her family, to attending to her children’s education, and to the governance of her household. Yet, at a time when women were still defined in official government documents as ‘‘deeply and irremediably inferior creatures,’’ and Cesare Lombroso made the pseudo-scientific contention that women are primitive beings and physiological inferior, Neera called for women’s moral, spiritual, and intellectual equality. Ultimately the importance of Una giovinezza del secolo XIX, which unromantically depicted the difficulties of growing up as a female in nineteenth-century society, deprived of a meaningful education, lies in its implicit indictment of contemporary society. But it is Neera’s fiction that most challenges society’s limitations. As Luigi Baldacci has shown, her novels ‘‘can be read as essential documents of the feminist spirit, in that women are seen as an oppressed class, and not as the ideal complement to man’’ (‘‘Nota introduttiva,’’ 1976). Neera’s narratives belonging to the naturalist period—Teresa (1886), Lydia (1887), and L’indomani (The Day After, 1890)—emphasize the social and environmental factors contributing to the misfortune of their heroines. They are not the victims of their passions but of what they have absorbed from their environment. Teresa, Neera’s most critically acclaimed work, is one of the first Italian female 1271

NEERA (ANNA ZUCCARI) bildungsromans, tracing a young woman’s spiritual, intellectual, and sensual awakening, in the face of long years of exploitation and self-effacement. Thanks to its keen psychological analysis, as well as its sophisticated narrative structure, this novel ranks among the masterpieces of late nineteenthcentury Italian fiction. Teresa mirrors Neera’s mature writing, which exposes women’s depression and anguish in a repressed milieu. This explains the endorsement of Ersilia Majno, one of the leading Milanese feminists of the time, who in a letter dated 10 May 1901 wrote with gratitude to Neera that ‘‘every woman will always pay a tribute of admiration and love to the author of Teresa.’’

Biography Neera was born Anna Zuccari on 7 May 1846, in Milan; she lost her mother, Maddalena Manusardi, 1856, and lost her father, the architect Fermo Zuccari, 1866. She married Emilio Radius, 1871, and had two children. She collaborated with the major literary journals and newspapers Il corriere della sera, Fanfulla della Domenica, Il corriere di Napoli, Nuova Antologia, and Il Marzocco, and cofounded a literary journal for women, Vita intima, 1890–1891. Neera traveled frequently and was active in the movement for military intervention in World War I. She died in Milan on 19 July 1918. PAOLA GIULI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Il canzoniere della nonna,’’ 1908. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1898. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1919.

Short Stories ‘‘Novelle gaie,’’ 1879. ‘‘Iride,’’ 1881. ‘‘La freccia del Parto,’’ 1883. ‘‘Voci della notte,’’ 1893. ‘‘La villa incantata,’’ 1901. ‘‘Monastero,’’ 1903; as Monastero e alti racconti, edited by Antonia Arslan, 1987. ‘‘Conchiglie,’’ 1905. ‘‘La sottana del diavolo,’’ 1912. ‘‘Fiori,’’ 1921.

Novels Addio!, 1877. Vecchie catene, 1878. Un nido, 1880. Il castigo, 1881. Il marito dell’amica, 1885.

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Teresa, 1886, as Teresa, translated by Martha King, 1998. Lydia, 1887. L’indomani, 1890. Nel sogno, 1892. Anima sola, 1895. L’amuleto, 1897. La vecchia casa, 1900. Una passione, 1903. Il romanzo della fortuna, 1906. Crevalcore, 1907. Duello d’anime, 1912. Rogo d’amore, 1914.

Nonfiction Dizionario d’igiene per le famiglie, 1881. Il libro di mio figlio, 1891. L’amor platonico, 1897. Fotografie matrimoniali, 1898. Un idealista. Alberto Sormani, 1898. Le idee di una donna, 1903; as The Soul of an Artist, translated by E. L. Murison, 1905. Il secolo galante, 1906. Profili, impressioni, ricordi, 1919. Una giovinezza del secolo XIX, 1919.

Letters Il concetto che ne informa. Benedetto Croce e Neera: corrispondenza, 1903–1917, 1988. Il sogno aristocratico: corrispondenza, 1889–1917. Angiolo Orvieto e Neera, 1990. Il sogno borghese: corrispondenza, 1910–1914. Neera e Marino Moretti, 1996.

Further Reading Arslan, Antonia, ‘‘Un’amicizia tra letterate: Vittoria Aganoor e Neera,’’, Quaderni Veneti, 8 (1988), 35–74. Arslan, Antonia, and Gian Luca Baio, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to Neera, Teresa, Lecco: Periplo edizioni, 1995. Arslan, Antonia, and Marina Pasqui (editors), Ritratto di signora: Neera (Anna Radius Zuccari) e il suo tempo, Milan: Comune di Milano, 1999. Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Nota introduttiva,’’ to Neera, Teresa, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Borlenghi, Aldo, Narratori dell’Ottocento e del primo Novecento, vol. 4, Milan: Ricciardi, 1966. Capuana, Luigi, ‘‘Neera,’’ in Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea, Catania: Giannotta, 1898. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Neera (1904),’’ in La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1929. Croce, Benedetto (editor), Neera, Milan: Garzanti, 1943. Folli, Anna, Penne leggere: Neera, Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo, scritture femminili italiane fra Otto e Novecento, Milan: Guerini, 2000. Graciotti, Sante, ‘‘Neera nella corrispondenza inedita con Jaksa Cedomil,’’ in Studi sulla cultura lombarda in memoria di Mario Apollonio, Milan: Universita` Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, 1972. Kennard, Joseph Spencer, Italian Romance Writers, New York: Brentano, 1906. Martini, Carlo, ‘‘Neera (Anna Radius Zuccari) e Gustavo Botta,’’ Nuova Antologia, 98 (1963): 195–206. Russo, Luigi, I narratori (1850–1957), Rome: Leonardo, 1923. Serao, Matilde, Ricordando Neera, Milan: Treves, 1920.

ADA NEGRI

ADA NEGRI (1870–1945) A prominent figure on the Italian literary scene between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, Ada Negri, called the ‘‘poetessa d’Italia,’’ was a multifaceted author whose works were ‘‘censored’’ after World War II because of her allegiance to Mussolini and the Fascist regime. The near-total silence on the part of the Italian cultural establishment after Negri’s death contrasted starkly with the success of her poetry (translated and reviewed abroad) and with the popular reception she enjoyed as a ‘‘daughter of the people’’ during her lifetime. Brought up in poverty in Milan by a widowed mother, she voiced social protest and never failed to support the poorest working women. Negri, nicknamed the vergine rossa (red virgin), began her literary career in 1892 when, at the age of 20, she published a collection of poems, Fatalita` (Fate and Other Poems), soon followed by Tempeste (Tempests, 1895). In both works, the poet boldly denounced the exploitation of the poor by the dominant classes; her inspiration was at once social, political, and autobiographical. Indeed, Negri became a teacher through her readings, comprised of ‘‘bourgeois’’ writers such as Emile Zola, Victor Hugo, Walt Whitman, Henrik Ibsen, and Feodor Dostoievsky. However, her utopian, humanitarian desire for social justice and her concern with the condition of the marginalized eventually yielded to a kind of Catholic spirituality and other introspective tendencies in mature poetry. In her later collections, the author attended to the beauty of nature, memory, death, pain, and the desire both to find herself and to lose herself in God: I canti dell’isola (The Songs of the Island, 1925), Vespertina (Vespertine, 1931), Il dono (The Gift, 1936), and Fons Amoris (The Fountain of Love, posthumous, 1946) rely on rhyme and meter reminiscent of Giosue` Carducci’s neoclassical oratorical style as well as the sublime vein of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Alcyone (1904). Negri also linked the divergent themes of her poetry to an ongoing investigation of the world and psychology of women, primarily expressed in her short stories, beginning with Le solitarie (The Solitary Women, 1917), which were published thanks to the encouragement of Margherita

Sarfatti. Like other women writers of her time, Negri’s artistic discourse was multilayered. On one side, she opposed the movement for women’s emancipation; on the other, with avowed solidarity, she decried the oppression of women within familial and societal structures, particularly their exploitation in factories and on fields. Regrettably, Negri’s heroines were victims with no social consciousness. Unlike the author herself, they never resist social or gender hierarchies and passively accept their prescribed roles as mothers and unfulfilled wives, ultimately condemned to a grey and shadowy existence. In her mature short-story collections, such as Le sorelle (The Sisters, 1929), Di giorno in giorno (One Day at a Time, 1932), and Erba sul sagrato (Grass on the Churchyard, 1939), Negri, influenced by prosa d’arte, further refined her narrative style, now marked by melodic rhythms, paratactic sentences, and a rich metaphorical fabric. For Negri, the unifying element of her oeuvre remained an autobiographical inspiration. In her fiction, she projected a working-class voice; in her poems, she lay herself bare, often charting her own contradictory psyche with profound psychological introspection. For example, the mysterious and mystical bonds of motherhood in Maternita` (Maternity, 1904); the disillusionments of love in Dal profondo (From the Depths, 1910); the fear and euphoria of freedom that follow marital separation in Esilio (Exile, 1914); and the excruciating pain after the sudden death of her beloved in Il libro di Mara (Mara’s Book, 1919). This book marked the apex of Negri’s poetic career: She abandoned the emphatic and classicizing tone of earlier collections and relied on free verse. Perhaps most enduring is her autobiographical Stella mattutina (Morning Star, 1921), a small prose masterpiece, in which Negri recounted the proletarian childhood of Dinin (her fictional alter ego), a childhood practically spent in the porter’s lodge of an aristocratic palazzo. Negri’s novel attests to a striking social commitment; a kunstelleroman, or coming-of-age, story of a woman artist (one of few in the Italian tradition), which stages an intensely powerful bond between mother, daughter, and grandmother. Within this protective space, Dinin defined her 1273

ADA NEGRI identity as a woman and an artist: Her mother’s language (her stories, her songs, her voice) became the irreplaceable matrix of her literary production, nurturing the young artist along with the classics that she read at school. Thus, for Ada Negri, creativity was conceived under the sign of the maternal.

Biography Ada Negri was born in Lodi (Milan) on February 3, 1870, orphaned by her father and raised in poverty by a working mother. After receiving her diploma as a schoolteacher (1887), she achieved considerable literary and economic success with her poetry. She moved to Milan in 1892, where she married Giovanni Garlanda, a wealthy factory owner with whom she had two children, Bianca and Vittoria, who died after just one month. The constraints of her role as a traditional wife and mother led to the failure of her marriage. She abandoned her husband in 1913 and followed her daughter Bianca to Switzerland. At the outbreak of World War I she returned to Milan where she attended to the wounded; shortly thereafter, she had an intense love affair with Ettore Pellizzi. After his death, she led an increasingly secluded life. A sympathizer of Fascism, she won the Premio Mussolini for literature (1931) and was inducted into the Reale Accademia d’Italian in 1940, the first woman ever to be elected. She befriended Benito Mussolini, with whom she shared humble origins and the socialist ideals that characterized the Duce’s first ideological phase. Their reciprocal esteem is attested by a correspondence that lasted from the 1920s to the 1940s. She died in Milan on 10 January 1945. FLORA GHEZZO Selected Works Collections Poesie, Milan: Mondadori, 1948; edited by Silvio Ruffo, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Prose, edited by Bianca Scalfi and Eligio Bianchetti, Milan: Mondadori, 1954; reprinted, 1966. Opere scelte, edited by Elena Cazzulani, Lodi (Milan): Il pomerio, 1995.

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Poetry ‘‘Fatalita`,’’ 1892; as Fate and Other Poems, translated by Marie Adelheid von Blomberg, 1898; reprinted, 1904. ‘‘Tempeste,’’ 1895. ‘‘Maternita`,’’ 1904. ‘‘Dal profondo,’’ 1910. ‘‘Esilio,’’ 1914. ‘‘Il libro di Mara,’’ 1919. ‘‘I canti dell’isola,’’ 1925. ‘‘Vespertina,’’ 1931. ‘‘Il dono,’’ 1936. ‘‘Fons amoris,’’ 1946.

Fiction Le solitarie, 1917. Orazioni, 1918. Stella mattutina, 1921; as Morning Star, translated by Anne Day, 1930. Finestre alte, 1926. Le strade, 1926. Le sorelle, 1929. Di giorno in giorno, 1932. Erba sul sagrato, 1939. Oltre, 1946.

Further Reading Abbrugiati, Perle, ‘‘Les Visages de la solitude dans les nouvelles d’Ada Negri,’’ in Les Femmes e´crivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles, edited by Marie-Anne Rubat du Me´rac, Aix-en-Provence: Universite` de Provence, 1993. Comes, Salvatore, Ada Negri: da un tempo all’altro, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. Folli, Anna, Penne legge`re: Neera, Ada Negri, Sibilla Aleramo. Scritture femminili tra Otto e Novecento, Milan: Edizioni Guerini e Associati, 2000. Gorini Santoli, Angela, Invito alla lettura di Ada Negri, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Guida, Patrizia, ‘‘Ada Negri: una scrittice fascista?’’ Quaderni d’italianistica, 23:2 (2002), 45–58. Mazzoni, Cristina, ‘‘Difference, Repetition and the Mother–Daugther Bond in Ada Negri,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 15:1 (1997), 55–74. Mazzoni, Cristina, ‘‘Impressionable Bodies: Pregnancy and Desire from Cesare Lombroso to Ada Negri,’’ Annali d’ Italianistica, 15 (1997), 137–157. Merry, Bruce, ‘‘Ada Negri,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russel, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. Pea, Mauro, Ada Negri, Milan; Mondadori, 1970. Zambon, Patrizia, ‘‘Leggere per scrivere: la formazione autodidattica delle scrittrici tra Otto e Novecento: Neera, Ada Negri, Grazia Deledda, Sibilla Aleramo,’’ Studi novecenteschi, 16:38 (1989), 287–324.

NEO-AVANT-GARDE

NEO-AVANT-GARDE The most ironic and felicitous, as well as the most accurate, formula used to describe the birth of the Italian movement of the neo-avant-garde is the ‘‘gita a Chiasso’’ (trip to Chiasso) coined by Alberto Arbasino. According to Arbasino, in the provincial Italian culture of the years after World War II, it would have been enough to peer only slightly beyond the country’s borders, which until then had been considered closed and restricted, to discover a world full of novelty, ferment, and in the midst of change. The chronicle of events is widely known: As early as 1961, the Biblioteca del Verri, directed by Luciano Anceschi, published an anthology of new poets: I novissmi. Poesie per gli anni ’60 (Novissimi. Poetry for the Sixties), edited by Alfredo Giuliani and including works by Edoardo Sanguineti, Elio Pagliarani, Nanni Balestrini, Giuliani, and Antonio Porta. It principally turned on three motifs: the transformation of the ‘‘I’’ into the critic, a ‘‘schizomorphic vision’’ of composition (that is to say, a writing that is neither subjective nor objective), and nonsyllabic metrics. The anthology generated much curiosity and interest (including from Giuseppe Ungaretti), most often unanticipated when not violently critical. Among the many voices to respond, Andrea Zanzotto in the periodical Comunita` (1962) emphasized the insufficiencies of their framework (the ‘‘group,’’ in fact, began to expand shortly afterward) and of their critique when considering the ‘‘current hypothesis on the reversibility of experiment and convention,’’ with precisely the danger of translating (and reducing) into convention the denunciation of the disorder and ruin of modernity, as well as the experience of refusal and revolt. But these new poets were already aware that ruin and chaos also remained problems of structure, of planning, or, better yet, of method, without the need for a univocal poetics or an ultimate ideological destination of the literary object. It is true, however, that it is only with this movement that emerges ‘‘a new age for poetry after what had developed between the wars,’’ and it is ‘‘only after the publication of Novissimi that people began to speak of a neoavant-garde,’’ as Alfredo Giuliani wrote in the introduction to the second edition of the anthology (1965).

Then, from October 2–9, 1963, by invitation of Francesco Agnello, who arranged the ‘‘Settimana internazionale della Nuova Musica’’ in Palermo, a larger group of writers sympathetic to the same ideal of renewal came together in several meetings, not all of them public, whose unexpected resonance in the media created a lively debate. The need to work had turned into a collective inquiry and exchange. On the suggestion of the great composer Luigi Nono, who was familiar with the German experience of the young writers in the annual meetings of Group 47, through which the new generation attempted to rebuild a literary tradition after the destructive experience of national-socialism, it was decided to adopt a name, Gruppo 63, with the identical kind of temporal reference, which was also, therefore, historical. Another four ‘‘official’’ meetings occurred at yearly intervals, with the progressive inclusion of new authors but also with a decline in interest and an eventual ‘‘technical’’ retrenchment, until the final meeting (after one in Reggio Emilia, one in Palermo entirely dedicated to experimental narrative, and one in La Spezia) in Fano, on May 26 through 28, 1967. But the history, the program of breaking with ‘‘established literature,’’ the legacy of what took place in Italy between 1956 and 1969 as a whole, and not merely in the literary arena, was not exactly clear-cut. What is certain is that 1963 was the year of the public emergence of a literary movement that was already latent in the 1950s, which beginning in 1956 had gathered around Luciano Ansechi’s magazine Il Verri, published after 1962 by Feltrinelli, where Enrico Filippini and Nanni Balestrini also worked. This movement was conscious of the end of modernity and tried to react as much to the legacy of the Hermetic vocabulary of the postwar period as to the Crocean idealism still at the root of so much Marxism, but it especially attempted to get beyond the dogmatic censures against any experimentalism, particularly against the forms and instruments of literary investigation that were labeled as avant-garde nihilism and bourgeois decadence. This criticism was leveled above all by those who, like Pier Paolo Pasolini and those connected with the magazine he founded, Officina (Franco Fortini, Francesco Leonetti, Roberto 1275

NEO-AVANT-GARDE Roversi, and Paolo Volponi) were still fatally bound to the conventional notion of ‘‘content’’ as a sum of thoughts, visions, and feeling that were valuable in themselves, outside of poetry, and that therefore it was enough to arrange them metrically in order to render them ‘‘poetic,’’ as Giuliani put it in the aforementioned introduction, as well as to a polished and mimetic attraction for the materials of the un-poetic. In hindsight, there were those from within the group who denied a more organized rationale for Gruppo 63 as a political movement and spoke instead of ‘‘a community of writers, essayists, painters, and musicians, who for a period of time knew one another and created things of shared interest,’’ to quote Umberto Eco (‘‘Il Gruppo 63, lo sperimentalismo e l’avanguardia,’’ 1985). According to Eco, the experimental impulse long survived within the Italian cultural system, which in fact celebrated it many times over the years, as opposed to the avant-garde’s more intimate vocation to break with the system. This latter experience essentially exhausted itself in July of 1969 with the closing of Quindici, the Roman journal of the group led first by Alfredo Giuliani (until the fifteenth issue) and then by Nanni Balestrini. On the other hand, Renato Barilli insisted on the ‘‘practicalorganizational nature, concerned with mobilization and for a predominantly external use,’’ of a group that saw the end, and not the beginning, of a ‘‘latency period’’ whose formation already had occurred elsewhere (La neoavanguardia italiana, 1995). To be sure, there were difficulties and struggles within the movement, such as the polemic between the ‘‘movimentismo permanente’’ (permanent movementism) of Angelo Guglielmi and the prudent reserve of Italo Calvino about what seemed to call into question logical rationalism as the privileged relation for knowledge of the world; or, more importantly, the debate about the welding of ideology and language defended especially by Edoardo Sanguineti, a difficult convergence that was not always shared and understood, and that was illuminated by Gian Carlo Ferretti in a review on the developments of the movement that appeared in Rinascita in 1965. During these years, this broad experimental activity also reverberated on the debate on novelistic prose raised, on the one hand, by the publication of Alberto Moravia’s La noia (The Empty Canvas, 1960), to which Sanguineti and Barilli responded positively, and on the other with the exciting discovery of Carlo Emilio Gadda’s literary legacy (itself already underway for some time), for which 1276

Arbasino devised the witty formula ‘‘nipotini dell’Ingegnere’’ (the little nephews of the engineer), thinking particularly of Pasolini’s prose, in spite of the divergences of poetics mentioned earlier, and of Giovanni Testori. Moreover, in the wake of the French nouveau roman of Alain RobbeGrillet and the narrative experiments of Michel Butor, there emerged numerous varieties of contemporary narrative that, beginning with the volcanic production of the oldest, Giorgio Manganelli, led to the altered transpositions of Gianni Celati, the rapid writing of Francesco Leonetti, the dialectal postulates of Luigi Malerba, the austere textual strategy of Sebastiano Vassalli, and, from the socalled Palermo School, the work of Michele Perriera (1937–), who was also active in the theater. At this point, two different notions of the opera aperta (open work)—Umberto Eco’s book of the same name from 1962—were gradually being distinguished, more and more systematically, depending on whether it was the author or the consumer who decided the fate—first material and then interpretative—of the work he encountered, with fruitful effects in the field of music and the visual arts, in what amounted to an unprecedented reevaluation of the materials and physicality of the work of art. On the literary front, it was an ‘‘undeniable claim that all of the debates and textual productions tied to Gruppo 63 must be seen as one of the first episodes of the practice and theory of the postmodern’’ (Renato Barilli, La neoavanguardia italiana, 1995). Just as in the theater, in the wake of the conference that took place in Ivrea in 1967 as a natural extension of the subversive linguistic plans of Gruppo 63 to social intervention, the autonomy of the scenic event was gradually asserted, thanks as well to the introduction of practices and schemes related to the ‘‘happening’’ and to performance. But the contacts among various fields, especially between art and science, did not always result in a real fusion capable of producing innovation. The persistent accusation of dilettantish impressionism made Eco introduce the corrective notion of ‘‘epistemological metaphor,’’ replacing the principle of resemblance with the more organic principle of system. John Picchione wrote: ‘‘All the attributes assigned to the open work (ambiguity, indeterminacy, discontinuity, polyvalence), and particularly disorder (which Eco, with great ability, connects to the principle of entropy derived from thermodynamics and information theory), make up the essential fabric of the poetry championed by the Novissimi’’ (The New Avant-garde in Italy, 2004).

NEO-AVANT-GARDE It is also true that an actual reconsideration of this collective experience, which was the first open poetic response to the cultural industry and to the technologies of mass culture, without falling back into or nostalgia for the contemplation of nature, was be firmly anchored on the priority of reading texts—poetic, narrative, as well as theoretical and critical. Unfortunately, because of the problems in the availability of the substantial legacy of documents, they remain difficult to publish today. Among the crowd of personalities and leading figures, a survey might begin by recalling a poet who died prematurely, Antonio Porta, the pseudonym of Leo Paolazzi (1935–1989), with his fictional idylls stripped bare of any verbal adornments, a rich poverty of subject and action. Such a survey might also include (among others) the reflexive and metanarrative investigations of the prose of Enrico Filippini (1934–1988), who also translated Walter Benjamin and Thomas Mann and worked in dramaturgy; the enraged, hyperexpressive invectives of the poetry of Giuseppe Guglielmi (1923–1995); the parallel universes of Giorgio Celli (1935–), who was closely associated with the magazine Malebolge (1963–1967); and finally the well-known poetic experiences of Corrado Costa (1929–1991) and the visual poetry of Adriano Spatola (1941–1988), which leaned in the direction of a poesia totale, as in the work of Lamberto Pignotti (1926–) and Eugenio Miccini (1925–). Indeed, one of the goals was the further liberation of verbal materials from the typographical prison as well as from any smaller linguistic unity endowed with meaning or grammatical function, often tending toward orality and performance. This process was continued by the Florentine Gruppo 70, whose activity could hardly be separated from political and ideological strategies and that resulted in the final remedy (although any idea of a neo-avant-garde was by now exhausted) of the La parola innamorata (The Enamored Word), the title of the collection of the ‘‘return to order’’ edited by Giancarlo Pontiggia and Enzo Di Mauro for Feltrinelli in 1978. The experience of the neo-avant-garde, whose leading figures later fell back into the system of communication, gave birth to more than just an epiphany of the marvelous, according to a precise, sterile rhetoric of astonishment and enchantment, perhaps solely on the level of signification. Today, at a moment when it is more urgent than ever to reread these works, when disenchantment nullify spectacular utopias, this poetry and narrative (along with its various subgenres, from narrative-poetry to pastiche and the metanovel) seem to be a more or

less lucid resemanticization of the forms of reality. They offer a further sense of recycling the wreckage of history and the ruins of the whole tradition, the realization of a desire to transform the world through the words of a joyful universe that still knows the pure, undated time of profound life, without claims for any pseudo-representation of reality. Finally, from within the movement, as late as 1995 Edoardo Sanguineti himself reconsidered, in a more faithful and careful way, the utopia that was necessary in the vicissitudes of avant-gardes and specifically in the poetic avant-garde in Italy, pointing out how it might survive in the future. Starting from the idea of a metamorphosis of literature, albeit hovering indistinctly between an always-possible resurrection (postliterature) and an inevitable degradation (Trivialliteratur), Sanguineti recovered the option of the reasons of history against the false rhetoric of the demands of the market and the literary consumer, illuminating the close relationship between total commodification and the irreversible consumability of the aesthetic product. This relation was consolidated, and not superseded, after the experience of the historical avant-gardes and, for Italy, of Futurism. Sanguineti pointed out the obligation, therefore, in the program of any future avant-garde to oppose the reigning technological neosublime, since ‘‘the significance of the newer and newest avant-gardes, in the now distant 1950s’’ was precisely to transform revolt, a primary root of the century’s antipoetry, into revolution to ‘‘change life’’ and ‘‘modify the world’’ (Per una critica dell’avanguardia poetica in Italia e in Francia). STEFANO TOMASSINI Further Reading Avanguardia e neo-avanguardia, Milan: Sugar, 1966. Balestrini, Nanni (ed.), Gruppo 63. Il romanzo sperimentale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966. Balestrini, Nanni, and Alfredo Giuliani (eds.), Gruppo 63: L’Antologia, Turin: Testo&Immagine, 2002. Balestrini, Nanni, and Alfredo Giuliani (eds.), Gruppo 63. La nuova letteratura, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964. Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: Dalla nascita del Verri alla fine di Quindici, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Barilli, Renato, and Angelo Guglielmi (eds.), Gruppo 63. Critica e teoria, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Neoavanguardia,’’ in Il viaggio testuale: le ideologie e le strutture semiotiche, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. D’Ambrosio, Matteo, Bibliografia della poesia italiana d’avanguardia: poesia visiva, visuale, concreta e fonetica, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977.

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NEO-AVANT-GARDE De Stasio Wedel, Giovanna, Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Illiano (eds.), Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, Detroit and London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1993. Eco, Umberto, ‘‘Il Gruppo 63, lo sperimentalismo e l’avanguardia,’’ in Sugli specchi e altri saggi, Milan: Bompiani, 1985. Eco, Umberto, Opera aperta, Milan: Bompiani, 1962. Esposito, Roberto, Le ideologie della neoavanguardia, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, ‘‘L’ottavo ‘Menabo`’: Orientamenti e sviluppi della neoavanguardia,’’ Rinascita, 35 (1965), 28. Gambaro, Fabio, Invito a conoscere la neoavanguardia, Milan: Mursia, 1993. Gentilucci, Armando, Oltre l’avanguardia: un invito al molteplice, Fiesole: Discanto, 1979.

Giuliani, Alfredo, ‘‘Introduction,’’ to I novissimi. Poesie per gli anni ’60, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Giuliani, Alfredo (editor), I Novissimi. Poesie per gli anni ’60, Milan: Rusconi e Paolazzi, 1961. Picchione, John, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetics Practices, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pontiggia, Giancarlo, and Enzo Di Mauro (eds.), La parola innamorata: I poeti nuovi 1976–1978, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Sanguineti, Edoardo, and Jean Burgos, Per una critica dell’avanguardia poetica in Italia e in Francia, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995. Vetri, Lucio, Letteratura e caos. Poetiche della neoavanguardia italiana degli anni sessanta, Milan: Mursia, 1993. Zanzotto, Andrea, ‘‘I ‘Novissimi,’’’ Comunita`, 99:16(1962), 89–91.

NEOCLASSICISM A cultural movement lacking a precise aesthetic formulation and of varied poetics, neoclassicism, on a European level and beginning from the middle of the eighteenth century in literature and the figurative arts, recaptured the tenets of sensistic philosophy toward Enlightenment rationalism. With the latter, in fact, it did not stand in contrast, as has long been said, but rather existed in a tie of continuity, given that it used the Enlightenment’s search for freedom from prejudices in the direction of an affirmation of the individual in all of his or her cognitive powers. Thus classicism, which characterized it in a determining manner and which naturally was stronger in Italy, was something distinct from what on many occasions, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, had distinguished Italian literature: It was no longer the imitation of classical authors but rather the personal reconstruction, through their works, for particular contemplative moments, of that contact with nature that ancient times had experienced in an intense and spontaneous manner, and that the modern age, with its social and spiritual complexity, rendered precarious and hence pervaded by a melancholic nostalgia. Having developed through a close comparison between literature and the figurative arts, neoclassicism found its theoretical aspect best exemplified in these forms, beginning with Johann Joachim 1278

Winckelmann’s History of Art in Antiquity (1764), which was intended to exalt the achievement of beauty realized in a Greek antiquity outside of time and fixed in plastic forms of an unattainable perfection; the inspirers, in their turn, in the moderns who contemplate them, of an absolute spiritual serenity. Next to Winckelmann, in the field of painting, with his Thoughts on Beauty (1762), translated into Italian in 1780, was Anton Raphael Mengs, who was also active in a Roman circle that, for the intensity of archaeological activity and its nearness to other landmark places of eighteenth-century excavations (Paestum, Pompei, Herculaneum), constituted the ideal locale for the elaboration of the successive stages of neoclassicism. These harkened back, shortly afterward, in Jean-Louis David, to republican Roman-ness, with a thematic and stylistic repertory conceived before the French Revolution that would later pass without substantial ruptures into the ‘‘imperial style’’ of the Napoleonic era. In this last phase it was Antonio Canova (1757–1822) who, more than anyone else, interpreted the dream of the return of ancient beauty, having at his side, on the theoretical level, art historian Leopoldo Francesco Cicognara (1767–1834), the author of a treatise Sul bello (On the Beautiful, 1808), which marked the extreme limit of neoclassicism, with its description of the concepts of bello relativo (relative beauty) and of

NEOCLASSICISM grazia (grace), set alongside the traditional concept of bello ideale (ideal beauty) in making the panorama of the arts and of poetry more supple and articulate. Under these conditions, it is easy to understand how diverse experiences could coexist under the wing of neoclassicism, from the classicistic variety of the so-called estense and parmense poetic schools, to the poetry of Giuseppe Parini, to the mysterious and dreamlike re-evocation of Greek and Roman antiquity that animated the novels of Alessandro Verri, to the serene melancholy of the rustic poetry of Ippolito Pindemonte, to the poetic experiences that until quite recently were grasped with the label of preromanticism, such as the tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri or Ugo Foscolo’s Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807), and up through the strong presence that neoclassicism, on the wave of the Napoleonic epic and beyond, had in the literature of the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Amidst the poets active in Emilia and Romagna, the most important was Ludovico Savioli Fontana (1729–1804), the author of a collection of lyrics, Amori (Loves, 1765), in which the tradition of Arcadian classicism was enriched with new models, celebrating in heptsyllabic songs female beauty in its erotic implications as well, particularly on the model of Ovid. Fontana’s immediate follower, Agostino Paradisi (1736–1783), was able to drape the contents of enlightenment reformism in neoclassical garb, with a small volume entitled Versi sciolti (Free Verse, 1762), which is of great stylistic elegance. In the group from Parma, on the other hand, what predominated was an attention to the philosophy of Condillac, oriented with Carlo Castone della Torre di Rezzonico (1742–1796) toward an identification of ideal beauty with the sublime, through poetic collections and short didactic poems such as Il sistema dei cieli (The System of the Heavens, 1775) and L’origine delle idee (The Origin of Ideas, 1778), which, beginning from Isaac Newton and John Locke, combined poetic tradition and scientific culture in an original, grandiose, and austere language. This was a quest for harmony that we can also identify in the next generation, in the early short poem L’armonia (Harmony, 1771) by Angelo Mazza (1741–1817) and in his collection of Odi (Odes, 1815). Parini’s participation in neoclassicism, on the other hand, resulted in the last phase of his lyric production, with odes such as ‘‘Il pericolo’’ (The Danger, 1787) or ‘‘Il dono’’ (The Gift, 1790)–all

pervaded by the quest for an expressive sobriety in the representation of the beautiful—with the incomplete elaboration of certain parts of La Notte (The Night, 1780) and with the treatise De’ principi delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti (On the Principles of Belles-Lettres Applied to the Fine Arts, 1773–1775), which emphasized the quest for an accord between the heritage of the classical world and sensismo. The greatest interpreter of Italian neoclassicism in all of its various phases was Vincenzo Monti (1754–1828), however, who with undisputed formal knowledge, offered repeated examples of aesthetic idealism in Feroniade (1784), or celebrated the creative power of nature in La bellezza dell’universo (The Beauty of the Universe, 1781), up through the extreme formalism and the identification of his poetizing with the ‘‘official’’ poetry of the Napoleonic empire in Prometeo (Prometheus, 1797), Il Bardo della Selva nera (Bard of the Black Forest, 1806), and La Ierogamia di Creta (Crete’s Hierogamy, 1810). On the other hand, Foscolo’s most intensely neoclassical moment is identifiable in Le Grazie (The Graces, 1812), which was dedicated to Antonio Canova; but we certainly cannot ignore the strength of typically neoclassical motifs in the autobiographical vein of the Odi (Odes, 1799 and 1802) and of Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), as well as in the civil ideality of Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807). Finally, it is necessary to emphasize that neoclassicism was characterized by an intense reflection on the classics, a reflection that, along with poetic creation, gave life with equal commitment and equal literary dignity, on the part of the very same authors, to an impressive series of new translations of the Greek and Latin poets of each epoch, with a variety of innovative solutions that found in Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808) their most attentive theorizer. He was also, however, the author of a complex version of the Iliade (The Iliad, 1786–1794) of which Pindemonte would take stock for his version of the Odissea (The Odyssey, 1822), Monti for his of the Iliade (The Iliad, 1810–1811), and finally Foscolo himself, who was also engaged in confronting the Homeric poem in his Esperimento di traduzione della Iliade (An Experiment in Translating the Iliad, 1807). GILBERTO PIZZAMIGLIO See also: Enlightenment 1279

NEOCLASSICISM Further Reading Assunto, Rosario, L’antichita` come futuro: Studio sull’estetica del neoclassicismo europeo, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Binni, Walter, Classicismo e neoclassicismo nella letteratura del Settecento, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963. Binni, Walter, Preromanticismo italiano, Florence: Sansoni, 1948. Cerruti, Marco, Neoclassici e giacobini, Milan: Silva, 1969. Franzini, Elio, L’estetica del Settecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Fubini, Mario, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Lirici del Settecento, edited by Bruno Maier, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1959. Honour, Hugh, Neo-classicism, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Maier, Bruno (editor), Lirici del Settecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1959. Meldolesi, Claudio, and Ferdinando Taviani, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Ottocento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Negri, Renzo, Gusto e poesia delle rovine in Italia fra il Sette e l’Ottocento, Milan: Ceschina, 1965. Praz, Mario, Gusto neoclassico, Milan: Rizzoli, 1940; as On Neoclassicism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1969. Solmi, Raffaella (editor), Poeti del Settecento, Turin: Utet, 1989. Timpanaro, Sebastiano, Classicismo e Illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1965. Ulivi, Ferruccio, Settecento neoclassico, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1957.

NEOPLATONISM ‘‘Neoplatonism’’ is the modern critical term commonly used to describe the work of Plotinus (204–270) and his followers, but it also refers to later Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers influenced either directly or indirectly by his thought. Plotinus attempted to systematize Platonism by incorporating elements from Aristotle, Middle Platonism, Stoicism, and Neo-Pythagoreanism into a unified metaphysical and psychological system. According to Plotinus, the ultimate principle of reality is the One or first hypostasis, which is beyond being and language; after the One come three successive levels of being that emanate one from the other: Intelligence or Mind (nouˆs), which is the domain of forms; Soul (psyche´), which is connected with succession and time; and the sensory world of matter. Human souls proceed from Soul—which acts as the intermediary between the world of forms and that of matter—and they can be divided into higher and lower ones, depending on their relationship to Intelligence and the body. The material world has the lowest reality and most opacity, and in a celebrated image, the outflow of being is compared to a light that diminishes to such a point that it becomes dark (Enneads v, 2, 1). Plotinian philosophy also encompasses a theurgic inspiration, inviting a return of the higher individual soul to the One by purifying the lower soul from its attraction to the world of sense. The followers of Plotinus (notably Porphyry, 1280

ca. 233–304; Proclus, 410/11–485; and Iamblichus, 250–330) introduced new distinctions into the hypostases, increased the role of theurgy, and attacked Christian religion (especially its view of creation). Post-Plotinian Neoplatonic writers usually presented an ordered hierarchy of being descending from the One to matter within a triad of remaining, downward procession and upward return. They were also increasingly drawn to the via negativa, by which only negative propositions are possible about the ultimate principles of reality, and they developed intricate theological allegories in order to uncover the Platonic substructure in ancient myth and poetry, particularly Homer and Virgil. Neoplatonism exercised a powerful and enduring influence on the intellectual and cultural life of Europe in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, especially in Italy. It was not until Marsilio Ficino’s activities (1455–1499) as translator, philosopher, and apologist that the works of Plato, Plotinus, and several other Neoplatonic writers become known in full. Throughout the Middle Ages, the only Platonic dialogue widely known was Chalcidius’s partial translation, with commentary, of the Timaeus. In earlier centuries, however, Plato’s views and NeoPlatonic writings were diffused through a range of other traditions: Latin, Greek, and Arabic. The Latin tradition comprised authors as varied as Cicero, Seneca, Apuleius, Macrobius,

NEOPLATONISM Augustine, Boethius, and Martianus Capella. Augustine (354–430), who read the books of the Platonists (Confessions, vii, 9, 13), and Boethius (480–525), who commented upon the Isagoge of Porphyry and reported the teachings of the Timaeus (Consolatio philosophiae, iii, metrum 9), are especially important early transmitters of a Porphryian form of Neoplatonic thought that was marked by Christian belief. The Greek tradition encompassed the writings of the Capadocian fathers and the works of the Pseudo-Dionysius. The PseudoDionysius was erroneously held in great esteem as the disciple of Paul, and his sixth-century Greek works, The Divine Names, Mystical Theology, The Celestial Hierarchy, and The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy—a blend of Christianity and Proclean Neoplatonism—became available in Latin translations from the ninth century. The Arabic current took in philosophers and metaphysicians such as Al-Farabi (870–950) and Avicenna (980–1037), who developed influential cosmologies based on emanation. In twelfth-century northern France, the masters of cathedral schools drew on all of these currents: They attempted to reconcile Plato’s cosmology with the teaching of Genesis and produced an important body of commentary on the Timaeus. Latin poets such as Bernard Silvestris and Alain de Lille composed allegorical poems (Cosmographia, Anticlaudianus, and the Plaint of Nature) built on cosmological and psychological premises that owe much to this context. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, moreover, the Aristotelian revival also brought more Platonic and Neoplatonic texts to the fore. Aristotle was himself presented in a markedly neo-Platonic form, both through commentaries by Simplicius, Avicenna, Albert the Great, and others and in anonymous works often attributed to Aristotle, such as the Book of Causes (a compilation based on Proclus) and the Theology of Aristotle (which gave him a religious dimension). For Dante, as for his contemporaries, Platonism was not limited to Plato; indeed, it is not clear whether he knew the Timaeus at first hand. He assimilated many of the traditions outlined above, especially through his familiarity with Augustine, Boethius, Macrobius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, the Chartrian poets, Albert the Great (who transmitted much information on Arab Neoplatonists), and others, as well as with Arabic works such as the Book of Causes. He may have placed Plato below Aristotle in his filosofica famiglia (Inferno iv, 130–35) and rejected Plato’s theory of the soul and doctrine of the return of souls to the star on

which they were created (Purgatorio iv, 1–6; Paradiso iv, 25–30), but his poetry and philosophy nonetheless revealed diverse traces of a diffuse Christian Platonism. He endorsed a variety of teachings that fuse Neoplatonic ideas with Aristotelian teachings in a manner that is not atypical of the Platonized Christian-Aristotelian culture of his time. Of particular note are his views (and poetic elaborations of such concepts) regarding creation (Paradiso vii, 64–72; Paradiso xxix, 13–18, 25–30, where he blended Christian doctrine with the language of emanation), on causality (Convivio iii, ii, 4–5; Par. ii, 121–23), on the prophetic powers of dreams (Purgatorio ix, 16–18), on the creation of the human soul (Purgatorio xxv, 67–75), and its return to its maker (Paradiso i, 103–36). The cosmology set out in Paradiso ii, which is arranged in hierachical grades with a prominent role assigned to the angelic intelligences, was inspired in large part by the Book of Causes. With Petrarch, we witness greater direct enthusiasm for Plato, a stronger desire to reconcile his works with Christianity, following Augustine’s De civitate Dei (City of God; viii, 9), and a preoccupation with recovering his works. Thus, Petrarch referred to Plato as the prince of philosophy in De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own and Other People’s Ignorance); and, in the Trionfi (Triumphs; especially Triumphus Fame iii, 4–7), he inverted Dante’s order by placing Plato before Aristotle. Yet while Petrarch owned a Greek manuscript of Plato’s works, he never read him in the original; and though his enthusiasm helped in part to pave the way for the fifteenth-century Platonic revival, his own Platonism was derivative, being dependent on Augustine, Apuleius, Cicero, and Macrobius. It is only in fifteenth-century Italy, then, that we encounter direct study of Plato with the first generation of Italian humanists schooled in Greek. In the first half of the quattrocento, Uberto and Pier Candido Decembrio were responsible for Latin versions of the Republic, while Leonardo Bruni translated the Phaedo (1405), Gorgias (1409), Apology and Crito (1410), Phaedrus (1424), and Letters (1410–1411). The most significant contribution of all came in the second half of the century with Ficino, who published the first complete translation of the Platonis Opera Omnia (Complete Works of Plato) in 1484. Ficino read Plato through the lens of his Neoplatonic interpreters and attempted to harmonize him with Christian teachings, above all in his Theologia platonica de immortalitate animarum (Platonic Theology, On the Immortality of the 1281

NEOPLATONISM Soul, 1469–1474). He also shared in a form of syncretism, encouraged by many Neoplatonists, which viewed Aristotle and Plato as being in accord with one another with Aristotle serving as a propaedeutic for Platonic philosophy. In the 1490s, moreover, he completed and published translations of Plotinus (published 1492), the Pseudo-Dionysius (dedicated 1492), and the Neoplatonists, Iamblichus, Proclus, Porphyry, Synesius, and Psellus (published in 1499). There is insufficient space to mention, let alone account for, the influence of Plato and the Neoplatonic school on fifteenthand sixteenth-century poets, artists, philosophers, cosmologists, theologians, and others in Italy. In late quattrocento Florence, poets such as Angelo Poliziano and Lorenzo de’ Medici drew on neoPlatonic motifs and images in their vernacular verse, and Girolamo Benivieni provided a popularized vernacular verse account of Ficino’s doctrines. In the same period, Cristoforo Landino also popularized an extensive corpus of Florentine Platonism through his widespread use of philosophical allegory and doctrinal compilation in his widely read Dante commentary. Artists such as Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Titian made use of neo-Platonic concepts in their work; in his own vernacular verse, Michelangelo later developed neo-Platonic love doctrine and other premises (such as the preexistence of the soul and the notion of the artist painting himself). In the sixteenth century, there developed a courtly vogue for a popularized version of Platonism, based in large measure on Ficino’s doctrines of love. Throughout the fifteenth century and beyond, love poets have had recourse to a diffuse set of neo-Platonic imagery and conceits that entered into wide currency and assumed a courtly vogue, above all through the popularized Platonic love doctrine found in Pietro Bembo, Leone Ebreo, Baldassare Castiglione, and in later Italian writers associated with the genre of trattati d’amore (treatises of love). SIMON A. GILSON Further Reading Armstrong, H. A. (editor), The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967; reprinted 1970.

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Baranski, Zygmunt G., Dante e i segni: Saggi per una storia intellettuale di Dante Alighieri, Naples: Liguori, 2000. Chenu, M.-D., Nature, Man and Society in the Twelfth Century: Essays on New Theological Perspectives in the Latin West, translated by Jerome Taylor and Lester K. Little, Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Copenhaver, Brian P., and Charles B. Schmitt, ‘‘Renaissance Platonism,’’ in A History of Western Philosophy: 3 Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Brian P. Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmitt, Oxford-New York, Oxford University Press, 1992. De Mottoni Faes, Barbara, Il platonismo medievale, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Dronke, Peter, Fabula: Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Leiden: Brill, 1974. Garin, Eugenio, Studi sul platonismo medievale, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Gersh, Stephen, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation into the Prehistory and Evolution of the PseudoDionysian Tradition, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978. Gregory, Tullio, Anima Mundi: La filosofia di Guglielmo di Conches e la scuola di Chartres, Florence: Sansoni, 1955. Gregory, Tullio, Platonismo medievale: Studi e ricerche, Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1958. Gregory, Tullio, ‘‘The Platonic Inheritance,’’ in Peter Dronke (editor), A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Hankins, James, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Leiden–New York: Brill, 1990. Klibansky, Raymond, The Continuity of the Platonic Tradition During the Middle Ages, 1939; reprinted with supplement, 1981. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘‘Renaissance Platonism,’’ in Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains, 1961. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, ‘‘Marsilio Ficino as a Beginning Student of Plato,’’ Scriptorium, 20 (1966), 41–54. Lamberton, Robert, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 1986. Meekins, Angela, ‘‘Reflection on the Divine: Notes on Dante’s Heaven of the Sun,’’ The Italianist, 18 (1998), 28–70. Nardi, Bruno, Saggi di Filosofia Dantesca, 2nd ed., Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967. Pozzi, Mario (editor), Trattati d’amore del Cinquecento, Bari: Laterza, 1980. Valese, Giulio, ‘‘La filosofia dell’amore nel Rinascimento: Da Leone Ebreo ai minori,’’ Parole e idee, 6 (1964), 207–218. Wallis, R. T., Neoplatonism, London: Duckworth, 1972. Wetherbee, Winthrop, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

NEOREALISM

NEOREALISM The true heyday of Neorealism lasted no more than the period from 1943 (the year of the release of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione, which is often regarded as the first neo-Realist film) to the early 1950s. The influence and importance of the neoRealist movement, however, extended well beyond the limited time of its most apparent flourishing. While avoiding the production of manifestos and thus any avant-garde social or intellectual program, Neorealist writers and, above all, filmmakers made possible an enduring cultural awakening in Italy and abroad. Although the term neorealismo surfaced sporadically in the literary and philosophical fields at earlier points, the word gained broad acceptance in the 1940s with reference to Italian cinema—particularly the productions of the directors Luchino Visconti, Roberto Rossellini, and Vittorio De Sica. In an article published in the June 5, 1943, issue of the journal Film, Umberto Barbaro used the term neorealismo for the first time to describe a new cinematic tendency, although in reference not to Italian but to French films of the 1930s (particularly to Jean Renoir). Only after the end of World War II, however, did the label attain its full historical and semantic weight. Two of Neorealism’s key proponents offered what may remain its most compelling definitions. For the screenwriter and film theorist Cesare Zavattini, neo-Realism acquired an exemplary value in its epistemological dimension. One of his main creative principles was ‘‘conoscere per provvedere’’ (to know in order to provide), an imperative that, in his opinion, neo-Realism fulfills by way of a ‘‘pedinamento’’ or ‘‘stalking’’ of reality that proceeds not in the manner of a work of mimesis but as a simultaneous exploration and construction of reality (Neorealismo, 1979). The resistance of Italian critics to the canonization of the Neorealist phenomenon was made manifest at a conference in Pesaro in 1974, where no consensus could be reached on the definition of Neorealist cinema. Typifying such resistance, Lino Micciche` insisted that neo-Realism cannot be considered a coherent movement resulting in a common aesthetics but perhaps rather in an ‘‘etica dell’estetica’’ (ethics of aesthetics) (Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, 1999).

The Neorealist outlook may be positioned within a genealogy that includes French Realism and Naturalism, Italian verismo (particularly the works of Giovanni Verga), and German Neue Sachlichkeit. Yet the perspective cannot be understood in relation only to European literary and philosophical currents. An important source of inspiration for Neorealist writers such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese was the Depression-era literature of American authors such as William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, William Saroyan, and Erskine Caldwell. And just as American literature and cinema had a profound effect on Neorealism, the reverse influence may also be detected in certain films by directors such as Elia Kazan and Samuel Fuller. At the crossroads of cinematic and literary media and of European and American traditions, Neorealism at its best may be regarded as the original result precisely of a propensity for cultural expansion and contamination, rather than for aesthetic or ethical dogma. Paradoxically, Neorealism also has had a crucial place in the redefinition of Italy’s national identity and stands as one of the watershed symbolic moments in the life of Italian society following the epochs of the Risorgimento and Fascism. The fall of Fascism in 1945 and the difficulty of the subsequent period of the Reconstruction initiated in Italy a period of intense ethical and political hope informed by the ideals of the Resistance, of freedom, and of social justice. In keeping with this outlook, Neorealism concerned itself with exposing the real society beyond the populist stereotypes and rhetorical mystifications of Fascist propaganda. The goal of such an investigation was shared by Catholics and Socialists alike, the two hegemonic social forces in Italy at the time. The cinematic masterpieces of the period, such as Rossellini’s Roma, citta` aperta (Rome, Open City, 1945) and Paisa` (Paisan, 1946), Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves, 1948), and Giuseppe De Santis’s Riso amaro (Bitter Rice, 1949) may be said collectively to chronicle the voyage of discovery of a country populated by refugees, the poor, children, women, and those otherwise marginalized. 1283

NEOREALISM Neorealist films are generally identified with a quasi-documentary style that eschewed conventional studio methods through nonprofessional casts; on-location shooting; natural lighting; uninterrupted, long takes; dialogue that incorporated regional dialect; and subjects revolving around social or ethical questions. However, these elements are neither necessary nor sufficient to define the dynamic heterogeneity of neo-Realism. In a larger sense, the fundamental attribute common to all Neorealist films is a contempt for purity (whether aesthetic or ethical) and for formal or social rigidity. In Roma, citta` aperta, for example, many typically Neorealist ingredients appear to be absent insofar as the cast was made up of some professional actors, the key sequences were tightly edited, and so forth. However, the film exemplifies a Neorealist approach through its contamination of different genres (comedy, melodrama, tragedy, farce), its consistent subversion and reversal of conventional social roles (women acting decisively, children acting like adults, Catholics helping Socialists), and a new way of approaching production techniques, which brought filmmaking out of the Hollywood studio system. Many Neorealist films may seem enigmatic precisely because they aim to escape the strictures of both film genres and accepted social paradigms. In this regard, the film that takes this inclination to its logical extreme and therefore might well be considered the symbolic end of neo-Realism is Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1950). De Sica’s dazzling allegory achieved a unique balance of social realism and fairytale fantasy in depicting the magical transformation of the poor into the rich, homeless squatters into a transcendent elect, and, in one of the film’s most astonishing sequences, white characters into their black alter egos and vice-versa. It might even be said that the collaboration between De Sica and Zavattini that resulted in the screenplay of Miracolo a Milano enacted the Neorealist determination to explore the attraction of opposites. Zavattini, who was arguably the most important screenwriter and theoretician of Neorealist cinema, generally wrote in a vein of dark, surrealist pathos that in Miracolo a Milano found its ideal aesthetic and political supplement in De Sica’s more gentle humanism. Two more features ought to be addressed to give a comprehensive account of cinematic neoRealism. First is a new way of visualizing the ratio between the body and the landscape, particularly evident in Visconti’s Ossessione and Rossellini’s Paisa`, that accentuated the horizontal line 1284

in direct contrast to the vertical dynamic of the image favored by earlier Italian films, especially during the Fascist era. This Neorealist emphasis on the horizontal, which insisted on a view of reality from eye level, might be said to have allegorically reinforced an understanding of social and historical relations incompatible with a monumental frame of reference. Second is the emergence of a more richly articulated, dialectical idea of the relationship between the individual and the mass, a refusal to settle ethical or political questions simply by deciding between the interests of the community and one of its members. In the best Neorealist films, a tension always exists between the people and the specific person, because conformity cannot be considered a virtue and solidarity may no longer be taken for granted. Although it is true that to speak of a pure Neorealism is difficult, it is undeniable that the Neorealist concept is central to the terms of film theory and criticism. In the late 1930s, two Italian journals helped prepare a critical environment favorable to Neorealism: Cinema, edited by Umberto Barbaro, and Bianco e nero, edited by Luigi Chiarini, which affirmed that reality rather than literature should be the principal source of subject matter for Italian films. French critics from Andre´ Bazin to Gilles Deleuze subsequently insisted on the unique ontological project of neoRealism as its defining stylistic trait. Indeed, it may well be said that the entire Realist aesthetic of cinema established by Bazin was predicated on his thinking about Neorealism. For Bazin, the uninterrupted, long take that he identified as one of Neorealism’s signature achievements with particular reference to De Sica’s Umberto D. (1951)–and that is also important, one might add, for Rossellini’s Paisa` and for Visconti’s La terra trema– guarantees a genuine openness to reality insofar as the interpretive manipulation of the editing process is kept in check. Although Deleuze did not develop a systematic taxonomy of the medium in Cinema 1 (1991) and Cinema 2 (1992), the philosopher ultimately assigned to Neorealism the role of the defining event that catalyzed the emergence of the time-image, the modernist mode of cinema that has prevailed in Europe since World War II and provided an aesthetic alternative to the Hollywood-style genre picture. In the literary domain, the reawakening of Italian culture toward the end of World War II manifested itself in a new generation of writers and critics who abandoned their predecessors’ ornate rhetoric to focus on social emancipation, the role of the

NEOREALISM intellectual, the question of popular culture, regional dialect and folklore, and a sober style. It could be argued that literary Neorealism was more politically radical than its cinematic counterpart, due to the early condemnation in the literary sphere of Fascist writing as ‘‘calligraphy without art.’’ Yet this polemical energy, as well as the determination to confine literature to the chronicling of existing conditions at the expense of narration or critical interpretation, soon began to dissipate in the writings of Cesare Pavese, Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini, and other authors. As was the case for cinema, Neorealist literature may be divided into two phases. The first phase spanned from 1943 to 1948 and ran parallel to the activities of the Resistance until the electoral victory of the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana). In this earlier phase, without adhering to an explicit, shared poetics, Neorealist literature seemed to express the aspirations of the collective, aiming at the critical renovation of Italian culture and politics. The second phase spanned from 1948 through the mid-1950s. In this later phase, Neorealism appeared to lose its most spontaneous qualities and at times degenerated into mere populism. In general, Neorealist literature aspires to a contamination of high and low culture, a free use of regional dialect and the vernacular, and a new emphasis on the importance of dialogue to the narrative process. We often find in Neorealist writing a propensity to mix different genres and styles in a manner similar to the eclectic methods of neorealist film. Vittorini’s Uomini e no (Man and Not Men, 1945) is exemplary in its effort to bring the historical novel, autobiography, and documentary into a harmonious mode of coexistence. Underlying these formal traits is a strong faith in the ethical and political function of literature as well as in the spirit and potential of the Italian people during their emergence from the war and its aftermath. A specific source of inspiration for this attitude among Neorealist authors was the publication of Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni dal carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1948–1951). Gramsci managed in these magisterial critical testaments to recuperate and transcend the idealist legacy of Benedetto Croce, while tracing the possibilities of ‘‘nationalpopular’’ culture in Italy. In Gramsci’s wake, a generation of Italian critics from Cesare Cases to Carlo Salinari attempted to redefine the role and function of literature from a theoretical perspective. During this period, the most important

literary contributions to the advancement of the Neorealist project were, besides Vittorini’s Uomini e no, Pavese’s Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters, 1941) and Il compagno (The Comrade, 1947), Renata Vigano`’s L’Agnese va a morire (1949), and Vasco Pratolini’s Il quartiere (A Tale of Santa Croce, 1945), Cronaca familiare (Family Chronicle, 1947), and Cronache di poveri amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers, 1947). It is important to note, however, that many of these writers cannot be described solely as ‘‘Neorealists’’; certainly in the cases of Pavese and Vittorini, neo-Realism corresponded only to one moment in their artistic careers. Two other writers who elaborated the Neorealist stance in important ways in some of their works were Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Calvino’s early novel Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947) is often identified as an important Neorealist achievement for its powerful depiction of the Resistance. Many of Pasolini’s films and novels, despite their insistent mannerist and lyric gestures, clearly aimed to revitalize and expand the poetics of neo-Realism. The most significant examples of this effort were his novels Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959) and Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), and La ricotta (1963) among his films. In conclusion, we might say that after an initial, reductive effort to interpret neo-Realism as a sign of sociopolitical redemption, historians of Italian cinema and literature have tended to downplay the cogency and coherence of a Neorealist aesthetic. The ongoing legacy of Neorealism is paradoxically to be found in its peculiar ability to provide an immanent field for the diverse poetic expressions of an ultimate love of contingency. ALESSIA RICCIARDI Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Barbaro, Umberto, Neorealismo e realismo, 2 vols., Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Bazin, Andre´, What Is Cinema? vol. 2, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967–1971. Bondanella, Peter, Italian Cinema from Neorealism to the Present, New York: Continuum, 2001. Brunetta, Gian Piero, Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 3: Dal neorealismo al miracolo economico. 1945–1959, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993. Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

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NEOREALISM Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Fanara, Giulia, Pensare il neorealismo, Rome: Lithos, 2000. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Introduzione al neorealismo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Kracauer, Siegfried, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, New York: Oxford University Press, 1960. Landy, Marcia, Italian Film, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Micciche`, Lino (editor), Il neorealismo cinematografico italiano, Venice: Marsilio, 1999.

Milanini, Claudio (editor), Neorealismo: Poetiche e polemiche, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Moneti, Guglielmo, Lezioni di Neorealismo, Siena: Nuova Immagine Editrice, 1998. Moneti, Guglielmo, Neorealismo fra tradizione e rivoluzione, Siena: Nuova Immagine Editrice, 1999. Muscetta, Carlo, Realismo, neorealismo, controrealismo, Rome: Lucarini, 1990. Rondi, Brunello, Il neorealismo italiano, Parma: Guanda, 1956. Tinazzi, Giorgio, and Marina Zancan, Cinema e letteratura del neorealismo, Venice: Marsilio, 1990. Verdone, Mario, Il cinema neorealista: Da Rossellini a Pasolini, Palermo: Celebes, 1977. Zavattini, Cesare, Neorealismo, Milan: Bompiani, 1979.

THE NEW LIFE See Vita nova (Work by Dante Alighieri)

NEW LYRICS See Rime nuove (Work by Giosue` Carducci)

GIULIA NICCOLAI (1934–) Giulia Niccolai lives and writes under the linguistic regime of two languages: Italian represents her father’s world, English her mother’s world. This brilliant, whimsical, accomplished, bilingual poet stands out in the contemporary poetic canon because of her ironic deformation of the rigid rules of literary experimentalism. She began her career as a 1286

photojournalist but began writing poetry and narrative. Influenced by the artistic debates of 1960s, Niccolai developed a distinctive and more personal experimental style that contrasted with the cerebral and rigid line of the Italian neo-avant-garde, in which she played a prominent role in the 1960s and 1970s. She met the writers of Gruppo 63 one

GIULIA NICCOLAI year after its official birth in Palermo and went on to collaborate with them on publishing and translations projects. Following the examples of her literary models, Gertrude Stein and Lewis Carroll, Niccolai’s poetic writing explores and crosses the boundaries of sense, of reality, of mind and body: Puns, nonsense, witticisms, allusions, alliterations, and echoes of sounds between foreign languages enrich her verses. An ironic approach to Western literature characterizes Niccolai’s personal way of transforming the relationship between word and thing, body and mind, author and reader, everyday and literary use of language. Her first novel, Il grande angolo (The Wide Angle, 1966), experiments with mixing visual language and media photography. After meeting the Gruppo 63, who advocated a radical break with traditional form, Niccolai produced her first book of poetry, Humpty Dumpty (1969), written in English. Purists do not consider it an Italian poetry book because of the evident influence of Lewis Carroll and the internationalistic style of concrete poetry. With Greenwich (1971), Niccolai began to dedicate poems and verses to friends and colleagues. Her writing discovered the joy of speaking to a known reader: Poems became a kind of public conversation that allowed her to rethink the forms and functions of Western intellectual groups. Rusky Salad Ballads & Webster Poems (1977) is a volume of verse that joins geographic images, cartography, and Western poetry in the experimental manner of Gertrude Stein. Niccolai herself has defined it as a milestone of her career and life. Stein’s linguistic experiments exploring the relationship between language and reality through spatial and geographic metaphors allowed Niccolai to rethink poetry during a hard time of her life. She tells the story of her meeting Stein and its consequences in a section of the autobiographical novel Esoterico biliardo (Esoteric Biliard, 2001). It consists of 13 chapters describing Niccolai’s life, her writings, friends, and readings. The narrative is built up through a secret geometry of words, thoughts, actions, and unexpected events, which produce meaning. Its structure reflects her interest in Buddhism and the Buddhist concept of travel from one spiritual stage to another, leading to new insight discovered and disseminated by poetic ` viaggiare che porta a fare giochi di language: ‘‘E parole / o sono i giochi di parole che si fanno viaggiando / o sono le parole che giocano e viaggiando fanno / e dove portano’’ (It is travel that leads to creating word games / or it is word games

that are created in traveling / or it is words that play and in traveling create / and lead somewhere) (‘‘La storia geografica,’’ in Harry’s Bar e altre poesie, 1981). Niccolai’s poems, collected in the volume Harry’s Bar e altre poesie, with a preface written by her friend Giorgio Manganelli, stress the importance of memory and freedom: Poetry is a kind of learning by heart the self and the other, the presence and the past, the masculine and the feminine. Like the movement of the Frisbee, poetry generates a new form of thinking; it is a game of returns, words hurled into the nonsense of life and enriching the silence.

Biography Born in Milan on 21 December 1934 to an Italian father and an American mother, Niccolai has spent her life between the United States and Europe. She began to work for the major magazines as photojournalist—Life, Paris Match, and Der Spiegel. In 1964 she met poets and intellectuals of Italian neo-avant-garde, the so-called Gruppo 63, during their second convention at Reggio Emilia. The friendship with Adriano Spatola led to a collaboration in life and art: They worked together for Geiger Publishing and founded the journal devoted to poetry Tam tam in 1970. Niccolai turned to poetic writing and performances, novels, and translations. Remarkable are her translations of Gertude Stein’s The Historical Geography of America and Carolyn Heilbrun’s stories, written under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross. In the mid-1980s Niccolai focused her spiritual research on Buddist religion. Frisbees: Poems for Launching won the Feronia Prize in 1994. She currently lives in Milan. DONATELLA ALESI Selected Works Novels Il grande angolo, 1966. The Ship in the Fields, with illustrations by Henry and Luciano Boschini, 1972. Esoterico biliardo, 2001.

Poetry ‘‘Humpty Dumpty,’’ 1969. ‘‘Greenwich,’’ 1971. ‘‘Poema & oggetto,’’ 1974. ‘‘Substitution,’’ 1975. Rusky Salad Ballads & Webster Poems, 1977.

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GIULIA NICCOLAI Harry’s Bar e altre poesie: 1969–1980, preface by Giorgio Manganelli, 1981. ‘‘Frisbees in facolta`,’’ 1984. Frisbees: Poesie da lanciare, 1994. ‘‘Orienti/Orients,’’ 2004.

Translations Prosper Me´rime´e, La notte di san Bartolomeo, 1975 (with Adriano Spatola). Gertrude Stein, La storia geografica dell’America, o Il rapporto della natura umana con la mente umana, 1981. Beatrix Potter, La favola di Ludovico Coniglio, 1981. Beatrix Potter, La favola della Signora Riccio Rotolo`, 1981. Dylan Thomas, Il mio Natale nel Galles, 1981. Beatrix Potter, La favola di Tom Miciozzion, 1985. Amanda Cross, Un delitto per James Joyce, 1992. Alexander Sutherland Neill, La nuvola verde, 1994.

Essays ‘‘Stein come pietra miliare,’’ in Le traduzioni italiane di Herman Melville e Gertrude Stein: secondo seminario sulla traduzione dall’inglese, Venice, 25–26 September 1995, Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1997. ‘‘L’infinito nel buddismo tibetano,’’ in Interminati spazi, sovrumani silenzi. ‘‘Un infinito commento’’: critici, filosofi, scrittori alla ricerca dell’ ‘‘infinito’’ di Leopardi,

edited by Vincenzo Guarracino, Grottammare : Stamperia dell’arancio, 2001.

Further Reading Alesi, Donatella, ‘‘L’etica in volo come un gabbiano. Appunti sulla nuova stagione poetica di Giulia Niccolai,’’ Avanguardia, 15 (2000): 3–14. Graffi, Milli, ‘‘L’analogia come urgenza in Giulia Niccolai,’’ Il verri, 19 (2002), 86–98. Lorenzini, Niva, Il presente della poesia 1960–1990, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Manganelli, Giorgio, ‘‘Preface,’’ in G. Niccolai, Harry’s Bar e altre poesie, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981. Manica, Raffaele, ‘‘Fuori dall’Harry’s bar, aspettando i frisbees. Una fuga per Giulia Niccolai,’’ in Discorsi interminabili, Naples: Altri Termini, 1987. Ricaldone, Luisa (editor), Incontri di poesia, Turin: Trauben, 2000. Tarozzi, Bianca, ‘‘Maestre e allieve,’’ in Parole scolpite. Profili di scrittrici degli anni Novanta, edited by Adriana Chemello, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 1998. Zagarrio, Giuseppe, Febbre, furore e fiele. Repertorio della poesia italiana contemporanea 1970–1980, Milan: Mursia, 1983.

GIOVANNI BATTISTA NICCOLINI (1782–1861) A teacher and dramatist in the classical tradition, Giovanni Battista Niccolini was one of the minor figures in the Tuscan cultural landscape of the first part of the nineteenth century and can be considered more a conservative linked to eighteenthcentury culture rather than a forerunner of the new times. In a period when romanticism opened up new horizons and sentiments, the artistic world of Niccolini remained rhetorical and incapable of interpreting the life and thought of his age. He was a diligent scholar of languages, philosophy, history, and literature, but his writing lacks originality of thought. His artistic ideal was based on the neoclassical concept of poetry, which he tried only later to adapt to romantic ideas. Niccolini’s earliest tragedies are classical in theme, while in his later ones there is a clear Shakespearian influence. His attraction for the three great Greek tragedians—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and 1288

Euripides—derived from a love for authority from which he was unable to free himself, in evident contrast with the romantic positions of Giovanni Berchet’s journal Il Conciliatore, which, while admiring the classics, condemned their imitators and all their norms based on authority rather than on the intrinsic nature of poetry itself. Nabucco (1819), an allegory of the figure of Napoleon following the example of Ugo Foscolo’s Aiace (Ajax, 1812), is cold and rigorously classical. Niccolini’s most successful work is considered to be Arnaldo da Brescia (Arnold of Brescia, 1843). Banned in Italy and published in Marseille to avoid censorship, this five-act tragedy revolves around the twelfthcentury reformist friar who incites the population to fight against the temporal power of the papacy in order to recreate the republic. Emperor Frederick I sides with Pope Hadrian IV, and Arnaldo is arrested and burnt alive, and his ashes are scattered. As a

GIOVANNI BATTISTA NICCOLINI work against the political power of the Church, it soon became very popular and provoked such a debate that it was nicknamed ‘‘The antidote to Papal supremacy.’’ Arnaldo represents an exemplary martyr for freedom against Imperial and Papal tyranny. He aims at restoring the Church to its former spiritual function. However, Arnaldo also remains an abstract figure, and even the Emperor and the Pope appear more like puppets. As Silvio D’Amico put it, ‘‘Niccolini’s verses, with their undeniable impetus and fluency, show a faith which resolves itself only in polemics’’ (Storia del teatro drammatico, 1968). In Filippo Strozzi (1847), Niccolini represented the last Florentine rebellion against Cosimo I de’ Medici. Political undertones are also present in the tragedy Mario e i Cimbri (1858) and his Poesie nazionali (National Poems, 1860), inspired by patriotic and anticlerical ideals. The influence of romanticism is evident in Niccolini’s plays on medieval themes, mostly inspired by Shakespeare and Friedrich Schiller. They include Beatrice Cenci (1838), a dark and romantic work but lacking dramatic force, and Rosmunda d’Inghilterra (Rosamund of England, 1839), based on a popular English ballad. Indeed, Niccolini’s civil, political and patriotic tragedies abound with an effusive lyricism fired up by a desire for action. For example, both in Giovanni da Procida (1830), which was banned until 1847, and in Lodovico Sforza (1833), he exalts the independence and unity of Italy. Niccolini’s patriotic works are predominantly magniloquent and rhetorical, but for the younger generation of the Risorgimento, he was a symbol of the civil poet. Thus, the great fame as a tragedian enjoyed during his lifetime depended for the most part on the content of his works, as the political ideals of the Risorgimento exaggerated their artistic significance.

Biography Giovanni Battista Niccolini was born on 29 October 1782 in Bagni di San Giuliano in the province of Pisa, from an aristocratic family of republican orientations. In 1799 he was imprisoned for his republican ideas. He received a degree in law from the University of Pisa and then moved to Florence, where he worked at the Reformation Office. In 1807 he began teaching history and mythology at the Accademia delle Belle Arti, where he also worked as a librarian. In 1817 he became a full member of the Accademia della Crusca. He was a

friend of Alessandro Manzoni and also a childhood friend of Ugo Foscolo, who dedicated the translation of the Chioma di Berenice to him. He collaborated with Giampiero Vieusseux in the foundation of the literary reviews Saggiatore and Antologia, in which he published many essays. In 1848 he was appointed to the Tuscan Senate, but he never actively participated in political life, effectively retiring in 1849. He died in Florence on 20 September 1861 and is buried in the Church of Santa Croce. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Opere, Florence: Le Monnier, 1852. Opere edite e inedite, edited by Corrado Gargiolli, 10 vols., Milan: Guignoni, 1863–1880.

Plays Polissena, 1810. Nabucco, 1819. Antonio Foscarini, 1827. Giovanni da Procida, 1830. Lodovico Sforza, 1833. Beatrice Cenci, 1838. Rosmunda d’Inghilterra, 1839. Arnaldo da Brescia, 1843; as Arnold of Brescia, translated by Theodosia Garron, 1846. Filippo Strozzi, 1847. Mario e i Cimbri, 1858.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie nazionali,’’ 1860. ‘‘Poesie inedite,’’ 1884.

Other Storia della Casa di Svevia in Italia, 1873–1880. Vespro siciliano. Storia inedita, 1882. Lettere famigliari inedite e quasi inedite, 1900.

Further Reading Alfieri, Luigi, Giovan Battista Niccolini: trageda del Risorgimento italiano, Milan: Zucchi, 1939. Baldini, Massimo, Il teatro di Giovan Battista Niccolini: studio critico-estetico, Florence: Galileiana, 1907. Borgomaneri, Teresa, Il romanticismo nel teatro di Giovan Battista Niccolini, Milan: Bolla, 1925. Croce, Benedetto, Conversazioni critiche: serie 3, Bari: Laterza, 1932. D’Amico, Silvio, Storia del teatro drammatico, vol. 2, Milan: Garzanti, 1968. De Sanctis Francesco, La letteratura italiana nel secolo diciannovesimo, edited by Franco Catalano, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1954. Illiano, Antonio, ‘‘From Monti’s Aristemo to Niccolini’s Arnaldo da Brescia: A Survey of Five Italian Tragedies,’’ Italica, 45:1 (1968), 70–82.

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GIOVANNI BATTISTA NICCOLINI Meldolesi, Claudio, ‘‘L’eta` degli avventi romantici in Italia,’’ in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, edited by Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, Turin: Einaudi, 2000.

Piromalli, Antonio, ‘‘Giovan Battista Niccolini,’’ in I minori, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Sbrana, Giovanni, Giovan Battista Niccolini: vita e opere, Pisa: Editrice Pisana, 1984.

IPPOLITO NIEVO (1831–1861) In spite of his death at age 30, Ippolito Nievo produced a considerable number of literary works, including thousands of lines of verse (collected in three volumes), plays, novellas, five novels, several notable essays, a remarkable number of journalistic works, and an intriguing epistolary. In fewer than 10 years, the young and versatile author directed his energies in multiple directions, as befits a writer capable of the extraordinary intellectual maturity evident in his greatest novel, Le confessioni d’un italiano (The Confessions of an Italian, 1867), and in his later writings. This abundance of interests long confined him to the role of an incoherent and dispersive polygraph and led to a fragmentary reading of his work. On the other hand, his militancy in the company of Garibaldi in the last phase of his life soon created the evocative myth of the poet-soldier, as indicated in the title of the first critical monograph about him by Dino Mantovani (Il poeta soldato, 1899). The relationship between Nievo’s biography and his poetry was noted well into the twentieth century, thanks also to the prestigious support of Benedetto Croce. Croce maintained that the author had spent the best of himself in the ‘‘active life’’ to the detriment of the contemplative, and he was thus more a ‘‘man’’ than a ‘‘man of letters’’ (‘‘Ippolito Nievo,’’ 1912). Only in the 1950s was this interpretative framework called into question, at which point there began the recovery of the complete works of a complex but not incoherent author, as well as the philological work necessary to this end. This critical reevaluation began with the fundamental critical edition of his greatest novel by Sergio Romagnoli (1952), who definitively quashed the suspicion that Nievo was an extemporaneous writer who wrote his masterpiece in an unrepeatable moment of creative fury. In this fervid decade of study there came to light, among many little-known or unknown texts by 1290

Nievo, the Antiafrodisiaco per l’amor platonico (The Anti-Aphrodisiac for Platonic Love), his first narrative work, finished in April of 1851 at the conclusion of a brief relationship with Matilde Ferrari. The 72 letters to the girl precede the text of the romanzetto, or little novel, as the author defines it, in which Ippolito, concealed under the ironic name of Incognito, recounted his initiation to love by way of Matilde, who in the text takes the name Morosina. But although the letters, strewn with literary echoes, recount the experience of a lovestruck man in the romantic tones of Rousseau’s La Nouvelle He´loı¨se and Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, the novel turns the event into satire and irony, using instead the models of Foscolo, traitor of Sterne, and of Sterne himself. The comic and satiric registers are fundamental components of Nievo’s production: These are dominant in Le avventure del Barone di Nicastro (The Adventures of the Baron of Nicastro, 1860), a short novel in the style of Voltaire’s Candide, which ridicules the idealistic and abstract philosophy of Camillo, but they also appear, alternating with a more cultured literary tone, in his verses. Giuseppe Giusti was Nievo’s tutelary deity at the time of his first forays into poetry, which were collected in two volumes of Versi (Poems) in 1854 and 1855. In the essay titled Studii sulla poesia popolare e civile massimamente in Italia (Studies on Popular and Civic Poetry Particularly in Italy, 1854), Nievo named Giusti as an antidote to the degeneration of romantic poetry and maintained that his proselike, popular intonation is a model of civic engagement in the literary context. In the theoretical perspective of the essay, this attention to the popular is connected with a particular interest in dialects; it guides the encounter, real and literary, with the peasant world. Between 1855 and 1856, during a long stay in Friuli, Nievo published a series of short stories that

IPPOLITO NIEVO he planned to collect (but did not) under the title Novelliere campagnuolo e altri racconti (The Country Storyteller and Other Tales). His objective was not that of speaking to the people, according to the educational literary model dear to moderate intellectuals, but of speaking to the bourgeois, ignored, vilified, and yet nevertheless an essential component of the nation, thus making him the interpreter between two distinct parts of society. His program, enunciated in the introductory story, translates into a representation of the countryside as a world apart, a world that is voluntarily archaic even when its social organization and its values are identified. Topics related to the world of the peasants are still present in Il Conte pecoraio: Storia del nostro secolo (The ShepherdCount: The History of Our Century), written at the end of 1856. But the open structure of the novel appears irreconcilable with the idyllic forms, which by nature are idealizing, of his campagnuolo (country) experiment. It is not by chance that Nievo at the same time composed a historical novel, Angelo di bonta`: Storia del secolo passato (Angel of Goodness: History of the Last Century, 1856), which depicts the world of Venetian nobility in the eighteenth century. The year 1857 was a year of fervid work during which the writer accumulated an impressive number of manuscripts on his desk, almost as if to keep faithfully to the program jokingly proposed to his friend Andrea Cassa: ‘‘Voglio scrivere in verso, in prosa, in tragico, in comico, in sublime, in burlesco, in inchiostro bleu e in inchiostro nero’’ (I want to write in verse, in prose, in the tragic mode, in the comic, in the sublime, in the burlesque, in blue and in black ink) (Lettere, 1982). After having composed various poems, two tragedies (I Capuani and Spartaco), and a comedy (Le invasioni moderne), he began the first draft of Le confessioni d’un italiano, which he completed in eight months. In the novel, the me´lange of genres and registers practiced up until this point—from the idyll to the theater to history—converge in a structure orchestrated by the voice of an elderly narrator. The form is free and flexible, quite far from that which Nievo had called in the preface to Angelo di bonta`, perhaps with ironic distance, ‘‘the perfect and ideal order’’ realized by some great narrators. The last years of Nievo’s life were divided between journalism and military-political activity. Having moved in November of 1857 to Milan, the editorial capital of Italy, where he contributed to Il pungolo and later to Uomo di pietra, he wrote book

and theater reviews, as well as articles about society. In his journalistic writings, he investigated the various facets of current affairs, experienced ironically as the destiny of the modern reporter, with a deft writing style, humorous in the sense of the term coined at the time by Heine. Nievo translated lyrics from Heine and excerpts from his Deutschland. In the style of the times, he wrote using pseudonyms that stimulate different tones and moods: He was moody as Dulcamara, poisonous as Arsenico, surly as Todero, sharp as Fantasio, and all of these things together as SSS. All of his works, however, share the light concreteness of the conversationalist and the lucid penetration of the moralist, two talents characteristic of the journalist and man who used writing as an instrument through which to reflect on the real. Nievo did not renounce writing even in times of action, far from the critical stereotype of hopeful activism that leads to thoughtless testimony. During his military campaign with the ‘‘Cacciatori a cavallo’’ (Hunters on Horseback) he wrote Gli amori garibaldini (Love for Garibaldi, 1860), a poetic diary of the epos lived with Garibaldi, to whom he consigned his disillusionment at the peace of Villafranca, ‘‘l’infausta pace’’ (the inauspicious peace) that left the Veneto to Austria. But it was in his political-theoretical essays that the writer demonstrated the new ideological and literary maturity that sprang from his direct experience of the events of 1859. The pamphlet Venezia e la liberta` d’Italia (Venice and the Freedom of Italy, 1859), published anonymously, is a militant document that realistically confronts the problem of the borders of the future Italian state. This is also a text full of the literary myths and implicit historiographic references that appear throughout Nievo’s production. At its center is Venice, historical city and mythical city, described and redescribed by the author throughout his life. In Le confessioni d’un italiano, Venice is the ‘‘madre antica di sapienza e di liberta`’’ (ancient mother of knowledge and freedom), recalled in the light of melancholic decadence. This is the place of synthesis of a distant, grandiose past, the recent heroic past, and the future, on which is projected the hope for independence: Without Venice, ‘‘la citta` piu` italiana della patria nostra’’ (the most Italian city in our homeland), the nation cannot call itself complete. In parallel with this pamphlet, Nievo wrote the Frammento sulla rivoluzione nazionale (Fragment 1291

IPPOLITO NIEVO on National Revolution), which in spite of its title is a complete text recently renamed Rivoluzione politica e rivoluzione nazionale (Political Revolution and National Revolution). The political revolution was for Nievo a precarious construction: the peasants, whose contribution to a national revolution is essential, together with the majority of the country remain estranged from its realization. Nievo asked himself why the peasants did not support the country’s fight for independence. He blamed the ruling classes, both moderate and democratic, whose pedagogical and philanthropic programs failed to respond adequately to the needs of the rural masses. With new historical-political concreteness, Nievo thus reintroduced the defense of their interests that he began in the Novelliere campagnuolo. And he insisted that, before educating the peasants, their lives must be improved; their representatives, those rural priests on whom he had begun to write a novel, interrupted by his departure with Garibaldi’s Mille, should remain unchanged. Nievo’s work has been read against the backdrop of the Risorgimento, which in its concluding phase made possible the foundation of the Italian state. His work is in fact steeped in ‘‘risorgimental’’ values of civic engagement and a solid sense of history, values evident in the structure of Le confessioni d’un italiano and in the ideology of its protagonist who, although never abandoning himself to simplistic optimism in the face of unification, is strongly oriented toward future objectives. Yet Nievo’s work can also be viewed through the existential historiographic category of the ‘‘age of transition’’ with which the writer described his own times, a historical moment unbalanced between past and future. His work bears the sign of this age of transition, an awareness of the complexity and the inconstancy of the real; in this sense, it was a response to the crisis of the traditional models (he employed, for example, the canonical Romantic forms of the idyll and the historical novel). In this sense, Nievo’s critical relationship with the greatest exponent of this tradition, Alessandro Manzoni, is significant. Some explicit references—such as intertextual citations of his work—reveal in fact an attitude of reverent and detached irony, of formal homage and substantial distance. Having lived on the border between two eras, at the divide between old and new, Ippolito Nievo did not break ties with the past, and his early death kept him from crossing into the new age. 1292

Biography Ippolito Nievo was born in Padova, 30 November 1831. He began school in Verona, 1841, but returned to Mantua to begin high school, 1847. He had a romantic relationship with Matilde Ferrari, 1848. Nievo lived in Florence and Pisa, distanced for reasons of political prudence, 1849. He began law studies at the University of Pavia, 1850–1852. His father, a magistrate, compromised in the revolutionary uprisings of 1848–1849, was transferred to Udine, 1850. He began to contribute to Alchimista friulano, 1852. Nievo graduated in jurisprudence from the University of Padova, 22 November 1855. He left the Alchimista friulano and began to contribute to various journals, 1855. He was accused for references against the Austrian Gendarmeria in his short novel L’avvocatino, 1856. He moved to Milan, drawn by editorial engagements and a romantic relationship with Bice Melzi Gobio, 1857. The trial for L’avvocatino ended with a pecuniary fine, February 1858. Nievo finished Le confessioni d’un italiano and went to the baths of Regoledo to recover from a nervous breakdown, 1858. At the start of the Second War for Independence, he enrolled in Garibaldi’s brigade of Cacciatori a cavallo and fought at Varese, San Fermo, and on the Stelvio. After the armistice of Villafranca, he once again took up journalism in Milan, 1859. He participated in the Garibaldi’s expedition of the ‘‘Thousand’’ to Sicily, about which he wrote a Giornale and, as Vice Superintendent, a Rendiconto amministrativo, 1860. He returned to Sicily to collect documents about the spedizione dei Mille. Departing on 4 March 1861, he died during the return voyage in the shipwreck of the steamboat ‘‘Ercole.’’ MARINELLA COLUMMI CAMERINO

Selected Works Collections Le piu` belle pagine di Ippolito Nievo, edited by Riccardo Bacchelli, Milan: Treves, 1929. Opere, edited by Sergio Romagnoli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1952 (includes the first critical edition of Le confessioni d’un Italiano). Tutte le opere narrative di Ippolito Nievo, edited by Folco Portinari, 2 vols., Milan: Mursia, 1967. Tutte le opere di Ippolito Nievo, edited by Marcella Gorra, Milan: Mondadori, 1970–1982 (only two volumes were published: Poesie, 1970; Lettere, 1982).

IPPOLITO NIEVO Poetry ‘‘Versi,’’ 1854. ‘‘Versi,’’ 1855. ‘‘Le lucciole: Canzoniere,’’ 1858. ‘‘Gli amori garibaldini,’’ 1860. ‘‘Quaderno di traduzioni,’’ edited by Iginio De Luca, 1964; revised edition 1976.

Fiction Angelo di bonta`: Storia del secolo passato, 1856; 1988. Il Conte pecoraio: Storia del nostro secolo, 1857. Le avventure del Barone di Nicastro, 1860 (includes ‘‘La corsa di prova’’). La pazza del Segrino, 1860 (includes ‘‘La Viola di San Bastiano’’). Le confessioni d’un Italiano, as Le confessioni di un ottuagenario, edited by Erminia Fua` Fusinato, 1867; as The Castle of Fratta, translated by Lovett F. Edwards, 1957. Novelliere campagnuolo e altri racconti, edited by Iginio De Luca, 1956. Antiafrodisiaco per l’amor platonico, edited by Carlo Bascetta and Vincenzo Gentili, 1956; new edition by Sergio Romagnoli, 1983.

Plays Teatro, edited by Emilio Faccioli, 1962.

Nonfiction Studii sulla poesia popolare e civile massimamente in Italia, 1854; edited by Marcella Gorra, 1994. Venezia e la liberta` d’Italia, 1859. Scritti politici e storici, edited by Gianni Scalia, 1965. Le confessioni d’un Italiano: Scritti vari, 2 vols., edited by Folco Portinari, 1967. Due scritti politici, edited by Marcella Gorra, 1988 (includes Venezia e la liberta` d’Italia and the critical edition of Frammento sulla rivoluzione nazionale). Scritti giornalistici, edited by Ugo Maria Olivieri, 1996.

Further Reading Colummi Camerino, Marinella, Introduzione a Nievo, Bari: Laterza, 1991. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Ippolito Nievo,’’ Critica, 10 (November 1912), 405–421. Di Benedetto, Arnaldo, Ippolito Nievo e altro Ottocento, Naples: Liguori, 1996. Gorra, Marcella, Ritratto di Nievo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1991. Grimaldi, Gabriele (editor), Ippolito Nievo e il Mantovano, Atti del Convegno Nazionale, Venice: Marsilio, 2001. Maffei, Giovanni, Ippolito Nievo e il romanzo di transizione, Naples: Liguori, 1990. Mantovani, Dino, Il poeta soldato: Ippolito Nievo 1831–61, Milan: Treves, 1899. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, L’epistolario di Nievo: Un’analisi linguistica, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Ragusa, Olga, ‘‘Nievo the Writer: Tendencies in Criticism,’’ Italian Quarterly, 2 (1958), 20–34. Romagnoli, Sergio, ‘‘Ippolito Nievo,’’ in Storia della cultura veneta, edited by G. Arnaldi and M. Pastore Stocchi, Vol. 6 (Dall’eta` napoleonica alla prima guerra mondiale), Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1986.

Sanguinetti Katz, Giuliana, The Uses of Myth in Ippolito Nievo, Ravenna: Longo, 1981.

LE CONFESSIONI D’UN ITALIANO, 1867 Novel by Ippolito Nievo

Le confessioni d’un italiano is the most representative novel of Italian national identity from the era of its modern construction. The work, written by Nievo in 1858 on the eve of the unification, is based on the character of Carlo Altoviti. Over the long course of his life he witnessed the events of a period in Italian history that he defined as ‘‘memorabile’’ (memorable). As a child, he lived in the feudal castle of Fratta; he passed his youth in the midst of the revolutions triggered by Napoleon’s arrival in Italy; as a mature adult he witnessed the uprisings of 1848 and their subsequent defeat, after which he decided to write his memoirs. Thus Le confessioni d’un italiano recounts, through the voice of the protagonist, Italy’s preparation for unification. The novel closes expectantly, implicitly pointing out the moment in which the ‘‘political revolution’’ would be transformed into a ‘‘national revolution’’ that involved the peasant classes originally excluded from the move for unification. Carlo Altoviti’s political course, exemplary of the path of the collectivity, transforms him from a ‘‘Venetian’’ into an ‘‘Italian.’’ This political path is interwoven with the hero’s personal story, that of a candid orphan and vagabond who becomes a patriarch who will educate the next generation, a transformation signaled by Altoviti’s childhood love for Pisana, a contradictory and elusive person and among the most fascinating of the nineteenth century in Italy. Combining the model of the historical novel (Manzoni), the autobiography or pseudoautobiography (Rousseau, Musset), and the bildungsroman (Thackeray), Nievo created a form that was completely new to Italy. History is recounted in the impassioned tones of lived 1293

IPPOLITO NIEVO experience, and great figures like Napoleon and Foscolo are viewed through the eyes of the ‘‘average’’ hero. Recent critics have recognized the structural strength of the novel (which in the past was judged to be lacking in cohesiveness) and brought to the fore the narrator’s role in indicating the structural, rhythmic irregularity of the narration when he declares that he writes ‘‘a sbalzi’’ (in jolts) as ‘‘l’estro e la memoria’’ (inspiration and memory) suggest. Le confessioni d’un italiano is organized in three parts (which correspond to the three notebooks of the handwritten manuscript) in which the periods of the story of the individual and Italian history are interwoven in an asymmetrical form: The protagonist takes his first steps as the feudal institutions reach their end (Chapters 1–7); his youth is consumed during the revolutions (Chapters 7–17); and his old age witnesses the dawn of the new Italy (Chapters 18–23). The first-person narrative voice is the structural cornerstone of the different sections, but Altoviti also has a welldeveloped psychological and rhetorical character, significantly distant from the voice of the writer. He displays the moralizing tendencies perhaps typical of an octogenarian, although he does not lack irony and a sense of humor regarding the mistakes of his youth. In the superficial layer of the text, constituted by the hero’s path toward maturity, the protagonist’s temporal frame reunites with that of the narrator and the tormented knot of the events of his life dissolve in awareness. But it is instead in the dialectic between the old and young Altoviti that the novel’s depth is revealed in all its human and civic passion. Nievo’s free use of different forms is also evident in the novel’s language, which is full of literary and dialectal terms (from

the Veneto and Lombardy) in conscious opposition to the Florentine school of Manzoni. MARINELLA COLUMMI CAMERINO Editions First edition: Le Confessioni di un Ottuagenario, edited by Erminia Fua` Fusinato, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1867; as Le confessioni d’un italiano, edited by Marcella Gorra, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Critical editions: Le confessioni d’ un italiano, in Opere, edited by Sergio Romagnoli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1952; revised edition edited by Sergio Romagnoli, Venice: Marsilio, 1990; edited by Simone Casini, 2 vols., Parma: Guanda, 1999. Translations: as The Castle of Fratta, partial translation by Lovett F. Edwards, London: Folio Society, 1954. Following translations by Edwards are larger but still incomplete, London: Oxford University Press, 1957; 1974.

Further Reading Allegri, Mario, ‘‘Le confessioni d’un italiano,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Le opere (Dall’Ottocento al Novecento), Vol. 3, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Cortini, Maria Antonietta, L’autore, il narratore, l’eroe: Proposte per una rilettura delle ‘‘Confessioni,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Falcetto, Bruno, L’esemplarita` imperfetta: Le ‘‘Confessioni’’ di Ippolito Nievo, Venice: Marsilio, 1998. Gaiba, Carla, Il tempo delle passioni: Saggio su ‘‘Le confessioni d’un italiano’’ di Ippolito Nievo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Appunti di lettura sulle ‘Confessioni’ di Ippolito Nievo,’’ Rivista di letteratura italiana,’’ 3 (1984), 465–518. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Storia e formazione nelle Confessioni,’’ in Il romanzo, Vol. 5, edited by Franco Moretti et al., Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Olivieri, Ugo Maria, Narrare avanti il reale: Le ‘‘Confessioni d’un italiano’’ e la forma romanzo nell’Ottocento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1990. Romagnoli, Sergio, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in I. Nievo, Le confessioni d’un italiano, Venice: Marsilio, 1990.

NOTEBOOKS OF SERAFINO GUBBIO See Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Work by Luigi Pirandello)

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NOVELLA

NOVELLA A novella is a short story in prose, generally circulated together with others, that was popular in Italy between the late thirteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. Unlike several other medieval genres, the novella had no authentic models among classical authors and was not, therefore, codified or guided by convention. Instead, it sprang from a wide variety of medieval sources, some literary and some deriving from various oral traditions. Despite some haziness among scholars in the precise definition of the Italian novella, the genre’s general characteristics may be summarized as follows: It is a relatively brief narration in prose (unlike the lai, the fabliau, or the romance); it contains human characters (unlike the Aesopian fable); its plot takes place within the realm of the believable (unlike the fairy tale) but does not typically depend upon historical facts (as do histories, chronicles, and anecdotes); it generally eschews clear-cut moralizing conclusions (unlike lives of the saints, exempla, parables, and sermons); finally, novellas often appear grouped together within a frame fiction or some other unifying structure. Although the novella may be roughly distinguished from these other types of narration, they have all influenced its development in one way or another. The most substantial roots of the Italian novella are grounded in the cultures of Asia, where short stories of this type were already quite widespread. From the late eleventh century, Eastern tales had begun to arrive in Italy directly from the Levant, North Africa, and Muslim Spain (through merchants, sailors, crusaders, mercenaries, and pilgrims) and indirectly from the Byzantine Empire, France, and various Jewish communities. Among the most significant collections were Kalilah and Dimna, fables from the Indian Panchatantra (The Five Doctrines, fourth century AD); Barlaam and Josaphat; and Christianized versions of the legends of Buddha that were quickly assimilated into hagiographical compilations such as Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend, ca. 1260). Alongside these were other collections such as the Historia septem sapientium Romae (The Seven Sages of Rome, eleventh century), also known as the Book of Sindbad or Li romans de Dolopathos (Dolopathos, twelfth century), originally Indian

tales of exemplary behavior set during the Roman Empire; Petrus Alfonsi’s Disciplina Clericalis (Monastic Education, ca. 1106), stories of a father that are intended to serve in the ethical instruction of his son; and the Fiore dei Filosofi (Florilegia of Philosophers, thirteenth century), which grouped sayings and catchy lessons attributed to remarkable men of antiquity. From the Christian tradition, the novella inherited themes and motifs from Gregory the Great’s Dialogorum Libri IV (Dialogues, 593), Jacque de Vitry’s Sermones vulgares (Exempla, 1240–1260), and various other collections commonly drawn upon by preachers. Additional materials of a more historical nature were taken from immensely popular works such as the Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans, thirteenth century), Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale (Mirror of History, midthirteenth century), Valerius Maximus’ Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem (Memorable Doings and Sayings, ca. AD 30), and other encyclopedic compilations. The French literary tradition contributed characters and legends from the romance cycles as well as comic and racy motifs from the fabliaux. Lastly, the native oral tradition in Italy contributed a series of tales from popular memory. The birth of the novella took place in Tuscany, where are found the oldest attempts at short narrative in the vernacular. The most important, if not the most ancient, of these texts is the anonymous Libro di novelle et di bel parlare gientile (The Book of Novellas and Genteel Speech), also known as the Cento novelle antike (The Hundred Ancient Novellas), and, from the sixteenth century, by its far more common title, the Novellino, which comprises a series of novellas, anecdotes, and sayings that date from between 1281 and 1300. The tales are extant in a few rather dissimilar manuscripts, yet the collection’s sources and literary intentions are clear. The author stated at the outset that the work is meant for those ‘‘che non sanno e disiderano di sapere’’ (who do not know and who wish to know). Ostensibly another compilation of memorable events and clever retorts, the Novellino is profoundly important not simply as a sort of sociohistorical document (as it has often 1295

NOVELLA been treated) but as an authentic literary work. Despite its author’s preference for extreme brevity, certain still-unresolved philological problems, and the Novellino’s lack of a frame, the prose belies stylistic decisions made in the adaptation of source material that are meant to lend consistency and entertainment value to the text. What emerges is a remarkably coherent ideological perspective on contemporary figures (such as Frederick II in novella 59) and on tales taken from other works that in turn reveal a genuine authorial attention to the power of the intellect, the efficacy of rhetoric, and the importance of ethical severity. It is, in some ways, the first evidence of the voice of the newly ascendant mercantile society. With the possible exception of some highly subjective moralizing novellas interpolated into the Reggimento e costumi di donna (The Governance and Ways of Women, ca. 1320) of Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348), the next milestone in the history of the novella is the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Written ca. 1350–1352 and variously refined until 1373, the Decameron is a collection of 100 novellas presented within an elaborate frame fiction that tells the story of ten young Florentines who, having temporarily escaped the ravages of the Black Death, entertain one another with storytelling. Boccaccio’s profound erudition, wide-ranging personal experiences, and exceptional literary abilities make the Decameron the single most important contribution to the genre and set the standard for all who followed him. Boccaccio’s novellas provide a synthesis of his own artistic sensibilities and provide a summa of sorts of the values of fourteenth-century Tuscany. Among the work’s principal themes are love as an instinctive force derived from the singular make-up of the individual; the power of an intelligence based on pragmatic bourgeois values; fortune as a forceful causality that conditions human behavior and reveals protagonists’ true natures. Though the work shares certain thematic characteristics with the Novellino (such as motifs of the witty retort and tales of exemplary behavior), Boccaccio richly enhances the genre through elaborately constructed plot lines and significant innovations, including the miniromance (novellas that relate the various fortunes of certain individuals), the beffa (a practical joke that lends itself to easy interpretation), and, most importantly, the realistic novella, in which the emotions and sensibilities of individual characters are set against verisimilar background events. 1296

The remainder of the fourteenth century and, arguably, all successive phases in the novella’s history are not marked by important improvements on the Decameron as a whole; rather, later short story writers, or novellieri, tend to make particular contributions to singular aspects of the genre. The Pecorone (The Big Sheep, ca. 1378), a collection of 50 novellas attributed to a Giovanni Fiorentino, is a good case in point. Its frame fiction is built upon conversations between a nun called Saturnina and a friar called Auretto (presumably an anagram of auttore, author) who attempts to woo her in a monastery in Forlı`. The Pecorone owes much, structurally and thematically, to the Decameron but places far greater emphasis on historical anecdotes. Nearly two-thirds of the tales are adapted from Giovanni Villani, and in them the author promoted a patently Guelf ideology. The Paradiso degli Alberti (The Albertis’ Paradise, ca. 1389), often attributed to Giovanni Gherardi (ca. 1360–1442), similarly uses the novella genre as a vehicle of political and social commentary. While its subject matter ranges widely, the frame fiction encourages an idealized society in which aristocrats and the bourgeoisie live happily together, regardless of the contemporary historical reality. The last novella writer of this period is Giovanni Sercambi (1348–1424), the author of an important chronicle of the history of Lucca and a collection simply called Novelle (Novellas, ca. 1402). Like Boccaccio, Sercambi used a flight from the plague as his unifying narrative structure and, like the Paradiso degli Alberti, his tales depend to a great degree on political ideology. In them, civic responsibility and ethical government are the principal innovative themes. The last great novelliere of the trecento is Franco Sacchetti (ca. 1323/24–1400), who was not only a politician but also a merchant and talented writer in his own right. His Trecentonovelle (Three Hundred Novellas, 1390s) contains novellas apparently arranged in no other order than that in which they came to his memory. Sacchetti’s principal contributions to the genre include the first-person appearances of the narrator and a highly subjective voice; an imagination that rivals Boccaccio’s; an accentuated attention to the realistic portrayal of the common man that leans more toward anecdote than universality. Unlike Boccaccio, who often represented lofty ideals and moving depictions of human nature, Sacchetti indulged in the vivid narration of day-to-day events and the petty vices of his contemporary Florentines. Sacchetti

NOVELLA owed much to his predecessors; however, he consciously strove to avoid slavish imitation. Thus, his Trecentonovelle, with its genuine humor, frequent ribaldry, and occasional moral lessons, is second only to the Decameron. The novella of the quattrocento, in no way immune to the rise of Humanism, saw the appearance of imaginative Latin translations of some of Boccaccio’s tales, a more profound use of classical sources, the facetia (a term commonly used to describe novellas written in Renaissance Latin), and the amplification of narratives to unprecedented lengths. Foremost among the authors of this period is Enea Silvio Piccolomini (1405–1464), the future Pope Pius II, who wrote the Historia de duobus amantibus (The Tale of Two Lovers, 1444). This long tale relates the thorny love affair of two youths with a novel blend of erudition and eroticism. Its sources range from Terence, Virgil, Seneca, Ovid, and Juvenal to Boccaccio and Petrarch. Other Humanists who tried their hand at the novella include Leonardo Bruni (ca. 1370– 1444), Luigi Passerini (late fifteenth century), and Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), whose Facetiae (1452) enjoyed enormous success. This collection is characterized by a strong satirical content (sometimes obscene) and owes much of its popularity to certain characteristics that, while not necessarily belonging to the novella, significantly influenced the genre. Most important is the increased use of the grotesque, the macabre, and the sensational, especially in relation to the theme of misogyny. At about this same time there appeared a novella, like Piccolomini’s of great length, known as the Novella del grasso legnaiuolo (The Fat Woodworker), which relates a beffa played by the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi on a friend named Manetto Ammannatini. It appeared in three anonymous versions between 1430 and 1435 and in a more refined final form in the 1470s prepared by Antonio Manetti (1423–1497). In it, the motif of the beffa reached its most elaborate form, yet the novella’s chief contribution to the genre lies in its indulgent play with earthy descriptions, not unlike that of the contemporary anonymous Motti e facezie del Piovano Arlotto (The Retorts and Facetiae of Parson Arlotto, ca. 1425). Bracciolini’s satirical vein resurfaces in Gentile Sermini’s Novelle (Novellas, after 1426). As in Boccaccio and Sercambi before him, Sermini mentioned the tales’ genesis in relation to an escape from a plague. The collection’s organization, however, is rather haphazard. Sermini claimed to have heard these novellas while in Petriolo, a spa town

near Siena, so most of them are set in Sienese surroundings. What makes them interesting is the author’s satirical treatment of rustics and his anticlericalism. The century’s principal collection of tales is the Novellino (1476) of Masuccio Salernitano (ca. 1410–1475), a low-ranking secretary of pro-Aragonese nobles in Naples. Perhaps the most talented novelliere after Boccaccio, Masuccio’s literary sensibility owes much to his times. The Novellino’s 50 tales are organized, like the Decameron’s, into groups of ten, culminating in stories of munificence and ideal behavior. Like Bracciolini, Masuccio significantly relied on the grotesque and misogyny; like Sermini, he engaged in scathing depictions of commoners and hypocritical clergymen. But unlike his Tuscan predecessors, he linked his novellas within an epistolary format, dedicating each to eminent members of Neapolitan society and appending to each a commentary in the first person. The Novellino is renowned for its mordant satire and antibourgeois attitudes. The quattrocento came to a close with one last collection: the Novelle Porretane (Novellas of Porretta, ca. 1492) of Giovanni Sabadino degli Arienti (ca. 1445– 1510), which are set in a spa town (Porretta, near Bologna) and are told by members of a sophisticated group of nobles. While there is no lack of offcolor anecdotes, the collection’s most noteworthy contribution is its depiction of the courtly society of the Bentivoglio, anticipating to a certain degree Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). By the sixteenth century, the genre of the novella began to look inward, and traditional themes took new directions. even if the Decameron remained the privileged linguistic model. While new authors worked to combine existing motifs, academics such as Francesco Bonciani (1552–1620) strove to limit the reach of the novella by following Aristotelian literary prescriptions. Imitators were abundant: in Naples, Girolamo Morlini (early sixteenth century) rewrote old novellas in Latin, mixing them with Apuleius’s Metamorphoses; Agnolo Firenzuola (1493–1543) did much the same in Tuscany for the vernacular, adding translations from the Panchatantra as well as animal fables; Giovan Francesco Straparola (ca. 1480–after 1557) also took this path. Little more than anthologies were composed by others, including Anton Francesco Doni (1513– 1574), Francesco Sansovino (1521–1586), and Giovanni Forteguerri (1508–1582). The admission of the fable into the mix was strongly rejected by Girolamo Bargagli (1537–1586), but it is not until Anton Francesco Grazzini, named Il Lasca 1297

NOVELLA (1503–1584), began writing Le cene (Banquets) around midcentury that the genre took a new direction. Admittedly derived from the Decameron, Le cene is nevertheless full of dramatic intensity and enough originality to warrant being listed among the best novellas of the century. Grazzini’s use of the grotesque influenced Pietro Fortini (ca. 1500–1562) in his Giornate and Notti (Days and Nights, 1555–1561), which bring back some common motifs and Sienese satirical themes painted in dark tones, and notably Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio (1504–1573), whose Hecatommithi (One Hundred Events, 1565) can be seen as a stylistic watershed. The birth of the violent, tragic novella, which can trace its roots perhaps as far back as the Decameron’s fourth Giornata, provided remarkably fruitful inspiration to cinquecento novellieri. The most successful was Matteo Bandello (ca. 1484/85–1561). His Novelle (Novellas, ca. 1530–1561), which does not have the traditional fictional frame, is given unity by dedicatory letters similar to Masuccio’s but rather more interesting. The collection comprises over 200 novellas, with a wide range in scope, intention, and influence. Bandello’s insistence on realism and his occasional predilection for tragedy made him the most revered Italian novelliere among the English Elizabethan dramatists. Not coincidentally, it was from a novella of Luigi Da Porto (1485–1529), inspired in turn by Masuccio Salernitano, that Shakespeare took the idea for Romeo and Juliet, and from a novella of Giraldi Cinzio that he found the story that would become Othello. As often happens, however, the apex of the novella was shortly followed by its decline and ultimate demise. This process began with the Diporti (Pastimes, 1550) of Girolamo Parabosco (1524–1557), who sought to reproduce another Decameron: Its themes are common and their elaboration less than remarkable. Sebastiano Erizzo (1525–1585), in his Sei giornate (Six Days, 1567), also aimed to provide moral lessons by alternating pleasant tales with tragic ones. Its sources went back to medieval exempla, French romance, and Valerius Maximus. By the close of the cinquecento, several authors had simply reached the end of a series of adaptations and clever reworkings from the Italian tradition, among them Niccolo` Granucci (1521–1603). Whereas other novellieri, such as Orazio ‘‘Celio’’ Malespini (1531–1609), faced with ever fewer options, had looked to the Cent nouvelles nouvelles (The Hundred New Novellas) or to Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptame´ron (Seven Days) for a fresh 1298

start, Granucci confined himself to translating the Spaniard Pedro Mexı´a’s Silva de varia leccio´n (Forest of Diverse Readings), itself a rather humdrum reworking of stock tales. At this point, if the age of the novella collection was nearing the end of its artistic life, its offshoot (the facetia) was not. After Bracciolini and Pontano, the facetia was largely reduced to groupings of witty remarks, but its influence remained relatively strong. Evidence of its importance is attested by the De re aulica (On Magnificent Things, after 1523) of Agostino Nifo (ca. 1470–1538) and the Facezie (1548) of Lodovico Domenichi (ca. 1514–1564), as well as by the courtly manuals of Della Casa and Castiglione. The last gasp of the genre may be found in the dialectal fables of Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales, ca. 1632) by Giovan Battista Basile (ca. 1575–1632) and in the novella in verse, exhausted by Domenico Batacchi (1748–1802) at the end of the settecento. MICHAEL PAPIO See also: Boccaccio, Matteo Bandello, Giambattista Basile, Giraldi Giambattista (‘‘Il Cinzio’’), Grazzini, Anton Francesco (Il Lasca), Il Novellino, Franco Sacchetti, Giovanni Sercambi Further Reading Albanese, Gabriella, Lucia Battaglia Ricci, and Rossella Bessi (eds.), Favole parabole istorie, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Allaire, Gloria (editor), The Italian Novella, New York: Routledge, 2003. Auerbach, Erich, Zur Technik der Fru¨hrenaissancenovelle in Italien und Frankreich, Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971. Battaglia, Salvatore, Capitoli per una storia della novellistica italiana, Naples: Liguori, 1993. Bonciani, Francesco, ‘‘Lezione sopra il comporre delle novelle,’’ in Trattati di poetica e retorica del Cinquecento, vol. 3, Bernard Weinberg (ed.), Bari: Laterza, 1972. Bragantini, Renzo, Il riso sotto il velame, Florence: Olschki, 1987. Branca, Vittore, Boccaccio medievale, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Di Francia, Letterio, Novellistica, 2 vols. Milan: Vallardi, 1924–1925. Guglielminetti, Marziano, La cornice e il furto, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1984. Italian Renaissance Tales, edited and translated by Janet Smarr, Rochester, MI: Solaris Press, 1990. La novella italiana, Atti del Convegno di Caprarola, 19–24 settembre 1988, 2 vols. Rome: Salerno, 1989. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, All’ombra di Dioneo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1996. Neuscha¨fer, Hans-Jo¨rg, Boccaccio und der Beginn der Novelle, Munich: Fink, 1969.

NOVELLA Pabst, Walter, Novellentheorie und Novellendichtung, Hamburg: Cram, De Gruyter & Co., 1953. Picone, Michelangelo, Giuseppe Di Stefano, and Pamela D. Stewart (editors), La Nouvelle, Montre´al: Plato, 1983. Rochon, Andre` (editor), Formes et signification de la «Beffa» dans la litte´rature italienne de la Renaissance, 2 vols., Paris: Sorbonne, 1972–1975. Rotunda, Dominic P., Motif-Index of the Italian Novella in Prose, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1942. Salwa, Piotr, La narrativa tardogotica toscana, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2004.

IL NOVELLINO What has come to be known as the Novellino is an anonymous collection of narrative material, originally assembled at the end of the thirteenth century, most likely in Florence, which underwent a series of philological vicissitudes—recombination, additions, editing—during the next three centuries before reaching the present form of 99 units plus a prologue. The most recent critical edition by Alberto Conte has identified three main stages in the development of the work’s form. First, the so-called UrNovellino, to which the editor restored the original title of Libro di novelle e di bel parlar gientile. The archetype of the tradition consisted, according to Conte, of a collection of 85 narrative modules plus the prologue and is witnessed by the oldest extant manuscript, the first half of the Panciatichiano 32 (P1), a codex dating from the first quarter of the fourteenth century. During the second, intermediate stage, from the original collection, still in the first half of the century, a compiler extracted some modules (the first 50 novellas) and combined them with heterogeneous material (novellas 51 through 59); subsequently, new modules were extracted from the original that had been previously left out (novellas 60 through 71; except for 64). Finally, again interspersed with a variety of texts not present in the original collection, two last modules (novellas 80 and 81) were selected and redeployed to build up the number to 100. As the two witnesses (the second half of the Panciatichiano, P2, and the codex BNF Palatino 566, A) suggest, the rubrics that now precede each unit were added at this point (Alberto Conte, Il

Novellino, 2001). The third and final stage is the vulgate text presented in the form of cento novelle, rubricated and numbered—a form probably influenced by the contemporary canonization of Boccaccio’s Decameron. Produced in the sixteenth century, most likely under the aegis of Pietro Bembo, the last reworking of the collection resulted in an edited text (in the direction of a standardization of grammar and punctuation) and the addition of a sequential numeration to the narrative units. This stage is preserved only by the two sixteenth-century crucial witnesses (Bembo’s own codex Vaticano Latino 3214, V, and Carlo Gualtieruzzi’s editio princeps, printed in Bologna in 1525, Gz). As it stands today, the Novellino comprises tales of the most varied subject and origin, loosely organized in blocks around recurring themes or characters. The nature of the work is well conveyed by a crucial passage in the prologue. The anonymous but fully self-aware author states: ‘‘facciamo qui memoria d’alquanti fiori di parlare, di belle cortesie e di belli risposi e di belle valentie, di belli donari e di belli amori’’ (Here I preserve the memory of some choice examples of conversations, beautiful acts of courtesy and beautiful answers, beautiful acts of prowess and beautiful gifts and beautiful love stories, I.4). The invariant of beauty balances the paramount variety of themes. The stated purpose of the text confirms that the work aims at a double goal. As it is spelled out in the prologue, the final cause of the Novellino (its intentio operis) is a mix of advantage and pleasure that the exemplary tales will extend to their audience: ‘‘E chi avra` cuore nobile e intelligenzia sottile sı´ li potra` simigliare per lo tempo che verra` per innanzi, e argomentare e dire e raccontare in quelle parti dove avranno luogo, a prode e a piacere di coloro che non sanno e disiderano di sapere’’ (And those who have noble heart and subtle mind will be able to imitate them and expound and say and tell them in the circumstances which call for it, so that those who don’t know but desire to know will gain both advantage and pleasure, I.5). Mirroring the twofold purpose of the text, the audience that the work imagines is also programmatically split between those who will pattern their verbal and moral behaviors on the examples they receive from the text and those who will redeploy the narrative material in a more traditional aural medium. In accordance with the value that the book assigns to ‘‘memory’’ as the cultural agent preserving 1299

NOVELLA their deeds and sayings, the narratives catch the protagonists at particularly memorable moments of their existence, when their virtues (or lack thereof) are most evident. Intelligence, in both its subsets of intellectual acuity and practical resourcefulness, but also humility, magnanimity as well as prudence, liberality, and sense of measure, are all virtues practiced and praised in the world of the Novellino. Vices are equally well represented and distributed: avarice, ambition, greed, lust. The work, however, is not a summa of vices and virtues. While still solidly anchored to a notion of the narrative text as subsidiary to an oral mode of fruition and a moral dimension, the Novellino also vindicates the value of refined entertainment and aesthetic pleasure connected to the text: from the prologue’s insistence on the beauty of behaviors and speech-acts, which constitutes the subject of the stories, to the carefully sought-after brevitas (conciseness) of the narration. The tales feature a varied cast of socially diversified protagonists. Characters range from historical, biblical, and legendary monarchs (Emperor Frederick II, Alexander the Great, Saladin, Solomon, David, and Prester John) to knights and their ladies (Lancelot, Tristan and Isolde, The Fearless Knight), from philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, Diogenes the Cynic, Seneca), to men of culture or of court (Taddeo Alderotti the physician and Francesco d’Accorso the jurist—both from thirteenth-century Bologna—Polo Traversaro of Ravenna, Marco Lombardo, Migliore degli Abati of Florence) to more or less anonymous and quasi-contemporary individuals—especially in the last section of the work—who are drawn from middle and lower strata of urban society (friars, jongleurs, peasants, artisans, women of the folk). The variety of subjects and characters is mirrored by the variety of sources from which the Novellino draws its plots. Both oral and literary sources contribute to the collection: oriental narratives and local anecdotes, ancient biographies and medieval anthologies of exempla, Provencal vidas, Old-French fabliaux and (Franco-Italian) romans. As Lucia Battaglia Ricci notes, Novellino 14, the story of a king who

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has his son grow up in the darkness and of how the young man chooses women, when he sees them for the first time, as the most beautiful of all the things in the world (notably, the plot of the only story told directly by the Author’s voice in the Decameron), is witnessed in a wide array of medieval Latin and vernacular texts, but ‘‘derives from the wide-spread legend of Barlaam and Josaphat, which in its turn is a Christian reworking of the life of Buddha’’ (Novellino, 1992). SIMONE MARCHESI Editions Critical edition: in La Prosa del Duecento, edited by Cesare Segre and Mario Marti, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1959. Il ‘‘Novellino,’’ edited by Guido Favati, Genoa: Fratelli Bozzi, 1970. Il ‘‘Novellino,’’ edited by Alberto Conte, Rome: Salerno, 2001. Translations: as Il Novellino: The Hundred Old Tales, translated by Edward Storer, New York: Dutton, 1925; as The novellino, translated by Roberta L. Payne, New York: Lang, 1995; as The novellino, or, One Hundred Ancient Tales, edited and translated by Joseph P. Consoli, New York: Garland, 1997.

Further Reading Battaglia Ricci, Lucia, ‘‘Novellino,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Le opere, vol. 5., Turin: Einaudi, 1992. D’Ancona, Alessandro, ‘‘Del ‘Novellino’ e delle sue fonti’’ and ‘‘Le fonti del ‘Novellino,’’’ in Studj di critica e di storia letteraria, vol. 2, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1912. Hall, Joan, ‘‘‘Bel parlare’ and Authorial Narration in the Novellino,’’ Italian Studies, 44 (1989), 1–18. Hall, Joan, ‘‘The Organization of the ‘Novellino,’’ Italian Studies, 39 (1984), 6–26. Monteverdi, Angelo, ‘‘Che cos’e` il ‘Novellino,’ ’’ in Studi e saggi sulla letteratura italiana dei primi secoli, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1954. Mulas, Luisa, Lettura del ‘‘Novellino,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Picone, Michelangelo, ‘‘La ‘cornice’ del ‘Novellino,’ ’’ in Studi di filologia e letteratura italiana in onore di Maria Picchio Simonelli, edited by Pietro Frassica, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1992. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Sull’origine delle novelle nel ‘Novellino,’ ’’ in Ecdotica e comparatistica romanze, edited by Alberto Conte, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1998.

GIACOMO NOVENTA (GIACOMO CA’ ZORZI)

GIACOMO NOVENTA (GIACOMO CA’ ZORZI) (1898–1960) A poet and philosopher born into a noble Venetian family, Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi took his pseudonym Noventa from his birthplace, near Venice. He was a fervent Catholic, socialist, anti-Communist, and anti-Fascist and one of the most original voices of Italian culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Reassessment of his achievement, particularly as a poet, commenced with the posthumous and systematic publication of his works (1986–1991). Because Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi preferred to recite from memory or jot down his poems in a disorderly fashion, only a few of his compositions were published before the 1956 edition of his poems. They appeared in magazines he worked with and, thanks to the efforts of Giogio Bassani, in Botteghe Oscure. Most of his writings survive in a few manuscripts, the transcriptions made of them by his wife, Franca Reynaud, and the memories of friends. As he states in Versi e poesie (Verse and Poetry, 1956): ‘‘Mi me son fato ’na lengua mia / Del venezian, de l’italian: / Ga` sti diritti la poesia, / Che vien dai lioghi che regna Pan’’ (I’ve made a language of my own / from Venetian, from Italian: / Poetry has these rights, / Coming from the realms of Pan). Noventa found it more natural to express himself in the practical, everyday language of the dialect, favoring an airy Venetian. His expression is not affected but rather subdued. In homage to his beloved Heine and Goethe, whom he openly ‘‘translated,’’ his poetry, which had little use for the blank verse of the twentieth century, returned to nineteenth-century metrics. His criticism was directed against the poetic practice of Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Eugenio Montale, who in his opinion are too hastily called upon to represent Italian poetry. Today the originality of his poetical works may seem more and more evident to us, but Noventa started his career as an essay writer and controversialist. Between 1926 and 1929 he worked with the novelist and film director Mario Soldati on a mock-heroic composition, Castogallo (The

Chaste Cock), in which a poet, a ‘‘vecchio, filosofo e folletto’’ (old man, a philosopher, and an imp), satirizes all religious, philosophical, and political beliefs. In 1934 he met Jacques Maritain in Paris and began an essay with the provisional title ‘‘Principio di una scienza nuova’’ (The Principle of a New Science). He began publishing the work in Solaria, to which his friend Alberto Carocci had invited him to contribute. The complete work appeared much later as Nulla di nuovo, come principio di una scienza nuova (Nothing New, as the Principle of a New Science, 1960). In this completed work he railed against the provincialism of Italian culture, preaching una nuova scienza inspired by contact with more intelligent and more cultured foreigners. He envisioned a new classicism following the example of Giacomo Leopardi, a universalist Catholicism such as Dante’s. His continued his collaboration with Solaria, arguing in support of dialect as a more expressive and dynamic tool for artistic creation than the Italian language with its excessive rules and rhetoric. His intransigence estranged him from established literary circles and even resulted in an arrest for suspected anti-Fascism (1935). Noventa did not give up and, with Carocci, started the magazine La riforma letteraria (1936– 1939), in which he first used the pseudonym Emilio Sarpi, born in Lampol (Venice) March 31, 1898, died October 19, 1933 (the day Noventa, saddened by not being able to witness the birth of his son, conceived the Principio). The magazine struggled to overcome certain prejudices, in particular Francesco De Sanctis’s ‘‘evolutionary’’ vision of Italian literature and the prejudice against ‘‘minor’’ authors less compromised by the powers of politics and culture than the better known ‘‘major’’ writers. In his essay ‘‘I calzoni di Beethoven’’ (Beethoven’s Trousers), he supported efforts to restore the original value to words. In a dialogue between Giacomo Debenedetti, representative of the Turin circle, and Soldati, his alter ego, Noventa exposed all the disguises of Croce’s

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GIACOMO NOVENTA (GIACOMO CA’ ZORZI) sterile idealism. In ‘‘I paroll d’on lenguagg’’ (The Words of a Language), from a verse by the Milanese poet Carlo Porta, he answered criticisms directed against the use of dialect with a universalist concept whose Catholicism and a theory of racism earn him the antipathy of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and anti-Semites. In the postwar period he showed no signs of becoming less intransigent, founding new two magazines, Il socialista moderno (1949) and the Giornale dei socialisti (1951). Noventa’s approach to the theater was significant. Shortly before his death, he wrote his only known comedy, La fiala (The Phial, 1960), destined to be read in the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. The play, which concerns the debate on who should be the next leader of the ‘‘phialists,’’ is a parodic allegory of meaningless parliamentarianism and turncoat politicians. A celebration on Noventa was held in Noventa di Piave and Venice in 1998 to mark the centenary of his birth and the publication of his Opere complete. This was the beginning of the historical reassessment he deserves.

Biography Giacomo Noventa was born Giacomo Ca’ Zorzi in Noventa di Piave (Venice) on March 31, 1898 to a noble family. He was expelled from high school. Arrested for enlisting as a volunteer while under age, he took part in World War I. He graduated in the Philosophy of Law at Turin, where he frequented the Rivoluzione liberale group and joined the Social Democrat Party. From 1926 till 1935, he spent long periods in Paris, Heidelberg, Vienna, Barcelona, London, and Lausanne. In 1933, he married Franca Reynaud and had a son, Alberto, and, the year after, a daughter, Emilia. In 1935, he was arrested for anti-Fascism. In 1936, his father Antonio died, and Noventa settled down in Florence, where he founded and managed the review La riforma letteraria. In 1938, he had a third son, Antonio. In 1939, he attempted to reorganize La riforma in Milan but was arrested and forbidden to live in towns that have a university. Under special surveillance, he did his military service in Piombino,

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Jesolo, and Florence. In the postwar period he founded three new journals and collaborated with Mondo nuovo and Italia socialista. Noventa died in Milan on July 4, 1960. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Collections Opere complete, edited by Franco Manfriani, 5 vols., Venice: Marsilio, 1986–1991.

Poetry ‘‘Versi e poesie,’’ 1956. ‘‘Versi e poesie di Emilio Sarpi,’’ 1963.

Plays La fiala, 1961.

Essays Il castogallo, 1926–1929 (with Mario Soldati). Inchiesta sulla nebbia, 1954. Il vescovo di Prato, 1958. Il grande amore, 1960. Nulla di nuovo, come principio di una scienza nuova, 1960. Renato Guttuso—Gott mit Uns, 1960 (with Antonello Trombadori). Il re e il poeta, 1960. Tre parole sulla Resistenza, 1965. C’era una volta, 1966. Po`rteme via..., 1968. Caffe` Greco, edited by Franca Noventa, 1969. Hyde Park (o L’innocenza della cultura), 1971. Storia di un’eresia, 1971.

Further Reading Debenedetti, Giacomo, ‘‘Noventa,’’ in Poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1980. Del Noce, Augusto, ‘‘Introduction’’ to Giacomo Noventa, in Tre parole sulla Resistenza, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Del Noce, Augusto, Il suicidio della Rivoluzione, Milan: Rusconi, 1978. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘‘A un’ebrea’ di Noventa,’’ in Nuovi saggi italiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Noventa e la poesia’’ and ‘‘Noventa politico,’’ in Saggi italiani, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Manfriani, Franco (editor), Giacomo Noventa, Florence: Olschki, 1988. Manfriani, Franco (editor), I mondi di Giacomo Noventa, Cavallino di Lecce: Capone, 1993. Urgnani, Elena, Noventa, Palermo: Palumbo, 1998.

O UGO OJETTI (1871–1946) his fiction and his criticism, Ojetti excelled in the portrayal of characters, indulging in digressions and anecdotes, and his writing may appear at times characterized by a certain mechanical nature and a distance from its subject. Hence in works such as I capricci del conte Ottavio (Count Ottavio’s Whims, 1908–1909), a collection of pieces written for L’illustrazione italiana (‘‘Conte Ottavio’’ was his pseudonym on the periodical), or the seven-volume series Cose viste (As They Seemed to Me, 1923–1939), the narration can be weak from the communicative point of view, and essentially self-referential. On the other hand, as a quick glance at the extensive indexes of the volumes of Cose viste demonstrates, he also portrayed the culture of the two decades of Fascism better than any historical handbook: Among other things, his subjects include Gabriele D’Annunzio and Paul Vale`ry for poetry, Giovanni Verga and Anatole France for prose, Luigi Pirandello for theater, Fortuny for artistic style, and while in the end Ojetti’s classicist proclivities are confirmed, he nevertheless offers an extensive picture of the climate of the belle e`poque. Ojetti had debuted in 1892 with a volume of verses, Paesaggi (Landscapes). While his harsh and occasional poetry was that of a young revolutionary, as a successful author, whose books were decorated by Leonetto Cappiello’s elegant art deco illustrations, he became an example of those writers who popularized in moralistic terms the rift between realism and Decadentism. His novels became increasingly characterized by Dannunzianism and

Hailed as ‘‘The Prince of Italian Journalists,’’ novelist and critic Ugo Ojetti was a product of the conservative Italian journalistic tradition whose career reached its unexpected apogee in the 1920s when he became editor of the most prestigious Italian newspaper, Il corriere della sera, of which he had been a longtime contributor, and when he was nominated member of the Accademia d’Italia in 1930. According to Piero Gobetti, Ojetti was a true ‘‘master of good manners and of the art of success [...], unsurpassable in the meagre art of reaching to the top’’ (Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, 1969). Therefore, in the 1920s Ojetti became if not the most representative, certainly the most typical example of the intellectual integrated into the structures of mainstream Italian culture, and carefully exploited the expectations of bourgeois art and literature. Especially influential as an art critic, when he organized a series of art exhibitions in Milan, at the ‘‘Pesaro’’ art gallery, from 1920 to 1924, he favored the so-called return to order that characterized the postwar period and in particular ‘‘magic realism,’’ an artistic approach that tried to find a middle ground between a traditional classicism and the stimulations from the European avant-garde, and that included major artists such as Felice Casorati and Giorgio De Chirico. In spite of the high level of its contributors, a similar culture of compromise and of conservative resistance to the new characterized also the art and literary journals that he founded, Dedalo (1920–1933), Pegaso (1929–1933), and Pan (1933–1935). In both 1303

UGO OJETTI cheap populism, carefully uncritical of social hierarchies. Indeed, his most famous and convincing novel, Mio figlio ferroviere (My Son, the Railway Worker, 1922) is a story of a class betrayal, although it has also been interpreted in more complex terms as a satire of the moral crisis that followed World War I. However, poetry and fiction should be regarded as accessory aspects of a long career in journalism. From the beginning, in fact, Ojetti had an unerring sense of how best to represent or characterize a certain cultural moment. His 1895 survey Alla scoperta dei letterati (Discovering the Literati), a collection of interviews with some of the best-known writers and critics of his times, including D’Annunzio, Giosue` Carducci, and Giovanni Pascoli, and the first of his works to bring him notoriety, still represents one of the best documents to understand the literary landscape of turn-of-the-century Italy. He also enjoyed a certain fortune as an author of epigrams, many of which he collected in Sessanta (Sixty, 1937), written, as the title indicates, when he turned 60. Because of his aesthetic and political conservatism, Ojetti has been mostly ignored by the critics of the second half of the twentieth century, but he has recently been the object of unprejudiced critical studies, such as Isabella Nardi’s Il primo passo (1990), on his journalistic writings, or Giovanna De Lorenzi’s Ugo Ojetti critico d’arte dal Marzocco al Dedalo (2004), on his collaboration to some of the major cultural journals of his times. The common denominator of these studies is that they tend to appreciate in particular his work as cultural promoter and art critic. His literary production, on the other hand, still awaits a thorough critical evaluation.

Biography Born in Rome on 15 July 1871, the son of Raffaello, an architect, who fostered his interest in the arts. Degree in law, 1892. Begun his journalistic activity contributing to La Tribuna, 1894, then to numerous other newspapers and magazines, including La nuova rassegna and, from 1898, Il corriere della sera. During World War I, he was in charge of the style of the war bulletins and of the protection of works of art. Took General Armando Diaz’s dictation of the victory bulletin on 4 November 1918, at 12 o’clock. Directed Il corriere della sera, 1926–1927. After the concordat between Italy and the Vatican, declared himself ‘‘a Roman citizen, of a family that used to be called papal, baptised in the church Santa Maria in Via, and 1304

educated to religion right in Sant’Ignazio in Rome and by you Jesuits’’ in a letter to the Jesuit periodical Civilta` cattolica, 1929. Appointed to the Accademia d’Italia, 1930. His daughter Paola became a well-known translator of Shakespeare. Died in Florence in the Renaissance villa Salviatina on 1 January 1946. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Paesaggi,’’ 1892.

Fiction Senza Dio, 1894. Il vecchio, 1898. Il giuoco dell’amore, 1899. Le vie del peccato, 1902. Il cavallo di Troia, 1904. Mimı` e la gloria, 1908. Donne, uomini e burattini, 1912. L’ amore e suo figlio, 1913. Mio figlio ferroviere, 1922. La nuora, 1949. Ricordi d’un ragazzo romano: note d’un viaggio tra la morte e la vita, 1958.

Plays Il matrimonio di Casanova, with Renato Simoni, 1910.

Critical Essays Alla scoperta dei letterati, 1895. L’arte moderna a Venezia: esposizione mondiale del 1897, 1897. L’America vittoriosa, 1899. I capricci del conte Ottavio, 2 vols., 1908–1909. Ritratti d’artisti italiani, 2 vols., 1911–1923. L’ Italia e la civilta` tedesca, 1915. I monumenti italiani e la guerra, 1917. Il martirio dei monumenti, 1918. I nani tra le colonne, 1920. Confidenze di pazzi e savii sui tempi che corrono, 1921. Raffaello e altre leggi, 1921. Cose viste, 7 vols., 1923–1939; as As They Seemed to Me, vol. 1, translated by Henry Furst, 1928. La pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento, 1924. Atlante di storia dell’arte italiana, with Luigi Dami, 3 vols., 1925–1938. Scrittori che si confessano, 1925. Paolo Veronese, 1928. Tintoretto, Canova, Fattori, 1928. La pittura italiana dell’Ottocento, 1929. Bello e brutto, 1930. Ottocento, Novecento e via dicendo, 1936. Sessanta, 1937. Piu` vivi dei vivi, 1938. In Italia, l’arte ha da essere italiana?, 1942. Vita vissuta, edited by Arturo Stanghellini, 1942. I taccuini: 1914–1943, 1954. D’Annunzio amico, maestro, soldato: 1894–1944, 1957. La luminaria a San Pietro e altri scritti, 1960.

ERMANNO OLMI Letters Lettere alla moglie 1915–1919, edited by Fernanda Ojetti, 1964. Carteggio D’Annunzio-Ojetti 1894–1937, edited by Cosimo Ceccuti, 1979.

Further Reading Ceccuti, Cosimo, and Marcello Vannucci (editors), Immagini nelle parole: Ugo Ojetti, Milan: Longanesi, 1978. De Lorenzi, Giovanna, Ugo Ojetti critico d’arte dal Marzocco al Dedalo, Florence: Le Lettere, 2004. Dotti, Goffredo, ‘‘I contenuti culturali di Pan e il giornalismo letterario di Ugo Ojetti,’’ in Accademie e Biblioteche d’Italia, 50 (1982): 89–97. Gatta, Bruno, La vendemmia del dio Pan: una rivista degli anni Trenta, Sorrento: Di Mauro, 1995.

Gobetti, Piero, Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, edited by Paolo Spriano, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Iermano, Toni, Preface to Ugo Ojetti, Cose viste. Un’antologia, Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano, 2002. Lenzi, Alessia, Adolfo De Carolis e il suo mondo 1892–1928: l’arte e la cultura attraverso i carteggi De Carolis, D’Annunzio, Maraini, Ojetti, Anghiati: I.T.E.A., 1999. Masini, Pier Carlo, Poeti della rivolta da Carducci a Lucini, Milan: Rizzoli, 1978. Merola, Nicola, Afterword to Ugo Ojetti, Alla scoperta dei letterati, Rome: Gela, 1987. Nardi, Isabella, Il primo passo. Note sulla formazione di un giornalista-letterato: Ugo Ojetti, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1990. Serra, Renato, Le lettere, edited by Umberto Pirotti, Ravenna: Longo, 1989.

ERMANNO OLMI (1931–) Ermanno Olmi stands out on the landscape of the Italian film industry for his lack of interest in sensationalism or commercialization; instead a compassionate spiritualism is the hallmark of his style. Olmi’s films consistently return to the large issues of post-World War II Italian society, like the difficulty of human relations in advanced industrial capitalism; the inadequacy of the consumerist society to say anything meaningful about real human needs; the ultimately unspeakable quality of our own one-to-one confrontation with the divine— and with death. Olmi’s cinematography is imbued with Christian existentialism and embraces a Christianity with a human visage. Olmi made his debut in the world of the documentary film; of these he shot a few dozen on behalf of Edison Volta, the utility firm based in Milan for which he worked early on in his life. His first feature film is Il tempo si e` fermato (Time Stood Still, 1959), which portrayed with sympathy and an occasional humorous touch the evolution in the rapport between the middle-aged warden of a hydroelectric power plant’s dam and the young student who joined him from the city. Time indeed stood still among the snow-capped mountains; but the young man brought his own time with him, contaminating the silence of the snow and the summits with the newly found carefree attitudes and habits typical of a society that discovered, down

there in the plains, what it believed were quick and easy answers to timeless dilemmas. Shot in black and white and featuring nonprofessional actors, Il tempo si e` fermato is an exemplary application of the precepts of the great neorealist masters. Il posto (The Job, a.k.a. The Sound of Trumpets, 1961) effectively depicted the helplessness experienced by the modern Everyperson in the face of the anonymous mechanisms that control and command our lives. Olmi explicitly acknowledged having been inspired by Kafka for this film. Throughout his career, Olmi has alternated between films with an implicitly or explicitly articulated Christian inspiration and films focusing on the malaise of human beings isolated and atomized within the opaque machinery of today’s industrial society. To the broadly speaking religious films belong E venne un uomo (A Man Named John, 1965), Durante l’estate (During the Summer, 1971), Cammina cammina (Keep Walking, 1981), and Genesis: La creazione e il diluvio (Genesis: The Creation and the Flood, 1994). E venne un uomo is an in-depth biography of Angelo Roncalli before he was elected pope as John XXIII. Durante l’estate, produced for RAI television, is a parable combining Christian and Kafkaesque imagery. The film features an idealistic professor whom modern society quickly renders harmless by trying him and putting him behind bars. Cammina cammina aims 1305

ERMANNO OLMI at evoking the long march of the Three Kings toward the birthplace of the Savior, while the people join them in ever-growing numbers. Genesi, coproduced by RAI-TV, illustrate just those parts of the ancient testament, in the framework of a larger biblical project assigned to various directors. In the group of films on what could be called the existential side of economic development, we find (after Il posto) I fidanzati (The Fiance´s, 1963), Un certo giorno (One Fine Day, 1968), and La circostanza (The Circumstance, 1973). I fidanzati explores the difficult interaction of a young couple against the backdrop of the miracolo economico, the Italian economic boom of the 1960s, as the man, a welder, is transferred to Sicily to work in a newly built industrial plant. Un certo giorno recounts the shattering of the unquestioning lifestyle of a factory manager that occurs when the successful, self-satisfied executive kills a man in a traffic accident. La circostanza dwells on the unexpected stresses that, during a few summer days, befall each individual member of a bourgeois family, highlighting the contradictions of life in the newly capitalistic Italy of the 1970s. A telluric vein inspires (after their prototype, Il tempo si e` fermato) two films with a special identity: I recuperanti (The Scavengers, 1969) and Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Woods, 1993). I recuperanti takes place on the Plateau of Asiago (province of Vicenza) and features a WWII veteran who, unemployed upon his return home, becomes mesmerized by the old-fashioned, but original and in its own right adventurous, lifestyle of an elderly mountaineer who has made a rough and lonely living by retrieving abandoned materiel from the cruel trench warfare of WWI. Il segreto del bosco vecchio is a recreation of Dino Buzzati’s story by the same title, straddling ecological topoi and mythical ones. About a quarter of a century after its disappearance, neorealism was revived in L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, 1978). The story, set in the lowlands of the Bergamo province, narrates the daily toil endured by four peasant families at the end of the nineteenth century. The film conveys affection and sympathy for a world on the wane, at a time when industrialization and suburbanization were rapidly swallowing up Olmi’s ancestral culture. A decade later, after a severe illness, Olmi made a high-profile comeback with La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1988), recreated from Joseph Roth’s novella by the same title. Here can be found once 1306

more Olmi’s favorite environment: that of the humble, simple, honest people and their everyday concerns—in this instance Andreas, a Parisian clochard of Polish origin, who sleeps under the bridges of the Seine. In La leggenda del santo bevitore, aesthetic exploration is clearly subordinate to a contemplation of the mystery of divine grace, bestowed by an unknown God upon a humanity generally unworthy of receiving it. In Il mestiere delle armi (The Profession of Arms, 2001), Olmi pursued both historical and existential interests. The first part of the film features Italy shortly before the sack of Rome by Charles V of Habsburg’s German troops in 1527: Giovanni de’ Medici, better known as Giovanni delle Bande Nere (John of the Black Banners), the principal Italian condottiero defending the peninsula, is wounded in battle by one among the first firearms in the history of Western warfare. The second part focused on Giovanni’s personal, drawn-out losing battle against septicemia and gangrene. Olmi’s long-standing concerns became obvious in the film, as long panning shots in the eerie silence, gloomy light, and fantastically chromatic frescoes of Mantuan Palazzo powerfully brought home the truth that, after the clamor and noise of great battles are over, each of us human beings must approach alone the silence we can overhear behind the dark curtain that hangs ahead of us. Olmi’s last production, Ticket (Ticket, 2004), is a film composed of three intertwined episodes, made in cooperation with Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach. Ermanno Olmi is highly reputed as one of the most serious, morally and professionally committed Italian filmmakers. To his credit, he also founded (in 1981) the experimental film school Ipotesi Cinema in Bassano del Grappa (Scuola di Bassano), which in 2000 moved to Milan and Bologna. Ipotesi Cinema coordinates the training of young, promising filmmakers, and it develops and supports their projects. Among those who attended Ipotesi Cinema are Francesca Archibugi, Mario Brenta, Giacomo Campiotti, Toni De Gregorio, Pier Giorgio Gay, Alberto Rondalli, Gianluca Tavarelli, Maurizio Zaccaro, and the film editor Paolo Cottignolo.

Biography Born in Bergamo (not, contrary to a widespread misconception, in Treviglio), 24 July 1931. The child of a peasant family on his mother’s side and of a railway worker, moved with his family to

ERMANNO OLMI Milan in 1934. Orphaned at age 13, worked in a bakery; after the war, at age 15, joined the electrical utility Edison Volta. There was in amateur theater, then, in 1951, founded the firm’s film section, for which he shot about 40 technical documentary shorts. Became a professional filmmaker with Il tempo si e` fermato. Main awards: Golden Palm at Cannes for L’albero degli zoccoli, 1978; Silver Lion at Venice for Lunga vita alla signora!, 1987; Golden Lion at Venice for La leggenda del santo bevitore, 1988. Married Loredana Detto, protagonist of Il posto, in 1961. Unlike most Italian filmmakers, never moved to Rome, and devoted himself instead to the film school Ipotesi Cinema. Since 1965, resides in Asiago (province of Vicenza). CARLO TESTA Selected Works Films Il tempo si e` fermato (Time Stood Still), 1959. Il posto (The Job, a.k.a. The Sound of Trumpets), 1961. I fidanzati (The Fiance´s), 1963. E venne un uomo (A Man Named John), 1965. Un certo giorno (One Fine Day), 1968. I recuperanti (The Scavengers), 1969. Durante l’estate, 1971. La circostanza (The Circumstance), 1973. L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs), 1978. Cammina cammina (Keep Walking), 1981. Lunga vita alla signora! (Long Live the Lady!), 1987. La leggenda del santo bevitore (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, based on the novella by Joseph Roth), 1988. Il segreto del bosco vecchio (The Secret of the Old Woods, based on the novel by Dino Buzzati), 1993. Genesi: La creazione e il diluvio (Genesis: The Creation and the Flood, based on the Bible), 1994. Il mestiere delle armi, 2001. Ticket, 2004 (with Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach).

Screenplays Il posto, Cineforum 7–9 (Sept.–Nov. 1961), 433–456. E venne un uomo, edited by Giacomo Gambetti and Claudio Sorgi (editors), Milan: Garzanti, 1965. L’albero degli zoccoli, edited by Giacomo Gambetti, Turin: ERI, 1980. La leggenda del santo bevitore, in Da Roth a Olmi, edited by Tullio Kezich, and Piero Maccarinelli, Siena: Nuova Immagine Cinema, 1988.

Further Reading Allegretti, Elisa, and Giancarlo Giraud, Ermanno Olmi: L’Esperienza di Ipotesi Cinema, Recco (Genoa): Le Mani, 2001. Apra`, Adriano (editor), Ermanno Olmi: Il cinema, i film, la televisione, la scuola, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Dell’Acqua, Gian Piero, L’albero degli zoccoli nell’Italia 1978, Milan: Moizzi, 1979. Dillon, Jeanne, Ermanno Olmi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. Este`ve, Michel (editor), Ermanno Olmi, Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 1992. Finatti, Luca, Stupore e mistero nel cinema di Ermanno Olmi, Rome: A.N.C.C.I., 2000. Kezich, Tullio, Ermanno Olmi: Il mestiere delle immagini. Diario in pubblico di un’amicizia, Alessandria: Falsopiano, 2004. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘Il posto: Discrediting the Economic Miracle,’’ in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Masoni, Tullio, Adriano Piccardi, Angelo Signorelli and Paolo Vecchi (editors), Lontano da Roma: Il cinema di Ermanno Olmi, Florence: La casa Usher, 1990. Owens, Charlie, Ermanno Olmi, Rome: Gremese, 2001. Pecchenino, Mauro, Il poeta con la cinepresa, Genoa: Edizioni Alkaest, 1979. Tabanelli, Giorgio, Ermanno Olmi: Nascita del documentario poetico, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Testa, Carlo, Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Todini, Stefano, and Eliana Vona (editors), Il segreto della natura: Il cinema di Ermanno Olmi tra l’umano e il divino, Rome: C.G.S., 1993.

ON SEPULCHRES See Dei sepolcri (Work by Ugo Foscolo)

1307

ARTURO ONOFRI

ON WORLD GOVERNMENT See Monarchia (Work by Dante Alighieri)

ARTURO ONOFRI (1885–1928) Generally considered a marginal poet in the poetic landscape of the 1910s and 1920s, Arturo Onofri is nonetheless an important figure in the first generation that experienced and reflected on the crisis of the poetic word. Together with Clemente Rebora, Dino Campana, Umberto Saba, and a few others, he sought a renewal of Italian poetry by embracing European cultural and poetic experiences. His prolific production is generally divided into three phases, corresponding to different stages of the elaboration of his poetics. Each phase is characterized by a dominant source of influence. His first production, dating from 1903 to 1914, showed a strong connection with the major poets of the Italian tradition, namely Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli, and with the crepuscular poet Sergio Corazzini. The influence of these poets was such that critics have often dismissed Onofri’s early collections as mere re-elaborations of conventional themes and poetic schemes. However, even in these works, Onofri already showed his more personal touch in the strong presence of mystical elements. As Susetta Sallucci has noted, the mystical annihilation of the self, in this case the poetic subject into the poetic object, was for him the solution to the necessary expressive fusion of subject and object (Arturo Onofri, 1972). In his view, the self can be innocent again only by fusing itself with the poetic object, whose innocence is guaranteed by its appurtenance to the original indistinct magma. Onofri also tried to combine mysticism with Orphism, believing that only by means of oblivion and Orphic dreams the subject can become one with the object and reconquer its original purity. Through mysticism, he attempted to 1308

abandon the schemes of traditional solemn poetry, and in particular to distance himself from the model of D’Annunzio. His philosophical ambition became more evident in Poemi tragici (Tragic Poems, 1908), where the anxiety for a spiritual quest, and the need for knowledge and self-knowledge takes the shape of an aspiration toward the infinite, the sky, and, in other words, God. In the years between 1910 and 1912, Onofri was an important presence in the journal Nuova antologia and established his own review, Liriche. At this time he discovered and explored Henri Bergson’s philosophical works and Edouard Schure´’s Les grands initie´s (1901), which profoundly affected and transformed his poetics. From Bergson, Onofri acquired the idea of the supremacy of the self and its capacity to attract all other phenomena. He thus developed his own peculiar idealism that stressed the divinity of man, and the possibility of deification through sacrifice and increased spirituality. A new sense of the divine became dominant and distinguished him from the Dannunzian superomismo that instead characterized many other poets of the time. Consequently, Onofri exalted a poetry that was purely lyrical, devoid of any content and intellectualism: He called it poetry of scontenuto (no content) because it was composed only of evocative, disconnected, and free images. His poetics showed overt similarities with Benedetto Croce’s idealism, especially when in an essay on Pascoli, published in 1916 in the journal La voce, Onofri stressed the poetic value of the part against the whole, explaining that real poetry occurs when the song becomes one with the image. His own Orchestrine (Little Orchestras, 1917) was a series of parole-immagini

ARTURO ONOFRI (words-images), a sequence of momenti creativi (creative moments) apparently disjointed but in fact unified within the poet’s rational spirit. After the interlude of Arioso (Airy, 1921), Onofri began an extended poetic project, which remained unfinished, called the cycle of the Terrestrita` del sole (Earthliness of the Sun, 1927), and introduced by the piccolo epos teoretico (little theoretical epos) Nuovo rinascimento come arte dell’io (The New Renaissance as Art of the Self, 1925). Here, as well as in the poems of the cycle, a crucial, though not exclusive, role was played by the theosophical philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, the first leader of the German section of the Theosophical Society and later founder of the International Anthroposophic society. Steiner’s philosophy allowed Onofri to reorganize his own aesthetic and religious ideas by providing a harmonious and organic vision of reality, a magical synthesis of divine and human, terrestrial and supernatural. The ‘‘new Renaissance’’ was in fact a fusion of science and faith, philosophy and art, Western and Eastern culture, which together made it possible for the poet to become the instrument for the cosmic spiritually to be revealed. The material became spiritual, and man became the cosmos. Moreover, Onofri took from Steiner’s theosophy the idea that Hellschein (clear vision) was achievable by spiritual meditation and repetition. As a result, his later poetry was condensed into a handful of themes and concepts persistently repeated, though in several distinctive combinations of words. From a poetry of the image, Onofri’s production was now a poetry of the Logos, and the repetition stressed the sacral value of the poetic word.

Biography Born in Rome on 15 September 1885 to a bourgeois family. His father Vincenzo was from Rome, his mother Beatrice Shreider was of Polish origin. Founded with Umberto Fracchia the literary periodical Liriche, January 1912; the journal closed at the end of 1913. Married Bice Sinibaldi, 1916, and had two sons, Giorgio and Fabrizio. Contributor to Il Popolo romano, 1913, La voce, 1915–1917, La Diana, 1916–1917, Cronache d’Italia, 1922. Wrote the preface for the Italian edition of Rudolf Steiner’s La scienza occulta nelle sue linee generali, 1924. Worked for the Red Cross in Rome. Died in Rome, on 25 December 1928.

Selected Works Collections Poesie edite e inedite (1910–1914), edited by Anna Dolfi, Ravenna: Longo, 1982.

Poetry ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1907. ‘‘Poemi tragici,’’ 1908. ‘‘Canti delle oasi,’’ 1909. ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1914. ‘‘Orchestrine,’’ 1917. ‘‘Arioso,’’ 1921. ‘‘Le trombe d’argento,’’ 1924. ‘‘Terrestrita` del sole,’’ 1927. ‘‘Vincere il drago!,’’ 1928. ‘‘Simili a melodie rapprese in mondo,’’ 1929. ‘‘Zolla ritorna cosmo,’’ 1930. ‘‘Suoni del Gral,’’ 1932. ‘‘Aprirsi fiore,’’ 1935.

Essays Robert Wagner: Tristano e Isotta. Guida attraverso il poema e la musica, 1924. Nuovo Rinascimento come arte dell’io, 1925. Letture poetiche del Pascoli, edited by Emilio Cecchi, 1953. Scritti musicali, edited by Anna Dolfi, 1984.

Letters Corrispondenze: con Comisso, De Pisis, Montale, Palazzeschi, Banfi, Gromo, Evola, Pe´ladan, De Gubernatis, Mazzarelli, Schwarz, edited by Magda Vigilante and Marco Albertazzi, 1999. Carteggi Cecchi, Onofri, Papini: 1912–1917, edited by Carlo D’Alessio, 2000. Esoterismo e poesia: lettere e documenti (1924–1930), with Julius Evola, edited by Michele Beraldo, 2001.

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano (editor), Lirici nuovi, Milan: Hoepli, 1942. Dolfi, Anna, Onofri, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Donati, Corrado (editor), Per Arturo Onofri: la tentazione cosmica, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1987. Fittoni, Mario, La visione del mondo di Arturo Onofri, Florence: D’Anna, 1973. Lanza, Franco, Arturo Onofri, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Maggiari, Massimo, Archetipi e cosmo della poesia di Arturo Onofri, Marina di Minturno: Caramanica, 1998. Mariani, Gaetano, Poesia e tecnica nella lirica del Novecento, Padua: Liviana, 1958. Pozzi, Gianni, La poesia italiana del Novecento; da Gozzano agli Ermetici, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Salucci, Susetta, Arturo Onofri, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Valli, Donato, Anarchia e misticismo nella poesia italiana del primo Novecento, Lecce: Milella, 1973. Vecchio, Alfio, Arturo Onofri negli scritti critico-estetici inediti, Bergamo: Minerva italica, 1978.

BARBARA GARBIN 1309

OPERA

OPEN CITY See Roma, Citta` aperta (Work by Roberto Rossellini)

OPERA Opera in Italy was born in the ‘‘aesthetics of wonder’’ that signaled the passage from the Renaissance to the Baroque, and with the eclipse of polyphony by monody (the libretto had a similar evolution). The pastoral fable, a mixed literaryinterpretive genre of the sixteenth century, played an important role in the birth of the opera. Indeed, one can speak of the opera in music only with Euridice (1600) by Ottavio Rinuccini (1564–1621) and Jacopo Peri (1561–1633): It is the first nonreligious theatrical opera whose music and libretto survive. Its monotony of declamation was overridden by the insertion of pieces that were more adapted to singing, later called ‘‘arias,’’ accompanied by musical instruments suitable for voices (the harpsichord and the large guitar). This new form of theater started in Florence with a group called La Camerata de’ Bardi that brought together several musicians and intellectuals, including Vincenzo Galilei (1520–1591), who maintained the superiority of ancient Greek music in his correspondence with Girolamo Mei between 1572 and 1582. He expressed these ideas in Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, 1581). This group of Florentine intellectuals founded an art that combined music, poetry, figurative arts, and dance. They also developed the technique of recitare cantando (recitative singing), a mode of declamatory singing. The first theoretical work on this new form was by Giulio Caccini (ca. 1545–1618), who in the preface to his score of Euridice and to Nuove musiche (New Music, 1601) affirmed that music must complement speech. However, the history of opera was from its beginning marked by conflicting views on the 1310

relation between speech and music, and Caccini’s ideal of balance was immediately called into question: Soon the public would impose its preferences for the sung parts (arias), decreeing the priority of music over words and of the singers over the librettist. Many opera singers did not follow the conventions that soon consolidated into norms. Opera survived changes in public taste thanks to its adaptability and openness to innovation: When it lost these abilities, it became a dead art appreciated only by restricted elites. Heterodoxy was the typical quality of the majority of opera singers. The history of Italian opera is not a monotonous repetition of the same characters, but is instead characterized by frequent revolutions. Opera rapidly acquired a secular connotation, transforming itself into an instrument of political propaganda: Indeed, it presupposed the twilight of the theocratic medieval ideal because on the stage God was substituted by man or by pagan myths. From this laicism derived both the tendency to refuse any ‘‘authority principle’’ and the attention to human passions. Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), in the appendix to Scherzi musicali (Musical Jokes, 1607), explained his frequent digressions with the necessity of musically representing ‘‘the affections.’’ An opera like Favola di Orfeo (The Fable of Orpheus, 1607), with a libretto by Alessandro Striggio (1572–1630) and music by Monteverdi, was particularly significant, as the music in the prologue declared its capability of inflaming souls, and therefore its centrality. Innovating on a consolidated practice, the number of musical instruments increased notably, and the recitatives became brighter and more

OPERA musically sustained. However, innovations were often questioned by traditionalists. In Il corago overo osservazioni per mettere bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche (The Corago, or Observation on How to Stage Well Dramatic Compositions), a manuscript kept in the Estense Library in Modena and considered the first essay on the practical preparation of opera in music, pastoral subjects are said to be more suited for singing. On the contrary, it would be ridiculous for historical characters to express themselves in song. That recommends the use of hendecasyllables and septenarii in an easy manner in recitatives, parisyllabic verses for the arias, the use of choirs and brief narrations. The arias must be introduced into situations that justify them. Their function is to interrupt the recitative, which would otherwise seem too monotonous. The connection between opera and politics was established early on in the courts of the Italian Renaissance. The Istituto del Teatro d’Opera emerged not by chance in secular Venice, where the theaters of S. Cassiano (1637), SS. Giovanni e Paolo (1639), and S. Moise´ (1640) developed and the mythological and chivalrous repertoire was consolidated. But the activity of the single theaters was coordinated with difficulty (only in the mid1800s did impresarios manage several theaters at the same time), and the result was a situation of endemic anarchy. Financial resources were based on interventions from the private sector, such as the patronage of the aristocracy or of the sovereigns, and this led to the great mobility of the troupes, as actors and musicians traveled from one city to another. Meanwhile, the most famous singers were able to impose their favorite parts. The laws of the market thus pushed impresarios and opera singers to prepare performances that attracted the interest of the grand patrician families who rented the theater boxes and turned them into places of conversation. The theater of the opera was not, at the start, ‘‘popular’’ by any means: It took until 1677 to open a ‘‘poor’’ theater (the St. Angelo) in Venice. The opera season lasted from 26 December until Shrove Tuesday. Opera in music arrived in Venice for the carnival of 1637 with Andromeda by Benedetto Ferrari (ca. 1603–1681), at the St. Cassiano theater. The following year Il ritorno di Ulisse in Patria (The Return of Ulysses to His Homeland, 1638) by Giacomo Badoaro (1602–1654) and set to music by Monteverdi was staged. The plot shows particular attention to the musical and vocal definition of the protagonists. It also includes for the first time two characters who

would be continually reproposed by the librettists of the eighteenth century: the soprano-soubrette and the page boy. Comic characters coexisted with serious ones, inaugurating a technique destined for great success. These characters were also found in L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Crowning of Poppea, 1643) by Gian Francesco Busenello (1598–1659) and Monteverdi, a story in three acts about the ascension to the throne of Poppea, who marries Nero and becomes empress. The author’s intention was to denounce the corruption of imperial Rome, contrasting it to the republican virtues, thus confirming the link between opera and politics. In these years, above all through the work of the musician Francesco Cavalli (1602–1676), this new form of representation spread throughout Europe. The librettist Giacinto Andrea Cicognini (1606–1670) composed the most famous opera of the seventeenth century, Giasone (Jason), performed in January 1649 at the S. Cassiano theater and part of the opera repertoires until 1690. The public enjoyed this version of the myth of Jason and Medea, which ended with a choral ‘‘triumph of love’’ when the original work was reproposed in a comic version. Baroque staging techniques further developed with the great machines and trompe d’oeil to produce the illusion of perspective. In the eighteenth century, opera became the most popular form of performance and attracted large audiences. From the beginning of the century, Naples was its most important center. The first opera produced in Naples to enjoy success all over the continent was Il trionfo di Camilla, regina dei Volsci (The Triumph of Camilla Queen of the Volsci, 1696) by Silvio Stampiglia (1664–1725), with music by Giovanni Bononcini (1670–1747), which in London was staged more than a hundred times between 1706 and 1726. The plot involves the adventures of the warrior Camilla to regain the territory of the Volsci usurped by the Latini. The main novelty was the use of the ‘‘da capo’’ aria, which allowed the singer to improvise, demonstrating his virtuoso singing. This work thus inaugurated the phenomenon of ‘‘bel canto,’’ which characterized the history of the opera. The line of evolution initiated by Il trionfo di Camilla, regina dei Volsci was continued, again in Naples, by the operas set to music by Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725). His Eraclea (libretto by Stampiglia), staged on 30 January 1700 at the S. Bartolomeo, tells the story of Heraclea, the daughter of Gerone, tyrant of Syracuse and ally of the Romans in the first Punic War. She becomes queen of Syracuse and after various vicissitudes marries her beloved Decio. 1311

OPERA This pie´ce adds realism to the plot, and the humorous scenes achieve their characteristic form of arias and recitatives ending with a duet. This prepared the ground for the comic opera and the transformation of the operatic genre. It also showed the influence of dialectic comedy and the commedia dell’arte. The most famous artist of this period in Naples, capital of the musical world, was Giovan Battista Pergolesi (1710–1736), who set to music Lo frate ‘nnamorato (The Brother in Love, 1732) and La serva padrona (The Servant Master, 1733) by Gennaro Antonio Federico. The latter, composed of two ‘‘intermezzi’’ and first staged on 28 August 1773 at the S. Bartolomeo Theater, is the story of a servant, Serpina (soprano), who, after several vicissitudes, manages to make her master Uberto (baritone) fall in love with her and marry her. It thus introduces into opera the topic of the social mesalliance, of great fortune in the theater of the time. Its success in France resulted in the querelle des bouffons and made the Neapolitan ‘‘opera buffa’’ famous all over Europe, in great part also because, in spite of its flimsy plots, it allowed ample space to the virtuosity of the singers. In this period, female roles were interpreted mostly by castrati, who were the real stars. The best known are Loreto Vettori, Baldassarre Ferri, Francesco Bernardi (Senesino), and Giovanni Carestini (Cusanino). Only at the end of the century would the cruel practice of castration come to an end, and women were able to perform on the stage (in 1815 a decree prohibited the exhibition of eunuchs in Lombardy-Venetia). The female voice (the soprano) quickly became the most important. The influence of the Enlightenment modified the original character of comic opera, whose essential subjects were social climbing, marriages between the bourgeois and aristocrats, and the critique of the nobility. The advent of a bourgeois society resulted in changes in the tastes of the audiences, and opera singers would have to adapt because they were no longer supported by the aristocracy. An interesting example is La Cecchina, ossia la buona figliuola (Cecchina, or the Good Daughter, 1760) by Carlo Goldoni, set to music by Nicolo` Piccinni (1728–1800) and based on the novel Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740) by Samuel Richardson. This choice is indicative of the taste of the bourgeoisie for pathetic love stories, in keeping with the characters of the ‘‘comedie larmoyant.’’ Italian opera thus opened up to new modern, European suggestions, and put aside its traditional mythological themes, but it did so cautiously. Since Italy lacked a revolutionary bourgeois 1312

class, audiences continued to be made up of conservative aristocrats or common people who were seeking easy entertainment. Among the operas of the period, Il Barbiere di Siviglia, ovvero la precauzione inutile (The Barber of Seville, or the Useless Precaution, 1782) by Giovanni Paisiello (1740–1816), on a libretto by Giuseppe Petrosellini (1727–1799), was repeatedly performed all over Europe. The source was Le barbier de Se´ville by Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais, but the librettist eliminated the satirical references to the nobility and the theme of class struggle. Evidently, Naples was not Paris. The flexibility of operas was confirmed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the novelties introduced by reformers like Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714–1787), who introduced the so-called ‘‘eclectic opera,’’ in which the neat distinctions between the serious and the comic were abolished. However, some theorists of the opera, and in particular Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764) with Sopra l’opera in musica (On Musical Opera, 1762) and Antonio Planelli (1747–1803) with Dell’opera in musica (On Musical Opera, 1772), argued for the need to return to mythological subjects for the inclusion of choruses and dances, and for a sharper distinction between arias and recitatives. Algarotti’s essay was translated into English in 1767 and into German in 1769, becoming a European bestseller. The first result of the new reform was Ifigenia in Tauride, staged on 4 October 1763 in Schonbrunn, on a libretto by Marco Coltellini (1719–1777), and music by Gianfrancesco De Maio (1732–1770). This reinterpretation of the myth of Ifigenia applied the rules of the reform: a small number of characters (five), the inclusion of choruses and dances (by Gasparo Angiolini), no amorous theme, and a reduction in the number of arias. This helped to limit the importance of the singers, pushing into a crisis the phenomenon of virtuosity, whose excesses had been criticized by Benedetto Marcello (1686–1739) in Teatro alla moda (Fashionable Theatre, 1720). After Metastasio, the role of the librettist went into notable decline. The spread of Romanticism influenced the evolution of the opera in the nineteenth century. With the debate on national unity, it became an instrument of political propaganda, and in the foreground was always the theme of opposition to foreign domination. While serious opera remained unchanged, comic opera renewed itself: Musical composition became more agitated and the stage action more realistic. New developments included the one-act farce and the semicomic opera, similar to the French pie´ce a sauvetage, although this evolutionary process was difficult.

OPERA For example, Gioacchino Rossini (1799–1868) oscillated between conservatism and innovation. His Il barbiere di Siviglia, on libretto by Cesare Sterbini (1784–1831), was staged for the first time in Rome on 20 February 1816 and became one of the greatest successes of the century (in 1825 it even reached New York). It presented all the typical characters of the theater of Rossini: roles of simple interpretation for the singers; the characteristic ‘‘crescendo’’ of vivacity of the music; the strength of the dramatic action; a subject bared of any sociopolitical reference. Rossini also inaugurated a new approach to the choice of subjects, and was the first opera composer to take material from Shakespeare’s tragedies, formerly unknown to Italian audiences, as in the case of Otello (1816), on a libretto by Francesco Berio di Salsa (1765–1820). French novels also became precious sources: Felice Romani (1788– 1865) and Vincenzo Bellini (1801–1835) adapted, respectively, Augustin Euge`ne Scribe with La sonnambula (The Sleepwalker, 1831) and Alexandre Soumet with Norma (1831). However, the most important innovator of the opera was Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), with whom politics became a central theme. Nabucco, on a libretto by Temistocle Solera (1815–1878), is perhaps the most famous example. Composed in 1841, and based on Auguste Anicete-Bourgeois and Francis Cornu’s Nabuchodonosor (1836), it was performed on 9 March 1842 at the Teatro la Scala in Milan. The story of the aggression of the Assyrians on the defenceless Hebrews was interpreted by the audience as an allusion to the Austrian domination in Italy, so it was censored. The same happened with Rigoletto (1851), on a libretto in three acts by Francesco Maria Piave (1810–1876) and from the play Le roi s’amuse by Victor Hugo. The tragic story of the court jester who lost his daughter Gilda, seduced by the wicked duke of Mantua, was the pretext for a ferocious satire of the aristocracy. The audience was appreciative and Verdi was confirmed as an extraordinary innovator. Verdi’s Aida (1871), the love story of the slave Aida, and the hero Radame`s on a libretto by Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824–1893), was free of political overtones and ended an epoch. After Verdi the opera became less popular. The most famous opera composers were no longer able to create an organic corpus. Thus, Pietro Mascagni (1863–1945) became identified with Cavalleria rusticana (1889) and Ruggero Leoncavallo (1857– 1919) with Pagliacci (1892). Based on a short by Giovanni Verga, the former told the story of a crime of honor in a Sicilian village and because of its theme and source it is considered the first

example of verismo in opera. Inspired by a piece of news on an event that had taken place in Calabria in 1865, the latter showed Canio killing his wife Nedda and her lover Silvio on stage. In contrast to the attempt to bring real life on the stage, there was also a ‘‘fantastic’’ vein that took its subjects from fables. This was the case of many works of Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), who in Turandot, left unfinished and premiered posthumously in 1926, staged the fairy tale of the Chinese princess who is won by Calaf. Puccini tested other neo-Romantic themes, for example in Manon Lescaut (1893), the story of a young woman who dies in the United States in the arms of her beloved, Des Grieux, after a dissolute life; or again in La Bohe´me (1896), on a libretto by Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906) and Luigi Illica (1857–1919), in which four young people cultivate the ideal of a free existence, but in the end have to come to terms with the harsh reality, the death of Mimi. At this point, opera seemed to have exhausted its ability to renew itself and, with the exception of the vaudeville theater of Nino Rota (1911–1979), author of Il cappello di paglia di Firenze (The Florentine Straw Hat, 1955), it has not found a way of creating new works. ALFREDO SGROI Further Reading Bianconi, Lorenzo, Il teatro d’opera in Italia: geografia, caratteri, storia, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993. Bianconi, Lorenzo, and Giorgio Pestelli (editors), Storia dell’opera italiana, 6 vols., Turin: EDT, 1988. Budden, John, ‘‘Verdi and the Contemporary Italian Operatic Scene,’’ in The Verdi Companion, edited by William Weaver and Martin Chusid, New York: Norton, 1979. Celletti, Rodolfo, Storia del belcanto, Fiesole: Disincanto, 1983. Dorsi, Fabrizio, and Giuseppe Rausa, Storia dell’opera italiana, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2000. Fabiano, Antonio, I buffoni alla conquista di Parigi. Storia dell’opera italiana in Francia tra Ancien Regime e Restaurazione, Turin: Paravia, 1998. Guarneri Corazzol, Adriana, Tristano, mio Tristano. Gli scrittori italiani e il caso Wagner, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988. Joly, Jacques, Dagli Elisi all’inferno: il melodramma tra Italia e Francia dal 1730 al 1850, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1990. Katz, Robert, Divining the Powers of Music: Aesthetic Theory and the Origins of Opera, New York: Pendragon Press, 1986. Kimbell, David R. B., Verdi in the Age of Italian Romanticism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Kimbell, David R. B., Italian Opera, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

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OPERA Marchesi, Gustavo, L’opera lirica: guida storico-critica dalle origini al Novecento, Florence: Giunti, 1986. Muraro, Maria Teresa, and Daniel Bryant Daniel (editors), I vicini di Mozart, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1989. Muresu, Gabriele, La parola cantata: studi sul melodramma italiano del settecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1982.

Rosselli, John, Sull’ali dorate. Il mondo musicale italiano dell’ottocento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992. Tedeschi, Rubens, Addio, fiorito asil. Il melodramma italiano da Boito al verismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Zoppelli, Luca, L’opera come racconto: modi narrativi nel teatro musicale dell’Ottocento, Venice: Marsilio, 1994.

ORAL LITERATURE In Italy, with the spread of studies of mass communication, and in general with the more recent interest taken by cultural studies in nonverbal languages and their diffusion within the performing arts, the term orality has acquired a new, strong topicality, especially when used in dialogic opposition with the univocal term writing. From Walter J. Ong’s surveys of ‘‘secondary orality,’’ which might be said to characterize the technological matrix of our age, to the more influential reflections of Jacques Derrida on writing as an object of philosophy that opposes the interiority of the voice as the direct expression of the identity of the signified, the question of orality’s status in contemporary society necessarily involves the nature of the forms that organize the transmission of knowledge in the Western world. But any discussion of the life of the forms of orality connected to a literary tradition at the very least ought to keep in mind a double set of considerations. On the one hand, it will be necessary to refer to the most general expressive dimension of narration—that is, to the modalities of speech and to the narrative forms typical of oral cultures. The first, as functions and codes, have been studied by Giorgio Raimondo Cardona in a perpetually close dialogue between the two cultures, which nevertheless always remain distinct. The latter have been pointed out in epic, myth, legend, fable, and biographical narrations. These are the forms from which the novel was to descend, the novel being the characteristic genre of cultures of the book, that is, of cultures endowed with writing on the wave of that ‘‘continuous and documentable exchange between the two worlds of orality and writing, which are not provinces remote from one another, but continuously communicate through messengers and ambassadors,’’ according again to 1314

Cardona (Cultures of Orality and Cultures of Writing, 1983). On the other hand, our considerations will be directed toward the relational system implicit in the oral dimension: listening and vocality. Voice and ear against the primacy of sight, as centers of performative generation of histories and tales, of the subject who speaks them; an idea of oral production no longer subjected to the prejudice against what is less realized—especially in view of the definitive and indefeasible value that writing traditionally assumes—but instead a privileged form of physical contact at a distance, without which, as Franco Lever has recalled (Sonorous Space, 1998), authentic communication is possible. Antonio Gramsci had already emphasized the importance of literature read aloud as the only thing capable of restoring the ‘‘sum of images and modes of self-expression that do not find a way into grammar’’ (Letteratura e vita nazionale, 1933). The voice is able to awaken, in a written text, the original spoken discourse, and with this, writes the theologian Romano Guardini, to recuperate ‘‘the bodily element’’ of signification (Elogio del libro, 1985). Given this new interest in the comparisons of orality, and following considerations also of metaphorical value on the excess of sound in the contemporary world, we may justify the further rediscovery, in the Italian field, of that which constitutes the impermanent, complementary, and privileged opposite of orality: the world of silence. According to Walter Benjamin, the decline of the oral tale can be traced to the advent of written narration, but it is possible to rediscover the artifices of speech even within written testimonies (Angelus Novus, 1962). The various combinations of sounds (proverbs, refrains, nursery rhymes, lullabies, tongue twisters, prayers, calls, vendors’

ORAL LITERATURE shouts), as the ‘‘insignia’’ of a genre, constitute themselves as a ‘‘sculpted, not merely painted, text, to be savored on two levels of perception,’’ (Giorgio Raimondo Cardona, Culture dell’oralita` e culture della scrittura, 1983). Even the bugle that announces and marks discourses denounces their spoken quality (that is, all the beginning variants of Once upon a time...), while an eminently oral genre is a spell (a formula or prayer), pronouncing which holds ‘‘a magic, operative power,’’ like those thirteenthcentury variants studied by Ignazio Baldelli in Medioevo volgare da Montecassino all’Umbria (1971), and of which it is possible to detect a fantastic memory, for example, in the entire evocation of the council of demons in Torquato Tasso’s Geruslemme liberata (IV, 1–19). Work songs and traditional lullabies, whose rhythmic scansion is tied to precise forms (mowing, pounding, washing, etc.): ‘‘the song is therefore a psycho-physical relief and mantra, a coordinator of movements with a view to the greatest output with the least effort’’ (Giorgio Raimondo Cardona, Cultures of Orality and Cultures of Writing, 1983). Similar considerations can be made for lullabies and dance songs of the Italian popular tradition with more obvious performative demands. Even the construction of the message in oral literature is distinguished by the technique of incremental repetition, through which the discourse continually reprises what has already been said before adding a new element, a new strophe, in order to hold the attention of the listener. One trace of this mechanism partly remains in texts of tenzone (poetic exchange); among the first of these are contained in Dante’s poetry. But it is above all in the use of obscene language that the spoken modality diverges from the modality of the written word. In the first, the gap between explicit language and metaphorical use is wide, while in the second, in writing in print, the explicit obscenity is forbidden, often as a graphic taboo, and hence the recourse to metaphor is obligatory. We can locate privileged channels through which the learned world of writing communicates orally with the popular world of nonwriters in the work of the medieval giullari (jongleurs) and their heirs, bards; in scenic representations (dilettantish or professional, of actors or puppeteers); and in the art of preaching, a genre that, typified by Paolo Aresi, finds its apex in the Baroque oratory of Luigi Giuglaris and Emanuele Tesauro. More recently, the linguistic processes of propaganda (as in the slogans of political or sport demonstrations), or the advent of means of mass communication in

Italy (radio and television), initially accompanied a policy of unifying the spoken Italian language in the standard Roman-Florentine form, but afterwards the vernacular revivals of advertising hypercommunication have contributed more and more to the disappearance of a unified and central model. In the written tradition, on the contrary, oral texts like Prediche volgari of Bernadino da Siena (1380–1444), delivered in the Piazza del Campo, transcribed only at secondhand, maintain, even in writing, a great deal of their original oratorical and performative nature. In modern editions, nevertheless, this nature is usually compromised, and the original writing is sacrificed by an uncertain poetic of modernization and by a misjudged imperative of legibility in ancient texts because of subordination to the needs of the marketplace and the salability of the commercial book. On the other hand, many of those writings that emerge without possessing the true intention of a text preserve an oratorical nature: the diary, a terse register of daily life in the emblematic example—among so many possibilities— of the Diario of the painter Jacopo da Pontormo (1494–1556); the account book (printed mostly for an intrinsic utility); relations, like the manuscript of 1630, concerning the plague in Piacenza, by the Genovese poet; journals (one thinks, for example, of the more recent rediscoveries of the Pirandellian Taccuini). Only the twentieth century has granted orality its full autonomy in literature. Not as materials to be set within the literary discourse, but as independent solutions capable of shattering conventions, in an arc that links, in Italy, the phonosyntactical and onomatopoetic experimentation of a futuristic literature to the most extreme results of visual and concrete poetry, with the international reading of poetry in Florence (April 8–13, Teatro Affratellamento). It is also attested to by one of its protagonists, Vincenzo Accame, in his study Il segno poetico, which, using a historical and interdisciplinary lens (from the Alexandrians to the performative outcomes of the Italian artist William Xerra), is able to show the fecundity of the oral dimension in poetic-visual projects. In the Italian literary tradition, the forms of written conservation of the oral tradition, derived from primitive and/or folkloric cultures tied to the cycles of agricultural festivals in which the serious is combined with the trivial and the obscene, are predominantly brief forms like the fable (for example, the fables collected by Giambattista Basile in Lo cunto de li cunti or the cycles of Bertoldo and 1315

ORAL LITERATURE Bertoldino of Giulio Cesare Croce) and the proverb (as in Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia). Lastly—but enjoying a surge of popularity in recent times—is the form of the oral interview as a literary or historical document of different cultures. Against the repression and taboos of a society like Italy’s, still so rooted in Catholic prejudices, the pact of testimony and oral, anonymous confession can bring into focus, for example, the heterocentric distortion still dominant in Italian society. One example may be found in interviews with young Italian homosexuals collected with a blend of cynicism and candor by Riccardo Reim and Antonio Veneziani in Pornocuore (Pornoheart, 1999). A survey of the diverse positions about orality on the part of Italian literary culture is collected in a volume edited by Stefano Mecatti, Fone` (1985). Reflections on orality as a narrative theme may be found, finally, in Dacia Maraini’s Voci (1994). In his Bucolicum Carmen (X, 8, 10–11), Francesco Petrarca had already recounted how, before catastrophe and death as loss and absence, there is only the word to stammer—between ‘‘sobs and tears,’’ as a shout of a voice not yet enslaved to the written word—the enigma of a possible communication through the artifice of expression. Only through dialogue, that is, in the intersecting play of voices, may the personal will to reassemble the scattered fragments of the world into a unity be imposed; only through the vehicle of the living voice is it possible to spread the power of argumentation, to disturb prejudices and combat falsehood. Indeed, the oral text is realized in time and space, involving many senses, and in a gestaltic perception of the orchestration of the various expressive means (voice and/or voices, tone, intonation, rhythm, gestures, looks, etc.), in a performative dynamism to which there corresponds an identical dynamism of the unfolding of the narration from performer to performer, from performance to performance. Once again Cardona recalls that the ‘‘library of orality is the memory’’: individual memory, collective memory, specialized memories (canovacci, fables, etc.), which reproduce within themselves the social mechanisms that allow their use (festivals and recurrences) and restore their meaning depending on use and functions (Culture dell’oralita e culture della scrittura, 1983). In the field of contemporary Italian philosophy, Carlo Sini points out in Filosofia e scrittura (1994) how the birth of literature, with the setting down of the Homeric poems, coincides with the ‘‘end of genuine epic practice.’’ In a culture of orality, without writing (in which the text does not exist), the 1316

only mode of exercising the memory, the transmission of knowledge and traditions, is that of ‘‘repeating creatively what one has heard,’’ in a kind of ‘‘passionate identification.’’ Sini overcomes the question of a choice between orality and writing in the direction of a living word and in action, as the transmitters of a ‘‘vision,’’ of an ‘‘intuition’’ capable of demanding from the practice of hearing an ethical dimension, ‘‘not in a moral sense, but as a passionate participation in the practical destinies of man.’’ In a different vein, Paolo Miccoli, from a Catholic perspective, recognizes this choice as necessary in order to ‘‘grasp the qualitative difference between orality and writing at the level of the epistemic status of the concept of truth’’ (Homo loquens, 1998). Corrado Bologna’s study, Flatus voci (1992), treats vocality as a sound that signifies and identifies itself with the voice; while Vincenzo Cuomo, author of Le parole della voce (1998), reclaims for vocality a surplus in comparisons of the word and of signification. New interpretations, at the crossroads of orality and expression, are emerging from contemporary philosophical reflection with a feminist perspective. For Adriana Cavarero, the voice restores to discourse the recognized meaning of its possessor, especially in feminine figures like the sirens, Echo the nymph, or opera singers. Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Un re in ascolto, Cavarero puts aside from philosophy’s reflection its object (the semantic of writing) in order to concentrate on orality (the vocalic), since the human voice, able to grasp ‘‘that which is peculiarly human, comes from a place that is outside politics’’ (A piu` voci, 2003). The uniqueness of man is not translated in his ability to combine words in a production of meaning, but in the vital difference of each voice compared to all other voices. The last few years have seen the spread in Italy of methodological publications on the vocality of the actor, often focused on interpretive training or on vocality in relation to the body/mind, as in the studies of Maurizio Boldrini (La voce recitante, 1994) and of Clemente Napolitano (La voce dell’attore, 1995). The greatest compendium on the practice of the oralization of texts, and the relative applications in poetry, music, and theater, is acknowledged to be by Carmelo Bene (1937–2002). In Bene’s theatrical teaching (with wide-ranging literary rediscoveries like Collodi’s Pinocchio or Manzoni’s Adelchi), a large part has been played by the so-called teatro di phone´, whose parts are described and analyzed by Bruno Venturi (Il testo come partitura, 1986). ‘‘Eloquent writings’’ are

ORAL LITERATURE also distinguished by another great figure of the Italian theater, Gabriella Bartolomei (1941–): verbal scores composed only of drawings, designed for the contemporary musical theater (Stefano Tomassini, Scrittura eloquente e poema della voce in Gabriella Bartolomei, 1999). It is at once a theatrical and poetic work, a work of visual transcription of that which alludes to the unconscious dimension of orality and sound, and which makes of the voice the phonic extension of a veritable visual poem. Finally, there is the necessity of retrieving for the spoken word its performative dimension, which writing, as a product of knowledge and distance, is no longer in a position to restore. In a world submerged by the sound of modern machines, with an acoustics degraded by the new materials of production and construction, ‘‘the audibility of oral communication’’ is reduced to such a point that it must be admitted that ‘‘silence no longer exists’’ (Franco Lever, ‘‘Spazio sonoro,’’ 1998). Such necessities have produced, in recent years, numerous contributions to the rediscovery of the literature of silence. That which appears is therefore a complex map that retraces literary paths on the art of remaining silent: from the act of the breath and the sigh, the dramaturgy of silence, to that e´cole du silence that puts critical discourse in strict conjunction with painting and iconography. Silence as a fundamental structure of man culminates in visio dei (a vision of God), while God’s silence, by virtue of love, transforms itself into the Word before which, according to Dante’s Paradiso, the ‘‘intellect collapses’’ and loses—as it is no longer necessary— all memory. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Popular Culture and Literature Further Reading Accame, Vincenzo, Il segno poetico: Materiali e riferimenti per una storia della ricerca poetico-visuale e interdisciplinare, Milan: Spirali, 1981. Baldelli, Ignazio, Medioevo volgare da Montecassino all’Umbria, Bari: Adriatica, 1971.

Benjamin, Walter, Angelus novus: Saggi e frammenti (1955), Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Bisello, Linda, Sotto il ‘‘manto’’ del silenzio: Storia e forme del tacere (secoli XVI-XVII), Florence: Olschki, 2003. Boldrini, Maurizio, La voce recitante: Un percorso controverso, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Bologna, Corrado, Flatus vocis: Metafisica e antropologia della voce, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992. Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo, Antropologia della scrittura, Turin: Loescher, 1981. Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo, ‘‘Culture dell’oralita` e culture della scrittura,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Produzione e consumo, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Cavarero, Adriana, A piu` voci: Filosofia dell’espressione vocale, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003. Cerina, Giovanna, Cristina Lavinio and Luisa Mulas (editors), Oralita` e scrittura nel sistema letterario, Rome: Bulzoni, 1982. Cuomo, Vincenzo, Le parole della voce: Lineamenti di una filosofia della phone´, Salerno: Edisud, 1998. Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, Baltimore-London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Bari: Laterza, 1933. Guardini, Romano, Elogio del libro, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1985. Lever, Franco, ‘‘Spazio sonoro,’’ in Dizionario di omiletica, edited by Manlio Sodi and Achille M. Triacca, Leumann (Turin): Elle Di Ci and (Gorle) Bergamo: Velar, 1998. Mecatti, Stefano (editor), Fone`: La voce e la traccia, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1985. Miccoli, Paolo, Homo Loquens: Oralita` e scrittura in Occidente, Rome: Urbaniana University Press, 1998. Napolitano, Clemente, La voce dell’attore: Aspetti dell’espressione vocale nel teatro del Novecento, Milan: Guerini Scientifica, 1995. Ong, Walter J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, New York: Methuen, 1982. Reim, Riccardo, and Antonio Veneziani, Pornocuore: Sogni e desideri segreti dei giovani omosessuali, Rome: Castelvecchi, 1999. Rovatti, Pieraldo, ‘‘Voce/Silenzio,’’ in Le parole del teatro, edited by Luigi Maria Musatti, Jesi: Transeuropa, 1995. Sini, Carlo, Il silenzio e la parola: Luoghi e confini del sapere per un uomo planetario, Genoa: Casa Editrice Marietti, 1989. Sini, Carlo, Filosofia e scrittura, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1994. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Scrittura eloquente e poema della voce in Gabriella Bartolomei,’’ in Scena 2, nos. 3–4 (1999): 55–59. Venturi, Bruno, ‘‘Il testo come partitura,’’ in Teatro Festival, 4 (1986): 57–60.

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GIORGIO ORELLI

GIORGIO ORELLI (1921–) Giorgio Orelli, poet and literary critic known also for his work as novelist and translator, is considered by many to be the greatest Swiss Italian-language writer after World War II. In 1952, several of Orelli’s lyric poems previously published in Ne´ bianco ne´ viola (Neither White, nor Violet, 1944) are included in Luciano Anceschi’s anthology Linea lombarda alongside the verses of Luciano Erba, Renzo Modesti, Roberto Rebora, Nelo Risi, and Vittorio Sereni. From that point on, a common issue of contention among Orelli’s critics is the degree to which his work fits the Lombard style marked by realism, attentive to the concrete nature of objects, diffident to symbolism. As an Italian-speaking Swiss writer from the Ticino, Orelli’s complex linguistic and cultural experience grows out of the geographical vicinity to the Milanese region, making him particularly receptive to other cultures and languages; as shown in his more recent multilingual works (dialects, German inserts) and in his polyglot translations of Lucretius, Goethe, Ho¨lderlin, Novalis, Mallarme´, and Andri Peer. Though remarks on the similarities between Giorgio Orelli and poets like Vittorio Sereni or Luciano Erba have often surfaced, critics are still reluctant to recognize the bran of Lombard poetry. Orelli is a sober and frugal poet: inasmuch in the dimensions he gives his work—especially sparse in the beginning—as for the limited number of collections throughout his years of activity. From his first collection Ne´ bianco, ne´ viola—with an introduction by Gianfranco Contini, Orelli’s professor at the University of Freiburg whose influence is often recalled by the author—eight years pass before the publication of Prima dell’anno nuovo (Before the New Year, 1952). Overwhelming in the following two collections, Poesie (Poems, 1953) and Nel cerchio familiare (In the Familiar Circle, 1960), is the persistence of the ephemeral. Orelli pays close attention to mundane natural occurrences, particularly focusing on the fauna and its Ticinese colors. Given the constancy in Orelli’s production up until this moment, the anthology L’ora del tempo (Time’s Watch, 1962), which was published by Arnoldo Mondadori, can be considered a conscious closure to this cycle and a trope to widen the public’s accessibility to his works. Orelli 1318

carefully eliminates a great deal from his earlier collections and rigorously elaborates certain poems by adding new stanzas and slightly altering or creating new lines. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo (Cento anni di poesia nella Svizzera italiana, 1997) points out the birhythmical nature in Orelli’s poetry: a longer beat, a close spinoff of narrative lines, and a shorter tempo linked to lyricism and the poetics of happenstance. Gradually in the following collections the former beat prevails. Sinopie (Sinopites, 1977) moves toward stylistic and narrative freedom. As Pietro De Marchi remarks (Dove portano le parole, 2002), this highly ironic and satirical work is Orelli’s most political expression. The political-satirical voice is most likely inherited from contemporary Swiss-German writers: Friedrich Du¨rrenmatt, Max Frisch, Peter Bichsel, and Hugo Loetscher. At times the poems have historic origins, and otherwise the satire takes a stance against a foolish sort of religion, as in Quell’uomo che prega il Signore (That Man Who Prays to God) and A un piccolo borghese (To a Petit Bourgeois). Others yet express a polemical view against the Vietnam War. His last collections are Spiracoli (Coils, 1989) and Il collo dell’anitra (The Duck’s Neck, 2001). The characters featured in poems increasingly reminiscent of small narrations are psychologically fuller and more developed, while some of the text borders on the prosaic. Sex makes an optimistic cameo in highlighting vitality and opposing bigotry. The stylistic and linguistic palimpsest is constantly expanding, exhibiting German phrases, dialectal compositions, as well as a comical tone of Dantean origin. ‘‘The idea of a literature alimented by literature’’ is increasingly stronger in Orelli, as Mattia Cavadini remarks in Per Giorgio Orelli (2001), a volume dedicated to the author’s 80th birthday. Orelli writes in a cultivated language and is influenced by his major Italian contemporaries, thus creating a formal style with predilections for alliteration, paronomasia, and phonetic allusions both internally (within the verses of one poem) and externally (with reference to the great texts of Italian literature). Giorgio Orelli’s literary criticism is also of note. In works dedicated to Petrarca, Foscolo, Manzoni, and Montale, the writer rereads some

ALFREDO ORIANI of the most important texts of the Italian literary tradition with accents on their phonetic and verbal characteristics. Orelli’s critical works are thus in consistent keeping with his creative works and the concept of a literature born of literature.

‘‘Poesie,’’ 1953. ‘‘Nel cerchio familiare,’’ 1960. ‘‘L’ora del tempo,’’ 1962. ‘‘Sinopie,’’ 1977. ‘‘Spiracoli,’’ 1989. ‘‘Il collo dell’anitra,’’ 2001.

Fiction

Biography

Un giorno nella vita, 1960.

Born at Airolo in Switzerland, 25 May 1921. Graduated from the University of Freiburg, where he studied under Gianfranco Contini; joined the military service in World War II for two years; taught Italian at the District School of Commerce and then at the high school of Bellinzona, 1945; taught a course on Petrarca as guest lecturer at the University of Zurich; married Myriam, 1960; and had two daughters Giovanna and Lucia; he contributed to the literary magazines Paragone, Strumenti critici, and Il verri. Won the Great Schiller prize (most important Swiss honor), 1988; the Chiara Career prize, 2001; and the Bagutta prize for the Il collo dell’anitra, 2001. Currently lives in Bellinzona. GIAN PAOLO GIUDICETTI Selected Works Poetry

Other Accertamenti verbali, 1978. Accertamenti montaliani, 1984. Quel ramo del lago di Como e altri accertamenti manzoniani, 1990. Il suono dei sospiri: Sul Petrarca volgare, 1990. Foscolo e la danzatrice: Un episodio delle ‘‘Grazie,’’ 1992.

Further Reading Agosti, Stefano, ‘‘Nel cuore del linguaggio: Spiracoli di Giorgio Orelli,’’ in Poesia Italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, La cultura e la poesia italiana del dopoguerra, Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1968. De Marchi, Pietro, Dove portano le parole: Sulla poesia di Giorgio Orelli e altro Novecento, Lecce: Manni, 2002. De Marchi, Pietro, and Paolo Di Stefano (editors), Per Giorgio Orelli, Bellinzona: Casagrande, 2001. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Giorgio Orelli,’’ in Cento anni di poesia nella Svizzera italiana, edited by Giovanni Bonalumi, Renato Martinoni and Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Locarno: Dado`, 1997.

‘‘Ne´ bianco ne´ viola,’’ 1944. ‘‘Prima dell’anno nuovo,’’ 1952.

ALFREDO ORIANI (1852–1909) Novelist and essayist Alfredo Oriani was celebrated as a prophet by the Fascists for foreshadowing the ‘‘third Italic resurrection’’ with his nationalist ideas of the newly unified Italy’s historical role. Oriani’s social thinking matured under Giuseppe Mazzini’s influence and is reflected in three political essays that were primarily responsible for his belated status with Fascism. In Fino a Dogali (As Far as Dogali, 1889), Oriani suggests a Mazzinian interpretation of the growing, but already problematic, Italian colonialism, considering it a step toward redemption in a country that, in fact, had been excluded from the main European historical

arena. Oriani eloquently sketched the terms for his dissatisfaction, making himself the spokesman for the majority of intellectuals. Dogali was the site of a major Italian defeat in Africa during the nation’s expansionist period after the unification. In the second essay, La lotta politica in Italia (The Political Struggle in Italy, 1892), which covers Italian history from the Fall of the Roman Empire to the Risorgimento, Oriani theorized the Risorgimento as an anomalous revolution because it was carried out without the actual contribution and participation of the common people: ‘‘La rivoluzione italiana,’’ he writes, ‘‘non poteva paragonarsi a nessuna 1319

ALFREDO ORIANI vera rivoluzione popolare’’ (The Italian revolution could not be compared to any real revolution of the people). However, this was nothing but the pars destruens of the great fresco that aimed at romantically passing through all of Italian history, singling out crucial points and guiding principles. These two works thus provided the interpretation of italianita` and a heroic model of living that Fascist ideology later incorporated in its nationalistic rhetoric. The conclusions of such ambitious vision intended to reassess, as a whole, the situation created by the new Italian state, which started with the vitality of its contradictions, is carried on in La rivolta ideale (The Ideal Revolt, 1908), which endorses the need of idealism against nineteenth-century positivism. Oriani envisions a new aristocracy to lead the nation and the people to fully realize their historical destiny. A determined republican, he did not disdain the monarchy for having, if nothing else, at least resolved the dichotomy between federalism, on the one hand, and unification, on the other. Oriani also regarded the return of exclusively spiritual power to the church as a further advantage, because it could, at last, make its own contribution to democracy. However, Italy’s success as one of the great European powers was bound to the pressing establishment of a new managerial class in place of the opportunistic bourgeoisie who had taken power without risking anything. The need for identifying the characteristics of the new ruling class, subject of reflection for the leading Italian sociologists of the period, i.e., Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, led Oriani to an individualistic notion. He placed himself in direct conflict with Socialism, as positivist in its ideology, pacifistic in its politics. For example, by referring back to Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche, in La lotta politica in Italia, Oriani developed the final aspect of his vision, which concurred with nationalism and mysticism. In this way, the features of a new aristocracy took shape, a ruling class made up of individuals who represented not themselves, but the ‘‘people’’ (la gente: a word that for the first time entered the vocabulary of political slogans in Italy, without ever leaving it). Thus, Oriani paved the way for another restless intellectual from Romagna: Benito Mussolini who, once he had become the Duce, would commission and edit himself the opera omnia of his precursor in 1924, overtly stating: ‘‘noi ci siamo nutriti delle pagine di Alfredo Oriani’’ (we have been nurtured by the pages of Alfredo Oriani). Is it possible to separate him from Fascism? Yes, provided that his prose be stripped of all rhetorical encumbrance, i.e., by observing it in 1320

the light of the persisting contradictions of the Italian Republic. Oriani’s style (‘‘Tacitean,’’ according to Mussolini) was extremely innovative, introducing the political aphorism in Italy, albeit with a confusion of method and principles. His tendency was always antiliterary, to the extent that he declared that he preferred the last letter of a suicide victim—central character of the successful short fiction Vortice (Vortex, 1899)—to Leopardi’s poetry. Indeed his novels, poetry, and plays were the artistic illustration of his ideas and political thinking. In his theater, Oriani transposed modern myths into provincial life: Hamlet in L’invincibile (The Invincible, 1902) and Marguerite Gautier, dame aux came´lias, in L’abisso (The Abyss, 1904); in his poetry, in the words of Piero Gobetti, one could perceive ‘‘an incoherent tumult producing scattered hopes that are not based on strong faith’’ (Monotonie di Alfredo Oriani, 1921). Finally as a novelist, Oriani was popular because of his morbid, suicidal characters, and aimed at a provincial reading public. He displayed, however, a considerable verve at times. ‘‘Oriani’s works,’’ comments Renato Serra, ‘‘are reprinted, sold and read; this is much more indication of inadequacy and vulgarity, rather than an effect of intelligent curiosity and of serious interest’’ (Le Lettere, 1914). Among the peculiar aspects of his violently anarchic personality, which is at its strongest in the novel No (1881), what stood out was his antifeminism, stigmatized by Gian Pietro Lucini as a ‘‘thorn’’ that ‘‘produced pus, opened a wound’’ (Alfredo Oriani, 1909). In Al di la` (Beyond, 1877), Oriani had already tackled the taboo subject of lesbian love, while the physical blond type was the one who in Gelosia (Jealousy, 1894), in front of a frustrated lover, symbolically left Romagna by train for Rome: The province was not just a bee in his bonnet, but rather a way of life. Mostly ignored during his lifetime, Oriani’s posthumous fame was officially sealed by the Duce’s ostensible endorsement. However, his veritable place in Italian literature has yet to be analyzed.

Biography Born in Faenza (Ravenna), on 22 August 1852 into a family of agricultural landowners. Studied at the Barnabite college San Luigi in Bologna, 1866; then at La Sapienza University in Rome and at the University of Naples where, under the direction of Camillo De Meis, graduated in law, 1872. Did not pursue a career in law and in 1875, retired to the paternal estate ‘‘Cardello’’ (Casola Valsenio,

ALFREDO ORIANI province of Ravenna); published his first collection of short stories, Memorie inutili, under the pen name of Ottone di Banzole, 1876. Died in Casola Valsenio, on 18 October 1909. In 1927, Benito Mussolini founded, with the consent of the writer’s son, the ‘‘Casa Oriani,’’ the seat of the library and of the periodical publication of the Quaderni del Cardello, an essential instrument for understanding Oriani’s works. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA Selected Works

Plays L’invincibile, 1902. L’abisso, 1904.

Nonfiction Matrimonio e divorzio, 1886. Fino a Dogali, 1889. La lotta politica in Italia, 1892. Ombre di Occaso, 1901. La rivolta ideale, 1908. Punte secche, 1921.

Letters Lettere, edited by Piero Zama, 1958.

Further Reading

Collections Opera omnia, edited by Benito Mussolini, 30 vols., Bologna: Cappelli, 1923–1933.

Poetry ‘‘Monotonie,’’ 1921.

Fiction Memorie inutili, 1875. Al di la`, 1877. Gramigne, 1879. No, 1881. Quartetto, 1883. Sullo scoglio e altri racconti, 1889. Il nemico, 1894. Gelosia, 1894. La disfatta, 1896. Vortice, 1899. Olocausto, 1902. La bicicletta, 1902. Oro, incenso e mirra, 1904. Sı`, 1923.

Bosi Maramotti, Giovanna, ‘‘La produzione teatrale di Oriani,’’ in Quaderni del Cardello, 2 (1991): 8–27. Croce, Benedetto, Letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1964. Dirani, Ennio (editor), Alfredo Oriani e la cultura del suo tempo, Ravenna: Longo, 1985. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘Oriani’s Vortice as a Politica Metaphor,’’ in Forum Italicum, 6 (1972): 488–496. Gobetti, Piero, ‘‘Monotonie di Alfredo Oriani’’ (1921), in Scritti storici, letterari e filosofici, edited by Paolo Spriano, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Licata, Vincenzo, Lo specchio e il precipizio. Saggi sulla narrativa di Alfredo Oriani, Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1994. Lucini, Gian Pietro, ‘‘Alfredo Oriani’’ (1909), in Scritti critici, edited by Luciana Martinelli, Bari: De Donato, 1971. Mussolini, Benito, Introduction to Alfredo Oriani, La rivolta Ideale, in Opera omnia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1924. Serra, Renato, Le Lettere (1914), edited by Umberto Pirotti, Ravenna: Longo, 1989. Spadolini, Giovanni (editor), Oriani, Faenza: Lega, 1961.

ORPHEUS See Fabula di Orpheo (Work by Angelo Poliziano)

ORPHIC SONGS See Canti orfici (Work by Dino Campana) 1321

ANNA MARIA ORTESE

ANNA MARIA ORTESE (1914–1998) From her literary debut, Anna Maria Ortese was stigmatized by the literary establishment for her alleged ineptness and for her isolation from social life. Only toward the end of her life, in the 1980s, did literary criticism begin to grasp the full value of her work. She has since come to be regarded as one of the major women writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Born into a large family, Ortese did not seem destined for a writing career. Due to health problems, a lack of interest in school and the nomadic existence of her impoverished family, she did not receive a proper education. Moreover, in her youth she had dreamed of a career as a piano teacher, but at the age of 18 she realised that her vocation lay elsewhere, even though she feared her family’s reaction. Her poverty-stricken relatives strongly disapproved of the publication of a series of poems, written on the occasion of the death of her beloved brother Manuele, in the journal La fiera letteraria in 1934. However, this did not stop Ortese from continuing to publish short stories in the same review, now occasionally under the pseudonym of Franca Nicosi. Her first 13 stories were then collected in Angelici dolori (Heavenly Pains), published, with the encouragement of Elio Vittorini, in 1937. Scathing reviews by leading critics Giancarlo Vigorelli and Enrico Falqui were the start of Ortese’s problematic relationship with the cultural press. The disappointing sales figures of her works published at irregular intervals made several publishing houses, including Vallecchi and Rizzoli, reluctant to renew financial support or contracts. Her living and working conditions consequently deteriorated over the years. Even the relative success of Il cardillo addolorato (The Lament of the Linnet, 1993), published by Adelphi, and the reeditions of which brought Ortese’s books back to the attention of readers, provided no relief to the writer and her sister Maria, who needed medical care and who died in the same year as Anna Maria. Massimo Bontempelli, the influential writer and director of the Mondadori publishing house, saw Angelici dolori as a work in the tradition of ‘‘magical realism,’’ but that view was rejected by most critics. The ensuing controversy foreshadowed the 1322

inability of critics to fit Ortese into any existing literary current. The critical reception of her work also failed to notice the intrinsic qualities of the stories, which betray Ortese’s commitment to society. Drawing on various sources of inspiration, from mythology to religion to literature, Ortese strives to show the fundamental role of nature in human experience. She believes that humankind in its pursuit of knowledge, profit, and progress has forsaken nature. She therefore creates nonmimetic or fantastic worlds that are populated by symbolical and fantastic characters. For Ortese, the human betrayal of nature represents the Fall of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Hence her abundant use of biblical references, even in her character’s names. For instance, Perdita (meaning loss) is the name of the main character of L’Iguana (The Iguana, 1965), Ortese’s first novel. Perdita or Iguana, symbolizing Evil, becomes a scapegoat and as such must be rejected, expelled, and even sacrificed. Yet she also seems to be the only character to be in touch with nature, thus equally representing Good. Perdita’s ambiguous nature, combining Good and Evil, turns her into a hybrid and changeable creature, metamorphosing from an enchanting maiden called Estrellita (little star) into a little old woman dressed in rags and finally into the iguana of the title. Her character is similar to that of Cardillo and Alonso, the protagonists of respectively Il cardillo addolorato and Alonso e i visionari (Alonso and the Seers, 1996), the two novels that complete what Monica Farnetti has described as the trilogy of the ‘‘angelbeasts’’ (Anna Maria Ortese, 1998). Each character is linked to a different colour and element of nature (water, air, fire). Their metamorphoses are only visible to those who are sensitive to the ambiguity of things and as a result are in danger of losing themselves, falling ill and even dying. Varying between the monster-like and the angelic, these metamorphoses recall the similar transformation undergone by the characters of Ortese’s early short fiction, as in Il Monaciello di Napoli (The House Spirit of Naples), first published in 1940 but collected only posthumously in 2001. Indeed, Ortese’s ouevre are characterized by a strong amount of intertextuality.

ANNA MARIA ORTESE The fantastic settings of Ortese’s fiction reflect the characters’ mutability. Spatial and temporal boundaries are blurred to the extent that physical and mental spaces merge, creating time loops and temporal incongruities. Furthermore, the setting visualizes the opposition between good and evil by opposing horizontal and vertical as well as open and closed spaces. This explains the author’s tendency to confine her creatures to basements, cellars or labyrinthine underground cities. In her more openly autobiographical texts, such as Il porto di Toledo (The Harbour of Toledo, 1975), the fantastic element is more subtly present. Here Ortese refers more openly to the cities that she visited or in which she has lived, turning her wandering character into a sort of Baudelairean flaneur. Ortese also frequently contributed to newspapers and periodicals, often writing about the themes of confinement or exile. Particularly good examples are her articles on Naples, which appeared on a regular basis in leading newspapers from the 1940s to the early 1950s, and were later collected as Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Bay Is Not Naples, 1953), for which she was awarded the Viareggio literary prize. In Il mare non bagna Napoli, Ortese focuses on people on the margins, the impoverished and the tenants of public housing, rendering not only their poverty and deprivation— conditions that she knew from her own experience—but also projecting their inner world onto space. She does so by applying the Leopardian principle of ‘‘double vision,’’ which allows one to see not only what is visible but what is (ordinarily) invisible as well. Ortese clearly did not consider it her duty to be an objective reporter; her ‘‘double vision’’ connects fiction and nonfiction. Yet she believed that nonfiction can have great social impact. In her articles on her journey to Moscow in 1954, she even dared to criticize the Communist regime, particularly its oppression of workers and women, a stand that was criticized by many of her colleagues who found left-wing sympathies incompatible with a critique of Soviet Communism. Like her description of life in Naples, which was judged superficial, folkloristic and antifeminist, Ortese’s views of the Soviet Union are not conservative or reactionary, but rather demonstrate her nonconformism and her unwillingness to adhere to the dogma of any group. Almost half a century later, Ortese’s writings could still be the object of intense debate: In an article published in Il corriere della sera on May 21, 2004, the Neapolitan

writer and columnist Erri De Luca accused her of racism. Ortese was also accused of conservatism in her stylistic and linguistic choices because she rejected stylistic experimentalism and kept away from avant-gardism, favouring a form of storytelling that looks back to the narrative traditions of the nineteenth century. She also drew inspiration from the gothic novel, the adventure story and the philosophical novel for both her literary writings and her nonfiction. Her literary models, aside from Leopardi, whose melancholy and pain she shared, were Leonardo Sciascia, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Elsa Morante, whom she admired for their commitment, and, perhaps more important, English writers such as Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf. Research on Ortese’s work is still ongoing and much still needs to be done to integrate her properly into the canon of modern Italian literature. Although her poetry first articulated her central themes of loss and suffering, today it is her fiction, her journalistic writings and her travel impressions, collected in La lente scura (The Dark Lens, 1991) that are receiving the greatest critical attention.

Biography Born in Rome on 16 June 1914 into a large family, who led a nomadic life because of economic difficulties. Moved from Rome to Apulia, to Naples to Tripoli (Libya) in 1924; returned to Naples in 1928. Had an irregular education, and went to primary school on a regular basis only while in Libya; upon her return she decided not to finish secondary school and instead took piano lessons at a private music school to prepare herself for the conservatory; later abandoned the idea of a career as a pianist and teacher for a literary career. Published a first set of poems in La Fiera Letteraria in 1933, followed by a series of short stories in the same journal; Massimo Bontempelli, director of Mondadori, published her first 13 stories in a collection entitled Angelici dolori (1937). Won several literary prizes, among which was the Premio Viareggio for Il mare non bagna Napoli, 1953. From 1937, contributed to numerous periodicals, including Il Mondo and L’Europeo. Left Naples in 1953, after her parents’ death. After that her journalistic activities were less frequent. While living in Rome, Milan, and finally Rapallo, she focused on her literary writings. Publishers Vallecchi and, later, Rizzoli gave her a 1323

ANNA MARIA ORTESE monthly allowance, barely enough to support herself and her sister Maria. In 1986, through the ‘‘Bacchelli law’’ created to support destitute writers, she was granted a monthly income by the government. Died in Rapallo of heart disease, on 9 March 1998. INGE LANSLOTS Selected Works Collections Romanzi, vol. 1, edited by Monica Farnetti, Milan: Adelphi, 2002. Romanzi, vol. 2, edited by Andrea Baldi, Monica Farnetti and Filippo Secchieri, Milan: Adelphi, 2005.

Fiction Angelici dolori, 1937. L’infanta sepolta, 1950. Il mare non bagna Napoli, 1953; as The Bay Is Not Naples, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1955. I giorni del cielo, 1958. L’Iguana, 1965; as The Iguana, translated by Henry Martin, 1987. Poveri e semplici, 1967. La luna sul muro, 1968. L’alone grigio, 1969. Il porto di Toledo, 1975. Il cappello piumato, 1979. Estivi terrori, 1987. In sonno e in veglia, 1987. Il cardillo addolorato, 1993; as The Lament of the Linnet, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1999. Alonso e i visionari, 1996. Corpo celeste, 1997. Il Monaciello di Napoli, 2001.

Poetry ‘‘Il mio paese e` la notte,’’ 1996. ‘‘La luna che trascorre. Poesie inedite (1930–1980),’’ 1998.

Nonfiction Silenzio a Milano, 1958. Il treno russo, 1983. Il mormorio di Parigi, 1986. La lente scura: scritti di viaggio, 1991.

Further Reading Bontempelli, Massimo, ‘‘Anna Maria Ortese,’’ in L’avventura novecentista. Sulla polemica (1926–1938), Florence: Vallecchi, 1938. Borri, Giancarlo, Invito alla lettura di Anna Maria Ortese, Milan: Mursia, 1988. Clerici, Luca, Apparizione e visione: vita e opere di Anna Maria Ortese, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. De Luca, Erri, ‘‘Cara Ortese, questa non e` Napoli’’, in Il corriere della sera, 21 May 1994, p. 30. De Nicola, Francesco, and Pierantonio Zannoni (editors), Convegno di studi su Anna Maria Ortese, Genoa: Sagep, 1999.

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Falqui, Enrico, Review of Angelici dolori, Quadrivio, 9 May 1937; rpt. in Novecento letterario, vol. 4, Florence: Vallecchi, 1970. Farnetti, Monica, Anna Maria Ortese, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Ghezzo, Flora, ‘‘Paesaggi del desiderio, ovvero devenir femme tra terra e acqua,’’ in ‘‘...E c’e` di mezzo il mare’’: Lingua, letteratura e civilta` marina, edited by Bart Van den Bossche, Michel Bastiaensen, and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, Florence: Cesati, 2002. Gramone, Antonella, ‘‘Travelling through the I: Anna Maria Ortese’s Melancholic Cities,’’ in Romance Studies, 19, no. 1 (2001): 95–108. Iannaccone, Giuseppe, La scrittrice reazionaria: il giornalismo militante di Anna Maria Ortese, Naples: Liguori, 2003. Vigorelli, Giancarlo, Review of Angelici dolori, Letteratura, 4 October 1937, pp. 175–176. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Fantasy and Narrative in Anna Maria Ortese,’’ in Italica, 71.3 (1994): 354–368.

IL MARE NON BAGNA NAPOLI, 1953 Fiction by Anna Maria Ortese

In 1953, the prestigious ‘‘Premio Viareggio’’ was awarded to two outsiders in contemporary literature, Anna Maria Ortese and Carlo Emilio Gadda, for Il mare non bagna Napoli (The Bay Is Not Naples) and Novelle dal ducato in fiamme (Short Stories from the Burning Duchy) respectively. Readers and critics applauded the event while intellectuals, particularly those with Neapolitan roots or a special bond with the city, objected to it, as they saw Ortese’s portrayal of Naples as incorrect and judgmental. The volume, a collection of fiction and nonfiction including short texts that had been awarded the Saint Vincent prize in 1952, was seen as lacking in so-called napoletanita`, the positive interpretation of Naples introduced by the previous literary generations of Matilde Serao and Eduardo De Filippo. Ortese’s perspective on Naples was considered stereotypical, antifeminist, and based on prejudice and conservatism. Ortese responded

ANNA MARIA ORTESE to these accusations in her introduction to the second edition of the collection published by Adelphi in 1994, but this did not put an end to the controversy. A ‘‘double vision’’ connects fiction and nonfiction, although Ortese believed that the latter could have a more direct impact on society. In ‘‘La citta` involontaria’’ (The Involuntary City), a chronicle on the life of the poor in Naples based on her guided visit to the neighbourhoods around the city harbour, she adds statistical data to her comments in order to denounce the inhuman living conditions of the inhabitants of what is almost a city within the city (as though Naples had tried to isolate its poverty). In ‘‘Il silenzio della ragione’’ (The Silence of Reason), she represents the members of Sud, a group of young and progressive intellectuals including Raffaele La Capria and Michele Prisco, who wanted to bring postwar Naples back to life. Ortese honestly represented the group’s divisions and disillusionments and as a result was severely criticized by its members and other intellectuals. In the first section, the story ‘‘Oro a Forcella’’ (Gold in Forcella) focuses on the theme of poverty. At a bus stop a beggar’s request for money creates a feeling of solidarity among the crowd. Their poverty is in stark contrast with the wealth on display in the shop windows in the Forcella neighbourhood. The appearance of a butterfly at the end of the story, drawing the crowd’s attention and offering some form of distraction, may stand for change and hope in a better future. Or it may just be that: a distraction. In ‘‘Interno familiare’’ (A Household), Ortese elaborates the theme of unfulfilled expectations. Anastasia Finizio is a young woman who realizes that she will become a spinster like her mother’s older sister when her hopes for love are dashed. Anastasia’s problems, which derive from her incapacity to fully understand things, her desire for a proper life and her subsequent resignation, are contrasted with the light-heartedness of her beautiful younger sister. Her troubles, however, are obliterated by the drama that strikes the family of the young man with whom Anastasia was in love. ‘‘Interno familiare’’ is a story of double despair and loss, as is stressed by the repeated song refrain about how things have gone by: ‘‘Tutto e` passato’’ (All is past). The irreversibility expressed by the song is exemplary of Ortese’s melancholy. INGE LANSLOTS

Editions First edition: Il mare non bagna Napoli, Turin: Einaudi, 1953. Translation: as The Bay Is Not Naples, translated by Frances Frenaye, London: Collins, 1955.

Further Reading Baldi, Andrea, ‘‘Infelicita` senza desideri: Il mare non bagna Napoli di Anna Maria Ortese,’’ in Italica, 77, no. 1 (2000): 81–104. Baldi, Andrea, ‘‘Ortese’s Naples: Urban Malaise through a Visionary Gaze,’’ in Italian Women and the City, edited by Janet Lavarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, Madison and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003. Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Narrare Napoli, anni Cinquanta: Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca,’’ in Narrativa, 24 (2003): 159–172. Iannaccone, Giuseppe, La scrittrice reazionaria. Il giornalismo militante di Anna Maria Ortese, Naples: Liguori, 2003.

L’IGUANA, 1965 Novel by Anna Maria Ortese

L’Iguana (The Iguana), Ortese’s first novel, appeared almost 30 years after her debut work, Angelici dolori (Heavenly Pains, 1937), but did nothing to change the relatively poor critical reception of the author. Although it was awarded the ‘‘Premio Maria Cristina’’ and was nominated for the ‘‘Premio Viareggio,’’ it was practically forgotten until its reissue in 1986 by Roberto Calasso’s publishing house Adelphi. L’Iguana presents itself as the travel journal of the young Milanese nobleman Carlo Ludovico di Grees, called Daddo, who is traveling overseas to acquire new real estate. Upon landing on the unknown island of Ocan˜a, Daddo immediately takes an interest in the house of the solitary Guzman family and becomes fascinated with their maid, Estrellita (Spanish for ‘‘little star’’), whom he wants to turn into an educated young lady. Daddo’s adventure, which initially has the appearance of a happy love story, ends tragically: Growing conflicts among the Guzman family members and the revelation of Estrellita’s presumed true identity—the inhabitants 1325

ANNA MARIA ORTESE of Ocan˜a see her as a selfish and monster-like creature—make Daddo lose himself in a fantasy world to which he succumbs. The final part of L’Iguana is composed of stories and comments made by the island’s inhabitants and other travelers who, while mourning Daddo’s death, complete his journal. The narration revolves around Estrellita’s monstrosity and her multiple changes, resulting from the dualism of her nature. Estrellita alternates between a human and a more animal appearance, assuming mainly the guise of an iguana, which explains the title of the novel. Indeed, the nickname Iguanuccia (little Iguana) echoes the diminutive form of her original name, Estrellita. Her monstrosity clearly links L’Iguana to the genre of the fantastic novel, but the tradition of the adventure story and the gothic tale is here intertwined with pictorial, oneiric, fairy tale, and mythological elements, often symbols of hybridity. Its generic hybridity also links L’Iguana to the eighteenth-century philosophical novel. The Iguana is one of the most important and complex allegoric figures in Ortese’s fiction. Through her, the author represents her conception of the distorted relationship between Culture and Nature in the modern world. The monster-like creature denounces the perversion of modern society and its exclusive belief in culture, knowledge and progress, which can only lead to Evil (Ortese herself capitalizes moral qualities). The Iguana, as the only remaining link with Nature, is therefore despised and regarded as a monster that must be sacrificed. That such sacrifice will be redemptive, as in the Fall from Eden was eventually redeemed, is suggested by the biblical connotation of the Iguana’s other name, Perdita (loss). Given her ambiguous nature, the Iguana is constantly being confined to closed spaces, located in the lower parts of the Guzman property and pointing toward infernal depths. However, the novel is

also spatially organized along the horizontal axis: The natural boundary of the sea reinforces the confinement and isolation of the characters. The mysterious island further blurs the boundaries of verisimilitude, already contaminated by the story’s fantastic components. The color green, for example, connects the imagery of the Iguana to the sea. The incongruities, enhanced by the theatricality of the setting, result in a continuous rearticulation of space and manifest themselves in liminal places such as terraces and doorways, which also function as signs of the characters’ tendency toward escape. Indeed, escape, the desire to evade dystopic time, replaces the paradisiacal time that once reigned on the island. INGE LANSLOTS Editions First edition: L’Iguana, Florence: Vallecchi, 1965. Translations: as The Iguana, translated by Henry Martin, 1987.

Further Reading Azzolini, Paola, ‘‘La donna Iguana,’’ in Il cielo vuoto dell’eroina: scrittura e identita` femminile nel Novecento italiano, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. De Giovanni, Neria, ‘‘L’Iguana di Anna Maria Ortese: l’ambiguita` di una metamorfosi incompiuta,’’ in Italianistica, 28, nos. 2–3 (1989): 421–430. Frizzi, Adria, ‘‘Performance, or Getting a Piece of the Other, or In the Name of the Father, or The Dark Continent of Femininity, or Just Like a Woman: Anna Maria Ortese’s L’Iguana,’’ in Italica, 79, no. 3 (2002): 379–390. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘L’Iguana di Anna Maria Ortese: La molteplicita` nel viaggio immobile di Daddo,’’ in Piccole finzioni con importanza. Valori della narrativa italiana contemporanea, edited by Nathalie Roelens and Inge Lanslots, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Lanslots, Inge, ‘‘Creature zoppicanti di Anna Maria Ortese,’’ in Narrativa, 24 (2003): 105–121.

OTTIERO OTTIERI (1924–2002) Ottieri is one of Italy’s most autobiographical authors. His fame began with the publication of Tempi stretti (Hard Times, 1957) and Donnarumma all’assalto (The Men at the Gate, 1959) that 1326

pioneered the literary trend labeled as Letteratura e industria (industrial literature)—Ottieri became, with Nanni Balestrini, one of the leading exponents. With La linea Gotica (The Gothic Line, 1962) and

OTTIERO OTTIERI L’impagliatore di sedie (The Chairmender, 1964), Ottieri ends his phase of writing sociological essaynovels based on his own experiences and dealing with factories, strikes, assembly lines, problems of industrialization in the South, and new forms of alienation during the economic boom years (1955–1965). In his first novel, Memorie dell’incoscienza (Unconscious Memories, 1954), where a group of people struggle with their anxieties after having fallen under the spells of Fascism, it was already evident that Ottieri’s strength as a writer lay in psychoanalytical presentations of characters suffering from anxieties, neuroses and other psychological disorders. In 1950, he had undergone therapy, under the well-known analyst Cesare Musatti, for depression and neuroses, and he would use this experience throughout his work where autobiographical elements played a central role. These early therapy sessions lead Ottieri to his lifelong and intensive studies of Freudian psychoanalysis. His favorite authors included Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Simone Weil, Herbert Marcuse and Jean Paul Sartre, and film directors such as Michelangelo Antonioni. His readings, direct experience with psychoanalytical therapies, the time spent working for Adriano Olivetti, and the many months in Swiss clinics, as well as his close attention to the linguistic and artistic innovations associated with the experimental artists of the Gruppo 63 and the neo-avant-garde are all traceable in his work in which his life and literature became one. The author’s life was like an endless therapy session and many of his pages were written in a clinic. Ottieri confessed to his friends that he could only write while intoxicated with alcohol, nicotine and coffee. Suffering from a bipolarity syndrome (manic-depression), he swayed from euphoria to deep depression and writing became a necessity. Ottieri’s love affair with the film industry occurred in the early 1960s, when he worked with Tonino Guerra and Michelangelo Antonioni on the screenplays of La notte (The Night, 1960) and L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962). Two years later, L’impagliatore di sedie was written in the form of a film script. But it is L’irrealta` quotidiana (The Daily Unreality, 1966) that marked a new phase in Ottieri’s writing. From here on narcissism and his existential and psychological maladies are examined within a larger picture of an alienated consumer society. Self-analysis and the feelings of depersonalization and ‘‘unreality’’ are also central

to his poetic collections, starting with Il pensiero perverso (The Perverse Thought, 1971) and La corda corta (The Short String, 1978) to the more socially committed lyrics of Il palazzo e il pazzo (The Palace and the Lunatic, 1993) and the diaristic essays of Storia del PSI nel centenario della nascita (History of the Italian Socialist Party on Its Centenary, 1993). Written in the first person through the point of view of a woman, Contessa (The Countess, 1975) tells the fascinating erotic story of Elena (Ottieri’s persona) who experiences therapy both as a doctor and as a patient. This novel is the first of several works where fictional elements blend with autobiography and self-analysis, such as in I due amori (The Two Loves, 1983); L’infermiera di Pisa (The Nurse from Pisa, 1991), Il poema osceno (The Obscene Poem, 1996) and Una tragedia milanese (A Milanese Tragedy, 1998). Through a number of alter egos (male and female) camouflaged as authors, poets, journalists, and patients, Ottieri examined different facets of narcissism, marital problems, neuroses, and addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex. Thus autobiography and lively dialogues, in which characters use uncensored language, continue to be defining aspects of his essay and diary-like narratives, which, since the days of the most successful Donnarumma all’assalto, have become his personal trademark. In 1987, Ottieri publishes a rare optimistic novel, Improvvisa la vita (Suddenly Life) where Alberto, the narrator-protagonist, in love, searches for happiness and dreams of a new life in a new body. Three years earlier in Il divertimento (Amusement, 1984) he narrated similar adventures through the eyes of a woman, Clara. His novels of the 1990s focus on the relationships between sickness, selfawareness and love of life: Inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, in 1999 Ottieri completes Cery, written in the Swiss Clinic at Cery. In May of 2002, two months before his death, he published Un’irata sensazione di peggioramento (An Irate Sensation of Worsening), in which, through the eyes of the alcoholic Pietro Mura (his final alter ego), the author sees himself as ‘‘illustre sconosciuto’’ (an illustrious unknown) more famous as ‘‘un nevrotico che come scrittore’’ (a neurotic than as a writer). Ottieri’s contribution to psychoanalytical literature in Italy has enriched the tradition started by Italo Svevo and continued by such writers as Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giuseppe Berto, Mario Tobino, Paolo Volponi and Goffredo Parise. 1327

OTTIERO OTTIERI

Biography Born in Rome, 29 April 1924, the descendant of an old Tuscan family (Ottieri della Claja). 1948: Moves to Milan. In April, marries Silvana Mauri who bears him two children. 1950: Undergoes psychoanalysis with analyst Cesare Musatti. 1953: First signs of depression and neuroses. 1954: Graduates in literature from University of Rome with a dissertation on Leon Battista Alberti. 1955: Elio Vittorini publishes his first novel. Begins working for industrialist Adriano Olivetti. 1955: Birth of his daughter Maria Pace, who later becomes his biographer. 1958: Decides to interrupt his diary, which started in 1948 and recounts his work experiences in the world factories. 1959–1965: Intensifies his journalistic activities writing for Il Contemporaneo, Il Mondo, and Il Giorno. Frequent visits to doctors and longer periods of recovery in psychiatric clinics. With his health deteriorating continues to write fiction and poetry at a frantic pace drawing extensively from his therapy sessions. Awarded the Premio Bagutta for La linea Gotica (1963), the Premio Viareggio for L’irrealta` quotidiana (1966), the Premio Mondello for L’infermiera di Pisa, 1991) and was short listed for the Premio Campiello in 1972 for Il campo di concentrazione. Died of a heart attack in Milan, 25 July 2002. ROCCO CAPOZZI Selected Works Collections Tutte le poesie, Venice: Marsilio, 1986.

Fiction Memorie dell’incoscienza, 1954. Tempi stretti, 1957. Donnarumma all’assalto, 1959; as The Men at the Gate, translated by Ivy Marion Rawson, 1962. La linea Gotica, 1962. L’impagliatore di sedie, 1964. L’irrealta` quotidiana, 1966. I divini mondani, 1968. Contessa, 1975. I due amori, 1983. Il divertimento, 1984. Improvvisa la vita, 1987. De morte, 1997.

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Una tragedia milanese, 1998. Cery, 1999. Un’irata sensazione di peggioramento, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Il pensiero perverso,’’ 1971. ‘‘La corda corta,’’ 1978. ‘‘Vi amo,’’ 1988. ‘‘L’infermiera di Pisa,’’ 1991. ‘‘Il palazzo e il pazzo,’’ 1993. ‘‘Diario di un seduttore passivo,’’ 1994. ‘‘Il poema osceno,’’ 1996.

Theater I venditori di Milano, 1960. Di chi e` la colpa, 1979.

Essays Il campo di concentrazione, 1972. Storia del PSI nel centenario della sua vita, 1993.

Further Reading Benedetti, Carla, ‘‘Ottieri notissimo sconosciuto,’’ in La rivista dei libri (January 2000): 19–21. Camon, Ferdinando, ‘‘Ottieri,’’ in Il mestiere di scrittore, Milan: Garzanti, 1973. Capozzi, Rocco, ‘‘Letteratura e industria e il meridione: Ottieri e Bernari,’’ in Cultura e letteratura meridionale. Atti dell’XI Congresso AISSLI, edited by Pompeo Giannantonio, Naples: Loffredo, 1984. Capozzi, Rocco, review of Improvvisa la vita, in World Literature Today (Autumn l988): 127. Coletti, Vittorio, ‘‘La sintassi della follia nella narrativa italiana del ‘900,’’ in Nevrosi e follia nella letteratura moderna, edited by Anna Dolfi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. De Feo, Sandro, Qualcosa di certo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1966. Golino, Enzo, Letteratura e classi sociali, Bari: Laterza, 1976. Gramigna, Giuliano, ‘‘La poesia epica di Ottieri,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 19 June 1993, p. 19. Gramigna, Giuliano, ‘‘Addio a Ottieri, la nevrosi in forma di romanzo,’’ in Il corriere della sera, 26 July 2002, p. 23. Iadanza, Giuseppe, L’esperienza meridionalistica di Ottieri, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Leone, Michele, L’industria nella letteratura contemporanea, Stanford: Anma libri, 1976. Piemontese, Felice (editor), Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani, Milan: Leonardo, 1990. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, ‘‘Ottiero Ottieri,’’ in Letteratura Contemporanea. I Contemporanei, vol. 4, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Tomaiuopo, Saverio, Ottiero Ottieri. Il poeta osceno, Naples: Liguori, 1998. Vergini, Lea, Gli ultimi eccentrici, Milan: Rizzoli, 1990.

NINO OXILIA (SANDRO CAMASIO)

OUR ANCESTORS See I Nostri antenati (Work by Italo Calvino)

NINO OXILIA (SANDRO CAMASIO) (1889–1917) Nino Oxilia, whose career as playwright, silent film director, and poet was cut short when he was killed in World War I, championed ‘‘tail coat films,’’ a cinematic approach that featured melodramatic stories of the upper classes. Oxilia worked in the ‘‘Golden Age’’ of Italian cinema, which lasted from 1909 until 1916, although he shunned the realistic tradition of filmmaking to emphasize a more stylized look at bourgeois characters and their world. He directed such actresses as Pina Menichelli, Lyda Borelli, and Francesca Bertini, as well as his fiancee´ Maria Jacobini, turning them into international figures and helping to create the movie star system. These women, or dive, starred in films specifically created to showcase their physical and aesthetic gifts. While the posturing and exaggerated movements of these actresses may seem laughable to modern audiences, these women—who were paid fantastic salaries—were worshiped for their beauty and sensuality. Oxilia is best known for his play Addio, giovinezza! (Goodbye, Youth!, 1911), written in collaboration with his friend Sandro Camasio (1886–1913), with whom he also directed a number of films, and his film Rapsodia satanica (Satanic Rhapsody, 1915). The comic drama, about the carefree life of bohemian students, was so successful it led to a contract with the Savoia film company, where he worked from 1912–1913, before moving to the Celio company. There he made Rapsodia satanica with Borelli. In this 45-minute film—a variation on

the Faust legend—the female protagonist sells her soul to the devil in exchange for eternal youth but a loveless life. Her pact with the devil is compromised when she meets two brothers who fall in love with her. In order to win her love, they commit a desperate act, arousing the protagonist’s own passionate feelings. Rapsodia satanica featured the music of Pietro Mascagni and its score is still performed by orchestras today. During this period in Italian cinema, films often focused on historical figures and events, or adaptations of the literary works of Dante, Tasso, Manzoni, and Shakespeare. The most successful historical film of this era was Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), which featured a poignant love story set against the drama of the Punic Wars. Oxilia also made several historical films, including Sangue blu (Blue Blood, 1914) starring Bertini, and Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc, 1913), starring Jacobini. Oxilia was also a poet, beginning his literary career while ostensibly studying law at the University of Turin. Two almost contemporaneous artistic movements influenced him, that of the crepuscular poets and that of Futurism; the impact of both schools is evident in his lyric production. In the poem ‘‘In automobile sotto la pioggia’’ (In a Car in the Rain), for example, the steady rain falling on the car’s window mirrors the narrator’s mood of pessimism and loneliness. The lyric also pays tribute to the automobile as the new symbol of strength and vitality. Indeed, many of his works interweave

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NINO OXILIA (SANDRO CAMASIO) the grayish overtones of the crepuscular poets with imagery reflective of the Futurist movement. In an unfinished poem, believed to have been written while Oxilia was on the front lines of World War I, the author described his generation of young men, many of whom would die on the battlefields. ‘‘Il saluto ai poeti crepuscolari’’ (Greeting to the Crepuscular Poets) explicitly discussed the works of several well-known crepuscular artists, including Sergio Corazzini and Guido Gozzano. Although he praises their poetry, he criticizes any attempt to glorify the past. Instead, he insists, the poets must look to the future, when a new world would be born, presumably out of the ashes of the war. Oxilia’s work in the cinema also influenced his poetry, for many of his literary works emphasize themes of light and color. He had two collections of poetry published, Canti brevi (Short Songs, 1909) and Gli orti (The Orchards, 1918), the second posthumously. Oxilia wrote the lyrics to ‘‘Giovinezza, giovinezza’’ (Youth, Youth, 1909, music by Giuseppe Blanc) to celebrate student life, but the song was adopted several years later as a tribute to the Italian soldiers fighting in Libya. In 1926, it became the Fascist national hymn with new lyrics by Salvator Gotta. Oxilia’s artistic promise was cut short when he was killed by an Austrian grenade on Mount Tomba in 1917.

Biography Born in Turin, Italy, 13 November 1889. Ne´ Angelo Agostino Adolfo Oxilia. Attended the University of Turin. Wrote plays, including Addio, giovinezza, and in 1912 began working in cinema, creating such silent classics as Sangue blu and Rapsodia

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satanica. Published two collections of poetry. Died on Mount Tomba (Belluno), on 18 November 1917. LAURA SALSINI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Canti brevi,’’ 1909. ‘‘Gli orti,’’ preface by Renato Simoni, 1918.

Plays La zingara, 1909. Addio, giovinezza!, 1911. La donna e lo specchio, 1914.

Films Addio, giovinezza!, 1913. Giovanna d’Arco, 1913. In hoc signo vinces, 1913. Il cadavere vivente, 1913. La monella, 1914. Sangue blu, 1914. Rapsodia satanica, 1915. Odio che ride, 1915. Sotto la bandiera nemica, 1915.

Further Reading Cherchi Usai, Paolo, ‘‘Italy: Spectacle and Melodrama,’’ in The Oxford History of World Cinema, edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, London: Oxford University Press, 1996. D’Asaro, Franz, ‘‘Meminisse Iuvat,’’ in Silarus: Rassegna Bimestrale di Cultura, 43 (2003): 54–55. Ghidetti, Enrico, ‘‘Geografia dei crepuscolari,’’ in Poesia italiana del ’900: Una proposta didattica per la lettura del testo poetico, edited by M. Mancini, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1984. Leprohon, Pierre, The Italian Cinema, translated by Roger Greaves and Oliver Stallybrass, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972. Mancini, Massimiliano et al. (editors), Poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: F. Angeli, 1984.

P ELIO PAGLIARANI (1927–) night-school students against the backdrop of a city that, in the midst of an economic boom, is also the site of disenchantment. In the two stanzas of the poem ‘‘Due temi svolti’’ (Two Written Compositions) Pagliarani experimented with the themes, motifs, and language that would be found in La ragazza Carla (The Girl Carla, 1962). Here, private confession, collective destiny, and the metropolitan landscape emerge as the background of a disenchanted lower middle class. ‘‘Sotto la torre, al parco, di domenica’’ (Under the Tower, at the Park, on Sundays), included in his second collection, Inventario privato (Private Inventory, 1959), centers on the theme of love, and the linguistic intimacy resolves into a fragmented inner monologue, albeit strongly communicative. Moreover, the constant, impending presence of the nuclear threat is underlined by the verses of ‘‘Il primo foglio’’ (The First Sheet): ‘‘il secolo altra luce esplode / che puo` farsi per noi definitiva’’ (the century other light explodes / that can become definitive for us). Such verses dissolve the need for a conversation between an ‘‘I’’ and a ‘‘you,’’ opening instead to the voices of the audience, to the necessity of an idea of community. In ‘‘Totale S. E. & O.’’ (Total S. E. & W.), the rhythm of time, yearly or seasonal, becomes a short catalogue that resists the principles of the end, culminating in the metapoetic reflection ‘‘quanto di morte noi circonda’’ (How much of death surrounds us), which lays bare the concept of loneliness as a remedy for life.

In his review of Italian neo-experimentalism published in Officina in 1956, Pier Paolo Pasolini spoke of a ‘‘mysterious lymph’’ in considering the early works of Elio Pagliarani, a then-unknown poet from Romagna. This ‘‘lymph’’ was in his opinion capable of providing ‘‘stability, grammaticality and rigor’’ to contemporary verse in a way that clashed with the ambitions of traditional poetry. From the outset, Pagliarani, writing against the academic, Petrarchan lyrical tradition, sensed the gradual decline of Hermetic poetry and aligned himself with a twentieth-century poetics closer to everyday life. His ensuing move into a less ornate linguistic register is buoyed by a narrative rhythm that captures the reader’s attention. Pagliarani’s language does not aspire to an identifiable style but instead seeks to capture the voice of the other. As John Picchione noted, his ‘‘poetic narration and epic vein can be traced as far back as the Scapigliatura and Verismo movements, which adopted literature as an antirhetorical documentation of social life and human oppression’’ (The New Avant-Garde in Italy, 2004). Starting with his first collection, Cronache e altre poesie (Chronicles and Other Poems, 1954), wrote Walter Pedulla`, Pagliarani showed ‘‘strength of irony, sarcasm and other attitudes of confrontation on different levels: intellectual, syntactic, rhythmic’’ (‘‘Elio Pagliarani,’’ 2004). His strongly confrontational mode produces ‘‘social’’ verses, which have become exemplary of an entire generation. ‘‘I goliardi delle serali’’ (The Goliards of Night School, 1953) describes light-hearted, working 1331

ELIO PAGLIARANI Pagliarani’s masterpiece, however, was composed between 1954 and 1957. Titled La ragazza Carla, it was first published in 1960 in the journal Il menabo` di letteratura, while selections were reprinted in the epochal anthology I Novissimi (1961), edited by Alfredo Giuliani. A polymetric poem in verses and rhythmic prose consisting of three main sections, it tells the story of a 17-year-old girl at her first job as a typist in the 1950s and in the middle of the economic boom in Milan. Pagliarani’s first ‘‘novel in verses’’ is marked by generic contaminations and is structured as a collage. It represents an important moment in the evolution of contemporary poetic language in its transition from neoRealism to the neo-avant-garde. The author’s debt to the ‘‘Lombard line’’ is striking, evident in references to Clemente Rebora’s moral lessons, or (in blatant contradiction with his hostility toward the twentieth century) in his affirmation of Eugenio Montale’s gnosis, in which God is artifex and demiurge. A more evident source for the poem’s narrative dimension is T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), in particular the episode in which a typist and a clerk make love under Tiresias’s gaze. Influenced by Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s theories of linguistic production and alienation, Pagliarani’s following work, Lezione di fisica (Physics Lesson, 1964), criticizes the notion of the word as a ware in a consumer society. He discussed theories of nuclear physics and the modern potential for destruction in counterpoint to the emotional language of affections, in order to use the resources of poetry in shaking the passive acceptance of sociolinguistic stereotypes. The volume was republished in an expanded edition with the title Lezione di fisica & Fecaloro (Physics Lesson and Fecalgold) in 1968. La ballata di Rudi (Rudi’s Ballad, 1995), his second ‘‘novel in verses,’’ is the result of a long process of maturation, which began in the early 1960s. Divided into 27 poetic sections, some mainly descriptive and others narrative, the ballata, set against the landscape of the Romagna seaside resorts, tells the story of Nando, Rudi, Nandi, and Armando from the postwar years to the era of the current affluent society. Guglielmo Pianigiani explained that in this work the assemblage of fragments is somehow ‘‘subjected to an idea of poetry as a ‘report,’’’ according to the assumption of a ‘‘‘cinematographic’ viewpoint’’ (‘‘La ballata di Rudi di Elio Pagliarani,’’ 1996). The polyphonic chorality of language thus becomes by necessity the calculated structure of life. However, the final abolition of the poetic self in favor of the revolutionary lightness of the poetic word is effected in Esercizi platonici 1332

(Platonic Exercises, 1985) and Epigrammi ferraresi (Epigrams from Ferrara, 1987), in which the tension of anonymity (the loss of the name) and the will to disguise endow the theme of the metamorphosis with new utopian meaning. As Pagliarani wrote in the poem ‘‘Oggetti e argomenti per una disperazione’’ (Objects and Topics for a Desperation): ‘‘respinti tutti i tipi di preti a consolarci non e` ai poeti che tocca dichiararsi / sulla nostra morte, ora della morte illuminarci? ’’ (having rejected all types of priests to console us, is it not up to the poets to declare themselves / about our death, the hour of death to illuminate for us?).

Biography Elio Pagliarani was born in Viserba di Rimini on 25 May 1927. He was awarded a degree in political sciences from the University of Padua, 1951, and then worked in an import-export firm in Milan, where he remained until 1960. He worked subsequently as a teacher in private night schools, such as the Scuola del Libro della Societa` Umanitaria. He coedited the newspaper Avanti!, 1956, and was transferred to the Rome headquarters. He worked as a publishing consultant, then from March 1968 was in charge of the theater review section of Paese Sera. Pagliarani is married to Cetta Petrollo, with whom he has a daughter, Rosa, born in 1976. A member of the Gruppo ‘63, he was also one of the founders of the Cooperativa Nazionale Scrittori. He was awarded the Viareggio Prize for La ballata di Rudi, 1995. Pagliarani lives in Rome. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Collections Tutte le poesie (1954–2005), edited by Andrea Cortellessa, Milan: Garzanti, 2006.

Poetry ‘‘Cronache ed altre poesie,’’ 1954. ‘‘Inventario privato,’’ 1959. ‘‘La ragazza Carla e altre poesie,’’ 1962. ‘‘Lezione di fisica,’’ 1964. ‘‘Lezione di fisica & Fecaloro,’’ 1968. ‘‘Rosso corpo lingua oro pope-papa scienza,’’ 1977. ‘‘Esercizi platonici,’’ 1985. ‘‘Epigrammi ferraresi,’’ 1987. ‘‘La ballata di Rudi,’’ 1995. ‘‘I romanzi in versi,’’ 1997.

Librettos Le sue ragioni, 1959. Pelle d’asino, 1964.

ALDO PALAZZESCHI Essays Manuale di poesia sperimentale, with Guido Guglielmi, 1966. Il fiato dello spettatore, 1972.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: Dalla nascita del Verri alla fine di Quindici, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Di Paola, Gabriella, La ragazza Carla: linguaggio e figure, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Elio Pagliarani,’’ in Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento 1945–1995, edited by Maurizio Cucchi and Stefano Giovanardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Elio Pagliarani,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978.

Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Il neo-sperimentalismo’’ (1959) in Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, edited by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Pedulla`, Walter, ‘‘Elio Pagliarani,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 15, Il Novecento: Sperimentalismo e tradizione del nuovo, Milan: Motta, 2004. Pianigiani, Guglielmo, ‘‘La ballata di Rudi di Elio Pagliarani: romanzo-partitura e drammaturgia antilirica,’’ Allegoria, 8:23 (1996), 149–165. Picchione, John, The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetic Practices, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Tomassini, Stefano, ‘‘Elio Pagliarani,’’ in Antologia della poesia italiana, edited by Carlo Ossola and Cesare Segre, vol. 3 Ottocento-Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1999.

ALDO PALAZZESCHI (1885–1974) A versatile writer, Aldo Palazzeschi (born Aldo Giurlani) dedicated his life to the literary world, being in the privileged economic position to do so. After a short stint as an actor, he turned to his true calling, literature, and went on to publish numerous books of poetry, short stories, novels, occasional essays, and translations. Palazzeschi’s poetry is marked by a peculiar chronology. Except for Viaggio sentimentale (Sentimental Journey, 1955), Palazzeschi’s poetry bookends his literary career. His early poetry, from 1905 to 1915, includes four original collections: Cavalli bianchi (White Horses, 1905), Lanterna (Lantern, 1907), Poemi (Poems, 1909), and L’incendiario (The Arsonist, 1910), of which he published a second edition in 1913 that also included a selection from the previous volumes. Cavalli bianchi and Lanterna are couched in a traditional language that, at times, harks back to a type of simplicity that reminds one of Giovanni Pascoli. ‘‘Dreamlike’’ and ‘‘enigmatic’’ are adjectives that aptly describe them as well as his third collection. The poems are written in a somewhat traditional language with a straightforward vocabulary, sometimes accompanied by a dose of irony. This irony and parody of social and artistic norms got him noticed, and with L’incendiario, Palazzeschi joined the artistic camp of Filippo

Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurism. Here, Palazzeschi changed his ars poetica, relying more directly on a nontraditional, anti-establishment stance reflected in both style and content. Explicit parody, grammatical fragmentation in poems such as ‘‘Noˆtre Dame,’’ ‘‘Su’’ (Up), and ‘‘Boccanera’’ (all published in the Florentine periodical La Voce in 1914 and 1915), and the desire to liberate himself from traditional social and artistic goals are clearly delineated in these later compositions. Palazzeschi returned to poetry in 1968 with Cuor mio (My Heart), characterized by a reiteration of his desire for social and artistic individuality and by a more conformist construction of his lyrics. Here and in his subsequent Via delle cento stelle (Street of a Hundred Stars, 1972) Palazzeschi’s poetry relies on satire, parody, irreverence, and contempt for the established order. A sense of self-determination remains the constant. Palazzeschi’s prose proves more substantial: ten novels and four collections of short stories. He published his first novel, :riflessi (:reflections), in 1908. Later rewritten and retitled Allegoria di novembre (November Allegory) in 1943, :riflessi is part epistolary writing and part narrative, though much briefer and quite journalistic in style in its second half. The letters, one for each day of

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ALDO PALAZZESCHI November, are written by Prince Valentino to Johnny, whose identity the reader never discovers. As in his early poetry, here the tone is dreamlike, echoing the fin de sie`cle aestheticism of Gabriele D’Annunzio. As will become apparent in later works, Valentino is Palazzeschi’s first diverso (different one), a well-to-do loner, whose letters reveal nothing directly about him but contain various possible references to social and personal matters. His second novel, Il codice di Perela` (Man of Smoke, 1911), stands as a companion piece to his poetry. Its stylistic divergence from the novelistic form is analogous to his poetic experience, as Palazzeschi adopted a mode of expression in complete opposition to those common at the time. The novel tells the story of an ‘‘uomo molto leggero’’ (very light man), Perela`, whose uniqueness lies in his physicality—he is, literally, a man of smoke! The Court elders decide that he is indeed the person sent by Divine Providence to establish the new Code. What follows is a series of episodes in which Perela` meets the many ‘‘important’’ members of the city’s high society. Perela` hardly utters a word and does absolutely nothing during his meetings: yet his reputation grows, and the citizenry becomes increasingly more infatuated with him. But Perela`’s good fortune takes a turn for the worse: He ends up the victim of the rumors and the behavior of the masses, ultimately liberating himself from their stifling codes of conduct. Leaving behind both Futurism and, for several decades, verse writing, Palazzeschi adopted a more traditional form of prose, thematically related to his earlier period, which is now considered the more original and daring of his long career. Before World War II he published story collections such as Il Re bello (The Handsome King, 1921), Stampe dell’800 (Nineteenth-Century Prints, 1932) and novels such as La Piramide (The Pyramid, 1926) and Sorelle Materassi (The Sisters Materassi, 1934). All capture the poignant humor and sarcasm of his early works and center on odd individuals who do not readily fit within a traditional social structure. An undertone of sexuality underlies many a scene, such as in his Sorelle Materassi. A veritable classic, Sorelle Materassi tells the story of Teresa and Carolina Materassi, whose life is completely turned topsy-turvy with the arrival of their young, handsome, self-centered nephew Remo. Wealthy because of their seamstress business and sexually repressed due to old-fashioned bourgeois values, Teresa and Carolina, along with their maid Niobe, fall victim to Remo’s charms, ending up bankrupt due to his spending. 1334

When they go broke, Remo seduces an American heiress and leaves his aunts to fend for themselves. Seductive and self-assured, Remo is an enigmatic figure, not too different from earlier characters in Palazzeschi’s works. While frustrating his aunts in many ways, he is also a source of sexual fascination. With him they experience their first real night on the town; with him, they experience their primordial impulses towards the male; and with him, they (and Carolina in particular) experience their first sexual feelings that verge on the orgasmic. Along with the diverso, the figure of the buffo (funny one) soon appears in Il palio dei buffi (The Festival of Funny People, 1937) as the eccentric person who creates in the reader compassion, empathy, and/or laughter. We find this and more in I fratelli Cuccoli (The Cuccoli Brothers, 1948), a novel that harks back to Palazzeschi’s previous works through themes such as the ambiguity of sexual patterns, the loss of wealth that ensues also in loss of social value for the loser, and, ultimately, the individual who remains a mystery even to those closest to him. In some ways, his Le bestie del novecento (Twentieth-Century Bestiary, 1951) belongs in this same category. A more comical tone informs this work, and Palazzeschi’s enigmatic diverso returns in the form of animals. This is, first and foremost, a guise, as his diverse array of characters represents various aspects of the human spirit, especially when free from oppressive ideological and social conditioning. Roma (1953) marked a particular turn toward an unmitigated religiosity unseen before in Palazzeschi’s works and ended a certain epoch in his career. The next decade would be dedicated to reorganizing his works for the first Mondadori collection of his opera omnia, a return to the buffo in Il buffo integrale (The Integral Buffo, 1966), and two collections of autobiographical writings, Il piacere della memoria (The Pleasure of Memory, 1964) and Ieri, oggi e...non domani (Yesterday, Today, and.... Not Tomorrow, 1967). Throughout his career, Palazzeschi participated in and was influenced by the various movements that helped to mold twentieth-century Italian literature. Indeed, we might credit the movement Gruppo ’63 for stimulating to some degree his return to the provocative subjects and the freer, personal style of his early period, which his writings of the 1960s and 1970s recalled. The return to his initial ars rhetorica evident in Cuor mio had its analogue in his prose works. In 1967, Palazzeschi published Il doge (The Doge), which recreates a surrealistic Venice where the most important of events, the appearance of the Doge,

ALDO PALAZZESCHI is anxiously awaited by all, and yet he never appears. During the wait, numerous unrealistic occurrences take place: For instance, on one occasion suitcases fall from the sky, while on another, St. Mark’s Basilica disappears. The most significant theme from his early fiction to reappear in this later phase is that of the relationship between the individual and the mass. Both here and in Stefanino (1969), the mass plays an integral role. This second novel, in fact, places the individual—that is, the buffo, the diverso—against the mass, or, better, against society’s norms and conventions. Palazzeschi’s third novel of this period was Storia di un’amicizia (Story of a Friendship, 1971), a tale about the friendship between two men, extreme opposites, removed from society at large. The foundation of the story line recalls Palazzeschi’s early thematics of the coincidentia oppositorum. While Palazzeschi’s prose career ended with Storia di un’amicizia, he continued to write poetry, though he never completed his nine Sinfonie (Symphonies). The posthumously published Interrogatorio della Contessa Maria (The Interrogation of Countess Maria, 1988) is assumed to have been written contemporary with La piramide, to which it is conspicuously similar in style and content. The Countess, like many of Palazzeschi’s early characters, is different from the norm: A seducer of men, she remains indifferent to society’s conventions, belonging, as such, to that exclusive club of the diverso that so distinguishes the Palazzeschian character from the others who populate the Italian literary world.

Biography Aldo Palazzeschi was born Aldo Giurlani in Florence on 2 February 1885. He adopted his mother’s maiden name for his professional career. Palazzeschi grew up in a fairly privileged economic position. In 1902, he earned a diploma in accounting and, simultaneously, flirted ever so briefly with a theatrical career; he enrolled in Luigi Rasi’s famous Florentine drama school ‘‘Tommaso Salvini.’’ It was at this time that he met Marino Moretti, who became a lifelong friend. His true calling, as became evident early on, was poetry and prose writing. Palazzeschi traveled frequently, especially during the first half of his life. In 1941, he moved definitively to Rome where he spent the rest of his life. He died in Rome on 17 August 1974 from an unattended abscess. ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI

Selected Works Collections Tutte le novelle, Milan: Mondadori, 1957. Opere giovanili, Milan: Mondadori, 1958. I romanzi della maturita`, Milan: Mondadori, 1960. Tutte le novelle, edited by Luciano De Maria, Milan: Mondadori, 1975. Tutte le poesie, edited by Adele Dei, Milan: Mondadori, 2002. Tutti i romanzi, edited by Gino Tellini, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 2004–2005. A Tournament of Misfits: Tall Tales and Short, translated by Nicolas J. Perella, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Fiction :riflessi, 1908. Il codice di Perela`, 1911; as Perela`: The Man of Smoke, translated and adapted by Peter Riccio, 1936; as Man of Smoke, translated by Nicolas J. Perella and Ruggero Stefanini 1992. Il Re bello, 1921. La Piramide, 1926. Stampe dell’800, 1932. Sorelle Materassi, 1934; as The Sisters Materassi, translated by Angus Davidson, 1953. Il palio dei buffi, 1937. I fratelli Cuccoli, 1948. Bestie del 900, 1951. Roma, 1953; as Roma, translated by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 1965. Il buffo integrale, 1966. Il Doge, 1967. Stefanino, 1969. Storia di un’amicizia, 1971. Interrogatorio della Contessa Maria, 1988.

Poetry ‘‘I cavalli bianchi,’’ 1905. ‘‘Lanterna,’’ 1907. ‘‘Poemi,’’ 1909. ‘‘L’incendiario,’’ 1910. ‘‘Viaggio sentimentale,’’ 1955. ‘‘Cuor mio,’’ 1968. ‘‘Via delle cento stelle,’’ 1972.

Other ‘‘Il controdolore, manifesto futurista,’’ Lacerba, 2(1914), 17–21. Due imperi...mancati, 1920. Tre imperi...mancati, 1945. Scherzi di gioventu`, 1956. Vita militare, 1959. Il piacere della memoria, 1964. Schizzi italofrancesi, 1966. Ieri, oggi e...non domani, 1967.

Further Reading Caretti, Lanfranco (editor), Palazzeschi oggi, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1978. De Maria, Luciano, Palazzeschi e l’avanguardia, Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce D’oro, 1976.

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ALDO PALAZZESCHI Guglielmi, Guido, L’udienza del poeta. Saggi su Palazzeschi e il futurismo, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Lepri, Laura, Il funambolo incosciente. Aldo Palazzeschi, 1905–1914, Florence: Olschki, 1991. Magherini, Simona, and Gloria Manghetti (editors), Scherzi di gioventu` e d’altre eta`. Album Palazzeschi (1885–1974), Florence: Polistampa, 2001. Marchi, Marco, Palazzeschi e altri sondaggi, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Pedulla`, Walter, Il ritorno dell’uomo di fumo. Viaggio paradossale con Palazzeschi in un paese allegro e innocente, Venice: Marsilio, 1987. Pieri, Piero, Ritratto del saltimbanco da giovane: Palazzeschi 1905–1914, Bologna: Pa`tron, 1980. Ross, Silvia, ‘‘Aldo Palazzeschi,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945, edited by Luca Somigli and Rocco Capozzi, vol. 264, Detroit: Gale, 2002. Saccone, Antonio, L’occhio narrante. Tre studi sul primo Palazzeschi, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Savoca, Giuseppe, Eco e Narciso. La ripetizione nel primo Palazzeschi, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1979. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Of Saltimbanchi and Incendiari: Aldo Palazzeschi and Avant-Gardism in Italy, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Per una lettura retrospettiva: Prose giovanili di Aldo Palazzeschi, Stony Brook, NY: Gradiva, 1994. Tellini, Gino (editor), La ‘‘difficile musa’’ di Aldo Palazzeschi, special issue of Studi italiani, 9.1–2 (1999). Tellini, Gino (editor), L’opera di Aldo Palazzeschi, Florence: Olschki, 2002.

IL CODICE DI ` , 1911 PERELA Novel by Aldo Palazzeschi

Il codice di Perela` (Man of Smoke), published originally in 1911 (it underwent three subsequent revisions in 1920, 1943, and 1954), stands as a companion piece to Palazzeschi’s early poetry, in both of which the author adopted a mode of expression that was in complete opposition to that of the times. Indeed, the novel tends toward antiRealism and ambiguity and is the allegory of the impossibility for an individual like Perela` to take part in a society that ultimately follows a strict code of norms and conventions. 1336

Il codice di Perela` is the story of an ‘‘uomo molto leggero’’ (very light man), Perela`, whose uniqueness lies in his physicality—he is, literally, a man of smoke! Discovered by the King’s soldiers and interrogated on the spot, he there receives his name, compounded from the first syllable of the names of each of the three centenarian women that Perela` considers his mothers: Pena (Pain), Rete (Net), Lama (Blade). Perela` is brought to the King’s palace. After pondering the account of his strange birth, the court elders decide that he, an ‘‘uomo su cui il fuoco e` passato purificatore supremo a interrompere, ad annientare l’egoistico lavoro di tutti i suoi sensi!’’ (man whom the purifying flame enveloped so as to annihilate the turbid travail and dross of matter), is indeed the person sent by Divine Providence to establish the new Code. What follows is a series of episodes in which Perela` meets the many ‘‘important’’ members of the city’s high society, from business people to socialites, from artists to countesses. He hardly utters a word and does absolutely nothing, and yet his reputation grows, as the citizenry becomes increasingly more infatuated with him. But Perela`’s good fortune eventually takes a turn for the worse. Alloro, the old palace servant, commits suicide by fire in his attempt to become ‘‘light’’ like the man of smoke. Taking Perela` at his word, he attaches himself to a chain over a great pile of firewood and lights it with the hope of becoming himself a man of smoke. Perela`’s seeming indifference at the sight of this man’s charred remains creates suspicion among the citizenry, and as a result the entire population now performs a complete about-face vis-a`-vis their feelings toward Perela`. Eventually, he is brought to trial as the responsible party for Alloro’s death, is found guilty, and, on his way to being imprisoned for life, he is humiliated by the public during his own via crucis. The initial impression of the novel is that Perela` does not succeed in dictating the new code, and consequently it remains unprescribed. Luigi Baldacci alluded to the novel’s cryptographic aspect, stating also that in Perela` ‘‘converge all the multiple meanings of the text’’ (‘‘Ritratto critico di Aldo Palazzeschi,’’ 1956). Palazzeschi, in fact, employed form to draw the reader’s attention to what the crowd has failed to perceive. Il codice di Perela` consists mainly of unmediated dialogue in direct freespeech form, interrupted occasionally by blank spaces. Thus, the reading process becomes a more aggressive activity as readers have to make sense of the conversations as they progress and draw from the dialogue those inferences and implications

PALERMO normally provided by the narrative, only to reconcile them against previous textual and intertextual knowledge. The reader’s task in Il codice di Perela` is thus to gather the code’s various bits and pieces scattered throughout, in order to decipher what Palazzeschi had enciphered. Through a comparative examination of certain episodes and characters, one sees that a code is indeed articulated. Furthermore, one also discovers that Il codice di Perela` is, in fact, Palazzeschi’s outline of what he was to expound eventually in later writings such as his futurist manifesto, ‘‘Il controdolore.’’ ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI Editions First edition: Il codice di Perela`, Milan: Edizioni futuriste di ‘‘Poesia,’’ 1911. Other editions: Il codice di Perela`, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920; Il codice di Perela`, in Romanzi straordinari 1907–1914, Florence: Vallecchi, 1943; as Perela` uomo di fumo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1954.

Translations: as Perela`: The Man of Smoke, by Peter M. Riccio with the author’s collaboration, New York: S. F. Vanni, 1936; as Man of Smoke, translated by Nicolas J. Perella and Ruggero Stefanini, New York: Italica Press, 1992.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Ritratto critico di Aldo Palazzeschi,’’ Belfagor, 11:2 (1956), 158–179. Baldelli, Luigi, ‘‘Dal Codice di Perela` all’Uomo di Fumo,’’ in Varianti di Prosatori Contemporanei, Florence: Le Monnier, 1965. De Maria, Luciano, ‘‘Il codice di Perela` e Il Doge: Due favole allegorico-sociali,’’ Il Verri, 6 (1974), 141–155. Lepri, Laura, ‘‘Il codice mancato,’’ in Il funambolo incosciente. Aldo Palazzeschi 1905–1914, Florence: Olschki, 1991. Nasi, Franco, ‘‘Un romanzo di deformazione: Il codice di Perela`,’’ Romance Languages Annual, 7 (1995), 290–297. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, Of Saltimbanchi and Incendiari: Aldo Palazzeschi and Avant-Gardism in Italy, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Tellini, Gino, ‘‘Perela` e l’eversiva trasgressione della ’leggerezza,’’’ in Aldo Palazzeschi et les avant-gardes. Atti del Colloquio Internazionale, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2002.

PALERMO Palermo has been the principal cultural center of Sicily since the Middle Ages. In around 1050 a secular court was formed in which Arab, Hebrew, and Sicilian intellectuals gathered, thereby forming a singular, cultural syncretism. This court was but a precursor of what was to follow in the years to come: The culture of Palermo has always been characterized by a strong, eclectic component based on a foundation of scepticism, which is the essence of the Sicilian character. After the Norman King Roger’s death on 22 June 1101, his political culture was carried on by his son, Roger II. The first mention of the troubadours’ love poetry arrived in 1116, laying the foundation for the development of a Sicilian school at the court of Emperor Frederick II, who reigned from 1220 to 1250. The Occitan component, however, was reworked with suggestions derived from the centuries-old cultural stratification of the city: Arab, Greek, Latin, German, and French elements each left their mark on the ensuing civilizations, thereby constituting

a unique cultural amalgam. The language spoken in the court of Palermo up until the middle of the twelfth century was French. Poets from other cities were also present, such as Giacomino Pugliese and Giacomo da Lentini, an imperial notary generally considered the leader of the Sicilian school during the first half of the thirteenth century. Diverse forms of literary expression were present during the golden age of the Frederician court, but Palermo did not limit itself to absorbing cosmopolitan influences. The importance of the city resides in its role as a filter for an authentic diffusion of writers and poets toward other parts of Italy. Following the death of King Manfred in 1266, Palermo underwent a long period of cultural crisis and political turmoil. It was not until the year 1400 that it recaptured its ancient role under Aragonese dominion. At the court of Alfonso of Aragon, known as the Magnanimous, several of the most important adherents of Humanism were present. What the city lacked was a university, though 1337

PALERMO there were many schools of grammar and Latin entrusted to the humanist Antonio Cassarino (1379–1447), who translated Plutarch and Plato. The most important public school was that of San Domenico, run by the Dominican friars, where important historians like Filippo Fazello were educated. The addition of the Jesuit College (founded by the viceroy Giovanni de Vega), the seminaries of the priesthood, the scuole pie (pious schools), and the college of the nobles ensured that the city’s cultural life, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was governed by the Catholic Church and by the aristocracy (favored by the Spanish domination). Hence Palermo was, as Leonardo Sciascia wrote in Vita di Antonio Veneziano (The Life of Antonio Veneziano, 1967), one of the most severely controlled cities by the Holy Inquisition. The flourishing of a vigorous classical tradition originated in this atmosphere, under the influence of Catholic-Spanish culture and Jesuit schools. For this reason, literature in Palermo oscillated between two opposite poles, the adhesion to classical models (revisited in opulent baroque style) and the desire to break away from tradition in order to open up to the most advanced European movements. The result was a blend of conformity and anarchy, a literature that was detached from the life of the popular classes. Indeed, writers from Palermo rarely succeeded in being in tune with the city’s commoners. La notti di Palermu (Night in Palermo, 1638) by Tommaso Aversa (1623– 1663), later published in Italian as Notte, fato, e amore in la corte delle selve (1657), is considered to be the first comedy composed entirely in Sicilian dialect. In this type of environment it was difficult for writers to avoid the rigors of censorship. They formed closed circles, sometimes clandestine, other times open to the cultural and social elites (academies), while literature moved toward Petrarchism, following Pietro Bembo’s example. Poetry became a sterile, formal exercise devoid of ethical tension. It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that a secular literature was able to affirm itself in Palermo, thanks to the diffusion of the Enlightenment and to the reformist era of the viceroy Francesco d’Aquino, an admirer of Voltaire. The most eminent figure of this time was the dialect poet Giovanni Meli (1740–1815), the author of Poesie siciliane (Sicilian Poems, 1787–1789), a collection of short lyrics and poems in ottava rima. However, the artistic activity in Palermo was sustained by the patronage of the aristocracy, which favored the development of 1338

the theater. The most important theaters of the city were the Santa Cecilia and Santa Lucia and subsequently the Biondo (renowned for its prose repertoire) and the neoclassical Teatro Massimo (built between 1875 and 1897). The audience’s love for opera was encouraged by the founding of several convitti musicali (musical boarding schools), the first one established in 1617. Supported financially by the nobility, young musicians were educated at the Collegio di musica del buon pastore beginning in 1747. In 1833, the Senate of Palermo entrusted the management of the school to Baron Pietro Pisani. Many foreign travellers were mesmerized by this new expansion of the city, the most famous being Goethe, who disembarked in Palermo on 2 April 1787 and described the sumptuous life of the local nobility in his letters and the Italianische Reisen (The Italian Journey, 1828). Goethe’s Palermo was a sensuous city full of books and art works, a city that was rich and parasitic. Johann Hermann von Riedesel also spoke of the city’s wealth in Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland (A Journey to Sicily, 1773), dedicated to his friend, Johann Winckelmann. The eighteenth century became Palermo’s golden era of the theater. The first public performance was in 1678, when Ha¨ndel’s melodrama Serse was staged at the Spasimo. The Santa Cecilia was founded by mandate of Palermo’s Senate on 28 October 1693, but, in 1726, a devastating earthquake forced the theater to close for ten years. However, many private theaters were established, supported by nobles like the Marquis of Valguarnera. When the Santa Cecilia reopened in 1737, the melodramas of Pietro Metastasio were in vogue, while opera buffa struggled to gain popularity, mostly due to the opposition of the Church, which considered it immoral. The Princess of Ganci, Lucia di Valguarnera, introduced comic opera in her palazzo, where she had a small theater built in 1718 (Teatro dei Travaglini). Popular comedies and farces were also performed. Throughout the eighteenth century, the people of Palermo attended the Santa Cecilia and Santa Lucia in great numbers. Among the assiduous theatergoers was Meli, who dedicated an ode entitled ‘‘Le Grazie’’ (The Graces) to the famous singer from Piedmont, Anna Davy. Frequent scandals surrounded the singers and actresses (such as Marina Calducci and Cecilia Bolognesi), involving viceroy Domenico Caracciolo as well, who was present for the first production of the musical comedy Giannina e Bernardone by Domenico Cimarosa in 1784. Palermo’s theatergoing public was

PALERMO composed mainly of aristocrats, but members of the clergy also frequented the theater. A performance of Cimarosa’s Il trionfo di Diana (Diana’s Triumph, 1797) was interrupted because the spectators left the theater scandalized by the singers’ costumes. The audiences of Palermo preferred farces in dialect, performed at the Casotto delle Vastasate, a small theater that began in a wooden shed (casotto) on the plain of the Marina under the direction of the Neapolitan Giuseppe Marotta and other amateur actors. Real-life people and events of Palermo inspired the plots of these performances in dialect called vastasate, since on the stage were found many characters of the lower classes, or vastasi. The parish priest Giovanni Alessi confirmed, in a manuscript found in Palermo’s council library, that by 1795 the term ‘‘farce’’ was no longer in use. The success of the vastasate brought about the construction of many new casotti (six in 1793), while the chivalric episodes (the Paladins of France) of the opera dei pupi (Sicilian puppet theater) were presented in the streets. In the eighteenth century, the pastoral ideals of the Roman Accademia dell’Arcadia (founded in 1690) were not present in Palermo, and the city’s literary culture remained distant from that of the national renewal. As the Lettre de M. l’Abbe´ Cannella a M. le Baron N.N. sur la literature de Palerme, c’est a` dire des portraits des savants palermitains de nos jours (Letter from the Abbot Cannella to the Baron N.N about Palermo’s Literature, That Is Portraits of Wise Palermitans of Our Time, 1794) by Salvatore Cannella attests, Palermo’s intellectuals preferred to devote themselves to philosophical-scientific studies; literary productions were discouraged by the repressive activities of the Holy Office and by the lack of publishers. In Palermo, until the early nineteenth century, there were only printing houses and booksellers (Nicola Volpe, Filippo Perrotta, the Martinon brothers), who could not guarantee the distribution of books beyond the borders of the city. By the end of century, thanks to the patronage of the Prince of Campoformio, the French literary style inspired by the Enlightenment became widespread. The abbot Francesco Carı` (1726–1798), considered to be the most important poet after Meli, composed sonetti but also wrote erotic texts in dialect. As reported by Giuseppe Pitre´ (1841–1916), a founding figure in the field of Sicilian folk culture, amateur verse writers filled the academies and the noble palaces, thereby creating poetry of pure evasion, which dismissed political or religious arguments. At the same time, many intellectuals left the city.

Yet Palermo remained the most important literary center in Sicily. There were no poet-prophets, only skeptical writers who embraced the conviction that nothing could be changed. Thus, they exalted the tranquility of the countryside in idyllic compositions in the vein of Theocritus. The lack of a romantic movement in the city is for this reason not surprising. The antiromantic opposition was lead by Francesco Paolo Perez (1812–1892), whose anti-Manzonian ideas were exposed in his treatise Della imitazione della natura e del vero nell’arte (Concerning the Imitation of Nature and Reality in Art, 1855). During the nineteenth century, a number of cultural journals were established, among them Lo spettatore siciliano (1816) and Galleria di bon ton (1842), founded by Giuseppe Crispi Genova. Of significant importance is the article ‘‘L’appaltatore di teatro’’ by Angelo Brofferio, which appeared on 20 April 1842 in Galleria del bon ton and offered a realistic portrait at contemporary theatrical life in Palermo. The author denounced the degeneration of a world inhabited by virtuosi, by incompetent impresarios, and by battitori (people who clap), recruited by the impresarios themselves to applaud their productions. When the troops of Giuseppe Garibaldi arrived in Palermo in 1860, the lagging literary environment was rejuvenated, but it was soon frustrated by the awareness that nothing had really changed in Sicily on a social level. This somber mood was later admirably portrayed by a member of the old aristocracy, Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1896–1957), in his novel Il Gattopardo (1958). Yet, there was a new openness to European literary movements, such as the advent of Realism. A number of important exponents were writing in Palermo, most notably Giuseppe Pipitone Federico (1859–1940), an attentive reader of the works of Emile Zola and Alphonse Daudet, who wrote Il naturalismo contemporaneo in letteratura (Contemporary Naturalism in Literature, 1886) and also initiated a debate on Naturalism in Il momento (1883–1885), a review he directed. Contributing to this debate was the writer-journalist Girolamo Ragusa Moleti (1851–1917), author of the psychological-realist novel Il signor Macqueda (Mr. Macqueda, 1881) and a collection of love poems entitled L’eterno romanzo (The Eternal Romance, 1883). The most popular novelist was, however, Luigi Natoli (1857–1941), who wrote well-researched historical fiction under the pen name of William Galt. The most successful was I Beati Paoli (The Blessed Pauls, 1921), which relates the adventures of secret 1339

PALERMO sects in Sicily between 1698 and 1719. The novel was rediscovered by Umberto Eco, who edited a reprint for the publisher Flaccovio in 1971. This led to new editions of several of Natoli’s novels. Palermo acquired a negative image in the second half of the nineteenth century, due to its association with the phenomenon of the Mafia following the success of a play by Gaspare Mosca (1825–ca.1867) and Giuseppe Rizzotto (1828–1895), I mafiusi di la Vicaria (The Mafia of Vicaria, 1863), staged at the Sant’Anna theater. Vicaria was the Bourbon prison to which a group of Mafiosi, led by Jachinu Funciazza, was deported in 1854. At the end of the play, the protagonist is freed and redeems himself, but this happy ending does not erase the image of a city that has surrendered to the rules of a criminal body. The word ‘‘Mafia’’ does not appear in the text itself, but the play went on to be performed nationally, and the term entered common currency. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Palermo joined in the artistic renewal promoted by the Futurist movement. A dynamic group united around Federico De Maria (1885–1954) and the journal La fronda. It was De Maria who anticipated the use of the free verse, and who, by way of regular correspondence with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Massimo Bontempelli, played an important role in the rejuvenation of the city’s literary culture. Among his works, we enlist pieces such as La spada di Orlando (Orlando’s Sword, 1929), the novel La vita al vento (Life in the Wind, 1934), and the anti-academic poems collected in Interludio classico (Classical Interlude, 1907). De Maria and the Futurists portrayed a Palermo that strived to break from tradition while opening itself to the European modernization foreseen by Marinetti. These efforts were encouraged by the arrival of cinema (the first screening took place in 1896). But this iconoclastic e´lan soon faded away, and the stifling atmosphere of the Fascist ventennium was followed by the disenchantment of the postwar years: Palermo fell back to its perennial state of skepticism and indolence. At this time, Tomasi di Lampedusa conceived Il Gattopardo, in which the city becomes the melancholic backdrop for the demise of the local aristocracy, unable to participate in the historical process of a unified nation. In sharp contrast with the gloriousness of the baroque palaces, in which the aristocrats experience their agonic decline, lies the advent of the bourgeoisie and the Mafia ‘‘hyenas’’ represented by Calogero Sedara. The same agonizing atmosphere is found in Lucio Piccolo (1901–1969), the poet and cousin of 1340

Tomasi di Lampedusa, who lived a secluded life in Sicily, withdrawing into the dreamlike sphere of esotericism. In his first collection, Canti barocchi e altre liriche (Baroque Songs and Other Lyrics, 1956), an aristocratic world doomed to extinction is projected onto the decayed interiors of Palermo’s baroque palaces. There is also the Palermo of Sciascia’s Il consiglio d’Egitto (The Council of Egypt, 1963). Here is a city where deception reigns, as does religious fanaticism encouraged by the Holy Office; a city where victims and executioners become indistinguishable and there is no hope for redemption (the reformer Di Blasi is killed by a delirious crowd). Sciascia implies that in eighteenth-century Palermo ( just as in present-day Palermo) justice is dead, and a violent end awaits anyone who fights for the people. In her first novel, La vigna di uve nere (The Vine of Black Grape, 1953), Livia De Stefani (1913– 1991) related the disquieting events concerning Casimiro Badalamenti and a city in which the traditional honor codes of the Mafia defy modernization during the 1950s. In a later monologue, La signora di Cariddi (The Lady of Cariddi, 1971), the writer depicted the empty existence of the Sicilian nobility, fading away under the blows of the rampant bourgeoisie. Autunnale Barocco (Autumn Baroque, 1977), written by the eclectic and innovative poet and critic Angelo Maria Ripellino (1923–1978), describes an anarchic experience that blurs the boundaries between a grotesque deformation of reality and the restoration of classical forms (such as the quatrain). A wave of literary renewal was triggered in Palermo when, from 3 to 8 October 1963, a group of writers of the Neoavanguardia came to the city in order to address cultural issues and the role of intellectuals in contemporary society. The so-called Gruppo ’63 had among its members the native Michele Perriera (1937–), whose Mafiosa image of the city comes up in several of his novels, for example in Con quelle idee da canguro (With Those Kangaroo Ideas, 1996). In recent years, Palermo has become the site for a new generation of authors who are supported by successful editorial initiatives promoted by Flaccovio, Sellerio, and Novecento Editrice. They embrace narratives as diverse as Fulvio Abbate’s Zero maggio a Palermo (May 0th in Palermo, 1990), a fantastic adventure of two young Communists in search of the treasure of the Beati Paoli; Francesco Gambero’s Palermo-Civico-Palermo (Palermo-CivicPalermo, 1999), a nightmarish journey into Palermo’s health system; Santo Piazzese’s detective story Delitti di via Medina-Sidonia (Crimes of

PALERMO Medina-Sidonia Street, 1996). Among the poets, Aurelio Pes (1944–) writes in the vein of an original experimentation. His most important work, Genealogia del fuoco (The Genealogy of Fire, 1988), is a ‘‘work in progress’’ in which new compositions come together according to an aristocratic concept of art (Goethe and Wagner are among his models). Nino Gennaro (1948–1995) composed surrealisticoneiric poems, written in an unconventional language. But the most well-known dialect poet has been Ignazio Buttitta (1899–1977), whose lyrics addressed political and social events. Buttitta also wrote the play Lu curtigghiu di li Raunisi (The Aragoneses’ Courtyard, 1973), a reelaboration of an eighteenth-century vastasata staged at the Teatro Biondo in September 1973. Palermo’s theatrical culture is influenced by both the opera dei pupi and the avant-garde, as in the case of Davide Enia’s Italia-Brasile 3 a 2 (Italy-Brazil 3 to 2, 2000). Finally, the publication of L’opera dei pupi (Puppet Theater, 1977) by Antonio Pasqualino (1931–) and Teatro con i pupi siciliani (Theater with the Sicilian Puppets, 1980) by Fortunato Pasqualino (1923–) were significant accomplishments, since these studies re-evaluate the epic dimension of the art of the puppeteers. Palermo’s literary production reflects a cosmopolitan, eclectic trend open to experimentation. It is no coincidence that Collage (1961) was the most sought-after journal by prominent writers during the 1960s and 1970s, becoming the testing ground for diverse literary genres (detective story, historical novel, aphorism) in a city that anticipated, on a cultural level, the chaos of postmodern art. One of the most telling signs of change is that internationally acclaimed writers such as Leonardo Sciascia lived and worked in Palermo. Perhaps it is Roberto Ando`’s Il manoscritto del principe (The Manuscript of the Prince, 2001), the story of two young men’s lives affected by the gigantic personality of Tomasi di Lampedusa as he writes Il Gattopardo, that best addresses the issue of art and culture in their relationship to reality and history in Palermo. Today’s Palermo displays a wide range of artistic sensibilities and styles. It is a city redefining itself, while exposing the dynamics of unsettling social and cultural boundaries. ALFREDO SGROI

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Borsellino, Nino, and Lucio Felici (editors), Storia della letteratura italiana: Il Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Buttitta, Ignazio, Io faccio il poeta, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972. Di Franco, Nuccia, and Elio Micciche´, Palermo allo specchio, Palermo: Terza Esperide, 1998. Finocchiaro Chimirri, Giovanna, Manzoni e le idee romantiche in Sicilia, Catania: Cuecm, 1979. Gamba, Bartolomeo, Lettere scritte nel mio viaggio d’Italia e di Sicilia, edited by Lisa Cerruti, Caltanissetta, Lussografica, 2003. Gesu` Sebastiano, Russo, Elena, Le Madonie: Cinema ad alte quote, Acireale: Maimone, 1995. Goethe, Wolfgang, Italianische Reisen (1828); as Viaggio in Italia, edited by Emilio Zamboni, Firenze: Sansoni, 1980. Isgro`, Giovanni, Feste barocche a Palermo, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1980. Isgro`, Giovanni, Teatro del Cinquecento a Palermo, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1982. Leone, Guido, L’Opera a Palermo, Palermo: Publisicula, 1988. Lo Curzio, Guglielmo, Scrittori siciliani, Palermo: Novecento, 1989. Mack Smith, Denis, A History of Sicily, vols. 2–3, London: Chatto and Windus, 1968. Meldolesi, Claudio, and Ferdinando Taviani, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Ottocento, Bari: Laterza, 1995. Moavero, Marilinda, and Gisella Cuffaro, Palermo nelle raccolte della B.C.R.S., Palermo: Regione SicilianaAssessorato dei Beni Culturali e Ambientali e della Pubblica Istruzione, 2000. Perreira, Michele, L’avvenire della memoria, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1976. Pitre´, Giuseppe, Goethe a Palermo, Palermo: Sellerio, 1976. Pitre´, Giuseppe, La vita di Palermo 100 e piu` anni fa, Palermo: Il Vespro, 1978. Riedesel, Johann Hermann von, Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland (1773); as Viaggio in Sicilia, edited by Mario Tropea, Caltanissetta: Lussografica, 1997. Sciascia, Leonardo (editor), Delle cose di Sicilia, Palermo: Sellerio, 1986. Sciascia, Leonardo, La coda pazza: Scrittori e cose della Sicilia, Milan: Adelphi, 1991. Sucato, Ignazio, Palermo, dalle origini ai giorni nostri: Tre millenni di storia, Palermo: La Via, 1974. Tedesco, Natale (editor), Scrivere la Sicilia, Siracusa: Ediprint, 1985. Tramontana, Salvatore, L’effimero nella Sicilia Normanna, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1984. Tuzet, Henry, Viaggiatori stranieri in Sicilia nel XVIII secolo, Palermo: Sellerio, 1988. Villasevaglios, Pietro, Palermo Felicissima, Palermo: Societa` Italiana per la Storia Patria, 1992.

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ALFREDO PANZINI (1863–1939) Alfredo Panzini was a multifaceted intellectual, a novelist, critic, historical writer, and lexicographer, who seemed to follow a path of a personal literary humanism that excluded the dominant cultural issues of his time. This intellectual isolation made Panzini’s first literary efforts suffer from a lack of connection with the present, which the author turned into a poetics of pessimism and sarcasm. Panzini’s cultural perspective, however, looked far beyond the literary features popular in his time, which found in Gabriele D’Annunzio a magister elegantiae, or, at least, an antagonist against whom many fin de sie`cle authors defined their own poetics. Panzini’s works do not even display a controversial attitude to the aftermath of the Risorgimento, which characterized the literary experiences of intellectuals and writers between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries in Italy; Benedetto Croce, for example, sharply criticized Panzini for the absence of any ethical stance due to the author’s isolated humanism. Panzini’s description of the world tends toward a fleeting, sarcastic glimpse of ordinary places and daily life (women especially are the target of an instinctive misogynism) that never develops into a complex analysis. This is why Panzini’s short stories, such as Piccole storie del mondo grande (Little Stories of a Big World, 1901) and Le fiabe della virtu` (Fables of Virtue, 1911), by framing small pictures of reality, are considered by critics the author’s most persuasive works. However, the author’s first narrative effort, Il libro dei morti (The Book of the Dead, 1893), as well as other literary works, were not of interest to critics for years. Only when his Le fiabe della virtu` was favorably reviewed was Panzini’s literary stature finally confirmed. Following the example of Carducci—to whom the critical essay L’evoluzione di Giosue Carducci (The Evolution of Giosue Carducci, 1894) is dedicated—Panzini shifted his cultural references to a classicism that became the only counterpart of his personal point of view on contemporary literature. Also, the author’s sincere passion for Matteo Maria Boiardo and the choice—which sometimes bordered on stubbornness—to reevaluate the literary stature of Orlando innamorato (Orlando in Love, 1482–1483/1495), overshadowed by Ludovico 1342

Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), is further evidence of his preference for classical forms. Even Panzini’s interest in experimentalism in literature makes its main reference to the quattrocento and Macaronic poetry: Saggio critico sulla poesia maccheronica (Critical Essay on Macaronic Poetry, 1887). In Panzini’s interpretation, Macaronic poetry is not a pure violation or overturning of poetic norms. As Tommaso Scappaticci noted, the author instead stressed how the Macaronic exaggeration ultimately has a moral intent (Il caso Panzini, 2000). However, only through memory and recollections did Panzini obtain his best results. All the existential suffering and intellectual restlessness in his works is based on nostalgia toward a lost world. It is not surprising that Panzini’s main literary concern is represented by the experience of the journey. This subject became the author’s personal means of expression: By a continual overlapping of autobiographic representation and recollection of the past, Panzini derived his understanding of reality. In this context, novels like La lanterna di Diogene (The Lantern of Diogenes, 1907)—unanimously considered his masterpiece—and Viaggio di un povero letterato (The Journey of a Poor Man of Letters, 1919) represent the fulfillment of this process. In the first, a bicycle ride from Milan to Bellaria and, in the second, a train trip throughout northern and central Italy, allow the author to draw sketches of present life and recall personal memories. Many other works employ the same technique, especially Panzini’s war memories: Il romanzo della guerra nell’anno 1914 (The Novel of the War in the Year 1914, 1914) and Diario sentimentale dal luglio 1914 al maggio 1915 (Sentimental Journal of the War from July 1914 to May 1915, 1923) and Diario sentimentale dal maggio 1915 al novembre 1918 (Sentimental Journal from May 1915 to November 1918, 1924). Here the author’s negative judgment of war betrays a subtle ethical need, which appears through his satiric and pessimistic perspective. In novels as Io cerco moglie! (Wanted—A Wife!, 1920) and Il padrone sono me (The Boss Is Only Me, 1922), Panzini, who was a famous novelist by this time, tried to fix his superficial view of the world. The result appears to be an attempt at

ALFREDO PANZINI analysis without a real grasp on reality. Even Panzini’s more historical novels like Santippe (1914), about Socrates’ much-maligned wife, and his last book Il bacio di Lesbia (The Kiss of Lesbia, 1937)—set in ancient Greece and Rome—are pure journeys into the past. Panzini’s finest legacy is his work as a lexicographer with Il dizionario moderno (The Modern Dictionary, 1905), an account of Italian current in his day that has been reprinted nearly ten times, assuring itself a central role in the study of the evolution of the Italian language.

Biography Alfredo Panzini was born in Senigallia (Ancona) on December 31, 1863. After spending his childhood in the beloved Bellaria (Rimini)—where he would build his casa rossa—he moved to Venice, where he entered the Convitto Foscarini, 1874. He obtained a degree in Italian literature from the University of Bologna with Giosue Carducci as a supervisor, 1886, and obtained professional qualification as a teacher, 1888. Panzini married Clelia Gabriella, 1890. His son Umbertino died, 1910. He was assigned the Italian literature course at the Politecnico in Milan, 1897. He engaged in a long correspondence with Marino Moretti, Renato Serra, and Giuseppe Prezzolini, 1911–1913/1936–1937. Along with various articles in literary journals (Nuova antologia, L’illustrazione italiana), he began his contributions to the cultural page (also known as terza pagina) of Il corriere della sera, with his famous elzeviri, 1924. He was made a member of the Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1929. Panzini died in Rome on April 10, 1939. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Novelle, edited by George L. Doty, Chicago: University of Chicago Italian Series, 1934. Sei romanzi fra due secoli, Milan: Mondadori, 1939. Romanzi d’ambo i sessi, introduced di Pietro Pancrazi, Verona: Mondadori, 1941. Opere scelte, edited by Goffredo Bellonci, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. Santippe e undici novelle, edited by Walter Mauro, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. Pagine dell’alba, edited by Ranieri Allulli, Milan: Mondadori, 1935. La cicuta, i gigli e le rose, edited by Marino Moretti, Milan: Mondadori, 1950.

La mia storia: Il mio mondo, edited by Piero Nardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1951.

Fiction Il libro dei morti, 1893. Gli ingenui, 1896. La moglie nuova, 1899. Piccole storie del mondo grande, 1901. Lepida et tristia, 1901. Trionfi di donna, 1903. La lanterna di Diogene, 1907. Che cos’e` l’amore?, 1908. Le fiabe della virtu`, 1911. Santippe, 1914. Donne, madonne e bimbi, 1914. La Madonna di mama`. Romanzo del tempo della guerra, 1916. Novelle d’ambo i sessi, 1918. Viaggio di un povero letterato, 1919. Io cerco moglie!, 1920; as Wanted–A Wife, translated by Frederic Taber Cooper, 1923. Il diavolo nella mia libreria, 1920. Il mondo e` rotondo, 1920. Signorine, 1921. La cagna nera, 1921. Il padrone sono me, 1922. La vera istoria dei tre colori, 1924. La pulcella senza pulcellaggio, 1925. Le damigelle, 1926. I tre re con Gelsomino buffone del re, 1927. I giorni del sole e del grano, 1929. Il libro dei morti e dei vivi, 1930. La sventurata Irminda!, 1932. Rose d’ogni mese, 1933. Legione decima, romanzo fra l’anno XII dell’eta` fascista e l’anno 58 a. C., 1934. Novelline divertenti per bambini intelligenti, 1934. Viaggio con la giovane ebrea, 1935. Il ritorno di Bertoldo, 1936. Il bacio di Lesbia, 1937. La valigetta misteriosa, 1942.

Theater Casa Leopardi: La giovinezza di Giacomo, 1948.

Diaristic Writing Il romanzo della guerra nell’anno 1914, 1915. Diario sentimentale dal luglio 1914 al maggio 1915, 1923. Diario sentimentale dal maggio 1915 al novembre 1918, 1924.

Criticism Saggio critico sulla poesia maccheronica, 1887. L’evoluzione di Giosue Carducci, 1894. Dizionario moderno, 1905. Il 1859: da Plombie`res a Villafranca, 1909. Matteo Maria Boiardo, 1918. Esidio: Le Opere e i Giorni, versione in prosa italiana con note e dichiarazioni, 1928. La penultima moda: 1850–1930, 1930. Il conte di Cavour, 1931. Guida alla grammatica italiana, con un prontuario delle incertezze, 1932. La bella istoria d’ ‘‘Orlando innamorato’’ e poi ‘‘furioso,’’ 1933. Per amore di Biancofiore: ricordi di poeti e di poesia, 1948.

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ALFREDO PANZINI Vita carattere opinioni del nobiluomo Monaldo Leopardi, 1997.

Correspondence Carteggio Alfredo Panzini-Renato Serra, 1940. Carteggio Panzini-Moretti 1914–1936, edited by Claudio Toscani, 1986. Carteggio Panzini-Prezzolini 1911–1937, edited by Sandro Rogari, 1990.

Further Reading Biondi, Marino, La provincia e la sua ombra: tessera per il Novecento letterario, Florence: Vallecchi, 1982. Bocelli, Arnaldo, ‘‘Alfredo Panzini,’’ in I contemporanei, I, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Cadioli, Alberto, Le muse e la sirena. Gli scrittori e l’industria culturale del primo Novecento in Italia, Milan: Iulm, 1990. Capuana, Luigi, Gli ‘‘ismi’’ contemporanei, Catania: Giannotta, 1898. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della Nuova Italia: Nuovi saggi, Bari: Laterza, 1947.

De Rienzo, Giorgio, Alfredo Panzini, Milan: Mursia, 1968. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. Finamore, Egidio (editor), Alfredo Panzini: biografia e opere, Rimini: Bibliograf Amici del Libro, 1993. Grassi, Ennio (editor), Alfredo Panzini nella cultura letteraria italiana fra ’800 e ’900, Rimini: Maggioli, 1985. Grassi, Ennio, Romagna futurista, Rimini: Mggioli, 1986. Pacifici, Sergio, The Modern Italian Novel from Capuana to Tozzi, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Pazzaglia, Mario (editor), Fra Bellaria, San Mauro e Svignano, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995. Pietravalle Nicoletta, Cara Italia, tuo Molise: lettere inedite di Pepe, Tommaseo, Cantu`, Panzini, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1983. Scappaticci, Tommaso, Il caso Panzini, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2000. Schiaffini, Alfredo, Italiano antico e moderno, MilanNaples: Ricciardi, 1975. Varese, Claudio, Cultura letteraria contemporanea, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1951.

MARCO PAOLINI (1956–) Marco Paolini is a representative figure in a generation of actor-authors who grew up in the 1970s in a popular theater tradition that was eclectic and minimalist. He is the quintessential monologue actor who speaks out about the social problems and contradictions of his age. For this reason he is variously referred to as a new bard, a modern jester, and the heir to Dario Fo. In this sense his artistic path has been exemplary. Initially he was the creator and organizer of theater groups like Teatro degli Stracci and Studio 900, where he followed the style of Grotowski. He then acted in groups noted for their poetics, like the Tag Teatro, where he learned the maschera stock comic characters and narrative techniques from the director Carlo Boso, and the Laboratorio Teatro Settimo, foremost among Italian experimental theaters. Eventually he called on all these actor models, which in different ways infuse his work with strong autobiographical elements, to become the author of his performances. It is for this work that Paolini is mainly known today. He began by reconstructing his childhood, played out in the courtyards of Treviso, in a series 1344

of souvenir ‘‘albums’’: Adriatico (Adriatic, premie`re 1987) narrates the events of enforced holidays, while Tiri in porta (Shots on Goal, premie`re 1990), dedicated to A Pal-utcai fiuk (The Kids of Via Paal, 1907) by Ferenc Molnar, and Liberi tutti (All Free, premie`re 1992), dedicated to the work of Luigi Meneghello, reproduce, respectively, football and poor courtyard games. The latter in particular marks the encounter with the anglo-veneto of Meneghello, who repeatedly inspired Paolini, beginning with the Bestiari veneti (Veneto Bestiaries, premie`re 1998–1999). The turning point in his career was a live broadcast on October 9, 1997, of Il racconto del Vajont (The Vajont Story), a show that Paolini had been staging in theaters for three years. Under the direction of Gabriele Vacis, Paolini reconstructed one of the most dreadful disasters to take place in Italy: In October 1963 a landslide caused such a great wave in Vajont’s artificial lake that an entire valley, and with it 2,000 souls, were submerged. The broadcast brought Paolini, then an unknown actor, great success for his frank recreation, in familiar, informal language, of a disaster that for over 30 years

MARCO PAOLINI had been represented by half-truths in the media. The broadcast exemplified the potential of television as a medium. A new phase began, in which Paolini became strongly aware of himself and the values for which he now considered himself the natural spokesman. His work thus developed in two explicit, decisive directions. First, he became the promoter of the culture of the Veneto region. In this work he was the heir of the theater of the Veneto, historically in decline but in reality very much alive. His efforts initially included Il Milione (premie`re 1997), titled after Marco Polo’s travel book, which was transmitted live on television from the Arsenal shipyards of Venice, and a series, the Bestiari, in which Paolini exposed television’s national audience to poets like Giacomo Noventa, Ernesto Calzavara, Giovanni Pascutto, and Biagio Marin. In the meantime Paolini pursued journalistic enquiries. In I-TIGI Canto per Ustica (Television News, Poem for Ustica, premie`re 2000), written with Daniele Del Giudice with music by Giovanna Marini, he tried to throw light on one of the most intricate state mysteries in Italy–the shooting down of an Alitalia airplane near Ustica, presumably because of NATO military maneuvers. In another instance, following the scandalous acquittal of the directors of the chemical complex at Porto Marghera (Venice), who were accused of irresponsible pollution and being the cause of hundreds of cancer deaths, Paolini, together with Francesco Niccolini, collected stories of workers in Parlamento chimico. Storie di plastica (Chemical Parliament. Plastic Stories, premie`re 2002). To ensure his own autonomy, he created his own production house (1999) to publish and distribute his works as widely as possible. Paolini’s involvement in the cinema, while not extensive, has been artistically and politically coherent, confirming his identity as a militant artist, responsible for every single artistic creation: from Daniele Segre’s Manila paloma blanca (Manila, the White Dove, 1992) to Nanni Moretti’s Caro diario (Dear Diary, 1993), where he represented his own generation’s problems in bringing up children; from Carlo Mazzacurati’s Il toro (The Bull, 1995) to Daniele Lucchetti’s I piccoli maestri (The Little Schoolteachers, 1998), where he is cast as an authoritative partisan who inducts young recruits into the Resistance fight. He has also produced, in collaboration with Mazzacurati, Ritratti (Portraits, 1999), in which he interviewed the great poets of the Veneto region—Luigi Meneghello, Mario Rigoni Stern, and Andrea Zanzotto.

If Paolini the author is the impassioned cosmopolitan of the Veneto region, Paolini the actor is the stubbornly heedless voice of a popular comic style without intellectualism.

Biography Marco Paolini was born in Belluno on March 5, 1956. He settled in Treviso, where during the 1970s he created the Teatro degli Stracci and Studio 900; until 1985 he worked as an actor with the Tag Teatro of Mestre. For a short period in 1984 he lived in the United States. With the Laboratorio Teatro Settimo he wrote the first of a series of monologues or ‘‘albums,’’ Adriatico, 1987. Between 1990 and 2000, Paolini continued the cycle of ‘‘albums’’ with the Cooperativa Moby Dick–Teatri della Riviera, among them Tiri in porta (1990), Aprile ‘74 e 5 (1995), Stazioni di transito (1999), and Il racconto del Vajont (1994), which was awarded the 1995 Ubu for Political Theater, the 1996 Idi for the best new play, and the 1997 television award as best program in the field of live TV. In the late 1990s, he created the Bestiari and 20 short radio tales, Storie alla radio. In 1999 he established Jole, his production house (renamed Jolefilm in 2002). He continued to compose accusatory dramas and also intensified his publishing activity, with texts, videos, and CDs of his shows. After a few remakes, Paolini set out on a new course of artistic collaboration with musicians Giorgio Gaslini and Mario Brunello, with whom he is still involved. ROBERTO CUPPONE Selected Works Plays Il racconto del Vajont, with Gabriele Vacis (premiere 1994), 1997; as The Story of Vajont, edited and translated by Thomas Simpson, 2000. Bestiario veneto. Parole mate (premiere 1998), 1999. I cani del gas (premiere 1998), 2000.

Essays L’anno passato, 2000. Quaderno del Vajont, with Oliviero Ponte Di Pino, 1999. Quaderno dei TIGI, with Daniele Del Giudice, 2001.

Further Reading Capitta, Gianfranco, ‘‘Paolini nel ‘parlamento chimico,’’’ Il manifesto, 12 December 2002, 8.

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MARCO PAOLINI Franchini, Vittorio, ‘‘La strada verso un’Itaca che non c’e` sulle note jazz di Uri Caine e Gaslini,’’ Il corriere della sera, 21 June 2003, 19. Marchiori, Fernando, Il mappamondo, Turin: Einaudi, 2003.

Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi. La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: UTET, 2003. Volli, Ugo, ‘‘Vajont, ricordi di una strage. ‘La verita` senza trucchi,’’’ La repubblica, 9 October 1997, 23.

GIOVANNI PAPINI (1881–1956) Giovanni Papini was one of most controversial figures in the Italian cultural arena of the early and mid-twentieth century. An active cultural journalist throughout his early years, with his old school friend Giuseppe Prezzolini he founded and for a time directed the influential but short-lived Florentine periodical Leonardo (1903–1907), while contributing to Il Regno, a nationalist publication directed by Enrico Corradini (1865–1931), who formed the Associazione nazionalistica italiana (Nationalist Association) in 1910 to support Italian colonial expansionism. In 1911 he founded L’Anima, along with Giovanni Amendola, and from 1912 to 1913 he directed La voce, another Florentine periodical launched by Prezzolini in 1908. However, his most important contribution to the fertile and dynamic culture of the early twentieth-century avant-garde was Lacerba, which he started in 1913 in collaboration with the writer and painter Ardengo Soffici, whom he had met during his visit to Paris in 1906. Lacerba soon became the leading review for the Italian Futurist movement and published many writings and manifestos helping to promote Futurism to a wider audience. However, Papini was never one to timidly follow the initiatives of others, and soon he and the Lacerba group, which also included the poet Aldo Palazzeschi, clashed with the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Their divorce was consummated in the 14 February 1915 issue of the journal with a scathing manifesto, ‘‘Futurismo e Marinettismo’’ (Futurism and Marinettism), in which Papini, Soffici, and Palazzeschi denounced their former ally as a superficial poseur. The various documents on Papini’s involvement with the movement were later collected in the provocative programmatic volume L’esperienza futurista (The Futurist Experience, 1919). A convinced advocate of Italian intervention in World War I, Papini 1346

however continued to share the view of many Futurists that war was a great cleanser. He expressed this thesis in the pages of Lacerba on 1 October 1914 with the infamous statement about the necessity of purifying the earth in a ‘‘caldo bagno di sangue nero’’ (a warm bath of black blood). Giovanni Papini was a prolific writer. Among his dozens of books, Il crepuscolo dei filosofi (The Twilight of the Philosophers, 1906) was his first important work, in which he expressed his rejection of traditional philosophies and openly attacked the six great thinkers of his contemporary culture, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Comte, Spencer, and Nietzsche, in the name of vitalistic irrationalism. Notwithstanding his lack of formal training in philosophy, he was open to new currents and introduced into Italy the works of John Dewey and Henri Bergson, among others. But Papini’s bestknown work, and the one that is unanimously considered his greatest achievement, is his autobiographical novel Un uomo finito (A Man—Finished, 1913). Written when he was just 30 years old, the novel stretches from his childhood to the symbolic moment when he reached maturity and recounts what the author defined as his failure to compensate for his intellectual life with his political activities. The best features of Un uomo finito are, undoubtedly, its readability, its characteristic as an epoch-making document, and, last but not least, the fact that it constitutes a sort of testament to the idealism of some intellectuals who would later subscribe to Italy’s nationalist and Fascist movements. Papini returned to fiction periodically, in particular with the complex allegorical narrative of Gog (1933) and its sequel Il libro nero: nuovo diario di Gog (The Black Book: Gog’s New Diary, 1951), which tell, in the form of the diary, the adventures, musings, and dreams of the titular character—Gog is short for Goggins—a self-made

GIOVANNI PAPINI American millionaire who eventually learns the importance of simple human values. However, the bulk of Papini’s production falls within the genre of essayistic writing. He remained an unremitting polemical voice who did not shy away from taking positions against such notable intellectuals as Benedetto Croce. In the 1910s Papini began to collect his essays in a series of volumes that includes Ventiquattro cervelli: saggi non critici (Four and Twenty Minds, 1913), Stroncature (Pannings, 1916), Testimonianze (Testimonies, 1918), and Gli operai della vigna (Laborers of the Vineyard, 1929). Couched in his characteristic narrative style, Papini’s essays are very subjective, at times poetic, and never academic, and they deal with artists, writers, and philosophers such as Leon Battista Alberti, Michelangelo, Spencer, Hegel, and Kwang-tse. In 1919 Papini converted to Roman Catholicism. His conversion resulted in Storia di Cristo (The Story of Christ, 1921), a vivid biography that became an international best seller in 1923, when it was translated into English in two different versions for the British and American markets. A number of religious works followed, including Pane e vino (Bread and Wine, 1926), a volume of religious poetry, the biography Sant’Agostino (St. Augustine, 1926), Lettere agli uomini di Celestino VI (The Letters of Pope Celestine VI to All Mankind, 1946) and Il diavolo: appunti per una futura diabologia (The Devil: Notes for a Future Diabology, 1953), in which he reaffirmed his strong Catholic commitment, claiming that this was the first book entirely dedicated the devil written by a Christian in the light of the deepest meaning of Christianity. Worth noting on the issue of religion is an article that Papini had published in Lacerba in 1913, entitled ‘‘Gesu` peccatore’’ (Jesus, a Sinner), suggesting that Christ was homosexual, an article that brought against him a blasphemy suit. During the Fascist period, Papini became an official writer for the party because his conservative attitude in religious and political matters met with the approval of the regime. In 1935, he was named chair of Italian literature at the University of Bologna, and in 1937 he became a member of the Fascist Accademia d’Italia. In the same year he also became president of the Istituto per gli studi sul Rinascimento and the director of the review La Rinascita. Papini eulogized Fascist ideology in his Italia mia (My Italy, 1939), a work that marks his undisputed alignment with Fascist foreign policy at a time when the implementation of the 1938 Racial Laws and the Rome-Berlin Axis had caused

Mussolini to lose many of his earlier supporters. After the war, however, ‘‘his Italy’’ did not forget his political past nor, perhaps most importantly, forgive him for having traded in the iconoclastic attacks of his youth for the conformism of his later years. Although affected by a severe illness, Papini continued to pursue his literary interests by dictating his texts to one of his secretaries. None of his later works, however, equal the originality of the writings of his youth. Papini has been called a ‘‘cultural activist,’’ and indeed his prose reflects the controversies that characterized his entire life. He always tried at all costs to shock the reader, and his strong faith in human beings and his constant vindication of the possibilities of each individual continue to win him readers to this day.

Biography Giovanni Papini was born in Florence on February 9, 1881, to lower-middle-class parents, Luigi, a former Garibaldino, and Erminia Cardini. Almost entirely self-educated, he never received an official university degree, and his highest level of formal education was a teaching certificate. He founded Leonardo with Prezzolini, 1903, and met William James and Henri Bergson, who greatly influenced his early works, 1905. Papini married Giacinta Giovagnoli, 1907; the couple had two daughters, Viola and Gioconda. He founded Lacerba with Ardengo Soffici, 1913. He made an official return to Catholicism, marked by the start of the composition of Vita di Cristo, 1919. Papini was appointed a member of the Accademia d’Italia, 1937. He was accepted in the third order of Franciscan friars with the name of Fra’ Bonaventura, 1943, and resided in the convent of La Verna until the summer of 1944. In later years, he had an illness that eventually paralyzed his hands and made him blind and unable to speak. Papini died in Florence on 8 July 1956. DANIELA ORLANDI Selected Works Fiction Tragico quotidiano, 1903. Il pilota cieco, 1907. Parole e sangue, 1912. Un uomo finito, 1913; as A Man—Finished, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1924; as The Failure, translated by Virginia Pope, 1924. Buffonate, 1914. Gog, 1931; as Gog, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1931.

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GIOVANNI PAPINI Racconti di gioventu`, 1943. Il libro nero: nuovo diario di Gog, 1951. Concerto fantastico: 110 racconti, capricci, divertimenti, ritratti, 1954. Strane storie, 1954. La seconda nascita, 1958.

Poetry ‘‘Cento pagine di poesia,’’ 1915. ‘‘Opera prima,’’ 1917. ‘‘Giorni di festa,’’ 1919. ‘‘Pane e vino,’’ 1926.

Essays Il crepuscolo dei filosofi, 1906. L’altra meta: saggio di filosofia mefistofelica, 1911. Pragmatismo, 1911. Ventiquattro cervelli: saggi non critici, 1913; as Four and Twenty Minds, translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, 1922. Il mio futurismo, 1914. Stroncature, 1916. Testimonianze, 1918. L’uomo Carducci, 1918. L’esperienza futurista, 1919. Storia di Cristo, 1921; as The Story of Christ, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1923; as Life of Christ, translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, 1923. Dizionario dell’omo selvatico, 1923. Sant’Agostino, 1926; as Saint Augustine, translated by Mary Prichard Agnetti, 1930. Gli operai nella vigna, 1929; as The Laborers in the Vineyard, translated by Alice Curtayne, 1930. Eresie letterarie, 1932. Ritratti stranieri, 1932. Ritratti italiani, 1932. Firenze, 1932. Dante vivo, 1933. Storia della letteratura italiana, 1937. Italia mia, 1939. Lettere agli uomini di Celestino VI, 1946; as The Letters of Pope Celestine VI to All Mankind, translated by Loretta Murnane, 1948. Passato remoto, 1948. Il diavolo: appunti per una futura diabologia, 1953; as The Devil: Notes for a Future Diabology, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1955. Il giudizio universale, 1957. Schegge, 1971. Rapporto sugli uomini, 1977.

Letters Storia di un’amicizia (with Giovanni Prezzolini), 2 vols., 1966–1968. Le ombre di Parnaso (with Pietro Pancrazi), edited by Silvio Ramat, 1973. Lettere domestiche agli amici della Valtiberina, 1909–1951, edited by Carlo Bo, 1983. Carteggio, 1911–1954 (with Antonio Baldini), edited by Marta Bruscia, 1984. Carteggio, 1904–1925 (with Armando Spadini), edited by Pasqualina Spadini Debenedetti and Vanni Scheiwiller, 1984. Carteggio, 1914–1941 (with Attilio Vallecchi), edited by Mario Gozzini, 1985. Carteggio (with Ardengo Soffici), edited by Mario Richter, 3 vols., 1991–2002.

Other Diario, 1962.

Further Reading Apollonio, Mario, Papini, Padua: CEDAM, 1944. Di Base, Carmine, Giovanni Papini: l’anima intera, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1999. Di Felice, Francesco, Itinerario di una conversione, Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993. Fabbroni, Fulvio, Demiurgo impossibile, Florence: Atheneum, 1991. Fantino, Giuseppe, Saggio su Papini, Milan: Editrice Italia Letteraria, 1981. Gentili, Sandro (editor), Giovanni Papini nel centenario della nascita, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1983. Invitto, Giovanni, Un contrasto novecentesco: Giovanni Papini e la filosofia, Lecce: Milella, 1984. Isnenghi, Mario, Papini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Lovreglio, Janvier, Une odysse´e intellectuelle entre Dieu et Satan: Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), 4 vols., Paris: ´ ditions P. Lethielleux, 1973–1975. E Richter, Mario, Papini e Soffici: mezzo secolo di vita italiana (1903–1956), Florence: Le Lettere, 2005. Ridolfi, Roberto, Vita di Giovanni Papini, Milan: Mondadori, 1957. Vannicelli, Andrea, La tentazione del racconto: le novelle del primo Papini tra Simbolismo e Futurismo, 1894–1914, Florence: Cesati, 2004.

GIUSEPPE PARINI (1729–1799) Giuseppe Parini’s work belongs to the cosmopolitan Lombardian literary culture of the second half of the eighteeenth century. An intellectual of diverse 1348

interests, an acute observer of the social reality in which he moved, Parini was substantially an author writing in a time of transition. Any attempt to place

GIUSEPPE PARINI him within a rigid literary typology would therefore be doomed to failure. Throughout his long career he experimented with a variety of poetic genres. His own cultural education followed a tortuous line, always balanced between a superficial interest in the French Enlightenment and an enduring Arcadian or neoclassical proclivity. Parini was in effect a moderate reformist intellectual, close to the position of the physiocrats in favoring reform of the decrepit Lombard society that would have no violent repercussions. He remained well out of the revolutionary process that overtook France and fell back on conservative and anti-Napoleonic positions, thus following the same political evolution as many other Italian writers and intellectuals. Living in Lombardy under Maria Theresa of Hapsburg obviously had its advantages: Parini felt part of the innovations taking place in the greatest transnational empire in Europe. The enlightened absolutism of the empress conceded ample space to the literary ambitions of the people of Milan, one of the liveliest, culturally and economically speaking, cities in Italy at that time. Parini was able to overcome the traditional classical culture acquired during his time as a seminary student and to reconcile his position as a man of the Church (he became a priest in 1754) with his place in gallant Milanese life. Indeed, he became the (almost always polemic) bard of Milanese social life. His first poetic production was set for the most part in the Accademie, where Milanese society often gathered. Parini thus placed himself in opposition to more radical groups, for example, the Illuminists of the periodical Il Caffe` (particularly Cesare Beccaria and Pietro and Alessandro Verri) or Lodovico Antonio Muratori. He was an intellectual who looked at the past with nostalgia, yet without falling into academic pedantry. Many of his works, drawing on the most diverse of sources, introduced more modern and advanced elements into a neoclassical aesthetic that tended to emphasize formal decoration and that drew on a traditional mythological repertoire. The moderate classicism of Parini was not an archeological reexhumation of mythic materials. On the contrary, he returned to myth and ancient poetry to respond to concrete and current problems. In his youthful work, Alcune poesie di Ripano Eupilino (A Few Poems by Ripano Eupilino, 1752), a collection of 94 poems in different genres, divided into comic and serious, the tendency toward pastiche was already notable. Parini mixed Petrarchism with Platonism; pastoral themes were taken from Virgil, Tibullus, Theocritus, and Jacopo

Sannazaro; Catullus and Horace were juxtaposed to the Petrarch of the Canzoniere. This first collection already demonstrated Parini’s stylistic ability. The temperament of the moralist that would emerge in his later works was not yet present, and he showed his talent as a satirist in the tradition of Luigi Pulci and Il Burchiello. This talent became refined on closer contact with the golden, yet fatuous aristocracy of Milan, observed directly in the years after 1754, which he spent in the house of the noble Serbelloni family. But the verve for polemic was also demonstrated in the writer’s involvement with the Accademia dei Trasformati when he launched a ferocious literary polemic against the pedantic Alessandro Bandiera (1699–ca. 1770), an orthodox imitator of Boccaccio, and Paolo Onofrio Branda (1710–1776), a passionate Tuscan purist who did not appreciate the Milanese dialect. It was on this occasion that Parini matured his theoretical positions and developed his own conception of poetry, which he considered, in the tradition of Horace, to be an artistic instrument for both enjoyment and instruction. He opposed any form of slavish imitation of classic models; in the name of the originality of poetic creation he proudly affirmed the literary dignity of the Milanese dialect. Poetry, Parini argued, must aim for the truth: Underneath its fantastic disguises its recourse to fairy tale and myth, it must contain a profound civic value. The poet could not therefore isolate himself from the society in which he lived. He must act as the people’s critical conscience, denouncing vice and guiding his readers toward a love for virtue. In this sense, Parini prepared the way for Alessandro Manzoni. These convictions were developed in a collection of essays in prose, in which Parini lashed out pitilessly against Milanese society. His most famous composition is Dialogo sopra la nobilta` (Dialogue over the Nobility, 1757), a work vaguely similar in tone to Voltaire, in which Parini imagined the meeting of the spirit of a nobleman and a poet in a tomb. They talk about the degeneration of the nobility and finally condemn it for having become a parasitical social group that has abandoned its ancient warrior-like virtues. In this as in other works, Parini made no concession to revolutionary positions. Parini, not being Voltaire, confessed his desire to morally restore the aristocracy so that the nobility could once more become the guide of society. Parini’s sense of equality was that of a humanist who defends the dignity of humankind but cannot completely abandon ancient social prejudices. His poetic compositions are strongly polemic, 1349

GIUSEPPE PARINI contrasting the decadence of civic customs to the uncontaminated purity of the countryside, in which it was still possible to live in harmony with nature in the style of Rousseau. In the serenity of the countryside the poet also found the opportunity to dedicate himself to intellectual activities. In the ode in septenary verses ‘‘La vita rustica’’ (Rustic Life, 1757– 1758), as in that entitled ‘‘La salubrita` dell’aria’’ (Healthiness of Air, 1759), both published in Odi (Odes, 1791), the contrast between the city and the country is graphic: To the crisp air and enchanted landscapes of the woods, he opposed the filth of Milan, with its gray and garbage-strewn streets and the comings and goings of a humanity hysterically striving for economic wealth. The escape to the serene space of the countryside remained, however, just an interlude: In truth, Parini could not live without the city, above all without the grotesque figures that crowded their aristocratic and bourgeois quarters. These figures became poetic material and inspiration for his best satirical works. At first they appear in such early works as the amusing Discorso sopra le caricature (Discourse on Caricatures, 1759), which present types, like the hypocritical and fatuous ladies, later ridiculed in Il giorno (The Day, 1763–1801), Parini’s most popular mock-heroic poem. Parini now discovered the attraction of irony. From this time forward, he used irony as a weapon at the service of his ethical anxiety to denounce the vices of the privileged social classes. The apparent celebration of the pomp of the nobility was meant to expose the fatuity of a social class on a downward slope, busily indulging in pointless amusements. The new mercantile bourgeois were not safe from criticism, either, as Parini favored agriculture rather than commerce and spoke about certain vulgar, mercantile fashions, such as that of the castrati, which flourished in Milan in the eighteenth century. He wrote against the barbaric practise of castration, which served to make impresarios and unscrupulous men rich. Indeed, the ode ‘‘La musica’’ (Music), also published in Odi, contributed to the disappearance of the musical phenomenon. His campaign against castration serves as another important example of how Parini took a position regarding current problems and used poetry as a vehicle to expound his ethical precepts. His morally charged poetry conformed to the principles presented in his Discorso sopra la poesia (Discourse on Poetry, 1804), written in 1761 and read at the Accademia dei Trasformati. One of Parini’s most significant reflections on the function of poetry in modern society, it articulates a position that coincided with the Enlightenment precept of imitating nature, 1350

things, and sentiments. Poetry should represent reality in such a way as to give the reader enjoyment without abandoning the pursuit for truth and moral teachings. The theoretical presuppositions at the base of Il giorno were extremely mature. Yet Parini continued to experiment, writing plays during the same period and odes on mythological subjects, occasionally with revealing poetical results. This was the case with the ode ‘‘La caduta’’ (The Fall, 1786), in which seven-syllable and hendecasyllabic verses alternate and in which the poet proudly saved his own dignity by refusing to let the subjects he wrote about offer suggestions that would show them in a more favorable light. It was in this latter phase of his work that Parini came closer to neoclassical subjects and gradually abandoned the subjects of social and public debate. Parini had felt a growing disenchantment at the defeat of his reformist ideals, especially after the death of Maria Theresa. In the new world of violent social discomfort and transformation, the poet withdrew into himself or returned to the gallant-heroic line of pure evasion. He composed poems such as the odi galanti in which he put aside the mask of critic to exalt the sensuality that still animated his old age. In the ode ‘‘Il pericolo’’ (Danger, 1789), for example, he told of a meeting with a Venetian noblewoman from whom he felt an understandable sensual attraction. These poems challenge the false picture of a poet strongly involved in satirizing men’s vices or even announcing the advent of a new society in which bourgeois values triumphed over those of the aristocracy. Instead, they confirm that even in the last years of his life, Parini remained a poet marked by profound contradictions. Significantly, the work that closed his career was the anthem to art entitled ‘‘Alla musa’’ (To the Muse, 1796), in which the poet offered a portrait of himself as man following the religion of beauty, a poet who, in the musicality of his multimetric verse, in his satirical witticisms, and in the rounded portraits of his characters, sought to create a poetic world full of attraction and desire.

Biography Giuseppe Parini was born on 23 May 1729 in Bosisio (Como) in Brianza. After his early studies, he moved to Milan to live with his aunt Anna Maria, 1739; upon her death, he received a yearly income as an inheritance on the condition that he should become a priest, 1740. He was employed as a tutor in the household of Duke Gabrio Serbelloni, 1752, and became a member of the Accademia dei

GIUSEPPE PARINI Trasformati, 1753. He was ordained as a priest, 1754. His father died, 1757, and his mother died, 1762. Parini refused an appointment at the University of Parma and began an intensive activity for the newspaper La gazzetta di Milano, 1766. He was appointed a professor at the Palatine schools, 1769, and later opened his lessons to students from the Academia di Belle Arti. He was received at the Arcadia Academy in Rome, 1777. He was called on to fulfill a secondary political role while Milan was occupied by the French troops, 1796. Parini died in Milan on 28 April 1799. ALFREDO SGROI Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Francesco Reina, 5 vols., Milan: Stamperia del Genio Tipografico, 1801–1804. Prose, edited by Egidio Bellorini, Bari: Laternza, 1915. Poesie, edited by Egidio Bellorini, Bari: Laterza, 1925. Tutte le opere edite e inedite di Giuseppe Parini, edited by Guido Mazzoni, Florence: Barbera, 1925. Opere, edited by Ettore Bonora, Milan: Mursia, 1967. Prose, 2 vols., edited by Silvia Morgana and Paolo Bertesaghi, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Alcune poesie di Ripano Eupilino,’’ 1752. ‘‘Il mattino,’’ 1763. ‘‘Il mezzogiorno,’’ 1765. ‘‘Odi,’’ 1791. ‘‘Il giorno,’’ edited by Francesco Reina, 1801; as The Day: Morning, Midday, Evening, Night, translated by Herbert M. Bower, 1927.

Essays Dialogo sopra la nobilta`, 1757. Discorso sopra le caricature, 1759. Discorso sopra la poesia, 1804.

Further Reading Annoni, Carlo, La poesia di Parini e la citta` secolare, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002. Antonelli, Sergio, Giuseppe Parini, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Badesi, Licia, Rivisitando la vita di Giuseppe Parini, Rimini: Luise`, 1999. Barbarisi, Gennaro, et al. (editors), L’amabil rito: societa` e cultura nella Milano di Parini, Milan: Cisalpino, 2000. Bonora, Ettore, Parini e altro Settecento. Fra Classicismo e Illuminismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982. Calori, Carlo, Parini, Zanella, Turoldo, sacerdoti poeti, Milan: L’informatore di Chioso, 1993. Carnazzi, Giulio (editor), L’Ambrosiana e Parini: manoscritti e documenti sulla cultura milanese del Settecento, Bologna: Cisalpino, 1999.

Carnazzi, Giulio, Forse d’amaro fiel: Parini primo e satirico, Milan: LED, 2005. Gibellini, Pietro, L’Adda ha buona voce. Studi sulla letteratura lombarda dal Sette al Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Isella, Dante, Le carte mescolate: esperienze di filologia d’autore, Padua: Liviana, 1987. Jonard, Norbert, Introduzione a Parini, Bari: Laterza, 1988. Martinelli, Bortolo, Carlo Annoni, and Giuseppe Langella (eds.), Le buone dottrine e le buone lettere: Brescia per il bicentenario della morte di Giuseppe Parini, 17–19 novembre 1999, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2001. Mezzanzanica, Massimo, Invito alla lettura di Giuseppe Parini, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Petronio, Giuseppe, Parini e l’illuminismo lombardo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961. Savarese, Gennaro, Iconologia pariniana: ricerche sulla poetica del figurativo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Savoca, Giuseppe, Parini e la poesia arcadica, Bari: Laterza, 1974. Spongano, Raffaele, La poetica del sensismo e la poesia del Parini, Messina and Milan: Principato, 1933.

IL GIORNO (1763–1801) Mock-Heroic Poem by Giuseppe Parini

Il giorno (The Day) is unanimously considered Giuseppe Parini’s masterpiece and was considered so by his contemporaries, beginning with Ugo Foscolo, for whom this loose, hendecasyllabic poem announced a new epoch. The poem is a complex work that offers a portrait of eighteenth-century Lombardian society. The protagonist is a giovin signore (young nobleman) who represents the conditions of his social class. Around him revolves a complete group of social subjects. He does not have a defined identity but rather serves a paradigmatic function. For this reason, the poem cannot be reduced to a mere satirical dimension but must be considered as a polyphonic work, rich in subjects and diverse stylistic registers, from bitter irony to the grotesque, and including invective, moral fable, and a humor that seems to anticipate Luigi Pirandello in its mixture of pleasantry and parodic sarcasm. 1351

GIUSEPPE PARINI The work describes a typical day of an aristocrat: It begins with his waking up, a trip to the toilette and other daily rituals of the society gallant, followed by erotic encounters, sumptuous dinners, evening revelries, and superficial readings. Irony is ever-present in the work: The poet used hyperbole and a language that rises in reverse proportion to the fatuousness of the subjects under discussion. This serves to create a strident dissonance, which is the strength of Parini’s satire. The fatuous aristocrat who adopts all the poses of a dandy ante litteram is compared to a pagan god. The poet ironically identifies this social class as a razza di dei (race of gods) made up of subjects who, for their presumed superiority, disdain the activities of the common people who support their existence. The mythological references and Parini’s virtuosity create an aura of apparent epic solemnity around the character. What escaped the poet was that the decline of the aristocracy was made irreversible by the rise of a new bourgeois class who were influenced by the Enlightenment culture of rationality. The aristocracy portrayed in the poem gives off an odor of death: It is a class without ethical principles. The institution of the family has been destroyed by the ‘‘ladies’ man,’’ a social claim made through the mythological fable of Amor and Hymen, the first part and central node of Il mattino (Morning, 1763). The two protagonists, Venus’s children, represent matrimony (Hymen) and love (Amor) and are condemned to live separately. In Il mezzogiorno (Midday, 1765), Parini sketched the portrait of the lady and made the seductive lover of the protagonist just as much of a narcissist. The erotic theme assumes a more concrete form, but it remains in the background. In the foreground are the poet’s bitter comments regarding the nonsensical prejudices of class. The first parts of the poem, which were published anonymously, show a substantial lack of unity, as the theme and the form are fragmentary. It is a work marked by a strong internal tension only partially softened by the incessant work of revision, which resulted in a rich variety of enjambments, hyperbatons, inversions, asyndetons, and even in the constant choice of the hendecasyllable. The poet intervened to comment on the narrated facts and to express his moral resentment in the last two parts of the work, Il vespro (Evening, 1801) and La notte (Night, 1801) published

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posthumously by Francesco Reina in the first complete edition of Parini’s work. The compositions of these last sections are of uncertain date, although the former was probably written between 1770 and 1780 and the latter between 1792 and 1796. They add a new dimension to the work by offering a more realistic and corrosive representation of the boredom behind the aristocrats’ anxious search for divertissement. The nobility could not really escape from its destiny, and so the poet preferred not to complete the work, conscious that his hopes for their redemption were destined to be defeated and silenced. ALFREDO SGROI Editions First edition: Il mattino, Milan: Agnelli, 1763 (part one); Il mezzogiorno, Milan: Galeazzi, 1765 (part two); Il Giorno, in Opere, 1, edited by Francesco Reina, Milan: Stamperia del Genio Tipografico, 1801 (first complete edition). Critical editions: Il giorno, edited by Raffaele Amaturo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966; Il giorno, edited by Dante Isella, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1969; Giorno, edited by Ettore Bonora, Milan: Rusconi, 1984. Translations: The Day: Morning, Midday, Evening, Night: A Poem, translated by Herbert Morris Bower, London: Routledge, 1927.

Further Reading Accade Bobbio, Aurelia, Storia del Giorno, Rome: Elia, 1974. Amaturo, Raffaele, Congetture sulla Notte del Parini: in appendice i manoscritti ambrosiani criticamente ordinati, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Barbarisi, Gennaro, and Edoardo Esposito (eds.), Interpretazioni e letture del Giorno: Gargnano del Garda, 2–4 ottobre 1997, Bologna: Cisalpino, 1998. Carducci, Giosue`, Storia del ‘‘Giorno’’ di Giuseppe Parini, Bolgona: Zanichelli, 1892. De Tommaso, Piero, Il giorno e l’ideologia agraria del Parini, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1983. Foscolo, Ugo, Saggi di letteratua italiana (1818), edited by Carlo Foligno, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Isella, Dante, I lombardi in rivolta, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Isella, Dante, L’officina della Notte e altri studi pariniani, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1968. Leopratti, Roberto, Per dar luogo alla notte, Florence: Le Lettere, 1990. Romagnoli, Sergio, La buona compagnia. Studi di letteratura italiana del Settecento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1983. Tizi, Marco, La lingua del Giorno e altri studi, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1997.

GOFFREDO PARISE

GOFFREDO PARISE (1929–1986) Parise’s narrative debut, Il ragazzo morto e le comete (The Dead Boy and the Comets, 1951), went relatively unnoticed, but a few reviews were sufficient to alert critics to keep their eyes on a most unconventional and nonconformist writer emerging from the midst of the neo-Realistic trends in cinema and literature. Parise’s unorthodox expressionistic writing, which some considered too bold and scandalous, was a reaction to what he considered to be the repetitious and even superficial political narratives of neo-Realism. In his first two novels, Il ragazzo morto e le comete and La grande vacanza (The Big Vacation, 1953), Parise introduced the first of a series of eccentric characters who would return in later works. Here we also find central themes and motifs that best exemplify Parise’s fiction: puberty, autobiographical allusions, initiation into eros and adulthood, a nostalgic return to the years of adolescence, social and religious hypocrisies, oneirism, traumatic experiences, satire of provincialism, violence, master–slave relationships, and death. From his earliest works, it became evident that Parise wrote driven by his instincts and was not afraid of being transgressive in his treatment of sex, religion, and politics. Moreover, his descriptive style ranged from precise and highly realistic to impressionistic. Il ragazzo morto e le comete ends with the death of a 15-year-old boy who had been befriended by Fiore. In this tragic and surreal story, the two boys converse with dead people who wander around until it is time for them to disappear forever. It is a strange story indeed about the conflicts of life and death and about people who are alive and yet seem to be dead, just as there are those who are dead and who continue to be alive. It is also a story in which Parise revealed his feelings toward God, here defined as a splendid and mysterious comet that came and went after having completed its orbit. With La grande vacanza and Il prete bello (Don Gastone and the Ladies, 1954), readers began to appreciate the author’s originality in his treatment of unusual characters, bizarre relationships, scandals, bigotry, and moral corrosion, which were set specifically in a stagnant and familiar provincial ambience. Most of Parise’s stories are set around

his native city of Vicenza and in the Veneto region. Combining first- and third-person accounts of events and descriptions, Parise was both humorous and sarcastic toward the hypocrisy of petty bourgeois characters who were often depicted as repulsive figures or as mere caricatures. In La grande vacanza, a 16-year-old boy, Claudio, accompanies his grandmother on vacation in the Venetian hills. Claudio encounters several grotesque characters who lead the narration into a series of digressions and flashbacks, especially about the war and postwar experiences. The ‘‘big vacation’’ ends with the grandmother’s death and with Claudio feeling depressed as a result of his encounters and of his awareness of having lost his adolescence (his innocence). With Il prete bello, Parise received his first major critical attention. This relatively risque´ novel confirms the author’s emphasis on subtle satire against bigotry, the middle class, religious repressiveness, and phony social conventions. A small community is affected by the arrival of a young Fascist priest, Don Gastone, and an attractive promiscuous woman, Fedora, who thrives on seducing and destroying men—including the priest, with whom she has a child. Parise’s criticism, written into a number of comical scenes, was directed against the Catholic Church, Fascists, and bourgeois families, all involved in hypocrisy, sex, and social scandals. The story ends with the deaths of the priest and of a young boy, called Cena, whom the narrator Sergio has befriended. Parise was a master in depicting men and women as marionettes, animals, insects, or comic book characters. Moreover, the powerful images of conflict between men and women and the embodiment of man-devouring woman present in Il prete bello returned and were reinforced in subsequent works such as L’assoluto naturale (The Natural Absolute, 1967) and in the screenplay L’ape regina (The Queen Bee), written in 1961 for the director Marco Ferreri. In the 1960s, in addition to his script-writing activities, Parise began his frequent travels around the world on behalf of major newspapers and weekly magazines such as Il corriere della sera and L’espresso. His superb sociopolitical reportages as a war correspondent in Vietnam and 1353

GOFFREDO PARISE Cambodia, as well as his travel experiences in China, Biafra, the United States, and Japan, appeared in beautifully illustrated texts such as Cara Cina (Dear China, 1966), Biafra (1968), and New York (1977). Parise was an excellent observer of the many changes that Italian society was undergoing after World War II. As the literary trend of Letteratura e Industria (Literature and Industry) was coming to an end, he wrote his most famous novel, Il padrone (The Boss, 1965). This is one of the most original and disturbing criticisms of modern alienation linked to neo-capitalism and industrialization. Rather than discussing, for example, in the fashion of Ottiero Ottieri and Paolo Volponi, assembly lines, strikes, or the exploitation and disillusionment of poor workers who had originally looked at industrialization as a chance to be part of progress, Parise chose to illustrate the gradual but complete submission by a worker (unnamed) to his ‘‘boss’’ (Dr. Max). In this mordantly ironic and grotesque presentation of psychological conditioning, conformism, and total loss of identity Parise mixed Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudian notions to portray different types of master–slave relationships in a society that appears to embrace industrialization and materialism like a new religion. The worker, for example, is forced to have unnecessary injections every day. The various absurdities of this story are constantly accentuated by the names of the main characters like Pippo, Pluto, Urania, Minnie, and Lotar, all echoing comic book and Disney characters. Other characters like Max (an allusion to Karl Marx) and Dr. Diabete (an allusion to diabetes as a slow consuming sickness) carry ironic names that can be linked to real people in Parise’s life. In the final and terrifying scene of the story we find the unnamed worker, who has been coerced by his boss’s wife to marry Zilietta, a girl with Down syndrome, waiting for the birth of his physically and mentally handicapped child. He is happy because his child will be handicapped at birth and will not have to undergo the humiliating experience of subjugation. With the publication of Sillabario n. 1 (Abecedary, 1972), followed ten years later by Sillabario n. 2 (Solitudes, 1982), the author confirmed his exceptional talent in creating minimalist narrations that captured the essence of life in brief but significant moments. Parise had originally planned to write a short story for each letter of the alphabet, but the project was left unfinished. Volume I goes from the letter ‘‘A’’ (Amore, love) to ‘‘F’’ (Famiglia, family), and Volume II from ‘‘F’’ (Felicita`, happiness) 1354

to S (Solitudine, solitude). This was a new Parise who was now focusing on common, daily, simple, but certainly not insignificant moments in people’s lives. The brief stories deal mainly with spontaneous emotions, sentiments, simple perceptions, memories, and sensations, all written in lyrical fashion, like long poems in prose form. The author stopped at the letter S, claiming that suddenly his lyrical voice and his passion for life had left him, and consequently it was time to stop writing. Parise’s most autobiographical and sexually explicit narrative was published postumously: L’odore del sangue (The Smell of Blood, 1999). L’odore del sangue was written and left unfinished in 1979, shortly after he suffered his first heart attack. The story portrays a morbid jealousy that seizes Filippo, a psychoanalyst in his fifties, who has found a younger lover, Paloma. Filippo is obsessed with the lovemaking of his wife Silvia who has also found a younger lover, Stefano. The novel is about marital problems, sickness, visions, obsessions and sadomasochism, employing extremely erotic scenes that involve Filippo as he often asks his wife to describe in graphic detail her lovemaking with Stefano, in order to confirm that his visions are correct as he imagines their animalistic sexuality. Parise’s familiar descriptions of scenes of adolescence, sexuality, maturing, and of a growing awareness of death are at the center of the narration. And once again we see how the descriptions at times appear to have been filtered through a distorting camera lens in order to produce oneiric, psychoanalytical, and surreal effects. It is an art form that Parise mastered during his experiments with the language and techniques of cinematography in his days of script writing. In 2003, Mario Martone adapted Parise’s novel for the silver screen with the title of L’odore del sangue, odore del sesso. After Parise’s death some critics wondered if the two volumes of Sillabario, by intending to describe from A to Z a series of significant moments, were also meant to put some order in his vision of a chaotic life. The collections are revealing both artistically and biographically, and it is not surprising that Silvio Perrella’s Fino a Salgare`da (2003) carefully reconstructs the author’s life in relation to his work, through specific references to several of the short stories.

Biography Goffredo Parise was born in Vicenza, 8 December 1929, the son of Ida Wanda Bertoli and an

GOFFREDO PARISE unknown father. He was raised mainly by his grandparents. At an early age, he developed a love-hate relationship with his mother and with women in general. In 1937, his mother married Osvaldo Parise. In 1943, Goffredo adopted his stepfather’s last name. In 1945, he registered at the University of Padua but never finished his degree. Parise moved to Venice in 1948 to pursue his passion for writing. In 1952, he moved to Milan where he began his career as journalist. In 1957, he married Maria Costanza Sperotti in Venice; the writer and good friend Giovanni Commisso was his best man. In 1961, Parise moved to Rome and began writing for filmmakers such as Marco Ferreri, Mauro Bolognini, and Federico Fellini. He became a close friend of important writers such as Elsa Morante, Alberto Moravia, Carlo Emilio Gadda, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1963, Parise met the painter Giosetta Fioroni and lived with her from 1964, after separating from his wife. In 1964, he fell in love with Omaira Rorato; she would live with Parise and Fioroni from 1966 until the author’s death. The publication of Il padrone in 1965, with which he won the Premio Viareggio, gave Parise wide recognition from critics and fellow writers. In 1968, his trips abroad as a reporter became more frequent. In 1970, he bought a house in Salgareda, which after his death would become the center for his archives. In 1975, he visited New York for the second time but did not change his negative views of the metropolis formulated during his first visit in 1961. In 1979, Parise suffered his first heart attack. In 1981, he underwent a quadruple bypass. In 1982, he was awarded the Premio Strega for the second volume of Sillabario. In 1986, he received an honorary degree from the University of Padua. Parise died on 31 August 1986 in the hospital in Treviso. ROCCO CAPOZZI Selected Works Collections Opere, 2 volumes, edited by Bruno Callegher and Mauro Portello, Milan: Mondadori, 1987. Poesie, introduced by Silvio Perrella, Milan: Rizzoli, 1998.

Fiction Il ragazzo morto e le comete, 1951; as The Dead Boy and the Comets, translated by Marianne Ceconi, 1953. La grande vacanza, 1953. Il prete bello, 1954, as Don Gastone and the Ladies, translated by Stuart Hood, 1955. Il fidanzamento, 1956. Amore e fervore, 1959.

Il padrone, 1965; as The Boss, translated by William Weaver, 1966. L’assoluto naturale, 1967. Atti impuri, 1969. Il crematotrio di Vienna, 1969. Sillabario n. 1, 1972; as Abecedary, translated by James Marcus, 1990. L’odore del sangue, 1979; as The Smell of Blood, translated by John Shepley, 2003. Sillabario n. 2, 1982; as Solitudes: Short Stories, translated by Isabel Quigly, 1984. Sillibari, 1984.

Theater La moglie a cavallo, 1960.

Screenplays La donna cannone, 1961. L’ape regina, 1962.

Essays and reporting Gli americani a Vicenza, 1966. Cara Cina, 1966. Due, tre cose sul Vietnam, 1967. Biafra, 1968. Guerre politiche: Vietnam, Biafra, Laos, Cile, 1976. New York, 1977. L’eleganza e` frigida (reportage on Japan), 1982. Artisti, 1984. Veneto barbaro di muschi e nebbie, 1987. Odore d’America, 1990. Verba volant, 1998. Lontano (newspaper articles collected by Silvio Perrella), 2002.

Further Reading Altaracocca, Claudio, Parise, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Crotti, Ilaria, Parise, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Crotti, Ilaria, Tre voci sospette: Buzzati, Piovene, Parise, Milan: Mursia, 1994. Folena, Gianfranco, Tre Narratori: Calvino, Levi, Parise, Milan: Liviana, 1989. Grossi, Paolo (editor), Les illuminations d’un e´crivain. Influences et recre´ations dans l’oeuvre de Goffredo Parise, Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2000. Guglielmi, Angelo, ‘‘Dal Padrone al Ragazzo morto,’’ Il Verri, 21 (April 1966), 151–156. La Capria, Raffaele, Caro Goffredo, Milan: Minimum Fax, 2005. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Parise: Il Crematorio di Vienna,’’ Il corriere della sera, 25 January 1970, 3. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Parise. Il ragazzo morto e le comete,’’ Il corriere della sera, 14 November 1953, 3. Naldini, Nico, Il solo fratello: Ritratto di G. Parise, Milan: Rosellina Archinto, 1989. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura del benessere, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973. Perrella, Silvio, Fino a Salgare`da: la scrittura nomade di Parise, Milan: Rizzoli, 2003. Petroni, Paolo, Invito alla lettura di Parise, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, ‘‘Parise,’’ in I contemporanei, 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1976.

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SILLABARI, 1984 Short Stories by Goffredo Parise

Parise’s inborn narrative skills are widely illustrated throughout two volumes of short stories, Sillabario n. 1 (Abecedary, 1972) and Sillabario n. 2 (Solitudes, 1982), which in 1984 appeared in one volume simply as Sillabari. The author’s original plan was to use every letter of the alphabet and to write one or several stories of each letter that would inspire him. However, as Parise stated in his preface to Sillabario n. 2, poetry suddenly abandoned him, and he decided to stop at the letter S with the word Solitudine (Solitude). Indeed, a reading of these stories attests that they were inspired by the author’s inner feelings and not by a mechanical impulse, as a literary project. The opening story of Sillabario n. 1, entitled Amore (Love), first appeared in Il corriere della sera in January 1971; the remaining tales were completed by August 1972. They were written during a period when Parise was denouncing the much-talkedabout ideological commitment of leftist contemporary writers and critics; instead, his interest lay in writing about matters of the heart. Much of his fiction, which often unfolds around his native Vicenza, results in exemplary tales of psychological and moral behavior. In Sillabari, the amount of content under each letter varies. For example, in Sillabario n. 1, made of 22 stories, under the letter ‘‘A’’ we find Amore, Amicizia, Affetto, Anima, Allegria, and Antipatia (Love, Friendship, Affection, Soul, Cheerfulness, Dislike); under B there are Bacio, Bambino, Bellezza, and Bonta` (Kiss, Child, Beauty, Goodness); and under the final letter of this volume, which is F, just Famiglia (Family). Sillabario n. 2, made of 32 stories, begins with Felicita`, Fascino, and Fame (Happiness, Fascination, Hunger) and ends with Sesso, Simpatia, Sogno, and Solitudine (Sex, Liking, Dream, Solitude). These collections, or fragments, of short novels, or better yet vignettes rich with psychological realism, are mostly about sensuality, friendship, love, fleeting moments of life (Caccia, Cuore), encounters and separations (Pazienza), the beauty of people or places (colors, smells, sounds are vividly depicted), nostalgia and memories (Famiglia, Ricordo), the 1356

awareness of aging (Eta`, Eleganza), violence (Roma, Paura), the ever-present feelings of loneliness (Sesso, Solitudine), and death. The element of time in these stories is undefined. Almost every story begins with un giorno (one day), and characters often remain unnamed: ‘‘un uomo, una donna, un bambino, un vecchio’’ (a man, a woman, a child, an old man). The location receives no elaboration either, even when it is Rome, Venice, or Parise’s own Veneto region. On the contrary, the descriptions of fears, anxieties, and memories are extremely well detailed. Every character experiences brief but intensive emotional moments, deeply engraved in his or her mind and heart: They are little epiphanies; feelings and truths that the reader can recognize and identify with because they suggest universal stages of human existence. Thus in her ‘‘Postfazione’’ to Sillabario n. 2, Natalia Ginzburg perceptively spoke of these stories as ‘‘momenti rubati al caos della vita’’ (stolen moments from the chaos of life). Ultimately Parise distilled each narrative as a reflection of some private moments from his adventurous and tormented life, trying to give meaning to sensations that are often lost in the daily routine of events. ROCCO CAPOZZI Editions First edition: Sillabario n. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1972; Sillabario n. 2, with an afterword by Natalia Ginzburg, Milan: Mondadori, 1982. Other editions: Sillabari, Milan: Mondadori, 1983; reprinted in 1992, with an introduction by Silvio Perrella. Translations: Sillabario n. 1, as Abecedary, translated by James Marcus, Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press, 1990; Sillabario n. 2, as Solitudes: Short Stories, translated by Isabel Quigly, London: J. M. Dent, 1984.

Further Reading Bacchereti, Elisabetta, ‘‘Sillabario II,’’ Inventario (December 1982), 242–243. Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Sillabario n.1,’’ Epoca, 28 Sept. 1973, 37. Ferrero, Ernesto, ‘‘Sillabari,’’ TuttoLibri, 22 May 2004, 4. Ginzburg, Natalia, ‘‘Postfazione,’’ in Goffredo Parise, Sillabario n. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1982. Guidorizzi, Ernesto, ‘‘Le voci del Sillabario,’’ in Parise, edited by Ilaria Crotti, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Loy, Rosetta, ‘‘Sillabari,’’ Il corriere della sera, 4 June 1993, 33. Minore, Renato, ‘‘Sillabari,’’ Il messagero, 12 May 2004, 27. Montefoschi, Giorgio, ‘‘Tornano I Sillabari,’’ Il corriere della sera, 22 May 2004, 35. Pacchiano, Giorgio, ‘‘Sillabari,’’ Il Sole 24Ore, 30 May 2004, 32.

CESARE PASCARELLA

CESARE PASCARELLA (1858–1940) Cesare Pascarella is considered, along with Gioacchino Belli and Trilussa, among the greatest poets in the Roman dialect. In his youth he was a painter, and throughout his life he was an eccentric and restless traveller; his restlessness informed also his intellectual and artistic maturation. His earliest sonnets were typical scenes, often set pieces resolved through a play on words or contrasting terms. For example, ‘‘L’allustrascarpe filosofo’’ (The Shoe-Shine Philosopher), published in 1987 in L’illustrazione della domenica, is a brief portrait of an everyday man that represents with particular effectiveness a resigned and indolent life. As Benedetto Croce noted, in these works ‘‘piu` che il comico affiorano il doloroso, il turpe e il triste’’ (pain, squalor, and sadness emerge, rather than comedy) (La letteratura della nuova Italia, 1921). Gioacchino Belli’s language influenced the young Pascarella, but in his case the Roman dialect became an expressive means contaminated at the root with the Italian language. In fact, Pascarella ‘‘si e` fatto un dialetto per conto suo, che romanesco non e` piu` e neppure lingua’’ (has made up a dialect of his own, which is neither Roman nor standard language), as critic Vincenzo Belli observed in 1941 (Le cose a posto! A proposito dell’opera poetica di Cesare Pascarella). On the other hand, his continuous revisions, his pleasure in story-telling and the intransigence of his passionate patriotism derive from Giosue` Carducci, who considered him his most direct disciple. Pascarella’s first important work, Er morto de campagna (The Country Corpse, 1881), is a series of five sonnets published in the periodical Capitan Fracassa. It tells the story of a group of people from a lower-class neighborhood who go to find the body of a murdered man to give him a dignified and Christian burial. The poems sketch lively and picturesque tableaux. The language of the speaker, simultaneously dramatic and grotesque, displays the elementary psychology of the man of the people, a combination of directness, simple compassion, and a threatening and lugubrious rudeness. In 1882 the journal Fanfulla published the drama of love and blood La serenata (The Serenade). Here, the author skillfully avoided the stereotypes and approximations that constitute the usual limitations

of dialectal writing. Indeed, in La serenata, another series of five sonnets on a popular theme set against a sinister and desolate Rome, Pascarella achieved unusual dramatic results, for instance when the protagonist is stabbed to death out of jealousy. Villa Gloria (1886) is a poem in 25 sonnets that tells of the vicissitudes and misfortune of the enterprise of Giuseppe Garibaldi at Villa Glori in 1867, presented from the low perspective of a Roman from the plebeian neighborhood of Trastevere. A powerful impression of truthfulness emerges from the crude expressions of the commoner, who relates the facts as a witness, without any reflections going beyond the events themselves. Even though Villa Gloria offers moments of great participation, the work is weighed down by patriotic rhetoric. La scoperta dell’America (The Discovery of America, 1893) is considered Pascarella’s best work. It is composed of 50 sonnets in which a commoner tells the story of the discovery of the New Continent. In the fervid imagination of the narrator, Christopher Columbus’s enterprise is a combination of simplicity and extravagance, its magnificence reduced and made strange by the popular perspective of the narrative. Thus, the sense of the epic and legend that permeates the event is overturned through the register of the grotesque, in which the poet’s detached and ironic spirit is ever present. After the publication of the poem, Pascarella undertook a triumphant tour of readings throughout Italy. He then began to compose the epic poem Storia nostra (Our Story, 1941), with which he aimed to retrace the most important moments of Italian history from the origins to the nineteenth century, seen, once again, from the point of view of a commoner. This time, however, the subject proved too vast and ambitious, and Pascarella was unable to convey that immediacy that made him unique in the dramatic sketches. Out of the planned 350 sonnets, only 267 and about 40 fragments survived. This work appeared only posthumously because during his lifetime the poet refused to publish it, although he worked on it for almost 40 years. In 1961, Pascarella’s recollections and reflections on his extensive travels, written in 16 nearly indecipherable notebooks, were collected in the second volume of his Opere, 1357

CESARE PASCARELLA entitled Taccuini (Notebooks). Still enjoyable nowadays, these notes are not a diary written with literary intentions. Rather, they are the observations of a traveller endowed with an irony and independence uncommon for his times.

‘‘Villa Gloria,’’ 1886. ‘‘La scoperta dell’America,’’ 1893; as The Discovery of America, translated by John DuVal, 1991. ‘‘Sonetti,’’ 1901. ‘‘Poesie disperse,’’ 1914. ‘‘Storia nostra,’’ 1941.

Biography

Other Viaggio in Ciociaria, 1920.

Cesare Pascarella was born in Rome on 28 April 1858, the son of Pasquale, a patriot who fought during the war in 1848, and of Teresa Bosisio, originally from Piedmont. He attended the Fine Arts Institute. He exhibited with the group ‘‘XXV della campagna romana,’’ founded in 1904. His favorite pictorial subject was the donkey. He collaborated on the periodicals Capitan Fracassa and Cronaca Bizantina. He befriended Edoardo Scarfoglio and Gabriele D’Annunzio. In 1885, he travelled to India, South America, North Africa, Japan, and China. In 1930, he was appointed to the Accademia d’Italia. He died in Rome on 8 May 1940. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Il manichino. Memorie di uno smemorato. Gita sentimentale. Er morto de campagna. Sonetti e altri versi, Naples: Bideri, 1915. Opere, vol. 1 (I sonetti. Storia nostra. Le prose); vol. 2 (I taccuini), Milan: Mondadori: 1955, 1961.

Poetry ‘‘Er morto de campagna,’’ 1881. ‘‘La serenata,’’ 1882.

Further Reading Antonelli, Sara, ‘‘La riscoperta dell’America: Carpentier e Pascarella,’’ Il Veltro, 44 (2000), 25–35. Aurigemma, Marcello, Pascarella prosatore, Rome: Signorelli, 1959. Baldini, David, ‘‘Tra epos e giornalismo: Croce e Pascarella,’’ in Croce e la letteratura dialettale, edited by Laura Biancini, Leonardo Lattarulo, and Franco Onorati, Rome: Quaderni della Biblioteca nazionale, 1997. Belli, Vincenzo, Le cose a posto! A proposito dell’opera poetica di Cesare Pascarella, Rome: Arte della stampa, 1941. Bernoni, Mario, Voci romanesche, Rome: Lazio ieri e oggi, 1986. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Cesare Pascarella,’’ in La Letteratura della nuova Italia, 2, Bari: Laterza, 1921. Felice, Lucio, ‘‘Il romanesco di Pascarella,’’ in Il romanesco ieri e oggi, edited by Tullio De Tomaso, Rome: Bulzoni, 1989. Haller, Hermann, ‘‘Columbus and Pascarella: America rediscovered,’’ Italica, 69 (1992), 359–377. Mariani, Gaetano, Pascarella nella letteratura romantico– veristica, Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1954. Sarazani, Fabrizio, Vita di Cesare Pascarella, Rome: Casini, 1957. Sorge, Paola, ‘‘Cristoforo Colombo all’osteria,’’ Mercurio, 23 (1990), 6.

GIOVANNI PASCOLI (1855–1912) Pascoli was one of the most original poets of his time. His work embodies a major tradition in Italian aestheticism in which poetry is fashioned out of emotions elicited by poet’s encounter with the smallest, simplest things. Pascoli’s fanciullino, or the childlike poetic sensibility existing in all of us, is the figure that inspired the poet and his relationship to the adult world and society. The mysterious realm of childhood and the natural landscape are 1358

the main subjects of his poetry. In his essay Il fanciullino (The Eternal Child), which first appeared in Il Marzocco in 1897, Pascoli articulated his poetic notions and cast himself in the role of a new Adam who names things for the first time. Pascoli’s poetry is rooted in a tragic event that marked his childhood: the murder of his father in August 1867. This was just the first of a series of painful, traumatic experiences that would strike

GIOVANNI PASCOLI Pascoli’s family. His mother, his oldest sister, and brother Luigi all died shortly after his father’s murder. Then in 1879, Pascoli was arrested during a political demonstration and charged with subversion for his Socialist ideas. Pascoli’s desire to retreat into rural life and familial love—a desire clearly, if often morbidly, expressed by the poet— became an urgent as well as primary need, one he at first completely tried to realize through his two sisters Maria and Ida, who became idealized figures to him. He hoped to find harmony and piece in the quiet state of nature, surrounded by the childlike innocence of human beings and the haunting but benevolent presence of the dead. According to Luigi Baldacci, what characterized Pascoli’s poetry is a ‘‘belittlement of the real (landscape) for the symbol [...] and reappraisal of the real only through symbolic impressions’’ (Introduction to G. Pascoli, Poesie, 1974). Pascoli experienced concrete reality in its primitiveness through symbolic ‘‘correspondences’’ that transcend history and rational perception. Pascoli’s complex web of themes and images are transformed into poetic symbols in Myricae (Tamarisks, 1891), Poemetti (Poemetti, 1897), and I Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs of Castelvecchio, 1903). The tones, genre, language, and metrical structure of Pascoli’s poems immediately generated critical controversy. Even though Gabriele D’Annunzio, ‘‘fratello minore e maggiore’’ (younger and older brother), as Pascoli wrote, understood and appreciated Pascoli’s value from the start, Benedetto Croce remarked on how, apart from rare moments and passages, the best of Pascoli’s poetry consists of ‘‘a reduction in fragments of his poetry’’ (La letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 4, 1914). Croce objected to the limits observed by Pascoli’s imagery, which, according to Crocean aesthetics, represented his inability to reach the stage of ‘‘pure poetry.’’ Later works like Odi ed inni (Odes and Hymns, 1906) were patriotic, like the posthumous collections Poemi del Risorgimento (The Poems of the Risorgimento, 1913) and the unfinished Le canzoni di Re Enzio (The Songs of King Enzio, ca. 1908–1909) published with Poemi italici (The Italic Poems, 1914). These collections were inspired by events and characters from Italian history. For example, in ‘‘Paolo Uccello’’ Pascoli demonstrated his philological sophistication by choosing archaic words to depict the Franciscan humility of the fifteenth-century Florentine painter. In e canzoni di re Enzio, he revisited the facts that led to the death of Manfred, the son of Frederick II, at the battle of Benevento (1266), celebrating the valor of the Italian people who

defeated the imperial army. The public themes of this poetry express Pascoli’s populism and nationalist rhetoric, which reached its apex in his public speech La grande proletaria si e` mossa (The Great Proletarian Has Moved, 1911), in support of Italy’s colonial expansion in Libya. This ideologically freighted work reinforces the critical claim that Pascoli’s best poetry is concerned with representing small and humble things. There is a strong democratic vein in Pascoli that counteracts Dannunzian eloquence. In this vein, Pascoli focused on unpretentious objects, which he represented in an unassuming style. Pascoli’s notion of the simple poet who sings of an idyllic world eventually became a critical cliche´. His lyricism was soon considered the art of ‘‘a naı¨f and childish poet,’’ as Croce put it (La letteratura della Nuova Italia, vol. 4, 1914). This critical estimation persisted as a common judgment and was still current in the critical writings of Emilio Cecchi and Renato Serra. Serra, despite the favor he showed to Pascoli and his writings, confirmed the Crocean idea of Pascoli as a poet whose best poetry is to be found in fragments. The critical dispute over the value of Pascoli’s poetry was so important to literary scholars that it provoked a cultural referendum on the pages of La Ronda in 1919. The first to contest Croce’s critical assessment was Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who read Pascoli’s poetic career as an ongoing development and experimentation with poetic forms rather than as a series of variations of the original poetic nucleus, Myricae. But only with the pivotal work of Giuseppe Nava did Pascoli’s poetry receive a more balanced critical treatment. Pascoli’s poetry is shown to reflect a deep knowledge of ancient and contemporary literature, both of which are sources whose importance is confirmed by Pascoli’s Traduzioni e riduzioni (Translations and Reductions, 1913). The common characterization of Pascoli as a simple poet in the Italian poetic tradition finally came to an end. The Myricae was no longer seen as the ‘‘pattern book’’ of Pascoli’s poetry, nor were his next collections, such as the Poemetti, I Canti di Castelvecchio, and the Poemi conviviali (Convivial Poems, 1904), regarded as nothing other than variations on a set of themes initially expressed in the Myricae and emanating from it. New critical attention was given to the most innovative aspects of Pascoli’s poetry, particularly to his use of onomatopoeia, what Gianfranco Contini called Pascoli’s ‘‘phonosymbolism’’ (Varianti e altra linguistica, 1970). Critics also began to study with new appreciation Pascoli’s metrical innovations, which stand out 1359

GIOVANNI PASCOLI clearly from those of Giosue` Carducci. Pascoli’s use of ‘‘special languages,’’ such as dialect, technical terms, and foreign and dead languages, was now regarded as evidence of his incomparable experimental work on language. Consider, for instance, poems like ‘‘The Hammerless Gun’’ or ‘‘Italy.’’ In these two poems Pascoli used proper English words (‘‘boy,’’ ‘‘still,’’ ‘‘come out! Fly!’’), onomatopoeic forms like ‘‘hush’’ and terms as bisini, checche, candi, scrima, which are Italianized and slang forms of the English words for ‘‘business,’’ ‘‘cakes,’’ ‘‘candies,’’ and ‘‘ice cream.’’ Once viewed as a simple poet singing of humble objects, Pascoli is now regarded as a sophisticated poet who varied his diction, his subjects, and his meter. This is evident form Pascoli’s first collection of poems, Myricae, which takes its title from Virgil’s IV eclogue ‘‘arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae’’ (I am fond of the small trees and the humble tamarisks). Pascoli would place this quotation at the beginning of the four collections of poems that follow. Myricae proceeds from the Georgic tone of the first edition in 1892 to the ‘‘tragic autobiography’’ realized in its sixth printing in 1903. The opening poem, ‘‘Il giorno dei morti’’ (The Day of the Dead) represents, above all, this crucial development in tone. Pascoli recalled his siblings and parents in a poetic ‘‘wake’’ that recalls his dead relations: ‘‘Io vedo (come e` questo giorno, oscuro!), / vedo nel cuore, vedo un camposanto / con un fosco cipresso alto sul muro / [...] Sazio ogni morto, di memorie, posa./ [...] Stretti tutti insieme, / insieme tutta la famiglia morta’’ (I see (how dark is this day), / I see in my heart, I see the graveyard, / the high cypress-tree leaning upon the wall / [...] All the dead lie full of memories... / all my family / close to one another). With extraordinary prosodic and linguistic mastery, Pascoli’s poetry expresses a traumatic relationship between humankind and history in which he is held captive as an exemplary victim. The catastrophe of the author’s family was a decisive experience in developing this tragic perspective. As Cesare Garboli rightly emphasized, Pascoli was the last Italian poet able to make his personal experience an entire subject for artistic study (Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli, 1990). The theme of death is also central to several poems in Pascoli’s second collection, Poemetti (or ‘‘little verses’’), but in this volume Pascoli was working with a wider and varied range of poetic forms. The Poemetti tend to offer a more regular narrative structure, and the choice of the hendecasyllable is dominant. It is clear that the metrics of the Poemetti differs completely from that of 1360

Myricae although the poet has been drawing up the Poemetti since 1895, right after the third series of Myricae in 1894. For example, the metrical pattern of ‘‘Il giorno dei morti,’’ the opening poem that Pascoli added to the Myricae in 1894, is properly that of a poemetto. In a sense, this poem represents his first coherent attempt at the poemettomi that would be more fully worked out in the Poemetti. Pascoli’s prevalent choice of the Dantesque terza rima in the Poemetti coincided with the writing and publication of his first study on Dante’s Comedia in 1898. A second series of the Poemetti would be published in 1900. To give the collection a clearer idyllic tone, Pascoli took an important section from that edition, Nel presente, which became part of the first edition of Odi ed inni in 1906. It can be said that the Poemetti expanded Pascoli’s poetic themes to encompass a cosmic and metaphysic dimension. Attention to humble things and love for poor people became part of an epos of helpless human beings. The rural background of the Poemetti frames the story of Rosa’s family and that of her love for the young hunter, Rigo. The internal structure of the Poemetti properly defines this work as a narrative poem. In 1904, the Poemetti were split into two collections and published as Primi poemetti (First Poemetti) and five years later, in 1909, as Nuovi poemetti (New Poemetti). I Canti di Castelvecchio represented a return to private concerns, which were again expressed in fragmentary and impressionistic forms. The march of time and the change of seasons recur as poetic tropes. As Pascoli wrote on August 7, 1902 in a letter to Alfredo Caselli: ‘‘C’e` vedrai, e i Canti, un ordine latente [...]: prima emozioni, sensazioni, affetti d’inverno, poi di primavera, poi d’estate, poi d’autunno, poi ancora un po’ d’inverno mistico, poi un po’ di primavera triste, e finis’’ (As you will see, the Canti have a hidden order [...]: emotions at first, sensations, feelings of winter, and then, one by one, those of spring, of summer, of fall. A sort of mystic winter will come again, followed by some sadness of another spring. Then, finis). The 20 poems that form the Poemi conviviali exhibit the extent of Pascoli’s cultural background. Some of the poems had previously appeared in Alfredo De Bosis’s literary review Il convito. On one hand, Pascoli’s title seems to be related to the journal; on the other one, it is more likely a reference to the Greek symposium and to Latin convivial songs. Pascoli derived his poetic subjects and themes from those of ancient Greece and Rome as well as early Christian tradition: ‘‘Alexandros,’’ in which the Great Macedonian acknowledges the

GIOVANNI PASCOLI emptiness of fame; ‘‘Solon,’’ in which poetry becomes a sad chant that transcends mortality; ‘‘Il sonno d’Odisseo’’ (Ulysses’ Sleep); ‘‘La buona novella’’ (The Gospel). The metrics of Poemi conviviali are dominated by the hendecasyllable, while in his choice of diction, Pascoli selected words from a wide range of Greek and Latin linguistic formations. In Odi ed inni, Pascoli returned to more varied metrical patterns. He also stressed his patriotism and the role of poeta-vate in this collection. The opening line of the collection’s preface, ‘‘Per voi io canto, o giovinetti e fanciulle: solo per voi’’ (I sing for you, children, only for you) recalls Virgil’s Eclogue IV (canamus) and reinforces Pascoli’s role as the bard of Italy. The poet’s nationalistic and imperialist ideology resulted, however, in an internal conflict. Contradicting the poet’s quest for freedom and social justice, Pascoli concluded by justifying acts of violence and war. ‘‘Nel carcere di Ginevra’’ (In the Prison of Geneva) exemplifies this tension: Pascoli sang in defense of the Italian anarchist Lucheni, who killed Empress Elisabeth of Austria, wife of Franz Joseph. However, the cause of Italy was advanced by singing the sufferings of the Italian people who fought and died for their country. According to Pascoli, the emigrants’ sufferings and the soldiers’ acts worked to free the weak and the poor Italian people from their misery. The development of Pascoli’s poetry reveals his profound and conscious relationship with European culture. This close network of relationships has been explored in recent criticism (Baldacci, Nava), which has challenged the traditional image of Pascoli as a poet sheltered inside his nido (nest) of the exclusive love that a family can offer. Pascoli’s range of references include both classical LatinGreek authors like Sappho and Virgil, and French Romantic and Symbolist writers like Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Mallarme´. German authors, such as Heine and Novalis, as well as the American Poe, also have been shown to be part of Pascoli’s cultural genealogy. It is impossible not to see, for instance, the uncanny and gloomy ‘‘chiu`...’’ of the ‘‘Assiuolo’’ as a phonosymbolic translation of Poe’s ‘‘Raven’’ (a poem translated by Pascoli), where the ending line of each strophe sounds in Italian ‘‘mai piu`’’ (nevermore). Undeniably, the late-Romantic taste of such popular poets as Giacomo Zanella, Aleardo Aleardi, and Giovanni Prati also left a mark on Pascoli’s poetry. Furthermore, Carducci’s classicism represented an instructive example for Pascoli’s ‘‘sentimental’’ assimilation of Roman-Greek myths. Carducci’s

naturalistic taste, as well as the autobiographic and historical aspects of his poetry, were patent influences on Pascoli. The influence of Alessandro Manzoni is also clear, and it is to Manzoni that Pascoli dedicated the poem ‘‘Eco di una notte mitica’’ (Echo of a Mythical Night, 1896). Giacomo Leopardi inspired Pascoli as well. Pascoli shared Leopardi’s love for small creatures, feeble feelings, and any fleeting sight of nature, as Il sabato (Saturday, 1897) shows. Little consideration has been given to Pascoli’s critical work on Dante: Minerva oscura (Obscure Minerva, 1898), Sotto il velame (Under the Veil, 1900), and La mirabile visione (The Admirable Vision, 1902). Indeed, Pascoli made a significant contribution in analyzing the centrality of structure in Dante’s Comedia. As a result of the work of scholars like Johannes Jakob Hartmann and Alfonso Traina, among others, Pascoli’s Latin writings, published in two volumes bearing the title of Carmina (Songs, 1914), are now regarded as having as much literary value as Pascoli’s Italian poems. These poems earned Pascoli 13 Gold Medals and 15 Lauds at the Certamen Hoeufftianum held annually at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam. The Carmina introduce their reader into a timeless space where it is possible to recover a deep and secret correspondence between a symbol and the thing itself. For Pascoli, Latin was a ‘‘luogo sacro’’ (a sacred place) as he stated in his ‘‘Un poeta di lingua morta’’ (Poet of a Dead Language, 1898). Finally in Pascoli’s poetry, language loses its normative nature and becomes a rare, mysterious means of obtaining knowledge of reality. Pascoli’s anthologies of Latin and Italian poetry: Lyra romana (Roman Lyre, 1895), Epos (1897), Sul limitare (On the Threshold, 1889), Fior da fiore (Flower Is from Flower, 1901), and Limpido rivo (Clear Rill, 1912) all represent his last poetic productions, whose most interesting aspect is his work as a translator. In 1979 Antonio De Lorenzi edited Pascoli’s dramatic works, which included comedies and tragedies such as Bruto (Brutus), Lorenzo De’ Medici, Lo squillo (The Blare), La bandiera (The Flag), Dolore e gioia (Joy and Pain), and some other sketches and drafts. Pascoli’s interest in theater dates to 1870. His drama tends toward a poetic theater rather than the naturalism favored by more traditional dramaturgy. He conceptualized theatrical poetry without having any interest at all in acting. Giovanni Pascoli contributed enormously to the renewal of Italian poetry. His belief in the evocative 1361

GIOVANNI PASCOLI power of the word links him to the poetics of symbolism and decadentismo. With Il fanciullino, he conceived a theory of poetry that fashioned a new language, replacing the traditional emphasis on imagery and ideas with a new poetics of the object-reality. His poetic idea rested on the conviction that within all adults there remains a child whose primitive voice expresses everything with wonder and surprise. Poetry thus visualizes the external world in eternal symbols, through sound and images produced by a fragmented syntactical rhythm. An individual is no longer the protagonist or victim of history, but a pure poetic voice that captures the deepest meanings of reality.

Biography Giovanni Pascoli was born in San Mauro di Romagna (Forlı`), on December 31, 1855. He attended Collegio Raffaello of Padri Scolopi in Urbino, 1862. His father, Ruggero, was killed, 1867, and his sister Margherita and mother, Caterina Vincenzi, died, 1868. His brother Luigi died, 1871. He moved to the Liceo of Padri Scolopi, first in Florence and then in Cesena, 1872. He was awarded a university fellowship at the University of Bologna, 1873, which was withdrawn in 1875. His brother Giacomo died, 1876. Pascoli published his first two poems, ‘‘Il maniero’’ and ‘‘Rio salto,’’ in I Nuovi Goliardi, 1877. He was arrested and charged with subversion, 1879. He obtained a new university fellowship at the University of Bologna, 1880, and graduated summa cum laude with a dissertation on Alcaeus, 1882. He was a teacher of Greek and Latin in Matera, Massa, and Livorno, 1884–1895. His sisters Ida and Maria moved with him, 1885. He published poems and contributions in Cronaca minima, Vita nuova, Il convito, Il Resto del Carlino, Marzocco, La vita italiana, and Tribuna, 1887–1907. He was awarded 13 Gold Medals and 15 Lauds at Amsterdam for his Latin poems, 1892–1912. Ida permanently left his household, 1895. He was appointed Temporary Professor of Greek and Latin Grammar at the University of Bologna, 1895, and appointed Full Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Messina, 1897. Pascoli met Gabriele D’Annunzio in Rome, 1897. He bought the Castelvecchio house in the foothills of the Apuan Alps, 1902. He moved to the University of Pisa, 1903. He met playwright Giuseppe Giacosa in Pisa, 1905. Pascoli succeeded Giosue` Carducci in the chair of Italian at Bologna, 1905. He moved to Bologna with Maria, 1906. Carducci died, 1907. Pascoli delivered a speech in commemoration of Carducci at the University of 1362

Bologna, 1908. He met Giacomo Puccini, 1911. Pascoli died of cancer in Bologna, on April 6, 1912, and was buried in Castelvecchio’s graveyard. DIEGO BERTELLI Selected Works Collections Poems of Giovanni Pascoli, freely rendered into English verse by Evaleen Stein, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1923. Poems of Giovanni Pascoli, translated by Arletta M. Abbott, New York: Vinal, 1927. Tutte le opere, edited by Augusto Vicinelli and Manara Valgimigli, 6 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1939–1952. Prose, edited by Augusto Vicinelli, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1946–1952. Opere, edited by Cesare Federico Goffis, Milan: Rizzoli, 1970 Poesie, edited by Giuseppe Nava, Bergamo: Minerva Italica, 1971. Poesie, edited with an introduction by Luigi Baldacci, Milan: Garzanti, 1974. Saggi di critica e di estetica, edited by Pier Luigi Cerisola, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1980. Opere, edited by Maurizio Perugi, 3 vols., Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1980–1981. Selected Poems, edited with introduction, notes, and vocabulary by Philip Russell Horne, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1983. Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli, edited by Cesare Garboli, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Antologia della lirica pascoliana, edited by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Tutte le poesie, edited by Arnaldo Colasanti, Rome: Grandi Tascabili Economici Newton, 2001. Poesie e prose scelte, edited by Cesare Garboli, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Myricae,’’ 1891. ‘‘Poemetti,’’ 1897. ‘‘Canti di Castelvecchio,’’ 1903. ‘‘Primi poemetti,’’ 1904. ‘‘Poemi conviviali,’’ 1904; as Convivial Poems, translated by Egidio Lunardi and Robert Nugent, 1979. ‘‘Odi ed inni,’’ 1906. ‘‘Nuovi poemetti,’’ 1909. ‘‘Poemi italici e Canzoni di Re Enzio,’’ 1914. ‘‘Poesie varie,’’ 1912. ‘‘Poemi del Risorgimento,’’ 1913. ‘‘Traduzioni e riduzioni,’’ 1913. ‘‘Carmina,’’ 2 vols., 1914.

Prose Il fanciullino, 1897, as The Eternal Child: The Poetry and Poetics of Giovanni Pascoli, translated by Rosamaria Lavalva, Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 1999. Minerva oscura, 1898. Sotto il velame, 1900. La mirabile visione, 1902. Miei pensieri di varia umanita`, 1903. Pensieri e discorsi, 1912.

GIOVANNI PASCOLI Conferenze e studi danteschi, 1915. Alceo, tesi per la laurea, 1986.

Theater Testi teatrali inediti, edited by Antonio De Lorenzi, Ravenna: Longo, 1979.

Letters Pascoli e gli Scolopi, edited by Pasquale Vannucci, 1950. Lettere agli amici lucchesi, edited by Felice Del Beccaro, 1960. Il fratello Valfredo, edited by Manara Valgimigli, 1961. Lettere agli amici urbinati, edited by Giorgio Cerboni, 1963. Lettere ad Alfredo Caselli (1898–1910), edited by Felice Del Beccaro, 1968. I bei giorni. Saggi, carteggi e incontri, edited by Claudio Marabini, 1970. Lettere a Mario Novaro e ad altri amici, Bologna: M. Boni, 1971. Lettere alla Gentile Ignota, edited by Claudio Marabini, 1972. I nobili spiriti, edited by Gianni Oliva, 1979. Lettere a Giovanni Ricci di Giovanni e Maria Pascoli. Quaderni pascoliani, edited by Carla Doni, Barga: Gasperetti, 1981. Lettere 1895–1912 (with Leopoldo Tosi), edited by Clemente Mazzotta, 1989. Carteggio Giovanni Pascoli-Augusto Guido Bianchi, edited by Manuela Montibelli, 2001.

Edited Works Lyra Romana, 1895. Epos, 1897. Sul limitare, 1889. Fior da fiore, 1901. Limpido rivo, 1912.

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Pascoli verso il Novecento, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1958. Aymone, Renato, Il bruco e la bella: saggi pascoliani, Salerno: Cava de’ Tirreni, 1999. Baldacci, Luigi, Introduction to Giovanni Pascoli, Poesie, Milan: Garzanti, 1974. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Simboli e strutture della poesia del Pascoli, Florence-Messina: D’Anna, 1966. Barilli, Renato, Giovanni Pascoli, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1986. Battaglia, Salvatore, Gli scritti danteschi di Giovanni Pascoli, in Studi per il centenario della nascita di Giovanni Pascoli pubblicati nel cinquantenario della morte. Convegno bolognese (28–30 marzo 1958), vol. 2., Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1962. Biagini, Mario, Il poeta solitario. Vita di Giovanni Pascoli, Milan: Corticelli, 1955. Binni, Walter, La poetica del decadentismo italiano, Firenze: Sansoni, 1961. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, La vita e il libro, Turin: Bocca, 1910–1913. Capovilla, Guido, Pascoli, Rome: Laterza, 2000. Cecchi, Emilio, La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli, Naples: Ricciardi, 1912. Contini, Gianfranco, Letteratura dell’Italia unita 1861– 1968, Florence: Sansoni, 1968.

Contini, Gianfranco, Varianti e altra linguistica, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della Nuova Italia, 4, Bari: Laterza, 1914. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Pascoli: la rivoluzione inconsapevole, Milan: Garzanti, 1979. Di Bernardino, Andrea, Giovanni Pascoli, Turin: Genesi, 2005. Ebani, Nadia, Pascoli e il canzoniere, Verona: Fiorini, 2005. Fahrner, Andrea, Poetik der natu¨rlichen Welt: Idylle und Landschaft in Giovanni Pascolis Leopardi-Rezeption, Berlin: Erich Schmift, 1995. Ferratini, Paolo, Fiori sulle rovine: Pascoli e l’arte del commento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Getto, Giovanni, Carducci e Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1957. Ghirardelli, Giuliano, Guida alla Romagna di Pascoli, Rimini: Panozzo, 2004. Gioanola, Elio, Giovanni Pascoli: sentimenti filiali di un parricida, Milano: Jaca Book, 2000. Hartmann, Johannes Jakob, La poesia latina di Giovanni Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1920. Marcolini, Marina, Pascoli prosatore: indagini critiche su ‘‘Pensieri e discorsi,’’ Modena: Mucchi, 2002. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, La tradizione del Novecento. Prima serie, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975. Momigliano, Attilio, Ultimi saggi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1954. Momigliano, Attilio, Elzeviri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1945. Nava, Giuseppe, ‘‘Casa mia’’ e il simbolismo onirico del Pascoli, Barga: Gasperetti, 1980. Nava, Giuseppe, Introduzione alla poesia del Pascoli, Rome: Salerno Editore, 1971. Nistri, Severino, Saggi letterari, Arezzo: Helicon, 2001. Oliva, Gianni, I nobili spiriti. Pascoli, D’Annunzio e le riviste dell’estetismo fiorentino, Bergamo: Minerva italica, 1979. Pascoli, Maria, Lungo la vita di Giovanni Pascoli, edited by Augusto Vicinelli, Milan: Modandori, 1961. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Passione e ideologia, Milan: Garzanti, 1960. Pazzaglia, Mario, Pascoli, Roma: Salerno Editore, 2002. Petrini, Domenico, Dal Barocco al decadentismo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1957. Petrocchi, Giorgio, La formazione letteraria di Giovanni Pascoli, Florence: Le Monnier, 1953. Salinari, Carlo, Miti e coscienza del decadentismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Pascoli, Rome: Il Ventaglio, 1985. Santagata, Marco, Per l’opposta balza, ‘‘La cavalla storna’’ e ‘‘il commiato’’ dell’‘‘Alcyone,’’ Milan: Garzanti, 2002. Savoca, Giuseppe, Pascoli, Gozzano e i crepuscolari, RomeBari: Laterza, 1976. Sereni, Umberto, Giovanni Pascoli nella valle del bello e del buono, Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 2004. Serra, Renato, Scritti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Tessari, Roberto, Pascoli, D’Annunzio, Fogazzaro e il decadentismo itlaiano, Turin: Paravia, 1976. Thovez, Enrico, Il pastore, il gregge e la zampogna, Naples: Ricciardi, 1910. Tomasello, Dario, La realta` per il suo vers e altri studi sul Pascoli prosatore, Florence: Olschki, 2005. Traina, Alfonso, Saggio sul latino del Pascoli, Padua: Liviana, 1961.

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GIOVANNI PASCOLI Turolla, Enrico, La poesia latina di Giovanni Pascoli, edited by Maria Benincasa, 2 vols., Venice: Montuoro, 1945–1946. Ukas, Michael, ‘‘Nature in the Poetry of Giovanni Pascoli,’’ Kentucky Foreign Language Quarterly, 13(1996), 51–59. Wittelsberger, Heide, Methaphorik und bildliche Anschauungswelt Giovanni Pascolis, Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovacˇ, 1998.

CANTI DI CASTELVECCHIO, 1903 Poems by Giovanni Pascoli

Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs of Castelvecchio), Giovanni Pascoli’s third collection of poetry, was first published by Zanichelli in Bologna in 1903. A second edition was published the same year. A third edition was published two years later, in 1905, with three new poems: ‘‘La partenza del boscaiolo’’ (The Departure of the Lumberjack), ‘‘L’uccellino del freddo’’ (The Little Bird of the Cold) and ‘‘Il primo cantore’’ (The First Singer). In the fourth edition of 1907, Pascoli included two more poems, ‘‘Imbrunire’’ (Nightfall) and ‘‘Il Viatico’’ (The Sacrament), which had already been published in his first edition of Odi ed inni (Odes and Hymns, 1906). In the fifth edition of the Canti di Castelvecchio (1910), Pascoli added a supplement, the Diario autunnale (Autumnal Journal), which had been published previously in the review Il Marzocco in 1907. A sixth edition, with no further changes, appeared after the poet’s death in 1912, followed by Maria Pascoli’s definitive edition in 1914, a volume augmented by the inclusion of ‘‘La capinera’’ (The Blackcap) and ‘‘Il compagno dei taglialegna’’ (The Lumberjacks’ Mate). Along with ‘‘La partenza del boscaiolo’’ and ‘‘L’uccellino del freddo,’’ this last poem forms the cycle of the ‘‘canzoni uccelline’’ (bird songs). The title of the collection is a clear reference to Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti (1931/1935). However, the link between the Canti di Castelvecchio and 1364

Pascoli’s first volume of poetry, Myricae, is also quite discernable. Pascoli himself called attention to the connection by placing the Virgilian quotation from Eclogue IV (‘‘arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae’’) that served as the epigraph for Myricae at the beginning of the Canti di Castelvecchio and defining the poems in his forward as ‘‘myricae autunnali’’ (autumnal myricae). The stanza forms Pascoli used in these poems also link them with Myricae, even though these new songs have greater poetic scope and are metrically more sophisticated. The poet’s mother now becomes the addressee of these ‘‘canti uccellini,’’ yet Pascoli’s recollections of his parents are infused by his obsessive thoughts of death. This obsessiveness deepens Pascoli’s sense that life is meaningful only because of the ubiquitous presence of death. Even the timeless vision of the celestial spheres yields to a vision of decay, as in the poem ‘‘Il ciocco’’ (Blockhead), where the planets are compared to insignificant gnats flying around a lamp: ‘‘E nel silenzio tutto avra` riposo / dalle sue morti; e cio` sara` la morte’’ (Everything will rest in silence / because everything descends from death; that will finally be the death). These poetic sentiments inspire Pascoli’s unique poetic language as well as his characteristic metrical experimentation. As Giuseppe Nava remarked in the introduction to his 1983 edition of the Canti di Castelvecchio, Pascoli succeeded in mixing the sublime d’en haut and sublime d’en bas. Pascoli’s symbolism is so complex and structured that it develops into allegory, as the symbolic nature of every object reveals itself. Canti di Castelvecchio is divided into two main sections, the proper songs and a smaller section entitled ‘‘Il ritorno a San Mauro’’ (The Return to San Mauro). Castelvecchio and San Mauro were places of great autobiographical significance for Pascoli. In these songs, he not only returned to San Mauro, the place of his birth, but confronted the collapse of his childhood hopes after a series of tragic personal and family experiences. To return to his native town entailed not only recollecting the past but concretely recreating it. In Canti di Castelvecchio, Pascoli went in search of his ‘‘family myth,’’ trying to recover what was definitively gone: ‘‘Chi passa [...] / Si trova al nativo villaggio, / vi ritrova quello che c’era’’ (The one who walks by / arrives in his place of birth / and finds again / what is was once there; ’’Il poeta solitario’’). The poet recollected and reentered the past as an ‘‘oscuro viaggio’’ (a dark journey) along ‘‘la pallida via della vita’’ (the pale path of life). In ‘‘La poesia’’ (Poetry), he attempted to capture nature at its most

GIOVANNI PASCOLI sublime and humble, in the light of everyday. The poet compared himself with, indeed declared himself to be, ‘‘una lampada ch’arda soave’’ (a gentle shining lamp) that can see and hear all the novelle e ragioni (the news and reasons) of the human and natural life around him. Poetry becomes the only means of knowing the world and of being fully conscious of Nature. DIEGO BERTELLI Editions First edition: Canti di Casterlvecchio, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1903. Other editions: Canti di Castelvecchio, edited by Giuseppe Nava, Milan: Rizzoli, 1983; edited by Nadia Ebani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 2001. Translations: in Selected Poems, edited with introduction, notes, and vocabulary by Philip Russell Horne, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Capovilla, Guido, Tra le carte di Castelvecchio, Modena: Mucchi, 1989. Chimenz, Siro Amedeo, Nuovi studi su Giovanni Pascoli, Rome: Edizioni italiane, 1942. Felcini, Furio, Pascoli europeo, Rome: Chiarucci, 1973. Flora, Francesco, La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1959. Garboli, Cesare, Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Momigliano, Attilio, Impressioni di un lettore contemporaneo, Milan: Mondadori, 1928. Pazzaglia, Mario, ‘‘Figure metriche pascoliane: i novenari di Castelvecchio,’’ Lingua e stile, 8 (April 1972), 47–80. Pazzaglia, Mario, Tra San Mauro e Castelvecchio: studi pascoliani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1995. Peritore, Giuseppe, La poesia di Giovanni Pascoli, Modena: Societa` editrice tipografica modenese, 1942. Venturelli, Gastone, Pensieri linguistici di Giovanni Pascoli: con un glossario degli elementi barghigiani della sua poesia, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 2000.

MYRICAE, 1891 Poems by Giovanni Pascoli

The nine short poems originally published in the journal Vita nuova on August 10, 1890, represent the very first nucleus of the Myricae (Tamarisks).

The publication of such a tiny collection of poems coincided with and commemorated the anniversary of the assassination of Pascoli’s father, Ruggero, on August 10, 1867. As a matter of fact, the poet had been thinking of assembling his poems since 1877. In 1891 the Livornese publisher Giusti finally released the Myricae as a collection of 22 poems, and, over time, Pascoli successively added to the collection. A second edition in 1892 increased the volume of the work with 50 new poems and a preface. In 1894, a third series of 116 poems was divided into different sections marked by separate titles. A fourth series, produced in 1897, included 36 new poems, while the fifth series, released in 1900, had only 4 new works and a Nota bibliografica added by the poet. The sixth edition and definitive edition made up of 150 poems, published in 1903, contained no substantial changes except for the small change of placing the Nota bibliografica at the end of the collection. Pascoli’s reputation as an innovator began with this collection, permeated by the sad familiar recollections and dominated by rural landscapes of Romagna. Both the title and the Virgilian quotation at the beginning of the book (‘‘arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae’’) allude to Pascoli’s poetics of humility and apply to both his subjective matter and his treatment of it. As Pascoli wrote in 1910 in the journal Il villaggio: ‘‘Le myricae sono basse, le piu` terra terra, povere pianticelle. Ma Virgilio le amava e ne faceva l’immagine dei suoi primi canti’’ (Tamarisks are short, grounded poor little plants. Yet, Virgil loved them and made them be picture of his songs). Yet from the Myricae’s foreword in the 1894 release, Pascoli’s Virgilian references of poetics are overshadowed by death: ‘‘Rimangano rimangano questi canti su la tomba di mio padre!... Sono frulli d’uccelli, stormire di cipressi, lontano cantare di campane [...] Uomo che leggi, furono uomini che apersero quella tomba. [...] Ma gli uomini amarono piu` le tenebre che la luce’’ (Let these songs rest, let them rest upon my father’s gravestone!... These are birds’ whirs, the rustle of cypresses, a long-distance song of bells [...] Man who read, there were men who opened up that tomb. [...] But man preferred dark to light). Pascoli seemed both to hint at Thomas Hobbes’ homo homini lupus and to make clear reference to John 3:19, as Giacomo Leopardi already did in his poetic testament La ginestra. The metrics of the Myricae represent its most peculiar trait. As Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo aptly reconstructed, it is possible to classify 13 different metric patterns (‘‘Un’introduzione a Myricae,’’ 1987). Mengaldo continually stressed how Pascoli’s extreme metric experimentation was a work in 1365

GIOVANNI PASCOLI progress, such that the more traditional metrics of the two first editions of the Myricae place the most original solutions at the beginning of the third edition. The themes of the poem derive from a contrasting burden of Pascoli’s poetics and ideology. The idyllic and georgic tones arise with a complex series of autobiographic issues, representing a unique trait of Pascoli’s poetry. The conscious and obsessive presence of evil among human beings and threatening nations with imperial wars, defined in ‘‘X agosto’’ as an ‘‘atomo opaco del male’’ (opaque atom of evil), or on a more personal level in the death of an innocent man, his father, in ‘‘La cavalla storna’’ (The Gray Mare), becomes a stronger and stronger thematic trait of the Myricae. This is superbly expressed through Pascoli’s exquisite formal ability, as he carried to extremes his deep knowledge of prosody and tropes. Pascoli’s symbolism should be approached as a personal hypersensitive aspect of the signifier; the poet who, more than anybody else, let the phonetic substance of verse charm his poetry. Above all, onomatopoeia represents Pascoli’s most comfortable means of expression. Pascoli’s language often speaks the words spoken by birds, as ‘‘videvitt,’’ ‘‘scilp’’ of ‘‘Dialogo’’ (Dialogue), or registers the simultaneous use of special languages as either foreign ones or technical terms. as in the subsequent collections Poemetti (Poemetti, 1897) and the Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs of Castelvecchio, 1903). Myricae broke with traditional poetic language, discarding elegant diction in favor of conversational idioms and using in an unprecedented fashion in Italian poetic tradition, words for ‘‘humble’’ objects. Pascoli showed that his aim was to capture the essential nature of things in their specificity and thus advanced a theory of poetry as a merely intuitive act. DIEGO BERTELLI

Editions First edition: Myricae, Livorno: Giusti, 1891. Other editions: Myricae, edited by Giuseppe Nava, Florence: Sansoni, 1974; Introduction by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, notes by Franco Melotti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1981; edited by Giuseppe Nava, Rome: Salerno, 1991; as Myricae. Primi poemetti, with an essay by Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1997, reprinted 2001; Milan: Rizzoli, 2000.

Translations In Selected Poems, edited with introduction, notes and vocabulary by Philip Russell Horne, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1983.

Further Reading Beccarla, Gian Luigi, ‘‘Polivalenza e dissolvenza del linguaggio poetico: Giovanni Pascoli,’’ in Le forme della lontananza, Milan: Garzanti, 1982. Capovilla, Guido, ‘‘Occasioni arcaizzanti della forma poetica italiana fra Otto e Novecento: il ripristino della ballata antica da Tommaseo a Saba,’’ Metrica, 1 (1978), 95–145. Capovilla, Guido, ‘‘Sulla formazione di Myricae,’’ Studi di filologia italiana, 40 (1982), 217–300. Croce, Benedetto, Giovanni Pascoli, Bari: Laterza, 1920. Felcini, Furio, Indagini e proposte per una storia delle ‘‘Myricae’’ alle origini del linguaggio pascoliano, Rome: La Goliardica, 1976. Ferri, Teresa, Pascoli. Il labirinto del segno. Per una semantica del linguaggio poetico delle ‘‘Myricae,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Myricae,’’ in Letteratura italiana. Le opere, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘Un’introduzione a Myricae,’’ in La tradizione del Novecento. Nuova serie, Florence: Vallecchi, 1987. Orelli, Giorgio, ‘‘Per una lirica del Pascoli,’’ Strumenti critici, 21–22 October 1973, 283–290. Pirandello, Luigi, Review of the fourth edition of Myricae, Rassegna settimanale universale, 14 marzo 1897; now in Giovanni Pascoli, Myricae, Milan: Rizzoli, 2000.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (1922–1975) Pier Paolo Pasolini’s literary career began in 1942 with a series of volumes of poetry published either at his expense or by the Friulan Language Academy (the Academiuta de Lenga Furlana) that was set 1366

up by Pasolini and several of his associates in Casarsa, his mother’s hometown in the region of Friuli. The volumes Poesie a Casarsa (Poems from Casarsa, 1942), Diarii (Diaries, 1945), I pianti

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI (Lamentations, 1946), Dov’e` la mia patria (Where Is My Fatherland, 1949), and Tal cour di un frut (The Heart of a Boy, 1953) all reflect Pasolini’s early adherence to a Hermeticist and Decadent style of lyric in the tradition of Giovanni Pascoli and Giuseppe Ungaretti. Written in the regional dialect of Friuli, these poems predate Pasolini’s indictment for allegedly contributing to the delinquency of minors (at least one biographer, Nico Naldini, suggested that the charges were trumped up by political opponents in the region). After moving with his family to Rome following the indictment, Pasolini largely abandoned the Friulan dialect in his poetry (though he would return to it in the early 1970s) and published the volumes of poetry that represent his most significant contributions to the Italian lyric tradition, including, most of all, Le ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci, 1957), as well as La religione del mio tempo (The Religion of My Time, 1962), and Poesia in forma di rosa (Poetry in the Form of a Rose, 1964). Pasolini’s poems of the 1950s show a new sense of bewilderment and bitterness as he bore witness to the dramatic transformation of Italy during the economic boom, when the nation shifted from a predominantly agricultural economy to one of industry and consumerism—ushering in a period Pasolini often characterized as mass hedonism. Ideologically, Pasolini continued to develop a Marxist—though peculiarly Gramscian—perspective on Italy’s cultural and economic development, while adopting the metrical forms from the lyric tradition most associated with ‘‘civil poetry’’: first and foremost, the tercets of Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, though also the alexandrines of the Bolognese lyric poet and playwright Pier Iacopo Martello (1665–1725). One of the distinguishing features of Pasolini’s poetry of this period is his unusual mixing of Marxism and mannerism. Indeed, an abiding penchant for mixing the styles taken from literary tradition with a revolutionary ideological perspective—an uncomfortable and, for some critics, contradictory blend of rhetorical conservatism and ideological rebellion— is, generally speaking, one of the defining characteristics of Pasolini’s oeuvre. In addition to writing his volumes of poetry, during the 1950s Pasolini published his most significant works of fiction. Though Pasolini’s first works of fiction date from the 1940s—resulting in Amado mio (My Love, 1982) and Il sogno di una cosa (The Dream of Something, 1962), both written in Friulan and published decades after their composition—his most innovative contributions to the history of the Italian novel—at least before his last,

unfinished novel, Petrolio (1992)—are found in Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959). The novels are set in the ghettos and shantytowns (borgate) of Rome, and his protagonists are drawn from the subproletariat—petty thieves, prostitutes, and small-time gangsters. Pasolini’s narratives introduced the sort of brutal cityscapes, degraded living conditions, and street slang (the Romanesco dialect) that had yet to find their way into the Italian novel in any sociologically coherent manner. And while Pasolini flirted with the formulas of the neo-Realist novels that dominated literary style during the postwar period—especially in Una vita violenta—in the end the author’s vision of what the future would hold for Italy’s most impoverished underclasses failed to conform to the programmatic optimism regarding the outcome of class struggle associated with the Italian Communist Party (a Party that forever suspected Pasolini of ideological heresy and moral decadence, due primarily to his homosexuality, though also to his artistic independence). Another contribution of these novels is found in their complex experimentation with a mixture of standard Italian and dialect, though this also required the inclusion of a glossary of Romanesco terms as an appendix. Pasolini’s novels reflect the interest in dialect literature that animates the more scholarly volumes he produced in the decade, including Poesia dialettale del Novecento (TwentiethCentury Dialect Poetry, 1952), Il canto popolare (Folk Songs, 1954), as well as the volume of critical essays Passione e ideologia (Passion and Ideology, 1960). A large body of short stories (as well as some scenarios) from Pasolini’s ‘‘Roman period’’ is found in Alı` dagli occhi azzurri (Roman Nights and Other Stories, 1965) and Storie della citta` di Dio: racconti e cronache romane, 1950–1966 (Stories from the City of God, 1995). Although his poetry and novels succeeded in winning considerable success—including a Viareggio Prize for Le ceneri di Gramsci and a Crotone Prize for Una vita violenta—in the last years of the decade Pasolini changed direction. He was hired by various filmmakers, including Federico Fellini and Mauro Bolognini, as a consultant on screenplays, and he also appeared as an actor in a handful of films. In 1961 he began a career in film directing. Several of his early films—Accattone (1961), Mamma Roma (1962), La ricotta (Ricotta Cheese, 1963), and Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966)—are, for all intents and purposes, adaptations of his Roman novels of the 1950s, and likewise express his identification with the 1367

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI underclasses and his hostility toward the rise in consumerism in Italy. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pasolini claimed to abandon the Marxist-inflected mode of filmmaking he developed ‘‘under the sign of Gramsci,’’ and he turned his attention mostly to free adaptations of canonical literary works, including Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967), Medea (1970), Il Decameron (1971), I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, 1972), Il fiore delle mille e una notte (Arabian Nights, 1974), and Salo` o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo`, 1975). Other films, such as Teorema (Theorem, 1968) and Porcile (Pigsty, 1969), focus on the upper middle class and offer scathing critiques of the moral and economic corruption of bourgeois European society, as well as blistering attacks on the literary, cinematic, and artistic avant-gardes of the 1960s. Many of Europe’s avant-garde writers would return Pasolini’s disdain in kind, especially several of the writers associated with Italy’s Gruppo 63. Pasolini’s most significant essays on the theory and practice of the cinema are found in Empirismo eretico (Heretical Empiricism, 1972), which contains the essay ‘‘Cinema di poesia’’ (Cinema of Poetry) that proved to be controversial among European film theorists due to its skepticism toward the semiological and structuralist theories of filmic language that were establishing themselves as the dominant mode of film theorizing in the 1960s. Pasolini’s stated desire to engage with the leading elements of the European intelligentsia, including even the most apparently rebellious groups of the avant-gardes, also motivated his brief but intense activity as a playwright and theorist of contemporary theater. During several weeks of convalescence following an ulcer attack in March 1966, he wrote six verse tragedies in standard Italian, all of which he would continually revise during the next several years. Soon thereafter, he drafted his Manifesto per un nuovo teatro (Manifesto for a New Theater), which was published in Nuovi argomenti (no. 9, 1968), and in which he called for a new political theater in Europe, a document that—while often accused of utopianism—remains influential to this day. Although Pasolini applauded the antibourgeois, rebellious spirit of such groups as Julian Beck’s Living Theatre—the paradigm, along with Antonin Artaud’s earlier Theatre of Cruelty, of engaged, experimental theater at the time—he criticized them for limiting their practice simply to overturning the naturalist theatrical conventions at the basis of bourgeois theater (represented, to Pasolini’s mind, by Giorgio Strehler, Luca Ronconi, and Luchino Visconti). 1368

In his Manifesto, he prescribed a new form of theater that is neither the middle class ‘‘theater of chatter’’ nor the avant-garde ‘‘theater of the gesture or the scream.’’ As an alternative to this mutually engendering opposition of theatrical philosophies, Pasolini called for a theater that might offer a locus for intellectual and ideological debate among the elite groups and marginalized intellectuals of the European bourgeoisie—precisely the groups from which he drew his characters in his verse tragedies of the 1960s. The Manifesto’s description of a theater that might refuse to be simply anticonventional also helps explain Pasolini’s choice to write his plays of the 1960s in the verse of the Italian lyric tradition (thus he called his plays a ‘‘theater of the word’’), as well as his decision to model his plays on traditional, often canonical, sources and texts, from Greek tragedy to Shakespeare and Caldero`n. In his verse tragedies, Pasolini ranged over the most pressing political, moral, and ideological issues of the postwar period, including the survival of Nazi-Fascism in sectors of European business and politics as found in Porcile, the defeat of the democratic ideals of the Resistance in Pilade (Pylades) and Caldero`n, the failures of the political parties of the Left and the hypocrisy of Soviet foreign policy in Bestia da Stile (Beast of Style), and the degradation of political tactics of extraparliamentary groups on the European Left in the late 1960s in Affabulazione. Several of the plays, but certainly Orgia (Orgy) most of all, offer some of Pasolini’s most sustained meditations on the psychological impact of sexual repression and the continuing criminalization of homosexuality. Pasolini reworked his plays frequently over the years, and most of them were published posthumously. Recently, scholars have uncovered several other plays written during his youth—certainly of lesser importance than his later plays—suggesting that Pasolini’s interest in the theater was not merely a way to pass the time of his convalescence but was sustained through his lifetime although never becoming a central preoccupation. In the last years of his life, Pasolini established an international reputation as one of Europe’s most challenging and innovative artists, especially in the world of the cinema. He also became one of Italy’s leading opinion makers, writing as a columnist for Italian magazine and newspapers, including Il corriere della sera in the early 1970s. His editorials and essays express his outrage concerning such pressing social issues as environmental pollution, the degradation of Italian cultural life (mainly due to television and poor public schooling, both of

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI which Pasolini suggested abolishing), and the corruption of political elites— especially members of the Christian Democrat Party—whom Pasolini felt should be brought to justice. Pasolini’s columns and political vocabulary of this period—gathered in Scritti Corsari (Pirate Writings, 1975), Lettere luterane (Lutheran Letters, 1976), and Le belle bandiere (The Beautiful Flags, 1977)—were widely influential, and several of his closest associates (such as the late Laura Betti) have claimed that Pasolini’s murder (which is still under investigation 30 years later in spite of the fact that one man was convicted of the crime) may have been motivated by a desire among members of Italy’s political establishment to silence him. Another noteworthy feature of his last years is that during the early 1970s Pasolini renewed his interest in poetry (though he never completely stopped writing, even when directing a film). His poems of the 1970s, collected in Trasumanar e organizzar (Transhumanize and Organize, 1971) and La nuova gioventu` (The New Youth, 1975)—reflect many of the same concerns found in his films and essays of the time regarding what he called the global threat of neocapitalist development. However, they also represent an opportunity for Pasolini to contemplate and pass judgment on the poetic production of his youth. Indeed, La nuova gioventu` represents a return to his Friulan writing of the 1940s, the writing anthologized in Un paese di temporali e primule (A Land of Thunderstorms and Primroses, 1993), and especially the poems of La meglio gioventu`, which he rewrote, revised, and overturned in a last, bitter refusal of his youthful political optimism and faith in the values of bucolic community life, which he had once identified with the agrarian culture of Friuli and that he now understood, late in life, to have been illusory. At his death in 1975, Pasolini left various works unfinished, including a project for a film based on the life of St. Paul and, most importantly, a partially completed manuscript for a 2,000-page novel entitled Petrolio. Published posthumously, Petrolio is a highly fragmented novel set in contemporary Rome, whose protagonist splits into two characters, Carlo di Polis and Carlo di Tetis, who traverse the Roman cityscape that has been devastated by the type of economic development that is symbolized in the petroleum that furnished the book’s title. Pasolini’s choice to use oil and the petroleum industry as the alpha and omega of neocapitalist economic development was motivated by his continuing ‘‘Marxist’’ analysis of the damage done through colonial and postcolonial imperialism in a world

growing increasingly dependent on the oil reserves of the Middle East and elsewhere. Indeed Pasolini’s preoccupations remained those of his editorials and poems of the 1970s: political corruption and cultural decay of Italy, the devolution of political action into right-wing and left-wing terrorism, the degradation of human interaction (including the commodification of sexual exchange), and the rise of a transnational economic hegemony based on control of the media and oil reserves. It is an example of Pasolini’s prescience that he foresaw the political stakes of the future as tightly bound up with oil and television.

Biography Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna, 5 March 1922. He moved to Casarsa (Friuli) to avoid Allied bombings, 1943; his brother Guido joined the Resistance and was killed in action, 1945. Pasolini enrolled at the University of Bologna, where he completed his thesis on Pascoli for his degree in literature, 1945. After World War II, he taught elementary school in Casarsa. He joined the Italian Communist Party, 1947, but was indicted for sexual misconduct with local boys and expelled from the Communist Party, 1949. He moved to Rome, 1949, where he cofounded the literary journal Officina, 1955. He was indicted for pornography for his first novel, Ragazzi di vita, 1956. He won the Viareggio Prize for Le ceneri di Gramsci, 1957, and won the Crotone Prize for Una vita violenta, 1959. He worked as screenwriter for Federico Fellini, Mauro Bolognini, Florestano Vancini, and others during the late 1950s, and directed his first film, Accattone, in 1961. Pasolini underwent a series of court trials regarding the morality of each of his films between 1961 and 1975. He won numerous prestigious awards for his films, including Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and Nastro d’Argento for Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, 1964; CIDAIC prize at the Venice Film Festival and Nastro d’Argento for Edipo re, 1968; Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Il Decameron, 1971; Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for I racconti di Canterbury, 1972. Pasolini was murdered in Ostia, 2 November 1975. PATRICK RUMBLE Selected Works Collections Poems, selected and translated by Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo, New York: Random House, 1982.

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PIER PAOLO PASOLINI Roman Poems, translated by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. Pier Paolo Pasolini: Poetry, selected and translated by Antonino Mazza, Toronto: Exile Editions, 1991. Bestemmia: tutte le poesie, edited by Graziella Chiarcossi and Walter Siti, 2 vols, Milan: Garzanti, 1993. Romanzi e racconti, edited by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Teatro, edited by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, Milan: Mondadori, 2001. Tutte le poesie, edited by Walter Siti, Milan: Mondadori, 2003.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie a Casarsa,’’ 1942. ‘‘Diarii,’’ 1945. ‘‘I pianti,’’ 1946. ‘‘Dov’e` la mia patria,’’ 1949. ‘‘Tal cour di un frut,’’ 1953. ‘‘La meglio gioventu`,’’ 1954. ‘‘Le ceneri di Gramsci,’’ 1957; as The Ashes of Gramsci, translated by David Wallace, 1982. ‘‘La religione del mio tempo,’’ 1962. ‘‘Poesia in forma di rosa,’’ 1964. ‘‘Trasumanar e organizzar,’’ 1971. ‘‘La nuova gioventu`,’’ 1975.

Fiction Ragazzi di vita, 1955; as The Ragazzi, translated by Emile Capouya, 1986. Una vita violenta, 1959; as A Violent Life, translated by William Weaver, 1968. Il sogno di una cosa, 1962; as A Dream of Something, translated by Stuart Hood, 1988. Alı` dagli occhi azzurri, 1965; as Roman Nights and Other Stories, translated by John Shepley, 1986. Teorema, 1968; as Theorem, translated by Stuart Hood, 1992. La divina mimesis, 1975. Amado mio, 1982. Petrolio, 1992; as Petrolio, translated by Ann Goldstein, 1997. Un paese di temporali e di primule, edited by Nico Naldini, 1993. Storie della citta` di Dio: racconti e cronache romane (1950– 1966), edited by Walter Siti, 1995.

Essays Poesia dialettale del Novecento, 1952. Il canto popolare, 1954. Passione e ideologia, 1960. Empirismo eretico, 1972; as Heretical Empiricism, translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, 1988. Scritti corsari, 1975. Lettere luterane, 1976; as Lutheran Letters, translated by Stuart Hood, 1987. Descrizioni di descrizioni, edited by Graziella Chiarcossi, 1979. Il portico della morte, edited by Cesare Segre, 1988.

Letters Le belle bandiere, 1977. Lettere, edited by Nico Naldini, 2 vols, 1986; as The Letters of Pier Paolo Pasolini, translated by Stuart Hall, 1992.

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Filmography Accattone, 1961. Mamma Roma, 1962. Rogopag (episode La ricotta), 1963. La rabbia, 1963. Comizi d’amore, 1964. Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew), 1964. Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), 1966. Le streghe (episode La terra vista dalla luna), 1966. Capriccio all’italiana (episode Che cosa sono le nuvole?), 1967. Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, inspired by Sophocles), 1967. Teorema (Theorem, based on a short story by Pasolini), 1968. Amore e rabbia, 1969. Porcile (Pigsty), 1969. Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1969. Medea (inspired by Euripides), 1970. Il Decameron (based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s novelle), 1971. I racconti di Canterbury (The Canterbury Tales, based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s stories), 1972. Il fiore delle mille e una notte (based on the Arabian Nights), 1974. Salo` o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo`, based on the Marquis de Sade’s novel, Les 120 Journe´es de Sodome), 1975.

Screenplays Accattone, preface by Carlo Levi, Rome: F.M., 1961. Mamma Roma, Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, Milan: Garzanti, 1964. La ricotta, in Alı` dagli occhi azzurri, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Uccellacci e uccellini, Milan: Garzanti, 1966. Edipo re, Milan: Garzanti, 1967; as Oedipus Rex, London: Lorrimer, 1971. Medea, Milan: Garzanti, 1970. Trilogia della vita (Il Decamerone, I racconti di Canterbury, Il fiore delle mille e una notte), Bologna: Cappelli, 1975. San Paolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977.

Further Reading Agosti, Stefano, La parola fuori di se`, Foggia: Bastogi, 2005. Allen, Beverly (editor), Pier Paolo Pasolini: the Poetics of Heresy, Saratoga: Anma Libri, 1982. Casi, Stefano, Pasolini: Un’idea di teatro, Udine: Campanotto, 1990. Casi, Stefano, Teatri di Pasolini, introduction by Luca Ronconi, Milan: Ubulibri, 2005. Fortini, Franco, Attraverso Pasolini, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Gordon, Robert S., Pasolini: Forms of Subjectivity, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Martinelli, Luigi, Introduzione a Pasolini, Rome: Laterza, 1989. Mazza, Antonio, Fortuna critica e successo di Pasolini, Pisa: Istituti editorialie poligrafici internazionali, 2002. Naldini, Nico, Mio cugino, Milan: Bietti, 2000. Naldini, Nico, Pasolini una vita, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Peterson, Thomas E., The Paraphrase of an Imaginary Dialogue: The Poetics and Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini, New York: Peter Lang, 1994.

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI Rumble, Patrick, and Bart Testa (eds.), Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Schwartz, Barth David, Pasolini Requiem, New York: Pantheon, 1992. Siciliano, Enzo, Vita di Pasolini, Florence: Giunti, 1995; as Pasolini: A Biography, New York: Random House, 1982. Siciliano, Enzo, and Federica Pirani (editors), Pasolini e Roma, Milan: Silvana, 2005. Stack, Oswald, Pasolini on Pasolini, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. Vighi, Fabio, Le ragioni dell’altro: La formazione intellettuale di Pasolini tra saggistica, letteratura, e cinema, Ravenna: Longo, 2001. Ward, David, A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Watson, William Van, Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Theatre of the Word, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989. Zigaina, Giuseppe, Pasolini Between Enigma and Prophecy, translated by Jennifer Russell, Toronto: Exile Editions, 1991.

CINEMA Works in film by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini was unquestionably one of Italy’s most important artistic personalities in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, film director, playwright, translator, and public intellectual, his work in any one field earned him international renown. His was an immensely personal body of work; his experiences, his suffering, his passions, his anger, and his otherness are barely hidden beneath the images in his films. It is equally futile to try to understand Pasolini’s films without some knowledge of the literary canon, of art history, and of the semiotics of cinema. His films frequently retell and thus comment on literary classics, from Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) to Salo` e le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo` or The 120 Days of Sodom, 1975). They also contain innumerable allusions to works of art ranging from Giotto to southwest Asian illustrations. In films ranging from Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966) to Il fiore delle mille e una

notte (The Arabian Nights, 1974), Pasolini wove into the narrative discussions of the semiotics of language and of theories of communications. Pasolini saw himself as the ultimate outsider; he felt he had been betrayed and/or attacked by virtually everyone, from his own mother to the Communist Party. Throughout most of his life, he sympathized with the downtrodden and the outsiders: the peasants of his native region, Friuli, the Roman subproletariat, and the oppressed populations of Third World countries—all of whom he eventually endowed with mythical qualities. Pasolini became involved in filmmaking somewhat by accident after arriving in Rome with his mother in 1951. There, living in abject poverty in a suburban slum, he was thrust into the midst of what he defined as the preindustrial subproletariat. He used the Roman dialect to describe this world of pimps, prostitutes, petty thieves, and hustlers in two novels, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955) and Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1959), which brought him to the attention of a number of filmmakers. During this period he earned a living by working on the scripts of several films, including Mario Soldati’s La donna del fiume (Woman of the River, 1955), Federico Fellini’s Le notti di Cabiria (The Nights of Cabiria, 1956), Mauro Bolognini’s La notte brava (Bad Girls Don’t Cry, 1959), Franco Rossi’s Morte di un amico (Death of a Friend, 1960), and Bernardo Bertolucci’s La comare secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962). Indeed, Bolognini, whose La notte brava was an adaptation of Pasolini’s Ragazzi di vita, is credited with having discovered and promoted the talent of the controversial young poet from Friuli. He had already enlisted Pasolini’s assistance in 1957 for his Giovani mariti (The Young Husbands), which attracted attention because of its harsh colloquial dialogue. And it was indeed Mauro Bolognini who found Pasolini a producer (Alfredo Bini) for his first feature film Accattone (Accattone!, 1961). By this time, Pasolini was considered one of Italy’s leading poets, a prolific screenwriter, and a constant voice of provocation in the social and political arena. Accattone!, which explores the world of the Roman borgate or shanty suburbs, deals with characters, locations, and situations that are reminiscent of those of his novels. It tells the story of a two-bit Roman hustler and pimp who dies in a motorcycle accident. This film, and the one that followed, Mamma Roma (1962), with Anna Magnani in the lead role, seemed to foreshadow a rebirth of Italian neo-Realism and was especially 1371

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI welcomed by nostalgia-prone leftist critics. Pasolini, however, rejected this notion, stating that while neo-Realist films were characterized by credulousness, naturalism, human warmth, and irony, he was striving to capture the ‘‘reverential’’ nature of reality itself. These early films were already marked by his use of pastiche, the juxtaposition of high art with humble subject matter: the music of Bach, Vivaldi, and Donizetti played against images of pimps, prostitutes, and hustlers; prison cells that are reminiscent of Renaissance studies in perspective; subproletarians clad in garments designed by Piero della Francesca. His characters, furthermore, come from social classes considered irrelevant to the political struggles envisioned by dogmatic Marxists. For example, in Mamma Roma, Anna Magnani no longer portrays the Resistance heroine and martyr, the role that made her famous in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, citta` aperta (Open City, 1945); now she is a prostitute obsessed by an all-consuming love for her son. The praise Pasolini received for his first films was immediately buried in the controversy that followed the appearance of his La ricotta episode in Rogopag (1963), a film with four segments directed also by Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Ugo Gregoretti. The Catholic Church became apoplectic over Pasolini’s short ironic film about the crucifixion, which starred a starving extra as Jesus. Pasolini was indicted for defamation of the state religion. La ricotta casts an unemployed worker who earns a few lire as a stand-in (he is the Good Thief) in a film about the life of Christ. During the shooting he stuffs himself with food, overeating ricotta, and actually dies on the cross. He is discovered when the producer visits the set with some guests and entertains them with an exorbitant banquet. The film director is played by Orson Welles. Pasolini’s selection of music, which ranges from the Gregorian ‘‘Dies Irae’’ to the contemporary, reinforces Pasolini’s satire, social injustice, and consumerism. Pasolini returned to his interest in the story of Jesus with Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964), which, ironically, received international acclaim from both Catholic and Marxist critics. In this film Pasolini began several practices that he would often follow in subsequent films set in the past. He conceived of the shot, a basic cinematic element, as at once primitive and sacred. He transcended the concept of technical ‘‘sacrality’’ by adopting his definition of ‘‘cinema di poesia’’ (cinema of poetry) relying on an individual system of images/signs. He began employing, as a rule, actors 1372

who were nonprofessionals and, for the most part, peasants and members of the subproletariat. In his search for authenticity, the director wanted faces, bodies, and teeth that were closer to what one might have found in Palestine, Naples, Greece, or southwest Asia hundreds, even thousands of years ago, rather than those seen in the virtually all conventional films about the life of Jesus, the Middle Ages, or Greek and Middle Eastern mythology. His highly iconoclastic use of music, ranging from blues to Missa Luba, Bach, Mozart, and Prokofiev has been emulated, consciously and not, by countless other directors. He also began to travel to Third World countries trying to find the settings for his films. For Il vangelo secondo Matteo he visited the Middle East, and while he eventually decided to shoot the film in Calabria, his trip is reflected in his 52-minute documentary Sopraluoghi in Palestina (Location Scouting in Palestine, 1964). Other trips would take him to India, Sudan, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Israel, Jordan, Ethiopia, Yemen, Iran, and Nepal. Pasolini’s next film, Uccellacci e uccellini, an ideological-comic view of the end of neo-Realism as seen by a Marxist intellectual, comments on the passing of the grandiose drama of social denunciation and on the more humble neo-Realist indictment of social and political ills. If his Il vangelo secondo Matteo had made every film about the life of Jesus made before or since somewhat irrelevant, in Uccellacci e uccellini, from the opening credits, which are sung out loud to road signs pointing to distant world capitals, to citations of Mao Zedong printed across the screen, to the structure of the film itself, which might be called picaresque, but only for lack of a better term, Pasolini was reinventing filmmaking. The film recounts the wanderings of two subproletarian protagonists, Toto` and Ninetto, who happen to meet a raven who comes from the Country of Ideology and lives in Via Karl Marx. Their journey unwinds through povertystricken borgate in which they have numerous symbolic encounters, including their participation at the funeral of Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti. At the end, Toto` and Ninetto decide to eat the raven, who has been preaching to them all along like an old Marxist ideologue. The films that followed—Edipo re, Teorema (Theorem, 1968), Porcile (Pigsty, 1969) and Medea (1970)—reflected the general European trend toward more intellectual, complex, art-house cinema. In these films, Pasolini exposed patriarchal bourgeois capitalist sexual repression by addressing themes such as the Oedipus complex, incest, cannibalism,

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI myth, magic, and infanticide. Although Pasolini received the plaudits of a number of critics, he increasingly alienated the general public. The cinematography of these films is often stunning, but the completely unconventional ‘‘reverential’’ acting style confused viewers, as did the seemingly odd choice of actors and the presentation of myth and magic as reality. Starting in the early 1970s Pasolini rejected avantgarde cinema in favor of what he described as ‘‘liberated’’ cinema. He had come to realize that his difficult, Hermetic films were undermining his own efforts to reach a wider audience. In an important essay Cinema impopolare (Unpopular Cinema), published in Nuovi argomenti (1970), Pasolini argued that art is valid only when it is ‘‘revolutionary,’’ that is, when artists are on the ‘‘firing line,’’ breaking the laws of the system within which they operate. Thus, he rejected both traditional and avant-garde cinemas. Both, he argued, are consumer products since neither challenges its respective public. Pasolini returned to the firing line by fusing traditional and modernist modes in his trilogia della vita (trilogy of life) films: Il Decameron (The Decameron, 1971), I racconti di Canterbury (Canterbury Tales, 1972), and Il fiore delle mille e una notte. Although these films found a broader and more popular audience, they disappointed some intellectuals, critics, and art house patrons who had earlier championed his more esoteric works. At this time Pasolini gathered 17 of his most important essays on film, written between 1965 and 1971, in Empirismo Eretico (Heretical Empiricism, 1972). In them, among other things, he discussed his theories about the semiotics of cinema. Cinema, he argued, is predicated on an as yet undefined ‘‘code of reality’’ and thus, like reality itself, is enigmatic and mysterious. That being the case, he claimed, he no longer found it necessary to make thesis films that defended a particular point of view. As he stated in an interview with Gideon Bachmann, now he could begin to enter into ‘‘the ontology of narration, into the making of cinema-cinema’’ (‘‘Pasolini Today,’’ 1973). The last lines of the ‘‘trilogy of life’’ films reveal rather explicitly Pasolini’s feelings about his experiment in the making of what he called ‘‘cinema-cinema.’’ He proceeded from a focus on the artistic process in Il Decameron: ‘‘Perche` realizzare un’opera quando e` cosı` bello solo pensarla?’’ (Why realize a work of art when it is so nice to simply imagine it?); to an expression of the sheer joy of storytelling in I racconti di Canterbury: ‘‘Qui finiscono I racconti di Canterbury raccontati per il solo piacere di raccontare’’ (Here end the Canterbury

Tales told solely for the pleasure of telling); to a final acknowledgment, in Il fiore delle mille e una notte, that the creative process, however painful, does generate enduring rewards: ‘‘Che notte! Dio non ne ha creato di uguali! Il suo inizio fu amaro, ma come fu dolce la sua fine!’’ (What a night! God has created none to equal it! Its inception was bitter, but how sweet its end!). However, beneath the joy of narration, Pasolini’s ideological message was quite harsh. At the core of Pasolini’s work is his intense antipathy toward his father and, by extension, toward all authority figures. Over the years, in films such as Edipo re, Medea, Teorema, and to an even greater extent in Il Decameron, I racconti di Canterbury, and Il fiore delle mille e una notte, he evolved a theory of Eros, the more unconventional the better, as revolutionary energy aimed against the patriarchal family, the cornerstone of bourgeois capitalist society. The films of the ‘‘trilogy of life’’ are his most ideological; They are all, without exception, constrained by sexual inhibitions. On June 15, 1975, Pasolini wrote his ‘‘Abiura dalla trilogia della vita’’ (Recantation of the Trilogy of Life). In it he explicitly repudiated what he had previously espoused: the subproletariat, sexual liberation, and leftist intellectuals in general. The Italian situation, which Pasolini defined as personally suicidal, led him to want to express his feelings more explicitly in Salo`, a film in which the Marquis de Sade’s novel Les 120 Journe´es de Sodome (1785) is set in the Fascist republic established for Mussolini by Hitler in the incongruously charming town of Salo` on Lake Garda. The film uses scenes of sex and violence inspired by both de Sade and Dante’s Inferno to reiterate Pasolini’s indictment of the contemporary power structure in terms that are shocking, controversial, and virtually unwatchable. On the night of November 2, 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini was beaten to death, allegedly by a part-time male prostitute, in a manner that, some have argued, might have been taken from one of his films. And yet, it would be far too simplistic to connect Salo` to the director’s death. Although Salo` is a deeply pessimistic film, Pasolini was, by all accounts, in great spirits during the shooting. Even though he appeared to have had little hope for political change in Italy, he was full of ideas and projects for further films and books. Il fiore delle mille e una notte, a work that is as critical of Western capitalist consumer society as any Pasolini ever wrote or filmed, culminates in a note of joy and hope. BEN LAWTON 1373

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI Selected Films Accattone, 1961. Mamma Roma, 1962. Rogopag (episode La ricotta), 1963. La rabbia, 1963. Comizi d’amore, 1964. Il vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to Matthew), 1964. Sopraluogi in Palestina per ‘‘Il vangelo secondo Matteo,’’ 1964. Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows), 1966. Le streghe (episode La terra vista dalla luna), 1966. Capriccio all’italiana (episode Che cosa sono le nuvole?), 1967. Edipo re (Oedipus Rex, inspired by Sophocles), 1967. Teorema (Theorem, based on a short story by Pasolini), 1968. Amore e rabbia, 1969. Porcile (Pigsty), 1969. Appunti per un film sull’India, 1969. Appunti per un’Orestiade africana, 1969. Medea (inspired by Euripides), 1970. Il Decameron (based on Giovanni Boccaccio’s novelle), 1971. I racconti di Canterbury (Canterbury Tales, based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s stories), 1972. Il fiore delle mille e una notte (based on the Arabian Nights), 1974. Salo` o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo`, based on the Marquis de Sade’s novel, Les 120 Journe´es de Sodome), 1975.

Screenplays Accattone, preface by Carlo Levi, Rome: F.M., 1961. Mamma Roma, Milan: Rizzoli, 1962. Il vangelo Secondo Matteo, Milan: Garzanti, 1964. La ricotta, in Alı` dagli occhi azzurri, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Uccellacci e uccellini, Milan: Garzanti, 1966. Edipo re, Milan: Garzanti, 1967; as Oedipus Rex, London: Lorrimer, 1971. Medea, Milan: Garzanti, 1970. Ostia (with Sergio Citti), Milan: Garzanti, 1970. Trilogia della vita (Il Decamerone, I racconti di Canterbury, Il fiore delle mille e una notte), edited by Giorgio Gatteri, Bologna: Cappelli, 1975. San Paolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Accattone. Mamma Roma, Milan: Garzanti, 1993.

Films on Pasolini Wie die waarheid zegt moet dood (Whoever Says the Truth Shall Die), directed by Philo Bregstein, 1981. Pasolini, un delitto italiano, directed by Marco Tullio Giordana, 1995. Pier Paolo Pasolini e la ragione di un sogno, directed by Laura Betti, 2001.

Essays Empirismo eretico, Milan: Garzanti, 1972; as Heretical Empiricism, translated by Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett, edited by Louise K. Barnett, 1988. Per il cinema, edited by Walter Siti and Franco Zabagli, 2001.

Further Reading Bachmann, Gideon, ‘‘Pasolini Today: The Interview,’’ Take One, 4 (1973), 18–21. Baranski, Zygmunt (editor), Pasolini Old and New: Surveys and Studies, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999.

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De Giusti, Luciano, I film di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Rome: Gremese, 1983. Di Giammatteo, Fernaldo (editor), ‘‘Lo scandalo Pasolini,’’ special issue of Bianco e nero, 37 (January–April 1976). Greene, Naomi, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Indiana, Gary, Salo` or the Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, London: BFI, 2000. Mancini, Michele, and Giuseppe Perella, Pier Paolo Pasolini: corpi e luoghi, Rome: Theorema, 1981. Rohdie, Sam, The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Snyder, Stephen, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Boston: Twayne, 1980. Viano, Maurizio, A Certain Realism: Making Use of Pasolini’s Film Theory and Practice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

LE CENERI DI GRAMSCI, 1957 Poetry by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Although Le ceneri di Gramsci (The Ashes of Gramsci) was Pasolini’s ninth volume of poetry, it is the book that established his reputation as one of Italy’s most important lyric poets, especially after it was awarded the prestigious Viareggio Prize. In the 11 metrical patterns of the long poems of which the work is made up, Pasolini showed a preference for the Dantesque terza rima—Dante provided the model of ‘‘civil poetry’’ that Pasolini emulated his entire life—as well as the ‘‘Alexandrine’’ verse popularized by Pier Iacopo Martello in the early eighteenth century. In terms of theme, Pasolini might best be placed in a ‘‘decadent’’ current of modern lyric poetry that reached Pasolini through Giovanni Pascoli, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, Erza Pound, and T. S. Eliot. Pascoli’s influence is perhaps the strongest, given Pasolini’s penchant for natural symbolism; an identification with victims, immigrants, outcasts; and the tendency to project the poet’s psychological dilemmas onto a traumatized landscape. Pasolini also emulated the plurilinguistic nature of some of Pascoli’s poems in their mixture of standard Italian alongside local dialect, as in ‘‘Il canto popolare’’ (Popular Song), and especially in the blending of high and low poetic registers

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI throughout the volume. This ‘‘mannerist’’ style of linguistic contaminatio is a dominant feature of Pasolini’s fiction writing of the period, as well, though it also grows out of his youthful poetic writing in the Friulian dialect. Published in the early years of Italy’s economic boom, Le ceneri di Gramsci registers the impact of modernity on Italy’s traditional (mainly agricultural) ways of life and describes the signs of such a transformation of life in dramatic new features of the Eternal City. In an ode to Rome, dated 1956, entitled ‘‘Il pianto della scavatrice’’ (The Weeping of the Excavator), the poet reflected on what six years of living there had done to transform him: ‘‘Stupenda e misera citta`, / che m’hai insegnato cio` che allegri e feroci / gli uomini imparano bambini, / le piccole cose in cui la grandezza / della vita in pace si scopre, come / andare duri e pronti nella ressa/delle strade....’’ (Stupendous and miserable city,/you taught me what joyful ferocious men/learn as kids/the little things in which the greatness/of life is found in peace,/how to be tough and ready/in the confusion of the streets...). The new Rome that is seen ‘‘under construction’’—with its new working classes in the ghettos, its housing projects, construction sites, and mass transportation projects— serves to communicate the birth of a new ‘‘consumerist’’ Italy that Pasolini found largely repugnant. Throughout the poems, it becomes clear that for Pasolini the new Italy would fail to conform to the vision of a renovated democracy of workers and peasants envisioned by Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937). The influential cofounder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and martyr-figure of postwar Resistance culture, the Gramsci in the book’s title signifies not only the democratic aspirations of anti-Fascism and communism in Italy but also the failure of achieving a true democracy in postFascist Italy given the Cold War pressures brought to bear in order to neutralize the political parties most associated with the Resistance (especially the PCI). In the title poem, but also in ‘‘Recit,’’ ‘‘Il pianto della scavatrice,’’ and ‘‘Comizio’’ (The Meeting), the picture that emerges of Italy is one of a nation undergoing rapid transformation as its traditions and customs struggle with the forces of innovation and modern development. In their contamination of metrical forms taken from the lyric tradition with the antilyrical settings and themes of Italy’s modernity (the new ghettos), Pasolini gave stylistic representation to Italy’s traumatic transition to modernity. And in the process, Pasolini resuscitated the Dantesque mode of civil poetry to the extent that it is motivated not only by

aesthetic concerns but also by moral and ideological outrage. PATRICK RUMBLE Editions First edition: Le ceneri di Gramsci, Milan: Garzanti, 1957. Translations: as The Ashes of Gramsci, translated by David Wallace, Peterborough, U.K.: Spectacular Diseases, 1982.

Further Reading Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Esistenza e manierismo in Pier Paolo Pasolini,’’ in I poeti del Novecento, Rome: Laterza, 1977. Jewell, Keala, ‘‘Deconstructing the Palimpsest: Pasolini’s Roman Poems,’’ Substance, 53 (1987), 55–56. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘L’eredita` di Pasolini e Fortini,’’ Il Ponte, 37:3–4 (March–April 1981), 356–362. Mannino, Vincenzo, Il discorso di Pasolini. Saggio su ‘‘Le ceneri di Gramsci,’’ Rome: Argileto, 2003. Naldini, Nico, Pasolini una vita, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Siciliano, Enzo, Vita di Pasolini, Florence: Giunti, 1995. Sillanpoa, Wallace, ‘‘Pasolini’s Gramsci,’’ Modern Language Notes, 96:1 (January 1981), 120–137.

RAGAZZI DI VITA, 1955 Novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s first novel, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi), is about the life of the Italian underclasses inhabiting the Roman slums, its action taking place from the end of World War II up until the early 1950s. Although the story centers mainly on Ricetto, an adolescent delinquent apprenticing in the ways of petty criminality, the narrative also shifts focus often onto other members of Ricetto’s gang of tough-talking street hustlers (the ‘‘boys of life’’ in the title). The refracted perspective offered by this cast of characters lends the narrative a choral quality that enhances its representation of collective life on the lowest rung of the social ladder during postwar reconstruction. We follow Ricetto and the others as they scrounge around the city, looking for easy prey: They participate in all manner of petty thievery (often stealing from each other), 1375

PIER PAOLO PASOLINI gambling, and prostitution. They spend their illbegotten profits at bars and swimming establishments along the shores of the Tiber and Aniene rivers, ever on the lookout for a quick buck. Indeed, Rome’s rivers stage the two most significant moments in the story of the ‘‘hardening’’ of Ricetto, or his dehumanization: While at the beginning of the novel Ricetto rushes into the Tiber to save a drowning swallow at great personal risk, by the end he cannot be moved to take similar risks to save one of the gang members, Genesio, who makes the mistake of swimming too far into the Aniene’s strong currents, where he will perish. In Ragazzi di vita, which is less of a developed narrative than it is a series of vignettes, the author took great care to offer a detailed panorama of the life of the city, its busy markets and thoroughfares, its degraded ghettos and abandoned warehouses. In the process he faithfully reproduced the streetslang of the Roman shantytowns of the period— the characters speak either Romanesco or a blend of southern Italian dialects. Indeed, the novel’s sociolinguistic realism—the way it offers a linguistic snapshot of the Roman subproletariat—is one of the main marks of its originality in the history of the modern Italian novel. In fact, when the book came out, it was accompanied by a glossary of Romanesco to help the reader decipher forms of spoken Italian that had only rarely found their way into print. The novel’s narrative of lawless and morally unbound characters, together with its setting in the impoverished and perennially overlooked shantytowns of Italy’s capital city, led critics of all political persuasions (Catholics and Communists alike) to denounce the book as ideologically and morally suspect. The book was temporarily banned and its author and publisher (Garzanti) accused of pornography. Though they were both ultimately absolved, with his next novel, Una vita violenta, Pasolini wrote a rather more orthodox narrative of a ghetto character who redeems himself by joining the Communist Party. In doing so, he abandoned many of the stylistic and thematic innovations found in Ragazzi di vita— whose characters remain utterly unredeemed and unresponsive to the solutions offered by any political parties and traditional religious institutions—to write in the more accepted manner of the socially engaged, neo-Realist novelists of the time, such as Vasco Pratolini. He would return to the Roman ghettos for the settings and characters of his first feature film, Accattone, in 1961. PATRICK RUMBLE 1376

Editions First edition: Ragazzi di vita, Milan: Garzanti, 1955. Translation: as The Ragazzi, translated by Emile Capouya, New York: Grove, 1968; reprinted, Manchester and New York: Carcanet, 1986.

Further Reading Baran´ski, Zygmunt (editor), Pasolini Old and New, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999. Francese, Joseph, Il realismo impopolare di Pier Paolo Pasolini, Foggia: Bastogi, 1991. Golino, Enzo, Pasolini. Il sogno di una cosa: pedagogia, eros, letteratura dal mito del popolo alla societa` di massa, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985. Muzzioli, Francesco, Come leggere ‘‘Ragazzi di vita,’’ Milan: Mursia, 1975. Vitti, Antonio, Il primo Pasolini e la sua narrativa, New York: Lang, 1987. Ward, David, A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

UNA VITA VIOLENTA, 1959 Novel by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Una vita violenta (A Violent Life) recounts the story of Tommaso Puzzilli from adolescence to early adulthood in the housing projects of Rome during the 1950s, the period documented in Pasolini’s most significant work in fiction and poetry. This is a coming-of-age story that, when compared to Pasolini’s earlier novel, Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955), seems fashioned largely in emulation of the thematic and stylistic formulas associated with ideologically motivated, neo-Realist novels of the 1940s and 1950s, written by authors on the Italian Left. What is more innovative, however, is Pasolini’s focus on Italy’s politically undefined lumpenproletariat (rather than the southern peasants of Carlo Levi and Elio Vittorini, or the industrial workers of Vasco Pratolini). Tommaso and his family are refugees living in a shack along the Aniene River since their house was destroyed by Allied bombs during World War II. Although Tommaso attends school, he soon loses

JACOPO PASSAVANTI his way and falls in with a group of street thugs; he literally joins the vita violenta (as found in the book’s title). The remainder of the story is the narrative of his political awakening. Unfocused anger and resentment, and the romanticization of violence, fuel Tommaso’s initial allegiance to a squad of neo-Fascist youths, though the group’s political motivations seem far weaker than their taste for alcohol and sadistic violence. Tommaso meets and falls in love with Irene, whose influence does not seem adequate to ennoble him. After a gang fight, Tommaso is arrested and sent to prison. When he emerges from the penitentiary, he is now 20 years old and ready to make something of himself. If the first part of the novel is the story of Tommaso’s apprenticeship in petty criminality, the second part recounts his desire for workingclass conformity. Moving leftward along the political spectrum, he turns his back on his old neoFascist pals, gets a regular job, and joins the Christian Democratic Party in the hopes that it will help him climb the social ladder. When he falls ill with tuberculosis, he finds himself in an overcrowded state hospital where the patients and staff strike for better conditions. Tommaso finds his sympathies drawn to the side of the strikers. Armed with his new political consciousness, he leaves the hospital and joins the Communist Party. Soon thereafter, he comes to the aid of his former neighbors in his old shantytown when it is flooded by the Aniene River. Tommaso’s heroic act signifies his political and moral redemption, though it also leads to a flare-up of his old tuberculosis. With the character’s death, Tommaso’s trajectory from the social marginalization and incoherent rebellion of his adolescence toward the ethical awakening and class-consciousness of mature adulthood is made complete.

Una vita violenta offered Italian readers of the time a glimpse into the harsh living conditions of the urban subproletariat in a manner rarely found before in Italian fiction. Unlike Ragazzi di vita, this story fits more readily into the conventions of the neo-Realist novel. Foremost among the significant stylistic novelties found in this work is the author’s use of regional dialects (Romanesco and various mixtures of southern Italian dialects) and street slang in the dialogues. This type of linguistic realism—as opposed to the more ‘‘baroque’’ plurilinguism of Carlo Emilio Gadda, whom Pasolini admired for his stylistic experimentation—is one of Pasolini’s defining contributions to the modern Italian novel. PATRICK RUMBLE Editions First edition: Una vita violenta, Milan: Garzanti, 1959. Translation: as A Violent Life, translated by William Weaver, New York: Pantheon, 1968.

Further Reading Baran´ski, Zygmunt (editor), Pasolini Old and New, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999. Camon, Ferdinando, Letteratura e classi subalterne, Venice: Marsilio, 1974. Rumble, Patrick, and Bart Testa (editors), Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994. Schwartz, Barth David, Pasolini Requiem, New York: Pantheon, 1992. Vitti, Antonio, Il primo Pasolini e la sua narrativa, New York: Lang, 1987. Ward, David, A Poetics of Resistance: Narrative and the Writings of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996.

JACOPO PASSAVANTI (CA. 1300–1357) Jacopo Passavanti was a Dominican preacher and theologian whose devotional book, Lo specchio della vera penitenza (Mirror of True Penance), is a model of simplicity and stylistic elegance in the Florentine vernacular. Lo specchio della vera

penitenza is a compilation and reelaboration in the form of a treatise of sermons that Passavanti wrote and delivered in the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence during the Lenten season of 1345. The structure is far from fragmentary, 1377

JACOPO PASSAVANTI however, as the author proceeded methodically through the exposition of a ‘‘dottrina della vera penitenza’’ (a doctrine of true penitence), considering the nature of penitence within the framework of the human conscience. He looked closely at the psychology of guilt and reflected on motivations, such as love of justice, fear of divine wrath, and the uncertainty of the hour of death, which inspire humankind to seek penitence. Shame and desperation, he warned, counter these motivations and lure humanity away from God. In order to achieve true penitence, one must submit oneself to a tripartite process. The three stages toward repentance in Passavanti’s scheme are designed to address the three primary vehicles of sin: thought, speech, and action. The first step in the process, which achieves repentance for sins of the mind, is contrition, the perfect and voluntary sorrow inspired by nothing other than love for God. Passavanti acknowledged the possibility of insincere or misguided repentance, warning that attrition, which he described as an imperfect sorrow stimulated by the fear of punitive consequences like pain, rejection, or not receiving a reward, is a false first step, a substitute for contrition that will not lead to true penitence. Only contrition will induct the second phase in the penitential process, confession, which will finally lead to satisfaction through works in reparation for acts of sinfulness. In order to render the abstract theological principles comprehensible to unlearned readers, Passavanti structured his lessons around 48 exempla, simple stories to communicate the moral thrust of his teaching and, at times, to instill a fear of God and hell in his audience. Drawn from medieval legends, lives of saints, and short popular narrative tales, most of the exempla focus on one character in a framework that looks at his or her psychological state through a religious lens. This parabolic structure, as well as his decision to write in the vernacular, indicates that Passavanti intended the work for an uneducated audience. This represents somewhat of a departure from customs for Dominicans, who tended to focus their predicatory efforts on the more learned, while the Franciscans often directed their message to the popular masses. By writing his sermons in the original vernacular, Passavanti targeted the lay community, or those who did not take part in high religious culture. Although recording sermons was not an uncommon practice, writing religious material for popular diffusion had few precedents. Passavanti recognized 1378

his own text as a pioneer for a new brand of prose, religious vernacular prose, and addressed the task of establishing a linguistic style appropriate to the dignity of the subject matter. In this way, he maintains a place among other renowned historical figures pivotal in the development of the vernacular, such as Dante Alighieri, whose Convivio (The Banquet, 1304–1307) provided the foundational example of prose that treated high, philosophical material in an adequately high-style vernacular, as well as Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary of Passavanti, whose Decameron (ca. 1373) made rich and witty prose writing accessible to a vast popular audience. Passavanti suggested that controlled language without excessive flourish is needed to illuminate religious truths and give proper respect to sacred material. Preachers must avoid poetry and vain philosophies expounded in cryptic language. The role of language must thus mirror the role of the preacher: that is, to be utile, or useful, and to clarify issues pertinent to the lives of common people. Therefore, a writer of Italian or a volgarizzatore, a translator into the vulgar tongue, of Latin religious sermons must not only know enough Italian grammar to be sufficient at the task but must also know theology, have expert knowledge of the sacred scriptures, be adept at rhetoric, be practiced in speaking the vernacular, and have a sacred devotion to God. Numerous editions of Lo specchio della vera penitenza were published in Florence and throughout Italy, confirming not only the originality and eloquence of the work but its essential contribution to the written vernacular tradition. The oldest extant edition is the Florentine edition of 1495, and particularly important was also the redaction ‘‘corrected’’ and published by the Accademia della Crusca in 1725.

Biography Jacopo Passavanti was born in Florence, ca. 1300, the son of Bianco Passavanti and Francesca dei Tornaquinci. He joined the Dominican order, 1317, and studied in Paris, 1330. He was a lecturer of philosophy at the University of Pisa and a professor of theology at the University in Siena and at the University of Rome. Passavanti was named prior of Santa Maria Novella in Florence and assisted with adorning the church in its ongoing construction. He was named Vicar of the Archdiocese of Florence by Frate Angelo degli Acciajoli, 1345–1352. Passavanti

PASTORAL died in Florence on June 15, 1357, and was buried in the Chapel of San Giovanni Evangelista in the church of Santa Maria Novella. ERIN M. MCCARTHY Selected Works Lo specchio della vera penitenza (1354), Florence, 1495; Florence: Bartolommeo Sermartelli, 1579; Venice: Pietro Marinelli, 1586; Venice: Giovanbattista Bonfadino, 1608; Florence: Vangelisti, 1681; Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1725; Milan: Societa` Tipografica de’Classici italiani, 1808; reedited by F.-L. Polidori, Florence: Le Monnier, 1856.

Further Reading Aurigemma, Marcello, Saggio sul Passavanti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1957. Auzzas, Ginetta, ‘‘Per il testo dello Specchio della vera penitenza. Due nuove fonti manoscritte,’’ Lettere Italiane, 26 (1974), 261–287. Auzzas, Ginetta, ‘‘Dalla predica al trattato: lo Specchio della vera penitenza di Iacopo Passavanti,’’ Lettere Italiane, 54:3 (2002), 325–342. Delcorno, Carlo, ‘‘Nuovi testimoni della letteratura domenicana del Trecento (Giordano da Pisa, Cavalca, Passavanti),’’ Lettere Italiane, 36:4 (1984), 577–590. Del Popolo, Concetto, ‘‘Una tessera iacoponica in Passavanti,’’ Lettere Italiane, 53:3 (2001), 397–400. Morpurgo, Giuseppe (ed.), Novelle del trecento, Citta` di Castello: Lapi, 1914.

PASTORAL In Italian literature, the pastoral genre, in its different forms, enjoyed a long life, lasting from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Its origins date back to the classic elegy, typified by elegiac couplets and love themes expressing feelings of misery and discontent that were inspired by the elegiac Latin poets of the Augustan age (Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid). In the bucolic genre, whose principal models were Virgil’s poems, especially his Bucolics, rural life, the locus amoenus, and love were constant themes conveyed through the metric form of the eclogue in an average linguistic register. However, their meanings and content changed with the changing of external reality and, after the first poetical endeavors of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, found new substance in the form of the drama and the romance. Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, in composing eclogues after the model set by Virgil, grafted onto the pastoral scenery and the characters’ vicissitudes elements rooted in their own private life, their own poetic activity, and contemporary historical events. Particularly, Boccaccio in the Ninfale fiesolano (Story of the Nymphs from Fiesole, written in 1344–1346) and in Ninfale d’Ameto (Ameto’s Story of the Nymphs, written between 1341 and 1342), introduced woodland scenery, shepherds,

nymphs, and love’s labors, which were subjects typical of the pastoral genre, in the structure of the romance, thus giving the Italian literature an example for the development of this new genre. In the fifteenth century Boccaccio’s heritage influenced Iacopo Sannazaro who, following the inclination to escapism and the idyllic interlude typical of Humanism and the pastoral vogue that prevailed among the Neapolitan intellectuals of Alfonso of Aragon’s court, between 1480 and 1486 wrote Arcadia, a bucolic romance that exercised a considerable influence on the successive production of pastoral poetry. This work mirrored the language, style, and contents of the poems of Theocritus and Virgil and helped to consolidate, as characteristics of this genre, the representation of Nature as a refuge from adversity, sharing with humanity the sentiment of love, seen as a source of joy and woe, and the yearning for the Golden Age, which was properly located in the mythical Arcadia. In addition to these features, which characterized bucolic tradition, in the places and images of Arcadia and in the shepherds that inhabited it, Sannazaro reproduced humanistic society and its aspiration to an ideal life of quietude and harmony. Following the models of Boccaccio’s Ninfali, Florentine culture produced other works that enhanced the dissemination of the pastoral genre.

1379

PASTORAL On the literary front, it must be recalled that in 1482 a printed edition of Bucoliche elegantissime appeared, presenting a terza rima version of Virgil’s Bucolics by Bernardo Pulci (brother of the better known Luigi, author of Morgante), together with other pieces on pastoral subjects written by contemporary poets and men of letters (the Florentine Girolamo Beniveni and the Sienese Francesco Arzocchi and Jacopo Fiorino de’ Boninsegna). This miscellany had a definite influence on Matteo Maria Boiardo, who between 1482 and 1483 wrote ten pieces on the model of Virgil’s Eclogues, with the title of Pastoralia (Pastorals), where he made a large use of allegorical references and endeavored to make pastoral subjects more relevant to his own day, recalling contemporary events and personalities. On the theatrical front, Angelo Poliziano’s Fabula di Orpheo (Orpheus), composed in Florence about 1473–1476, presented the first model for a pastoral drama, placing the mythological fable in a bucolic setting. In the years preceding the composition of Orpheo, pastoral eclogues were recited during banquets at court entertainments by singers in shepherds’ clothes. This very simple textual structure was built on alternating speeches, while choreography, costumes, and musical pieces were quite refined and elaborate. For this reason, the agile but functional dramatic structure that Poliziano’s Orpheo exemplified was readily imitated in, for example, Niccolo` da Correggio’s Cefalo, acted at Ferrara in 1487, Bernardo Bellincioni’s l’Ecloga overo Pasturale, written before 1488 and certainly performed by the author, and Baldesar Castiglione’s Tirsi, which he himself produced and performed at Urbino in 1506. These and other works contributed to the definition of the metrical features of pastoral drama, whose characters were acted by shepherds, nymphs, and satyrs; whose stage settings were meadows, hills, trees, and green clearings; and whose subject was love. After all, the representation conformed to literary and courtly conventions and was not meant to give a true-to-life picture of reality. Pastoral drama soon met with the favor of the Italian courts and aristocracy, because it offered the means to express in an allegorical and eulogistic language the ideals of humanistic culture projecting them into a world different from everyday life. At first, it conserved the literary form of an eclogue in dialogue form, with a variegated musical accompaniment prevailing over the text in the representation itself, as in I due pellegrini (The Two Pilgrims, 1525) by the southern courtier Luigi Tansillo or in Cecaria 1380

or Dialogo di tre ciechi (Blindness or The Dialogue of Three Blind Men, 1525) and in the Mirzia (ca. 1528) by the Neapolitan Marc’Antonio Epicuro. The pastoral genre enjoyed such wide diffusion in the first two decades of the sixteenth century (favored by the printing business then flourishing in Venice) that it prompted a hostile reaction from the important Paduan playwright Angelo Beolco, known as Ruzzante. With his Pastoral (ca. 1517–1518), Ruzzante ridiculed the mawkishness of bucolic poetry, contrasting the shepherds’ amorous lives with the peasants’ privations through an adept use of language: first of all Petrarch’s Italian and secondly the dialects of the Padua and Bergamo districts. In the sixteenth century, the subjects covered in Sannazzro’s Arcadia, such as classicism, and the idealization and literary setting of court circles within a pastoral environment combined with the academies’ definition of the ‘‘third genre’’—that of satirical plays—thereby permitting the creation of new forms capable of further development. The structural regularization of the pastoral genre, and of comedy and tragedy, reached a conclusion about the middle of the sixteenth century, with the dissemination of an Italian version of Aristotle’s Poetics, where the features of the ‘‘third genre’’ were defined, and with the progress of studies on Vitruvius’s De architectura (the renowned Latin treatise written at the time of the emperor Caesar Augustus), where the characteristics of three different stage sets—tragical, comical, and satirical— were described. The success and diffusion of the pastoral genre was mainly due to the patronage and support of the Estense family of Ferrara, who since the fifteenth century had favored theatrical experimentation and the promotion of comedy to the highest rank of public entertainments. PAOLA VENTRONE See also: Sannazaro Tasso Further Reading Accorsi, Maria Grazia, Pastori e teatro. Poesia e critica in Arcadia, Modena: Mucchi, 1999. Baratto, Mario, Tre saggi sul teatro: Ruzante, Aretino, Goldoni, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1964. Carrai, Stefano (editor), La poesia pastorale nel Rinascimento, Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1998. Carrara, Enrico, La poesia pastorale, Milan: Vallardi, 1909. Chiabo`, Miryam, and Federico Doglio, Origini del dramma pastorale in Europa, Atti del convegno di studi, 1984, Viterbo: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimentale, 1985.

CESARE PAVESE Chiabo`, Miryam, and Federico Doglio, Sviluppi della drammaturgia pastorale nell’Europa del Cinque-Seicento, Atti del convegno di studi, 1991, Rome: Centro studi sul teatro medioevale e rinascimentale, 1992. Cox, Virginia, ‘‘Fiction, 1560–1650,’’ in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Gifford, Terry, Pastoral, London-New York: Routledge, 1999. Isotti Rosowsky, Giuditta (editor), La campagna in citta`: letteratura e ideologia nel Rinascimento. Scritti in onore di Michel Plaisance, Florence: Franco Cesati, 2002. Ivaldi, Armando Fabio, Le nozze Pio-Farnese e gli apparati teatrali di Sassuolo del 1587: studio su una rappresentazione del primo dramma pastorale italiano, con intermezzi di G. B. Guarini, Genoa: Erga, 1974. Kidwell, Carol, Sannazaro and Arcadia, London: Duckworth, 1993.

Mamczarz, Ire`ne, Le The´aˆtre Farnese de Parme et le drame musical italien, 1618–1732: e´tude d’un lieu the´aˆtral, des repre´sentations, des formes: drame pastoral, interme`des, ope´ra-tournoi, drame musical, Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1988. Niccoli, Gabriel, Cupid, Satyr, and the Golden Age: Pastoral Dramatic Scenes of the Late Renaissance, New York: P. Lang, 1989. Pieri, Marzia, La scena boschereccia nel Rinascimento italiano, Padua: Liviana, 1983. Ricco`, Laura, ‘‘Ben mille pastorali.’’ L’itinerario dell’Ingegneri da Tasso a Guarini e oltre, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Sampson, Lisa, ‘‘The Mantuan Performance of Guarini’s Pastor fido and Representations of Courtly Identity,’’ Modern Language Review, 98:1 (2003), 65–83. Shiff, Jonathan, Venetian State Theater and the Games of Siena, 1595–1605: The Grimani Banquet Plays, Lewiston, NY: Mellen, 1993.

CESARE PAVESE (1908–1950) Cesare Pavese was one of the most distinctive contributors to the technique of the modern novel and one of the most isolated and revolutionary voices of twentieth-century Italian poetry. During his short lifetime, he also distinguished himself as a highly regarded translator and a very successful editor. He found inspiration for his work in the hills and peasantry of the small village of Santo Stefano Belbo in the Piedmont hills, where he was born and where he spent many summers, and in the industrial city of Turin, where his family had their permanent home. He lived with extraordinary intensity many of the existential problems and vicissitudes his generation of intellectuals encountered under Fascism, during a bitter civil war, and later in an extremely difficult postwar era. The dilemma of being attracted to the energy and enthusiasm of life but unable to participate in it is a recurrent motif in his work, as are the themes of humanity’s failure to communicate with others and the inability to make commitments. His entrance into the Liceo Massimo d’Azeglio in Turin in 1923 was one of the most important events in Pavese’s life. Here, he fell under the guidance of the celebrated teacher Augusto Monti, who combined his love for literature with a vigorous though not yet direct anti-Fascism. Upon completion of

high school, many of the ex-pupils of the Massimo d’Azeglio, a number of whom would become active in the anti-Fascist clandestine movement Giustizia e Liberta`, formed a circle, and under the guidance of Monti and Leone Ginzburg their discussions became much more politically oriented. One of these students, Giulio Einaudi, founded a publishing house in 1933 for which Pavese worked and served as the guiding light during the first 17 years of its history, both as a tireless editor and author. As a student Pavese discovered his affinity with American culture, slang, and literature. First inspired by Walt Whitman, whose works were the subject of his thesis at the University of Turin in 1930, Pavese found in American literature a vehicle to free himself from an imposing tradition and discover a new way of living and a new means of expression. His brilliant translations and excellent essays on American authors, which indicate an awareness of the linguistic experimentation taking place in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, helped contribute to the deprovincialization of Italian culture. Pavese saw in the writings of Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis an alternative to the fossilized and autocratic culture of the Fascist establishment. He was struck by the rebellious force and 1381

CESARE PAVESE commitment of human existential values that emerged from the writings of the American authors he translated and studied. American culture provided Pavese with an ideal place, if only metaphorically, in which to work and study. He wrote that America represented for him and other Italian intellectuals, such as Elio Vittorini, a literary allegory, a spiritual ideal, and a political myth. In his 1932 essay on Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, Pavese recognized the richness of culture in a work that treats the lives of average people from a provincial midwestern town and did so by adopting a nonrhetorical realistic expression. Though he moved in anti-Fascist circles, Pavese remained politically detached. Around 1930, he started a relationship with a committed Communist activist Tina Pizzardo, who would have a profound influence on his emotional life. She appeared to embody qualities that Pavese lacked: strength, masculine attitudes, and a decisive, self-assured character. This relationship with Pizzardo had political consequences ultimately. In May 1935, the police raided his house and found compromising letters to Pizzardo from another subversive that Pavese had agreed to receive at his address. He was arrested and then exiled for three years to the remote southern coastal village of Brancaleone Calabro on the basis of his association with members of the Giustizia e Liberta` movement, his role as editor of anti-Fascist magazine La cultura, and the possession of the dissident’s letters. His sentence was subsequently reduced to less than a year. Pavese’s first novel Il carcere (The Political Prisoner), which was not published until 1947, reflects the experiences of an urban intellectual in a remote village of southern Italy and the question of existential solitude. This period in Calabria is also well-documented by his numerous letters and his critically acclaimed diary (Il mestiere di vivere, The Burning Brand, 1952), which he started here and kept until his suicide in 1950. From the very outset of his political exile Pavese’s writing, be it letters, diary, or poems, ‘‘betrays a sense of futility and utter helplessness in the face of his destiny—a feature which was to pervade almost all of his subsequent work’’ (Thompson, 1982). From the beginning, Pavese’s writings reveal a desire for literary renewal. His first major publication, the poetry collection Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor, 1936) was and remains a novelty. When viewed in the context of the Hermetic tone that dominated the Italian landscape in the 1930s, these poems introduce a fresh new voice tending toward a sort of epic or narrative poetry written in 1382

a realistic, rhythmic language that tells stories of whores, thieves, drunks, farmers, factory workers, runaway boys, lonely men, tramps, and a hermit. The first poem of the collection, ‘‘I mari del Sud’’ (South Seas), about the return of the free-spirited ‘‘giant’’ cousin to the Langhe hills, contains nearly all the dominant themes of Pavese’s entire artistic production: the juxtaposition of the two contrasting landscapes of the city and country, the return to one’s roots, escapism, work, misogyny, and solitude. The collection’s lyrical sensitivity and highly personal tone contribute to its uniqueness. From 1936 to his death, Pavese’s literary activity was occupied primarily with narrative prose. His earliest entries in his diary, dating back to his confinement in Brancaleone Calabro, express a concern with the limitations of his own stylistic principles and anticipate the transition from verse to prose. With his first published novel, Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters), which appeared in 1941, Pavese sought to shatter the literary fashions of the period based on conventional, idyllic plots. The tragic conditions of the Langhe region are reflected in this novel, which marked another return to the peasant world of Santo Stefano Belbo. An innovation in expression and style is at the base of the novel, as Pavese turned to the Piedmontese vernacular for inspiration. As he discovered the primitivism of the countryside from the perspective of an unemployed Turin mechanic, Pavese blended psychological insight with a fresh treatment of the Piedmontese peasants. Pavese’s next novel, La bella estate (The Beautiful Summer), was written in 1940 but did not appear in print for nine years. In La bella estate the setting is exclusively urban, as the city becomes a place in which one grows and acquires maturity, and with it solitude. Pavese described the novel as the ‘‘storia di una verginita` che si difende’’ (story of a virginity that defends itself ). The novel La spiaggia (The Beach), which was completed in early 1941 and appeared that same year in installments in the magazine Lettere d’oggi, expands the theme of the psychological differences between adolescent youth and maturity to explore the urban upper class and its corruption. In an accompanying publicity note to the novel, Pavese explained that this last novel represents an effort to transcend naturalism by building up psychological atmosphere. Pavese’s diary indicates that, by the time he had completed La spiaggia, he had already found new ways of exploring anthropology and ethnology, which would eventually lead him to a theory of history based on myth. For Pavese, the discovery

CESARE PAVESE of myth allowed images to become symbols and served as a means of decoding reality. The collection of short stories and essays, Feria d’agosto (August Holiday), treats the writer’s childhood experiences in the country, his exploration of the world, and his theories of myth and symbol. His study of ethnology and myth owes a great debt to Vico’s Scienza nuova. From Vico, Pavese learned to approach the ancient story through the sensibility and culture of modern humanity and to view childhood as a reflection of the primitive world. From this perspective, the childhood represents a privileged period, with the past serving as an archetypal model. Along with Feria d’agosto, Pavese’s inquiry of myth found its artistic expression in what the author considered his major achievement among his writings: Dialoghi con Leuco` (Dialogues with Leuco`, 1947), a collection of lyrical pieces presented in the form of dialogues between mythological characters that explores such questions as memory, the passage from childhood to maturity, the concept of the selvaggio (the principle of untamed, instinctual motivation), and the poetics of destiny. In the final months of 1946, Pavese wrote his most political novel, Il compagno (The Comrade, 1947), considered by its author to be the antithesis of the Dialoghi. The novel’s protagonist overcomes a state of unresolved ennui through his active affiliation with the Communist Party. This period coincides with a moment of political activism for Pavese, when he joined the Communist Party and began to contribute articles on subjects of varied cultural interest to the Communist newspaper L’unita` and to the party’s weekly political magazine Rinascita. Pavese’s political involvement at this time appeared to be a direct response to his lack of participation in the previous war years. During the turbulent times of the civil war years (1943–1945), Pavese, unlike many of his friends who had gone off to join the wartime resistance against Fascism or had been imprisoned, had retreated to the Langhe hills and into his world of introspective solitude. Although Pavese hardly mentioned the war in his diary, the novel La casa in collina (The House on the Hill, 1949) provides a fictional version of his state of mind during the war. In treating the familiar themes of city/country, childhood/adulthood, and the myth of the return, the novel also tackles the issue of political commitment and the intellectual’s inability to act. What emerges is a profound meditation on the demands of history and the effects of war on the human condition.

In 1948 Pavese became deeply engaged in establishing a new anthropological and ethnological series at Einaudi. During this period he wrote Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in the Hills, 1949), a novel that focuses on the exploration of the countryside by three male students during their summer vacation. Pavese noted in his diary on 7 October 1948 that he had developed a ‘‘nuovo linguaggio’’ (new language) in this work and had for the first time effectively ‘‘piantato simboli’’ (planted symbols) in one of his novels. His next novel, Tra donne sole (Among Women Only), was written in the spring of 1949 and was published later that year in La bella estate, a trilogy that included the short novel La bella estate and Il diavolo sulle colline, for which Pavese received Italy’s most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize, in 1950. While writing Tra donne sole, Pavese referred to it as a ‘‘gran romanzo’’ (great novel) that sought to investigate the ‘‘mondo finto e tragico della haute’’ (false, tragic world of the upper class). Set almost exclusively in the city, Tra donne sole is the story of Clelia, a young woman who has risen from humble origins to a successful career as a couturier and is sent back to her native Turin to open a branch of a Roman fashion house in the immediate postwar years. At the opposite spectrum of Clelia, who accepts her destiny of isolation through her self-sufficiency, there is Rosetta, who cannot find any value in life and becomes a victim of suicide. The novel’s compelling rhythm is a result of ‘‘Pavese’s familiar technique of recurrent images and symbols—his ‘poem-story’ technique’’ (O’Healy, 1988). Pavese’s final novel, La luna e i falo` (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950) is considered by critics to be his most ambitious and mature work, the culmination of all his themes and of his research on style as well as meaning. The protagonist of the novel, an orphan nicknamed Anguilla (Eel), returns to his small village in Piedmont after the war, following a 20-year absence in the United States. This return is a personal quest to rediscover his roots and his identity, which, in turn, allows the author to explore perennial symbols of human destiny. Ultimately, Pavese, through Anguilla’s experiences, realized that mythical space cannot conquer historical time. In 1949, Pavese met the American actress Constance Dowling, who was shooting a picture in Italy. His love for Dowling and his disillusionment at the failure of their relationship were the inspiration of his last poems Verra` la morte e avra` i tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes), which were published after the writer’s 1383

CESARE PAVESE death in 1951. Here, and in an earlier collection of verse, La terra e la morte (Earth and Death, 1947), which was inspired by his relationship with Bianca Garufi, who coauthored the novel Fuoco grande (Great Fire, 1959) with him, Pavese charged his poetry with an intense lyrical impulse and a personalized subjective tone. In the early hours of 27 August 1950, Pavese died of an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel in Turin. In the room was his copy of Dialoghi con Leuco` opened to the first page where he had written the words: ‘‘Perdono a tutti e a tutti chiedo perdono. Va bene? Non fate molti pettegolezzi’’ (I forgive everyone and ask forgiveness of everyone. OK? Not too much gossip, please). Notwithstanding his own personal failures, through his works of art and his teachings, Pavese was able to instill that enthusiasm for freedom, that faith in the truth, that sincerity of expression he discovered, as a youth, in American literature.

Biography Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, 9 September 1908. He studied at the Ginnasio Moderno and the Liceo Massimo D’Azeglio in Turin, 1924–1927, and attended the University of Turin, earning a degree in letters, 1930. Pavese became editor of La cultura review, 1934–1935. He was arrested and sentenced to political confinement in Brancaleone Calabro, 1935–1936. He began a fulltime position with Einaudi, publishers, 1938, and was sent to Rome to set up branch of Einaudi, 1943. Pavese became editorial director at Einaudi in Turin, 1945. He joined the Communist Party, 1945. He founded a series on religious, ethnological, and psychological studies (‘‘Collezione di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici’’) for Einaudi, 1948–1950. He was awarded the Strega Prize, 1950. Cesare Pavese committed suicide in Turin, 27 August 1950. MARK PIETRALUNGA Selected Works Collections Poesie edite e inedite, Torino: Einaudi, 1962. Lettere 1924–1950, 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1966. The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese (includes The Beach, The House on the Hill, Among Women Only), New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1968; and New York: The New York Review of Books, 2001. Selected Letters 1924–1950, London: Peter Owen, 1969. A Mania for Solitude: Selected Poems 1930–1950, London: Peter Owen, 1969.

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The Leather Jacket and Other Stories, London: Quartet Books, 1980. Le Poesie, Torino: Einaudi, 1998. Tutti i romanzi, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Tutti i racconti, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Diaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2002.

Fiction Paesi tuoi, 1941; translated as The Harvesters, 1961. La spiaggia, 1942; translated as The Beach, 1963. Feria d’agosto, 1946; translated in part as Summer Storm and Other Stories, 1966. Dialoghi con Leuco`, 1947; Dialogues with Leuco`, 1965. Il compagno, 1947; translated as The Comrade, 1959. Il carcere, 1949; translated as The Political Prisoner, 1959. La casa in collina, 1949; translated as The House on the Hill, 1961. La bella estate, translated as The Beautiful Summer, in The Political Prisoner, 1959. Il diavolo sulle colline, in La bella estate, 1949; The Devil in the Hills, 1959. Tra donne sole, in La bella estate, 1949; translated as Among Women Only, 1953, and For Women Only, 1959. La luna e i falo`, 1950; translated as The Moon and the Bonfires, 1952 and 2002. Notte di festa, 1953; Festival Night and Other Stories, 1971. Fuoco grande, with Bianca Garufi, 1959; translated as Great Fire in The Beach, 1963. Ciau Masino, 1969. Lotte di giovani e altri racconti (1925–1930), 1993.

Poetry Lavorare stanca, 1936; revised edition, 1943; translated as Hard Labor, 1976. Verra` la morte e avra` i tuoi occhi (includes La terra e la morte), 1951.

Other La letteratura Americana e altri saggi, 1951; American Literature: Essays and Opinions, 1970. Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950, 1952; new complete edition, 1990; translated as The Burning Brand: Diaries 1935–1950, 1961; This Business of Living, 1961. Vita attraverso le lettere, 1973. Il diavolo sulle colline: soggetto cinematografico, 2003.

Translations Sinclair Lewis, Our Mr. Wrenn–Il nostro signor Wrenn, 1931. Herman Melville, Moby Dick–Moby Dick, 1931. Sherwood Anderson, Dark Laughter–Riso nero, 1932. James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man–Dedalus, 1934. J. Dos Passos, Forty-second Parallel–Il 42  parallelo, 1935. Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas–Autobiografia di Alice B. Toklas, 1938. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders–Moll Flanders, 1938. John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men–Uomini e topi, 1938. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield–David Copperfield, 1939. Gertrude Stein, Three Lives–Tre esistenze, 1940. William Faulkner, The Hamlet–Il borgo, 1942. Percy Bysshe-Shelley, Prometheus Unbound–Prometeo slegato, 1997.

CESARE PAVESE Further Reading Biasin, Gianpaolo, The Smile of the Gods, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968. Donatelli-Noble, Cinzia, Cesare Pavese e la letteratura americana. Saggi e ricerche, Pescara: Italica, 1983. Fiedler, Leslie, ‘‘Introducing Cesare Pavese,’’ Kenyon Review, 16 (1954), 536–553; included in volume No! In Thunder. Essays on Myth and Literature, Boston: Beacon Press, 1960, 135–150. Gianola, Elio, Cesare Pavese: La realta`, l’altrove, il silenzio, Milan: Jaca Book, 2003. Gigliucci, Roberto, Cesare Pavese, Milan: Mondadori, 2001. Guglielminetti, Marziano, and Giuseppe Zaccaria, Cesare Pavese, Florence: Le Monnier, 1977. Guiducci, Armanda, Invito alla lettura di Pavese, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Heiney, Donald, Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Pavese, Vittorini, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968. Lajolo, Davide, Il vizio assurdo, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1960. Lajolo, Davide, An Absurd Vice: A Biography of Cesare Pavese, translated and edited by Mario and Mark Pietralunga, New York: New Directions Press, 1983. Lajolo, Davide, Pavese, Milan: Rizzoli, 1984. Mondo, Lorenzo, Cesare Pavese, Milan: Mursia, 1961. Musumeci, Antonio, L’impossibile ritorno, Ravenna: Longo, 1980. Mutterle, Anco Marzio, L’immagine arguta: Lingua, stile, retorica di Cesare Pavese, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. O’Healy, Aine, Cesare Pavese, Boston: Twayne, 1988. Thompson, Doug, Cesare Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Tondo, Michele, Invito alla lettura di Cesare Pavese, Milan: Mursia, 1983. Van den Bossche, ‘‘Nulla e` veramente accaduto’’: Strategie discursive del mito nell’opera di Cesare Pavese, Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press and Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2001. Pautasso, Sergio, Cesare Pavese oltre il mito, Genoa: Marietti, 2000.

DIALOGHI CON ` , 1947 LEUCO A Collection of Lyrical Dialogues by Cesare Pavese

Considered by its author to be his best and most original work, Dialoghi con Leuco` (Dialogues with Leuco`) is also his most complex and enigmatic

book. Pavese’s own words, in a letter of 24 January 1948, describe his aspirations with regard to the Dialoghi: ‘‘Infine non le nascondo che mia ambizione, componendo questo libretto, fu pure d’inserirmi nella illustre tradizione italiana, umanistica e perdigiorno, che va dal Bocccaccio a D’Annunzio’’ (I shall not try and conceal from you the fact that in composing this little book I was, if you like, seeking to make a place for myself in the illustrious Italian tradition—humanistic and speculative—which stretches all the way from Boccaccio to D’Annunzio). It was conceived, as Pavese himself told us in his diary, during the long months of his voluntary and tormented retreat in the Piedmontese hills during the final years of the war. There he relived in his memory the places of his childhood and the events of his life as mythic places and events. Written between 1945 and 1947, the book was published by Einaudi in 1947. This period corresponds with the inauguration of the Einaudi series Collezione di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici, directed by Pavese, and bears witness to his need to penetrate the meanings of myth from a variety of different perspectives rather than from a purely literary one. The work is the culmination of Pavese’s inquiry about the nature of myth and his exploration of a number of classical myths. The Dialoghi con Leuco` is a collection of lyrical pieces presented in the form of 27 brief dialogues between gods and heroes of classical Greek mythology (from Oedipus and Tiresias to Calypso and Odysseus, from Eros and Thanatos to Prometheus and Heracles, from Dionysus and Demeter to Achilles and Patroclus). The pieces can be organized according to the following thematic groupings indicated by the author: ‘‘The Titanic World: Gods and Divine Iniquities’’ (I–VII); ‘‘The Tragedy of Men Crushed by Destiny’’ (VIII–IX); ‘‘Human Salvations and Embarrassed Gods’’ (XI–XXIII); and ‘‘Good Gods’’ (XXIV–XXVII). The title of the work was inspired by Bianca Garufi, a colleague at the Einaudi branch office in Rome at the time of its composition. The nymph Leucothea, the only character who is a protagonist in several of the dialogues, was an intended reference to the Greek translation of the name ‘‘Bianca.’’ It is Pavese’s only work that does not have a contemporary setting and where his landscape is veiled through metaphor. Though structured like Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali, it differs in tone and in its lack of focus on philosophical reflection. The mythological characters were chosen by Pavese to discuss existential questions that were 1385

CESARE PAVESE dear to him and to all humankind: the relationship between humanity and nature, the passage from childhood to adulthood (maturita`), the interaction between the selvaggio (the principle of untamed, instinctual motivation) and the civilized, the essence of life and death, and the reasons of love and of suffering. The Titan–Olympian conflict, which is central in the Dialoghi, is symbolic of these dialectical processes. The mythological figures, through their ability to blend a human and real dimension with an intense symbolic significance, became lyrical and metaphysical representations for Pavese. In a letter written just a few days before his death in 1950, Pavese’s thoughts were fixed on the Dialoghi: ‘‘piu´ un libro che nessuno legge e, naturalmente, e` l’unico che vale qualcosa, Dialoghi con Leuco`’’ (It is a book that no one reads and, naturally, it is the only one that is worth something). The Dialoghi would be the book Pavese chose for the inscription of his last words before ending his life. MARK PIETRALUNGA Editions First edition: Dialoghi con Leuco`, Turin: Einaudi, 1947. Translation: as Dialogues with Leuco`, translated by William Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross, London: Peter Owen, 1965; Ann Arbor: Eridanos Press, 1965.

Further Reading Antoni, Claudio G., ‘‘Il colore del mito. Percezione cromatica e ricuperi culturali nei ‘Dialoghi con Leuco`’ di Pavese,’’ Intersezioni, 1:XVIII(1998), 103–127. Bernabo`, Graziella, ‘‘L’inquita angosciata che sorride da sola’’: La donna e l’amore nei ‘Dialoghi con Leuco`’ di Pavese,’’ Studi novecenteschi, 12:IV (1975), 313–331. Corsini, Eugenio, ‘‘Orfeo senza Euridice: I Dialoghi con Leuco` e il classicismo di Pavese,’’ Sigma, 1:3–4 (1964), 121–146. Jesi, Furio, Letteratura e mito, Turin: Einaudi, 1968. Mariani, Umberto, ‘‘The Sources of Dialogues with Leuco` and the Loneliness of the Poet’s Calling,’’ Rivista di studi di italiani, 2 (1988), 46–68. Premuda, Maria Luisa, ‘‘I Dialoghi con Leuco` e il realismo simbolico di Pavese,’’ Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa, 26 (1957), 221–249. Rimanelli, Giose, ‘‘Pavese’s Mythical Theatre of the Mind,’’ The Theatre Annual, 25 (1969), 1–19. Rusi, Michela, ‘‘Dialogo e ritmo: il modello leopardiano nei Dialoghi con Leuco`, Cesare Pavese Oggi,’’ Proceedings of Conference at San Salvatore Monferrato, edited by Giovanna Ioli, San Salvatore Monferrato, 1989, 77–85.

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`, LA LUNA E I FALO 1950 Novel by Cesare Pavese

La luna e i falo` (The Moon and the Bonfires), Pavese’s last novel, is considered by critics to be his most ambitious and mature work, the culmination of all his themes and of his research on style as well as meaning. While in the midst of developing his novel in the summer of 1949, Pavese wrote to friends, humorously announcing that he was about to begin the construction of a ‘‘modesta Divina Commedia’’ (modest Divine Comedy) whose inspiration was a result of a ‘‘mirabile visione’’ (wondrous vision) of ‘‘stalle, sudore, contadinotti, verderame e letame’’ (stables, sweat, peasants, verdigris, and manure). During this same period, Pavese highlighted the mythopoeic dimension of his novel when he noted in his diary on August 23 that the story should ‘‘partire dall’umile uomo comune e a poco a poco dargli il senso di un Ulisse’’ (start from the humble, common man and gradually give him the significance of a Ulysses). The novel’s protagonist-narrator, nicknamed Anguilla (Eel), is an orphan who was born in the countryside of the Piedmont region and has emigrated to America in search of fortune. In the novel, America, which recalls Pavese’s literary debut as an American translator, captures the narrator’s solitude and alienation, as it represents a land without ties, a type of antipaese. The novel takes place after World War II, when the protagonist returns to the small village of his youth in a personal quest to rediscover the landscape of his childhood. Here he finds an old childhood friend, the strong and solid Nuto, who acts as a link with the narrator’s past and with the Fascist period and the war. From Nuto the narrator learns that much has changed during his 20-year absence and that he is out of touch with all that has occurred in the intervening years. Anguilla hears that his foster family, as well as the owners of the prosperous farm where he went to work as a youth, has by now disappeared. The joy of the first encounters and the happy childhood memories are replaced by the bitterness of lost illusions and by the desperate awareness of maturity. Anguilla’s

CESARE PAVESE return home leads to the realization that in life there is no return. Anguilla’s search for identity and for his roots allowed the author to explore perennial symbols of human destiny. The return to one’s childhood evokes the rites of a primitive peasant world, which is controlled by atavistic beliefs. The novel’s title refers to local agricultural myths of death and renewal that involve in their mysteries the victims of the civil war, the burning of a barn where the narrator lived as a child, and the burning of the body of the beautiful Santina, which leaves a scar on the hillside like the bed of a bonfire. History and myth are in constant tension throughout the novel. Pavese, through Anguilla’s experiences, realized that mythical space cannot conquer historical time. Nevertheless, history has not changed the immobile world of the countryside. La luna e i falo` reopens and concludes the eternal dialogue between the real and symbolic, the inability to communicate and participation, childhood and maturity, the city and the country, nature and history, and myth and destiny. The novel’s epigraph, ‘‘Ripeness is all,’’ underlines Pavese’s continual search for clarity and equilibrium in a world of complex contradictions. MARK PIETRALUNGA

Editions First edition: La luna e i falo`, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Critical edition: in Tutti i romanzi, edited by Marziano Guglielminetti, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Translations: as The Moon and the Bonfire, translated by Louise Sinclair, London: Lehmann, 1952; as The Moon and the Bonfires, translated by Marianne Cecconi, with a foreword by Paolo Milano, New York: Farrar Straus, 1953; translated by R. W. Flint, with an introduction by Mark Rudman, New York: New York Review of Books, 2002.

Further Reading: Finzi, Gilberto, Come leggere ‘‘La luna e i falo`’’ di Cesare Pavese, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Freccero, John, ‘‘Myth and Logos: The Moon and the Bonfires,’’ Italian Quarterly, 16 (1962), 3–16. Livorni, Ernesto, ‘‘Come il letto di un falo`: The Myth of the Moon and the Bonfire of History,’’ Italian Culture, 17 (1999), 31–78. Norton, Peter M., ‘‘Cesare Pavese and the American Nightmare,’’ Modern Language Notes, 77 (1962), 24–36. Procaccini, Alfonso, ‘‘Pavese: On the Failure of Understanding,’’ Italica, 42 (1985), 214–229.

Pugliese, Stanislao, ‘‘Il mito del ritorno: Simbolo e memoria ne La luna e i falo` di Cesare Pavese,’’ American Journal of Italian Studies, 21 (1998), 128–138. Salsini, Laura, ‘‘Woman as a Conquered Landscape in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falo`,’’ Cincinnati Romance Review, 1993, 177–185.

LAVORARE STANCA, 1936 Poems by Cesare Pavese

The poetry collection, Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), Cesare Pavese’s first major publication, had a rather laborious editorial history. The first edition, which contained 45 poems, was published in limited edition by Solaria, a small Florentine publishing house, in 1936, after difficulties with Fascist censorship. In 1943, a second, definitive edition of the collection, comprised of 70 poems and two critical postscripts (‘‘Il mestiere del poeta’’ and ‘‘A proposito di certe poesie non ancora scritte’’), was published during the most intense period of the war, bearing the following publishing blurb penned by its author: ‘‘Una delle voci piu´ isolate della poesia contemporanea’’ (one of the most isolated voices of contemporary poetry). Though Pavese had hoped for immediate recognition and acclaim when it first appeared, almost no one took note of the volume. Years later Pavese wrote with regard to this early work and to the cultural climate in which it was created: ‘‘In tempi che la prosa italiana era un ‘collquio estenuato con se stessa’ e la poesia un ‘sofferto silenzio’, io discorrevo in prosa e versi con villani, operai, sabbiatori, prostitute, carcerati, operaie, ragazzotti’’ (At a time when Italian prose was a languid conversation with oneself and poetry a painful silence, I was talking in prose and verse with peasants, laborers, sandblasters, prostitutes, prisoners, working women, youths). When viewed in the context of the hermetic tone and the tendency toward obscurity that dominated the Italian literary scene in the 1930s, these poems introduce an original new voice tending toward a sort of epic or narrative poetry written in a realistic, rhythmic language. Pavese’s 1387

CESARE PAVESE efforts to write naturalistic dialogue were influenced by his strong interest in the Piedmontese or Turinese slang and in the realistic manner American writers depicted their native regions in a fresh, colloquial language. The work’s affinity to the verse and prose of Walt Whitman, who had been the subject of Pavese’s thesis in 1930, is reflected in the celebration of the humble, ordinary life and in the child’s ‘‘primitive,’’ or virgin, perspective of the world. Pavese regarded the early poems in the collection as realistic poems in which he insisted on ‘‘austerity of style’’ as a basic premise of his poetics. After this initial phase in which he developed his notion of the poesia-racconto (poemstory), Pavese turned to a second phase, called poesia immagine (poem image). His appreciation of Shakespeare and other Elizabethans inspired him to search for a narration based on imaginative links that infused reality with a metaphoric value. The new discovery of the value of the image made the imaginative relationship itself ‘‘the subject of the story.’’ Pavese defined Lavorare stanca as ‘‘l’avventura dell’adolescente che, orgoglioso della sua campagna, immagina consimile la citta`’’ (the adventure of the adolescent boy who is proud of the countryside where he lives and who imagines the city will be like the country); instead, in the city he experiences a tragic loneliness that marks the end of adolescence. The first poem of the collection, ‘‘I mari del Sud (South Seas),’’ about the return of the free-spirited ‘‘giant’’ cousin to his native village in the Langhe hills of lower Piedmont after having circled the world, contains nearly all the dominant themes of Pavese’s entire artistic production: the juxtaposition of the two contrasting landscapes of the city and country,

the relationship between youth and maturity, the return to one’s roots, escapism, work, misogyny, and solitude. Pavese’s lyrical sensitivity and his fascination with mythology contribute to its uniqueness in the landscape of contemporary Italian poetry. MARK PIETRALUNGA Editions First Edition: Lavorare stanca, Florence: Solaria, 1936; enlarged edition, Lavorare stanca, Turin: Einaudi, 1943. Critical Edition: Lavorare stanca, edited by Mariarosa Masoero, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Translations: as Mania for Solitude: Selected Poems 1930–1950, edited and translated by Margaret Crosland, London: Peter Owen, 1969; as Hard Labor (bilingual edition), translated, with introduction by William Arrowsmith, New York: Grossman; translated with an introduction by Geoffrey Brock, in Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2002.

Further Reading Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Un esperimento di poesia non aristocratica,’’ in Altri esercizi, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Girelli Carasi, Fabio, Lavorare stanca. Canzoniere suo malgrado, Bolzano: Il Brennero/Der Brenner, 2001. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Racconto e canto nella metrica di Pavese,’’ Sigma, 3–4 (1964), 22–33. Mutterle, Anco Marzio, ‘‘Una forma virtuale di Lavorare stanca,’’ Esperienze Letterarie, 25:3–4 (July–Dec., 2000), 103–120. Rimanelli, Giose, ‘‘Myth and De-Mythification of Pavese’s Art,’’ Italian Quarterly, 49 (1969), 3–40. Van Den Bossche, ‘‘La rappresentazione della campagna in Lavorare stanca: il caso di ’Paesaggio [I] e ‘Il diocaprone,’’ Sotto il gelo dell’acqua c’e` l’erba. Omaggio a Cesare Pavese, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001.

ROBERTO PAZZI (1946–) A poet, a novelist, and a columnist, Roberto Pazzi imaginatively blends history and fantasy. Both his poetry and fiction originate from his unwavering belief in the creative power of imagination and voice his obsession with time and history—a 1388

common interest among Italian fiction writers from the 1970s on, whose attention to historical subjects is viewed as a response to the crisis of political and ethical foundations characterizing mass culture in late-capitalist society. A graduate

ROBERTO PAZZI in aesthetics from the University of Bologna with a thesis directed by Luciano Anceschi on the poetry of Umberto Saba, for almost 20 years Pazzi taught Italian literature and history at the liceo classico ‘‘Vincenzo Monti’’ in Ferrara, where he has been living since his childhood. He began his literary career as a poet. His first poems appeared in the journal Arte e Poesia in 1969, with a preface by Vittorio Sereni, who called attention to the young author’s original blend of critical thinking, imaginative situations, and spontaneity, reflecting his encounter with the language of poetic tradition and personal insights on existence. With the publication of his first novel, Cercando l’imperatore (Searching for the Emperor, 1985), and fourth poetry collection, Calma di vento (Calm Wind, 1987), Pazzi’s writing, drawing on the Greek, Latin, European, and Italian literary traditions, finally received great critical attention and praise for its artful style, complex representation of time, emphasis on the function of personal and collective memory, and attention to ethical and religious themes. Pazzi’s use of historical narrative in the 1980s attests to his rejection of the 1960s neoavant-garde’s break with tradition but also to his acknowledgment of the end of the modernist belief in human progress as founded on rationality. In Pazzi’s view, cultural tradition and the historical past need to be explored and confronted to make sense of the present, resist today’s consumerist society and mass culture, and possibly prevent humans from fulfilling their self-destructive inclination. His revisionist account of the death of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family in Cercando l’imperatore; his utopian figuration of the return to a natural, uncorrupted, and armsfree world order in La malattia del tempo (Adrift in Time, 1987); and his representation of a new beginning for the Catholic Church when it miraculously rediscovers its original Christian message in Conclave (Conclave: A Novel, 2001), all originate from this stance. In creating alternative histories, Pazzi aims at defamiliarizing the reader’s experience of reality, questioning both personal and official recollection of historical events and finally inviting the reader to view objects and experiences, places and times differently and freely. Such liberating treatment of time and remembrance is brought about through an imaginative and complex narrative that intertwines multiple plots and voices, plays with the idea of time as developing both linearly and recursively, employs dreams and hallucinations as narrative devices, and resorts to the uncanny presence of

mirroring figures like Cesarione and Afra in La stanza sull’acqua (The Room on the Water, 1991), or the estranging perspective of the dead on existence in La principessa e il drago (The Princess and the Dragon, 1986) and Le citta` del dottor Malaguti (Doctor Malaguti’s Cities, 1993), or the vision of a dying man concentrating on both past and future— such as the pope in L’erede (The Heir, 2002). Roberto Pazzi’s narrative serves the purpose of criticizing any form of power in contemporary society, whether enforced through the reckless deployment of destructive weapons eventually leading to an environmental catastrophe as in La malattia del tempo or through the pervasive misuse of technological devices for the production and diffusion of culture as in Il signore degli occhi (The Man of the Eyes, 2004). It centers on the individual, who is represented at the particular moment of his psychological and historical demise—but also eventual redemption—while a community’s survival and regeneration depend on him. His stories never end with a radical defeat or definitive victory; in fact, the complexity of his views and narrative techniques point to a fundamental ambiguity in his overall conception of a writer’s social task. Pazzi believes in the importance of the aesthetic experience resulting from the creative use of imagination through storytelling and language, for it grants beauty to human experience and offers a vantage point of observation on reality; but he is also aware, as he demonstrates in Vangelo di Giuda (The Gospel According to Judas, 1989), that storytelling and language as a means of expression and communication, whether written or oral, can misrepresent or even falsify reality, and ultimately deceive the human quest for knowledge and truth. Fascinated with the seductive and creative power of imagination and language, Pazzi nevertheless wonders which truth, if any at all, may lie behind the human word.

Biography Roberto Pazzi was born in Ameglia (La Spezia) 18 August 1946. He graduated in classics from the University of Bologna and taught high school and lectured at the Universities of Ferrara and Urbino. He served as editor of the journal Almanacco dello Specchio, 1984–1985, and was founder and editor of the journal Sinopia, 1986–1989. He was a regular contributor as literary and cultural critic to Il corriere della sera, 1985–1997. Pazzi has been a translator from English, Latin, and Greek as well as a columnist for several Italian newspapers and 1389

ROBERTO PAZZI periodicals and The New York Times. He organized a three-day international conference in Ferrara on the role of imagination in today’s world (‘‘L’immaginario contemporaneo’’), 21–23 May 1999. He has been awarded the Montale International Prize for Calma di vento, 1987; Selezione Campiello Prize for Cercando l’imperatore, 1985, and Incerti di viaggio, 1996; Grinzane Cavour Prize for Vangelo di Giuda, 1990; and the Scanno, SuperFlaiano, Comisso, Zerilli Marimo` and Strega Prizes for Conclave, 2001. Pazzi lives and works in Ferrara. FRANCESCA PARMEGGIANI Selected Works Fiction Cercando l’imperatore, 1985; as Searching for the Emperor, translated by M. J. Fitzgerald, 1989. La principessa e il drago, 1986; as The Princess and the Dragon, translated by M. J. Fitzgerald, 1990. La malattia del tempo, 1987; as Adrift in Time, translated by Vivien Sinott, 1991. Vangelo di Giuda, 1989. La stanza sull’acqua, 1991. Le citta` del dottor Malaguti, 1993. L’angelo e il re, 1993. Incerti di viaggio, 1996. Domani saro` re, 1997. La citta` volante, 1999. La maldicenza e altri racconti, 2001.

Conclave, 2001; as Conclave: A Novel, translated by Oonagh Stransky, 2003. L’erede, 2002. Il signore degli occhi, 2004. L’ombra del padre, 200?

Poetry ‘‘L’esperienza anteriore,’’ 1973. ‘‘Versi occidentali,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il re, le parole,’’ 1980. ‘‘Calma di vento,’’ 1987. ‘‘Il filo delle bugie: poesie edite ed inedite 1966–1994,’’ 1994. ‘‘La gravita` dei corpi,’’ 1998. ‘‘Talismani: antologia personale 1969–2003,’’ 2003.

Further Reading Cooke, Philip, ‘‘Roberto Pazzi: Dialogues of History and Fantasy,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baran´ski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Jansen, Monica, ‘‘History as a Peripheral Event? ‘Marginal’ Historical Novels by Three Italian Writers: Loy, Pazzi, Tabucchi,’’ in Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, edited by Hendrik van Gorp and Ulla MusarraSchrøder, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Piemontese, Felice (editor), ‘‘Pazzi Roberto,’’ in Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani, Milan: Leonardo, 1989. Ricci, Franco, ‘‘Beyond Tautology: The Cosmo-Conception of Time in Roberto Pazzi’s La malattia del tempo,’’ Italica, 68:1(1991), 13–28. Sereni, Vittorio, et al., ‘‘Testimonianze e critiche,’’ in Roberto Pazzi, Il filo delle bugie, Ferrara-Rome: Corbo Editore, 1994.

ENRICO PEA (1881–1958) An eccentric figure in twentieth-century Italian literature, Enrico Pea started writing relatively late in life, after a difficult youth in the costal region of Versilia, in Tuscany, which would later provide the background for many of his novels. Unschooled and with few prospects, Pea immigrated to Egypt at the age of 16. In Alexandria he came in contact with local anarchist groups, and his warehouse, the Baracca Rossa (Red Barrack), became their gathering place. He also rediscovered the Bible, which, along with anarchism, strongly influenced his early literary works. With the encouragement of the young Giuseppe Ungaretti, Pea began to write, initially devoting himself to poetry and the theater. 1390

His three collections of lyrics—Fole (Fables, 1910), Montignoso (1912), and Lo spaventacchio (The Bugbear, 1914)—are characterized stylistically by an expressionistic use of the Tuscan vernacular and thematically by a concern for the rituals and superstitions of his native region, with, at times, an inclination for morbid situations such as incest or brutal revenge. Among his early plays, Giuda (Judas, 1918) was condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities for its interpretation of the biblical figure as a sort of anarchist hero. This controversy precipitated the religious crisis that resulted in Pea’s new conversion to Catholicism. Religion and its relationship

ENRICO PEA to one’s racial and cultural identity is the dominant theme of the theatrical works that followed, such as Prime pioggie, published as Prime pioggie d’ottobre (First Rainstorms in October, 1919) and Rosa di Sion (1920), which revised the 1912 Sion. La passione di Cristo (Christ’s Passion, 1923), modeled on the scheme of the miracle play, brings together the strands of this complex personal ideology. As manager of the ‘‘Politeama’’ theater of Viareggio, Pea further continued his involvement with the stage, directing and acting in the popular plays known as maggi, with the participation of local peasants and villagers, as well as producing plays featuring some of the most famous actors of the period, from Ermete Zacconi to Alda Borelli and Annibale Ninchi. Pea, however, found his most suitable medium in prose fiction. His first novel, Moscardino (1922), tells the partially fictionalized story of his grandfather, a figure of mythic proportions in his imagination, as seen through the eyes of a small child, Moscardino, an autobiographical narrator. The work is characterized by a powerful linguistic impasto that combines vernacular and aulic diction and renders both the grandfather’s madness and jealousy for his wife as well as the child’s sense of wonder. Central to his grandfather’s philosophy, further outlined in Pea’s second novel Il Volto Santo (The Holy Face, 1924), is the belief in the fundamentally free nature of human beings: Civilization is merely an assortment of imposed restrictions. This philosophical approach resonated powerfully with Pea’s own interest in anarchism. In Il servitore del Diavolo (The Devil’s Servant, 1931), set in Egypt, Moscardino’s intellectual maturation is completed. Here, Pea began to consider the importance of religion not only as a series of beliefs but also—and perhaps most importantly— as the source of a vital connection between the individual and the community, a theme that he continued to explore in many of his writings. With La figlioccia (The Goddaughter, 1931), Pea’s style moves in the direction of a more linear narration, gradually abandoning the linguistic experimentalism of his previous works. Now he aimed at a more immediate and realistic representation of the world. In the novels of the 1930s, he insistently re-proposed the theme of the exile who returns to his community and learns how to accept its ancestral social and moral values. This theme was imbued with autobiographical implications for the author himself, who had returned to his native Versilia in 1914. Il forestiero (The Foreigner, 1937) tells the story of Giubbino, who leaves his hometown for the love of an actress, and of his son

Foresto (‘‘foreigner’’ in Tuscan dialect), who instead finds happiness in the simplicity of his father’s village after a life of dissolution as a stockbroker in South America. In Solaio (1941), the same conflict between urban and rural culture leads the protagonist, a young doctor, to embrace the primitive existence of Solaio, the mountain village where he is posted, thus renouncing the materialistic values of bourgeois society. Pea’s keen interest in the spiritual reawakening of the individual confronted by the void and aridity of modern life made him less perceptive when analyzing the broader social context in which his characters move. Indeed, he failed to portray in its complexity early twentieth-century Italian society with La maremmana (1938), even though the novel provides an interesting depiction of Fascist violence. After World War II, the most significant development in Pea’s literary career was a nostalgic reconsideration of his anarchist ideology, as in his memoir Vita in Egitto (My Life in Egypt, 1949). Throughout his career, Pea cultivated his own personal themes and kept away from the literary debates of his times, although in his polemic with bourgeois culture he found himself on the side of certain modernist groups such as that of the journal La Voce. While his oeuvre enjoyed the respect and esteem of many of his contemporaries, from Emilio Cecchi and Gianfranco Contini to Eugenio Montale and Ezra Pound (who translated Moscardino into English), Pea was never a popular author. The general critical consensus is that his more experimental early novels remain his best works, free of the ideological strictures that limit his later fiction.

Biography Born in Seravezza in the province of Lucca, 29 October 1881, Enrico Pea had no formal education (he learned to read and write from his grandfather, Luigi Gasperetti). His father, Mattia died, 12 November 1885; Pea first lived with relatives and then (1890–1893) with Gasperetti, who had spent 17 years in an insane asylum between 1864 and 1881. He immigrated to Egypt, 1897, and established an import-export business, 1901. Pea married Aida Cacciagli, 1902, and had three children: Valentina (1903), Pia (1904), and Marx (1906). He returned to Italy, 1914. He became impresario of the Politeama theatre in Viareggio, 1921. He won the Viareggio Prize for La maremmana, 1938. He was forced to evacuate from Viareggio, settled in Lucca, but lost several manuscripts in the air raid that destroyed 1391

ENRICO PEA the Politeama, 1943. He fled Lucca for a few months because of suspicions of anti-Fascist activities, 1944. Pea died of tuberculosis in Forte dei Marmi (Lucca), 11 August 1958.

Elzeviri lucchesi (1948–1953), edited by Enrico Lorenzetti, 1998. Memorie e fughe (1926–1958), edited by Enrico Lorenzetti, 2001.

Letters

LUCA SOMIGLI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Fole,’’ 1910. ‘‘Montignoso,’’ 1912. ‘‘Lo spaventacchio,’’ 1914.

Plays Giuda, 1918. Prime piogge d’ottobre, 1919. Rosa di Sion, 1920. Le parole di scimmie e di poeti, 1922. La passione di Cristo, 1923. L’anello del parente folle, 1940. Tre alberi, 1951.

Fiction Moscardino, 1922; as Moscardino, translated by Erza Pound, 1956. Il Volto Santo, 1924. Il servitore del Diavolo–La figlioccia, 1931. Il forestiero, 1937. La Maremmana, 1938. Il trenino dei sassi, 1940. Solaio (Storie di noi viventi), 1941. L’acquapazza, 1942. Magoometto, 1942. Rosalia, 1943. Lisetta, 1946. Malaria di guerra, 1947. Zitina, 1949. La figlioccia e altre donne, 1953. Peccati in piazza, 1956.

Nonfiction Vita in Egitto, 1949. Il ‘‘Maggio’’ in Versilia, in Lucchesia e in Lunigiana come lo ha visto Enrico Pea, 1954. L’arca di Noe`: Racconti, memorie, elzeviri 1945–1953, edited by Enrico Lorenzetti, 1997.

Ungaretti, Pea e altri: Lettere agli amici ‘‘egiziani’’. Carteggi inediti con Jean-Le`on e Henri Thuile, edited by Franc¸ois Livi, 1988. ...il mare e` il mio elemento: Carteggio con Lisetta Zucchetti 1943 –1957, edited by Raffaella Castagnola, 1996.

Further Reading Arslan, Antonia, and Patrizia Zambon, Enrico Pea, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983. Barsotti, Anna, Il teatro dei ‘‘maggi’’ in Toscana, Rome: Lucarini, 1983. Bellora, Giovanni (editor), Il mondo di Pea, Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi, 1981. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Torniamo a Pea,’’ L’approdo letterario, 47 (1969), 29–46. Borlenghi, Aldo, Pea, Padua: CEDAM, 1943. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Donne di Pea,’’ in Libri nuovi e usati, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1958. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Il lessico di Pea,’’ in Varianti e altra linguistica, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Corsi, Mario, Il teatro all’aperto in Italia, Milan-Rome: Rizzoli, 1939. Fratnik, Marina, Enrico Pea et l’e´criture du moi, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Il servitore del diavolo,’’ La fiera letteraria, 31 January 1952, 1. Pacifici, Sergio, The Modern Italian Novel: From Pea to Moravia, Carbondale & Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press; London-Amsterdam: Feffer & Simons, 1979. Salvestroni, Simonetta, Enrico Pea: Fra anarchia e integrazione, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Somigli, Luca, ‘‘Enrico Pea,’’ in Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945. Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 264, edited by Rocco Capozzi and Luca Somigli, DetroitWashington-London: Gale Research, 2002. Travi, Ernesto, Umanita` di Enrico Pea, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1965. Ungaretti, Giuseppe, Lettere a Enrico Pea, edited by Jole Soldateschi, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1983.

SILVIO PELLICO (1789–1854) The son of an Italian grocer and a French-speaking mother from Chambery, Silvio Pellico was a member of a new generation of bourgeois writers in 1392

Italy that first came to the fore in the Napoleonic period. Although best known for his autobiographical Le mie prigioni (My Prisons, 1832), Pellico was

SILVIO PELLICO also a successful playwright and important man of letters even before publication of his prison memoirs. Between 1815 and 1835 he wrote more than a dozen plays, most of them on historical subjects. In these verse tragedies, not all of which were actually performed, the playwright was influenced by the examples of Schiller and Byron, whose Manfred (1917) Pellico translated into Italian and who frequented some of the same circles in Italy that Pellico did. Though mostly forgotten today, the plays told the stories of intense passion among the highborn that were favored by opera librettists throughout much of the nineteenth century. His tragedy Francesca da Rimini, staged in Milan in 1815 and published three years later, is one of the first and most successful to be inspired by the famous episode from Dante’s Inferno (Canto V) and gained its author considerable fame. Piedmontese by origin, after moving to Milan in 1809 Pellico was taken into the household of Count Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, where he served as tutor to the count’s children. While in Porro’s service, he also worked as contributor and principal editor of Il conciliatore, a Milanese journal supported by a number of patricians and intellectuals, including Count Federico Confalonieri, a patriot and political moderate who would later be incarcerated with Pellico in the Spielberg Prison in Moravia. Il conciliatore was an important early venue for the expression of the ideas for social and political reform that were soon to lead to the conspiracies and wars of the Risorgimento and the ultimate Unification of Italy. Deemed subversive by the Austrian authorities governing the city where it was printed, the journal ceased publication in 1819 after only slightly more than one year of existence. Pellico himself, who had meanwhile joined the political action group of the Carbonari and was close to a young patriot named Piero Maroncelli (1795–1846), was thus well known to the authorities when, with other members of the group, he was arrested on October 12, 1820. After a trial held in Venice on February 22, 1822, Pellico was sentenced to death. The sentence was then commuted to 15 years of carcere duro or ‘‘hardtime’’ imprisonment to be served at the Spielberg Prison near Brno. As its title indicates, Le mie prigioni is an account of experiences in not just one but several jails. The institutions involved are the Santa Margherita in Milan; the infamous Venetian I Piombi, the attic cells ‘‘under the lead’’ of the Ducal Palace where Giacomo Casanova had been confined some years earlier; and—for the longest part of his

detention—the Spielberg. In his peregrinations through these gloomy fortresses, Pellico’s autobiographical hero encounters a number of colorful characters. In Milan, these include a deaf-mute child whom he befriends and the thieves and ‘‘degenerate women’’ whom he does not; in Venice the libertine Giuliano and the jailer’s daughter Zanze, whom he rather implausibly encounters while in captivity there; and the rough-exteriored but goldenhearted jail-keeper Schiller of the Spielberg. Pellico’s hero’s most significant encounter during his imprisonment, however, is with his Christian faith. His belief in God was strengthened rather than weakened by his prison stay, and the author of Le mie prigioni emerged from his long and painful confinement more certain than ever of the consolatory power of his religion and the basic goodness of all people despite their sometimes questionable behavior. To a modern reader, at least, the quiet heroics of Le mie prigioni may seem more ambiguous than they did to readers in the early Romantic era. The prisoner’s refusal to struggle against his plight, for example, has struck some recent commentators as not so much an example of Christian humility as a classical example of passive aggression by an individual determined to be victorious in his struggle with the forces detaining him. Particularly in the light of other prison accounts from more recent times—such as those contained in the prison letters of Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned by the Fascists from 1926 to 1937—it has become increasingly difficult to take all aspects of Pellico’s account at face value. Recent scholarship has revealed, for example, that the good-hearted Schiller of Pellico’s memoirs was a much more mercenary individual than Pellico’s characterization of him would suggest. It is also clear that the unfailing goodwill and sense of gentle solidarity that in Pellico’s pages characterize interactions among the imprisoned conspirators were in reality replaced after the publication of his memoir by a good deal of squabbling about the thoroughness and accuracy of what Pellico had written. When Le mie prigioni was first published, some readers thought it a political tract disguised as a religious apology, while others found it just the opposite. At the beginning of his book, Pellico insisted there is nothing subversive in what he was writing. In this introduction to his work he defended his silence about political issues by explaining to his readers that in doing this he resembled a lover whose mistress has mistreated him and who preferred to pout in dignified fashion rather than confront the 1393

SILVIO PELLICO object of his desire directly. Whatever this may mean, it is true that the all-important motive for Pellico’s imprisonment is never articulated in his book; the politics that inspired it are hidden from sight. And that there are so many other instances in his writing of masks, disguises, silences, and concealment only deepens the impression that Pellico’s account of his ordeal is at least partially disingenuous and that the ardent sincerity that so thrilled his Romantic readers was more carefully calculated than was first perceived. Like that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852) 20 years later, the phenomenal success of Le mie prigioni was due in part to extraliterary events. Though it was not fueled by indignation at a system of slavery that would shortly be contested in a civil war of major proportions and lasting effect the way Stowe’s work was, Pellico’s book seemed to give similar voice to widespread outrage at an antiquated and repressive political order that was already seething and 16 years later, in 1848, would explode in violent upheavals throughout Europe. This is largely because so many of the work’s earliest readers took the message of Le mie prigioni to be a denunciation of Austrian tyranny and a plea for the liberation of oppressed Italy rather than an account of a religious crisis successfully overcome. Pellico, who had written his memoir at the urging of his confessor, had not entirely anticipated this. Although his tract suggests that political struggle is ultimately futile—especially when compared to the more important issue of personal salvation—Le mie prigioni became such a powerful weapon in the struggle for independence that its effect on the Austrians has been described as the equivalent of a battle lost to the Italian forces. Although Pellico may seem an author whose time has come and then gone, the reasons for his book’s extraordinary success with readers all over the world, both during his own time and afterward, are still a matter worthy of reflection today. Long after its author’s death, Le mie prigioni was a continuing presence in the imaginations of later authors of prison memoirs and letters, even in the twentieth century when militants of varying ideological beliefs continued to evoke it in trying to make sense of their own prison experiences.

Biography Silvio Pellico was born in Saluzzo (Cuneo) on June 25, 1789, the son of Onorato and Margherita 1394

Tournier, of modest financial circumstances. He studied in Turin and then, in 1806, in Lyon. In 1809, he returned from France and moved to Milan, where he became acquainted with Ugo Foscolo, Vincenzo Monti, and the Risorgimento patriots Pietro Borsieri, Ludovico di Breme, Giovanni Berchet, Luigi Porro (who hired Pellico as a tutor for his children), and Federico Confalonieri. In 1815, his play Francesca da Rimini was staged with a great success. He was a major contributor to the reformist journal, Il conciliatore, published for 13 months between 1818 and 1819. Arrested by Austrian authorities as a member of the Carbonari sect, 1820, Pellico was condemned to death, but his sentence was commuted to 15 years in prison. He was released after years of confinement in Milan, Venice, and—for most of his sentence—at the Spielberg prison at Brno (Czech Republic), 1830. The first edition of Le mie prigioni was published in 1832; French, English, and other editions followed soon afterward, and the book became widely read throughout the world. He became the secretary and librarian to the Marchioness of Barolo and a member of this patrician’s politically conservative household, 1834. Pellico died on January 31, 1854, in Turin, where he is buried. CHARLES KLOPP See also: Romanticism Selected Works Collections Opere, 4 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1856–1860. Opere scelte, edited by Carlo Curto, Turin: UTET, 1964.

Memoirs Le mie prigioni, 1832; as My Prisons, introduced and translated by I. G. Capaldi, 1963.

Tragedies Francesca da Rimini, 1818; as Francesca da Rimini, translated by Joel Foote Bingham, 1905. Eufemio di Messina, 1820. Ester d’Engaddi, 1830. Tre nuove tragedie, 1832 (includes Gismonda da Mendrisio, Leoniero da Dertona, and Erodiade). Tommaso Moro, 1833. Boezio, 1934.

Poetry ‘‘Cantiche,’’ 1831. ‘‘Eugilde della Roccia,’’ 1832. ‘‘Poesie inedite,’’ 2 vols., 1837.

Political Treatise Dei doveri dell’uomo, 1834.

SANDRO PENNA Letters Epistolario di Silvio Pellico, edited by Guglielmo Stefani, 1856. Lettere alla donna gentile, edited by Laudomia CapineriCipriani, 1901. Lettere milanesi (1815–21), edited by Mario Scotti, 1963.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Al palinsesto dell’autobiografia: Pellico e D’Azeglio,’’ in Dall’anima al sottosuolo: problemi della letteratura dell’Ottocento da Leopardi a Lucini, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Bellorini, Luigi, Introduction to Silvio Pellico, Le mie prigioni ed altri scritti scelte, Milan: Vallardi, 1907. Derla, Luigi, Letteratura e politica tra la Restaurazione e l’Unita`, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1977.

Finocchiaro Chimirri, Giovanna, La Francesca da Rimini nella produzione teatrale dal Pellico, Catania: C.U.E.C.M., 1985. Klopp, Charles, ‘‘Inklings and Effacements in Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni,’’ Italica, 68:2 (1991), 195–203. Klopp, Charles, Sentences: The Memoirs and Letters of Italian Political Prisoners from Benvenuto Cellini to Aldo Moro, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Menocal, Marı´a Rosa, ‘‘Bondage: Pellico’s Francesca,’’ in Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccaccio, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Stival, Miriam, Un lettore del Risorgimento: Silvio Pellico, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1996. Zavatti, Giovanna, Vita di Silvio Pellico e di Juliette Colbert marchesa di Barolo, Milan: Simonelli, 2004.

SANDRO PENNA (1906–1977) Sandro Penna started writing poetry at around 20, but his first collection, simply entitled Poesie (Poems), was not published until 1939. During this crucial period, which was marked by the separation of his parents and his subsequent move to Rome, he became aware of his literary vocation as well as his existential dilemmas. His exquisite poems are mainly on homoerotic love, and Penna suffered the marginalization and loneliness associated with his sexual orientation. In 1929, he sent a small group of poems to Umberto Saba, who answered him back immediately, recognizing the qualities of his work. The affectionate correspondence between the two poets (which lasted until 1940) casts light on the problematic genesis of the 57 lyrics of Poesie and bears witness to the mutual influence on their poetical works. In the early 1930s, Penna was also in contact with the literary circle of the eclectic Florentine journal Solaria and corresponded with Eugenio Montale. After his debut collection, acclaimed by critics such as Luciano Anceschi and Sergio Solmi, Penna’s poetical career had one more significant reception when he published Una strana gioia di vivere (A Strange Joy of Living, 1956) and another one in the 1970s, when, after a silence of more than ten years, he published Tutte le poesie (Complete Poems, 1970) with considerable integrations. In all, the verse production of Penna consists of around

500 lyrics, some published posthumously by biographer Elio Pecora and critic Cesare Garboli. Unlike many contemporary poets, Penna’s collections of verse display a lack of internal connections or development and were simply juxtaposed in successive stages as a single comprehensive collection. During the last part of his life, the author even used to mix up juvenile and recent poems without any explicit indications. This approach, which is ‘‘as remote as one can think from the idea of canzoniere in the 20th century’’ (Mengaldo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, 1978), is primarily justified by the homogeneity of his themes and techniques. Often consisting of sudden images of everyday life brightened (or obscured) by the numinous appearance of a young boy, each poem actually mirrors and renews all the others as an infinite series of specular variations but gives at the same time an impression of absolute completeness and autonomy. The recurrent settings of these sensual epiphanies are suburban landscapes and trains, where the joy and torment of instantaneous contemplation exclude any historical or ethical concern. According to Garboli, the entire work of Sandro Penna can be defined as a ‘‘reflection on desire’’ (Penna Papers, 1996). Repetition and specularity also characterize metrical forms. Penna’s short poems often rely on iterative figures for 1395

SANDRO PENNA lexis, rhythm, and sound (such as parallelisms, refrains, perfect rhymes, identical rhymes, and the like). The poet frequently used symmetrical units (such as pairs of tercets or single quatrains divided into two couplets) or very short patterns (such as a single couplet or even a monostich). His thematic exclusiveness and his refined formal elegance are matched by a rigorous unicity of language, which consists in an unaltered blend of literariness and spontaneity. Always pervaded with an airy and serene musicality, Penna’s poetical microorganisms are reminiscent of the canzonetta genre of early Italian melic tradition and ultimately refer back to classical erotic epigrams, imbued with uninhibited sensuality (Saba used to playfully call Penna ‘‘Meleagro,’’ the famous Hellenistic poet from Gadara). Penna’s short stories, organized by the author in a single book (Un po’ di febbre, 1973; A Bit of Fever) according to a ‘‘progressive clarification,’’ display the same settings and topics of his poems, of which they represent a sort of amplification in prose. From a structural point of view, one could actually draw a connection between single lines (or stanzas) and paragraphs. The typical procedure of associating an external situation with an inner state is reproduced and developed in many stories, although the emotional reactions of the narrator toward his objects of desire are depicted in detail, and a moral reflection is sometimes clearly expressed in a conclusive paragraph. Prose writings also bring about a more realistic definition of the places of Penna’s world. Titles such as ‘‘Angolo di via Porpora’’ (Corner of Via Porpora) or ‘‘Aspetti di Milano’’ (Aspects of Milan) attest to the idea of the city as a living entity and as a real poetical character. In a short piece entitled ‘‘Tutte storie,’’ the author stated: ‘‘I feel with lucidity the love of the city as an individual.’’ As a matter of fact, Penna was the only contemporary poet who talked about Italian cities and their people in such a humane and direct way. Stemming from the literary experiences of Gabriele D’Annunzio and Giovanni Pascoli, and mediated by the Crepuscolari poets, Penna’s poetics was strongly influenced by Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, as well as Nietzsche and Friedrich Ho¨lderlin: ‘‘Di la` dal fiume un canto di ragazzi / ebbri, nella sera di luglio. / Io buio, sul sedile, e vuoto. / Ero una volta Holderlin... Rimbaud...’’ (Beyond the river a song of drunken boys, in the evening of July. Me dark, on the bench, and empty. I was once Holderlin... Rimbaud...) (‘‘Letteratura,’’ from Stranezze, 1976). As for his Italian contemporaries, 1396

Penna is usually associated with his mentor Umberto Saba, because of the way they subliminally captured the present moment through eroticism. They both reacted against the intellectual dominance of the Hermetic current by pursuing clearness of style and by adopting traditional lyric forms. Giacomo Debenedetti effectively defined their work as poesia relazionale (poetry of relations), in contrast with the Hermetic poets who could not establish a rational connection to the outside world. Some critics also pointed out significant links between Penna and the early Montale. Nevertheless, Penna’s radical alienation into sensual life has no precedent in Italian poetic tradition, whereas a comparison could be made with contemporary painters, in particular Filippo De Pisis— whose luminous art finds a literary counterpart in Penna’s visual sketches, such as ‘‘La veneta piazzetta’’—and some exponents of the Metaphysical school. Critics have found it difficult to give a consistent definition of Penna’s work, whose apparent simplicity hinders an unequivocal interpretation. Moreover, homoerotic obsession has blurred the reception of his poetry: On one hand, it gave rise to a somewhat uncritical cult; on the other, it fostered underestimation. In his 1956 article, Pier Paolo Pasolini summed up earlier reductive reviews stating the literary and social importance of Penna’s work. He recognized a realistic and fundamentally negative matrix and detected an intermittent ‘‘psychological history’’ in his poems, which are placed ‘‘outside of the Human’’ and permeated by a sense of ‘‘religious morality.’’ This essay represents the grounds of subsequent criticism and was explicitly quoted by Giovanni Raboni (1970) and by Giacomo Debenedetti (1974). The latter brilliantly explained that Penna’s ostensible escape from reality and refusal of history actually claim and mirror their existence. Preceding interpretations were further developed by Cesere Garboli (1984 and 1996). Stressing the importance of the poet’s exaltation of sensual life, viewed as a ‘‘systematic infraction’’ of intellectual trends and social rules of his time, Garboli pointed out some lapidary sentences of ‘‘oracular wisdom’’ scattered in Penna’s erotic poetry (for example, ‘‘Ognuno e` nel suo cuore un immortale’’ [Everyone is immortal in his heart]), and convincingly described him as a ‘‘sapiential poet disguised as an epigrammatist.’’ Thanks to this unbiased criticism, Penna has progressively acquired a considerable status within contemporary Italian literature. Now considered one of the major exponents of the antimodernist current and

SANDRO PENNA a model for writers such as Pasolini and Dario Bellezza, he is frequently the object of scholarly investigations. The constant interest in his singular and enigmatic work proves that it still demands a more adequate interpretation.

Biography Sandro Penna was born in Perugia, 12 June 1906. He studied at Istituto Tecnico Commerciale (high school) in Perugia, earning a diploma in accounting, 1926. His parents separated, 1929. He moved to Rome, 1929. Penna worked as an accountant in a construction firm, 1930–1932. He started psychoanalysis with Edoardo Weiss, 1930. He met Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale, 1932. He worked as an accountant for a bookmaker, 1936. Penna visited Saba in Trieste, 1937. He moved to Milan, met writers Sergio Solmi and Oreste Macrı`,worked as a proofreader at Bompiani publishers for a few months, then moved back to Rome, 1938. He started (often illegal) trading of various sorts of goods, rare books, and paintings, 1940. Penna was awared the ‘‘Le Grazie’’ Prize, 1948. He contributed to weekly literary magazine Il mondo, 1949–1950. He met Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1950. Penna started a relationship with Raffaele Cedrino, 1956. He was awarded the Viareggio Prize (ex-equo with Pasolini) for Poesie, 1957, and the Fiuggi Prize, for Tutte le poesie, 1970. He suffered from hypochondria and insomnia, 1973. He was awarded the Bagutta Prize for Stranezze, 1977. Penna died in Rome, 21 January 1977. FRANCESCO CARAPEZZA Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1939. ‘‘Appunti,’’ 1950. ‘‘Una strana gioia di vivere,’’ 1956. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1957. ‘‘Croce e delizia,’’ 1958. ‘‘Tutte le poesie,’’ 1970, 1973; as This Strange Joy: Selected Poems of Sandro Penna, translated by W. S. Di Piero, 1982; as Remember Me, God of Love, translated by Blake Robinson, 1993. ‘‘L’ombra e la luce,’’ 1973. ‘‘Stranezze (1957–1976),’’ 1976. ‘‘Il viaggiatore insonne,’’ 1977; edited by Roberto Deidier, 2002.

‘‘Il rombo immenso,’’ 1978. ‘‘Confuso sogno,’’ edited by Elio Pecora, 1980. ‘‘Penna Papers,’’ edited by Cesare Garboli, 1984; enlarged edition, 1996. ‘‘Peccato di gola: Poesie al fermoposta,’’ 1989. ‘‘Una felicita` possibile: Appunti di diario,’’ edited by Elio Pecora, 2000. ‘‘Cose comuni e straordinarie,’’ edited by Elio Pecora, 2002.

Fiction Arrivo al mare, 1955. Un po’ di febbre, 1973.

Translations Claudel, Paul, Presenza e profezia, 1947. Merime´e, Prosper, Carmen e altri racconti, 1977.

Further Reading Abbondanza, Roberto, and Maurizio Terzetti (editors), L’epifania del desiderio, Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi su Sandro Penna (Perugia, 24–26 settembre 1990), Perugia: Provincia di Perugia, 1992. Anceschi, Luciano, ‘‘Sandro Penna: Poesie’’ [1939] in Saggi di poetica e poesia, Bologna: Boni, 1972. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca, Sandro Penna: Una diversita` moderna, Rome: Fahrenheit 451, 2000. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1974. Deidier, Roberto, L’officina di Penna. Le Poesie 1939: Storia e apparato critico, Milan: Archinto, 1997. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘The Undisciplined Eros of Sandro Penna,’’ Books Abroad, 47 (1973), 304–306. Garboli, Cesare, Penna, Montale e il desiderio, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Montale, Eugenio, and Sandro Penna, Lettere e minute 1932–1938, edited by Roberto Deidier, Milan: Archinto, 1995. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Una strana gioia di vivere,’’ [1956] in Passione e ideologia, Milan: Garzanti, 1960. Pecora, Elio, Sandro Penna: Una cheta follia, Milan: Frassinelli, 1984; revised as Sandro Penna: Una biografia, Milan: Frassinelli, 1990. Pecora, Elio, Maria Ida Gaeta, and Furio Terra Abrami (editors), Una strana gioia di vivere: Sandro Penna poeta a Roma, Catalogo della Mostra (Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 16–26 maggio 1997), Milan: Electa, 1997. Raboni, Giovanni, ‘‘La trasgressione e il mistero nella poesia di Penna,’’ [1970] in Poesia degli anni Sessanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Saba, Umberto, Lettere a Sandro Penna 1929–1940, edited by Roberto Deidier, Milan: Archinto, 1997. Solmi, Sergio, ‘‘La poesia italiana contemporanea,’’ Circoli, 8:1 (January 1939).

1397

CATERINA PERCOTO

PENSIERI See Zibaldone di pensieri (Work by Giacomo Leopardi)

CATERINA PERCOTO (1812–1887) Caterina Percoto’s literary career began with a critical essay on Andrea Maffei’s translation of Friedrich G. Klopstock’s epic, Messiade. Dissatisfied with Maffei’s translation, she wrote to Francesco Dall’Ongaro, editor of the journal La favilla. Dall’Ongaro, who published her essay and later became her mentor, invited Percoto to submit some of her writings; she sent several short stories focusing on the natural and simple life of the peasants of Friuli, her birth region. Her first story, entitled ‘‘San Giovanni Battista’’ (Saint John the Baptist, 1941), was inspired by a local legend; her 70-page ‘‘Lis cidulis’’ (The Fire Wheels, 1844) received considerable critical recognition. Largely thanks to Dall’Ongaro, Percoto then started a correspondence with prominent literary figures (Niccolo` Tommaseo, Carlo Tenca, and Pacifico Valussi). Tommaseo, for example, wrote the preface to her first collection of Racconti (Short Stories, 1858). Of profound Christian belief, Percoto found inspiration in Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi and read Tommaso Grossi and Aleardo Aleardi. Living amid the poor country folks of San Lorenzo, a village near Udine in Friuli, Percoto wrote stories in the so-called letteratura rusticale, a rustic genre that was popular at the time. With their emphasis on a regional and folkloric reality, her stories bridge Romantic sensibilities with naturalist aesthetics. Her depiction of the poor farmers under Austrian rule, in Sotto l’Austria nel Friuli (Under Austria in Fiuli, 1918) or ‘‘Il bastone,’’ (The Stick, 1880), reflected intense Christian and patriotic beliefs. Percoto’s Italian and Friulian dialect stories contrast the positive natural virtues of country life to the artificial values of urban society. While 1398

her farmers are characterized by simplicity of heart, mind, and expectations and by solidarity and sense of community, her city dwellers often embody artificiality, pomposity, decadence, corruption, and egotism. In ‘‘II bastone,’’ the ‘‘welleducated’’ protagonist is redeemed only through the love of an innocent illiterate girl that turns him into the thoughtful loving Beppino he once was. Eventually, to vindicate his fiance´e suffering under Austrian ruling, Beppino takes to the mountains and joins the Italian insurgents. This is the patriotic conclusion of a story begun in the refined town salons beholden to the dominant Austrian culture. The widespread revolutions of 1848, a turning point in the Italian Risorgimento, inspired Percoto to write short stories such as ‘‘La coltrice nunziale’’ (The Nuptial Blanket) and ‘‘La donna di Osoppo’’ (The Woman from Osoppo), both published in Racconti. Based on historical events, ‘‘La donna di Osoppo’’ tells of a woman and her two children who were brutally killed by the Austrian army when they tried to escape a besieged city. ‘‘La coltrice nunziale,’’ one of Percoto’s longest and most articulated stories, illustrates the sufferings of the population through the young aristocratic protagonist’s journey toward political and social awareness. Oppressed by insensitive and corrupt administrators and by the economic backlash of the independence wars, Percoto’s country folk are quiet antiheroes, often exploited to the point of starvation. Yet, in spite of their harsh life, they know how to enjoy ‘‘pure’’ pleasures: the pleasure of a work well done, honest family affections, and a close interaction with nature.

CATERINA PERCOTO Some of her fiction, assembled in Novelle scelte (Selected Short Stories, 1880), discloses an autobiographical theme, which celebrates the wisdom of a high-ranking woman who reconciles the generous heart of the country folk with the culture and means of nobility. Indeed, in ‘‘Licof ’’ and ‘‘Il pane dei morti’’ (Bread for the Dead), the unconventional countess Ardemia della Rovere, a friend of the peasants, who promotes progressive agricultural technologies and shares in the pleasures of country life, mirrors the artist herself. In other stories education is seen as a determining factor. Percoto was deeply concerned with the inadequate education women received in both private and public schools. In her preface to Giovanni Verga’s Storia di una capinera (1871), she praised not only the author’s writing skills but also his critique of the custom of forced monacations. ’’L’album della suocera’’ (The Mother-in Law’s Album) is the story of Countess Giulia, a casualty of a repressive education aiming at transforming an aristocratic woman into a passive ornament, rather than an actively thinking being. Giulia’s drama resolves in a mutually rewarding relationship with her motherin-law: Both women understand their social limitations but vow to change, with an appropriate education, the destiny of future generations. Percoto’s letters attest to her keen interest in classical Latin (Virgil), medieval authors (Boccaccio), and contemporary Italian literature (Manzoni, Nievo, D’Annunzio). Her correspondence with Tommaseo, Graziadio Ascoli, and Pietro Fanfani reveals her ongoing fascination with philology and linguistics. Percoto’s comments on the dialect of Friuli anticipated the dialectological work of Angelo Arboit, who dedicated to her his work on Italian dialects.

Biography Caterina Percoto was born in San Lorenzo di Soleschiano (Udine) on 19 February, 1812, of a noble family, the only girl among seven children. Her father died in 1821, and she was sent to the convent of Santa Chiara to be educated by the nuns. Her first love was opposed by her family, and she made the decision never to marry in 1829. Percoto returned to San Lorenzo in 1836, where

she administered the family lands and took care of her mother, brothers, and nephews. She suffered from Basedow disease (a form of thyroiditis and arthritis). After her mother’s death in 1854, she traveled to Turin and Milan, where she met Tommaseo, Tenca, and Carlo Cattaneo, in 1856. In Florence she became a friend of Gino Capponi, 1861. She became a school inspector for the Veneto region, 1871. She traveled to Rome in 1872. Percoto died on 14 August, 1887, in San Lorenzo. PAOLA GIULI Selected Works Collections Novelle, edited by Bruno Maier, Bologna: Cappelli, 1974.

Short Stories ‘‘Racconti,’’ 1858. ‘‘Racconti,’’ 2 vols., 1863. ‘‘Dieci raccontini,’’ 1868. ‘‘Nuovi raccontini,’’ 1870. ‘‘Novelle scelte,’’ 2 vols.,1880. ‘‘Novelle popolari edite ed inedite,’’ 1883. ‘‘Quindici nuovi raccontini,’’ 1888. ‘‘Sotto l’Austria in Friuli (1847–1866). Racconti per i giovanetti, per il popolo, per i soldati,’’ 1918. ‘‘Scritti friulani,’’ 1929.

Other Epistolario: Caterina Percoto, Carlo Tenca, edited by Ludovica Cantarutti, 1990.

Further Reading Caterina Percoto cent’anni dopo: convegni di studio del settembre 1987–gennaio 1988, Udine: Del Bianco, 1990. De Gubernatis, Angelo, Francesco Dall’Ongaro e il suo epistolario scelto, Florence: Editrice dell’Associazione, 1875. Livi, Grazia, Da una stanza all’altra, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Marchi, Gian Paolo, ‘‘Francesco Dall’Ongaro e Caterina Percoto in due lettere inedite di Giovanni Verga,’’ Italianistica, 1 (1972), 85–88. Russo, Luigi, I narratori, Milan: Principato, 1958. Scappaticci, Tommaso, La contessa e i contadini: studio su Caterina Percoto, Naples: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1997. Tommaseo, Niccolo`, Dizionario estetico, Florence: Le Monnier, 1867. Varisco Ferrero, Enrica, Niccolo` Tommaseo e Caterina Percoto protagonisti di un caso letterario, Udine: Arti grafiche friulane, 1975.

1399

ANTONIO PETITO

ANTONIO PETITO (1822–1876) Comedian and playwright Antonio Petito is regarded as the greatest Pulcinella (the English Punch) of the nineteenth century. Son of an actor, Petito is the recognized creator of a new form of performance in which the actor is a master of his craft and at the same time a convincing interpreter of the written word. He was an admirable and proteiform artist who tried and excelled in many things; in his hands, Pulcinella became a singer, a mime, an amoroso, and an acrobat. By this time most Neapolitan theater companies had entrepreneurial power concentrated in the hands of a few actor-authors. When Feliciello Sciosciammocca first appeared in a series of plays by Petito at the San Carlino, Naples already had in place welldeveloped production infrastructures. Thus actorauthors had the capacity of reviving old plays and presenting them with their own personal interpretations, which departed from the style of their predecessors. At the height of verismo and bourgeois comedy, Petito proposed popular adaptations and parodies of classic ‘‘high art,’’ from melodrama to tragedy, to historical plays. He offered travesties of the learned culture, observing it from ‘‘below.’’ He subverted all aspects of the performance, by relying on what the commedia actors used to call the old skills of ‘‘playing the mask’’: caricature and deformation (particularly parodies of melodrama) in lieu of fixed middle class behavior, disguise over standard costume, the fragmentary plot of one-act plays instead of the three-act structure, and regional dialect without sentimental lyricism. As Franca Angelini has argued, Petito’s theater embodies classic entertainment elements, which can later be found in the commedia-type farce of the legendary Neapolitan actor Toto` (Antonio de Curtis), unquestionably the most popular comic performer of the 1950s (Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento, 1988). Antonio Petito was inducted (prese la maschera) into the stage of the San Carlino during Easter week of 1852. His father Salvatore had introduced him to impresario Silvio Maria Luzi. In Storia del Teatro San Carlino (1935), Salvatore Di Giacomo vividly records this memorable debut describing how the 80-year-old actor took off his mask during a performance of Salvatore Cammarano’s farce, Si e` spento il lume, and, in a ritual analogous to initiation, 1400

placed it on the face of his son, uttering in tears: ‘‘E pe cient’anne!’’ (For a hundred years!). Petito’s main character plays a valet whose many functions involve typical city jobs. The supporting role, in the persona of Feliciello Sciosciammocca, is a petit bourgeois full of handicaps. Petito’s Pulcinella is an honest worker, somewhat courageous, witty, not subservient, not a clumsy suitor; that is, he becomes an intelligent popolano, or commoner. In Petito’s theater, his main character is a valet whose many functions involve typical city jobs, while the supporting role, in the person of Feliciello Sciosciammocca, is an incompetent petit bourgeois figure, at a loss in a world he cannot fully comprehend. In 1850 Petito staged Pasquale Altavilla’s comedy No sviluppo de nobilita` e no sviluppo de miseria (A Development of Nobility and a Development of Poverty), a play that anticipated Eduardo Scarpetta’s well-known drama Miseria e nobilta` (Poverty and Nobility, 1888). As Pulcinella, Petito sang the famous rigmarole of Cicerenella, showing that he did not limit himself to a passive acceptance of the prescribed text but that he would improvise on stage and reform the text during his performance, with the support of the company actors as well. Therefore, Petito’s style, as an actor-author, was unique; his skills were immediately recognized by his contemporaries and, afterward, by the great Neapolitan dialect poet Salvatore Di Giacomo (1860–1934). Petito began writing for the theater around 1849, as he recounted in his Autobiografia (Autobiography, 1895). His illiteracy and the peculiarity of his writing are often debated. Undeniably, both writing and reading must have been quite hard for him, and his direct knowledge of important theatrical and literary texts is doubtful. That, however, does not confine Petito to the niche of an ‘‘illiterate’’ culture. Indeed he belonged to the culture of the Neapolitan popular theaters, which constituted the point of contact for various traditions: folklore, commedia dell’arte, comic operas, picaresque novels, commedia ridicolosa, and classical theater. Petito also ventured into parodies: Oreste, adapted from Vittorio Alfieri; Don Fausto (1868), adapted from Goethe; Francesca da Rimini tragedia a vapore stravesata (Francesca da Rimini, A Distorted Steam Tragedy, 1868), inspired by Silvio Pellico’s tragedy;

ANTONIO PETITO La muta di Portici (The Dumb Girl from Portici, 1868), from Auber; and La bella Elena (The Beautiful Helen, 1868) from Offenbach. Here, Petito’s Pulcinella emphasizes his satirical vein more and more, by overturning the tragic de´nouement of the original plots. The parody appears as a caricatured and grotesque picture of the backstage activity in general and of the problems of the Neapolitan theatrical companies. Pulcinella narrates the intrigues and the amorous brawls of the actresses and their lovers through verbal puns and carnival-like language. Petito’s innovations extend to the traditional costume of Pulcinella, which he revised substantially: the black half mask and the long smock, on which Petito often superimposed a modern jacket; the cylinder in place of the large cap and an elegant stick in place of the traditional club; the red sweater, because of rheumatism. Ultimately, Petito’s theater consists in strong polemic accents toward the unscrupulousness of the new middle class and the oppression against the popular classes, in an altogether optimistic picture. In 1868 Petito staged one of his best farces, So’ muorto e m’hanno fatto turna` a nascere (I Died but They Brought Me Back to Life), in which he dealt with the theme of metempsychosis—later on adapted by Raffaele Viviani as Siamo tutti fratelli (We Are All Brothers, 1941). The following year Petito returned to the San Carlino, where he had begun his career, and created, together with Eduardo Scarpetta, the character of Don Felice Sciosciammocca, which seemed to supersede his own Pulcinella, according to an operation of ‘‘bourgeoisification.’’ But this reformist process was very slow: Scarpetta’s attempt at remodelling the stock mask of Pulcinella was indeed accomplished by his natural son, Eduardo De Filippo (1900–1984). Petito’s plays are inscribed into a distinct theatrical frame: At first the text is staged, and then it is put into writing; the transcription is made by Marulli and Cerlone. His innovative use of disguise, the sexual ambiguity, and the parody have survived, with success, in recent stagings: ‘A morte dint’ ’o lietto ’e Don Felice (Death in Don Felice’s Bed), directed and performed by Carlo Cecchi in 1974; and Petito Strenge (1996) by Alfonso Santagata. In the most touching of theatrical traditions, Antonio Petito died on stage, while performing in the Dama bianca by Giacomo Marulli on March 26, 1876. Due to his liberal ideas, the Church denied him a Christian burial. His theater friends dressed themselves up as Pulcinella and accompanied the hearse through the streets of Naples. Petito’s death symbolized the end of an era.

Biography Antonio Petito was born in Naples, on 22 June 1822, the son of Salvatore, an actor-manager, and Giuseppina Errico. He debuted in a play by Filippo Cammarano, Giovanni della Vigna, 1831, and wore for the first time the white smock of Pulcinella, 1841. He married Marianna Parlati, the daughter of a bankrupt merchant, 1841. Petito acted in L’innocenza in trionfo by Cerlone, in the role of Pascariello, 1850. He publicly received the mask of Pulcinella from the hands of his father, 1852. At the San Carlino, he staged a parody of Il Trovatore by Verdi, 1854. He had immense success with the comedy ‘O Munaciello dint’ a casa ’e Pulicenella, which ran for 80 consecutive nights, 1870. Petito died on the stage of the San Carlino on 24 March 1876. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Collections Tutto Petito, edited by Ettore Massarese, 3 vols., Naples: Luca Torre, 1978–1984. ’Na gran cavalcata, edited by Antonio Pizzo, Naples: Alfredo Guida, 2004.

Autobiography Vita artistica di Antonio Petito dal 1822 sino al 1870, edited by Salvatore Di Giacomo, 1895.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, ‘‘Antonio Petito, attore-autore,’’ Problemi, 54 (1979), 97–118. Angelini, Franca, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1988; reprinted, 1997. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, ‘‘Salvatore e Antonio Petito,’’ in Pulcinella, Rome: Gherardo Casini editore, 1953. De Matteis, Stefano, Lo specchio della vita. Napoli: antropologia della citta` del teatro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Di Giacomo, Salvatore, Storia del Teatro San Carlino, Milan: Mondadori, 1935. Greco, Franco Carmelo (editor), Pulcinella. Una maschera tra gli specchi, Naples: ESI, 1990. Meldolesi, Claudio, and Ferdinando Taviani, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Ottocento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991; reprinted, 2000. Scafoglio, Domenico, and Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, Pulcinella. Il mito e la storia, Milan: Leonardo, 1990. Scarpetta, Eduardo, Cinquant’anni di palcoscenico: Memorie, preface by Benedetto Croce, Rome: Savelli, 1922. Viviani, Vittorio, ‘‘Antonio Petito’’ in Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida editori, 1969; enlarged edition, 1992.

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PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA)

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA, 1304–1374) It is customary in histories of literature and philosophy to describe Francesco Petrarca (or Petrarch, as he is known in English) as the founder and initiator of the modern epoch. The claim acknowledges the role he has played in intellectual history. Throughout his life he was nothing less than the complete man of letters and, indeed, a ‘‘committed’’ writer, in the modern sense of the word. He wrote histories, lyrical poetry, epic fragments, treatises of moral philosophy, reflections on rhetoric and language, religious meditations, confessional selfanalyses, polemics about the current conflicts between science and faith, and political invectives against the Avignon Papacy, as well as against the new philosophical fashions, such as Averroism. His works, taken in their totality, constitute a deliberate, comprehensive intellectual project of refounding culture for the modern age. He envisioned a simultaneously Humanistic and Christian culture free of the encroachments of all political and institutional powers. Because his life spanned most of the fourteenth century—a century that experienced the crisis of the two central medieval institutions (the ‘‘Babylonian captivity’’ of the papacy, while the Empire, to all interests and purposes, enjoyed a merely formal existence) and the Black Plague that ravaged Europe in 1348—he grasped the need for new ways of thinking adequate to the demands of the real, historical world. Such a grand definition of Petrarch’s decisive role in the history of modern European consciousness is acceptable only with some precise qualifications. The starting point of his ‘‘project’’ is marked by a rethinking of the sense of (Roman) history and is scanned by a steady, overt opposition to the premises and implications of the logical discourses of the Scholastics. In turn, the two aspects, history and opposition to Scholasticism, originate in the discovery of the subjective dimension of experience. They rest upon a new conception of the self over and against the objective, eternal order of knowledge pursued by both the rationalism of Thomists and of the sciences, which were then peddled in centers of learning, such as the University of Padua. 1402

Before venturing further into the twists and turns of his intellectual activity, it must be stressed that Petrarch’s sense of modernity is not so radical as to entail a complete break with the past. If anything, he broke with the present. He rejected the intellectual fashions of the present and set aside the modes of thought that unfold without reference to the phenomena and contingencies of daily living. The existential realities of life, the importance of subjective experiences afforded him the critical perspective from which to judge the present as well as the past. Thus, he inaugurated the beginning of the modern age by the systematic retrieval of the ancient teachings about living that were put forth by spiritual traditions with a focus on the cultivation of the inner life. These traditions were available to him from the repertories of classical Rome and of Augustinian-Franciscan Christianity. The interplay of these two traditions—Roman history and the Augustinian idea of the self— turned early on into the distinctive trait of Petrarch’s thought. The dialectics of interiority and exteriority, private discourse and public language characterize his whole production. At the heart of his work, however, lies the desire to make his deeply held Christian faith stand and be tested in the light of classical culture, and, at the same time, to submit the classical world to the questioning by his Christian faith. One thing is clear: He never treated these issues as if they were objective or merely logical abstractions. He experienced them within the dimension of his own subjectivity in the persuasion that the relation of oneself to the world is never one of pure thought. Quite to the contrary, one’s subjectivity coincides with and is shaped by one’s own desires and contingent, unique history. In his modern view of the essence of the self, Petrarch can be called a ‘‘voluntarist,’’ one who places desire, not reason, at the heart of one’s subjective experience and makes it the defining focus of one’s life. In the recognition of desire’s power to shape the self (even if desire is steadily marked by shiftiness and contradictions), Petrarch was thoroughly Augustinian: ‘‘My heart is restless

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) till it rests in thee,’’ wrote St. Augustine at the opening of his autobiographical Confessiones. The restlessness of desire, which for Augustine was the symptom of an inner lack and revealed the incompleteness and hunger of one’s being, leads to the development of individual consciousness. Desire’s endless migrations and metaphysical quality force the self to seek an absolute end wherein the fragments of one’s will are gathered in a Whole. For Augustine, the end lay in conversion from being a mere ‘‘salesman of words’’ to a belief in the Word. Petrarch longed to reach the same resolution as Augustine did. But he lingered in the shady, ambiguous region of indecisions. It is well known that Petrarch was a deeply autobiographical writer. It can even be said about him that he lived in order to write in the persuasion that a life reaches its significance when it becomes a literary text. What allowed him to articulate and bring to their ultimate consequences these powerful Augustinian insights about the restless dislocations of desire was his sustained meditation on his personal history. As he wrote in the autobiographical portrait he sketched in the introductory passage of his collections of letters Rerum familiarum Libri (Letters on Familiar Matters, 1325–1366), or Familiares, he was born in exile and spent his early years moving around with his family from one town to another, first in Tuscany, later settling in Avignon, studying in Bologna, and finally choosing Arqua´ as the place to end his years. This experience of displacement—he journeyed almost everywhere—became the metaphor of both his existential, temporal, and spatial instability and his concomitant quest for spiritual permanence. But one event in particular, the encounter with Laura on April 6, 1327, on a Good Friday, in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon, forced him to come to terms with the enigmas of the ‘‘self.’’ His lyrical poetry is primarily both an analysis and a crystallization of his own self, as it is caught in the throes of a tenacious love passion for Laura. The love experience is set against the backdrop of time’s flow, which stands for the ontological instability of one’s self. The encounter with Laura, however, marked a true beginning, the onset of a passion that, in its uncanny power over his will, threw Petrarch back on himself. The effects of the passion on the mind were studied with the sort of clarity that makes for a great autobiography. The Canzoniere (Lyric Poems, ca. 1342–1374), also known as Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Poetic Fragments in the Vernacular), gathers together 366 poems. It becomes, thus, a

sort of diary or calendar of love, and it details the protagonist’s psychological daily self-analysis. It records the alternation of contradictory pulls on his mind and provides the phenomenology of the desiring self. The sequence of poems relates how Petrarch, as the protagonist-lover, became mired in his passion and, thus mired, drew the circle of his entanglement. He turned round and round the corridors of the labyrinth he had laid out and mused on his inability and even complacent unwillingness to extricate himself from it. The songbook (or Canzoniere) is subdivided into two major parts, poems written for Laura while she was alive and poems written for Laura after she was dead. But the structural division should not disguise the real issue for Petrarch, the link between time and desire, and this imaginative link unveils the fundamentally temporal structure of the self. Poem after poem ponders the oscillating moods, the vanishing thoughts of love, the pleasures of memory and the memory of the original vision of the unresponsive beloved, the regrets and hopes— in short, the repertory of disorientations the powerless self suffers. This awareness of a broken, desiring, and timebound self became the topic of Petrarch’s esthetic reflection, which gave a further twist to his radically new representation of the self. His love for Laura engendered his poetry, and the connection between the two (poetry and love) gave rise to the central conceit of the Canzoniere: The love of Laura existed as a love of the laurel crown and earthly fame. It follows that the work of art that he was composing created him as a poetic self and became the self’s enduring monument. In this sense, the Canzoniere differs sharply from another Augustinian text, Dante’s Vita Nova, which simultaneously narrates the lover’s sentimental education and the poet’s apprenticeship. The Vita Nova reaches an open-ended conclusion. On the contrary, the Canzoniere tells the further story of the work of art as the sphere of self-enclosed making, which paradoxically comes forth as the idolatrous world in which the poet loves the creation of his own hands. And if, in the Confessiones, Augustine narrated his turning inward into the self as the preliminary condition to arrive at the recognition of a necessary conversion to the word of God, in the Canzoniere Petrarch placed himself ambiguously between the finite world of history and the world of transcendence he steadily longed for. It is the irony of history that readers of Petrarch have come to know him chiefly through his lyrical poetry in the vulgar language (which he dismissed, 1403

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) with suspect self-deprecating modesty, as mere trifles). It is ironic because, in spite of their authentic power, the Italian poetry hampers our seeing in its true light the scope and power of his Latin works. The truth, needless to say, is that his Latin and Italian works, no matter the differences in their respective subject matter, are not altogether detached from one another. The original analysis of self, which he conducted in his poetry throughout his life, was the basis of his Latin texts, which primarily articulate what can be called a generalized conception of history. The two dimensions of his activity—self and history—belong together, and they reveal his effort to place himself within the horizon of the historical world in order to shape it. Let it be said that for Petrarch history was not a phantom or merely a product of the imagination. There was an objective world of history, which he identified as the history of the Roman past. Such a history was intelligible and was accessible to his mind, and this meant for him that it could be revived for (in) the modern age. In 1327 the private chance encounter with Laura in the mythical land of Provence, the historic space of minstrels and fated passions, determined the trajectory of his sentimental life and his poetry. Like an old Provenc¸al poet, he sang about Laura, and his poetry became the musical expression of his thought of love. Yet, another major public event imparted a change of direction to his life and his works. In 1340 he received at the same time, from both the University of Paris and from the Roman Senate, the offer of the poetic crown. He chose to be crowned ‘‘laureate poet’’ on the Capitol in Rome. The solemn ceremony took place on April 8, 1341, during which he read a speech, the Collatio Laureationis (Oration for the Honorary Degree). The recognition was understood by Petrarch as the summons to enter the arena of history, to define a new public project for himself. By this time, with the Pope in Avignon (which to Petrarch, and even worse to Dante and St. Catherine of Siena, appeared as the shame of the ‘‘Babylonian Captivity’’), Rome was in utter political disarray. The city’s squalor gave the symbolic celebration of the poetic coronation a paradoxically special significance. It was taken by Petrarch as more than a mere celebration of past achievements. It was a sign of things to come both for him and for the city of Rome. That he should understand the poetic coronation as a call for something like a providential mission was not altogether arbitrary. Nonetheless, in this hope that his future would follow the path of the classical roman poets, there 1404

was at the beginning considerable wistfulness on his part. In point of fact, by this time his output, though it largely (but not exclusively) centered on Roman history, was relatively small. He had started two works that address Roman history, the epic poem Africa (ca. 1338–1374) and the historical account De viris illustribus (On Famous Men, ca. 1338–1374). Neither was conceived as a form of antiquarianism or monumental history, in the mode of the practice identifiable with Cola di Rienzo (an antiquarian turned revolutionary who tragically pursued the dream of restoration of the Roman republic) or of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, who ruefully contemplated the beauty of Rome’s ancient ruins as the metaphor of existence’s temporality. The self-recognition as a new, living Roman poet, in the tradition of Virgil, Horace, Statius, and Lucan, forced Petrarch to depart from these fashionable—political and esthetic—treatments of antiquities. He left Africa unfinished. On the other hand, his De viris illustribus conceives history as biography, and in both he reflected on the burden of republican Roman history as the pursuit of universality. In 1341, as he stood on the steps of the Roman capitol, he substantially rethought the way the Roman past could be brought back to life in the present. His Collatio made clear that he lucidly understood that only thanks to its pagan poets and rhetoricians, and not the ruins of the city, the language of Rome was still audible and still worth retrieving from the depths of oblivion that threatened its possible posthumous existence. The speech, thus, reflects on three interconnected issues that would steadily figure in Petrarch’s future works: the defense of poetry as the tool by which the myths of civilization are forged and perpetuated; the enduring spiritual legacy of Rome; and Petrarch’s own self as a public voice. The contemporary Rome lying under his eyes appeared as the graveyard of scattered, illegible ruins, but Petrarch, Orpheus-like, could move stones and could edify the city. In the Canzoniere, the poet saw himself poised between Ovid’s Narcissus and the biblical David. The interplay between these two figures, although not widely acknowledged by Petrarch scholars, figures centrally in his lyrical poetry. In the Metamorphoses, Narcissus is the young man without self-knowledge, who sees his own image in a fountain, seeks to embrace it, and dies. The mythical figure stands for the inevitability and tragedy of self-contemplation. Petrarch flanked this myth

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) with many references to King David’s psalms. In imitation and acknowledgment of David, he wrote penitential psalms, and the Canzoniere’s language of miserere bears clear traces of David’s voice of loneliness, faith, and regret. By contrast, in the Collatio, Petrarch’s public voice recalled the myths of Orpheus and Echo, and each of them stands for the power of poetry and sound, respectively, to conquer death and to survive as a voice, without body. This theoretical understanding about poetic language is the premise on which the ‘‘discourse of Rome’’—the values Roman culture has contributed to the world—unfolds. The ideological core of Roman values that Petrarch unearthed as the basis of history stems from Cicero’s Pro Archia. It had happened that between 1330 and 1337 he traveled extensively to Paris, Ghent, Lieges, Aix la Chapelle, and Cologne. In Cologne he discovered this unknown oration of Cicero, and he absorbed it in his Collatio. Pro Archia is the speech Cicero made in 62 BC in defense of the Syrian poet Archias, who had lived in southern Italy and was granted honorary citizenship. Because the Roman prosecutor revoked the privilege, Cicero took the case, and Archias was acquitted. Yet, the genuine question lying at the heart of the speech is the defense of poetry: If Rome is to be a just city and its rule is to be just, it will acclaim the poet Archias as one of her own. Plainly enough, by his speech, Cicero presented a deliberate reversal of Plato’s Republic with its strictures (especially in book X) against Homer and poetry. Cicero’s reversal of the Platonic expulsion of the poets from the ideal republic depended on the peculiarly Roman concept of universality, identifiable with the universal principles of natural law. Petrarch, who sought a renewal of history and of Rome, echoed Cicero’s anti-Platonic thesis about poetry’s place in the city: The city needs poets. Nonetheless, he grasped what Rome’s ruins, which lie all over and around, were telling him. Ruins told him that this is how time works: It erases living worlds and leaves behind illegible fragments. Petrarch willed to reverse the process of decay: The ruins and dusty relics of the past could become building blocks that would go into the construction of a future work. Where esthetes and antiquarians-revolutionaries go wrong is in nostalgically believing that the ancient city and its glory can and must be restored as it was. For Petrarch, by contrast, the history of Rome could be revived, not as it literally once was but as an event of language: His Collatio, in effect, etches a theory

of culture that both replaces and fulfills the frame of the Roman world. It is a vision that later humanists (Leonardo Bruni, Lorenzo Valla, Niccolo` Machiavelli, among others) cherished. This novel understanding of Rome was a far cry from Dante’s idea of the Roman empire, which he articulated in his Monarchia. It completely broke also with St. Augustine’s assessment of Rome, which he put forth in the De civitate Dei, where Rome is inextricably part of the tragic economy of the earthly city. Whereas Dante followed Virgil’s notion of Rome’s providential mission, St. Augustine dismissed Rome’s ideology of power as the counterfeit of the heavenly Jerusalem. Unlike his two predecessors, Petrarch cast Rome as the model of a new, humanistic culture, as the prefiguration of the empire of culture, and as a modern world, that is, that human beings make. His redefinition of the values of immanence (and of the medieval perspectives on history) does not mean that he separated himself drastically from St. Augustine’s vision or, for that matter, from Dante’s. Petrarch, who confronted squarely the contradiction within himself and within the intellectual domain he inhabited, engaged in the effort to justify his defense of the validity of Roman, secular ethos to St. Augustine. The Secretum, or, in full, De secreto conflictu curarum mearum (On the Secret Conflict of My Preoccupations)—which was begun in 1342 and, after several redactions, probably finished in 1353—leads us to the center of Petrarch’s sense of the contradictory nature of his self and of his consciousness. The confessional text is organized around two perspectives: the immanent, diachronic perspective of Franciscus, who stands for Petrarch himself, and the transcendent perspective of a fictional Augustinus, who retains some trait of the historical Augustine, but who also appears as Petrarch’s rhetorical manipulation of the historical figure. A dialogue takes place over three days between the two of them in the presence of a silent allegorical figure, Truth, who recalls the fiction of Lady Philosophy in Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae. Franciscus does not simply condemn his pursuit of private desire, the love of Laura and poetry and the love of fame: He argues, rather, that he has the right to pursue these subjective impulses and recognizes these desires as positive forces. By adopting an argument drawn from ancient Stoic teachings, which he has gleaned from Seneca, he reasons that the extirpation of ‘‘sinful’’ desires would entail the concomitant extirpation of virtuous desires. On the other hand, Augustinus, in urging the desire for 1405

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) the good and the love of wisdom, is wary of Franciscus’s thesis that the gratification of private and selfish desires leads eventually to the rule of reason. From Augustinus’s standpoint, Franciscus has to free himself from the unbreakable chains holding him in bondage and has to learn to overcome what St. Paul calls the weakness of the will in order to become master of himself: The will is weak to the extent that it submits to the tyranny of the passions. He is given a choice—a choice of the ‘‘fig tree’’ over the ‘‘laurel tree’’ (Christian conversion over the pursuit of poetry and fame). Throughout this text, Petrarch held up the notion of an opposition between the two perspectives of Augustinus and Franciscus, and the difference between them figures the break between a medieval eschatological standpoint and a modern historical standpoint. But, taken together, the two perspectives of Franciscus and Augustinus acknowledge the principle of choice and responsibility for one’s action. Further, Petrarch claimed the dignity and openness of the finite world and human artifacts. Whereas the historical Augustine (much as his fictional projection in the Secretum) made vertical transcendence the hinge of his vision, Petrarch added a modern dimension, the ideal of a horizontal self-transcendence. The pulls he experienced along the linear, temporal axis of life can be productive. Thus understood, Petrarch’s Franciscus, which is his autobiographical mask, retains something of the original Franciscus, St. Francis of Assisi. In effect, the Secretum, in its deepest layer of meaning, records an imaginary conversation between two theologies, the theology of Augustine, who sees history in its eschatological fulfillment, and that of Francis, who cherishes contingent history. The interaction between them weaves together eschatology and the open future of human history, natural world and transcendent heaven. There is no doubt that the Secretum (and its various redactions prove the point) stemmed from the awareness of a moral crisis within Petrarch’s own self and worked itself out toward a troubled, uneasy reconciliation of the contradictory perspectives of the two interlocutors. The figure of a silent Truth encompasses the totality of their viewpoints. Further, the notion of a crisis—the word means ‘‘to choose’’—accurately expresses Petrarch’s conception of the primacy both of the concrete self (Franciscus) in contrast to objective, external teachings (Augustinus) and of a spiritual, open-ended quest. In this vision, to insist that he live as if he were already in the beyond is tantamount to making the attraction of this world and the passions of human 1406

beings worthless. It would be a mistake, however, to reduce Petrarch’s theology altogether to the parameters of the Secretum and to a steady polemical stance with St. Augustine. Petrarch’s loyal friendship with the Augustinian friar Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, who memorably made him a gift of the Confessiones, and his bonds of affection with his brother Gherardo, who was a Carthusian monk, inspired him to write tracts of a different tenor. In De vita solitaria (On Solitary Life, 1345–1347) he wrote on the spiritual joy the contemplative life affords. Petrarch’s powerful insights about the structure of the self, the poetic foundations of culture, the modern idea of Rome, and the wisdom of the religious life, which have been described above, remained fundamental to his intellectual project for the modern age. If anything, these insights and his project were crystallized by a number of events and encounters that took place between 1345 and 1350 and determined his intellectual stance till the end of his life. One such event was the discovery, in 1345 in the Cathedral Library of Verona, of the corpus of letters Cicero had written to Atticus, Quintus, and Brutus. These letters, along with Seneca’s Epistola ad Lucilium, gave Petrarch the impulse to compose the Familiares and, eventually, the Rerum senilium libri (Letters of the Old Age, 1361–1374), or Seniles. In 1347, Cola di Rienzo was elected the Roman tribune of the people. Petrarch, at first, supported Cola’s political aspiration to restore the ancient Roman republic (a plan conceived in overt opposition to the Avignonese papacy) but, soon after, distanced himself from Cola’s scheme. In 1348, the year of the plague, Laura died. In 1350, a jubilee year, Petrarch traveled as a pilgrim to Rome, and in Florence he met Giovanni Boccaccio, who would try, in vain, to convince his new friend to take up residence in their common ancestral city. All these events brought about a shift of direction away from the at times solipsistic subjectivity of the earlier years (although, by writing his poems, he made a spectacle of himself and made the inner self visible to the outside world) to an assertion of his public role as a moral teacher about politics, morality, science, and theology. More than that, Petrarch discovered the political aspects of modern individualism and forged a link between politics and culture. Such a connection, generally developed in both overt and oblique language, was posited in the Dedicatory Letter of the Familiares. Writing in an autobiographical mode to a Flemish friend, the musician Ludwig Van Kempen,

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Petrarch evoked the contours of his life as a perpetual exile, since the time (1302) when his father was banished from Florence, along with Dante. Petrarch’s experience of exile or homelessness came through as an existential Odyssey: He was a modern Ulysses. He cast himself as a Ulysses (along the way he acknowledged Dante’s figuration of the Greek hero), and he liked Ulysses because the whole literary tradition represented him in the most contradictory light, simultaneously as a sage and as a crafty dissimulator. From this standpoint, the fascination the Greek hero exerted on Petrarch is obvious: Like Ulysses, he was a recognizable hero, while yet remaining (and willing to remain) a stubbornly enigmatic, elusive character. What was, indeed what must have been truly enigmatic in him was his collusion with the tyrants, such as the Viscontis in Milan and the Carraras in Padua. He was reproached for such collusion by Boccaccio, who saw in it what amounts to a dishonorable subordination of intellectual freedom to political power. Petrarch’s arguments in favor of moral virtues as the basis of life came to sound hollow to Boccaccio, just as his earlier claims in favor of rhetoric as central to political thought sounded suspect to Cola di Rienzo. To his critics Petrarch responded that they got it all wrong: The project of a culture he had conceived as independent both of the powers of the Church and of petty despots needed wisdom and the ruses of intelligence to circumvent the manipulations and likely violence it might have triggered. To achieve this project he had to know how to use the tyrants. The covertness of his strategies in his exercise of the politics of culture was not constant. The letters in Sine nomine (Without a Name, 1352), written against the papal court in Avignon, launched a frontal attack against ecclesiastical corruption. Equally explicit is the polemical work, Invective contra medicum quondam (Invectives against a Physician), composed after 1351, when Pope Clement VI lay sick. The polemic focuses on a crucial aspect in Petrarch’s teaching, the rejection of medicine and the sovereign claims of the physical sciences. More precisely, it sets up a clear-cut antithesis between, on the one hand, the liberal arts and, on the other, the world of science, between rhetoric and medicine. Whereas medicine, which Petrarch unabashedly scorned, leads into the abyss of sophistry and false inferences, rhetoric (and poetry) manages to nourish the soul. The argument reenacts and significantly alters the opening drama of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, where Lady Philosophy

appears to the languishing philosopher and banishes the meretricious muses of poetry from his bedside in the persuasion that they, far from bringing a remedy, have caused his sickness. It is striking how often Petrarch indulged in polemics. They were the symptom of his understanding of culture as a struggle for the assertion of values over and against competing interests. A polemic witnessed his sense of the impossibility of reconciling seemingly opposed viewpoints in one overarching totality. Yet, not all his works dramatize conflicts and moral debates. De vita solitaria, in fact, seeks to weave together and harmonize two different moral traditions by pulling together their threads: Book I vindicates the values of the insights on tranquility voiced by Seneca, Cicero, Horace, and Epicurus. Book II, on the other hand, shifts to the Christian context of interiority. It goes into an extended praise of cenobitic life and monastic spirituality. The collation of secular and Christian examples he realized vindicates the harmonious, synthetic order of a mind capable of rising above contradictions and of turning to the contemplation of the Whole. And contemplation is correctly seen as the unifying trait of both religious askesis and philosophical theoria. Nonetheless, this all-encompassing vision of a harmonized, hierarchically arranged knowledge, whereby philosophy and theology; secular, humanistic traditions; and true Christian Wisdom are linked together, was short-lived. The truth is that Petrarch never stopped in his perception of the contradictory nature of experience. A text such as De otio religioso (On the Leisure of the Religious, ca. 1347–1357), which also deals with contemplation, introduces a disruption into the idyllic vision of leisure. Although its two books draw lavishly from both Christian and pagan sources in order to emphasize their common views about the fragility of life and the dangers of dissolute practices, they conclude with an excoriation of the empty eloquence of the arts and the exhortation to the monks to seek nothing outside of the Bible. From the perspective of the biblical revelation, the values of the secular moral tradition are found insignificant. The absolute, irreconcilable split between culture and faith advanced in De otio religioso is not an isolated experience. Even a sophisticated, truly rich tract, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others), dated on January 13, 1368, highlights the radical break between natural philosophy and theology, knowledge and faith. More specifically, the text—written against four young Aristotelians who have called on Petrarch 1407

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) and have accused him of ignorance, of lacking a rigorous knowledge of modern philosophy, and of being only an expert in empty eloquence—is addressed to a grammarian friend of Petrarch’s, Donato, a name that plainly echoes that of the Latin arch-grammarian and announces Petrarch’s genuine purposes. Grammar—which in the traditional encyclopedic classification of the arts encompasses correct reading, history, and literature—is juxtaposed to the logic of the modern philosophers, who are de facto housed at the nearby University of Padua. More than that, the initial recall of an autobiographical episode sheds light, once again, on Petrarch’s understanding of an intellectual confrontation: He was not a thinker in the classical Aristotelian mold, one who is intent on producing an abstract order of thought. Thinking for him was an act rooted in the ordinary texture of life. Autobiographical writing, further, underscored the thrust of De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia: The art of living, which was the specific domain of ethics, brought to a focus Petrarch’s desire to expose the ethical inconsistencies lying behind the claims at intellectual coherence in the new philosophical trends. He criticized the Aristotelian system of knowledge, saddled, as it appears to him, with ponderous abstractions that had nothing to do with the demands of lived experiences. In short, the four young scholars bracket the importance of rhetoric, ethics, and, in general, the complexities of personal history in favor of the seeming universalism of the neo-Aristotelian style of philosophy. By contrast, Petrarch trivialized the import of encyclopedic knowledge with its premise that total knowledge is possible. To be sure, during his Avignon years, Petrarch had endorsed the encyclopedic works compiled by his friends, Pierre Bersuire and Giovanni Colonna, and he himself composed an erudite archeological-geographical text, the Itinerarium Syriacum (The Syriac Itinerary). Nonetheless, his critique of the encyclopedic project in De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia remains crucial to the understanding of Petrarch. To their anachronistic models of natural science and universal knowledge, which they view as the truth, Petrarch juxtaposed the history of oneself as the concrete and legitimate domain of knowledge. Ultimately, Aristotelian philosophy was dismissed because it knows absolutely nothing of true Christian happiness. The constitutive component of happiness is not the intellectual quest for Immortality. In the formulation of this theological sense of happiness, the language of Petrarch’s text retrieves the insights voiced by his 1408

spiritual master, St. Augustine, in his De Trinitate (XIII, 7). In all these texts, be it in the sphere of politics, ethics, or philosophy, Petrarch discerned and argued for a separation between faith and reason. The science of natural or pagan philosophers does not enlighten human beings. Human beings must enlighten themselves following inner routes of selfknowledge, such as those mapped by Plato and Augustine. Thus, the spiritual activity Petrarch performed was to enlighten himself and his times about the limitations of a way of knowing that stems from and focuses on the outside world. Thus understood, his cultural project does not present itself as a surrogate for religion or ethics. The culture he conceived had its own independence from political power. Yet, it buttressed religion and ethics by stressing one’s inner resources. Further, his project provided the intellectual condition whereby questions of moral and political values were debated, even if circumstances might arise (and this is the language of the first letter of the Familiares) when one must speak with prudence and deploy a controlled double voice in staking claims for one’s role in those debates. Petrarch, who, over the arc of his writings, wrote moral philosophy and poetry, retrieved the fables and myths and antiquity in order to reach himself and, paradoxically, to hide himself and cast himself for the future. In the self-invention he achieved there is never any easy myth of transparency or flat self-confession. It can be recalled that he dramatized the allegorical representation of Truth (Truth as a fiction) in the Secretum, and the detail shows how lucidly he grasped the implications of metaphorical self-representation. Nonetheless, he certainly knew that to be authentic and be invested with the moral authority he sought all his life, as one can say by a spin on Dante’s etymology of auctor from autentin (Convivio IV, vi), is to be the author of one’s own acts and to take responsibility for them. For all his poses and all the theatrical masks he wears, Petrarch was an authentic writer, who, aware of the ambiguities of modern existence, shed light on them as well as on his internal oscillations. He both masked and staged himself, and in the process he recognized the self as the very source of all contradictions. To these contradictions he gave a distinct voice and a style, the fragmentary style of his lyrical poems, in which modernity— from Wyatt to Sidney and Shakespeare, from Garcilaso to Boscan and Sor Juana, from Du Bellay to Louise Labbe´, from Vittoria Colonna to Pietro Bembo and Luigi Tansillo (not to mention Tasso, Leopardi, and Zanzotto)—mirrors itself.

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) It is most certainly a sign of his constant experimentalism in poetry and of his self-analysis (and his steady self-contradictions) that Petrarch tried his hand at a lyrical synthesis, the Triumphi (Triumphs, ca. 1354–1374). In this poem, under the guise of a traditional medieval dream-vision, he presented a series of triumphs—the triumph of love, the triumph of chastity, the triumph of death—and they are followed by the triumph of fame, of time, and of eternity. Taken together, the parts of the poem show Petrarch bent on overcoming the ravages of isolated, atomized, and, indeed, partial intellectual experiences. By focusing on the major topics of his imagination, he wanted to impart a unified design and a purposive, ascensional movement to the fundamental values and categories of life—love, time, death, eternity. Ironically, however, the poems preserve a radically unfinished, fragmentary quality. As in all his other works, here, too, he sought to make the fragments stand together, as in a system or a Whole. The fragments, to be sure, prevail. Yet, more than anyone else in modern literature, Petrarch understood that fragments mark the way to the future. The future of the culture he dimly envisioned lies in our ability to assimilate his powerful insights.

Biography Francesco Petrarca was born on July 20, 1304, in Arezzo, where his father, Ser Petracco, a White Guelf, had been living since being banished from Florence in 1302. By 1312, when all hopes of ever returning to Florence faded, Petracco, who had found employment at the papal court in Avignon, moved his family (his wife Eletta and two children) to nearby Carpentras. Francesco began his schooling in Carpentras (under the tutelage of a distinguished rhetorician, Convenevole da Prato). He then went to school in Montpellier and later, in 1320, studied law at the University of Bologna. In 1326 Ser Petracco died. Francesco and his brother Gherardo returned to Avignon to take care of their patrimony. Here the most memorable event of Francesco’s life occurred: on April 6, 1327, a Good Friday, he met Laura. From the love passion for Laura stemmed the writing of the Canzoniere or songbook of love poems he kept writing and revising throughout his life. For all its powerful hold over his mind, this passion, however, did not keep Petrarch from engaging in other activities. In 1330, he began working in the household of Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, and, on the cardinal’s behalf and as a member of his retinue, he traveled to Paris, Ghent, Liege (where he found two orations of

Cicero), Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, and Lyons. In 1336 Francesco visited the city of Rome for the first time, and the impact on his mind of the spectacle of ruins was memorably recorded in a letter to Colonna (Familiares, VI, 2). In a way, his myth of Rome took shape at this time. Upon returning to Provenc¸e, he settled in his beloved Vaucluse, where he started his work of Roman historiography, De viris illustribus, as well as his historical epic, Africa. On April 8, 1341, he returned to Rome to receive the poetic crown. On the occasion he read a speech, Collatio Laureationis, and met Cola di Rienzo, a passionate student of Roman antiquities, who was fired up by the ultimately tragic dream of reestablishing the Roman republic. One year later Petrarch got down to writing his Secretum. In 1345, he was in Verona, where he discovered a manuscript containing the first 16 books of Cicero’s Epistolae ad Atticum and where he met Dante’s son, Pietro di Dante. At this time, the pace of Petrarch’s writerly activity became feverish: He wrote letters that would eventually become the book of his Familiares; he completed a piece of contemplative literature, De vita solitaria, and starts a second one, De otio religioso; and he composed the 12 allegorical eclogues of his Bucolicum Carmen that variously deal with the politics of the Avignon curia, the patriotism of Cola di Rienzo, the war between the French and the English, and so on. Petrarch escaped death during the Black Plague of 1348. In 1350, as he was on his way to Rome for the Jubilee, he stopped in Florence, where he met the local intellectuals, such as Giovanni Boccaccio, Francesco Nelli, and Zanobi da Strada. By this time Petrarch, somewhat disgusted by the conduct of the papal court (recounted in his Sine nomine), had decided to leave Avignon definitely, and he took up residence in Milan as a guest of the governor of the city, Visconti. In 1361, he divided his time between Padua and Venice (where his daughter Francesca and his granddaughter Eletta joined him). In 1366, he prepared the edition of the 24 books of the Familiares, and, one year later, he penned up the brilliant invective, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, aimed at four young Venetian Aristotelians. In 1370, Petrarch moved to Padua at the court of the Carraras and spent most of his time in his country house on the Euganean hills in Arqua`. To satisfy Carraras’s wishes, he devoted a tract to the matter of the government of princes. After barely finishing the Triumphus Eternitatis, he died on July 18, 1374. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA 1409

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Selected Works Works in the Vernacular Canzoniere (Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), ca. 1342–1374; as Lyric Poems, translated by Robert M. Durling, 1976; as Canzoniere, translated by J. G. Nichols, 2000. Triumphi, ca. 1354–1374; as Triumphs, translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, 1962.

Works in Latin Rerum familiarum Libri, 1325–1366; as Rerum Familiarum Libri I–VIII and Letters on Familiar Matters: Books IX–XXIV, translated by Aldo Bernardo, 1975–1982. De viris illustribus, ca. 1338–1374. Africa, ca. 1338–1374; as Africa, translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson, 1977. Collatio Laureationis, 1341. Secretum (De secreto conflictu curarum mearum), ca. 1342–1353; as Secretum, translated by Davy Carozza and H. James Shey, 1989. Rerum memorandum libri, ca. 1343–1345. De vita solitaria, ca. 1345–1347; as The Life of Solitude, translated by Jacob Zeitlin, 1924. Bucolicum carmen, ca. 1345–1348; as Bucolicum Carmen, translated by Thomas G. Bergin, 1974. De otio religioso, ca. 1347–1357; as On Religious Leisure, translated by Susan S. Schearer, 2002. Psalmi poenitentiales, ca. 1348. Sine nomine, 1352; as Book Without a Name, translated by Norman Zacour, 1973. Invective contra medicum quondam, ca. 1352–1355. Rerum senilium libri, 1361–1374; as Letters of Old Age, translated by Aldo Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 1992. De remediis utriusque fortune, 1366; as Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, translated by Conrad H. Rawski, 1991. De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, 1367; as On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, translated by Hans Nachod, 1948. Posteritati, ca. 1370. Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italiae, 1373.

Further Reading Billanovich, Giuseppe, Petrarca letterato, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1947. Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, Petrarch’s Genius: Pentimento and Prophecy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Cachey, Theodore J. Jr., ‘‘‘Peregrinus (quasi) ubique’: Petrarca e la storia del viaggio,’’ Intersezioni: Rivista di storia delle idee, 27 (1997), 369–384. Cachey, Theodore J. Jr., ‘‘Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the New World Encounter,’’ Stanford Italian Review, 10:1 (1991), 45–59. Dotti, Ugo, Vita di Petrarca, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1987. Ku¨pper, Joachim, Petrarca: Das Schweigen der Veritas und die Warte des Dichters, Berlin-New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Santagata, Marco, Per moderne carte: la biblioteca volgare di Petrarca, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Santagata, Marco, Il copista, Palermo: Sellerio, 2000.

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Stierle, Karlheinz, Francesco Petrarca: ein Intellektueller im Europa des 14. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Hanser, 2003. Trinkaus, Charles Edward, The Poet as Philosopher: Petrarch and the Formation of Renaissance Consciousness, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, Life of Petrarch, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, Studies in the Life and Works of Petrarch, Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1955. Witt, Ronald, In the Footsteps of the Ancients: The Origin of Humanism from Lovato to Bruni, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2000.

CANZONIERE, CA. 1342–1374 Lyric Poems by Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)

The version of the Canzoniere—or, as the original title goes, the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Poetic Fragments in the Vernacular)—we read nowadays is the result of nine different redactions, selections, and daily revisions carried out over most of Petrarch’s life. It is likely that he wrote some of the poems of this collection even before he met Laura, the woman who was to become his muse and unresponsive beloved, on that fated April 16, 1327, a Good Friday, in the Church of St. Clare in Avignon. Nonetheless, the 366 poems (sonnets in the style of the Sicilian school and of the stil novo, songs, madrigals, Provenc¸al sestinas, laments, and the like) that make up the sequence of the Canzoniere recount obsessively the vicissitudes of this abiding passion for Laura. The principle of repetition—identical moods edged by slight variations of lexicon and tone— sustains the movement of the poetic collection. It is as if this love, which was born in time, exists outside of time, forever (monotonously) the same. Time, thus, is the primary imaginative component of this love, which is born in time and strains to overcome the wear of time. As a matter of fact, the 366 poems—the days of the year plus one—cast the Canzoniere as a diary of love and simulate the

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Great Year, the eternal calendar of love. It is made of discontinuous days, and yet it appears as a unified totality. From this viewpoint of the fragmentary and unified temporal scheme of the sequence, its two titles, Canzoniere and Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, point to a key ambiguity in the formal structure of the collection. Although they are commonly used interchangeably, they do not mean the same thing, nor is it advisable to blur the difference between them. Canzoniere, literally a songbook, rests on the assumption of a unified pattern emerging from the totality of the poems. The other title, Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, draws attention to the poems as partitioned, broken pieces, as fragments irreducible to any unity. They remain what Petrarch in the first sonnet called rime sparse (scattered rhymes) and in the dialogic Secretum (ca. 1342–1353), he evoked for the benefit of his interlocutor, Augustinus, as ‘‘scattered fragments of his soul.’’ The question of whether, how, and why the Canzoniere (as we can refer to it for mere convenience) is a unified or fragmentary work of art is given a thematic status in the collection. To begin with, we might ask what constitutes the unity of the work. The answer is not simple. What primarily weaves the parts into a whole is Petrarch’s style, the peculiar ‘‘unilinguism,’’ as Gianfranco Contini defined it in opposition to Dante’s ‘‘plurilinguism’’ in his 1992 critical edition of the poem. Petrarch’s lexicon, which echoes and refines the lyrical language of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and the whole medieval lyrical tradition, binds the parts together and crystallizes the language of love for generations to come. There is no doubt, let it be said in passing, that the Western tradition of lyric poetry has been decisively shaped by the stylistic model Petrarch has painstakingly constructed. The scope of its influence on and rapid dissemination throughout Europe and Latin America (via Spanish Petrarchism) is in itself an important chapter of Western literary history. What also gives unity to the Canzoniere is the story of the self, the autobiography of a man in love, Petrarch himself, who explored the impact of his passion on his mind, sought to discover the essence of love out of the contingent moods experienced daily, and discerned the labyrinthine nature of his passion. Two literary and moral models stand behind Petrarch’s representation of the self: St. Augustine’s Confessiones (and its own appropriation of King David’s spiritual drama in the Psalms) and Ovid’s figuration of the myths of

Narcissus and Echo, Apollo and Daphne, Orpheus, and Pygmalion. Petrarch’s self was precariously poised between these two paradigmatic and in many ways antithetical versions of the self. Like Augustine, Petrarch viewed the self in terms of desire and time. Like him, he intuited that the importance of time lies in the fact that it is within the self (and not just that the self is in time, as the Aristotelians contend). And like Ovid’s Narcissus, Petrarch’s self tried to know himself through the images of his mind. Unlike Narcissus, however, Petrarch understood that reality is not reducible to mere phantoms or products of the imagination. And unlike Augustine, who understood his spiritual conversion as also the redemption of time’s fallen quality, Petrarch represented the self as caught in a steady impasse. Such an impasse of the self who oscillates and stands at the metaphorical crossroads where two existential possibilities intersect, an Augustinian Christian conversion and, on the other hand, the fascinated gazing at one’s own image, is affirmed by a crucial thematic motif that gives continuity to the poetic sequence. As indicated above, Petrarch recounted meeting Laura on Good Friday (he devoted a wonderful sonnet, number 3 of the Canzoniere, to this experience). On that central day of the Christian calendar, the day that commemorates Christ’s passion on the cross, Petrarch fell in love with Laura. The idolatrous juxtaposition between the two events and the two passions—one of universal significance for the economy of redemption, the other an erotic private passion, which nonetheless aspires to its own form of universality—figures repeatedly throughout the Canzoniere and imparts to the narrative the quality of a moral quest from sin to redemption. The palinode at the end of the book, the poem-prayer to the Virgin (song 366) suggests the lover’s renunciation of worldly passions. It is Petrarch’s irony, however, to open the Canzoniere with a sonnet that functions both as a proem and a palinode. The collection, thus, is framed by two palinodes, and the repeated technique unveils the circular structure of the text: The lover-poet is inescapably caught in a world of his making. This means that the ascensional movement of the narrative—the journey of the mind in love from Laura to God—is flanked by a countermovement that complicates the idea that Petrarch was engaged in a clear spiritual quest. If anything, the Canzoniere—especially through the myths of Orpheus, Apollo, and Pygmalion—reflects on poetry as the activity that gives poets the immortality they long for. Like Apollo’s Daphne, who is 1411

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) metamorphosed into a laurel tree (sonnet 4), the tree of the poetic laurel, Petrarch’s Laura stands for poetry. What dismantles the facile notion that the Canzoniere tells a continuous, unified story of a spiritual quest, however, is Petrarch’s insight, dramatized as it is in various poems (such as, for instance, the extraordinary songs 125 and 126), that desire and time, the two philosophical concepts that he steadily explored under the guise of memory and the imagination, are never reducible to a unity. These complications, which exist simultaneously in Petrarch’s poetry, never cancel each other out. They persist in each part and confer on the Canzoniere the unquestionable status of a classic, which numberless generations of readers and imitators have confirmed.

Suitner, Franco, Petrarca e la tradizione stilnovistica, Florence: Olschki, 1977. Vickers, Nancy J., ‘‘The Body Re-membered: Petrarchan Lyrics and the Strategies of Description,’’ in Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, Augustine to Descartes, edited by John D. Lyons and Stephen G. Nichols, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1982. Wilkins, Ernest Hatch, The Making of the ‘‘Canzoniere’’ and Other Petrarchan Studies, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951.

COMMENTARIES

GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Editio Princeps: Canzoniere e Trionfi, Venezia: Vindelino da Spira, 1470. Critical editions: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, edited by Gianfanco Contini, Paris: Tallone, 1949; Canzoniere, edited by Gianfranco Contini and annotated by Daniele Ponchiroli, Turin: Einaudi, 1964, reprinted 1992; Canzoniere, edited by Marco Santagata, Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Translations: Petrarch’s Lyric Poems: The ‘‘Rime sparse’’ and Other Lyrics, edited and translated by Robert M. Durling, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976; Canzoniere, translated by J. G. Nichols, Manchester: Carcanet, 2000.

Further Reading Barolini, Teodolinda, ‘‘The Making of a Lyric Sequence: Time and Narrative in Petrarch’s Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta,’’ MLN, 104:1 (1989), 1–38. Forster, Leonard Wilson, The Icy Fire: Five Studies in European Petrarchism, London: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Freccero, John, ‘‘The Fig Tree and the Laurel: Petrarch’s Poetics,’’ Diacritics, 5:1 (1975), 34–40. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Noferi, Adelia, L’esperienza poetica del Petrarca, Florence: Le Monnier, 1962. Petrie, Jennifer, Petrarch: The Augustan Poets, the Italian Tradition and the Canzoniere, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1983. Roche, Thomas Jr., ‘‘The Calendrical Structure of Petrarch’s Canzoniere,’’ Studies in Philology, 71:2 (1974), 152–172. Santagata, Marco, ‘‘Presenza di Dante ‘comico’ nel Canzoniere del Petrarca,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 146 (1969), 163–211.

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The recognition of Petrarch as a classic of world literature took place while he was still living. In 1348, Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a biography of Petrarch, De vita et moribus Francisci Petracchi de Florentia (The Life and Mores of Francis Petrarch from Florence), which draws a sharp, surprisingly accurate portrait of his yet unknown friend as a sage bent on retrieving ancient culture, both classical and Christian. For Boccaccio, who singled out the Latin works, Petrarch’s visions manage to join together in a harmonious weave, Cicero and St. Augustine. His love lyrics, on the other hand, were mentioned almost parenthetically, and they were read allegorically to signify not the poet’s love of Laura, but the love of the poetic laurel. Petrarch himself, in what can be called his contribution to the critique of himself, namely, the Posteritati (Letter to Posterity, ca. 1370), retraced and confirmed the exegetical outline of Boccaccio’s biography. Largely because of Boccaccio’s deep admiration for this Florentine master, whom he practically elevated to the role of founder of Humanism, a circle of Florentine imitators and disciples such as Lapo da Castiglionchio (d. 1381), Francesco Nelli (d. 1363), Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), and Zanobi da Strada (d. 1361), took up Petrarch’s classicizing project. The same phenomenon occurred in Padua, where humanists such as Giovanni Dondi dall’Orologio (1330–1389), Francesco Zabarella (1360–1417), and Pietro Paolo Vergerio il Vecchio (1370–1444), began the unprecedented diffusion of

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Petrarch’s fame all over Europe. Once again, they acknowledged the centrality of his historical works, of his anti-Avignonese tracts, and of the moral meditations in his Latin works. These works inaugurate the advent of a modern European consciousness or what can be called the dawn of a European humanism as Petrarch conceived of it. In the new century—the quattrocento—Petrarch’s impact on literary and intellectual history underwent a substantial redefinition. He became a specifically poetic model. Petrarchism, which is to be understood as a systematic imitation both of his lyrical language as is deployed in the Canzoniere and of his love ethos, arose first in the context of Florentine neo-Platonism. The names of Lorenzo de’ Medici; Angelo Poliziano, especially in his Stanze; and Matteo Maria Boiardo come quickly to mind. Through these highly gifted and original heirs of the Petrarchan lyrical legacy, the sixteenth century (or as Italian historians refer to it, the cinquecento) consecrated the practice, expanded the boundaries, and altered the nature of Petrarchism. As in the quattrocento, the cinquecento valued not the Latin works of Petrarch, but his vulgar works. Pietro Bembo, who prepared in 1501 the Aldine edition of the Canzoniere (and this was the first time that this title was used over the original Rerum vulgarium fragmenta), marked the shift in taste. This edition, because of the prestige of Bembo, gave rise to a number of weighty commentaries, which in a real sense parallel those that Dante’s Comedia had received throughout the fourteenth century. The most ancient (and still valuable) commentary of the Canzoniere was penned in 1525 by Alessandro Vellutello (d. 1544) and was followed by M. Gio. Andrea Gesualdo’s, written in 1531. A few years later, in 1582, the best commentary of the period appeared, written by Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–1571) and published posthumously. With elaborate sophistication and with notable finesse, all of these commentaries focus on the language, style, meter, variety of rhyme schemes, and the nobility of the themes treated in the songbook. Pietro Bembo is also to be credited with the elevation of Petrarch’s poetry to the status of unsurpassable mode of literary language. The socalled Questione della lingua, which he raised as a major issue for the esthetics of the Renaissance both in his Asolani (The Asolans, 1505) and in Prose della Volgar Lingua (Prose in the Vulgar Language, 1525), is given a provisional resolution by casting the unstable, shapeless vulgar language through the filter of Petrarch’s style. His refined, atemporal poetic style is said to provide the model

to be imitated by poets and courtiers alike. This myth of a crystallized, esthetically pleasing and ideal, immutable language (which, in effect, bears a resemblance to Petrarch’s idea of love) found its eloquent articulation in Baldassarre Castiglione’s Libro del Cortegiano (Book of the Courtier, 1528). By the second half of the sixteenth century, Petrarchism had become a widely accepted European fashion of style and morality. Indeed, the greatest lyrical achievements in Renaissance Europe stemmed from an avowed admiration of Petrarch’s love language and thought. In Italy, one must mention the prodigious poems by Torquato Tasso, Michelangelo’s sonnets, Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, and the extraordinary texts by women poets such as Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco, as well as Luigi Tansillo, the poet who, in turn, was loved by Giordano Bruno and Miguel de Cervantes. The rest of Europe, on the other hand, saw the Petrarchan fashion at work in the poetry of Fernando de Herrera and Luis de Gongora, Francisco de Sa´ de Miranda and Luis de Camo˜es, Thomas Wyatt and Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare and John Milton, Jean Marot and Joachim Du Bellay. And, unavoidably, the fashion developed its ironic and satirical antiPetrarchism, which is especially visible in the tradition of the Commedia erudita (Erudite Comedy) up to Giordano Bruno and beyond, and which, as parodies always do, ended up buttressing the canonical, paradigmatic value of Petrarchism. The seventeenth century, which in poetic history was marked by the advent of the so-called Marinismo and the Baroque taste for hybrid excesses, made of the esthetics of anti-Petrarchism (which came to mean the rejection of a classical purism in language) a new bizarre grammar or code of poetry. If poets such as Claudio Achillini (1574– 1640), Anton Maria Narducci, and Ciro di Pers (1599–1663), writing in the wake of Marino, were interested in a deliberate satire of Petrarch by emphasizing facetiously the incoherence of his conceits (with the lady’s hair compared to a river; her eyes to the sun, and so on), Petrarch’s Canzoniere was acclaimed by the seventeenth century composers, who set to music many of his poems, just as his Triumphi were widely illustrated by painters in the previous centuries. Modern criticism of Petrarch began with Ugo Foscolo’s Saggio sopra la poesia del Petrarca (Essays on Petrarch, 1823), which, in opposition to the moralism of critics, such as Salfi and, later, Settembrini, asserts the undeniable value of Petrarch’s innovative poetic clarity. Foscolo’s cult of 1413

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Petrarch, which found an echo in some memorable scenes of his novel, Le ultime Lettere di Iacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Iacopo Ortis, 1802) was shared, at first, by Giacomo Leopardi, who devoted a commentary to the Canzoniere (1826). Eventually, as one finds out from same fragmentary reflections on his Zibaldone, Leopardi would distance himself from Petrarch’s poetics. At any rate, the spirit of Foscolo’s critical assessment of Petrarch reappeared eloquently in the exemplary, nuanced discussion produced by Francesco De Sanctis in his Saggio critico sul Petrarca (Critical Essay on Petrarch, 1869). As in a genuine Romantic drama, Petrarch’s poetic spiritual world was juxtaposed to Dante’s, but the juxtaposition De Sanctis set up issues into the acknowledgment that Dante and Petrarch stand for two different, antithetical but equally authentic visions. De Sanctis’s reading of Petrarch (which ignores the Latin works) was severely criticized by the poet-academician Giosue Carducci on two major counts. He criticized De Sanctis for relying excessively on preestablished Romantic critical categories and for the essay’s scarcity of philological care. Carducci, in collaboration with Severino Ferrari, went on to produce a philologically rich, beautifully annotated edition of the Canzoniere, which they called Rime (1885). By that time, however, Petrarch’s Latin and vulgar works were receiving close attention by philologists and historians, both in Italy and France, such as Alessandro D’Ancona, Giuseppe Fracassetti, and Pierre De Nolhac. The twentieth century witnessed a flowering of critical interest in the texts, the philosophical ideas, and the poetry of Petrarch. Both Giovanni Gentile and his disciple, Eugenio Garin, highlighted Petrarch’s ideological core—classical and Christian—in his formulation of Humanism. Guido Martellotti, Giuseppe Billanovich and E. H. Wilkins, on the other hand, have provided a brilliantly documented account of the various phases of Petrarch’s life and inventions. Umberto Bosco, Natalino Sapegno, Adelia Noferi, and Gianfranco Contini—scholars who have exerted a great influence on the direction contemporary Petrarchan studies have taken—sought to redefine his rich and elusive personality as well as the perimeter of influences on his poetry. More recently, two well-known younger scholars in particular, Marco Santagata and Roberto Antonelli, have continued to probe and rediscover in a magisterial way Petrarch’s original insights and thought. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA 1414

Further Reading Cecchetti, Dario, Il petrarchismo in Francia, Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1970. Cocco, Mia, La tradizione cortese ed il petrarchismo nella poesia di Cle´ment Marot, Florence: Olschki, 1978. Dubrow, Heather, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Duperray, Eve, Or des mots: une lecture de Pe´trarque et du mythe litte´raire de Vaucluse des origins a` l’ore´e du XXe sie`cle: histoire du pe´trarquisme en France, Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1997. Fucilla, Joseph G., Estudios sobre el petrarquismo en Espan˜a, Madrid: OGRAMA, 1960. Gigliucci, Roberto, Contraposti: petrarchismo e ossimoro d’amore nel Rinascimento: per un repertorio, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Graf, Arturo, Attraverso il cinquecento, Turin: Loescher, 1888. Guglielminetti, Marziano, and M. Masoero (editors), Petrarca e il petrachismo contemporaneo: documenti, Turin: G. Giappichelli, 1975. Heiple, Daniel L., Garcilaso de la Vega and the Italian Renaissance, University Par: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994. Hempfer, Klaus W., Testi e contesti: saggi post-ermeneutici sul Cinquecento, translated by Laura Bocci, Naples: Liguori, 1998. Kennedy, William J., Authorizing Petrarch, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Minta, Stephan (editor), Petrarch and Petrarchism: the English and French Traditions, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1980. Navarrete, Ignacio Enrique, Orphans of Petrarch: Poetry and Theory in the Spanish Renaissance, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Quondam, Amedeo, Petrarchismo mediato: per una critica della forma antologia, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974.

LATIN WORKS All his life, Petrarch never wavered in his commitment to keep Latin—its language, literature, history, and generally, moral values—alive. Although his most enduring work, the Canzoniere, was written in the vulgar language, he opposed the emergence of a literature in the vernacular as a sign of decadence. Latin, on the contrary, could be the genuine foundation for a cultural renewal. More specifically, he felt that it provided a shared

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) tradition and a common language and could, thus, integrate within the encompassing synthesis of Roman history the centrifugal, regional differences of the various nationalities. Petrarch did not conceive these ideas of Latin and of Rome in a historical and political vacuum. It can be granted that they were inspired by his traditionalist, conservative bent of mind. They probably were ripened in reaction to the experience of living as exile in Avignon, a city that sought to usurp—so did he genuinely feel—the authority and legitimacy of historical and Christian Rome. Nonetheless, the claim of Latin as a universal and living language was the current practice by the Church, and, in this sense, the Church provided the concrete context within which the revival of genuinely classical Latin could be envisioned. The fashion for Latin had also become a generalized intellectual tendency among the Humanists at the turn of the thirteenth and at the beginning of the fourteenth century. With the emergence of Humanism, in fact, a new age of classical studies had dawned, and it expressed itself as the retrieval of historical antiquities, as a belief in the hegemony of rhetoric (which meant the cult of Cicero and Quintilian), and even as a specifically philological practice. Such a tendency is exemplified by some well-known cases. Years later, Boccaccio would look for ancient manuscripts in the library of Montecassino, and Petrarch himself would track down the manuscripts of Cicero’s Pro Archia (at Liege and Cologne in 1345) and the Epistulae ad Atticum (in the Cathedral Library of Verona). Petrarch’s Latin works have, thus, to be read within the context of the transformation of taste and desire for intellectual renewal his century had witnessed. If the classical auctores (Virgil, Ovid, Livy, Valerius Maximus, Lucan, and Boethius, for example) had never left the center stage of academic life, the phenomenon of ‘‘vulgarization’’ of these authors became widespread. One should mention, as a quick illustration, the vulgarization of Ovid’s Heroides by Filippo Leffi (1320), which certainly inspired Boccaccio’s Fiammetta, as well as the work on Latin literature produced at the University of Bologna by Giovanni del Virgilio (ca. 1300–1327), at Padua by Lovato dei Lovati (1241–1309) and Albertino Mussato (1261–1321), and at Verona by Geremia di Montagnone (1250–1320). Petrarch’s Latin works bear unmistakable traces of this first wave of interest in classical culture, which also was alive in Avignon, where he spent his formative years, and, beyond that, in France. Strong formulations of the importance of this

classical tradition were made available to him by the most erudite English classicist, Richard de Bury (chancellor to Edward III), whom Petrarch came to know in Avignon; by the distinguished scholar of Latin codices, Roberto dei Bardi; by the Christian allegorical moralization of Ovid by his Avignonese friend, Pierre Bersuire; by the work of the Augustinian friar, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro, who combined a knowledge of Christian patristics (especially St. Augustine) with interest in classical literature; and by the study of Roman antiquities by the Dominican Giovanni Colonna, who authored the Liber de viris illustribus. It is no doubt against this complex background of enthusiasm for Latin language and culture that Petrarch’s commitment to and production of his Latin works have to be seen. But he departed from narrow antiquarian conventions—the point of which is the cult of the past as past—and sought to bind together antiquities and living history. In Petrarch’s aesthetic world, the study of literature, very simply, amounted to a study of antiquity, the notitia vetustatis, as he defined it in his Posteritati (Letter to Posterity, ca. 1370). For example, his unfinished epic, Africa, which he conceived in 1338 while living in Vaucluse and whose fragments he assiduously reworked till the very end of his life, gives itself as the imaginative reconstruction of a critical juncture of Roman history, the second Punic war, and it celebrates the heroic virtue of Scipio, who is juxtaposed to Hannibal as the antihero. With Scipio as a republican hero, antiquity is studied for its historical relevance to the present and as a source for the poet’s imagination. Nor did Petrarch abide by an isolated repertory of ancient history. Thus, if the storyline of the epic fragment follows the historian Livy’s account, the poem’s meter and narrative were modeled on Virgil’s Aeneid. One of Africa’s successfully developed scenes, for example (the arrival of the Carthaginian ambassadors to Rome in book VIII), comes through as a rewriting of Aeneas’s visit to Evander’s Arcadian Kingdom (Aeneid VIII). By pulling different sources together, Petrarch attempted a complex hermeneutics of classical Rome. Nonetheless, his representation of ancient history remains narrowly ‘‘medieval,’’ and what he perceived of the Roman past is what the present age mirrors: the confused spectacle of ruins and the ghostly traces time has impressed on them. In Petrarch’s understanding, the poet is the modern archeologist who, overwhelmed by the devastation time has inflicted on the achievements of the Roman past, writes powerful elegiac lyrical fragments, which reflect 1415

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) the fascination with mortality dominant in his own time. The same historical attitude toward Roman antiquities emerges from the two historical works, De viris illustribus (On Illustrious Men) and Rerum memorandum libri (Books of Memorable Happenings). De viris illustribus, written at the same time that Africa was being composed, understands history as biography. Petrarch staged a gallery of characters—Romulus and the other Roman kings, Cincinnatus, Scipio, Cato, Nero, and Titus (and in a later edition he would include, among others, Adam, Moses, and Hercules). He perceived, in effect, that Roman history does not coincide with universal history. The second historical work, Rerum memorandarum libri (begun in 1343) casts history as a persistent moral drama. It is explicitly modeled on Valerius Maximus’s Factorum and dictorum memorabilium libri, and it aims at reading events and characters of ancient and modern history within the moral framework of the four cardinal (classical and Christian) virtues: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Furthermore, from a formal standpoint, the structure of the book resembles a medieval florilegium. Alongside figures of the past there are memories of contemporary figures, such as Clement VI, Robert of Anjou, and Dante. In terms of content, however, it is governed by a principle of discontinuity between past and present. The discontinuity allowed Petrarch to articulate his opposition to the decadence of the present, which, in truth, figures steadily in his work, and to uphold the myth of the greatness of the past. The insight into the discontinuity between the past and the present (which determined Petrarch’s ‘‘medieval’’ standpoint as well as his choice of medieval genres and his conception of the temporal instability and fluctuation of the sensuous world) accounted to a large extent for the limited esthetic success of these early Latin works. For all his commitment to Latin and to Rome, Petrarch lived in two separate spiritual worlds or in two separate moments of the same world, the past and the present. He did not view the relation between ancient Rome and the present reality as part of the same absolute, historical continuity, as Dante, for instance, did. A significant change soon took place. In 1341, he was appointed Rome’s ‘‘poet laureate.’’ On the steps of the Capitol, he read the Collatio Laureationis (Oration for the Honorary Degree). The speech re-conceptualizes Petrarch’s understanding of Rome. He came to the realization that the city’s past was kept alive by the language of its poets and rhetoricians—Virgil, Cicero, Lucan, Statius, and so on. In effect, he grasped the vital force of the poets’ 1416

rhetoric to impact and shape the world. To come alive, a work of art (or Rome itself) cannot be reduced to a mechanical artifice, myth, or inventory of an inanimate past from the contingent perspective of the present. It must transplant the past to the present and not appear as a nostalgic replica of the myths of the past. In this sense, the Collatio Laureationis marked a watershed in Petrarch’s Latin production. To assimilate Roman antiquity and forge links of continuity between the past and the present, he rediscovered the coextensiveness of classical values and Christian values. The insight produced genuinely dramatic conflicts. The confrontation of the uneasy relation between the two traditions occurs in the Secretum (ca. 1342–1353), the narrative of Petrarch’s self-consciousness, of his split between the pull of Christian revelation (represented by a fictional Augustinus), and the lure of worldly achievements (love and fame), voiced by Franciscus, the autobiographical mask of Petrarch himself. The resolution of the quarrel takes place in a Christian key, and it occurs in the tract on contemplation, De vita solitaria (The Life of Solitude, 1345–1347), and, to a limited extent, in De otio religioso (On Religious Leisure, begun in the same years). It is confirmed by the seven Psalmi poenitentiales (Penitential Psalms), written in 1348 (the year of the plague), the year when death, in all its flat powers, ravaged all of Europe. But no resolution of moral dilemmas was ever final for Petrarch. In the same year that he wrote De vita solitaria, he turned to a classical genre, the pastoral poem. In the wake of Virgil’s Eclogues, he wrote the Bucolicum carmen (The Bucolic Poem, ca. 1345–1348), which focuses, much as De vita solitaria and De otio religioso do, on the range of meaning of pastoral ‘‘leisure.’’ Leisure for Petrarch did not coincide with mere idleness. Rather, it described the condition of the mind, which, relieved of all cares, is capable of producing work. The presumed idleness of the pastoral genre, thus, is bent to dramatize the dignity of work. Understandably, the 12 eclogues of the Bucolicum carmen treat various topics, such as the relationship of monastic life to the life of literary pursuits (in the first eclogue, which is dedicated to his brother Gherardo, a Carthusian monk); the value of King Robert of Naples; and the civic virtues of the Roman revolutionary, Cola di Rienzo. These Latin works become extensive commentaries on the moral turmoil of the present. They seek to give a spiritual assessment of the present from the standpoint of the Latin literary tradition. Plainly, even the Sine nomine (Book Without a

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Name, 1352), a number of epistles written against the moral decadence of the Avignonese Court, belongs to this context of concerns, as do the epistles composing the Familiares (Letters on Familiar Matters, 1325–1366) and the Seniles (Letters of the Old Age, 1361–1374), which were conceived in imitation of Cicero’s Epistulae ad Atticum and Seneca’s Epistulae ad Lucilium. It can be said that, from a technical point of view, Petrarch’s own Latin language reached its highest point in the Familiares: The ease with which his mind moved from ancient moral (Stoic) considerations to literary and esthetic questions, from politics to reflections on his own self (how the self poses its own significance and authentic value in the exercise of its acts) was a veritable homage to the power of his two models on his mind and style of thought, Seneca and Cicero. Their names and their tragic fates (Cicero was murdered by the henchmen of Mark Antony, while Seneca was forced to commit suicide by the Emperor Nero) constituted the boundaries for Petrarch’s self-understanding as a ‘‘free’’ intellectual in the courts of his patrons, such as the Viscontis and the Carraras. In time, Petrarch’s Latin works increasingly became Christian meditations on the disorientation of modern existence. De remediis utriusque fortunae (Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul, 1366), De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, 1367), and the Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italiae (Invective against One Who Spoke Ill of Italy, 1373) affirm Petrarch’s perplexities against the moral, intellectual, and political direction the world has taken, and they show him thinking through its limitations as a way of overcoming them. Italy, Rome, Augustinian interiority, and Christian faith are all assimilated into one. To the very end, Latin became for Petrarch the unavoidable language of history, in all its concreteness and grandeur, over and against the abstractions of the scholastics or the vain indulgences of those (like himself) who dabble in the vulgar Italian. As a matter of fact, for him, who even gave Latin titles to his poetry in the vernacular, Latin stood for the very future of culture. The later Humanists, at least in this, heeded his summons to the cultivation of the Latin language and culture. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions and Translations L’Africa, edited by Nicola Festa, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, vol. 1, Florence: Sansoni,

1926; as Petrarch’s Africa, translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. Bucolicum carmen e i suoi commenti inediti, edited by Antonio Avena, Padua: Societa` cooperativa tipografica, 1906; as Petrarch’s Bucolicum Carmen, translated by Thomas G. Bergin, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974. Collatio laureationis, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Antonietta Bufano, Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975, vol. 2, 1255–1283. De otio religioso, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Antonietta Bufano, Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975, vol. 1, 567–809; as On Religious Leisure, edited and translated by Susan S. Schearer, New York: Italica Press, 2002. De remediis utriusque fortunae, Cremona: Bernardinus de Misinti et Caesar Parmensis, 1492; as Petrarch’s Remedies for Fortune Fair and Foul: A Modern English Translation of De remediis utriusque fortune, edited and translated by Conrad H. Rawski, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Antonietta Bufano, Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975, vol. 2, 1025–1151; as On His Own Ignorance and That of Many Others, translated by Hans Nachod, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, and J. H. Randall, Jr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948. De viris illustribus, edited by Guido Martellotti, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, vol. 2, Florence: Sansoni, 1964. De vita solitaria, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Antonietta Bufano, Turin: Unione TipograficoEditrice Torinese, 1975, vol. 1, 261–565; as The Life of Solitude by Francis Petrarch, translated by Jacob Zeitlin, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924. Le familiari di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Vittorio Rossi and Umberto Bosco, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, vols. 10–13, Florence: Sansoni, 1933–1942; Books I–VIII as Rerum Familiarum Libri I–VIII, translated by Aldo Bernardo, Albany: State University of New York, 1975; Books IX–XXIV as Letters on Familiar Matters: Books IX–XXIV, translated by Aldo Bernardo, 2 vols., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Invectiva contra eum qui maledixit Italie, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Antonietta Bufano, Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975, vol. 2, 1153–1253. Invective contra medicum quondam, in Opere latine di Francesco Petrarca, edited by Antonietta Bufano, Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1975, vol. 2, 817–941. Posteritati, in Prose, edited by Guido Martellotti et al., La letteratura italiana. Storia e Testi, Milan-Naples: Riccardi, 1955, 2–18; as Epistle to Posterity, in Letters from Petrarch, translated by Morris Bishop, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. Psalmi poenitentiales in Salmi penitenziali, edited by Roberto Gigliucci, Rome: Salerno, 1997. Rerum memorandum libri, edited by Giuseppe Billanovich, Edizione nazionale delle opere di Francesco Petrarca, vol. 5., Florence: Sansoni, 1943; as Letters of Old Age.

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PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) Rerum Senilium Libri I–XVIII, translated by Aldo Bernardo, Saul Levin, and Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Francisci Petrarche laureati Rerum senilium liber XIV. Ad magnificum Franciscum de Carraria Padue dominum. Epistola I. Qualis esse debeat qui rem publicum regit, edited by Vincenzo Ussani, Padua: Collegium Typographorum Patavinum, 1922. Secretum, Prose, edited by Guido Martellotti et al., La letteratura italiana. Storia e Testi, Milan-Naples: Riccardi, 1955, vol. 7, 22–214; as Petrarch’s ‘‘Secretum,’’ with Introduction, Notes, and Critical Anthology, translated by Davy A. Carozza and H. James Shey, New York: Peter Lang, 1989. Sine nomine: Lettere polemiche e politiche, edited by Ugo Dotti, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1974; as Petrarch’s Book without a Name: A Translation of the ‘‘Liber sine nomine,’’ translated by Norman P. Zacour, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1973.

Further Reading Bernardo, Aldo, Petrarch, Scipio and the ‘‘Africa’’: The Birth of Humanism’s Dream, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962. Billanovich, Giuseppe, Petrarca letterato: Lo scrittoio del Petrarca, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1947. De Nolhac, Pierre, Petrarque et l’humanisme, Paris: Librairie Honore´ Champion, 1907. Durling, Robert M., ‘‘The Ascent of Mt. Ventoux and the Crisis of Allegory,’’ Italian Quarterly, 69 (1974), 7–28. Greene, Thomas M., ‘‘Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic,’’ In Italian Literature, Roots and Branches: Essays in Honor of Thomas Goddard Bergin, edited by Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth John Atchity, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976. Kohl, Benjamin G., ‘‘Petrarch’s Prefaces to De viris illustribus,’’ History and Theory, 13 (1974), 132–144. Martellotti, Guido, ‘‘Linee di sviluppo dell’umanesimo petrarchesco,’’ Studi Petrarcheschi, 2 (1949), 51–80.

TRIUMPHI, CA. 1354–1374 Poem by Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca)

Written in the form of classical and medieval visions (one thinks of book VI of the Aeneid, of the dream governing the Roman de la rose and Dante’s Comedia) and in Dante’s terza rima (tercets), the 1418

Triumphi (Triumphs), which is the original Latin title by Petrarch himself, is composed of six frames or chapters. The series begins in the springtime with the poet in Vaucluse, where on the anniversary day of his first seeing and falling in love with Laura, he has a dream. It is the dream of Love’s victories or the Triumphus Cupidinis (Triumph of Love). The poet sees the God of Love, who, as he rides a triumphal chariot, is followed by a host of characters (among whom he recognizes Cino da Pistoia and Boccaccio). The spectacle is followed by an epic catalogue of the names of all those (including Dante) who have been defeated by love. The Triumphus Cupidinis is superseded by the Triumphus Pudicitiae (Triumph of Chastity), the locale of which shifts to Rome, and one of the heroes is Scipio. From Rome the narrative moves to Provenc¸e and it relates, through the death of Laura, the Triumphus Mortis (Triumph of Death). Another triumphal chariot now appears and it carries a queen, Fame or earthly glory, who is followed by a line of Roman heroes and Greek philosophers. But Fame is short lived, and time’s tooth devours these earthly achievements (Triumphus Temporis, the Triumph of Time). The poet, overwhelmed by the knowledge of time’s destructiveness, withdraws into himself, and by turning inward, that is, by adopting a contemplative posture, he experiences the vision of a reality beyond the finitude and instability of the sublunary world. There, by the grace of God’s light, appear to him Laura and the Joy of all the blessed (Triumphus Eternitatis, the Triumph of Eternity). Even from this bare synopsis of the poem, it is clear that Petrarch intended to present a comprehensive, synthetic inventory of the major themes that in a fragmentary or isolated way composed his past works. Plainly enough, he recapitulated the topics of love, time, death, and glory, and eternity variously treated in the Canzoniere, his historical works, and contemplative tracts, but he did so as if these topics were expressions of his subjectivity: At the heart of the representation there is the dreaming self. A difference exists, however, between the autobiographical impulse lying behind all other works and the autobiography in the Triumphi. The first sign of difference emerges from the explicitly Dantesque structure of the poem. As in Dante’s Comedia, in the Triumphi we confront the narrative of a spiritual and moral ascent, a journey of the mind (and the echo of St. Bonaventure’s Itinerarium mentis in Deum is, I believe, deliberate), through six stages, from love to the beatific vision of Laura and God. In this dramatic movement from earth to heaven, Petrarch

PETRARCH (FRANCESCO PETRARCA) departed from his previous conceptualization of an impasse of the mind. In the Triumphi, by contrast, he sought to establish an ordered, hierarchical relationship among the self’s multiple regions of experience or categories of thought (love, time, fame, and the like). There is a second and even more poignant novelty that Petrarch introduced in his figuration of self. Quite obviously, the Triumphi do not just seek to provide a retrospective unification of Petrarch’s past works. They also come through as the acknowledgment of the whole classical and medieval literary tradition. In this sense, they constitute a recapitulation of the history of the Italian lyric: There are deep traces of Dante, Cino, Boccaccio (especially his Amorosa visione), Cavalcanti, and earlier Tuscan poets. The novelty consists in Petrarch’s formulation of a strong connection between the sense of self and the literary history he evoked. By joining these two narrative dimensions, Petrarch dramatized a new insight about the self: His own self became the locus of contradictory voices and pulls crossing one another. In it a conversation takes place between Dante and Virgil, Cavalcanti and Cino, St. Bonaventure and St. Augustine, Ovid and the Provenc¸al poet, Seneca and Scipio, and so on. All these voices that he conjured up constitute the uniqueness of Petrarch’s self. These conceptual and formal concerns of Petrarch do not exhaust the richly speculative burden of the poem, which, although it was left unfinished, persistently dogged the poet’s imagination (the final date he wrote on his last poem was February 12, 1374, and it showed his desire to work through to the end the complexities of this experiment). From this standpoint, Petrarch appears as a relentlessly experimental poet. The most important intellectual challenge of the Triumphi—the question of the relationship between language and vision— turns out, however, to have been barely sketched and not successfully transacted. Nonetheless, the poem deliberately stages the transformation of vision into language or discursive understanding: it

moves from the anaphoric ‘‘io vidi’’ (I saw) to the enumerations and catalogues (obvious devices of the epic form) of names. In the Triumphi, clearly, language is detached from the vision it seeks to describe. It is as if the dreamer wants to affect the primacy of the dream, for in such a dream the reconciliation of all quarrels and all conceptual or personal contradictions finally takes place. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions Early editions: Trionfi, with commentary by Bernardo Lapini, Venice: Petrus de Piasiis, 1484; Trionfi, in Il Petrarcha: con l’espositione di M. Gio. Andrea Gesualdo: nuouamente ristampato, e con somma diligenza corretto, et ornato di figure, con doi tauole, vna de’ sonetti e canzoni, & l’altra di tutte le cose degne di memoria, che in essa espositione si contengono, Vinegia: Appresso Iacomo Vidali, 1574. Critical editions: Trionfi, in Rime, trionfi e poesie latine, edited by Ferdinando Neri et al., Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1951; I trionfi, in Rime sparse e I trionfi, edited by Ezio Chiorboli, Bari: Laterza, 1930. Translation: Triumphs of Petrarch, translated by Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Further Reading Amaturo, Raffaele, Petrarca, vol. 6 of Letteratura italiana Laterza, Bari: Laterza, 1974. Bernardo, Aldo, Petrarch, Laura and the Triumphs, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Bruscagli, Riccardo (editor), Trionfi e canti carnascialeschi del Rinascimento, 2 vols., Rome: Salerno editrice, 1986. Carnicelli, D. D. (editor), Lord Morley’s Tryumphes of Fraunces Petrarcke; the first English translation of the Trionfi, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The Worlds of Petrarch, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Santagata, Marco, Per moderne carte: la biblioteca volgare di Petrarca, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Waller, Marguerite, Petrarch’s Poetics and Literary History, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

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PETRARCHISM

PETRARCHISM A printed, pocket-sized volume of Le cose volgari di messer Francesco Petrarca, edited by Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), was published by Aldus Manutius’s press in Venice. In the newly constituted book market, the so-called petrarchino became an instant best seller and reached an audience that its earlier manuscript version—slower to circulate because of the paucity of its number and the larger size of its dimensions and binding—could not have reached. The pocket book contained both Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374) and Triumphi (Triumphs, ca. 1354–1374), circulating for the first time without the traditional accompaniment of a commentary: The text, it was deemed, should speak for itself. However, the sequence of poems was divided by Bembo into two parts, ‘‘Sonnets and Songs Written during Laura’s Life’’ and ‘‘Sonnets and Songs Written after Laura’s Death.’’ This division, implicitly present in Petrarch’s Canzoniere, is meant to underline the self-referential, exemplary, autobiographical character of a spiritual journey at play in the text. Petrarch’s ‘‘scattered rhymes’’ would therefore find their meaning and reason only in the readers’ interpretation of poems consigned either to the ‘‘during’’ or to the ‘‘after’’ of Laura’s existence, between a celebration of profane love and the acknowledgment of the vanity of it. This typographic barrier points to a reading that became more persuasive than any explicit, exegetic commentary: Petrarch’s lyrics, reinterpreted in sixteenth-century Italy in the light of a decisive Augustinian neo-Platonism, became the model of poetic autobiography, in which poetry substantiates the experience of profane love and soothes the grief deriving from the loss of it. Petrarch’s experience of bereavement and penance absorbs the liability of earthly existence and in the end rescues him, the poet who has finally consecrated himself to the Virgin and to God, from the passing of time and worldly passions. Bembo’s edition explicitly underlines the unavoidable literary connections between experience (life) and literature—that is, of experience ontologically turned into writing; ultimately, it underscores the stringent correlation of life and poetic activity, which, in this reading, should correspond to an existential condition of spiritual reflection, renewal, and self-ennoblement. Petrarch’s 1420

language must therefore look within itself for an ideal of perfection, in the corollary that the poet really becomes man and artist only if he is able to express his life through the exercise of poetry. This fashionable petrarchino immediately became the mandatory reading of the literate public; it attached itself to a sign of renowned intellectual and social status while at the same time providing the model of a lifestyle and of its specific, highly specialized idiom. Bembo’s attempt at ‘‘canonizing’’ Petrarch–of which the petrarchino’s widespread diffusion was the first obvious step—corresponded with the use of literary texts for cultural and political reasons: Italian Petrarchism was undoubtedly tied to the socalled questione della lingua, that is, the complex debate over the literary language (and of its style) for the politically and linguistically divided Italian peninsula. In his treaty Prose della vulgar lingua (Prose on Vernacular Eloquence, 1525), Bembo, using the tools of the humanistic debate over what models to use for Latin (whose outcome had been Cicero for prose and Virgil for poetry), proposed the use of Petrarch for vernacular poetry and Giovanni Boccaccio for prose. Given the situation of the fragmented Italian peninsula, Bembo firmly rejected the possibility of contaminating the Petrarchan code with everyday language (that is, with the contribution of the Italian dialects), recognizing in Petrarch’s linguistic system a model that already could not be surpassed. In Bembo’s hegemonic project, the ‘‘Italian’’ vernacular of Petrarchism would hopefully become ‘‘the’’ language of any literary pursuit, the language of the intellectuals and the ruling class, of a society finally united beyond geographical and political borders, in the same way that the adoption of the rules of classical Latin and the imitation of Cicero and Virgil had unified the endeavors of the Humanists toward a rebirth of civilization, united in the name of a language and a literature. Petrarchism is the tool that unifies the different languages of culture, by allowing the intellectuals to understand one another beyond their place of birth or residence or their social status through a common, shared ideal; it does recreate, at least formally, a national identity. To be a Petrarchist was the sign of a privileged

PETRARCHISM condition, a code of communication among people belonging to the same world who want to be, and be known as, intellectuals and lovers of culture. Bembo’s own book of Rime (Poems, 1530) unleashed this notion of Petrarchism and provided a strict example of the ‘‘correct’’ application of the original Petrarchan model. As the metric form of choice, the Petrarchan sonnet became the privileged medium of expression; because of its simplicity (its syntactical structure mirrors the metric: Quatrains and tercets are kept logically separate and each divided from one another), it reached an enormous success all over Europe. In Italy, the major Petrarchists were Giovanni Della Casa (1503–1556), considered by Torquato Tasso the inventor of enjambement (which modifies the structure of the sonnet, providing a new kind of phrasing to lyric poetry); Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564); Luigi Tansillo (1510–1568); and Celio Magno (1536–1602), who, with his somber Rime (Poems, 1600), opened the new century and closed the most representative season of sixteenth-century Petrarchism. For the first time in Italian literature, women poets were published: The moral and intellectual deference that the poetessa obtained in the Italian courts (derived from the newfound respect for women set forth by Petrarchism itself) allowed these women poets to adhere to the Petrarchan model and to start a series of important renegotiations of its language. Ludovico Domenichi’s volume Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime e virtuosissime donne (Various Poems by the Most Noble and Virtuous Ladies, 1559) included almost 100 women poets and was widely read. Among the authors to note are Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547), Veronica Ga`mbara (1485–1550), Tullia d’Aragona (c.1508– 1556), Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554), Veronica Franco (1546–1591), Laura Ammanati Battiferri (1523–1589), Chiara Matraini (1514–after 1597), Isabella di Morra (1520–1546), Laura Terracina (1510–after 1577), and Isabella Canali Andreini (1562–1604). The diffusion of presses, the work of Aldus Manutius in Venice, and the new audience of readers helped Bembo in his project. However, some of the consequences of his classical choice, like the direct ban on any external linguistic interference, condemned his model to a ‘‘poetic of repetition,’’ easily sliding toward mannerism. Once accepted as a ‘‘closed’’ system and the form of a model as the humanistic principle of imitation dictates, Petrarch’s language was transformed by its users in a rich, albeit rigid, lexical repertory of encoded syntagms applied to preordained sets of situations. The

new Petrarchan code transcended poetry and was applied to the social rites of courtiers and to court life; most importantly, it reached a new religious and philosophical foundation when it was filtered through the neo-Platonic theory of love and beauty, allowing to rewrite Petrarch’s interior story of his love for Laura and his renunciation of it as the ideal and symbolic journey of a man toward his true, celestial nature and perfection. Purification of the Petrarchan language therefore also corresponded to a precise gnosiological choice, and it was obtained by searching for gravitas and medietas, for a limited set of neutral expressions whose combination would always point to the same existential experience. Indeed, some of its rhetorical features became the incontrovertible sign of Petrarchism—that is, of the presence of a Petrarchan palimpsest, the cue of immediate imitation. The insistent recurring of oxymora and antitheses (concrete and abstract concepts used to summarize the poet’s internal love conflict, in the contrast of ‘‘hot’’ and ‘‘cold,’’ ‘‘fire’’ and ‘‘ice,’’ ‘‘war’’ and ‘‘love’’), adjective coupling and doubling, syntactic parallelisms, and some of the emblematic imagery systematically organized in blazons and conceits were often accepted as a more conventional poetic code of fixed expressions by rote, less capable epigones, who take advantage of an artificial vocabulary whose signifiers are now stronger than the content signified, from which they are ontologically detached. The rigid correspondences were collected in apt dictionaries like Il giardino degli epitheti (Giovan Battista Spada, Bologna 1648), in lists that completely define this widespread, stylish Petrarchism, now devoid of its own original, ideological plan. ANDREA DINI Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, Il petrarchismo italiano nel Cinquecento, Padova: Liviana Editrice, 1974. Bonora, Ettore, ‘‘Il Classicismo dal Bembo al Guarini,’’ Storia della letteratura italiana. Volume Quarto: Il Cinquecento, Edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Milano: Garzanti, 1987, 127–597. Braden, Gordon, Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Torino: Einaudi, 1999. Fedi, Roberto, La memoria della poesia. Canzonieri, lirici e libri di rime nel Rinascimento, Roma: Salerno, 1990. Gardini, Nicola, Le umane parole. L’imitazione nella lirica europea del Rinascimento da Bembo a Ben Johnson, Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 1997.

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PETRARCHISM Gigliucci, Roberto, Contraposti. Petrarchismo e ossimoro d’amore nel Rinascimento, Roma: Bulzoni, 2004. Greene, Roland A., Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Lyric Sequence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Holmes, Olivia, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Jones, Ann Rosalind, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Kennedy, William J., Authorizing Petrarch, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Kennedy, William J., The Site of Petrarchism: Early Modern National Sentiment in Italy, France, and England, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Lanza, Antonio, ‘‘Il petrarchismo fiorito.’’ La letteratura tardogotica. Arte e poesia a Firenze e Siena nell’autunno del Medioevo, Anzio: De Rubeis, 1994, 717–838. McLaughlin, Martin L., Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo, Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, La lingua del Boiardo lirico, Florence: Olschki, 1963. Minta, Stephen, Petrarch and Petrarchism, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1980. Moore, Mary B., Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Mutini, Claudio, L’autore e l’opera: Saggi sulla letteratura del Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973. Quondam, Amedeo (editor), Petrarca in Barocco. Cantieri petrarcheschi. Due seminari romani, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Quondam, Amedeo, Petrarchismo mediato: Per una critica della forma ‘‘antologia,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Rabitti, Giovanna, ‘‘Lyric Poetry (1500–1650),’’ In Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood (eds.), A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 37–51. Soletti, Elisabetta, ‘‘Dal Petrarca al Seicento,’’ Storia della lingua italiana. I. I luoghi della codificazione, Edited by Luca Serianni and Pietro Trifone, Turin: Einaudi, 1993, 611–678. Taddeo, Edoardo, Il manierismo letterario e i lirici veneziani del tardo Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Vickers, Nancy J., ‘‘Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,’’ Critical Inquiry, 8 (1981), 265–279.

SANDRA PETRIGNANI (1952–) Sandra Petrignani is a brilliant and profound author whose remarkable accomplishments in the field of cultural journalism are reflected in the rigorous use of language throughout her work. Among the writers who have most influenced her style are Perec, Nabokov, and Calvino—the latter author’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979) and Lezioni americane (1988) in particular served as a model for her narrative forms. Her breakthrough novel Navigazioni di Circe (Voyages with Circe, 1987) draws on Joyce, Beckett, the neo-avant-garde movement, and her close relationship with her friend Giorgio Manganelli. The novel is self-questioning on its narrative success and self-fulfilling in that Circe, the protagonist, accepts writing her story and thus becomes human. The novel is rich in realistic descriptive elements (the witch with a never-ending tan, healthy teeth, beautiful arms) and takes visionary leaps: This modern, partly autobiographical Circe frees her prisoners, leaves Ulysses, and yearns to escape from the island 1422

following whichever way the wind blows. The greatest threat facing her is surrendering to Ulysses—she fears her past far more then the future before her. In Il catalogo dei giocattoli (The Toys’ Catalogue, 1988), Petrignani perused her childhood in the 1950s as she would a catalogue of dear objects: Every toy (in total 65—Lego blocks, balls, kaleidoscopes) triggered her memory and activated past emotions, which in turn launched each story. The narrative rhythm and tone were conceived around a musical theme developed along many variations. In 1991, she published the novel of an entire generation, Come cadono i fulmini (How Lightning Falls). The story is portrayed by angel-narrators who impose their unified vision of space and time: They parade before the reader the dreams, ideals, and inevitable disillusionments of young people in the 1960s. The protagonist, Luigi Tomek, represents the conflicts, political disappointment, and myths of sexual liberation of the hippies. The desolation of the 1980s, with the fall of the Berlin Wall

SANDRA PETRIGNANI at the crest of this new era, provided the author with a new thematic inquiry—is it possible to narrate dreams? In her short stories there is a ‘‘militant’’ quality and a predilection for an investigative narrative thread: Poche storie (A Few Stories, 1988) enters the mundane life of those ‘‘nearly normal’’ women who try to escape their homemaker bastions and follow a dream or vision. Vecchi (Old People, 1994) documents true stories collected in old people’s homes, rest homes, and gardens where the elderly take refuge. These testimonials piece together a puzzle for the form of modern humanity: Having entered the last phase of life with ever-decreasing e´lan, progress escapes us and we are left alone and disarmed of our own devices. Petrignani employs antisentimental realism in her stories—a technique chillingly efficient in voicing raw emotion unencumbered by rhetorical constructs. Her stories always interrogate the world and relate to existential questions: Ultima India (The Last India, 1996) is a straightforwardly narrated travel story as well as a book of meditation filled with aphorisms of our historical present. Come fratello e sorella (Like Brother and Sister, 1998) delves into the risky themes of incest with unnerving candor and in concrete terms, while conveying a strong message for the freedom of love and its fleeting presence in our lives. Petrignani’s interviews, dating to her years in journalism, are refined literary portraits that become stories. Le signore della scrittura (The Ladies of Writing, 1984) and Fantasia e fantastico (Fantasy and the Fantastic, 1985) were both written in the vein of reconstructive biographical inquiry (along the lines of Ritratti di signora by Elisabetta Rasy) and paved the way for her latest success La scrittrice abita qui (The Writer Resides Here, 2002). This work brings before us the most important women authors of the twentieth century: Grazia Deledda, Marguerite Yourcenar, Colette, Alexandra David-Ne`el, Karen Blixen, and Virginia Woolf. Each is invoked during a se´ance that takes place on a long journey to their museum-homes. The furniture, decorative objects so different one from the other, rooms, and gardens weave their sentimental quilt: It is as if each of the authors welcomes the reader into her home and envelops him or her in the most beautiful personal narrative. Furthermore, the reader discovers that these fantastic travels bring Petrignani closer to her own creative experience. Marked by outstanding linguistic precision, stylistic clarity, and narrative constructs, the versatility and unending investigation into anything that could be narrated are some of the main

characteristics of this outstanding author translated in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Poland. At the time of this writing, she was working on a new novel, Care presenze (Dear Presences).

Biography Sandra Petrignani was born in Piacenza, 9 July 1952. She received a degree in Italian literature from the University of Rome, 1974. At age 20 she began her career in journalism, contributing to various newspapers, such as Il messaggero, where she became an editor in 1987. Petrignani won the Elsa Morante Prize for Navigazioni di Circe, 1987; she transferred as editor to Panorama, where she continues her activity today, 1989. She was a finalist for the Viareggio Prize for Poche storie, 1993; La scrittrice abita qui was finalist for the Strega Prize; and she has also won several prizes, including the Selezione Bancarella Prize. Petrignani lives and works in Rome as well as at her home in the Umbrian countryside. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN

Selected Works Fiction Navigazioni di Circe, 1987. Il catalogo dei giocattoli, 1988. Come cadono i fulmini, 1991. Poche storie, 1993. Vecchi, 1994; revised edition, 1999. Ultima India, 1996. Come fratello e sorella, 1998. Dopo cena, 1999. Care presenze, 2004.

Other Le signore della scrittura: Interviste, 1984. Fantasia & fantastico: Dialoghi, 1985. La scrittrice abita qui, 2002.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, La bussola e il sogno: Narrativa italiana 1991, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1991. Azzolini, Paola, ‘‘Una narratrice giovane: Sandra Petrignani,’’ in Parole scolpite: Profili di scrittrici degli anni Novanta, edited by Adriana Chemello, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 1998. Canali, Luca, ‘‘Quegli imbarazzanti segreti nelle case delle scrittrici,’’ Il giornale, 19 January 2003, 25. Debenedetti, Antonio, ‘‘Cosı` sanno amare le grandi scrittrici,’’ Il corriere della sera, 21 January 2003, 35.

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SANDRA PETRIGNANI Giudici, Giovanni, ‘‘Poche storie, dolore e silenzio,’’ L’unita`, 24 May 1993, 16. La Porta, Filippo, La nuova narrativa italiana: Travestimenti e stili di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995. Mammı`, Alessandra, ‘‘Il genio in una stanza,’’ L’espresso, 31 October 2002, 170–172. Piemontese, Felice (editor), Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani, Milan: Leonardo, 1989. Ricaldone, Luisa, ‘‘Una casa e` un destino,’’ L’Indice dei libri, 20:2 (February 2003), 14. Romano, Lalla, ‘‘La fatica di essere,’’ Panorama, 25 April 1993, 24.

Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Scrittori contemporanei: Interviste a Sandra Petrignani, Giovanni Raboni, Gianni Celati,’’ in ‘‘Leggiadre donne...’’: Novella e racconto breve in Italia, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Tani, Stefano, Il romanzo di ritorno: Dal romanzo medio degli anni Sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni Ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Trevi, Emanuele, ‘‘Narrativa recente (1992–93),’’ Nuovi Argomenti, 48 (1993), 115. Wood, Sharon, Italian Women’s Writing, 1860–1994, London-Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1995.

GUGLIELMO PETRONI (1911–1993) A narrator, poet, and painter, Guglielmo Petroni, out of self-defence and apprehension, led a life distant from worldly affairs and jealous of its own solitude. Not by chance, critics have described his career as lived under the sign of discretion and of a ‘‘naive conscience,’’ to suggest the particular lightness with which the writer found the means to describe fear and human pain. Forced to interrupt his studies at a very young age because of his father’s financial difficulties, he was self-taught. He soon discovered a particular predilection for Rainer Maria Rilke and French literature, especially Jean Jacques Rousseau. Initially a painter, he then moved on to the written word with verse in the tradition of Hermeticism, although his true vocation was prose. The short collection Versi e memoria (Verse and Memory, 1935) represents the best of his early literary production and reflects the condition of an existence that seeks in memory the reason and comfort for its unease. He also published verses full of subdued lyricism, collected in the volume Terra segreta (Secret Land, 1987). Lettere da Santa Margherita (Letters from Santa Margherita)—published in instalments in 1937 in the journal Letteratura, reprinted in 1946, and then, with variants and additions, in 1953 with the title Tre racconti d’amore (Three Tales of Love)—is an important step in Petroni’s poetics. In it emerges the Rilkian concept of ‘‘solitude as a measure of things.’’ Its subject is the love of a man and a woman against the backdrop of the social and political reality of Fascism and reveals Petroni as a narrator sensitive to the intertwining of the plot 1424

but also to atmospheres and sentiments, described straightforwardly and with equilibrium. The most important of Petroni’s works is undoubtedly Il mondo e` una prigione (The World Is a Prison, 1949). Born out of his tragic experience as a prisoner of the Nazis, it reevokes the days of his internment in Rome. Against a seemingly imminent death and the ferocious and blind ritual of interrogations and tortures that confronted him, Petroni opposed his calm testimony of reason, balance, and humanity. His dry reflections on victims and jailors, his growing awareness of what jail means, underline the negation of any freedom and bring into focus the continuous humiliation of the body to which it is necessary to react with lucidity of thought and clarity of reason. The problem of the relationship between the writer and the world, and the consequent spur to meditate on the necessity of coming out of one’s solitude, finds in the exceptional nature of the events the first stimulus to assimilate them into the depth of his conscience. Petroni was thus not interested in the facts but in the meaning that could be gleaned from them. In this book, which cannot be considered a novel but rather an examination of one’s conscience both for oneself and for others, the author felt the need to communicate, to participate in the suffering of others in order to reach that inner freedom that he had always considered of inestimable value. What emerges is one of those testimonies that lie somewhere between the tale of an exemplary adventure and the diary, simple and unadorned, based on self-control.

GUGLIELMO PETRONI Another of his works reveals a predilection for a kind of diary-like narration with a declared moral content. La casa si muove (The House Moves, 1950) is the story of the dramatic crisis of a man who, at the end of the war, removes himself from reality, resigned and indifferent to life. The useless final dialogue of the dying protagonist, Ugo, is emblematical: He has finally decided to communicate, but his servant Cesira is incapable of understanding. Often in Petroni’s novels there emerges a tendency toward simplification that robs the characters of their independence, transforming them into puppets maneuvered by the strategy of a moral apologue. Il colore della terra (The Color of the Earth, 1964) is the story of a difficult sentimental education, but somehow Petroni tried to give his characters greater autonomy and intellectual richness. With his final narrative work, Il nome delle parole (The Name of Words, 1984), Petroni renewed his memorialistic narrative by recounting the discovery of the word by a poor boy, whose life is reevoked in its fundamental episodes up to the end of the war. Petroni traced a suggestive picture of his conscience as an artist and man of letters, and Il nome delle parole transcends the limits of autobiography to become an important human and poetic testimony. Aside from Il mondo e` una prigione, recognized as one of the most important books on the experience of war, Petroni’s novels have received little attention, and their success is restricted to a select public.

Biography Guglielmo Petroni was born in Lucca on 13 October 1911. He interrupted his studies as a young man to start working in the family shop. He moved to Rome after an invitation by Curzio Malaparte, who invited him to work as an editor for the literary review Prospettive. He also contributed to other reviews like Solaria, Il Selvaggio, and L’italiano. At the outbreak of World War II he ended his literary activity and became a partisan working within the editorial committee of La Ruota, along with Mario Alicata, Carlo Muscetta, and Antonello Trombadori. In 1944, he was arrested and tortured

by the Nazis until the Liberation. After the war he contributed to La fiera letteraria and to Radio RAI. In 1974, he won the Strega Prize with La morte del fiume. In 1985, the University of Sassari awarded him a honorary degree. He died in Rome on 29 April 1993. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Opere, Milan: Mondadori, 1960. Terra segreta: Tutte le poesie, edited by Antonio Facchin, Montebelluna: Amadeus, 1987.

Fiction Personaggi d’elezione, 1938. Lettere da Santa Margherita, 1946. Il mondo e` una prigione, 1949; new edition 1960; as The World Is a Prison, translated by John Shepley, 1999. La casa si muove, 1950. Tre racconti d’amore, 1953. Noi dobbiamo parlare, 1955. Il colore della terra, 1964. Le macchie di Donato, 1968. La morte del fiume, 1974. Un cane rosso e blu, 1980. Il nome delle parole, 1984.

Poetry ‘‘Versi e memoria,’’ 1935. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1959. ‘‘Fermo sereno,’’ 1969. ‘‘Poesie 1928–1978,’’ 1984.

Further Reading Angeletti, Leandro, Guglielmo Petroni, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1987. Accrocca, Elio Filippo (editor), Ritratti su misura di scrittori italiani, Venice: Sodalizio del Libro, 1960. Bassani, Giorgio, Le parole preparate e altri scritti di letteratura, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Del Beccaro, Felice, ‘‘L’opera ciclica di Guglielmo Petroni,’’ Belfagor, 19 (1964), 719–723. Del Beccaro, Felice, ‘‘Guglielmo Petroni,’’ in I contemporanei, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Pacifici, Sergio, A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism, Cleveland: World Publishing, 1962. Pullini, Giorgio, Il romanzo italiano del dopoguerra, 1940–1960, Milan: Schwarz, 1961.

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PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE The relations between Italian philosophy and literature are not easily defined. There are two principal reasons for this. First, there is no canonical referent for the term ‘‘Italian philosophy.’’ Second, the relations between ‘‘Italian philosophy’’ and literature are, to say the least, complex. This complexity is in part due to the longevity of the Italian cultural tradition. It is, however, also due to the specific character of Italian philosophers and literati. Throughout the centuries, Italian philosophers have not only engaged in the development of new thought, they have also often been involved in the production of literature. The converse can be said of Italian writers. The Italian peninsula is home to what is certainly one of the oldest philosophical traditions in the world, and most likely the most continuous. Philosophy has been practiced in Italy almost uninterruptedly since Pythagoras moved to Crotone in the sixth century BC. Philosophy in Italy, as such, is somewhat like architecture: It is a wondrous stratification of millennia of continuous construction. Abbot Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1851) made this point in Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (On the Moral and Civil Primacy of the Italians, 1843), as had Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) before him, in De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae originibus eruenda libri tres (On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Language, 1709). Nor is longevity the only remarkable feature of the philosophical tradition developed on the Italian peninsula. Those ‘‘Italians’’ who practiced philosophy have often been great thinkers. The stunning and lasting accomplishments of medieval theologians—Anselm of Canterbury, whom the Italians remind us should be called Anselmo d’Aosta (1033–1109); Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274); and Bonaventure (1221–1274), just to cite a few of the most prominent names— not to mention Renaissance thinkers like Niccolo` Machiavelli and Tommaso de Vio Cajetani and modern thinkers like Antonio Rosmini should be more than enough evidence to demonstrate this point. As remarkable as the longevity and significance of the Italian philosophical tradition are, they also present anyone who wants to speak meaningfully 1426

of ‘‘Italian philosophy’’ with a problem: There does not seem to be a clear way to define ‘‘Italian’’ philosophy. Part of the problem concerns the fact that there is no single canonical referent for the term ‘‘Italian.’’ One need only compare how the disparate historical canons of discreet disciplines define this term ‘‘Italian’’ to see that this is the case. Another part of the problem concerns the manner in which the canon of the history of philosophy specifically defines historical epochs. It has the medieval period begin in the fifth century AD (and at times even earlier). Thus, if one were to claim that medieval philosophers from Italy—or who worked in Italy—are ‘‘Italian,’’ just as medieval painters like Giotto and poets like Dante are considered ‘‘Italian,’’ one would have to claim that Ambrose and Boethius were ‘‘Italian philosophers,’’ even though the former lived before the Roman Empire of the West fell, and the latter lived in its ashes. Some might think that this is not a problem per se. It would, however, apparently make for odd history. There is no clearer example of the continuity of Italian thought (and its problems) than the constant attempt on the part of philosophers to establish a rigorous intellectual tradition in Italy. In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero bemoaned the need to get Romans to think philosophically and did his best to establish an ‘‘intellectual tradition’’ in the city (I, 2, 5). Five centuries later, Boethius (ca. 480–524) undertook his massive project of translating and commenting on the primary works of the Greek philosophers for the Romans because he was convinced that Cicero, despite his work, was right: The inhabitants of the Italian peninsula were sorely lacking in their ability to reason clearly and to develop speculative systems. He claimed as much both in his Introductio ad categoricos syllogismos (Commentary on the Categories) and in his Commentaria in Topica Ciceronis (Commentary on Cicero’s ‘‘Topica’’). Seven centuries after Boethius, Dante explicitly agreed with both of his predecessors and did his utmost to set up some sort of Italian intellectual tradition. Indeed, he spelled out his project in the Convivio (The Banquet, ca. 1304–1307). A few centuries later, Vico, Mamiani, Rosmini, and Gioberti all attempted to do the same thing.

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE And each of these thinkers explicitly referred to the historical endeavors to establish an intellectual tradition in Italy. One need only think of the Rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia proposto dal Conte Terenzio Mamiani ed esaminato da Antonio Rosmini Serba (The Renewal of Philosophy in Italy, Proposed by the Count Terenzio Mamiani and Examined by Antonio Rosmini Serba, 1836). During the Risorgimento there were particular demands of an Italian hereditary leadership in philosophy, which was necessary to recapture in order to fight the invasion of foreign influences, namely the Celtic and Gallic foes of Catholicism, Luther, and Descartes. These examples indicate that ‘‘Italian’’ thinkers from antiquity to the present have much more in common than the accident of having been born in the same peninsula. They have read each others’ work and have similar intellectual projects. There is a definite causal chain that links ancient and contemporary philosopher. This chain implies that both Italian philosophy and Italian literature are informed by ancient traditions and cannot be properly understood if one abstracts from them. For our purposes, Italian philosophy is defined as that philosophy developed by people whose spoken language is Italian—or, to be precise, one of the Italian languages. This makes the dividing line between bulk of the philosophical tradition of the Italian peninsula and Italian philosophy properly speaking the Middle Ages. This dividing line seems especially felicitous since it coincides with the establishment of universities in Italy. There is a debate with respect to this point. Many of the contemporary attempts to define ‘‘Italian’’ philosophy presuppose that a philosopher must write in Italian in order for his work to be considered Italian. This criterion is not only restrictive, it is misleading. It is restrictive because philosophers can very well write (and indeed often have written) in languages other than their own native languages. Vico, who is undeniably Italian, wrote, at times, in Latin. Meister Eckhart and Leibniz, who were undeniably German, also wrote part of their works in Latin. It is misleading because it divorces Italian thought from the tradition with which it is still in dialogue, a point which Giovanni Gentile made clear in I problemi della scolastica e il pensiero italiano (The Problems of Scholascicism and the Italian Mind, 1923) as did Eugenio Garin in his excellent Storia della filosofia italiana (History of Italian Philosophy, 1947). Defining the primary characteristics of Italian philosophy is nearly as difficult as defining Italian philosophy itself. Italians have belonged to nearly

every philosophical school established since the early Middle Ages. Indeed, they were heavily involved in the development of these schools. The philosophical schools themselves, however, often differ enormously in their premises and methodologies. Italy has had prominent scholastic thinkers in every major period of Scholasticism, including neo-Scholasticism. At the same time, Italian philosophers were associated with strongly anti-Scholastic schools. Both Italian Scholasticism and anti-Scholasticism developed through the centuries, often in antithesis to one another. Thus, where such Italian thinkers as Tommaso da Vio Cajetani (1469–1534), Roberto Bellarmino (1542–1621), Gaetano Sanseverino (1811–1865), and Tommaso Maria Zigliara (1833– 1893) continued the development of scholastic thought well into the modern age, the anti-Scholastic schools have flourished since the Renaissance. The scuola padovana di filosofia, for instance, included pronouncedly anti-Scholastic Renaissance thinkers like the Aristotelian Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) and the more Platonizing Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494). As the case of the scuola padovana indicates, Italian anti-Scholasticism from its very incipience was a pluralistic phenomenon. One of its first important schools was naturalism. Founded by Bernardino Telesio (1508–1588), whose treatise De Rerum Natura Juxta Propria Principia (On Natural Science, 1586) advocates the use of the empirical method of investigating nature, and developed by Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619) and Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), Italian naturalism grew through the centuries and was strongly influenced by French thought. Some of its descendents are the sensisme and empiricism of Melchiorre Gioja (1767–1829) and Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835) and eventually the positivism of Enrico Ferri (1856– 1929), Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), Andrea Angiulli (1837–1890), Aristide Gabelli (1830–1891), and Roberto Ardigo` (1828–1920). Another series of important anti-Scholastic philosophical schools is political in nature. Marsilio da Padova (1270–1342), who propounded the authority of the State over the Church, was the first of many political philosophers who in various ways have argued this very point. In modern times, anti-Scholastic political philosophers often espoused the principles of the various descendents of naturalism. Thus, just as Romagnosi attempted to apply the rigor of empiricism to law in Genesi del diritto penale (Genesis of Penal Law, 1791) and in Introduzione allo studio del diritto pubblico universale (Introduction to the Study of Universal Public Law, 1805), so too did Giuseppe Ferrari 1427

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE (1811–1876) in Teoria dei periodi politici (Theory of Political Periods, 1874), aimed at applying positivism to politics. This tendency of anti-Scholastic political philosophers to combine positivism and political theory was contrasted by such Marxist thinkers as Antonio Labriola (1843–1904) who, in his Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Discussing Socialism and Philosophy, 1897), claimed that political theory regards man as a social and not a biological being. Communist leader and theoretician Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) continued Labriola’s work. A third series of anti-Scholastic philosophical schools arose directly from Kantianism, although their more distant forebear was the nominalism of such thinkers as Gregorio da Rimini (ca. 1300–1358). These include criticism, whose principal exponent was Pasquale Galuppi (1770–1846), who introduced Kantianism to Italy in such books as Lettere sulle vicende della filosofia da Cartesio sino a Kant (Letters on the Incidents of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant, 1827); idealism, whose first major representative was Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855) but later included Benedetto Croce (1866–1952); and actualism, whose promoter was Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). The virtual demise of scholastic philosophy in the twentieth century and the increasing influence of French, German, and English schools of thought somewhat changed the philosophical panorama in Italy. It determined a great proliferation of philosophical schools. Besides concentrating on retaining mastery in traditional philosophical systems, Italian philosophers participated in every major trend of contemporary thought, from logical positivism to post-modernism. Nicola Abbagnano (1901–1990), author of such books as La struttura dell’esistenza (The Structure of Existence, 1939), combined existentialism and Anglo-American pragmatism and was the first and most important Italian existentialist. In Italian literature, existentialist themes, particularly concerning free will, can be traced in the works of Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, and Salvatore Quasimodo, among others. In the area of philosophy of language, or what has more generally come to be known as analytic philosophy, we enlist the analyticpragmatist Giovanni Vailati (1863–1909), Paolo Parrini with his Linguaggio e teoria (Language and Theory, 1976), or again, Andrea Bonomi with Le vie del riferimento (The Ways of Reference, 1975). In the Enlightenment tradition, Norberto Bobbio (1909–2004) became one of the few to disagree with Marxist political thinkers (such as Sartre) that 1428

Marxism was central to intellectual endeavors. In his Politica e cultura (Politics and Culture, 1955), as in later books such as Il futuro della democrazia (The Future of Democracy, 1984), he defended legal institutionalism and parliamentary democracy. Silvio d’Arco Avalle (1920–2002) introduced structuralism in Italy, which influenced such literary critics as Maria Corti and Cesare Segre, and semiotician Umberto Eco, as can be seen in La struttura assente: La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale (The Missing Structure: Semiotic Research and the Structural Method, 1968). In Il nome della rosa (In the Name of the Rose, 1980), through intertextual rewriting, Eco translated into fiction an entire cultural system where art and philosophy blend together. For many years, this novel was considered a model of postmodern rationality in philosophy. But Gianni Vattimo (1936–) is Italy’s foremost postmodern thinker and a leading cultural critic of extraordinary scope. In such works as La fine della modernita` (The End of Modernity, 1985) and La societa` trasparente (The Transparent Society, 1989), Vattimo argued that philosophy abandon those systematic pretenses that derive from its ‘‘strong’’ metaphysical categories and embrace ‘‘weak’’ categories grounded in becoming—rather than being. Pursuing a range of questions central to aesthetics and hermeneutic philosophy, he proposed the school of pensiero debole, or weak thought, and disclaimed the possibility of stable foundations for knowledge. On the other hand, postmodernism takes the form of total identification of philosophy and theology with Massimo Cacciari (1944–), the leader of a school that aims at interpreting philosophical writing through a more mystical aestheticism, as in L’angelo necessario (The Necessary Angel, 1986). Other works, such as the recent Della cosa ultima (The Last Thing, 2004), are mostly collections of essays written as commentaries on ancient classics and the Bible. Finally, Giorgio Agamben (1942–), one of Italy’s most perspicacious analysts of aesthetics, brings together political commitment and theoretical investigation to cultural phenomena, with a pessimistic view of modernity. In works such as L’uomo senza contenuto (The Empty Man, 1970), he reexamined the relationship between singularity and universality, casting a key role to the potentials of language and literature. Despite their differences, there are several characteristics that Italian philosophers seem to share. The most notable are a profound relation to Catholicism; a deep awareness of the history of

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE philosophy—and of history more generally—and of their place in it; a direct interest in literature; and an abiding interest in politics. Italian philosophers have often been deeply committed Catholics. Cornelio Fabro (1911–1995) certainly was. Italian philosophers have also often also been violently opposed to Catholicism. Antonio Gramsci certainly was. But as Benedetto Croce pointed out in an essay published in La critica (November 1942), ‘‘Perche´ non possiamo non dirci cristiani,’’ (Why We Cannot Not Call Ourselves Christians), no Italian philosopher has been (or could ever be) indifferent to Catholicism. Indeed, despite the strong influence foreign thought has had on Italians in recent times, on the whole Italian philosophical schools continue to be informed by the contraposition between Catholic and non-Catholic thought. Thus, there emerged Catholic and Marxist existentialist philosophical schools. One of the leading exponents of Marxist existentialism was Enzo Paci (1911–1976), who played an important part with Antonio Banfi (1886–1957) in developing phenomenology in Italy. His Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (The Function of Sciences and the Meaning of Man, 1963) analyzes the crisis of the subject in modernity with a novel perspective. Paci also applied philosophy to the study of literature and the arts, particularly Mann and Proust. Luigi Stefanini (1891–1956) and Luigi Pareyson (1918–1991), on the other hand, were some of the leading Catholic existentialists. One of the common contemporary criticisms of Italian philosophy is that it is too concerned with the history of philosophy, as opposed to the problems of philosophy. This issue is raised, for example, by Enzo Ruffaldi in Archivio del Forum Internazionale sulla Didattica della Filosofia (March 2001), where he proposed didactic reforms with respect to philosophy. This may be true. If it is, however, it is not because Italian thinkers have recently developed interest in the history of philosophy. They have always had a marked tendency to view their work as a continuation of their predecessors’ work. This tendency is in part the effect of that stratification that is peculiar to Italian culture, arguably one of the most continuously creative cultures in the world. It is also the effect of a specifically Italian way of viewing history, as something which is both informed by ‘‘un ideale eterno... o disigno della providenza sopra la quale idea son poi fondate tutte le repubbliche di tutti i tempi, di tutte le nazioni’’ (an ideal eternal history or design of providence upon which idea all republics of all

times and of all nations were founded; Giambattista Vico, Autobiografia, 1725). As Vico indicated, this awareness of history has led Italian philosophers to view the present as informed by two discreet causes: unchanging Providence and mutable human free will. The exact relation between these causes differs from philosopher to philosopher. Aquinas, like Boethius before him, held that both causes were real and compatible. Gioberti, like Giordano Bruno before him, on the other hand, believed that there was only one real cause of history: Providence itself. This specific way of history has ancient roots: In his De Consolatio Philosophiae (V, 3 ff), Boethius thought of history as being both informed by Providence and punctuated by moments determined by human free will. So too did the Latin Stoics before him. One of the most influential philosophical works in the Middle Ages, Boethius’s De Consolatio Philosophiae is a brilliant metaphysical text. Like Plato’s dialogues, it is also a complex work of art. It consists of a long dialogue between Lady Philosophy and the imprisoned Boethius, who awaited death for alleged treason, written in alternating prose and verse. The verses are composed in a stunning array of classical meters. Boethius was influenced by Menippean satire, Cicero, and Augustine. Another characteristic Italian philosophers share is their direct interest in literature. Aquinas, who is most likely the greatest of the Italian philosophers, began and ended his career by writing verses. Aquinas’s later Latin hymns—such as Tantum Ergo and Pange Lingua—are well known and are still part of the Latin hymnal of the Catholic Church. The first verses attributed to Aquinas, ‘‘Tanto ha virtu ziascun, quanto ha intelletto...,’’ on the other hand, are in vulgate. Vico’s first published works, Affetti di un disperato (The Feelings of One in Despair, 1692) and Canzone in morte di Antonio (Ode on the Death of Antonio, 1693), were also poems. Vico’s speculative works would later promote an organic study of the relationship between poetry and rational thinking according to the cyclic rhythm of eternal history. They would exercise a definite influence, in the twentieth century, on Galvano Della Volpe (1895–1968) and his theory of art, specifically in Critica del gusto (A Critique of Taste, 1960), where he revaluated the semantic aspect of literary texts. Other telling examples of philosophers’ direct involvement with literature include Bonaventure’s Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (The Mind’s Journey into God), a great work in speculative philosophy and also an accomplished literary text, which combines formal elegance with intellectual acumen. 1429

PHILOSOPHY AND LITERATURE Giordano Bruno too wrote verses, as well as a satirical comedy, Il candelaio (The Candlebearer, 1582); and Tommaso Campanella’s poems, written during his long period of incarceration, transcend the literary fashions of his day. Umberto Eco has demonstrated that the tendency of Italian thought to interlace with literature is still alive and well. If it is true that philosophers have often been involved in literary writing, the converse is also true: Italian men of letters have often been well versed in philosophy. Dante is certainly the most extraordinary example of philosophical proficiency in a writer. The Divina Commedia is not only a literary masterpiece, it is also a philosophical summa in its own right. Dante himself gave us an account of his philosophical training in the Convivio where he told us that he spent some 30 months frequenting ‘‘le scuole de li religiosi e a le disputazioni de li filosofanti’’ (the schools of the religious orders and the disputations of the philosophers; Conv. 2.12.7). Other writers were also well versed in philosophy. Petrarch and Leopardi certainly were. Indeed, Italian writers generally received classical educations, which included philosophical training. The importance of classical education is attested, for example, in Alessandro Manzoni’s youthful Latin verses. In the twentieth century, Luigi Pirandello’s plays were typecast as philosophical representations of a sort of nihilistic metaphysics, a critical stand that brought Benedetto Croce to firmly reassess the limina between literature and philosophy. For Croce, Pirandello’s artistic crisis during the 1930s was ultimately caused by mediocre speculative thought. Italian literature, like Italian philosophy, is characterized by a profound relation to Catholicism (Dante’s Divina Commedia, Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi). But literary authors can also be profoundly anti-Catholic (Boccaccio’s Decameron). However, Italian literature is never indifferent to Catholicism, or to Christianity in general. And as Catholicism has divided philosophy into separate camps since the Renaissance, at least, so too has it divided literature into separate camps. This division is most noteworthy in the canon of twentieth century literature, which has excluded nearly every author suspected of being Catholic. Furthermore, Italian literature, like Italian philosophy, is also deeply political. Indeed, there seems to be no escaping politics in Italian literature. As religious as the Divina Commedia and I Promessi Sposi are, they are also ridden with political significance. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958) displays deeply felt reflections on 1430

the politics of the Risorgimento. The writer’s preoccupation with history has also informed some of the leading themes, such as the overarching ineffectiveness of the human will and the mutability of fortune, which are constants in Petrarch’s and Leopardi’s verses; the need for divine grace for actual transformation (Dante and Manzoni, among others); and humankind’s inability to change our character because it is too molded by our traditions, as is again the case in Il Gattopardo. As for politics, Italian philosophers have shown a deep speculative interest in it—one need only to think of the relevance of politics to such diverse thinkers as Aquinas and Machiavelli. They have often become directly involved in politics. Thus, just as Croce and Gentile were both involved in the political arena of the Italian twentieth century, so too was Gioberti tied to the establishment of a unified Italy in the nineteenth century. As tempting as it might be to claim that this aspect of Italian philosophy derives from the political troubles of pre-Risorgimento period, it would certainly be simplistic to believe that this is the case. Philosophers participated in politics long before the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent division of the Italian peninsula, and they continue to do so. Cicero was, of course, heavily involved in politics, as was Boethius. Since the second half of the twentieth century, such philosophers as Massimo Cacciari, Rocco Buttiglione, and Marcello Pera (at some time, all members of Parliament) have demonstrated that they still engage directly in politics. SIOBHAN NASH-MARSHALL Further Reading Abbagnano, Nicola, Storia della filosofia, 3 vols., Turin: UTET, 1946–1950. Antiseri, Dario, et al., La filosofia contemporanea, 2 vols., Turin: UTET, 1991–1994. Antiseri, Dario, The Weak Thought and Its Strengths, Aldershot, U.K. and Brookfield, VT: Avebury, 1996. Borradori, Giovanna, Recoding Metaphysics: The New Italian Philosophy, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1989. La cultura filosofica italiana dal 1945 al 1980 nelle sue relazioni con altri campi del sapere: Atti del Convegno di Anacapri, giugno 1981, Naples: Guida, 1982. Costa, Filippo, Struttura e genesi dell’enunciato filosofico, Pisa: ETS, 1996. Costa, Filippo (editor), Il testo filosofico. Ermeneutica: teoria e pratica, Palermo: L’epos, 1994. Dal Pra, Mario (editor), Storia della Filosofia, 10 vols., Milan: Vallardi, 1975–1978. Garin, Eugenio, Storia della filosofia italiana, Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1947.

PHOTOGRAPHY Garin, Eugenio, Intellettuali italiani del XX secolo, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987. Gentile, Giovanni, I problemi della scolastica e il pensiero italiano, Bari: Laterza & Figli, 1913. Gentile, Giovanni, Le origini della filosofia contemporanea in Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1957. Geymonat, Ludovico, Storia del pensiero filosofico e scientifico, 6 vols., Milan: Garzanti, 1970–1972. Mathieu, Vittorio, La filosofia italiana contemporanea, Florence: Le Monnier, 1971. Mandonnet, Pierre, ‘‘Thomas d.Aquin novice preˆcheur,’’ Revue Thomiste, 8 (1925), 222–249.

Natoli, Salvatore, Giovanni Gentile filosofo europeo, Turin: Bollati-Boringhieri, 1989. Nicolini, Fausto, Benedetto Croce, Turin: UTET, 1962. Rossi, Paolo, La filosofia, 4 vols., Turin: UTET, 1995. Rossi, Paolo, and Carlo Augusto Viano, Filosofia italiana e filosofie straniere nel dopoguerra, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Verdicchio, Massimo (editor), The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Zuccarino, Giuseppe (editor), Palinsesto. I modi del discorso letterario e filosofico, Genua: Marietti, 1990.

PHOTOGRAPHY ‘‘A Firenze nell’i.r. museo di fisica e storia naturale, il preparatore delle lezioni di fisica alle 2,45 pom. ottiene risultati fotografici conformi a quelli del francese Daguerre comunicati da Arago il 15 scorso agosto all’Accademia delle scienze di Parigi e divulgati dai giornali’’ (In Florence in the museum of physics and natural history, the preparer of physics lessons at 2:45 in the afternoon obtains photographic results consistent with those of the Frenchman Daguerre communicated by Arago last August 15 at the Academy of Sciences in Paris and reported by the newspapers): This is the laconic and imprecise information about the invention of the photograph (the exact date is 19 August 1839) given in the historic compendium by Alfredo Comandini on 2 September 1839 (L’Italia nei Cento Anni del Secolo XIX, 1801–1900, 1907). The ‘‘preparer’’ was Tito Puliti (1809–1870), who successfully replicated a trial daguerreotype in Pisa between October 1 and 15, during an international congress of scientists. For the promotion of his disegni fotogenici (photogenic designs), William Henry Fox turned in the meantime to the optician Giovanni Battista Amici, who presented a series of calotypes to the Accademia dei Georgofili of Florence in 1843, which are still conserved in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena. News of Daguerre’s invention (Paris, 7 January 1839), taken from the Moniteur parisien, was first reported in Italy on 15 January by the Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano with an article that concluded ‘‘v’e` una rivoluzione nell’arte del disegno ed in quello dell’incisione, di cui molto soffrira`, poiche´

mediante il processo in quistione, la natura stessa verra` riprodotta in un batter d’occhio, senza la cooperazione della mano dell’uomo’’ (there is a revolution in the art of design and in that of engraving, and much will suffer, because via the process in question, nature itself will be reproduced in the bat of an eye, without the cooperation of a human hand). On January 18, the news reached Venice, then Bologna (29 January), and so on throughout the peninsula, inspiring growing curiosity. Talbot’s photographic technique on paper, which in the end won out over the more complex and costly process of the daguerreotype, was noted by the Gazzetta of Milan on 8 March, while the scholar Gaetano Lomazzi in the same year edited the translation of a pamphlet by the English inventor, ‘‘Metodo per eseguire sulla carta il disegno fotogenico rinvenuto dal signor Fox Talbot scudiere, e pubblicato dalla Reale Societa` di Londra’’ (Method for Implementing on Paper the Photogenic Design Discovered by Mister Fox, Squire, and Published by the Royal Society of London). The daguerreotype and the calotype quickly attracted the interest of artists and scientists, and some compiled treatises and manuals at the behest of academies and scientific institutes. In Naples, Macedonio Melloni dedicated himself to the studies of these new techniques, concluding a technical lecture on 12 November 1839 with an allusion to the historical path leading from the camera obscura of Giambattista Della Porta to the first heliographs of Joseph Nice`phore Nie`pce. These new, spectacular images, concluded Melloni, 1431

PHOTOGRAPHY ‘‘offrono la precisione e la morbidezza de’ contorni, la dolcezza dei lumi, la trasparenza delle ombre, la soavita` delle sfumature, gli effetti di rilievo e di prospettiva, tutte in somma le qualita` desiderabili in un disegno a chiaroscuro’’ (offer the precision and softness of borders, the sweetness of light, the transparency of the shadows, the sweetness of the shades, the effects of relief and of perspective, in short, all the qualities desired in a drawing in chiaroscuro) (Relazione intorno al dagherrotipo, 1839). In Bologna, where the institute was aware of the precocious but unsatisfying experiments of Thomas Wedgwood and Humphry Davy of 1802, member Enrico Barratta was asked to give a lecture on the topic. In Venice the editor Giuseppe Antonelli asked scientist Giovanni Minotto to draft the entry ‘‘Fotografia’’ for the Supplimento al Nuovo Dizionario Universale Tecnologico e di Arti e Mestieri (1839). In Italy there were also those who doubted that the invention should be credited to the French, and in Ravenna Count Alessandro Cappi devoted himself to a passionate diatribe that sought to attribute the procedure of the photograph to the Italian Marco Antonio Cellio in the seventeenth century. After careful research in the Vatican Library, Cappi concluded, in his 1839 Delle applicazioni dell’italiano Cellio e del Francese Daguerre alla Camera-Oscura: ‘‘confessando candidamente’’ (confessing candidly) that ‘‘questa volta nulla ci usurpo` lo Straniero’’ (this time the Foreigner did not usurp anything from us). Literature on photography increased in successive years, consistent with the growing success (commercial and otherwise) of the daguerreotype and copperplate printing. Some emerging photographers distinguished themselves for their pioneering experiences, including Alessandro Duroni in Milan; two ‘‘mechanics’’ at the University in Turin, Enrico and Carlo Jest; Carlo Fontana in Trieste; Marquis Romualdo Trigona di Sant’Elia in Palermo; and Gaetano Fazzini in Naples (probably the creator of the first daguerreotype to be transcribed into a lithograph by Giovanni Forino, published in Poliorama pittoresco on 21 December 1839, a global typographic discovery). In Venice and Padova, scientists such as Francesco Zantedeschi (a professor of physics at the university) and Francesco Malacarne (an engineer) immediately undertook the creation of daguerreotypes. Malacarne took some of the first photographs of a flea through a microscope. The publication of handbooks increased in the first decade after the invention, but it was the Padovan painter and photographer Giacomo 1432

Caneva who drafted the first treatise on photography in Italy, titled Della fotografia, trattato pratico di Giacomo Caneva pittore prospettico (On Photography: Practical Treatise by Giacomo Caneva, Prospective Painter, 1855). A year later there followed the voluminous essay by Giuseppe Venanzio Sella, ‘‘Plico del fotografo, ovvero arte pratica e teorica di disegnare uomini e cose sopra il vetro, carta, metallo, ecc. ecc .col mezzo dell’azione della luce (The Photographer’s Papers, Or, Practical and Theoretical Art of Drawing Men and Things on Glass, Paper, Metal, etc., etc., Using Light, 1856). The world of publishing also took off, and in 1863 there emerged, a first in Italy, the bimonthly magazine La Camera Oscura, under the direction of Colonel Ottavio Baratti. In his editorial, Baratti specified the need for such a weekly publication, which elsewhere had relevant models, such as La Lumie`re in France, in existence since 1851: Da lungo abbiamo rivolto la nostra mente al bisogno di un giornale che accomuni al maggior numero di fotografi il sapere di pochi (...); non ometteremo cosa alcuna che valga a promuovere e diffondere l’arte fotografica, la quale, bisogna pur confessarlo sinceramente, in Italia e` rimasta immensamente indietro. We have long directed our minds to the need for a periodical that imparts to the greatest number of photographers the knowledge of a few (...); we will not omit anything that helps to promote and diffuse the photographic art, which, we must sincerely confess, in Italy remains immensely behind the times (La Camera Oscura, Milan, 5 April 1863).

Baratti exaggerated, if one takes into account the appreciated works of some of the most prominent and economically prosperous Italian studios, such as the Alinari brothers (Leopoldo, Romualdo, and Giacomo) and of Giacomo Brogi in Florence; Carlo Ponti and Carlo Naya in Venice; Antonio D’Alessandri, Gioachino Altobelli, Tommaso Cuccioni, Domenico Anderson in Rome; and Giorgio Sommer and Robert Rive in Naples, to cite only the best-known authors. These men received increasing numbers of requests from travelers on the Grand Tour who came in growing numbers to the peninsula, as well as requests by art historians. In those years studio photographers, working in true businesses often staffed by many employees, compiled an imposing catalogue of art, architecture, landscapes, and Italian customs, forming a compendium of images that are still the most effective historical memory, not only in documentary terms, but also romantically and sociologically speaking. The photographic market developed in

PHOTOGRAPHY the meantime with the production of souvenir albums that allowed people a view of Italian culture, at the same time that it gave that culture a coherent meaning, at least by way of the image. In 1889, the Societa` Fotografica Italiana (Italian Photographic Society) was founded in Florence, following the examples of the Socie`te` Franc¸aise de Photographie and the Royal Photographic Society. The first president elected was a scientist and anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, who lent an emblematic consensus to photography, as did microbiologist Giorgio Roster who afterward assumed the presidency. The Society, which organized the first photographic congresses, published a bulletin until 1912, a fundamental point of reference and source of information on the workings of international photography, in terms of both technique and artistic innovation. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, during the transition from colloidal technique to the simpler one, using silver gelatin, there emerged various proponents of these techniques. Luigi Gioppi and Rodolfo Namias were among these, and the latter was considered one of the most important European chemists of the field. Gioppi produced innumerable manuals, a fundamental treatise published in 1891, La Fotografia secondo i processi moderni (Photography According to Modern Processes), and also an exhaustive Dizionario Fotografico ad uso dei dilettanti e professionisti (Photographic Dictionary for the Use of Dilettantes and Professionals, 1892). In 1890, he founded the magazine Il dilettante di fotografia, followed some years later by Il Progresso Fotografico (1894) and Il Corriere Fotografico (1902), which in 1922 became (thanks to the yearbook Luci ed Ombre) a pilot publication, intended above all for picturesque photographers. In the meantime, these photographers had dedicated themselves to the artistry of photography, a subject that had already been confronted on an international level by both preRaphaelite English pioneers and by the Frenchmen Robert Demachy and Costant Pujo around the turn of the century, during a heated debate on photography and whether it should be understood as merely documentary in nature or as a work of art. Italy published an international magazine dealing with these issues, La Fotografia Artistica, directed by Annibale Cominetti, between 1903 and 1917. Analogous to Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, this publication was dedicated to the history and the ontological study of photography, intended as art, albeit still imitating painting and manual graphics. At the same time, it charted a

new cultural course, a course that might be defined as ‘‘modernist’’ in its refutation of historical pictorialism, in favor instead of a ‘‘specific’’ formalism connected to ‘‘instantaneity’’ and ‘‘ipernitidezza’’ (hyper-neatness), technical factors reevaluated as essential elements of the photographic language. Art scholars from Pietro Selvatico to Corrado Ricci had in the meantime identified in photography (and recognized in this) a fundamental contribution to their field. Ricci wrote in an article published in Il Secolo XX and later collected in La fotografia e l’arte della rappresentazione del vero (1905) that photography ‘‘mantiene e sottopone ad ogni necessita` forme che la memoria avrebbe obliato o non riuscirebbe sempre a richiamare fuor dalle nebbie dell’incertezza. Sul nostro tavolo potremo per essa confrontare scolture, pitture, disegni che si trovano a Pietroburgo come a Madrid, a Palermo come a Londra, e se per la pittura avremo a lamentare la mancanza del colorito, in compenso qualche volta la fotografia ci rivelera` parti di pitture che la distanza o la deficienza di luce ci aveva impedito di scorgere a perfezione’’ maintains and fills a need for forms that memory would have obliviated or would not always manage to recall from the fog of uncertainty. By way of photography we could compare the sculpture, painting, and drawings found in Petersburg as in Madrid, in Palermo as in London, and if in painting we sometimes lament the lack of color, in compensation sometimes photography reveals to us parts of pictures that distance or lack of light had impeded us from perfectly perceiving. Photography began to be diffused among amateurs, and of these, history remembers figures of extraordinary importance, such as Count Giuseppe Napoleone Primoli and his brother Luigi in Rome, between 1890 and 1915, ‘‘street’’ photographers devoted to the snapshot. During these years, it was object of reflections that went beyond the obvious demonstration of its artistry. After the provocative Futurist Manifesto was published in Paris in 1909 and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti involved artists and writers in his program (and among these Umberto Boccioni, signer of the 1910 Manifesto della Pittura Futurista), the young intellectual Anton Giulio Bragaglia proposed, together with his brother Arturo, a new idea of photography, in paradoxical contrast with the rhetoric of those years of instantaneity, finally possible with technical progresses. The fotodinamismo (photodynamism) proposed by the Bragaglia brothers was the fruit of bold experimentation between 1911 and 1913, synthesized in the essay ‘‘Fotodinamismo 1433

PHOTOGRAPHY futurista’’ (Futurist Photodynamism, 1912). The brothers developed a ‘‘conceptual’’ formula for visualizing movement, not via the analysis of its phases, such as in the chronophotography of Muybridge and in the strobe photography of Marey, but as a synthesis of action, obtained by fixing on the film the complete trajectory, evanescent, of the subject in movement. ‘‘L’istantanea fotografica ridicolmente uccide i gesti vivi contraendoli ed immobilizzando uno dei cento mila fuggevoli loro stati’’ (The photographic instant ridiculously kills living gestures, contracting them and immobilizing one of the hundred thousand of their fleeting states), observed Bragaglia in a later essay in the journal Comoedia, while ‘‘il nostro movimentismo distrugge, perche´ deforma e trasforma, la usata linea e l’usato colore, ma a questi sostituisce valori nuovi, che sono di ritmo al posto di quelli statici’’ (our artistic activism destroys, because it deforms and transforms the customary line and color, but to these it substitutes new values which are rhythmic in the place of the former static ones) (Fotodinamica, cronofotografia e cinema, 1929). In 1930, almost 20 years after the proposed photodynamism of Bragaglia, Marinetti composed a Manifesto della fotografia futurista (1930), together with the Futurist Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni), indicating in 16 points some rules for a ‘‘new Futurist photography,’’ with the goal ‘‘di far sempre piu` sconfinare la scienza fotografica nell’arte pura e favorirne automaticamente lo sviluppo nel campo della fisica, della chimica e della guerra’’ (of making photographic science cross the frontier ever more into pure art and automatically favor its development in the fields of physics, chemistry, and war). Between the two world wars, photography felt the more urgent needs of communication and information by way of newspapers that, thanks also to the improved printing techniques, were increasingly full of images and illustrations. Photojournalism also developed, following the example of the German and French weeklies and, from 1936, the American Life. While photofiles insisted on the pictorialist tendency (romantic sunsets, sheep at pasture, blurred backlighting, retouching, and the like), although some set out for modernist experiences in the Bauhaus style, many photographers instead set out on the new and promising path of photojournalism. These include Adolfo Porry-Pastorel, Luca Comerio, and Federico Patellani, who in 1937 became the fundamental illustrator of the magazine Tempo, founded by Alberto Mondatori on the model of Life. Around the same time, in Turin the architect Carlo Mollino wrote a history of contemporary 1434

photography, Messaggio dalla camera oscura (Message from the Camera Oscura) that was published by Chiantore in 1949, noting the photographers of the avant-gardes. In the final postwar years, photographic publishing was fed by the magazines Ferrania (Alfredo Ornano, Guido Bezzola, Luigi Veronesi), Fotografia (Pietro Donzelli, Ezio Croci), and later Foto-Film (Antonio Arcari, Tranquillo Casiraghi, Mose` Menotti, Cesare Colombo), Fotografia italiana (Lanfranco Colombo, Angelo Schwarz), and Photo 13 (Ando Gilardi, also the author of a captivating Storia sociale della fotografia published in 1976). Among magazines on the history and culture of the photograph, Fotologia (Alinari Ed.) and Fotostorica (Zoppelli Ed.) are particularly significant. Engagement in philological research of the history of Italian photography found scholars such as Carlo Bertelli, Wladimiro Settimelli, Piero Becchetti, Marina Miraglia, Angelo Schwarz, and Daniela Palazzoni ready to explore the cultural and social context in which photographers were involved. These scholars offered a panorama of notable incisiveness, making also international comparisons. This critical task had before long been entrusted to the prestige of a few amateur photographers, including the ‘‘formalists’’ Giuseppe Cavalli, Mario Finazzi, Vincenzo Balocchi, and Nino Migliori, also in theoretical terms. The masterly Mario Giacomelli, in the meantime, synthesized ‘‘formalism’’ and ‘‘neo-Realism’’ in images of mournful religiosity. Professional reportage photography and architectural photography found new artists who often came from the world of amateur photography, such as Paolo Monti, Fulvio Roiter, Mario De Biasi, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Ferdinando Scianna, and Ugo Mulas. This last made note, at the end of the 1970s, of the transition toward a more autonomous, more conceptual photography, removed from traditional, servile documentarism, specifically with the publication of his metalinguistic reflections, Verifiche, by Einaudi in 1972. In the meantime the so-called paparazzi, including the emblematic Tazio Secchiaroli, presented the ‘‘other Italy,’’ the bourgeois country, as the neo-Realist moment was surpassed. In photography (as in cinema, literature, and painting), neoRealism had long been imposed in the postwar period. Taking as their model American photography, such as the minimalist and sociological models of Walker Evans or Robert Franck, other artists such as Guido Guidi, Luigi Ghirri, Roberto Salbitani,

LUCIO PICCOLO Franco Vaccari, Gabriele Basilico, Mimmo Jodice, and Mario Cresci took shape. These artists proposed images of a metaphysical (and also minimalist) aesthetic, in particular in their readings of suburban decline and architecture polluted by kitsch. Franco Fontana instead dwelled, as Fulvio Roiter had already done, on spectacular chromatic readings, to the point of confronting the actual possibilities of intervention on the image using digital technologies. This set in motion a new era of photography, overturning even the conventional idea of documentary ‘‘realism,’’ in the search for new expressive possibilities of the rhetorical mediation of reality. Reflecting on the new course of photographic research, as Paolo Costantini has observed, ‘‘dominando l’avvenimento, dissolvendolo e rivalutandone l’importanza, si propone con un’attenzione piu` analitica, pacata e sottile, meno frenetica e immediata, per l’esperienza del vissuto e la sua percezione visiva’’ (dominating the event, dissolving it and reevaluating its importance, one proposes a more analytic attention, calm and subtle, less frenetic and immediate, for lived experience and its visual perception) (‘‘L’immagine fotografica 1845–1945,’’ 1989). ITALO ZANNIER

Further Reading Becchetti, Pietro, Fotografi e fotografia in Italia. 1839–1889, Rome: Quasar, 1978. Bertelli, Carlo, and Giulio Bollati, ‘‘L’immagine fotografica. 1845–1945,’’ in Storia d’Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 1979. Costantini, Paolo, and Italo Zannier, L’insistenza dello sguardo. Fotografie italiane 1839–1989, Florence: Alinari, 1989. Fotografia italiana dell’800, Milan-Florence: Electa-Alinari, 1979. Gilardi, Ando, Storia sociale della fotografia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976. Melloni, Macedonio, Relazione intorno al dagherrotipo, Naples: Porcelli, 1839. Minotto, Giovanni, ‘‘Fotografia,’’ in Supplimento al Nuovo Dizionario Tecnologico, Venice: Antonelli, 1839. Miraglia, Marina, ‘‘Note per una storia della fotografia italiana (1839–1911),’’ in Storia dell’Arte italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Quintavalle, Carlo Arturo, Messa a fuoco. Studi sulla fotografia, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983. Segni di luce, Ravenna: Longo, 1991–1993. Turroni, Giuseppe, Nuova Fotografia Italiana, Milan: Schwarz, 1959. Vitali, Lamberto, ‘‘La fotografia italiana dell’Ottocento,’’ in Storia della fotografia, edited by Peter Pollak, Milan: Garzanti, 1959. Zannier, Italo, Storia della fotografia italiana, Bari: Laterza, 1986. Zannier, Italo, and Paolo Costantini, Cultura fotografica in Italia, Milan: Angeli, 1985.

LUCIO PICCOLO (1901–1969) Lucio Piccolo, like his cousin Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, remained unpublished until late in life. He privately printed his first chapbook in 1954, which contained nine poems, and sent it to Eugenio Montale. When, in July of the same year, at a conference in San Pellegrino Terme attended by major Italian novelists and poets, including Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giorgio Bassani, and Italo Calvino, Montale introduced Piccolo as a gifted young new poet, an accomplished musician, and a savant of philosophy, everyone was shocked to meet a 53-year-old nobleman. In Piccolo’s poems, the Ligurian poet particularly valued their intensity and musicality. Piccolo, who was a brilliant pianist and an extraordinary interpreter of Wagner, lived a secluded

life in his native Sicily, leaving the island only for short visits to England and the north of Italy. His life was solitary, static, and to one observing it from the outside, almost unbearably sad in its avoidance of normal human affections. Despite his geographical and social isolation, Piccolo was familiar with contemporary European poetry and in touch with the most outstanding personalities of his time. He was particularly close to William Butler Yeats in his esoteric inclinations. The Irish poet had an extraordinary influence on Piccolo, and the two maintained a correspondence. Piccolo’s poetry evokes the themes and techniques of Yeats’s symbolist poetry. The Sicilian baroque tradition dominates Piccolo’s poetic scenery, but the esoteric complexity of Yeats’s poetry gives the 1435

LUCIO PICCOLO poems a Celtic resonance as well. Although Piccolo’s poetry evokes multiple poetic and philosophical voices, he was an original who transmuted diverse cultural echoes into his own unique harmony. The English poet Charles Tomlinson, who has translated five of Piccolo’s poems, described Piccolo as a modern polytonal composer who used rhythm and rhyme with brilliant vivacity. Piccolo reminds us of the chromatic richness of the neo-Futurist avant-garde, who were very active in Sicily, and of the anguished lucidity of the Hermetic poets. In Canti barocchi e altre liriche (Baroque Songs and Other Lyrics, 1956), Piccolo conveyed the aura of baroque churches, of old convents, and of uniquely Sicilian landscapes. Piccolo’s personal memories helped him to preserve voices, sounds, forms, and ways of living that had been forgotten or ignored. Piccolo’s poetry, however, urges the reader not to pay attention to the poet’s personal feelings, but to be captivated by descriptions and circumstances. But though Piccolo was obsessed by the idea of writing unemotional poetry, his work cannot completely overcome a tendency toward emotional lyricism. In the poems ‘‘Mobile universo di folate’’ (Unstill Universe, 1956) and ‘‘Ombre’’ (Shadows, 1960), in which he recalled hidden circumstances, landscapes, and emotions; and in his collection entitled Plumelia (Plumelia, 1967), which he dedicated to the novelist Antonio Pizzuto, his orchestration of multiple voices and echoes produces a sort of symphony. Many years after his death, Piccolo’s poetry, with its interplay of personal memories with a ‘‘documentary’’ memory empty of any personal emotion, has still not been explored in its full complexity. He was a metaphysical poet, sometimes strictly surrealistic, occasionally realistic, as close to the Italian crepuscolari poets Corrado Govoni and Giovanni Bertacchi as to the neo-baroque and extreme Hermeticist poets Clemente Rebora and Giuseppe Ungaretti. In his elaborate natural symbolism as well as his profound assimilation of contemporary European poetry, Piccolo was influenced by Tomasi di Lampedusa. In a letter to Vittorio Sereni (13 December 1959), written in his residence at Capo D’Orlando, Piccolo noted that the collection of poems Gioco a nascondere, canti barocchi e altre liriche (The Game of Hide-andSeek, 1960) might remind a reader of the passage in Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958) concerned with Donnafugata. Donnafugata was, in fact, the villa of the Cuto` family, common ancestors on their mothers’ side. The references in Gioco a nascondere 1436

are partly to the villa of the same family in Palermo, where both Piccolo and Tomasi di Lampendusa used to go as boys. Piccolo also wrote to Sereni that the first draft of Gioco a nascondere was in prose, and he read it to the prince long before he started working on Il gattopardo.

Biography The Baron Lucio Piccolo of Calanovella was born in Palermo, on October 27, 1901. He lived most of his life in close relationship with his cousin, Prince Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The two cousins were heavily influenced by their mothers, Teresa (Lucio’s mother) and Beatrice (Giuseppe’s mother) who came from a noble Sicilian family, the Mastrogiovanni Lanza Filangeri. Piccolo became a close friend of William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound after meeting them during their trip to Sicily in 1924. Piccolo was working on collecting his correspondence with Yeats when he died unexpectedly in Capo D’Orlando (Messina) on May 26, 1969. ANNA SICA Selected works Collections Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated and edited by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, with a foreword by Glauco Cambon and an afterword by Eugenio Montale, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

Poetry ‘‘9 Liriche,’’ 1954. ‘‘Canti Barocchi e altre liriche,’’ 1956; revised edition, 2001; as Baroque Songs and Other Lyrics, in Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, 1972; ‘‘Veneris Venefica’’ as ‘‘Agrestis’’ and ‘‘Mobile universo di folate’’ as ‘‘Unstill Universe,’’ translated by Charles Tomlinson, in Poems from Italy, 1985. ‘‘Gioco a nascondere, canti barocchi e altre liriche,’’ 1960; as The Game of Hide-and-Seek, in Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, 1972. ‘‘Plumelia,’’ 1967; as Plumelia, in Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, translated by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, 1972. ‘‘La seta e altre poesie inedite e sparse,’’ edited by Giovanna Musolino and Giovanni Gaglio, 1984; revised edition, 1993. ‘‘Il raggio verde e altre poesie inedite,’’ edited by Giovanna Musolino, 1993. ‘‘Antologia poetica,’’ edited by Giuseppe Celona, 1999.

Fiction L’esequie della luna, 1967; revised edition, 1979; edited by Giovanna Musolino, 1996.

ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI (PIUS II) Letters L’oboe e il clarino, carteggio 1965–1969, Antonio Pizzuto, edited by Alessandro Fo and Antonio Pane, 2002.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, Lucio Piccolo: figura d’enigma, Milan: All’insegna del pesce rosso, 1988. L’anima e i prestigi. Lucio Piccolo e il suo Mondo, Palermo: Regione Siciliana, 2001.

Barolini, Helen, ‘‘The Birth, Death, and Re-Life of a Poet: Lucio Piccolo,’’ The Yale Review, 65 (1976), 194–202. Bradshaw, Victoria, From Pure Silence to Impure Dialogue: A Survey of Post-War Italian Poetry, 1945–1965, New York: Las Americas Publishing, 1971. Palumbo, Sergio, I Piccolo di Calanovella. Magia e poesia, Palermo: Novecento, 2001. Tedesco, Natale (editor), Lucio Piccolo: La figura e l’opera, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1990. Valenti, Franco, I misteri del Gattopardo. Ricordi di vite parallele: Tomasi di Lampedusa, Lucio Piccolo e Beatrice di Cuto`, Patti: Calabria, 2000.

ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI (PIUS II) (1405–1464) Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who reigned as Pope Pius II from 1458 to 1464, was at times a libertine and a poet (he was elected poet laureate in 1442 at 37, at the same age as Petrarch), a jurist and an orator, a diplomat and a statesman, a man of faith and a warmonger, and an important figure in the culture of Humanism. The scion of an aristocratic but impoverished Sienese family, Piccolomini spent his youth in Siena, where Antonio Beccadelli, better known as ‘‘Il Panormita’’ (1394–1471), was composing his collection of erotic epigrams in Latin, Hermaphroditus (1425). Piccolomini’s own early literary efforts are licentious rhymes in Latin, dedicated to a beloved Cinthia. Later, he tried to make his youthful writings disappear, and indeed the Nymphilexis, written before 1435, is now lost, whereas the comedy Chrysis remained hidden for five centuries in a library in Prague. A burlesque short drama in imitation of Plautus for its colorful scenes and of Terence for its meditative moments, Chrysis is also full of mocking references to the author’s intellectual circle. It was written in 1444, a particularly fruitful year for Piccolomini, who also composed the Historia de duobus amantibus (Tale of the Two Lovers), first printed in 1476 and which immediately achieved great popularity throughout Europe. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Filostrato (1535–1536), it has however a different ending in Piccolomini’s text; the female character, Lucretia, dies from sorrow while the male character, Eurialus,

soon finds consolation. The work was among those repudiated by the author when he took his religious vows in 1446. Finally, 1444 was also the year of De curialium miseriis (On the Misery of Courtiers), a treatise, in epistolary form, about the difficulty of a courtier’s life but also a pessimistic meditation on the human condition. During Piccolomini’s youth, the Franciscan St. Bernardino preached in Siena, leaving a strong impression on the young man. Later, as Pope Pius II, Piccolomini, intending to emulate St. Francis, who allegedly converted a Muslim ruler, meditated to do the same with the Sultan of Turkey. The result is a masterpiece of rhetoric, the Epistola ad Mahumetem (The Letter to Mohammed II, 1461), which, however, was never sent. In spite of the fact that he sometimes threw barbs at jurists, in his prose and orations Piccolomini displayed the solid legal formation acquired under the guidance of Mariano Sozzini. But above all, Piccolomini was a Humanist. Although his ideal of papal leadership over Europe was more medieval than Humanistic, he combined the precepts of the Church with a Humanistic belief in the dignity of humankind. For him, the work of the intellectual must be accompanied by an engagement with the world, and as pope he founded universities and built ideal cities, completely redesigning the center of his hometown of Corsignano (now, in his honor, Pienza). 1437

ENEA SILVIO PICCOLOMINI (PIUS II) Piccolomini’s work is remarkable for its quality and variety, and includes, in addition to his fictional works, essays on history, geography, astronomy, pedagogy, morality, and religion, and an impressive collection of memoirs. He wrote in Latin, although his use of the language is not outstanding. However, he was less interested in literary study than in man as a social being. Indeed, one being in particular attracted his attention: himself. His masterpiece, Commentarii rerum memorabilium (The Commentaries of Pius II), written approximately from 1458 until his death, is both a compilation of memories and an opinionated chronicle of the events of his time. Following a classical tradition that includes Julius Caesar, Piccolomi wrote about himself in the third person. The Commentarii rerum memorabilium express the author’s humanistic admiration for the classical age, seen as a source of virtue and wisdom; his quest for harmony between the classical legacy and Christianity; his pride in being Italian; his pursuit of beauty; and his political acumen. Despite their hagiographic intent, the Commentarii also reflect the perspective of an ironic, astute, ambitious, and cynical personality longing for glory. Particularly intense are the narration of events leading up to the author’s election as Pope Pius II and the passages in which he expressed thinly veiled contempt for Cosimo de’ Medici. In his pedagogical writings, such as De liberorum educatione (1450), Piccolomini showed his Humanistic preference for classical authors over medieval ones, including St. Thomas Aquinas. His geographical works, and especially the projected Cosmographia (Cosmography), of which he completed the section entitled De Europa (On Europe, 1458), are dense with observations. Notably, he perceived the invasion by the Turks as a human event and not as God’s punishment, in contrast to many of his contemporaries. Finally, following the example of both Petrarch and Boccaccio, he wrote biographies of the great personalities of his time in De viris aetate sua claris (On the Famous Men of His Age, ca.1440–1450). Collected in 1571 in his Opera quae extant omnia (Complete Extant Works), Piccolomini’s rich epistolary, which was also the foundation of his literary production since most of his works are in the form of letters, represents an indispensable tool to understand the man and his literary creations, as well as his times.

Biography Enea Silvio Piccolomi was born on October 18, 1405, in Corsignano (Siena), now Pienza, where 1438

his father Silvio and his mother Vittoria Forteguerri lived in exile. He studied law and rhetoric in Siena, Bologna, Florence, Ferrara, and Padua and then taught in Siena until he became secretary to Cardinal Domenico Capranica, 1432. He followed Capranica to Basel (Switzerland), where the conclave was held. There, he navigated among opposing factions, earning the esteem of the most prominent men of his time. An able orator and diplomat, Piccolomini traveled throughout Europe. Most of his literary works were produced during these long journeys. In emulation of Petrarch, he campaigned to be crowned Poet Laureate, 1442. His culture, talent, and cynicism allowed him to mend the division between Emperor Frederick III and Pope Eugene IV while remaining on good terms with Eugene’s rival, the antipope Felix V. He lived licentiously (he had at least two illegitimate children) until he was ordained subdeacon, 1446. He was appointed cardinal, 1456, and elected pope, 1458, choosing the name ‘‘Pius II’’ in reference to the pietas of Aeneas (Enea, in Latin). He canonized St. Catherine of Siena. He disappointed the Humanists because he did not protect them as they had expected. Although he envisioned a crusade against the Turks, he received little support from the Christian powers that were reluctant to fight under the command of a pope. Embittered by that failure, Piccolomini died in Ancona on August 15, 1464. BERNARDO PICICHE` Selected Works Collections Opera quae extant omnia, Basle: Heinrich Petri, 1571.

Play Chrysis (1444); critical edition by Enzo Cecchini, 1966; as Chrysis, translated by Gary R. Grund in Humanist Comedies, 2005.

Fiction Historia de duobus amantibus, 1476; as The Tale of Two Lovers, translated by Flora Grierson, 1929.

Treatises De curialium miseriis (1444); critical edition by Wilfred P. Mustard, 1928. De viris aetate sua claris (ca.1440–1450); as De viris illustribus, critical edition by Adrian van Heck, 1991. De liberorum educatione (1450); as De liberorum educatione, translated by Joel Stanislaus Nelson, 1940. De Europa (1458); critical edition by Adrian von Heck, 2001. Epistola ad Mahumetem (1461); critical edition by Reinhold F. Glei and Markus Kohler, 2001.

GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA Memoirs Commentarii rerum memorabilium (1458–1464); critical edition by Giuseppe Lasca, 2 vols., 1981; critical edition by Adrian van Heck, 2 vols., 1984; as The Commentaries of Pius II, edited and translated by Florence Alden Gragg, 4 vols., 1937–1957.

Letters Selected Letters of Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, edited and translated by Albert R. Baca, 1969.

Further Reading Miglio, Massimo, Storiografia pontificia del Quattrocento, Bologna: Patron, 1975.

Mitchell, Rosamond J., Laurels and the Tiara: Pope Pius II 1458–1464, London: Harvill Press, 1962. Naville, Charles-E´douard, Enea Silvio Piccolomini: l’uomo, l’umanista, il pontefice (1405–1464), Bologna: Analisi, 1984. Olivetti, Alberto, Costruito instabile: Pio II e la caducita` dell’opera d’arte, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2003. Rotondi Secchi Tarugi, Luisa (editor), Pio II e la cultura del suo tempo, Milan: Guerini e associati, 1991. Russell, Joyceline Glendhill, Diplomats at Work: Three Renaissance Studies, Gloucestershire, Wolfeboro Falls, NH: Sutton, 1992. Totaro, Luigi, Pio II nei suoi Commentarii: un contributo alla lettura della autobiografia di Enea Silvio de Piccolomini, Bologna: Patron, 1978.

GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA (1463–1494) A dazzling philosopher and humanist, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola exerted great influence on early modern Italian culture. His name is usually linked to his famous Oratio de hominis dignitate (Oration on the Dignity of Man, 1486) and to his complex Commento sopra una canzone de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni (Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, 1486), which is considered to be one of the first examples of the so-called trattati d’amore (treatises on love) that flourished throughout the Renaissance. A first noteworthy work is the famous letter to Ermolao Barbaro, De genere dicendi philosophorum (On the Philosophers’ Rhetoric, 1485), which is a short but significant treatise on the importance of the philosophical freedom against the strictures posed by grammarians. Pico’s vast philosophical apprenticeship included scholasticism at the University of Paris and the Cabala, which he learned through his tutor Flavio Mitridate, a converted Jew. His famous Oratio de hominis dignitate was meant to introduce and explain his 900 Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalisticae et theologicae (Philosophical, Cabalistic, and Theological Conclusions, 1486). The young philosopher had decided to organize a philosophical conference in Rome (not at a university), where he would expose his project of a pia philosophia (pious philosophy), which is

also reflected in his Oratio. This intended public disputation, later subtitled De hominis dignitate, is renowned for its opening discussion on the making of Adam as a being with free will to choose the course of his creation. Like Proteus, Adam could mold himself in whatever form he desired: either to degrade to a bestial being or to ascend to the divine. Pico’s ‘‘pious philosophy’’ held that it was possible to prove a general concordance among all philosophical schools and traditions. Pico’s Oratio is usually considered the optimistic manifesto of the Italian Renaissance, although recent scholarship, questioning its originality, claims that the dignitate portrayed in Pico’s text is nothing but an old-fashioned form of inner enlightenment with strong neo-Platonic and Cabalistic connotations and not a new interpretation of the relationship between human identity and divine creation. Although the philosophical concepts expressed in the Oratio (which was not printed until 1495– 1496, after Pico’s death) might be less original than a lay reader may think, its powerful rhetoric makes this brief text a unique specimen of the early Renaissance. Our appreciation of this text is justified more by its exceptional literary achievement than by its philosophical originality. The Oratio was founded on three essential sources: the book of Genesis, Plato’s Symposium, 1439

GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA and the Christian neo-Platonism of the PseudoDionysius. Pico believed that human dignity is not a given. Dignity is based on freedom and choice. Dignity is the conclusion of an inner itinerary that, through moral discipline and the practice of contemplation, leads the subject to God’s mind. This process of self-realization is universal, because it is present in the classical cultural traditions, included the so-called ‘‘theology of the ancients.’’ Pico did not support, however, a withdrawal from the world, because contemplation is strictly related to the philosophical analysis of the creation. The second part of the Oratio is Pico’s self-defense against his possible detractors, who deny that someone at the age of 23 is able to discuss in an open forum 900 philosophical theses revolving around Christian theology, pagan philosophy, and other still-unexplored disciplines, like the Chaldean oracles and the Orphic hymns, in an effort to prove the essential concordance of all human schools of thought. At the beginning of 1487 (on 20 February) Pope Innocent VIII suspended the public discussion of Pico’s Conclusiones and formed a review theological commission that after a month attacked seven and questioned six of Pico’s 900 theses. As a response, Pico composed an Apologia in the attempt to defend the orthodoxy of his views, primarily regarding astrology and magic. The Pope, however, condemned the whole philosophical venture in a bull published on 15 December 1487. Pico composed some of his major works at Lorenzo de’ Medici’s villa il Querceto, near Florence. Lorenzo had helped Pico regain his freedom after his arrest in France because of his heretical philosophical opinions. Among these works is Heptaplus (Heptaplus, 1489), which is a commentary on the first book of the Bible and relevant for its Christological concepts and a cabbalistic appendix; De ente et uno (On Being and the One, 1491), dedicated to the poet Angelo Poliziano, is a first attempt to outline the existence of a ‘‘perennial philosophy’’ by claiming a fundamental agreement between Plato and Aristotle; and a series of Epistles for his nephew Giovan Francesco Pico (1469–1533), a deeply original figure of sixteenth-century Italian culture who is nowadays merely remembered for his unique use of Sextus Empiricus’s skepticism. Of particular relevance is the letter in which Giovanni Pico recommended that his nephew read and meditate on the Christian Scriptures with great dedication. Pico’s well-known Commento alla canzone d’amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni is a response to his friend Marsilio Ficino’s De amore 1440

(On Love, 1484). Pico intended to develop the ideas expressed in the Commento in a subsequent treatise on Plato’s Symposium. Although Pico’s Commento came out posthumously in 1519 in an abridged edition edited by Benivieni, it had a remarkable manuscript circulation and was also mentioned in some of the sixteenth-century treatises on love. Benivieni’s poem is divided into eight stanzas of 18 verses plus a ninth final stanza of 10 verses. Faithful to the Florentine neo-Platonic philosophy of love, Benivieni envisioned the love experience as a divine insight that descends from the heavenly spheres into the human soul. Pico’s commentary comprises four parts, but only the fourth is a direct reading of Benivieni’s text. In the first book of the Commento, which is divided into 13 sections, Pico detailed his theological views, according to which there are three natures: divine, angelic, and human (what Pico defined as ‘‘rational soul’’). Borrowing from Plato, Plotinus’s neoPlatonism, and Hermetic thought (particularly in chapter 11, devoted to the distinction of the creation into eight celestial spheres plus the ‘‘soul of the world’’ corresponding to the nine muses), Pico contended that, through love of beauty, the human soul is meant to transcend into an angelic form (book one, chapter 13). The second book, in 24 chapters, opens with a discussion of the name amore (chapters 1 and 2) and follows with a definition of Venus as ‘‘beauty.’’ In chapter 11, where he mentioned Ficino in a defiant manner, Pico claimed that Venus is not a power of the soul or of the mind, but rather is beauty. Beauty is called Venus because it gives birth to love. The second half of book two is a close analysis of the generation of love according to the Symposium. In the short book three, which recalls Ficino’s De amore, Pico examined the different kinds of love (celestial, human, and bestial). Book four, a close reading of Benivieni’s poem, expands on the ideas expressed in the previous three books. Pico’s Commento is, along with Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore (Dialogues on Love, 1535), the most challenging Renaissance treatise on love. Heptaplus is a compelling text that can be considered Pico’s most accomplished work. Starting from the first lines of Genesis, Pico aimed at painting a complete vision of the created world, of humankind, and of the divine mind. He stated that antiquity envisioned three worlds: The highest is the ‘‘angelic’’ or ‘‘intelligible’’ world; the second is the celestial world; and the third is the world of shadows we inhabit. Thus, in the biblical tradition, Pico held that this third world is dominated by

GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA water, which is a mutable and flowing matter, whereas the first world is made of fire, and the second is an in-between area composed of both fire and water. Moreover, he contended that Moses portrayed these three worlds in his construction of the tabernacle. The first part was with no protection and thus exposed to rain or snow; an area for everybody, pure and impure people and animals. The other two parts were protected. In particular, the second part shone with an imposing seven-branch candelabrum, which represented the seven planets. In the third and most sacred area, there were the winged cherubim. Pico concluded that these distinct worlds are in fact one and only one world. It is Christ’s sacrifice that allows man to return to the third, most sacred world. Heptaplus is divided into seven long Expositiones (Expositions) whose themes are the corruptible world; the celestial world; the angelic and invisible world; human nature; the various connections among the three worlds; and eternal life. As a conclusion, Pico added a chapter that clarifies individual points, such as the opening sentence ‘‘In the beginning,’’ which he submitted to a Cabalistic exegesis. Subsequently Pico expressed his keen interest in biblical exegesis in various commentaries on the psalms. Pico also composed poems in both Italian and Latin. But because of the negative feedback he received from his friend Poliziano, he burned most of them. Only some 60 poems in Italian have survived. Of particular interest is a series of 45 sonnets, which were published in 1894. Even though stylistically indebted to the Petrarchan model, these poems unquestionably echo the same topics of Pico’s philosophical treatises. For instance, in ‘‘Se ellecto m’hai nel cel per tuo consorte’’ (If you have elected me as your spouse in heaven), he spoke of humanity’s fall and redemption through Christ and revisited Adam’s creation in Genesis. Pico’s philosophical poetry is a unique case in fifteenth-century Italian canon. Pico’s last book is a sophisticated refutation of all superstitions and astrology by the title of Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (Disputations against Astrology), which death prevented him from revising. This treatise was published posthumously by his nephew Giovan Francesco in 1495. An abridged edition in the vernacular was also included by Girolamo Savonarola in his Tractato contra li astrologi (Treatise Against Astrologers, 1497). Here Pico summarized the astrological tradition to conclude that the stars act on earthly beings only through heat and light, not because of any occult powers we attribute to them. Pico’s objection

to astrology was not scientific but rather religious. However, the influence of the Disputationes was such that even Kepler is known to have modified his initial stand on this matter. Pico’s fame rests primarily on his treatment of a huge amount of eclectic sources and on his brilliant attempt to synthesize cabbalistic materials into contemporary Renaissance philosophical thought.

Biography Giovanni Pico was born in Mirandola (Modena) on 24 Februay 1463. At the age of 14, he moved to Bologna to study canon law. In 1475, he traveled to Ferrara, where he probably encountered Girolamo Savonarola. In the same year, he also went to Florence, where he met Poliziano and maybe Ficino. In the years 1480–1482, at the University of Padua, he became acquainted with Aristotelian philosophy and its Greek, Latin, and Arab commentators. In 1484, he was in Florence, where he embraced Ficino’s neo-Platonic philosophy. In 1485 he visited the University of Paris, where he studied scholastic thought. In 1486, Pico composed in Italian the Commento alla canzone d’amore, the Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalisticae et theologicae, and the Oratio de hominis dignitate. On December 7, Pico was in Rome, where his Conclusiones were published with immediate negative reactions. Pico fled to France but was arrested and imprisoned in Vincennes, 1488. He was released thanks to the intercession of his powerful friends. At Lorenzo de Medici’s villa, the Querceto, near Florence, Pico composed Heptaplus in 1489; De ente et uno in 1491; and a series of Epistles for his nephew Giovan Francesco Pico. Giovanni Pico died in Florence on 17 November 1494. ARMANDO MAGGI Selected Works Collections Commentationes Joannis Pici Mirandulae in hoc volumine contentae: quibus anteponitur vita per Joannem Franciscum illustris principis Galeotti Pici filium conscripta, Bologna: Benedictus Hectoris Bononiensis, 1496 (it includes Heptaplus, Apologia tredecim quaestionum, De ente et uno, the Oratio, and several epistles). Opera omnia, Venice: Gulielmum de Fontaneto de Monferrato, 1519. Omnia quae extant opera, Venice: Scotum, 1557. De hominis dignitate. Heptaplus. De ente et uno, e scritti vari, edited by Eugenio Garin, Florence: Vallecchi, 1942. Opera omnia, introduced by Eugenio Garin, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1971.

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GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA Philosophical Treatises De genere dicendi philosophorum, 1485. Commento sopra una canzone de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni, 1486; as Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, translated by Jayne Sears, 1984. Oratio de hominis dignitate, 1486; as On the Dignity of Man, translated by Charles Glenn Wallis, 1965; as Oration on the Dignity of Man, translated by A. Robert Caponigri, 1998; as On the Dignity of Man, translated by Charles Glenn Wallis, 1998. Heptaplus, 1489; as Heptaplus, translated by Jessie Brewer McGan, 1977; translated by Douglas Carmichael, 1998. De ente et uno, 1491; as Of Being and Unity, translated by Victor Hamm, 1943; as On Being and the One, translated by Paul J. W. Millers, 1998. Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem, 1495.

Poetry ‘‘Sonetti,’’ 1894; edited by Giorgio Dilemmi, 1994.

Further Readings Anagnine, Eugenio, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, sincretismo religioso-filosofico, Bari: Laterza, 1937.

Bacchelli, Franco, Giovanni Pico e Pier Leone da Spoleto, Florence: Olschki, 2001. Bori, Pier Cesare, Pluralita` delle vie, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2000. Craven, William, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Symbol of His Age, Geneva: Droz, 1981. Di Napoli, Giovanni, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola e la problematica dottrinale del suo tempo, Rome: Descle´e, 1965. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: convegno internazionale di studi nel cinquecentesimo anniversario della morte (1494–1994), Mirandola, 4–8 ottobre 1994, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Garin, Eugenio, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola: Vita e dottrina, Florence: Le Monnier, 1937. Jader, Jacobelli, and Eugenio Garin, Pico della Mirandola, Milan: Longanesi, 1986. L’opera e il pensiero di Giovanni Pico della Mirandola nella storia dell’umanesimo, Florence: Istituto Nazionale per gli Studi Rinascimentali, 1965. Roulier, Fernand, Jean Pic de la Mirandole, Gene`ve: Slatkine, 1989. Sears, Jane, Commentary on a Canzone of Benivieni, New York: Peter Lang, 1984.

PIER DELLE VIGNE (CA. 1190–1249) Pier delle Vigne (or Piero or Pietro della Vigna) is known to history because of his dramatic fall from the height of political favor and his subsequent death in prison, and also, more justly, as the most famous and influential of the imperial functionaries in the court of Frederick II, a highly cosmopolitan environment blending the rich cultures of the Mediterranean world in the thirteenth century. He is arguably one of the greatest Latin stylists of the Middle Ages, a notable jurist and author of laws, a significant imperial minister, and one of the earliest Italian poets. He participated in a number of important and sensitive diplomatic missions for Frederick, and he seems to have spoken with greater authority than usual in the name of the emperor in general, a situation recognized, perhaps, by his designation as logotheta (chief spokesman) in 1247. Before 1220 he was a student of law in the university at Bologna, where he developed a polished rhetorical style, probably building on an earlier rhetorical education in the schools of his native Capua. With the patronage of Berardo, Archbishop of 1442

Palermo, he was brought to Frederick’s attention and swiftly advanced in power and prestige in the imperial bureaucracy. As a judge of the Magna Curia, he most likely participated in the drafting of the Liber Augustalis, also known as the Constitutions of Melfi (1231), and he certainly had control over many of the official edicts issuing from the chancery during his tenure. As author of many of the emperor’s and the Curia’s letters, he helped to create and define the widely imitated style of the Magna Curia Fredericiana, one of the most complex, artificial, elegant, and learned of the late Middle Ages—a style influenced, but not defined, by such disparate elements as the stilus Romanae Curiae (the style of the Roman Curia), the French ars dictandi, St. Bernard and Cistercian rhetoric broadly understood, Ovidian influences, and even Arabic epistolary style, which had survived in Norman Sicily. He is also the author of several Latin satirical poems, the best known of which is an attack on the greed of priests and the mendicant orders. His contributions to Italian literature are far more modest and are clearly overshadowed by his

PIER DELLE VIGNE importance to Latin prose and by his administrative and judicial roles in the imperial government. His surviving Italian works consist of two authentic canzoni, ‘‘Amore, in cui desio ed ho speranza’’ (Love, in which I desire and place my hope) and ‘‘Amando con fin core e con speranza’’ (Loving with noble heart and with hope); a third of more doubted authenticity, ‘‘Uno piasente isguardo’’ (A pleasing look); and a sonnet securely attributed to him in a tenzone on the nature of love with Jacopo Mostacci and Giacomo da Lentini. Other attributions to him have garnered little critical support. Pier’s poems are characterized by their structural complexity and lexical freedom, but otherwise they do not advance or develop the poetic formulae found in the characteristic production of the socalled Scuola Siciliana. As such, they do not approach the significance of his Latin prose works in aesthetic value or in terms of cultural significance and influence. The conflicting and ambiguous testimonies surrounding Pier delle Vigne’s fall from imperial favor, blinding, and presumed suicide in 1249 thrust him into the realm of legend almost immediately after his death. Although a major figure in the imperial government, a great deal of later interest in the man and his works arguably stems from readers’ preoccupation with his end, a situation certainly aggravated but not caused by Dante’s representation of Pier in the thirteenth canto of the Inferno, where his soul is trapped in the trunk of a tree eternally ripped apart by the Harpies. Authorities differ on the reason for his arrest for laesae majestatis crimine deprehensum—betraying imperial secrets to the Pope, attempting to poison the emperor, being a rival for a love-interest of the emperor, financial corruption, abuse of power, and so on—and further differ on whether these accusations are true or the fabrications of rivals in the Curia, jealous that a man of humble origin had risen to the pinnacle of imperial favor. Dante certainly accepted the injustice of the accusations (Pier’s shade swears his loyalty to the emperor) and was followed by many later writers. Pier most likely did commit suicide, or attempt to, but the exact manner and location of his death are likewise disputed from the earliest testimonies. Even his early life smacks of the legendary in its presentation, starting with his humble origins (in reality, his father appears to have been a judge in Capua), his impoverished youth and financial difficulties in Bologna, his discovery by Archbishop Berardo on the basis of a single Latin letter, and his meteoric

rise to the pinnacles of the imperial bureaucracy. Although his letters remained rhetorical models to be emulated for decades after his death, Pier’s substantial contributions to government, administration, and to Latin epistolary style to this day remain overshadowed by the romance of his personal history and downfall.

Biography Pier delle Vigne was born in Capua (near Caserta) ca. 1190; he studied in Bologna before 1220 and was a notary in the imperial chancery, ca. 1220. He served as a judge in the Magna Curia, 1225–1247, and was ambassador to Pope Gregory IX, 1232– 1233, 1237. Together with Taddeo da Sessa, Pier directed all activities of the imperial chancery, 1239–1247; was ambassador to Louis IX in France, 1247; and, on Taddeo’s assassination, was named protonotaro of the court and logotheta of the kingdom of Sicily, 1247. He was arrested at Cremona by imperial order, February 1249 and was taken to San Miniato, where he was blinded. Pier delle Vigne died in San Miniato (or Pisa), 1249. FRANK ORDIWAY Selected Works Petri de Vineis judicis aulici et cancellarii Friderici II Imperatoris epistolarum, edited by Johannes Rudolphus Iselius (Iselin), 1740. Rime, edited by Gianfranco Contini in Poeti del Duecento, vol. 1, 1960.

Further Reading Bigi, Emilio, ‘‘Pietro della Vigna,’’ in Enciclopedia dantesca, vol. 4, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1973. Cassell, Anthony K., ‘‘Pier della Vigna’s Metamorphosis: Iconography and History,’’ in Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio: Studies in the Italian Trecento in Honor of Charles S. Singleton, edited by Aldo S. Bernardo and Anthony L. Pellegrini, Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983. Huillard-Bre´holles, Jean Louis Alphonse, Vie et correspondence de Pierre de la Vigne, minister de l’Empereur Fre´de´ric II: avec une etude sur le movement re´formiste au 13e sie`cle, Paris: Henri Plon, 1865. Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘Alcuni caratteri dello stile della cancelleria federiciana,’’ in Antico e nuovo, Caltanissetta and Rome: Sciascia, 1965. Picone, Michelangelo, ‘‘La tenzone de amore fra Iacopo Mostacci, Pier della Vigna e il Notaio,’’ in Il genere ‘‘tenzone’’ nelle letterature romanze delle Origini, edited by Matteo Pedroni and Antonio Sta¨uble, Ravenna: Longo, 1999.

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PIER DELLE VIGNE Schaller, Hans Martin, ‘‘L’epistolario di Pier delle Vigne,’’ in Politica e cultura nell’Italia di Federico II, edited by Sergio Gensini, Pisa: Pacini, 1986.

Stephany, William A., ‘‘Pier della Vigna’s Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: The ‘Eulogy’ of Frederick II and Inferno 13,’’ Traditio, 38 (1982), 193–212.

ALBINO PIERRO (1916–1995) A leading twentieth-century figure of the rich Italian tradition of dialect poetry, which he has endowed with renewed significance, Albino Pierro was born in Tursi, a small town near Matera in the region of Lucania. After initial volumes of verse in Italian, which attracted polite but unenthusiastic attention, he turned to his native dialect in ‘A terra d’u ricorde (The Land of Memory, 1960). In this medium, Pierro found his true inspiration, a way of giving voice to his musical and spiritual impulses, simultaneously choral and lyrical, popular and individualized. Classical Italian poetry in dialect, from Carlo Porta, and Gioacchino Belli to Salvatore Di Giacomo and Giovanni Meli, revels in the stylistic unorthodoxies of the down-to-earth, popular expressions, and largely mimes the social conditions of each linguistic community. In recent times, as in the case of the poetry of Biagio Marin or Pier Paolo Pasolini, the dialect turns into a precious mirror of self-discovery, a way of articulating the primary sources of reality. Pierro’s poetry, on the contrary, creates a unique, surrealistic dreamworld that evokes the aesthetic realm of the classical Italian lyrical tradition (Stilnovisti, Petrarch) and of European modernism, (Ferdinando Pessoa, Federico Garcia Lorca). For example, Nu belle fatte (A Beautiful Story, 1975) stands out as a modern song book, a love diary in the tradition of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (ca. 1342–1374). Pierro’s extraordinary poem, ‘‘I’nnammure`te’’ (The Lovers), from the 1963 collection of the same title, which focuses on love in its nascent state, in the moment of stupefied contemplation, bears clear signs of Dante’s vision of love in the Vita nova (New Life, ca. 1294). Indeed, following Dante’s model, Pierro linked together the origin of language and the enigmatic adventure of love: ‘‘E te`cchete, na vota, come ll’erva / ca tro`vese ‘ncastre`te nda nu mure, / nascı`vite ‘a paro´ua, / po n’ata, po cchiu` asse`i: / schitte ca tutt’i vote / assimigghia`ite ‘a voce / a na cosa sunne`ta / ca le sintı`se ‘a notte e ca po to`rnete / cchiu` de`bbua nd’ ‘a 1444

iurne`ta.’’ (And behold, once, like grass / you find trapped in a wall, / the word was born, / then another, then many others: / only that every time the voice resembled / something dreamt / that you hear in the night and then comes back / weaker during the day). One can also find in Pierro’s poetry echoes of Dante’s ‘‘stony rhymes,’’ as well as of Guido Guinizelli’s ‘‘donna angelicata’’ (angelic lady). Such an awareness of the Italian literary tradition defies the common notion that Pierro is a poet without a real sense of history. Quite to the contrary, the main themes comprise the ambiguous sweetness of recollecting, death, and the town of Tursi, with its houses, streets, ravines, and cliffs. Pierro’s poetry expresses the anguish and loneliness of modern man, uprooted from his native soil, the destruction of old communities and their moral values by industrialization; a fear of death and a sense of hopelessness, which find in memory the only emotional refuge. In a way, the specificity of Pierro’s lyrical voice consists in his effort to recapture the choral experience of the Lucanian people and not merely to articulate his own existential anguish, thus a world of shared memories, popular traditions, religious festivities, and rituals that run parallel to but do not coincide with everyday life. However localized in the rhythms and sounds of his native town, Pierro’s poetic language is indeed universal. Marked by musical ligatures, counterpoints, and irregular lines that stress dissonance, Pierro used the dialect in a creative and somewhat experimental way. His poetry has drawn the attention of scholars such as Contini, Folena, and Emerico Giachery, all of whom have subjected Pierro’s poetry to the detailed critical scrutiny given to a classic. The acclaim of these critics is complemented by the increasing recognition by fellow poets, such as Carlo Betocchi, who in his Incontro a Tursi (1973) has argued for Pierro’s inclusion in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

IPPOLITO PINDEMONTE

Biography Albino Pierro was born in Tursi, Lucania, on November 19, 1916, in a well-to-do family; his early childhood was marked by the traumatic event of the death of his mother. After spending two years as a student in a seminary, Pierro moved around several cities: Salerno, Sulmona, Fusine, Novara, and finally Rome, where he worked, during the war years (1939–1942), as a librarian in the Biblioteca Alessandrina and completed his studies in philosophy writing a thesis on ‘‘La teoria dello Stato in Sant’Agostino,’’ 1944. He taught history and philosophy in high schools. He was awarded the Premio Carducci, 1976. Pierro died in Rome on March 23, 1995. MARIA C. PASTORE PASSARO Selected Works Collections Un pianto nascosto: antologia poetica 1946–1983, edited by Francesco Zambon, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. La voce di un paese: poesie edite ed inedite, Vibo Valentia: Qualecultura and Jaca Book, 1996. Selected Poems, edited and translated by Luigi Bonaffini, Toronto: Guernica, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Liriche,’’ 1946. ‘‘Nuove liriche,’’ 1949. ‘‘Mia madre passava,’’ 1955. ‘‘Il paese sincero,’’ 1956. ‘‘Il transito del vento,’’ 1957. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1958. ‘‘Il mio villaggio,’’ 1959. ‘‘Agavi e sassi,’’ 1960. ‘‘’A terra d’u ricorde,’’ 1960. ‘‘I ’nnammure`te,’’ 1963. ‘‘Metaponto,’’ 1966. ‘‘Nd ’u piccicarelle di Turse,’’ 1967. ‘‘Ecco´ ’a morte,’’ 1969. ‘‘Famme dorme,’’ 1971. ‘‘Curtelle a lu so´ue,’’ 1973.

‘‘Nu belle fatte,’’ 1975; as A Beautiful Story, translated by Edith Farnsworth, 1977. ‘‘Com‘agghi’ ‘a fe`,’’ 1977. ‘‘Sti mascre,’’ 1980. ‘‘Ci ue´ra turne`,’’ 1982. ‘‘Si po´’ nu jurne,’’ 1983. ‘‘Nun c’e` pizze di munne,’’ 1992.

Further Reading Betocchi, Carlo, Incontro a Tursi. Lettere di Betocchi a Pierro, poesie, testi critici vari, edited by Emerico Giachery, Bari: Laterza, 1973. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Albino Pierro,’’ in Schedario di scrittori italiani moderni e contemporanei, Florence: Sansoni, 1978. Dell’Aquila, Michele, Humilemque Italiam: Studi pugliesi e lucani di cultura letteraria tra Sette e Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1985. De Mauro, Tullio, ‘‘La colazione di Donn’Albino. Conversando con Albino Pierro,’’ in L’Italia delle Italie, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1992. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Un canzoniere d’amore di Albino Pierro,’’ Almanacco dello Specchio, 4 (1975), 135–145. Giachery, Emerico, Albino Pierro grande lirico, Turin: Genesi, 2003. Ghiglione, Nicola, Pierro, Savona: Sabatelli, 1969. Manacorda, Giuliano, ‘‘Albino Pierroˆ,’’ in Vent’anni di pazienza: saggi sulla letteratura italiana contemporanea, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Marti, Mario (editor), Pierro al suo paese, Galatina: Congedo, 1985. Meccia, Rosa (editor), Il Transito del vento: il mondo e la poesia di Albino Pierro, Rome: Edizioni scientifiche italiane, 1989. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Albino Pierro,’’ in Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, and Cesare Vivaldi, ‘‘Calabria e Lucania,’’ in La poesia dialettale: dal Rinascimento a oggi, vol. 2, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Tisano, Vincenzo, Concordanze lemmatizzate delle poesie in dialetto tursitano di Albino Pierro, 2 vols., Pisa: Servizio editoriale universitario di Pisa, 1985. Spinelli, Tito, Basilicata, Brescia: La Scuola, 1987. Stussi, Alfredo, ‘‘Grammatica della poesia: Appunti sui versi tursiniani di Pierro,’’ Lingua e stile, 22:2 (1987), 295–305.

IPPOLITO PINDEMONTE (1753–1828) Within Italian neoclassicism, Ippolito Pindemonte is perhaps the greatest representative of the melancholic and meditative tradition that seeks inspiration for its own poetry in the private dimension of the contemplation of nature. Nourished by an

education marked by the study of the classics but meant at the same time to overcome the by-now manneristic repetitiveness of the Arcadia’s models, he proved open to Enlightenment innovations and to the ways the elegy was being shaped in Europe, 1445

IPPOLITO PINDEMONTE on the part of Thomas Gray, James Thomson, and Salomon Gessner, as well as one of their greatest Italian interpreters, Aurelio de’ Giorgi Bertola (1753–1798), who made Gessner’s idyllic poetry known through his translation and who was a poetic interlocutor of the first order with Pindemonte. It is precisely these readings that inspired the Poesie campestri (Country Poems), composed in the summer of 1785 in the villa of Avesa, near Verona, and a full expression of the tranquilly melancholic sensibility with which Pindemonte experienced his own nostalgic relation with a rustic classicality of the Virgilian and Theocritian type; this classicality was pursued in its presumed sentimental simplicity and taken up as a model for personal ethical conduct. The collection, published in a quasi-definitive form in 1788, includes the most famous of Pindemonte’s lyrics: ‘‘La solitudine’’ (Solitude), ‘‘Alla luna’’ (To the Moon), ‘‘La melanconia’’ (Melancholy), ‘‘La giovinezza’’ (Youth), ‘‘Le quattro parti del giorno’’ (The Four Parts of the Day); poems in which the pictorial descriptivism is a prelude to the search for a ‘‘sublime’’ intentionally reduced to a practice of life aristocratically dedicated to study, correspondence with literary friends, the pleasures of the countryside, the frequenting of literary salons from Padua to Venice that were animated by women who are both cultured and charming. The Poesie was followed, on the same theme, by Le prose campestri (Country Prose), conceived along with the Poesie but appearing for the first time together only in 1795; they emphasize the unity of an experience that has been protracted for a decade and that finds here, in the calm unfurling of prose that borrows from the examples of the Latin classics, its most mature expression. In between these two editions was the most decisive and demanding of the travels undertaken by Pindemonte: the grand tour, completed between 1788 and 1790, which brought him through the major European capitals, including Paris, where, together with Vittorio Alfieri, he became passionate about revolutionary principles, but where, shortly afterward, faced with Jacobin violence, he displayed the first germs of that existential skepticism that would henceforth dominate all of his future productions. The consequences of this can be seen with Abaritte (1790), a clearly autobiographical satirical novel in which cultural and political experiences are relived critically—adopting the narrative formula of the conte philosophique, in the manner of Voltaire’s Candide or Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas—and in which strong doubts 1446

are expressed over the possibility of putting into practice the enlightenment principle of human perfectibility; it sketches out, on the contrary, an ideal of life favorable to the private exercise of virtue as the path to happiness. Possessed of a poetic personality substantially different from that of Ugo Foscolo, whom he met in Venice, Pindemonte entered into tacit opposition with him in 1807, when he abandoned the alreadybegun I cimiteri (Cemeteries)—a short poem in four cantos and ottava rima inspired by meditations on Verona’s Camposanto—as soon as he realized that his younger rival, coming before him to the same theme, and in a certain sense ‘‘robbing’’ him of the idea, was about to publish Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchres). In the memory of their conversations, Foscolo dedicated his carme to Pindemonte, who, a stranger to any clamorous polemics, limited himself to responding with a letter in verse of the same title. Into this exquisitely neoclassical literary picture falls Pindemonte’s translation of the Odissea (The Odyssey), begun in 1806 and published in 1822, after 15 years of careful and constant labor; it was planned philologically according to the dictates of the Arcadia but quickly turned, in the wake of his friend Melchiorre Cesarotti, toward an idea of poetic re-creation intended to exalt the spirit of the original rather than its literal rendering, which was never neglected, however. Similar in this regard to his contemporary Vincenzo Monti, but more cautious than he in seeking to accommodate both demands, Pindemonte thus gave life to a poetic construction with subdued tones, far from Monti’s epicality and involved in a search for an adequate lexicon rather than syntactic novelty. A sort of melodious song relying on the repeated use of Latinisms that expressly reflects in Ulysses—the doubtful hero nostalgically yearning for homecoming rather than being drawn by the clamor of arms—a true quest for balance. The result is an undisputed expressive elegance that, notwithstanding some discontinuities, made Pindemonte’s translation canonical within the Italian school of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, paired with Monti’s translation of the Iliad.

Biography Ippolito Pindemonte was born on 13 November 1753, to a noble family in Verona. He attended the Collegio San Carlo in Modena along with his brother Giovanni, who was a man of letters and a tragedian, starting in 1765. He returned to Verona,

GUIDO PIOVENE where he attended the translating ‘‘school’’ of Giuseppe Torelli and Girolamo Pompei in 1771; traveled to Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Malta in 1778; and entered the Arcadia under the name of Polidete Melpomenio in 1779. Between 1788 and 1790, Pindemonte traveled throughout Europe, to Paris, London, Berlin, and Vienna. Napoleonic troops damaged his villa at Avesa in 1796, making it uninhabitable. He spent the rest of his life between Verona and Venice, with frequent brief trips in Northern Italy, to Milan, Piacenza, and Trieste, retiring to Verona in 1803. Pindemonte died in Verona on 18 November 1828. GILBERTO PIZZAMIGLIO Selected Works Collections Prose e poesie campestri, edited by Angiola Ferraris, Turin: Fo`gola, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Gibilterra salvata,’’ 1782. ‘‘La Fata Morgana,’’ 1784. ‘‘Poesie campestri,’’ 1788; reprinted with Le prose campestri, 1795. ‘‘La Francia,’’ 1789. ‘‘I Sepolcri: Versi di Ugo Foscolo e d’Ippolito Pindemonte,’’ 1807.

Prose Abaritte, 1790; as Abaritte, storia verissima, edited by Angiola Ferraris, 1987. Le prose campestri, 1795; revised with Poesie campestri, 1817.

Tragedies Ulisse, 1778. Arminio, 1804.

Translations Odissea di Omero, 1822; edited by Michele Mari, 2 vols., 1993.

Other Epistole in versi, 1805. Sermoni, 1819. Lettere a Isabella (1784–1828), edited by Gilberto Pizzamiglio, 2000.

Further Reading Bassi, Ottavia, Fra classicismo e romanticismo, Milan: Societa` Anonima Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1934. Binni, Walter, ‘‘Il ‘grave stil nuovo’ del Pindemonte,’’ in Preromanticismo italiano, Bari: Laterza, 1948. Cimmino, Nicola Fausto, Ippolito Pindemonte e il suo tempo, 2 vols., Rome: Edizioni Abete, 1968. Ebani, Nadia, I ‘‘Sepolcri’’ di Ippolito Pindemonte: Storia dell’elaborazione e testo critico, Verona: Edizioni Fiorini, 2002. Jonard, Norbert, ‘‘Pindemonte. Preromantique?’’ Re´vue de litte´rature compare´es, 46 (1972), 46–67. Maier, Bruno (editor), Lirici del Settecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1959.

GUIDO PIOVENE (1907–1974) Guido Piovene led a long and fruitful career as a novelist, journalist, and travel writer. As regards his novels, his work is characterized by a profound interest in the psychological portraiture of women and the repressive atmosphere of the modern Catholic Church, which demonizes sexual expression. The author is also recognized for his ability to explore the society of regional, non-urban Italy, specifically his native Veneto. Piovene’s travel writing and journalism reached a peak during the 1950s and early 1960s, with chronicles of his journeys to the Americas (North and South), as well as in Italy, and especially with his book-length essay concerning his work as a journalist throughout the Fascist ventennio, as the 20-year period between 1922 and 1943 is known.

Piovene’s debut, the collection of short stories entitled La vedova allegra (The Merry Widow, 1931) hinted at the depth of characterization that would come in later works. In the author’s oeuvre, the characters’ often tormented psychology and personal conflict are key attributes. Psychological torment reaches its climax in the prose work for which Piovene is best known, the epistolary novel Lettere di una novizia (Confession of a Novice, 1941). Like Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s lateseventeenth-century Les liaisons dangereuses, from which it draws its literary model and the aim of exposing the hypocrisy of bourgeois society, Piovene’s novel tells the story of Rita Passi through a series of exchanged letters. Traditionally, scholars have seen this novel as a contest between good and 1447

GUIDO PIOVENE evil; and, if Rita dies at the end, a victim to pneumonia contracted in prison, it is the retribution due an inveterate liar. The novel’s collected letters chart Rita’s progress from convent to prison. Most of the correspondence is between Rita and her confessor, Don Paolo, and many of the early letters document Rita’s unwillingness to take the veil, like Gertrude, Alessandro Manzoni’s acclaimed Monaca di Monza in I promessi sposi before her. What the letters lay bare is Rita’s defective and selective memory, not an exact historical chronology of events. The ‘‘truth’’ of the novel’s events is always suspect and always filtered through the psyche of the letter writer, Rita, her mother, her surrogate mother (the Mother Superior), and each of the epistolary interlocutors. When Rita was ten, the reader learns, she was sent to board at a convent in the Veneto. When she returns home for holiday at the age of 16, she and her mother discover friendship and intimacy, a happy event clouded by the mysterious death of a neighbor, Giuliano, whom Rita has befriended during the vacation. Appealing to Don Paolo’s sense of justice at what would be her monacazione forzata (forced vow-taking), Rita escapes from the convent. Once her identity is discovered, yet another mysterious and wrongful death occurs (that of Giacomo, the family groundskeeper) for which she will ultimately be held responsible. Rita is detained and tried for the murder of Giuliano, her first victim, found guilty and sentenced, and dies in prison. Both interior (that is, psychological) and exterior landscape are worthy of remark in Lettere di una novizia. Fog, so crucial an element in Piovene’s native Veneto, is everywhere present and matches the shroud that hides the truth that Rita, the accomplished prevaricator, dissembles. As the author himself said in his Introduction to the novel, ‘‘una delle bellezze di questa terra sono certamente le nebbie di vario e incerto colore, tanto che il paesaggio non giunge a definirsi per intero, che voglia essere tutti i paesaggi nell’infinito della sua ambiguita`’’ (the fogs of different and uncertain colors are one of the beauties of this area; so much so that the landscape cannot really define itself entirely, it is almost as if in the infinity of ambiguity it wants to be every landscape). Piovene’s protagonist, Rita, lives with him like the fog. Some of the themes advanced in Lettere di una novizia return in Le stelle fredde (The Cold Stars, 1970). Here troubled filial relationships unfold but, unlike the earlier work, not between mother and daughter but, rather, between father and son. The happier ending may in fact owe to this difference in gendered context. The novel begins with the 1448

protagonist narrator, fearing a loss of hearing, visiting his physician, where the novel’s principal theme of transformation appears. Humankind will become as larva surprised by the unannounced ‘‘avvento delle stelle fredde’’ (advent of the cold stars). Leaving his urban home and returning to the family villa, the narrator begins his meditation on death and stating that ‘‘il mondo esiste solo per essere catalogato’’ (the world exists only to be classified). This conclusion is not unlike that of the title character from Jorge Luis Borges’s 1942 short story ‘‘Funes, the Memorious.’’ The anthropology of travel writing constitutes the other half of Piovene’s literary career. In 1953, the RAI (Italy’s state-owned radio) engaged Piovene as a foreign correspondent for both print and radio journalism. Piovene brought his keen novelist’s eye to foreign as well as domestic travel. Piovene’s observations are self-avowedly those of a northern Italian visiting the rest of his country for the first time. These writings were collected in Viaggio in Italia (A Journey in Italy, 1957). The title is identical to that of Goethe’s famous text, dating from 1786, and Piovene is at his best when exploring those areas visited by the German poet: Vicenza and the Veneto at large. The musings from his subsequent trips to eastern bloc countries in Europa semilibera (In Search of Europe: Portraits of the Non-Communist West, 1973) to the Americas in De America (On America, 1953), as well as the Middle East in La gente che perde´ Gerusalemme (The People Who Lost Jerusalem, 1968), all of which display his eye for detail and cultural difference. Despite the climate of censorship during the Fascist period, Piovene worked consistently as a journalist. Facing down what he felt was ‘‘leftwing opportunism’’ in the 1950s that took aim at all ‘‘collaborators,’’ Piovene approached the problem of ‘‘collaboration’’ in his 1962 publication La coda di paglia (Feet of Clay), becoming one of the first writers in the postwar Italy to enter into a debate concerning an artist continuing to work and write throughout the Fascist regime. La coda di paglia has since become known as his ‘‘apology.’’

Biography Born in Vicenza, 27 July 1907, Guido Piovene spent most of his youth and adolescence in his native city, where he displayed an interest in classical literature and poetry from an early age. In 1925, he moved to Milan and, in 1929, completed his degree in lettere (literature and humanities.) As a

LUIGI PIRANDELLO journalist, Piovene wrote for the dailies Il corriere della sera and La stampa and, with Giuseppe De Robertis, served as the codirector for the literary review Pan from 1933 to 1935. In addition to his work as a novelist, he became known as a foreign correspondent and travel writer; his travels in and writings on North America were teamed with trips he took within Italy to places that, in the 1950s, were as foreign to the Veneto native as more farflung reaches of the world. Piovene won the Premio Strega for Le stelle fredde, 1970. In March 1974, he cofounded Il giornale nuovo with fellow journalist Indro Montanelli. Piovene died in London 12 November 1974. ELLEN NERENBERG Selected Works Collections Opere narrative, edited by Clelia Martignoni, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. I saggi, edited Luciano Simonelli, Milan: Mondadori, 1986–1990.

Fiction La vedova allegra, 1931. Lettere di una novizia, 1941; as Confession of a Novice, translated by Eithne Wilkins, 1950. La gazzetta nera, 1943. Pieta` contro pieta`, 1946. I falsi redentori, 1949. Le furie, 1963. Le stelle fredde, 1970. Idoli e ragione, 1975. Il ragazzo di buona famiglia, 1998.

Travel Writing De America, 1953. Viaggio in Italia, 1957.

La gente che perde´ Gerusalemme, 1968. Madame la France, 1967. Europa semilibera, 1973; as In Search of Europe: Portraits of the Non-Communist West, translated by John Shepley, 1975.

Other La coda di paglia, 1962.

Further Reading Afribo, Andrea, ‘‘Le case e le cose: Guido Piovene,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 23 (June 1996), 47–74. Catalano, Gabriele, Costanti tematiche nell’opera narrativa di Guido Piovene, Naples: Ferrero, 1974. De Nicola, Francesco, ‘‘Il viaggio in Italia di Guido Piovene: L’Italia negli anni Cinquanta,’’ in Da Ulysses a 2001: Odissea nello spazio. Il viaggio come motivo artistico nel XX secolo, edited by Giorgetta Revelli, Pisa: ETS, 2002. Gerbi, Sandro, Tempi di malafede: Una storia italiana tra fascismo e dopoguerra. Guido Piovene ed Eugenio Colorni, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Marchetti, Giuseppe, Invito alla lettura di Guido Piovene, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Parisi, Luciano, ‘‘I romanzi di Guido Piovene,’’ Testo, 22 (January–June 2001), 87–114. Pelosi, Olimpia, ‘‘Prodromi di una fine: Una rilettura de Le stelle fredde di Guido Piovene,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 18 (2000), 327–346. Rosso-Mazzinghi, Stefano (editor), Guido Piovene, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1980. Sommavilla, Guido, ‘‘Ierologia di Guido Piovene,’’ Letture, 31 (1976), 3–24, 87–110. Stella, Guido, ‘‘Guido Piovene saggista,’’ Humanitas, 30 (1975), 243–247. Strazzabosco, Stefano (editor), Guido Piovene tra idoli e ragione. Atti del convegno di Studi Vicenza, 24–26 novembre 1994, Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Zaczek, Barbara, ‘‘Guido Piovene’s Lettere di una novizia: Misreading a Nun,’’ in The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Memory of Emmanuel Hatzantonis, Chapel Hill, NC: Annali d’Italianistica, 1997.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO (1867–1936) Perhaps the most important episode in Luigi Pirandello’s life was his troubled marriage with Antonietta Portulano, the daughter of his father’s business partner. Antonietta, an introvert worn down by three pregnancies in the brief span of four years (1895 to 1899), was beset with paranoiac obsessions, some of which led her to accuse Luigi

of an incestuous relationship with their daughter. Another traumatic episode also left its mark on Pirandello’s work. As an adolescent, he witnessed a disturbing scene of adultery in a sort of morgue. It is from this incident, perhaps, that the motif of observing in his writing derives its strength. His years during World War I were marked by tension 1449

LUIGI PIRANDELLO and pain: his wife’s loss of her mental faculties; his mother’s death; his son Stefano’s capture as a prisoner of war; and his other son Fausto’s contraction of tuberculosis during his military service. The war, despite its nationalistic fac¸ade, was felt rather as a historical tragedy. An economic crisis altered Pirandello’s professional destiny: Formerly an independently wealthy poet and intellectual, he became a writer of theatrical works as well in order to support himself and his family. Today, however, from accounts of plays that have been lost, some even written for the renowned actress Eleonora Duse, we know that Luigi’s vocation for the theater began in his early youth. Some of these lost plays allude to the ‘‘play within the play’’ theme in their titles, such as Provando la commedia (Rehearsal of the Comedy), written in 1891. And yet the stage was seemingly peripheral in Pirandello’s early career. Luigi appeared to gravitate toward the role of poet and translator of Goethe, whose Roman Elegies he edited in 1896. Pirandello’s poetic production is noteworthy, in fact, for its sheer quantity, at least early in his career; from Mal giocondo (Painful Joy, 1889), whose emblematic title highlights the ruptures that characterize Pirandello’s universe, to Pasqua di Gea (Gea’s Easter, 1891); from Elegie renane (Rhenish Elegies, 1895) to Zampogne (Bagpipes, 1901). Pirandello was also concerned with the theoretical aspect of writing. From La menzogna del sentimento nell’arte (The Falsification of Sentiment in Art, 1890) to L’azione parlata (The Spoken Action, 1899), from Arte e scienza (Art and Science, 1908) to Illustratori, attori e traduttori (Illustrators, Actors, and Translators, 1908) and to Teatro e letteratura (1918; Theater and Literature), the Sicilian writer adopted an explicit attitude of skepticism and wariness toward the passage from written work to the stage, where the ‘‘translation’’ of the actor who interprets is an unfaithful ‘‘betrayal’’ of the poet’s original production. It would be ideal if the characters could walk out from the written page, as though from a painting, and come to life onstage! By way of compensation, he emphasized in these reflections his aversion to any form of literary mannerism. In 1908, Pirandello published L’umorismo (On Humor), a catalogue of the different modes of the comical in literature and aesthetics. Some of the models for his grotesque laugh are Socrates and Alessandro Manzoni, Orlando Furioso and Don Quixote, Dostoevskji and Schlegel. The essay leads to a debate with Benedetto Croce, to whom he provided a controversial response in the book’s reprinting in 1920. But the humoristic 1450

theory, according to dictates that go back to Giuseppe De Sanctis, does not help the character to become organic and unitary. Each one of us sees and is seen by others in a chaotic mixture of changeable visions. Liking and disliking, il sentimento del contrario (the feeling of the opposite), are directed towards the same object. Pirandello arrived late in life to the stage, when he was nearly 50 years old. In 1910 he became involved with the Metastasio of Rome, the Teatro Minimo under the direction of Nino Martoglio, where he staged Lumie di Sicilia (Sicilian Limes, 1911) and La morsa (The Vice, 1898). Among Pirandello’s narrative works are seven novels, in which we are presented with either provincial sketches or the newly urbanized Rome. It is a Rome shown predominantly through the whitecollar working class’s struggle during the economic crisis of the end of the nineteenth century. Thus we have L’esclusa (The Outcast, 1901), the story of a faithful wife accused of adultery and then taken back into the fold when she is in fact guilty, and Il turno (The Shift, 1902), a sexual farce that sees both young and old fight over and marry the desired girl in succession. There is also I vecchi e i giovani (The Old and the Young, 1909), a historical and generational novel in the vein of Federico De Roberto that exposes the author’s disenchantment. Pirandello’s mother, Caterina Ricci-Granata, belonged to traditional patriotic stock. This inheritance explains the author’s subsequent disillusionment with the newborn Italian state and provides the premise that pushed Pirandello to join the Fascist party shortly after Giacomo Matteotti’s disappearance in 1924. Suo marito (Her Husband, 1911) is an apologue about the career of a motherwriter (a thinly-masked Grazia Deledda) having difficulty reconciling natural pregnancies and literary creations. The trilogy of novels written in the first-person, Suo marito (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904), Si gira...then Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Shoot!, then Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, 1915), and Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No-One, and One Hundred-Thousand, 1925–1926), develops the figure of the narratorprotagonist, who in a total renunciation of self forsakes the world, his appetites, and his ambitions, only to throw himself thereafter into life with total abandon. Vitangelo Moscarda, the third of these ascetics, does precisely this, voluntarily seeking refuge in an institutional home after having donated all of his belongings. In short, the passage from the third-person narration of his first novels to the first-person narrative of the trilogy

LUIGI PIRANDELLO sees the lyric-self dissolve into woeful and euphoric moments. One thinks, for example, of the ending of the story of Vitangelo Moscarda, who declares emphatically that he dies and is reborn every day, becoming object, water, air, and sky, in an explicit homage to Gabriele D’Annunzio’s ‘‘Meriggio’’ (Midday). But a similar course parallel to the evolution from the naturalistic scene to the centrifugal force of the stage may be traced through his most important dramatic writings. And yet the frequent productions of his plays run up against the valorization of the unity of the character, thanks to the contribution of great actors whose reassuring charisma guarantees the restoration of the human figure. This same character, belonging to the more modern twentieth century, is instead a decentralized figure. It is, in fact, a character separated from the humoristic vision of his author. One needs to think only of the philosophical sitting room divided between the raisonneur, the thinking character, and the character tied to human desires, to the coherence of the self, to material wealth, to honor. This is the symbolic wound that undermines the foundation of the unity of the self, a character that is, on the other hand, projected into separate parts unmindful of their common origin. Moreover, the theatrical subject, if he hopes to become eternal, needs the body of the actor to become incarnate, without being satisfied with it. In effect, the only character who received the explicit approval of the author was the one who showed himself to be intimate with death, or with a grave illness, which was seen as grace rather than a curse. Perhaps he is already dead, like the philosopher at the center of Mistero profano, entitled All’uscita (Profane Mystery—At the Exit, 1916), first performed in 1922. Often it is illness—cancer in L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, 1926), tuberculosis in L’imbecille (The Imbecile, 1926)—that gives its victims the occasion to adopt an ironic view of human ambitions. Pirandello’s dramaturgy is articulated between his production in dialect of the years from 1910 to 1915 and the dialectical sitting room of 1916 to 1920, and then between the meta-theatrical trilogy of 1921 to 1930 and his final works dedicated to myths. His milieu consists on the one hand of the Futurist soire´es and Surrealism, and on the other of Expressionism with deformations a` la Georg Grosz, evident in the physical ruin reserved for the character’s body, especially for those worn down by internal tensions, as in Sagra del Signore della nave (The Festival of Our Lord of the Ship, 1924). This writing, torn between the differentiating forces

released by the birth of the cinema, appears suspended between two points, the need to impose itself on the tastes of the public and the need to transcend those tastes. What the Futurists had done, but only in brief episodes, Pirandello succeeded in doing within professional circles, transforming acting methods and the typologies of the audience. That his early characters at times speak in dialect can be traced to the Sicilian acting companies, especially those from Catania. But Pirandello was not enamored of the regional idiom because he was more drawn toward a conception of language that synthesizes local tradition and literary dignity and that tends toward a variety of commonly spoken Italian that softens the original dialect. From the very first works in dialect, the eccentric style characterized by a strong anthropological vein reorganizes the heritage of the vernacular. Hence we have the explosion of rural vitality in Liola`, staged in 1916, the only work for which he edited an edition in dialect the following year. Thus the legal quarrel over the broken jar, where the old protagonist holes himself up, in A Giarra (The Jar), performed in 1917, and the jinx who constructs a new statute of the necromancer on the marginalization inflicted upon him by the gossip in La patente (The License, 1918). Quite early in his career, however, the curtain would no longer rise on naturalistic settings but on a restless and agitated sitting room, that of the love-triangle in the French-derived style of Marco Praga. In the beginning, the subjects of these works are immersed in the conformist atmosphere of the nineteenth century in which the adulteress, tripped up by the suspicions of her husband, pays for her guilt by killing herself, as in La morsa, the result of an early draft conceived in 1892 and entitled The Epilogue. In turn, an adulterer must let himself die, as in Il dovere del medico (The Doctor’s Duty, 1912). In All’uscita, the love triangle had already undergone a sort of abstract multiplication: The lover does not want his lover’s husband to die lest he becomes, in turn, a victim of her betrayals with another man. In the same way Bellavita (Bellavita, 1928), which treats the relationship between two men, is colored with homosexual ambiguity and with references to Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband. The widower Bellavita torments his ex-rival and submits theatrically to his own cuckolding, unconcerned with the scandal created in the eyes of the conformists. Honor and betrayal here are parodies of each other, even more radically so than in the contemporaneous tradition of the grotesque, parodies intent on defusing the act of adultery that still conditions society and penal codes as well as 1451

LUIGI PIRANDELLO the melodramatic forms that nurtured it. Now, the faux pas of marital betrayal arises from the alternation between light-comic farce and the realistic drama of jealousy, so that the two registers become confused. At the center of this sitting room is a long series of raisonneurs, that is, those who do not live on the stage but instead limit themselves to watching others live. In short, the implacable commentators who sabotage any pretense of constructing a conformist mask, a sitting room coherence, or an existential certainty. Pirandello succeeds in transforming the role of the brilliant actor, which was subordinate in the nineteenth century, in the onstage protagonist. The raisonneur undermines the first actor, the romantic hero, who is most often humiliated and ridiculed by the plot. Lamberto Laudisi in Cosı´ e` (se vi pare) (Right You Are, If You Think So, 1918), the contemporary Angelo Baldovino in Il piacere dell’onesta` (The Pleasure of Honesty); Leone Gala in Il giuoco delle parti (The Rules of the Game, 1919), who makes fun of the audacity of the futurists; Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922), trapped in its simulated madness and in an artificial Middle Age: All are gifted with a detached view of the world, all are heroes of the dialectic theater, and all are argumentative men who unearth the contradictions between ideologies and hidden motives. Problematic and relativistic, this character shines a spotlight on the institution of marriage, uncovering (perhaps retrospective) faults, as in Tutto per bene (All for the Best, 1920), creating scandalous me´nages, as in Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think It Over, Giacomino!, 1917), or destroying family roles amidst animal-like deformities in L’uomo, la bestia e la virtu` (Man, Beast, and Virtue, 1919). But this raisonneur projects his own apocalyptic vocation onto the workings that support the play’s interpersonal communication and assure the consistency of the conflicts, causing the drama to lean precipitously toward meta-theatrical solutions. In Il berretto a sonagli (Cap and Bells, 1918), performed in its dialectal version in 1917, we already witness the allusive intrusions of the meta-scene, concurrent with the genesis of the philosopher—in this case Ciampa, the humble clerk. Thanks to the stratagem of the madness imposed on the mistress of the house, Ciampa avoids the crime of honor and rises to the level of solitary ‘‘director’’ of the final resolutions. An authentic spokesman for the author in his knowledge of the alternation of the expressive ‘‘cords,’’ he suggests gestures and lines to the other characters, not only to silence the chorus of gossips but also to make the curtain 1452

drop. The clownlike sneer with which Ciampa takes leave of his adversaries and moves to the background of the story, relegating the jealous wife to a psychiatric institute, is somewhat akin to the corrosive grimace of Enrico IV: In both plays one gains access to the solitude of the writer. Enrico IV uncovers the impossibility of penetrating the mystery of the ‘‘other,’’ and, even earlier, Lamberto Laudisi converses with himself in front of the mirror as though he were in front of another person in Cosı´ e` (se vi pare). But it is in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921) that reflection on the nature of the theater undermines the possibilities of interpersonal conflict, while the scene, based on the prudent and gossipy conversation, dissolves into fascinating images composed of horrific dreams and delirious confessions. Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise, 1930) affirms a systematic disunion that puts the Symbolist and Wagnerian dream of the total artwork into question. Film, jazz, religious procession, and cabaret collide with one another. Thus, lyric opera is consumed from within by means of a broken-down gramophone, while on the screen we see the mute image of the opera itself amidst the chatter of the characters and the furious protests of the minor characters. In this sense, Ciascuno a suo modo (Each in His Own Way, 1924) exalts an expansion beyond the Italian stage, an expansion already experienced through the syntheses of Marinetti and the futurists. Hinkfuss, the deformed director in Questa sera si recita a soggetto, acts as a seller of commercialized images and of sensations that can no longer be resisted. He is the crippled trafficcontroller who regulates the intersection of trances and awakenings between the stage and the viewers, the deus ex machina of the postmodern spectacle from which the theatrical representation can only be expelled. Pirandello’s theatrical creation is overturned, especially in this meta-theatrical strategy. Often, the actor and the subject coexist in the same character in a disturbed relationship: from Enrico IV and Questa sera si recita a soggetto to the last and incomplete I giganti della montagna (The Mountain Giants, 1931–1934), where the actors drag their roles along perplexedly, mixing them with portions of ‘‘live’’ dream sequences. The meta-theatrical turning point likewise liberates traumas much graver than the usual adulterous triangles. But at the same time, the theater is no longer at the center of the modern city of mass culture and totalitarian regimes. The play seems to be buried within the

LUIGI PIRANDELLO chaotic bedlam of the metropolis, where the crisis of the lyric-self calls for other techniques, more rapid and anxious, in order to manifest itself. On 4 April 1925, with the one-act play Sagra del Signore della nave, Pirandello inaugurated his Teatro d’Arte in Sala Odescalchi, in the presence of Benito Mussolini himself. It was here that the fatal meeting with Marta Abba, who would take over the company in 1929, occurred. In the meantime, Pirandello’s theater became ‘‘mythic,’’ and included, in addition to I giganti della montagna, La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1928) and Lazzaro (Lazarus, 1929). Private folly, archaic magic, and occult phenomena all made impressions of themselves on the internal walls of the strange abode, as in the whim-nightmares of Sogno (ma forse no) (A Dream. But Perhaps It’s Not, 1929). The subliminal adulterers are also seen in Non si sa come (You Don’t Know How, 1935). As Pirandello pursued baroque coups de the´aˆtre, the raisonneur of dialectic theater gradually disappeared. The father-author is definitively absent, condemned to sterility, to rigor mortis, as in Quando si e` qualcuno (When One Is Somebody, 1933); or to suicide, like the poet in I giganti della montagna, an idea that finds a sort of consecration in the nihilist request contained in the will of Pirandello himself, who wished to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea. Pirandello had no love for the vanity of his actors; hence the playwright’s gradual sabotage of the acting roles within the rigid hierarchies of the art companies for which he worked. In 1921, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore was produced by the most elegant company of the time and directed by the playwright Dario Niccodemi, in an atmosphere of white telephones and scarlet roses before its time (one thinks of Noel Coward), where the mystery of the characters introduces sinister deviances and lugubrious miasmas. In his last productions it was the female actress, Marta Abba, who played the part of inspiring muse and protagonist. For her, the writer created his last female roles: Tuda in Diana e la Tuda (Diana and Tuda, 1927) and Marta in L’amica delle mogli (The Wives’ Friend, 1927), Sara in Lazzaro, the unknown woman in Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me, 1930), Donata in Trovarsi (Finding Oneself, 1932), the Russian Veroccia in Quando si e` qualcuno; and she was the model for Ilse in I giganti della montagna. Previously, the character of the actress in Pirandello’s oeuvre was built around the stereotype of the vamp. Now the scheme is filled with renewed and

complex motivations: Mobility, impulsiveness, intolerance for bourgeois decor and masculine authority, the gift of self, trembling and disdainful sensuality, physical dissatisfaction, anxious inspiration, and disgust for the body are all inventions that coalesce in the culturally mythologized actor. In a prostitute like Spera in La nuova colonia, in a rebellious adulteress like Sara in Lazzaro, the process of transforming the material into the spiritual rises to an even more clamorous level. Perhaps demographic propaganda and Fascism’s incentives for a theater open to the masses can be the cultural points of reference for a similar ideology of the Medierranean mother. Nonetheless, thanks to Marta Abba, Pirandello’s last theatrical works seem to remotivate and establish themselves at the limits of this tormented devotion to this investigation of the ‘‘other,’’ which only a woman, and only an actress, can embody. A desperate love story lacking a physical outlet in the daughter-muse Marta, this is also the metaphorical horizon of the last writings. The most famous Italian playwright of the twentieth century had trouble being recognized in Italy, thanks to the opposition of the idealistic philosopher Benedetto Croce, Catholic criticism, and the press charge of ‘‘cerebralism.’’ Abroad, on the contrary, there were frequent debuts of several important plays. He was often invited to Europe, the United States, and South America—along with his companies, when he became a kind of actormanager starting in 1925. Today, he is present everywhere, on the playbills of every nation.

Biography Luigi Pirandello, born in the Sicilian town of Girgenti (Agrigento), 28 June 1867, completed his high school education in Palermo, where he began his literary studies at the university. He later transferred to Rome and then Bonn, 1889, and graduated with a dissertation on Sicilian phonetics and morphology, Sounds and Developments of Sounds in the Girgenti Dialect, 1891. Upon his return, Pirandello established himself in Rome and married Antonietta Portulano, 1894. Three children were born: Stefano, Lietta, and Fausto. He collaborated on a number of publications: Il Marzocco, from 1897; Ariel, from 1898; Nuova antologia, 1902; and Il corriere della sera, from 1909. He was a professor of Italian language and stylistics at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero in Rome, 1897–1922. Pirandello joined the Partito Nazionale Fascista, 1924. He was inducted to the newly created 1453

LUIGI PIRANDELLO Accademia d’Italia, 1929. The staging of La favola del figlio cambiato (The Changeling), set to music by Malipiero, took place in Braunschweig (Germany), where he was accused of attacks on the Nazis, 1934. Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize, 1934. He died in Rome, 10 November 1936. PAOLO PUPPA Selected Works Collections Three Plays, London: Dent, 1922; contains Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV, translated by Edward Storer; Right You Are! (If You Think So), translated by Arthur Livingston. One Act Plays, edited by Arthur Livingston, New York: Dutton, 1928; contains The Imbecile, Our Lord of the Ship, The Doctor’s Duty, At the Gate translated by Blanche Valentine Mitchell; The Judgment of Court, Chee-Chee, The Vice, The House and the Column, translated by Elisabeth Abbott; The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, The Jar, translated by Arthur Livingston. Tutti i romanzi, edited by Giovanni Macchia and Mario Costanzo, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Three Plays, introduced by John Linstrum, London: Methuen, 1985; contains The Rules of the Game, translated by Robert Rietty and Noel Cregeen; Henry IV, translated by Julian Mitchell; Six Characters in Search of an Author, translated by John Linstrum. Maschere nude, edited by Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1958; new edition, edited by Alessandro D’Amico et al., 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1986–2004. Collected Plays, general editor Robert Rietty, London: John Calder, 1987; contains Henry IV, translated by Robert Rietty and John Warle; The Man with the Flower in His Mouth, translated by Gigi Gatti and Terry Doyle; Right You Are (If You Think So), translated by Bruce Penman; Lazarus, translated by Frederic May. Collected Plays, general editor Robert Rietty, London-New York: John Calder and Riverrun Press, 1988; contains Six Characters in Search of an Author, translated by Felicity Firth; All for the Best, translated by Henry Reed; Clothe the Naked, translated by Diane Cilento. Pirandello’s Major Plays, translated by Eric Bentley, Evanston-Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1991; contains Right You Are; Six Characters in Search of an Author; Emperor Henry; The Man with the Flower in His Mouth. Tutto il teatro dialettale di Luigi Pirandello, edited by Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, 2 vols., Milan: Bompiani, 1993; as His Plays in Sicilian, translated by Joseph F. Privitera, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1998.

Plays L’epilogo-La morsa (produced 1910), 1898. Il dovere del medico (produced 1913), 1912. All’uscita (produced 1922), 1916. Liola` (dialect version produced 1916), 1917. Pensaci, Giacomino! (produced 1920), 1917.

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Cosı´ e` (se vi pare) (produced 1917), 1918; as Right You Are, translated by Eric Bentley, 1954; as Right You Are (If You Think You Are), edited by William-Alan Landes, 2002. Il piacere dell’onesta`, 1918. Il berretto a sonagli (produced 1923), 1918; as Cap and Bells, translated by John and Marion Field, 1974. Il giuoco delle parti (produced 1918), 1919; edited by E. Martin Browne as The Rules of the Game, with The Life I Gave You and Lazarus translated by Frederick May, 1959; as The Rules of the Game, translated and adapted by David Hare, 1993. L’uomo, la bestia e la virtu` (produced 1919), 1919; as Man, Beast and Virtue, translated by Charles Wood, 1989. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (produced 1921), 1921; as Six Characters in Search of an Author, translated by Mark Musa, 1995. Enrico IV (produced 1922), 1922; as Henri IV, translated by Julian Mitchell, 1979; edited by William-Alan Landes, 1999; new adaptation by Robert Brustein based on a translation by Gloria Castorino, 2002. Sagra del Signore della nave (produced 1925), 1924. Ciascuno a suo modo (produced 1924), 1924; as Each in His Own Way, and Two Other Plays, translated by Arthur Livingston, 1923; it includes The Pleasure of Honesty and Naked. L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (produced 1923), 1926. Diana e la Tuda (produced 1927), 1927; as Diana and Tuda, translated by Marta Abba, 1950. L’amica delle mogli (produced 1927), 1927; as The Wives’ Friend, translated by Marta Abba, 1949. La nuova colonia (produced 1928), 1928. Lazzaro (produced 1929), 1929; as Lazarus, translated by Phyllis H. Raymond, 1952. Come tu mi vuoi (produced 1930), 1930; as As You Desire Me, translated by Samuel Putnam, 1931. Questa sera si recita a soggetto (produced 1930), 1930; as Tonight We Improvise, translated by Samuel Putnam, 1932; revised and rewritten by Marta Abba, 1960; as Tonight We Improvise, with ‘‘Leonora, addio!,’’ translated by J. Douglas Campbell and Leonard G. Sbrocchi, 1987. I giganti della montagna (produced 1937), 1931–1934; as The Mountain Giants and Other Plays, translated by Marta Abba, 1958. Trovarsi (produced 1932), 1932; as To Find Oneself, translated by Marta Abba, 1943. Quando si e` qualcuno (produced 1933), 1933; as When One Is Somebody, translated by Marta Abba, 1956. Non si sa come (produced 1935), 1935; as No One Knows How, translated by Marta Abba, 1949.

Short Stories ‘‘Novelle per un anno,’’ 1922; edited by Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti, 2 vols., 1937–1938; new ed., 3 vols., 1985–1990; as Short Stories, translated by Lily Duplaix, 1959; translated by Frederick May, 1987.

Novels L’esclusa, 1901; 1908; as The Outcast, translated by Leo Ongley, 1925. Il turno, 1902. Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904; as The Late Mattia Pascal, translated by Arthur Livingston, 1923; translated by William Weaver, 1964.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO I vecchi e I giovani, 1909, 1913; as The Old and the Young, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, 1928. Suo marito, 1911; then Giustino Roncella nato Boggio`lo, 1941; as Her Husband, translated by Martha King and Mary Ann Frese Witt, 2000. Si gira..., 1915; then Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore, 1925; as Shoot! (si gira) the Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, 1926. Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1925–1926, 1926, as One, None, and a Hundred-Thousand, translated by Samuel Putnam, 1983; as One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, translated by William Weaver, 1990.

Poetry ‘‘Elegie romane’’ (translated from Goethe), 1896. ‘‘Mal giocondo,’’ 1889. ‘‘Pasqua di Gea,’’ 1891. ‘‘Elegie renane,’’ 1895. ‘‘Zampogna,’’ 1901. ‘‘Scamandro,’’ 1909. ‘‘Fuor di chiave,’’ 1912.

Other Arte e scienza, 1908. L’umorismo, 1908, then 1920; as On humor, translated by Antonio Illiano and Daniel P. Testa, 1974. Saggi, poesie, scritti varii, edited by Manlio Lo VecchioMusti, 1977. Lettere a Marta Abba, edited by Benito Ortolani, 1995.

Further Reading Aguirre D’Amico, Maria Luisa, Vivere con Pirandello, Milan: Mondadori, 1989. Angelini, Franca (editor), Il punto su Pirandello, RomeBari: Laterza, 1992. Bassnett, Susan, ‘‘Pirandello and Translation,’’ Pirandello Studies (Coventry), Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies, 20 (2000), 9–17. Bassnett, Susan, and Jennifer Lorch (editors), Luigi Pirandello in the Theatre: A Documentary Record, London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1993. Biasin, Gian Paolo, and Manuela Gieri, Luigi Pirandello: Contemporary Perspectives, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1999. Borsellino, Nino, Ritratto e immagini di Pirandello, RomeBari: Laterza, 1991. Caesar, Ann, Characters and Authors in Luigi Pirandello, Oxford-New York: Clarendon Press, 1998. Callari, Francesco, Pirandello e il cinema: Con una raccolta completa degli scritti teorici e creativi, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Dashwood, Julie (editor), Luigi Pirandello: The Theatre of Paradox, New York: Mellen, 1996. Donati, Corrado, Il sogno e la ragione: Saggi pirandelliani, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1993. Donati, Corrado, and Anna T. Ossani, Pirandello nel linguaggio della scena: Materiali bibliografici dai quotidiani italiani (1962–1990), Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Gieri, Manuela, Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion. Pirandello, Fellini, Scola, and the Directors of the New Generation, Toronto-BuffaloLondon: University of Toronto Press, 1995.

Gioviale, Fernando, La poetica narrativa di Pirandello: Tipologia e aspetti del romanzo, Bologna: Patron, 1984. Giudice, Gaspare, Pirandello, Turin: Utet, 1963; as Pirandello: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Gu¨nsberg, Maggie, Patriarchal Representation: Gender and Discourse in Pirandello’s Theatre, Oxford-Providence: Berg, 1994. Lauretta, Enzo, Luigi Pirandello: Storia di un personaggio ‘fuori di chiave,’ Milan: Mursia, 1980. Livio, Gigi, La scena italiana: Materiali per una storia dello spettacolo dell’Otto e Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1989. Puppa, Paolo, Dalle parti di Pirandello, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Puppa, Paolo, La parola alta: Il teatro di Pirandello e D’Annunzio, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1993. Ragusa, Olga, Luigi Pirandello: An Approach to His Theatre, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980. Taviano, Stefania, and Lorch, Jennifer, ‘‘Producing Pirandello in England,’’ Pirandello Studies (Coventry), Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies, 20 (2000), 18–30. Vicentini, Claudio, L’estetica di Pirandello, Milan: Mursia, 1970. Vicentini, Claudio, Pirandello: Il disagio del teatro, Venice, Marsilio, 1993.

I GIGANTI DELLA MONTAGNA, 1934 (UNFINISHED) Play by Luigi Pirandello

Pirandello first conceived I giganti della montagna (The Mountain Giants) after his Teatro d’Arte broke up in Viareggio. The first draft was begun between April 1930 and March 1931. The first and second parts, entitled ‘‘Fantasmi’’ (Ghosts), were published in La nuova antologia on 16 December 1931 and were included in Drama on 15 March 1932. In the summer of 1933, the third part, which derived from his short story, ‘‘Lo storno e l’Angelo Centuno’’ (The Starling and Angel Centuno, 1910), was published in the November issue of Quadrante (1934). The last part, corresponding to the third act, was never written, and only an outline remains. Pirandello’s son, Stefano, completed it based on instructions he received from his dying father. I giganti della montagna borrows 1455

LUIGI PIRANDELLO some elements from Alessandro De Stefani’s I pazzi sulla montagna (The Madmen on the Mountain), a play that Pirandello premiered in 1926 and that features Harlequin leading a revolt in an asylum against the normal people. There are also elements from I pazzi (The Madmen, 1922), by the Neapolitan writer and playwright Roberto Bracco, and from Gli dei della montagna (The Gods of the Mountain, 1917) by the Irish Lord Dunsany, the first play to be performed by Pirandello’s company at the Odescalchi Theater in 1925. All these plays are characterized by a slew of discussions against science. I giganti della montagna may be considered a thematic encyclopedia of Pirandello’s entire oeuvre. In the play, a company of actors that has been rejected by the theaters, led by the countess Ilse, arrives at the Villa of the Scalognati, a strange and miserable people who live only on illusions and dreams. The players are in search of a new audience. They were invited by the Giants, a mythical community who live on the mountaintops. Unfortunately, the text is interrupted right before this mysterious performance in front of the Giants. The whole scene in the Arsenal of the Apparitions is based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Cotrone, the director of the Villa of the Scalognati, is the Puck figure, though his character also draws heavily on The Tempest’s Prospero. The Villa, which is inhabited by spirits, is taken from Pirandello’s meta-theatrical short story ‘‘La casa del Granella’’ (Granella’s House, 1905). Cotrone, the guardian of the lunatics, is actually a director playing with shadows, just as Pirandello did at his Teatro d’Arte. He is a raisonneur, exalting the Nietzschean-Bergsonian intuitive experience and deploring the principle of individualization. I giganti della montagna incorporates La favola del figlio cambiato (The Changeling-Boy, 1933), though Pirandello’s original intention was to have involved Come tu mi vuoi (As You Want Me, 1930), of which some features are indeed retained. For instance, the actor Battaglia’s homosexuality can be traced to the lesbian character, Mop. The tension between the Countess Ilse and her husband arises from the man’s claim that Love can ward off Time. I giganti della montagna inhabits the mythical world of late Pirandello and is one of his metatheatrical works. Ilse, the idealized double of the Red Lady (a character from the Favola set among the Scalognati), is sleepy and sexually compliant. But she is also the emulator of the old Sgricia. Indeed, if the play’s hypothetical ending did not 1456

call for Ilse to be torn to pieces, she might have become another of the miserable lunatics trapped in her own reveries. As it stands, Ilse combines various roles: leading actress (a tribute to Pirandello’s beloved Marta Abba); wife in a marital crisis; stage manager; and mother, who performs in the Favola in order to please the poet, who is suicidal because she has refused him. We should also note the presence in the play of the Hegelian idea of the death of Art in the modern metropolis, marked by mass society and totalitarian government. The other actors in the company are typical of those of the 1930s—Cromo, for instance, conceives of the theater as a business. As for the Scalognati, they combine themes borrowed from late-Romantic culture with the Symbolist and Surrealist traditions. When they privilege the night, they are monstrous freaks. Their awful bodies exhibit some elements of Positivism, which exists within an atmosphere of idealism brought about by their feverish anticipations of the night. Pirandello here showed the influence of his philosophical apprenticeship with Henri Bergson and Gabriel Se´ailles and examined the difference between dream and art. In this process of isolation and imagination, the puppets in the Arsenal of the Apparitions are walk-on partners that can be put to any use, save that of becoming motionless presences to the unfamiliar eye. Pirandello borrowed these animated shapes from the avant-garde, especially from Massimo Bontempelli, who introduced the collaboration of actors and puppets in Siepe a nord Ovest (Hedge to Northwest, 1919). I giganti della montagna was performed posthumously on 5 June 1937 in the Florentine Boboli Gardens, under the direction of Renato Simoni. PAOLO PUPPA Editions First edition: I giganti della montagna, in Maschere nude, 3:10, Milan: Mondadori, 1938; and in Maschere nude, 8:2, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Translations: as The Mountain Giants and Other Plays, translated by Marta Abba, New York: Crown Publishers, 1958; as The Mountain Giants, translated by Felicity Firth, in The Yearbook of The British Pirandello Society 10, 1990; as The Mountain Giants, translated by Charles Wood, Bath, England: Absolute Classics, 1993.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, Missiroli: ‘‘I giganti della montagna’’ di Luigi Pirandello, Turin: Multimmagini, 1980.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO Artioli, Umberto, L’officina segreta di Pirandello, RomeBari: Laterza, 1989. Aste, Mario, Two Novels of Pirandello, Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1979. Bisicchia, Andrea, ‘‘Giorgio Strehler’s Production of I giganti della montagna in the Context of Its Performance History: An Examination of the Aesthetic Potential of the Stage,’’ The Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies (Birmingham), 11 (1991), 1–25. Bradby, David, and Enzo Cozzi, ‘‘On Directing The Mountain Giants,’’ The Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies (Birmingham), 11 (1991), 26–31. Buonanno, Giovanna, ‘‘I giganti della montagna, dalla dissoluzione del Teatro d’Arte alla rappresentazione del Maggio fiorentino,’’ Il castello di Elsinore, 8 (1990), 71–107. Dashwood Julie, ‘‘Pirandello’s Myth Plays,’’ The Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies (Birmingham), 12 (1992), 64–77. Gardair, Jean Michel, Fantasmes et logique du double, Paris: Larousse, 1972. Illiano, Antonio, Metapsichica e letteratura in Pirandello, Florence: Vallecchi, 1982. Pupo, Ivan, Un frutto bacato: Studi sull’ultimo Pirandello, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002. Puppa, Paolo, Fantasmi contro giganti: Scena e immaginario in Pirandello, Bologna: Patron, 1978. Savinio, Alberto, Palchetti romani, Milan: Adelphi, 1982.

suicide, which may explain the repeated appearance of this theme in the book. Despite his desire for success in life, Mattia becomes only an invisible narrator. The book itself is something between a picaresque novel and a bildungsroman. This Italian Tom Jones is initially too busy using money and energy in his pursuit of women and love, a pursuit which anticipates Liola` (1916) and its libertine protagonist. But under the sadistic direction of the author (his double), Mattia finally abandons his dream of a happy ending. Unlike later Pirandellian characters, he is human and not angelic. He even has an operation on his eye in order to become more normal, thus sacrificing the magical powers thought to be a feature of strabismus. This eye had in fact helped him when his terrible mother-in-law was assaulting him. Looking at himself in the mirror, he had discovered the virtue of humor and laughed at his own tears, since his wandering eye was looking in another direction. This scene is perhaps a tribute to Alberto Cantoni, the Scapigliato writer. That Mattia invents a new name and rewrites his life shows us that he is a figure of the writer and foreshadows the novel’s ending, when Mattia writes a book about his adventures. PAOLO PUPPA

IL FU MATTIA PASCAL, 1904 Novel by Luigi Pirandello

With its unexpected plot twists and alternation of love and death, Il fu Mattia Pascal has many features of the popular novel. It also contains neogothic elements, such as the large number of dead bodies, a symbol that appears again in the se´ances conducted by the Paleari family. The exotic/erotic language of the se´ance anticipates the character of Madame Pace in Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore. After the se´ance, Mattia begins to wonder whether the incredible events he has experienced have been orchestrated by the drowned man whose identity he had stolen. The events themselves seem to fall somewhere between tricks and metaphysical hypotheses. In the course of writing this novel, Pirandello suffered from depression and entertained thoughts of

Editions First edition: Il fu Mattia Pascal, issued in Nuova Antologia, 16 April–16 June 1904, then Rome: Edizioni della Nuova Antologia, 1904; Milan: Treves, 1910 and 1918; reprinted with an Appendix, ‘‘Avvertenza sugli scrupoli della fantasia,’’ Florence: Bemporad, 1921. Critical edition: Tutti i romanzi, edited by Giovanni Macchia and Mario Costanzo, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1973 (it reports all the 1904, 1910, 1918, and 1921 variations). Translations: as The Late Mattia Pascal, translated by Arthur Livingston, New York: Dutton, 1923; translated by William Weaver, Garden State, NY: Doubleday, 1964; translated by Nicoletta Simborowski, London: Dedalus-New York: Hippocrene, 1987; translated by W. Weaver, Hygiene, CO: Eridanos Press, 1987; translated by W. Weaver, London: Andre´ Deutsch, 1993.

Further Reading Borsellino, Nino, ‘‘Il manoscritto del ‘Fu Mattia Pascal,’’’ in Ritratto e immagini di Pirandello, Rome-Bari: Laterza 1991. Cudini, Piero, ‘‘‘Il fu Mattia Pascal’: Dalle fonti chamissiane e zoliane alla nuova struttura narrativa di Luigi Pirandello,’’ Belfagor, 6 (1971), 702–714. De Benedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971.

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LUIGI PIRANDELLO Donati, Corrado, La solitudine allo specchio, Rome: Lucarini, 1980. Ferrario, Edoardo, L’occhio di Mattia Pascal: Poetica ed estetica in Pirandello, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Gardair, Jean-Michel, Il fu Mattia Pascal di Luigi Pirandello, Pesaro: Metauro, 2001. Kezich, Tullio, Il fu Mattia Pascal di Tullio Kezich da Luigi Pirandello, Rome: Officina, 1986. Lauretta, Enzo (editor), Lo strappo nel cielo di carta: Introduzione alla lettura del Fu Mattia Pascal, Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1988. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, Pirandello nel romanzo europeo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Giovanni Episcopo e Mattia Pascal,’’ in La parola alta: Sul teatro di Pirandello e D’Annunzio, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Saccone, Antonio, La biblioteca del Fu Mattia Pascal, in Gianvito Resta, Luoghi e paesaggi nella narrativa di Luigi Pirandello, Rome: Salerno, 2002. Sedita, Luigi, La maschera del nome: Tre saggi di onomastica pirandelliana, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1988. Stella, John, ‘‘Mattia Pascal and the Tragedy of Being,’’ in The Yearbook of the Society for Pirandello Studies (Birmingham), 15–16(1995–1996), 34–53. Stocchi-Perucchio, Donatella, Pirandello and the Vagaries of Knowledge: A Reading of ‘‘Il fu Mattia Pascal,’’ Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1991.

NOVELLE PER UN ANNO, 1922–1937 Short Stories by Luigi Pirandello

Novelle per un anno (Stories for a Year) is Pirandello’s title for his collection of short stories, a title that implies the reading of one story a day for one year. He wrote stories for much of his adult life, beginning in 1894 and continuing until his death in 1936. These stories encompass a vast array of events and characters that could function as a reservoir he drew upon for his theatrical works. They also represent an apprenticeship in the craft of expressing a spoken language that was suitable for the stage and spanned several different registers, from his initial Naturalism and sketches in the style of Verga, like the first story ‘‘Capannetta’’ (The Little Hut, 1884), to the metaphysical and surrealistic prose of his later work. The early 1458

stories’ frequent theme of love gradually gives way to a concern with death. Pirandello’s characters must usually confront economic hardships and physical and moral humiliations, so that life becomes unbearable. Set for the most part within the Agrigento–Rome axis, these novelle present us with bleak de´cors, the pitiless hostilities of social authorities, belligerent neighbors, and colleagues caught up in continuous lawsuits and conflicts. The protagonist of his pre–First World War stories, often depicted as a wretched bureaucrat beset by the backwardness of southern Italy and the impoverishment of the lower classes, must face overwhelming responsibility and sudden illnesses. Typical of this period is the shocking situation of ‘‘La camera in attesa’’ (The Waiting Room, 1916), in which families and loved ones wait in vain for the return of the dead. Dreams and madness, neurosis and superstition, the suicide’s desires and escape from the world— all depict a domestic hell and the alienating workplace. From ‘‘Il professor terremoto’’ (Professor Earthquake, 1910), ‘‘La trappola’’ (The Trap, 1912), and ‘‘Tu ridi’’ (You’re Laughing, 1912) to ‘‘Il treno ha fischiato’’ (The Train Whistled, 1914) and ‘‘Rimedio: La geografia’’ (Remedy: Geography, 1920), the human race appears doomed, alienated by the flow of life, and ‘‘fixed’’ for death, as in ‘‘La morte addosso’’ (Death to Tail, 1918). After the war, Pirandello’s horizon widened: Paranoid fantasies, vague desires, hidden grudges, and sexual phobias surface in ‘‘Puberta`’’ (Puberty, 1926) and ‘‘I piedi sull’erba’’ (Feet on the Grass, 1934), but, on the whole, the stories evoke a deeper pessimism than the plays. Pirandello’s protagonist, a poor biblical Job, sometimes chooses other means of escape. He regards himself from a distance in space and time, through the wrong end of a telescope, as Doctor Fileno does in ‘‘La tragedia di un personaggio’’ (The Tragedy of a Character, 1911), when his grief for a daughter’s death is too much to bear; he may detach himself, as in ‘‘Quando si e` capito il gioco’’ (When the Game’s Been Understood, 1913); or he may turn to the realm of play, as in ‘‘La carriola’’ (The Wheelbarrow, 1917). Other Pirandellian characters visit the small study of the author, who is initially disguised as a lawyer, and emerge on their own in search of a more complete script and eternal existence. There are three phases of this trope, corresponding to three meta-theatrical stories: ‘‘I personaggi’’ (The Characters, 1906), ‘‘La tragedia del personaggio,’’ and ‘‘I due colloqui coi personaggi’’ (Two Interviews with the Characters,

LUIGI PIRANDELLO 1915). In 1936, the same theme resurfaces in ‘‘Visita’’ (A Visit), when an attractive dead lady appears in the author’s memory as a kind of artistic savior. The lawyer-writer can hardly tolerate his petitioners, though he does so with a dose of humor. Meanwhile, Pirandello entertained himself by confuting the hypotheses of science and spiritualism, which were mocked in ‘‘La casa del Granella’’ (Granella’s House, 1905), ‘‘Dal naso al cielo’’ (From the Nose to the Sky, 1907), and ‘‘Sopra e sotto’’ (Above and Below, 1914). In the final short stories, which include ‘‘Di sera, un geranio’’ (At Night, a Geranium, 1934), ‘‘Effetti di un sogno interrotto’’ (Effects of an Interrupted Dream, 1936), and ‘‘Una giornata’’ (A Day, 1936), Pirandello’s surrealist disorientations reach a climax: Mirrors, windows, pictures become the magical aspects of a sheer bedlam. To distinguish between those who watch and those who are being watched, or rather between the external eye and the glimpsed image, is no longer possible. PAOLO PUPPA Editions Collections Novelle per un anno, Florence: Bemporad, 1922–1937; edited by Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1937–1938; edited by Giuseppe Morpurgo, Milan: Mondadori, 1951; as Amori senza amore: Tutti i racconti esclusi dalle‘Novelle per un anno,’ edited by Giovanni Macchia, Milan: Mondadori, 1989; edited by Giovanni Macchia and Mario Costanzo, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1985, 1987, 1990; edited by Luigi Sedita, 6 vols., Milan: Garzanti, 1993–1994.

by Frederick May, London-New York: Oxford University Press, 1965, paperback edition, 1975; as Stories, translated by Lily Duplaix, Franklin Center, PA: Franklin Library, 1959; as Tales of Madness: A Selection from Luigi Pirandello’s Short Stories for a Year, translated and introduced by Giovanni R. Bussino, Brookline Village, MA: Dante University of America Press, 1984; translated by Frederick May, London: Quartet, 1987; as Tales of Suicide: A Selection from Luigi Pirandello’s Short Stories for a Year, translated and introduced by Giovanni R. Bussino, Brookline Village, MA: Dante University of America Press, 1988.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La barriera del naturalismo, Milan: Mursia, 1964. Bonifazi, Nereo, Teoria del fantastico e il racconto del fantastico in Italia: Tarchetti-Pirandello-Buzzati, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Giovanelli, Paola Daniela, Dicendo che hanno un corpo: Saggi pirandelliani, Modena: Mucchi, 1994. Lugnani, Lucio, L’infanzia felice, Naples: Liguori, 1982. Milioto, Stefano (editor), Le novelle di Pirandello, Agrigento: Centro Nazionale di Studi Pirandelliani, 1980. Puppa, Paolo, Fantasmi contro giganti: Scena e immaginario in Pirandello, Padova: Patron, 1987. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Il sogno pirandelliano tra simbolismo e surrealismo’’ and ‘‘Pirandello e oltre,’’ in Dalle parti di Pirandello, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Terracini, Benvenuto, Analisi stilistica: Teoria, storia problemi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966. Zangrilli, Franco, L’arte novellistica di Pirandello, Ravenna: Longo, 1983. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah (editor), Pirandello in guanti gialli: Con scritti sconosciuti o rari e mai raccolti in volume, 2nd ed., Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 1988.

First Editions Amori senza amore, Rome: Bontempelli, 1894. Beffe della morte e della vita, Florence: Lumachi, 1902; second series, 1903. Quand’ero matto, Turin: Streglio, 1902; new edition, Milan: Treves, 1919. Bianche e nere, Turin: Streglio, 1904. Erma bifronte, Milan: Treves, 1906. La vita nuda, Milan: Treves, 1910. Terzetti, Milan: Treves, 1912. Le due maschere, Florence: Quattrini, 1914; as Tu ridi, Milano: Treves, 1920. La trappola, Milan: Treves, 1915. Erba del nostro orto, Milan: Studio Editoriale Lombardo, 1915. E domani, lunedı`, Milan: Treves, 1917. Un cavallo nella luna, Milan: Treves, 1918. Berecche e la guerra, Milan: Facchi, 1919. Il carnevale dei morti, Florence: Battistelli, 1919.

Translations as Short Stories, translated by Lily Duplaix, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959; translated and introduced

QUADERNI DI SERAFINO GUBBIO OPERATORE, 1915 Novel by Luigi Pirandello

Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator) is the second book in Pirandello’s trilogy of novels narrated in the first person. It was originally 1459

LUIGI PIRANDELLO published in installments as Si Gira! (Shoot!, 1915). This title may convey an impression of fluidity and realistic communication, but Pirandello’s style was quite distinct from the twentieth-century mode of stream-of-consciousness narration adopted by many writers. His humorous narrative technique involved tearing the character apart and disrupting the story. In this novel, he showed disdain for the advent of machines in modern life and saw the cameraman reduced to a mere hand turning a crank. The dramatic ending is not unlike the most violent grand guignol, mixed with a touch of the feuilleton and the me´lo. In a scene that was supposed to be staged, the exotic Russian actress, Varia Nestoroff, symbolizing the kind of woman who wants men to see her as a soul and spirit, not just a body, is killed by her jealous lover, Aldo Nuti. Nuti is then torn to pieces and devoured by a tiger representing Varia’s double. Serafino Gubbio, who may be merely the hand that turns the cinematograph, is so shocked by this violent scene that he loses his voice. He decides to write in order to compensate for his muteness. He observes the relationships among the various characters around him—their passions, intrigues, ambitions, and vanities. The story is also an investigation of a new industry, the cinema, and into the suffocating atmosphere of the new metropolis, which is represented by the Kosmograph Production Company, where Serafino works. ‘‘Kosmograph’’ means explicitly writing about the world. The sets are described as being covered with hanging strips of film, which resemble the viscera of a human corpse. There are many direct references to the body and its imperfections (illness, old age, madness, death, even excrement). The characters are frequently compared to animals: The jealous Carlo Ferro is a bear; Luisetta, who is in love with Aldo Nuti, is a butterfly; Nuti himself is a mouse. But Serafino appears to be more ascetic than any earlier Pirandellian character (Mattia Pascal, for instance). For one, his name makes us think of an angel. And another instance comes when he tries to erase his childhood memories during his trip to Sorrento at the end of the sixth notebook. In the old house of his grandparents, Serafino wants to challenge Chronos and obtain a sort of masochistic satisfaction by contemplating his horrendous shape. This is a ‘‘metamorphosisnovel,’’ where the past becomes unrecognizable to the protagonist and distorts both the sweet Duccella and the protective grandmother, Rosa, into grotesque figures, who are described as maggots 1460

close to death. This effect evokes Act V of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in which the gravediggers play with the skulls of the famous. In the Quaderni, Serafino’s physical appearance is factually erased. Any character who might suggest a paternal figure, or a sociocultural authority, suffers a dethronement. The other characters, attracted to Gubbio’s emptiness, are rather like the clients knocking on the door of the lawyerwriter in Pirandello’s meta-theatrical stories. Serafino regards them with an attitude somewhere between the impassive observation produced by the cinematograph and the pity he feels for the characters who are destined to die. When Serafino must defend himself from the anxiety he experiences at seeing Varia or Luisetta, he renounces the world by losing his voice, a symbol of the individual. He writes a mournful piece halfway between a philosophical diary and digressive tract in the style of Tristram Shandy on the vanity of the passions. PAOLO PUPPA Editions First edition: Si gira... (Shoot...), in Nuova antologia, 1 June–16 August 1915; reprinted, Milan: Treves, 1916; as Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore, Florence: Bemporad, 1925. Critical edition: Tutti i romanzi, edited by Giovanni Macchia and Mario Costanzo, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1973; it includes the 1925 edition with the 1915–1916 variations. Translations: as Shoot (si gira) the Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff, NY: Dutton, 1926; reprinted, NY: Fertig, 1975; as The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, or, Shoot!, translated by C. K. Scott-Moncrieff, Sawtry, England: Dedalus, 1990.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, Serafino e la tigre: Pirandello tra scrittura, teatro e cinema, Venice: Marsilio, 1990. Callari, Francesco, Pirandello e il cinema: Con una raccolta completa degli scritti teorici e creativi, Venice: Marsilio 1991. De Benedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del Novecento: Quaderni inediti, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Il romanzo del Novecento italiano: Strutture e sintassi, Genoa-Milan: Silva, 1964. Luperini, Romano, L’allegoria del moderno, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, Pirandello nel romanzo europeo, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Serafino Gubbio e le bestie,’’ in La parola alta: Sul teatro di Pirandello e D’Annunzio, Bari-Rome: Laterza, 1990.

LUIGI PIRANDELLO

SEI PERSONAGGI IN CERCA D’AUTORE, 1921 Play by Luigi Pirandello

When Pirandello began working on Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) in 1917, his intention was to write a novel, not a play. The story is about an elderly man in a brothel that is disguised as a boutique. He is about to make love to a middle-class teenage girl who works as a prostitute. In his previous meta-theatrical works, such as ‘‘Personaggi’’ (Characters, 1906), Pirandello had introduced the figure of the lawyer-writer who is harassed all day long by his lugubrious clients. Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore’s debut in 1921 at the Teatro Valle in Rome (Dario Niccodemi Company) brought Pirandello international recognition and enthusiasm, although it also exposed him to harsh criticisms. The ghost-characters are the father, the mother, the son, the stepdaughter, and the two children of the mother and her lover. These characters interrupt the rehearsal of the play Il giuoco delle parti (The Rules of the Game, 1918), which Pirandello chose expressly because its two protagonists, husband and wife, have a troubled relationship. In Sei personaggi, this tension is reflected in the ambiguous relationship between the father and his stepdaughter. All of these characters must struggle with the forceful poetics of Pirandellian humor, which pulls the character on stage to pieces. The encounter between the actors and the six characters, who believe that the stage is the only place where truth can exist, reveals the difference between our view of ourselves and that which others have of us. The six characters eventually replace the actors, who are deemed unfit for the task of acting. In the end, the children die, and the daughter runs away. In this play, the father is skeptical of the function of the theater group’s capocomico. Perhaps this skepticism anticipates the advent of the stagedirector, a figure who was to become firmly established on the Italian stage a few years later. The director thinks he is superior to the father, since he

is a living man, not an unborn ghost. The father undermines his certainties and conceptions, asserting that what we believe to exist today will cease to exist tomorrow. In the course of time, the infinite manipulations of personal opinion render our ideas insignificant. What takes place onstage may seem to resemble a se´ance in which the characters are the dead, who appear and speak. The mechanism of a play-within-a-play helped the author to overcome his own obsessions. One of these was the subject of incest, which appears frequently in Pirandello’s life and work. For example, the daughter in The Pre´face torments the author and is the cause of his inability to finish his work. The incestuous tension reaches its peak in the crucial scene in which the daughter insists on acting. This tension dissolves with the death of the innocents, when the two children are sacrificed in the garden. The many references to the conventions of stage-acting, and to its falseness, allow the image to speak for itself. The father who longs for unusual experiences is a carnal version of the raisonneur, the philosopher enamored with the process of thinking. The meta-theatrical structure produces reflections on the theater in the theater. In so doing it may destroy the theater itself, since it removes the possibility of interpersonal conflict. As the father angrily complains when he is caught about to have sex with his stepdaughter (whose identity is unknown to him), gestures no longer represent the character. Moreover, words have different meanings when used by different interlocutors. It is therefore impossible to understand the drama of another person, and a scene based on dialogue will give way to a dialectic of shouting and silence in which the ego disintegrates in the face of dreamed horrors and delirious confessions. In 1921, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore was performed on the stage, not in the theater stalls. Only in 1925 did the performance descend into the stalls, thus multiplying the metatheatrical possibilities; such an innovation was most likely influenced by the excellent productions of Georges Pitoe¨ff in Paris in 1923 and of Max Reinhard in Berlin in 1924. It may also have been influenced by the work of Alberto Savinio, who staged his Il Capitano Ulisse (Captain Ulysses) in 1924. PAOLO PUPPA Editions Between 1921 and 1936 this play was reprinted 11 times. The most important editions are the first and the fourth. Both have the subtitle Commedia da fare.

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LUIGI PIRANDELLO First edition: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore: Commedia da fare, Florence: Bemporad, 1921; revised edition, 1937. Critical editions: Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, Florence: Bemporad, 1925, this text includes the stalls movements and the Preface; in Maschere nude, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1933; in Maschere nude, edited by Alessandro D’Amico, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1993, this edition includes the two integrated scripts of 1921 and 1925 and variations made in 1923, 1927, and 1933. Translations: as Six Characters in Search of an Author, translated by Edward Storer, in Three Plays, LondonToronto: Dent, 1922; in Naked Masks, translated by Eric Bentley, New York: Dutton, 1952; translated by Frederick May, London: Heinemann, 1954, reprinted 1973; translated by John Linstrum, London: Methuen, 1979; in Three Plays, translated by John Linstrum, London: Methuen, 1985; in Collected Plays, translated by Felicity Firth, vol. 2, London: Calder-New York: Riverrum Press, 1987; in Pirandello’s Major Plays, translated by Eric Bentley, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991; as Six Characters in Search of an Author and Other Plays, translated by Mark Musa, London-New York: Penguin Books, 1995; new adaptation by Robert Brustein and The American Repertory Theatre Company, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998; translated and introduced by Eric Bentley, New York: Signet, 1998; in Luigi Pirandello: Three Major Plays, translated by Carl R. Mueller, Hanover, NH: Smith and Kraus, 2000; translated by Edward Storer, Sidney Landes, and William-Alan Landes, Studio City, CA:

Players Press, 2001; adapted by David Harrower, London: Methuen, 2001.

Further Reading Artioli, Umberto, Pirandello allegorico: I fantasmi dell’immaginario cristiano, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2001. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in L. Pirandello, Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Gardair, Jean Michel, Pirandello: Fantasmes et logique du double, Paris: Larousse, 1972. Lauretta, Enzo (editor), Il teatro nel teatro di Pirandello, Agrigento: Centro Nazionale di Studi Pirandelliani, 1977. Lorch, Jennifer, ‘‘The 1923 Text of ‘Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore’ and Pitoe¨ff Production of 1925,’’ in The Yearbook of the British Pirandello Society, 2 (1982), 32–47. Macchia, Giovanni, Pirandello o la stanza della tortura, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. O’Keefe Bazzoni, Jana, ‘‘Pirandello per il pubblico americano: Traduzioni e adattamenti dai ‘Sei personaggi,’’’ Rivista di Studi Pirandelliani, 5 (1990), 59–70. Puppa, Paolo, Parola di scena: Teatro italiano tra ’800 e ‘900, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Sciascia, Leonardo, Pirandello e il pirandellismo, Palermo: Sciascia, 1953. Taviani, Ferdinando, Uomini di scena: Uomini di libro. Introduzione alla letteratura teatrale italiana del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Vicentini, Claudio, Pirandello: Il disagio del teatro, Venice: Marsilio, 1993.

THE PLAGUE-SOWER See Diceria dell’untore (Work by Gesualdo Bufalino)

UMBERTO POLI See Umberto Saba

1462

ANGELO POLIZIANO

ANGELO POLIZIANO (1454–1494) Angelo Ambrogini, known as Angelo Poliziano, was one of the foremost classical scholars of the Renaissance. In 1469, he moved from his native Montepulciano to Florence and went to stay at his uncle’s house. Under Medici patronage, he frequented the most important teachers of his time (Giovanni Argiropulo, Andronico Callisto, Cristoforo Landino, Demetrio Calcondila), who helped him acquire a broad knowledge of the ancient cultures, especially Greek. His first work to be considered is a translation into Latin hexameters of Homer’s Iliad—books II–V: The first book had been translated by Carlo Marsuppini. Poliziano’s version (first published in 1867) was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici. This enterprise won him the sobriquet ‘‘homericus adulescens’’ (the Homeric adolescent) and, in 1473, won him access to the house and the library of Florence’s first citizen, where he established a rapport with the neo-Platonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Poliziano’s cultural life now began in earnest, running parallel to that of Lorenzo de’ Medici, who was approximately his contemporary. While on the one hand Lorenzo was his patron, friend, and protector, on the other he was the source of inspiration for Poliziano’s cultural interests, their changes, and development in the years that followed. Thus, through Poliziano’s works it is possible to trace the whole history of Florentine culture in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici. The first period of Poliziano’s activity fell between 1473 and 1478, when he become personal secretary to Lorenzo il Magnifico and teacher of his eldest son Piero. At that time he produced his best vernacular poems and his much-valued Greek and Latin epigrams and elegies, which made him famous as a refined and learned poet. Among his earlier works, the Fabula di Orfeo (Orpheus, 1494), and the Stanze (1494) highlight Poliziano’s compositional technique that borrowed both from the legacy of classical culture and from the Tuscan courtly tradition. He had carefully studied the classics, using the full range of his philological mastery, while the Tuscan heritage was being revalued in those years by Lorenzo de’ Medici for political reasons and because of his neo-Platonic sympathy for the dolce stil novo (sweet new style).

Significantly, about this time (1476) Lorenzo also compiled the work known as Raccolta Aragonese (The Aragon Collection), where texts of Tuscan poets, old and contemporary (Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Guittone D’Arezzo, other fourteenth-century minor writers together with poems of his own) are presented in honor of Prince Frederick of Aragon. The prefatory epistle, where the primacy of the vernacular over Latin is asserted, bears Lorenzo’s signature, though actually written by Poliziano. Poliziano’s Latin and Greek verses, too, are among the best examples of humanist poetry: They comprise elegies, odes, and epigrams inspired by Latin epigrammatists such as Catullus and Martial. Some of the best known and valued elegies are In Albieram Albitiam puellam formosissimam morientem (For the Death of Albiera degli Albizi, Most Beautiful Girl), In violas (To the Violets), and In Lalagen (To Lalage), all first published in 1498. These are modelled first on Horace’s poems and Statius’s Sylvae (literally Woods, a metaphor for the collection of various poetic themes dictated by extempore inspiration). To the same period belongs the Sylva in scabiem (Sylva on the Scabies), an experimental poem in Latin hexameters written ca. 1475–1478 in which Poliziano gave a realistic description of the symptoms of scabies, mixing the language of the poetic tradition with that of the scientific prose of classic authors. In those years, Poliziano began a collection of maxims and witticisms, written in vernacular between 1477 and 1482, under the title of Detti piacevoli (Witty Sayings). On April 26, 1478, in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Poliziano was present at the wounding of Lorenzo the Magnificent followed by the killing of his brother Giuliano (protagonist of the Stanze). The event was the outcome of a conspiracy planned by members of the Pazzi family against the Medici, whom they intended to dispossess with the help of Pope Sixtus IV. A short time after the event, Poliziano published a real ‘‘instant book,’’ a eulogy for his patron titled Pactianae coniurationis commentarium (A Report on the Pazzi Conspiracy, 1478), printed by Nicholaus Lorenz, in which he described the ambush and the assassination of Giuliano, extolling the victim’s 1463

ANGELO POLIZIANO virtues while giving a pungent account of the plotters’ character. In the aftermath of the conspiracy, in order to escape the turmoil in the city and the outbreak of the plague, soon to follow, Poliziano escorted Lorenzo’s wife, Clarice Orsini, and her two young sons Piero and Giovanni, whose tutor he was, in a long sojourn outside Florence. In some letters he reported on the state of dismay and dejection he had plunged into because of the political events of recent months. Unfortunately, in the spring of 1479, he was dismissed from Lorenzo’s household as a result of an argument he had had with Clarice Orsini about her sons’ education. All that is known of this period is that he retired first to Fiesole, where to pay homage to Lorenzo he set out to translate Epictetus’s Enchiridion from the Greek (first published in 1498); and that, thereafter, he travelled in northern Italy (Venice, Padua, Verona, and Mantua) and, finally, on April 21, 1480, was appointed chaplain and table companion of the Mantuan Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga, who had commissioned Orpheus. It is because of his presence at Mantua and his connection with the cardinal that some critics have been induced to assign the composition and first performance of Orpheus to the year 1480; later researchers, however, have definitely rejected that date. The year 1478 marked a hiatus in the history of Florentine culture as well as in Poliziano’s life. Giuliano’s death and the ensuing bloody repression put an end to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s youthful period. Under Lorenzo’s direction, the new policy initiated an era of legislative transformations that endeavored to strengthen Medici’s rule over the territory and directed the regime’s intellectuals toward a more exclusive cultural production, Latin and Greek principally. The new activity was to have first and foremost a philosophical and philological character, which would suit the gravity of the new situation better than Luigi Pulci’s or Matteo Franco’s vernacular jocundity, still popular in Florence in the 1470s. Poliziano was himself implicated in this new cultural policy. Summoned back to Florence in May 1480, he was appointed Professor of Poetics and Rhetoric at the Studio (University). He started the following November with a course on Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae and on Statius’s Sylvae. Subsequently, he engaged himself in the exacting job of preparing an annotated edition of the Latin and Greek classic authors, who had long been the object of his meditation and study and whom he had now taken as the main theme of his lectures. He 1464

inaugurated some of the courses with lectures in Latin hexameters, known collectively as the Sylvae, whose publication (by the printer Antonio Miscomini) he personally supervised; the Manto, on Virgil’s poems (1482), whose title recalls the name of the Theban soothsayer, Tiresias’s daughter, who predicted Virgil’s poetic glory when he was a child in his cradle; the Rusticus (On the Countryside, 1483), about country life, based on the bucolic poems of Hesiod and Virgil and on several other classical sources; Ambra (1485), on Homer, considered as the master of poetry of any form: The title recalls the name of the Medici Villa at Poggio a Caiano where the Sylvae were probably written. The last poem, Nutricia (The Wet Nurse’s Salary, 1486), examined the different genres of Greek and Latin literature that nourished Poliziano’s own poetry. Among the numerous commentaries on classical authors prepared by Poliziano for his university lectures, such as those accompanying Ovid’s Letter from Sappho to Phaon (1971), or the poem On Roses (1983), or On Persius’s Satyrae (1985), to quote but a few, of outstanding importance are his Lezioni sull’‘‘Andria’’ di Terenzio (Lectures on Terence’s ‘‘Andria,’’ 1973) delivered in 1484–1485, where, after an analysis of the text of the comedy, he offered a historical reconstruction of the origin and typology of comic genre, both Latin and Greek, founded on the perusal of all known classical sources, including Aristotle’s Poetics, that had not yet been translated into Latin. It is important to underline that Poliziano’s interest in ancient theater was not only directed to its textual structure but also to its scenic and material production. The lectures on Terence have a many-faceted cultural importance because they represent the first systematic approach to classical theater that Renaissance culture had so far produced; furthermore, because they explained the structure of the comedy, underlining the nature and characteristics of its elements that might be used as a guide by contemporary comedy writers and because they claimed that the art of acting was a requisite for the education of young people. Poliziano reaffirmed his opinion on this matter, which was quite revolutionary at the time, in 1488, when he wrote, at Lorenzo’s request, a fiery Prologo ai ‘‘Menechmi’’ di Plauto (Prologue to Plautus’s ‘‘Menaechmi,’’ 1498), an introduction to the comedy that was staged on May 12 of the same year by the young pupils of the San Lorenzo choir. This work, in Latin hexameters, ran counter to all who censured theatrical activities and branded as immoral the study of classical authors, keeping up an ancient prejudice that was still widespread

ANGELO POLIZIANO among the clergy: Notwithstanding the work done by the Humanists, the controversy was still alive at the end of the fifteenth century. In fact, Poliziano reverted to it, in order to defend classical studies and, consequently, Lorenzo de’ Medici’s cultural policy, which focused on that study, in his most important work on classical philology, the Miscellaneorum centuria prima (First Collection of One Hundred Various Notes, 1489). Along with Miscellaneorum centuria secunda, which remained in manuscript until 1972, this collection consisted of a number of erudite, historical, and philosophical notes on classical texts, lacking a systematic structure. These two works, together with the university lectures, laid the foundations for subsequent scholarly studies in classical philology. In the 1480s, however, and until his death, Poliziano abandoned the vernacular tongue almost definitively in favor of Latin and Greek. The exceptions are the Rime (Rhymes), which contain such famous poems as ‘‘Che fai tu, Eco’’ (Echo, What Are You Doing?), and ‘‘Non potra` mai dire Amore’’ (Love Never Can Say), both published in 1494, and canzoni a ballo (ballads) such as ‘‘Ben venga maggio’’ (Welcome May), or ‘‘I’ mi trovai, fanciulle, un bel mattino’’ (Oh Girls, I Found Myself One Beautiful Morning). The Rime were mostly written before 1487, according to the date of the manuscript (Riccardiano 2723) at the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence. In these poems he endeavored to combine the expressive forms inspired by classical poets—the Greek epigrams of the Antologia Planudea (Anthologia Planudea)—with subject matter derived from both popular tradition and Tuscan courtly tradition (in particular, Petrarch and Boccaccio), attaining a high level of originality. His writings of the last period also include 12 books of Epistulae (Latin Letters, 1494) on problems of style and literature, which he published personally and dedicated to Piero de’ Medici, son of Lorenzo il Magnifico. Also in his letters, addressed, sometimes in a controversial vein, to some of the major humanists of the time (Paolo Cortese, Giorgio Merula, Bartolomeo Scala), Poliziano continued to expound his own philological method with literary and linguistic examples, focusing his attention on Latin and Greek classics, involving indifferently minor as well as major writers, in the attempt to spread a form of culture that took a wider view than that of humanist culture. The last years of Poliziano’s life, enlivened by his close friendship with Pico della Mirandola, who brought him back to the study of philosophy, saw him engaged in the interpretation of Aristotle, to

whom he dedicated his university lectures from 1490 to 1494. For Aristotle’s Ethics, he prepared an introductory lecture entitled Panepistemon (The Knowledge of Everything, 1498), in which he classified the various branches of learning, including those of an inferior order, so as to show how they all contributed to the enrichment of the human mind; for the Prior Analytics, he composed his only introductory prose work, entitled Lamia (The Witch, 1492), an ironic presentation of scandalmongers that, like witches, congregated to denigrate his belated interest in philosophy. Among Italian Humanists, Poliziano was not only one of the most polished and learned poets and an eminent scholar but also the first herald of Florentine culture in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici. His researches, covering all aspects of classical culture, were always original and innovative; some of his philological advances are still unsurpassed. Four years after his death, his fame as philologist and humanist was definitely ratified by Opera omnia, an edition of his complete works printed at the famous Venetian printing house of Aldo Manuzio in 1498.

Biography Angelo Poliziano was born in Montepulciano (Siena), 14 July 1454. His father Benedetto, a doctor in law and merchant linked to the Medici family, was murdered in 1464, leaving the family in difficulties. Not later than 1469, Poliziano was sent to Florence. In 1473, he entered the Medici household and soon became Lorenzo’s personal secretary. There he was able to avail himself of the Medici library for his studies until, in 1475, he was entrusted with the education of Lorenzo’s eldest son, Piero. In 1477, although a layman, he was beneficed with the priory of San Paolo. In May 1479, he was temporarily dismissed from the Medici household and undertook a series of journeys around Florence and in northern Italy until May 1480, when he was appointed to the chair of poetics and rhetoric in the Florentine Studium (University). In 1484, he took part in a diplomatic mission to Pope Innocent VIII, and two years later he was ordained priest in the Florentine cathedral. In 1491, he travelled through Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Venice searching for manuscripts on behalf of the Medici library. He spent the last years of his life in Florence, where he died in the night between 28 and 29 September 1494. PAOLA VENTRONE See also: Neoplatonism 1465

ANGELO POLIZIANO Selected Works

Further Reading

Collections

Bettinzoli, Attilio, Daedaleum iter: studi sulla poesia e la poetica di Angelo Poliziano, Florence: Olschki, 1995. Branca, Vittore, Poliziano e l’umanesimo della parola, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Colilli, Paul, Poliziano’s Science of Tropes, New York: P. Lang, 1989. Godman, Peter, ‘‘Florentine Humanism between Poliziano and Machiavelli,’’ Rinascimento, 35 (1995), 67–122. Grafton, Anthony, ‘‘On the Scholarship of Politian and its Context,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 40 (1977), 150–188. Maı¨er, Ida, Ange Politien. La formation d’un poe`te humaniste (1469–1480), Geneva: Droz, 1966. Martelli, Mario, Angelo Poliziano: storia e metastoria, Lecce: Conte, 1995. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘Il Libro delle epistole di Angelo Poliziano,’’ Interpres, 1 (1978), 184–255. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘Il prologo di Poliziano ai ’Menaechmi’ di Plauto,’’ in Le tradizioni del testo. Studi di letteratura italiana offerti a Domenico De Robertis, edited by Franco Gavazzeni and Guglielmo Gorni, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1993. Perosa, Alessandro, ‘‘Febris: A Poetic Myth Created by Politian,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 9 (1946), 74–95. Pesenti, Giovan Battista, ‘‘Lettere inedite del Poliziano,’’ Athenaeum, 3 (1915), 284–315. Picotti, Giovan Battista, Ricerche umanistiche, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1955. Ribuoli, Riccardo, La collazione polizianea del codice Bembino di Terenzio, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1981. Rochon, Andre´, La jeunesse de Laurent de Me´dicis, 1449–1478, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1963. Ventrone, Paola, Gli araldi della commedia. Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento, Pisa: Pacini, 1993.

Cose vulgare del Politiano, Bologna: for Platone die’Benedetto, 1494 (Stanze, Orpheus, and two poems). Omnia Opera Angeli Politiani, Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1498. Prose volgari inedite e poesie latine e greche edite e inedite, edited by Isidoro Del Lungo, Florence: Barbera, 1867 (facsimile, 1976). Opera omnia, edited by Ida Maı¨er, Turin: Bottega D’Erasmo, 1970–1971 (Contents: t. 1. Scripta in editione Basilensi anno MDLIII collecta; t. 2. Opera ab Isidoro Del Lungo edita Florentiae anno MDCCCLXVII; t. 3. Opera miscellanea et epistulae).

Poetry Sylva in scabiem (ca. 1475–1478), edited by Alessandro Perosa, 1954; edited by Paolo Orvieto, 1989. Nutricia, 1486, edited by Giuseppina Boccuto, 1990. Rime (before 1487), edited by Daniela Delcorno Branca, 1986. Stanze di messere Angelo Poliziano cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, 1494; critical edition by Vincenzo Pernicone, 1954; as The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, translated by David Quint, 1993. Silvae, edited by Francesco Bausi, 1996; as Silvae, edited and translated by Charles Fantazzi, 2004. Poesie volgari, edited by Francesco Bausi, 1997. Angeli Politiani Liber epigrammatum Graecorum, edited by Filippomaria Pontani, 2002.

Prose Detti piacevoli (ca. 1477–1482); edited by Tiziano Zanato, 1983. Della congiura dei Pazzi (Coniurationis commentarium), 1478; edited by Alessandro Perosa, 1958. Miscellaneorum centuria prima, 1489; edited by Hideo Katayama, 1982. Lamia. Praelectio in Priora Aristotelis analytica, 1498; critical edition, introduction, and commentary by Ari Wesseling, 1986. Commento inedito all’epistola ovidiana di Saffo a Faone, edited by Elisabetta Lazzeri, 1971. Miscellaneorum centuria secunda, critical edition by Vittore Branca and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1972 (main edition); 1978 (minor edition). La commedia antica e l’Andria di Terenzio, edited by Rosetta Lattanzi Roselli, 1973. Commento inedito alle Selve di Stazio, edited by Lucia Cesarini Martinelli, 1978. Una ignota Expositio Suetoni del Poliziano, edited by Vincenzo Fera, 1983. Il commento del Poliziano al carme ‘‘De rosis,’’ edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1983. Commento inedito alle Satire di Persio, edited by Lucia Cesarini Martinelli and Roberto Ricciardi, 1985. Commento inedito alle Georgiche di Virgilio, edited by Livia Castano Musico`, 1990.

Plays Fabula di Orpheo, 1494; edited by Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, 1986; as A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo Politian and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso, translated by Louis E. Lord, 1931; reprinted, 1986. Prologo ai ‘‘Menechmi’’ di Plauto, 1498; edited by Giovanna Bombieri, 1985.

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FABULA DI ORPHEO, 1494 Pastoral play by Poliziano

The Fabula di Orpheo (Orpheus) by Angelo Poliziano is considered to be the first vernacular play on a classical subject in the history of Italian theater. There is no agreement on the date of composition: Some scholars put it as early as 1473–1476, some others attribute it to 1480. The play belongs to the genre of the mythological spectacle, which

ANGELO POLIZIANO was becoming particularly appreciated in the Italian courts: It consisted of short metrical compositions (called entremets), derived mainly from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and sung in rich finery at solemn banquets. Poliziano drastically modified the configuration of the entremets, arranging their disconnected episodes in an organic dramatic structure, after the pattern of the sacra rappresentazione (religious play). The influence of the latter is also evidenced by the high frequency with which the ottava rima appears, although skilfully alternated with other metric patterns, so as to bestow great variety to the performance. The metrical variety also corresponds to the use of different kinds of music (from madrigal to frottola, to strambotto); the music is now lost because at that time there would have been no binding score for the performers to follow. Thus each performance would have had its own individual music. The plot is as follows. The god Mercury enters and, like the angel prologue in a sacra rappresentazione, declares the subject of the play. This play opens with Aristeo, Apollo’s son, telling Mopso, an old shepherd, that he has seen a very beautiful nymph. Then the servant Tirsi comes in to report that he has seen a wonderful young lady. Aristeo, realizing that she is the nymph he loves, runs after the girl who, seeking shelter in a wood, gets bitten by a snake. Orpheus, hearing the news of Eurydice’s death, in desperation descends into Hades to beg for her release. Pluto and Proserpine, enchanted by the power of his music, agree to give him back his wife, but only on condition that he does not look at her on the journey back from Hades. Orpheus, unable to fulfil the condition, loses Eurydice forever. Agonized with grief, he reviles women’s love and decides to follow homosexual love. The Bacchantes hear him and for this blasphemy savagely tear him to pieces, bringing his severed head as a sacrificial offering to Bacchus. Finally, in a wild dance, they sing a carnival song. The Fabula di Orpheo is divided into three parts: The first is a pastoral, based on Virgil’s Bucolics—a model for most of the dramatic production belonging to the pastoral genre that flourished mainly in the sixteenth century; the second part is tragic and corresponds to the descent into Hell; the third part changes abruptly from tragic to comic, with the final song of the Bacchantes, which follows the metric pattern and style of the canti carnascialeschi (carnival songs), much in vogue in the Florence of Lorenzo il Magnifico. In the prefatory letter, Poliziano declared that the play was written quite rapidly, at Cardinal

Francesco Gonzaga’s request, and was to be acted in Mantua; the performance, however, probably never took place. Nevertheless the text is a refined example of the mosaic writing this author employed in his major work. This technique consisted in molding together a variety of verbal expressions derived from classical and vernacular sources to create new and original works, which, specifically in the Fabula, go beyond their ephemeral destination on the stage. Indeed it combines a variety of allegorical meanings inspired by neo-Platonic philosophy followed by Medicean intellectuals in the 1470s; in particular, it represents the inability of human nature (Orpheus) to prevail over worldly passions (his love for Eurydice makes him turn back to look at her) in order to gain eternal life, thus falling into sin (homosexual love), for which he must be tormented in the body. The text was performed several times in the late fifteenth century, both in Mantua and elsewhere, as testified by some manuscripts, but no direct document or description of the play’s production has survived. Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of a turning mountain stage machine (in the British Museum, London) were possibly invented for the performance of a later adaptation of the Fabula (the Orphei tragedia) in early sixteenth-century Milan. For several centuries it was taken as a model for many court plays (for example Baldassarre Taccone’s Danae) and paved the way to Italian melodramma with Jacopo Peri’s Euridice (1598), Claudio Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s Orpheo (ca. 1733), and Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice (1762). PAOLA VENTRONE See also: Opera Editions First edition: Cose vulgare del Politiano, Bologna: for Platone de’ Benedetti, 1494. Critical editions: L’ ‘‘Orfeo’’ del Poliziano, con il testo critico dell’originale e delle successive forme teatrali, edited by Antonia Tissoni Benvenuti, Padua: Antenore, 1986; Fabula di Orfeo edited by Stefano Carrai, Milan: Mursia, 1988; in Poesie volgari, edited by Francesco Bausi, 2 vols., Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1997. Translations: as A Translation of the Orpheus of Angelo Politian and the Aminta of Torquato Tasso, with an introductory essay on the pastoral by Louis E. Lord, London: Oxford University Press, 1931; reprinted, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986.

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ANGELO POLIZIANO Further Reading Guarino, Raimondo, ‘‘Generi e tecniche nell’ ‘Orfeo’ del Poliziano,’’ in L’officina del teatro europeo, edited by Alessandro Grilli and Anita Simon, vol. 1, Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2001. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘Il mito di Orfeo nell’eta` laurenziana,’’ Interpres, 8 (1988), 7–40. Mattellini, Davide, ‘‘Poliziano, il cardinale, il carnevale: contributi per una rilettura della Fabula di Orfeo,’’ Civilta` Mantovana, 33 (1998), 102–131. Mazzocchi Doglio, Mariangela, ‘‘Mito, metamorfosi, emblema dalla Favola di Orfeo del Poliziano alla Festa del Lauro,’’ Lettere italiane, 29 (1977), 140–170. Munro Pyle, Cynthia, ‘‘Il tema di Orfeo, la musica e le favole mitologiche del tardo Quattrocento,’’ in Ecumenismo della cultura, edited by Giovannangela Tarugi, vol. 2., Florence: Olschki, 1981. Pirrotta, Nino, Li due Orfei. Da Poliziano a Monteverdi, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Sternfeld, Frederick William, ‘‘The Birth of Opera: Ovid, Poliziano and the lieto fine,’’ Analecta Musicologica, 19 (1979), 30–51. Ventrone, Paola, ‘‘‘Philosophia. Involucra fabularum’: la Fabula di Orpheo di Angelo Poliziano,’’ Comunicazioni sociali, 19 (1997), 137–180. Warden, John (editor), Orpheus. The Metamorphoses of a Myth, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982.

STANZE, 1494 Narrative Poem by Angelo Poliziano

The Stanze is a eulogistic poem in ottava rima, left in an unfinished state. In the surviving manuscripts, it bears the title Stanze cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici (Stanzas Begun for Giuliano de’ Medici’s Joust). Only the first book (125 stanzas) and the beginning of the second (46 stanzas) survive. The work was meant to celebrate the victory of Giuliano de’ Medici, younger brother of Lorenzo the Magnificent, in the joust fought in Florence, January 29, 1475, and his love for Simonetta Cattaneo, Marco Vespucci’s wife, who was to figure as his lady-love on that festive occasion, as was required by courtly conventions. The Stanze were composed between 1475 and 1478. As things turned out, Giuliano was assassinated on April 26, 1478, during the Pazzi conspiracy. The first printed edition, edited by Alessandro Sarti, a disciple of Poliziano, appeared in Cose vulgare del Politiano 1468

(Poliziano’s Vernacular Works), published in Bologna, Platone de’ Benedetti, August 9, 1494. Poliziano’s refined culture made him depart from previous verse descriptions of court spectacles, like the famous Giostra (Joust) by Luigi Pulci, when he came to introduce the subject of a contest between mounted knights in a mythological representation freighted with allegorical significance: Iulio (Giuliano), given only to hunting, hates women and scorns love. Cupid, displeased by Iulio’s ways, devises a means of subjugating the young man. By and by, while chasing a doe, Iulio runs into a very beautiful nymph, Simonetta, and falls desperately in love with her. He goes back home with his mind perturbed by a passion he had never felt before. Meanwhile, Cupid sets off for Cyprus in order to report his victory to his mother Venus. At this point, Venus’s kingdom and palace are presented, in the description of which the rhetorical method of ekphrasis (a literary description of an illustrative image, used also by Dante) is masterfully employed. At the beginning of the second book, Cupid tells the goddess how he managed to cause Iulio to fall in love. Then Venus resolves that the lover should prove his worth in a joust. Meanwhile she orders Pasitea, the wife of Sleep, to make Iulio dream that Cupid, having been tied to an olive tree and threatened by Simonetta arrayed in Minerva’s armor, implores his help and invites him to look up to Glory. This goddess descends, disarms Simonetta, and dresses Iulio in her armor (this scene corresponds to the one depicted by Botticelli on the standard that Giuliano bore in the tournament). Simonetta’s death is then predicted (she eventually died on April 26, 1476). The poem and the plot break off at the point when the lover in his prayer acknowledges the power of Love, Minerva, and Glory, whose help he implores. The plot itself shows the distance that separates Poliziano’s project from the genre of rhymed descriptions that claimed to give a realistic and true-to-life representation of social events: In the Stanze, the eulogistic and narrative intentions are the occasion for an elegant allegorical composition with mythological accoutrements that are instrumental in endowing persons and actions with an added significance. The poem admits more than one level of interpretation. The first one is historical and literal, the celebration of the joust fought in support of the civic tradition initiated the previous century by the city ruler. The second is political: The government of Lorenzo de’ Medici is extolled, and particularly, the alliance with two great northern city states,

ANGELO POLIZIANO Venice and Milan, against Pope Sixtus IV. The third is expressed by the allegorical message carried by the poem. If one accepts Mario Martelli’s convincing interpretation, the Stanze were influenced positively by Marsilio Ficino’s neo-Platonic philosophy, quite influential at that time in Florence. Accordingly, they represent an itinerarium mentis in Deum (mind’s journey toward God) that begins with sensual life (allegorized by the wood, recalling Dante, and by the doe, image of unattainable earthly beauty), moves through political life (symbolized by Simonetta Cattaneo, who sums up the qualities of the four cardinal, that is, civil, virtues), and finally attains contemplative virtue (represented by Venus’s reign). The transition from sensual life to rational knowledge and active life was a recurrent theme with the Florentine Platonists around 1470; it related to an allegorical reading of a series of classical myths (from the love of Venus and Mars, to Hercules’s fight with Cacus and the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice) that inspired such contemporary paintings as Botticelli’s Primavera, Pallade e il centauro, and Venere e Marte. Poliziano’s Stanze represented the positive outcome of that theme (Iulio successful in his life on earth), whereas a few years earlier, the Fabula di Orpheo had portrayed the negative outcome of that same theme (Orpheus unable to renounce his sensual love for Eurydice). The two works constituted a sort of poetic diptych as witnessed also by the manuscript and printed tradition. The closeness of the two works, although the genres from which they derive are different, is attested also by their composite style, which exploits the ideal of docta varietas (erudite variety) theorized by Poliziano himself: This consists in interweaving elements borrowed from Latin authors (Ovid, Seneca, Virgil, and others), and from the Tuscan learned tradition (Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio), with other elements drawn from the vernacular tradition and freely interpreted by the author. The composite essence of such a work concerns the phonological, morphological, lexical, syntactic, and rhythmic levels. Through the characteristics of their subjects and style, the Stanze and the Fabula di Orpheo represent two of the supreme examples of allegorical and mythological poetic practice among the circle of

intellectuals that gathered around Lorenzo de’ Medici in the 1470s. They clearly represent the value of that literature as a form of initiation, as it was reserved for the chosen few that were capable of comprehending its meanings. PAOLA VENTRONE Editions First edition: Cose vulgare del Politiano, Bologna: for Platone de’ Benedetti, 1494. Critical editions: Stanze di messere Angelo Poliziano cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, Turin: Loescher-Chiantore, 1954; edited and corrected by Mario Martelli, Alpignano: Tallone, 1979; Stanze, edited by Stefano Carrai, Milan: Mursia, 1988; in Poesie volgari, edited by Francesco Bausi, 2 vols., Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1997. Translations: as The ‘‘Stanze’’ of Angelo Poliziano, translated by David Quint, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Further Reading Bessi, Rossella, Di alcune sconosciute fonti classiche nell’opera volgare di Angelo Poliziano, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1996. Bessi, Rossella, ‘‘Per un nuovo commento alle Stanze del Poliziano,’’ Lettere italiane, 31 (1979), 309–341. Ghinassi, Ghino, Il volgare letterario e le ‘‘Stanze’’ del Poliziano, Florence: Le Monnier, 1957. Gombrich, Ernst H., ‘‘Botticelli’s Mythologies: A Study in the Neoplatonic Symbolism of His Circle,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 8 (1947), 7–60; reprinted in Symbolic Images: Studies on the Art of the Renaissance, Oxford: Phaidon, 1972. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘’Stanze’ di Angelo Poliziano,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Alberto, Le opere. Dalle Origini al Cinquecento, vol. 1, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Rossi, Diego, Concordanza delle ‘‘Stanze’’ di Angelo Poliziano, Hildesheim and New York: G. Olms, 1983. Settis, Salvatore, ‘‘Citarea ‘su un’mpresa di bronconi,’’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 34 (1971), 135–177. Ventrone, Paola (editor), ‘‘Le tems revient’’–‘‘’l tempo si rinuova’’. Feste e spettacoli nella Firenze di Lorenzo il Magnifico, exhibition catalogue, Milan: Silvana, 1992. Warburg, Aby, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance, Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999.

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MARIO POMILIO

MARIO POMILIO (1921–1990) Mario Pomilio’s stories document the illusions and disillusionment of a generation of Italian intellectuals who, born in the 1920s, lived through World War II and the Cold War, the end of the Fascist regime, the establishment of Italian parliamentary democracy, the creation of the European Union, fast-paced national and global economic growth, and the crisis of ideologies and values and their replacement by the elusive icons of mass culture. They show the inner struggle of the individual whose political idealism, moral values, and spiritual beliefs clash with reality and whose conscience is burdened by metaphysical doubts and conflicting emotions about the present. After composing two novels that describe a priest’s spiritual crisis—L’uccello nella cupola (The Bird in the Cupola, 1954)—and the unjust victimization of a woman and her child by a disaffected police officer—Il testimone (The Witness, 1956)—Pomilio turned from existential to political subjects. In Il cimitero cinese (The Chinese Cemetery, 1958), an Italian and a German student take a trip to Normandy after World War II. Among signs of the recent past of hate and destruction, Pomilio portrayed the attempt of young generations to overcome the division caused by the war, acknowledging individual and collective historical responsibility in shaping the future social order. The author’s hopeful tone gave way to political skepticism as he witnessed the weakening of postwar leftist ideals and the fracture between the West and the Soviet block. In Il nuovo corso (The New Line, 1959), Pomilio denounced the 1956 Soviet repression in Hungary by imagining people’s reaction in a totalitarian regime to the local newspaper’s announcement of the beginning of a new era of freedom: After a sense of initial disbelief, excitement turns sour when the news is disproved the following day. Later, in La compromissione (The Compromise, 1965), he drew on his own experience as a militant in the ranks of the Partito d’Azione and the Socialist Party at the end of World War II and his withdrawal from politics after the 1948 general elections when the Communist–Socialist coalition lost to the

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Christian Democrats, to portray a Socialist who renounces idealism and turns into an apathetic intellectual. The demise of his characters reflects Pomilio’s personal crisis and political disillusionment. In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, his creative thrust apparently came to a halt. In fact, he intensified his critical activity, publishing important essays on the Italian realist tradition and participating in the debate on the forms and function of contemporary literature. More importantly, as the Catholic Church began to address the sociopolitical concerns and the religious and moral needs of the lay community through Vatican Council II, the two ‘‘souls’’ Pomilio inherited from his parents—his mother was a devout Catholic, his father a fervent Socialist— reconciled. The best-selling novel Il quinto evangelio (The Fifth Gospel, 1975), which tells of a former American officer’s lifelong search for a fifth gospel, and the essay collection Scritti cristiani (Christian Writings, 1979), which discusses the literary uniqueness of Scripture and the importance of Christianity in contemporary secular culture, document Pomilio’s newfound belief system. To make sense of their historical existence, he suggested, human beings need to renew their commitment to Jesus’ original message of love and self-sacrifice; literature’s primary function is to express the enduring human effort to endorse God’s word in a time of moral disorder and ideological confusion (dissesto, or instability, as he defines it) such as the present. In the 1970s and 1980s, Pomilio opted for a structurally fragmented and open-ended narrative to articulate the psychological complexity of his characters and voice his latest ethical and metaphysical concerns. Il cane sull’Etna (The Dog on Mount Etna, 1978), a collection of short stories composed previously, including the rambling thoughts of a writer who no longer manages to understand the world around him, criticizes avant-garde reduction of literature to nonsensical language, while questioning the very expressive and communicative function of language. In his following novel, Pomilio imagined Alessandro Manzoni’s spiritual and

MARIO POMILIO poetic crisis at the death of his beloved Enrichetta Blondel in Il Natale del 1833 (The Christmas of 1833, 1983). As in the previous novel, although the protagonist’s questioning of God on the presence of pain and death in human life remains unanswered, Pomilio suggested that there is no consolation for human suffering but that of faith in Christ’s redeeming crucifixion. Still suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, for which he had undergone hand surgery, Pomilio was diagnosed with a tumor of the respiratory system. Una lapide in via del Babuino (A Tombstone on Babuino Street, 1991)—an unfinished story narrated, significantly, by a sick writer who, at the end of his life, wistfully collects his memories like relics of the past—was published posthumously.

Selected Works Poetry Emblemi:Poesie 1949–1953,editedby TommasoPomilio, 2000.

Fiction L’uccello nella cupola, 1954; revised edition, 1969. Il testimone, 1956; as The Witness, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1959. Il cimitero cinese, 1958. Il nuovo corso, 1959; as The New Line, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1961. La compromissione, 1965. Il quinto evangelio, 1975; selected excerpts translated by Umberto Mariani, 1985. Il cane sull’Etna, 1978. Il Natale del 1833, 1983. Una lapide in via del Babuino, 1991.

Nonfiction

Biography Mario Pomilio was born in Orsogna (Chieti), 21 January 1921. He studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, graduating in 1945. He traveled on research grants to Brussels, Louvain, and Ghent, 1950, and Paris, 1951–1952. He lived in Naples with his wife Dora, married in 1951, and their two children, Annalisa and Tommaso, working as high school teacher and adjunct faculty at the University of Naples. With Michele Prisco, Pomilio founded the short-lived journal Le ragioni narrative, 1960–1961; he also contributed articles on literary and religious subjects and contemporary culture to several Italian newspapers, periodicals, and journals. He was awarded the Marzotto Prize for L’uccello nella cupola, 1954; the Campiello Prize for La compromissione, 1965; the Napoli Prize (Naples, 1975), the Prix du meilleur livre e´tranger (Paris, 1978), and the Pax Prize (Warsaw 1979) for Il quinto evangelio, as well as the Fiuggi and Strega Prizes for Il Natale del 1833, 1983. Pomilio was diagnosed with lung tumor, 1989, and on 2 April 1990 he died at his home in Naples. FRANCESCA PARMEGGIANI

La fortuna del Verga, 1963. Dal Naturalismo al Verismo, 1966. La formazione critico-estetica di Pirandello, 1966; revised edition, 1980. Contestazioni, 1967. Scritti cristiani, 1979. Cellini e altri saggi dal Tre all’Ottocento, 1981.

Theater Il Quinto Evangelista, 1986.

Further Reading Di Biase, Carmine, Mario Pomilio: l’assoluto nella storia, Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1992. Di Biase, Carmine (editor), Mario Pomilio e il romanzo del Novecento, Naples: Guida, 1995. Di Biase, Mario, and Mario Gabriele Giordano (eds.), Mario Pomilio intellettuale e scrittore problematico: scritti e testimonianze per il decennale della morte, Avellino: Sabatia, 2001. Marchi, Maria, and Carla Menotti, Il cristianesimo come profezia in Mario Pomilio, Rome: LAS, 1984. Mario Pomilio: Un simposio letterario—A Literary Symposium: Mario Pomilio, special issue of Italian Quarterly, 26:99–101 (1985). ‘‘Mario Pomilio e Carmine Di Biase,’’ Sı`larus: Rassegna Bimestrale di Cultura, 44:233–234 (2004), 75–80. Piemontese, Felice (editor), ‘‘Pomilio Mario,’’ in Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani, Milan: Leonardo, 1989. Rupolo, Wanda, Umanita` e stile. Studio su Mario Pomilio, Naples: Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, 1991.

1471

GIOVANNI PONTANO

GIOVANNI PONTANO (1429–1503) As a humanist, poet, philosopher, courtier and politician, Giovanni Pontano devoted his intellectual and political career to the Aragonese Court and the Academy in Naples. During the fifteenth century, these institutions were important centers of power and culture that attracted humanists, such as Antononio Beccadelli (Il Panormita) and, later, Jacopo Sannazaro. Pontano held important offices at the court, and his Academia Pontaniana initiated a local tradition of literature written in Latin. His literary and speculative works soon gained European resonance. In the final part of the dialogue Antonius (Anthony, 1491), Pontano described himself as a tall, handsome, and strong man, commenting upon his physical skills and his intense worldly life. In the Book 5 of Urania (ca. 1475–1479), he expressed confidence in the immortality that the fruits of both his diplomatic and literary activity (his poetic writings) would achieve. Divided between private and public life, Pontano’s self-portrait perfectly mirrored his literary works, which consisted of poems, dialogues, and treatises, all written in humanistic Latin. The chronology and the structure of Pontano’s poetic collection, entitled Carmina (1505–1512), is still uncertain, as his poems were edited and published by Pietro Summonte posthumously. Summonte did not follow Pontano’s ordering and choice of the texts, and the philological question that ensued is still central to contemporary scholarly debates. Part of Pontano’s poetry belongs to the didactic and pastoral genre. Two juvenile projects he never ceased to revise focus on astronomy and the natural sciences, the poems in hexameters collected in Urania and the Metereorum liber (Book of Meteors, ca. 1474). Another didactic work is the Hortus Hesperidum (Garden of Hesperides, ca. 1498), which imitated Virgil’s Georgics and focused on the cultivation of orange trees. Pontano also worked with pastoral poetry. In his Eclogae (Eclogues, ca. 1490–1500), he blended the pastoral genre with the elegy in the eclogue ‘‘Meliseus,’’ dedicated to his dead wife; and again with the epithalamium in the poem ‘‘Lepidina,’’ describing the allegorical marriage of Naples to the river Sebethus. Pontano’s major works, however, are lyrical and erotic, a large corpus of writings that he most likely 1472

planned to collect in an independent work. Donatella Coppini considered this potential book the neo-Latin equivalent of Petrarch’s Canzoniere (‘‘Carmina di Giovanni Pontano,’’ 1992). Inspired by Propertius, Pontano aimed at experiencing poetry as a destiny by balancing poetic inspiration and life. Thus, his canzoniere became the lyrical biography of a man, spanning from juvenile love to love in old age, from marriage and paternity to friendship and mourning. Pontano’s ‘‘love book’’ comprises the youthful Parthenopeus sive Amores (The Neapolitan, or Rather Loves, ca. 1458); the De Amore Coniugali (On Love in Married Life, ca. 1461–1490), a work devoted—for the first time in European literature—to marriage and paternity; the Naeniae (Lullabies, 1469–1490), elegies written for his son Lucio; and the De tumulis (Of Graves, ca. 1502), a collection of elegies honoring dead relatives and friends. These three works were widely imitated in Europe and offered the model for three new literary genres. The Hendecasyllabi seu Baiae (Hendecayillables or Rather Baia, ca. 1480–1490) depicts women and youthful loves at Baia, a coastal town near Naples, while love in later life is the subject of Eridanus (Eridanus, ca. 1498). In this northern Italian setting, with a new selfironic and melancholic vein, Pontano celebrated his last love for a young girl and ideally concluded his poetic autobiography. The Dialogi (Dialogues, 1491) represent a vivid document of the poet’s daily life at the Aragonese court and offer an interesting combination of genres. Dialogue and satire, for example, are combined in the Charon, a bitter caricature of pedantry and grammar studies. In his political treatises, instead, Pontano tried to outline an ideal figure of a prince and focused on the dignity of man. In his De Principe (On the Prince, 1490), he defined the political and strategic skills of the ideal prince, which would serve as a model both for Machiavelli’s masterpiece, Il principe, and for his own speculative activity in the field of moral philosophy. In the dialogue Asinus, Pontano bitterly reconsidered the role of culture in front of the folly of power, thus expressing the crisis of civil humanism. In De Sermone (On Conversation, ca. 1498, published posthumously, 1509), he introduced his

GIOVANNI PONTANO ideals of humanity and established the parameters for a definition of culture. The civil engagement of early humanists and the pedagogic principles of fifteenth-century treatises are reshaped, as Sergio Lupi remarked, into a ‘‘rhetoric of rest,’’ which reflects a moral ideal of self-discipline and politeness appropriate to the condition of the intellectual in early Renaissance Europe (‘‘Il De Sermone di Gioviano Pontano,’’ 1955).

Ioannis Ioviani Pontani Carmina: Ecloghe, elegie, liriche, edited by Johannes Oeschger, Bari: Laterza, 1948. Poesie latine, edited and translated by Liliana Monti Sabia and Francesco Arnaldi, Turin: Einaudi, 1977; selection and translations in Renaissance Latin Verse: An Anthology, edited by Alessandro Perosa and John Sparrow, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979; in An anthology of Neo-Latin Poetry, edited by Fred J. Nichols, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979.

Poetry

Biography Giovanni Pontano was born in Cerreto (Umbria), 7 May 1429. He entered the Aragonese court, 1447; studied ancient Greek and Astronomy in Naples with Antonio Beccadelli, 1448; and joined the war for King Alphonse’s succession, 1458–1462. Pontano married Adriana Sassone, named Ariadna in his lyrics, 1461. He became Counselor of the King Alphonse, 1462. His son Lucio was born, 1469. He became a citizen of Naples and then director of the Naples Academy, 1471. Pontano joined the war of Ferrara, 1482–1484, and was appointed secretary of state, 1484. He remained in Naples during the invasion of Charles VIII and the Aragonese defeat, 1498. He retired from public life and devoted himself to collect his writings. Pontano died in Naples, September 1503. MATTEO SORANZO See also: Pastoral Selected Works Collections Ioannis Pontani carmina, edited by Pietro Summonte, Naples: Sigismondo Mayr, 1505–1512. Pontani Opera, Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1505. Opera omnia soluta oratione composita, Venice: Aldo Manuzio, 1518–1519. Ioannis Pontani carmina: Testo fondato sulle stampe originali, e riveduto sugli autografi, introduzione bibliografica, ed appendice di poesie inedite, edited by Benedetto Soldati, Florence: Barbera, 1902; selection and translation from Urania in Renaissance Latin Poetry, edited by Ian Dalrymple MacFarlane, New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

‘‘Hendecasyllabi seu Baiae,’’ 1505. ‘‘Eclogae,’’ 1505; as Ioannis Ioviani Pontani Eclogae, edited by Liliana Monti Sabia, 1973. ‘‘Metereorum liber,’’ 1505; as Metereorum Liber: I Poemi Astrologici di Giovanni Pontano. Storia del Testo, edited by Mauro De Nichilo, 1975. ‘‘Ioannis Ioviani Pontani Hendecasillaborum Libri,’’ edited by Liliana Monti Sabia, 1978.

Philosophical Treatises De Principe, 1490; edited by Guido M. Cappelli, 2003. Dialogi, partially printed 1491; as Dialoge, edited and translated by Hermann Kiefer, et al., 1984. De Sermone, 1509; edited by Alessandra Mantovani, 2002.

Further Reading Coppini, Donatella, ‘‘Carmina di Giovanni Pontano,’’ Letteratura Italiana: Le Opere, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Finzi, Claudio, Re, baroni, popolo: La politica di Giovanni Pontano, Rimini: Il Cerchio, 2004. Kidwell, Carol, Pontano: Poet & Prime Minister, London: Duckworth, 1991. Lupi, Sergio, ‘‘Il De Sermone di Gioviano Pontano,’’ Filologia Romanza, 2:4 (1955), 366–417. Monti Sabia, Liliana, Pontano e la storia: Dal ‘‘De bello neapolitano’’ all’ ‘‘Actius,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. Nespoulous, Pierre, ‘‘Giovanni Pontano, poe`te de l’amour conjugal,’’ Acta Conventus Neolatini Lovaniensis. Proceedings of the first International Congress of NeoLatin Studies (Louvain, 23–28 August 1971), edited by Josef Ijsewijn and Echard Kessler, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1973. Parenti, G., ‘‘L’invenzione di un genere: il tumulus pontaniano,’’ Interpres, 7 (1987), 125–158. Parenti, Giovanni, ‘‘Naenia,’’ Inventario, 21 (1983), 45–60. Tateo, Francesco, L’umanesimo etico di Giovanni Pontano, Lecce: Milella, 1972. Trinkhaus, Charles Edward, The Astrological Cosmos and Rhetorical Culture of Giovanni Gioviano Pontano, New York: The Renaissance Society of America, 1985.

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GILLO PONTECORVO

GILLO PONTECORVO (1919–) Gillo (Gilberto) Pontecorvo is one of Italy’s most important political filmmakers. His films Kapo` (1960) and La battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers, 1966) were nominated for Academy Awards and have been highly influential on directors worldwide. During World War II Pontecorvo remained outside the sphere of Nazi occupation in southern France but returned to Italy as an active participant in the anti-Fascist Resistance fight of 1943–1945 and also worked on underground issues of Communist Party newspaper L’unita`. After the war, he collaborated with Agence Havas (later FrancePresse) as well as La repubblica and Paese sera. These experiences profoundly marked his artistic career; he never abandoned his belief in the representational power of raw reality. Pontecorvo has often credited, for his decision to become a filmmaker, Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa’ (Paisan, 1946), a neo-Realist docudrama intended to portray a ‘‘history of Italy’’ during the AngloAmerican liberation war in 1944. He was particularly struck by the film’s final episode, set in the marshland of the Po River, where an American OSS (agency precursor of the CIA) operative and a group of partisans are hunted down and executed by the Nazi-Fascists. This episode had great relevance for Pontecorvo, particularly in view of his own experience in the wartime Resistance, giving him a sense of mission about the themes of popular armed struggle that would pervade his cinema. Pontecorvo appeared on the film scene as early as 1945 when he served as a set volunteer and an extra on Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora (Outcry, 1946), a crude picture of Italy at war set in Lombardy after the events of September 1943. He played a small role, a peasant boy who is eventually executed, but met other future directors, Carlo Lizzani (who played a priest) and Giuseppe De Santis (a collaborator to the script). After the completion of the film, Pontecorvo looked for work abroad and was an assistant director on a Toto` Marcanton documentary and on Yves Alle´gret’s Les miracles n’ont lieu qu’une fois (Miracles Only Happen Once, 1951). Back in Italy, he went on to work with Giancarlo Menotti and Mario Monicelli, among others. 1474

As did many directors of his generation, Pontecorvo started his career with documentaries. In the early 1950s he used Italian governmental subsidies to produce socially oriented shorts. His first documentary was Missione Timiriazev (Timiriazev Mission, 1953), which records Soviet assistance to flood victims in the Po Valley. In 1954, he made Porta Portese (1954), about the famous Roman flea market, and Cani dietro le sbarre (Dogs Behind Bars, 1954). He made several more documentaries: Festa a Castelluccio (Castelluccio Festival, 1955), on a popular festival; Uomini del marmo (Men of Marble, 1955), on marble cutters on the Apuan Alps; and Pane e zolfo (Bread and Sulfur, 1956), which was shot in the Marche region and investigates the decline of a community dependent on a closed sulfur mine. The documentary experience was decisive. In La battaglia di Algeri, the photographic approach and some shots of ordinary life are reminiscent of Porta Portese. Pontecorvo was then invited to participate in Joris Iven’s episodic film Die Windrose (Rose of the Winds, 1956). He contributed Giovanna, casting nonprofessional actors. The film, which marks the director’s transition from documented stories to fictional narratives, recounts a women’s strike at a textile mill. At this time, despite his close relationship with the elite of the Italian Communist Party from his Resistance days (particularly with Pietro Ingrao), and his brother Bruno’s defection to the Soviet Union to work on nuclear weapons program, Pontecorvo left the Communist Party following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. Pontecorvo’s first feature film, La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, 1957), based on the novel Squarcio` by his friend Franco Solinas, tells the story of a Sardinian fisherman at odds with his fishing community who uses dynamite to illegally catch more fish. With his thirst of independence and desire for economic improvement, the protagonist and his two sons recall the Valastro family in Luchino Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). True to his grounding in the neo-Realist style, Pontecorvo initially balked at the idea of having to make the film with stars (Yves Montand, Alida Valli) and in color. The result is an example of what later became known as neorealismo rosa, or

GILLO PONTECORVO pink neo-Realism, in which the conventions of neoRealism were maintained with nods to audience demands for more visually pleasing elements. Collaborating again with Franco Solinas (1927–1991), the screenwriter who would script all of his feature films from now on except Ogro (1979), Pontecorvo took up the theme of survival in a Nazi concentration camp in Kapo`. It is the story of a 14-year-old Jewish girl from Paris deported to Auschwitz, who conceals her Jewish identity and becomes a trusty, or kapo`. Despite criticism regarding an unlikely love bond between Edith, the kapo` (played by Susan Strasberg), and a Russian prisoner of war, Sacha (Laurent Terzieff), the film was ranked among the best neo-Realist films of the period and furthered the director’s artistic reputation. Pontecorvo re-created the horrors of a Nazi camp for women with a high degree of authenticity, notwithstanding his sentimentalism in the portrayal of the young Jewish girl. One of the film’s key scenes, the attempted escape of Red Army soldiers from the lager, was indeed inspired by a true event that happened at Treblinka during the war. Pontecorvo’s next film, La battaglia di Algeri, banned by the French government until 1971, resurrects the war theme in the depiction of the Algerian struggle for independence. In this highly influential film, Pontecorvo revisited the cinematic style of his neo-Realist beginnings, with thematic input that evokes memories of clandestine, Resistance struggle. Casting nonprofessional actors, with one main exception (Colonel Mathieu), he combines the fictional and the documentary in a most compelling restaging of the historical events that brought an end to the French colonization of Algeria in 1962. Even though the film neglects dialectical duality, La battaglia di Algeri, with its impressive spectacle and powerful indictment of colonialism, has been widely recognized as an act of civic courage. In his next film, the undervalued Queimada (Burn!, 1969), Pontecorvo continued his exploration of Third World issues and colonialism. Following the international success of La battaglia d’Algeri, he was able to command a Hollywood budget and an international star, Marlon Brando, who played William Walker, an adventurous agent of the British Crown who is sent to the Western Indies around 1840 to organize a popular upsurge against the Portuguese, only to mold a legendary figure in the indigenous rebel Jose` Dolores. Political commitment dominates still more clearly in Ogro (Operation Ogre, 1979), Pontecorvo’s last feature film to date, which depicts the assassination of Franchist Prime Minister, Carrero Blanco, by ETA

Basque separatists in 1973. The film was shot in 1978, a year in which Italy was traumatized by the kidnapping and subsequent murder of former Christian Democrat Premier Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades. Due to this national tragedy, Pontecorvo modified Ogro’s conclusion to include a coda questioning the legitimacy of terrorism. Despite receiving numerous offers, after Ogro Pontecorvo steadfastly refused to return to the director’s chair. His major unfinished project is a film portraying Jesus as a revolutionary figure. The projects that Pontecorvo did manage to complete were documentaries and shorts that sharply contrast with the committed spirit of his earlier features. In the documentary Il ritorno ad Algeri (Return to Algiers, 1992), Pontecorvo went back to Algiers as a journalist to witness that country’s struggle with Islamic fundamentalism and de facto civil war. In the short Danza della fata Confetto— Nostalgia di protezione (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy: Protection Nostalgia, 1997), his last effort in a fictional setting, a grown man yearns for the security he experienced as a child protected by his mother. During the past decade, Pontecorvo’s activity as a filmmaker has been largely limited to the production of TV commercials and short documentaries. Worth mentioning is a state-sponsored tourist film about the wonders of Italy, entitled 12 registi per 12 citta` (12 Directors for 12 Cities, 1998), in which Pontecorvo presented a cinematic postcard of the northeastern Italian city, Udine. Pontecorvo has also accepted prestigious appointments in the Italian state culture apparatus, first as the President of the Venice International Film Festival (1992–1995) and subsequently as President of Cinecitta` Holding in Rome.

Biography Gillo Pontecorvo was born in Pisa on 19 November 1919 in a well-to-do family, the fifth of eight children. He abandoned the University of Pisa to tour Europe as professional tennis player in 1938. He stayed in Paris with his brother Bruno, who inducted him into Marxist ideology, 1940. He married Henriette Niepce in 1940; they were divorced in 1970. He was an undercover courier for the anti-Fascist Resistance, 1942, and a Resistance leader in Milan and Turin, 1943–1945. Pontecorvo debuted as an actor in Aldo Vergano’s Il sole sorge ancora, 1946. He worked with Yves Alle´gret, 1951. He was assistant director to Giancarlo Menotti and Mario Monicelli’s Le infedeli (1952) and Toto` and Carolina (1955). After a long apprenticeship in 1475

GILLO PONTECORVO shorts and documentaries, he debuted as director with La grande strada azzurra, 1957. He received an Academy Award nomination for Kapo` (1960) and La battaglia di Algeri, which also won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, 1966. He married Zinno Maria Adele in 1970; they have three children. He served as President of the Venice Film Festival 1992–1995. A Lincoln Center retrospective of his work took place in 1999. Pontecorvo currently lives in Rome. CARLO CELLI

Dramatic Films Giovanna (Episode in Die Winderose by Joris Ivens), 1956. La grande strada azzurra (The Wide Blue Road, based on the novel Squarcio` by Franco Solinas), 1956. Kapo`, 1959. La Battaglia di Algeri (The Battle of Algiers), 1965. Burn! (Queimada!), 1969. Ogro (Operation Ogre—The Tunnel), 1979.

Screenplays Gillo Pontecorvo’s ‘‘The Battle of Algiers’’: A Film Written by Franco. Solinas, edited by PierNico Solinas, New York: Scribner, 1973.

Further Reading Selected Works Documentaries Missione Timiriazev, 1953. Porta Portese, 1954. Cani dietro le sbarre, 1954. Festa a Castelluccio, 1955. Uomini del marmo, 1955. Pane e zolfo, 1956. Una storia per l’energia, 1984. 12 registi per 12 citta` (‘‘Udine’’ segment), 1989. Il ritorno ad Algeri, 1992. Danza della fata Confetto- Nostalgia di protezione, 1997.

Bignardi, Irene, Memorie Estorte a uno smemorato: Vita di Gillo Pontecorvo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1999. Celli, Carlo, Gillo Pontecorvo: From Resistance to Terrorism, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. Cipriani, Luigi, et al., Primo piano sull’autore Gillo Pontecorvo ‘‘La dittatura della verita`.’’ Rome: Designer Press, 1999. Ghirelli, Massimo, Gillo Pontecorvo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Martini, Giacomo (editor), Il cinema di Gillo Pontecorvo, Cesena (Forli’): Il ponte vecchio, 2005. Mellen, Joan, Filmguide to ‘‘The Battle of Algiers,’’ Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Said, Edward, ‘‘The Quest for Gillo Pontecorvo,’’ Interview, 18 (November 1988), 90–93.

GIUSEPPE PONTIGGIA (1934–2003) Discovered by Elio Vittorini in 1956, Giuseppe Pontiggia was—with Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, Antonio Porta, and others—one of the founders of the review Il verri, Luciano Anceschi’s journal aimed at renewing Italian culture and making it independent both of Hermeticism and neo-Realism. Pontiggia’s contribution was quite strong until 1961: In those years of experimentation, the new critical methods described in the review stimulated him to write his first novels, La morte in banca (Death at the Bank), published in 1959, and L’arte della fuga (The Art of Escaping), the most experimental of all, in 1968. Some of Pontiggia’s recurrent subjects and characters are already present in these two works, as they are in a series of his short stories, marked by an autobiographical

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dimension and by new and peculiar takes on traditional types. In La morte in banca, the main character is a clerk. The nineteenth-century tradition offers several models that Pontiggia recalled to varying degrees: His Carabba, for instance, nods at Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, is disillusioned in his hopes as is Balzac’s David Se´chard, grows indifferent to the mortifications of everyday dull work as does Melville’s ‘‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’’ (1853) and exhibits the same astonished precision as some clerks in Dickens, Gogol, Emilio De Marchi, and Federigo Tozzi. Furthermore, his smile grows feebler and feebler, like Svevo’s unfit characters (Pontiggia wrote his dissertation on Svevo). In other words, he is ready to become what other people expect from him, a petty clerk just waiting for the end of

GIUSEPPE PONTIGGIA the day and for his summer holidays. The awareness of tradition is also apparent in Pontiggia’s original use of language, even when he plays with the technical terms of banking that he came to know though his personal experience. L’arte della fuga deals with the theme of escape, a subject that would become one of his favorites, as in the novel La grande sera (The Big Evening, 1989) and in other prose pieces. Indeed, in L’arte della fuga, Pontiggia practiced his highest form of explicit experimentation and ended his collaboration with Il verri and with the new avant-garde. Not by chance, he left the magazine in 1961, the same year that the review published the anthology I Novissimi, written by the poets who later composed the Gruppo 63. Pontiggia’s experimentalism continued even after his decision to ‘‘stand on his own.’’ It is a discreet, all inner, experimentalism, more implosive than explosive. His technique was to take possession and control of the entire text, of each small part of it, from vocabulary to structure, from names to models, by mixing technical terms and special languages in a register that is always somewhat metalinguistic. Hence the narrator, while telling the story, is also analyzing how stories are told. Pontiggia’s experimentalism in fact consisted of that special ‘‘art of escaping’’ that allows language to boil without ever overflowing. Il giocatore invisibile (The Invisible Player, 1978), a denunciation of the hypocrisy of the university world, was met with critical success and the Selezione Campiello Award. In 1989, with La grande sera, a novel about the life of a tranquil clerk who suddenly decides to disappear, abandoning work and family, Pontiggia won the Strega award and was recognized as one of Italy’s most important writers. His journalistic activity became even more intense, while his narrative work continued with very successful results, as, for instance, in the case of Vite di uomini non illustri (Lives of Ordinary Men, 1993), in which the chronicle of the everyday becomes the burlesque model of a hybrid genre, imbued with a tragic feeling and informed by a small dose of irony. With Nati due volte (Born Twice, 2000), translated into several languages, he reached his highest point, with an autobiographical work in which a deep, painful analysis never gives way to the commonplace. Rather, it becomes a quiet model for writing and a masterpiece in its genre. The story of the relationship between a father and his disabled son sums up all of the author’s favorite subjects, from a short escape to the heaviness of being, from everyday nonsense to nonsensical language, from the

examination of words to the slippery truth of love. A lover of aphorisms, collected in Le sabbie immobili (Still Sand, 1991); of armchair travels, as in Prima persona (First Person, 2002); and of books (he was a self-proclaimed bibliomaniac), Pontiggia informed his writing with the highest literary conscience without either boring or alienating his reader.

Biography Giuseppe Pontiggia was born in Como on September 25, 1934, and moved to Milan where, after secondary school, he worked in a bank. At the same time, he was enrolled in the University of Milan. After earning his degree in humanities, 1961, he taught evening school. Pontiggia married and had a son, Andrea. He worked as an editor and journalist for Il verri, 1956–1961. He was also editor of the Almanacco dello specchio, with Marco Forti. Pontiggia worked as a publishers’ adviser, becoming one of the most authoritative readers of unpublished books in Italy (he discovered, among others, Guido Morselli). He wrote for newspapers, including Il Sole24 ore. He was awarded the Selezione Campiello prize for Il giocatore invisibile, 1978, and the Strega Prize for La grande sera, 1989. Pontiggia died in Milan on June 27, 2003, of heart failure. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE

Selected works Collections Opere, edited by Daniela Marcheschi, Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

Fiction La morte in banca. Cinque racconti e un romanzo breve, 1959. L’arte della fuga, 1968. Il giocatore invisibile, 1978; as The Invisible Player, translated by Annapaola Concogni, 1988. Cichita la scimmia parlante, 1979. Il raggio d’ombra, 1983. Il giardino delle Esperidi, 1984. La grande sera, 1989. Vite di uomini non illustri, 1993. Portrait de l’artiste de taille, 1995. L’isola volante, 1996. I contemporanei del futuro. Viaggio nei classici, 1998. La contemporaneita` dell’antico, 1998. Le utopie della lettura, 1999. Nati due volte, 2000; as Born Twice, translated by Oonagh Stransky, 2002. Il residence delle ombre cinesi, 2004.

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GIUSEPPE PONTIGGIA Nonfiction Le sabbie immobili, 1991. Prima persona, 2002.

Further Reading Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino 1995. De Federicis, Lidia, ‘‘Il rapporto fra vita e letteratura nella nuova narrativa italiana,’’ Belfagor, 58:347 (2003), 582–588. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Pontiggia e la futuribilita` dei classici,’’ Nuova Antologia, 2211 (1999), 209–219. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Il romanziere Pontiggia,’’ Nuova Antologia, 2149 (January–March 1984), 322–333.

Giuliani, Alfredo, Autunno del Novecento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983. Marcheschi, Daniela, ‘‘Giuseppe Pontiggia,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 196, Italian Novelists Since World War II, 1965–1995, edited by Augustus Pallotta, Detroit, Washington, and London: Gale Research, 1999. Marcheschi, Daniela, ‘‘La letteratura in ‘prima persona’ di Giuseppe Pontiggia,’’ in Giuseppe Pontiggia, Opere, Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Martignoni, Clelia (editor), Leggere il mondo, vol. 8, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2001. Minore, Renato, Il gioco delle ombre, Milan: SugarCo, 1985. Ruozzi, Gino (editor), Scrittori italiani di aforismi, vol. 2, Il Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1996.

POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE Popular culture has always been a difficult subject to define independently of the theory that is designed to explain it. The sociologist of religion Carlo Prandi, in his historical and critical examination of the concept of the ‘‘popular,’’ described it as ‘‘the anthropological milieu of the Western subordinate classes,’’ referring first to an imperfect polarity through which a hierarchy is defined and justified (‘‘Popolare,’’ 1980). In the early twentyfirst century, however, the semantic field of the word is so wide that it cannot escape from a generic and neutralizing usage. Therefore, it is generally preferable to make use of the notion of folklore. In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, the recognition of folklore as the objectification of the popular world and the recording of the literary forms through which a new collective identity of the people expresses itself started in the early nineteenth century, during the Napoleonic Restoration. Already in 1763, Abbot Melchiorre Cesarotti, in translating the poems attributed to Ossian, imposed upon the old, Arcadian nature, depicted as bright and Mediterranean, the new taste for a wild nature of rocks, fogs, and windstorms. As Enrico Mattioda noted in the introduction to his 2000 edition of Cesarotti’s translations, the abbot identified the literary myth of Ossian with ‘‘a primitiveness that can 1478

break the literary canon and question its rules as well as introduce neologisms and mix and invent new genres.’’ Since the late eighteenth century, after Giambattista Vico and Lodovico Muratori, it had been difficult for Italian culture to recognize and examine the popular world without linguistic prejudices for what appeared deformed and distorted and without religious prejudices for what was considered as superstition. Examples of this difficult relationship are the works of Nicola Valletta (1750–1814) and Giovanni A. Battarra (1714–1789). For all its erudition, even the Storia di varj costumi sagri e profani dagli antichi sino a noi pervenuti (History of Various Sacred and Secular Practices of the Ancients That Have Come Down to Us, 1750) by Michelangelo Carmeli (1706–1766) investigates the meaning and etymology of the words, naming things in order to cast the dark and decadent present in opposition to the myth of the original innocence of a past spirituality, when customs had not yet been corrupted by their secular use. The first scientific approach to the study of popular culture can be found in the studies of the early nineteenth century when, following the example of the French Accade´mie Celtique, Giustina Renier Michiel (1755–1832) began her Origine delle feste

POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE veneziane (Origin of Venetian Festivals, 1817–1827), while the Napoleonic administration of the Kingdom of Italy sponsored a series of questionnaires aiming at investigating popular traditions and customs. Even Giacomo Leopardi, in a note of his Zibaldone (Notebook), wrote down a few lines of ‘‘Canzonette popolari in Recanati negli anni 1818–1820’’ (Popular Songs in Recanati, 1818– 1820), in line with the Romantic myth of a correlation between popular poetry and an instinctive and unconventional kindness. In the studies of popular life made by Michele Placucci (1782–1840), Atanasio Basetti (1798–1888), and, most importantly, Pietro Ercole Visconti (1802–1880), author of Saggio dei canti popolari della provincia Marittima e Campagna (Essay on Popular Songs of the Maritime and Country Provinces, 1830), as well as Niccolo` Tommaseo (1802–1874), author of the fourvolume Canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici, greci (Tuscan, Corsican, Illiryan, and Greek Popular Songs, 1841–1842), an unconditioned acceptance of the expressive modes of the popular world was explicitly opposed to erudite poetry. Furthermore, the popular spirit provided the basis for a political claim to national autonomy. This holds in the case of Giovanni Berchet (1783–1851) who, following the example of Johann G. von Herder, selected and translated Vecchie romanze spagnuole (Old Spanish Romances, 1837) and promoted in his romantic manifestos a new relationship between the writer and the people, toward a language both simple and close to things in question. Soon, this approach became fashionable, even with obvious formal distortions and trivializations such as the imitation of popular poetry in the political satire of Stornelli italiani (Italian Stornellos, 1862) by Francesco Dall’Ongaro (1808–1873) or in the numerous editions of the Poesie popolari published by Cesare Cavara (1818–1880) between 1852 and 1859, in which the evident naı¨vete´ cannot be redeemed by the imitation of popular forms. After writing the essay ‘‘Dell’organismo poetico e della poesia popolare italiana’’ (On the Poetic Organism and on Italian Popular Poetry, 1866), Vittorio Imbriani made use of his anti-academic attitude and great interest in language in a series of collections of popular stories and songs, La Novellaja fiorentina (Florentine Fables, 1871), La Novellaja milanese (Milanese Fables, 1872), and the two-volume Canti popolari delle province meridionali (Popular Songs of the Southern Provinces, 1871–1872). Alessandro D’Ancona (1835–1914) with Poesia popolare italiana (Italian Popular Poetry, 1878) began the process of recognition and

philological investigation of a literary tradition that ran parallel to that of high culture, while Costantino Nigra (1828–1907), in his Canti popolari del Piemonte (Popular Songs of Piedmont, 1888), distinguished between two different genres, one of Celtic-Romance and the other of Italian origin. The collection of the products of popular culture reached its peak with Giuseppe Pitre´ (1841–1916), the most important Italian folklorist and founder of the series ‘‘Biblioteca delle tradizioni popolari siciliane,’’ of which 25 volumes appeared between 1871 and 1913, and of the journal Archivio per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari (1882–1906). Finally, the major contributions of the twentieth century are represented by the early works of Benedetto Croce and by Antonio Gramsci’s prophetic definition of national-popular culture that, as a young Pasolini later observed, was quite close to what ‘‘nowadays is defined as ‘mass culture’’’ (‘‘Poesia popolare e poesia d’avanguardia,’’ 1955). Fascism had a great interest in popular culture, mostly as a means of propaganda and in a purely national and racial perspective, as Simonetta Falasca Zamponi has shown in her 1997 Fascist Spectacle. This position, however, was also supported by Vincenzo Cardarelli, who, in his essay ‘‘Italia popolare’’ (Popular Italy, 1831), recognized in the tradition of popular origins the opposite of the negative European universality, while in ‘‘Stato popolare: Riflessioni intorno al Fascismo’’ (Popular State: Remarks on Fascism, 1931), he prefigured the ‘‘myth’’ of the Fascist state along the lines of a truly popular state. The final romantic example of the myth of origins reflected by popular traditions was articulated by Pier Paolo Pasolini in the essays on regional and popular poetry, including military songs, later collected in Passione e ideologia (Passion and Ideology, 1960). It is through them that, in the postwar period, Pasolini offered to the vanquished nation a possible regeneration, through this example of a minor and disinherited Italy. The origin of the popular within the history of literature can be traced back to the figure of the jester, described by Giuseppe Cocchiara as ‘‘the true and authentic representative of the popular world’’ (Popolo e letteratura in Italia, 1959). It can also be traced back to many different forms of nonerudite poetry and works such as ‘‘L’acqua corre la borrana’’ (Water runs the stream), a ballad quoted by Giovanni Boccaccio in Decameron (VIII, 2), the contrasti (for instance those of Cielo d’Alcamo) derived from the mid-Latin altercationes, or what is left of the works of the jesters 1479

POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE Ruggieri Apugliese of Siena and Castra, a Florentine author mentioned without praise by Dante in the De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, 1304–1305), in which popular literature is relegated to the level of the literature of the mediocre. Or, finally, it can be traced back to the lauda, a ballad on a sacred topic written in monorhyme laisses or in stanzas of six verses sung by a soloist, responded to with a refrain by a chorus, and generally performed by wandering companies of penitents such as the Disciplinati or the Battuti. The most archaic form followed the pattern of the responsorial prayer, as in the case of the Cronica (Chronicle, ca. 1282–1287) by Salimbene da Parma (1221–1289) and then developed into the psalm pattern of St. Francis’s ‘‘Cantico di frate Sole’’ (Canticle of Brother Sun, 1224), and finally into the lauda-ballad of Jacopone da Todi (the greatest author of laude of the eleventh century), Guittone d’Arezzo, and Ser Garzo dell’Incisa (thirteenth century), Petrarch’s great-grandfather. What these early literary works have in common is the dramatic genre. As Paolo Toschi pointed out in his fundamental study Le origini del teatro italiano (1955), popular drama constituted ‘‘a repetition and new elaboration of patterns peculiar to the old seasonal rites of fecundity-fertility,’’ reshaped in the anonymous dramatic corpus of the Middle Ages to reemerge as a stereotypical production, the popular origin of which must ascertained case by case. Finally, such production followed the patterns of a double calendar: that of labor in the field and that of the liturgical/religious festivals. The cantari of the fourteenth century—a literary genre in octaves, either short or repeated, addressed initially to a poorly educated audience, the oldest of which is the anonymous Florio e Biancifiore copied around 1343—brought together material from diverse popular sources such as the Bible and the lives of the saints as well as chivalric cycles and fairy tales, according to a modular language that reached its most rewarding results with the Renaissance chivalric epic. Sermons are another bridge between popular and erudite culture, with their riddles and humble puns, as in the case of Lo specchio della vera penitenza (Mirror of True Penance, 1345) by Jacopo Passavanti and of the works of Domenico Cavalca (ca. 1270–1342), written in the Dominican spirit of vulgarizing religious culture. In the background remained the ongoing recycling of forms of oral culture, culminating in the experience of the carnival and in the propitiation rites, through which popular dramatic forms contaminated the whole of comic theater well into 1480

the second half of the fifteenth century. From parodies of funeral rites to wedding dialogues (mariazo or mogliazzo), the popular world was transposed vertically into the cultured universe of the courts and the cities, in the frottole and farces of Pietro Antonio Caracciolo and the eclogues of the Accademia dei Rozzi, in Il Ruzzante’s peasant characters and in the farces by Andrea Calmo (ca. 1510–1571). In fifteenth-century Florentine carnival songs, ballads in verse of eight syllables, staged and accompanied by music (often linked to the rise of opera), every aspect of daily life became the object of a sexual double entendre, with a particular insistence on sodomy. In Venice, Leonardo Giustinian (1388–1446), a poet and musician with a solid classical education, devised a kind of love poetry, called after him ‘‘giustiniana,’’ characterized by a true popular tone and milieu. By this point, when the encounter between popular poetry and the printing press completed the course already run by the oral tradition, a real taste for the popular had fully developed, affecting both treatise writing, with the documentation of customs and practices, as in Tommaso Garzoni’s La piazza universale di tutte le professioni (The Square of All Professions of the World, 1585), as well as the typically seventeenth-century genre of the heroicgallant novel, exemplified by Calloandro fedele (Faithful Calloandro, 1540–1553) by Giovanni Ambrogio Marini (ca. 1594–ca. 1650), the popular character of which is demonstrated by its success among the lower classes. The people thus became the new audience of readers. No less significant was the evolution of the fairy tale, from Giovambattista Basile’s reelaboration of popular themes and motifs within the marvelous universe of the southern Baroque in his collection of fables in dialect Lo cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de’ Peccerille (The Pentamerone, 1534–1536) to Carlo Gozzi’s theatrical fables, in which, in Venice, the mysterious and the fantastic demonstrated, in opposition to both the old theater of Pietro Chiari and the new reform of Carlo Goldoni, its authentic capacity of transfiguring life and overturning the visible order. In more recent times, Cristina Campo has recalled the esoteric and popular nature of the transfiguring message of the fairy tale entitles Gli imperdonabili (The Unforgivable, 1987), while Italo Calvino sponsored a project, Fiabe italiane (Italian Folktales, 1956), which, in its careful investigation of the fairy tale tradition, was also an example of cultural engagement, in opposition to consumer society. Finally, a significant aspect of a growing pedagogical interest in the symbolic-ritual language

POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE of popular cultures has been the rediscovery of nursery rhymes, for instance in the region of Friuli in the research collected by Diego Lavaroni and other scholars in Le parole divine dei cantori di strada (2003). On the other hand, for instance in the nineteenth century, the political imaginary of the subaltern classes was able to nourish the conscience of a growing national identity through literary icons: Galileo Galilei, the mathematician of infinity, and Giordano Bruno, the monk in revolt against Christianity, became on numerous occasions the spiritual leaders of the new rationalism and free thought of the Tuscan popular movements against the ‘‘Papal Rome’’ of the Risorgimento, as demonstrated in the volume Galilei e Bruno nell’immaginario dei movimenti popolari tra Otto e Novecento (2001), edited by Franco Bertolucci. From the epos of the humble Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842) to the serial novels of Francesco Mastriani (1819–1891), inspired by a sort of humanitarian verismo; from the pedagogic engagement by means of genres such as popular almanacs and proverbs of Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895) to Luigi Pirandello’s Sicilian theater based on the folkloristic repertoire of ‘‘mimes’’ that he turns into tragedy by showing its painful and absurd side; from the later plays of Ignazio Buttitta (1899–1997) to those of Antonino Uccello (1922–1982), the guardians of a Sicilian oral tradition and folklore at risk of extinction—throughout the works of these authors the relationship between literature and the popular world always documents a condition of pain and loss, always capable nevertheless of renewing itself in new contexts. Recently, the nomenclature of terms belonging to the semantic field of ‘‘popular culture,’’ and in particular of those describing the relationship with the literary tradition, has expanded to include ‘‘popolarita`’’ (popularity), as in Salvatore S. Nigro’s ‘‘Popolo e popolarita`’’ (1986) and ‘‘populismo’’ (populism), as in Alberto Asor Rosa’s Scrittori e popolo: saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia (1964), which have introduced new topics for reflection. The renewed interest in the material imaginary, as in Piero Camporesi’s studies on the late Middle Ages and the Baroque, Il sugo della vita: Simbolismo e magia del sangue (1984) and Le officine dei sensi (1985), or for The Practice of Everyday Life, to quote the title of Michel de Certeau’s fundamental anthropological study (1984), or for consumption practices as forms of construction of communities and of collective identities, as in John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture (1989), dem-

onstrate how the value of difference promoted by popular culture may constitute a novelty within a homogeneous and passive mass conscience. Other examples include the cultural promotion of the popular metanarratives produced in the world of sports, as Nicola Porro explained in ‘‘Sport plurale e cittadinanza sportiva’’ (2003); the popular mythology produced by opera both in and outside the theaters, as described by Roberto Leydi in ‘‘Diffusione e volgarizzazione’’ (1981); the social experience of ballroom dancing, from the rituals of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie to proletarian soire´es and political galas, well documented by Anna Tonelli in E ballando, ballando (1998); and the recent legitimization of ‘‘popular devotion,’’ celebrated through expressive forms often outside the liturgy of the Church and with literary manifestations in the descriptions of pilgrimages, processions, and holy sites, investigated by Ignazio M. Calabuig in ‘‘Pieta` popolare’’ (1998). Finally, Carlo Ossola, in ‘‘Symboles et destins du peuple’’ (2004), has acknowledged the limited literary awareness of the notion of ‘‘people’’ in the Italian literature of the last two centuries. From the different versions of the same subject in the two famous paintings by Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo, La fiumana (The Flood) and Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth Estate), to the variants in the 1915 and the 1931 text of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s hymn ‘‘Popolo’’ (People) to the utopian myth of a ‘‘Nuova Preistoria’’ (new prehistory) in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Poesia in forma di rosa (Poetry in the Shape of a Rose, 1964), the notion of people remains an inexhaustible idea. STEFANO TOMASSINI Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo: saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia, Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1964. Bertolucci, Franco (editor), Galilei e Bruno nell’immaginario dei movimenti popolari tra Otto e Novecento, Pisa: BFS, 2001. Bredekamp, Horst, Calcio fiorentino: Il Rinascimento dei giochi: Il calcio come festa medicea, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1995. Calabuig, Ignazio M., ‘‘Pieta` popolare,’’ in Dizionario di omiletica, edited by Manlio Sodi and Achille M. Triacca, Leumann: Elle Di Ci; Gorle: Velar, 1998. Campo, Cristina, Gli imperdonabili, Milan: Adelphi, 1987. Camporesi, Piero, Il sugo della vita: Simbolismo e magia del sangue, Milan: Edizioni di Comunita`, 1984. Camporesi, Piero, Le officine dei sensi, Milan: Garzanti, 1985. Cardarelli, Vincenzo, Opere, edited by di Clelia Martignoni, Milan: Mondadori, 1981.

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POPULAR CULTURE AND LITERATURE Certeau, Michel de, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Cirese, Alberto Mario, Cultura egemonica e culture subalterne, Palermo: Palumbo, 1971. Cocchiara, Giuseppe, Il paese di Cuccagna e altri studi di folklore, Turin: Einaudi, 1956. Cocchiara, Giuseppe, Storia del folklore in Italia, Palermo: Sellerio, 1981. Cocchiara, Giuseppe, Popolo e letteratura in Italia, Turin: Einaudi, 1959. Croce, Benedetto, Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte: Studi sulla poesia italiana dal Tre al Cinquecento, Bari: Laterza, 1933. Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Fiske, John, Understanding Popular Culture, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Gallini, Clara, ‘‘Teatro popolare,’’ in Enciclopedia del teatro del ’900, edited by Antonio Attisani, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Ginzburg, Carlo, Miti emblemi spie: Morfologia e storia, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Gramsci, Antonio, Letteratura e vita nazionale, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Lavaroni, Diego, et al., le parole dei cantori di strada: con un’antologia di filastrocche friulane, Rome: Carocci, 2003.

Leydi, Roberto, ‘‘Diffusione e volgarizzazione,’’ in Storia dell’opera italiana, edited by Lorenzo Bianconi and Giorgio Pestelli, vol. 6. Teorie e tecniche, immagini e fantasmi, Turin: EDT, 1988. Mattioda, Enrico, introduction to Melchiorre Cesarotti, Le poesie di Ossian, Rome: Salerno, 2000. Nigro, Salvatore S., ‘‘Popolo e popolarita`,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 5. Le Questioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Ossola, Carlo, ‘‘Symboles et destins du peuple,’’ in L’avenir de nos origines. Le copiste et le prophe`te, Grenoble: Millon, 2004. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Poesia popolare e poesia d’avanguardia,’’ Paragone, 64 (1955), 101–104. Pitre´, Giuseppe, Bibliografia delle tradizioni popolari d’Italia, Turin and Palermo: Clausen, 1894. Pitre´, Giuseppe, Curiosita` popolari tradizionali, 16 vols., Palermo: Pedone Lauriel, 1885–1899. Porro, Nicola, ‘‘Sport plurale e cittadinanza sportiva,’’ in Letteratura e Sport, edited by Nicola Bottiglieri, Arezzo: Limina, 2003. Prandi, Carlo, ‘‘Popolare,’’ in Enciclopedia Einaudi, edited by Ruggiero Romano, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Strinati, Dominic, An Introduction to Theories of Popular Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Tonelli, Anna, E ballando ballando. La storia d’Italia a passi di danza (1815–1996), Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998. Toschi, Paolo, Le origini del teatro italiano, Turin: Einaudi, 1955.

ANTONIO PORTA (LEO PAOLAZZI) (1935–1989) Antonio Porta’s notoriety on the Italian literary scene of the second half of the twentieth century began with the publication of several of his writings in the anthology I Novissimi (The Newest Poets, 1961), edited by Alfredo Giuliani, after which he was assigned a lead role that was, however, critically autonomous within the movement known as the neo-avant-garde. His works exerted great influence on the contemporary cultural context, thereby provoking a wide array of judgments that were conditioned in general by the diverse aesthetic and ideological positions of literary critics. Nonetheless, the appreciation for his lyrical production turned out to be widely shared for its untiring artistic investigation, enriched by a strong ethical tension. In fact, the radical experimentation conducted by 1482

Porta was never without a price in the sense that the unquenchable tension toward innovation always originated from sincere and profound demands. His fiction, however, raised more diametrically opposed sentiments: On the one hand it was praised for its organized structure achieved by means of unpredictable, almost dreamlike associations, while on the other it frequently revealed the incapacity to organize itself in a discourse that was neither organic nor formal—and not even convincing—because of its wider dimensions. This is the case with Partita (Match, 1967), an experimental novel written in the context of the Gruppo 63. The need to distinguish Porta’s literary production from the experiments of other writers has often been underlined, as it would be limiting to

ANTONIO PORTA (LEO PAOLAZZI) circumscribe it exclusively within the aesthetic and ideological confines defined by the neo-avant-garde. A number of characteristic traits from his entire artistic path certainly find an important confirmation in the reflections of the Gruppo 63; in fact, it is thanks to these reflections that these traits were able to acquire full self-consciousness. However, these elements are already clearly present in the works that precede Porta’s adhesion to the neoavant-garde movement. A tormented approach to reality manifests itself from his first poetic collection, Calendario (Calendar, 1956), and therefore the need to develop more serene attitudes is expressed. His style was still far from the typical experimentations of the years that would follow, and he did not hide his dependence on models from Italian literary tradition. Yet several of Porta’s themes emerge here: solitude, death, expectation, and the constant existential issues with profoundly tragic implications. Already in his next collection of poems, La palpebra rovesciata (The Inside Out Eyelid, 1960), Porta attempted a new, formal discourse—which was deliberately fragmented—which approached the diverse structural and figurative elements in a free and almost brutal manner, apparently without logic. To this was matched the use of quotes isolated from their original context and inserted in a foreign, often incompatible framework in order to simulate the production of completely unpredictable meanings. The feelings of disorientation provoked by similar techniques was intensified by the constant references to a concrete dimension, which was represented by absolutely real events, often inspired by facts from news stories. Here the need to force the purely tangible dimension of the world became manifest without, however, losing the relationships with it. This implicated an intense faith in poetry and in its capacity to render comprehensible the essence of things. However, and indeed Porta insisted on this concept, he did not believe it possible nor desirable to arrive at a definitive knowledge of things, since this would represent only the paralysis, and therefore the death, of the lyric self that instead lives in unending transformation. Such basic themes were developed further in Metropolis (Metropolis, 1971) as well as in the poetic and narrative works from his later production, from Il re del magazzino (The King of the Storehouse, 1978) to Il giardiniere contro il becchino (The Gardener against the Grave-Digger, 1988); they assumed particular importance in Melusina, una ballata e un diario (Melusina, a Ballad and a Diary, 1987).

Likely influenced by the Hermeneutic interests and reception theory prevalent in Italy at the end of the 1970s, Porta developed during his later years a more serene vision regarding the role that art must and is able to play in society. In this period he recuperated the Illuminist ideal of the communicative value represented by culture insofar as the language is stimulated to open itself up towards the ‘‘other’’ in order to initiate a constructive dialogue. This conviction became reality on the practical level in the organization of demonstrations focused on the promotion of contemporary literature and on the creative level in the research for new formal structures that allow a more direct involvement with the recipient. Thus texts were born in which the poetic dimension is enriched by the contamination with other genres: In Passi passaggi (Steps Passages, 1980) the epistolary writing, the diary, and performative expressions emerge, in Melusina the fairy tale appears, in Il giardiniere contro il becchino, beyond recalls to the theater of the absurd, the mixture of contrasting linguistic registers occurs. At first sight it can seem as though a similar faith in communication contradicts the reflections of the neo-avant-garde, according to which the nature of every human discourse is by principle illusory. But in reality it brings back the utopias of the 1960s, adapting them, however, to the changed historical conditions. The deepening of the relationship with reality, however, necessarily generates suffering, since humankind can never decipher all aspects of existence, which will forever maintain its numerous contradictions. Moreover, the cognitive process renders us tragically aware of the pain that constantly oppresses our lives, and it is from here that originates the strong ethical and political drive that uninterruptedly characterized the thoughts of the author, even if it assumed a different relevance according to the specific historical and existential moment in which a text was conceived. It was only after the active adhesion to the neo-avant-garde movement that Porta’s ideals became organized in a conscious program delineated with clarity. However, already in the very first phase of his activity (above all in La palpebra rovesciata) he elaborated a concept that would later be essential for Gruppo 63: that is, the realization that the cultural product inevitably becomes assimilated by the same mechanisms it attempts to oppose. Naturally the political and social problems became more prevalent with the demands of the 1960s, and in the diametrically charged climate that finally exploded in the year 1968, becoming even more violent with 1483

ANTONIO PORTA (LEO PAOLAZZI) the difficult tensions of the successive decade. The works written between 1967 and 1980 can be seen from this point of view, beginning with the novel Partita up through the poetic collection Passi passaggi. The apex of this phase is represented by Week-end (1974) and by the coeval La presa di potere di Ivan lo sciocco (Silly Ivan’s Coming into Power, 1974), a theatrical piece that reveals close ties with the lyrical production and Week-end in particular. But yet in Il giardiniere contro il becchino, the last creative work of the author, the individual can be defined exclusively in his social, civil, anthropological, and political features. The profound need for formal experimentation was present in Antonio Porta before 1964, the year of his entrance into Gruppo 63, in which he participated from the second meeting. Daring linguistic experiments are found in Zero (1963) and Aprire (To Open, 1964), where the estranged condition of modern humanity finds direct expression in a fragmentary and dense style full of internal conflict. Without a doubt, however, the neo-avant-garde experience was fundamental for the maturation of the author insofar as it permitted him to discuss and measure himself with intellectuals of his generation. Thanks to this he could also assimilate extraliterary influences of international importance (from psychoanalysis, physics, linguistic theory, and pictorial and musical currents) while his artistic research acquired a solid theoretical base. Here are found the origins of the works in which experimentation is conducted in the most radical, systematic and conscious manner: Examples include the poetic collection Cara (Dear, 1969) and the novel Partita, both committed to a metaliterary reflection that exceeds the stereotypes of its genre and invites the reader to ponder the mechanisms that form the basis of language.

Biography Antonio Porta was born in Vicenza on November 9, 1935, son of Anna Trentin and Pietro Paolazzi, future owner of the publishing house Rusconi and Paolazzi. In 1936 his family moved to Milan. He began to work in his father’s publishing house. In 1957, he married Emilia Alba Meneghelli, who gave birth to a son, Luca, in 1958 and a daughter, Monica, in 1959. In 1958 he began to work in the editorial office of the journal Il Verri. In 1960, he graduated in modern literature from the Universita` Cattolica of Milan. In 1964, Porta participated in the second meeting of Gruppo 63. In 1970, with 1484

Metropolis, he was a finalist for the Viareggio Prize for literature. In 1972, he became general director of Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas libri. He began to collaborate with Il Giorno. In 1974, he separated from his wife. In 1977, he entered into the directive committee of the publishing house Feltrinelli. In 1978, he began to collaborate with Il Corriere della Sera and Sette. In 1979, he started an affair with Rosemary Ann Liedl and founded the journals Tabula and Alfabeta. In 1980, a son, Giovanni, was born. With Passi passaggi, he won the Val di Comino Award and was a finalist for the D’Annunzio Award. In 1981, Porta left the directors’ committee of Feltrinelli and began to occupy himself with the events of Milanopoesia. In 1982, a daughter, Margherita, was born and he received the Gandovere-Franciacorta Award for L’aria della fine. In 1984, with Invasioni, he won the Viareggio and the Citta` di Latina Awards. In 1988 Porta married Rosemary Ann Liedl and a son, Mario, was born. With Il giardiniere contro il becchino, he won the Carducci Award, the Acireale Award, and the Stefanile Award. He hosted the weekly show Prima di cena, tra speranza e nostalgia on Radiodue. Porta died of a heart attack on April 12, 1989, in Rome. GIADA VIVIANI See also: Neo-Avant-Garde Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Calendario,’’ 1956. ‘‘La palpebra rovesciata,’’ 1960. ‘‘Zero,’’ 1963. ‘‘Aprire,’’ 1964. ‘‘I rapporti. Poesie 1958–1964,’’ 1966. ‘‘Cara,’’ 1969. ‘‘Metropolis,’’ 1971. ‘‘Week-end,’’ 1974. ‘‘Quanto ho da dirvi, poesie 1958–1975,’’ 1977. ‘‘Passi passaggi,’’ 1980. ‘‘L’aria della fine,’’ 1982. ‘‘Emilio, poemetto per bambini,’’ 1982. ‘‘Invasioni,’’ 1984. ‘‘Melusina, una ballata e un diario,’’ 1987. ‘‘Il giardiniere contro il becchino,’’ 1988.

Fiction Partita, 1967. Il re del magazzino, 1978. Se tutto fosse un tradimento, 1981.

Plays La presa di potere di Ivan lo sciocco, 1974. La festa del cavallo, 1986.

CARLO PORTA Further Reading Giuliani, Alfredo (editor), I Novissimi. Poesie per gli anni ’60, Milan: Rusconi e Paolazzi, 1961. Graffi, Milli, ‘‘Una questione di espressione dell’io in Antonio Porta,’’ Il Verri, 2 (1976), 136–144. Moroni, Mario, Essere e fare. L’itinerario poetico di Antonio Porta, Rimini: Luise`, 1991. Muzzioli, Francesco, ‘‘La poesia di Antonio Porta e l’ideologia dell’avanguardia,’’ L’Argine letterario, September 1973, 868–878. Picchione, John, ‘‘Antonio Porta: dalla semantica in frantumi al progetto di comunicazione poetica,’’ in Scrittori,

tendenze letterarie e conflitto delle poetiche in Italia (1960–1990), edited by Rocco Capozzi and Massimo Ciavolella, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Picchione, John, Introduzione a A. Porta, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Picchione, John, ‘‘Linguaggio come terapia nell’ultimo Porta,’’ Strumenti critici, 39–40 (1979), 349–362. Picchione, John, ‘‘Poesia come provocazione: itinerari espressivi di Antonio Porta,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 2 (1983), 167–182. Sasso, Luigi, Antonio Porta, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980.

CARLO PORTA (1775–1821) Carlo Porta was one of the greatest Italian dialect poets. A member of the Milanese intellectual salons, he was a civil servant for most of his life, except for the short period in which he performed as a comic actor at the Teatro Patriottico, 1800–1804. He opened his own salon (or Cameretta), where friends such as Giovanni Berchet gathered weekly to debate literary and political issues. The life and work of Porta are framed within a historical context that ranges from the Enlightenment to the Romantic revolution and that is situated in the Milan and Lombardy of the times, which lived through the traumatic events of the enlightened reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph II, then the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic reaction. Like Alessandro Manzoni, Porta was deeply imbued with the Enlightenment ideas of freedom and equality. His Enlightenment education was always alive and present in his spirit, and it was precisely this kind of intellectual formation that made it possible for him to understand and appropriate the principles of the Romantic movement. As a result, Porta’s literary works are permeated by a liberal, progressive, and democratic spirit and are characterized by a modern content and by the need for a concrete language that adheres closely to things. This is the source for the antihumanistic, antimythological, and realist polemic that proved to be something of an obstacle to an immediate positive evaluation of his work. Aside from the culture of the Enlightenment, his poems were also rooted in the tradition of dialectal literature that in northern Italy had been flourishing

since the seventeenth century, with Carlo Maria Maggi (1630–1699), most famous for his dialect plays, the author of the theatrical masterpiece I consigli di Meneghino (Meneghino’s Advice, 1697). In fact, Porta’s first composition, El lava piatt del Meneghin che` mort (The Dead Meneghino’s Dishwasher, 1792) pays a tribute to the Milanese mask of Meneghino as well as to Maggi himself, who had invented one of Italy’s most popular stock masks. Porta’s poetic activity began with his translations into the Milanese dialect of Giuseppe Parini’s ode ‘‘A Silvia’’ (To Silvia, 1795) and, between 1802 and 1805, of several cantos from Dante’s Inferno, the first ever known dialect translation of the Comedia (ca. 1305–1321). One should also consider two historical works, Pietro Verri’s Storia di Milano (History of Milan, 1783) and Carlo Cattaneo’s Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia (Natural and Civil Reports on Lombardy, 1844), where can be found information that explains Porta’s bent for dialect, his choice of which was neither arbitrary nor dilettantish. The adoption of dialect helped him to penetrate more deeply into the depths of a humanity neglected by professional writers—a modern, natural, and authentic humanity devoid of artifices. Dialect was his means of approach and moral participation, even though he ventured only rarely into the modes of protest and invective. Indeed, Porta was led to adopt dialectal by what he perceived as the necessity of renewing the national language itself, which no longer corresponded to the culture of either the popular or the bourgeois class that was poised to assume 1485

CARLO PORTA control of history and become its protagonist. Parini’s example also loomed large for Porta, but only in terms of the preference for realistic themes. His subjects can be traced back to the three major components into which society was divided and structured: the nobility, the clergy, and the people. Furthermore, the use of the octave (he preferred narration in verse) can be explained by the fact that this was the classical meter of popular poetry and of the cantari, compositions loved by the lower classes, and by the fact that, like the sestina, the octave is appropriate for leisurely narratives. All of Porta’s works have a great value as documentation. His poetic compositions are filled with various classes of men and women and the locals they frequent: aristocrats, heavily made-up women infatuated with themselves, bigots whose exterior religiosity has dulled their wits, voracious priests, gluttonous friars, guileless commoners with the marks of oppression etched on their faces, the dull setting of the aristocratic salons, the taverns, the brothels—everything was rendered with great realistic forcefulness worthy of true art. Given this diverse social presence, the range of Porta’s inspiration unfolded through different grades and tones: from comedy and satire he moved to drama, as was the case of La Ninetta del Verzee (Ninetta from Verzee, 1814), in which, the most famous of a series of low-life female characters tells the piteous story of how she was seduced, exploited, and thrown into the depths of vice and misery. The poet, narrator, and portraitist of Desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee (The Misfortunes of Giovannin Bongee, 1812), with its follow-up Olter desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee (More Misfortunes of Giovannin Bongee, 1814), of El lament de Marchionn di gamb avert (The Lament of the Bowlegged Melchiorr, 1816), and of La Ninetta del Verzee became a fully-fledged figure in the history of Italian literature. Most of Porta’s narrative poems focus on lower-class suffering men, such as the unassuming Marchionn who recounts the misdeeds of his beautiful and chatty wife, the ‘‘Tetton’’ (Big Tits). But the most celebrated of Porta’s works remains La Ninetta del Verzee, a short poem composed of 43 octaves of hendecasyllables that follow the scheme ABABABCC. The monologue, set in the Verzee, which is Milan’s main vegetable market, remained long unpublished, like all Porta’s poems, and was initially distributed only as a manuscript or in fascicoletti printed secretly on account of the coarseness of the contents. The protagonist of the story is a poor young girl, a prostitute, who recounts to one of her clients the sad and painful 1486

story of her own love. The figure of a neighbor, a robust and libertine fishwife who raised the girl after she was orphaned, looms large in the story. To enjoy herself in peace with her lover, the woman used to shut up her son with the Ninetta in a room. When they became adolescents, their friendship was transformed into love, but in order to overcome her reluctance, el Pepp, the boy, threatens to kill himself. After her neighbor’s death, the young girl takes over the fish-shop, eventually acquiring her own home. ‘‘Pepp’’ does not split up with her, however, instead driving her into poverty, profitting from the money that she earns in her business and as a prostitute and also selling the few pieces of furniture in her possession. No longer able to endure his bullying, one day Ninetta rebels against her exploiter, who leaves her, but, in order to take revenge, resorts to having a popular poet write a slanderous satire against her. The poem’s spirit is neither elegiac nor drenched in pathos; rather, the work is permeated by a tragic sentiment rendered through a powerful realism. The protagonist shows goodness and instinctive generosity, using plain language which, in its expressive crudity, becomes subversive within a social context marked by formalistic hypocrisy. Ninetta’s dialect, contaminated by its vulgar usage, is characterized by a variety of expressive tones, which create a half-comic, half-tragic dramatization of the character. Unaware of the notion of sin, the girl does not seek redemption but clings instead to her honor, which she tries to defend is spite of her profession, which she practices out of economic necessity. Porta’s great originality consisted therefore in his power to give voice to characters abandoned to fend for themselves, to the disgraced who suffer and are oppressed. It is a representation that relies on a poetic discourse in which the language proves to be immediate and natural. The spontaneous and communicative dialect thus expresses a harmonious tension, a participation by the author in the vicissitudes of his protagonists, whom he portrayed with great mastery. No other writer before E´mile Zola and Guy de Maupassant was as able as Porta to convey the life of a brothel, in which misery, vice, and squalor were one and the same, or to penetrate the squalid slums of the modern city. If the high society of the eighteenth century lived in the hendecasyllables of Parini, the now-decayed nobility, shut up in its solitary palaces, and the clergy wounded by Napoleon’s decrees and impoverished by the suppression of the congregations, live in the stories of Porta. Even when the poet represented characters with

CARLO PORTA whom he did not sympathize, he did not exaggerate, nor did he ever adopt a tone of derision or sarcasm. He was one of those frank men who did not give offense, and indeed by means of his honest and cordial temperament he was able to give his creations as much pity and emotion as tolerance and understanding.

Biography Carlo Porta was born in Milan on 15 June 1775 to a bourgeois family. His inclination for literature was opposed by his father, a civil servant in the Austrian administration. In the wake of the entry of the French into Milan, his father lost his position, 1796–1797. Porta moved with his brother Baldassare to Venice, 1798, where, after the Treaty of Campoformio, Austria exercised administrative power. He became employed by the inland revenue office and fell in love with the noblewoman Adriana Diedo. He returned to Milan along with the Austrians, 1799, again working in the inland revenue office, but lost his position with the return of the French, 1800. Porta rejected membership into the Milanese Accademia letteraria and successfully performed as a comic actor at the Teatro Patriottico, 1800–1804. He founded the Societa` delle Ganasse, 1801. He married Vincenzina Prevosti, the widow of Raffaele Arauco, a minister of finance in the Cisalpine Republic, 1806. His son Giuseppe was born, 1807. Porta served as treasurer at Monte Napoleone, 1814. He participated in the cultural life of the time and established friendships and collaborated with several Milanese intellectuals, who, beginning in 1816, met at his house. The group of the Cameretta included Giovanni Berchet, Ennio Visconti, Tommaso Grossi, and Giovanni Torti; he was also in contact with Alessandro Manzoni. Porta died in Milan on 5 January 1821. CARLO SANTOLI Selected Works Collections Le poesie, edited by Dante Isella, 2 vols., Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1955–1956.

I poemetti, edited by Guido Bezzola, Venice: Marsilio, 1997. Poesie, edited by Dante Isella, Milan: Mondadori, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘El lava platt del Meneghin ch’e` mort,’’ 1792. ‘‘Desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee,’’ 1812. ‘‘Olter desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee,’’ 1814. ‘‘La Ninetta del Verzee,’’ 1814; first edition in Raccolta di poesie inedite in dialetto milanese di Carlo Porta coll’aggiunta della ‘‘Prineide’’ e di alcune altre anonime, 1826. ‘‘El lament de Marchionn di gamb avert,’’ 1816. ‘‘Le poesie,’’ 1817. ‘‘Poesie edite in dialetto milanese,’’ 1821. ‘‘Poesie edite e inedite,’’ 1826.

Letters Le lettere di Carlo Porta e degli amici della camerata, edited by Dante Isella, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1967.

Further Reading Beretta, Claudio, Carlo Porta. Fonti letterarie milanesi, italiane, europee, Bellinzona: Istituto editoriale Ticinese, 1994. Bezzola, Guido, Le charmant Carline, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1972. Bezzola, Guido, Vita di Carlo Porta nella Milano del suo tempo, Milan: Rizzoli, 1980. Gibellini, Pietro, L’Adda ha buona voce. Studi di letteratura lombarda dal Sette al Novecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984. Isella, Dante, Carlo Porta: cinquant’anni di lavori in corso, Turin: Einaudi, 2003. Isella, Dante, Ritratto dal vero di Carlo Porta, Milan: Pizzi, 1973. La poesia di Carlo Porta e la tradizione milanese, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976. Luciano, Bernadette, ‘‘Carlo Porta’s ‘La Ninetta del Verzee’: The Voice of a Woman/Prostitute,’’ Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 15:45 (1992), 106–116. Milanini, Claudio, ‘‘Carlo Porta, i monologhi e le antifrasi,’’ in Studi di lingua e letteratura lombarda offerti a Maurizio Vitale, Pisa: Giardini, 1983. Monga, Luigi, In the Very Heart of Man: The Life and Poetry of Carlo Porta, Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1986. Portinari, Folco, Strumenti del realismo portiano, Turin: Giappichelli, 1971. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Profilo di Carlo Porta,’’ in Ritratto di Manzoni ed altri saggi, Bari: Laterza, 1961. Segre, Cesare, Lingua, stile e societa`: studi sulla storia della prosa italiana, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963.

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ANTONIA POZZI (1912–1938) Antonia Pozzi committed suicide at the age of 26, having published nothing aside from her essay on Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza (1938). The work appeared in the magazine Vita giovanile (Milan) in April of 1938 following a discussion Pozzi had with Huxley while at the University of Milan. Her manuscript notebooks contain about 300 poems. The refined sense of tragedy present in her poetry earned her renown and critical recognition. In an attempt to promote a positive image and wide distribution of his daughter’s work, her father, Roberto, drastically manipulated the text of the first posthumous collection, Parole (Words, 1939). He made a careful selection and censored or reshaped the poems severely, omitted their dedications, and sometimes altered their titles. It was only in 1989 that a first edition faithful to the original manuscripts was published, edited by Alessandra Cenni. Antonia Pozzi shaped her poetic voice under the tutorship of Antonio Banfi. In his years as professor at the University of Milan, Banfi disseminated his antidogmatic views and encouraged openness to the influence of foreign philosophy and literature. A great literary group formed around him, all to become important intellectual voices in the beginning of the twentieth century, among whom were Vittorio Sereni, Luciano Anceschi, Enzo Paci, Remo Cantoni, and Giulio Preti. Pozzi’s poems, composed between 1929 and 1938, stand out for their autobiographical journal-like quality. Specified at the bottom of each poem is the date as well as sometimes the place of composition, thus recalling important moments in the writer’s life: retreats in the quiet house in Pasturo near Lecco, her adored trips in the Alps, the trips in Italy and abroad, the Milanese winters. In the oftentimes intimate poems, she addressed the lyrical first person to a ‘‘You’’ sometimes represented by an object, her own soul, or another human presence. The naturalistic representation of the elements configures as a favorite theme. Nature is oftentimes personified or subjectively perceived through the first person lens as in ‘‘La grangia’’ (The Mountain Refuge): ‘‘La montagna—davanti a loro / nella quieta sera / sembra un grand’angelo / con chiuse le ali / e il viso nascosto in preghiera’’ (The mountain—before them / in the tranquil night / seems 1488

a great angel / with shut wings / and the face hidden as if praying); similarly in ‘‘Ninfee’’ (Water Lilies), whereupon the author identified herself with a natural element that allowed her to clarify her own state of mind: ‘‘Ninfee / con le radici lunghe / perdute / nella profondita` che trascolora / anch’io non ho radici / che leghino la mia / vita—alla terra / anch’io cresco dal fondo / di un lago—colmo / di pianto’’ (Water lilies / with long roots / lost / within the depth that changes color / I too lack roots / that bind my / life— to earth / I too rise from the bottom / of a lake—the depths / of despair). The speaker shares an euphoric relationship with Nature, resolved on occasion in a pantheistic recognition as in ‘‘Acqua alpina’’ (Alpine Water): ‘‘Gioia di cantare come te, torrente; / gioia di ridere / sentendo nella bocca i denti / bianchi come il tuo greto’’ (The joy to sing like you, torrent; / the joy to laugh / feeling teeth inside the mouth / white as your riverbed’s stones). A different fascination seems to infuse the poem ‘‘La vita sognata’’ (Dreamt Life), with which Pozzi delved into her tormented relationship with mentor Antonio Maria Cervi. In it, the adored protagonist, ‘‘Antonello,’’ is associated with images of purity and described in terms laden with religious undertones. She obsessively returned to the idea of an unborn but much-dreamt-of son. In ‘‘Saresti stato’’ (Had You Been) and ‘‘Il bimbo nel viale’’ (Child in the Road) the baby, as if in a dream, is described in day-to-day situations. Her notion of the past as a joyous time of myths and dreams is abruptly contrasted by the present; the end of her relationship with her lover stands for the end of existence itself. Throughout Antonia Pozzi’s work lingers an inherent fatalistic sense toward which the subject drifts with a morbid attraction. There are other instances where death is an integral part of the natural cycle and is closely related to life as in ‘‘Funerale senza tristezza’’ (Funeral without Mourning); death is explained as a means to reach peace and as a return to origin. From a formal standpoint, Pozzi alternated free verse with traditional meter, sometimes following precise rhythmic patterns. The elements are structured in studied symmetrical and parallel relationships according to rhetorical methods based on repetition and similitude. The narrative structure

ANTONIA POZZI privileges parataxis and a standard lexicon, accented with technical botanical terminology as well as literary references to Pascoli and D’Annunzio. After 1935, the poems become fragmentary, their language symbolic in analogue patterns. Pozzi’s poetry matured in the very active atmosphere of Milan during the darkest periods of the Fascist regime—the 1930s, birth years of the Hermetic movement. Her works’ discursive tone and the concreteness of her language distinguish her as a representative poet in the collection Linea lombarda of Anceschi alongside such authors as Vittorio Sereni, Roberto Rebora, Giorgio Orelli, Nelo Risi, Renzo Modesti, and Luciano Erba. Anceschi pinpointed ‘‘a particular Lombard predisposition,’’ ‘‘a poetry in re’’ that involves the poetic potential of objects. Two fundamental qualities of these tendencies are the close adherence to the real and the search of a translating image for the will to exist and persevere of the ‘‘I’’: ‘‘We dreamt of an image to capture the unsettled but real feeling of our existence—not a lack, a denial, a platonic freedom’’ (Luciano Anceschi, Linea Lombarda, 1952). Thus the ‘‘Lombard Line’’ exists as an alternative to Hermeticism in verses that take refuge in the arduous symbolism of the word thus becoming poetry of ‘‘absence.’’ From 1937 on, the life and works of Antonia Pozzi reveal a progressive exposure to social realities. Alongside philosopher and critic Dino Formaggio, she became involved in volunteer work in the periphery of Milan; this activity echoes in ‘‘Via dei cinquecento’’ (Street of the Five Hundred) and ‘‘Periferia’’ (Suburbs). She outlined a novel mapping life in Lombardy across three generations starting in 1870. Of this never-finished work, two chapters remained and were published posthumously as Diari (Journals, 1988). The first edition of her poems, translated in five languages, incurred some critical response. In the introduction to the 1948 edition of Parole, Eugenio Montale expressed his appreciation for the young talent of Pozzi, as well as pointing out her limits. After a lengthy period lacking critical interest, her work has undergone resurgence within the recent studies of Alessandra Cenni.

Biography Antonia Pozzi was born in Milan, 13 February 1912. Her father, Roberto Pozzi—a very successful lawyer—was in the political service for the Fascist regime; her mother, Lina Lavagna Sangiuliani,

came from a noble Lombard family. Pozzi received a very refined education: She studied music and art, as well as foreign languages that she perfected while traveling to England in 1931 and Austria in 1936; she took to skiing, horseback riding, tennis, and mountain climbing; she spent winters in Milan and summers on the family estate at Pasturo, Val Sassina (Lombardy), or traveling in Italy and abroad: to Greece in 1934, Berlin and Prague in 1937. She attended the prestigious Milanese high school ‘‘Manzoni,’’ where she met the Greek language teacher Antonio Maria Cervi, with whom she became involved romantically. Despite the disapproval of her family, Pozzi pursued this relationship in clandestine circumstances for several years until its dissipation in 1933. She enrolled at the University of Milan, 1930, and earned a degree in literature and philosophy, 1935, with a thesis on Flaubert: The Literary Formation (1856–1930), posthumously published. She taught Italian, history, and geography at the Technical Institute ‘‘Schiaparelli’’ in Milan, 1937. Pozzi committed suicide on 2 December 1938. SARA LORENZETTI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Parole,’’ 1939; enlarged editions as Parole: Diario di poesia, 1943, 1948, 1964; revised editions 1989, 1998, edited by Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino; a selection as Poems translated by Nora Wydenbruck, 1955; a selection as Breath: Poems and Letters, translated by Lawrence Venuti, 2002. ‘‘La vita sognata e altre poesie inedite,’’ edited by A. Cenni and O. Dino, 1986. ‘‘La giovinezza che non trova scampo: Poesie e lettere degli anni trenta,’’ 1995, edited by A. Cenni. ‘‘Mentre tu dormi le stagioni passano,’’ 1998, edited by A. Cenni and O. Dino. ‘‘Poesia mi confesso con te: Ultime poesie inedite (1929– 1933),’’ 2004, edited by Onorina Dino.

Other Eyeless in Gaza, 1938. Flaubert: La formazione letteraria (1830–1856), edited by Antonio Banfi, 1940. Diari, edited by A. Cenni and O. Dino, 1988. L’eta` delle parole e` finita: Lettere 1927–38, edited by A. Cenni and O. Dino, 1989; enlarged edition, 2002; a selection as Breath: Poems and Letters, translated by Lawrence Venuti, 2002.

Further Reading Amelotti, Luciana, Antonia Pozzi nella sua poesia, Genoa: L’Arca, 1953.

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ANTONIA POZZI Anceschi, Luciano, Linea lombarda: Sei poeti, Varese: Libreria Magenta Editrice, 1952. Annoni, Carlo, ‘‘Parole di Antonia Pozzi: Lettura tematica,’’ in Studi sulla cultura lombarda in memoria di Mario Apollonio, edited by Carlo Annoni, vol. 2, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1972. Cenni, Alessandra, In riva alla vita: Storia di Antonia Pozzi poetessa, Milan: Rizzoli, 2002. De Marco, Giuseppe, ‘‘Antonia Pozzi: Dal portico della morte al destino delle Parole come vita,’’ Testo: Studi di teoria e storia della letteratura e della critica, 21:39 (January–June 2000), 89–111.

Dino, Onorina, ‘‘Naufragio nella luce,’’ in Antonia Pozzi: Mentre tu dormi le stagioni passano, edited by Alessandra Cenni and Onorina Dino, Milan: Viennepierre, 1998. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Prefazione,’’ in Antonia Pozzi, Parole, Milan: Mondadori, 1948. Scorrano, Luigi, ‘‘Memorietta su Antonia Pozzi,’’ in Carte inquiete: Maria Corti Biagia Marniti, Antonia Pozzi, Ravenna: Longo, 2002. Secchi, Graziella Berabo`, Per troppa vita che ho nel sangue: Antonia Pozzi e la sua poesia, Milan: Viennepierre, 2004.

EMILIO PRAGA (1839–1875) A major figure in the Milanese scapigliatura movement, whose artistic manifesto he drafted with Arrigo Boito, Emilio Praga was throughout his life and works acutely aware of the conflict between the ideal and reality and of the opposition between the individual artist and society. An Italian version of poe`te maudit, like other scapigliati (literally meaning ‘‘disheveled’’), he polemicized against the spiritualistic and sentimental aspects of Italian romanticism and followed with great interest the newest expressions of foreign literatures. He was especially influenced by Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, Heinrich Heine, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Edgar Allan Poe, whom he admired and imitated both for their ability at plumbing the unexplored regions of the human psyche and for their macabre, morbid subjects and taste for extreme experimentation. In Praga, too, art and life tended to blend together, and aesthetics turned into moral anarchism, somewhere between personal disorder and dissoluteness. A poet, painter, and storyteller, Emilio Praga showed his knowledge of Baudelaire’s poetry in his first poetic collection, Tavolozza (Palette, 1862), which drew its inspiration from his European travels, also recounted in diary form in Schizzi a penna (Sketches in Ink), serialized in the periodical Rivista minima in 1865. The collection is composed of short descriptions of the landscape and scenes of daily life, in which the misfortunes and hopes of humble characters are represented. Behind a variety of literary echoes, it is possible to perceive a renewed linguistic register imbued with descriptive 1490

realism, rendered in a modest, colloquial tone that anticipates the style of Vittorio Betteloni and Guido Gozzano. In terms of metrical structure, hendecasyllables and seven-syllable lines alternate in the stanzas in an irregular rhythmical progression. At the core of Praga’s poetic discourse is the search not only for new forms but also for a connection with tradition, with particular reference to Giuseppe Parini and Alessandro Manzoni. It is no accident that the poem ‘‘Il corso all’alba’’ (The Path at Dawn) adopts the metrical scheme of Manzoni’s hymn ‘‘La Pentecoste’’ (Pentecost, 1822) and many of Parini’s terms. Praga thus defined a new conception of poetry, antithetical to both the Arcadia and Romanticism, and established an alternative relationship between the poet and reality. The function of the poet is diminished and appears as insubstantial and banal. Praga declared that he was singing not only a poor song, but a true one as well, transfigured in pictorial terms, as the title Tavolozza suggests and those of other subsequent poetic collections, such as Penombre (Penumbras, 1864) and Trasparenze (Transparencies, 1878), confirm. In particular, he captured natural landscape through the isolation and deployment of realistic details. Aside from the beauty of the landscape, the poet also expressed his solidarity with laborers, describing the life of the fishermen and launching into a harsh polemic against the priests, who preached the ‘‘miracles’’ of progress for the poor. Siding with the lowest strata of society, Praga sought to understand through his poetry the ways in which

EMILIO PRAGA scientific progress would determine new social conditions, bringing peace, abolishing unjust laws that caused social divisions, and fostering reconciliation among the classes. However, after these initial sentiments of human communion, he experienced a profound disillusionment and declared himself estranged from progress, which he believed had devastated the world. He now recognized himself only in the beauty of nature, in the works of the past, and in adherence to artistic principles. Indeed, it is in the irreconcilable conflict between a desire of renewal and a sense of nostalgia that lies one of the most original aspects of Praga’s poetry. In terms of images, macabre, insolent, and transgressive elements parallel and express the description of intimate conflicts. It is an attitude that is found again in Penombre, where horrid and funerary motifs, terrible hallucinations, erotic impulses and desires, and a dark sense of death all coexist with themes of tender simplicity and intimacy. On the other hand, the collection Fiabe e leggende (Fables and Legends, 1867) is characterized instead by a poetic narrative discourse in which can be seen the influence of the romantic historical novel. In Praga’s final poetic work, the posthumous Trasparenze, poetry itself assumes thematic importance as the only value that has escaped the clutches of disillusionment and that can provide consolation and an understanding of the beauty of nature. The reevocation of childhood memories, along with the treasured figures of the sister, the mother, and the grandmother, runs through the compositions, which are also characterized by a softening of the poet’s polemical tones and the suspension of his aggressive language. Praga wrote a number of opera librettos, including I profughi fiamminghi (The Flemish Refugees, 1864); Il giudizio d’Oreste (The Judgment of Orestes, 1868); L’avvocato Patelin (Patelin, The Lawyer, 1871); Atala (1876); and Maria Tudor (Mary Tudor, 1879). He was also the author of prose and theatrical works, although he did not achieve convincing results in these genres. Particularly noteworthy, however, is the novel Memorie del presbiterio (Memoirs of a Presbytery), subtitled Scene di provincia (Scenes of Provincial Life), which was published in installments in Il pungolo from 23 June to 14 November 1877 but left unfinished. Roberto Sacchetti, a friend of the poet, completed it in 1881. It includes a mix of heterogeneous elements and influences, skillfully united in a narrative plot characterized by long digressions. The charm and serenity of the naturalist landscape

provides the backdrop of the narration and stands in sharp contrast to the human passions and dramas that unfold. The characters and incidents show the influence of Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842). For example, the figure of Don Luigi incorporates aspects of both the attitudes of Don Abbondio and Father Cristoforo, and the result is a complex character, animated by generosity and a deep human sensibility. The Catholic religion becomes the sole ideal perspective for the mountain people represented in the novel, who lead a hard life in the village. However, the work registers also a sense of indifference and of superiority in regard to the plight of the poor, as in the scene of Gina’s funeral, as well as a satirical thrust in the illustration of the conformist attitude of the bourgeoisie.

Biography Emilio Praga was born on 18 December 1839 in Gorla (Milan) to a well-to-do family. Between 1857 and 1859 he traveled Europe, to France, Switzerland, Germany, the Low Countries, and Italy, with stays in Brianza and Liguria. His interests included poetry, narrative, and painting; he began his career in 1859, in Brera, where he executed four oil paintings. In 1863, the staging of his comedy Le madri galanti, written in collaboration with Arrigo Boito, was unsuccessful. In the wake of his father’s death, in 1864, and the failure of his business, he faced economic difficulties and turned to alcohol. In 1865, with a recommendation by the Countess Maffei, he received a position in poetic and dramatic literature at the Conservatory of Milan, which lasted only briefly due to his irregular behavior. Praga established relations with the exponents of the scapigliatura movement: Arrigo Boito, Giuseppe Rovani, Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Cletto Arrighi, and Antonio Ghislanzoni. He collaborated on the scapigliatisti journals Il pungolo and Figaro. In 1872–1873, he separated from his wife and son Marco, continuing to abuse alcohol. Praga died on 26 December 1875 in Milan. CARLO SANTOLI See also: Scapigliatura Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Gabriele Catalano, Naples: Rossi, 1969. Poesie, edited by Mario Petrucciani, Bari: Laterza, 1969.

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EMILIO PRAGA Poetry ‘‘Tavolozza,’’ 1862. ‘‘Penombre,’’ 1864. ‘‘Fiabe e leggende,’’ 1867. ‘‘Trasparenze,’’ 1878.

Fiction Due destini, in Il Pungolo, 1867–1868; edited by Gilberto Finzi, 1989. Memorie del presbiterio—Scene di provincia, with Roberto Sacchetti, 1881.

Plays Le madri galanti, with Arrigo Boito, 1863.

Travel Writing Schizzi a penna, in Rivista minima, 1865; edited by Ermanno Paccagnini, 1993.

Librettos I profughi fiamminghi, 1864. Il giudizio d’Oreste, 1868. L’avvocato Patelin, 1871.

Atala, 1876. Maria Tudor, 1879.

Further Reading Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della scapigliatura, Rome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1967. Marinari, Attilio, Emilio Praga poeta di una crisi, Naples: Guida, 1969. Paccagnini, Ermanno, ‘‘Emilio Praga e le contesse: Due inediti e qualche variante,’’ Otto/Novecento, 23:1 (1999), 123–131. Paladino, Vincenzo, Emilio Praga, Ravenna: Longo, 1967. Petrucciani, Mario, Emilio Praga, Turin: Einaudi, 1962. Rogante, Guglielmina, ‘‘Emilio Praga. Prime ricerche poetiche e pittoriche,’’ in Novita` e tradizione nel secondo Ottocento italiano, edited by Francesco Mattesini, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1974. Scapaticci, Tommaso, Emilio Praga tra impegno e intimismo, Cassino: Garigliano, 1986.

MARCO PRAGA (1862–1929) Son of the scapigliato Emilio Praga, Marco inherited from his father neither the attitude of a maudit writer nor the ideological position of open dissent against bourgeoisie society, of which he, on the contrary, was a convinced interpreter. Whereas Emilio’s passions were poetry and painting, Marco had a constant interest for the theater as a more lucrative art form that allowed a more immediate and direct communication with the Milanese public that flooded the local theaters between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. His commitment to theater was not limited to the writing of dramatic texts. Indeed, he also assumed important responsibilities, such as president of the Societa` Italiana degli Autori and director of the Teatro Manzoni, which allowed him to pursue a cultural agenda of strenuous defense and renewal of Italian dramaturgy, which was being threatened by the competition of foreign theatrical works. While Giovanni Verga and Luigi Capuana were working on the ‘‘project’’ of a naturalistic theater in the wake of the Verist experimentalism that had already renewed—with Verga’s I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881)—the form of 1492

the postunification novel, Praga, with Giuseppe Giacosa, Girolamo Rovetta, Camillo Antona Traversi, and Roberto Bracco, was participating in the so-called bourgeois realist theater, which represented on stage the daily life of the middle class and its familiar interior spaces in which—in the name of ‘‘decorum’’—minor dramas of ‘‘honor’’ are consumed and then recomposed. Critics agree in considering La moglie ideale (The Ideal Wife, 1891) Marco Praga’s most successful play. The protagonist, Giulia, is without a doubt sketched on the model of Henri Becque’s La parisienne (1885). Both playwrights create a unique female figure, capable of shrewdly managing her own adultery along with the respectability that the role of wife assures. There is no tragic epilogue, which usually recurs in romantic literature as a punitive or auto-punitive solution for transgressive female figures. Instead Giulia waits for the finale: The curtain closes on a domestic situation that has not suffered consequences from the extramarital relationship that has by then come to an end without any melodramatic goodbyes and on a provocative image of the female figure, who is capable of manipulating the male characters

MARCO PRAGA that surround her. In time, the predilection for ‘‘psychological’’ theater, for the representation of the afflictions of the soul, induced Praga to reformulate the theme of adultery, taking it out of the usual clashes of the ‘‘love comedy’’: A significant example is La porta chiusa (The Closed Door, 1913) in which a tormented Giulio, born from a past betrayal by his mother, Bianca, breaks the veil of appearances, pinning his biological parents to their fault and to the inescapable necessity of a painful expiation. Eleonora Duse played the lead role of both La moglie ideale (of which she induced the author to rewrite the last act) and La porta chiusa, But Praga was also a prolific critic of the theater. Between 1919 and 1929 he published in Illustrazione italiana about 300 Cronache teatrali (Theatrical Chronicles), then collected in annual volumes (1920–1929), through which it is possible to reconstruct a sort of history of Italian dramaturgy of the 1920s. An all-accomplished man of the theater, Praga gave great importance to the role of the public, to its moods and reactions that made it possible to gauge in the moment the destiny of a play. He also recognized in the producers a fundamental directorial function and, finally, he bestowed enthusiastic praises on emerging actors when, with their acting, they contributed to the efficacy of the representation. Still too bound to the conventions of the late nineteenth century, in his numerous chronicles on Luigi Pirandello, although fascinated by the innovative energy of Il gioco delle parti (The Rules of the Game, 1919), of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921), and of Vestire gli ignudi (Naked, 1923), he advanced strong reservations on the intellectualistic substance of Pirandello’s theatrical pieces while his judgment about the sanguine and ‘‘poetic’’ tragedies of Gabriele D’Annunzio was enthusiastic. Foreign theater, which, especially with Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev, was gaining consensus among the Italian intelligentsia, found in Praga a convinced denigrator. In an interview with Ugo Ojetti published in Alla scoperta dei letterati (Discovering the Literati, 1895), Praga declared himself convinced of the superiority of the theater over the novel. This was a position diametrically opposed to Verga’s stance, expressed in the same volume, according to which the mediation of the actor and the presence of a public ‘‘radunato a folla’’ (gathered in a crowd) make of the theater ‘‘una forma inferiore e primitiva’’ (an inferior and primitive form). This, however, did not impede Praga from publishing in 1893 the novel La Biondina (The Blond). The lesson of

the de Goncourt brothers, of E´mile Zola, and especially of Gustave Flaubert, allowed Praga here to recount the path of degradation of Adelina, the young wife of Giacomo Burton who finds herself stuck in the gray monotony of a petit bourgeois existence. With an aristocratic vision of existence, Adelina lets herself be swept away by the seductions of adultery and lives, in her affair with a writer, a passion similar to that found in romantic literature. The death of her lover and the blackmail of a usurious procuress to whom the protagonist had appealed in order to sustain her life of luxury, transform the mild Adelina into the vamp Niniche the Blond, a high-class prostitute. By pure chance her husband finds out about her double identity; Adelina, with surprising pride, attempts to explain how she came to that point, but Giacomo, in the name of his offended honor, kills her. Even as a narrator Praga confirmed his interest for women and their complex psyche: It is not by chance, in fact, that the narrator, who initially tells the story, lets the protagonist herself speak as, through the letters to her friend Bianca—a sort of alter ego of Adelina herself—she becomes aware of her own distance from the asphyxiating places of bourgeois morality, of which her married home, the ‘‘quartierino in via principe Umberto’’ (little apartment on Prince Umberto Street), is a significant symbol. The realistic prospective that distinguishes Praga’s writing allowed him, beyond the conservatism of his ideological and cultural positions, to set up a gallery of modern female figures who are ‘‘in revolt’’ against the dominating logic of the male universe and to offer to the reader a limpid visual representation of the middle class. Marco Praga was a protagonist of the journalistic chronicles of the beginning of the twentieth century, which followed the productions of his theatrical works with assiduous interest; and, even later, criticism has privileged his dramaturgy, reserving little space for his novel and for his collections of short stories, Storie di palcoscenico (Stories of the Stage, 1895), a source of anecdotes useful for understanding the material life of the backstage, and Anime a nudo: lettere di donne e di fanciulle (Naked Souls: Letters of Women and Young Ladies, 1920).

Biography Marco Praga was born in Milan on June 20, 1862; his father Emilio, one of the most notable representatives of Milan’s scapigliatura movement, 1493

MARCO PRAGA died in 1875, leaving his family in a difficult economic situation. After completing his studies in accounting, Praga worked as an accountant for a charitable organization, a position that allowed him to support his mother with dignity. He began writing in 1882, although his first work, the novel La biondina, was not published until 1893. Afterward he dedicated himself almost entirely to the theater, where, on the advice of Eleonora Duse, he also had experience as an actor. He was director of the Societa` Italiana degli Autori, 1896–1911, and director of the Compagnia Stabile of the Manzoni Theater in Milan, 1913–1917. He worked as theater critic for Illustrazione italiana, 1919–1928, and collaborated with Il carro di Tespi, Il corriere della sera, and La lettura. He was named Cavaliere dell’Ordine della Corona, 1890, then Commendatore, 1911. Praga died, probably a suicide, in the sanatorium of Varese on January 31, 1929. MARIELLA MUSCARIELLO

Selected Works Plays L’amico, 1886. Le vergini, 1890. La moglie ideale, 1891. Alleluja, 1892. L’erede, 1894. Il bell’Apollo, 1894. La crisi, 1905. La porta chiusa, 1913. L’ondina, 1920. Il dubbio. Il divorzio, 1921. L’innamorata, 1929.

Fiction La Biondina, 1893. Storie di palcoscenico, 1895. Anime a nudo: lettere di donne e di fanciulle, 1920.

Poetry Quando muore l’amore, 1935.

Essays Cronache teatrali, 10 vols., 1920–1929; as Cronache teatrali del primo Novecento, edited by Ruggero Rimini, 1979.

Letters Lettere a Federico De Roberto, edited by Ninfa Leotta, 1987. Marco Praga e Silvio D’Amico: lettere e documenti, 1919–1929, edited by Guido Lopez, 1990.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, and Francesca Malara, ‘‘Il teatro italiano di tradizione,’’ in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, edited by Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, vol. 3, Avanguardie e utopie del teatro: il Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Antonucci, Giovanni, ‘‘Marco Praga cronista teatrale,’’ Cultura e Scuola, 28:112 (1989), 82–89. Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Praga-Pirandello. Un nodo gordiano,’’ Ariel, 15:1–2 (2001), 93–126. Bertolucci, Giuseppe, La didascalia drammaturgica: Praga, Marinetti, Pirandello, Naples: Guida, 1973. DeMatteis, Giuseppe, ‘‘Un Marco Praga inedito,’’ Italianistica, 9:3 (1980), 496–498. Ferrone, Siro (editor), Teatro dell’Italia unita, Milan: Il saggiatore, 1980. Giovanelli, Paola Daniela (editor), La Societa` teatrale in Italia fra Otto e Novecento. Lettere ad Alfredo Testoni, 3 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1985–1986. Gobetti, Piero, Scritti di critica teatrale, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. MacClintock, Lander, The Age of Pirandello, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1951. Pullini, Giorgio, Marco Praga, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960.

VASCO PRATOLINI (1913–1991) A deep sense of place, of workers’ lives, and of everyday life colors Vasco Pratolini’s oeuvre, from the choice of narrative subject to the choice of linguistic register. For the attention paid to details of everyday life rendered clearly and without great sentiment, the author’s novels are thought to belong to the period of Italian neo-Realism, a genre that dominated the Italian postwar production of both 1494

prose and cinema. The postwar phenomenon is rooted in the late nineteenth-century European Realist vein, when writers like Giovanni Verga and Honore´ de Balzac displayed a profound interest in the relationship between prose narrative and photography. Pratolini’s oeuvre may be seen as one formed by concentric spheres, reaching out from the

VASCO PRATOLINI individual to society and from there to history, conceived in both broad and microtechnical terms. These spheres correspond roughly to three phases in the writer’s career: From his youthful, autobiographically based novels, Pratolini turned, in early adulthood, to meditations on the fabric of Italian social life. His most mature work corresponds also to his most ambitious prose project, one that embroiders onto the fabric of Italian social life the history of Italian class movement since Unification. The Florence of Pratolini’s childhood, where he lived with his grandparents following the death of his mother, is both setting and protagonist in his earliest prose efforts, significantly in his first publication, Il tappeto verde (The Green Carpet, 1941), and Via de’ Magazzini (Warehouse Street, 1942) of the following year. Like Alberto Moravia, Pratolini also suffered from childhood illness and, as a result, developed a voracious appetite for books and habit for study. These early efforts were marked, too, by a trajectory that traveled from innermost reaches of psychology and family life to portraits of neighbors and to portrayals of the community within one street, one quarter, and the city. Le amiche (The Girlfriends, 1943) was one of Pratolini’s earliest attempts at depicting the psyche of women, a trait that ripened in the years and novels that follow. Taking a longer view of his career, the author felt that Cronache di poveri amanti (A Tale of Poor Lovers, 1947) should have been his first book, and indeed the thematics presented in this novel, written in 1946, emblematize key themes recurrent throughout his oeuvre. The story is set between 1927 and 1930 in Florence’s Via del Corno, in the Santa Croce neighborhood. The street, home to working-class families and ‘‘working girls,’’ is itself a protagonist and bears witness to the births, deaths, and declines of the inhabitants. In unadorned language, Pratolini narrated events that helped readers in the immediate postwar to see the ascent of Fascism in interwar Florence and in broad strokes painted characters as either ‘‘red’’ or ‘‘black.’’ Although Cronache di poveri amanti exhibits a ‘‘choral’’ element, with characters alternating in the narrative focus, Ugo, if not the novel’s protagonist, is at least one of its most important players. Like a religious allegory, Pratolini told the story of Ugo’s progress. A street vendor, Ugo falls out of his landlord’s good graces and takes up residence in Via del Corno’s Hotel Cervia. Like the prostitutes whose company he shares, Ugo learns the utility of the sale of an intimate thing, in his case, his workingman’s clear conscience so that he

can increase his cash flow. The events of the Notte dell’apocalisse (Night of the Apocalypse), a real event Pratolini immortalized in the novel when young Black Shirts attacked and killed non-Fascist activists, along with the love of a ‘‘good’’ woman, reclaims Ugo and renews his alliance with the nonFascist working class of Florence. Like Cronache di poveri amanti, Metello (1955), which Pratolini began in 1952, also makes use of a historical backdrop, this time 1875. This work, for which the author won the Viareggio Prize in 1955, is the first in Pratolini’s trilogy Una storia italiana (An Italian History)—the other two novels are Lo scialo (The Waste, 1960) and Allegoria e derisione (Allegory and Derision, 1966)—opens the narrative that illustrates the broad sweep of historical events from the period immediately following Unification to the time of Pratolini’s writing. The three books form a trilogy only loosely and only in the sense that the second and third book begin where the previous one finishes. Apart from this shared and linear chronology, the books are discrete in terms of plot and character. Pratolini’s focus in these novels was on the intersection of the private and the public and the ways in which the psychology and vicissitudes of individuals can both affect the sweep of history and reveal its internal workings. Metello Salani, a bricklayer and protagonist of the novel of that name, gives expression to a nascent working-class consciousness that configures around such key episodes as work, marriage, betrayal, and prison. Scholars believe that Pratolini, writing in 1952, absorbed and transmitted the growing sense of crisis in the political Left. Pratolini’s novel commanded the attention of literary critics as well as political ideologues who debated the novel’s merits at length in mid-1950s, a time noted for the sea-change of postwar and preBoom (as the following decade would be called for its economic expansion). Metello should not be seen as the saint of the working class, Pratolini insisted, but instead as a working man who understands his exploitation and seeks to fight against those who would exploit him. Lo scialo, the lengthy second volume of the trilogy, takes up at the point Metello leaves off and is set in the years between 1910 and 1930 among the Italian middle classes that will be the most compromised by (and complicit with) Fascism. Whereas Metello had sufficed as the lone protagonist of an earlier and perhaps simpler construction of class tension, Pratolini multiplied the protagonists of Lo scialo, alternating between five points of view 1495

VASCO PRATOLINI to get better purchase on the competing viewpoints present in the middle class during this period. With Allegoria e derisione, which takes as its subject the beginning of Fascism, the war years, and the Resistance, Pratolini concluded his ‘‘Italian history.’’ The loss of the protagonist’s beloved, Lori, and the solitude Bruno feels as consequence may be seen in an allegorical vein as the mourning of the euphoria among engage´ writers, like Pratolini, in the immediate postwar period. But perhaps more significant than this elegiac interpretation is Lori’s courage in the face of death and the way in which Bruno is able to survive it and prevail. Though he wrote one collection of poems, La citta` ha i miei trent’anni (The City Has My Thirty Years, 1967), Pratolini is best known as a writer of narrative. His novels all display strong visual components and, not unsurprisingly, he also collaborated on screenplays, most notably for Roberto Rossellini’s Paisa` (Paisan, 1946) and Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), which sketch the loose configurations of Italian cinematic neo-Realism, the former in a more doctrinal fashion than the latter, whose elaborate mise-en-sce`ne, score, and deliberate overlay of melodrama all serve to question neo-Realism as both practice and category.

Selected Works Collections Opere, 10 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1960–1966. Il mantello di Natascia e altre cronache di versi e prosa (1930–1980), Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Romanzi, 2 volumes, edited by Francesco Paolo Memmo, Milan: Mondadori, 1993–1995.

Fiction Il tappeto verde, 1941. Via de’ Magazzini, 1942. Le amiche, 1943. Il quartiere, 1944; as The Naked Streets, translated by Peter and Pamela Duncan, 1952. Cronaca familiare, 1947; as Two Brothers, translated by Barbara Kennedy, 1962; as Family Chronicle translated by Martha King, 1988. Cronache di poveri amanti, 1947; as A Tale of Poor Lovers, 1949; reprinted, 1988. Un eroe di nostro tempo, 1949; as Hero of Our Time, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1951. Una storia italiana I: Metello, 1955; as Metello translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1968. Una storia italiana II: Lo scialo, 1960. La costanza della ragione, 1963; as Bruno Santini, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1964. Una storia italiana III: Allegoria e derisione, 1966. Un ragazzo diverso e altri racconti, 2001.

Poetry ‘‘La citta` ha i miei trent’anni,’’ 1967.

Other Diario sentimentale, 1956. Lettere a Sandro, edited by Alessandro Parronchi, 1992.

Biography Vasco Pratolini was born in Florence 19 October 1913; his childhood was characterized by emotional loss and economic privation. He began working at the age of 12 in various menial jobs (delivery boy, typesetter, waiter, and the like). In 1935, he began a two-year stay in a sanatorium, which allowed him to continue his passionate interest in reading and study. Upon returning to Florence, Pratolini met Elio Vittorini, who encouraged him to write, 1936. With Alfonso Gatto, he founded the literary journal Campo di Marte, which would soon undergo censorship and be shut down. As ‘‘Rodolfo Casati,’’ Pratolini coordinated the Ponte Milvio sector of the Resistance in Rome between 1941 and 1945. From 1951 onward, Pratolini settled in Rome, where he wrote all of his major novels and collaborated also on a number of screenplays. Pratolini died in Rome 12 January 1991. ELLEN NERENBERG See also: Neorealism

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Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo. Il populismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea. Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Asor Rosa, Alberto, Vasco Pratolini, Rome: Edizioni Moderne, 1958. Bertoncini, Giancarlo, ‘‘Il ‘cantiere’ di Metello: L’esperimento del realismo nel primo tempo della trilogia pratoliniana,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 10 (December 1983), 115–141. Bertoncini, Giancarlo, Vasco Pratolini, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1987. Bevilacqua, Mirko (editor), Il caso Pratolini. Ideologia e romanzo nella letteratura degli anni cinquanta, Bologna: Cappelli, 1982. De Pieri, Maria-Teresa, ‘‘Un eroe del nostro tempo di Vasco Pratolini: Una formazione negata’’ Il lettore di Provincia, 29 (August 1998): 39–51. Hainsworth, Peter, ‘‘Fascism in Fiction: Pratolini Reconsidered,’’ Italian Studies, 55 (2000), 121–137. Manacorda, Giuliano, ‘‘Vasco Pratolini,’’ in Novecento. I contemporanei, vol. 7, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1979. Mandrici, Mariella, and Tiziana Valenti, ‘‘Cronache di studi pratoliniani: Il Convegno fiorentino,’’ Cristallo: Rassegna di Varia Umanita`, 34 (August 1992), 39–50.

MARIO PRAZ Nerenberg, Ellen, ‘‘Love for Sale, or, That’s Amore: Representing Prostitution During and After Fascism,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 16 (1998), 213–235. Paolini, Paolo, ‘‘Tra le polemiche su Metello e quelle sul Gattopardo: La fine del neorealismo,’’ Otto/Novecento, 26 (September–December 2002), 47–69. Rodondi, Raffaella. ‘‘L’ultimo Pratolini,’’ Strumenti Critici, 12 (May 1997), 261–290.

Rosengarten, Frank, Vasco Pratolini: The Development of a Social Novelist, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965. Scorrano, Luigi, ‘‘Cronaca familiare di Vasco Pratolini: Epifania del materno, dimensione del silenzio e altre annotazioni,’’ Il lettore di Provincia, 28 (April 1997), 95–107.

MARIO PRAZ (1896–1982) Mario Praz holds a peculiar position in the Gotha of twentieth-century Italian intellectuals. A versatile and prolific author, he is mostly renowned as an English scholar and for his work on high Romantic literature, breaking new ground in the field of comparative analysis of European art and literature. However, Praz was also an enthusiastic collector of art objects, and his erudite writings on domestic art and furnishing constitute a significant part of his work. After a degree in law, his passion for English Romantic poetry (he translated Swinburne’s Laus Veneris in 1920) convinced Praz to devote his studies to literature and the arts. While in Britain on a scholarship, he secured the position of lecturer of Italian at Liverpool University in 1924 and then of professor of Italian at Manchester University. In 1934, he returned to Italy to take up a professorship in English literature at Rome University, which he held until 1966. His scholarly work explored a number of different fields. In English literature he is mostly renowned for his work in three areas. His Storia della letteratura inglese (History of English Literature, 1937) was for generations the best available history of English literature in Italian. His work on seventeenth-century English writers, such as Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne, Richard Crashaw (Secentismo and Marinismo in England, 1925) contributed to the reevaluation of English metaphysical poetry. And his study of Victorian fiction, La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano (The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction, 1952) traced the progressive imborghesimento (‘‘bourgeoisification’’) of the romantic hero in the work of authors such as Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, and George Eliot. Praz was also a pioneer-

ing scholar on the cultural relations between Italy and England with his Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi (The Flaming Heart, 1942) and Ricerche angloitaliane (Anglo-Italian Studies, 1944) and on American literature (mainly through articles and reviews for La Stampa and other periodicals). A keen collector of objects of fine art, he wrote on various aspects of figurative art: Gusto neoclassico (On Neoclassicism, 1940), domestic architecture in La filosofia dell’arredamento (An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, 1945), and the relationship between literature and art in Mnemosyne (1971). The autobiographical La casa della vita (The House of Life, 1958) traces his passion for antique objects through an erudite discussion of the artworks and pieces of furniture appearing in his Roman house. In 1995, his house was turned into one of the few domestic museums in Italy. However, Praz’s most influential works are in the field of comparative criticism. A groundbreaking achievement in this area is La Carne, la Morte e il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica (The Romantic Agony, 1930), a thematic study of eroticism, death, and sin in high Romantic literature and art. Praz’s scholarly competence in moving between different national cultures and in drawing constant examples and parallels from the figurative arts provided a seminal picture of the common threads of European culture at the turn of the last century. He was also a keen translator from English into Italian. Among his works are Poeti inglesi dell’Ottocento (English Poets of the Nineteenth Century, 1925), in which he attempted to translate the work of English poets using Italian traditional metres; T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which he introduced to Italian readers in 1932; and Antologia della 1497

MARIO PRAZ letteratura inglese e scelta di scrittori americani (An Anthology of English Literature with a Selection of American Writers, 1955). He also wrote travel books, Isola pentagonale (Unromantic Spain, 1928) and Viaggi in occidente (Journeys in the West, 1955), and collected his journalistic work in various volumes. If there are any recurrent traits in Praz’s writings, the first one is the combination of philogical accuracy and imaginative, often witty, criticism. At its best, his prose style produces a rare fusion of erudition, clarity of vision, and agile imagination. It is also a prose style that lends itself to journalistic cultural writing, hence his prolific collaboration with English and Italian periodicals such as The London Mercury, English Miscellany (which he founded and directed), Criterion, Cultura, La Stampa, Corriere della Sera, and others. A second recurrent feature is Praz’s interest in the eccentric and the sensual. This is shown by his preference for historical periods whose cultural production was characterized by mannerism and excess, with rare exceptions (such as his study of neoclassical culture in Gusto neoclassico). It is also reflected in his travel writing, particularly in Isola pentagonale, in which Spain is explored as a country producing a culture drenched in sadistic sensuality. Praz’s vast knowledge of European art and literature was counterbalanced by a certain lack of interest in underpinning his many-faceted analyses with theoretical foundations. His fascination for figurative aspects of literary culture would sometimes run the risk of being entrapped in a neverending succession of mirroring effects and erudite cross-referential observations. His reluctance to engage with psychoanalytical approaches is also somewhat surprising, given the subject matter of his studies. In this respect, Praz’s cultural formation showed the influence of the imposing erudition of nineteenth-century English scholars such as Charles Lamb and John Ruskin, and at the same time of the Italian cult for prosa d’arte (‘‘art prose’’), as embodied by the work of his friend and fellow Anglophile Emilio Cecchi. Finally, Praz’s sophisticated culture and aesthete’s personality was a source of inspiration for filmmaker Luchino Visconti, whose Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (1974) drew from Praz’s essay Scene di conversazione (Conversation Pieces, 1971) and attempted a portrait of the scholar through the character of the protagonist, a professor, played by Burt Lancaster. Praz’s intellectual legacy, apart from his pioneering work on English and comparative literature, 1498

lies in his example of a rare fusion between refined scholarly knowledge and a fluent, witty prose style.

Biography Mario Praz was born in Rome, 6 September 1896, and spent his early childhood in Switzerland, where his father worked in a bank. After his father’s death, he moved to Florence with his mother and studied law at Bologna University, 1914–1915; eventually he received his law degree with honors at Rome University, 1918. Praz undertook further study in Italian literature at the Istituto di Studi Superiori at Florence University, ca. 1919–1922. He went to England on a study grant, 1923, and was appointed lecturer in Italian at Liverpool University, 1924–1932. He became a professor of Italian at Manchester University, 1932–1934, and then a professor of English at Rome University, 1934–1966. Praz was awarded the Marzotto Prize for literary criticism, 1952, and received an honorary degree from Cambridge University, 1957. After his retirement, he devoted himself to his studies, writings, and collection of art objects. Praz died in Rome, 23 March 1982. GUIDO BONSAVER Selected Works Essays Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne, Richard Crashaw, 1925. La Carne, la Morte, il Diavolo nella letteratura romantica, 1930; as The Romantic Agony translated by Angus Davidson, 1933. Studi sul concettismo, 1934. Storia della letteratura inglese, 1937. Studi e svaghi inglesi, 1937; as Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery translated by Mario Praz, 1939. Gusto neoclassico, 1940; as On Neoclassicism, translated by Angus Davidson, 1969. Machiavelli in Inghilterra e altri saggi, 1942; as The Flaming Heart translated by Mario Praz, 1958. Ricerche angloitaliane, 1944. La filosofia dell’arredamento, 1945; as An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration: from Pompei to Art Nouveau, translated by Mario Praz, 1981. La crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano, 1952; as The Hero in Eclipse in Victorian Fiction translated by Angus Davidson, 1956. La casa della vita, 1958; as The House of Life, translated by Angus Davidson, 1964. Bellezza e bizzarria, 1960. Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature, the Visual Arts, 1970; as Mnemosine: Parallelo tra la letterauira e le arti visive 1971.

GIORGIO PRESSBURGER Scene di conversazione, 1971; as Conversation Pieces: A Survey of the Informal Group in English Portrait in Europe and America, 1971. Il patto col serpente, 1972.

Travel Books Penisola pentagonale, 1928; as Unromantic Spain, translated by Mario Praz, 1929. Viaggi in Occidente, 1955.

Translations Poeti inglesi dell’Ottocento, 1925. Antologia della letteratura inglese e scelta di scrittori americani, 1955.

Further Reading Astaldi, Maria Luisa, ‘‘Praz saggista,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I critici, edited by Gianni Grana, vol. 4, Milan: Marzorati, 1969.

Buffoni, Franco (editor), Mario Praz vent’anni dopo: Atti del Convegno (Roma-Cassino, 15–18 ottobre 2002), Milan: Marco y Marcos, 2003. Cane, Andrea, Mario Praz critico e scrittore, Bari: Adriatica Editrice, 1983. Cattaneo, Arturo, Il trionfo della memoria: La casa della vita di Mario Praz, Milan: V&P Universita`, 2003. Cavallera, Herve´ Antonio, ‘‘L’educazione del gusto e il contributo di Mario Praz,’’ Belfagor, 9 (1989), 227–237. Cruciti, Francesca Bianca (editor), Carteggio Cecchi-Praz, Milan: Adelphi, 1985. Gabrieli, Vittorio, Bibliografia degli scritti di Mario Praz, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1967. Gabrieli, Vittorio (editor), Friendship’s Garland: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on His Seventieth Birthday, 2 vols., Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1966. Rosati, Salvatore, ‘‘Praz anglista,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I critici, edited by Gianni Grana, vol. 4, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Rosazza, Ferraris Patrizia, Il Museo Mario Praz, Rome: SACS, 1996.

GIORGIO PRESSBURGER (1937–) Giorgio Pressburger is a singular case in the panorama of Italian literature. Beginning with his experiences as a theatrical author and director, he has earned recognition for his innovative drive both in crafting original productions and in adapting works for the stage and the radio. In the literary field, his novels place themselves opposite consumerist literature: They neither court readership nor promise to be easy pastimes; rather, they invite the reader to reflect, even at the cost of emotional discomfort. Pressburger’s formation is Mittel-European; amongst his referents are Franz Kafka, Umberto Saba, Italo Svevo, Carlo Michelstaedter, and Claudio Magris. He admires Dante’s Vita nuova, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and, more widely speaking, Giambattista Vico, Karl Ke´renij, and Martin Buber. He began his career directing and writing radio dramas, the first of which, Il mattatoio (The Slaughterhouse), airing in 1967, enjoyed immediate success. The storyline is minimal: Luciano Prisco, an ItalianAmerican proprietor of butcher hops and slaughterhouses in New York, is suspected of trafficking drugs; while he is visiting family in Italy, the police

intercept his conversations to prove his guilt. The conclusion is a cliff-hanger, with the protagonist embodying two different aspects of society: the dark one outside of the law and the respectable facade that shows his strength in the eyes of his family. The characters are almost nonexistent, representing symbols; the focus remains on their social and existential conditions. One of his most significant radio dramas, Gioco di fanciulli (Childrens’ Game, 1972), was inspired by the painting of the same name by Bruegel the Elder. Some of the themes recurrent in Pressburger’s future fiction are already evident in this work. As the author explains: ‘‘Magia, lotta, sopraffazione emanano dalle figure del quadro. Gli oggetti sono simboli, non hanno piu` valore in se´, il mondo stesso sembra immerso in questa rappresentazione il cui significato sfugge o e` l’Assenza stessa’’ (Magic, struggle, a sense of the overwhelming emanate from the figures in the painting. The objects are symbols; they no longer have meaning in themselves; the world itself seems immersed in this representation whose meaning escapes us, or is Absence itself) (cited in Franco Malatini, Cinquant’anni di teatro radiofonico in Italia, 1929–79, 1981). 1499

GIORGIO PRESSBURGER Pressburger is innovative in his radiophonic activity, not only in his choice of sources but also in his elaboration of classic texts, such as Molie`re’s Tartuffe, broadcast in 1973. He pays particular attention to the effects that can be achieved using the technology of sound. For example, Carlo Goldoni’s La guerra (The War), staged in 1964, was notable for its set design, centered on the presence of an enormous white sheet that envelops the entire stage and physically suffocates the characters. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Caldero`n, first staged in 1980 (which he also directed for the cinema in 1981), is set in Franco’s Spain in 1967. All of Pressburger’s works involve a careful investigation of the characters’ symbolic roles, amply representing their existential conditions. Their staging points to a critical textual interpretation, while the radio dramas evoke metaphysical atmospheres primarily through the suggestive use of sound. Presburger’s first notable fiction, Storie dell’Ottavo Distretto (Stories of the Eighth District, 1986), cowritten with his twin brother Nicola, is a collection of stories about the brothers’ Jewish infancy and their adolescence in Budapest, in the zone known as the ‘‘Eighth District’’; it is a character study that mixes the pathetic with the humorous. After Nicola’s death in 1985, Giorgio began to write alone, both short stories and novels, increasingly drawing on his scientific training. Among the most significant titles is La legge degli spazi bianchi (The Law of White Spaces, 1989), which is composed of five stories that unite the various protagonists, all affected by an illness that weighs on their physical, as well as, inner being. These characters happen to be treated as patients of doctors who observe, with clinical detachment, the evolving illness, ever without hope. That which is behind the visible symptoms is truly important: a state of metaphysical unease. Thus, as Pressburger writes, ‘‘tutto e` scritto negli spazi bianchi tra una lettera e l’altra. Il resto non conta’’ (Everything is written in the white spaces between one letter and another. The rest doesn’t count). Another book of stories with a similar foundation is Denti e spie (Teeth and Spies, 1994), a tragic and humorous account of the fate that befalls the 32 teeth of the protagonist, which translate into 32 stories. For the author, the dental arch corresponds in fact to the existential arc of the main character, who speaks in the first person. Pressburger’s so-called bildungsromans are Il sussurro della grande voce (The Whisper of the Great Voice, 1990) and La coscienza sensibile (The Sensible Conscience, 1992). The first is dedicated to the autobiographical recollection of the flight from 1500

Hungary after the Russian invasion in 1956; the second is a philosophical reflection on existence, exemplified by the protagonist’s encounter with a character who personifies the figure of the thinker and writer Carlo Michelstaedter (1887–1910). Pressburger’s leading narrative motifs are religion, illness, and the pain by which the body attempts to communicate with the mind. Perception of pain functions as a mechanism with symbolic purpose; indeed it constitutes the contact between nature and conscience, and illness must reveal the typology of that contact. There are many affinities with the thematics of Italo Svevo, with whom Pressburger also shares his geographical surroundings from a biographical point of view (Trieste). Among his works in essay form, Sulla fede (On Faith, 2004) addresses the ‘‘necessity’’ of faith for the human race, comparing more general reflections and autobiographical questions. In Scrittori orfani di madre lingua (Writers Deprived of a Native Language, 1996), he treats the complex problem of writers (such as Conrad, Svevo, and himself) who do not write in their native language. Pressburger’s dramaturgical production is also significant. Notable is Moissi, fantasma d’amore (Moissi, Ghost of Love), produced by the Teatro Stabile Friuli-Venezia Giulia in 1985 and staged at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome a year later. The text revisits the life of a celebrated Triestine actor, Alessando Moissi (1879–1935), famous for his staging of Schiller and Ibsen and for whom Pirandello wrote Non si sa come. His latest play, Il rabbino di Venezia (The Rabbi from Venice, 2004), centers on a rabbi and his wife, whose great affection for each other causes them to replay the myth of Alcestis, by offering their lives for the salvation of the other. This love story embodies the values of a society guided by the rules of the Jewish community, set amidst the Venetian calli (streets), the canals, the vaporetti (water taxis). Yet again illness, pain, memory, and betrayal, themes dear to the author, constitute the background of the story, which delves into the subjects of faith and reason, into the heart and in the weaknesses of humanity.

Biography Giorgio Pressburger was born in Budapest (Hungary), on 21 April 1937 into a Jewish family. As a child, he was hidden and thus escaped Nazi roundups. He completed his classical studies in his native city, but fled in 1956 to Italy after the Soviet invasion. Pressburger moved to various cities and settled in Rome, where he studied biology and

GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI attended the Accademia d’Arte Drammatica, founded by Silvio D’Amico; he graduated and stayed on as teacher of direction and acting from 1968 to 1976. He began to work in theater and radio and earned recognition for his great originality, winning the Pirandello Prize for La partita in 1974 and the Flaiano Prize for Le tre madri in 1995. He married Lidia Cozlovich and has one child, Andrea, born in 1960. Pressburger won the Prix Italia with Giochi di fanciulli, 1970, and in 1972 with Ages and in 1975 with Diario immaginario. In 1986, he began to write short stories and novels and established himself in the wider public. He won the Viareggio Prize for La neve e la colpa, 1998. He was appointed director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest, 1998–2002, and of the Mittelfest di Cividale del Friuli, 1991–2004, at which he participated with his most recent theatrical work, Il rabbino di Venezia, in the summer of 2004. His work as opera director begun with La donna senz’ombra by Richard Strauss, in 1977, staged at La Fenice in Venice, followed by engagements at La Scala in Milan, the Opera in Rome, and the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto. Pressburger lives in Trieste. ANGELA GUIDOTTI Selected Works Theater Esecuzione (produced 1963). La partita (produced 1974). Moissi,fantasma d’amore (produced 1986). Le tre madri (produced 1995). Il rabbino di Venezia (produced 2004).

Radio Plays Il mattatoio, 1967. Giochi di fanciulli, 1972.

Ages, 1972. Diario immaginario, 1975. Gli ebrei, 1976. Il formaggio e i vermi, 1979.

Fiction Storie dell’Ottavo Distretto, 1986. La legge degli spazi bianchi, 1989; as The Law of White Spaces, translated by Piers Spence, 1998. Il sussurro della grande voce, 1990. La coscienza sensibile, 1992. Denti e spie, 1994; as Teeth translated by Piers Spence, 1996. I due gemelli, 1996. La neve e la colpa, 1998; as The Snow and the Guilt translated by Shaun Whiteside, 2000. Di vento e di fuoco, 2000. L’orologiaio di Monaco, 2003.

Essays Scrittori orfani di madre lingua, 1996. Sulla fede, 2004.

Further Reading Bertani, Odoardo, ‘‘Pressburger, Giorgio,’’ in Enciclopedia dello Spettacolo, Milan, Garzanti, 1976. Ceserani, Remo, ‘‘Esilio e divisione in Giorgio Pressburger,’’ in L’esilio come certezza: La ricerca culturale in Italia dalla Rivoluzione Francese ai giorni nostri, edited by Andrea Ciccarelli and Paolo Giordano, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 1998. Ceserani, Remo, ‘‘Ottavo Distretto di Budapest: Una metafora per ogni luogo,’’ Il Manifesto, 14 September 1989, 12. Cordoni, Giovanni, ‘‘Giorgio Pressburger,’’ in Enciclopedia della Radio, Milan, Garzanti, 2003. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Esperienze narrative singolari e atipiche,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, Il Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Ritualita` e ricorrenze simboliche in un romanzo di Giorgio Pressburger,’’ Paragone, 49–50 (1995), 66–81. Malatini, Franco, Cinquant’anni di teatro radiofonico in Italia, 1929–79 Rome: ERI, 1981.

GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI (1882–1982) Giuseppe Prezzolini was an eclectic and prolific intellectual and the author of several critical essays and autobiographical works, primarily known for establishing the influential Florentine journal La Voce in 1908. He made his debut with Vita intima

(Private Life, 1903), which was followed respectively by Il linguaggio come causa d’errore (Language as a Cause of Error, 1904) and L’arte di persuadere (The Art of Persuasion, 1907), arising out of a spiritual crisis, a search for faith, which the writer 1501

GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI was unable to find. Vita intima is attributed by the young author to ‘‘Giuliano il Sofista’’ (Julian the Sophist), a nickname that he also used to sign the periodical Il Leonardo, which he founded in 1903 along with his close friend Giovanni Papini. Organized in brief chapters, each of which offers its date of composition, the text of Vita intima seems to be a diary or a collection of letters, in which we come across an identification of narrator, character, and reader. Prezzolini wrote in a chapter of L’italiano inutile (The Useless Italian, 1954), entitled ‘‘Storia di un nome’’ (History of a Name): ‘‘Mi ribattezzai Giuliano per simpatia con Giuliano Sorel e con Giuliano l’Apostata’’ (I re-baptized myself Julian out of admiration for Julian Sorel and Julian the Apostate), where Sorel refers to Stendhal’s hero in Le rouge et le noir. And he further explained: Non essendoci preti della nuova religione degli Uomini liberi, ci battezzammo da noi stessi, e quando pubblicammo il Leonardo quegli pseudonimi erano nostri da un pezzo; ma non per ragioni di segretezza o di estetismo, come per certi letterati o politici. I nostri pseudonimi erano gia` i nostri nomi intimi: erano i nomi di setta, che escivano in pubblico, quasi a celebrare la nuova personalita`, non piu` quella delle famiglie e dello Stato, della storia, insomma, che ci aveva fatti, ma di nuova storia, nella quale credevamo di esserci rifatti nuovi e senza antenati, da tutto sradicati, senza impegni od obblighi verso nessuno, soli di fronte all’avvenire, che doveva pure essere nostro, perche´ bastava l’individuo a farselo, e come voleva farselo lui. Volonta`, liberta`: Gian Falco, Giuliano il Sofista. Since there were no priests of the new religion of Free Men, we baptized ourselves, and when we published Il Leonardo those pseudonyms were ours for a short while; but not for reasons for secrecy or of aestheticism, as for certain writers and politicians. Our pseudonyms were our private names: they were our cult names, which went out into the public, as a quasi-celebration of the new personality, which was no longer that of the family or of the State, of the history, in short, that had made us, but of a new history, in which we believed ourselves to be re-fashioned anew and without ancestors, uprooted from everything, without commitments or obligations to anyone, alone before the future, which was to be ours as well, because the individual could make it, just as he desired. Desire, freedom: Gian Falco, Julian the Sophist.

In Vita intima, the literati also figure among his adversaries. If Prezzolini proved to be critical toward Gabriele D’Annunzio and the aestheticizing literary current, he expressed ‘‘admiration,’’ on the other hand, for Angelo Conti (1860–1930) in the 1502

first article published in Il Leonardo, entitled ‘‘Vita trionfante’’ (Triumphant Life). Conti was reclaimed as the unconscious trendsetter of the new culture, a writer who, before all else, offered the example of a poetic that shattered the front of formal logic (Fabio Finotti, Una ferita non chiusa, 1992). For the knowledge of reality, art therefore takes on a more incisive role compared to science. Prezzolini gained notoriety with Il linguaggio come causa d’errore, dedicated to Henri Bergson, whom he met in Paris in 1902. As Maria Manganelli observed, Bergson did not devote any specific study to the treatment of language, although there is no Bergsonian work in which this theme is not in some way touched upon; for this reason, it is astonishing that, with the exception of Prezzolini, no scholar of Bergson’s thought has made it an object of explicit investigation (Il linguaggio nel pensiero di Henri Bergson, 1981).Indeed, for the renewal and enrichment of the Italian language, Prezzolini signaled out Giovanni Pascoli, whom he considered exemplary in poetry and, as a theorist, in prose. This task of renewal—of the culture of the twentieth century, to be exact—can also be seen in the activity of the literary journals that emerged at the turn of the last century. In 1903, the very same year Benedetto Croce founded La critica, Papini and Prezzolini established Il Leonardo, which until 1907 (when it ceased publication) was marked by a deeply antipositivist bent. This journal explored the experiences of Bergsonian intuitionism and American pragmatism. In 1908, Prezzolini, in collaboration with Papini, founded La Voce, which he edited until 1914, when he was replaced by Giuseppe De Robertis. Many literary figures who were committed to a radical renewal of Italian culture clustered around La Voce, which was without ideological preclusions: The review aimed at discovering and connecting the intellectual energies dispersed, and often forgotten, throughout the Italian regions, hence the championing of writers such as Renato Serra, Clemente Rebora, and Umberto Saba, among others. It is important to mention the role of diffusion promoted by the avant-garde in Europe as well as its defense of a culture that adhered strictly to the concrete problems of society. In the pages of La Voce, one could find broad debates on current affairs, ranging from the invasion of Libya and the questione meridionale to illiteracy. The journal underwent various historical phases, due primarily to editorial changes. A first phase ran from December 1908 to November 1911,

GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI when Gaetano Salvemini, one of the most authoritative Italian political writers, left La Voce and soon founded the weekly L’Unita` (1911–1920). From the very beginning, La Voce was a serious intellectual endeavor, manifested in its collaborators’ work of protest and critique. As managing editor, Prezzolini synthesized these objectives with clarity in one of the journal’s first articles, when he wrote that the journal must address ‘‘tutte le questioni che hanno riflessi nel mondo intellettuale e religioso ed artistico; reagire alla retorica degli italiani obbligandoli a vedere da vicino la loro realta` sociale; migliorare il terreno dove deve vivere e fiorire la vita dello spirito’’ (all questions that have ramifications in the intellectual and religious and artistic world; to oppose the rhetoric of Italians by obliging them to see their social reality at close range; to improve the ground where the life of the spirit must live and flourish; ‘‘Al lettore,’’ La Voce, no. 1, 1909). The La Voce enterprise ended in the period following World War I, when the rise of Fascism took shape. Although a friend of Benito Mussolini, Prezzolini did not initially intend to take a distinct position. Moving to the United States in 1929, he ultimately played the role of a mediator of culture at Columbia University for 20 years.

Biography Guiseppe Prezzolini was born in Perugia on 27 January 1882 to a Tuscan father. After his studies, he moved to Florence in 1903, establishing a friendship with Giovanni Papini, with whom he founded Il Leonardo. In 1908, he founded the weekly review La Voce, which he edited until 1914. In 1915, he became the political correspondent for Mussolini’s Roman newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia. He also collaborated with Piero Gobetti’s Rivoluzione liberale. He served at the front during World War I and after the war lived in Paris, 1925–1929. In 1929, he moved to New York City and taught at Columbia University, where he was also director of the Casa Italiana, 1930–1950. He became an American citizen in 1940. After World War II, he returned periodically to Italy and settled his residence in Lugano, 1968. During the last years of his life, he continued to contribute essays to various newspapers, among them Il Borghese, La Nazione, Il Resto del Carlino, and Il Tempo. Prezzolini died in Lugano, 15 July 1982. CARLO SANTOLI

Selected Works Critical Essays Vita intima, 1903. Il linguaggio come causa d’errore, 1904. La verita` del pragmatismo, 1904. La cultura italiana, 1906. L’arte di persuadere, 1907. Cos’e` il modernismo?, 1908. Benedetto Croce, 1909. Discorso su Giovanni Papini, 1915. La Dalmazia, 1915. Uomini 22 e citta` 3, 1920. La cultura italiana, 1923. Vita di Nicolo` Machiavelli fiorentino, 1927; as Nicolo` Machiavelli, the Florentine, translated by Ralph Roeder, 1928; as Machiavelli, translated by Gioconda Savini, 1967. Repertorio bibliografico della storia e della critica della letteratura italiana 1902–1942, vols. 1–2, 1937–1939; vols. 3–4, 1946–1948. The Legacy of Italy, 1948. L’italiano inutile: Memorie letterarie in Francia, Italia, e America, 1954. Sul fascismo, 1976; as Fascism translated by Kathleen Macmillan, 1926.

Letters Giovanni Papini–Giuseppe Prezzolini: Storia di un’amicizia, 2 vols., 1966–1968. Carteggio Giovanni Boine–Giuseppe Prezzolini (1908–1915), edited by Margherita Marchione and S. E. Scalia, 1971. Giuseppe Prezzolini–Ardengo Soffici. Carteggio I (1907–1918), edited by Mario Richter, 1977; Carteggio II (1919–1964), edited by Maria Emanuela Raffi and Mario Richter, 1982. Le lettere di Croce a Prezzolini, edited by di Ottavio Besomi and Augusta Lo`pez Bernasocchi, 1981. Alberto Moravia–Giuseppe Prezzolini: Lettere, 1982. Prezzolini: Un secolo di attivita`. Lettere inedite e bibliografia di tutte le opere compilata da Francesca Pino Pongolini edited by Margherita Marchione, 1982. Cesare Angelini-Giuseppe Prezzolini. Carteggio 1919–1976, edited by Margherita Marchione and Gianni Mussini, 1983. Aldo Palazzeschi–Giuseppe Prezzolini. Carteggio 1912–1973 edited by Michele Ferrario, 1987. Cara mamma: Lettere dagli USA, 1988. Benedetto Croce–Giuseppe Prezzolini. Carteggio 1904–1945, edited by Emma Giammattei, 2 vols., 1990. Alfredo Panzini–Giuseppe Prezzolini. Carteggio 1911–1937, 1990.

Other Diario 1900–1941, 1978.

Further Reading Benvenuto, Beppe, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Palermo: Sellerio, 2003. Biondi, Marino, Cultura di Prezzolini, Florence: Pagliai Polistampa, 2005.

1503

GIUSEPPE PREZZOLINI Biondi, Marino, Prezzolini: Diario di un secolo, Bolzano: Centro di Cultura dell’Alto Adige, 2001. Campanile, Marina, Giuseppe Prezzolini, l’intellettuale, ‘‘La Voce,’’ Naples: Banco di Napoli-Loffredo, 1985. Campanile, Marina (editor), Giuseppe Prezzolini nella formazione della coscienza critica degli italiani. Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Studi, Caserta, 25–26–27 October 1985, Naples: Banco di Napoli-Loffredo, 1986. Finotti, Fabio, Una ‘‘ferita non chiusa’’: Misticismo, filosofia, letteratura in Prezzolini nel primo Novecento, Florence: Olschki, 1992. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Giuseppe Prezzolini: L’esperienza del Leonardo. La Voce,’’ in Letteratura italiana contemporanea, vol. 1, Rome: Lucarini, 1979. La Voce 1908–1913: Cronache, antologia e fortuna di una rivista, Milan: Rusconi, 1974.

Lugaresi, Giovanni, La lezione di Prezzolini: L’‘‘italiano inutile’’ e altri personaggi, Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 1998. Manganelli, Maria, Il linguaggio nel pensiero di Henri Bergson, Milan: Marzorati, 1981. Marchione, Margherita, Giuseppe Prezzolini: Ricordi, saggi e testimonianze, Prato: Palazzo, 1983. Papini, Giovanni, ‘‘Un uomo finito,’’ Quaderni della Voce, 28–29 (1913); reprinted, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Pino Pongolini, Francesca (editor), Giuseppe Prezzolini 1882–1982. Atti delle giornate di studio 1982, Bellinzona: Dipartimento della Pubblica Educazione, 1983. Ragusa, Olga, Anni americani di Giuseppe Prezzolini, Florence: Le Monnier 2001. Salek, Roberto, Giuseppe Prezzolini: Una biografia intellettuale, Florence: Le Lettere, 2002.

THE PRINCE See Il Principe (Work by Niccolo` Machiavelli)

PRINTING AND PUBLISHING The introduction of printing from movable metal types to Italy is traditionally ascribed to Konrad Sweynheym (d. 1477) and Arnold Pannartz (d. ca. 1476), two German clerics who set up a press at a Benedictine monastery in Subiaco. Between 1465 and 1467, they used roman types to print Cicero’s De oratore (55 BC), a Latin grammar, and works by Lactantius and Saint Augustine. Over the next decade, typography was introduced to Rome, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Naples, and other cities. Italy’s flourishing economy, its vibrant cultural life, and the relatively high literacy rates among its large urban population made it ideal for the rapid spread of the new technology. The peninsula produced about 40 percent of the estimated 35,000 editions that appeared during the incunabula (pre-1501) period, more than any other region in Europe. Venice provided the best conditions of 1504

all the Italian cities, since its extensive commercial network and the availability of capital to finance editions greatly facilitated the business of producing, distributing, and selling books. In the 1470s, the printer-publishers Nicholas Jenson (1420–1480) and Johann von Ko¨ln (d. 1480) ran large firms in the city, and by the end of the century Venice had established a long-lasting dominance of the Italian publishing industry. The majority of incunabula were printed in Latin and included theological, philosophical, and legal texts; Bibles; and classical and humanistic works, usually in larger formats. Vernacular production increased steadily during this period and was characterized by wide-circulation titles, both secular—chivalric romances such as I Reali di Francia (The Royals of France, 1491) by Andrea da Barberino (1370–1431) were very popular—and

PRINTING AND PUBLISHING religious—the anonymous Fior di virtu` (Flower of Virtue, 1487) was a best seller—usually printed in smaller and thus cheaper formats. Grammars and schoolbooks were also widely produced. The first edition of Petrarca’s Canzoniere was printed in Venice by Windelin of Speyer in 1470, and two years later Johann Neumeister (d. ca. 1522) printed the princeps of Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy) in Foligno. The influence of print on scholarship and literature is illustrated by the career of Aldo Manutius (ca. 1452–1515), a Humanist who set up a publishing house in Venice in partnership with the publisher Andrea Torresani (1451–1529) and the nobleman Pietro Francesco Barbarigo (d. 1499). The Aldine press (1495–1515) made the Greek and Latin classics available in accurate texts to the cultivated public of Renaissance Europe. Erasmus, Pietro Bembo, and other scholars were associated with the press as authors and editors. In 1501, Aldo began printing a series of classics in the small octavo format, with Latin and Italian texts set in italic, a typeface that he had introduced the previous year. The Aldine enchiridion, or handbook, was a successful and much-imitated innovation. The editions in this format prepared by Bembo of Petrarch’s Canzoniere in 1501 and Dante’s Comedia in 1502 were important in the reception of these two works and in the development of an Italian literary vernacular. Aldo’s son Paolo (1512–1574) and his grandson Aldo (1547–1597) were active as printers and publishers in Venice and Rome. It should be pointed out that although the roles often overlapped, a publisher, who was often a bookseller, financed an edition: He procured a text, hired a printer to produce a certain number of copies, and then attempted to recover his investment and make a profit by selling them. Printers acted as publishers when they financed their own editions. The expansion of the printing industry in the first half of the sixteenth century was related to a concurrent increase in the number of readers. Literacy rates rose significantly during the period, although one must remember that, as Brain Richardson has noted, ‘‘in the Renaissance those who were potential readers of books of any sort were a minority, almost certainly less then a quarter of the male population and an even smaller proportion of women’’ (Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy, 1999). The traditional reading public was predominantly male, concentrated in urban centers, and made up of two broad categories: educated, well-to-do readers with a knowledge of

Latin (clerics, humanists, teachers, doctors, courtiers), and ‘‘popular’’ readers of lower social status with little education and little or no Latin (artisans, merchants, shopkeepers, and also women). Print made available a greater quantity of affordable books in the vernacular and thus fostered, along with other factors such as schooling, the growth of the second category. In the 1520s and 1530s, publishers such as Niccolo` d’Aristotile de’ Rossi, (known as lo Zoppino and active in 1505–1543) and the firm of Francesco Bindoni (d. 1555 or 1558) and Maffeo Pasini (d. ca. 1551), which operated between 1524 and 1551, responded to the demand generated by this new public by putting out vast amounts of cheap editions of popular literature. Chivalric titles were especially successful, and they now included Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), the century’s best-selling literary work with some 160 Italian editions in the sixteenth century. Printing in the vernacular, however, truly flourished only in the middle of the century, after some publishers, not content with satisfying existing demand, developed dynamic strategies vis-a`-vis the market. The most important figure in this process was Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari (d. 1578), who turned the firm founded by his father Giovanni (d. 1539 or 1540) into the largest publisher in sixteenth-century Venice. This efficient organization owned its own printing house and operated a network of bookshops throughout Italy; it produced over 1,000 editions from 1536 to 1606, of which only 5% were in Latin. Gabriele pursued a clear and successful program in the 1540s and 1550s, the firm’s most prosperous decades, when literature made up the largest part of his catalogue. Along with numerous editions of Petrarch, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Castiglione, he printed contemporary authors like Pietro Aretino, Anton Francesco Doni, Lodovico Domenichi, Lodovico Dolce, Tullia d’Aragona, and Laura Terracina, as well as collections of letters and verse anthologies. He employed polygraphs like Dolce and Domenichi as editors: They prepared a ‘‘correct’’ copy of the text (that is, one that conformed to trecento Tuscan models), compiled glossaries and other paratexts designed to assist inexperienced readers in understanding the work, and authored critical commentaries promoting its literary qualities (for example, the Orlando Furioso was presented as a modern equivalent of the classical epics). Giolito and other midcentury vernacular publishers such as Francesco Marcolini (active 1534–1559) played a crucial role in the evolution of Italian literary 1505

PRINTING AND PUBLISHING culture. They opened the ranks of literary society to authors from a wider range of social backgrounds, often without Humanist training and resembling the new readers they served; they encouraged the perception that Italian literature was comparable in dignity to the literature of Greece and Rome; and the linguistic mediation of texts enacted by their editors contributed to the standardization of Italian, a process naturally favored by the commercial logic of publishing, which needed the largest possible market for its products. The expansion of vernacular printing implied the decline of Latin, but the process was gradual, and publishers continued to exploit the latter sector in the early modern period. Various members of the Giunti family were active as publishers, printers, or booksellers in Florence, Venice, Rome, and several European cities from the end of the fifteenth and well into the seventeenth century. They put out a wide range of both classical and vernacular titles, and the Venetian branch was the leading producer of liturgical works in Catholic Europe. In Rome, Antonio Blado (1490–1567) printed over 1,400 editions from about 1516 until his death. Many of these were papal bulls and briefs (he was printer to the Apostolic Camera from 1535), but he also produced the first edition of Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Il Principe (The Prince) in 1532. The Counter-Reformation brought significant changes to the Italian book industry. The first Roman Index of Prohibited Books was promulgated by Paul IV in 1559, marking the advent of an aggressive ecclesiastical censorship that removed from the market large numbers of titles; moreover, its vagaries and inconsistencies made the production and sale of even legitimate books an uncertain business. In the 1560s, publishers responded to the change by shifting their production from secular to religious titles, thus conforming to the new orthodoxy while at the same time supplying what was, perforce, an expanding market. The clandestine trade eventually became another manner of adapting to censorship. The repressive climate was a factor in the loss of Italy’s preeminent position in European publishing in the second half of the cinquecento. The long-term economic crisis that began in the 1620s created additional difficulties for the industry, which were evident in the declining quality of Italian books of the period. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century publishers, however, managed to overcome these obstacles and at times to prosper by turning out massive quantities of low-priced editions of vernacular titles with wide appeal. Devotional works and 1506

popular literature—Baroque novels were highly successful—were the mainstay of the industry, and another important sector was constituted by pamphlets, handbills, almanacs, newspapers, and periodicals. Although Latin had long lost a majority share of book production, Venetian firms such as Baglioni continued to be leading suppliers of theological and liturgical works for the European Catholic markets until the late eighteenth century. Other important printers and publishers of the period were the Albrizzi in Venice (active from the end of the seventeenth century); Antonio De Rossi in Rome (1668 or 1671–1755); who printed most of the works of the Accademia dell’Arcadia; and the Remondini of Bassano (1660-1861), one of the largest European firms in the second half of the settecento. The same period saw a resurgence of fine printing with the beautiful illustrated editions of Italian classics produced in Venice by Antonio Zatta (1722–1804), Giambattista Albrizzi (1698–1777), and others, and with the typographical achievement of Giambattista Bodoni (1740–1813) in Parma. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, Milan replaced Venice as the center of the Italian book industry. Among the largest publishers based there were Giovanni Silvestri (1778–1855) and Anton Fortunato Stella (1757–1833). In Turin, another major center, Giuseppe Pomba (1795–1876) introduced his immensely successful ‘‘Biblioteca Popolare’’ in 1828–1830, a series of low-priced, pocket-sized editions of Italian works and classical texts in translation. Pomba also implemented technical innovations such as the use of machine presses. Attempts to expand and modernize, however, were hampered by the absence of a national market, by the protectionist policies of the single states, and by the lack of an effective copyright regime. When national unification removed these obstacles, the industry was left to face what was and still remains the major problem and the essential characteristic of Italian publishing: the restricted size of the reading public. In 1861, the literacy rate was 25% with the slow development of public education and the gradual growth of the urban working and middle classes, the rate rose to 62% by 1911, but it was still below European standards. Nevertheless, the numbers of readers rose, and publishers were able to expand by catering to their tastes and needs: Book production increased from 6,317 titles in 1872 to 11,120 in 1914. Literature, particularly narrative fiction, held the largest share of the market during this period, consolidating a centuries-old trend toward

PRINTING AND PUBLISHING popular genres into another defining feature of the modern book market in Italy. The leader in this sector was the Milanese firm Treves, founded in 1861 by the brothers Emilio and Giuseppe, which used its large-circulation periodicals and newspapers to spur book sales. Another key segment of the market was made up by technical, scientific, and self-help books, and here Hoepli, founded 1871, earned a prominent place with its famous series of manuals. Most publishers were involved in the production of schoolbooks, including the Salesians, who were naturally active in religious publishing, a sector that retained a significant share of the market. A number of publishing houses played an influential role in the cultural and intellectual development of the new nation by serving the smaller reading public of scholars and writers, and among these were Sandron (1839), Morano (1849), Loescher (1861), Olschki (1886), Carabba (1880), and Vallecchi (1913), the last two tied to the Florentine avant-garde, as well as Laterza (1901), closely associated with Benedetto Croce. The industrialization of Italian publishing began in earnest in the interwar period. Arnoldo Mondadori (1889–1971) and Angelo Rizzoli (1889–1970) led the way in the transformation by applying innovations designed to exploit the commodity nature of the printed book. Large-scale investment made possible technical advances, improvements in distribution, and larger and more up-to-date catalogues, enabling their Milan-based firms to better identify, respond to, and even condition the tastes of their clientele. Popular fiction, including ever-increasing numbers of translations of foreign titles, enlarged its share of the market and confirmed its permanent status as the mainstay of the industry. Mondadori, the largest publishing enterprise, was prominent in this field; in 1929 it launched I libri gialli, its long-lasting detective series. The reading public continued to expand (the literacy rate reached 74% in 1931), and although the average yearly production of titles in the 1930s (11,000) was not much higher than 30 years earlier, print runs and sales were greater. The modernization of the industry occurred within the historical context of Fascism. Laterza, Einaudi (founded in 1933), and other firms made notable attempts to pursue independent programs, but most publishers adapted themselves to the political climate. The regime at first encouraged ideological alignment through a combination of repression and incentives like subsidies and tariff reductions. The suppression of titles contributed to the difficulties of the industry and had long-term

effects since it meant the closure of Italy to international intellectual culture. In later phases, the regime intensified its repressive action. The decision of the Ministry of Popular Culture in 1938 to pursue the purification of the book trade of those titles deemed to be at variance with Fascist principles and the promulgation of anti-Semitic laws later the same year led to the blacklisting of Jewish authors and to hardships and persecution for Jewish publishers. The intellectual ferment of the post–World War II period encouraged the birth or the resurgence of a number of firms that relied on the close collaboration of intellectuals and that had a profound influence on Italian culture: Einaudi, Feltrinelli (founded 1955), Il Mulino (1954), Il Saggiatore (1958), and others. At the same time, the Italian book industry, like the economy in general, entered a phase of unprecedented growth. Several factors contributed to the expansion, including the continued rise in literacy levels (from 87.1% in 1951 to 94.8% in 1971), increased expenditure on books due to improved economic conditions, and greatly expanded enrollments in universities. The evolution toward a true mass reading public, however, was complicated by the rising popularity of cinema, radio, magazines, and television. Following the example set by Mondadori, which held on to its preeminent position, the major publishers sought to compete with other media by covering as wide a spectrum of the market as finances allowed, by continuing to cultivate narrative fiction, and by turning increasingly to the paperback, itself the most important development of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, the industry exploited the highly successful formula launched by the Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli (BUR) in 1949: a series of very affordable pocket books that made available to the public a full range of literature from all periods. This model was taken up by most publishers and was extended to nonfiction as well, and in 1965 it found its apotheosis in Mondadori’s ‘‘Oscar’’ series, a cultural and social phenomenon that brought to a mass public numerous Italian and foreign authors and that sold eight million copies in the first year, helped no doubt by newsstand distribution. The attempt to capitalize on the commercial advantages offered by smaller formats and cheaper materials can be traced back without interruption to the origins of printing. The permanent success of the cheap mass-market paperback turned this historical trend into another defining characteristic of Italian publishing at the end of the millennium. 1507

PRINTING AND PUBLISHING The last three decades of the twentieth century saw the concentration of the industry into a few large groups with diversified media interests. There were over 5,200 registered publishers in Italy in 2003, but at the end of 2004 four conglomerates dominated the market: Mondadori, the largest publishing group and part of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire (it controlled Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Einaudi, and Sperling & Kupfer); RCS Libri (part of RCS MediaGroup, its imprints included Rizzoli, Bompiani, Sansoni); Il Gruppo De Agostini (Utet); and Messaggerie Italiane, the leader in distribution and in electronic bibliographical services through Messaggerie Libri, and with a significant presence in publishing through its control of Longanesi. The corporate ethos behind this restructuring of the industry demands promotional synergies and favors publishing programs based on paperback sales and best sellers. It has also facilitated successful innovations such as reference works on CD-ROM and the development of Internet bookstores. As the Italian publishing industry moves away from the printed book and into the world of electronic texts and online distribution, it finds itself in a position of unprecedented strength. In 2002, it produced just over 53,000 titles for a total of about 254 million copies and sales in excess of 3.7 billion euros, figures that make it one of the major book industries in the world. Yet some of its traditional peculiarities remain unchanged. That same year, only 42% of Italians over six years of age claimed to have read at least one nonschool book in the previous 12 months, one of the lowest readership levels in Europe, and the market predominance of the cheap paperback as a format and of popular fiction as a genre confirmed the survival of deeply rooted realities. The remarkable resilience of historical trends was dramatically illustrated by the publishing phenomenon of 2002: La Biblioteca di Repubblica, a series of low-cost but elegant hardback editions of 50 twentieth-century novels distributed weekly at newsstands with the national newspaper La Repubblica. The series and the epigones developed by other dailies sold 44.2 million copies over the course of the year. The first title was offered as a gift to buyers of the newspaper in order to promote the initiative. It was Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980), a novel ostensibly in the detective genre, constructed around inaccessible manuscript books and the mysterious attempts to keep them from readers. ANTONIO RICCI 1508

Further Reading Ascarelli, Fernanda, and Marco Menato, La tipografia del ’500 in Italia, Florence: Olschki, 1989. Braida, Lodovica, Stampa e cultura in Europa tra XV e XVI secolo, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2001. Cadioli, Alberto, and Giuliano Vigini, Storia dell’editoria italiana dall’Unita` ad oggi: Un profilo introduttivo, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 2004. Castronovo, Valerio, and Nicola Tranfaglia (editors), Storia della stampa italiana, 7 vols., Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1976–2002. Cavallo, Guglielmo, and Roger Chartier (editors), Storia della lettura nel mondo occidentale, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1995. Clerici, Luca, Bruno Falcetto, and Gianfranco Tortorelli (eds.), Editoria libraria in Italia dal Settecento a oggi: Bibliografia 1980–1998, Milan: Il Saggiatore / Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 2000. Colonetti, Aldo, Andrea Rauch, Gianfranco Tortorelli, and Sergio Vezzali (editors), Disegnare il libro: Grafica editoriale in Italia dal 1945 ad oggi, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1988. Decleva, Enrico, Arnoldo Mondadori, Turin: UTET, 1993. Decleva, Enrico (editor), Ulrico Hoepli, 1847–1935: Editore e libraio, Milan: Hoepli, 2001. Fabre, Giorgio, L’elenco: Censura fascista, editoria e autori ebrei, Turin: Zamorani, 1998. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Storia dell’editoria letteraria in Italia: 1945–2003, Turin: Einaudi, 2004. Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin, L’Apparition du Livre, Paris: E´ditions Albin Michel, 1958. Finocchi, Luisa, and Ada Gigli Marchetti (editors), Editori e lettori: La produzione libraria in Italia nella prima meta` del Novecento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2000. Forgacs, David, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980: Cultural Industries, Politics and the Public, Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1990. Garin, Eugenio, Editori italiani tra ’800 e ’900, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1991. Grendler, Paul F., The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press, 1540–1605, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Infelise, Mario, L’editoria veneziana nel ’700, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1989. Javitch, Daniel, Proclaiming a Classic: The Canonization of Orlando Furioso, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Lowry, Martin, The World of Aldus Manutius: Business and Scholarship in Renaissance Venice, Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 1979. Mangoni, Luisa, Pensare i libri. La casa editrice Einaudi dagli anni trenta agli anni sessanta, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Murialdi, Paolo, La stampa italiana dalla Liberazione alla crisi di fine secolo, Rome: Laterza, 1995. Nuovo, Angela, Il commercio librario nell’Italia del Rinascimento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998; revised edition, 2003. Pasta, Renato, Editoria e cultura nel Settecento, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Petrucci, Armando (editor), Libri, editori e pubblico nell’Europa moderna. Guida storica e critica, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1977.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘La letteratura in tipografia,’’ in Letteratura italiana, vol. 2 Produzione e consumo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Ragone, Giovanni, Un secolo di libri: Storia dell’editoria in Italia dall’Unita` al post-moderno, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Richardson, Brian, Printing, Writers and Readers in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Santoro, Marco, Storia del libro italiano: Libro e societa` in Italia dal Quattrocento al Novecento, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 1994. Scapecchi, Piero, ‘‘Subiaco 1465 oppure [Bondeno 1463]? Analisi del frammento Parsons-Scheide,’’ La Bibliofilia 103:1 (2001), 1–24. Tagliaferri, Cristina, and Stefano De Rosa (editors), Olschki: Un secolo di editoria, 1886–1986, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1986.

Tranfaglia, Nicola, and Albertina Vittoria, Storia degli editori italiani: Dall’Unita` alla fine degli anni Sessanta, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2000. Trovato, Paolo, L’ordine dei tipografi: Lettori, stampatori, correttori tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Turi, Gabriele (editor), Storia dell’editoria nell’Italia contemporanea, Florence: Giunti, 1997. Vannucchi, Francesca, Introduzione allo studio dell’editoria: Analisi, dati, documentazione sul libro e la lettura, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 2004. Vigini, Giuliano, Rapporto sull’editoria italiana: Struttura, produzione, mercato, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 1999.

PRISON NOTEBOOKS See Quaderni del carcere (Work by Antonio Gramsci)

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE In his correspondence with his friend, the otolaryngologist Wilhelm Fleiss, Sigmund Freud saw himself as ‘‘a conquistador’’ rather than as a scientist or experimenter (Abhandlungen an Wilhelm Fliess, 1892–1897). Aware of moving peripherally with respect to the traditional scientific domain, he seemed to privilege the literary one. He also declared in his Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900) that oneiric and nocturnal activity makes licit what the daytime world tends to inhibit. It is not the basic idea that is new, but rather its contours, of which, like a cartographer, Freud provided the first rough map. In his exploration of dreams, he in fact distinguished the oneiric production of thoughts from their transformation into manifest content, in which the story of the vision and its formalization cooperate on the same level, resulting in an epistemological see-saw between the

object of a form of knowledge and the knowledge of that same object. It is in the linguistic premises of Freudian discourse that his thought is interwoven with his interpreters, and the analysis of language constitutes its test horizon. Although Freud placed an emphasis preliminarily on a complex of symbols that maintain a constant meaning in different productions of the unconscious, the French school, from Claude Le´vi-Strauss to Jacques Lacan, aimed at inverting this perspective, not so much in order to oppose itself to Freudian thought as to realize it completely. It is not a question of emphasizing the relation that connects the symbol with what it represents but rather of asserting the primacy of the symbolic system that comprises them. What Le´viStrauss achieved in Les Structures e´le´mentaires de la parente´ (1949) is an extension and transposition of the structural conception of language within the 1509

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE symbolic order. For his part, Lacan aimed at bringing the structure of language close to that of the unconscious, beginning from the term that defines it. His effort was directed at reconceiving the unconscious from within, and the dream, its typical manifestation, can constitute the privileged channel by locating its rules of functioning within the more general modalities of language. The analysis of ‘‘displacement’’ and ‘‘condensation’’ suggested to Roman Jakobson that the unconscious mechanisms described by Freud are arranged between the metaphoric and the metonymic, the fundamental poles of every language, conceived within a further repartition between contiguity and similarity (‘‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances,’’ 1956). If Freud’s analysis was reminiscent of nineteenth-century comparative philology and ended up privileging a Hermeneutic approach (that of Lacan), on the other hand, it is inclined to assert, in ‘‘La Direction de la cure et les principes de sou pouvoir,’’ collected in E´crits (1966), that ‘‘the unconscious is structured like a language.’’ Lacan took the notions of ‘‘structure’’ and ‘‘language’’ from Le´vi-Strauss’s Anthropologie structurale (Structural Anthropology, 1958), in which ‘‘the unconscious ceases to be the refuge of individual particularities,’’ fulfilling an ordering function that imposes laws on a reality that is reduced to the minimal elements—linguistically in his vocabulary— where these, however, ‘‘are less important than structure.’’ In ‘‘L’Instance de la letter dans l’incoscient ou la raison depuis Freud,’’ written in 1957 and also collected in E´crits, the unconscious is conceived of as a linguistic structure that uses the figures of rhetoric (taking up Jakobson) to develop them within a simpler pair of equivalences in which condensation refers to metaphor, while displacement corresponds to metonymy. Within this transposition between psychic modalities and rhetorical figures, there arises an essential characteristic of the unconscious, which is always open to a plurality of determining elements. Language, in reproducing the ‘‘object’’ described, reflects its characteristics, and the insatiable unconscious desire corresponds to the continuous displacement represented by metonymy, while the neurotic symptom, pairing two signifiers, takes on a metaphoric role. What the ego desires is structured on the laws of the unconscious and involves the loss of spontaneity of the traditional individual agent, a foundation of the psychology of the self, which is replaced by a de-centered subject that sees in the Other the place where the self is formed. This unprecedented power over the psyche, which language embodies, returns in certain Freud1510

ian passages where ‘‘the word has preserved much of its ancient magical power. With words, a man can make another happy or push him into despair’’ (Vorlesungen zur Einfu¨hrung in die Psychoanalyse, 1915–1917). Words both save and poison, and the path from sickness to cure is so interwoven with them that the crossover between the literary and psychoanalytic spheres is not restricted to the application of analytic categories to the narrative text but includes the use of narrative tools within the ‘‘clinical case.’’ As Cesare Segre has remarked, in the Dora case the individual, like a character, is at the center of an analysis, whose complete interpretation reveals that the ‘‘codes and the structures of novel’’ are presented here ‘‘as already-tested and quasi-inevitable schemes’’ (Teatro e romanzo, 1984). And Freud himself was aware that his clinical histories read like stories. The mixture of scientific investigation and literary form allows fantasies—those that impose themselves coercively on the patient and those that are intentionally discovered in the writer’s imagination—to participate in an analogous nature, insofar as the mechanism of poetry might be analogous to that of the hysterical fantasies. Common to both is their combining of a real origin and another one that is imagined, and the story is presented as a hybrid in which it is impossible to uncouple the fantastical element from the real one. The tragedy of Oedipus is paradigmatic, therefore, not for the contrast between destiny and will that it classically represents, but rather for its letting resurface ‘‘primordial desires of our childhood,’’ which the power of repression resists and in which the ‘‘foolishness of Oedipus is the legitimate representation of the unawareness in which, for the adult, the entire affair is sunken’’ (Abriss der Psychoanalyse, 1938). If here the unconscious deploys all of its coercive power, it is also subjected, in time, to modifications, and in Die Traumdeutung Freud noted a certain distance between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, a distance he assumed to be the result of the ‘‘continual progress of repression in the affective life of man.’’ In Oedipus Rex, the fantasy is fulfilled, while in Hamlet the irresolution of the protagonist leads to the victory of inhibiting forces. As Mario Lavagetto showed in ‘‘La critica freudiana’’ (1983), within this polarity are arranged the characteristics of literature that tend to veil what psychoanalysis wants to unveil, since the art of the poet consists essentially in veiling. Narrative form becomes an expression of this concealment, a necessary dissimulation that opposes itself to the direct

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE manifestation of the unconscious. The fantasies that this expresses, Freud added, can ‘‘give rise in us to a certain repugnance’’ and evoke a sense of shame: It is a dimension that the adult experiences in a hidden way, to the point that he ‘‘prefers to confess his own guilt, rather than communicate his own fantasies’’ (Der Dichter und das Phantasieren, 1908). Alongside the possibility of the writer who conceals, there is a more radical one who sees ‘‘repression,’’ which the unconscious fantasy brings to light, ‘‘penetrating’’ into consciousness on condition of letting itself be negated (Die Verneinung, 1925). Negation, as Emile Benveniste remarked in the first volume of Proble`mes de linguistı´que ge´ne´rale (Problems of General Linguistics, 1966), refers to the paradox that to suppress something, it must be explicitly affirmed, with the consequence that a judgment of nonexistence enjoys the same formal status as a judgment of existence. The revoking of repression, however, does not entail its automatic acceptance, since only literature has the power, in its dissimulation, to overcome shared revulsion by becoming a compromise-formation, located between the individual and the collectivity, between the narcissistic pressures dictated by the pleasure principle and the inhibiting pressures of the reality principle. The relation between art and society brings up the question of the status of its texts, and, in the wake of structural linguistics, Yurij M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskii, in their The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History (1985), support an idea ‘‘of culture as a system of languages and of their concrete manifestations as texts,’’ later coming to postulate the existence of an isomorphic relationship between the particular text and the wider cultural system. Although one is applied to the parole of the text and the other to the langue of the cultural code, textual and cultural analysis refer to the same method of inquiry. In the most recent research, we see an important overcoming of a linguistic notion conceived in its simple elements, as a relation between sender-addressee that is placed at the foundation of every semiotic act through the reversal of Ferdinand de Saussure’s position: It is no longer a question of beginning from atomic elements, which are definable in their simplicity, but from a semiotic universe that, in its unity, is able to subsume them. Psychoanalytic reflection, in the formulation of Ignacio Matte Blanco, moves within an analogous dimension. Beginning with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico philosophicus (1922), the individual’s tie with the world passes through the simultaneous manifestation of two different

modalities, the one dividing and the other unifying. The unconscious, for Freud, became the realm of the illogic that does not allow recourse to the classical rules of thought. The path of structuralism, which, from Saussure through Jakobson and Lacan, proceeds within the rules of rhetoric, no longer seems passable and is replaced by a bivalent logic that puts antinomy at the very heart of the unconscious. On the one hand, this implies a continuous tendency toward generalization, with every element located within the whole that contains it through a procedure of continuous enlargement; on the other hand, it entails that every relation will become symmetrical. The difference between the whole and the part, considered in its infinite dimension, leads to a paradoxical identity, and temporal relationships themselves see their character of succession erased, while the classical unidirectionality of time’s arrow disappears. If the part is equal to the whole, everything becomes equal to everything else, and symmetry, from being a mechanism aimed at the creation of order and harmony, oddly turns into disorder and chaos. As Lotman’s semiotics suggests, not only the unconscious but also art and the literary text exist between a symmetrical, homologizing pressure and an asymmetrical pressure aiming at restoring the lost order. Literature, noted Francesco Orlando, oscillates therefore between ‘‘mixture’’ and ‘‘conflict,’’ in which the typical Freudian categories of ‘‘pressure’’ and ‘‘resistance’’ are simply the ultimate expression of these two different logics (Illuminismo e retorica freudiana, 1982). This duplicity of the literary writer emerges toward psychoanalysis itself by marking proximities and differences. La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno, 1923), a novel that Italo Svevo inscribed in certain respects within the Freudian perspective, is characterized by a double movement tending, on the one hand, to assimilate psychoanalysis’s content on the plane of ‘‘writing,’’ in order to deprive it of validity on the level of ‘‘cure.’’ The narrative’s axiom postulates that if life is always fatal, health is not possible, and sickness seems to be an ineradicable feature of humanity. ‘‘Free association,’’ in offering itself as the foundation of writing, as the means of recovering the depth of life, is paradoxically transformed during the cure into ‘‘restricted association.’’ The criticism that Wittgenstein leveled against Freud in the posthumous collection Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (1966) is similar to Svevo’s critique, in which the poor Zeno is forced to repeat, parodically, the preestablished Oedipal theme. This 1511

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE compulsory character of therapy becomes liberating in writing. There is no degree of truth within it, since the horizon of the novel seems to be entirely encompassed within the domain of undecidability. Compared to this complex interaction of literature and psychoanalysis, the work of philosopher Benedetto Croce, the dominant intellectual figure in the first half of the twentieth century, is characterized by a position of resistance. In the ‘‘Breviario di estetica’’ (The Essence of Aesthetic, 1920), the critic is conceived of as a philosophus additus artifici whose task is ‘‘distinguere la realta` dall’irrealta`’’ (to distinguish reality from unreality), avoiding undecidability and excluding the pathological from art. Psychology and psychoanalysis are thought of, at best, as handmaidens of philosophy, even if their ultimate perspective is consigned to ‘‘pseudoscience’’ (Michel David, La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana, 1966). At the end of the century, when Milan Kundera, in the role of critic, defined the status of literature, in particular of the novel, he imagined it in antithesis precisely to philosophy. Like Penelope, the novel ‘‘undoes each night’’ the tapestry that philosophers ‘‘have woven the day before’’ and, almost as if to demonstrate the ideas of Matte Blanco from within, Kundera saw the mathematical structure that presides over the novel assert itself as an unconscious imperative, almost an obsession (L’Art du roman, 1986). Ever since this irresistible pressure, psychoanalysis in Italy has had all the marks of an underground phenomenon that, beneath a hard layer that is opposed to it, sees resistance eroding inexorably. Umberto Saba’s poetics were significant for his desire to regress toward a painful primal beginning that had almost been erased. The amnesias of childhood, Freud’s screen memories, which are typical of the psychopathology of everyday life, became, in Il Canzoniere (The Songbook, 1921/1945), the amnesias that screened, according to a paradox of memory, the occurrences of early childhood, in which one finds ‘‘la chiave dei conflitti che lacerano la vita dell’adulto’’ (the key to the conflicts that torment the life of the adult) as Saba himself put it in his Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (1948). In Saba the theme of the double tended to rediscover the neuroses of the present in germinal form in the past. Carlo Emilio Gadda, in his ‘‘Psicoanalisi e letteratura’’ (Psychoanalysis and Literature, 1946), entered decisively into the work of Saba, isolating the fundamental conflict between an inadempiente (neglectful) mother and a trionfante (triumphant) wet-nurse. The essential love that, rather than ‘‘spegnersi nella separazione, si alimento` nel rim1512

pianto’’ (extinguishing itself in separation, fed on sorrow) is developed toward the nurse. To be sure, when Gadda was speaking of Saba he was thinking of himself, of his La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief, 1963), perhaps the apex of the encounter between Italian literature and psychoanalysis, which he began after the death of his mother. The protagonist, the writer’s alter-ego, harbors a painful resentment against the maternal figure—a resentment inseparable from an implacable instinct toward destruction. The will to knowledge does not emend the pain, since knowledge, realizing itself as an abstract pain that is suffered even when the destruction of the ‘‘ego’’ is consummated, does not offer escape from unhappiness. In La cognizione del dolore, as Guido Piovene showed, the neurosis of the ego and amor matris result in an ‘‘obscure pain of which history, the laws, and the universal disciplines of the great university chairs persist in ignoring the causes’’ (‘‘La cognizione del dolore di Gadda capolavoro tragico di valore europeo,’’ 1963). If Gadda poetically historicized the impermeability and the distance of ‘‘culture’’ with respect to the ‘‘pain of living’’ with which psychoanalysis deals, Piovene added, ‘‘one carries pain within oneself...graver every day, untreated,’’ thus emphasizing the inability of analysis to placate that insuppressible grief. With Gadda, the myth of Italian sanity, which is opposed to sickness, to Nordic tragedy, and which persists even in Italian Freudian exegesis as anthropological difference (for instance, in Enrico Morselli’s La psicanalisi, 1926), collapsed from within. The equation of Latinity and sanity that is built around the peculiarities of the region, revealed, from a Jungian perspective, the pathological implication of that myth by asserting the presence, in the Latin man, of the negative side of the Great Mother. This kind of Edenic land brought with it, as a result, the ‘‘eternal child,’’ a figure of the maternal complex which from Giovanni Pascoli to Cesare Pavese and up to the present has characterized a great deal of Italian literature. The nursing mother knows the shadow of separation, in which duplicity is not a severance but rather an ambivalence that is revived in the person himself. Thus, while in postFreudian criticism the ‘‘‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother can no longer be kept so widely apart,’’ as Melanie Klein wrote in ‘‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant’’ (1952), in the Jungian perspective this ambivalence acquires the generality of the archetype that at root governs the so-called ‘‘Latin sanity,’’ which is experienced as free of any malaise.

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE The distance between these perspectives can be seen in their different consequences. Freud, in the final phase of his thought, assigned psychoanalysis a civilizing function. The individual, in fact, must impose order on the fantasies that the unconscious evokes in him, and in this context the inclination toward the imaginative world becomes a clue to a neurosis that is understood as a deficiency of the normal mechanisms of control. The visionary qualities on which literature feeds must be ‘‘civilized,’’ even if literature, from Svevo to Gadda to Giorgio Manganelli, seems to move on the opposing slope. ‘‘It is precisely because it is a neurosis,’’ claimed Manganelli, ‘‘that literature is so essential to modern culture, precisely because it is its dream, its symptom, its sickness’’ (Il vescovo e il ciarlatano, 2001). From intimate reality, the alter ego became, in Manganelli, a parallel dimension that could be relished as a deception, as a phantasm with which the character conversed until he discovered the shadow of his self. It is not a question of normalizing writing within the ‘‘reality principle,’’ since writing says something only by moving within an obsessive, nocturnal space, whereas the daytime reality opposed to it is merely ‘‘bad literature.’’ Sickness is thus not something alien to be normalized, as C. G. Jung reminded us, but the expression of an archetype that connects one’s own experience to that of the world, no longer as a pain that isolates, but as a pain without bitterness that unites all men (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, 1969). The thread connecting individual, author, and work leads to several considerations. If the artist’s biography must be thoroughly assimilated, for Jung, on the contrary, the orientation toward personal factors involved a misunderstanding of the nature of the work of art, a production that transcends the individual (‘‘On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,’’ 1922). It is necessary to distinguish the person of the artist from the creator within him: The latter must be ‘‘impersonal,’’ since as an artist he is his work and not a ‘‘man.’’ The writer would thus write at the edge of ignorance, in a condition of intrinsic darkness that must be passed through with lucid tenacity. Since the early 1970s, the feminist movement has made a decisive contribution to psychoanalysis. Though acknowledging the masculine premises of several of Freud’s works, a number of women authors adopted his theories to address the ‘‘Pensiero della differenza’’ or the theory that advocates ‘‘thinking sexual difference.’’ At the same time, the so-called Pratica dell’inconscio (Unconscious

Practice) was being developed by Lea Melandri, whose recent Una visceralita` indicibile (2000) continues to apply psychoanalytic practice between women as a revolutionary means for treating sexuality, maternity, and lesbianism. Also the oral historian Luisa Passerini’s Autoritratto di gruppo (1988) and Storie di donne e femministe (1991) attest to the role of psychoanalytical thinking in terms of sexual difference. Thus, it seems necessary to explore the inner life of the individual in order to uncover what remains unsaid and to deepen the relationship between unconscious and conscience. The theories of Teresa De Lauretis, often elaborated through reference to literary and cinematic texts, have made a major contribution to the feminist rereading of Freudian writings In closing, when Italo Calvino, in his Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1988), investigated the nature of images, he returned to the two choices offered by psychoanalysis. Alongside the imagination as a phenomenon of interiority, taken in a Freudian way in its individual dimension, he placed the Jungian notion of assigning the origin of the imagination to archetypes. While Freud justified the work of art as a capacity to represent certain things that are otherwise repugnant by purifying them, Jung identified an ambivalent function for the imagination that sees terror and hope as the recto and verso of the same reality. Significantly, Calvino asserted that his writing oscillated between these two choices, between the story as a result of ‘‘un disegno condotto secondo un’intenzione razionale’’ (a design conducted according to a rational intention) and that which reflected an imagination that went beyond the individual in order to identify itself ‘‘con l’anima del mondo’’ (with the soul of the world). How far, then, is Italian thought from its American counterpart—from that imprudent and hasty de profundis that Harold Bloom decreed too boldly regarding psychoanalysis: ‘‘[it] is dying, perhaps already dead’’ (The Western Canon, 1994). PAOLO CIANFRONE Further Reading Benveniste, Emile, Proble`mes de linguistı´que ge´ne´rale, 2 vols., Paris: Gallimard, 1966–1974. Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon: The Book of the Ages, New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1994. Calvino, Italo, Lezioni americane: Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Milan: Garzanti, 1988. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Breviario di estetica,’’ in Nuovi saggi di estetica, Bari: Laterza, 1920.

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PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LITERATURE David, Michel, La psicoanalisi nella cultura italiana, Turin: Boringhieri, 1966. De Lauretis, Teresa, The Practice of Love, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Gadda, Carlo Emilio, ‘‘Psicoanalisi e letteratura,’’ in I viaggi e la morte, Milan: Garzanti, 1958. Freud, Sigmund, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, edited and translated by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Freud, Sigmund, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James Strachey et al., 24 vols., London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974. Jakobson, Roman, ‘‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’’ (1956), in On Language, edited by Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Jung, Carl Gustav, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, translated by R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX, 2nd ed., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Klein, Melanie, ‘‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant,’’ in Development in Psycho-analysis, edited by Joan Riviere, London: Hogarth Press, 1952. Kundera, Milan, L’Art du roman, Paris: Gallimard, 1986; as The Art of the Novel, translated by Linda Aster, New York: Grove Press, 1986. Lacan, Jacques, Ecrits, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966. Lavagetto, Mario, ‘‘La critica freudiana,’’ in Sette modi di fare critica, edited by O. Cecchi and Enrico Ghidetti, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1983. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, Anthropologie structurale, Paris: Plon, 1958; as Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf, 2 vols., New York: Basic Books, 1963–1976. Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, Les Structures e´le´mentaires de la parente´, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949; as

The Elementary Structures of Kinship, translated by James Harle Bell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham, Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Lotman, Yurij M., and Boris A. Uspenskii (editors), The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985. Manganelli, Giorgio, Il vescovo e il ciarlatano: Inconscio, casi clinici, psicologia del profondo. Scritti 1969–1987, edited by Emanuela Trevi, Rome: Quiritta, 2001. Matte Blanco, Ignacio, The Unconscious as Infinite Sets: An Essay in Bi-logic, London: Duckworth, 1975. Melandri, Lea, Una visceralita` indicibile: La pratica dell’inconscio nel movimento delle donne degli anni Settanta, Milan: Fondazione Badaracco and Franco Angeli, 2000. Morselli, Enrico, La psicanalisi, 2 vols., Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1926. Orlando, Francesco, Illuminismo e retorica freudiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Passerini, Luisa, Autoritratto di gruppo (1988); as Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996. Passerini, Luisa, Storie di donne e femministe, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Piovene, Guido, ‘‘La cognizione del dolore di Gadda capolavoro tragico di valore europeo,’’ in Oltre la sponda, edited by Romualdo Marrone, Naples: Ferraro, 1996. Saba, Umberto, Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere, Milan: Mondadori, 1948. Saussure, Ferdinand de, Cours de linguistique ge´ne´rale, Paris: Payot, 1945. Segre, Cesare, Teatro e romanzo: Due tipi di comunicazione letteraria, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus logico philosophicus, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company–London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922.

PUBLISHING See Printing and Publishing

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ANTONIA PULCI (ANTONIA TANINI)

ANTONIA PULCI (ANTONIA TANINI) (CA. 1452–1501) Antonia Tanini is known anachronistically as Antonia Pulci; history has given her the surname of her husband Bernardo Pulci (1438–1488) rather than the name with which she was known in her lifetime. Incorrect historically, this is perhaps poetic justice, since she surely became a writer and is remembered today as a consequence of joining the Pulcis, a family of important Florentine literati belonging to circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici. Antonia Pulci’s literary corpus is composed exclusively of religious literature; drama (sacre rappresentazioni), much if not all of which has survived; and poetry (laude), which have not been identified but which are probably among the anonymous religious poems of the early Florentine collections. Her known works include some of the most popular, late fifteenth-century religious plays, the earliest of which, the Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla (St. Domitilla Play, 1483), was published in an anthology of the early 1490s by either the press of Antonio Miscomini or Francesco Bonaccorsi. This was the first published anthology of such plays and appeared in two volumes known as the prima raccolta (first collection) and seconda raccolta (second collection). Antonia’s plays, the Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla, Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma (St. Guglielma Play), a Rappresentazione di San Francesco (St. Francis Play), and one by her husband Bernardo, the Rappresentazione di Barlaam e Josafat (Barlaam and Josaphat Play), appeared and are specifically attributed to them in the seconda raccolta. Antonia is known to have also written a play based on the story of Joseph, and it may be the anonymous Rappresentazione di Joseph figliuol di Jacob (Play of Joseph, Son of Jacob), included in the anthology between two of her plays, but it is published anonymously. Her friend the Augustinian friar Antonio Dolciati, remembering her fondly in the dedication of his discussion of the Rule of Saint Augustine in De tribus regulis S. Augustini (On the Rule of St. Augustine, 1528), attributed to her a Joseph play, one on the subject of the Prodigal Son, and another on Saul and David. The Rappresentazione del

figliuol prodigo (Prodigal Son Play), known today only in a mid-sixteenth-century edition, was attributed to her then and is certainly the play to which Dolciati referred. The edition of the Distruzione di Saul e pianto di Davit (Demise of Saul and Sorrow of David), undated but published in the 1490s, is the only known play on that subject from the period and has all the earmarks of her work. Antonia’s plays belong to the second generation of sacre rappresentazioni; Written and published in the last decade of the fifteenth century, these plays privilege the stories of virgin martyrs and are imbued with elements of romance literature. The Santa Domitilla, the story of the early Christian martyr Flavia Domitilla, follows the account in the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) by Jacopo da Varazze, with its traditional praise of virginity and indictment of marriage and motherhood. The Santa Guglielma, her best-known and most often anthologized play, is the story of the innocent wife falsely accused and persecuted, who, finally vindicated, forgives and saves her accuser and her husband. The San Francesco play has been studied primarily by scholars of Franciscanism, but it is also worthy of note for containing some, though oblique, autobiographical references. Her Figliuol prodigo, a predominately allegorical tale, owes much to the earlier play by Piero di Mariano Muzi, the Festa del vitel sagginato (Play of the Fatted Calf); its unusual opening, depicting a card game, probably inspired the similar prologue to Castellano Castellani’s play of the same title. The Distruzione di Saul e il pianto di Davit, only recently attributed to Pulci, like her other work, follows the biblical account closely for the story of Saul’s death and that of his sons and of David’s anger and grief, but it also introduces an entirely original episode involving Saul’s wife: The playwright staged her interrogation and martyrdom at the hands of Philistines, a particularly effective scene enlivened by the feisty spirit and colloquial language attributed to the female character. Work on Antonia Pulci has been impeded by the attribution to her of a false identity. The early 1515

ANTONIA PULCI (ANTONIA TANINI) historian Giuseppe Richa and the bibliographer Paul Colomb de Batines knew her to be Antonia Tanini, but Francesco Flamini, in an article on her husband Bernardo, called her Antonia Giannotti, and the error was perpetuated throughout the twentieth century (‘‘La vita e le liriche di Bernardo Pulci,’’ 1888). We have, however, the testimony of Fra Antonio Dolciati that the widow of Bernardo Pulci was Antonia Tanini and, with this information, the new attributions, which confer an interesting variety, until now unknown, to her repertoire and considerable complexity to her image as a writer (De tribus regulis S. Augustini, 1528).

Biography Antonia Pulci was born in Florence (or perhaps Scarperia) ca. 1452, the daughter of Francesco d’Antonio di Giannotto Tanini, a Florentine merchant, and Jacopa di Torello di Lorenzo Torelli, a Roman woman. She had five sisters, a brother, and a half-brother and half-sister, her father’s natural children. She was married, in 1470 or 1471, to Bernardo di Jacopo Pulci (brother of the poets Luca and Luigi Pulci), a well-known literary figure who became an important functionary of the Florentine University. The marriage was childless. After Bernardo Pulci died in 1488, she became an Augustinian ammantellata (a religious woman living in secular society) and devoted herself to the study of sacred scripture, prayer, and penance. In 1500 or 1501, having retrieved her dowry from the Pulcis, she bought a house outside of the gate of San Gallo where she installed herself with the small group of Augustinian tertiaries with whom she intended to found a convent; in her will, written shortly before her death, she established the Convent of Santa Maria della Misericordia and arranged to be buried in the chapel of Santa Monica in the church of San Gallo. Neither her convent nor the church of San Gallo long survived. San Gallo was destroyed in the early sixteenth century and by midcentury the women of her convent had moved into the city and merged with the tertiaries of San Clemente. Antonia Pulci died in Florence on 26 September 1501. ELISSA B. WEAVER Selected Works Religious Plays La rapresentatione di Santa Domitilla, La rapresentatione di Santa Guglielma, La rappresentatione di Sancto

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Francesco, in the seconda raccolta n. p. n. d., but Florence: ca. 1490–1495. La rapresentatione della distructione di Saul e il pianto di Davit, Florence: 1490–1500. La rapresentatione del figliuol prodigo, 1572. Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays, annotated and translated by James Wyatt Cook, edited by James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook, Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Selected Plays Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI, edited by Alessandro D’Ancona, 3 vols., 1872. L’antico dramma sacro italiano, edited by Paolo Toschi, 2 vols., 1926–1927. Le sacre rappresentazioni italiane: Raccolta di testi dal secolo XIII al secono XVI, edited by Mario Bonfantini, 1942. Sacre rappresentazioni del Quattrocento, edited by Luigi Banfi, 1963; reprinted, 1968. Beitra¨ge zur a¨lteren Italianischen Volksdictung untersuchungen und texte, no. 17, part 4, Sacre rappresentazioni, edited by Erhard Lommatzsch, 1963. Sacre rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento, edited by Giovanni Ponte, 1974.

Further Reading Bryce, Judith, ‘‘‘Or altra via mi convien cercare’: Marriage, Salvation, and Sanctity in Antonia Tanini Pulci’s Rappresentazione di Santa Guglielma,’’ in Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present: Essays in Honour of Richard Andrews, edited by Brian Richardson, Simon Gilson, and Catherine Keen, Occasional Papers, number 6, Leeds: The Society for Italian Studies, 2004. Cardini, Franco, ‘‘La figura di Francesco D’Assisi nella ‘Rappresentatione di Sancto Francesco’ di Antonia Pulci,’’ in Il francescanesimo e il teatro medievale, Castelfiorentino: Societa` Storica della Valdelsa, 1984. Colomb de Batines, Paul, Bibliografia delle antiche rappresentazioni sacre e profane stampate nei secoli XV e XVI, Florence: La Societa` Tipografica, 1852; reprinted, Milan, 1958, and Rome, 1967. Dolciati, Fra Antonio, De tribus regulis S. Augustini (1528), ms Gaddi 132 in the Biblioteca Laurenziana, Florence. Ferrigni, Mario, ‘‘San Francesco e il teatro,’’ Nuova Antologia, 63 (1928), 207–220. Flamini, Francesco, ‘‘La vita e le liriche di Bernardo Pulci. Studio,’’ Extract from Il Propugnatore, New Series, Vol. 1, Part 1, Fasc. 2–3., Bologna: Fava e Garagnani. 1888. Konigson, Elie, L’espace the´aˆtrale medievale, Paris: Ed. du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975. Mancini, Andrea, ‘‘Francesco nella lauda e nella sacra rappresentazione,’’ in Il Francescanesimo e il teatro medievale, Proceedings of the Convegno Nazionale di Studi, San Miniato, 1982, Castelfiorentino: Societa` Storica della Valdelsa, 1984. Martines, Lauro, Strong Words: Writing and Social Strain in the Italian Renaissance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Palandri, Eletto, O.F.M., ‘‘Rappresentazioni sanfrancescane,’’ Studi francescani, 12:23 (1926), 413–428.

LUIGI PULCI Richa, Giuseppe, Notizie istoriche delle chiese fiorentine, vol. 5, Florence: Stamperia di Pietro Gaetano Viviani, 1754– 1762; reprinted, Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1989. Ulysse, Georges, ‘‘Un couple d’e´crivains: Les sacre rappresentazioni de Bernardo et Antonia Pulci,’’ in Les femmes e´crivains en Italie au Moyen Age et a` la Renaissance, Actes du Colloque International Aix-enProvence, 12, 13, 14 novembrd 1992, Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite´ de Provence, 1994. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Antonia Pulci e la sacra rappresentazione al femminile,’’ in La maschera e il volto: Il teatro in

Italia, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Marsilio, 2002. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Antonia Tanini (1452–1501), Playwright, and Wife of Bernardo Pulci (1438–88),’’ in Essays in Honor of Marga Cottino-Jones, edited by Laura Sanguineti White, Andrea Baldi, and Kristin Phillips, Florence: Edizioni Cadmo, 2003. Weaver, Elissa, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

LUIGI PULCI (1432–1484) Luigi Pulci, Florentine writer and author of the Morgante (1481)—the first masterpiece of Italian chivalric literature—led a difficult life, filled with economic constrictions. Born into one of the most ancient and noble, albeit impoverished, Florentine families, Pulci was for his entire life under the service of several signori as a secretary, factotum, and diplomatic envoy and was never able to establish himself independently, nor was he able to acquire a social dimension consonant with his artistic talent and his exuberant and creative personality. Nevertheless, regardless of the economic precariousness in which he found himself, Pulci was a prolific writer and, in addition to his celebrated long narrative poem, composed other masterpieces, including his sonnets and his letters that, like most of his works, have not received the critical attention they deserve. In fact, very few of these writings are even available in modern critical editions. The entire production of Pulci belongs to the cultural setting of Florence of the second half of the fifteenth century and is strictly tied to the patronage of the Medici and other wealthy men of culture. Pulci’s writings that have survived to our day all belong to the period beginning in the early 1460s, when Luigi entered into contact with the Medici, a moment that represented a turning point in his life. Beginning in 1461, and thanks probably to Castellani, Pulci became a frequent guest at Cosimo’s noted palazzo of Via Larga. During that year, Pulci most likely began the Morgante, a chivalric poem in celebration of Charlemagne and his paladins, whose composition was commissioned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni, wife of Piero de’ Medici

and mother of Lorenzo il Magnifico. This commissioning and Pulci’s inclusion among the literati of the Medici household are closely linked with the precise cultural context and, above all, the political situation of the moment. In the first half of the 1400s, Florence—a republican city in which citizens were allowed to participate on an equal basis in the political system—was immersed in a profound political crisis caused by two parties, the Oligarchic and the Medicean. In 1434, Cosimo returned from a yearlong exile and set into motion his family’s progressive hegemony over the city. The novelty of his government was that it was a ‘‘civil principality.’’ Indeed, Cosimo, thanks to the support of the citizens, acquired and directly exercised widespread authority but did not reduce the power and autonomy of the republican institutions that, nonetheless, remained in place. The Medici, thus, were civil princes in a republic and wielded their political power—within the framework of a republican constitution—by a variety of means of controls. But the transfer of power from Cosimo to his son Piero and, later, from Piero to Lorenzo, transgressed the limits of this framework and required, above all, the weakening of the oligarchic faction. This weakening was addressed even on a literary level, through the Medicis’ appropriation of the tradition that had, until that moment, characterized the oligarchic culture. Before Cosimo’s exile, the two sides represented vastly different cultures: The symbols of the oligarchy included the volgare language (vernacular), the legacy of the ‘‘three crowns’’ (Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio) and the great thirteenth-century commune, while 1517

LUIGI PULCI the Medici party embraced Latin, Greek, philosophy, and classical authors. After 1434, however, the Medici also tried, with all means available to them, to associate themselves with the literary tradition in volgare in order to reduce the influence of the oligarchic party. Thus, members of the Medici family sponsored two specific kinds of literary production. On the one hand, Cosimo and Piero patronized philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino and the study of Latin and Greek literature. On the other, Lucrezia Tornabuoni and, later, her son Lorenzo endorsed the literary production in volgare of poets such as Pulci and, at the same time, wrote works of their own in the vernacular. Since Pulci was an important representative of oligarchic ‘‘expressionism’’ (an artistic phenomenon characterized by a strong dialectal and comical-realistic vein, typical of authors such as Il Burchiello and Francesco d’Altobianco degli Alberti), it is clear that his admission into the Medici Palace was part of a larger cultural and political project. Thus, from 1461 until the beginning of the 1470s, Pulci was the prominent literary figure at the Medicean court; and, while he was writing the Morgante, he composed numerous other works. Among these are sonnets of dialectal and religious parody (in the manner of Il Burchiello); two frottole (convincingly dated by Paolo Orvieto in his 1986 edition of the Opere minori to the years 1466–1469); a few ballads and strambotti; a parodic poem entitled La Beca di Dicomano (The Beca from Dicomano, ca. 1500); written before 1470, a famous encomiastic canzone, ‘‘Da poi che ’l Lauro’’ (Since the Laurel, 1466); and a poem in ottave, La giostra di Lorenzo de Medici (The Joust of Lorenzo de Medici, 1482), written in celebration of Lorenzo’s February 7, 1469, victory in a joust. Particularly noteworthy is the unframed (spicciolata) novella, known as the Besso Senese (The Simpleton from Siena, 1547), composed around March or April 1471 and dedicated to Ippolita Maria Sforza, wife of Alfonso d’Aragona, the Duke of Calabria. Pulci composed it during his stay in Naples, with the intention of discrediting the citizens of Siena at the Aragonese court. The novella tells the story of a slow-witted man from Siena who mistakes a woodpecker for a parrot, and who, in 1462, donates it to Pope Pius II (Enea Silvio Piccolomini). During this period, Pulci was accustomed to spending long periods of time outside of Florence in the interest of personal business (as, for example, in Foligno, where he dealt as a wholesale merchant) and as Lorenzo’s emissary. Until the early 1470s, Luigi remained a close friend of the young Lorenzo. This 1518

was a friendship that Pulci, more than Lorenzo, continued to feel intensely for the rest of his life, even when his polemical attitude and the change in Medicean politics of culture resulted in the end of his cultural leadership. In regard to Pulci’s polemical character, we know of two ruinous disagreements in the years 1473–1476 between him and two men of the Medicean court, Matteo Franco (1447–1494) and Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499). The first, a priest and Medici courtier, exchanged a series of violent sonnets with Pulci, which perhaps rendered his relations with Lorenzo much less serene. In addition to this dispute, in those very same years, Pulci steadfastedly disagreed with Ficino who, even more than Franco, was dear to the Medici family. As one of the most influential philosophical personalities in Florence, Ficino was, in that period of time, in the process of composing his Theologia platonica (Platonic Theology, 1469–1474). Against him, and against Ficinian Platonism, Pulci engaged in a fierce cultural battle with attacks through his sonnets, to which Ficino responded with four aggressive epistles, in defense of himself and of religion. In fact, the polemic also included some sonnets of religious parody such as ‘‘Costoro che fan sı` gran disputazione’’ (They who dispute so much), ‘‘In principio era buio e buio fia’’ (In the beginning was darkness, and let there be darkness), and ‘‘Poich’io partii da voi, Bartolomeo’’ (Since I left you, Bartolomeo), that resulted in Pulci’s reputation as a heretic. This notoriety had lasting effects on the interpretation of the poet’s religiosity and of his works. Nevertheless, the critical debate has not properly evaluated several documents that should be reexamined. For example, in favor of a nonheretical Pulci, one must consider that the only truly incriminating sonnet, ‘‘Costor che fan sı` gran disputazione,’’ was in fact not written by Pulci, but by his friend Benedetto Dei (1418–1492), as Orvieto has shown in his essay ‘‘Uno ‘scandalo’ del ’400: Luigi Pulci e i sonetti di parodia religiosa’’ (1983). As to the second reason for the progressive weakening of his relationship with Lorenzo, one must remember that Pulci’s literary production became obsolete when Il Magnifico decided to imprint the Florentine culture of the second half of the 1470s with a Neoplatonic and Ficinian twist. In addition, Lorenzo, together with Angelo Poliziano (1454–1494), endorsed a true linguistic and stylistic reform of the vernacular poetry with the purpose of promoting an image of Florentine culture that could cross over the strict municipal limits and become exportable and, thus, national. This they

LUIGI PULCI did by adopting the language of the duecentisti and trecentisti (the Sicilians, the stilnovisti, Dante and Petrarch) and by discouraging the literary use of fifteenth-century Florentine jargon. For these reasons, thus, Lorenzo viewed Pulci’s cultural proposal as too limited because it relied heavily on the use of jargon and comical-realistic language. The year 1474 is commonly considered by scholars to mark the beginning of the crisis: Lorenzo distanced himself from Pulci, forcing the poet to abandon the city and to find work under Roberto Sanseverino, a condottiere allied with Lorenzo. However, there are reasons to believe that events occurred somewhat differently. While the epistolary exchange clearly documents that the relations between Pulci and Lorenzo were not always serene, their ties in 1474 were far from being soured. This is proved in a letter written by Matteo Franco in January 1476, in which Pulci is still described as a beloved member of the Medici household. In addition, based on the extant documents discussed by Marcello Simonetta in Rinascimento segreto (2004), it appears that Pulci was tied to Sanseverino beginning in December 1472, and, thus, before his problems with Ficino and Franco came to the forefront. It is, instead, possible that the decision to leave Florence was not the consequence of cultural ostracism but of another less evident factor. As Lorenz Bo¨ninger has determined, Pulci worked at the same time for Lorenzo and Roberto Sanseverino, who both frequently sent him on secret diplomatic missions (‘‘Notes on the Last Years of Luigi Pulci,’’ 1987). Pulci spent the rest of his life traveling frequently to northern Italy and corresponding with Lorenzo, for whom he still acted as a service envoy, even though their friendship of times past had lost its intensity and he was now working for Sanseverino. What remains of this complex relationship between Lorenzo and Luigi is the collection of the extraordinary epistles that Pulci sent to Il Magnifico. During the last ten years of his life, and despite monetary hardship, Luigi continued to write and, in fact, began work on the Ciriffo Calvaneo (1490), the chivalric poem in ottave that was left unfinished by his brother Luca (who was unable to complete the poem). It was only concluded later by Bernardo Giambullari (1495–1555), on the request of Lorenzo de’ Medici. During the same years, Pulci finished his Morgante, and composed, between February 1483 and August 1484, his Confessione (ca. Confession, 1488–1490), a poem in terzine dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This last text was considered by critics as his final attempt to pardon himself for a past of religious

unorthodoxy, marked by the parodic religious sonnets that he and Benedetto Dei had composed.

Biography Luigi Pulci was born in Florence on August 15, 1432, to Jacopo di Francesco and Brigida de’ Bardi. There is little to no information about his youth or of his studies. The three brothers Luca, Luigi, and Bernardo—all devoted to poetry with noteworthy results—began a series of unprofitable business enterprises. The inability to repay their debts led to their exclusion from Florentine public offices, causing them great difficulties in securing stable appointments. Luigi Pulci met Francesco Castellani, who took the poet under his protection, 1459–1460. He entered into the Medici household ca. 1461. When, in December 1469, Lorenzo took over from his father, Pulci began a period of intense activity, during which Lorenzo sent him as an emissary to Naples, Camerino, Foligno, and Roma. He married Lucrezia degli Albizi, ca. 1473, and undertook frequent travels in northern Italy, especially to Milan, Venice, and Bologna, 1473–1484. He died of unknown causes in Padua, on his way to Venice with Roberto Sanseverino, between September and early October 1484. Due to his notoriety as an unbeliever, Pulci was buried close to the cemetery of St. Thomas, on unconsecrated ground. ALESSANDRO POLCRI See also: Epic; Humanism Selected Works Collections Il ‘‘Libro dei sonetti’’ (with Matteo Franco), edited by Giulio Dolci, Milan: Societa` Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1933. Morgante e Lettere, edited by Domenico De Robertis, 1960; revised edition, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Opere minori, edited by Paolo Orvieto, Milan: Mursia, 1986. Morgante e opere minori, edited by Aulo Greco, 2 vols., Turin: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1997. Luigi Pulci e quattordici cantari, edited by Ermanno Cavazzoni, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘La Beca di Dicomano,’’ ca. 1500; edited by Vito R. Giustiniani, 1976. ‘‘Morgante,’’ 1481. ‘‘La giostra di Lorenzo de Medici,’’ 1482. ‘‘Confessione,’’ ca. 1488–1490. ‘‘Ciriffo Calvaneo,’’ by Luca and Luigi Pulci, 1490; edited ´ tienne Audin de Rians, 1834. by E ‘‘Strambotti,’’ edited by Albino Zenatti, 1887.

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LUIGI PULCI ‘‘Besso Senese,’’ 1547. ‘‘Strambotti e rispetti nobilissimi d’amore,’’ edited by Albino Zenatti, 1894.

Letters Lettere di Luigi Pulci a Lorenzo il Magnifico e ad altri, edited by Salvatore Bongi, 1886.

Further Reading Bo¨ninger, Lorenz, ‘‘Notes on the Last Years of Luigi Pulci (1477–1484),’’ Rinascimento, 27 (1987), 259–271. Carrai, Stefano, Le muse dei Pulci. Studi su Luca e Luigi Pulci, Naples: Guida, 1985. Cervigni, Dino (editor), Pulci e Boiardo, special issue of Annali d’Italianistica, 1 (1983). Davie, Mark, Half-serious Rhymes. The Narrative Poetry of Luigi Pulci, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1998. Jordan, Constance, Pulci’s Morgante. Poetry and History in Fifteenth-Century Florence, Washington, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1986. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘Firenze,’’ in Letteratura Italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Storia e geografia vol. 2, L’eta` moderna, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. Orvieto, Paolo, Pulci medievale. Studio sulla poesia volgare fiorentina del Quattrocento, Rome: Salerno, 1978. Orvieto, Paolo, ‘‘Uno ‘scandalo’ del ’400: Luigi Pulci e i sonetti di parodia religiosa,’’ Annali d’Italianistica, 1 (1983), 19–23. Pastore Stocchi, Manlio, ‘‘Ritratto di Luigi Pulci,’’ Atti dell’Accademia Patavina, 97 (1984–1985), 23–42. Simonetta, Marcello, Rinascimento segreto. Il mondo del Segretario da Petrarca a Machiavelli, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2004. Villoresi, Marco, La letteratura cavalleresca dai cicli medievali all’Ariosto, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Villoresi, Marco, La fabbrica dei cavalieri. Cantari, poemi, romanzi in prosa fra Medioevo e Rinascimento, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2005. Villoresi, Marco (editor), Paladini di carta. Il modello cavalleresco fiorentino, Rome: Bulzoni, 2006. Volpi, Guglielmo, ‘‘Luigi Pulci. Studio biografico,’’ Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 22 (1893), 1–55.

IL MORGANTE, 1481 Epic-chivalric poem by Luigi Pulci

The Morgante is a poem of 28 cantari written in ottave on the subject of Charlemagne and his paladins, commissioned by Lucrezia Tornabuoni at the beginning of the 1460s (or possibly even erarlier). 1520

Luigi Pulci went to work immediately and, by the autumn of 1462, he had already arrived at cantare 14. Not much information is known on the timeline of its composition, but it appears that a first manuscript of the poem must have circulated in the first half of the 1470s and that the editio principes of the first 23 cantari—which was unfortunately lost— was printed before November 1478. It is not known exactly when Pulci composed the final five cantari (24–28). What can be said with certainty is that, before the printed edition of 1483, there is no evidence of their existence. The composition of the Morgante continued, thus, for another 20 years amid interruptions and resumptions. Nevertheless, the success of the work was enormous and, indeed, as declared in the printed editions, it was readers themselves who gave it its celebrated title. The poem has a general structure that, while rich in numerous episodes and situations, is clear and linear. As Mario Martelli has convincingly noted in his Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento (1996), the entire plot is organized as follows: Two diasporas of paladins who leave Charlemagne’s court conclude with two general returns (cantari 1–10 and 11–24). Each of these returns to the city is marked by two great battles between opposing forces (one between Morgante, the Christian giant, and Vegurto, the Muslim giant; and the other between the Christian army of Charlemagne and the Muslim army of Antea). The last four cantari (25– 28) narrate the defeat at Roncesvalles, the death of the paladin Orlando, the story of Charlesmagne’s taking of Saragozza and, finally, the story of the Christian king’s life. Within this macrostructure, many episodes are inserted, involving in particular Orlando, his cousin Rinaldo, and Morgante, the giant who converts to Christianity and becomes Orlando’s companion in his adventures. No less important is Gano di Maganza, who never tires of weaving treacheries and who is necessary for the progression of the plot toward the final tragedy of Roncesvalles, caused by his act of extreme betrayal. The central theme of the Morgante, therefore, is the heroic deeds of the valorous and righteous Christian paladins against evil, represented by the Muslim warriors. When Lucrezia Tornabuoni assigned Pulci the writing of the poem, this theme resonated strongly among the people. In fact, during those very years, Pope Pius II was energetically attempting to organize a crusade, considered necessary after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an event that instilled the fear of a Turkish invasion. Furthermore, it was not a coincidence that many chilvalric poems (inspired by the heroic accomplishments of Charlesmagne’s paladins)

LUIGI PULCI were launched on the book market precisely around the middle of the century. But the commissioning of the Morgante is also an aspect of the Francophile political atmosphere upheld by Cosimo de’ Medici at the beginning of the 1460s, when Donato Acciaiuoli, in 1461, dedicated a Vita Caroli Magni to Louis XI, the newly crowned King of France, and Ugolino Verino, in the years 1465–1466, started composing his famous Latin poem, Carliade. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism has interpreted the Morgante in different ways, judging it at times as a popular or burlesque poem, or as a parody of religion, or even as a poem of the crisis of the chivalric world and its values. Although critics have disagreed on the categorization of his work, they have agreed that Pulci’s poetic language and his inventiveness are the true greatness of his art, limiting it, thus, to a stylistic and expressive level. As a consequence of this continued emphasis on style to the exclusion of meaning, the potential allegorical or moral content of the Morgante has been widely dismissed. However, new lines of interpretation (Mario Martelli, Rossella Bessi, Stefano Carrai, Alessandro Polcri) have identified an allegorical message in Pulci’s poem, which seems to be the true unifying factor of the various and innumerable adventures of the paladins. Within the Morgante, Pulci defended his traditional culture as being opposed to the new orientations of Florentine NeoPlatonic Humanism, while also showing that his cultural proposal was no less serious than Marsilio Ficino’s. The entire Morgante could be seen as a reflection on the evangelical theme of purification by way of trials. Its paladins live a Dantesque experience of passage from a sinful condition to final purification, as in the example of Orlando, whose journey culminates in Roncesvalles, with the ascension of his soul to Heaven, and with a temporary resurrection, which is necessary for restoring the sword, Durlindana, to Charlemagne. Finally, it is necessary to note a thorny problem regarding the sources of the Morgante. It is commonly believed that Pulci derived the material for the first 23 cantari from a poem that Pio Rajna discovered in 1869 and that he entitled this work Orlando. The work is known also by the title Orlando laurenziano, since it is contained in a manuscript (Manuscript Laurenziano 78) of the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence. While recognizing Pulci’s enormous stylistic superiority, Rajna downgraded Pulci from renovator of the chivalric epic tradition to a talented rewriter of a work composed by another (‘‘La materia del Morgante in un ignoto poema cavalleresco del secolo XV,’’ 1869). This

position has recently been contested by Stefano Carrai (‘‘‘Morgante’ di Luigi Pulci,’’ 1990), Mario Martelli (‘‘Tre studi sul ‘Morgante,’’’ 1993), and Paolo Orvieto (‘‘Luigi Pulci,’’ 1996) with new and convincing arguments that not only show that the Morgante is not a rewriting of the Orlando laurenziano but also recognize Pulci’s creative force, an attribute that has been denied him for too long. ALESSANDRO POLCRI Editions First editions: Morgante, Florence: Stamperia di San Iacopo di Ripoli, 1481 (edition in 23 Cantari); Venice: Luca Veneziano, 1482 (edition in 23 Cantari); Florence: Francesco di Dino, 1483 (first edition in 28 Cantari). Critical editions: Morgante, edited by Franca Ageno, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1955; Il Morgante, edited by Raffaello Ramat, Milan: Rizzoli, 1961; in Morgante e Lettere edited by Domenico De Robertis, 1984; Morgante, edited by Davide Puccini, 2 vols, Milan: Garzanti, 1989. Translation: as Morgante: The Epic Adventures of Orlando and His Giant Friend Morgante, translated by Joseph Tusiani, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Further Reading Ankli, Ruedi, Morgante iperbolico. L’iperbole nel ‘Morgante’ di Luigi Pulci, Florence: Olschki, 1993. Bausi, Francesco, ‘‘L’Epica tra latino e volgare,’’ in La Toscana al tempo di Lorenzo il Magnifico. Politica, economia, cultura, arte, Lucca: Pacini, 1996. Bessi, Rossella, ‘‘Santi, leoni e draghi nel Morgante di Luigi Pulci,’’ Interpres, 12 (1992), 57–96. Carrai, Stefano, ‘‘’Morgante’ di Luigi Pulci,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Le Opere I. Dalle Origini al Cinquecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Davie, Mark, ‘‘Pulci e Ficino: verita` religiosa per sola fede,’’ in Il sacro nel Rinascimento, edited by Luisa Secchi Tarugi, Florence: Franco Cesati Editore, 2002. De Robertis, Domenico, Storia del Morgante, Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘Tre studi sul ‘Morgante,’’’ Interpres, 13 (1993), 56–109. Martelli, Mario, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento. Il filtro degli anni Sessanta, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Orvieto, Paolo, ‘‘Luigi Pulci,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 3, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1996. Polcri, Alessandro, ‘‘Per un’interpretazione allegoricomorale dei primi due cantari del ‘Morgante’ di Luigi Pulci,’’ Interpres, 15 (1995–1996), 94–200. Polcri, Alessandro, ‘‘Rinaldo versus Orlando nel Morgante (cantari ii-ix),’’ Interpres, 18 (1999), 198–215. Polcri, Alessandro, ‘‘La salita del monte Olimpo e ‘le lettere gran tempo scritte prima’: il caso del ‘Morgante’ di Luigi Pulci,’’ Schede Umanistiche, n.s. 1 (1999), 25–59.

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LUIGI PULCI Rajna, Pio, ‘‘La materia del Morgante in un ignoto poema cavalleresco del secolo XV,’’ Il Propugnatore, 2 (1869), 7–35; 220–252; 353–384. Ruggieri, Ruggiero, L’umanesimo cavalleresco italiano da Dante all’Ariosto, Naples: Fratelli Conte Editori, 1977.

Verde, F. Armando (editor), Lo Studio fiorentino 1473– 1503. Ricerche e documenti, 5 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1985. Zingarelli, Nicola, ‘‘La composizione del ‘Morgante’ di Luigi Pulci,’’ in Scritti di varia letteratura, Milan: Hoepli, 1935.

PAOLO PUPPA (1945–) Paolo Puppa works closely with actors and others associated with the theater as he searches for his own identity by means of an anarchic writing style expressing oneiric-surreal atmospheres and a quotidian reality captured in its most disquieting aspects. Puppa’s dramaturgy is fundamentally one of ‘‘obsession,’’ which often times exposes the manias of troubled human beings. All of his characters are wealthy and well-educated individuals, but petty and in unremittent conflict with themselves and with the people who surround them. Ultimately, Puppa’s plays sketch the unitary portrait of a bourgeois class devoid of feelings and of values, bewildered by the modern world and absorbed in the futile search for a new identity. These characters are wishful thinkers who narcisistically find their reason for existence in the power of words. They are antiheroes who reveal themselves without masks, the poisoned fruit of a reality in which the ‘‘rampant’’ bourgeoisie of the Veneto region prospers (a metaphor for a universal human condition). Their environment remains clouded in uncertainty, often identified in places in which illness and ethical disorder flourish: Mental institutions, hospitals, and hospices become the gray interior/inner spaces of bourgeois life. Puppa began his literary career with Svevo a Venezia (Svevo in Venice, 2003), a fragmentary reconstruction of writer Italo Svevo’s sojourn in the Venetian city, first performed in 1991 by Alberto Lionello. However, his theatrical production as performer-monologuist began later in 1998 with Minotauro (Minotaur), the first of his ancient characters transported into a modern and minimalist context. Next came Le parole al buio (Words in the Dark, 1992), a monologized one-act play in which an aspiring actress desperately attempts to capture the attention of a director, Giorgio, who, 1522

after leading her on, abandons her at the edge of the stage. The importance of this early work (which discloses Puppa’s predilection for nocturnal atmospheres) lies in the words pronounced in the dark, a metaphor for the empty space in which the story unfolds. The same is true for Una famiglia per Giacomo (A Family for Giacomo, 1998), a play in two parts and seven scenes, where the main characters (Giacomo, Massimo, and Alina) are entrapped in a domestic situation rich with lacerating conflicts and set against a torrid erotic backdrop (the suggestive readings of Jung and Freud). As a leitmotif, eros obsessively resurfaces in the lines recited by the protagonists, which at times turn into real monologues, and at others into an economical and abrupt style. Puppa’s dramaturgy reveals a preference for intense passions, imprinted in mythical archetypes and in the awareness that nothing can be created anew: thus, everything is born out of an incessant process of deja vu. This thematic homogeneity also defines Venire, a Venezia (Come, to Venice, 2002). An off-stage interviewer records a series of ‘‘confessione,’’ 12 monologues tied together by the lagoon setting as well as by the pathological obsessions exhibited by each character (the anxiety of upward social mobility, work and university life, an unsatisfied eros, difficult familial relationships). These themes connote Puppa’s corpus of theatrical production, thereby constituting a sort of ‘‘plot of obsession’’ in which his protagonists are confined by their own neuroses. Above all it is the bourgeois institution par excellence, the family, that is probed in its irreversible crisis: All emotional bonds are dissolved and substituted by economic concerns and by an egocentric and conflictual volition. The academic world and its intellectuals do not escape this progressive decay of contemporary society.

PAOLO PUPPA Puppa’s nocturnal theater, whether realistic or visionary, defies illusory dream and hypocrisy; it is a social theater in which ‘‘marionettes’’ devoid of any passion mechanically behave as if they were autonomous individuals, who can suffer but have neither strength nor will to implement changes. For this reason even the mythical characters act under the sign of a mortal exhaustion, as they are transported into the realm of contemporary daily life. For example, in La collina di Euridice (Euridyce’s Hill, 1998), Piero, an architect, and his wife Carla lose their daughter Valeria (new Euridyce) in a car accident and vainly attempt to recall her in a spiritual se´ance; in Famiglie di notte (Families by Night, 2000), Puppa’s ‘‘neoclassicism’’ acquires a specificity not only for the nocturnal setting in which his protagonists exist but also because they embody the sickly morbidity of a bourgeois class that has lost all restraint. Puppa also experiments with oneiric and surreal atmospheres, almost as if he aims at separating himself from an overly debased reality, which both horrifies and fascinates him at the same time.

Biography Paolo Puppa was born in Venice, 12 January 1945, to a middle-class family (his father is a physician and his mother descends from a family of French origin). He received a degree in humanities and philosophy from the University of Venice with a dissertation on the theatrical poetics of Jacques Copeau, 1968. Puppa married Silvia Cantimori Vaccari, 1969; they have two children (Giacomo and Letizia). As a playwright and consultant, he has collaborated with several actors and directors, beginning with Pirandello’s Cece` and Lumie di Sicilia for Angelo Savelli, 1989; Shakespeare’s King Lear for Giorgio Albertazzi at the Festival of Taormina, 1992; L’inferno coniugale (based on texts by Wedekind, Kaiser, Schnitzler, Sternheim, and Strindberg) for Aroldo Tieri and Giuliana Loiodice, and Manniana (based on Mann’s short stories) for Franca Nuti and Giancarlo Dettori, in Madonna di Campiglio, 1993; La luna (based on texts by Bontempelli) for Valeria Moriconi and later for Lucilla Morlacchi, and Le rigenerazioni (based on texts by Svevo) for Giorgio Albertazzi, at the Festival of Nora, 1996. Puppa staged Grotesque at the Steiner Theatre in London, 1999; La scena del filo`, a laboratory on narrative with performers such as Moni Ovadia, Marco Paolini, and Enzo Moscato, December 2003. He is the recipient of several awards, among them the Savarese Prize

for Saturno in laguna, 1988; the Pirandello Prize for La collina di Euridice, 1996; the Monte Vibio Castello Prize for Il Minotauro, 1998; and the Bignami Riccione Prize for Zio mio!, 1999. Puppa lives in Venice and is director of the Dipartimento delle Arti e dello Spettacolo at Ca’ Foscari. ALFREDO SGROI Selected Works Plays Le parole al buio, 1992. Dannati Angeli–Dialoghi sotto vento, 1997. Il muro incinto, 1997. Una famiglia per Giacomo, 1998. La collina di Euridice:Alida volontaria, 1998; as Words in the Dark: Euridyce’s Hill, translated by Donato Santeramo, 1998. Episcopus, 1999. Il Minotauro, 1999; as Il Minotauro, translated by Maggie Rose, 1999. Penelope, 1999. Agave, 1999. Zio mio!, 1999. Famiglie di notte, 2000. Prove di drammaturgia, 2000. Ponte all’Angelo, 2001. Eteocle, 2001. Abramo e Filottete, 2001; as Abraham, translated by Joe Farrell, 2001. Roesso mondo, 2002. Venire, a Venezia, 2002. Il Centauro, 2003. Angeli ed acque, 2003. Svevo a Venezia, 2003. Appassionate appassite pazienti: Corteo muliebre per Tex, 2003. Sı`, famose, 2004. Demone, mio demone!, 2005.

Novels Saturno in laguna, 1987.

Further Reading Garrone, Nico, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in P. Puppa, Angeli ed Acque, Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 2003. Grimaldi, Emma, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in P. Puppa, Episcopus, Salerno: Plectica, 2005. Guagnini, Elvio, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in P. Puppa, Svevo a Venezia, Venice: Helvetia, 2003. Manfridi, Giuseppe, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in P. Puppa, Le parole al buio, Milan: Ricordi, 1992. Santeramo, Donato, Introduction, in P. Puppa, Words in the Dark, New York–Toronto: Legas, 1998. Sgroi, Alfredo, ‘‘I grotteschi fantasmi nel ‘Ponte all’Angelo,’ ’’ Prima fila, 91 (2003), 111–112. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Introduzione a Dialoghi sotto vento,’’ Prima fila, 33–34 (1997), 108–109. Treu, Martina, ‘‘Autopsia di un amore: Alcesti nel duemila,’’ Comunicazioni sociali, 3 (2004), 430–440.

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Q SALVATORE QUASIMODO (1901–1968) concretezza del linguaggio’’ (‘‘from my early poetry to my most recent, there is only a maturation toward concreteness of language’’). Only in recent years, with works such as Pautasso’s ‘‘‘Poesie’ 1938: un libro fantasma’’ (2003), have critics accepted the poet’s suggestion, seeing in his movement from the doleful and refined Hermeticism of the prewar period (1930–1942) to the broad and expansive postwar style (1946–1966) a natural evolution, through an internal development, of styles and themes already present in his early production. The Hermetic label does not actually exhaust the characteristics of Quasimodo’s poetry, not even in its beginnings, as Oreste Macrı` noticed already in ‘‘La poetica della parola e Salvatore Quasimodo,’’ his introduction to Poesie (Poems, 1938). In fact, the valorization of words in themselves—distilled, concentrated, elliptical, playing on synesthesias, daring metaphors, and unusual analogies, and located in a rarefied atmosphere, according to the stylistic features of Hermeticism—coexists with other, diverse expressive registers. These include: a particular type of realism, characterized by a veristic rawness (which is not always sufficiently revised in the early poems) that sometimes declines into heated expressionistic figures; a sharp figurative linearity of the classical type, organized into complex compositional structures, which had its most successful result in his translation of Lirici greci (Greek Lyric Poets, 1940); and an elegiac, melancholic, and weary intonation with which the anguished drama

The critical fate of Salvatore Quasimodo is strange and paradoxical. A poet, a versatile translator of works of poetry and drama both ancient and modern, an essayist, and a theater critic, throughout his life he was the object of much approval and praise, to the point of receiving the most prestigious literary prize in the world, the Nobel prize. However, at the same time, he provoked bitter and not always justified criticism, especially among Italian cultural circles, even as his work was appreciated and translated throughout the world. Even in the early twentyfirst century, with fewer immediate reasons for polemics, and with the bitter feelings of his contemporaries having settled, there persists around him strange zones of silence and oblivion. Moreover, important poetry anthologies such as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo’s Poeti italiani del Novecento (1978) give little room to his poetry, and often, on the level of critical judgment, are highly reductive. A kind of odi et amo thus accompanies the development of his poetic production, which is also nourished perhaps not only by his difficult character, but also by the dualism that seems to mark his own iter as a poet. Moreover, Quasimodo himself did not recognize this dualism as a form of contrast or opposition, but rather as diversity in continuity and as a development of a constant personal quest. In a 1950 speech entitled Una poetica (A Poetics) and collected in Poesie e discorsi dulla poesia (1971), he says: ‘‘dalla mia prima poesia a quella piu` recente non c’e` che una maturazione verso la

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SALVATORE QUASIMODO of the content is often mixed. All of these stylistic components span diachronically and coexist singly within the entire oeuvre of Quasimodo, creating fugue-like tensions and new directions in the ‘‘poetica della parola’’ (poetics of the word), which the Sicilian poet assimilates and renovates in a personal fashion (Oreste Macrı`, ‘‘La poetica della parola e Salvatore Quasimodo,’’ 1938). His early poetry earned him a place among the exponents of Hermeticism (especially the Florentine variety), due to his adherence to the movement’s stylistic features: the recourse to free and almost syllabized verse (a legacy of Giuseppe Ungaretti), unusual comparisons and complex phonic-linguistic games, polysemous richness, and the refinement of language, which is almost aristocratic, especially in Oboe sommerso (Muted Oboe, 1932), in which certain lyrics of a lucid elegance seem to justify the hypothesis of Parnassianism advanced by Giuseppe de Robertis (Scrittori del Novecento, 1940). Quasimodo’s first collection Acque e terre (Waters and Lands, 1930), published by the Edizioni di ‘‘Solaria’’ and greeted with approval from authoritative critics, is located decisively in the Hermetic arena. But, right from the beginning, Quasimodo’s lyrical discourse was pervaded by a Southern melancholic sensuality that insinuates itself into the images, metaphors, and rhythmic flow, and confers on the verbal texture a supple lightness, a softness of song, that is not found in other poets of the Hermetic school. Words teem with secret vibrations, with quasi-echoes of a mysterious and elusive beyond, and with Orphic and Panic inflections, creating suggestive atmospheres in which things, people, landscapes, and even autobiographical experience of love and pain, though defined in their concrete reality, appear as though suspended in a metaspatial and metatemporal dimension that tends toward the absolute exemplarity of classical poetry. The Hermetic principle of pure poetry, self-sufficient and self-referential, a place for the revelation of malaise (expressed, for example, in Eugenio Montale’s biting and lucid objectivity), is reclaimed by Quasimodo along a vertical axis of psychological plunges into phenomena that range from the unconscious to the imagination to the dream, in order to capture the primal and secret flux that animates the cosmos. To this end, nature, especially but not exclusively of Sicily, is humanized in a pagan sense and in an obliquely anthropomorphic key, shot through as it is with modern tremors and anxieties, as in ‘‘Ariete’’ (Aries), from Acque e terre: ‘‘Ogni 1526

erba dirama/e un’ansia prende le remote acque / di gelidi lauri nudi iddii pagani’’ (Every weed spreads / and an anxiety seizes the remote waters / of frozen laurels naked pagan gods). Revisited by nostalgia and memory, and transformed into a place of childhood and a lost paradise, Sicily is described in Acque e terre ‘‘con l’andatura leggera alata di un inno’’ (with the light winged pace of a hymn), as Eugenio Montale wrote in his review of the book published on Pegaso in 1930. The poet offers glimpses of landscape and memories: the soft hill of Tindari that looks over the Gulf of Patti and the Aeolian Islands in ‘‘Vento a Tindari’’ (Wind in Tindari), the sea ‘‘che odora della terra/dove canta alla riva la mia gente’’ (that smells of the land / where my people sing on the shore in ‘‘Terra’’ (Earth), and springtime on the banks of the Anapo in ‘‘Albero’’ (Tree), for example. But the sweet wind that sweeps across the hill of Tindari alludes to the more dramatic and erosive wind of the ‘‘male di vivere’’ (pain of living): ‘‘a chi non sa / che vento profondo m’ha cercato’’ (to those who do not know/that a deep wind has sought me). The nostalgic call of his native island is, therefore, also a discovery of a resemblance between that pain of the poet and that of his land: ‘‘m’e` dentro il male vostro che mi scava’’ (inside me is your woe that digs into me) (‘‘Terra’’). This discovery constitutes the essential condition for a new historical awareness of the condition of the age-old backwardness of the South, dominated by poverty and disease, which in the more mature perspective of the postwar phase gives rise to the sad ‘‘Lamento per il sud’’ (Lament for the South) in La vita non e` sogno (Life is not a Dream, 1949): ‘‘Oh il Sud e` stanco di trascinare i morti in riva alla paludi di malaria’’ (Oh the South is tired of dragging the dead on the shore to malaria swamps). A constant leitmotif, a Terra impareggiabile (Peerless Land), as the title of the 1958 collection calls it, Sicily becomes the metaphor for a profound feeling of dislocation and existential estrangement, in a vast array of expressive descriptions brought together and exemplarily defined in Ed e` subito sera (And Evening Comes Quickly, 1942), a collection that is the summa of all of Quasimodo’s preceding creative activity. A milestone, but also a turning point and a moment of growth, the collection synthesizes a poetic career that also includes compositions already characterized by the more expansive, flowing, and effusive forms prevalent in his postwar phase, anticipated by the Poesie and

SALVATORE QUASIMODO confirmed by the dominant stylistic register of Nuove poesie 1936–1942 (New Poems 1936– 1942), the opening poetic section of Ed e` subito sera. The master of his stylistic means and aware of his original power of lyrical transfiguration, Quasimodo exploited the creative energy of words by experimenting with their possibilities in many directions. After the dramatic years of the war, years of silence and pain—‘‘E come potevamo noi cantare / con il piede straniero sopra il cuore’’) (and how could we sing/with the foreign boot above our hearts) he wrote in ‘‘Alle fronde dei salici’’ (In the Willow Branches) in Giorno dopo Giorno (Day After Day, 1947)—language becomes more available for communication and for the reader’s enjoyment, expanding in an open song of pain and pity, of protest and accusation. As for many Italian intellectuals, the experience of the war is a crucial junction. Quasimodo’s new vision, parallel to and contemporary with the birth of neorealism and the lyrical narrative of a Cesare Pavese, moves the center of attention from the ego, which is turned in on itself to hear its own individual pain, toward the external world, with a transition from the monologue to the dialogue that makes Quasimodo’s poetry and poetics re-enter the horizon of so-called ‘‘engaged’’ poetry. Words, before the wreckage not only of the self, but also of human history, seem to declare their own insufficiency, as in ‘‘Forse il cuore’’ (Perhaps the Heart), also from Giorno dopo giorno: ‘‘Le parole ci stancano, / risalgono da un’acqua lapidata; / forse il cuore ci resta, forse il cuore’’ (Words weary us, / they rise from a stoned water; / perhaps the heart remains, perhaps the heart). The sharp, anguished perception of the devastation and horrors provoked by the collective madness of war now imposes shame: ‘‘resta il pudore di scrivere versi’’ (there is still the shame of writing verses), as he says in ‘‘Il falso e vero verde’’ (The True and False Green), a lyric that provides the title for a collection of 1954. In its turn, this shame forcing the poet to seek ‘‘i segni veri della vita’’ (true signs of life)—the verse is from ‘‘Ride la gazza, nera sugli aranci’’ (The Magpie Laughs, Black on the Orange Trees) in Ed e` subito sera—not only in his beloved Sicilian world, but in the disastrous postwar reality. The poet perceives, as a categorical imperative, the need to transform the poetic voice into a prophetic voice, into a civil song, an ethicalsocial hymn, incorporating as well the tensions of a deep, complex, tormented, however heterodox, religiosity that was already emerging in Oboe

sommerso in poems such as ‘‘Curva minore’’ (A Minor Curve), ‘‘La mia giornata paziente’’ (My Patient Day), and ‘‘Primo giorno’’ (First Day). The religious appeal, which became more urgent and dramatic after the devastating action of the war, was transformed into a desperate imprecation to a silent, absent God. The new perspective obviously had an impact also on the compositional structure, which modulated into a broader and more colloquial articulation, exploiting, at the metrical level, the flexible and potentially more flowing pace of the hendecasyllable, privileging the epic-narrative unfurling of lines, and greatly reducing the margins of allusiveness and Hermetic obscurity, which were no longer justified by the social urgency of the poetry. This new social-ethical anxiety expressed itself in highly dramatic tones in the collection Giorno dopo giorno in lyrics such as ‘‘Milano, Agosto 1943’’ (Milan, August 1943) and ‘‘Giorno dopo giorno’’ (Day after Day). The tones became darker and more intense in Il falso e vero verde, for example in the poem ‘‘Ai quindici di piazzale Loreto’’ (To the Fifteen of Piazzale Loreto), in memory of the victims of Nazism and Fascism, or in ‘‘Auschwitz,’’ in which the images of women ‘‘soffocate urlando / misericordia all’acqua con la bocca / di scheletro sotto le docce a gas’’ (suffocating, shouting / for mercy in the water with their skeleton / mouth beneath the showers of gas), reactivated Quasimodo’s particular expressive realism, raising it to the high intonation of tragic poetry. Under the impetus of ethical and emotional urgency, the danger is that of amplifying the poetic discourse until it is flooded with oratory and declamation, a danger almost always bypassed, with the exception of some lyrics in Dare e avere (To Give and to Have, 1966), and curbed by those stylistic and expressive correctives that the poet has at his disposal. The limpid classical structure and supple elegiac dimension are able to retain, even in the new, distinct organization of the lyrical discourse, those cadences of colloquial intimacy, diffuse verbal sweetness and lightness of figure, that had already marked his first and most suggestive lyrics, thus establishing a circular connection between the early and the late Quasimodo. The final verses of ‘‘Alle fronde dei salici’’ in Giorno dopo giorno, ‘‘anche le nostre cetre erano appese / oscillavano lievi al triste vento’’ (even our citherns were hanging / swinging lightly in the sad wind), possess the same rhythmic and timbric measure of ‘‘Vento a Tindari.’’ The sinuous and 1527

SALVATORE QUASIMODO precise lyrical voice, along with the supple elegical inflections, which characterizes and distinguishes his poetry right from the beginning, emerges again unchanged in his most mature lyrics, such as ‘‘Lettera alla madre’’ (Letter to My Mother) in La vita non e` sogno, and ‘‘Al padre’’ (To My Father) in La terra impareggiabile. The distinction between the two Quasimodian phases, therefore, seems to concern a change in theme and structure, which develops horizontally more than vertically, within the very dynamics of his poetics and his vision of the world, in an evolving continuum that is subject to variations and qualitative oscillations. This, however, does not compromise or deny the specificity of his stylistic qualities, which he pursues with obstinate faithfulness, in a progressive process of self-recognition that ensures his authenticity and originality.

Biography Born in Modica (Ragusa) on August 20, 1901, to Gaetano, a railway stationmaster whose mother was the daughter of Greek refugees from Patrasso, and Clotilde Ragusa. Spent his childhood among Gela, Roccalumera, Acquaviva, and Travia, then followed his father, who moved to Messina. In 1919, having studied in Palermo and received a diploma from the Istituto Matematico-fisico, moved to Rome to attend the Politecnico, but his precarious economic condition obliged him to seek work to support himself and his companion, Bice Donetti. Worked at Genio Civile, then as a journalist and as a high school teacher. In Florence, in 1929, his brother-in-law, Elio Vittorini introduced him into the literary circle around Solaria. Daughter Orietta born out of an extramarital affair with Amelia Specialetti, 1935. Worked with the association of Periodici Italiani, 1938, and later edited the Milanese magazine Tempo. Awarded ‘‘per chiara fama’’ the chair of Italian literature at the ‘‘Giuseppe Verdi’’ music conservatory in Milan, 1941. Enrolled in the Communist Party, 1945, and was an active member for two years. Married the dancer Maria Cumani, 1948, with whom he had a son, Alessandro. Wrote a theater column, first in Omnibus and then in the weekly Tempo, 1950; awarded the San Babila prize for his poetry, 1950; shared with Dylan Thomas the EtnaTaormina prize, 1953; awarded the Viareggio prize for La Terra impareggiabile, 1958. Awarded the Nobel prize for Literature, 1959. Conferred a degree honoris causa from Oxford University, 1967. 1528

Struck by a cerebral hemorrhage in Amalfi. Died in a clinic in Naples on June 14, 1968. GRAZIELLA CORSINOVI Selected Works Collections Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo, edited and translated by Allen Mandelbaum, New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1960. Poesie e discorsi sulla poesia, edited by Gilberto Finzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Salvatore Quasimodo: Complete Poems, translated by Jack Bevan, London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1983. Tutte le poesie, edited by Gilberto Finzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1984.

Poetry ‘‘Acque e terre,’’ 1930. ‘‘Oboe sommerso,’’ 1932. ‘‘Odore di eucalyptus ed altri versi,’’ 1933. ‘‘Erato e Apo`llion,’’ 1936. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1938. ‘‘Ed e` subito sera,’’ 1942. ‘‘Con il piede straniero sopra il cuore,’’ 1946. ‘‘Giorno dopo giorno,’’ 1947. ‘‘La vita non e` sogno,’’ 1949. ‘‘Il falso e vero verde,’’ 1954. ‘‘La terra impareggiabile,’’ 1958. ‘‘Dare e avere,’’ 1966; as Debit and Credit, translated by Jack Bevan, 1972. ‘‘Notturni del re silenzioso,’’ 1989. ‘‘Epigrammi,’’ edited by Giovanna Musolino, 2004.

Librettos Billy Budd, 1949. L’amore di Galatea, 1964.

Critical Essays Petrarca e il sentimento della solitudine, 1945. Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, 1960; as The Poet and the Politician, and Other Essays, translated by Thomas G. Bergin and Sergio Pacifici, 1964. Scritti sul teatro, 1961. Leonida di Taranto, 1968. A colpo omicida e altri scritti, edited by Gilberto Finzi, 1977.

Letters Lettere d’amore a Maria Cumani, 1936–1959, 1972. Lettere d’amore: 1936–1959, edited by Alessandro Quasimodo, 1989. La Pira-Quasimodo. Carteggio, edited by Giuseppe Miligi, 1998. Carteggi con Angelo Barile, Adriano Grande, Angiolo Silvio Novaro, 1930–1941, edited by Giovanna Musolino, 1999.

Translations Lirici greci, 1940. Il fiore delle Georgiche di Virgilio, 1942. Dall’Odissea, 1945. Il Vangelo secondo Giovanni, 1946. John Ruskin, La Bibbia di Amiens, 1946.

SALVATORE QUASIMODO Sophocles, Edipo re, 1947. William Shakespeare, Romeo e Giulietta, 1949. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1952. William Shakespeare, Riccardo III, 1952. Pablo Neruda, Poesie, 1952. Sophocles, Elettra, 1954. William Shakespeare, La tempesta, 1956. Molie`re, Tartufo, 1958. E. E. Cummings, Poesie scelte, 1958. William Shakespeare, Otello, 1958. Dalle Metamorfosi di Ovidio, 1959. Euripides, Ecuba, 1963. Euripides, Eracle, 1964. William Shakespeare, Antonio e Cleopatra, 1966.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe (editor), Quasimodo e il post-ermetismo, Modica: Centro Nazionale Studi-Salvatore Quasimodo, 1989. Baroni, Giorgio, Tempo e tempo. Ungaretti e Quasimodo, Milan: ISU Universita` Cattolica, 2002. D’Alessandro, Francesca, ‘‘Quasimodo, Sereni e la lirica,’’ in Otto/Novecento, 26, no. 1 (2002): 49–63. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. De Stefano, Paolo, ‘‘Nota al ‘Discorso sulla poesia’ di S. Quasimodo,’’ La Nuova ricerca, 9–10 (2001–2002): 71–76. Finzi, Gilberto (editor), Quasimodo e la critica, Milan: Mondadori, 1969. Frassica, Pietro (editor), Salvatore Quasimodo nel vento del Mediterraneo, Novara: Interlinea, 2002. Guagnini, Elvio, ‘‘‘La voce del poeta dentro il mondo’. Sugli scritti di Quasimodo intorno alla poesia,’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 21, nos. 1–2 (2003): 25–34. Lorenzini, Niva, La poesia di Quasimodo tra mito e storia, Modena: Mucchi, 1993. Macrı`, Oreste, ‘‘La poetica della parola e Salvatore Quasimodo,’’ in Salvatore Quasimodo, Poesie, Milan: Primi Piani, 1938. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘‘Acque e terre’ di Salvatore Quasimodo,’’ in Pegaso, 3 (1931). Musarra, Franco, Bart Van den Bossche, and Serge Vanvolsem (editors), Quasimodo e gli altri, Florence: Cesati; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2003. Pautasso, Sergio, ‘‘‘Poesie’ 1938: un libro fantasma,’’ in Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 1–2 (2003): 43–48. Pelosi, Pietro, Presenza e metamorfosi del mito di Orfeo in Salvatore Quasimodo, Naples: Edizioni del Delfino, 1978. Pisana, Domenico, ‘‘La dimensione religiosa della poesia di Quasimodo,’’ in Percorsi critici. Lettura di autori contemporanei, Rome: Pagine, 2001. Savoca, Giuseppe, Concordanze delle poesie di Salvatore Quasimodo, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Sipala, Mario (editor), Quasimodo e l’ermetismo, Modica: Centro Nazionale Studi- Salvatore Quasimodo, 1986. Tedesco, Natale, L’isola impareggiabile: significati e forme del mito di Quasimodo, Florence:

ED E` SUBITO SERA, 1942 Poetry by Salvatore Quasimodo

Ed e` subito sera (And Suddenly It’s Evening), a collection published by Mondadori for the series Lo specchio, brought Quasimodo’s work to the attention of a large audience and ensured his success. The first edition sold out in six months, and 10,000 copies were sold. Both a conclusive summing up and a turning point in the expressive growth of the poet before his postwar phase, it definitively brings together and systematizes his previous output through a careful and calibrated work of revision intended to secure a new tonal and thematic homogeneity. In a process of elimination, decomposition, recomposition and even contamination of various poems, the poet organizes his lyric material through precise structural scansions (already clear in the choice of the title, which reclaims), while strewing it throughout the entire collection—the vibrant suggestions of one of his most intense lyrics, an epigraphic and sudden Hermetic formulation: ‘‘Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra / trafitto da un raggio di sole / : ed e` subito sera’’ (Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth / transfixed by a ray of sunlight / : and suddenly it’s evening). The volume opens with Nuove poesie 1936–1942 (New Poems 1935–1942), followed by Erato e Apollion (Erato and Apollion), Oboe sommerso (Muted Oboe), and Acque e terre (Waters and Lands), in reverse chronological order of the dates of composition and publication of the sections. It also includes, in the final section Dalle traduzioni (From the Translations), 12 texts translated from the great Greek and Latin classics, absorbed into the collection as autonomous creative products. The Nuove poesie, placed significantly at the beginning, appear as a kind of declaration of intentions. The expressive line that characterizes them seems, in fact, to have been chosen by the poet in order to indicate a path, without breaks in continuity, from the Hermetic concentration of certain poems of the early collections to the expansive structure, supported by the rhythmic scansion of the hendecasyllable and open to a fluid and 1529

SALVATORE QUASIMODO relaxed lyrical discourse, that is a compositional trait characterizing the Nuove poesie. The same stylistic pursuit and an identical expressive code, Quasimodo seems to be telling us, are at the root of the various poetic articulations and declensions in the collection. The milestone of the morbid, slow song of the more recent poems is surely the result obtained ‘‘sugli angoli assoluti e sull’eco verticale dei gridi’’ (on the absolute angles and vertical echo of cries, as Carlo Bo wrote in Condizione di Quasimodo (1939). It must nevertheless be emphasized that many of the most successful lyrics at the beginning of Acque e terre (1930) such as ‘‘Vento a Tindari’’ (Wind in Tindari), ‘‘Vicolo’’ (Alley), and ‘‘I ritorni’’ (Returns) (it is no coincidence that the variations offered are minimal) inhabit the same expansive rhythmic and melodic movements, in an analogous evocative and allusive atmosphere, weakened and softened by the subdued and pensive tones of elegy, which prove to be perfectly suited to the characteristics and intonation of poems such as ‘‘Ride la gazza nera sugli aranci’’ (The Black Magpie Laughs in the Orange Trees), ‘‘Strada di Agrigentum’’ (A Street in Agrigentum), ‘‘Davanti al simulacro di Ilaria del Carretto’’ (Before the Simulacrum of Ilaria del Carretto), ‘‘Sulle rive del Lambro’’ (On the Banks of the Lambro), and ‘‘Elegos per la danzatrice Cumani’’ (Elegos for Cumani, the Dancer) of Nuove Poesie. In the complete formal beauty of Ed e` subito sera, and in the balance of content it achieves, the poet’s topoi—such as the memory of the Sicilian landscape, the moments of painful autobiographical revelation, and the pervasive anguish of existence— reappear as they are filtered and purified into a fluid, evocative, and musical rhythm and resolved into assorted images of refined intensity that seem to make their own, in their prevailing tonal homogeneity, the limpid structure of ancient poetry. GRAZIELLA CORSINOVI Editions First edition: Ed e` subito sera, Milan: Mondadori, 1942. Other editions: Ed e` subito sera, in Poesie e discorsi sulla poesia, edited by Gilberto Finzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1971; Ed e` subito sera, in Tutte le opere, Milan: Mondadori, 1977. Translation: as And Suddenly It’s Evening (1920–1942), translated by Jack Bevan, in Salvatore Quasimodo. Complete Poems, London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1983.

Further Reading Baroni, Giorgio, ‘‘Tempo: subito sera,’’ in Italianistica, 2–3 (2002): 29–34.

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Bianco, Paola, Tra ermetismo e realismo. La poesia siciliana da Quasimodo a Cattafi, Foggia: Bastogi, 1999. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Condizione di Quasimodo,’’ in Otto studi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1939. Ferrari, Curzia, ‘‘Eros e morte in Salvatore Quasimodo,’’ in Rivista di letteratura Italiana, 21, nos. 1–2 (2003): 129–132. Gioanola, Elio, ‘‘Quasimodo, la passione del figlio,’’ in Esperienze letterarie, 27, no. 1 (2002): 21–42. Rocci Lassandro, Giulia, Quasimodo, Salerno: Il grappolo, 1999. Solmi, Sergio, Scrittori negli anni: saggi e note sulla letteratura italiana del ‘900, Milan: Il saggiatore, 1963.

LIRICI GRECI, 1940 Anthology of translations by Salvatore Quasimodo

The translation of Lirici greci (Greek Lyric Poets) is considered one of Quasimodo’s greatest literary achievements, even by those (such as Manara Valgimigl in his 1957 essay Poeti greci e lirici nuovi) who express doubts about the correctness of his philological undertaking. Indeed, as the Sicilian poet explained in the 1950 speech entitled Una poetica (A Poetics), later collected in Poesie e discorsi sulla poesia (Poems and Discourses on Poetry, 1971), the interpretive model with which he approached the fragments of the great lyrics spurned literal correspondence and eludes ‘‘il metodo delle equivalenze metriche’’ (the method of metrical equivalencies), in order to break through the opacity and thickness of philology in the name of a ‘‘filologia poetica’’ (‘‘poetic philology’’), and a lyrical equivalence, or, to use Quasimodo’s neologism, ‘‘equilirica’’ (equi-lyrical) that proposed restoring to the ancients the song and poetic density almost always denied by literal and philologically exact translations. Aware of the transgressive originality of his own undertaking, and referring to the first translation of Sappho’s ‘‘Come uno degli dei’’ (Like One of the Gods), the poet declared in a letter published in Lettere d’amore a Maria Cumani (Love Letters to Maria Cumani, 1973): ‘‘Naturalmente e` una Saffo veduta e sentita da me, ed ecco che quelle parole suonano come nelle mie migliori liriche’’ (Naturally it is a

QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE Sappho seen and felt by me, and thus it is that those words sound as they do in my best lyrics). The assertion might seem implicitly to support the opinion that the choice of translating Greek lyrics, which have come to us in fragmented conditions, derives tout court from the projection on them of a twentieth-century poetics of the fragment, with the consequent leveling of their original expressive values and compositional paradigms. This opinion can only partially be shared, since the reasons for the singular stylistic and expressive accomplishments of Lirici greci must be sought in the particular sensibility of the poet, who is able to put himself in contact with the genetic core and remote archetypes of each lyric. Quasimodo, effecting an initial transformation of the text, bends it to its own interior rhythm and stylistic tension, and confers on it a peculiar modulation of modernity, taking on and making his own its dimension of human and poetic universality. The translation of Greek poetry, therefore, is for Quasimodo a happy occasion to display the most authentic demands of his expressive quest and his Sicilian-Grecian soul, which is intent on the essential purity and musical evocation of language, but also on measure, on concreteness, and on the sharp figurative linearity of classical poetry. A central junction for the subsequent evolution of his poetry, a creative moment of exceptional importance and perhaps unique for the level it achieves, Quasimodo’s translation restores to us the voice of the Greek lyric poets with an intimacy of tone that cannot be found in the versions by other poets such as Ugo Foscolo or Giovanni Pascoli. Without subscribing to the reductive assertion of Edoardo Sanguineti, who called Quasimodo’s translation of the Greek lyrics ‘‘his truest original contribution to the poetry of our century’’ (Poesia italiana del Novecento, 1993), there is little doubt that Lirici greci represents, within a many-sided course of experimentation and poetic creativity, an absolutely

new achievement, a fundamental moment in a hypothetical history of translations, compelling a critical reconsideration of the function, direction, and very meaning of translation. GRAZIELLA CORSINOVI Editions First edition: Lirici greci, Milan: Edizioni di Corrente, 1940. Other editions: Lirici greci, edited by Niva Lorenzini, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Lirici greci, edited by Armando Torno, Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

Further Reading Fornaio, Pierpaolo, ‘‘Quasimodo traduttore: il frammento come evento,’’ in Levia Gravia, 3 (2001): 353–364. Gigante, Marcello, L’ultimo Quasimodo e la poesia greca, Naples: Guida, 1970. Hays, Gregory, ‘‘Le morte stagioni: Intertextuality in Quasimodo’s Lirici greci,’’ in Forum Italicum, 29, no. 1 (1995): 26–43. Macrı`, Oreste, ‘‘Saffo e Omero,’’ in Caratteri e figure della poesia italiana contemporanea, Florence: Vallecchi, 1956. Marchi, Donatella Fiaccarini, ‘‘Lirici greci di Salvatore Quasimodo: Un’ipotesi di datazione e di interpretazione,’’ in Salvatore Quasimodo, edited by Paolo Mario Sipala and Ermanno Scuderi, Catania: Tringale, 1975. Quasimodo, Salvatore, ‘‘Sulla versione dei Lirici greci,’’ in Il poeta e il politico e altri saggi, Milan: Schwarz, 1960. Quasimodo, Salvatore, ‘‘Una poetica,’’ in Poesie e discorsi sulla poesia, edited by Gilberto Finzi, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Quasimodo, Salvatore, Lettere d’amore a Maria Cumani, 1936–1959, Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Sanguineti, Edoardo (editor), Poesia italiana del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1970. Santi, Flavio, ‘‘La vera storia di Quasimodo,’’ in Paragone, 3 (2001): 84–102. Valgimigli, Manara, ‘‘Poeti greci e lirici nuovi,’’ in Del tradurre e altri scritti, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1957. Zagarrio, Giuseppe, Quasimodo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1969. Zappa, Ferdinando, ‘‘Quasimodo traduttore dei lirici greci,’’ in Svizzera italiana, 21, no. 150 (1961): 19–33.

QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE The idea that the southern part of Italy is beset by a special set of social and economic problems that differentiate it from the rest of the country emerged soon after unification in 1860. Already in the 1870s

a number of Italian intellectuals began to focus their attention on what they called for the first time la questione meridionale or Southern Question. Since then the Southern Question—also referred to 1531

QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE occasionally as il problema del Mezzogiorno (problem of the South)—has been one of Italy’s most pressing topics of political discussion and intellectual inquiry. A special feature of modern Italian culture is indeed the tradition of analyses and debates about the South known as meridionalismo (Meridionalism). From the beginning, however, discussions of the Southern Question have tended to emphasize the peculiarity of the South, marking it as an anomaly vis-a`-vis the North, framing its history as one of difference and deficiency. In both the scholarly and broader public imagination it has been difficult to think of the South without the accompanying negative qualifiers, ‘‘question’’ or ‘‘problem.’’ An important body of scholarship produced since the 1980s has challenged this way of thinking. Social scientists such as Piero Bevilacqua, Carmine Donzelli, and Salvatore Lupo have called into question the dualistic image of the nation that posits the South as a geographic entity that is different, lacking, and backward vis-a`-vis the North. Bevilacqua, Lupo, and Marta Petrusewicz, among others, have re-examined the economic history of the South, challenging the established notion of Southern immobilism by highlighting both the economic diversity of the regions that constitute the South and the important role of economic change in these regions. Historians like Gabriella Gribaudi and Paolo Macry have also provided a more nuanced view of Southern political life, social classes, and the family. More generally, revisionist scholars such as those cited above—many of whom associated with the journal Meridiana founded by Piero Bevilacqua in Rome in 1989—have asked whether it is even possible to speak of the South as a separate, distinct whole, arguing instead that it should be regarded and analyzed as a normal ‘‘part of the world’’ (Domenico Cersosimo and Carmine Donzelli, Mezzo Giorno, 2000). Powerful images of Southern difference have circulated widely through Italian society and culture from unification to the present. When, in the fall of 1860, a Northern general reported back to Count Cavour in Piedmont about the conditions in the South, he exclaimed: ‘‘This is not Italy! This is Africa’’ (cited in Nelson Moe, View from Vesuvius, 2002). In recent years, anti-Southern rhetoric has flared up with renewed intensity. Since the 1990s, the separatist Lega Nord (Northern League) led by Umberto Bossi has made the economic inferiority of the South and Southerners one of the founding principles of a powerful political movement. Yet the Southern Question is more than just the ensemble of real and imagined discrepancies 1532

between North and South, a great national ‘‘problem.’’ It has also played a formative and productive role in the nation’s cultural history. Three areas in particular—literature, social and political thought, and cinema—have been deeply shaped and enriched by the evolving interplay between North and South. Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) was the first writer in postunification Italy to explore the aesthetic potentialities of the South in literature. In his work, the South and Sicily in particular became a symbolically charged imaginative geography, a landscape of intensified human drama. In some respects, Verga’s short stories, novels, and plays both drew upon and helped to reinforce certain stereotypes about a Mezzogiorno where passion, violence, and archaic codes of honor could be found in greater doses than elsewhere. His collaborator and fellow Sicilian novelist Luigi Capuana (1839–1915) lamented that readers came away from such stories as ‘‘Jeli il pastore,’’ ’’La Lupa,’’ and, most famously, ‘‘Cavalleria rusticana’’ with the idea that the acts of ardor and violence depicted in them were the true reflection of the Sicilian character and way of life (La Sicilia e il brigantaggio, 1892). But Verga’s literary representations of Sicily are multifaceted and complex, and part of their complexity derives from the intersection between his work and the emergence of the Southern Question in the 1870s. When Verga first began writing stories with a Sicilian setting in 1874– 1875, he was closely aligned with Italy’s major new illustrated weekly magazine, the Milan-based Illustrazione italiana, which provided its bourgeois readers with a markedly picturesque and folkloric view of the South. In the years that followed, however, the emergence of the Southern Question, inaugurated in 1875 by Pasquale Villari’s Le lettere meridionali (Southern Letters, 1885), would have a profound impact on Verga’s work. Villari’s book provided Italian elites with their first dramatic view of the poverty, misery, and criminality in the South, helping to establish the Southern Question as a topic of intellectual inquiry and broader public discussion. Two years later, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino published their landmark study, La Sicilia nel 1876 (Sicily in 1876, 1877), extending and deepening the social and political analysis of the Mezzogiorno. This new social perspective on the South impressed Verga deeply, and some of his most important work—from the short story ‘‘Rosso Malpelo’’ to the novel I Malavoglia (1881), and many of the Novelle rusticane (1883)— is clearly indebted to the realistic vision of the

QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE South offered by Franchetti and Sonnino in their studies. Verga’s fiction is thus an important example of how the political discourse of the Southern Question has interacted with and contributed to the artistic representation of the South. At the same time, Verga’s work highlights another significant way in which the Southern Question has shaped Italian culture, namely the structuring role of geography. Verga was Sicilian, but his artistic vision of Sicily was developed in Milan, where he resided from 1872 to 1893 (throughout the period in which he produced all of his major stories and novels set in Sicily). A distinctive feature of his narrative art is his consistent exploration of the counterpoint between an outsider’s and insider’s perspective, between that of the Northern city dweller and that of a rural Sicilian. Verga’s work thus reveals the shaping imaginative force of both the Southern Question and of geography more generally. The life and work of Antonio Gramsci (1891– 1937) constitute a key example of the fundamental role the Southern Question has played in the sphere of Italian social and political thought. In the decades following the discussions initiated by Villari, Franchetti, and Sonnino in the 1870s, a wide range of social and economic thinkers turned their attention to the Southern Question: most notably, Giustino Fortunato, Francesco Saverio Nitti, and Gaetano Salvemini. Gramsci’s writings on the Mezzogiorno, which range from the first journalistic pieces he wrote during World War I through the reflections penned in his Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks) around 1930, grow out of the discussions and debates that involved these and other thinkers. At the same time, Gramsci brought to his analysis of the Southern Question his own special perspective as a migrant from Sardinia who came of age politically and intellectually in the industrial city of Turin. His writings express a persistent concern with thinking about the North and South, city and country, in relation to one another. The overarching emphasis of his famous 1926 essay, Alcuni temi della questione meridionale (On Some Aspects of the Southern Question), is precisely the importance of coordinating the political efforts of the Northern proletariat and the Southern peasants. Gramsci’s 1926 essay and other writings constitute an important contribution to the social and political analysis of the Southern Question. But the Southern Question is more than just one topic among others in his work. It was through

Gramsci’s engagement with this problem that he developed some of the key categories and perspectives that distinguish his thought. The role of the intellectuals, the problem of hegemony, the relations between city and countryside, and the problems of nation-building all develop from and are connected to his reflections on the Southern Question. This Southern dimension of Gramsci’s thought may help to explain its resonance far beyond Italy, in contexts like that of Subaltern Studies, where his writings helped to reshape the historiography of India in the 1980s. In the context of postcolonial studies, more generally, Edward Said has argued that Gramsci’s work offers a powerful geographical model for cultural analysis, which points the way toward a reading of culture in terms of the counterpoint between North and South, metropolis and periphery (Culture and Imperialism, 1993). The South and Sicily in particular have figured prominently in the films of many directors, including Luchino Visconti, Pietro Germi, Francesco Rosi, and, most recently, Gianni Amelio. Visconti’s cinematic engagement with the Southern Question was especially rich and influential, reflected in his three masterpieces with a Southern theme, La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), and Il Gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Visconti’s interest in the South was deeply shaped by the work of Verga, and by his reading of Gramsci’s writing on the Southern Question, which, he claimed, enabled him to enrich Verga’s mythic vision of the South with a more social and historical perspective. Visconti thus provides another signal example of the fertile intersection between the historical Southern Question and the diverse forms of its cultural representation. Visconti’s turn to the Mezzogiorno in the 1940s was part of a broader rediscovery of the South in Italian culture in the years after World War II. The Fascist regime had declared an end to the Southern Question, going so far as to prohibit the use of the term in official documents. Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), Carlo Levi’s classic memoir about his year in exile among the peasants of Lucania, refocused the public’s attention on the Southern problem with extraordinary eloquence and force. His lyrical homage to the ‘‘peasant world’’ (mondo contadino) of the Southern region of Lucania, ‘‘serrato nel dolore e negli usi, negato alla Storia e allo Stato’’ (closed off in its suffering and its customs, negated by both history and the state), not only helped to rekindle 1533

QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE interest in the South among writers, filmmakers, and anthropologists, but also to bring the poverty and neglect of the Southern peasants to the attention of politicians and policymakers. In Levi, too, the geographical perspective plays a crucial role. A doctor and painter from the industrial capital of Turin, Levi discovered in this remote world at the other end of the peninsula a peasant civilization that, while needing economic improvement, also offered valuable critical lessons on some of the enduring political divisions and cultural antagonisms in the history of modern Italy. While denouncing the particular abuses of the Fascist state that had exiled Levi to Lucania in the first place, Benito Mussolini’s regime was, in Levi’s view, only the last in a long line of conquerors and governments that had dominated and misinterpreted this world. Levi’s book therefore offers an impassioned appeal to establish a relationship between the ‘‘two Italies’’ based on mutual understanding and respect. Francesco Rosi’s 1979 cinematic adaptation, starring Gian Maria Volonte` as Carlo Levi, captures one man’s discovery that it is possible to find meaningful human bonds beyond the boundaries of political exploitation and cultural difference. Over the past half century, the differences between the ‘‘two Italies,’’ portrayed by Levi in such starkly contrastive terms, have diminished in a number of important ways. Both Southern and Northern regions have participated in the profound social, economic, and environmental transformations that occurred in the wake of the ‘‘economic miracle’’ after the late 1950s. The lifestyle of Italians across the peninsula is similar. All Italians, moreover, now live within the common political and economic framework of the European Union. Yet there are serious problems in parts of the Mezzogiorno—in particular, high levels of unemployment, especially among the young, the poor quality of public services, and the power of organized crime—that help to reinforce the image of a South that is markedly if not irremediably different. Whatever problems the South faces today clearly need to be seen, however, against the backdrop of the multiple commonalities that link it to the rest of the country, to Europe, and to other parts of the world. This tension between commonality and difference has been at the heart of the Southern Question since its inception in the late nineteenth century. It has been a difficult and vexing problem for the Italian body politic, to be sure. But it has also been deeply productive for some of Italy’s most creative writers, thinkers, and 1534

artists, and continues to be one of the distinctive and fertile features of Italian culture today. NELSON J. MOE Further Reading Bevilacqua, Piero, Breve storia dell’Italia meridionale dall’Ottocento a oggi, Rome: Donzelli, 1993. Capuana, Luigi, La Sicilia e il brigantaggio, Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico Italiano, 1892. Cersosimo, Domenico, and Carmine Donzelli, Mezzo Giorno: Realta`, rappresentazioni e tendenze del cambiamento meridionale, Rome: Donzelli, 2000. Davis, John A. ‘‘Casting Off the ‘Southern Problem’: Or the Peculiarities of the South Reconsidered,’’ in Italy’s ‘‘Southern Question’’: Orientalism in One Country, edited by Jane Schneider, Oxford: Berg, 1998. Dickie, John, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1869–1900, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Fortunato, Giustino, Il Mezzogiorno e lo Stato Italiano, 2 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1973. Franchetti, Leopoldo, and Sidney Sonnino, Inchiesta in Sicilia, Florence: Vallecchi, 1974. Galasso, Giuseppe, Passato e presente del meridionalismo: Genesi e sviluppi, Vol. 1, Naples: Guida, 1978. Giarrizzo, Giuseppe, Mezzogiorno senza meridionalismo: La Sicilia, lo sviluppo, il potere, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Gramsci, Antonio, La questione meridionale, edited by Franco De Felice and Valentino Parlato, Rome: Riuniti, 1982. Gramsci, Antonio, Disgregazione sociale e rivoluzione: Scritti sul Mezzogiorno, edited by Francesco M. Biscione, Naples: Liguori, 1995. Gribaudi, Gabriella, A Eboli: Il mondo meridionale in cent’anni di trasformazione, Venice: Marsilio, 1990. Levi, Carlo, Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Lumley, Robert, and Jonathan Morris (editors), The New History of the Italian South: The Mezzogiorno Revisited, Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 1997. Lupo, Salvatore, Il giardino degli aranci: il mondo degli agrumi nella storia del Mezzogiorno, Venice: Marsilio, 1990. Lupo, Salvatore, ‘‘Mezzogiorno,’’ in Dizionario storico dell’Italia unita, edited by Bruno Bongiovanni and Nicola Tranfaglia, Bari: Laterza, 1996. Lupo, Salvatore, ‘‘Storia del Mezzogiorno, questione meridionale, meridionalismo,’’ in Meridiana, 32 (1998): 17–52. Macry, Paolo, I giochi dell’incertezza: Napoli nell’Ottocento, Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2002. Macry, Paolo, Ottocento: Famiglia, e´lites e patrimoni a Napoli, Turin: Einaudi, 1988. Moe, Nelson, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Nitti, Francesco Saverio, Scritti sulla questione meridionale, 4 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1958–1978. Petraccone, Claudia, Le due civilta`: Settentrionali e meridionali nella storia d’Italia, Bari: Laterza, 2000.

QUESTIONE MERIDIONALE Petrusewicz, Marta, Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Petrusewicz, Marta, Come il Meridione divenne una Questione: Rappresentazioni del Sud prima e dopo il Quarantotto, Catanzaro: Rubbettino, 1998. Riall, Lucy, Sicily and the Unification of Italy: Liberal Policy and Local Power, 1859–1866, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Riall, Lucy, ‘‘Which Road to the south? Revisionists revisit the Mezzogiorno,’’ in Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 5, no. 1 (2000): 89–100. Rossi-Doria, Manlio, Scritti sul Mezzogiorno, Turin: Einaudi, 1982.

Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism, New York: Knopf, 1993. Salvadori, Massimo, Il mito del buongoverno: La questione meridionale da Cavour a Gramsci, Turin: Einaudi, 1960. Salvemini, Gaetano, Scritti sulla questione meridionale (1896–1955), Turin: Einaudi, 1955. Schneider, Jane (editor), Italy’s ‘‘Southern Question’’: Orientalism in One Country, Oxford: Berg, 1998. Teti, Vittorio, La razza maladetta: Origini del pregiudizio antimeridionale, Rome: Manifestolibri, 1993. Villari, Pasquale, Le lettere meridionali ed altri scritti sulla questione sociale in Italia, 2nd edition, Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1885.

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R GIOVANNI RABONI (1932–2004) pensi / che groviglio, che buio/quante cose difficili’’ (It’s too easy / to call someone a poor thing... but think / what confusion, what darkness / how many difficulties; ‘‘Abbastanza posto’’). A man’s life thus can become an uneasy target for a power that presents itself in the threatening form of police: ‘‘Dal fondo / quindici poliziotti in fila, in maniche di camicia /sparano in una sagoma di legno’’ (From the rear / fifteen police officers in line, in shirt sleeves, / shoot at a wooden figure; ‘‘Simulato e dissimulato’’). Death and the evocation of Christ dying on the cross bring the collection to an end: ‘‘Quante volte a chi / mi chiedeva notizie di mio padre ho risposto ‘non c’e` male’. Ma se era / morto da giorni, forse da mesi!’’ (How many times, / when asked for news of my father / did I answer ‘‘he is fine.’’ But he had been/ dead for days, perhaps for months!; Una specie di tic’’). The poet’s condemnation of the hypocrisy of the contemporary social system is infused by a sad irony toward the conditions of man’s personal existence. Ogni terzo pensiero (Every Third Thought, 1993) continues the search started with Versi guerrieri e amorosi (Verses of War and Love, 1990) for a rhetoric to reflect the last phases of every historical epoch. The city of Milan evoked by the poet forms the backdrop for the sleepless night, the dear visits of the dead, the years when lei (she, the female character) was yet in the mind of God. It is a Milan soaked in the blood of many slaughters, in perfect consonance with thoughts of the grave. As Giacinto Spagnoletti showed, ‘‘in Raboni there is the

Although Giovanni Raboni’s poetry has its roots in the Lombardian experimental tradition, he is nevertheless well versed in both French (Baudelaire) and Anglo-American (T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) poetry. He also has affinities to other Italian poets like Franco Fortini and, above all, Vittorio Sereni, who inspired some of his verse forms. Recurring throughout his work are the central themes of the city, his own personal experiences, and the dead. From a metrical point of view Raboni’s poetry is characterized by ‘‘the fusion of prose and measured, but arrhythmic forms that transform ‘prose’ into a poetic and euphonious recitative’’ (Stefano Giovanardi, ‘‘Metrica: tra norma e infrazione,’’ 2000). Le case della Vetra (Vetra’s Houses, 1966), one of his early poetry collections, contains verses he had written between 1951 and 1964. The book contains 55 poems, divided into three sections (‘‘1955–1959,’’ ‘‘1960–1961,’’ ‘‘1962–1965’’) and has an appendix with references to the life of Jesus (with particular attention to the crucifixion). The Milanese landscape, often portrayed in dark or even ghostly tones, is a constant presence. The lyrical self beholds the urban landscape in its uncertainty and disorder: ‘‘Queste strade che salgono alle mura / non hanno orizzonte, vedi’’ (These roads climbing up to the walls / don’t have a horizon, you see; ‘‘Citta` dall’alto’’). The poet observed how the individual has become marginalized, a victim of the monstrous machine of history, and consequently beset by an incurable weakness and indecisiveness: ‘‘Si fa presto a / chiamare cosı` un poveraccio...ma ci 1537

GIOVANNI RABONI constant reduction of every late nineteenth-century romantic exaltation to a concrete level and an accurate reflection on every possibility of inner life’’ (Poesia italiana contemporanea, 2003). In the play Rappresentazione della croce (Description of the Cross 2000), the poet returned to the evangelical inspiration of some of his early works in relating the life and death of Jesus. The protagonist Christ is absent or, at least, not visible. The voices of this theatrical poem are those of the secondary actors, the witnesses present at the crucifixion who only later become aware of the mystery that touched them. In 2002 Raboni published Alcesti o la recita dell’esilio (Alcesti, or the Performance of Exile), a work with strong meta-theatrical elements that was heavily influenced by the French writer Albert Camus. The protagonists Sara, Simone, and Stefano are fleeing their country, which is on the brink of disaster. To escape danger, they hide for one night in an abandoned theater. They plan to leave at dawn, but there is only room for two. Someone will have to sacrifice his life for the sake of others. Sara is an actress who had acted in Alcesti on the very stage where they seek shelter. Simone and his child Stefano cannot understand her reticence and her silences. The play is in unrhymed verse composed of sequences of seven-, nine-, and elevensyllable lines whose varied stresses express the rhythm of spoken language. From his early works, such as Il catalogo e` questo (This Is the Catalogue, 1961), L’insalubrita` dell’aria (The Unhealthiness of the Air, 1963) and Gesta Romanorum (Roman Exploits, 1967), to the self-anthologized A tanto caro sangue, (To So Much Dear Blood, 1988), Raboni’s lyrics are characterized by the variety of linguistic registers ranging from informal speech to the ‘‘bureaucratic’’ language of politicians and legal records. Within such abrupt changes of register, one readily perceives the conscious and ironic wish to represent the lost ‘‘mission’’ of contemporary poets. In Barlumi di storia (Rays of History, 2002) ‘‘his political discourse, becomes less an antagonist than a protagonist, at once accomplice and victim of the fragmentation of reality’’ (Luigi Reina, Scenario novecento, 2003). Raboni’s verses reflect personal memories that begin with his childhood, depict the war years, and conclude in a present for which the poet seemed to feel more disgust than anger. His personal experience of history was charged with traumas and horrors, from the bombardments that forced Raboni’s family to flee from the ruins of Milan, to the bomb that exploded in Piazza 1538

Fontana, killing 16 people on 12 December 1969. ‘‘Da allora a questo inizio di millennio,’’ Raboni asserted, ‘‘molte, troppe speranze sono cadute e la realta` di un mondo imbarbarito e senza prospettive ideali di riscatto e` quel che rimane’’ (From then to this new millennium, many, too many hopes have fallen and the reality of a corrupted world without any ideal perspectives to improve is what we are left with; Barlumi di storia). The only comfort the poet seemed to find was in becoming part of a community of the living and the dead, a desire that gives an authentically religious character to his poetry. For Romano Luperini, ‘‘Raboni’s poetry belongs to a generation that got rid of aesthetics, but on its ruins tried to build the fragile architectures of a Lombard civilization, whose founder is Sereni’’ (Breviario di critica, 2002).

Biography Giovanni Raboni was born in Milan on 22 January 1932. At the beginning of his career, he wrote for two magazines, Paragone and Quaderni Piacentini. In the 1970s, Raboni worked as a film critic and was director of the magazine L’Illustrazione Italiana. From 1976 to 1982 he directed the series ‘‘Quaderni della Fenice,’’ pubished by Guanda, and from 1981 to 1982 he directed the monthly magazine L’illustrazione italiana for the same publisher. In 1983 Raboni married the poet Patrizia Valduga. From 1987 to 1998 he was theater critic for Il Corriere della Sera. In 1994, Ogni terzo pensiero received the Viareggio Poetry Prize. In 2000, Tutte le poesie received the Bagutta Prize. Raboni died in Parma on 16 September 2004. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Collections La fossa di Cherubino, Milan: Guanda, 1980. Tutte le poesie (1951–1993), Milan: Garzanti, 1997. Tutte le poesie (1951–1998), Milan: Garzanti, 2000. Giovanni Raboni, Selected Poems, translated by Tina Chiappetta, Stony Brook, NY: Gradiva, 2001.

Poetry ‘‘Il catalogo e` questo,’’ 1961. ‘‘L’insalubrita` dall’aria,’’ 1963. ‘‘Le case della Vetra,’’ 1966. ‘‘Gesta Romanorum,’’ 1967. ‘‘Economia dalla paura,’’ 1971. ‘‘Cadenza d’inganno,’’ 1975. ‘‘Il piu` freddo anno di grazia,’’ 1978; as ‘‘The Coldest Year of Grace: Selected Poems, translated by Stuart Friebert and Vinio Rossi, 1985.

ERNESTO RAGAZZONI ‘‘Nel grave sogno,’’ 1982. ‘‘Canzonette mortali,’’ 1986. ‘‘A tanto caro sangue: Poesie 1953–1987,’’ 1988. ‘‘Versi guerrieri e amorosi,’’ 1990. ‘‘Ogni terzo pensiero,’’ 1993. ‘‘Devozioni perverse,’’ 1994. ‘‘Nel libro della mente,’’ 1997. ‘‘Quare tristis,’’ 1998. ‘‘Barlumi di storia,’’ 2002. ‘‘Ultimi versi,’’ 2005.

Plays Rappresentazione della croce, 2000. Alcesti o la recita dell’esilio, 2002.

Essays Poesia degli anni Sessanta, 1976. Poesia italiana contemporanea, 1980. Quaderno in prosa, 1981. Raboni, Manzoni, 1985. I bei tempi dei brutti libri, 1988. Contraddetti, 1998. Ventagli e altre imitazioni, 1999.

Translations Gustave Flaubert, L’educazione sentimentale, 1966. Louis Aragon, Bianca e l’oblio, 1969. Franc¸ois Mauriac, Un adolescente d’altri tempi, 1971. Gustave Apollinaire, Bestiario o Il corteggio d’Orfeo, 1977. Jacques Prevert, Poesie, with Maurizio Cucchi, 1979. Marcel Proust, Un amore di Swann, 1981. Louis Ferdinand Celine, Mea culpa. La bella rogna, with Daniele Gorret, 1982. Marcel Proust, Alla ricerca del tempo perduto, 4 vols., 1983–1993. Gustave Apollinaire, La chiamavano Lu e altre poesie, 1984. Jean Racine, Fedra, 1984; new edition, 1999. Charles Baudelaire, I fiori del male e altre poesie, 1987; new edition, 1999.

Gustave Apollinaire, Bestiario o Il corteggio d’Orfeo, 1996. Victor Hugo, Ruy Blas, 1996. Sofocle, Antigone, 2000. T. S. Eliot, Assassinio nella cattedrale, 2003. Jean Franc¸ois Vegliante, Nel lutto della luce. Poesie 1982–1997, 2004. Vladimir Holan, A tutto silenzio. Poesie (1961–1967), translated by Vittorio Fesslova´, Italian verses by Giovanni Raboni and M. Ceriani, 2005.

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Ultime tendenze,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi, Poeti italiani del secondo novecento 1945–1995, Milan: Mondatori, 1996. Finzi, Giuseppe, Poesia in Italia: Montale, novissimi e postnovissimi, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Giovanardi, Stefano, ‘‘Metrica: Tra norma e infrazione,’’ in Letteratura italiana del novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Luperini, Romano, Breviario di critica, Naples: Guida, 2002. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Profili critici del novecento, Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Forti, Maria, Le proposte della poesia e nuove proposte, Milan: Mursia, 1971. Ramat, Silvio, L’intelligenza dei contemporanei, Florence: Rebellato, 1968. Reina, Luigi, Scenario novecento, Naples: Editrice Ferraro, 1993. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Spirali, 2003.

ERNESTO RAGAZZONI (1870–1920) A bohemian poet, but also a prolific writer of witty and pungent journalistic prose in which nature, personal contemplation, and an irreverent sense of humor are prevalent, Ernesto Ragazzoni remained at length outside of editorial circles while his legacy was entrusted to the oral tradition. Yet he was not without admirers of great importance such as Papini and Montale; his memory and his verses appear in a number of literary works, like Giorgio Bassani’s Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Mario Soldati’s L’attore, and more recently Sebastiano

Vassalli’s Cuore di pietra, where Ragazzoni, the ‘‘poet’’ and ‘‘ambassador from Lapland,’’ becomes an extravagant and amicable character in the novel. Of little significance—if not for a distinct interest in the occult, in magic, in the Cabala—is his early literary production, which is marked by the obvious and in part already obsolete models (Carducci, Pascoli, D’Annunzio), by French and German Romanticists (who in some cases the poet reworked in Italian), by gothic literature, and by 1539

ERNESTO RAGAZZONI literature from the scapigliatura movement. His work was inspired by ‘‘Europeanism,’’ as Gianfranco Contini observed, which, however, is also a recognizable characteristic in other writers from Piedmont of the same generation (‘‘Introduzione ai narratori della Scapigliatura piemontese,’’ 1992). Important, on the other hand, is the discovery of the crepuscolari poets, who ‘‘brought to its maximum the charge of irony already strong in Gozzano, in Chiaves, and in others,’’ as Eugenio Montale would say (‘‘Letture: Ragazzoni,’’ 1956). And it was above all the readings of Thackeray, of Browning, of Poe, translated into Italian and published by Ragazzoni in 1896, that opened new horizons. Ragazzoni dedicated some interesting articles to a number of Anglo-Saxon and French writers (Robert Louis Stevenson, Jerome Klapka Jerome, Sar Pe´ladan). Yet in spite of an ostentatious disinterest in any literary model, it was French culture that exercised a more revealing role: the Symbolists, the Intimists, but most importantly, after his relocation to Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century, his encounter with the fantaisistes or entertainer-poets (Tristan Corbie`re, Laurent Tailhade, Charles Cros, Georges Fourest), who loved to read in public, reciting their ballads in their own particular way. From these authors Ragazzoni learned new metrical techniques (the refrain or the author’s note, which closes the stanzas or the entire piece, pushes the limits of the nonsensical), verbal acrobatics, the art of the rhythmical and phonic spectacle, linguistic experimentation, the paradox and the grotesque, the provocation, the comical contrast between the gravity of the recital, and the futility or extravagance of its content. In 1914, Ragazzoni published in the journal Numero (immediately abandoned due to its growing nationalistic vein) several of his most noteworthy poems, like the ‘‘Laude dei pacifici lapponi e dell’olio di merluzzo’’ (Praises of Peace-Loving Laplanders and of Cod Oil). It is difficult to establish the precise chronology of his works: Ragazzoni was the author of serious lyric poetry and of compositions in the tradition of minstrels and jesters, among which are ‘‘Il madrigale della neve calda e del caffe` bianco’’ (Madrigal of Hot Snow and White Coffee), ‘‘Poesia della rottura delle scatole’’ (Poetry of the Pain in the Neck), ‘‘Elegia del verme solitario’’ (Elegy of the Tapeworm), and ‘‘Omaggio al 606’’ (Homage to 606), which is a medicament used to combat syphilis. His is a poetry that is often born out of situations: resounding current events (scientific or geographic discoveries, railway 1540

disasters), political facts (colonialism or the massacre of African soldiers on the front lines in World War I), and other various pretexts (journalistic gossip, minor controversies, advertisements). It is whimsical and inventive, satirical and irreverent: ‘‘frottole in versi’’ (stories in verse), ‘‘corbellerie’’ (nonsense) as Ragazzoni himself called it in ‘‘Insalata di San Martino’’ (San Martino Salad). It is corrosive toward nationalistic rhetoric, but also, in its ‘‘culto per le bazzecole’’ (cult of trifles), toward the mythologies of the poet-prophet and of the poet-soldier. It is poetry that ranges between the humorous and the grotesque, between amusement and pyrotechnic spectacle, between oddness and provocative declarations of poetics: ‘‘io fo buchi nella sabbia’’ (I make holes in the sand) is the refrain of ‘‘Ballata’’ (Ballad). It is, in short, poetry spoken rather than written; monologues written to be recited aloud, at times yelled; poetry as spectacle to be exhibited in public. Ragazzoni even parodied notable texts of other writers, like D’Annunzio’s ‘‘La passeggiata.’’ ‘‘Everything can be forgiven, but not irritating people,’’ proclaimed Sebastiano Vassalli (‘‘Introduzione,’’ 2000). From this derives the poetics of dissipation, of nonwriting, of the ‘‘invisibili pagine meravigliose che scritte sarebbero sciupate’’ (marvelous invisible pages that if written down would be ruined; Le mie invisibilissime pagine, 1919). It is the controversial declaration against the verbosity of literature: ‘‘Abbasso i versi e chi li legge e scrive!’’ (Down with the verses and those who read and write them!) wrote Ragazzoni in ‘‘Parole contro le parole’’ (Words against Words). And he added: ‘‘Che gioia non annegare nel calamaio, non torturare nel buio e nella materia dell’inchiostro le idee, i sogni cosı` felici di essere abandonati liberi a se stessi!’’ (What a joy to not drown in the inkwell, to not torture ideas and dreams so happy to be freely abandoned to themselves in the darkness and in the substance of the ink!). Thus the motivations for a poetry that was rarely written, always new, or at the least renewable, even for its author who recited it in theaters, in front of friends, and in the newspaper editorial offices; a production in part (but only in part) preserved after the poet’s death in the memory of friends and in that of a collective group of anonymous admirers. No manuscript is left from this ‘‘juggler of words,’’ this ‘‘delightful chansonnier,’’ as Arrigo Cajumi, the first editor of a compilation, called him. And yet, thanks to the subsequent editions published by Mondo, Mauri, and Martinoni, Ragazzoni remains a beloved and repeatedly quoted author. He appears among the bedtime readings

SILVIO RAMAT not only of the actor in Soldati’s novel but also among those of Vittorio Gassman and more recently of David Riondino, who brought to the stage Ragazzoni’s most noteworthy poems.

Biography Ernesto Ragazzoni was born in Orta in the province of Novara on January 8, 1870. He studied at the Technical Institute of Novara from 1883 to 1887 and moved to Turin as an employee in the railway shipping office, 1893. He married Felicita Rey in 1899. Ragazzoni became a journalist for La stampa in 1900 and a correspondent in Paris in 1902. He traveled in Switzerland in 1902 and in England in 1911. He relocated to Bologna, collaborating on Il resto del Carlino, in 1918, then on to Rome where he worked for Il tempo in 1919. Ragazzoni died of apoplexy in Turin on January 5, 1920. RENATO MARTINONI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Ombra,’’ 1891. ‘‘Poesie: Seguite dalle versioni ritmiche di Edgar Poe¨,’’ edited by Arrigo Cajumi, 1927. ‘‘Poesie,’’ edited by Arrigo Cajumi, 1956. ‘‘Poesie e prose,’’ edited by Lorenzo Mondo, 1978. ‘‘Poesie,’’ edited by Paolo Mauri, 1978. ‘‘Buchi nella sabbia e pagine invisibili: Poesie e prose,’’ edited by Renato Martinoni, 2000.

Prose L’ultima Dea, 1891. Le mie invisibilissime pagine, edited by Anna Bujatti, 1993.

Essays Letterati contemporanei: Robert Louis Stevenson, Emporium, 9:52 (April 1, 1899), 278–300. Letterati contemporanei: Sar Pe´ladan, Emporium, 10:58(October 1899), 255–281. Letterati contemporanei: Jerome Klapka Jerome, Emporium, 12:71 (November 1900), 353–363.

Translations Edgar Allan Po¨e, with Federico Garrone, 1896.

Further Reading Bermani, Cesare (editor), Parole che ridono: A proposito di Ernesto Ragazzoni, Rome: Odradek, 2004. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Introduzione ai narratori della Scapigliatura piemontese,’’ in Letteratura italiana. OttoNovecento, Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. Guglielminetti, Marziano, ‘‘Chiaves Ragazzoni Oxilia,’’ in La ‘‘Scuola dell’ironia: Gozzano e i viciniori, Florence: Olschki, 1984. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Letture: Ragazzoni,’’ Il corriere della sera, 29 June 1956; reprinted in Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920–1979, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Papini, Giovanni, ‘‘Ernesto Ragazzoni,’’ Il resto del Carlino, 9 January 1920. Pedroni, Matteo, ‘‘Osservazioni sulla poesia di Ernesto Ragazzoni,’’ Otto-Novecento, 12 (1998), 63–90. Tamburini, Luciano, ‘‘Ernesto Ragazzoni e la poesia fourestie`re,’’ Studi piemontesi, 20 (1991), 293–311. Vassalli, Sebastiano, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in E. Ragazzoni, Buchi nella sabbia e pagine invisibili: Poesie e prose, edited by Renato Martinoni, Turin: Einaudi, 2000.

SILVIO RAMAT (1939–) The literary intellect of Silvio Ramat is explicated in two different but tangential fields: speculative research—in the form of university professor, essayist, and critic—and poetic expression. On the critical front, the scholar has distinguished himself in the field of Italian literature right from his first publication, dedicated to Eugenio Montale (the monographic work titled Montale, 1965), which represents a premonitory sign of ulterior interpretive contributions such as L’acacia

ferita e altri studi su Montale (The Wounded Acacia and Other Studies on Montale, 1986). In these pages Ramat highlighted the sensibility with which the Genovese poet perceives and interprets the doubts and illusions of his time; but what impresses, right from Ramat’s first critical investigations, is how he focused not so much on the entire corpus of Montale as much as on the single works, following an analytic procedure more or less invariable even in his successive studies. Two examples are I 1541

SILVIO RAMAT sogni di Costantino (Constantine’s Dreams, 1988) and Particolari: Undici letture novecentesche (Details: Eleven 20th Century Readings, 1992), both dedicated to literature from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; this is exactly the time period (even if not rigorously circumscribed) to which Ramat gave particular attention with works such as La poesia italiana 1903–1943: Quarantun esemplari (Italian Poetry 1903–1943: Forty-One Examples) and Romanzieri tra realismo e decadenza (Novelists from Realism to Decadence), published in 1997. The first of these volumes represents one of the most exact and exhaustive acknowledgments of twentieth-century Italian poetry, while in the second the critic, now in the area of prose writing, dialogued with six exemplary writers who are extremely significant and illustrative of the literary debates necessary in the area of narrative at the end of the nineteenth century and in particular in the passage from the experiences of Realism to those of the scapigliatura movement. Ermetismo (Hermeticism, 1969) and Crisi di lettura: Anticronache del vero (Reading Crisis: AntiChronicles of Truth, 1974) deal with twentieth-century literature but with two different approaches. In Ermetismo, Ramat heuristically investigated the values of the Hermetic poetics at the time of World War I, which gave to the culture of the time a model of intellectual resistance against the Fascist repression of every form of self-awareness; while in Crisi di lettura Ramat collected writings of antiacademic militant criticism dating from 1969 to 1973. In his critical research Ramat firmly intertwines a lyric voice that began to express itself in 1959. This is the date of his first collection, Le feste di una citta` (The Festivals of a City), which right from the title is a witness of the crisis of the neorealist demands that began halfway through the 1950s. To these appeals, Ramat—born in Florence, the homeland of Hermeticism—opposed expressive forms closer to the Hermetic in the desire to restore to the poetic word its more pure and polished polysemic richness and to free its most intimate evocative potential. From his first poetic experiences, in fact, the poetic message of Ramat has not revealed purely communicative intents, not even when it presents personal experiences of life drawn from the intimacy of his own ‘‘biography,’’ a term that does not recur by chance in some of the poet’s verses. Ramat wrote in the emblematically entitled collection Una fonte (Source, 1988): ‘‘che altro c’e` di toccabile / nella mia biografia? [...] non mi sento / di arretrare a cercarmi altre fonti?’’ (what else is there that is touchable / in my biography? [...] 1542

don’t I feel like / going back to look for other sources?), with the clear epiphany of the almost synonymic relationship that ties the two key words ‘‘biography’’ and ‘‘source.’’ Memory, then, is not used to attempt a rigorous historic reconstruction of private events by the poet who rejected, rather, the risks of a severe, objective history. His memories, which often come from the family sphere, lose in concreteness to remain as if suspended in a timeless atmosphere, faded in the surroundings on the one hand, but on the other enriched by an emotional pathos due to the elaborate and controlled classical appearance of form. Resulting from it are images similar to dreamlike fragments and visions that require being perceived and interpreted with the eyes of the soul. It is from this perspective that the narrative poem, Mia madre un secolo (My Mother a Century, 2002), must be read. Dedicated to the maternal figure, this work recounts her story by sketching a portrait, evanescent and intangible but yet strong and vital, far from any photographic precision and plastic description, that, without any rhetoric of sentiment and far from commonplace, allows the states of mind tied to reciprocal affection to filter through, together with the joys and sufferings of a centenary life intertwined with the events and with the personages from the history of the twentieth century. Ramat accentuated that the quotidian dimension and the formal choice of verse is antirhetorical (the free hendecasyllable), which is close to a middle register prose while still maintaining the classic rigor of the form. Among Ramat’s very latest works, Nel bosco sibillino (In the Mysterious Wood, 2005) must be remembered. It is a work that ably matches the accuracy of the dictation with the evocative dimension of the almost extracorporeal world that represents the poetic space of Ramat, here populated by ghost characters identifiable only by the sound of their voices.

Biography Silvio Ramat was born in Florence on October 2, 1939, son of a notable scholar of Italian literature, Raffaello Ramat. He was professor of the history of literary criticism in the Department of Educational Sciences of the Universita` di Firenze and since 1976 teaches modern and contemporary Italian literature in the Department of Letters and Philosophy of the Universita` di Padova. He has been decorated with awards for literature and criticism, such as the award for poetry from the city of Tirano for Numeri primi, 1997, and in 2001

SILVIO RAMAT received an award for his activity as a literary critic from the Accademia dei Lincei. He is a member of the editorial committee of the review Poesia and is Associate Editor of Forum Italicum. He has collaborated, and continues to do so, with periodicals and newspapers, among which are Poesia, Letteratura, and Il corriere della sera. In 1964, he married Luisella Bernardini and was later divorced; he remarried Giovanna Gianola in 1991. Ramat has two children: Silvia, born in 1966, and Giuliano, born in 1971. He currently lives in Padova. Selected works

LORENZA MIRETTI

Poetry ‘‘Le feste di una citta`,’’ 1959. ‘‘Lo specchio dell’afa,’’ 1961. ‘‘La rissa dei salici: Quaderni di differenze,’’ 1963. ‘‘Gli sproni ardenti,’’ 1964. ‘‘Corpo e cosmo: Poesie (1964–1972),’’ 1973. ‘‘Fisica dell’immagine,’’ 1973. ‘‘Poema intempestivo,’’ 1976. ‘‘In parola,’’ 1977. ‘‘Take-off,’’ 1978. ‘‘L’inverno delle teorie,’’ 1980. ‘‘L’arte del primo sonno: Quintetti,’’ 1984. ‘‘Codici di poesia,’’ 1986. ‘‘Orto e nido,’’ 1987. ‘‘Una fonte,’’ 1988. ‘‘Serials,’’ 1988. ‘‘Ventaglie altre servitu` 1981–1988,’’ 1991. ‘‘Pomerania,’’ 1993. ‘‘Origine e destino,’’ 1995. ‘‘Numeri primi,’’ 1996. ‘‘Il gioco e la candela,’’ 1997. ‘‘Le rose della Cina,’’ 1998. ‘‘Per more,’’ 2000. ‘‘40 poesie,’’ 2001. ‘‘Sharing a Trip: Selected Poems,’’ translated by Emanuel Di Pasquale, 2001. ‘‘Mia madre un secolo,’’ 2002. ‘‘Nel bosco sibillino,’’ 2005.

Criticism Montale, 1965. L’intelligenza dei contemporanei: Saggi, note, interventi sulla poesia italiana del Novecento, 1968.

Ermetismo, 1969. Psicologia della forma leopardiana, 1970. La pianta della poesia, 1972. Crisi di lettura: Anticronache del vero (1969–1973), 1974. Storia della poesia italiana del Novecento, 1976. Protonovecento, 1978. Invito alla lettura di Bigongiari, 1979. L’acacia ferita e altri saggi su Montale, 1986. In piena prosa 1980–81, 1987. I sogni di Costantin. La poesia testo a testo: Corrispondenze e raccordi otto-novecenteschio, 1988. Particolari: Undici letture novecentesche, 1992. La poesia italiana 1903–1943: Quarantuno titoli esemplari, 1997. Romanzieri tra realismo e decadenza, Fogazzaro, Zena, Gualdo, Lucini, De Marchi, Capuana, 1997. Poesia, pittura, architettura e industria dagli anni Trenta agli anni Sessanta, 2002. I passi della poesia: Argomenti da un secolo finito, 2002. Alfonso Gatto, Tutte le poesie, 2005 (editor).

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Prefazione,’’ in Silvio Ramat, Fisica dell’immagine, Mandria: Lacaita, 1973. Bartoletti Poggi, Maria, ‘‘Silvio Ramat,’’ in Poeti italiani del Novecento: La vita, le opere, la critica, edited by Giorgio Luti, Rome: NIS, 1985. Berardinelli, Alfonso, and Franco Cordelli, Il pubblico della poesia, Cosenza: Lerici, 1975. Berardinelli, Alfonso, and Franco Cordelli, Il pubblico della poesia: Trent’anni dopo, Rome: Castelvecchi, 2004. Bigongiari, Piero, ‘‘Prima Speculazione su un poeta della Quinta generazione: Modelli d’attrito nella poesia di Ramat,’’ in Poesia italiana del Novecento: Da Ungaretti alla terza generazione, vol. 2, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. De Giovanni, Neria, Da Sebastiano Satta a Eugenio Montale. Studi sulla poesia italiana del Novecento, Pisa: Giardini, 1984. Giunta, Elio, Antideologia e linguaggio: Discorso sui testi di Ramat e Cattafi, Palermo: Vittorietti, 1979. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Silvio Ramat,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography: Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, edited by Giovanna Wedel De Stasio, Glauco Cambon, and Antonio Illiano, Detroit: Bruccoli, Clark & Layman, 1993.

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FRANCA RAME

FRANCA RAME (1929–) Franca Rame was born into a traditional theater family who can trace their history as a touring family-company in northern Italy back to the seventeenth century. Franca made her stage debut eight days after her birth in Genoveffa by Brabante. In her teens, she joined a major Milanese theater troupe, the Compagnia di Prosa Tino Scotti, and in the revue Sette giorni a Milano (Seven Days in Milan, 1951) by Spiller and Carosso, she met Dario Fo, a fellow performer. Their personal and professional lives have since been inseparable. This union of minds makes it difficult to identify and assess the precise nature and extent of Rame’s contribution to the couple’s output and performance style. From her debut in Marcello Marchesi’s Ghe pensi mi at the Teatro Olimpia in Milan (Compagnia Tino Scotti), there was no doubt over her acting talents, and it may even be that her association with Fo, whose playwriting is based on the farcical and grotesque, has prevented her developing as an actress in serious or even tragic roles. In the 1950s, she appeared in around a dozen films, among them Papaveri e papere (Poppies and Ducks, 1952), directed by Marchesi, and performed with established companies, taking a part in King Lear (1955; directed by Fantasio Piccolo) at the Teatro Stabile in Bolzano, with the then celebrated ‘‘great actor’’ Memo Benassi. In her early performances with Fo, she took the conventional female role, accepting essentially ‘‘decorative’’ parts. In the mid-1970s, when she had established herself as one of Italy’s leading feminists, both in theater and in society, she was self-critical over these ‘‘vamp’’ roles. On the archetypal role of bella svampita, her characterization of Dafne in Chi ruba un piede e` fortunato in amore (He Who Steals a Foot Is Lucky in Love, 1961) is exemplary. She was self-effacingly indispensable to Fo’s development and used her instinct for the workings of theater, grasp of performance rhythms, and sense of audience reactions. In 1953, she performed in Fo’s first revue, Il dito nell’occhio (A Poke in the Eye), and was given equal standing when, in 1958, they set up the Compagnia Fo-Rame. This troupe staged two programs of Fo’s one-acts plays at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro and, after an unsuccessful interval in Rome when they tried to make their way 1544

in cinema, the same company put on his six socalled ‘‘bourgeois’’ comedies (1959–1968). In each of these she played the female lead, with parts that grew more demanding and more central, both in terms of plot and politics. In Settimo, ruba un po’ meno (Seventh: Steal a Little Less, 1964), a denunciation of corruption in public life where she was required to switch roles from the ingenue who spoke to the dead to a seeming prostitute and then a nun, her part was of greater importance than Fo’s. They were jointly invited to present the television show Canzonissima in 1962 and attained national fame and notoriety when they walked off the set after a management refusal to allow them to put on a sketch judged too political. The couple broke with ‘‘bourgeois theater’’ in 1968 and established politically minded cooperatives, Nuova scena (1968–1969) and La Comune (1970–1973). Rame was fully occupied in multiple roles, as lead actress, principal administrator, and manager of the companies whose prime business was touring, but she was also editor, transcriber, and publisher of the scripts. As writer, Fo showed little interest in his texts once the run was over, so it was she who chose between the various rewrites, alterations, and modifications Fo made during rehearsals, and she who produced the final draft for publication. It was a creative, not mechanical, task, and if the plays started life as Fo’s, they ended as Rame’s. Her input was recognized in the final volumes of the collected works that carry her name alongside Fo’s. The switch to political cooperative coincided with the rise of the women’s liberation movement, and Rame undertook political as well as theatrical initiatives of her own. In 1972, with the terrorist campaign underway, she established Soccorso Rosso (Red Aid) to offer practical support for detainees and their families. Although she totally dissociated herself from all violence, she became the object of vilification in the right-wing press and in 1973 was kidnapped and raped by a group of neo-Fascists acting, as was later established by an investigation conducted by Judge Guido Salvini, with the connivance of the police. As regards to her female parts in the plays written by Fo, the part of Antonia in Non si paga! Non

FRANCA RAME si paga (We Can’t Pay? We Won’t Pay!, 1974) may be taken as a turning point. In it, Antonia takes charge of the action, ridiculing the dependence of the men on policy lines dictated by the Communist party and instigating debates not only the impact of inflation—the main theme of the play—but also on the role of women. The focus is on the condition of women inside the family rather than in society, and both Fo and Rame agreed that a theater like theirs had to give more serious consideration to wider questions regarding women. By her own account, Rame’s own early efforts at writing plays were not successful, so she coaxed Fo into writing pieces for her but rejected his first efforts (Dario Fo, Il teatro politico di Dario Fo, 1977). She then provided ideas for him to turn into drama, and these became the one-woman monologues given the overall title, Tutto casa, letto e chiesa (Female Parts, 1978). In one, Una donna sola (A Woman Alone), the woman is surrounded by the paraphernalia of domestic drudgery and is tormented both by a priapic brother-in-law who is encased in plaster and by an intrusive peeping tom of a neighbor. As the scene closes she sits down with a rifle over her knee, waiting for her husband to return. In spite of that, Rame was too much of a socialist to have any sympathy with antimale feminism and remained of the view that both sexes suffered exploitation in an oppressive society. She held feminists in high regard and joined in divorce and abortion campaigns but was chary of the use of the word ‘‘feminism.’’ In turn, some feminists kept her at a wary distance, criticizing the centrality of traditional mother figure in her plays, whether the Passion sketches in Mistero buffo or such monologues as Il risveglio (Waking Up). Other notions current at the time, such as free love or open relationships, had no attraction for her, as the play Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (The Open Couple—Very Open, 1983) makes clear. In spite of her initial doubts over her own abilities, Rame has written several pieces of her own. Lo stupro (The Rape, 1975), a powerful monologue based on her own appalling experience, is wholly hers, and in 1991 she wrote two further one-act plays, L’eroina (Heroin/Heroine) and Grasso e` bello! (Fat Is Beautiful!). In L’eroina, she found a distinct voice with a play set in some Beckettian wasteland, which eschews the farcical tone in favor of an unremittingly darker mood. She has since played Pizzocca in Fo’s Il diavolo con le zinne (The Devil in Drag), produced in 1997 with Giorgio Albertazzi and toured with Fo to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their artistic partnership.

Biography Franca Rame was born in Parabiago (Milan), 18 July 1929, to Domenico and Emilia Baldini, in a family of touring performers; she performed on stage as child. In 1947, the family company dissolved, following her father’s stroke. In 1950, she joined the Tino Scotti theater company in Milan and met Dario Fo. During the 1950s, she appeared in around a dozen films. In 1953, she began a professional collaboration with Fo in a satirical revue cowritten with him. In 1954, she married Fo; their son Jacopo was born in 1955. In 1958, the Compagnia Fo-Rame was founded. In 1959– 1968, Rame took the female lead in a series of comedies in Fo’s ‘‘bourgeois period.’’ In 1968, they broke with commercial theater to set up first Nuova Scena (1968–1970), then La Comune (1970– 1973), militant theater cooperatives. In 1972, Rame founded Soccorso Rosso, to assist families of political prisoners in Italian jails. In 1973, Rame was kidnapped and raped in Milan by a group of neoFascist thugs. In 1977, Italian television broadcast her first monologues on the condition of women; 1977–1978 also marked the first one-woman performance of Tutto casa, letto e chiesa. In 1980, 20 episodes of Buonasera con Franca Rame were shown on TV. She toured widely (Canada, Denmark, Germany) by herself or with Fo, but appearing in her own right. In 1987, she announced on television her separation from Fo, but the two soon reconciled. In 1991, a premiere was shown of the double bill L’eroina and Grasso e` bello, written by Rame; 1994 saw the premiere of Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire, a humorous, educational one-woman show, written in collaboration with Jacopo and Dario Fo. In 2004 the controversial L’anomalo bicefalo was written and presented by Fo and Rame. Rame lives in Milan. JOSEPH FARRELL See also: Dario Fo Selected Works The majority of the works of Dario Fo and Franca Rame are collected in the 13-volume Einaudi edition (1974– 1998). The following volumes contain works cosigned by Rame.

Collections Le commedie di Dario Fo, vol. 8, contains Venticinque monologhi per una donna, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Le commedie, vol. 9, contains Una giornata qualunque; Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata; and other shorter plays and monologues, Turin: Einaudi, 1991.

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FRANCA RAME Le commedie, vol. 13, contains Parliamo di donne; Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire; and several other monologues, Turin: Einaudi, 1998.

Plays and Dramatic Monologues Tutta casa, letto e chiesa (produced 1977), 1978; revised with a prologue by Rame, 1981; as Female Parts, translated by Margaret Kunzle, 1981; as A Woman Alone and Other Plays, edited by Stuart Hood, 1991. Parti femminili: Una giornata qualunque and Una coppia aperta (produced 1986), 1987; as An Ordinary Day, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1990, and as The Open Couple, translated by Stuart Hood, 1990. Parliamo di donne 2: L’eroina and Grasso e` bello! (produced 1991), 1992. Sesso? Grazie, tanto per gradire (produced 1994), 1994.

Further Reading Abbiezzi, Mario (editor), La stagione delle stragi. Il caso di Franca Rame: Piazza Fontana, Milan: Comitato per il Sessantennale della Liberazione da Nazifascisimo, 2004. Anderlini, Serena, ‘‘Franca Rame: Her Life and Works,’’ Theater, 17:1 (1985), 32–40.

Colombo, Enzo, and Orlando Piraccini (editors), Pupazzi con rabbia e sentimento: La vita e l’arte di Dario Fo e Franca Rame, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1998. D’Arcangeli, Luciana, ‘‘Franca Rame: Pedestal, Megaphone or Female Jester?’’ in Research Papers on Dario Fo and Franca Rame, edited by Ed Emery, London: Red Notes, 2002. Farrell, Joseph, Dario Fo and Franca Rame: Harlequins of the Revolution, London: Methuen, 2001. Fo, Dario, Il teatro politico di Dario Fo, Milan: Mazzotta, 1977. Gunsberg, Maggie, ‘‘Centrestage: Franca Rame’s Female Parts,’’ in Gender and the Italian Stage: From the Renaissance to the Present Day, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hirst, David, Dario Fo and Franca Rame, London: Macmillan, 1989. Valeri, Walter, ‘‘Franca Rame autrice e attrice,’’ Sipario, 528 (November 1992), 12–15. Valeri, Walter (editor), Franca Rame: A Woman on Stage, West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 2000. Wood, Sharon, ‘‘Parliamo di donne: Feminism and Politics in the Theater of Franca Rame,’’ in Dario Fo: Stage, Text, and Tradition, edited by Joseph Farrell and Antonio Scuderi, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

FABRIZIA RAMONDINO (1936–) The city of Naples is the privileged protagonist in Fabrizia Ramondino’s works. In her collection of autobiographical stories, Star di casa (Feeling at Home, 1991), she wrote: ‘‘Napoli usa seguire i suoi concittadini dovunque, come un’ombra, se si trasferiscono altrove.... Napoli, dove e` cosı` difficile vivere e che invoglia tanto a partire, che e` cosı` difficile da abbandonare e che costringe sempre a tornare, diventa, piu` di molti altri, il luogo emblematico di una generale condizione umana nel nostro tempo: trovarsi su un inabitabile pianeta, ma sapere che e` l’unico dove per ora possiamo star di casa’’ (Naples follows its citizens everywhere, like a shadow, if they move elsewhere.... Thus Naples, where it is so difficult to live and which induces one so much to leave, which is so difficult to abandon and which compels one to return, becomes, more than other places, the emblematic place of the general human condition of our time: to find oneself on an uninhabitable planet and yet to know that this is the only one that for the time being we can call home.) 1546

Defining herself in her 1989 collection Dadapolis as ‘‘una napoletana che e` vissuta anche altrove’’ (a Neapolitan who has lived in other places), Ramondino keeps returning to her place of origin, literally and metaphorically, as if pursued by it. In the process, her identity is always transformed, recomposed, and reconstituted as a nomadic consciousness. Traveling is described in In viaggio (Traveling, 1995) as one of the most creative experiences because it involves resituating the boundaries and negotiating between home and abroad. In the 1960s, she had a profound existential crisis from which she recovered by opening an evening school for workers and a kindergarten where she worked full time until 1966. Through her social and political activism she came to discover the ‘‘other’’ Naples, of which she had caught a glimpse through the servants who worked in her family home. For Ramondino, Naples is one of the main components of her own self. The city is the place where the literary themes of her works are situated: memory,

FABRIZIA RAMONDINO displacement, loss, childhood, sexuality, relationships, gender roles, and the past. Autobiography and memory intersect as significant elements in narratives about culture, language, and identity. However, Ramondino’s concept of home does not presume the uniqueness of the Neapolitan community or exclude forms of otherness. Because of its cultural hybridism, Naples is clearly open to cosmopolitanism and cross-cultural fragmentation. By returning to her cultural origin, Ramondino is rescuing the past to transform the present. Ramondino inherited the rich legacy of authors who wrote about Naples and its culture, such as Matilde Serao, Eduardo de Filippo, Giuseppe Marotta, Domenico Rea, Raffaele La Capria, and Anna Maria Ortese. What distinguishes Ramondino is her vantage point as an outsider. As the daughter of Neopolitan parents who spent the first years of her life in Majorca, an island off the coast of Spain, Ramondino is not completely Neapolitan. Nevertheless, having spent the later years of her childhood in Naples, she knows the city and its culture well enough to describe them also as an insider. Her transitional status does not create a feeling of displacement but becomes instead a privileged point of view, making her almost a nomad among languages, cultures, and social classes. In her first autobiographical novel, Althe´nopis (1981)—literally ‘‘occhio di vecchia’’ (eye of the old woman), a variation on Partenope, ‘‘occhio di vergine’’ (eye of the virgin), which is what the Germans called Naples during the war—Ramondino recounted her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in Naples through an interweaving of firstperson and third-person narrations. The novel is a portrait of Neapolitan life and an account of the difficult relationship between the narratorprotagonist—a young girl from the middle class in the immediate postwar years—and her mother. Both the mother and the city become the focus of the narrative, which is characterized by concrete descriptions—scents, tastes, bodily odors, and bodily functions—and Proustian epiphanies of an involuntary memory. Taccuino tedesco (German Notebook, 1987) focuses on the condition of the migrant. Even though the novel is an account of the period Ramondino spent in Germany between the ages of 18 and 21, she frequently referred to Naples. A young woman’s encounter with German culture gives her an alternative perspective on the world. In trying to define her ambitions and objectives, she ends up rejecting both the model of Mediterranean

womanhood and the materialist northern ideology of work and money making and decides to become a writer. She wrote: ‘‘scoprivo l’unico modo possible per me di sfuggire a quella legge del mondo, verso la quale provavo una segreta ripugnanza: scrivere significava diventare adulta a mio modo, non al loro’’ (I found out the only possible way for me to escape the law of the world, toward which I was feeling an inner disgust: to write for me meant to become an adult in my own way, not theirs). In Storie di patio (Patio Stories, 1983), Ramondino expressed her repugnance for women’s retrograde condition in Naples while critiquing their ambiguous position in the Neapolitan matriarchal system. She showed how matriarchy does not increase women’s power or women’s solidarity but rather perpetuates the ideological basis of patriarchy. The ten short stories Il calore (The Heat, 2004) are an attempt to define a more open and flexible idea of southern culture without romanticizing it. In Ramondino’s writing, the spaces and characters of the South become a metaphor for the human condition.

Biography Fabrizia Ramondino was born in Naples, 30 August 1936, and moved to Majorca as a baby because her father had been appointed Italian Consul there. She returned to Naples when she was eight and moved to France in 1948. She went back to Naples after her father’s death, 1949, but lived in Germany between 1954 and 1957. She lived in Milan and Rome before moving back to Naples in 1960. In 1980, when her Neapolitan home was destroyed by the earthquake, she moved to Itri in the province of Latina. Ramondino was awarded the Flaiano Literary Prize, 2000, and the Pasolini Poetry Award to Per un sentiero chiaro, 2004. She currently lives between Itri and Naples. PATRIZIA LA TRECCHIA See also: Naples Selected Works Fiction Althe´nopis, 1981; as Althe´nopis, translated by Michael Sullivan, 1988. Storie di patio, 1983. Star di casa, 1991. In viaggio, 1995. La signora di Son Batle, 1997. L’isola riflessa, 1998.

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FABRIZIA RAMONDINO Guerra d’infanzia e di Spagna, 2001. Il calore, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Per un sentiero chiaro,’’ 2004.

Other Napoli, i disoccupati organizzati: i protagonisti raccontano, 1977. Taccuino tedesco, 1987. Dadapolis: caleidoscopio napoletano, 1989. Morte di un matematico napoletano (with Mario Martone), 1992. Terremoto con madre e figlia, 1994. Polisario: un’astronave dimenticata nel deserto, 1997. Ci dicevano analfabeti. Il movimento dei disoccupati napoletani negli anni 70, 1998. L’isola dei bambini, 1998. Polisario, 2000. Passaggio a Trieste, 2000. Bagnoli. Lo smantellamento dell’Italsider (with Rossana Rossanda), 2000. Il libro dei sogni, 2002.

Further Reading D’Episcopo, Francesco, Luigi Lamberti, and Pina Lamberti Sorrentino, ‘‘Fabrizia Ramondino,’’ in Napoli salvata dai suoi scrittori, vol. 2, Naples: Edizioni Tempo Lungo, 2002. Farnetti, Monica, Il centro della cattedrale: i ricordi d’infanzia nella scrittura femminile. Dolores Prato, Fabrizia Ramondino, Anna Maria Ortese, Cristina Campo, Ginevra Bompiani, Mantua: Tre lune, 2002.

Giorgio, Adalgisa, ‘‘A Feminist Family Romance: Mothers, Daughter and Female Genealogy in Fabrizia Ramondino’s Althe´nopis,’’ Italianist, 11 (1991), 128–149. Giorgio, Adalgisa, ‘‘Moving across Boundaries: Identity and Difference in the Work of Fabrizia Ramondino,’’ Italianist, 18 (1998), 170–186. Giorgio, Adalgisa, ‘‘Narrazione come denuncia: atti narrativi di donna ne ‘La signora di Son Batle,’’’ in Les Femmes e´crivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles, edited by Marie-Anne Rubat du Me´rac, Aix-enProvence: Universite´ de Provence, 1993. Lucamante, Stefania, ‘‘Le scelte dell’autofiction: Il romanzo della memoria contro il potere della Storia,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 25 (1998), 367–381. Lucamante, Stefania, ‘‘Tra romanzo e autobiografia, il caso di Fabrizia Ramondino,’’ Modern Language Notes, 112:1 (1997), 105–113. Marotti, Maria Ornella, ‘‘Ethnic Matriarchy: Fabrizia Ramondino’s Neapolitan World,’’ in Italian Women Writers from the Renaissance to the Present: Revising the Canon, edited by Maria Ornella Marotti, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Marotti, Maria, ‘‘Filial Discourse; Feminism and Femininity in Italian Women’s Autobiography,’’ in Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy, edited by Giovanna Miceli Jeffries, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Knox, Susanna, ‘‘Framing Fantasy: Fairy Tale and Literary Tradition in Ramondino’s Storie di patio,’’ Italianist, 18 (1998), 187–212. Usher, Jonathan, ‘‘Fabrizia Ramondino: The Muse of Memory,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

ELISABETTA RASY (1947–) Elisabetta Rasy is one of the most prominent figures of contemporary Italian literature as well as an important contributor to the feminist movement and the main follower of Julia Kristeva’s theories in Italy. A writer with eclectic and diverse interests, during her career she has established herself as an author of novels, short stories, and essays, as well as a contributor to many important newspapers and cultural periodicals. Her language is characterized by a rejection of immediate referentiality, which makes her narrative texts emblematically evocative. Although she agrees that the experience of the neo-avant-garde has cast a dull light on traditional narrative forms, she also acknowledges 1548

her debt toward avant-garde literature and cinema and baroque painting. In the early 1970s, after the economic boom and following the revolutionary impetus of the late 1960s, Rasy became involved with the feminist movement and fought in the most important social battles of the times, such as those over the referenda legalizing divorce and abortion. During that period, she joined the group of the Teatro della Maddalena, the all-women theater collective in Rome founded by Dacia Maraini. In 1975, she cofounded the first publishing house devoted to women’s writing, the Edizioni delle donne, with Anne Marie Boetti, Maria Caronia, and Manuela

ELISABETTA RASY Fraire. In 1978, she published her first collection of short essays, La lingua della nutrice: percorsi e tracce dell’espressione femminile (The Nurse’s Language: Paths and Traces of a Female Expression), in which she echoed Kristeva’s semiotic notion of a presymbolic maternal state to escape the construction of a female consciousness ordered by a masculine language that supports the formation of a unified female identity (in fact, Kristeva wrote the introduction to the volume). In 1984, Rasy wrote Le donne e la letteratura (Women and Literature), in which she gave reasons for the long exclusion of women’s writing from the literary canon and provided a clear overview of the relationship between literature and feminism, women’s writing and literary genres. The following year she published La prima estasi (The First Ecstasy), with an introduction by Valerio Magrelli. The novel not only shows Rasy’s interest in mystical writings but also addresses the relation between a sense of the absolute and the prelinguistic space that young Teresa reaches through the mortification of her body and the pursuit of silence. Rasy’s close acquaintance with the French intellectual milieu of the 1970s and 1980s and her interest in psychoanalysis led to the publication in 1988 of Il finale della battaglia (The End of the Battle), in which an apparent dialogue between two former World War I soldiers reveals itself to be a careful reflection on the forms of narration. Her third novel, L’altra amante (The Other Lover, 1990), inspired by Honore´ de Balzac’s La fausse Maitresse (1841) is, as she herself stated in a closing note, an act of ‘‘appropriation’’ moved by a pietas for a character, the fausse maitresse, whom Rasy wanted to rescue from her marginal, silent place in the French text. After a collection of short stories, Mezzi di trasporto (Means of Transportation, 1993), Rasy returned to essay writing with the critically acclaimed Ritratti di Signora (Portraits of Ladies, 1995), which was short-listed for the prestigious Premio Strega. Here Rasy traced the youth of three of the most important Italian women writers, Matilde Serao, Ada Negri, and Grazia Deledda, in a work that shows a mature author dealing with writing as a means for voicing what is silenced, for revealing what is denied. After the partially autobiographical novel Posillipo (Posillipo, 1997), with its fusion of fantastic and real, Rasy published L’ombra della luna (The Shadow of the Moon, 1999) and Tra noi due (Between Us Two, 2002). In the former, the relevance of women’s actions returns to the fore, as historical events mingle with fictional data to highlight

Rasy’s notion that autobiographical elements only serve as a source for the creation of a new form. L’ombra della luna restages the experiences of Mary Wollstonecraft during the French Revolution, while in Tra noi due, Rasy started again from her own biographical experiences in Rome to embark on another journey that articulates a new literary form by means of carefully chosen words and that rejects the purely mimetic function of language to construct a powerfully evocative prose. Her latest work, La scienza degli addii (The Science of Farewells, 2005), is a historical novel set against the background of the Russian Revolution and the Stalinist terror, in which the story of the love between the poet Osip Mandelstam and the beautiful dancer Nadezda Chazina serves as a meditation on the conflict between individual lives and the pressures of history.

Biography Elisabetta Rasy was born in Rome on 16 September 1947. She spent her childhood in Naples, then studied art history at the University of Rome with Cesare Brandi and Carlo Giulio Argan. She graduated with a dissertation on Pietro da Cortona, 1970, and married that same year. She was divorced, 1975. Also in 1975, she cofounded the publishing house Edizioni delle Donne. Rasy worked as a journalist for Paese Sera, La stampa, L’espresso, and Il corriere della sera. Her son Carlo was born, 1980. She became a cofounder of the journal Panda with Pier Vittorio Tondelli and Alan Elkan, 1988. She collaborated with many journals, including Nuovi Argomenti, Marcatre´, Paragone, Filmcritica, L’erba voglio, and Il piccolo Hans. She was awarded the Premio Mondello Opera Prima and Premio Milano–Amica for La prima estasi, 1985; Ritratti di Signora was shortlisted for the Premio Strega, 1995; she was awarded the Campiello Prize and Premio Napoli for Posillipo, 1997; and she was awarded the Premio Donna Citta` di Roma for L’ombra della luna, 1999. MARIA LAURA MOSCO See also: Feminist Theory and Criticism Selected Works Novels La prima estasi, 1985. Il finale della battaglia, 1988. L’altra amante, 1990. Posillipo, 1997.

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ELISABETTA RASY L’ombra della luna, 1999. Tra noi due, 2002. La scienza degli addii, 2005.

Short Stories ‘‘Mezzi di trasporto,’’ 1993.

Essays La lingua della nutrice: percorsi e tracce dell’espressione femminile, 1978. Le donne e la letteratura, 1984. Ritratti di signora, 1995. Esercizi di lettura, 1996. Succede a Roma, illustrated by Giosetta Fioroni, 2004.

Further Reading Bono, Paola, and Sandra Kemp (editors), Italian Feminist Thought: A Reader, Oxford, U.K., and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991. Guidoni, Christiane, ‘‘Elisabetta Rasy: Un desir qui aurait pour toujours perdu son objet,’’ in Les femmes e´crivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles, edited by

Marie-Anne Rubat du Me´rac, Aix en Provence: Universite´ de Provance, 1993. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing, 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Marchesi, Daniela, ‘‘Elisabetta Rasy e i suoi ‘mezzi di trasporto,’’’ Il Verri, 1–2(1995), 129–136. Panizza, Letizia, and Sharon Wood (editors), A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Puccianti, Tatiana, ‘‘Elisabetta Rasy entre autobiographie et autoanalyse,’’ in E´critures autobiographiques, edited by Giuditta Isotti Rosowsky, Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincienne, 1997. Tani, Stefano, ‘‘In attesa del nuovo: riflessione e metanarrativa,’’ in Il romanzo di ritorno: dal romanzo medio degli anni sessanta alla giovane narrativa degli anni ottanta, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Westphal, Bertrand, ‘‘Relire Balzac: De La Fausse Maıˆtresse a` l’autre maıˆtresse d’Elisabetta Rasy,’’ Revue de Litte´rature Compare´e, 67:4(1993), 513–517. Wood, Sharon, Italian Women’s Writing. 1860–1994, London and Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone, 1995.

LIDIA RAVERA (1951–) Lidia Ravera’s novelistic career began with the novel-diary Porci con le ali. Diario sessuo-politico di due adolescenti (Pigs Have Wings, 1976), coauthored with Marco Lombardo Radice. Republished numerous times, translated into several languages, adapted for the silver screen by Paolo Pietrangeli in 1977, Porci con le ali stands out among the best sellers—and ‘‘long-sellers’’—of the last 30 years not only for its evident literary merits but also because it constitutes an important social document of post-1968 Italy, a tranche de vie of the generation of adolescents that was at the center of the movement of 1977 and, finally, a phenomenon that has attracted the attention of sociologists of literature, in particular Alberto Abruzzese, who has offered an insightful analysis in his essay ‘‘Antagonismo e subalternita` nella produzione di scrittura’’ (1983). Ravera was thus in danger of remaining forever tied to her first work as the sole evidence of her literary activity. In fact, she has achieved expressive maturity, formal equilibrium, and incisiveness of narration in the following 30 years. 1550

Nevertheless, Porci con le ali certainly was the cradle where many of the narrative topics dear to her first manifested themselves: adolescence as an unhappy and problematic age; the foundational relationship between parents and children; the passage from one season of life to another; the inability to live wisely through the experience of aging; the possibility of renewing oneself, of starting afresh at any moment; the dimension of organized social time, in particular that of the holidays, as a space-time in which one can let all of one’s energies loose. Porci con le ali is thus the point of departure of a long writing experience and not only a unique literary phenomenon. In the first place, it is the story of the sexual initiation of two adolescents, structured through a denial of the dynamics of the bildungsroman. Rocco and Antonia are two bourgeois high school students in Rome who share vague, distracted political ideas and live their social engagement without a real participation, although they accept the ideology of the left-wing youth protest. They

LIDIA RAVERA live through the anni di piombo and the experiences of student collectives but also suffer the confusion of a whole generation and are closed within themselves, unable to engage in a dialogue with the generation of their parents. The story of their sexual experiences is told through the structure of both narrative and the diary, with the insertion of monologues and exchanges of letters. The fundamental theme of the novel is thus sex, experimented by the two protagonists as a fantasy and as autoeroticism, while the politicized environment in which they live considers sexuality and affection useless and possibly even harmful. Their thoughts often relate to their erotic impulses, expressed through the repetition of obscenities pronounced with a childish anger and with a verbal rebelliousness inflected by youth slang (one of the catchier elements for the reader). For both, sexual fantasies are the expression of an immediate and instinctual reaction to a presente scialbo (dim present), even though they have never been really attracted to one another. They share a tender but superficial and shortlived relationship. The story closes with the free experiences of both after the end of their liaison and with their attempt to make peace with one another—probably not for the last time. In her later works, Ravera has continued to develop, with an increasing stylistic maturity, the narrative themes already present in her first work. In Maledetta gioventu` (Damn Youth, 1999), for instance, she investigated the narrow but profound borders that divide the seasons of life with truly penetrating descriptions and dialogues full of implications and unspoken meanings. The characters, Carlo, his young lover Mimı`, his wife Linda, and their two children, are all searching for a reason to live that can save them from personal unhappiness and from the loss of traditional familial and affective roles, but all seem incapable of meeting the demands of their inner age. Linda organizes a long, liberating journey, while the other members of the family live a life cut up into many uncontrollable events. It remains doubtful whether the characters will be able to re-create authentic relationships. In Il freddo dentro (The Cold Within, 2003), Ravera took her subject from a recent news story, the double murder in Novi Ligure of a mother and her little son committed by her own daughter and her boyfriend, all within the respectable confines of a Piedmontese family. With an essential, necessary, and pitiless writing, Ravera demonstrated the incomprehensibility of the murder and above all the uselessness of the

deluge of words produced by the mass media. Inevitably, the events will be forgotten and set aside, and it will thus become impossible to understand the tragic nature of the two young criminals.

Biography Lidia Ravera was born in Turin on 6 February 1951; after university, she moved to Rome, 1975. She has written screenplays for cinema and television for directors such as Giuseppe Bertolucci, Dino Risi, and Mario Orfini, as well as texts for the theater. She contributes to numerous newspapers and periodicals, including L’Unita`, Donna, and Moda. At the end of the 1970s, she created the first Italian sit-com, entitled ‘‘Casa Cecilia.’’ Since 2001, she has organized in Maratea (Potenza) the annual congress ‘‘Chi ha paura delle vacanze?’’ with the participation of writers, sociologists, philosophers, historians, and anthropologists. She has a son and a daughter with Mimmo Rafele. She has won several awards, including the Premio Milano for narrative. Her Porci con le ali has sold over two million copies. Lidia Ravera lives in Rome. GIORGIO TAFFON Selected Works Novels Porci con le ali. Diario sessuo-politico di due adolescenti, with Marco Lombardo Radice, under the pseudonyms of Rocco and Antonia, 1976; as Pigs Have Wings, translated by Jane Sebastian, 1977. Bambino mio, 1979. Bagna i fiori e aspettami, 1986. Per funghi, 1987. Se lo dico perdo l’America, 1988. Voi grandi, 1990. Due volte vent’anni, 1992. Il paese di Eseap, 1994. Nessuno al suo posto, 1996. Maledetta gioventu`, 1999. Ne´ giovani, ne´ vecchi, 2000. La festa e` finita, 2002. Il paese all’incontrario, 2002. Il freddo dentro, 2003.

Short Stories ‘‘Sorelle,’’ 1994. ‘‘I compiti delle vancanze,’’ 1997. ‘‘Un inverno fiorito e altre storie,’’ 2001.

Other In quale nascondiglio del cuore: lettera a un figlio adolescente, 1995. In fondo a sinistra, 2005.

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LIDIA RAVERA Further Reading Abruzzese, Alberto, ‘‘Antagonismo e subalternita` nella produzione di scrittura,’’ Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Produzione e consumo, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Mazza, Antonia, ‘‘Quattordicenne solo e fin troppo adulto,’’ Letture, 10 (1996), 41–42. Muraro, Luisa, ‘‘Elogio della superficialita`,’’ Quaderni piacentini, 67–68 (1978), 165–167.

Spinazzola, Vittorio, ‘‘Dal romanzo popolare alla narrativa di intrattenimento,’’ in Manuale di letteratura italiana. Storia per generi e problemi, edited by Franco Brioschi and Costanzo Di Girolamo, vol. 4, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. Vittori, Maria Vittoria, ‘‘Scrittrici del Novecento,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, edited by Walter Pedulla` and Nino Borsellino, vol. 14, Milan: Federico Motta Editore-Gruppo Editoriale L’Espresso, 2004.

DOMENICO REA (1921–1994) Domenico Rea’s writings typically focus on the reality and life of the poor of Naples and the Mezzogiorno, through a new moral and ideological vision that offers authentic cultural perspectives. In the tradition of the neo-Realist storytellers, Rea represented the injustices, miseries, and atavistic suffering of the lowest classes, by adopting more open forms that convey more concrete and popular themes. Rea transmitted with immediacy the passions, hopes, emotions, and vitality that animated Neapolitans after World War II. An autodidact of humble origins, he read voraciously and turned his attention not only to American and Russian storytellers but also to Italian fiction, starting with Boccaccio, while absorbing the influence of the realists as well. Rea’s first short fiction, La figlia di Casimiro Clarus (The Daughter of Casimiro Clarus), which was published in Mercurio in 1945, was favorably reviewed. It recounts the story of a love affair between a schoolteacher and the daughter of a rich landowner. The following collections of short stories established him as a neo-Realist. They comprise the memorable tales of Spaccanapoli (The Spaccanapoli Quarter, 1947), with their mixing of Neapolitan dialect and Italian; Gesu` fate luce (Jesus, Shed Your Light, 1950); Ritratto di maggio (A Portrait of May, 1953), which follows the destinies of the subjects of a junior school photo; and the long short story Quel che vide Cummeo (What Cummeo Saw, 1955). Some important historical factors affected the evolution of Rea’s narrative art, specifically the years of the ‘‘interregnum,’’ a term that applies to the period that elapsed between

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the Allied forces’ occupation of Naples and the post-Liberation period. According to Rea, this historical moment was of paramount importance because it created an opportunity for the people to escape from their bassi (poor living quarters) and aspire to higher social conditions. Rea’s narratives reflect their spirit, their most hidden passions, their preliterate world, which is both intricate and complicated. Indeed, Rea’s talent appears at its best in the short story, a cross between sketch and essay, in which the language spoken by his lower-class protagonists emerges with immediacy but also discloses cultured stylistic features, along with dialogue that combines vivacity and theatricality. From the late 1950s, along with the journalistic prose that was later collected in Il re e il lustrascarpe (The King and the Shoeshine, 1960), Rea wrote the novel Una vampata di rossore (A Blush of Shame, 1959), which marks a creative crisis. The novel tells the story of a family facing terminal cancer. In a narration filled with dolorous and funereal tones, there is the world of Nocera, the threat of poverty, as well as of individual dramas and the memory of figures such as the dying mother, who are rendered with expressive power. After 1959, Rea’s narrative activity slowed with his foundation of Le ragioni narrative, a journal where he published essays but also wrote articles and inquiries as well. He took up creative writing again with La signora e` una vagabonda (The Lady Is a Vagabond, 1968), in which he attempted to analyze with caustic irony the condition of a bourgeois lady during the years of the Italian economic boom. In 1971 he published a second collection of journalistic

DOMENICO REA writings entitled Diario napoletano (Neapolitan Diary). In Tentazione e altri racconti (Temptation and Other Stories, 1976), Rea combined fables, short stories, and chronicles, almost all of which had already appeared in newspapers and magazines. In these works, he reread inert everyday figures with an ironic and detached attitude, without, however, undertaking an analysis of the causes of this social immobility. To the cynicism and indifference that animate a variety of opulent figures in ‘‘La preghiera della sera’’ (The Evening Prayer) or in ‘‘Padri e figli’’ (Fathers and Sons), Rea preferred the humanity of those who live in the grottos of Matera, about whom he wrote in ‘‘I sassi di Matera’’ (The Stones of Matera). His portraits reveal the need for the emancipation from a social condition made up of servitude and exploitation. Rea also wrote more stories collected in Fondaco nudo (The Empty Warehouse, 1985), in which he confirmed another degree of stylistic maturity. This is evident in the power of thought of his last novel, Ninfa plebea (Plebian Nymph, 1992), which introduces erotic motifs alien from his earlier work. Domenico Rea remains one of the more prominent Neapolitan writers of the neo-Realist style. He also composed historical and literary essays, which are gathered in Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio (Do Good for the Souls of Purgatory, 1973)— among them, ‘‘Boccaccio a Napoli’’ (Boccaccio in Naples) captures true Neapolitan psychology—and plays. The early Le formiche rosse (Red Ants, 1948) is an experimental family drama, while the comedy Re Mida (King Midas), a mythical and allegorical fable, was staged in 1979.

Biography Domenico Rea was born in Nocera Inferiore (Naples), on 8 September 1921. He was self-taught. An eclectic writer, he gave voice to the reality of lower-class Naples without indulging in stereotypes. Along with Mario Pomilio and Michele Prisco, he edited the journal Le ragioni narrative. In 1951 he won the Viareggio Prize for Gesu`, fate luce and in 1992 the Strega Prize for Ninfa plebea. Rea died in Naples on 26 January 1994. CARLO SANTOLI

Selected Works Collections Opere, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1959–1965.

Fiction La figlia di Casimiro Clarus, 1945. Spaccanapoli, 1947. Il confinato, 1949. Le due Napoli, 1950. Gesu`, fate luce, 1950. Ritratto di maggio, 1953. Quel che vide Cummeo, 1955. Una vampata di rossore, 1959; as A Blush of Shame, translated by Maureen Duffy, 1963. La signora e` una vagabonda, 1968. Tentazione e altri racconti, 1976. Il fondaco nudo, 1985. Ninfa plebea, 1992.

Plays Le formicole rosse, 1948. Re Mida, 1979.

Nonfiction Il re e il lustrascarpe, 1960. Diario napoletano, 1971. Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio, 1973. Pensieri della notte, 1987. Il calcolo e la furia, 1989. Il valzer dei mendicanti e altri scritti, 1989. Crescendo napoletano, 1990.

Further Reading Butcher, John, ‘‘A proposito dell’esordio letterario di Domenico Rea,’’ Il Lettore di Provincia, 119–120 (2004), 121–127. Butcher, John, ‘‘Storia di Una vampata di rossore di Domenico Rea,’’ Riscontri, 4 (2004), 9–52. Contarini, Silvia, ‘‘Narrare Napoli, anni Cinquanta: Domenico Rea, Anna Maria Ortese, Raffaele La Capria, Erri De Luca,’’ Narrativa, 24 (2003), 159–172. Di Consoli, Andrea, Le due Napoli di Domenico Rea, Milan: UNICOPLI, 2002. Jouakim, Mino, Peccati geniali: ritratto di Domenico Rea, Naples: Pironti, 1995. Manacorda, Giuliano, ‘‘Domenico Rea,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 5, Milan: Marzorati, 1975. Onorati, Lucia, Domenico Rea scrittore napoletano, Rome: Sovera, 1999. Pascale, Vincenzo, ‘‘Rea e la radice del raccontare,’’ Misure Critiche, 1–2 (2003), 104–118. Piancastelli, Corrado, Domenico Rea, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1975. Prina, Serena, Invito alla lettura di Domenico Rea, Milan: Mursia, 1980.

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CLEMENTE REBORA

CLEMENTE REBORA (1885–1957) The poetic legacy of Clemente Rebora is indissolubly tied to his inaugural collection, Frammenti lirici (Lyric Fragments, 1913), which was published by the most important Italian journal of the early twentieth century, Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La Voce. The core of his poetry, as of his life, is the continuous, contradictory, and exhausting search for a truth that offers an answer to the most piercing existential dilemmas. Rebora’s work emerged from within a cultural environment—one that may be called ‘‘Vocian’’—in which ethical tension, the reference to contemporary social problems, and philosophical reflection all demonstrated the attempt by intellectuals and writers to modify the very conditions of socio-political life. Rebora joined this effort, characterizing his poetry as a total commitment and relying on the enlightened ‘‘concreteness’’ of the Lombard cultural tradition, on attentiveness to the ‘‘present,’’ as well as on a problematic interior reflection that owes much to Giacomo Leopardi, with an antithesis between concrete and abstract, natural and artificial, individual psychological impulses and collective energies, the individual and the civic crowd, culture and nature (often diseased, decomposed, and harsh). Rebora’s presence in the group of ‘‘Vocian’’ poets is distinguished by his elaboration of a ‘‘fragmentist’’ writing that has little in common with previous European symbolist enterprises or with the efforts of other poets brought together by their collaboration on Prezzolini’s journal. In fact, Rebora’s fragmentism does not find expression in an impressionistic writing or in poetic diction entrusted to an aleatory and disconnected succession of images and sensations. Rather, it relies on a broader conception that, through a careful montage of the compositions, reveals a poetic journey in which the pieces connect with, collide with, and come undone from one another, creating the organic sense of a poetry of contrast and contradiction, beginning with that between living and writing, between the power of verse to contain and exalt the vital impulse, and the impossibility of fully endowing writing with the sign of life, capturing it in the form of writing. Another of Rebora’s qualities, on which the important study ‘‘Clemente Rebora’’ (1974) by 1554

Gianfranco Contini dwelled, consisted in his being a poet close to the German expressionist avant-garde, both from the perspective of mythopoetic elements and from that of linguistic and expressive experimentalism. This was demonstrated by certain stylistic forms based on the violent semantic distortion of words and on the twisting and de-composition of lyric language (vocabulary, especially in the forms of verbs, meter, rhythm, and rhetoric, especially in the use of oxymoron and antithesis), whose forms are formal metaphors of a bitter agitation and internal debate in the poet. Even such peculiarities were fully revealed in the collection of Frammenti lirici, although they tended to fade away in his later efforts. Rebora’s expressionism emerged as an absolute quest for authentic truth and communication and as a subjective testament to the difficulty of reaching them while being prisoners of necessity. Thus, a rebel against positivistic determinism, Rebora made this condition explicit in his poetry through a long series of objective correlatives that, in their reference to reality, return to opposition and resistance, which the objects of the world oppose to the individual subject. These objects are composed and de-composed in an accelerated and inflexible rhythm of a daily life that, in its repetitiveness, loses meaning: Rebora registered the alienation of the world and dramatically perceived the desertification of reality and the sense of estrangement and separation that the subject experiences between himself and the world, and that Rebora staged with truly original formal means. The poet’s subjectivity thus reacted either with a sarcastically demythologizing attitude toward the modern world or with an assumption of intellectual and moral values that place a distance between things and the poet. He came to reject the shocking universe of the metropolis, anchoring himself nobly in tradition (and emphasizing the opposition between the civilization of the city, with its false dynamism and the purity of the country with its anthropological certainties), finally arriving at a reconversion to the faith and to priesthood between the 1920s and 1930s. The release in 1913 of Frammenti lirici for the Edizioni della Voce, despite the author’s being

CLEMENTE REBORA strongly tied to the Vocian sensibility, did not receive a particularly enthusiastic reception from his immediate associates: Emilio Cecchi, for example, in a review published in La Tribuna on November 13, slammed Rebora’s book, labeling it an example of weak idealistic poetry; only the rediscovery in the 1930s by the Florentine Catholics of the journal Frontespizio (Carlo Betocchi and Carlo Bo, in particular), together with the critical work of Contini, fully reevaluated the exemplarity of Rebora’s collection—an exemplarity that throughout the years and until today has found other careful and enthusiastic interpreters. The enduringness of Rebora’s poetic value is owed, above all else, to his stylistic inventions, to what we earlier called his ‘‘stylistic expressionism’’: a formal and technical repertoire that is almost unique in the panorama of twentiethcentury Italian poetry and that allowed the author to put feelings, ideas, states of the soul, and visions located firmly in the imagination of modernity into compositional form, even while beginning from quite traditional positions, such as the reference to biblical writings, or the poetry of Dante, or Lombard literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which the name of Alessandro Manzoni stands out (we should also mention some other writers favored by the Vocians, from Tolstoy to Nietzsche and Romain Rolland). His peculiar expressive inventions were necessary for Rebora, both to distance himself from the dominant models, such as Giovanni Pascoli, and to distance himself from an experimental literary extremism, such as that of the Futurists. To this end, we can read the opening lines of one of his most famous poems, ‘‘Dall’intensa nuvolaglia,’’ in which the naturalistic, temporal element falls on the city and disturbs its normal order, and where we are far from the impressionistic and intimistically mysterious descriptiveness of Pascoli: ‘‘Dall’intensa nuvolaglia / giu` brunita la corazza, / con guizzi di lucido giallo, / con suono che scoppia e si scaglia / piomba il turbine e scorrazza / sul vento proteso a cavallo / campi e ville, e da` battaglia’’ (From the thick clouds / below the burnished armor,/with flecks of clear yellow, / with a sound that bursts forth and lashes out / turmoil falls and whirls / on the outstretched wind around/fields and villas, and gives battle). Here the metrical measure, the arrangement of the rhymes, the phonically crackling harshness of the words, the anomalous use of verbs (the intransitive scorazzare declined as a transitive) lead formally to the creation in verse of an objective correlate of the estranged, sudden, and disturbing natural element within an urban

context. And, similarly, but with a greater metrical skill that drives the measure and prosody of the lines, in ‘‘O pioggia dei cieli distrutti’’ (Oh, rain from the destructive skies), we read another example in a fragment in which the protagonist is a fierce rain whom, personified, the poet addressed: ‘‘Intoni il gran funerale / dei sogni e della luce / nell’ora c’ha trattenuto il respiro: / bussano i timpani cupi, / strı`sciano i sistri lisci, / mentre occupa l’accordo tutti i suoni; / intoni il vario contrasto / della carne e del cuore / fra passi neri che han gocciole e fango’’ (You sing the great funeral / of dreams and light / in an hour that held its breath: the somber timpani are struck, / the clear sistrums scrape along, / while harmony takes up all sounds; / you sing the various contrast / of the flesh and the heart / amid black steps that have drops and mud). On the theme of civic alienation, of the deterministic necessity of things, we can read the following lines, in which an empty railway car coupled to a locomotive on an abandoned track (with a powerful assonance between vuoto and morto) is rendered as an objective correlative of a condition of forced and meaningless passivity: ‘‘O carro vuoto sul binario morto, / ecco per te la merce rude d’urti / e tonfi. Gravido ora pesi / sui telai tesi; / ma nei rantoli gonfi / si crolla fumida e viene / annusando con fa`scino orribile/ la macchina ad aggiogarti’’ (Oh empty car on the abandoned track, / here for you is the rough freight of shouts / and tumbles. Heavy, now you lie / on tense frames; / but in swollen gasps, smoky, collapses and/with a horrible fascination / there is the scent of the car to be yoked to you; from ‘‘O carro vuoto sul binario morto’’). We also see in this fragmented passage how, with the verb si crolla, the poet exercised a brilliant semantic ambiguity through the apharaesis of the reflexive verb scrollarsi, with the apparent assimilation of crollare to the intransitive verbal voice. On the meaning of the poetry, which is oxymoronic and contradictory (‘‘o poesia di sterco e di fiori’’) (O poetry of dung and flowers), we can note in the following lines how the asyndetic use of the series of names let the poet sever syntactical ties in order to accumulate, through contiguity and contrast, scattered, flashing, and unrelated images, for which poetic experience cannot find a balancing point between language and biological elementalness: ‘‘O poesia, nel lucido verso / che l’ansieta` di primavera esalta / che la vittoria dell’estate assalta / che speranze nell’occhio del cielo divampa / che tripudi sul cuor della terra conflagra, / o poesia, nel livido verso / nel verso inviolabile/ tu stringi le 1555

CLEMENTE REBORA forme che dentro / malvive svanivan nel labile / gesto vigliacco’’ (O poetry, in the clear verse / which exalts the anxiety of spring / which attacks the victory of summer / which sparks hopes in the eye of the sky / which ignites jubilations on the heart of the earth/o poetry, in livid verse / in inviolable verse / you grasp the forms that inside / barely vanished in the faint cowardly gesture; from ‘‘O poesia, nel lucido verso’’). Concerning the theme of the poet’s personal and social identity, a topos of the early twentieth century, we can see how the expressionistic harshness of the words (names and verbs), the presence of dialect forms as the violent brushstrokes in an expressionist picture, constitute the technical tools for framing an interior, sacrificial portrait in the social context of a group of schoolkids that passes as a pecorume (flock), and whose vacant texts are analogous with towering balloons (from Nell’avvampato sfasciume): Nell’avvampato sfasciume, / tra polvere e pe`ste, al meriggio, / la fusa scintilla / d’un demone bigio / atterga affronta assilla / l’ignava sloia dei rari passanti, / la schiavitu` croia dei carri pesanti / Erra, tra polvere e pe´ste / il gonzo pecorume / dei ragazzi di scuola, / e, palloncini sugli spaghi, oscilla / dai corpi smilzi il vuoto delle teste: / dietro mi stringo con passo caduto, / vittima che s’immola / al sacrificio muto. / Sbirciano i passanti, / sbirbo´nano i cavallanti. In the flaming wreckage, / between dust and pestilence, at noonday / the spark / of a grey purring demon / backs off faces spurs on / the slothfulness of the rare passers-by, / the harsh slavery of the heavy cars / Wanders, between dust and pestilence / the foolish flock / of school boys, / and balloons on strings, the emptiness of the heads / swings from the thin bodies: / behind, I shrink with a fallen step, / a victim who immolates himself / in silent sacrifice. / The passers-by peek, / the riders smirk knavishly.

The dramatic and anguishing experience of the war, the search for religious meaning, the preparation for the priesthood—all led his writing toward a meditative lyrical language that became less and less experimental in its forms. Thus, in Canti anonimi (Anonymous Poems, 1922), together with lines expressing, after the disasters of the war, a populist sentiment of life, a large space is occupied by poems representing the time of his religious calling: an instant suspended in a stupefatto (stupefied) space: The unsayable is made into a state of silent expectation, as in ‘‘Dall’immagine tesa’’: ‘‘Dall’immagine tesa / vigilo l’istante / con imminenza di attesa / e non aspetto nessuno’’ (From the taut image / I stand vigil for the instant/with an imminence of expectation / and I do not wait for anyone). The 1556

title itself of the piece becomes an emblem of the development—and not merely the poetic development—of Rebora, whose last work was Canti dell’infermita` (Poems of Infirmity, 1956), in which the imminence of death and sufferings are sung of as a mystical, spiritual testimony and Christian faith in the form of a redemptive prayer.

Biography Clemente Rebora was born in Milan on January 6, 1885; his father, Emilio, originally from Genova, was a fervent Mazzininan and Garibaldian and steeped his son’s education in the ‘‘Lombard’’ secular tradition, even though his mother, Teresa Rinaldi, did not fail to instill in Clemente Catholic religious practice. In Milan, he attended school up through university, taking a degree in letters at the Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria, with a thesis on Gian Domenico Romagnosi; in the academic world, he found several great teachers to rely on—the philosopher Antonio Banfi, the historian Gioacchino Volpe, the Romance philologist Angelo Monteverdi, and the Germanist Lavinia Mazzucchetti. He taught at the technical middle schools in Milan, Treviglio, Novara, and Como, becoming interested, from a theoretical point of view as well, in the writings published in La Voce about the didactic and pedagogical issues concerning early-twentieth-century Italian scholastic institutions and popular education. He collaborated on journals such as La Riviera Ligure, La Diana, and La Brigata. He fought as an infantry soldier and then as a petty officer, in World War I, returning after only a few months of the military campaign with severe cranial trauma, for which he was discharged: The terrible experience, both personal and collective, sharpened his existential anguish and his fragile, neurotic psychological temperament. From 1919 on, having abandoned public teaching, he dedicated himself to educational activities of various kinds, lecturing and also teaching in private institutions. In 1929, his long, deep disquietude, which from the very first found a general refuge in oriental philosophies and religions, especially in Buddhism, found an outlet in the Catholic faith: In 1931, he became a novice with the Rosminian fathers of Domodossola; in 1936, he took his perpetual vows and joined the order, practicing as a priest above all in Rovereto and Stresa, where he was the spiritual director of the Collegio Rosmini. In 1952, after a first grave illness, Rebora began to suffer from a long, painful neurological disease

FRANCESCO REDI from which he died, after a slow, progressive paralysis, on November 1, 1957. GIORGIO TAFFON Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Frammenti lirici,’’ 1913. ‘‘Canti anonimi,’’ 1922. ‘‘Le poesie (1913–1947),’’ 1947. ‘‘Canti dell’infermita`,’’ 1956. ‘‘Le poesie (1913–1957),’’ 1988.

Prose Arche di Noe`: le prose fino al 1930, 1994.

Essays Saggi, 1993.

Translations Gogol, Il cappotto, 1992.

Letters Lettere, I (1893–1930), edited by Margherita Marchione, 1976. Lettere, II (1931–1957), edited by Margherita Marchione, 1982.

Further Reading Bandini, Ferdinando, ‘‘Elementi di espressionismo linguistico in Rebora,’’ in Ricerche sulla lingua poetica contemporanea, Padua: Liviana, 1966.

Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘Tre note su Rebora,’’ in Astrazione e realta`, Milan: Rusconi e Paolazzi, 1960. Beschin, Giuseppe, et al., (editors), Clemente Rebora nella cultura italiana ed europea, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1993. Betocchi, Carlo, ‘‘Su Clemente Rebora,’’ Il Frontespizio, 10 (1937), 13. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Disegno di una poesia,’’ in Nuovi studi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1942. Carlino, Marcello, ‘‘Le parole maledette di un musicista mancato (note in margine ai ‘Frammenti lirici’ di Clemente Rebora),’’ Studi novecenteschi, 23 (1982), 117–144. Cecchi, Emilio, ‘‘Esercizi e aspirazioni,’’ La Tribuna, 13 November 1913. Cicala, Roberto and Valerio Rossi (editors), Bibliografia reboriana, Florence: Olschki, 2002. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Clemente Rebora,’’ in Esercizi di lettura, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Del Serra, Maura, Clemente Rebora. Lo specchio e il fuoco, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1976. Giovanetti, Paola, ‘‘I ’Frammenti lirici’ di Clemente Rebora: questioni metriche,’’ Autografo, 8 (1986), 11–35. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Clemente Rebora, Milan: Mursia, 1960. Kingcaid, Rene´e, and Charles Klopp, ‘‘Coupling and Uncoupling in Rebora’s ‘O carro vuoto,’’’ Italica, 56 (Summer 1979), 147–171. Marchione, Margherita, L’immagine tesa. La vita e l’opera di Clemente Rebora, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1976. Perella, Nicolas J., Midday in Italian Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.

FRANCESCO REDI (1626–1698) Francesco Redi, an encyclopedic intellectual and a skilful courtier, is considered a leading figure in the history of medicine, pharmacology, physiology, anatomy, and microscopy. A distinguished man of letters (his dithyrambs are praised as the best example of the genre in seventeenth-century Italy), a naturalist and physician at the Medici court in Florence, Redi was also an associate of the Accademia della Crusca, and a leading figure of the Accademia del Cimento, the Galileian scientific circle promoted by Prince Leopold and the Grand Duke Ferdinand. He was the personal physician to the Grand Duke Ferdinand II and the superintendent of the pharmacy and foundry at the Medici

court, where he performed several scientific esperienze. He also served as a tutor to Crown Prince Ferdinand, the son of Cosimo III, who had three medals struck in his honor. His scientific writings include texts on natural history, comparative anatomy, and medicine. He participated in the drafting of the third edition of the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca (Vocabulary of the Members of the Accademia della Crusca, 1691), and in 1670, following his philological interests in the translation of Arabic medical treatises, he also began a compilation of a Vocabolario di alcune voci aretine (Vocabulary of Some Words from Arezzo), which remained unpublished until 1928. His

1557

FRANCESCO REDI most successful literary works were his Petrarchan love poems and the dithyramb Bacco in Toscana (Bacchus in Tuscany, 1685), a burlesque poem published with hundreds of erudite annotations. The fame of Bacco in Toscana granted him access to the Arcadia, of which he was one of the first members and where he held the name of ‘‘Anicio Traustio.’’ Besides being a physician, a poet, and a naturalist, Redi was also a teacher and a philologist: He collected rare ancient texts and taught scholars and scientists such as Benedetto Menzini (1646–1704), Anton Maria Salvini (1663–1729), and Alessandro Marchetti (1633–1714), the translator of Lucretius’s De rerum natura. As a friend of Carlo Roberto Dati (1619–1676), a follower of Galileo Galilei and the erudite librarian of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici, Redi collaborated with the lexicographic activity of the Accademia della Crusca and studied the history of scientific prose. His first scientific work was the Osservazioni intorno alle vipere (Observations Concerning Vipers, 1664), a revolutionary book in the history of biology, in which he turned an experimental study of the location of the viper’s poison into a powerful epistemological statement. His prose follows the satirical and entertaining literary style theorized by Dati in the Discorso dell’obbligo di ben parlare la propria lingua (Discourse on the Obligation to Speak One’s Own Language Properly, 1657). Redi’s masterpiece is the Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti (Experiments Concerning the Generation of Insects, 1688), a treatise conceived as a letter to Dati in which, through a decisive experiment with putrefying meat in two containers, one open to the air, the other sealed, he disproved the doctrine of spontaneous generation of insects and parasites— that is, the widespread belief that living things could arise spontaneously from nonliving or waste materials. The language of the Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti, a rich texture of quotations, ironic arguments, and descriptions of observations, was meant as a polemical weapon against Jesuitical science and the principle of authority. In 1671, he published Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali, e particolarmente a quelle che ci son portate dall’Indie (Experiments Concerning Various Natural Things, Particularly Those That Come to Us from the Indies, 1671). Here, Redi set aside the Galileian attitude and unfolded a Baroque prose, creating a literary Kunstkammer and giving account of the natural marvels and curiosities— botanical and zoological specimen such as snakes and iguanas, pepper, Chinese star anise, vanilla 1558

pods—gathered in the port of Livorno from India and other exotic places. The book, whose style is akin to the travel accounts of the Jesuit Daniello Bartoli (1608–1685), was presented in the form of a letter to Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), the Jesuit Father of the Collegio Romano, whom he had forcefully criticized in his previous work for his defense of spontaneous generation. In 1684, Redi published his major parasitological treatise, the Osservazioni intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi (Observations Concerning Live Animals Found in Live Animals, 1684), a treatise on the comparative anatomy of parasites, for which he performed dissections of all sorts of creatures and made extensive use of the microscope. A second section was planned but never published. Redi the poet and member of the Accademia della Crusca is well represented by the dithyramb Bacco in Toscana, a playful poem in verses of various metres, telling the story of Bacchus and Arianna during their stay in the Medici villa of Poggio Imperiale. The dithyramb was first conceived for a session (stravizzo) of the Accademia della Crusca that took place on the evening of 12 September 1666. Before being published in the last, richly annotated version of 1685, the 980 verses of Bacco in Toscana passed through several stages of composition: from the 97 verses of the Scherzo anacreontico (Anacreontic Joke, 1673), to the 122 verses of I vini della Toscana (The Wines of Tuscany), and the 157 verses of the Baccanale in lode de’ vini della Toscana (Bacchanal Praising Tuscan Wines). Later publications such as the undated Osservazione intorno a quelle gocciole e fili di vetro che rotte in qualsiasi parte tutte quante si stritolano (Observation on Those Drops and Threads of Glass That, Broken at Any Point, Shatter Altogether) and Lettera intorno all’invenzione degli occhiali (Letter on the Invention of Glasses, 1678) deal with optics and scientia curiosa. In discussing issues such as the fragmentation of glass strings and balls, and the construction of spectacles, Redi showed that his biological expertise was also accompanied by Galileian interests in physics and late-seventeenthcentury passion for scientific amenities. The Consulti medici (Medical Consultations, 1726–1729), published posthumously by Giuseppe Manni, is a masterpiece in the history of medicine: Here Redi, in an aphoristic style that is both comic and descriptive, advocated a reform of therapeutic practices based on the prescription of simple remedies, combining his philological knowledge of scientific prose with his skills in anatomy and medicine.

FRANCESCO REDI

Biography Francesco Redi was born in Arezzo, 18 February 1626. He studied at the Jesuit school in Florence and graduated in medicine in Pisa, 1643–1647. He traveled to Rome, Naples, Bologna, Padua, and Venice, 1650–1654. He was nominated archiatra by Grand Duke Ferdinand II, 1654, then nominated lettore publico in the Studio fiorentino, 1666. Redi was accepted in the Accademia della Crusca, 1665. He served as Arciconsolo from 1678–1690. He was a member of the Accademia del Cimento, 1657–1667; entered the Accademia di Maria Cristina di Svezia, 1685; then entered the Arcadia, with the name Anicio Traustio, 1690. Redi died in Pisa 1 March 1698. FEDERICO LUISETTI

Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali, e particolarmente a quelle che ci son portate dall’Indie, 1671. Lettera intorno all’invenzione degli occhiali, 1678. Osservazioni intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi, 1684. Consulti medici, 1726–1729. Vocabolario di alcune voci aretine fatto per ischerzo da F. Redi, vol. 2 of Vita, opere, iconografia, bibliografia, vocabolario inedito delle voci aretine e libro inedito de’ Ricordi di Francesco Redi, edited by Ugo Viviani, 1928.

Letters Lettere di Francesco Redi, edited by D. Moreni, 1825. Diciotto lettere inedite di Francesco Redi al balı` Gio. Batta suo fratello, edited by Gaetano Imbert, 1894.

Other La Vacchetta: libro di ricordi di Francesco Redi, vol. 3 of of Vita, opere, iconografia, bibliografia, vocabolario inedito delle voci aretine e libro inedito de’ Ricordi di Francesco Redi, edited by Ugo Viviani, 1931.

Selected Works Collections

Further Reading

Opere di Francesco Redi, 7 vols., Venice: Gio. Gabbriello Ertz, 1712–1730. Opere di Francesco Redi, 9 vols., Milan: Societa` tipografica de’ classici italiani, 1809–1811. Poesie toscane di Francesco Redi Aretino, Florence: Presso L. Ciardetti, 1822. Scritti di botanica, zoologia, medicina, edited by Piero Polito, Milan: Longanesi, 1975.

Altieri Biagi, Maria Luisa, Lingua e cultura di Francesco Redi, medico, Florence: Olschki, 1968. Bernardi, Walter, and Luigi Guerrini (editors), Francesco Redi: un protagonista della scienza moderna: documenti, esperimenti, immagini, Florence: Olschki, 1999. Bucchi, Gabriele, Per un’edizione critica del Bacco in Toscana di Francesco Redi, Florence: Le lettere, 2003. Findlen, Paula, ‘‘Controlling the Experiment: Rhetoric, Court Patronage and the Experimental Method of Francesco Redi,’’ History of Science, 31 (1993), 35–64. Imbert, G., Il Bacco in Toscana di Francesco Redi e la poesia ditirambica, Citta` di Castello: Lapi, 1890. Mangani, Lorella, and Giuseppe Martini (editors), Francesco Redi aretino: atti del Convegno di studi, Arezzo, 12–13 febbraio 1998, Arezzo: Accademia Petrarca di lettere arti e scienze, 1999. Prandi, Dino, Bibliografia delle opere di Francesco Redi, Reggio-Emilia: Nironi & Prandi, 1941. Rossi, Umberto, Francesco Redi prosatore, Arezzo: Pellegrini, 1965. Viviani, Ugo, Vita, opere, iconografia, bibliografia, vocabolario inedito delle voci aretine e libro inedito de’ Ricordi di Francesco Redi, 3 vols., Arezzo: Tipografia I. Beucci, 1924–1931.

Poetry ‘‘Bacco in Toscana,’’ 1685; as Bacchus in Tuscany, a Dithyrambic Poem, from the Italian of Francesco Redi, edited by Leigh Hunt, 1825. ‘‘Sonetti del signor Francesco Redi aretino, accademico della Crusca,’’ 1702. ‘‘Sei odi inedite,’’ 1968.

Scientific and Philological Works Osservazioni intorno alle vipere, 1664; as Francesco Redi on Vipers, selected and translated by Peter K. Knoefel, 1988. Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti, 1668; as Experiments on the Generation of Insects, translated by Mab Bigelow, 1909. Lettera di F.R. sopra alcune opposizioni fatte alle osservazioni intorno alle vipere, 1670.

REEDS IN THE WIND See Canne al vento (Work by Grazia Deledda) 1559

REGIONAL LITERATURE

REGIONAL LITERATURE The study of Italian literature has traditionally been conducted along historical-chronological lines. Prompted by the suggestions of Carlo Dionisotti (Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 1967), critics have recently embraced a geographicalspatial approach that focuses on the contributions of regional literature to the Italian tradition. Until 1870, Italy was a divided country in which local governments retained the fundamental role they had held since the Middle Ages (communes and signorie). Linguistic and literary unification, which took place later in Italy than in other European nations, did not succeed in replacing or absorbing existing regional cultures. There were reasons for this incomplete assimilation of local dialect and regional writings. Literature written in the national language was restricted to intellectual circles until the twentieth century. Moreover, the high rate of illiteracy (in the south, in 1915, 90% of the population), the difficulties in interregional communication, and frequent wars between neighboring Italian towns worked against the emergence of a national literature. Nor was there a centralizing cultural hub in Italy, equivalent to London or Paris, to help establish a national language and literary tradition. In Perche´ la letteratura italiana non e` popolare in Italia (1855), Ruggero Bonghi argued that regional literature was popular because it used the spoken language of Italy’s little nationalities (the regional states), while ‘‘Italian’’ literature was written in a cultured and courtly language. The division had already been theorized in Giuseppe Ferrari’s essay ‘‘La litterature populaire en Italie,’’ published between in 1839 and 1840 in the Revue des deux mondes, in which the author underscored the historical connection between the regional states and dialect-based cultures, thus anticipating a historical-geographical understanding of regional literatures. The first person to argue for a history of regional literature was, however, Benedetto Croce in Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia (1927). Croce argued that there was no actually ‘‘Italian’’ history before the Risorgimento, since before Unification Italy was divided into several political entities (regional or local). What existed was a dialect literature (spontaneous and regional) that was 1560

linked to local daily routines. Croce dated the origin of this tradition to the seventeenth century, citing as examples Giambattista Basile, the author of Lo cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de’ Peccerille (The Pentamerone of Giambattista Basile, 1534–1536), written with a folk diction and rich in grotesque word deformations, and the socalled commedia dell’arte. Croce’s suggestion was further elaborated by Walter Binni and Natalino Sapegno in their Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia (1968). However, Dionisotti remarked that the present regional system does not correspond to what historically existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. During that time, there were at least 12 little states in Italy besides the five most important ones: Venice, Milan, Florence, Rome, and Naples. As Dionisotti observed, the regional system developed only in central and northern Italy, while in the south a feudal monarchy was predominant: ‘‘Thus, the literature that developed cannot be considered regional, but certainly appears to be geographically characterized depending the political system’’ (Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, 1967). In the early Middle Ages, three dialect groups already existed: the Italic-Gallic or northern dialects (Piedmontese, Lombard, Ligurian, and Istrian dialects, as well as the dialects of Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto); the central or southern dialects; and the Tuscan dialect. It was after Pietro Bembo’s three-volume treatise Prose della volgar lingua (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525) that Tuscan, following the literary conventions elaborated by Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, became the literary language of the entire country. In the various regions, however, the use of the local dialects survived. Ludovico Ariosto wrote his Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532) using local regional words (Emilian), although he eliminated them once he accepted Bembo’s ideas. Dialect literature, with its regional and local character, blended with the literary language and created a sort of regional Italian language, with specific differences in the inflections and syntax depending on the various Italian regions. This blending of languages did not occur everywhere: for example, in

REGIONAL LITERATURE Lazio, where the influence of the Church was strong, a Roman local literature developed, whose most famous representative was Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli. Italian, outside Tuscany, was therefore a written, not an oral, language. The use of Italian as a literary language in the sixteenth century reduced regional literary language to a dialect. The vernacular of regional literatures should not, however, be considered as inferior: It has been pointed out that dialect words are present in Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321). The idea of a unitary ideal language was outlined in Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, 1304–1305). In the thirteenth century, the linguistic and literary fragmentation in Italy was firmly established, as is confirmed by a sonnet attributed to Cecco Angiolieri in which six commoners from different towns use their own dialect to speak at the market. The so-called frottole, nonsense or funny poems like those of Francesco Vannozzo (1340–1389) in the Venetian language, date back to the same period. The use of the volgare instead of Latin in literary compositions occurred in Sicily at the beginning of the thirteenth century in the poetic school born at the court of Frederick II. The Sicilian language, purified of folk elements, became a very polished literary language, as in Jacopo da Lentini’s sonnets. The first Sicilian literary document was the contrasto ‘‘Rosa fresca auletissima’’ (Fresh and sweet-smelling rose, ca. 1231–1250) by Cielo D’Alcamo (thirteenth century), in which the two main characters, a nobleman and his female interlocutor, use, respectively, learned language and common daily dialect (regional and local). The interplay between literary and learned language and folk or popular dialect was thus already active in the thirteenth century as the basis of a regional literary formation. The Laurenziani and Ambrosiani codices of the fifteenth century mention Neapolitan, Calabrian, and Sicilian songs that in northern Italy are considered models of southern folk poetry. The ballad ‘‘Le`vati dalla porta’’ (Move away from the door), which dates back to the fourteenth century, is mentioned in the codex Magliabechiano Strozziano VII 1040. Like Cielo’s work, this ballad presents a contrast between two speakers, Donna and Amante (a woman and a lover). In the poem, learned and dialect words are mixed together, a combination characterizing some of the sonnets of Luigi Pulci, who mixed southern and Tuscan diction. These examples demonstrate the prevalence of cultural exchanges and contacts among the various regions

but also the clear division between national and regional literature before the sixteenth century. For this reason, the linguist Mario Cortellazzo in Lineamenti di italiano popolare (1972) maintained that the separation between national and regional literature is fictitious: Before the sixteenth century, a real national literature did not exist. There was only a dialect and regional literature. It is indeed difficult to determine the historic moment when regional literatures became conscious of their differences from each other, but generally speaking, we can date it to sometime between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Some critics have suggested the year 1559 (peace of Cateau–Cambresis), when Spanish domination was consolidated in Italy, since in that period, regional and folk literature suffered under the literary and linguistic hegemony imposed by Spain and the Catholic Church. The Church still used Latin and did not value the commoners’ ways of speaking. The cultural domination of church and aristocracy was decisive in creating a division between the national literature and folk-regional literature. Foreign domination also encouraged the formation of an aristocratic national literature, thanks to Petrarchism, and stopped the expansion of the regional volgari. However, even after that date, a sort of regional literature continued to exist, especially in the tradition of folk tales: The stories of the Mille e una notte (One Thousand and One Nights) reached Naples orally and were translated into the local dialect; the so-called ‘‘Satira del villano’’ (Satire of the Peasant) had a regional dimension; satirical pasquinate were read (but also performed) in Rome and in Latium, while the bosinade, verse commentaries on daily events, were popular in Lombardy. Piedmont, Liguria, and Lombardy developed a dialect regional literature that, at least until the nineteenth century, was autonomous compared to the literary tradition of Tuscany. The same was true of southern Italy. In the Veneto, the situation was different. The first Venetian prose document, Trattato de redimine rectoris by the monk Paolino Minorita (ca. 1270–1344), dates to 1313. In spite of the fact that Venice did not have a princely court, it had an active and lively dialect literature. At the end of the fifteenth century, the diffusion of the Tuscan literature was thus confined to some areas of central Italy and the Veneto, where Giovanni Quirini (fourteenth century), the first imitator of Dante Alighieri, was born. Also from the Veneto was Leonardo Giustinian (1388–1446), who had books brought from Florence and copied out 1561

REGIONAL LITERATURE Petrarch’s sonnets directly from the autograph text (the Laurenziano Rediano codex 118). However, the first Venetian literary work, a sonnet in a manuscript kept in the Biblioteca Marciana, dates back to 1530. Towns like Ferrara, Mantua, Urbino, and Naples strongly objected to the unitary language Bembo proposed. Angelo Beolco, called Ruzzante, a playwright from Padua, was the most important member of the regional and dialect reaction against the Petrarchan model. In 1514, he created a new style in the regional theater with the comedy called burlesca. The mixture of city dialects created a particular language that was understandable throughout its surrounding regions. For example, Andrea Calmo (ca. 1510–1571) created a linguistic pastiche formed of Venetian and Dalmatian, folk dialects, and aristocratic language. The masks, originating in different regions, moved from one place to another and encouraged the mutual exchanges between the dialect idioms. Moreover, works written in Tuscan were translated into regional languages: As an example, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1580) was translated into the dialects of Bologna, Bergamo, and Naples, the latter by Gabriele Fasano (1645–1689) with the title Tasso napoletano (Neapolitan Tasso, 1689). In the late fifteenth century, in Campania, the humanist Giovanni Brancati di Policastro (1440–1481) translated Pliny’s Naturalis istoria into a dialect that he defined as misto (mixed), as it was not addressed to the restricted public of a single town but to all inhabitants of the kingdom of Naples. Giovan Battista del Tufo (1548–1600) wrote a bilingual work that blended the Neapolitan and Tuscan dialects: Ritratto o modello delle grandezze, delizie e meraviglie della nobilissima citta` di Napoli (Portrait or Model of the Greatness, Delights and Wonders of the Most Noble City of Naples, ca. 1590). Neapolitan was also the language of one of the first novels, Delli travagliuse ammure dei Ciullo e Perna, (The Adventurous Loves of Ciullo and Perna, 1614), a love story unfolding against storms and battles at sea. Its author, Giulio Cesare Cortese (1575–1625), also started a learned dialect tradition with his Vaiasseide (The Servants’ Poem, 1612). Stefano Guazzo’s treatise, La civil conversatione (The Civil Conversation, 1574), which belongs to this same period, confirms the vitality of regional Italian. The minutes of the court trials, especially for witchcraft, are further important sources that record the dialogues between the learned judges and the accused person or the witnesses, who appear to come from a lower class. Reading these documents gives a clear sense of the great 1562

differences among the various regions in the popular knowledge of Italian. In the late sixteenth century, the Accademia della Crusca accepted Bembo’s proposals and compiled the first dictionary of the Italian language (1612). According to the Accademia’s criteria, Italian literature was distinguished from the regional-dialectal literature. Objections soon arose: From the town of Messina, Scipione Errico (1592–1670) satirized the Crusca in the comedy Le rivolte del Parnaso (The Riots of Parnassus, 1625), and Paolo Beni published L’Anticrusca (The Anti-Crusca, 1612). Contrary to what the Accademia della Crusca maintained, the comedy and folk literature written in dialect were not invariably of a low quality. In many cases, regional writers created refined works that dealt with the same themes as literature written in Tuscan. Representations of folk life mixed with Petrarchism and the imitation of the classical writers (such as Dante, Boccaccio, Ariosto, and Tasso). By this time, this relationship between dialect and natural language was observable in almost all regions. In the literature of Friuli, Girolamo Sini (1529–1602) used multilinguism in the Cronaca della magnifica comunita` di San Daniele del Friuli (Chronicle of the Magnificent Community of San Daniele of Friuli, 1600). The literary situation in the region was a representative one: A variety of dialects existed in different areas (Pordenone, Gorizia), and only during the nineteenth century did they blend together to form a regional Italian. Giulio Cesare Croce, a Bolognese writer, used a combination of Lombard-Emilian speech mixed with an Italian-like regional language in some of his works, such as ‘‘La rossa d’Alvergato’’ (The Red of Alvergato, 1600), an eight-line nursery rhyme in which a mountain lady serves a few Bolognese gentlemen. The linguistic pastiche is also present in ‘‘La cavalcata dei vari lenguaggi’’ (The Cavalcade of Various Languages, ca. 1600), a poem written by mixing several northern Italian dialects. In Liguria, the Genoese poet Gian Giacomo Cavalli (1590–1658) used the dialect to represent realistically the passions and feelings of the common people but also to deal with politics and love affairs. Paolo Foglietta (sixteenth century), in the Rime diverse in lingua genovese (Different Kinds of Rhymes in the Genoese Language, 1588–1612), followed the same imagery and themes as the Petrarchan model. In 1761, Stefano De Franchi (1714– 1785) used dialect rhymes politically to celebrate the Genoese revolt of the Balilla, but he also composed love and moralizing poetry. Genoese became

REGIONAL LITERATURE an even more developed literary language as a result of the successful plays of Gilberto Govi (1889–1966). The Piedmont developed a marginal regional literature, inducing Vittorio Alfieri to spiemontesizzarsi, that is, to look beyond Piedmont’s borders and to denounce ‘‘il peso di quel provenire dall’ultima regione d’Italia acquisita alla letteratura italiana’’ (the burden of coming from the last Italian region to become part of Italian literature), as he wrote in Vita scritta da esso (The Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself, 1806). Before him, Francesco Domenico Tarizzo composed a peculiar poem of about 2,000 lines celebrating the siege of Turin in 1705–1706, L’arpa discordata (The Untuned Harp, 1706). The most important poet of Piedmont was the libertine and anticlerical Edoardo Ignazio Calvo (1773–1804). Among his notable works are Follie religiose (Religious Follies, 1801), full of historical and philosophical notes, and the Favole morali (Moral Tales, 1802), in which he criticized and strongly attacked French domination. His famous ode ‘‘Su la vita ‘d campagna’’ (On Country Life, 1803), which celebrates rural life, was considered by Marco Cerruti in Neoclassici e giacobini (1969) to be one of the most important literary texts in the early nineteenth century. For a long time, the regional literature of Lombardy did not play a significant part in Italian literary innovation. Dante Isella, in his essay I lombardi in rivolta (1984) argued that regional literature spread in Lombardy as Milan grew in importance. Although literary experiments in the dialect date back to the fifteenth century, it was through the dramatic work of Carlo Maria Maggi that the Milanese dialect acquired the importance of a regional language. Four of his many successful comedies were written in the Milanese dialect, the most famous being I consigli di Meneghino (Meneghino’s Advice, 1701), and became important not only for their satire on the aristocracy but also for the new dramatic features represented in the character of Meneghino. The mask no longer displayed the burlesque lineaments of the traditional commedia dell’arte but expressed and symbolized popular wisdom. Maggi anticipated Carlo Porta in his use of Milanese as a dignified language capable of representing reality. By giving the dialect an Italian tone when spoken by the noblewoman Quinzia, for instance, he obtained an expressiveness that would later distinguish the famous ‘‘Preghiera’’ (Prayer, 1819–1820) by Porta, in which the artistocrat Donna Fabia thanks God for not having given her a plebeian birth. The Lombard current of

Italian literature survived until Carlo Emilio Gadda, but in the meantime many Lombard writers, included Alessandro Manzoni, wrote in Italian. Antonio Fogazzaro’s fiction has a regional character, and a regional background also characterizes Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un italiano (The Castle of Fratta, 1867), where Italian is blended with idioms of the Veneto and Lombardy. Milan, a city in the economic and cultural vanguard, was a main center for disseminating new European literary currents such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism. But the regional literature of Lombardy encouraged innovation in other Italian regions. The scapigliatura is a case in point. Its members objected to the unitary language solution: Carlo Dossi combined the dialect and Tuscan in many of his works, like Vita di Alberto Pisani (Alberto Pisani’s Life, 1870), and Ambrogio Bazzero (1851–1882) wrote historical plays in which he created a linguistic pastiche by using the Milanese dialect. The tradition of the scapigliatura and of Lombard literature can be perceived in the grammelot of Dario Fo, Giovanni Testori, and Antonio Tarantino (1938–). The most autonomous regional literature, derived from a long period of isolation, is that of Sardinia. Before the eighteenth century, the island produced no literary works except for the Urania sulcitana (1626) by the Capuchin friar Salvatore Vidal (1589–1647), a tale of St. Antioco’s martyrdom. Sardinian culture followed an oral tradition, and it is only with Grazia Deledda and Giuseppe Dessı` that we have examples of regional Italian without any strictly dialect element. There are, however, important examples of Sardinian-Italian bilingual plays such Miele amaro (Bitter Honey, 1954) by Salvatore Cambosu (1895–1962). In Sicily, Giovanni Meli had independently Italianized the Sicilian dialect in his works. Pier Giuseppe Sanclemente (1605–1675) edited the four volumes of Le muse siciliane (The Sicilian Muses, 1645–1653), a collection of dialectal poems. In 1857, three years before national unification, Lionardo Vigo (1799– 1879) collected the Canti popolari siciliani (Sicilian Folk Songs), which he regarded as evidence of Sicily’s cultural autonomy. Giovanni Verga started contemporary regionalism by using the dialect as the characteristic element of his narration, in particular as the basis for the syntactic structure and lexicon of his Italian. After reading Verga’s Mastro don Gesualdo (1889), Luigi Pirandello, from Agrigento, complained in the article ‘‘Prosa moderna’’ (Modern Prose, 1890) of the absence in Italy of a conversational language to be used by the people belonging to the different regions. 1563

REGIONAL LITERATURE It was the diffusion of verismo at the end of the nineteenth century that promoted and confirmed the development of a regional current in Italian literature. The main writers of this current described the classes and folk culture of the various regions and emphasized the expressiveness of the idiomatic dialects. From the literary point of view, however, both southern and northern writers agreed with the unitary language solution, a solution that was rather heavily enforced under Fascism, which opposed local particularism and the use of dialects. The emergence of the new mass media, like radio, cinema, and, increasingly, television, led to the widespread and generalized use of Italian. In the 1950s, dialect was newly valued by some neo-Realist writers. Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote a series of essays on dialect literature, collected in Passione e ideologia (Passion and Ideology, 1973), and Cesare Pavese considered dialect to be an instrument of expression for the common people. In Sicily, Stefano D’Arrigo returned to literary pastiche in his novel Horcynus Orca (1975). Corrado Grassi, in ‘‘Italiano e dialetti’’ (1993), maintained that dialect literature is now in a deepening crisis, a crisis intensified by the forces of globalization. The writer Andrea Camilleri is the most important example of the present state of regional literature. His works, popular throughout Italy, use a language invented by himself (a sort of combination of Italian and Sicilian). Thus, regional literatures and their dialect languages continue to evolve: The dynamic relationship between regional and national literature is not finished at all. ALFREDO SGROI

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana. Storia e geografia, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1987–1989. Beccaria, Gian Luigi (editor), Letteratura e dialetto, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1975. Binni, Walter, and Natalino Sapegno, Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Bonghi, Ruggero, Perche´ la letteratura italiana non sia popolare in Italia, Milan: Richiedei, 1855. Bruni, Francesco (editor), L’italiano nelle regioni, 4 vols., Turin, Utet, 1992–1997. Castellani, Arrigo, I piu` antichi testi italiani, Bologna: Patron, 1973. Cerruti, Marco, Neoclassici e giacobini, Milan: Silva, 1969. Cortellazzo, Manlio, Lineamenti di italiano popolare, Pisa: Pacini, 1972. Cortellazzo, Manlio, and Alberto M. Mioni (editors), L’italiano regionale, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Croce, Benedetto, Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1927. De Mauro, Tullio, Storia linguistica dell’Italia unita, Bari: Laterza, 1963. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Fano, Nicola, Le maschere italiane, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2001. Ferrari, Giuseppe, La letteratura popolare in Italia, Capolego: R. Stamperia, 1840. Grassi, Corrado, ‘‘Italiano e dialetti,’’ in Introduzione all’italiano contemporaneo, edited by Alberto Sobrero, Bari: Laterza, 1993. Isella, Dante, I lombardi in rivolta: da Carlo Maria Maggi a Carlo Emilio Gadda, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Passione e ideologia, Milan: Garzanti, 1960 Picone, Michelangelo, Percorsi della lirica duecentesca, Fiesole: Cadmo, 2003. Pirandello, Luigi, ‘‘Prosa moderna,’’ Psiche, 19 (1890), 16–19. Stussi, Alfredo, Letteratura italiana e culture regionali, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1979.

RELIGION AND LITERATURE Many disciplines—including anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy, theology, and the like— concern themselves with the universal phenomenon called religion. Historians, philosophers, and anthropologists of religion, as well as literary critics, have not only claimed a connection between literature and religion; they have also emphasized the essential role of religion in the development of 1564

civilization and thus all literary artifacts. In this regard, it bears recalling that the Italian vernacular claims as one of its earliest written documents St. Francis’s so-called Cantico delle creature (Canticle of All Creatures, ca. 1224–1225): a hymn of paramount importance for its religious nature, ethical content, and aesthetic value. Consecrated, as it were, by St. Francis, the relation between

RELIGION AND LITERATURE religion and literature in Italy’s literary culture finds its deepest roots in the Bible and the Christian rewritings and interpretations of ancient classical literature, while accompanying every moment of Italy’s literary culture. The pervasiveness of the religious phenomenon throughout Italy’s literary culture can hardly be overemphasized, notwithstanding an ever-present secular tendency that developed particularly during the Enlightenment and Italy’s Reunification (1860–1870). A distinction must also be established between such related terms as ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘religiosity.’’ The notion of religion typically includes a set of mythical narratives, bearing on the individual’s and society’s beliefs, as well as ethical and cultic norms, which are intended to lead humans to spiritual salvation and manifest the individual’s and society’s relation with God here on earth and in the afterlife. Although these narratives, beliefs, and norms may originally have been transmitted orally, in all advanced religions they have also been written down. Throughout the centuries different religions have developed diverse beliefs, which may set them apart substantially. Thus we can speak of pantheism, polytheism, or monotheism. The latter includes primarily Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: Each presents itself as a revealed religion that has come down to humankind directly from God and through prophets, contains a set of revealed writings that have been commented upon, and depends on some form of structure and institution that has evolved throughout the centuries. By contrast, religiosity invariably entails internal beliefs and emotions, which may manifest themselves externally in the individual’s and society’s conduct; furthermore, religiosity does not necessarily depend on, albeit does not exclude, institutionalized religion, which also calls for the individual’s internal adherence as well as his or her appropriate external conduct. Religion is characterized by the sacred. In his work entitled Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy, 1917), Rudolf Otto described the religious experience by concentrating on its irrational and frightening aspect, the feeling of terror it causes, and its numinous or divine manifestation, all pointing to something as wholly other from natural events. Seeking to expand Otto’s concerns primarily with religion’s rational and nonrational elements, Mircea Eliade focused on the sacred in its entirety, which he sought to define as the opposite of the profane (The Sacred and the Profane, 1957). Christianity assimilated, transformed, and adopted classical literature during the first millennium

of the Christian era. Out of this cultural process, which saw also the transformation of Latin into the Romance vernaculars, were born the first literary manifestations of the religious and the sacred. After the year 1000 many highly influential scholastic authors wrote philosophical and theological treatises (Summae) in medieval Latin, synthesizing Christian philosophy, ethics, and theology. Among the most prominent Christian authors born after 1000 on the Italian peninsula rank foremost St. Anselm of Aosta (1033–1109), one of the founders of Scholasticism and Archbishop of Canterbury; Peter Lombard (end of the eleventh century– 1160), author of a standard textbook of theology for many centuries, Sententiarum Libri (Books of Sentences, ca. 1148–1151); Gioacchino da Fiore (1130–1202), who proposed an eschatological vision of history (condemned by the Church at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215) as three successive eras of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; St. Bonaventure (1221–1274), who played a major role in leading the newly formed Franciscan order after the death of its founder, St. Francis; and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), a Dominican, whose theological works are viewed as the highest synthesis of medieval philosophy and theology. All the clerics just mentioned influenced medieval religious literature and became themselves characters in Dante’s Comedia (Par. 12–14). St. Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) was a mystic who first received the stigmata for his desire to imitate Christ and who was among the first to write poetry in the Italian vernacular. St. Francis has left an indelible mark on Italy’s literary culture with his hymn of praise to God through all living creatures; the spreading of the spiritual movement, called Franciscanism, which finds its origin in the simplicity, poverty, and holiness of St. Francis in his desire to imitate Christ; as well as through the writings of his followers. Some of his followers are Jacopone da Todi (1228–1306), who wrote primarily laude, namely, poetic invectives against human vices and dramatic representations of scenes of Jesus’ and Mary’s lives, including the poetic dialogue between the dying Christ on the cross and Mary called ‘‘Donna di Paradiso’’ (Lady of Paradise), and probably, in medieval Latin, the sequence ‘‘Stabat Mater’’ (Mary Stood Grieving); the several authors of St. Francis’s lives and the anonymous Fioretti (Little Flowers); and one of the first women to write in the vernacular, Chiara (or Clare) d’Assisi (1193/ 94–1253), an imitator of St. Francis and a founder of a religious order, who left a Rule, a Testament, a Blessing for her nuns, and five letters. 1565

RELIGION AND LITERATURE Mystical writings constitute an essential aspect of religious literature. Mysticism indicates the believers’ search for, and state of, perfection, whereby the mystic establishes a continuous and personal relationship and dialogue with God. While coming out of themselves through ecstatic experiences in order to reach the absolute Other, male and female mystics experience God also within themselves, allowing God to take over their lives. Throughout many centuries, women have had access to the word only by describing their own ascetic and mystical experiences, which they made known either by their own volition or under order of their confessors or Church authority, whether these women were able to write on their own or depended on male scribes or other women to do so. Often bridging several genres—such as autobiography, epistle, diary, and didactic treatise—ascetic and mystical writings, particularly by women, have developed a style of their own, revealing the self in a very particular manner, often through peculiar behavior, extraordinary acts of penitence, and ecstatic visions. Angela da Foligno (ca. 1248–1309) and Catherine of Siena (1347–1380) were the most prominent women mystic writers during the time that goes from the Middle Ages to the Council of Trent (December 1545–December 1563). They were preceded by Chiara d’Assisi and many other women mystics (for example, Beatrice I d’Este and Umiliana Cerchi) and followed by many more (such as Francesca Romana, Caterina Vegri, and Stefana Quinzani). After her conversion and the death of her mother, husband, and children, Angela da Foligno, a Franciscan tertiary, embraced a life of poverty and love for Christ. After 1285, the date of her conversion, she narrated her mystical experiences to a Franciscan, usually identified with Frate Arnaldo, who in the so-called Liber or Memoriale (The Book or The Memorial) claimed to have been faithful to Angela’s voice in transcribing her mystical experience, which he did in a very rude, albeit very effective, medieval Latin. An extraordinary mystic who received, like St. Francis, the stigmata, Catherine of Siena became involved in reforming the Church, urging the popes to return from Avignon to Rome, and reconciling cities, communities, and families. An indefatigable apostle, she composed (through the hands of her followers, since she was illiterate) 381 letters and Il dialogo della divina Provvidenza (The Dialogue on Divine Providence, 1277–1278), which is a deeply felt exposition of her own ascetic and mystic experiences, mostly drawn by her followers from her letters. 1566

Primarily through the Comedia, but also in the Vita nuova and the Convivio, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) constituted, in Italy’s literary culture, the highest poetic and philosophical manifestation of Christianity’s most profound sense of the religious and the sacred, which he rendered in its doctrine, myths, and history, viewed from the beginning of humankind until the Christian notion of the end of times, both universally and personally. Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374) manifested his religiosity and his adherence to Christianity with a more modern attitude. The writings of Petrarch that reveal most markedly his religiosity—among them, the Canzoniere (Songbook, 1336–1374); Triumphi (The Triumphs, 1351–1374); the Secretum (The Secret Conflict, 1347–1353)—are permeated by an inner attitude torn between his doctrinal adherence to Christianity’s tenets and his pursuits of poetic fame and earthly pleasures, symbolized by Laura. The Canzoniere’s last canzone, addressed to the Blessed Virgin, may be read as the Petrarch-persona’s desire to turn his self wholly to God. Somewhat in contrast with Dante and Petrarch, both of whom he admired, Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) situated his whole literary and humanistic production not only outside Christianity’s view of humankind and the world but also outside a notion of life as the sacred gift of a transcendent God, in whom he nevertheless believed as a Christian. Nevertheless, the Decameron (1349–1351) displays an ethical conduct in substantial agreement with Christianity, as evinced by the conduct of the ten narrators and the characters of the ten stories in Decameron 10. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Franciscans, Dominicans, and members of other religious orders, as well as lay people, promoted lofty Christian ideals and inveighed against political and moral corruption by means of ethical and didactic works, epistles, and poems, in Latin as well as in the vernacular. Author of the first sermons in the Tuscan vernacular bequeathed to us is Giordano da Pisa (ca. 1260–1311), also known as Giordano da Rivalto. A writer of love poems in his youth, Guittone d’Arezzo (ca. 1230–1294), after his conversion in 1265, wrote letters and poems condemning civic corruption and strife and proposing religious and ethical ideals for civic and private life. The Dominican Domenico Cavalca (ca. 1270–1342) wrote ascetic treatises in prose, such as Specchio di croce (Mirror of the Cross), interspersing them with poems, and the Vite dei santi padri (Lives of the Holy Fathers), a simple and highly effective prose rendering of medieval hagiographical writings.

RELIGION AND LITERATURE Another Dominican, Jacopo Passavanti (ca. 1302– 1357), wrote his Lenten sermons, in a collection entitled Specchio di vera penitenza (Mirror of True Penitence), in lucid and elegant vernacular, drawing primarily from medieval sermons and collections of moral exempla. During the fifteenth century, devotional literature continued spreading also among lay people; sermons circulated in a manuscript form, such as those of St. Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444), and, after the middle of the century, in printing. The first Italian translation of the Bible (Bibbia volgare) was printed in 1471; the spiritual current called devotio moderna (modern devotion), which originated in Flanders, spread also in Italy; manifestations of political-ecclesiastical prophetic character, as well attempts at ecclesiastical reforms, took place, such as the reform promoted by Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), who was burned at the stake in Florence. The Humanism and subsequently the Renaissance have at times been situated outside Christianity’s notion of religion and the sacred. More correctly, however, scholars have recognized that this period’s appropriation of ancient classical culture, while placing a more secular emphasis on humanity’s position in the world, does not view human destiny from the profane and secular view typical of present-day societies. Devotional, ascetic, and mystic writings continued throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among the many Humanists, the priest Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) sought to show antiquity’s continuity in Christianity in his De Christiana Religione (On Christian Religion, 1474) and defended the immortality of the soul in Theologia Platonica de Immortalitate Animorum (Platonic Theology on the Immortality of the Souls, 1482). Furthermore, several works by Humanists, while revealing their concerns with the stylistic elegance and imagery of classical antiquity, not only celebrated Christian myths; they also initiated a literary genre that would be imitated and furthered in the vernacular. For example, Jacopo Sannazaro (1458–1530) composed De Partu Virginis (On the Birth of the Virgin, 1526), a poem in Latin hexameters devoted to Mary’s Immaculate Conception and virginal birth of Christ. Sannazaro’s poem constitutes a poetic landmark for appropriating biblical and legendary motifs, while also incorporating pagan elements. Religious poetry continued throughout the sixteenth century, often times in close connection with love poetry, just as it happened in Petrarca’s Canzoniere, which was ‘‘spiritualized’’ or bowdlerized,

as by Girolamo Malipiero (end of fifteenth century–1547) through Il Petrarca spirituale (The Spiritual Petrarch, 1536). Many Petrarchists expressed truly felt religiosity in their collections of lyric poems; among them are Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and Vittoria Colonna (1490–1547). Almost on the opposite side of Christianity, however, Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527), bringing Boccaccio’s desacralizing attempts to the sphere of politics, sought to remove politics from the realm of ethics, especially in his De Principatibus (The Prince, 1513–1514), while depicting approvingly, albeit comedically, a wholly corrupt family, clergy, and society in his play La Mandragola (The Mandrake, ca. 1520). In fact, Renaissance drama often satirizes the clergy. Historically, culturally, and religiously, the Council of Trent constituted one of the most important events of the sixteenth century. As an internal reformation of the Catholic Church, as well as a response to the Protestant Reformation initiated by Martin Luther on October 13, 1517, the Catholic Reformation exercised a major influence on all aspects of the believers’ lives until the twentieth century and the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). Until the Reformation enacted by the Council of Trent, the mystic writers’ model focused on three key elements: the mystic’s love for God; the nothingness of all human actions; and the resurrection as the moment of perfect union with God. With the Catholic Reformation, the mystical experiences of men and women, just as every aspect of the believers’ spiritual life, was guided more directly by ecclesiastical authorities. Since the Reformation was now part of the Church’s mission, mystics were no longer empowered to take over this role, nor were they allowed to speak prophetically. Christ’s cross became the mystic’s central experience, as it appears in Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi (1566–1604), although she still shared some of the characteristics of pre-Tridentine mystics. Oftentimes involved in visions lasting weeks and months, her Libro de’ quaranta giorni (Book of the Forty Days) and Libro de’ colloqui (Book of the Dialogues) consist primarily of the words that she heard and spoke during her ecstasies and that were transcribed by her fellow nuns. In the seventeenth century Maria Domitilla Galluzzi (1596–1671), a Capuchin nun, pursued a total annihilation of the self in her desire to imitate Christ on the cross and wrote an autobiography and many letters. Another Capuchin, Veronica Giuliani (1660–1727), submitted herself to the most excruciating and humiliating penances. She 1567

RELIGION AND LITERATURE was ordered to write her experiences by several confessors, leaving behind five versions of her Diario (Journal) in 22,000 handwritten pages. The phenomenon of mysticism characterizes also our time, as confirmed, among others, by Angela Gavazzi (1907–1975), a Carmelite nun, the last mystic whose writings are anthologized in Giovanni Pozzi’s and Claudio Leonardi’s Scrittrici mistiche italiane (1988). In his introduction, Leonardi outlined our contemporary times’ possibilities of mystical experiences, and thus mystical writings, outside medieval and post-Tridentine models. This form of mysticism for all, Leonardi claimed, was exemplified by St. Therese of Lisieux (1873–1897), Simone Weil (1909–1943), and the Venerable Lucia Mangano (1896–1946), who announced the models of sanctity later proposed by the Second Vatican Council. Exhibiting greater concerns for doctrinal orthodoxy and pastoral care than in previous centuries, the post-Tridentine Church directly influenced all forms of the printed word: from the political, theological, and philosophical treatises, such as Atheismus Triumphatus (Vanquished Atheism, 1605) and Monarchia Messiae (Monarchy of the Messiah, 1606) by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), to the sacred oratory Quaresimale (Lent Sermons, 1679) by Paolo Segneri (1624–1694), to historiographical works. Indeed, the relation between politics and morality concerned several historians of this age, who produced examples of histoire engage´e: Among them are the Annales Ecclesiastici (Ecclesiastical Annals, 1588–1607) by Cesare Baronio (1538–1607), the Istoria del Concilio tridentino (History of the Council of Trent, 1619) by Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), and the Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu`; (History of the Society of Jesus, 1673) by Daniello Bartoli, (1608–1685). In literature Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) manifested traits of the post-Tridentine spirit in his epic poems Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1584) and Le sette giornate del mondo creato (The Seven Days of the Creation of the World, 1592– 1594), as well as in his religious rhymes. Further developing Tasso’s epic model, the epic tradition devoted to the crusades and religious topics continued throughout the seventeenth century, although by and large scholars have neglected this genre. After the seventeenth century, the sacred and the religious must also be sought outside strictly religious literature; for instance, in works that seek to interpret Italy’s culture within a Christian matrix. Such is the case of Rerum Italicarum Scriptores 1568

(Writers of Italian Works, 1723–1738) and Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevii (Italian Antiquities of the Middle Ages, 1738–1742) by the priest Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), and Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1782–1794) by the Jesuit Girolamo Tiraboschi (1731–1794). At the same time, in the eighteenth century the philosophical, cultural, and literary movement called Illuminism sought programmatically (for the first time in the history of Western culture) to exclude transcendency from human history, accepting God as creator (deism), but opposing Christianity’s belief in God’s intervention in human history. Even before Illuminism reached its apogee in France with the Encyclope´die (1751–1772; 1780–1781), Voltaire, and the French Revolution (1789–1795), Giambattista Vico (1668–1744) opposed aprioristic rationalism and, in Principi di una scienza nuova (Principles of a New Sciente, 1725) stated his belief in transcendency and divine providence in human history. Heir of the rationalistic spirit of Illuminism, from which he removed himselfwith his conversion to Catholicism, and one of the major representatives of Romanticism in Italy, Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) displayed his Christian faith in all his works, from his Inni sacri (Sacred Hymns, 1812– 1822) and the apologetical treatise Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (Observations on Catholic Ethics, 1819, 1855), to his tragedies in verse, Adelchi (1822), Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1820), and his masterpiece, the novel I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842). In it, Manzoni interpreted the history of a troubled epoch, the sixteenth century, not from the perspective of the great, but rather of the humble and the poor, seeking and finding God’s providence in the persecutions suffered by the betrothed, Renzo and Lucia, as well as in the history of a nation and Europe. Many other great writers represent, in various manners, the religious spirit of the nineteenth century, which saw Italy’s political unification: Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), a philosopher and a politician; Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855), a founder of a religious order, a politician, and a philosopher; Niccolo` Tommaseo (1801–1874), whose Fede e bellezza (Faith and Beauty, 1840) expressed his dilemma between virtue and vice; Antonio Fogazzaro (1842–1911), who in many of his novels displayed the end-of-the century’s decadentism, yoked with a conflictual sense of religiosita`, especially in Il Santo (The Saint, 1905), influenced by modernist theories, so much so that it was on the Index.

RELIGION AND LITERATURE The twentieth century witnessed a rediscovery of the spiritual values of Christianity but also the continued presence of agnosticism and neopaganism. The same notion has been corroborated by anthropologists. As Mircea Eliade pointed out, for ‘‘those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany; however, nonreligious man in the pure state is a comparatively rare phenomenon, even in the most desacralized of modern societies’’ (The Sacred and the Profane, 1959). At the same time, writers such as novelist Alberto Moravia (1907–1990), who seek to portray an utterly nonreligious and profane experience, reveal nevertheless what Eliade called ‘‘vestiges of the behavior of the religious man,’’ since he ‘‘will not be truly free until he has killed the last god’’ (The Sacred and the Profane, 1959). Thus, the manifestation of the sacred, which in Italy’s literary culture cannot but include Christian elements, not only remains a viable option for the religious writer; it may also be sought in the secular world of contemporary culture, even in the social and reformist courses pursued by leftist and atheist groups before and after World War II. The existential angst and the search for God that characterize twentieth-century literature find their models in the novels of Grazia Deledda, among others, and the theater of Ugo Betti and Diego Fabbri, whose frame of reference is Catholic. The latter, in his plays Inquisizione (Inquisition, 1950) and Incontro al parco delle terme (Meeting at the Park, 1978), staged a conflict between conservative ecclesiastical figures and individuals tormented by Christ’s message of love, which defies hierarchical institutions. Poetry as a means of transcending the uncertainty and alienation of daily life was represented by Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Clemente Rebora, and Margherita Guidacci, while the concerns with ethics, social justice, violence and war, and also a more openly religious standpoint were explored by the likes of Giosue` Borsi, Giovanni Papini—particularly for his popular biography Storia di Cristo (The Life of Christ, 1921), following his 1921 religious conversion—David Maria Turoldo, and Mario Pomilio. These tendencies also found a significant expression in Ignazio Silone’s L’avventura di un povero cristiano (The Story of a Humble Christian, 1968), a play focusing on Pope Celestino V. Ultimately, all of these aspects, which pervade contemporary Italian literature, may also be read in light of the presence of the religious and the sacred, which no longer manifest themselves as in medieval and

Renaissance times but in ways appropriate to our current epoch. DINO CERVIGNI See also: Sacra rappresentazione, Liturgical Drama Further Reading Archivio italiano per la storia della pieta, 15 vols., Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951–2004. Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Cervigni, Dino S. (editor), ‘‘Italian Women Mystics,’’ Annali d’italianistica, 16 (1995). Cervigni, Dino S., ‘‘Il tempio peregrino, poema sacroeroico di Giulio Acquaticci (1603–88), continuatore della Gerusalemme liberata del Tasso: epica, poesia religiosa, oratoria sacra,’’ in ‘‘Quei battenti sempre aperti’’: Gli Acquaticci e Treia nella cultura marchigiana. Atti del Convegno di Studi, 4 novembre 2000. Treia: Accademia Georgica, 2002. De Luca, Giuseppe, Introduzione alla storia della pieta`. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1962. De Luca, Giuseppe (editor), Prosatori minori del Trecento. Tome 1. Scrittori di religione, Milan: Ricciardi, 1954. Dictionnaire de spiritualite´ asce´tique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, edited by Marcel Viller et alii, 16 vols. Paris: Beauchesne, 1932–1995. Dizionario degli Istituti di Perfezione, edited by Guerrino Pelliccia and Giancarlo Rocca, 10 vols., Rome: Edizioni Paoline, 1974. Eliade, Mircea (editor), The Encyclopedia of Religion, 16 vols., New York: Macmillan, 1987. Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959. Encyclope´die the´ologique, ou se´rie de dictionnaires sur toutes les parties de science religieuse, edited by M. L’abbe´ Migne, Paris: Chez L’E`diteur, 1845–1873. Fallani, Giovanni, La letteratura religiosa in Italia, Naples: Loffredo, 2000. Fonti francescane: Scritti e biografie di San Francesco d’Assisi. Cronache e altre testimonainze del primo secolo francescano. Scritti e biografie di santa Chiara d’Assisi, Padua: Edizioni Messaggero, 1990. Getto, Giovanni, Letteratura religiosa dal Due al Novecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1967. Niccoli, Ottavia, Rinascimento anticlericale: Infamia, propaganda e satira in Italia tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005. Papini, Giovanni (editor), Antologia della poesia religiosa italiana. Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1923. Papini, Giovanni, and Giuseppe De Luca (editors), Prose di cattolici d’ogni secolo. Turin: SEI, 1941. Il peso della speranza: Antologia della poesia religiosa degli anni ’70, edited by Vera Passeri Pignoni, Forlı`: Forum/ Quinta Generazione, 1977. Petrocchi, Giorgio, Ascesi e mistica trecentesca, Florence: Le Monnier, 1957. Petrocchi, Massimo, Storia della spiritualita` italiana, 3 vols., Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1978–1979.

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RELIGION AND LITERATURE Pozzi, Giovanni, and Claudio Leonardi (editors), Scrittrici mistiche italiane, Genoa: Marietti, 1988. Pozzoli, Luigi, Immagini di Dio nel Novecento: Gesu`, lo Spirito e il Padre nella letteratura contemporanea, Milan: Paoline, 1999. Prandi, Stefano, ‘‘Arcadia sacra: l’ultimo sogno dell’Umanesimo,’’ in Jacopo Sannazzaro, De Partu Virginis. Il parto della Vergine. Volgarizzamento di Giovanni Giolito de’ Ferrari (1588), Rome: Citta` Nuova, 2001. Ricoeur, Paul, Fallible Man, 1965. Revised translation by Charles A. Kelbley, New York: Fordham University Press, 1986.

Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil, translated by Emerson Buchanan, Boston: Beacon Press, 1967. Segre, Cesare, and Carlo Ossola (editors), Antologia della poesia italiana, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi-Gallimard, 1997–1999. Ulivi, Francesco, and Marta Savini. Poesia religiosa italiana dalle origini al ’900, Casale Monferrato: Piemme, 1994. Vauchez, Audre´, et al., Storia dell’Italia religiosa. Rome: Laterza, 1993–1995. Zabughin, Vladimiro, Storia del rinascimento cristiano in Italia, Milan: Treves, 1924.

A RENAISSANCE COURTESY-BOOK See Galateo (Work by Giovanni Della Casa)

RENAISSANCE The term ‘‘Renaissance’’ (rebirth) stands for the historiographical category defined and employed by nineteenth-century historians to describe the radical and comprehensive changes that occurred in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, bringing about the alleged end of the Middle Ages and setting forth the political, anthropological, and cultural foundation of modern Europe. These pivotal changes comprise the revitalization of ancient culture, the rediscovery of individualism, the secularization of human knowledge, and the emergence of an immanent spirit of learning that supposedly allowed human beings to determine for themselves the meaning, the value, and ultimately the goal of their own lives. Awareness about the significance of this portentous cultural shift was already felt by prominent figures of the time, who made an extensive use of the prefix ‘‘re-’’ (again), both in Latin and in the Italian vernacular, to 1570

express the general sense of a luminous renovatio (renovation) associated to their time, against the background of the medieval ‘‘dark age.’’ For example, Petrarch’s letter to Tommaso da Messina in Rerum familiarum libri (Letters on Familiar Matters, 1325–1366), where the idea is vividly cast through a series of such words in conjunction with ancient authors: ‘‘Redde michi Pithagoram, reddam tibi illius ingenii contemptores; redeat in Greciam Plato, renascatur Homerus, reviviscat Aristotiles, revertatur in Italiam Varro, resurgat Livius, reflorescat Cicero’’ (Return Pythagoras to me and I shall deliver the despisers of his talent. Let Plato return to Greece, let Homer be reborn, let Aristotle live again, let Varro return to Italy, let Livy appear again, let Cicero flourish again). Or suffice it to recall Flavio Biondo, who, in Italia illustrata (Italy Illustrated, 1448–1453), spoke of his time (aetas nostra) as the one in which ‘‘ceterarum

RENAISSANCE artium tum maxime eloquentiae studia revixerunt’’ (the studies of all arts and especially rhetoric were reborn); and Giorgio Vasari’s Vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568), where the nature of contemporary art is staged in terms of ‘‘il progresso della sua rinascita, e di quella stessa perfezzione, dove ella e` risalita’’ (the progress of her second birth and of that very perfection whereto she has risen again). Central and emblematic for this movement of cultural rejuvenation is also the shift in terminology to identify the cohort of learned intellectuals of the time: from grammatici, whose main interests were mostly limited to Latin language, to auctoristi, who developed their particular expert knowledge in lecturing and commenting on the classical authors, to humanisti, whose studies comprised not only grammar but also philology, not only Latin but also the Italian vernacular, not only the academic practice of commenting and lecturing on classical authors but also the absorption and revitalization of ancient modes, ancient genres, and ancient discourses, offering to the Italian repertory a variety of new forms of literary and artistic expressions. This shift, both in terminology and in the ways to understand intellectual practice, was accompanied by an increasing interest in the immanent and secular dimension of human life, which dramatically changed the methods of approaching the text and history. Poetry was no longer thought of as a form of theology but as a form of anthropology, graphically expressed by Giovanni Boccaccio in his Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, ca. 1350–1360), where ancient literature and ancient mythology are presented as physiological and ethological repositories to understand and study the human being as embedded in his or her worldly environment: ‘‘Esto non unquam, ut in precedentibus patet, circa honesta eorum theologia versetur, que sepissime potius physiologia aut ethologia quam theologia dicenda est, dum eorum fabule naturalia contegunt aut mores’’ (there are times, as in this book, when the theology of the Ancients will be seen to exhibit what is right and honorable, though in most such cases it should be considered rather physiology or ethology than theology, according to whether the myths embody the truth concerning physical or human nature). This new secular disposition in reading the ancient past through the lens of the contingencies of the present opened up new vistas for a new form of study not only of literature and art but also of politics, science, and geography, providing the cultural and

epistemological grounding for the development of modernity—all this, of course, according to a rather conventional view of history and of the role played by the Italian Renaissance within it. As a historical category, the term ‘‘Renaissance’’ was firstly introduced by the French historian Jules Michelet in his monumental Histoire de France (1855), to highlight the cultural influence exerted by Italy upon the rest of Europe during the sixteenth century. Five years later, the same term appeared in the groundbreaking Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, by Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897). The German scholar not only divulgated the term to a wider public but ostensibly contributed to its traditional canonization as the cradle of the modern era. Interpreting Burckhardt’s usage of the term as a mere form of loyalty to Michelet’s definition, and therefore equating the German notion of Kultur to the French notion of civilisation, would be misleading. Already in the years immediately subsequent to Michelet’s work, the Swiss historian had expressed in several occasions his personal dissatisfaction with the term. The term ‘‘renaissance,’’ albeit still written in lowercase, had caught Burckhardt’s attention already in Histoire de la renaissance de la liberte´ en Italie, de ses progre`s, de sa de´cadence, et de sa chute (1832), by Jean-CharlesLe´onard Simonde de Sismondi (1773–1842), published as compendium of his ponderous Histoire des re´publiques italiennes du moyen aˆge (1809– 1818), and in Histoire des sciences mathe´matiques en Italie depuis la renaissance des lettres jusqu’a` la fin du dix-septie`me sie`cle (1838–1841), by Guglielmo Libri (1803–1869). In these works, the idea of ‘‘renaissance’’ went hand-in-hand with the parallel notions of political and cultural progression for Europe and regression for Italy. Sismondi’s book was generally received as a manifesto of European liberalism, and its Italian translation, where the term ‘‘renaissance’’ was rendered with the term ‘‘risorgimento,’’ contributed to the mythology of Italy’s belated national redemption during the nineteenth century, for instance in Vincenzo Gioberti’s Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia (On Civic Renewal in Italy, 1851), where the usage of the term rinascimento indicates the phenomenon of political renovation later labeled as ‘‘Risorgimento.’’ Libri’s book was strongly imbued by the Enlightenment anticlerical paradigm that informed the French tradition of the histoire de la civilisation, according to which the idea of modernity was associated with rationalism, secularism, liberalism, and progressivism: an idea of modernity deeply entrenched in the revolutionary events that drastically changed 1571

RENAISSANCE the political and intellectual landscape of nineteenth-century Europe and that Burckhardt himself quite skeptically contrasted. It is variously admitted that Burckhardt reinvented the Italian Renaissance conceptually; equally admitted, and not altogether incorrectly, is also the account that attributes to this reinvention the promotion of the idea of the Italian Renaissance as the origin of the modern world. But if in Burckhardt’s thought the link between modernity and the Renaissance appeared to be clear, less clear was his understanding of modernity itself. Far from endorsing the modern ideals that circulated in Europe during the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century, Burckhardt professed in fact a vigorous hostility toward them, loathing them forcefully for their naı¨ve and partisan glorification of the illusions attached to the notion of progress. This ambiguity may be expressed at its best by means of a conceptual oxymoron, qualifying Burckhardt’s modernity as antimodern, in the same way as his Renaissance appears to be antirenascent, if judged against the factious background depicted by liberal historians such as Sismondi and Libri. Not unlike them, Burckhardt’s Italian Renaissance certainly entails an adventure of freedom. But his notion of freedom can be hardly reduced to the timely fashion of a given zeitgeist and rather concerns more pertinently the freedom of critical judgment: the critical judgment of an autonomous intellectual, portrayed as a responsible and cultivated individual, self-consciously engaged in a distinguished tradition of learning. This ethical and cultural commitment deeply informed the very logic of Burckhardt’s modernity, which deserved in his view to be fostered and sustained by an engaged project of historical popularization. Already in 1848, Burckhardt announced a series of highly readable monographs on some fundamental periods of Western history, from the age of Pericles to the age of Raphael, to provide the European readers with what he viewed as a library of cultural history. The sketched outline shared with Sismondi and Libri the same allegiance to the enlightened history once proposed by Voltaire; and yet, against Voltaire and his civilization model, the choice of culminating the project with a book devoted to ‘‘the culture of the Italian Renaissance’’ and not to ‘‘the age of Raphael,’’ as originally envisioned, stands for his polemical advancement of casting the history of modernity as a problem to be immanently discussed, rather than as a fact to be transcendentally demonstrated. Burckhardt’s ‘‘invention’’ of the Italian 1572

Renaissance afforded as such a dynamic paradigm of cultural history, where the origins of modernity are dialectically staged as a multifaceted dialogue between a set of rational and irrational, political and religious, individual and collective, material and ideal, popular and learned, innovative and traditional, past and present concerns. Viewed from this articulated perspective, Burckhardt’s notion of the Italian Renaissance can be less valued as a naı¨ve manifesto for the origin of the modern era than as an engaged agenda for the introduction of culture as a legitimate historical category. Burckhardt’s seminal book achieved two main objectives, viewed later as highly controversial at both the historical and historiographical level. From the historical point of view, it polemically concentrates the origins of modernity in the Italian quattrocento, portrayed more as the stage for the artificial, and therefore not natural, development of the modern state and of the modern individual, rather than as the scenario for the nostalgic rebirth of ancient culture, and primarily motivated as well as substantially enhanced by a new form of attraction to the outward world and the inward dimension of human psychology and balanced by the vibrant interplay of immanent and transcendent forces. From the historiographical point of view, the stress placed on culture and its material tradition, rather than on history and its spiritual progression in Hegelian sense, opened up the possibility for the exploration and certification of new forms of history, be they concordant or discordant with the assumptions provided by Burckhardt. The undeniable success of his study unarguably elevated the Italian Renaissance as a privileged topic for both historical and historiographical inquiries and as such in the subsequent century was able to mobilized the efforts of an impressive cohort of scholars, from Warburg to Yates, Panofsky to Gombrich, Huizinga to Weise, Baron to Grendler, Kristeller to Black, Cantimori to Ginzburg, Garin to Grafton, to name a few. Despite the ambiguities of his theoretical approach, Burckhardt’s luminous definition of the Italian Renaissance did not preclude, but in fact promoted, the integration of his discourse in the teleological perspective that informed in his times the so-called linear development of Western history. In the United States, this teleological outlook found its pedagogical and ideological consecration in the so-called Western civilization course, vigorously sponsored toward the beginning of the twentieth century by the American historian James H. Robinson (1863–1936). In the grandiose structure

RENAISSANCE of this scenario, didactically staged as the ‘‘dramatic’’ development of Western history and orderly divided into three successive ‘‘acts,’’ devoted respectively to antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modernity, the Italian Renaissance was emplaced as the opening scene of the third and final act, destined to culminate in the history of the United States as the emergent dominant world power. This rather instrumental and biased interpretation gave way during the course of the last century to one of the most hotly debated controversies. Attacked by medievalists, who challenged the intellectual innovations allegedly ascribed to that period; by social historians, who refused to acknowledge that those alleged innovations affected all strata of the late medieval society; by feminist historians, who showed the rather inauspicious effects on the condition of women implicit in those innovations; by historians of economics, who devalued as merely ‘‘legendary’’ the role played by the Italian mercantile bourgeoisie in the development of Western capitalism; and finally by historians of sciences, who denied that the so-called scientific revolution found its origins in the Italian Humanistic tradition, the Italian Renaissance came to represent one of the most enduring historiographical conundrums, a destitute label whose reference now one is at a loss to name. In 1978, in his landmark presidential address to the American Historical Association, William J. Bouwsma announced the definite ‘‘collapse of the traditional dramatic organization of Western history’’ and, consequently, of the privileged role played by the Italian Renaissance in that overarching narrative (‘‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,’’ 1978). Twenty years after Bouwsma’s address, the official journal of the same American Historical Association devoted a specific forum to the subject, significantly entitled ‘‘The Persistence of Renaissance’’ and sensitively guided by the intention of recuperating ‘‘this category as more than a term of convenience’’ through a careful scrutiny of the origins of the phenomenon and the ways in which its meaning was fostered and sustained, outside the domain of ‘‘professional historians,’’ by ‘‘artists, writers, connoisseurs, and patrons’’ directly involved ‘‘in shaping Western European definitions of culture,’’ as Paula Findlen explained (‘‘Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance,’’ 1998). Bouwsma himself, asked to express his view on this project of revitalization, replied with a piece significantly entitled ‘‘Eclipse of the Renaissance’’ (1998) where he vigorously demoted the idea of the Renaissance as

a ‘‘period in European history,’’ advancing for it a rather vague cultural definition as a ‘‘set of developments during a time in which quite contrary tendencies were also at work, some of them destined to survive and grow stronger during later centuries.’’ And, yet, Bouwsma eventually qualified this set of complex and sometimes contradictory developments in quite subliminal Burckhardtian terms ‘‘as movements toward liberation.’’ The story of the ascendancy and the decline of the Italian Renaissance has definitely lost its theoretical quidditas while maintaining, for whatever reason, its aesthetic qualitas, its glamour, its magnitude. The term ‘‘Renaissance’’ persists in a historiographical limbo: It remains as an evocative word, as a cultural label, perhaps more as a poetic licence than as a historically grounded label. The attempt to recuperate a strong functionality of the term, by referring to widely accepted theoretical spins, such as the linguistic, the cognitive, or the political turn, has proven so far to be heuristically challenging but in fact quite unavailing. The arguable opportunity to avoid the term altogether and to replace it with expressions such as ‘‘late medieval’’ or ‘‘early modern’’ has been variously advanced. But equally advanced has been also the charge of fallacy implied in such a solution: While certainly allowing the comfortable circumvention of seeing the Renaissance as the transition to modernity, the recourse to a new terminology did not evade the equally unsettled question of escaping all kinds of anachronism in historical discourse. The fact is that in times of globalization and multiculturalism the very notions of Middle Ages and modernity appear to be likewise problematic. If in 1995 the editors of The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies felt the urge to symbolically change the title of their prestigious periodical to The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Massimo Montanari and the other authors of a recent Italian handbook on medieval history have felt the same urge to exclude from their text any reference to the term ‘‘Middle Ages’’ and its derivatives. The book itself is indeed entitled Storia medievale (2002), but only to highlight the conventional, inertial, and merely scholastic praxis of labelling as such this historical period. It is equally significant that the Renaissance Society of America, publisher of Renaissance Quarterly, qualifies itself as ‘‘the leading organization in the Americas for the interdisciplinary study of the late medieval, Renaissance and early modern period,’’ encompassing under the ‘‘Renaissance’’ label both the ‘‘late medieval’’ and the ‘‘early modern’’ periods. 1573

RENAISSANCE Far from identifying a clear ‘‘break’’ between medieval and modern times, representing a ‘‘transition’’ between the two ages and even indicating a well-defined ‘‘period’’ of Western history, the term ‘‘Renaissance,’’ especially when associated with Italy, seems nowadays to merely evoke the passion and fascination of its faithful aficionados. The massive work of historical revision, mainly fostered by increasing scepticism toward the hypostasis of grandiose overarching narratives, has certainly divested the present of any claim of affiliation with the Renaissance. Freed from this sort of claims, the Renaissance has become the privileged topic for a set of microhistorical explorations of political, social, and cultural natures, which, avoiding the direct consideration of dramatic events in history, have popularized their compelling fascination with the discrete, the marginal, the intriguing and, at times, sensational aspects of human experience, without providing any coherent paradigm. These studies have greatly contributed to expand our knowledge of the period once called Renaissance in all its multifarious manifestations, which in fact have less to do with any sort of historical continuity with ourselves than with the sense of desire, attachment, and nostalgia that the otherness of the past is able to provoke. Reduced to a label, the Italian Renaissance gains favor also among the consumers of popular history, attracted by the idea that it is not the origin of their own modernity but rather the origin of a distinguished definition of culture, shared today by an increasing variety of people. Thus, an eclectic and pluralistic approach of the so called, perhaps infelicitously, ‘‘New Erudition,’’ now defines those acolytes who have elected the Italian Renaissance as their privileged, albeit not exclusive, field of study. Knowledge becomes tasteful appreciation; cultivation becomes passionate cult; history becomes poetry, whereby the findings, gathered together through the careful consultation of real and virtual libraries, are counterbalanced by the skilful recourse to the old toolbox of textual exegesis (palaeography, bibliography, philology, and even stylistics) and enhanced through a stylish form of academic writing. All this testifies the high degree of self-reflexivity that the Italian Renaissance has attained nowadays, eloquently demonstrated by the six volumes in folio of the recent Encyclopedia of the Renaissance edited by Paul Grendler, in association with the Renaissance Society of America. Archived, perhaps once and forever, the old quarrel over the alleged modernity of the 1574

Renaissance, as well as the disputes over its intrinsic chronology, over the learned and popular variation of its culture, over the centrality and marginality of its achievements, over the philosophical and rhetorical dimension of its humanistic inflection, the attraction of the compound label ‘‘Italian Renaissance’’ seems nowadays to be rather conveyed by the topicality of the adjective, than by the universality of the noun. In Burckhardt’s times, as Riccardo Fubini has recently put it, Italy, while still representing the most beloved destination for the cultivated traveller, constituted in a way a distant land, ‘‘outside of any fixed tradition of his own cultural motherland’’ (L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici, 2001). It was therefore a perfect candidate for the mythical elaboration of the origins of modern Europe. Italy remains today a country still in search of its own cultural and historical identity. Carlo Dionisotti, a critic particularly attentive to the internal development of our national history, once maintained that up to the entire quattrocento Italian literary history is ‘‘palaeography,’’ prospecting an archaeological work to provide a final general assessment of the Italian textual and material patrimony, beyond and prior to any form of lapidary definition (‘‘Dante nel Quattrocento,’’ 1965). The model for this intensive work of informative assemblage is not to be found in a book of history, but in Paul Oskar Kristeller’s monumental Iter italicum (1963–1997), a veritable bible for both ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘old’’ Renaissance scholars, whereby the difference between ‘‘new’’ and ‘‘old’’ is the same one intervening between ‘‘passion’’ and ‘‘patience.’’ This need of assessment and groundwork is perhaps even more critical for the subsequent centuries, from 1530 to 1830: centuries, without name and ‘‘without history,’’ variously referred to as the Renaissance (in its extended version), the Ancien Re´gime, or the Age of Classicism. For this vast period of historical and alleged cultural decline, from the Italian Renaissance (in its traditional version) to the Italian Risorgimento, Amedeo Quondam has provocatively suggested the label of ‘‘new Middle Ages’’ or a ‘‘new middle era’’ spanning ‘‘the mythical foundation of republican liberties and their definitive redemption and revolutionary progre`s’’ (‘‘Per un’archeologia del Canone e della Biblioteca del Classicismo di Antico Regime,’’ 2002). Whether or not, and in what way and form, this ‘‘middle era’’ contributed to the Italian modernity and/or postmodernity is still to be accounted. STEFANO CRACOLICI

RENAISSANCE See also: Humanism; Courts and Patronage Further Reading Battisti, Eugenio, L’antirinascimento, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962. Bouwsma, William J., ‘‘Eclipse of the Renaissance,’’ The American Historical Review, 103 (1998), 115–117. Bouwsma, William J., ‘‘The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,’’ The American Historical Review, 84:1 (1979), 1–15. Brown, Richard D., ‘‘From Burckhardt to Greenblatt: New Historicism and Old,’’ in The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader, edited by Keith Whitlock, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Burckhardt, Jacob, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, translated by Samuel G. Chetwynd Middlemore, 2 vols., London: Kegan Paul, 1878. Celenza, Christopher S., The Lost Italian Renaissance: Humanists, Historians, and Latin’s Legacy, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Copenhaver, Brian, ‘‘Did Science Have a Renaissance?’’ Isis, 83 (1992), 387–407. Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Dante nel Quattrocento,’’ in Atti del Congresso internazionale di studi danteschi, Florence: Sansoni, 1965. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Ferguson, Margaret W., Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (editors), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Ferguson, Wallace K., The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948. Findlen, Paula, ‘‘Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance,’’ The American Historical Review, 103:1 (1998), 83–114. Findlen, Paula, and Kenneth Gouwens, ‘‘Introduction: The Persistence of the Renaissance,’’ The American Historical Review, 103:1 (1998), 51–54. Fubini, Riccardo, L’umanesimo italiano e i suoi storici: Origini rinascimentali, critica moderna, Milan: Angeli, 2001. Garin, Eugenio, Italian Humanism, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1965; reprinted, 1975. Gilbert, Felix, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Ginzburg, Carlo, ‘‘Conversare con Orion,’’ Quaderni storici, 36:3 (2001), 905–913.

Grafton, Anthony, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine, From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Grafton, Anthony, April Shelford, and Nancy G. Siraisi. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. Greene, Thomas M., The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. Grendler, Paul F. (editor), Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, 6 vols., New York: Scribner’s, 1999. Herlihy, David, ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?: A Reconsideration,’’ Mediaevalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture, 13 (1985), 1–22. Jardine, Lisa, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, London: Macmillan, 1996. Kelly-Gadol, Joan, ‘‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’’ in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Kristeller, Paul O., Iter Italicum: A Finding List of Uncatalogued or Incompletely Catalogued Humanistic Manuscripts of the Renaissance in Italian and Other Libraries, 7 vols., London: Warburg Institute–Leiden: Brill, 1963–1997. Martin, John, ‘‘Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,’’ American Historical Review, 102:5 (1997), 1309–1317. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, Il Rinascimento dei moderni: La crisi culturale del XVI secolo e la negazione delle origini, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1985. Montanari, Massimo, et al., Storia medievale, Rome: Laterza, 2002. Muir, Edward, ‘‘The Italian Renaissance in America,’’ American Historical Review, 100:4 (1995), 1095–1118. Muir, Edward, and Guido Ruggiero (editors), Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. Quondam, Amedeo, ‘‘Per un’archeologia del Canone e della Biblioteca del Classicismo di Antico Regime,’’ in Il canone e la biblioteca: Costruzioni e decostruzioni della tradizione letteraria italiana, edited by Amedeo Quondam, vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002. Robinson, James H., Medieval and Modern Times, BostonNew York: Ginn and Co., 1931. Starn, Randolf, ‘‘Introduction: ‘The New Erudition,’’’ Representations, 56 (1996), 1–7.

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LEONIDA RE`PACI

LEONIDA RE`PACI (1898–1985) Mostly known as the founder of the Premio Viareggio, one of the most prestigious Italian literary prizes, Leonida Re`paci was a highly controversial intellectual figure. Despite his versatility and extensive production, critics have never agreed on the importance of his works, still debating whether to consider Re`paci only an accomplished promoter of cultural events or also a truly talented writer. Born in Calabria, Re`paci left his home after the 1908 earthquake that destroyed cities such as Reggio Calabria, Messina, and Re`paci’s hometown, Palmi. This event, together with other biographical occurrences, is found later in his works, where fiction and reality often overlap. In Turin Re`paci met Antonio Gramsci and Piero Gobetti, two of the figures who most influenced his intellectual growth. In 1923 he published his first novel, L’ultimo cireneo (The Last Cyrenian), the tragic story of Mario Antonelli, a World War I veteran whose serious injury affects his sexual performance. Unable to fulfill his young wife’s conjugal expectations, Mario falls into despair and, blinded with jealousy, kills his cousin Aldo, suspected to be his wife’s secret lover. The novel, positively received by critics and readers, presents some of the most predominant traits of Re`paci’s poetics: the obsession with eroticism, a strong biographical element, and the political and social implications of his writings. After the publication of La carne inquieta (Restless Flesh, 1930), Re`paci began to work on what is considered his most essential contribution to Italian literature, the story of the Rupe family, the first episode of which, I fratelli Rupe (The Rupe Brothers), was published in 1932. The saga of the Rupe family starts in 1900 in Sarmura, a small Calabrian village in which one can recognize the author’s hometown, Palmi. Protagonists of the story are the ten children of Antonio and Maria Rupe, through whose vicissitudes Re`paci represents the major historical events of the twentieth century, from World War I to the Cold War. The narrative, which covers 68 years of Italian history, unfolds in four volumes: Storia dei fratelli Rupe (History of the Rupe Bothers, 1958), later republished as Principio di secolo (Beginning of the Century, 1969), which includes, in addition to I fratelli Rupe, Potenza dei fratelli Rupe (The Power of the Rupe Brothers, 1934) and 1576

Passione dei fratelli Rupe (The Passion of the Rupe Brothers, 1937); Tra guerra e rivoluzione (Between War and Revolution, 1969); Sotto la dittatura (Under the Dictatorship, 1971); and La terra puo` finire (The World Can End, 1973), in which Re`paci explored the relationship between the members of the family and the world. The Rupe cycle is characterized by the strong ideological perspective of its narration, in which the reader finds references to socialist and revolutionary intellectuals such as Gramsci, Gobetti, Sorel, and Marx, but also, from a literary standpoint, to writers such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giovanni Verga, and the French naturalists. The final result is a gigantic narrative in which Re`paci’s ambition to combine chronicle, epic, and autobiography was at times frustrated by the writer’s own passionate and excessive prose. Between the publication of the first and the last volume of the Rupe cycle, Re`paci was involved in numerous cultural activities. He was a journalist, literary and theatrical critic, playwright, poet, painter, and essayist. However diverse and multifaceted his cultural activities, it is nonetheless possible to identify in his works some common qualities such as, for example, the love for his region, which he defined as grande e amara (great and bitter) in the title of a 1964 essay, the sympathy for the unfortunate and the poor, and his intellectual honesty. All these traits can be found in two of Re`paci’s best works, the novel Un riccone torna alla terra (A Rich Man Goes Back to His Land, 1954) and the short story ‘‘Marcia dei braccianti di Melissa’’ (The March of the Melissa’s Laborers, 1953, published in Un filo che si svolge in trent’anni [A Thread That Has Unraveled over Thirty Years], 1954). Un riccone torna alla terra is the grotesque story of the rich landowner Totonno Riccobaldi who, close to death and loathed by his own countrymen for his arrogance and avarice, intends to organize the greatest funeral in the history of Sarmura. To accomplish this plan, he decides to use his money to buy the human sympathy he never had during his life and asks his wife Leonora to gather for his funeral as many people as possible. Totonno’s memorial service is a huge success, as the promise of money attracts thousands of miserable people from the entire region. Even dead,

LEONIDA RE`PACI Totonno is able to deride the wretchedness of the people he exploited throughout his existence. In this sense, Un riccone torna alla terra becomes for Re`paci a paradigmatic example of the unjust and tyrannical relationship between landowners and peasants in Calabria, a relationship that he strongly challenged with his art and political commitment. Similarly, ‘‘Marcia dei braccianti di Melissa,’’ based on true historical facts, is a desperate call for social justice that narrates the attempt to conquer a small and forgotten portion of land by a community of peasants from Melissa. Unfortunately, the peaceful invasion ends in a tragic bloodshed, as the state police kill some of the braccianti whose only fault is to seek better work conditions. Re`paci was at his best here, and the successful combination of art and social awareness makes this piece a manifesto of the author’s deep and committed social dedication. Re`paci may well not have been the most gifted writer, but his cultural activity and commitment have resulted in an important legacy for Italian contemporary culture.

Selected Works Collections L’ultimo cireneo, 1923. La carne inquieta, 1930. I fratelli Rupe, 1932. Potenza dei fratelli Rupe, 1934. Passione dei fratelli Rupe, 1937. Un riccone torna alla terra, 1954. Il deserto del sesso, 1956. Omaggio al teatro (Questo nostro tempo, La madre incatenata, Favola di Martino, La barba alla morte, La voglia, Il superuomo e la montagna, Notturno del tempo e dell’illusione, Luciano 1930), Milan: Ceschina, 1957. Il pazzo del casamento, 1958. Storia dei fratelli Rupe, 1958 (includes I fratelli Rupe, Potenza dei fratelli Rupe, Passione dei fratelli Rupe); reprinted as Principio di secolo, 1969. Amore senza paura, 1963. Magia del fiume, 1965. Il caso Amari, 1966. Tra guerra e rivoluzione, 1969. Sotto la dittatura, 1971. La terra puo` finire, 1973. Lanterne rosse a Montevenere, 1974.

Short Stories All’insegna del gabbamondo, 1928. Cacciadiavoli, 1930. Racconti della mia Calabria, 1931. Un filo che si svolge in trent’anni, 1954.

Biography Leonida Re`paci was born in Palmi (Reggio Calabria) on 5 April 1898. He earned a law degree at the University of Turin, 1920, then worked with Antonio Gramsci at Ordine Nuovo, 1921–1923. He worked for L’Unita`, 1924. Re`paci married Albertina Antonelli, 1929. He was cofounder and director of the Premio Viareggio, 1929. He collaborated with La Gazzetta del Popolo and La Stampa, 1931. He traveled to the United States, Cuba, Hawaii, Japan, China, India, and Egypt for La Gazzetta del popolo, 1934. He served as theatrical critic for L’illustrazione Italiana, 1937–42, and was cofounder of Il Tempo, 1944, then founder and director of Premio Sila, 1948. Re`paci was a member of the Consiglio Mondiale della Pace, and coorganizer of the conference Cultura e Resistenza, Venice, 1950. He traveled to the Soviet Union, 1952. He worked with Federico Fellini on La dolce vita, 1960. He was awarded the Premio Bagutta for I fratelli Rupe, 1933; the Premio Crotone for Un riccone torna alla terra, 1956; the Premio Villa San Giovanni for Storia dei fratelli Rupe, 1958; the Premio Sila for Tra Guerra e rivoluzione, 1970; and the Cariglio d’oro, 1984. Re`paci died in Rome on 19 July 1985. PAOLO CHIRUMBOLO

Poetry ‘‘Il ribelle e l’Antigone,’’ 1919. ‘‘Poemi della solitudine,’’ 1920. ‘‘Poemetti civili,’’ 1973. ‘‘Mamma leonessa,’’ 1983. ‘‘Poesia aperta,’’ 1986.

Plays La Madre incatenata, 1931. Teatro, 1949.

Critical Writing Ribalte a lumi spenti: 1937–1938, 1939. Ribalte a lumi spenti: 1938–1940, 1941. Galleria: taccuino artistico degli anni di guerra 1941–1942– 1943, 1948. Giro del mondo di ieri, 1948. Socialismo sognato, 1948. Taccuino politico, 1949. Francesco Cilea, 1954. Peccati e virtu` delle Donne: caratteri e ritratti, 1954. Compagni di strada, 1960. Il sud su un binario morto, 1963. Calabria grande e amara, 1964.

Other Taccuino segreto, 1939.

Further Reading Accrocca, Elio Filippo (editor), Re`paci 70 e la cultura italiana, Rome: Costanzi, 1968.

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LEONIDA RE`PACI Altomonte, Antonio, ‘‘Leonida Re`paci,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, Milan: Marzorati, 1969. Altomonte, Antonio, Re`paci, Florence: Il Castoro, 1976. Crupi, Pasquino, ‘‘Leonida Re`paci,’’ in Letteratura calabrese contemporanea, Florence: Casa Editrice D’Anna, 1972. Figlietti, Mario (editor), Viaggio televisivo intorno a Leonida Repaci, Siracusa: Cartia, 1974. Messina, Natalia, and Francesco Uttieri, Il paese del Sud in La Cava, Seminara, Repaci, Asprea, Cosenza: Pellegrini, 1984.

Pampaloni, Geno, ‘‘Leonida Re`paci,’’ in Novecento. I Contemporanei, vol. 8, edited by Giovanni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1979. Ragni, Eugenio, ‘‘Leonida Re`paci,’’ in Letteratura italiana contemporanea, vol. 2, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, Rome: Lucarini, 1980. Ravegnani, Giuseppe (editor), Re`paci controluce, Milan: Ceschina, 1963. Zaczek, Barbara, ‘‘L’ovario di ochette: Fascism and Female Sexuality in Leonida Re`paci’s Il deserto del sesso,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 18:1 (2000), 116–126.

LITERATURE OF THE RESISTANCE An initial distinction must be made between the literature of the Italian Resistance and literature on the Italian Resistance. The former has a direct function affecting the Resistance and appeared in partisan journals during the Nazi occupation between 8 September 1943 (the armistice between the Italian government and the Allied forces) and 25 April 1945 (Liberation Day). The latter has as its object the events and the period of the Resistance itself. It is difficult to establish a precise starting date for Resistance literature; such a date should take into account the relationship with the earlier antiFascist writings. The two-year period 1943–1945 has been considered a definitive break with the past by most scholars and artists, including Italo Calvino, who enlisted Elio Vittorini’s novel Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily, 1941) in the corpus of Resistance works, although it was written during the dictatorship. In Calvino’s opinion, Italian literature ‘‘s’e` arricchita, attraverso l’esperienza della Resistenza, di qualcosa di nuovo e necessario’’ (was enriched, through the experience of the Resistance, by something new and necessary), thanks primarily to works of minor proportions, poetry and short stories (‘‘La letteratura italiana sulla Resistenza,’’ 1949). In the anti-Fascist press of the time, one can trace the birth of a new language, expression of a new human experience, notwithstanding its rhetorical and sentimental nuances. This production should be considered on its own terms and not assigned a marginal, dependent role with respect to neo-Realism. In his 1965 Scrittori e popolo, Marxist critic Alberto Asor Rosa sustained a widely discussed 1578

theory of the continuity between Resistance works and preceding literature, using populism as his lens. The Italian intellectual tendency to idealize the people and to make them the central objects of a progressive impegno (engagement), a concept already vibrant in the Risorgimento and Fascist periods, underwent a phase of literary-populist stimulation during the Resistance thanks to ‘‘l’identificazione del Popolo nel concetto di Umanita`’’ (the identification of the People in the concept of Humanity). Thus, Populism in Resistance literature appears to have been motivated by a strong moralistic and ideological impulse: The intellectual reached out to the people but most of the time transformed them into a myth, into an upsidedown image of themselves. According to Asor Rosa, this tendency also concerned Italy’s most important authors, albeit in different ways: from Elio Vittorini to Cesare Pavese, from Vasco Pratolini to Italo Calvino, from Carlo Levi to Carlo Cassola and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Asor Rosa paid particular attention to the marked sociological interest that inspired Carlo Levi’s Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1945), which was followed by an oneiric re-evocation of the Resistance, L’orologio (Watch, 1950). At the other end lie the works selected by Giovanni Falaschi in his 1976 essay La Resistenza armata nella narrativa italiana. Intending to consider only ‘‘true partisan literature,’’ Falaschi stopped his study chronologically at 1950. He justified this choice, on one hand, on the basis of the quantity of works produced in the 1940s and the homogeneity of subjects they treated; on the other, on the basis of changes that took place during the next decade

LITERATURE OF THE RESISTANCE due to the Cold War and the consolidation of the model of socialist realism. Within this context, Vittorini’s Uomini e no (Men and Not, 1945), which recounts events of partisan guerilla warfare in Nazi-Fascist–occupied Milan, was assigned center stage as the first proper Resistance novel. So were Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1947), inspired by his own partisan experience in a Garibaldi Brigade and narrated through the eyes of its child protagonist, and Beppe Fenoglio’s posthumously published Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan, 1968). Fenoglio effected an ideological decentering through bilingualism: The archetype of his partisan novels was written in English. He remained faithful to the themes of the Resistance and closed its most authentic phase with Ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba (The Twenty-Three Days of the City of Alba, 1952) and Una questione privata (A Private Matter, 1963), in which the author took his experience fighting in the Piedmont Langhe as his point of departure. Falaschi excluded Cesare Pavese, notwithstanding the merit of La casa in collina (The House on the Hill, 1948), because of his declared nonparticipation in the Resistance; Vasco Pratolini, who treated the subject in only a few short stories; and Carlo Cassola, whose Resistance fiction relates to a character’s individual, rather than ideological, choice. A literary investigation of the Resistance must take into account new historiographic works as well, without diminishing the importance of foundational studies such as the Storia della Resistenza italiana (1953) by Roberto Battaglia—who also authored the diary Un uomo, un partigiano (A Man, A Partisan, 1945). During the early 1990s, historian Claudio Pavone revisited the Resistance movement, analyzing the political and moral behaviors of the protagonists, and claimed that it was fighting three wars during this time: patriotic (against the Germans), civil (against the Fascists), and a class war (Una guerra civile. Saggio storico sulla moralita` nella Resistenza, 1991). He also addressed the problems that emerged in the field of women’s history. Such a historical approach highlights active female participation in the Resistance, working against the reductive thesis that women’s contributions were minor and mostly limited to the activities of care and support. Starting with the years between the two wars, it is possible to identify a female literary community, in which women writers, who would emerge after 1945, developed their skills. These women (among them Anna Banti, Alba De Ce´spedes, and Sibilla

Aleramo) followed an itinerary different from that of other writers of Resistance literature. In their works, as Marina Zancan has noted, the objectivity of history evaporates in a thought process in which the greater theme underlying their narration becomes writing itself, as the place for expressing one’s own subjectivity (Il doppio itinerario della scrittura, 1998). Of the more neo-Realist works, Renata Vigano`’s L’Agnese va a morire (Agnese Goes to Die, 1949), an intense evocation of the Emilian fight for liberation and of the choral participation of the peasants, entered the canon of major Resistance literature. Vigano`’s Agnese is molded as an exemplary female figure, maternal and unthreatening in comparison with the young partisan women who leave behind their families and traditional occupations to participate in the historical fight. There are numerous female accounts of the Resistance, beginning with some extraordinary diaries that were reconstructed at a later time, such as Diario partigiano (Partisan Diary, 1956) by Ada Gobetti (1902–1968) and I giorni veri (The Real Days, 1963) by Giovanna Zangrandi (1910–1988). Their substance and the knowledge they express make these accounts one of the forms assumed by the literary tradition of women’s writing. They are strongly imaginative, and, for this reason, Zancan spoke of ‘‘private’’ writings, rather than ‘‘extraliterary’’ ones (‘‘Memoria e scrittura nella Resistenza,’’ 1992). Writing itself represents a way out of the Resistance worthy of that unique experience. Many women, who because of their social origins or scholastic level did not seem destined to translate their life experiences into books, felt legitimated to do so: The partisan fight and World War II achieved the liberating effect that World War I had for men from the working classes. Male memoir writing of the Resistance is heterogeneous in terms of geographic distribution, literary genre, linguistic level, and political and ideological orientation. It had its origins in the ethical need of its authors to testify, beginning with their personal stories and subsequently projecting themselves into history and wanting to be faithful to the ‘‘truth’’ of the facts. The results vary from texts that use antiquated styles of language and rhetoric, to intense books such as those by Nuto Revelli (1919–2004), who in Mai tardi (Never Late, 1946) and La guerra dei poveri (The War of the Poor, 1962) told the story of his experiences respectively as an officer in the Russian campaign and as a partisan commander. In L’ultimo fronte (The Last Front, 1971), Revelli also collected the diary-letters of 1579

LITERATURE OF THE RESISTANCE the Alpinists who disappeared in Russia; while I piccoli maestri (The Little Teachers, 1964) by Luigi Meneghello (1922–) is a fictional memoir that records the events of young antiheroes from the Veneto. Also extraordinary are books such as La Quarantasettesima (The Forty-Seventh, 1946) by Ubaldo Bertoli (1908–2000), on the fight for liberation in Emilia Romagna; Un salto nel buio (A Shot in the Dark, 1959) by Mario Bonfantini (1904–1978), on his deportation journey to Mauthausen; and Cronache degli anni neri (Chronicles of the Black Years, 1984) by Romano Bilenchi (1909–1989), on the Tuscan Resistance. Before being arrested by the Nazis, Bonfantini was a partisan in Valdossola. Most importantly, a great number of memoirs recorded on the lager (detainee camps) experiences have a Resistential matrix, which is wide and influential: It was in their roles as politicians and partisans that many concentration camp deportees told their stories. Such was the case of Piero Caleffi (1901–1978) who, in his Si fa presto a dire fame (It Is Easy to Say Hunger, 1955), expressed a sense of continuity between his anti-Fascist resistance fight and deportation to Mauthausen. Notable are the works of Lidia Beccaria Rolfi and Anna Maria Buzzone’s Donne di Ravesbru¨ck (Women of Ravesbru¨ck, 1978), which collects the testimonies of five women who were deported, including Beccaria Rolfi herself (1925–1996); and Rivoluzionaria professionale (Professional Revolutionary, 1975), the autobiography of Teresa Noce (1900–1980), worker and Communist leader, who went through prison, exile in France and in the Soviet Union, and the lager. Workers who enter the lager dream of freeing it in Pasolini’s Caldero´n (1973), in the person of the theatrical manifestation of Rosaura: Theirs is indeed a dream, given the crisis of the working class. Literature of deportation does not have an easy life. The memories of survivors of the lager have proved too disquieting to be easily welcomed in Reconstruction Italy. On the one hand, this Italy claims to be born in the armed, politicized Resistance; on the other, it tends to erase its past. Even Primo Levi’s Se questo e` un uomo (If This Is a Man) was refused in 1947 by Einaudi, a publishing house with strong political engagement, and was published instead by the pocket editions of De Silva thanks to Sandro Galante Garrone. This book, recognized as a benchmark of postwar Italian literature, opened the way for the writing of memoirs of genocide, creating a wider possibility for survivors than that offered by the Resistance model. Anna Bravo and Daniele Jalla have traced 146 published 1580

works and numerous unpublished manuscripts, offering an important panorama of the number of texts composed by the protagonists of that extreme experience, a collection of hard-fought translations of the ‘‘unspeakable’’ and the ‘‘incomprehensible’’ into words (Una misura onesta: Gli scritti di memoria della deportazione dall’Italia 1944–1993, 1994). Oral testimonies respond to a widely diffused need to narrate and give life to a sort of collective autobiography; these testimonies should be considered alongside written production, the work of authors. In its most directly Resistential phase, neo-Realist literature was characterized by the interference of semantic fields related to orality; the force of this tradition is such that, in the words of Maria Corti (1915–2002), an epic could have been born (Il viaggio testuale, 1978). But these same oral narratives, repeated over and over again, have tended to be fixed into a sort of mental writing codified in its points of pathos, in dialectal expressions inserted in the language, in interruptions. Exemplary have been the cases of Alcide Cervi and her daughter-in-law Margherita, who, in the house of a family that has become a museum in Gattatico (Reggio Emilia), recited the tragedy of the seven Cervi brothers shot by Fascists for Sunday morning visitors; or the experience of the ‘‘Teatro di massa’’ of Marcello Sartarelli, who during the postwar period brought to life on stage the partisan experiences of hundreds of men and women. The field of civic oratory, instead, is the form expressed in the Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (Letters of Those in the Italian Resistance Condemned to Death, 1952) edited by Piero Malvezzi and Giovanni Pirelli and in the Lettere di antifascisti dal carcere e dal confino (Letters of Antifascists from Prison and from Political Confinement, 1962) collected on the initiative of Giancarlo Pajetta. Finally, the number of Resistance poems was far smaller than its fictional production. Among the major poets treating the subject, Alfonso Gatto (1909–1976), whose ‘‘Per i morti di piazzale Loreto’’ (For the Dead of Piazzale Loreto, in Il capo sulla neve, 1949) circulated clandestinely, and Salvatore Quasimodo, whose ‘‘Alle fronde dei salici’’ (At the Willow Fronds, in Giorno dopo giorno, 1947) is considered to be the most famous Resistance poem. Written during the war, this poem is emblematic for its reference to biblical and classical literary sources as well as to contemporary nonliterary ones, including underground newspapers that made militant use of rhetoric; it ties sentimentality and a vague religiosity to political themes.

LITERATURE OF THE RESISTANCE Gatto insisted on a broad approach to the Resistance, not only as an armed fight, but also as a political one, which comprised both personal tragedies, such as in ‘‘Lamento d’una mamma napoletana’’ (Lament of a Neapolitan Mother), and defining events, as in ‘‘Sei agosto’’ (Sixth of August), on Hiroshima, published in La storia delle vittime (The History of the Victims, 1966). History evolves into poetry also in Vittorio Sereni’s celebrated lyric ‘‘Non sa piu` nulla, e` alto sulle ali’’ (He Knows Nothing More, He’s Flying High, in Diario d’Algeria, 1947), where, as a prisoner of war in Algeria, he imagined the first soldier to die during the Allied landing in Normandy. Similar experiences were recounted by Neri Pozza (1912–1988), who in La prigione e altri versi (Prison and Other Verses, 1969) offered an emotional diary of his experience as a partisan political prisoner; and Paola Masino (1908–1989), who, in ‘‘Vento del nord’’ (Nothern Wind, in Poesie, 1947) remembered the world of affections in times of horror. On another level, the texts of partisan songs should be mentioned; the most famous of these, ‘‘Bella ciao,’’ has become part of national culture. However, not having fought personally may render the poetic voice even more powerful; such is the case of Pier Paolo Pasolini, who in ‘‘Vicino agli occhi e ai capelli sciolti’’ (Near the Eyes and Stranded Hair, in Dal diario, 1954) and ‘‘Cosı` giunsi ai giorni della Resistenza’’ (In This Way I Arrived to the Days of the Resistance, in La religione del mio tempo, 1961) remembered his brother Guido, who was shot at 22, together with the men of the Osoppo brigade, by Communist partisans and Slavs at Porzuˆs. Franco Fortini (1917–1994) took refuge in Switzerland after September 8, 1943, and participated in the final partisan conflicts. Beginning with ‘‘Canto degli ultimi partigiani’’ (The Last Partisans’ Song, in Foglio di via, 1946) to ‘‘Quel partigiano tedesco’’ (That German Partisan, in Poesia ed errore, 1959), he outwardly composed vivid poems on the Resistance and continued to revisit this experience from the cultural-political perspective. In the end, Fortini provocatively suggested that ‘‘di letteratura della Resistenza, come tale, non si possa parlare...ne consegue che quell’esperienza si chiude con le nostre biografie. E ovviamente non puo` trasmettersi se non attraverso il giudizio storico o la partecipazione letteraria’’ (of literature of the Resistance, as such, one cannot speak... the consequence would be that the experience would end with our biographies. And obviously it cannot be transmitted if not through historical judgment or literary participation;

‘‘Poesia e Resistenza,’’ 1995). For this very reason we can continue to speak of the Resistance today because it represents a significant expression of the autobiography of the Italian nation, in a literary tradition that has been marked by influential movements, such as neo-Realism. ANNA LAURA MARIANI See also: Literature of World War II Further Reading Accrocca, Elio Filippo, and Valerio Volpini (editors), Antologia poetica della Resistenza italiana, Florence: Luciano Landi, 1956. Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo: Il populismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, Turin: Einaudi, 1965; reprinted, 1988. Battaglia Roberto, Storia della Resistenza italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1953; reprinted, 1970. Bianchini, Andrea, and Francesca Lolli (editors), Letteratura e Resistenza, Bologna: CLUEB, 1997. Bravo, Anna, and Anna Maria Bruzzone, In guerra senza armi. Storie di donne. 1940–1945, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Bravo, Anna, and Daniele Jalla (editors), Una misura onesta: Gli scritti di memoria della deportazione dall’Italia 1944–1993, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994. Bruzzone, Anna Maria, and Rachele Farina, La resistenza taciuta: Vite di dodici partigiane piemontesi, Milan: La Pietra, 1976; reprinted, 2003. Calvino, Italo, ‘‘La letteratura italiana sulla Resistenza,’’ in Il movimento di liberazione in Italia, 1 (July 1949), 40–46. Cooke, Philip (editor), The Italian Resistance: An Anthology, Manchester, U.K., and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997. Corti, Maria, Il viaggio testuale, Turin: Einaudi, 1978. Falaschi, Giovanni, La Resistenza armata nella narrativa italiana, Turin: Laterza, 1976. Falaschi, Giovanni (editor), La letteratura partigiana in Italia 1943–1945, preface by Natalia Ginzburg, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1984. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Poesia e Resistenza,’’ in ‘‘Con la violenza la pieta`’’: Poesia e Resistenza. Antologia dei maggiori poeti italiani con un saggio di Franco Fortini, edited by Roberto Cicala, Novara: Centro Novarese di Studi Letterari, 1995. Malvezzi, Piero, and Giovanni Pirelli (editors), Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1952. Mariani, Laura, Quelle delle idee: Storie di detenute politiche (1927–1948), Bari: De Donato, 1982. Mariani, Laura, ‘‘Risorse e traumi nei linguaggi della memoria: Scritture e re-citazione,’’ in Donne guerra politica: Esperienze e memorie della resistenza, edited by Dianella Gagliani, Elda Guerra, Laura Mariani, and Fiorenza Tarozzi, Bologna: CLUEB, 2000. Meldolesi, Claudio, ‘‘Le scene dei comunisti da quattro a due’’ and ‘‘Il taglio delle estreme: Il teatro da camera e il teatro di massa,’’ in Fondamenti del teatro

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LITERATURE OF THE RESISTANCE italiano. La generazione dei registi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Pavone, Claudio, Una guerra civile: Saggio storico sulla moralita` nella Resistenza, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991. Reggiani, Rene´e, and Luciantonio Ruggieri, Teatro della Resistenza e della guerriglia, Venice: Marsilio, 1977. Romano, Tito, and Giorgio Solza (editors), Canti della Resistenza italiana, Milan-Rome: Avanti, 1960.

Siti, Walter, Il neorealismo nella poesia italiana 1941–1956, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Zancan, Marina, Il doppio itinerario della scrittura: La donna nella tradizione letteraria italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Zancan, Marina, ‘‘Memoria e scrittura nella Resistenza,’’ in Donna lombarda 1860–1945, edited by Ada Gigli Marchetti e Nanda Torcellan, Milan: Franco Angeli 1992.

MARIO RIGONI STERN (1921–) The life and the works of Mario Rigoni Stern can be best understood in relation to the memories, values, and traditions he preserved from the Alpine world of his upbringing. When his first work, Il sergente nella neve. Ricordi della ritirata di Russia (The Sergeant in the Snow), appeared in 1953, Elio Vittorini famously wrote on the dust jacket that Rigoni Stern ‘‘non e` scrittore di vocazione’’ (is not a writer by vocation). Vittorini considered the book a personal testimony rather than the work of a professional novelist. Indeed, Vittorini perceived one of the most peculiar characteristics in Rigoni Stern’s writing: Even when not based on events that he has personally lived, his narrative usually takes the form of a private writing. The novel itself could be considered a diary (the first notes were written during Rigoni Stern’s imprisonment in the concentration camp 1/B, in Poland), Il sergente nella neve, which was immediately acclaimed upon publication, can be considered paradigmatic of Rigoni Stern’s writing. The novel deals with the his experiences in the regiment of Alpini, the Italian mountain troops, during the Russian campaign of 1942–1943, in particular with the retreat from the River Don in which a great number of Italian lost their lives. The moving account of the devastating retreat is divided into two parts: ‘‘Il caposaldo’’ (The Stronghold), in which Rigoni Stern described trench life, and ‘‘La sacca’’ (The Pocket), which relates his unit’s escape on foot, in the snow, from the Russian army. Written in a dry and direct style, the second part is composed of short episodes that describe the sufferings of the soldiers and their continuous contact with death. Rigoni Stern also recounted his own painful responsibilities of command when he, a 1582

sergeant-major, became the highest-ranking surviving officer of his unit. In its language and style, as well as in its descriptions of the soldiers and their behavior, the book made a sharp break with Fascist military rhetoric. It brought into relief the senselessness of the orders coming from the headquarters. Il sergente nella neve is permeated by a pragmatism typical of mountain people; the heroism of the characters comes from the simple acts and the solidarity of everyday people forced to live exceptional events. In elaborating the collective experience of the retreat, Rigoni Stern represented the relationships linking individuals both to one another and to the world of nature. Despite having lived through the horrors and vicissitudes of the war, in his book Una partita a carte (A Game of Cards, 2002), Rigoni Stern remained optimistic about human nature and retained his faith in human solidarity. Even though his novels seldom have a truly happy ending, they admit a ray of hope, with the exception of Storia di To¨nle (The Story of To¨nle, 1978). This work tells the true story of To¨nle Bintarn, a mountaineer who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and died from the hardships he experienced after his return home from the World War I. Usually, however, Rigoni Stern depicts mountain people, and especially those of the Alps of the northeast, with warmth and sympathy, as the bearers of positive values of cohesion and camaraderie. This very personal poetics is emphasized by a peculiar style, made up of short but eloquent sentences. Moreover, Rigoni Stern never presents facts in a neutral fashion but subjects them to a personal evaluation or moral judgment. As a result, his dry style is never cold or sterile but rather

MARIO RIGONI STERN tempers his natural empathy for the people and the events he describes, thus helping him to maintain his critical point of view. Rigoni Stern’s sense of responsibility for the people and the environment of the northeastern Alps is reflected in a complex literary saga, of which Storia di To¨nle and Il sergente nella neve constitute the first and last section. Other installments include L’anno della vittoria (The Year of Victory, 1985), about a family that returns home after World War I; Le stagioni di Giacomo (Giacomo’s Seasons, 1995), set in the period between the two wars; and Quota Albania (Albania Altitude, 1971), about the Italian campaign in Albania. As Rigoni Stern himself has declared, he wrote these novels without the help of newspapers or documents, relying only on his own and other people’s memories. In addition to his novels, Rigoni Stern has also published several anthologies of short stories on similar themes: World War I and II, the Resistance, and the natural world. One of the most interesting is Arboreto salvatico (Wild Arboretum, 1991), the title of which is also a play on words on the double meaning of the word salvatico: ‘‘wild,’’ but also ‘‘that which provides health’’ or even ‘‘salvation.’’ Intertwining natural descriptions and popular beliefs and tradition about plants, he found correspondences between the characteristics of the trees and the behavior of the people. As always, the reciprocal exchange between the world of nature and that of culture constitutes one of Rigoni Stern’s most profound sources of inspiration.

Biography Mario Rigoni Stern was born on November 1, 1921, in Asiago, where he was educated. He enrolled at the Scuola Militare Centrale d’Alpinismo in Aosta, 1938. During World War II, he fought against France in northwestern Italy, then in Albania and in Russia. After Italy surrendered, he was captured by the Germans, who deported him to a concentration camp Stammlager 1/B, in Poland, 1943. He began writing his diary with the memories from the Russian campaign, 1944. He worked as a clerk for a very low salary, 1945. Rigoni Stern was awarded the Viareggio Prize for Il sergente nella neve, 1953. He traveled to Russia, to the same places where he had fought during the war, and as a result wrote Ritorno sul Don, October 1970. He

was awarded the Bagutta and the Campiello prizes for the novel Storia di To¨nle, 1979, and the Italian PEN Prize, 1999. Rigoni Stern lives in Asiago. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Fiction Il sergente nella neve. Ricordi della ritirata di Russia, 1953; as The Sergeant in the Snow, translated by Archibald Colquhoun in The Lost Legions; Three Italian War Novels, 1954. Il bosco degli urogalli, 1962. Quota Albania, 1971. Ritorno sul Don, 1973. Storia di To¨nle, 1978; as The Story of To¨nle, translated by John Shepley, 1998. Uomini, boschi e api, 1980. L’anno della vittoria, 1985. Amore di confine, 1986. Il libro degli animali, 1990. Arboreto selvatico, 1991. Aspettando l’alba, 1994. Le stagioni di Giacomo, 1995. Sentieri sotto la neve, 1998. Inverni lontani, 1999. Tra due guerre ee altre storie, 2000. L’ultima partita a carte, 2002.

Edited Work 1915–1918: la guerra sugli altipiani, 2000. Parole sulle pietre, 2005.

Further Reading Angelini-Trevet, Marie-He´le`ne, L’esemplificazione del concetto cassoliano di ‘‘sub-limine’’ e la denuncia antibellica nella narrativa di Mario Rigoni Stern, Avellino: Sabatia Editrice, 1996. Buzzi, Michele, Invito alla lettura di Mario Rigoni Stern, Milan: Mursia, 1985. Ferguson, Ronnie, ‘‘The Critique of National Identity in the Novels of Mario Rigoni Stern,’’ Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38:2 (2002), 155–169. Me´moire d’automne. Autour de Mario Rigoni Stern, Les cahiers de la FACIM, no. 1 (2002). Motta, Antonio, Mario Rigoni Stern, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1982. Polato, Lorenzo, ‘‘La ’memoria’ di Rigoni Stern,’’ Studi Novecenteschi, 27:60 (2002), 385–398. Siddell, Felix, ‘‘Mario Rigoni Stern: Memorialism as the Documentation of Cultural Change,’’ in Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory, edited by Hendrik van Gorp and Ulla Musarra-Schroeder, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. Zambon, Patrizia, ‘‘Le volpi sotto le stelle: i primi racconti di montagna di Mario Rigoni Stern,’’ Quaderni Veneti, 19 (1994), 147–159.

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DINO RISI

DINO RISI (1917–) Dino Risi’s long and successful film career is traditionally associated with the popular genre called ‘‘comedy Italian-style,’’ due to his repeated attempts to represent Italian society during several important historical and political moments of the twentieth century. Thanks to his medicalpsychiatric expertise, Risi’s films do not just portray Italian society; they also depict characters who, rather than complain about their ineluctable fate, try to analyze their own behavior. Risi’s fascination with Russian literature (Chekov’s works in particular) has shaped his humor and his melancholy attitude toward life. According to Risi, viewing a film is a ‘‘wonderful adventure,’’ during which one encounters different and strange people, and therefore his cinema embodies his intention to define the most representative examples of Italian society. Risi, along with Luigi Comencini, is the most acclaimed director of the so-called neorealismo rosa (or pink neo-Realism) of the 1950s, a kind of spinoff of the great neo-Realist Italian cinema. Risi searched for forms of expressions for popular spectacle, against the rising American competition, that could boost film production and focused on attracting the audience by proposing a constant variety of topics, often characterized by a balance of the comic and the tragic. Risi’s strong feeling for contemporary issues accompanied him in filming poverty in postwar Italy, dealing with distressing social events and showing bleak sides of human nature, relying however on a compromise between verisimilitude and traditional comedic conventions. Risi strongly believes that life is ‘‘cinema,’’ and his more than 50 films are a demonstration that reality is a source of countless subjects for filming. Risi’s cinematic career began in the early 1940s as an assistant director on various films, such as Mario Soldati’s Piccolo mondo antico (Little OldFashioned World, 1940), Alberto Lattuada’s Giacomo l’idealista (Jacob, the Idealist, 1942) and Anna (1952), Mario Monicelli and Steno’s Toto` e i re di Roma (Toto` and the Kings of Rome, 1951), and Mario Camerini’s Gli eroi della domenica (Sunday Heroes, 1952). His debut feature film, Vacanze con il gangster (Vacations with a Gangster), was released in 1952, but it is with Paradiso per 4 ore 1584

(Paradise for Four Hours), one of the six episodes of L’amore in citta` (Love in the City, 1953), directed with Antonioni, Fellini, Lattuada, Lizzani, and Maselli, that his artistic reputation was ensured. In 1956, Risi started his ‘‘poveri ma belli’’ series, somewhat cynical but funny stories launching Marisa Allasio, Alessandra Panaro, Sylvia Koscina, Maurizio Arena, and Renato Salvatori as popular stars. Poveri ma belli (Poor but Beautiful Boys) was followed by Belle ma povere (Poor but Beautiful Girls, 1957) and Poveri milionari (Poor Millionaires, 1959), all set in Roman squalid quarters and showing how these poor but beautiful characters end up losing their innocence and spontaneity once faced with serious social problems. The 1960s marked a turning point in Risi’s career. His films became more committed and his characters more embedded in social realities. He also discovered several young, talented actors (Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Ugo Tognazzi). The protagonist of Una vita difficile (A Difficult Life, 1961), starring a superb Sordi, embodies this new approach balanced between the comic and the dramatic in the cinematic representation of life. Risi’s ambitious tale of 20 years of Italian life tells the story of an average man, Silvio Magnozzi, from 1941 to 1961. First a partisan, then a leftist journalist, and eventually a citizen confronted with unemployment, prison, and marital problems, Silvio represents an acute satire about the average Italian man, and yields a message that life is difficult because of its extreme moral poverty. Risi’s greatest cinematic achievement came with Il sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962), starring Vittorio Gassman, with whom Risi had a long working and personal relationship that lasted through 15 films. The film is the tragicomic description of a pleasure trip on a summer Italian holiday (Ferragosto) by a street-smart man and a reticent younger student. The fatal race in the expensive sports car (a Lancia) was Risi’s response to the ‘‘easy life’’ in the 1960s in Italy. The incumbent tragedy that the audience perceives from the beginning of the film becomes and allegorical representation of the Italian boom years. The film offers fleeting moments of happiness underlined by the suggestive music of the soundtrack.

DINO RISI With I mostri (The Monsters, 1963), Risi continued a popular trend in Italian cinema—films with various episodes made by different directors. These films thrived at the box office since they often enlisted some of the most prestigious names in the business. At this time, the appeal of Risi’s films lay mainly in their subject matter. For example, L’ombrellone (The Beach Umbrella, 1965), a bathing establishment comedy, takes on the theme of Italian vacations and the massive migration to the beaches as a wearisome social statement. Although on the surface the film appears to be light and frivolous, it actually touches on an important social issue: the obligatory family vacation in a country barely emerging from postwar poverty. The main character, played by Enrico Maria Salerno, takes the audience on a sad journey in a world where vacations become a trying experience in resorts crowded by people in search of new emotions. Il tigre (The Tiger), released in 1967, embodies instead the new direction Italian comedy was taking at the time, reflecting our middle-class intolerance toward the new generation and in particular the student movement that would explode in 1968. Risi moved beyond the ‘‘comedy Italian-style’’ to explore deeper aspects of human nature (memory, dreams, expectations). The 42-year-old protagonist of Il tigre, Francesco Vincenzini, played by Gassman, is the expression of a tragic view of human existence. In the 1970s, Risi’s humor became more guarded, and his cinema began to mirror the more arduous times in Italian society, facing the threat of political terrorism. The 1973 Mordi e fuggi (Bite and Flee) is, in fact, an ambitious attempt to recount on screen the birth of the Red Brigades. Even though the film appears to be somewhat disorganized and was not well received by critics, it attests to the director’s constant interest in engaging in captivating social issues. His next film, Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman, 1974), was one of the greatest box-office hits of the decade, grossing over a billion lire in its year of release. It remains an exception in Risi’s production in that it is based on Giovanni Arpino’s successful novel, Il buio e il miele (The Darkness and the Honey) and represents an ambitious endeavor to describe the world as ‘‘seen’’ by a blind middle-aged man (played by Gassman). The direction that Risi has taken through the Italy of economic boom and of political upheaval has left very little room for comedy; and his 1979 Caro papa‘ (Dear Dad) deals with the tragedy of a father, Albino Millozza, who has been sent to

death by his own son. At the beginning of the 1990s Risi, prompted by a law that ordered the closing of psychiatric hospitals, made Tolgo il disturbo (I Excuse Myself, 1990), his fifteenth film, casting once again Vittorio Gassman, who at the time was fighting depression. Despite the near failure of the film at the Italian box office, it was successful in France, where Risi’s films have been very popular over the years. This film was his last cinematic endeavor, proving again his ability to master dramatic as well as comic issues. Risi communicated, with the experience of the protagonist, Augusto, the impossibility of finding youth again and of reconciling love and old age. Italian social and political reality offered Risi countless themes for his films, which are endowed with a strong touch of real life, driven by an instinct for the defining issue of the moment. Dino Risi was publicly recognized in 2002 at the Venice Film Festival with the Golden Lion for career achievement, a well-deserved tribute to an artist whose films are now considered a historical and social document in a country with a long and acclaimed tradition in cinema. DANIELA BISELLO ANTONUCCI

Biography Dino Risi was born in Milan on 23 December 1917. He attended the Berchet High School in Milan. He was detained in Switzerland after the Armistice in 1943; he studied there under filmmaker Jacques Feyder. While in Switzerland, he met his wife, Claudia Mazzocchi, with whom he had two sons. Having returned to Italy, he graduated from medical school in psychiatry; after working in a psychiatric hospital near Pavia, he decided to leave medicine and soon started writing for newspapers and making short films. His film debut was in 1952 with Vacanze col gangster. Risi directed many popular actors such as Alberto Sordi, Nino Manfredi, Ugo Tognazzi, Marcello Mastroianni, and his friend and loyal interpreter of his best characters, Vittorio Gassman. In the late 1980s, he began working for the television (RAI 2 and Canale 5). After a serious heart operation, Risi stopped filming at the age of 87. Selected Works Films Vacanze con il ganster, 1952. l viale della speranza, 1953. Paradiso per 4 ore (episode of L’amore in citta`), 1953.

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DINO RISI Il segno di Venere, 1955. Pane, amore e..., 1955. Poveri ma belli, 1956. Belle ma povere, 1957. Poveri milionari, 1959. Il mattatore, 1959. Una vita difficile, 1961. A porte chiuse, 1961. La marcia su Roma, 1962. Il sorpasso (The Easy Life), 1962. I mostri, 1963. L’ombrellone, 1965. Operazione San Gennaro, 1966. Il profeta, 1967. Il tigre, 1967. Straziami, ma di baci saziami, 1968. Vedo nudo, 1969. La moglie del prete, 1970. In nome del popolo italiano, 1972. Sessomatto, 1973. Mordi e fuggi, 1973. Profumo di donna (Scent of a Woman; base on Giovanni Arpino’s novel, Il buio e il miele), 1974. Telefoni bianchi, 1975. I nuovi mostri, 1977. La stanza del vescovo (based on Piero Chiara’s novel), 1977. Caro papa`, 1979. Fantasma d’amore (based on Mino Milani’s novel), 1981. Dagobert, 1984. Il commissario Lo Gatto, 1986. Teresa, 1987.

Tolgo il disturbo, 1990. Giovani e belli, 1996. Esercizi di stile, 1996. Bellissime (made for TV), 2000.

Screenplays Mordi e Fuggi, edited by Valerio Caprara, Venice: Marsilio, 1993. Il sorpasso, Turin: Lindau, 2002.

Other I miei mostri, 2003.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, ‘‘Comencini e Risi: elogio del mestiere,’’ in Il cinema itlaiano degli anni ’50, edited by Giorgio Tinazzi, Venice: Marsilio, 1979. Argentieri, Mino (editor), Risate di regime: La commedia itlaiana 1930–1944, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Bernardi, Sandro (editor), Si fa per ridere... ma e` una cosa seria, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1985. Caprara Valerio, Dino Risi maestro per caso, Rome: Gremese, 1993. D’Agostini, Paolo, Dino Risi, Milan: Il Castoro Cinema, 1995. D’Amico, Masolino, La commedia all’italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Micciche`, Lino (editor), La vita difficile di Dino Risi: risate amre nel lungo dopoguerra, Venice: Marsilio, 2000. Vigano`, Aldo, Commedia all’italiana in 100 film, ReccoGenoa: Le Mani, 1995.

NELO RISI (1920–) Originally included by Luciano Anceschi in the linea lombarda (Lombard line), Risi developed over time the project of a civic poetry, alien to any temptation to be celebratory and removed from a tendency to ideological or sentimental blackmail. He can be distinguished, therefore, for his concreteness and his knowledge of the self, a particular ethical tension, a stubborn desire to confront, a´ la Montale, the ‘‘occasions’’ of history, and his attention to each day’s events, great and small. For Risi, the poet must avoid ‘‘literature’’ and bombast and remain on guard, continually in the opposition, against a social system whose contradictions, iniquities, degenerations of mores (particularly in politics), and contents of violence and death must be exposed. To achieve this objective, Risi makes use of critical power and of irony, which ends as sarcasm or even crosses into satire. 1586

From his first collections, Le opere e i giorni (Works and Days, 1941) and L’esperienza (Experience, 1948), Risi, who served on the Russian Front during World War II, has viewed history primarily as war, with its burden of struggles, sacrifices, destructions, and betrayals. These poems were reprinted in his next book, Polso teso (Tense Pulse, 1956), which is divided into four sections and was substantially revised in 1973. Along with the war, other variegated themes appear there: family affections, memories, reflections, personal experiences, love, urban and travel vignettes. The journey is one of its driving motifs. Moreover, the poet’s wartime experience led him from the Russian front to internment in Switzerland and to the profession of documentary filmmaker in places from Europe to Africa. In the final section, ‘‘Cronache’’ (Chronicles), disenchantment and vitality are followed by

NELO RISI disappointment and mistrust of a reality hostile to humanity, whose liturgies the poet demystified and whose defects, vices, and horrors he lay bare. In Pensieri elementari (Elementary Thoughts, 1961), Risi abandoned the sentimental and leaves room for confrontation, for resentful comic and moral turmoil, for bitter self-irony, for the corrosive smile, and alongside these, commentary steeped in pain. He launched an appeal, addressed above all to the oppressed, not to despair, but instead to rebel, to reconquer dignity and a human existence, to oppose atomic escalation and the strategy of terror. The last section of the book, entitled ‘‘Requiem,’’ is significant for its reflection on the theme of death. The ground was already prepared for Dentro la sostanza (Within Substance, 1965), in which Risi embraced contemporary experimentations with form and language. The poet immersed himself in the ‘‘substance’’ of things in order to point out the path to acquire a common conscience, against all conformity, against the sirens of the economic boom, against the errors and lies of history. In ‘‘La questione meridionale’’ (The Question of the South), he wrote: ‘‘O bambini rachitici del sud / che ci venite incontro / con cestini di fragole di bosco / fate che non si compia piu` / la buona azione / -buttate bombe / sotto le nostre ruote, rifiutare / la nostra compassione’’ (Oh scrawny children of the south/who come toward us/with baskets of wild strawberries/don’t allow any more good deeds to be performed/–throw bombs under our cars, reject/our compassion). Then followed Di certe cose (About Certain Things, 1970) defined as Risi’s ‘‘Sessantotto’’ (1968). In this collection, the conviction that man must find himself and intervene in the world in order to survive became more firm. Risi did not, however, renounce his own, very private, truth. This is documented by his moving composition, ‘‘Attesa la`’’ (Waiting There), inspired by the memory, which is no longer a torment, of his dead mother. The figure of the mother and the dimension of memory as a rational instrument return in Amica mia nemica (My Enemy-Friend, 1976). Immune from sentimentalism, as attested by the title of the first section ‘‘Con occhio asciutto’’ (With a Dry Eye), and with a lively interest in psychoanalysis as a process of knowledge, Risi wanted to capture life ‘‘vuoi amica, vuoi nemica’’ (as friend, as enemy). The finest section of the book, ‘‘Suite a ritroso’’ (Backwards Suite), is a search for lost time, the representation of figures and places ‘‘del paese dell’infanzia’’ (from the land of childhood). On the other hand, we discover no reference to the private realm in I fabbricanti del

‘‘bello’’ (The Manufacturers of the ‘‘Beautiful,’’ 1983). It is an organic book in which, as in Di certe cose, the gnomic form and the epigram lose power and in which the manufacturers of the kitsch and of ephemera are contrasted with the great figures of the past. With Mutazioni (Mutations, 1991) and Altro da dire (Something Else to Say, 2000), he continued with the observation of the world. Indeed, there is something else to say about globalization, about the polluted Earth, about the Rome of the Jubilee, about the intolerance, about hivelike cities where people in subhuman conditions are found. In 2004, Risi published Ruggine (Rust), whose central theme is time—the time, in particular, of a present adrift, marked by evil, by the use of religion as a weapon of mass destruction and a world populated by indolent men, no longer in harmony with the universe and indifferent to the underprivileged. Nevertheless, the poet did not renounce writing, remembering, dreaming of a new day, probing himself, and probing the world. Poets, in particular Leopardi, remain a part of his poetic horizon. Risi’s antilyrical, ironic tendencies resurface in his cinematic production, where he embraces contemporary sociohistorical issues with stylistic rigor and courageous denunciation, particularly in documentaries such as Il delitto Matteotti (1956) or the dramatic feature film Diario di una schizofrenica (Diary of a Schizophrenic Woman, 1968), adapted from Marguerite Andre´e Sechehaye’s book. ANTONIO D’ISIDORO

Biography Nelo Risi was born April 21, 1920, to a bourgeois family. His father Arnaldo, a doctor, died when he was young, leaving Nelo and his brother Dino as orphans. Both graduated in medicine (Nelo never practiced) and took up careers in cinema. After fighting on the Russian front during World War II and his subsequent internment in Switzerland, he dedicated himself to poetry, literature (including translations of Laforgue, Jouve, Supervielle, Illye`s, Kavafy, and Queneau), to journalism, contributing to Il Politecnico, L’Avanti, Milano Sera, and Domus. He also worked for the theater, RAI television in Milan, and the cinema, beginning with directing documentaries and later feature films. Risi has traveled widely, in Europe as well as in Asia and Africa, and lived for some years in Paris. He moved to Rome permanently in 1955, where he still resides and where he lived for a certain period with his second wife, Hungarian writer Edith Bruck. He 1587

NELO RISI has been the recipient of several awards, including the Premio Viareggio for the poetry collection Di certe cose in 1970; the International Eugenio Montale Prize in 1983; The Montale, the Librex Guggenheim, and ‘‘Il Pascoli’’ prize for Altro da dire, 2001. Selected Works Collections Poesie scelte, edited by Giovanni Raboni, Milan: Mondadori, 1977.

Poetry ‘‘Le opere e i giorni,’’ 1941. ‘‘L’esperienza,’’ 1948. ‘‘Polso teso,’’ 1956; revised and enlarged edition, 1973. ‘‘Il contromemoriale,’’ 1957. ‘‘Civilissimo,’’ 1958. ‘‘Pensieri elementari,’’ 1961 (includes Il Contromemoriale and Civilissimo). ‘‘Minime massime,’’ 1962. ‘‘Dentro la sostanza,’’ 1965 (includes Minime massime). ‘‘Di certe cose,’’ 1970. ‘‘Amica mia nemica,’’ 1976. ‘‘I fabbricanti del ‘‘bello,’’ 1983. ‘‘Le risonanze,’’ 1987. ‘‘Mutazioni,’’ 1991. ‘‘Il mondo in una mano,’’ 1994. ‘‘Altro da dire,’’ 2000. ‘‘Ruggine,’’ 2004.

Translations In viaggio con Superville, 1956. Jean Jouve, Dal Paradiso perduto, 1961. Jean Jouve, Poesie, 1963. Jean Jouve, Paradiso perduto, 1972. G. Illye´s, Ke´t Ke´z, 1995. K. Kavafis, 55 Poesie, 1968. J. Laforgue, Moralita` leggendarie, 1972. K. Kavafis, ‘‘Ricordati, mio corpo,’’ in Testo a fronte, 6 (1993), 113–119. Majakovskij, ‘‘Il flauto di vertebre,’’ in Testo a fronte, 9 (1993), 94–101.

Sophocles, Edipo re, 1995.

Films Le italiane e l’amore (episode Le ragazze madri; based on Gabriella Parca’s book Le italiane si confessano), 1961. Andremo in citta` (based on Edith Bruck’s novel), 1966. Diario di una schizofrenica (based on Marguerite Andre´e Sechehaye’s Journal d’une schizophre`ne), 1968. Ondata di calore (based on Dana Moseley’s novel), 1970. Una stagione all’inferno, 1971. La colonna infame (based on Alessandro Manzoni’s Storia della colonna infame), 1973. Le citta` del mondo (made for TV), 1975. Un amore di donna, 1987. Per odio, per amore, 1990.

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Linea lombarda, Varese: Magenta, 1962. Cucchi, Maurizio, and Stefano Giovanardi (editors), Poeti italiani del secondo Novecento (1945–1995), Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Forti, Fiorenzo, Tempi della poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Fortini, Franco, Saggi italiani, Bari: De Donato, 1974. Garboli, Cesare, La stanza separata, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. Giuliani, Alfredo, Immagini e maniere, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1965. Lorenzini, Niva, La poesia italiana del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Lorenzini, Niva, Il presente delle poesie, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo (editor), Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Nelo Risi,’’ in Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. Raboni, Giovanni, Poesia degli anni sessanta, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1976. Ramat, Silvio, L’intelligenza dei contemporanei, Padua: Rebellato, 1968. Ramat, Silvio, ‘‘Nelo Risi,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 5, Milan: Marzorati, 1974.

RISORGIMENTO The term ‘‘Risorgimento’’ designates a period of cultural nationalism and political activism that, from the Napoleonic campaigns of 1796–1799 to 1861, led the Italian peninsula from a condition of territorial, political, and economic fragmentation to a unified and independent nation under the Savoy King Victor Emmanuel II. 1588

While it is an anachronism to speak of a cultural nationalism before the eighteenth century, various concepts of Italy were already circulating in the works of medieval authors Dante Alighieri, Brunetto Latini, and Francesco Petrarch, among others. These glimmerings of what would later solidify into a national culture became more

RISORGIMENTO widespread in the sixteenth century when the Italian peninsula was rocked by a series of international power struggles leading to the consolidation of the Spanish, Austrian, and Burgundian powers under the Hapsburgs. The Florentine diplomat and writer Niccolo` Machiavelli made an appeal to save Italy from foreign invasions in the last chapter of Il Principe (The Prince, 1513), but the concept of a unified Italy continued to have primarily a literary rather than a political appeal. This was to change in the eighteenth century when the Enlightenment ideas of reformism, progress, individual human rights, and popular sovereignty gained ground, pressing rulers to engage in moderate reforms that reduced some of the privileges enjoyed by the wealthiest classes. Yet, the outlook of the Enlightenment remained cosmopolitan and internationalist, and the main impetus for Risorgimento was to come from the French Revolution (1789) and especially Napoleon’s invasion of Italy and the creation of new states—the Cispadane, the Cisalpine, the Roman, and the Neapolitan Republics— between 1796 and 1799. This short time of Jacobin rule proved to be most subversive for the orders of the ancien re´gime since Church and Crown land was sold and a centralized fiscal and financial system of administration was established. However, the century-long fragmentation of the peninsula soon surfaced. The Italian Jacobins remained divided over issues of reform and the shape of democratic governments. As demands for taxes from France grew, tensions arose between the new governments and the poor, leading to insurrections and riots. The counterrevolution of the Parthenopean Republic, in southern Italy, where an army of Sanfedisti peasants, bandits, nobles, and royalist agents led by Cardinal Fabrizio Ruffo overthrew the republic in 1799, was a case in point. In 1800, Napoleon crossed the Alps again and, after the proclamation of the Empire in 1804, established a more authoritarian rule. Nevertheless, the Napoleonic rule had given cultural nationalism the political significance that it lacked in earlier centuries. With the creation of the Italian republics, the Italian middle class had been allowed to participate in government, and visions of unification and of political independence had gained ground. When the expansionistic aims of Napoleon were made manifest, the political overtones of the existing cultural nationalism emerged, and opposition to the Emperor’s drive toward centralization expanded among the peasants, the middle class, and the intellectuals, such as the poet Ugo Foscolo (1778–1827). After having supported

Napoleon’s campaigns and even enrolled in the army of the Cispadane Republic, Foscolo became disillusioned with the emperor following the Treaty of Campoformio (1797), whereby Napoleon bartered the Veneto, Foscolo’s adopted country, for Lombardy. Foscolo expressed his criticism of the emperor in the epistolary novel Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802) and in the long poem Dei sepolcri (On Sepulchers, 1807). With the collapse of Napoleon’s empire and the Restoration settlement at the Congress of Vienna (1815), the legitimist rulers returned and, in some cases, even enlarged their dominion significantly. Ties between Church and state were also reaffirmed, and the papacy acquired, once again, its political powers. Yet the turmoil of the previous decades would not cease. The members of the elites, who had enjoyed a relative autonomy in the local administration, opposed the centralized bureaucracies of the Restoration and the strong influence now exerted by the Austrian Hapsburgs. A general economic crisis, aggravated by a swell in population growth, set in after 1815 and bred unrest and discontent among the peasantry. However, the strongest challenge to the legitimist rulers was the one mounted by a younger generation of urban bourgeois and young unemployed professionals whose prospects for work depended on a radical political change. Steeped in liberal doctrines and fully aware of the more progressive administrations of France and Britain, they posed a serious threat to the authorities, who responded with repression and rigidity to ever-increasing calls for progress. Journals that had become a forum for the entire peninsula, such as Il Conciliatore, which circulated in Milan between 1818 and 1819 and was led by Federico Confalonieri and Lodovico Di Breme, were forced to close. The opposition was pushed underground, to secret societies such as the Calderari, Concistoriali, Guelfi, and especially the Carbonari. Pressures to gain constitutional governments and political representation grew stronger. The Carbonari organized uprisings in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1820 and in Sardinia in 1821. Despite reprisals, new uprisings took place in 1831 in the Papal States and in the duchies of Modena and Parma. The failures of these uprisings, which led to the arrest and/or exile of a number of sectarians, including Confalonieri, Giuseppe Pecchio, Luigi Porro Lambertenghi, and Silvio Pellico, the author of Le mie prigioni (My Prisons, 1833) and one of the main contributors to Il Conciliatore, reveal the problems that plagued members of the 1589

RISORGIMENTO secret societies: a wide array of political visions, inadequate and ineffective leadership, and especially the wrongly held belief that the objectives of the masses would coincide with their own. Meanwhile, events outside Italy, such as the July monarchy in France (1830) and the Great Reform Act in Britain (1832), fostered new demands for political reforms. These demands polarized even more the existing political positions that now fell within several distinct groups: The democratic faction, whose program was republican, anticlerical, and often radical; the clerical, or neo-Guelf, which pursued a federation of states ruled by the Pope; the neoGhibelline, which advocated an independent Italy under a secular ruler; and the moderate, which opposed secret societies and favored constitutional liberalism. The democratic faction coalesced around the Giovine Italia (Young Italy), which was founded in 1831 by Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) and attracted the more radical members of society, who upheld the vision of a revolutionary nationalism founded upon the unity of the people. Inevitably, the culture of Italian Romanticism became heavily involved with the political struggles for nationhood. Literary, pictorial, dramatic, and musical works were seen as media to create a sense of a shared culture and tradition and played a major role in the diffusion of nationalist mythology. Patriotic themes came to inform the works of poets, including Giacomo Leopardi, Alessandro Manzoni, Luigi Mercantini, Giovanni Berchet, Goffredo Mameli, Giuseppe Giusti, and Pietro Giannone, among others. For most of these writers, the existence of Italy as a nation was taken for granted because of a perceived unity of culture, history, and ethnicity, such as the one evoked by Manzoni in the poem ‘‘Marzo 1821’’ (March 1821, 1821), where he famously described the Italian nation as ‘‘una d’arme, di lingua, d’altar, / di memorie, di sangue e di cor’’ (one of arms, language, altar, / one of memories, blood and heart). Thus, writing became a means to articulate the pain and frustration over the present state of a nation oppressed by foreign aggressors and subject to internal divisions, such as one finds in Leopardi’s ‘‘All’ Italia’’ (To Italy, 1818) and ‘‘Sopra il monumento di Dante che si preparava a Firenze’’ (On the Proposed Dante Monument in Florence, 1818), where Italy is a disconsolate and imprisoned mother figure. More often, however, poetry sought to awaken the nation from its slumber and lead it to its ‘‘risorgimento,’’ that is to say, a resurgence and a resurrection against all oppressing forces. Nationalist 1590

rhetoric also permeated narrative, especially the historical novel that offered the Risorgimento writers an important means to promote pride in the nation by revisiting the glorious, heroic events of the past. The republican and civic tradition of medieval and Renaissance cities provided a particularly rich storehouse of materials and is the background of works such as Ettore Fieramosca (1831) by Massimo D’Azeglio (1798–1866), La battaglia di Benevento (The Battle of Benevento, 1827) and L’assedio di Firenze, (The Siege of Florence, 1834) by Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi (1804– 1873), and Marco Visconti (Marco Visconti, 1834) by Tommaso Grossi (1790–1853). The contribution of opera and drama to cultural and political nationalism was also significant. The arias of operatic works, including Mose` (Moses, 1818), L’assedio di Corinto (The Siege of Corinth, 1826), and Guglielmo Tell (William Tell, 1829) by Gioachino Rossini (1792–1868), and especially Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar, 1842), I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards at the First Crusade, 1843), Ernani (Hernani, 1843), and La battaglia di Legnano (The Battle of Legnano, 1848) by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), evoked the public aspirations for liberty and nationality while fomenting the audience’s passionate and emotional responses. It is often recalled how the audience of the premie`re of Verdi’s Nebuchadnezzar, staged at the Milanese theatre La Scala in 1842, demanded an encore of the chorus of chained Hebrew slaves, the famed ‘‘Va’ pensiero’’ (Fly Thought), thereby contravening the prohibitions of the Austrians against repeated performances. Like opera, dramatic works, such as Francesca da Rimini (1815) by Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), and Il conte di Carmagnola (1820) by Alessandro Manzoni, also played an important role in the construction of a national mythology. The works of painters, whose subjects were often drawn from contemporary novels and poems, were of great patriotic appeal. Francesco Hayez became the leader of the Romantic school, and his paintings, including I vespri siciliani (The Sicilian Vespers, 1822) and La congiura dei Lampugnani (The Conspiracy of the Lampugnani, 1826–1829) were the source of much admiration. Giuseppe Mazzini, for example, praised Hayez as ‘‘the leader of the school of historical paintings, which national thought demanded in Italy’’ (‘‘Modern Painting in Italy,’’ 1941). With the economic slump of the 1840s, contrasts between moderate and democratic movements grew even sharper, and the gulf between their

RISORGIMENTO political programs widened. Social unrest brought the moderates to ask rulers for reforms to avoid the specter of a revolution that could be mounted by a successful manipulation of popular discontent. While Mazzini remained firm in his vision of a democratic republicanism to be achieved by insurrections as well as open proselytizing, proposals for moderate political programs were brought forth by a number of political thinkers, including liberal historian Cesare Balbo (1789–1853) in Delle speranze d’Italia (On the Hopes of Italy, 1844) and the Turinese philospher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–1852), who, in his Del Primato morale e civile degli Italiani (The Civil and Moral Primacy of the Italians, 1843), proposed the idea of a confederation under the pope. In 1846, the election of Pius IX (1792–1878) to the papacy gave rise to much optimism and patriotic fervor. By 1848, new waves of uprisings occurred in Venice, Milan, Palermo, the Papal States, and Tuscany. It was also at this time that women became more politicized, and a few of them took on active militant roles fighting alongside men. Overall, however, the role of women was mostly confined to that of care providers and the few who participated in public events, including Caterina Francesca Ferrucci, Gualberta Aliade Beccari, Cristina Barbiano di Belgioioso, Luisa Molina Sanfelice, and Colomba Antonietta, could do so because of their social standing as members of bourgeois and aristocratic families. As demands for a war against the Austrians grew in 1848, the king of Piedmont, Charles Albert, helped the Lombard rebels against the Austrians but was defeated at the battle of Custoza and then Novara, after which the king abdicated in favor of his son, Victor Emmanuel II, who made peace. Revolutions were suppressed in Venice, Parma, Modena, Tuscany, the Two Sicilies, and the Papal States. The only state to retain the constitution, or Statuto, after 1849, was Piedmont, where a representative government was responsible to an elected parliament. This was due not so much to the liberalism of the monarch but to the expansionistic ambitions of the Savoy dynasty that could benefit from becoming the beacon of liberalism for the nationalist movement. Such ambitions were made clear after 1852, when the prime minister of Piedmont, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour (1810–1861), embarked on an aggressive program of domestic and foreign policy. When France’s war against Austria heated uprisings in the peninsula, Cavour convinced the heads of the provisional

governments of Tuscany, Emilia, Parma, and Modena to allow an annexation by Piedmont in 1860. Meanwhile, episodes of popular insurrections fueled by pressing economic issues had rendered the Italian south very unstable. In the spring of 1860, a popular uprising in Sicily gave the democratic movement the opportunity to turn a localized unrest into a national revolution. While Francesco Crispi organized an expedition of northern volunteers to help Sicilians rioters, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807–1882), who had refined his military skills in the fight for the independence of the South American republics, agreed to lead them and, with his army of a ‘‘thousand’’ men, mostly volunteers, sailed from Quarto, landing in Marsala, on the western Sicilian coast, on 11 May 1860. From there, the expedition advanced into the mainland and, by the summer of 1860, Garibaldi was victorious at Calatafimi and entered Palermo in June. On 7 September 1860 he reached Naples. Fearing a republican outcome and, possibly, a foreign intervention, Cavour sought the rapid annexation of the south to the Savoy monarchy. He stopped an attempt by the democrats to hold elections for a new constitution in Naples and convinced Garibaldi to hold, on 21 October 1860, a popular vote, or ‘‘plebiscito’’ for a unitary state. The ballot was public, and the electoral process was in all likelihood rigged, but since the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of extending the Piedmontese administration to the entire peninsula, Garibaldi gave King Victor Emmanuel the control of the south. The new Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in March 1861, and Victor Emmanuel II assumed the title of King of Italy. Turin became the new capital, and the Piedmontese Statuto was extended to the entire peninsula. Garibaldi attempted to march on Rome but was halted by the national troops on the slopes of the Aspromonte Mountains, in Calabria, on 29 July 1862. In 1866, with the Austro-Prussian war, Italy acquired Venice, and in 1870 Italian troops seized the city of Rome, thus completing the unification of the peninsula. However, since territorial unity had been achieved by a moderate-bourgeois alliance that had defeated federalist, republican, neo-guelfic, democratic, and socialist solutions to establish a monarchic government in the nineteenth-century tradition of liberalism, the newly founded state had to confront overwhelming issues of legitimacy. The antagonistic, conflict-ridden climate from which the new liberal state had been born led to further uprisings, particularly in the impoverished 1591

RISORGIMENTO south, but these were violently crushed by the national troops. Writers and intellectuals would draw attention to the desperate need for social reforms in the Italian south, thereby opening the discourse on what came to be known as the ‘‘southern question.’’ Many of the events that led to territorial and political unity were recorded in the cultural output of the time. Among narrative works is the famed Le confessioni d’ un italiano (The Castle of Fratta, 1867) by Ippolito Nievo (1831–1861), who, having played a key role in Garibaldi’s 1860 expedition, was drowned when his vessel was wrecked during his way back to Naples. The copious literature of memoirs, or memorialistica, includes D’Azeglio’s I miei ricordi (My Memoirs, 1868) and Garibaldi’s Le mie memorie (My Memoirs, 1872), as well as Ricordanze della mia vita (Recollections of My Life, 1879–1880) by Luigi Settembrini (1813–1876) and Da Quarto al Volturno: Noterelle di uno dei Mille (The Diary of One of Garibaldi’s Thousand, 1880) by Giuseppe Cesare Abba (1838–1910), a highly idealized account of the expedition of Garibaldi’s ‘‘Thousand.’’ Among visual artists, the work of the Macchiaioli painters is especially significant. Young men born in the 1820s and 1830s and originating mostly from the region of Tuscany, the Macchiaioli sought to provide a realistic representation of the themes and subjects drawn from the recent wars for unification, such as Giovanni Fattori’s Accampamento italiano alla battaglia di Magenta (The Italian Camp at Magenta Battle, 1861) or Gerolamo Induno’s Triste presentimento (Sad Premonition, 1862). Risorgimento did attain the status of a glorious, united struggle for nationhood very early on as the Italian governments, from the Historic Right (1861–1876) and New Left (1876–1887) to the ministries of Francesco Crispi (1887–1889; 1891–1896), Giovanni Giolitti (1901–1914) and beyond, actively pursued practices of nation building and state formation to gain consensus and legitimacy. In the first half of the twentieth century, the interpretation of the neo-idealist philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) dominated historical accounts. In his writings, summarized in Storia dell’ Italia liberale (History of Liberal Italy, 1927), Croce described the Risorgimento as the glorious achievement of the modernizing and progressive forces of nineteenth-century liberalism. Croce’s account was refuted by the leftist interpretation provided by Antonio Gramsci in Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks, 1949–1951), where unification was seen 1592

as a social revolution that was thwarted by an alliance between the moderate bourgeoisie and the existing feudal order. From the 1970s onward, other interpretative models of the Risorgimento have emerged. These include reassessments of the construction of national identity from the perspective opened by ethnic, subaltern, and gender studies, such as Annarita Buttafuoco’s Le Mariuccine (1985), Stephen Hughes’s Crime, Disorder, and the Risorgimento (1994), and Nelson Moe’s The View from Vesuvius (2002). Collectively considered, these interpretative models suggest that the Risorgimento remains at the center of historical inquiry, enduring as a most powerful memory for many generations well past the unification of the peninsula. NORMA BOUCHARD Further Reading Ascoli, Albert Russell, and Krystyna von Henneberg (editors), Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento, Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 2001. Banti, Alberto, La nazione del Risorgimento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Banti, Alberto, and Roberto Bizzocchi (editors), Immagini della nazione nell’Italia del Risorgimento, Rome: Carocci, 2002. Bouchard, Norma (editor), Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Past in History, Narrative, and Culture, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. Buttafuoco, Annarita, Le Mariuccine, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Cattaneo, Carlo, Le piu` blle pagine, edited by Gaetano Salvemini, Rome: Donzelli, 1993. Clark, Martin, The Italian Risorgimento, London and New York: Longman, 1998. Davis, John A., and Paul Ginsborg, Society and Politics in the Risorgimento, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Davis, John A. (editor), The 19th Century: The Oxford Short History of Italy, Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2000. Della Peruta, Franco, Milano nel Risorgimento: Dall’eta` napoleonica alle Cinque giornate, Milan: Amici del Museo del Risorgimento, 1998. Della Peruta, Franco, Realta` e mito nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1996. Hughes, Stephen C., Crime, Disorder, and the Risorgimento, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Levra, Umberto, Fare gli italiani memoria e celebrazione del Risorigmento, Turin: Pubblicazioni del Comitato di Torino dell’Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, 1992. Mazzini, Giuseppe, ‘‘La peinture moderne en Italie’’ (1840); as ‘‘ Modern Painting in Italy,’’ London and Westminster Review (January–March 1941), 35.

LALLA ROMANO Moe, Nelson, The View from Vesuvius, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. Patriarca, Silvana, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in 19th Century Italy, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Riall, Lucy, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society and National Unification, London: Routledge, 1994.

Romani, Roberto, L’economia politica del Risorgimento italiano, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994. Scirocco, Alfonso, L’Italia del Risorgimento: 1800–1860, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Sofri, Adriano (editor), L’Italia in frantumi?: Il dibattito federalista dal Risorgimento alla Lega, Pordenone: Biblioteca dell’Immagine, 1993.

ROMAN TALES See Racconti romani (Work by Alberto Moravia)

LALLA ROMANO (1906–2001) During her long and fruitful career as a writer, Lalla Romano experimented continuously with new forms of expressions, moving from lyrical poems to poetic prose to collections of family photographs accompanied by brief explanations, always suspended between dream and reality, fiction and autobiography. Although some critics took her to task for her excessive use of autobiographical material, her dwelling on past memories, and her lack of immediate social relevance, she had also strong supporters among contemporary writers, including Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini, Natalia Ginzburg, and Eugenio Montale. In 1941, she published her first volume of poetry, Fiore (Flower), and five years later she decided to abandon painting in favor of writing, because she found the latter more suited to her personality. From her initial work, Romano showed a particular sensitivity for everyday events, which she imbued with a poetic force that transforms them into revelations and dream sequences. The poems of Fiore recapture the various stages of a love story and fix in time the passionate feelings of the moment, conveyed through few gestures and reflected in the landscape. Her experience of translating Gustave Flaubert’s Trois contes in 1944 drew Romano to fiction, and

she began to develop a poetic prose that she then used in her own works, in which private events predominate and major historical events are seen only through the eyes of common people. Her fondness for introspection is clear in her first short stories, included in the collection La villeggiante (The Tourist, 1975), in which she explored her characters’ inner thoughts, and in Le metamorfosi (The Metamorphoses, 1951), in which she collected 68 dreams belonging to five different characters. Romano was especially attracted to the creative aspect of dreams and their ability to communicate, through condensed images and symbols, the subject’s inner reality in the same way as painting and writing do. Her early novels, Maria (1953) and Tetto murato (Walled-Up Roof, 1957), trace the lives of ordinary people and their everyday concerns. In the first work, influenced by Flaubert’s Un coeur simple, Maria, the author’s cleaning lady, a humble woman of peasant origins, shares the life of the author’s family with quiet and constant devotion and sees the tragic events of World War II through the misfortunes of the people in her village. In Tetto murato, which reflects Romano’s participation in the Resistance, the reader follows the relationship between two young couples who are 1593

LALLA ROMANO hiding from the Fascists in a little village during the war. Even though one of the protagonists is part of the Resistance movement, history is only the background to the complicated feelings the four young people develop toward one another in their hiding place, while waiting for the war to be over. In her most important novels, La penombra che abbiamo attraversato (The Penumbra, 1959), Le parole tra noi leggere (The Light Words between Us, 1969), L’ospite (The Guest, 1973), Una giovinezza inventata (An Invented Youth, 1979), Inseparabile (Inseparable, 1981), and Nei mari estremi (In the Remotest Seas, 1987), Romano examined the narrator’s relationships with her parents, her son, her grandchild, and her husband by remembering crucial moments spent with them, in the recent and faraway past. Once again landscapes and interiors frame special encounters, and the writer moved with agility from the near to the remote past and vice versa, following her trends of thoughts and associations. Indeed, La penombra che abbiamo attraversato, a title taken, significant´ la recherche du temps ly, from Marcel Proust’s A perdu, is exemplary of Romano’s narrative. Here the narrator goes back to her native village soon after her mother’s death and relives her childhood. She recounts memories, dreams, descriptions of beloved people and landscapes, old grudges, and fears, mingled with fascinating discoveries and shifts between different moments, including tales of the mythical time that preceded her birth. The initial section of the novel exemplifies Romano’s poetic style and her use of free associations to convey her ambivalent feelings toward her childhood. The narrator is staying in Ponte Stura, in a fly-ridden, dingy room in a fourth-rate hotel, an interior that underlines her extreme sadness at her mother’s death. With horror and fascination she remembers that in her childhood hotels were thought to be full of fleas, that her dog and the poorest of her school companions were bitten by fleas, and that her father had even found bedbugs marching on the bed sheets in a hotel room. Then the narrator moves from these disgusting thoughts about the present and the past to sweet memories of the gifts that her father brought her back from his trips. At this point she sees her childhood as a happy time of her life, when her father had been loved and admired, a time that had come to an end when they had moved to another town. The narrator realizes at the end of the book that the images of herself as a child with her parents in her old house, her village, and her valley all belong 1594

to the past, but that she can keep them alive in her imagination. The clarity with which the narrator presents her past and brings it to life is typical of all of Romano’s writing: Each scene leads to another, revealing a special side of the narrator and carrying a message that resonates in the mind of the reader. Among her later work, Lettura di un’immagine (Reading an Image, 1975), revised and expanded in 1986 as Romanzo di figure (A Novel in Pictures), stands out as a particularly original experiment and witnesses to Romano’s continuing interests in the figurative arts and the relationship between words and images. In this volume, she assembled a series of early-twentieth-century photographs taken by her father and divided them into 14 categories that map a whole range of activities of turn-of-the-last-century rural society. Each image is accompanied by a caption that ‘‘reads’’ or comments on it, bringing to life the still subjects of the photographs. In recent years, her pre-1946 paintings and drawings have also received some critical attention. Her ninetieth birthday in 1996 was celebrated with an exhibition of her figurative works, while Antonio Ria has edited catalogues of her paintings and drawings. Lalla Romano also wrote travel memoirs in her later years.

Biography Lalla Romano was born in Demonte (Cuneo), on 11 November 1906 to Roberto Romano, a land surveyor, and Giuseppina Peano, a housewife. She attended elementary schools in Demonte, high school in Cuneo, and from 1924–1928 studied at the University of Turin, receiving a degree in literature and philosophy. In Turin she met many writers, critics, and historians, like Cesare Pavese, Mario Soldati, and Carlo Dionisotti, and frequented the studios of two painters, Giovanni Guarlotti and Felice Casorati. After university, Romano painted and exhibited in various shows, while working first as a high school teacher and then as a librarian. She married Innocenzo Monti, a bank clerk, 1932; their son Piero was born, 1933. She lived with her child in Cuneo, in her parents’ house, and was part of the Resistance movement, 1943. She abandoned painting for writing, 1946, and moved to Milan, 1947. She retired from teaching and devoted herself to writing, 1960. Romano was awarded the International Veillon Prize for Maria, 1954; the Pavese Prize for Tetto Murato, 1957; the Prize of the Milanese Booksellers for La penombra che abbiamo

ROMANTICISM attraversato, 1964; and the Strega Prize for Le parole tra noi leggere, 1969. She died in Milan on 26 June 2001. GIULIANA SANGUINETTI-KATZ

Eugene Delacroix, Diario (1822–1863), 1945. Beatrix Beck, Leon Morin, prete, 1954. Gustave Flaubert, L’educazione sentimentale, 1984.

Visual arts Lalla Romano pittrice, edited by Antonio Ria, 1993. Lalla Romano: disegni, edited by Antonio Ria, 1994. L’esercizio della pittura, edited by Antonio Ria, 1995.

Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Cesare Segre, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1991–1992.

Fiction Le metamorfosi, 1951. Maria, 1953. Tetto murato, 1957. La penombra che abbiamo attraversato, 1959; as The Penumbra, translated by Siaˆn Williams, 1998. Le parole tra noi leggere, 1969. L’ospite, 1973. La villeggiante, 1975; republished as Prale`ve, 1978. Lettura di un’immagine, 1975; expanded as Romanzo di figure, 1986. Una giovinezza inventata, 1979. Inseparabile, 1981. Nei mari estremi, 1987. Un caso di coscienza, 1992. In vacanza col buon samaritano, 1997. Dall’ombra, 1999. Ritorno a Ponte Stura, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘Fiore,’’ 1941. ‘‘L’autunno,’’ 1955. ‘‘Giovane e` il tempo,’’ 1974.

Travel Writing Diario di Grecia, 1960.

Translations Gustave Flaubert, Tre racconti, 1944.

Further Reading Brizio, Flavia, ‘‘Memory and Time in Lalla Romano’s Novels: La penombra che abbiamo attraversato and Le parole tra noi leggere,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Brizio, Flavia, La scrittura e la memoria, Milan: Selene, 1993. Brizio Skov, Flavia, ‘‘Rosetta Loy e Lalla Romano: ritratto di due scrittrici contemporanee,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 14:2 (1996), 206–212. Catalucci, Annamaria, Invito alla lettura di Lalla Romano, Milan: Mursia, 1980. Ferroni, Giulio, ‘‘Lalla Romano,’’ in Storia della Letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, vol. 4, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Lalla Romano,’’ in Prosatori e narratori nel Novecento italiano, Milan: Mursia, 1984. Pedri, Nancy, ‘‘From Photographic Product to Photographic Text: Lalla Romano’s Movement Away from Ekphrasis,’’ Rivista di Studi Italiani, 19:2 (2001), 141–161. Petrignani, Sandra, Le signore della scrittura, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1984. Ria, Antonio (editor), Intorno a Lalla Romano, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Lalla Romano fra pittura e scrittura,’’ in Lalla Romano pittrice, edited by Antonio Ria, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Tesio, Giovanni, ‘‘Lalla Romano,’’ Belfagor, 35 (1980), 671–686. Vincenti, Fiora, Lalla Romano, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974.

ROMANTICISM Born of the failures of the revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment, and of the loss of faith in the instruments of reason, which was resoundingly defeated by the events of history, Romanticism effected a reversal in the vision of the world and in the conception of art that marks an epochal

turning point for the history of culture and European consciousness, establishing itself as an inescapable basis of modernity. Its first and most original formulation was German. Between 1798 and 1804, a group of intellectuals, poets, philosophers, and critics gathered around the Berlin 1595

ROMANTICISM journal Athena¨um, and the circles of Heidelberg sketched out the theoretical and aesthetic foundations of Romanticism that became the reference point for the entire early-nineteenth-century European debate on literature and art. Spreading rapidly throughout all of Europe and characterized by an extreme variety of articulations in different European nations, Romanticism is difficult to reduce to certain parameters and exhaustive definitions and can be considered a program of common poetics, but with multiple variants. In Italy in particular, Romanticism has such peculiar characteristics as to provoke the paradoxical thesis advanced by Gina Martegiani in her book Il romanticismo italiano non esiste (1908), a thesis that still seems to persist in subterranean fashion in the critical literature, while, as Joseph Luzzi notes (‘‘Did Italian Romanticism Exist?,’’ 2004), in some general treatments of Romantic culture Italy is not even taken into consideration. But, aside from the paradox, there remains the Italian movement’s specificity, which was already grasped by the leading figures of the intellectual life of the time such as Goethe and Alessandro Manzoni, who, in the 1823 letter to the Marquis Cesare d’Azeglio later published as Sul romanticismo (Letter on Romanticism), declared that the word ‘‘Romanticism’’ ‘‘ha significati espressamente distinti, e, in alcune parte opposti, in Francia, in Germania, in Inghilterra’’ and that ‘‘in Italia, a Milano, e` stata adoperata a rappresentare un complesso di idee piu` ragionevole, piu` ordinato, piu` generale che nessun altro al quale sia stata applicata la stessa denominazione’’ (has expressly distinct, and in certain places opposite, meanings, in France, Germany, and England. In Italy, in Milan, it was adopted to represent a more reasonable, ordered, and general complex of ideas than anything else to which the same label was applied). Manzoni’s assertion, while bearing a personal imprint, also very clearly defines the characteristic lines of Italian Romantic culture in its internal and specific articulations. The moderate character of Italian Romanticism derives, in fact, from an array of factors, which are tied to the delay with which the new current was assimilated compared to other countries, to the curbing action that the rhetorical-literary tradition exerted on the new European acquisitions, and to the persistence of an Enlightenment, rationalistic, and pragmatic mentality (especially typical of the area of Lombardy) that tended to contain and weaken the paths of escape and the irrationalistic elements implicit in the Romantic revolution. To this we should add that Italy, still under Austrian 1596

rule and urgently needing to develop a national consciousness, tended to bring the demands for freedom, modernity, and independence coming from northern Europe into the realm of its own nationalistic needs, and as a result to accentuate the functional aspect of literary work. Already present in the Enlightenment (for instance in the program of the journal Il caffe´), the demand for a literature that is both educative and engaged in civil affairs and that adheres to the present and to its ethicalsocial problems by using an antirhetorical, agile, and communicative language more concerned with ‘‘things’’ than with ‘‘words’’ now solidified with the Romantic postulate of the relation between literature and life and of the dynamic interaction between writer and society. Even though the equation Romanticism-Risorgimento today appears simplistic, superseded by the documented presence of authentic patriots among the ranks of the socalled classicists collaborating on Biblioteca italiana (1814–1840)—among them Giacomo Leopardi’s close friend, Pietro Giordani (1774–1848)—we should acknowledge that Italian Romanticism is strongly characterized by patriotic tension and by the need to promote, through literary means, the awareness of a true national identity, in order to lay claim to autonomy in a political sense. The publication in the first issue of Biblioteca italiana (January 1816) of the article ‘‘Sulla maniera e l’utilita` delle traduzioni’’ (On the Manner and Usefulness of Translations) by Madame de Sta¨el (1766–1817), which called upon Italians to translate and study the new European literatures in order to shatter the insularity of an academic and sterile culture, drew immediate reactions from the cultural circles. Those from the literati still tied to the Arcadian-classicist taste were resentful and negative, while those from the Romantic intellectuals were positive and concordant. De Sta¨el’s text became, for the Romantics, a polemical weapon in defense of a modern and engaged literature that in fact confirmed convictions already deeply engrained in their ideology and, from a literary point of view as well, developed principles already contained in the works of certain critics of the eighteenth century. In the pages of Il conciliatore (1818–1819), a mouthpiece of liberal Romanticism, a fierce debate between the Romantics and the classicists, between the moderns and the ancients, between the supporters of the poetry of the vivi (living) and those of the poetry of the morti (dead) exploded around Giovanni Berchet’s Sul ‘‘Cacciatore feroce’’ e sulla ‘‘Eleonora’’ di Goffredo Augusto Bu¨rger. Lettera semiseria di

ROMANTICISM Grisostomo al suo figliolo (On the ‘‘Ferocious Hunter’’ and ‘‘Eleonora’’ by Gottfried August Bu¨rger: A Semi-Serious Letter from Grisostomo to His Son, 1816). The famous polemic, which saw the involvement of the most representative figures from both parties of the culture of the time, today appears, in a different historical perspective, rather fragile in its arguments, characterized more by the clamor of a journalistic campaign than by substantial differences of perspective. The theoretical principles on which the Romantic opposition should be established also prove to be scarcely original. Indeed, they are limited to echoing superficially the urgings drawn from German cultural trends without understanding them completely or subjecting them to an autonomous reworking. The theoretical pronouncements of Italian Romanticism, offered in various pamphlets by Ludovico Di Breme (1780–1820), Silvio Pellico (1789–1854), Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852), Ermes Visconti (1784–1841), Giovanni Berchet (1783– 1851), and others, turn out to be hardly solid on the speculative plane, with strong swings of position even in Berchet’s brilliant Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliolo, historically considered the manifesto of Italian Romanticism. Nevertheless, for all their obvious limits, the demands and issues of the German movement, which were welcomed and shared enthusiastically, functioned as reactants and catalysts for a greater awareness of Italy’s own difference with respect to the past, and became effective means of renewal for a provincial culture and milieu as lagging behind as Italy’s. Compensating for the argumentative weakness of Italian Romantic debates, however, is the attitude with which those Romantic principles are experienced and defended, which allows us to distinguish, even within the Italian movement, the characteristic elements of its European counterpart. The claim of the priority of feeling over reason, the defense of the subjective and personal character of art, the centrality of the individual genius in his absolute originality and, as a result, the singularity of each nation specifically defined by its own cultural and historical tradition, the confutation of imitation and the defense of creative freedom against the fetters of rules and of literary genres (with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, the great ‘‘barbarians,’’ as privileged models), the acceptance of the ugly and the shapeless as aesthetic categories— all these are the strong points of the Romantics in the debate against the classicists. Extended to all of the new literary expressions, the principle of freedom and of adhering to the real, in its manifold

complexity, produced especially innovative and useful results in the organization of the dramatic text, which, under the influence of the theories of Vorelsungen u¨ber dramatische Literatur (1809) by August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) and taking Shakespeare as a privileged model, violates the rigid pseudo-Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action. This approach was theorized by Manzoni himself in the Lettre a Monsieur Ch sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu dans la trage´die (Letter to Monsieur Chauvet on the Unity of Time and Place in Tragedy, 1823). The many historical dramas produced in the Romantic age, of varying levels and aesthetic results—for example, Silvio Pellico’s Francesca da Rimini (1818) and, of quite different quality, Manzoni’s Il conte di Carmagnola (The Count of Carmagnola, 1820) and Adelchi (1822)— are the synthesis par excellence of pathos and memory, of history and freedom, of imagination and reality, and are above all exemplary documents of civil engagement. This also explains the success of the literary genre of the novel, influenced especially by the historical novels of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and of Manzoni, as a response to the new demands for nonelitist communication by the new emerging bourgeois class, which Italian intellectuals by necessity grasped. Even when the production moved in the direction of exemplary and memorial autobiography, as in Silvio Pellico’s Le mie prigioni (My Prisons, 1832), or of the epistolary novel, following the evocative model of Foscolo’s Le ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802), the individual drama, the pathos, and the fantastical elements were yoked to clear ethicalcivil intentions that recalled the stance of the eighteenth-century reformers, although the concept of usefulness was given a moral rather than merely cultural or economic significance. Manzoni’s theoretical assumption—‘‘l’utile per iscopo, il vero per soggetto, l’interessante per mezzo’’ (the useful for an end, the true for a subject, the interesting for a means), as he wrote in Sul romanticismo, with its fullest realization in I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), published in its first version in 1827— seems, in fact, to be the victorious principle in the literary works of Italian Romanticism. In this context, the voice of the young Giacomo Leopardi sounds more solitary than ever. Leopardi, who held the end of poetry to be ‘‘diletto’’ (pleasure) and not ‘‘il vero e l’utile’’ (the true and the useful), intervened in the debate between the classicists and the Romantics first with his Lettera ai compilatori della ‘‘Biblioteca italiana’’ (A Letter to the 1597

ROMANTICISM Compilers of the ‘‘Biblioteca italiana,’’ 1816), which was never published, and then with the Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry, 1818), which was published only in 1906 and was thus not influential in the Italian cultural debate. The most characteristic themes of European Romanticism—the nostalgic flight into the past, in time, and space, the self’s folding in upon itself, in continuous conflict between the real and the ideal, the awareness of the unhappiness of genius, who is an exile in the world and in society, of which, however, because of his superior vision, he may become a privileged interpreter and a prophetic voice of redemption—all find extremely modern solutions exclusively in the poetry of Leopardi. Accepting the distinction made by Friedrich Schil¨ ber naive und sentimentalische ler (1759–1805) in U Dichtung (1800) between ‘‘naı¨ve’’ poetry (that of the ancients) and ‘‘sentimental’’ poetry (that of the moderns)—a leitmotiv that spanned all of European and Italian culture as it became aware of the difference between the world of the ancients, harmonious and cohesive with nature, and that of the moderns, irreparably separated from nature— only Leopardi, in an attempt to overcome the irreversible tear, gave himself romantically to the utopian impetus of feeling and imagination and recovered the accents, the tones, and the typical inflections of early German Romanticism, the genetic core and radiating center that was fundamental for future developments of poetry and contemporary culture. The production of verse in Romantic Italy was, on the whole, much reduced and of scant quality, with the exception of the satirical-dialectal line of Carlo Porta (1775–1821), Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli (1791–1863), and Giuseppe Giusti (1809–1850), who were also imbued with ethical-civil intentions and certain ballads or romances by Berchet such as I profughi di Parga (The Refugees of Parga, 1823), Romanze (Romances, 1824), and Fantasie (Fantasies, 1829), where, when the patriotic fervor slackened, there emerged melancholic and allconsuming Romantic nostalgias, expressed in a musical, spontaneous, and immediate language. It is also possible to find some hint of a personal Romantic approach in the lyrical-sensual outbursts of the poems of Niccolo` Tommaseo (1802–1874), a tormented and complex intellectual figure represented at his best in the strange novel Fede e bellezza (Faith and Beauty, 1840), and who, in his poetry, seemed to anticipate the elegiac weariness of Giovanni Prati (1814–1884) and of Gaetano 1598

Aleardi (1812–1878), who now belonged to the declining phase of so-called late Romanticism. More interesting than the concrete lyrical results was the new structural organization given to poetry, which, following trans-Alpine models, became explicit in new forms like the romance, the Romantic ballad, and the verse tale. These were all lyricalnarrative compositions, which presupposed the mixture of literary genres and the rejection of rigid normative canons, in accordance with the new Romantic desire to be released from a priori rhetorical rules and to use freely the expressive instruments inherited from tradition. The manifold and dissimilar production of many Romantic writers—among others, Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), Domenico Guerazzi (1804– 1873), Massimo D’Azeglio (1798–1866), Giuseppe Rovani (1818–1874)—did not stray, except in rare moments, from these programmatic lines, marking out a path of rhetorical weakening that goes from myth to history, from the idyll to drama and the novel, from poetry to prose. The internal differences of literary works are located almost exclusively in the stylistic-expressive register, which appears in the double imitative vein either of Foscolo’s passionate eloquence or of the calm, fluent thoughtfulness of Manzoni. In this situation, the influence of German Romanticism, filtered through a small number of important texts, such as De L’Allemagne (On Germany, 1812) by Madame de Sta¨el and August Schlegel’s Vorelsungen u¨ber dramatische Literatur, and readapted to Italian needs, greatly reduces the extent of transgressive novelty possessed by the Germanic movement. On the other hand, Italian Romanticism as a selfaware literary current developed ten years late compared to the foreign movement, and the knowledge of German Romanticism (investigated closely only much later) is scarce and indirect, conveyed only through French translations. The strident challenge of the French Enlightenment and its lucid, geometric rationalism; the irrational and fantastical impulse with hints of mysticism; the philosophical depth and the originality of aesthetic formulation; all central phenomena of German Romanticism, in fact, seem to be foreign to Italian culture. It also avoids the richness and complexity of a vision of reality as eternal becoming and of a conception of nature as a cosmos animated in correspondence with the spirit of humanity. Only Foscolo, in his poem Dei Sepolcri (On Sepulchres, 1807) was able, autonomously, through the mediation of the classics, to capture the correspondence d’amorosi sensi (of loving senses) between

ROMANTICISM humanity and nature. Absent was the conception of pure music, unbound from speech, as the essence of every art (in Italy, opera reigned supreme) and of poetic activity as a prolongation of the creative action of nature, on which was based the overturning of the principle of imitation (concepts that were later broadly developed, on the other hand, by the Italian decadent movement). Although it did not occur through the philosophical systematizing of German idealism, the reclaiming of history, in particular of the Middle Ages, reevaluated as a fundamental moment in the national and linguistic diversification of the various European states, and as a mythologized space of strong sentiments and adventurous deeds, still had the same power of denying the ideological abstractness of the Enlightenment, opposing to it the concrete meaning of the unfolding of history and the reflection, in its evolution, of the age of humankind and the nation, mediated by the historicist vision of Giambattista Vico (1668–1744). Rediscovered by the Romantics through the studies of Vincenzo Cuoco (1770–1823) and accepted for all of his speculative power and for the imaginative, passionate richness of his language, the Vico of Principi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni (Principles of a New Science Concerning the Nature of Nations, 1744) deeply influenced Italian Romanticism, providing it with a vision of historical evolution (for German idealism, of the development of spirit) that allowed it to arrive, by a different but analogous path, at a dynamic conception of the phenomenology of history, a decisive acquisition of European historicism. In opposite but fruitful directions, and with extraordinary results, the two greatest Italian Romantics encountered Vico: The Foscolo of Dei sepolcri and the Leopardi of the canzone ‘‘Ad Angelo Mai’’ (To Angelo Mai, 1820). The chronology and typology of these works reveal another paradox of Italian Romanticism: Its true protagonists, with the exception of Manzoni, were located outside the schemes of the official movement and arrived autonomously at Romantic solutions from within a fully Enlightenment and solidly classical formation that would seem to have been in open contradiction with the problems of Romanticism. The way in which Foscolo understood the classical world and used mythology is in fact profoundly Romantic (a perception valid as well for many other Italian and European exponents of neoclassicism, which criticism now considered not as being in opposition, but as a particular form of Romanticism). It was pervaded by Sensucht, by

that infinite nostalgia for the beauty of the past that derived from the entirely Romantic consciousness of an irreparable fracture between the self and the world, between the real and the ideal. Only poetry could attempt to heal it through feeling and the creative genius of the poet, who was at once a victim and a titanic master of fate. Inverting the vision of Vico and Foscolo, Leopardi, a convinced materialist and sensist, offered an outlook that was the reverse of eighteenth-century scientific optimism and a disenchanted, outdated critical perspective toward Romantic, spiritualist, liberal utopianism. He thus saw in the history of humankind, crushed by the indifferent mechanism of nature, only a constant progress toward pain and tried to overcome it through escape, illusion, and dream. Through a lyrical song that relied exclusively on the interior flux, on the free expansion of feelings and sensations, in a continuous opening up of reality as it dissolves into the ideal, Leopardi was thus able to capture, in poetic speech, the magic of a rarefied and astral music that points to the construction of absolute poetry, a signature of Romanticism. It is the lone example of authentic Romanticism but remains decisively outside the realistic line that dominates the cultural landscape of Romantic Italy. GRAZIELLA CORSINOVI Further Reading Beiser, Frederick, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Bellorini, Egidio, Discussioni e polemiche sul Romanticismo: 1816–1826, 2 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1943. Berchet, Giovanni, Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al figlio, edited by Luigi Reina, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Cadioli, Alberto, Romanticismo italiano, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 1995. Ciancio, Claudio, and Federico Vercellone (editors), Romanticismo e modernita`, Turin: Zamorani, 1997. Cotrone, Renata, Romanticismo Italiano. Prospettive critiche intellettuali Di Breme Visconti Scalvini, Taranto: Lacaita, 1996. Dell’Aquila, Michele, Foscolo e il romanticismo, Bari: Adriatica, 1992. Derla, Luigi, Letteratura e politica tra la Restaurazione e l’Unita`, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1977. Di Benedetto, Arnaldo, Dal tramonto dei lumi al Romanticismo. Valutazioni, Modena: Mucchi, 2000. Fasano, Pino, L’Europa romantica, Florence: Le Monnier, 2004. Givone, Sergio, La questione romantica, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992. Jonard, Robert, Le romantisme italien, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996.

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ROMANTICISM Leopardi, Giacomo, Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica, edited by Rosita Copioli, Milan: Rizzoli, 1998. Leopardi, Giacomo, Epistolario, edited by Franco Brioschi and Patrizia Landi, 2 vols., Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998. Luzzi, Joseph, ‘‘Did Italian Romanticism Exist?’’ Comparative Literature, 56:2 (2004), 168–191. Macchia, Giovanni, I fantasmi dell’opera: idee e forme del mito romantico, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Manzoni, Alessandro, Opere varie, Milan: Richiedei, 1870. Martegiani, Gina, Il romanticismo italiano non esiste, Florence: Seeber, 1908. Murray, Christopher John (editor), Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, 2 vols., New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004. Orcel, Michel, Il suono dell’infinito. Saggi sulla poetica del primo romanticismo italiano da Alfieri a Leopardi, Naples: Liguori, 1993.

Petronio, Giuseppe, Romanticismo e verismo: due forme della modernita` letteraria, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Pontiggia, Giancarlo, Contro il Romanticismo. Esercizi di resistenza e passione, Milan: Medusa, 2002. Praz, Mario, La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica, Rome: Societa` editrice la cultura, 1930. Puppo, Mario, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan: Istituto di propaganda libraria, 1985. Raimondi, Ezio, Romanticismo italiano e romanticismo europeo, Milan: Mondadori, 1997. Reina, Luigi, Romanticismo e dintorni, Salerno: Edisud, 2005. Rella, Franco, L’estetica del Romanticismo, Rome: Donzelli, 1997. Spera, Gianni, Significati e poetiche della narrativa italiana: fra romanticismo e idealismo, Florence: Le Lettere, 1989.

ROMANZO ROSA Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, there appeared on the literary scene a distinct novelistic genre in which love is of fundamental importance, and in which, unlike the love novels popular until that point, the emotions of the characters can be expressed in a continuous flow of passions. It was women who, in the 1700s, determined the genre’s success, precisely because of the presence of the theme of love. An entire epoch was pervaded by the universal aura of this sentimentalism, which would influence every one of its aspects, from the religious to the artistic, not to mention its fashion, mores, and manners. These novels do not conceal this sentimentalism; rather, they make it their centerpiece and bring it into everyday life through protagonists who must not, by necessity, possess any advantages of birth, goodness, or heroism beyond the common person’s. These characters speak directly to the reader, generally a female audience, by facing experiences in the course of their adventures of which this audience had immediate knowledge and thus establishing a communion between imagination and life that created strong and indissoluble ties. Written by women for women—never until then had women writers been so numerous or well-known—the romanzo rosa was able to overcome all of the age’s reservations about the dangers 1600

of reading for young female minds and became the most common means for diffusing new identities, new mores, new modes of being. From that point on, no one would any longer be able to ignore the new phenomenon of the sentimental novel, which in the twentieth century would witness a popular expansion even greater than that enjoyed by the serial novel in the nineteenth century. The romanzo rosa as we know it today derives directly from the sentimental novel, and its most simplified form is aimed at an ever-larger audience that is still mostly female. In Italy, the romanzo rosa began to drape itself in the national identity at the end of the 1930s and the 1940s: If foreigners, until that moment, had taken the lion’s share, now authors and titles reclaimed the right to express the mentality, tradition, and thought of Italy, at a political and social moment that was hardly open and progressive. This led to a discouraging impoverishment of plots, which were squeezed into the threads of a petite-bourgeois puritanism and an ideological and behavioral conservatism, and to numerous publications of melodramatic stories of crime and passion. Prolific writers such as Milly Dandolo (1895–1946) with Il dono dell’innocente (The Gift of the Innocent, 1926), Forte come l’amore (Strong Like Love, 1930), E´ caduta una

ROMANZO ROSA donna (A Woman Has Fallen, 1936), La fuggitiva (The Fugitive, 1939), Liberaci dal male (Deliver Us from Evil, 1939), and Luciana Peverelli (1902–1986), with Il bacio di Guya (Guya’s Kiss, 1938), Siglinda (Siglinda, 1942) Gli angeli non si sposano (Angels Don’t Marry, 1943), Sposare lo straniero (To Marry a Stranger, 1946), as well as Liala and Carolina Invernizio, were immensely popular in their lifetimes. A trace of lipstick could tip the balance between good and evil, and the aversion to anything that had the whiff of a modern idea, in opposition to good old-fashioned sense, became the main thread of the production of the moment. One example among many is Claudio Vela’s Tizı´ ed io (Tizı´ and Me, 1937), a parable of the contrast between two friends: Tizı´, a Parisian peroxide blonde, of modest origins and loose morals; and Francesca, Italian to the core, of a more elevated, elegant, and reserved class. They are both symbols: one of the new petitebourgeois class that was ready, through a mixture of presumption and ignorance, to embrace the new fashions coming from abroad, which were dazzling but without the foundation of tradition; the other of the old aristocracy devoted to the strenuous defense of wholesome values and duly engaged in the attempt to educate the first in taste and principles. The rapid social distortions that followed World War II made these models unsustainable, but neither the power nor the motivation was found to replace them with others: The romantic novel thus continued to revolve around cliche´s, the taste of mass production replaced that of personal imagination, and the plot became ever more monolithic, the scheme ever more fixed. Today, tradition dictates the course of Italian romantic fiction, whose leading authors are Maria Venturi (1936–), with Caro amore (Dear Love, 1988), La storia spezzata (The Broken Story, 1992), Incantesimo (Enchantment, 2000), Il nuovo incantesimo (The New Enchantment, 2003), and Sveva Casati Modignani (nom de plume of two journalists, Nullo Cantaroni and Bice Cairati), with Il cigno nero (The Black Swan, 1992), Il corsaro e la rosa (The Pirate and The Rose, 1995), Vicolo della Duchesca (The Alley of Duchesca, 2001), Qualcosa di buono (Something Good, 2004), both entrenched within formulas that do not stray (albeit with large concessions to contemporary life) from the paradise of fine sentiments and immutable wholesome principles, to the point of easily being adapted into television shows. Identified generally with the simplistic definition of the sentimental novel with a happy ending, the romanzo rosa is characterized by a popularity that amounts to an absence of literary pretensions.

Considered, therefore, a consumer genre, rather than a literary genre, it presents certain characteristics in common with the popular novel, whose mantle it has claimed, in some respects: the pedagogical intention contained in the message presented to the reader, which reaches her through a medium that draws her in by entertaining her and through the strong relation that binds audience and writer in a continuous exchange. On the other hand, however, the social aspects that pervade the popular novel, whose educative aim is entirely based on the reestablishment of justice through the overcoming of conflict, become less significant in the romanzo rosa, which, eliminating much of the contrast between the incarnation of good and evil, removes any pathos from the conflict itself, whether it be interior or class related. This notwithstanding, the problem of class difference is an element that does not disappear from the plot but rather adapts to the evolution of mores: If the heroine, of inferior birth, had previously achieved her aim by protecting her only endowment, that is her purity, this topic was now gradually reimagined. Access to a superior status is no longer an exceptional occurrence, and the matrimonial bond is no longer based on the preservation of virginity: The heroine has a way of distinguishing herself through other qualities, such as courage, tenacity, and initiative. This process of adapting to mores allowed the romanzo rosa to enter the field of eroticism and physical passion, aspects that are both carefully concealed or only glimpsed for the entire twentieth century but that are already present in the libertine strand of the eighteenth-century sentimental novel. The term ‘‘eroticism’’ certainly seems like a contradiction if it is used in reference to what until the middle of the twentieth century was defined as the romanzo per signorine (novel for women), the only narrative consumption worthy to figure alongside the prayer book. The erotic game is no longer veiled, even if it is almost never described in its completeness, and it is precisely its being revealed only up to a certain stage, through rhetorical figures such as ellipsis and reticence, that gives it a strong erotic charge, to the point of being considered quasipornographic. Eroticism in the romanzo rosa has been expressed differently according to genre and epoch, but it becomes more and more essential and assumes more and more definite, unequivocal contours. Liala (1897–1995) herself, although she vigorously defended the value of reluctance and virginity for her heroines, let them use this same value in a market of questionable taste: ‘‘E Chantal, calcolando da perfetta matematica, si agito` in modo da portare sotto la bocca dell’uomo la snellezza della 1601

ROMANZO ROSA sua gamba. E mentre l’altro baciava e ribaciava, ella tentava di svincolarsi pregando’’ (And Chantal, calculating like a perfect mathematician, wriggled herself so as to bring the slenderness of her leg beneath the man’s mouth. And while he was kissing her again and again, she tried to free herself, begging; Bisbigli al piccolo mondo, 1951). In the novel, the beautiful and poor Chantal Philipson seeks to be married to the ugly and wealthy Antonio Rizzio, and in order to achieve her aim she does not hesitate to allow him foretastes of what he might enjoy once the legitimate matrimonial bargain, naturally, is concluded. The admission of the theme of sensuality also revolutionized the position of the third subject, an inevitable presence in the fable as in the popular novel and the romanzo rosa: the rival, a sort of operatic contralto. The rival in the fable is generally a stepmother, whose thoughts are aimed at increasing the disadvantage of the heroine, depriving her right from the beginning of the protection of a wise and reassuring figure, the mother, who might give her, however, too decisive and unconditional a support. In the popular novel, on the other hand, the two characters are more similar; the rival is personified in the antagonist for the man’s love, often an old lover, a malicious relative, a scheming colleague. But, while the popular novel contrasts love and marriage and thus identifies passion as a dangerous and mortal feeling, in the romanzo rosa the concession to the good heroine of her own sexual identity in a positive sense makes love and marriage compatible, thus eliminating any negative aura surrounding sensuality: The only characteristic that irrevocably marks the figure of the rival as evil remains the wickedness at the core of her soul. Taking on a great erotic specificity, the romanzo rosa appears to be decisively centered on the theme of the conflict between man and woman and assumes even more of a typically female connotation by attributing to the woman a kind of fixation in fantasizing about love and by offering itself to her as a way to forget her own troubles, even if the romantic mechanism, designed as it is to produce upheavals of passion in the reader, seems to be almost a parody of that profound sentiment known as sensibility. However, this does not reduce its most evident power, which is that of stimulating the response of the reader, whose natural feeling of revenge about life is also gratified, through an omnipresent justice that strikes without exception anyone who deviates from the rules of the game. The romantic genre presents characteristics that are not necessarily fixed but that are always bound together by affinities. One of the most fundamental 1602

is what Greimas and Courte`s have defined as the ‘‘polemical confrontation between man and woman,’’ which is opposed to a ‘‘contractual confrontation’’ (Se´miotique, 1979). The contractual confrontation marks the tales whose story develops through a lens of class struggle, while the polemical confrontation marks those in which the individual identity of the protagonists prevail. In the romanzo rosa the fluidity of the storyline must evolve, without any great surprises or twists, toward a foreseeable happy ending, the realization of which can be delayed only by slight incidents generally not dependent on the external world but on a relational scheme pertaining to the two lovers or their immediate circle (gossip, venality, unrecognized virtue). These incidents and constraints of life dissolve into an interior reflection that transforms each of the two protagonists into the only possible destiny for the other, for better or for worse. Although it offers some analogies with the structure of the fable, the romanzo rosa is distinguished from it by means of a polemical confrontation: In the fable, in fact, the incidents are conditioned by a magic and fatalistic process and are supported or hindered by destiny; the characters act, not according to their own wills, but guided by a quasi-supernatural imperative. In the fable, pure narrativity prevails over interior aspects, unlike the romanzo rosa, in which the thinness of the plot becomes a simple backdrop for a profusion of emotional elements. Another difference is the frequent anticipation of marriage, the ultimate goal of every fable, at the beginning of the story and not at the end—a starting point and not the shimmering endpoint of the protagonists’ travails. In the romantic novel the ultimate end is not marriage, but rather love itself, even if it is always firmly set within the same lens of sacredness, of moral advantage. A common element between the fable and the romanzo rosa is the tendency to blur temporal references, even though some novels (typically those of Barbara Cartland, the queen of the British romance) are furnished with a note describing the epoch and country in which they are set. This historical information then has less importance in the development of the story and only confers a certain patina of preliminary research and inquiry. The determination of places is also vague, wavering between concrete indication and fablelike setting: During the 1930s and 1940s there was a strong propensity for bucolic backdrops—simple and pure, like the ideal soul of the protagonists—and in our time it is the exotic scenario that dominates. The absence of precision concerning these two factors can be

ROME justified by the decision not to distance the romantic plot from an idealizing development—and hence, necessarily, without space and without time. In the romanzo rosa, the happy ending is an obligation, with the just reward and the just punishment. The importance given to values time and again undergoes light modifications, depending on the ideology of the author: In Liala’s writing, for example, often a character who is basically decent ends up suffering, not always through his or her own faults, a punishment that smacks of catharsis. The joy of the lawful bond is, however, always the yearned-for end: Whether marriage is the beginning or the endpoint of the story, all of the vicissitudes, obstacles, and conflicts have reason to exist solely in virtue of their opposing this happiness. The romanzo rosa is characterized by ‘‘popularity’’ in both the accepted senses of the term: popularity as a lack of literary pretensions, but also as the extraordinary diffusion of the genre. Moreover, we cannot fail to grasp how the offering of models of extraordinary quality, who are yet so close to us, and of stories that superimpose the exceptional on the everyday favor an identification between character and reader capable of a symbiosis so strong that it becomes a potential dependence. For this reason, today this genre represents a billion-dollar business, as demonstrated by the publishing empire built by the Harlequin Mondadori Italia, whose books can be found wherever there is a reader. Though it continues to recount the eternal story of the encounter between a man and a woman, the romanzo rosa has evolved in step with the times and treats the theme of love by surrounding it with psychological, thrillerlike, and erotic overtones. This also mirrors the emerging tendencies of society, with the new demands of an audience that perhaps tends to find the same functions in the media triumph of the large-scale television dramas, which nevertheless

do not cut into or reduce the success of a long-lived genre. ANNA BOGO See also: Liala (Amaliana Cambiasi Negretti), Carolina Invernizio Further Reading Abruzzese, Alberto, Sociologia della letteratura, Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Bordoni, Carlo, Il romanzo senza qualita`: sociologia del nuovo rosa, Naples: Edizioni Libreria Sapere, 1984. Forte, Gioacchino, I persuasori rosa: sociologia curiosa del rotocalco femminile in Italia, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1966. Greimas, Algirdas Julien, and Courte`s, Joseph, Semiotique. Dictionnaire raisonne´ de la the´orie du langage, Paris: Hachette, 1979. Landolfi, Mario, Anatomia del romanzo rosa, Saviano: Societa` e Vita, 1990. Mercier, Michel, Il romanzo al femminile, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1979. Petronio, Giuseppe, Letteratura di massa e letteratura di consumo, Bari: Laterza, 1979. Pozzato, Maria Pia, Il romanzo rosa, Milan: Editori Europei Associati, 1982. Rak, Michele, Rosa. La letteratura del divertimento amoroso, Rome: Donzelli, 1999. Roccella, Eugenia, La letteratura rosa, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1998. Romano, Massimo, Mitologia romantica e letteratura popolare: struttura e sociologia del romanzo d’appendice, Ravenna: Longo, 1977. Rousset, Jean, Leurs yeux se rencontrent: la sce`ne de la premie`re vue dans le roman, Paris: Corti, 1981. Sarlo, Beatriz, ‘‘Segni della passione. Aspetti del romanzo sentimentale (1700–2000),’’ in Il romanzo, vol. 2: Le forme, edited by Franco Moretti, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Solinas Donghi, Beatrice, La fiaba come racconto, Venice: Marsilio, 1976. Sughi, Laura, Evasione e conformismo nella narrativa rosa, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1977.

ROME With the end of the Western Empire, the cultural history of Rome became the history of a myth clashing with the reality of a space that has difficulty defining itself as a city because it is fatally

conditioned by a double universalistic dream: a pagan one, fed by a nostalgia for an unrepeatable past, and a Christian one preached and followed by the Chair of St. Peter. Two works, Mirabilia Urbis 1603

ROME Romae (Wonders of the City of Rome, twelfth century) and the Cronica by Anonimo Romano (Chronicle, 1357–1358), lay out the constants of the idea of Rome in the collective imagination, both Italian and European, between the high medieval period and the dawning of Humanism. The Mirabilia Urbis Romae (a stratified work with its oldest text dating back to the beginning of the eleventh century) was reworked from the Latin into a Roman dialect under the title of Le miracole de Roma (The Miracles of Rome, mid-thirteenth century). It is a guide for pilgrims that suggestively contrasts the ancient buildings in ruins with the new temples of Christianity, surrounding them with a magical aura: We are thus dealing with the first literary projection of the perception of a Christian Rome that becomes the continuation and transformation of pagan Rome. The Cronica, on the other hand, the sole masterpiece in the old Roman dialect, is the powerful and dramatic representation of a city abandoned by the exiled pontiffs in Avignon and torn apart by the conflicts among baronial families and tells the tragic story of the popular Roman notary Cola di Rienzo (ca. 1313– 1354). It is a secular text, written in a deeply expressive, realistic style, which presages attitudes typical of civil Humanism in that it countenances the resort to antiquity not as a yearning for an impossible continuity but as a harsh lesson to modify and improve the present. With the definitive return of the popes (after the schism of the West came to an end in 1417), Rome became one of the great centers of Humanism and of the Renaissance, characterized by cosmopolitanism and syncretism. Few of the most important Humanists were born in Rome or in Lazio; many came from different parts of Italy. On the whole it was a curial Humanism, which tended to make use of heterogeneous contributions for syncretistic ends, that is, with the aim of reconciling the cult of the classics and Christian morality. In this perspective, the myth of Rome is more and more confined to a strictly literary and archaeological arena and deprived of ethical-civic resonances. The important antiquarian studies of Poggio Bracciolini and Flavio Bondo became popular, studies that substitute a scientific archaeology for the fantastical archaeology of Mirabilia; but Lorenzo Valla had a troubled relationship with the Curia, and with his rigorous and antidogmatic scholarship he demolished the exploitations of ancient sources by ecclesiastical circles; and in 1468 the Roman Academy of Pomponio Leto was dissolved (by 1604

Pope Paul II), found guilty of an excessive classicistic-paganistic infatuation and suspected of plotting against the pontifical government. It has been written that scholars, artists, and poets streamed enthusiastically to Rome because they discovered there greater freedom and better chances for advancement than in other courts; but it was a controlled freedom, which in the fifteenth century— especially during the court splendors of the Medicean Pope Leo X, the great patron of Michelangelo and Raphael—produced a sharp separation of art and literature from individual and collective life. Hints of the truth may be gathered from exceptional works: the tormented religiosity of Michelangelo’s Rime (Lyrics, post-1623) and the Rime (Lyrics, post-1558) of his friend and correspondent Vittoria Colonna; the satiric project of the anti-papal lampoons or pasquinate (1521–1522) by Pietro Aretino, which dignify a genre of popular protest consisting of anonymous satires, in Latin or in Italian, on a mutilated statue called ‘‘Pasquino’’; and finally the vivacious and colorful realism of certain anticlassical comedies like Franceso Belo’s Il Pedante (The Pedant, 1529) and Annibal Caro’s Gli straccioni (The Beggars, 1544). After the Council of Trent, the shadows of the Counter-Reformation lengthened over the splendors of Renaissance Rome: Emblematic in this regard are the tragic end (in the Convento di Sant’Onofrio in Gianicolo) of Torquato Tasso (1595), driven mad by religious qualms; the condemnation of Giordano Bruno to the stake (1600); and the trials of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition (1616 and 1633). Rome was transformed into the land of the baroque, but it was precisely in Rome, in the course of the seventeenth century, that the divorce of art and literature was finalized. The grandiose architectonic scenographies of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini served as a frame for the spectacles of Catholic ceremonies and popular festivals; but in literature, writers proceeded with caution because the written word was morally ‘‘dangerous’’: the poetry of Giovanbattista Marino had only a slim following, while the baroque style of treatise writing and eloquence were softened by the moderation of the Jesuits, who had their stronghold in the Collegio Romano. And Giovanni Ciampoli and Virginio Cesarini (both Galileans) were fundamentally classicists, exponents of a scientific culture open to new theories regarding religion, whose greatest institution was the Accademia dei Lincei, founded in 1603 by the botanist Prince Federico Cesi.

ROME Even the late dialectal flowering was quite distant from the daring fantasy of a Giambattista Basile or a Giulio Cesare Cortese: the heroic-comic poems Il maggio romanesco (Roman May, 1688) of Giovanni Camillo Peresio and Il Meo Patacca (Meo Patacca, 1695) of Giuseppe Berneri, the fathers of a falsely popular and oleographic tradition, are predominantly folkloric compositions. It is symptomatic, however, that precisely in the seventeenth century, with the ascendancy of grand universalistic ideals, the myth of Rome was reduced to the form of a postcard. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth century Rome would continue to play a substantial role in Italian literature. The Arcadia, founded in 1690, gave rise to a number of ‘‘colonies’’ spread throughout the entire peninsula and established itself, therefore, as the first truly national academy. Its program, once again, was a moderating one, which gathered the diffuse stirrings of reaction to baroque malgusto (bad taste) by diluting its more audacious secular and Cartesian ideological presuppositions. In the practice of poetry this program translated into a facile and catchy rhyming, which has suggestive and lasting results only in the songs and melodramas of Pietro Metastasio. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the function of the academy was exhausted and no longer presided over the conflict with the Enlightenment claims of northern European culture. Salvaging Rome’s prestige (before the French occupation) was the pontificate of Pious VI (1775–1799), the last nepotist pope and patron of the arts, and the advocate of a neoclassicism that would adhere above all to the canons of Greekness, aiming at an Olympian serenity that would be dominant over the passions, a perfect harmony between nature and spirit: This was the theory elaborated in Rome, 20 years previously, by the great German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann (working in Rome from 1755 onward). The official court poet of Pius VI was Vincenzo Monti, who wrote occasional poems such as La belleza dell’universo (The Beauty of the Universe, 1781); while the Milanese Alessandro Verri, who established himself in Rome by renouncing his past as an enlightenment reformer, managed to set down archaeological suggestions in the lugubrious atmospheres of the novel Le notti romane (Roman Nights, 1792–1804), a herald of the turbulent morbidities of Romanticism, thanks as well to the success of Piranesi’s etchings. In 1786, inspired by Winckelmann’s ideas, Goethe arrived in Rome. It was a formative journey, in contact with a landscape in which myth and reality are mixed together.

He dampened the ardors of Sturm und Drang and composed the Romische Elegien (Roman Elegies, 1789) with an open and often ironic sensuality and the celebrated pages of the Italianische Reisen (The Italian Journey), reworked 40 years later in 1828. At the end of the eighteenth century, and for the whole of the following century, the image of Rome was mostly consigned to the journals, novels, and poems of foreign writers who descended on Italy for the Grand Tour. The lure of Rome was contradictory. In the novel Corinne ou l’Italie (Corinne, or, Italy, 1807), Madame de Stae¨l contrasted the innocence and purity of the north with the looseness, both radiant and seductive, of the Roman south: a motif that first English writers (Smollett, Dickens) and then American writers (Hawthorne, James) would intensify with anti-Catholic tendencies, having Rome embody ‘‘original sin,’’ a kind of metaphysical evil manifested in material misery, in the dirt of the streets, in the malaria that poisoned the air of the city beset by the marshes, in brigandry, and finally in the corruption of the customs of the Roman natives. On the other hand, a romantic aestheticization of ruins was elaborated, the first manifestation of which came in the Lettre a M. de Fontanes sur la campagne romaine (Letters to M. De Fontantes on the Roman Countryside, 1804) of Chateaubriand and that would come to be one of the themes of the poetry of Byron, Keats, and Shelley. In the middle of the road, between admiration for and the critique of libertinism, we find the Rome, Naples, et Florence (1817) and Promenades dans Rome (Walks in Rome, 1829) by Stendhal, an intellectual flaˆneur who was happy to linger amid the theatrical and salon life of Rome. In each case we are dealing with ‘‘images’’ constructed from the outside, with a foreign eye; while, from within, the Rome of the Restoration emerges only in the Sonetti romaneschi (Roman Sonnets) of Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, a gigantesque representation of a people in a primordial condition, condemned to live in an anachronistically theocratic state. With the exception of Belli, Roman literature of the nineteenth century has little to offer. Classicism congealed into the sterile and dull erudition that Giacomo Leopardi attested to in his letters from Rome of 1822–1823; nor would the young poets of the Roman school (such as the brothers Giambattista and Giuseppe Maccari), who met at the Caffe` Nuovo and experimented with a classicist line in tune partly with Leopardi and partly with the bourgeois realism of the second generation of romantics, be able to free themselves from the influence of 1605

ROME the Arcadia. The influence of the enthusiasms of the Risorgimento was also weak. The heroic days of the Mazzinian Republic of 1849 had only one Roman memoirist: the Garibaldian painter Nino Costa, the author of a short, lively book, Quel che vidi and quel che intesi (What I Saw and Heard). From the Risorgimento arose the myth of the ‘‘third Rome,’’ that is to say of Rome as the capital of Italy after being the capital of the Caesars and of the popes. It was a myth promoted by Giuseppe Mazzini and pleaded for by Giosue` Carducci in Odi barbare (Ancient Odes, 1877–1889) but which shows its fragility right away. The city that the pontifical troops handed over to the sergeants of Porta Pia in 1870 was little more than a village: Hastily converted into a capital, it was overwhelmed by political corruption, building speculation, and by the intrigues and scandals of a new bourgeoisie of immigrants, from the north and the from the south, who added their avid commercialism to the endemic vices of the local population. These were the years of ‘‘Byzantine Rome,’’ from the name of a journal, Cronaca bizantina, founded in 1881 by a Milanese man, Angelo Sommaruga, who with open-minded initiative planned to establish in Rome a modern national publishing enterprise and lined up a broad swath of diverse contributors: from Carducci to the young Gabriele D’Annunzio, and later Arrigo Boito, Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Matile Serao, and Edoardo Scarfoglio. The ambiguity is already there in the journal’s title, taken from a couplet in Giambi ed epodi (Iambics and Epodes, 1867–1879) by Carducci, who condemned the ‘‘third Italy’’ and the ‘‘third Rome’’; but the myth of Byzantium is a fascinating icon of a simultaneously refined and corrupt civilization snared by the curse of history. In fact the literature of the time considered this Rome-Byzantium through the double lens of denunciation and aestheticism: In the pages of Cronaca bizantina there appeared in installments a forgotten masterpiece of Roman realism, L’eredita` Ferramonti (The Ferramonti Inheritance, 1884), and other writings of social criticism like La conquista di Roma (The Conquest of Rome, 1885) by Matilde Serao and Roma sotteranea (Subterranean Rome, 1892) by Giustino Ferri. However, an opposing current elaborated a sensual and aestheticizing vision of Rome, praising the rituals of the salon and the boudoir, in the luxurious frame of the Piazza di Spagna, Trinita` dei Monti, and Villa Medici; the city of D’Annunzio’s novel Il piacere (Child of Pleasure, 1889), and of other ‘‘sinful’’ variations 1606

like the poems and prose of Contessa Lara (a pseudonym of Caterina Cattermole Mancini). With the closing of Cronaca bizantina in 1885, the dominance of the aestheticizing strand was sealed by Il Convito (1895–1907) by Adolfo De Bosis, who undertook a reduction of European decadence into petit-bourgeois terms, with nationalistic and reactionary results, thus confirming the subaltern character of Roman culture at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, the reflections of the historical avant-gardes are sporadic. Crepuscolarismo had a fleeting Roman episode in the brief poetic career of Sergio Corazzini; Futurism scandalized the bienpensants with the famous speech Contro Roma (Against Rome) that Giovanni Papini gave at the Teatro Costanzi on 21 February 1913, but it would be rash to speak of a Roman Futurism in literature. Someone who invented his own language of the avant-garde, rooted in the humus of the city, was a genial man of the theater, Ettore Petrolini (1886– 1936), who used nonsense with rare parodic and desecrating energy, carried on later by the dialectal variety show of Checco Durante (1893–1976); and we must also remember Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s experiments in scenographic renewal in synch with Futurism and that would later result in the Teatro degli Indipendenti, where the surreal humor of Achille Campanile would make its first appearance. Surely the narrative and the theater of Luigi Pirandello have a tie with Rome but within a subordinate idea of setting: Rome as a portacenere (ashtray), as we read in Il fu Mattia Pascal (1904), a portacenere in which Italians of every region come to toss the ashes of their cigars. In the capital Pirandello established the Teatro d’arte at the Palazzo Odescalchi (1925), previously the home of Vittorio Podrecca’s theater of marionettes. A more precise sign of Roman and Romanesque characterization is retraced in the evolution of poetry written in dialect, which, with Cesare Pascarella and Trilussa, assumed a function that is no longer alternative to but competitive and integrative with poetry in standardized Italian. Then imperial Romanism, an excess of rhetoric imposed by Fascism, arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, during the 1920s, if on the one hand institutions like the Accademia d’Italia (which replaced the suppressed Accademia dei Lincei) established themselves, on the other hand there was the birth of institutions that, although desired and propagandized by the regime, developed their own lasting and autonomous vitality: The Istituto Treccani

ROME della Encicipledia Italiana, founded in 1925 and directed by Giovanni Gentile, was a modern organization of knowledge that became the capital’s only publishing venture; 1935 saw the creation of the Accademia Nazionale d’Arte under the direction of Silvio d’Amico and the beginning of Cinecitta`, which made Rome the capital of the Italian cinema; and the journal Primato was founded by Giuseppe Bottai in 1940. With little in common with the nationalistic autarchy of Fascism, there was Enrico Fermi’s school of physics and the other young scientists of Via Panisperna, the twentieth-century program of Massimo Bontempelli or the Roman painting school of Scipione (pseudonym of Gino Bonichi) and Mario Mafai, with which poets and critics, from Giuseppe Ungaretti to Libero De Libero, from Bruno Barilli to Roberto Longhi, would show solidarity. And 1929 was the year of Alberto Moravia’s censored novel Gli Indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), a work for which the term neorealismo was coined. In the years after World War II Alberto Moravia was the protagonist of the literary scene, and Rome reaffirmed her own central role in the Neofealist period, especially in the cinema, beginning with Rossellini’s Roma citta´ aperta (Open City, 1945), Visconti’s La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), and De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (The Bicycle Thief, 1948). In the 1940s and 1950s, there erupted a political-cultural debate in journals such as Mario Pannunzio’s Il mondo and Alberto Carocci and Moravia’s Nuovi argomenti. Later this fervor dissolved into worldliness and a taste for scandal, revealing a humanity in perpetual disquiet that was deafened by the mythologies of the masses, a humanity that received its emblematic panegyric, among others, in Federico Fellini’s films La dolce vita (1960) and Roma (1971), ironic-grotesque portrayals of the hypocrisies and false idols of Rome during the economic boom. Two other non-Romans captured the chaotic and violent essence of the city: Carlo Emilio Gadda, with the explosive linguistic mix of Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1957), and Pier Paolo Pasolini, with his representation of the subproletariat of the suburbs, tending toward a picaresque expressionism in Ragazzi di vita (The Ragazzi, 1955), Una vita violenta (A Violent Life, 1957), and in his first feature film, Accattone (1961). The experience of neo-Realism substituted for the image of imperial Rome that of a poor, proletarian Rome, home to the scoundrel: an image exported principally by the cinema, up until

the so-called Comedy Italian Style, which it would be better to call commedia alla romana (comedy Roman-style). It is the last myth produced by Rome in the picture of the national culture. From the end of the 1960s on, the neo-avant-garde, the student revolts, globalization, and many other phenomena of international scope seemed to block, in Rome as everywhere else, whatever urge the intellectual has to identify with a precise topographical and social rootedness. There are still many writers who continue to live and work in Rome, but their relationship with the city is almost insignificant. In the vein of the theater of fantastical narration, we may point to Ascanio Celestini, with his monologues drawn from oral testimony from within wartime Rome, especially with his Radio clandestina (2000), on the tragedy of the Nazi massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine. In the cinematic arena, what stands out is social criticism, from Nanni Moretti to ¨ zpetek, even though Rome has lost her Ferzan O hegemonic role as the capital of creative production. It is perhaps through the images evoked by Roma: Imago Urbis (Image of the City of Rome, 1990–1994), a multimedia audio-visual event photographed by Vittorio Storaro and directed by Luigi Bazzoni, that we are transported into a journey of the memory of time, a continuous historical and cultural discovery of a city that for itself is synonymous with civilization. LUCIO FELICI Further Reading Acquaro Graziosi, Maria Teresa, L’Arcadia: Trecento anni di storia, Rome: Palombi, 1991. Angeli, Diego, Storia romana di trent’anni: 1770–1800, Milan: Treves, 1931. Antonucci, Giovanni, et al., Il futurismo e Roma, Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1978. Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Letteratura italiana: Storia e geografia, 3 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1987–1989. Bartoccini, Fiorella, et al., Il decadentismo e Roma, Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1980. Bartoccini, Fiorella, La ‘‘Roma dei romani,’’ Rome: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento, 1971. Binni, Walter, and Natalino Sapegno, Storia letteraria delle regioni d’Italia, Florence: Sansoni, 1968. Bonanni, Francesca, Lazio, Brescia: La Scuola, 1989. Bonanni, Francesca, Teatro a Roma: Studi e testi, Rome: Lucarini, 1982. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Storia del teatro popolare romano, Rome: Colombo, 1958. Brezzi, Paolo, and Maristella De Panizza Lorch (editors), Umanesimo a Roma nel Quattrocento, Rome-New York: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani-Barnard College (Columbia University), 1984.

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ROME Camilucci, Marcello (editor), Roma nei poeti e nei prosatori contemporanei, Rome: Staderini, 1964. Caracciolo, Alberto, Roma capitale, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1956; 5th ed., 1999. D’Amico, John F., Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome: Humanists and Churchmen on the Eve of the Reformation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. D’Amico, Silvio, Bocca della verita`, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1943; reprinted, Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. De Caprio, Vincenzo (editor), Poesia e poetica delle rovine di Roma: Momenti e problemi, Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1987. De Caprio, Vincenzo (editor), Viaggiatori inglesi tra Sette e Ottocento, Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1999. Edwards, Catharine (editor), Roman Presences, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Edwards, Catharine, Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Escobar, Mario (editor), Poesia e prosa romanesca dalle origini a Trilussa, Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1957. Frateili, Arnaldo, Dall’Aragno al Rosati: Ricordi di vita letteraria, Milan: Bompiani, 1964. Frattini, Alberto, and Marcella Uffreduzzi (editors), Poeti a Roma 1945–1980, Rome: Bonacci, 1983. Ghidetti, Enrico (editor), Roma bizantina, Milan: Longanesi, 1979. Gnoli, Domenico, I poeti della Scuola romana (1850–1870), Bari: Laterza, 1913. Graf, Arturo, Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del Medioevo, 2 vols., Turin: Loescher, 1882–1883. Gregorovius, Ferdinand, Diari romani, translated by Romeo Lovere, Milan: Hoepli, 1895.

Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, Storia di Roma, 31 vols., Bologna: Cappelli, 1938–1987. Lunetta, Mario (editor), Verso Roma, Roma in versi: Antologia poetica, Rome: Lucarini, 1986. Milizia, Barbara, Le guide dei viaggiatori romantici, Rome: Istituto Nazionale di Studi Romani, 2001. Negro, Silvio, Seconda Roma, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1966. Orioli, Giovanni (editor), Memorie romane dell’Ottocento, Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1963. Petrocchi, Giorgio (editor), Orfeo in Arcadia: Studi sul teatro a Roma nel Settecento, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1984. Porena, Manfredi, Roma capitale nel decennio della sua adolescenza (1880–1890), Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1957. Possenti, Francesco (editor), Cento anni di poesia romanesca, 2 vols., Rome: Staderini, 1966. Scarfoglio, Edoardo, Il libro di Don Chisciotte, Rome: Sommaruga, 1885; reprinted, Milan: Mondadori, 1925. Squarciapino, Giuseppe, Roma bizantina, Turin: Einaudi, 1950. Stinger, Charles L., The Renaissance in Rome: Ideology and Culture in the City of the Popes, 1443–1527, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. Teodonio, Marcello (editor), La letteratura romanesca: Antologia di testi dalla fine del Cinquecento al 1870, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2004. Treves, Piero, L’idea di Roma e la cultura italiana del secolo XIX, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1962. Ulivi, Ferruccio (editor), I poeti della Scuola romana dell’Ottocento, Rocca San Casciano: Cappelli, 1964. Veo, Ettore (editor), I poeti romaneschi, Rome: Anonima Editoriale Romana, 1927.

FRANCESCO ROSI (1922–) The hallmark of Francesco Rosi’s filmmaking is a personal, poetic reinterpretation of neo-Realism that, beyond the extinction of that movement, has aimed at reviving its style, its sober commitment to historical truth and human feelings. In Rosi’s cinema civic courage, rising above specific political banners, blends with an artistic eye and creates a world of many facets, in which intellectual rigor is executed as aesthetic enjoyment on the backdrop of sceneries as varied as those of Sicily (Salvatore Giuliano, Cadaveri eccellenti), the Amazon forest (Cronaca di una morte annunciata), Spain (Il momento della verita`, Carmen), Germany (I magliari),

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the Alps (Uomini contro), Naples (La sfida, Mani sulla citta`), Apulia (Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, Tre fratelli), and many more. Rosi’s first feature film, La sfida (The Challenge, 1958), takes place in the director’s native Naples, where an ambitious young man, Vito Polara, attempts to reach a position of prominence in the wholesale distribution of produce, traditionally in the criminal hands of the camorra. Having crossed one boss too many, he is killed, only to be belatedly avenged by his fiance´e. The film is lively, fast paced; it combines the attractions of a love story with a keen interest in social phenomena, displaying a

FRANCESCO ROSI historical precision that would be the envy of many a documentary—without the limitations of the documentary genre. I magliari (The Swindlers, 1959) illustrates the period of Germany’s reconstruction after the war—and to this extent should be watched after Roberto Rossellini’s Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1948) and Paura (Fear, 1954), and before Vittorio De Sica’s I sequestrati di Altona (The Condemened of Altona, 1962), combining that theme with one of Alberto Sordi’s early performances in the genre of commedia all’italiana. The eponymous swindlers are a group of picaresque salespersons of fabrics, among whom ‘‘Totonno’’ (Sordi) charismatically stands out, bent on cheating unsuspecting German buyers. The film is both serious in its analysis of a ruthless struggle to control the informal economy and entertaining in a more facile sense; thanks to its repeated shifts in tone, it keeps the viewers’ attention constantly alert. Rosi’s next film, Salvatore Giuliano (1962), marked the beginning of the director’s international reputation. Salvatore Giuliano shows that the rigorously documented study of a historical and social phenomenon, such as the post–World War II Sicilian independent movement and its relation to the Mafia, can overcome the traditional distinction between fiction and documentary and create a gripping style that is both individually tragic and historically persuasive, both methodologically accurate and psychologically refined. With Mani sulla citta` (Hands Over the City, 1963), Rosi produced another major film that has a strong sociohistorical framework: real estate speculation during the Italian miracolo economico, the industrial economic boom of the 1960s; corruption in the civil service; and links between the Neapolitan (and national) political world and that of the camorra. However, over and above its documentary value, Mani sulla citta` also has a symbolic narrative as an illustration of ‘‘the morality of power’’: in Italy among the long-ruling Christian Democrat party and even well beyond that, in the universal sphere of politics. Set in Spain, Il momento della verita` (The Moment of Truth, 1965) is the story of the high hopes, and premature death, of Miguel, a young man of humble origins whose dream it is to blaze a lightning trail as a torero in the bullring. The film takes great care to stress the exploitative nature of the entertainment industry that surrounds the practice of the corridas. At the end of the decade, in the context of ever-sharper societal questioning of the conventional tenets of nationalism (a questioning

stimulated, in Italy as in the United States, by the ominous turn taken by the Vietnam war), Rosi made Uomini contro (Just Another War, 1970), re-created from the World War II book of memoirs Un anno sull’Altipiano (One Year on the Plateau, 1945) by Emilio Lussu. As was often the case with World War II memoirs, both the book and the film portray the atrocity of trench warfare, denounce the unconfessed economic and political interests that use shrill ideological arguments to profit from sending millions of men to their graves, and portray—indelibly so—the lunacy, bordering on criminality, of officers who treat other people’s lives as no more than stepping stones to their own military reputation. In this film, Gian Maria Volonte´ (Lt. Ottolenghi) began a long and profitable cooperation with Rosi. Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair, 1972) explores the meteoric rise and mysterious death of Enrico Mattei, who from the 1950s on chaired ENI, the Italian nationally owned oil company, and in that capacity aggressively moved to challenge the ‘‘seven sisters’’’ control over global oil production. Far from concerning itself with the mere praise of a hardly idealistic personality, the film peers into sensitive political issues that, because of the interests they threatened, had been hushed up by the status quo both in Italy and internationally. In researching the fundamental question of who killed Mattei, Rosi shed light on one of the many mysteries that haunt the history of the young Italian republic. Lucky Luciano (1973) is an excellent example of the different approaches taken by Italian cinema and American cinema in dealing with the theme of the Mafia. The interconnection between the historical and political level, on the one hand, and Luciano’s figure as an individual, on the other, form the core of Rosi’s inquiry. Thus, going against the grain of the genre’s classical conventions, Rosi opted for a real-life narrative style, multifaceted inquisitiveness, historical factuality, and openendedness. Rosi’s next film, Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, 1975), depicts an archpolitical yet entirely metaphorical condition. Inspired by Leonardo Sciascia’s book Il contesto (Equal Danger, 1971), the film uses the devices of the detective story, skillfully adapted by Sciascia to the Italian (and particularly Sicilian) situation, in order to make statements about a society in which political criminality strikes, while vested interests conspire to hide the truth, and—to use the words made famous in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo 1609

FRANCESCO ROSI (The Leopard, 1958)—‘‘everything changes, so that everything can remain the same.’’ Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, 1979), a touching and inwardly turned rendering of Carlo Levi’s book of memoirs by the same title (1945), explores a remote southern village to which the Turin-born anti-Fascist intellectual was banished under Mussolini’s regime. The village, Aliano (named Gagliano in the book; actually filmed in Craco), is lost in the hills way beyond Eboli, the last train station and outpost of civilization. As Levi (played by Gian Maria Volonte´) quickly realizes, Christ’s humane message has never made it to the desperate hamlet on the wrong side of the watershed: Only an abject, hopeless, ancestral poverty reigns there, and fatalism and superstition hold sway as though the good tidings had never been announced. In full accord with the book he is re-creating, Rosi deliberately contrasted the despondency of the local condition humaine with the timeless beauty of the Lucanian landscape. In Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, 1981), Rosi offered us a re-creation from a novella by Andrei Platonov, Tretii syn (The Third Son, 1936). Unlike its prototype, set in post-Revolutionary Russia, Rosi’s film is concerned with the conflicts that threaten to tear apart the fragile Italian polity of the late 1970s. Raffaele, the eldest son, is a judge in Rome, exposed to attack by terrorist groups; Rocco, the youngest, works in Naples in a community for the reform of juvenile delinquents; and Nicola, the middle one, is a disgruntled auto worker in Turin. When the fourth major character in the film—Donato, the father—calls on his sons to join him for their mother’s funeral, they all meet in the native village they had long before abandoned to pursue careers in faraway corners of Italy. Despite the differences in their political views and personalities, the brothers feel mutual solidarity, and the different generations complete the symbolic circle in the ongoing single identity of their country. Carmen (1984) re-creates the well-known plot of Bizet’s opera in a rigorous, even austere environment, where the poetry of wild Mediterranean landscapes is tempered by the real-life humanity of people seen in their humble social context; among those are the female workers at the cigar factory, the street urchins, the gypsies at Lillas Pastia’s tavern, and the masses crowding in the bullring for their accustomed Sunday ritual. The film also renders with great precision the baroque beauty of the European south: religious processions, flamenco 1610

dances, the torero’s trance-like preparation for the fight. This, too, is accomplished in a sober tone that, far from activating the facile exoticism of tourist literature, primarily amounts to a psychological exploration of the Mediterranean culture’s particular mindset. In 1987, Rosi continued his long-standing dialogue with the neo-Latin world and southern cultures by filming Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez’s Cronaca di una morte annunciata in the Amazon basin. And, in 1992, Diario napoletano (Neapolitan Diary), made for RAI television, marked Rosi’s return to a close confrontation with his native city some 30 years after his first denunciation of her ills. As the title suggests, the film was shot in the first person, and it consists of a sweet-and-sour meditation on just how often, despite improved living standards, life in Naples falls short of allowing the napoletani to fulfill their immense cultural and human potential. La tregua (The Truce, 1997) is re-created from Primo Levi’s book of memoirs by the same title (1963), and it tells of the adventurous train ride to Italy by which Holocaust survivors were allowed to return home. Tragic moments (for example in the confrontation with the local populace, unwilling to be reminded of the war) alternate with a number of more cheerful or almost picaresque ones, when the former inmates seek food or some diversion from their ongoing plight. Tossed, with no apparent plan or destination, through various countries of Central and Eastern Europe, these witnesses of the Holocaust enjoy—if that is the word—a brief moment of ‘‘truce’’ between one war that has just ended and the no less difficult one that awaits them on their arrival home: a war that will know no end to keep alive the memory of the sufferings they have endured. Francesco Rosi has repeatedly endorsed the view of a socially constructive cinema, a cinema of memory and identity that would maintain a continuity with the culturally and economically vibrant years of Italy’s post–World War II reconstruction. In commenting on the crisis of Italian cinema in the 1980s and 1990s, which he linked to individualism, widespread passivity and stagnation of the spirit in the Italian society of the time, Rosi held up films such as Rossellini’s Paisa` (Paisan, 1946) as models for a cinema committed to a new enthusiasm. ‘‘It is necessary,’’ he argued in an interview published in La repubblica (20 April 1994), ‘‘that we rediscover lost moral values [...] It is necessary that we identify with a society that is morally

FRANCESCO ROSI reunited, rather than one made up of myriad stray monads, as could be the case if we fail to act. The great fathers of Italian neorealism did not preach solidarity; they practiced it in their art.’’ Rosi’s poetics lucidly upheld a combination of artistic creativity and documentary rigor in approaching one’s subject matter: ‘‘I do not recognize myself in austerity. What I do recognize myself in is the rigor with which I tried to develop some arguments that demanded rigor—and they demanded it because they demanded respect for truth. One cannot make films such as Salvatore Giuliano, or Mani sulla citta`, or Uomini contro, or Lucky Luciano, or Cadaveri eccellenti, or Tre fratelli, or Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli, without expecting from oneself respect and rigor [...] This in no way detracts from the freedom which creativity is to enjoy. On the contrary, one can allow creativity to roam perhaps even more freely, once one has made sure to abide by the historical platform, the social platform, the general platform of truth’’ (Carlo Testa, ‘‘Interview with Francesco Rosi,’’ 2002). CARLO TESTA

Biography Francesco Rosi was born November 15, 1922, in Naples. The child of a director of a sailing company who was also a respected caricaturist and an avid amateur photographer and filmgoer, Francesco Rosi grew up partaking in his father’s passions from his earliest years. His studies of law having been interrupted by World War II, he moved to Rome, where he was assistant director to Ettore Giannini in the theater (1946). In 1948 in Sicily, he was assistant director to Luchino Visconti for La terra trema, a collaboration continued with Bellissima (1951) and Senso (1954); he also worked as assistant director to Luciano Emmer, Raffaele Matarazzo, Michelangelo Antonioni (I vinti, 1952), and Mario Monicelli. In 1952, he completed Goffredo Alessandrini’s Camicie rosse; in 1956, he collaborated with Vittorio Gassman on the screenplay of Kean. His first film as director, La sfida (1958), won the Special Jury Prize at Venice; Salvatore Giuliano (1962), the Silver Bear at Berlin for best director and the Nastro d’Argento at Venice for best cinematography, best director, and best score, 1963; Le mani sulla citta` (1963) the Golden Lion at Venice; Il caso Mattei (1972) the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Padua University (1996), Middlebury

College (2000), the Turin Politecnico (2001), and the Paris Sorbonne (2002) awarded him honorary degrees. He is married with one daughter (actress Carolina, born 1966) and lives in Rome. Selected Works Films La sfida (The Challenge), 1958. I magliari (The Swindlers), 1959. Salvatore Giuliano, 1962. Le mani sulla citta` (Hands over the City), 1963. Il momento della verita` (The Moment of Truth), 1965. C’era una volta (Cinderella, Italian Style), 1967. Uomini contro (Just Another War, based on the war memoirs by Emilio Lussu), 1970. Il caso Mattei (The Mattei Affair), 1972. Lucky Luciano, 1973. Cadaveri eccellenti (Illustrious Corpses, based on the novel Il contesto by Leonardo Sciascia), 1975. Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli, based on the memoirs by Carlo Levi), 1979. Tre fratelli (Three Brothers, based on the novella The Third Son by Andrei Platonov), 1981. Carmen (based on the novella by Prosper Me´rime´e and the opera by Georges Bizet), 1984. Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Chronicle of a Death Foretold, based on the novel by Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez), 1987. Dimenticare Palermo (The Palermo Connection, based on the novel by Edmonde Charles-Roux), 1990. Diario napoletano (Neapolitan Diary), 1992. La tregua (The Truce, based on the novel by Primo Levi), 1997.

Screenplays Salvatore Giuliano, edited by Tullio Kezich, Rome: Edizioni FM, 1961. Le mani sulla citta` (with Raffaele La Capria, Enzo Forcella and Enzo Provenzale), L’Ora (Palermo), 10 September 1963, 7–10. Uomini contro, edited by Callisto Cosulich, Bologna: Cappelli, 1970. Il caso Mattei: Un ’corsaro’ al servizio della Repubblica (with Eugenio Scalfari), Bologna: Cappelli, 1972. Lucky Luciano (with Lino Jannuzzi), Milan: Bompiani, 1973. Tre fratelli (with Tonino Guerra), Mantua: Circolo del Cinema-Casa Del Mantegna, 1999. La sfida (with Suso Cecchi D’Amico and Enzo Provenzale), Manuta: Circolo del Cinema-Casa Del Mantegna, 2001. I magliari (with Suso Cecchi D’Amizo and Giuseppe Patroni Griffi), Manuta: Circolo del Cinema-Casa del Mantegna, 2001.

Further Reading Bolzoni, Francesco, I film di Francesco Rosi, Rome: Gremese, 1986. Boussinot, Roger (editor), ‘‘Francesco Rosi’’ in L’encyclope´die du cine´ma par l’image, Paris: Bordas, 1970.

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FRANCESCO ROSI Ciment, Michel, Le dossier Rosi, Paris: Ramsay, 1976; reprinted, 1987. Gesu`, Sebastiano (editor), Francesco Rosi, Acicatena (Catania): Incontri con il cinema, 1991. Giacci, Vittorio (editor), Francesco Rosi, Rome: Cinecitta` International, 1994. Gili, Jean A., Francesco Rosi: Cine´ma et pouvoir, Paris: E´ditions du Cerf, 1976. Gili, Jean A. (editor), Francesco Rosi, Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard, 2001. Mancino, Anton Giulio, and Sandro Zambetti, Francesco Rosi, Milan: Il Castoro, 1977; revised edition, 1998. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers: After the Diaspora,’’ and ‘‘Filming the Text of Witness: Francesco Rosi’s The Truce,’’ in After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘Rosi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli: A Tale of Two Italies,’’ in Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Micciche´, Lino, Cadaveri eccellenti, Acicatena (Catania): Incontri con il Cinema, 1991. Testa, Carlo, Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Testa, Carlo, ‘‘The Consummation of Meridionalism: Carmen (1984),’’ in Masters of Two Arts: Re-Creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Testa, Carlo, ‘‘Interview with Francesco Rosi,’’ in Poet of Civic Courage: The Films of Francesco Rosi, edited by Carlo Testa, Westport, CT: Greenwood Praeger, 1996.

SALVATORE GIULIANO, 1962 Film by Francesco Rosi

Salvatore Giuliano became a rebel and a ‘‘bandit,’’ during the Allies’ occupation of Sicily in World War II, in a context that knew of practically no venues for social dissent other than this primitive form of opposition to precapitalistic forms of production. Rapidly rising to mythical status, the outlaw long succeeded in rallying around himself the ranks of the outcast and in obtaining the support and complicit silence (omerta`) of the local population. To this end, he adopted a vaguely messianic social message, envisaging, Robin Hood-like, an 1612

independent Sicily that would take from the rich and give to the poor; at the same time, Giuliano had to jostle the competing interests of the Allies, the reactionary landed gentry, the Church, and obviously the Mafia. Between 1945 and 1948 this interregnum gradually wound down; in particular, the elections of April 1948 brought the centrist, Christian Democratic Party (DC) to a solid position of power. History could thus carry on as before: Continuity had been guaranteed on all fronts—much to the satisfaction of the traditional powers-that-be. As a consequence, there no longer was any need for those powers to tolerate Salvatore Giuliano’s quixotic and archaic posturing, let alone to experiment with his ambivalent social views: In the new world of NATO and the atomic bomb, the bandit Giuliano had to revert to being no more than just that, a bandit. Where the antiguerrilla warfare of the Italian state had failed, treason by insiders worked better—and Giuliano was duly shot by his secondin-rank Gaspare Pisciotta on July 5, 1950. However, the official report stated that Giuliano was killed in a shootout with the carabinieri. In 1954, Pisciotta was poisoned in a high-security prison in Palermo. More than half a century later, this seems a plausible and consistent enough reconstruction of the facts. But the details of what at the time was an enormously sensational death seemed murky— and, indeed, remain such to this day. In Salvatore Giuliano, Rosi asked many disturbing questions. As Ben Lawton synthesized: ‘‘Who killed Giuliano? Why? Who killed Pisciotta? Why? Why did Giuliano continue to fight, even after the [June 1946] general amnesty? Why did Giuliano become involved in the massacre of [eleven Communist landless laborers on May 1, 1947, at] Portella della Ginestra? What happened to Giuliano’s diary? To what extent was the Italian government involved in all these events? To what extent was the mafia involved?’’ (‘‘Salvatore Giuliano,’’ 1996). Rosi’s film responds to these challenges by the creation of what has been called an ante litteram ‘‘postmodern’’ form of realism (Gary Crowdus, ‘‘Francesco Rosi,’’ 1994)—a realism that presents facts in loose association rather than in strict linear form, moving as needed between different blocks of information that it is up to the viewer to reassemble logically. For Rosi, this manner of presentation reflected the very absence of clarity with which the events occurred in reality. Lawton argued convincingly that Rosi not only was postmodern in an aesthetic sense but also contributed to that particular Italian form of constructive revolutionary

ROSSANA ROSSANDA postmodernism theorized by Pier Paolo Pasolini and, suggesting an intriguing analogy with Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ (1963) stressed that Salvatore Giuliano, too, upset conventional narrative patterns, because Rosi ‘‘took facts, documented historically as much as anything can be, and presented them in such a manner as to deliberately generate confusion, raise questions and engage the audience in a dialogue’’ (‘‘Salvatore Giuliano,’’ 1996). Nevertheless, Rosi was far from cultivating subjectivist aesthetics; his methodology was based, if anything, on respect for the events he approached. Rosi believed in the ethical and civic value of a cinema whose aims are awareness and understanding: ‘‘When I was shooting Salvatore Giuliano [...] I demanded of myself, and of the producer, that we shoot on the very locations where the original events had taken place. This was not a director’s whim. It was a necessity—it was an imperative need for historical reconstruction, to be fulfilled by the participation and the involvement of the people who had witnessed those events no more than ten–fifteen years before. By way of that involvement, and thanks to that respect, I managed to add emotion to the film, causing a sort of trauma of an emotional nature which allowed people to

cooperate. Reproducing that emotion served as a basis for images that could get closer to the truth’’ (Carlo Testa, ‘‘Interview with Francesco Rosi,’’ 1996). CARLO TESTA Further Reading Ciment, Michel, Le dossier Rosi, Paris: Ramsay, 1976; reprinted, 1987. Crowdus, Gary, ‘‘Francesco Rosi: Italy’s Postmodern Realist,’’ Cineaste, 20:4 (October 1994), 19–25. Gili, Jean A., Francesco Rosi: Cine´ma et pouvoir, Paris: E´ditions du Cerf, 1976. Kezich, Tullio, and Sebastiano Gesu`, Salvatore Giuliano, Acicatena (Catania): Incontri con il Cinema, 1992. Lawton, Ben, ‘‘Salvatore Giuliano: Francesco Rosi’s revolutionary postmodernism,’’ in Poet of Civic Courage: The Films of Francesco Rosi, edited by Carlo Testa, Westport, CT: Greenwood Praeger, 1996. Rosi, Francesco, Interview with Carlo Testa in Poet of Civic Courage: The Films of Francesco Rosi, Westport, CT: Greenwood Praeger, 1996. Sitney, P. Adams, Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Tranfaglia, Nicola (editor), Segreti di Stato. Dai documenti al film, Rome: Fandango Libri, 2003.

ROSSANA ROSSANDA (1924–) Few Italian intellectuals have achieved Rossana Rossanda’s compelling and coherent presence within both cultural and political discourse. As for many of her contemporaries, the experience of World War II and the fight against Fascism was life-defining. In 1943, the young student of art history became a runner of dangerous errands for the Resistance in Milan. Thus, a passion for scholarly work grew into a commitment for political activism and almost 30 years of militancy in the Italian Communist Party (PCI). Rossanda brought to the Party the commitment of the Resistance, the demanding presence of a new generation of emancipated women, and her cultural interests (she would run the Party’s cultural office from 1963 to 1966). But Rossanda’s inquiring mind, formed from an unorthodox study of Marx’s

thought, was increasingly at odds with a Party that, by the 1960s, had frozen into a stale opposition to the Christian Democrats. In Un viaggio inutile o della politica come educazione sentimentale (A Useless Trip, or Politics as Sentimental Education, 1981), written about her 1962 trip in Spain to reconnoiter the progressive forces opposed to Franco’s regime, Rossanda recorded retrospectively how for the first time she felt the Party was out of step with the deep economic and social changes that were rippling through Italian and European society. The ‘‘capitalist revolution’’ of the Italian economic boom was to be followed in the spring of 1968 by another revolution, one that rocked the streets, schools, and factories and for which the Party was totally unprepared. L’anno degli studenti (The Year of the Students, 1968), Rossanda’s first 1613

ROSSANA ROSSANDA book, is a chronicle and political analysis of the nature, limits, and potentialities of the student revolt. In it, Rossanda attempted to understand the seeming chaos of this volcanic event and to involve the Party and the larger society in the work of rethinking that it initiated. The Party’s answer to the book was one of censure and rejection. In 1969, Rossanda, with a group of intellectuals who had just founded the journal Il manifesto—Luigi Pintor, Luciana Castellina, Lucio Magri (the core of the Italian New Left—were expelled from the PCI. In Il manifesto, transformed into a daily newspaper in 1971, Rossanda began her long ‘‘adventure’’ as a journalist. Orphaned by the Party, she found a home in the newspaper, a place to combine her passion for the world of action and intellectual reflection through writing as an instrument of social change. In the 1970s, Rossanda’s New Left underwent an increasing atomization that climaxed, after the second student rebellion of 1977, in the secession of the feminist groups. This last splintering was particularly painful for Rossanda and triggered her exploration of the conflicting reasons of politics and feminism. Le altre. Conversazioni a Radiotre sui rapporti tra donne e politica, (The Others: Conversations on Radiotre on the Relations between Women and Politics, 1979) is an attempt at bridging the time and space of the persona with that of the collectivity. While supporting the feminist project, she insisted on the primacy of the order of the real (economic structure, social relations) over the symbolic order, thus rejecting the hypothesis of a women’s identity defined in ahistorical, biological. or metaphysical terms. Rossanda’s quality as an obstinate fighter is most apparent in her Note a margine (Notes at the Margins, 1996), a collection of the editorials she contributed to Il manifesto. Far from discouraged or defeated, Rossanda raised in the face of political disengagement the necessity of understanding where we are and posited the impelling question of the future in a global society that seems to have found all its answers and contentedly abandons itself to the workings of the free market. Whether reassessing the lesson of Marx or dialoguing with feminists, Catholics, and members of the Red Brigades, in her essential Le Brigate Rosse. Una storia italiana (The Red Brigades: An Italian Story, 1994), Rossanda undertook a restless work of clarification to reappropriate a political language amidst indifference. She resurrected the discredited word ‘‘politics,’’ not as the fallen world of broken promises and disillusion but rather as the 1614

expression of the polis, the unalienable, because profoundly human, collective dimension of life’s dreams and possibilities: ‘‘le parole della politica sono le parole di qualcosa che non si ha e si cerca’’ (the words of politics are the words for something that one does not have but seeks; Le altre, 1979). With her poetic insight, Rossanda praised politics precisely because of the quotidian limits of its proper sphere: ‘‘I would like to say it quietly: many are the uncertainties among which we move, the time before birth, the time after death, our very fragile life, obscure the body, far away the powerful unconscious, doubtful our perception, paradoxical the intellect that cannot bear the finite yet cannot cross into infinity. But there is a plane on which there are no unfathomable mysteries, the one of the order we give ourselves through politics. This comes only from us, is within our limits, it is earthly, relatively simple, even poor if compared with the potentiality of experience. Politics is like a computer, you find in it only what human beings put in it, and it is always less than a day of life. From this it follows that a political disaster is not a natural calamity. A political project is not ineffable. Within its limits, human beings respond to other human beings. Let’s not avoid this modest, dry truth’’ (Note a margine, 1966). Rossanda responds to the ‘‘end of history’’ and the postmodern crisis of referentiality by recuperating a more modest and pragmatic sense of the Enlightenment faith in reason and political doing as a human dimension. Now more than ever, human beings need not truths, inherited and eternal, but values, understood as products of a refounded human practice. GIULIANA MINGHELLI

Biography Rossana Rossanda was born in Pola, now part of Croatia, on April 23, 1924. She studied aesthetics in Milan with the philosopher Antonio Banfi, an antiFascist. In 1943, she joined the Communist Party and fought in the Resistance against the Germans in the Garibaldi Brigades. She was a member of the central committee of the Party from 1959. Rossanda contributed to the newspaper L’Unita` and was on the editorial staff of the journal Rinascita from 1959 to 1963. She served as a deputy in the Italian Parliament from 1963 to 1968, but was expelled from the Communist Party in 1969 for having founded the journal Il manifesto with Lucio Magri, Luigi Pintor, and Aldo Natoli.

AMELIA ROSSELLI Starting from 1971, she has been on the board of directors of Il manifesto, then transformed into a daily. From 1999, she has been on the editorial board of La rivista del manifesto. Rossanda lives between Paris and Rome. Selected Works Political and Critical Writing L’anno degli studenti, 1968. Le altre. Conversazioni a Radiotre sui rapporti tra donne e politica, liberta`, fraternita`, uguaglianza, democrazia, fascismo, resistenza, stato, partito, rivoluzione, femminismo, 1979. Un viaggio inutile o della politica come educazione sentimentale, 1981. Anche per me. Donna, persona, memoria, dal 1973 al 1986, 1987. ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Sophocles, Antigone, translated by Luisa Biondetti, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1987. Brigate Rosse. Una storia italiana (with Carla Mosca), 1994. Appuntamenti di fine secolo (with Pietro Ingrao), 1995. La vita breve. Morte, resurrezione, immortalita` (with Filippo Gentiloni), 1996. Note a Margine, 1996. Il manifesto del partito comunista 150 anni dopo, 2000.

Autobiography La ragazza del secolo scorso, 2005.

Further Reading Basevi, Enrica, ‘‘Gutenberg e il calcolatore’’: Quale futuro per i giornali? Bari: De Donato, 1982. Berlinguer, Luigi, La questione comunista, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1986. Caldwell, Lesley, ‘‘Italian Feminism: Some Considerations,’’ in Women in Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Shirley W. Vinall, London: Macmillan, 1991. Lazzaro-Weis, Carol, From Margins to Mainstream: Feminism and Fictional Modes in Italian Women’s Writing 1968–1990, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Moltedo, Guido, ‘‘Il Manifesto: Italy’s Left-Wing Media,’’ The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 5:2 (Spring 2000), 122–125. Muraro, Luisa, Domande a Rossana Rossanda, Milan: Libreria delle donne, 1993. Negri, Antonio, ‘‘Entre ‘compromis historique’ et terrorisme: Retour sur l’Italie des anne´es 70,’’ Le Monde diplomatique, August 1998, 25. Quartermaine, Luisa, ‘‘Women’s Viewpoint: Expectation and Experience in Twentieth-Century Italy,’’ in Textual Liberation: European Feminist Writing in the Twentieth Century, edited by Helena Forsas-Scott, London: Routledge, 1991. Ravera, Lidia, ‘‘Note a margine,’’ L’indice, 5 (1996). Tatafiore, Roberta, ‘‘Il sesso non e` una meringa: Colloquio con Rossana Rossanda,’’ Noi donne, 1 (January 1989), 17–18.

AMELIA ROSSELLI (1930–1996) In the years after her suicide in 1996, the reputation of Amelia Rosselli continued to grow in Italy and in the world. New editions and translations of her poems appeared, along with studies and appreciations, as well as a volume, Una scrittura plurale (A Plural Writing, 2004), that brought together her articles, prefaces, and critical essays. Rosselli was the only woman to be included in the canonical 1978 anthology Poeti italiani del Novecento, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo. Jacqueline Risset called her ‘‘surely one of the greatest Italian poets of the 20th century’’ (Le monde, 2 February 1996). Rosselli’s achievement is linked to her highly original language. Trilingual from an early age, she infused her poetic Italian with elements of English (the language of her mother) and French (the language of the country where she was brought

up while in exile from Italy with her anti-Fascist parents), sometimes creating new words across languages. She wrote experimental poems in English, collected in the volume Sleep (1992), with texts dating from 1953 to 1966. Her language was also shaped by her passion for music. She played the violin, the organ, and the piano and contemplated a career in music. She was a student of the dodecafonic school in the 1950s, worked briefly with John Cage, and became very interested in dissonance as well as repetitive structures and seriality, which influenced her poetry. When she came onto the scene of writing in 1964 with Variazioni belliche (War Variations), there was nothing immature about her work, which fascinated even those who found it opaque and unsettling. Her second book, Serie ospedaliera (Hospital Series, 1969) included 1615

AMELIA ROSSELLI the long poem La libellula (The Dragon Fly) that, although dating from 1958, already shows the marks of Rosselli’s original experimentalism. The neo-avant-garde Gruppo 63 invited her to their meetings. She went a few times to read her work but generally disliked their poetry (with the exception of Antonio Porta’s) because it seemed too glib. The obsession with linguistic and imaginary violence and wild formal experimentation for its own sake that characterize the Italian poetic neoavant-garde are entirely absent from Rosselli’s poetry. Her work with language—however obscure it may seem at first—is always the result of a painstaking attempt to give to the reader an accurate sense of a painful, oppressive, and violent reality experienced or witnessed directly, a reality that Rosselli wished to expose, resist, and call into question. Fascism, World War II; the Holocaust; the Cold War; right-wing political brutality; economic, racial and sexual discrimination; social injustice; the oppressiveness of media and consumer culture; the crass and obtuse selfishness of the bourgeoisie are all realities that her texts evoke, weaving the private with the public, the personal with the political. Sound and the patterns of meaning and semantic associations generated by sound effects (such as repetitions of single letters, vowels, or words across lines or across the page or pages, assonances, echoes, and, especially, paranomasia) are the foundation of Rosselli’s work with language. Meaning is created vertically on the page through sound patterns, echoes, and allusions interspersed through the text rather than by merely following the horizontal, syntactical unfolding of the sentence through the line and from one line to the next. In deploying various kinds of paranomasia, Rosselli brought together words that have some phonetic resemblance with each other (whether or not they are etymologically, semantically or historically related), thus creating startlingly evocative, multiple new meanings. To obtain particular connotations, she altered syntax and disfigured the morphology of words by adding or subtracting letters, sounds, or syllables and invented new words by joining together parts of existing words. Yet her poetry was not based solely on this experimental work with sound, morphology, and semantic associations. Although (or perhaps because) her study of literature was very personal and outside the usual tracks of an Italian education, her poems bear the traces of a careful and loving reading of the Italian tradition, with 1616

particular words, expressions, and images alluding (like flashes from the past) to the stilnovisti, Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Dino Campana, Eugenio Montale, and Cesare Pavese, among others. These intersect with echoes from English and French poetry, especially John Donne (whose religious-erotic imagery is often evoked), Emily Dickinson (whom Rosselli translated) and Rimbaud. Rosselli’s punning across three languages is extremely original, but her practice of language manipulation and wordplay is indebted to the modernist English-language tradition (Eliot, Pound, Stein, and Joyce) as well as to the witty analogical inventiveness of some of the authors she most admired, especially Shakespeare and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Rosselli’s diction, often highly literary and refined, also includes colloquialisms, words from the Italian vernacular, street talk, and pop culture, creating effective, startling contrasts of high and low. While almost never crudely autobiographical (unlike Sylvia Plath, to whom she is sometimes compared, and whose less confessional work she admired and translated into Italian), Rosselli’s poetry is personal in tone and lyrical. A male addressee is invoked or envisioned as an object of love, especially in Variazioni belliche and Serie ospedaliera, but the conventions of the lyric poem (traditionally male) are referenced only to be gently mocked and ironically subverted. The sexual body, and the body in pain, are recurrent themes. One poem celebrates a negative pregnancy test. The erotic relationship between self and other, female and male, are problematized, seen as a dark dialectic of reciprocal blindness reminiscent of Kafka (another favorite), yet the tone of Rosselli’s poems is unresigned, and her voice never expresses acceptance of separation, illness, or confinement as ultimate destinies. Because in Rosselli’s poetry the private and intimate is always interwoven with the public and political, the male addressee and object of erotic passion often overlap with the wider, collective figure of the reader/audience that the poem energetically calls on to share the speaker’s emotion or indignation. Rosselli’s poetry refuses to be confined to the realm of the private; her commitment to the political and to the interrogation of historical events transpired through the entire body of her work. Critical irony and the impulse toward revolt animate her poetry. Unlike Pier Paolo Pasolini, however, with whom she had affinities (and who was among the first to be intrigued by her work, helping her to publish it), Rosselli never preached,

AMELIA ROSSELLI and in the evocation of erotic as well as political passion she was hardly self-indulgent, valuing pudore (modesty and reserve) more than exhibition. Yet Rosselli’s poetry speaks with a passionate voice that resolutely says ‘‘I,’’ conveying strong, sometimes traumatic personal feelings, fears, and desires, as well as emotions of joy and tenderness. A mystical vein runs through her early work, with intonations that call to mind St. Catherine of Siena. Rosselli’s eroticized and politicized Christ symbolizes the agony and the outrage of the oppressed and a utopian longing for salvation. Although her poetic practice has sometimes been compared to the automatic writing of the Surrealists, textual studies and the publication of her apprenticeship and ‘‘rejected’’ poems have shown that there is little that is automatic or ‘‘immediate’’ in her writing. Not only is her poetry permeated with textual allusions, but the emotions in her poems are the product of a painstaking orchestration of sound patterns and variations. The structure of her poems, which–with the exception of La libellula and Impromptu (1981)–tend to be short (occasionally only two or three lines in Variazioni belliche), is carefully constructed on a rigorous spatio-temporal measurement of syllables, reading time (each line is to last the same) and line lengths, and a compact cubelike shape. Frustrated by free verse, Rosselli created this rigorous structure for herself and theorized it in the 1962 essay ‘‘Spazi metrici’’ (Metric Spaces), appended to Variazioni belliche. The anguish and suffering that marked her lifelong struggle with mental illness transpire in Rosselli’s poems, but her work is not the unfiltered expression of ‘‘madness’’ or of depression. Like Virginia Woolf, Rosselli learned from her illness and the attempts to manage it, but mental illness was an impairment, not a tool for writing. Rosselli’s poems reflect an agonizing, painstaking work with the rhythms and possibilities of poetic language. However, partly through her familiarity with illness and psychoanalysis, Rosselli learned to listen to the unconscious and was intrigued by its linguistic devices of displacement and condensation, finding in them yet another source for her plurilinguistic idiom. In Documento (Document, 1976), whose composition coincided in part with an acute phase of her illness (as well as a period of political disillusionment and terrorism in Italy), the strict metric limits were abolished, while the exuberance of her earlier experimentalism was replaced by a more disciplined, spare, and analytical language. Here Rosselli reflected on the relationship between writing, language, and suffering,

pointing to madness as the ultimate experience of limits—the very end (rather than the source) of writing. Nonetheless, even under the threat of aphasia, Rosselli was able to take poetry into new directions, opening up the borders of selfhood, doubling, multiplying, and at times even eliminating the lyric self from the text, which becomes uncannily multivoiced. Rosselli’s last book of poetry in Italian was Impromptu, a long single poem in 13 sections composed in one day in 1979, after seven years of silence. A testament of sorts, Impromptu is filled with musical effects and self-quotations, and it addresses once again her poetic ‘‘brother,’’ Pier Paolo Pasolini, killed in 1975 and read by her with renewed affection, though also with a clear sense of distance. Impromptu, with its kaleidoscopic language, has the delightful lightness of an improvisational piece by a great master. It is also a poem that once again reiterates, for the last time, Rosselli’s passionate political commitment.

Biography Amelia Rosselli was born in Paris on March 28, 1930, the daughter of Marion Cave and Carlo Rosselli, both anti-Fascist activists. Her mother, a graduate of the London School of Economics, was British of Irish Quaker descent; her father’s family was Jewish. Her paternal grandmother, to whom she was close, was the Venetian writer Amelia Pincherle Rosselli. Carlo—leader of the ‘‘Giustizia e Liberta`’’ anti-Fascist movement—and his brother Nello were assassinated by Fascist henchmen in June 1937. Fleeing Nazi-occupied France during Word War II, Amelia with her brothers and mother (who suffered from a heart condition) in 1940 went to live in Larchmont, near New York, with other refugees. After the war, the family moved to London, where Amelia studied in a private school for girls and began her musical education. In 1948, Amelia moved to Florence to live with her grandmother and study music composition. The same year, her mother died; Amelia, who had began to suffer from the mental illness that recurred through the rest of her life, tried both Freudian and Jungian psychoanalytic cures. She later underwent other forms of treatment, including electroshock. While still studying music, she began working as a freelance translator between Florence and Rome (where she settled in 1953) but was poor, even destitute, her entire life, barely supporting herself with poetry readings and commissioned reviews and articles. She had a brief romance (alluded to 1617

AMELIA ROSSELLI in Diario ottuso) with the neo-Realist poet and activist Rocco Scotellaro, who died in 1953 at the age of 30. In the summers of 1959–1960 she studied music theory and ethnomusicology in Darmstadt; some of her research was published. In the late 1950s, she joined the Communist Party, performing simple tasks for her neighborhood section. In 1969, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Although she knew and sometimes met with writers and artists such as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Carlo Levi, and Afro and had relationships with Mario Tobino and Renato Guttuso, her life was mostly solitary, with a small circle of intimate friends. In the 1980s, she suffered from hallucinations and almost entirely stopped writing, but she read from her work often throughout Italy and abroad. She took her own life on February 11, 1996. LUCIA RE Selected Works Collections Antologia poetica, edited by Giacinto Spagnoletti, 1987. Le poesie, edited by Emmanuela Tandello, Milan: Garzanti, 1997.

Poetry ‘‘Variazioni belliche,’’ 1964; as War Variations, translated by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti, 2005. ‘‘Serie ospedaliera (1963–1965),’’ 1969. ‘‘Documento (1966–1973),’’ 1976. ‘‘Primi scritti (1952–1963),’’ 1980. ‘‘Impromptu,’’ 1981. ‘‘Appunti sparsi e persi (1966–1977),’’ 1983. ‘‘La libellula,’’ 1985. ‘‘Sonno-Sleep (1953–1966),’’ Italian vesion by Antonio Porta, 1989.

‘‘Sleep: Poesie in inglese,’’ Italian translation by Emmanuela Tandello, 1992.

Other ‘‘Storia di una malattia,’’ in Nuovi argomenti, 56 (1977). Diario ottuso (1954–1968), 1990. Una scrittura plurale. Saggi e interventi critici, 2004.

Further Reading Agosti, Stefano, ‘‘La competenza associativa di Amelia Rosselli,’’ in Poesia italiana contemporanea, Milan: Bompiani, 1995. Attanasio, Daniela, and Emmanuela Tandello (editors), Galleria, 47:1–2(1997), special issue on Amelia Rosselli. Giudici, Giovanni, ‘‘Preface,’’ to Amelia Rosselli, Antologia poetica, edited by Giovanni Spagnoletti, Milan, Garzanti, 1987. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Moe, Nelson, ‘‘At the Margins of Dominion: The Poetry of Amelia Rosselli,’’ Italica, 69: 2 (1992), 177–197. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Notizia su Amelia Rosselli,’’ Il Menabo`, 6 (1963), 66–69. Re, Lucia, ‘‘Introduction to Amelia Rosselli,’’ in War Variations by Amelia Rosselli, translated by Lucia Re and Paul Vangelisti, Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005. Re, Lucia, ‘‘Poetry and Madness,’’ in Shearsmen of Sorts: Italian Poetry 1875–1993, edited by Luigi Ballerini, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum Series, 1992. Re, Lucia, ‘‘Variazioni su Amelia Rosselli,’’ Il verri, 3–4 (1993), 131–150. Risset, Jacqueline, ‘‘Amelia Rosselli: La voix ‘‘etouffe’’ d’un poe`te,’’ Le monde, 2 February 1996: 3. Snodgrass, Ann, Knowing Noise: The English Poetry of Amelia Rosselli, New York, Peter Lang, 2001. Tandello, Emmanuela, ‘‘Doing the Splits: Language(s) in the Poetry of Amelia Rosselli,’’ The Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 1 (1992), 363–373. Tandello, Emmanuela, and Giorgio Devoto, Trasparenze, 17–19 (2003), special issue on Amelia Rosselli.

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI (1906–1977) As a result of his excellent social and economic position, his charming personality, and his good looks, Roberto Rossellini seemed destined to become a playboy rather than a film director, and there was always something of the nonchalance of the nonspecialist in his approach to the cinema. He seemed equally interested in fast racing cars and beautiful women as in the cinema. 1618

Rossellini began working as a sound technician, then progressed to film editor, and gradually rose to work on scripts with other directors before he achieved the post of assistant director and then director on his own. He made no fewer than six short films during the 1930s, only one of which survives, before he received his crucial break, an invitation to collaborate on the making of Goffredo

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI Alessandrini’s Luciano Serra pilota (Luciano Serra, Pilot, 1938) as assistant director and scriptwriter. His position probably had more to do with the fact that he was a friend of Benito Mussolini’s son Vittorio, who was supervising the film, than any wealth of cinematic experience on his resume´. Rossellini’s apprenticeship took place precisely when an interest in a new cinematic realism was being expressed by a number of ideologically diverse individuals in Italy. Rossellini could have found numerous precedents in films made during the Fascist period for a number of the postwar techniques in his Neorealist classics, including nonprofessional actors, the use of dialect rather than standard Italian, and the transition from constructed studio sets to authentic outside or indoor locations. When Italy entered World War II in June 1940, the film industry (as in Nazi Germany, Great Britain, or the United States) was expected to assist the war effort, providing not only newsreels but also popular entertainment that bolstered the regime’s political and ideological goals. As a result, the most innovative aesthetic experiments in the cinema involved what have become known as ‘‘fictional documentaries.’’ Essentially, such films would employ documentary footage and authentic locations (battleships, air fields, military outposts) from the war, combining them with a fictional framework; in some cases, nonprofessional actors were employed (the actual protagonists of the events portrayed), while in other instances, famous actors were mixed with ordinary sailors, soldiers, and airmen. The model for this kind of filmmaking that Rossellini could not have ignored, given its phenomenal critical and commercial success, was Augusto Genina’s L’assedio dell’Alcazar (The Siege of the Alcazar, 1940) or similar ‘‘fictional documentaries’’ produced before the fall of the Fascist regime (1943) by various branches of the Italian armed forces, particularly works by Francesco De Robertis (1902–1959) in the Centro Cinematografico del Ministero della Marina. The navy sponsored Rossellini’s first feature film, La nave bianca (The White Ship, 1941), and the air force produced his second feature, Un pilota ritorna (A Pilot Returns, 1942). Rossellini’s third feature film, L’uomo dalla croce (The Man with a Cross, 1943), completed his ‘‘Fascist trilogy’’ about Italian soldiers, sailors, and airmen at war. Rossellini adopted the now-familiar neo-Realist techniques of nonprofessional actors, on-location shooting, documentary photographic style, and rapid editing from this earlier and lesser-known trilogy in his renowned Neorealist ‘‘war trilogy’’:

Roma, citta` aperta (Open City, 1945), a moving portrait of the Resistance against Nazi occupation of the Eternal City that announced to the entire world the rebirth of Italian cinema with a neoRealist style; Paisa` (Paisan, 1946), a film in six episodes following the Allied invasion of Italy from Sicily through Naples, Rome, Florence, the Apennines, and the Po River Valley that celebrated the encounter of Italians and their American liberators; and Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero, 1947), a devastating look at the impact Nazi culture has on a young German in the midst of the still-smoldering ruins immediately after the end of hostilities. These films made Rossellini an international celebrity and the most interesting director in the world at the time. No sooner had Rossellini become identified with neo-Realist cinema than he moved away from it, searching for a psychological realism that virtually required skilled actors rather than nonprofessionals. He began with L’amore (Love, 1948), a homage to the acting talents of Anna Magnani. La macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People, 1948–1952), a lighthearted comedy based on the commedia dell’arte, cast doubt on the camera as a means of knowing the truth. Francesco, giullare di dio (The Flowers of St. Francis, 1950) examined the Christian principles that would animate his subsequent films on the spiritual poverty produced by the conflict that had just ended. His scandalous love affair with Ingrid Bergman after 1949 allowed Rossellini to cast this internationally celebrated star in five works that became either vehicles for her talent or progressive signs of her deterioration as a top-billed star. These films departed radically from Neorealist style and content: Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, Land of God, 1949); Europa ’51 (Europa ’51, 1952); Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, 1953); Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (Joan of Art at the Stake, 1954); and La paura (non credo piu` all’amore) (Fear, also known as Angst, 1954). These films were characterized by long takes, distancing or alienating effects on the audience rather than appeals to the emotions so central to neo-Realist melodramas, complex acting performances, and artistic photography that linked characters tightly to their environment in a style not unlike the one being developed almost contemporaneously by Michelangelo Antonioni. Just as rapidly as Rossellini moved away from neo-Realist cinema in his Ingrid Bergman period, he returned to documentary films in 1957 with a film on India that would eventually lead to a series of television documentaries in his later career. He 1619

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI also made four traditional films that may be termed a ‘‘historical tetralogy’’: Il generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere, 1959), a commercially and critically acclaimed portrait of a con man who becomes a hero of the anti-Fascist Resistance with a brilliant performance by actor and director Vittorio De Sica in the leading role; Era notte a Roma (It Was Night in Rome, 1960), an exploitative revisitation of the material already employed in his neo-Realist masterpiece Roma citta` aperta; Viva l’Italia (Garibaldi, 1961), a bio-pic of Italy’s most famous hero; and Vanina Vanini (1961), an adaptation of Stendhal’s Chroniques italiennes. By now, however, Rossellini’s commercial appeal and critical reputation had both gone into decline. Beginning with L’eta´ di ferro (The Iron Age) in 1964 and continuing in this same vein until his death in 1977, Rossellini produced 11 major works of an essentially didactic nature that were designed for mass-market television. Many of these films range from four to twelve hours on screen and are made up of a number of separate episodes. They reflect what has been defined as the cinema-saggio or the film essay, abandoning the traditional idea of a dramatic protagonist for a pedagogical look at a great man in history, usually representative of an age in which some profound psychological shift in human consciousness occurs (Socrates, Blaise Pascal, Louis XIV, Cosimo de’ Medici, Augustine, Descartes, Alcide De Gasperi, and Jesus Christ). With few exceptions, these films fail to display the genius of Rossellini’s neo-Realist period. When Rossellini died, he was planning several equally ambitious projects, films on Karl Marx and the American Revolution. This period in his career also coincided with a massive outpouring of letters, interviews, and articles about the cinema and, most particularly, in defense of a didactic cinema for television. Rossellini was thus one of the first major film directors to move to the medium of television and to defend his decision to do so on intellectual grounds. While attempting to reconstruct historical realities of past eras with as little distortion by ideology as possible, Rossellini nevertheless rejected cine´ma verite´, at the time a favorite technique of some of his French admirers, especially Jean Rouch. For Rossellini, even documentary films implied artistic interpretation (the fundamental rational element of filmmaking), while cine´ma verite´ embodied in essence a refusal to interpret. Moreover, in a rather heated Parisian debate in 1963, Rossellini argued that the French fascination with the camera and with cinematic technique was a sign of artistic 1620

weakness and lack of ideas: Only a moral position, and not a mechanical technology, could grasp the truth, he believed. Explicitly rejecting the label of avant-garde artist or an experimenter, Rossellini considered himself a craftsman making a product (the didactic film) that could instruct and enlighten millions of individuals. His approach was not unlike that great didactic project of the European Enlightenment, the Encyclope´die that was intended to broaden the base of human knowledge and to extend it to the masses that were untouched by an elitist system of education. Not the least of the advantages of this turn to television, however, was Rossellini’s freedom from commercial restraints. He no longer worried about his luck at the box office. As the RAI, the public Italian television network, enjoyed a protective state monopoly, he was practically guaranteed a huge audience that had little choice but to watch his films or turn off the set. Moreover, Rossellini’s legendary quickness in shooting a film now became one of his greatest virtues. In almost no time at all, Rossellini could complete a series of episodes in a television program, assisted by his technique of long takes and his frequent use of a zoom lens (the Pacinor), which he helped to design in order to limit the amount of editing in postproduction. Rossellini’s first television film, L’eta` del ferro, traced the history of iron and steel from the Iron Age to the present day in a five-part series. It was followed by his acknowledged television masterpiece, La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV (The Rise to Power of Louis XIV), completed in only 24 days in August 1966 and presented at the Venice Film Festival in September of the same year. When this work, produced for French television, won the director both critical and popular praise, it confirmed him in his radical decision to turn from traditional cinema to television for the rest of his life. La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza (Man’s Struggle for Survival), a 12-part series made over a long period (1964–1969), during which time Rossellini interrupted work to shoot both the film on Louis XIV and Atti degli Apostoli (The Acts of the Apostles, 1968). In it, Rossellini covered the history of humanity from prehistory and the agricultural revolution through the Bronze age, the rise of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman civilizations, the barbarian invasions, the advent of Islam, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the origins of modern science and technology, and the era of great inventions (radio, the telegraph, electricity) down to the advent of space travel. In Atti degli apostoli, made

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI on location in Tunisia and employing primarily a cast of nonprofessionals, Rossellini eliminated almost all the miracles reported in the New Testament, thus showing us apostles who are historical figures rather than saints. He saw Christianity more as a stage of human development than as a revealed truth, and in his next film, he would turn to the contributions of Greece civilization in Socrate (Socrates, 1970). L’eta` di Cosimo (The Age of the Medici, 1972) provides a ponderous portrait of the marriage of politics, economics, art, and philosophy in quattrocento Florence, emphasizing a fundamentally materialist interpretation of the Italian Renaissance. Rossellini’s influence was seminal on Italian neo-Realism but also on a subsequent generation of Italian directors (Bertolucci, Pasolini, Pontecorvo, the Taviani Brothers, Olmi), whose works were inspired by reactions or interpretations of his neo-Realist classics. Even Federico Fellini, whose cinematic style developed in entirely different directions, always claimed that he had learned how to be a director from Rossellini’s example. The French New Wave critics and directors worshipped Rossellini, and subsequent filmmakers for television cited his late works as landmarks in developing a cinematic grammar for this new medium of mass communication. However, in retrospect, Rossellini’s work for television must be judged as clearly inferior, with a few exceptions, to his contributions to the traditional form of commercial cinema.

Biography Roberto Rossellini was born in Rome to Angelo Giuseppe and Elettra Bellan, 8 May 1906, into a well-to-do family; his brother Renzo was born in 1908 and his sister Marcella in 1909. Rossellini dropped out of school at 16, 1923, and turned to a life filled with fast cars and love affairs, but he was eventually forced to find employment because of financial problems. He began work on his first short film, Daphne, 1935. He married Marcella De Marchis in 1936; their first son, Romano, was born in 1937. He began to work as a scriptwriter, signing his first film in 1938. By 1941, Rossellini had completed the first work in his ‘‘Fascist trilogy.’’ His second son, Renzo Paolo, was born, 1941; he separated from De Marchis. In 1943, he avoided moving with the Fascist regime’s cinema to Venice and went into hiding, returning with the Allies to Rome to work on Roma citta` aperta, which became an international hit in 1945. His son Romano died

after a short illness, 1946. Rossellini began an affair with actress Anna Magnani in 1947; he met Ingrid Bergman in 1949, whom he married in Mexico in 1950 and with whom he had two children in 1952, Isotta and Isabella. They separated in 1957. He participated in the Mille Miglia race in 1953 with his Ferrari. He met Sonali Das Gupta in India and returned to Italy with her in 1957; their daughter Raffaella was born the same year. Rossellini abandoned cinema for television in 1963. He became first Extraordinary Commissioner, then President of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, 1968–1969. He made his first visit to Rice University in 1970, where he subsequently enjoyed the patronage of the De Menil family in Houston. In 1974, he separated from Sonali and acquired a new companion, Silvia d’Amico Bendico`. He presided over the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1977. Rossellini died of a heart attack on 3 June 1977 in Rome. PETER BONDANELLA Selected Works Films La nave bianca, 1941. Un pilota ritorna, 1942. L’uomo dalla croce, 1943. Roma, citta` aperta (Open City), 1945. Paisa` (Paisan), 1946. Germania, anno zero (Germany, Year Zero), 1947. L’amore (Love), 1948. La macchina ammazzacattivi (The Machine to Kill Bad People), 1948–1952. Stromboli, terra di Dio (Stromboli, Land of God), 1949. Francesco, giullare di dio (The Flowers of St. Francis, based on I fioretti of Francis of Assisi), 1950. Europa ’51 (Europa ’51), 1952. Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy, also The Strangers), 1953. Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (Joan of Art at the Stake, based on the oratorio Jeanne au bu¨cher by Paul Claudel), 1954. La paura (non credo piu` all’amore) (Fear, based on the novella Die Angst by Stefan Zweig), 1954. India, also known as India, Matri Buhmi (India, Mother Earth), 1958. Il generale Della Rovere (General Della Rovere), 1959. Era notte a Roma (It Was Night in Rome), 1960. Viva l’Italia (Garibaldi), 1961. Vanina Vanini (based on Stendhal’s Chroniques italiennes), 1961. L’eta` del ferro, 1964. La Prise de Pouvoir par Louis XIV, 1966. La lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza, 1967–1969. Atti degli apostoli, 1968. Socrate, 1970. Blaise Pascal, 1972. Agostino d’Ippona, 1972. L’eta` di Cosimo de’ Medici, 1972.

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ROBERTO ROSSELLINI Cartesius, 1973. Anno uno (Italy: Year One), 1974. Il Messia, 1975.

Screenplays La trilogia di guerra, Introduction by Stefano Roncoroni, Bologna: Cappelli 1972; as The War Trilogy, New York: Grossman, 1973. Atti degli apostoli, Socrate, Blaise Pascal, Agostino d’Ippona, L’eta` dei Medici, Cartesius, edited by Luciano Scaffa and Marcella Mariani Rossellini, Rome: ERI, 1980.

Writings on the Cinema Il mio metodo: Scritti e interviste, edited Adriano Apra`, Venice: Marsilio, 1987; as My Method: Writings & Interviews, translated by Annapaola Cancogni, New York: Marsilio, 1992.

Further Reading Bondanella, Peter, The Films of Roberto Rossellini, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Brunette, Peter, Roberto Rossellini, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Bruno, Edoardo (editor), Roberto Rossellini, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Forgacs, David, Sarah Lutton, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (editors), Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real, London: British Film Institute, 2000. Gallagher, Tag, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini: His Life and Films, New York: Da Capo, 1998. Rondolino, Gianni, Rossellini, Milan: UTET, 1989. Trasatti, Sergio, Rossellini e la televisione, Rome: La Rassegna Editrice, 1978.

` ROMA, CITTA APERTA, 1945 Film by Roberto Rossellini

The birth of Italian Neorealism is linked forever with the international success of Rossellini’s portrayal of life in Nazi-occupied Rome between the fall of the Fascist regime in September 1943 and Rome’s liberation in June of the following year. Unlike other Neorealist films, which seldom enjoyed a respectable box office, Roma, citta` aperta was the largest grossing film in Italy during 1945. 1622

The film’s astounding success fostered the impression that something new was brewing in Italy (Neorealism) and that this new aesthetic phenomenon was largely the creation of an obscure director named Roberto Rossellini. The film’s plot, put together by a team of scriptwriters that included Rossellini, Federico Fellini, and Sergio Amidei, is an anti-Fascist melodrama. A Marxist partisan leader named Giorgio Manfredi (Marcello Pagliero), who is being hidden from the Germans by a printer named Francesco (Francesco Grandjacquet), enlists the assistance of a partisan priest, Don Pietro (Aldo Fabrizi). The next day, just before Francesco is to be married to his pregnant fiance´e Pina (Anna Magnani), she is gunned down by the Germans when they arrest Francesco. Manfredi is the object of an intense manhunt by the Gestapo, led by an evil and effeminate Nazi, Major Bergmann (Harry Feist), who is assisted by his lesbian agent Ingrid (Giovanna Galetti), who uses drugs to obtain information about Manfredi from Marina (Maria Michi), a dancer and Manfredi’s old girlfriend. Manfredi, Don Pietro, and an Austrian deserter from the battlefield of Monte Cassino that the priest has been hiding are all captured by Bergmann after Ingrid induces Marina to betray them in return for drugs and furs. The deserter hangs himself; Manfredi refuses to talk under torture and dies from the brutal treatment he has received; the next morning, Don Pietro faces a firing squad while the young boys from his parish witness the event. Traditional criticism of Italian neo-Realism has stressed its use of nonprofessional actors, its grainy documentary-like photography, its post-synchronized sound, its preference for authentic locations rather than studio sets, and its simple plot as a template for understanding neo-Realist cinema in general. Only recently have historians of the cinema underlined the fact that such techniques were also employed by Italian directors Rossellini knew and with whom he worked during the prewar period. The documentary quality of the film’s photography has always been one of the benchmarks of traditional definitions of neo-Realism. The grainy character of the film (as well as the segments of actual documentary footage inserted by the editor into the fictional story) certainly reminded viewers of pictures they associated with the newsreels. Because of a lack of funds, Rossellini could not afford to view daily rushes and was obliged to shoot without direct sound, subsequently dubbing the dialogue. But this enabled him to heighten the

PIER MARIA ROSSO DI SAN SECONDO authenticity of the sound track by having his Germans speak German and his Italian characters speak Italian, something that must have struck many American viewers as ‘‘realistic.’’ Hollywood’s cinema often handled this problem quite differently: Foreigners spoke either a kind of Oxford English or a heavily accented English to distinguish them from the Americans. Perhaps the most persuasive of the stylistic elements traditional definitions cite as defining Italian neo-Realism is a reliance on nonprofessional actors. But this exploitation of nonprofessional actors for particular aesthetic effects is absent from Roma, citta` aperta. Both Fabrizi and Magnani had extensive experience in the entertainment business. Rossellini, however, chose his cast against the grain, placing actors normally associated with comic roles in situations that would eventually call for tragic or tragicomic actions. The tone of the work is far more indebted to the director’s message of Christian humanism than to any programmatic attempt at cinematic realism. The positive characters who fight the Nazis are united by their belief in what Francesco calls an impending ‘‘springtime’’ in Italy and a better tomorrow, no matter what their political ideology may be. The iconography of the death of Manfredi,

a Communist atheist, nevertheless associates him with the crucified Christ. Rossellini did not invent a new cinematic aesthetics of neo-Realism in Roma, citta` aperta. This would be left to his subsequent work, Paisa` (Paisan, 1946). Instead, he created a brilliant hybrid film, combining the fruits of developments from a number of areas (prewar Fascist cinema, Hollywood melodrama, documentary films, German expressionism) with a revolutionary representation of the precise moment in Italian history that the film so perfectly preserves. PETER BONDANELLA Further Reading Apra`, Adriano (editor), ‘‘Roma citta` aperta’’ di Roberto Rossellini, Rome: Comune di Roma Assessorato alla Cultura, 1994. Bondanella, Peter, The Films of Roberto Rossellini, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Forgacs, David, Rome Open City (Roma citta` aperta), London: British Film Institute, 2000. Gottlieb, Sidney (editor), Roberto Rossellini’s ‘‘Rome Open City,’’ New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Rossellini, Roberto, The War Trilogy: Open City, Paisan, Germany Year Zero, edited by Stefano Roncoroni, translated by Judith Green, New York: Grossman, 1973.

PIER MARIA ROSSO DI SAN SECONDO (1887–1954) Pier Rosso di San Secondo has always been considered a revolutionary writer and experimentalist who over the years renounced audacity in order to create a classically serene art. This picture, although true in part, fails to consider the care Rosso took in composing his works, which were rigorously molded after canons of diverse literary genres. Rosso used the same material in short stories and in plays, attesting to his attentiveness to the special quality of each literary genre. A poet, a playwright, short story writer, novel writer, an essay critic, and a script writer for the cinema, Rosso took the spotlight during an especially vivacious and fertile period in the history of Italian literature. He could count

on the appreciation of exceptional intellectuals, from Giuseppe Antonio Borgese (who reviewed his Elegie a Maryke in Il corriere della sera, 3 March 1914) to Luigi Pirandello, whom he befriended upon moving to Rome from his native Caltanissetta, in Sicily. His relationship with Pirandello was fundamental in forming the character of his writing. Pirandello made it clear that Rosso was not one of his disciples but had developed a personality and art that was entirely original. Although he acknowledged their differences, Rosso was deeply indebted to Pirandello, and Pirandello himself often succumbed to the attraction of his genial disciple, 1623

PIER MARIA ROSSO DI SAN SECONDO especially in regard to the subject of creative grief. During World War I, Pirandello wrote the preface to Rosso’s first novel, La fuga (The Escape, 1917). He praised the work as a ‘‘libro totale’’ (a total book): at once humorous, ironic, satirical, grotesque, epic, and lyrical. The novel concerns a passionate man of the south who escapes to the north, which he finds to be a world governed by hypocrisy. This is a fundamental theme in Rosso’s oeuvre– the rational bitterness of the northern culture and the passions of the Mediterranean. In 1918, when Rosso’s new novel, La Morsa (The Vice), was published, noted critic Orio Vergani accused Rosso of being a complex writer who was much too cerebral, a writer who was unclassifiable and eclectic (Review of La morsa, La gazzetta di Torino, 18 August 1918). It was Rosso’s work in the theater that brought him his greatest success. He immediately aimed at a pluralistic form of writing and tried various genres, consciously looking to synthesize diverse forms of artistic expression. Obviously influenced by Freud and Bergson, he aimed to describe the dark, mysterious world of dreams and of unconscious conflicts. Anticipating a postmodern sensibility, Rosso wanted to capture the anxieties that beset the contemporary self who seemed to split into pieces— uno, nessuno e centomila (one, no one, and one hundred thousand), as Pirandello wrote. The work of art mirrored this fragmentation of the self. Rosso frequently returned to an oneiric symbolism to delineate characters who lived suspended between dream and reality. He emptied realism from within, reducing art to a pure mimesis of reality through irony and fantastic deformation. The image of reality that Rosso transmitted was therefore chaotic; a battered, shaken humanity inhabited and moved within this reality often prey to folly, unable to liberate itself from the stifling conventions imposed by bourgeois society. A follower of Expressionism, Rosso often portrayed his characters as searching, in their suffering, for a way to escape from their existential anxiety, often finding solace in dreams. His style was also fragmented. Rosso’s prose assimilated diverse tones, from the lyrical of D’Annunzian stamp to the tense and agitated tone of Expressionism. He took his themes from eclectic sources as well, ranging from Ibsen, for whom the affirmation of woman’s dignity was central, to Strindberg. Rosso thus achieved a singular and melancholic cultural synthesis in which the sunny atmospheres and heated passions of the south (and of Sicily in particular) blended with the metropolitan feelings 1624

of unrest in the north. Il ratto di Proserpina (The Rape of Proserpina, 1954) is an example. In this work, the marriage of Proserpina and Pluto (personified in the character of an American millionaire) alludes to the necessary reconciliation of the primitive, agricultural world of the south and the modern, industrial north. Following the example of Alberto Savinio, Cocteau, Giraudoux, and Kokoscha, Rosso refused to reduce the work of art to a mechanical reproduction of reality. He created a fantastic, crepuscular world, in which a funereal theme circulates insistently. This is confirmed by his early short story collection, Ponentino (1916), which presents a complete selection of his preferred themes: love conceived as a total and destructive passion that eludes every form of rational control, the intrusion of the dead into the world of the living, an oneiric narrative frame. Rosso’s blending of genres and styles is used with great effect in the novel Il minuetto dell’anima nostra (The Minuet of Our Soul, 1922). The protagonist, a young actress, goes mad with love. It is a fantastic fable in which the codes of the theater (the fictional setting) and those of the novel intertwine continuously. Eros is represented as a force against which no one could resist. This is also the theme of an earlier novel La mia esistenza d’acquario (My Aquarium Existence, 1919), in which the protagonist is a seductive woman who loses sight of her identity. Such fates are typical in the unpredictable feminine universe explored by Rosso. In another variation, Rosso depicted women who live nontraditional lives of absolute chastity, which soon takes a toll on their personalities. For example, the protagonist of the play La bella addormentata (The Sleeping Beauty, 1923), defined as a ‘‘Avventura colorata in tre atti’’ (Colored adventure in three acts), repudiates her carnality until she becomes a sleepwalker. A similar but opposite conversion is dramatized in Rosso’s melodrama in which the main female character goes from being a village prostitute to becoming a virtuous mother. Carmelina is a prostitute who finally rebels and discovers her dignity once she discovers that she is pregnant. Such metamorphoses materialize most commonly in dreams, however. Virginia, the protagonist of I peccati di gioventu` (The Sins of Youth), staged at the Milanese Teatro Manzoni in 1923, conserves her virginal purity for her wedding night. However, the young newlyweds fall asleep on their first night together and start to dream. In the dream, the woman claims her right to chastity, yet the next day the couple awake and return to normality. This

PIER MARIA ROSSO DI SAN SECONDO theme of women looking to escape Eros can also be found in the novel La donna che puo` capire, capisca (The Woman Who Can Understand, Understands, 1923). In this instance, Marcella Alzala d’Arsi marries, without loving her husband, who soon dies. After also losing her son, she dreams of redemption by fighting to emancipate other women. Her Ibsenlike project fails and, after converting to Christianity, she falls victim to a hysterical crisis. The novel presents the typical defect of Rosso’s narrative: a certain slowness in the development of the plot, the difficulties created by his use of different styles. Rosso was more assured and convincing in his theater pieces. As a playwright he was an innovator who introduced some of the most modern midEuropean theatrical subjects and models to Italy. This is why Adriano Tilgher in Studi sul teatro contemporaneo (1922) considered him ‘‘il vero superatore del teatro borghese’’ (the true over-comer of the bourgeois theater), while Gino Gori, in Il grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura, included him in the theater of the grotesque. Lazzarina fra i coltelli (Lazzarina among the Knives, 1924) is set, like a fable, in a land of circus acrobats. The main character, who represents Life, abandons Epifanio to become involved with the knife thrower, Leone. In Rosso’s theater, the treatment of carnality risks censorship, as in Una cosa di carne (A Thing of the Flesh, 1925). Dark erotic attraction is also the theme of L’ospite desiderato (The Desired Guest, 1921). The protagonist Melina is a femme fatale who seduces men with her sensuality. She is finally killed by a waitress who is helped by Paride and Stefano, whom Melina had earlier seduced. A hallucinatory atmosphere (like Maeterlinck) pervades this piece, in which Pirandello-like suggestions and echoes of D’Annunzio are also present. This play also works with the theme of the fantocci or puppets, or rather characters reduced to marionettes. Rosso di San Secondo’s oeuvre explores the dynamics between reason and passion, individual freedom and social conventions. He wrote over 30 plays, in which the sensuous details are as expressive as the communicative quality of the dialogue. Since his theatrical debut with Marionette, che passione! (Puppets of Passion!, 1918), which was an enormous success, Rosso dramatized the evolving stages of passion though puppetlike characters. His later work has the oneiric quality of a fable, but it is also a harsh indictment of a materialistic society. He represents a critical voice between the turn-ofthe-last-century drama and the Grottesco, as well as the early plays of Luigi Pirandello.

Biography Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo was born in Caltanisetta on 30 November 1887 to a noble family. He spent his infancy in Sicily until he took his diploma in classics. At 18, he moved to Rome, where he enrolled at the faculty of law. He befriended Luigi Pirandello. In 1907, he left Rome for Holland but returned to Rome and took his degree. He frequented cultural clubs of the capital and met the most important Italian writers of the time. He de´buted in 1908 as a playwright with two works that have been lost: Madre (Mother) and La sirena ricanta (The Mermaid Sings Again). In 1918, he began his collaboration with Idea Nazionale and Il Messaggero (Rome). In the early dramatic Sintesi and in the collection of poems, Elegie a Marykhe (1914) surpassed Sicilian naturalism in favor of Symbolism. With Marionette che passione! he became famous in Italy and abroad (the play was performed in Prague, Paris, and Berlin). Between 1926 and 1932 Rosso di San Secondo lived in Germany, where he met Inge Redlich, his future wife, and refined his knowledge of Expressionism. Proposed by Pirandello, in 1934, he was awarded the Accademia d’Italia Prize for literature. Two years later, in 1936, he had a house built at Lido di Camaiore in Versiglia, where he spent the last years of his life. After the end of World War II, he worked actively as a theater critic for Il Giornale d’Italia. He was awarded the prize Melpomene in 1954 for the drama Il ratto di Proserpina. Rosso di San Secondo died in Lido di Camaiore on 2 November 1956 after a long illness. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Grotesque Theatre Selected Works Collections Teatro (1911–1925), edited by Luigi Ferrante, Bologna: Cappelli, 1962. Teatro, edited by Ruggero Jacobbi, 3 vols., Rome: Bulzoni, 1976. Novelle, edited by Natale Tedesco, vol. 1, Caltanissetta: Salvatore Sciascia, 1991. Teatro espressionista di Rosso di San Secondo, edited by Franc¸ois Orsini, 2 vols., Foggia: Bastogi, 1995.

Novels La fuga, 1917. La morsa, 1918. La mia esistenza d’acquario, 1919. Le donne senza amore, 1920. La festa delle rose, 1920.

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PIER MARIA ROSSO DI SAN SECONDO Il minuetto dell’anima nostra, 1922. La donna che puo` capire, capisca, 1923. Orlando in Brandeburgo, 1937. Ignazio Trappa, maestro di cuoio e di suolame, 1943. Incontri di uomini e di Angeli, 1946. Zagru`, edited by Roberto Salsano, 2004. Lo sdoppiamento di Matteo Derbini, edited by Rita Verdirame, 2004.

Short Stories ‘‘Elegie a Maryke,’’ 1914. ‘‘Ponentino,’’ 1916. ‘‘Le frange della nostalgia,’’ 1924. ‘‘C’era il diavolo o non c’era il diavolo?,’’ 1929.

Plays Madre, 1908. L’occhio chiuso: sintesi drammatiche, 1911. Marionette che passione!, 1918; as Puppets of Passion!, in 20th-Century Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, 1995. Amara (1918), 1921. L’ospite desiderato, 1921. La bella addormentata (1919), 1923. La roccia e i monumenti, 1923. I peccati di gioventu`, 1923. Lazzarina fra i coltelli, 1924. Una cosa di carne (1924), 1925. L’avventura terrestre, 1925. Il delirio dell’oste Bassa`, 1925. La scala, 1925. Canicola, 1927. Tra vestiti che ballano (1926), 1927. Le esperienze di Giovanne Arce, filosofo, 1930. La signora Falkenstein (1929), 1931. Lo spirito della morte, 1931. Per fare l’alba, 1931. Il ratto di Proserpina, 1954. Mercoledı`, luna piena, 1966.

Further Reading Barbina, Alfredo, Elegie ad Amaranta: Ricerche e documenti su Rosso di San Secondo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Barsotti, Anna, Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Bellingeri, Edo (editor), Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. Bisicchia, Andrea, Invito alla lettura di Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, Review of Elegie a Maryke, Il corriere della sera, 3 March 1914. Di Grado, Antonio, L’isola di carta: incanti e inganni di un mito, Palermo: Lombardi, 1996. Di Legami, Flora, Angela Guidotti, and Natale Tedesco, Pier Maria Rosso di S. Secondo. La figura e l’opera, Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1989. Di Legami, Flora, Il viandante della notte. La narrativa di Rosso di San Secondo, Palermo: Ila Palma, 2000. Giovanelli, Paola Daniela (editor), La critica e Rosso di San Secondo, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. Gori, Gino, Il grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura, Rome: Stock, 1926.

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Guidotti, Angela, ‘‘Spazio scenico come camera oscura nel teatro di Rosso di S. Secondo,’’ in Storia della Sicilia, edited by Natale Tedesco, vol. 8, Rome: Editalia, 2000. Menghi, Maria Cristina, Rosso di San Secondo. Tra l’espressionismo e il mito, Florence: Libri Atheneum, 1996. Pellegrino, Angelo (editor), Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990. Pirandello, Luigi, Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, edited by Manlio Lo Vecchio Musti, Milan: Mondadori, 1960. Salsano, Roberto, L’immagine e la smorfia. Rosso di san Secondo e dintorni, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Sipala, Paolo Mario, Borgese, Rosso di San Secondo, Savarese, Rome: Bulzoni, 1985. Tilgher, Adriano, Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, Rome: Libreria di Scienze e lettere, 1922. Vergani, Orio, Review of La morsa, La gazzetta di Torino, 18 agosto 1918.

MARIONETTE, CHE PASSIONE! Play by Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo

Marionette, che passione! (Puppets of Passion!, 1918) is considered one of the most important theatrical works by Rosso di San Secondo and an important one to the grotesque theater. It premiered at the Teatro Manzoni in Milan on March 4, 1918, due to Luigi Pirandello’s insistent appeal to the capocomico Virgilio Talli, the legendary head comedian of one of Italy’s most prestigious theatrical companies. Its success, despite some initial scepticism, was clamorous, particularly after the Paris premie`re of 1923. The originality of the piece made the public curious. Breaking with the conventions of the bourgeois commedia, the play concerns the suffocating anxiety and desperation of three main characters, the marionettes of the title, who do not even have a family name. These characters are so generalized, their identification with their existential condition so complete, that their clothes are enough to identify them. They seem like puppets made rigid by passion. Their drama is born from the contrast between the loss of their individuality and the solitude into which they fall. They attempt to escape their isolation, but their attempts

GIUSEPPE ROVANI fail: They are completely unable to act, condemned to live on a stage on which they pretend to talk, while silence and death reign. Marionette, che passione!, as Rosso warned in the prelude to the play, represents ‘‘un sentimento di tragico umorismo’’ (a piece of tragic humor). The reduction of living characters to marionettes symbolizes the dramatic plight of contemporary man, torn between being and appearing to be, forced to wear a mask with a deformed expression in order to recite his part on the stage of life. The result is a lyrical and tragic, oneiric and realistic drama. Three characters without any identity, described simply as La Signora dalla volpe azzurra (The Lady with the Blue Fox Fur), Il Signore in grigio (The Man in Gray), and Il Signore a lutto (The Man in Mourning), have met casually in a telegraph office, on a foggy, desolate Sunday afternoon in Milan. Each knows the tragedy of the other. They promptly recognize themselves as ‘‘gli sperduti nel mondo, i senza tetto, i vagabondi’’ (the lost in the world, the homeless, the vagabonds). They confide and confess their desperation: The woman who has been abandoned by her lover, ‘‘The Man in Mourning’’ following the elopement of his wife with her lover, and ‘‘The Man in Gray’’ who contemplates suicide. When they meet again in the living room of the La Cantante, ‘‘The Singer,’’ they create an angry hostile atmosphere. The dinner table, which evokes atavistic Mediterranean rites, is set for those absent as well. The characters are too weak to rebel against the strength of their passions; not even in desperation are they able to find solidarity. In the end, their options are annihilation (the suicide of Il Signore in grigio) or giving into passion (La Signora dalla volpe azzurra, who runs away with her lover). As Andrea Bisicchia perceptively remarked in Invito alla lettura di Rosso di San Secondo (1978), the absurd encounter of these marionettes concludes with a ray of

hope, as La Cantante utters her last words: ‘‘Peccato!... Forse avrei potuto amarlo!...’’ (What a Pity!... Maybe I could have loved with him!...) ALFREDO SGROI Editions First edition: Marionette, che passione!, Milan: Treves, 1918. Other editions: in Teatro, edited by Luigi Ferrante, vol. 1, Rome: Bulzoni, 1976; in Paolo Puppa, La morte in scena: Rosso di San Secondo, Naples: Guida, 1986. Translations: as Puppets of Passion!, in 20th-Century Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.

Further Reading Calendoli, Giovanni, Il teatro di Rosso di San Secondo, Rome: Vito Bianco, 1956. D’Amico, Silvio, Cronache di teatro, Bari: Laterza, 1963. Di Grado, Grado, Scritture della crisi, Catania: Maimone, 1988. Grazioli, Cristina, Lo specchio grottesco, Marionette e automi nel teatro tedesco del primo 900, Padua: Esedra Editrice, 1999. Livio, Gigi, Il teatro in rivolta, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Ocello, Eugenia (editor), Il teatro di Rosso di San Secondo. Atti della tavola rotonda, Florence: Franco Cesati, 1985. Puppa, Paolo, La morte in scena:Rosso di San Secondo, Naples: Guida, 1986. Salsano, Roberto, Sintesi e ‘‘Grottesco’’ nel primo Rosso di San Secondo, Rome: Lucarini, 1984. Savoca, Giuseppe, Strutture e personaggi, Rome: Bonacci, 1989. Tedesco, Natale, Il cielo di carta. Teatro siciliano da Verga a Joppolo, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1989. Tilgher, Adriano, La scena e la vita, Roma: Libreria di Scienze e Lettere, 1925. Zinna, Lucio, ‘‘Le antinomie del quotidiano nel Preludio di Marionette, che passione,’’ in Pier Maria Rosso di San Secondo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, edited by Angelo Pellegrino, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1990.

GIUSEPPE ROVANI (1818–1874) Dismissed as a mere epigone of Alessandro Manzoni by Benedetto Croce, exalted as the initiator of the scapigliatura by Piero Nardi, Giuseppe Rovani was undoubtedly one of the most eclectic and

intellectually vibrant figures in the Milan of his day. A prolific writer and journalist, he contributed articles on music, art, literature, and various other topics to numerous magazines and newspapers, 1627

GIUSEPPE ROVANI from Archivio triennale to Letture di famiglia, from Italia musicale to La gazzetta ufficiale di Milano, of which he also became co-owner. An active Republican, he also participated in the revolutionary campaign of 1848 in Milan and in Venice, for which he was exiled in the Swiss Canton Ticino. Here, he became acquainted with some of the most important figures of the Italian Risorgimento, including Carlo Cattaneo, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Giuseppe Ferrari, but his involvement was short lived, and back in Milan he dedicated his time primarily to journalism. However, for a long time, Rovani was remembered neither for his revolutionary activities nor for his journalism but rather for his dissolute lifestyle as a wine lover and absinthe addict. His bohemian behavior is immortalized in the two anthologies of anecdotes and sayings collected by the scapigliatura novelist Carlo Dossi as Note azzurre (Blue Notes, 1912) and Rovaniana (On Rovani, 1946). Although Dossi intended the collections to be a tribute to the man and not a form of literary criticism, they created the myth of Rovani as an extravagant and witty character, beloved by the bohemian intellectuals in Milan and even initiator of the scapigliatura group, relegating his literary works to the background. Only in the late 1960s, with the renewed interest in minor novelists of the nineteenth century, was Rovani re-evaluated for his important contribution to the genre of the novel. Rovani’s first experiences as a novelist clearly show the influence of Alessandro Manzoni, to whose works he was first introduced by his tutor, Abbot Giuseppe Pozzone (1791–1841), who had been very close to the Manzoni family. Rovani’s early fiction, Lamberto Malatesta (1843), Valenzia Candiano (1844), and Manfredo Pallavicino (1845– 1846), follow the model of the historical novel as defined by Manzoni. In his introduction to each of them, the author claimed that his stories must be ‘‘interesting’’ and ‘‘useful,’’ according to the parameters of his famous predecessor. Yet these novels suffer from evident literary immaturity and inexperience. They appear to be approximate and rushed, giving a general sense of incompleteness. Indeed, Rovani himself was aware of the imperfections of his works, which he later called simply bozze (drafts). Nevertheless, they were a necessary step in his evolution as a writer and a theoretician of the genre. With Cento anni (One Hundred Years), initially published in serial form in La gazzetta ufficiale di Milano between 1857 and 1864 and later collected in a volume in 1868, Rovani reached a more mature literary result and completely abandoned 1628

his model. Now he strongly asserted the literary dignity of the genre in reaction to Manzoni’s censure in Del romanzo storico (On the Historical Novel, 1828). In his theoretical introduction, or ‘‘Preludio’’ (Prelude), Rovani defended the importance of the novel as the literary genre of modernity, as the form of narration that best responds to the natural human necessity of grasping reality in its complexity. Cento anni tells the story of Milanese family throughout a century, narrated by one of his members, a 90-year-old man. Unfolding the events in somewhat episodic manner and over 1,000 pages, Rovani interwined extraordinary historical facts and characters with the vicissitudes of generations of ‘‘normal’’ people. In the end, the author’s literary alter ego, Giunio Baroggi, reminds us that, as a genre, the novel reflects the infinite colors of humanity; it is a study of humankind, in its variety and multiplicity, based on the example of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). For this reason, as Guido Baldi noted, Cento anni is, together with Ippolito Nievo’s Le confessioni di un Italiano (The Castle of Fratta, 1867), the necessary step from the historical novel to the realist bourgeois romance (Giuseppe Rovani e il problema del romanzo nell’Ottocento, 1967). After Cento anni, Giuseppe Rovani wrote two other fictional works with less fortunate results. The first, La Libia d’oro (The Golden Libya, 1868) is a continuation of his masterpiece, of which he recasts the same characters and situations; the other, La giovinezza di Giulio Cesare (The Youth of Julius Caesar, 1872), was intended to counter the biography of Caesar written by Napoleon III and to celebrate the glory of ancient Rome. Rovani, who had always been interested in the relationship between the arts, formulated his theories on synesthesia in a series of articles assembled in Le tre arti (The Three Arts, 1874).

Biography Giuseppe Rovani was born in Milan as Vittorio Giuseppe Roano, on 12 January 1818, and educated at the Imperial Institute ‘‘Sant’Alessandro’’ with Abbot Giuseppe Pozzone. He worked as private tutor in Venice and as contributor to Italia musicale, 1847. He witnessed the revolt in Venice, 1848; during the same year he was also in Rome. He was exiled to Lugano, in Canton Ticino, Switzerland, and became a contributor to Archivio triennale

ROBERTO ROVERSI with other exiled patriots. He returned to Milan, 1851, and married Luisa Stabilini. He worked at the Brera library and was a contributor to Italia musicale, 1847–1854, and Letture di famiglia, 1852–1859. From 1851, Rovani wrote for the La gazzetta ufficiale di Milano. He reported on the travels in the Lombard-Veneto region of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph for the La gazzetta ufficiale, causing scandal and disapproval among the Milanese patriots, 1857. He became co-owner of the La Gazzetta, 1859. Rovani died of typhusrelated pneumonia in Milan on 26 January 1874. BARBARA GARBIN See also: Scapigliatura Selected Works Fiction Lamberto Malatesta, 1843. Valenzia Candiano, 1844. Manfredo Pallavicino, 4 vols., 1845–1846. Cento anni, 1868. La Libia d’oro, 1868. La giovinezza di Giulio Cesare, 1872.

Essays Di Daniele Manin, presidente e dittatore della Repubblica di Venezia: memoria storica, 1850. Storia delle lettere e delle arti in Italia, 4 vols., 1855–1858; enlarged as Le tre arti considerate in alcuni illustri italiani contemporanei, 2 vols., 1874.

Further Reading Bacchereti, Elisabetta, Il romanzo al negativo: Rovani, Lucini, Cena, Povegliano Veronese: Gutenberg, 1989. Baldi, Guido, Giuseppe Rovani e il problema del romanzo nell’Ottocento, Florence: Olschki, 1967. Bigazzi, Roberto, I colori del vero. Vent’anni di narrativa: 1860–1880, Pisa: Nistri Lischi, 1969. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Giuseppe Rovani,’’ in La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 1, Bari: Laterza, 1914. Cottignoli, Alfredo, ‘‘Tenca, Rovani, De Sanctis e il discorso manzoniano ’Del romanzo storico,’’’ Studi e problemi di critica testuale, 10 (1975), 155–165. Madrignani, Carlo Alberto, ‘‘Giuseppe Rovani e la crisi del romanzo storico,’’ in Cultura, narrativa e teatro nell’eta` del positivismo, edited by Franca Angelini and Carlo Alberto Madrignani, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1975. Mutterle, Anco Marzio, ‘‘Narrativa e memorialistica nell’eta` romantica. La storia romanzata di Giuseppe Rovani,’’ in Storia letteraria d’Italia. L’Ottocento, vol. 10, edited by Armando Balduino, Milan: Vallardi, 1990. Nardi, Piero, Scapigliatura da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1924. Rocca, Alfonso, Tarchetti e Rovani: temi e orientamenti della Scapigliatura, Naples: Liguori, 1970. Scrima, Valentino, Giuseppe Rovani critico d’arte, Milan: LED, 2004. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Goldmann, Lo scapigliato in archivio: sulla narrative di Giuseppe Rovani, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1994. Tellini, Gino, Il romanzo italiano dell’Ottocento e Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Tordi, Rosita, Il manto di Lindoro: Rovani e il teatro d’opera, Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. Vittori, Fiorenza, ‘‘Giuseppe Rovani tra Manzoni e gli scapigliati,’’ in Il vegliardo e gli antecristi, edited by Renzo Negri, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1978.

ROBERTO ROVERSI (1923–) Roberto Roversi’s poetry is characterized by a semantic research applied to the contemporary practice of poetic discourse. His poetry demonstrates a strong conviction that art is a reflection of how reality is perceived, rather than a mere retreat from the outside world. His first collections, Poesie (Poems, 1942), Rime (Rhymes, 1943), and Umano (Human, 1943), show a vigorous moralism and a Petrarchesque style. Poesie per l’amatore di stampe (Poems for the Lover of Prints, 1954) is pervaded by an idyllic vision, and its section titled ‘‘Libretto

d’appunti’’ (Small Notebook) reveals a preference for everyday description narrated in simple language. The collection also marks the beginning of a new development, culminating with the first edition of Dopo Campoformio (After Campoformio, 1962), the title of which refers to the treaty between Austria and France that abolished Venetian independence in 1797. At about this time, Roversi published his first novel, Caccia all’uomo (Manhunt, 1959), which combines an earlier collection of short stories, Ai tempi di re Gioacchino (At the 1629

ROBERTO ROVERSI Time of King Joachim, 1952), with some of his short poems originally composed in 1952 and now turned into prose. In Dopo Campoformio, Roversi tried to accelerate the flow and rhythm of the verses by almost eliminating the subject pronoun I, along with diminutives and descriptive adjectives and many articles and prepositions. He realized that he had to experiment with new modes of expression in order to redefine the terms ‘‘prose’’ and ‘‘poetry’’ in a society confronted with industrialization and neocapitalism, both of which were affecting literature and language. As a reaction to this historical period, Roversi formulated his own conception of ‘‘patience,’’ which he defined as a strategy to be used against the power and the supremacy of the political establishment. Patience allows an astute search for truth. His earlier leftist political commitment was replaced by a social one, as revealed in the tone of the 46 poems of the group entitled ‘‘La raccolta del fieno’’ (The Hay Harvest), which were added in the 1965 revised edition of Dopo Campoformio. Written in unrhymed free verse, the poems are rich with images presented in a style imbued with passion and tension. The themes primarily reflect the degradation of life under neocapitalism. The Treaty of Campoformio ultimately stands as a parallel to the failed ideals of the Risorgimento and the unkept promises of the Resistance, which were all dwarfed by the political restorations that followed. To escape futile experimentation, Roversi sought a way to place the literary event in a social context. Indeed, his search for the proper expression must be distinguished from the experiments associated with the historical neo-avant-garde, as the poets of this group rejected the political ideology of the Resistance, favoring a language stripped of its sociopolitical connotations. Language itself became an autonomous system with no necessary reference to or dependence on external social reality. Roversi’s polemical stance with the Gruppo 63 became more evident with the publication of his second novel, Registrazioni di eventi (Recording of Events, 1964), at which time he was accused of being unable to write prose without lyricism and of resorting to outdated language. Roversi defended his position by reaffirming his cultural formation and rejecting experimental innovations at the level of form, which, in his view, deconstructed the order structure of conventional language. He also opposed the trend of reemerging Hermeticism. He further explored these ideas in a short play, Il crack (The Crack, 1969), first staged at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. 1630

As a poet and writer Roversi has maintained an open heated debate with the dominant cultural establishment. He has rejected the coveted practice of literary awards, a trait that distinguishes him in the contemporary editorial world and gives him an air of moral integrity. As a further step in this direction, he published the collection Le descrizioni in atto (Ongoing Descriptions, 1970) as an underground venture, printed on a cyclostyle at his own cost, and sent it free of charge to interested readers on request (3,000 copies were distributed in this manner). The book comprises 46 poems, 13 of which consist only of a few lines, which could be read as prefaces to other poems. These self-styled ‘‘descriptions’’ are polemical attacks sparked by newspaper articles, headlines, letters, essays, and philosophical treatises. Theoretically the collection is the culmination and fusion of Roversi’s main themes, anger and reason. Modern society has a false sense of consciousness; therefore, reason and anger are dialectically united in a poetry of action used to describe events. Because reason alone can never change the course of historical events, anger becomes a catalyst for commenting on them. In the 1970s, to publicly voice his protest, Roversi also wrote lyrics for the popular singer and composer Lucio Dalla. They collaborated on a series of albums, Il giorno aveva cinque teste (The Day Had Five Heads, 1973), Anidride solforosa (Sulphur Dioxide, 1975), and Il futuro dell’automobile (The Future of the Automobile, 1976). All of Roversi’s mature works are defined by a bitter sense of a political defeat, in which anger and loss of hope play a big part. This become more evident in L’Italia sotto la neve (Italy under the Snow), the title of the complex work-in-progress on the state of the nation on which Roversi has been working for over 20 years. The sections published so far, all from small publishing houses, include the Premessa (Foreword, 1984) and the first two parts, as well as the more recent La partita di calcio (The Soccer Game, 2001). Roversi has fostered and encouraged publications by young and unknown writers through his publishing house, Palmaverde, named after the antiquarian bookstore that he has owned since 1946, and that has been traditionally a meeting site for poets and writers in Bologna.

Biography Roberto Roversi was born in Bologna on January 28, 1923, to a middle-class family. During World War II, after the armistice in 1943, he was captured

GEROLAMO ROVETTA by the Germans and interned in a concentration camp from which he escaped to join the Resistance fighters in Piedmont. He was awarded a degree in philosophy from the University of Bologna, 1946, and subsequently worked for a manufacturer before opening Palmaverde, a bookstore specializing in antique and rare books in Bologna, 1946. Roversi became a founder of the bimonthly cultural magazine Officina, with Pasolini, Leonetti, Scalia, Romano`, and Fortini, 1959. He founded the Marxist-oriented literary journal Rendiconti in 1961. Roversi lives in Bologna. ANTONIO VITTI

‘‘L’Italia sotto la neve. Premessa,’’ 1984; Parte prima, 1989; Parte seconda, 1993. ‘‘La partita di calcio,’’ 2001.

Fiction Ai tempi di re Gioacchino, 1952. Caccia all’uomo, 1959. Registrazione di eventi, 1964. I diecimila cavalli, 1976. Roversi/Giaconi, with Luisa Giaconi, 1986.

Plays Unterdenlinden, 1965. Il crack, in Sipario, 275, March 1969. La macchina da guerra piu` formidabile: testo per il teatro (1971), edited by Arnaldo Picchi, 2002.

Further Reading Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1942. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1943. ‘‘Umano,’’ 1943. ‘‘Poesie per l’amatore di stampe,’’ 1954. ‘‘Dopo Campoformio,’’ 1962; revised edition, 1965. ‘‘Le descrizioni in atto,’’ 1970. ‘‘Materiale ferroso,’’ 1977.

Bonfiglioli, Pietro, ‘‘Errore e furore dopo Campoformio,’’ Palatina, 6:23–24 (1963), 45–60. Caruso, Luciano, ‘‘Roberto Roversi,’’ in Scritti in onore di Cleto Carbonara, Naples: Giannini, 1976. Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio Martini, Roberto Roversi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978. Moliterni, Fabio, Roberto Roversi: un’idea di letteratura, Bari: Edizioni dal Sud, 2004. Ramat, Silvio, Storia della poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1976.

GEROLAMO ROVETTA (1851–1910) A novelist and playwright, Gerolamo Rovetta represented in his works the turn-of-the-lastcentury bourgeoisie to which he belonged. Indeed, Rovetta developed his life-long passion for the arts in his mother’s literary salon and went on to write hugely successful novels. His first novel, Mater dolorosa (Sorrowful Mother, 1882), is the melodramatic story of a woman of earnest principles and noble sentiments who sacrifices everything to her maternal duties. After a few novellas and short stories, Rovetta wrote I Barbaro`: Le lagrime del prossimo (The Barbaros: Other People’s Tears, 1888), the story of a mean and greedy man willing to do anything in order to achieve power and fame. Selecting some salient episodes, Rovetta adapted the novel into the gloomy drama of the same title. There are obvious similarities between this novel and La Baraonda (Bedlam, 1894), also adapted for the theater in 1905. The protagonist, a scheming

exploiter, moves within the business and the political circles of unified Italy and was portrayed with effectiveness and vigor. In fact, La baraonda is considered Rovetta’s best novel. Most of Rovetta’s novels deal with similar themes. Il tenente dei Lancieri (The Lieutenant of the Lancers, 1896) is the story of a rich and arrogant woman set in a frivolous and fashionable Milan. The protagonist discovers the recklessness of her dissolute son and reveals to her husband that the father is in fact an officer who seduced her years before. In La Signorina (The Young Miss, 1900), a young writer who is raising the little daughter of a friend who was killed in a duel falls in love with a greedy woman. Eventually, he runs away with the woman he loves. Years later, abandoned by his lover, he is reunited with the girl, who is now a woman, and love blossoms between the two. 1631

GEROLAMO ROVETTA The characters and situations of Rovetta’s theatrical production are also similar to those of his novels. His world is always divided between the same human types: the honest and the naı¨ve on one side, and the greedy and the careerists on the other. His first play, Un volo dal nido (A Flight from the Nest, 1875), was represented in Genoa only because of the friendship between the director of the company and his mother. Alla citta` di Roma (To the City of Rome, 1891) is a much better play. It is the story of a shopkeeper betrayed by his wife who decides to forgive her only because her charm draws people into his shop. In the play La Trilogia di Dorina (Dorina’s Trilogy, 1891), Rovetta dealt with the usual moral issues of middle-class society. He depicted in a very touching and painful way the character of a girl who works as a governess for an aristocratic family. Niccolino, the irresponsible son of the marchioness, molests her and has her fired. Poor and without a family, after many misadventures Dorina has to give up her virginity in order to survive. After becoming a famous singer and an experienced and respected lady, she again meets Niccolino, and the man who had rejected her when she was poor now falls deeply in love and marries her. In the last years of his life Rovetta wrote historical plays, among them Romanticismo (Romanticism, 1901), which was a success due to the interpretation of the actress Tina di Lorenzo and the passionate way with which Rovetta described the Risorgimento. It tells the story of a man and his wife who unknowingly fight against the Austrians for the unification of Italy. Their fading love is rekindled when they discover their common cause. Rovetta was a writer of great technical skill. His works lie between an ironic and bitter realism and a romantic sentimentalism. He was more concerned with satisfying the tastes of his audience, and, as Silvio D’Amico stated, his style ‘‘rivela superficialita`, un piacevole abbandono alla moda contemporanea, e meno sottili facolta` d’osservazione’’ (reveals superficiality, a pleasant acceptance of contemporary fashions, and less subtle powers of observation; Storia del teatro drammatico, 1968).

Biography Gerolamo Rovetta was born in Brescia on 3 March 1851 from the patriot Agostino and from Maria Ghisi, a rich and fickle woman. In 1860, after his father’s death, he moved to Verona with his 1632

mother. His education resulted not from formal schooling but from frequenting his mother’s literary salon, where he was introduced to a frivolous set of artists and intellectuals such as Ugo Capetti, Angelo Dall’Oca Bianca, and Vittorio Betteloni. In 1882, after inheriting his father’s fortune he moved to Milan, where he began writing. Having achieved success, he led a frivolous lifestyle. He tried to inherit his maternal grandfather’s wealth and as a result broke off relations with his mother. He committed suicide in Milan on 8 May 1910, leaving his last novel, Il successore, unfinished. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Fiction Mater dolorosa, 1882. Ninnoli, 1882. Sott’acqua, 1883. Processo Montegu`, 1884. Tiranni minimi, 1886. I Barbaro`. Le lagrime del prossimo, 1888. La baraonda, 1894. Il tenente dei lancieri, 1896. L’idolo, 1898. Novelle, 1898. La signorina, 1900. Casta diva, 1903. La moglie di sua eccellenza, 1904.

Plays Un volo dal nido, 1875. La moglie di Don Giovanni, 1877. In sogno, 1878. Gli uomini pratici, 1879. I Barbaro`, 1890. Alla citta` di Roma, 1891. La trilogia di Dorina, 1891. Marco Spada, 1892. La cameriera nova, 1893. I disonesti, 1892. Madame Fanny, 1895. La realta`, 1895. Principio di secolo, 1897. La moglie giovane, 1899. Il ramo d’ulivo, Il poeta, 1899. Le due coscienze, 1901. Romanticismo, 1901. La baraonda, 1905. Il re burlone, 1905. Il giorno della cresima, 1906. Papa` eccellenza, 1906. Molie´re e sua moglie, 1911.

Other Gli Zulu` nell’arte, nella letteratura, e nella politica, 1880. Cinque minuti di riposo, 1912.

RUSSIAN INFLUENCES Further Reading Adamo, Sergia, ‘‘Mondo giudiziario e ricreazione narrativa in Italia dopo l’unita`,’’ Problemi, 113 (1999), 70–98. Apollonio, Carla, ‘‘Gerolamo Rovetta,’’ in I minori, vol. 3, Milan: Marzorati, 1962. Bevilacqua, Enrico, Gerolamo Rovetta e la sua famiglia materna, Florence: Le Monnier, 1925. Costetti, Giuseppe, Il teatro italiano nel 1800, Rocca S. Casciano: Cappelli, 1901. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Emilio De Marchi Girolamo Rovetta,’’ La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1929.

D’Amico, Silvio, Storia del teatro drammatico, vol. 2, Milan: Garzanti, 1968. Oliva, Gianni, and Vito Moretti, Verga e i verismi regionali, Rome: Studium, 1999. Pellini, Pierluigi, ‘‘Gerolamo Rovetta: la letteratura finanziaria fra romanzo e teatro,’’ Filologia antica e moderna, 13 (1997), 49–70. Pullini, Giorgio, Teatro italiano fra due secoli: 1850–1950, Florence: Parenti, 1958. Reimond, Cheryl, ‘‘A Passing Smile: On Some Plays of Rovetta, Italica, 51:2 (1974), 215–235. Tonelli, Luigi, Il teatro italiano dalle origini ai giorni nostri, Milan: Modernissima, 1924.

RUSSIAN INFLUENCES Apart from those occasions when, from the fourteenth century onward, we have precise documentation of journeys and exchanges of various natures between Italy and Europe’s more eastern territories, real cultural and literary contact between Italy and Russia did not begin until the Russian capital was transferred to St. Petersburg in 1713, according to the wishes of Peter the Great, initiating the modern period of Russian literature. Through the dynamic exchange with what was arriving from Germany and France, but also from Italy (the work carried out by Italian architects in the new capital was of particular importance), Russia renewed its traditions and updated its own linguistic trends. In this context, the work of Michail Lomonosov (1711–1765) was important in fixing the parameters of literary language, and so was that of Nikolaj Karamzin (1766–1826), who modelled it on the French to make it more fluid and elegant. In Italy, news of all this is to be found in the anonymous Essai sur la litte´rature russe (possibly attributed to I. Bogdanovicˇ) printed in Livorno in 1771, as well as in the essay Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura (On the Origins, Progress and Present State of Every Literature), published in Parma by Juan Andre´s (1740–1817) between 1782 and 1799. At the same time, the first literary texts started to circulate, particularly those from the poetic and theatrical repertoire of Aleksandr Sumarokov (1717–1774) and Michail Kheraskov (1791–1837), though more often than not translated from the French. On the other hand,

some Italian writers found inspiration in Russian life and stories for their own works, as in the case of Russiade (1795) by Carlo Denina (1731–1813) or the Poema tartaro (Tartar Poem, 1796) by Giambattista Casti (1724–1803). In 1825, Ippolito Pindemonte and Vincenzo Monti translated (though not directly from the Russian) Ivan Krylov’s Fables; yet while in Italy there was keen interest in Russia at the time, the opposite was not the case. Nevertheless, attention for Russian culture began to consolidate, philological studies became established, and, within the international context of Romanticism to which Russia also made its contribution, albeit with its own specific characteristics, translations started to become more widely available. These included works by Karamzin, Ivan Kozlov (1779–1840), Faddej Bulgarin (1789–1859), and, in 1834, the first translation of Aleksandr Pusˇkin (1799–1837): The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820– 1821), which would soon be followed by other translations that would bear witness to the author’s greatness. A Russian traveller’s account, read in French, inspired Giacomo Leopardi’s ‘‘Canto notturno d’un pastore errante dell’Asia’’ (Night Song of a Shepherd Wandering in Asia, 1831) and Russia provided material for Gaetano Donizetti’s operas Pietro il Grande (Peter the Great, 1819) and Otto mesi in due ore, ovvero gli esiliati in Siberia (Eight Months in Two Hours, or the Exiles in Siberia, 1827). Connections and contacts between the two countries were reinforced, and in the 1830s Princess 1633

RUSSIAN INFLUENCES Zinaida Volkonskaja’s Roman salon opened its doors, as Cesare De Michelis wrote, ‘‘to most of the Russians who passed through the Eternal City or spent some time there in that period (such as Vjazemskij, Zˇukovskij, Gogol’, Sˇevyre¨v) thus favouring direct contact with Italian writers’’; ‘‘Russia e Italia,’’ 1997). However, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that the process of recognition of Russian literature experienced a decisive leap forward. In particular, prose, often interpreted unilaterally in terms of its realistic component and its ideological content, became widely known to Italian readers due to the works of Nikolaj Gogol’ (1809–1852), Aleksandr Herzen (1812–1870), Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), and Aleksandr Ostrovskij (1823–1886). Thus, Italy followed a process that had already taken place in France, and even masterpieces such as War and Peace (1863–1869) or Crime and Punishment (1866), although known in Italy as early as 1869, did not assert themselves until later, in the wake of their success in France. Nonetheless, Lev Tolstoj (1828–1910) and Feodor Dostoevskij (1821–1881) achieved lasting success and recognition, the former with his detached and limpid classicism, the latter with the depth of his relentless introspection, and both with the complexity of their social, religious, and existential themes. Between the nineteenth and the twentieth cenˇ echov (1860–1904), with his short tury, Anton C stories and plays; Maksim Gor’kij (1868–1936); Leonid Andreev (1871–1919); and Dmitry Merezˇkovskij (1865–1941) became widely known and well established, and one can observe some specific influences in the literary choices of Italian authors, from Giovanni Verga (Gogol’, Dostoevskij, and ˇ echov have all been mentioned) to Gabriele C D’Annunzio (Tolstoj, Dostoevskij, and Turgenev) and Italo Svevo (Dostoevskij). At the same time, Giovanni Papini’s and Giuseppe Prezzolini’s contacts with the Symbolist review Vesy and the close links established between Italian and Russian Futurism formed part of the context of experimental innovation and avant-garde in the early twentieth century. Gor’kij lived for some time in Italy after 1906 and Vjacˇeslav Ivanov (1866–1949) from 1924, while in the period between the two wars attention should be drawn to the contribution of writers who translated directly from Russian or knew the language sufficiently well to influence the choices of publishers in the preparation of the translations—among them, Corrado Alvaro, Clemente Rebora, and Giovanni Comisso (Elda Garetto, 1634

‘‘La diffusione della letteratura russa dai classici ai ‘soviettisti,’’’ 2004). Piero Gobetti, Leone Ginzburg, Tommaso Landolfi, and above all Ettore Lo Gatto, the founder of modern Slavic studies in Italy, all promoted in their different ways the knowledge of Russian authors and above all endeavored to overcome in their translation work the traditional mediation from French. The market was still dominated by Tolstoj and Dostoevskij, but now the number of authors translated was on the increase: first and foremost Ivan Bunin (1870–1953), Nobel Prize winner in 1933, and with him Boris Zajcev (1881–1972), Ivan Sˇmelev (1875–1950), and Mark Aldanov (1886–1957), representing the Russian emigrants. There was also considerable interest in the new Soviet literature, with figures such as Isaac Babel (1894–1941), Michail Bulgakov (1891–1940), Boris Pil’njak (1894–1937), Michail Sˇolochov (1905–1984), who won the Nobel Prize in 1965. Moreover, the interest in Russian poetry should be emphasized, from Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921) to Sergej Esenin (1895–1925) and Vladimir Majakovskij (1893–1930), from Anna Achmatova (1889–1966) to Marina Cvetaeva (1892–1941) and Boris Pasternak (1890–1960). The diffusion of their poetry, promoted primarily by the translations of Renato Poggioli, contributed to the renovation of Italian poetic language in the 1930s. At this stage, however, literature in Russia was subject to ideology and could no longer operate freely or strengthen its connections with the West. It was not until the 1950s that the situation began to change slowly. Indeed, Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), who emigrated after 1917, achieved his great success abroad (and from 1945 wrote in ˇ ivago, English), while Pasternak published Doctor Z the novel that would bring him worldwide renown, in Italy in 1957. During the 1960s, the critical work of the early twentieth-century ‘‘formalists’’ was rediscovered and subsumed in the framework of structuralism (in Italy Roman Jakobson, Viktor Sˇklovskij, Jurij Tynjanov, and Michail Bachtin were read and appreciated) and semiology (Yurij Lotman). Meanwhile, there was an ever-growing presence of works by dissident writers, both those who continued to lead a difficult life in their own country, such as the poets Evgenij Evtusˇenko (1933–) and Andrej Voznesenskij (1933–), or who were forced to emigrate, as in the case of Aleksandr Solzˇenicyn (1918–), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, and Josif Brodskij (1940–1996), who won it in 1987.

RUSTICO DI FILIPPO (RUSTICO FILIPPI) A particularly important role has been played by the research and translation work of Angelo Maria Ripellino and of the Roman school, as well as by ˇ echov’s plays in Giorgio Strehler’s stagings of C Milan. Narrators such as Vasilij Aksjonov (1932–) and Yurij Trifonov (1925–1981) became well known, but the true revelation in recent times, linked to the process of democratic change set in motion under Michail Gorbacˇe¨v, is that of the many writers—Osip Mandel’sˇtam (1891–1938) to name one—forced to silence during the Stalinist years and who are all the more eagerly studied and read now. Finally, of great relevance is also the success achieved by theatrical directors such as Anatolij Vassiliev, who has given us an unforgettable rereading of Pirandello, and the Lithuanian Eimuntas Nekrosius, with his company ‘‘The Seagull.’’ EDOARDO ESPOSITO Further Reading Beljaev, V., ‘‘Dostoevskij rannjaja novella I. Zvevo ‘Ubiistvo na ulice Bel’podzˇo,’’’ in Dostoevskij. Materialy i issledovanija, Georgij M. Fridlender (editor), Leningrad: Nauka, 1987. Bonazza, Sergio, ‘‘Gli esordi della filologia slava in Italia,’’ in Europa Orientalis, 1 (1982), 77–81. Brogi Bercoff, Giovanna, et al. (editors), La Slavistica in Italia. Cinquant’anni di studi (1940–1990), Rome: Ministero per i beni culturali e ambientali, 1994.

Damiani, Enrico, ‘‘Quel che c’e` di Pusˇkin e su Pusˇkin in Italia,’’ in Alessandro Pusˇkin nel primo centenario della morte, edited by Ettore Lo Gatto, Rome: Istituto per l’Europa Orientale, 1937. De Michelis, Michelis, ‘‘D’Annunzio, la Russia, i paesi slavi,’’ in D’Annunzio europeo, edited by Pietro Gibellini, Rome: Lucarini, 1991. De Michelis, Michelis, ‘‘Russia e Italia,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria russa, edited by Michele Colucci and Riccardo Picchio, Turin: UTET, 1997. Garetto, Elda, ‘‘La diffusione della letteratura russa dai classici ai ’soviettisti,’’’ in Le letterature straniere nell’Italia dell’entre-deux-guerres, edited by Edoardo Esposito, Lecce: Pensa MultiMedia, 2004. Hiepko Schro¨ter, Erika, Beitra¨ge zur Geschichte des russischen Italienerlebnisses, Bonn: 1960. La traduzione letteraria dal russo nelle lingue romanze e dalle lingue romanze in russo, Milan: Cisalpino-Goliardica, 1979. Renton, Bruce, ‘‘La letteratura russa in Italia nel XIX secolo,’’ in Rassegna Sovietica, 11:1 (1960), 40–59; 12:1 (1961), 48–80; 12:3 (1961), 27–69; 12:4 (1961), 36–70; 12: 5 (1961), 67–94. Sapegno, Natalino, ‘‘Il romanzo russo dell’Ottocento e l’Italia,’’ in Il romanzo russo nel secolo XIX e la sua influenza nelle letterature dell’Europa occidentale, Rome: Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, 1978. Scandura, Claudia, Letteratura russa in Italia. Un secolo di traduzioni, Rome: Bulzoni, 2002. Strada, Vittorio (editor), I Russi e l’Italia, Milan: Banco Ambrosiano Veneto; Scheiwiller, 1995. Varese, Marina Federica, Batjusˇkov. Un poeta tra Russia e Italia, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Zveteremich, Pietro, ‘‘Lo studio della letteratura russa e sovietica in Italia,’’ in Rassegna sovietica, 1 (1958).

RUSTICO DI FILIPPO (RUSTICO FILIPPI) (CA. 1230 / 1240–CA. 1300) An ardent Ghibelline but also a friend of the Guelf Brunetto Latini, who dedicated his Favolello (Little Poem, 1282) to him, the Florentine Rustico di Filippo (or Rustico Filippi), nicknamed Il Barbuto, is thought to be the inventor of poesia giocosa (‘‘comic,’’ ‘‘burlesque,’’ or ‘‘realistic’’ poetry). Caposcuola of this innovative group of poets that included Cecco Angiolieri, Meo dei Tolomei, Niccola Muscia, Pietro de’ Faitinelli, Folgore da San Gimignano, Pieraccio Tedaldi, and others, Rustico

is considered one of the most inventive and original poets of his time. His extant poetry, nearly all of which is contained in one manuscript (the Vat. Lat. 3793), consists of 58 undated sonnets written in the vernacular. There is also one sonnet of debatable attribution, ‘‘Vogliendo contentarmi di composte’’ (Wanting to Please Me with a Stew; Vat. Urbinati 697) that may have been among other possibly lost poems in the missing folios of Vat. Lat. 3793, as suggested by Olivia Holmes in Assembling the 1635

RUSTICO DI FILIPPO (RUSTICO FILIPPI) Lyric Self (2000). Of the 58 confirmed poems, 29 are jocose, and 29 are courtly love poems. This stylistic ‘‘bifrontism,’’ as Mario Marti called it (Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, 1953), that is, the presence of two distinct lexicons, two registers, and two general subject matters, has been a point of much discussion by scholars, especially when trying to set an order to the poems. Some argue that Rustico wrote the love poems first, inspired as he was in his younger years by the troubadours, the Sicilian School, and the Siculo-Tuscan poets. Some, like Vincenzo Federici in his 1899 edition of Le rime di Rustico di Filippo, ordered the love sonnets into what he perceived as a narrative thread, allowing that the comic poems (with their diverse subjects) be free of a particular sequence. Holmes has pointed out that the way in which a number of the love poems form a corona pattern, whether arranged as such by a scribe or by Rustico himself, with the penultimate rhyme of one sonnet connected to the first line of the sonnet that follows. In Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli (1920), Aldo Francesco Masse`ra tried to order both the love poems and comic poems into a possible chronology. Recent critics have usually maintained Masse`ra’s order in their editions of the sonnets, although with some modifications. The generally accepted order begins with ‘‘Due cavalier valenti d’un paraggio’’ (Two Equally Valiant Knights), the first half of a tenzone with Bondie Dietaiuti, followed by the 28 love poems, and then by the 29 jocose poems, ending with the racy ‘‘El Muscia sı` fa dicere e bandire’’ (Muscia Announces and Would Have It Known). Rustico is one of the few known poets of duecento Italian poetry to have solely composed sonnets and has the largest corpus consisting only of this form. The epitome of vituperium, of caustic condemnations and caricatures of human attributes and actions, Rustico’s poesia giocosa was particularly degrading to woman and later earned him the title of ‘‘misogynist.’’ Particularly vivid is his sonnet ‘‘Dovunque vai conteco porti il cesso’’ (Wherever You Go You Carry a Toilet with You), describing in grotesque detail the disturbing smells, sights, and sounds emitted by an elderly woman. Popular as Rustico’s poems were in his lifetime, Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348) famously condemned Rustico in his Documenti d’Amore (ca. 1317) for the poet’s unkind representation of women. In addition to such biting depictions, Rustico had no few scurrilous words for marriage, the overweight, the elderly, the money- or station-obsessed, 1636

or anyone who seemed worthy of gossip in some way. He focused all his attacks on specific people or groups and did not parody himself, as Cecco did. Horrific as Rustico sounds, he is not thought to have been a misanthrope or a mere scandalmonger. Rather, critics have seen him as someone who was commenting on everyday life as he saw it—on the mores and values of his time—and perhaps even following the Church’s warnings against pleasures of the flesh and objects of carnal or sensual desire through calling into question the dangers of writing love poetry. Rustico’s poesia giocosa, in contrast to his aulic verses, is rich with hyperbole, dialect, colloquial syntax, bestiary similes, and a language that is vibrant, violent, and certainly obscene. While the majority of scholarship on Rustico has commented on his comic poems, the first monographic essay dedicated to the poet, Tommaso Casini’s ‘‘Un poeta umoristica del secolo decimoterzo,’’ written in 1890 and collected in his Scritti danteschi (1913), considered his love lyric and how it may have served as a precursor to the dolce stil novo. Most scholars today, however, would disagree. Joan Levin, for example, has pointed out that Rustico’s love poetry is characterized by a large lexicon of verbs, a lack of similes, numerous exchanges between the lover and the beloved (even querulous at times), and openings to his sonnets in medias res (Rustico di Filippo and the Florentine Lyric Tradition, 1986). Such techniques departed from the earlier schools of love poetry and do not have much in common with the stil novo’s abstract terminology. Rustico may, however, have inspired the comic poetry of the stil novisti, especially Dante’s tenzone with Forese Donati, which shows a number of close similarities to ‘‘Io fo ben boto a Dio, se Ghigo fosse’’ (I Bet That If Ghigo Were), in which a wife is ‘‘freezing’’ even in the summer months due to her husband’s lack of libido or sexual prowess. Early critics even theorized that Rustico authored the Fiore, which is now generally attributed to Dante. Interestingly, Dante does not mention him in De vulgari eloquentia, nor is he included in the sourcebook of comic poetry compiled in the fourteenth century by Nicolo` de’ Rossi. These omissions notwithstanding, Rustico’s poesia giocosa was renowned enough in his time to be satirized, for instance by Jacopo da Le`ona in his ‘‘Segnori, udite strano malificio’’ (Sirs, Hear of a Strange Spell), and he is now recognized not only as the father of comic poetry in Italy but as the one who made this style a literary form in and of itself.

IL RUZZANTE (ANGELO BEOLCO)

Biography

Rustico Filippi. Sonetti, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

There is nearly no information about Rustico’s life. He was born sometime between 1230 and 1240 to a working-class family in the Santa Maria Novella district of Florence. He may have been employed as a merchant or in the silk industry, as his father appears to have been. He had a number of children, at least two sons of whom may have been exiled by Henry VII of Luxembourg. He died sometime after 1291 and before 1300. ARIELLE SAIBER Selected Works Le rime di Rustico di Filippo, edited by Vincenzo Federici, Bergamo: Istituto Italiano d’Arti Grafiche, 1899. Masse`ra, Aldo Francesco, Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli, Bari: Laterza, 1920. Marti, Mario, Poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, Milan: Rizzoli, 1956. Vitale, Maurizio, Rimatori comico-realistici del Due e Trecento, Turin: UTET, 1956. Contini, Gianfranco, Poeti del Duecento, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960.

Further Reading Buzzetti-Gallarati, Silvia, ‘‘Sull’organizzazione del discorso comico nella produzione giocosa di Rustico Filippo,’’ Medievo romanzo, 9:2 (1984), 189–213. Casini, Tommaso, ‘‘Un poeta umoristico del secolo decimoterzo: Rustico di Filippo,’’ in Scritti danteschi, Citta` di Castello: Lapi, 1913. Holmes, Olivia, Assembling the Lyric Self: Authorship from Troubadour Song to Italian Poetry Book, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Levin, Joan H., Rustico di Filippo and the Florentine Lyric Tradition, New York: Peter Lang, 1986. Marrani, Giuseppe, ‘‘I sonetti di Rustico Filippi,’’ Studi di Filologia Italiana, 57 (1999), 33–199. Marti, Mario, Cultura e stile nei poeti giocosi del tempo di Dante, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1953. Orvieto, Paolo, and Lucia Brestolini, La poesia comico-realistica: dalle origini al Cinquecento, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Roncaglia, Aurelio, ‘‘Correzioni al testo delle Rime di Rustico di Filippo,’’ Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 13 (1946), 201–205. Stanghellini, Menotti, Rustico di Filippo: I trenta sonetti realistici, Siena: Accademia dei Rozzi, 2004. Suitner, Franco, La poesia satirica e giocosa nell’eta` dei Comuni, Padua: Antenore, 1983.

IL RUZZANTE (ANGELO BEOLCO) (1496–1542) An actor as well as a playwright—an unusual combination for Italian literature—Angelo Beolco was called Ruzzante after a character of his comedies that he himself interpreted on the stage and made eternal. The meaning of the name is obscene and, as the character himself notes in L’Anconitana (The Woman from Ancona, 1551), connotes ‘‘copulation with animals,’’ in accordance with the tradition of the satire of peasant characters on the part of high culture. His figure of actor-author was subjected to the romantic myth of the uncultured, idle, and poor artist. Indeed, his contemporary Sperone Speroni portrayed him in this way in the dialogue ‘‘L’usura’’ (Usury, 1542), as did, in a different cultural environment, Maurice Sand, son of

the writer George Sand, who dedicated to him an entry in his Masques et Bouffons (Come´die Italienne, 1862). Furthermore, for a long time his works were known only superficially, since, as often happens to literature in dialect, they have begun to receive specific philological attention only recently. The use of Latin sources in some of Beolco’s comedies, in particular La vaccaria (The Comedy of Cows, 1551) and La Piovana (The Girl from the Piove, 1548), both first performed in 1533, suggests on the contrary a direct knowledge of classical texts on Ruzzante’s part. Even his inclination for popular literature in dialect (mainly of the area between Venice and Padua, but also of Bergamo) seems to result not only from an inner congeniality with that 1637

IL RUZZANTE (ANGELO BEOLCO) kind of production but also from a shrewd evaluation of the dramatic potential of its themes and situations, such as the mariazi, plays on lovers’ quarrels that often end in marriage. Additionally, his connection with the intellectual circle of the Cornaros in Asolo and his participation to the festivals directed by Ludovico Ariosto in Ferrara are a guarantee of his classical linguistic competence, as Piermario Vescovo has demonstrated (Da Ruzante a Calmo, 1996). La Pastoral (The Pastoral) is considered the oldest of Beolco’s works and was written in verse around 1517–1518, when the author was only 20 years old. The text was transmitted through a single handwritten exemplar (ms. Marciano it. 6072). Composed after the model of the pastoral or magiaiuole eclogues of Siena, the work presents a series of insolent peasant figures against an idyllic background. The shepherds of a very literary Arcadia are thus held up to ridicule by the rural and instinctive world of realism in dialect. This opposition anticipates Ruzzante’s polemic against literary poetry in some of his later works. The first prologue, in verse and in Paduan dialect, is performed by the peasant Ruzzante and introduces the character in a soliloquy which, as Carlo Grabher has written, ‘‘is already in itself an act of comedy’’ (Ruzzante, 1953). The second prologue, serious and in prose, introduces the dialectal part of the text. It is not a parody, and it recalls the prose sections that Jacopo Sannazaro had inserted between his eclogues in Arcadia (1504). The intention of confronting the orderly world of ideal loves through comic and parodistic effects is clearly expressed in the speech on love made by the Doctor after the old shepherd Milesio has taken his life because he has been rejected by the nymph Siringa. There are some autobiographical implications in the joy of the protagonist at his father’s death and in his self-confident attitude toward the doctor, both references to Beolco’s father, a doctor of arts and medicine at the University of Padua. Ruzzante’s closing remarks and the happy ending of the play reiterate the carnivalesque aura of the comedy, with a final dance that involves the public and turns into a feast. Betı´a, also written in verse, is derived directly from the mariazi of the Paduan tradition, with the addition of some complementary characters and collateral scenes that follow one another at a fast rhythm, without unity of time and place and without divisions in scenes. Here, too, Ruzzante satirizes the lyrical poetry and the treatises on love by his contemporaries. The text, originally untitled (the 1638

traditional title was proposed by Emilio Lovarini), was handed down through two manuscripts (mss. Grimani-Morosini 4, Correr Museum, Venice; Marciano it. 6730). In the two prologues in prose Ruzzante took up again themes discussed in the first of his two Orazioni (1551; Orations), written in 1521 and addressed to Cardinal Cornaro, in which he presented, in a clear and compelling way, his poetics polemically in favor of a ‘‘natural’’ and simple world whose language is dialect, a kind of paradisiacal counterworld to which he had been initiated through the experience of the comic utopia and that he would discuss again in the famous Littera all’Alvarotto (Letter to Alvarotto, 1551). In Betı´a, Ruzzante used the oppositions between the country and city and between language and dialect, not without a sense of painful contemplation, as in the description of the comforts of Venice made by a peasant in the ‘‘Prologo per le recite in Venezia’’ (Prologue for the Performances in Venice), in which, as Sergio Torresani showed, ‘‘the fairy-tale to´pos of cockaigne is viewed in the historical perspective of a kind of ‘peasant’s dream’’’ (Invito alla lettura di Ruzante, 1994). A similar bitterness is found in the practical joke played by Nale, who pretends to be a ghost in order to speak maliciously of death and of feminine pleasures, expressing the hatred of the peasants against the enemy troops and turning laughter into a protest full of pain and resentment. The three dialogues written in dialect and composed in the period between the creation of Betı´a and the later so-called ‘‘classical’’ comedies mark Ruzzante’s definitive rejection of verse in favor of prose, though still (with very few exceptions) in the Paduan dialect. They are also characterized by a sharper realistic approach to the definition of characters and themes rather than, as was common with cinquecento comedy, of events and plots. In the first dialogue, the one-act play Parlamento de Ruzante che l’era vegnu` de campo (The Veteran, 1551), written around 1528–1529, the figure of the peasant assumes the brutal tones of an ancient suffering against the background of the contemporary tragedy of wars and famine. In this work Ruzzante is a veteran who has enlisted to escape starvation. During his absence, his wife Gnua finds a lover who can feed her, and when Ruzzante, together with his mate Menato, return to Venice, she decides to remain with her lover after he beats up her poor husband. Generational conflict is the theme of the second dialogue Bilora (Weasel, 1551), also written around 1528–1529. In Bilora, various idioms, from the dialect of Venice and Bergamo to that of Padua, coexist, while the action, which once

IL RUZZANTE (ANGELO BEOLCO) again revolves around hunger and adultery, leads to a more dramatic conclusion: a crime of honor. In Bilora, a somber story of peasant–city conflict, the main character is a brazente, a laborer in the boat trade tormented as much by hunger as by love. He is nicknamed after the popular word that indicates a weasel, or an animal similar to the stone marten, which is endowed with an insideous and sanguinary instinct. Bilora is a victim of the old and rich Andronico, who took his wife Dina away from him. With the purpose of joining his wife, the peasant arrives in the town of Venice and, together with his mate Pitaro, he plots unsuccessfully to coax his wife to come back to him. Monologues and dialogues were characterized by a continuous clash between the Venetian dialect of the cultured classes and the rustic dialect of the rural classes. The final words of Bilora to Andronico, ‘‘Te l’hegi dito’’ (Didn’t I tell you?), suggest a born resentment of identity against the Venetian ruling class. Ruzzante’s third Dialogo facetissimo et ridiculosissimo (Very Funny and Ridiculous Dialogue, 1554), composed of eight scenes in Paduan dialect, was performed in 1528 at Cornaro’s house and aimed at exorcizing the threat of famine through some physiological expedients thought up by the peasant protagonists in order to calm their hunger, erotic as well as for food. In the end, only a priest of Diana can return health and his wife to the poor veteran Me´nego. Ruzzante’s intention of experimenting with the tradition of the mariazi in forms and structures more similar to comedy is clear in La Fiorina (1551), a play written in 1528. The simple plot, the love rivalry between Ruzzante and the peasant Merchioro, is set in a rural atmosphere in which the countryside is already seen as a more authentic myth. Even though no performance in the sixteenth century is documented, this work was imitated by Andrea Calmo in the comedy of the same title printed in Venice in 1553. The schemes and elements of the regular comedy are more evident in La Moscheta (Posh Talk, 1528), with which Ruzzante returned to the theme of the peasant returning from the wars. According to Ludovico Zorzi’s philological reconstruction in L’attore, la commedia, il drammaturgo (1990), Ruzzante’s first comedy in prose was L’ Anconitana, written and revised between 1521 and 1524, or, according to other scholars such as Carlo Grabher, Emilio Lovarini, and Giorgio Padoan, between 1527 and 1539, and probably performed in 1529 or in 1535 in Venice. In any case, it is considered the first of three of comedies that are defined as ‘‘classical.’’ Based mainly on a novella

from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373), it tells the story of three Sicilian noblemen, Tancredi, Teodoro, and Isotta disguised as Gismondo, and thus adopts programmatically from the very prologue the comic system of disguise that turns into comedy the themes of the double and of the misunderstanding already successfully used in Il Bibbiena’s Calandria (The Follies of Calandro, 1521). The three young men try to redeem a debt previously contracted while serving three gentlewomen. The arrival in Venice of Ginevra, a widow from Ancona who falls in love with the disguised Isotta and then finds out that she is the sister that she believed dead, introduces the theme of an ambiguous and collective sexuality. The gallant story is mirrored by the grotesque plot involving decrepit old men in love and servants in heat, like Ruzzante, who by now has become a sort of comedy factotum and real engine of the action and the plot and looks forward to the figure of Arlecchino. Not by chance, as Roberto Alonge has remarked, in this obvious anticipation of the commedia dell’arte ‘‘Beolco’s theatre in a way condenses the whole development of sixteenth-century drama, its natural tendency towards a pure and formalized stage representation of a human and social reality which is more and more emptied of its vital essence’’ (‘‘La riscoperta rinascimentale del teatro,’’ 2000). The picture of Beolco’s peasant dramaturgy, the poetics of which in the end bring into relief the limitations of the amateurish comic theater of the closed circles of the court and the academy, is rounded out by two Plautine comedies, both written around 1533. La Piovana follows the model of Plautus’s Rudens, with elements taken from Terence and from Ariosto’s Cassaria (The Coffer, 1508), while La Vacca`ria is based on Asinaria. In the first comedy, the scheme recognition/wedding of the classical tradition acquires new vigor thanks to the vibrant dialogue in dialect, while in the second work Beolco’s creative skill stages a strategic encounter between the Tuscan of the masters and the procuresses and the expressive dialect of the servants and parasites in which shrewdness and instincts live together without mediation. Ruzzante’s theater, in conclusion, must be always traced back to its performative dimension, and to the link that the text seems to maintain with the body of the actor. As Richard Andrews has written, Ruzzante ‘‘threw all his effort and skill into formulating performance texts which were only partly verbal, and which were tailored carefully for particular actors, a particular audience, and a particular occasion’’ (Scripts and Scenarios, 1993). 1639

IL RUZZANTE (ANGELO BEOLCO)

Biography Il Ruzzante was born as Angelo Beolco in Padua, or in the surrounding countryside, in 1496, as demonstrated by notary deeds. His father, doctor Giovan Francesco, belonged to the branch of the noble Beolco family that had moved from Milan to Veneto in 1459; his mother was a maid, Maria, in service of his father’s wife. Brought up in the cultured and refined world of his brothers, he enjoyed the privilege of a small inheritance after his father’s death. He probably made his debut as actor on 13 February 1520, at Foscari palace, Venice. From November 1525, he undertook various trading activities on behalf of the nobleman Alvise Cornaro, his friend and patron. As a regular visitor at Cornaro’s Paduan house, he became acquainted with Pietro Bembo and Sperone Speroni. By 1527, he was married to one of the daughters of Benedetto and Speronella Palatino. While working on the staging of Sperone Speroni’s tragedy Canace, on request of the members of the Academia degli Infiammati, he died in 1542, day and month unknown, in Cornaro’s house in Padua. STEFANO TOMASSINI Selected Works Collections Teatro, edited by Lodovico Zorzi, Turin: Einaudi, 1967.

Plays La Pastoral (1517–1518). La Betı´a (1523–1525). La Piovana, 1548. Parlamento de Ruzante che l’era vegnu` de campo, 1551; as The Veteran, translated by Ronnie Ferguson, 1995. Bilora, 1551; as Weasel, translated by Ronnie Ferguson, 1995. La Moscheta, 1551; as Posh Talk, translated by R. Ferguson in Three Renaissance Comedies, edited by Christopher Cairns, 1991; as La Moschetta, translated by Antonio Franceschetti and Kenneth R. Bartlett, 1993. La Fiorina, 1551. L’Anconitana, 1551; as The Woman from Ancona, translated by Nancy Dersofi, 1994. La Vaccaria, 1551. Dialogo facetissimo et ridiculosissimo, 1554.

Andrews, Richard, Scripts and Scenarios. The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Baratto, Mario, Tre studi sul teatro: Ruzante, Aretino, Goldoni, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1964. Borsellino, Nino, Rozzi e Intronati, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Bullegas, Sergio, Angelo Beolco: la lingua contestata, il teatro violato, la scena imitata, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 1993. Calendoli, Giovanni, Ruzante, Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1985. Il convegno internazionale di studi su Ruzante (1983), Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1987. Il convegno internazionale di studi su Ruzante (1987), Venice: Corbo e Fiore, 1989. De Bosio, Bosio, ‘‘Riflessioni sul mondo e l’opera di Angelo Beolco detto il Ruzante,’’ in Il teatro del Cinquecento. I luoghi, i testi e gli autori, edited by Siro Ferrone, Florence: Sansoni, 1982. Ferguson, Ronnie, The Theatre of Angelo Beolco (Ruzante): Text, Context and Performance, Ravenna: Longo, 2000. Ferrone, Siro, ‘‘Attori: professionisti e dilettanti,’’ in Il teatro del Cinquecento. I luoghi, i testi e gli autori, edited by Siro Ferrone, Florence: Sansoni, 1982. Grabher, Carlo, Ruzzante, Milan and Messina: Principato, 1953. Guarino, Raimondo, Teatro e mutamenti. Rinascimento e spettacolo a Venezia, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Lovarini, Emilio, Studi sul Ruzante e la letteratura pavana, edited by Gianfranco Folena, Padua: Antenore, 1965. Padoan, Giorgio, La commedia rinascimentale veneta, 1433– 1565, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1982. Prosperi, Mario, Angelo Beolco nominato Ruzante, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Sand, Maurice, Masques et bouffons (Come´die italienne), vol. 2, Paris: Le´vy, 1862. Torresani, Sergio, Invito alla lettura di Ruzante, Milan: Mursia, 1994. Vescovo, Pier Mario, Da Ruzante a Calmo. Tra ‘‘signore comedie’’ e ‘‘onorandissime stampe,’’ Padua: Antenore, 1996. Zorzi, Ludovico, L’attore, la commedia, il drammaturgo, Turin: Einaudi, 1990.

LA MOSCHETA, 1551

Other Orazioni, 1551. Littera all’Alvarotto, 1551.

Play by Il Ruzzante

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, ‘‘La riscoperta rinascimentale del teatro,’’ in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, edited by Roberto Alonge and Guido Davico Bonino, vol. 1, La nascita del teatro moderno Cinquecento-Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000.

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In La Moscheta (Posh Talk), described as ‘‘probably Beolco’s comic-farcical masterpiece’’ by Carlo Grabher (Ruzzante, 1953) and as a ‘‘work of his full artistic and intellectual maturity’’ by Lodovico

IL RUZZANTE (ANGELO BEOLCO) Zorzi (L’attore, la commedia, il drammaturgo, 1990), the structure of the erudite Renaissance play in five acts replaces, not without strains, the usual forms of the dialogue. Written in 1528 (although other dates have been suggested), it was performed in the same year in Ferrara for carnival, possibly with Ludovico Ariosto as the speaker of the prologue. The comedy, which cannot be easily classified according to traditional categories, tries to express the power of love with witty remarks, soliloquies, and outbursts of erotic fury that often infect all the characters, in an obvious parody the neo-Platonism then prevailing in Paduan intellectual circles. The action is more dynamic and complex than Beolco’s previous dramatic compositions and is interpreted by characters who belong to the same social class, peasants who have recently moved to the Paduan suburbs. The text presents a dramatic structure in which rustic love, the main theme of the comedy, is played at an obscene and carnivalesque level in a feast for the senses in which the characters are all ready for scenes with a clear erotic content. A balance is found only through the astuteness and the shrewdness of Betı´a’s feminine intelligence (it is not clear whether the role was performed by a woman). On the stage, Beolco himself, as Ruzzante, coordinated the action and the different accents and idioms of the characters. The lustful Menato comes to Padua looking for Betı´a, who, however, prefers Tonin, a soldier from Bergamo, from whom the veteran Ruzzante, Betı´a’s rightful husband, has stolen some money. Menato then organizes a practical joke at Ruzzante’s expense by suggesting that he should test his wife’s faithfulness by disguising himself as a student and talking to her in the moscheta language, the cultured literary and polished language, as defined by Pietro Bembo, instead of the usual Padua dialect. Betı´a however soon sees through the trick and, out of spite, gives herself first to Tonin, and then again to Menato. The copulation with Tonin happens almost under the staring eyes of the husband, in a scene that is probably the most obscene of the whole Renaissance and much more explicit than the similar sequences in Il Bibbiena’s Calandria (The Follies of Calandro, 1521), for example. Ruzzante is forced by Menato to refund Tonin. In the end, during a night out, Ruzzante, assailed by his own fears and cheated as usual, returns home defeated in an almost fairy-tale atmosphere in which he can hardly distinguish dream

from reality. The fifth act, with its night ambushes and blows and Betı´a’s sexual betrayals, in a quick succession of unforeseen events and surprises, tends, according to Giovanni Calendoli, to ‘‘represent a historical situation’’ in which the characters ‘‘belonging to a clearly defined world, the Veneto region in the postwar period, with all its profound upheavals,’’ are no longer hungry, but ‘‘on the contrary have all found a way to settle down in the chaos, and at the cost of a deep moral degradation’’ (Ruzante, 1985). The fortune of this play in modern Italian theater goes back to 1942, on the occasion of the fourth centennial of Beolco’s death, when the Accademia d’Italia sponsored the staging of La Moscheta in an open-air performance under the direction of Renato Simoni. Among the actors were Emilio Baldanello (Ruzzante), Gino Cervi (Menato), Rina Morelli (Betı´a), and Paolo Stoppa (Tonino). In 1956, the director Gianfranco De Bosio staged a memorable performance of the play, first at the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara and then at the Teatro Verde on the Venetian island of San Giorgio, with the actors Cesco Baseggio and Franco Parenti. STEFANO TOMASSINI Editions First edition: La Moscheta, Venice: Alessi, 1551. Critical edition: La Moscheta, in Teatro, edited by Lodovico Zorzi, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Translations: as Posh Talk, translated by R. Ferguson in Three Renaissance Comedies, edited by Christopher Cairns, Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991; as La Moschetta, translated by Antonio Franceschetti and Kenneth R. Bartlett, Toronto: Dovehouse, 1993.

Further Reading Calendoli, Giovanni (editor), Ruzante sulle scene italiane del secondo dopoguerra, Padua: Liviana, 1983. Canova, Mauro, ‘‘1516–1531: ipotesi sull’attivita` teatrale di Ruzante,’’ Rassegna europea di letteratura italiana, 15 (2000), 37–66. Franceschetti, Antonio, ‘‘Aspetti e motivi della ‘Moscheta,’’’ Quaderni Veneti, 27–28 (1998), 191–228. Padoan, Giorgio, ‘‘‘La Moscheta’ da egloga a commedia,’’ Quaderni veneti, 27–28 (1998), 175–189. Puppa, Paolo, Cesco Baseggio. Ritratto dell’attore da vecchio, Sommacampagna: Cierre, 2003. Torresani, Sergio, Invito alla lettura di Ruzante, Milan: Mursia, 1994.

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S UMBERTO SABA (UMBERTO POLI) (1883–1957) such as the sonnet, the canzone, and the canzonetta. However, the young Saba was not drawn to the militant literature revered by irredentist youth; he idolize Gabriele D’Annunzio’s early sentimental strains but rejected the poet’s popular paeans to the superman, sensuality and violence. Saba’s sense of difference, even alienation, is a hallmark of his writing and self-image. Therefore, it is difficult to categorize his poetry within specific artistic groupings or schools given his determination to remain true to his muse. This uniqueness is at the heart of his inspiration and art. Saba enunciated his poetics in an article written for, but rejected by, La Voce in 1911. Quello che resta da fare ai poeti (What Is Left for Poets to Do) proposes the need for poesia onesta (honest poetry) as embodied in Alessandro Manzoni and based on the artist’s quest for personal truth and loyalty to his deepest inner voice. An ardent believer in the need for genuine inspiration, the author rejected any art that is ideological, moralistic, artificial, or exhibitionist, which he labels ‘‘dishonest’’ (as embodied in D’Annunzio). Self-analysis, selfdescription, and autobiographical references are at the heart of Saba’s verse, as he struggled to give sincere voice to his authenticity. His poetry is subjective, confessional, and personal even when depicting a street or a bird. Peopled with the events, locations, and protagonists of the writer’s own existence, it depicted a life richly experienced as observation,

One of the great Italian poets of the twentieth century, Umberto Saba’s inspiration comes, in part, from the ethnic and cultural diversity in which he is born. The only child of a Jewish mother, abandoned by her gentile husband, Saba grows up in the ghetto of Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He lovingly memorializes his Jewish origins in a series of stories written during his youth titled Gli Ebrei 1910–1912 and included in a revised version of the Ricordi-Racconti (Memoirs and Short Stories, 1956). His heritage is further commemorated in his pseudonym: Saba means ‘‘bread’’ or ‘‘abundance’’ in Hebrew but is also derived from the name of his beloved Slavic nurse, Peppa Sabaz, a Catholic. Saba’s discordant ethnic legacy—‘‘due razze in antica tenzone’’ (two races locked in ancient quarrel), as he writes in Autobiografia (Autobiography, 1924)—and dysfunctional childhood would impact the writer for life, as did his roots in Trieste. Saba was nurtured on the Italian classics, especially Francesco Petrarca, Giuseppe Parini and the great Romantics Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and Alessandro Manzoni. He remains attached to the ‘‘golden thread’’ of the Italian canon, including a marked but eccentric partiality for eighteenth-century melic poetry, as witnessed in Preludio e canzonette (Prelude and Little Songs, 1923) and Preludio e fughe (Prelude and Fugues, 1928). He continued to employ traditional forms and meters for decades, preferring formal genres 1643

UMBERTO SABA (UMBERTO POLI) attachment, and emotions rather than as action and adventure. For example, in Trieste e una donna (Trieste and a Woman, 1910–1912) the poems form a short verse novel told in Bergsonian patterns of time and memory, as autobiography is transformed into art in a declared fusion of cityscape, love story, and subjective lyricism. One recurring aspect of Saba’s thematics is his fascination with family, infancy, and childhood. Numerous poems are dedicated to his mother, wife, and daughter, as the poet developed a personal mythology where the feminine is antithetically depicted as both refuge and otherness. As early as ‘‘La casa di mia nutrice’’ (My Nurse’s House), written in 1901, Saba described the wonder of a child’s discovery of the outside world. Not surprisingly, the poet’s subjectivity involved subconscious, subliminal aspects. The parent-child relationship haunted Saba, eventually becoming a main theme of the sonnet cycle Autobiografia, in which he first explores the mythic polarity of the absent father and the self-sacrificing but distant mother. After undergoing psychoanalytic therapy and studying Freud, childhood trauma and development inspire Il piccolo Berto (Little Berto, 1929–1931), the lyrics of which focus on Saba the child, viewed from the perspective of psychic conflict and unresolved psychological dichotomies. Il piccolo Berto offers an unprecedented convergence of psychoanalysis and literature, preceded only by the novel La coscienza di Zeno (1923), by fellow Triestine Italo Svevo. Not surprisingly, the poet’s wife, Lina, one of his favorite subjects, embodied a maternal quality, as in the famous ‘‘A mia moglie’’ (To my wife, 1909–1910). Commenting on the composition, Saba refered to its child-like character, stating that it was the poem a boy would write to his wife, if he could have one. Theoretically, Saba holds that a poet is a merger of child and man, joined in a harmonious coexistence that is the basis of creativity. Saba’s poetry contains an underlying sense of cosmic pain and suffering that contrasts with love for la calda vita (warm life), one of the recurring dualities found throughout his opus. The poet represented himself and his life as archetypal, connected to mankind’s experiences throughout time. He finds pain in nature, in humanity, in animals, even in inanimate objects, creating a feeling of communal and inescapable suffering, as in the famous ‘‘La capra’’ (The Goat, 1909–1910), in which he elevates a tethered goat to a universal symbol of fraternal misery for ‘‘il dolore e` eterno, / ha una voce e non varia’’ (pain is eternal/ having one voice that does not vary), in a 1644

continuous copenetration of life’s pain and joyous vitality. If Saba’s humanized goat represents a timeless brotherhood of living creatures, other poems portray the subject’s abandonment of dialogue and interaction in favor of solipsism and solitude. The topos of the cuor morituro, or dying heart, emerges as an image of the painful reality of living. Also the title given a collection dated 1925–1930, Cuor morituro signals a change in the rapport between the poet and his beloved ‘‘things.’’ The volume depicts an existential angst and exhaustion that typify many of Saba’s later works. Maturing as a poet and aging as a man, Saba produced darker verse, tinged with melancholy, sadness, and an awareness of loss and decline. But both poetry and prose continued to suggest a collective experience; the poet took on the role of voice for a people in crisis during the years of Fascism and war. The same conflicted world is referenced in the brief compositions of Scorciatoie e raccontini (Shortcuts and Little Stories, 1946). Consisting of aphorisms, commentaries, and jottings on culture, politics, and art, the scorciatoie owe much to Freud and Nietzsche. But in Saba, pessimism is not conclusive, nor is death the denial of life for ‘‘e` il pensiero/ della morte che, in fine, aiuta a vivere’’ (it is the thought / of death, in the end, that helps us live) (‘‘Sera di febbraio’’ in Ultime cose, 1935–1943). Stylistically a shift away from traditional prosody begins with the volume Parole (Words, 1934) as Saba takes note of the lyric revolution wrought by such avantgarde contemporaries as Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, and integrated some of their innovations. His poetry becomes more experimental, less attached to conventional models in its meter, syntax, and rhythms. His basic themes, however, do not alter considerably. Edited by his daughter Linuccia, Saba’s Prose (Prose, 1964) contains most of the writer’s nonlyric production from 1910 to 1957, including short stories, memoirs, critical studies, speeches, and articles. The first section (the Ricordi-Racconti) comprises realistic accounts of middle- and lowermiddle class life in Trieste. There are tales of Jewish secondhand merchants in the old town, poor struggling artists in love, hopeful dressmakers, unhappy wives, and young clerks. These narratives describe small domestic tragedies, the struggles to make ends meet, the love and pain of parenthood, the sly profiteering of merchants. Saba’s memoirs and fiction revisit many of the figures and places found in the verse, from adolescent boys and pretty girls to the narrow city streets, sea, and sky of Trieste. For Saba, even the rejects of society, its drunks and

UMBERTO SABA (UMBERTO POLI) prostitutes, were embodiments of la calda vita, notwithstanding their pain and rejection. Saba’s last work marks both a shift in his art and a return to treasured themes and images. Ernesto is the writer’s only novel, published posthumously in 1975. Composed in a period of relative tranquility, Ernesto is an act of love begun, as Saba puts it, ‘‘in a crisis of maternity.’’ The narrative is a tale of adolescence and discovery, slightly darkened by the protagonist’s encroaching adulthood. The novel is also a controversial work, both thematically and linguistically. Like the short stories written between 1910 and 1913, Ernesto borrowed considerably from the life and persona of its creator. Set in 1898 or 1899, the action takes place in Hapsburg Trieste, long before the catastrophic events of the twentieth century. In part, it is a fictional recreation of aspects of Saba’s own adolescence, broken home, haphazard schooling, and early employment. The narration is penned in simple, unadorned Italian, but much of the dialogue is in Triestine dialect, true to the characters’ reality but far removed from the typical polished, literary transformation of the spoken tongue. This choice is both ‘‘honest’’ and reminiscent of Saba’s lifelong search for chiarezza, an elusive term implying not only clarity of thought and diction, but also immediacy of language resulting in direct, unimpeded communication with the reader. Ernesto is an erotic work that deals with sexuality frankly as the plot follows the young protagonist through a series of experiences with love. Only half of the planned book was completed by Saba; this half deals with the boy’s sexual awakening and instinctual hedonism, leading to a homosexual relationship, followed by visits to a maternal prostitute, and finally, to a Platonic infatuation with another boy. The complete novel would have taken the adolescent through the experience of heterosexual love. This coming-of-age work is explicit for its time and remarkable in its open depiction of gay relationships. The figure of Ernesto concludes the long line of adolescents and boys populating Saba’s verse, inevitably recalling the poet himself, captured in childhood and youth in his extensive autobiographical poetry and memorial prose. Several volumes of Saba’s extensive correspondence have been published and are important secondary sources for understanding the man and the writer.

Biography Born in Trieste on March 9, 1883, to a Jewish mother, Felicita Rachele Coen, and an absent gentile

father, Ugo Edoardo Poli. Publishes his first lyrics in the local Socialist paper, Il Lavoratore. In January 1903, moves to Pisa to pursue university studies in literature; education cut short by his first bout of recurring psychological problems. In 1907–1908 is drafted into the Italian Army, due to his paternally acquired citizenship, and is stationed in Salerno, the background for I versi militari. In 1908, he marries Carolina (Lina) Woelfler in Trieste. They have one daughter, Linuccia. Publishes first volume of poetry, Poesie in 1911 under the pseudonym Saba. The family resides in central Italy, and he contributes to the avant-garde Florentine journal La Voce, whose press publishes his second work, Coi miei occhi in 1912. After another military tour of duty during World War I, Saba returns to Trieste and opens an antiquarian bookshop with an inheritance. The bookshop will become one of the centers of Triestine intellectual life. The first edition of the Canzoniere appears in 1921. Saba is involved in several important exchanges with thinkers and poets like Giacomo Debenedetti, Sergio Solmi, Sandro Penna, and Carlo Levi. The first edition of the Canzoniere appears in 1921. Saba’s fame grows and the journal Solaria dedicates an issue to the poet in 1928. From 1929–1931 undergoes psychoanalytic therapy. A victim of the anti-Semitic racial laws of 1938, Saba flees to Paris then Rome and Florence, where he is hidden by friends, including fellow poet Eugenio Montale, until the end of World War II. The definitive edition of the Canzoniere is published by Einaudi in 1945 and receives the Viareggio prize for literature in 1946, followed in 1951 by the Accademia dei Lincei poetry award, and the Taormina prize. An honorary degree is awarded by the University of Rome in 1953. His mental condition worsens and Saba is admitted to residential clinics, first in Rome then in Gorizia, near Trieste, where he dies on August 25, 1957. FIORA A. BASSANESE See also: Trieste

Selected Works Collections Prose, edited by Linuccia Saba, Milan: Mondadori, 1964. Tutte le poesie, edited by Arrigo Stara, Milan: Mondadori, 1988. La terza stagione di Umberto Saba: Poesie e prose dal 1933 al 1946 (Testi e documenti), edited by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Il Polifilo, 1997.

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UMBERTO SABA (UMBERTO POLI) Tutte le prose, edited by Arrigo Stara, Milan: Mondadori, 2001. Umberto Saba: Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Vincent Moleta, Bridgetown, Australia: Aeolian Press, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1910. ‘‘Trieste e una donna,’’ 1910–1912. ‘‘Preludio e canzonette,’’ 1923. ‘‘Autobiografia,’’ 1924. ‘‘Preludio e fughe,’’ 1928. ‘‘Il piccolo Berto,’’ 1929–1931. ‘‘Parole,’’ 1934. ‘‘Ultime cose,’’ 1935–1943. ‘‘Il Canzoniere’’ (includes all poetry), 1961.

Fiction Scorciatoie e raccontini, 1946. Ricordi-Racconti (1910–1947), 1956; as The Stories and Recollections of Umberto Saba, translated by Estelle Gilson, 1993. Ernesto, 1975; as Ernesto, translated by Mark Thompson, 1987.

Other Storia e cronistoria del ‘‘Canzoniere,’’ 1948; as History and Chronicle of the Songbook, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, 1998. La spada d’amore: Lettere scelte, 1902–1957, 1983. Atroce paese che amo: Lettere famigliari (1945–1953), 1987. Quante rose a nascondere un abisso: Carteggio con la moglie, 1905–1956, edited by Raffaella Acetoso, 2004.

Further Reading Cecchi, Ottavio, L’aspro vino di Saba, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1988. Favretti, Elvira, La prosa di Umberto Saba. Dai racconti giovanili a ‘‘Ernesto,’’ Rome: Bonacci, 1984. Gambarota, Paola, ‘‘Beyond Revealed Religions: Saba, the Creatures, and the Political Animal,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 120, no. 1 (2005): 137–160. Guagnini, Elvio, Il punto su Saba, Bari: Laterza, 1987. Guarneri, Sandro, Umberto Saba e la critica, Prato: Campanotto, 1998. Lavagetto, Mario, Per conoscere Saba, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Lopez, Guido, ‘‘Umberto Saba e l’anima ebraica,’’ in L’ebraismo nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, edited by Marisa Carla` and Luca De Angelis, Palermo: Palumbo, 1995. Maier, Bruno, Saggi sulla letteratura triestina del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Mattioni, Stelio, Storia di Umberto Saba, Milan: Camunia, 1989. Muzzioli, Francesco, La critica e Saba, Bologna: Cappelli, 1976. Pinchera, Antonio, Umberto Saba, Florence: La Nuova Italia/Il Castoro, 1976. Pontiggia, Giuseppe, Introduction to U. Saba, La malinconia amorosa: Poesie 1900–1954, Milan: Rizzoli, 1992. Tordi, Rosita (editor), Umberto Saba, Trieste e la cultura mitteleuropea. Atti del Convegno (Roma, 29–10 marzo 1984), Milan: Mondadori, 1986.

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IL CANZONIERE, 1921; 1945; 1961 Collection of Poems by Umberto Saba

As early as 1913, Umberto Saba conceived the idea of a volume that would encompass his entire lyric production. The idea of a canzoniere, or songbook, is tied to the earliest models of Italian poetry, the most celebrated being Francesco Petrarca’s influential fourteenth-century work. Like the medieval master, Saba constantly revisits individual poems and recasts their placement in order to capture a cohesive development of his life. The first edition of the Canzoniere appeared in 1921, issued by Saba’s own Libreria Antica e Moderna. For historical and personal reasons, the second was published a quarter century later, in 1945. The definitive 1961 edition is posthumous and included his entire output. In addition to amending his poems, Saba also undertook an ongoing weeding-out process. For example, 29 compositions selected under Poesie dell’adolescenza e giovanili (Adolescent and Youthful Poetry, 1900–1907) in the Canzoniere’s first edition are not present in later editions. Reflecting the poet’s youthful imitative phase, many of these eliminated pieces borrowed from Petrarca, Giacomo Leopardi, and Giovanni Pascoli, and were not consistent with Saba’s mature self-appraisal. Similarly, Saba replaced the archaic vocabulary found in earlier versions with more contemporary, colloquial language: Old-fashioned words such as avel (bird), teco (with you) and speme (hope) disappeared. This editorial process of reworking materials gave a linguistic consistency to the poems chosen for the later editions of the Canzoniere. The unity of the volume also derives from the persistence of themes and images throughout a half-century of creativity and from the confessional and autobiographical character of Saba’s lyric voice. The songbook is organized chronologically, and poems from each of the author’s 20-odd ‘‘books’’ or ‘‘groupings’’ are included, dating from 1900 to 1954. Saba divided the Canzoniere into three volumes that cover significant stages in his prosody: 1900–1920, 1921–1932, 1933 –1947. Later lyric collections were added gradually, although they were

UMBERTO SABA (UMBERTO POLI) not part of the 1945 edition: Mediterranee (Mediterranean Scenes), Uccelli (Birds), Quasi un racconto (Almost a Story), Sei poesie della vecchiaia (Six Poems of My Old Age), and Epigrafe (Epigraph). In all, the final version of the Canzoniere contains more than 400 poems. Acting as his own critic and publicist, Saba also composed a unique commentary of his anthology titled Storia e cronistoria del ‘‘Canzoniere’’ (History and Chronicle of the ‘‘Songbook,’’ 1948). Written in the third person, this self-study combines historical reconstruction, biography, and public relations, affording extraordinary insight into Saba’s creative process. In 1948, the author planned an abridged version of this volume, which was edited by Carlo Muscetta and published posthumously in 1963 as Antologia del ‘‘Canzoniere.’’ Here he disclosed some of his preferences and idiosyncrasies, from his predilection for Heine to his adversion to Pascoli. Saba’s literary recognition rests on the simplicity and directness of his discourse, from the adolescent verse to his mature production. His language captures the beauty and poignancy of daily reality, devoid of rhetorical embellishments, aestheticism, or Hermeticism. Saba’s idiom is concrete and selfevident, so much so that he considered giving his Canzoniere the title ‘‘Chiarezza,’’ or clarity. Since the earliest reviews of his poetry, such as Slataper’s for La Voce or Alfredo Gargiuolo’s, critics have accused Saba of being prosaic, naı¨ve, lacking musicality or true poetic diction. On the other hand, Saba himself held that his language was ‘‘honest,’’ true to his subject matter, which is often the celebration of everyday events, familiar places, and unexceptional characters: people he encountered on streets or in cafe´s, household objects, soccer games, domestic animals. He discovered infinite possibilities in common things, viewed not as symbols of emotional states or as projections of an ineffable mystery but as concrete and particular elements. For Saba, objects, people, spaces were beautiful in themselves, even if such beauty was innately sad or tragic, as in his portrayal of poor streets, local drunks, or aging women. Therefore, while some reviewers, including Gargiuolo, may consider for example ‘‘A mia moglie’’ (To My Wife, 1909–1910) unpoetic, even offensive, because Saba compares his beloved Lina to a series of animals (a hen, a cow, a cat, an ant, a dog, a rabbit, a swallow), however, both the woman and the creatures are transfigured into a spiritual communion with nature and God, described in an unrhetorical style. While cherishing the beauty of domesticity, the poet also celebrates, in Versi

militari (Military Verse, 1908), the brotherhood underlying the routine dreariness of a military barracks, in a realistic language, which includes military jargon, slang, dialect, and vulgarity. The elements of honesty, clarity, love for reality, domesticity, communion with nature, and shared humanity reappear throughout Saba’s verse. In one of his final poems, ‘‘Al lettore’’ (To the Reader, 1951), he stated that even if his verse is not beautiful, it is true, for it contains ‘‘un canarino e tutto il mondo’’ (a canary and the entire world). Indeed, Saba’s intimate conversations with the world around him form the basis for his lyric universe. As Antonio Pinchera notes, the Canzoniere is ‘‘a book of stupendous myths and fascinating metamorphoses, the book of the thousand adventures of a soul’’ (Saba, 1976). Saba’s later verse is more melancholic and contemplative, but it remains the expression of his inner life. Saba never surrendered to literary currents (such as Hermeticism). Ultimately, he himself acknowledged his singular voice: ‘‘Amai trite parole che non uno / osava. M’incanto` la rima fiore / amore, / la piu` antica e difficile del mondo’’ (I loved trite words that no one / dared. I was enchanted by the rhyme flower / love, / the most ancient and difficult in the world) (‘‘Amai,’’ 1946). FIORA A. BASSANESE Editions First edition: Il Canzoniere (1900–1921), Trieste: Libreria Antica e Moderna, 1921. Other editions: Il Canzoniere (1900–1945), Turin: Einaudi, 1945; Il Canzoniere (1900–1947), 2nd expanded and revised edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1948; Il Canzoniere (1900– 1947), 3rd expanded and revised edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1957; Il Canzoniere (includes all poetry), Turin: Einaudi, 1961; Antologia del ‘‘Canzoniere,’’ edited by Carlo Muscetta, Turin: Einaudi, 1963; Il Canzoniere 1921, critical edition by Giordano Castellani, Milan: Fondazione Mondadori, 1981; Il Canzoniere 1900–1954, edited by Nunzia Palmieri, Turin: Einaudi, 200. Translations: as Umberto Saba: Thirty-One Poems, translated by Felix Stefanile, New Rochelle, NY: Elizabeth Press, 1978; rpt. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1987; as The Dark of the Sun: Selected Poems of Umberto Saba, translated by Christopher Millis, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1994; as Songbook: Selected Poems from the ‘‘Canzoniere’’ of Umberto Saba, translated by Stephen Sartarelli, Riverdale-On-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 1998.

Further Reading Caccia, Ettore, Lettura e storia di Saba, Milan: Bietti, 1967. Cary, Joseph, Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, 2nd. revised edition, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

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UMBERTO SABA (UMBERTO POLI) Cro, Stelio, ‘‘Umberto Saba,’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 114, Twentieth-Century Italian Poets, Detroit and London: Gale Research, 1992. Ferri, Teresa, Poetica e stile di Umberto Saba, Urbino: Quattroventi, 1984. Gargiuolo, Alfredo, ‘‘Umberto Saba,’’ in Letteratura italiana del Novecento, new ed., Florence: Le Monnier, 1958. Hallock, Ann H., ‘‘Umberto Saba’s Reply to Chaos,’’ in Canadian Journal of Italian Studies, 9, no. 32 (1986): 10–20.

Jones, Frederic J., The Modern Italian Lyric, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1986. Pinchera, Antonio, Umberto Saba, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Portinari, Folco, Umberto Saba, Milan: Mursia, 1963. Savoca, Giuseppe, and Maria Caterina Paino (editors), Concordanze del ‘‘Canzoniere 1921’’ di Umberto Saba: Testo, concordanza, liste di frequenza, indici, Florence: Olschki, 1996. Sla`taper, Scipio, ‘‘Poesie di Umberto Saba,’’ in La Voce, 26, January, 1911.

FRANCO SACCHETTI (CA. 1332/1334–1400) The two great volumes of Franco Sacchetti’s literary work are the Libro delle rime (Book of Poems, 1352–1400), for which the autograph exists, and Il trecentonovelle (Three Hundred Tales, 1390s), for which the earliest manuscript is an incomplete sixteenth-century copy. He wrote also 16 extant letters (mostly after 1378) and Sposizioni di Vangeli (Commentary on the Evangels, 1378–1381), personal and somewhat unorthodox reflections in prose on religious and moral topics tied to Scriptural verses and days of Lent. Sacchetti lived in Florence during turbulent times that included dangerous wars with Pisa, the papacy, and Milan, as well as the Ciompi rebellion. Given his involvement in political missions and administration from the 1360s on, it is not surprising to find strong antiwar statements and other politically engaged poetry and prose, along with his better known lighter-hearted writing. In the beginning of Il trecentonovelle, Sacchetti describes himself as discolo e grosso (unschooled and coarse), but although he had no university training, he was well-read in Italian poetry, knew Latin, and states his admiration for Livy, Valerius Maximus, and Cicero’s De amicitia. His deep interest in contemporary Italian poetry and prose is evident in his own writings. His first work, La battaglia delle belle donne di Firenze con le vecchie (The Battle of the Beautiful Ladies of Florence with the Old Women, ca. 1352), an encomiastic poem in four cantos of ottave, manifests the mix of lyric idealization and grotesque comico-realism that would pervade much of his work. 1648

The Libro delle rime, Sacchetti’s collection of over 300 poems roughly in the order of composition, is remarkable for its formal and thematic variety. The madrigals, caccie, canzoni, ballads, sonnets, sestine, frottole, capitoli, and a 12-sonnet corona, range from stilnovistic love poems to comicly colloquial satires, verse exchanges on literary topics, urgent political exhortations, and melancholy reflections on the world’s corruption and mutability. Sacchetti openly acknowledges his admiration for Dante, whose rime petrose influenced his sestine, and for Petrarch, whose vocabulary is most present in the earliest poetry, but he draws as well on the traditions of comic-realism and the rhythms of popular speech. The Florentine poet Antonio Pucci was one of his friends. Much of his lyric verse was intended for music. Among his best loved poems are crystalline madrigals, set to music by himself or contemporary Ars Nova composers: ‘‘Sovra la rive d’un corrente fiume’’ (On the Banks of a Running Stream), ‘‘La neve e’l ghiaccio e’ venti d’oriente’’ (The Snow and Ice and East Winds); pastoral scenes with lively action and dialogue: ‘‘O vaghe montanine pasturelle’’ (O Charming Mountain Shepherd Girls), ‘‘Passando con pensier per un boschetto’’ (Walking Deep in Thought Through a Little Forest), ‘‘Tra’l bue e l’asino e le pecorelle’’ (Among the Cow and Donkey and Little Sheep); satirical descriptions of contemporary fashions; and exuberant dances: ‘‘Benedetta sia l’estate’’ (Blessed Be Summer), ‘‘Cosı` m’aiuti Dio’’ (So Help Me God), which influenced the carnival

FRANCO SACCHETTI songs of Lorenzo de’ Medici and Poliziano. Sound is extremely important to Sacchetti, who plays frequently with assonance, alliteration, anaphora, polyptoton, puns (‘‘O mondo / immondo / e di ben mondo’’), and lists of names, animal cries, or words of Florentine slang. Over the years, he shifted toward longer and more solemn poems. A late series of capitoli on history, from the Persian kings through the pre- and post-Carolingians, was apparently part of an incomplete project, one more new experiment in form and matter. The same combinations (but now more smoothly merged) of realistic observation, moral reflection and comic satire, of entertainment and serious engagement, shape Il trecentonovelle. The project may have been conceived in the mid-1380s, but the tales (of which 78 are lost and several more are fragments) were written during the last decade of Sacchetti’s life (1392–1399). This was also the decade of Florence’s crucial conflict with Gian Galeazzo Visconti and his lordship in Milan. Franco Sacchetti repeatedly, in both poems and prose, decried war and the folly of those who advocate going to war; the ‘‘Proemio’’ (Preface) of his trecentonovelle offers the collection of tales as a comfort to survivors suffering the miseries of war and pestilence, and eager for a laugh at the oddities of their society. Although Boccaccio is named at the start, there is no narrative framework or order, and no attempt at an elevated prose; totally absent are the Decameron’s romances and tragedies. Rather, the paratactic syntax, personal commentary, and brief but vivid anecdotes more closely resemble the medieval Il novellino. In his 1993 edition of Il trecentonovelle, Antonio Lanza has contrasted Sacchetti’s narrative prose with the Latinized language and selfconsciously complex sentence structures of his contemporary and friend Gherardi da Prato’s Paradiso degli Alberti. Sacchetti, even though he appears as a participant in the gatherings described in Gherardi’s book (set in 1389), writes as if he were talking casually to friends. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars have puzzled over whether the frank and humorous style, with its popular proverbs and colloquialisms, was the result of an artful or unselfconscious naturalness. Sacchetti sometimes links several tales by reference to a theme or character, and often ends with his own personal comments. While his values largely reflect the contemporary mercantile ethic and practical common sense, he is capable of radical remarks, such as the reflection in tale #228 that most wealth and palaces are based on theft. Roughly one-quarter of the tales concern tricks

and jokes, either physical or verbal; others exemplify the risks of dealing with powerful men, the worldliness of the clergy, the tendency of small events to get out of hand, and the importance of recognizing good advice. Set primarily in and around Florence, though also elsewhere in Italy and Europe, the tales are peopled with the entire gamut of social classes but focus chiefly on the urban commercial society to which Sacchetti belonged. We find the wife with a flooded basement, the ambassador who needs a few drinks to be eloquent, the artist annoyed by a pestering public, the butcher trying to hang up a heavy carcass, and the envoy whose witty reaction saves him from an embarrassing fart while bowing to the king. We also find interactions with animals: a boy’s mouse escaped from its cage, a horse that refuses to go, a fisherman’s wife gripped by a crab. Critics have pondered over what, if anything, unifies the collection: a moral attitude, a worldview, a personality, a style, or some combination of all of these? They have argued about how the objective quality of Sacchetti’s presentations relates to the moral stance of his commentaries, and about whether the aim of entertainment or moral example dominates. Bruno Porcelli suggests that both are subordinate to the express aim of telling il nuovo, or the new, the odd, extravagant, or surprising (‘‘Osservazioni sul trecentonovelle,’’ 1969). The first effort at formulating an accurate biography and list of Sacchetti’s works was made by Giovanni Bottari in the preface to his 1724 edition of the Novelle. Although previously unpublished, Sacchetti’s tales were not unknown; they were a source for a number of the anecdotes in Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber Facetiae (Book of Jests) and in Giorgio Vasari’s Vite dei Pittori (Lives of the Painters). It was not until the mid-twentieth century that Alberto Chiari, Ettore Li Gotti, and Vincenzo Pernicone began serious archival research toward a critical edition. Sacchetti, near the end of his life, had rejected requests by his friends for copies of Il trecentonovelle, saying that he preferred to attend to his soul. Fortunately the book survived despite his nonchalance. Il trecentonovelle, with its colloquial phrases, proverbial wisdom, and scenes of daily life, is a treasure-mine for linguists and social historians as well as a delight for readers.

Biography Perhaps born in Ragusa (the modern Dubrovnik, Dalmatia), circa 1332–1334 where his father, Benci 1649

FRANCO SACCHETTI di Uguccione, did business, but he grew up in Florence; was listed in the Arte del Cambio and started a business career, 1351; about the same time he also began writing; married Maria Felice Strozzi, 1354; the couple had two sons, Filippo and Niccolo; became involved in civic affairs during the 1360s: from 1363 until near the end of his life he held administrative positions in the environs of Florence, serving as podesta` of Mangona, Cascia, Casentino, Empoli, Bibbiena, Faenza, and San Miniato; was also sent on embassies to Bologna (1376), Lombardy (1381), Milan (1382), and Genoa (1383). During the 1370s a series of unhappy events beset him: the deaths of Petrarch and Boccaccio (memorialized in canzoni), the war of the Otto Santi, the death of his wife, the Ciompi rebellion, and the capital punishment of his brother Giannozzo for treason. From this period come his letters and Sposizioni di Vangeli. Married a second time to Ghita di Piero Gherardini, 1383; was elected a prior of Florence, 1384; soon after Ghita’s death (1396) married Giovanna Francesco Bruni; his property at Marignolle was destroyed in the fires of war, 1397; was vicar at San Miniato (Florence) when he died in August 1400, probably of plague. JANET LEVARIE SMARR See also: Novella Selected Works Collections La battaglia delle belle donne. Le Lettere. Sposizioni di Vangeli, edited by Alberto Chiari, Bari: Laterza, 1938. Opere, edited by Aldo Borlenghi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1957.

Fiction Delle novelle, 1724; 1795. Il trecentonovelle, edited by Vincenzo Pernicone, 1946; edited by Ettore Li Gotti, 1946; edited by Emilio Faccioli, 1970; edited by Antonio Lanza, 1984; revised edition, 1993; edited by Valerio Marucci, 1996; as Tales from Sacchetti, translated by Mary G. Steegman, 1978; as ‘‘The Book of Three Hundred Tales, Composed by Franco Sacchetti, Citizen of Florence,’’ a selection of 20 tales translated by Simone Turbeville, Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Literature,

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7 (1982); selection in Italian Renaissance Tales, edited and translated by Janet Smarr, 1987.

Poetry ‘‘La battaglia delle vecchie con le giovani,’’ edited by Basilio Amati, 1819; as La battaglia delle belle donne di Firenze con le vecchie, edited by Sara Esposito, 1996. ‘‘Il libro delle rime,’’ edited by Alberto Chiari, 1936; edited by Franca Brambilla Ageno, 1990.

Other I sermoni evangelici, le lettere, ed altri scritti inediti e rari, edited by Ottavio Gigli, 1857.

Further Reading Ageno, Franca, ‘‘Per il testo del Trecentonovelle,’’ in Studi di filologia italiana, 16 (1958): 193–274. Battaglia Ricci, Lucia, Palazzo Vecchio e dintorni: Studio su F. Sacchetti e le fabbriche di Firenze, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1990. Caretti, Lanfranco, Saggio sul Sacchetti, Bari: Laterza, 1951. Corsaro, Antonio, ‘‘Cultura e meccanismi narrativi del Trecentonovelle di F. Sacchetti,’’ in Filologia e critica, 6 (1981): 22–49. Di Francia, Letterio, Franco Sacchetti novelliere, Pisa: Successori Fratelli Nistri, 1902. Li Gotti, Ettore, Il Sacchetti e la tecnica musicale del Trecento italiano, Florence: Sansoni, 1935. Marietti, Marina, ‘‘La Crise de la socie´te´ communale dans la ‘beffa’ du Trecentonovelle,’’ in Formes et significations de la ‘beffa’ dans la litte´rature italienne de la Renaissance, Centre de Recherche sur la Renaissance Italienne, 4, edited by Andre´ Rochon, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1975. Porcelli, Bruno, ‘‘Osservazioni sul Trecentonovelle,’’ in Novellieri Italiani dal Sacchetti al Basile, Biblioteca di Lettere e Arti, 24, Ravenna: Longo, 1969. Rampin, Olindo, ‘‘Rassegna Sacchettiana (1954–1995),’’ in Lettere Italiane, 49, no. 1 (January-March 1997): 113–158. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘Tendenze stilistiche nella sintassi del Trecentonovelle,’’ in Lingua, stile e societa`, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1963. Stanghellini, Menotti, Nuove congetture e interpretazioni sul Trecentonovelle di Franco Sacchetti, Siena: Accademia dei Rozzi, 2000. Tartaro, Achille, ‘‘La carriera artistica di Franco Sacchetti,’’ in Il manifesto di Guittone e altri studi tra Due e Quattrocento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1974. Zampese, Cristina, ‘‘Le ballate e le cacce del Sacchetti,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 160, no. 511 (1983): 321–343.

SACRA RAPPRESENTAZIONE

SACRA RAPPRESENTAZIONE The sacra rappresentazione is a form of religious theater that appeared in Florence in the midfifteenth century. One-act religious plays were known throughout Italy, but especially in the central regions, from the end of the fourteenth century on, but the greatest flourishing of religious theater was in Tuscany in the fifteenth century. There the sacra rappresentazione followed upon the tradition of religious spectacles performed in some of the major churches of Florence, which staged biblical mysteries, most notably those of the Annunciation, Ascension, and Pentecost. The sacre rappresentazioni translated the mysteries into words, often following closely the biblical text. The plays are in verse, generally ottava rima, a metrical form often used in the cantari (popular narrative poetry). Some of the early plays, however, employ other verse forms; the early Festa dei magi (Magi Play), for example, was written in ballad stanzas. In most plays, but not in all of the early versions, the action is introduced by an Angel who delivers a brief prologue; in some plays such as the early Festa di Santa Susanna (Saint Susanna Play), and especially in later ones, there is a prologue in dialogue form. Usually at the close of the play an Angel delivers the envoi (licenza). The action is without formal division into acts or scenes. While there were many occasions in the liturgical calendar that were celebrated with the performance of religious spectacles and plays from the time of the return to Florence of Cosimo de’ Medici in 1434 until the death of Lorenzo in 1492, the most important was the feast of San Giovanni Battista (St. John the Baptist), the city’s patron saint, on June 24. Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475) has left an eyewitness account in his Florentine history (Liber de temporibus Historia Fiorentina) of one such event in 1454, which Nerida Newbigin (Nuovo corpus di sacre rappresentazioni fiorentini del Quattrocento, 1983) has reconstructed convincingly as a cycle of biblical plays representing the story of redemption from the Creation of the world through the Final Judgment. They were performed on edifici, or floats, brought into Piazza della Signoria. Plays performed on such a civic occasion were, at least in part, underwritten by the Signoria. Performances for the San Giovanni Battista celebrations were suspended periodically

between 1476 and 1488 (for fear of contagion, according to some historians; others cite political and economic reasons), but even then sacre rappresentazioni were performed for various religious occasions in churches and at the confraternities; this was also true when public performances were suspended during the brief reign (1496–1498) of the fiery reformer Fra. Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498). The earliest known examples of the sacre rappresentazioni can be dated to the 1440s. The early plays generally took their subjects from the Bible, but later in the century the tradition turned to saints’ lives found in the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend) by Jacopo da Varazze, especially stories of virgin martyrs, such as Agatha, Agnese, Apollonia, Cecilia, and Domitilla, and tales of virtuous women defamed, persecuted, and finally vindicated, such as Stella, Rosana, and Santa Guglielma. This trend coincided with the early years of the printing press in Florence, and the brief texts—usually published as a quarto in eights—served as devotional reading as well as theatrical material. From everyday life the authors drew domestic encounters, social occasions, and street scenes; they introduced familiar characters, to provide local color and humor: doctors, lawyers, shopkeepers, thieves, judges, jailers, servants, nuns, friars, and, frequently, heavenly apparitions of God, the Virgin Mary, saints, and angels. They were infused with the spirit, the ethics, and the experiences of the merchant class. The play by Feo Belcari (1410–1484), Abramo quando volse sacrificare Isaac (Abraham When He Decided to Sacrifice Isaac), performed in 1449, stages Abraham’s obedience to God, but central too is the family drama of Isaac’s obedience to his father and Sarah’s worry when their return home is delayed. Feo Belcari is the best known among the authors working in this genre; besides his Abramo he also wrote plays on the subjects of the early spectacles, the Annunciation, Ascension, Pentecost, one on Saint John the Baptist, and another on Saint George. Antonio di Matteo di Meglio (1384–1448), known as the Araldo, since he was the herald (araldo) of the Signoria, wrote a Rappresentazione del dı´ del giudizio (On the Final Judgment). Another early representative of the tradition was Piero di Mariano Muzi (active 1440s and 1450s), who dramatized the 1651

SACRA RAPPRESENTAZIONE parable of the prodigal son in the Festa del vitel sagginato (Play of the Fatted Calf ), a popular subject later taken up by Antonia Pulci (Antonia Tanini, ca. 1452–1501) and Castellano Castellani (1461–1519/ 1520), both of whose rappresentazioni open the action with a card game, foreshadowing the misadventures of their protagonists and making the story resonate with the experiences of the audience. The plays were performed by male religious confraternities and by young boys’ companies that often specialized in theater. Belcari’s Abramo was performed by the Company of the Purification in their oratory at the friary of San Marco during carnival of 1449–1450. Later, perhaps, but certainly by the early 1490s, the plays were performed in female convents as well: Performances were documented at carnival time 1492–1494 at the convent of Santa Caterina al Monte, known as San Gaggio, just outside the Florentine Porta Romana. As in the case of earlier theatrical traditions, the performances served as part of the educational program for the young, to teach religion and elocution. Antonia Tanini and her husband Bernardo Pulci (1438–1488), who belonged to an important family of Florentine writers in the circle of Lorenzo de’ Medici, added to the genre in the 1480s and 1490s. At least three plays by Antonia and one by Bernardo were published in the first two-volume anthology of sacre rappresentazioni. Bernardo’s play, the Rappresentazione di Barlaam e Josafat (Barlaam and Josafat Play), is based on the legend of Buddha, known in the West in the version of Saint John Damascene. Antonia wrote many plays, often creating strong female protagonists; her most unusual and entertaining work is the Distruzione di Saul e pianto di Davit (Demise of Saul and Sorrow of David). Lorenzo de’ Medici also contributed to the genre with his Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo (The Saint John and Paul Play), which was performed for a private audience by the boys of the Company of the Vangelista for the carnival of 1491, when one of his sons was elected captain of the group. The most prolific writer of sacre rappresentazioni, however, was Castellano Castellani, to whom as many as 17 plays have been attributed. A priest and follower of Girolamo Savonarola, Castellani wrote plays that are ideological and which privilege the themes of Savonarolan religious reform. In addition to a Rappresentazione del figliuol prodigo (Prodigal Son Play), Castellani wrote the Rappresentazione della disputa nel tempio (Disputation in the Temple), the Cena e passione (Last Supper and Passion) and the Rappresentazione della Resurrezione di Gesu´ Cristo (Resurrection of 1652

Jesus Christ). Castellani held a teaching position at the Studio (the early Florentine university) and his plays reflect his learning through frequent recourse to Latinisms (and occasionally Latin) and figurative language of literary as well as biblical origin; yet he also employs expressive examples of popular speech and gruesome scenes of torture. He wrote romance plots not unlike the Santa Guglielma of Antonia Pulci or the anonymous Stella, Rosana, and Santa Uliva (plays relaunched in the twentieth century by the celebrated production in Florence mounted by Jacques Coupeau in 1933, in the cloisters of Santa Croce); however, his Rappresentazione di San Silvestro papa e Sant’Elena (Saint Sylvester and Saint Helen) and the Rappresentazione di Costantino imperatore (Emperor Constantine) are characterized by a more insistent religious message and greater dramatic tension. Among the best known of his plays alongside the Figliuol prodigo, are a Sant’Onofrio (St. Honofrius), a San Venanzio (St. Venantius), a Sant’Eufrasia (St. Euphrasia), and a San Tommaso (St. Thomas). He is probably also the author of the Rappresentazione della conversione di Santa Maria Maddalena (Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene), the Sant’Orsola (St. Ursula), the Santi Grisanto e Daria (Sts. Chrysanthus and Daria), and others, which share his linguistic trademarks and occasionally repeat images and even lines from his known work. Popular in the fifteenth century and at the beginning of the sixteenth, the sacra rappresentazione soon afterward lost its public appeal as the influence of classical Latin and Greek theater encouraged the development of a modern theatrical tradition. Religious theater continued to be performed by the confraternities and in some public venues, but in the new form of commedie sacre or spirituali (sacred or spiritual comedies) that imitated the classics as well; generally written in prose, they are divided into acts and scenes, contain subplots and musical intermedi (entr’actes). Yet sacre rappresentazioni continued to be published. The Giunta Press in Florence produced a three-volume collection of sacre rappresentazioni, containing also a small number of commedie sacre, in 1555, 1560, and 1578; and in the next two decades the Florentine publishers Jacopo Chiti and Giovanni Baleni followed with their own. Throughout the sixteenth and for most of the seventeenth century these early religious plays were reprinted, testifying to a continued demand, if not by the secular public, by members of female religious houses for whom theater was an important part of the education of their young members and served as entertainment for their

SACRA RAPPRESENTAZIONE communities, as they were increasingly closed off from the secular world in the post-Tridentine era. Giorgio Vasari describes in detail the stage machinery built for early Florentine religious spectacles in his biographies of Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) and Francesco di Giovanni, known as Cecca (1447–1488), published in Part Two of Le vite de’ piu` eccellenti architetti, pittori, e scultori italiani da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (1550 and 1568), the book known in English as Lives of the Artists. The Russian bishop Abraham of Suzdal, who took part in the Council of Florence in 1439, has left an elaborate account of the production of an Annunciation play. These accounts may provide some idea of how the sacre rappresentazioni were performed, though they were probably not often, if ever, such elaborate events as the earlier religious spectacles they describe. Little information remains about the productions of sacre rappresentazioni, and most of what we have is found in surviving manuscript copies of the plays. Some manuscripts of convent provenance list costumes and props and allude to the sets and occasions of performance; they give names of the actresses alongside their speeches, and they often mention intermittent instrumental music, songs, and dance. Songs, primarily laude (hymns of praise), sometimes followed the plays, and there is some evidence that early plays were entirely sung, probably in psalmody, but this does not seem to be the case of the plays that were performed in Florence at civic festivities. Bibliographers, such as Paul Colomb de Batines and Alfredo Cioni and the literary historian Alessandro D’Ancona provided the initial impetus for the re-evaluation of the genre. D’Ancona published the most thorough anthology (Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI raccolte e illustrate, 1872) and historical study (Origini del teatro italiano, 1877, 1891). Several smaller anthologies appeared in the twentieth century, privileging the plays of Feo Belcari, Antonia and Bernardo Pulci, and Castellano Castellani. Important new work regarding the purpose, occasions, and methods of performance has been published by Nerida Newbigin, Paola Ventrone, and Konrad Eisenbichler. ELISSA B. WEAVER Further Reading Banfi, Luigi (editor), Sacre rappresentazioni del Quattrocento, Turin: UTET, 1963.

Bonfantini, Mario (editor), Le sacre rappresentazioni italiane: raccolta di testi dal secolo XIII al secolo XVI, Milan: Bompiani, 1942. Cioni, Alfredo, Bibliografia delle sacre rappresentazioni, Florence: Sansoni Antiquariato, 1961. Colomb de Batines, Paul, Bibliografia delle antiche rappresentazioni sacre e profane stampate nei secoli XV e XVI, Florence: La Societa` Tipografica, 1852. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI raccolte e illustrate, 3 vols., Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1872. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Origini del teatro italiano, 2 vols., Turin: Loescher, 1971 (rpt. of 1891). Eisenbichler, Konrad, The Boys of the Archangel Raphael: A Youth Confraternity in Florence, 1411–1785, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1998. Guarino, Raimondo (editor), ‘‘Per una morfologia della sacra rappresentazione fiorentina,’’ in Teatro e culture della rappresentazione: Lo spettacolo in Italia nel Quattrocento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988. Konigson, Elie, L’espace the´aˆtral me´die´vale, Paris: Ed. du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1975. Lommatzsch, Erhard (editor), Beitra¨ge zur a¨lteren Italianischen Volksdictung untersuchungen und texte, no. 17, vol. 4, part 2, Sacre Rappresentazioni, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1963. Molinari, Cesare, Spettacoli fiorentini del Quattrocento: Contributi allo studio delle sacre rappresentazioni, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1961. Newbigin, Nerida (editor), Nuovo corpus di sacre rappresentazioni fiorentini del Quattrocento, Bologna: Commissione per i Testi di Lingua, 1983. Newbigin, Nerida, Feste d’ Oltrarno: Plays in Churches in Fifteenth-Century Florence, 2 vols., Florence: Olschki, 1996. Ponte, Giovanni, Attorno al Savonarola: Castellano Castellani e la sacra rappresentazione in Firenze tra ‘400 e ‘500, Genoa: Fratelli Pagani Tipografi Editori, 1969. Ponte, Giovanni (editor), Sacre rappresentazioni fiorentine del Quattrocento, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Pulci, Antonia, Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival: Seven Sacred Plays, annotated and translated by James Wyatt Cook, edited by James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Salvadori, Corinna, Lorenzo de’ Medici: Selected Writings, edited with an English verse translation of the Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo, Dublin: Belfield Italian Library, 1992. Toschi, Paolo (editor), L’antico dramma sacro italiano, 2 vols., Florence: Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 1926. Ulysse, Georges, ‘‘Un couple d’ e´crivains: Les sacre rappresentazioni de Bernardo et Antonia Pulci,’’ in Les femmes e´crivains en Italie au Moyen Age et a` la Renaissance, Actes du Colloque International Aix-en-Provence, 12, 13, 14 novembre 1992, Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Universite´ de Provence, 1994. Ventrone, Paola, Gli araldi della commedia: Teatro a Firenze nel Rinascimento, Ospedaletto (Pisa): Pacini Editore, 1993. Weaver, Elissa, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

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EMILIO SALGARI

EMILIO SALGARI (1862–1911) Prolific travel and adventure novelist Emilio Salgari wrote approximately 80 novels and 150 short stories. Despite critical disdain and the disapproval of contemporary pedagogical schools, these works aimed at a young audience have been continually reissued. Salgari’s early serialized stories, Tay-see and I selvaggi della Papuasia (The Primitives of Papua) were published in 1883 in the weekly magazines La Nuova Arena and La Valigia. From the start, Salgari was well-informed, precise, even didactic, a close reader of the reality he is describing. He assumed the attitude of an anthropologist who appreciated that strange lands and populations have in fact their own rules, their own language, their own culture; he was a Darwin visiting unknown countries, studying its flora and fauna, taking notes. He did not use exotic locales simply as a setting for his stories, but tried to describe and understand them on their own terms. His complex attitudes showed the combined influence of Italian positivismo, especially the work of anthropologist Cesare Lombroso and philosopher Roberto Ardigo`, who posited experience as the only source of knowledge, and of verismo, the literary style that considered the primitive and the elemental as expressions of truth not altered by the social superstructure. Indeed, Salgari’s debut occurs at the same time when Giovanni Verga’s Preface to I Malavoglia (the manifesto verista) is published. Salgari, an insatiable reader, learned how to dramatize these attitudes from his literary model, the French writer Eugene Sue (1804–1857). He adapted Sue’s techniques to his own purposes: describing historical subjects and adventures in a heightened dramatic manner; dividing the world into Good and Evil, with pure, good heroes and fascinating evildoers; using the roman-feuilleton, the new technique of the serial novel published in newspapers, as a vehicle of social criticism. Sue’s Les Myste`res de Paris (The Mysteries of Paris, 1842), a story set in the Parisian slums, was especially important in Salgari’s formation. But his work also shows the influence of the narrative energy and the suspenseful and imaginative fables of Alexandre Dumas (1802– 1870). Once Salgari became a regular contributor to La Nuova Arena, he published a cycle called La Tigre della Malesia (The Tiger of Malaysia, 1883), 1654

which features his most popular and beloved character, Sandokan (the Tiger of Malaysia), the son of a rajah of a Malaysian kingdom. The events take place in 1849 when the British Empire begins its rule of Malaysia. Sandokan’s father receives every assurance of friendship and protection from the English governor, Lord James Brooke, but Sandokan’s family is killed under the eyes of the guards assigned to protect them. Raised by his schoolmaster, Sandokan lives on the island of Mompracem, thinking of the death of his family and resolved to find out why Brooke betrayed his father. Sandokan fights as a pirate to free his country from British rule. Sandokan fights until he meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl named the Pearl of Labouan, but who is actually English, and, moreover, Lord Brooke’s niece. With its theatrical dialogue and a prose rich in detailed, even Baroque descriptions of interiors, settings, characters, objects, colors, the series was a great success. Sandokan is a romantic hero whose ethical code is based on a strong sense of friendship, courage, honor, and a deep scorn for riches, arrogance, and dishonesty. Lord Brooke is the complete opposite: a self-controlled, elegant Victorian civil servant, ready to do anything to maintain his power. As we are told, Brooke, a kind of Conradian Kurtz, is in Malaysia as ‘‘un emissario della pieta`, della scienza, del progresso e del diavolo sa cosa altro’’ (an emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else). This tale about the negative consequences of European colonialism appeared during the administration of Francesco Crispi, who supported an aggressive foreign policy in Africa. The series was issued as a book with the title I pirati della Malesia (The Pirates of Malaysia, 1897). Sandokan’s story was a simple but useful frame for succeeding adventures. In the 11 books that follow, Salgari has Sandokan fight the Thugs in India, sorcerers, the descendant of Circe, and various lost peoples. Salgari was perfectly aware of the geopolitical problems of his age. His views on colonialism are especially clear in Le stragi delle Filippine (The Massacres in the Philippines, 1898), a story about the 1896–1897 Philippine revolt against Spanish rule. The author clearly champions Romero Ruiz, the native leader of the revolt. During the early

EMILIO SALGARI 1890s Salgari published three other novels: Il continente misterioso (The Mysterious Continent, 1892), which is set in Australia; Il tesoro del Presidente del Paraguay (The Treasure of the President of Paraguay, 1892); and a collection of stories about the sea, Le novelle marinaresche di Mastro Catrame (The Sea Stories of Master Tar, 1892). Notwithstanding the popularity of his books, Salgari made little money on these popular works, due to the deceptive publishing contracts. While the early novels were intended for adults, Salgari began to write for younger readers with the Sandokan romances and with a new series, Il Corsaro Nero (The Black Pirate, 1899), which has a magnificent pirate hero who sails the nineteenthcentury Caribbean. Between 1907 and 1911, Salgari wrote 19 novels for the publisher Bemporad. Notwithstanding the hostility and scorn of the literary work, these tales for children and young adults attracted a large adult audience that eventually led to the retelling of the stories in other media, in comic book, radio, film, and television versions.

Selected Works

Biography

Further Reading

Born in Verona, 21 August 1862. Studied at the Royal Naval Institute Paolo Sarpi in Venice, 1878. In 1892, he married Ida Peruzzi; in 1894, moved with his family to Turin, and in 1898 to Genoa. In the summer of 1903, the financial difficulties grow more and more; his wife has a serious nervous breakdown, and is committed to a psychiatric asylum. Collaborator to various newspapers and magazines, among which La Nuova Arena and La Valigia. In 1910, his wife’s health worsens; in 1911 her internment for life is decided; unable to live without her, and deeply in debt, he writes a final letter to his publisher and family, and with a medieval Japanese technique, commits suicide in Turin, 25 April 1911. STEFANO ADAMI

Collections Il primo ciclo della giungla, 2 vols., edited by Mario Spagnol, Milan: Mondadori, 1969. Il ciclo dei Corsari, Milan: Mondadori, 1970. Il secondo ciclo della giungla, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Il ciclo del west, Milan: Mondadori, 1972. Romanzi d’Africa, Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Romanzi di guerriglia, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1974. Tutti i racconti e le novelle di avventure, Milan: Mursia, 1977.

Fiction Tay-see, 1883. I selvaggi della Papuasia, 1883. La Tigre della Malesia, 1883. La scimmia di Budda, 1890. I pescatori di balene, 1891. Il continente misterioso, 1892. Il tesoro del Presidente del Paraguay, 1892. Le novelle marinaresche di Mastro Catrame, 1892. I misteri della giungla nera, 1895. I pirati della Malesia, 1897. Le stragi delle Filippine, 1898.

Arpino, Giovanni, Vita, sciagure e tempeste di Salgari, il padre degli eroi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1982. Beseghi, Emy (editor), La Valle della Luna: Avventura, esotismo, orientalismo nell’opera di Emilio Salgari, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992. Carloni, Massimo, ‘‘Nazionalismo, eurocentrismo, razzismo e misoginia nel ‘Ciclo del Far West’ di Emilio Salgari,’’ in Problemi, 97 (1993): 27–36. Di Biase, Carmine, Il Caso Salgari: Atti del Convegno, 3–4 aprile 1995, Naples: CUEN, 1997. Gonzato, Silvino (editor), Omaggio a Salgari: Io sono la tigre. Atti del Convegno Nazionale di Verona, 26 gennaio 1991, Verona: Banca Popolare di Verona, 1991. Innocenti, Orsetta, La letteratura giovanile, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991. Pozzo, Felice, Emilio Salgari e dintorni, Naples: Liguori, 2000. Sarti, Vittorio, Nuova Bibliografia Salgariana, Turin: Sergio Pignatone Editore, 1994. Traversetti, Bruno, Introduzione a Salgari, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1989.

1655

SALIMBENE DA PARMA (OGNIBENE DE ADAM)

SALIMBENE DA PARMA (OGNIBENE DE ADAM) (1221–CA. 1288) Known for his sole extant work, the Cronica (Chronicle, ca. 1282–1287), Salimbene da Parma is our principal witness to several of the leading personalities shaping thirteenth-century society. His detailed and often spirited firsthand accounts supply invaluable insights into one of the most turbulent periods of French and Italian history and, since he was a second-generation Franciscan friar, a unique perspective on the Order of the Friars Minor in the years directly following the death of Saint Francis of Assisi. Intertwining annalistic history with personal memoir, spiritual piety with quotidian cares and delights, Salimbene’s Cronica offers modern readers a comprehensive portrait of late medieval politics, religion, and culture. All that is known of Salimbene’s life and works comes directly from the autobiographical references contained within his Cronica. Though Salimbene frequently alludes to having composed other chronicles, most notably the XII scelera Friderici imperatoris (The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II, ca. 1248), all of these works have been lost to posterity. The Cronica itself survives in a single mutilated copy from the Vatican Archives (Vat. Lat. 7260), which, due to its lack of copyist errors, is assumed to have been penned by the author’s own hand. Missing from the autograph edition are the first 207 pages, presumably containing a prologue and introduction to universal history, entries for the years 1283–1288, as well as the final 14 pages. In its present form, the Cronica spans the years from the founding of the city of Alessandria by the Lombard League in 1168 up until the siege of Montecavallo in June 1288. Although the Cronica is organized annalistically, the highly subjective nature of Salimbene’s narrative choices and sources—firsthand observation and popular folklore mixed in with imperial and ecclesiastical data—results in a work that, in both flavor and scope, stretches far beyond the parameters of strictly objective history. The Cronica is as significant for what it contains as for what it omits. Distrusting the veracity of indirect sources and expressing a strong preference 1656

for anecdotes culled from personal experience, Salimbene nevertheless makes frequent recourse to parallel works by authors such as Sicardo da Cremona, Milioli da Reggio, Martin of Troppau, and Vincent of Beauvais. Unlike his contemporaries, who peppered their works with references to ancient literary authorities, Salimbene limits his allusions to small doses of Juvenal, Cato, and Claudian, betraying either the shortcomings of his educational formation or a disdain for classical erudition. Scriptural citation and biblical aphorisms fill the void, often leading to prolonged digressions into commentary, sermonizing, and personal association. Most surprisingly, however, is the intrusion of popular culture. His Latin prose is infused with the parlance of his times, oscillating between the didactic sermo humilis of a preacher and the goliardic verses of vernacular lyrics. On the linguistic level alone, the fluid traffic between secular and nonsecular influences supplies modern scholars with a precious snapshot of the various forces informing the emerging Italian vernacular. Today, critics still battle over the relative degree to which Salimbene’s prose reflects the aristocratic prejudices of his upbringing or a sincere mendicant ethos. Of note is the curious suppression of hagiographic material pertaining to the founder of his order, Saint Francis of Assisi. Despite the dearth of explicit references, the saint’s presence can be felt emanating from his direct pupils and subsequent followers, fueling the raging battles between spiritualist friars and papal authorities and, significantly, structuring the autobiography of the author. The initial pages of the Cronica tell the tale of a young man of noble birth who, not unlike Saint Francis himself and contrary to his father’s objections and expectations for the family’s last viable male heir, is nonetheless spurred by religious zeal to join the Mendicant Order. When he meets the last brother to receive his investiture directly from Saint Francis—a pious man who notes that the novitiate’s given name, Ognibene (Every-good), is appropriate for only God himself—our narrator changes his name definitively to Salimbene (Leap-into-good).

SALIMBENE DA PARMA (OGNIBENE DE ADAM) His subsequent travels bring him in direct contact with some of the most influential members of the Franciscan clergy, and his candid impressions of Joachite preachers such as Girardino da Borgo San Donino, Hugh of Digne, and rulers such as Louis IX and Frederick II shed light on the spiritual idealism and political machinations at work in the early years of the order. Materializing alongside these medieval kings, emperors, prophets, and saints, Salimbene leaves us an intimate portrait of himself—a garrulous individual, a lover of fine food and drink, song, and play, as well as salvation and edification.

Biography Born Ognibene de Adam in Parma to an affluent family with close ties to papal and imperial courts on October 9, 1221; attended spiritual revival known as the Alleluia, 1233; spurred on by the example set by his older brother Guido and despite petitions to intercede against his son’s wishes made by his father to Emperor Frederick II, at 17 left home to join the Franciscan Order of the Friars Minor, February 4, 1238; Salimbene was then sent to the Monastery of Fano on the Adriatic coast to thwart efforts by his father to remove him from the order; completed novitiate at Fano, studied music at Lucca, and in the following years traveled to convents in Jesi, Siena, and Pisa; returned briefly to Parma as Emperor Frederick II led his assault against the rebellious city, 1247; shortly thereafter departed for Paris to complete his theological studies and perhaps to deliver correspondences from the besieged citizenry to Pope Innocent IV in Lyons; resumed peripatetic life visiting newly founded Franciscan convents across France, met King Louis IX, and was influenced by notable followers of Gioacchino da Fiore including, among others, Giovanni da Borgo San Donnino, Giovanni da Parma, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, and Hugh of Digne; returned to Italy and, though he never held office in the order, was ordained priest in Genoa, 1248; participated in procession of the flagellants at Sassuolo and, following the death of Frederick II, became disenchanted with Joachite prophecy,

1260; left behind itinerant existence and permanently retired to Reggio Emilia, 1279–1287; worked on the Cronica from around 1282 until his death. Died, most probably, in Montefalcone in 1288. SARA E. DI´AZ Selected Works Cronica (ca. 1282–1287); as Cronica fratris Salimbene de Adam Ordinis minorum, edited by Oswald Holder Egger, 3 vols., Hannover: Hahnian, 1905–1913; as The Chronicle of Salimbene de Adam, translated by Joseph L. Baird, Giuseppe Baglivi and John Robert Kane, Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1986. Cronica, edited by Giuseppe Scalia, 2 vols., Turnholt: Brepols, 1998–1999. Salimbene de Adam, edited and translated from Latin into Italian by Claudia Sebastiana Nobili, Rome: Istituto poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 2002.

Further Reading Apollonio, Mario, Uomini e forme nella cultura italiana delle origini: storia letteraria del Duecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1934. Carile, Antonio, Salimbene e la sua sua opera storiografica: dalle lezioni tenute alla Facolta di magistero dell’Universita` di Bologna nell’anno accademico 1970–1971, Bologna: Patron, 1971. D’Alatri, Mariano, La cronaca di Salimbene: personaggi e tematiche, Rome: Istituto Storico dei Cappuccini, 1988. Momigliano, Attilio, ‘‘Motivi e forme della Cronica di Salimbene,’’ in Cinque saggi, Florence: Sansoni, 1945. Paul, Jacques, ‘‘L’e´loge des personnes et l’ide´al humain au XIII sie`cle d’apre`s la Chronique de fra Salimbene,’’ in ˆ ge, 73 (1967): 403–430. Le Moyen A Scivoletto, Nino, Fra Salimbene da Parma e la storia politica religiosa del secolo decimoterzo, Bari: Laterza, 1950. Violante, Cinzio, ‘‘Motivi e carattere della Cronica di Salimbene,’’ in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 22 (1953): 108–154. Violante, Cinzio, La cortesia chiericale e borghese nel Duecento, Florence: Olschki, 1995. West, Delno C., ‘‘The Present State of Salimbene Studies with a Bibliographical Appendix of Major Works,’’ in Franciscan Studies, 32 (1972): 225–241. West, Delno C., ‘‘Between Flesh and Spirit: Joachite Pattern and Meaning in the Cronica of Fra Salimbene,’’ in Journal of Medieval History, 3 (1977): 339–352.

1657

LITERARY SALONS

LITERARY SALONS That revision of the Italian literary canon which has focused upon the protagonism of women has recently been enriched by the study of salons and the discovery of the lives of the salonnie`res of the modern age. These terms derive from pre-Revolutionary French culture and history, when aristocratic women hosted writers, philosophers, and politicians in their palaces, which were as close as possible to the royal court. Letters and novels document the customs, rules, and protagonists of the salons, which French historians have summarized through the term sociabilite´. The salons were a great and complex space and place of public conversation, meeting, and social education of individuals, which developed before the birth of the public role of the upper middle class. In French and premodern Italy, salons were dominated by women: Madame du Deffand, for instance, and Cristina of Sweden are remarkable examples of famous salonnie`res, who opened their homes to intellectuals during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The latter’s salon, which Cristina established in Rome, leaves us in no doubt about the double image of the academy-salon, which both promoted the development of the Arcadian Academy and hosted women poets who had been previously excluded by male-centered laws. The salon became a space of social conversation and relationships dominated by the lady of the house, whose cultural education preserved and guaranteed good manners and an aristocratic style of life based on kindness, moderation, and discretion. Under the influence and patronage of the salonnie`res, intellectuals and political men began to consider the salon’s rules social categories of modern citizenship, thus lending a paradoxically public role to the private salons in modern Europe. The salonnie`res’ memoirs and letters are remarkable documents that record the life and style of the salons and, above all, are portraits of many of the salonnie`res themselves. Entertaining people and reading literary or philosophical texts aloud were the most important activities of a salon before and after the birth of modern journalism. Because of the significant role played by social and cultural places devoted to conversations, meeting, and debates, the major studies on salons have focused not on archival documents, 1658

but on the intersections of biographies, autobiographies, portraits, private letters, diaries, and unpublished writings. The lack of national unification and a single capital did not pose a serious obstacle to the formation of salons in Italy. Rather, it was the cause of the affirmation of various models of salons in different Italian cities, such as in Venice and Milan, until the birth of the modern state. The formation of Italy can be considered both the milestone of the secular history of Italian salons, and the beginning of their decline. After unification, cultural and political debates migrated to newspapers and magazines, as opposed to oral conversation. Before and after the fall of the Serenissima Republic, Venice was the center of famous salons, which were hosted by learned and aristocratic women, who were able to use their intellectual freedom both as salonnie`res and as authors. Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi (1760–1836), friend of Ippolito Pindemonte and Ugo Foscolo, opened a salon at the Ponte de’ Baratieri in 1782 and continued the practice at Calle Cicogna after her second marriage to the Count Giuseppe Albrizzi in 1796 (she had been divorced by her first husband Carlo Antonio Manin, whom she married at the age of 16). She also hosted the writer and scholar Melchiorre Cesarotti. Isabella was both a literary muse and a writer capable of translating those ideas, words, and thoughts, which she gathered from her salon, into her famous Ritratti (Portraits, 1807), which are the monuments to the Venetian conversations held between the Enlightenment and the Restoration. Their literary style, which combines physical and moral description, derives from the classical portrait tradition, but focuses on the characteristics of gentility and affability. Particularly remarkable are Isabella’s portraits of literary women: Vita di Vittoria Colonna (Life of Vittoria Colonna), a famous Renaissance poet, and Ritratto di Giustina Renier Michiel (Portrait of Giustina Renier Michiel), another illustrious Venetian literary woman and salonnie`re. An essay on Opere di scultura e di plastica di Antonio Canova (The Works of Antonio Canova in Sculpture and Modelling), which was translated into English in 1824–1828 after having been published in Florence in 1809, documents Isabella’s critical

LITERARY SALONS propensity to analyze both art and literature in relation to the lives and thought of those men who frequented her salon. The portrait is one of the typical literary genres that flourished in the salon environment: It describes the individual feelings of men strictly observed during conversations and readings and deals with literary or artistic debates. In 1798, Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi herself visited and described an illustrious Florentine salon, that of the well-known countess of Albany. Her private travel diary, Diario di viaggio e visita di Firenze (Diary of My Travels and Visit to Florence), which was unpublished until 1992, illuminates her literary career before she began writing her famous portraits and suggests that the portraits themselves were intended to be read aloud in the salon. Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi’s attention to women’s salons is also illustrated in her portrait of Giustina Renier Michiel (1755–1832), which was published in 1833, after Giustina’s demise. Born into the family of the last Doges of Venice, Giustina married Marco Antonio Michiel and had a long stay in Rome where her husband was the ambassador of Venetian Republic. After separating from her husband, Giustina opened her palace of Procuratia of San Marco to poets, politicians, and artists and hosted an international salon. At the same time, she dedicated herself to cultural studies focused on Venetian history and its declining republic. In 1829, she published her most fascinating work, Origine delle feste veneziane (The Origin of Festivities of Venice). In her portrait of the Venetian salonnie`re and scholar, Isabella focuses on Giustina Renier Michiel’s secret spirit, and underscores that vibrant love of Venice that Giustina infused in her public role of salonnie`re. From this point of view, the portrait becomes the perfect tribute to women writing about the social and cultural activities provided by women themselves. Giustina Renier Michiel is also the protagonist of a biography written by a guest of her salon, the poet Luigi Carrer. The work is a tribute to the activity and vision of a woman and her extreme love of the country. It opens the nineteenth-century tradition of biographies of salonnie`res written by men: Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi (1826–1900), who is the protagonist of Edmondo De Amicis’ Un salotto fiorentino del secolo scorso (A Florentine Salon of Last Century, 1902), and Clara Spinelli Maffei (Elena Chiara Carrara Spinelli Maffei, 1814–1886), whose circle was described in Raffaello Barbiera’s Il salotto della contessa Maffei (The Salon of Countess Maffei, 1895).

Emilia and Clara established two different kinds of Risorgimento salons. Both were considered sources of the political formation of the Italian e´lite. Emilia Toscanelli and her husband Ubaldino Peruzzi, both a member of Conservative Party after the unification and mayor of the city of Florence, hosted a famous salon in Turin and Florence, the two capitals of Italy before the conquest of Rome. Their Villa of Antella was the typical site of those political meetings during the Risorgimento. The meetings were described by Edmondo De Amicis, whose literary career was encouraged by this important relationship. He defines the Peruzzis as the most influential, remarkable, and attractive of the Italian salons, confirming that, however, ‘‘non si puo` descrivere quel salotto senza parlar prima della signora, che ne fu l’anima’’ (it is not possible to describe that salon without talking about the lady of house, who was its soul) (Un salotto fiorentino del secolo scorso, 1902). Villa of Antella was regularly frequented by politicians of the new state (Marco Minghetti, Pasquale Villari, Sidney Sonnino, Silvio Spaventa, Emilio Broglio), teachers, scholars, and journalists (Isidoro Del Lungo, Renato Fucini, Ruggero Bonghi). Beginning in 1834, Clara Spinelli Maffei, together with her first husband Andrea Maffei, a famous translator of Schiller, Goethe, and Byron, and then with her new companion Carlo Tenca, a well-known literary critic and journalist who was born in an aristocratic family, hosted a salon in Milan. At first, the salon was established in Andrea Maffei’s house, and was frequently visited by many of his friends. After their separation in 1846, the salon was hosted in via Bigli and was recognized as Clara Maffei’s place and influenced by her benevolence and generosity. Until the birth of the nation, the most valuable poets, novelists, journalists, and politicians—both men and women—all visited her, as Raffaello Barbiera recounts in his famous essay: Tommaso Grossi, Giulio Carcano, Giuseppe Verdi, Francesco Hayez, Balzac, Liszt, Eugenio Torelli Viollier and his wife Marchesa Colombi, Neera, Matilde Serao, Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Sofia Bisi Albini, and Emilia Ferretti. The decline of Maffei’s salon began when new trends in literature and politics, such as Scapigliatura’s themes, arose in the context of the Italian nation. In a letter of 1877, Clara Maffei writes that her society is irreparably declining and she is allowing the water to flow down its slope (‘‘la mia societa` sta languendo e direi spegnendo. Io lascio scorrere l’acqua per la sua china’’). From 1870 to 1915, after the fall of the political power of the Vatican, the renowned Caetani palace in 1659

LITERARY SALONS Rome, also known as Latin domus Lovatellia, hosted the salon of Ersilia Caetani Lovatelli (1840–1925). Its doors opened on Thursday and Sunday. The young widow of Giovanni Lovatelli, who died in 1879, and mother of six children, Ersilia Caetani undertook both archaeological and historical studies following the trends of the Roman cultural environment in which the life and works of Theodore Mommsen and Wolfgang Helbig flourished. She became a member of famous academies such as Lincei, San Luca, and Pontaniana. She published scholarly essays and books such as La festa delle rose: Tramonto romano (The Festival of the Roses: A Roman Sunset, 1888), Thanatos (1888), Antichi monumenti illustrati (Old Illustrated Monuments, 1889), Ricerche archeologiche (Archaeological research (Varia, 1905)), Passeggiate nella Roma antica (Walking in Ancient Rome, 1909), Aurea Roma (1915). Illustrious guests of her salon were Giosue` Carducci, Antonio Fogazzaro, whose novel Daniele Cortis was very successful in Caetani’s circle, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Emile Zola, Domenico Comparetti, Angelo De Gubernatis, Costantino Nigra, Maggiorino Ferraris, Eugenia Codronchi Argeli, who described Ersilia Caetani’s salon after her death, and Emma Perodi. The end of this salon at the beginning of World War I coincided with the celebrations for the General Luigi Cadorna’s leaving for the front. Generally speaking, this moment has been considered the sunset of the nineteenthcentury aristocratic salon and its social function of

opinion maker in the fields of culture, politics, and cultural promotion. ANTONIA ARSLAN and DONATELLA ALESI Further Reading Arslan, Antonia, Adriana Chemello, and Gilberto Pizzamiglio (editors), Le stanze ritrovate: Antologia di scrittrici venete dal Quattrocento al Novecento, Mirano-Venice: Eidos, 1991. Arslan, Antonia et al., Gentildonne artiste intellettuali al tramonto della Serenissima, Seminar Proceedings, Venice, 24 April 1998, Mirano-Venice: Eidos, 1998. Barbiera, Raffaello, Il salotto della contessa Maffei, Milan: Treves, 1925. Betri, Maria Luisa, and Elena Brambilla (editors), Salotti e ruolo femminile in Italia tra fine Seicento e primo Settecento, Venice: Marsilio, 2004. Craveri, Benedetta, La civilta` della conversazione, Milan: Adelphi, 2001. De Amicis, Edmondo, Un salotto fiorentino del secolo scorso, Florence: Barbera, 1902; new edition, Pisa: ETS, 2002. Fortunato De Lisle, I. M., The Circle of the Pear: Emilia Toscanelli Peruzzi and Her Salon. Political and Cultural Reflections, Issues and Exchange of Ideas in the New Italy, 1860–1880, Ann Arbor, MI, 1991. Mori, Maria Teresa, Salotti: La sociabilita` delle e´lite nell’Italia dell’Ottocento, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Palazzolo, Maria Iolanda, I salotti di cultura nell’Italia dell’Ottocento: Scene e modelli, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Pizzagalli, Daniela, L’amica: Clara Maffei e il suo salotto nel Risorgimento italiano, Milan: Mondadori, 1977.

CARLO ALBERTO SALUSTRI See Trilussa

1660

COLUCCIO SALUTATI

COLUCCIO SALUTATI (1331–1406) Active between the time of chancellery and the age of Humanism, Coluccio Salutati is a figure who represents two different worlds. He received a notarial and curial education, and in the years between 1355 and 1370 he also studied ancient literature. He thus learned to master the classical style, and in his writings left behind the more common modernus modus. His correspondence, which covers a period of 40 years, can be compared in some aspects with Petrarch’s, as in his letters Coluccio focuses on topics both literary and political that will become crucial in his mature production. Stylistically, he rejected the rhetorical emphasis of Dante and Cola di Rienzo and attempted to emulate Cicero’s style—in particular that of the Epistolae ad Familiares—although he never reached the perfect style of Poggio Bracciolini and Leonardo Bruni. Salutati’s letters address the most diverse subjects, from purely literary issues to political invectives. Among the most remarkable is the one dated January 4, 1376, in which he exhorted the citizens to rebel against the power of the pontiff, and for this reason he was excommunicated by the pope. Salutati’s politics were extremely conservative, always oriented to the protection of privileges rather than improving the conditions of the lower classes or of the merchants. Thus, he fought strenuously the insurrection of the lower classes in 1378 (the socalled Revolt of the Ciompi). He wrote his first important treatise, De saeculo et religione (About the Secular and the Religious State, 1381), after the revolt in order to oppose the widely felt sense of tension and political uncertainty. In its first part, he analyzes the risks of modern life, while in the second he praises the qualities of the monastic condition. Even though the treaty shows strong opinions, pessimism, and rigidity (for instance, in the fierce condemnation of lust that comes close to a wholesale rejection of sexuality), the text can be considered for the most part a tortuous exercise of style. The treatise De nobilitate legum et medicine (On the Nobility of Laws and Medicine) is dated 1399. In this work, the author argues against Bernando di Firenze, criticizing his appreciation for medicine as a practical art. De nobilitate legum et medicinae represents Salutati’s contribution to the debate on the ‘‘arts,’’ one of the most discussed

topics of his time. The writer sides with the speculative arts, considering them superior to the mechanical ones. In 1400, Salutati wrote De tyranno (On Tyrants), in which he defines what a tyrant is, and states that such a figure should not be killed. Subsequently the author gives the example of Caesar’s murder, condemning his assassins as Dante had done by placing them in Lucifer’s mouth in the Comedia. For him, Cassius and Brutus are guilty because Caesar was a legitimate monarch, and a political leader who fought for a just cause. However, in those very same years Salutati himself was fighting the power of Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the ruler of Milan, whom he accused precisely of being a ‘‘tyrant.’’ However, this is not the only novelty in the treatise. In the past, he had repeatedly celebrated the Roman republic in his letters, and clearly this sympathy could not be easily reconciled with an equal sympathy for the man who had contributed in a significant way to its dissolution. Probably the two positions never appeared contradictory to Salutati, who considered Caesar quite separately from his role in the history of Rome, and saw him rather as an emblem of the strong and capable politician. In the Invectiva in Antonium Luschum (Invective against Antonio Loschi, 1402), he rebutted the criticism leveled against him by Antonio Loschi, one of his pupils in Florence, who did not approve his opposition to Visconti because he considered it useful for the freedom and the independence of Italy as a whole. Loschi had encouraged the people of Florence to renounce their desire for independence in the name of the common national interest. Responding to this argument, Salutati argued in his invective that the struggle fought by Florence must be seen as a struggle of freedom against tyranny. Salutati’s last work, De laboribus Herculis (On the Labors of Hercules), should have been, in the author’s intention, his most important. It is a complex mythological allegory that recalls Boccaccio’s Genealogie deorum gentilium (Genealogies of the Gentile Gods, ca. 1350–1360), and was left incomplete at his death. Also incomplete was his answer to the Dominican monk Giovanni Dominici (ca. 1355/1356–1419), who in his polemical Locula noctis (1405) had qualified the importance of classical 1661

COLUCCIO SALUTATI culture and the need for its diffusion by arguing that the ancient stories could distract younger minds from the true religion. The issue had been at the center of the intellectual debate for quite some time, and had opposed Giovannino da Mantova and Albertino Mussato (1261–1329). While respecting it, Salutati could not accept Dominici’s argument, as he believed that the classical tradition constituted one of the highest culture products of all times, which humanity could not renounce at any cost. In any case, the polemic was already on the decline, and the classics were winning over their opponents. In his youth, Salutati had also begun writing poetry, a practice that he continued throughout his life until he decided to burn them because of their limited artistic value. After the death of Petrarch and Boccaccio, Salutati was for 30 years the most noteworthy among the Italian Humanists. His work spanned the medieval world and the humanistic culture. His main contribution is the reappraisal of the Caroline miniscule script, the most diffused writing style for the classics, and his philological work to reconstruct the original text of the Comedia. In this sense it could be said that he created the bases for the broader humanistic culture of men like Leon Battista Alberti, or his pupils Poggio Bracciolini and Leonardo Bruni.

Biography Born in Stignano, near Pistoia, in 1331. Still young, moved to Bologna to study in the school of Pietro da Moglio, who had been himself a pupil of Giovanni del Virgilio. His earliest remaining texts are notarial acts dated back to the years between 1351 and 1353. His political career was always connected tightly to his intellectual production: He began working in the administration of Buggiano, a little town near the one where he was born. In 1367, he was appointed to the chancellery of Todi (1367), then of Lucca (1370–1371), ending his career in Florence, where he arrived in 1374 and maintained his office until his death on 4 May 1406. VALERIO VICARI

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Selected Works Collections Il trattato ‘‘De Tyranno’’ e le lettere scelte, edited by Francesco Ercole, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1942. De nobilitate legum et medicinae. De verecundia, edited by Eugenio Garin, Florence: Vallecchi, 1947. Coluccio Salutati: Editi e inediti latini dal Ms. 53 della Biblioteca comunale di Todi, edited by Enrico Menesto`, Assisi: Porziuncola, 1971.

Treatises De saeculo et religione, 1381; edited by Berthold L. Ullman, 1957. De fato et fortuna, 1390; edited by Concetta Bianca, 1985. De nobilitate legum et medicinae, 1399; edited by Eugenio Garin, 1947. De tyranno, 1400; edited by Francesco Ercole, 1942. Invectiva in Antonium Luschum, 1403; edited by D. Moreni, 1826. De laboribus Herculis, 1378–1403; edited by Berthold L. Ullman, 2 vols., 1951.

Letters Epistolario, edited by di Francesco Novati, 4 vols., 1891– 1911.

Further Reading Atti del Convegno su Coluccio Salutati: Buggiano Castello, giugno 1980, Buggiano: Edito dal Comune, 1981. Craven, W. G., ‘‘Coluccio Salutati’s Defence of Poetry,’’ in Renaissance Studies, 10, no. 1 (1996): 1–30. De Rosa, Daniela, Coluccio Salutati: il cancelliere e il pensatore politico, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1980. Garin, Eugenio, ‘‘Coluccio Salutati e la cultura umanistica agli inizi del ‘400,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, vol. 3, Milan: Garzanti, 1966. Petrucci, Armando, Coluccio Salutati, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1972. Ullman, Berthold L., The Humanism of Coluccio Salutati, Padua: Antenore, 1963. Viti, Paolo, ‘‘L’umanesimo toscano nel primo ‘400,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 3, Rome: Salerno, 1996. Witt, Ronald G., Coluccio Salutati and His Public Letters, Gene`ve: Librairie Droz, 1976. Witt, Ronald G., Hercules at the Crossroads: The Life, Works, and Thought of Coluccio Salutati, Durham: Duke University Press, 1983.

GABRIELE SALVATORES

GABRIELE SALVATORES (1950–) Gabriele Salvatores is one of the most representative directors of the ‘‘New Italian Cinema,’’ the cinematographic movement beginning at the end of the 1980s, and officially established by the mid1990s. In those years, as the national industry was still struggling to exit a long period of crisis, films such as Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso, 1988) by Giuseppe Tornatore, Mediterraneo (1991) by Salvatores, and a little later La vita e` bella (Life is Beautiful, 1998) by Roberto Benigni, achieved an extraordinary international success and collected numerous Academy Awards. It is therefore clear how Salvatores has become a very important figure in the Italian cinema, and one of the most successful authors of his generation. Yet theater had been Salvatore’s first interest and inspiration, and theatrical traces can be found in his first films. In 1972, he founded the Teatro dell’Elfo in Milan, a place of experimentation that became an authentic social phenomenon between the 1970s and 1980s. It was not only very successful in Italy, but soon became a reference point for an entire new generation of spectators. This theatrical imprinting formed also his first full-length feature film, Sogno di una notte d’estate (Dream of a Summer Night, 1983) a rock-musical picture adapted from his homonymous show, and clearly inspired from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The theatrical production was presented in 1981 at the Teatro dell’Elfo, with music by Mario Pagani. The play reached the incredible number of 200,000 spectators and it became the show-manifesto of the group. The cinematographic version, besides the actors of the company of Elfo, stars also the rock singer Gianna Nannini, with Flavio Bucci, and Alberto Lionello. Dante Spinotti is the director of photography, and he capably combines hyperrealism and lyrical visions. Gradually, however, Salvatores moved from theater to cinema direction. He eventually left the Teatro dell’Elfo in 1989, after directing Cafe´ Procope, a show structured as a talk-show set at the time of the French Revolution, starring Claudio Bisio, Gigio Alberti, Antonio Catania, and Bebo Storti. But Salvatores’ first major feature film is Kamikazen: Ultima notte a Milano (Kamikazen: Last Night in Milan, 1987), in which a good part of the cast of Comedians (a preceding theatrical production

adapted from Trevor Griffiths’ work) performs. Kamikazen is a juvenile comedy, which distances the New Italian Cinema from Rome and Cinecitta` as the main centers of film industry, and underlines the beneficial creative contribution of regional production centers such as Milan, Naples, Sicily, and others. Salvatores is by now one of the most prominent authors of this new generation. With Marrakech Express (1989) and Turne´ (1990), he created a personal audience interested in a comic genre that is nonvulgar and attentive to the issues of the youth. Marrakech Express is the story of a group of friends who go to Morocco to help another pal who, after starting a small business, is unjustly imprisoned. The film follows the narrative structure of Ettore Scola’s Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (Will Our Heroes Retrace Their Friend Who Mysteriously Disappeared in Africa?, 1968), and aims to revitalize the tradition of Italian comedy, something also other directors attempt to achieve, first of all Paolo Virzı`. Turne´ is a kind of road movie, since it tells of the love triangle among a woman and two actors of a theatric company that is touring Italy. Salvatores achieved an international success with his third film, Mediterraneo, of what could be called a ‘‘trilogy about exodus and friendship.’’ It is the story of a group of Italian soldiers, who, after a failed military campaign, are abandoned on a Greek island during World War II. It is a highly metaphorical movie, which Salvatores dedicates to those who ‘‘do not agree’’ and are ‘‘on their way to escape’’ from a less and less attractive Italy. The film is introduced by a quote from the French biologist ´ loge de la fuite (1976), which Henri Laborit’s book E was apparently recommended to the director by his scriptwriter Enzo Monteleone. It reads: ‘‘In times such as these, fleeing is the only way to remain alive and continue to dream.’’ In 1992, Salvatores directed Puerto Escondido, from a novel by Pino Cacucci (published by Interno Giallo in 1990), starring Diego Abatantuono, Claudio Bisio, and Valeria Golino. It became a huge success in the 1992–1993 cinematographic season. It is about an Italian man who fled to Mexico after witnessing a homicide. Here he encounters two other Italians who take him into a series of misadventures 1663

GABRIELE SALVATORES and journeys, both physical and metaphorical, including an experience with drugs. Technically speaking, however, the peyote episode is simply an alleged reason for the director to experiment with a ‘‘visionary’’ cinema. In 1993, he shot Sud (South), starring Silvio Orlando, Francesca Neri, and Claudio Bisio as three unemployed Southerners who, as a protest, occupy a polling station during the political elections in Marzameni, a tiny town in Sicily. Due to further complications, the protest ends in a violent confrontation with the police. The film also contributed to the success of the song ‘‘Curre, curre guaglio`’’ (Run, Run, Boy) by the Neapolitan rap group 99Posse, used in the final credits. A creative and aesthetic twist in Salvatores’ production occurred with Nirvana (1997), a sciencefiction story imbued with Zen-philosophy elements (the hero of a video game wants to become a human being). The stars include Christopher Lambert, Diego Abatantuono, Sergio Rubini, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Stefania Rocca. From this moment on, Salvatores’ aestheticism matured as he paid more attention to technological experimentation. The following Denti (Teeth, 2000) is in fact the surreal story of a man’s obsessions, starting, indeed, from his teeth. The protagonist, played by Sergio Rubini, has two enormous incisor teeth, which his girlfriend breaks by throwing an ashtray at him during a fight. He then begins a peregrination from dentist to dentist seeking a cure, but this tour also unveils to him an entire new imaginary world. Amne`sia (Amnesia, 2002) shares with Denti the same attempt of a metacinematographic analysis, since it dwells on the narrative and linguistic structures of cinema. It presents four entwined stories set in the Spanish island of Ibiza, those of a director and producer of porn movies visited by his daughter, the manager of a beach bar, a woman restaurant owner, and a drug addict’s conflicted relationship with his father. Salvatores’ latest film also confirms his research for a stylistic experimentation. Io non ho paura (I Am not Afraid, 2003) is based on the 2001 homonymous bestseller by Niccolo` Ammaniti, one of the young Italian writers included in the group of ‘‘Cannibals’’ (so called because of their devotion to pulp fiction a` la Quentin Tarantino). In the film, as in the book, the protagonist is a child who discovers, hidden in a hole in an abandoned hovel, a young boy who had been kidnapped for ransom. The picture stars mainly unknown actors, with the exception of the Diego Abatantuono, a true representative of much of Salvatores’ work. Quo vadis baby? (2005) is adapted from a novel by Grazia Verasani, a postmodern thriller with a 1664

melodramatic setting. It is the story of a private detective (Angela Baraldi) who investigates a marital infidelity and becomes deeply involved in her own detective story. A series of videocassettes obliges her to confront the memory of her sister (the young Daria Zanella), who committed suicide 16 years earlier. Two characters are involved in her sister’s death: a professor-writer-director (Gigio Alberti, a recurrent actor in Salvatores’ films) and her father (Luigi Maria Burruano), also a private detective. Thus the film comprises family symbols and selfreflective implications (such as the obsessive presence of the television screen). In conclusion, Gabriele Salvatores’ cinema developed from the rethinking of the so-called juvenile comedy and Italian comedy to linguistic and technological experimentation. It is a collective cinema with a few recurrent aspects, which have become almost actual cliche´s, for instance friendship, comradeship, juvenile rituals, and above all journey. The journey, however, focuses on the route rather than the target, which is often set in exotic lands to stress its distance from reality, for example the dreamed India in Nirvana, Greece in Mediterraneo, Mexico in Puerto Escondido, Ibiza in Amne`sia, or even just the southern little village in Sud. On the other hand, Salvatores’ films also aspire to declare a political viewpoint in relation to the historical framework of profound tension and disillusionment in which they are produced.

Biography Born in Naples, on 30 July 1950, he moved very young to Milan where he studied at the Piccolo Teatro. He founded the Teatro dell’Elfo, in 1972 and left it in 1989. He debuted as film director with Sogno di una notte d’estate, which won an award at the Venice Film Festival, 1983; Mediterraneo won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1992. Also directed some operas for the municipal theaters of Bologna and Alessandria; and the concert of pop singers Lucio Dalla and Gianni Morandi, and the video clip of cantautore Fabrizio De Andre`’s ‘‘La domenica delle salme.’’ He currently lives between Rome and Milan. VITO ZAGARRIO Selected Works Films Sogno di una notte d’estate (adapted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare), 1983.

GAETANO SALVEMINI Kamikaren: Ultima notte a Milano, 1987. Marrakech Express, 1989. Turne´, 1990. Mediterraneo, 1991. Puerto Escondido (adapted from a novel by Pino Cacucci), 1992. Sud, 1993. Nirvana, 1996. Denti, 2000. Amne`sia, 2002. Io non ho paura (adapted from a novel by Niccolo` Ammaniti), 2003. Quo vadis baby? (adapted from a novel by Grazia Verasani), 2005.

Screenplays Monteleone, Enzo, Mediterraneo, Milan: Baldini and Castoldi, 1992. Bernini, Franco, Angelo Pasquini and Gabriele Salvatores, Sud, edited by Diego Grazioli, Rome: Ediesse, 1993. Rubini, Sergio, Paolo Villaggio, Anita Caprioli and Gabriele Salvatores, Denti, Cesena: Il Pontevecchio, 2000.

Di Giammatteo, Fernaldo, Dizionario del cinema italiano, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1995. Grassi, Raffaella, Territori di fuga: Il cinema di Gabriele Salvatores, Alessandria: Edizioni Falsopiano, 1997. Macchitella, Carlo, Nuovo Cinema Italia: Autori, industria, mercato, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Marcus, Millicent, ‘‘Mediterraneo and the ‘Minimal Utopias’ of Gabriele Salvatores,’’ in After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore-London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Marrone, Gaetana (editor), New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Annali d’Italianistica, 17 (1999). Martini, Giulio, and Guglielmina Morelli (editors), Patchwork Due: Geografia del nuovo cinema italiano, Milan: Il Castoro, 1998. Merkel, Flavio (editor), Gabriele Salvatores, Prefazione by Michele Anselmi, Rome: Dino Audino Editore, 1992. Sesti, Mario, Nuovo cinema italiano: Gli autori, i film, le idee, Rome-Naples: Teoria, 1994. Zagarrio, Vito, Cinema italiano anni novanta, Venice: Marsilio, 1998; new ed. 2001. Zagarrio, Vito (editor), Il cinema della transizione: Scenari italiani degli anni novanta, Venice: Marsilio, 2000.

Further Reading Apra`, Adriano, Per non morire hollywoodiani: Notizie dal cinema di fine millennio, Rome: Reset, 1999.

GAETANO SALVEMINI (1873–1957) Historian and political writer Gaetano Salvemini was a leading figure of the anti-Fascist movement in early twentieth-century Italy. As a Socialist in the late 1890s he was much influenced by Karl Marx. His first book, La dignita` cavalleresca nel Comune di Firenze (Chivalric Dignity in the Florentine Commune, 1896), on the fading institution of knighthood, reveals two crucial elements of his cultural and political vision: an emphasis on historical interpretation against detached objectivism, and the influence of economic and sociological determinism. It was from his mentor Pasquale Villari that Salvemini learned to combine the rigor of documentation and of logical reasoning with the need for moral and political engagement. With this approach, he rejected dogmatic Marxism in favor of a pragmatic vision of Socialism as activism aimed at reform, and as commitment to the solution of concrete social problems, central among which was the ‘‘Southern Question.’’ A native of Southern Italy

himself, Salvemini investigated the main causes of its isolation and unrest, namely its resentment against an indifferent national government and the appalling conditions of farmers. A strong supporter of universal suffrage, he advocated a connection between the Northern factory workers and the Southern agricultural laborers, calling for both the abolition of custom tariffs protecting industries in the North and the redistribution of land and income in favor of small landowners. Salvemini’s belief in the decentralization of Italian politics brought him close to federalism and to the thought of republican figures of the Risorgimento like Carlo Cattaneo and Giuseppe Mazzini. The volume Il pensiero religioso politico sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini (Mazzini, 1905) marks the first attempt at a historical understanding of the Risorgimento revolutionary thinker in the intellectual framework of his time. Salvemini highlights the influence of Saint-Simon’s utopian Socialism upon 1665

GAETANO SALVEMINI Mazzini, as well as his involvement with the workers’ movements and with the postunification democratic youth. Although Salvemini criticizes the mysticism and the centralization of power at the roots of Mazzini’s republican ideal, he identifies with the patriot’s moral enthusiasm and heroic politics of action, as is confirmed by numerous articles, lectures, and several later editions of his volume. Salvemini’s growing mistrust for political parties and his dissent with the liberal and nationalist orientation of Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti culminated at the time of the Lybian War (1911– 1912), when Salvemini broke with the Socialist Party and founded the newspaper L’Unita`, to which younger Socialists like Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti would also contribute. Salvemini’s aim was to create a secular and progressive public opinion, and to unify a fragmented Italian political culture through democratic ideals against the threat of German militarism and the potential dangers of Italy’s adherence to the Triple Alliance. However, although opposing Italy’s expansion, when Austria declared war on Serbia in 1914 triggering World War I, he supported Italy’s intervention and even volunteered for military service, reviving, as he would later claim, Mazzini’s own interpretation of war as a temporary but necessary tool in view of the ultimate conquest of democracy. A strong supporter of an independent Yugoslavia, as he would extensively state in La questione dell’Adriatico (The Adriatic Question, 1918), he endorsed President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of the self-determination of nations. This provoked tensions with the imperialist position of Benito Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia, the beginning of Salvemini’s fight against what would soon become the Fascist regime. With his 1919 election to the Chamber of Deputies, Salvemini reiterated his hostility to Giolitti’s politics and was confronted with the growing aggressiveness of right-wing forces, a prelude to the Fascist threat that soon led him to seek refuge in Paris and then to emigrate to the United States, where, ultimately appointed as a professor of history at Harvard University (1934–1948), he began a thorough examination of the Fascist phenomenon. From early diary entries (1922–1923) to subsequent volumes like The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy (1927), Mussolini diplomate (Mussolini the Diplomat, 1932), Under the Axe of Fascism (1936), or Le origini del fascismo in Italia (The Origins of Fascism in Italy, 1966)—the first full-length analyses of Mussolini’s regime—Salvemini’s writings 1666

presented Fascism as a complex, evolving movement characterized by internal tensions and despotic pressures. Salvemini denounced the crisis of the pre-Fascist liberal state and the moral bankruptcy of its political class, while laying bare the failure of Filippo Turati’s left-wing opposition. The advent of Fascism, therefore, emerged as the effect, rather than the cause, of Italy’s governmental debacle, and according to Salvemini owed a great deal to the connivance of Italian landowners, the clergy, and high financial powers. From an original standpoint only later endorsed by historians, Salvemini debunked Mussolini as reactionary, by underscoring his revolutionary Socialist past, soon to be neutralized by his countermovement to the right. Likewise, he linked Fascism’s destabilizing foreign policy to Mussolini’s demagogy and opportunism, just as he denounced the Fascist reorganization of Italian production into corporations as an ideological move to broaden the dictatorship’s appeal. Salvemini has been criticized for his inability to turn his anti-Fascism into a consistent political standpoint. Yet, his intellectual commitment went hand in hand with important actions against the Fascist regime, both inside and outside Italy, from the foundation of the Florentine Circolo di Cultura (1923) and the newspaper Non mollare (1925), to the organization of the English ‘‘Friends of Italian Freedom’’ (1928) movement, the Paris-based Giustizia e liberta` (1929) and the American ‘‘Mazzini Society’’ (1939). Although his scholarly and political impact in the postwar years was not comparable to that of the previous decades, with his return to Italy after the fall of Mussolini’s regime Salvemini began to campaign in favor of civil liberties, electoral reform toward a majoritarian system, the project of a European federation, and the construction of a republican movement without either right- or left-wing connotations. His most enduring legacy since his exile, however, remains his enhancement of the interest in Italian history and culture in the American academia. With his analysis of the Fascist phenomenon during the Harvard years, Salvemini initiated a critical investigation into modern Italy that continues to foster new scholarship.

Biography Born in Molfetta (Bari) on September 8, 1873. Studied literature and medieval history at the University of Florence under Pasquale Villari, 1890–1896; married Maria Minervini, 1897; secondary school teacher in Palermo, Faenza, Lodi, and Florence,

GAETANO SALVEMINI 1895–1901; professor of medieval and modern history, University of Messina, 1901–1908; University of Pisa, 1909–1916; University of Florence, 1917– 1925; active in the Italian Socialist Party, 1895– 1911; lost his family in the Messina earthquake, 1908; founded the newspaper L’Unita`, 1911–1920; commanded an infantry platoon in World War I, 1915; married Fernande Luchaire, 1916; elected to the Chamber of Deputies, 1919–1921; lectured in Italian foreign policy, Cambridge University and King’s College, London, 1923; promoted the anti-Fascist movement in Florence through the Circolo di Cultura together with Carlo Rosselli and Ernesto Rossi, 1923; founded the underground anti-Fascist newspaper Non mollare in Florence, 1925; arrested by Fascist police and imprisoned, escaped to France due to an amnesty, 1925; deprived of Italian citizenship and pension by the Fascist regime, 1926; lectured in England and the United States, 1927–1932; founded the ‘‘Friends of Italian Freedom movement’’ in England and contributed to its official publication, Italy ToDay, 1928; organized an international exhibition of anti-Fascist press in Koln, Germany, 1928; with Carlo Rosselli and Emilio Lussu, organized the anti-Fascist movement Giustizia e Liberta` in Paris, 1929; taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, 1929; at Yale University, 1932; at Harvard University, 1934–1948; founded the ‘‘Mazzini Society,’’ an anti-Fascist, Republican, and anticlerical organization, 1939; naturalized U.S. citizenship, 1940; resumed chair of modern history, University of Florence, 1949; retired in Sorrento, 1951; awarded the International Prize for History by the Accademia dei Lincei, and an honorary degree by Oxford University, 1955; died in Sorrento on September 7, 1957. NICOLETTA PIREDDU Selected Works Collections Opere, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961–1968.

Political and Historical Writing La dignita` cavalleresca nel Comune di Firenze, 1896. La questione meridionale e il federalismo, 1900. Il pensiero religioso politico sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini, 1905; as Mazzini, translated by I.M. Rawson, 1957. La questione dell’Adriatico, with Carlo Maranelli, 1918.

Dal patto di Londra alla pace di Roma, 1925. The Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, 1927. Mussolini diplomate, 1932. Under the Axe of Fascism, 1936. Italian Fascism, 1938. Historian and Scientist; an Essay on the Nature of History and the Social Sciences, 1939. What to do with Italy, 1943. La politica estera dell’Italia, dal 1871 al 1914, 1944. Come funziona la dittatura fascista, 1945. Prelude to World War II, 1953. Le origini del fascismo in Italia, 1966; as The Origins of Fascism in Italy, translated and edited by Roberto Vivarelli, 1973. Italian Fascist Activities in the United States, 1977. Il ministro della mala vita: notizie e documenti sulle elezioni giolittiane nell’Italia meridionale, edited by Sergio Bucchi, 2000.

Memoirs Memorie di un fuoruscito, edited by Gaetano Arfe`, 1960. Memorie e soliloqui. Diario 1922–1923, edited by Roberto Pertici, 2001.

Letters Lettere dall’America, edited Alberto Merola, 1967–1968. Carteggio 1912–1914, edited by Enzo Tagliacozzo, 1984. Carteggio, 1914–1920, edited by Enzo Tagliacozzo, 1984. Carteggio, 1921–1926, edited by Enzo Tagliacozzo, 1985. Salvemini e i Battisti: carteggio 1894–1957, edited by Vincenzo Calı`, 1987. Carteggio, 1894–1902, edited by Sergio Bucchi, 1988. Carteggio, 1903–1906, edited by Sergio Bucchi, 1997. Carteggio, 1907–1909, edited by Sergio Bucchi, 2001. Carteggio, 1910, edited by Sergio Bucchi, 2003.

Further Reading Antiseri, Dario (editor), Gaetano Salvemini: metodologo delle scienze sociali, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1996. Cingari, Gaetano (editor), Gaetano Salvemini tra politica e storia, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986. Di Scala, Spencer, ‘‘Salvemini in the United States,’’ in Italian Socialism: Between Politics and History, edited by Spencer Di Scala, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Galante Garrone, Alessandro, Salvemini e Mazzini, Florence: D’Anna, 1981. Killinger, Charles, Gaetano Salvemini: A Biography, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002. Pacelli, Donatella, Societa` e politica nell’opera di Gaetano Salvemini: un profilo intellettuale, Rome: Universita`— Facolta` di scienze politiche, 1981. Puzzo, Dante, ‘‘Gaetano Salvemini: A Historiographical Essay,’’ in Journal of the History of Ideas, 20, no. 2 (1959): 217–235. Salvadori, Massimo, Gaetano Salvemini, Turin: Einaudi, 1963.

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LIONARDO SALVIATI

LIONARDO SALVIATI (1539–1589) Lionardo Salviati was born into one of the most distinguished Florentine families of his time. His wealthy origins granted him access to the many literary academies then flourishing in the city as well as to the attention of several established intellectuals, including Pier Vettori and Benedetto Varchi. Salviati soon emerged as one of the leading and most interesting spokespersons for a cultural program concerned with the advancement of all things Florentine. As a philologist and grammarian, Salviati’s contribution to this patriotic project amounted to nothing less than the legitimization of a national language founded on the example provided by the fourteenth-century Florentine vernacular. The main features of Salviati’s view on language were defined as early as 1564, when he delivered his Orazione di Lionardo Salviati nella quale si dimostra la fiorentina favella, & i fiorentini autori essere a tutte l’altre lingue, cosı` antiche, come moderne, e a tutti gli altri scrittori di qualsivoglia lingua di gran lunga superiori (Leonardo Salviati’s Oration in Which It Is Demonstrated that the Florentine Language and the Florentine Authors Are by Far Superior to All Other Languages, Both Ancient and Modern, and to All Other Writers in Whatever Language). In this oration, Salviati attempted to reconcile the divergent views regarding the relative merits of the spoken language (Benedetto Varchi) and the literary one (Pietro Bembo). The renown he gained by means of this and other orations was due less to his syncretism than to his attempt to restate the responsibilities pertaining to a Humanist, maintaining that the attention of the scholar should be transferred from the Latin classics onto the greatest vernacular literary achievements of the Trecento. Salviati’s conservative and patriotic sentiments were in fact representative of an era of decline in Florentine history, as Francesco succeeded Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1564. At this time, all the financial and oratorical means available for the embellishment of the city and the revitalization of its cultural heritage were employed, and it is therefore no surprise that at Varchi’s death in 1565, Salviati was offered his mentor’s position as the consul of the Accademia Fiorentina. To this period belong his two comedies, Il granchio (The Crab, 1566) in verse and La spina (The Thorn) in prose, the latter published 1668

posthumously in 1592. Even though both plays were written according to the rules of classical poetics, particularly Roman models, the point for Salviati was to accommodate idiomatic Florentine to the discipline of verse. Around 1582, Salviati’s philological skills were officially put to the service of the state when he was asked to ‘‘save’’ Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373), which had been placed on the Index several years before, by purging and censoring it according to the moral taste of post-Tridentine Italy. Salviati’s most important work, Avvertimenti della lingua sopra ‘l Decamerone (Remarks on the Language of the Decameron, 1584–1586), comes as a sequel to his revised Decameron, published in 1582, and includes in Book II of the first volume his major contribution to the so-called questione della lingua. According to Salviati, the excellence of any given language depends on its inherent qualities. For this reason, the grammarian is not expected to make up the rules himself but, rather, to evince such norms from the best authors’ use of the language. The philologist’s relation to his subject must not hamper, but rather facilitate the natural expansiveness and alteration of language by supervising its development. However, as any living organism, language too has its culmination, and in the case of the Florentine volgare, this is the literature of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. Moreover, the decline of the vernacular, which Salviati already sees occurring in his own time, is attributed to the advent of Humanism and the consequent contamination of the spoken and written language with Latin. In 1583, Salviati was one of the founding members of the Accademia della Crusca, taking the pseudonym of ‘‘Infarinato.’’ In this period, he was involved in a series of well-known controversies regarding the assessment of Ludovico Ariosto’s and Torquato Tasso’s relative literary merit. In his Difesa dell’Orlando furioso (Defense of the Orlando furioso, 1584) and the Risposta all’Apologia di Torquato Tasso (Response to the Apology of Torquato Tasso, 1585), Salviati first answered to Tasso’s supporters, and then to the poet himself by maintaining that Ariosto’s epic was a far more remarkable achievement of Italian culture. While in Salviati’s view Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem

EDOARDO SANGUINETI Delivered, 1580) adhered more closely to Aristotelian poetic standards, the superiority of the Orlando furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532) was sanctioned on the basis of its unadulterated language. Salviati’s anticlassicism and Florentine patriotism greatly contributed to the definition of a new national consciousness. His linguistic principles, moreover, played a major role in the compilation of the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca (Vocabulary of the Members of the Accademia della Crusca), published in Venice 1612, and made him a precursor of contemporary linguistic theory.

Biography Born in Florence on June 27, 1539. Educated by Pier Vettori, became close friends with Benedetto Varchi; was nominated consul of the Accademia Fiorentina, 1570. Francesco I de’ Medici assigned him the task of expurgating Boccaccio’s Decameron, 1582. A year after its establishment, he was admitted to the Accademia della Crusca, 1583. Moved to a university post in Ferrara, 1587. He died in Florence in July 1589. ROCCO RUBINI See also: Questione della lingua Selected Works Collections Opere, 5 vols., Milan: Societa` tipografica de’ Classici italiani, 1809–1810. Prose inedite, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1968.

Treatises and Orations Orazione di Lionardo Salviati nella quale si dimostra la fiorentina favella, & i fiorentini autori essere a tutte

l’altre lingue, cosı` antiche, come moderne, e a tutti gli altri scrittori di qualsivoglia lingua di gran lunga superiori, 1564. De’ dialogi d’amicizia, 1564. Difesa dell’Orlando furioso, 1584. Avvertimenti della lingua sopra ‘l Decamerone, 2 vols., 1584– 1586. Risposta all’Apologia di Torquato Tasso, 1585.

Plays Il granchio, 1566. La spina, 1592.

Edited Work Il Decameron di messer Giovanni Boccacci di nuovo ristampato, e riscontrato in Firenze con testi antichi, & alla sua vera lezione ridotto dal cavalier Lionardo Salviati, 1582.

Further Reading Antonini, Anna, ‘‘La lessicologia di Leonardo Salviati,’’ in Studi di grammatica italiana, 11 (1982): 101–135. Battaglia, Salvatore, ‘‘La crisi rinascimentale nella ricerca linguistica di L. Salviati,’’ in Filologia e letteratura, 17 (1971): 400–426. Brown, Peter M., Lionardo Salviati: A Critical Biography, London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Engler, Rudolf, ‘‘I fondamenti della favella in Lionardo Salviati e l’idea saussuriana di ‘langue complete,’ ’’ in Lingua e Stile, 10, no. 1 (1975): 17–28. Engler, Rudolf, ‘‘Lionardo Salviati e la linguistica cinquecentesca,’’ in XIV Congresso internazionale di linguistica e filologia romanza: Atti, edited by Alberto Varvaro, Naples: Macchiaroli; Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1981. Mordenti, Raul, ‘‘Le due censure: La collazione dei testi del Decameron ‘rassettati’ da Vincenzio Borghini e Lionardo Salviati,’’ in Le Pouvoir et la plume: Incitation, controˆle et re´pression dans l’Italie du XVIe sie`cle, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1982. Weinberg, Bernard, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols., Chicago: University Press, 1961.

EDOARDO SANGUINETI (1930–) Edoardo Sanguineti has made an outstanding contribution to the intellectual, literary, and political life of the second half of the twentieth century. He is not only one of the foremost poets of the Neoavanguardia but also a novelist, journalist,

dramatist, librettist for Luciano Berio, translator, and parliamentarian. He has held chairs in Italian literature in Turin, Salerno, and Genoa and has made a major contribution to criticism with his books on Dante Alighieri, Alberto Moravia, and 1669

EDOARDO SANGUINETI Guido Gozzano (to mention but a few studies from his copious output). He is especially known as a theorist of the Italian Neo-avant-garde. As a young man Sanguineti had wanted to be a dancer: Who knows what kind of dancer Edoardo Sanguineti would have become, had not an incorrect diagnosis of a serious, possibly life-threatening, heart disease thwarted his teenage aspiration to dance. Judging by the answers he gave years later to a questionnaire (now accessible as an appendix to his anthology of poems, Mikrokosmos, 2004), his permanent attraction to the art of movement privileges the idea of the ‘‘agility’’ of the dancing body. This kind of lightness can transfer a potential new order of objects, thoughts, and language to a higher plane, and without linguistic communication, although it should be recognized that it is the very theme of the body and its presence that is the most salient issue of Sanguineti’s poetry. His first work, the poem Laborintus (1956), whose title comes from a thirteenth-century treatise on rhetoric by Everardus Alemannus, is constructed ‘‘as a plurilinguistic, babelic text in which fragments of sentences, quotations from foreign languages (English, French, German, Greek, Latin), neologisms, scientific terms, and segments of banal conversations are assembled in a montage that indiscriminately combines the language of erudition with that of the colloquial’’ (John Picchione, Edoardo Sanguineti and the Labyrinth of Poetry, 2004). The poetics of montage is close to certain aspects of action painting and John Cage’s serial music, while a central role is played, as Elisabetta Baccarani shows, by the apocalyptic theme of the end, ‘‘both as cultural theme and as a concrete historical risk’’ (La poesia nel labirinto, 2002). In a paratactical and strongly cerebral style, in which the language itself becomes the carrier of some kind of subjectivity, one of the characters, Laszlo Varga, emerges as a personality constantly split between first and third person, as an emblem of the individual condition of psychic disintegration along with the ongoing crumbling of the temporal horizon. Throughout the 27 sections we find scattered verbal forms and conceptual reminiscences, from Jung to the writer closest to his heart, Dante. Sanguineti opposes the upward motion of the Dantesque journey, the horizontal movement within the labyrinth. In his second collection of poetry, Erotopaegnia (Erotic Games, 1960), the language in its physicality and in its capacity to evoke the dimension of the body continues to be at the center of Sanguineti’s verbal experimentation. Thus the orgasms and the sexual pleasures envisioned in the poem establish a 1670

parallel with the pleasure principle associated with the playfulness of the language itself. But it is above all in Purgatorio de l’Inferno (Purgatory of Hell, 1964) that we witness, during an initiating dialogue with his son Alessandro, a need to transform poetry into a receptacle for the Marxist utopia, in opposition to the loss of humanity caused by the capitalistic system and to the idea of the world as a display of merchandise. He finally foreshadows, at the end of the collection, a future of redemption in the restless and bright dreams of children: ‘‘i bambini | che sognano (che parlano sognando); (ma i bambini, li vedi, cosı` inquieti); | (dormendo, i bambini); (sognando, adesso)’’ (the children | dreaming [they talk dreaming]; [but the children, you see them, so restless]; | [the children, sleeping]; [dreaming now]; Purgatorio de l’Inferno, no. 17). His interest in material of dreams is also evident in his first novel, Capriccio italiano (Italian Capriccio, 1963). Here, in a ‘‘low’’ style associated with the spoken language, he sets as background the story of an unborn baby and a marriage to be saved, together with the story of the novel to be written, creating a universe of gloomy and foggy landscapes, which evoke mythological images, symbols, and rituals reconceived anew and translated into oneiric modes and tones. Once again, Sanguineti constructs a counterideology to that of neocapitalism on the Jungian premises of the collective unconscious, suggesting that dreams forge a language in which the mind can shape order out of chaos.

In 1968, Sanguineti published the short collection of poetry T.A.T. (Thematic Apperception Test), in which the radicality of the linguistic confusion aims at an extreme denial of every communicative possibility between words and things. This short collection of seven poems is republished in 1972 in Wirrwarr (German for disorder), together with Reisebilder (German for ‘‘travel illustrations’’), which represents its dialectical antithesis. The title recalls Heinrich Heine’s 1824 homonymous work and is constructed as a medley of travel notes recounting a trip the author took through Belgium, Holland, and Germany. The language here is almost colloquial, not far from the registers of parody and irony, although it maintains and develops most of the political and moral themes that can be found in the previous collections. The same tone extends also to Postkarten (Postcards, 1978), whereas in Stracciafoglio (Scribbling Pad, 1980) self-parody becomes a medium of derision and self-derision, a language of destruction and self-destruction, in the metalinguistic perspective of infringement of the traditional models through the intimate middle tone of diary and confession.

EDOARDO SANGUINETI Perhaps the finest poetical expression of Sanguineti’s ideological position can be found in the 43 octaves of Novissimum Testamentum (The Newest Will, 1986), whereas the following Bisbidis (Whispering, 1987) includes the wondrous and skillful Alfabeto Apocalittico (Apocalyptic Alphabet) series, dedicated to the painter and scenographer Enrico Baj. This is a reflex of the whole world written in the code closest to the book’s subject, in which a high degree of semantic energy is produced ‘‘through homophonic combinations and semantic variations and permutations—anagrams are occasionally used as well as acrostics—that reach a level of Baroque virtuosity’’ (John Picchione, Edoardo Sanguineti and the Labyrinth of Poetry, 2004). More recently Sanguineti’s reflections have become more strategic and move toward an increasingly antilyrical language, which is nevertheless capable of expressing the objects in the communication, such as in Corollario (Corollary, 1997) or, appropriately, in Cose (Things, 1999). Theater is for Sanguineti a further activity through which he tries to translate into physical acts or bodily themes the fixity of the mask as disguise. He began with K e altre cose (K and Other Things, 1962); continued with his sensational experiment of Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1970), realized in collaboration with theatrical director Luca Ronconi in 1970 in a full revival of Ariosto’s epic poem within a perspective of popular orality and performative multisimultaneity related to the ideas of Richard Schechner; and with the most conspicuous themes of ‘‘disguise’’ in Commedia dell’Inferno (Hell’s Comedy, 1989) and L’amore delle tre melarance. Un travestimento fiabesco dal canovaccio di Carlo Gozzi (The Love of the Three Oranges. A Fairy-tale Disguise from Carlo Gozzi’s Plot, 2001). With composers Luciano Berio, and later with Vinko Globokar and Andrea Liberovici, with whom he worked on Rap (1996) and Sonetto (1997), Sanguineti participated as librettist in works that are fundamental to the history of contemporary musical theater. Their unique collaboration produced works in which they break away from the logics of genres, competences, and hierarchies, such as in Passaggio (Passage), which premiered in 1963 at the Piccola Scala in Milan, Laborintus II (1965) and A-ronne (1974). Within this practice of writing, the musicality of the verses creates an ideal acoustic environment that essentially consists of their diachronic or synchronic relation, according to the circumstances. Thus words become music and transfer to the realm of literature the same compositional exactness as dodecaphonic research, highlighting the physical dimension and the body energy of vocality in relation to language—so much so that Sanguineti speaks

of ‘‘metamorfosi biologica del testo, del suo calarsi concreto in una voce nella vocalita` corporea’’ ‘‘biological metamorphosis of the text, of its concrete diving into a voice in bodily vocality,’’ according to a ‘‘sympathy’’ accomplished long before the word’s final musical and scenic destination (Luigi Pestalozza, ‘‘Critica spettacolare della spettacolarita`,’’ 1993).

More recently, in the three lectures/essays collected in Verdi in Technicolor (2001), Sanguineti attributes the popular language of Italian melodrama to the ‘‘historically correct’’ middle-class pattern with which the first Italian Romantics (Giovanni Berchet in particular) invented ‘‘popular poetry.’’ And in a perspective of social fruition, he hints, in post-World War II Italy and according to a legitimate genre derivation, at the progressive and unstoppable final passage from the melodramatic message to the filmic message, ‘‘dov’era l’aria e il duetto, vive l’inquadratura e la sequenza’’ (Where there were once arias and duets, now there are takes and sequences; Verdi in technicolor, 2001). Perhaps the most authentic and eloquent vade mecum of Sanguineti’s profession as a man of letters, which is also a constant private and daily commitment, is the 139 Gramsci’s papers entitled Schede gramsciane (2004), that Sanguineti based on Antonio Gramsci’s vocabulary, in a lively exchange and comparison with the language of, among others, Piero Gobetti, Benedetto Croce, and Antonio Labriola. Ultimately, in this exercise of literary discipline, one last encouragement can be found as evidence for Sanguineti’s enduring trust in language and vocabulary, one that certainly is neither mannered nor academic: Rather it is as if the most uncertain and deceiving drifts of thought are forged into the certainty of the infinite possibility of words.

Biography Born in Genoa on 9 December 1930 to Giovanni and Giuseppina Chocchi. Attended the D’Azeglio high school in Turin, where he studied with Luigi Vigliani and Albino Galvano, who introduced him to the avant-gardes world. Attended the University of Turin and graduated with a dissertation on Dante under the supervision of Giovanni Getto, 1956. In 1954, married Luciana with whom he had four children: (1955) Federico, (1958) Alessandro, (1962) Michele, (1973) Giulia. Collaborated with Il Verri, Luciano Anceschi’s literary review. In 1961, met Luciano Berio, who asked him to collaborate on an opera for the Milanese Piccola Scala, Paesaggio was composed and was staged in 1963. Selections 1671

EDOARDO SANGUINETI from Laborintus were included in the volume I novissimi edited by Alfredo Giuliani, 1961. Between 1961 and 1965 attended the De´cades de Cerisy in France. Appointed professor of Italian literature in the University of Turin, 1965. A frequent contributor to the newspapers Paese sera, Il giorno, L’unita`, among others. In 1968, moved to Salerno where he taught Italian contemporary literature. In 1974, moved to Genoa, where he was appointed to a chair of Italian literature. He became active as city councillor in the Genoese administration (1976–1981). As an independent candidate for the Italian Communist Party (PCI), he was elected to the Parliament (1979–1983). Retired from university post in 2000. Received several literary prizes, including the Bagutta for Il gatto lupesco (2002); and the Premio alla Carriera del Festival Nazionale di Poesia Italiana Citta` di San Pellegrino, 2003. In 1996, bestowed the title of Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito by the president of the Italian Republic. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Neo-avant-garde

Theater K e altre cose, 1962. Traumdeutung, 1965. Protocolli, 1969. Orlando Furioso, 1970, with Luca Ronconi, and 1996, edited by Claudio Longhi. Storie naturali, 1971; as Natural Stories, translated by Jana O’Keefe Bazzoni, 1998. Commedia dell’Inferno, 1989. Sei personaggi.com, 2001. L’amore delle tre melarance. Un travestimento fiabesco dal canovaccio di Carlo Gozzi, 2001.

Librettos Passaggio, 1963, music by Luciano Berio Esposizione, 1963. Laborintus II, 1965, music by Luciano Berio. A-ronne, 1974, music by Luciano Berio. Carrousel, 1977, music by Vinko Globokar. Requiem italiano, 1985, music by Luca Lombardi. Faust. Un travestimento, 1985, music by Luca Lombardi. Opus 89 per 6 musicisti d’oggi, 1989, music by Mauro Bonifacio et al. De origine musices, 1991, music by Sergio Liberovici. Prestop II, 1991, music by Vinko Globokar. L’armonia drammatica, 1993, music by Vinko Globokar. Rap, 1996, music by Andrea Liberovici. Sonetto. Un travestimento shakespeariano, 1998, music by Andrea Liberovici.

Essays

Selected Works Collections Segnalibro. Poesie 1951–1981, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1989. Per musica, edited by Luigi Pestalozza, Modena: RicordiMucchi, 1993. Il gatto lupesco. Poesie (1982–2001), Milan: Feltrinelli, 2002. Mikrokosmos. Poesie 1951–2004, edited by Erminio Risso, Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Laborintus,’’ 1956. ‘‘Erotopaegnia,’’ 1960. ‘‘Opus metricum, 1951–1959,’’ 1960. ‘‘Purgatorio de l’Inferno,’’ 1964. ‘‘Triperuno,’’ 1964. ‘‘T.A.T,’’ 1968. ‘‘Wirrwarr,’’ 1972. ‘‘Catamerone,’’ 1974. ‘‘Postkarten,’’ 1978. ‘‘Stracciafoglio,’’ 1980. ‘‘Novissimum Testamentum,’’ 1986. ‘‘Bisbidis,’’ 1987. ‘‘Senzatitolo,’’ 1992. ‘‘Corollario,’’ 1997. ‘‘Cose,’’ 1999.

Fiction Capriccio italiano, 1963. Il giuoco dell’oca, 1967. Il giuoco del Satyricon: Un’imitazione da Petronio, 1970. Smorfie, 1986. L’orologio astronomico, 2000.

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Interpretazione di Malebolge, 1961. Tra liberty e Crepuscolarismo, 1961. Alberto Moravia, 1962. Ideologia e linguaggio, 1965. Guido Gozzano. Indagini e letture, 1966. Giornalino (1973–1975), 1976. Giornalino secondo (1976–1977), 1979. Scribilli, 1985. La missione del critico, 1987. Gazzettini, 1993. Per una critica dell’avanguardia poetica in Italia e in Francia, with Jean Burgos, 1995. Il chierico organico, 2000. Verdi in technicolor, 2001. Schede gramsciane, 2004. Genova per me, 2004.

Translations Euripides, Le baccanti, 1968. Seneca, Fedra, 1969. Petronius, Il Satyricon, 1969. Aristofanes, La festa delle donne, 1979. Sofocles, Edipo tiranno, 1980. Eschilus, I sette contro Tebe, 1992. Molie`re, Don Giovanni, 2000. Bertold Brecht, Il cerchio di gesso del Caucaso, 2003.

Further Reading Baccarani, Elisabetta, La poesia nel labirinto: Razionalismo e istanza ‘‘antiletteraria’’ nell’opera e nella cultura di Edoardo Sanguineti, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Barilli, Renato, La neoavanguardia italiana: Dalla nascita del ‘‘Verri’’ alla fine di «Quindici», Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995.

EDOARDO SANGUINETI Curi, Fausto, Struttura del risveglio. Sade, Sanguineti, la modernita` letteraria, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Esposito, Roberto, ‘‘Tra coscienza della storia e storia della coscienza: Edoardo Sanguineti,’’ in Le ideologie della neoavanguardia, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Gambaro, Fabio, Colloquio con Edoardo Sanguineti: quarant’anni di cultura italiana attraverso i ricordi di un poeta intellettuale, Milan: Anabasi, 1993. Giordano, Luigi (editor), Sanguineti. Ideologia e linguaggio, Salerno: Metafora, 1991. Giuliani, Alfredo, Le droghe di Marsiglia, Milan: Adelphi, 1977. Longhi, Claudio, Orlando Furioso. Un travestimento ariostesco di Edoardo Sanguineti, Bologna: Il Nove, 1996. Lorenzini, Nevia, Il laboratorio della poesia, Rome: Bulzoni, 1978. Pesce, Maria Dolores, Edoardo Sanguineti: La poetica del travestimento, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2003. Pestalozza, Luigi, ‘‘Critica spettacolare della spettacolarita`. Conversazione con Edorado Sanguineti,’’ in Edoardo Sanguineti, Per musica, edited by Luigi Pestalozza, Modena: Ricordi-Mucchi, 1993. Picchione, John, ‘‘Edoardo Sanguineti and the Labyrinth of Poetry,’’ in The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetics Practices, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pietropaoli, Antonio, Unita` e trinita` di Edoardo Sanguineti. Poesia e poetica, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1991. Pietropaoli, Antonio (editor), Per Edoardo Sanguineti: ‘‘Good Luck (and Look),’’ Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2002. Stroppa, Sabrina, ‘‘Edoardo Sanguineti,’’ in Antologia della poesia italiana, edited by Carlo Ossola and Cesare Segre, vol. 3, Ottocento-Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1999. Weber, Luigi, Usando gli utensili di utopia: traduzione, parodia e riscritture in Edoardo Sanguineti, Bologna: GEDIT, 2004.

LABORINTUS, 1956 Poem by Edoardo Sanguineti

Laborintus: Laszo Varga: XXVII poesie, 1951–1954 is Sanguineti’s first poetic work, part of which was initially published in the Florentine periodical Numero, then in volume form in 1956. The title is borrowed from the ars poetica of the thirteenthcentury Everardus Alemannus, while the 27 texts of the work belong to the years from January 1951 to July 1954. Tibor Wlassics identifies two distinctively interrelated groups but each with their separate themes and techniques (‘‘Edoardo Sanguineti,’’

1974). The first group (1–17) is of a metapoetic nature, a speculation on how to make poetry within a framework consisting of an apparent erotic plot preceded by a proclaimed intention in the opening from the preliminary mental shipwreck of section 3 to the disapproving preface of section 4. The second group (18–27) emphasizes the purgatorial journey of desublimation, which leads the writing beyond representation and the unambiguous control of the sense for a true and not fantastic imagination, passing through a meditative and reflective bridge section. From the first line, the necessity of the struggle with disorder, in crossing the ‘‘Palus Putredinis’’ (Swamp of Rottenness) is explicit, and vital in order to emerge toward a ‘‘new poetry.’’ This is a poetry to be thought out in a laboratory, with the maximum of poetic or theoretical critical awareness, rather than a poetry of content and substance. In the absence of a consoling and metaphysical function for the lyrical word, all that remains is language, a ‘‘linguaggio che partorisce’’ (language which gives birth) to bring a personal struggle against the most obsolete and long forgotten discourses of traditional poetry, prefiguring new grammars, but always tussling with ‘‘materia ribellante’’ (rebellious matter), through spatial allegories of oneiric and lunar worlds (influenced by C. G. Jung) leading to the complete livid disintegration of objects and consciousness: ‘‘livida Palus / livida nascitur bene strutturata Palus; lividissima (lividissima terra)’’ (livida Palus / livida nascitura well-structured Palus; very livid [very livid earth]). The figure of the protagonist emerges against this background. Laszo Varga (introduced in section 4 but subsequently with his double, a less complete presence, called Ruben) continually divided between the first and then third person, expanded into the multitude ‘‘io sono io sono una moltitudine’’ (I am I am a multitude) is an emblem of a psychological individual condition of disintegration linked with the continuous peeling away of the temporal horizon. The figure of Ellie on the other hand is the ‘‘cifra plurivalente, quasi compendio dei temi laborintici’’ (the multisignifying symbol, almost a labyrinthine compendium of Laborintus themes), is ‘‘l’essenza e la personificazione del disordine combattuto’’ (the essence and personification of the contested disorder) until her final disintegration into a purgatorial journey capable of welding all the technical discoveries of Laborintus: ‘‘la tecnica del sincronizzato dialogomonologo, la tecnica dell’esclamazione assurda 1673

EDOARDO SANGUINETI e della parentesi falsamente esplicativa, delle tarsie sconcertanti in latino e greco, in francese tedesco inglese’’ (the technique of the synchronized dialogue-monologue, the technique of the absurd exclamation and of falsely explanatory parentheses, of disconcerting fragments in Latin and Greek, French, German, and English). The text of Laborintus II, which combines themes taken from Dante Alighieri’s Vita Nova (The New Life, ca. 1294), Convivio (The Banquet, ca. 1304–1307), and Comedia (The Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), was developed in 1965 into an important work of contemporary musical theater, realized in collaboration with the composer Luciano Berio. It was commissioned by French Radio and Television as a tribute to Dante to commemorate the seventh centenary of his birth. STEFANO TOMASSINI Editions First edition: Laborintus, Varese: Magenta, 1956. Other editions: in Opus metricum 1951–1959, Milan: Rusconi and Paolazzi, 1960.

Further Reading Baccarani, Elisabetta, La poesia nel labirinto: Razionalismo e istanza ‘‘antiletteraria’’ nell’opera e nella cultura di Edoardo Sanguineti, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Esposito, Roberto, ‘‘Tra coscienza della storia e storia della coscienza: Edoardo Sanguineti,’’ in Le ideologie della neoavanguardia, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Favaro, Roberto, ‘‘Musica in poesia, poesia in musica: Edoardo Sanguineti librettista e scrittore,’’ in La musica nel romanzo del ‘900, Lucca: Ricordi-LIM, 2003. Giordano, Luigi (editor), Sanguineti. Ideologia e linguaggio, Salerno: Metafora, 1991. Hand, Vivienne, ‘‘Laborintus II: a neo-avant-garde celebration of Dante,’’ in Italian Studies, 53 (1998): 122–149. Picchione, John, ‘‘Edoardo Sanguineti and the Labyrinth of Poetry,’’ in The New Avant-garde in Italy: Theoretical Debate and Poetics Practices, Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Risso, Erminio, ‘‘Un nuovo fabbro per nuove questioni di fabbricazione. Cinque bagatelle per Laborintus,’’ in Poetiche, 1 (2000): 111–127. Vitiello, Ciro, Teoria e tecnica dell’avanguardia, Milan: Mursia, 1984. Wlassics, Tibor, ‘‘Edoardo Sanguineti,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I contemporanei, vol. 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1974.

JACOPO SANNAZARO (1457–1530) Humanist, pastoralist, poet in Italian vernacular and Neo-Latin, Jacopo Sannazaro, also known by the Arcadian name Azio Sincero, lives during the twilight of Humanism and on the threshold of the Renaissance. Early studies at the literary Academy of Naples under the leadership of Giovanni Pontano, his intellectual mentor, deeply influenced Sannazaro’s philological approach to antiquity and his knowledge of classical culture. His artistic journey is defined by a melancholic and nostalgic sensibility, a voluntary exile to France, and historical changes that involved the Aragonese dynasty in Naples. While early sixteenth-century Italian writers tended to move from Neo-Latin to vernacular poetry, Sannazaro’s poetic corpus documents the opposite tendency. The first part of his literary activity is in the vernacular, though Sannazaro continues to discover, read, and translate ancient Latin and Greek manuscripts. In the last decades of 1674

his life, he devotes himself exclusively to Neo-Latin poetry. Part of Sannazaro’s vernacular poetry is occasional, connected to his commitments as a courtier. He wrote six Farse (Farces, ca. 1480–1490) in order to celebrate and entertain the court of Naples. From a linguistic point of view, these dramatic compositions reveal a general interest in Tuscan models, even if they are rich in local expressions in Neapolitan dialect. The theme is lyrical, as the author develops motifs such as the impermanence of beauty and the nostalgia for ancient times (ubi sunt). The later farces attest to his familiarity with the dramatic genre and a considerable attention to aspects of performance. As a courtly poet, Sannazaro also used a popular Neapolitan poetic genre, the Glı`uommeri (literally, gomitoli or balls of wool), composed in stanzas of hendecasyllables with some dialect and linguistic hybridism. Compared with

JACOPO SANNAZARO Sannazaro’s major works in vernacular, however, both the Farse and the Glı`uommeri are mere juvenile works, which were never revised and organized into a book. Instead, Sannazaro devoted himself to two vernacular works that are widely known and imitated during the sixteenth century: his masterpiece, Arcadia (Arcadia, 1504), and the Rime (Rhymes), published posthumously in 1530. Arcadia, a collection of poems and artistic prose, is the first example of a new literary genre in Europe: the pastoral novel. Neglecting Christian pastoral allegories, Sannazaro reworks the bucolic models of Virgil and Theocritus, combining autobiographical elements, lyrical motifs, political issues, magic, and folklore. Twelve episodes take place over an unspecified number of days during spring, and are suffused most of all by an overriding melancholy. The final version of Arcadia attests to Sannazaro’s transition from pastoral to lyrical poetry. It is only after its appearance that Sannazaro revised and published his collection of vernacular lyrics. The Rime is a typical fifteenth-century book of poems, modeled on Petrarch’s Canzoniere and on Giusto de’ Conti’s La bella mano (1472). It is divided into two sections, which include respectively 32 (sonnets, canzoni, sestine, and madrigals) and 69 poems (sonnets, canzoni, sestine, madrigals, and three capitoli in terza rima). The first section combines Petrarchan metrical cliche´s with celebrative themes, while the second exhibits typical fifteenthcentury motifs (descriptions of women, transience of beauty and glory) as well as others that belong to Sannazaro’s mature poetics (dreams, death, visions of ravines, and religious meditation). This second section attests to a creative turning point. In Rime 33, for example, Sannazaro declares his decision to change his life and literary style, and he asks the Muses to lead him back to the pastoral world, thus searching for a new audience, beyond the Court and the Academy. This confirms what the author writes in the preface to the collection, which is dedicated to Cassandra Marchese, a Neapolitan noble lady with whom he maintained a close relationship over many years. Both the lyrical declaration and the preface announce Sannazaro’s definitive switch to Neo-Latin poetry. The reason for Sannazaro’s change is complex. He may have turned to Latin in order to corroborate his philological background and wide classical culture, but the choice of Neo-Latin may also reflect a new historical context coinciding with the demise of the Aragonese Court and its exuberant audience. By writing in Latin, Sannazaro could

address a learned international public, and also blend ancient culture into contemporary issues. This choice ultimately coincided with his lifelong goal to restore and renew antiquity through the use of the pastoral genre. Sannazaro’s first Neo-Latin poem, Salices (Willow Trees, 1526), is a short mythological composition in hexameters modeled after Virgil, Ovid, and Pontano’s eclogues. It tells the story of a group of nymphs who, in order to escape a herd of satyrs, dive into the river Sarno and turn into willow trees. Salices’ elegiac vein prevails in the Elegiarum libri (Books of Elegies), published posthumously in 1535 but partially printed in 1527. The definitive edition consists of 24 elegies and is divided into three books. The dominant theme of the collection is Sannazaro’s autobiographic and intellectual memory. In Elegy 2, 10, for instance, the poet urges a friend to gather the fragments of his life and write an epitaph on his grave after his death. Sannazaro’s Neo-Latin work also includes the Epigrammaton libri (Books of Epigrams, published posthumously, 1535), 152 poems written in various metrical forms, in which melancholy blends with invectives directed against Humanists such as Angelo Poliziano. The language and the style of the pastoral are translated into a maritime setting in the Eclogae piscatoriae (Piscatorial Eclogues, 1526), which contain five eclogues and the fragments of a sixth poem. They constitute the first example of a new genre, which will be imitated throughout Europe: the piscatorial eclogue. Finally, Sannazaro’s most significant Neo-Latin poem, De partu Virginis (The Virgin’s Childbirth, 1526), which includes 1443 hexameters (divided into three books), is dedicated to Mary’s Annunciation, Christ’s Nativity, and the Story of Salvation. It combines classical and Christian culture by relating ancient myths to the Gospel and to patristic writings. The poem’s theoretical background is indebted to Marsilio Ficino’s definition of docta religio (learned religion), as Sannazaro reinterprets the pagan myth of the Golden Age in Christian terms. For example, he bridges the story of Mary and the birth of Jesus to Old and New Testament characters and episodes, along with ancient history and pagan characters, by using prophetic discourse and narration in the future tense. In Limbo (Book 2), the Annunciation of Jesus’ birth echoes the biblical David, who, according to the Christian doctrine, is supposed to live until Christ’s Resurrection. Having heard the good news, David prophesizes episodes of the New Testament. As the shepherd of Poseidon’s flocks, endowed with the power to turn his body into animal forms 1675

JACOPO SANNAZARO or natural elements along with the gift of prophecy, the sea-god Proteus is a recurrent figure in Sannazaro’s literary work. In Eclogae piscatoriae 4, Proteus relates a prophecy of Naples and the Aragonese dynasty by mourning their tragic destiny; in De partu Virginis 3, he predicts the redemption of humanity according to classical and Christian history. As Giuseppe Velli has suggested, Sannazaro most likely interpreted Proteus as a mythical alter ego and the symbol of his attitude regarding the world’s mutability (Tra lettura e creazione, 1983). Thus, Sannazaro selected the god Proteus as the voice of his personal experience, together with his humanistic hope for a universal rebirth in the name of culture and religion. Sannazaro also left vernacular correspondence with Roman Humanists and Pope Clement VII.

Italian Verse Arcadia, 1504; edited by Francesco Erspamer, Milan: Mursia, 1990; translated in Ralph Nash (editor), Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, Detroit-Toronto: Wayne State University Press, 1966. Rime, 1530.

Latin Verse Salices, 1526. Eclogae Piscatoriae, 1526; as The Piscatory Eclogues of Jacopo Sannazaro, edited by W.P. Mustard, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1914; translated in Ralph Nash (editor) Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966. De partu Virginis, 1526; edited by Charles Fantazzi and Alessandro Perosa, Florence: Olschki, 1988. Elegiarum libri, 1527 (partial); 1535. Epigrammaton libri, 1535.

Further Reading

Biography Born in Naples, 29 July 1457, to a noble family originally from Lomellina (Pavia). After his father’s death (1462), due to economic restraints retired with his mother and brother Marcantonio to their feud of San Cipriano Piacentino (Salerno), 1470. Returned to Naples, where he studied under the tutelage of Humanists Lucio Grasso, Giuniano Maio, and Giovanni Pontano, 1474. Entered the Aragonese Court, thanks to Pontano’s recommendations. Followed Alfonso of Aragon, duke of Calabria, in the war against Pope Innocent VIII, 1482–1484; served also Federigo, who gave him the villa in Mergellina near Naples, 1499; and followed him in voluntary exile to France, 1501; traveled to Paris, Lyon, Calais, 1501–1504; after Federigo’s death returned to Naples, and retired in his villa at Mergellina, 1505. Died in Naples, 24 April 1530.

Dionisotti, Carlo, ‘‘Appunti sulle Rime del Sannazaro,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 140 (1963): 161–211. Kennedy, William J., Jacopo Sannazaro and the Uses of Pastoral, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983. Kidwell, Carol, Sannazaro and Arcadia, London: Duckworth, 1993. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, ‘‘La lirica volgare del Sannazaro e lo sviluppo del linguaggio poetico rinascimentale,’’ in Rassegna della letteratura italiana, vol. 7, no. 2 (1962): 436–482. Poggioli, Renato, The Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975. Quint, David, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Riccucci, Marina, ‘‘La profezia del vate: Sannazaro e il caeruleus Proteus,’’ in Nuova rivista di letteratura italiana, vol. 3, no. 2 (2000): 245–287. Velli, Giuseppe, Tra lettura e creazione: Sannazaro, Alfieri, Foscolo, Padua: Antenore, 1983.

MATTEO SORANZO See also: Pastoral Selected Works Collections Opera omnia latine scripta, Venice: Paolo Manuzio, 1535; as Opere Latine Scripta, edited by Jan Von Broekhuizen and Pieter Vlaming, Amsterdam: Gerard Onder de Linden, 1728; as The Major Latin Poems of Jacopo Sannazaro (selection), edited and translated by Ralph Nash, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1995. Opere di Jacopo Sannazaro, edited by Enrico Carrara, Turin: UTET, 1952; rpt. 1970. Opere volgari, edited by Alfredo Mauro, Bari: Laterza, 1961 (includes Arcadia, Sonetti e Canzoni, Farse, Lettere).

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ARCADIA, 1504 Pastoral Novel by Jacopo Sannazaro

Sannazaro’s Libro pastorale nominato Arcadia is the most famous vernacular work of the quattrocento: It went into over 60 Italian editions and was largely imitated in Europe, particularly in England,

JACOPO SANNAZARO where the vogue for pastoral owed much to Sannazaro’s example. Indeed, Arcadia’s European resonance lasted until the French Revolution, but this masterpiece did not benefit from its author’s final revision. Sannazaro, who was abroad and absorbed in other endeavors, eventually delegated the first authorized edition to a friend, the Neapolitan Humanist Pietro Summonte. In spite of such an unusual genesis, Arcadia starts a European tradition and establishes the new literary genre of the pastoral novel. The composition of Arcadia begins around 1480 and reflects the author’s early interest for Tuscan vernacular eclogues. Sannazaro, however, gradually abandoned these models and enframed his poems in a prose commentary that follows the tradition of the prosimetrum, a mixed composition of verses and prose. In 1483, he then organized his poems into a narrative modeled on Boccaccio’s Ameto. The early part is linked to the prose section that concludes the book by an autobiographical passage. This new version of Arcadia was revised in the subsequent years and nearly completed in 1490. At this point, Sannazaro added two more eclogues. Meanwhile, the text was already circulating in poor quality editions. It is only after a pirated edition is published in Venice (1502) that he asked Summonte to edit his work, which was printed in Naples by Sigismundo Mayr in 1504. This definite edition was reprinted 66 times, and was soon accompanied by historical commentaries and imitated in literary works such as Torquato Tasso’s Aminta. The influence of Arcadia on French, Spanish, and English literature, as well as the figurative arts, was even more profound: Sannazaro’s masterpiece became a model for Philip Sidney and painters such as Nicolas Poussin. Poussin translated the essence of Sannazaro’s melancholic lyrics in his painting of a speaking tomb, encircled by shepherds gazing at the inscription Et in Arcadia Ego. The title refers to the imaginary place where the narrator (Sannazaro himself) takes refuge after a delusional love experience, assuming the pastoral name Azio Sincero. Modeled on Virgil’s Bucolics, Arcadia is imagined as an idyllic land populated by shepherds and nymphs who engage in jesting and arguing, singing and playing. Arcadia’s shepherds are either fictional characters, like Selvaggio and Clonico, or real people whose identity is hidden behind pastoral names. Sannazaro (Sincero) interacts with living poets, such as Giovanni Pontano (Meliseo), Cariteo (Barcinio), and Summonte (Summonzio). The narrative is simple. During the Feast of the Latin goddess Pales, which takes place

according to the pastoral code between April 20 and 25 (time in Arcadia is determined exclusively by festivities and by the sun’s rising and setting), Sincero takes part in pastoral activities, suffused with nostalgia for his past life. But an ominous dream causes him to return to Naples. Accompanied by a nymph, he descends to the caves from which all the rivers spring and returns to the city following the course of the river Sebeto. He encounters Barcinio and Summonzio who quote the poems that Meliseo addressed to his dead wife. The story ends on a mournful note: In the epilogue, the narrator announces that Sincero’s beloved has also died. Here Sannazaro reveals his conversion to a new poetical genre, stating the superiority of the lyre (symbol of the lyric genre) over the oaten-flute (symbol of bucolic poetry). Arcadia perfectly matches the expectations of early modern Europe. It is a self-reflexive work that embodies Sannazaro’s poetic formation. In Arcadia 9 (Ecl. 9 139–151), for instance, the poetic competition of Elenco and Ofelia concludes with Montano’s words stressing how Apollo can elevate the bucolic to the lyrical level; and in Arcadia 7 (31–33), Carino gives Sincero the oaten-flute foretelling his future as a lyric and Latin poet. As Francesco Erspamer has noted, this pastoral novel offered European readers a ‘‘model of completeness and harmony between past and present, no more practicable as an illusion, yet pleasant to imagine’’ (‘‘Introduzione,’’ 1990). The poet’s nostalgia for a world that disappeared and his awareness of human fragility represented the instability of Italy and Europe on the threshold of modernity; however, Arcadia’s inspiration and thematic aspects are the most credited reason for its lasting success. MATTEO SORANZO See also: Pastoral Editions First edition: Arcadia, edited by Pietro Summonte, Naples: Sigismondo Mayr, 1504. Critical editions: in Opere volgari, edited by Alfredo Mauro, Bari: Laterza, 1961; in Opere di Jacopo Sannazaro, edited by Enrico Carrara, Turin: UTET, 1970; edited by Francesco Erspamer, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Translations: in Arcadia and Piscatorial Eclogues, translated by Ralph Nash, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966.

Further Reading Boillet, Danielle, ‘‘Paradis perdus et retrouve´ dans l’Arcadie de Sannazaro,’’ in Ville et campagne dans la litterature

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JACOPO SANNAZARO italienne de la Renaissance, edited by Andre` Rochon, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1976–1977. Caracciolo Arico`, Angela, L’Arcadia del Sannazaro nell’autunno dell’Umanesimo, Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Il codice bucolico e l’Arcadia,’’ in Metodi e fantasmi, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1969. Erspamer, Francesco, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in J. Sannazaro, Arcadia, Milan: Mursia, 1990. Riccucci, Marina, Il ‘‘neghittoso’’ e il ‘‘fier connubio’’: Storia e filologia nell’Arcadia di Jacopo Sannazaro, Naples: Liguori, 2001.

Ternaux, Jean Claude, ‘‘La Me`lancolie dans l’ Arcadie de Sannazar,’’ in Malinconia e Allegrezza nel Rinascimento, edited by Luisa Rotondi Secchi Tarugi, Milan: Nuovi Orizzonti, 1999. Velli, Giuseppe, ‘‘Tytirus redivivus: The Rebirth of Vergilian Pastoral from Dante to Sannazaro,’’ in Forma e Parola: Studi in memoria di Fredi Chiappelli, edited by Dennis Dutschke, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Villani, Gianni, Per l’edizione dell’Arcadia del Sannazaro, Rome: Salerno, 1989.

FRANCESCA SANVITALE (1928–) With six novels, three collections of stories, two collections of essays, in addition to translations and commentaries, Francesca Sanvitale has a significant body of work to her name to enable us to trace ‘‘la coerenza nella scrittura’’ (the coherence in the writing) which, she says, ‘‘viene a galla nella sua forza sotterranea e trainante solo quando il disegno e` stato completato’’ (rises to the surface with all its subterranean and driving force once the overall scheme is complete) (Felice Piemontese, editor, Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani, 1990). Her fiction has its roots in her reading of the great nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers among whom Stendhal, Hugo, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and also Kafka and Conrad stand out: writers who understood that fiction has a social as well as an aesthetic function. Sanvitale’s novels and stories and their characters are driven consciously or unconsciously by an anguished search for a sense of reality. Their attempts to apprehend the real are often the product of a heightened, hallucinatory awareness induced by fever, loneliness or, increasingly, old age. The change of title of one of her best stories from La realta` e` un dono (Reality Is a Gift) (in the 1987 volume of the same title) to ‘‘Che cos’e` la realta`?’’ (What Is Reality?) in Separazioni (Separations, 1997) is a measure of how much more difficult the search has become with the passing of time. Il cuore borghese (The Bourgeois Heart, 1972) is an intelligent and uncomfortable narrative that through its five characters, two couples and a child, captures the spirit of 1950s’ Italy. Brittle and narcissistic, they do not readily endear themselves 1678

to the reader, and the heart of the book’s title, Il cuore borghese, is an ironic echo of one of Sanvitale’s preferred novels, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The novel begins and ends in a darkness, but, in a world without myths or illusions, the darkness is quickly dispelled with the flick of a light switch ‘‘...uno dei residui atti di potenza e liberta` rimasti all’uomo’’ (one of the few residual acts of power and freedom left to man). Il cuore borghese took seven years to write, La realta` e` un dono six. Sanvitale’s practice of working on her fictions, irrespective of their length, over extended periods of time, produces loosely structured episodic narratives leading to neither resolution nor conclusion but to a kind of modus vivendi, an accommodation with a tenuously apprehended and understood reality. While Irma, the protagonist of the short story, enjoys an epiphanic moment that brings a tentative understanding of, and reconciliation with, reality, the characters in Sanvitale’s first novel, Il cuore borghese live their lives in a state of emotional paralysis, alienated from the mythmaking of post-1945 politics that was busy turning their country’s recent history into fable. Her next novel, Madre e figlia (Mother and Daughter, 1980), an unsparing account of a mother-daughter relationship, enjoyed an immediate success. The daughter of the title is Sonia, born in 1930. The mother is Marianna, the only daughter born after six sons of indulgent parents from the Piedmontese-landed aristocracy whose idyllic, belle e´poque childhood was brought to a swift and unhappy close with the death of her beloved father and the dissipation of the family’s wealth. After

FRANCESCA SANVITALE Sonia’s birth, the outcome of a liaison with a married army officer, mother and daughter live a rootless existence, always on the move from town to town, from apartment to rented room to boarding house according to the fluctuations of their allowance. Fear that they will be discovered by the vindictive wife of Sonia’s father leads them to live in semiclandestinity; it is only many years later that a middle-aged Sonia learns at her father’s deathbed that the wife was a figment of his imagination and one in which her mother may have connived. After her own unhappy marriage and the birth of a much loved son, Sonia finds herself assuming ever more responsibility for an increasingly dependent mother until she finds herself more mother than daughter to Marianna. The love and self-abnegation, the rage and the hatred that inform Sonia’s relationship to her mother persist for years after Marianna’s death so that the process of writing becomes a settling of accounts, a step toward reconciliation. The focus of the narrative is on the years from 1930 to 1978, although the story begins with Marianna’s childhood at the turn of the century. While external events accumulate and become history, it is above all the biological processes of birth, maturation, aging, and death that mark out the passing of time. The struggle to connect past and present by piecing together the narrative of private life within its broader historical context takes two directions in Sanvitale’s narratives. Sonia in Madre e figlia draws on the work of memory—‘‘una grande caldaia’’ (a great boiler house)—to excavate her past as part of a process of coming to terms with the present. Giulia, by contrast, protagonist of L’uomo del parco (The Man in the Park, 1984) battles not to lose touch altogether with everyday life, and slowly discovers that what she experiences as a phantasmagoric nightmare is not a simple manifestation of her own advanced state of mental disintegration but is an intrinsic part of contemporary life. Situated in Rome between 1962 and 1982, the narrative focuses on the period following the kidnapping of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in March 1978—the roadblocks, the random searches, the military presence, the paranoia, and the fear. The endless filtering and recycling of those days and weeks through the media, in print and in celluloid, contributes to the disturbing and pervasive sense of the unreality of life. Sanvitale has explained that the title of Separazioni (1997) refers to how her characters are caught at a moment when reality appears to have separated off from their understanding of it. This

estrangement from the real can be traced back to the decade of her cultural formation, the 1950s. She has written approvingly about Alberto Moravia in this context, but there are also affinities to be found in Il cuore borghese with the French nouveau roman writers and their search for a new realism that would recognize and assert the separateness of external reality. Sanvitale has described how over the years during which she worked on Il cuore borghese pressures of work, motherhood, and writing led to a detachment from the outside world that reached her, muffled and indirectly, through newspapers and the printed word. What is described here is an ad hoc process, but it brings us to the other approach consciously adopted by Sanvitale in a struggle to hold on to the sense of the real. Sanvitale’s books are all thoroughly researched; the gathering of information, evidence, documentation is integral to her writing. The research may take different forms but it is always meticulous. So the writing of the short novel Verso Paola (Towards Paola, 1991), which traces the changes in consciousness of the protagonist as he journeys south by train from Bolzano, where he has holidayed with one of his students to where his wife is waiting for him, through landscapes that show increasing signs of environmental degradation, involved its author in repeated journeys along the same route to ensure that the timing and the visual details of the journey were correct. Four years’ archival work went into the writing of Il figlio dell’Impero (Son of the Empire, 1993), a novel that spans the period 1814 to 1832, from the end of the Napoleonic era, through the Restoration and the birth of modern Europe. It tells of the short, unhappy life of the ‘‘King of Rome,’’ Napoleon II, son of Napoleon Bonaparte. When the child was 3, his father’s empire collapsed, leaving him cut off from his past and bound to a future in which he would not see his father or his homeland again. He returned to Vienna with his Austrian mother where with a new identity, that of Franz Duke of Reichstadt, he was educated in the Court of Emperor Francis I, the intention being that he should take his place in the Habsburg dynasty. At 21 he died of tuberculosis. More recently Sanvitale has brought together document and memory in L’ultima casa prima del bosco (The Last House before the Wood, 2003). Giacomo Impronta, a man who has expunged all traces of his own murky past, discovers in his flat a dresser with the history of his apartment block since its construction in 1920. Homebound with a high fever, he pieces together the cache of paperwork—plans, 1679

FRANCESCA SANVITALE letters, ministerial decrees; as he does so the building and its occupants acquire materiality, and through them he begins to understand how deeply and irrevocably the public sphere intervenes in and determines people’s lives. The second part of the diptych moves out of the city into the mountains where another kind of past is retrieved, as the suppressed, traumatized personal histories of the protagonists are brought back to the surface. In this novel, the search for a sense of reality engages both memory and psyche, intellect and archive. Sanvitale has always alternated writing fiction with essays and journalism while at the same time pursuing a career in television. An independent voice in Italian culture, she adopts a position that perhaps can best be summed up as one of engaged detachment. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in her contribution to feminism. Her novel, Madre e figlia, for example, did not emerge from the women’s movement but with great prescience spoke to it, while the magisterial introduction to her anthology of nineteenth-century women’s writing Le scrittrici italiane dell’Ottocento (Italian Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century, 1997) returns to the light of day the lost or submerged voices of a century whose culture she has helped keep alive and relevant to today’s readers.

French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish, and some of her stories have appeared in anthologies in the United States and the United Kingdom. She lives in Rome.

Biography

Further Reading

Born in Milan on 17 May 1928, where she lived until she was 11. Sanvitale studied at the University of Florence where she graduated with a thesis on Le Rime of Franco Sacchetti under the guidance of Giuseppe De Robertis. Since 1961, she has been living in Rome. For 26 years she worked on cultural and historical programs for RAI-TV (Italian national television) and, between 1974 and 1977, she was responsible for the weekly program Settimo giorno. Together with Raffaele La Capria and Enzo Siciliano she was, until 1993, coeditor of Nuovi argomenti; she has also been on the editorial board of Micromega, and as journalist and essayist she has been a regular contributor to L’Espresso, Il Messaggero and L’Unita` among others. She has won several literary awards including the Premio Rapallo for La realta` e` un dono, 1987, the Premio Donna Citta` di Martina for Verso Paola, 1991, the Premio Basilicata for Il figlio dell’Impero, 1993. Many of her books have been translated into

Autodizionario degli scrittori italiani, edited by Felice Piemontese, Milan: Leonardo, 1990. Blelloch, Paola, ‘‘Francesca Sanvitale’s Madre e figlia: From Self-reflection to Self-invention,’’ in Contemporary Women Writers in Italy—a Modern Renaissance, edited by Santo L. Arico`, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990. Caesar, Ann Hallamore, ‘‘Francesca Sanvitale: Investigating the Self and the World,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Filippelli, Fiammetta, ‘‘Memoria e realta` nell’itinerario narrativo di Francesca Sanvitale,’’ in Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli, Sez. rom., 33 (1991): 217–230. Marabini, Claudio, ‘‘Diario di lettura,’’ in Nuova Antologia (October-December 1997): 149–151. Pecora, Elio, ‘‘Ritratto di Francesca Sanvitale,’’ in Belfagor, 3 (2005): 303–319. Wilson, Rita, Speculative Identities: Contemporary Italian Women’s Narrative, Leeds: Northern Universities Press, 2000. Wright, Simona, ‘‘Francesca Sanvitale: Passato e presente come strumenti narrative,’’ in La fusta, Special Conference Issue (1993/1994): 241–249.

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ANN HALLAMORE CAESAR Selected Works Fiction Il cuore borghese, 1972. Madre e figlia, 1980. L’uomo del parco, 1984. La realta` e` un dono, 1987. Verso Paola, 1991. Il figlio dell’Impero, 1993. Tre favole dell’ansia e dell’ombra, 1994. Separazioni, 1997. L’ultima casa prima del bosco, 2003.

Essays Mettendo a fuoco. Pagine di letteratura e realta`, 1988. Camera ottica, 1999.

Translations Raymond Radiguet, Il diavolo in corpo, 1989.

Other Francesca Sanvitale presenta La battaglia di Waterloo di Hugo, 1995. Le scrittrici italiane dell’Ottocento da Eleonora de Fonseca Pimental a Matilde Serao, 1997.

MARGHERITA SARFATTI

MARGHERITA SARFATTI (1883–1961) An intellectual, journalist, and art critic, Margherita Sarfatti was the most powerful woman in Italy during the years of the Fascist regime. Cultivated and cosmopolitan, she served as a talent scout and as a promoter of the arts, supporting the members of the Futurist avant-garde as well as the modernists, the architectural rationalists and the Novecento group. Sarfatti also acted as Benito Mussolini’s political and cultural advisor, and, as recent studies have shown, she was responsible for elaborating some of the key components of the regime’s ideology: the concept of Fascism as a political cult or religion, replete with symbols and rituals; the myth of romanita`; the role of the intellectual in the consolidation of the state; and the notion that art should be profoundly politicized. Raised in a Venetian Jewish family, Sarfatti was receptive to a wide range of cultural influences, from Antonio Fogazzaro and Gabriele D’Annunzio to Dante Alighieri and Friedrich Nietzsche, from the French symbolists to Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Ruskin. She began her journalistic career in Venice and Milan, with articles on art and social commentaries written for Il Marzocco, La Voce, Utopia, and, later, for the Socialist journal Avanti! (led by Mussolini) and Il Popolo d’Italia (until 1923). Beginning in the fall of 1918, her relationship with Mussolini intensified and became deeply personal. Sarfatti was at the Duce’s side during the decisive moments of his rise to power, from the Fiume venture (1919) to the March on Rome (1922) and the Matteotti murder (1924)—and throughout the consolidation of the regime. In 1922, Sarfatti and Mussolini cofounded Gerarchia, which was to become the principal ideological organ of the Fascist party. Sarfatti edited the journal from 1925 until 1933. Her tasks in the regime’s cultural committee were numerous. In 1924, she was named head of the Italian committee for the International Exposition of Decorative Arts in Paris; in 1925, she was the only woman to participate in the Congress of Fascist Intellectuals, with a report on art and the national economy. Beginning in 1926, when she moved to Rome from Milan, Sarfatti’s salon occupied the cultural center of the capital, becoming a launching pad for young authors and new artistic movements. Her

drive and persistence were instrumental in the creation of the Novecento group, which included Achille Funi, Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Carlo Carra`, Gino Severini, and others. In the group’s work, Sarfatti witnessed the realization of her ambition to politicize art. Countering the experimentalism and formal fragmentation of the avant-garde, the art of the Novecento group sought to embody the return to order that the Fascist regime so desired, uniting modernity (in its content) and classic tradition (in its style, modeled on the fifteenth-century Italian masters). If in her Storia della pittura moderna (History of Modern Painting, 1930) Sarfatti delineated her political and ethical understanding of art, it was with the composition of Dux in 1926 that the author first succeeded in achieving a synthesis of culture and ideology. This biography of Mussolini had been released the year before in England as The Life of Benito Mussolini to lend credibility and political credentials to the new Italian leader. With remarkable shrewdness and foresight (though heedless of historical accuracy), Sarfatti depicted the Duce as a mythic and messianic icon, laying down the ideological bases of the regime in the process. A new Roman ‘‘warrior,’’ an erotic and priapic idol, a plebeian and self-taught leader, Mussolini became the sole legitimate dux of a new state; he alone could restore order and hierarchy to Italy, by bridging modernity, Roman tradition, and Catholic spirituality. In her novel Il palazzone (The Great Palazzo, 1929), Sarfatti mixed romance and political discourse. Through the metaphor of an aristocratic palace (representing the Fascist state) and the love plot between Fiorella, a widow with a dead son (much like Sarfatti herself), and the nobleman Manlio dei Valdeschi, Sarfatti again gave voice to her mythic (and erotic) ideal of the Fascist state and its leader. Charismatic and manly, intellectually and morally superior, Manlio is the builder of a new Italy, who marches on Rome at the head of a group of Fascist action squads. In the novel, Sarfatti expressed her frustration with the turn that the regime had recently taken; betraying its original, ‘‘Sarfattian’’ ideals, the regime had become a mere propagandistic apparatus, aimed at securing mass consensus. 1681

MARGHERITA SARFATTI Rather than informing art, politics had become aestheticized, an assemblage of rites and spectacles. Beginning in the late 1920s, Sarfatti—who had become too powerful and cumbersome—was gradually removed from the regime’s managerial spaces. Bit by bit, Sarfatti lost all of her official responsibilities; she was pointedly excluded from the landmark Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (1932), or Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution. The fruit of her disappointed hopes was L’America, ricerca della felicita`, (America, The Pursuit of Happiness, 1937). In this work, Franklin Roosevelt’s United States of America replaces Mussolini’s Italy, and comes to embody the Sarfattian ideal of the modern state. American culture, on the rise and guided by an intellectual and charismatic figure, a sort of antiMussolini, triumphantly carries the weight of white, Western civilization. After 1938, the events of history all but swept Sarfatti away. She made her voice heard again only many years later, with the publication of her autobiography Acqua passata (Water under the Bridge, 1955). Here Sarfatti revisited her own intellectual, personal, and political history, recasting her life as mere acqua passata. Mussolini is never mentioned, as if Sarfatti wanted to forge, at last, a new identity for herself, one without ties to Fascism.

Biography Born in Venice on 8 April 1883 to a learned and wealthy Jewish family, Margherita Sarfatti spent her childhood traveling and reading widely about art and literature. An activist in the Italian Socialist Party and in the feminist movement, she married a Socialist and Zionist lawyer, Cesare Sarfatti, with whom she had three children. She moved to Milan in 1902, where she had close ties with Socialist and feminist activists (including Filippo Turati, Anna Kuliscioff, and Ersilia Majno). Later, Sarfatti became a supporter of Mussolini’s revolutionary Socialism and his ‘‘interventionism.’’ In 1919, after her son Roberto was tragically killed in the Great War, she joined the Fascist movement. She was a companion and an advisor of Mussolini between 1918 and the early 1930s. After her relationship with the Duce ended, she traveled extensively in Europe and to the United States, where she met President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With the implementation of the Fascist racial laws in 1938, Sarfatti left Italy with a passport provided for her at Mussolini’s behest. She lived out her esilio dorato, or golden exile, between Switzerland, Paris, and 1682

Argentina, and returned to Italy in 1947. She died in her villa on Lake Como, called Villa Il Soldo, on 30 October 1961. FLORA GHEZZO See also: Fascism and Literature Selected Works Art Criticism L’arte e il fascismo, undated. La fiaccola accesa: polemiche d’arte, 1919. Segni, colori e luci: note d’arte, 1925. Achille Funi, 1925. Storia della pittura moderna, 1930. Daniele Ranzoni, 1935.

Fiction Il palazzone, 1929.

Poetry ‘‘I vivi e l’ombra,’’ 1921.

Biographies The Life of Benito Mussolini, with a preface by Benito Mussolini, translated by Frederic Whyte, London: T. Butterworth, 1925; as Dux, 1926 (Italian edition). Casanova contro Don Giovanni, 1950. Acqua passata, 1955.

Travel Writing Tunisiaca, 1924. America, ricerca della felicita`, 1937.

Other La milizia femminile in Francia, 1915. Amore svalutato, 1950.

Further Reading Basilico Pisatauro, Antonella, Margherita Grassini Sarfatti: tra futurismo e metafisica, Ercolano: La buona stampa, 1990. Bosi Maramotti, Giovanna, ‘‘Margherita Sarfatti: appunti per una storia della letteratura femminile nel periodo fascista,’’ in Il pensiero reazionario: la politica e la cultura dei fascismi, edited by Bruno Bandini, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Gallucci, Carole, ‘‘She loved Mussolini: Margherita Sarfatti and Italian Fascism,’’ in Right-Wing Women: from Conservatives to Extremists around the World, edited by Paola Bacchetta and Margaret Power, New York: Routledge, 2002. Harrowitz, Nancy, ‘‘Margherita Sarfatti and the Culture of Fascism,’’ in Veltro: Rivista della Civilta` Italiana, 40, no. 1–2 (1996): 143–148. Pontiggia, Elena (editor), Da Boccioni a Sironi: Il mondo di Margherita Sarfatti, Milan: Skira, 1997. Sullivan, Brian R., and Philip V. Cannistraro, Il Duce’s Other Woman, New York: Morrow, 1993. Urso, Simona, Margherita Sarfatti: dal mito del Dux al mito americano, Venice: Marsilio, 2003.

PAOLO SARPI

PAOLO SARPI (1552–1623) As much for his practical activities as for his literary productions, Paolo Sarpi was the most important adversary of the papal Counter-Reformation. The work that gave him literary fame, Istoria del Concilio tridentino (History of the Council of Trent, 1619), represented only the last in a long line of interests that ranged from medicine to mathematics, from philosophy to law, making him one of the most versatile intellectuals of the Italian culture of the ancien regime. His interests follow the path marked out by the course of his life, which underwent a radical change in 1606 with the interdiction launched by Pope Paul V against the republic of Venice and the bitter conflict that followed. The interdiction was an ecclesiastical censure prohibiting the priests from celebrating the sacred offices throughout the Venetian republic, and was provoked by two laws that limited the expansion of ecclesiastical property and by the Venetian tribunals’ habit of subjecting the clerics to their own courts. Sarpi was at that time a theologian belonging to the religious order of the Servants of Mary (Servite Friars) who had assumed important responsibilities within his order, and was already known for his anticurate positions. This fact should not surprise us. In Renaissance Italy, the ecclesiastical tonsure and belonging to an order were still considered means of income for philosophers and Humanists, and it often happened that the ecclesiastical ranks harbored writers who were for the most part secular. It was for these reasons that in January of 1606 Sarpi was hired by the Venetian republic as a theological adviser, and in this capacity he led the resistance to the Roman censures by publishing three writings between August and September 1606 in defense of Venice’s sovereignty: the Considerazioni sopra le censure della santita` di papa Paolo V contro la Serenissima repubblica di Venezia (Considerations on the Censures of His Holiness Pope Paul V against the Serene Republic of Venice), the Trattato dell’Interdetto dela santita` di papa Paolo V (Treatise on the Interdiction of His Holiness Pope Paul V), and finally the Apologia per le opposizioni dell’illustrissimo e reverendissimo signor cardinale Bellarmino alli trattati e risoluzioni di Giovanni Gersone sopra la validita` delle scmuniche (Defense of the Resolutions of the Most Illustrious and Reverend

Signor Cardinal Bellarmino to the Treatises and Resolutions of Giovanni Gersone on the Validity of the Excommunications). In these writings, Sarpi defended the principle of the sovereignty of the state, maintaining that it should be extended to all of its subjects, including the ecclesiastics, and accusing the papacy of having abandoned its original religious purpose in order to turn toward worldly interests. The ban having been resolved by a compromise in April of 1607, Sarpi was hired permanently as a judicial adviser to Venice and became in this position the intellectual guide of Venetian ecclesiastical policy. From this point on, Sarpi became a statesman in the service of Venice, and as such concerned himself with law, religious history, international politics, and the relations between church and state, writing for the Venetian government more than a thousand ‘‘consultations in law,’’ political-juridical opinions on predominantly religious subjects, but which were sometimes more strictly political, and which thereafter formed the foundation of Venetian law on matters of church and state. Sarpi’s cultural production nevertheless did not begin with his public life, even though with this turn he changed direction and addressed himself to more purely political and religious subjects. Before becoming a juridical adviser to the Venetian government, he assumed important governmental responsibilities within the order of the Servants of Mary—eventually attaining the rank of general procurator of the order—and was a central figure of Venetian intellectual life, frequenting the most important intellectual centers—the ‘‘foyer’’ of the Morosini brothers near Rialto, the circle of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, the house of the Querengo brothers and the haberdashery shop with the sign of the golden ship of the Zecchinellis, Dutch merchants of reformed religion. In this first phase of his life, he devoted himself to his philosophical and scientific interests and approached the atomistic and protomechanistic currents of the day, while on the philosophical and moral levels he proceeded slowly, elaborating a skeptical theory in a gnoseological and religious field, and an epicurean theory in a moral one. This theoretical research yielded a vast harvest of scientific notes and aphoristic writings that were issued in three short treatises, or 1683

PAOLO SARPI essays, of an esoteric character, known today by the names of Arte di ben pensare (The Art of Thinking Well), Pensieri medico-morali (Thoughts on Medicine and Morality), and Pensieri sulla religione (Thoughts on Religion). These three texts were written around the time of the interdiction, between 1603 and 1608, and were devoted to gnoseology, morality, and religion respectively. The Arte di ben pensare and the Pensieri medico-morali are two parallel essays dedicated to the reform of the human intellect and of moral conduct. In the Arte di ben pensare, Sarpi elaborates a critique skeptical of the traditional categories of metaphysics and theology, considering them an attribution of categories formed in man’s own experience to reality. The skeptical suspension of judgment therefore becomes a kind of method used to reform the categories of the intellect. The Pensieri medicomorali develops a parallel reform of moral conduct, a reform which, beginning from the materialist presupposition of the psychophysical unity of man, applies the procedures of the art of medicine to the cure of the soul. Here Sarpi expounds his conviction that habits and deeply rooted superstitions cannot be changed at one stroke but must instead be altered and improved gradually, through the introduction of reasonable and useful ideas, even if they are not entirely true. On the religious level, this argument meant that superstitious beliefs were to be reformed gradually by introducing beliefs more useful to individuals and society, even though they did not for the most part answer to ‘‘truth.’’ In Pensieri sulla religione, finally, Sarpi pushes theology toward a form of anthropology by arguing that the image of God created by religions is an amplification of the image that man has and desires of himself: Theology is thus reduced to the function of satisfying desire. All of these private writings, composed in a vulgate language in a terse, defensive style, constitute esoteric writings meant to be secret, and as such raise the complex methodological question of how to interpret texts protected by a deliberately obfuscating shield. Having entered into the service of the Venetian republic, Sarpi defends Venetian traditions in the religious field by trying to check the expansion of the papal powers into Venetian territory. He strove to limit the powers of the tribunals of Inquisition in order to guarantee the rights of the minorities of the realm—Jews, Greeks, and Protestants—and to defend the secular collation of ecclesiastical goods, the fiscal tax on ecclesiastical property, and secular jurisdiction over matrimonial matters. In the course of this political-juridical work, he 1684

established personal relationships and embarked on a sharp epistolary correspondence with the most important European jurists and theologians, the ‘‘Gallicans’’ Jacques Leschassier, Jacques Gillot, Jacques Auguste de Thou, and the Calvinist Je´rome Groslot de l’Isle, Philippe Duplessis Mornay, Christoph and Acatius von Dohna, Jean Hotman de Villiers, yielding an impressive collection of letters, in Latin and in the vulgate, which today provides one of the most fruitful sources on Italian politicoreligious life of the early seventeenth century. After the interdiction, Sarpi aimed at a break between Venice and the papacy, at a fissure in the anti-Hapsburg front that had been motivated by evangelical union. Internally, this plan anticipated the encouragement of Calvinist propaganda in the territories of the dominion, but not of Venice’s adherence to Calvinism, which, aside from being quite dangerous politically, also presented to his mind the inconvenience of substituting one confession for another, with scant benefits for Venetian freedom. In these years of service as a politicaljuridical adviser to the Venetian republic, Sarpi wrote several works that, for their literary range and quality, exceeded the bounds of political ‘‘consultation,’’ like the Istoria dell’Interdetto (The History of the Inquisition), composed between 1607 and 1610 but only published after his death in 1624, and the Trattato delle materie beneficiarie (Treatise of Beneficiary Matters, 1676), which traced the juridical evolution of ecclesiastical revenues. But the most wide-ranging and relevant of his long works, for its literary structure as much as its effort at documentation, was the Istoria del Concilio di Trento, published in London in 1619 at the behest of the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, and of James I himself. The grand history of the Council of Trent constitutes Sarpi’s approach to the ideological and institutional processes that had led the Italian church to be governed by an absolute monarchy. The Council of Trent was for him the decisive episode in a process of concentration and expansion of papal power. The essential thesis of his history is indeed that the plot of diplomatic events and the political skill of the curate had transformed the last chance to reform the church, reorganize the papal power, and promote episcopal power, in what turned out to be a further and definitive reinforcement of the absolutist organization of the church. Along with its historiographical thesis, the Istoria del Concilio di Trento presents a grand literary plot, a concise narration, and a biting, ironic style that gives it great force. Despite its one-sidedness, intended to denounce the papacy in

PAOLO SARPI the eyes of Europe, Sarpi’s history is based on a vast scrutiny of sources—written decrees, diaries, letters, votes—pertaining to the council that were for the most part unknown to previous historians, and that were placed in the service of an explicit methodological argument. His skeptical philosophy leads Sarpi to place his history on a strictly rational plane of interests and policies, of the intentions of the protagonists themselves and the structural interests of institutions, thus transporting onto the plane of ecclesiastical history the model designed for civil history by Francesco Guicciardini in his Istoria d’Italia.

Biography Born in Venice 24 August 1552; he completes his early studies with his maternal uncle Ambrogio Morelli and then with the Servite Gian Maria Capella; at 14 he enters the religious order of the Servi di Maria (Servants of Mary), 1566; at 20 he takes the solemn profession of vows; he receives a degree in theology at Padua, May 1578; he becomes regent of his own Venetian monastery; in the same year, 1578, he begins to collect his Pensieri on mathematical, medical optical, mechanical, and later philosophical arguments. In 1579, he becomes prior of the Venetian province of the order; in 1585, he is elected procurator general of the order and is invited to Rome, where he stays until 1588; returning to Venice, he mixes with drinking and libertine circles, and begins a friendship with Galileo Galilei and Giovan Battista della Porta; in 1601, his candidacy for the bishoprics of Caorle and of Nona in Dalmatia is revoked because of his bad relations with Rome, relating to questions of his doctrinal orthodoxy. In January 1606, he is named theologiancanonist of the Venetian republic; on 5 October 1607, he survives a dangerous attempt on his life on the bridge of Santa Fosca organized by the circle of Cardinal Borghese; in 1609, his contacts with Protestants are denounced by the French ambassador; in 1611, he is barred access to secret state documents; in 1612, his access is restored. Died in Venice, 15 January 1623. VITTORIO FRAJESE

Selected Works Collections Opere di fra Paolo Sarpi servita teologo e consultore della Serenissima repubblica di Venezia, 8 vols., Helmstad: Jacopo Mulleri, 1761–1768. Opere, edited by Gaetano and Luisa Cozzi, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1969. Pensieri naturali, metafisici e matematici, edited by Luisa Cozzi and Libero Sosio, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1996. Consulti, edited by Corrado Pin, 2 vols. (2 Parts), PisaRome: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 2001.

Historical Writing Istoria dell’Interdetto e altri scritti editi e inediti, edited by Manlio Duilio Busnelli and Giovanni Gambarin, 3 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1940; as The History of the Inquisition, translated by Robert Gentilis, 1639. Istoria del Concilio tridentino, seguita dalla ‘‘Vita del padre Paolo’’ di Fulgenzio Micanzio, edited by Corrado Vivanti, 2 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1974; as The Historie of the Councel of Trent, translated by Nathanael Brent, 1620; as History of Benefices and Selections from History of the Council of Trent, edited by Peter Burke, 1967.

Other Lettere ai protestanti, edited by Manlio Duilio Busnelli, 2 vols., 1931. Scritti giurisdizonalistici, edited by Giovanni Gambarin, 1958. Lettere ai gallicani, edited by Boris Ulianich, 1961.

Further Reading Bouwsma, William J., Venice and the Defense of Republican Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation, Berkeley-Los Angeles: California University Press, 1968. Chabod, Federico, La politica di Paolo Sarpi, Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1962. Cozzi, Gaetano, Paolo Sarpi tra Venezia e l’Europa, Turin: Einaudi, 1969. Cozzi, Gaetano, Repubblica di Venezia e Stati italiani: Politica e giustizia dal secolo XVI al secolo XVIII, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Fontanini, Giusto, Storia arcana della vita di fra Paolo Sarpi, Venice: Pietro Merletti, 1803. Frajese, Vittorio, Sarpi scettico: Stato e Chiesa a Venezia tra Cinque e Seicento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Wootton, David B., Paolo Sarpi between Renaissance and Enlightenment, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

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SALVATORE SATTA

SALVATORE SATTA (1902–1975) During his lifetime, Salvatore Satta was considered one of the most important jurists of his time, the author of the Commentario al codice di procedura civile (Commentary on the Code of Civil Procedure, 1959–1971). After his death, his family found a manuscript among his papers entitled Il giorno del giudizio (The Day of Judgment), which they published in 1977. Satta was revealed to be a novelist who found his material in the events of his life. This led to the rediscovery of De profundis, a novel published in 1948 in Padua by Cedam, the same editor of his law books, as well as the recovery of a second unpublished manuscript, La veranda (The Veranda, 1981). Written between 1928 and 1930 and then submitted to a literature contest where it was enthusiastically received by one of the judges, the poet and novelist Marino Moretti, La veranda was later set aside by its author. On the basis of these posthumously published works, Satta is now regarded as one of the most important figures of Sardinian culture, from which he derived not only his artistic norms but also his linguistic structures. His moral vision of existence, and his inclination toward fatalism are typical values of a pastoral and peasant culture. His idea of a God of pure immanence is typically Sardinian, as is the mood of desperation and the feeling of a crumbling life endemic to an underdeveloped society coping with new technologies and customs. Indeed, Satta’s dreams, myths, and metaphors are anchored to the natural landscape of a vanishing society that is more rural than industrialized. Satta also embraces a premodern conception of time as circular, the concept of the eternal return found in numerous local tales and fables as well as in the works of his contemporary Salvatore Cambosu (1895–1962). As Cambosu’s Miele amaro (Bitter Honey, 1954) demonstrates, most Sardinian writers did not separate pastoral and literary production. Satta’s works are different in subject and tone, but derive from the same premises. La veranda deals with an autobiographical episode: Satta was forced to spend two years in a sanatorium near Merano. The veranda is the place where the main characters meet and are able to come to terms with their illness and pain. The sense of failure and defeat that permeates the whole novel also pervades the love 1686

story between the narrator and one of the female patients, endowing the novel with a terrifying sense of precariousness. Between June 1944 and April 1945, when Satta was a refugee in Friuli, he wrote what would later become De profundis. A chronicle of the 25 years of Italian history leading up to World War II, De profundis is, however, far from being a mere analysis of the rise and fall of the Fascist regime. Its tone and style are meditative and apolitical: Matters are treated with sarcasm and a profound bitterness. Satta’s work does not focus on any particular historical character. In Il giorno del giudizio, for example, he does not examine one specific family and its members. Instead, by analyzing the story of his native city, Nuoro, at the beginning of the century, he describes a middle class searching for an order that it is unable to find. He focuses on a closed and homogeneous community in a delimited period and examines every possible subject: the history of the city’s foundation, its inhabitants, the streets and the houses, the country and its seasonal rites, the graveyard. Thus, Il giorno del giudizio can be read as a rich ethnographic document about the strange community that lived in Nuoro at the end of nineteenth century, even if everything is seen through the lenses of the Sanna Carboni family. Around them the whole city unfolds: the aristocrats and the nobles, the bandits and the shepherds, the priests and the vagabonds. It is of no importance that the patriarch, Don Sebastiano, a notary, failed in his role as husband and father; that his sons, one of whom is the narrator, are marked in different ways by war and their environment; that Donna Vincenza, the mother, suffers from carelessness and neglect of her relatives because of her illness. The main intention of the novel is to recollect a world and a way of life that no longer exists but can be reconstructed by memory. As Leonardo Sole writes, ‘‘the author’s personal memory expands to include collective memory within its boundaries, and Nuoro becomes the landscape of the soul’’ (‘‘Il giorno del giudizio: Tempo di vita, tempo di morte,’’ 1979). The book, written for a reader to whom everything needs to be explained for the first time, is full of all those observations that anthropologists call cultural traits or ethnic characteristics, such as the description and

ALBERTO SAVINIO (ANDREA DE CHIRICO) explanation of local practices and the translation of the few dialect words necessary for understanding the text. The characters, their psychology, and the setting are the object of a careful analysis that never falls into the stereotypical. Satta, who was never in contact with any literary group or circle, alternates a sober and linear style with the main techniques of twentieth-century novels: psychological analysis, stream of consciousness, and metafictional elements.

Selected Works Novels De profundis, 1948. Il giorno del giudizio, 1977; as The Day of Judgment, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1987. La veranda, 1981.

Legal Writings Commentario al Codice di procedura civile, 5 vols., 1959– 1971. Quaderni del diritto e del processo civile, 6 vols., 1969–1972.

Biography

Further Reading

Born in Nuoro, 9 August 1902; studied at the Liceo Classico Azuni in Sassari; studied law at the University of Sassari, 1920–1922, then graduated from the University of Pisa, 1924; moved to Milan and began his law career with Professor Zanzucchi; fell ill with tuberculosis and went to a sanatorium in Merano; this experience inspired his first novel, La veranda, 1928; began Commentario al codice di procedura civile, published between 1959 and 1970 and Quaderni del diritto e del processo civile, published between 1969 and 1972; professor of law at the University of Camerino, 1934; at the University of Macerata, 1936; at the University of Padua, 1938; at the University of Genoa, 1939; married Laura Boschian in Trieste, 1939, and had two sons, Filippo and Gino; prorector at the University of Trieste, 1945; professor of law at the University of Genoa, 1947–1957; published De profundis, 1948; professor of law at the University of Rome, 1958. Began to write his masterpiece Il giorno del giudizio, in 1970. Died in Rome, 19 April 1975 of cancer.

Bigi, Brunella, L’ autorita` della lingua: per una nuova lettura dell’opera di Salvatore Satta, Ravenna: Longo, 1994. Borzı`, Salvatore, Il cristianesimo laico di Salvatore Satta, Soveria Mannelli (Catanzaro): Rubbettino, 2004. Brugnolo, Stefano, L’idillio ansioso: Il giorno del giudizio di Salvatore Satta e la letteratura delle periferie, Cava de’ Tirreni: Avagliano, 2004. Carrera, Alessandro, Il principe e il giurista: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa e Salvatore Satta, Rome: Pieraldo, 2001. Collu, Ugo (editor), Salvatore Satta e Il giorno del giudizio, Nuoro: Quaderni del Consorzio per la pubblica lettura ‘‘S. Satta,’’ 1979. Collu, Ugo, La scrittura come riscatto: Introduzione a Salvatore Satta, Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre, 2002. Corda, Mario, La filosofia della vita in dimensione esistenzialista: Salvatore Satta filosofo, Rome: Armando, 2004. De Giovanni, Neria, La scrittura sommersa: Itinerari su Salvatore Satta, Cagliari: Gia, 1984. Marci, Giuseppe (editor), L’autografo de ‘‘Il giorno del giudizio,’’ Cagliari: CUEC, 2003. Sole, Leonardo, ‘‘Il giorno del giudizio: Tempo di vita, tempo di morte,’’ in Salvatore Satta e Il giorno del giudizio, edited by Ugo Collu, Nuoro: Quaderni del Consorzio per la pubblica lettura ‘‘S. Satta,’’ 1979. Stacchini Gazzola, Vanna, Come in un giudizio: Vita di Salvatore Satta, Rome: Donzelli, 2002. Studi in memoria di Salvatore Satta, Padua: CEDAM, 1982.

MARCELLA FARINA

ALBERTO SAVINIO (ANDREA DE CHIRICO) (1891–1952) A composer first and then a writer and painter, Andrea De Chirico went from the time he was a young man by another name: Alberto Savinio. The reasons behind the change are unclear. The pseudonym in any case helped distinguish Savinio’s

opus from that of his brother, the renowned painter Giorgio De Chirico. Savinio’s numerous contributions to Italian literature, art, and culture were magnified by his multimedial talents and his steadfast convictions 1687

ALBERTO SAVINIO (ANDREA DE CHIRICO) concerning the indivisibility of the arts. His offbeat sense of humor, flamboyant erudition, and brilliant wordplay contributed to a reputation for bizarre, surreal, and difficult texts. His works both disorient and seduce the reader or viewer with their enigmatic creations. Inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire, Savinio in an early, long dramatic poem, Les chants de la mi-mort (The Songs of Half-Death, 1914) created a first, enduring symbol of his particular talents: the faceless mannequin. His brother Giorgio made this figure the emblem of the Scuola Metafisica in painting. Along with his brother and the painter Carlo Carra`, Savinio was in fact instrumental in the birth of that movement, itself characterized by the presence of mystery and secrets. The school, explicitly concerned with defining Italianicity as inseparable from a rich, multiform cultural past, was part of the avant-garde, yet it differed in important ways from Italian Futurism, which rejected all things historical in favor of dramatic change and renewal. Affinities with French surrealism instead were notable, especially in compositional styles. Both movements turned tradition on its head for the purpose of ‘‘turning things around,’’ a move Savinio used in his recasting of Greek and Roman myth and literature as well as biblical narratives. The ancient and modern were therefore drawn together in original, sometimes shocking ways. The early mannequin figure, for instance, foreshadowed a host of hybrid figures that populated Savinio’s texts, visual and verbal, with their spectacular proliferation of statue-people, ephebes, hermaphrodites, humanoid furniture and architecture, bird people, and other human-beasts. The instability of the ‘‘human’’ is, paradoxically, a constant destiny and therefore a sign of continuity. Equally important to Savinio’s work is a combination of high and low lexicon, cultural references, and genres. Typically, the lowly is associated with the marginal, the different, and with potential transformations, while the high tradition comes in the form of narratives about heroes and gods transposed into modern settings to brilliant effect. Savinio’s intense, prolific, and sustained theoretical reflections on aesthetic questions informed his creative efforts. A reader of Friedrich Nietzsche and of pre-Socratic philosophy, Savinio disdained idealist thought and was a critic of cultural categories such as ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘man,’’ or ‘‘woman.’’ While engaging in correspondence with avantgarde artists, such as Tristan Tzara in Zurich, he produced his first major work and one of the most extraordinary, jarring novels of World War I, 1688

Hermaphrodito (Hermaphrodite, 1918), written in both French and Italian and both verse and prose. From then onward Savinio’s work gravitated toward ironic and comic modes and to monstrous, dark subjects. The work contains short prose poems and semiautobiographical tales, such as ‘‘La partenza dell’Argonauta’’ (‘‘The Departure of the Argonaut’’), about a soldier traveling from Bologna to Macedonia during wartime, and ‘‘Isabella Hasson,’’ the story of the failed courtship of a woman who belongs to the Jewish community in Salonika. After World War I, Savinio lived between Paris and Rome, where he was influential in what has been called, somewhat too simplistically, the ‘‘ritorno all’ordine’’ (return to order), a supposed restoration, after the iconoclasm of the avantgarde, of more traditional cultural values. Savinio explored the question of how to renew the Italian cultural tradition in a modern key in works such as Tragedia dell’infanzia (Tragedy of Childhood, 1937), which depicts a child’s comic revolt against bourgeois family conventions, and Angelica o la notte di maggio (Angelica or a May Night, 1927), as well as in the short stories of collections such as Casa ‘‘La Vita’’ (House ‘‘Life,’’ 1943). As the title suggests, in the latter work the author also investigated, with characteristic humor, other aspects of the human condition, from illness to death and beyond, as in the short story ‘‘Il signor Mu¨nster’’ (Mister Mu¨nster), in which the eponymous character watches himself die with a mixture of embarrassment, amusement, and detachment. Savinio’s painting career began in earnest in the later 1920s and continued throughout his lifetime. In the 1930s, he also began to write for the theater, an activity that intensified in the 1940s. Indeed, Savinio’s multidisciplinary vocation seemed to find an almost natural home in the theater, and he also experimented with all aspects of theatrical production, from stage to costume design to directing: His famous edition of Gioacchino Rossini’s Armida for the Maggio Musicale opened in Florence just a few days before his death. His earliest play, Capitano Ulisse (Captain Ulysses, 1934) was written for Pirandello’s Teatro d’Arte, of which he was a founding member, although it was only produced in 1938, after the group had dissolved. Its reinterpretation of classical mythology through the mores and values of bourgeois society links it thematically to the narrative works of the same period, as well as to later theatrical works such as Alcesti di Samuele (Alcestis Daughter of Samuel, 1949), set against the background of World War II

ALBERTO SAVINIO (ANDREA DE CHIRICO) and the Holocaust, and the one-woman play Emma B. vedova Jocasta (Emma B., Widow Jocasta, 1949), a story of incest that explores the repressed tensions and taboos that threaten to rupture the bourgeois order. Performed to critical acclaim by the famous actress Paola Borboni, who included it in her repertoire, Emma B. vedova Jocasta was undoubtedly Savinio’s most successful theatrical work. Beginning around World War II, Savinio developed a more readable style in his fiction. It characterized a prose work on Milan, Ascolto il tuo cuore, citta` (I Listen to Your Heartbeart, City, 1943), which contains an entertaining history and typology of the first train stations in Italian cities. These later books capture an acute sense of displacement and unfamiliarity. The short, whimsical collection of biographies of artists and politicians in Narrate, uomini, la vostra storia (Operatic Lives, 1942) depicts human beings who are caught up in tangled webs of representations and are victims of cultural subjection on unconscious levels (among them are Isadora Duncan, Giuseppe Verdi, and Paracelsus). Savinio distrusted the surrealist theorization of an ‘‘automatic’’ or ‘‘unconscious’’ generation of art, yet he admired what he saw as the psychologist’s assault on the deity, understood very broadly as a cultural ‘‘father.’’ Hence, the symbolic systems of dominant cultures are seen as repressive, tragic, and awe-inspiring at once. Savinio was a frequent reviewer of literary books, music, and cinema. His critical voice was influential throughout his lifetime (for example, as the editor of the journal Colonna beginning in 1933), and the numerous edited volumes of his essays and short editorials demonstrate just how prolific the author was in this endeavor. Yet, critical opinion about his own fiction and painting followed a pattern that also dogged his brother, De Chirico: Both were seen as either not avantgarde enough or not enough aligned with Fascist aesthetic experiments linked to Futurism. Savinio was deemed at different times overly literary and overly fantastic, too neoclassical and too international. In the 1930s, with the historical consolidation of Fascism, his work appeared to some critics as, in fact, not ‘‘national’’ enough. A magazine to which Savinio contributed, Omnibus, was shut down by Fascist censors in 1939 when he wrote an ironic piece in which he suggested that the great Romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi died of an overdose of ice cream. In the postwar years, critical opinion changed again, only now it appeared that Savinio’s outlook was not sufficiently realistic

at a time when neorealism was at its most influential. The writer responded in the 1950s with the charge that neorealist prose was overreliant on the form of the chronicle. Since the 1970s, Savinio is held to be a great postmodernist antelitteram. This renewed interest has resulted in reissues of his works and translations into numerous languages, including French and English, as well as in retrospective exhibitions of his paintings.

Biography Born 25 August 1891, in Athens, Greece; graduates in 1903 at the age of 12 from conservatory; in 1906, moves to Munich to study musical composition with Max Reger and begins an intensive study of German philosophy and literature; moves to Paris in 1911, where he enters the literary circle of Guillaume Apollinaire and lives until 1915; during World War I he is stationed first in Ferrara and then in Salonika (Greece); in the 1920s, he commutes between Rome and Paris; in 1926, Savinio marries the actress Maria Morino; two children are born: Angelica in 1928 and Ruggero in 1934; threatened with charges of anti-Fascism, Savinio spends a portion of the war years in a remote area away from Rome but continues to write and paint; from 1948 onward Savinio works as set designer for La Scala theater in Milan. Died of a heart attack on 5 May 1952 in Rome. KEALA JEWELL Selected Works Collections Opere, scritti dispersi: tra guerra e dopoguerra (1943–1952), edited by Leonardo Sciascia and Franco De Maria, Milan: Bompiani, 1989. Alcesti di Samuele e atti unici, edited by Alessandro Tinterri, Milan: Adelphi, 1991. Hermaphrodito e altri romanzi, edited by Alessandro Tinterri, Milan: Adelphi, 1995. Scritti dispersi, 1943–1952, edited by Paola Italia, Milan: Adelphi, 2004.

Poetry Les chants de la mi-mort, 1914; as The Songs of Half-Death, translated by James Brook and Susan Etlinger, 1991.

Fiction Hermaphrodito, 1918. La casa ispirata, 1925. Angelica o la notte di maggio, 1927. Tragedia dell’infanzia, 1937; as Tragedy of Childhood, translated by John Shepley, 1991. Achille inamorato (Gradus ad Parnasum), 1938.

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ALBERTO SAVINIO (ANDREA DE CHIRICO) Infanzia di Nivasio Dolcemare, 1941; as Childhood of Nivasio Dolcemare, translated by Richard Pevear, 1987. La nostra anima, 1944; as Psyche, translated by James Brook and Susan Etlinger, 1991. Casa ‘‘La Vita,’’ 1943. Tutta la vita, 1945.

Nonfiction Dico a te, Clio, 1940; as Speaking to Clio, translated by John Shepley, 1987. Narrate, uomini, la vostra storia, 1942; as Operatic Lives, translated by John Shepley, 1988. Ascolto il tuo cuore, citta`, 1943. Sorte dell’Europa, 1945. Scatola Sonora, 1955. Maupassant e ‘‘l’altro,’’ 1960. Nuova encyclopedia, 1977. Vita di Enrico Ibsen, 1979. Capri, 1988; as Capri, translated by John Shepley, 1989.

Plays Morte di Niobe, 1925; as The Death of Niobe, translated by James Brook and Susan Etlinger, 1991. Capitano Ulisse, 1934. Il suo nome, 1945. La famiglia Mastinu, 1948. Emma B. vedova Jocasta, 1949. Alcesti di Samuele, 1949.

Further Reading Baldacci, Paolo, ‘‘De Chirico and Savinio: The Theory and Practice of Metaphysical Painting,’’ in Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900–1988, edited by Emily Braun, Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1989. Bramanti, Vanni, Gli dei e gli eroi di Savinio, Palermo: Sellerio, 1983.

Calvesi, Maurizio, La metafisica schiarita. Da De Chirico a Carra`, da Morandi a Savinio, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982. Carlino, Marcello, Alberto Savinio. La scrittura in stato d’assedio, Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, 1979. Cirillo, Silvana, Alberto Savinio. Le molte facce di un artista di genio, Milan: Mondadori, 1997. Guglielmi, Guido, La prosa Italiana del Novecento: umorismo, metafisica, grottesco, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. Gutie´rrez, Maria Elena, Alberto Savinio. Lo psichismo delle forme, Florence: Cadmo, 1999. Italia, Paola, Il pellegrino appassionato: Savinio scrittore, 1915–1925, Palermo: Sellerio, 2004. Jewell, Keala, The Art of Enigma: The De Chirico Brothers and the Politics of Modernism, University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2004. Lanuzza, Stefano, Alberto Savinio, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Piscopo, Ugo, Alberto Savinio, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Sabbatini, Marco, L’argonauta, l’anatomico, il funambolo, Rome: Salerno, 1997. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Alberto Savinio (1973),’’ in La missione del critico, Genoa: Marietti, 1987. Secchieri, Filippo, Dove comincia la realta` e dove finisce: studi su Alberto Savinio, Florence: Le Lettere, 1998. Somigli, Luca, ‘‘Theatre and Its ‘Truth’: A Reading of Alberto Savinio’s Il suo nome,’’ in Theatre and the Visual Arts, edited by Giuliana Sanguineti-Katz, Vera Golino and Domenico Pietropaolo, New York and Ottawa: Legas, 2001. Tinterri, Alessandro, Savinio e lo spettacolo, Bologna: il Mulino, 1993. Vivarelli, Pia, Alberto Savinio: Catalogo generale, Milan: Electa, 1996.

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA (1452–1498) Girolamo Savonarola’s literary work is closely tied to his life and his apostolate. The period of ‘‘conversion,’’ the beginning of his religious vocation, coincides with his first poetic production. At 20 years of age, he composed a canzone, Petrarchan in its structure and themes, titled De ruina Mundi (On the Ruin of the World, 1472), in which he deplored the vices of Italy and the church. Three years later, he wrote another canzone, De ruina Ecclesiae (On the Ruin of the Clergy, 1575) in which the condemnation of ecclesiastic habits is even more explicit. On the same subject, he passed 1690

from the canzone to the laud with Oratio pro Ecclesia (Prayer for the Church) when, during his first stay in Florence, he witnessed the simoniacal election of Innocent VIII to the papacy in August of 1484. All of the lauds that follow the devotional model of religious literature about the Medici and San Marco are from this Florentine period. A number of erudite treatises in Latin date to the beginning of his second visit to Florence (1490), for instance the Apologeticus de ratione poeticae artis (Apologue on the Justification of the Poetic Arts, 1492), a four-books work that

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA condemns poetry when it does not incite to faith, as well as short works of religious edification written in the vernacular, destined for the faithful. Savonarola also held lessons in the Church of San Marco on the Apocalypse and, between October 1490 and January 1491, a series of sermons commenting on the first Epistle of Saint John. Of Savonarola’s first great preaching in the Cathedral of Florence, Santa Maria del Fiore, during Lent in 1491, there remain only his own drafts in Latin. This is also the case for the sermon for Lent in 1492 in the church of San Lorenzo, during which Savonarola bitterly censured corrupt Florentine habits. It was only with a series of sermons for Advent 1494 in Santa Maria del Fiore, from 1 November to 28 December, that we have a text in the vernacular, even if the words recorded are not necessarily those that issued forth from the friar’s mouth. The title Prediche sopra Aggeo (Sermons On Haggai) is improperly given to the cycle, but the first 13 sermons continue and finish the lessons on the ark and the Flood given during Lent the same year. The very heterogeneity that allows for adaptation to the variable circumstances of time makes this cycle a model of Savonarola’s homiletics. The sermons for the holidays of 1495 were recorded by the notary Lorenzo Violi, who collected them with the title Prediche sopra i Salmi (Sermons on the Psalms). The first sermon on the theme of universal peace (of 8 January) is particularly important, as is the third, from 13 January, on the necessary renovation of the church. The Lenten sermons of 1495, from 1 March to 24 April are titled Prediche sopra Giobbe (Sermons on Job), but open with an introductory sermon that reevokes the theme of Noah and the ark. With Job, Savonarola introduced the theme of the troubled elect, to which he would often return. After the disastrous retreat of Charles VIII’s army, which had threatened the authority of Pope Alexander VI, Savonarola was hit with three successive papal briefs between July and October of 1495. That year, there was no sermon for Advent. The voice of the Domenican priest was heard again, with the ambiguous consent of the pope, for Lent 1496. This cycle, that extended beyond Easter (from 17 February until 10 April) and was entitled Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria (Sermons on Amos and Zechariah), is the apex of Savonarola’s preaching. Aside from the transcription by Lorenzo Violi, there is a printed version edited by Savonarola himself, which had immediate, resounding success in Italy and abroad. The choice of Amos, killed for

his prophecies, marks a return to the theme of martyrdom and sounds a challenge to his enemies. Savonarola also casts prudence aside when he evoked la verita` (the truth) that would explode like a spreading fire (sermon of 8 March) or when, commenting on a verse by Zechariah, on 24 March, he traced the ideal portrait of a good pope in strident, allusive contrast with the image of the Borgia pope. But his final sermon, the appeal to the Church of Rome and to all Christians that they might do penitence for their sins as long as time allows, signaled an interval of hope. Savonarola returned to the pulpit for a cycle of sermons between Lent and Advent (from 8 May to 27 November), particularly dedicated to the reform of customs, which are collected under the comprehensive title of Prediche sopra Ruth e Michea (Sermons on Ruth and Micah). At the same time, he put the final touches on the treatise De simplicitate christianae vitae (On the Simplicity of Christian Life, 1496). For Advent (from the 30 November of 28 December), Savonarola chose the prophet Ezekiel and the theme of truth, and returned to the same biblical text again on the next Lent (from 8 February to 20 March 1497), during which the rebuke of the church’s wickedness (sermon of 4 March) became more bitter. These latter sermons were then collected together under the title of Prediche sopra Ezechiele (Sermons on Ezekiel). Savonarola’s evident resentment was also the result of a series of political events that threatened his apostolate and his life itself: The truce between Charles VIII and the league that included the pope meant that he had no external support, while within Florence the rapid succession of different signorie or lordships made the political situation unstable. Finally, he was prohibited from preaching outside of his convent and was excommunicated by the pontiff on 18 June 1497. Constrained to silence, on 8 May he wrote the Epistola a tutti gli eletti di Dio e fedeli cristiani (Epistle to All of God’s Elect and Faithful Christians) and dedicated himself to his most important religious and political treatises: the Triumphus Crucis (The Triumph of the Cross, 1497), an apologetic treatise in four books intended to demonstrate the truth of the Christian faith, and the Trattato circa il reggimento e il governo della citta` di Firenze (Liberty and Tyranny in the Government of Men, 1498), in three books, that exalts the Florentine republican traditions and the free popular government, recently instated. Finally, a favorable signoria permitted him to return to his preaching in the cathedral for Lent in 1498. 1691

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA His excommunication was extended to those who came to listen to him, but Savonarola refused the very foundations of the sanctions against him. The biblical narration of the Hebrews in flight from Egypt under the guidance of Moses seemed to adapt itself perfectly to his situation, illustrating the necessity of saving himself by isolating himself from ecclesiastic corruption. He decided thus to comment the book of Exodus and, although some of the sermons were on the Psalms, they were all collected under the title Prediche sopra l’Esodo (Sermons on Exodus). This is in fact the last phase of Savonarola’s life and his work as a reformer, a period that concludes with his arrest, his triple trial, and his burning at the stake. In this dramatic period, he produced lofty spiritual works both in the vernacular, such as the Regola a ben vivere (Rules for Living Well, 1498), dedicated to a fellow prisoner whom he converted, and in Latin. A central figure in the political and religious history of Europe, author of apologetic and theological works, Savonarola is also one of the greatest preachers in literary history. The urgency of his prophetic words in Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria—‘‘il verbo di Dio e` nel mio core come un foco, il quale se io nol mando fuora mi arde dentro le medulle e le osse’’ (the word of God is in my heart as a fire, and if I do not send it out, it burns inside my marrow and my bones)—and the awareness that ‘‘la carita` di Dio e del prossimo e` tutta la fortezza della lingua’’ (the charity of God and one’s neighbor is the fortitude of language) made him an inspired preacher, a mediator between God and the faithful. But, as he himself also noted, he belonged to an order that prepared its followers with extreme rigor for preaching, according to techniques handed down over centuries. In the quantity of biblical references and the rational structure of his sermons, Savonarola remained faithful to the Domenican model, although he gave new vigor to these forms with the fieriness of his prophetic message. His contemporaries were aware of the power of his words and of his unstudied preaching all’apostolesca (in apostle-like fashion), as his contemporary Bartolomeo Cerretani called it. Few have known how to use rhetorical figures, which give dynamism to his discourse, with such naturalness and coherence: The condemnation of the tyrant, for example, is developed, in his eighth sermon on Amos and Zechariah (24 February 1496), by way of a dramatic hypotyposis that recalls the Medicean expressions to awaken the republican spirit. Indeed, it 1692

might be said that Savonarola constructed his sermons on images to which he assigned symbolic value. Like the themes of various sermons and the texts that help him to develop them, these images are, above all, taken from the Old Testament (the ‘‘ark’’ of good Christian living; the ‘‘serpent’’ of the corrupt church) but also from the New (Christ as ‘‘doctor’’ of a corrupt Florence or as ‘‘gardener’’ of a healed Florence). But the trademark of Savonarola’s style is the evolution of these images in the form of continued, interwoven metaphors that bridge his sermons and cycles of sermons, giving them, in their entirety, unity and force.

Biography Born in Ferrara on 21 September 1452, the son Niccolo` di Michele and Elena Bonacossi. His grandfather, the learned and pious Michele Savonarola, had a great influence over his education. Michele was chief physician at the Este court, educated at the University of Padua, the city in which the family originated. Earned the title of master in liberal arts; during his studies in medicine, discovered his religious vocation that led to his entering the Domenican Order in the convent of San Domenico in Bologna in 1475. Sent by the superiors of the order in the convent of San Marco in Florence as a ‘‘lettore,’’ or commentator, on the Scripture for the friars and a small circle of laymen, May 1482. Remained in Florence until 1487. Lorenzo dei Medici, who had heard people praise his spirituality and knowledge of doctrine, asked the general of the order that he return soon. Returned to Florence, 1490. His relationship with Lorenzo was excellent, even though his first sermons in San Marco and San Lorenzo were particularly harsh regarding the Florentine oligarchy. Continued to enjoy the support of the signore of Florence when he was elected prior of San Marco, July 1491. Maintained close ties to Lorenzo’s successor, Piero, from whom he had the autonomy that allowed him to adopt a more rigorous project of religious life. When, with the arrival of Charles VIII and the French army in Italy, the Florentines overthrew the Medici, Savonarola approved the constitution of a popular republican government. Supported the law of reconciliation that permitted avoidance of settling accounts between the various factions, 19 March 1495. This provoked the animosity of the oligarchy hostile to the Medici (the Arrabbiati). Their opposition to the followers of the friar (the Piagnoni) became more bitter, and had the support of a large

GIROLAMO SAVONAROLA majority of the clergy (the Tepidi). Savonarola managed to continue his reform of lay and ecclesiastical customs as long as he could rely on the neutrality of the Medici and the support, although distant, of the king of France, who threatened the pope with an ecumenical council. The conjunction of the opposing forces and the aggressions of the Compagnacci (the younger and more fervid of the Arrabbiati) led to his arrest in San Marco, 8 April 1498, his imprisonment in the Palazzo della Signoria, his trials (two secular and one ecclesiastical trial, all involving torture) and finally his burning at the stake, together with two brethren, in the Piazza della Signoria, on 23 May 1498. MARINA MARIETTI Selected Works Collections Edizione nazionale delle opere di Girolamo Savonarola, directed by Roberto Ridolfi, Rome: Angelo Belardetti, 1955–1992. Poesie, edited by Mario Martelli, Rome: Angelo Belardetti, 1968. Selected Writings of Girolamo Savonarola: Religion and Politics, 1490–1498, translated and edited by Anne Borelli and Maria Pastore Passaro, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Treatises Solatium itineris mei, 1484; edited by Giulio Cattin, 1978. Apologeticus de ratione poeticae artis, 1492. Compendium logicae, 1492. De simplicitate christianae vitae, 1496; edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, 1959. Triumphus Crucis, 1497; edited by Mario Ferrara, 1961; as The Triumph of the Cross, translated by John Proctor, 1901. Trattato contra li astrologi, 1497. Epistola a tutti gli eletti di Dio e fedeli cristiani, 1497. De veritate prophetica, 1498; edited by Angela Crucitti, 1974. Regola a ben vivere, (1498); as A Guide to Righteous Living, translated by Konrad Eisenbichler, 2003. Trattato circa il reggimento e il governo della citta` di Firenze, 1498; as Liberty and Tyranny in the Government of Men, translated by C. L. Flumiani, 1976. Operette spirituali, edited by Mario Ferrara, 2 vols., 1976.

Sermons Prediche sopra Aggeo (1494); edited by Luigi Firpo, 1955. Prediche sopra i Salmi (1495); edited by Vincenzo Romano, 2 vols., 1969. Prediche sopra Giobbe (1495); edited by Roberto Ridolfi, 2 vols., 1957. Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria (1496); edited by Paolo Ghiglieri, 3 vols., 1972.

Prediche sopra Ruth e Michea (1496); edited by Vincenzo Romano, 2 vols., 1962. Prediche sopra Ezechiele (1497); edited by Roberto Ridolfi, 2 vols., 1955. Prediche sopra l’Esodo (1498); edited by Pier Giorgio Ricci, 2 vols., 1956. Sermones in Primam Divi Ioannis Epistolam, con il volgarizzamento toscano, edited by Armando F. Verde, O.P., 1989.

Letters Le lettere, edited by Roberto Ridolfi, 1933.

Other Scritti filosofici, edited by Giancarlo Garfagnini and Eugenio Garin, 2 vols., 1988. Scritti vari, edited by Armando F. Verde, O.P., 1992. l breviario di frate Girolamo Savonarola: postille autografe, edited by Armando F. Verde, 1999.

Further Reading Cattin, Giulio, Il primo Savonarola. Poesie e Prediche autografe del Codice Borromeo, Florence: Olschki, 1973. Ferrara, Mario, Nuova bibliografia savonaroliana, Vaduz: Topos Verlag, 1981. Fontes, Anna, Jean-Louis Fournel, and Michel Plaisance (editors), Savonarole. Enjeux, de´bats, questions, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997. Fournel, Jean-Louis, and Jean-Claude Zancarini, La politique de l’expe´rience. Savonarole: Guicciardini et le re´publicanisme florentin, Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2002. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo (editor), Studi savonaroliani. Verso il V centenario, Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1996. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo (editor), Savonarola. Democrazia. Tirannide. Profezia, Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998. Garfagnini, Gian Carlo, ‘‘Questa e` la terra tua.’’ Savonarola a Firenze, Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2000. Marietti, Marina, Savonarole, Paris: P.U.F., 1997. Martines, Lauro, Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Florence, London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. Ridolfi, Roberto, Vita di Girolamo Savonarola, Rome: Belardetti, 1952; new ed. with notes by Armando F. Verde, O.P., Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1997 (ript. of 6 edition, Florence: Sansoni, 1981). Scapecchi, Piero (editor), Catalogo delle edizioni di Girolamo Savonarola (secc. XV-XVI) possedute dalla Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Florence: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1998. Uzzani, Giovanna (editor), Girolamo Savonarola: storia, fede, arte, Florence: Le Lettere, 1999. Verde, Armando F., O.P., ‘‘Le lezioni o i sermoni sull’ ‘Apocalisse’ di Girolamo Savonarola (1490),’’ in Immagine e parola, Memorie Domenicane, new series, 19 (1988): 5–109. Weinstein, Donald, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970.

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CAMILLO SBARBARO

CAMILLO SBARBARO (1888–1967) A poet and author of prose poetry, Camillo Sbarbaro was among the first to express in Italy the crisis of the individual that, at the turn of the century, emerged in European literature. This accomplishment is all the more remarkable given the fact that, being naturally inclined to solitude, he often chose to isolate himself from the literary community. Except for a brief period when he was part of the group centered around the Florentine literary magazine La voce, he chose to live in seclusion, seldom leaving his beloved Liguria. In 1911, Sbarbaro published his first book of poetry, Resine (Resins), which featured lyrics that are lively descriptions of natural events, quick sketches captured in a language still fully belonging to the nineteenth century. The young Sbarbaro succumbed to naturalistic commonplaces, as in his personification of the months and the seasons, or in his conception of poetry as a plain, immediate, representation of nature. Eugenio Montale’s severe judgment of this plaquette, published in the literary review L’azione, states: ‘‘Sonnets and quatrains, and various strophes, all honest and decent but nothing more’’ (Camillo Sbarbaro, 1920). Montale’s dismissive opinion as well as Sbarbaro’s later disavowal of these verses, has negatively affected the critical consideration of the book. In contrast to the assumption of those who plainly discarded Resine as the product of an immature or premature phase of the author, it should be said that at least three aspects link this youthful collection to Sbarbaro’s later works. The first aspect is the anticlimactic mood generated in the reader by a quiet, nonchalant understatement regarding the role of poetry, exemplified by the figure of the god of poetry Pan, who is directly quoted from a poem by Gabriele D’Annunzio but who is here playfully cast as a bourgeois character. The second regards the intensity with which the scenery is rendered, even if rooted in the harsh landscape of Liguria, seems occasionally to bring into question the faith in external reality upon which naturalism was based. Finally, Sbarbaro’s lyric style appears already his own: seemingly prosaic, structured around internal tensions and modulations, with enjambment as its most explicit technique. 1694

The second book of verses, Pianissimo (1914), constitutes a turning point: Still linked to Resine in many ways, it also signals a deviation from the contemporary Italian poetic tradition. As is often the case when a poet envisions his work as a lyrical autobiography, the book is in reality a bold description of a restless soul. The affliction of the soul here represented is generated by the crisis of the absolute certainties of the nineteenth century and by the perception of human loneliness in the world and in society. The individual is ultimately isolated from other beings by making any prospect for communication impossible, and from nature, which cannot provide a sense of rest or consolation. Pianissimo thus narrates the discovery of this human condition, in which suddenly, the world of men is no longer recognized for what it was. Discovering the inauthentic, fictitious side of human life—and his own, first and foremost—Sbarbaro breaks his ties with realism in an extremely personal way: Indeed, in this work there is nothing more real than the inner condition of the self, dramatically removed from any ontological reality. Abandoning naturalist mimesis, his writing reveals an impulse to distill reality to its bare essence. Even if the collection vehicles a condition of aridity and indifference reminiscent of crepuscolarismo, Sbarbaro distanced his work from the ironic effect and the repertoire of tropes characteristic of the movement. If anything, in its choice of tones, in its vernacular characteristics, in presenting the ragged landscape of Liguria as the object correlative of the alienation of the narrating self, his works echo the regional tradition exemplified by Ceccardo Roccatagliata Ceccardi (1871–1919) and Giovanni Boine (1887–1917). The inner world of the narrating voice is neither colorful nor rich, and certainly not narcissistic. Rather, the self is often denied its full range of perceptive abilities—for instance, it is represented as deaf, mute, or as a somnambulist— and thus reified in its approach to the world. It is grief that generates the poetry of the book, often limited to acknowledging the subject’s solitude. Nevertheless, this leads to an ethical function: By remaining sharply self-conscious, Sbarbaro accomplishes a moral task because, without eschewing or

CAMILLO SBARBARO abandoning the burden of his experience, he composes poetry in an effort to salvage what is left of the self, to rescue it from the complete reification induced by the habit of living. Not a well-read poet, but naturally erudite, Sbarbaro did not conceive his interpretation of the crisis of the individual through mere personal introspection. The influence of French symbolism, and of Charles Baudelaire in particular, is evident in Pianissimo, which is characterized by a deep ambivalence toward the modern city as the locus of human degradation, at times envisioned as a desert of objectified human relations, at times rendered metaphorically as a cruel sanctuary, or as a brothel where one must go to get rid of lustful thoughts and to forget one’s tired and resigned soul. An example are the opening lines of ‘‘Esco dalla lussuria’’ (I Emerge from Lust): ‘‘Esco dalla lussuria. / M’incammino / pei lastrici sonori nella notte. / Non ho rimorso e turbamento. Sono / solo tranquillo immensamente’’ (I emerge from lust. / I start walking through / the sonorous cobbled-stone paved streets in the night. / I do not feel any remorse or perturbation. I feel / an immense tranquility alone). The city in which Pianissimo is staged is Genoa, the only urban center with which the author was familiar. Its presence, however, is not recognizable in the verses by any particular topographic description. Rather it is denoted by the vernacular elements chosen to characterize it, by the objects of everyday use that can be found only there. Culturally, poetically, and geographically, it is very distant from Baudelaire’s Paris, but it is a city nevertheless: Opposed to nature, it is the place of a temporary loss of the self into the realm of the senses. However, the satisfaction of the senses is short-lived, swiftly followed by an even more oppressive aridity. The poetry of Pianissimo is not without the intimacy of a familial element. However, like the occasional solace found in nature or in the rewards of the senses, the consolation found in the verses dedicated to his father or to his sister is fallacious and ephemeral. After Pianissimo, a reflection on the reification of the self, Sbarbaro stopped writing verse. He did not remain idle, however. Apart from Cartoline in franchigia (Postcards, From Off-Duty), written on the front lines in World War I, not intended for publication, and finally edited by Vanni Scheiwiller in 1966, his Trucioli (Shavings, 1920), initially published in the literary magazine Riviera Ligure, collects short prose-poems that mirror the meditations already expressed in Pianissimo: existential alienation; the impossibility—and, eventually, the

undesirability—of overcoming subjectivity; human society represented as a collection of senseless figures. The titles of his other books of prose that span over 40 years point to and continue a tradition of love for the little things: Liquidazione (Liquidation, 1928), Rimanenze (Remnants, 1955), Fuochi fatui (Ignis Fatus, 1956), Scampoli (Scraps, 1960), Gocce (Drops, 1963), Bolle di sapone (Soap Bubbles, 1966), Quisquilie (Trifles, 1967). These books of petites poe`mes en prose attest to the evolution of a self stifled by its inability to communicate. Initially the few human figures that do not belong to an emotional, familial sphere are depicted in grotesque tones that emphasize their baseness and cruelty. Later on, an ironic attitude tempers the condemnation of humanity to value life in its limited possibilities of comfort. After 1951 Sbarbaro retired to live a simple and modest life in Spotorno, a coastal village near Savona, in the company of his sister but in voluntary intellectual isolation. This behavior was consistent with his highly protective attitude toward his privacy, with his love for little, often neglected objects and situations. At this point in his life, he transformed his interest in plants and his customary long walks in the woods into a serious botanical hobby, culminating in extensive lichen collections now housed in museums across Europe and North America. In fact, with the poems written in the 1930s (but left unpublished until 1955), Sbarbaro reinvented himself as a less solitary and tragic author. His poetry highlighted sentiments and familiar affections, as best demonstrated in his poems of elegiac memory, Versi a Dina (Verses to Dina, 1931), five poems included in the collection Rimanenze. These are Sbarbaro’s only lyrics that could properly be considered to be about love; they focus on the positive aspects of existence, from which human beings might derive some small consolation. Paradoxically, the stubbornness with which Sbarbaro always defended his own private life, his resistance to any sort of public recognition, so striking in contrast to many of his colleagues, have become the characteristics most appreciated by his critics, who, beginning with the publication of Gina Lagorio’s Sbarbaro: un modo spoglio di esistere (1981), have initiated an ever more sympathetic re-evaluation of his works.

Biography Born in Santa Margherita Ligure (Genova), 12 January 1888. Began to write at a very young age 1695

CAMILLO SBARBARO and published his first book of verses, Resine, before his 23rd birthday. Shortly after, collaborated with literary journals such as Riviera Ligure, La voce, Lacerba. Upon publication of his collection of poems Pianissimo in the edition i Quaderni della Voce, traveled to Florence to meet the journal editors, Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini. During the same journey met the poets Dino Campana, Clemente Rebora, and Giovanni Boine. Lived almost exclusively in Liguria, but spent brief periods of time traveling throughout Europe and doing clerical work for steel companies in Savona and Genoa. After World War I, in which he participated as an infantry officer, settled in Genoa where worked as an instructor of Latin and Greek, and met Eugenio Montale. Started teaching Latin and Greek on a regular basis in various private high schools, until the Fascist government mandated that all schoolteachers be members of the Fascist Party; rather than obey the rule, left his position. After World War II collaborated on numerous newspapers and literary journals and translated Greek and French classics (Sophocles, Euripides, Molie`re, Balzac, Flaubert, Stendhal, Huysmans). Won the Saint-Vincent Poetry prize in 1949; the Etna-Taormina prize in 1959; in 1961, the Accademia dei Lincei decorated him. Died in Spotorno (Savona), 31 October 1967. GIUSEPPE GAZZOLA Selected Works Collections L’opera in versi e in prosa, edited by Gina Lagorio and Vanni Scheiwiller, Milan: Garzanti, 1985. The Poetry and Selected Prose of Camillo Sbarbaro, edited and translated by Vittorio Felaco, Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1985.

Poetry ‘‘Resine,’’ 1911. ‘‘Pianissimo,’’ 1914; expanded edition, 1954. ‘‘Trucioli,’’ 1920; expanded edition, 1948. ‘‘Liquidazione,’’ 1928. ‘‘Rimanenze,’’ 1955. ‘‘Fuochi fatui,’’ 1956.

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‘‘Primizie,’’ 1958. ‘‘Scampoli,’’ 1960. ‘‘Gocce,’’ 1963. ‘‘Il nostro e nuove gocce,’’ 1964. ‘‘Bolle di sapone,’’ 1966. ‘‘Cartoline in franchigia,’’ 1966. ‘‘Quisquilie,’’ 1967. ‘‘Trucioli dispersi,’’ edited by Giampiero Costa and Vanni Scheiwiller, 1986.

Essays I licheni: un campionario del mondo, 1967.

Letters La trama delle lucciole: lettere ad Angelo Barile (1919– 1937), edited by Domenico Astengo and Franco Contorbia, 1979. Il paradiso dei licheni: lettere a Elio Fiore, 1960–1966, edited by Alessandro Zaccuri, 1991. Il bisavolo: lettere a Tilde Carbone Rossi (1940–1967), edited by Domenico Astengo, 2003. Cara Giovanna: lettere di Camillo Sbarbaro a Giovanna Bemporad, 1952–1954; edited by Anna Benucci Serva, 2004.

Further Reading Angeleri, Carlo, and Giampiero Costa, Bibliografia degli scritti di Camillo Sbarbaro, Milan: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1986. Astengo, Domenico, and Vanni Scheiwiller, Camillo Sbarbaro: la Liguria, il mondo, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1997. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Camillo Sbarbaro, Milan: Mursia, 1971. Devoto, Giorgio, and Paolo Zoboli (editors), Camillo Sbarbaro, Genoa: San Marco dei Giustiniani, 2003. Giusti, Simone, Sulla formazione dei ‘‘Trucioli’’ di Camillo Sbarbaro, Florence: Le Lettere, 1997. Goldmann, Silvana Tamiozzo, ‘‘La ‘serena disperazione’ di Camillo Sbarbaro,’’ in Yearbook of Italian Studies, 8 (1989): 44–60. Lagorio, Gina, Camillo Sbarbaro: Un modo spoglio di esistere, Milan: Garzanti, 1981. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Camillo Sbarbaro’’ (1920), in Sulla poesia, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Nanni, Luciano, L’idea di oggettivazione artistica in Camillo Sbarbaro, Naples: Guida, 1973. Padovani Soldini, Antonella, Ho bisogno d’infelicita`: Pianissimo, Rimanenze, Primizie: storia della poesia di Camillo Sbarbaro con testimonianze inedite, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1997. Romanello, Alessandro, ‘‘Il poeta nella grande citta`: Introduzione a Pianissimo,’’ Lettere italiane, 48, no. 2 (1996): 230–251.

SCAPIGLIATURA

SCAPIGLIATURA The Risorgimento entrusted intellectuals with the task of promoting and supporting Italians’ patriotic fervor, creating a fertile harmony between romantic literature and history. This harmony was shattered, however, in the wake of Italy’s unification. The bourgeoisie in power, which also played a leading role in the anti-Austrian uprisings, now channeled its energy into canceling the deficit in production that made Italy a backward country compared to industrialized Europe. The dominance of new profit- and capital-based values profoundly changed the role of the artist, who was now out of step with a society that had become ‘‘prosaic’’ and was therefore seen as an antagonistic power. From this derived a sense of extraneousness, and a need for exasperated protest, which united certain literati who in various ways identified with the Scapigliatura movement, active between 1860 and 1875, with Milan as its epicenter. The Lombard city—the economic and cultural capital of the new kingdom and the seat of a teeming book and newspaper publishing industry—was for the Scapigliati the most ideal site to give visibility to a transgressive and in certain respects avant-garde idea of literature. The salons, cafes, and taverns acted as privileged gathering spaces, where debate was encouraged and solicited. The former—the salons of Clara Maffei, Ermellina Dandolo, and Vittoria Cima were famous—welcomed Italian intellectuals and writers and foreigners passing through, spread word of political and cultural events, and functioned, in short, as a privileged observatory of contemporary life; the latter—Caffe` Europa, Caffe` Martini, the Osteria del Polpetta and the Osteria dell’Ortaglia, to list only a few—offered the Scapigliati the opportunity for a close study of civic reality, strengthening the atmosphere of a fraternal guild that is established among them. Cletto Arrighi (an anagram of Carlo Righetti, 1830–1906), the founder of the Cronaca grigia, the newspaper in which the anticonformist wits found a space of their own, first used the term scapigliato in the introduction to his novel La scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio (The Scapigliatura and February 6, 1861). The novel offers a profile of a sharply countercurrent group of restless, eccentric, transgressive, revolutionary intellectuals, the propagators

of brillianti utopie (shining utopias) and mad enthusiasms, characterized by ‘‘volto smunto, solcato, cadaverico; su cui stanno le impronte delle noti passate nello stravizzo e nel giuoco; su cui si adombra il segreto d’un dolore infinito [. . .] i sogni tentatori di una felicita` inarrivabile, e le lagrime di sangue, e le tremende sfiducie, e la finale disperazione’’ (a haggard, furrowed, cadaverous face; on which lie the impressions of nights passed in debauchery and gambling; on which is figured the secret of an infinite pain [...] the tempting dreams of an unreachable happiness, and the tears of blood, the terrible misgivings, the final desperation). Arrighi himself died reduced to poverty by the vice of gambling. Of his associates, Emilio Praga, a victim of alcohol and drugs, died at age 36, and Igino Ugo Tarchetti died at 30, worn out by poverty and consumption. An Italian version of the Parisian Bohe`miens, the Scapigliati expressed their dissent from norms and conventions by subjecting them to critical revision. They favored Giuseppe Rovani, the author of the grand historical-contemporary portrait Cento anni (One Hundred Years, 1868) which, thanks first to Felice Cameroni and then to Carlo Dossi, became the undisputed model of their ethos. And while the example of Ugo Foscolo and of Giacomo Leopardi still attached them nostalgically to romantic mythology, trans-Alpine literature—E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul, Heinrich Heine, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and even the nascent naturalism—indicated to them the need for a deprovincialization of Italian letters. As a result, they worked in new registers and favored new themes. Tarchetti experimented with various gradations of the horrid and the fantastic, while a brutal and ‘‘cursed’’ realism infused the poetry of Praga. The automobile and the city invaded the pages of the Scapigliati as equally disquieting signs of the negative effects of progress. The desire to break with tradition is visible in their poetic language. The clashing coexistence of prosaic and dignified terms, the use of unusual stanzas, the reduction of the lyrical to the forms of prose, the abundance of metaphors elaborated under the banner of eccesso (excess) are all functional expedients toward the construction of a 1697

SCAPIGLIATURA rhetoric of disharmony and rift. Exemplary in this sense is Arrigo Boito’s poem ‘‘Dualismo’’ (Dualism, 1863), in which a sequence of antitheses recounts the interior drama of the post-Risorgimento artist: the impossibility of acceding to the certainties of a faith; an unappeased yearning for the ‘‘ideale’’ (‘‘ideal’’) polluted by the need to give voice to vice, to the ‘‘vero’’ (‘‘true’’) in its crudest and most brutal aspects; an irremediable discrepancy between the poetic reasons of the soul and the prosaic logic of contemporary society. But it is above all in narrative genres that the Scapigliati exercised their desire for experimentation. The age of the historical novel had passed; already during the early 1850s, in the pages of the journal Il crepuscolo an anonymous journalist (probably Carlo Tenca) had called upon literati to write ‘‘il romanzo della vita contemporanea’’ (the novel of contemporary life), and writers such as Giulio Carcano (1812–1884), Caterina Percoto (1812–1887), and Antonio Ranieri (1806– 1888) quickly took up the call, trying their hands at rustic narrative and the social novel. Behind the variety of these and other subgenres there persisted the recognition of a positive role for the writer who, in the forms of philanthropic paternalism, still possessed certainties for which he served as guarantor. It was no longer so for the Scapigliati. For them, contemporary society was the place of demons, the prison of the self; it was impossible, therefore, to portray idyllic worlds, and to resort to an omniscient narrator who had a clear and solid vision of the surrounding reality. Tarchetti’s Fosca (Passion, 1869), Camillo Boito’s Senso (Senso, 1883), Praga’s Memorie del presbiterio. Scene di provinciale, left unfinished and completed by Roberto Sacchetti in 1881 (Memoirs of a Presbytery: Scenes of Provincial Life) all entrust a first-person narrator with the task of recounting the obscure depths of disturbed characters, the transgressive substance of mad passions. But alongside this tone of gravity, the authors of the Scapigliatura were able to set the lightness of irony. Extremely attentive to the European scene, and aware of the availability and flexibility of the form of the novel, some of them participated in the recent comic tradition, inaugurated in the Italian nineteenth century by Foscolo’s Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico (Information Regarding Didimo the Clergyman, 1813). The ‘‘Sterne effect,’’ visible in irregular, digressive writing, also touched the serious Tarchetti, but achieved its most interesting results with Carlo Dossi. In the short novel L’Altrieri. Nero su Bianco (The Day Before Yesterday: Black on White, 1868) and in Vita di Alberto Pisani (The Life of Alberto Pisani, 1870), 1698

the irreverence of the writing is evident in the structure of the story and the language, rather than the content. The multiplicity of linguistic registers, which is one of Dossi’s distinctive marks and a stylistic tool with which he desecrates presiding norms, grants him a rightful place in the ‘‘Lombard line’’ that runs from Giuseppe Parini to Carlo Emilio Gadda, and that is characterized by a combination of formal innovation and ethical engagement. In his 1953 Racconti della scapigliatura piemontese, Gianfranco Contini expanded the map of Scapigliatura by annexing the Piedmont region to it. In Turin, young writers with strong ties to Boito and Praga gathered around the ‘‘Dante Alighieri’’ society and the journals Il velocipede and Serate italiane. Their leader was Giovanni Faldella, who, like Praga, loved to mix painting and writing. While the Milanese writer published his Schizzi a penna (Sketches in Ink) in Rivista minima in 1865, Faldella published his travel reportage in a volume in 1874 entitled A Vienna: Gita col Lapis (To Vienna: A Trip with a Pencil). In his most famous work, Figurine (Figurines, 1875), a series of short prose pieces on country life filtered through the populist lens of rustic literature lend themselves well to Faldella’s linguistic experimentalism, which aimed to reproduce whimsical and quaint segments of provincial life. His friendship with Praga, Boito, Luigi Gualdo and Giovanni Verga, and his assiduous presence at their gatherings, not to mention his journalistic work at Leone Fortis’ Il pungolo provided Roberto Sacchetti (1847–1881) with the copious material for his contribution to the anthology Milano 1881, the article La vita letteraria (Literary Life). In the novel Cesare Mariani (1876), he showed his support for the ideas of the Scapigliatura on the myth of the artist, who, in a society of banks and industrial enterprises is condemned to a desolate defeat, while in the posthumous Entusiasmi (Enthusiasms, 1881), he subjected the ideals of the Risorgimento to a critical revision by recounting, in a prose far removed from romantic grandiloquence, some of its unpoetic results. Musicality and chromatism distinguish the poems of Giovanni Camerana (1845–1905), collected in the posthumous volume Versi (Verses, 1907), who borrowed from his friends Boito and Praga the theme of dualism and some metrical and linguistic choices derived in their turn from Baudelaire. However, in Camerana the ‘‘maudit’’ attitude of the Scapigliati is converted from a ringing, fullblown protest into an interiorized, obscure malady which, in the mode of French symbolism, perceives nature and the surrounding landscape as a

SCAPIGLIATURA disquieting forest of funereal signs, thus anticipating aspects of the experience of the Decadent movement. If these experiences widened the geographical borders of the territory of the Scapigliatura, its time frame is expanded by the so-called Scapigliatura democratica, although not all critics, for example Francesco Spera (Il principio dell’antiletteratura, 1976) and Giovanna Rosa (La narrativa degli Scapigliati, 1997), agreed on the matter. The Scapigliatura democratica, which included figures such as Felice Cameroni (1844–1913) and Paolo Valera (1850–1926), enlivened the Milanese literary world in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Its publishing organ was the Gazzettino rosa, run by Achille Bizzoni and Felice Cavallotti, which, radically politicizing the antibourgeois attitude of the first Lombard generation, took on the task of denouncing political scandals and parliamentary squabbles, social injustices and instances of corruption. Cameroni, one of the newspaper’s brightest collaborators, defined himself as a ‘‘Gallomaniac fanatic,’’ and, indeed, with his critical contributions, he brought the texts of realism and naturalism (Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourt brothers, Maupaussant and the scandalous Valle`s) into circulation throughout Italy. Valera, with his novel La folla (The Crowd), written between 1884 and 1894 but published in 1901, the same year when he founded the weekly periodical of the same name, recounted the Socialist class struggle during the years that saw the birth of the Italian Socialist Party and the bloody repression of the popular Milanese uprising of 1898 by the general Bava Beccaris. The story broke down many of the canonical narrative structures, from the plot and the hero to space, while the style is also original and transgressive, a multilingual mixture that confers on the story an unmistakably realistic substance. The abundant recourse to free indirect discourse allows the proletarian characters on the stage and the bourgeois figures opposed to them to have significant freedom of expression. In the critical history of the Scapigliatura, the work first of Piero Nardi (Scapigliatura, 1923) and then of Gaetano Mariani (Storia della Scapigliatura, 1967) reconstructed the literary contours of a group that had previously generated interest more as a social phenomenon than for its literary value. However, the analysis of the Scapigliatura through the most refined critical instruments is a recent phenomenon. The publication of anthologies, essays, and monographs, along with the reissuing of certain texts, has generated new interest in

a chapter of Italian literary history that is emblematic of a complex phase of transition and in its leading figures who share, beyond their particular intellectual biographies, a desire for debate that resulted in a search for the new and unusual, in a movement (in some of them uncertain and clumsy, in others, such as Boito and Dossi, consciously open to European culture) toward modernity. MARIELLA MUSCARIELLO Further Reading Bettella, Patrizia, ‘‘The Debate on Beauty and Ugliness in Italian Scapigliatura and Baudelaire,’’ in Rivista di studi italiani, 18, no. 1 (2000): 68–85. Bettini, Filippo (editor), La critica e gli scapigliati, Bologna: Cappelli, 1976. Bigazzi, Roberto, I colori del vero. Vent’anni di narrativa: 1860–1880, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1969. Bolzoni, Lina, ‘‘Le tendenze della Scapigliatura e la poesia fra tardo-romanticismo e realismo,’’ in La letteratura italiana. Storia e testi, edited by Carlo Muscetta, vol. 8, tome 2, Bari: Laterza, 1975. Contini, Gianfranco (editor), Racconti della scapigliatura piemontese, Milan: Bompiani, 1953. Del Principe, David, Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Farinelli, Giuseppe (editor), La pubblicistica nel periodo della Scapigliatura, Milan: IPL, 1984. Farinelli, Giuseppe, Scapigliatura, Rome: Marzorati-Editalia, 2001. Ghidetti, Enrico, ‘‘La Scapigliatura,’’ in Storia generale della letteratura italiana, edited by Nino Borsellino and Walter Pedulla`, vol. 9, Milan: Motta, 1999. Gioanola, Elio (editor), La Scapigliatura: testi e commento, Turin: Marietti, 1975. Isella, Dante, I Lombardi in rivolta: da Carlo Maria Maggi a Carlo Emilio Gadda, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Mariani, Gaetano, Storia della Scapigliatura, Caltanissetta and Rome: Sciascia, 1967. Moestrup, Jorn, La Scapigliatura. Un capitolo della storia del Risorgimento, Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1966. Nardi, Piero, Scapigliatura: da Giuseppe Rovani a Carlo Dossi, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1923. Paccagnini, Ermanno, ‘‘Dal Romanticismo al Decadentismo. La Scapigliatura,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, edited by Enrico Malato, vol. 8, Rome: Salerno, 1999. Rosa, Giovanna, La narrativa degli Scapigliati, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1997. Spera, Francesco, Il principio dell’antiletteratura: Dossi, Faldella, Imbriani, Naples: Liguori, 1976. Spera, Francesco, ‘‘La letteratura del disagio: Scapigliatura e dintorni,’’ in Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana, edited by Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, vol. 5, tome 1, Turin: UTET, 1994. Surdich, Luigi, La narrativa scapigliata, Modena: Mucchi, 1995. Tessari, Roberto (editor), La Scapigliatura. Un’avanguardia artistica nella societa` preindustriale, Turin: Paravia, 1975.

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EDUARDO SCARPETTA

EDUARDO SCARPETTA (1853–1925) Actor, playwright, and manager, Eduardo Scarpetta was one of the greatest figures in Neapolitan theater in the second half of the nineteenth century. He began as a young actor playing a messenger in the revue Cuntiente e guaje (Happy and Troubled), a cheerful, satirical representation of the most controversial issues following Italian unification. His career as an author started in 1869 with the farce Pulcinella creduto moglie di un finto marito (Punch Considered the Wife of a False Husband); this work reflected the influence of Antonio Petito (1822–1876), who in 1872 wrote the play Felice Sciosciammocca creduto guaglione ‘e n’anno (Felice Sciosciammocca Considered a One-year-old Boy) for Scarpetta. At the same time, Petito staged plays by the young Scarpetta: Gelosia (Jealousy), Quinnice solde so’ cchiu` assaie de seimila lire (Fifteen Cents Are More than Six Thousand Lires), and Buscia o verita` (Lies or Truth), adapted from Carlo Goldoni’s Il bugiardo (The Liar, 1751); these followed the tradition of interregional translations, thus avoiding the centrality of the Tuscan language. In his first plays, the characters of Pulcinella (the English Punch) and Felice Sciosciammocca are compatible: This choice stemmed from his desire to preserve a mask (Pulcinella) deeply rooted in Neapolitan culture, without straying too far from Petito’s public at the Teatro San Carlino. The commedia performers perfected one role in a lifetime practice. They spoke a language of gestures and relied upon the body to do the work of the face. They were allowed to improvise making choices from a vast repertoire of learned speeches and antics, this freedom had its limitations in character. They were mime experts as well as improvising actors. Scarpetta was the first to reform the older tradition in order to keep up with the changing tastes of the general public. He transformed the mask of Pulcinella into an individualized character and ventured beyond the canovacci of the commedia dell’arte, which he found increasingly limiting. The passage from Antonio Petito to his pupil, Scarpetta, is usually seen as a move toward the bourgeois. Sciosciammocca was originally a naı¨ve country student who played against the more sophisticated Pulcinella. In Scarpetta’s ‘‘reform’’ this semimask 1700

slowly evolved into the embodiment of the petitbourgeois values, resembling the initial Zanni, the Venetian Brighella, with aspirations of climbing the social ladder. Scarpetta’s effort to create a united company also began in that period, revealing a disposition for theatrical management and, more particularly, theatrical business. He was in fact the first actor-author who sought to increase the vital economic impulse of the theater. His theatrical reform tended to increase offerings of crowd-pleasing plays, and implied eliminating old sets, theatrical machines, the gala evening and the tray, by which actors measured their popularity. The most important change concerned acting, eliminating the extemporaneous in favor of written scripts. Felice Sciosciammocca, a new mask of the Neapolitan theater, was a symbol of this change: ‘‘half character and half mask’’ or, as Salvatore Di Giacomo described it, a ‘‘semimask’’ (Storia del Teatro San Carlino, 1935). Sciosciammocca is funny, mocking, hedonist and philanderer, selfish and mean, naive and opportunist. He has a petit bourgeois haircut and wears a close-fitting check dress and a polished half-bowler, and appears in various roles. Scarpetta also renewed the physical space of the theater house. He had a strong and well-amalgamated company, comprised of the best, most beloved actors from San Carlino. Although he had a tested repertoire, he felt the need for a new repertoire of works corresponding to his places for a theatrical and cultural renewal. He thus made recourse to the French pochades, hegemonic in Italian theater of that time, as Eduardo De Filippo underlined in his 1974 anthology of texts on Scarpetta. In the comedy Tetillo, adapted from A.N. Hennequin’s Bebe`, he inaugurated a long series of adaptations from French pochades and vaudevilles, which he considered more interesting than the old Neapolitan farces. Tetillo represents an aspect of the Neapolitan ‘‘momism,’’ emphasized by the mechanisms of misunderstanding and naivety. Scarpetta’s plays were, indeed, adaptations, rewritings of original French texts, in which he inserted original scenes and characters, skillfully adapted to the tastes of the Neapolitan public. Accused of plagiarism, he defended himself by stating that translating and adapting is different

EDUARDO SCARPETTA from cutting, abridging, and transposing scenes and characters from one setting to another, especially when the contexts vary dramatically (as they did from that of the French pochades). The great success of Tetillo was followed by Mettiteve a fa’ l’ammore co me (Do Love Me!), an adaptation from Giovanni Silvestri’s comedy Fatemi la corte (Court Me!): The slow Felice is manipulated by Emilia, who expresses a crafty, decisive femininity. A three-act play, taken from Meilhac and Halevy’s La Boule, entitled O’ scarfalietto (The Bedwarmer, 1881), is the culmination of Scarpetta’s reform. It features new characters, strongly caricatural, like the lawyer Anselmo Raganelli, whose stammer generates a series of comic elements. In O’ scarfalietto, the central theme is the rather easy recourse to divorce based on scant accusations like the insertion of a warmer in the matrimonial bed. The originality of the text lies in the individuation of a crisis in family and institutional values. The extraordinary success of O’ scarfalietto caused a polemic between two renowned critics: Michele Uda of Il Pungolo and Federico Verdinois of the Corriere del Mattino. Uda maintained that Scarpetta’s theater represented the new dialect theater, while Verdinois stated it had nothing to do with popular theater. Scarpetta answered by staging in 1881 a play, Duje marit ‘mbrugliune (Two Dishonest Husbands), and an old comedy by Salvatore Cammarano (1801–1852), No soldato ‘mbriaco dinto a lo vascio de la sie´ Stella (A Drunk Soldier in Stella’s House), which met with great success, surpassed only by another famous comedy: Tre pecore viziose (Three Vicious Sheep, 1881). This three-act play, taken from Hennequin’s The Veaurardier Trial, contains the recurrent themes of Scarpetta’s theater, including a dominating wife of the Sciosciammocca family, who controls her husband Don Fortunato, her brother Don Camillo, and her son-in-law Don Felice. After the demolition of the San Carlino in 1884, Scarpetta’s company successfully toured Italy, thanks to a repertoire enriched by new texts, including the original Miseria e nobilta` (Poverty and Nobility, 1887), considered his masterpiece. The protagonists are a group of miserable people (Felice, Pasquale, Concetta, and Pupella), whom the marquis Eugene asks to dress up as noble gentlemen, pretend to be his relatives, and ask, on his behalf, for the hand of the beautiful dancer Gemma, with whom he is in love. The complicated plot triggers various comic situations, especially due to the strong contrast between the marquis’s real family, rich and

serious, and his fictitious one, hungry and poor. The play enjoyed public and critical success, winning the approval of such severe critics as Benedetto Croce and Ferdinando Maria Martini, who, in Nuova Antologia, declared that the first act of the play was worthy of Molie`re. In 1954, a popular cinematic adaptation of Miseria e nobilta`, starring Toto` and a young Sophia Loren, was directed by Mario Mattoli. In 1889, Scarpetta wrote ’Na Santarella (A Little Saint), an adaptation of Meihlac and Millaud’s M.lle Nitouche, acclaimed throughout Italy. The three-act play is a collection of amusing figures from the Neapolitan bourgeoisie, with a falsely modest, chaste girl at its center. Then followed Il figlio di Jorio (Jorio’s Son, 1904), parody of a famous work by Gabriele D’Annunzio, which caused polemic and a real trial. Charged with imitation, Scarpetta was acquitted because his work was a parody. An instinctive artist, Eduardo Scarpetta reconciled his Neapolitan background with the national and European scene, reassessing the function of the protagonist and balancing characters, situations, and humor. His last play, ‘O miedeco d’ ‘e pazze (The Madmen’s Doctor, 1908), an adaptation from Laufs’s Chottle Pension, deals with the theme of folly in a comic key: Don Felice finds himself a madman among madmen; the dreams and the daily deliriums of the low middle class are theatrically disguised as obsessive behaviors. Scarpetta’s final phase of production showed a disposition toward music. In writing his memoirs, he recounted his own theatrical experience, and above all his reform. His autobiography is an important key to interpret his project. The revival of his most famous plays by such playwrights as Raffaele Viviani, Eduardo and Peppino De Filippo affirms his commitment to a theater that succeeds in arousing interest. Some recent adaptations demonstrate this tendency, including L’amico di papa` (Daddy’s Friend), directed and played by Tonino Taiuti, and Mettiteve a fa’ l’ammore cu me, played and directed by a young Neapolitan artist, Arturo Cirillo. These performances confirm that Scarpetta’s theater has a more modern resonance than has been suggested thus far.

Biography Born in Naples on 13 March 1853, the third of four children, to Domenico, an official of the Bourbon Kingdom, and Emilia Rendina. In 1868, engaged as ‘‘bit player,’’ debuted at the Teatro San Carlino 1701

EDUARDO SCARPETTA in Naples. In 1870, first played the role of Felice in the farce by Enrico Parisi Feliciello mariuolo de na pizza (Feliciello Thief of a Pizza). Engaged at the Teatro San Carlino, worked together with the great Antonio Petito. On 16 March 1876, married Rosa De Filippo, the daughter of a modest Neapolitan dealer, with whom he had three children: Domenico, Maria, and Vincenzo; with Rosa’s niece, Luisa, had three more children, Titina, Eduardo, and Peppino De Filippo. Besides his house in Via Dei Mille, in the center of Naples, had a villa built on the hill of the Vomero, on the fac¸ade of which he had the phrase ‘‘Qui rido io’’ (Here I laugh) written. On 10 October 1910, staged his great success ‘O miedeco d’ ‘e pazze, his farewell to theater. Died in Naples, on 29 November 1925. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Theatrical Collections Eduardo De Filippo presenta quattro commedie di Eduardo e Vincenzo Scarpetta, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Miseria e nobilta`, e altre commedie di Eduardo Scarpetta, edited by Wanda Monaco, Naples: Guida, 1980. Sei Commedie, edited by Mario Scarpetta, Naples: Guida, 1984. Tutto il teatro, edited by Romualdo Marrone, Rome: Newton e Compton, 1992. Qui rido io, edited by Luca Torre, Naples: Torre, 1994.

Autobiographical Writing Don Felice. Memorie di Eduardo Scarpetta, 1883. Da San Carlino ai Fiorentini, 1895. Cinquant’anni di palcoscenico, 1922.

Further Reading Angelini, Franca, and Carlo Alberto Madrignani, Cultura, narrativa e teatro nell’eta` del Positivismo, Rome: Laterza, 1975; rpt. 1996. Artieri, Giovanni, ‘‘Storia economica di Sciosciammocca,’’ in Napoli mobilissima. Uomini, storie, cose di una citta`, Milan: Longanesi, 1958. De Filippo, Peppino, Una famiglia difficile, Naples: Marotta, 1976. De Matteis, Stefano, Lo specchio della vita. Napoli: antropologia della citta` del teatro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Di Giacomo, Salvatore, Storia del Teatro San Carlino, Milan, 1935. Greco, Franco Carmelo (editor), Pulcinella. Una maschera tra gli specchi, Naples: ESI, 1990. Massarese, Ettore, ‘‘Ordine ed eversione,’’ in Nord e sud. Un secolo di teatro napoletano (1900–2000), special issue edited by Davide Barba and Delia Morea, 5 (2000): 23–32. Paladini, Tiziana, Scarpetta in giacca e cravatta, la maschera di Felice Sciosciammocca, Naples: Luca Torre Editore, 2000. Piscopo, Ugo, Maschere per l’Europa, il teatro popolare napoletano da Petito a Eduardo, Naples: ESI, 1994. Scafoglio, Domenico, and Luigi M. Lombardi Satriani, Pulcinella. Il mito e la storia, Milan: Leonardo, 1990. Viviani, Vittorio, ‘‘Eduardo Scarpetta,’’ in Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida Editori, 1969; enlarged edition, 1992.

Poetry ‘‘Canzoni napoletane,’’ 1890. ‘‘La buona fanciulla,’’ 1897. ‘‘Poesie, motti e pensieri,’’ 1923.

SCHOLASTICISM Medieval ‘‘scholasticism’’ constitutes the discursive form for learning and speculation in Western Europe, in a mature phase of medieval philosophy, after monastic scholarship and when a growing number of the learned e´lite has reached a stage of professionalization. Perhaps the most significant single event associated with the ripening of this culture, and surely the one deserving most attention in histories of medieval thought, is the assimilation of nearly the complete corpus of Aristotle’s 1702

surviving writings. A new paradigm of knowledge springs from an assiduous program of translations, first from Arabic versions but increasingly from the original Greek, and from the unpacking and ostensible adoption of Aristotle’s prescriptions in a new idea of book, the Gothic libro da banco. This amounted to the integration into the curriculum, primarily for the faculty of arts but also to a considerable degree for theology, of Aristotle’s works beyond the first books of the Organon. For each field of investigation,

SCHOLASTICISM the goal becomes the identification of basic principles defining ‘‘evidently’’ the essential nature of the subject and then the rigorous deduction, from such principles, of a systematic body of truths concerning the subject’s properties. The key to this scheme of what high medieval thinkers regularly accepted as the ideal toward which ‘‘science’’ should aspire lays buried in Aristotle’s authority, auctoritas. Steeped in a tradition with roots in classical Greek and Roman strategies for reading the canonic texts of myth and epic, Christian exegetes, by the central Middle Ages, recognized four interpretative levels: the literal meaning of the words, the figural signification, the moral lesson embedded in the letter, and finally the anagogical meaning. Such a hermeneutics makes for extraordinary flexibility in the employment of Scripture as standard of truth. Similarly, under the aegis of Aristotle’s authority, what is called ‘‘Aristotelianism’’ takes many forms in the scholastic world, none of them pure. One result is that a great deal of what would now be considered scholastic literature is done by theologians. The first and certainly the most celebrated examples of theological speculation in which extensive philosophizing takes place present themselves in the writings of a number of later thirteenth-century theologians, all of whom taught for at least part of their career at the University of Paris, the jewel in the high medieval theological crown. They range from the Dominican friars Albert the Great (ca. 1200–1280), and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), through the Franciscans Bonaventure of Bagnoreggio (ca. 1217–1274) and John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308), to the ‘‘secular’’—that is, still clerical but neither mendicant nor monastic—masters Henry of Ghent (ca. 1217– 1293) and Godfrey of Fontaines (ca. 1250–1309). Medieval scholasticism grows out of the university curriculum; consequently, one characteristic vehicle of it is the commentary on a schoolbook. Medieval philosophers do not, in general, believe that the authoritative authors of the textbooks are infallible, but they share the conviction that the auctores had laid down the right principles of the different disciplines, by dividing them into subdisciplines. In this light, medieval Latin scholasticism is not just a phenomenon comparable with its Greek predecessor, but is directly descended from it. Examples of this continuity are, among others, the enduring influence of porphyrian logical semantics or the very similar arguments offered by Radulphus Brito (ca. 1270–1320) in Paris around 1300 and by John Philoponus (ca. 490–570) in Alexandria around 525 to prove that Aristotle’s Organon is

a well-organized and exhaustive course in the essentials of logic. Some scholastic commentaries, including most of Aquinas’, are ‘‘literal,’’ that is, they are phraseby-phrase explications of the text. Others are in question form, posing and resolving objections to Aristotle’s doctrine and sometimes taking the opportunity to put forward the commentator’s own ideas at some length. Already in the twelfth-century, textbooks designed for the classroom are produced in Italy, France, and England; a prominent type is the compendium (summa or summula) on logic. The classic in this line are the Summulae logicales of the thirteenth-century Dominican Peter of Spain, and the most celebrated example, Aquinas’ Summa theologiae, a compilation designed for a whole field, even one as vast as theology. The question (quaestio), the genre most closely identified with high medieval scholasticism, arises from the classroom exercises that typify pedagogy in the West from the twelfth century on: the debate or disputation, studied in great detail by Yves M. Congar in his essay ‘‘Aspects eccle´siologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et se´culiers dans la seconde moitie´ du XIIIe sie`cle et le de´but du XIVe’’ (1961). Pitting student against student and sometimes master against master, these debates not only help to hone one’s skill in logic but also serve as the principal vehicle for investigating the issues. Sic et non (For and Against), the classroom text for theology by Peter Abelard (1079–1142), had already opened the way to the literary appropriation of this initially oral technique. A typical quaestio begins with the statement of a problem or thesis, followed by a list of arguments on both sides of the issue; the core, then, consists in the determination (determinatio), in which the master lays out his considered response. From the later thirteenth century on, more complexly structured questions are not uncommon: the initial sets of arguments may include objections and responses, and there may be an additional round of arguments at the end (dubitationes additae). Gatherings of questions drawn from a master’s classroom disputation on a particular topic are published—that is, offered for public dissemination by university booksellers as ‘‘ordinary questions’’ (quaestiones ordinariae); the polished revisions of special magisterial debates where questions are posed from the audience about ‘‘anything at all’’ take the form of quaestiones quodlibetales. The Tractatus de tropis loquendi (Treatise on the Figures of Speech) by Peter the Chanter (d. 1197) fits quite well into the pattern: The problems of grammar, rhetoric, 1703

SCHOLASTICISM and logic are confronted through the exegesis and lecture on the ‘‘sacred page’’; the method of the distinctio in its simplest form consists in taking a word according to its meanings and attaching a quotation of the Bible to each. The two theologians of the Middle Ages who, more squarely, conceived the task of assimilating the complete works of Aristotle are Albert the Great and his pupil Thomas Aquinas. Speaking of Albert’s uncommon hunger for reality, bellicose young Roger Bacon would later comment sarcastically that, as a professor, he wanted to teach without having been taught. But at the beginning of the thirteenth century, there existed neither a teacher nor a school for the type of knowledge that Albert wanted to acquire. In 1242, Albert became the first German to hold a chair at the University of Paris, signing a document with the name Albertus Teutonicus; in 1248, he was to set up an academy of the Dominican Order at the cathedral of Cologne, where he later died in 1280, after years of travels. A real turning point in Albert’s life and in the history of scholasticism as well occurred in 1268, when the superiors of the order called Albert the Great back to the University of Paris for the second time. As an outstanding verbal duellist, Albert was needed there to engage the extreme ‘‘Averroistic’’ wing of the Aristotelians, but he, who as a bishop already occupied a rather special position in the order, declined the invitation and his pupil Thomas Aquinas went in his stead. Two firm resolutions guided the two men: on the one hand, to surrender no part of the traditional stock, neither Holy Scripture nor Augustine (and therefore not Plato either); and the other hand, to take full and whole possession of the new truths that were just beginning to be graspable. Thus, Albert’s incommensurate works with their powers of assimilation—including the De vegetabilibus (On Plants), and the De animalibus (On Animals)—stand on one side of this historic edge, and the task of fitting together all these naturally divergent elements into a unitary and ordered intellectual structure is left to Thomas Aquinas. Albert’s unyielding belief that all natural cognition must begin with the concrete knowledge of reality obtained from direct encounters with the things of the world largely shapes the scholastic sense of empiricism. Another difficult problem is that of the conjunction of fides and ratio—a field in which only Aquinas’ speculation marks a point of synthesis between creation and faith, a brief moment of intellectual concord. On the literary side of scholasticism, it is perhaps Thomas Aquinas 1704

who, following and extending an argument of Aristotle’s, expressed some of the most trenchant pronouncements on the traditional Greek view of poets as liars: not only that poets lie but also, as he writes in Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Expositio (Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics), ‘‘the poets Orpheus, Musaeus and Linus, of whom Orpheus was the most famous, treated some aspects of the nature of the universe through the enigmas of fable’’ (aenigmatibus fabularum). Aquinas’ language here is Aristotelian: It is through a fabled image, he says, that poets misjudged the class of material causes, the ultimate principle of things. In his notable discussion of the theme of poetry and truth in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), Ernst Robert Curtius equally stresses Aquinas’ hostility to the poets’ claims to truth. Yet, there is another side of this argument. Where Aristotle says that the philosopher should to some extent make concession to modes of symbolic thought, Aquinas adds a comment that has no counterpart in Aristotle, in which he links the philosopher’s inspiration with the poet’s: The reason is that both reflect on wonders. Scholasticism passed through a complicated period of rejection and influence during the Renaissance, the final stage of which can be summarized with the traditional saying that philosophers of such tradition are cymini sectores—‘‘hair splitters.’’ In 1621, Bacon, at the start of his Novum organon, explicitly set himself apart from what had gone before; in 1651, Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan gave a scholastic passage as a sample of ‘‘Insignificant speech,’’ and the language and style—let alone the content—of Descartes’ Discourse (1637) seems in turn to proclaim a new beginning. A standard charge against the Aristotelians is that they are uninformative. Antoine Le Grand, to whom is attributed the introduction of Descartes into England, asks what would be the use of appealing to a scholastic ‘‘form’’ to explain the phases of the moon or of Venus. Roots of renewal and resources for the study of scholasticism are increased dramatically by the publication of Patrologia graeca (162 volumes) and Patrologia latina (221 volumes) between 1844 and 1866 under the editorship of the abbe´ J. P. Migne. A powerful impetus to the study of Thomas Aquinas in particular is given by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical letter Aeterni patris (1878), which commends Aquinas as the ‘‘chief and master’’ of the scholastics; finally, for Etienne Gilson (1884–1978), a Thomist in his own way, the route to Aquinas was via Descartes and an investigation of the intellectual background

LEONARDO SCIASCIA of Cartesianism, which in his view is markedly scholastic. STEFANO GULIZIA Further Reading Aquinas, Thomas, Selected Philosophical Writings, translated by Timothy McDermott, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Congar, Yves M., ‘‘Aspects eccle´siologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et se´culiers dans la seconde moitie´ du XIIIe sie`cle et le de´but du XIVe,’’ in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et litte´raire du moyen aˆge 36 (1961): 35–161. Curtius, Ernst Robert, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, translated by Willard R. Trask, New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953. Destrez, Jean, La pecia dans les manuscrits universitaires du XIIIe et du XIVe sie`cles, Paris: E´ditions Jacques Vautrain, 1935. Dronke, Peter, Fabula. Explorations into the Uses of Myth in Medieval Platonism, Leiden: Brill, 1974. Finnis, John, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000. Gilson, Etienne, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, translated by A. Downes, New York: Screibner, 1940. Giusberti, Franco, Materials for a Study on Twelfth Century Scholasticism, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1982.

Godfrey of Fontaines, Les Quodlibet Cinq, Six, et Sept, edited by M. de Wulf and J. Hoffmans, Louvain: Institut Supe´rieur de Philosophie, 1914. Hughes, Christopher, On a Complex Theory of a Simple God: An Investigation in Aquinas’ Philosophical Theology, Ithaca, NY-London: Cornell University Press, 1989. James of Viterbo, On Christian Government: De regimine christiano, edited and translated by R. W. Dyson, Woodbridge, UK, and Rochester: Boydell Press, 1995. Leijenhorst, Cees et al. (editors), The Dynamics of Aristotelian Natural Philosophy from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2002. Les Genres litte´raires dans les sources the´ologiques et philosophiques me´die´vales, Louvain-La-Neuve: Universite´ ´ tudes Me´die´vales, Catholique de Louvain, Institut d’E 1982. Pollard, G., ‘‘The Pecia System in the Medieval Universities,’’ in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts and Libraries, edited by M. B. Parks and Andrew G. Watson, London: Scholar Press, 1978. Rosier, Ire`ne, ‘‘Signes et sacrements: Thomas d’Aquin et la grammaire spe´culative,’’ Revue des sciences philosophiques et the´ologiques, 74.3 (1990): 392–436. Weisheipl, James A. (editor), Albertus Magnus and the Sciences, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980. Zambelli, Paola, The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma. Astrology, Theology, and Science in Albertus Magnus and his contemporaries, Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1992.

LEONARDO SCIASCIA (1921–1989) Leonardo Sciascia was born in Racalmuto, in southwestern Sicily, not far from Agrigento, the birthplace of Luigi Pirandello, whose writings had a profound influence on him. He fully embraced Sicilian culture, outlook and traditions but was more savagely critical than any adversary of the many deficiencies and injustices that were part of the island’s history and current experience. ‘‘La Sicilia e` ancora una terra amara’’ (Sicily is still a bitter land) he wrote in his 1967 introduction to a republication of Le parrocchie di Regalpetra (The Parishes of Regalpetra, 1956) and he never deviated from that view. Sciascia was not a writer who protested against prevailing conditions of life by creating a parallel, fantastic or utopian universe. His heroes are, he wrote in La Sicilia come metafora (Sicily as Metaphor, 1979), ‘‘il contrario di quelli di Pirandello: tra la vita reale e il foglio di

carta, nel loro caso, la distanza e` minima’’ (the opposite of those of Pirandello: between real life and the sheet of paper, the distance is, in their case, minimal). Under a lightly disguised name, Racalmuto was the setting for his first major book, Le parrocchie di Regalpetra. As a work of reportage based on his experiences as primary schoolteacher, it appeared to be in tune with the neorealism of the period, but Sciascia never saw himself as an adherent of any school. The problems facing children at school in a desperately poor area are part of a portrait that includes a brief history of the town, an account of the funeral of a salt miner who died in a work accident, an acid depiction of the clergy and politicians, and an autobiographical account of boyhood under Fascism. Many of the themes—social injustice, mafia power, clerical rule, impact of 1705

LEONARDO SCIASCIA Fascism—that preoccupied the later Sciascia were already present. The book is the first site of a lifelong battle between a pessimism based on a recognition of the problems confronting Sicily and an optimism of aspiration. In 1958, Sciascia made his first venture into fiction with Gli zii di Sicilia (Sicilian Uncles), a collection of three (later four) novellas. The tales deal with the poverty of postwar Sicily, the experiences of a Sicilian in the Spanish Civil War, the dilemmas of a Communist in the light of Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Joseph Stalin, and the transformation of Sicily in the aftermath of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala in May 1860. The latter story, Quarantotto (Forty-Eight), is similar in theme to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (The Leopard), which appeared the same year, and represents a treatment of a moment in Sicilian history to which historical novelists have returned obsessively. The international success of Il gattopardo puzzled Sciascia, and he remained critical of its class-based, abstract, ahistorical vision of Sicily. Although he wrote one historical novel, Il consiglio d’Egitto (The Council of Egypt, 1963), most of his fiction took the form of the detective story. Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl, 1961) brought him a mass readership, and was followed by A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own, 1966), Il contesto (Equal Danger, 1971), and Todo Modo (One Way or Another, 1974), after which he abandoned the genre for 14 years. Sciascia had written a perceptive account of the detective story, and was an admirer of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Georges Simenon and G(ilbert) K(eith) Chesterton, but his own crime stories are more akin to the Enlightenment conte philosophique than to the conventional morality tale. He reproached his critics for failing to note, as he stated in La Sicilia come metafora, that he had ‘‘introdotto il romanzo pirandelliano nel romanzo poliziesco’’ (introduced Pirandellian drama into the detective story). If the classic detective story is composed of three elements—murder, investigation, and unmasking— the third element is lacking in Sciascia. In Agatha Christie’s douce English countryside, the investigator can count on the backing of the state and society, but in mafia-polluted Sicily, dominated by the dictates of omerta` (code of silence and noncompliance), society will side with the criminal and actively impede the efforts of the investigator. In none of his novels is the criminal consigned to justice, and in Todo Modo, it is not even indisputably clear who is really responsible for the crimes. 1706

Sciascia’s objective is to use the genre not as escapist entertainment, but as an engage´ device for revealing a rottenness at the core of a society that is initially Sicilian, but later becomes Italian, and finally universal. The reader must be active not passive, fully committed to the quest for guilt, and able to supply the de´nouement the detective cannot provide. Il giorno della civetta is set in a Sicilian village, and while the corrupt relations between Roman politicians and village criminals are laid bare, the plot deals with the mafia in the sense of localized gangsterism. A ciascuno il suo, probably his most acute probe into the Sicilian psyche, is also set in a small town. The investigation into the killing of two men on a hunting trip is conducted not by a professional but by a slightly dim, credulous teacher, Paolo Laurana. He uncovers a plot involving the church as well as the criminal syndicates, and questions the nature of the Sicilian family and that almost mystical attachment to la roba (possessions) that had intrigued Giovanni Verga. His inquiry costs him, not the criminal, his life. The mafia in the two subsequent novels is metaphorical. Il contesto, as well as being a detective story, is a meditation on institutional justice and a reflection on the nature of the state. Judges are gunned down by some serial killer, but Inspector Rogas, compelled by his superiors in the period of terrorism in Italy to follow a false trail involving youthful groups, uncovers mafia-like behavior among the holders of power in the state. Il contesto inspired Francesco Rosi’s Cadaveri eccellenti (1975), a deft investigation into political conspiracy. Todo modo unfolds in a religious retreat house where don Gaetano, a deeply cultured priest and a cynical power broker, brings together prominent figures in business and politics. The artist-narrator engages the clergyman in discussions on theological matters that allow Sciascia to probe the theological-ideological basis of relations between church and state in Italy. A series of murders, the last of which is of don Gaetano himself, interrupts the prayers and the deals, but the murderer is not identified. Alongside his fiction, Sciascia produced a series of works that belong to no standard genre, but which have their origin in Alessandro Manzoni’s Storia della colonna infame (History of the Column of Infamy, 1842), to which he wrote an appreciative introduction in 1973. These works are investigative essays, best tagged inchieste (inquiries). They take as their starting point some event in history, but have little in common with the neutral, objective reconstruction that is the task of the professional

LEONARDO SCIASCIA historian. Sciascia is present in them, conducting the inquiry, commenting, intervening, but also structuring the events according to literary criteria. He grew to appreciate Jorge Luis Borges, and there is, especially in the later examples of the genre, something of the labyrinthine complexity of Borgesian essays. In Morte dell’inquisitore (Death of the Inquisitor, 1964), the first inchiesta, various facts relating to the murder of an officer of the Holy Inquisition in Palermo in 1657 caused him to identify closely with the perpetrator of the killing. Fra Diego La Matina was a native of Racalmuto, an ex-Augustinian friar of heretical views, and an opponent of the Inquisition. ‘‘Gli eretici, di qualunque eresia, fanno la vera storia della cultura’’ (heretics, of whatever heresy, make the real history of culture), Sciascia wrote in an afterword to Giuseppe Antonio Borgese’s Golia (1986). All throughout his life, Sciascia’s principal opponents were the forces of death, which were for him incarnated in three bodies: the Inquisition, the mafia, and Fascism. In his writings, these forces tend to become interchangeable, and he sides unequivocally with those like Fra Diego, who stand against them, even when defeated. In addition to Manzoni, the other inspirational model for these inchieste, and for Sciascia’s general outlook, is Voltaire. The sardonic irony, the scorn for all misuse of power, the upholding of the right of the individual caught in the relentless machinery of inhuman governmental processes and, above all, the reliance on pure reason were all aspects of Voltaire’s thought that drew Sciascia’s unreserved admiration. It is no accident that the Supreme Court judge in A ciascuno il suo was composing, before his assassination, a refutation of Voltaire’s Traite´ sur la Tole´rance (1764), or that the journey undertaken by the eponymous hero in Sciascia’s most personal novel, Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia (Candido or a Dream Dreamed in Sicily, 1977), ends at the foot of Voltaire’s statue in Paris. Candido is born in Sicily on the night of the Allied invasion in 1943 and grows up in a land torn between the conflicting demands of Catholicism and Communism, but ends his quixotic journey through life disillusioned with both. The very title of the novel is an evident act of homage to Voltaire’s celebrated tale, but it has also veiled Pirandellian overtones, since Sciascia greatly admired, and frequently quoted, a speech Pirandello o del candore (Pirandello or on Candor) delivered by Massimo Bontempelli in 1937 to the Reale Accademia d’Italia, in which Bontempelli identified candor as the prime characteristic of Pirandello’s writing.

Sciascia created his own original worldview, and nothing is more typical of him than his simultaneous, but wholly idiosyncratic, respect for the supreme rationalist, Voltaire, and for the arch irrationalist, Pirandello. The one was an indispensable counterbalance to the other: Sciascia wrote that for him Pirandello was Sicily as he knew it, with all its contradictions, violence, unreason, and tensions over identity, but this recognition brought him no comfort. Faith in reason, as that term was understood in the eighteenth century, offered him respite and refuge from a Sicilian cultural, emotional, and intellectual turbulence he could not endure. Pirandello remained the overwhelming figure in his development, the strong writer against whose influence he fought tenaciously in the process Harold Bloom called ‘‘anxiety of influence’’ (The Anxiety of Influence, 1973), but to whom he was eventually reconciled. He wrote several books on Pirandello, including Pirandello e il Pirandellismo (1953), Pirandello e la Sicilia (1961), Alfabeta pirandelliano (Pirandellian Alphabet, 1989) as well as countless essays, articles, and introductions, culminating in the piece entitled Pirandello, mio padre (Pirandello, My Father, 1989), which appeared posthumously. His constant effort as critic was to separate Pirandello from the overgrowth of the ideology named pirandellismo, for which he held Adriano Tilgher responsible, and to assert the Sicilianness of all Pirandello, not merely the Pirandello of the early dialect works. His most controversial inchiesta was undoubtedly L’affaire Moro (The Moro Affair, 1978), an investigation of the kidnapping and assassination of the Christian Democrat politician, Aldo Moro, by the Red Brigades. No admirer of the Christian Democrats, Sciascia was nonetheless horrified by the readiness of the terrorists to use killing as an instrument of policy. He viewed them as the latest proponents of an eternal philosophy of death and as such the successors of the Inquisition. During the long period of Moro’s imprisonment, Sciascia was an uncompromising advocate of negotiation as the only means of saving the life of a human being, even if that policy involved the state doing a deal with terrorists. That same year, Sciascia was elected to the Italian Parliament in the ranks of the Radical Party, and was a member of the parliamentary commission investigating the Moro case. Predictably, he produced a dissident report that was carried as an appendix to the majority report. Sciascia was one of nature’s dissidents, incapable of adopting any fixed ideology, and an implacable critic of the misuse of power. 1707

LEONARDO SCIASCIA His final creative period came when he was diagnosed as suffering from terminal cancer. Between 1987 until his death in 1989, he published four works, all expressing the quintessentially Sicilian obsession with death. The boundaries are blurred, with 1912+ 1 (1986) classified as an inchiesta, and Porte aperte (Open Doors, 1987) categorized as a novel. Both took historical murder cases as their theme. Porte aperte dealt with a murder, not politically inspired, occurring in Palermo under Fascism, but its real theme is capital punishment. The protagonist, known only as the piccolo giudice (little judge), exposed himself to risk by opposing the death penalty, even for a man guilty of a heinous crime. The novel was adapted for the screen by Gianni Amelio in 1990, with a memorable performance by Gian Maria Volonte` as the ‘‘little judge’’ determined to put the requirements of justice above all calls for vengeance, even when sanctioned by current legislation. Il cavaliere e la morte (The Knight and Death, 1988) takes its title from an etching by Albrecht Du¨rer and introduces into the detective story an unexpected, if imprecise, religious element. This dimension had already become clear in Sciascia’s last discussions of Pirandello, and is the recurrent concern of an investigator who is himself suffering from an incurable illness as he grapples with a series of assassinations. Una storia semplice (A Straightforward Tale, 1989), the most perfectly structured of all his detective stories, appeared after his death, but in this novel too the guilty party escapes justice. Sciascia had written in Le parrocchie di Regalpetra that he believed ‘‘nella ragione umana, e nella liberta` e nella giustizia che dalla ragione scaturiscono’’ (in human reason, in the liberty and justice that spring from it), and he remained faithful to that belief, even if he never found, not even in fiction, any society capable of giving it form.

Biography Born in Racalmuto (Agrigento), 8 January 1921, the first of three sons: grew up under Fascism. Between 1935–1942, attends the Istituto Magistrale IX Maggio in Caltanissetta where his family had moved. The novelist Vitaliano Brancati was one of his teachers. 1943, starts work in state grain store, being thus introduced him to the peasants’ world. 1944, marries Maria Andronico; the couple have two daughters. 1949, starts work as elementary schoolteacher. 1950, publishes first book, Le favole della dittatura. 1957, posted to Rome to the Ministry of Education; wins with Gli zii di Sicilia the 1708

Libera Stampa prize awarded in Lugano for previously unpublished material. 1958, returns to Caltanissetta. 1969, moves to Palermo. 1971, retires from educational post: Il contesto arouses fierce controversy with the Italian Communist Party. 1972, refuses to allow this novel to be entered for the Campiello prize. 1974, Todo modo attacked by the Catholic hierarchy. 1975, elected to Palermo City Council as an independent in the lists of the Communist Party. 1977, resigns from council. 1978, supports negotiations with terrorists to free kidnapped premier Aldo Moro. 1979, elected to Parliament as member of Radical Party. 1983, resigns from Parliament. 1987, controversy provoked by his article I professionisti dell’antimafia, published in Il corriere della sera. 1987, diagnosed with cancer. Died in Palermo, 20 November 1989. JOSEPH FARRELL Selected Works Collections Opere, 3 vols., edited by Claude Ambroise, Milan: Bompiani, 1987–1990.

Poetry ‘‘La Sicilia, il suo cuore,’’ 1953.

Fiction Gli zii di Sicilia, 1958; as Sicilian Uncles, translated by N. S. Thompson, 1986. Il giorno della civetta, 1961; as Mafia Vendetta, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver, 1963; rpt. as The Day of the Owl, 1984. Il consiglio d’Egitto, 1963; as The Council of Egypt, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1966. A ciascuno il suo, 1966; as A Man’s Blessing, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1968; rpt. as To Each His Own, 1989. Il contesto, 1971; as Equal Danger, translated by Adrienne Foulke, 1973. Il mare colore del vino, 1973; as The Wine Dark Sea, translated by Avril Bardoni, 1985. Todo modo, 1974; as One Way or Another, translated by Sacha Rabinovich, 1977; rpt. 1987. La scomparsa di Majorana, 1975; as The Mystery of Majorana, translated by Sacha Rabinovich, 1987. Candido, ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia, 1977; as Candido or a Dream Dreamed in Sicily, translated by Adrienne Foulkes, 1979; rpt. 1982. Porte aperte, 1987; as Open Doors, translated by Marie Evans, in The Knight and Death and Other Stories, 1992. Il cavaliere e la morte, 1988; as The Knight and Death, translated by Joseph Farrell, 1992. Una storia semplice, 1989; as A Straightforward Tale, translated by Joseph Farrell, in The Knight and Death and Other Stories, 1992.

LEONARDO SCIASCIA Inchieste and Nonfiction Le favole della dittatura, 1950. Le parrocchie di Regalpetra, 1956; 1967. Morte dell’inquisitore, 1964; as Death of the Inquisitor, translated by Judith Green, 1969; as Death of an Inquisitor and Other Stories, translated by Ian Thompson, 1990. Atti relativi alla morte di Raymond Roussel, 1971. I pugnalatori, 1976. L’affaire Moro, 1978; revised second edition, with Sciascia’s minority report to the Parliamentary Commission, 1983; as The Moro Affair, translated by Sacha Rabinovich, 1987. Dalle parti degli infedeli, 1979. La Sicilia come metafora (with Marcelle Padovani), 1979; as Sicily as Metaphor, translated by James Marcus, 1994. Il teatro della memoria, 1981. Conversazione in una stanza chiusa (with Davide Lajolo), 1981. Kermesse, 1982. La sentenza memorabile, 1982. Occhio di capra, 1984. Cronachette, 1985; as Little Chronicles, translated by Ian Thompson, in Death of an Inquisitor and Other Stories, 1990. Per un ritratto dello scrittore da giovane, 1985. La strega e il capitano, 1986; as The Captain and the Witch, translated by Ian Thompson, in Death of an Inquisitor and Other Stories, 1990. 1912+1, 1986; as 1912+1, translated by Sacha Rabinovich, 1989.

Theater L’onorevole (produced 1965), 1965. Recitazione della controversia liparitana (produced 1968), 1969. I mafiosi (produced 1965), 1976. Quando non arrivarono i nostri (produced 1988), 1989.

Critical Essays Pirandello e il pirandellismo, 1953. Pirandello e la Sicilia, 1961. La corda pazza, 1970. Nero su nero, 1979. La palma va a nord, 1982. Cruciverba, 1983. Alfabeto pirandelliano, 1989. Fatti diversi di storia letteraria e civile, 1989. A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro), 1989. Pirandello, mio padre, 1989.

Further Reading Ambroise, Claude, Invito alla lettura di Sciascia, Milan: Mursia, 1974. Budriesi, Antonio, Pigliari di lingua: Temi e forme nella narrativa di Leonardo Sciascia, Rome: Efele, 1986. Collura, Matteo, Il Maestro di Regalpetra, Milan: Longanesi, 1996. Di Grado, Antonio, La lotta con l’angelo: Gli scrittori e le fedi, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Farrell, Joseph, Leonardo Sciascia, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994.

Jackson, Giovanna, Leonardo Sciascia 1956–1976: A Thematic and Structural Study, Ravenna: Longo, 1981. Lo Dico, Onofrio, Leonardo Sciascia: Tecniche narrative e ideologia, Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1988. Luisi, Luciano (editor), Leonardo Sciascia: Una vita per il romanzo, Taranto: Mandese, 1990. Mauro, Walter, Sciascia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970. Motta, Antonio, Leonardo Sciascia: La verita`, l’aspra verita`, Bari-Rome: Lacaita, 1985. Onofri, Massimo, Storia di Sciascia, Bari: Laterza, 1994. Porzio, Domenico, Fuoco all’anima, Milan: Mondadori, 1992. Rossani, Ottavio, Leonardo Sciascia, Rimini: Luise`, 1990. Sgroi, Salvatore, Per la lingua di Pirandello e Sciascia, Caltanissetta-Rome: Salvatore Sciascia, 1990.

IL GIORNO DELLA CIVETTA, 1961 Novel by Leonardo Sciascia

Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) appeared at a time when, in spite of increasing mafia activity, the official line propagated by church and state was that the mafia did not exist. Sciascia challenges this facile belief with a plot in which the cultural mindsets of mafia boss, don Mariano Arena, and of the police chief, Captain Bellodi, are pitched one against the other. An expartisan with a profound belief in law and the values of the Italian republic as it emerged from the Resistance, Bellodi had joined the police to defend those ideals but, like most of Sciascia’s detectives, he remains a personification of abstract ethical and political ideals. Arena, for all his viciousness and cynicism, is a splendidly imagined character, who has the feel of a flesh-and-blood human being. Sciascia transfers to Sicily the techniques of the detective story, while undermining several of its conventions. The classical detective story, with its unilinear progress from crime to detection, offers the reader the reassurance of living in a politically well-functioning and morally comprehensible 1709

LEONARDO SCIASCIA society. Sciascia uses a bilinear structure to expose a corrupt, mafia-dominated world. The efforts of the detective are paralleled and thwarted by a counterinquiry in which sinister, nameless, but highly placed and influential characters thwart the attempts of the police to bring the criminal to justice. While in the comfortable world of Agatha Christie the criminal is an outcast in society, in Sciascia’s Sicily the police as representatives of the state occupy that position, and find their efforts frustrated by public distrust and official doubledealing. The novel opens, in keeping with the traditions of the genre, with a murder. The victim is a local industrialist who had defied mafia demands. The investigator, Captain Bellodi, is shocked by the grip of omerta` over even the victim’s family, so he has to rely not on clues and rational investigation but on an informer, Calogero Di Bella, known as Parrinieddu, who is killed after putting the police onto the right track. The climactic interrogation scene between the mafia boss and the investigator is a clash of ethical, political, and cultural standards rather than a straightforward attempt to uncover responsibility for a specific crime. Bellodi, like Sciascia himself, was deeply imbued with an Enlightenment outlook that looked to law based on reason as the only defense against chaos and the rule of mere strength, while Arena, a product of Sicilian history, sees law as the code of the selfinterest of the powerful, to be broken by people like him with no stake in a society that excludes them. In his 1989 A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro), Sciascia stated that with this novel he became the first Italian novelist to give ‘‘una rappresentazione non apologetica del fenomeno mafioso’’ (a nonapologetic representation of the mafia phenomenon), but the work drew the ire of the novelist Sebastiano Vassalli, who saw it as confirming his doubts on Sciascia’s overall civic commitment and antimafia credentials, particularly since Bellodi ends by paying his adversary the compliment of recognizing his mettle as un uomo (a man) (‘‘Signora Mafia con gli occhi di Medusa,’’ 1992). The dialogue, however, in no way condones mafia violence, but it does unpick the complex symbiosis between Sicilian society and the criminal body that had emerged from it. In this corrupt society, the final act of the detective story—the consignment of the criminal to justice—cannot take place. The mafioso is released, and the crime goes unpunished. JOSEPH FARRELL 1710

Editions First edition: Il giorno della civetta, Turin: Einaudi, 1961; rpt. Milan: Adelphi, 1992. Other editions: with foreword by Sciascia and notes by Sebastiano Vassalli, Turin: Einaudi, Letture per la Scuola Media, 1972; in Opere, vol. 1, edited by Claude Ambroise, Milan: Bompiani, 1987; with introduction and notes in English by Gerard Slowey, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998. Translations: as Mafia Vendetta, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Arthur Oliver, London: Jonathan Cape, 1963; rpt. as The Day of the Owl, Manchester: Carcanet, 1984; rpt, London: Granta Books, 2001; rpt with introduction by George Scialabba, New York: NYRB, 2003.

Further Reading Bufalino, Gesualdo, ‘‘Il poliziotto di Dio,’’ in Cere perse, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985. Cannon, Joann, ‘‘The Detective Fiction of Leonardo Sciascia,’’ in Modern Fiction Studies, 29, no. 4 (1983): 282–291. Fano, Nicola, Come leggere ‘‘Il giorno della civetta,’’ Milan: Mursia, 1993. Farrell, Joseph, ‘‘Sciascismo: Sciascia Uno, Nessuno e Centomila,’’ in Ercole Patti e altro novecento siciliano, edited by Pietro Frassica, Novara: Interlinea, 2004. Mineo, Nicolo`, ‘‘Lo scrittore e il detective,’’ in Omaggio a Leonardo Sciascia (Proceedings of Conference, 6–8 April 1990), edited by Zino Pecoraro and Enzo Scrivano, Agrigento: Provincia Regionale di Agrigento, 1991. Onofri, Massimo, ‘‘Verso una microfisica del potere: Il giorno della civetta,’’ in Quaderni dell’Istituto Italiano di Cultura (Melbourne), 1 (1994): 33–48. Tani, Stefano, The Doomed Detective, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984. Toti, Anna, Leonardo Sciascia e la ragione investigatrice, Genoa: Il Basilico, 1992. Vassalli, Sebastiano, ‘‘Signora Mafia con gli occhi di Medusa,’’ in La repubblica, 7 (August 1992): 3.

L’AFFAIRE MORO, 1978 Inchiesta by Leonardo Sciascia

There being no standard genre to which L’affaire Moro (The Moro Affair) can be ascribed, the term adopted in Italian is simply inchiesta (inquiry).

LEONARDO SCIASCIA Sciascia introduced the category with Morte dell’inquisitore (Death of an Inquisitor, 1964), and subsequently produced many other such books. The inchiesta is neither a work of fiction nor a work of reportage or history. The starting point is some injustice in society, past or present, that goads the writer to embark on an idiosyncratic investigation and meditation whose aim is to establish motivations and responsibility, and to reconstruct the moral, cultural, and political environment in which the event occurred. L’affaire Moro was published within a few months of the assassination of the Christian Democrat politician, Aldo Moro, ex-prime minister and architect in the mid-1970s of a political understanding between the Christian Democrats and Italy’s Communists. On 16 March 1978, while on his way to Parliament to cast his vote for the government headed by Giulio Andreotti, which embodied that alliance, he was kidnapped by the terrorists of the Red Brigades. In the carcere del popolo (people’s prison), he wrote many letters to his family and his political colleagues urging negotiations with his captors to secure his release. The hard-line arguments of the Communists and Christian Democrats (opposed by the Socialist Party) prevailed, and on 9 May, Moro was murdered and his body abandoned in the trunk of a car in Via Caetani, a street in central Rome chosen with cynical symbolism because it was equidistant between the headquarters of the Communist and Christian Democratic parties. Sciascia’s sense of incredulous outrage toward those he viewed as responsible for Moro’s death is palpable. All his life, Sciascia had been a scornful opponent of the Christian Democrats, but he agreed with Pier Paolo Pasolini that Moro was ‘‘il meno implicato di tutti’’ (the least implicated of them all) in the malgovernment and corruption for which the party was responsible. Sciascia’s stance in favor of a deal was determined not by his belief in Moro’s guilt or innocence but by his belief in the fundamental value of a human life. In L’affaire Moro, he upholds the Christian virtue of pietas (pity) against the relentless, heedless power both of the state and its terrorist opponents. He is as scathing as he had ever been toward the party, but his Moro, however paradoxical it may be of a man who had spent his life in the corridors of power, is a victim who finds himself crushed between two opposing ‘‘Stalinisms,’’ as Sciascia terms them: the ‘‘subdolo e sottile’’ (cunning and subtle) idolatry of the state by its servants and the ‘‘violento e spietato’’ (violent and pitiless) ideology of

the terrorists. For Sciascia, the three great antilife forces in history had been the Inquisition, the mafia, and Stalinism, and he saw the terrorist lotta armata (armed struggle) as sharing the amorality of all three. The work was highly controversial on first publication, and remains troubling and enigmatic. The recommendation that the Italian state should have, in Kipling’s phrase, ‘‘paid the dane-geld’’ (‘‘Dane-Geld,’’ in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, 1986) and negotiated with the terrorists is disconcerting, and in a wider sense the book is curiously indirect, allusive, literary, and even precious. Sciascia drew not on interviews or research but on Moro’s letters alone, describing himself as writing surrounded by ‘‘ritagli di giornali’’ (newspaper cuttings), with only ‘‘il dizionario di Tommaseo solido in mezzo come un frangiflutti’’ (Tommaseo’s dictionary solidly in the middle like a wave-breaker). The book opens with a quotation from Pasolini that twins the corruption of Italian society with the disappearance of the fireflies, and closes with a passage from Jorge Luis Borges on a detective story that may have the wrong ending. Sciascia writes that he is haunted by feeling that the whole case had occurred previously, in literature, but the humanity he advocates is at odds with the coldly rational, occasionally fanciful approach he adopts. JOSEPH FARRELL Editions First edition: L’affaire Moro, Palermo: Sellerio, 1978. Other editions: L’affaire Moro, with the ‘‘Relazione di minoranza presentata dal deputato Leonardo Sciascia’’ (written by Sciascia in his capacity as member of the parliamentary commission charged with investigating the kidnap and murder of Moro), Milan: Adelphi, 1983; in Opere, vol. 2, edited by Claude Ambroise, Milan: Bompiani, 1989. Translations: as The Moro Affair, translated by Sacha Rabinovich, Manchester: Carcanet, 1987; rpt. London: Granta Books, 2001; rpt with introduction by Peter Robb, New York: NYRB, 2004.

Further Reading Belpoliti, Marco, Settanta, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Di Grado, Antonio, Leonardo Sciascia, Messina: Pungitopo, 1986. Drake, Richard, The Aldo Moro Murder Case, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Galli, Giorgio, Piombo Rosso, Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2004. Sofri, Adriano, L’ombra di Moro, Palermo: Sellerio, 1991. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica, The Moro Morality Play, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Willan, Philip, Puppet Masters, London: Constable, 1991.

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SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE The emergence of a significant body of philosophical and scientific texts available to a lettered public, dating in Italy to the mid-seventeenth century, was due to the particular example of Galileo Galilei’s work, and more generally to the increasing expansion of a print culture favoring more rapid dissemination of concrete and current information destined for specialists and amateurs, to the sustained attention to intellectual developments abroad, and to the rise in those arenas in which such broad readership flourished—urban academies, salons, and cafe´s. Thus while much of Galileo’s oeuvre provided ready stylistic and generic models for his followers—showing, for instance, the immediate advantages of the vernacular over Latin, of lively dialogic exchanges between recognizable types, and of the persuasive admixture of canonical literary and more earthy analogies in the explanation of technical matters—the advent of a scientific literature for the general reader depended also upon broader social mechanisms and publishing practices developing in Italy and imported from abroad. Writers treating philosophical, scientific, or technical subjects and addressing themselves to a general public were often eager to intersperse such information with literary commonplaces already familiar to a well-read audience. In his crucial refutation of the widespread belief in spontaneous generation, Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti (Experiments Concerning the Generation of Insects, 1668), for instance, Francesco Redi (1626–1698) drew heavily upon the many classical, medieval, and early modern works in which the erroneous doctrine had been promulgated, taking care to cite, rather than simply to paraphrase, the best-known of such examples—those of Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Martial, and Dante—in the course of developing a counterargument based upon his own observations and experimentation. This is not to say, however, that Redi presented poetry as a mere repository of scientific errors—for some verses are adduced in support of his own position, while others figure neutrally as the context for an observation, and all are introduced with praise—but rather that he assumed that the intellectual backdrop of his argument, the fabric of the knowable, was the world of letters. And Redi’s occasional habit of 1712

seeing in literary works latent allusions to natural phenomena—the most striking of which is perhaps his reference to the gardens of Alcina in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and to the plaintive tree in Dante’s Inferno XIII as indices of the sentient nature of plants—appears to have been a standard feature of early modern academy culture. That sometime insistence upon a continuum between classicizing literary and emergent scientific worlds underwent complication in the eighteenth century when Italian authors, increasingly informed by publications such as the Giornale de’ Letterati (Venice, 1710–1740), the Novelle letterarie (Florence, 1740–1770), and Il Caffe` (Milan, 1764– 1766), tended to emphasize less the achievements of antiquity and the early Renaissance, and more the enormous influence of contemporary English and French culture. The best-known representative of this more cosmopolitan sort of scientific literature, Francesco Algarotti (1712–1764), opened his Neutonianismo per le dame (Newtonianism for Ladies, 1737), a dialogue based on Bernard de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralite´ des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, 1686), with a reference to two lines from Alexander Pope’s recently published Ode for Music on Saint Cecilia’s Day. Algarotti’s philosopher compared the sonorous verses ‘‘mentre con note tarde e allungate / spira l’organo profondo maestoso e solenne’’ (While in more lengthen’d notes and slow, / The deep, majestic, solemn organs blow), to touches of color used to enliven a painting, prompting his interlocutor, the Marquise, to mention an allusion to a prism in a Petrarchan poem by Algarotti honoring the learned Laura Bassi, and permitting an overall but never entirely permanent shift of focus from literature to Newtonian optics. While this suturing of verse to vision, like his fascination with contemporaneous experimentation with the chromatic keyboard in Paris, is typical of Algarotti’s occasional tendency to overstate the connections between aural and visual phenomena, it also signals the author’s awareness of the cultural resources available to an emergent female readership, and his desire to appeal to an audience of modern and informed tastes. Literary examples illustrate both scientific ignorance and progress in Algarotti’s text.

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE Pope is commended, for instance, for having offered a sort of template for the entire dialogue with the lines ‘‘la natura era involta in profonde tenebre; venne il Neutono, e fu luce ogni cosa,’’ (Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night, / God said, Let Newton be and all was light), but taken to task for having compared the prism to false eloquence in his newly published Essay upon Criticism; the discarded Cartesian philosophy is associated with the magic palaces of Renaissance epic, and the inopportune anti-Newtonian buffoon of the piece, Simplicio, is portrayed as a ‘‘great Petrarchan.’’ While distinctions are regularly drawn between the untrammeled imagination of the poet and the rational method and experimental techniques of the natural philosopher, it is fantasia, rather than reason or sensory data, that is routinely evoked in discussions of the immeasurably small and the infinitely large, the latter, in fact, being conjured up not in quantifiable terms, but through a series of references to the Satan of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Fama of Virgil’s Aeneid, and the oceanic giant Adamastor of Luis Camo˜es’ Lusiads. Though Neutonianismo per le dame is arguably the most belletristic instance of Italian scientific and philosophical works, even later and more technical works did not wholly discard their lively pace and patina of worldly urbanity. The Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienze (Essay on the True Goal of Letters and Sciences, 1754) by Antonio Genovesi (1713–1769), a lengthy preface to a short and more pragmatic treatise devoted to the urgent need for agricultural reform in Italy, for instance, repeatedly portrayed metaphysical philosophers—the supremely idle foil to the literary man—as ‘‘the Don Quixotes of the Republic of Letters,’’ and compared their endless quarrels to the fruitless work of Penelope. Not surprisingly, printing and engraving techniques were crucial to Genovesi’s project of enlightenment, for ‘‘they brought human genius to an indivisible point, and made man a citizen of all the present and past nations on Earth.’’ More celebrated still in their combination of technical matter and literary style, and typical of a general shift of intellectual interests from the natural to social sciences, were the Dialogues on the Commerce of Grain, originally published in French in 1770 as the Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds by the Abbot Ferdinando Galiani (1728–1787), nephew of the very influential Newtonian Celestino Galiani. Taking as a point of departure the severe famines experienced in Italy in the mid-1760s, the Dialogues sought to reveal the disastrous effects of the French Physiocrats’ trade

policies through a series of exchanges between a clever Chevalier and a stolid Marquis. Gone, of course, are the constant references to the world of letters, Galiani’s principal focus being upon the various theoretical works and administrative edicts associated with the Physiocrats. In one of the work’s more somber moments, the Chevalier insisted (as had other scholars, following Ludovico Muratori, for decades) upon the absolute irrelevance of Arcadia and the ‘‘bright and cheerful palette of romances’’ to the squalid conditions in eighteenth-century Italy’s agricultural regions, and he established his own literary credentials rather briskly, with a couple of passing allusions to Virgilian and Horatian commonplaces, and a few comic references to ‘‘the immortal Sancho Panza’’ of the Quixote, a scene from Molie`re, a gag of Arlecchino, a famous line from a contemporary comedy, and the Gazette de France. While the relentless tempo and tenor of some of the heckling exchanges between the irrepressible Chevalier and the hapless Marquis seem closer in spirit to those that would soon emerge between Jacques and his master in Denis Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist than to any Italian model, Galiani’s compatriots would have recognized certain Galilean touches in this Dialogue. The Chevalier’s comparison of the works of the political theorist Montesquieu and of other ‘‘metaphysicians’’ to the disconnected and inorganic components of intarsia or to a mosaic, and his suggestion that good poets, characterized by inventiveness and sprezzatura would hardly applaud such efforts, clearly recalled Galileo’s famous description of Torquato Tasso’s work as a collection of impoverished and unrelated poetic conceits cobbled together like inlaid wood. More generally, the Chevalier’s distaste for allegory likewise recalls Galileo’s scant regard for the genre, and his suggestion that the Marquis abandon his abstract theories and consult instead with actual artisans and tradesmen evoked the scientist’s sometime deference to craftsmen and merchants in his astronomical and mechanical writings. While Galiani’s work explicitly rejected the Physiocrats’ assumption that nature, tending to an equilibrium, should be left to govern economies as she does the physical world, the Dialogue deftly complemented the apparent irrelevance of Galilean physics with an implicit insistence of the importance of the Pisan philosopher’s approach and style. Despite earlier attempts to attract and to educate a female readership—or perhaps in reaction to such efforts and to the contemporaneous debate over the political, commercial, and social value of 1713

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE schooling for women—scientific and philosophical literature of the period is not without strong overtones of misogyny. In the Lettera dell’Abate Conti P.V., a letter written in 1721 by Antonio Conti (1677–1749) and published with his complete works in 1756, the erudite Newtonian used materialist principles and what he saw as a wealth of empirical evidence to demonstrate the natural inferiority of the female of all species. Galiani, for his part, referred in passing to women as capricious invalids in his Dialogues on the Commerce of Grain, returning to the issue in his Sketch of a Dialogue on Women, an incomplete work of 1772 first published in French as the Croquis d’un dialogue sur les femmes in 1784, and several times thereafter. In this dialogue, the Chevalier emphasized the physiological origins of women’s inferiority, embellished his theory of a pampered female population better acquainted with and innately more suited to sickness than well-being, ascribed women’s occasional bouts of energy to a febrile imagination, and discarded the Marquis’ timid suggestion that weakness and ill health were the effects of inferior education or societal expectations. The sort of schooling earlier proposed in Algarotti’s Neutonianismo per le dame, where women of a certain class and disposition easily learn a few particulars about the prism and the camera obscura, appears disputed when the doctor, physicist, and poet Lorenzo Pignotti (1739–1812) published his very popular Favole e Novelle (Fables and Novellas, 1782). In his ‘‘Descrizione anatomica del core d’una donna galante,’’ (Anatomical Description of the Heart of a Gallant Woman), the optical sideshow returned as a cautionary tale and a masculine genre, for when the anatomist reaches the center of the heart: In quell vuoto vedeansi a cento a cento Imagini leggiadre e pellegrine Apparire, e sparire ogni momento. Gemme, piume, carrozze, abiti, trine, E con rapido moto si vedea Un Agnus Deo, che a un nastro succedea. Come il fanciul, che nelle fredde fere Chiamato al rozzo suon di rauca lira Va` la laterna magica a vedere Citta`, campagne, armi, soldati mira Passar rapidamente in confusione E ad Attila succeder Salomone. In that void one sees hundreds and hundreds Of gay and exotic images Appear and disappear by the second: Jewels, feathers, carriages, clothes, laces, And in a flash an Agnus Dei

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followed a ribbon. So on cold evenings a boy Called by the rough sound of the raucous lyre Goes to the magic lantern And watches cities, countryside, weapons, and soldiers Pass rapidly in confusion and sees Solomon follow Attila.

Italian journalism in this period offered the most visible arena for the contest over women’s potential utility as citizens and workers, and her access to and interest in philosophical and scientific literature, the former issue having been addressed in a single article in the mid-1760s in Il Caffe`, and the latter more at length in the intellectually ambitious Venetian Giornale Enciclopedico, and the decidedly frivolous Milanese Donna galante ed erudita. But scientific literature’s sometime interest in what women could or should learn is also part of a larger and older question, one that sought to offer a new context for that wealth of anthropological materials thus far consigned to travel narratives and the relazioni of the missionaries. In his Relazione della China (Report on China, 1697), an immensely readable work based on conversations in 1665 with Father Johann Gru¨ber, S.J. in the antechamber of the Grand Duke Leopoldo de’ Medici, for instance, Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712) sometimes presented scientific and technological progress in the Far East alongside a glorious if slightly dated Galilean standard. He emphasized a peculiar likeness between the fates of Aristotle and Confucius, insisted upon the impoverished character of Chinese science, especially geometry, optics, and perspective, and a correlative mania for the pseudosciences and the occult, and noting that affordable concave mirrors of high quality had become common in the Far East, credited the Jesuits with the importation of techniques for making these and other optical instruments. The alleged primacy of the Chinese in the invention of paper and in printing is curiously absent in Magalotti’s account, but finds a suitable emblem in the insistence upon the ‘‘mountains of paper’’ burned along with all the riches of the imperial household on the occasion of the emperor’s death. The long acquaintance of the Chinese with gunpowder, while acknowledged, is presented in terms of its sheer evanescence, for Father Gru¨ber’s lyrical description of a display of fireworks ends with the moralizing recognition that the spectacle itself lasted no longer than the penitential psalm Miserere, the bright colors leaving only a skeleton-like trail in the sky; the missionary’s insistence on the jealous secrecy with which the Chinese guarded this art

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE appears entirely undercut by Magalotti’s excited revelation that such displays had already been offered 11 years earlier to the king of Denmark by a subject who had just returned from the Orient. And Magalotti’s story about a Nepalese prince, who, having been given a small telescope by Father Gru¨ber, viewed his enemies from afar, mistook the images for reality, and was ready to fire upon the still distant foe, has not only the hallmarks of domestic narratives about a foreigner’s susceptibility to optical illusions, but also the nostalgic evocation of the heyday of the Tuscan court. The Relazione della China, while not a dialogue, simulates the conversational rhythm of much scientific and philosophical literature in presenting Father Gru¨ber’s account as a series of replies to questions, and it finishes, like Galilean dialogues, with a reference to the tardy hour, encoded here as an elegiac resistance to the passage of time. The achievements and capabilities of other societies were also examined in various discussions of the role of climate upon individual cultures, a question previously taken up by Niccolo` Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Montesquieu, and David Hume, and addressed by Algarotti in an essay of 1765, the Saggio sopra la questione se la qualita` varie de’ popoli siano dallo influsso del clima, ovveramente dalla virtu` della legislazione (Essay on Whether the Various Features of Nations Are Due to the Influence of Climate or the Result of Laws). The plaintive observation with which Algarotti began—‘‘the same nation has in some centuries the world’s admiration, and in others its mockery’’—had something to do, of course, with Italy’s diminished place in European culture, a situation that the author elsewhere described as a sort of repose after the strenuous scientific progress of the early modern period. In this work, Algarotti sought to steer a middle course between the determining emphasis that Bodin and Montesquieu placed upon climate, and Machiavelli’s and Hume’s insistence on the much greater role of the state, but his real interest may have been in portraying the French as no different from the ancient Franks from which they descended, ‘‘full of valor, but impatient with inconvenience, incapable of long efforts and undisciplined,’’ ‘‘expert at imitating whatever they see,’’ vain, giddily prone to pleasure, and inferior, finally, on the battlefield. Algarotti elsewhere insisted, in assessing the particular situation of China, upon the timelessness of the East, and concluded that despite its early access to print and the state’s generosity to men of letters, Chinese culture was exclusively belletristic and profoundly conservative, ‘‘apt for forming antiquaries

and chatterers, but not for arousing the mind or awaking reason,’’ and that the country deserved credit for its chief exports, its porcelain and its fans, but none for natural philosophy. Geography, if not climate per se, explained what Algarotti saw as the enormous contrast between scientific learning in the East and the West, for in the course of explaining a conflict between the followers of Newton in England and his detractors in France, he argued that Europe’s many mountains and rivers had resulted in separate and competing communities whose very rivalry ensured dynamic study and constant progress, while a certain featurelessness in Asia—surely a function of Europe’s still imperfect knowledge of that vast region—appeared to him to ensure by contrast a uniformity and crippling stasis in its customs and beliefs. What the Chinese did in their marketplaces, Algarotti explained—accepting no tokens of value except for assayed silver—the Europeans did in the public spheres where they practiced philosophy. But while neighboring France and the remote East figured at times as feminized alternatives to the robust philosophical learning and technological progress to which Italy aspired, a new sort of anthropological understanding emerged in the wake of the priest and naturalist Alberto Fortis’ presentation of the Morlacchi in his Viaggio in Dalmazia (Travels in Dalmatia, 1774). In this well-illustrated and extremely popular work—one that was translated to German in 1776, and to French and to English in 1778—Fortis described the physical setting, the natural resources available in each region, the fossils and the remnants of Roman antiquity typically coveted by naturalists and antiquarians, and most influentially, the character and customs of the Morlacchi, previously seen as the most brutish and ungovernable subjects under Venetian rule. Fortis insisted, to be sure, on the primitive nature of the Morlacchi, on their remarkable resistance to innovations in agriculture, animal husbandry, and even in fashion, on their bouts of profligacy and lack of foresight, and on the ease with which they were duped by Italian merchants, but such observations contributed to a portrait of a people uncorrupted by modern culture, and in whom traces of an ancient pastoral liberty still survived. This skillful blend of scientific, ethnographic, and historical information appeared within a framework that presupposed an audience inclined to take vicarious pleasure in the rugged conditions and primitive world he depicted. To choose a typical instance, in his account of his exploration of a series of underground caverns near the Cetina 1715

SCIENCE AND LITERATURE River, Fortis began with an allusion to the bandits who formerly dwelt there, passed to a lively depiction of the stalagmites and stalactites in the main grotto and a quick review of the ways in which contemporaries and ancients had misunderstood the phenomena, then advanced the suggestion that such formations had originally been corroded by a subterranean river, and finally compared the ‘‘natural bridge’’ under which the hypothetical waters had once flowed to the Ponte di Veja in the Veronese, the latter popularly regarded as the inspiration for the Malebolgia. The discussion of the unreal scene ends, in fact, with Fortis’ affirmation, one of calculated appeal to a nascent Romanticism, that the geological site ‘‘seemed to be a real image of Dante’s Inferno; a situation well-suited for one disposed to reflect on Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, and to render them still more dismal.’’ Fortis was, of course, astute in suggesting that readers of this geological discussion were as likely to associate the imagined scene with Night Thoughts as with the Inferno, for Italy was just entering its long obsession with and imitation of Young’s work, but this is not to say that he had much use for the pious antiempirical posture of the English poet. Abbot Fortis’ writings are characterized not only by an antipathy for clerics, but also by a Galilean insistence on the independence of science from religion, particularly in his examination of the fossil record, and in this they continue the skeptical approach of his godfather and mentor, Antonio Vallisneri, and are distinctly opposed to an English tradition of natural theology. As one might expect, the proximity of philosophical and scientific discourse to contemporaneous developments in literature, particularly poetry, emerged from both an attention to the demands of an audience of lettered nonspecialists, and more importantly, from an increased willingness to treat language—like mores, clothing, and religious customs—as an object of study. The close association between Galileo and the Accademia della Crusca was not without influence, and certainly prompted a greater tolerance for the specialized and less abstract vocabularies particular to tradesmen, artisans, and naturalists. In his epistolary Sopra la lettera B., e perche` ella s’adoperi cosı` spesso nel principio de’ Cognomi (On the Letter ‘‘B,’’ and Why It Is Used so Frequently in the Beginning of Names) written in 1711 and posthumously published a decade later, Lorenzo Magalotti offered a more speculative discussion, insisting, for instance, on the onomatopoeic quality of words from seemingly unrelated languages, a deep 1716

structure that signaled both their pre-Babelic unity and their poetic expressivity. He followed this meditation upon the primordial phase of language with a reference to a report from the English newspaper The Spectator about a new dialect lately emergent in London, and yet already polished and possessed of grammar and syntax, a silent and militaristic system of signals employed exclusively by the fanwielding ladies of that city. What Magalotti presented as a kind of cicalata in his letter—the sonorous remnants of a lost original language common to all, and the gestural patois of a fashionable few ‘‘mistresses of the weapon’’—was to flourish, however, in the philosophical literature of the later eighteenth century. The taste for a sentimentalized primitivism, for instance, would in the early 1760s compel Fortis to add to one version of his Dei cataclismi sofferti dal nostro pianeta (On the Cataclysms Suffered by Our Planet), a poem explaining the role of both floods and fire in the formation of the Earth, certain ‘‘Ossianic traits’’ in homage to the Italian passion for the pseudoantique Poems of Ossian. Fortis’ translation in his Viaggio in Dalmazia of the ‘‘heroic songs’’ of the Morlacchi and his presentation of them as inferior to Ossianic verse but nonetheless sonorous and moving, allegedly reminiscent in their artless simplicity of both Provenc¸al troubadours and Homer, appears to have brought such verse to the more enthusiastic attention of Herder and Goethe. And for all its frivolity, Magalotti’s ready recycling of what The Spectator called ‘‘the exercise of the fan’’ emphasizes the importance of journalism to the development of philosophical literature, echoes the more serious associations of gesture with both primitive and exotic cultures, and reminds us that the anxious subtext of much of this literature concerned women’s access to specialized knowledge. Some of the issues central to the development of philosophical and scientific literature during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the relationship of the hard sciences to the arts and to the emerging social sciences, the availability of such discourses to women, and Italy’s place within an increasingly complex culture of intellectual exchanges—find their best expression today in the work of Rita Levi Montalcini (1909–), recipient of the Nobel prize in medicine in 1986 for her research in neurobiology. The autobiographical Elogio dell’imperfezione (In Praise of Imperfection, 1988) describes in lucid, pictorial, and occasionally lyrical detail the influence of her family and environment upon Levi-Montalcini’s intellectual development, the obstacles of anti-Semitism and misogyny, the

SCIENCE FICTION pattern of conjecture, testing, and reformulation that led her to the discovery of the Nerve Growth Factor, and the crucial differences between Italian and American scientific institutions. La Science Citoyenne (Civic Science, 1994), a series of interviews in French between Levi-Montalcini and Ruth Scheps, captures the dialogic quality of much scientific literature, and places its author’s concerns with the education of women, the environment, and social inequity within a context of ethical inquiry of global, rather than national, dimensions. EILEEN ADAIR REEVES Further Reading Antonello, Pierpaolo, and Simon A. Gilson, Science and Literature in Italian Culture From Dante to Calvino: A Festschrift for Patrick Boyle, Oxford, UK: European Humanities Research Center, 2004. Arato, Franco, ‘‘Intorno al ‘Neutonianismo’: Quattro lettere inedite di Francesco Algarotti,’’ in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 104 (1987): 556–569. Arato, Franco, Il Secolo delle cose: Scienza e storia in Francesco Algarotti, Genoa: Marietti, 1991. Bertipaglia, Giuliana, ‘‘Ossian and Cesarotti: Poems and Translations,’’ in Studies in Scottish Literature, 32 (2001): 132–139. Binni, Walter, Preromanticismo italiano, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1959. Bufalini, Robert, ‘‘Alberto Fortis at the Edges of Europe: Preromantic Fashion and Vergilian Tradition in the Service of Enlightened Reform,’’ in Forum Italicum, 32 (1998): 132–140. Castronovo, Valerio, and Nicola Tranfaglia, La stampa Italiana dal Cinquecento all’Ottocento, Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1976. Cervigni, Dino (editor), ‘‘Letteratura e scienza,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 23 (2005). Ciancio, Luca, Autopsie della Terra: Illuminismo e geologia in Alberto Fortis (1741–1803), Florence: Olschki, 1995.

Cristea, S. N., ‘‘Ossian v. Homer: An Eighteenth-Century Controversy,’’ in Italian Studies, 24 (1969): 93–111. Dooley, Brendan, Science, Politics, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Italy: The Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia and its World, New York and London: Garland, 1991. Dooley, Brendan, ‘‘The Public Sphere and the Organization of Knowledge,’’ in Early Modern Italy 1550–1796, edited by John A. Marino, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ferrone, Vincenzo, The Intellectual Roots of the Italian Enlightenment: Newtonian Science, Religion, and Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995. Findlen, Paula, ‘‘Science and Society,’’ in Early Modern Italy 1550–1796, edited by John A. Marino, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Findlen, Paula, ‘‘Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Italy,’’ in Science in Context, 16, nos. 1–2 (2003): 59–87. Gronda, Giovanna, ‘‘Scienza e letteratura nell’epistolario di Antonio Conti,’’ in Scienza e letteratura nella cultura italiana del Settecento, edited by Renzo Cremante and Walter Tega, Bologna: Societa` editrice, 1984. Gu¨ntert, Georges, Un poeta scienziato del Seicento: Lorenzo Magalotti, Florence: Olschki, 1966. Jovanovic´, Vojislav M., ‘‘Deux traductions ine´dites d’Albert Fortis,’’ in Archiv fu¨r Slavische Philologie, 30 (1909): 586–596. Matteo, Sante, ‘‘Ossian and Risorgimento: The Poetics of Nationalism,’’ in Romanticism across the Disciplines, edited by Larry H. Peer, New York: University Press of America, 1998. Valensise, Maria Rosa, ‘‘Il Saggio di F. Algarotti (1765) e l’idea di clima nella storiografia del Settecento,’’ in Rivista di storia della storiografia moderna, 15, nos. 1– 2 (1994): 133–163. Woolf, Larry, ‘‘The Enlightened Anthropology of Friendship in Venetian Dalmatia: Primitive Ferocity and Ritual Fraternity among the Morlacchi,’’ in Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32, no. 2 (1998–1999): 157–178. Woolf, Larry, Venice and the Slavs: The discovery of Dalmatia in the Age of Enlightenment, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001.

SCIENCE FICTION Science fiction in Italy is known as fantascienza, a term coined in 1952 by publisher Leonardo Mondadori and Giorgio Monicelli when in October they launched Urania (named after Camille Flammarion’s novel), a periodical featuring a full novel, short stories, and other material, that became quickly very popular and continues to this day. Although

the term has been criticized because, unlike the original, it stresses the fantastic rather than the scientific element, it is now commonly used and has even been exported: In some Latin American countries the genre is indicated with the calque fantaciencia. Furthermore, the word fantascienza does reflect one of the fundamental characteristics of the Italian and, 1717

SCIENCE FICTION more generally, European approach to the genre, namely a greater emphasis on humanistic rather than on scientific elements, typical instead of the American production. Urania was not the first science fiction periodical in Italy, since it was preceded in April 1952 by the short-lived Scienza fantastica (a phrase intended as a translation of science fiction). It published the first ‘‘official’’ Italian short stories in the genre, written by one of its owners, Lionello Torossi (1918–1998) under the pen name ‘‘Massimo Zeno,’’ while the first novel, L’Atlantide svelata (Atlantis Revealed) by Emilio Walesko, appeared in Urania in 1954. Numerous other publications followed, and the phenomenon peaked between 1957 and 1962. Like much popular literature, this material was sold in newsstands rather than in bookstores, a fact that further marginalized the genre. Many libraries, for instance, did not acquire science fiction novels precisely because they were considered ephemera. As in most European countries, however, numerous works written before the ‘‘official’’ birth of the genre can in fact be classified if not as pure at least as ‘‘proto’’ science fiction. ‘‘Precursors’’ are normally identified within the genres of the ‘‘extraordinary travel,’’ of utopian literature, or of the conte philosophique, including some of Giacomo Leopardi’s Operette morali (1827). In the nineteenth century, utopian fiction often draws its inspiration from Socialism, with results that can also be considered as early examples of the science fiction genre. The titles of many of these works suggest their political thrust: I misteri politici della Luna (The Political Mysteries of the Moon, 1860) by Guglielmo Folliero De Luna; La colonia felice (The Happy Colony, 1874) by Carlo Dossi (1849– 1910); Nell’anno Millenovecento. . .: Dopo il trionfo del socialismo italiano (In the Year Nineteen Hundred...: After the Triumph of Italian Socialism, 1907) by Ulisse Grifoni. An unusual example of apocalyptic fiction is Abrakadabra: Storia dell’avvenire (Abrakadabra: A History of the Future, 1884) by Antonio Ghislanzoni (1824–1893), better known as librettist for Giuseppe Verdi. At the turn of the century, under the influence of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, more futuristic themes are introduced. In addition to Grifoni’s Dalla terra alle stelle (From the Earth to the Stars, 1887), this more adventurous fiction is represented by the works of Emilio Salgari (1862–1911), such as I figli dell’aria (The Children of the Air, 1904), and of his epigones, including the prolific Luigi Motta (1881–1955), and Enrico Novelli (1874–1943), who 1718

authored under the pseudonym of Yambo several children’s books such as Gli esploratori dell’infinito (The Explorers of Infinity, 1906). The narrative produced between World War I and 1952 is characterized by two fundamental tendencies: on the one hand, adventures and extraordinary journeys, in which works written for children are difficult to distinguish from those for adults; on the other, utopian fiction or attempts at ‘‘anticipating’’ the future. Among the most important figures in this period are Motta and his collaborator Calogero Ciancimino (1899–1936), who wrote together Il prosciugamento del Mediterraneo (The Draining of the Mediterranean, 1932); Giorgio Scerbanenco (1911–1969), better known for his detective fiction, who wrote Il paese senza cielo (The Country Without a Sky, 1938) and who returned to the genre in the 1960s with Il cavallo venduto (The Sold Horse, 1963) and L’anaconda (1966); Armando Silvestri (1909–1990), author of La meravigliosa avventura (The Wonderful Adventure, 1927) and Il signore della folgore (The Lord of Lightning, 1931); Virgilio Martini (1903–1986), with La Terra senza il Sole (The Earth Without the Sun, 1926) and Il mondo senza donne (The World Without Women, 1936), as well as the amusingly satirical L’allegra terza guerra mondiale (The Happy Third World War), which marked his return to science fiction in 1977. However, the traditional disdain of the Italian critical establishment for popular literature compounded in this case with the suspicion of the Humanist tradition against scientific thought contributed to the general neglect of the genre in the first half of the century. In this period, a number of themes later associated with science fiction are present also in mainstream literature, and the genre cannot always be clearly distinguished from the broader domain of ‘‘fantastic’’ literature. Although there is not a direct relationship between Futurism and science fiction, the movement, with its glorification of speed, technology, and the machine played an important role in the formation of a consciousness projected toward science and the future. Still steeped in the decadent culture of the fin de sie`cle, Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist, 1909), by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), introduces the figure of the artificial man with the character of Gazurmah, a cyborg-like flying machine that becomes a symbol of the new human being. Other Futurist authors to experiment with science fiction themes include Rosa Rosa` (Edyth von Haynau, 1884–1978), who wrote an early example of feminist fantascienza with her Una donna con tre anime

SCIENCE FICTION (A Woman with Three Souls, 1918), the story of a woman’s astonishing intellectual and personal development as a result of a scientific experiment gone haywire; and Count Vincenzo Fani Ciotti (1888– 1927), known as Volt, author of La fine del mondo (The End of the World, 1921), a novel meant to illustrate the imperialist and reactionary politics advocated by its author. The fantastic literature that emerges with new vigor in the 1920s and 1930s with authors like Alberto Savinio (1892–1952) and Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) is also imbued with science fiction elements: For instance, Bontempelli’s play Minnie la candida (Candid Minnie, 1927) is one of the most original interpretations of the theme of the robot in Italian literature. The popular production of this early period is well-documented in an anthology edited by Gianfranco De Turris, Le aeronavi dei Savoia: Protofantascienza italiana 1891–1952 (2001), which demonstrates that all the themes of the genre, including those most scientific in nature, were already present in Italian fiction. Since the 1950s the privileged medium of fantascienza has been the short story, usually published in periodicals: Oltre il cielo (1957–1970), a magazine of astronautics that also included narrative, founded and directed by Silvestri; Futuro (1963–1964), uniquely devoted to Italian authors; Gamma (1965–1968), which, however, did not have an actual policy of promoting Italian science fiction; and Nova SF* (1967–), distributed by subscription only, thus with limited circulation. In the late 1970s, Robot (1976–), an innovative magazine that, unlike its predecessors, featured also interviews, critical essays, reviews, and comics, devoted a considerable amount of space to Italian narrative (on average a short story per issue). Among the prominent authors who specialized in short fiction, we should mention: Vittorio Curtoni (1949–), founder of Robot and the author of the anthologies Retrofuturo (Backward Future, 1999) and Ciao Futuro (Hello, Future, 2001); De Turris (1944–), with the collection Il silenzio dell’universo (The Silence of the Universe, 1988), and Inisero Cremaschi (1928–), whose short stories remain uncollected, and who has edited important anthologies such as I labirinti del terzo pianeta (The Labyrinths of the Third Planet, 1964), Universo e dintorni (The Universe and Environs, 1978), and Futuro (Future, 1978), all accompanied by excellent critical-historical introductions. Gianni Montanari has called the 1950s and 1960s ‘‘the age of aliases,’’ since Italian authors wrote for the established popular series under

foreign-sounding pseudonyms (‘‘Italian SF,’’ 1987). Between 1954 and 1967, at least 114 novels appeared, mostly in the series ‘‘I romanzi del cosmo,’’ and only 11 were signed by the author’s real name (oftentimes sounding foreign as for Walesko or Nora De Siebert). Among the most prolific authors, Roberta Rambelli (1928–1996), Luigi Naviglio (1936–2001), Gianfranco Briatore (1935–), and Luigi Rapuzzi Johannis (1905–1968). It was only with the series Galassia (1961–) that science fiction authors began to sign under their real names. Between 1970 and 1973, Galassia released three miscellaneous volumes as well as novels by Piero Prosperi (1945–), Autocrisi (Autocrisis, 1970) and Seppelliamo Re John (Let Us Bury King John, 1973), on John F. Kennedy; by Montanari, La sepoltura (The Burial, 1972) and Nel nome dell’uomo (In the Name of Man, 1971); by Mauro Antonio Miglieruolo (1942–), Come ladro di notte (Like a Thief in the Night, 1972); and by Vittorio Catani (1940–), L’eternita` e i mostri (Eternity and the Monsters, 1972). As in the first half of the century, in the postwar period a number of mainstream writers adopted themes and situations of science fiction, initially in polemical opposition to the dominance of neorealism, and then as part of the recuperation of strategies of genre fiction typical of postmodernism. Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics, 1965) and Ti con zero (T Zero, 1967), by Italo Calvino (1923–1985), are perhaps the best-known examples of this process of contamination. Its most interesting and persistent practitioner was perhaps Guido Morselli (1912–1973), who, in the stringent critique of the ideologies of modernity that runs through his whole oeuvre, made use of elements of different subgenres in several of his novels, all published posthumously, from the description of the future in Roma senza Papa (Rome without the Pope, 1966–1967) to the postapocalyptic novel with Dissipatio H. G. The Martian Kunt, an updated version of the ‘‘innocent abroad,’’ is the protagonist of the play Un marziano a Roma (A Martian in Rome), by Ennio Flaiano (1910–1972), performed in 1960, the same year in which Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) published the allegorical and oneiric Il grande ritratto (The Great Portrait). More recently, the comical novels through which Stefano Benni (1948–) vehicles his criticism of contemporary Italian society have frequently toyed with science fiction situations, most notably in Terra! (1983). The well known ‘‘futurologist’’ Robert Vacca (1927–) has used the structures of fantascienza to illustrate his faith in the possibilities of 1719

SCIENCE FICTION science and his fear of wrong uses of technology in Il robot e il Minotauro (The Robot and the Minotaur, 1959), La morte di Megalopoli (The Death of Megalopolis, 1974), and Perengana (1977). Meanwhile, by the 1970s science fiction began to acquire a certain degree of cultural legitimacy through the critical works of literary historians and theorists such as Umberto Eco, Vittorio Spinazzola, and Carlo Pagetti. Science fiction also finally made it into the bookstores thanks to the Milanese publisher Editrice Nord, which also sought out Italian talent—a practice it continues to this day—publishing works in a variety of subgenres, from the alternative worlds of Prosperi (Garibaldi a Gettysburg [Garibaldi at Gettysburg, 1993]) to the cyberpunk of Alessandro Vietti (1969–) (Cyberworld, 1998). One of the distinctive elements of Editrice Nord is the attention for women writers, including Daniela Piegai (1943–), who in Parola di alieno (Alien’s Honor, 1978) and Ballata per Lima (A Ballad for Lima, 1980) was able to create convincing alien civilizations with the coherence and the ‘‘sense of wonder’’ of classical science fiction, and most importantly Gilda Musa (1926–1999), a poet and scholar of German literature who in her fiction—Festa sull’asteroide (A Holiday on the Asteroid, 1972), Giungla domestica (Domestic Jungle, 1975), and Esperimento donna (The Woman Experiment, 1979)—often relates the theme of women’s role in society to the broader question of the role of human beings in the universe. Until recently, the central figure of Italian science fiction was considered Lino Aldani (1926–), who made his debut in the 1950s. Well known also abroad (he has even had the rare fortune of publishing a short story in English), Aldani has played a significant role as editor of anthologies and critic. He wrote the first essay on the genre published in Italy, La fantascienza (Science Fiction, 1962), and founded the magazine Futuro, now published as Futuro Europa. Among his narrative works, the most significant are the collections Quarta dimensione (Fourth Dimension, 1963) and Parabole per domani (Parables for Tomorrow, 1987), and the novels Quando le radici (When the Roots, 1977), Eclissi 2000 (Eclypse 2000, 1979), and La croce di ghiaccio (The Cross of Ice, 1989). Aldani is a true writer, capable not only of articulating strong ideas but also of rendering them narratively through real, almost tangible, characters placed in realistic settings, and through a lucid style that can be both essential and lyrical. The other major representative of Italian science fiction is Renato Pestriniero (1933–), who also 1720

began writing in the 1950s. Among his numerous works, the most important are the novels Il villaggio incantato (The Enchanted Village, 1982), the expansion of a short story by A. E. Van Vogt published under the latter’s name, Le torri dell’Eden (The Towers of Eden, 1983), the book for children Una voce dal futuro: storia di fantasia e computer (A Voice from the Future: A Story of the Imagination and the Computer, 1996), and the collections Sette accadimenti in Venezia (Seven Accidents in Venice, 1985) e Di notte...lungo i canali (At Night...along the Canals, 1994). Born in Venice, where he has always resided, Pestriniero has dedicated many of his novels to his city and its inhabitants, telling with elegance and introspection its most secret aspects, transfigured through a fantastic perspective or through futuristic speculation. Several other important authors came to prominence in the 1960s: Sandro Sandrelli (1926–2000), who moves easily across a number of registers, from the satirical to the grotesque to the space opera; Giuseppe Pederiali (1937–), who, after Venivano dalle stelle (They Came from the Stars, 1974), has arrived to a very personal interpretation of the fantasy genre rooted in the traditions of the Po Valley and, more recently, to the noir; Roberta Rambelli, who has achieved her narrative maturity with a novel of ‘‘social science fiction,’’ Il ministero della felicita` (The Ministry of Happiness, 1972), and with Profilo in lineare-B (Profile in B-Linear, 1980); and Ugo Malaguti (1945–), an eclectic author, as well as translator and editor, who has worked in a variety of subgenres, from pure adventure to the social novel, from satire to the grotesque. His works include Satana dei miracoli (Satan of Miracles, 1966), Il sistema del benessere (The Well-fare System, 1965), and Il palazzo nel cielo (The Palace in the Heavens, 1970). With the creation in 1990 of an award for unpublished novels, Urania also opened its pages to Italian authors. Many of the most innovative figures in the genre have emerged thanks to the Premio Urania, the first edition of which was won by a veteran, Catani, with Gli universi di Moras (Moras’s Universes). Other winners include Francesco Grasso (1966–), who is to date the only writer to have won it twice, with Ai due lati del muro (On the Two Sides of the Wall, 1992), and 2038: la rivolta (2038: The Revolt) of 2000; Nicoletta Vallorani (1959–), who with Il cuore finto di D. R. (D. R.’s False Heart, 1993), inaugurated a peculiar brand of narrative that mixes to great effect science fiction and noir; Massimo Mongai (1950–), author of the humoristic Memorie di un cuoco d’astronave

ETTORE SCOLA (Memoires of a Cook on a Starship, 1997); Luca Masali (1963–), author of historical science fiction set between the end of World War I and the 1920s; and Franco Ricciardiello (1961–), whose Ai margini del caos (On the Margins of Chaos, 1998) is a fantastic thriller steeped in art history. The most unusual among the prize winners is La notte dei Pitagorici (The Night of the Pythagoreans, 1999), by Claudio Asciuti (1956–), an experimental novel in both language and plot, captivating in spite of its difficulty. Undeniably, the success story of the 1990s is Valerio Evangelisti (1952–), who won the award with his debut novel Nicolas Eymerich, inquisitore (Nicolas Eymerich, Inquisitor, 1994). Initially characterized by an original interweaving of historical fiction and science fiction through the juxtaposition of the adventures of his fourteenthcentury inquisitor with a dystopian future, Evangelisti’s narrative has gradually moved in the direction of fantastic literature tout court, equally indebted to the horror, noir, and western genres as to traditional fantascienza. In spite of the renewed vigor of the genre at the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, publishers still remain to a certain extent suspicious of Italian production. Whereas several small publishing houses invested successfully in the boom of detective fiction in the 1990s, science fiction is still mostly the domain of three publishers: Mondadori, Fanucci, and Editrice Nord. Thus, in Italy science fiction in general, and the Italian production in particular, still remains generally confined to the margins of the literary system. GIAN FILIPPO PIZZO and LUCA SOMIGLI

Further Reading Cammarota, Domenico, ‘‘Fantascienza,’’ in Il dizionario del futurismo, edited by Ezio Godoli, vol. 1, Florence: Vallecchi, 2001. Cremaschi, Inisero, ‘‘Cronistoria della fantascienza italiana,’’ in Universo e dintorni, Milan: Garzanti, 1978. Curtoni, Vittorio, Le frontiere dell’ignoto: Vent’anni di fantascienza italiana, Milan: Editrice Nord, 1977. Curtoni, Vittorio, ‘‘Italia,’’ in Enciclopedia della fantascienza, edited by Gianni Montanari, Milan: Mondatori, 1986. De Turris, Gianfranco, and Claudio Gallo (editors), Le aeronavi dei Savoia: Protofantascienza italiana 1891– 1952, Milan: Editrice Nord, 2001. Falcetti, Bruno, ‘‘Dalla fantascienza al cyberpunk,’’ in Tirature ‘94, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1994. James, Edward (editor), The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Malaguti, Ugo, ‘‘La fantascienza italiana negli anni ‘70,’’ in Nova sf* speciale no. 1 (1976). Montanari, Gianni, ‘‘Italian SF,’’ in Anatomy of Wonder, edited by Neil Barron, 1976, 3rd rev. ed., New York and London: Bowker, 1987. Pagetti, Carlo, ‘‘Italy,’’ in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995. Pagetti, Carlo, ‘‘Dalle sabbie di Marte alle rovine di Milano,’’ in Tirature ‘03. I nostri libri. Letture d’oggi che vale a pena di fare, edited by Vittorio Spinazzola, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2003. Roberts, Adam, Science Fiction, London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Suvin, Darko, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979. Versins, Pierre, ‘‘Italie,’’ in Enciclopedie de l’utopie, des voyages extraordinaires et de la science fiction, 2nd ed., Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1982.

ETTORE SCOLA (1931–) Ettore Scola is among the most daring, creative, innovative, and committed of the great Italian writer-directors. Politically, his films are as engaged as those of Pier Paolo Pasolini; aesthetically, his films can be as evocative as anything created by Federico Fellini. Although he has won innumerable awards, he has not received the recognition he so richly deserves, perhaps because he began by

directing comedies at the very time when art films such as Fellini’s 8½ (1963) and Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964) were exploding on world screens. By the time Scola became one of the most widely discussed and admired Italian filmmakers of the 1970s, he had scripted some 50 screenplays and directed a few films of marginal interest. 1721

ETTORE SCOLA According to Scola, there are two secrets to making good films: commitment and the script. Film should not be a mirror in which the filmmaker contemplates himself, but a window through which he observes the world and comments on it from a political and moral perspective. Somewhat surprisingly for a man who has made aesthetically revolutionary films like Ballando ballando (Le Bal, 1983), in which the history of this century from 1936 to 1983 is told entirely, without words, by observing people interacting in a French dance hall, Scola also contends that film style should not be an end in itself, but at the service of the story. Scola will typically spend up to a year researching and writing the script. As a result, there is little or no turmoil or improvisation during the actual shooting of one of his films. Like so many others who were to become famous as film writers and directors (Federico Fellini, Ruggero Maccari, Vittorio Metz, Mario Monicelli, Steno [Stefano Vanzina], Furio Scarpelli, and Cesare Zavattini) Scola’s first work in the film industry was as a caricaturist and gag writer for Marc’Aurelio, the Italian weekly illustrated comic magazine. It was there, while still a high school student, that he began to develop his aesthetic sense and his gift for narrative, working alongside and under the mentorship of these already established artists. Scola, whose talent was immediately obvious, approached his tasks in a serious, workmanlike fashion and proved that he could meet a deadline. Before he was 20, he began to write and draw for other magazines and for radio shows (among others, he wrote skits for Alberto Sordi). He also began to frequent both the theater and the ‘‘Circolo Romano’’ film screenings organized by Cesare Zavattini. In 1950, Scola began to contribute one-liners and gags to scripts written by more established writers like Metz and Maccari. Eventually, he graduated to collaborating on scripts for somewhat formulaic popular comedies with virtually all the major Italian scriptwriters; finally he became one of the principal writers, most often in collaboration with Maccari, for films by established directors like Antonio Pietrangeli, Nanny Loy, Dino Risi, and Carlo Lizzani. I mostri (Opiate ‘67, 1963), directed by Dino Risi, was so successful that Scola, who had already cowritten scripts for over 40 films, decided to try his hand at directing with Se permettete, parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women, 1964), a collection of nine brief skits that lampooned the relations between women and men in contemporary Italy. 1722

Scola, who has gone on to write and direct films too numerous to mention individually, has said that he has the feeling that he is always making the same film. Yet his films are so different from one another that frequently they do not seem to have been directed by the same person. This notwithstanding, it is possible to identify certain themes that appear more or less prominently in virtually all his films. These themes typically involve indictments of: the negative impact of consumer capitalism on proletarians and subproletarians; hypocrisy, from Sicilian peasants to the Vatican-connected nobility and the suddenly rich Northern Italian capitalists; friendship, love, sex, love and sex, love without sex, sex without love; male chauvinism; the family; eating as social event; travel; the sense of the ‘‘other’’ in all her and his configurations. Not all themes appear in all his films, nor do all have the same level of importance throughout. The prominence of his indictments varies from film to film and is often concealed somewhat by satire and irony. Thus it appears in only a few of the episodes of Se permettete parliamo di donne and is only something of a pretext in La congiuntura (Hard Times for Princes, 1964). In the films that follow, Scola begins to rely less on visual and verbal gags and more on a criticism of the mores of all social classes, but in particular of the newly enriched ‘‘borghesia.’’ Thus, in Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (Will Our Friends Succeed in Finding Their Friend Who Disappeared in Africa?, 1968), we find ‘‘ugly Italians’’ abroad colonizing the Third World as tourists, and in Il commissario Pepe (Police Chief Pepe, 1969) he courted scandal by revealing a world of pandemic sexual corruption beneath the seemingly respectable surface of the wealthy city of Vicenza. Dramma della gelosia—Tutti i particolari in cronaca (A Drama of Jealousy, 1970), the story of a working class love triangle, reveals the destructive impact of bourgeois consumer values on the proletariat. Permette? Rocco Papaleo (My Name is Rocco Papaleo, 1971), the story of a sometime Italian boxer stranded accidentally in Chicago, is a harsh attack on American consumer values and their soul-destroying materialism. His semidocumentary Trevico-Torino...viaggio nel Fiat Nam (Trevico-Torino...A Journey in the Fiat Nam, 1973) connects American capitalism, the war in Viet Nam, and the destruction of traditional human values in Italy. C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much, 1974), is Scola’s most famous

ETTORE SCOLA film. With this film Scola effected a quantum leap beyond his previous work, from somewhat traditional narratives to a postmodern pastiche of cinematic styles. At the simplest level, the film traces the lives of three men, Antonio, Gianni, and Nicola from the time they become friends as partisans fighting against the Nazi-Fascists during World War II until the mid-1970s. The plot is complicated by the fact that they all fall in love, although lust may be the more accurate term in the case of Nicola, with the same woman, Luciana. The film, however, is more than the simple story of the passing of time and friendship; it is also a history of Italian cinema after World War II. The scenes of a given historical period are shot, in black and white or in color, in the style of the most prominent directors of that period. Through constant references to theatrical productions and films too numerous to mention, C’eravamo tanto amati constantly foregrounds the cinematic medium without ever interrupting the narrative. Finally, it is an allegorical tale about Scola’s perception of the role that different social classes—the proletariat, capitalists, and the intelligentsia, represented respectively by the protagonists Antonio, Gianni, and Nicola—have played in the history of Italy, represented by Luciana. In the films that followed, Scola would alternate between a return to his comedic roots: Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Down and Dirty, 1976), I nuovi mostri (Viva Italia!, 1977); films based on literary sources or historical events: Passione d’amore (Passion of Love, 1981), Il mondo nuovo (La nuit de Varennes, 1982), Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa (The Voyage of Capitan Fracassa, 1991); films about the impact of Fascism on the lives of ordinary people: Una giornata particolare (A Special Day, 1977), Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition, 2001); films about lives of quiet desperation: Maccheroni (Macaroni, 1985), Che ora e`? (What Time Is It?, 1989), Splendor (1988), La cena (The Dinner, 1998), Mario, Maria e Mario (Mario, Maria and Mario, 1993); and films of a more specifically political nature in which different segments are directed by various individuals: L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer (The Last Good-by to Enrico Berlinguer, 1984), Un altro mondo e` possibile (Another World Is Possible, 2001), and Lettere dalla Palestina (Letters from Palestine, 2002). Throughout he is absolutely revolutionary, constantly destroying the expectations of the audience in new and unexpected ways, and thus frequently alienating both critics and public. Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, for example, depicts the life of a

poverty-stricken Southern Italian family that has relocated to the outskirts of Rome. There is nothing the protagonists will not do for money: theft, graft, prostitution, self-mutilation, arson, and murder. This indictment of the poor can seem excessive, since the viewer cannot feel empathy for them as in neorealist films, nor find them cute and endearing, as in neorealismo rosa films. And yet this film is the logical continuation of films such as Dramma della gelosia—Tutti i particolari in cronaca and Trevico-Torino...viaggio nel Fiat Nam, films that, according to Scola, depict what he has called the genocide of the Southern Italian peasant culture effected by the advent of consumer capitalism. Or consider Una giornata particolare. May 6, 1938, was a special day for Fascists: Adolf Hitler came to Rome to visit Mussolini. But, in Scola’s film we see nothing of the special event. At most we hear the crowd’s roar. What we see is the brief encounter between Antonietta, played against type by superstar Sophia Loren, a tired, worn out, submissive mother of six and wife of a Fascist official, and Gabriele, played equally improbably by the definitive Latin lover Marcello Mastroianni, a radio announcer who has been fired as a subversive, but in reality because he is homosexual. As much as any in Scola’s work, this film reveals the contrast between official history and the real histories of common people. It was the first major Italian film to focus on the Fascist oppression of homosexuals. Scola will return to the theme of Fascist oppression in Concorrenza sleale, the story of two Roman families, one of whom happens to be Jewish, whose friendly business competition ends when the Jewish family is compelled to sell out and move because of the Fascist racial laws. Il mondo nuovo returns to the conflict between official history and real histories, but this time it is set in the past, during Louis XVI’s attempted flight from France. Somehow, Giacomo Casanova, Thomas Payne, and his French publisher, Restif de La Bretonne, find themselves in hot pursuit of the monarch in a film that continues Scola’s revelation of the demythologizing power of the medium. After two films that dealt explicitly with contemporary political issues, Un altro mondo e` possibile, in which 33 Italian filmmakers documented the events of the G8 meeting in Genova in July of 2001, and Lettere dalla Palestina, in which 12 Italian directors invited the people of Palestine to tell their tragic story, Scola returned to the city that has been his home for most of his life. In Gente di Roma (People of Rome, 2003), we see the clash between the old city which, in the past, had somehow 1723

ETTORE SCOLA absorbed all newcomers, and its new multicultural, multiracial population. This film arguably returns Scola to his origins as a caricaturist. With a rapid and sure hand he sketches scenes that capture the essence of Rome, some with obvious affection, others with less. But throughout one sees evidence of his great integrity, humanity, and belief in the possibility of a better world.

Biography Born in Trevico (Avellino) on 10 May 1931. At four moved to Rome. Attended the lyceum ‘‘Umberto I’’ and then studied jurisprudence at the University of Rome. Acquired his encyclopedic literary culture when, starting from a very young age, he read out loud to a blind relative. In 1947, began to sell sketches, caricatures, and gags to Marc’Aurelio, the weekly illustrated comic magazine, through which he met Fellini, Maccari, Age, Scarpelli, Monicelli. In 1950, began to write gags for other scriptwriters, then to cowrite scripts, and finally, signed his first film Fermi tutti arrivo io! directed by Sergio Grieco, 1953. Directed his first feature film, Se permettete parliamo di donne, 1964. Became one of the most active members of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and in 1973 shot Trevico-Torino, a political film distributed only in cine clubs and feste dell’Unita`. During the 1970s and 1980s he became very popular in France, and was awarded the Golden Palm for directing at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 for Brutti, sporchi e cattivi and the Jury Prize for career achievement in 1981. His daughters Silvia and Paola assisted on most of his films. Among his many awards are the 1975 Moscow International Film Festival, Golden Prize and the 1977 Ce´sar (France) for C’eravamo tanto amati, 1975; the Ce´sar for Una giornata particolare, 1978; the Montreal Film Festival, Grand Prix for La cena, 1999; the 2001 Moscow International Film Festival, Silver St. George, for Concorrenza sleale. Lives and works in Rome. BEN LAWTON Selected Works Films Se permettete parliamo di donne, 1964. La congiuntura, 1964. Thrilling (segment ‘‘Il vittimista’’), 1965. L’arcidiavolo, 1966. Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa?, 1968. Il commissario Pepe, 1969.

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Dramma della gelosia—Tutti i particolari in cronaca, 1970. Permette? Rocco Papaleo, 1971. La piu` bella serata della mia vita (based on the play The Breakdown by Friedrich Du¨rrenmatt), 1972. Festival dell’Unita` 1972, 1972. Trevico-Torino (viaggio nel Fiat Nam), 1973. Festival Unita`, 1973. C’eravamo tanto amati (We All Loved Each Other So Much), 1974. Signore e signori, buonanotte (Goodnight, Ladies and Gentlemen), 1976. Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Down and Dirty), 1976. Una giornata particolare (A Special Day), 1977. I nuovi mostri (Viva Italia!), 1977. La terrazza (The Terrace), 1980. Passione d’amore (Passion of Love, based on Fosca by Igino Ugo Tarchetti), 1981. Il mondo nuovo (La nuit de Varennes), 1982. Ballando, ballando (Le Bal), 1983. L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer, 1984. Maccheroni (Macaroni), 1985. La famiglia (The Family), 1987. Splendor, 1988. Che ora e` (What Time Is It?), 1989. Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa (The Voyage of Capitain Fracassa, based on The´ophile Gautier’s novel ), 1990. Mario, Maria e Mario, 1993. Romanzo di un giovane povero, 1995. La cena, 1998. Concorrenza sleale (Unfair Competition), 2001. Un altro mondo e` possibile, 2001. Lettere dalla Palestina, 2002. Gente di Roma, 2003.

Screenplays Una giornata particolare (with Ruggero Maccari), edited by Maurizio Costanzo, Milan: Longanesi, 1977. La famiglia (with Ruggero Maccari and Furio Scarpelli), Mantua: Casa del Mantegna, 1988. Che ora e` (with Beatrice Ravaglioli and Silvia Scola), Mantua: Casa del Mantegna, 1989. Il mondo nuovo (with Sergio Amidei), Mantua: Casa del Mantegna, 1989. Il viaggio di Capitan Fracassa (with Furio Scarpelli), Mantua: Casa del Mantegna, 1992. La piu´ bella serata della mia vita (with Sergio Amidei), Mantua: Casa del Mantegna, 1996. La cena, Rome: Gremese, 1999. Concorrenza sleale, Turin: Lindau, 2001. Una giornata particolare: Un film di Ettore Scola. Incontrasi e dirsi addio nella Roma del ‘38, edited by Tullio Kezich and Alessandra Levantesi, Turin: Lindau, 2003.

Other Disegni per il cinema: Furio Scarpelli ed Ettore Scola, Matua: Casa del Mantegna, 1985. Il cinema e io, conversation with Antonio Bertini, Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1996.

Further Reading De Santi, Pier Marco (editor), Ettore Scola: immagini per un mondo nuovo, Pisa: Giardini Editori, 1988. De Santi, Pier Marco, and Rossano Vittori (editors), I film di Ettore Scola, Rome: Gremese, 1987.

ROCCO SCOTELLARO Ellero, Roberto (editor), Ettore Scola, Milan: Il Castoro, 1966. Gieri, Manuela, Contemporary Italian Filmmaking: Strategies of Subversion. Pirandello, Fellini, Scola, and the Directors of the New Generation, Toronto-BuffaloLondon: University of Toronto Press, 1995. Maraldi, Antonio (editor), I film e le sceneggiature di Ettore Scola, Cesena: Centro Cinema citta` di Cesena, 1982. Marlia, Giulio, Ettore Scola: il volto amaro della commedia all’italiana, Viareggio: M. Baroni, 1999.

Micheli, Paola, Ettore Scola: i film e le parole, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Russo, Paolo (editor), Ettore Scola. Pesaro 21–29 giungo 2002, Rome: Fondazione Pesaro Nuovo Cinema, 2002. Siciliano, Enzo (editor), C’eravamo tanto amati, di Ettore Scola: storie di italiani, storia d’Italia, Turin: Associatione Phillip Morris-Progetto Cinema-Lindau, 2001. Zagarrio, Vito (editor), Trevico-Cinecitta`: l’avventuroso viaggio di Ettore Scola, Venice: Marsilio, 2002.

ROCCO SCOTELLARO (1923–1953) Rocco Scotellaro is considered one of the most important poetic voices expressing the struggles, contradictions, and reawakening of the contemporary Southern Italian peasant world. The principal theme of his poetry and narrative works, all of which were published posthumously, is the concrete existence of the farm workers and laborers of the South. In his writings and political actions, the Southern peasant becomes for the first time a protagonist within a national context. Scotellaro’s poetry captured the ancestral feelings of disappointment of his world of Lucania (or Basilicata), while at the same time it launched a message of hope and renewal following the fall of Fascism and the end of World War II. Scotellaro’s short novel Uno si distrae al bivio (Distracted at the Crossroads, 1974) reconstructs the personal history of its author between 1941 and 1944. The sudden death of his father in 1942 and the experience of his final year of high school in the Northern city of Trento play a fundamental role in this work. The novel tells the story of the personal crisis of the adolescent Ramorra, who finds himself at a crossroads in life. An anxiety for literary glory is at the root of his crisis. Ramorra’s sterile, romantic idealism must die in order for him to discover his true self and become an active part of the real world. E` fatto giorno (The Sky with Its Mouth Wide Open, 1954), considered Scotellaro’s most significant collection of poetry, covers the entire trajectory of his poetic career from 1940 until his death in 1953. Scotellaro’s ‘‘adolescent’’ poems, which include ‘‘Lucania,’’ ‘‘In Autunno’’ (In Autumn), and ‘‘Nel Trigesimo di mio padre’’ (On the Thirtieth Day of

My Father’s Death), already evoke the profound humanity of the Southern peasant. In his search for a poetic identity, Scotellaro’s early verses are distinguished by their literary borrowings from such poets as Leonardo Sinisgalli and Salvatore Quasimodo. In May of 1946, Scotellaro met Carlo Levi, who would play an important role in the poet’s increasing awareness of the peasant world. Scotellaro’s active political involvement in a growing peasant movement led to a rich period of poetic production. The poems of this collection reflect on the first serious disappointments of the peasant struggle, such as the historical defeat of the Popular Front in 1948 in ‘‘Pozzanghera nera il diciotto aprile’’ (Black Puddle on April 18), the poet’s own personal setbacks, including his arrest for abuse of power, in ‘‘Io sono un uccello di bosco’’ (I Am a Bird of the Forest), and his decision to leave his hometown and his beloved peasants in ‘‘Passaggio alla citta`’’ (Passage to the City). Margherite e rosolacci (Daisies and Field Poppies, 1978), consisting of poems composed from 1941 to 1953, completes the preceding volume of poetry. As Franco Vitelli has remarked in his introduction to this collection, its strength is ‘‘the absolute identity of the poet’s life with that of the Lucanian peasants.’’ These poems reveal a poet who is at the service of his people and with whom he has established an unshakeable pact. Like his earlier collection of poems, these verses offer a faithful and loving portrait of his land of origin, the world of his shoemaker and emigrant father, and his loving mother. In 1950, Scotellaro was accused of abusing his power as a public official and was imprisoned for 1725

ROCCO SCOTELLARO 45 days. After being acquitted of the crime, he decided to step down as mayor of Tricarico and to study agrarian economy with Manlio RossiDoria at Portici (Naples). Scotellaro dedicated the last three years of his life to social researches on the peasant civilization of the South, which he believed had a rightful claim to its own literature. During this period he began the autobiographical novel, L’uva puttanella (Strumpet Grapes, 1955), which narrates the events of his life, including the return to his father’s vineyard, his early education at the Serafico boarding school run by the Capuchin friars at Sicignano degli Alburni, the war years, and his experiences in prison. The author’s sudden death prevented him from completing the novel. In his preface to L’uva puttanella, Carlo Levi defined the book as a ‘‘testimonial to our (Southern) land,’’ much like his own Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (1945). The title of the volume, which refers to a type of grape that is unable to fully ripen, is a metaphor for the historical condition of the South, overlooked by history and the Italian state. The title and book also suggest a reluctance on the part of the Southern peasants to mature. At the root of this pessimistic vision is Scotellaro’s belief that the South will come of age not through political battles but rather through a process of study and inquiry aimed at educating and attracting national and international public opinion. Scotellaro dedicated the last months of his life to a book on the culture of Southern peasant culture, Contadini del Sud (Peasants of the South, 1954). The book, unfinished at the time of his death, recounts the story of the struggles, hopes, and aspirations of this civilization. The aim of this ambitious, sociological inquiry was to provide, as Nicola Tranfaglia notes in his introduction to the 2000 edition, ‘‘an exceptional profile of the Southern agrarian society before an industrialization that appeared imminent.’’ Scotellaro conducted his research through direct interviews and by collecting autobiographical stories of Southern peasants. He sought to introduce the intimate cultural and religious attitudes of Southern culture to the rest of Italy and to articulate real issues and problems. Included among these tales and recollections of life in Lucania is the story of the author’s mother, Franca Armenta, whose funereal lament reflects the tragic destiny of this isolated world. Scotellaro preserved the language spoken by those he interviewed, since he believed that the Lucanian language mirrored the landscape, the people, and the entire region. Contadini del Sud prompted a series of sociological inquiries, including those of 1726

Luciano Bianciardi, Carlo Cassola, and Danilo Dolci, which helped many Italians understand large portions of the peninsula that had previously remained in the shadows of history and culture. In 1953, Scotellaro suffered a fatal heart attack at the age of thirty. One year later, in an article published in Il corriere della sera on 16 October 1954, Calabrian novelist Corrado Alvaro remembered Scotellaro’s close ties to the people of his region: ‘‘To the people of his hometown he is a legend and an example of how much a generous talent can do in Southern Italy.’’

Biography Born in Tricarico (Matera), 19 April 1923. Obtained his high school diploma in Trento, 1940–1941; enrolled in law school at the University of Rome, 1942; death of his father forced him to return to his hometown and to change universities, first Naples then Bari, 1942; joined the Socialist Party, 1943; founded a local branch of the Socialist Party in Tricarico, 1944; elected first Socialist mayor of Tricarico, 1946; founded the municipal hospital of Tricarico, 1947; accused, and subsequently found innocent, of abuse of power as a public official, 1950; invited by Manlio RossiDoria as researcher at the Observatory of Agrarian Economy in Portici (Naples), where he began an inquiry on illiteracy in the region of Basilicata, 1951; Cattolica prize for dialect poetry, 1951; San Pellegrino prize for Contadini del Sud and the Viareggio prize for E` fatto giorno, 1954. Died of a heart attack in Portici, 15 December 1953. MARK PIETRALUNGA See also: Questione meridionale Selected Works Collections The Dawn Is Always New: Selected Poems, translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. The Garden of the Poor (Selections), translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, Merrick, NY: Cross-Cultural Communications, 1993. Poems, translated by Christopher Whyte, Edinburgh: Morning Star Publications, 1993. Tutte le poesie, 1940–1953, edited by Franco Vitelli, Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

Poetry

E` fatto giorno, edited with an essay by Carlo Levi, 1954; rev. ed. by Franco Vitelli, 1982; as The Sky with Its Mouth Wide Open, translated by Paul Angelisti, 1976. Margherite e rosolacci, edited by Franco Vitelli, 1978.

SCREENWRITERS Prose Contadini del Sud, edited and with a preface by Manlio Rossi-Doria, 1954. L’uva puttanella, edited and with an introduction by Carlo Levi, 1955. L’uva puttanella. Contadini del sud, with a preface by Carlo Levi, 1964; rpt. with an introduction by Nicola Tranfaglia, 2000. Uno si distrae al bivio, edited and with a preface by Carlo Levi, 1974. Giovani soli, edited by Rosaria Toneatto, 1984. Scuole di Basilicata, 1999.

Letters Lettere a Tommaso Pedio, edited by Raffaele Nigro, 1986.

Further Reading Alvaro, Corrado, ‘‘Biografie meridionali,’’ Il corriere della sera, 16 October 1954, p. 3. Amoroso, Giuseppe, ‘‘Rocco Scotellaro,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I contemporanei, vol. 6, Milan: Marzorati, 1974.

Angrisani, Anna, Rocco Scotellaro, Naples: Societa` Editrice Napoletana, 1982. Crovi, Raffaele, ‘‘Meridione e letteratura,’’ in Il Menabo`, 3 (1960): 292–303. Chiara, Piero, and Luciano Erba, Quarta generazione, Varese: Magenta, 1954. De Canio, Angela Rita, Rocco Scotellaro, Rionero in Vulture: Calice Editori, 2003. Giannantonio, Pompeo, Rocco Scotellaro, Milan: Mursia, 1986. Fortini, Franco, La poesia di Scotellaro, Matera: Basilicata Editrice, 1974. Mancino, Leonardo (editor), Omaggio a Scotellaro, Manduria: Lacaita, 1974. Moe, Nelson, ‘‘Rocco Scotellaro and Politics of Culture in Post-War Southern Italy,’’ Forum Italicum, 22 (Fall 1988): 259–266. Picardo, Gerardo, Rocco Scotellaro: Poeta del mediterraneo contadino, Castrovillari (Cosenza): Il coscile, 2002. Scotellaro trent’anni dopo, Conference Proceedings (Tricarico-Matera, May 27–29, 1984), Matera: Basilicata Editrice, 1991. Vitelli, Franco, Bibliografia critica su Scotellaro, Matera: Basilicata Editrice, 1978.

SCREENWRITERS The different roles writers occupy in the production process deeply affect the history of Italian cinema. From its origins Italian cinema was influenced by its aristocratic birth, by the peculiarity of being produced by barons and banks. In their films, these unusual producers disregarded commercial considerations, attributing instead great value to literary and artistic quality. From its beginnings, Italian cinema was not primarily interested in commercial success (and reaching popular audiences), but in representing the culture of the class in charge of its production. This explains the importance assigned to the literary quality of intertitles in silent cinema, and of film sources in sound cinema. Early Italian cinema often depended on literature, adapting Dante’s Inferno in 1911, and remaking both I promessi sposi and Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei three times in the silent period. The history of Italian silent screenwriting can be easily permuted into a chapter of literary history, with Gabriele D’Annunzio writing for Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914), Luigi Pirandello and his Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator,

1925), the scripts by Guido Gozzano, and the intermedia role of Lucio D’Ambra in theater, and literature as well as in radio and in film. The interaction between Italian cinema and literary and theatrical culture represented a marked trait of long duration. It produced a mix of ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ with the adaptation of both popular literature and the classics; it proposes the avant-garde experience, and theater—from opera, to symbolism, from vernacular to variety theater. There was a constant and reciprocal exchange between these fields—literature, theater, and the movies—but cinema was never a parasitic partner. In the 1930s, the coming of sound and the industrialization of national cinema encouraged a more specialized activity in screenwriting. In these years the script was typed in the ‘‘French style,’’ with two columns: on the left action and visual description, on the right sound and dialogue. However, the contact with literature continued with Emilio Cecchi directing film production at Cines, where he hired Pirandello, Giacomo Debenedetti, Mario Soldati, Raffaele Viviani, Alberto Moravia, Aldo De Benedetti, and Alessandro De Stefani. 1727

SCREENWRITERS Toward the end of the 1930s, several cultural experiences encouraged a debate on national cinema: from the Fascist university film clubs, the Cine Gufs, to the work of film magazines such as Cinema, where Gianni Puccini, Corrado Alvaro, Massimo Bontempelli, Ennio Flaiano, and Cesare Zavattini began writing. Even more relevant in this direction was the teaching of Umberto Barbaro at the Centro Sperimentale, with his translation of Pudovkin’s theory of screenwriting, which opened to the political and expressive rupture of neorealist cinema. This generation of filmmakers developed projects that were often too advanced from a political and narrative point of view, as in the case of Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1943). In association with Visconti, a group of collaborators of Cinema including Mario Alicata, Gianni Puccini, and Giuseppe De Santis, together with Antonio Pietrangeli, coalesced around the project of this film, which opened the way to a new realist cinema. Neorealist filmmakers claimed that their films were improvised and that they worked without a script; on the contrary there is no period of the history of Italian cinema in which the work of screenwriters had more relevance. From a formal point of view, neorealist screenwriters did not modify the format of the script, still typically written in two columns. Their intervention on the narration was substantial, substituting individual heroes with a choral protagonist. Neorealist films privileged the fragment and the episode, disrupting the traditional narrative structure, and clearing the way to the irruption of reality on the screen. There was a tendency toward episodes, as in Roberto Rossellini’s Roma, citta` aperta (Rome Open City, 1945), a sort of Via Crucis toward national sacrifice and redemption, in which the death of Sora Pina (played by Anna Magnani) is an unusually early tragic event. Tragic endings and an unexpected rhythm constituted the most evident violation of the rules, which prevail in commercial cinema. Neorealist cinema allowed for improvisation and nonprofessional actors, but it did utilize detailed scripts and devotes great attention to the preproduction process. In its constant search for a closer relationship with reality, it intervened through sociological investigation and linguistic observation, as in the work of Sergio Amidei, or through the participant observation proposed by Cesare Zavattini. A powerful personality, and a prolific but never careless author, Zavattini wrote for every possible medium, but gave his best contribution in collaboration with Vittorio De Sica, writing such 1728

masterpieces as Sciuscia` (Shoeshine, 1946), Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief, 1948), Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1950), and Umberto D (1951). More than his strategy of ‘‘shadowing’’ his characters in their daily life, his peculiarity is his participant gaze, which captures the small gestures of the human being in a constant movement from individual to collectivity. His Pudovkian search for symbolic gestures and objects is perfectly represented by the phenomenological exploration of ‘‘the bicycle’’ in Ladri di biciclette or by the ritual of preparing coffee in Umberto D. Zavattini was also an original neorealist screenwriter for his use of playful fantasies, inventing flying sweeps and white horses in the bleakest environments, but accompanying them with a humanistic curiosity for everyday people—a sincere attention that never becomes intrusion. Sergio Amidei is instead the prototype of the neorealist writer, able to work with all kinds of directors, and to write in group, always maintaining a touch of irony, the openness to experimentation, and an attentive gaze on social reality. Amidei started as an extra in silent cinema in Turin; in the mid-1930s he moved to Rome and wrote for the commercial cinema. Actively engaged in the Resistance struggle, he came into contact with Rossellini, and worked with him on the script of Roma, citta` aperta, together with Alberto Consiglio and Federico Fellini. Amidei also collaborated on another neorealist masterpiece, Sciuscia`, adapted from a story by Zavattini. He then started working with Luigi Zampa and Renato Castellani, but his favorite writing experience remained Una domenica d’agosto (A Sunday in August, 1950) by Luciano Emmer, which opened the way to the episodefilm and to social comedy. Professional, militantly Communist, with a remarkable personality, Amidei was an innovative screenwriter, especially with respect to comic models, carefully recording social transformations, and aiming at a higher cultural quality in film writing. He introduced linguistic variations, including dialects, and specialized professional jargons—a gift inherited by his pupils Age (Agenore Incrocci) and Furio Scarpelli, when later writing the ‘‘comedy Italian style’’ of the 1960s and 1970s. From Amidei’s atelier came another couple of creators of social comedies, Ruggero Maccari and Ettore Scola. If considered in detail, the list of films signed by Amidei and Zavattini includes both commercial and art works, the credits involve literary figures, playwrights, members of all political parties, old professionals and young beginners—a network of

SCREENWRITERS contributions typical of this phase of Italian filmmaking. In fact, in these years screenwriting was conducted within a constant debate among the people involved in making the film, which became a collective enterprise. The group-work of neorealist writers indicated a desire for discussion, signaling the political differences among them after the anti-Fascist unity of the Resistance, partisans coming from the most diverse experiences, converging on the reconstruction of Italian cinema. After the political disillusions of 1948, the ideal tension died out, and group-work became a sort of consolation. The crowded screenwriting credits evoke this collective method of work, more than accurately reflecting individual contributions to the script. Initially the constant discussing—the assemblylike creation of a film—was a reaction to the years of forced silence during Fascism, but it expressed also the desire to approach reality in different ways, getting rid of the traditional dependency on theater and literature, so typical of Italian cinema. Another trait of neorealist credits is that the director was often credited among the writers. In this respect we should remember that most neorealist directors started their careers as screenwriters, including Roberto Rossellini (who wrote Luciano Serra, pilota for Alessandrini in 1936), and Federico Fellini. The filmographies of these screenwriters reveal that they wrote for commercial cinema too. Far from being a negative factor, their professional versatility played an important role in the knowledge of the mechanisms of popular storytelling they acquire working for comic or adventure films. This ability functions with a different project in their neorealist films, giving them popular appeal, as with the comic or melodramatic moments of Roma, citta` aperta. As to professional backgrounds, most of these writers came from experiences in Fascist media: Several had already written for the cinema, others for radio or vaudeville, or in satiric magazines such as Marc’Aurelio, or practiced film criticism for the prestigious journal Cinema. Together with his collaborators from Cinema, Visconti planned to make a documentary in Sicily in three episodes, but ended up shooting only the one on fishermen. La terra trema (1948) is carefully scripted, but the dialogues, which imitate those written by Giovanni Verga in his novel I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881) are improvised by the (real) fishermen of Aci Trezza, who are the protagonists of the film. Through his contacts at Marc’Aurelio, Federico Fellini started writing for the movies at the end of

the 1930s. Before his directorial debut he worked on some 100 films, having been also a newspaperman, and a writer for fumetto Gordon Flash, and for radio. In his screenwriting (and later in his direction) he introduced his peculiar abilities as a vignettista: the touch for caricature and sketch, evoking a character through the combination of a few significant traits. This ability favors the taste for the fragment, the episode, the symbolic detail, which are neorealist specialties. As a writer Fellini often worked with Tullio Pinelli, whom he met at Lux, where they cowrote several scripts from 1939 onward. In the 1940s, Fellini collaborated with Rossellini on the scripts of Roma, citta` aperta and Paisa` (Paisan, 1946) in a hybrid role, similar to that of the assistant director. Indeed his credit for the screenwriting of Paisa` demonstrated that the neorealist script should not be considered a document or a text, but a process: a new creative way to organize the preproduction of a film, in order to be able to adjust the project to events, by improvising. Later, again for Rossellini, and together with Pinelli, Fellini wrote also the episode Il Miracolo, where he also plays the cruel role of the fake San Giuseppe, who seduces poor Anna (played by Anna Magnani). An underevaluated element of the background of these writers is their ability in drawing and sketching. Zavattini, Scola, Fellini, and Scarpelli (as well as Antonioni) loved to draw and paint, developing a visual richness, which is a constituting quality of national cinema. Moving into regional sets, neorealist cinema discovered dialects; the refined Italian of Fascist cinema is therefore substituted by a linguistic pluralism, which included also technical and professional jargon, accurately recording socioeconomical transformations. Neorealist filmographies also signal a frequent move from screenwriting to directing, as if it were an inevitable choice, anticipating the relationship between screenwriters and authors, typical of the next phase of the Italian cinema. In the early 1950s, screenwriting played a key role in auteur cinema, as well as in high-caliber commercial production such as ‘‘comedy Italian style’’ and in ‘‘low’’ genres. The same writers worked in different sectors: Fellini wrote for Rossellini but also for Coletti; Ennio De Concini went from Sciuscia´ to Vedi Napoli e poi muori! (1952) by Riccardo Freda. According to the traditions of Italian cinema, the permeability high/low and the connection with literature remained constant. Gradually from this group-work emerged a series of screenwriting couples: Age (Agenore Incrocci) and Furio Scarpelli, Steno (Stefano Vanzina) and 1729

SCREENWRITERS Mario Monicelli, Marcello Marchesi and Vittorio Metz, Leo Benvenuti and Piero De Bernardi, all particularly effective in comedy. This collective work creates lengthy credits, but it also favors the hiring of ‘‘slaves’’—young writers who collaborate in the writing process, are regularly paid but not credited. One of the most popular pairs, Age and Scarpelli, met while working for Marc’Aurelio. They wrote mostly comedy, in particular for Toto`, usually discussing the story and dividing the sections of the script rather than the functions (when one writes the dialogues, the other works on the structure). With their narrative craft, their work on language and dialects, for example in Mario Monicelli’s L’armata Brancaleone (The Brancaleone Army, 1966), and with their attention to social change, Age and Scarpelli contributed to one of the happiest periods of commercial screenwriting in Italy, with the successful commedia all’italiana. Rodolfo Sonego was also a screenwriter with a peculiar ability in recording social transformations and their impact on language, as demonstrated by the films he wrote for comedian Alberto Sordi, which constitute a veritable ‘‘history of the Italian man.’’ In the 1960s, screenwriters divided into more orderly groups, writing both for commercial cinema (from comedy to costume films, and spaghetti western) and for directors such as Antonioni, Fellini, Visconti, and Rosi. The auteur dominated national cinema, but he needed a special collaborator to put into words his imagery, his complex vision of the world. Thus Antonioni relied on Tonino Guerra, Fellini on Ennio Flaiano and Tullio Pinelli, Visconti on Suso Cecchi D’Amico. The latter started writing in 1946 and collaborated on the script of Ladri di biciclette. After working on Visconti’s Bellissima (1951), she became the director’s most trusted collaborator, basically writing all of his films. She also works for Blasetti, Zampa, and Antonioni, and is often associated with literary and theatrical adaptations. Given her knowledge of foreign languages, she collaborated on the scripts for foreign films shot in Italy, such as William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953). With his flair for satire and the grotesque, Ennio Flaiano too contributed mostly to art cinema, writing for Fellini, Soldati, Antonioni, and Pietrangeli. As Suso Cecchi D’Amico, knowing both English and French, he collaborated on the scripts of several foreign films produced in Italy. A multifaceted writer, Flaiano maintained a distance from his work in the cinema, always ignored by critics and audiences. In fact, during these years, 1730

several writers abandoned their profession to move behind the camera; beside Fellini, the same goes for Gianni Puccini, Antonio Pietrangeli, and Mario Monicelli. Another gifted screenwriter, Ennio De Concini, worked mostly in commercial cinema: indeed he invents the sandaloni, that is the costume films set in ancient Rome or Greece, a genre inbetween historical epic, fantasy, and adventure, marked by his typical irony. Hyperactive but wellorganized, De Concini could switch from epics to comedy, from action pictures to auteur cinema; and in order to meet the deadlines of his heterogeneous engagements, he made large use of ‘‘slaves,’’ within a sort of atelier, where young writers could learn their craft. Finally, the relationship between literature and film takes up a new creative asset in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini. A screenwriter of both commercial and auteur cinema, he became a unique director, working with an experimental approach, and yet within the realist tradition, offering his dense intellectual and literary contributions in different fields. In recent years, the rebirth of Italian cinema can be attributed to a new generation of screenwriters and to their crucial contribution to the development of a more solid and, at the same time, experimental narrative structure. The filmographies of Stefano Rulli and Sandro Petraglia, of Vincenzo Cerami, Enzo Monteleone, Franco Bernini, and Francesco Bruni bear elements of continuity with the ‘‘old school: the recurring presence of a writerdirector in the credits, the return of the work of investigation and documentation in the making of social cinema (the so-called ‘‘new neorealism’’), and the comeback of the ‘‘comedy Italian style.’’ There is also a reprise of the relationship between cinema and literature, with the adaptation for the screen of the work of young writers such as Sandro Veronesi, Niccolo` Ammanniti, and Carlo Lucarelli. The innovative contribution of the new generation of writers involves both characters and film structure. The positive hero has almost completely disappeared in favor of a more nuanced character, while narratives experiment with generic expectations, often mixing comedy and noir. The new Italian cinema has widened its geographic horizons, with the mobility of its characters and a sort of anthropological curiosity, moving the sets to the Tuscany of Roberto Benigni and the Taviani brothers, the Turin of Mimmo Calopresti, the Veneto of Carlo Mazzacurati, the Naples of Mario Martone, and most of all the Sicily of Giuseppe Tornatore, Roberta Torre, Emanuele Crialese, and Roberto Ando`. The work of these

SERAFINO AQUILANO (SERAFINO DE’ CIMINELLI) screenwriters/directors has been affected also by a different balance among the media, when television has conquered the general audience. Screenwriting can now move more freely in themes or propose characters less linear than in televised fiction. And yet this sophisticated new cinema has avoided the arrogant self-centeredness of certain authorial cinema, in favor of an apparently popular cinema, which takes liberties from narrative conventions, without losing contact with its audience. GIULIANA MUSCIO Further Reading Amidei, Sergio, Soggetti cinematografici, edited by Lorenzo Codelli, Gorizia: Comune di Gorizia, 1985. Bernardini, Aldo, and Jean A. Gili (editors), Cesare Zavattini, Paris: E´ditions du Centre Pompidou, 1990.

Bertelli, Gian Carlo, and Pier Marco De Santi (editors), Omaggio a Flaiano, Pisa: Giardini, 1987. Flaiano, Ennio, Un film alla settimana, edited by Tullio Kezich, Rome: Bulzoni, 1988. Muscio, Giuliana, Scrivere il film, Rome: Dino Audino, 1993. Muscio, Giuliana, ‘‘Sceneggiatori e nuovo cinema italiano,’’ in New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, edited by Gaetana Marrone, Annali di Italianistica, vol. 17 (1999): 185–194. Muscio, Giuliana, ‘‘La sceneggiatura,’’ in Storia del cinema mondiale, edited by Gian Piero Brunetta, 5, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Muscio, Giuliana, ‘‘Gli sceneggiatori: un’attivita` senza confine,’’ in Storia del cinema italiano, edited by Callisto Cosulich, vol. 8 (1945–1948), Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Muscio, Giuliana, ‘‘Fucine di sceneggiatori,’’ in Storia del cinema italiano, edited by Luciano De Giusti, vol. 8 (1943–1953), Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Zavattini, Cesare, Basta con i soggetti!, edited by Roberta Mazzoni, Milan: Bompiani, 1979.

SERAFINO AQUILANO (SERAFINO DE’ CIMINELLI) (1466–1500) The verses of Serafino de’ Ciminelli, called l’Aquilano, enjoyed enormous success both in Italy and abroad, especially in England and France, where they were put on the same level as the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio and influenced writers such as Thomas Wyatt and Jean Lemaire. This acclaim represented an extraordinary phenomenon, for at the time only literature written in Latin was considered a cultural product, while poetry written in the vulgar tongue—above all the poetic production of the courts—was seen as a simple means of entertainment. Courtesan literature developed in the second half of the fifteenth century, and by the century’s end reached its highest level of maturity with Ciminelli, the most eclectic and famous poet of the genre. Already during his own lifetime his productions had spread throughout all of Italy, thanks mostly to the author himself, who worked in many courts as singer and improviser of verses. He sang his own poems, accompanying himself on the lute. The testimonies of the epoch describe with enthusiasm his artistic talents and the great appeal of his performances.

The success that Serafino Aquilano’s verses enjoyed up until 60 years after his death renders it difficult to definitively attribute his writings to him. The tradition of this literary genre is complicated, since it was transmitted both orally and textually. The verses were sung by the author himself and then copied by numerous minstrels; the verses were then spread by printed publications, manuscripts, and even in single sheets or in low-quality fascicles destined for a socially inferior audience. No copy in the author’s hand has survived. Therefore the false attributions were many, above all during the wave of notoriety that immediately followed the author’s death. A careful philological and archival investigation has been necessary, based on the most credible direct testimonies and on the first attempts at a systematic cataloging carried out at the time by scholars close to Aquilano. The works that have been identified as authentic in this way are the following: two theatrical acts, Oroscopo (Oroscope) and Orologio (Clock), a theatrical representation titled Rappresentazione allegorica della Volutta`, Virtu` e Fama (Allegoric Representation of Will, Virtue, and Fame), performed at the court of 1731

SERAFINO AQUILANO (SERAFINO DE’ CIMINELLI) Mantua between 1495 and 1497, and a body of 391 poems, including 261 strambotti, 97 sonnets, 13 barzellette, three pastoral eclogues, six love epistles in terza rima, and 11 chapters. For 29 of these writings there also exists the musical accompaniment, which is generally for voice accompanied by the lute. In rare instances, the music is exclusively instrumental. Even the linguistic physiognomy of these verses has been corrupted by the interaction of oral variants with the written tradition. These poems, however, already represent lexical hybrids, as the author mixed the Italian learned by reading Dante and Petrarch with his own spoken language, developed over the course of his travels from his native region, Abruzzo, to Naples, Rome, and Urbino and later to the courts of Northern Italy, such as Mantua and Milan. Praised for his brilliant improvisational talents, Ciminelli revealed in his musical writing, which is never artificial nor particularly polished, a secure mastery of the conduction of the parts. This knowledge resulted from his studies as a youth with illustrious composers (Josquin Desprez, Wilhelm Guarnier), from whom he learned the basic principles of Flemish counterpoint. These principles were applied to usually fixed, simplified, metric patterns that serve as a ‘‘monotone’’ background on which to make stand out unpredictable elements. Such poetics satisfied the expectations of the audience, which required an easy effect and a disengaged character from poetry. The versification is therefore rapid and carried out within a shared code. The content is generic and conceived by mixing diverse cultures: themes in vogue during the period, classical and mythological motifs, Petrarchan canons, and typical stereotypes from courtesan poetry and from the popular imagination. Immediately following his sudden death, interest in Serafino Aquilano increased, and up until the 1560s numerous volumes containing his poetry were circulated. Here, as well, the phenomenon had extraordinary dimensions for the time: About 250 volumes were printed, and among these more than 40 were titled ‘‘complete works.’’ Thus about 1,400 compositions were attributed to the poet. This success lasted until the literary reform desired by Pietro Bembo, which heavily influenced the tastes of contemporaries and posterity. Court lyrics came to be rejected because they were too eccentric in style and content; the forms did not conform to the rhetorical norms, and references to classical culture were practically nonexistent. For this reason, Serafino Aquilano’s verses were of little interest in later centuries, and only a few anthologies of 1732

the eighteenth century mention his name (Giacomo Leopardi, however, speaks of him). A revival began in the last 20 years of the nineteenth century, when a new interest developed in the world and culture of the late quattrocento. However, this interest was destined to fade: After the crushing criticism expressed by Benedetto Croce (‘‘Serafino Aquilano,’’ 1952) in regards to Ciminelli’s production, it disappeared again from the Italian literary scene.

Biography Born in L’Aquila in 1466, son of the nobleman Francesco de’ Ciminelli and Lippa de’ Legistis; went to Naples with a maternal uncle, 1478, and there became a page for the count of Potenza, Antonio de Guevara, where he studied music under the guidance of Flemish composers Wilhelm Guarnier and Josquin Desprez; returned to L’Aquila, 1481, where he remained for the next three years; moved to Rome, 1484, and entered into the service of the Cardinal Ascanio Sforza, brother of Ludovico il Moro; followed Cardinal Sforza to Milan, 1490, becoming a notable success in the court there; returned to Rome after several months and began to frequent the literary circle of Paolo Cortese; entered in the service of Prince Ferdinando d’Aragona in Naples, 1493; in his last years of life, resided in Urbino in the house of Elisabetta Gonzaga, in Mantua at the court of Isabella d’Este, in Milan, and was briefly in Venice and perhaps Genoa; at the end of 1499 returned to the court of Valentino in Rome. Died in Rome on August 10, 1500. GIADA VIVIANI Selected Works Opere del facundissimo Seraphino Aquilano collette per Francesco Flavio. Sonetti. 89. Egloghe. 3. Epistole. 6. Capitoli 9. Strammotti. 206. Barzelette. 10, Rome: Besicken, 1502. Le rime, edited by Mario Menghini, Bologna: RomagnoliDall’acqua, 1896. Alcune edizioni delle rime di Serafino de’ Ciminelli dall’Aquila (Serafino Aquilano), edited by Alfredo Fabrizi, L’Aquila: Vecchioni, 1930. Strambotti, edited by Antonio Rossi, Parma: Guanda, 2002.

Further Reading Caprioli Pirani, Alfonsina, Varia fortuna di Serafino Ciminello detto l’Aquilano. Contributo per lo studio della vita italiana nella seconda meta` del Quattrocento, Rome: Maglione, 1928.

MATILDE SERAO Cecchini, Antonio, Serafino Aquilano e l’influenza della lirica italiana sulla lirica inglese del ‘500, L’Aquila: Tipografia Bodoniana, 1934. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Serafino Aquilano,’’ in Poeti e scrittori del pieno e del tardo Rinascimento, Bari: Laterza, 1952. Giustiniani, Vito Rocco, ‘‘Serafino Aquilano e il teatro del Quattrocento,’’ in Rinascimento, 5 (1965): 101–117. Greco, Aulo, L’ apologia delle ‘‘Rime’’ di Serafino Aquilano di Angelo Colocci, Citta` di Castello: Arti Grafiche, 1972. Huguelet, Theodore L., ‘‘Serafino Aquilano: Musician and Poet of the Late Quattrocento,’’ in Rinascimento, 5 (1965): 101–117.

Kolsky, Stephen D., ‘‘The Courtier as Critic: Vincenzo Calmeta’s Vita del facondo poeta vulgare Serafino Aquilano,’’ in Italica, 67, no. 2 (1990): 161–172. La Face Bianconi, Giuseppina, and Antonio Rossi (editors), Le rime di Serafino Aquilano in musica, Florence: Olschki, 1999. Rossi, Antonio, Serafino Aquilano e la poesia cortigiana, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1980. Vivio, Alessandro, Il poeta Serafino Aquilano, L’Aquila: Arte della stampa, 1952.

MATILDE SERAO (1856–1927) Regarded by Henry James and Benedetto Croce as one of the main European novelists of the time, Matilde Serao, when still in her 30s, had already reached great notoriety both at the national and international level. Serao devoted her professional career to both literature and journalism. The author of more than 15 novels, numerous essays, and short stories, she was also the first woman in Italy to work as editor for a major national publication, Capitan Fracassa, the founder of her own daily, Il giorno, and the cofounder of three newspapers, Il corriere di Roma, Il corriere di Napoli, and Il mattino. The daughter of a journalist, Serao mingled in the circles of Neapolitan journalism since she was a child. In her early 20s, she published literary reviews and short stories for Il piccolo and Il giornale di Napoli, and soon after began writing for national periodicals. In 1881, she moved to Rome to work as permanent editor for Capitan Fracassa, where she befriended Edoardo Scarfoglio and Gabriele D’Annunzio, who dedicated to her his novel Giovanni Episcopo (1892). From that moment, her work as journalist intensified, and she became one of the most accomplished and renowned journalists of the time. Besides writing for Capitan Fracassa, she also wrote for other national periodicals, such as Fanfulla della domenica, Nuova antologia, Domenica letteraria, and Cronaca bizantina where, in addition to her articles and essays, her fiction appeared in installments. Serao’s literary career has traditionally been divided into two main periods: the naturalist and

the postnaturalist, though more recently critics have rejected such sharp division. The first period spans approximately 1879 to 1890, and includes works written in a realistic vein and mainly centered on themes connected to the urban life of Naples. After publishing under the pseudonym of Tuffolina her first book Opale (Opal, 1878), a love story that anticipates the writer’s later sentimental production, Serao wrote a collection of sketches, Dal vero (From Reality, 1879), which opened her season of realistic narrative, based on a wide range of Neapolitan figures and motifs. In Il romanzo della fanciulla (A Young Girl’s Novel, 1885), a compilation of five short stories, she described with autobiographical insights the life of lowerclass Neapolitan girls as they struggle to reconcile their dreams for a better future with the harsh reality of limited opportunities. In one of these short stories, ‘‘Scuola Normale femminile’’ (High School for Girls), the protagonists are girls who attend a specialized high school designed to train them as schoolteachers, but it is basically ineffective in granting them a decent living. Serao addressed a most debated issue at the time: school reforms. In 1886, following the publication of Edmondo De Amicis’ Cuore, Il corriere della sera publicized a controversial report on the state of the Italian school system, sparked by the suicide of a rural school teacher, Italia Donati. As the newly established national government of Italy was launching several investigations on the so-called questione meridionale, Serao’s writings aimed at demystifying the picturesque Neapolitan 1733

MATILDE SERAO character, without denying the endemic degradation of her city. Serao’s realistic account of Naples’ appalling living conditions is best exemplified by Il ventre di Napoli (The Belly of Naples, 1885), a collection of nine articles devoted to a different aspect of city life (food, religion, gambling, usury, etc.), serialized first in Capitan Fracassa and later published as a book. These articles were a response to a comment made by the Italian prime minister, Agostino Depretis, who, after visiting Naples during an epidemic outbreak of cholera, had suggested reforming the urban layout of the city by ‘‘desembowelling’’ (sventrare) its overpopulated historical center. Though in Rome at that time, Serao voiced her indignation at the government’s lack of understanding of the problems of the Italian South, and its ineffective policies of reformation. Titled after Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873), Serao’s book is reminiscent of I misteri di Napoli (1875) by Francesco Mastriani, a Neapolitan writer, whom she acknowledged as a literary model. The same motif can be found in All’erta, sentinella (Be on Your Guard, Sentinel, 1889), a story about the disappointment of a lower middle-class woman and her daughter over the missed opportunity of winning the lottery; and in Il paese di cuccagna (The Land of Cockayne, 1891), based on the causes and effects of gambling, an unredeemable Neapolitan passion. Composed of an intricate collection of stories, this novel favors a choral rather than an individual voice as the expression of the popular Neapolitan character. At that time, Serao had founded, with Antonio Fogazzaro and Giulio Salvadori, the Cavalieri dello spirito (Knights of the Spirit), a polemical movement against a materialistic and scientific approach to the artistic creation. In fact, Il paese di cuccagna reflects the author’s attempt to distance herself from positivism. This book had great commercial success in Italy, and its translation into French, with an introduction by novelist George Herelle, marked the beginning of Serao’s fame in France. With the publication of Addio amore! (Farewell Love!, 1890), also a commercial success with 12 editions published within a couple of decades, Serao began her prolific production of romance fiction, influenced by the French feuilleton and, in particular, by Paul Bourget’s psychological novels. Focused on female desire and on the popular femme fatale, Serao’s sentimental narrative depicts the elegant life of aristocratic and upper-class women. Fior di passione (Passion Flower, 1888), Castigo (Punishment, 1893), and Le amanti (The Lovers, 1894) all portray the constraints of the 1734

domestic world, in which female erotic desires remain unfulfilled. The theme of love had already appeared in La virtu` di Checchina, (Checchina’s Virtue, 1884), which focused on an unhappily married lower middle-class woman, who contemplates adultery with a young aristocrat as an escape from her dull life. Considered by critics to be one of Serao’s best fictional works, La virtu` di Checchina combines the author’s realistic and sentimental veins. Later productions of sentimental fiction are written in the tradition of the gothic novel. For example, in Il delitto di via Chiatamone (The Murder on Chiatamone Street, 1908) and La mano tagliata (The Severed Hand, 1912) melodramatic and supernatural elements are added to the motif of intrigue and transgression. Serao’s love fiction, such as Lettere d’amore (Love Letters, 1901) and Novelle sentimentali (Sentimental Stories, 1902), is conventional and ideologically conservative; it represents a hybrid of journalistic and literary modes. During this period, Serao’s work reflects her familiarity and fascination with the elegant life of Rome and Naples, whose literary salons and aristocratic circles she frequented regularly. While Serao has been praised by critics for her realistic narratives and her journalistic work, it was with her sentimental fiction that she reached a larger public. Saper vivere: Norme di buona creanza (Knowing How to Live, 1900), a conduct book on matters concerning social propriety and etiquette, was also a very popular book. Serao’s fiction mainly concentrates on female subjectivity, with two exceptions: La conquista di Roma (The Conquest of Rome, 1885) and Vita e avventure di Riccardo Joanna (The Life and Adventures of Riccardo Joanna, 1887). The first, originally serialized in Capitan Fracassa, belongs to the nineteenth-century subgenre of ‘‘parliamentary novels.’’ It illustrates the Roman political life as it follows the adventures of Francesco Sangiorgio, a newly elected Southern representative to the Italian Parliament, whose ideals are defeated by the intricate and corrupt reality of the political system. The second, also set in Rome, focuses on the world of journalism through the life of Riccardo Joanna, a young man who becomes a journalist, notwithstanding a promise to his father to never write for a newspaper. Initially successful, Riccardo becomes gradually disillusioned with a profession he once idealized. Though a conservative, Serao shined away from any political affiliation. She distanced herself from the feminist movement, opposed universal suffrage in articles such as Votazione femminile (The

MATILDE SERAO Women’s Vote, 1883), and often engaged in polemical articles with progressive writers, such as Anna Maria Mozzoni and Marchesa Colombi, who campaigned for women’s legal rights. Although she herself led a rather unconventional life for a woman of that time, Serao ultimately reaffirmed traditional gender roles. Her narratives, however, bear witness to the struggle for survival of proletarian women in the midst of dismal living conditions. At the first onset, she criticized the Partito Nazionale Fascista, but later praised Mussolini and sought his friendship. Indeed her initial opposition to the Fascist Party resulted in a raid to her newspaper, Il giorno, in 1924. During the 1911 colonialist campaign against Libya, Serao supported the Italian intervention in Evviva la guerra! (Long Live War!, 1912), but as the events of World War I unfolded, she expressed more pacifist feelings. In Parla una donna (A Woman Speaks, 1916), a collection of articles published in Il giorno, she sympathized with the anguish of mothers whose sons are at war. In 1926, with Mors tua... (Your Death...), Serao openly denounced the devastating effects of war on people’s lives. Her polemical articles cost her the Nobel prize, which was awarded to Grazia Deledda. Supposedly, Serao’s antiwar campaign compromised Mussolini’s support for her nomination. Matilde Serao’s reputation declined after her death, but there has been a justified critical revival in recent years.

Biography Born in Patras, Greece, 28 February 1856 from a Neapolitan father of middle-class origin, Francesco, and a Greek noblewoman, Paolina Borrely (or Bonelly) Scanary; moved to Italy, first to Ventaroli (province of Caserta), 1860; then to Naples, 1865; learned to read late with the help of her mother and then entered the Scuola Normale, a high school for girls, 1870–1873; converted to Catholicism, 1872; worked as a telegrapher, 1874–1878; started writing articles and short stories for local and national newspapers Il piccolo, Il giornale di Napoli, La gazzetta letteraria, Gazzetta piemontese, Roma capitale, L’illustrazione italiana; mother died, 1879; moved to Rome as editor for Capitan Fracassa, 1881; met Gabriele D’Annunzio and Edoardo Scarfoglio, whom she married in 1885 and with whom she had four children. Founded with Scarfoglio Il corriere di Roma, in which her famous column ‘‘Api, mosconi e vespe’’

appeared under the pseudonym of Gibus and Chiquita, 1885. Moved back to Naples, 1888; cofounded with Scarfoglio Il corriere di Napoli, 1888, and Il mattino, 1892, in which she started a new popular column, Mosconi. Scarfoglio’s lover, Gabrielle Bressard, killed herself at her doorsteps, 1894; separated legally from husband, 1902; founded a literary magazine, La settimana, 1902; then her own newspaper, Il giorno, 1904; daughter Eleonora born from her relationship with the lawyer Giuseppe Natale, 1905; father died, 1911. Nominated for the Nobel prize for literature, 1926. Died of a heart attack in Naples, 27 July 1927. GABRIELLA ROMANI Selected Works Fiction Opale, 1878. Dal vero, 1879. Cuore infermo, 1881. Leggende napoletane, 1881. Piccole anime, 1883. Fantasia, 1883; as Fantasy, translated by Henry Harland and Paul Sylvester, 1890. La virtu` di Checchina, 1884; as Checchina’s Virtue, translated by Tom Kelso, 2005. La conquista di Roma, 1885; as The Conquest of Rome, 1902; translated and edited by Ann Caesar, 1991. Il romanzo della fanciulla, 1885. Vita e avventure di Riccardo Joanna, 1887. Fior di passione, 1888. All’erta, sentinella, 1889. Addio amore!, 1890; as Farewell Love!; translated by Henry Harland 1894. Il paese di cuccagna, 1891; as The Land of Cockayne, 1901. Castigo, 1893. Le amanti, 1894. Storia di una monaca, 1898. La ballerina, 1899. Suor Giovanna della Croce, 1901. Lettere d’amore, 1901. Novelle sentimentali, 1902. Dopo il perdono, 1905. Il delitto di via Chiatamone, 1908. Evviva la vita!, 1909; as The Desire of Life, translated by William Collinge, 1916. O Giovannino o la morte!, 1912. La mano tagliata, 1912. Ella non rispose, 1914; as Souls Divided, translated by William Collinge, 1919. La vita e` cosı` lunga!, 1918. Mors tua... romanzo in tre giornate, 1926.

Nonfiction Il ventre di Napoli, 1884. L’Italia a Bologna: Lettere di Matilde Sero per le feste del 1888, edited by Valerio Molinari and Giancarlo Roversi, 1888.

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MATILDE SERAO Leggende napoletane, 1891. Nel paese di Gesu`: Ricordi di un viaggio in Palestina, 1899; as In the Country of Jesus, translated by Richard Davey, 1905. Saper vivere: Norme di buona creanza, 1900. Lettere d’ una viaggiatrice, 1908. Evviva la guerra!, 1912. Parla una donna: Diario femminile di guerra maggio 1915-marzo 1916, 1916. Ricordando Neera, 1920. L’occhio di Napoli, 1962. I Mosconi, edited by Gianni Infusino, 1974.

Further Reading Banti, Anna, Matilde Serao, Turin: Utet, 1965. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Note sulla letteratura italiana nella seconda meta` del secolo XIX,’’ in La critica, 1 (1903): 332. De Nunzio Schilardi, Wanda, Matilde Serao giornalista, Lecce: Milella, 1986. Fanning, Ursula, Gender Meets Genre: Woman as Subject in the Fictional Universe of Matilde Serao, DublinPortland, OR: Irish Academic Press, 2002. Ghirelli, Antonio, Donna Matilde: Una biografia, Venice: Marsilio, 1995. Harrowitz, Nancy, Antisemitism, Misogyny, and the Logic of Cultural Difference: Cesare Lombroso and Matilde Serao, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Infusino, Gianni, Matilde Serao tra giornalismo e letteratura, Naples: Guida, 1981.

Jeuland-Meynaud, Maryse, Immagini, linguaggio e modelli del corpo nell’opera narrativa di Matilde Serao, Rome: Ateneo, 1986. Kroha, Lucienne, ‘‘Matilde Serao’s Fantasia: An Author in Search of a Character,’’ in Women and Italy: Essays on Gender, Culture and History, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Shirley W. Vinall, London: Macmillan, 1991. Palermo, Antonio, ‘‘Le due narrative di Matilde Serao,’’ in Da Mastriani a Viviani, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Palma, Loredana, ‘‘Matilde Serao tra riedizioni di testi e studi critici: una rassegna (1996–2002),’’ in Esperienze Letterarie, 27, no. 3 (2002):111–115. Pascale, Vittoria, Sulla prosa narrativa di Matilde Serao: Con un contributo bibliografico 1877–1890, Naples: Liguori, 1989. Pezzini, Isabella, ‘‘Matilde Serao,’’ in Tre donne intorno al cor: Carolina Invernizio, Matilde Serao, Liala, edited by Umberto Eco, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Salsini, Laura, Gendered Genres: Female Experiences and Narrative Patterns in the Works of Matilde Serao, Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson UP, 1999. Sarcina, Angela, La signora del Mattino: Con antologia dei Mosconi di Matilde Serao, Capri: Edizioni La Conchiglia, 1995. Scappaticci, Tommaso, Introduzione a Serao, Bari: Laterza, 1995. Vittori, Maria Vittoria, ‘‘Matilde Serao,’’ in Le scrittrici dell’Ottocento: Da Eleonora da Fonseca a Matilde Serao, edited by Francesca Sanvitale, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1995.

GIOVANNI SERCAMBI (1348–1424) Giovanni Sercambi was a chronicler and novellatore. His most substantial work, Croniche (Chronicles) of the city of Lucca, which remained unpublished because of the realism with which he dealt with the politics of his times, gained critical attention thanks to Salvatore Bongi’s 1892 edition in three volumes. Sercambi was also known as the author of some short stories, many of which appeared in a total of 14 incomplete editions between 1816 and 1972, and were first published in their entirety by Giovanni Sinicropi and Luciano Rossi (1974) under the titles respectively of Novelle (1972 and 1995) and Il Novelliere (1974). The different nomenclature reflects two viewpoints on how the lacunae affect the very structure of the volume, especially in the beginning of the manuscript, the Ms. Trivulziano 193 upon which both 1736

editions are based (Sinicropi argued that the first story is missing and that the numbering should start at 2 and end at 156). Nevertheless, together they have placed Sercambi among those novellatori worthy of attention in the post-Boccaccian novella tradition. Both the Croniche and the Il Novelliere or Novelle have drawn the attention of historians and literary critics. Some such as Marina Marietti have emphasized the relation of Sercambis to Boccaccio (Imitation et transposition du De´came´ron chez Sercambi et Sermini, 1984), while others such as Christian Bec view Sercambi’s work as a window on the mercantile climate and values of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries (Sur la fortune du De´cameron a` la fin du Trecento, 1975). In all cases, however, the chronicles and the novelle

GIOVANNI SERCAMBI are read together because the history of the city of Lucca played an important role in the writing of the Il Novelliere. Sercambi’s gusto for storytelling is made explicit by the introduction of a total of 14 novelle in the second book of the Croniche, all of which were likely written after 1400, and 12 of which find their echo in the Il Novelliere. The chronicles are an invaluable source of information for an understanding not only of the history of Lucca from 1164 until 1424, but also of the biography of their author, especially after 1372 when he entered the service of the much-revered Francesco Guinigi, the ruler of Lucca since its independence from Pisa in 1369. Guinigi turned the merchant Sercambi into a politician by making him a member of the General Council, thereby recognizing his diplomatic talents and loyalty, qualities also acknowledged by his successor, Lazzaro, who appointed him to the most prestigious position in local government, Gonfaloniere di Giustizia, in 1397. When on February 15, 1400, Lazzaro was assassinated in a conspiracy led by his brother Antonio, Sercambi took advantage of the power vacuum to appoint himself as part of a temporary government that quickly declared Paolo Guinigi, Lazzaro’s younger brother, the new ruler. Sercambi’s personal circumstances apparently prompted the cessation of the first book of the Croniche on April 6, 1400. The second book was likely started much later, possibly even toward the end of the author’s life: It lacks the illuminations by the hand of Sercambi that decorated the first book, and its tone is radically different. The work also records its author’s disillusionment: with chapter 360 and culminating in chapter 374, all written in the first person, it becomes apparent that Sercambi has become a victim of ill government and that he hopes to be reimbursed for the financial losses suffered in exchange for his loyalty and friendship. Most likely written after 1400, in spite of a reference to the year 1374 and to the plague of that year, the Il Novelliere clearly echoes the autobiographical chapters of the second book of the Croniche. The author cleverly introduces himself as the sole storyteller in an acrostic spelling of his name, and in the third person as ‘‘colui che ha molte ingiurie sostenute e a lui senza colpa sono state fatte’’ (he who endured many wrongs done to him for no reason), an almost word-for-word restatement of the description of his lot under Paolo Guinigi in Croniche. Like Boccaccio’s Decameron (ca. 1373), the Il Novelliere makes use of the plague for its frame story. However, there are significant differences: Here, a heterogeneous and faceless

brigata of men, women, monks and priests and other people from Lucca decides to leave the plague-ridden city and travel through Italy under the guidance of a unanimously elected leader, Aluizi, who appoints Sercambi as storyteller. In his edition, Rossi argues that behind the figure of Aluizi stands Francesco Guinigi, a theory that underscores the personal motivations for the writing of much of the Il Novelliere and Sercambi’s need to moralize, juxtaposing examples of good and bad government. Indeed, the author refers to his novelle as exempla and numbers them as such. Boccaccio is more obviously present in the choice of novelle, as 24 are inspired or even blatantly copied from the Decameron. At all times, the stories articulate the concerns of the merchant class governed by protocapitalist ideals and Sercambi’s own misgivings as a politician who feels betrayed by the very power structure he has helped to create. The fictional world represented is to a large extent a reflection of the ‘‘real’’ world of the chronicles.

Biography Born in 1348, son of Jacopo di Ser Cambio, in Lucca, where he studied under Francesco da Cremona and Francesco da Moncignoli; as a member of the city General Council; entered (1372) the service of Francesco Guinigi who died in 1384 and was succeeded by Lazzaro Guinigi who confirmed Sercambi in his post until 1397. Appointed ‘‘Gonfaloniere di Giustizia,’’ 1397. Lazzaro Guinigi was murdered in a conspiracy by his brother, Antonio, and brother-in-law Nicolao Sbarra, 1400. Sercambi was instrumental in installing Paolo Guinigi and himself to the City Council that in turn elected Paolo Guinigi as the new ruler of Lucca. Under Paolo Guinigi’s rule, Sercambi’s political career took an uncertain path. The timeline for the writing of his two great works, the Croniche and the Il Novelliere or Novelle remains unclear, but the second book of chronicles and most of the Il Novelliere were likely written after 1400 and as an outlet for his frustration with Paolo Guinigi’s ineptitude. He died in plague-ridden Lucca on March 27, 1424. MYRIAM RUTHENBERG See also: Novella Selected Works Le croniche, pubblicate sui manoscritti originali, edited by Salvatore Bongi, 3 vols., Lucca: Tipografia Giusti, 1892–1893.

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GIOVANNI SERCAMBI Novelle, edited by Giovanni Sinicropi, 2 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1972; revised edition as Novelle. Nuovo testo critico con studio introduttivo e note, 2 vols., Florence: Le Lettere, 1995. Il Novelliere, edited by Luciano Rossi, 3 vols., Rome: Salerno, 1974.

Further Reading Bec, Christian, ‘‘Sur la fortune du De´cameron a` la fin du Trecento. Plagiat et re´invention dans le Novelliero de Sercambi,’’ in Revue des Etudes italiennes, 21, (1975): 62–81. Chiecchi, Giuseppe, ‘‘Sulle moralita` in Giovanni Sercambi novelliere,’’ in Lettere italiane, 29, 2 (1977): 133–147. Dinucci, Alberto Guglielmo, ‘‘Le novelle nelle Cronache di Giovanni Sercambi,’’ in Miscellanea lucchese di studi storici e letterari in memoria di Salvatore Bongi, Lucca: Tipografia Artigianelli, 1931. Dornetti, Vittorio, ‘‘Le novelle di Giovanni Sercambi e il moralismo eretico dei Bianchi,’’ in Italianistica, 8 (1979): 275–286.

Marietti, Marina, ‘‘Imitation et transposition du De´came´ron chez Sercambi et Sermini: Re´e´criture et contexte culturel,’’ in Re´e´critures, I–II: Commentaires, parodies, variations dans la litte´rature italienne de la Renaissance, Paris: Universite´ de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1984. Rossi, Luciano, ‘‘Per il testo del Novelliere di Giovanni Sercambi,’’ in Cultura neolatina, 28 (1968): 16–63, 165–220. Ruthenberg Swennen, Myriam, ‘‘Telling Lies, Telling Lives: Giovanni Sercambi between ‘Cronaca’ and ‘Novella,’’’ in The Italian Novella, edited by Gloria Allaire, New York: Routledge, 2003. Salwa, Piotr, Narrazione, persuasione, ideologia: una lettura del Novelliere di Giovanni Sercambi lucchese, Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1991. Sinicropi, Giovanni, ‘‘Per la datazione delle novelle del Sercambi,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 141 (1964): 548–566. Sinicropi, Giovanni, ‘‘Le progressioni narrative nelle novelle del Sercambi,’’ in Italica, 42, no. 3 (1965): 218–223. Vivarelli, Ann West, ‘‘Giovanni Sercambi’s Novelle and the Legacy of Boccaccio,’’ in MLN, 90, no. 1 (1975): 109–127.

CLARA SERENI (1946–) Clara Sereni is one of the most evocative writers in contemporary Italian culture. She has authored novels, short stories, and critical essays. Throughout her various literary works of autobiographical origins, Sereni treats themes regarding emotional ties, feminine writing and identity, and diversity. She connects the private and public spheres of life, as well as between individual and collective history, privileging the point of view of women. Using a mix of linguistic codes and nonverbal communication, she delves into day-to-day reality with innovative narrative program and fragmentary writing style. Sereni debuts with the novel Sigma Epsilon (Sigma Epsilon, 1974), in which she describes the professional and emotional experience of a young woman clinging to leftist political ideals in hopes of staking her social and cultural independence. In a dominantly patriarchal setting, where sexual discrimination thrives, the only possibility for personal affirmation is represented by a relationship with an extraterrestrial. This otherworldly character starts living in the protagonist’s house disguised as a physiotherapist with initially feminine traits (Maria). The relationship established with the extraterrestrial allows the woman to break free of 1738

the routine rapport with her partner Dado. The extraterrestrial assumes masculine characteristics (Mario) and declares his love for his host. In doing so he allows her the freedom of choice over his physical appearance. In the end the protagonist chooses the extraterrestrial’s feminine identity. The following book, Casalinghitudine (Keeping House, 1987) has a novel theme and narrative structure, partly foreshadowed by the style of Sigma Epsilon. Sereni combines her literary language with a culinary strand, alternating between narrating events and detailing modalities of food preparation striving to rebuild and reconnect with her familial ties. The protagonist (a double for the author) recounts the most important moments of her existence. She describes family bonds, her Jewish origins, friendships, political and professional experiences, and not lastly, emotional ties. The narrator recalls her romantic relationship with Massimo, the complex relationship with her son Tommaso, likewise the relationships with grandmothers Alfonsa and Xenia, aunts Elena and Ermelinda, the conflicted relationship with her father, the image of her mother. The episodes and characters in her private life cross paths with

CLARA SERENI accurate historical events and figures, as for example Socialist leader Pietro Nenni. The kitchen becomes the place where the woman asserts her own identity, squares off with her past, and reconciles with the projection of her future. The word casalinghitudine is the product of a fusion of terms casalinga (housewife), abitudine (habit), solitudine (solitude), Negritude, all emblematic of the feminine condition. As Sereni, having coined the term, states: ‘‘la casalinghitudine e` anche un angolino caldo. Un angolino da modificare ogni momento, se fosse fisso sarebbe morire’’ (domesticity is also a warm corner. A corner that must be altered with every passing second; if stable, one would die). Il gioco dei regni (The Game of Kingdoms, 1993) was a great success, drawing on Casalinghitudine for certain themes and characters. The novel, structured on parallel narratives and born of the contamination of several literary genres—biography, autobiography, historical novel, and memoir—unites history and invention. The author draws on the experience of the Sereni family, of Jewish origin, accounting family history as it interacts with historical events of the 1900s. In an attempt to reconstruct the past, the writer uses the paths of the three Sereni brothers (Enrico, Enzo, and Emilio) and carries the reader through the Russian revolution, world conflicts, the birth of Zionism, Communism, the anti-Fascist struggle, and the decline of leftist ideals. Sereni pays particular attention to the description of Zionism and Communism as represented by Enzo and Emilio. The fraternal relationship, strengthened at first by their shared Zionist cause, deteriorates with Emilio’s involvement in Communist ideology. The brothers fight on different fronts, committed to different ideals: one to the realization of the Zionist dream (the birth of the state of Israel), and the other to the anti-Fascist resistance. The most important roles are the women’s, above all Xeniuska’s (the protagonist’s mother), grandmothers Xenia and Alfonsa, and aunt Ermelinda. The adoption of a feminine point of view in the narrative justifies the term ‘‘feminine genealogy’’ used by the author and critics alike. In the book’s last section entitled ‘‘Dopo la storia: Perche`’’ (Beyond History: Why), Sereni explains the impetus for the birth of the novel and the relevance of maternal grandmother Xenia (a character with historical importance). This work is translated in France and Israel. The short-story collection Manicomio primavera (Spring Madness, 1989) affirms the author’s interest in social problems and the themes of maternity and diversity. The protagonists are mothers of outcast

sons, portrayed in their day-to-day life struggles. Manicomio primavera and Casalinghitudine have both been adapted for the stage, produced in 1995 by Carlina Torta at the Women’s Theater in Florence and in 1990 at the Todi Festival. Other short stories appear in the collection Eppure (And Yet, 1995), dedicated to affection, diversity, and isolation. Clara Sereni’s essays appear in Taccuino di un’ultimista (Sereni’s Notebook, 1998) and Da un grigio all’altro (From Grey to Grey, 1998). The essays reflect the writer’s reaction to cultural, social, and political polemics. In the first volume, Sereni emphasizes her activity on behalf of ‘‘outcasts,’’ thus creating the neologism ultimista (marginalist). In the second, she focuses on her own cultural upbringing. In 1998, Daniele Segre films the documentary Sto lavorando (I’m Working) inspired by the work experience of Matteo, the mentally disabled son of the author. In Passami il sale (Pass Me the Salt, 2002), the protagonist—again the author’s alter ego—relives the political experience of her time as vice-mayor of Perugia. Similar to Casalinghitudine, the novel’s literary language is interspersed with culinary terminology. Food continues to be a way to reconnect past and present, an instrument for self-affirmation, a vindication of an identity that risks annulment by the pressing duties of her political engagement. The irreconcilable coexistence of her political activity and private life is transferred onto the culinary plane. The frenetic rhythm of her professional tasks reverberates in the private sphere, dictating their respective courses. The author controversially denounces the absence in today’s Italy of the conditions for the effective participation of women in politics. The novel was rewritten for the stage by Annalisa Bruni, and directed by Matilde Tudori in 2004 for the Murata Theater in Mestre. In 2004, Sereni publishes Le Merendanze, in which she documents the lives of a diversified group of women, who are united by the same commitment to social causes. They found the project Merendanzo in order to combat emargination, immigration, and diversity. Once again food plays a major role in symbolizing human relationships. Sereni is also known as a translator of Stendhal, Balzac, and Mme de la Fayette. She has contributed to a collection of short stories Mi riguarda (1994) with the autobiographical Diario (Diary), and has edited Si puo`! (It’s Possible!, 1996). The latter is a collection of ‘‘tales of suffering’’ for which she has drafted the introduction in hopes of contributing to the establishment of relationships that hold together ‘‘i sommersi e i salvati’’ (the drowned and the saved) in the words of Primo Levi’s famous definition. 1739

CLARA SERENI

Biography Born in Rome, 28 August 1946, daughter of Emilio Sereni—one of the most prominent members of the Italian Communist Party, active in the Resistance. Attended the Liceo Classico; began her university studies that she never completed; passionate reader of the classics from an early age, narrowed her studies to works authored by women; moved out of the family home, 1967; pursued various professional careers before making a mark as a writer; is active in the domain of cultural politics while working as translator, dactylographer, event organizer, folk singer in order to gain economic independence; married film director Stefano Rulli, son Matteo is born, 1978. In 1991, together with son Matteo (disabled from birth) and husband Stefano Rulli (film director and set designer) moved to Perugia where she lives today; served as vicemayor of the Comune of Perugia assigned to social affairs 1995–1997 (resigned in the summer of 1997); organized an orientation course on women’s representation rights for Progetto Donna; organized ‘‘Banca del Tempo’’—opening 23 booths in sociocultural centers in Perugia for the exchange of ‘‘crafts,’’ a volunteer operation; responsible for the on-line cataloguing of rare documents from the collection of the Biblioteca Augusta in Perugia; activist for the rights of outcasts, member of Aurap (Umbrian Association for the Research and Assistance of Psychotic Patients); presides over the foundation La citta` del sole—Onlus, established in 1998, dedicated to the organization of projects and events for the mentally disabled. Stefano Rulli’s film Un silenzio particolare (1994), which portrays the experience of the foundation, was presented at Venice Film Festival in the section Venezia digitale, 1994. Received various literary awards: Reader’s Society of Lucca prize and Marotta prize for Il gioco dei regni, 1993; Grinzane Cavour prize for Passami il sale, 2003. Widely published as contributing editor for L’unita` and Il manifesto, contributes to literary magazines, among them Tuttestorie. CARLA CAROTENUTO Selected Works Fiction Sigma Epsilon, 1974. Casalinghitudine, 1987; as Keeping House, translated by Giovanna Miceli Jeffreys and Susan Briziarelli, New York: Suny Press, 2005.

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Manicomio primavera, 1989. Il gioco dei regni, 1993. ‘‘Diario,’’ in Isabella Bossi Fedrigotti et alia, Mi riguarda, Rome: e/o, 1994. Eppure, 1995. Passami il sale, 2002. Le Merendanze, 2004.

Translations Stendhal, Intrighi d’amore e altre storie, 1980. Honore´ De Balzac, ‘‘La Grande Brete`che,’’ in L’albergo rosso, edited by Bruno Schacherl, 1984. Honore´ De Balzac, Be´atrix, 1995. Madame de La Fayette, Zaı¨de, 1995.

Other ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Laura Braghetti and Francesca Mambro, Nel cerchio della prigione, Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 1995. ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Rose Zwi, Un altro anno in Africa, Rome: Lavoro, 1995. Lucia Annunziata et alia, Si puo`!, Rome: e/o, 1996. Taccuino di un’ultimista, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998. Da un grigio all’altro: Dialogo con Clara Sereni, Rome: Di Renzo, 1998. ‘‘Scritto introduttivo,’’ in Uguccione Ranieri (di Sorbello), La bella in mano al boia: Una storia inedita nella Perugia del Seicento, Perugia: Era Nuova, 1998.

Further Reading Bianchini, Angela, ‘‘Il vivere quotidiano,’’ in Scritture, scrittrici, edited by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Milan: Longanesi, 1988. Caputo, Iaia, and Laura Lepri (editors), Conversazioni di fine secolo: Dodici interviste con dodici scrittrici contemporanee, Milan: La Tartaruga, 1995. Del Principe, David, ‘‘Consuming Women and Animals in Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine,’’ in Italica, 76, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 205–219. Gaglianone, Paola (editor), Conversazione con Clara Sereni: ` micron, 1996. Donne, scrittura e politica, Rome: O Kolsky, Stephen, ‘‘Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine: The Politics of Writing. Structure and Intertextuality,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 34, nos. 133–134 (Summer -Fall 1997): 47–58. La Porta, Filippo, ‘‘Clara Sereni,’’ in La nuova narrativa italiana: Travestimenti e stili di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Marcaccio, Donatella, ‘‘Ramondino e Sereni: Legami nascosti,’’ in Tuttestorie, New Series, no. 3 (March 1995): 115–120. Menozzi, Giuliana, ‘‘Food and Subjectivity in Clara Sereni’s Casalinghitudine,’’ in Italica, 71, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 217–227. Miceli Jeffries, Giovanna, ‘‘Il gioco dei regni,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 34, nos. 133–134 (Summer-Fall 1997): 115–116. Morini, Agne`s, ‘‘I racconti di Clara Sereni: Dall’altra parte del muro,’’ In Narrativa, 16, (September 1999): 73–91. Paulicelli, Eugenia, and David Ward (editors), ‘‘Interview with Clara Sereni,’’ in L’anello che non tiene, 9, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 1997): 83–111.

VITTORIO SERENI

VITTORIO SERENI (1913–1983) Vittorio Sereni is a writer whom literary criticism has identified, in the wake of Luciano Anceschi, as the leader of the so-called Linea lombarda (Lombard School), which was made up of writers born in the first decade of the twentieth century in Lombardy, and in which a great tension with the ‘‘objectivity’’ associated with the contemporaneous Florentine representatives of Hermeticism may be seen. Sereni’s literary career, from his first collection Frontiera (The Border, 1941) to his last work, Stella variabile (Variable Star, 1981), which is richer in linguistic experimentation, has a common thread: the conviction that the poetic act is born from a vital energy that is nourished by the writer’s existential geography, an energy that comes to bear individual and collective witness. Particularly in Frontiera, which collects poems from his youth, Luino, the town on Lake Maggiore where he was born and spent his childhood and adolescence, becomes, as the author himself has written, ‘‘an idol of memory,’’ a place where he can find emotional nourishment and sensations tied to the landscape or to people or things, quickened by the ‘‘immaginazione non accorata ma smaniosa del tornare’’ (imagination, which is not melancholy, but in a frenzy at returning) (Gli immediati dintorni; Immediate Surroundings, 1962). In 1933, Sereni came to Milan, where he frequented not only literary circles, which included Anceschi, Antonia Pozzi, and Salvatore Quasimodo, but also the university lectures of Antonio Banfi, one of the first Italians to elaborate a phenomenological philosophical theory that would greatly influence Sereni’s poetics. After becoming involved with the editing of the review Corrente di vita giovanile, he came into contact with a group of painters (Cassinari, Migneco, Morlotti, Guttuso, De Grada, Treccani) who reclaimed the principles of a committed art and a return to realism, rediscovering the European roots of culture through the study of Impressionism and the most important experiences of the early twentieth century. It was Corrente that first published Frontiera, which is released under the title Poesie in collaboration with the publisher Vallecchi in a revised

and expanded edition in 1942. The title has an autobiographical justification. During the Fascist period, in places in Lombardy near the border with Switzerland, where the echo of another civilization could be heard, Sereni elaborated the myth of the border, understood as a Leopardian barrier, which precisely in its presence as a limit pushes the imagination’s power to expand in order to open itself up to European perspectives and assume, finally, social and historical characteristics. Onto the metaphorical axis of the garden as an archetype of earthly paradise, a happy place of primal innocence, is grafted the theme of movement, of time passing, of the journey. And thus the idyllic dimension is put to a difficult test by the intrusion of events, by a series of shouts, of disturbing presences, of premonitions that evoke a fear of the mysterious. What dominates is a sense of precariousness, epitomized by the iconography of the lake, a privileged place of vision and at the same time a limit within which the individual and social history of the poet is consumed. The rupturing of the idyllic-contemplative circle opens gaps in the border of youth, allowing the tragedy of the war, pain, and death to enter. ‘‘Versi a Proserpina’’ (Lines to Proserpine) constitute the final short part of Frontiera where the voice of the poet darkens and assumes a mournful, ritual tone that prefigures what has already come to pass— the disappearance of the world of youth. On the more strictly stylistic and linguistic level, the collection presents itself as a successful attempt to harmonize the Hermetic affinity for the evocative word with the need for a discursive rationalism respectful of the objectifying value of language, incorporating into the symbolist and decadent tradition the use of the spoken word or the language of naming. Diario d’Algeria (Algerian Diary, 1947) is Sereni’s account of a long period of imprisonment (1943–1945) in Algerian camps during World War II. The volume is subdivided into three parts: a first part that consists of texts referring to the years immediately before his imprisonment (1940–1943); the section that gives the volume its title; and a last part entitled ‘‘Il male d’Africa,’’ (Thinking of 1741

VITTORIO SERENI Africa) in which the poet reflects on the meaning of his experience and how it influenced the choices he made afterward. In the opening section, what predominates is the idea of the journey as wandering without a goal, as a flight that already prefigures the prisoner’s exile. To the Europe convulsed by violence and Nazi Fascism the poet opposes his cultural myth of a mother Europe of civilization, peace, and tolerance among peoples. In the central part, what prevails instead is the idea of the circle, suggested spatially by the concentration camps and recalled temporally by an incident of frozen duration in which actions repeat themselves. The atmosphere is reminiscent of the Dante in Purgatory, which in its configuration as a place of subtle but relentless physical and moral torment is a fundamental theme of the second half of Sereni’s career. Constrained to a forced inertia, to an endless waiting, the poet sought his own salvation in his patrimony of memories and fantasies, which no evil could destroy. The more prison pushed him into a state of limbo, the more he entrusted himself to the world of the dream and desire, and the more he would animate the anguishing reality through the segregation of epiphanies, of apparitions to entrust the residual yearnings for freedom. A bipolarity was born of memories and presences, but also of a nostalgia for absences. Finally, the section ‘‘Il male d’Africa,’’ consisting of compositions written after 1944, represents instead the argumentative moment of memory, which seeks to refill the void of social life represented by two years’ imprisonment, and which is at the core of the difficulty Sereni faced in experiencing the present. Many years later, in 1965, Sereni published Gli strumenti umani (Human Instruments). The survivor from Algeria, who desired to return and immerse himself in his own individual and collective history, confirmed his estrangement from the Hermetic conception in favor of a poetry more open to the concerns of time and society. The recurring motifs are the journey and the return. Sereni unfolded a differentiated and inverted revisitation of the places of his youth in order to spark a confrontation between present and past, underlining the impossibility of recovering, after the experience of the war, that harmony with nature that had been at the core of Frontiera. Gli strumenti umani is the chart of the psychological disorientation suffered by the poet in the years when Italian society, having just emerged from Fascism, suffered the irruption of the new industrial and tech1742

nological reality. The heart was no longer sufficient to understand the world, as it had been in Frontiera. In order to grasp contemporary reality and to eliminate the injustices and acts of violence that thwart the triumph of democracy, there was now a need for the force of reason and moral intransigence. Especially in the triptych Dall’Olanda (From Holland), La pieta` ingiusta (Unjust Pity), Nel vero anno zero (In the Real Year Zero), Sereni warned against forgetting the Nazi crimes, the errors of a Germany that cannot be absolved lightly of responsibility for having spread war throughout all of Europe, and that then completely set aside its own past in the name of a misguided aspiration for capitalistic development. Doubts about the knowability of the real as transmitted through poetry are the pivots around which the intricate discourse of Stella variabile takes shape. This volume reprises and develops the driving motifs of its predecessor but places them in a dimension of profound distrust for the human instrument of poetry, which is now insufficient to investigate a world dominated by negativity, and sustained by a more radical involvement of private events in the sphere of the public and the social. What prevails in the text is intratemporality, a sharp dialectic between acting in time and the thinking of time on the part of the subject, in which repetition (of the deed, of emotion, of the word) plays a historicizing function insofar as it actualizes the being in the existent. Positivity and negativity coexist in myriad gestures, images, memories, and events, within which boils the ceaseless dialectic of opposites that rules the course of man’s history. In this perspective, the composition Un posto di vacanza (A Vacation Spot), which forms the central nucleus of the volume, can be considered the synthesis of the attempts to harmonize writing with the material accumulation of opposites, creating a polyphony derived from the union of many voices that insert themselves in counterpoint into the monody of the poet and refract it, by amplifying it, in myriad stylistic motifs and a choral tonality. Complementing the poetry is that which Sereni himself called ‘‘la tentazione della prosa,’’ or the temptation of prose, and that furnishes the title for the volume collecting his creative prose writings published in 1998. 1962 saw the publication of Gli immediati dintorni, a sort of ‘‘intermittent diary’’ of thoughts, quotations, and suggestions that were elaborated in Gli strumenti umani and in Stella variabile. L’opzione (The Option, 1964) is a short story

VITTORIO SERENI devoted to the capitalistic Germany of the time. Beginning from his direct experience as an editorial official on a visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair, Sereni constructed a story centered on the hunt for the option for the project of a book that ought to anticipate the world’s future for the next 10 years. But history and the past resurface as involuntary memory that is prompted by the torrent of words pronounced in the frenetic race for communication, for a financial agreement. In the same vein is Il sabato tedesco (The German Saturday, 1980), which is in part a return to these same places and a differentiated reprise of these same motifs and which (through the persistence of problematic nodes attending the knowledge of the world and the hermeneutic efficacy of language) should be considered in relation to the themes of Stella variabile. Ventisei (Twenty-Six, 1970) is a revisitation 26 years later—in order to construct a moral and political balance that will render the present comprehensible—of the places in western Sicily where Sereni, as a young soldier, experienced the trauma of war and capture. Sereni’s work as a translator was wide-ranging and constant. The volume Il musicante di SaintMerry (The Musician of Saint-Merry, 1981) collects a selection of poetic texts translated between 1948 and 1980 and includes works by Apollinaire, Camus, Williams, Char, and Fre´naud. Sereni has also translated Julien Green and Vale´ry.

Biography Born 27 July 1913 in Luino (Varese), on Lake Maggiore. In Brescia, where his father was transferred, finishes his studies with a degree in classics; enrolls in the University of Milan, first in the faculty of jurisprudence and then in letters, 1932–1933; graduates in letters with a thesis on Guido Gozzano, and publishes his first poems in Meridiano di Roma, 1936; some of his poems are published in the journal Il frontespizio, with an introduction by Carlo Betocchi, 1937; begins to take part in the editing of Corrente di vita giovanile, 1938–1939; is recalled to the army 14 June 1940, and 19 June of the same year marries Maria Luisa Bonfanti; his first daughter, Maria Teresa, born 1941; is called up as part of a division set to deploy to North Africa, fall 1941; is taken prisoner by the Allies at Paceco (Trapani) on 24 July and in August is transferred to North Africa, 1943; is taken on board for re-entry to

Italy, 28 July 1945. Teaches Latin and history in Milan; wins a special prize, Libera Stampa for the unpublished Diario d’Algeria, 1946. His second daughter, Silvia, born 1947. Quits teaching and finds work in the publicity department of the Pirelli firm, 1952; his daughter, Giovanna, is born and he wins the Libera Stampa prize, 1956; joins the editorial department of Mondadori where he becomes literary director, 1958; together with Niccolo` Gallo, Dante Isella, and Geno Pampaloni runs the journal Questo e altro, 1961–1963; wins the Montefeltro prize, 1965; travels to the United States, 1966. In Sicily, returns to the places of his wartime experience, 1969; wins the Premio dell’Accademia dei Lincei for poetry with his Un posto di vacanza, 1977. Travels to Egypt, Mexico, Provence, and Russia, 1974–1978; along with Mario Luzi, Alberto Arbasino, and other writers, visits China, 1980; wins the Bagutta prize, 1981; is awarded the Viareggio prize for poetry, 1982. Dies of an aneurysm in Milan, 10 February 1983. ALFREDO LUZI Selected Works Collections Poesie scelte (1935–1965), edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Milan: Mondadori, 1973. Tutte le poesie, edited by Maria Teresa Sereni, Milan: Mondadori, 1986; as Selected Poems, edited and translated by Marcus Perryman and Peter Robinson, London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1990. Poesie, critical edition by Dante Isella, Milan: Mondadori, 1995; new edition, Turin: Einaudi, 2002.

Poetry ‘‘Frontiera,’’ 1941. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1942. ‘‘Diario d’Algeria,’’ 1947; revised and enlarged edition, 1965; 1979. ‘‘Gli strumenti umani,’’ 1965; 1975. ‘‘Frontiera,’’ 1966; edited by Luciano Anceschi, 1991. ‘‘Un posto di vacanza,’’ 1973. ‘‘Stella variabile,’’ 1981; as Variable Star, edited and translated by Luigi Bonaffini, 1999.

Prose Works Gli immediati dintorni, 1962. L’opzione, 1964. Ventisei, 1970. Letture preliminari, 1973. Il sabato tedesco, 1980. Gli immediati dintorni: Primi e secondi, 1983.

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VITTORIO SERENI Sentieri di gloria: Note e ragionamenti sulla letteratura, edited by Giuseppe Strazzeri, 1996. La tentazione della prosa (Gli immediati dintorni, La traversata di Milano, Appendice), edited by Giulia Raboni, 1998. Viaggio in Cina, 2004.

Letters Attilio Bertolucci, Una lunga amicizia: Lettere 1938–1982. Attilio Bertolucci - Vittorio Sereni, edited by Gabriella Palli Baroni, 1994. Antonia Pozzi, La giovinezza che non trova scampo: poesie e lettere degli anni trenta, edited by Alessandra Cenni, 1995. Un tacito mistero: Il carteggio Vittorio Sereni-Alessandro Parronchi, 1941–1983, edited by Barbara Colli and Giulia Raboni, 2004. Miei cari tutti quanti.... Carteggio di Vittorio Sereni con Ferruccio Benzoni e gli amici di Cesenatico, edited by Dante Isella, 2004.

Translations Julien Green, Le´viathan, 1947. Paul Vale´ry, Eupalinos. L’anima e la danza. Dialogo dell’albero, 1947. William Carlos Williams, Poesie, 1961. Rene´ Char, Fogli d’Ipnos, 1968. Rene´ Char, Ritorno sopramonte, 1974. Il musicante di Saint-Merry, 1981.

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Linea lombarda: Sei poeti, Varese: Libreria Magenta Editrice, 1952. Barile, Laura, Il passato che non passa: Le poetiche provvisorie di Vittorio Sereni, Florence: Le Lettere, 2004. Cipriani, Stefano, Il ‘‘libro’’ della prosa di Vittorio Sereni, Florence: Societa` Editrice Fiorentina, 2002. Cordibella, Giovanna, Di fronte al romanzo: Contaminazioni nella poesia di Vittorio Sereni, Bologna: Pendragon, 2004. D’Alessandro, Francesca, L’opera poetica di Vittorio Sereni, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2001. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Poeta e di poeti funzionario: Il lavoro editoriale di Vittorio Sereni, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1999. Grillandi, Massimo, Sereni, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Isella, Dante, Giornale di ‘Frontiera,’ Milan: R. Archinto, 1991. La poesia di Vittorio Sereni, Milan: Librex, 1985. Luzi, Alfredo, Introduzione a Sereni, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Luzi, Alfredo (editor), La poesia di Vittorio Sereni: Se ne scrivono ancora, Grottammare: Stamperia dell’Arancio, 1997. Merry, Bruce, ‘‘The Poetry of Vittorio Sereni,’’ in Italian Studies, 29 (1974): 88–102. Pagnanelli, Remo, La ripetizione dell’esistere: Lettura dell’opera poetica di Vittorio Sereni, Milan: Scheiwiller, 1980. Pagnanelli, Remo, Studi critici, Milan: Mursia, 1991. Welle, John, ‘‘Forza accomunante: Popular Culture in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni,’’ in Rivista di studi italiani, 1–2 (1989): 24–38.

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GLI STRUMENTI UMANI, 1965 Collection of Poems by Vittorio Sereni

Gli strumenti umani (Human Instruments) constitutes a shift in Sereni’s poetics from Hermeticism and phenomenology toward a poetry more open to the concerns of time and society. The subjectivism that in Frontiera made Luino a privileged place of memory and which in Diario d’Algeria had been scarred by history, with the tragic collective events of war and imprisonment, is transformed in Gli strumenti umani into an epistemological attitude through poetic writing. Mindful of the teaching of the Milanese philosopher Antonio Banfi, and close to the problematics of Husserl, Sereni knows that poetry can be, among the various human instruments, a form of knowledge, provided that it has the power to draw nuggets of meaning from the existential morass. He derives from this a notion of poetry that is no longer Platonic and immobile specularity in which things are the mirror of the psychological richness of the individual, but a dynamic of refractions, of projections, which are traces of the complex relationship that the ‘‘I’’ establishes with experience in the search for its own identity. But the deeper change registered in Gli strumenti umani concerns the temporal category. The chronological process suffers a sudden acceleration that corresponds to the rapidity with which lived experience is consumed within industrial and technological society and mass civilization. Gli strumenti umani collects compositions written between 1945 and 1965, from the years when there was still hope of a resistance to the capitalistic boom that invades Italy during the 1960s, which Sereni conceives of as a ‘‘vacation,’’ that is to say, devoid of history. In the first part, the dominant themes are the journey and the return, a continuous conflict between present and past through which the subject reveals that he cannot stand before the countryside in the same idyllic and euphoric relation of an earlier time. The return serves only to disclose an emptiness, an imbalance of rhythm that is never restored, and which is registered in the

RENATO SERRA distance placed between the temporality of events and the judgment of their value. The irruption of the new industrial and technological reality into the contents of poetry is seen in the short poem ‘‘Una visita in fabbrica’’ (A Visit to a Factory), whose composition corresponds to the period of his employment with the Pirelli firm from 1952 to 1958, and in which he makes explicit his estrangement as an intellectual from the working world, even though he notes its inauthenticity, the dehumanization imposed by the owners. It is a Dantean journey into the new inferno into which the working class is hurled, having passed from the war to the factory, from oppression at the hands of political power to oppression at the hands of the owners’ economic-industrial power. In the second part of the work, there is a constant osmotic exchange between private and collective history. The multiplicity of themes and the variety of expressive modes converge toward a compactness of writing whose element of cohesion and point of reference is the motif of resistance, whether as an individual memory of a missing experience or as a civil warning too-often forgotten by the collectivity. Sereni’s words tend to possess a dramatic power that springs both from the individual crisis relative to language, which has now become inadequate to express the essence of things, and from the complexity of the social world, which is rendered ever more indecipherable by the persistence of

structural contradictions. Precisely during the years in which the neoavant-garde was theorizing the disintegration of language, Vittorio Sereni adopts an inclusive procedure that, while taking note of the rupture of the poetic linguistic system, has language retain a sufficient degree of communicability in order to remain in contact with the collectivity. ALFREDO LUZI Editions First edition: Gli strumenti umani, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Critical edition: in Poesie, edited by Dante Isella, Milan: Mondadori, 1995. Translations: Journey at Dawn, Window, Visit to a Factory, Appointment at an Unusual Hour, translated by Carlo L. Golino, Italian Quarterly, 6, no. 22 (1962): 70–77.

Further Reading Barile, Laura, La poesia di Vittorio Sereni, Milan: Librex, 1985. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, La letteratura del rifiuto, Milan: Mursia, 1968; rpt. 1982. Finzi, Gilberto, Poesia in Italia, Milan: Mursia, 1979. Luzi, Alfredo, Introduzione a Sereni, Bari: Laterza, 1990. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Storia della lingua italiana: Il Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994. Pedulla`, Walter, La letteratura del benessere, Rome: Bulzoni, 1973. Ramat, Silvio, Storia della poesia italiana del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1976.

RENATO SERRA (1884–1915) Renato Serra is one of the most important Italian literary critics of the early twentieth century. His complex position derives from his attempt to resolve the crisis of the role of the intellectual by denying its very existence and the opposing inclination to incarnate that figure to the fullest. This generational trend would come to define those young men of letters who, having survived the experiences of World War I, strove to overcome their uneasiness by exploring new identities and roles. Serra’s body of work is characterized by a vital inconsistency, which reveals its depth in the guise of critical

investigations. Critics such as Ezio Raimondi describe his personality as that of a lettore di provincia, or a provincial man of letters devoted to a ‘‘religion of literature’’ that is historically detached; some others highlight his troubled spirit, committed as he was to contesting the separateness of literature. These interpretations ultimately reflect the contradictions faced by the Italian writer, divided between his passion for literature and the trauma of war. Serra’s writings on contemporary literature remained for the most part unpublished until after his death. They include the emblematic essay 1745

RENATO SERRA entitled Rudyard Kipling, written in 1907, which marks the beginning of his critical activity. The author of Kim, who enjoyed great success at that time, exemplified a writer of modernity, a bard of a life that is different, exotic, and adventurous. For Serra, Kipling transcended the common label of ‘‘poet of imperialism’’: He had the capacity to observe the world in all its reality, including its burden of suffering. The image of Serra as an isolated literary man— one of the masks he was pleased to wear—is, however, dispelled by his contacts with some of the most important intellectuals of his day: Croce and Pascoli, as well as Prezzolini, Cecchi, and De Robertis. Of particular importance was his relationship with Benedetto Croce, documented by a prolonged correspondence. Their mutual appreciation, however, cooled off over time, and eventually Serra distanced himself from the prominent philosopher, neither sharing the abstractness of his absolute historicism nor his rationalist approach to human activity. Serra instead appears to have been more receptive to the teachings of Giosue Carducci, a formative influence during his university years in Bologna. Serra’s interest in Carducci’s work was blended with a sense of nostalgia for the image of the intellectual, which was by now fading (see for example the poet-prophet, symbol of the Risorgimento). In a commemorative speech given in his hometown of Cesena, entitled La commemorazione di Giosue Carducci (The Commemoration of Giosue Carducci, 1914), as well as in the Commemorazione di Giovanni Pascoli al Teatro Comunale di Cesena (Commemoration of Giovanni Pascoli at the Teatro Comunale of Cesena, 1912), Serra searches for values that can inform action, not within the sphere of D’Annunzio’s heroic logic, but of a commitment that is ethical in nature. He discloses at times conflicting positions between what he declares in public occasions and what he entrusts to his most tormented private meditations. His reading selections were also oriented in diverging directions and range from the circle of his professors in Bologna (the philosopher Francesco Acri, his friend Alfredo Panzini) to Alfredo Oriani and D’Annunzio—all of whom are discussed in the critical essays he published in literary journals beginning in 1909. Serra’s analytical mind pays close attention to the texts, which are always approached with great sensitivity and dialogic openness. Serra’s Le lettere (Letters, 1914) offer an overview of early twentieth-century literature, and constitute a benchmark of the militant literary 1746

criticism of the period. The author’s declared intention is that of providing a cronaca, or a commentary in which books are examined from the reader’s point of view. He begins with ‘‘a general view’’ of the literary marketplace and acknowledges an improvement of the average level of production, but laments the absence of true genius, of ‘‘successful works,’’ and of ‘‘true literary passion.’’ It follows a detailed analysis of D’Annunzio, particularly his most recent work, and a chapter entitled Versi (Verses), signifying that true poetry is absent, thus replaced by mere ‘‘verses.’’ Among the many authors reviewed by Serra, a positive opinion is expressed of Salvatore Di Giacomo and Guido Gozzano, whom he separates from his crepuscolari imitators. As for prose writers, they appear to be recognized by a substantial ‘‘uniformity of the mold’’ and profoundly influenced by French Decadentism. The field of literary criticism, furthermore, is dominated by Benedetto Croce, whom Serra admittedly values more as a letterato, an exceptional man of letters and writer, rather than as a ‘‘critic’’ tied to the ‘‘old school.’’ Serra’s closing remarks focus on the widespread tendency toward the ‘‘revision of values’’ and the need to ‘‘confront things as problems.’’ He also acknowledges Emilio Cecchi and Fedrico De Robertis as serious and ‘‘vigorous’’ critics. What emerges from Le lettere is Serra’s willingness to accept the diverse scopes of the literary phenomenon along with a cautious openness to the sociological considerations of literature. His reflections on the social role of the intellectual are further developed in a seminal essay he published a few months before his death in La Voce. In Esame di coscienza di un letterato (A Man of Letters’ SelfExamination, 1915), Serra measures himself with the epochal event of the war, leaving behind the most telling confession by an Italian writer on this subject. The essay, which partakes of the debate about the intervention and appeared in literary journals such as La Voce and Lacerba, consists of two parts. In the first, which echoes the positions of De Robertis, who had supported the possibility of continuing to write literature even in the face of the war, Serra reluctantly declares that literature remains ‘‘perhaps among many other things, one of the more worthwhile.’’ The war is destined not to change anything in the world, not even literature. War is blind loss, pain, and useless destruction in which not a single value or function can be recognized. In the second part of the essay, however, passion instead of rational argumentation prevails. Now the war becomes an event from which

RENATO SERRA individuals, unlike nations, cannot be absent, an appointment not to be missed. It is precisely in this collective venture, in this ‘‘going together’’ toward a common destiny of life or death, that Serra finds his reason to accept war: the ultimate occasion of knowledge and a decisive experience in itself. Esame di coscienza di un letterato concludes with a kind of leap into nothingness: the identification with the present, ora di passione (‘‘time of passion’’), beyond which no one wishes to go. This is the call shared by a generation destined to be decimated by World War I and its aftermath. In light of this nihilistic belief, Serra’s death in the trenches could be projected as a voluntary suicide. Young postwar artists singled out Renato Serra as their mentor, attracted by his keen critical eye and his elegant writing style.

Biography Born in Cesena (Forlı´), 5 December 1884, where he also spent most of his brief life. Completed his high school studies at 15 years of age; received a degree in letters from the University of Bologna with a thesis on Petrarch’s Trionfi, 1904; was in Rome for several months for military service, 1905; resided in Florence from 1907 to 1908 and attended the Istituto di Studi Superiori, though he did not receive a diploma. Returned to Cesena where he began to teach; he collaborated with several literary journals, among them La Voce, Romagna, Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, and Il Cittadino; planned a new journal entitled Neoteroi with his friend Ambrosini, but was never published; appointed director of the Biblioteca Malatestiana of Cesena, 1909; called up for military service in April 1915 and sent to the front lines where he was fatally killed in the trenches near Monte Podgora on 20 July by a gunshot wound to the head. RICCIARDA RICORDA Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Giuseppe Prezzolini, 4 vols., FlorenceRome: Edizioni della «Voce», 1919–1923. Scritti, edited by Giuseppe De Robertis, and Alfredo Grilli, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1938.

Versi e versioni, edited by Alfredo Grilli, Forlı`: Zavatti, 1946. Scritti letterari, morali e politici: Saggi e articoli dal 1900 al 1915, edited by Mario Isnenghi, Turin: Einaudi, 1974. Scritti critici, edited by Ivanos Ciani, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1990. Carducciana, edited by Ivanos Ciani, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996.

Critical Writings Scritti critici: Giovanni Pascoli, Antonio Beltramelli, Carducci e Croce, 1910. Commemorazione di Giovanni Pascoli al Teatro Comunale di Cesena, 1912. La commemorazione di Giosue Carducci, 1914. Le lettere, 1914. Esame di coscienza di un letterato, edited by G. De Robertis and L. Ambrosini, 1915 (it includes Ultime lettere del campo).

Letters Epistolario, edited by Luigi Ambrosini, et alia, Florence: Le Monnier, 1934. Lettere in pace e in guerra, edited by Milva Maria Cappellini, Turin: Nino Aragno, 2000. Lettere a Fides ‘‘saetta che ferisce e vola,’’ edited by Renato Turci, Florence: Le Monnier, 2001.

Further Reading Acciani, Antonietta, Renato Serra: Contributo all’intellettuale senza qualita`, Bari: De Donato, 1976. Bo, Carlo, Intorno a Serra, Milan: Greco & Greco, 1998. Brasini, Antonio (editor), Scritti in onore di Renato Serra: Per il cinquantenario della morte, Florence: Le Monnier, 1974. Briosi, Sandro, Renato Serra, Milan: Mursia, 1968. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Serra e l’irrazionale,’’ in Altri esercizıˆ (1942–1971), Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Curi, Fausto (editor), Tra provincia ed Europa: Renato Serra e il problema dell’intellettuale moderno, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1984. Guglielmi, Guido, ‘‘Esame di coscienza di un letterato di Renato Serra,’’ in Letteratura italiana: Le Opere, 4, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Luperini, Romano, La crisi degli intellettuali nell’eta` giolittiana, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1978. Pacchiano, Giovanni, Serra, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1970. Raimondi, Ezio, Il lettore di provincia: Renato Serra, Florence: Le Monnier, 1964; rpt. as Un europeo di provincia: Renato Serra, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993. Reina, Luigi, L’inquietudine di Renato Serra, Salerno: Libreria Internazionale Editrice, 1972. ‘‘Su Renato Serra,’’ special issue of Il Lettore di Provincia, 99–100 (1997). Talentoni, Viola, Vita di Renato Serra, Ravenna: Edizioni del Girasole, 1996.

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LUIGI SETTEMBRINI

LUIGI SETTEMBRINI (1813–1876) The two essential components of Luigi Settembrini’s intellectual profile are civil commitment and faith in the social function of literature; they permeate in profundity his entire body of work. From his father—a participant in the Jacobin movement of 1799 in Naples—he received an education inspired by the principles of the Enlightenment. This teaching was filtered, however, by a classical conception of man. He furthered this classical lesson by attending the school of Basilio Puoti, whose purism he interpreted as a reminder of the seriousness of education and of moral fortitude. With an understanding of literary production as cultural divulgation, Settembrini decided to dedicate himself to teaching. Right from the first years as a teacher of eloquence in Catanzaro, he revealed a nonconformist spirit and manifested a profound aspiration for a more just society, which brought him to enter into the world of conspiracy and to found with Benedetto Musolino the sect of the Figliuoli della Giovane Italia. His activity as conspirator led him to prison in 1839: Several texts, in part unpublished, were written in this period, such as the first book of a more ambitious project, Della letteratura italiana. Libri IV (On Italian Literature. Four Books, ca. 1837–1838) and several dialogues, which are the products of a writer initially tied to the sensist movement and aligned with the antiRomantic position in the defense of the traditions and of the national conscience, yet also committed to expanding his own cultural horizon with regard to the great names of European literature, from Schiller and Goethe to M.me De Stae¨l. Upon his release from prison, Settembrini returned to teaching, which he viewed as an expression of active civil commitment. His social commitment also manifested itself in polemical pamphlets such as Protesta del popolo delle due Sicilie (Protest of the People of the Two Sicilies, 1847) and Castelcapuano o la Vicaria di Napoli nel 1850 (Castelcapuano, or the Vicaria Prison of Naples in 1850, 1850). The first of these is a very powerful and severe accusation against the Bourbon misgovernment. The mythical happiness of the natural state of Southern Italy is set against the condition of oppression and misery into which the people find 1748

themselves, and Settembrini puts the blame squarely on the king and on the Bourbon ruling class. His pages are animated by an admirable civil courage and are filled with an ideal of good government as well as the typically nineteenth-century notion of collective happiness. The pamphlet was published anonymously and obtained ample circulation, thereby forcing the author to flee to Malta. In 1848, he participated in the revolutionary movement with the spirit of one who fights on the side of enlightened reason and of the new culture against tyranny. With philosopher Silvio Spaventa and others, Settembrini established the ‘‘Grande societa` dell’Unita` d’Italia’’ with the conviction that the intellectuals and the middle class can propose themselves as protagonists in the struggle and even assume the role of political guide. However, the Cronaca degli avvenimenti di Napoli nel 1848 (Chronicle of the Events of Napoli in 1848), written between 1848 and 1849 but only published in Opuscoli politici editi e inediti (1847–1851) (Published and Unpublished Pamphlets, 1969), is marked by a progressive loss of that faith. During the long period of his second imprisonment—from 1849 when the Bourbon repression condemned him first to death and then to a life sentence, until 1859 when he arrived in London as an exile—he dedicated himself to his studies and, in particular, to the important activity of translating Lucian’s Dialogues. A profound knowledge of Greek literature is revealed by the singular and suggestive short novel I neoplatonici (The Neoplatonists), whose composition was carried out in this period but that would not be published until 1977 after a long period of repression by the official cultural establishment. Falsely attributed to Aristeo di Megara, it is a story both erotic and ironic that enriches Settembrini’s profile: Two young male friends discover the joys of sex, first experimenting amongst themselves and then moving on to heterosexual eros; they both end up marrying, but they do not cease exchanging loving attention with each other up until old age. Useful in shedding some light on the difficult period of imprisonment is the epistolary work Lettere dall’ergastolo (Letters from Prison), published posthumously in 1962, which reveals the solitude and isolation

LUIGI SETTEMBRINI suffered by the writer while at the same time demonstrating his strength of mind. It also allows us to follow the evolution of his political thought, and in particular his developing adhesion to the Piedmont monarchic solution and the acceptance of the Savoy dynasty. In the years following the unification of Italy, Settembrini taught at the University of Naples and befriended Francesco De Sanctis. He also resumed a project from his exile in London and composed Lezioni di letteratura italiana (Lessons on Italian Literature, 1866–1872), a three-volume study in which Italian literary culture is retraced from the perspective of the Risorgimento, and in the light of a very strong opposition between the church and secular power, whose dynamic relationship is analyzed in seven periods characterized by the prevalence of one or the other. Although the argument is carried out with some rigidity, the work is full of interesting aspects and of insightful critical judgments founded on the conviction that literature must be analyzed in its historical context and in its interdisciplinary relationship to the sensitivity revealed with regard to different authors and works, from Dante’s Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321) to Petrarch’s Africa (ca. 1338–1374), from Giovanbattista Marino to Ufo Foscolo. The anticlerical polemic returns in Settembrini’s last work, I dialoghi (The Dialogues, 1909). Already begun in 1859 and left unfinished, Ricordanze della mia vita (Remembrances of My Life) appeared posthumously in 1879–1880 edited by his friend Francesco De Sanctis. Recently Mario Themelly published a corrected edition of the text, distinguishing the first 23 organic chapters of the narrative, which covers the years from Settembrini’s childhood to the revolution of 1848, from the collection of biographic fragments and letters that refer to the period between 1849 and 1860, which are instead collected under the heading Scritti autobiografici (Autobiographical Writings). The author, in a simple but effective prose, retraces the stages of his own existence, which is at the same time a testimony of a collective history, of an entire epoch. The most recent interpretations of Settembrini’s production, which is still partly unpublished, allow us to see him as one of the pre-eminent representatives of the culture of the Risorgimento. They also allow us to reconstruct a more articulated and problematic image of him, even in reference to the evolution of his thought, removing him from the limits of nineteenth-century interpretations, both hagiographic and reductive.

Biography Born in Naples on April 17, 1813. Began his academic career in juridical studies, however he attended the school of Basilio Puoti and later dedicated himself to teaching; taught eloquence in Catanzaro, 1835, moving there with his young wife, Raffaella Luigia Faucitano, with whom he would have two children; his activity as a conspirator led him to prison twice, from 1839 to 1842 in the Neapolitan prison of Santa Maria Apparente, and from 1848 to 1859 in the Vicaria prison; as a result of the failure of the plan to deport political prisoners to the United States, he found refuge in England, where he remained until national unification; beginning in 1861 he taught at the University of Naples, of which he became chancellor; in the years following the unification he collaborated with several periodicals and directed Italia, the publication of the Associazione unitaria costituzionale, a liberal movement that he founded along with his friend De Sanctis and of which he assumed the presidency, and later Lo stivale; appointed senator for life, 1873. Died in Naples on November 3, 1876. RICCIARDA RICORDA Selected Works Memoirs Ricordanze della mia vita, 2 vols., 1879–1880; as Ricordanze della mia vita e Scritti autobiografici, critical edition by Mario Themelly, 1961.

Fiction I neoplatonici, (1849–1859); edited by Raffaele Cantarella, 1977.

Literary and Critical Writing Protesta del popolo delle due Sicilie, 1847. Elogio del marchese Basilio Puoti, 1847. Castelcapuano o la Vicaria di Napoli nel 1850, 1850. Opere di Luciano voltate in italiano, 3 vols., 1861–1862. Lezioni di letteratura italiana, 3 vols., 1866–1872. Il Novellino di Masuccio Salernitano restituito alla sua antica lezione, 1874. Scritti vari di letteratura, politica e arte, 2 vols., 1879–1880. Scritti inediti, edited by Francesco Torraca, 1909. Dialoghi, edited by Francesco Torracca, 1909. Opuscoli politici editi e inediti (1847–1851), edited by Mario Themelly, 1969.

Letters Epistolario, 1883; expanded edition by Francesco Torraca, 1894. Lettere dall’ergastolo, edited by Mario Themelly, 1962. Lettere edite e inedite, 1860–1876, edited by Anna Pessina, 1983.

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LUIGI SETTEMBRINI Further Reading Bertacchini, Renato, ‘‘Luigi Settembrini,’’ in Letteratura italiana. I minori, 4, Milan: Mondadori, 1962. Bulferetti, Domenico, ‘‘Settembrini,’’ in Scrittori italiani; con notizie storiche e analisi estetiche, 2, Turin: Paravia, 1925. Catalano, Gabriele, ‘‘Settembrini, ‘martire dei Borboni,’ e oltre,’’ in Il ponte, 34 (1978): 197–215. Gigante, Marcello, Settembrini e l’antico, Naples: Guida, 1977. Lozito, Vincenzo, La vita e le opere di Luigi Settembrini, Livorno: Giusti, 1915.

Omodeo, Adolfo, ‘‘Luigi Settembrini,’’ in Figure e passioni del Risorgimento italiano, Milan: Mondadori, 1945. Pensa, Maria Grazia, ‘‘Settembrini, Luigi,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, 4, Turin: U.T.E.T., 1986. Themelly, Mario, Luigi Settembrini nel centenario della morte: note e proposte per una biografia politica, Naples: Societa` nazionale di scienze, lettere e arti, 1977. Vallone, Aldo, ‘‘Settembrini letterato attraverso testi inediti: Nel centenario della morte,’’ in Accademie e Biblioteche d’Italia, 45 (1977): 23–40.

CARLO SGORLON (1930–) Carlo Sgorlon began his career as a novelist in the late 1960s and immediately enjoyed considerable critical and popular success. Born in Cassacco (Udine), Sgorlon spent his early years in close contact with the rural life of the peasants of Friuli, and this world left a deep mark on his imagination. Indeed, all of his novels reflect a very strong tie to the Friuli region and its language. After an initial concession to the fashion of the 1960s for a literature of neurosis and with fantastic and surrealistic features a` la Dino Buzzati in La poltrona (The Armchair, 1968) and La notte del ragno mannaro (The Night of the Werespider, 1970), Sgorlon soon found his true inspiration in his native Friuli, its history and traditions. Il vento nel vigneto (The Wind in the Vineyard), which offers a remarkably realistic representation of archaic peasant culture, was published in 1973 but written in 1960 in two versions (one in Italian and one in the Friulan vernacular)—which in turn had been previously published as Prime di sere (Before Nightfall, 1971). In this novel, Sgorlon clearly defines the pivotal principles of his existential philosophy: Refusing the anthropocentrism and individualism of modern society, he proposes a ‘‘biocentric’’ vision, which asserts the centrality of life rather than that of man. Human beings are temporary and transient, nature is eternal. To overcome temporality, each individual should not only return to the original symbiosis and unity with others and nature, but also reevaluate myths and archetypes, which are the sole constant and enduring aspects of human existence. Therefore, in his fiction, Sgorlon seeks narrations 1750

that endorse archetypal values and concepts, and he often tells collective stories, that is, stories of the individual harmoniously rejoining the group. In some novels, such as Il trono di legno (The Wooden Throne, 1973) and Gli dei torneranno (The Gods Will Return, 1977), the protagonist, in seeking his origins, comes to understand the importance of the oral transmission of myths and legends of the rural culture to which he belongs, and dedicates his life to recollect and revive their magical aura. For Sgorlon, Friuli is the land of myth and atemporality, a space of perfect harmony between man and nature. Yet, this world is constantly threatened by either the greed of technological progress, or the changes of the modern world, as he shows in some other novels, starting with La carrozza di rame (The Copper Carriage, 1979). In La conchiglia di Anataj (The Anataj Shell, 1983), Sgorlon tells of the epic journey of the many Friulans who migrated to Siberia to work on the construction of the first Trans-Siberian railway. In L’armata dei fiumi perduti (Army of the Lost Rivers, 1985), one of his most compelling works, he recounts the Jewish persecution during World War II and the collision of two peoples, the Friulans and the Cossacks, through the myths of an Italian small town and its protagonist, Marta. In L’ultima valle (The Last Valley, 1987), Sgorlon retells the legendary construction of the dam in Vajont and the subsequent catastrophe that destroyed the towns of Erto, Casso, and Longarone. He addresses tragic historical events in La foiba grande (The Large Foiba, 1992), on the destiny of the Istrian population in the years 1939–1947,

CARLO SGORLON and in La malga di Sıˆr (Sıˆr’s Malga, 1997), on the massacre of Porzuˆs, where in 1945 a Communist partisan brigade murdered another partisan group, the brigade Osoppo. After the fictional biographies of the seventeenthcentury preacher Marco d’Aviano in Marco d’Europa (Marco of Europe, 1993), and of the fourteenth-century Franciscan friar Odorico da Pordenone in Il filo di seta (The Silk Thread, 1999), Sgorlon released three novels: La tredicesima notte (The Thirteenth Night, 2001), the story of a mysterious woman who has close connections with nature; Il uomo di Praga (The Man from Prague, 2003), an enigmatic stranger purchases all the land in a Friulian town to prevent its exploitation by a local businessman; and Le sorelle Boreali (The Borealis Sisters, 2004), the story of five Russian girls who inherit a villa in the Veneto from their greatgrandmother. In this last novel, Sgorlon addresses some of the most acute social problems (prostitution, mafia, and illegal immigration), but he endows the girls with an ancestral and sacral will to resist the corruptions of modern society. They confront the evil of the world almost untouched, rescued by an ancient education that has an order and a mental structure that transcend the temporality of human life.

La luna color ametista, 1972. Il trono di legno, 1973, as The Wooden Throne, translated by Jessica Bright, 1988. Il vento nel vigneto, 1973. La stanchezza di Mose`, 1974. Regina di Saba, 1975. Gli dei torneranno, 1977. La carrozza di rame, 1979. La fuga di Istaar, 1979. La contrada, 1981. La conchiglia di Anataj, 1983. L’armata dei fiumi perduti, 1985; as Army of the Lost Rivers, translated by Jessica Bright, 1998. I sette veli, 1986. Il quarto re mago, 1986. L’ultima valle, 1987. Il calde´ras, 1988. Racconti della terra di Canaan, 1989. La fontana di Lorena, 1990. La tribu`, 1990. La foiba grande, 1992. Marco d’Europa, 1993; republished as Il taumaturgo e l’imperatore, 2003. Il guaritore, 1993. Il regno dell’uomo, 1994. Il costruttore, 1995. La malga di Sıˆr, 1997. Il processo di Tolosa, 1998. Il filo di seta, 1999. La tredicesima notte, 2001. L’uomo di Praga, 2003. Le sorelle boreali, 2004.

Play Le parole sulla sabbia (radiodrama), 1971. Gli sposi d’Atene, with Licio Damiani, 1990.

Biography Born in Cassacco (Udine), on 26 July 1930. Attended high school in Udine. Entered the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa with a scholarship, 1948. Graduated with a degree in German literature, 1953, with a thesis on Franz Kafka; further studies in Mu¨nich, 1953. Since 1960, secondary school teacher of Italian literature in Udine; married Edda Agarinis, 1961. Awarded several prizes, including the Campiello for Il trono di legno (1973) and for La conchiglia di Anataj (1983); the Strega for L’armata dei fiumi perduti, 1985; the Nonino Risit d’aur for Il calde`ras, 1989; the R. Brignetti— Isola d’Elba for La malga di Sıˆr, 1997; the Fregene and Frontino for La tredicesima notte, 2001. Lives in Udine. BARBARA GARBIN Selected Works Fiction La poltrona, 1968. La notte del ragno mannaro, 1970. Prime di sere, 1971.

Further Reading Aliberti, Carmelo, La narrativa di Carlo Sgorlon, Foggia: Bastogi, 2003. Caronia, Sabino, ‘‘La conchiglia di Sgorlon: una identita` narrativa,’’ in Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea, 6, no. 14 (1985): 201–214. Damiani, Roberto, Carlo Sgorlon narratore, Rome: Gremese, 1978. Di Biase, Carmine, ‘‘L’eta` dei sogni e degli eroi in Carlo Sgorlon,’’ in Studium, 83, no. 6 (1987): 938–941. Dorigo, Ermes, ‘‘La ragnatela del solipsismo: una lettura della narrativa di Carlo Sgorlon,’’ in Problemi, 78 (1987): 64–76. Magni, Stefano, ‘‘Carlo Sgorlon: Ideologia e guerra,’’ in Images litte´raires de la socie´te´ contemporaine, edited by Alain Sarrabayrouse, Grenoble: Universite´ Stendhal, 2005. Maier, Bruno, Carlo Sgorlon, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1985. Toscani, Claudio, Invito alla lettura di Carlo Sgorlon, Milan: Mursia, 1994. Vanelli, Paolo, ‘‘Miti e archetipi nella narrativa di Carlo Sgorlon,’’ in Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/ Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 7, no. 2 (1994): 37–49.

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SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY

SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY Despite their great differences, Dante and Petrarch viewed the early poetic tradition in Italy in a very similar manner, at least with regard to the chronological precedence of the poets of the Sicilian School. In his unfinished treatise on language and prosody, De vulgari eloquentia, Dante gives precedence to the Sicilian vernacular that ‘‘seems to hold itself in higher regard than any other, first because all poetry written by Italians is called ‘Sicilian,’ and then because we do indeed find that many learned natives of that island have written serious poetry’’ (1.12.2). Dante praises certain of these poets for their intrinsic excellence: Guido delle Colonne, Giacomo da Lentini, and Rinaldo d’Aquino. So, too, Petrarch, in the Trionfo d’Amore (Triumph of Love), presents those souls conquered by love, and in the long procession the Sicilian poets are seen as bringing up the rear: ‘‘...e i Ciciliani, / che fur gia` primi e quivi eran da sezzo’’ (IV, 35–36: and the Sicilians, who once were first and now come last). For all intents and purposes the Italian literary tradition begins with the group of poets who came together at the imperial court of Frederick II Hohenstaufen in Sicily in the first half of the thirteenth century, and more specifically during the 30-year period from 1220 to 1250. The cosmopolitan court was the locus for cultural and intellectual exchange, and prime among these activities was the invention of a distinctly Italian tradition of lyric poetry that involved the talents of some 15 to 20 individuals, most of whom had some function in Frederick’s court and related bureaucracy. Meager biographical information exists for most of these poets, and thus the most we know about them is their name, possible provenance, and perhaps some idea of their role at court. For example, Guido delle Colonne (ca. 1210–after 1287) was probably a judge from Messina; Pier de la Vigna (1190–1249) was the emperor’s secretary and logothete; and Giacomo da Lentini (early thirteenth) was a notary. In addition to composing poetry in the vernacular, Frederick was well-versed in a number of languages and disciplines and wrote a treatise on falconry, De arte venandi cum avibus (ca. 1229). The poetry of this school adhered in the main to the established models of poetic excellence provided by the troubadours, and to a lesser degree 1752

to those of the trouve`res and minnesingers. The principal theme of the Sicilian poets was love— fin’amors (noble or courtly love)—and their presentation of this phenomenon, its nature and effects and its actors—the lady and the lover—follows conventional patterns. Following the troubadour models, the Sicilian poets recreated in their lyrics the feudal setting with many of the elements of fin’amors: the lady as midons (my lord) and the poet-lover as her faithful vassal, hoping to win her affection and some token of her love (the guiderdone or reward). The Sicilian poets also followed the models provided by the Occitanic metrical forms: canso ! canzone; tenso ! tenzone (although in Italy the sonnet served as the basic strophic unit), and descort ! discordo. It was probably Giacomo da Lentini who invented the sonnet, which would become one of the most important lyric forms in Western literature. Giacomo was the most prolific and inventive poet of the Scuola Poetica Siciliana, and it is probably because of his prominence that Dante designates him as the ‘‘leader’’ of this school (Purgatorio 24). Another mark of his prominence is that his poems are the first ones in the fundamental Vatican codex 3793; in fact, the first poem in this manuscript is Giacomo’s canzone ‘‘Madonna, dir vo voglio’’ (My lady, I wish to tell you), which is also singled out as a prime example of the illustrious style by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia. Giacomo’s large poetic corpus consists of 14 canzoni, one discordo, and at least 25 sonnets. In his canzone ‘‘Meravigliosamente’’ (Wondrously), Giacomo employs the traditional motifs of the servitude of love, the necessity of secrecy in matters of love, the importance of the heart as the affective center of love, and the poet as artist. In another canzone, ‘‘Amor non vole ch’io clami’’ (Love does not want me to call), Giacomo voices his apparent dissatisfaction with the limitations posed by slavish imitation of troubadour models. Here he proclaims his double desire to avoid stylized amorous conventions and to shape his poetry along more innovative lines. This canzone may be a sort of poetic declaration of independence, in which Giacomo grapples with the problem of poetic virtuosity and originality and states that he will not continue to

SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY write in a traditional, conventional manner. This canzone may even forecast the invention of the sonnet, as a poetic form invented in protest against the artistically dominating influence of the troubadour tradition. Giacomo’s sonnets contain many references to natural phenomena and often develop along lines that reflect syllogistic argumentation. He engaged in two tenzoni, both concerned with the nature of love; one with the Abbot of Tivoli, and the other ‘‘Sollicitando un poco meo savere’’ (Entreating My Mind a Little), initiated by Jacopo Mostacci, features a response by Pier de la Vigna entitled ‘‘Pero` ch’amore non si po` vedere’’ (Because Love Cannot Be Seen) and the concluding contribution by Giacomo, ‘‘Amor e` un desio che ven da core’’ (Love Is a Desire That Comes from the Heart), in which he presents the classic statement on the role of the eyes in the generation of love. In his poetry, Rinaldo d’Aquino (early thirteenth), who may have been falconer at Frederick’s court and brother to Thomas Aquinas, reiterates several familiar themes: the extraordinary beauty of the woman, the exhilarating effects of love, the joy of love-service, and the hoped-for reward for such service. In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante cites one of Rinaldo’s poems, ‘‘Per fin’amore vao sı` allegramente’’ (For Noble Love I Go so Joyously) for its excellence. In the more popular canzonetta, ‘‘Gia` mai non mi conforto’’ (I Will Never Be Comforted), the female protagonist relates her intense grief, which is occasioned by the departure of her lover on the Crusades. Guido delle Colonne (a judge at the imperial court) was praised for his lyrics by Dante in De vulgari eloquentia. One of his canzoni, ‘‘Amor, che longiamente m’hai menato’’ (Love, who for a long time has led me) treats the common theme of the tyranny of the god of Love and the paradoxical nature of the amorous state. Another canzone, ‘‘Ancor che l’aigua per lo foco lassi’’ (Although Water Because of Fire Loses), incorporates scientific images and metaphors, thus adding a naturalistic dimension to the description of the phenomenology of love. The poetry of Pier della Vigna (the emperor’s faithful chancellor and counselor) is generally traditional in terms of subject matter, but contains a number of examples of elaborate wordplay and rhetorical flourishes, as, for example, in his canzone ‘‘Amando con fin core e con speranza’’ (Loving with a Noble Heart and with Hope). The lyrics of Giacomino Pugliese (early thirteenth) demonstrate great stylistic range, moving from the tragic, courtly canzone ‘‘Morte, perche` m’a`i fatta sı` gran

guerra’’ (Death, Why Have You Waged so Great a War on Me) to canzonette (e.g., ‘‘Isplendiente’’: Radiant), contrasti (e.g., ‘‘Donna, di voi mi lamento’’: Lady, I Complain of You), and a discordo (‘‘Donna, per vostro amore’’: Lady, for Your Love), all of which are in decidedly more popular registers and alternately celebrate and lament a vibrant, sensual passion. Other noteworthy Sicilian poets include Jacopo d’Aquino, Odo delle Colonne, Jacopo Mostacci, Mazzeo di Ricco, and the emperor Frederick II and his illegitimate son Enzo. With one notable exception, all the poetry of the Sicilian School is found in codices that were assembled and transcribed by Tuscan scribes (Vatican Lat. 3793, Laurentian Rediano 9, and Banco Rari 217 in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence), and therefore, the texts of these lyrics have been transmitted through the ages in ‘‘Tuscanized’’ versions of the original Sicilian dialect. In this regard, the exception is the canzone by Stefano Protonotaro, ‘‘Pir meu cori allegrari’’ (To Gladden My Heart), of particular interest and importance because it provides the only extensive example of the language used by the Sicilian poets. This canzone is found in the manuscript known as the carte Barbieri (Archiginnasio, Bologna), compiled by the sixteenth-century philologist Giovanni Maria Barbieri and eventually published by Girolamo Tiraboschi in his Dell’origine della poesia rimata (1790). In addition to its great linguistic importance, this poem by Stefano as well as his other canzone ‘‘Assai mi placeria’’ (It Would Please Me Greatly) contain interesting animal images that recall the use of bestiary material by the troubadour Rigaut de Berbezilh. Imitation of earlier Occitan metrical techniques (e.g., coblas capfinidas, coblas capcaudadas, and, to a lesser degree, coblas unissonans) was common among the Sicilian poets, who, in addition, embraced many of the major themes and images of the troubadours and incorporated certain of their poetic devices (the convention of using a code name—senhal—for the lady to keep her identity a secret and the authorial ‘‘signing’’ of the poem). The amorous lexicon of the Sicilian School also derived in large part from Occitan, as the following words demonstrate: intendanza (love), amanza (love), drudo (lover), sollazzo (pleasure), gioia (joy), and coraggio (courage and heart). Despite these extensive borrowings, the Sicilian poets succeeded in showing their artistic independence in other ways, particularly in the invention of the sonnet and in the forging of new images and concepts. Imitation and innovation are thus the complementary principles 1753

SICILIAN SCHOOL OF POETRY that characterize the poetic production of the Sicilian School. Alongside the generally refined and noble courtly lyrics of the Sicilian poets more popular rhymers were composing their lyrics. Cielo d’Alcamo (thirteenth century), for example, is well-known for his contrasto, ‘‘Rosa fresca aulentissima’’ (Most Fragrant Fresh Rose), which is a dialogue, in the pastourelle mode, between a woman of the bourgeoisie and an itinerant minstrel. In this lively poem, we find a wonderful mixture of courtly and rustic language that contributes to the realistic nature of their dialogue. In addition to the psychological interplay between the two interlocutors, the contrasto brilliantly demonstrates how language can either convey or mask inner feelings. Another more popular poet often loosely associated with the Sicilian School is Compagnetto da Prato (thirteenth century), whose two poems treat topics that are usually defined as chansons de femmes (women’s songs). One of these—‘‘Per lo marito c’ho rio’’ (Because of My Evil Husband)—is representative of the genre known as the malmaritata, in which the female protagonist complains about her harsh and cruel husband and determines that, to counter this abuse, she will take a lover. Compagnetto’s other canzonetta, ‘‘L’amor fa una donna amare’’ (Love Make a Woman Fall in Love), deals with the unconventional theme of the desperate woman who takes the initiative in pursuing a lover. Neither Cielo nor Compagnetto should, however, be viewed as belonging to the Sicilian School, because of their decidedly ‘‘uncourtly’’ subject matter. The Italian lyric was born in Sicily, and these poets thus hold a place of prime importance in the history of Italian literature. Not only were they the first to use the Italian vernacular in an organized fashion as the medium for artistic expression, but through the innovative imitation of earlier models, they succeeded in compiling a rich and influential body of literature and also invented the sonnet, which would in time become the poetic vehicle

par excellence in Italy and throughout the rest of Europe. CHRISTOPHER KLEINHENZ Further Reading Abulafia, David, Frederick II: A Medieval Emperor, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Apollonio, Mario, Uomini e forme nella cultura italiana delle origini, Florence: Sansoni, 1934. Barbieri, Giovanni Maria, Dell’origine della poesia rimata, edited by Girolamo Tiraboschi, Modena: Societa` tipografica, 1790. Bertoni, Giulio, Il Duecento, Milan: Vallardi, 1910. Biadene, Leandro, ‘‘Morfologia del sonetto nei secoli XIII–XIV,’’ in Studi di filologia romanza, 4 (1889): 1–234. Cesareo, Giovanni A., Le origini della poesia lirica e la poesia siciliana sotto gli Svevi, Palermo: Sandron, 1924. De Bartholomaeis, Vincenzo, Primordi della lirica d’arte in Italia, Turin: S.E.I., 1943. Debenedetti, Santorre, ‘‘Le canzoni di Stefano Protonotaro,’’ in Studi romanzi, 22 (1932): 5–68. Dronke, Peter, The Medieval Lyric, New York: Harper & Row, 1968; 2nd ed., 1977. Folena, Gianfranco, ‘‘Cultura e poesia dei siciliani,’’ in Le origini e il Duecento, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Garzanti, 1965. Kleinhenz, Christopher, The Early Italian Sonnet: The First Century (1220–1321), Lecce: Milella, 1986. Mattalia, Daniele, ‘‘La scuola siciliana,’’ in I minori, Milan: Marzorati, 1961. Pasquini, Emilio, and Antonio Enzo Quaglio, Le origini e la scuola siciliana, Bari: Laterza, 1971. Poeti del Duecento, 2 vols., edited by Gianfranco Contini, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Poeti della prima scuola, edited by Maurizio Vitale, Milan: Paideia, 1951. The Poetry of the Sicilian School, edited and translated by Frede Jensen, New York: Garland, 1986. Le rime della scuola siciliana, 2 vols., edited by Bruno Panvini, Florence: Olschki, 1962–1964. Rivers, Elias L., ‘‘Certain Formal Characteristics of the Primitive Love Sonnet,’’ in Speculum, 33 (1958): 42–55. Valency, Maurice J., In Praise of Love. An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance, New York: Macmillan, 1958.

THE SILENT DUCHESS See La lunga vita di Marianna Ucria (Work by Dacia Maraini) 1754

IGNAZIO SILONE (SECONDINO TRANQUILLI)

IGNAZIO SILONE (SECONDINO TRANQUILLI) (1900–1978) Ignazio Silone became a writer at the age of 30, following a decade of political activism, and published Fontamara, his first novel, in 1933 after his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party. The traumatic event of his youth was the 1915 earthquake that killed his mother and caused nearly 30,000 deaths in Abruzzo. The vicissitudes that he faced in its aftermath sharpened his critical awareness and shaped his political views. A conflicted adolescent, he overcame the trials of his formative years with the help of Don Luigi Orione, a Franciscan priest elevated to sainthood in 2004. Although he studied in various seminaries, in 1918 Silone became a Socialist, but the transition was not an easy one. Writing to Don Orione, he confessed his inner turmoil: He yearned for the absolute but feared the abyss; he could neither believe nor disbelieve. An ‘‘incoherent materialist,’’ he was terrified when musing upon the tenets of Marxism regarding the ultimate end of man and society. Even as he committed to the Socialist cause, Silone never entirely embraced the ideology of Marxism. He discusses his choices and their consequences in Uscita di sicurezza (Emergency Exit, 1963), and writes about the positive impact of the 15 years he spent as an exile in Switzerland in his Memoriale dal carcere svizzero (Memoirs from the Swiss Penitentiary, 1979). In Switzerland, he states, he became a writer but, most important, he became a man. All of Silone’s works preceding his return to Italy at the end of World War II were first published in German translation, his third novel with changes required by the Swiss Military Command. When Fontamara appeared, in the wake of the Italian celebrations of the decennale, the first decade of Fascism, Silone’s talent was immediately recognized, and the English version that followed, in 1934, won him international acclaim. Readers valued his epic rendering of the plight of the Italian cafoni (Southern Italian peasants), and noted the striking contrast between the human condition that he represents and the regime’s official portrait of Italy. Like most of Silone’s works, Fontamara is rooted in the reality of rural Abruzzo, a region in

which the Christian spirituality of the origins, ancestral traditions, and pagan superstitions are constantly at play shaping the value system and conditioning thought and behavior. Silone, however, is not a regional writer. If, like Giovanni Verga, he too penetrates his regional reality to its core, unlike the Sicilian writer, he interprets it from the perspective of the European intellectual whose engagement precludes the possibility of naturalistic objectivism. He is also immune to the pervasive influence of his coregional Gabriele D’Annunzio, rejecting his rhetorical virtuosity in favor of simplicity, in its highest sense, and authenticity. Silone claimed that in his narrative he simply ‘‘weaved’’ one line after the other, like a weaver, but his simplicity is only apparent. His originality, and his power, stem from his ability to load basic narrative patterns with such a semantic charge that they effectively render the immediate, realistic dimension, while also summoning archetypal echoes that convey universal meanings. On the surface, Silone’s view of human life can also appear to be rather simplistic, but he goes countercurrent at his own risk. A need for intellectual honesty compelled him to profess his ‘‘simple truths’’ knowing full well that this brought him closer to Alessandro Manzoni than to his contemporaries. Thus, he rejected determinism, questioned the assumptions of existentialism, and countered the seduction of nihilism with his faith in the possibilities of the individual to withstand the challenges of history. Having fully apprehended the tragic vision, he transcended it, convinced that righteous individuals, who do not yield to egocentric drives, can deny tragedy its final victory. Profoundly inspired by the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice, Silone, like Georges Roualt, his favorite painter, ‘‘paints’’ with equal passion the semblance of the Christ as it reveals itself in the lives of ordinary people. Berardo, the hero of Fontamara; Cristina in Pane e vino (Bread and Wine, 1936); Luigi Murica in the same novel and in the play Ed egli si nascose (And He Hid Himself, 1944); Pietro Spina in Il seme sotto la neve (The Seed beneath the Snow, 1941); 1755

IGNAZIO SILONE (SECONDINO TRANQUILLI) Luca Sabatini in Il segreto di Luca (The Secret of Luca, 1956) are some of the compelling characters that the author elevates to figurae Christi. Silone’s fortune as a writer is largely due to his novels. Widely translated, they received much attention, even as critics diverged in their views causing their long debate to become the caso Silone. But Silone was more than a novelist. Among his early works are: Il viaggio a Parigi (Mr. Aristotle, 1934), a collection of short stories in which he explores various narrative techniques, Il fascismo: origini e sviluppo (Fascism: Its Origins and Development, 1934), an essay on Fascism, and La scuola dei dittatori (The School for Dictators, 1938), a satire against all types of mystification that shows how the concept of sapientia has degenerated, and with what consequences. This work has been compared to Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Il principe (The Prince, 1532) insofar as it deals with the science of politics, human nature, and society. But, while Machiavelli looks to the prince to counter the power of theocracy in his era, Silone mocks the ‘‘prince’’ and places his faith on the Socratic individual whose quest for authenticity alone can advance the cause of freedom. This very quest is also Silone’s own, resulting in his remarkable ability to read the signs of history. Distinguishing idea from ideology and theory from practice, Silone eschewed all formulas and prevailing tendencies, equally intent in foretelling the future while retrieving the lessons of the past. In this spirit he wrote the many articles that appeared in leading international journals such as Twice a Year, Partisan Review, Terzo fronte, Tempo presente, and La Fiera Letteraria, as well as his essay on The Living Thoughts of Mazzini (1939). His last play, L’avventura di un povero cristiano (The Story of a Humble Christian, 1968) also draws upon the lesson of history to dramatize the dialectical tension that results when the lessons of Christianity collide with the practical needs of the church as an institution. Silone’s quest for authenticity is a constant in his work, be it expressed through subject matter, as it is in this play, or through warnings about the corruption of form. Like Dante’s Inferno XXVI, where Ulysses pronounces his ‘‘brief exhortation’’ to compel his men to share his will, or the Manzonian episode in I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840– 1842) where the lawyer uses rhetoric and Latin to intimidate Renzo, Silone’s works deal with the issue of fraudulent language usage. But his concern is both greater and more pervasive. In Fontamara, he denounces this practice and its tragic impact on the lives of the Fontamarans. In Il seme sotto la 1756

neve, he contrasts the authentic, simple words that Pietro Spina teaches Infante with the Fascist practice of the mistica statale (state mystique) in hybrid speeches where fraudulent Italian is interspersed with German words. Silone’s postwar novels as well reiterate the point from other perspectives. In Una manciata di more (A Handful of Blackberries, 1952), the symbolic power of language and the provisional nature of symbols come under scrutiny, to show how Communism has replaced Fascism in the practice of oppression, mystification, and indoctrination. Silone builds his argument by incremental units, widening the scope as he probes deeper and deeper, to achieve a lasting impact. His narrative benefits from his natural inclination to irony, used both for comic relief and to point to the emergency exit in the menacing darkness. Initially, the political aspects of Silone’s works and his passionate tone caused different, often divergent reactions. Abroad, there was widespread enthusiasm; in Italy, where political factions and stylistic considerations play a greater role, critics were predominantly negative. Catholics censured Silone as a Communist, while Communists considered him a renegade and rejected his critique of their ideology in Una manciata di more. In time, however, most begun to reassess their positions, and when Silone published Il segreto di Luca, he finally received the acclaim he deserved. A tendency toward a more objective reading followed. However, after 2000, allegations of Silone’s cooperation with the Fascist police caused a return to the initial tendency of blending facts with fiction and of interpreting some of the early works from a purely autobiographical perspective. By general consensus, Fontamara, Pane e vino and Il segreto di Luca are Silone’s best novels even as La volpe e le camelie (The Fox and the Camellias, 1960), and Severina (1981), left unfinished and completed by his wife Darina, are his lesser works. Also important, to know the man and his thought, is to consider the affinity he found with the ideas of Gandhi, Simone Weil, Gramsci, and Ragaz, as well as the influence of Joachim of Flora and St. Francis of Assisi. His opus, including his uncollected writings and his correspondence now preserves his intellectual legacy—a legacy that is rooted in lifelong commitment to the Socialist cause. On 24 March 1956, Silone wrote in Unita` socialista that a Socialist writer betrays his mission if he does not represent human suffering and does not voice the sense of what is true and just as it germinates in those who are humiliated and oppressed. For these Silone struggled, as a political activist and as a writer.

IGNAZIO SILONE (SECONDINO TRANQUILLI)

Biography

Selected Works

Born Secondo Tranquilli in Pescina dei Marsi (L’Aquila), 1 May 1900, the son of Paolo Tranquilli, a small landowner, and Marianna Delli Quadri. Studied in state and religious schools, 1912–1918, but never attended university. First articles on social injustice, 1919; director of L’Avanguardia, joined Antonio Gramsci in the foundation of the Partito Comunista d’Italia (Pcd’I), participated in the Third Congress of the Communist International, where he met Lenin, joined editorial board of Il Lavoratore, and began relationship with Gabriella Seidenfeld, 1921; moved to Berlin and was arrested in Madrid for anti-Fascist activities; adopted the pseudonym Silone after Poppedius Silo, 1923; arrested in Barcelona, 1924; escaped to France, where he edited La Riscossa and headed Pcd’I’s press and propaganda office, 1925; joined Camilla Ravera in the underground, 1926; attended the senior convent of the Comintern in Moscow, 1927; participated in the International Antifascist Congress in Berlin and sought asylum in Switzerland, 1929; expelled from the Communist Party, 1931; liaison with Aline Valangin, 1931–1933; cofounder and director of information, 1932–1934; cofounder and director of the Nuove edizioni di Capolago, 1936; secretary of Socialist foreign office, 1939; worked with the Partisan Review Fund for European Writers and Artists, 1940; jailed in Switzerland, wrote Memoriale dal carcere svizzero, 1942; director of L’Avvenire dei Lavoratori; returned to Italy 12 October; married Darina Elizabeth Laracy, December 20, 1944; director of the Avanti!, 1945–1946; elected as a PSIUP representative to the Constitutional Assembly, 1946; founder and director of Europa socialista, 1946–1947; secretary of the new Partito Socialista Unitario, 1949–1950; played major role at the Berlin Congress for Cultural Freedom and became director of the Associazione italiana per la liberta` della cultura, 1950; cofounder and codirector of Tempo presente with Nicola Chiaromonte, 1956; participated in the direction of the International Association for Cultural Freedom, 1967–1970; received honors and literary prizes including: the Marzotto prize for Uscita di sicurezza, 1965; the Moretti and Campiello for L’avventura di un povero cristiano, 1968; the Doctor of Letters degree honoris causa from Yale University, 1966; and the French Le´gion d’honneur, 1973; was named Cavaliere di Gran Croce dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana, 1974. Died in Geneve (Switzerland), 22 August 1978.

Collections

MARIA NICOLAI PAYNTER

Ignazio Silone: Romanzi e saggi, 2 vols., introduced and edited by Bruno Falcetto, Milan: Mondadori, 1998– 1999. The Abruzzo Trilogy, translated by Eric Mosbacher and revised by Darina Silone, South Royalton, VT: Steerforth Italia, 2000.

Novels Fontamara, 1933; first edition in German as Fontamara, translated by Nettie Sutro, 1933; final Italian revised edition, 1958; as Fontamara, translated by Michael Warf, 1934; as Fontamara, translated by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, 1934; as Fontamara, translated by Erich Mosbacher, 1984. Pane e vino, 1936; first edition in German as Broth und Wein, translated by Adolf Saager, 1936; as Bread and Wine translated by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, 1936; final revised edition as Vino e pane, 1955; as Bread and Wine, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1962. Il seme sotto la neve, 1941; first edition in German as Der Samen unterm Schnee, translated by W. J. Guggenheim, 1941; as The Seed beneath the Snow, translated by Francis Frenaye, 1942; first Italian edition, 1942; final Italian revised edition, 1961. Una manciata di more, 1952; as A Handful of Blackberries, translated by Darina Silone, 1953. Il segreto di Luca, 1956; as The Secret of Luca, translated by Darina Silone, 1958. La volpe e le camelie, 1960; as The Fox and the Camellias, translated by Eric Mosbacher, 1961. Severina, edited and coauthored by Darina Silone, 1981.

Short Stories ‘‘Il viaggio a Parigi,’’ 1934; first edition in German as Die Reise nach Paris, translated by Nettie Sutro, 1934; as Mr. Aristotle, translated by Samuel Putnam, 1935; as The Journey to Paris, translated by John Lehman, 1936; first Italian edition, translated from German by Silvia Caruso and Karin Wiedemeyer Francesconi, 1993.

Plays Ed egli si nascose, 1944; first edition in German as Und er verbarg sich, translated by Lotte Thiessing, 1944; as And He Hid Himself, translated by Darina Silone, 1946; first Italian edition, 1944; final Italian revised edition, 1966; critical edition by Benedetta Pierfederici, 2000. L’avventura di un povero cristiano, 1968; as The Story of a Humble Christian, translated by William Weaver, 1971.

Nonfiction Il fascismo: origini e sviluppo, 1934; first edition in German as Der Fascismus: seine Entstehung und seine Entwicklung, translated by Gritta Baerlocher, 1934; translated from German by Maria Gabriella Canonico, 1992. La scuola dei dittatori, 1938; first edition in German as Die Schule der Diktatoren, translated by Rudolf Jacob Humm as Jacob Huber, 1938; as The School for Dictators, translated by David and Mosbacher, 1938; revised Italian edition, 1962. The Living Thoughts of Mazzini, 1939; Italian edition as Nuovo incontro con Giuseppe Mazzini, 1978.

1757

IGNAZIO SILONE (SECONDINO TRANQUILLI) Uscita di sicurezza, 1963; as Emergency Exit, translated by Harvey Ferguson, 1968. Bread Alone? The 1964 Keynote Lectures, translated by Darina Silone, 1964. Memoriale dal carcere svizzero, edited by Lorenzo Mercuri, 1979. Gli articoli di ‘‘information’’ (Zurigo 1932–1934), edited by Maria Antonietta Morettini Bura, translated by Lelio Cremonte, 1994.

Further Reading Aragno, Piero, Il romanzo di Silone, Ravenna: Longo, 1975. Arnone, Vincenzo, Ignazio Silone, Rome: Ateneo, 1980. Biocca, Dario, Silone: la doppia vita di un italiano, Milan: Rizzoli, 2005. Biocca, Dario, and Mauro Canali, L’informatore: Silone, i comunisti e la polizia, Milan and Trento: Luni Editrice, 2000. Crossman, Richard (editor), The God that Failed, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949. Cucchiarelli, Paolo, and Raffaello Petruzzelli (editors), La scuola della liberta`, Rome: Ragionamenti, 1980. D’Eramo, Luce, L’opera di Ignazio Silone, Milan: Mondadori, 1971. Howe, Irving, ‘‘Malraux, Silone, Koestler: The Twentieth Century,’’ in Politics and the Novel, New York: Horizon, 1957. Krieger, Murray, ‘‘Ignazio Silone: The Failure of the Secular Christ,’’ in The Tragic Vision:Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation, Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. Leake, Elizabeth, The Reinvention of Ignazio Silone, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Martelli, Sebastiano, and Salvatore Di Pasqua, Guida alla lettura di Silone, Milan: Mondadori, 1988. Paynter, Maria Nicolai, Simbolismo e ironia nella narrativa di Silone, L’Aquila: Regione Abruzzo, 1992. Paynter, Maria Nicolai, Ignazio Silone: Beyond the Tragic Vision, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Rigobello, Giuliana, Ignazio Silone: Introduzione e guida allo studio dell’opera siloniana. Storia e antologia della critica, Florence: Le Monnier, 1983.

FONTAMARA, 1933 Novel by Ignazio Silone

Silone began to write Fontamara in 1929 in a hospital near Ascona, and completed it in 1930 save for minor revisions made in 1931. In a letter dated Solstizio d’inverno, 1931 Silone noted that there 1758

were variants in the novel’s extant copies, and preannounced that the true and final version would appear after the fall of Fascism. With the 1953 Mondadori edition, he achieved his intended purpose revealing, by virtue of many stylistic changes, his unique, new approach to realism. One of the classics of twentieth-century world literature, Fontamara is the first Italian novel in which the voice of the cafoni (poor peasants and farmers) is central. Three members of a Fontamaran family narrate the story from the points of view of a man, a woman, and their young son; their words bear witness to the ‘‘facts’’ as they took place in Fontamara. The story encompasses a process of awareness wherein the cafoni gradually abandon their pessimistic, egocentric vision, and come to recognize the rights and responsibilities that are inherent in their human condition. Set in Silone’s native region of Abruzzo in a period when the Fascist regime is actively divulging a glorious image of Italy, the novel depicts a strikingly different reality. In rural areas, historically poor and oppressed people have further lost freedom and rights, and even the church, after the Laterano Pact of 1929, sides with Benito Mussolini’s regime. Berardo, the novel’s revolutionary hero, is initially the only cafone who will risk his own safety to stem the tide. He acts impulsively, to no avail. Only when the local impresario diverts the course of the brook, stealing their water, do the other cafoni react, causing the Fascist wrath to descend upon the village. In the aftermath, Berardo, yielding to selfish motives, leaves for Rome. He intends to earn money so that he can marry Elvira. Arrested during a raid, he recognizes his jail mate as an anti-Fascist activist. Initially refractory to the man’s political arguments, when he learns about Elvira’s sudden death, Berardo takes his place, proclaiming to be the solito sconosciuto—the enemy of the state who is to be put to death. By his own free will, he thus becomes the first cafone to die for the sake of others and a figura Christi. Upon learning of his death, the nearly illiterate Fontamarans decide to write their own newspaper. The first headline is a call to action: Hanno ammazzato Berardo Viola (They have killed Berardo Viola), followed by the question Che fare? (What are we to do?). The question carries political, literary, and biblical echoes and reveals their new awareness. The answer, the novel suggests, is in Berardo’s example. The impact of Silone’s materialistic realism initially compelled readers to hail Fontamara as a great political novel. At a distance from the historical

RENATO SIMONI period represented, and following Silone’s revisions that elevated the story to a higher plane, the focus shifts to its moral value. Carlo Lizzani’s 1977 film by the same title captures both aspects. But beyond the political and moral dimensions, the novel’s fundamental e´lan is libertarian and its core concern is the spiritual dimension of human life: the very concern Silone expresses in all his works and in his 1950 speech, Habeas animam! MARIA NICOLAI PAYNTER Editions First edition: as Fontamara, translated into German by Nettie Sutro, Zurich: Verlag Oprecht und Helbling, 1933. First Italian edition: Fontamara, Zurich and Paris: Nuove Edizioni Italiane, 1933; revised edition: Milan: Mondadori, 1958. Translation: Fontamara, translated by Michael Warf, New York: Smith & Haas, 1934; Fontamara, translated by Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher, London: Methuen, 1934; third and final revised edition, Milan: Mondadori, 1953; translated by Harvey Ferguson II, New York: Atheneum, 1960; translated by Erich Mosbacher, New York: New American Library, 1984.

Further Reading Aliberti, Carmelo, Come leggere Fontamara di Ignazio Silone, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Biondi, Liliana (editor), Letture siloniane. Fontamara: la critica italiana ed estera, L’Aquila: Amministrazione Provinciale, 1993. Bolognese, Giuseppe, ‘‘Silone’s Modern Quest and Primordial Discovery,’’ in Perspectives in Contemporary Literature, 8, no. 9 (1992): 106–114. Di Gregorio, Francesco (editor), Letture siloniane. Fontamara: le fonti, L’Aquila: Amministrazione Provinciale, 1996. Falcetto, Bruno, ‘‘Fontamara: genesi e storia editoriale,’’ in Ignazio Silone: Romanzi e Saggi, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Hanne, Michael, ‘‘Silone’s Fontamara: Polyvalence and Power,’’ in MLN, 107, no. 1 (1992): 132–159. Letture siloniane: Fontamara, L’Aquila: Amministrazione Provinciale, 1991. McLaughlin, Martin, ‘‘Imagery in the Two Versions of Silone’s Fontamara,’’ in ATI Journal, 47 (1986): 32–42. Paynter, Maria Nicolai, Ignazio Silone: Beyond the Tragic Vision, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Rawson, Judy, ‘‘‘Che fare?’: Silone and the Russian ‘Chto Delat?’ Tradition,’’ in Modern Language Review, 76, no. 3 (1981): 556–565. Riddei, Volfango, Ignazio Silone e Fontamara, Rome: Ciranna, 1973. Spezzani, Pietro, Fontamara di Silone: Grammatica e retorica del discorso popolare, Padua: Liviana, 1979.

RENATO SIMONI (1875–1952) Critic, author, and theater director whose work encompasses librettos for opera and ballet, essays and film scripts, Renato Simoni is a point of reference for the postwar world of Italian theater. He was the last Romantic interpreter of the rivista (review), an innovator in ‘‘dialectical’’ theater, and a forerunner of Italian theater direction in his respect for the script and voice scores. His work as a journalist was the practical springboard for his career in the theater. His first assignments were for the periodicals of his native city, Verona (L’Adige, L’Arena). He then went to Milan to work for the important national newspapers, Il Tempo and La Lettura, where he served as director from 1906 to 1924. His pieces for L’illustrazione italiana appeared under the pseudonym Nobilomo Vidal, a name taken from the character

in Serenissima by Venetian playwright Giacinto Gallina (1852–1897). He also wrote for Il corriere della sera uninterruptedly from 1903 until 1952, beginning his stint as the paper’s theater critic in 1914. Almost half a century of reviews are enlivened by his passion for ‘‘his own’’ writers of the Veneto region, Carlo Goldoni especially, but also Il Ruzzante, Luigi Selvatico, and Gallina. The clarity and immediacy of Simoni’s language, his suggestive way of calling attention to the plot, and his honest caution when faced with something new, make him the ‘‘pope’’ of Italian dramatic criticism in the twentieth century. At the age of 27 he embarked on a brief but intense course of dramatic writing, which he interrupted when he became a critic for Il corriere della sera. La Vedova (The Widow, premiere 1902), 1759

RENATO SIMONI written in a polished Veneto dialect and translated into Neapolitan, Milanese and Italian by the company of Dina Galli, Emma Gramatica, and Tatiana Pavlova, dramatizes the story of a young widow taken into the house of her parents-in-law who had opposed her marriage. The sentimental plot, which pits the widow against the jealous old mother and, too late, with her gentle father-in-law, recalls Antonio Fogazzaro, Giuseppe Giacosa, and Girolamo Rovetta. But the play also displays new elements, in particular Simoni’s portrayal of a province closed in on itself, the dry and allusive dialogues, and the use of Veneto dialect. Tramonto (Sunset, premiere 1902) and Carlo Gozzi (premie`re 1902)—both staged by Ferruccio Benini, the second translated into Italian by the company of Flavio Ando`, Irma Gramatica, Maria Melato—did not enjoy the same success. Tramonto, returning to the same, arid, provincial environment, concerns a proud and powerful mayor, surrounded by material and moral decadence, who cracks when he discovers his wife has betrayed him. Having lost his sense of self-sufficiency, the mayor, overwhelmed by a feeling of irremediable solitude, kills himself. His death is an explicit homage to Ibsen’s tragic motif—the devastating return of the past. The actor Cesco Baseggio made the drama into a success in 1928. Simoni offered another portrait of solitude in Carlo Gozzi. The Venetian playwright is shown defending himself against the ghosts of his emotional and artistic life, who continuously betray him. Paradoxically, it is the ghost Truffaldino Sacchi who will finally decree his defeat. After writing a play in Italian, Il matrimonio di Casanova (The Wedding of Casanova, premiere 1910), with Ugo Ojetti, Simoni brings his career as a ‘‘dialect’’ author to a close with Congedo (The Discharge, premiere 1910), staged by Benini and at once translated into Roman dialect by Ettore Petrolini and into Italian by Armando Falconi and Irma Gramatica. The play focuses on Benigno Gugole and his children, who live irresponsibly. Their wife and mother, Letizia, desperate to prevent a bad marriage for her son, reveals that he is afflicted with cancer. This unexpected ‘‘discharge’’ brings the family back to reality. Before his death Simoni collected these plays in a single volume (1949). He also was known as an author of musical rivistas (Turlupineide, premie`re 1908; a model of its kind); librettos for opera (Turandot, premie`re 1926; with Giuseppe Adami, for Giacomo Puccini; and others for Umberto Giordano and Lodovico Rocca), for operetta and ballet. Simoni’s third ‘‘soul’’ was theater directing, an art in which he attempted late in life and in which he 1760

was substantially self-taught. But he left his directorial mark, creating unforgettable productions that were sensitive to the European vogue epitomized by Jacques Copeau and Max Reinhardt. His staging and mise en place in the campielli (small squares) of the Venice of his beloved Goldoni are exemplary: Il Ventaglio (The Fan, 1936), Le Baruffe chiozzotte (The Quarrels of Chioggia, 1936), Il Bugiardo (The Liar, 1937), Il Campiello (1939); I Rusteghi (The Peasants, 1947), and L’impresario delle Smirne (The Producer from Smyrna, 1947) received enthusiastic notices. Simoni also worked occasionally in cinema. He wrote the screenplay for Illusione (Illusion, 1916) by Guglielmo Zorzi, collaborated in the production of his own La Vedova (1939), directed by Goffredo Alessandrini, with Ruggero Ruggeri, Emma Gramatica, and Isa Pola, and helped with the film script of Se non son matti non li vogliamo (If They’re Not Mad, We Don’t Want Them, 1942), directed by Arnaldo Fratelli, from the comedy by Gino Rocca. He left his immensely rich theater collection to the Museum of La Scala in Milan. The collection of more than 40,000 volumes includes magazines, paintings, and statuettes on theatrical subjects, actors’ costumes, maschera stock characters, puppets, leaflets, and autographs. To the generation of Italian postwar metteurs en sce`ne he bequeathed a lesson in how to be modern.

Biography Born in Verona on September 5, 1875, interrupted his studies after high school to become a theater reporter for L’Adige (1894), then for L’Arena; at the same time began work for humorous periodicals under the pseudonym of Turno. Moved to Milan as a theater critic for Tempo (1899); joined the Il corriere della sera (1903) where he replaced Giovanni Pozza as drama critic (1914), a post held until his death. Managed La Tradotta, a paper for the soldiers of the Third Army, creating a Soldiers’ Theater for them, 1917; worked for the Guerin Meschino, Il corriere dei piccoli, La Domenica del Corriere, Lettura, where he was director (1906–1924); and L’Illustrazione italiana (under the pseudonym of Nobilomo Vidal). Made famous speeches on Gustavo Modena, Girolamo Rovetta, Berto Barbarani, Luigi Selvatico, Ermete Zacconi, and Luigi Pirandello, some of which are published. Made academician of Italy (1939) and president of the Milan Press Circle. Died in Milan on July 5, 1952. ROBERTO CUPPONE

LEONARDO SINISGALLI Selected Works Collections Le commedie, Turin: Societa` Editrice Torinese, 1949. Trent’anni di cronaca drammatica, 5 vols., Turin: Societa` Editrice Torinese, 1952–1960.

Uomini e cose di ieri: discorsi e celebrazioni, 1952. Il collegio. La Delizia, 1952. Cronache di un grande Teatro: il Teatro Manzoni di Milano, 1952 (with P. Mezzanotte e R. Calzini). Le fantasie del Nobilomo Vidal, 1953.

Further Reading

Plays La Vedova (produced 1902), 1949. Tramonto (produced 1902), 1949. Carlo Gozzi (produced 1903), 1949. Il matrimonio di Casanova (produced 1910), 1949. Congedo (produced 1910), 1949.

Essays Vicino e lontano, 1920. Gli assenti, 1920. Ritratti, 1923. Per la inaugurazione del Teatro A. Gandusio, 1923 (with R. Contu). Cronache della ribalta (1914–1922), 1927. Teatro di ieri, 1938. Piccola storia d’Arlecchino e C., 1946.

Meldolesi, Claudio, Fondamenti del teatro italiano. La generazione dei registi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Palmieri, Eugenio Ferdinando, ‘‘Omaggio a Simoni,’’ in Sipario, 78 (1952): 43–61. Pavolini, Corrado, Lo spettacolo teatrale, Siena: Ticci, 1944. Puppa, Paolo, Teatro e spettacolo nel secondo Novecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Raboni, Giovanni (editor), Renato Simoni a teatro: cronache drammatiche 1915–1952 scelte da Giovanni Raboni, Verona: Gemma Editco, 2002. Renato Simoni, monographic issue of Il Dramma, 163–164 (1952). Zannoni, Ugo, Renato Simoni. La vita e le opere, Verona: Vita Veronese, 1952.

LEONARDO SINISGALLI (1908–1981) Leonardo Sinisgalli was an electronic engineer and industrialist, a graphic designer, poet, and prose writer. His activities and production lie at the boundaries between the arts and sciences, between mathematical calculation and fantastic invention. Like Carlo Emilio Gadda, Sinisgalli is a significant example of the non opposition and the possibility of interaction between the two cultures as defined by Charles Percy Snow, showing, as had Giacomo Leopardi before him, the common identity of poetry and science, diversified only by their different strategies and linguistic organization. The most important and best known of his prose writing, Furor mathematicus (Mathematical Passion, 1944) is central to this idea in its urge to give sense and reciprocity to the two big formal languages of poetry and mathematics. The work also presented the fundamental direction of his poetry, defined as a mathematical formula, in the letter to the critic Gianfranco Contini included in the volume. In it, Sinisgalli proposed his ‘‘idea di poesia come un quantum, una forza, una estrema animazione esprimibile mediante un numero complesso (a+ bj) dove a e b sono quantita` reali e j il

famoso operatore immaginario.... il simbolo j e` un’alterazione provocata dal linguaggio sulla realta`, del rapporto cioe` tra cosa ed immagine’’ (idea of poetry as a quantum, a force, an extreme excitement which can be expressed by a complex number (a+bj) where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are real quantities and ‘j’ is the famous imaginary operator....the symbol ‘j’ is an alteration provoked by language on reality, of the relationship that is between things and image). Poetry would then be only a vector and not a creation of reality. This explains why Sinisgalli, arriving in Rome from his native Lucania, in the Roman Hermetic environment of Giuseppe Ungaretti (who was his first admirer, with Emilio Cecchi and Giuseppe De Robertis), Salvatore Quasimodo, Libero De Libero, and Alfonso Gatto was, from his very first work, 18 poesie (18 Poems, 1936), characterized by a specificity of language that differentiated him clearly from other Hermetic poets. ‘‘Quella freschezza e petrosita` dei versi, con irruzioni quasi proasticche’’ (That freshness and stony quality of his poetry with almost prose-like eruptions) identified by Ungaretti appears to be the most singular characteristic of the poet-scientist 1761

LEONARDO SINISGALLI (‘‘Foggia fontane e chiese,’’ 1934). Even in his poetic writing, as he admits in his Furor mathematicus, Sinisgalli pursued the ‘‘l’eresia di Leonardo’’ (Leonardo heresy), giving ‘‘il primato del fenomeno sull’anima, della mente ordinatrice sulle sofferenze del cuore’’ (supremacy to the phenomenon over the soul, to the organizing mind over the sufferings of the heart). His poetry is in fact a poetry of forces rather than forms, of directions of poetic energy, of space, time, and solid objects, in which the nominal dryness, the precision of the lyrical syntax tend toward the constructive essentiality a forma d’uovo or in the form of an egg. When in the preface to Vidi le muse (I Saw the Muses, 1943), a collection that gathers together key texts from 18 Poesie and Campi elisi (Elysian Fields, 1939), Contini speaks of ‘‘eloquenza invertita’’ (inverted eloquence) and ‘‘di trasloco dalla metafisica alla fisica’’ (of movement from the metaphysical to the physical), he catches perfectly the prevailing realistic dimension that cognitive lucidity and constructive rigor direct toward a progressive paring away of the self-referential value of the words; strongly reducing the margins of their possible semantic and evocative ambiguity: a method dynamically opposed to the aesthetic ideology of Hermeticism. Even in those lyrics where memory of childhood and the Lucanian landscape dominate, as in ‘‘Lucania e Paese’’ (Lucania and Countryside), and of his mother, as in ‘‘Nessuno mi consola’’ (No One Can Comfort Me) and ‘‘Epigrafe’’ (Epigraph), collected in I nuovi campi elisi (The New Elysian Fields, 1947); or of his father, as in the poems ‘‘Le lunghe sere’’ (The Long Evenings) and ‘‘Padre mio’’ (My Father) in the collection La vigna vecchia (The Old Vineyard, 1952), there is no slipping into elegy, and memory excludes the story telling function. The world of Lucania, against a background of a primitive pessimism, appears in its rural ordinariness, and in its peasant realities of simplicity, poverty, and roughness. Poetry is to be found in the bitter and lovingly ironic but sometimes mocking recovery in startling cinematic frames or in compositions of a descriptive-narrative type that presents things, objects, animals, and people in a search for Lucanian ancestral presences. The progressive reduction of the poetic discourse to words denoting objects in an objective humilitas so different from that of Eugenio Montale, who always intimates a meaning beyond, the prevalence of nouns, the parsimony of figural elements, the abandonment of the contained rhythmic movements of 1762

the most successful attempts—combined, after strict selection, in Poesie di ieri (Poems of Yesterday, 1966)—seems to lead to the prose of L’immobilita` dello scriba (The Immobility of the Scribe, 1960) ‘‘che non ha bisogno di far chiasso per trovare la verita`’’ as ‘‘il poeta non deve edificare, deve soltanto allineare’’ (who has no need to make a fuss to find the truth as the poet does not have to build, he has only to align). The poetry that is born at the point of attritionloss ‘‘come un essere anfibio tra essere e non essere’’ (as an amphibian being between being and nonbeing), according to G. W. Leibniz’s definition, quoted by Sinisgalli in Furor mathematicus, seems to reduce his space even more, by further stiffening the terms of an absolute antieloquence. The versification progressively dries up, assumes epigrammatic and gnomic tones, followed closely by a distrust of the lyrical word, which already surfaces in Quadernetto alla polvere (Notebook to Dust, 1948), La musa decrepita (The Decrepit Muse, 1959), Cineraccio (Ash Grey, 1961), then collected in L’eta` della luna (The Age of the Moon, 1962). It is then further consolidated in Il passero e il lebbroso (The Sparrow and the Leper, 1970), becoming stronger in Mosche in bottiglia (Flies in a Bottle, 1975) or in Dimenticatoio (Oblivion, 1978), where, as Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo shows in his Poeti italiani del Novecento (1978), the reduction of the real to minimal proportions reaches outcomes of ‘‘quasi stremata gratuita`’’ (almost extreme gratuity). Well aware of the results of his poetic production, Sinisgalli admits in the foreword to Dimenticatoio that ‘‘il cedimento della materia espressiva’’ (the fading of expressive material), and ‘‘lo stato di inerzia’’ (the state of inertia) could give the impression that these compositions are leftovers, or scraps of larger compositions that have been abandoned or avoided. He declares, however: ‘‘Queste poesie non sono nate ricche per diventare povere; la riduzione ai minimi termini non e` avvenuta sulla pagina ma nella mia coscienza. Non si tratta di cernita progressiva (alla maniera di Eratostene); io ho accettato questo limite come un’umiliazione’’ (These poems were not born rich to become poor; the reduction to minimal terms did not happen on the page but in my consciousness. It is not a question of progressive selection (in the manner of Eratosthenes); I have accepted this limit as a humiliation). This seems to echo the line in ‘‘Commiato’’ (Farewell) in La musa decrepita: ‘‘O Musa, vecchia musa decrepita, il poeta e` ogni anno piu` cieco’’ (O Muse, old decrepit muse, the poet goes blinder every year).

LEONARDO SINISGALLI In the words of Giorgio Ba`rberi Squarotti, the poetic production of Sinisgalli’s last phase reaches a language that is dried up and emptied, reduced to pure naming and objective listing, expressing the ‘‘reattivo di un rifiuto di partecipazione, di compromesso con le situazioni, i fatti, gli oggetti, accolti nel verso’’ (the reaction of a refusal to participate, to compromise with the situations, facts, and objects gathered in the poetry), making reality prevail over the poet’s love (Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, 1961). But the rationalistic limit, already present in his early poetic experiments and cause of a progressive decline in lyrical power in the poetry, is transformed on the other hand in the prose works into its exact opposite. The clarity and moral statements, which hang heavy in the poetry, are the conditio sine qua non of Sinisgalli’s outstanding prose writings that are criss-crossed with irrational flashes and tangential flights with respect to the logical-mathematical rigor. In the structural lack of symmetry and verbal brilliance of Furor mathematicus can be found those metaphoric transgressions, musical rhythms, and mechanisms of linguistic-syntactic transformation that are the business of poetry. Furor mathematicus contains thoughts, reflections, apologies, and autobiographical passages linked to mathematics, physics, geometry, architecture, painting, crafts, and to the world of signs that challenges rules: for example the writings on Leonardo da Vinci or ‘‘Promedades Architecturales’’ (Architectural Walks) or the 10 short dialogues of L’indovino (The Soothsayer, 1946), a kind of ironic and knowing Leopardian Operette Morali, or Horror vacui (Horror of Emptiness, 1945). The short passage ‘‘Addio’’ (Farewell), which closes Horror vacui, provides an emblematic example: ‘‘Putrida buccia di sangue e` la tua cresta superba, vecchio gallo spennato, spauracchio sulla gruccia. Pallida e` l’erba che un giorno fu energica d’ira, il sole e` atro, brulla la luna. Un pulcino ha imparato il tuo verso e lo ripete, se pur sbaglia. L’universo per te e` un caos di paglia’’ (Your magnificent comb is putrid bark of blood, you old plucked cock, scarecrow on the crutch. The grass is pale that once was throbbing with anger, the sun is black, the moon barren. A little chick has learned your song and repeats it, even if he makes a mistake. The universe for you is a chaos of straw). Here are the signs of lyrical heightening, in the rhythmic movements of the sentence, in the metaphorical play, in the climaxes, onomatopoeia, assonance, and even rhyme (sbaglia—paglia), caught with extreme nonchalance in the clause, according

to the dictates of the oldest rhetoric. Evident demonstration that ecstasy experienced ‘‘by virtue of mathematics’’ is transferred above all in a page of prose, to which Sinisgalli has entrusted his finest gifts as a writer.

Biography Born in Montemurro (Potenza), 9 March 1908, son of Vito and Carmela Lacorazza. Enrolls in the University of Rome in 1925, and graduates in electronic and industrial engineering. In 1927, publishes privately his first collection of poetry, Cuore. In 1929, refuses Enrico Fermi’s invitation to become part of the Institute of Physics in Via Panisperma, preferring to follow ‘‘pittori e poeti’’ (‘‘painters and poets’’). 1931, moves to Milan, and subsequently lives between Rome and Milan. His encounter with Giuseppe Ungaretti, who appreciates the poetic talent of the young engineer, is crucial. He works in advertising for architectural and interior design magazines. Meets Giorgia de Cousandier, translator, poet, and narrator, who becomes his companion, bears him a son, and marries him in 1969. Vidi le muse (1943) and Furor Mathematicus (1944) attest to his originality as both poet and prose writer. In 1949, he produces two didactic-scientific documentaries, Lezione di geometria and Millesimo di millimetre, which won prizes at the Venice Film Festival. In 1953, Sinisgalli founds the periodical Civilta` delle machine, which he directs until 1958. In 1961, he is awarded (with Tristan Tzara) the Etna-Taormina prize; in 1966, the Fuggi prize for Poesie di ieri; in 1971, the Gubbio-Inghirami prize for poetry; in 1975, the Viareggio prize for Mosche in bottigia and the Basilicata prize for Un disegno di Scipione e altri racconti; in 1978, the Vallambrosa prize for Dimenticatoio. Died on 31 January 1981 of a heart attack in Rome during the opening of his first important graphics exhibition. GRAZIELLA CORSINOVI See also: Hermeticism Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Cuore,’’ 1927. ‘‘18 Poesie,’’ 1936. ‘‘Campi Elisi,’’ 1939. ‘‘Vidi le Muse,’’ 1943; as I Saw the Muses, edited and translated by Rina Ferrarelli, 1997. ‘‘I nuovi campi elisi,’’ 1947.

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LEONARDO SINISGALLI ‘‘Quadernetto alla polvere’’ (poetry and prose), 1948. ‘‘La vigna vecchia,’’ 1952. ‘‘Banchetti’’ (poetry and prose), 1956. ‘‘Tu sarai poeta,’’ 1957. ‘‘La musa decrepita,’’ 1959. ‘‘Cineraccio,’’ 1961. ‘‘L’eta` della luna’’ (poetry and prose), 1962. ‘‘Poesie di ieri,’’ 1966. ‘‘Il passero e il lebbroso,’’ 1970. ‘‘L’ellisse: Poesie 1932–1972),’’ edited by Giuseppe Pontiggia, 1974; as The Ellipse, translated by W. S. Di Piero, 1982. ‘‘Mosche in bottiglia,’’ 1975. ‘‘Dimenticatoio,’’ 1978. ‘‘Imitazioni dall’Antologia Palatina,’’ 1980. ‘‘Infinitesimi,’’ 2001.

Prose Furor mathematicus, 1944. Horror vacui, 1945. Fiori pari, fiori dispari, 1945. L’indovino, 1946. Belliboschi, 1948. Quadernetto 1954–1955, 1955; as Quadernetto americano, edited by Giuseppe Appella, 1997. L’immobilita` dello scriba, 1960. Prose di memoria e di invenzione, 1964. I martedı` colorati, 1967; as I martedı` colorati: Un poeta alle mostre, 2002. Archimede, i tuoi lumi, i tuoi lemmi!, 1968; as Calcoli e fandonie, 1970. La rosa di Gerico, 1969. Il tempietto, 1972. Un disegno di Scipione ed altri racconti, 1975. L’odor moro, 1990. Intorno alla figura del poeta, 1994. Furor geometricus, 2001. Civilta` della cronaca.‘‘Il Mattino’’(1976–1979). Antologia degli articoli, 2005. Gallo reale, 2005.

Translations Charles Baudelaire, Il riso, il comico, la caricatura, 1945. Julien Green, Passeggero sulla terra, 1959.

Documentary Films Lezioni di geometria, 1946. Millesimo di millimetro, 1946.

Further Reading Appella, Giuseppe (editor), Le muse irrequiete di Leonardo Sinisgalli, Rome: De Luca, 1988. Appella, Giuseppe, Leonardo Sinisgalli tra poesia e scienza, Rome: Edizioni della Cometa, 1992.

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Aymone, Renato, Poeti ermetici meridionali, Salerno: Palladio, 1981. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1961. Bongarzoni, Oretta, Introduction to Furor Mathematicus, Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1992. Borri, Giancarlo, Ritratto di Leonardo Sinisgalli. Il poeta ingegnere e ‘‘La civilta` delle machine,’’ Turin: Daniela Piazza Editore, 1990. Caserta, Giorgio, Storia della letteratura lucana, Venosa: Edizioni Osanna, 1993. Cecchi, Emilio, Di giorno in giorno. Note di letteratura italiana contemporanea (1945–1954), Milan: Garzanti, 1954. Contini, Gianfranco, Ultimi esercizi ed elzeviri, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Scrittori del Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1940. De Robertis, Giuseppe, Altro Novecento, Florence: Le Monnier, 1963. Di Silvestro, Antonio, ‘‘La parola di Sinisgalli tra poesia e critica d’arte,’’ in Rivista di Letteratura Italiana, 1–2 (2005): 391–394. Faggella, Marino, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Potenza: Edizioni Ermes, 1996. Fortini, Franco, I poeti del Novecento, Bari: Laterza, 1988. Getto, Giovanni, I poeti del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1977. Lupo, Giuseppe, Sinisgalli e la cultura utopica degli anni Trenta, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1996. Lupo, Giuseppe (editor), Sinisgalli a Milano. Poesia, pittura, architettura e industria dagli anni trenta agli anni sessanta, Novara: Interlinea, 2002. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Ottieri, Alessandra, I numeri, le parole. Sul furor mathematicus di Leonardo Sinisgalli, Milan: Franco Angeli, 2002. Piccioni, Leone, Le antinomie di Leonardo Sinisgalli, Potenza: Ermes, 1998. Pontiggia, Giuseppe, ‘‘Le muse di Sinisgalli,’’ in Leonardo Sinisgalli, Ellisse (1932–1972), Milan: Mondadori, 1974. Pontiggia, Giuseppe, Il giardino delle Esperidi, Milan: Adelphi, 1984. Snow, Charles Percy, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, La letteratura italiana. Saggi e ritratti, Milan: Spirali, 1997. Tedeschi, Giuseppe (editor), Leonardo Sinisgalli, Infinitesimi, Rome: Edizioni della Cometa, 2001. Ungaretti, Giuseppe, ‘‘Foggia fontane e chiese,’’ in La gazzetta del popolo, Turin: 20 February 1934. Vitelli, Franco, ‘‘Sinisgalli. Storia di Via Velasca e dintorni,’’ in Critica letteraria, 4 (2002): 795–830.

` TAPER SCIPIO SLA

SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR See Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Work by Luigi Pirandello)

` TAPER (1888–1915) SCIPIO SLA One of the most innovative young writers to emerge in the early twentieth century, Scipio Sla`taper is an exponent of Vocianesimo, a literary movement fostered by the Florentine journal La Voce that rejected traditional genres in favor of a lyrical narrative style given to fragmented expression and self-exploration. As a Triestine, the author is also considered one of the founding fathers of a vibrant regional literature that reflects the complex character of the area. Sla`taper was born and raised in Trieste when it was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His ethnicity and cultural background are representative of the area’s diversity: a mixed Slavic and Italian heritage, and multilingualism. His irredentism drew Sla`taper to embrace the ideals of liberty, justice, and social welfare espoused by the nineteenth-century patriots of Italian unification; his education introduced him to the classics; his intellectual curiosity led him to the modern writers and thinkers of Northern Europe. In his short lifetime, Sla`taper wrote tirelessly and read extensively. His most important artistic creation, Il mio Carso (My Carso, 1912), is often described as a ‘‘lyric prose’’ or a life-book, rather than a novel. Sla`taper moved to Italy as a romantic but equally self-centered and tormented 20-year-old student. In Florence, then the country’s intellectual hub, he befriended the contributors to La Voce, whose antiacademic, antibourgeois, and antipositivistic spirit as well as sociopolitical commitment appealed to the intellectually restless Triestine. His first contribution was a series of polemical articles on the provincial atmosphere and institutions of his native city:

The five Lettere triestine (Triestine Letters) were published in early 1909. Sla`taper’s thesis is that while the Italian identity of Trieste should be reinforced, culturally if not politically, its citizens should also foster a mutually respectful accord between the area’s Slavic and Italian populations. While the tone of the Lettere triestine is sometimes strident, the message of cultural development and ethnic harmony would remain a fixed point in Sla`taper’s hopes and plans for his city. In 1910, he published more than 20 pieces in La Voce, ranging from political articles on irredentism to literary and cultural reviews. After an early fascination with Gabriele D’Annunzio’s lavish writing and Nietzschean vitalism, Sla`taper moves on to Friedrich Hebbel, whose concept of a hero-poet supplants that of the superman as a role model. He is the first to introduce the unfamiliar German playwright to Italian readers through his translation of Hebbel’s diaries. Sla`taper’s evolving personality as well as his aesthetic aspirations emerge vividly in his extensive epistolary. The rhetorical excess, mystical euphoria, sensuality, and narcissism found in his earlier letters form the experimental backdrop for Sla`taper’s refinement of his role as a ‘‘poet.’’ But this youthful romantic surfeit proved superficial and deficient after he received the news of the suicide of his beloved correspondent Gioietta (Anna Pulitzer), in 1910. Sla`taper’s soul-searching following her death led to a new vision of literature and the composition of Il mio Carso. Sla`taper’s quest for integrity coincided with the emphasis on literary self-analysis fostered 1765

` TAPER SCIPIO SLA by the contributors to La Voce. This narrative model is part confession, part examination of conscience, part autobiography. Stylistically the vociani favored fragmentation, tied to an impressionistic mode of rendering sensations subjectively, suggesting the complexities of perception. Il mio Carso borrows this fragmentary technique. The text is constructed of a series of tableaux held together in a tenuous chronological sequence. Here Sla`taper is influenced by Henri Bergson’s theories on the relativity or subjectivity of time, which is a continuous flow that includes past and present, thereby being inseparable from memory and consciousness. Time and states of being are alternating and changing in the narrative, brought together by the unifying force of one narrative consciousness. The protagonist is called Pennadoro (golden pen), which is the Italian translation of slataper. Pennadoro’s awareness connects a disparate series of anecdotes that are semiautobiographical in origin. Il mio Carso borrows from a multiplicity of genres: from lyric poetry, diary, and autobiography, to thesis novel, allegory, documentary, and bildungsroman. Its language is equally original, mixing dialect, neologisms, lyricism, realism, eloquence, and terseness. The whole is, however, astonishingly harmonious and modern. Il mio Carso’s three sections correspond to different life experiences, ranging from a free childhood in nature, through integration into the city, to the encounter with death and mystery that leads to the concluding message of humanitarianism. In some ways, the first section is Dannunzian, full of a hedonistic, even inebriated sense of communion with the rugged but beautiful nature of the Carso region. This part of the novel describes a boy’s experience of natural forces, explored irrationally through the senses. A wholesome, almost innocent, eroticism is depicted. The protagonist’s sensual, unquestioned oneness with nature suggests an age of irresponsibility and egotism, unfettered by societal impositions. Part Two, the ’’Calata’’ (Descent), highlights Pennadoro’s meeting with other men within the city, resulting in the re-evaluation of nature, now transformed into an emblem of physical and moral health. In Part Three, in the return to the Carso, the land symbolizes life. Like the savage, arid, windbeaten Carso, the protagonist must go on and allow growth, indicating the ethical imperative to master the pain of living. And while Pennadoro is Sla`taper’s alter ego, he is also the spokesman for generations of Triestini, embodying a collective experience of alterity, psychological maturation, regional insecurity, and cross-cultural identity. 1766

The shifting role of nature in the text parallels Sla`taper’s artistic and personal evolution: from an egocentric pantheism to the moral force the Carso symbolizes at the end. Sla`taper’s self-acknowledged ‘‘barbarism’’ is to be interpreted in Vichian terms of reinvigoration and uncivilized primitivism that give birth to poetry. Pennadoro’s first descent into the city signals his attempt to separate from nature and, thus, childhood, by becoming a responsible citizen. Trieste, especially the port, represents work, progress, and community: It is a space of dialogue and discovered brotherhood. But it is also a place of conflict and alienation. In the protagonist’s final descent into the city of labor, responsibility and suffering become a moral choice. Stylistically, this shift is rendered with a switch in subject pronouns from the narrating ‘‘I’’ to an all-inclusive ‘‘we.’’ The concluding sentence of Il mio Carso, ‘‘Noi vogliamo amare e lavorare’’ (We wish to love and work), encompasses a message Sla`taper acts upon for the rest of his life. Art, for the maturing Sla`taper, is a means of affirming life and an expression of shared humanity, action, and communication. For inspiration, he turns to Ibsen and Tolstoy, because they are adamant critics of a society that victimizes the common man through technology, industrialization, and alienation. In a letter written in 1911, he states: ‘‘ho capito che la mia vita ha per compito di conciliare amore e opera, uomini e arte, sacerdote e poeta’’ (I understand that it is my life’s task to reconcile love and work, men and art, priest and poet) (Alle tre amiche, 1958). As a literary critic, Sla`taper rejects idealism in favor of a personal version of historicism. For him, history creates society, society man, and man art in an indissoluble union. The poet is the man; and he approaches the artist as a total person, intrigued by the moral figure of the individual as well as by the work produced. Fascinated by journals, diaries, and epistolaries, Sla`taper the translator and critic prefers such intimate genres, believing that they are the most honest transmission of a writer’s spiritual world. In his Ibsen (1916), completed in the trenches, he captures the human figure of the Norwegian dramatist during the creative moment in order to discover his sources of inspiration. This approach results in a series of ‘‘portraits of the artist,’’ understood ethically and psychologically more than aesthetically. In Sla`taper’s hands, the critical essay becomes an ideological and biographical instrument. In his final year, Sla`taper is obsessed with history, considering it the best mirror of man’s actions. Caught up in the events of his day, the Triestine moves to Rome,

` TAPER SCIPIO SLA and turns his pen toward political articles, writing ceaselessly on the necessity of war and Italian intervention. At the front, he and his friends Giani and Carlo Stu´parich planned an eventual return to their city to begin the work of cultural renewal and education once the conflict is over. He focused on Trieste to the very end.

Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, edited by Giani Stu´parich, 6 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1950–1958.

Fiction Il mio Carso, 1912; revised and edited by Giani Stu´parich, 1958; as My Carso, translated by Gerald Moore, 2002.

Critical Writing

Biography Born in Trieste 14 July 1888 into a middle-class family. Publishes his first articles and reviews in the local Socialist paper Il Lavoratore from 1905 to 1907. Involved in his city’s irredentist and Socialist circles while continuing his lyceum studies. Moves to Florence in 1908 to attend the Istituto di Studi Superiori, becoming active in the new cultural journal La Voce. Writes juvenile fiction and directs the children’s magazine, Giornalino della Domenica, to support himself during his university years. Undergoes a personal crisis in 1910 due to overwork and the suicide of his beloved ‘‘Gioietta.’’ Spends two months in 1911 in the Carso, followed by an extensive tour of Central Europe. From December 1911 to March 1912 as La Voce’s secretary, he temporarily takes over for Giuseppe Prezzolini, the editor. His novel Il mio Carso is published by La Voce’s press in May 1912, but he gradually cuts ties with the journal, now directed by Giovanni Papini. In December 1912, graduates with a thesis on Ibsen that he would rework into a critical study published in 1916. After teaching in Hamburg for two years (1913–1914), Sla`taper and his bride, Luisa (Gigetta) Carniel, move to Rome in late 1914, where he is active in the interventionist cause and writes political articles, notably for Il Resto del Carlino. When Italy entered the war in 1915, Sla`taper and his friends, the Stuparich brothers, enlisted in the army. Died on 3 December 1915, shot while on patrol on Mt. Podgora. His only child, Scipio Secondo, is born on 26 December 1915. Sla`taper is awarded the silver medal for military valor posthumously. FIORA A. BASSANESE See also: Trieste

Ibsen, 1916. Scritti politici, 1925. Scritti letterari e critici, 1956.

Other Epistolario, 1950. Appunti e note di diario, 1953. Alle tre amiche, edited by Giani Stu´parich, 1958.

Translation Friedrich Hebbel, Diario, 1912.

Further Reading Abruzzese, Alberto, Svevo, Slataper e Michelstaedter, Venice: Marsilio, 1979. Arosio, Sandra, Scrittori di frontiera: Scipio Slataper, Giani e Carlo Stu´parich, Milan: Guerini, 1996. Baroni, Giorgio, Trieste e ‘‘La Voce,’’ Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1975. Campailla, Sergio, L’agnizione tragica: Studi sulla cultura di Slataper, Bologna: Patron, 1976. Cary, Joseph, A Ghost in Trieste, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Coda, Elena, ‘‘The Representation of the Metropolis in Scipio Slataper’s Il mio Carso,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 117, no. 1 (2002): 153–173. Luperini, Romano, Scipio Slataper, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1977. Luperini, Romano, L’allegoria del moderno, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1990. Luzi, Alfredo, ‘‘Il mio Carso’’: Struttura, sintassi e symboli, Rome: Bulzoni, 1972. Maier, Bruno, Scrittori triestini del Novecento, Trieste: LINT, 1968. Marchetti, G., La Voce. Ambiente, opere, protagonisti, Florence: Vallecchi, 1986. Mutterle, Anco Marzio, Scipio Slataper, Milan: Mursia, 1965. Pizzi, Katia, A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste, London & New York: ContinuumSheffield Academic Press, 2001. Premuda, Maria Luisa, ‘‘Scipio Slataper e Trieste,’’ in Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa, Serie 2, 30, nos. 3–4 (1961): 191–256; 61–145. Stu´parich, Giani, Scipio Slataper, Milan: Mondadori, 1950.

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SOCIALISM

THE SMILE OF THE UNKNOWN MARINER See Il Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio (Work by Vincenzo Consolo)

SOCIALISM The word ‘‘socialism’’ was originally used to refer to the followers of the jusnaturalistic school and to the pre-eminence of society over the individual, according to the teachings of the jurist and German philosopher Samuel Pufendorf, author of De iure naturae et gentium (1672). The word took on its contemporary meaning, based on the abolition of private property, in 1827 at the hands of the followers of Robert Owen. The ideal roots of the Socialist movement are recognized, however, in Thomas More’s De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus (1516). Drawing on Plato’s Republic, he describes an ideal society freed of private property and regulated by an ante litteram welfare state. The themes that animate the Socialist movement centuries later are delineated here in farsighted analyses formulated explicitly in terms of class. The work of the great English utopist arrived in Italy thanks to Ortensio Lando (circa 1508–1555), who in 1549 published his translation in Venice with the printing house of Anton Francesco Doni. Lando is also the author of various works inspired by Thomas More, among which the Commentario delle piu` notevoli et mostruose cose d’Italia et d’altri luoghi di lingua aramea in italiano tradotto [. . .] da un anonymo d’Utopia composto (Commentary on the Most Notable and Monstrous Things in Italy and in Other Places of Aramaic Language, Translated into Italian, Composed by an Anonymous Person, 1548), an account of the voyage of a citizen

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of Utopia to Italy, which provides an amusing, polemical portrait of the country. The masterpiece of Italian utopianism came from Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), a Dominican monk and follower of the doctrines of Bernardino Telesio, and the author of the La citta` del Sole (The City of the Sun, 1602). The city is ruled over by the prince priest called Sun, chosen for its knowledge of all of the disciplines, and flanked by a triad of ministers, each assigned specific virtues (Power, Wisdom, and Love). Citizens share goods, work, meals, residences, and even women; clothes are uniform, and gold disparaged. Officials keep watch over the morality of the citizens according to a Platonic model reinterpreted in terms of the severe optic of the Counter-Reformation. The utopian society, traditionally nostalgic for the Golden Age, is renewed by Campanella’s exaltation of modernity and its conquests. Evanderia is the name, instead, of the ideal city described by Ludovico Zuccolo (1568–1630) in his Dialoghi (Dialogues, 1625); an elected monarchy, it provides for the ample delegation of powers to a Senate of unspecified composition. The people retain important powers over crucial decisions, even while subjected to censorship by officials who exert control over art and public and private life. Social injustices are harshly criticized, but utopia is reduced to a realistic program, that of mitigating social injustices by way of specific regulations, without undermining the pillars of private property.

SOCIALISM Another distinctive figure is Alberto Radicati di Passerano (1698–1737), a Piedmontese count who created a radically anticlerical utopianism. In his Re´cueil de pie`ces curie`uses sur les matie`res les plus interessantes (1736), Christ, called the ‘‘Nazarenus,’’ supports a return to the laws of nature and revindicates equality, democracy, and the co-ownership of goods, a revolutionary doctrine betrayed by the clergy. The egalitarian demands of the Enlightenment (Morelly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, ClaudeAdrien Helve´tius) find voice in the work of the Pisan Filippo Buonarroti (1761–1837), descendent of Michelangelo, a former bookseller with a solid knowledge of utopian literature. Exiled to Corsica for his political activities, he founded the journal L’amico della liberta` italiana; he then moved to revolutionary France, but was imprisoned upon Robespierre’s fall. He thus met Franc¸ois-Noe¨l Babeuf and probably converted him to Communism. Once freed, he together with the French revolutionary plotted the Conspiracy of Equals, directed toward the establishment of a Communist society. The program of the uprising is set out in two works written with Babeuf: Analyse de la doctrine de Babeuf and Re´ponse a` une lettre signe´e M. V. (1796). The discovery of the conspiracy led to a tormented succession of exiles and prison sentences, over the course of which Buonarroti founded the secret societies of the Philadelphians and the Sublime Perfect Masters in Geneva, societies organized according to hierarchical and gradual schemes of initiation. He then wrote his best-known work, La Conspiration pour l’egalite´ de Babeuf (1828), in which the Jacobin arsenal of eighteenth-century Communism, founded on the idea of the conspiracy, is reproposed as an alternative ideology to democratic corporatism. In these same years, the translation of texts of Stirnerian and Proudhonian inspiration inaugurated a significant dialectic between the anarchic movement and Socialism, especially in Tuscany and in Romagna. Socialism as an ideological-political movement was redefined with the expansion of capitalism, which profoundly transformed the structures of production, extirpating the peasants from the countryside and concentrating large masses of workers in the cities. There resulted a process of social mobility that, on the one hand, brought workers to unite in unions and to fight for their rights, and, on the other, stimulated many intellectuals to consider societal reform in new terms. Subsequent to the diffusion of Marxian theories and the foundation of the Italian Socialist Workers’ Party in 1892, which

became the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) in 1895, the doctrine acquired markedly pragmatic connotations, useable in the public sphere. Popular literature also took the lot of the poor to heart. Such fiction ranges from feuilletons of populist inspiration, such as I misteri di Napoli (The Mysteries of Naples, 1880) by Francesco Mastriani, to the naı¨ve social idealism of novels such as Gli ammonitori (The Ones Who Warn, 1904) by Giovanni Cena. But one might also think of the presence of the masses in the Novelle della Pescara (Stories of Pescara, 1902) by Gabriele D’Annunzio; and in I vecchi e I giovani (The Old and the Young, 1909) by Luigi Pirandello. In an era when universal suffrage had yet to come, the Italian Socialist Party bore the mark of the reformist gradualism of Filippo Turati (1857–1932), the founder of the journal La critica sociale (1891). Following the teachings of Eduard Bernstein, Turati theorized a nonviolent, progressive transformation of society, conforming with the strategies of the Second International: The laws of history will decree the collapse of the capitalist system, without the proletariat having to use violence. The party’s actions should tend toward the realization of a program of organic economic reforms and to the launch of new tax legislation and work laws. Turati’s companion was Anna Kuliscioff (1854–1925), a Russian exile who was skeptical of the possibility of subverting the bourgeois state and refused the isolation of the proletarian forces in favor of a politics of alliances. Kuliscioff passionately denounced masculine privilege and feminine oppression, underlining the nexus between the emancipation of women and social questions: Women must create solid ties between them and appropriate instances of the social transformations of the subaltern classes in order to reach complete emancipation, impossible under the yoke of capitalism. Economic independence is the first condition for civil and political rights. On the other hand, she recognized ‘‘the different nature of the oppression of women and of workers’’ (Anna Casalini, La signora del socialismo italiano, 1987), and on this level, as on that of political practice, she resembled the bourgeois feminists who privilege the conflict between the sexes. The radical wing of Italian Socialism opposed the ‘‘minimalist’’ tendencies inside and outside the party, and found a brilliant interpreter in the person of Arturo Labriola (1873–1959), founder of the journal Avanguardia socialista (1902–1906), 1769

SOCIALISM the voice of revolutionary trade unionism. Labriola opposed the integration of the workers’ party in the bourgeois state, which he categorically condemns. The liberation of the subaltern class can happen only outside of the parliamentary system and outside of the market economy, while reformist engagement risks prolonging the dominance of the bourgeois class. There followed a conservative decline, culminating in his support of the war in Libya. Another Labriola, Antonio (1843–1904), was nicknamed the professorissimo, or extremely professorial, for his strictly orthodox Marxism and his rigorous historicism. For Labriola, the analysis of factual developments was indispensable to the ends of the revolutionary’s political action, which must use the instruments of the bourgeois state against potential reactionary outbursts, while ever maintaining the knowledge of the impossibility of overturning the system from within. He, too, supported colonial expansion in the name of the development of the bourgeois, an indispensable precondition for the affirmation of the proletariat. In these same years, Rodolfo Mondolfo (1877–1976) became the spokesperson for a type of Socialism centered around political action and the awareness of the masses. This contrasted with the volunteerism of the revolutionary unionists and with the reformist gradualism of the party’s elite, which tended to deprive the proletariat of power. The birth of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921 signaled a new stage in the history of Italian Socialism. Its protagonist was Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the greatest theorist of Italian Marxism, who hypothesized an order centered on the power of the Factory Councils’ Movement, profoundly democratic in inspiration. He found a significant interlocutor in the person of Piero Gobetti (1901–1926), founder of La rivoluzione liberale (1922–1925), a journal championing the fulfillment of the promises of the Risorgimento by way of an alliance between the working class, the enlightened bourgeois, and the intellectuals. Notwithstanding the danger of totalitarianism, the Bolshevik revolution and the workers’ movement were inherently liberal, because they represented the movement’s principles of antiunanimity; rigorously egalitarian state Socialism was rejected, however. Carlo Rosselli (1899–1937), son of the poet Amelia Rosselli, translated the millenarian values of Judaism into a strong yearning for justice. In his Socialismo liberale (Liberal Socialism, 1930), he formulated a valid alternative to Fascist and Stalinist forms of totalitarianism: Against Marx, he 1770

negated historic determinism and the primacy of the economic sphere, proposing instead a society marked by the values of autonomy, federalism, and decentralization. Socialism represents a generalization and intensification of the principles of liberty, at last also extended to the poor. This philosophy represents a revindication of ‘‘Giustizia e Liberta`,’’ the movement he founded with other exiles in France, and contrasts with the dominant simplifications of the ideologies of the time. Starting in the 1960s, Socialist thought divides neatly between exponents of the central-left and theorists in search of regeneration. The former vein, based on the results of concrete experience and making appeals to international social democracy and historic reformism, never attracted brilliant thinkers; the left wing of the party is instead animated by various and complex thinkers. One might mention Raniero Panzieri, founder of Quaderni rossi (1961–1965), who in Sette tesi sulla questione del controllo operaio (dopo Stalin) (Seven Theses on the Question of Control of the Workers [After Stalin], 1986) theorized a democratic and peaceful road to Socialism via the foundation of the powers of the ‘‘collective worker’’ in the systems of production; Lelio Basso, who, in his Problemi del socialismo (The Problems of Socialism, 1958–1991), placed side-by-side militant politics inspired by the positions of Rosa Luxemburg, and a form of editorial promotion that sought to verify the theoretical epicenters of Marxism; Vittorio Foa, a union leader to whom can be attributed the most courageous attempt to refound Socialist thought in the context of its historical outcome; and Norberto Bobbio, the lucid interpreter of a libertarian and egalitarian Socialism. In Destra e sinistra: Ragioni e significati (Right and Left: Reasons and Meanings, 1994), Bobbio created a new foundation for the classic distinction between political right and left: In Socialism, which represents the perfect realization of democracy, the wellbeing, pluralism, freedom, and equality of liberalism are advanced to the maximum degree, rather than being destroyed. On 13 November 1994, however, the Italian Socialist Party dissolved following the Mani Pulite investigations, launched by judges to combat political corruption. ALESSANDRA MELDOLESI Further Reading Canalini, Maria, La signora del socialismo italiano: Vita di Anna Kuliscioff, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1987.

ARDENGO SOFFICI Cole, George D. H., Storia del pensiero socialista, Bari: Laterza, 1968. De Grand, Alexander, The Italian Left in the Twentieth Century: A History of the Socialist and Communist Parties, Bloomington-Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989. Di Scala, Spencer, Dilemmas of Italian Socialism: The Politics of Filippo Turati, Amherst: Massachusetts University Press, 1980. Di Scala, Spencer, Renewing Italian Socialism: Nenni to Craxi, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Di Scala, Spencer (editor), Italian Socialism, Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Galli, Giorgio, Storia del socialismo italiano, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1983. Griffith, William E., The European Left: Italy, France and Spain, Lexington: Lexington Books, 1979. Hobsbawm, Eric J., I ribelli: Forme primitive di rivolta sociale, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Hobsbawm, Eric J., I banditi: Il banditismo sociale nell’eta` moderna, Turin: Einaudi, 1971.

Hostetter, Richard, The Italian Socialist Movement, Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1958. Manacorda, Gastone, Il socialismo nella storia d’Italia, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1966. Miller, James E., From Elite to Mass Politics: Italian Socialism in the Giolittian Era, 1900–1914, Kent: Kent State University Press, 1990. Mucchi Faina, Angelica, L’abbraccio della folla, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983. Riosa, Alceo, Rosso di sera, Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1996. Sabatucci, Giovanni (editor), Storia del socialismo italiano, Rome: Il Poligono, 1980. Socialismo e socialisti dal risorgimento al fascismo, Bari: De Donato Editore, 1974. Spini, Giorgio, Le origini del socialismo, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Tamburrano, Giuseppe, Antonio Gramsci, Milan: Sugar, 1977. Valiani, Leo, Questioni di storia del socialismo, Turin: Einaudi, 1958.

ARDENGO SOFFICI (1879–1964) Ardengo Soffici’s period of greatest artistic-literary productivity is situated between his return in 1907 from a long stay in Paris and the end of World War I. During his Parisian years, Soffici witnessed the crisis of the symbolist cultural milieu. Like many other artists who had settled in the French capital and with whom he became acquainted (for instance, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire), he was aware that an aesthetic, figurative, and literary canon was being destroyed. Reality demanded to be expressed in its concreteness, and at the same time in its confused and vital force. Soffici’s imagination was dominated by a substantial realism that was incompatible with the idealism typical of symbolist art. His return to Tuscany signaled his definite rapprochement with the idea of natural concreteness—in subsequent years he would indicate it as italianita` (Italianness)—and the consequent refusal of any ‘‘idealistic’’ element. As an active collaborator to Giuseppe Prezzolini’s La voce, to which from 1908 onward he contributed remarkable essays on the recent developments in French art, Soffici embraced the trend toward autobiography typical for so many writers in the circle around Prezzolini’s journal. This is witnessed especially by the project

for a work entitled Vita (Life), of which only the pages relating to the years 1879–1896 were completed. However, Soffici also acknowledged the autobiographical nature of the unfinished novel La famiglia Turchi (The Turchi Family), which can be dated around 1908 and was published posthumously, of the short portrait Ignoto toscano (Unknown Tuscan, 1909) and of his novel Lemmonio Boreo (1912), while insisting energetically on the fundamental literary mediation without which these works never could have been achieved. Generally speaking, in Soffici’s entire literary production the works of an autobiographic nature (diaries and memoirs) largely prevail over the more imaginative ones. Soffici took a quietly provocative position against ‘‘fictitious’’ works like the novel, the novella and drama in Giornale di bordo (Logbook, 1915), and in the 1930s and the 1950s, he reasserted the opinions he had previously expressed in avant-garde circles. Unsurprisingly, then, Soffici soon abandoned his novelistic aspirations, leaving both La famiglia Turchi and Lemmonio Boreo unfinished. The second was initially conceived as a saga, and as a result the published chapters represented only a limited part of the whole project. 1771

ARDENGO SOFFICI However, Soffici’s first long narrative works should not be considered as literary failures. In La famiglia Turchi, the reader is struck by the clear descriptions of phenomenal reality in its different manifestations, from the most idyllic to the most abject (in the latter, Soffici reaches a remarkably expressive style). This realism was not at all meant to be mimetic: The ‘‘romantic’’ memory of secret correspondences was to be preserved, but its principle of unity was not of a metaphysical order. In Soffici’s view, the task of the artist consists in being a guide to the mysteries of the world and in turning the perception of these mysteries into an authentic dynamic fabric of rhythms and colors. In other words, it was a matter of expressing reality as it appears at the intersection between physical perception and subjective impression. Rimbaud was the most effective catalyst for the definition of the aesthetics that would guide Soffici throughout his entire career as a man of letters. The essay Arthur Rimbaud (1911) not only confirms Soffici as the most important mediator between the French avant-garde and Italian culture, but also offers him an extraordinary opportunity for the elaboration of his poetic work. Soffici saw Rimbaud as engaged in the effort, already mentioned by Baudelaire, to resolve the gap between the objects of poetic-artistic activity (the purified, immaterial, aerial reality) and those of concrete life (the impure, the material). This separation between poetry and reality had indeed become ever more radical in the post-Romantic era. It is significant that in discussing the final years of Rimbaud’s biography, Soffici appears unaware of the failure of the poet who had surrendered to material life after his early years dedicated to poetry. Instead, for him Rimbaud’s years in Abyssinia seemed the difficult continuation and the terrestrial completion of an experiment of life aimed at penetrating in a relentless way all aspects of reality. Soffici’s predilection for autobiographical genres was dictated by his effort to get out of literature as conscious ‘‘fiction.’’ His ample poeticalfragmentistic production, which includes the remarkable Giornale di bordo and the Futurist collection BI¨F§ZF+18, Simultaneita`, Chimismi lirici (BI¨F§ZF+18, Simultaneity, Lyrical Alchemisms, 1915), was much more congenial to his lyrical temperament than long, drawn narrations and should also be understood in this context. For Soffici, the attempt to achieve greater literary directness through autobiography did not mean falling back on a spontaneous style, deprived of cultural references. The 1772

long-established critical-aesthetical tradition regarding the ‘‘virginity’’ of Soffici’s inspiration, and the spontaneity of his production, considered as a gift rather than as a work, is completely outdated. Recent studies have proved that behind this ‘‘gift’’ there was a very active literary memory that did not prejudice but rather inspired Soffici’s natural poetical talents. His points of reference include Vittorio Alfieri, Benvenuto Cellini, Giovanni Boccaccio, Thomas Carlyle, Romain Rolland, and Miguel de Unamuno in narrative, and the major French symbolists (Rimbaud in primis), as well as the Parisian avant-garde of the early twentieth century (Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars) in poetry. The influence of these authors demonstrates both the breadth of Soffici’s culture of the author, and the originality of his own notion of Futurist simultaneita` (simultaneity), quite different from that advocated by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The foundation of the periodical Lacerba in 1913 in collaboration with his close friend Giovanni Papini meant for Soffici the definitive release from the didactical-divulgative dimension of his work for Prezzolini’s La voce. With the new periodical, mainly dedicated to avant-garde literature, he intended to hold fast to his convictions about the absolute and intrinsic cognitive value of artistic activity. In Prezzolini’s opinion, strongly influenced by Croce’s aesthetics, art was one of the different activities of the spirit. For Soffici, on the contrary, it was the activity of the spirit. It should be pointed out that the brief collaboration of Lacerba with Marinetti’s Futurist group between 1914 and 1915 ended, very significantly, because of the evident irreconcilability of their opposed aesthetic visions. Soffici, Papini, and Aldo Palazzeschi considered art to be an activity of a subjective and spiritualistic nature, while for Marinetti and his followers it was of an objective and materialistic nature. For Soffici, the discriminating point in art remains the persistence of the lyrical ‘‘I’’ as the center where all sensations aggregate, in contrast to its total abolition in favor of the objectivity of ‘‘matter’’ professed by Marinetti. Consequently, Soffici attempted to articulate his own understanding of Futurism, in particular with the theoretical articles collected in 1920 in Primi principi di un’estetica futurista (First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetics). Following the suggestions of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, which he wholeheartedly embraced, Soffici saw in World War I the possibility of living a new social reality, intact and essential, and less

ARDENGO SOFFICI determined by the conventions upon which was founded life in times of peace. Not only had Rimbaud’s work incited Soffici to a total identification of literature and life: His realistic and vitalistic aesthetics, further nurtured by Nietzsche’s thought, had also led Soffici to take a position in favor of intervention in the war. Given his ideal of a literature in direct contact with daily life, during the war Soffici continued to write poetry based on daily observations and lyrical fragments: It seemed to him that everyday life, taken as such, could be poetical, as the artist’s mind would transfigure it. His only preoccupation was to take note, without any artificially artistic stylization, of his own experience of the reality of the war. However, a powerful literary filter continued to condition his view of the events that, between 1917 and 1920, he confided to the diaries and published later as Kobilek (1918), La ritirata del Friuli (The Friuli Retreat, 1919) and Errore di coincidenza (Mistaken Connection, 1920), the latter in Rete Mediterranea in 1920. However, while Kobilek still is crowded with expressionistic examples and with intertextual references to the European avant-garde (above all Apollinaire), in the other two diaries the style is already more sober and sedated and announces the restorative classicism of the later Soffici. Indeed, after the war he was one of the most convinced advocates of the ‘‘return to order’’ after the avantgarde, and he exalted the classical models in literature and in painting.

Biography Born on 7 April 1879 at Rignano sull’Arno (Florence), Soffici made irregular studies in Florence, where he also attended the Academia delle Belle Arti and the private Scuola del Nudo. As a consequence of his father’s financial difficulties, he was obliged to work in a notary’s chambers. In 1900, he went to Paris on the occasion of the Universal Exposition. He lived and worked (painting and writing) in the French capital until 1907, when he returned to Italy and settled in Poggio a Caiano (now in the province of Prato), where his family also lived. In 1908, he started collaborating to Prezzolini’s La voce; in 1913, together with Papini, he founded Lacerba (1913–1915). In 1915, he left for the front as a volunteer; he continued to collaborate to the La voce, now directed by Giuseppe De Robertis (1914–1916). In 1919, he married Maria Sdrigotti with whom he had three children: Valeria, Sergio, and Laura. After the war he supported

Fascism as a regenerating movement in Italian society and contributed regularly to the daily Il popolo d’Italia. In 1939, he was appointed to the Accademia d’Italia. In 1943, he joined the Repubblica di Salo`. In 1944, he was interned in the concentration camp of Collescipoli (Terni) as a Fascist collaborator. He was released after a trial in 1946. In 1955, he received the Marzotto award for L’uva e la croce, the first part of the autobiography Autoritratto d’artista nel quadro del suo tempo. He died in Forte dei Marmi (Lucca) on 19 August 1964. DIRK VANDEN BERGHE Selected Works Collections Opere, 7 vols., Florence: Vallecchi, 1959–1968. Ardengo Soffici dal romanzo al ‘puro lirismo,’ 2, Testi inediti 1908–1910, edited by Dirk Vanden Berghe, Florence: Olschki, 1997.

Fiction Lemmonio Boreo, 1912

Poetry

BI¨F§ZF+18, Simultaneita`, Chimismi lirici, 1915; revised as Marsia e Apollo, 1938.

Autobiographical Writings Ignoto toscano, 1909. Arlecchino, 1914. Giornale di bordo, 1915. La giostra dei sensi, 1918. Kobilek. Giornale di battaglia, 1918. La ritirata del Friuli, 1919. Taccuino d’Arno Borghi, 1938. Ricordi di vita artistica e letteraria, 1942. Autoritratto d’artista nel quadro del suo tempo, 4 vols. (L’una e la croce: Infanzia, 1951; Passi tra le rovine: Adolescenza, 1952; Il salto vitale: Giovinezza, 1954; Fine di un mondo: Virilita`, 1955).

Other Il caso Medardo Rosso. L’impressionismo e la pittura italiana, 1909. Arthur Rimbaud, 1911. Cubismo e futurismo, 1911. Statue e fantocci, 1919. Scoperte e massacri, 1919. Primi principi di un’estetica futurista, 1920.

Letters Carteggio (with Giuseppe Prezzolini), 1, edited by Mario Richter; vol. 2, edited by Mario Richter and M.E. Raffi, 1977–1982. Lettere 1913–1929 (with Carlo Carra`), edited by Massimo Carra` and Vittorio Fagone, 1983. Lettere a Prezzolini (1908–1920), edited by Anna Maria Manetti Piccinini, 1988. Carteggio (with Giovanni Papini), edited by Mario Richter, 4 vols., 1991–2002.

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ARDENGO SOFFICI Further Reading Bellini, Eraldo, Studi su Ardengo Soffici, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1987. Bohn, Willard, The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Cavallo, Luigi, Soffici. Immagini e documenti (1879–1964), Florence: Vallecchi, 1986. Federici, Corrado, ‘‘Ardengo Soffici,’’ in Italian Prose Writers, 1900–1945, vol. 264, Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Luca Somigli and Rocco Capozzi, Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2002. Giacon, Mariarosa, Simbolisme, avant-garde e plurilinguismo in ‘‘Simultaneita`. Chimismi lirici’’ di Ardengo Soffici, Poetica e stile, edited by in Lorenzo Renzi, Padua: Liviana, 1976. Luti, Giorgio, ‘‘Un debito con Soffici,’’ in Firenze corpo 8, Florence: Vallecchi, 1983. Martini, Alessio, Storia di un libro. ‘‘Scoperte e massacri’’ di Ardengo Soffici, Florence: Le Lettere, 2000.

Pampaloni, Geno (editor), Ardengo Soffici. L’artista e lo scrittore nella cultura del ‘900, Florence: Centro Di, 1975. Richter, Mario, La formazione francese di Ardengo Soffici, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1969. ———, ‘‘Riflessi apollinairiani in Italia,’’ in Apollinaire. Il rinnovamento della scrittura poetica all’inizio del Novecento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Sanguineti, Edoardo, ‘‘Poetica e poesia di Soffici,’’ in Tra liberty e crepuscolarismo, Milan: Mursia, 1961. Trione, Vincenzo, Dentro le cose. Ardengo Soffici critico d’arte, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2001. Vanden Berghe, Dirk, Ardengo Soffici dal romanzo al ‘‘puro lirismo,’’ vol. 1, Modelli narrativi e poetici, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Wilson, Rita, ‘‘Variations on a Futurist Theme: The Poetry of Ardengo Soffici,’’ In Studi d’Italianistica nell’Africa Australe/Italian Studies in Southern Africa, 2 (1989): 26–33.

MARIO SOLDATI (1906–1999) Mario Soldati’s first schooling took place in a Jesuit institution, the spiritual dominance of whose teachings can be perceived in the subtle psychological relationships among his fictional characters. During the 1920s, he joined a circle of liberal intellectuals, whose most prominent member was journalist and fellow writer Piero Gobetti. Hence, it was in a nonconformist spirit that Soldati wrote his first collection of short stories, Salmace (1929), in which he denounced a number of social hypocrisies such as middle-class respectability and provincialism. He developed his own kind of literary individualism, with a take on society differing from the liberalSocialist stance of Gobetti who called for a workers’ revolutionary movement led by a radical political group. The Jesuit education Soldati had received gave rise to a sense of transgression in his writing. Behind the attention he meticulously paid to detail and the poetic talent with which he effaced the border between dream and reality lays an expression of loss and regret. His works are imbued with pain, and do not produce any dramatic (or tragic) effect among the characters, whose mode of thought never changes. Between 1929 and 1931, Soldati felt disenchanted with Italy and traveled to the United States. His 1774

novel America, primo amore (America, First Love, 1935), a reworking of the journal he kept during this journey, is an account of his life as a Columbia University fellow at first and then as a young man trying to earn a living in New York City on menial jobs. It is organized in a linear fashion, starting with Soldati’s initial fascination for the novelty of the country, its material affluence, and striking modes of social interaction. In this part of the novel, the author compares his experience to that of the very first emigrants to the United States. As his journey progresses, however, Soldati becomes increasingly disillusioned by the harshness of American public life and the individual sense of desolation he sees in ‘‘the new country.’’ Still, his love for the United States persists until the end, despite his critique and anger against the effects of the Great Depression and his encounter with certain rather melancholy figures. The book also devotes much space to a discussion of films, which he defines as ‘‘works of taste’’ rather than works of art. America primo amore became one of the most important books of the so-called ‘‘American Myth,’’ which dominated the Italian literary scene during the 1930s. Upon his return to Italy, Soldati pursued a literary and cinematographic career. Perhaps his most

MARIO SOLDATI known work, Le lettere da Capri (The Capri Letters, 1954), best reveals the style he developed at the time. It is a mannerist exercise in literary ambiguity. In it the author aims at involving his reader in an endless and inextricable series of plots, tied together in a complicated tangle of psychological and moral issues. The novel is a sort of Chinese boxes, constructed around the narrator and three distinct witnesses: Harry, a journalist; Jane, a nurse; and Dorothea, an unsophisticated girl from the lower classes. The plot complexity results from the interrelation of the lives of these expatriates while the resolution is achieved through a deusex-machina in a cinematographic way. Soldati’s subsequent novel, La confessione (The Confession, 1955), is an emblematic work that sheds light on the fears the author experienced as an adolescent and never overcame. Clemente, the protagonist, is a sensitive Jesuit novice who undergoes a spiritual crisis, being tempted by all of the world’s vices, but primarily by sexual attraction. In the end, he discovers his homosexuality. Soldati’s visual style captures the ambiance of the college with precision: a sense of confinement, repetitive gestures with their allusive charge, the desire for sanctity and the profound halo rousing from the cells and the corridors, the religious spirit that reveals itself more in exterior postures than in a real tension. In one of his later novels, La sposa americana (The American Bride, 1977), Soldati tackles once again familiar themes. It tells the story of a man and two women: Edoardo, a lecturer in Italian who works in the United States, his wife Edith, and her friend Anna. It is a classic love triangle where Edith represents the completeness and strength of sacred love, the kind developed in a meaningful relationship based on mutual affection, while Anna is the irresistible siren of profane love and inescapable carnality. The plot unravels through a sequence of lies, suspicions, and mutual psychological contortions in the cultural context of America. In 1986, Giovanni Soldati directed a highly stylized adaptation of his father’s novel, starring Stefania Sandrelli as Anna. In addition to his prolific literary production, Soldati also pursued a successful cinematic career. For him cinema was a way out of a difficult financial situation, but it also brought him the attention of the critics and the general public to a much greater extent than did his more prestigious writing profession. Since the 1930s he worked on over 40 films, first as scriptwriter for Mario Camerini’s Il cappello a tre punte (1934) and Alessandro Blasetti’s

La contessa di Parma (1937), then as a director beginning with Italian adaptations of French films, such as his collaboration with Fedor Ozep on La principessa Tarakanova (Princess Tarakanova, 1938) and Andre´ Berthomieu for La signora di Montecarlo (The Lady from Montecarlo, 1938). He also directed the war sequences for King Vidor’s War and Peace (1956) and was second unit director for Willliam Wyler’s Ben Hur (1959). However, Soldati was best known for his literary adaptations, particularly of Antonio Fogazzaro, whose Piccolo mondo antico (Little World of the Past, 1941) and Malombra (1942). Piccolo mondo antico became legendary and was considered by some (including Giuseppe De Santis) as an early expression of neorealism. It evokes its literary model, but the camera work and naturalistic settings are employed in order to convey a sense of psychological realism, highlighting the relationship of characters and their landscape. Malombra made him the leading ‘‘calligrapher,’’ and is one of Soldati’s most beautiful films because it allowed the director the opportunity to adapt traditional literary techniques to the creation of a cinematic work of art. It cast Isa Miranda in the role of Marina, haunted by the appearance of her dead aunt. Soldati’s characters engage in a universal game based on the mere pleasure of playing, a comedy that also touches upon the tragic. Plots and settings are also invariably alive and artistically accomplished. Soldati went on to shoot one to three films a year until 1959. This convergence of cinema and literature is emblematic of all of Soldati’s work. Indeed, he engaged in a variety of mediums and adopted their means of expression in his narrative. For instance, television enabled him to become a witness to the Italian way of life. In his reportages, Viaggio nella valle del Po alla ricerca di cibi genuini (A Journey through the Po Valley in Search of Natural Food, 1957) and Chi legge? Un viaggio lungo il Tirreno (Who’s Reading? A Journey Along the Tirrenean Sea, 1960), Soldati illustrates the culture and traditions of a society trying to live up through industrialization. The first documentary is an account of his visits to a dairy product farm and that of a ham producer, its impact is more anthropological than scientific. Through his use of literary and social anecdotes, Soldati was the first writer turned television star after the airing of this film. Who Is Reading?, on the other hand, is a cultural inquiry into what Italians like to read, filmed together with Cesare Zavattini. It unfolds as an invitation to travel across Italy, a sort of Grand 1775

MARIO SOLDATI Tour leading the spectator from the usual attractions (Virgil’s and Leopardi’s graves) to less revered places like jails and factories. Perhaps the best way to decipher Soldati’s complex personality and intense career as a writer, journalist and commentator is to read his semiautobiographical novel L’attore (The Actor, 1970), where he paints an inglorious picture of the film business by highlighting its vanity, superficiality, and hypocrisy, all this through the point of view of an old disenchanted television director. The novel tells the story of a retired actor who is compelled to perform again because of a complicated situation involving blackmail, murder, and debt. Thus, L’attore portrays the sad decline of the entertainment world and of the people who work in it, who just too easily turn from riches to rags, from fame to solitude and oblivion. Soldati also criticizes television for sullying the artistic nature of the cinematographic industry.

Biography Born in Turin, 17 November 1906. Studied at a Jesuit institution. Was awarded the silver medal of civic values for rescuing his friend Lello Richelmy from drowning in the Po River, 1922. Wrote his first comedy, Pilato, 1924. Graduated in literature at the University of Turin, 1927. Started writing for the literary journal L’arte, while studying art history at the Istituto Superiore di Storia dell’Arte in Rome, 1927–1929. Published his first collection of short stories, Salmace, 1929. Founded the journal La Libra with Mario Bonfantini and Enrico Emanuelli. Visits the United States as a fellow at Columbia University, 1929– 1931. Came back to Italy and married Marion Rieckelman, 1931. Started working at Cines, in Rome, 1931. Separated from his wife, 1934. Worked as a director and a screenwriter, 1936–. Became a celebrity with Piccolo mondo antico and met his second wife, Giuliana Kellermann, 1941; had three sons, Wolfango, Michele and Giovanni. Began working on reportages for Rai-TV with Viaggio nella valle del Po alla ricerca di cibi genuine, 1957. Moved to Milan, 1960. Bought a house in Tellaro (La Spezia), where he resided for the rest of his life, 1967. Winner of several literary prizes, including San Babila prize for A cena con il commendatore, 1950; Strega for Le lettere da Capri, 1954; Cannes for best comedy, Policarpo, ufficiale di scrittura, 1959; Campiello for L’attore, 1970; Bagutta for Lo specchio inclinato, 1976; Premio 1776

Letterario Napoli for La sposa americana, 1978. Died in La Spezia, 20 June 1999. MARCELLA FARINA Selected Works Collections La carta del cielo, edited by Natalia Ginzburg, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Regione regina, Bari: Laterza, 1987. Opere, Milan: Rizzoli, 1991.

Novels America, primo amore, 1935. Ventiquattro ore in uno studio cinematografico, 1935. La verita` sul caso Motta, 1941. Le lettere da Capri, 1954; as The Capri Letters, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1955; 1956. La confessione, 1955; as The Confession, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1957; 1958. Il vero Silvestri, 1957; as The Real Silvestri, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1960. Le due citta`, 1964; as The Malacca Cane, translated by Francis Frenaye, 1973. La busta arancione, 1966; as The Orange Envelope, translated by Bernard Wall, 1969. Il meglio, 1970. L’attore, 1970. Lo smeraldo, 1974; as Emerald, translated by William Weaver, 1977. La sposa americana, 1977; as The American Bride, translated by William Weaver, 1979. Addio diletta Amelia, 1979. L’incendio, 1981. Lo scopone (with Maurizio Corgnati), 1982. L’architetto, 1985. El Paseo de Gracia, 1987. Sere, 1994.

Short Stories ‘‘Salmace (sei novelle),’’ 1929. ‘‘L’amico gesuita,’’ 1943. ‘‘A cena col commendatore,’’ 1950; as Dinner with the Commendatore, translated by Gwyn Morris and Henry Furst, 1958. ‘‘I racconti,’’ 1957. ‘‘La messa dei villeggianti,’’ 1959. ‘‘I racconti 1927–1947,’’ 1960. ‘‘Storie di spettri,’’ 1962. ‘‘I racconti del maresciallo,’’ 1967. ‘‘55 novelle per l’inverno,’’ 1971. ‘‘Il polipo e i pirati’’ (fiaba illustrata), 1974. ‘‘44 novelle per l’estate,’’ 1979. ‘‘La casa del perche´,’’ 1982. ‘‘Nuovi racconti del maresciallo,’’ 1984.

Diaries Fuga in Italia,’’ 1947. Fuori, 1968. Da spettatore, 1973. Un prato di papaveri: Diario 1947–1964, 1973.

SERGIO SOLMI Lo specchio inclinato: Diario 1965–1971, 1975. L’avventura in Valtellina, 1986.

Other Canzonette e viaggio televisivo, 1962. Vino al vino: Viaggio alla ricerca dei vini genuini, 1969. I disperati del benessere (viaggio in Svezia), 1970. Vino al vino 2, 1971. Vino al vino 3, 1975. Lettere di Mario Soldati, 1979. Sua maesta` il Po, 1984. Ah! Il Mundial!, 1986. Rami secchi (ritratti e ricordi), 1989. Viaggio a Lourdes, 1999.

Films La principessa Tarakanova, 1938. La signora di Montecarlo, 1938. Due milioni per un sorriso, 1939. Dora Nelson, 1939; based on the comedy by Louis Verneuil. Tutto per una donna, 1940; based on the comedy by Nicola Manzari. Piccolo mondo antico, 1940; based on the novel by Antonio Fogazzaro. Tragica notte, 1942; based on the novel La trappola by Delfino Cinelli. Malombra, 1942; based on the novel by Antonio Fogazzaro. Quartieri alti, 1942; based on the novel by Ercole Patti and on the comedy Le rendez-vous de Senlis by Jean Anouilh. Le miserie del signor Travet, 1946; based on the comedy Le miserie ‘d mo¨nssu` Travet by Vittorio Besenzio. Eugenia Grandet, 1946; based on the novel by Honore` De Balzac. Daniele Cortis, 1947; based on the novel by Antonio Fogazzaro. Fuga in Francia, 1949. Quel bandito sono io, 1950; based on the comedy by Peppino De Filippo. Botta e risposta, 1950. Donne e briganti, 1951. E` l’amor che mi rovina, 1951. O.K. Nerone, 1951. Il sogno di Zorro, 1952. Le avventure di Mandrin, 1952. I tre corsari, 1952; based on the novel by Emilio Salgari. Jolanda la figlia del Corsaro Nero, 1953; based on the novel by Emilio Salgari.

La provinciale, 1953; based on the short story by Alberto Moravia. Questa e` la vita (segment ‘‘Il ventaglio’’), 1954. La mano dello straniero, 1954; based on the short story by Graham Greene. La donna del fiume, 1955. Era di venerdı` 17, 1957. Italia piccola, 1957. Policarpo, ufficiale di scrittura, 1959; based on the novel La famiglia De Tappetti by Luigi Arnaldo Vassallo.

Further Reading Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, La narrativa italiana del dopoguerra, Bologna: Cappelli, 1965. Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Paolo Berretto and Guglielminetti, Marziano (editors), Mario Soldati: la scrittura e lo sguardo, Turin: Lindau and Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1991. Caldiron, Orio (editor), Letterato al cinema: Mario Soldati anni ‘40, Rome: Cineteca nazionale del Centro sperimentale di cinematografia, 1979. Delpino, Marco, and Paolo Riceputi (editors), Mario Soldati: eccentrico sognatore: La letteratura, il cinema, la fantasia e la gioia di vivere di un grande protagonista del Novecento, preface by Giulio Andreotti, Santa Margherita Ligure: Tigullio-Bacherontius, 2000. De Santis, Giuseppe, ‘‘Per un paesaggio italiano,’’ in Cinema (Rome), 25 April 1941; rpt. in Sul neorealismo: Testi e documenti, Rome: Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Nuovo, 1974. Grillandi, Massimo, Mario Soldati, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Heiney, Donald, America in Modern Italian Literature, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1964. Ioli, Giovanna (editor), Mario Soldati: Lo specchio inclinato. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, San Salvatore Monferrato (Alessandria): Edizioni della Biennale Piemonte e Letteratura, 1999. Lajolo, Davide, Conversazione in una stanza chiusa con Mario Soldati, Milan: Frassinelli, 1983. Manacorda, Giuliano, Storia della letteratura italiana contemporanea, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1967. Mauro, Walter, Invito alla lettura di Mario Soldati, Milan: Mursia, 1981. Pullini, Giorgio, Il romanzo italiano del dopoguerra, Padova: Marsilio, 1965.

SERGIO SOLMI (1899–1981) 1899, the year when Sergio Solmi was born, is an emblem of a generation that, poised at the final phase of scientific and secular positivism, within a span of 20 years came to criticize its myths with

pragmatism and idealism, stirred as well by World War I and by the violent nationalisms that followed the conflict. Solmi reacted to all of this, against the impulses of his young age, by forcing 1777

SERGIO SOLMI himself into an introspective analysis and exercising on everything, and in the first place on himself, ‘‘lo strumento lucido ma corrosivo della critica’’ (the lucid but caustic instrument of criticism), as he wrote in a 1984 essay entitled Fine di stagione (Season’s End). For this purpose, he developed a writing responding to the demands of order and of rational clarity. In the Turin of Piero Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, he founded in 1922 the journal Primo tempo, inspired, albeit not in orthodox terms, by Benedetto Croce’s aesthetics, and he collaborated with Il Baretti and Solaria. In 1924, Solmi finally found his poetic and critical ‘‘tone,’’ with which he pursued, dialectically, two paths: devotion to literature, especially to poetry, and reflection on it. This dialectic seems to constitute a ‘‘forma del suo destino’’ (form of his destiny), as he said, with an expression dear to him, in an interview for Terza Rete Radiofonica on October 18, 1980. His presentation of early Montale and his lucid analysis of the work of Umberto Saba are marked by a strong desire to recover a classical, albeit thoroughly twentieth-century tradition, that is to say, historically empirical and European by vocation. In the careful critical works that he conducted throughout his life, particularly on Giacomo Leopardi and on French literature (Montaigne, the symbolists, Paul Vale´ry, Alain, Jules Laforgue), Solmi availed himself of the methodological lesson of Croce, even though, as he wrote in L’‘Alcione’ e noi (‘‘Halcyon’’ and Us), ‘‘il pericolo di certi sviluppi della fondamentale distinzione crociana e` che vengono a smarrirsi, nell’idoleggiamento della pura poesia, i segni, le caretteristiche individuali della particolare poesia, nelle sue intime ragione storiche, le quali sono pur sempre [. . .] ragioni ‘personali’’’ (the danger of certain developments of the fundamental Crocean distinction is that, in idolizing pure poetry, the marks, the individual characteristics of the particular poem, in its intimate historical reasons, which are always ‘‘personal reasons,’’ come to be lost). Poetry, for Solmi, always dares to take the problematic step from the particular to the universal in order to better understand the uniqueness of the single word or image. Beginning in the 1930s and 1940s, intrigued by the expressive means with which thought is absorbed into subject matter, into the body of the poetic text that constitutes the true content of the work, Solmi reflected on the problems left unresolved by Croce, more to supplement than to go beyond him. In Poiche` mi si chiede (Since You Ask Me, 1983), he 1778

explained: ‘‘il mio ideale, piu` che di una poesia ‘scritta’, fatta cioe` per l’occhio di un lettore, e` di una poesia pronunciata, se non altro mentalmente [. . .] che inerisca integralmente all’uomo, la cui musica sia il respire stesso della voice, il cui ritmo sia il gioco stesso dei muscoli, il pulsare del sangue’’ (my ideal, rather than a ‘written’ poetry, which is to say made for a reader’s eye, is of a poetry that is pronounced, if only mentally [...], and that pertains fully to the human being, a poetry whose music is the very breath of the voice, whose rhythm is the play of the muscles, the pulsing of the blood). Solmi’s work as a poet is also never naı¨ve; rather, it is conceived consistently to hold on to the traditional structures that humankind in the course of history has distilled into the measure of the hendecasyllable, the musical rhythm which, for Solmi, suffuses Italian prose itself, as well as persisting in free verse. This ideal of poetry, which distances him from the writers of the late nineteenth century, from the experiments of the Futurists, and from the fragmentism of La voce, and brings him close to the models of Foscolo and Leopardi, ‘‘non esclude, anzi per contrasto esige, la piu` assoluta modernita`’’ (‘‘does not exclude, on the contrary it demands, the most absolute modernity’’), as he further writes in ‘‘Poiche` mi si chiede.’’ In the lyrical prose and poems that he published in 1933 as Fine di stagione (Season’s End), he shows, against any moral ambiguity, the disciplined grace of a style that is never careless, and in which the elimination of all superfluous and false elements acquires a moral and ethical dimension. In these lyrics, the regret for a childhood interrupted too quickly and for an adolescence that was never experienced because of the call to arms, colors with sadness what he calls in ‘‘Aeroplano’’ (Airplane) ‘‘l’oscura agonia quotidiana’’ (‘‘the dark daily agony’’), the aridity of ordinary activity. Leopardi offers to Solmi an example of mediation between reason and instinct in the softening, at the level of syntax, of the emotion enclosed in the words. The rigorous composure of the texts actually lets shine through a subterranean, sudden restlessness, which is not even appeased in the rare moments of astonishment and suspended illusion: the lament of a barrel organ that crosses the city; the unexpected enchantment of a woman’s voice like a desire emerging from the shadows; one’s reflection in the fleeting and incorruptible mirror. With the poems ‘‘Sera al parco’’ (An Evening at the Park) and especially ‘‘Bagni popolari’’ (Public Baths), the

SERGIO SOLMI first phase of Solmi’s poetic production reaches its peak: Foreign men, the Babel-like fruit of different languages, converge into a chorus of voices emerging out of the little musical refrain heard in the public baths. Under the banner of human fraternity, the second stage of Solmi’s poetry begins, with a group of poems entitled, significantly, Soste e ritorni (Pauses and Returns, 1932–1940), which foretells the dramatic atmospheres developed in Dal quaderno di Mario Rossetti (From the Notebook of Mario Rossetti, 1944–1946) and in Poesie (Poems, 1950). The horrors of the conflict, and the intoxication of a youth rediscovered alongside his partisan companions, ‘‘miei quasi figli, fatti miei fratelli,’’ (almost my sons, in deeds my brothers), as he calls them in ‘‘Aprile a San Vittore’’ (April in San Vittore, 1950) from Poesie, divide the poet’s conscience. The language reveals this ambivalence in the adoption, along with learned expressions that do not shrink from celebratory speech, of tones that are colloquial and imbued with fresh emotion. Coherently with his prophetic curiosity about science fiction (which distinguished him in the panorama of literary criticism) and a taste for the fantastic that guided his readings since childhood, Solmi showed, beginning in 1953, the complexity of the sense of wonder on which science feeds, between terrible obsessions and the predictions of worlds yet to come. A fantastical vision of life takes shape in the technique that joins word and image, as in the machine that becomes a place of myth and of monstrosity. In both, we experience the intoxicating fear of the old roots of individuality that vacillate in the flux of existence, of which reading becomes a metaphor when, in the banality of quotidian activity, it opens up, to use Solmi’s expression from C ¸ e vice impuni, la lecture (This Unpunished Vice, Reading, 1984), a ‘‘sopramondo fatto di luce’’ (an overworld made of light).

Biography Born in Rieti on December 16, 1899. Conscripted while at the University of Turin, completes law degree after the end of World War I, in 1923. From 1916, begins his collaboration with numerous periodicals, including Cronache latine, Primo tempo (of which he is the founder in 1922), Il Baretti, Solaria, La Cultura, Lettere e Arti, La Rassegna d’Italia, Nuovi Argomenti. Begins to work as a lawyer for the Banca Commerciale Italiana in Milan, 1923. Awarded various prizes: Saint-Vincent, 1949;

Montparnasse, 1950; and Viareggio, 1963 and 1976. Married to Dora Martinet, had two children, Renato and Raffaele. Died in Milan on October 7, 1981, as the result of an accident at home. NOEMI BILLI Selected Works Collections Poesie complete, Milan: Adelphi, 1974. Opere, Milan: Adelphi, 1983.

Poetry ‘‘Fine di stagione,’’ 1933. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1950. ‘‘Levania e altre poesie,’’ 1956. ‘‘Dal balcone,’’ 1968.

Essays Il pensiero di Alain, 1930. Gigiotti Zanini, 1940. La salute di Montaigne e altri scritti di letteratura francese, 1942. Scrittori negli anni: saggi e note sulla letteratura italiana del ‘900, 1963. Scritti leopardiani, 1969. Della favola, del viaggio e di altre cose, 1971. Meditazioni sullo Scorpione e altre prose, 1972. Saggio su Rimbaud, 1974. Studi e nuovi studi leopardiani, 1975. La luna di Laforgue e altri scritti di letteratura francese, 1976. Saggi sul fantastico: dall’antichita` alle prospettive del futuro, 1978. Studi e nuovi studi leopardiani, 1978. Quadernetto di letture e ricordi, 1979.

Edited Works Giacomo Leopardi, Opere, 2 vols., with Raffaella Solmi, 1956. Le meraviglie del possibile. Antologia della fantascienza, 1959. Giacomo Leopardi, Pensieri, Memorie del primo amore, Elegia 1, Elegia 2, 1970. Giacomo Leopardi, Operette morali, 1976. Giacomo Leopardi, Lettere, with Raffaella Solmi, 1977. Il terzo libro della fantascienza. Il giardino del tempo e altri racconti, 1983.

Translations Jose´ Ortega y Gasset, Il tema del nostro tempo, 1946. Versioni poetiche da contemporanei, 1963.

Further Reading Anceschi, Luciano, Lirici Nuovi, Milan: Hoepli, 1942. Bartolini, Chiara, ‘‘Sergio Solmi: Gli ultimi anni di formazione (1945–1981),’’ in Cristallo, 40, no. 3 (1998): 58–73.

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SERGIO SOLMI Borghello, Giampaolo, ‘‘Dalla luna alla terra: Glosse a ‘Levania’ di Sergio Solmi,’’ in Saggi di linguistica e di letteratura in memoria di Paolo Zolli, edited by Giampaolo Borghello et al., Padua: Antenore, 1991. Caretti, Lanfranco, ‘‘Itinerario di Solmi,’’ in Antichi e Moderni, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. D’Alessandro, Francesca, Lo stile europeo di Sergio Solmi. Tra critica e poesia, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2005. Giappi, Alessandra, ‘‘Dal balcone: Sergio Solmi spettatore e veggente,’’ in Forum Italicum, 20, no. 2 (1986): 161–169. Grignani, Maria Antonietta, ‘‘Montale, Solmi, Praz e la cultura europea: Dalla Francia all’Inghilterra,’’ in Montale e il canone poetico del Novecento, edited by

Maria Antonietta Grignani and Romano Luperini, Rome: Laterza, 1998. Laffin, Janet, ‘‘Solmi as a Critic of Leopardi,’’ in Esperienze Letterarie, 13, no. 1 (1988): 15–24. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Orelli, Giorgio, ‘‘Appunti sulla poesia di Sergio Solmi,’’ in Strumenti Critici, 39–40 (1979): 215–225. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Solmi: evasione e impegno,’’ in Passione e ideologia, Milan: Garzanti, 1960. Valli, Donato, ‘‘Sergio Solmi,’’ in Letteratura italiana contemporanea, edited by Gaetano Mariani and Mario Petrucciani, 2, Rome: Lucarini, 1980.

LEONE DE’ SOMMI (1527–1592) Judah Leone ben Isaac Sommo, also known as Leone de’ Sommi, was an important and influential figure in late sixteenth-century theater due to his wide experience as playwright, theater theorist, producer, stage manager, and poet. In order to understand the modernity of his thought, it is important to consider the cultural framework of the Italian Renaissance courts in which plays, feasts, and in general all the theatrical activities were organized by architects or poets, and thus theater was generally considered as a literary activity. In such a situation, what makes de’ Sommi of special relevance to the modern development of the theater is the unique blend of his skills. He was what we would consider today an interdisciplinary artist, endowed with a modern awareness of the importance of the theater as a performing art. Indeed, only a few of his contemporaries such as Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio or Ludovico Ariosto shared this awareness, at a time when the theater was generally considered simply as representation of a text. As a consequence, de’ Sommi promoted and supported for the Italian courts a kind of theater in which professionalism was fostered by using mostly actors of the commedia dell’arte, while also trying to create a permanent company in Mantua. The actors, and especially the director and all the technicians, should not be amateurs, as was usually the case in the Renaissance courts, but had to develop the necessary skills for a complete and balanced work, in which the various elements would be integrated harmoniously. 1780

De’ Sommi’s view of theater is found in his major work, Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche (Four Dialogues on the Art of the Stage), which is also a primary source of information on sixteenth-century Italian theater and a mine for ideas and questions that were developed over the following centuries. The date of composition of this work is uncertain. It has been dated between 1561 and 1565 because of a reference to the wedding of the duke of Mantua and Eleonora of Austria that took place in 1561; however, the date of 1556, quoted in the foreword of the sole transcription (which dates only to the late eighteenth century) is believed to be accurate by several scholars. In the Quattro dialoghi, de’ Sommi offers a detailed discussion of dramaturgy, staging, and acting, making use of both practical experience and scholarship to establish the highest standards for theatrical performances. The first dialogue deals with the origins of comedy and tragedy, which, according to the author, have biblical roots. Here de’ Sommi expresses his preferences for comedy in prose, without any monologues or asides, because in everyday life language is natural, and comedy should always resemble that natural pattern; verse, by contrast, is suitable for tragedy. In the second dialogue, he explains why comedy is divided into five acts, and what the right proportions are among the different parts of the play. The third section, surely the most important, considers the relationship between the performance and the text, but is also largely dedicated to the role of the producer in

LEONE DE’ SOMMI managing the stage and the actors. De’ Sommi demonstrates considerable experience in both fields and a very modern sense of the theatrical work. He explains that a good presentation is more important than a good text, and he explains how to conduct the work on the stage, from the choice of the actors to the organization of their work and of the scenes. The fourth dialogue takes place during a rehearsal and is not only interesting as a description of the work with the actors, who, according to the third monologue, all have to obey the producer, but perhaps most importantly because here the author discusses at length the marvelous scenes of the theater of Mantua and the importance of stage lighting. In fact, this part is one of the most significant sources of documentation of the techniques used in the period. De’ Sommi gives directions for such things as the use of water refraction by immersing the lights in glass bowls filled with colored water and of reflection obtained with mirrors on the stage. De’ Sommi also wrote several plays that were mostly lost in the 1904 fire at the Biblioteca Nazionale of Turin, where they were kept. The ones that remain include the comedy Tre sorelle (Three Sisters, 1588), and Tzahut bedihuta de-qiddushin (A Comedy of Betrothal, 1550), which is considered the first known Hebrew drama.

Biography Born in Mantua in 1527, a member of the Jewish family of the Portaleone. Lived in Ferrara, where he befriended the Jewish scholar Azariah dei Rossi. Around 1550, returned to Mantua at the Gonzaga court, at a time when the city was a flourishing cultural and artistic center, and the wise politic of the Gonzaga permitted a true integration between

Christian and Jewish cultures. Upon the appearance of his poem ‘‘Drusilla,’’ elected a member of the Accademia degli Invaghiti, 1562. Died in Mantua in 1592. NICOLA FUOCHI Selected Works Tzahut bedihuta de-qiddushin (1550); edited by J. Schirmann, 1945–1946; as A Comedy of Betrothal, edited by Alfred S. Golding, 1988. Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche (1556?), edited by Ferruccio Marotti, 1968. Tre sorelle (1588); edited by Giovanni Romei, 1982; as Three Sisters, translated by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella, 1992.

Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, and Guido Davico Bonino (editors), Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, 1, La nascita del teatro moderno Cinquecento-Seicento, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Attolini, Giovanni, Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1988. Belkin, Ahuva (editor), Leone de’ Sommi and the Performing Arts, Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1997. Burattelli, Claudia, Spettacoli di corte a Mantova tra Cinque e Seicento, Florence: Le Lettere, 1999. Carandini, Silvia (editor), Teatri barocchi: tragedie, commedie, pastorali nella drammaturgia europea fra ‘500 e ‘600, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Ciavolella, Massimo, ‘‘Leone de’ Sommi e il teatro ebraico a Mantova nel Rinascimento,’’ in La maschera e il volto. Il teatro in Italia, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Marsilio, 2002. Cruciani, Fabrizio, and Daniele Seragnoli (editors), Il teatro italiano nel Rinascimento, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. Muraro, Maria Teresa, Scena e messinscena. Scritti teatrali 1960–1998, Venice: Marsilio, 2004.

THE SONGBOOK See Il Canzoniere (Work by Petrarch)

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SONGWRITERS

SONGS OF CASTELVECCHIO See I Canti di Castelvecchio (Work by Giovanni Pascoli)

SONGWRITERS The Italian for ‘‘songwriter’’ is either autore di canzoni or cantautore, the 1960s neologism that defines a certain way of composing that is antithetical to popular songwriting. In both cases, however, the autore is central and is to be understood within the context of the Italian cultural tradition, which had to adapt to a consumer industry. In the canon of contemporary Italian songwriting, there are authors of popular music who are considered prominent regardless of the criteria governing the ups and downs of the commercial hits. Canonical songwriting began in Italy in the 1950s, i.e., in the time of Domenico Modugno’s hits. Even if Italian song was born, as Gianni Borgna proposed, in 1848 with Santa Lucia, the form of the song really became independent of its historical origins as soon as authors realized that the use of microphones and the spreading of music-broadcasting and -playing technologies would allow songs to acquire a distinctive expressive feature (Storia della canzone italiana, 1992). In Italy, this epoch-making trend coincided with a gradual but inescapable transformation of the linguistic medium: While lyrics rid themselves of the cumbersome legacy of the lofty poetic tradition, the sung language progressively approaches spoken Italian. The stir caused by Domenico Modugno (1928–1994) at the Sanremo Festival in 1958 with Nel blu, dipinto di blu (better known as Grammywinning Volare to English-speaking audiences) is aptly explained. The innovative power of this song is due to the fortunate concurrence of three factors. First, the surreal and liberating images of flight evoked by the lyrics (written by Franco Migliacci and inspired by two paintings by Chagall) suggest a 1782

cheerful, fulfilling sexuality. They display a poetic sensitivity unprecedented in Italian songs, which had abided either by the cliche´ of chaste love and the angel-like woman or by the opposite cliche´ of vulgar, coarse double entendres (especially in the Fascist period). Secondly, the music of Nel blu, dipinto di blu, with its hints of swing and blues, is the culmination of a receptiveness to American music that had already surfaced in Italy, despite censorial restrictions, during the Fascist period. Modugno’s song combines such influences with the melodic bent of the Italian tradition, thus becoming its first, unsurpassed example of internationalization. Finally, Modugno’s extraordinary voice and the audacity of his gestures bound the singer with the song, turning voice and appearance into semiotically relevant elements of the songlistening process. Although the personalization of the performance would eventually foster the unavoidable prima donna by-products of mass-culture industry, it would also give singers-songwriters a chance to embody the ‘‘voice’’ of their own poetics into a personal, expressive vocal ‘‘grain,’’ thereby extending the very concept of ‘‘authority’’ to include control over performance itself. The years of Modugno’s triumph were the years of the debut of Gino Paoli (1934–), who, along with Luigi Tenco, Fabrizio De Andre´, Bruno Lauzi, and Umberto Bindi, formed part of the so-called Genoese school. In 1960, Gino Paoli wrote Il cielo in una stanza for Mina. Despite its peculiar formal structure (a diatonic melody linking two equivalent themes) that lacks a real refrain, it is one of those songs all Italians know by heart. An explicit line in the lyrics—‘‘quando tu sei vicino a me/questo soffitto

SONGWRITERS viola no, non esiste piu`’’ (when you’re close to me, / this purple ceiling, no, is no longer there)—recalls, although it is not generally perceived, an ‘‘irregular’’ or even mercenary love: The adverb ‘‘quando’’ hints at an occasional togetherness that the ‘‘soffitto viola’’ locates in a bedroom whose de´cor is quite different from a conventional master bedroom. In this song, Paoli inaugurates a distinctive sign of the cantautorale approach: an attention to, and proclivity for alternative feelings and lifestyles. With a limited voice range, but endowed with a very personal vocal ‘‘grain,’’ he made himself known as the performer of his own songs, such as Senza fine (1962), a masterpiece of melodic elegance. Following his success, the vindication of authorship evident in Paoli’s works would strive to assert itself against—or offer itself as alternative to—the tradition of Italian bel canto, in which, as many have noted, the ‘‘heart’’ (cuore) always rhymes with ‘‘love’’ (amore). Luigi Tenco (1938–1967), one of the most talented songwriters of the early 1960s, is perhaps the most striking (and tragic) instance of a twofold realization: As a popular media, songs offered a multitude of expressive possibilities, but their aesthetic potential and the actual possibility of making them understandable to everyone were radically diverging. Tenco’s suicide at the Sanremo Festival symbolically marked the end of the illusions brought about by the economic boom and was a clear statement of a creeping malaise that these songwriters had been the first to sense. His suicide was also interpreted as the songwriter’s indictment of a country that still preferred the deceptions of secondhand love rhetoric to the possibility of considering songs as the bearers of a genuine truth. Fabrizio De Andre´ (1940–1999), by now regarded, even beyond the musical sphere, as one of the most influential personalities of twentiethcentury Italy, is the songwriter who expressed a world from which music had thus far kept aloof. Since the early 1960s, his ballads, crowded with prostitutes, thieves, convicts, and murderers, import into the horizon of ‘‘the singable’’ the same attention to the material aspects of living, to marginality and minorities that one decade later would characterize the approach to history of the French Annales school. His La canzone di Marinella (1964) consecrated him as author. His paradigmatic use of the ballad form in this song remains one of his most influential, distinctive traits. In 1967, he released Volume I, which contained the poignant Via del Campo (the Genoese street where prostitutes used to work) and Bocca di rosa. In this record, he

proves his exceptional bent for being ‘‘popular’’ in both senses of the word: He voices the young generations’ will to be free, while relating to the nobler culture and to the world of the paupers and the forgotten. Le nuvole (1990) is perhaps his most overtly political album, whose Aristophanesinspired title recalls all that weighs on men’s heads and prevents them from looking at the sky: Among the songs of the album, Ottocento is a gem of satiric eclecticism, making irreverent use of any possible music style, language, genre, and register. De Andre´’s last album, Anime salve (1996), cowritten with Ivano Fossati, contains perhaps the legacy of his work, dedicated to ‘‘chi viaggia in direzione ostinata e contraria’’ (those who stubbornly move against the stream). The Milanese school, whose most prominent figures are Enzo Jannacci (1935–) and Giorgio Gaber (1939–2003), has many elements in common with the Genoese along with very different stylistic traits. A controversial character, a careful observer of society, and a fierce critic of politics, Gaber never spares exposing the hypocrisies of ideology and the tragicomic gap between the revolutionary ideas of his generation and their impracticality. Barbera e Champagne (1969) contains some of Gaber’s best-known songs, including the title song, and Come e` bella la citta`. An idiosyncratic songwriter, Gaber found his most congenial dimension in Il Signor G (1970), in which he launched the socalled sung theatre: From then on, his songs always alternated with ironic, sometimes grotesque, monologues. This penchant for theatricality and the surrealism of situations and characters, which are peculiar to Milanese school, can also be found in the songs of Enzo Jannacci. With him, however, they become an integral part of the song. His encounter, in the early 1960s, with Dario Fo (author of many songs that mixed the Italian language with the Milanese dialect) was decisive for Jannacci. Their collaboration produced his best-known records and songs: Vengo anch’io (1968) and Ho visto un re (1969). Although the 1960s contributed to the improvement of songwriting techniques, reflecting a growing awareness of the autonomous status of the song, the 1970s, with their deep upheavals in social mores following student protests, were traversed by opposite, often clashing, trends. In this decade, Lucio Battisti (1943–1998) held sway with his extraordinary ability to interpret the contradictory feelings of the time and revolutionize its musical language; at the other end of the spectrum, ‘‘commitment’’ and attention to the political dimension 1783

SONGWRITERS intensified to the point of becoming a trait unfailingly associated with songwriters-cantautori. Battisti began his career as a guitar player in the 1960s; when he decided to become a solo singer, he moved to Milan, where he met the lyricist Giulio Rapetti (1936–), known as Mogol, and started with him the most famous and remunerative artistic collaboration in the history of Italian song. When they met, Mogol was already a famous lyricist who had released quite a few successful songs for the record company Ricordi. Credit should be awarded to Mogol for leaving Battisti all the creative freedom he needed. The result of their encounter was a break from traditional songwriting style: a straightforward and versatile, even eclectic, songwriting pattern, endowed with a great prosodic and rhythmic freedom (from asymmetrical stanzaic modules to single-verse ones). In 1969, Battisti and Mogol presented the song Un’avventura at Sanremo, followed by the first album Lucio Battisti. In the same year, they won the Festivalbar with Acqua azzurra, acqua chiara. A very productive period began with the release of the beautiful album Emozioni (1970) and, the following year, of the hit single Pensieri e Parole. Several albums followed in a very short period of time: Amore e non amore (1971) contains Dio mio no, censored by RAI for its sexually allusive lyrics. In 1972, two albums are released: Umanamente uomo: il sogno, which contains the masterpiece of the duo Battisti-Mogol I giardini di marzo. Between 1973 and 1976, five more records were produced, all remarkably successful. Una giornata uggiosa (1980) ended Battisti’s professional and personal relationship with Mogol. He began collaborating with Pasquale Panella. His learned and metrically dense texts confirmed Battisti’s extraordinary versatility as a singer and songwriter, but they also removed him from the top of the charts, where he had reigned for a decade. Battisti produced with Panella his last four albums, probably bound to be known by connoisseurs only. Battisti’s success traversed the political divisions of the 1970s; the most influential Italian intellectuals of the time, however, sided with the left. A great number of important songwriters wrote songs in which political and civic commitment played a significant role. This was the case with Francesco Guccini (1940–). He was already well-known in the 1960s for his collaboration with the group I Nomadi. He became famous as a singer with the album Radici, considered by critics to be the most significant album written by a songwriter of that time. It contains at least one song, the anarchist ballad La locomotiva, 1784

which immediately became part of the common heritage of a generation. In the following years, Guccini confirmed his success with Via Paolo Fabbri 43 (the author’s address in Bologna), which contains the famous song L’avvelenata, a long polemic ballad against the world of music and its hypocrisy. Lucio Dalla (1940–) also came from Bologna, with a strong jazz background. After a series of varying musical experiences, in 1972 he achieved extraordinary success with 4/3/1943 (known also with its original title Gesu` bambino, with lyrics by Paola Pallottino). In that same year, Dalla took part in Sanremo with Piazza grande, a tender description of a tramp’s life. The topic tackled by this song and the occasion chosen for its launch show how important social issues were in Italy in those years, but they also reflect Dalla’s personality, which does not disdain traditional and popular promotional channels. In the mid-1970s, Dalla began collaborating with the poet Roberto Roversi, and released several records with a strong political commitment. The effort to overcome traditional patterns and to experiment with new forms are evident as Dalla’s voice in these songs is sometimes reduced to an affective recitative. Come e` profondo il mare (1977) was the first album with lyrics written by Dalla. The title song is a beautiful autobiography remarkable for the way it breaks away from the whole tradition of Italian songs. Since then, and for more than a decade, Dalla enjoyed a series of successes, among them L’anno che verra` and Cosa sara`, performed with Francesco De Gregori, and the 1986 album, Dallamericaruso. Francesco De Gregori (1951–) started his career working on covers for Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen (the influence of the former being a decisive element and a constant inspiration). His first album, scarcely successful, was Theorius Campus (1972), shared with his friend Antonello Venditti. The following year he participated in the festival Disco per l’Estate with Alice non lo sa, a song which, though ranking lowest in the contest, was quite successful among the young. In 1974, he released Francesco De Gregori. In that same year, he also began cooperating with Fabrizio De Andre´, for whom he translated Dylan’s Desolation Road. In 1975, Lucio Dalla wrote for him the music of Pablo: The song had an unexpected success with the public, and Rimmel, the album that contained it, remained for a whole year on the Italian pop charts. Rimmel also contains the wonderful love song Buonanotte fiorellino, an inspired rereading of Winterlude by Bob Dylan. With Buffalo Bill (1976), whose title track refers to

SONGWRITERS the story of William F. Cody (the famous cowboy who, reduced to a circus attraction, went to Italy to compete against Maremma cowherds), De Gregori offered one of the must inspiring, again Dylan-influenced, visions of America in the Italian tradition. Criticized by a group of extremists during a 1977 concert, De Gregori left the stage for two years and only made records. He returned to the stage in 1979 with Lucio Dalla for the famous tour Banana Republic. With the tour he began the most prolific period of his career, producing the beautiful concept album Titanic and the mini-LP La Donna Cannone (1983), whose title track is a beautiful song considered to be, both by critics and public, his masterpiece. Paolo Conte (Asti, 1934–) hardly fits in any of the above-mentioned trends. Born in a small and rich provincial town in Piedmont, whose melancholic affluence, anxious escapism, and taste for exoticism he describes in many of his songs, Conte is a great expert in jazz, a sophisticated musician, a talented painter, and writer of unforgettable lyrics (Premio Montale, 2001). His compositions are striking in their extraordinary ability to mix different influences in an eclectic musical language: the swing of great orchestras, for the most part, but also milonga, habanera, tango, the Italian opera, and Neapolitan song. As a lyricist, Conte can be considered part of a specific piedmont literary tradition (represented by Guido Gozzano, together with the often-forgotten nineteenth-century forefathers Giovanni Faldella and Achille Cagna). His taste for understatement and linguistics (the American of African-American jazz singers, as well as French and Neapolitan) have helped make Conte the most highly valued Italian author by the international learned public. His work dates back to the 1960s, when he composed a few songs destined to become classics. His career as a singer began in 1974 with the album Paolo Conte, which includes songs whose great evocative power is triggered, like the best twentieth-century poetry, by everyday details. From Un gelato al limon (1979) to Parole d’amore scritte macchina (1990), Conte refined his technique as a singer, abandoning the distracted falsetto of his beginnings, refining the hoarse bass tone and the recitative that make his voice the perfect theater for the images he evokes. After consolidation of his success his live shows became frequent: Especially after 1985 Conte began a series of international concerts that took him to the Olympia in Paris, to the Blue Note in New York, to Canada, Spain, Greece, and Holland (where he was awarded the platinum disc). In 2000,

he appeared at the Barbican Hall in London in the preview of Razmataz, a musical set in the Paris of the 1920s. The rapid economic and social changes of the 1980s, which intensified the hedonistic and individualistic elements in Western societies and decreased the level of political involvement, marked a profound change in Italian song. New songwriters and new formal solutions, in music and lyrics alike, emerged. The most significant innovator was Franco Battiato (1943–). After the first experimental albums of the 1970s and the ‘‘pop’’ shift in 1979 with L’era del cinghiale bianco (1979) and Patriots (1980), he achieved an extraordinary success with the album Bandiera bianca (1981). The supremacy of Battiato as a lyricist in those years consisted in his power to allude to something without actually saying it, to disseminate hints, to refer to elusive images whose concreteness is often located only in the desire of the listener to find one. In years that saw a return to consumerism, Battiato used the allusive language of advertisement and elevated it to a style. An accomplished musician (the preview of his opera Genesi, 1987, was performed at the theater Regio in Parma) and an indefatigable researcher into musical origins, Battiato can compose complex operas and simple songs. Fascinated by and expert in Oriental philosophies and Arab culture, he has been called the ‘‘shaman of Italian music’’ (G. Monti-V. Di Pietro), partially because of his so-called ‘‘mystic shift’’ at the end of the 1980s. More than a shift, Battiato’s new work represented a further exploration of topics and gestures that were already present in his works. Since 1994, Battiato has worked with the philosopher Manlio Sgalambro, author of many lyrics, for his new songs and of the libretto of the opera Il cavaliere dell’intelletto (1994). In 1997, La cura (contained in L’imboscata, 1996) was awarded the title of best song of the year at the International Music Awards. With a qualitatively uneven production, but crowned by uninterrupted success, Vasco Rossi (1952–) also left his mark on the 1980s. He should be credited for having introduced in a convincing way a strong rock matrix conceived and performed in Italian. Only with him was the artistic gap between daily language and the language of music overcome. In this respect, his first albums from the early 1980s were already the most significant ones. Pino Daniele (1955–) deserves similar credit for his contribution to blues and world music (of which he was a precursor). By reusing Neapolitan dialect, mixed with Italian and American slang, he gave a new shape to the Neapolitan melodic 1785

SONGWRITERS attitude. His classical albums are Terra mia (1977), and in particular Vai mo’ (1981) and Bella ‘mbriana (1982). Today the cantautori remain the most original Italian contribution to pop culture, even if not as politically engaged as in the early 1960s, when most of them were associated with leftist intellectual movements. Since the 1970s, some notable women songwriters emerged, such as Giovanna Marini, Gianna Nannini, Teresa De Sio, and Grazia Di Michele. In 1993, the 18-year-old Laura Pausini won the Sanremo Festival with a ballad called La solitudine; in 2006, she received a Grammy for Best Latin Pop Album (Escucha), the only other Italian ever to be recognized since Domenico Modugno. This international award confirms that singersongwriters continue to appeal to their audiences and are not easily superseded by new musical phenomena. SIMONE MARCHESI Further Reading Borgna, Gianni, Le canzoni di Sanremo, Bari: Laterza, 1986. Borgna, Gianni, Storia della canzone italiana, Milan: Mondadori, 1992.

Carrera, Alessandro, Musica e pubblico giovanile, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Carrera, Alessandro, ‘‘Folk Music and Popular Song from the Nineteenth Century to the 1990s,’’ in Modern Italian Culture, edited by Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca West, Cambridge, UK-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Castaldo, Gino (editor), Dizionario della canzone italiana, Rome: Armando Curcio Editore, 1990. Coveri, Lorenzo (editor), Parole in musica: Lingua e poesia nella canzone d’autore italiana, Novara: Interlinea, 1996. Falassi, Alessandro, Italian Folklore: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: Garland, 1985. Filippa, Marcella, ‘‘Popular Song and Musical Cultures,’’ in Italian Cultural Studies, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Jachia, Paolo, La canzone d’autore italiana 1958–1997, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998. Liperi, Felice, Storia della canzone italiana, Rome: Rai-Eri, 1999. Middleton, Richard, Studying Popular Music, Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1990. Monti, Giangilberto, and Veronica Di Pietro, Dizionario dei cantautori, Milan: Garzanti, 2003. Pivato, Stefano, La Storia leggera, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003. Salvatore, Gian Franco, Mogol-Battisti, l’alchimia del verso cantato. Arte e linguaggio della canzone moderna, Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998.

MARIA LUISA SPAZIANI (1922–) Maria Luisa Spaziani is an essayist and translator of theatrical, poetic, and narrative works dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Spaziani is also one of the most interesting voices of contemporary Italian poetry. At 19, she had already founded the journal Il dardo, which published the writings of important authors—Mario Luzi, Sandro Penna, Leonardo Sinisgalli, Vasco Pratolini (all of whom maintained a lasting friendship with Spaziani), and Virginia Woolf. As she recounts in the ‘‘Prefazione’’ to her Poesie 1954–1996, published in 2000, Woolf sent the then little-known Spaziani several unpublished pages of The Waves. On January 14, 1949, during a conference at the Teatro Carignano of Turin, Spaziani met Eugenio Montale, with whom she forged a strong friendship, 1786

as attested by the 360 letters conserved in the Maria Corti archives of the Universita` di Padova. Montale, who referred to Spaziani as Volpe in the collection La bufera e altro, was an important influence, especially in her early literary work. Still, one must not forget, as Vincenzo Paladino reminds us, Spaziani’s affinities with the so-called Lombard Line of poets, whose work reflected the Hermetic poets (very active during those years in Florence, a city frequented by Spaziani) and the French symbolists (‘‘Poesia di Maria Luisa Spaziani,’’ 1989). Spaziani’s poetic debut dates to 1954 with Le acque del sabato (Saturday’s Waters), which also contains writings from the 1940s. This collection, in which the major themes of her poetry are already delineated, makes her distance from her contemporaries quite evident, especially in the classical

MARIA LUISA SPAZIANI concreteness of her verses. This poetic concreteness is embodied in the object-text, something different from a poetry of ‘‘objects.’’ Spaziani’s relationship with the poetry of the 1930s and with Montale’s modernism is paramount, but it is also true that she endows her poetry with a classical, compositional rigor and formal appearance based on a musical orchestration of the word. These first verses are informed by a lyrical and autobiographical expressiveness that departs from both the practice of Hermetic poetics and of European avant-garde movements. In succeeding works, her poetry drops direct references to reality and becomes more atemporal. Nevertheless, her poems never lose contact with their origins in experienced reality, in events, but especially in places visited. Spaziani’s latest works reveal new poetic directions inspired by her first experience of Paris. Spaziani writes that next to the ‘‘acquarello cosı` educato ed estetizzante delle prime poesie si affiancano i colori di unavita ed un ambiente diverso, scoperte ed emozioni’’ (the portrayals so well-mannered and aestheticizing of the first poems are placed the colors of a different life and environment, discoveries and emotions) (‘‘Prefazione’’ to Poesie 1954–1996, 2000). Thus next to verses such as ‘‘Ricordo una stagione in mezzo a colli / immensi, affaticata dal soffiare / dalla notturna tramontana’’ (I remember a season among the hills / immense, fatigued from the blowing / of the nocturnal north wind) or ‘‘Luna d’inverno che dal melograno / per i vetri di casa filtri lenta / sui miei sonni veloci’’ (Winter moon which from the pomegranate / through the house windows you filter in slowly / onto my swift sleep), taken from ‘‘Ricordo una stagione’’ (I Remember a Season) and ‘‘Luna d’inverno’’ (Winter moon), are placed other verses like ‘‘Fetido e allegro il Mouff tra ritmi / gregoriani e lamenti di moschea’’ (Fetid and allegro the Mouff among Gregorian rhythms / and laments from the mosque) from ‘‘Marzo in rue Mouffetard’’ (March in Mouffetard Street). Spaziani concludes with two isolated, almost epigrammatic verses: ‘‘Il cadente rifugio di Verlaine / scuotono a notte rumbe negre’’ (The falling refuge of Verlaine / at night the Negro rumba shakes). These verses elaborate a geography of memory. Spaziani is well-aware of the time and the space in which she lives: She translates them into images that are never merely descriptive, but allusive and full of symbolic, mythical, or magical elements. Spaziani’s poetic development is revealed in her next collection Il gong (The Gong, 1962), in which she moves away from Montale’s hendecasyllable

(which dominated Le acque del sabato) and begins working in nine-syllable verses, seven-syllable verses, and ‘‘barbaric rhythms’’ (ritmi barbari) that become consolidated in Utilita` della memoria (Usefulness of Memory, 1966) and L’occhio del ciclone (The Eye of the Cyclone, 1970). The elegance of these verses can conceal the vital, revivifying force of Proustian memory also at work in them. The poems are careful to document their poetic settings: Utilita` della memoria is set in Lombardy and L’occhio del ciclone between the sea of Sicily and the woods of Calabria. These collections (especially the last one) are also distinguished by the introduction of a multilingualism that can also be seen in succeeding works. The lyric self is now projected into different linguistic realities. Utilita` della memoria contains exemplary verses such as ‘‘Abbraccio tutto cio` che viene, il nome / che non conosco et ce petit peu de mal’’ (I embrace everything that comes, the name / that I don’t know et ce petit peu de mal) taken from ‘‘Dalla finestra di Colette’’ (From Colette’s Window). ‘‘Credo quia absurdum. Amerti uguale vivere / ogni alba una pietra miliare. / Deve restare absurdum. / Credere e non pensare’’ (I believe quia absurdum. Amerti all the same to live / every dawn a milestone. / It must remain absurdum. / To believe and to not think) appears in Latinı`e in Transito con catene (Transit with Chains, 1977), a collection that offers a rich display of multilingual expressionism. Beginning with L’occhio del ciclone, Spaziani turns more and more to gnomic and epigrammatic forms. An example of her growing originality is the sui generis collection Poesie dalla mano sinistra (Poetry by the Left Hand, 2002), in which a manuscript version of poetry is placed side by side with its transcription alongside. The volume alternates epigrammatic verse, a form that connects her to Montale, with verse passages almost epic or biblical in their intensity. The epigrammatic, in any case, is not privileged by the poetess who often inclines toward narrative poetry. This narrative poetic culminates in a very original novel in verse, Giovanna d’Arco (Joan of Arc, 1990). The poem, which was successfully staged, achieves a great compactness ‘‘per la continuita` dell’azione e l’unita` di tono narrativo delle ottave con il suo vasto respiro e i suoi scenari epici’’ (through the continuity of the action and the unity of the narrative tone of the octaves with its vast breadth and epic scenarios) (‘‘Prefazione’’ to Poesie 1954–1996, 2000). Among her other memorable poetic collections are Geometria del disordine (Surveyor of Disorder, 1981), La stella del libero arbitrio (The Star with Free Will, 1787

MARIA LUISA SPAZIANI 1986), and La traversata dell’oasi (The Crossing of the Oasis, 2002). La traversata dell’oasi is a collection of poems, prevalently in two quartets, dedicated to all the nuances of love; it is a sort of private diary in which memory has deposited its diverse recollections with a vivid immediacy and intimacy.

Biography

Fiction La freccia, 2002.

Plays Dottore di vetro, radio play, 1996. Teatro comico e no, 2004.

Translations

Born in Turin on December 7, 1922 (not 1924 as most biographies report); graduated from the University of Turin with a thesis on Marcel Proust; first taught German language, then German literature, and then French at the Universita` di Messina, and translated, among others, works by Jacques Audiberti, Jean Cocteau, Andre´ Gide, Goethe, Gombrich, Racine, Shakespeare, Ronsard, and Michel Tournier; met Eugenio Montale in 1950, with whom she corresponded until the 1960s; in 1958, married Ele´mire Zolla, whom she divorced in 1960; she has one daughter, Oriana, born in 1964; in 1981, presided over the Centro Internazionale di Poesia, which she established along with Danilo Dolci and Giorgio Caproni, and administered and judged the Montale prize; received numerous awards, among them the Viareggio prize for Geometria del disordine in 1981, and two nominations for the Nobel prize in 1990 and in 1992; her poetic works have been translated into a number of languages; she currently lives in Rome. LORENZA MIRETTI Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Le acque del sabato,’’ 1954. ‘‘Primavera a Parigi,’’ 1954. ‘‘Luna lombarda,’’ 1959. ‘‘Il fuoco dipinto,’’ 1959. ‘‘Il gong,’’ 1962. ‘‘Utilita` della memoria,’’ 1966. ‘‘L’occhio del ciclone,’’ 1970. ‘‘Ultrasuoni,’’ 1976. ‘‘Transito con catene,’’ 1977. ‘‘Geometria del disordine,’’ 1981. ‘‘La stella del libero arbitrio,’’ 1986; as Star of Free Will, translated by Carol Lettieri and Irene Marchegiani Jones, 1996. ‘‘Giovanna d’Arco,’’ 1990. ‘‘Torri di vedetta,’’ 1992; as Sentry Towers, edited and translated by Laura Stortoni, annotated by Maria Luisa Spaziani, 1995. ‘‘I fasti dell’ortica,’’ 1996. ‘‘Fresco castagneto,’’ 1999. ‘‘Radice del mare,’’ 1999. ‘‘La radice dei mari,’’ 2000.

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‘‘Poesie 1954–1996,’’ 2000. ‘‘Poesie dalla mano sinistra,’’ 2002. ‘‘La traversata dell’oasi: Poesia d’amore 1998–2001,’’ 2002.

Jean Racine, Britannico, Bajazet, Atalia, 1986. Michel Tournier, Il gallo cedrone, 1988.

Other Il teatro francese del Seicento, 1960. Due poeti. Charles D’Orleans e Sully-poudhomme, 1970. Ronsard fra gli astri della ple´iade, 1972. Il teatro francese del Settecento, 1974. Il teatro francese del Novecento, 1976. Il teatro francese dell’Ottocento, 1977. Da «Stello» a «Chatterton»e la poesia di Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, 1977. Racine e il «Bajazet», 1977. Donne in poesia, 1992. Catalogo delle lettere di Eugenio Montale a Maria Luisa Spaziani (1949–1964), edited by Giuseppe Polimeri, foreword by Maria Corti, 1999. La voce di Maria Luisa Spaziani: forse un angelo parla a tutti, texts read by Piera degli Esposti, 2002.

Further Reading Arcurio, Bruno, ‘‘Giovanna D’Arco in una vibrante ballata gotica di Maria Luisa Spaziani,’’ in Il Veltro, 35, nos. 3–4 (May-Aug. 1991): 316–328. Bisutti, Donatella, ‘‘Su poesie dalla mano sinistra,’’ in Maria Luisa Spaziani, Poesie dalla mano sinistra, Milan: Archivi del ‘900, 2002. Cambon, Glauco, ‘‘La voce di Maria Luisa Spaziani,’’ in Italica, 41 (June 1964): 158–161. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Due situazioni poetiche,’’ in Le proposte della poesia e nuove proposte, Milan: Mursia, 1971. Frabotta, Biancamaria, Introduction to Maria Luisa Spaziani, Donne in poesia: Antologia della poesia femminile in Italia dal dopoguerra ad oggi, Rome: Savelli, 1977. Marchegiani Jones, Irene, ‘‘Maria Luisa Spaziani: Metafore del’ambiente e dello spazio,’’ in Italian Culture, 10 (1992): 205–215. Paladino, Vincenzo, ‘‘La poesia di Maria Luisa Spaziani: Il certo normativo della metafora,’’ in Critica letteraria, 14 (1986): 501–510. Paladino, Vincenzo, ‘‘Poesia di Maria Luisa Spaziani,’’ in Novecento: Gli scrittori e la cultura letteraria nella societa` italiana, edited by Gianni Grana, Milan: Marzorati, 1989. Ramat, Silvio, ‘‘Maria Luisa Spaziani e l’assolutezza del desiderio,’’ in Storia della poesia del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Wedel, Giovanna, ‘‘La memoria divinatoria di Maria Luisa Spaziani,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 27 (Fall 1986): 45–49. Wright, Simona, ‘‘Maria Luisa Spaziani: Principium Individuationis e progetto poetico nell’incontro con venti voci liriche femminili,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 35 (Summer-Fall 1998): 35–81.

SPERONE SPERONI

SPERONE SPERONI (1500–1588) Sperone Speroni is a central figure in the lively discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics and literary criticism throughout the middle part of the sixteenth century in Italy. His close contact with many of the leading artists and political figures of his day, such as Il Ruzzante, Pietro Aretino, Bernardo, and Torquato Tasso, as well as Alfonso II of Ferrara and Guidobaldo II of Urbino, point to the fame he had earned as a learned man. The publication in 1542 of 10 of his Dialoghi (Dialogues) and the composition of his controversial tragedy, Canace in the same year (it was then published in 1546) bring into clear focus his activities as philosopher, artist, and literary critic. His dialogues treat a variety of moral, practical, and artistic concerns and represent the work for which he is best known today. Of particular importance is the Dialogo delle lingue (Dialogue on Languages), which addresses the question of the value of Latin and various forms of the vernacular and was unquestionably a source of Joachim du Bellay’s Deffense et illustration de la langue franc¸oyse (1549). The Canace sparked polemics about the interpretation of Aristotle’s Poetics that continued throughout Speroni’s lifetime and afterward. In his introduction to the collected works of Speroni, Mario Pozzi writes that in the 1570s the author hoped to publish a corrected and expanded version of the Dialoghi. This hope, however, was never fulfilled, leaving his grandson Ingolfo with a great quantity of his unedited writings. Noting that Speroni’s friend Daniele Barbaro had had the Dialoghi published against Speroni’s will, Ingolfo labored to bring forth in 1596 his grandfather’s corrected and finished versions, along with the Apologia dei dialoghi (Justification of the Dialogues), written by Speroni in 1574 to defend his earlier works against charges of indecency by the Roman Inquisition. A new edition of the Canace was published in 1597, also under Ingolfo’s guidance, together with the Apologia della Canace and Lezzioni sei in difesa della Canace (Justification of Canaca and Six Dialogues in Defense of Canace), originally written in 1553. Ingolfo then issued an edition of Speroni’s letters in 1606. These early editions, as Pozzi notes, have serious weaknesses, and it was only in 1740 that Natale Dalle Laste and Marco

Forcellini scrupulously restored the integrity of the texts in their edition of Speroni’s oeuvre, which remains the standard even today for most of the works. Critics have pointed out the multiplicity of voices and opinions in Speroni’s dialogues, such that it is often difficult to judge the overarching perspective. The form does not appear to allow for a straightforward argument, but rather articulates an ensemble of voices that may invite different and equally valid interpretations. In Apologia dei dialoghi, Speroni himself defines the genre as a hybrid form, placing it between philosophy and rhetoric insofar as it does not affirm or lead to a truth, but rather generates opinions. Using the metaphor of traveling, Speroni defines the philosopher as on the road of philosophy, and the discussants in a dialogue as on a path that winds and twists like a labyrinth. Dialogue, with its dramatic tension, may produce sparks or signs of the truth but not reveal truth itself. In the same work, Speroni likens his dialogues to comedies, or to innocent and playful children, speaking spontaneously and without a single authoritative voice. Each perspective is fallible, and indeed, Speroni’s ultimate defense of the opinions expressed in the dialogues is that errors are a vital part of the form. Still, one must be cautious in viewing all of the dialogues as only generating opinions, for one can detect in them the author’s irony toward certain values of his day, as in Dialogo d’amore (Dialogue on Love) toward the Neoplatonic ideas about love. Much of Speroni’s work as a literary critic stems from his engagement with Aristotelian poetics, and in particular with the idea of imitation. In his Discorso sopra Virgilio (Discourse on Virgil), left incomplete in 1581 and published in the 1596 edition of the Dialoghi, he argues that Virgil was inferior to Homer in invention and eloquence, that he merely took his material from Homer, and that one derives little pleasure in his concision. Here one sees Speroni’s great emphasis on the need for artistic invention, as he draws upon the authority of Aristotle, who maintained the prime importance of plot. He also refers to the philosopher in discussing the usefulness of poetry for its moral effects in Apologia dei dialoghi, and the importance of verisimilitude and 1789

SPERONE SPERONI the relation of poetry to history in the Dialogo dell’historia (Dialogue on History, 1596). The controversy around Speroni’s Canace is a lesson in the tension between the respect among scholars and artists for the authority of Aristotle’s Poetics and the need to find a space for creative maneuvering to serve their art. The polemics around this tragedy were preceded by similar objections to Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s Orbecche (1541), on the basis of the tragedy’s apparent violations of certain dictates in Aristotelian poetics. Hence, the critical atmosphere of time was clearly steeped in concern for abiding by the rules. Canace is a tale of incestuous love between Canace and Macareo, twin children of Aeolus. When the father discovers that a child has been born from this love, he has both the daughter and the child die, and as a result Macareo dies of grief. Aeolus is left to grieve the loss of his son. The play immediately provoked an anonymous response, often attributed to Bartolomeo Cavalcanti (1503–1562), Giudicio sopra la tragedia di Canace e Macareo (Judgment on the Tragedy of Canace and Macareo, 1543), that criticized the play for the wickedness of its heroes and their consequent inability to evoke the tragic effect (or catharsis) in the audience, for its diversion from known ancient stories, for its failure to meet the requirements of verisimilitude, and for its unorthodox use of various meters not normally used in tragedy. These criticisms were supported by references to Aristotle. Speroni responded with six lectures on the play at the Accademia degli Elevati in Padua and his Apologia in difesa della Canace. Using Aristotle’s Poetics, he supported his play, though he held, as Giraldi Cinzio had, that modern authors need not follow slavishly the dictates of classical authorities. He justified his experimentation with meter as an effort to have the speech of the play conform to real speech, and he maintained that the play could be read in several ways. This defense was followed by a series of reactions that treated both the practical concerns of drama and the correct interpretation of Aristotle, and the discussion continued into the 1590s.

Biography Born April 12, 1500, in Padua, the second child of Bernardino di Bartolomeo di Francesco, a successful physician, and Lucia Contarini. Received his university degree in artibus, 1518, then taught at the Sacro Collegio degli Artisti e Medici in Padua.

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Went to Bologna to study with the Aristotelian scholar Pietro Pomponazzi, 1523. Returned to Padua in 1525 after the death of Pomponazzi and was a professor of philosophy in Padua, 1525–1528. After the death of his father, left teaching to attend to family affairs. Around 1530, married Orsolina da Stra and had three daughters between 1533 and 1538. He also had an illegitimate daughter with whom he had a good relationship. During this time he began his political career: elected to the Counsel of Padua, 1532; served in Padua’s governing council, 1533–1548. Member of the learned society, Accademia degli Infiammati in Padua, of which he was elected its Principe in 1542. After 1553, Speroni’s life was divided between his service to the pope in Rome and his care for his family in Padua. Left Rome in 1553 to tend to the marriages of his daughters in Padua, where he remained until 1560. In 1560, again at the duke of Urbino’s urging, Speroni returned to Rome where he served the pope. In 1564, again returned to Padua. When Ugo Boncompagni was made Pope Gregory VIII in 1572, Speroni returned to Rome. In 1574, his dialogues were presented to the Roman Inquisitor and he was compelled to defend them. In 1578, he traveled back to Padua to tend to his niece’s wedding. Died in Padua, on June 2, 1588. THOMAS E. MUSSIO Selected Works Collections Opere, 5 vols., edited by Natale Dalle Laste and Marco Forcellini, Venice: Domenico Occhi, 1740; reproduced with introduction by Mario Pozzi, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1989.

Dialogues Dialoghi, 1542; expanded edition as Dialoghi: di nuovo ricorretti; a’ quali sono aggiunti molti altri non piu` stampati; e di piu` l’Apologia de i primi, 1596. Dialogo delle lingue, in Dialoghi, 1542; critical edition by Antonio Sorella, 1999.

Plays Canace (1942), 1546; expanded edition as Canace, tragedia del sig. Sperone Speroni, alla quale, sono aggiunte alcune altre sue compositioni, & una apologia, & alcune letioni in difesa della tragedia, 1597; as Canace e scritti in sua difesa, critical edition by Christina Roaf, 1982.

Letters Lettere, 1606. Lettere familiari, edited by Maria Rosa Loi and Mario Pozzi, 2 vols., 1993–1994.

SPORTS WRITING Further Reading Cammarosano, Francesco, La vita e le opere di Sperone Speroni, Empoli: R. Noccioli, 1920. Cecchi, Emilio, and Natalino Sapegno (editors), Storia della Letteratura Italiana, 4, Il Cinquecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1966. Daniele, Antonio et al., Sperone Speroni, Padua: Editoriale Programma, 1989. Fournel, Jean-Louis, Les dialogues de Sperone Speroni: liberte´s de la parole et re`gles de l’e´criture, Marburg: Hitzeroth, 1990. Lowry, Martin, ‘‘Aristotle’s Poetics and the Rise of Vernacular Literary Theory,’’ in Viator, 25 (1994): 411–425. Navarrete, Ignacio, ‘‘Strategies of Appropriation in Speroni and Du Bellay,’’ in Comparative Literature, 41, no. 2 (1989): 141–153.

Pozzi, Mario (editor), Trattatisti del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1996. Pugliese, Olga Zorzi, ‘‘Sperone Speroni and the Labyrinthine Discourse of Renaissance Dialogue,’’ in Imagining Culture: Essays in Early Modern History and Literature, edited by Jonathan Hart, New York: Garland, 1996. Russell, Rinaldina, ‘‘‘Opinione’ e ‘giuoco’ nel Dialogo d’amore di Sperone Speroni,’’ in Parola del testo, 6, no. 1 (2002): 133–146. Smarr, Janet L., ‘‘A Dialogue of Dialogues: Tullia d’Aragona and Sperone Speroni,’’ in MLN, 113, no. 1 (1998): 204–212. Snyder, Jon, Writing the Scene of Speaking: Theories of Dialogue in the Late Italian Renaissance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.

SPORTS WRITING The interest of cultured Italians in sports, both as a mass phenomenon and as an expression of the social imaginary, manifests itself at various levels. Excellent amateurs like Orio Vergani and Dino Buzzati have joined the ranks of journalists specializing in sports writing. At almost 80 years of age, Mario Soldati wrote in Ah! Il Mundial (Ah! The Mundial, 1986) about the Italian national team at the World Cup in Spain in 1982, an assignment he claimed was his ‘‘prima, ardua, finora unica esperienza di vero giornalista’’ (first, difficult and sole experience as a real journalist). Soldati further explained: ‘‘la maggior parte della mia vita fu immersa in un fenomeno collettivo. Mi occupavo soltanto di cio` che interessava agli altri, i lettori del Corriere della sera, i miei colleghi, i calciatori di tante squadre del mondo, le vicende di tutte le partite che si giocavano, quelle a cui assistevo negli stadi e quelle che vedevo, ogni giorno, ogni sera, nei piccoli schermi’’ (The greatest part of my life has been absorbed in a collective phenomenon. I have only taken an interest in what interested others, i.e., the readers of Il corriere della sera, my colleagues, the players of many football teams throughout the world, the vicissitudes of all the matches played, the ones which I watched in the stadium and those which I saw, every day, every evening on

the screen). Soldati’s words illustrate the principle of synergism, which had already been articulated by Umberto Saba in his Cinque poesie per il gioco del calcio (Five Poems about Soccer, 1934). In writing about sports, writers have to abandon their own words and submit themselves to the words of others: In sports literature, the modern gives way inadvertently to a collective postmodern subject. Soldati’s final reportage, Ah! The Mundial, would be the most important book about football of the 1900s. It coincided with the unexpected victory of the Italian team in the World Cup that year. It is difficult to isolate sports writing from the reporting of radio, cinema, and television—media that disseminate sports jargon and determine its infiltration into everyday language. In his choral novel, City (1999), Alessandro Baricco reconstructs a boxer’s career using many of these media voices. The novel alternates interior monologue with offscreen, 1950s-style running commentary (a nod to Martin Scorsese’s film, Raging Bull ), with the changing-room gossip typical of boxing news. Baricco, as a freelance journalist, also refers back to the tradition that considers the sports event as drama, in accordance with the theater of Marco Paolini, Edoardo Erba, and Giuseppe Cederna, among others.

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SPORTS WRITING In a praiseworthy but overlooked attempt at creating a sports ‘‘literature,’’ Franco Ciampitti, coeditor with the traditionalist critic Giovanni Titta Rosa, of a pioneering anthology of sports writing, wrote a novel, Novantesimo minuto (Ninetieth Minute, 1960). In the introduction to this novel, Massimo Bontempelli praises the author for introducing the stream of consciousness into sports fiction and for initiating a demythologizing process within the narratives themselves. The novel’s protagonist is fated to die in the ring. His death is presented as a consequence of the fighter’s growing doubt about the conventional values associated with the sport. As both a real and imaginary event, the boxing match between man and man is defined by rules. The fight as sport event is contained within the magic circle of fiction and performance. After the running commentary and reportage, the second level of sports literature is biography: the life and works of the great champions, like Primo Carnera, Tazio Nuvolari, and Fausto Coppi. In these biographies, the excess and the clamor of the public feats are played off against minimalist and demythologizing accounts of personal matters, defining a parabola of ascent, triumph, and fall, which the moralists love. Thus, sports biography seems like the last exemplary genre in which the protagonist, the champion, is Everyman. Autobiographies of champions, written in collaboration with, or directly by, journalists and writers, also lie within this heroic/comic pattern. The source of the sports epic may be found in the myth of the riders in the sky. This myth helped dramatize the challenges faced by that wizard of military aviation, Francesco Baracca, during World War I. It is not by chance that the shield of the rampant black horse portrayed on the hull of aircraft would quickly become the insignia of the Ferrari, the car emblematic of motor racing. After the experience of World War I, sporting competitions assumed a nationalistic component that they would never lose. War itself was often reported in Fascist propaganda in the idiom of the sporting page. One of the protagonists of Ettore Scola’s film, Una giornata particolare (1977), hails the pact with Mussolini by exclaiming: ‘‘Con la squadra che abbiamo creato se scoppia un’altra guerra gli facciamo un culo cosı`!’’ (With the team we’ve created, if another war breaks out, we’ll screw them!). These conscious and unconscious analogies between historical situations and sporting competitions are to be found in the best examples of the 1792

genre. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel Forse che si, forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No, 1910) is dedicated to aviation and fatal speed competitions, which, in times of peace, take place in aerodromes equipped like citadels of war. Sporting challenges and battles also intertwine in the reflections of Daniele Del Giudice, Staccando l’ombra da terra (Becoming Airborne, 1994). One can recall the appearance of the famous driver Giuseppe Campari in Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1974), or the mythical driving champion in Lucio Dalla’s song Nuvolari, or the great cyclist Gino Bartali, winner of the Tour de France, who, according to Paolo Conte, was credited with having saved Italy from civil war after the attempt on the life of the Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti on 14 August 1948. Sports stars are the iconic personalities of their historical period, examples of the destiny of the Italietta. Italy’s greatest sports writer, Gianni Brera (1919–1992), considered regionalism as the key to the cultural and ideological importance of sports. According to this line of thought, the champion athlete expresses his regional, rather than national, identity, a cultural rather than sporting identity. Not by chance was Gianni Brera repeatedly accused of racism. In the soccer reportage that Soldati dedicated to Brera, the same principle is extended to the global village, to the provinces of the world participating in an international festival. In Brera’s opinion, it is in language that we find the revolutionary lesson of sport. Sport is a breach of the social contract and a form of direct democracy, where it is impossible to cheat, and in which, in order to win, everyone must first be themselves. Brera was editor of La Gazzetta dello Sport (Italy’s most important daily sports paper) and of Guerin sportivo (Italy’s premier sports magazine), modeled after Guerino il Meschino, a fifteenthcentury courtly romance by Andrea da Barberino. There is not a definite place for Brera in traditional literary histories in spite of the enormous influence of his writing, which introduced neologisms that would become part of everyday language. Critics have been stubbornly resistant to ratifying Brera’s work, preferring instead classic treatises on games and sports. This is unfortunate because Brera’s articles were comprehensible and much appreciated by the general public, in spite of their undoubted complexity and of their provocative cultural notions. ALESSANDRO SCARSELLA

STAGE DIRECTING Further Reading Bascetta, Carlo, Il linguaggio sportivo contemporaneo, Florence: Sansoni, 1962. Bascetta, Carlo (editor), Sport e giuochi: trattati e scritti dal XV al XVIII sec., Milan: Il Polifilo, 1978. Bontempelli, Massimo, Introduction to Franco Ciampitti, Novantesimo minuto, Rome: Vito Bianco, 1960. Brera, Gianni, Storia critica del calcio italiano, Milan: Bompiani, 1975. Brera, Gianni, Coppi e il diavolo, Milan: Rizzoli, 1981. Brera, Gianni, Il principe della zolla, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1994. Brera, Gianni, L’Anticavallo. Sulle strade del Tour e del Giro, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1997. Brunamontini, Giuseppe (editor), Antologia della letteratura sportiva italiana, Rome: Societa` stampa sportiva, 1984. Buzzati, Dino, Dino Buzzati al Giro d’Italia, with an Introduction by Claudio Marabini, Milan: Mondadori, 1981. Caretti, Lanfranco, Lingua e sport, Florence: Vallecchi, 1973.

Casaburo, Alfredo, Sport e poesia, Casoria: Polisud, 1975. Ciampitti, Franco, Novantesimo minuto, Rome: Vito Bianco, 1960. Colombo, Umberto (editor), Le parole e lo sport. Letteratura sportiva del Novecento, with the collaboration of Franco Lanza and Claudio Toscani, Brunello: Edizioni di Otto, 1979. D’Orrico, Antonio (editor), Momenti di gloria. Un’antologia di sport e letteratura, Milan: Leonardo, 1992. Goggioli, Giordano, and Beppe Pegolotti (editors), Racconti dello sport, Florence: Vallecchi. Mazzeo, Luigi (editor), Letteratura sportiva. Storia e testi, Naples: Loffredo, 1971. Soldati, Mario, Ah! Il Mundial, Milan: Rizzoli, 1986. Titta Rosa, Giovanni, and Franco Ciampitti (editors), Prima antologia degli scrittori sportivi, Lanciano: R. Carabba, 1934. Vergani, Orio, Festa di maggio, Turin: SEI, 1940. Viazzi, Luciano, and Emiddio Valente, I cavalieri del cielo, Cremona: Persico, 2001.

STAGE DIRECTING During the 1930s, a new professional figure arrived on the Italian theatrical scene: the stage director. His role was not especially clear, particularly in a milieu like the Italian one, which was dominated by the overwhelming presence of the actor. It was not until 1932 that the linguist Bruno Migliorini coined the terms regia and regista (stage directing; stage director). The critic Silvio d’Amico, who founded the Accademia Reale d’Arte Drammatica in Rome in 1935, promoted this new role. From the beginning of the twentieth century, light-comedy actors, such as Ermete Novelli and Virgilio Talli, had assumed control over the direction of the play, and playwrights like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Emilio Praga, and Pirandello decided to follow suit. One may assume a connection between stage direction and the overdevelopment of those authors so valued by the Fascist regime. During that period, the desire of the stage director to achieve independence gradually waned. People attended the theater to hear words; the visual aspect was secondary. This revisionism distanced the Italian stage director from the theoretical tensions and linguistic utopias of twentieth-century European drama. In contrast with directors who experimented with images and

space, the Italian director was more interested in serving dramaturgy and the dramatic text. Renato Simoni was the most adept representative of this stage-directing philosophy: He considered the visual element to be less important than the alliance between the text and the actor. Conversely, Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960) reduced stage direction to the link between actor and text. On 18 April 1939, he made his debut at the Teatro delle Arti in Rome as the art director of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The actor Renato Cialente interpreted the role of the nameless stage director. On this empty stage—which, despite the cinematic use of lighting, eschewed any attempt at scenery—the stage manager occupied the space; he animated it. According to D’Amico, stage directors and actors should complete one another, growing harmoniously in their common subordination to the charisma of the text. The Accademia aimed not to expand the player’s expressive role, but rather to concentrate on voice training, the development of phonetics (along with singing), with musical theory and music underlining the centrality of sound. Historically speaking, Orazio Costa (1911–1999) was the most instrumental representative of this model. 1793

STAGE DIRECTING After his graduation in stage directing from the Accademia in 1937, he became a prominent actor and a firm advocate of the supremacy of the text, in opposition to those who urged creative initiatives in order to improve the theater. According to Costa, the script functions like a machine, and thus possesses its own rhythm and soul. The voice is the embodiment of the actor’s expressive talent. Luchino Visconti (1906–1976), a self-taught stage director, embraced the supremacy of stage directing over the other elements of the play—a supremacy he derived from his parallel experience with the cinema. On 30 January 1945, he staged Jean Cocteau’s Les parents terribles at the Teatro Eliseo in Rome. He worked with manic precision on stage, as though he were using a camera. The plot, a sentimental grand guignol, seemed to meet with the audience’s approval. Visconti therefore introduced several foreign works, mainly from the United States (Erskine Caldwell, Tennessee Williams). However, the United States of these works was not the liberal one so treasured by the writer Cesare Pavese, but the one of turbid, infected suburbs. From France, Visconti adopted Jean Anouilh’s vaudevilles, and the provocative comedies of Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre. He rarely chose Italian texts. It is with opera that Visconti’s stage directing was to capture a range of pathetic images of the past. His direction allowed the female singers to emphasize their acting and expand their feelings, which are the real essence of opera. Maria Callas, whom Visconti directed in La Traviata (1955), was the diva par excellence. She became the incarnation of a maternal figure. Melodrama and cinema here exchanged functions and point to the investigation of the opera’s crucial scene, the ceremony of beatification and expulsion of the prima donna. A light in the dark night: This metaphor explains Giorgio Strehler’s (1921–1997) early work. The small university theaters during the last years of Fascism, with their catastrophic taste for the destiny of theater, formed the young director’s moral and ideological background. Here he developed his idea of a theater that would embody a feeling of fraternity. The opening of the Piccolo Teatro in Milan on 14 May 1947, with Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths, a production marked by resignation and anger, confirmed the affinities among stage direction, the act of love, and knowledge. Strehler emphasized the minimalism of the performance. As a priest of eternal poetry, the stage director must return to the classics for their diverse forms and metahistorical truths. Strehler’s loyalty to the text stood in contrast to a critical approach. It was Chekhov who 1794

inspired the most complete formulation of such a loyalist stance. In The Cherry Orchard, staged in 1974, Strehler elaborates on three themes: the first privileges the private realm and everyday life; the second investigates personal and social conflicts; and the third concerns abstract typologies. Strehler and Visconti both frequented the opera, and were convinced that it, and not the theater, was the national Italian popular repertoire. But at other times, Strehler transformed the stage into a blinding kaleidoscope of images striving for the fantastic. Pirandello’s Crotone, the safety islands between enchantment and deception in I giganti della montagna (which Strehler staged several times) and Shakespeare’s Prosperus, with his magical tricks in The Tempest (staged in 1978) are emblematic in this regard. On the one hand, he believes theoretically in the complete sacrifice of the actor to the character; on the other hand, he demands from his actor a responsible, secular behavior. For example, the actor Marcello Moretti had to wear a mask and adopt the nervous begging of Harlequin in Goldoni’s Il servitore di due padroni (A Servant of Two Masters), staged in 1947. This play rapidly became the playbill of the Piccolo Teatro abroad. A taste for martyrdom and expertise were the two poles of Strehler’s development. His encounter with the theater of Bertold Brecht, and his techniques of epic acting, stressed this polarity. Through Brecht, Strehler became more determined to eliminate the lyrical remnants of his debut. His relationship with the German playwright became more intense beginning in 1955, when he prepared an essay on acting for the school of the Piccolo Teatro, until 1962, when he staged Leben des Galilei (The Life of Galileo). The empty stage, created according to the teachings of Jacques Copeau, reinforced the dialectic materialism translated into an instructive vacuum, in which suggestion and social information ambiguously alternate in order to guarantee the distancing effect between stage and stalls, between actor and character. Here the alienation effect corresponded to a specific mode of acting: The actor is the one who leans over the emotional abyss of the character, thus turning fear and pain into an art of observation. The character was shown in a vertiginous sequence of insertions, or interruptions, and emotional abandonment. The same effects were achieved by transforming the character’s lines into the third-person singular. Moreover, the delivery of lines was slowed down in order to allow the actor and the audience to perceive references to social relations and to grasp implicit economical information through the actor’s gestures. Brecht’s Die

STAGE DIRECTING Dreigroschenoper (The Three Penny Opera) was a parody of consumerism, and in his 1956 production, Strehler attacked the most successful forms of entertainment, from opera to the cinema. Strehler’s excessive use of Brecht, first set beside Stanislavsky, and then Artaud, led the Italian stage to repudiate him into the 1980s. Strehler distanced himself from Brecht, even though without him he ran the risk of falling back into an eclectic repertoire. His interest in the theme of historical nostalgia led to a series of Shakespearean plays, such as his memorable encounter with King Lear in 1972, an encounter filled with autobiographical elements, in which senile madness is eventually humiliated by the arrogance of the young. Strehler pondered the stage director’s destiny as part of an old-fashioned theater in a mercilessly changing world. After having been banned for almost 25 years from the Piccolo Teatro as an apocalyptic author, Samuel Beckett reappeared in 1982 with Happy Days. Luigi Squarzina (1922–), who graduated from the Accademia in 1945, is a stage director and a professor at the University of Bologna. He is also a historian of stage directing. According to Squarzina, after the initial pioneering work from 1952 to 1962, the stage director assumed the role of a despot and granted privilege to classical and foreign works. The period after 1962 is characterized by the abolition of precautionary censorship. The third and final period began with the student protests of 1968–1969. Squarzina’s most important idea involves the assembling of the play’s sequences, with an eye to communicating as much as possible with the audience. Therefore the classics, which serve as a means of exchange with contemporary life, answer to his needs. The major contributions Squarzina makes to stage directing are the choice of play and the tradition: It is a kind of ideal Come´die italienne. This dramatic and histrionic tradition allows second-tier authors like Alfredo Testoni and Giacinto Gallina to be represented. Squarzina directed Testoni’s Il cardinal Lambertini (Cardinal Lambertini) in 1981 and Gallina’s La famegia del santolo (The Godfather’s Family) in 1986. An even more subversive staging was defined by its marginalization of the script, which was to be rewritten according to the inspirations of the stage director. This mode was represented by the mannerism of Giancarlo Cobelli (1933–), a mannerism genuinely inspired by his vocation for a corrupt stage and dominated by a schizophrenic pastiche of varie´te´ and melodrama. Mario Missiroli (1934–) reduced the theatrical space to an infernal one dominated by Death, and yet still lightened by

its grotesque style and persistent parody. Aldo Trionfo (1921–1989) chose Victorian and Humbertian interiors in order, ironically, to demystify their languor, often using them as settings for Elizabethan and nineteenth-century repertoires. The mannerism of Massimo Castri (1943–) was more inclined toward bleakness and pessimism. He made his debut in the late 1960s as a politically biased actor-presenter, and as a scholar who initially fused Brecht and Artaud, but then became increasingly fascinated by his discovery of a dark dramaturgy. This subjective reading of the text allowed him to penetrate its deep meaning and brought him nearer to the interpretive tools of Freudianism and Lacanianism. The works of Ibsen and Pirandello best uncovered such archaic conflicts. Luca Ronconi’s (1933–) theatrical career can be considered the anthological climax of these diverse approaches to stage directing. He introduced workshops and rarely adhered to the conventions of the marketplace. His stage was exclusively a place of study and reflection about the relationship between text and space. Consequently, the place where the performance occurred became the protagonist of the director’s work, making it difficult to transplant the invented architecture outside of its context. Ronconi achieved his first success in 1966 with Middleton’s The Changeling. Here, the character’s descent into vice and guilt, along with the maniacal setting, erases the distance between the wise man and the lunatic. Another of Ronconi’s strategies is pluralism in acting, while tradition, both in drama and opera, breaks down. A famous example is Edoardo Sanguineti’s adaptation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, a production that after its 1968 de´but in Spoleto played successfully all over the world. Ronconi’s productions, with their slow and articulate pronunciation, created a kind of Brechtian alienation effect: The actor seemed to be flooded by the wave of words within the space. In the 1970s, the centrality of the stage director and the resident theatrical company were undermined. But in 1961, Vittorio Gassman (1922–2000) had already staged Pirandello’s Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise). Pirandello’s text provided the occasion to parody the role of the stage director: The actor takes on the role of the stage director and slowly deflates some of his historic idiolects. Gassman the comedian, in the tradition of the individualist, itinerant Italian actor, intended to restore his reputation and assumed responsibility for the production. 1795

STAGE DIRECTING In the meantime, while the destabilization of stage directing and a crisis of the theatrical institutions were taking place, new cooperative formulas, sparked by the egalitarian movement of 1968, were being developed. Giorgio De Lullo (1921–1981) reinterpreted Pirandello in a chilling, complacent, and formalistic manner, relying on the restraint of Romolo Valli as an actor. But this crisis brought new eccentric figures to the forefront. There is Carlo Cecchi (1942–), who was inspired mainly by the acting style of Eduardo De Filippo, his enigmatic and ambiguous speechlessness aphasia. His Neapolitan origins and use of the Neapolitan dialect as a national language made him an attractive archetype for the attempt to subvert the hegemony of Tuscany that was imposed both by the Accademia and by Fascism, which had waged a campaign against the dialects. And still, although beginning with the Neapolitan dialect, Cecchi tried to invent a style of acting that could not be sustained, except in low comedy. Nevertheless, he approached the sophisticated European repertoire by retranslating it into his own dialect, as he did with Bu¨chner’s Woyzeck, which he first produced in 1973 in the Romagnol dialect, and then in a mixture of the dialects of Basilicata and Calabria. His use of dialect on stage did not end when he tackled Soviet Futurism, with Mayakovsky’s The Bath or his later productions of Thomas Bernhardt. Carlo Quartucci (1938–) was one of the prime movers at the conference on the Italian theater held in Ivrea in 1967. There was an evident need for an agreement between the strategy of radically transforming the stage—including gesture, speech, and sound—and the approach concerned with increasing the involvement of the audience, in order for the theater to penetrate society. Carmelo Bene (1937–2002) was the most important representative of those who combined the three functions of stage director, actor, and playwright. He was at his most subversive in reinterpreting the classics, and introduced a wide expressive range, from the power of the voice over technological instruments to the reintroduction of the avant-garde, in a concert of kitschy provocations. Toward the end of the 1960s, the theater as service suffered a crisis. History was in motion: social unrest; political tensions; the working class fighting against the productive system; schools and universities in revolt. Everyone and everything seemed to conspire in an attack against the recently founded theatrical institutions. While Strehler quit the direction of the Piccolo Teatro, both the 1796

Triennale d’arte of Milan and the Accademia D’Amico were occupied by protesters. This was the result of a broader, worldwide protest, and the stage did not want to lag behind or be excluded from it. Theater emerged from the theater and into the street. In other words, everybody and everything had to be put on trial, and public trials were therefore held, both in the newspapers and on the stage. Another profession, animation, took the place of stage direction. Giuliano Scabia (1935–), a playwright and professor at the Dams in Bologna, is the most significant representative of this historical period. His works are characterized by his continual wrong-footing of the audience, and his unique blend of agitprop (that is, an aggressive, surprising boost in order to scrape off the remnants of false morality provoked by the cultural industry) with didactic drama (that is, the search for a homogeneous circuit in which to grow together with the consumer). There is yet another trend connected in some ways with animation, the so-called ‘‘third theater’’ that avoided both commercial and intellectual theater. The stage director became the first member of the audience, who then observed a theatrical group whose actors, through a long workshop experience, created their own works. On the empty stage, the actor used his body like a polyphonic orchestra. Eugenio Barba (1936–) moved from Apulia to Denmark to work for the guidance of an international theatrical company. The Odin Teatret followed, and Grotowski’s method (the use of the body and the mysticism of the group). Barba alternated between touring plays in international festivals (it is sufficient to cite his Ferai, which premiered in the Biennale of Venice in 1969) and immersing himself in marginal areas, with an eye to cultural exchanges with the natives. As soon as the utopia of animation had faded away, the theater fell back into the scenic approach, freeing the adult audience’s infantile need for stories. The result was narrating actors, often tied to a local, even dialectal culture: Ascanio Celestini from Rome; Marco Baliani from Parma; Marco Paolini from Belluno; Moni Ovadia from Milan; Laura Curino from Turin; and Davide Enia from Palermo. The resurfacing memories of their roots, and the tragic history of the recent past (the death of Aldo Moro or the Vajont’s disaster), became the subjects of their storytelling. Now there is only the actor reciting his monologue, perhaps accompanied by music, and seducing the predominantly young audience. PAOLO PUPPA

GASPARA STAMPA Further Reading Alonge, Roberto, Teatro e spettacolo nel secondo Ottocento, Rome-Bari, Laterza, 1988. Alonge, Roberto, and Guido Davico Bonino (editors), Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo: Avanguardie e utopie del teatro. Il Novecento, 3, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Alonge, Roberto, Il teatro di Massimo Castri, Part 2, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Barba, Eugenio, La canoa di carta: Trattato di antropologia teatrale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993. Barba, Eugenio, and Nicola Savarese (editors), The Secret Art of the Performer: A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology, London-New York: Routledge, 1991. Bentoglio, Alberto, Invito al teatro di Strehler, Milan: Mursia, 2002. Bosisio, Paolo (editor), Storia della regia teatrale in Italia, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Capriolo, Ettore (editor), Pirandello Ottanta, Milan: Ubulibri, 1981. Castri, Massimo, Ibsen postborghese, Milan: Ubulibri, 1984. Cavaglieri, Lina, Invito al teatro di Ronconi, Milan: Mursia, 2003. Chinzari, Stefania, and Paolo Ruffini, Nuova scena italiana, Rome: Castelvecchi, 2000. Colli, Gian Giacomo, Una pedagogia dell’attore: L’insegnamento di Orazio Costa, Rome: Bulzoni, 1996. Colombo, Laura, and Federica Mazzocchi, Luigi Squarzina e il suo teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1996. D’Amico de Carvalho, Caterina, and Renzo Renzi (editors), Luchino Visconti: Il mio teatro, 2 vols., Bologna: Cappelli, 1979.

Hirst, D. L., Giorgio Strehler, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Innamorati, Isabella (editor), Luca Ronconi e il suo teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Innamorati, Isabella (editor), Massimo Castri e il suo teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Meldolesi, Claudio, Fondamenti del teatro italiano: La generazione dei registi, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Meldolesi, Claudio, Arnaldo Picchi, and Paolo Puppa (editors), Passione e dialettica della scena, Rome: Bulzoni, 1994. Puppa, Paolo, Il salotto di notte: La messinscena di ‘‘Cosı` e`(se vi pare),’’ Turin: Multimmagini, 1980. Puppa, Paolo, Teatro e spettacolo nel secondo Novecento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1990. Quadri, Franco, Il rito perduto: Saggio su Luca Ronconi, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Squarzina, Luigi, Da Dioniso a Brecht, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1988 Squarzina, Luigi, Questa sera Pirandello, Venice: Marsilio, 1991. Squarzina, Luigi, Da Amleto a Shyloch: Note di regia, Rome: Bulzoni, 1995. Squarzina, Luigi, Il romanzo della regia. Duecento anni di trionfi e sconfitte, Pisa: Pacini, 2005. Strehler, Giorgio, Per un teatro umano: Pensieri scritti, parlati e attuati, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974. Strehler, Giorgio, Shakespeare, Goldoni, Brecht, Milan: Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 1988. Strehler, Giorgio, Inscenare Shakespeare, Rome: Bulzoni, 1992. Taviani, Ferdinando (editor), Il libro dell’Odin: Il teatro laboratorio di Eugenio Barba, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1975.

GASPARA STAMPA (CA. 1523–1554) Gaspara Stampa is one of Italy’s foremost women writers, perhaps the best female poet of the Renaissance. The sixteenth century did not foster literary innovation, and women, in particular, found themselves limited by a hegemonic canon that demanded the imitation of Francesco Petrarca’s lyric poetry. In most cases, imitation provided reassurance and direction, but it did not encourage individuality or experimentalism. Fledgling artists such as Stampa found themselves tied to an idiom and a perspective that were predetermined and masculine, yet success was judged by the imitator’s ability to properly capture and personalize the conventions, imagery, and language of the sanctioned prototypes rather than by demonstrating originality. Like other female poets of her day, Stampa turned to

Petrarchism as a viable means of achieving artistic acceptance among her contemporaries. Using the fourteenth-century Petrarchan model, generally known as the Canzoniere or the Rime sparse, as her source, Gaspara Stampa imitates its metaphors, motifs, lexicon, and phrasing. In her Rime (Rhymes, posthumous, 1554), she explicitly acknowledges her emulative strategy in the opening sonnet, which is a personalized rephrasing of the Canzoniere’s introductory composition. The very first lines of the two sonnets read: ‘‘Voi ch’ascoltate in rime sparse...’’ (You who listen in scattered rhymes; Canzoniere) and ‘‘Voi ch’ascoltate in queste meste rime...’’ (You who listen to these sad rhymes; Rime). Thereafter, the correspondence of the two volumes is repeatedly reinforced by 1797

GASPARA STAMPA Stampa’s employment of derivative subject matter, language, imagery, and phonic echoes. Both lyric works propose a love story devoid of much action but overflowing with depictions of emotions and states of mind. The storyline follows the lyric personae through the labyrinth of love, from its beginnings to an unhappy conclusion. Unlike Petrarca’s beloved Laura, Stampa’s love interest, her ‘‘Conte,’’ does not die but abandons her. The Rime includes a few sonnets of religious contrition, also based on the Petrarchan model. What significantly distinguishes Stampa’s ‘‘plot’’ from the Petrarchan source is the inclusion of a handful of poems dedicated to a second beloved after the negative conclusion of the first love experience. Such a digression from the medieval prototype is found in other Renaissance lyric collections, suggesting that Stampa was in tune with the literary practice of her day. Nevertheless, the inclusion of multiple love interests is a clear subversion of the source. As in the Canzoniere, epistolary poems addressed to friends, fellow poets, and important figures are also contained in the Rime. While Stampa’s adherence to canonized standards places her among the multitude of contemporary imitative poets, in her own estimation she fails to capture the rhetorical perfection of the models proposed. In the Rime, she depicts herself apologetically as inadequate in craft, knowledge, and talent. An active participant in the thriving Venetian cultural scene, Stampa engaged in discussions on poetics, style, and rhetoric and possibly joined one of several intellectual academies, the Accademia dei Dubbiosi, where she came in contact with leading theoreticians and writers such as Sperone Speroni, Giovanni Della Casa, Luigi Alamanni, and Domenico Venier. Stampa’s occasional verse is addressed to these and other major cultural figures whom she celebrates for their literary skills, based in large measure on their ability to successfully reproduce their models. Although Stampa enjoyed some appreciation of her work during her lifetime, her diminutive self-assessment proved prophetic: The Rime received only one limited printing in the sixteenth century, whereas Vittoria Colonna’s poetry underwent more than 20 editions and the courtesan Tullia D’Aragona’s verse had three reprintings. Neither Stampa nor her contemporaries were aware that her ‘‘unsuccessful’’ variants form an independent discourse within the dominant Petrarchan canon. In her occasional verse, Gaspara Stampa attributes her literary deficiencies to gender. Yet the poet’s individuality derives, in large measure, from 1798

her sex as she revisits the Canzoniere from a feminine point of view. Thus, her recreation of Petrarca’s poetry becomes the transformation as well as the reworking of a male code. From the outset, the Stampian text invites comparison to the Canzoniere yet suggests difference. Rime, 1, defines the speaker as an exemplum of the ideal lover, whose subjectivity acts as a paragon of femininity and art for others of her sex to emulate and envy, in sharp contrast to Petrarca’s ‘‘I,’’ which is inescapably gendered male. This sonnet also ignores the familiar Petrarchan themes of profound spiritual conflict and confessed personal error, replacing them with the typically Stampian concepts of embraced suffering, fidelity, and the exaltation of the love experience. The Rime’s introductory sonnet is linguistically and thematically derivative, yet its distinctiveness is exhibited through nuance and variation, tone, and gendered perspective: It is a strategy Stampa maintains throughout her poetry. The issue of gender brings Stampa to manipulate literary conventions and seek imagery and language suited to her voice. As happened to other women poets of the Renaissance, she is caught in the dilemma of borrowing from the male-authored tradition to self-consciously construct a female identity that also meets societal expectations of her sex. For example, Rime, 2, ‘‘Era vicino il dı` che ‘l Creatore’’ (The Day Was Close When the Creator), emulates the Petrarchan innamoramento sonnet that establishes Good Friday as the symbolic date of the poet’s falling in love with Laura, setting in motion the Canzoniere’s recurring theme of the contrast between sacred and profane love and the resultant spiritual conflict. Stampa opts instead for the joyous celebration of Christmas to commemorate her love, a choice that allows her to introduce a second female figure, the Virgin Mary, as an analogy for herself as writer and lover. By referencing Mary’s acceptance of God’s will, followed by Christ’s conception and birth, Stampa is able to project suitable womanly attributes: submission, modesty, obedience, and selfless love. She too accepts the will of her lord, receiving him into her heart and giving birth to her poetry. In ‘‘Signor, io so che ‘n me non son piu` viva’’ (My Lord, I Know That I No Longer Live Within Myself; Rime, 124), she bears witness to the destructive power of her unrequited love, comparing herself to the mythological figure of the nymph Echo, who is consumed by love for the self-involved Narcissus and wastes away. In both comparisons, Christian and pagan, Stampa represents herself as a humble subject deferring to a superior beloved

GASPARA STAMPA object: A depiction derived from the courtly love tradition as well as the more spiritual verse of the Dolce Stil Novo. Throughout the Rime, Stampa’s lyric ‘‘I’’ is defined as inferior to the beloved; a possible autobiographical allusion to the social chasm separating the musician Stampa and her aristocratic lover, Count Collaltino di Collalto, or perhaps a purely literary rendering of the longstanding topos of the ‘‘cruel beloved.’’ In either case, the female subject is ennobled by her fidelity and constancy, particularly when compared to the fickle, faithless count. Indeed his indifference and silence contrasts with her undying love and pain. Like Echo, Stampa’s persona disintegrates for love, retaining only a small measure of speech. In addition to Stampa’s debt to the Petrarchan tradition, we note other influences derived from the conventional cultural framework of her day. Neoplatonic ideas, as filtered through popular treatises on love, blend seamlessly with the poet’s Petrarchan borrowings, as they do in much of the lyric production of the sixteenth century. Love becomes the force that joins inferior and superior worlds into one, and the lover necessarily fuses into the beloved, no longer belonging to herself. The Conte’s beauty is defined as a divine emanation from the ideal world to human reality; as popular Renaissance philosophy taught; such perfection inspires love. Stampa’s occasional use of the pastoral may have originated in her activities in an official academy whose members took on pseudonyms reminiscent of the bucolic world of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia. In a sequence of poems, she assumes the identity of the shepherdess Anassilla, naming herself after the river that flowed through her beloved’s estates, thus becoming one of his possessions. Essentially ignored for centuries, Gaspara Stampa re-emerged on the cultural scene when a second edition of the Rime was edited by Luisa Bergalli and Apostolo Zeno in 1738. The impetus for publication came from Count Antonio Rambaldo di Collalto, a descendent of Stampa’s beloved Collaltino. Hoping to immortalize the family name, Antonio Rambaldo subsidized an elegant volume that included not only the Rime but verse by Baldassare Stampa, Collaltino himself, and his brother Vinciguerra. The count also penned a fictionalized account of Gaspara’s life that depicted her as a gifted young noblewoman, betrayed by a cruel lover, resulting in her sudden death by either suicide or murder. This fanciful biography initiated the melodramatic legend of Gaspara Stampa as an innocent victim of masculine perfidy in the corrupt atmosphere of Renaissance Venice. In the

Romantic period, this interpretation of the poet’s character and life inspired epistolary novels, plays, and narrative poems, reinforcing the myth of a passionate, doomed victim of love. Well into the twentieth century, Stampa’s poetry was treated as a biographical resource at the expense of its artistic qualities, while readers searched for the private self hidden in the verse, considering the poems as autobiographical documents or personal journals, failing to take into account the Rime’s solid adherence to traditional prosody. Compared to more academic and elegant petrarchisti, Stampa’s style appears quotidian, immediate, even conversational, creating a quality of directness and simplicity that is a far cry from the gravitas espoused by Renaissance poetics and setting Stampa apart linguistically. In 1913, Abdelkader Salza, a dedicated researcher and historian, challenged the romanticized version of Stampa’s life and character, rejecting the archetype of the doomed maiden. Instead, he viewed her autonomy and liaisons as indicative of the career of a high-class prostitute. Although his evidence is circumstantial, Salza concluded that both Gaspara and her sister Cassandra were probably courtesans, given their affluence, lifestyle, and social connections. The publication of Salza’s findings initiated a heated literary debate that burned for decades but added little to the understanding of the Rime. Salza’s edition is of great literary import for it contains a corrected and somewhat revised version of the Rime. The critic’s moralistic view of Stampa as a fallen woman clearly influenced his decision to publish her verse alongside Veronica Franco’s Terze rime (1580); not only was Franco a self-proclaimed courtesan but her lyric collection is not in keeping, stylistically or thematically, with Petrarchan imitative practices. Interestingly enough, in 1882, selections from Stampa’s Rime had appeared in a volume including compositions by the undeniably virtuous and aristocratic poets Vittoria Colonna and Veronica Ga`mbara, both notable Petrarchan versifiers. Given the paucity of biographical information surrounding Stampa’s life, her actual social status will likely remain undocumented; however, a comparison between the first edition of the Rime (1554) and Salza’s revised edition (1913) suggests that the reordering of a good portion of the volume was undertaken judgmentally. The sixteenth- (and eighteenth-) century version, possibly conceived by Stampa but more likely organized posthumously by her editors, emphasizes the aesthetic elements of the collection, dividing it by lyric genres (sonnets, canzoni, madrigals). Instead, while keeping the sequence of the 1799

GASPARA STAMPA love poetry unchanged, Salza alters the order of about one-third of the text, separating the substantial epistolary verse, for example, but most importantly, he closes the Rime with a moral message for the reader, by shifting about a dozen sonnets with spiritual and penitential themes to the end of the text. Indeed, Salza’s edition ends with one of Stampa’s most famous sonnets, ‘‘Mesta e pentita de’ miei gravi errori’’ (Saddened and Repenting of My Heaviest Errors), which is poem 278 in the first and second editions of the Rime. Such textual manipulation suggests the need for spiritual redemption, a theme in keeping with the Petrarchan model but unjustified by the original edition. It should be noted that all modern printings of the Rime are based on Salza’s edition.

Biography Born sometime between 1520 and 1525 in Padua, to Bartolomeo, a wealthy Milanese jeweler, and Cecilia, a Venetian. In 1531, family moved to Venice after death of father. Gaspara and her siblings received a solid humanistic education and extensive musical training. During the 1540s, the Stampa household became a successful literary and musical salon. Gaspara and her sister Cassandra were reputed instrumentalists and singers. Brother Baldassare, a promising poet and university student, died in 1544. In 1548–1549, Stampa began an affair with Count Collaltino di Collalto, a feudal landowner and military man. In the summer of 1549, she sent a collection of her love poems to Collalto, who was at the French court. The affair ended after several years and long separations. A second, later, love interest, Bartolomeo Zen, is mentioned in the poetry. In 1553, three sonnets by Stampa were published in Il sesto libro delle rime di diversi eccellenti autori. On 23 April 1554, Gaspara Stampa died after a brief illness. FIORA A. BASSANESE See also: Petrarchism Selected Works Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, edited by Giorgio Benzone and Cassandra Stampa, l554. Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa con alcune altre di Collaltino e di Vinciguerra conti di Collalto, e di Baldassare Stampa, edited by Luisa Bergalli and Apostolo Zeno, l738. Rime di Gaspara Stampa nuovamente pubblicate, edited by Pia Mestica Chiappetti, 1877.

1800

Benson, Eugene (editor), Gaspara Stampa, with a Selection from her Sonnets, translated by George Fleming, 1881. Rime di tre gentildonne del secolo XVI: Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Ga`mbara, edited by Olindo Guerrini, 1882. Rime di Gaspara Stampa e di Veronica Franco, edited by Abdelkader Salza, l913. Rime, edited by Rodolfo Ceriello, l954. Gaspara Stampa: Selected Poems, edited and translated by Laura Anna Stortoni and Mary Prentice Lillie, 1994.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, Il Petrarchismo italiano nel Cinquecento, Milan-Naples: Ricciardi, l957. Bassanese, Fiora A., Gaspara Stampa, Boston: Twayne, l982. Bassanese, Fiora A., ‘‘Gaspara Stampa’s Petrarchan Commemorations: Validating a Female Lyric Discourse,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 22 (2004): 155–169. Borsetto, Luciana, ‘‘Narciso ed Eco. Figura e scrittura nella lirica femminile del Cinquecento: esemplificazioni ed appunti,’’ in Nel cerchio della luna: Figure di donna in alcuni testi del xvi secolo, edited by Marina Zancan, Venice: Marsilio, l983. Braden, Gordon, ‘‘Gaspara Stampa and the Gender of Petrarchism,’’ in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 38.2 (1996): 115–139. Donadoni, Eugenio, Gaspara Stampa, Messina: Principato, 1919. Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘‘Feminine Pastoral as Heroic Martyrdom: Gaspara Stampa and Mary Wroth,’’ in The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘‘Bad Press, Modern Editors versus Early Modern Women Poets (Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco),’’ in Strong Voices, Weak History. Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, edited by Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Lipking, Lawrence, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Phillippy, Patricia, ‘‘Gaspara Stampa’s Rime: Replication and Retraction,’’ in Philological Quarterly, 68:1 (1989): 1–23. Robin, Diane, ‘‘Courtesans, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco,’’ in Italian Women and the City: Essays, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, Madison, NJ, and London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Press, 2003. Russo, Luigi, ‘‘Gaspara Stampa e il Petrarchismo del ‘500,’’ in Belfagor, 13, no. 1 (l958): 1–20. Salza, Abdelkader, ‘‘Madonna Gasparina Stampa secondo nuove indagini,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 62 (1913): 1–101. Salza, Abdelkader, ‘‘Madonna Gasparina Stampa e la societa` veneziana del suo tempo,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 70 (1917): 1–60, 281–299.

ALESSANDRA MACINGHI STROZZI Vitiello, Justin, ‘‘Gaspara Stampa: The Ambiguities of Martyrdom,’’ in Modern Language Notes (January l975): 58–71. Warnke, Frank J., ‘‘Aphrodite’s Priestess, Love’s Martyr: Gaspara Stampa,’’ in Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Katharina

M. Wilson, Athens/London: University of Georgia Press, 1987. Zancan, Marina, ‘‘L’intellettualita` femminile nel primo Cinquecento: Maria Savorgnan e Gaspara Stampa,’’ in Annali d’Italianistica, 7 (1989): 42–65.

ALESSANDRA MACINGHI STROZZI (1408–1471) In 1877, a book by Cesare Guasti dedicated ‘‘Alle donne italiane’’ (to Italian women) was published in Florence. The volume collected 72 Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo XV ai figliuoli esuli (Letters of a Fifteenth-Century Florentine Noblewoman to Her Exiled Sons), to which, in 1890, Isidoro Del Lungo added a further letter already transcribed by Guasti. These 73 letters, all written and signed in her hand, created the human and literary personality of Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi. Her history is not different from that of many of her contemporaries: Married at 16, she gave birth to a child almost yearly (eight children from 1426 to 1435), and was widowed early. Certain events, however, diverge notably from the normal pattern, including the exile and death of her husband in Pesaro; her return to Florence with the five surviving children; and the exile of her sons Filippo and Lorenzo as soon as they reached the age specified by the ban. Her distance from them obliged Alessandra to a long correspondence, the result of which is this epistolary, in which her principal addressee is her eldest son, Filippo. Only 10 letters are addressed to her second son, Lorenzo, during the period (from 1453 to 1462) in which he lived alone in Bruges, while a few toward the end are addressed to the two sons together, both by then residents of Naples where their bank prospered. The situations involving citizenship and family— the Medici were in power in Florence, and a part of the oligarchy was hostile to the Strozzi family— bestowed a particularly delicate task upon Alessandra, that of mediator in both fields. From the time of her first letter, in response to a missive from Filippo (24 August 1447), it became evident that she had taken the reins of her house in hand.

Alessandra decided the marriage of her firstborn daughter, Caterina, to Marco Parenti, a silk merchant, also settling the amount of the dowry, and arranged for the education of Matteo, her youngest child, by then an 11-year-old. She additionally kept an eye on the fiscal politics of the commune and on the international politics that reverberated on her as a citizen. She also did not hesitate to comment on her children’s behavior. To the oldest son, by then 19 years old, she wrote in the first letter ‘‘che non e` piu` un fanciullo’’ (that he is no longer a boy). As her children grew, however, her maternal words were progressively transformed, first becoming more complicit and, near the end, more subdued, as if the roles have been exchanged. From the first, Alessandra’s authority disguised devotion and anxiety for all of her children. She is concerned for Caterina, by then grown, married at 16, and a beauty without equal in Florence; for Matteo, from whom she does not intend to separate herself; and for the two eldest who are seeking their fortunes far from her, between Naples and the European commercial markets. However, she also looked after business: in a letter of 4 November 1448 she lucidly explained the situation of the house contiguous to the Strozzi family home, noting that it was for sale and that they should buy it to maintain the property value. The acquisition eventually took place, and in that enlarged area there now rises the monumental Palazzo Strozzi. When Matteo finally joined his brothers, she displayed anxiousness at the idea of the young boy sent out in the world, and also her unhappiness at not having been able to oppose his departure. A dark presentiment hovers over these pages, and this foreboding becomes harshly real when the boy died some years later in Naples. 1801

ALESSANDRA MACINGHI STROZZI Her letters to Filippo (6 and 13 September 1459) on the occasion of her mourning are among the most beautiful ever written for the death of a dear one. Although she avoids speaking of him in her later letters, Matteo’s name appears every now and then, the sign of a wound that cannot be healed. Alessandra prepared herself to face adversity with courage, even when the blows seemed unsustainable. She was constantly nourished by a faith in God, a faith without mystic outbursts. Her only earthly goal was to obtain from Medici the revocation of the ban on her children and to reunite her family in Florence. She thus attentively observed the minutest signs in the fabric of the Florentine oligarchy that might permit her to hope for favorable change. She had a sure intuition of human relationships and a realistic approach to public and private affairs, such that reading her epistolary illuminates certain moments of Medicean history, as for example the crisis that follows the death of Cosimo I. A painstaking diffidence marks the pages evoking Florentine politics, because Alessandra worried constantly about her children and could not entrust ‘‘la carne e il sangue’’ (her flesh and blood), as she called her family on 5 February 1465, to the ‘‘molto voltanti’’ (very changeable) men of her time (26 May 1465). There is no rancor, however, for her fellow citizens: She approved of her children’s display of charity toward those who opposed them because of partisan hatred, and she thanked God, whom she believed conceded commercial success to her sons. The search for an adequate wife first for Filippo, and later also for Lorenzo, occupied a good part of the correspondence. Marriage is a delicate ‘‘merce’’ (ware) that requires tact and vigilance. She favored beautiful and intelligent women (not simply good ones) for her sons, and her words sketch unforgettable pictures of the two young girls she eyed for Filippo: the 18-year-old Tanagli seen early one morning in Santa Maria del Fiore (tall and well-made, of good complexion but with a slightly long face, with a gait and appearance that reveal a lively spirit), and the 15-year-old Fiammetta Adimari (who was eventually chosen), of whom she wrote that she ‘‘ha buona carne e assai savore’’ (has good flesh and much taste) to indicate that she was not simply beautiful and young (4 January 1466). Alessandra’s pen, which often lingered with mercantile precision on particulars, can be colored with humor, as when she jokes mischievously with her sons about their fear of matrimony. She was always lively and incisive, particularly in domestic matters. Reading her letters in comparison with 1802

those of her contemporaries (those, for example, of her children or of her son-in-law Marco Parenti), which are similar in their form of expression, it becomes clear that aside from the special personality of the author, the dynamic of this epistolary is, as Angela Bianchini writes in her excellent 1987 introduction to Tempo di affetti e di mercanti, ‘‘la tensione emotiva interna che salda tempo e argomenti’’ (the internal emotional tension that joins times and subjects).

Biography Born in Florence to the Macinghi family probably in 1408. Married Matteo of Simone Strozzi, 1422. With the arrival of Cosimo to power, Matteo was exiled and the couple moved to Pesaro, November 1434. Her husband and three of her eight children died of the plague, 1435. Her remaining children, in order of birth, were Filippo, Lorenzo, Caterina, Alessandra, and Matteo, born after her husband’s death. Little is known about the years spent in Florence with all of her children before the beginning of the correspondence in 1447. The exile of her children ended on 20 September 1466. Died in Florence on 2 March 1471. MARINA MARIETTI Selected Works Lettere di una gentildonna fiorentina del secolo XV ai figliuoli esuli, edited by Cesare Guasti, Florence: Sansoni, 1877. Una lettera in aggiunta alle 72 pubblicate da Cesare Guasti nel 1877, edited by Isidoro Del Lungo, Florence: Carnesecchi, 1890. Lettere ai figlioli: Edizione completa, Lanciano: Carabba, 1914. Tempo di affetti e di mercanti. Lettere ai figli esuli, edited by Angela Bianchini, Milan: Garzanti, 1987.

Further Reading Bianchini, Angela, Introduction to Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi, Tempo di affetti e di mercanti. Lettere ai figli esuli, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Bianchini, Angela, Alessandra e Lucrezia. Destini femminili nella Firenze del Quattrocento, Milan: Mondadori, 2005. Cocco, Mia, ‘‘Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi,’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994. Crabb, Ann, The Strozzi of Florence: Widowhood & Family Solidarity in the Renaissance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001.

´ PARICH GIANI STU Doglio, Maria Luisa, Lettera e donna: scrittura epistolare al femminile tra Quattro e Cinquecento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, La famiglia e le donne nel Rinascimento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Schuller, Michelle, ‘‘Le temps et l’espace dans les lettres d’Alessandra Macinghi-Strozzi,’’ in Revue des E´tudes italiennes, 46, nos. 3–4 (2000): 163–188.

Schuller, Michelle, ‘‘La correspondance de la famille Strozzi: L’e´criture comme discours de l’absence,’’ in Arzana`, 9 (2003): 243–292. Wanner, Dieter, ‘‘On the Language of the Letters by Alessandra Macinghi Strozzi,’’ in Papers in Romance, 3, no. 3 (1981): 161–177.

´ PARICH (1891–1961) GIANI STU A storyteller, essayist, and journalist, Giani Stu´parich is a leading figure in the ‘‘golden age’’ of Triestine literature. In his 1946 Scrittori d’oggi, Pietro Pancrazi defined him—with respect to this generation—as a ‘‘cadet,’’ since he was the youngest (Italo Svevo was born in 1861, Umberto Saba in 1883, and Scipio Sla`taper in 1888). Compared to Sla`taper, whose work Stu´parich edited and of whom he considered himself an heir, a pupil, or a younger brother, the difference in age was negligible. But his life stretched into the beginning of the 1960s, thus Stu´parich participated in events that belong to the generations after his own. His work developed within diverse times and contexts (and in contact with diverse personalities and institutions): in the first phase, the Florentine periodical La Voce, along with the University of Prague and his travels throughout Europe, the University of Florence, the experience of World War I and his volunteering for the Italian army and subsequent imprisonment in Hungary, under a false name (so as not to be punished as a deserter from the Austro-Hungarian army). Then there are his narratives, his work as a journalist, his contacts with important periodicals between the wars and after World War II (from Solaria to Pe`gaso, from Convegno to Pan, from Letteratura to Ponte). And, later, his anti-Fascist stance, his struggles in Trieste with the nationalist, and Fascist, establishment, which took a dramatic turn in 1944. In the postwar years came his activity as an organizer of culture. And, finally, there is the writer who was occupied with problems of the leveling and homogenization of modern civilization, and with apocalyptic and utopian explorations of this civilization. His efforts, though diverse, attest to a coherent journey, within the experience of his own

autobiographical fate, that is conditioned by a dramatic reflection on the human condition, by defining experiences such as the war, and by a constant observation of his city and of the historical and political changes in relation to a more general anthropological and cultural transformation of reality. Originating from this problematic and complex perspective are memoirs such as Guerra del ‘15 (The War of ‘15, 1931), an antirhetorical and harsh representation of the war that includes a deeply felt viewpoint; the intensely lyrical Colloqui con mio fratello (Conversations with My Brother, 1925), inspired by the tragic death of his brother Carlo in 1916; the polemical novel Ritorneranno (They Shall Return, 1941), based on his experiences of World War I, which generates violent attacks against Stu´parich in the nationalistic climate during the years of World War II; and the novel Simone (Simone, 1953), which combines an apocalyptic vision of violence in reality and the hope for emotional consolation, for a love that will confer an identity on man. Alongside these works, there are also the many prose writings about his immediate environment: pages of memoirs, drafts of portraits and stories rich in psychological elements, in lyric tension as well as meticulous narrative explorations. In the stories of the 1920s and 1930s, which appeared in prestigious periodicals like Solaria and Pe`gaso and were collected in Donne nella vita di Stefano Premuda (The Women in Stefano Premuda’s Life, 1932), the first-person narration provides a connecting thread between the lyrical moment, unfolded with restraint, and the narrative continuity, representing a poetics largely in agreement with those of Solaria. 1803

´ PARICH GIANI STU One of the most organic of Stu´parich’s works is Trieste nei miei ricordi (The Trieste of My Memories, 1948), in which the autobiographical element is imbued with historical and analytic argument, in which memory and personal recollection are combined with a lucid portrait of the place, and in which Stu´parich draws with clarity a portrait of his own generation between the pre-World War I period and the period after World War II: ‘‘Infelice generazione la nostra, che vedemmo prima salire la realta` verso il sogno piu` bello e poi ripiombare giu`, prima d’ogni altro temuto incubo’’ (Ours was a most unhappy generation; we who first saw reality rise toward the most beautiful dream, but then only to plunge down before every other feared nightmare). A democratic irredentist who countenanced ideas of peoples living in harmony together that were to be frustrated by history, a secular thinker driven by the ideology of Giuseppe Mazzini, Stu´parich is a writer of wide interests and views, and a seeker of the ethical and human meaning of places, characters, individual psychologies, and existential paradigms: as in the exemplary story L’isola (The Island, 1942), in which landscapes, psychologies, different generations, and existential motifs are organized into a discourse of high lyric and narrative intensity. Confronted with the violence, prejudices, struggles, and catastrophes both impending and realized of his last decades, Stu´parich is convinced that artistic language has the power to help assuage and overcome suffering, the power to achieve unions reaching beyond deep divisions and splits. And he expresses his own will to restaurare l’uomo (restore man), to understand, through his own literary work, the orologieria (clockwork) of individuals and also of more complex communities. The discovery of the inner workings of human beings is for him an indispensable condition for the exorcism of violence and savagery—a central theme in the essay Restaurare l’uomo (Restoring Man), the penultimate chapter of Piccolo cabotaggio (Small Scale, 1955).

Biography Born in Trieste 4 April 1891; studied at the Trieste Liceo; enrolled first at the University of Prague (1913), then the University of Florence from where he graduated in literature in 1915; between 1913 and 1914, associated with La Voce; after 24 May 1915 (when Italy entered World War I), he and his brother Carlo and Scipio Sla`taper enlisted as volunteers in the First Regiment of the 1804

Grenadiers of Sardinia; fought on the Isonzo and Trentino front; was taken prisoner of war by the Austrians in May 1916 and interned in a Hungarian camp. In 1919, he married Elody Oblath, one of three women friends of the Sla`taper circle, who bore him three children (Giordana, Giovanna, Giancarlo); gold medal for military valor; antiFascist linked to the republican group; teacher of literature at the Ginnasio-Liceo ‘‘Dante Alighieri,’’ 1919–1942, interrupted briefly by one year’s teaching in Prague, 1921–1922; in 1942, became part of the government department responsible for monuments and galleries; closely linked with the Resistance, 25 August 1944; transported to the SS camp at Risiera, Trieste’s deportation and extermination camp, from which he was freed after an intervention from the city’s bishop. In 1946, he founded the Club for Culture and the Arts and was its first president. From 1949, he collaborated with Anita Pittoni to further her publishing project of Edizioni dello Zibaldone. Died in Rome 7 April 1961. ELVIO GUAGNINI See also: Trieste Selected Works Fiction Racconti, 1929. Donne nella vita di Stefano Premuda, 1932. Nuovi racconti, 1935; enlarged edition as L’altra riva, 1944. Ritorneranno, 1941. Stagioni alla fontana: Racconti brevi, 1942. L’isola, 1942. Giochi di fisonomie, 1942. L’altra riva, 1944. Il giudizio di Paride e altri racconti, 1950. Simone, 1953. Ricordi istriani, 1961. Il ritorno del padre, edited by Pier Quarantotti Gambini, 1961.

Poetry ‘‘Poesie (1944–1947),’’ 1956.

Essays La nazione czeca, 1915. Scipio Sla`taper, 1922. Trieste nei miei ricordi, 1948. Piccolo cabotaggio, 1955.

Other Colloqui con mio fratello, 1925. Guerra del ‘15 (Dal taccuino di un volontario), 1931. Scrittori garibaldini, 1948.

Edited Works Carlo Stu´parich, Cose e ombre di uno, 1919. Scipio Sla`taper, Scritti letterari e critici, 1920.

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) Scipio Sla`taper, Scritti politici, 1925. Scipio Sla`taper, Lettere, 1931. Scipio Sla`taper, Alle tre amiche, 1931. Giovanni Guglielmo Sartorio, Memorie, 1949. Antonio De Giuliani, Riflessioni sul porto di Trieste, 1950. Scipio Sla`taper, Epistolario, 1950. Scipio Sla`taper, Appunti e note di diario, 1953. Virgilio Giotti, Appunti inutili (1946–1955), 1959.

Further Reading Apih, Elio, Il ritorno di Giani Stu´parich, con lettere inedite, Florence: Vallecchi, 1988. Arosio, Sandra, Scrittori di frontiera. Scipio Sla`taper Giani e Carlo Stu´parich, Milan: Guerini, 1996. Bertacchini, Renato, Giani Stu´parich, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1968. Criscione, Giusy, Bibliografia della critica su Giani Stu´parich, Trieste: Alcione, 2002. Frosini, Vittorio, La famiglia Stu´parich. Saggi critici, Udine: Del Bianco, 1991.

Giani Stu´parich fra Trieste e Firenze, Rome: Associazione Nazionale Venezia Giulia e Dalmazia, 2001. Guagnini, Elvio, Paradigmi narrativi, paradigmi esistenziali. Su ‘‘L’isola’’ di Giani Stu´parich, Trieste: Il ramo d’oro, 2003. Maier, Bruno, ‘‘L’opera di Giani Stu´parich,’’ in Saggi sulla letteratura triestina del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Maier, Bruno, Introduction to Giani Stu´parich, Ritorneranno, Milan: Garzanti, 1991. Pagine Istriane, special number dedicated to Giani Stu´parich, 13, no. 10 (December 1963). Pancrazi, Pietro, ‘‘Giani Stu´parich triestino,’’ in Scrittori d’oggi, second series, Bari: Laterza, 1946. Pancrazi, Pietro, ‘‘Romanzo e racconti di Giani Stu´parich,’’ in Scrittori d’oggi, third series, Bari: Laterza, 1946. Quaderni Giuliani di Storia, special number dedicated to Giani Stu´parich, 10, no. 2 (December 1989). Thoraval, Andre´, Bibliografia degli scritti di Giani Stu´parich, Trieste: Alcione, 1995. Vasari, Bruno, Giani Stu´parich. Ricordi di un allievo, Trieste: Lint, 1999.

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) (1861–1928) In many aspects, Italo Svevo must be considered an outsider among Italian writers. Trieste, his hometown and focal point of his entire oeuvre, is still a part of Austria-Hungary in 1919, the year in which the city is ceded to Italy by the Dual Monarchy. As the main port of Austria-Hungary, Trieste has since always had intense trade relations, east and westward. In this commercial and cultural melting pot, among the various representatives of the local upper middle class—boring and colorful alike—Svevo casts the characters for his novels: bankers, traders, insurance agents, employees, doctors, journalists, craftsmen, failed intellectuals, together with their wives, fiance´es, mistresses, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers. Svevo himself is a respected member of Trieste’s society, more respected still when he marries Livia Veneziani and joins his father-in-law’s business in marine paints. Some boredom, characteristic of Svevo’s professional and social life after his own father’s business failure and subsequent employment in a local bank, may have filtered through in the impassive main

characters, Alfonso and Emilio, of his first two novels: Una vita (A Life, 1892) and Senilita` (As A Man Grows Older, 1898). Both works flop with the readers, and literary activity goes more or less into hiding for some 25 years, until the publication of the La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923). Svevo’s language does not fit into his Italian contemporaries’ standards. Being at the crossroads of various cultures (Germanic, Slavonic, and Romance), Trieste is a multilingual environment. Svevo’s language and syntax harbor many characteristics of the local languages and dialects; and these are not in keeping with the current fashion of Milanese or Roman literary circles. Something these circles are unable to comprehend is the specific nature of Svevo’s ‘‘provincialism.’’ Svevo’s couleur locale has nothing to do with the idealized representation of a so-called primitive, ‘‘real’’ local world such as depicted a few years earlier by Giovanni Verga’s Sicilian narratives. Verga’s fishermen and shepherds use a much more carefully molded language than can be found in Svevo’s dry and 1805

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) analytical prose. Svevo’s attachment to his familiar environment is philosophically founded. The banality that characterizes Svevo’s fictional universe seamlessly connects with a conception of ordinariness found in a certain Austro-Hungarian, Mittel Europa-culture, as revealed in Hugo von Hofmannstahl, Joseph Roth, or Robert Musil. The insignificance or mediocrity exuded by many of Svevo’s characters reflects a deep existential crisis. For Claudio Magris, Svevo’s atmosphere of nihilistic banality is to a certain point due to the loss of Habsburg rule, to the disintegration of the Dual Monarchy (L’anello di Clarisse, 1984). Cultural and linguistic pluralism is a century-long trademark of the Austro-Hungarian political conglomerate. But all grip on its components is now lost. Following disintegration and the fading away of a trusted environment, moral uneasiness and mistrust appear. Some might sustain, however, that too much order was provided for in the good old days of the ruling Habsburg dynasty. Especially in Svevo’s masterpiece, La coscienza di Zeno, life is portrayed as a succession of ritual acts, of social and moral enactments, where truth and lie, substance and semblance are inextricably intertwined. Svevo’s oeuvre is Italy’s major contribution to European Modernism, next to Musil, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, and Andre´ Gide. Svevo wrote a total of three novels, some 20 short stories and 13 theatrical works. By far best known are his novels Una vita, Senilita`, and La coscienza di Zeno. It is remarkable that, although self-sufficient entities on their own, these novels contain several mutually exchangeable episodes, thus underlining their strong thematic unity. Even most of the short stories could become chapters of these novels, while episodes in his plays are reminiscent of both the short stories and the novels. The unfinished fictional project, the so-called Quarto romanzo or Fourth Novel, is itself an extension of La coscienza di Zeno. Svevo’s oeuvre can be considered as variations on one theme. Taking into account the 25-year interruption in literary activity between Senilita` and La coscienza di Zeno, it can be said that along the sidelines of his intense nonliterary life, Svevo is pursuing one major literary project to the realization of which he came closest after writing the La coscienza di Zeno. Read as a naturalistic novel, Una vita is the story of a countryman’s failed adaptation to modern life in the city. Alfonso, in an unrealistic attempt to conquer his employer’s daughter, ever more helplessly steers himself into a position leaving no other perspective than suicide. Read metaphorically, the 1806

pseudointellectual Alfonso, unfit for any employment, too easy a prey for his well-adapted environment, ridiculed and manipulated for his continuous posing and complete lack of judgment, becomes Svevo’s first prototype of inettitudine (inaptness), understood as an existential category. However, Alfonso is neither a neo-Romantic nor is he portrayed as the incarnation of authenticity. In Svevo’s ongoing search for literary rendering of modern life, Alfonso portrays a negative role model. Behind Una vita are Svevo’s most decisive early readings: Charles Darwin and Arthur Schopenhauer, whose influence results from firsthand knowledge and the mediation of French novelists such as Zola. Svevo’s fictional debut introduces several of the author’s leading themes: the richness of the mind considered as a handicap in the instinct-driven strife for success; the innumerable shapes hypocrisy and unauthenticity can assume; ethics and free will as the invisible actors in this inner conflict. In the guise of Emilio, an unsuccessful would-be writer, the protagonist of Senilita`, continues another negative representation of modernity. Emilio’s relationship with a young and buoyant prostitute is marked by hypocrisy and by disengagement. This novel signals a moralistic turn in Svevo’s oeuvre: It uncovers the dangers of false idealism, and it brings Emilio to face responsibility for his immorality and face the reader’s moral condemnation. In this struggle, Svevo projects Emilio in deterministic territory: ‘‘Egli vedeva l’impassibilita` del destino. Non v’era colpa, per quanto ci fosse tanto danno’’ (Fatality is all there is. There was no guilt, however lacerating the pain inflicted) is his final, selfacquitting, conclusion. Guilt, duplicity and untruthfulness will play a major role in La coscienza di Zeno, as well as a philosophical sense of disquiet, uneasiness and malaise. Readers’ interest in these novels was limited. At the turn of the century, Italy revered Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novels, their pathos and their Wagnerian drama. Svevo goes on writing short stories and dramas, but without publishing them. Trieste’s middle class is invariably center stage and, following his marriage, Svevo himself is now a familiar part of it. Far from D’Annunzio’s aristocratic characters, far also from Giuseppe Verdi’s high ground (the opera is the prime narrative of those years), Svevo keeps his focus on the bourgeoisie, their fixations and obsessions. For Svevo, the banality, superficiality, and even boredom of his own class, hide more unfathomable secrets than the impenetrable myths of antiquity or the moving intrigues

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) among Roman princely families. In silence, he prepares La coscienza di Zeno, one of the most penetrating analyses of the modern subject available in literature. In the years between Senilita` and La coscienza di Zeno, Svevo the writer does not pay much attention to the political turmoil following Italy’s colonial fiasco and surrounding Giovanni Giolitti’s successive governments. In this period, he is attracted to Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis; but he is not at all impressed, much less convinced, by the Freudian explanations of our subconsciousness. Here lie the roots of La coscienza di Zeno as a confrontation, conducted in the mode of parody, between psychoanalysis and Svevo’s own take on guilt, with or without punishment. The title itself remains ambiguously in balance between both the moral and the intellectual reference, coscienza meaning ‘‘consciousness’’ as well as ‘‘conscience.’’ But while discovering Freud, Svevo also becomes acquainted with Joyce, who earns a living in Trieste teaching English and, like Svevo, is expecting literary recognition. Such recognition, for Joyce, arrives with the publication of Ulysses in 1922, one year before La coscienza di Zeno, whereas Svevo’s book is largely ignored. However, a letter dated June 6, 1924, from Joyce to Vale´ry Larbaud, the Parisian critic of the influential Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, expressing a positive appraisal of Svevo’s work is followed by a literary breakthrough in France. In Italy, the discerning remarks on the specificity of Svevo’s prose made by the eminent poet Eugenio Montale, instead of paving the way for a national recognition, create what is now known as the ‘‘Svevo case.’’ Indeed, Montale speaks of a ‘‘linguaggio antiletterario, ma fervido, essenziale’’ (antiliterary language, but lively, essential) in his article published in the Milanese journal L’esame (Omaggio a Italo Svevo, 1925). The most striking aspect of La coscienza di Zeno with respect to Svevo’s previous novels is the omission of a tragic perspective. No more suicides, and if for some reason a suicide occurs, it is by accident (as in Guido’s case). Facing bankruptcy, Guido halfheartedly decides to commit suicide and chooses a slowly operating poison in order to leave ample (not ample enough, though) opportunity to be saved by his family (physically and financially). Guido’s unintended suicide is the parody of Alfonso’s slow selfdestruction. For Zeno life is much lighter. Key to the dramatic change is the newly acquired and acute sense of self-interest on Zeno’s part. Simulation has become routine, moral justification totally inexistent. Occasional unfaithfulness to his wife Augusta

is compensated by the promise of a new washroom. Zeno must be considered the inventor of the principle of balance of payments as applied to individual moral conduct. But this mental stability is only achieved at the end, after Zeno’s ‘‘illness’’ has been cured. This so-called ‘‘illness’’ manifests itself each time restrictions are posed to the free deployment of Zeno’s pleasure principle. Once such restrictions are lifted, the ‘‘illness’’ disappears and Zeno’s ‘‘health’’ is re-established: Zeno has taken total control over the economy of his lust. Only then will he be able, as an autobiographical narrator, to monitor his own actions at a distance, watching, mercilessly and with dry laughter, whatever bias he himself can detect in them. Reading Freud and reflecting on conventional psychoanalysis has proven to be a disappointment for Svevo. On the personal level, his brother-in-law was in therapy with Freud for a long period and then diagnosed incurable. In the novel, Zeno’s doctor is himself good for one session on the couch, as ironically suggested by his vindictive reaction to the aborted therapy sessions, which results in the unauthorized publication of the unsatisfied patient’s manuscript. La coscienza di Zeno is interspersed with parodies of textbook neuroses. On a macro level, all five major chapters can be considered parodical: the planned treatment for Zeno’s tobacco addiction and its reversal in a smoking spree remembered by the ailing patient as a moment of cosmic triumph; his father’s agony and death with the farcical climax of the slap in the face administered by the dying old man; the selection of his future bride Augusta, leading to the least good looking of the four sisters Malfenti; Zeno’s extramarital escapade with Carla, who believes him married to the good looking Ada and sends him back to his wife; the business relationship with his brother-in-law Guido (Ada’s husband), with Zeno reaching the double goal of replacing Guido as the family’s savior, thus regaining Ada’s respect. La coscienza di Zeno’s last chapter marks Zeno’s recovery and resurrection: The writing of a therapeutic autobiography is called off and, in the midst of the great illness of the world (World War I), Zeno’s shrewd business operations firmly secure his present and future ‘‘health.’’ During the next five years (1923–1928), Svevo’s literary activity is intense, though moving in different directions and leaving much unfinished. He finishes two substantial short stories: La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla (The Good Old Man and the Pretty Girl, 1929) and Una burla riuscita (The Hoax, 1929). He nearly brings to 1807

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) completion a comedy, Rigenerazione (Regeneration), his lengthiest theatrical achievement, which deals with the surgical revitalization of an aging man. We also know from a letter to Benjamin Cre´mieux dated May 16, 1928, of his ‘‘improvvisa decisione’’ (sudden resolve) to start a new novel: a ‘‘continuazione di Zeno’’ (continuation of Zeno), entitled Il vecchione (The Grand Old Man) (Epistolario, in Opera Omnia, vol. 1, 1966). Though unfinished, many drafted parts or even whole chapters of this so-called Quarto romanzo, which remained unpublished during Svevo’s lifetime, follow the now familiar Zeno Cosini, turned a septuagenarian paterfamilias, as he tries to cope with the unrelenting attentions of his aging wife; the worries about his son, a painter; the unabating sorrow of his widowed daughter; his lovely but noisy grandchild; and above all with his own uncrippled lust, to be looked after more than before due to his old age. The most innovative undertaking, equally unfinished, of this final period, is the disingenuous travel narrative of explicit Sternian origin, Corto viaggio sentimentale (Short Sentimental Journey). Its protagonist l’Aghios, of Greek descent, travels by train from Milan to Trieste, evoking Laurence Sterne’s Yorick (l’Anglois) and his amorous and adventurous wanderings in France and Italy. Through its reinvented third-person narrative voice in combination with an extensive use of dialogue and free indirect discourse, Corto viaggio sentimentale departs from Zeno’s subjective method, also characteristic of the Quarto romanzo. L’Aghios is a Zeno Cosini on the move well beyond his familiar universe. By reconnecting with a strong narrative tradition of digressive storytelling (Joyce besides Sterne), this work opens a new front in Svevo’s literary strategy. Yet it largely retains Zeno’s Weltanschauung: Coincidence and surprise are more influential than free will and logic; tragedy and drama are systematically suspended or undramatized. Life appears primarily as comedy, where men’s actions are inspired by the all-encompassing desire for divertimento = diversivo (distraction = diversion), to use Aghios’ words, reminiscent of Pascal’s philosophy of divertissement. Noteworthy with respect to the critical reception of Svevo’s work is, paradoxically and with the exception of Montale, the near absence of it at least until the postwar period. The autobiographical aspect, as well as Svevo’s use of literature as a medium of introspection and self-analysis, has received much attention by such biographers as John Gatt-Rutter, who sharply points out Svevo’s two personae, the writer and the man (Italo Svevo, 1808

1988). Some critics (among them Mario Lavagetto, Teresa De Lauretis, Elio Gioanola) combine intertextual analysis with psychological and psychoanalytical insights; others (Norbert Jonard, Renato Barilli, Clausio Magris, Giuseppe, A. Camerino, Giuliana Minghelli) have focused on the specific position taken by Svevo within the Mittel Europa context and European or Italian Modernism. More recently, given the author’s specific and often ambiguous stand with respect to language and the Italian literary canon, both literary and linguistic research has addressed issues concerning influences stemming from the Trieste dialect, and Svevo’s suggested corrections to his own work.

Biography Born in Trieste, December 19, 1861 from a well-todo Jewish family. Father Francesco of Austrian descent, mother Allegra Moravia. 1873: secondary school in Segnitz, Germany. 1878: commercial institute in Trieste. 1880: bankruptcy of father’s glass business. Works as a clerk in local bank until marriage to Livia Veneziani, his cousin, a Catholic, daughter of wealthy industrialist, 1898. Employed by father-in-law. Many business travels, especially to London. Intense management activity after father-in-law’s death. Intermittent, unsuccessful novelistic activity, then literary silence until 1923. 1907: meets James Joyce, Svevo’s English teacher and occasional literary stimulator. 1912: plans translation of Freud’s work. 1923: publishes La coscienza di Zeno. 1926: special Svevo issue of the Parisian literary review Le Navire d’argent. Died in car accident at Motta di Livenza (Treviso), September 13, 1928. WALTER GEERTS Selected Works Collections Opera omnia, edited by Bruno Maier, 4 vols., Milan: Dall’Oglio, 1966–1969 (Epistolario; Romanzi; Racconti, Saggi, Pagine sparse; Commedie). Romanzi, edited by Pietro Sarzana with an introduction by Franco Gavazzeni, Milan: Mondadori, 1985. Tutte le opere, edited by Mario Lavagetto, 3 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 2004 (Racconti e scritti autobiografici; Romanzi e continuazioni; Teatro e saggi).

Novels Una vita, 1892; as A Life, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1963. Senilita`, 1898; as As a Man Grows Older, translated by Beryl De Zoete, 1968; rpt. 2001; as Emilio’s Carnival, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, 2001.

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) La coscienza di Zeno, 1923; as Confessions of Zeno, translated by Beryl De Zoete, 1930; rpt. 1958; as Zeno’s Conscience, translated by William Weaver, 2002.

Short Stories La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla, 1929; as The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, translated by L. Collinson Morley, 1930. Corto viaggio sentimentale ed altri racconti, 1949; as Short Sentimental Journey and Other Stories, translated by Beryl De Zoete, 1967.

Other Carteggio Italo Svevo con James Joyce, 1978. ‘‘Faccio meglio di restare nell’ombra,’’ edited by Giovanni Palmieri, 1995.

Further Reading Anzellotti, Fulvio, Il segreto di Svevo, Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1985. Barilli, Renato, La linea Svevo-Pirandello, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Brombert, Victor, In Praise of Anti-heroes: Figures and Themes in Modern European Literature 1830–1980, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Buccheri, Mauro, and Elio Costa, Italo Svevo tra moderno e postmoderno, Ravenna: Longo, 1995. Cacciaglia, Nicola, and Lia Fava Guzzetta (editors), Italo Svevo scrittore europeo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Perugia, 18–21 March 1992, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Caspar, Marie-He´le`ne (editor), Italo Svevo, special issue of Narrativa (Paris), February 1998. Co`ntini, Gabriella, Svevo, Palermo: Palumbo, 1996. De Angelis, Luca, ‘‘La reticenza di Aron: Letteratura e antisemitismo in Italo Svevo,’’ in L’ebraismo nella letteratura italiana nel Novecento, edited by Marisa Carla` and Luca De Angelis, Palermo: Palumbo, 1995. De Lauretis, Teresa, La sintassi del desiderio: Struttura e forma del romanzo sveviano, Ravenna: Longo, 1976. Gatt-Rutter, John, Italo Svevo: A Double Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Gioanola, Elio, Un killer dolcissimo: Indagine psicanalitica sull’opera di Italo Svevo, Genoa: Il Melangolo, 1977. Guidotti, Angela, Zeno e i duoi doppi: Le commedie di Svevo, Pia: ETS, 1986. Jonard, Norbert, Italo Svevo et la crise de la bourgeoisie europeenne, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1969. Joyce, James, Letters, edited by Richard Ellmann, 3, London: Faber and Faber, 1966. Lavagetto, Mario, L’ impiegato Schmitz e altri saggi su Svevo, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Lebowitz, Naomi, Italo Svevo, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978. Luti, Giorgio, Svevo, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1967. Magris, Claudio, L’anello di Clarisse, Turin: Einaudi, 1984. Maxia, Sandro, Svevo e la prosa del Novecento, Bari: Laterza, 1983. Minghelli, Giuliana, In the Shadow of the Mammoth: Italo Svevo and the Emergence of Modernism, Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003. Moloney, Brian, Italo Svevo: A Critical Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974.

Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Omaggio a Italo Svevo,’’ in L’esame (Milan), 11–12 (1925); rpt. in Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920–1979, edited by Giorgio Zampa, 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Mosca-Riatel, Cora, ‘‘Svevo e Veruda: Il sentire la vita nell’articolato colloquio di parole ed immagini,’’ in Aghios: Quaderni di studi sveviani, 2 (1999): 11–44. Paolini, Noemi, Italo Svevo: Il superuomo dissimulato, Rome: Studium, 1993. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘The Hidden Jew: The Scene of Italo Svevo,’’ in Aghios: Quaderni di studi sveviani, 2 (1999): 63–70. Rimini, Ruggero, La morte nel salotto: Guida al teatro di Italo Svevo, Florence: Vallecchi, 1974. Russell, Charles C., Italo Svevo: The Writer from Trieste: Reflections on his Background and his Work, Ravenna: Longo, 1978. Saccone, Eduardo, Il poeta travestito: Otto scritti su Svevo, Pisa: Pacini, 1977. Sechi, Mario, Il giovane Svevo: Un autore mancato nell’Europa di fine Ottocento, Rome: Donzelli, 2000. Tuscano, Pasquale, L’ integrazione impossibile: Letteratura e vita in Italo Svevo: Milan: Istituto Propaganda Libraria, 1985. Veneziani Svevo, Livia, Vita di mio marito con inediti di Italo Svevo, Trieste-Pordenone: Edizioni dello Zibaldone, 1950; rpt. 2001; as Memoir of Italo Svevo, translated by Isabel Quigly, Marlboro Press-Northwestern University Press, 1989. Weiss, Beno, Italo Svevo, Boston: Twayne, 1987.

LA COSCIENZA DI ZENO, 1923 Novel by Italo Svevo

Trying to explain Svevo’s silence of 25 years before publishing La coscienza di Zeno, Eugenio Montale accuses the Italian literary milieu of being composed of ‘‘puristi in ritardo, manzoniani falliti,‘spiritualisti’ senza gusto’’ (‘‘late-comer purists, failed imitators of Manzoni, tasteless ‘spiritualists’’’) (‘‘Omaggio a Italo Svevo,’’ 1925). Not unlike his previous novels, La coscienza di Zeno is written in unfashionable Italian, without concessions to the polished Florentine literary language, profoundly molded by the Trieste dialect, and influenced by German and the Slavonic languages. Skillfully using all artifices of a first-person fiction, Svevo leaves French naturalism behind while shaping a new take on the novel within 1809

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) the context of European Modernism. However, the existential, moral, and philosophical issues questioned by Alfonso and Emilio, Zeno’s predecessors, are not entirely abandoned. Zeno’s novelty lies in the undramatized and profoundly ironic perception of reality developed by the first-person narrator. The novel displays an unusual—some might say Proustian—thread. In the first of two prologues, the fictional psychiatrist S. explains why he instructed his patient Zeno Cosini, who is struggling with a number of unspecified psychosomatic disorders, to start writing his autobiography as a first step toward a complete psychoanalytic treatment. At the end, all confidence in the therapy lost and self-confidence restored, Zeno stops writing for his therapist. But the revengeful S. decides to publish the manuscript; its contents are what readers come to know when they open the book. In the second prologue, Zeno mocks psychoanalysis and concludes with a warning to a newborn boy in his family. Giving up his inspection of the past and turning his mind to the child’s future he declares himself unable to protect the boy from the countless perils of life. Life is a chemical process containing many dangerous reactions, and in order to confront them no cure other than vigorous selfgovernance is available. Thus La coscienza di Zeno becomes a plea for self-enfranchisement and selfgovernment. Instead of having a narrative voice detail the anatomy of Zeno’s illness (as in Alfonso’s and Emilio’s case), Svevo meticulously reports in the next five chapters the healing process as perceived and recorded by the subject himself: Zeno’s smoking addiction, his father’s agony and death, the story of his marriage, his adultery, the story of his business relationship with his brother-in-law. These chapters, written in a lightly ironic mode, deploy profound skepticism about the therapeutic remedies of psychoanalysis. The focus rests on Zeno’s ability to observe himself from a distance. Once the crucial episodes of his past are written down, Zeno’s health is restored. A healed subject is a self-governing subject, but Zeno’s growing selfgovernance is a result of, or at least synchronous with, the recollection and reconstruction of his past. It is unclear at what exact moment the sick man puts down the pen and the healthy novelist takes over. Zeno, the sick man, is counterfeiting the novelist as much as the novelist is a forged patient. At the heart of La coscienza di Zeno there is a paradox, firmly established as a philosophical assumption about the world. The five chapters 1810

work toward this conclusion, unfolding landmark episodes of Zeno’s—and everyman’s—life. From the onset, the confused assemblage of alibis explaining why Zeno turns to a clinical cure in order to get rid of his smoking addiction, is in itself symptomatic of his ineptness. By interrupting the ‘‘cure’’ before even starting it, after ridiculing the doctor and his staff, Zeno succeeds in leaving the clinic unnoticed. Triumphantly lighting one cigarette after another, he admires the stars ‘‘come se le avess(e) conquistate da poco’’ (as if he had just conquered them). The first chapter is paradigmatic for the entire novel: Zeno grows from weakness into cosmic supremacy, from frustration into euphoria, not by having his illness cured but by nourishing his impairment. For example, in Chapter Two, his light-heartedness in telling the story of his father’s death (following a violent argument) signals a potential lifelong trauma. Indeed, paternal punishment comes in the guise of a harsh blow to Zeno’s face just before dying, but again we notice no self-reproach or shame on his behalf. The following chapters record the protagonist’s failure to compete with Guido, his rival for Ada’s hand, and how he subsequently resigns to settling for the not-so-good-looking Augusta. This frustrating outcome calls for a twofold ‘‘revenge.’’ Revenge is first bestowed upon Augusta herself: Zeno will betray his wife with Carla, who by a twist of mistaken identities eventually sends him back to his wife; secondly upon his brother-in-law and nemesis, Guido, who commits suicide. The final chapter, inscribed to ‘‘psychoanalysis,’’ witnesses the shutting down of all therapeutic writing. It also contains some diaristic fragments flaunting Zeno’s newly established ‘‘health.’’ In the last fragment, we are informed that as Italy enters World War I, Zeno’s wealth prospers thanks to his trading skills. The individual is thus cured, but the illnesses of the world endure. In conclusion, for the world to become healthy, that is ‘‘priv(o) di parassiti e di malattie’’ (freed from parasites and illnesses), man has to cause the entire terrestrial globe to explode into space: a warning for too much ‘‘health’’ and a plea for one’s acceptance to an inevitable degree of sickness. WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: La coscienza di Zeno, Bologna: Cappelli, 1923. Critical edition: La coscienza di Zeno, edited by Bruno Maier, Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1985.

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) Translations: as Confessions of Zeno, translated by Beryl De Zoete, New York: Knopf, 1930; as Zeno’s Conscience, translated by William Weaver, London: Penguin, 2002.

Further Reading Brombert, Victor, In Praise of Anti-heroes: Figures and Themes in Modern EuropeanLiterature 1830–1980, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Co`ntini, Gabriella, Il romanzo inevitabile: Temi e tecniche nella ‘‘Coscienza di Zeno,’’ Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Dombroski, Robert S., ‘‘La coscienza di Zeno ai confini della modernita`,’’ in Italo Svevo tra moderno e postmoderno, edited by Mauro Buccheri and Elio Costa, Ravenna: Longo, 1995. Gatt-Rutter, John, Italo Svevo: A Double Life, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Geerts, Walter, ‘‘Svevo en porte-a`-faux,’’ in Dire la cre´ation: La culture italienne entre poe´tique et poı¨e´tique, edited by Dominique Budor, Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1994. Langella, Giuseppe, Italo Svevo, Naples: Morano, 1992. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘Omaggio a Italo Svevo,’’ in L’esame (Milan), 11–12 (1925); rpt. in Il secondo mestiere: Prose 1920–1979, edited by Giorgio Zampa, 1, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Palmieri, Giovanni, Schmitz, Svevo, Zeno: Storia di due ‘‘biblioteche,’’ Milan: Bompiani, 1994. Saccone, Edoardo, Commento a ‘‘Zeno,’’ Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973. Savelli, Giulio, L’ambiguita` necessaria: Zeno e il suo lettore, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1998.

` , 1898 SENILITA Novel by Italo Svevo

In Svevo’s second novel, Senilita` (As a Man Grows Older), existential maladaptation takes a strong moral turn. While in Una vita Alfonso could still be an object of pity, Emilio, Senilita`’s protagonist, provokes the reader’s deep moral disapproval, since there is a greater distancing of the author’s self from its projection into a literary double. Emilio Brentani is an embittered employee living a lethargic life in Trieste in the company of his colorless younger sister, Amalia. At 35, his modest literary activity as a local writer already belongs to the past. He falls, ‘‘cautiously’’ as he says, in love

with Angiolina, an exuberant but disreputable blonde. The ‘‘education’’ of the young woman becomes a pretext for him to keep the affair going. Life, as the narrative voice remarks ironically, is finally paying back Emilio its large accumulated debt. Angiolina’s amorous adventures have strong social implications: They keep her extended family afloat. And since Emilio’s involvement with her must be risk-free—that is to say, ruling out marriage—Angiolina’s former ‘‘uncles’’ do not interfere significantly. Emilio’s dishonorable conduct becomes clear when he agrees to share her with someone who is willing to provide her—and her family—with much-needed material security. The notion of responsibility is nonexistent in Emilio’s ethics: Man’s actions are like the waves in Trieste’s harbor—flattened every time they attempt to rise up. Svevo, like other fin-de-sie`cle writers (Andre´ Gide, for instance), is forced to come to terms with the moral questions of guilt and responsibility, questions that dominate French naturalism. In his next novel, La coscienza di Zeno, Svevo discovers a ‘‘modern’’ morality. The plot and characterization of Senilita` are much stronger than in Svevo’s previous novel. Emilio and Angiolina, for instance, are counterbalanced by Amalia and Balli, Emilio’s good-hearted bohemian sculptor friend with whom Amalia secretly falls in love. Balli is the only bright spot in Amalia’s dull life. However, Emilio’s jealousy— artfully conveyed through Svevo’s technique of free indirect speech—puts a brutal end to this onesided idyll. An etheromaniac, and completely abandoned, Amalia dies, her sole support having been Balli and Elena, a neighbor embodying the truly ‘‘good’’ person. During Amalia’s agony, Svevo stages Emilio’s last encounter with Angiolina. It is only by chance that Emilio assists his sister in her agony. But, in a certain sense, his sister’s death from love-induced madness saves Emilio from following a similar path, and thus he is freed from an obsessive dependence. Perhaps the sequence, toward the end, where Angiolina’s old mother, in an act of pandering, offers Emilio her younger sister, represents the final stage of abjection, from which Emilio flees, traumatized. In the twelfth chapter, we see the final vain encounter with the girl, when, exhausted by their usual heated discussions, Emilio, who was looking for a stone to hit her without finding any, throws gravel at Angiolina as she runs away in fear. The biblical ‘‘stoning’’ of the unfaithful liar marks Emilio’s farewell to the real Angiolina. Finally, we should emphasize some 1811

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) of the aspects in Senilita` that prepare for La coscienza di Zeno, such as the fusion at the end of Angiolina, the emblem of possessive love, and the sweet Amalia, the object of sororale pity, anticipating the analogous work of memory in Zeno at the grave of his father, who is transformed into a friend and protector. The novel’s syntactic structure preserves the technique of free indirect style, bringing to it a pronounced flexibility that brushes up against the stage soliloquy, which is later given free rein in the Zeno novel. This technique is so pervasive that at the end of the story the reader knows no more of Angiolina (is she truly corrupt, or only the victim of Emilio’s paranoia?) than what the protagonist furnishes, so that the entire novel might be reread as a metaphor of the inevitable subjectivity of knowledge, since the other, for the I, is only a specter. WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: Senilita`, Trieste: Vram, 1898. Critical editions: Senilita`, in Romanzi e continuazioni, 2, Tutte le opere, edited by Mario Lavagetto, Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Translations: as As a Man Grows Older, translated by Beryl De Zoete, New York: Bantham, 1968; as Emilio’s Carnival, translated by Beth Archer Brombert, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Further Reading Baldi, Guido, Le maschere dell’inetto: Lettura di Senilita`, Turin: Paravia, 1998. Baldo, Adelaide, ‘‘Per una lettura psicoanalitica di Senilita`,’’ in Aghios-Quaderni di Studi Sveviani, 2 (1999): 73–79. Cernecca, Domenico, ‘‘Le due redazioni di Senilita` di Italo Svevo,’’ in Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagabriensia, 9–10 (1960): 53–74. D’Antuono, Nicola, Amore e morte in ‘‘Senilita`’’ e altro su Svevo, Salerno: Pietro Laveglia, 1986. Fusco, Mario, ‘‘Sur la repre´sentation de la jalousie dans Senilita`,’’ in La Jalousie: Tolstoj, Svevo, Proust, edited by Jean Bessie`re, Paris: Champion, 1996. Jeuland Meynaud, Maryse, Zeno e i suoi fratelli: La creazione del personaggio nei romanzi di Italo Svevo, Bologna: Patron, 1985. Lepschy, Anna Laura, ‘‘Voce e focalizzazione in Senilita`,’’ in Moving in Measure: Essays in Honour of Brian Moloney, edited by J. Bryce and D. Thompson, Hull: University of Hull, 1989. Maier, Bruno, ‘‘Postille a ‘‘Senilita`’’ di Italo Svevo: Apologia di Angiolina. Il personaggio nasce da una vicenda reale,’’ in Compositori di vita, Trieste: Hammerle, 2002. Robinson, Paula, ‘‘Senilita`: The secret of Svevo’s Weeping Madonna,’’ in Italian Quarterly, 55 (1971): 61–84. Tellini, Gino, ‘‘Per una cronistoria di Senilita`,’’ in Studi Novecenteschi, 2 (1972): 161–175.

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UNA VITA, 1892 Novel by Italo Svevo

Una vita (A Life) is Svevo’s first novel, written and published—at his own expense—in the period that lies between his father’s bankruptcy (1880) and his marriage (1898). To read Una vita as a mere fictionalization of years of dullness and financial problems is an overstatement of the autobiographical element in Svevo’s work. At this time, his readings and interests (Schopenhauer and French naturalism) already point toward a specific kind of fictional protagonist, whose principal traits emerge in the main character of Una vita, Alfonso Nitti. Unwillingly, dreamy Alfonso leaves his village for a white collar job at the Maller bank in Trieste. Inefficient as a correspondent, he is held, however, in high esteem by the impoverished Lanucci family, his host in the city. Mrs. Lanucci, especially, plots to match him to her daughter Lucia. Without much conviction Alfonso flirts with his boss’s daughter, Annetta, who is eager to take advantage of the young man’s literary skills in order to enhance her social status. They embark on the writing of a novel. Caught up in a moment of distraction, Alfonso seduces Annetta and has to return to his hometown, just in time to witness his mother die. Stripped of his rank at the bank, his poor possessions left to Lucia, a stranger in every place, Alfonso enters into a slow process of self-liquidation, which climaxes in suicide. But suicide, in his case, is not portrayed as drama, as, for instance, Madame Bovary’s death. Alfonso’s suicide is merely the unspectacular final stage of the unfolding emptiness of the character. Una vita has many allegiances to the literature of French naturalism. Its ironical and often cynical narrative voice acts as the well-known caricature representing Gustave Flaubert dissecting Madame Bovary’s body with a scalpel. It tracks down, with his merciless analysis, Alfonso’s spiraling demise. Thus, the protagonist appears as a false and fabricated romantic. Unlike Charles Baudelaire’s emblematic albatros, which reveals its superior nature once its large wings spread in the air, Alfonso is not a creative genius nor a model of authenticity. Alfonso is a travesty of a romantic: Dissembling

ITALO SVEVO (ARON HECTOR SCHMITZ) and masquerading, impersonating those he is unable to compete with has only become his ineffective strategy of temporary survival. The conviction that life can only be lived as a performance, acting the comedy of life, makes him into a premodernist character. Initially entitled L’inetto (The Unfit), Svevo’s first novel levels the field for a fictional development of the theme of existential inaptness, and prepares for the emerging of Zeno, the author’s proposed solution for this problem. WALTER GEERTS Editions First edition: Una vita, Trieste: Vram, 1892. Critical editions: Una vita, edited by Bruno Maier, Pordenone: Studio Tesi, 1985; in Romanzi, edited by Pietro Sarzana, Milan: Mondadori, 1985; edited by Mario Lavagetto, in Romanzi e continuazioni, 2, Tutte le opere, Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Translations: as A Life, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, London: Secker, New York: Knopf, 1963.

Further Reading Camerino, Giuseppe Antonio, Italo Svevo e la crisi della Mitteleuropa, Naples: Liguori, 2002. Curti, Luca, Svevo e Schopenhauer: Rilettura di ‘‘Una vita,’’ Pisa: ETS, 1991. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, Il primo romanzo di Italo Svevo: Una scrittura della scissione e dell’assenza, Messina-Florence: D’Anna, 1991. Geerts, Walter, ‘‘Tra il dire e il fare—Da Alfonso a Zeno,’’ in Italo Svevo scrittore europeo, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Perugia, 18–21 March 1992, edited by Nicola Cacciaglia and Lia Fava Guzzetta, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Guagnini, Elvio, ‘‘Esordi di Svevo: Citta`, letteratura e societa` triestina,’’ in Italo Svevo scrittore europeo. Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Perugia, 18–21 March 1992, edited by Nicola Cacciaglia and Lia Fava Guzzetta, Florence: Olschki, 1994. Langella, Giuseppe, Italo Svevo, Naples: Morano, 1992. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Tre progetti di analisi per tre microstrutture sveviane (Una Vita),’’ in Forma e ideologia, Naples: Liguori, 1974. Spagnoletti, Giacinto, Da ‘‘Una vita’’ a ‘‘La coscienza di Zeno,’’ Modena: Mucchi, 1991.

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T ANTONIO TABUCCHI (1943–) innovative filmic structure, based upon montage, nonlinearity, and juxtaposition. Too often neglected by critics, these valuable apprenticeship works testify to Tabucchi’s early interest in the interplay between history and fiction as well as to his search for an individual narrative mode oriented toward the disruption of mimetic conventions. With the short-story collection, Il gioco del rovescio (Letter from Casablanca, 1981), Tabucchi achieves a distinctive mode of storytelling, opening a new phase in his writing, one characterized by an all-encompassing metaphysical vision of life and by the subtle exploration of existential themes and motifs. Wide-ranging in settings and situations, Il gioco del rovescio (literally The Backwards Game) draws inspiration and thematic unity from the concept of ‘‘reversal’’ that, in the author’s words, is the acknowledgment that ‘‘una certa cosa che era ‘cosı`’ era invece anche in un altro modo’’ (a certain thing that was one way was also another way). The hidden side of people and events, to which Tabucchi alludes in his preface, is brilliantly illustrated in the eponymous tale, where an apparently univocal reality gradually discloses its ambiguous ‘‘reversal.’’ Set in Lisbon and permeated by the melancholic feeling of saudade, this story takes on an inaugural value, introducing in Tabucchi’s fiction the figure of Fernando Pessoa: the master of reversals, as celebrated in the text, and Tabucchi’s literary father and alter ego. With his pluralistic and heteronymic vision of the self as well as with his conception of life

One of Italy’s foremost contemporary authors, Antonio Tabucchi is an original novelist, a prolific short-story writer, an engaging essayist and a distinguished critic and translator of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. Since the mid-1970s, Tabucchi has written numerous works of fiction, which have attracted remarkable critical attention earning him international fame and recognition. Like most writers of his generation, Tabucchi belongs to no literary movement, resisting tags and definitions. Thus he has often been described as a postmodernist, since his narratives blend tradition and innovation, realism and Expressionism, minimalism and existentialism, fantasy and history. Employing complex intertextual strategies, metanarrative practices, and genre contamination, Tabucchi gives shape to a problematic and multifaceted fictional world that is both alluring and disturbing and, for its ambiguity and ontological uncertainty, exhibits profound affinities with postmodern philosophical thinking. Tabucchi’s first two novels, Piazza d’Italia (Italy Square, 1975) and Il piccolo naviglio (The Little Ship, 1978), chronicle the vicissitudes of two anarchist Tuscan families, linking their private stories with troubled periods of Italian history, including unification, Fascism and the postwar years. Both novels combine a picaresque rhythm and flow of action with expressionistic imagery and language. However, Piazza d’Italia stands out for its magical realism, reminiscent of Gabriel Garcı´a Ma´rquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as for its

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ANTONIO TABUCCHI as fiction, Pessoa affects indelibly the spirit and tone of Tabucchi’s subsequent writing, becoming a recurrent motif in all his works. Il gioco del rovescio also signals the adoption of the short story as a narrative measure congenial to Tabucchi, who experiments with it in some volumes of the 1980s, such as Donna di Porto Pim (The Woman of Porto Pim, 1983), a collection of brief narratives inspired by the Azores, and I volatili del Beato Angelico (The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, 1987), a heterogeneous mosaic of sketches and narrative fragments, having a surreal quality and drawing suggestively upon the visual. A more traditional short-story book, Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Little Misunderstandings of No Importance, 1985), further develops the poetics of ‘‘reversal’’ introduced by the author in Il gioco del rovescio, sharing with the latter a highly allusive and elliptical style. This collection is made up of elusive stories, dominated by temporal shifts and revolving around unreliable memories, banal mistakes and irrevocable misunderstandings. As suggested in the tale ‘‘Rebus’’ (A Riddle), Tabucchi’s ambiguous vision of things takes here the form of narrative enigmas, whose solution inevitably escapes the reader. Equally suspended and open-ended are the short novels, Notturno indiano (Indian Nocturne, 1984) and Il filo dell’orizzonte (The Edge of the Horizon, 1986). Similar in structure and themes, both works are organized as quest novels, whose respective protagonists are engaged in the search of a friend or a stranger, while traveling across uncanny geographical spaces. In Il filo dell’orizzonte, Tabucchi employs and subverts the conventions of the traditional detective story to present a double investigation, in which the search for the identity of an unknown dead man runs parallel to the character’s search for his own identity. The last work of the 1980s, I dialoghi mancati (Failed Dialogues, 1988), consists of two one-act plays, the first of which regards an imaginary telephone conversation between Pessoa and another of Tabucchi’s most admired authors, Luigi Pirandello. Both plays were staged by Giorgio Strehler for the Piccolo Theatro in Milan in 1989 and in 1990. During the 1990s, Tabucchi showed a tendency to link up existential concerns with social and ethical ones, creating increasingly challenging and unsettling fictional worlds. Thus in the short stories collected in L’angelo nero (The Black Angel, 1991) the oneiric quality of much of his earlier fiction

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tends to acquire a more shadowy connotation. The author’s established repertoire of dreams, visions and memories is here employed to portray situations of existential and political malaise. Also affected by this kind of unease is the protagonist of Requiem: Uma alucinac¸a˜o (Requiem: A Hallucination, 1991), who finds himself adrift between reality and hallucination on a scorching midsummer’s day in Lisbon, encountering in his itinerary the living and the dead alike. Written in Portuguese and a year later translated into Italian by Sergio Vecchio, Requiem is Tabucchi’s most accomplished novel. It employs metafictional and intertextual strategies and skillfully orchestrates around the themes of remorse and disquiet, the author’s lifelong concern for questions of time and memory, identity and otherness, death and nostalgia. Two successive books, Sogni di sogni (Dreams of Dreams, 1992) and Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa (The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, 1994) illustrate respectively the imagined dreams of 20 artists dear to Tabucchi, and Pessoa’s delirium before death. Sostiene Pereira (Declares Pereira, 1994) is the writer’s bestselling and most popular novel, and the object of controversial criticism on publication because of its alleged left-wing standpoint. It traces the existential and political awakening of Pereira, an aging journalist living in Lisbon in 1938, who is transformed from passive spectator into an opponent of the Salazar regime. While several of Tabucchi’s fictional stories have been adapted for the silver screen, Roberto Faenza’s Sostiene Pereira (1995), starring Marcello Mastroianni in the leading role, is truly a political film, which alludes to and harshly criticizes contemporary Italy. The motifs of justice and personal responsibility stressed in the latter novel are revisited in La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro (The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, 1997), set once again in Portugal and inspired by a news item. Tabucchi’s most recent fiction is increasingly complex, with multiple narrative voices and reworking of earlier themes. Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi (It’s Always Getting Later, 2001) is an unconventional epistolary novel, made up of a number of short stories taking the form of letters and centered on past relationships, absences and losses. Instead Tristano muore: Una vita (Tristan Dies: A Life, 2004) reaffirms the author’s abiding interest in the interlocking of public history and private lives. Here the narrator, who is dying of cancer, evokes crucial

ANTONIO TABUCCHI events of Italy’s recent history, as he recounts his life to a silent interlocutor—most likely a journalist or a writer. Highlighting the best of Tabucchi’s talent as a novelist, Tristano muore confronts the delicate question of historical truth, in its ambiguous relation with memory and storytelling. An attentive and passionate observer of everyday reality, Tabucchi is also a columnist and contributor to several newspapers. His occasional journalistic writing, inspired by local and international events, shares with his fiction a commitment to political justice and equality. Tabucchi’s social involvement, much alike Leonardo Sciascia and Pier Paolo Pasolini, informs two small volumes of the late 1990s: La gastrite di Platone (Plato’s Gastritis, 1998) and Gli zingari e il rinascimento (The Gypsies and the Renaissance, 1999). The former combines Tabucchi’s views on the public role of intellectuals with a bitter reflection on the Sofri affair, whereas the latter is an account of social and cultural conditions of the gypsies’ communities in today’s Florence. Incisive in style, these books retain a narrative tendency that rounds off their satiric and at times polemical tone. Tabucchi’s most recent volume of critical essays entitled Autobiografie altrui: Poetiche a posteriori (Others’ Autobiographies: Poetics After the Event, 2003) is a collection of previously published and unpublished observations on his work. In this suggestive exercise of self-criticism, writing about fiction and fiction writing often blend and overlap. Notwithstanding his international success and the wide range of his literary writing, Tabucchi keeps a very low profile and loves to be defined as a Sunday writer who writes not for professional reasons but only when motivated by inspiration or inner urgency. His fiction has been translated into many languages.

Biography Born in Pisa, 24 September 1943; graduated in languages and literatures at the University of Pisa with a thesis on surrealism in Portugal, 1969; pursued further study at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, early 1970s; while at university traveled extensively in France and Portugal; appointed lecturer in Portuguese language and literature at the University of Bologna, 1973–1975; moved to the University of Genoa 1978–1990 and successively to the University of Siena; director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Lisbon, 1987–1989; during the 1980s and early 1990s visited various countries, including India,

Macao, the Azores, China, Brazil, South America and Australia; awarded the order Do Infante Dom Henrique by the president of the Portuguese Republic and appointed Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, 1989; visiting professor at the E´cole des Hautes E´tudes of Paris, 1994. Among his literary awards, Comisso prize for Piccoli equivoci senza importanza, 1985; Me´dicis Etranger Prize for Notturno indiano, 1987; Viareggio-Re`paci Prize, Selezione Campiello Prize, SuperCampiello Prize and Jean Monnet prize for Sostiene Pereira, 1994; Nossack Prize of the Leibniz Academy, 1998; France Culture Prize for Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi, 2002. Widely published as contributing editorialist for Il corriere della sera, L’unita`, La repubblica, El pais, Die Zeit. With his wife, Maria Jose´ de Lancastre, and his son and daughter lives in Vecchiano (Pisa). MICHELA MESCHINI Selected Works Fiction Piazza d’Italia, 1975. Il piccolo naviglio, 1978. Il gioco del rovescio, 1981; enlarged edition, 1988; as Letter from Casablanca: Stories, translated by Janice M. Thresher, 1986. Donna di Porto Pim e altre storie, 1983; as The Woman of Porto Pim, in Vanishing Point, translated by Tim Parks, 1990. Notturno indiano, 1984; as Indian Nocturne: A Novella, translated by Tim Parks, 1988. Piccoli equivoci senza importanza, 1985; as Little Misunderstandings of No Importance: Stories, translated by Frances Frenaye, 1987. Il filo dell’orizzonte, 1986; as The Edge of the Horizon, translated by Tim Parks, 1990. I volatili del Beato Angelico, 1987; as The Flying Creatures of Fra Angelico, in Vanishing Point, translated by Tim Parks, 1990. L’angelo nero, 1991. Requiem: Uma alucinac¸a˜o, 1991; as Requiem: A Hallucination, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, 1994. Sogni di sogni, 1992; as Dreams of Dreams, in Dreams of Dreams and The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, translated by Nancy J. Peters, 1999. Sostiene Pereira: Una testimonianza, 1994; as Pereira Declares: A Testimony, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1995; in the United Kingdom as Declares Pereira: A True Account, 1995. Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa: Un delirio, 1994; as The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, in Dreams of Dreams and The Last Three Days of Fernando Pessoa, translated by Nancy J. Peters, 1999. Marconi, se ben mi ricordo, 1997.

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ANTONIO TABUCCHI La testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro, 1997; as The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1999. Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi, 2001. Tristano muore: Una vita, 2004.

Theater I dialoghi mancati, 1988.

Other La parola interdetta: Antologia dei poeti surrealisti portoghesi, 1971. l teatro portoghese del dopoguerra, 1976. Il poeta e la finzione: Scritti su Fernando Pessoa, 1983. Un baule pieno di gente: Saggi su Fernando Pessoa, 1990. La gastrite di Platone, 1998. Gli zingari e il rinascimento: Vivere da Rom a Firenze, 1999. Autobiografie altrui: Poetiche a posteriori, 2003.

Translations Alexander O’Neill, Made in Portugal, 1978. Fernando Pessoa, Una sola moltitudine, 2 vols., 1979–1984 (with Maria Jose´ de Lancastre). Fernando Pessoa, Il libro dell’inquietudine, 1986 (with Maria Jose´ de Lancastre). Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Sentimento del mondo: Trentasette poesie scelte da Antonio Tabucchi, 1987. Fernando Pessoa, Lettere alla fidanzata, 1988. Fernando Pessoa, Il marinaio, 1988. Fernando Pessoa, Il poeta e` un fingitore: Duecento citazioni scelte da Antonio Tabucchi, 1988.

Further Reading Ammirati, Maria Pia, Il vizio di scrivere: letture su Busi, De Carlo, Del Giudice, Pazzi, Tabucchi e Tondelli, Rubbettino: Soveria Mannelli, 1991. Biasin, Gian Paolo, Le periferie della letteratura: da Verga a Tabucchi, Ravenna: Longo, 1997. Brizio-Skov, Flavia, Antonio Tabucchi: Navigazioni in un arcipelago narrativo, Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2002. Cattaruzza, Claudio (editor), Dedica a Antonio Tabucchi, Pordenone: Associazione Provinciale per la Prosa, 2001. Ferraro, Bruno, and Nicole Prunster (editors), Antonio Tabucchi: A Collection of Essays, Melbourne: Spunti e Ricerche, 1997. Lepschy, Anna Laura, ‘‘Antonio Tabucchi: Splinters of Existence,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Paccagnini, Ermanno, ‘‘Il viaggio a rovescio di Tabucchi,’’ in Letture, 51 (1996): 115–122. Roelens, Nathalie, and Inge Lanslots (editors), Piccole finzioni con importanza: Valori della narrativa italiana contemporanea, Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Universita` di Anversa, May 1991, Ravenna: Longo, 1993. Trentini, Nives, Tabucchi fra romanzo e racconto, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003.

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NOTTURNO INDIANO, 1984 Novel by Antonio Tabucchi

After traveling through India in 1983, Tabucchi was inspired to write Notturno indiano (Indian Nocturne), a short narrative about absences and appearances. In the author’s own words, the book is both insomnia and a journey, taking the form of a ‘‘Notturno in cui si cerca un’Ombra’’ (Nocturne in Which One Seeks a Shadow). The protagonist and first-person narrator, an unnamed European intellectual, travels to India in search of Xavier, an old friend who has mysteriously disappeared. He follows vague and uncertain traces, exploring on his way from Bombay to Goa the contrasting facets of a nocturnal country, pervaded by smells and strange laments and characterized by opulence and poverty alike. Enclosed in the volume is an index of the locations where the story takes place. These range from unprepossessing and sordid hotel rooms to the magnificent luxury of the Taj Mahal Hotel, from a seedy hospital infested with cockroaches to a theosophical society, from remote waiting rooms to an old Jesuit library. Mostly interiors, these settings are immersed in twilight and host the narrator’s encounters and appointments with disparate characters, such as the Jain who is going to die and does not know who Andrea Mantegna is; the member of the theosophical society who keeps quoting Ferdinando Pessoa’s verses; the monkeylike prophet who tells the narrator that he is nothing other than a pure illusion; the postman from Philadelphia who keeps sending postcards home from Goa; and finally the French photographer who warns the narrator to be aware of selected details: ‘‘Me´fiez-vous des morceaux choisis.’’ Each one a perfect sketch, or rather a morceau choisi, these baffling encounters give shape to an incongruous and absurd itinerary where the geographical space is nothing more than a visionary scenario. Stemming from insomnia, the protagonist’s journey is in fact interspersed with dreams and visions that swallow up the external reality,

SUSANNA TAMARO superimposing on it the inner landscape of the narrator’s own unconscious with its haunting presences. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that the nocturnal quest takes on a symbolic resonance, and what had started as the narrator’s private search for a missing friend is actually a search for his own self. This is revealed in the final scene, when, after adopting his old nickname Roux (the Portuguese diminutive for nightingale, which is in turn Xavier’s nickname), the narrator presents himself as a writer intent on writing a novel, in which he is someone who has disappeared in India. Therefore, through a metafictional twist, the seeker becomes the sought after and the investigation turns on itself. Open-ended and unresolved as most of Tabucchi’s narratives are, Notturno indiano is an intriguing novel, not only because of its themes but also because of its trompe l’oeil effects. Woven around the motifs of the journey, the double and the oneiric, the narration hovers between reality and appearance, producing constant effects of visual and conceptual displacement. Highly allusive in style, imbued with irony in many sequences, Notturno indiano attests to Tabucchi’s ability to explore the multiplicity of the self and to create seductive but deceptive fictional worlds. Significant links exist between this novel and two subsequent short stories: ‘‘La frase che segue e` falsa. La frase che precede e` vera’’ (The Sentence That Follows Is False. The Preceding Sentence Is True), and ‘‘I treni che vanno a Madras’’

(The Trains That Go to Madras). The latter was included in the 1989 film adaptation of Notturno indiano, directed by Alain Corneau. MICHELA MESCHINI Editions First edition: Notturno indiano, Palermo: Sellerio, 1984. Critical edition: Notturno indiano, edited by Anna Dolfi, Turin: SEI, 1996. Translation: as Indian Nocturne: A Novella, translated by Tim Parks, London: Chatto and Windus; New York: New Directions, 1988.

Further Reading Arvigo, Tiziana, ‘‘From Notturno indiano to Il filo dell’orizzonte: ‘Landscape of Absence’ and ‘Landscape of Disappearance,’’’ in Antonio Tabucchi: A Collection of Essays, edited by Ferraro Bruno and Nicole Prunster, Melbourne: Spunti e Ricerche, 1997. Livorni, Ernesto, ‘‘Trompe l’oeil in Notturno indiano di Antonio Tabucchi,’’ in I tempi del rinnovamento, Atti del Convegno Internazionale Rinnovamento del codice narrativo in Italia dal 1945 al 1992, edited by Serge Valvolsem, Franco Musarra, and Bart Van den Bossche, Rome: Bulzoni-Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1995. Ravazzoli, Flavia, ‘‘Viaggi tangenziali e storie ribattute: l’insonnia narrativa di Tabucchi,’’ in Autografo, 2 (1985): 23–37. Surdich, Luigi, ‘‘‘Uno che si cerca e si cerchera` sempre’: la ‘queˆte’ di Antonio Tabucchi,’’ in Il Ponte, 54 (1998): 79–97.

SUSANNA TAMARO (1957–) Novelist and short-story writer Susanna Tamaro achieved international recognition with her 1994 runaway bestseller Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart). The novel, translated into more than 25 languages, was the first such Italian literary success abroad since Umberto Eco’s Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose, 1980). However, unlike Eco’s work, Va’ dove ti porta il cuore engendered a fierce debate about its literary merits, as it was seen as a reflection and an endorsement of the increasingly conservative political climate of 1990s Italy. Some decried its sentimentality, reading in it

a decidedly anti-intellectual bias. The novel’s huge success is tied in part to its gripping depiction of a sometimes tormented family history, complete with illegitimate children, fatal automobile accidents, thwarted ambitions, and extramarital liaisons. Its atypical protagonist—Olga, an elderly woman— and its emphasis on her female family members raised interest among critics of feminist studies. In a series of letters written to her distant granddaughter, Olga traces through her own personal history the development of women’s roles and rights in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century 1819

SUSANNA TAMARO Italy. The focus on the relationship between a daughter and a maternal figure, which is re-created in different combinations throughout the text, offers an illuminating perspective from which to explore the dynamics of relations among women. However, many critics found the particular bond between Olga and her unnamed granddaughter a restrictive one, perpetuating stereotypical norms of female behavior. Despite, or perhaps because of its notoriety, Va’ dove ti porta il cuore has sold more than 2.5 million copies in Italy alone. It was made into a film in 1996, directed by Cristina Comencini and starring Virni Lisi and Margherita Buy. The overarching tone of sentimentality characterizing Va’ dove ti porta il cuore is rarely found in other works by Tamaro. Indeed, her novels often focus on the tensions between the innate innocence of her child protagonists and the cruelties and unpredictability of the world around them. Her first novel, La testa fra le nuvole (The Head in the Clouds), published in 1989 in a series devoted to promoting promising young authors, follows the travels and travails of the main character, a boy named Ruben, who clings to the safety of the imaginary world he has created. Critics applauded the picaresque structure, elegiac prose, and philosophical subtext of the book, which was awarded the Premio Elsa Morante. The short stories contained in Per voce sola (For Solo Voice, 1991), Tamaro’s next book, are replete with frightful descriptions of abused and abandoned children, continuing her interest in exploring the contrast between innocence and evil. These works, although marked by violence, are also infused with a sense of irony that only underlines the horror unfolding in the texts. In the short story ‘‘Di nuovo lunedı´’’ (It’s Monday Again), for example, the protagonist is a writer of fairy tales for young children. However, she is blind to the physical and mental abuse inflicted by her husband on their young daughter, abuse unwittingly recorded in the mother’s diary. Perhaps because of these disturbing themes, the collection was not well-received by the public, although it was greeted by extremely positive critical reviews and won Italy’s Pen Club award. Like Va’ dove ti porta il cuore, Tamaro’s 1997 novel Anima mundi (The Soul of the World) also polarized her reading public with its sharp condemnation of Communism. Here the protagonist is a young man named Walter, who may be Tamaro’s alter ego because, like her, he turned his back on his native Trieste for an artistic career in Rome. Walter is a committed anti-Communist, and the novel’s fervent attack on this ideology, along with 1820

its endorsement of Christianity, struck a nerve among many leftist critics who felt Tamaro ignored and ridiculed Italy’s own historical embrace of Communist tenets. Since the publication of Anima mundi, Tamaro’s books have not matched either the publishing success of Va’ dove ti porta il cuore or the literary acclaim awarded La testa fra le nuvole and Per voce sola. Rispondimi (Answer Me, 2001) takes its title from a phrase contained in the Gospel of St. John. The work comprises three novellas that emphasize the power of hope and love over misery and depredation. In each novella, the protagonists are tormented by threats to their psychic and physical well-being. Indeed, in the final story even nature is under siege, its suffering corresponding to that endured by the female lead character. Fuori (Outside, 2003) is made up of four short stories revolving around themes of social alienation, diversity, and the difficulty in genuine communication. Tamaro’s deeply felt spirituality can be found in almost all her works, which often explore not only Christianity but also Buddhism and lesser-known spiritual practices. Several of her books deal thoroughly with the topic. Cara Mathilda (Dear Mathilda, 1997) and Piu´ fuoco, piu´ vento (More Fire, More Wind, 2002) contain letters and essays published in Tamaro’s column in the Catholic periodical Famiglia cristiana. In these essays, Tamaro examines her own personal and spiritual life in the form of an epistolary correspondence with an imaginary young friend. Verso casa (Homeward, 1999) is a series of reflections on life, death, and other spiritual issues. Tamaro’s interest in children extends beyond focusing on young protagonists in her fictional works. She has also written books for children, including Il cerchio magico (The Magic Circle, 1995), and Tobia e l’angelo (Tobia and the Angel, 1998). Many of Tamaro’s works are infused with a sense of wonder and appreciation for the natural world, unsurprising given that she began her artistic career in Rome writing and directing scientific documentaries for television. In 2000, Tamaro established a foundation in her name dedicated to helping those she considered most at risk in modern society, including children and the elderly. All the proceeds from her book Rispondimi go toward the foundation’s humanitarian efforts.

Biography Born on 12 December 1957 in Trieste, distant relative of author Italo Svevo. Studied at the Istituto

LUIGI TANSILLO magistrale of Trieste. Moved to Rome, 1976, and studied at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. Worked as a screenwriter and assistant director for television documentaries, 1977–1978. Awarded the Premio Elsa Morante for La testa fra le nuvole, 1989, and the Pen Club prize for Per voce sola, 1991. Published Va’ dove ti porta il cuore, which generated heated critical debate over its alleged conservatism, 1994; Anima mundi polarized her readers with its sharp condemnation of Communism. Tamaro also writes children’s books. Famously withdrawn from the glittering social scene of Italy’s tight-knit literary world, Tamaro lives quietly in the Umbrian countryside, near Orvieto. LAURA SALSINI Selected Works Fiction La testa fra le nuvole, 1989. Per voce sola, 1991; as For Solo Voice, translated by Sharon Wood, 1995. Va’ dove ti porta il cuore, 1994; as Follow Your Heart, translated by Avril Bardoni, 1995; as Follow Your Heart, translated by John Cullen, 1995. Anima mundi, 1997. Rispondimi, 2001; as Answer Me, translated by Avril Bardoni, 2002. Fuori, 2003.

Children’s Books Cuore di ciccia, 1992. Papirofobia, 1994. Il cerchio magico, 1995. Tobia e l’angelo, 1998.

Nonfiction Cara Mathilda, 1997. Verso casa, 1999. Piu´ fuoco, piu´ vento, 2002.

Further Reading Lombardi, Giancarlo, Rooms with a View: Feminist Diary Fiction, 1952–1999, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002. McGowan, Nicoletta DiCiolla, ‘‘‘Anima Parvuli’: A Child’s Destiny According to Susanna Tamaro,’’ in Forum Italicum, 33, no. 2 (1999): 459–484. Pezzin, Claudio, Susanna Tamaro, Sommacampagna: Cierre, 2000. Rorato, Laura, ‘‘Childhood Prisons. Denied Dreams and Denied Realities: The Ritualization of Pain in the Novels of Susanna Tamaro,’’ in Romance Studies, 28 (1996): 61–78. Ryan, Colleen Marie, ‘‘In the Heart of the Nineties: Theorizing a Grandmother’s Subjectivity in Two Works by Susanna Tamaro,’’ in Romance Languages Annual, 10, no. 1 (1999): 360–367. Salsini, Laura, ‘‘Maraini Addresses Tamaro: Revising the Epistolary Novel,’’ in Italica, 78 (2001): 351–366. Senardi, Fulvio, ‘‘Nonne e Giardini: la narrativa di Susanna Tamaro, ovvero come si costruisce il successo letterario,’’ in Problemi, 102 (1995): 180–199.

LUIGI TANSILLO (1510–1568) Luigi Tansillo was a Renaissance poet, very precocious both in his studies and in his literary production. A courtier by family tradition and upbringing, he was deeply rooted in the socially conservative and yet restless culture of Naples. Born in a patrician household in Venosa, Horace’s own hometown, he flourished in the Spanish-Neapolitan court of Don Pedro of Toledo. Tansillo’s poetic production grew out of the moral and stylistic values and concerns of his elegant courtly life. The literary experiences of the previous centuries, as well as the poetic and philosophical conversation of the Renaissance, are echoed in his literary works. Tansillo began his poetic career by adhering, as

most of the Italian intellectuals of the mid-sixteenth century, to the rhetorical conventions of Petrarchism, a manner known for its artificiality that had been codified by Pietro Bembo in the Prose della Volgar Lingua (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525), written in Rome at the court of Pope Paul III. Bembo’s Petrarchism also proposed a model of linguistic and social order, a style of a timeless moral stability. Tansillo’s early poems, written in the Dantesque ‘‘terza rima,’’ recall the Petrarchan paradigm of longing for a woman who is simultaneously present and absent, gracious and unavailable, and embody the courtly ideals of control, smoothness, and elegance. The poems were 1821

LUIGI TANSILLO written for a noble woman, Maria d’Aragona d’Avalos, to whom Tansillo refers with the plainly Petrarchan name of Laura. His Canzoniere (Songbook), made up of 104 sonnets, nine songs, four chapters, five madrigals and other poems, was inspired by the dream of a serene life in the fields, cared and loved by his family. Composed throughout his life, it was published only in 1711 as Sonetti e canzoni (Sonnets and Songs). In this songbook, it is evident that his poetry underwrites the ideological climate of an Italian society proximate to and imbued by the Spanish aesthetics of the incipient Counter-Reformation. Tansillo’s poetry, however, shows such an autonomy from the widespread practice of slavish imitation of the classics of the trecento, that he can be legitimately considered a transitional figure in the poetic landscape of the time. If Bembo is his point of departure, Giordano Bruno and Torquato Tasso become the figures that his love poetry foreshadows. His autonomy can be described through an analysis of the components of his style. The features that gave his work its international prestige and scope were the elements he borrowed from the Southern classical and humanistic tradition of naturalism (and, in some cases, from Francesco Berni), which he grafted on to the Petrarchan scheme. Tansillo’s Clorinda (1547) is a vivacious description of Don Garcia’s villa life on the Bay of Naples, and his two didactic poems, La balia (The Nurse, 1552) and Il podere (The Farm, 1560), are occasionally humorous. The early eclogue I due pellegrini (The Two Pilgrims, 1527) plainly owes a considerable debt to Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), as well as to the idyllic classical tradition that stretches back to Theocritus and Virgil. On the other hand, his realistic account of naval life, Stanze a Bernardino Martirano (Stanzas for Bernardino Martirano, 1540), pays homage to the poetry of Horace. In thematic terms, strong traces of naturalism appear in the erotic bacchanalian poem, Il Vendemmiatore (The Vintager, 1532), which was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1559 (the year when the first catalog of forbidden books was published), as dangerous to the morals of Roman Catholics. To make amends, in the later years of his life, he wrote a longer poem, Le lagrime di San Pietro (The Tears of Saint Peter, 1580), published after his death. The poem, which expresses Counter-Reformation views about the role of Saint Peter in Christian history, inaugurated the long genre of poems of tears, the epitome of which is Torquato Tasso’s Stanze per le lagrime di Maria Vergine (Stanzas for the Tears of the Virgin Mary) and received 1822

accolades even outside of Italy. In a clear sign of admiration, Cervantes quotes a stanza from it in the tale ‘‘El curioso impertinente’’ in part one of Don Quixote (1605). Among all the Petrarchists of his time, at least in terms of his stylistic resources, Tansillo was certainly the most gifted and the most experimental poet of the period. Sonnets, such as ‘‘Valli nemiche al sol’’ (Valleys inimical to the sun) and ‘‘Strane rupi, aspri monti’’ (Strange cliffs, harsh mountains) give a clear indication of the novelty of his writing even as he deploys Bembo’s narrow purist linguistic code: A naturalistic depiction of the landscape (the Vesuvius), after the volcano’s eruption of 1538, is transformed in a symbolic, hellish space. Pozzuoli, which ever since the classical past marks the gate of Avernus, becomes the place where the poet roams among meste ombre (sad shades). Such a language prefigures Torquato Tasso’s style in his tragedy Il re Torrismondo (King Torrismondo, 1587). It is Giordano Bruno, however, who in his Degli eroici furori (On Heroic Frenzies, 1585) employs Tansillo as one of his interlocutors to reflect on questions such as Neoplatonic and Petrarchan love, the ladder of love, and Plato’s concept of the soul. One of Tansillo’s sonnets, ‘‘Poi che spiegat’ho l’ali al bel disio’’ (Now that I have unfolded my wings unto the beautiful desire), perhaps his masterpiece and whose central conceit is the fall of Icarus as he soars toward the absolute, is included in Bruno’s text in order to celebrate the greatness of Tansillo’s lyrical poetry. In Icarus’ flight, as in all his love poems, Tansillo represents human daring when the mind is moved by passion. For love—and here Tansillo aligns himself with the major voices of the Italian lyrical tradition (the stilnovisti, Dante, and Petrarch)—remains the ideal of life and the measure of human perfection.

Biography Luigi Tansillo was born in Venosa (Potenza), in 1510, in a family of the minor nobility; moved to Naples as a child and spent most of his life in the military service of the Spanish government, serving both on land and at sea; was employed at the court of the Spanish viceroy, Don Pedro of Toledo, and later, he remained employed by Don Garcia, Pedro’s son, serving them as ambassador and, eventually becoming governor of Gaeta, a position he kept until his death; married Luisa Puccio di Teano, 1550. Died in Teano (Caserta) on 1 December 1568. MARIA C. PASTORE PASSARO

ARCANGELA TARABOTTI (GALERANA BARATOTTI) Selected Works Collections Capitoli giocosi e satirici di Luigi Tansillo editi ed inediti, edited by Scipione Volpicella, Naples: Dura, 1870. Il Canzoniere edito ed inedito, edited by Erasmo Percopo, Naples: Societa` Editrice della Biblioteca di Scrittori Meridionali, 1926. Poesie eroiche ed encomiastiche, edited by Tobia R. Toscano, Naples: Consorzio editoriale Fridericiana and Liguori, 1996.

Poetry ‘‘I due pellegrini,’’ 1527. ‘‘Il Vendemmiatore,’’ 1532. ‘‘Stanze a Bernardino Martirano,’’ 1540. ‘‘Clorinda,’’ 1547. ‘‘La balia,’’ 1552; as The Nurse: A Poem, translated by William Roscoe, 1800. ‘‘Il podere,’’ 1560. ‘‘Le lagrime di San Pietro,’’ 1580. ‘‘Sonetti e canzoni,’’ 1711.

Further Reading Bart Rossebastiano, Alda, ‘‘Un nuovo codice di poesie di Luigi Tansillo,’’ in Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, 151 (1974): 383–390. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘A proposito di un sonetto del Tansillo,’’ in Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana, Bari: Laterza, 1910. Flamini, Francesco, Sulle poesie del Tansillo di genere vario: studi e notizie, Pisa: T. Nistri, 1888. Flora, Francesco, Storia della Letteratura Italiana, vol. 2, Milan: Mondadori, 1941. Milburn, Erika, Luigi Tansillo and Lyric Poetry in Sixteenthcentury Naples, Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing, 2003. Pestarino, Rossano, ‘‘Per Luigi Tansillo: Due recenti contribute,’’ in Strumenti Critici, 20, no. 3 (2005): 447–477. Petrocchi, Giorgio, ‘‘Tansillo e il petrarchismo napoletano,’’ in I fantasmi di Tancredi, Caltanissetta and Rome: Sciascia, 1972. Rubino, Ciro, Tansilliana: la vita, la poesia e le opere di Luigi Tansillo, Naples: Istituto grafico editoriale italiano, 1996. Toscano, Tobia R., ‘‘Due ‘allievi’ di Vittoria Colonna: Luigi Tansillo e Alfonso d’Avalos,’’ in Critica Letteraria, 16, no. 4 (1998): 739–773.

ARCANGELA TARABOTTI (GALERANA BARATOTTI) (1604–1652) Elena Cassandra Tarabotti (known as Arcangela) was one of the most noteworthy women writers of seventeenth-century Italy. Because of a minor physical disability (she had a limp), she was forced by her father to become a nun against her will. Once in the convent, she focused on literary studies, being self-taught. She corresponded with famous writers of her time in Italy and abroad. In Venice, she enjoyed the friendship of several of the libertine members of the Accademia degli Incogniti, such as Ferrante Pallavicino (1616–1644) and Girolamo Brusoni (1614–1686), and was particularly close to Giovan Francesco Loredan (1606–1661), who supported and encouraged her to publish her works. Tarabotti was also admired by members of the Florentine Accademia del Cimento, and corresponded for years with the French scientist Ismae¨l Boulliau and with other representatives of the Copernican school of thought. Tarabotti’s first book, Tirannia paterna (Paternal Tyranny), was printed only after her death, in 1654, with a new title, La simplicita` ingannata (Simplicity

Deceived), and under the author’s nom de plume, Galerana Baratotti or Barcitotti. The book was listed in 1661 in the Index of Forbidden Books by the Holy Office. As modern critics have pointed out, Tirannia paterna is a vehement invective against the patriarchal establishment responsible for keeping women in an inferior status. In her disquisition, Tarabotti unveils the multiple repressive aspects of patriarchal coercion, and, using quotations from the Bible and the New Testament, demonstrates God’s and Christ’s equal treatment of men and women. She blames Venetian laws that, in collusion with unjust fathers, either allow them to enslave their daughters into convents, or deny women the right to attend university and to practice a profession. Tarabotti deplores the outcome of such injustice whereby women remain inferior to men not because they lack intelligence, but because they are deprived of knowledge. Tarabotti’s second work, entitled L’Inferno monacale (The Nuns’ Hell), was never published, on the author’s expressed orders, although it circulated 1823

ARCANGELA TARABOTTI (GALERANA BARATOTTI) widely as a manuscript. It was lost after Tarabotti’s death, and eventually found in a private Venetian archive in 1960. L’Inferno monacale describes in detail the miserable conditions of women forced to become nuns, dumped in the convents like defenseless lambs brought to the slaughter. It was followed by Il Paradiso monacale (The Nuns’ Paradise, 1643), which for some scholars is a mild revision of what Tarabotti had stated in her previous books. As Letizia Panizza has suggested in her introduction to the translation of Tirannia paterna (2004), this change of direction was probably influenced by Tarabotti’s friend, Cardinal Federico Cornaro (to whom the book is dedicated), as a means to repair the scandal caused by L’inferno monacale. In this work, characterized by a polished and eloquent style, Tarabotti reiterates, through erudite quotations in Italian and Latin, that God appreciates more the women who voluntarily choose to take the veil, rather than the ones who are compelled to bury themselves in a convent. In 1644, Tarabotti published another successful book, entitled Antisatira in risposta al ‘‘Lusso donnesco’’ (Antisatire in Answer to ‘‘Women’s Luxury’’), which was so popular that a second edition was printed in 1646. In Antisatira in risposta al ‘‘Lusso donnesco,’’ she forcefully responds to the misogynist treatise Contro ‘l lusso donnesco. Satira menippea (Against Women’s Luxury. Menippean Satire) by the Senese Francesco Buoninsegni, first published in 1638. Rejecting Buoninsegni’s various accusations against women such as frivolity, excessive attention to fashion, and so on, she passionately defends them, giving several examples on how men are even more frivolous than women about clothing and accessories. Tarabotti’s Lettere familiari e di complimento (Familiar and Ceremonial Letters), were printed when she was at the peak of her fame, in 1650. The collection, dedicated to Loredan, offers an insight into her literary motivation and the extent of her intellectual and social interactions. Her last printed book Che le donne siano della spetie degli uomini (Women Do Belong to the Human Species, 1651), subtitled In difesa delle donne (In Defense of Women), is a polemic response to a translation from Latin, Che le donne non siano della spetie degli uomini (Women Do Not Belong to the Human Species, 1647), whose author is believed to be the Roman Horatio Plata and which had first appeared in 1595. Tarabotti harshly rebuts the accusations of women being irrational, immoral, and unworthy of salvation. Rebellious as a nun, and passionate as a writer, Tarabotti stands out in the multifaceted panorama of women’s literature of 1824

seventeenth-century Italy as a sharp, lucid, and indefatigable advocate of women’s equality and dignity.

Biography Born in Venice, Sestiere Castello, from a family of the wealthy middle class, on February 24, 1604. Boarded in the Benedictine convent of Sant’Anna, located in her same neighborhood, 1617. Became a novice, taking the name of Arcangela, 1620. Became a nun, 1629. Died in the same convent probably of tuberculosis, on February 28, 1652. OLIMPIA PELOSI Selected Works Treatises Il Paradiso monacale, 1643. Antisatira in risposta al ‘‘Lusso donnesco,’’ in Francesco Buoninsegni, Contro ‘l lusso donnesco. Satira menippea, 1644. Che le donne siano della spetie degli uomini. Difesa delle donne di Galerana Barcitotti contro Horatio Plata (under the pseudonym of Baratotti Galerana), 1651. La semplicita` ingannata (under the pseudonym of Baratotti Galerana), 1654; as Paternal Tyranny, translated by Letizia Panizza, 2004. L’Inferno monacale, edited by Francesca Medioli, 1990.

Letters Lettere familiari e di complimento, 1650; critical edition by Meredith Kennedy Ray and Lynn Lara Westwater, 2005.

Further Reading Canepa, Nancy L., ‘‘The Writing Behind the Wall: Arcangela Tarabotti’s Inferno monacale and Cloistral Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century,’’ in Forum Italicum, 30, no. 1 (1996): 1–23. Conti Odorisio, Ginevra, Donna e societa` nel Seicento: Lucrezia Marinelli e Arcangela Tarabotti, Rome: Bulzoni, 1979. Costa-Zalessow, Natalia, ‘‘Tarabotti’s La semplicita` ingannata and Its Twentieth Century Interpreters, With Unpublished Documents Regarding Its Condemnation To The Index,’’ in Italica, 78, no. 3 (2001): 314–325. De Bellis, Daniela, ‘‘Attacking Sumptuary Laws in Seicento Venice: Arcangela Tarabotti,’’ in Women in Italian Renaissance Culture and Society, edited by Letizia Panizza, Oxford: Legenda, 2000. De Rubeis, Flavia, ‘‘La scrittura forzata. Le lettere autografe di Arcangela Tarabotti,’’ in Rivista di Storia e letteratura religiosa, 32 (1996): 21–40. Panizza, Letizia, ‘‘Polemical Prose Writing: 1550–1560,’’ in A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, edited by Letizia Panizza and Sharon Wood, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

ANTONIO TARANTINO Ray, Meredith, ‘‘Letters from the Cloister: Defending the Literary Self in Arcangela Tarabotti’s Lettere familiari e di complimento,’’ in Italica, 81, no. 1 (2004): 24–43. Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Arcangela Tarabotti,’’ in An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, edited by Katharina M. Wilson, vol. 2, New York: Garland, 1991.

Weaver, Elissa, ‘‘Suor Arcangela Tarabotti,’’ in Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Entry, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Zanette, Emilio, Suor Arcangela Tarabotti, monaca del Seicento veneziano, Rome-Venice: Istituto per la Collaborazione Culturale, 1960.

ANTONIO TARANTINO (1938–) Antonio Tarantino came to the theater late in life and soon became the standard bearer of a new dramaturgy, characterized by the presence of multiple dialects. His work combines idioms from the Piedmont-Lombardy regions with Southern inflection, incorrect Italian, rich with barbarism and parody of the official ceremonious language. For Tarantino, language is personalized by obsessive, repetitive metaphor and street lingo. It extols the world of metropolitan hobos, people who are social outcasts, and who do not show solidarity toward one another; to the contrary, their behavior is bitterly aggressive. Pasolinian-like characters parade on stage, situated within police stations, nursing homes, madhouses, hospitals; a sort of ethnical and cultural chaos evoking Bernard Marie Koltes’ nocturnal cities. These homeless derelicts become underground heroes through the power of language, which expresses their secular Way of the Cross. A mythical subtext, derived from the evangelical tradition, acts as a grotesque shadow behind proletarian stories. An elemental passion, influenced by writers such as Elsa Morante, Sandro Penna, and Giovanni Testori, places these pariahs and the characters of Christ’s story in similar contexts. The names are mockingly and nostalgically explicatory: Mary, Magdalene, Peter, Anna, John, Pontius, and Caiaphas. Stabat Mater, a solo oratorio produced in 1994, stages a vagrant prostitute, Maria, a kind of Brechtian Mutter Courage filtered through Carlo Porta’s Ninetta del Verzee. The woman is suffering because her son is possibly involved in terrorist circles, a story that brings to mind Natalia Ginzburg’s Caro Michele. Her mourning, made of an extreme diet regimen, physiological fancies, sexual desires for the young priest Don

Aldo, and resentment against her son’s distant father (who married her rival), is murmured and screamed in a soliloquy encompassing four scenes. Stabat Mater, starring Piera Degli Esposti in the title role, was a triumph in Rome and then throughout Italy. Passione secondo San Giovanni (The Passion According to Saint John), staged in 1994 at Asti, is defined by the author in terms of a mystery for two voices. The play is organized around an articulated flow of paranoid hallucinations in a schizophrenic and bipolar patient. Set in a mental ward in the Northern Italian town of Brescia, the protagonist (named just as I-He) is overwhelmed by electroshock treatment, medication, and continuous furious complaints. Giovanni, a nurse, is a kind of stooge for the protagonist, and shows solidarity toward this ‘‘holy fool.’’ He continually quotes, as a child would, supermarket advertisements. Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vesper of the Virgin Mary), which premiered at Benevento in 1995, introduces a father, the classical Southern proletarian immigrant, who goes in the morgue to collect the dead body of his son, a petty thief transvestite named Beata Vergine Puttanina (Virgin Mary, the Hussy). Transformed into a pathetic Caron, the father talks to his dead son within the darkness of the morgue, in an attempt to teach him about the afterlife. The son’s soul describes his journey through crowds of dead people (street boys, children who are casualties of ethnic wars), human beings and beasts metamorphosed into skulls and bones. A mournful melancholy culminates in the farewell, which is reminiscent of Spoon River Anthology. Beckett-style ghosts and psychodramas a` la Jean Genet are found in Lustrini (Lustrini, 1997). 1825

ANTONIO TARANTINO Contrary to his previous work, characterized by an irregular yet seducing verse, the dialogue is now more prosaic. Here we encounter a couple of clowns from the commedia dell’arte: Lustrini, a Marxist exteacher, and Cavagna, a former door-to-door salesman of L’Unita` (the Communist daily newspaper), who is a competitive billiard player and habitual robber of alms boxes. Cold and hungry, suggestive of depressed Picasso’s Harlequins, the clowns inspire love, even if promptly cooled by bewilderment and sudden mood changes. In the end, Cavagna beats Lustrini to death, a hammering sound that reaches a chilling comic trait; a rhapsody of curses and sitcom skits, which evokes a Fellinian taste for the freakish and deformed. In his last plays, Tarantino addresses issues concerning our recent tragic history. In Materiali per una tragedia tedesca (Materials for a German Tragedy), which premiered in Milan in 2000 and was directed by Cherif, his grotesque registers expose the conflict between the German police and the terrorist group Baader-Meinhof; in La casa di Ramallah (Ramallah’s House), presented in a public reading in 2004, he follows a family traveling by train toward Ramallah during Arab-Israeli war in Palestine.

Biography Born in Bolzano, 10 April 1938. With only a sporadic scholastic career, limited to grammar school, he worked different jobs as mason, porter, and cook, before opening a sort of private art atelier, 1979; at 56 years of age he became involved with the theater, prodded by the critic Franco Quadri and Tunisian director Mohamed Cherif; won the Riccione Prize for Stabat Mater and Passione

secondo Giovanni, 1993; and for Materiali per una tragedia tedesca, 1997. He lives in Turin. PAOLO PUPPA Selected Works Collections Quattro atti profani: Stabat Mater. Passione secondo San Giovani. Vespro della Beata Vergine. Lustrini, Milan: Ubulibri, 1997. La casa di Ramallah e altre conversazioni: Stranieri, La casa di Ramallah, La pace, Conversazioni, 2005.

Plays Materiali per una tragedia tedesca, 2000.

Further Reading De Angeli, Elena, ‘‘Il caso Tarantino,’’ in A. Tarantino, Quattro atti profani: Stabat Mater. Passione secondo San Giovani. Vespro della Beata Vergine. Lustrini, Milan: Ubulibri, 1997. De Angeli, Elena, ‘‘Gli anni ’70 in un Al di la` in mezzo tra le due Berlino,’’ in Il Patalogo-Annuario 2000 dello spettacolo, 23 (2000): 293–296. Molinari, Renata, ‘‘Le lingue del teatro,’’ in Il PatalogoAnnuario 1994 dello spettacolo, 17 (1994): 141–163. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia italiana nel Novecento, Turin: Utet, 2003. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Il mito quotidiano in una scrittura che e` gia` teatro,’’ in A. Tarantino, Quattro atti profani: Stabat Mater. Passione secondo San Giovani. Vespro della Beata Vergine. Lustrini, Milan: Ubulibri, 1997. Quadri, Franco, ‘‘Tarantino esplora la ‘Germania d’autunno’ colla lingua di una nuova commedia dell’arte,’’ in A. Tarantino, Materiali per una tragedia tedesca, Milan: Ubulibri, 2000. Ronconi, Luca, ‘‘Il perche´ di una scelta: Una drammaturgia ‘oggi e qui’ in cerca del corpo degli attori,’’ in A. Tarantino, Materiali per una tragedia tedesca, Milan: Ubulibri, 2000.

IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI (1839–1869) Iginio Ugo Tarchetti, one of the most representative figures of the Milanese Scapigliatura, perfectly embodied the reciprocity between life and writing— both tinged with anticonformist excess—that was a distinctive feature of Italian bohemia. Arriving in the Lombard capital in 1863 from his native Piedmont, 1826

he established the following year, along with Albino Ronco, Salvatore Farina, Federico Aime, and Giovanni Faldella, an artistic-literary club on via dei Fiori Chiari, in which he adopted, in honor of an author that he read fanatically, Foscolo’s first name, thus rebaptizing himself Iginio Ugo. This

IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI choice also allowed him to tie his new identity to the institutional heritage of the latest literary tradition. In deference to his favored model, Tarchetti composed poems, later collected by Domenico Milelli as Disjecta (Fragments, 1879), wrote passionate love letters, the Lettere a Carlotta Ponti (Letters to Carlotta Ponti) published in 1937 in the journal Alexandria by Teresio Rovere, and, above all, he donned and alternated in equal measure the tragic mask of Jacopo Ortis and the comic one of Didimo Chierico in his narrative works. And there is more. Like Foscolo in the Orazione inaugurale (Opening Speech, 1809) of his Pavia lectures, he had urged writers toward the novel— a ‘‘middle’’ genre able to ‘‘istruire dilettando’’ (to instruct while delighting), so the young Tarchetti published in the Rivista minima of October 31, 1865, his ‘‘Idee minime sul romanzo’’ (Minimal Ideas on the Novel), a fragment of literary theory of unarguable interest. In a bitter attack on the Italian publishing industry that often issued the worst products of an abundant European body of narrative, Tarchetti marked out a constellation of foreign authors who were shaping his sensibility as a reader worried about the fate of Italian letters: Above all were Oliver Goldsmith and Laurence Sterne in England, and Jean de La Fontaine and Victor Hugo in France. He thus expressed a clear predilection for the social novel and for comic narrative. Paolina. Mistero del Coperto dei Figini (Paolina. The Mystery of the Lodge of the Figini, 1866) and Drammi della vita militare (Dramas of Military Life), first serialized in 1866 in Il sole, then retitled Una nobile follia (A Noble Madness, 1867) for its volume publication, belongs to the first of the two subgenres. Clear polemical and didactic intentions underlie them: In one, the story of love and death of the young working-class heroine Paolina is a pretext to voice an agonized indictment of social injustices and the miserable conditions of the urban proletariat; in the second, antimilitarist ideas, which Tarchetti supports tenaciously, find an exemplary confirmation in the sad tale of Vincenzo D. In the vein of Sterne, on the other hand, are stories such as ‘‘Un suicidio all’inglese’’ (An Suicide in English Fashion, 1865) and ‘‘Ad un moscone. Viaggio sentimentale nel giardino Balzaretti’’ (‘‘To a Bluebottle: A Sentimental Journey in the Balzaretti Garden, 1865’’), published in Rivista minima, or the volumes Racconti umoristici (Comic Tales, 1869) and L’innamorato della montagna (The Mountain Lover, 1869), which all exhibit a rich array of quotations from Tristram Shandy (1760)

and particularly from Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). These are eccentric stories, often revolving around the theme of the journey, in which the temporality of the tale is continuously disturbed by divagations and digressions. The plots are all constructed either by mixing different registers or by parodying certain canonical forms of nineteenth-century narrative. But in the skillful use of light, ironic writing, full of ‘‘opinions,’’ the ‘‘passions,’’ however miniaturized and hidden, are not at all reduced: There persists in the comic tales a tension with the tragic and with the ‘‘sublime’’ that confirms the contradictoriness of an experience balanced between the old and the new, between audacious experiments and romantic mythologies, between an awareness of the plurality of the self and a nostalgia for the absolute and for totality. Tarchetti gives proof on many occasions of his attitude to experimentation, which is a telltale sign of the avant-garde potential of the Scapigliatura: While his Canti del cuore (Songs of the Heart, 1865), published in Rivista minima and then collected in Disjecta, are short Byronian prose poems for which there were few significant antecedents in Italy, L’elixir dell’immortalita`. Traduzione dall’inglese (The Elixir of Immortality: A Translation from the English, 1858), Storia di una gamba (History of a Leg, 1869), and the Racconti fantastici (Fantastic Tales, 1869) were all efforts engaged in the disturbing territory of the paranormal, and the most convincing contributions of Scapigliatura narrative to the ‘‘fantastic,’’ a genre which, by definition, violates the objective parameters of the real. The Racconti fantastici are particularly interesting and innovative: La lettera U. Manoscritto d’un pazzo (The Letter U: Manuscript of a Madman) seems to anticipate the synesthesias of Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet ‘‘Voyelles’’ (1871), while in ‘‘Un osso di morto’’ (A Dead Man’s Bone) or ‘‘Uno spirito in un lampone’’ (A Spirit in a Raspberry) ghosts, hidden presences, and maniacal obsessions flood the page in order to describe—in an age of enthusiastic faith in science and particularly in medical science—unexplainable and incurable maladies. Associated with the example of Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and even more of Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian’s Histoires et contes fantastiques (1849) the fantastic offers itself to a maudit writer both as a gateway to the forms of European literature, and as an instrument of provocative transgression compared to the comforting parameters of reason. Spiritualism and mesmerism also inhabit the three stories of Amore nell’arte (Love in Art, 1869), ‘‘Lorenzo 1827

IGINIO UGO TARCHETTI Alviati,’’ ‘‘Riccardo Waitzen,’’ and ‘‘Bouvard,’’ to whose exceptional tales the narrator tries to confer credibility by using fragments from letters and excerpts from diaries. The protagonists are artists with distorted psychologies, mad and passionate geniuses seduced by the perverse alchemy that is established between the rarefied charms of music and the fatal attractions of eros and thanatos. Of the three, Bouvard is the most accomplished: The dualism of the ugliness of his body and the beauty of his soul (a contradiction in which the echo of Leopardi’s Sappho can be heard), which is materialized in the harmonic notes of his violin, make him a figure on the borders of schizophrenia, destined to experience love only under the aspect of morbid necrophilia. Love and death, ugliness and sickness are woven together in Tarchetti’s final novel, Fosca (Passion). Published in installments in Il pungolo, it remained unfinished because of the author’s early death, and was completed by his friend Salvatore Farina in 1869. It is the history of the pathological passion of the eponymous heroine, physically repugnant and afflicted by hysteria, for a young officer, Giorgio, who is in love with a woman of shining beauty, Clara. If the name-scheme Fosca/Clara is all too openly conventional, the heroine and her history are hardly so: The prototype of the femme fatale of romantic fame, with her harmonious features able to entice impassioned lovers into the grips of her seduction, is here totally reversed; and yet Fosca, with the stubborn obstinacy of her right to eros, is able to trick Giorgio, to the point of drawing him into a delirious night of love. Once she is dead, the illness that had devastated her now afflicts, through a strange contagion, the man whom she vampirically desired. The novel is the diary written by the heroine herself and ‘‘published,’’ so to speak, by the doctor, whose function in the story is more as a curer of souls than of bodies—a meaningful presence, because he signals within the psychological novel, which proceeds to a systematic exploration of the meanderings of the self, the suggestions of the positivistic culture that also influenced Tarchetti’s writing. It is a writing, not coincidentally, that here collects aphorisms able to guarantee a kind of universal value to the one-sided and egotistic perspective of the narrator. Albeit from different angles, criticism has always insisted on the autobiographical character of Fosca, and indeed, it is legitimate to speak of autobiographical elements from Una nobile follia onwards. Tarchetti’s vocation for subjective writing, for using the page as a space in which to expand his own self, is 1828

certainly an effect of Foscolo’s heritage. But at a time when romantic ‘‘illusions’’ were no longer permitted, the passions for the fatherland and for the woman were converted into the pathos of an obsessive questioning of one’s own interior conflicts, of one’s own irresolvable traumas. Tarchetti’s compositional haste, due to economic necessities, was often reflected in a careless and melodramatic style, which did not diminish, however, the essential modernity of his idea of literature.

Biography Born in San Salvatore Monferrato (Alessandria) on June 29, 1839, to a well-to-do family. Having finished his studies at the Collegio Trevisio of Casale, joined the army, moving to various cities of the South. Transferred to Varese, 1863, where he meets Carlotta Ponti, with whom he has an intense but anguished love affair, while his relations with the military authorities begin to become difficult. Suspended from duty for health reasons, moves to Milan, and is a guest of Federico Aime; during this stay, he publishes his first story, ‘‘La fortuna del capitano Gubart’’ in Giornale per tutti of May 4, 1865. Returning to the army, and stationed in Parma, has an affair with a certain Carolina or Angiolina, who will undergo a literary transfiguration into the character of Fosca. Since the woman is the daughter of a superior, there arises a scandal that leads Tarchetti, upon his return to Milan, to quit the army. Now completely free to devote himself to writing, and pressed by financial necessity, he begins a feverish activity of collaboration with various publications (Rivista minima, Spirito folletto, Strenna italiana, Settimana illustrata, Emporio pittoresco, in which he publishes nearly all of his works), founding two of them himself (Palestra musicale and Piccolo giornale). Weakened by consumption, died of an attack of typhus on March 25, 1869. MARIELLA MUSCARIELLO Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere, edited by Enrico Ghidetti, 2 vols., Bologna: Cappelli, 1967.

Fiction Paolina. Mistero del Coperto dei Figini, 1866. Una nobile follia, 1867. Storia di un ideale, 1868. Storia di una gamba, 1869.

BIANCA TAROZZI Fosca, 1869; as Passion, translated by Lawrence Venuti, 1994. Amore nell’arte, 1869. Racconti fantastici, 1869; as Fantastic Tales, translated by Lawrence Venuti, 1992. Racconti umoristici, 1869. L’innamorato della montagna. Impressioni di viaggio, 1869.

Poetry ‘‘Disjecta,’’ edited by Domenico Milelli, 1879.

Further Reading Bettella, Patrizia, ‘‘Fosca: The Myth of the Ugly Woman,’’ in Gendered Contexts: New Perspectives in Italian Cultural Studies, edited by Laura Benedetti, Julia L. Hairston, and Silvia Ross, New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Bonifazi, Neuro, Teoria del ‘‘fantastico’’ e il racconto ‘‘fantastico’’ in Italia: Tarchetti, Pirandello, Buzzati, Ravenna: Longo, 1982. Coda, Elena, ‘‘La cultura medica ottocentesca nella Fosca di Igino Ugo Tarchetti,’’ in Lettere italiane, 3 (2000): 438–454. Colummi, Camerino, Marinella, ‘‘La narrativa di Tarchetti tra ‘ragione’ e ‘follia,’’’ in Letteratura e scienza nella

storia della cultura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, Palermo: Manfredi, 1978. Convegno nazionale su Igino Ugo Tarchetti e la Scapigliatura, San Salvatore Monferrato: Comune, 1977. Del Principe, David, Rebellion, Death, and Aesthetics in Italy: The Demons of Scapigliatura, Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996. Mangini, Angelo M., La volutta` crudele: fantastico e malinconia nell’opera di Igino Ugo Tarchetti, Rome: Carocci, 2000. Muscariello, Mariella, ‘‘L’umorismo di Igino Ugo Tarchetti ovvero la passione delle opinioni,’’ in Effetto Sterne: la narrativa umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1990. Patruno, Maria Luisa, ‘‘I romanzi di Igino Ugo Tarchetti,’’ in Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 7 (1977): 1215–1259. Pireddu, Nicoletta, ‘‘Poe spoetizzato: L’esotismo tarchettiano,’’ in Fantastico Poe, edited by Roberto Cagliero, Verona: Ombre Corte, 2004. Roda, Vittorio, Homo duplex: scomposizioni dell’io nella letteratura italiana moderna, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Scordo-Polidori, Angela, ‘‘Masochism and Rebellion in Igino Tarchetti’s Fosca,’’ Italica, 80, no. 2 (2003): 195–208.

BIANCA TAROZZI (1941–) Among contemporary Italian authors whose works are marked by a strong narrative line, Bianca Tarozzi stands out as an original voice. As described by Giovanni Raboni in ‘‘Nota di copertina’’ in La buranella (1996), her poetry rationalizes reality: Behind the foreground of stories of daily life lurks a constant questioning of the reality of the instant, affections never fully under control, a present lived with difficulty at its fullest. Tarozzi’s breakthrough came at a later age: her first book, Nessuno vince il leone: Variazioni e racconti in versi (Nobody Wins the Lion: Variations and Stories in Verse, 1988), experiments and pioneers in writing prose poems. Her poetry was born a mature child of a lengthy period of internal suffering. The metaphysical highly complex narrative of her first volume evolves in lighter and slightly ironic verses and obscure storytelling. Her poetic diction can be immediately identified for its characteristic simple rhymes, melodic song-like quality, and its oftentimes colloquial vocabulary. One of her stylistic forefathers is Umberto Saba; she

inherited his yearning for clarity and the blossoming endeavor into understanding matters of the heart. Similar to other great poets in the Italian tradition like Pascoli, Caproni, Penna, or Giudici, Tarozzi employs easy rhymes laden with intrinsic humorism to describe the day-to-day difficulties of life. Another dimension of Tarozzi’s work relates her to the Anglo-American tradition. Reverberations of Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, J. Merril, Richard Wilbur (widely translated by Tarozzi) surface in the rare but resounding visionary moments in her poetry—such as the flying hospital in La buranella (The Woman from Burano, 1996), or the dream sequence in Smemorata (Forgetful, 1998). Tarozzi also coauthored an important history: Storia della letteratura Americana (A History of American Literature, 2001). Her poems broach many feminine topics. The most important and known lends its title to her most acclaimed book, La buranella. The life and experiences of the young protagonist all take place 1829

BIANCA TAROZZI inside the walls of the Venetian hospital San Giovanni e Paolo. The personal narrative of this protagonist acting as witness unfurls sacrifices, illness, love, and the simple yet precious gift of the art of embroidery. This latter endeavor helps her survive and recover, while setting her apart from the other women living with her under the same circumstances. The poet-narrator, who reports this melodramatic tale, chooses to relate the episodes in such a manner that she acts as both the recovering heroine as well as witness-gazer. The delicate story of the Burano woman coincides with the similarly painful experiences of many other Venetian women. These stories, recounted with a delicate ironic tone, recall the verses of Guido Gozzano, whose song-like fairy tales are imprinted in a voluntary access to memory (exemplified by her use of repetition, inversion, and elementary phonic echoes, reduplications). The minute and seemingly insignificant details presented by Tarozzi suggest a grander and more complex meaning hidden in her verse narrative. Her poems pay obsessive attention to objects, nearing a painterly quality (among her favorite painters is Giorgio Morandi). There are puppets, toys, books, paintings, bottles, and old photographs found discarded in attics or in street markets. They are all treated as repertoires of mysterious and decomposed memories—silent and speaking both at once. But there are also banal and domestic object-actors such as a heater, rusty keys or brooms: ‘‘Triste e` la vita senza/ calici specchi banchetti e ricami:/ ah castelli, ah stagioni!’’ (‘‘Fili,’’ in La buranella). The objects have a life of their own, become characters, and tell their story. The settings are usually interiors, dark basements in old houses, and cities portrayed as theater sets, as for ‘‘La citta`’’ (The City) in Prima e dopo (Before and After, 2000). The ambient fades out of significance; it is the characters and the stories conjured by memory who stand out: the mother, the sister, a girlfriend, all-female characters with a strong presence in Tarozzi’s life. The light rhythmical dialogue makes her poems similar to theatrical exchanges: The reader can follow the stories as if watching and listening to a play. The strong autobiographical current (as in La buranella and Prima e dopo) is oftentimes the fount for telling various women’s stories, as for example Rosalba’s diary, the story of her sister, her girlfriend, as well as various appearances by women ostracized by society who exist as strays of the world. In Nessuno vince il leone the women are on the contrary exemplary (Artemisia Gentileschi) and mythical (Arianna and Penelope): Memory reconstructs stories whose 1830

female protagonists possess the key to understanding the complexities of the world. Bianca Tarozzi’s poetic universe is composed of a myriad of precious parts: It does not exclude nursery rhymes, as in Storia di Matilde (Matilde’s Story, 2001) and Il principe e la rosa (The Prince and the Rose, 2002), or short stories verging on aphorisms such as Anch’io vissi in Arcadia: Storie molto brevi (I Too Lived in Arcadia: Very Short Stories, 1996). Her entire body of work is involved in a constant search for a poetic language that morphs into storytelling, configured as the personal and solitary pursuit of a reader from beyond the hubbub and noise of our deafening times.

Biography Born in Bologna, 8 December 1941. Translated W. H. Auden’s Another Time as thesis project to graduate from translators’ school, 1963; received a diploma as parliamentary interpreter (for both English and French), 1964; doctorate in Anglo-American language and literature from the Universita` Ca’ Foscari (Venice) with a dissertation on Robert Lowell under the tutelage of Sergio Perosa, 1970; taught Anglo-American literature at Ca’ Foscari, 1971–1988; moved to the Universita` di Verona where she teaches to date, 1988; travels expansively in Europe and the United States giving conferences and poetry readings at the University of Pennsylvania, 1976, 1994, 1997, 2001; and New York University, 1993, 1997; won the Unione Lettori Italiani prize, 1996. Currently lives in Venice in the neighborhood of Campo S. Angelo. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Nessuno vince il leone: Variazioni e racconti in versi,’’ 1988. ‘‘La buranella,’’ 1996. ‘‘Anch’io vissi in Arcadia: Storie molto brevi,’’ 1996. ‘‘Smemorata,’’ 1998. ‘‘Prima e dopo,’’ 2000. ‘‘Storia di Matilde,’’ 2001. ‘‘Il principe e la rosa,’’ 2002. ‘‘Il mondo di Ivo,’’ 2004.

Other Il nudo artificio: Una lettura dei sonetti di Robert Lowell, 1981. La forma vincente: I romanzi di Jean Rhys, 1984. Henry James, Watch and Ward, 1985. Storia della Letteratura americana (edited with G. Fink, M. Maffi, F. Minganti), 1991; enlarged edition, 2001. Elisabeth Bishop: Dai libri di geografia, 1994.

BERNARDO TASSO Emily Dickinson, La bambina cattiva—Settanta poesie, 1997. Richard Wilbur, Contrari, Ancora Contrari e Qualche Differenza, 2002.

Further Reading Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘Il Pisolino di Dio: Pensieri in versi di una bambina cattiva che fuggirebbe dall’Eden, in Diario della settimana, 28 May–3 June 1997, p. 71. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La ragazza dei burattini,’’ in Diario, 1–7 October 1997, p. 67. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La poesia,’’ in Storia della Letteratura italiana. Il Novecento: Scenari di fine secolo, edited by Nino Borsellino and Lucio Felici, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 2001.

Fusini, Nadia, ‘‘Versi a ritmo di samba,’’ in La Repubblica, 18 August 1994, p. 26. Manacorda, Giorgio, ‘‘Bianca Tarozzi,’’ in Poesia ’96: Annuario, Milan: Mondadori, 1996. Muraro, Luisa, and Chiara Bertola, ‘‘Postfazioni a Prima e dopo,’’ Milan: Libreria delle donne, 2000. Niccolai, Giulia, ‘‘Postfazione,’’ in Nessuno vince il leone, Venice: Arsenale, 1988. Raboni, Giovanni, ‘‘Nota di copertina,’’ in La buranella, Venice: Marsilio, 1996. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Il canto della buranella: Note sulla poesia di Bianca Tarozzi,’’ in Pietro Spezzani: In memoriam, edited by Eugenio Burgio and Silvana Tamiozzo Goldmann, vol. 2, Ravenna: Longo, 2002.

THE TARTAR STEPPE See Il Deserto dei tartari (Work by Dino Buzzati)

BERNARDO TASSO (1493–1569) Bernardo Tasso, father of the famous Torquato, was a man of letters and courtier in the service of Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno. It is somewhat difficult to assess the extent of the son’s contribution to his father’s work because the initial influence of Bernardo on Torquato was soon surpassed by the latter’s refurbishing his father’s writings. However, it would be unfair to dismiss Bernardo as a pale shadow of his more talented son. Although he remained primarily a courtier and, unlike Torquato, did not make literature his only occupation, writing was more than a mere pastime for him, as it shielded him from frustration and offered a considerable, if ephemeral, fame. Bernardo also hoped (erroneously) that his L’Amadigi (Amadis, 1560) would rescue him from financial distress. Commonly viewed as his masterpiece (and indeed it was highly celebrated in Renaissance courts), this voluminous poem of 100 cantos

(56,000 verses), strikes a modern reader as something of a literary monster. Like Ariosto did for Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532), Tasso relied on an existing text, Garci Ordon˜ez de Montalvo’s Amadı´s de Gaula (Amadis of Gaula, 1508), the most important heroic poem of the Spanish tradition. Tasso carefully worked out the plot, to buttress the allegorical meaning of the text, because his readers favored Ariosto’s varietas (the interweaving of situations) to the monotonous adventures of a single character. Hence, Amadigi and his beloved, the princess Oriana, is joined by two more couples, Alidoro and Mirinda, and Floristano and Filidora. However, Tasso does not sustain the rhythm throughout the work. The premise behind L’Amadigi, as expressed in the treatise Ragionamento della poesia (On Poetry, 1562), is more interesting than the poem itself. With L’Amadigi, Tasso aimed at offering an alternative 1831

BERNARDO TASSO model to the Orlando Furioso by combining the chivalric tradition of heroic poetry (a long narration of a hero’s deeds) with the Aristotelian concept of an idealized ‘‘superhero’’ that embodies all the virtues. Thus, he expunges any licentious or merely human weakness from his hero, and sketches a portrait that skirts the ridiculous. Indeed Miguel de Cervantes parodies Tasso’s poem more than any other Spanish source in Don Quijote (1605–1615). Furthermore, L’Amadigi is not always consistent with the aesthetics purported by its author. A conciliatory attitude toward the reader brought Tasso to adopt a metrical form in octaves rather than a stanza of free hendecasyllabic verses. This contradicts the theoretical precepts and classical practice of Gian Giorgio Trissino, the patrician Humanist who inspired Tasso. Furthermore, given the disappointing reception of Trissino’s ambitious poem La Italia liberata da’ Gothi (Italy Freed from the Goths, 1547–1548), in which he had hoped to give Italy an epic of Homeric proportions, Tasso purposely steered away from a strictly moralistic approach. His Amadis is exempt from carnal desire, but the other characters entice the audience with salacious episodes. Torquato would spend much energy defending the literary value of his father’s L’Amadigi; nevertheless, he would not follow his example when he composed his own poem. In 1563, Tasso began to develop one episode of L’Amadigi as an independent epic poem in ottava rima entitled Floridante (Floridante, Prince of Castile) but wrote 19 cantos only; it was published posthumously, edited by Torquato, in 1587. Tasso’s lyric poems, collected in their definitive edition as Rime (Verses, 1560), represent his best work. Inspired by Pietro Bembo’s theory on lyric poetry, these compositions rigidly imitate Petrarch. However, Tasso did not lack in personality or originality, and his chaste love for Ginevra, a real woman, is expressed with vivid images quite distant from Petrarchan stereotypes. Tasso performs at his best when confronted with tragic love: His poetic renderings of the episodes of Hero and Leander and of Pyramus and Thysbe are remarkable. Formally, Tasso is impeccable. Not only did he master the codified metrics, but also tried to be innovative, writing odes, psalms, silvae (as he named the Horatian stanza made of hendecasyllabic and septenary lines), eclogues and sonnets. And his preference for the metrical form of the ode made his verses particularly apt for musical accompaniment. In closing, a mention should be made of the literary ‘‘revenge’’ that Torquato took on his father. 1832

In his dialogue Il padre di famiglia (The Family Father, 1584), he defined an ideal paternal figure, which is the opposite of his real father: Although the protagonist in the dialogue is a sedentary country gentleman with no literary ambitions but a wealthy life, Bernardo was a courtier with no stable residence, a man of letters without economic means.

Biography Born in Bergamo (some sources report Venice) on 11 November 1493, son of Gabriello and Catarina from the noble Bergamasque family Tassi del Cornello. Soon lost both parents. Studied rhetoric and classics in Padua. Lived in various Italian courts from 1520. Fell in love with Ginevra Malatesta, who married Ludovico degli Orbizzi (possibly a fiction, in accordance with the Petrarchist vogue of the time). Became secretary to Ferrante Sanseverino, prince of Salerno, 1532. Followed Sanseverino to Tunis to fight in the army of Charles V, 1536. Married the noble Porzia de’ Rossi, 1536. The couple lived in Naples, where their daughter Cornelia was born (ca. 1537), and in Sorrento where they had Torquato (1544). Exiled with his master, 1552, Bernardo never saw Porzia again (she died in 1556). His properties confiscated, led an errant life that took him and his son Torquato to the major Italian centers, and to the court of Henri II in France. Achieved literary fame, but remained poor. Entered the Venetian Accademia della Fama, 1558. Started to serve the duke of Mantua, 1563. Appointed by the duke governor of Ostiglia, 1569. Died in Ostiglia on 5 September 1569. BERNARDO PICICHE`

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Libro primo de gli amori,’’ 1531. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1560; critical edition by Domenico Chiodo, 1995. ‘‘L’Amadigi,’’ 1560. ‘‘Floridante,’’ 1587; edited by Michele Catalano, 1931.

Treatise Ragionamento della poesia, 1562.

Letters Le lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso, 1549. Li tre libri delle lettere di M. Bernardo Tasso. Alli quali nuouamente s’e` aggiunto il quarto libro, 1559; as Lettere, critical edition by Donatella Rasi and Adriana Chemello, 2002. Lettere inedite; precedute dalle notizie intorno la vita del medesimo, edited by G. Campori, 1869.

TORQUATO TASSO Further Reading Barbieri, Silvio, Ombre e luci sulla vita e sulla poesia di Bernardo Tasso, Bergamo: Scuola Tipografica Patronato S. Vincenzo, 1972. Capasso, Bartolomeo, Tasso e la sua famiglia a Sorrento: ricerche e narrazioni storiche, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1997. Cerboni Baiardi, Giorgio, Lirica di Bernardo Tasso, Urbino: Argalı`a, 1966.

Di Benedetto, Arnaldo, Tasso, minori e minimi a Ferrara, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1970. Venturelli, Roberto, Corte farnesiana di Parma (1560– 1570): programmazione artistica e identita` culturale, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Williamson, Edward, Bernardo Tasso, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1951.

TORQUATO TASSO (1544–1595) Torquato Tasso was the son of the poet Bernardo and a descendant of an ancient noble family from Bergamo, born in Sorrento and raised in Urbino, Venice, and Padua, and a courtier at the Este court in Ferrara. Tasso was a poet released after years of confinement for apparent insanity who later waited to be crowned poet laureate in Rome. For Tasso, this uprootedness appears to be the essential element of a variegated destiny and, consequently, of a different and open ‘‘Italian’’ identity. Dislocation may also be understood positively in the sense of lacking an affiliation with a civic or regional dimension and tradition, in accordance with the norm of omnipresence in the cultural experience of Renaissance Italy, a norm distinguishing itself as perhaps the principal of the constitutive traits that make the poet, retrospectively, a figure characterizing the principle of modernity. On another level, given the great attention to, if not expansion of, biographical data, we are also faced with a condition that allows the romantic tradition to construct a literary portrait of the poet that begins from the trope of the ‘‘wandering pilgrim,’’ and emphasizes the favored places of his nomadic existence, his scarred sensibility, and his troubled mind beset by madness. On a more broadly historical level, Tasso’s varied human and territorial experiences make him—beyond his difficulties and sufferings—into a fully Italian figure; a cultural personality who transcends his origins and his individual identity as a courtier, which at this date (and others), for some time to come, normally characterize the careers of Italian writers. It is not by chance that the seventeenth and eighteenth-century literary and historical tradition sees the reclaiming, on the

part of various ‘‘homelands,’’ of Tasso’s identity, which is expressed in the biographical tradition, and in theatrical reinventions (one thinks of the comedy of Carlo Goldoni, where representatives of the different major Italian cities come to solicit and reclaim their cities’ heritage regarding their poetic genius). The fate of Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered, 1581) itself, in a long series of reinventions and transformations in the various Italian dialects— from the Emiglian to the Neapolitan to the Bergamese to the Venetian—no doubt develops from this condition in the seventeenth century, which sees the birth of a letteratura dialettale riflessa, or rather works in dialect that reflects their literary counterparts. We should remember, however, that it is a success that spreads in the course of the following century, and at times to the threshold of the nineteenth century, fostering the great popularity of Tasso’s epic poem through dialectal reinvention, from performances in piazzas to the songs of gondoliers. The principal cities that shape Torquato and his first literary efforts, in the wake of his father, are above all Urbino and Venice, where in 1559 he first conceived the nucleus of his future great poem, and later Padua (where he studied law, philosophy, and eloquence) between 1562 and 1565. While his father completed his Amadigi (Amadigi, 1560), in Venice ‘‘Tassino’’ or ‘‘little Tasso’’ writes and publishes a romance in 12 cantos entitled Rinaldo (Rinaldo, 1562), begun in the preceding years under the title of ierusalemme. The composition of the first group of lyrics born of his participation in the Paduan Accademia degli Eterei, to which he is accepted under the name of Pentito, dates to the same 1833

TORQUATO TASSO period. In addition to the production of lyrics and the writing of texts intended for the stage, from the pastoral play Aminta (Aminta, 1580) to Galealto re di Norvegia (Galealto, King of Norway, 1573)— later completed with the title Il re Torrismondo (King Torrismondo, 1587)—these years are occupied with the composition of Gerusalemme liberata, which is completed in the first edition in 1575. Tasso’s voluntary offer of the poem to the inquisitors of Bologna and Ferrara in 1575 and 1577 exposes the doubts and torments that form the deepest core of his creation to an external tribunal, in order to establish the doctrinal lawfulness of the book’s contents. Here we doubtless have one of the episodes—and perhaps the most exemplary— commonly remembered as representing the interior conflict that, through the turbulent fate of his masterpiece, unites Torquato Tasso’s life and work in the second half of the 1570s. Persecution manias, traumas, a desire to escape the world of the court and a nostalgia for it, up to the irruption of madness, complete this picture. It is a madness, however, that the literature of the decades following Tasso’s death—well before the Romantic reinterpretation, in its quest for a foundation of the myth of poetic individuality as a substantially antisocial value—treats not only and not so much its degenerative aspects, content with picturesque anecdotes, but beginning from the poet’s overcoming of his troubles and manifestations of madness. More than the troubled writer’s times, what matters fundamentally for this tradition as an exemplary moment is the ‘‘resurrection’’ demonstrated by his extensive productivity during his confinement in the hospital of Sant’Anna in Ferrara until 1586. Here Tasso composed a large part of the Dialoghi (Dialogues), which he revises and publishes in the following years, along with other works. In 1580, in Venice, Gerusalemme liberata is published without the author’s consent with the title Il Goffredo. The next year Tasso authorizes for the first time, only later to disavow it, the Ferrarese edition of Febo Bonna`. As opposed to the Romantic investment in the period of his confinement as a point of rupture with his previous existence and his experience at court, in actuality Tasso’s entire life seems to be traversed by the constant application and devotion to certain privileged genres and works—the epic, the lyric, and the poetic. His various dramatic efforts and his experiments with the humanistic dialogue and the hexametric poem belong to more circumscribed moments in time—yielding projects and works that 1834

are therefore more settled and fixed in form. In the first place, in terms of overall importance, Tasso’s entire literary career is bound up with, and can largely be summed up in, the tormented composition—tormented in editorial, rhetorical, and in human and conceptual terms—of a heroic poem, from his youthful attempts with Rinaldo and Gierusalemme to the different forms of Gerusalemme liberata, up to Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered, 1593). It is a continual elaboration that finds a constant parallel of reflection and justification in his theoretical writings. From the Discorsi dell’arte poetica (Discourses on the Art of Poetry, 1587) to the Discorsi del poema eroico (Discourses on the Heroic Poem, 1594), he traces out a vast itinerary of poetics and literary theory, which comprises many other writings, dedicated to his own works (in particular to Gerusalemme liberata) or, through the works of others (three canzones of Giovan Battista Pigna, or a sonnet of Giovanni Della Casa), participating in the dominant veins of late sixteenth-century poetics of Aristotelianism and rhetoric, and of the theoretical definition of literary genres. His body of Rime (Poems, 1581) is also highly complex—primarily in terms of their textual definition—from the youthful elaborations to the systematization in the ‘‘Parti’’ or volumes, in which they are arranged according to theme. Tasso’s public entrance into the poetic society of the second half of the sixteenth century occurred in 1567, at 23, when he participated in the collective miscellany prepared by the Paduan Accademici Eterei in honor of Marguerite of Valois, by contributing 42 poems dedicated to the singer Lucrezia Bendidio. The Rime are no doubt one of the most important collections of its kind, which is fairly common at this time, in which Tasso shows himself to be particularly bound to the imitation of the models offered by Pietro Bembo and Giovanni Della Casa. The large production that covers the entire arc of Tasso’s literary career is organized, with notes and commentary by the poet himself, in Prima parte (Part One), which was published in Mantua in 1591 and comprises love poems (Amori); and in Seconda Parte (Part Two), which was published in Brescia in 1593 and contains courtly poetry (the panegyric Laudi and Encomi). A third and a fourth part, which the poet does not live long enough to organize, would have been devoted to the sacred and ‘‘irregular’’ poems. After 1581, there are numerous published editions, unrevised by the author, that attest to the great success of his lyric

TORQUATO TASSO poems, especially in their distance from the Petrarchan canon and from the narrow imitation of a single model. Difficulties of style and occasion, along with a recovery of a musical dimension (from which springs the widespread adaptation for music of this repertory), coexist in this vast thematic openness, as opposed to the exclusive choice of amorous subjects, with a preference, moreover, for less canonical forms like that of the madrigal. In this direction, the lyric is the literary form most open to courtly and social occasions. Such variety, with its eulogistic and religious predilections and, above all, in the constant reference to a courtly and literary society, turns out to be a cornerstone of the future system of the Baroque lyric. Among the most celebrated compositions are those that, open to personal motifs and the reflection of the individual experience in the landscape, tend to that expression of anguish and search for peace that constitute the crucial elements of Tasso’s future poetic fate (or, better yet, his myth); consider, for example, the famous canzone ‘‘Al Metauro.’’ Another important component, and ‘‘genre,’’ of the Tassian lyric also concerns poetry with a religious inspiration (which cannot be resolved into the stereotypical definitions of ‘‘Counter-Reformation poetry’’) in the attempt to recompose the themes that span the author’s entire literary career. With substantial evidence, we may identify this tendency in Tasso’s last great poetic effort, the hexametric poem Le sette giornate del mondo creato (Creation of the World), composed between 1592 and 1594 and published posthumously in 1607. Inspired by the sacred writing of San Basilio, San Gregorio Nisseno, and Sant’Ambrogio—with a strong desire to offer a vulgarization of these illustrious precedents and the foundation of a fully Italian genre—this 9,000-line religious didactic poem provides, in the ‘‘wonder’’ of the list of created things or in their contrary ‘‘horrible form,’’ a grand antecedent to the taste and fantasy of Giovanbattista Marino, or, in French, of Guillaume Du Bartas. On the dramatic front, at the center of which stands the ‘‘pastoral fable’’ Aminta, we can place the composition of the unfinished tragedy Galealto re di Norvegia, later taken up again as Il re Torrismondo. Of the first draft he completes one act and the first scenes of the second, while the work is resumed immediately after his release from the hospital of Sant’Anna, a circumstance that perhaps influences readings excessively marked by the

search for psychological projections. It is a story with a gothic setting in which the incestuous motif of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex reappears in the fatal affair of Torrismondo and Alvida, who discover that they are brother and sister. The sources, rather far from the usual repertory of sixteenth-century tragedy, are the chronicles of the Nordic countries that appear several years before in Latin editions in Italy, from Historia de gentibus septentrionablibus (History of the People of the Northern Regions, 1555) by Olof Ma¨nsoon (Latinized as Olao Magno) to the Gesta Danorum (History of the Danes, 1514) by Saxo Grammaticus. For its reservoir of dark and pathos-ridden themes, the text is often read in light of the myth of Tasso’s personality, without taking into proper account his close relationship with Ferrara’s tradition of tragic drama, particularly the works of Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio. There is also too much insistence, as two contrasting spiritual moments, upon the presumed ‘‘serenity’’ of Aminta and the morbid tone of Il re Torrismondo, forgetting both the constitutive difference between the genres and Giraldi’s experiments in reinventing tragedy inspired by Seneca’s model, outside of the classical heritage, in a ‘‘modern’’ gothic setting. It is a question of choices that will influence the entire history of European drama (merely consider Shakespeare and the Elizabethans). The style of tragedy—except for the distinction of the chorus, that of ‘‘the highest speech’’ (‘‘dee parlare piu` altamente’’)—Tasso puts significantly a step below the style of the epic, a choice that shows his adherence to the Ferrarese tradition—and in particular to the example of Giraldi—as opposed to the purely academic and literary renderings found in parallel Italian traditions. The corpus of Tasso’s theatrical works is quantitatively less rich compared to those of other sixteenth-century poets—and compared to that of Ludovico Ariosto himself—but it is varied in its choice of genres. As for the possible presence in it of a comic effort as well, the authorship of the comedy Intrichi d’amore (Love Games, 1603) remains disputed; beginning with Viterbo’s edition in 1603, it is published several times under Tasso’s name, and from the very first seventeenth-century biographies is judged to be falsely attributed to the poet. In the most recent studies, however, it is reclaimed as a Tassian work. Finally, his vast epistolary activity—comprising approximately 1,700 letters—offers a composite portrait of the various facets of the poet’s personality. 1835

TORQUATO TASSO Naturally we are confronted with an intricately detailed self-construction, showing a high degree of literary control, even if it cannot be thought of as an ideal, well-rounded portrait (a shortcoming that one might expect in a retrospective simplification). On the other hand, we have a corpus that is exceptionally rich in occasional as well as typical circumstances of the court (for example, the high number of requests and supplications), which only on the basis of a clear misinterpretation is it possible, ever since the Romantics, to reduce to material for imprecise and unbounded psychological reconstructions. The themes of madness and the ‘‘melancholic humor’’—a madness, it should be noted, that does not conquer the writer but that he, on the contrary, tries to make the subject of a precise description—coexist, even in the conspicuous and most famous group of letters written during his confinement, with courtly dialogue and ‘‘commerce’’ with literary society. The mythopoetic fate of the figure of Tasso in poetry and the theater is also noteworthy. His fate in Romantic literature–from Goethe’s 1789 play to Lord Byron’s poem ‘‘The Lament of Tasso’’ (1817) to Giacomo Leopardi, up through epigones like Alberto Nota and Alberto Giacometti, but in many representations in the figurative arts as well—will assume, rather, the symbolic force of the self-tormented poet in conflict with society as a motif of anxiety and autobiographical reflection. And, further, the myth of Torquato’s ‘‘small tomb’’ (an inadequate monument for an artist of such a stature) impresses itself on these same generations between Leopardi and Chateaubriand as a perennial representation of the distance between the identity of the solitary, tormented genius and the world’s judgment—of their symbolic disparity.

Biography Born in Sorrento on 11 March 1544. Spends his childhood in Sorrento with his mother, Porzia de’ Rossi; attended a Jesuit school in Naples. In 1554, his father Bernardo moves to Rome, exiled by the viceroy of Naples. Between 1562 and 1565 attends the University of Padua and Bologna to study law, philosophy, and eloquence. He is accepted under the name of Pentito by the Paduan Accademia delgi Eterei. From 1565 on he enters the service of the Cardinal Luigi d’Este, whom he follows into France in 1570–1571. In 1573, after leaving the service of the cardinal, he becomes a courtier of Duke Alfonso II, who names him Lettore di geometria e sfera at the studio. In 1577, he makes a 1836

self-accusation at the tribunal of the Inquisition, which absolves him, for the ‘‘licenses’’ of Gerusalemme liberata. After an attempt to stab a servant in 1577, he is confined in Ferrara; he escapes and moves throughout Italy for a number of years. Returning to Ferrara, after further episodes of madness he is imprisoned in the hospital of Sant’Anna for seven years until 1586. Vincenzo Gonzaga hosts the poet in Mantua. He leaves Mantua for a series of long wanderings, with protracted stays in Rome and Naples. In Rome, he obtains a pension from Pope Clement VIII, and awaiting the laureate coronation in the Campidoglio, he died in the monastery of Sant’Onofrio sul Gianicolo on 25 April 1595. PIERMARIO VESCOVO Selected Works Collections Rime e Prose, 6 vols., Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini and Giulio Vassalini, 1581–1587. Opere, edited by Giovanni Rosini, 33 vols., Pisa: Capurro, 1821–1822. Poesie, edited by Francesco Flora, Milan-Rome: Rizzoli, 1934. Prose, edited by Ettore Mazzali, Milan: Ricciardi, 1959. Opere, edited by Bruno Maier, 5 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1963–1965. Teatro, edited by Marziano Guglielminetti, Milan: Garzanti, 1983.

Epic Poems ‘‘Rinaldo,’’ 1562; edited by Michael Sherberg, 1990. ‘‘Il Goffredo,’’ 1580 (unauthorized edition of the first 14 cantos of Gerusalemme liberata); as Godfrey of Boulogne, translated by Richard Carew, 1980. ‘‘Gerusalemme liberata,’’ edited by Febo Bonna`, 1581; edited by Scipione Gonzaga, 1584; as Jerusalem Delivered, edited and translated by Anthony M. Esolen, 2000. ‘‘Gerusalemme conquistata,’’ 1593. ‘‘Le sette giornate del mondo creato,’’ 1607; edited by Bruno Basile, 1990; as Creation of the World, translated by Joseph Tusiani, 1983.

Lyrics Rime, 2 vols., 1591–1593; edited in 6 vols., 1608. Rime ‘‘eteree,’’ edited by Lanfranco Caretti, 1990. Rime de gli Academici Eterei, edited by Ginetta Auzzas and Manlio Pastore Stocchi, 1995.

Dialogues Dialoghi, 1587; edited by Ezio Raimondi, 2 vols., 1958; as Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection, with the Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue, edited and translated by Carnes Lord and Dain Trafton, 1982.

Plays Aminta, 1580; as Aminta, a Pastoral Drama, translated by Ernest Grillo, 1924. Il re Torrismondo, 1587; as King Torrismondo, translated by Maria Pastore Passaro, 1997.

TORQUATO TASSO Letters Lettere, edited by Cesare Guasti, 5 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1853–1855. Lettere, edited by Ettore Mazzali, 1978. Lettere poetiche, edited by Carla Molinari, 1995.

Other Apologia della ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata,’’ 1585. Discorsi dell’arte poetica e in particolare sopra il poema eroico, 1587. Discorsi del poema eroico, 1594; as Discourses on the Heroic Poem, translated by Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel, 1973.

Further Reading Aurnhammer, Achim, Torquato Tasso in deutschen Barock, Tu¨bingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1994. Brand, Charles Peter, Torquato Tasso: A Study of the Poet and his Contribution to English Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Da Pozzo, Giovanni (editor), La ragione e l’arte: Catalogo della mostra Torquato Tasso e la Repubblica Veneta (Venezia, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Libreria Sansoviniana, 10 October–11 November 1995), Venice: Il Cardo, 1995. De Vendittis, Luigi, ‘‘Ancora qualche osservazione sul sentimento religioso del Tasso,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 165 (1988): 481–510. Erspamer, Francesco, ‘‘Il ‘pensiero debole’ di Torquato Tasso,’’ in La menzogna, edited by Franco Cardini, Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1989. Getto, Giovanni, Interpretazioni del Tasso, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1951. Grosser, Hermann, La sottigliezza del disputare: Teorie degli stili e teorie dei generi in eta` rinascimentale e nel Tasso, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1992. Guaragnella, Pasquale, Le maschere di Democrito e di Eraclito: Scritture e malinconie tra Cinque e Seicento, Fasano: Schena Editore, 1990. Jori, Giacomo, Le forme della creazione: Sulla fortuna del ‘‘Mondo creato,’’ Florence: Olschki, 1995. Martignone, Vercingetorige, ‘‘Per l’edizione critica del ‘Torrismondo’ di Torquato Tasso,’’ in Studi di filologia italiana, 45 (1987): 151–196. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Dall’eroe errante al funzionario di Dio,’’ in Cheiron, 6 (1986): 25–36. Quint, David, ‘‘Political Allegory in the Gerusalemme Liberata,’’ in Renaissance Quarterly, 43 (1990): 1–29. Regn, Gerhard, ‘‘Tasso und der Manierismus,’’ in Romanistisches Jahrbuch, 38 (1987): 99–129. Scarpati, Claudio, Tasso, i classici e i moderni, Padua: Antenore, 1965. Selmi, Elisabetta, ‘‘Stratigrafie tassiane: La ricezione dell’’Ars Poetica’ di Orazio nei ‘Discorsi’ del Tasso,’’ in Orazio e la letteratura italiana, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato—Libreria dello Stato, 1994. Starobinski, Jean, Rousseau e Tasso: Lezione Sapegno 1993, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1994. Zaccarello, Michelangelo, ‘‘Appunti sulle ‘Eteree’ del Tasso,’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 9 (1991): 565–598.

AMINTA, 1580 Pastoral Play by Torquato Tasso

Written for the Ferrarese court and performed on the small island of Belvedere del Po, in July 1573, and later in Pesaro in 1574, Torquato Tasso’s ‘‘sylvan fable’’ Aminta (Aminta) is published at the beginning of the following decade, inaugurating an extensive series of published writings and great success in Europe. The tradition of the eclogue in the form of a dialogue and its dramatic development, which was particularly relevant in Ferrara’s culture of literature and spectacle (one thinks of Giambattista Giraldi Cinzio’s ‘‘satyr play’’ Egle mounted in 1545), reach a mature form in this work, thanks as well to the Tassian apprenticeship between lyrical experimentation and humanistic formation. The fable is divided into the canonical five acts, with the presence of the chorus and lyric interludes sung between the acts, and scans in endecasyllables and heptasyllables, but its plot is justifiably regarded as a comedy up through the beginning of the third act, followed by a tragic structure conceived in accordance with the Aristotelian canons. In continuity with the tradition of the eclogue in dialogue of the second half of the fifteenth century, the pastoral fable preserves the allusion, through fictitious figures, to the world of the court: The characters of the fable do indeed conceal the figures of literati and courtiers at the Ferrarese court, who see themselves reflected in the original staging of the story, set in a place of delight outside of, yet not far from, Ferrara. Nevertheless, in the course of its success in Italy and Europe, the text will soon be detached from the cultivated public of the court and its initial game of reflection. After the prologue recited by Amore (who has fled to the woods because of Venus’ injunction to act only in noble circles), Daphne tries to persuade Silvia (a follower of Diana) to pursue her amorous passion and Tirsi asks Aminta (who loves Silvia unrequited) to spy on her while she is nude at the fountain. There a satyr tries to use violence against the young woman; Aminta saves her and Silvia flees. Some symmetrical misunderstandings (Aminta believes Silvia has been killed by wolves 1837

TORQUATO TASSO and Silvia believes, as a result, that Aminta is a suicide) complicate the plot until the resolution of the happy ending, with the celebration of nuptials. Tragic passion and violence dominate the stage until the end, therefore, as the central theme of the ‘‘fable,’’ which alludes openly to the culturenature dialectic (court-Arcadia) and conceals the ravages of the dark times of heresy and wars of religion. As Franco Croce notes, little by little and episode by episode, each character, major and minor, takes on the function of narrator, in a seeming absence of action (‘‘La teatralita` dell’Aminta,’’ 1990). We are faced with a modulated use of the spoken word that—often described superficially as scarcely ‘‘theatrical’’ or ‘‘literary’’—characterizes a dramatic choice. Thus the characters can be seen as ‘‘voices’’ to whom the development of themes is entrusted, akin to the level that establishes, in the near future, the musical theater. An epilogue that beginning in 1581 appears in a coda to many editions—to which Angelo Solerti and Giosue Carducci call attention in 1895—contains a counterpoint ‘‘in the opposite direction,’’ showing Venus in pursuit of her son, entailing what would be a dramatically important reversal and a darker, bleaker ending. It is a problem that is not purely scholarly, but that relates to the possible choice of another textual form for the ‘‘fable.’’ The epilogue probably ‘‘is entitled to be in the book but not in the text of Aminta,’’ not necessarily intended by the author for the dramatic body but for a more complex significance, somewhere between stage and book (Ferdinando Taviani, ‘‘Teatro di voci in tempi bui,’’ 1994). PIERMARIO VESCOVO Editions First edition: Aminta, Venice: Manuzio, 1580. Critical editions: Aminta, edited by Angelo Solerti and Giosue Carducci, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1895; edited by Bortolo Tommaso Sozzi, Turin: UTET, 1974; edited by Claudio Varese, Milan: Mursia, 1985; edited by Marziano Guglielminetti, Milan: Garzanti, 1985. Translations: as Aminta, the Famous Pastoral, translated by John Dancer, London: Printed by John Starkey, 1660; as Amyntas, translated by Percival Stockdale, London: Printed for T. Davies, 1770; translated by Ernest Grillo, London: Dent, 1924; edited and translated by Charles Jernigan and Irene Marchegiani Jones, New York: Italica Press, 2000.

Further Reading Accorsi, Maria Grazia, Aminta: Ritorno a Saturno, Sovenia Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1998.

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Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, ‘‘La tragicita` dell’Aminta,’’ in Fine dell’idillio: Da Dante a Marino, Genoa: Marietti, 1978. Bruscagli, Riccardo, ‘‘L’Aminta del Tasso e le pastorali ferraresi del Cinquecento,’’ in Studi di filologia e critica offerti dagli allievi a Lanfranco Caretti, vol. 1, Rome: Salerno, 1985. Caly, Richard, The Landscape of the Mind: Pastoralism and Platonic Theory in Tasso’s ‘‘Aminta’’ and Shakespeare’s Early Comedies, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. Croce, Franco, ‘‘La teatralita` dell’Aminta,’’ in Sviluppi della drammaturgia pastorale nell’Europa del Cinque-Seicento, Rome: Centro Studi sul Teatro Medievale e Rinascimentale, 1990. Da Pozzo, Giovanni, L’ambigua armonia: Studio sull’ ‘Aminta’ del Tasso, Florence: Olschki, 1983. Fenzi, Enrico, ‘‘Il potere, la morte, l’amore: Note sull’‘Aminta’ di Torquato Tasso,’’ in L’immagine riflessa, 3 (1979): 167–248. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Teatro di voci in tempi bui (Riflessioni brade su ‘Aminta’ e pastorale),’’ in Teatro e storia, 9 (1994): 9–39.

DIALOGHI, 1587 Dialogues by Torquato Tasso

Torquato Tasso’s 27 Dialoghi (Dialogues) were composed during his confinement in the hospital of Sant’Anna in Ferrara between 1579 and 1586, and were later revised, with most of them going through various drafts. With these dialogues, Tasso participated—in a project of grand dimensions and complexity—in one of the fundamental vulgate literary genres between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. We are dealing with texts inflected by the contemporary civilization of conversation, in which we can see the strong imprint and the echo of courtly discussion, which also appears in the choice of subjects revolving chiefly around aspects of the nobility and its peculiar and particular codes of behavior: courtship, dignity, feats, virtue, friendship, beauty, Tuscan poetry, play, honest pleasure, spirits, family, masks. It is not necessary, however, to draw from a simple list such as this an excessively abstract judgment; these themes should be framed in an organic design and, first, within the sphere of contemporary court culture. Paradoxically it is precisely the distancing from the court and its conversational

TORQUATO TASSO milieu, during his incarceration and in the empty space of the hospital, that strengthen this conventional component and that fix upon one of the more traditional and ‘‘social’’ genres for a distinct and unique experience. If it is correct to see in the Dialoghi an eminently literary work, ‘‘the result of a synthesis of motifs and themes illustrated by a meticulous disquisition intended to satisfy the curiosity of a mundane group of people’’ (Giovanni Getto, Torquato Tasso, 1987), we should not underestimate, however, the overall Tassian project, lest we lose its significance. Aside from the particular argumentative choices, the author defines his Dialoghi, by and large, as an intermediary genre ‘‘between poetry and philosophy’’; in particular, the strong implication of the figure of the author—who traditionally is absent, deputizing to others his arguments and his point of view—defines his role as ‘‘almost halfway between the poet and the dialectician.’’ By privileging rhetorical elaboration or, rather, choosing passages memorable from the point of view of personal confession and lyrical-descriptive disclosure, criticism often underestimates the work’s overall, conceptual value. It is better to reflect on the ‘‘spectacle of communication’’ or on the ‘‘intellectual theater,’’ which this personal idea of the dialogue sustains, and on the ‘‘social masks,’’ which the play of conversation summons in giving voices to interlocutors (Giulio Ferroni, Storia della letteratura italiana, 1991). If in the first sense, and for the choice of genre, Tasso’s Discorso sull’arte del dialogo (Discourse on the Art of the Dialogue, 1585) is particularly relevant, Il Gianluca overo de le maschere (Gianluca, or On Masks, 1586) is of great interest in the latter direction. Intellectual autobiography itself, therefore, emerges as a characteristic trait of the project, and in the attempt to compose the disquiet and affliction of Tasso’s life into a social image, displacing and investing it on a more broadly cultural level. But this occurs, nevertheless, on the page, and despite the preference of romantic and even modern readers for texts touched by an autobiographical presence, perhaps in connection with his letterwriting from the period of his confinement in Sant’Anna, through the summoning of a distancing fiction (the ‘‘Neapolitan stranger,’’ in which the author conceals and reveals himself at the same time). Dialogues such as Il messaggiero (The Messenger) or Il padre di famiglia (The Paterfamilias) exemplify this point of view and are undeniably well-known and successful. The first (in three versions, between 1580 and 1587) imagines a

dialogue between the secluded poet and a ‘‘kind spirit.’’ The text contains a substantial development of autobiographical elements and literary fiction. It imagines the appearance of a ‘‘familiar spirit’’ during the uncertain moment separating sleep from waking (‘‘between vigil and calm’’) to the poet while he is locked up in the hospital of Sant’Anna. The messenger from another, supernatural dimension—of which Tasso’s letters seem to speak in a pathological form—here appears clearly, and that which elsewhere proves itself to be an element of profound turmoil is represented and analyzed. In the second dialogue, composed in 1580 and published two years later, the flight of the ‘‘peculiar stranger,’’ a victim of power and of fate, from the life of the court and his troubles, his refuge in a quiet, stable rustic environment—a theme vividly present to the poet of Aminta and Gerusalemme liberata—are all portrayed as a familiar measure, tied to a tradition typical of urban literature and the mercantile outlook. Here what shines through is a power of ‘‘recounting without exposing in a true autobiographical account’’ (Marziano Guglielminetti, Manierismo e barocco, 1990). PIERMARIO VESCOVO Editions First edition: Dialoghi, Venice, 1587. Critical editions: Dialoghi, edited by Cesare Guasti, 3 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1858–1959; edited by Ezio Raimondi, Florence: Sansoni, 1958. Translations: as Tasso’s Dialogues: A Selection with the Discourse on the Art of Dialogue, edited and translated by Lord Carnes and Dain A. Trafton, BerkeleyLondon: University of California Press, 1982.

Further Reading Baldassarri, Guido, ‘‘L’arte del dialogo in Torquato Tasso,’’ in Studi Tassiani, 20 (1970): 5–46. Bozzola, Sergio, Purita` e ornamento di parole: tecnica e stile dei ‘‘Dialoghi’’ di Torquato Tasso, Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1999. Ferroni, Giulio, Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1991. Geerts, Walter, Annick Paternoster, and Franco Pignatti, Il sapere delle parole: Studi sul dialogo latino e italiano del Rinascimento, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘Tasso, Torquato,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, Turin: UTET, 1986. Girardi, Raffaele, La societa` del dialogo: Retorica e ideologia nella letteratura conviviale del Cinquecento, Bari: Adriatica, 1989. Guglielminetti, Marziano, Manierismo e barocco, Turin: UTET, 1990.

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TORQUATO TASSO Pignatti, Franco, ‘‘I Dialoghi di Torquato Tasso e la morfologia del dialogo cortigiano rinascimentale,’’ in Studi Tassiani, 36 (1988): 7–43. Prandi, Stefano, ‘‘Sul dibattito critico attorno ai ‘Dialoghi’ di Torquato Tasso,’’ in Lettere italiane, 42 (1990): 460–466. Raimondi, Ezio, ‘‘Il problema filologico e letterario dei ‘Dialoghi’ di T. Tasso,’’ in Rinascimento inquieto, Palermo: Manfredi, 1965.

GERUSALEMMA LIBERATA, 1581 Epic Poem by Torquato Tasso

The composition of Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) occupied practically the entire life of Torquato Tasso. There is the Gierusalemme (1559), three episodes (116 verses in ottava rima), which the 15-year-old poet initially completed, and the writing and publishing of Il Goffredo (Godfrey, 1562) in 12 cantos. One mention of the completion of the ‘‘poema di Goffredo’’ turned up in a letter dated 5 April 1575. In 1580, Gerusalemme was published in Venice in a gravely incorrect form by Celio Malespini, in only 14 cantos and with the title of Il Goffredo, but without the consent of the author, who had been incarcerated the year before in the hospital of Sant’Anna in Ferrara. The following year Tasso authorized for the first time—only to renounce it later—the Ferrarese edition of Febo Bonna`; in Mantua, in 1584, there appeared an edition by Scipione Gonzaga: The entire complex history of the text unfolded, therefore, while the author was imprisoned as a madman. But the poem immediately met with an enormous success that also opened the Ariosto/Tasso querelle, which would long occupy European, and not merely Italian, culture. The last phase of Tasso’s life, with the return of his liberty, saw the writing of a new form of the poem entitled Gerusalemme conquistata (Jerusalem Conquered), which was immensely less fortunate in its reception and criticism, and which was conceived in 1586 and published in Rome in 1593, two years before the poet’s death. 1840

In 24 cantos, the poem takes for its argument the First Crusade (1096–1099), privileging Guglielmo di Tiro’s Historia in partibus transmarninis gestarum (History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, eleventh century) among the various sources. The project acknowledges Ariosto’s success and his poem’s inimitability—already shown by the example of Tasso’s father and his Amadigi, loosely based on the Spanish romance Amadı´s de Gaula by Garcia Ordo´nez de Montalvo—and, at the same time, the failure of Gian Giorgio Trissino’s Italia liberata da’ Goti (1547–1548). It keeps in mind, however, Trissino’s choices regarding historical subject and Aristotelian references to the unity of the poem. The theorizing of the ‘‘Christian marvelous’’ allows the partial justification of the romance subject matter, of the ‘‘freedom to fictionalize’’—in times distant enough to permit inventions—once the religious foundation is assured. The action of the poem opens in the spring of the sixth year of the crusade (which in reality does not exceed three years), when God commands Goffredo (Godfrey de Bouillon), through the messenger Gabriel, to hasten the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre. The Christian army arrives in Jerusalem, sets up camp, and begins the siege. The principal incidents concern a triangle of impossible love, of the pagan Erminia (daughter of the king of Antioch and a guest in Jerusalem of King Aladino) for the Christian Tancredi, and of Tancredi for the pagan warrior Clorinda. In the meantime, Hell opposes the Christian army in a diabolical council presided over by Pluto, who conceives a plan to send the enchantress Armida (the niece of the king of Damascus) into the Christian camp. The appearance of the beautiful woman, who pretends to be a victim and asks for an escort, sows confusion among the troops and provokes the killing of the king of Norway by Rinaldo, who as a result is exiled from the camp and begins his wanderings. Argante, a champion among the infidels, proposes to King Aladino that the fate of the war be settled by a duel; his challenger is Tancredi, who is distracted, however, by the sight of Clorinda. The duel resumes after the killing of other Christians and is interrupted only by the onset of darkness. Erminia, who sees the battle from afar, leaves Jerusalem in secret with the armor of Clorinda to tend to the wounded Tancredi, but the Christians mistake her for a warrior and she is forced to flee. Tancredi, believing that he is following his beloved, finally arrives at the palace enchanted by Armida, where he is imprisoned and unable to resume the duel. Raymond of Tolosa takes his place and is

TORQUATO TASSO protected by an angel, but Hell intervenes on Argante’s behalf and unleashes a storm. Moreover, the furious Aletto spreads rebellion throughout the Christian camp and Sveno, king of the Danes, is killed by the Arabs commanded by Solimano. Rinaldo, in the meantime, is also believed to have been killed. Solimano manages to instigate a betrayal in the Christian camp, in a night populated by evil specters. Only the arrival of the knights formerly imprisoned by Armida turns the situation in the Christians’ favor. Solimano, swearing vengeance, arrives in Jerusalem with the wizard Ismeno on a magic chariot, protected by a cloud, and reaches Aladino. Through a divine vision, Pier l’Eremita reveals that Rinaldo is alive (and predicts the glories of the ducal family of Ferrara, which traces its descent to him). The Christians, after a procession to the Mount of Olives, lay siege to the walls; Goffredo is wounded and tended to by an angel. The following night, Clorinda and Argante set fire to the siege tower. Tancredi—not recognizing Clorinda—challenges one he believes to be a warrior and discovers his beloved only when, on the verge of death, she asks him to be baptized; the heroine thus fulfills the prophecy of salvation pertaining to her (she is born white to black parents; her mother, a Christian, sends her far away with a servant, who raises her as a pagan). The Christians try to reconstruct the tower, but the wizard Ismeno bewitches the forest where they go to procure wood. Only a restorative rain, putting an end to a prolonged dry spell, breaks the enchantment. After an apparition in a dream, through which Goffredo receives the order to bring Rinaldo back to the camp, the wizard of Ascalona reveals that he is a prisoner of Armida in one of the Fortunate Isles. A boat guided by Fortuna allows the knights to conquer Ercole’s columns, eventually, after many trials, liberating Rinaldo from the enchantment that binds him to the enchantress. Upon his departure, Armida reverses roles, from a subjugator to a woman desperate at being abandoned. Promising revenge, she reaches the immense army, which is ready to confront the Christians. After his purification, Rinaldo returns to combat and defeats the terrifying visions conjured by Armida. Another relevant episode—among the many clashes and deployments of the powers of the wizard Ismeno— is the completion of the duel between Tancredi and Argante, who is defeated. With the capture of Jerusalem, Goffredo reaches the Holy Sepulchre and fulfills his vow. The poet’s underlying attitude in Gerusalemme liberata has been defined as an ambiguous spiritual

attitude, or as a conflict between different codes, beginning with the issue of censorship that the author sensed and, in part, to which he wanted his creation subjected: the more or less extreme Aristotelian poetics dominant in the second half of the sixteenth century on the question of form; and Catholic orthodoxy, in relation to the lawfulness of its content. More generally, and better yet, there is the conflict between codes throughout the entire poem, which is expressed as a relation between the uni-form Christian and the multi-form pagan. As Sergio Zatti has perceptively pointed out, Gerusalemme liberata stages a dynamic process of reducing the various to the one, of discord to harmony, of dispersion to concentration (L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano, 1983). Schematically, such a process juxtaposes Heaven to Hell, in the different Christian and pagan ideologies of war, and the ‘‘pious armies’’ to the ‘‘mixed people.’’ The mission of Godfrey de Bouillon, for which he is chosen by God, is to reunite the dispersed Christian army, as the captain of wandering knights. Wandering, deviation, dispersion, leading astray, which variously afflict the Christian camp, are functions of adventure and romance, and as such they are opposed to Goffredo’s mission, and to the epic design that inspires the poem’s unity. On the other hand, multiformity and a logic of defeat— also in the form of ‘‘nostalgia’’ for Heaven on the part of the fallen angels—determine the non-Christian world, through the themes of that which is not yet known (undiscovered islands, transcending the ancient providential design) and of the prefiguration that the ruin of other civilizations (such as the vision of Carthage) offer of the destiny of the pagan world. If the chivalric code is subordinated to the superior ends of the Christian mission, which fights and eradicates it, the construction of the epic poem against the ‘‘romance’’ is expressed, therefore, as a conflict between ideology and emotional identification. Here resides, historically, the core of Gerusalemme liberata and, consequently, its immense ‘‘romantic’’ and ‘‘modern’’ success; on the other hand, the desire to rewrite the work without this foundation of fertile ambiguity leads to the planning of Gerusalemme conquistata. The true theme of Gerusalemme liberata is, in Franco Fortini’s words, ‘‘the desire for unity and the impossibility of achieving it’’ (Dialoghi col Tasso, 1999). The heroic poem finds itself, therefore, suspended between the delight (figural and sensual) that procures its variety and the confusion (moral and intellectual) that this provokes. This accounts for the author’s psychic torment, for the 1841

TORQUATO TASSO characters as his ‘‘points of view,’’ all the way to the formal structures and choices. The author himself grasps clearly that ‘‘for the most part the excess of ornament is in lascivious subjects,’’ thus tying deviant content to the metaphorical level and to stylistic complication (Fortini, Dialoghi col Tasso, 1999). Tasso’s epic style has been seen as the attempt to reduce to a single language a large, dissimilar variety of components, and as the synthesis of tradition and the repertoire. This is expressed well by recurring figures such as oxymoron and parallelism, and, metrically, by enjambement (the Tassian ‘‘disjuncted speech’’), in a desire for the union of opposites and a simultaneous evasion and confirmation of the rule. PIERMARIO VESCOVO Editions First editions: Gerusalemme liberata, Ferrara: Vittorio Baldini, 1581; Parma: Erasmo Viotto, 1581; Mantova: Osanna, 1584. Critical editions: edited by Ezio Raimondi, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1963; edited by Bruno Maier, Novara: Istituto Geografico De Agostini, 1966, rpt., 1968; edited by Lanfranco Caretti, Turin: Einaudi, 1971; edited by Bertoldo Tommaso Sozzi, Turin: UTET, 1974; edited by Marziano Guglielminetti, Milan: Garzanti, 1982; edited by Fredi Chiappelli, Milan: Rusconi, 1982; edited by Bruno Maier and Ezio Raimondi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988; edited by Giorgio Cerboni Baiardi, Modena: Panini, 1991. Translations: as Godfrey of Bulloigne or The Recoverie of Ierusalem, translated by Edward Fairfax, London: Ar. Hartfield for I. Iaggard and M. Lownes, 1600; as Jerusalem Delivered, translated by Joseph Tusiani, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970; translated by Ralph Nash, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987; translated by Anthony M. Esolen, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Further Reading Ardissino, Erminia, L’aspra tragedia: Poesia e sacro in Torquato Tasso, Florence: Olschki, 1996. Baldassarri, Guido, ‘‘Inferno’’ e ‘‘Cielo’’: Tipologia e finzione del ‘‘meraviglioso’’ nella ‘‘Liberata,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Baldassarri, Guido, ‘‘Poema eroico o romanzo? Riscritture della ‘Liberata’ dal Camilli al Gentili,’’ in Scritture di scritture: Testi, generi, modelli nel Rinascimento, edited by Giancarlo Mazzacurati and Michel Plaisance, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Basile, Bruno, ‘‘Un decennio di studi tassiani (1970–1980),’’ in Lettere Italiane, 33 (1981): 400–437. Caretti, Lanfranco, Ariosto e Tasso, Turin: Einaudi, 1961; rpt. 1977. Chiappelli, Fredi, Il conoscitore del caos: Una ‘‘vis abdita’’ nel linguaggio tassesco, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Fortini, Franco, Dialoghi col Tasso, edited by Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo and Donatella Santorone, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999. Gigante, Claudio, ‘‘Vincer pariemi piu` se stessa antica’’: La ‘‘Gerusalemme conquistata’’ nel mondo poetico di Torquato Tasso, Naples: Bibliopolis, 1996. Girardi, Maria Teresa, ‘‘Dalla Gerusalemme liberata alla Gerusalemme conquistata,’’ in Studi Tassiani, 33 (1985): 5–68. Girardi, Maria Teresa, Tasso e la nuova Gerusalemme: Studio sulla ‘‘Conquistata,’’ Naples: ESI, 2002. Gu¨ntert, Georges, L’epos dell’ideologia regnante e il romanzo delle passioni: Saggio sulla Gerusalemme liberata, Pisa: Pacini, 1989. Oldcorn, Anthony, The Textual Problems of Tasso’s ‘‘Gerusalemme Conquistata,’’ Ravenna: Longo, 1976. Raimondi, Ezio, ‘‘Il dramma nel racconto: Tipologia di un poema,’’ in Rinascimento inquieto, Palermo: Manfredi, 1965. Rhu, Lawrence, The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory: English Translations of the Early Poetics and a Comparative Study of Their significance, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Scianatico, Gianna, L’arme pietose: Studio sulla ‘‘Gerusalemme liberata,’’ Venice: Marsilio, 1990. Zatti, Sergio, L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano: Saggio sulla ‘‘Gerusalemme Liberata,’’ Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983.

ALESSANDRO TASSONI (1565–1635) For his European influence and his stylistic dexterity, Alessandro Tassoni is the most significant exponent of the sixteenth-century burlesque mode of poetry, also known as heroic-comic, probably initiated by the mock-heroic poet Francesco 1842

Bracciolini (1566–1645), but whose genealogy can be equally traced to the preface to La secchia rapita (The Rape of the Bucket, 1622), where Tassoni speaks of his poem as a new experiment in mixed forms (‘‘nuovo poema misto’’). In any case, it is

ALESSANDRO TASSONI perhaps futile to speculate on issues of historical primacy, as well as on the psychological reasons for Tassoni’s skepticism about social and ethical values. The Modenese writer had a difficult and quarrelsome temperament. Yet, his trenchant critique of such established institutions as the Accademia della Crusca and the classical traditions of Homer and Aristotle—reflected in Varieta` di pensieri (Miscellaneous Thoughts), published in various versions between 1608 and 1620, and especially in the tenth and last book Paragone sugli ingegni antichi e moderni (Comparison of Ancient and Modern Geniuses)—is couched in the form of the controversy of the ancients and the moderns. This querelle, which occupies European thought throughout the sixteenth century, finds one of its earliest instances in the work of another sharp-eyed Modenese observer of the contemporary scene, Ludovico Castelvetro (1505–1571). In light of Castelvetro’s lucid criticism, Tassoni advocates the disengagement of philology from natural philosophy, and of the exploration of the world from the scholastic tradition. Already in the lesser-known Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca (Thoughts on Petrarch’s Rhymes, 1609), Tassoni dismisses the persistent premodern myth of pedantic imitation in Italian literature on the ground of rhetoric and of the intrinsic temporality of literary forms. An example of this attitude is Tassoni’s merciless reduction of the fabulous geography of the ancients to a collection of inadequate evidence in comparison to the new cosmology: The decline of Petrarchism is thus compared to the loss of reverence toward the Aristotelian system. Yet, Tassoni criticizes both the new science and the intellectualism of old philosophy, and he is ambivalently poised between the Renaissance and a Baroque poetics, as attested by his marinismo. He accepts some of Marino’s formal strategies, but also criticizes his ‘‘modern’’ style, which he finds obscure and richly ornamented, and sets against it the complex novelty of his La secchia rapita. Despite Tassoni’s underlying ambivalence and critical inconsistencies, the mock-heroic epic is a revolutionary genre in his hands. He masters the technique of grafting and the literary bricolage characterizing the epic of his generation, and avoids both the passive imitation of the ancients as well as Baroque. Seventy years after the publication of Tassoni’s masterpiece, John Dryden aptly frames the mock-heroic in terms of a new relationship between word and thing. Capturing Tassoni’s interest in rhetoric rather than fiction, he defines

La secchia rapita as a poem of ‘‘Varronian kind,’’ and by comparing it with the fourth book of Virgil’s Georgicae (on bees), he praises how Tassoni raises its low subject through the loftiness of his words (Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire, 1693). As in the poem’s first stanza: ‘‘vedrai...Elena trasformarsi in una secchia’’ (‘‘Fair Helen shall a Bucket’s form assume’’), where the metamorphosis ‘‘Elena/secchia’’ refers both to the metrical closure of the verse and to the rhetorical closure of the stanza. The heroic-comic ottava is a complex structure. The opening lines appear majestic and severe, while the last ones turn everything into pleasant ridicule. Similarly, ordinary citizens of villages and small towns are cast in the guise of epic heroes, although at times Tassoni brings in gods and mythological figures, degrading them to the level of ‘‘low’’ human characters. In this way, he manages to attain an epic scale of proportion while representing an anti-ideal and antiheroic world. In Tassoni, the small and the gigantic stand side by side, according to a tradition that links La secchia rapita to the pseudo-Homeric Greek comic poem Batracomiomachia (Battle of the Mice and Frogs). Tassoni’s poem also articulates a negative critique of the Italian civic republics to the extent that municipal fights are described as fossils from a violent prehistoric age. Tassoni’s critical fortune has been varied. Rescued by Benedetto Croce in his Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia (1928) from the status of a seicento relic, La secchia rapita has received new critical attention from a sociological perspective in Alberto Asor Rosa’s Scrittori e popolo (1964). However, it is only with the editions published by Pietro Puliatti and Ottavio Besomi that a sound philological reading of Tassoni’s work has begun. The contemporary scholarship on the author further investigates the stylistic concerns of the mockheroic genre by shifting the emphasis from the formulaic idea of ‘‘parody’’ to the definition of a more sophisticated process of literary transposition, thus showing an awareness of the oblique stance of the poem—a stance mirrored in the image of the mule who plays chess at the end of the first canto.

Biography Born in Modena, on 28 September 1565, from a noble family. Studied law in Bologna, Pisa and Ferrara; probably lived in Nonantola, until 1597, where he was involved in brawls because of his 1843

ALESSANDRO TASSONI boasted nobility; started the career of secretary at the court of Cardinal Ascanio Colonna, in Rome, after 1599; took part in diplomatic expeditions in Spain (during which he perhaps matured the profound dislike for the country that will resound in his La secchia rapita), 1600–1603; returned and spent several years in Rome; took part in a diplomatic mission at the court of Carlo Emanuele I, in Turin, 1620; came back in Rome, after 1621, where he served at the court of Cardinal Ludovisi; returned to Modena as a man of letters at the court of Francesco I. Died in Modena, on 25 April 1635. STEFANO GULIZIA See also: Heroic-Comic Poetry Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Giorgio Rossi, 2 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1930. Rime di Alessandro Tassoni, edited by Tommaso Casini, Bologna: Commissione per i testi di lingua, 1968. Scritti inediti, edited by Pietro Puliatti, Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 1975. Lettere, edited by Pietro Puliatti, Bari: Laterza, 1978. Pensieri e scritti preparatori, edited by Pietro Puliatti, Modena: Panini, 1986.

Poetry ‘‘La secchia rapita,’’ 1622; La secchia rapita: Prima redazione, edited by Ottavio Besomi, 1987; La secchia rapita: Redazione definitiva, edited by Ottavio Besomi, 1990; as The Rape of the Bucket. A Mock-Heroic Poem, the First of the Kind, translated by Mr. Ozell, 1713; as The Rape of the Bucket, 2 vols., 1825.

Prose Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca, 1609. Varieta` di pensieri diversi, 1608–1620. Filippiche, 1615.

Further Reading Arcudi, Bruno A., ‘‘Alessandro Tassoni and the Accademia della Crusca,’’ in Forum Italicum, 6 (1972): 378–392.

1844

Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo, Rome: Samona e Savelli, 1964. Besomi, Ottavio, ‘‘Per un’edizione della Secchia rapita,’’ in Vestigia, edited by Rino Avesani et al., Rome: Storia & Letteratura, 1984. Cabani, Maria Cristina, La pianella di Scarpinello: Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico, Pisa: M. Pacini Fazzi, 1999. Croce, Benedetto, Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1928. Daniele, Antonio, ‘‘Di alcuni caratteri della poesia eroicomica. Dal Tassoni al Dottori, e oltre,’’ in Carlo De’ Dottori. Lingua, cultura e aneddoti, Padua: Antenore, 1986. Diffley, Paul B., ‘‘Tassoni’s Linguistic Writings,’’ in Studi Secenteschi, 33 (1992): 67–92. Dryden, John, ‘‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’’ (1693), in Essays of John Dryden, edited by W. P. Ker, vol. 2, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926. Grayson, Cecil, ‘‘Some Autograph Verses of Alessandro Tassoni,’’ in Book Production and Letters in the Western European Renaissance, edited by Anna Laura Lepschy and John Took, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1986. Longhi, Silvia, Le memorie antiche: modelli classici da Petrarca a Tassoni, Verona: Fiorini, 2001. Loos, Erich, Alessandro Tassonis ‘‘La secchia rapita’’ und das Problem de heroisch-komischen Epos, Krefeld: Scherpe-Verlag, 1967. Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, ‘‘Alessandro Tassoni e l’epifania dei ‘moderni,’’’ in Rivista di letteratura italiana, 4, no. 1 (1986): 65–92. Puliatti, Pietro, ‘‘La tradizione delle rime del Tassoni,’’ in Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 155 (1978): 386–437. ———, ‘‘Il pensiero linguistico del Tassoni e la Crusca,’’ in Studi Secenteschi, 26 (1985): 3–23. ———, ‘‘Il Sublime della Secchia,’’ in La secchia rapita: Atti del Convegno. Modena, Villa Cesi, 22 settembre 1990, Modena: Panini, 1991. Sarnelli, Mauro, ‘‘Commistioni dei generi e polemiche poetico-religiose nel classicismo tardorinascimentale e barocco,’’ in Il poema eroicomico, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 2001. Scalabrini, Massimo, ‘‘Gli amori ridicoli dell’eroicomico: Tassoni e la storia di Lucrezia,’’ in MLN, 120, no. 1 (2005): 223–238. Studi, Tassoniani, Convegno nazionale di studi per il IV centenario dela nascita di Alessandro Tassoni, Modena: Aedes Muratoriana, 1966.

PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI

PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI (1931– AND 1929–) Born in the small Tuscan town of San Miniato (Pisa), the Taviani brothers studied in Florence and were thunderstruck during their student years by Roberto Rossellini’s filmmaking style, thus discovering their own vocation. Just as in Rossellini’s, in their case, too, political interests came to represent but one of the facets of an extremely rich and diverse repertoire, stretching from preunification Italian history to Russian literature, from Tuscan landscapes to the social aspects of literacy and education, from Luigi Pirandello to the history of the nineteenth-century labor movement. Their greatest artistic achievements can, in fact, be said to originate just at the intersection of two or more such areas of scrutiny. Their films share some common features: a superior attention to the quality of the image; an unflinching rigor in presenting and pursuing stories with far-reaching ethical implications; an exquisite understanding of the historical and philosophical contexts they are drawing upon; and where applicable, utmost respect for the literary authors who inspire them. Although it is difficult, in the absence of dramatic turning points or discontinuities, to establish a clear-cut periodization in the Tavianis’ filmography, one can discern in it three successive phases: a first one, lasting from the early 1960s into the mid-1970s, when the theme of social justice and/or social revolution is looked at from different angles; a central one, from the mid-1970s throughout the 1980s, when the directors depict epic individual struggles against the backdrop of some supratemporal, immutable sociohistorical order; and the third one, from 1990 onward, during which the Tavianis’ interest has mostly accrued to classics of modern world literatures. Indeed they are able to free these from the patina accrued by many decades of ongoing canonization, due to their powerfully original rereadings. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s films from the 1960s and 1970s contain a gallery of socially committed heroes whose first incarnation is Salvatore, the Sicilian peasant and labor union organizer from Un uomo da bruciare (A Man to Be Burned,

codirected with Valentino Orsini, 1962), who pays with his life for the fearless leadership he provides during his fellow workers’ century-old struggle against the mafia. Later, I sovversivi (The Subversives, 1967) depicts the diverse and difficult circumstances in which four Marxists who live in Rome attempt to face the fact that the revolution is not on the agenda for the foreseeable future, while a host of very pressing personal issues are. In 1969, the Tavianis made Sotto il segno dello Scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio), an imaginative and stylistically avant-garde foray into symbolic anthropology. The film narrates the conflict between a tribe of hunters-gatherers, the Scorpionids, and one of farmers when an earthquake causes them to make contact with each other. While the Scorpionids are ‘‘maximalist’’ Utopians who seek out an ideal land in which to settle, the peaceful farmers are ‘‘minimalists’’ content with their routine lifestyle in the foothills of a dangerous volcano. Predictably, the Scorpionids exterminate the shepherds, carrying off their women to be the oxymoronic captive denizens of an ideal society. The next two films are the most important ones in this period. San Michele aveva un gallo (Saint Michael Had a Rooster, 1971), re-created from Tolstoy’s Bozheskoe i chelovecheskoe (Divine and Human, 1906), explores the life story, feats, and eventual demise of Giulio Manieri, a fictional nineteenth-century revolutionary who in vain attempts to incite an uprising in central Italy, is jailed for many years, and by an adroit mix of willpower and imagination (the occasion for a series of virtuoso visionary sequences in the film) succeeds in surviving his prolonged segregation. Manieri, however, eventually breaks down when, during a transfer from one jail to another, he accidentally meets a group of younger revolutionaries who bluntly tell him that his political line has long been out of step with the times, and is, in fact, detrimental to the fortunes of the Italian revolution. Confronted with the collapse of everything for which he has lived, Manieri dives to his death from the boat that carries him. Allonsanfan (Allons Enfants, 1974) is set 1845

PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI in the post-Napoleonic Italy of the early Risorgimento period, grieving under the Habsburg empire, and it portrays the failure of a revolutionary movement from the politically advanced North to ignite a peasant revolt in the heavily exploited agricultural South. Indeed, in 1844, a similarly conceived expedition by the brothers Attilio and Emilio Bandiera failed; in 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s succeeded with his expedition to Sicily. In the middle period of their production, approximately 1975–1990, during which Italy’s polity experienced both a marked reflux of revolutionary ideals and a rampant proliferation of armed terrorists’ activities, the Tavianis turned to telling stories of individuals bearing the weight of quite diverse struggles on their lone shoulders. Padre padrone (My Father My Master, 1977), inspired by Gavino Ledda’s homonymous autobiographical novel (1975), perfectly reflects the book’s subtitle: L’educazione di un pastore (Education of a Shepherd). Padre padrone is, indeed, the life story of a Sardinian shepherd who by dint of superhuman efforts, and thanks to the support of many people around him, manages to break free from his father’s tyranny, learns how to read and write, and eventually finds a meaningful position in civilized society. Il prato (The Meadow, 1978) re-creates, in modern version, the story line of Goethe’s Werther (1774) by narrating the failure of the Utopian ideal of a perfectly open couple: a subject that was a highprofile subject of debate in Italian society at the time when the film was made. La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars, 1982) evokes, via the recollections of an adult mother who was still a child at the time of the events, the Nazi-Fascist occupation of San Miniato in the summer of 1944. The then-child’s consciousness acts as the particular lens through which the story is told, and thus lends the film its vibrant, at times visionary, narrative tone. Kaos (1984) consists of four episodes revisiting Sicilian novellas by Pirandello and provides them with an original epilogue, which evokes the warm intimacy that the directors attribute to Pirandello’s relation with his mother and siblings. An outstanding example of cinematographic re-creation of literature, the film—whose title refers to Pirandello’s birthplace, Kaos—ranges from the ominous and tragic to the folksy and comical, such as the third episode, ‘‘La giara’’ (The Jar), featuring the Sicilian comedians Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia. The Tavianis’ films from about 1990 onward, mainly produced with the backing of RAI television, 1846

reflect the directors’ renewed commitment to approach great classics of European letters for all the wisdom that these are able to yield to contemporary viewers, if and when their original texts are read with keen eyes by intelligent, informed, and passionately creative interpreters. Thus, Il sole anche di notte (The Night Sun, 1990), from Tolstoy’s Otets Sergii (Father Sergius, 1890–1898), portrays the plight of an ambitious young aristocrat at the Bourbon court in Naples, who, disappointed by the corruption of his environment, withdraws to a life of contemplation and prayer, first in a monastery and then, as a hermit, in the mountains of the Abruzzi. Le affinita` elettive (Elective Affinities, 1996), re-created from Goethe’s novel by the same title (Die Wahlverwandtschaften, 1808), examines with subtlety the contradiction in which we human beings find ourselves when, as we must, we try to balance the opposite pulls that nature and culture—instinct and society—exert on our desires. Tu ridi (You’re Laughing, 1998), once again inspired by Pirandello’s novellas, consists of two long episodes, ‘‘Felice’’ and ‘‘Sequestri’’ (Kidnappings). The second of these is especially troubling for today’s viewers: It consists of the blood-curdling retelling of two stories—a nineteenth-century abduction, during which the criminals at least treat their prisoner with respect, and a contemporary one, in which the mafia hit man in charge of watching over a young boy shows no compunction whatever in first befriending and then murdering his victim. Resurrezione (Resurrection, 2001) re-creates for the screen Tolstoy’s homonymous novel (Voskresenie, 1899), a passionate defense of evangelical Christianity (the novel argues that we ought to take literally ethical precepts such as the five principal ones set forth in Matthew 5: 21–48—failing which, our claim to be Christians is but hypocritical pretence). Luisa Sanfelice (2004), a TV series adapted from Alexandre Dumas pe`re’s novel La San Felice (1864), which recounts the last months, and the tragic death on the scaffold, of a Neapolitan noblewoman caught in the crossfire of revolution and counterrevolution at the time of Napoleon’s struggle against sundry anciens re´gimes across Europe. Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s cinema is an outstanding example of what could be called ‘‘visionary realism’’: a realism rooted in history, in the sympathy for humankind’s suffering, and in a strong ethical commitment—but, also, a realism enriched by a mesmerizing ability to reach, below the surface of images, to their epic, symbolic, and

PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI thus perennial validity. An accomplished example of this attitude is, in La notte di San Lorenzo, the battle between partisans and Fascists in the wheat field, where an analogy with Homeric combats is unequivocally driven home by having ‘‘real’’ ancient Greek soldiers rise—and fight—from the brown ears in the midday heat of the rolling Tuscan countryside. This is realism, to be sure; but a universal one.

Biography Born: Vittorio, September 20, 1929, and Paolo, November 8, 1931, in San Miniato (Pisa). The children of an anti-Fascist lawyer who was persecuted under Fascism, in the immediate post-WWII years the Tavianis attended Pisa University (Vittorio in law, Paolo in lettere, liberal arts) and had a revelatory encounter with cinema in viewing Roberto Rossellini’s neorealist Paisa` (1946). In Pisa, they met Valentino Orsini, with whom they directed various documentaries. During the 1950s they moved to Rome, where they live. Their first notice occurred with a film they made with Orsini— Un uomo da bruciare, 1962, Critics’ Prize at Venice—but international fame came with Padre padrone (Golden Palm at Cannes in 1977, when Rossellini presided over the jury shortly before his death) and La notte di San Lorenzo (Jury Grand Prize at Cannes and 5 David di Donatello in 1982; U.S. Film Critics award in 1983). They were also awarded a Golden Lion for their career (Venice, 1986) and won the Moscow Film Festival with Resurrezione (2002). They work together on all aspects of their filmmaking, and when they shoot, they alternate behind the camera, each refraining from influencing the other’s takes. CARLO TESTA Selected Works Films Un uomo da bruciare, 1962, codirected with Valentino Orsini. I fuorilegge del matrimonio, 1963, codirected with Valentino Orsini. I sovversivi (The Subversives), 1967. Sotto il segno dello Scorpione (Under the Sign of Scorpio), 1969. San Michele aveva un gallo (St. Michael Had a Rooster, based on Tolstoy’s Divine and Human), 1971. Allonsanfa´n (Allons enfants), 1974. Padre padrone (based on the novel by Gavino Ledda), 1977.

Il prato (The Meadow, inspired by Goethe’s Werther), 1978. La notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of the Shooting Stars), 1982. Kaos (based on four novellas by Pirandello), 1984. Good Morning Babilonia (Good Morning, Babylon), 1987. Il sole anche di notte (Night Sun, based on Tolstoy’s novella Father Sergius), 1990. Fiorile, 1993. Le affinita` elettive (Elective Affinities, based on Goethe’s novel), 1996. Tu ridi (You’re Laughing, inspired by a selection of Pirandello’s novellas), 1998. Resurrezione (Resurrection, based on Tolstoy’s novel), 2001. Luisa Sanfelice (based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas pe`re), 2004.

Screenplays I fuorilegge del matrimonio, edited by Edoardo Bruno, Rome: Biblioteca di Filmcritica, 1963. San Michele aveva un gallo, Allonsanfan, edited by Salvatore Piscicelli, Bologna: Cappelli, 1974. Padre padrone, edited by Mino Argentieri, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. Sotto il segno dello scorpione, Il prato, edited by Bruno Torri, Turin: ERI, 1981. Good Morning Babylon, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987. Kaos, Mantua: Circolo del cinema, 1997. Tu ridi, Mantua: Circolo del cinema, 1999.

Further Reading Accialini, Fulvio, and Lucia Coluccelli, Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1979. Aristarco, Guido, Sotto il segno dello scorpione: Il cinema dei fratelli Taviani, Messina and Florence: G. D’Anna, 1978. Bertellini, Giorgio (editor), The Cinema of Italy, LondonNew York: Wallflower Press, 2004. Callegari, Giuliana, and Nuccio Lodato (editors), Ragione, trasparenza, utopia: Il cinema dei fratelli Taviani, Pavia: Quaderni di documentazione—Amministrazione provinciale di Pavia, 1977. Camerino, Vincenzo, and Antonio Tarsi, Dialettica dell’utopia: Il cinema di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Manduria (Taranto), Lacaita Editore, 1978. Cuccu, Lorenzo, The Cinema of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani: Nature, Culture and History Revealed by Two Tuscan Masters, Rome: Gremese, 2001. De Poli, Marco, Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Milan: Moizzi, 1977. De Santi, Pier Marco, I film di Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Rome: Gremese, 1988. Ferrucci, Riccardo (editor), La bottega Taviani: Un viaggio nel cinema da San Miniato a Hollywood, Florence: La Casa Usher, 1987. Ferrucci, Riccardo, and Patrizia Turini, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani: Poetry of the Italian Landscape, Rome: Gremese, 1995. Gili, Jean A., Paolo et Vittorio Taviani: Entretien au pluriel, Arles: Institut Lumie`re—Editions Actes Sud, 1993. Legrand, Ge´rard, Paolo et Vittorio Taviani, Paris: Editions des Cahiers du Cine´ma, 1990.

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PAOLO AND VITTORIO TAVIANI Marcus, Millicent, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Marcus, Millicent, Filmmaking By the Book: Italian Cinema and Literary Adaptation, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Orto, Nuccio, La notte dei desideri: Il cinema dei fratelli Taviani, Palermo: Sellerio, 1987.

Testa, Carlo, Italian Cinema and Modern European Literatures, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002. Testa, Carlo, Masters of Two Arts, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Torri, Bruno (editor), Paolo e Vittorio Taviani, Rome: Quaderni di Cinecitta` Estero, 1990.

TEATRO GROTTESCO When the debate over the future of the theater and its contemporary function broke out in Italy around 1920, numerous dramatists and intellectuals participated, including Cesare Vico Lodovici (1885–1968), who was very close to Luigi Pirandello (Pirandello in fact opened the debate during a conference in Venice in July of 1923). Lodovici theorizes the birth of a ‘‘new theater,’’ coinciding with the great season of ‘‘the grotesque,’’ in an article that appeared in the journal Comoedia on 20 July 1926, titled Le nuove forme del teatro contemporaneo (New Forms of Contemporary Theatre). Pirandello’s novel Il Fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904) represents a fundamental model of the theater of the grotesque. The theme of adultery is at the centre of these works, a theme brought to light in the theatrical version of Cavalleria Rusticana (1884) by Giovanni Verga. Indeed, in the essays Un critico fantastico (A Fantastic Critic), found in Arte e scienza (Art and Science, 1908) and L’umorismo (On Humour, 1908), Pirandello identifies Alberto Cantoni (1841–1904) as the principal precursor of the grotesque. Cantoni theorizes a new genre of humour, ‘‘modern humour,’’ based on the contamination of comic and tragic elements. He is thus defined as a ‘‘fantastic critic,’’ a ‘‘humourist’’ capable of using the weapon of criticism to identify the tragic essence concealed by the disturbed smile provoked by humorous situations. Furthermore, according to Lodovici, the comedian, tied to the French traditions of the Pochade and of Vaudeville, has three physiognomies: ‘‘the ironical,’’ ‘‘the paradoxical,’’ and ‘‘the intimist.’’ In the article, he uses the term ‘‘grotesque’’ explicitly. In art history, in fact, the ‘‘grotesque’’ is a type of painting in which vegetable themes, human figures, and animals are 1848

intertwined to create disturbing figures with deformed characteristics. It is thus a pictorial genre, inspired by murals found on ancient Roman monuments. Defining the theater of the grotesque poses several problems: It is difficult to pinpoint its development chronologically, and equally challenging to identify authors who have adhered to it. Its date of birth might be fixed as 31 May 1916, when Luigi Chiarelli’s La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face) was performed at the Teatro Argentina in Rome. Chiarelli’s work synthesizes the dramaturgical and thematic choices of his predecessors. Avant-garde theater, for example, introduces the use of marionettes and puppets in works such as Ubu Roi (King Ubu, 1888) by Alfred Jarry or Roi Bombance (King Baldoria, 1905) by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; these are destined to become an important presence in the theater of the grotesque. Several Italian writers, such as Luigi Antonelli (1882–1942) and Enrico Cavacchioli (1886–1954), adhere to this theatrical current. They treat typically grotesque themes in several successful pieces, before moving toward new artistic forms. The season of the grotesque in fact lasts only a few years: It is an ephemeral fashion, the residues of which, however, will flourish in writers who are not truly writers of the grotesque, including Pier Maria Rosso di S. Secondo and Pirandello. In Il teatro grottesco (Grotesque Theatre), which appears in his Studi sul teatro contemporaneo (Studies of Contemporary Theatre, 1923), Adriano Tilgher writes that the theater of the grotesque is characterized by a mixture of comic and tragic tones that provoke a bitter smile from the audience. Along with the ‘‘deformity and obscenity of the social mask,’’ it lays bare the misery of the human

TEATRO GROTTESCO condition. In effect from the time of its appearance, the grotesque aims at deforming the characteristics of traditional bourgeois theater, transforming passionate love stories (with, at their centre, classical adultery) into tragic-comic situations, which have, as protagonists, characters who do not know how to control their passions. They are thus reduced to the status of mere ‘‘marionettes,’’ unable to impose reason on reality. For this, according to Tilgher, the art of the grotesque is an artistic answer to the crisis of values that came about during World War I, an answer present in the theater of Jevreinov with the play Cio` che piu` importa (That Which Is Most Important), staged on 29 May 1925 by Pirandello. In this play, Tilgher sees the portrayal of the fundamental problem of the grotesque, the ‘‘relationship between dream and reality, between pretence and truth.’’ Thus the theater of the grotesque is inserted into contemporary European theater, since in Jevreinov the theme of the ‘‘masque’’ and the renunciation of realism converge in a grotesque theater of caricature. The same marionette-like tendency is also underlined by Silvio D’Amico in his Teatro dei fantocci (Puppet Theatre, 1920), where he is influenced by the grand-guignol and its ‘‘gloomy farces.’’ But literary critic Gino Gori provides the most organic definition of the theater of the grotesque: He finds a characteristic common to all the writers, a tendency toward the absurd and the irrational by which bourgeois theater is unhinged. In the volume Il grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura (The Grotesque in Art and Literature, 1926), Gori also clarified the polyvalent nature of the grotesque by distinguishing the tragic, the ironic, the lyrical and the decorative. It is an artistic expression distinct from both the comic and the tragic in its outright rejection of the rational component that exists in both of these. The most important authors of the theater of the grotesque have written widely varying plays. In Luigi Antonelli, lyrical and fantastic tones prevail, while in Cavacchioli, the taste for paradox reigns. Antonelli rises to fame thanks to L’uomo che incontro` se stesso (The Man Who Met Himself, 1918), performed 23 May 1918 at the Teatro Olimpia in Milan. The conventional, bourgeois structure of comedy is put aside in order to create a ‘‘fantastic humour.’’ In effect the plot is not at all realistic: The protagonist, Luciano, believes he has married an honest woman, but his wife Sonia dies during an earthquake and her body is discovered in the arms of her lover, Rambaldo. After many years, Luciano arrives on a mysterious island where he meets

Doctor Climt, a wizard-scientist (a typical character in the theater of the grotesque), who offers him the possibility of reliving his past. Luciano meets himself as a young man and tries to uncover Sonia’s deceit. But all is in vain: In the end, Luciano leaves the island dissatisfied at not having been able to change his past. Antonelli confirms his propensity to the fantastic in his successive work La fiaba dei tre Maghi (The Fable of the Three Wizards, 1919). The protagonists, the Wizard of Truth, the Wizard of Justice and the Wizard of Poetry, come to the world of men and find it vulgar and corrupt. As a result, they decide to govern it for three days; on the first day the Wizard of Truth will govern, on the second, Justice and on the third, Poetry. Over the course of the first two days the other characters (Gaspare, Barbara and Osvaldo), living according to Justice and Truth, find themselves in a state of crisis, from which they are saved only thanks to the Wizard of Poetry. In this way, Antonelli exalts the role of poetry, the only thing able to render human existence bearable. L’uccello del Paradiso (The Bird of Paradise) by Cavacchioli is performed on 19 March at the Teatro Carignano in Turin by the company of Virgilio Talli. The plot is not original (a typical bourgeois comedy with the usual adultery at its centre). A professor is abandoned by his wife, and after many years, she returns to him accompanied by her lover. This latter falls in love with Donatella, the professor’s daughter, but the mother, Anna, saves her and impedes the realization of the amorous relationship. The presence of the raisonneur, a sort of philosophical puppeteer who governs the destiny of men reduced to puppets, is typically ‘‘grotesque.’’ It is a figure central in the theater of Pirandello. In Quella che t’assomiglia (She Who Resembles You, 1919), the protagonist is a fortune teller, Leonardo, who lives a tormented erotic relationship with Gabriella, who will in the end return to her blind husband, Gabriele. Cavacchioli at last arrives at the form of the grotesque fable in his Pinocchio innamorato (Pinocchio in Love) and Pierrot impiegato del lotto (Pierrot, Clerk of the Lottery, 1925). He preferred, however, that his theater be defined as ‘‘new Grotesque or of the vision,’’ based upon his refusal of the ‘‘usual scenic angles’’ and the theme of adultery. The usual nihilist vision is also at the base of a pie´ce by Fausto Maria Martini (1866–1931), Il Fiore sotto gli occhi (The Flower Under the Eyes, 1921). In reality, all is in vain; men are mere puppets, slaves to a senseless destiny. Alessandro De Stefani (1891–1970), who writes comedy of 1849

TEATRO GROTTESCO Pirandellian inspiration and of the grotesque, impresses this notion in around 1925, in particular in I pazzi sulla Montagna (The Madmen on the Mountain, 1925). The protagonist, Arlecchino, is a madman who organizes a revolt in a lunatic asylum, and presents himself as a magician and demiurgo-regisseur. He belongs to that special category of raisonneurs, able to make rationality explode from the inside by revealing the paradoxical consequences that follow from applying his principles to the facts of ‘‘life.’’ This explains why his main desire is to dream, to assume the role of his chosen mask, even to the point of speaking in the dialect of Bergamo. The theater of the grotesque is the expression of a widespread, national need for theatrical renewal, a need that affirms itself when the subjects of bourgeois dramaturgy (adultery, in the first place) seem tired. The young writers who fuel it are anchored to their vision of a disenchanted world, highly critical of rationality and the myth of progress fueled by bourgeois culture. Instead, they bitterly criticise dominant social conventions; beginning with matrimony, they illustrate the absurdity of such rules, and show how man, caged by convention, suffers from his loss of freedom. The writers of the grotesque are in fact unable to find any positive way out: The senseless destiny of men is to be suffocated by social conventions or, alternatively, to become a slave to passion. Man tries in vain to rebel, but is ultimately unable to overthrow his condition as a ‘‘marionette.’’ This portrait of contemporary man is the one illustrated by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1876), the result of the coexistence of the Dionysian urge, ruled by instinctive passions, and the Apollonian one, that attempts to establish order and harmony where chaos reigns. The subject, therefore, seems to be divided into two components in perennial conflict (reason–passion), and the writers of the grotesque, overturning the reassuring picture of man conceived as a ‘‘rational animal,’’ aim to dramatize these irrational, contradictory impulses of the subject. Thus in grotesque theater, there appear fantastic and bizarre situations that do not conform to everyday reality. Puppets and marionettes illustrate the vices of contemporary man, who is subjected to an exhausting process of mechanisation that reduces him to a spiritless puppet. In Freudian terms, it is a theater in which the subject’s obsessions are made

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manifest in a hallucinatory atmosphere, in a carnival-like world turned upside down. It is not by chance, in the works of Antonelli and Cavacchioli in particular, that the dimension of the fantastic dream and of magic clearly prevails over realism. ALFREDO SGROI Further Reading Antonelli, Luigi, Teatro, edited by Luciano Paesani, Montesilvano: Associazione Culturale del libro abruzzese, 2001. Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Pupi, marionette, robots tra futurismi e pirandellismi,’’ in Anna Bonacci e la drammaturgia sommersa degli anni 30–50, edited by Anna T. Ossani, Pesaro: Metauro, 2003. Bottoni, Luciano, Storia del teatro italiano, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Calendoli, Giovanni, La suggestione del grottesco, Padua: Delta Tre, 1976. Cavacchioli, Enrico, L’uccello del paradiso e altri drammi rappresentati, edited by Giancarlo Sammartano, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. D’Amico, Silvio, Il teatro dei fantocci, Florence: Vallecchi, 1920. Ferrante, Luigi, Teatro italiano grottesco, Bologna: Cappelli, 1964. Francalanza, Margherita, ‘‘Il tempo che si ammala: sperimentalismo visionario ed equivoco del grottesco nella drammaturgia di Enrico Cavacchioli,’’ in Syculorum Gimnasium, 1–2 (2002): 409–418. Giammarco, Marilena, Luigi Antonelli: la scrittura della dispersione, Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Gori, Gino, Il grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura, Rome: Stock, 1926. Grazioli, Cristina, Lo specchio grottesco, Marionette e automi nel teatro tedesco del primo 900, Padua: Esedra editrice, 1999. Livio, Gigi, Il teatro in rivolta, Milan: Mursia, 1976. Livio, Gigi, La scena italiana. Materiali per una storia dello spettacolo dell’Otto e Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1989. Lodovici, Cesare Vico, ‘‘Le nuove forme del teatro contemporaneo,’’ in Comoedia, 5 (July 1926): 9–10. Pirandello, Luigi, Arte e scienza, Rome: Modes Editore, 1908. Pirandello, Luigi, L’umorismo, Lanciano: Carabba, 1908. Puppa, Paolo, Dalle parti di Pirandello, Rome: Bulzoni, 1987. Salsano, Roberto, L’immagine e la smorfia. Rosso di S. Secondo e dintorni, Rome: Bulzoni, 2001. Sgroi, Alfredo, Rose lubriche e telefoni pallidi. La scena plurale di Alessandro De Stefani, Rome: Bulzoni, 2003. Taviani, Ferdinando, Uomini di scena. Uomini di libro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Tilgher, Adriano, Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, Rome: Libreria di scienze e lettere, 1923.

BONAVENTURA TECCHI

BONAVENTURA TECCHI (1896–1968) The work of novelist, Germanist, and critic Bonaventura Tecchi is marked by variety and richness. The author of a remarkable number of essays, novels, and autobiographical works, his many literary interests ranged from creative writing to Italian literature and German Romanticism. Tecchi served as a volunteer in World War I. He was captured and imprisoned in the Celle Lager near Hamburg, where he met Ugo Betti and Carlo Emilio Gadda, with whom he formed a friendship that would last for decades. There, too, Tecchi had his first encounter with German literature. He read everything the small prison library offered, taking a special interest in Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (1797) and Arturo Farinelli’s Il romanticismo in Germania (1911). After the war, he earned a degree in Italian literature with a thesis on Ugo Foscolo, later published as Il dramma del Foscolo (Foscolo’s Drama, 1927). He traveled extensively in Germany, Switzerland, and Czechoslovakia, continuing his studies in German literature. As director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux between 1925 and 1931, he was in Florence where he came in contact with the circle of intellectuals associated with the journal Solaria. The poetics advocated by the Solaria group influenced his first collections of short stories, Il nome sulla sabbia (The Name on the Sand, 1924) and Il vento tra le case (The Wind among the Houses, 1928), in which he offers short autobiographical narrations characterized by an intense lyricism and an openness to memory. Nonetheless, these works also display some of the pivotal elements of Tecchi’s own poetics, namely anguish over the mystery of life, grief over the disconnection between the real and the ideal, and a solipsistic perception of existence. As the epigraph of Il nome sulla sabbia, ‘‘Uscire dal carcere di se stesso’’ (exiting the prison of oneself), clearly suggests, he was also attempting to dispel these feelings and to overcome his isolation by opening himself to others. Both in his fictional and autobiographical writings, Tecchi sought to expose the evils in the world and to explore the constant struggle between the desire for harmony and the search for solitude. In 1935, he published his first novel, I Villatauri (The

Villatauris), in which he developed the themes of a previous short story into an extended narrative. Critics were not receptive to this experiment and Tecchi returned to shorter fiction with La Signora Ernestina (1936) and Idilli moravi (Moravian Idylls, 1939). Indeed he achieved remarkable results in the short-story form, particularly in his descriptions of natural scenery and his portraits of women and children. Tecchi believed in the profound ethical function of literature, in representing human dilemmas and tribulations in order to expose the vices and sins of the world. For example, in Giovani amici (Young Friends, 1940) evil takes the form of egoism, individualism, and incommunicability; in Valentina Velier (1950), the protagonist’s selfishness and her withdrawal into her own grief are shown to be common ills that can be combated by unselfish love. Finally, in Gli onesti (The Honest Ones, 1965), perhaps Tecchi’s best-known work, the dialectic of good and evil is dramatized in the relationship between two brothers who personify opposite conceptions of life: One is selfish, cruel, and unable to communicate with the rest of the world, while the other is open to the good in any situation. Here, however, Tecchi’s agenda spoils the artistic result, as the narration suffers from the excessive dichotomy between the two protagonists. In Gli egoisti (The Egoists, 1959), his most successful work, Tecchi succeeded in presenting his poetics while respecting the dramatic integrity of the narration. The novel is a profound analysis of human life, a reflection on loneliness, incommunicability, and egotism. Tecchi finds a solution in the unselfish, altruistic love taught in the Gospels. It is not by accident, then, that his last autobiographical work is entitled Il senso degli altri (The Sense of Others, 1968). In this collection of essays and autobiographical pieces produced between 1945 and 1966, Tecchi meditates on his art and his life, and concludes by affirming once again that openness to others is the only possible remedy for existential sufferings.

Biography Born in Bagnoregio (Viterbo), on 11 February 1896. Volunteer in World War I, wounded in 1851

BONAVENTURA TECCHI February 1918, hospitalized in Rastatt (Germany). Prisoner in Celle Lager camp, south of Hamburg, June-December 1918. Degree in Italian literature at the University of Rome with Vittorio Rossi, thesis on Ugo Foscolo, 1920. Lived in Berlin, 1922–1923, then in Switzerland, 1924. Director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence, 1925–1931. Lecturer then visiting professor of Italian at the universities of Brno and Bratislava, 1933–1939. Professor of German language and literature at the University of Padua, 1939–1943. Arrested by the Germans, October 1943 on suspicion of hiding Italian deserters. Professor of German literature at the University of Rome, 1943–1968. Director of the Italian Institute of German Studies and Institute of Modern Philology at the University of Rome, 1960–1968. Awarded the Premio Bagutta and Premio Bancarella for Gli egoisti, 1960. Died in Rome, 30 March 1968. BARBARA GARBIN

Nonfiction Wackenroder, 1927. Il dramma del Foscolo, 1927. Maestri ed amici, 1934. Scrittori tedeschi del ’900, 1941. Carossa, 1947. L’arte di Thomas Mann, 1956. Officina segreta, 1957. Scrittori tedeschi moderni, 1959. Romantici tedeschi, 1959. Mo¨rike, 1962. Le fiabe di E.T.A. Hoffmann, 1962. Svevia, terra di poeti, 1964. Goethe scrittore di fiabe, 1966. Goethe in Italia, 1967. Il senso degli altri, 1968. Svevi minori, 1975.

Memoirs Baracca 15 C, 1961. Taccuini del 1918: sulla letteratura e sull’arte, edited by Franco Lanza, 1991.

Letters Epistolario (with Manara Valgimigli), edited by Silvana Marini and Alberto Raffaelli, 2005.

Translations

Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Arnoldo Bocelli, Milan: Bompiani, 1974.

Fiction Il nome sulla sabbia, 1924. Il vento tra le case, 1928. Tre storie d’amore, 1931. I Villatauri, 1935. La signora Ernestina, 1936. Idilli moravi, 1939. Giovani amici, 1940. La vedova timida, 1942. Un’estate in campagna, 1945. L’isola appassionata, 1945; enlarged edition, 1961. La presenza del male, 1947. Valentina Velier, 1950. Luna a ponente, 1955. Storie di bestie, 1957. Gli egoisti, 1959; as The Egoists: a Novel, translated by Dennis Chamberlin, 1964. Storie di alberi e di fiori, 1963. Gli onesti, 1965. Antica terra, 1967. La terra abbandonata, 1970. Resistenza dei sogni, 1977. La grazia sottile, edited by Geno Pampaloni, 1991.

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Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Scritti di poesia e di estetica, 1934. Hans Carossa, Adolescenza, 1935. Paul Alverdas, La stanza dei fischiatori, 1940. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sette liriche di Goethe, 1949.

Further Reading Amoroso, Giuseppe, Itinerari stilistici di Tecchi, Florence: Le Monnier, 1970. Amoroso, Giuseppe, Tecchi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976. Belski, Franca, Bonaventura Tecchi e le novelle goethiane, Milan: LED, 2003. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca (editor), Bonaventura Tecchi: classico e moderno, Rome: Officina, 1996. Caira Lumetti, Rossana M., and Daniele Ferrara (editors), Bonaventura Tecchi: scrittore e germanista, Rome: Studium, 1999. De Tommaso, Pietro, Bonaventura Tecchi, Ravenna: Longo, 1971. Marini, Silvana, Tecchiana: Bibliografia degli scritti di e su Bonaventura Tecchi, Ravenna: Longo, 1980. Orilia, Salvatore, Bonaventura Tecchi, Palermo: Flaccovio, 1965. Pancrazi, Pietro, Italiani e stranieri, Milan: Mondadori, 1957. Pischedda, Giuseppe, Bonaventura Tecchi, L’Aquila: Japadre, 1967. Sicari, Carmelina, Bonaventura Tecchi, Reggio Calabria: Parallelo 38, 1968.

TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE

TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE The first technological object to capture the attention of the modern Italian literary community was the hot-air balloon. Its surprising appearance in Parisian skies in June of 1783 was immediately heralded by Vincenzo Monti, in his ode ‘‘Al Signor di Montgolfier’’ (To Signor Montgolfier, 1784), as a ‘‘portento’’ (wonder) generated by contemporary ‘‘chimica’’ (chemistry). It was an historic phenomenon so suggestive that it bears comparison with the mythical voyage of the Argonauts, and has been remembered over time as the greatest triumph of a science which, according to the poet, would alone have the task of procuring men’s immortality. Giuseppe Parini, who dedicated a 1784 sonnet ‘‘Alla macchina aerostatica’’ (To the Aerostatic Machine), also considered the hot-air balloon a marvelous contraption to which he would proclaim with pride, ‘‘e col fumo nel grembo e al piede il foco,/ salgo per l’aria e mi confido al vento.’’ (and with smoke in my lap and fire at my feet,/ I rise in the air and entrust myself to the wind). Unlike Monti, however, Parini did not declare himself unequivocally convinced of the positive effects of the invention. In his view, each discovery can be appreciated only if it contributes to the happiness of humanity. As long as the conquest of the skies resulted in damages and disasters, the instrument that rendered this conquest possible should be considered fascinating but still sinister ‘‘segno di stolta impotenza’’ (sign of foolish impotence). Thus were formed the two perspectives from which, for many decades, the Italian literary community considered technological novelty. On the one hand, theirs was an enthusiastic gaze, concerned above all with using the art of the word to attribute mythological meanings to machines ever-more representative of scientific progress. On the other, it was a fundamentally skeptical gaze, still anchored to representing these machines in critical terms, valorizing their social significance according to a more or less traditional Humanist philosophy. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Giacomo Leopardi’s thought, as evidenced in several notes in the Zibaldone (1898), appears to adhere radically to the second of these positions. But Leopardi employs a rigorous dialectic not often used by contemporary Italian poets. In his opinion,

as he writes on 23 April 1821, the invention of firearms is not only deplorable for the deaths it provoked, but primarily because, after their appearance, ‘‘l’energia che prima avevano gli uomini si trasporto` alle macchine, e si trasformarono in macchine gli uomini’’ (the energy that man had at first was transferred to the machines, and men also turned into machines). Considering more recent mechanical devices that help construct the first railroads, or the technological marvels promised by Alessandro Volta’s discovery of electricity, Leopardi’s bitterly ironic poetry dissolves their novelty (as in the Palinodia al Marchese Gino Capponi, 1835), revealing the advances to be nothing more than privileged objects of journalistic interest, the theme of the ‘‘magnifiche sorti e progressive’’ (magnificent progressive destiny) that should redeem humanity. They formed part of a carefully orchestrated campaign, he believed, to convince people that the miracles of technology would forever save them from conflicts of war and thirst for economic power. Fewer than 30 years later, in the very different climate of the newborn reign of Italy, Giosue` Carducci believed the railroad to be a new angel, bringing the light of the modern era. His ‘‘scandalous’’ hymn A Satana (To Satan, 1863), defines the railroad as ‘‘un bello e orribile / mostro’’ (a beautiful and horrible / monster), and exalts it as a supreme symbol of divinity, intended in the positivistic sense: It is the absolute synthesis of ‘‘material e spirito / ragione e senso’’ (substance and spirit / reason and sense). The locomotive is the ‘‘carro del fuoco’’ (fire wagon) beneficial for all men. In it burns the same Luciferan flame that Catholic obscurantism had attempted to extinguish in the medieval period, and which, according to Carducci, had again begun to shine in the protest of Martin Luther and in the witches’ Sabbath. For the writers of the Scapigliatura, the new railroads that crossed Italy were a privileged symbol of contemporary technology. With his 1878 collection of poetry, Trasparenze (Transparencies), Emilio Praga entrusted a composition entitled ‘‘La strada ferrata’’ (The Railway) with the mission of expressing his poetics and the tormented ideological vision of the literary movement of which he was leader. In his opinion, the train can be 1853

TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE considered the new, biblical ‘‘arca di pace’’ (ark of peace) that contains the mystery of a new evangelical pact between God and men: ‘‘non piu` stragi di popoli in guerra,/ non piu` schiavi di avaro lavor!’’ (no longer the destruction of a population at war,/ no longer slaves of avaricious work!). Thus, the work of the modern poet should be that of addressing the poor and uneducated and of becoming the kind, persuasive relater of such a message. It is a message that the poet considers ‘‘sacrosanct,’’ but which, he adds, cannot exempt him from reflecting on a further effect brought by the railways, that is the changes impressed on the national landscape, perhaps obliterating ancient monuments and entire natural habitats: ‘‘un ridotto di terra alzo` la fronte/ e questo e` il nostro fulgido orizzonte’’ (a piece of earth raised its forehead/ and this is our shining horizon). The Scapigliato writer, who proclaimed himself a lover of old Gothic convents and of the ‘‘pace de’ campi pensosa,’’ (thoughtful peace of the fields) was certainly not disposed to accept without regret the geometric panoramas designed by the roadbeds of the railroad, although he realized that the triumph of technology could radically change man’s aesthetic perception of the world. Machines and industry distort the conventional design of the landscape, and succeed in creating an artificial cosmos that in its turn is able to redraw, often crudely, the body and destiny of the individual. This is what happens to the young female worker, Carboneta, sung in verses in ‘‘I pitochi’’ (The Beggars, 1897), a dialect poem by Veronese writer Berto Barbarani (1872–1945). Driven by necessity, the young Carboneta lives a tragic odyssey amongst the material and social ‘‘gears’’ of the spinning mill that mutilates her physical and moral integrity: ‘‘Maledetta filanda! A passo a passo / quell’ingranaggio che l’onore le ha tolto, / quell’ingranaggio le ha carpito un braccio!’’ (Damned spinning mill! That cogwheel that took her honor, / that cogwheel seized her arm!). Alternatively, in the novel Gli ammonitori (The Ones Who Warn, 1903) by Giovanni Cena (1870– 1917), the typographer Martino Stanga is the victim of the changes propitiated by the company for which he works when machines such as the linotype and the monotype are introduced. The machines chain him to the crossroads between unemployment and political extremism, an extremism capable of delivering the most ambiguous of results. Crossing the threshold into the twentieth century, Italian culture was tormented above all by a new problem, that of attempting to adapt the contents and expressive forms of traditional artistic 1854

languages to the widespread presence of new technological instruments. In the volume La nuova arma (la macchina) (The New Arm [The Car, 1905]), philosopher Mario Morasso compares Nike of Samothrace and a race car in order to observe how this latter (like the former) constitutes a ‘‘complesso di sagome, di linee, di forme’’ (complex mix of shadows, lines, and forms) which, rendered vibrant by the ‘‘battito concitato del motore’’ (excited beat of the motor), could be considered the perfect symbol of a fresh ‘‘estetica della velocita`’’ (aesthetic of speed). And, on the basis of similar considerations, he invites modern literary Italians to find a ‘‘fraseggiare da ingegnere meccanico’’ (phrasing a´ la` mechanical engineer) permeated by ‘‘termini tecnici’’ (technical terms). Five years later, a novel by Gabriele D’Annunzio in certain ways proved him right. In Forse che sı`, forse che no (Maybe Yes, Maybe No, 1910), the protagonist Paolo Tarsis (without excessively indulging mere linguistic technicalities ‘‘da ingegnere’’ (of an engineer) displays a most passionate adherence to the ‘‘heroic’’ aesthetic of the speed of the automobile. To the ‘‘rossa macchina precipitosa’’ (hasty red car) with its ‘‘rombo guerresco’’ (war-like rumble), in the end he prefers the new competitive airplanes, ‘‘l’ordigno dedaleo’’ (Dedalean device) capable of triumphing not simply over time and space, but also over ‘‘peso’’ (weight). According to D’Annunzio, if on the one hand modern technology is welcomed without vainly indulging traditionalist nostalgia, on the other hand it is ‘‘ennobled,’’ valorized, through the use of traditional mythological symbolism. And if the automobile, incapable of beating the forces of gravity, remains on the ground (linked to the ‘‘feminine’’ dimension of material bodies), only the sky-bound airplane is an instrument worthy of the longing for infinity that should characterize authentic ‘‘masculine’’ spirituality. These distinctions were of little interest to Futurism, the first artistic movement to promote, in Italy and abroad, an aesthetic creation inspired by the cardinal elements of modern technological civilization. In his 1909 Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti revisits and resolves without hesitation the question posed by Morasso: ‘‘Un automobile da corsa [...] e` piu` bello della Vittoria di Samotracia.’’ (A race car [...] is more beautiful than the Victory at Samothrace). For the Futurists, as Umberto Boccioni writes in Pittura, scultura futuriste (Futurist Painting, Sculpture, 1914), ‘‘aver bisogno del vecchio mito significa esteriorizzare il mondo nell’ormai logora fabbricazione d’immagini

TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE e non viverlo in identita`’’ (needing the old myth signifies exteriorizing the world in the by now worn-out fabrication of images, and not living it in identity). It is necessary, then, not to submit technology to the judgment of an aged mythological form of thinking, but to submit every individual to the teachings of mechanical devices. The task of the artist and the writer is, for Marinetti, that of ‘‘preparare l’imminente e inevitabile identificazione dell’uomo col motore, facilitando e perfezionando uno scambio incessante d’intuizione, di ritmo, d’istinto e di disciplina metallica’’ (preparing the imminent and inevitable identification of man with the motor, facilitating and perfecting an unceasing exchange of intuition, of rhythm, of instinct and of metallic discipline) (L’uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina, 1910). From this comes the predilection for onomatopoeia, the desire to reproduce industrial sirens, the rumble of motors or crackle of machine guns. And from this stems the utopia of writing free words whose compositional norms seek to closely follow the dry and plastic functioning of mechanical joints: ‘‘Bisogna distruggere la sintassi disponendo i sostantivi a caso [...]. Si deve usare il verbo all’infinito, perche´ si adatti elasticamente al sostantivo [...]. Si deve abolire l’aggettivo, perche´ il sostantivo nudo conservi il suo colore essenziale’’ (We must destroy syntax, using nouns randomly [...]. We must use the infinitives of verbs, so that they adapt elastically to the nouns [...]. We must abolish adjectives, so that the nude noun conserves its essential color) (Marinetti, Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista, 1912). In short, prose and poetry that subjectively describe technological products no longer make sense: Instead, the ‘‘pure’’ material perfection of the product is converted into a mechanism of writing appropriate to the time. But it is against the exaltation of the machine and against the ‘‘aesthetic of speed’’ that Luigi Pirandello raises his voice in the novel, Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator, 1925). According to the author, the most disquieting symbol of modernity can be found in cinematographic technology, a contrivance that ‘‘swallows’’ the life and soul of men-actors, and restores them to men-spectators ‘‘in pezzetti e bocconcini, tutti d’uno stampo, stupidi e precisi’’ (in pieces and bites, all the same, stupid and precise). The films realized by the cinema camera are ‘‘vermi solitari’’ (solitary worms), parasites of humanity. The laboratory in which they are developed resembles ‘‘un ventre nel quale si stia [...] formando una mostruosa gestazione meccanica’’ (a belly in which

a monstrous mechanical gestation is forming). The end of the work bitterly synthesizes the problems connected to the relationship between concrete existence, representative commercialized fiction, and technological reproduction of the real. During the filming of the principal scene of an adventure film, the actor who is supposed to triumph over a tiger is unexpectedly torn to pieces; Serafino Gubbio, ‘‘manovratore’’ (operator) of the ‘‘macchinetta di presa’’ (little movie camera) is paralyzed by the monstrosity of the event and loses his ability to speak, although his hand continues to perform its work. The individual is transformed, as Futurists wanted, into a perfect machine, ‘‘solo, muto e impassibile’’ (alone, mute, and impassive), and society rewards him by paying handsomely for the horrible scene. Italo Svevo affirms a similar point in the pages of La coscienza di Zeno (The Confessions of Zeno, 1923), that ‘‘gli ordigni si comprano, si vendono e si rubano e l’uomo diventa sempre piu` furbo e piu` debole’’ (devices are bought, sold, and stolen and man becomes ever more shrewd and weak). The fierce irony of the concluding pages of the novel yield an analogous conclusion, the visionary omen of an explosive device of incomprehensible power, which, erasing all humanity from the earth, frees the planet of the evil ‘‘legge del possessore del maggior numero di ordigni’’ (law of the possessor of the greatest number of devices). In the cultural climate of the early twentieth century (and in the climate created by Fascism), however, both the provocative pessimism of Pirandello’s and Svevo’s reflections and the radical avant-gardism of Marinetti were isolated phenomena. The erratic attention that writers dedicated to contemporary technology tended above all to slide toward themes of the factory and the conditions of the workers, as in the novels Rube´ (1921) by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, Tre operai (Three Workers, 1924) by Carlo Bernari, Erica e i suoi fratelli (Erica and Her Brothers, 1954) by Elio Vittorini; or in the stories of the collection Il capofabbrica (The Foreman, 1930–1932) by Romano Bilenchi. In other cases, this attention was manifested in curiously significant forms. For example, in the novel by Massimo Bontempelli, ‘‘522’’: Racconto di una giornata (‘‘522’’: Story of a Day, 1926), the author, attributing all of the characteristics of a ‘‘creatura sensitiva e cosciente’’ (‘‘sensitive and conscious creature’’) to an automobile, drives for a day around the roads of Italy, registering ‘‘emotions,’’ primarily explained with the motto, ‘‘Viaggiando il mondo in automobile, si vedono molte cose belle 1855

TECHNOLOGY AND LITERATURE e meravigliose’’ (traveling the world by automobile, one sees beautiful and marvelous things). Essentially, Bontempelli’s thinking vehicle is not the stupefying ‘‘monster’’ of luxury dear to the Futurists: It is the most recent series released on the market by FIAT (the Turinese car factory). He does not intend to impart aesthetic lessons, but creates an infantile and lovingly ‘‘human’’ (and even feminine) character. Artistic writing evaporates into the studied composition of the persuasive advertising message destined for its wide consumer public. After World War II, Italian writers focused primarily on the sociocultural changes in processes of production that means the majority of output was creation of mass-consumed products, rather than concentrated on the latest innovations and the problems that emerge from new technologies. They considered the role of the intellectual in the context of these changes; literature and industry were considered two ineluctable poles that writers of prose and of poetry must confront. And thus to these two poles were dedicated numbers 4 (1961) and 5 (1962) of the journal Il Menabo`, directed by Italo Calvino and Elio Vittorini. The most important intellectuals of the period participated in the debate, alongside its directors of publication: Giuseppe Ungaretti, Franco Fortini, Gianni Scalia, Umberto Eco. According to Vittorini, the writer in the second half of the twentieth century must measure himself against a ‘‘potere tecnico-scientifico’’ (technical-scientific power) that has realized a ‘‘natura-industria’’ (nature-industry). In order to define this ‘‘nature,’’ Calvino evokes the image of the labyrinth, and wishes for ‘‘una letteratura della sfida al labirinto’’ (a literature of a challenge to the labyrinth), a writing able to elevate itself to the cosmic height ‘‘dei piani di conoscenza che lo sviluppo storico’’ (of the planes of awareness of historical development) that technology ‘‘ha messo in moto’’ (set in action). For Ungaretti, atomic devices, electronic calculators, televisions, and space vehicles constitute dreams of omnipotence translated into reality. The poet’s job (as the best avant-garde poets of the twentieth century demonstrate) is to affirm the supremacy of man over the artificial: ‘‘ridare valore sacro alla vita e alla morte’’ (to give back sacred value to life and death). Eco’s vision, already oriented toward perspectives that converge in the artistic ideas of the neo-avant-garde Gruppo ’63, insists on revindicating a style of writing that can express ‘‘nelle sue

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forme aperte e indeterminate gli universi vertiginosi e ipotetici azzardati dall’immaginazione scientifica’’ (the dizzying universes and hypotheses hazarded by scientific imagination in its open and indeterminate forms). This is not, then, an opening of the literary page to a mere presence of technological themes on the level of content, nor are these topics submitted to the judgments of an aged Humanism, nor are they twisted in a style that attempts to imitate the dynamism of the machines. Rather, a ‘‘mutazione genetica’’ (genetic mutation) of expressive forms is necessary, a change that must stem in the suffered, meditated union between authentic processes of artistic awareness and authentic processes of scientific awareness (of that science that is the matrix of technological products, but that cannot be considered solely responsible for their alienated uses). ROBERTO TESSARI Further Reading Ba´rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, and Carlo Ossola (editors), Letteratura e industria, Florence: Olschki, 1997. Bordoni, Carlo, Introduzione alla sociologia della letteratura, Pisa: Pacini, 1974. Castronovo, Valerio (editor), Cento anni di industria, Milan: Electa, 1988. Cerritelli, Claudio (editor), Il mito della velocita`-L’arte e il movimento. Dal futurismo alla video-arte, Mantua: Paolini, 2003. Cioni, Vincenzo, Filosofia e letteratura dell’industrialismo, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Crispolti, Enrico, Il mito della macchina e altri temi del Futurismo, Trapani: Celebes, 1969. Guglielmi, Angelo, Avanguardia e sperimentalismo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964. Lucas, John (editor), Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, London: Methuen and Co., 1971. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Ideologia e linguaggio, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1965. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Poeti e poetiche del primo Novecento, Turin: Giappichelli, 1966. Tessari, Roberto, Il mito della macchina. Letteratura e industria nel primo Novecento italiano, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Tessari, Roberto (editor), Letteratura e industria, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1976. Varotti, Carlo, ‘‘Fabbrica,’’ in Luoghi della letteratura italiana, edited by Gian Mario Anselmi and Gino Ruozzi, Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2003. Vene´, Gianfranco, Il capitale e il poeta. Storia dei rapporti tra il capitalismo e la letteratura italiana dall’Illuminismo a Pirandello, Milan: Sugar, 1972. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780–1950, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961.

TELEVISION

TELEVISION The history of Italian television can be divided into three periods: RAI monopoly (1954–1975); development of commercial networks (1975–1995); development of new technologies and media integrations (1995–). After an experimental phase during the 1930s, Italian television starts regular broadcastings on the January 1, 1954, rather late compared with other European countries. In 1947, the newly formed democratic Parliament confirms the government’s control over the broadcast system, inaugurated under the Fascist regime, and trusts it to RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane). Television continues the structure of national radio: It is a public service (financed by the state and by the viewers through a subscription); only a small revenue comes from advertising. Unlike most European countries, Italy adopts a mixed system of economic support for television: a public structure, financed and controlled by the government, and commercial sponsors. Thus, the history of Italian television is connected to the political and economic life of the country. At its birth, Italy is facing the difficult task of postwar reconstruction after a ventennium of Fascist dictatorship, however, by the late 1950s the fast pacing of industrialization and urbanization promoted the development of communication media. During the first 20 years of its history, Italian television, characterized by the national monopoly of state-controlled RAI, does not need to be financially independent nor competitive with other media. Its programs are designed to ‘‘educate, inform, and entertain’’ the public. This very concept of a public, and not of an audience, implies that both culture and entertainment find a happy balance throughout its programs. RAI does not aim at reaching the masses, yet within ten years it becomes the primary medium in the country not limited to the urban middle classes. In addition to its unifying cultural function, television covers the important linguistic role of standardization, the single and stronger element in the diffusion of ‘‘spoken Italian’’ in the country, eroding the traditional use of dialects at home. Television becomes a key factor in shaping national identities, in more sense than one.

From an institutional point of view, the RAI Direttore Generale (General Manager) is appointed by the government, which was controlled by the Christian Democrats until the 1960s. Because of the educational vocation encouraged by Catholic executives, special attention is given to children’s programs (the so-called TV dei ragazzi), usually scheduled in the afternoon. Children’s programs include documentaries, American films (such as the popular Rin Tin Tin, followed by a series of programs casting adventurous animals like Fury and the Black Stallion), educational programs, variety shows like the ones conducted by Mago Zurlı` (Cino Tortorella), and a national song contest called the Zecchino d’oro, first aired in 1959. But, the big hit of Italian television was Lascia o raddoppia, a quiz show broadcasted from 1955 to 1959, and conducted by an Italian-American, Mike Bongiorno. It was so popular that, on Thursday night, some movie theaters chose not to project films but offer their audience TV sets in order to watch Lascia o raddoppia. This quiz show represents a metaphor of the new dream of social mobility—a broader possibility to gain success and money, through personal efficiency. It is modeled after an American format ($64,000 Question), even though the different typology of questions reveals the Italianization of the American model. The contestants are experts on cultural matters more often than in the American program. Another peculiarity is the length of the program (one hour and a half), the typical length of prime time programming on Italian television, even today. By favoring a longer program, Italian television mimics the theater, with its middle-class habits in the consumption of culture and entertainment. This extension of prime time programming starts with radio, following the traditional standards of entertainment in bourgeois culture, not only in their length but also by avoiding commercial interruptions. The (presupposed) aversion of Italian audiences of the 1950s to advertising introduces us to the most peculiar program of Italian television: Carosello, which starts in 1957 and lasts until 1977. This program comprises four or five shorts, including animated cartoons, musical numbers, or comical sketches of about two minutes each, with a 1857

TELEVISION commercial message in the end, lasting at most 30 seconds. Thus for 20 years on Italian television advertising is limited to a single program, Carosello, which devotes to actual commercial ads only a couple of minutes a day. Carosello is broadcasted after the evening news and before the prime time program, becoming the dividing line for generations of television viewers, because children were expected to go to bed ‘‘after Carosello’’—the new collective clock. When television starts programming in the mid-1950s, Italy is still a rural country and consumption is yet to be developed, thus the television set constitutes a symbolic dividing line between an economy of production and one of consumption. Another prominent television broadcasting of early television, still popular today, is the musical Festival of Sanremo, which had already been a famous radio event (starting in 1951), and has an immensely popular televised edition in 1958, when Domenico Modugno sings Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu), relaunching modern Italian popular music in the world. Thus, early Italian television enacts its ideological project to educate and entertain its public quite literally, with two strong characters: the nationalistic reappropriation of American (or foreign) formats and products, and the modernizing implications. During the 1950s and 1960s television programming has a ritualistic weekly rhythm: a movie on Monday, a quiz show on Thursday, theater on Friday, a variety show on Saturday, and a TV drama (often in episodes) on Sunday. The Saturday night variety shows are quite spectacular, often presenting famous Italian and foreign performers as guests, usually singing or performing live. Shows such as Studio Uno, Giardino d’inverno, and Canzonissima include song and dances, and comedy sketches. They launch several showgirls, engaged both in singing and dancing. But there are strict censorship rules, with more than one pinch of Catholic severity, in relation to dressing: Both the Kessler twin sisters and Raffaella Carra` are stigmatized for their scandalous dancing outfits—and the most famous Italian singer, Mina, is banned from RAI altogether, when she has a child outside wedlock. Sunday night is devoted to fiction, to the sceneggiato, usually an adaptation of classical novels, at the very beginning broadcasted live, as in the prestigious American Live Anthology Dramas. The sceneggiato has high-quality standards: The performers are experienced theater actors, and the sources recognizable national works such as Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi and Riccardo Bacchelli’s Il mulino del Po, or classics such 1858

as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Dickens and Hugo. A later phase sees the popularity of mystery novels in episodes, as the Maigret series adapted from Simenon, casting theater actor Gino Cervi in the lead role. Adaptations are not scheduled on Sundays, but rather American TV series such as Perry Mason, Lucy and I, Twilight Zone, Bonanza, and Doctor Kildare. Theater has its glorious moments too, with important events recorded for television or, more rarely, broadcasted live, thus presenting some of the best performers of the stage, such as Vittorio Gassman, Romolo Valli, Monica Vitti, and Eduardo De Filippo, to a wide audience. In the 1960s, the radio-television system adapts to the economic boom and to the new sociopolitical climate, favored by the center-left government. Under the enlightened leadership of Ettore Bernabei, television opens to investigative journalism and to documentary, but most of all it launches a new channel in 1961. The programs of the Second Channel are not an alternative to the ones on Channel 1, but they serve a complementary function, diversifying programming without competition. And there is no competition between television and other media: Not with the sport arenas, given that no soccer game but that of the national team is broadcasted in its entirety and live; and not with cinema: Films are programmed on days of low theatrical attendance, such as Monday, and only after they finish their commercial cycle. In 1960, a decree of the Constitutional Court confirms the monopoly of television broadcasting to RAI, stating however that it must guarantee equal access to its services for all citizens, and maintain the objectivity of information. The main information service offered by RAI is the evening news or telegiornale. At the beginning the news is read by a speaker or reader, and carefully worded, according to the information transmitted by the state news agency; only in 1967 journalists start writing and reading their own reportages. The telegiornale is by far the more politically controlled program of Italian television, with a careful monitoring of the news, which implies the absence of political opposition and the silence about its actions—practically until the reform of 1975. Only at this time politics enters the small screen with Tribuna politica, a program of interviews and debates with political leaders, characterized by strict rules and the presence of a moderator. Sport programs have also been an important factor in dynamizing television information, developing good journalism in reference to national sports as soccer and cycling. At first, only the second part of a

TELEVISION soccer game is aired, on Sunday evening, without previous announcement of the game selected, in order not to damage the sport arenas. Finally, documentaries have had a decisive impact on RAI informative programming, starting with India (1958) by the great master of Italian neorealism, Roberto Rossellini. The national petrol company, ENI, went as far as to commission a special TV program to famous documentarian Ioris Jvens, entitled L’Italia non e` un paese povero (1960). Throughout the 1960s, Alessandro Blasetti and Rossellini direct several series of historical documentaries, and Michelangelo Antonioni shoots a documentary on China for RAI in 1972. Indeed cultural programming has always been a strong component of the RAI output, with interesting experiments of book reviewing such as Libri per tutti o Tuttolibri, or broader cultural discussions such as Alamanacco and L’Approdo; thus many pre-eminent Italian intellectuals, writers and artists have had a chance to introduce a program or collaborate with RAI. Starting in 1970 RAI began producing films (I recuperanti by Ermanno Olmi, La strategia del ragno by Bernardo Bertolucci, and I clowns by Federico Fellini) and a few years later L’albero degli zoccoli (1978) by Olmi, Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (1979) by Francesco Rosi, and Francesco (1989) by Liliana Cavani, just to mention a few titles. Until the 1970s, the Italian media (press, radio, and cinema) function in harmony, because there is no economic interference; but the advent of cable TV severely alters this balance. In 1971, Tele Biella marks the beginning of commercial broadcasting in Italy, and Slovenian station Capodistria broadcasts in color into Italy. In fact, RAI is rather slow in introducing color: In most European countries, color TV is available since 1967, but Italy adopts it only in 1977. In the meantime, ‘‘private televisions’’ proliferate, in a legislative void about frequencies: Technologies are faster than regulations in Italy. In 1975, a new law regulates the institutional organization of RAI, but does not address the issue of commercial broadcasting. The law establishes that the leadership of RAI is appointed by the Parliament, and not anymore by the government, in order to ensure pluralism and objectivity. It limits advertising to 5% of airtime, in order to protect newspaper publishing, but this provision ends up favoring private television networks, which have no limits in this respect. RAI news programs are divided in political quotas: the Christian Democrats control the most prestigious telegiornale, on the first channel, the Socialists the second. After this political diversification,

the two channels start competing in terms of programming too. This second phase of the history of Italian television is associated with drastic socioeconomic transformations. The country has become quickly industrialized and urbanized—the quickest process of this kind in the developed world. Even if it is not yet an affluent society, the Italy of the mid-1970s is radically different from the postwar country: modern, rich, and quite vivacious media-wise. New private and ‘‘free’’ radios prosper, together with new commercial televisions, creating a new media economy, unregulated as well as unprecedented. RAI reacts to the new situation with contradictory moves. It is by now forced to cast aside its old values and endorse a commercial approach. It innovates its programming with showman Renzo Arbore’s L’altra domenica—a new type of variety show, more sophisticated and original, targeted to younger audiences; and journalist Maurizio Costanzo starts Grand’Italia, the first Italian talk show. However, the most interesting new development relates to fiction: In order to compete with foreign TV series, RAI produced La Piovra, a police serial on the mafia, with good scripts and good actors, creating an Italian product with international sale potential. At the same time, politicized reforms foster an overdose of political partisanship, especially in information programs. And in 1979, RAI starts its third channel, assigning its leadership to a leftist Catholic and the codirection to a Communist journalist. The broadcast news of this channel also includes regional editions. The third channel is responsible for some of the most innovative programs of the latest years, such as the intelligent satire of Tv delle ragazze, and Blob, a rerun of television materials of the day before, with surreal humor. In the private sector, a number of networks bloom: In 1982, publishers Rusconi and Mondadori start respectively ‘‘Italia 1’’ and ‘‘Rete 4,’’ but a process of concentration led to Silvio Berlusconi winning control by 1983–1984 over them both and Canale 5. In 1983, Publitalia, the advertising agency of the Berlusconi networks, overtakes Sipra (the RAI agency). The courts try to stop Berlusconi, but there is no law to support their effort. Commercial networks cannot broadcast news, however, in 1986 Telemontecarlo airs its first telegiornale, mostly with international news, and Channel 5 starts an information program too. In 1990, subsequent to the pressure from the Constitutional Court and the European Commission to regulate the private broadcast sector, there is the approval of a new 1859

TELEVISION ‘‘Television Law,’’ or Legge Mammı`, after several years of deregulation. In terms of antitrust it establishes the maximum ownership of three networks; in reference to advertising, it allows for not more than 12% of air time on RAI, and 18% on the Berlusconi networks. It also allows every national network to present news and to broadcast live. Since the economy of commercial television is based on advertising and a monopolistic control of media sectors, throughout the 1980s Berlusconi had built a media empire by buying film libraries, a film production company (Medusa), a circuit of theaters (Cinema 5), the main Italian publishing house (Mondadori) associated with Blockbuster Video, and department stores (such as Standa), in addition to the Milan Football Club. Old and new films, telefilms and telenovelas constitute the programming of most ‘‘private televisions.’’ The ownership of big film libraries allows the Berlusconi networks to fill their schedule without investing in the production of autonomous television programs. In fact, Italian commercial television makes large use of foreign programs and formats: Latin-American soaps (the so-called telenovelas), Japanese animation from robots to the Smurfs, American sitcoms or TV series, and Dutch formats of reality shows. Educational and cultural programs are prominently absent, but the information services at times are less ‘‘official’’ than RAI’s telegiornali, especially in reporting daily news. Overall, commercial television does not address the people at home as a public but it considers it an audience, to be quantitatively evaluated. Finally, in 1991, the first pay TV, ‘‘Tele+1,’’ starts broadcasting, later followed by analogous services. Therefore in the 1990s there is the birth of a ‘‘new television,’’ as Umberto Eco and Francesco Casetti define it. This new television is the result of numerous technological developments; it implies longer hours of broadcasting, a growing number of domestic TV sets, and of channels, the multiple communicative functions acquired by the TV set, the competition between private and public

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networks, and more advertising on the air. Today television represents the mainstream industrial culture, the principal site for the formation of taste and of cultural vogues, the prime site of entertainment, an information agency for the entire country, and a crucial political arena. While a globalized programming is common to all televisions, the political use of commercial networks seems to be a specificity of the Italian situation. In a vain competition with commercial broadcasting, RAI seems to have blurred its cultural identity, its very traits as a public service, endangering its crucial function in the articulation of national identity. GIULIANA MUSCIO Further Reading Abruzzese, Alberto, Lo splendore della TV: origini e destino del linguaggio audiovisivo, 2nd ed., Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1997. Bettettini, Gianfranco, La nostra televisione, edited by Elena Colombo and Guido Michelone, Milan: Lampi di stampa, 2005. Cardini, Daniela, La lunga serialita` televisiva: origini e modelli, Rome: Carocci, 2004. Casetti, Francesco (editor), Fra me e te. Strategie di coinvolgimento dello spettatore nei programni della Neotelevisione, Turin: RAI/VQPT, 1988. Casetti, Francesco, Communicative Negotiation in Cinema and Television, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 2002. Chiocci, Francesca et al., La grana dell’audio: la dimensione sonora della televisione, Rome: Rai-ERI, 2002. Emanuelli, Massimo, 50 anni di storia della televisione attraverso la stampa settimanale, Milan: Greco & Greco, 2004. Grasso, Aldo, Storia della televisione italiana, Milan: Garzanti, 2000. Menduni, Enrico, La televisione, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Monteleone, Franco, Storia della radio e della televisione, Venice: Marsilio, 1999. Muscio, Giuliana, Piccole italie, grandi schermi: scambi cinematografici tra Italia e Stati uniti, 1895–1945, Rome: Bulzoni, 2004. Santori, Giovanni, Homo videns: televisione e post-pensiero, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1997. Zagarrio, Vito, L’anello mancante: storia e teoria del rapporto cinema-televisione, Turin: Lindau, 2004.

LAURA TERRACINA

LAURA TERRACINA (1519–CA. 1577) A respected poet well before the appearance of her first collection, Laura Terracina was inducted into the Neapolitan Accademia degli Incogniti (1545), where she assumed the name of Febea, probably in honour of her mother ( febea is an epithet for Diana, the goddess of the moon). Drawn to poetry from an early age, Terracina published her first collection of verses in 1548 with the renowned Venetian printer Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari. It met with immediate success and was soon republished six more times in the next few years, always in Venice and mostly by Giolito. Pleased with her good fortune, Terracina followed suit with eight more volumes. At her death, in or after 1577, her ninth collection, dedicated to Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici, remained in manuscript and was not published until 1993. Terracina’s poetry is richly biographical. She speaks of her family, of her late marriage, of her husband’s unwarranted jealously. It is also profoundly imbued with moral and civic ideals expressed, as in the case of Ariosto whom she greatly admired, in an ironic or sometimes satiric voice. In the sonnet ‘‘Veggio il mondo fallir, veggiolo stolto’’ (I see the world err, I see it foolish), for example, she decries the decadence of her times, its moral dissolution, its disinterest in the Muses, and finishes by wishing either to be struck blind or to see the entire world blinded (Rime, 1548). In ‘‘A Napoli’’ (To Naples), speaking of her beloved city, she laments the violence and hatreds that tear it apart; she then places the blame squarely on the shoulders of her fellow citizens in a manner reminiscent of Dante’s or Petrarch’s laments for wartorn Italy (Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti di Orlando Furioso, 1549). Taking issue with the situation of women in her time, Terracina denounces the misogyny of her contemporaries with barely contained anger and great disdain in her voice: ‘‘Vorrei parlar, ma l’ira il dir m’intoppa / poi che sola difendo il nostro sesso’’ (I would like to speak out, but wrath impedes my speech / for I, alone, come to the defence of our sex) (Terze rime, 1557). Much of Terracina’s poetry is epistolary or encomiastic. Some of the most renowned names in contemporary Italian letters can be found among the recipients of her verses: Pietro Aretino,

Ercole Bentivoglio, Ludovico Dolce, Galeazzo di Tarsia, Benedetto Varchi, Gabriele Giolito, Giovan Alfonso Mantegna di Maida, and Luigi Tansillo. She also writes to a long roster of cardinals, and to important women of her time, such as the poet Vittoria Colonna, Isabella Villa Marina, princess of Salerno, or Herina Scanderbech, princess of Bisignano. And she composes verses on the death of many illustrious figures of her times such as Bembo, Pedro de Toledo, and others. Although high on the horizon in the 1550s, by the early 1560s the star of her lyric poetry had clearly waned, a reflection perhaps of the superficiality of her inspiration, the lack of originality in her verses, and the changing cultural climate of the Italian literary world. Although Ludovico Domenichi, for example, included one of her poems in his 1546 collection of Rime diverse di molti eccellentiss. avttori and contributed a dedicatory letter to the Rime (Poems, 1548), her first collection of poetry, he did not include any of her works in his 1559 Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime, et virtvosissime donne, where one would have expected Terracina to be well. While Terracina’s lyrics disappeared from view, her Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti d’Orlando Furioso (Discourse on the First Cantos of Orlando Furioso, 1549) remained very much in circulation and underwent many re-editions over the next 50 years. Devised as a commentary on the initial octaves of each canto of Ludovico Ariosto’s epic poem, the Discorso is a poetic tour de force: Composed, like its subject, in cantos of ottava rima, it is also intricately connected to it by a curious, though facile, poetic ploy—the final verses of Terracina’s octaves are taken from the initial octaves of the various canti of the Furioso. The popularity of this work led Terracina to compose a segue using the same structure, but basing it on the second octaves of Ariosto’s epic: La seconda parte de’ Discorsi sopra le seconde stanze de’ Canti d’Orlando Furioso (The Second Part of the Discourses on the Second Stanzas of Orlando Furioso, 1567). Although Terracina’s poetry is not spectacular from a technical or literary perspective, it is nonetheless a valuable document of the sociocultural context in which it was composed, of Neapolitan 1861

LAURA TERRACINA literary circles in the mid-cinquecento, and of the emerging role of women poets in sixteenth-century Italian society.

Biography Born of noble parentage in Naples in 1519; her father, Paolo Terracina, worked in the vice-regal administration of Naples and apparently lived to be 110; her mother, Diana Anfora, belonged to the high bourgeoisie of Naples; she had three siblings, Mariano (who became an abbot), Giacomo, and Dionora. In 1545, Terracina enters into the Accademia degli Incogniti where she assumes the name Febea, but leaves it in 1547, though she will continue to use her academic name as a nom de plume; in 1548, she publishes her first collection of Rime; seven more such collections follow in rapid succession in the following decade; in 1559 or shortly thereafter she marries her distant relative Polidoro Terracina; in 1570–1572 she is in Rome where she composes her last collection of poems, many of them addressed to the cardinals gathered for the conclave that elected Pope Gregory XIII; she dies in Naples sometime after 1577, leaving this ninth collection unpublished. The story of her being married to the poet Giovanni Mauro who then killed her out of jealousy for having accepted the Order of the Garter from King Edward VI of England is a whimsical fabrication of Traiano Boccalini who, in his Ragguagli di Parnaso (1612) imagines such an event and denouement taking place in an imaginary Parnassus. Unfortunately, some later writers reported it as fact (in spite of severe chronological impediments) and thereby created a lot of confusion.

Selected Works Rime, Venice: G. Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1548, in 8 . Rime seconde, Florence: L. Torrentino, 1549. Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti di Orlando Furioso, Venice: G. Giolito de’ Ferrari, 1549, (colophon, 1550), 83 fols. Quarte rime, Venice: G.A. Valvassori detto Guadagnino, 1550. Quinte rime, Venice: G.A. Valvassori, 1552. Le seste rime, Lucca: V. Busdrago, 1558. Sovra tutte le donne vedove di questa citta` di Napoli titolate e non titolate, Naples: M. Cancer, 1561. La seconda parte de’ discorsi sopra le seconde stanze de’ canti d’Orlando Furioso, Venice: G.A. Valvassori detto Guadagnino, 1567. None rime, in Luigi Montella, Una poetessa del Rinascimento: Laura Terracina. Con le none rime, Salerno: Edisud, 1993; rpt. 2001.

Further Reading Borzelli, Angelo, Laura Terracina, poetessa napoletana del Cinquecento, Naples: M. Marzano, 1924. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘La casa di una poetessa’’ (1901), in Storie e leggende napoletane, Bari: Laterza, 1923. Dersofi, Nancy, ‘‘Laura Terracina (1519–ca. 1577),’’ in Italian Women Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1994. Maroi, Lucia, Laura Terracina, poetessa napoletana del sec. XVI, Naples: Perrella, 1913. Montella, Luigi, Una poetessa del Rinascimento: Laura Terracina. Con le none rime, Salerno: Edisud, 1993; rpt. 2001. Mutini, Claudio, ‘‘Bacio Terracina, Laura,’’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 5, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1963. Toffanin, Giuseppe, ‘‘Petrarchiste del ’500,’’ in Rinascita, 3, no. 3 (1938): 73–93.

KONRAD EISENBICHLER

TERRORISM The 1990s are likely to be remembered as a decade that witnessed a rich cinematic and literary production dwelling on Italian political terrorism, which was generally portrayed as a disturbing issue still largely unresolved, as a common traumatic 1862

experience that loomed in the collective unconscious of the entire population. In order to discuss such works, as well as those produced in the preceding decade, we need to take a step back, and retrace the tumultuous events that

TERRORISM occurred during the period known as anni di piombo. The student riots of May 1968 and the factory revolts of the autunno caldo (hot autumn) of the following year mark the backdrop against which the first left-wing terrorist organizations were formed. Their presence, however, is not felt until a few years later, apparently in response to the bombing of a bank in Piazza Fontana, Milan, in December 1969, which inaugurated a long cycle of mysterious bombings causing countless victims. Anarchists were initially deemed responsible, yet decades later it became clear that a group of rightwing extremists placed the bomb in Piazza Fontana, aided and abetted by the Italian secret services. The strategia della tensione, or strategy of tension, staged by the secret services through support of right-wing terrorist organizations as well as infiltration of its left-wing counterparts, had just begun: Its goal, it would soon be revealed, was to undermine public support for the Communist Party (PCI), and thus impede its ascent to power. Among militants from the extreme left, several groups embraced the armed struggle as a reaction to these events: the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) disseminated panic all over Italy for almost two decades. In 1978, they kidnapped and killed the president of the Christian Democrats, Aldo Moro, promoter of the compromesso storico (historical compromise) between his party and the Italian Communist Party, a compromise the Red Brigades saw as the final ‘‘selling out’’ of the left. The early 1980s witnessed the reoccurrence of right-wing terrorism, which culminated with the bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980. Soon after that, both left- and right-wing terrorism came to a sudden demise, mainly brought about by the probing investigation led by General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, and by the passing of emergency laws that increased convictions for common crimes committed by terrorists while offering substantial reduction of the punishment to terrorists willing to collaborate with justice. By the mid-1990s, most of the 5,000 people tried for terrorism had begun to re-enter society: As of 1999, 207 of those 5,000 convicts were still in jail, and 94 of them benefit from the so-called Gozzini Law, which grants long-term convicts eventual permission to work outside of prison and sleep in a halfway house. The passing of indulto, a parliamentary provision that grants the reduction of the punishment, would allow most of the remaining prisoners to benefit from such law, with the exception of those terrorists who once fled the country, and those indicted for massacres.

It is the debate on indulto, fiercely contested by the families of many victims of terrorism, that spurred the intensification of a cultural production that began, however, 20 years earlier. In the 1970s, terrorism appeared on the pages of novels by Natalia Ginzburg (1916–1981) and Dacia Maraini (1936–), yet never in a central role. The many unanswered letters addressed to Michele, the mysterious protagonist of Ginzburg’s Caro Michele (No Way Out, 1973), leave no doubt to the reader about the character’s involvement in a terrorist organization: The polyphonic novel essentially revolves around Michele’s silence, which thus comes to assume a higher signification. It is a silence that indirectly speaks the inanity of the choice of the armed struggle: Michele, the quintessential balordo (good for nothing), hardly ever speaks because he has nothing to say, because there is no rational motivation for his absurd actions. The protagonist of Maraini’s Donna in guerra (Woman at War, 1975) comes in contact with a terrorist organization during her journey of self-discovery: Her lengthy and suffered process of emancipation takes her, like Alice in Wonderland, along a path where this will be just one of many encounters, one of many choices she will briefly consider and soon dismiss. Unlike Ginzburg’s Michele, Maraini’s Giovanna is firmly established at the center of the novel: her voice is the only one that orients the narrative, which is written in diary form. And while Michele’s voice is never employed to justify his actions, Giovanna’s voice amply describes the motives for her rejection of a universe whose values she could never partake. Two novels published in the 1980s, Nucleo zero (Nucleus Zero, 1981) by Luce D’Eramo (1925–) and Gli invisibili (The Unseen, 1987) by Nanni Balestrini (1935–) approach this topic directly, narrating the life of a terrorist organization before and after its dismemberment. D’Eramo offers a detailed portrayal of the life of a group, poignantly named Nucleo Zero: In symbolic correspondence with the zero that composes its name, this organization survives thanks to its absolute invisibility. Its members are free to lead regular lives because their illegal actions have been mistaken for those of a much larger organization that, like the Red Brigades at the time, is virtually being disbanded. Nucleo zero ends exactly where Gli invisibili begins: Balestrini’s novel, in fact, exclusively concentrates on the life and experiences of a group of terrorists imprisoned in a maximum security facility. Its experimental nature, which likens its textual strategies to those of a Renaissance epic, is meant to encourage readers to draw unlikely comparisons between the heroes of 1863

TERRORISM Torquato Tasso and Ludovico Ariosto’s epics and the unsung leaders of a prison riot. At this time, there appeared the very first films on terrorism: among them, Colpire al cuore (Blow to the Heart, 1983) by Gianni Amelio (1945–) and Segreti segreti (Secret Secrets, 1984) by Giuseppe Bertolucci (1947–). Common to these films is the exclusive focus on terrorists and their sympathizers: No virtual mention is made, instead, of their victims. While Amelio kills his terrorist early on, thus shifting the focus to a more indirect portrayal of the issue, Bertolucci follows his militant through a larger period of time, depicting her attacks as well as her eventual imprisonment. In both films, the protagonist is not only portrayed in relation to the terrorist organization to which s/he belongs, but also, and especially, in relation to his or her family. In close connection to the portrayal of the terrorist as family member stands the topos of the delazione, bearing its unspoken yet direct reference to the phenomenon of ‘‘penitentism.’’ It is the figure of the terrorist ‘‘as penitent’’ that assumes peculiar characteristics when analyzed, in these films, with respect to the two social networks to which s/he belongs: family of origin and terrorist organization. Colpire al cuore tells the story of the Oedipal rivalry between an Italian academic and his teenage son. The former is a sympathizer and possibly an active member of a terrorist organization, while the latter is a law-abiding conservative who does not hesitate to report his father to the police once he realizes that he might be aiding and abetting a young terrorist, to whom both father and son are obviously attracted. Segreti segreti, instead, chooses an opposite path, portraying several dysfunctional pairings of mothers and daughters, likening terrorism to a ‘‘family affair,’’ a struggle between ‘‘bad mothers’’ and ‘‘disobeying children,’’ and thus stressing the idea of terrorism as civil war. No event that occurred during the anni di piombo bears universal tragic overtones more than the Moro affair, and it is significant that the decade that witnessed the apparent defeat of all terrorist organizations should end with the first film inspired by these events: Il caso Moro (The Moro Affair, 1988) by Giuseppe Ferrara (1932–). However, this minute historical reconstruction of the abduction and murder of Aldo Moro suffers from the fatal flaws common to many docudramas: with the exception of Gian Maria Volonte´, who offers a powerfully subtle portrayal of the Christian Democrat politician, all other actors appear as virtual caricatures of the actual people they represent. Because of this shortcoming, evidenced in particular during 1864

scenes played by the fictional counterparts of Mario Moretti, Bettino Craxi, and Giulio Andreotti, dramatic events lose much of their punch. Furthermore, the director’s meticulous adherence to the real events eventually backfires, inevitably outdating his film once ongoing investigations bring to light previously undetermined facts. Since Il caso Moro, the encumbering presence of the many victims of terrorist attacks, or that of their surviving relatives, would continue to lie at the heart of the most important films on this subject. Per non dimenticare (Lest We Forget, 1992) by Massimo Martelli (1957–), La seconda volta (The Second Time, 1995) by Mimmo Calopresti (1955–), Le mani forti (The Heavy Hands, 1996) by Franco Bernini (1954–), and Vite in sospeso (Belleville, 1996) by Marco Turco (1960–) all choose to portray terrorism by giving (in)direct voice to its victims. Viewed collectively, these films actually manage to attain the impossible, bringing forth the victim while often humanizing the terrorist. Signs of a time that is witnessing a lively debate on the possibility of an indulto that would ease the ‘‘closing of the book’’ on terrorism, many of these films offer a more ‘‘palatable’’ image of the terrorist, who is thus portrayed as worthier of state pardon. What is particularly effective, in this process of demystification of the terrorist, is the fact that none of these terrorists is ever portrayed ‘‘in active duty.’’ Different from the protagonists of Segreti segreti and Colpire al cuore, these terrorists are all immortalized in a neutralized state of captivity. In full reflection of the current debate, several of these films stage a new encounter between victim and victimizer, or between the victimizer and a representative of the world s/he once tried to subvert. La seconda volta begins as Alberto Sajevo accidentally meets the young terrorist who was once jailed for shooting him, Le mani forti opens on the psychotherapy session between a secret agent and the sister of one of the victims of the attack he once directed, La mia generazione (My Generation, 1996) by Wilma Labate (1949–) stages the encounter between a terrorist and the carabiniere who should induce him to collaborate with justice, while Vite in sospeso narrates the meeting between a terrorist in exile and his estranged brother, who is trying to understand the reasons for his choices. In all four films, the terrorist is asked to account for his or her past, and thus revisit that past as a chance to be partially redeemed. The sole account of the broken lives of the victims of a terrorist attack whose responsibilities

TERRORISM have yet to be fully ascertained, Per non dimenticare limits its focus on the choral voice of those who can no longer speak, and its group portrayal of the random targets of the bombing at the Bologna railway station is particularly powerful because of its brief intensity. Heading a large cast of stars who have graciously appeared in significant cameo roles, Giuseppe Cederna plays the nameless survivor of the massacre, a man who escaped the bombing simply because he had left the waiting room shortly before its explosion in order to buy a pack of cigarettes. Through his eyes, viewers revisit the very last minutes in the life of the many people who died that August 2, 1980. During the 1990s, a number of memoirs penned by former members of terrorist organizations were also published. One of the most compelling is Nel cerchio della prigione (In the Circle of the Prison, 1995) by Anna Laura Braghetti (1953–) and Francesca Mambro (1959–), which narrates the odd encounter between two terrorists who were once enemies, but become friends after sharing the same jail cell for many years. Their memoir is particularly important because it exemplifies the role played by most of these autobiographies upon their appearance on the market: Their portrayal of a humanized terrorist, who claims her redemption while taking full responsibility for her previous crimes, is aimed at creating a climate that could indeed foster the passing of the indulto. The instant picture of an unlikely friendship, Nel cerchio della prigione is a book that shoots straight to the heart, and its perlocutive force is further strengthened by its literary quality, evident in its subtle handling of the rhetoric of guilt and forgiveness. Similarly, Silvana Mazzocchi’s Nell’anno della tigre (In the Year of the Tiger, 1994) written in collaboration with Adriana Faranda (1950–), narrates the tumultuous events that led to Faranda’s entrance into the Red Brigades, her arrest, as well as her dissociation from the armed struggle, never losing sight of her commitment to a child she was forced to abandon before going underground. Once a ruthless terrorist, always a caring mother, Faranda is portrayed in terms that are unequivocally meant to rehabilitate her figure. The same can be said of Barbara Balzerani (1949–), who tells her own story in Compagna luna (Comrade Moon, 1998) and then bases a number of short stories on the same events in La sirena delle cinque (The Five O’clock Siren, 2003). One of the founders of the Red Brigades, Alberto Franceschini (1947–), coauthors (with Anna Samueli) the most important novel on terrorism that appeared in the 1990s, La borsa del Presidente

(The President’s Briefcase, 1997), where he provides a fictional investigation on the Moro affair. He chooses as a protagonist the fictional alter ego of his closest friend in the Brigate Rosse (Renato Curcio) and he imagines him on a quest for the truth in the Moro kidnapping after his release from jail. A roman-a`-cle´f aimed at leveling accusations against those terrorists who were most directly influenced by the secret services, Franceschini turns Curcio into a hero in a swift reversal of roles. Instead, Gianni Marilotti’s La quattrodicesima commensale (The Fourteenth Guest, 2004) follows a female terrorist who accidentally escapes arrest, and then lives the rest of her life on the fringes, as the ‘‘fourteenth guest’’ at a table whose food she is never destined to partake. Her half-life reflects the lives of several terrorists who were never caught and kept on living in hiding, waiting to be called back into action. It is no accident that this novel appeared five years after the Red Brigades suddenly struck again: In 2004, terrorism was no longer a phenomenon from the recent past. Only a year before the publication of Marilotti’s novel, two films focused on Franceschini in his pursuit of the Moro affair. Just as the return of the Brigate Rosse could be interpreted as a virtual ‘‘return of the repressed’’ in a country that had never fully addressed the causes leading to sociopolitical unrest, the production of new films on the Christian Democratic premier identifies this very episode as its traumatic locus. In this light, Renzo Martinelli’s Piazza delle cinque lune (Five Moons Plaza, 2003) and Marco Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte (Good Morning, Night, 2003) were both released in theaters on the 25th anniversary of Moro’s death. Influenced by Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), Piazza delle cinque lune combines the quick pace and the special effects of the action genre with the investigative pitch of the Italian engage´ cinema. The end result is disappointedly a hybrid film that pays excessive lip service to the box office. Much like Oliver Stone, Martinelli sets out to unveil the outcome of his own inquiry, eventually leveling the same accusations brought forth by Alberto Franceschini’s La borsa del Presidente. If Martinelli’s Red Brigades are politically heterodirected, in Bellocchio’s film, the terrorist organization is in charge of its destiny. Out of touch with the world outside, the Brigate Rosse commando is steeped in Marxist ideology, unable to predict the response of the Italian population to their extreme actions. Strikingly different from the other films on the Moro affair, Bellocchio’s Buongiorno, notte is based on the 1998 memoir by terrorist Anna Laura Braghetti, Il 1865

TERRORISM prigioniero (The Prisoner), where she offers her own version of the 55 days of Moro’s captivity. But unlike the memoir from which it is adapted, Bellocchio’s film rests on an oneiric dimension, rich with cinematic quotations; and it never sets out to establish ‘‘the truth’’ about the killing of Moro. It is rather a poetic interpretation of a defining moment in Italian history. Not directly addressing the Moro affair, La meglio gioventu` (The Best of Youth, 2003) by Marco Tullio Giordana (1950–) offers a sumptuous fresco of a generation of Italians who came of age during the late 1960s, giving ample representation to the anni di piombo and their devastating effects. Giordana’s vivid portrayal of Giulia, and of her descent into the clandestine world of the Red Brigades, lies at the very heart of the film. Giulia’s subsequent capture and incarceration, orchestrated by her husband who prefers to see her safe behind bars, as well as her strained relationship with a daughter she hardly knew, constitute one of the many narrative strands of Giordana’s film. La meglio gioventu` somehow reconnects to the earlier cinema on terrorism, to Colpire al cuore and Segreti segreti: the depiction of Italian terrorism as a highly dysfunctional ‘‘family affair.’’ GIANCARLO LOMBARDI Further Reading Biacchessi, Daniele, Fausto e Iaio, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1996. Biacchessi, Daniele, 10.25, cronaca di una strage, Rome: Gamberetti, 2000. Biacchessi, Daniele, Il delitto D’Antona, Milan: Mursia, 2001. Bianconi, Giovanni, A mano armata. Vita violenta di Giusva Fioravanti, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1992. Catanzaro, Raimondo, Ideologie movimenti terrorismi, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. Curcio, Renato, A viso aperto, Milan: Mondadori, 1993. Della Porta, Donatella, Il terrorismo di sinistra, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990. De Lutiis, Giuseppe, Il lato oscuro del potere, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1996.

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Drake, Richard, The Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Drake, Richard, The Aldo Moro Murder Case, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Fenzi, Enrico, Armi e bagagli. Un diario delle Brigate Rosse, Milan: Costa & Nolan, 1987. Ferrara, Giuseppe, Misteri del Caso Moro, Bolsena: Massari, 2003. Flamigni, Sergio, La tela del ragno, Milan: Kaos, 1988. Flamigni, Sergio, ‘‘Il mio sangue ricadra` su di lor’’: Gli scritti di Aldo Moro prigioniereo delle Br, Milan: Kaos, 1997. Flamigni, Sergio, Il covo di stato, Milan: Kaos, 1999. Flamigni, Sergio, La sfinge delle Brigate Rosse, Milan: Kaos, 2004. Franceschini, Alberto, Mara, Renato ed io, Milan: Mondadori, 1988. Galli, Giorgio, Affari di stato. L’Italia sotterranea 1943–1990, Milan: Kaos, 1991. Galli, Giorgio, Il partito armato, Milan: Kaos, 1993. Gambino, Michele, La loggia P2, Rome: Avvenimenti, 1992. Giovagnoli, Agostino, Il caso Moro: Una tragedia repubblicana, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. Graziani, Clemente, Processo a Ordine nuovo, Rome: Ordine Nuovo, 1973. Lumley, Robert, States of Emergency, London: Verso, 1990. Luther Blissett Project, Nemici dello stato, Rome: Derive Approdi, 1999. Mambro, Francesca, Il bacio sul muro e altre storie, Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 2000. Meade, Robert C., Red Brigades: The Story of Italian Terrorism, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Moretti, Mario, Brigate Rosse: Una storia italiana, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1994. Morucci, Valerio, Ritratto di un terrorista da giovane, Alessandria: Piemme, 1999. Peci, Patrizio, Io l’infame, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Pellegrino, Giovanni, Giovanni Fasanella, and Claudio Sestieri, Segreto di stato, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Salierno, Giulio, Autobiografia di un picchiatore fascista, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Sciascia, Leonardo, L’affaire Moro, Florence: Adelphi, 1978. Tarantelli, Carol B., ‘‘Terrorismo e psicoanalisi,’’ in MicroMega, 3 (1999): 51–71. Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica, The Moro Morality Play, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Zavoli, Sergio, La notte della repubblica, Milan: Mondadori, 1992.

DELIO TESSA

DELIO TESSA (1886–1939) Delio Tessa is one of the major Italian poets of the twentieth century and the most important poet to write in the Milanese dialect after Carlo Porta. Devoted to the tongue of his native city, Tessa claims to honor as his one and only master the popular speech of the lower classes. Feverish and sometimes hallucinatory, his lyric poems portray the daily life of common people. Revealing a genuine concern for the dispossessed, Tessa focuses on prostitutes, priests, shopkeepers, and soldiers; and re-creates the atmosphere of the popular and petitbourgeois quarters of Milan in the early decades of the twentieth century. Fiercely independent by temperament, Tessa was an ardent opponent of Fascism. Withdrawn to the margins of Milanese society, he lived quietly surrounded by a small circle of friends and admirers. Writing musical, theatrical, and film criticism, Tessa collaborated with a variety of regional papers, illustrated monthlies, and radio programs serving Lombardy and the Italian-speaking Canton Ticino of Switzerland. He utilized these forums to reflect on new artistic developments, to voice his opposition to Benito Mussolini’s policies, and to reflect on changing social mores. Although Tessa’s verse achievements in Milanese dialect rank him among the major modern poets of Italy, this critical recognition arrived posthumously. The tardiness of Tessa’s critical recognition reflects, in part, the fact that he published only one book of poetry in his lifetime. Renowned in Milanese circles for his ability to recite verses, both his own as well as those of Carlo Porta, Tessa was persuaded by his friends to bring out L’e` el dı` di Mort, alegher! (It’s the Day of Death, Hurray!) with Mondadori in 1932. Consisting of nine narrative compositions, organized chronologically to portray Milan before, during, and after World War I, this collection was ignored by critics with the exception of Benedetto Croce who praised it in an important article of 1933 for political reasons having to do with the Neapolitan philosopher’s opposition to Fascist linguistic policies. Tessa’s limited output in terms of poetry published during his lifetime, as well as the lack of widespread critical acclaim in the 1930s, is also due in large part to

the prejudices and antipathies of Fascist officials toward the dialects and dialect poetry. Tessa’s first volume contains such civil poems as the eponymous ‘‘L’e` el dı` di Mort, alegher!’’ subtitled ‘‘Caporetto 1917,’’ which treats the catastrophic military defeat from which the Italians were ultimately able to recover, as well as the famous ‘‘La mort della Gussona’’ (The Death of Lady Gussona), which draws a sharp contrast between the physical suffering of an old woman and the fantasy world portrayed in the American movies that dominated Italian cinema screens in the 1930s. A distinguished film critic who covered the first film festivals at Venice, Tessa was also the author of two screenplays, Vecchia Europa (Old Europe, 1932), which was published in 1986, and Uomini maledetti (Men Accursed, unpublished), which he reportedly intended to offer to Rene´ Clair or Jean Renoir. Published posthumously in 1947, Tessa’s second collection, Poesie nuove ed ultime (New and Final Verses) consists of five poems gathered under the title ‘‘De la` del mur’’ (Beyond the Wall), as well as 16 other poems found among his papers by his friends, Franco Antonicelli and Fortunato Rosti, who edit the volume. Ranging in date from 1909 until his death, this collection demonstrates that his poetic talent continues to grow despite the lack of critical recognition. In the late 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, due to the efforts of such poets and critics as Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gian Franco Contini, and Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, Italy’s rich tradition of literature in the regional dialects begins to come into clearer focus leading to the full-scale rediscovery and repositioning of the dialect tradition vis-a`-vis that in standard Italian. Following the publication in 1985 of the critical edition of his poetry, L’e` el dı` di Mort, alegher! De la` del mur e altre liriche, edited by Dante Isella, Tessa wins recognition as a European poet who reflects the influences of such Italian figures as Carlo Porta, Giovanni Pascoli, Guido Gozzano, and the scapigliati, as well as incorporating the lessons of French symbolism and German Expressionism. Tessa’s colorful Italian prose, originally brought out in the 1930s, is published in such 1867

DELIO TESSA collections as Ore di citta` (City Hours, 1988), Color Manzoni (1988), and Critiche contro vento (Criticism Against the Wind, 1990).

‘‘L’e` el dı` di Mort, alegher! De la` del mur e altre liriche,’’ edited by Dante Isella, 1985. ‘‘Altre liriche,’’ 1999.

Screenplay

Biography

Vecchia Europa, 1986.

Born in Milan, on 18 November 1886; completes classical studies at the Liceo Beccaria of Milan in 1906; law degree at the University of Pavia conferred in 1911; practices law with little enthusiasm and scant success, between 1934 and 1939 turns increasingly to journalism, collaborates on local and provincial newspapers and illustrated magazines including Il corriere del Ticino, L’illustrazione ticinese, and with the Swiss Radio Monte Ceneri in 1935, in 1936 with L’Ambrosiano; a passionate and prolific film critic he authors some 120 articles; he covers the Biennale Film Festival at Venice in 1932 and 1934; dies from complications stemming from an abscessed tooth, 21 September 1939.

Journalism

JOHN P. WELLE See also: Regional Literature Selected Works Poetry ‘‘L’e` el dı` di Mort, alegher!,’’ 1932; 1960. ‘‘Poesie nuove ed ultime,’’ 1947. ‘‘Alala` al pellerossa,’’ 1979.

Ore di citta`, 1988. Color Manzoni, 1988. Critiche contro vento: Pagine ticinesi, 1934–1939, 1990.

Further Reading Anceschi, Giuseppe, Delio Tessa profilo di un poeta, Lugano: Giampiero Casagrande Editore, 1990. Brevini, Franco, Poeti dialettali del novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1987. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Poesia dialettale,’’ in La critica, 31 (20 March 1933): 155–158. Fortini, Franco, I poeti del Novecento, Rome: Laterza, 1977. Haller, Hermann W., The Hidden Italy: A Bilingual Anthology of Italian Dialect Poetry, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1986. Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, Poeti italiani del Novecento, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Novelli, Mauro, I saggi lirici di Delio Tessa, Milan: Il Filarete, 2001. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, ‘‘Per Delio Tessa,’’ in Poesia. Quaderni Internazionali, 8 (October 1947): 118–119; rpt. in Passione e ideologia, Milan: Garzanti, 1960. Welle, John Patrick, ‘‘Delio Tessa and Greta Garbo: Notes on the Poet as Film Critic,’’ in L’anello che non tiene, 2, no. 2 (Fall 1990): 33–41.

GIOVANNI TESTORI (1923–1993) Giovanni Testori’s literary journey as a novelist, poet and dramatist presents a personalized linguistic imprint strongly rooted in the Milanese area and characterized by an increasing emphasis on the figure of Christ. Elio Vittorini discovered him in 1954, and published his short story Il dio di Roserio (Roserio’s God). The protagonist is Dante Pessina, Roserio’s God (the God of the President, Mr. Gino), because he cycles better than anyone else. He would be a simple provincial proletarian of preindustrial Lombardy, if it were not for this machine that makes him a god. He has one flaw, however: During a race he pushed his team partner (guilty of 1868

daring to pass his leader) causing a serious wound to his head. The image of his partner’s bleeding head torments him until it is symbolically removed in the final race, when Pessina becomes the unbeatable ‘‘Roserio’s God’’ once more. In this first work, as Giovanni Raboni remarks, ‘‘the events...revolve around sport as a group activity and as a possible medium of moral and material redemption’’ (‘‘Introduction,’’ 1996). The novel Il ponte della Ghisolfa, (The Ghisolfa Bridge, 1958) is the first episode of I segreti di Milano (Milan’s Secrets), a series that will end with the posthumous publication in 1995 of Nebbia

GIOVANNI TESTORI al Giambellino (Fog at Giambellino). Testori writes in strong Lombard overtones and adopts a neorealistic matrix; and his books paint an almost documentary picture of the life and conditions of unskilled workers on the outskirts of Milan in the 1950s and 1960s. He writes about young men and women without a future or any sense of joy, where surviving is already a miracle and in order to find a job, regardless of how poor one may be, one needs to be recommended by somebody. Nebbia al Giambellino is an homage to Alessandro Manzoni, an author Testori much admired. In the persecutions suffered by the protagonist, Gina Rastelli, a tragic variation resonates of those of Lucia in I Promessi Sposi, as Don Rodrigo’s role is taken by the despotic Master Cattaneo. The metatheatrical ideas and the considerations on Manzoni’s book reappear in greater depth when Testori publishes I promessi sposi alla prova (Rehearsal for a Promised Marriage, 1984). The social context does not change even when these same characters are represented on stage with the two plays Maria Brasca (Maria Brasca, 1960) and L’Arialda (The Arialda, 1960). Centred on the world of the subproletariat of industrial Milan, the two texts seem to mirror each other. The protagonists are female figures who are willing to fight for an illusion of happiness based on the love of a man. Maria Brasca (against the advice of family and friends) loves a younger man who at the end leaves her for another woman who has a better reputation than Maria. Arialda has devoted her youth to a man who died after a long illness. Later on, another man comes into her life, only to be snatched away by another woman desperate for subsistence for herself and for her starving daughter. There is no tomorrow for these characters; happiness is inconceivable as they are bound to live under a cloak of dark pessimism, in a suffocating, interpersonal conflict that is essential for survival. Among the poor, there can be no solidarity of any kind. Testori shows no compassion for his characters; he describes human existence with a strongly realistic grip, in a documentary style, despite the lyric mood surrounding the central motive of social denunciation. After a short interruption, during which he worked as art critic focusing his attention on mannerism in Lombardy, Testori introduced a new rhetorical strategy into his work with I trionfi (The Triumphs, 1965). In adopting eloquent registers, now he uses the poetic vehicle to express the great issues of mankind, in primis of one’s relationship with God: ‘‘Children of God we are told, maybe.’’

The contradictions between the material and the spiritual worlds are eviscerated with painful determination. Set in a classical metric structure, the story, which is continually interrupted by questions and exaltations, ends with sincere and desperate confessions. I Trionfi comprises a series of complex metaphors, in which every figure stands for something else, thus creating a magma of words that is perhaps the proleptic summa of poetry (Giovanni Cappello, Giovanni Testori, 1983). In Per sempre (Forever, 1970), every line is a declaration of love: (‘‘Crucifixed to you / tied to you / so I die / because I have loved you so’’). More human sufferings crowd the verses of Testori’s poems from Theo (1970) to Nel tuo sangue (In Your Blood, 1973), where the love-hate relationship with the image of Christ reaches a climax. Testori does not hesitate to ask obscene questions: ‘‘On the cross/ with your eyes darkened by death/you still saw his carnal beauty. / Where was at that point / Your superb deity?’’ In this period of his life, the poet does not yet seem to have found his guiding light in the icon of the suffering Christ. He is tormented, as Giorgio Taffon writes, by the fact that he is homosexual, that he has betrayed his pro-Communism alliance, namely a bourgeois in constant struggle with all the ideological and moral hypostases of the social class he was born into (Lo scrivano, gli scarrozzanti, i templi, 1997). With Il ventre del teatro (The Belly of the Theatre) published in the journal Paragone, Testori criticises the director’s theater and experimentation, and calls for a rediscovery of the poetic and ritual values of the theatrical event. His linguistic journey continues with the striking La trilogia degli scarrozzanti (The Trilogy of the Scarrozzanti), which includes Ambleto (1972), Macbetto (1974), and Edipus (1977), which are deliberately distorted reinterpretations of the Shakespeare classics and the Greek tragedy. Set in Lombardy, each play is characterized by a rich plurilingual dialect in which southern Italian, Latin, French, Spanish, and Milanese intermix. Ambleto is the story of a company of players from Brianza who move around the countryside with their few stage props in order to perform Shakespeare. In Macbetto, the characters of Macbet, Ledi Macbet, the witch, and the choir recall the original play, while the story takes place in a church in ruins. Instead Edipus is a monologue, where a single impoverished actor, on a thinly furnished stage, recites to himself the history of his downfall. Testori’s next plays, In conversazione con la morte (Conversation with Death, 1978), written 1869

GIOVANNI TESTORI after his mother’s death, as well as Interrogatorio a Maria (Questioning Mary, 1978) and Factum est alla prova (So It Is Done, 1981) attest to his return to his faith. These are ‘‘all liturgical monodies that transcend the theatre and are more suitable for places of worship, churches and church courtyards; thus a return to the origins of the medieval play, to the mystical jestings of the priests and to their testamentary footnotes?’’ (Paolo Puppa, Il teatro dei testi, 2003). Indeed, Christ’s figurative image, more suffering and human, is again described in the novel In exitu (In exitu?, 1988), in which Jesus is portrayed as a dying drug addict, torn by loneliness and cynicism in the latrines of Milan’s central train station. Testori’s last play, Tre lai (The Three Lai, 1994), casts female figures with mythical resonance, drawn closer by common geographical roots: the scandalous Cleopatra`s is a banker from Brianza, with greedy and ironic sensuality, mocking and yet lamenting Antonio’s death; the cursing Eroda`s is an obscene individual in love with the prophet, drowned in her lust and with a crude, spiteful vulgarity; the aching Mater Stangoscia`s, inspired by the Madonna of Gaudenzio Ferrari, is based on the frescos of the Sacred Varallo Mountain and depicts the torment of a mother desperately weeping over the torn body of her child. The monologues of the female characters in Tre lai attest to what are some of the finest moments in Testori’s dramatic works.

Selected Works

Biography

Poetry

Born in Novate Milanese, near Milan, 12 May 1923. He was the sixth of seven brothers. Between 1940 and 1943, wrote for various university magazines, among them L’architrave. In 1947, graduated in philosophy from the Universita` Cattolica in Milan. In 1953, helped to organize the exhibition entitled The Painters of Reality in Lombardy. In 1959, Il ponte della Ghisolfa was shortlisted for the Strega award. In 1960, censorship prevented Luchino Visconti from staging Testori’s play, Arialda. In 1978, began to write for the daily paper Il corriere della sera. In 1973, Nel tuo sangue was awarded the Etna-Taormina prize for poetry. In 1985, received the Renato Simoni life achievement award in the theater, and in 1986, the Diego Fabbri theater prize. The collection of poems Et Nihil received the Pandolfo prize in 1989. Died at the St. Rafael Hospital in Milan, 16 March 1993. MARIANO D’AMORA 1870

Collections Opere, edited by Fulvio Panzeri, introduced by Giovanni Raboni, 1996–.

Fiction Il dio di Roserio, 1954. Il ponte della Ghisolfa, 1958; new edition, 1985. Il fabbricone, 1961, as The House in Milan, translated by Sidney Alexander Collins, 1963. Passo letitiae et felicitatis, 1975. In exitu, 1988. Gli angeli dello sterminio, 1992. Nebbia al Giambellino, 1995.

Theater Maria Brasca, 1960. L’Arialda, 1960. La monaca di Monza, 1967. Erodiade, 1969. Ambleto, 1973. Macbetto, 1974. Edipus, 1977. Conversazione con la morte, 1978. Interrogatorio a Maria, 1978. Factum est alla prova, 1981. Post Amlet, 1983. I promessi sposi alla prova, 1984. Confiteor, 1985. La morte, 1988. Verbo`, 1989. Sfaust, 1990. Sdisore`, 1991. Tentazione al convento, 1993. Tre Lai, 1994. ‘‘I trionfi,’’ 1965. ‘‘Per sempre,’’ 1970. ‘‘Theo,’’ 1970. ‘‘Alain,’’ 1971. ‘‘A te,’’ 1972–1973. ‘‘Nel tuo sangue,’’ 1973. ‘‘Ossa mea,’’ 1981–1982; 1983 new ed. ‘‘Tre poesie per il trittico del toro di Giancarlo Vitali,’’ 1985. ‘‘Diade´mata,’’ 1986. ‘‘Crux, Arnulf Rainer,’’ 1986. ‘‘A re Enzo,’’ 1987. ‘‘Et nihil,’’ 1989.

Essays Romanino e Moretto alla cappella del sacramento, 1975. Beniamino Simoni a Cerveno, 1976. Disegni di Roberto Longhi, 1980.

Further Reading Bisicchia, Andrea, Testori e il teatro del corpo, Cinisello Balsamo (Milan): San Paolo, 2001. Bo, Carlo, Testori: L’urlo, la bestemmia, il canto dell’amore umile, edited by Gilberto Santini, Milan: Longanesi, 1995.

GIOVANNI TESTORI Cappello, Giovanni, Giovanni Testori, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1983. Cascetta, Annamaria, Invito alla lettura di Testori, Milan: Mursia, 1995. Doninelli, Luca, Conversazioni con Testori, Milan: Guanda, 1983. Marani, Pietro, La realta` della pittura: Scritti di storia e critica d’arte dal quattrocento al settecento, Milan: Longanesi, 1995. Meldolesi, Claudio, ‘‘Sguardi teatrali al secolo dei giganti,’’ in Letteratura italiana del novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Panzeri, Fulvio, Coro degli irreparabili: Topografie testoriane dalla ‘‘Citta`-civis’’ alla ‘‘Valle Assina,’’ Milan: Palazzo Soriani, 1997.

Panzeri, Fulvio, Vita di Testori, Milan: Longanesi, 2003. Pierangeli, Fabio, and Davide Dall’Ombra, Giovanni Testori, Asti: Gribaudo, 2000. Puppa, Paolo, Il teatro dei testi: La drammaturgia di fine millennio, Turin: UTET, 2003. Raboni, Giovanni, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in G. Testori, Opere, Milan: Bompiani, 1996. Ria, Antonio (editor), Maestro no, Milan: Interlinea, 2004. Santini, Gilberto, Nel ventre del teatro, Milan: Quattro Venti, 1996. Taffon, Giorgio, Lo scrivano, gli scarrozzanti, i templi: Giovanni Testori e il teatro, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997.

THAT AWFUL MESS ON VIA MERULANA See Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (Work by Carlo Emilio Gadda)

THREE CROSSES See Tre croci (Work by Federigo Tozzi)

THE TIME OF INDIFFERENCE See Gli Indifferenti (Work by Alberto Moravia)

1871

GIROLAMO TIRABOSCHI

GIROLAMO TIRABOSCHI (1731–1794) Continuing Ludovico Antonio Muratori’s work as a librarian at the Este Library in Modena by appointment of Duke Francesco III in 1770, Girolamo Tiraboschi assimilated his predecessor’s innovative historiographical methodology, which stressed the absolute relevance for historians of grounding their studies on a documentary and scientific basis, emphasizing the ideals of clarity and evidence. Such methodological guidelines produced its first relevant results in the important work he dedicated to the history of the Order of the Humiliati, Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta (Ancient Documents of the Humiliati, 1766–1768), in which his accuracy of presentation and his access to a considerable number of unpublished sources allowed him to retrace the vicissitudes that bound the penitential order to the Lombard and Italian society of the time. The minor fame gained in Italy as well as in Europe as a result of this vast work would be soon confirmed and enhanced by the great renown acquired with the publication of Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1772–1782), republished in an expanded version between 1787 and 1794, and considered his masterpiece and the most fruitful outcome of his historiographical methodology. The premises of his approach, founded on the need for a more adequate criterion in giving a historical account of literature, are expressed by Tiraboschi in the preface to the Storia della letteratura italiana, when he compares it with other previous examples: ‘‘niuna di queste, o di altre opere di somigliante argomento non ci offre un esatto racconto dell’origine, de’ progressi, della decadenza, del risorgimento, di tutte insomma le diverse vicende, che le lettere hanno incontrato in Italia’’ (no one, among these, or among other works of similar subject, offers us an exact account of the origins, of the progresses, of the decadence, of the resurgence, in a word, of all the various vicissitudes that literature underwent in Italy). Hence, the necessity to conceive historiography anew and to give it a new foundation, to go beyond both the traditional history of genres (partially maintained, but reframed within the broader perspective of the cultural connections to which genres are subordinated) and the history of writers, the diachronic display of isolated authors. To these 1872

approaches, Tiraboschi opposed a history of the concrete, cultural texture in which every single literary phenomenon finds its root. In this configuration, drafted according to the Enlightenment concept of the historical process and therefore marked by the ideas of ‘‘origin,’’ of ‘‘progress,’’ and of their exact account, the emphasis is on two main features that constitute the real strength that permits his Storia della letteratura italiana to stand out as an innovative and solid methodological model. The first of these features, which anticipates the Romantic and Risorgimento perspective, is his reference to a cultural unity of Italy. Such unity exists virtually, if not politically, in what he designates as letteratura italiana (a term that he meant in a substantially all-inclusive sense) and geographically marked by the natural borders of the Italian peninsula. This conception allows a broadening of the historian’s perspective toward an integrated reconstruction of the living cultural background from which the literary document springs (up until then limited to specific regions or periods of time). However, it also necessarily leads Tiraboschi to trace the ultimate criterion of his research outside the boundaries of culture, in the extrinsic geographic unity of the Italian territory. The lack of an intrinsically defined unifying element of the lettere compels him to extend his consideration to ‘‘tutti coloro che vissero in quel tratto di paese, che or dicesi Italia’’ (everyone that lived in that part of the country, which is now named Italy). This entails, in a certain way, a dissolution of the very object of his research into a collection of evidences bound together by a noncultural factor. Indeed, his Storia della letteratura italiana includes very different populations speaking very different languages, from the Etruscans to the Romans to the inhabitants of the Magna Graecia. The second feature can be identified in his firm resolution to give preference to the study of works, rather than to biographies, as the effective documents by which it is possible to reconstruct a history of the scienze (his Storia della letteratura italiana includes a historical account of cultural institutions and schools, of philosophy, mathematics, medicine, jurisprudence, fine arts, and so on, thus turning effectively into a history of culture)

GIROLAMO TIRABOSCHI and in the effort to establish a progressive and exact succession grounded on the detection of facts. In his programmatic statement, ‘‘verita` ed esattezza’’ (truth and exactness) are considered as the chief virtues required of historians in their attempts to discover the ‘‘circostanze de’ fatti’’ (the circumstances of facts). In spite of his explicit claim for the necessity of giving form to a ‘‘history’’ rather than to a ‘‘library,’’ however, the philological accuracy that allows him to detect the minimal agencies at work in the historical process often turns into mere erudition. Such learning finds its emblematical formulation in the judgment expressed by Ugo Foscolo, who in his 1826 essay Intorno ad antiquari e critici (now in Opere, 1958) defined Tiraboschi’s work as ‘‘archivio ordinato e ragionato di materiali, cronologie, documenti e disquisizioni’’ (a methodic and reasoned archive of materials, chronologies, documents and disquisitions). The absolute relevance of Tiraboschi’s work is nevertheless granted not only by the huge amount of documentation it contains, but also by the attempt to organize it in a consistent order. With the introduction of a chronological partition according to centuries, he thus offers for the first time a model that would influence all subsequent historiography of literature. Apart from his Storia della letteratura italiana, Tiraboschi’s active engagement in literary studies and in the debate on literature and science found a further contribution in his collaboration to the Nuovo Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia, published in Modena from 1774 to 1790 under his direction, and in his historical work on literature in Modena, Biblioteca modenese (Library of Modena, 1781–1786).

Biography Born in Bergamo, 18 December 1731; educated at the schools of the Society of Jesus, which he joined in 25 October 1746; appointed professor of rhetorics at the University of the Society of Jesus in Brera, 1755, and subsequently responsible for its library; appointed prefect of the Biblioteca Estense (Estense Library) in Modena by Duke Francesco III, 1770; appointed by Duke Francesco III president of the Biblioteca Estense, professor at the university, and cavaliere, 1780. From 1774 to 1790 directed the Nuovo Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia. Died in Modena, 3 June 1794. ALESSANDRO CROCE See also: Literary History

Selected Works Literary Histories Storia della letteratura italiana, 10 vols., 1772–1782; expanded edition, 1787–1794.

Historical Treatises Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta, 3 vols., 1766–1768. Vita del conte d. Fulvio Testi cavaliere degli ordini de’ ss. Maurizio e Lazaro, e di s. Jago consigliere e segretario di stato della corte di Modena, 1780. Biblioteca modenese, 6 vols., 1781–1786. Storia dell’augusta badia di S. Silvestro di Nonantola, 2 vols., 1784–1785. Memorie storiche modenesi, 5 vols., 1793–1795. Dizionario topografico-storico degli Stati Estensi, 2 vols., 1824–1825.

Letters Lettere al padre Ireneo Affo tratte da’ Codici della Biblioteca Estense di Modena e della Palatina di Parma, edited by Carlo Frati, 1894. Carteggio fra Girolamo Tiraboschi e Eustachio Cabassi, edited by Policarpo Guaitoli, 1894. Carteggio fra Girolamo Tiraboschi e Clementino Vannetti (1776–1793), edited by Giuseppe Cavazzuti e Ferdinando Pasini, 1912. Lettere a Prospero Fontanesi, edited by Anna Maria Razzoli Roio, 1997.

Further Reading Bigi, Emilio (editor), Critici e storici della poesia e delle arti del secondo Settecento, vol. 4 of Dal Muratori al Cesarotti, Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1960. Bruyning, Lucas, ‘‘From Tiraboschi to Francesco De Sanctis: Italian Literary History as a Legitimation of National Unity,’’ in Yearbook of European Studies, 12 (1999): 197–206. Dionisotti, Carlo, Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1967. Di Pietro Lombardi, Paola, Girolamo Tiraboschi, Rimini: Luise`, 1996. Foscolo, Ugo, ‘‘Intorno ad antiquari e critici,’’ in Opere, vol. 11, part 2, edited by Cesare Foligno, Florence: Le Monneir, 1958. Getto, Giovanni, ‘‘La ‘Storia della letteratura italiana’ del Tiraboschi,’’ in Storia delle storie letterarie, Milan: Bompiani, 1942. Mari, Michele, Il genio freddo. La storiografia letteraria di Girolamo Tiraboschi, Milan: Cuem, 1999. Raimondi, Ezio, I lumi dell’erudizione. Saggi sul Settecento italiano, Milan: Vita e pensiero, 1989. Sapegno, Maria Serena, ‘‘Storia della Letteratura italiana di Girolamo Tiraboschi,’’ in Letteratura Italiana. Le Opere, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Venturi Barbolini, Anna Rosa (editor), Girolamo Tiraboschi. Miscellanea di studi, Modena: Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, 1997.

1873

MARIO TOBINO

MARIO TOBINO (1910–1991) Mario Tobino is the bard of the madhouse, whose concentrated spaces he believes are capable of liberating the poetic impulses and complex human relations of its inmates, the mentally ill, the nurses and doctors who attend them. Tobino began his career writing for such important literary reviews as Il Selvaggio, Letteratura, Il Mondo, and publishing two collections of poetry in 1934, Amicizia (Friendship) and Veleno e Amore (Poison and Love). He served in the Italian Army in northern Africa and took part in the Resistance against the Nazis and Fascists in Tuscany, an experience that was extremely important in his development as a writer. His novel, Il deserto della Libia (The Desert of Libya, 1952), was dedicated to his own military experience in Africa. The silent desert is a symbol of sensuality, but also of Tobino’s deep love of life, his Catholicism, and his profound feeling for others. Le libere donne di Magliano (The Free Women of Magliano, 1953) describes his experience as director of a psychiatric asylum in Lucca. In a meditative, lyrical and tender voice, Tobino presents the ‘‘insane’’ as complete human beings who must be loved and understood rather than jailed and repressed. During this period, the psychiatric treatment of the insane consisted mainly in trying to control and repress them by any means possible. In the 1970s, in a number of famous articles published in the newspaper Il Resto del Carlino, Tobino engaged in a long controversial debate with the psychiatrist Franco Basaglia and other advocates of the so-called antipsychiatric movement. Citing the research of English psychiatrist R. D. Laing, Basaglia had argued that asylums should be closed down and patients returned, step by step, to normal everyday life. Tobino countered that the asylum was a necessary institution, a place where the mentally ill could be understood, cured and protected. Tobino was defending what he called psichiatria umana, or human psychiatry. In his opinion, insanity was a destiny, a condition for life: We should try to live with the patient, respecting and loving him, trying to improve his life. This vision also informs Tobino’s autobiographical novel Per le antiche scale (By the Ancient Stairs, 1972). The book opens with a young and 1874

enthusiastic psychiatrist, Dr. Anselmo, hearing nurses tell stories about the romantic and paternalistic figure of Dr. Bonaccorsi, the previous director of the asylum and a symbol of a heroic age of psychiatry. Because his sister was schizophrenic, Dr. Bonaccorsi felt a personal calling to become a psychiatrist. He promised himself not to have sons so that he would not pass on the madness that ran in the family to a future generation. Dr. Bonaccorsi lived in the asylum, only leaving to recruit nurses among the peasants, asking them to treat the insane with the same care, the same wisdom, the same humanity they display in their day to day labour. When Dr. Bonaccorsi is forced to leave the asylum and retire, the nurses mourn his absence. After Dr. Bonaccorsi’s death, the young Dr. Anselmo comes to share his view that insanity is a dangerous malady, not, as the advocates of the progressive antipsychiatric movements maintained, a product of society or of power. Insanity, Tobino writes, is like a storm or a period of bad weather that destroys the natural balance of the seasons. In May 1978, the Italian Parliament passed a law supported by the antipsychiatric movement. Known as Law n. 180 or the Basaglia Law, it ratified the closure of the asylums and provided alternative treatment for the mentally ill, who were to be housed in apartments supervised by health authorities. To criticize this law, Tobino published a new version of Le libere donne di Magliano entitled Gli ultimi giorni di Magliano (The Last Days of Magliano, 1982). Tobino emphasized the fact that many patients, beset by the pressure of family and society once, when they were forced to leave the asylums and to move to urban apartments to take up a normal life, ended up committing suicide. Tobino’s attitude toward mental insanity is represented by the figure of the nurse Scipioni, who regards his work as a continuous charity. Also central to Tobino’s work is Sulla spiaggia e al di la` del molo (On the Beach and Beyond the Pier, 1966), a delicate book he dedicated to Viareggio, his birthplace. Sulla spiaggia e al di la` del molo takes the form of a passionate diary in which Tobino tells the story of Viareggio, describes the most important personalities of his life, like the painter Lorenzo Viani, and recounts his own

MARIO TOBINO emotions living there. In this period, Tobino also published a remarkable work, Biondo era e bello (Blond He Was and Handsome, 1974), a combination novel-essay based on the life of Dante Alighieri. The book carefully describes Dante’s first experiences as a child and his friendship with Guido Cavalcanti and Forese Donati. Tobino sees Dante as a symbol of the critical relation of the writer toward his age. Tobino’s description of the great Florentine poet’s life reveals his deep identification with him. But Todino’s narrative horizons are not confined to psychiatric themes or regional history or even more recent works that treat university life, like Bandiera Nera (Black Flag, 1950), an overt political satire of Fascism, or the early phase of the Resistance in Il clandestino (The Clandestine, 1962). He also wrote a lively travelogue Due italiani a Parigi (Two Italians in Paris, 1954) and a play La verita` viene a galla (The Truth Comes to Light, 1987). Nonetheless, the passion and centrality of autobiographical elements in his work, also presented in his psychiatric series, form the heart of his work.

Born in Viareggio (Lucca), 16 January 1910, son of a local chemist. Medical degree at the University of Bologna, 1936. Specializes in psychiatry, 1938. A war prisoner in Africa, fought against the Nazifascist, in Tuscany, as a partisan during the Resistance. As a psychiatrist, directed the Psychiatric Asylum of Maggiano (Lucca), until his retirement in 1980. Won the Strega Prize for Il clandestino, 1962; and the Campiello Prize for Per le antiche scale, 1972. Died in Agrigento, 11 December 1991. STEFANO ADAMI

Poetry ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1934. ‘‘Amicizia,’’ 1934.

Fiction La gelosia del marinaio, 1942. Il figlio del farmacista, 1947. Bandiera nera, 1950. Il deserto della Libia, 1952; in The Lost Legions: Three Italian War Novels, translated by Archibald Colquhoun and Antonia Cowan, 1967. Le libere donne di Magliano, 1953; as The Women of Magliano, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1954. La brace dei Biassoli, 1956. Il clandestino, 1962; as The Underground, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1966. Sulla spiaggia e al di la` del molo, 1966. Per le antiche scale, 1972. Biondo era e bello, 1974. La bella degli specchi, 1976. Perduto amore, 1979. Gli ultimi giorni di Magliano, 1982. Zita dei fiori, 1986. Tre amici, 1988. Una vacanza romana, 1992.

Theater La verita` viene a galla, 1987.

Other

Biography

Selected Works

‘‘Veleno e amore,’’ 1934. ‘‘Asso di picche,’’ 1955.

Ecco Tobino: Antologia degli scritti, selected by Pietro Tobino, 2001.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, La letteratura italiana del Novecento. Bilancio di un secolo, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Bedoni, Giorgio, and Bianca Tosatti (editors), Arte e Psichiatria. Uno sguardo sottile, Milan: Mazzotta, 2000. Belpoliti, Marco, Settanta, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Del Beccaro, Felice, Mario Tobino, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Grillari, Massimo, Invito alla lettura di Mario Tobino, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Marabini, Claudio, Gli Anni Sessanta. Narrativa e storia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1969. Marabini, Claudio, Le citta` dei poeti: Viareggio e Tobino, Turin: SEI, 1976. Pedulla`, Walter, La narrativa contemporanea, Rome: Newton Compton, 1998. Ragionieri, Rossana (editor), Mario Tobino oggi, Montespertoli: Maschietto & Musolino, 2001.

1875

GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA

GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA (1896–1957) The huge readership success (crowned by the award in 1959 of Italy’s top literary prize, the Strega) of the novel Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1958) by the recently deceased Giuseppe Tomasi, prince of Lampedusa, hitherto unknown to the literary world, caused an unprecedented and manifold politicoliterary hullabaloo. Tomasi’s resurrection of the supposedly archaic genre of the historical novel appalled the literary avant-garde as much as the nostalgic apology for the aristocracy and the apparent denial of rational progress in history appalled the ideological correctness of the time. The novel’s rejection of the Risorgimento as a failure and as a confidence trick played against the South implied an analogous disappointment with the similar results of Italy’s postwar liberation from Fascism and its new republican constitution, as the country experienced the Cold War and Christian Democrat domination. Some critics denied the book’s aesthetic coherence or dismissed its artistry as snobbishly vulgar. Yet the French Communist writer Louis Aragon claimed that Tomasi had followed his favourite novelist, Stendhal, in producing a radical critique of his own class (‘‘Un Grand fauve se le`ve sur la litte´rature,’’ 1959); other critics proclaimed its deep artistic integrity. Tomasi’s narrative eschews action, relaying events mainly through the everyday consciousness of Fabrizio Corbera, prince of Salina (partly modeled on the author’s great-grandfather, and partly on the author himself), who dominates six of the novel’s eight parts and, indirectly, the other two. These are dated May 1860, August 1860, October 1860, November 1860, February 1861, November 1862, July 1883, May 1910. The first coincides with the landing in Sicily of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers, and the last with the fiftieth anniversary of the same event. By the second date, Sicily has been conquered for the new Italian state; by the third, a plebiscite in Sicily and Southern Italy (now also freed) has ratified their union with Italy’s constitutional monarchy; by the fourth, the new order is taking shape; the fifth sees the new Kingdom of Italy impose its rule on Sicily; the sixth sees 1876

the Sicilian aristocracy celebrate its survival as the Italian army brings Garibaldi under control; the seventh records Prince Fabrizio’s last hours as he contemplates the inexorable bourgeoisification of that once proud aristocracy. The novel ends with his symbolic rejection by his eldest surviving daughter, the aged spinster Concetta: She throws out the stuffed remains of his favourite dog, Bendico`, who, as he flies down on to the dustheap, momentarily assumes the dancing silhouette of the Salina family’s heraldic animal, the leopard. Animal imagery runs right through the novel, whose informally aristocratic discourse plays with a heraldic hierarchy: Lions and leopards metaphorically stand for the aristocracy, contrasted to the base jackals and hyenas, or toads, or elephants of the mercenary upwardly mobile bourgeois. But the prince’s captivating nephew, Tancredi, is compared to a cat and once describes himself love-smitten as a cat, wet as a frog, filthy as a stray dog and hungry as a wolf, while the daughters of the nobility at the Ponteleone ball in Part 6 are likened to chattering monkeys. This metaphorical bestiary suggests a naturalistic, pseudo-Darwinian deterministic process that will see the lower orders taking over. The final discarding of Bendico` also links up with recurrent images of dead animals, slaughtered for the table or shot for sport, and dead humans, from the disemboweled Neapolitan soldier, early in Part 1, to the death of the prince himself, which takes up the whole of Part 7. In the naturalistic world, death is the ultimate event, and the novel indeed opens with the Latin words from the Ave Maria, Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae (Now and at the hour of our death), linking the historical present to nonexistence. Death comes to the prince in the figure of a veiled young woman, whose beauty is reminiscent of Angelica, the low-born but wealthy girl who marries the aristocratic but impecunious Tancredi, and who is an object of desire for the prince. But the veiled figure is also Venus, the goddess whose planet is the object of the prince’s contemplation as he seeks refuge in his serene pursuit of astronomy. The mythological frescoes of the prince’s palace

GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA outside Palermo include Zeus, to whom the prince himself is likened, and bearded Vulcan, who bears a remarkable resemblance to Garibaldi. By such means, the novel conveys the aristocratic imagery and the sense of its passing as Sicily undergoes a historical transformation whose events—political conflict, battles, plebiscites, revolutions—are not directly narrated but enter the text as reports, filtered through the recollections, insights, projects and desires of the characters, and indeed embodied in their behaviours. An unheroic embodiment of the ‘‘world-historic individual,’’ caught between two social orders, tradition and modernity, feudalism and capital, theorized by Georg Luka`cs as being pivotal to the historical novel genre, Prince Fabrizio pursues the strategy suggested to him by Tancredi, as the latter sets out to join the Garibaldini: ‘‘se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’e`, bisogna che tutto cambi’’ (if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change). He resolves, therefore, to preserve his family’s aristocratic status not by fighting the ‘‘revolution,’’ but by capturing it—the strategy by which Cavour created the Kingdom of Italy. His one decisive act, not of heroism, but of squalid compromise, is to marry the dashing Tancredi to the daughter of the unscrupulous social climber, Don Calogero Seda`ra, rather than to his own daughter, Concetta, though the latter has informed him of her tender feelings toward her cousin. ‘‘Swallowing the toad,’’ as Fabrizio describes the matrimonial deal with Seda`ra, is, he knows, a betrayal of his daughter, of his family, of his class, and of his delicate conscience, the values that he presumes he and his class stand for; but he tyrannically quells the protests of his hysterical wife and his traditionalist underling, Don Ciccio Tumeo, the local church organist and Fabrizio’s shooting companion. As in using a prostitute or shooting a rabbit, he enjoys not only the sport itself but also the following self-indulgent remorse. The novel’s fascinating ambiguity depends on this characterization, and on the relationship between Fabrizio and the impersonal narrator, who presents scenes and sensations mostly through Fabrizio’s perceptions, but intermittently, at key moments, steps outside his character to project the perspective of a later century, setting up startling comparisons with such things as the Odessa steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (1925), an Allied air raid in 1943 when the Lampedusa palace in Palermo was destroyed and looted, and a jet airliner. This perspective from the twentieth-century present reinforces and is

reinforced by the chronology of the narrative, with the first six chapters, as we have seen, dated between 1860 and 1862, and the last two (as planned from an early stage) zooming forward to 1883 and 1910, to end on the historic anniversary of its opening scene, nearly 20 years after the passing of the novel’s presumed protagonist. Here lies much of the formal and imaginative originality of the novel, which shatters at least two of the genre’s canonical conventions: continuity in time, and a close fit with the biography of the protagonist. But the novel’s real protagonist is history, which animates every detail, or maybe the narrator endowed with historical hindsight: a narrator who can further shatter the traditionalist aesthetic by abruptly switching, in Part 5 (the last to be written) and Part 8 (included in the original conception), to the consciousness of a minor character. In Part 5, in a mise-en-abıˆme doubling in miniature the main story, the prince’s Jesuit chaplain, Father Pirrone, who so far has been patronized and gently ridiculed, undertakes a horrendous journey into the countryside (as the prince’s household had done in Part 2), delivers a justification of the aristocracy built on much special pleading, and then finds himself ordaining a marriage settlement in a sordid story of seduction and property among poor country folk, which makes him realize that the Devil twists the mightiest aristocrats around his little finger as easily as the lowliest peasants. In Part 8, it is the aged Concetta who hears that her feelings for Tancredi had been reciprocated and that a match between the two of them might have been possible if it were not for her own pride and her father’s indifference. As if the narrator has not done enough in suggesting a reinterpretation of all that has gone before, he plants, right at the end of his narrative, the suspicion that truth is merely hypothetical anyway, a variable and perishable construct. Concetta, deprived of her sense of aristocratic superiority, gets rid of its last relic, Bendico`. This, in effect, amounts to the novel’s rejection of its own protagonist. He, however, had virtually rejected himself—first in rejecting his own class at the Ponteleone ball in Part 6, and ‘‘courting death’’ in a painting by Greuze, and then, in Part 7, as he lay dying, in acknowledging that his strategy of marrying his class into the rising bourgeoisie had failed and that he could not recognize in the new aristocratic generations the values he had tried to preserve. The narrator, then, and perhaps also the reader with him, simultaneously identifies with and rejects 1877

GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA the novel’s central character, who has deluded himself that he can stand aside from history, but in so doing makes a historic decision. In the celebrated conversation, toward the end of Part 4, with the Piedmontese envoy, Chevalley, who has visited the prince in the Godforsaken Sicilian countryside so as to offer him a seat on the Senate of the new Italian Kingdom, the honest Chevalley is shocked when the prince, declining the offer, proposes Seda`ra instead, thereby contradicting his own excuses based on the stereotypical characterization of Sicilians as too proud to undertake any endeavour. He thus leaves history to be made by those he most despises. There has been much argument as to whether Fabrizio’s philosophy of a history that leads nowhere and of a Sicily that is unredeemable is actually the philosophy of the book, or whether this latter differs, and, if so, what it consists in. Certainly, there is much in the book to suggest a strongly ethical critique—the rigged plebiscite, the cynicism of Tancredi and his class (and, indeed, of Fabrizio himself) in using the Garibaldian ideal for their own ends. But Fabrizio’s totalization of history, or at least of Sicilian history, as the inevitable succession of a new power elite in place of the previous one finds no alternative in the book, though the miseries, as well as the splendours, of the aristocracy are unblinkingly, if compassionately, exposed. The 3,000 copies of the first edition of Il gattopardo sold out overnight. The bestselling novel was very appealing to the film industry. But Licy, the author’s widow, did not agree to sell the film rights until Luchino Visconti had been signed up as director. Visconti’s film (1963), which is set during the years 1860–1862, focuses on the circumstances that led to the birth of modern Italy. In 2001, Roberto Ando` released the highly stylized film, Il manoscritto del Principe (The Manuscript of the Prince), recounting the story of two young men’s lives affected by the gigantic personality of the prince, as he writes Il gattopardo. Ando` presents the magical encounter of Tomasi di Lampedusa with Marco (Francesco Orlando) and Guido (Gioacchino Lanza), and speculates why, in the end, the prince entrusts the manuscript of his novel not to Marco for publication, but to Guido, whom he considers his equal and adopts as his son. None of Tomasi’s texts (now in the Opere volume) is quite definitive. There is mild debate over the relative status of the 1957 manuscript of Il gattopardo and the typescript edited by Giorgio Bassani in 1958. Tomasi’s autobiographical Ricordi d’infanzia (A Memoir), intensely 1878

nostalgic and precise recollections of early childhood and his various homes, and of a nowvanished aristocratic lifestyle, have been re-edited back to their original tentative form. His other texts show little significant variation. There is the first chapter of a planned novel, ‘‘I gattini ciechi’’ (The Blind Kittens), about a new and coarser breed of landowners in the new century who, like their predecessors, do nothing to redeem Sicily and still founder. Two short stories further extend Tomasi’s range. ‘‘La gioia e la legge’’ (Joy and the Law) painfully relates how a seven-kilogram panettone awarded to an impecunious employee for outstanding service has to be given away to pay a debt of honour instead of being enjoyed as part of the family Christmas. In ‘‘La sirena’’ (The Siren), a Sicilian journalist, Corbera, recounts how, living in Turin just before the war, he gets to know an elderly fellow Sicilian, La Ciura, an eminent retired classical Greek scholar. La Ciura eventually tells Corbera how, as a young student on summer vacation on the Sicilian coast, he had been the lover of a siren; shortly after this astounding revelation, the old professor disappears one night off a cruise ship in the open sea. These works display stylistic and compositional skills comparable to those of Il gattopardo, and an ultimate commitment to the sublimating value of literary art, which Tomasi (possibly hiding under the pseudonym of Aromatisi in the early 1920s) shows in all his writings about literature and art, and which is the implied message of that absorbingly problematical artefact that is his novel.

Biography Born in Palermo, 23 December 1896; inherited the title first of duke of Palma and then of prince of Lampedusa, but was unable to halt the economic decline of his aristocratic heritage. Without completing his law degree, he fought briefly in World War I and was taken prisoner by the Austrians. After the war, his intense and broad cultural and literary interests led him to be among the first in Italy to read Joyce in the original, certainly before 1926, when he contributed three articles to the Genoa monthly Le opere e i giorni. He may also, under the pseudonym of Giuseppe Aromatisi, have been the author of 24 shorter articles in the Palermo daily Il giornale di Sicilia in 1922–1924. He traveled extensively in Europe, especially to London, where his uncle Pietro was ambassador, and married the Latvian aristocrat, Alessandra (familiarly known as Licy) Wolff-Stomersee, a

GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA psychoanalyst, in Riga in 1932. President of the Sicilian Red Cross, 1944–1947. Between 1953 and 1956, he gave informal lessons on English and French literature to some young friends, among them Francesco Orlando. It was not until 1955 that he started writing Il gattopardo, the stories, a memoir, and the opening of a second novel. Il gattopardo was initially turned down by Mondadori and Einaudi (both involving the Sicilian writer Elio Vittorini), then accepted by Giorgio Bassani on behalf of Feltrinelli, who published it in 1958. He had no offspring, but shortly before his death adopted as his heir his young cousin Gioacchino Lanza. Died of cancer in Rome, 23 July 1957. JOHN GATT-RUTTER Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by Nicoletta Polo, introductions by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Milan: Mondadori, 1995.

Fiction Il gattopardo, edited by Giorgio Bassani, 1958; rev. ed. following the 1957 manuscript, edited by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, 1969; as The Leopard, translated by Archibald Colquhoun, 1960; reprints 1984 and 1991. I racconti, 1961; new edition by Nicoletta Polo, with preface by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, 1988; as Two Stories and a Memory, translated by Archibald Colquhoun with an introduction by E. M. Forster, 1962; rpt. 1988; as The Siren and Selected Writings (including ‘‘Tutorials on Stendhal’’), translated by A. Colquhoun, D. Gilmour and G. Waldman, 1995.

Letters Lettere a Licy: Un matrimonio epistolare, edited by Caterina Cardona, 1987. Licy e il gattopardo: Lettere d’amore di Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, edited by Sabino Caronia, 1995.

Essays Lezioni su Stendhal, in Paragone (1959): 3–49; reprinted 1977. Invito alle lettere francesi del Cinquecento, 1979. Il mito, la gloria, as titled by the editor Marcello Staglieno (three essays published in Genoa monthly, Le opere e i giorni, 1926–1927), 1989.

Letteratura inglese, edited by Nicoletta Polo, Vol. I, Dalle origini al Settecento, Vol. II, L’Ottocento e il Novecento, 1990–1991. Scritti ritrovati, signed Giuseppe Aromatisi and published during 1922–1924 in Il giornale di Sicilia, and convincingly attributed to Tomasi, edited by Andrea Vitello, 1993.

Further Reading L’Anello che non Tiene, Vols. 13–14, nos. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 2001): double issue on Tomasi di Lampedusa. Buzzi, Giancarlo, Invito alla lettura di Tomasi di Lampedusa, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Giarrizzo, Giuseppe (editor), Tomasi e la cultura europea, Catania: Universita` degli Studi, 1996. Gilmour, David, The Last Leopard: A Life of Giuseppe di Lampedusa, London: Quartet Books, 1988. Hampson, Ernest, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo: An Introductory Essay, Market Harborough: Troubadour, 1996. Kuhns, Richard F., ‘‘Modernity and Death: The Leopard,’’ in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 5, no. 2 (1969): 95–119. Lansing, Richard, ‘‘The Structure of Meaning in Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo,’’ in PMLA, 93, no. 3 (1978): 409–422. Lanza Tomasi, Gioacchino, I luoghi del Gattopardo, Palermo: Sellerio, 2001. Lucente, Gregory L., ‘‘Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo: Figure and Temporality in a Historical Novel,’’ in Beautiful Fables: Self-Consciousness in Italian Narrative from Manzoni to Calvino, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Musarra, Franco, and Serge Vanvolsem (editors), Il gattopardo, Leuven and Rome: Leuven University Press and Bulzoni, 1991. O’Neill, Tom, ‘‘Ants and flags: Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Gattopardo,’’ in The Italianist, 13 (1993): 180–208. Orlando, Francesco, Ricordo di Lampedusa, 1st ed. 1962, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996. Orlando, Francesco, L’intimita` e la storia: Lettura del ‘‘Gattopardo,’’ Turin: Einaudi, 1998. Reale, Basilio, Sirena Siciliana: l’anima esiliata in ‘‘Lighea’’ di Tomasi di Lampedusa, Palermo: Sellerio, 1986. Salvestroni, Simonetta, Lampedusa, ‘‘Il Castoro,’’ Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1973. Samona`, Giuseppe Paolo, Il ‘‘Gattopardo’’ e i ‘‘Racconti’’ di Lampedusa, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Vitello, Andrea, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Palermo: Sellerio, 1987. Zago, Nunzio, I Gattopardi e le Iene: Il messaggio inattuale di Tomasi di Lampedusa, Palermo: Sellerio, 1993.

1879

FULVIO TOMIZZA

FULVIO TOMIZZA (1935–1999) The work of Fulvio Tomizza has as a recurring thematic core the existential condition of the border (frontiera). He continues and modernizes, in the light of the events that follow World War II in Istria and Trieste, the tradition of Triestine literature that had its greatest representatives in the first half of the twentieth century in Scipio Sla`taper, Giani Stu´parich, Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba, and Pier Antonio Quarantotti Gambini. In less than half a century, Trieste, a central European archipelago of culture (Italian, Austrian, and Slavic) experiences separation from the two worlds that had influenced it. In November of 1918, political ties with the Danubian and Baltic hinterland were severed; after World War II, with the Treaty of Paris (10 February 1947), the southern part of Istria was allotted to Yugoslavia, and 270,000 Italians were forced to leave the land where until then they had lived in peace with other ethnic groups. Tomizza’s debut novel, Materada (Materada, 1960), reconstructs the political climate of the summer of 1955, when the inhabitants of Istria, as a result of the London Memorandum of 1954, must decide whether to remain with the Socialist regime or to immigrate to Italy. Materada is a portrait of an Istria torn apart, and a testimony of the suffering of individuals subjected to the violence of power— first Fascist, then Communist. The epicenter of the novel is the tie between man and the earth, an elective space of his affections and hopes. Three years later Tomizza publishes La ragazza di Petrovia (The Girl from Petrovia, 1963), where he continues to tell the story of the tragic postwar destiny of the people of Istria. The novel is set in a refugee camp on the Carso, in the Italian territory, where the refugees evoke their lost rural society in order not to despair. These first two volumes, along with Il bosco di acacie (The Acacia Wood, 1966), in which he describes the life of a family of exiled farmers who, caught between nostalgia and utopia, try to reconstruct their relation with the earth at a farm assigned to them in the region of lower Friuli, are republished as the Trilogia istriana (Istrian Trilogy) in 1967. A year before had seen the publication of La quinta stagione (The Fifth Season, 1965). Mixing descriptive realism and psychological introspection, in writing characterized 1880

by linguistic pastiche (a formal mark of the social co-existence of many peoples), Tomizza describes the open physical and moral wounds inflicted by the events of the war on the conscience of an entire generation born around the 1930s, which witnesses the crumbling of Fascist Italy, and at the same time becomes aware of the valor of the Resistance. With L’albero dei sogni (The Tree of Dreams, 1969), acclaimed by critics Bruno Maier and Roberto Damiani as one of the best novels of the second half of the twentieth century, Tomizza brings to maturation some of the thematic and stylistic suggestions already laid out in earlier works. The autobiographical dimension, favored by the use of the first person and by the mixture of narrative materials and diary notes, extends into the reconstruction of the psychological birth of the narrating self and concentrates on the conflict between father and son, while the style is interiorized until it takes on psychoanalytic tones, whose traces were beginning to emerge from beneath the realistic patina of La ragazza di Petrovia. And the following novel, La citta` di Miriam (Miriam’s City, 1972), represents yet another step on the path to maturity of Stefano Markovich, Tomizza’s literary double and alter ego, who realizes within the urban space of Trieste, in the story of his love affair with Miriam, his process of integration and assimilation. In 1977, Tomizza publishes what is perhaps his most successful work, La miglior vita (The Better Life). Taking up and modernizing the norms of the historical novel, he retraces, through the eyes of the protagonist, a century of Istrian history, experienced within the microcosm of a parish convulsed by the events of the war and personal dramas. Martin Crusich, the sexton who mediates between different cultures and is custodian of the community’s memory, registers in the common destiny of ‘‘passing into a better life’’ the presence of death in everyday existence and the tie between the individual and society: ‘‘Questo non sapevo, che il mondo muore a ogni morte di un uomo’’ (This I had not known—that the world dies upon each man’s death). In the early 1980s, Tomizza becomes increasingly interested, within the perspective of narrative combining historical documentation and social ethics,

FULVIO TOMIZZA in archival research, and he enriches his oeuvre with works set between the sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries, almost as though he wishes to distance the narrated events from his own life. Thus, after L’amicizia (Friendship, 1980), in which there persists a theme typical of Triestine literature, that of the conflict between city and country, symbolized here by the shiftless friendship between Marco (a son of the Carso) and Alessandro (an urbanized Triestine), in 1981 Tomizza publishes La finzione di Maria (Heavenly Supper). Fascinated by microhistory, which is valued by the French historical methodology of the Annales, the writer reconstructs a trial of the Inquisition that took place in 1662 against a young girl destined to sanctity, and highlights the interconnections of political power and the ecclesiastical authorities, who are blind to the authenticity of faith experienced as social redemption. The story of Maria Janis, who claimed she had fasted for several years, is recorded in the archives of the Inquisition in Venice. Also taking place in the Counter-Reformation is the incident recounted in Il male viene dal Nord (Evil Comes from the North, 1984), in which the reforming Bishop Pier Paolo Vergerio, excommunicated by the Catholics and unpopular with the Lutherans, presents himself on the ethical and religious level as a man of the frontiera, ready to embrace the suggestions of Protestantism precisely when the Catholic Church is inclined to enclose itself in a rigid orthodoxy based on the supremacy of the papacy. Along the same thematic lines is the narrative experiment Quando Dio uscı` di chiesa (When God Abandoned the Church, 1987), which is almost a continuation of the preceding novel, and which recounts the sufferings of those who in a border land such as Istria’s Dignano are tried for heresy because they are supporters of the Lutheran doctrine. On the other hand, Fughe incrociate (Intertwined Flights, 1990) bears witness, in a chiasmatic structure, to the existential turmoil connected with the religious conversion of the two main characters, one moving from Judaism to Christianity, the other taking the opposite path. On the level of narrative strategies, at least beginning from the mid-1980s, Tomizza approaches the norms of the epistolary novel. The literary artifice, which often has documentary support, is thus used as a kind of historical source in which the biographical dimension has priority over collective events that remain in the background of the narration. This is precisely what occurs in Gli sposi di Via Rossetti (The Couple of Via Rossetti, 1986), in which, however, the discovery of the letters is only a pretext for beginning the tale in the third person.

We can also place in this sphere novels that present a true epistolary structure: I rapporti colpevoli (Sinful Relations, 1992), which is written with strong dream-like and psychoanalytic tones, and is built around the dialectic between two worlds, Western and Eastern; Dal luogo del sequestro (From the Site of the Kidnapping, 1996), which has the rhythm of a detective story, and is based on events that occurred between Rome and a remote island of an imaginary South; and Franziska (Franziska, 1997), which reconstructs, through the epistolary relationship of a young Slovene girl and an Italian official, the misunderstandings of a love hindered by different origins and national borders, against the backdrop of a Europe that has emerged from World War I shattered into pieces. A few months before his death, in the volume Nel chiaro della notte (In the Clear of the Night, 1999), Tomizza collects 70 dream-like stories in which the elective spaces are still the writer’s own places transformed into utopias, not without irony, by the fantastical energy of the dream. There are several posthumous novels: La casa col mandorlo (The House with the Almond Tree, 2000), La visitatrice (The Visitor, 2000), a novel in which private incidents and collective events intersect between Lubjana and Trieste, and Il sogno dalmata (The Dalmatian Dream, 2001), in which the author returns to the themes of the border, exile, and the search for a homeland, recounting the exodus of the Dalmatians and Croatians, who in order to escape from the Turks take shelter in Istria, where they encounter a difficult reality that will extinguish their illusions. Tomizza also wrote dramatic adaptations, children’s books, and essays, always remaining faithful to an idea of the border writer, a promoter of the coexistence of peoples and, through literature, a peacemaker.

Biography Born in Giurizzani near Materada, an Istrian village in the municipality of Umago, to an Italian father (Ferdinando) and a mother of remote Slovene origins (Margherita Franck Trento), on January 26, 1935. He pursues his studies at the seminary of Capodistria and later at the Collegio dei Salesiani in Gorizia, from 1944–1945. He attends the ‘‘Carlo Combi’’ secondary school in Capodistria in 1947. After the peace treaty of February 10, 1947, his family, made up of small land owners and merchants, suffers the confiscation of their goods by Tito’s Communist regime, and his father is imprisoned from 1947 until 1949. 1881

FULVIO TOMIZZA He immigrates to Trieste in 1950. He comes back to Materada, when his father Fernando dies in 1953. Having received a classics degree in Capodistria, he returns to Materada in the wake of the London Memorandum of October 5, 1954, which allotted his land to Yugoslavia. He wins a scholarship and enrolls in the Department of Romance Literature at the University of Belgrade. He participates as an assistant director on the film Attimi decisivi directˇ ap. Moves ed by the Czechoslovakian Frantisˇek C to Trieste permanently; marries Laura Levi, the daughter of musicologist Vito Levi, and has a daughter named Franca in 1955. He is the editor of the local newspaper-radio. He wins the Premio Cinque Bettole di Bordighera with three stories in 1957. At Trieste’s Teatro Stabile, in 1962, he stages Vera Verk, with the direction of Fulvio Tolusso, sets by Nino Perizi, and performances by Paola Borboni and Fosco Giachetti. The text of the drama is published in Sipario. He wins the Campiello Prize for La quinta stagione in 1965. In 1969, for Trieste’s Teatro Stabile, he dramatizes Giulio Cesare Croce’s Storia di Bertoldo, with the direction of Giovanni Poli, sets by Mischa Scandella, and a performance by Franco Mezzera. By invitation of the ‘‘Associazione Culturale Italiana’’ in 1970, he conducts a series of conferences in Italy, Vienna, Graz, Prague, and Bratislava. He receives the Fiera Letteraria prize for La citta` di Miriam, 1972, and for Dove tornare, 1974. In 1976, he adapts a work by the great Slovenian writer, Ivan Cankar, Martı`n Kacˇur, biografia di un idealista, which is performed at the Teatro Stabile with the direction of Franco Macedonio, sets and costumes by Sergio D’Osmo, and music by Giampaolo Coral. The actors include Corrado Pani, Miriam Bartolini, Nestor Garay, and Leda Negroni. Wins the Strega Prize in 1977 for La miglior vita. The novel is translated into ten languages. For Gli sposi di Via Rossetti is awarded the Campiello Prize in 1986, the Vilenica della Associazione Scrittori Sloveni and the Ascona degli scrittori della Svizzera Italiana prizes, in 1987. In 1984, the University of Trieste confers on him an honorary degree in letters, ‘‘for the high artistic level of his extensive narrative work, in which he has made himself an acute, original interpreter of a culture based on the values of the peaceful coexistence of peoples.’’ From 1985 to 1999, lives in isolation, dedicating himself to study and writing. For I rapporti colpevoli, he wins the Campiello and the Giovanni Boccaccio prizes in 1992. He wins the Estense Prize for Alle spalle di Trieste in 1995, and the Alassio Prize for Franziska in 1998. Dies in 1882

Trieste on May 21, 1999, from liver disease, and is buried in Materada. ALFREDO LUZI Selected Works Novels Materada, 1960; as Materada, translated by Russell Scott Valentino, with the collaboration of Laura Levi Tomizza, 2000. La ragazza di Petrovia, 1963. La quinta stagione, 1965. Il bosco di acacie, 1966. L’albero dei sogni, 1969. La torre capovolta, 1971. La citta` di Miriam, 1972. Dove tornare, 1974. La miglior vita, 1977. L’amicizia, 1980. La finzione di Maria, 1981; as Heavenly Supper: The Story of Maria Janis, translated by Anne Jacobson Schutte, 1991. Il male viene dal Nord: Il romanzo del vescovo Vergerio, 1984. Gli sposi di via Rossetti: Tragedia di una minoranza, 1986. Quando Dio uscı` di chiesa, 1987. Poi venne Chernobyl, 1989. L’ereditiera veneziana, 1989. Fughe incrociate, 1990. I rapporti colpevoli, 1992. L’abate Roys e il fatto innominabile, 1994. Alle spalle di Trieste, 1995. Dal luogo del sequestro, 1996. Franziska, 1997. La casa col mandorlo, 2000. La visitatrice, 2000. Il sogno dalmata, 2001.

Short Stories ‘‘Ieri, un secolo fa,’’ 1985. ‘‘Nel chiaro della notte,’’ 1999.

Plays Vera Verk, 1963. La storia di Bertoldo, 1969. L’idealista, free adaptation of the novel by Ivan Cankar, 1976.

Children’s Books Trick, storia di un cane, 1975. Anche le pulci hanno la tosse, 1993. Il gatto Martino, 1994.

Essays Destino di frontiera: Dialogo con Riccardo Ferrante, 1992. M’identifico con la frontiera, 1999.

Further Reading Aliberti, Carmelo, Fulvio Tomizza e la frontiera dell’anima, Foggia: Bastogi, 2001. Bellucci, Maria Claudia, La produzione letteraria dei primi quindi anni di Fulvio Tomizza, Salo`: Tip. Bortolotti, 2000.

` TOMMASEO NICCOLO Damiani, Roberto, Fulvio Tomizza, Milan: Marzorati, 1972. Giannetto, Nella, La figura del paragone ne ‘‘La ragazza di Petrovia’’ di Fulvio Tomizza, Ravenna: Longo, 1981. Kadic´, Ante, ‘‘Fulvio Tomizza’s Depiction of the ItaloYuguslav Frontier,’’ in World Literature Today, 59 (1985): 346–353.

Maier, Bruno, Saggi sulla letteratura triestina del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Monai, Fulvio, Fulvio Tomizza, Gorizia: Bressan & Campestrini, 1969. Neirotti, Marco, Invito alla lettura di Fulvio Tomizza, Milan: Mursia, 1979.

` TOMMASEO (1802–1874) NICCOLO Niccolo` Tommaseo is one of the most complex and multifaceted personalities of Italian Romanticism. A versatile writer, he was interested in literature, politics, philosophy, questions of language, literary criticism, and pedagogy; he wrote novels and short stories, lyric poetry and memoirs; he was the translator and drafter of several Italian language dictionaries; and, lastly, he left behind an enormous amount of correspondence, a large part of which still needs to be put in order. He moved with ease among all genres of nineteenth-century literature, and still today there does not exist a complete catalogue of his immense production that continues to reveal unpublished writings from time to time. For example, Diario intimo (Intimate Diary) was published for the first time only in 1938. A unique character, a man with a difficult disposition, passionate and impulsive and involved in frequent literary or political polemics, Tommaseo cannot be easily identified with a movement, school, or group of intellectuals. A fervent Catholic and convinced patriot, he nurtured a strong sentiment for the people seen not so much as a social class but as a mystic union of all men belonging to the same nation. Therein lay his interest for popular songs and traditions, but also for language, which, according to him, is the strongest means by which the people express their own feelings. Tommaseo’s contentious spirit was evident from his participation in the debate over Romanticism, in Milan, thereby revealing a personal stance that set him against Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, and even Alessandro Manzoni, whom he profoundly admired. He contested the classicism of Vincenzo Monti, arguing that beauty is the union of all beauties embraced by the human soul, and negatively reviewed I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) in 1827, contesting Manzoni’s formula of the historical novel and highlighting the existence of an imbalance between literary invention

and historical fact. It is an imbalance that, according to the critic, appears evident above all in the description of the humble characters—beginning with the main protagonists Renzo and Lucia—that seem too invented, contrary to his conviction that the poor are on the top rung of the ladder of truth. After having reviewed all the great Italian historical novels of the time for the Florentine periodical Antologia, Tommaseo articulated his theory of this literary genre, arguing that it is necessary to overcome the risks of a romantic falsification of history, and that the truth that needs to be pointed out is related to the psychological condition and to the morality of the heroes chosen from the most humble classes: a sort of intimist path that opens the way toward his greatest novel, Fede e bellezza (Faith and Beauty, 1840). One of Tommaseo’s many interests was the study of linguistics. His relationship with Manzoni pushed him to elaborate a theory that distances itself from the great Milanese novelist. If the ideal literary language, for Manzoni, was modeled after the Tuscan dialect, for Tommaseo, on the contrary, it was necessary to establish a sort of equilibrium between the written language and that spoken by the people. Two ideas are central to this theory: on the one hand, the conviction that if men of letters continuously transform language, the people will conserve it, and on the other an almost religious attitude concerning the miracle of human language, in which the author finds the divine origin of the word. The ideal of an equilibrium between literary language and the spoken idiom of the people governs the Dizionario della lingua italiana (Dictionary of Italian Language, 1858–1879) in which, more than a scientific approach, an ethicalcivil attitude is evident. This also explains why every single term, aside from being accompanied by a vast literary documentation, is elaborated with moralistic and polemical personal considerations. Similar considerations are behind his great admiration for Dante, 1883

` TOMMASEO NICCOLO which resulted in numerous essays dedicated to the Florentine poet. According to Tommaseo, the literary language of Dante is closer to the spoken volgare than the language of Petrarch or Boccaccio, and thus it represents an absolute model for modern writers. Furthermore, interpreting the writer through the lens of romantic ideology and his own personal history, Tommaseo also felt particularly close to Dante’s patriotic sentiments. Tommaseo’s strictly literary production is also vast, including numerous works of narrative, lyric poetry, essays, and translations. His versatility as well as his propensity to avoid any pre-existing models causes his poetry to often look more like prose, his essays to contain poetic passages, and his narrative to open itself up to lyrical contemplation. His first significant narrative work is the novel Due baci (Two Kisses, 1831), a kind of confessional story, that has as its protagonist Eugenia, who recounts to her brother how the seductive force of her first kiss still persists, even though she is now married to another man. Following a pattern that repeats itself in Tommaseo’s narrative, guilt exists together with the need for redemption and with a fascination for sin. The excruciating interior conflict of the heroine is, however, canceled in the moment in which, when her former lover shows himself, she rejects him. As Quinto Marini has written, ‘‘Her rejection is not, however, an exhortation to Christian virtue or to the stoic duties as a wife and mother: it is the conscience of the absolute impossibility to repeat that ideal first kiss that determines Eugenia’s refusal and makes her a truly modern character’’ (La letteratura del pieno Romanticismo e del Risorgimento. Niccolo` Tommaseo, 1998). Il sacco di Lucca (The Sack of Lucca, 1834), Il Duca d’Atene (The Duke of Athens, 1837), and L’assedio di Tortona (The Siege of Tortona, 1844) are all historical novels. The first is set in 1314 and narrates the clash between opposing factions of the Tuscan city of Lucca after the death of Henry VII. The second takes place in 1343 and recounts the Florentine insurrection against the tyrant Gualtieri of Brienne. The last recalls the conflicts between Italian cities at the arrival of Barbarossa in 1155. All are characterized by the intertwining of historical events with love stories and private facts, by a good psychological depiction of the protagonists, but above all, by large-scale scenes in which the greatness of the people as well as its suffering is celebrated, and which must serve as an example for the modern reader. Tommaseo’s lyrical production is particularly extensive. The majority of his poems presents, however, only occasional originality and therefore they 1884

are of modest literary value. Some witness to his internal history, and describe the anxieties, fears, and uncertainties of a man torn among the experience of exile, spiritual wandering, and worldly passions. The definitive edition of his Poesie (Poetry, 1872) is divided into five parts and presents a kind of transition from historical and political themes to more intimate, doctrinal, and religious topics. His essay production often reveals a pedagogical tension and attempts to highlight the political contradictions in Italy of the time through a liberal Catholic vision derived from Antonio Rosmini. His interest for the people and his desire to capture its linguistic richness can be appreciated, lastly, in the translations of popular folk songs, which constitute one of the most valuable parts of his entire literary production: Canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici e greci (Tuscan, Corsican, Illyrian, and Greek Popular Songs, 1841–1842). Niccolo` Tommaseo’s masterpiece is generally held to be the novel Fede e bellezza, an experimental work in nature and the object of infinite discussions, to the point of living more in literary criticism than as a narrative. From its appearance, the novel was labeled ‘‘antimodern,’’ but ‘‘antimodern’’ in the sense that it did not conform to the poetic canons of the time, with an absolutely innovative type of writing and of analysis of characters that anticipates the twentieth century. At its center is the love story between Maria and Giovanni, contrasted by memories of preceding passions, by betrayals and reconciliations, by the need of expiation and the final resolution with the death of Maria. The narration winds itself through six books, along which prevails, over the narration of the facts and events, interior reflections and the ‘‘intimate diaries’’ of the two protagonists. The nonlinear writing oscillates between true narrative registers and a sort of lyric prose, while the atmospheres move from the sinful sensuality of certain episodes to the religious need for expiation. The description of conjugal love, detailed and provocative for the times, finds one of the most unexpected points in the renewal of Giovanni’s physical desire, just as soon as he becomes aware of the first signs of Maria’s fatal illness. In such a vision, absolutely against the mainstream of mid-nineteenth century morality, pleasure and sin become the necessary means by which man can achieve for himself expiation and redemption in a sort of morbid entwining of good and evil, a model that has a precedent in several of George Sand’s novels. Among the works published posthumously, Diario intimo, which spans 50 years of the author’s life, from 1821 to 1871, is particularly important. In

` TOMMASEO NICCOLO this work, alongside pages of immediate quotidian realism, like the description of the urban landscapes (that of Trieste is especially interesting), emerge the intellectual passions of the author, the moments of religious fervor, his friendships, his studies, the polemics, the sins, and the continual remorse, all signs of a complex personality often characterized by lacerating interior conflicts.

Fiction Due baci, 1831. Il sacco di Lucca, 1834. Il Duca d’Atene, 1837. Fede e bellezza, 1840. L’assedio di Tortona, 1844.

Memoirs and Autobiographical Works Memorie poetiche e poesie, 1838. Diario intimo, 1838. Il secondo esilio, 1862.

Literary and Linguistic Works

Biography Born in Sebenico (now Sˇibenik, Dalmatia) on October 9, 1802; studied at the seminary of Spalato and later in Padua; graduated with a degree in jurisprudence in 1822; between 1824 and 1827, lived in Milan; then moved to Florence, where he became codirector of the journal Antologia and where he met numerous intellectuals; an article critical of Austria published in Antologia in 1833 forced him into exile in France; in 1839, thanks to the amnesty conceded by the emperor Ferdinand I, returned to Italy and established himself in Venice; was arrested for one of his speeches on freedom of press; freed in 1848, became minister of culture and of public education of Venice; at the fall of the republic of Venice, left as an exile for Corfu`, where he lived in isolation afflicted by blindness; married the young widow Diamante Artale, with whom he had two children; returned to Italy and, from 1854, lived in Turin where he became an instructor in a technical institute; in 1859 moved to Florence, where he dedicated himself to writing of his last works; refused the nomination of senator of the kingdom as well as a university professor position while he opened a polemic against the Italy of the Risorgimento and committed himself to defending the autonomy of Dalmatia. Died in Florence on May 1, 1874. PAOLO QUAZZOLO Selected Works Collections Edizione nazionale delle opere di Niccolo Tommaseo, 6 vols., Florence: Sansoni, 1954–1973. Opere, edited by Michele Cataudella, Naples: Rossi, 1969.

Poetry ‘‘Confessioni,’’ 1836. ‘‘Versi facili per la gente difficile,’’ 1837. ‘‘Scintille,’’ 1841. ‘‘Iskrice,’’ 1844. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1872.

Il Perticari confutato da Dante, 1825. Nuovo dizionario de’ sinonimi della lingua italiana, 1830. Dell’educazione, 1834. Commedia di Dante Alighieri, col commento di N. Tommaseo, 3 vols., 1837. Della bellezza educatrice, 1838. Nuovi scritti, 4 vols., 1838–1841. Dizionario estetico, 1840. Studi filosofici, 2 vols., 1840. Nuova proposta di correzioni e di giunte al Dizionario italiano, 1841. Studi critici, 1843. Rome et le monde, 1851. Il supplizio di un italiano a Corfu`, 1855. Dizionario della lingua italiana, with Bernardo Bellini, 8 vols., 1858–1879. Nuovi studi su Dante, 1865. Storia civile nella letteraria, 1872.

Translations Canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici e greci, 4 vols., 1841–1842. I Santi Evangeli, 1866.

Further Reading Agostini, Tiziana (editor), Daniele Manin e Niccolo Tommaseo: cultura e societa` nella Venezia del 1848: Convegno internazionale di studi: Venezia, 14–16 ottobre 1999, special issue of Quaderni veneti, 31–32 (2000). Bacchetti, Flavia, Niccolo Tommaseo e il Giornale della Caterina: un’immagine d’infanzia nell’Ottocento italiano, Florence: Le lettere, 1997. Bronzini, Giovanni Battista, I Canti popolari toscani di N. Tommaseo, Lecce: Milella, 1985. Bruni, Francesco (editor), Niccolo Tommaseo e il suo mondo: patrie e nazioni, Mariano del Friuli: Edizioni della Laguna, 2002. Di Biase, Carmine, Il dizionario dei sinonimi di Niccolo Tommaseo, Naples: Federico & Ardia, 1990. Manai, Alberto, Per un’edizione critica delle poesie di Niccolo Tommaseo, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1995. Marini, Quinto, ‘‘La letteratura del pieno Romanticismo e del Risorgimento. Niccolo` Tommaseo,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana, vol. 7 Il primo Ottocento, edited by Enrico Malato, Rome: Salerno Editrice, 1998. Monastra, Rosa Maria, I peccati di Tommaseo e altri studi sulla confessione letteraria, Palermo: Sellerio, 2004. Ruozzi, Gino (editor), Niccolo` Tommaseo: tra modelli antichi e forme moderne, Bologna: Gedit, 2004. Turchi, Roberta, and Alessandro Volpi (editors), Niccolo Tommaseo e Firenze, Florence: Olschki, 2000.

1885

PIER VITTORIO TONDELLI

PIER VITTORIO TONDELLI (1955–1991) Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s first books of fiction, Altri libertini (Other Libertines, 1980) and Pao Pao (1982) were controversial for their portrayal of youth culture and gay love. Although he became a cult writer to many, he was also dismissed by critics as a purely ‘‘generational writer.’’ With his third work Rimini (1985), a conventional beach novel, Tondelli changed genre and style to a kind of a parody of soap operas that sold over 100,000 copies. Critics then accused him of being formulaic, pandering to the public, in an effort to produce a bestseller. His somber Camere separate (Separate Rooms, 1989), however, attested that Tondelli had finally matured as an artist. As a journalist and fiction writer, Tondelli showed an interest in kitsch and pop culture from the very beginning, especially for American films and rock music, and for traditional as well as provincial Italian culture. He recognized the influence of writers such as Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, and at the same time he tried to connect, through writing, the culture of his region (Emilia Romagna) with the broader Western civilization. Thus travel as the experiencing of other cultures is fused with the physical and mental journey of self-awareness. Tondelli traveled extensively in Western and Eastern Europe, North Africa, and North America. Tondelli’s early narratives depict the student generation of the 1970s, paying attention to the forms of spoken language (including slang), drugs, and music. Altri libertini comprises six stories written in an experimental style that mimics the youth idiom and relies mainly on multilinguism and some blasphemy. Its representation of prostitution, criminality, drug addiction, and sex implicitly defies any ideological commitment. The experience of military service, at the age of 24, in Orvieto and Rome, inspired his autobiographical Pao Pao, in which profiles of young Italian men obliged to serve in the military were interwoven with tales of gay love. Rimini remains a contrived portrait of leisure life in the popular vacation town (Fellini’s own) on the Adriatic coast. This commercially successful work is more traditional for its use of the third-person narrator, polished Italian, the detective genre, and a strong plot. 1886

In 1986, Tondelli published a limited number of copies of Biglietti agli amici (Notes to Friends), which includes 24 notes for 24 friends. They are personal, intimate thoughts about love, friendship, death, writing, and traveling. Several of these themes return in Camere separate, a deeply personal, reflective work on death and loneliness, even though youth culture with its music, literature, traveling, and night life remains a strong element. It is a story about Leo’s mourning for the loss of his lover, Thomas. Like the character Bruno May (the young writer facing an existential crisis in Rimini) or Didi (who drinks too much and writes too little in Dinner Party), Leo is struggling to write. For Tondelli, this apparent phase of inactivity is an essential one since ‘‘e` proprio nell’inattivita` che lo scrittore sente sulla sua pelle il vuoto di quella che ancora si ostina a chiamare ‘‘la mia professione’’ (it is precisely in inactivity that the writer feels, on his own skin, the void of what he still stubbornly calls ‘‘my profession’’) (‘‘Frammenti dell’autore inattivo’’ in L’abbandono, 1993). Traveling becomes an escape from the world shared with Thomas; solitude is a necessary step in the process of mourning, as writing is a tool for introspection and pleasure. In 1985, working with publisher Il Lavoro Editoriale (later Transeuropa), Tondelli invited submissions of short stories by young writers for an anthology entitled Giovani Blues. Under 25, 1 (Young Blues: Under 25, 1986). The volume was so successful that two more followed: Belli e perversi. Under 25, 2 (Beautiful and Perverse: Under 25, 1987), and Papergang. Under 25, 3 (Paper Gang: Under 25, 1990). After Tondelli’s death, the writer Silvia Ballestra, initially included in Papergang, continued this editorial project. Tondelli collected his numerous journalistic pieces in Un weekend postmoderno. Cronache dagli anni ottanta (A Postmodern Weekend: Chronicles from the Eighties, 1990), and his short fiction and other essays were published posthumously as L’abbandono. Racconti dagli anni ottanta (Abandonment: Stories from the Eighties, 1993). During the 1980s, he also wrote a play, La notte della vittoria (Victory Night), a critique of bourgeois hypocrisy. A revised version, Dinner Party, was published posthumously in 1994.

LUCREZIA TORNABUONI Pier Vittorio Tondelli is recognized today as one of Italy’s most significant and influential writers of the late twentieth century.

Un weekend postmoderno. Cronache dagli anni ottanta, 1990. L’abbandono. Racconti dagli anni ottanta, 1993.

Theater Dinner Party, 1994.

Biography

Edited Works

Born in Correggio (Reggio Emilia), 14 September 1955; Studied at Liceo Classico Rinaldo Corso, 1969–1974; attended the University of Bologna 1975–1979, and graduated in 1980 with a dissertation on the epistolary novel; his first novel Altri libertini (1980) was banned by authorities because of its explicit representation of gay sex. Charges against Tondelli were dropped at the subsequent trial, 1981. Served in the military 1980–1981; worked for several newspapers (Il Resto del Carlino, La Nazione, Il Corriere della Sera) and magazines (L’espresso, Rockstar, Linus); Riccione Ater Prize for La notte della vittoria, 1985; traveled to Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North Africa. Died of AIDS in Correggio, 16 January 1991. GRAZIA MENECHELLA Selected Works Collections Opere. Romanzi, teatro, racconti, 2 volumes, edited by Fulvio Panzeri, Milan: Bompiani, 2000–2001.

Fiction Altri libertini, 1980. Pao Pao, 1982. Rimini, 1985. Biglietti agli amici, 1986. Camere separate, 1989, as Separate Rooms, translated by Simon Pleasance, 1992.

Giovani Blues. Under 25, 1, 1986. Belli e perversi. Under 25, 2, 1987. Papergang. Under 25, 3, 1990.

Further Reading Buia, Elena, Verso casa. Viaggio nella narrativa di Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Ravenna: Fernandel, 1999. Canalini, Massimo (editor), Federica in Cina (Pier Vittorio Tondelli e la sua ragazza), Ancona: Transeuropa, 2004. Carnero, Roberto, Lo spazio emozionale. Guida alla lettura di Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Novara: Interlinea, 1998. Minardi, Enrico, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Florence: Cadmo, 2003. Palandri, Enrico, Pier Vittorio Tondelli e la generazione, Bari: Laterza, 2005. Panzeri, Fulvio (editor), Pier Vittorio Tondelli, special issue, Panta: I nuovi narratori, vol. 9, Milan: Bompiani, 1992. Panzeri, Fulvio (editor), Tondelli tour, special issue, Panta, vol. 20, Milan: Bompiani, 2003. Panzeri, Fulvio, and Generoso Picone (editors), Tondelli. Il mestiere di scrittore. Un libro-intervista, Ancona: Transeuropa, 1994. Rota, Enos (editor), Caro Pier: i lettori di Tondelli, ritratto di una generazione, Milan: Selene, 2002. Spadaro, Antonio, Pier Vittorio Tondelli. Attraversare l’attesa, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1999. Spadaro, Antonio, Lontano dentro se stessi: l’attesa di salvezza in Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Milan: Jaca Book, 2002. Zancani, Diego, ‘‘Pier Vittorio Tondelli. The Calm after the Storm,’’ in The New Italian Novel, edited by Zygmunt Baranski and Lino Pertile, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.

LUCREZIA TORNABUONI (1425–1482) Both the personality and the literary work of Lucrezia Tornabuoni are marked by family tradition and her religious education: Together with her sister Dianora, she was in fact the addressee of the Opera a ben vivere (Guide to Living Well) by the Domenican Antonio Pierozzi (later canonized as St. Antoninus), an edifying work aimed at influencing every

moment of the life of a girl and future wife. On the other hand, her noble Florentine family (the Tornabuoni are the ancient Tornaquinci) followed the literary current that exalted the ‘‘three crowns’’ of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch, and the use of the vernacular. This explains on the one hand her passion for the sacre rappresentazioni, mystery plays 1887

LUCREZIA TORNABUONI such as those of Feo Belcari, Bernardo and Antonia Pulci, and on the other, her admiration for the poetry in the vernacular of Luigi Pulci, whom she commissioned to write a poem in octaves on the feats of the paladins in France, the Morgante (1481). Lucrezia was a vernacular poet of lauds and biblical stories. The Vita di santo Giovanni Battista (Life of Saint John the Baptist) and the Istoria di Judith vedova ebrea (Story of Judith, Jewish Widow) are short poems in octaves (159 and 151, respectively) that, in their meter and their style, draw on the tradition of the cantari. The spare biblical stories are enriched by lively episodes, such as the flight of young Saint John into the desert in the first poem, and the description of his parents’ concern and the humble life of the boy among the beasts, or the dance of Salome` and the twofold narration of the beheading of the saint from opposite points of view. But, particularly in Vita di santo Giovanni Battista, the poet’s engagement with the sacred text remains strong. The story is woven with precise evangelical echoes, and allows hymns and prayers, such as the Ave Maria (octaves 21–22), the Magnificat (28–30), and the Benedictus (38–41) to emerge. The stories written in tercets—Storia di Ester regina (Story of Queen Esther), Istoria della devota Susanna (History of the Devout Susanna), and Vita di Tubia (Life of Tobias)—lend themselves to moralizing, such as in the elegy of chastity in the prayer of Sarah to God in Vita di Tubia. Yet, her agile writing style pays no less attention to dramatic events and situations, either literary—as in the description of the royal palace and the garden of Assuerus, typical locus amoenus and part of the Bible story in Storia di Ester regina—or more popular in a realistic, figurative register—such as the description of Tobias’ mother’s vigil on top of a mountain. In recounting her stories, Lucrezia lingers on female figures, giving special emphasis to their physical appearance and their moral qualities, amongst which she privileges humility. In Storia di Ester regina, the exaltation of humility takes the form of a body of precepts on the wife’s submission to her husband. Indeed, one of her favorite themes is that of the family, either in the relationship between husband and wife, or between parents and children. The observation of a young child, still breast-feeding, and later older, is perhaps one of her most peculiar and original traits, and the images of youth recall contemporary iconographic themes (that of the young Saint John in particular). Her Laudi (of which some are still in manuscript 1888

form) frequently have at their center this interest in childhood, considered through the theme of the Nativity, as in ‘‘El piccolin Messia’’ (The Little Messiah) of Ecco el Messia—e la Madre Maria (Behold the Messiah—and His Mother Mary). It is evident in the structures (moralistic and proverbial forms, synonymic repetitions) and meter that her work belongs to a popular, oral literature. In her octaves, the use of rime facili (easy rhymes), chain rhymes, and anaphora is notable. In the tercets, the model of Dante’s Comedia is passed through her moralizing, satirical filter. Lucrezia’s works were not widely diffused, and it seems that they were destined to remain within a family circle (which included erudite men such as Agnolo Poliziano, who taught her grandchildren), but were also probably shared with nuns living in convents and members of religious fraternities of the Medicean area. Lucrezia was certainly a pious woman, but her epistolary transmits an image of someone not uninterested in material things. From her letters, written in her hand or dictated, and from those of her interlocutors, there emerges the profile of an able administrator of property, a noblewoman devoted to a broad social circle and perfectly in tune with Medicean customs and practices. The domestic economy constitutes a large part of the material of the epistolary, and Lucrezia demonstrates her full knowledge of the Albertian concept of masserizia (possessions) and her capacity to use her time and her possessions well. But there are also connections between her letters and the image of her transmitted in her literary works. In her correspondence, she displays a constant preoccupation with the health of her family, in particular that of her youngest children, and thus emerges the pious woman who entrusts herself to the will of ‘‘Domeneddio.’’ Her duties as organizer of the charitable actions of the Medici, particularly for women and for the so-called ‘‘poveri vergognosi’’ (disgracefully poor ones) were of great use for the image of the dominant family. Some letters make note of another, more political aspect of her work for the Medici. In 1467, she traveled to Rome to secure the support of the pontiff for Medicean politics, and to find a wife of appropriate, princely status for the eldest son Lorenzo. On this occasion she sent her husband a letter on 28 March in which she described their future daughter-in-law, Clarice Orsini, with merciless realism, and the familial patrimony in terms of mercantile precision. A noblewoman by birth, she was called to fulfill an important task for the

GIUSEPPE TORNATORE diplomatic contacts of the Medici family, in particular after the death of her husband, as her son Lorenzo noted in a letter written upon her death.

Biography Born in Florence to Francesco Tornabuoni and Nanna Guicciardini on 22 June 1425. Married Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici, 3 June 1444. Of her seven children, five survived: Lorenzo, Giuliano, Bianca, Nannina, and Maria. Because of a painful form of arthritis, stayed frequently at the thermal baths at Bagno a Morbo near Volterra. Organized the sumptuous marriage of Lorenzo with Clarice Orsini in the summer of 1469. Widowed on 2 December 1469. Died in Florence on 25 March 1482. MIRELLA MARIETTI Selected Works Le laudi di Lucrezia de’ Medici, edited by Guglielmo Volpi, Pistoia: Flori, 1900. I poemetti sacri di Lucrezia Tornabuoni, edited by Fulvio Pezzarossa, Florence: Olschki, 1978; as Sacred Narratives, translated by Jane Tylus, 2001. Lettere, edited by Patrizia Salvadori, Florence: Olschki, 1993.

Further Reading Bianchini, Angela, Alessandra e Lucrezia: destini femminili nella Firenze del Quattrocento, Milan: Mondadori, 2005. Borsetto, Luciana, ‘‘‘Storie di Giuditta’ in Europa tra Quattro e Cinquecento: Il ‘Cantare’ di Lucrezia Tornabuoni; Il poema di Marko Marulic (Exordium e Narratio: Prime ricognizioni),’’ in Colloquia Maruliana, 7 (1998): 95–126. Hausmann, Friederike, Die Macht aus dem Schatten: Alessandra Strozzi und Lucrezia Medici: zwei Frauen im Florenz der Renaissance, Berlin: K. Wagenbach, 1993. Klapisch-Zuber, Christiane, La famiglia e le donne nel Rinascimento, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1995. Martelli, Mario, ‘‘Lucrezia Tornabuoni,’’ in Les femmes ˆ ge et a` la Renaissance, e´crivains en Italie au Moyen A Actes du Colloque International, Aix-en-Provence, 12–14 November 1992, Aix-Marseille: Publications de l’Universite´ de Provence, 1994. Martelli, Mario, Letteratura fiorentina del Quattrocento. Il filtro degli anni Sessanta, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Pernis, Maria Grazia, Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici and the Medici Family in the Fifteenth Century, New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Russell, Rinaldina, ‘‘Lucrezia Tornabuoni (1425–1482),’’ in Italian Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994.

GIUSEPPE TORNATORE (1956–) Giuseppe Tornatore is one of the most internationally acclaimed filmmakers of the so-called new Italian generation. Unlike his contemporaries, representatives of a minimalist or autobiographical cinema (Nanni Moretti, Roberto Benigni, Gianni Amelio), Tornatore relies largely on a rich visual language informed by imagination and a technical virtuosity that, in its attention to spectacle, recalls the classical cinema of the studio era. The wide camera movements, the preference for long and medium shots, the refined iconography of the external setting, and the articulated mise-en-sce`ne attest to the artist’s concern for production and technique over auteurism. Best known outside Italy as the director of Nuovo Cinema Paradiso’s (Cinema Paradiso, 1988), Tornatore cannot be easily labeled according to genre or

style. His varied and original films, which include melodramas, thrillers, and documentaries, have been at times criticized for what some perceive to be a sentimental or popular appeal designed to win commercial success, nationally and internationally. If it is at all possible to identify a common thematic denominator in Tornatore’s oeuvre, this is the pleasure of storytelling combined with the use of memory as a primary narrative device. For Tornatore, the screenplay is the fundamental element of the film. In the introduction to the published script of Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, he writes: ‘‘E` fatale che la costruzione delle immagini imponga la trasformazione, anche radicale, di cio` che e` stato inizialmente il film scritto. Anche le piu` belle pagine e profonde parole devono talvolta cedere il passo alla piu` semplice delle immagini, e` una crudele ma affascinante 1889

GIUSEPPE TORNATORE regola del cinema’’ (It is inevitable and also radical, that constructing images forces a transformation of what was initially presented in the written script. Also beautiful and profound words must sometimes relinquish control to simple images, which is a cruel but fascinating rule of cinema). By superimposing his cinematic gaze over that of the fictional character, he highlights the inextricable link between reality and imagination, and how illusion is an intrinsic human desire that helps us survive. His directorial gaze unfolds a narrative that condenses visual and aural material into a fluid passage of time in which human experiences, present and past, are revisited in a flawless continuity. Real memories, sensory memories, and imagined memories are the substrata upon which his narrative is woven and embedded. Thus individual and collective memory becomes the starting point for the recovery of lost national identity. Imagination is embodied by the cinema itself, as the director’s deliberate use of metacinematic language and his predilection for references of great cinema reveal, for instance in the final screening of the censored love scenes in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso. Tornatore started out as a photographer, capturing the emotional character of the people around him, an interest that persisted throughout his career as filmmaker. In the early 1970s, he began by shooting a series of documentaries in 8mm and Super 8 film. They focused on Bagheria, Tornatore’s hometown, and Sicilian culture at large: Scene di morte a Bagheria (Scene of Death in Bagheria, 1973), Le vampe ed altri modi di festeggiare San Giuseppe in Sicilia (The Flames and other Ways to Celebrate Saint Joseph in Sicily, 1977), Sicilia tradita (Sicily Betrayed, 1981), and Il carretto (The Sicilian Borrow, 1980), among others, already disclose signs of a promising director. In 1979, he began a close collaboration with Raitre, the cultural channel of Italian television, for which he directed numerous programs. In 1982, he won his first major award for best documentary with Le minoranze etniche in Sicilia (Sicilian Ethnic Minorities). After a short while he made his first feature film, Il camorrista (The Professor, 1986), starring Ben Gazzara in the role of a charismatic Camorra boss. Technically impressive, Tornatore combines the Italian investigative film genre with the Baroque style of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), and uses a double-narrative to chronicle recent history as well as individual human drama. The film is loosely based on the story of Raffaele Cutolo (called ‘‘the Professor’’), a kingpin of the Neapolitan criminal organization, 1890

and one of the most sinister camorristi of recent times. The story of Franco is instead that of a common man who, in order to defend the honor of his sister, killed a man and received a 30-year prison sentence. Respected by his inmates, he then manages to create an empire of organized crime that defies both the police and the old guard Camorra. The film, however, does not end on this note: Franco eventually feigns insanity to be transferred to a mental ward where, ironically, he goes truly insane. Furthermore, Tornatore, who was drawn early on to left-wing politics, provocatively criticizes the unholy pact between the Red Brigades, Italian Secret Service, the Camorra, and the Christian Democrats to free the kidnapped politician Ciro Cirillo, an alliance that caused a major scandal at the time. Il camorrista, which did not meet with critical or financial success at first, was later credited as one of the best films of the decade. Success also came rather late for Tornatore’s second feature film, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, a nostalgic testament dedicated to the vanishing cinematic culture. An Italian-French coproduction, the film was originally financed by the legendary Franco Cristaldi, Federico Fellini’s own producer. It was released in 170-minute version, but received poor critical reception. A second release, cut down by 15 minutes also failed to win national recognition. A year later, in 1989, a 123-minute version was awarded the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Distributed worldwide by Miramax, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso would win an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1990, gaining Tornatore international prominence. The film is a flashback to the postwar years, set in the imaginary Sicilian village of Giancaldo, where personal and cinematic realities are closely interwined. It tells the story of the little orphan Salvatore Di Vita (Toto`), who befriends the projectionist of the local movie theater, Alfredo (played by Philippe Noiret), and then grows up to become a famous film director. The movie theater itself, named Cinema Paradiso, represents the beating heart of the small Sicilian town; it is a social and cultural microcosm, a metaphor for postwar Italian society. The prudishness of the church (which owns the theater, as it was customary in those years), the good manners of the aloof bourgeoisie, the class distinctions between the nouveau riche and the working poor are all made real by an array of characters, which captivated audiences all over the world. Tornatore’s lovers, mothers, kids, priests, and even mafiosi, who indeed form the audience of Cinema Paradiso, intensely dream, like Toto`, about that

GIUSEPPE TORNATORE ‘‘other’’ world they see on the screen. The old and new, the real and the imaginary, togetherness and loneliness—these are the dichotomies Tornatore develops as a narrative of memory. The Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia would later praise Tornatore’s film as a moving portrait of Sicily, of ‘‘true’’ cinema, and a requiem ‘‘del cinema qual era, del cinema che era parte delle nostre giornate e della nostra vita’’ (of cinema as it used to be, of cinema as an integral part of our days and our life) (C’era una volta il cinema, 1991). Tornatore sets up a dream world and reproduces for his audience a childlike wonder at the emotional power of cinema. This theme continues with L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker, 1995), featuring a con artist who poses as a talent scout from Rome, traveling through Sicilian villages during the 1950s. The common people become the victims in a land where only the fittest can survive. After Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, the melodramatic ‘‘road movie’’ Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine, 1990) provides a sharper polymorphic portrait of an Italy made up of mediocrity, failure, and lying. The sociohistorical process addressed in this film is one of passive accommodations and compromise. A retired Sicilian widower, Matteo Scuro (played by Marcello Mastroianni in a memorable performance), decides to take a trip up North to pay a surprise visit to his five grown-up children, only to discover that none of them lives up to his expectations. His disillusionment reflects the defeat of the Italian middle class’s aspirations to a better respectable life. Matteo entertains a tender ‘‘dialogue’’ with his diseased wife, stoically assuring her that their kids stanno tutti bene. To record Matteo’s itinerary from Naples to Rome, Florence, Milan, and Turin, Tornatore relies on magnificent traveling and panoramic shots. But the film suffers under the weight of a didactic script (coauthored by Tonino Guerra), which somewhat compromises its narrative agility. With Una pura formalita` (A Pure Formality, 1994), a psychological thriller, Tornatore focuses on one man’s painful soul-searching, which leads him to commit suicide. He abandons the natural scenery of his previous films to shoot in an interior setting: a police station. In this confined environment, the director displays a sophisticated visual language through stylized scenography, and powerful close-ups and counter shots. Punctuating shots between the face of the unnamed devilish police inspector (Roman Polanski) and a famous writer, Onoff (Gerard Depardieu), who was involved in a

mysterious assassination, gives the film a surreal and claustrophobic look. Hauntingly beautiful, Una pura formalita` succeeds in combining the subtleties of narrative with a compelling visual style to challenge the cognitive process of the cinematic spectator. In La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900, 1998), adapted from Alessandro Baricco’s short fiction Novecento, the story of a boy abandoned onboard a ship who never steps off and becomes a virtuoso pianist, and in Male`na (2000), the protagonists are painfully aware of time lost. The rich and stylized aesthetics of the first film, along with the diegetic music produced by Novecento and his musician friends, work well to immerse the viewer in the jazz era and to stimulate all the senses. With Male`na, Tornatore returns to Sicily and offers a compelling portrait of a woman’s drama and her unique way of coping with the constrictions imposed by society. Tornatore’s most recent films, which include La sconosciuta, currently in production, move toward a tragic process of human self-knowledge and isolation. He has been consistent in his technical approach as well as his use of extraordinary cinematography and set design. His cinema is an homage to an idealized past that clashes with an impersonal and overcrowded contemporary Italy; it is an homage to the art of filmmaking as collective memory.

Biography Born in Bagheria (Palermo), 27 May 1956. The son of a labor leader, worked as photographer at a very young age, publishing in various photographic magazines. At the age of 16, staged two plays by Luigi Pirandello and Eduardo De Filippo. He then made many documentaries, including Il carretto, which received recognition at various regional and national festivals, 1980. From 1979 to 1984, collaborated with RAI television (Italian national network), for which he directed Diario di Guttuso, Incontro con Francesco Rosi, Scrittori siciliani e cinema, and Ritratto di un rapinatore. Le minoranze etniche in Sicilia awarded Best Documentary at Salerno Film Festival, 1982. From 1978 to 1985, presided on the film Cooperative CLCT, which produced Giuseppe Ferrara’s Cento giorni a Palermo, for which he cowrote the script. Directed first feature film, Il camorrista, 1986. Awarded a Nastro d’Argento and a Golden Globe for best upand-coming director. In 1988–1989, Nuovo Cinema Paradiso won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, a 1891

GIUSEPPE TORNATORE Golden Globe, and an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. He has since made five feature films with international distribution and awards, among them: Stanno tutti bene, Nastro d’Argento and OCIC at Cannes, 1990; Una pura formalita`, Robert Bresson Prize, Golden Globe, 1994; L’uomo delle stelle, Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, 1995; La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano, six Nastri d’Argento and six David di Donatello, 1999; Male`na, two Academy Award nominations, 2000. Cofounder of Philip Morris Cinema Project for restoration of films, 1990. Titled knight of arts and letters in France, 1995; titled Commendatore della Repubblica in Italy, 1996. Tornatore also directs commercial spots and produces films, including Il manoscritto del principe (2000), directed by Roberto Ando`. Married with one daughter, currently lives at the outskirts of Rome. GIOVANNA De LUCA Selected Works Films Il camorrista (based on Giuseppe Marrazzo’s novel), 1986. Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Cinema Paradiso), 1988. Stanno tutti bene (Everybody’s Fine), 1990. Il cane blu (episode of La domenica specialmente), 1991. Una pura formalita´ (A Pure Formality), 1994. L’uomo delle stelle (The Star Maker), 1995. Lo schermo a tre punte (documentary), 1995. La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano (The Legend of 1900, based on the novel Novecento, by Alessandro Baricco), 1998. Male`na, 2000. La sconosciuta (in production), 2006.

Screenplays Nuovo Cinema Paradiso, introduced by Vincenzo Consolo, Palermo: Sellerio, 1990. Cinema Paradiso, London: Faber and Faber, 1994.

Una pura formalita´ (I caratteri), introduced by Manlio Sgalambro, Catania: De Martinis, 1994. La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano, introduced by Tullio Kezich, Rome: Gremese, 1999. Male`na, introduced by Harvey Weinstein, Rome: Gremese, 2000.

Other Opera prima, forward by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Palermo: Sellerio, 1990. Palermo bandita (with Angelo Pitrone), Caltanissetta: Slavatore Sciasci, 1996. La leggenda del pianista sull’oceano, photographs by Sergio Strizzi, Milan: Leonardo, 1999. Male`na, photographs by Sergio Strizzi, Milan: Leonardo, 2000.

Further Reading Caprara, Valerio (editor), Sicilia e altre storie: Il cinema di Giuseppe Tornatore, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1996. Comuzio, Ermanno, ‘‘Nuovo Cinema Paradiso,’’ Cineforum, 29 (1989): 81–84. Faustini, Giuseppe, ‘‘Stanno tutti bene: l’Italia amara di Tornatore,’’ American Journal of Italian Studies, 22 (1999): 29–38. Hope, William, The Films of Giuseppe Tornatore, Market Harborough: Troubador, 2001. Marcus, Millicent, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Marrone, Gaetana (editor), New Landscapes in Contemporary Italian Cinema, Annali d’Italianistica, vol. 17, Chapel Hill: Chapel Hill University Press, 1999. Sciascia, Leonardo, ‘‘C’era una volta il cinema,’’ in Opere, edited by Claude Ambroise, Milan: Bompiani, 1991. Toffetti, Sergio (editor), Giuseppe Tornatore, Turin: Lindau, 1995. Vitti, Antonio, ‘‘Dal ‘pedinamento’ all’affabulazione cinematografica in Stanno tutti bene,’’ in Italica, 80 (2003): 53–68. Volpe, Sandro, ‘‘Giuseppe Tornatore: Ritratto del regista da giovane,’’ Nuove effemeridi (Palermo), 4, no. 13 (1991): 14–24.

` (ANTONIO DE CURTIS) (1898–1967) TOTO Born out of wedlock in a poor neighborhood of Naples and registered as Antonio Clemente (the last name was his mother’s), of one thing he became sure at a very early age, perhaps as early as four or five: He wanted to act. During his lifetime, 1892

under the stage name of Toto`, he would become Italy’s best known and most beloved vaudeville comedian. Drawing on the rich tradition of Neapolitan theater, Antonio, still a boy, experimented with

` (ANTONIO DE CURTIS) TOTO creating quick caricature sketches of recognizable types, part of his vaudeville repertoire for years to come and which carried over into his cinema acting. He was especially struck by the contortions of the popular Gustavo De Marco, known all over Italy as the ‘‘rubber man,’’ a sort of human puppet. Exercising every day to gain limberness, Antonio soon learned how to parody all De Marco’s numbers, even outdoing the master, whose stage costume he also mimicked, consisting of oversized shoes, baggy pants, a tight, checkered jacket, and a bamboo cane. His facial expressions would become all the more convincing after a boxing accident in 1911 that left him with a broken nose and his chin twisted to the right. His off-kilter face became his trademark. His earliest audiences, while still a boy, were at Sunday performances at the homes of wealthy aristocratic and bourgeois families. From there Antonio, whose stage name at the time was Clerment (a French twist on his real last name), took to the carnival-like street theaters of Naples, where he had a long, intense apprenticeship, and little to eat. But by 1915, on the eve of World War I, the 16-year-old comic actor had an audience. After two years as a soldier, having judiciously avoided combat by expertly faking an epileptic fit, he was discharged and returned to the round of engagements in street theaters in Naples. Finally he began to work in regular showplaces, although they were very poor ones. In 1919, using his new stage name Toto`, he got to do a sketch in the Sala Napoli, one of the better theaters. In January 1920, his photo was published in the magazine Cafe´-chantant with the title of ‘‘Toto` il comicissimo’’ (Toto`, the supercomedian). In 1922, he moved to Rome with his mother and father, and his theater career soon took off on a national scale. He auditioned for Giuseppe Jovinelli and was engaged to perform regularly in the Jovinelli Theater, destined to become the main stage for variety shows. Toto`’s movie career got off to a slow start in 1937 with Fermo con le mani (Hands Off Me!), followed by four other films before and during World War II. In this early period, he was still sporting his vaudeville costume, with the addition of a top hat. In the course of time, he gradually modified his mask. The poverty and misery of the immediate postwar years found eloquent expression in Toto`, as in his unforgettable interpretation in the film adaptation of Eduardo Scarpetta’s Miseria e nobilta` (The Poor and the Noble, 1954). It is almost a critical commonplace to see the Pulcinella tradition behind his deep, intuitive understanding

of the bond between hunger and humor, and of course he had been very poor himself in the Sanita` neighborhood of Naples where he was born and grew up. Many of Toto`’s films hinge on identity changes, where Toto` pretends to be a Turk, gangster, sheik, madman, wooden puppet, nobleman, or even the owner of the Fountain of Trevi, which he ‘‘sells’’ to a naive American tourist. These films often involve outlandish costumes and, when he assumes female identities (in the carnivalesque tradition), crossdressing and flirting. In some films, Toto` plays multiple parts, six of them in Toto` diabolicus (Toto` Diabolikus, 1962), a mock horror movie. Among his supporting roles, the best is perhaps his cameo appearance in Mario Monicelli’s I soliti ignoti (Big Deal on Madonna Street, 1958), where he gives a lesson to a gang of would-be thieves in the noble art of safe-cracking. In the postwar period, his popularity as a theater and cinema artist thrived and spread, cutting across regional and ideological lines. He continued to act even when, in the last ten years of his life, his sight almost completely failed him: Toto` had become Italy’s comic mask. After his death his popularity grew even more, to the point where his films would be broadcast daily on television. People of all age groups and all walks of life see them over and over again, often knowing his lines by heart. Toto`’s comic artistry relies on a genial mixture of words and gesture. He is a national mask, but his Neapolitan origins are unmistakable. Although in his films he almost never speaks in his native dialect, one feels the Neapolitan speech-ways lurking just below the surface of his Italian, always threatening to emerge. According to Pasolini, who directed him in Uccellacci e uccellini (Hawks and Sparrows, 1966), Toto`’s ‘‘language was a sort of mimesis of the dialect or of the speech ways of the Neapolitan, the Southerner, who has immigrated to a bureaucratic city like Rome’’ (Faldini and Fofi, Toto`, 1977). This is the language of Toto`’s mask, which evolved over 50 years of acting, expressing a mixture of rebellious orneriness, sometimes with a political thrust, and a basic sweetness of disposition informed by a sort of proletarian or subproletarian wisdom. Pasolini’s film brings out only the second side to Toto’s nature: to have the full picture, the mask needs to be defined in its totality, as if Groucho and Harpo were wrapped up in one. Indeed, according to Goffredo Fofi, the Marx Brothers are the only foreign comedians comparable to Toto`, in the sense that he shared with them a taste for wordplay, gestures, grimaces, 1893

` (ANTONIO DE CURTIS) TOTO quick shifts and breaks, reckless inventiveness, and above all a sovereign freedom of action, which brings him to shatter normality with the mainspring of irreverent desire (Faldini and Fofi, Toto`, 1977). However, the Marx Brothers’ gags are determined by absurdity, and are thus surreal, whereas Toto`’s antics are rooted in the concrete reality of poverty, hunger, and basic human needs. His Italian is often a zany, invented language, characterized by the semantic displacement so typical of the Neapolitan speech, consisting of irony, rhetorical questions, obscure allusion, obsessive use of metaphor, and truncated utterances. Toto` also goes in strongly for puns and other nonsense; some of his odd words and expressions have found their way into common speech. His body language too has the rich gesture vocabulary of the former Kingdom of Naples as its starting point, but transformed from mere communication into artistic expression. A direct anticipation may possibly be found in fellow Neapolitan Raffaele Viviani’s one-man sketches, involving full-bodied gesturing. Toto`’s contortions, gestures, and facial expressions must be seen to be appreciated, but some idea can be had from the following description in an 1832 study on gesture in Naples by archaeologist and art historian Andrea De Iorio: ‘‘Especially when it comes to the expression of the emotions, the Neapolitan is never content. He uses all parts of his body to execute a gesture.... He produces a kind of rapture in the spectator, who becomes so amazed by such a plethora and vivacity of gestures that, although he does not know what draws his attention the most, he is not only persuaded, but he comes to share in the very feelings of the gesturer himself. Nothing is left untried, every part of the body assists in the action, hands, feet, head, eyes: everything is put into motion for the gesturer’s purpose’’ (Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity, 2000). Toto`’s films were commercial hits, but they were often criticized from three points of view, corresponding to approximately three social groups. Priests and strait-laced people judged Toto`’s films vulgar, and sometimes posted them on parish lists as ‘‘restricted’’ or ‘‘forbidden,’’ especially for younger viewers. Some intellectuals and movie critics looked down on them as mass entertainment, potboilers catering to the lowest common denominator, unworthy of serious critical attention. Pro-Fascists resented Toto`’s postwar, satirical representations of Mussolini and Fascism, while left-wing ideologues accused him of qualunquismo (‘‘whateverism’’), that is to say with no ethical and political position. 1894

Taking these strictures in order, one must admit that Toto`’s lascivious glances into the plunging necklines of the bosomy actresses in his films as well as his verbal gags and horseplay might raise eyebrows even today, though more in the realm of political correctness than a religiously grounded sense of decency. As for the second point, there were prominent critics and well-known intellectuals (such as Osvaldo Scaccia, Sandro De Feo, Giuseppe Isani, Dino Risi, Mario Soldati, Ettore Zocaro, and Pasolini), who were enthusiastic about Toto`. During his lifetime, Toto` won more awards than can be listed here. Finally, in order to disclaim Toto`’s presumed qualunquismo, an example might be found in the 1962 satirical film, Toto` e Peppino divisi a Berlino (Toto`, Peppino, and the Berlin Wall), which tended to tar the USA and the USSR with the same brush, a polemical equidistance that the Italian left found untenable. One film, Gli onorevoli (1963), spoofing the ‘‘honorable members of parliament, especially irritated the Communist daily Paese sera, which accused it of insulting all political parties, as well as Parliament, and other democratic institutions. In an election rally, the Communist Party candidate blasts the other parties for accepting money from the imperialist United States, but it comes out that he is on the take too. Kicked out of the party, he quickly forgets his left-wing ideals and leaves for the USA in a deluxe automobile. Yet the film is more scathing in its criticism of other parties, including the ruling Christian Democrats and Toto`’s personal preference, the Monarchists. Toto` had to wait until the 1970s to be accepted by the Italian left, when he was used as an anti-Fascist icon on posters in an election for mayor of Naples (the left candidate won). Although many of his madcap comedies were as innocent of social criticism as any Marx Brothers film, the political thrust of Toto`’s work has been underestimated. The most significant example is Siamo uomini o caporali? (Men and Corporals, 1955), especially since he had a major hand in writing it. According to his daughter Liliana De Curtis, ‘‘in this film Toto` expresses his philosophy for the first time, based on a deeply humane idea. Corporals symbolize power wielded with arrogance against the downtrodden, of whom he was always the champion’’ (Pistolese, Toto` Stars & Stripes, 2000). From one episode to the other, the corporals are all played by a thoroughly despicable Paolo Stoppa: first a cruel Nazi concentrationcamp commander, then a drunken, lecherous USO officer in the occupying army, followed by other odious incarnations, until the Chaplinesque

` (ANTONIO DE CURTIS) TOTO ending where the last of the ‘‘corporals’’ steals the love of Toto` Esposito’s life. Much of Toto`’s early vaudeville work has been lost, though many sketches have been recovered and published along with interviews and articles. Of his several songs, the most popular is Malafemmina (Hussy), which was written in 1951. His poems (all in dialect) have been brought forth in various editions, both legitimate and pirated. The best known is A livella (The Leveler, the Plumb Rule), a dialogue between a rich aristocrat and a commoner, both of them dead and buried. The poor man admonishes the rich one to get over his class airs, unseemly in his present condition, where all men are truly equal: ‘‘Sti ppagliacciate ’e ffanno sulo ’e vive: nuje simmo serie...appartenimmo a morte!’’ (Only the living engage in such farces: we’re earnest...we belong to death). Toto`’s comic brilliance came out especially when he worked with other comics: Anna Magnani (especially in variety), Aldo Fabrizi, Mario Castellani, Nino Taranto, Carlo Croccolo, Fernandel, and especially Peppino De Filippo. The roles of comedian and straight man were often surprisingly switched and switched back again. Many of the movie scenes with these duos were genial improvisations, little record for which exists in the surviving screenplays. The importance of Toto` for anyone interested in understanding Italian culture can hardly be overestimated. Not only for the excellence of some of his many—certainly too many—movies, and for the high quality of his acting, but also because he represents Italy, more than any other single theater or film actor. This is why one can hardly find an Italian who has not seen Toto`’s films and whose face will not light up at the very mention of his name.

Biography Born in Naples, 15 February 1898 to Anna Clemente and the Marquis Giuseppe De Curtis, a theatrical agent. Elementary school education; recites comic routines in private shows (so-called periodiche) in wealthy homes and in street theaters, 1914– 1915; vaudeville (varieta`) and theatrical revues, 1917; moves to Rome with his mother and father (who finally marry in 1921), continuing to recite in low-class theaters, 1922; makes a hit in the renowned Roman vaudeville theater Sala Umberto, 1922; begins to tour national theaters with leading companies, 1922; is recognized as his son by the Marquis, inheriting the title of prince of Byzantium, 1928; marries Diana Lucchesini in a civil ceremony,

1932; daughter Liliana is born, 1933; marries Diana in church, 1935; cinema career with nearly 100 films, 1937–1967; his marriage is annulled, 1940; radio debut with the show Tuttototo`, 1951; begins a lifelong relationship with movie actress Franca Faldini, 1952; TV appearances, 1958–1967. Died of heart failure in Rome, 15 April 1967, and is buried in Naples. GORDON POOLE Selected Works Films Fermo con le mani (dir. Gero Zambuto, Hands Off Me!), 1937. San Giovanni decollato (dir. Amleto Palermi, St. John the Baptist Beheaded), 1940. I due orfanelli (dir. Mario Mattoli), 1948. Fifa e arena (dir. Mario Mattoli), 1948. L’imperatore di Capri (dir. Luigi Comencini), 1949. Toto` le moko (dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia), 1949. 47 morto che parla (dir. Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia), 1950. Napoli milionaria (dir. Eduardo De Filippo, Naples Millionaire, aka Side Street Story), 1950. Toto` sceicco (dir. Mario Mattoli), 1950. Guardie e ladri (co-dir. Steno and Mario Monicelli, Cops and Robbers), 1951. Toto` e i re di Roma (co-dir. Steno and Mario Monicelli, based on short stories by Chekhov), 1951. Toto` a colori (dir. Steno), 1952. Un turco napoletano (dir. Mario Mattoli), 1953. L’uomo, la bestia e la virtu` (dir. Steno), 1953. L’oro di Napoli (episode ‘‘Il guappo,’’ dir. Vittorio De Sica, Every Day’s a Holiday, aka The Gold of Naples, based on the novel by Giuseppe Marotta), 1954. Miseria e nobilta` (dir. Mario Mattoli, The Poor and the Noble, based on the play by Eduardo Scarpetta), 1954. Siamo uomini o caporali? (dir. Camillo Mastrocinque, Men and Corporals), 1955. La banda degli onesti (dir. Camilio Mastrocinque, The Gang of Honest Men), 1956. Toto`, Peppino e la malafemmina (dir. Camillo Mastrocinque, Toto`, Peppino and the Hussy), 1956. La legge e` la legge (dir. Christian-Jaque, The Law is the Law, La Loi c’est la Loi, 1957). I soliti ignoti (dir. Mario Monicelli, Big Deal on Madonna Street), 1958. Toto` nella Luna (dir. Stella), 1958. Arrangiatevi! (dir. Mauro Bolognini, based on the play Casa nova... vita nova by Mario De Majo and Vinicio Gioli), 1959. Risate di gioia (dir. Mario Monicelli, The Passionate Thief, based on short stories by Alberto Moravia), 1960. Signori si nasce (dir. Mario Mattoli), 1960. Toto`, Fabrizi e i giovani d’oggi (dir. Mario Mattoli, Toto`, Fabrizi and Today’s Young Folk), 1960. Tototruffa ’62 (dir. Camillo Mastrocinque, Toto` the ConMan), 1961. I due colonelli (dir. Steno, The Two Colonels), 1962. Toto` diabolicus (dir. Steno, Toto` Diabolikus), 1962. Toto` e Peppino divisi a Berlino (dir. Giorgio Bianchi, Toto`, Peppino and the Berlin Wall), 1962.

1895

` (ANTONIO DE CURTIS) TOTO Toto` contro i quattro (dir. Steno, Toto` Against the Four), 1963. Gli onorevoli (dir. Sergio Corbucci), 1963. La mandragola (dir. Alberto Lattuada, The Mandrake Root), 1965. Uccellacci e uccellini (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Hawks and Sparrows), 1966. Le streghe (episode ‘‘La Terra vista dalla Luna,’’ dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Witches), 1966.

Poetry ‘‘A livella: Poesie napoletane,’’ 1990. ‘‘A livella e poesie d’amore,’’ 1995.

Plays Il teatro di Toto` (1932–1946), edited by Goffredo Fofi, Milan: Piu` Libri, 1976.

Further Reading Bispuri, Ennio, Vita di Toto`, Rome: Gremese Editore, 2000.

De Curtis, Antonio, Toto` si nasce, edited by Marco Giusti, Milan: Mondadori, 2000. De Curtis, Liliana, Toto`, femmene e malefemmene, Milan: Rizzoli, 2003. De Jorio, Andrea, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano, [1832] Naples: Associazione Napoletana per i Monumenti e il Paesaggio, 1964; as Gesture in Naples and Gesture in Classical Antiquity, translated by Adam Kendon, 2000. Faldini, Franca, and Goffredo Fofi, Toto`: L’uomo e la maschera, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977. ———, Toto`: Storia di un buffone serissimo, Milan: Mondadori, 2004. Infusino, Giampaolo, Toto`: La maschera di un principe, Naples: Lito-Rama, 1998. Pistolese, Paolo (editor), Toto` Stars & Stripes, Turin: Lindau, 2000. Viviani, Vittorio, Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida Editore, 1969.

FEDERIGO TOZZI (1883–1920) Federigo Tozzi was literary critic, poet and playwright, but it is almost exclusively through his narrative that he ranks among the greatest Italian writers of the first half of the twentieth century. He died at an early age, and only in the last years of his life had the chance to publish his literary works thanks to his friendship with Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Luigi Pirandello. Some were published as incomplete and posthumous works. Active during a period when autobiographical prose triumphed, Tozzi was among the founders of the contemporary Italian novel. He borrowed from the nineteenth-century literary tradition, in particular Giovanni Verga, whom he considered the greatest modern Italian writer. The cross-references to Verga, particularly evident in essays written between 1917 and 1920 and collected in Realta` di ieri e di oggi (Yesterday and Today’s Reality, 1928), form a fervent call for unity within a literary composition. Nonetheless, in his essay Come leggo io (As I Read)—part of the same collection—Tozzi considers plot a superfluous flourish. Thus the critical pages of the author are too contradictory and rather ‘‘lean’’ to extract a theoretical backbone. Tozzi’s criticism is polarized between fragment and narrative continuity—probably as a result of the tension between discontinuity and unity (of 1896

theme, syntax and tone) inherent to Tozzi’s writing proper. Tozzi wrote three great novels: Con gli occhi chiusi (Eyes Shut, 1919), Tre Croci (Three Crosses, 1920), and Il podere (The Farm, 1921). Tozzi was revising Il podere at the time of his death, which was consequently published posthumously. Taking place in the 1900s, the novel has as protagonist Remigio Selmi, 20-year-old son of wealthy landowner Giacomo, who dies at the outset of the novel. Remigio inherits the unfortunate task of carrying on with the family affairs. Unlike his father, Remigio has little luck in gaining the loyalty and respect of those dependent on his land for work. Furthermore, Remigio becomes entangled in a hateful web of distrust instigated by the claims of his own stepmother Luigia and his father’s mistress Giulia to the inheritance. Connections with dishonest lawyers, trials with false witnesses, and amassing debts drive Remigio to a fatal catastrophe, related in the epilogue as a violent death at the hand of a resentful worker, Berto. Remigio, much like the protagonists of Tozzi’s other two novels, can be characterized as ‘‘inept’’ as postulated by Giacomo Debenedetti (Il romanzo del Novecento, 1971)—parallels are drawn to likewise legendary ‘‘inept’’ characters in the works of

FEDERIGO TOZZI Pirandello, Svevo, Borgese, and Moravia. Remigio’s unrealistic approach to life is demonstrated in his reactions relative to the effect had on others rather than concrete consequences. His feelings become muddled as he yearns for sympathy and affection from his employees. Moreover he displays an inability to assume responsibility and concentrate on reality, living in his own partially alienated world. Ineptitude insufficiently explains the tragic fate that befalls Tozzi’s characters: They are also prey to existential mal de vivre, victims of metaphysical angst. From a formal standpoint, Tozzi’s novels are innovative contributions to Italian literature. He leaves behind any trace of objectivity in perceiving the world. Reality is indecipherable for his characters or can only be interpreted through a subjective lens. Cause and effect relationships are weakened and hierarchies undermined, so that details often assume a disproportionately weighty consequence to characters unable to maintain a united perception of the real. Descriptive landscape passages are no longer realistic, but gain symbolic or allegorical qualities—characteristic of the e´lan of great modern European writers (such as Proust, Kafka, and Virginia Woolf) to overcome naturalism. The difficult relationship between a father and his youngest son—a typical, likely autobiographical theme for Tozzi—becomes tokens of a face-off with his literary past. In addition to these three major novels, other narrative works include Adele: Frammenti di un romanzo (Adele: Fragments of a Novel), written probably between 1909 and 1910 and published by his son Glauco in 1979; and Bestie (Animals), which was published in 1917 thanks to Borgese. Both works are composed of short episodes, owed partly to the fragmentary climate of the period, although also ‘‘marred’’ by narrative continuity. In Adele, his continuity springs from the tormented fate of the young protagonist—pecked by her parents for her involvement in a passionate adolescent love affair leading to suicide. Bestie is composed of short descriptions of life experiences, each concluding with an allusion to an animal. Beyond its bestial element, the fundamental elements—power, the lovers, financial difficulty—give the renditions unity and coherence. Realistic characteristics are present—even if only as balancing the presence of beasts, which appear on a horizon nearly always metaphysically. Among further notable works are Ricordi di un impiegato (Memories of an Employee, 1920) and Gli egoisti (Egotists, 1923). Ricordi di un impiegato is an autobiographical account written in

1910, revised until death and published posthumously. The novel is composed of daily entries— in journalistic fashion—over a period of three months. Railroad employee Leopoldo Gradi oscillates between his feelings of superiority and those of existential failure while his instinctive inhibitions negate his passion for girlfriend Attilia. The novel is exemplary of typical themes in most Tozzi works. The text was published posthumously, edited by Borgese with help from Emma Palagi—Tozzi’s wife—and from Pirandello. Borgese chose to exclude certain fragments that to him seemed strange to the overall sense of the work, and was thus accused of forging the work around a naturalistic core. Gli egoisti was never revisited, written between 1918 and 1919. The protagonist is young musician Dario Gavinai, a particularly delusional and fickle character. The text is exemplary of its title and of an existential inconvenience and narrow foresight present also in Tozzi’s short stories. These are more important than has been generally thought. Tozzi wrote 120, collected in Giovani (Youths, 1920), except for those written before 1914. In 1920, L’amore, edited by Borgese and Emma, was published posthumously. Formalistically, Tozzi is considered among the innovators of the genre characterized by intentional contradictions in narrative development and discrepancies in the interior world of the characters. Among the most notable short stories are Pigionali (Tenants, 1917), La casa venduta (The Sold House, 1918), I nemici (The Enemies, 1919), Un amico (A Friend, 1919), La cognata (The Sister in Law, 1919), and L’ombra della giovinezza (The Shadow of Youth, 1919). The theme of lack of communication is overwhelming, as for example in Pigionali between two neighbors, a widow and a spinster who show no trace of understanding each other though exhibiting extreme emotions of love and hate. Often protagonists are young and yearning to find compassion in unlikely situations, while subjected to the prepossessing will of another. In La casa venduta—a story equally commanding in comic registers—a man sells a house at a loss in an attempt to please the dishonest buyers. In I nemici, the protagonist knows a colleague obtained his job through trickery but treats him graciously nonetheless. L’ombra della giovinezza tells a tale of ineptitude: a young country landowner in love with a poor local woman, weak and insecure, asks his brother to conclude the relationship on his behalf. La cognata introduces some aspects of Tozzi’s complicated perspectives on religion. The wife of a carpenter 1897

FEDERIGO TOZZI dies and her sister accuses the man of poisoning her by sending an anonymous letter to a lawyer. The carpenter then kills her using a cross. Tozzi also published two volumes of verses: La zampogna verde (The Green Bagpipes, 1911), a collection of sonnets and ballads, and La citta` della Vergine (The City of the Virgin, 1913), inspired by Catherine of Siena. The poems are exemplary of D’Annunzio’s influence on the author—a tendency overcome later in his career, as he notes in Saggi di pedagogia (Pedagogical Essays, 1918) and in Realta` di ieri e di oggi. Tozzi also contributed many works to theater. Among the most notable are: L’eredita` (The Inheritance, 1908–1909), about a family feud; La famiglia (The Family, 1909–1910), in which a woman is driven to suicide by her dissolute husband and egotistical in-laws; Verita` (Truth, written before 1914), a traditional drama of family betrayal; Gente da poco (People of Little Importance, around 1919), the story of a marriage annulled on the basis of poverty; and L’incalco (The Casting, published 1923), portraying the young Virgilio Poggi—an egotist converted to self-critic by the last act. Tozzi’s theatrical themes are heterogeneous, although maintaining a certain continuity with his narrative works. On the value of his plays—still very understudied—there is no consensus among critics. Throughout his life, Tozzi made great efforts to be recognized, earning attention only after his death from writers involved in the literary magazine Strapaese. They performed a naturalist reading on the texts and glimpsed in Tozzi an avant-garde spirit of anti-intellectualism and the anti-European move to the provinces. Only in 1929 and 1930 did the magazine Solaria take a modern approach and began to doubt Tozzi’s naturalist affiliations. During the following decades, Tozzi was seldom mentioned until the end of the 1970s, when conferences were devoted to the study of his work and Debenedetti’s lessons on Tozzi held in Rome in the 1960s were published. Today Tozzi is among the most studied and widely read authors of the 1900s. The evaluations on the respective merit of his various works are still in discordance. Some prefer the nervous original writing style of Con gli occhi chiusi, while others consider this novel to be excessively autobiographical and prefer the grand narrative structure and objective tone of Tre croci and Il podere. If Tozzi can be considered an innovator, it is due to his literary influences. He read William James, Bergson, Freud, The`odule Ribot and greatly valued 1898

the symbolists (Mallarme`, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck) and the great Russians (Dostoevski). He also edited the Antologia d’antichi scrittori senesi (The Anthology of Past Sienese Writers, 1913), paying homage in particular to Catherine of Siena and Bernardino of Siena for their expressive force and sincerity. His ideological background can also explain his literary inclination toward religion. Together with friend Domenico Giuliotti, Tozzi founded the magazine La Torre in 1913, printed with the subtitle Organo della reazione spirituale italiana. Its agenda was Catholic reactionary, monarchic or ‘‘imperialist’’ (in a Dantean sense). Its literary concerns lashed out against the avant-garde of La Voce and Lacerba. Tozzi is said to have been a libertariananarchist, whose religious beliefs lack the mediation of the church and in whose internal hierarchy mystery and guilt played a significantly dominant role.

Biography Born in Siena, 1 January 1883. Attended the Collegio Arcivescovile of Siena and was expelled in 1895; mother died, 1895; and the troubled relationship with his father worsened; expelled from the Scuola di Belle Arti, 1897; attended a technical school in Siena and Florence, 1898; but failed qualifying exams; met Domenico Giuliotti with whom he later founded the magazine La Torre, 1910; joined the Socialist Party, 1902. Between 1902 and 1908 he struggled with temporary blindness, side effect from a venereal disease; won a post for the railroad company, 1907; and was sent to Pontedera where he stayed for two months before returning to Florence; married Emma Palagi, 1908. After father’s death (1908) abandoned job, managed poorly his inheritance, and lived on the farm of Castagneto until 1914; son Glauco was born, 1909; published first short story, ‘‘In campagna,’’ in Pagine libere, thanks to Francesco Chiesa, 1910; contributed to L’eroica and to San Giorgio (Bologna), 1911–1913; moved to Rome in 1912 where he worked as editor of Messaggero della domenica and contributed to Noi e il mondo, L’idea nazionale, L’illustrazione italiana, and La nuova antologia. During World War I, he volunteered as a journalist for the Red Cross; met Pirandello, 1917; endured the failure of his comedy Le due mogli, 1919. Died of pneumonia in Rome, 21 March 1920. GIAN PAOLO GIUDICETTI

FEDERIGO TOZZI Selected Works Collections Opere complete, 3 vols., edited by Emma and Glauco Tozzi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1943–1950. Opere, 5 vols., edited by Glauco Tozzi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1961–1981. Opere: Romanzi, prose, novelle, saggi, edited by Marco Marchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1987.

Marco, Marchi (editor), Federigo Tozzi tra tradizione e modernita`, Assisi (Perugia): Cittadella, 2001. Pacifici, Sergio, The Modern Italian Novel from Capuana to Tozzi, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Saccone, Eduardo, Allegoria e sospetto: Come leggere Tozzi, Naples: Liguori, 2000.

Fiction Bestie, 1917. Con gli occhi chiusi, 1919; as Eyes Shut, translated by Kenneth Cox, 1990; as Ghisola, translated by Charles Klopp, 1990. Tre croci, 1920; as Three Crosses, translated by R. Capellero, 1921. Giovani, 1920. L’amore, 1920. Ricordi di un impiegato, 1920. Il podere, 1921. Gli egoisti, 1923. Le novelle, 1963; a selection as Love in Vain, translated by Minna Proctor, 2001. Adele: Frammenti di un romanzo, 1979. Cose e persone: Inediti e altre prose, 1981. Giovani e altre novelle, 2000.

Plays L’incalco, 1923; as The Casting in Jane House and Antonio Attisani (editors), 20th Century Italian Drama, 1995. Il teatro, 1970.

Poetry ‘‘La zampogna verde,’’ 1911. ‘‘La citta` della Vergine,’’ 1913. ‘‘Le poesie,’’ 1981.

Other Antologia d’antichi scrittori senesi (Dalle origini fino a Santa Caterina), 1913. Le cose piu` belle di Santa Caterina da Siena, 1918. Novale, 1925. Realta` di ieri e di oggi, 1928. Carteggio con Domenico Giuliotti, 1988.

Further Readings Ambrogi, Silvano, Federigo Tozzi: Commedia in due atti, edited by Lucia Strappini, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Baldacci, Luigi, Tozzi moderno, Turin: Einaudi, 1993. Benevento, Aurelio, Il reale e l’immaginario: Saggi su Federigo Tozzi, Naples: Guida, 1996. Bertoncini, Giancarlo, Studi tozziani, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1996. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il romanzo del Novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1971. Fontanelli, Giorgio, Il teatro di Federigo Tozzi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1993. Luperini, Romano, Federigo Tozzi: Le immagini, le ide´e, le opere, Bari: Laterza, 1995. Maffeo, Pasquale, Federigo Tozzi, Rimini: Luise`, 1993. Marchi, Marco, Federigo Tozzi: Ipotesi e documenti, Genoa: Marietti, 1993.

CON GLI OCCHI CHIUSI, 1919 Novel by Federigo Tozzi

Con gli occhi chiusi (Eyes Shut) is the first novel Tozzi published in 1919. Written in 1913, it is the story of Pietro Rossi, an adolescent tormented and unsuitable to the livelihood of restorer his miser father Domenico chose on his behalf. Pietro finds affinities with Socialism and uses it as a means to feel important among the rest. He falls in love with Ghisola, a peasant girl with a free disposition toward sexual customs. Ghisola is attracted to Pietro’s sincerity, and would not mind marrying him for economical reasons. On the other hand, Pietro loves her platonically until he finds out that she is pregnant with another man’s child and leaves her. Even if the father, a tavern keeper in Siena, has some positive traits, motherless Pietro is the object of his violent tendencies. He feels for his father dually love and hate in this quasi-Oedipal relationship. As a result of his trying childhood, Pietro tends to alienate himself. The metaphor of eyes shut indicates on the part of Pietro a complete incomprehension of the world, an inability to assess the differences between ideals and reality, as well as a subconscious desire to reject a petty and immoral society. It is only on the farm of Poggio a’ Meli, the stage for his unresolved love affair with Ghisola, that he can find respite from his dislike for Siena. The novel is written in third person, but the narrative voice displays the discordance and incoherence of Pietro’s anomalous perspective on the real. Herein lies the great innovative aspect of Tozzi’s work. He accomplishes this effect using indirect free speech, as well as other techniques 1899

FEDERIGO TOZZI like isolating details, omitting a complex allencompassing view of things, punctuating oddly and using some vernacular language. Another relevant trait is the disproportionate rapport between the relevant accounted facts and the tone used. Claudio Carabba (Tozzi, 1972) traces this stylistic engagement to Verga and the Great Russian novelists. This tone is surprisingly laconic, when describing the plot’s most relevant events, such as Ghisola’s first sexual encounter. Tozzi’s language falls short of shedding any sort of objectivity or clarity on the events at hand. For example, Pietro is incapable of describing his feelings or communicating with his mother. At the time of her death he is not only unable to cry but also constrained to fake a pain that is in reality absent. The polar opposite father is found constantly screaming with great vigor, thus marking the generational incongruity overwhelming in many father-son relationships in Italian literature at the outset of the twentieth century. Con gli occhi chiusi is considered Tozzi’s greatest work, because of its assemblage and narrative construction; in this true masterpiece, reality is no longer explained but rather represented. In 1995, Francesca Archibugi directed a film based on the novel. GIAN PAOLO GIUDICETTI Editions First edition: Con gli occhi chiusi, Milan: Treves, 1919. Critical editions: in Opere, vol. I, edited by Glauco Tozzi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1961; in Opere, edited by Marco Marchi, Milan: Mondadori, 1987; Milan: Garzanti, 2002. Translations: Eyes Shut, by Kenneth Cox, Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1990; and as Ghisola, by Charles Klopp, New York: Garland Pub. 1990.

Further Reading Carabba, Claudio, Tozzi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Cavalli Pasini, Annamaria, ‘‘La visione rifratta: Una lettura di Con gli occhi chiusi di F. Tozzi,’’ in Dal Novellino a Moravia: Problemi della narrativa, edited by Ezio Raimondi and Bruno Basile, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1979. Chiarenza, Carlo, ‘‘Autore, narratore e personaggio nella struttura narrativa di Con gli occhi chiusi,’’ in Paragone, 330 (1977): 22–41. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Il personaggio-uomo, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1970. Melloni, Giorgio, ‘‘La scrittura come ‘vertigine della dissoluzione’: Una proposta di lettura di Con gli occhi chiusi di Federigo Tozzi,’’ in Strumenti critici, 11, no. 1 (1996): 23–50. Saccone, Eduardo, ‘‘Con gli occhi chiusi,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 110, no. 1 (1995): 1–19.

1900

TRE CROCI, 1920 Novel by Federigo Tozzi

Tre croci (Three Crosses), the last (by publishing date) of Tozzi’s three great novels, tells the story of three Sienese brothers, Giulio, Niccolo` and Enrico Gambi, inspired by a true story. The three bookshop owners differ radically in character: Giulio is the most mature and hardworking; Niccolo` has a volatile temperament and is prone to a hedonistic lifestyle; Enrico is the least courageous but most clever. The brothers are faced with financial difficulties and decide to forge the signature of their wealthy friend Nicchioli on several promissory bills. Although aware of the short-lived nature of their forged success, the brothers are incapable of changing or ceasing this newfound ‘‘livelihood.’’ They are exalted by the fatalistic quality of this ‘‘exercise’’ and unable to make a resolution they could honor. When the bank finally exposes the hoax, Giulio acknowledges the crime solely on his behalf and commits suicide. Niccolo` dies shortly thereafter of an illness, while Enrico finds his end in a homeless shelter. Their two young nieces Lola and Chiarina use their sparse savings to buy three crosses for the three brothers’ graves in a symbolic (and sole) gesture of dignity and hope present in the novel. The false bills indicate a counterfeit relationship with the world. The brothers are incapable of assuming the responsibilities of adult life. They are united in their evasive and escapist desire in pursuit of extreme physical satisfaction, especially culinary indulgences. Their existential crisis is rooted not solely in the mundane reality around them; it seems to come from their perception of something beyond the measly effects that pinpoint society. Their metaphysical belief is strong enough to belittle societal mores and upturn its significant scales, but it lacks of specificity. Ergo the religious presence at the conclusion: not because Giulio’s suicide could be interpreted as a Christ-like sacrifice driven by a greater undeniable force, but rather because it resembles ethereally the Sienese landscape of savior churches that protect the inhabitants from above. Stylistically Tre croci has a well-defined structure. It cannot be described as an ode to naturalism; it is marked by a brave lyrical foreground

TRANSLATION against the fading horizon of realism. Tozzi’s prose is dry, the dialogues theatrical, and the narrator stubborn to lose his impersonal stake and abandon his style to free indirect speech. Tre croci makes the reader acutely aware of the inescapable nature of fate. The brothers face a force that is too immutable to understand them and destroys them instead. In Giulio’s suicide the only apparent truth before dying is the impossibility to modify one’s fate. The wide landscapes described in Tre croci alternate with theatrical exchanges, thus giving the story the implacable rhythm of life. GIAN PAOLO GIUDICETTI Editions First edition: Tre croci, Milan: Treves, 1920. Critical editions: in Opere, vol. I, edited by Glauco Tozzi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1961; in Opere, edited by Marco Marchi, Milano: Mondadori, 1987; Milan: Garzanti, 2002.

Translations: Three Crosses, by R. Capellero, London: Martin Secker, 1921.

Further Reading Chiarenza, Carlo, ‘‘Ambiguita` della scrittura tozziana: Il caso di Tre croci,’’ in Tozzi e l’America, edited by Luigi Fontanella, Rome: Bulzoni, 1986. Mattesini, Francesco, ‘‘Tozzi: Il nascondimento del religioso,’’ in Letteratura e religione: Da Manzoni a Bacchelli, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1987. Palumbo, Matteo, ‘‘‘Forza lirica’ e mondo allegorico: Tre croci di Federigo Tozzi,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 112, no. 1 (1997): 57–80. Pullini, Giorgio, ‘‘Espressionismo narrativo di Federigo Tozzi,’’ in Volti e risvolti del romanzo italiano contemporaneo, Milan: Mursia, 1971. Saccone, Eduardo, ‘‘Le cambiali di Tozzi,’’ in Modern Language Notes, 104, no. 1 (1989): 151–188.

TRANSLATION The translator, according to an old saw, tended to be invisible. Often underappreciated, underpaid, and untenured, the best he or she could hope for was anonymity, for the less attention the translation attracted, then presumably the more seamlessly it negotiated the fraught journey from source to target language. By the new millennium, however, the translator had become increasingly visible in Italy and elsewhere, for many scholars believe that few issues implicate the nature of literary composition, study, and transmission as vigorously as this word that, in the Middle Ages, meant the translatio (carrying over) of sacred remains from one burial site to another. Because of globalization and the spread of English as the lingua franca of international culture and commerce, foreign writers depend more than ever before on translation for the dissemination of their work. Moreover, new technologies and the Internet, with their virtual textual economies and tentative steps (however awkward) toward automated modes of translation, have made it increasingly difficult to maintain the traditionally neat distinctions between original and

reproduction or source and target language. The emergence in universities throughout the world of programs in translation studies confirms what most lay readers, who now have the literary texts of the world in the languages of their choice available at the click of a mouse, have long intuitively sensed: The issue of translation strikes to the core of literary production and consumption in the global age. In Italy, one finds that translation dramatically reveals the complexities and difficulties inherent in the controversial monolithic term ‘‘Italian literary history.’’ The earliest languages of modern Italy— the myriad of local dialects whose study formed the basis of Dante’s pioneering treatise in Romance philology, De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, 1304–1305)—were to an extent ‘‘translations’’ in the term’s etymological sense of having been carried over from the putative ‘‘mother tongue,’’ Latin. Translation surfaced from the beginning of Italian literary history as a practical problem and formal challenge to writers of the peninsula who wished to communicate outside of their 1901

TRANSLATION native dialect with readers from whom they were often separated by significant linguistic differences. The writings of many authors from Dante onward reveal that Italy’s drive for belated political unity was inextricably linked to the centuries-long questione della lingua, a paradigmatic issue in which ‘‘Italy’’ itself, both as a sovereign entity and a linguistic construct, was often lost in translation. The case of Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873) vividly illustrates this point. Whereas Manzoni’s European contemporaries in the historical novel produced one work after another in the genre (one thinks immediately of Sir Walter Scott), Manzoni labored in a two-decade-long process of autotranslation in which he transformed I promessi sposi (The Betrothed) from its original hybrid, Lombard-inflected ‘‘Italian’’ to the definitive Tuscan edition of 1840. Manzoni’s militant commitment to placing his novel at the service of the questione della lingua in order to provide the burgeoning Italian nation with a suitable literary idiom absorbed—perhaps even exhausted—his energies to such a degree that I promessi sposi was his last major creative work. Italians today live intimately with the results of Manzoni’s endeavor, for the Tuscan of his novel did in fact become the official language of Italy. Indeed one of Manzoni’s final works, Dell’unita` della lingua e dei modi di diffonderla (On the Unity of Language and the Means for Its Diffusion, 1868), was a report on the unity of the new Italian language and the means for its promulgation. During Manzoni’s lifetime, an international debate about the role of translation in Italian literary culture surged to the fore after the publication of Mme de Stae¨l’s inflammatory essay ‘‘De l’Esprit des traductions’’ in Biblioteca italiana (1816). The French exile and Italophile, whose earlier novel entitled Corinne, ou l’Italie (1807) represented the age’s most influential view of Italy written by a foreigner, stimulated the debate that became known as the questione del romanticismo, by urging Italians to translate the more progressive and sophisticated literature of Northern Europe. Only through this literary cross-fertilization, she argued, could Italians free themselves from the moribund and pedantic cultural isolation that resulted from their continued promotion of mythological and neoclassical norms that had long since been abandoned by the rest of Europe. Her essay drew responses from some of the leading writers of the period, including Pietro Borsieri (1788–1852), Ludovico Di Breme (1780–1820), Giovanni 1902

Berchet (1783–1851), and the precocious adolescent from Recanati who would become Italy’s most acclaimed lyric poet, Giacomo Leopardi. However one evaluated Mme de Stae¨l’s seminal writing (Ugo Foscolo did so quite severely), one fact is unquestionable: She diagnosed that the issue of translation, rather than being a merely practical literary challenge, epitomized the exceptional nature of Italian literary history, many of whose forms, such as the recondite mythological and neoclassical imagery in Foscolo’s Dei Sepolcri (On Sepulchers, 1807) or Le Grazie (The Graces, 1815), defied translation into foreign formal and thematic codes. The Italian literary tradition is filled with illustrious translations that have earned the right to be called works of art in themselves. For example, Foscolo’s mentor, philosopher and philologist Melchiorre Cesarotti (1730–1808) helped introduce the vogue of European pre-Romantic thought into Italy with his influential translation of the ‘‘epic’’ fragments of Ossian (1763), the counterfeited name of James Macpherson, an eighteenth-century Scotsman masquerading as a medieval bard. Ippolito Pindemonte’s version of the Odyssey, published in 1822 after 15 years of constant labor and planned philologically according to the dictates of the Arcadia, offers with the Iliad (1822) an exquisitely neoclassical picture of the literary creativity of translation. An important contribution is also Vincenzo Monti’s 1810 translation of the Iliad. In modern times, especially during the Fascist regime (1922–1943), authors such as Cesare Pavese (translator of Melville’s Moby Dick) and Elio Vittorini translated American literature as a subversive gesture, in order to introduce democratic voices against Benito Mussolini’s censorship and political totalitarianism. This use of translation as resistance is also powerfully shown in Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Sostiene Pereira (Pereira Declares, 1994), whose eponymous protagonist strategically works to sway public opinion against the Salazarist regime of Portugal by publishing translations of foreign texts that contain politically dissident elements. One of Italy’s incomparable translators was Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968), an indefatigable interpreter of ancient Greek and Latin literature. Quasimodo aimed at achieving a creative aesthetic tension between the distinctly remote literary qualities of the source text and the modern poetic idiom that could bring this same text to life in the mind of his readers. For example, his masterful translation of a celebrated text by Catullus, the amorous paean

TRANSLATION to Lesbia in Carmen 5 published in Carmina (1945), exemplifies his capacity to speak the language of the ancients to contemporary readers. Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus, rumoresque senum severiorum omnes unius aestimemus assis. soles occidere et ridere possunt: nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda. da mi basia mille, deinde centum, dein mille altera, dein secunda centum, deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum. dein, cum milia multa fecerimus, conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus, aut nequis malus invidere possit, cum tantum sciat esse basiorum. Viviamo, mia Lesbia, e amiamo e ogni mormorio perfido dei vecchi valga per noi la piu` vile moneta. Il giorno puo` morire e poi risorgere, ma quando muore il nostro breve giorno, una notte infinita dormiremo. Tu dammi mille baci, e quindi cento, poi dammene mille baci, e quindi cento, poi dammene altri mille, e quindi cento, quindi mille continui, e quindi cento. E quando poi saranno mille e mille nasconderemo il loro vero numero, che non getti il malocchio l’invidioso per un numero di baci cosı` alto.

As George Steiner notes in his After Babel (1976), Quasimodo self-consciously distances his language from the ancient source by limiting the number of facile verbal connections between the linguistically similar elements of the Italian and the Latin. For example, instead of translating soles as the homologue soli (suns) and lux as luce (light), he chooses the more neutral giorno (day)—a word that evokes the passing of time and a distance from source in a manner that the cognates would not convey. The repetition of giorno relates to a principal theme of the poem, the passionate love between Catullus and Lesbia, which flickers into night as dramatically as it bursts into day. Indeed, Quasimodo’s translation of Catullus underscores the temporality of both language and the human passions, a strategy that recalls the epigraph to the first collection of Quasimodo’s poems, Acque e terre (Waters and Land, 1930): ‘‘Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra / trafitto da un raggio di sole: / ed e` subito sera’’ (Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth / pierced by a ray of sun / and suddenly, it’s evening). Pier Paolo Pasolini’s translation of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus into Roman dialect or Carlo Porta’s Milanese versions of some cantos of Dante’s

Inferno attest to an old tradition of dialect renderings of classic Italian texts, often, as in the case of Porta, with parodic intent. Recent geographical and cultural phenomena like the establishment in Italy of large diaspora communities of Eastern Europeans and North Africans as well as the predominance of English because of tourism, industry, and commerce make the issue of translation a vital concern to many of the nation’s leading authors and intellectuals (most prominently, Umberto Eco). In considering the relationship between issues of translation and some of the long-standing questions in popular, middlebrow, and high-cultural Italian life, we are reminded of what Dante Alighieri wrote in Convivio (The Banquet, 1304–1307), that ‘‘nulla cosa per legame musaico si puo` de la sua loquella in altra transmutare, sanza rompere tutta la sua dolcezza e armonia’’ (no poetic thing can be transformed from its own language to another without breaking its sweetness and harmony). Dante’s texts are rife with translations of works by others (especially Virgil) and, more pointedly, himself. For example, when Beatrice prompts Dante’s confession in Purgatorio, she does so by ‘‘translating’’ or recasting into a Christian idiom themes and words borrowed from his Vita Nova (New Life, ca. 1294). Dante’s experience suggests that perhaps no literary dialogue is as intimate or as potentially volatile as the encounter between the translator and the original. In rewriting a work in another language, one produces a new text that reflects as much our knowledge of the source as it does our deferral to its ultimate mystery and impenetrability. JOSEPH LUZZI Further Reading Barnstone, Willis, The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Benjamin, Walter, ‘‘The Task of the Translator,’’ in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, New York: Shocken, 1988. Catullus, Carmina, translated by Salvatore Quasimodo, Milan: Edizioni di Uomo, 1945. De Man, Paul, ‘‘‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator,’’’ in The Resistance to Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. De Stae¨l, Germaine, ‘‘De l’Esprit des traductions,’’ in Me´langes, vol. 17 of uvres comple`tes de Madame la Baronne de Stae¨l, edited by Auguste-Louis de Stae¨lHolstein, Paris: Treuttel et Wu¨rtz, 1820. Eco, Umberto, Experiences in Translation, Toronto: University of Toronto, 2001. Ferme, Valerio, Tradurre e` tradire: La traduzione come sovversione culturale sotto il fascismo, Ravenna: Longo, 2002.

1903

TRANSLATION Lepschy, Giulio, ‘‘Tradurre,’’ in Enciclopedia Einaudi, directed by Ruggiero Romano, vol. 14, Turin: Einaudi, 1981. Luzzi, Joseph, ‘‘Did Italian Romanticism Exist?’’ in Comparative Literature, 56, no. 2 (2004): 168–191.

Steiner, George, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, London: Oxford University Press, 1976. Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

P. TRAPASSI See Pietro Metastasio

TRAVEL LITERATURE The globalization of literary and cultural studies has stimulated critical reflection concerning the undervalued category of Italian travel literature, and mobilized the relatively staid canons of traditional Italian literary historiography. Recent research in the field of travel writing has led to the publication of critical monographs, essay collections, and new editions of historic texts, as well as previously unpublished or neglected travelogues to and from Italy by editorial houses seeking to capitalize on the popularity of the travel genre in an age of mass tourism. The ways in which the reality and the metaphor of travel have been fundamental for the constitution of the traditional canons of Italian literature has also emerged into clearer view. Italian literary history and criticism of travel literature has been notoriously underdeveloped, despite the fact that Italians, since Dante and Marco Polo, have been among the most welltraveled of Europeans. The curious lack of critical consideration of travel literature when compared to its status in other major Western European traditions is an effect of Italy’s lack of a national political unity until the second half of the nineteenth century. Italy was marginal to the early modern conquest and colonization of the world pursued 1904

by nation-states like France, Spain and England, whose respective literary systems vigorously developed ‘‘modern’’ literary genres such as the novel and travel literature, to which the novel itself had a close genealogical relation going back to its origins in the Spanish picaresque. Instead, the model for modern Italian language and literature promulgated by Pietro Bembo at the height of the Italian wars between France and Spain for dominion over Italy in Prose della volgar lingua (Writings in the Vernacular Language, 1525) was designed not for foreign conquests and colonization but rather to respond to the linguistic and cultural fragmentation of the peninsula and to its abject political state. In taking as its ideal not a spoken national language but the fourteenth-century literary classics, Boccaccio and Petrarch, the classicizing canons of the modern Italian literary system that emerged from the Renaissance established Italy as a deterritorialized literary and cultural destination. Italian literature thus tended to be resistant to the literature of journeys away from Italy since the focus of the tradition was its preoccupation with constituting and consolidating the place and position of ‘‘Italy’’ as a literary-cultural home that transcended regional boundaries and in a very real

TRAVEL LITERATURE sense, ‘‘history’’ itself. The attitude of the literary canon toward travel, given Italy’s lack of national territorial identity and the peninsula’s marginal status vis-a`-vis the early modern nation states was not so different from that expressed by ‘‘Mamma mia, dammi cento lire’’ (Mum, give me a hundred lire), a noted late-nineteenth / early twentiethcentury folk song of emigration that viewed the experience of the journey as a dangerous and potentially deadly form of alienation from home: ‘‘Cento lire io te le do / ma in America no no no’’ (I will give you a hundred lire but do not go to America: no no no). There has thus been the distinct tendency in Italian literary history and criticism to overlook the impressive literary legacy of the great travel writers of the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods: There is no place for Marco Polo nor for Cristoforo Colombo (neither of whom wrote in Italian) in Francesco De Sanctis’ Risorgimento classic Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian Literature, 1870–1871). Yet, the fact that Italians had no national-political home in fact represented historically a strong stimulus to travel both within and outside Italy, so that the Italians from Dante to Pascoli, from Colombo to the emigrants of the late-nineteenth century, have always displayed a special propensity for journeying. Moreover, traditions of travel, in particular the experiences of exile and emigration, were in fact fundamental for the canonical literary tradition itself, beginning with Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. From the beginning of Italian literary history there has been an intriguing, to some extent complementary relation between on the one hand the way in which the canonical literary tradition and its notions of ‘‘literariness’’ have sublimated the journey, developing it as a metaphor or motif and harnessing it in the service of the consolidation of a literary-cultural home, and on the other the status of the real historical journeys of Italian travelers, often recorded in languages other than Italian, expressed in the spatial-geographical dimension and in their own way a response to the fundamental lack of an Italian national home. Indeed, the contrast between the situations of Dante and Marco Polo is symptomatic. While Dante’s linguistic and literary response to his exile, which took the form of travel narratives in both the De vulgari eloquentia (Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue, ca. 1304–1305) and the Comedia (Divine Comedy, ca. 1305–1321), was foundational for the establishment of a national linguistic, literary and cultural tradition, Marco Polo’s travels, originally written

in a Franco-Venetian koine´, and relatively neglected by Italian literary history and criticism until the modern period, represent a legacy for European and world literary traditions of travel. When one considers from this dual perspective Italian travel and travel writing it becomes possible to recognize how during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the travels of Marco Polo (1254– 1324) and of other Italian travelers such as Giovanni da Pian del Carpine (ca. 1180–1252), Giovanni da Monte Corvino (1247–1328), and Odorico da Pordenone (ca. 1265–1311) to the East, or of Jacopo da Verona (ca. 1335–ca. 1442), Niccolo` da Poggibonsi, Leonardo Frescobaldi, Simone Sigoli, Nicolaus de Marthono to the Holy Land expressed geographically a horizontal mobility related to Dante’s spiritual and ideological journey along the vertical axis of the three realms of the Comedia. Both types of journey were inspired by the revolutionary cultural, political, and economic force of the Italian duecento, a period that witnessed the seeding of the modern lay urban and literary cultures in Italy that would lead to the Renaissance ‘‘discovery of man and of the world’’ as Franc¸ois Michelet famously put it. Italian travel literature will thus play a leading role in both the spiritual and geographical journey of the West, from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries, that is, for the entire period during which Italy represented a central point of reference (also in spatial and topographical terms) and a radiating source of literary and cultural models for Europe. While the literary and biographical journeys of the exiled Dante were driven and inspired by a longing for home in both the spiritual and the material sense, Petrarch, the son of a Florentine, was born in exile and had no home to which he could return. From the perspective of world literary history, Petrarch is the first in a long line of modern writers for whom, in the absence of an original territorial motherland, writing becomes both a vehicle through which to locate the self and to construct a place called home. Thus, in the transition from Dante to Petrarch one witnesses an abrupt shift from medieval to modern travel and the beginning of Humanist travel and travel writing. Indeed, the fragmentary, discontinuous itineraries of Petrarch’s life, which he relentlessly styled according to the metaphor of the life as journey, present already many of the ambiguities and ambivalences of modern travel. Is the ascent of Mt. Ventoux in Familiares (Letters on Familiar Matters, 1325– 1366) an Augustinian spiritual journey of the self or a parodic exercise in literary self-promotion? Is 1905

TRAVEL LITERATURE Petrarch’s pilgrimage guide to the Holy Sepulchre, Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini (Journey to the Sepulcher of Our Lord, 1358), a model for the most holy of penitential journeys or is it mainly an opportunity for satisfying the author’s modern touristic desire for self-fashioning? Petrarch and Boccaccio mark the beginning of modern travel writing also to the extent that their studies of the geography of the classical world—for example, Boccaccio’s De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris (On Mountains, Forests, Springs, Lakes, Rivers, Ponds or Swamps, and Diverse Names of the Sea, 1350–1365)—and of contemporary cartography laid the foundations for subsequent developments in scholarship and travel literature. Boccaccio’s De Canaria (On the Canary Islands, 1342) is the ‘‘translation’’ into Latin of a firsthand report of the discovery and exploration during the 1330s of the Canary Islands (or Fortunate Islands) beyond the pillars of Hercules. Boccaccio grants literary status to what will become a central genre of early modern travel literature, the discoverer’s letter of report, and previews in a remarkably prescient way the same topoi (for instance, naked indigenous peoples) and themes (the noble savage) that will characterize this important Renaissance genre, which features texts like Columbo’s Epistola de insulis nuper inventis (Letter on the Recently Discovered Islands, 1493) or Giovanni da Verrazzano’s Lettera sull’America a Francesco I re di Francia (Letter on America to Francis I, King of France, 1522). Yet another important genre of travel and travel writing inaugurated at this time is that of archeological tourism. Petrarch, in a familiar letter to his friend Cardinal Giovanni Colonna, is considered the forerunner of the archeological studies of Humanist travelers and antiquarians during the fifteenth century like the merchant-traveler Ciriaco d’Ancona (1390–1455), only fragments of whose travel journals survive, Poggio Bracciolini (1380– 1459), author of Ruinarum urbis Romae descriptio (Description of the Ruins of the City of Rome, 1431) and Flavio Biondo (1392–1463), who wrote Roma instaurata (Rome Restored, 1531) and Italia illustrata (Italy Illustrated, 1531). Holy Land travel continued throughout the quattrocento, producing a significant textual record, including the accounts of a pilgrimage by Duke Niccolo` III d’Este (1383–1441), recorded by his chancellor Luchino del Campo (1413), as well as pilgrimage texts by Ser Mariano di Nanni of Siena, who wrote his Viaggio fatto al Santo Sepolcro (Journey 1906

to the Holy Sepulcher) in 1431, by the condottiere Roberto di Sanseverino, and by the Milanese Santo Brasca (ca. 1444–ca. 1522). In addition, Italian travel writers of the period especially distinguished themselves within a European context by exploring and reporting back from the near, middle and far East. These include Niccolo` dei Conti (1395–1469), whose report was dedicated to Pope Eugene IV and transcribed by Poggio Bracciolini in his De varietate fortunae (On the Vicissitude of Fortune, 1448), the Venetian diplomat-merchant traveler Iosafa Barbaro (1413–1494), whose account of his journeys in the East written in 1487 were only published during the sixteenth century, and the Bolognese Lodovico de Varthema (ca. 1465/1470– 1517), who traveled as far as Ceylon and India, converted for a time to Islam, and whose Itinerario de Lodovico Bolognese (Itinerary of Lodovico of Bologna, 1510) was dedicated to Vittoria Colonna. The innovative and formative role of Italian travel writing of the quattrocento, however, is perhaps best illustrated by the Liber Insularum Archipelagi (Book of the Islands of the Archipelago, ca. 1415–1430) of Cristoforo Buondelmonti (ca. 1385– ca. 1430), a first-person account of the Greek archipelago that combined travel narrative with 79 hand-drawn maps. Buondelmonti’s isolario inaugurated the protean ‘‘book of islands’’ genre, which displayed an astonishing typological multiformity thereafter. It represents the distant but nonetheless clear point of departure for the Greek island travelogue, which continues down to the present and to which such major modernist writers as Laurence Durrell and Henry Miller have contributed. At the height of the Renaissance, it represents a model in the genre of virtual travel on maps for the Isolario. Libro nel qual si ragiona di tutte l’isole del mondo (Isolario. Book of All the Islands of the World, 1528) by Benedetto Bordone (d. ca. 1530), establishing an encyclopedic cartographic genre of travel books that influenced the fictions of Franc¸ois Rabelais and the cosmographical works of Andre´ Thevet. Buondelmonti’s ‘‘Book of Islands’’ is also a model for what has been considered one of the masterpieces of Renaissance exploration and discovery, Primo viaggio intorno al globo di Antonio Pigafetta (First Journey around the World, ca. 1522–1525), by the Vicentine Antonio Pigafetta (ca. 1480–ca. 1536), which is the most famous and important firsthand source describing the Magellan-Elcano first circumnavigation of the globe (1519–1522), and which also included hand-drawn maps to accompany the firsthand account.

TRAVEL LITERATURE Pigafetta was the last in a distinguished line of Renaissance Italian expatriate travel writers during the discovery and exploration period. The Florentine Amerigo Vespucci (1452–1512), after whom America was named by virtue of his famous, in part apocryphal, letter, the Mundus Novus (The New World, 1503–1504), sailed under the flags of Spain and Portugal, while Giovanni da Verrazzano’s elegant 1522 letter in which he described for the first time the North Atlantic coasts of the United States including New York Harbor is addressed to Francis I of France, on whose behalf he made his discoveries. The vital role of travel writing during the discovery and exploration period parallels the ‘‘mobility’’ in Europe of Italian literary works like Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1504), Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (The Frenzy of Orlando, 1532) and Baldassare Castiglione’s Il libro del Cortegiano (The Book of the Courtier, 1528). An often overlooked yet nonetheless important genre of travel writing during the same period includes texts produced by some of Italy’s most prominent authors in relation to their diplomatic activities, including Niccolo` Machiavelli’s Rapporto di cose della Magna (Report on the Matters of Germany, 1508), Francesco Guicciardini’s Diario di viaggio in Spagna, (Diary of the Trip to Spain, 1512) and Francesco Vettori’s Viaggio in Alemagna, (Journey to Germany, 1523). Meanwhile, the nonnational character of Italian travel literature is exemplified by the Historia del mondo nuovo (A History of the New World, 1565) by a Milanese ‘‘traveler’’ to America, Girolamo Benzoni (b. 1519), whose picaresque history and disenchanted account of the Spanish American colonies became a canonical work on the New World despite the fact that it massively borrowed from other sources. Benzoni’s work enjoyed numerous translations and wide circulation, while contributing to the ‘‘Black Legend’’ in Europe of Spanish atrocities against the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Following the accounts of the Italian expatriate explorers during the heroic period of explorations, Italy’s greatest contribution to Renaissance traditions of travel writing was the mid-sixteenth century publication of the three volumes of Navigationi et viaggi (Navigations and Travels, 1550–1559) by Giovanni Battista Ramusio (1485–1557). This encyclopedic work, which brought together all of the travel narratives of the major western traditions going back to Marco Polo was the first of its kind and influenced the other Renaissance masterpiece in the genre, the Elizabethan Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages (1582). But while the Englishman’s

collection presented the prospect of new worlds and territories ripe for conquest and colonization by the English nation, Ramusio’s collection had instead a more retrospective and classicizing character and represents a kind of epilogue to the recently concluded period of discovery, and translated the Spanish, Portuguese, French and vernacular Italian narratives into the deterritorialized Italian promulgated by Bembo and the Venetian bookmakers in those years. However, the fact that Italy was not a nation-state player on the international stage never kept Italian travelers from going abroad and writing back to their various regional homes about what they witnessed there. For example, the merchant-traveler Filippo Sassetti (1540– 1588) left behind the middle-class perspective of his Florentine homeland for Seville, Madrid, and Lisbon and traveled throughout the East, reporting back to the Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici and to the Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco I concerning political and diplomatic questions as well as to Bernardo Davanzati and Pier Vettori on more intellectual and scientific issues. His letters are particularly noteworthy for their ethnographic and ethno-linguistic interests, and he was the first European to attempt the translation of Sanskrit. From the cosmopolitan perspective of the lateRenaissance travel literature exemplified by Sassetti, one can begin to understand why the Italian seicento represented the Golden Age of Italian travel writing. During the Italian Baroque the strong emergence of the regional cultures of Italy and of dialect literatures was accompanied by a flowering of Italian travel writing by viaggiatori like Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), Francesco Carletti (1573–1636), Pietro Della Valle (1586–1652), Francesco Negri (1623–1698), Lorenzo Magalotti (1637–1712), Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri (1651–1725), to name just a few of the major authors. Their travel reports, beginning with the letters of the Jesuit Ricci from China, were of world-literary resonance—indeed, Goethe praised Della Valle’s Viaggi (Travels, 1650) for their refreshing directness. The first private citizen to complete a tour around the early modern world between 1594 and 1606 for independent commercial purposes (in which he failed miserably), the Florentine Carletti described from a disillusioned perspective in his posthumously published Ragionamenti del mio viaggio intorno al mondo (Considerations on My Journey around the World, 1701) the new reality of the global economy under European dominion. At the end of the century, Gemelli Careri in his six-volume Giro del mondo (Around 1907

TRAVEL LITERATURE the World, 1699–1700), which was translated immediately into English and French, exemplifies the persistence of the cosmopolitan, world-encompassing Italian traveler, on the eve of Enlightenment and the Grand Tour. During the eighteenth century, the travel of intellectuals throughout Europe assumed a particular importance and became an essential element of their cultural formation. While Italy was the destination of the Grand Tour travelers, including Goethe, Montesquieu, and de Brosses, the period of the Enlightenment also marked an increase in the number of Italians who traveled in Europe and in the popularity of travel literature in Italy, usually taking the epistolary form, as with Giuseppe Baretti’s Lettere familiari ai suoi tre fratelli (Familiar Letters to His Three Brothers, 1762–1763) about his journeys through England, Spain and Portugal, or Pietro and Alessandro Verri’s Viaggio a Parigi e Londra (Journey to Paris and London, 1766– 1767), generally considered the most complete cultural portrait to come down to us concerning Italian society of the second half of the eighteenth century, or Lettere sopra l’Inghilterra, la Scozia e l’Olanda (Letters on England, Scotland and Holland, 1790) by Luigi Angiolini (1750–1821). The Venetian Francesco Algarotti’s Viaggi di Russia (Travels to Russia, 1767) and Giovanni Battista Casti’s Relazione di un mio viaggio da Venezia a Costantinopoli (Report of My Journey from Venice to Constantinople, 1802) illustrate extra-European travel writing of the period. Meanwhile, the pervasiveness of travel accounts during the period influenced any number of genres and works, including Giacomo Casanova’s Histoire de ma vie (The History of My Life, 1826–1837) and Vittorio Alfieri’s Vita scritta da esso (The Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself, 1806). However, the case of Baretti, arguably the most important Italian travel writer of the period, illustrates the continuing significance of the national identity question. While living in England, where he spent a large part of his life, Baretti became involved in a controversy with the dyspeptic Samuel Sharp, whose Letters from Italy (1766) was also the object of Lawrence Sterne’s satire in A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768). Baretti’s An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1767) presents a defense of Italy and its people against the unsympathetic observations of Sharp, illustrating in the process how the peninsula had become by the eighteenth century Europe’s ‘‘internal other’’ for Grand Tour travelers. Baretti’s work reflects the subaltern status of Italians in the 1908

eyes of contemporary travelers in Europe at this time as distinguished from the European’s admiration for Italy’s monuments, history, and natural setting. The defensiveness exemplified by Baretti represents a pronounced characteristic of nineteenth-century Italian literature, when, in a reversal of its formerly pre-eminent role as a center and source for literary models during the medieval, Renaissance and Baroque periods, Italy became increasingly the receiver of European influences. For instance, while the Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland (1802) of Giuseppe Acerbi (1773–1846), immediately translated into French and German and only published in Italian in 1832, illustrate the Italian adaptation of the encyclopedic travel of the Enlightenment, Il viaggio di un ignorante ossia ricetta per gli ipocondriaci (The Journey of an Ignorant, or a Recipe for Hypochondriacs, 1857), by Giovanni Rajberti (1805–1861), is a satirical narrative in the fashion of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, an international classic of travel literature that had an impact across the Italian literary system, from Foscolo to Svevo. This satirical and sentimental vein of travel writing continues in Giovanni Faldella’s works, including A Vienna: Gita col Lapis (To Vienna: A Trip with a Pencil, 1874), A Parigi, viaggio di Geronimo e comp. (To Paris; The Journey of Geronimo and C., 1887) and Un viaggio a Roma senza vedere il papa (A Journey to Rome Without Seeing the Pope, 1880). Meanwhile, nineteenth-century Italian literature presents a distinctively negative attitude toward traveling that is generally considered exceptional in Europe and the result of the peninsula’s special history. In fact, in the absence of a national-political territorial unification Italy had been defined by regional boundaries that were to be respected rather than crossed, and a primary value had become attached to the sphere of the home and of family. One consequence is that for most of nineteenth-century literature, from Foscolo to Manzoni, from Leopardi to Verga, the journey is rarely taken to be a positive value. By the end of the century, however, with unification achieved, Italy was ready to enter the ranks of the modern colonial states and it is in relation to unification that an Italian national development of travel literature begins. Under the influence of positivism and of Italy’s own colonial enterprise, the study of travel literature is undertaken with great seriousness by scholars like Pietro Amat di San Filippo (Biografia dei viaggiatori italiani colla bibliografia delle loro opera, 1882) and Alessandro D’Ancona (Viaggiatori e avventurieri, 1912) among

TRAVEL LITERATURE others. Nevertheless, the traditional polarity between literary journeying and real travel persists, as demonstrated by the difference in two of the most popular turn-of-the-century authors, Edmondo De Amicis and Emilio Salgari. The remarkably successful and extensive travel books of De Amicis set a high water mark for Italian travel literature, despite Benedetto Croce’s strictures against him and the genre in which one seems to hear the distant but distinct echo of the classicizing literary system established by Bembo. Once the national-political home had been established, other forms of colonial travel writing by ‘‘adventurous’’ travelers like Giacomo Bove (1852–1887), Giovanni Miani (1810–1872), Romolo Gessi (1831–1881), and Vittorio Bottego (1860–1897) became viable. The Italian propensity for exotic literary and virtual journeys for those who preferred to stay at home, meanwhile, found expression and satisfaction in the imaginative tales of adventure of the prolific Salgari. During the twentieth century this particular polarity has largely been bridged, in particular by Italian prose writers and poets who have taken up, in addition to their creative writings, the travelogue as genre (usually under the cover of the journalistic elzeviro), including Guido Gozzano, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Emilio Cecchi, Mario Soldati, Alberto Arbasino, Italo Calvino and Gianni Celati among others. Nevertheless, the sign that an enduring prejudice against the genre in the Italian literary system is found in the fact that no contemporary writer has established a major reputation as a travel writer as has been possible in other traditions (Theroux, Chatwin, Bryson), with the possible exception of Claudio Magris, whose Danubio (Danube, 1986) enjoyed an international reputation during the 1990s. It is perhaps the paradoxical position of travel in the Italian tradition that particularly recommends travel writing as an object of study and a means of achieving critical perspective, within the context of an emerging postnational and globalized community, on the competing claims of movement and of place, of traveling and staying at home. Reflection on Italian travel literature offers both a means for cultivating ‘‘the art of travel’’ in the light of secular traditions of travel to and from Italy, and at the same time for addressing the problem of how to consolidate and make a home in the midst of modern mobility, or as Calvino wrote in his rewriting of Marco Polo, Le citta` invisibili (Invisible Cities,

1972), how to ‘‘cercare e saper riconoscere chi e cosa, in mezzo all’inferno, non e` inferno, e farlo durare, e dargli spazio’’ (seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space). THEODORE CACHEY Further Reading Amat di San Filippo, Pietro, Biografia dei viaggiatori italiani colla bibliografia delle loro opere, vol. 1 of Studi biografici e bibliografici sulla storia della geografia in Italia pubblicati in occasione del III Convegno Geografico Internazionale, 2nd edition, Rome: Societa` Geografica Italiana, 1882. Bonora, Ettore (editor), Letterati, memorialisti e viaggiatori del Settecento, Milan- Naples: Ricciardi, 1951. Brilli, Attilio, Quando viaggiare era un’arte: il romanzo del Grand Tour, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Campbell, Mary B., The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo, ‘‘I viaggi e le scoperte,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 5, Le questioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1986. D’Ancona, Alessandro, Viaggiatori e avventurieri, Florence: Sansoni, 1912. Effetto Sterne: la narrazione umoristica in Italia da Foscolo a Pirandello, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1990. Guagnini, Elvio, Viaggi d’inchiostro: note su viaggi e letteratura in Italia, Pasian di Prato (Udine): Campanotto, 2000. Guglielminetti, Marziano (editor), Viaggiatori del Seicento, Turin: UTET, 1967. Leed, Eric J., The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism, New York: Basic Books, 1991. Luzzana Caraci, Ilaria (editor), Scopritori e viaggiatori del Cinquecento, 2 vols., Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1996. MacCannel, Dean, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Magliocchetti, Bruno, and Anthony Verna (editors), The Motif of the Journey in Nineteenth-century Italian Literature, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Michelet, Jules, Histoire de France, Paris: Lacroix, 1877. Monga, Luigi (editor), L’odeporica / Hodoeporics: On Travel Literature, special issue of Annali d’Italianistica, 14 (1996). Monga, Luigi (editor), Hodoeporics Revisited/Ritorno all’odeporica, special issue of Annali d’Italianistica, 21 (2003). Polezzi, Loredana, Translating Travel: Contemporary Italian Travel Writing in English Translation, Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2001. Vincenti, Leonello (editor), Viaggiatori del Settecento, Turin: UTET, 1950.

1909

TRIESTE

TRIESTE In 1909, Scipio Slataper published a series of controversial essays on his native city in the Florentine journal La Voce, titling the first Trieste non ha tradizioni di cultura (Trieste Has No Cultural Traditions). While polemical and defiant, Slataper’s declaration held an element of truth. Unlike other ethnically Italian cities having a long artistic and intellectual heritage, Trieste’s early history was not impressive. Successively a Roman town, patriarchal possession, medieval commune, feudal territory, and a rival to Venice for the trade in the Adriatic Sea, Trieste flourished only after 1719, when Austrian Emperor Charles VI declared it a free port. Its location provided an ideal access to the Mediterranean and the East. As Austria’s chief maritime city, Trieste mushroomed from a town of some 5,000 inhabitants in 1700 to a city of 150,000 by 1850, becoming one of Europe’s chief emporiums. It was a city where commerce, not culture, ruled. New settlers were drawn to the port’s expanding economy from the Balkans, Greece, Central Europe, and Italy itself, including a sizeable Jewish migration. Fearing potential economic and political upheavals, the Hapsburg Empire sought to impose its Germanic imprint on the city by curtailing the process of assimilation of its immigrant population. Austria’s attempt to curb nationalism by favoring the Slavic minority also backfired: The city’s first newspaper, L’osservatore triestino, established in 1784, was published in Italian, and its first major intellectual circle, the Gabinetto di Minerva, founded by Domenico Rossetti in 1810, also followed Italian models. After the revolutionary surge of 1848, irredentism, or the movement to integrate the pro-Italian areas of the empire in the cultural fatherland, became a way of life for many Triestines—even more so after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy (1861) and the hanging of patriot Guglielmo Oberdan (1882). Up to World War I, many institutions and associations in Trieste fostered the cause of Italian cultural identity. Schools became the weapons of nationalism and acculturation, notably the lyceums and the municipal Universita` Popolare (1900). However, the city remained, geographically and politically, separated from the contemporary centers of Italian letters and thought. The emphasis on 1910

irredentism led to an exaggerated cult of tradition. Few noteworthy literary works were produced in Trieste at the turn of the century, with the exception of Italo Svevo’s Una vita (A Life, 1892) and Senilita` (As a Man Grows Older, 1898), which were not well-received by local critics or readers. The pursuit of irredentism also resulted in a revival of Italian Romanticism, as nationalists looked at Mazzini, Verdi, and Garibaldi for inspiration. Artistic trends reached Trieste with a notable delay and were tardily assimilated by a few writers. Such is the case of the Istrian poet Renato Rinaldi (1889–1914), attracted to Giovanni Pascoli’s lyrics; or journalist Enea Silvio Benco (1874–1949), who shared the romantic cult for the sensual and the mysterious in his novels La fiamma fredda (The Cold Flame, 1903) and Il castello dei desideri (The Castle of Desires, 1906). But, during the early years of the twentieth century, a need for innovation and literary independence was felt by the Triestine intellectual and artistic community: The review Il Palvese was founded in 1907 in order to spearhead such renewal, hosting local young writers and thinkers, such as Scipio Slataper (1888–1915) and Umberto Saba (1883–1957). While the typical Triestine’s contacts with Italian culture under the Hapsburgs were generally limited to the classics, now he had ample access to Germanic languages and literatures. This promoted a unique climate, open to Mitteleuropa but also to Slavic communities. Trieste was the first Italian city to stage a Wagnerian opera, one of the first to add Ibsen and Strindberg to its theatrical repertory; and it was Trieste that introduced Freud’s works and psychoanalytic therapy in Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno (Confessions of Zeno, 1923), as well as in many of Saba’s lyrics. This Northern influence can be detected in Svevo’s Una vita, which was written in the wake of his reading of Schopenhauer, Slataper’s translations of Hebbel and Ibsen, or Saba’s La serena disperazione (Serene Desperation, 1913–1915) inspired by Otto Weininger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). Before World War I, a Germanic-Italian heritage formed the cultural backdrop for Triestine intellectuals and artists; students attended universities in both countries, reinforcing their biculturalism. Irredentism was a major

TRIESTE factor in Italy’s decision to join in World War I. Young artists, students and irredentists sought to define their identities by residing in Italy; some became active contributors to literary and social movements centered in Florence, particularly around La Voce (1908–1914), a periodical that aimed at improving and internationalizing the intellectual climate of the nation. These young Triestines, however, soon developed a growing sense of their difference and place within Italian culture. Thus, Slataper denounced the provincialism of his city, but he also acknowledged Trieste as being at the crossroads of three languages (Italian, Germanic, and Slavic), a city where cultures could meet and create a novel form of ‘‘Italianness.’’ He also recognized that such multiple ethnicity could cause both personal and social conflict and dissociation. In 1918, as a result of the Treaty of Versailles, Trieste became Italian, realizing the irredentist dream at the cost of many lives and a striking decline in its economic importance. Now part of the homeland, the city became peripheral, culturally marginal, and diverse. In the following years, Triestine literary production continued to reflect consciousness of difference and an ambiguous national identity derived from the citizenry’s mixed ethnic, social, and religious heritage. For some authors, such as historian Attilio Tamaro (1884–1956), attachment to an Italian identity produced xenophobia, and a rejection of all Germanic or Slavic components (an attitude favored in Fascist circles); for others, it offered a positive representation of the Slavic minority, as in Slataper’s Il mio Carso (My Carso, 1912), while insisting on a decidedly Italian definition of triestinita`, or regional character. A boost to this notion of the unique voice of local artists came with the critical success of Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno in the mid-1920s. Set in Hapsburg Trieste, the novel explores the alienation of modern man and his difficulty in actively participating in society and its institutions by employing the innovative technique of the interior monologue. Svevo’s work was hailed as European and original, with emphasis on its Triestine roots. Born Ettore Schmitz, Italo Svevo was ethnically German-Jewish, culturally Italian-Triestine, and he acknowledged them both in his choice of pseudonym. One part of the Hapsburg legacy to the city is the prominent Jewish presence among regional writers; Svevo did not emphasize this heritage, but others cherished it (Saba or Ferruccio Fo¨lkel). Writers from the Istrian peninsula, connected to Trieste by language, history, and mixed ethnicity, enrich the regional literary scene. Giani Stuparich (1891–1961), Pier

Antonio Quarantotti Gambini (1910–1965) and Enzo Bettiza (1927–) set their novels in the city and its surroundings but also focus on Triestine issues in their autobiographies, memoirs, and critical essays. For example, in Trieste nei miei ricordi (Remembering Trieste, 1948), Stuparich depicts the cultural landscape and artistic figures of the first half of the twentieth century while narrating his personal and literary odyssey. Bettiza’s Il fantasma di Trieste (A Ghost in Trieste, 1958) is a bildungsroman that describes the crisis of a man caught in the vise of a ‘‘dual personality’’: the strain of being Italian under the Austrian flag. An intriguing phenomenon is the lifelong attachment to the city and its heritage by numerous writers born or raised in Trieste but residing elsewhere. This is the case of film critic and playwright Tullio Kezich (1928–), who has adapted works by and about Svevo for the stage as well as writing plays in Triestine dialect, such as L’americano di San Giacomo (The American of San Giacomo, 1998). The end of World War II only reinforced Trieste’s character as a border town subject to ethnic tensions and marginalization. The partition and transfer of most of the Istrian peninsula to Yugoslavia, the gradual exodus of the Istrian population, the loss of a large part of the Carso to Slovenia, and the uncertain political situation that kept Trieste from rejoining Italy until 1954, exacerbated its population, particularly ethnic Slavs and Italians. Among the writers closely bound up with the Northeast region, Fulvio Tomizza (1935–1999) dedicated his early novels to the Yugoslav occupation of Istria, the resulting social and personal lacerations, and the uneasy integration of Istrian refugees into the Triestine urban landscape. Materada (1960), the saga of a village (Tomizza’s hometown) decimated by violence and ethnic conflict during the final exodus of 1954, and La miglior vita (The Better Life, 1977), the fictionalized history of a small country parish caught in the turbulence of events, are mainly autobiographical novels. After the war, prominent citizens sought to keep the culture of their city visible through local endeavors. Anita Pittoni founded Lo Zibaldone in 1948, a publishing house that was devoted to regional writers. Pittoni promoted forgotten or unknown talent and also published minor works of celebrated local authors. As a literary site, Trieste has been viewed as inexorably Italian, internationally cosmopolitan, or Mitteleuropean—implying a nostalgic re-evaluation of life under the old Hapsburg Empire. The allure of the past reappears in the works of some 1911

TRIESTE contemporary writers, including the Germanist Claudio Magris, whose best-known book, Danubio (1986), narrates a journey unfolding along the flow of the mythical Danube River. In Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Follow Your Heart, 1994), Susanna Tamaro chronicles a feminine family set in Trieste. While most Triestine authors compose in Italian, there has always been a strong tradition of dialect authors as well. Virgilio Giotti (1885–1957) and Biagio Marin (1891–1985) of Grado are considered two of the best dialect poets, using the local vernacular to depict ordinary lives. Carolus Cergoly (1908–1987), Fabio Doplicher (1938–), and Claudio Grisancich (1939–), among others, have also added to a solid body of literature written in Triestino. Theater remains an important aspect in the city’s rich and diverse cultural life as well: from the annual revival of Hapsburg-era operettas and dramas to the classics of the Italian canon, to an everexpanding repertory of plays in dialect and in Slovene, produced by local organizations, professional groups, and by the city’s Teatro Stabile. Improved relations between Slavs and Italians have also resulted in greater cross-cultural awareness. A growing number of artists composing in their native Slovene have emerged on the literary scene, mirroring the vibrancy of the city’s largest ethnic minority. FIORA A. BASSANESE

Further Reading Ara, Angelo, and Claudio Magris, Trieste: Un’identita` di frontiera, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Ara, Angelo, and Eberhard Kolb, Regioni di frontiera nell’espoca dei nazionalismi: Alsazia e Lorena, Trento e Trieste (1870–1914), Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Benevento, Aurelio, Scrittori giuliani, Milan: Ed. Otto/ Novecento, 1992. Cary, Joseph, A Ghost in Trieste, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Cecovini, Manlio et alia (editors), Scrittori triestini del Novecento, Vol. 1, Trieste: LINT, 1968; 2nd ed., 1991. Cecovini, Manlio, et alia (editors), Scrittori triestini del Novecento, Vol. 2, Trieste: LINT, 1997. Dedenaro, Roberto (editor), Poeti triestini contemporanei, Trieste: LINT, 2000. Guagnini, Elvio (editor), Ventisette racconti, Trieste: La Biblioteca del Piccolo, 2004. Intellettuali di frontiera, Florence: Gabinetto Viesseux, 1983. Maier, Bruno, Saggi sulla letteratura triestina del Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1972. Pellegrini, Ernestina, La Trieste di carta: Aspetti della letteratura triestina del Novecento, Bergamo: P. Lubrina, 1987. Pizzi, Katia, A City in Search of an Author: The Literary Identity of Trieste, London-New York: Continuum/ Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Slataper, Scipio, ‘‘Trieste non ha tradizioni di cultura,’’ in Scritti politici, edited by Giani Stuparich, Milan: Mondadori, 1954. Spirito, Pietro, Trieste: Paesaggi della nuova narrativa, Florence-Trieste: Stazione di Posta/LINT, 1997. Weininger, Otto, Geschlecht und Charakter, Wien-Leipzig: Braumuller, 1903.

TRILUSSA (CARLO ALBERTO SALUSTRI) (1871–1950) Along with Giuseppe Gioachino Belli and Cesare Pascarella, Trilussa completes the grand triad of Roman poets. Nevertheless, leaving aside the hierarchy of values, his work is sharply distinguished from that of the other two: Belli’s Sonetti (Sonnets) are a solitary monument to the unlearned and poor people of the pontifical state; the short poems of Pascarella are a rhapsody to the common man who is evolving because he has been nourished by patriotic ideals; the sketches and fables of Carlo Alberto Salustri, who makes his debut at 16 under the 1912

pseudonym-anagram ‘‘Trilussa,’’ are an ironic representation of the petit bourgeoisie (which was born in the young capital of a united Italy). But formulas never correspond to the complexity of artistic phenomena, and not a few prejudices have come to cluster around Trilussa. In the first place it must be noted that, in the course of his long life, he passed through and commented on approximately 50 years of Roman and Italian history, from the belle e´poque to WWI, from Fascism to WWI; it is therefore untrue that he was only the voice of the

TRILUSSA (CARLO ALBERTO SALUSTRI) Umbertian Italy. Next we must consider criticism’s reluctance to confront his characteristics as an unorthodox poet, who developed within the school of humorous journalism and of the cabaret, and became popular thanks to his gifts as a fine dicitore (refined speaker) and to the character parts he wrote for comic actors. Finally, it is difficult, if not impossible, to trace the evolution of Trilussa’s poetry because the author continually revised his texts in their passage from magazine to book, and then from reissue to reissue of the same books, until the definitive arrangement in one volume divided into 12 books. This volume appears posthumously, in 1951, with the comprehensive title Le poesie (Poems): a total of 704 compositions, from which he excluded numerous verses from his youth and from his maturity; the theatrical parts; the journalistic prose pieces; and the entire collection Stelle de Roma (The Stars of Rome, 1889), a series of madrigals dedicated to the most beautiful aristocratic and bourgeois girls in the city. In order to grasp the themes of Trilussa’s work we must therefore thread our way through the extensive re-elaborations and synchronizations imposed on the approved corpus. The book containing the oldest texts is I sonetti (Sonnets, 1922): The original nucleus is Quaranta sonetti romaneschi (Forty Roman Sonnets, 1895), which gradually climbed to 145 with Altri Sonetti (Other Sonnets, 1898), Caffe` concerto (Cabaret, 1901), Sonetti romaneschi (Roman Sonnets, 1909). These are satirical sketches filled with figures from all the social classes, from the minister to the salesman, from magistrates to shopkeepers, priests, porters and servants, who alternate with characters of the demimonde: chanteuses, fortunetellers, pimps and procuresses, prostitutes, canvassers, usurers, hooligans. The results are small portraits of a city initiated into its role as capital by shifting political alliances, the corruption of the parties, and scandals. There is therefore an implicit denunciation of aspects of the Risorgimento, a denunciation that refers us to literary tradition expressed by Scapigliatura, the iambic verses of Giosue Carducci, and realism. Trilussa obtains his most original results when he depicts the miseries of a weary, foolish, or petty humanity that is entertained by the spectacles of the cabaret and the illusionistic shows that will afterwards become the amusement park. Also significant is the section ‘‘Dialetto borghese’’ (Bourgeois Dialect) that—aside from mocking whoever strives to speak civilly—fixes the Trilussian linguistic constant: a dialect that is, precisely, gentrified, and rather close to Italian.

In 1901, with the collection Favole romanesche (Roman Fables), Trilussa turns to the form of the Aesopian fable with talking animals. Even in this arena, his production proceeds by accumulation: the 34 texts of 1901 rise to 75 in the final edition of 1922, entitled Le favole (Fables). The poet works in an ancient genre, which, from Aesop to Phaedrus, passed through Jean de La Fontaine and the Italian fabulists of the eighteenth century; his project of renewal is already declared in the title of the two internal sections: ‘‘Favole rimodernate’’ (Modernized Fables) and ‘‘Favole moderne’’ (Modern Fables). The innovation consists in the zoo-epic disguise of human types and behaviors represented in the Sonetti: The vices, weaknesses, and hypocrisies are the same, but the ‘‘moral’’ now transcends the contingent situation because the fable’s frame and lesson are atemporal. Trilussa also introduced new solutions and intonations into the genre: He enriched the usual bestiary with insects and small animals (fleas, louses, cockroaches, and beetles), which are better suited to symbolize the intrigues and subterfuges of the petit bourgeoisie. He playfully inverted the parts that conventions have assigned to lions, tigers, foxes, wolves, lambs, dogs, and cats. Above all, he experiments masterfully with a wide variety of meters, alternating monostrophic endecasyllabic and septasyllabic, or strictly octosyllabic compositions with other scansions in quatrains and sestine, in a book that plays with rhymes, assonances, and enjambments. In his successive collections, sketches and fables alternate: from Nove poesie (Nine Poems, 1909 and 1922) to Le storie (Stories, 1913 and 1922), Ommini e bestie (Men and Beasts, 1914 and 1923), Lupi e agnelli (Wolves and Lambs, 1919 and 1922), Le cose (Things, 1922), La gente (People, 1927), Libro N. 9 (Book No. 9, 1929), Giove e le bestie (Zeus and the Beasts, 1932), Libro muto (Silent Book, 1935). In the course of this long development, the realistic sketch and the modernized fable lose their original connotations and contaminate one another, descending into the thematics and poetics of modernity. The fables are relieved of the sententious moral, colored with fairytale-like tones that brush up against symbolism, as in ‘‘La serenata de le ranocchie’’ (The Frogs’ Serenade). Or, with a further symbolist undercurrent, the fables substitute ‘‘talking things’’ for talking animals, as in ‘‘Bolla de sapone’’ (A Soap Bubble) and ‘‘Cortile’’ (A Courtyard). L’orco innammorato (The Ogre in Love), Er libbro der mago (The Wizard’s Book), and Er nano Orme` (Orme` the Dwarf) are explicitly magical, with ogres, 1913

TRILUSSA (CARLO ALBERTO SALUSTRI) wizards, witches, fairies, dwarfs, and sprites. Analogously, realistic pictures tend to be arranged in poetic sequences: The seven sonnets of Lisa e Mollica (Lisa and Mollica) are poems in miniature, as are the six of Paesetto (The Small Village) and the three of Sogno bello (A Beautiful Dream), with dramatized stories that evoke Pascoli and Salvatore Di Giacomo. In contrast with this narrative tension, Trilussa also practices the ‘‘brief forms’’ of the epigram and the aphorism, which have the lightning-like speed of strip cartoons, and are congenial to his attitudes as a vignettist. Trilussa’s authentic temperament nevertheless remained that of a satirist who over time assimilated Luigi Pirandello’s theory of humor: a humor that uncovers the paradoxical and ridiculous aspects of life by seeing its painful implications. This is the source of the many pathetic characters who do not resign themselves to the decay of old age in ‘‘La risata de la duchessa’’ (The Duchess’ Laughter) and ‘‘La toletta de la marchesa’’ (The Marchesa’s Toilette); the madmen who with artifices give rise to their own sufferings in ‘‘Er matto’’ (The Madman) and ‘‘Er professore de filosofia’’ (The Philosophy Professor); the leitmotif of faded or betrayed loves in ‘‘Ricordi d’un como`’’ (Memories of a Chest of Drawers) and ‘‘Momenti scemi’’ (Silly Moments), with cadences that were modeled after Guido Gozzano. His attitude in his encounters with politics must be referred to the poet’s radical skepticism. It is true that he subjected every party and ideology to ridicule, and therefore attracted the charge of qualunquismo or political indifference; but it is equally true that he never renounced his faith in freedom. From this faith arose his satire of the Fascist regime, often dissimulated for reasons of censorship, sometimes declared explicitly, as in ‘‘L’editto’’ (The Edict) and ‘‘Er grillo zoppo’’ (The Lame Cricket), and also in his staking a position against the racial laws, as in ‘‘Questione de razza’’ (A Race Matter). But on the artistic level we recognize in particular that from the oppression of dictatorship there developed a new Trilussian poetry, which draws inspiration from a tragic historical moment in order to project it in images with a strong expressive charge: It is the poetry of ‘‘suspicion’’ and of ‘‘silence,’’ which accounts for two small masterpieces: ‘‘Mania de persecuzzione’’ (Persecution Mania) and ‘‘Caffe` del Progresso’’ (The Progress Cafe`). Trilussa was a popular poet until his death, in Italy and abroad (his poems were translated into all the European languages). His fame began to fade 1914

in the 1950s, when the grandness of Belli was rediscovered (an inappropriate and crushing comparison), and when poetry in dialect first took the road of neorealism, and then of the experimentalism of the new avant-gardes. Today criticism is turning toward a balanced picture of his personality within the limits of an epoch and a taste to which he has made a contribution that cannot be ignored.

Biography Born in Rome, 26 October 1871, to Vincenzo, a waiter at Albano Laziale, and a Bolognese seamstress, Carlotta Poldi. At the age of three he is orphaned; the godfather, the Marquis Ermenegildo Del Cinque, assumes his care. Enrolled in the Scuole Christiane, he interrupts his studies in 1886, and in the following year makes his debut with a sonnet in the dialectal periodical Rugantino, adopting the pseudonym of ‘‘Trilussa’’; lives predominantly through journalistic projects, and often puts himself into debt with moneylenders; writes theatrical parts for comic actors of the cabaret or of the variety show (Nicola Maldacea, Ettore Petrolini, Dina Galli). He becomes popular as the fine dicitore of his poems and, in this role, performs tourne´es in Italy and abroad, often appearing together with the Bolognese Alfredo Fregoli; receives a sympathetic reception in Parisian cultural circles, 1904; is in Egypt, with a film troupe, 1914; goes to Argentina with a company of lyrical singers, 1924. By 1921, he has already signed an exclusive contract with the editor Arnoldo Mondatori, who will remain his friend until his final days. His Roman house, decorated bizarrely with embalmed animals and exotic objects, becomes a gathering spot for writers, journalists, actors, and actresses. His old age is tormented by economic woes and pulmonary emphysema; appointed senator for life for literary merits, 1 December 1951; but 20 days later, died in Rome, on 21 December. LUCIO FELICI Selected Works Collections Le poesie, edited by Pietro Pancrazi, Milan: Mondadori, 1951. Tutte le poesie, critical edition by Claudio Costa and Lucio Felici, Milan: Mondadori, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Favole romanesche,’’ 1901. ‘‘Nove poesie,’’ 1908; 1922.

GIAN GIORGIO TRISSINO ‘‘Sonetti romaneschi,’’ 1909; as Roman Satirical Poems, translated by Grant Showerman, 1945. ‘‘Le storie,’’ 1913; 1922; as Tales of Trilussa, translated by John DuVal, 1990. ‘‘Ommini e bestie,’’ 1914; 1923. ‘‘Lupi e agnelli,’’ 1919; 1922. ‘‘Le favole,’’ 1922. ‘‘Le cose,’’ 1922. ‘‘I sonetti,’’ 1922. ‘‘La gente,’’ 1927. ‘‘Libro N. 9,’’ 1929. ‘‘Giove e le bestie,’’ 1932. ‘‘Libro muto,’’ 1935. ‘‘Acqua e vino,’’ 1944.

Prose Maria Tegami intima, 1903. Picchiabbo` ossia La moje der ciambellano, 1927. Le prose del ‘‘Rugantino’’ e del ‘‘Don Chisciotte’’ e altre prose, edited by Anne-Christine Faitrop, Porta, 2 vols., 1992.

Further Readings Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, ‘‘Trilussa. Roma in pantofole,’’ in La vita e il libro, Turin: Bocca, 1910. D’Amico, Silvio, Trilussa, Rome: Formı`ggini, 1925.

D’Amico Silvio, ‘‘Trilussa,’’ in Bocca della verita`, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1943; rpt. Rome: Bulzoni, 1991. Dell’Arco, Mario, Lunga vita di Trilussa, Rome: Bardi, 1951. Faitrop, Anne-Christine, Trilussa: Doppio volto di un uomo e di un’opera, Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1977. Falqui, Enrico, ‘‘Trilussiana,’’ in Novecento letterario, vol. 9, Florence: Vallecchi, 1968. Felici, Lucio (editor), Studi trilussiani, Atti del Convegno (Rome 15–17 May 1973), Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1977. Jannattoni, Livio, Roma fine ottocento: Trilussa dal madrigale alla favola (1871–1901), Rome: Newton Compton, 1979. Mariani, Gaetano, Trilussa: Storia di un poeta, Rome: Bonacci, 1974. Orioli, Giovanni, ‘‘Trilussa,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I contemporanei, vol. 1, Milan: Marzorati, 1963. Pancrazi, Pietro, ‘‘Il Libro N. 9 di Trilussa,’’ in Scrittori d’oggi, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1946. Pancrazi, Pietro, ‘‘Favole e poesie di Trilussa,’’ in Scrittori d’oggi, vol. 6, Bari: Laterza, 1953. Paratore, Ettore, ‘‘Trilussa,’’ in Moderni e contemporanei, Florence: Olschki, 1975. Trompeo, Pietro Paolo, ‘‘Trilussa e Pascoli,’’ in Il lettore vagabondo, Rome: Tumminelli, 1942. Trompeo, Pietro Paolo, ‘‘Trilussa,’’ in L’azzurro di Chartres e altri capricci, Caltanissetta-Rome: Sciascia, 1958.

GIAN GIORGIO TRISSINO (1478–1550) Gian Giorgio Trissino was the most celebrated Vicentine Humanist of the sixteenth century. A poet and philosopher, an expert in the military arts, a diplomat in the service of the Papal Court, and an accomplished architect, Trissino wrote comedies, tragedies such as La Sofonisba (Sophonisba, 1524), and the heroic poem La Italia liberata da’ Gothi (Italy Freed from the Goths, 1547–1548), with which he hoped to rekindle the classical epic. He was a major participant in the debate on the Italian language which, in the first part of the sixteenth century, involved many intellectuals. He favoured the idea of a common language formed from all the regional dialects, not only Tuscan, and argued for a literature in the classic tradition, founded on established literal genres. Historically, Trissino’s critical works on the questione della lingua are more important than his literary production, in which he emulated the Greek and Latin models in order to legitimize the literature in the vernacular with classical examples.

Trissino advocated his literary orientation in the ‘‘four sections’’ of his influential La Poetica (Poetics) written in Rome between 1526 and 1529, and followed by Della poetica la quinta e la sesta divisione (Fifth and Sixth Division of Poetics), published posthumously in 1562. With regards to the questione della lingua, he asked which is the optimal language for writers, the one best able to fulfill the need for aesthetic dignity. This was a subject much debated by the intellectuals of several regions, and the notion of an ‘‘Italian language,’’ replacing the ‘‘Italian vernacular,’’ emerged only in the sixteenth century. If the literary prestige of the Tuscan tongue as a result of the works of Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca and Giovanni Boccaccio was generally acknowledged, non-Tuscans challenged the hegemonic claims of a language that had exhausted its historical role, and proposed more universally recognized literary forms drawn from the culture of other regions. Trissino engaged in a 1915

GIAN GIORGIO TRISSINO complex argument that encompasses broader problems, from the historical genesis of the ‘‘Italian vernacular’’ to its geographical demarcation, from the definition of a normative model to its social extension, from its cultural quality to specific grammatical and orthographical questions. Trissino made his literary debut with the dialogue I ritratti (Portraits, 1524), dedicated to Isabella Gonzaga, which was followed by Epistola de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova (A Letter on the Behavior Appropriate to a Widow, 1524) and Sofonisba, usually considered the first ‘‘regular’’ vernacular tragedy in modern European literature, composed in accordance with Aristotelian precepts and Greek tragedy. The Carthaginian Princess Sofonisba, Massinissa’s bride, poisons herself to avoid being taken back to Rome as a spoil of war. In it, Trissino’s imitations of Sophocles’ Antigone and of Euripides’ Alcesti are evident. He followed the unities of time and action, and established the use of the unrhymed endecasyllables or blank verse; however, these reforms do not serve the dramatic intensity of the events. By the nineteenth century, this tragedy, which was influential outside Italy and had been considered a model, had been dropped from the repertoires. At the same time Trissino participated in the heated debate on grammatical and linguistic questions with the Epistola de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana (A Letter on the Newly Added Characters of the Italian Language, 1524), a letter addressed to Clement VII argued for spelling reforms in Italian orthography by eliminating useless symbols and incorporating certain letters of the Greek alphabet. Many of his suggestions were ignored, but one was accepted: the distinction between U and V. Works on rhetorics and linguistics define the theoretical horizon of Trissino’s classical research. For example, in La Poetica, the technical issues concerning metrics, genre, and versification are scrutinised with profound acumen. Trissino then expanded his thesis into a general argument on language in Il Castellano (The Lord of the Castle, 1529) and other later works. Indeed, his anti-Florentine and anti-Tuscan advocacy of an Italian language based on the common characters of regional dialects derives from a particular reading of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia translated by Trissino in 1529 from a codex (Codex T.) that he owned, a fact that provoked an animated reaction from Tuscan intellectuals. The dilemma ‘‘Italian language or Tuscan language’’ was resolved by Trissino through the logical method of arguing for the Italian nature of Tuscan, as opposed to 1916

Niccolo` Machiavelli who championed the Florentine nature of literary Italian. His premise is that each individual is subordinate to his ‘‘species’’; this, in turn, is subordinate to ‘‘genre.’’ The formula reads: genre=the Italian language, species=Tuscan language, individual=Florentine language. The result is that the genre can dominate the species (Tuscan is Italian), while the reverse (Italian is Tuscan) is unacceptable. Trissino devoted 20 years to the completion of his most ambitious poetic venture, L’Italia liberata da’ Gothi, 27 books in blank verse, in which he tried to create an epic of Homeric proportions that did not depart from Aristotelian rules. The poem is dedicated to Charles V, a champion of the empire, and tells (after the Greek historian Procopius of Caesarea) of the war between the Byzantines (commanded by Belisarius and Narsetes) and the Barbarians, defeated following the capture of their chieftain Vitige. The work stands out more for its erudition than for its poetic qualities: the hendecasyllable (through which Trissino tried to reproduce the heroic pentameter) is monotonous; the story almost a mechanical substitution of a Christian for a Pagan ‘‘fantastic’’ (the Virgin Mary for the goddess Venus). Nonetheless, L’Italia liberata da’ Gothi is important in the tradition of the sixteenth-century epic, although it never enjoyed the success of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the kind of ‘‘irregular’’ poem against which Trissino campaigned. A more experimental approach is notable in Trissino’s Rime (Rhymes, 1529), as if the author felt the need to broaden the horizon of the metrics of the vernacular lyric by drawing upon classical schemes. During the last years of his life, Trissino measured himself with comedy by rewriting in Italian verse Plautus’ Menaechmi as Simillimi (The Look Alikes, 1548). Except for the introduction by the chorus, the work is a faithful rendering of the Latin original, and it may be considered a mere attempt to combine Roman and Greek comedy by means of the experience of the modern. In the epic as in linguistics, Gian Giorgio Trissino remains a prominent representative of the utopic compromise between the ancient and the new through erudition and literary precepts wielded with unusual confidence.

Biography Gian Giorgio Trissino was born in Vicenza on 8 July 1487 in an aristocratic family. In 1506, he

GIAN GIORGIO TRISSINO went to Milan to study Greek at the school of Demetrio da Calcondia. After his return to Vicenza, he was sent in exile in 1509 because he supported the imperialistic party against the Republic of Venice and started working for the Emperor Maximilian, whom he followed to Germany and Lombardy. In 1512, he settled in Ferrara where he studied philosophy under the patronage of Lucrezia Borgia. In 1513, he moved to Florence where he attended the Orti Oricellai. There he met Niccolo Machiavelli. In 1514, he went to Rome where he was involved in important diplomatic missions on behalf of the pope and befriended Pietro Bembo, il Bibbiena, and Giovanni Rucellai. He returned to Vicenza thanks to the intercession of Pope Leo X. The most prestigious Vicentine academy gathered in his villa, and he discovered Andrea Palladio, whom he sponsored in his liberal and humanistic education. He died in Rome on 8 December 1550 and was buried in the Church of Sant’Agata in Suburra. ANDREA BOSELLO Selected Works Collections Tutte le opere, 2 vols., edited by S. Maffei, Verona: Jacopo Vallarsi, 1729. Scritti linguistici, edited by Alberto Castelvecchi, Rome: Salerno, 1986.

Poetry ‘‘Canzone al santissimo Clemente settimo PM,’’ 1524. ‘‘Orazione al Serenissimo Principe di Venezia Andrea Gritti,’’ 1524. ‘‘I ritratti,’’ 1524. ‘‘Encomion ad Maximilianum Caesarem,’’ 1529. ‘‘Rime,’’ 1529. ‘‘La Italia liberata da’ Gothi,’’ 1547–1548. ‘‘Sonetti e serventese inediti,’’ 1875. ‘‘Versi volgari e latini inediti e rari,’’ 1876.

Plays La Sofonisba, 1524; as Sophonisba, translated by Gillian Sharman, 1997. I simillimi, 1548.

Other Epistola de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova, 1524. Epistola de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana, 1524. Alfabeto italiano, 1529. Il Castellano, 1529. Dubbii grammaticali, 1529. Gramatichetta, 1529. La Poetica, 1529. Gramatices introductionis liber primus, 1540. Della poetica la quinta e la sesta divisione, 1562.

Further Reading Daniele, Antonio, ‘‘Sulla ‘Poetica’ di Giovan Giorgio Trissino,’’ in Linguaggi e metri del Cinquecento, Rovito: Marra Editore, 1994. Gallo, Valentina, Da Trissino a Giraldi: miti e topica tragica, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 2005. Gigante, Claudio, Esperienze di filologia cinquecentesca. Salviati, Mazzoni, Trissino, Costo, Il Bargeo, Tasso, Rome: Salerno, 2003. Herrick, Marvin T., Italian Tragedy in the Renaissance, Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1965. Lentini, Giuseppina, ‘‘L’Italia liberata dai Goti’’ di Giangiorgio Trissino. Modelli, fonti storiche, elaborazione artistica, Palermo: Cappuggi, 1950. Lettieri, Michael, and Michael Ukas (editors), Trissino’s Sofonisba and Aretino’s Horatia: Two Italian Renaissance Tragedies, Lewiston: Mellen Press, 1997. Lieber, Maria, ‘‘Giangiorgio Trissino e Martin Lutero: due autori in cerca della lingua nazionale. La sperimentazione lessicale,’’ in Italia ed Europa nella linguistica del Rinascimento, Modena: Panini, 1996. Marpicati, Arturo, ‘‘Un bel cavaliere del Cinquecento. Profilo di Giangiorgio Trissino,’’ in Saggi storico-critici, Fiume: Associazione Nazionale Dante Alighieri, 1921. Mazzocco, Angelo, Linguistic Theories in Dante and the Humanists. Studies of Language and Intellectual History in Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Italy, Leiden: Brill, 1993. Palumbo, Pietro, ‘‘Giangiorgio Trissino,’’ in I minori, Milan: Marzorati, 1961. Pozza, Neri (editor), Convegno di studi su Giangiorgio Trissino, Vicenza: Accademia Olimpica, 1980. Scarpa, Attilio, G. G. Trissino poeta d’amore, Venice: Libreria Emiliana, 1934. Scarpa, Attilio, Giangiorgio Trissino nel IV centenario della morte, Vicenza: Rumor, 1950. Segre, Cesare, ‘‘La polemica della lingua dal Bembo al Trissino,’’ in Celebri polemiche letterarie, Brescia: La Scuola, 1957.

1917

TULLIA D’ARAGONA

TRIUMPHS See I Trionfi (Work by Giovanni Testori)

ALBERICA TRIVULZIO See Cristina di Belgioioso

THE TRUCE See La Tregua (Work by Primo Levi)

TULLIA D’ARAGONA (CA. 1510–1556) Known as the academician’s courtesan, Tullia d’Aragona’s early career garners her a reputation for brilliance as well as charm. In Rome, a city with a marked lack of cultured and courtly women, the courtesan caste provides a superior level of elegance, worldly sophistication, good conversation, fashionable entertainment, and sexual availability. Graceful, clever, and poised, the well-educated d’Aragona also offers her admirers and friends stimulating intellectual discussions; in turn, her contemporaries compare her favorably to such great and learned ladies as Vittoria Colonna and 1918

Isabella d’Este. As a second-generation Roman cortigiana onesta (honest or honored courtesan), Tullia d’Aragona is one of the top-ranking professionals of her day, moving in the highest social circles. The courtesan’s early reputation continues to serve her well as she ages, gaining her entree into academies, intellectual salons, and literary circles throughout Italy. Part of her success is determined by her accomplishments as a writer. Until 1547, d’Aragona appears to have treated her literary talent as a social grace and part of her private intellectual pursuits. That year, however, the Medici

TULLIA D’ARAGONA government issues an edict requiring prostitutes of all categories to don a yellow veil in public, and d’Aragona’s name appears on the list, although she had only recently moved to Florence. Having obtained an exemption from Duke Cosimo de’ Medici because of her poetry, the courtesan sets out to give public proof of her literary merits: A collection of poetry and a Neoplatonic dialogue are published, thanks to two influential lovers and men of letters, Girolamo Muzio and Benedetto Varchi. The Rime (Poems, 1547) and the Dialogo della infinita` d’amore (Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, 1547) validate her status as an author and enhance her shaky public image. D’Aragona’s verse is patterned on the culturally endorsed Bembian-Petrarchan model. Consisting primarily of imitative epistolary sonnets, her poems are often addressed to powerful men: aristocrats, lovers, mentors, and fellow poets. Celebratory in tone, they are unabashedly laudatory, typical of Renaissance epistolary verse. The organization of her Rime is, however, more creative. This text is distinguished by the presence of panegyrics in honor of Tullia d’Aragona but penned by several poets and admirers. Printed side by side on facing pages, paired sonnets form the bulk of the Rime, as male and female voices alternate. Just as d’Aragona sings the praises of her subjects, her admirers reciprocate by praising her. The resulting effect is a dual representation of the author as poet and as literary subject. As poet, d’Aragona projects a decorous, suitable image in the sanctioned discourse of Petrarchism, in which she communicates with her prevalently male addressees. Following the dictates of polite society, her polished and codified verse projects a modest, humble, and suitably flirtatious feminine persona. By adopting the conventional attitude of humility, the poet achieves validation by allowing the merits of her literary subjects to elevate her through association with virtue and attainment. As subject, she reaches literary stardom without endangering her respectable femininity. Thus, for d’Aragona, imitation becomes an instrument of self-affirmation. In the Rime, she appropriates the canon to construct a complimentary dual identity that is concurrently inoffensive and meritorious, hiding its subversive manipulation of male discourse beneath its rhetorical dress. A similar strategy is used in the Dialogo della infinita` d’amore. By composing a trattato d’amore (treatise on love), one of the most popular Renaissance genres, d’Aragona again places herself in the dual role of author and subject. The sole woman of

her generation to have composed a treatise on love, she demonstrates proficiency in the philosophical and lyric discourse of her time, ably integrating Plato, Aristotle, Marsilio Ficino, Leone Ebreo, Francesco Petrarca, and Pietro Bembo, among others. Through her portrayal of the character ‘‘Tullia,’’ the author also constructs another idealized self-portrait. Taking place in d’Aragona’s Florentine salon, the Dialogo della infinita` d’amore depicts a discussion on the nature and duration of love. Besides the writer’s alter ego, the other prominent interlocutor is Benedetto Varchi, a famous scholar, historian and writer. The resolution of the main question is eventually pronounced by Tullia on the basis of experience as well as reason and authority. In contrast to Varchi’s somewhat pompous wisdom, the character Tullia provides sophistication, even playfulness. It is a lively game of wits, spiced with banter, repartee, retort, humor, and double entendre, all delivered in the most proper and elegant of courtly language. For the most part, Tullia the character emerges the victor from these skirmishes, displaying more wit, common sense, and humor than her adversary. Varchi’s superiority as mentor and man is met by Tullia’s brilliance and charm, thereby challenging existing gender norms and redefining the discourse of love according to the courtesan’s own terms. D’Aragona’s dialogue offers a unique vision of honest love as the lovers’ desired but unattainable union of body and soul, open equally to both sexes. Viewing sensual passion as natural, she rejects the total spiritualization of love often proposed in Renaissance philosophy. In an era that prized decorum and conventions, d’Aragona’s fictional self-portrayal as a sanitized Petrarchan poet or a rational thinker demonstrates the transformative role of literature in masking a courtesan’s reality. D’Aragona shares her culture’s profoundly ingrained belief in the power of art, particularly poetry, to move and influence audiences. The import and potency of literature is a theme she revisits in the dedication of her final work, an epic romance titled Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino (Meschino, Otherwise Known as Guerrino), published posthumously in 1560. This is not an original book but the verse translation of a Spanish prose romance. The story of Il Meschino’s odyssey in search of his true parentage is filled with fantastic creatures, battles between Christians and Moslems, love, betrayals, and adventures told in a manner generally suitable for the most innocent readers, with a didactic, proChristian subtext. D’Aragona’s verse epic is a 1919

TULLIA D’ARAGONA modest literary accomplishment. However, in the dedicatory letter addressed to her readers, the courtesan turns moralist, judging literature on both its content and language. Focusing her critique on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, she takes to task the medieval work as a model for immorality and pornography, regrettably imitated by numerous contemporary writers including Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo, Ludovico Ariosto, and Pietro Aretino. In her final statement on writing, d’Aragona defines an author’s moral responsibility to society, having internalized the assumption that literature does and will influence behavior and thought. For Tullia d’Aragona, writing is a means to legitimacy; through her texts, she can construct a permanent public identity. The persona d’Aragona projects in all her existing works is a socially acceptable figure, gifted with intelligence, dignity, and talent.

Biography Born in Rome circa 1510, daughter of famed courtesan Giulia Campana. Received humanistic education and was celebrated for her learning from childhood. While working in Rome, was mistress of great Florentine banker Filippo Strozzi (1531) and established a refined literary salon. In the 1530s and 1540s, resided in several Northern Italian cities including Venice, Siena, Florence, and Ferrara. A handful of sonnets appeared in the published papers of the Roman Accademia degli Umidi in 1541. In 1542, appeared as an interlocutor in Sperone Speroni’s published Neoplatonic dialogue, Dialogo d’amore, in which she is described as the lover of poet Bernardo Tasso. In 1543, married one Silvestro Guicciardini in Siena, possibly to avoid prosecution as a courtesan. In 1547, published her own philosophical treatise, a dialogue on the infinity of love, and her collected verse, the Rime, partially in response to Florentine edicts against prostitutes. Her salon in Florence, known as the Academy, was frequented by members of the ruling family and notable intellectuals. In her final years, returned to Rome where she died in relative obscurity on March 14, 1556, declaring Celio, a young but not otherwise identified son, her sole heir. FIORA A. BASSANESE See also: Petrarchism

1920

Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Rime della Signora Tullia d’Aragona; e di diversi a lei,’’ 1547; revised editions 1549 and 1560. ‘‘Le Rime di Tullia Di Aragona. Cortigiana del Secolo XVI,’’ edited by Enrico Celani.

Treatise Dialogo della Signora Tullia d’Aragona della infinita` di amore, 1547; as Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry, 1997.

Translation Il Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino, 1560.

Further Reading Biagi, Guido, Un’etera romana. Tullia d’Aragona, Florence: Paggi, 1897. Casagrande di Villaviera, Rita, Le cortigiane italiane nel Cinquecento, Milan: Longanesi, 1968. Jones, Ann Rosalind, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe. 1540–1620, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Jones, Ann Rosalind, ‘‘Bad Press, Modern Editors versus Early Modern Women Poets (Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, Veronica Franco),’’ in Strong Voices, Weak History. Early Women Writers and Canons in England, France, and Italy, edited by Pamela Joseph Benson and Victoria Kirkham, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Lawner, Lynne, Lives of the Courtesans, New York: Rizzoli, 1987. Masson, Georgina, Courtesans of the Italian Renaissance, London: Secker and Warburg, 1975; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Portigliotti, Giuseppe, Some Fascinating Women of the Renaissance, translated by Bernard Miall, New York: Brentano’s, 1929. Robin, Diane, ‘‘Courtesans, Celebrity, and Print Culture in Renaissance Venice: Tullia d’Aragona, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Franco,’’ in Italian Women in the City: Essays, edited by Janet Levarie Smarr and Daria Valentini, Madison NJ and London: Farleigh Dickinson University Press/Associated University Press, 2003. Russell, Rinaldina, ‘‘Tullia d’Aragona,’’ in Italian Women Writers. A Bio-bibliographical Sourcebook, edited by Rinaldina Russell, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994. Russell, Rinaldina, Introduction to Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, edited and translated by Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry, University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1997. Smarr, Janet Levarie, ‘‘Dialogue and Social Conversation: Tullia d’Aragona and Catherine des Roches,’’ in Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.

TURIN

TURIN The literary image of Turin is linked to the Savoy court, and its importance increased in the sixteenth century, when it became a meeting place for scholars and artists. Since the foundation of the dynasty with Humbert Biancamano (1032) until the fifteenth century, the growth of the state was linked to wars, leaving little room for literature, although the Study of Turin, the university, was founded as early as 1404. Amadeus VIII, who became pope with the name of Felix V in 1440, is well-known for the illuminated codices in his library. The beginning of Turin as a true court and capital city of the Savoy state, however, occurred under Emanuel Philibert, in 1563, after the peace of CateauCambre´sis. His court was frequented by intellectuals such as Bernardo Tasso, who presented the sovereign with a copy of his Amadigi (1560), and his son Torquato, who stayed there from 1578 and 1579 and dedicated the 1581 edition of his Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) to Charles Emanuel I of Savoy. To him were dedicated also De regia sapientia (Royal Wisdom, 1583) and Della ragion di stato (The Reason of State, 1589) by Giovanni Botero (1544–1617). In 1608, Giovanbattista Marino wrote his poetical Ritratto del Serenissimo don Carlo Emanuello duca di Savoia (Portrait of the Most Serene Carlo Emanuel Duke of Savoy). A writer himself, the ruler wrote in several languages and collected in his De institutione principis a testament on the rules of a good government, as an answer to Niccolo´ Machiavelli’s Il Principe (The Prince, 1532). Chivalric literature bloomed with Tancredi principe (Prince Tancredi, 1587) by Federico Asinari from Camerano (1527– 1575) and Amedeide (ca. 1584) by Agostino Bucci (1531–1592). In 1585, Battista Guarini represented his masterpiece Il Pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd), published in 1590. In 1570, the galleys of Savoy took part in the battle of Lepanto, and the friendly relationship of the duke with Charles Borromeo brought to Turin the relic of the holy Shroud in 1578. A touchstone for the cultural growth of the city was Marguerite of Valois, daughter of Francis I, brought up at the court of Navarre by another great Marguerite, her aunt, a queen and an illustrious scholar.

In 1619, Victor Amadeus married Christina of Bourbon, daughter of Henry IV and sister of Louis XIII. These were also the years of the plague, brought to Turin by French soldiers, and which spread, together with the famine, throughout the state for over five years until it finally waned in 1636. This is testified by the Diario del contagio del Piemonte nelli anni 1630–1631 e del Congresso allora tenuto in Cherasco per la pace generale d’Europa (A Diary of the Infection in Piedmont in the Years 1630–1631 and of the Congress Then Held in Cherasco for a General Peace in Europe) by the Carmelite friar Francesco Voersio from Cherasco and the Trattato della peste et pestifero contagio di Torino (A Treaty on the Plague and on the Plague Infection in Turin, 1631) by the physician Giovanni Francesco Fiocchetto. The situation did not prevent the duchess Christina from organizing a cultural life that had its pivot in the parties held by the ruling family, with dances, games, fireworks, and plays in which famous artists participated. One of such plays was L’inavertito (The Unnoticed, 1629) by Nicolo´ Barbieri (1576–1641), an important actor of the Commedia dell’Arte, educated at the court of Henry IV and Louis XIII and later imitated by the greatest European playwrights, including Molie`re, Quinault, Dryden, Goldoni, and Centlivre. These are also the years of Emanuele Tesauro, the most important exponent of Baroque taste with his Cannocchiale aristotelico (The Aristotelian Telescope, 1654) and of the Theatrum Sabaudiae (The Theater of Savoy, 1682), a collection of images illustrating the sites of the kingdom. Printed in Amsterdam, this was in fact a grand project addressed to European courts aiming at demonstrating the political and cultural growth of the state of Savoy. In the eighteenth century the lively cultural life of the court of Turin continued with Filippo Juvarra (1678–1736), present in the city since 1714 and designated by Victor Amadeus II as ‘‘the first architect of the king.’’ Juvarra had already had some stage experiences in Rome, where he had been entrusted with organizing increasingly more bewildering feasts using the technique of ephemeral architecture (fake fac¸ades, stage machines, and 1921

TURIN so on). Yet the eighteenth century in Turin was also characterized by the presence of Enlightenment thinkers who started fighting their battle against the obscurantism at the Accademia Sampaolina. This group of intellectuals met in the house of Count Emanuele Bava di San Paolo (1737–1829), and included Gianfrancesco Galeani Napione (1748–1830), author of the treatise Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana (On the Use and Merits of the Italian Language, 1791), Ottavio Falletti di Barolo (1753–1828), Tommaso Valperga di Caluso (1737–1815), Prospero Balbo (1762–1837), and Vittorio Alfieri (1749–1803). Giuseppe Baretti brought new ideas into the culture of the realm, also thanks to his frequent travels abroad (he died in London in 1789). In 1763, he founded the magazine La frusta letteraria and with his critical essays such as Discours sur Shakespeare et sur Monsieur de Voltaire (Discourse on Shakespeare and on Voltaire, 1777) engaged in an intellectual debate at a European level. Alfieri, born in Asti but educated in Turin, portrayed the culture and slang of the city in his Vita scritta da esso (The Life of Vittorio Alfieri Written by Himself, 1806). The nineteenth century starts out with political and literary debates, which take place in the Accademia Concordi, among Luigi Ornato (1787–1842), Luigi Provana del Sabbione (1786–1856), Cesare Balbo (1789–1853), and Carlo Vidua (1785–1830). The principal subject matters were the independence of Italy, the Italianness of Piedmont, and the relationship between Christianity and progress, later resumed again by Vincenzo Gioberti (1801– 1852). All these writers were marked by the historical process that contributed to the foundation of the Italian nation: Massimo D’Azeglio (1798–1866) with I miei ricordi (My Memories, 1867), Angelo Brofferio (1802–1866) with his Canzoni piemontesi (Piedmont Songs, 1839), Vittorio Bersezio (1828– 1900) with Le miserie ‘d monssu´ Travet (Miseries of Mr. Travet, 1863), and Giuseppe Giacosa with Tristi amori (Sad Loves, 1888) and Come le foglie (Like Leaves, 1894). A Scapigliatura group was formed in Piedmont, following the example of the scapigliati in Milan, around the Dante Alighieri Society (1860–1870) and the journals Il velocipede (1869–1870) and Serate italiane (1874–1878). The group included Giovanni Faldella (1846–1928), Achille Giovanni Cagna (1847–1931), Roberto Sacchetti (1847–1881), Giovanni Camerana (1845– 1905), and Edoardo Calandra (1852–1911), author of the novel La bufera ( The Storm, 1899). Such an atmosphere also moved Arturo Graf, Enrico Thovez, Carolina Invernizio, and Emilio Salgari. The 1922

most successful post-Risorgimento writer from Turin, however, was Edmondo De Amicis, whose Cuore (Heart: A Schoolboy’s Journal, 1886), translated into many languages, was constructed through mixed narrative techniques, and offered the Italian people a common culture and system of values in the name of the nation. In the first half of the twentieth century, poetry plays a central role in the culture of the city with Guido Gozzano (1883–1916), who, overcoming the French and Belgian symbolist models of Crepuscolarismo carried out a subtle parody of turn-of-the-century society in a series of experiments appreciated even by the Futurists. The poem collections La via del rifugio (Road to the Shelter, 1907) and I colloqui (Conversations, 1911) as well as his stories and his travel book about India, Verso la cuna del mondo (Toward the Cradle of the World, 1917) represent a novelty in the stale panorama of Turin’s culture at the time. Other writers lingered more on postunity melancholy, regretting the capital city that was ‘‘stolen’’ from Turin: Examples of this literature of nostalgic regret include the poets Giulio Gianelli (1879–1914) and Carlo Vallini (1885–1920), a friend of Gozzano and of Amalia Guglielminetti; Nino Oxilia (1888–1917), author with Sandro Camasio of the successful play Addio, giovinezza! (Farewell, Youth, 1911); Salvator Gotta (1887–1980), the author of a series of Risorgimento novels; and the novelist Carola Prosperi (1883–1981). Among the masters of this and the next generation of writers from Turin were Augusto Monti, the teacher of Massimo Mila, Giulio Einaudi, and Cesare Pavese at the secondary school ‘‘D’Azeglio.’’ Also worth noting are the linguistic and philological studies of Luigi Foscolo Benedetto, Benvenuto Terracini, and Carlo Dionisotti. Turin was an important city for the so-called ‘‘second Futurism.’’ Preceded by Mario Morasso’s pamphlet, La nuova arma (la macchina) (The New Weapon [The Machine], 1905), Turin Futurism included Tullio Alpinolo Bracci (1891–1951), Ugo Pozzo (1900–1981), Luigi Enrico Colombo (1904–1936), who wrote under the pen name of Fillı`a, Mino Rosso (1904–1963), Nicolay Diulgheroff (1901–1982), and Pippo Oriani (1909–1972). Fillı`a was the most important exponent of the new architecture, inspired by Antonio Sant’Elia, who died in the war in 1916, and followed the flow of international modernism, drawing inspiration from Gropius and Le Corbusier. When Fillı`a died in 1936, the group dissolved. The painter Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), from Turin but more active in Rome, marked in an authoritative way the

TURIN transition from the first to the second Futurism, and his native city would pay him posthumous homage with the exhibition Futur-Balla in 1974. The literary life of Turin was characterized by a strong anti-Fascist strain before the war, and by the experiences of the Resistance and reconstruction afterward. A central role was played by the publishers Piero Gobetti and Giulio Einaudi. Civil and political committed literature, with Gobetti and Antonio Gramsci, and later, neorealism, endowed Turin with a cultural life both rich and original as it had never been in the past. After nearly 40 years of Futurism (of which its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had foreseen the involution), neorealism offered a poetics of expressive research, in which various writers produced works that differed both in style and subject but remained linked by a common will to approach reality in a way that diverged from the supposed unbiased gaze of the ‘‘realisms’’ that had come before them. This new approach is exemplified by works such as Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ stopped at Eboli, 1945) and Le parole sono pietre (Words Are Stones, 1955) by Carlo Levi, Dialoghi con Leuco´ (Dialogues with Leuco´, 1947) and La luna e i falo´ (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950) by Cesare Pavese. A most reserved figure, Primo Levi is considered today one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. In his writing, the narration of the experience of the Nazi concentration camps assumes both epical and low tones, thus creating an antirhetorical language in which chemistry and literature meet with very successful expressive results. In the 1960s and 1970s, Turin saw a proliferation of various forms of avant-garde writing distributed through journals such as Il Menabo´ and Antipiugiu`, as well as less conventional means such as art galleries for visual poetry and, following the lesson of the Futurists, from which the new avant-garde took many ideas, theaters for poetry readings and happenings. Important works of this period include Paolo Volponi’s novels on the human condition confronted by the factory and modern technology such as Memoriale (My Troubles Began, 1962) and La macchina mondiale (The Worldwide Machine, 1965). Volponi was appointed director of the social services at the Olivetti main office in Ivrea in 1956. Among others, Lalla Romano’s La penombra che abbiamo attraversato (The Penumbra, 1959), Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico famigliare (Family Sayings,

1963), Carlo Fruttero and Franco Lucentini’s La donna della domenica (The Sunday Woman, 1972) and Nico Orengo’s Le rose di Evita (Evita’s Roses, 1990). Among the successful authors of the latest literary generation, the best-known figures are Alessandro Baricco, with works such as Castelli di rabbia (Anger Castles, 1991) and Oceano mare (Ocean sea, 1993) and director of the ‘‘Holden’’ school of creative writing; Laura Mancinelli, author of novels set in the Middle Ages such as I dodici abati di Challant (The Twelve Abbots of Challant, 1981), and Andrea Canobbio. An important role in the cultural life of the city is played by the annual book fair and by the Museo Nazionale del Cinema, built inside Turin’s most recognizable icon: the Mole Antonelliana. GIUSEPPINA BALDISSONE Further Reading Abrate, Mario, Torino citta` viva: da capitale a metropoli, 1880–1980, Turin: Centro studi piemontesi, 1980. Bergami, Giancarlo, Da Graf a Gobetti: cinquant’anni di cultura militante a Torino (1876–1925), Turin: Centro studi piemontesi, 1980. Centini, Massimo (editor), La grande enciclopedia di Torino, Rome: Newton Compton, 2003. Clivio, Gianrenzo P., Profilo di storia della letteratura in piemontese, Turin: Centro studi piemontesi, 2002. Coldulmer, Piera, Le trasformazioni di Torino: storia e cronaca di quattro secoli, 1500–1911, Turin: Codella, 1981. D’Orsi, Angelo, La cultura a Torino tra le due guerre, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Gianazzo di Pamparato, Francesco, Famiglie e palazzi: dalle campagne piemontesi a Torino capitale barocca, Turin: Gribaudo Paravia, 1997. Guglielmo, Marcella (editor), Storia di Torino, storia di citta`. Bologna: Il mulino, 2004. Masoero, Ada, Renato Miracco and Francesco Poli (editors), L’estetica della macchina: da Balla al futurismo torinese, Milan: Mazzotta, 2004. Merlo, Gabriella et al., Gli artisti a Torino dai censimenti 1705–1806, Turin: Paravia, 1996. Pollack, Martha D., Turin, 1564–1680: Urban Design, Military Culture, and the Creation of the Absolutist Capital, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Possi, Emilio (editor), Torino, i luoghi della musica, Turin: D. Piazza, 1986. Prosio, Pier Massimo, Guida letteraria di Torino, Turin: Centro studi piemontesi, 1988. Prosio, Pier Massimo, Stendhal e altri viaggiatori a Torino: il viaggio letterario, Moncalieri (Turin): Centro interuniversitario di ricerche sul viaggio in Italia, 2004.

1923

DAVID MARIA TUROLDO

DAVID MARIA TUROLDO (1916–1992) David Maria Turoldo belongs to the generation of young poets who, in the late 1930s, were influenced by Hermeticism as well as by the lessons of such masters as Giovanni Pascoli, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Eugenio Montale. However, he was not only a poet: As a prominent figure in the Italian intellectual scene for nearly half a century, he produced a remarkable body of work including plays, theological and philosophical essays, liturgical compositions, homilies, as well as interviews, taped televised programs, and radio broadcasts. His only film, Gli ultimi (The Last Ones, 1963) is considered to have been a precursor to Ermanno Olmi’s L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree of the Wooden Clogs, 1978). Turoldo published his first verses during the war, in the clandestine publication L’uomo. In 1948, encouraged by Mario Apollonio, his professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, he issued his first poetic collection Io non ho mani (I Have No Hands), for which he was awarded the Saint Vincent prize in 1947. The work speaks of the solitude of a poet who is also a priest, and introduces the poetic ‘‘I’’ that Turoldo almost invariably employs, initially, in an autobiographical context, and later as the subject of a long ontological journey. This journey began with his doctoral dissertation, La fatica della ragione. Contributo per un’ontologia dell’uomo (The Labors of Reason. A Contribution to the Ontology of Man) and continued in his poetic works where the ‘‘labors of reason’’ are further enlightened by theology, and the writings of St. Augustine, Blaise Pascal, and Sø´ren Kierkegaard provide the main guidance. Although the biblical texts are the ‘‘reservoir’’ of Turoldo’s opus, and a collective reading reveals a macrotext unfolding in an itinerary that goes from Genesis to The Book of Job, his poetry eschews proselytism and aims instead at expressing the existential tension that is inherent in the human condition. In harmony with the author’s understanding of creation as a continuum and of history as a process of becoming— as postulated by Teilhard de Chardin—the various collections encompass a gradual evolution. This is also reflected in the quality of the ‘‘songs.’’ While the early ones are closer in tone to the verses of Jeremiah, in the later years the model appears to 1924

be Isaiah. Now a mystical quality prevails and all defiance, lamentation, and emphatic yearning for the divine are abandoned to give way to a form that privileges gesture, silence, and a lucid essentiality. Turoldo’s three main poetic collections reveal the stages of this stylistic process. O sensi miei... (Oh My Senses..., 1990), the most comprehensive of the three, is introduced by Andrea Zanzotto and Luciano Erba and contains wide selections from the previous seven collections of poetry written between 1948 and 1988. By leaving out most of the compositions that appeared in the two volumes of Lo scandalo della speranza (The Scandal of Hope, 1984), Turoldo implicitly repudiated his temporary shift toward realism and political invective and was able to maintain both the thematic and stylistic unity of his three final volumes. In the final part of O sensi miei...the ontological quest reaches an initial point of rest after an arduous and protracted struggle. Whereas before the subject engaged in a duel with the divine, whose presence both eluded and conditioned him, now the gaze begins to turn inward to find the Deus absconditus and greater serenity prevails. In a natural sequel, the poems of the Canti ultimi (Last Songs, 1991) encompass the stages that prepare the being for the return to the eternal source. Finally, in the posthumous Mie notti con Qohelet (My Nights with Koheleth, 1992) the Ecclesiastes is challenged and placed before the evidence that determines the limits of reason. The rational example of Job offers the answers that eluded Koheleth to both atheists and believers, and for the latter the music of the Song of Songs replaces the pessimistic notes of the Book of Wisdom. Thus Turoldo, in the tradition of Dante, concludes the journey as a poet, a human being in the search for truth, and a universal man. Unlike Dante, however, he allows reason to accompany him all the way so that the argument could be sustained on modern terms, even without the support of theology. Indeed, Turoldo’s lifelong ideal was to write and bear witness in brotherhood with the believer as well as the nonbeliever. For the impact of his native Friuli on his poetic vision Turoldo is often associated with Pier Paolo Pasolini, whereas as a religious poet he ranks with Clemente Rebora and Carlo Betocchi as one of

DAVID MARIA TUROLDO Italy’s pre-eminent voices. His Laudario alla Vergine: Via pulchritudinis (Lauds to the Virgin: Via Pulchritudinis, 1980) and other poems found in O sensi miei...constitute one of the most significant expressions of Marian devotion in our time and have been the object of several studies in the field of Mariology. Turoldo’s essays are also inspired by the Scriptures. In each of them, he isolates selected passages for analysis in order to explore their meaning and relevance from a philosophical and theological stance. For his plays, the author tends to choose salient aspects in the lives of historical figures such as Saint Francis of Assisi, Saint Lawrence, and Archbishop Oscar Romero to create dramatic situations that point to the tragic source of human suffering. To better understand Turoldo, he should be considered in the tradition of mysticism that includes St. Francis, Jacopone of Todi, Therese of Avila, and John of the Cross. It is also important to read Perche´ verita` sia libera. Memorie, confessioni, riflessioni e itinerario poetico di David Maria Turoldo (For Truth to Be Free. Memories, Confessions, Reflections and the Poetic Itinerary of David Maria Turoldo), the book-length interview in which he recalls his humble origins, and speaks of his religious vocation and his studies as well as the decade he spent in Milan preaching at the cathedral under Cardinal Schuster. Also central to this interview is his social involvement, from his participation in the Resistance during World War II and his efforts to rescue the survivors of the German lagers at the end of the war to the short-lived hopes following the liberation and the church’s dismantling of Nomadelfia, the Christian commune that he had supported and the ostracism he suffered as a result. Finally, he movingly describes how his battle with cancer altered his concept of time and impacted his creative work.

Biography Born Giuseppe Turoldo in Coderno di Sedegliano (Udine), 22 November 1916. Became a priest of the Servites, 30 October 1938; was admitted to the subdiaconate, diaconate and presbyterate; transferred to Milan, 1940; became main preacher at the Duomo, 1943; cofounded, and contributed to the clandestine journal L’uomo and participated in the Resistance, 1943–1945; organized an expedition to rescue the survivors of German lagers, 1945; received doctorate in philosophy, 1946; cooperated with Don Zeno Saltini, the founder of the Christian commune of Nomadelfia, 1949–1953; for his liberal

ideas was transferred to Innsbruck, 1953–1955; returned to Italy and taught philosophy in Florence, 1955–1961; began his televised ministry that lasted until his death; after brief missions to London, Canada, and the United States, was transferred to Udine, 1961; founded the association Amici della casa di Emmaus and the Centro di studi ecumenici Giovanni XXIII, 1964–1965; continued cultural activities through his writings, editorial initiatives, conventions, and the mass media, 1967–1988; during his illness, redoubled his efforts to organize his works and communicate his vision, 1988–1992. Literary awards include the Saint Vincent prize, 1947; the Citta` di Bergamo prize, 1979, the Citta` di Pescia prize, 1982, the Camposampiero prize, 1986, the Giosue` Carducci prize, 1987, the Isola d’Elba prize, 1989, the Premio Internazionale Letterario Ignazio Silone, 1989, and the Premio Lazzati, 1991. Died in Milan of cancer on 6 February 1992. MARIA NICOLAI PAYNTER Selected Works Collections David Maria Turoldo, translated by Allan Mandelbaum, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1993. Teatro, Sotto il Monte (Bergamo): Servitium, 1999.

Poetry ‘‘Io non ho mani,’’ 1948. ‘‘Udii una voce,’’ 1952. ‘‘Gli occhi miei lo vedranno,’’ 1955. ‘‘Se tu non riappari...,’’ 1963. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1971. ‘‘Fine dell’uomo?,’’ 1976. ‘‘Il sesto Angelo,’’ 1976. ‘‘Lo scandalo della speranza,’’ 1978; revised, 2 vols., 1984. ‘‘Laudario alla Vergine: Via pulchritudinis,’’ 1980. ‘‘Impossibile amarti impunement: Voi chi dite che io sia? ed altre liriche su Gesu` Cristo: 1948–1981,’’ 1982. ‘‘Ritorniamo ai giorni del rischio: maledetto colui che non spera,’’ 1985. ‘‘Il grande male,’’ 1987. ‘‘Nel segno del Tau,’’ 1988. ‘‘Cosa pensare e come pregare di fronte al male,’’ 1989. ‘‘O sensi miei...,’’ 1990. ‘‘Canti ultimi,’’ 1991. ‘‘Mie notti con Qohelet,’’ 1992.

Plays Da una casa di fango, 1951. La terra non sara` distrutta, 1951. La passione di San Lorenzo, 1961. Sul monte la morte, 1983. La morte ha paura, 1983.

Essays Non hanno piu` vino, 1957. La parola di Gesu`, 1959.

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DAVID MARIA TUROLDO Amare, 1982. Il diavolo sul pinnacolo, 1988. Il Vangelo di Giovanni: nessuno ha mai visto Dio, 1988. Anche Dio e` infelice, 1991. Il dramma e` Dio. Il divino, la fede, la poesia, 1992.

Other ...e poi la morte dell’ultimo teologo, 1969. Alla porta del bene e del male, 1978. Mia terra, addio..., 1980. Neanche Dio puo´ star solo: veglie eucaristiche, 1991; as Revelation of Love: Scripture, Prayers, and Reflections for Eucharistic Adoration, translated by Espedito D’Agostini, 1996. Lettere dalla casa di Emmaus, edited by Abramo Levi, 1992. La parabola di Giobbe, edited by Abramo Levi, 1992. Dialoghi durante la malattia. Antologia di interviste degli anni 1988–1991, edited by Davide Maria Montagna, 1992. Il fuoco di Elia profeta, edited by Elena Gandolfi Negrini, 1992. Dialogo tra cielo e terra, edited by Elena Gandolfi Negrini, 1994. Perche´ verita` sia libera. Memorie, confessioni, riflessioni e itinerario poetico di David Maria Turoldo, edited by Maria Nicolai Paynter, 1994. Inquietudine dell’universo, edited by Elena Gandolfi Negrini, 1995. Oltre la foresta delle fedi, edited by Elena Gandolfi Negrini, 1996. La mia vita per gli amici. Vocazione e Resistenza, edited by Maria Nicolai Paynter, 2002.

1926

Further Reading Accogli, Francesco (editor), David Maria Turoldo. Un uomo vero, un cristiano autentico: nel decimo anniversario della scomparsa, Tricase: Edizioni dell’Iride, 2002. Commare, Giuseppina, Turoldo e gli ‘‘organi divini’’: lettura concordanziale di ‘‘O sensi miei...,’’ Florence: Olschki, 2003. Crociani, Lamberto (editor), Ricordando David Maria Turoldo, Florence: SS. Annunziata, 1994. Fiscon, Armando, and Enrico Grandesso (editors), Testimonianza e poesia. David Maria Turoldo, Camposampiero: Edizioni del noce, 1993. Laicita` e profezia: la vicenda di David Maria Turoldo. Saggi storici, Palazzago (Bergamo): Servitium, 2003. Lollo, Renata, La poesia di David M. Turoldo, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1971. Marrone, Gaetana, ‘‘Gli ultimi: figure dell’Apocalisse turoldiana,’’ in Italian Criticism: Literature and Culture, edited by Gregory Lucente, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Mattana, Giancarlo, Turoldo, l’uomo, il frate, il poeta, Milan: Edizioni Paoline, 1995. Paynter, Maria Nicolai, ‘‘La lectio mariana di David Maria Turoldo,’’ in Maria Vergine nella letteratura italiana, edited by Florinda M. Iannace, Stony Brook, NY: Forum Italicum Publishing, 2000. Ravasi, Gianfranco, and Marco Ballarini, David Maria Turoldo: invito alla lettura, Milan: San Paolo, 2000. Zovatto, Pietro, Il fenomeno Turoldo, Trieste: Parnaso, 2004.

U GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI (1888–1970) contradictions—cosmopolitanism vs. nationalism is but one of them, others being, for instance, individualism vs. universalism, or expressionism vs. symbolism. Indeed, as Silvana Ghiazza shows, in the first period especially, antithesis and oxymoron appear to constitute the two dominant features of the poet’s imagination (Le antitesi nella poesia di Ungaretti, 2003). These devices are overwhelmingly present in his work and are even significantly prominent in the titles of his two seminal collections: If Il porto sepolto (The Buried Harbour, 1916) presents the reader with the incongruity of a haven buried in sand (implying the antitheses of movement / stasis, activity / paralysis, life / death), Allegria di naufragi (The Joy of Shipwrecks, 1919) is even bolder and more striking in its oxymoronic juxtaposition of positive and negative images and their associated conceptual and poetic connotations. The exploration of the infinite combinatory possibilities of paradox is systematically pursued in many poems of the two collections and affects all realms of perception, both at the level of sensorial input (vision, hearing, touch) and at the level of general apprehension of space and time (proximity / distance, motion / immobility, duration / absolute, and so on), as well as the existential, social, and emotional dimensions, again moving from a specifically individual, autobiographical perspective (Egypt / Italy, Africa / Europe, desert / city) in the direction of a more universal application (one / many, solitude / solidarity, nature / culture, immanence / transcendence, sin /

Giuseppe Ungaretti is, together with Eugenio Montale, the most significant Italian poet of the first half of the twentieth century, credited with reasserting the status and privileged position of poetry at a time (World War I and its troubled aftermath) when it appeared to have all but lost its purpose, and with radically transforming poetic language and forms in a manner that would prove highly influential over future generations of poets. In his work he combines ingredients of diverse provenance, reflecting what—for an Italian intellectual of his time—is an uncommon familiarity with foreign literatures and openness to other cultures, coupled however with an intense yearning for identification with his own. This conflict is undoubtedly the result of an unusual personal experience, that of an Italian writer born in a faraway and exotic land, who in the formative years is exposed to the impact of strange languages, landscapes, climates, customs, and for whom national and cultural identity is not a given, but an exciting and at times painful rediscovery. This situation of linguistic and cultural marginality or extraterritoriality (that he has in common, in different forms but with similar effects in terms of self-identification, with another groundbreaking writer of the same era, Triestine novelist Italo Svevo) is in his case compounded by a more generalized condition of conflict: It can be said that from the very start Ungaretti’s internal and external world is dominated by polarized tensions, which often take the form of insoluble (yet artistically productive) 1927

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI innocence). The same oppositional structure operates also in Ungaretti’s poetic theory (and his understanding of his own practice), with the dichotomies mentioned above acquiring a metaphorical meaning in relation to the structuring of poetic discourse itself, and ultimately resulting in the major antitheses that constitute the genetic nuclei of his work: word / silence, utterable / ineffable, balance / frenzy, clarity / obscurity, revelation / mystery. Ultimately the first two collections themselves come to occupy the two extremes of an evolution, but also of a polarized alternative: while L’allegria (Cheerfulness, 1931) irresistibly tends toward extreme concentration and the absolute, Sentimento del tempo (Sentiment of Time, 1933) embraces the infinite multiplicity of human experience, through the means of linguistic articulation and stylistic forming. Finally, it should be noted that, although this paradoxical inclination is undoubtedly more prominent (and productive, both conceptually and artistically) in the earlier collections, it doesn’t ever subside: Ungaretti’s very last poetic effort, completed a few months before his death, is entitled L’impietrito e il velluto (The Petrified and the Velvet, 1970). Ungaretti’s social background was modest (his parents emigrated from Lucca to Alexandria in Egypt, where they lived rather precariously, his father working as a laborer at the Suez Canal— before dying of an accident when Giuseppe was only aged 2—and his mother running a bakery), but his early years were not deprived of intellectual stimulation. His education was officially entrusted to a renowned French-speaking institution, the E´cole Suisse Jacot, that he attended (without particular enthusiasm) until 1905. However, he was more profoundly influenced by members of the lively Italian expatriate community, including political exiles (Socialists and anarchists) forced out of the country by the conservative involution taking place in the latter part of the nineteenth century, but very keen to maintain contact with the fatherland; Enrico Pea was one such acquaintance, to whom Ungaretti owed the discovery of a large range of authors, including Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mallarme´, and Nietzsche. He also had friends in the indigenous Arab community, such as Moammed Sceab, who would later share a flat with him in Paris, and commit suicide. This tragic event and the figure of Sceab are the object of ‘‘In memoria’’ (In Memoriam), one of the poems of L’allegria. Despite his intense and wide-ranging readings and growing interest for literature, Ungaretti was not particularly precocious as a writer. Nothing is 1928

left of his early poetic attempts during his life in Africa; it is only after leaving Egypt for Italy (where he stops very briefly in 1912) and then Paris (where he settles until shortly before the start of the war) that he begins to publish poetry, initially (1915) in the Futurist review Lacerba, thanks to the invitation of Giovanni Papini, Ardengo Soffici, and Aldo Palazzeschi, whom he had met in the French capital. But, notwithstanding some initial, superficial stylistic and ideological similarities (among which their common commitment to interventismo), the association with the Futurist movement did not last and he would later either discard or re-elaborate this early production. In Paris, Ungaretti attended philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne (being particularly influenced by Henry Bergson and his revolutionary concept of time) and made the acquaintance of Apollinaire, Picasso, De Chirico, Modigliani, Le´ger, and many other artists and writers. Ungaretti’s poetic work shows considerable variations (in content, inspiration, style, structure, and chosen models) over the five decades spanned by its development. The most significant tendencies in the course of this evolution can be summarized as follows: from simplicity to complexity; from absolute concentration to distension; from earnestness to detachment, or irony; from a rejection—in favor mainly of French symbolist suggestions—of the Italian poetic canon (particularly as incarnated in its most influential recent representatives, Carducci and D’Annunzio) to a progressive and increasingly open and enthusiastic rediscovery of the various ‘‘voices’’ of the Italian lyrical and epic traditions. Within this broad direction, the three main moments of Ungaretti’s poetic career can be described (borrowing from Giovanni Raboni’s formulation) under the headings ‘‘Word,’’ ‘‘Phrase,’’ and ‘‘Meditation.’’ It must be noted, however, that distinctions among those phases are not absolute, in part because of the natural continuum of the poet’s inspiration, and partly as a result of the process of revision a posteriori that he applied to his work at various points, also with the conscious aim of unifying it under a common denominator, as shown by the general title (adopted since 1942 for the whole of his poetic and essayistic production, as well as for his translation work) of Vita d’un uomo (Life of a Man). This intention of retrospective systematization of his own oeuvre, which has one of its obvious models in Dante, is visible in many of Ungaretti’s numerous literary essays, now collected under the title Vita d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi (Life of a Man: Essays and Papers, 1974) and in

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI particular in Ragioni d’una poesia (Reasons for a Poetry), dated 1949, but in fact an edited patchwork of earlier texts. As with many other young European intellectuals, World War I was a defining moment in Ungaretti’s life. He experienced it firsthand in its full horror, as a simple soldier in the Italian army, fighting against the Austrians on the northern front. It is at this time that, under the enormous pressure (but also, paradoxically, liberating power) of extraordinarily difficult circumstances, his most original stylistic qualities took shape in his first poetic book, Il porto sepolto, which constitutes the core of what later (with the addition of poems published separately in Allegria di naufragi and other collections) will become L’allegria, encompassing the production of the war time (1914–1919). Ungaretti’s first significant step as a poet is, at the same time, a lucid examination of the abysmal depths of the human condition (both in an intensely personal, and also a collective and ultimately— albeit not always explicitly—universal perspective), an act of redemption from it (and in particular the tragedy of war) through human and cosmic solidarity, an assessment of the function of poetry and of the role of the poet, and an exploration of the representative, suggestive, and mysteriously revelatory powers of the word. Of particular interest is the thread (passing through the whole collection) of the young poet’s reflection on the meaning of poetry; it may be argued that this is alluded to in the very first poem of L’allegria, ‘‘Eterno’’ (Eternity), where the image of the flower colto (picked) and donato (given) is a transparent metaphor for the poetic word, and the inesprimibile nulla (inexpressible nothing) a version of the mistero to which Ungaretti refers in other poems, as well as in Ragioni d’una poesia. In ‘‘Il porto sepolto’’ (the poem that gives the title to Ungaretti’s first book, now a section of L’allegria), the poet is explicitly mentioned, initially in the third person: ‘‘Vi arriva il poeta’’ (The poet arrives there), and then in the first: mi resta (I am left with), again as the bearer of a gift with i suoi canti (his songs) that he must ‘‘scatter,’’ without however being able to relieve himself once and for all of the inesauribile segreto (inexhaustible secret) that lies at the heart of poetry and at the bottom of language. But it is in the last two poems of the section, ‘‘Italia’’ (Italy) and ‘‘Commiato’’ (Leave), that Ungaretti more explicitly spells out his definition of poetry. In the former, the dichotomy of cosmopolitanism vs. nationalism is clearly exhibited: Whereas

initially the poet (speaking in the first person) is described as the fruit of ‘‘innumerevoli contrasti d’innesti / maturato in una serra’’ (innumerable contrasts and graftings / ripened in a greenhouse), in the second the connection between the poetsoldier and his nation, already hinted at in the title, is strongly and contrastively posited as the implicit source of legitimization of the act of poetry itself: ‘‘Ma il tuo popolo e` portato / dalla stessa terra / che mi porta / Italia’’ (But your people is sustained / by the same earth / that sustains me / Italy); and reiterated in the stunning conclusive simile equating his uniform with the cradle of his father. We are led to understand, in other terms, that the identity of the poet is the result of a complex evolution (if not, perhaps, of a permanent contradiction) in which multiculturalism and nationalistic allegiance play each a crucial part. In ‘‘Commiato,’’ dedicated to his friend and Maecenas Ettore Serra, Ungaretti summarizes his vision of the poetic word as the blossoming of ‘‘il mondo l’umanita` / la propria vita’’ (the world humanity / one’s own life) and employs a powerful oxymoron to identify yet another fertile antithesis as a source of his creativity: poetry is ‘‘la limpida meraviglia / di un delirante fermento’’ (the limpid wonder / of a delirious turmoil). He then concludes reiterating the three necessary conditions for the production of the poetic miracle: the willingness to impose and accept silence, the choice of a painful duty of search and excavation, and the awareness and full recognition of mystery (the abyss) as the ultimate source and limit of poetry. A clearly distinguishable second moment in Ungaretti’s artistic evolution, identified by critics as the ‘‘poetic of the Phrase’’ (to be understood in both a syntactical and musical sense), is represented by the collection Sentimento del tempo, where the poet, having quenched his initial and fundamental thirst for a more essential word, is free to pursue a systematic recuperation of the full spectrum of the linguistic, poetic, cultural, ideal, and emotional resources available to him. This is a time of greater maturity and leisure, when the search doesn’t cease, but changes direction, becoming focused on the task of exploring and expressing the entire range of strings of the human soul, through an impressive variety of tones and modes. The cosmic unity with the essence of the universe recedes somewhat, together with the imminence of death, to make room for a more attentive and humane relationship with external and internal realities, as well as for greater freedom in the pursuit of the formal riches of language and the infinite promise of analogical thought. 1929

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI The third and final phase in Ungaretti’s evolution has been described as the ‘‘poetic of Meditation,’’ articulated in the collections Il dolore (Grief, 1947), La terra promessa (The Promised Land, 1950), Un grido e paesaggi (A Cry and Landscapes, 1952), and Il taccuino del vecchio (The Old Man’s Notebook, 1960). The first of these, Il dolore, contains the harrowing poems written following the death of his son, Antonietto, in consequence of a wrongly diagnosed appendicitis; after such a painful reminder of our inescapable fragility, a long season of reflection was inaugurated, in which the spasmodic search for the true word and the experimentation with the extreme capabilities of both language and the soul were progressively replaced by a more detached (at times stoical, at times ironic) contemplation of human destiny. The time of heroic innovation was over, but the poet could now rely on a consummate technique and on a fully embraced reservoir of stylistic models and formal possibilities. Ungaretti was also a translator of poetry, a contributor to literary periodicals, and a charismatic lecturer. As a translator he chose primarily from French literature (Racine, Saint-John Perse, Paulhan, Mallarme´), but also worked on English, Spanish and Greek authors, such as Blake, Shakespeare, Homer, and Gongora. He wrote regularly in periodicals and newspapers and after the advent of television could occasionally be seen peering from the small screen, donning the inevitable beret, reading his own poetry or that of the Odyssey in his own, uniquely expressive way. The relationship between Ungaretti and Fascism is a delicate and not entirely clarified topic. Attracted, as so many others, by the dual keyword ‘‘Patria e Rivoluzione’’ (Fatherland and Revolution), Ungaretti very publicly joined the movement in 1919 with an enthusiastic statement published in Il popolo d’Italia, and in 1925 he signed (with Pirandello and around a hundred other prominent intellectuals) the ‘‘Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti,’’ composed by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile. Upon his return from Brazil at the end of 1942, he was made a member of the Accademia d’Italia (an institution created by Mussolini to promote the cultural philosophy of the regime) and called to a chair at the University of Rome. Because of this association, after the fall of Fascism in 1945, he was ‘‘quarantined’’ by the postwar literary milieu for some time, but did not suffer any further consequences. Giuseppe Ungaretti received from early on (and still enjoys) considerable critical attention. Some of the best critics and writers of the twentieth century 1930

have paid tribute to his art, among them Giovanni Papini, Eugenio Montale, Gianfranco Contini, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His contemporaries realized the significance of his transformation of poetic language and, although the Hermetic quality of some of his poetry—especially in the 1930s—attracted some negative comments, in general his place on the top shelf of Italian modern poetry was never seriously disputed. Critical reception has oscillated broadly between two positions, proposing interpretations of his work, on the one hand, as part and parcel and ‘‘manifestation’’ of his life and, on the other, as a powerful assertion of the autonomy and sovereignty of poetry. Ultimately what Ungaretti stands for is the inextricable coimplication of life and writing, and the crucial function of poetic discourse.

Biography February 8, 1888: Born, in Alexandria in Egypt, son of Antonio Ungaretti and Maria Lunardini. 1912: Left Egypt for Florence and then France. 1913: his friend Moammed Sceab committed suicide. 1913– 1914: enrolled at the Sorbonne University in Paris and attended lectures by Henri Bergson. 1914–1915: became friends with Paul Fort, Guillaume Apollinaire, Ardengo Soffici, Giovanni Papini. 1915: enrolled as volunteer in the Italian army. 1919: enrolled in the Fascist Party. June 3, 1920: married Jeanne Dupoix. 1921: moved to Rome, where he worked in the ministry of Foreign Affairs. 1924–1932: collaborated with the French journal Commerce. 1925: signed the Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti. 1928: converted to Catholicism. 1930: his mother died and his son Antonietto was born. 1935–1940: collaborated with the French journal Mesures. 1931–1935: took trips as newspaper correspondent to Southern Italy, Egypt, Flanders. 1933: held a tour of lectures on Italian literature in several Western European countries. 1936: moved to Sao Paulo in Brazil. 1937–1942: taught Italian literature at Sao Paulo. 1937: his brother died. 1939: his son Antonietto died. 1964: lectured at Columbia University. June 2, 1970: died in Milan. GIUSEPPE STELLARDI Selected Works Collections Life of a Man, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, London: H. Hamilton-New York: New Directions, 1958.

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI Vita d’un uomo. Tutte le poesie, edited by Leone Piccioni, Milan: Mondadori, 1969. Vita d’un uomo. Saggi e interventi, edited by Luciano Rebay e Mario Diacono, Milan: Mondadori, 1974. Selected Poems, translated and edited by Allen Mandelbaum, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975. Opere, 4 vols., edited by Leone Piccioni, Mario Diacono, Luciano Rebay and Paola Montefoschi, Milan: Mondadori, 1989–2000. Vita d’un uomo. Viaggi e lezioni, edited by Paola Montefoschi, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Selected poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Andrew Frisardi, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘Il porto sepolto,’’ Udine: Stabilimento Tipografico Friulano, 1916; edited by Carlo Ossola, 2001; as The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Kevin Hart, 1990. ‘‘Allegria di naufragi,’’ 1919. ‘‘L’allegria,’’ 1931; 1936; 1942; critical edition by Cristiana Maggi Romano, 1982. ‘‘Sentimento del tempo,’’ 1933; 1936; 1943; critical edition by Rosanna Angelica and Cristiana Maggi Romano, 1988. ‘‘Poesie disperse,’’ 1945. ‘‘Il dolore,’’ 1947. ‘‘La terra promessa,’’ 1950. ‘‘Un grido e paesaggi,’’ 1952. ‘‘Il taccuino del vecchio,’’ 1960. ‘‘L’impietrito e il velluto,’’ 1970.

Critical Writings Il povero nella citta`, 1949. Il deserto e dopo, 1961. Invenzione della poesia moderna. Lezioni brasiliane di letteratura (1937–1942), edited by Paola Montefoschi, 1984. Lezioni su Giacomo Leopardi, edited by Mario Diacono e Paola Montefoschi, 1989. ‘‘Filosofia fantastica.’’ Prose di meditazione e d’intervento (1926–1929), edited by Carlo Ossola, 1997.

Cary, Joseph, Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Contini, Gianfranco, Esercizi di lettura, Florence: Le Monnier, 1947. Contini, Gianfranco, Altri esercizi, Turin: Einaudi, 1972. Cortellessa, Andrea, Ungaretti, Turin: Einaudi, 2000 (book and videotape). Dombroski, Robert, L’esistenza ubbidiente. Letterati italiani sotto il fascismo, Naples: Guida, 1984. Forti, Marco, Ungaretti girovago e classico, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1991. Ghiazza, Silvana, Le antitesi nella poesia di Ungaretti, Bari: Palomar, 2003. Giuseppe Ungaretti: identita` e metamorfosi, Lucca: Pacini Fazzi, 2005. Guglielmi, Guido, Interpretazione di Ungaretti, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989. Jones, Frederic Joseph, Giuseppe Ungaretti: poet and critic, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Livorni, Ernesto, Avanguardia e tradizione. Ezra Pound e Giuseppe Ungaretti, Florence: Le Monnier, 1988. Macrı`, Oreste, La vita della parola. Studi su Ungaretti e poeti coevi, Rome: Bulzoni, 1998. Montale, Eugenio, Auto da fe`, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1966. Ossola, Carlo, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Papini, Giovanni, Testimonianze, Milan: Facchi, 1918. Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Passione e ideologia, Milan: Garzanti, 1960. Piccioni, Leone, Vita d’un poeta. Giuseppe Ungaretti, Milan: Rizzoli, 1970. Raboni, Giovanni, Introduction to Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vita d’un uomo. 106 poesie (1914–1960), Milan: Oscar Mondadori, 1966. Rebay, Luciano, Le origini della poesia di Ungaretti, Rome: Edizioni di Storiae Letteratura 1962. Savoca, Giuseppe, Concordanza delle poesie di Giuseppe Ungaretti, Florence: Olschki, 1993.

Translations XXII sonetti di Shakespeare scelti e tradotti da Giuseppe Ungaretti, 1944. Vita d’un uomo. 40 sonetti di Shakespeare tradotti, 1946. Vita d’un uomo. Da Gongora e da Mallarme´, 1948. Vita d’un uomo. ‘‘Fedra’’ di Jean Racine, 1950. Vita d’un uomo. Visioni di William Blake, 1965. Saint-John Perse, Anabase, 1967 (with T. S. Eliot).

Further Reading Barenghi, Mario, Ungaretti. Un ritratto e cinque studi, Modena: Mucchi, 1999. Baroni, Giorgio, Giuseppe Ungaretti: Introduzione e guida allo studio dell’opera ungarettiana, Florence: Le Monnier, 1992. Bertoni, Alberto, and Jonathan Sisco, Montale vs. Ungaretti: introduzione alla lettura di due modelli di poesia del Novecento, Rome: Carocci, 2003. Cambon, Glauco, La poesia di Ungaretti, Turin: Einaudi, 1976.

L’ALLEGRIA, 1931 Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti

What is now regarded as Ungaretti’s first poetic collection is in fact the result of a lengthy process of composition and successive phases of reelaboration. The first editorial step is represented by the publication of Il porto sepolto (printed in 1916 thanks to the financial support of Ettore Serra), followed by the French poems of La Guerre and P-L-M, and then by Allegria di naufragi (The Joy of Shipwrecks), all published in 1919. In 1923, 1931

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI Benito Mussolini penned a very brief but certainly sympathetic introduction to the second, revised edition of Il porto sepolto. But it was only in 1931 that the collection of poems composed between 1914 and 1919 acquired its definitive shape under the title of L’allegria, which would remain when, in 1942, Ungaretti starts the systematic publication of all his works under the title Vita d’un uomo. L’allegria comprises five sections: Ultime, Il porto sepolto, Naufragi, Girovago, Prime, and covers the first and most original period in the development of Ungaretti’s style, marked by a desire to liberate language of all unnecessary incrustations and recover the primordial power of the word, as well as the essential means of true communication amongst human beings. Thematically, the collection—in its final shape—covers a variety of topics, and in particular the experience of war, memories of Africa, a contemplation of the poet’s present condition, the attempt to investigate issues of cultural and national identity, and a reflection on the role of poetry. The principal characteristics of this first phase are, on the one hand, the expressionistic intensity of the portrayal of the condition of the soldier at war as in ‘‘Veglia’’ (The Watch): ‘‘un compagno / massacrato / con la sua bocca / digrignata / volta al plenilunio’’ (a massacred / comrade / with his bare-toothed / mouth / turned to the full moon); and, on the other, there is an attempt to reactivate the dormant powers of language, hidden in words that the noise and habits of both ordinary communication and specialized artistic manufacture tend to neutralize. The revitalization of the word is accomplished primarily by making space and silence around it as in ‘‘Natale’’ (Christmas): ‘‘Sto / con le quattro / capriole / di fumo / del focolare’’ (I remain / with the four / pirouettes / of smoke / of the fireplace), and by releasing it from the strictures of complicated syntax and punctuation as in ‘‘Stasera’’ (Tonight): ‘‘Balaustrata di brezza / per appoggiare stasera / la mia malinconia’’ (Balustrade of breeze / on which to lean tonight / my melancholy), or in order to unleash in complete simplicity and freedom its full payload of expressive and analogical meaning as ‘‘In Galleria’’ (In the Gallery): ‘‘Un occhio di stelle / ci spia da quello stagno’’ (A starry eye / spies on us from that pond). Whilst showing his proximity to French symbolism, Ungaretti also retains in part some of the tenets of Italian Futurism, but the aim is not a complete break with the past. On the contrary, his objective is a recuperation of the vital, organic connection between poetry and language, in its revelatory, creative 1932

and redeeming function. If this requires a ‘‘clean slate’’ and therefore a temporary and radical suspension of the established norms and forms dictated by the poetic tradition (hence the systematic avoidance of recognizable metrical units, such as the hendecasyllable, or compositional structures, such as the sonnet), this should not be misinterpreted as being the same as the iconoclastic, histrionic, and fundamentally artificial gesture of a Marinetti. The most telling aspect of L’allegria is perhaps the exploration of the link connecting man, in his contingency and fragility, with the inalterable substance of the universe itself, thereby achieving an at-least temporary overcoming of the unbearable present condition, as seen through stunning images in poems such as ‘‘Fase d’Oriente’’ (The Oriental Phase): ‘‘Ci vendemmia il sole’’ (The sun harvests us); ‘‘Annientamento’’ (Annihilation): ‘‘mi trasmuto in volo di nubi’’ (I am transformed into a flight of clouds); ‘‘I fiumi’’ (The Rivers): ‘‘mi sono riconosciuto / una docile fibra dell’universo’’ (I recognized myself / as a docile fiber of the universe); ‘‘Trasfigurazione’’ (Transfiguration): ‘‘Come una nuvola / mi filtro / nel sole’’ (Like a cloud / I dissolve myself / into the sun) and ‘‘Sereno’’ (Clear sky): ‘‘Mi riconosco / immagine / passeggera // Presa in un giro / immortale’’ (I recognize myself / fleeting / image // Caught in an immortal round). L’allegria is now generally acknowledged as Ungaretti’s boldest and more lasting contribution to the development of Italian twentieth-century poetry. GIUSEPPE STELLARDI Editions First edition: Allegria di naufragi, Florence: Vallecchi, 1919; as L’allegria, Milan: Preda, 1931. Other editions: L’allegria, Rome: Novissima, 1936; as Vita d’un uomo. L’allegria, Milan: Mondadori, 1942; as L’allegria, critical edition by Cristiana Maggi Romano, Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 1982. Translations: in Selected Poems, translated and edited by Allen Mandelbaum, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975; in The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Kevin Hart, Canberra: Leros Press, 1990; in Selected poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Andrew Frisardi, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Further Reading Bigongiari, Piero, ‘‘Struttura dell’«Allegria» di Ungaretti,’’ in La poesia del novecento, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1980. Genot, Ge´rard, Se´mantique du discontinu dans l’Allegria d’Ungaretti, Paris: Klincksieck, 1972.

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI Noyer-Weidner, Alfred, Zur Frage der ‘‘Poetik des Wortes’’ in Ungarettis L’Allegria, Krefeld: Scherpe, 1980. Paglia, Luigi, L’urlo e lo stupore: lettura di Ungaretti: «L’Allegria», Florence: Le Monnier, 2003. Suvini-Hand, Vivienne, ‘‘‘Uomo di pena’ o un lupo in veste di agnello? Rileggendo L’Allegria di Ungaretti,’’ in Rivista di Studi Italiani, 20, no. 1 (June 2002): 281–305. Suvini-Hand, Vivienne, Mirage and Camouflage: Hiding Behind Hermeticism in Giuseppe Ungaretti’s L’Allegria, Market Harborough, Leicester: Troubador, 2000.

SENTIMENTO DEL TEMPO, 1933; 1936 Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Sentimento del tempo (Sentiment of Time), Ungaretti’s second collection of poetry, appeared in 1933, followed by a new and increased edition in 1936. In its definitive version, it includes poems composed over a long period of time (between 1919 and 1935), and describes the progressive rediscovery (after the traumatic experience of war, and the concomitant commitment to the revelatory and healing power of the word in its absolute nakedness) of the fullness of human and artistic experience. Its language became richer, absorbing more vocabulary from the poetic tradition; a greater degree of syntactical complexity was also allowed; analogical constructs reached, at times, levels of sophistication and impalpability akin to the Hermetic poets, as in ‘‘Lago luna alba notte’’ (Lake Moon Dawn Night): ‘‘Gracili arbusti, ciglia / Di celato bisbiglio’’ (Frail shrubs, eyelashes / Of concealed whisper). Furthermore, metrical forms previously avoided (chiefly the hendecasyllable) were now patently exhibited, sometimes in clusters, together with stronger and more regular structures of versification as in ‘‘Notte di marzo’’ (A Night in March): ‘‘Luna impudica, al tuo improvviso lume / torna, quell’ombra dove Apollo dorme, / A trasparenze incerte’’ (Immodest moon, under your sudden light / Returns, that shadow where Apollon sleeps, / To uncertain transparencies); and homage is paid to the masters of the Italian lyrical canon

(Leopardi and Petrarch), as well as to the classical tradition. As the title indicates, the collection signals a widening of the temporal categories applied by Ungaretti in L’allegria, which were predominantly the suspended time of an absolute present, and the universal time of cosmos, thereby excluding the distended time that, through memory and anticipation, constitutes the bulk of the human apprehension of it. Sentimento del tempo is thus a sustained exploration of all dimensions of time pertaining to our experience, including the seasons, the cultural past, the poetic tradition, the recollection of stages of one’s life, and ultimately transcendence. Following Ungaretti’s conversion to Catholicism in 1928, God—already mentioned in L’allegria, often in a question without answer as in ‘‘Dannazione’’ (Damnation): ‘‘Perche´ bramo Dio?’’ (Why Do I Long for God?) and ‘‘Risvegli’’ (Awakenings): ‘‘Ma Dio cos’e`?’’ (But What Is God?)—now becomes a direct interlocutor in his poetry, but always in a dialogue pervaded by anguish, guilt, and the desire of an impossible purification, as is obvious in a poem from Sentimento del tempo, also entitled ‘‘Dannazione,’’ where the poet reclaims: ‘‘Tu non mi guardi piu`, Signore...’’ (You no longer look at me, o Lord...). Similarly for the topic of sexuality, which in the previous collection evoked images of gentle surrender—as in ‘‘Malinconia’’ (Sadness): ‘‘Abbandono dolce di corpi’’ (Soft abandonment of bodies), or in ‘‘Giugno’’ (June): ‘‘Vedremo il nostro amore reclinarsi / come sera’’ (We will see our love recline / like the evening)—but now became inescapably enmeshed with sin and guilt, as in ‘‘Canto sesto’’ (Canto VI): ‘‘E dei vostri rimorsi ho pieno il cuore’’ (And my heart is filled with your remorses). In Sentimento del tempo, the suspended state of L’allegria has been resolved in a new mode of consciousness, leading the poet to project himself into all aspects of human experience, in the pursuit of an impossible quest for authenticity and fullness. GIUSEPPE STELLARDI Editions First edition: Sentimento del tempo, Florence: Vallecchi, and Rome: Novissima, 1933. Other editions: Sentimento del tempo, Rome: Novissima, 1936; as Vita d’un uomo. Sentimento del tempo, Milan: Mondadori, 1943; as Sentimento del tempo, critical edition by Rosanna Angelica and Cristiana Maggi Romano, Milan: Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori, 1988. Translations: as Life of a Man, translated by Allen Mandelbaum, London: H. Hamilton, and New York:

1933

GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI New Directions, 1958; in Selected Poems, translated and edited by Allen Mandelbaum, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975; in Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, translated by Andrew Frisardi, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.

Further Reading Baroncini, Daniela, Ungaretti e il sentimento del classico, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1999. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca, ‘‘Reminiscenze e suggestioni baudelairiane nella sezione ‘Inni’ del Sentimento del tempo,’’ in Atti del convegno internazionale su Giuseppe Ungaretti, Urbino, 3–6 ottobre 1979, edited by Carlo Bo et al., Urbino: 4 Venti, 1981. Bigongiari, Piero, ‘‘Il Sentimento del tempo tra Chronos e Aioˆn,’’ in Atti del convegno internazionale su

Giuseppe Ungaretti, Urbino, 3–6 ottobre 1979, edited by Carlo Bo et al., Urbino: 4 Venti, 1981. Brambilla, Rosa (editor), Giuseppe Ungaretti: il sentimento del tempo, Assisi: Cittadella, 1984. Brose, Margaret, ‘‘Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Sentimento del Tempo: Baroque Rome and the Experience of Time,’’ in Pacific Coast Philology, 21 (November 1986): 65– 72. Carle, Barbara, ‘‘An Intertextual Reading of ‘Canto secondo’ and ‘Canto terzo’ from Ungaretti’s ‘La morte meditata,’’’ in Romance Notes, 34 (Fall 1993): 55–60. Gennaro, Rosario, Le patrie della poesia: Ungaretti, Bergson e altri saggi, Fiesole (Firenze): Cadmo, 2004. Giachery, Emerico, and Noemi Giachery, Ungaretti ‘‘verticale,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 2000. Ossola, Carlo, ‘‘L’esperienza religiosa di Ungaretti: Dall’’Allegria’ al ‘Sentimento del tempo,’’’ in Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, 8 (1972): 259–301.

UNIVERSITIES In Italy, the project of instituting a university educational tradition is still being academically institutionalized and is characterized by fixed elements originating from the academies of law consolidating the educational model typical of the Roman society. This project is moreover dominated by the presence of the state, whereas the teacher figure in the university faculty (from the medieval Latin expression facultas docendi, which indicated the higher-level teaching) is akin to a civil servant whose activity is linked to ‘‘the task of preserving, of saving what had been created and fixed in other times and places’’ (Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘‘Universita` e scuola in Italia,’’ 1982). However, since the fourth century, the emerging ecclesiastical forms counterbalanced the ancient academy with its expertise in law. Bishop schools were thus opened within the dioceses and spread out rapidly, posing the problem of the religious education of laymen (catechism and prayer) in an environment that was increasingly dominated by written culture, at least until Charles the Great and the foundation of palatinate schools aimed at a lay kind of literacy. At that time, then, the first European universities—the Studia—were born. These authentic creations of urban and communal civilization (Pavia, Padua, Bologna, Paris, Oxford) linked the Roman model of the academy to some new functions 1934

typical of bishop schools. Originally the role models of all European centers of study were the Parisian (universitas magistrorum, teachers’ organization) or the Bolognese (universitas scholarium, students’ organization). However, there was a substantial difference between the Italian centers, whose ‘‘graduation purpose was empowering to a profession’’ and the foreign universities, where ‘‘the chief study was theology, which in Italy until the fourteenth century was prerogative of religious orders, especially of Dominican and Franciscan Friars’’ (Roberto Weiss, ‘‘Universita`,’’ 1973). Other university centers were established by the sovereign’s initiative, such as in 1224 in Naples, by Frederic II for the Southern state, according to a ‘‘regalist and jurisdictionalist tradition that inspired in the eighteenth century reformers such as Celestino Galiani and Pietro Giannone’’ (Giuseppe Ricuperati, ‘‘Universita` e scuola in Italia,’’ 1982). The Middle Ages produced, from Turin to Palermo, an abundance of university cultural institutions that, not without efforts against strong resistance, loosened the rigid medieval rule of the relationship between pupil and auctores, according to the new humanistic education model that originates precisely from the grammarians’ educational activity. A more authentic discovery of culture, man, and of man’s dignitas and urban libertates

UNIVERSITIES therefore took place. Only through the study of letters, as Leonardo Bruni stated in a famous epistle (Epist., 6), can perfection be achieved. Lorenzo Valla is probably the most significant example of such resistance to the new model of studia humanitatis, whose harsh cultural conflict dates back at least to Francesco Petrarca’s argument in favor of letters and spirit against the futile doctors’ science (Invectivae contra medicum). Valla was called in 1431 by the University of Pavia to hold the chair of rhetorics (from 1450, at the Roman Study) and had to flee in 1433 because of the opposition of Pavia’s jurists. Also Angelo Poliziano, who obtained the chair of Latin and Greek eloquence at the Florence Study in 1480, had to ‘‘defend himself from the accusation of invading, being a ‘grammarian,’ the realm of philosophy’’ (Eugenio Garin, L’educazione in Europa, 1966). The success of literary teaching within Italian studies, often due to the work of humanistic poets and writers (from Giovanni Conversini to Benedetto Varchi and Paolo Beni), as well as the exhortation to read secular books and the polemics about the teaching of Latin, led to the renewal of the classics survey methods and to a novel idea of life and knowledge. A primary systematization of the studies, which was typical of this cultural direction, can be found in De ingenius moribus et liberalibus studiis adulescentiae by the Humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio (1370–1444), a teacher of dialectics and logics in Florence, Bologna, and Padua, and the author of Paulus (1390), the first comedy of the age of humanities. In Vergerio’s pedagogical treatise, eloquence is presented as an educational discipline with the ability to complete and perfect the citizen’s identity. Furthermore, the cultural vitality of university centers is capable of determining poetics and finding affinities with literal invention. This is the case of medieval goliardic poetry (Carmina) or of the influence of philosophical tendencies at the University of Bologna on Guido Guinizzelli and thus on the ideological substratum of Dolce stil novo. The humanistic model of the supremacy of rhetoric and of the art of argumentation, which was assimilated by important centers of cultural aggregation such as the academies, declined and underwent a gradual process of transformation, as the free Italian cities lost their political power. On the one hand, this model adapted itself in the prince’s political constellation, in the figure of the man of court and the priority of behavior: the courtier, the secretary, or the chancellor. On the other hand, it survived partially in the new school model of the

Jesuit College, which was aimed at the education of clergymen and patricians, and established itself in the Italian culture only after the Council of Trent and the adoption of the Ratio studiorum. The vast and heterogeneous proliferation of the colleges, together with the respect toward Jesuits as educators, depended directly on the widespread presence in Italy of this order and on the combination of the model of disciplined monastery life with the curriculum of studia humanitatis toward a new age of rhetoric. According to Jacques Le Goff, the ties between university and literature disappeared, replaced by the rise of intellectuals by profession, due to the ‘‘lack of the responsibility they used to have in the communal world.’’ These ties resurfaced only ‘‘when the renewal of human and social sciences and their entrance in the literary universe inaugurate the new relationship between teachers and literary production’’ (‘‘Alle origini del lavoro intellettuale,’’ 1982). In reality this was the beginning of a completely different era: the supremacy of the church over the state in the education field. The college became the public school par excellence, whereas universities, in a deep crisis, became corporate centers whose members’ inferiority was compensated only by the creation of several autonomous academies. A first change in the educational system took place in Piedmont when King Vittorio Amedeo II included among his reforms the university reform, thus openly opposing the cultural supremacy the Jesuits had been enjoying for over a century. The anti-Jesuit controversy was, in fact, a Europe-wide phenomenon. After France and Spain, also in Italy the school reforms brought about by the Bourbons caused the removal of the order from Parma, Naples, and Palermo. The Turinese Paolo Maria Paciaudi (1710–1785), who belonged to the Order of Saint Gaetano de Thiene and wrote a Costituzione per i regii studi (A Constitution for the Royal Studies, 1768), was the main promoter of the reform in Parma. The revival of the state’s role in the educational field can also be found in Naples in the illuminist views of Antonio Genovesi (1713–1796), teacher of metaphysics, ethics, and political economics (he is commonly considered to be the founder of this discipline). In his Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere (Discourse on the True Aim of Letters, 1753) and Lettere accademiche su la questione se sieno piu` felici gl’ignoranti che gli scienziati (Academic Letters Concerning the Question Whether Ignorames Are Happier than Scientists, 1764), he warned that bad legislation, and not 1935

UNIVERSITIES civilization, can be the sole cause of the decay of values. The revival of universities, away from the influence of local authorities and with a stronger prestige replaced the ancien re´gime paradigm of college and its ministerial origins with the more martial boarding school and its military origins, typical of the Napoleonic age. Due to the lack of political unity in Italy, the geographical gap, especially the one between urban and countryside areas, was so strong that it became, in the decades following the Restoration, the subject most consistent with the formation of a proper ‘‘national’’ identity. From the ideals promoted by Gian Domenico Romagnosi (1761–1835), through to the reflections of his pupils Carlo Cattaneo (1802–1869) and Cesare Cantu` (1804–1895), and up to Francesco De Sanctis’ educational project for a united Italy, the university participates in the transformation of the nation’s political institutions, but it also inherits its basic problems and contradictions. These problems stem from the disparity between a low literacy rate and the numerous university centers that were the result of the complex system of small states that had existed before unification. Until the late eighteenth century, the language of teaching was Latin. The pursuit of sciences was discouraged by both the state and the church. In 1859, the Casati Law laid down that teachers could lose their jobs should they transgress the truth upon which religion and morality rest. Symbolic for the purpose of national unity and preparation for modernity is Giosue` Carducci’s academic appointment to professor of Italian literature at Bologna in 1860, which best represented the national character of the universities of a united Italy. Minister of Education Terenzio Mamiani Della Rovere appointed him, in lieu of Monsignor Gaetano Golfieri, who had refused to swear a fidelity oath to the king of Italy, and after the refusal of Giovanni Prati. The reputation of Carducci’s eloquence and teaching quickly increased the number of students within the Facolta` di Lettere, thus creating the kind of school Italy considered necessary after its unification. This is testified by the names of many of his pupils: Giovanni Pascoli (who inherited his chair in 1906), Renato Serra, Manara Valgimigli, Guido Mazzoni, Severino Ferrari, Giovanni Federzoni, and Giuseppe Albini, among others. Before achieving an international acclaim, university teaching seemed to be Luigi Pirandello’s destiny following his education at Rome University under the Romance philologist Ernesto Monaci. 1936

However, after a misunderstanding with Dean Onorato Occioni, professor of Latin and former teacher of Gabriele D’Annunzio, Pirandello transferred to Bonn where he studied under Wendelin Foerster, a pupil of Friedrich Christian Diez, the founder of the discipline. This German spiritual apprenticeship, together with an emerging critical conscience, is reflected in Pirandello’s most important philological essay of this period, Petrarca a Colonia (Petrarch in Colonia, 1889). Pirandello’s university career began in 1897 at the Istituto Superiore Femminile di Magistero in Rome, where he was appointed to the chair in linguistics and stylistics, formerly held by the poet Giuseppe Ma`ntica (1865–1907). Another literary school was founded by Arturo Graf (1848–1913) at the University of Turin, where he was professor of Italian from 1882 to 1907. Among his pupils was the influential critic Attilio Momigliano (1883–1952). In this school, a lively debate took place on positivistic determinism replacing Romantic historicism and, between the research of the sources and philological analysis, the Turin circle became the most prestigious center of the ‘‘historical method school.’’ In 1883, the journal Giornale storico della letteratura italiana was established. During the Fascist ventennium, the Giovanni Gentile reform (1923) strengthened academic elitism in ways that prevented the democratization of university education. In 1931, the Italian government demanded that all university professors swear loyalty to the National Party. Only about 20 did not. But the most significant date concerning the relationship between the university as a state institution and its professors is 5 September 1938, when the Royal Decree (Law XVI, no. 1390) was ratified. It addressed ‘‘race defence in the Fascist school.’’ As a consequence, Jewish students and teachers were expelled from Italian schools and universities. This law affected, among others, Momigliano (replaced in Florence by Giuseppe De Robertis), Mario Fubini (who, under Fascist orders, refused to have his Arian assistant Plinio Carli sign his own national edition of Ugo Foscolo works), Aron Benvenuto Terracini, and Cesare Musatti (the founder of the Freudian school in Italy). During the Republic of Salo` (1943–1945), and under German occupation, Concetto Marchesi (1878–1957), Latinist and chancellor at the University of Padua, incited students to join the Resistance and the fight for liberation. Finally, it is worth mentioning the influence of Benedetto Croce from outside the university

UNIVERSITIES system. In 1938, the very same year the racial laws were issued, Croce published, in his review La critica, an epistle on the defense of the Jews by Antonio de Ferrariis, also known as Il Galateo (1444–1516/1517), without translating it from humanistic Latin. The philosopher implies through Il Galateo’s teaching that truth overcomes prejudice and ignorance. At a time when this humanistic lesson is betrayed, the truth of action is combined with the dignity of letters: ‘‘Sine litteris nec reges, nec duces, nec milites, nec classes, nec ipsi piratae suo munere fungi possent’’ (Without letters neither kings, nor captains, nor soldiers, nor fleets, nor pirates themselves can act) (Antonio de Ferrariis, ‘‘De dignitate disciplinarum ad Pancratium,’’ in La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento, edited by Eugenio Garin, 1982). It thus appears that Walter Benjamin’s teaching on the role of literature is already being accepted. Benjamin, who himself never succeeded in enrolling in a university, a few years earlier in 1931 suggested that the presentation of works in the time that has produced them has also to occur ‘‘in the time that knows them, i.e. ours’’ (‘‘Storia della letteratura e scienza della letteratura,’’ in Scritti 1930–1931, 2002). STEFANO TOMASSINI Further Reading Arnaldi, Girolamo (editor), Le origini dell’Universita`, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974. Benjamin, Walter, ‘‘Storia della letteratura e scienza della letteratura,’’ (1931), in Opere complete, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenha¨user, vol. 4, Scritti 1930–1931, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Benzoni, Gino, Gli affanni della cultura: Intellettuali e potere nell’Italia della Controriforma, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. Bobbio, Norberto, ‘‘Concetto Marchesi e la Resistenza all’Universita` di Padova,’’ in Trent’anni di storia italiana (1915–1945), edited by Franco Antonicelli, Turin: Einaudi, 1975. Brizzi, Gian Paolo (editor), La ‘‘Ratio studiorum’’: Modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti tra Cinque e Seicento, Rome: Bulzoni, 1981. Calogero, Guido, ‘‘Universita`,’’ in Enciclopedia italiana: edizione 1949, vol. 34, Rome: Treccani, 1950.

Carducci, Giosue`, ‘‘Del rinnovamento letterario in Italia,’’ in Bozzetti critici e discorsi letterari, Livorno: Vigo, 1876. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Un’epistola del Galateo in difesa degli ebrei,’’ in La critica, 36 (1938): 71–76. Finzi, Roberto, L’universita` italiana e le leggi antiebraiche, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997. Fumaroli, Marc, L’aˆge de l’e´loquence: Rhe´torique et «res literaria» de la Renaissance au seuil de l’e´poque classique, 1st ed. 1980, Paris: Albin Michel, 1994. Garin, Eugenio (editor), La disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento, 1st ed. 1947, Rome: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1982. Garin, Eugenio, L’educazione in Europa (1400–1600): Problemi e programmi, Bari: Laterza, 1966. Hamon, Philippe, ‘‘Tra Parigi e Urbino,’’ in Le immagini della critica: Conversazioni di teoria letteraria, edited by Ugo M. Olivieri, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003. La Penna, Antonio, ‘‘Universita` e istruzione pubblica,’’ in Storia d’Italia, edited by Ruggiero Romano and Corrado Vivanti, vol. 5, pt. 2, I documenti, Turin: Einaudi, 1973. Le Goff, Jacques, Tempo della Chiesa e tempo del mercante: E altri saggi sul lavoro e la cultura nel Medioevo, Turin: Einaudi, 1977. Le Goff, Jacques, ‘‘Alle origini del lavoro intellettuale in Italia: I problemi del rapporto fra la letteratura, l’universita` e le professioni,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1. Il letterato e le istituzioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Manacorda, Giuseppe, Storia delle scuole in Italia: Il medioevo, 2 vols., Milan: Sandron, 1913. Ossola, Carlo, ‘‘L’insegnamento dell’italiano come ‘‘istituzione,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 2, Produzione e consumo, Turin: Einaudi, 1983. Ossola, Carlo, ‘‘La storia della letteratura: Una scrittura di genere,’’ in L’italianistica: Introduzione allo studio della letteratura e della lingua italiana, edited by Giorgio Barberi Squarotti et alii., Turin: Utet, 1992. Raimondi, Ezio, ‘‘Italianistica ed Europa,’’ in Letteratura e identita` nazionale, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Ricuperati, Giuseppe, ‘‘Universita` e scuola in Italia,’’ in Letteratura italiana, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, vol. 1, Il letterato e le istituzioni, Turin: Einaudi, 1982. Sangalli, Maurizio, ‘‘Di Paolo Beni e di una riforma dello Studio di Padova (1619),’’ in Studi veneziani, 43 (2001): 57–134. Villoslada, Riccardo G., Storia del Collegio Romano dal suo inizio (1551) alla soppressione della Compagnia di Gesu` (1773), Rome: Pontificiae Universitatis Gregorianae, 1954. Weiss, Roberto, ‘‘Universita`,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, edited by Vittore Branca, Turin: Utet, 1973.

1937

UTOPIAN LITERATURE

UTOPIAN LITERATURE There are two prevailing definitions of the widely polysemic term utopia: ou-topia as no-place, a site of social reform that does not exist in reality, and eu-topia as a good-place, an escape into imagination. The term was first used in these two ways by St. Thomas More (1478–1535) in his De optimo rei publicae statu deque insula Utopia (Utopia, 1516). In Italian culture the interpretations of utopia vary according to the particular historical and geographical context. Ou-topia became a term of positive criticism only after Thomas More. Still, the utopian mode of thought can be traced back to De republica (The Republic, 54–51 BC) by Marc Tullius Cicero, the author who introduced Ancient Greek philosophy to Rome. After Cicero the realistic moral thought of the Latin world gave rise to medieval theological history, which is eschatologically founded on ideas of universal significance. Thus, the mystics of the twelfth and thirteenth century, such as the major theological historians Anselmo d’Aosta and Bonaventura da Bagnoregio, wrote in the Augustinian philosophical tradition. The latter, on the other hand, originates from De civitate dei (The City of God, 413–426) by Saint Augustine, who was influenced by Platonic thought. In this work, St. Augustine opposes a civitas terrena (a city of Man) to a civitas dei, and, thus, finds a basis for Christian spiritualism in the discrepancy between the real world and an ideal universe. This essentially Platonic core of utopian thought remains present even in the most modern utopia. During the Renaissance, Platonic thought often inspired the philosophical and literary works of the Italian Humanists. The mystical poem La citta` di vita (The City of Life, 1464) by Matteo Palmieri (1406–1475), who denounces the crisis of the civil Humanism, is an example of such writing. In his political treatise Della vita civile (Of Civic Life, 1431–1438), Palmieri, who was a prominent diplomatic figure in the Medici court, outlines the new figure of the citizen active in public affairs. In this endeavor, he is deeply influenced by Cicero’s De officiis, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria, Gellius, and Varro, whose ideas have a significant aspect of public utility. Neoplatonic thought was, furthermore, developed by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), 1938

whose Theologia platonica (Platonic Theology, 1482) is the work of greatest cultural significance from the Laurentian age. The influence of Ficino is also evident in Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola’s De hominis dignitate (Of Human Dignity, 1487). This book presents an exemplary description of the utopia of the Renaissance man, a creature of greatness and privilege in the order of the universe. A number of magnificent utopian works about imaginary places were also created during the Renaissance. Luigi Pulci’s Morgante, Matteo Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, and Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso present the richest examples of imaginary utopian space. In Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, the castle of the wizard Atlante, where the inner world of the characters is illusorily projected, and the voyage of Astolfo to the Moon on the Hippogryph represent some of the highest achievements in the writing style of the utopia of the fantastic. This eu-topic movement of the Italian Renaissance, still imposing in the splendor of the fine arts, came to an abrupt end with the death of Lorenzo, il Magnifico in 1492 and the expulsion of Piero De’ Medici from Florence in November 1494. In an age of political decline, utopian thinking took a different turn. The Ferrarese Dominican Girolamo Savonarola (1452–1498), the passionate advocate of the burning of all vanities, proposed a popular republic in harmony with the early Christian utopian worldview. After Pico Della Mirandola and Savonarola, Giovanni Nesi wrote the Oraculum de novo saeculo (Of the New Age, 1497), inspired by the prophecy of Calabrian monk Gioacchino Da Fiore (ca. 1130–1202). The latter had foretold the appearance of an ordo iustorum, which would rule in a third age, that of the Holy Spirit (the age of monastic contemplation and church reform), following the ages of the Father (the Law) and the Son (the Gospels), in which the Old and the New Testament ruled. With this prophecy, Gioacchino Da Fiore influenced the heretical millenarian utopias in the following centuries as well, thus marking the writing even of Dante, Petrarch, Cola di Rienzo, and Tommaso Campanella. A utopian writer of the sixteenth century, Anton Francesco Doni (1513–1574) criticizes the

UTOPIAN LITERATURE contradictions inherent in the culture of the Renaissance in his I marmi (Marbles, 1552–1553), in which he imagines himself as a big bird reporting conversations overheard on the steps of the Duomo of Florence, and in his I mondi (Worlds, 1552–1553). He revives the myth of the golden age and writes about an ideal city founded on the equality of its citizens. At the same time Francesco Patrizi da Cherso (1529–1597) writes the treatise La citta` felice (The Happy City, 1553), inspired by Platonic thought. Patrizi is also the author of Nova de universis philosophia (Concerning a New Philosophy of the Universe, 1591), a work cast off by the Index for its innovative anti-Aristotelian spirit. Likewise, Giordano Bruno’s De infinito (Of Infinity, 1583) offers new insight into utopian literature. In it, Bruno endows philosophy with the task to rebuild the life of men by directing it toward nature. In this period, one might also mention Ortensio Lando (ca. 1508–1553), who disclaims the idea of a European visiting utopia in his Commentario delle piu` notabili e monstruose cose d’Italia e altri luoghi (Commentary on the Most Notable and Monstrous Things in Italy and Elsewhere, 1548). After Plato, St. Thomas More, Bernardino Telesio, and Bruno, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) also designates the philosopher, the Prince Priest, named Sun or Metaphysician, as the most suitable leader to rule over in both spiritual and temporal matters. In his naturalistic La citta` del sole (The City of the Sun, 1602), Campanella gives an eloquent presentation of the decline of Renaissance culture. Although the periodical Il caffe` (1764–1766), which was founded in Milan by Pietro and Alessandro Verri, and the works of Cesare Beccaria are important contributions to the Italian tradition of utopian literature, it is difficult to speak of any significant developments of this genre during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, while the writer and adventurer Giovanni Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798) acquired great popularity abroad, hardly any ethical or philosophical significance can be attributed to his utopian novels such as the bulky romance in French, Icosameron (1788). Likewise, Pietro Chiari’s Le isole della fortuna (The Isles of Fortune, 1774) did not make a significant mark on the tradition of utopian literature and the author remains more famous for his theater and his bitter polemic with Carlo Goldoni rather than for his utopian reflections. Finally, the short story ‘‘Racconto dell’isola’’ (A Tale from the Island) by writer and journalist Giovanni Papini

(1881–1956) or L’anno 3000 (The Year 3000, 1897) by anthropologist Paolo Mantegazza (1831– 1910) propose an optimistic Darwinian utopia praising scientific progress rather anachronistically in the age of the crisis of positivism. In this context, the didactic Rousseauistic fable La colonia felice (The Happy Colony, 1878) by Carlo Dossi (1849– 1910), the most inventive of the Scapigliatura novelists, also has little philosophical significance. Similarly, the Italian twentieth century does not offer a truly utopian literary mainstream. There are, however, occasional examples of rather rich fantastic utopias. These include the works of authors concerned with social and historical issues as well as ones who have assigned a vital part of their poetics to utopian writing. Belmoro by Corrado Alvaro falls into the first category. An unfinished novel, published posthumously in 1957, this work was deeply influenced by Gioacchino Da Fiore and Campanella. Yet, unlike Gioacchino Da Fiore, Alvaro foresees a catastrophic future for men. Alvaro’s dystopian fantasy of an overstructured consumer society traces the development of science after a supposed third world war, which is believed to bring out a negative charge whose destructive effect may only be moderated through the power of love. On the other end, other writers, such as leftwing poet and novelist Paolo Volponi (1924–1994), stress the contradictions inherent in the industrial world. His utopian works La macchina mondiale (The Global Machine, 1965), Il pianeta irritabile (The Irritable Planet, 1978), and Le mosche del capitale (The Flies of Capitalism, 1989) become exemplary cases in the debates about literature and society. Volponi, who has lived through the economic boom of the 1960s, is a spokesman of the mainstream of the Italian literature of commitment that deals with the relationship of intellectuals with the capitalist world. Also Luigi Pirandello gives a certain utopian turn to his last works, while preserving their relativist substratum. By confronting mythos and logos, Pirandello creates utopias of the human consciousness in the context of a deep historical crisis that leads to the collapse of any community project. His La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1926), for instance, rehabilitates the shattered myth of the family through the positive universal image of the mother. At the end, the mother emerges from the waters of a metaphorical wreck of life, carrying her child in her arms as a symbol of perpetual regeneration. Lazzaro (Lazarus, 1929), on the other hand, offers the utopia of a mystic catharsis presented through the character of Lucio Spina, while I giganti della montagna (The Giants 1939

UTOPIAN LITERATURE of the Mountain, 1933) represents the utopia of art in opposition to obtuse materialism. In conclusion, by going back to Voltaire’s contes philosophiques, Italo Calvino introduces certain critical elements of utopian thought in Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics, 1965), Le citta` invisibili (Invisible Cities, 1972), and Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1979), while Giuseppe Ungaretti, who pursues the utopia of Mallarme´’s absolute in his poetry, introduces Platonic themes and the myth of Eden in his Sentimento del tempo (Sentiment of Time, 1933). His later collections, such as La terra promessa (The Promised Land, 1950), contrast a desert of material things to poetry. Man remains a curious wonderer in search of a promised land. PAOLA MARTINUZZI

1940

Further Reading Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio (editor), Mondi impossibili: L’utopia. Teoria e storia dei generi letterari, Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1990. Bloch, Ernst, Geist der Utopie, 1st ed. 1918, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1964. Bloch, Ernst, Das Prinzip Hoffnung: In funf Teilen, 1st ed. 1954, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959. Letteratura italiana e utopia, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1995. Lunati, Giancarlo, Dall’utopia alla progettualita`, RomeBari: Laterza, 1997. Mumford, Lewis, The Story of Utopias, New York: The Viking Press, 1922. Petrucciani, Alberto, La finzione e la persuasione: L’utopia come genere letterario, Rome: Bulzoni, 1983. Schiavone, Giuseppe, Democrazia e modernita`: L’apporto dell’utopia, Turin: UTET, 2001.

V PATRIZIA VALDUGA (1953–) theoretical reverberations of her work. Integral to the varied interests is her activity as translator of John Donne, Molie`re, Mallarme`, Vale`ry, Kantor, Beckett, and Shakespeare. The key themes in Valduga’s poems are love, death, and the power of seduction. These may be considered the focal components of her libretto, which she orchestrates with great rhetoric skill and accomplished personal metric. Love is not only a roguish and deceitful eroticism but also a translation of the quasi-physical struggle that takes place in language. Medicamenta opens by acknowledging the power that words have to ‘‘shape destiny.’’ The erotic interchanges play out in her verses as the tragedy of splitting a common language between the two sexes. Valduga’s poetry uses the erotic language to narrate human suffering and the concrete nature of pain as, for example, in Donna di dolori (The Lady of Sorrow, 1991), imbibed by a sense of passionate mourning, and in Corsia degli incurabili (The Ward of Terminal Patients, 1996), relating the poet’s experience in the hospital. Valduga’s experimental nature uses the past, feeds on her refined cultural knowledge, and vindicates the right to ‘‘steal’’ verses from elsewhere and organically ‘‘repossesses’’ them in her work. She is thus one of the most efficient interpreters of language and its crisis in modern poetry. The poetry of Patrizia Valduga is delicately peremptory: The poetic ‘‘I’’ is remarkably decentralized, and the meta-poetic tangle characteristic of most twentieth-century poetry is completely absent. Her diction is self-confident,

Patrizia Valduga is considered one of the most significant contemporary Italian poets. She was encouraged to pursue poetry by Andrea Zanzotto, and she was later appreciated for the individuality of her voice by Giovanni Raboni, who also became her partner. Valduga’s body of work is vast and complex. Starting with her first collection Medicamenta (Remedies, 1982) until the most recent Lezioni d’amore (Love Lessons, 2004)—with which she breaks her 25-year commitment to hendecasyllabic verse into the settenario—her work focuses on the relationship between the body and writing, using the finest metric forms. She chooses closed forms as a sort of indispensable cage of poetic self-psychoanalysis. The canons most used in her poetry are the rediscovered and improved tools of the great poetic tradition: sonnets, quatrains, madrigals, sestets, octaves, and Dante’s tercets. The poem La tentazione (Temptation, 1985) is composed of ten cantos of 100 hendecasyllables each, in rhymed tercets. Valduga’s poetry engages in a loving dialogue with the Italian lyrical tradition: from Dante and the classic Petrarchan tradition to baroque poetry, the Jesuits, and Pascoli, Rebora, D’Annunzio. This serves as grounds for Alfondo Berardinelli’s description of her work in terms of her demoniac-magic possession and medium-like evocation of past metrical forms (‘‘La Poesia,’’ 2001). From another perspective, the influence of thinkers such as Matte Blanco, Derrida, and Kantor, as well as her formative studies with Francesco Orlando, substantiates the complex 1941

PATRIZIA VALDUGA guided by a personal and independent quest, from which transpires the impossibility of continuing to write poetry in the tradition of Eugenio Montale. Together with other significant contemporary voices (Patrizia Cavalli, Ermanno Krumm, Gianni D’Elia, Fabio Pusterla, Gabriele Frasca, Bianca Tarozzi, Riccardo Held), Patrizia Valduga is responsible for a drastic change in the development of contemporary Italian poetry. Her rhetorical skills, her formal work with poetry, keep her at a distance from the poet in a lyrical role. With the essay Per una definizione di ‘‘poesia’’ at the conclusion of Quartine: Seconda centuria (Quatrains: Two Hundred, 2001), Valduga articulated the progress of her poetic formation: from poetry as enchantment to poetry as thoughtful feeling, as a means to resist, or experience death, to be exposed to the ritual of death, poetry that transforms from choral song to personal therapeutic ritual. Her works, throughout their evolution, have potential as intense and involving performances tending toward the ability to declaim and monologue. Her poetry is theatrical: ‘‘Donna di dolori’’ is a proper monologue conceived to be read in public; in fact it was staged by Luca Ronconi at the ‘‘Teatro Carignano’’ of Torino in 1992. Other works that have been brought to the stage are ‘‘La Tentazione,’’ at the ‘‘Teatro Trianon’’ in Rome, directed by B. Mazzali (1986), and ‘‘Corsia degli incurabili’’ at the ‘‘Teatro Santa Chiara’’ in Brescia, directed by G. Varetto (1997). In ‘‘Manfred’’ (2003) and in ‘‘Lezioni d’amore,’’ even more than in the series ‘‘Quartine,’’ the reader is assailed by fast-paced waves of images; what is most striking is not the physical presence of bodies in the poems but rather the discovery that sounds and words are the real protagonists. Valduga’s poetry reaches its readers in its immediacy, impresses in its difficulty, and is unmistakably different from that of all other contemporary poets. Patrizia Valduga is aware of the impossibility of repeating the past just as much as she is aware of the necessity of form as a sort of prison in which one can achieve poetic freedom; the paradoxical cohabitation of the fundamental ideas in her credo represent the author’s sense of alienation from her own time.

Biography Patrizia Valduga was born in Castelfranco Veneto (Treviso) 20 May 1953. Following her graduation from high school, she enrolled for three years at the school of medicine at the Universita` di Padova; she then transferred to the Universita` di Venezia, where 1942

she attended the courses of the French scholar and theorist Francesco Orlando and graduated summa cum laude. She established the monthly Poesia, which she directed for a year, 1988, and contributed to various magazines and newspapers (in particular La repubblica). Valduga lives in Milan with the poet Giovanni Raboni. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMANN Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Almanacco dello specchio,’’ 1981. ‘‘Medicamenta,’’ 1982. ‘‘La tentazione,’’ 1985. ‘‘Medicamenta e altri medicamenta,’’ 1989. ‘‘Donna di dolori,’’ 1991. ‘‘Requiem: Per mio padre morto il 2 dicembre 1991,’’ 1994; enlarged edition, 2002. ‘‘Cento quartine e altre storie d’amore,’’ 1997. ‘‘Prima antologia,’’ 1998. ‘‘Quartine: Seconda Centuria,’’ 2001. ‘‘Manfred,’’ 2003. ‘‘Lezioni d’amore,’’ 2004.

Plays Corsia degli incurabili, 1996.

Translations Donne, John, Canzoni e sonetti, 1985. Mallarme´, Stephane, Poesie, 1991. Kantor, Tadeusz, Stille Nacht, 1991. Vale´ry, Paul, Il cimitero marino, 1995. Molie`re, Il Misantropo, 1995. Molie`re, Il malato immaginario, 1995. Shakespeare, William, Riccardo III, 1998. Beckett, Samuel, Notte di grazia scendi, 1999.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘La parola immedicata,’’ in Medicamenta e altri medicamenta, Turin: Einaudi, 1989. Berardinelli, Alfonso, ‘‘La poesia,’’ in Storia della Letteratura italiana. Il Novecento: Scenari di fine secolo, edited by Nino Borsellino and Lucio Felici, vol. 1, Milan: Garzanti, 2001. Canali, Luca, ‘‘Cento quartine e altre storie d’amore,’’ Poesia (September 1997), 69–70. Cortellessa, Andrea, ‘‘Il trucco e` l’anima,’’ L’Apostrofo, 6:16 (2002), 9–11 (special issue on Valduga). Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Dieci canti per una tentazione,’’ L’espresso, 1 December 1985, 209. Frasca, Gabriele, ‘‘Genealogie della poesia nel secondo Novecento,’’ Moderna, 3:2 (2001), 44–46. Ghidetti, Enrico, and Giorgio Luti, Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana del Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 1997. Raboni, Giovanni, ‘‘Prefazione,’’ in Medicamenta, Parma: Guanda, 1982. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Incontri con l’autore: Intervista a Patrizia Valduga,’’ in Vaghe stelle dell’orsa: L’ ‘‘io’’ e il ‘‘tu’’ nella lirica italiana, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Marsilio, 2005.

DIEGO VALERI

DIEGO VALERI (1887–1976) Diego Valeri was a poet, translator, literary critic, and essayist. He was a writer who, in the words of Ruggero Jacobbi, was gifted with ‘‘a strong musical sensibility...mediated through the symbolist experience’’ (L’avventura del novecento, 1984). His poetry was influenced by Giovanni Pascoli and the Crepuscolari poets, influences filtered through the breadth of Valeri’s engagement with modern culture and enriched by his interest in the French poets, Mallarme`, Verlaine, Apollinaire, and Vale´ry. Goethe, whose Iphigenie auf Tauris he translated in 1954, was also a major influence. A member of the Accademia dei Lincei, Valeri counted Eugenio Montale, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Riccardo Bacchelli, Carlo Carra`, and Aldo Palazzeschi as his friends. Valeri’s poetic production spans from 1910 to 1975, even though he began writing earlier. His poetry, which increasingly addressed the realities of everyday life and his personal truth, culminated in the 1970 volume, Verita` di uno (One’s Truth). Valeri gave us an image of humanity horrified by absurdity, oppressed by anguish, but determined to communicate the shame of contemporary history. Valeri’s work is rich in landscapes, people, and objects, all depicted in the manner of the great Venetian paintings of Titian, Tiepolo, Veronese, and, in particular, Guidi (Valeri’s contemporary). In Venice, Valeri found a perfection that is not confined to itself but functions as a symbol of every other perfection. Venice was for him a place where opposites were finally reconciled in a superior harmony. There were two, ten, a hundred Venices, as in a set of Chinese boxes where each image followed the previous one. Venice was the city rising from the sea, but also the city admired from the sea or hiding from the sea. It was a city of joy, of colors, of flashing lights, of silence, of melancholy, of shadows. Valeri also wrote in French with the dual purpose of meeting Europe on its own terms and moving away from Italian regionalism, the latter motive putting him at odds with Italian cultural circles. His French works demonstrate the permeability of linguistic frontiers and the translatability of his poetic images. Nevertheless, Valeri did not

embrace the avant-garde, since he chose a form in which the poet is no longer the privileged protagonist, a shaman celebrating rites, a prophet communicating divine suggestions. There is no discernible ego in Valeri’s poetry. His abandonment of his mother tongue was partial proof of his abandonment of the ego; he did not reveal any personal detail that could identify him, not even his citizenship. Instead, his persona was that of a neutral witness whose knowledge of the French language, widespread in Italy before the end of World War II and indeed mandatory in diplomatic circles, was a sign of his international perspective. Valeri’s combining of Italian and French literary traditions emulated the mutual ‘‘contamination’’ of Venetian and French literature during the Middle Ages, among whose products were the Franco-Venetian cantari (narrative verses recited to music). As a translator, Valeri resembled a traveller who brings back objects, thoughts, and memoirs of his voyage to France to his native language and culture. He suggested as much in the introduction to I lirici francesi (The French Lyricists, 1960), selections of the best of French poetry. For Valeri, the translator must know how to make the necessary adjustments and compromises in translating works from one language to another without giving up his integrity as a writer. Accordingly, if he translates poetry, he will remain a poet. It may happen on occasion that the translation surpasses in poetic beauty the translated text; in such a case Valeri spoke of pretext rather than text. As a critic, Valeri maintained a low profile. He considered criticism more as an act of reading than of judgment. The critic was for him a mediator whose main purpose is to help the reader recognize the connections between literature and life. His own criticism included authors of varying styles, forms, and attitudes, ranging from De Noailles to Colette, from Vale´ry to Cocteau and Cendrars, from Mazeline to Fernandez. Among his first critical writings Montaigne (1925) figures prominently. His reading of Montaigne was free of ideology and moral judgment. Valeri recognized that Montaigne was able to see humanity’s dark and awful truths, as no one before had done so in such a clear manner. 1943

DIEGO VALERI

Biography Diego Valeri was born in Piove di Sacco (Padua) on 25 January 1887. He graduated in literature and became professor of French and Italian literature at the University of Padua. After the fall of Fascism (25 July 1943), he directed the newspaper Il Gazzettino. In 1959, he won the Etna-Taormina Prize for Il flauto a due canne; in 1967 the Viareggio Prize for the collection Poesie; in 1975 the Frascati and the Ibico Reggino prizes for his poetic work. In 1956, he received the Acade´mie Francaise prize for Jeux de mots and in 1964 the Prix Ile-Saint-Louis for his work as translator. In 1965, he received the degree Honoris causa from the University of Geneva. In 1968, he became a member of the Institut de France of the Acade´mie des Beaux-Arts and received the Legion of Honor shortly thereafter. Valeri died in Rome on 27 November 1976. MARIANO D’AMORA Selected Works Collections Poesie: 1910–1960, Milan: Mondadori, 1962. Poesie scelte, edited by Carlo Della Corte, Milan: Mondatori, 1977. My Name on the Wind (selected poems), translated by Michael Palma, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Poetry ‘‘Monodia d’amore,’’ 1908. ‘‘Le gaie tristezze,’’ 1913. ‘‘Umana,’’ 1916. ‘‘Crisalide,’’ 1919. ‘‘Ariele,’’ 1924. ‘‘Il campanellino,’’ 1928. ‘‘Scherzo finale,’’ 1937. ‘‘Poesie vecchie e nuove,’’ 1939. ‘‘Tempo che muore,’’ 1942. ‘‘Terzo tempo,’’ 1954. ‘‘Jeux de mots,’’ 1956. ‘‘Metamorfosi dell’angelo,’’ 1957. ‘‘Il flauto a due canne,’’ 1958. ‘‘I nuovi giorni,’’ 1961. ‘‘La sera,’’ 1963. ‘‘Poesie piccole,’’ 1965. ‘‘Amico dei pittori,’’ 1967. ‘‘Verita` di uno,’’ 1970. ‘‘Calle del vento,’’ 1975.

Fiction Colli euganei, 1932. Fantasie veneziane, 1934. Guida sentimentale a Venezia, 1942; as A Sentimental Guide to Venice, translated by Cecil C. Palmer, 1955. Citta` materna, 1944. Taccuino svizzero, 1947.

1944

Padova, i secoli, le ore, 1967. Giardinetto, 1970. Tempo veneziano, 1973. Invito al Veneto, 1977. La domenica col poeta, 1979.

Essays Poeti francesi del nostro tempo, 1924. Montaigne, 1925. Pre´cis historique et antologie de la litte´rature franc¸aise, 1940. Saggi e note di letteratura francese moderna, 1941. Cinque secoli di pittura veneta, 1945. Il teatro comico veneziano, 1949. Il simbolismo francese da Nerval a Re´gnier, 1954. Da Racine a Picasso: Nuovi studi francesi, 1956. Tempo e poesia, 1962. Conversazioni italiane, 1968. Riflessioni di un letterato sul problema della morte, 1973.

Translations Gustave Flaubert, La signora Bovary, 1936. Guy De Maupassant, Maupassant, 1942. Liriche tedesche, 1942. Romanzi e racconti d’amore del Medio Evo francese, 1944. Stendhal, Il rosso e il nero, 1946. Jean De la Fontane, Quaranta favole, 1952. Antichi poeti provenzali, 1954. J. W. von Goethe, Cinquanta poesie, 1954. J. W. von Goethe, Ifigenia in Tauride, 1954; new edition, 1958. Lirici tedeschi, 1955. Heinrich Heine, Intermezzo, 1956. Paul Vale´ry, Il cimitero sul mare, 1958. Franc¸ois Villon, Cinque ballate, 1958. Lirici tedeschi, 1959. Lirici francesi, 1960; new edition, 1964. Quaderno francese del secolo, 1965. Molie`re, Il signor di Pourcegnac, 1967.

Other Carteggio Valeri-Valgimigli: 1928–1963, edited by Maria Vittoria Grezzo, 1984. Carteggio 1934–1972 (with Aldo Palazzeschi), edited by Gloria Manghetti, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004.

Further Reading Bandini, Fernando, ‘‘Poesie di Diego Valeri,’’ in Poesia italiana del Novecento, edited by Piero Gelli and Gina Lagorio, Milan: Garzanti, 1980. Bettini, Sandro, Il colore di Diego Valeri, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1962. Camon, Ferdinando, Il mestiere di poeta, Milan: Garzanti, 1982. Calcaterra, Carlo, Con Guido Gozzano e altri poeti, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1944. Colliard, Lauro, Diego Valeri poeta francese, Turin: Edisco, 1961. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Intermezzo, Milan: Mondadori, 1963. Fasolo, Ugo (editor), Omaggio a Diego Valeri, Florence: Olschki, 1979.

LORENZO VALLA Fasolo, Ugo, L’opera poetica di Diego Valeri, Lugano: Cenobio, 1962. Jacobbi, Ruggero, L’avventura del novecento, Milan: Garzanti, 1984. Magrini, Giacomo, ‘‘Il sublime non negativo,’’ in Letteratura italiana del novecento: Bilancio di un secolo, edited by Alberto Asor Rosa, Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Manghetti, Gloria, La poesia del secondo Novecento, Milan: Vallardi, 1993.

Manghetti, Gloria, So la tua magia: e` la poesia. Diego Valeri, prime esperienze poetiche, 1908–1919, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1994. Piscopo, Ugo, Diego Valeri, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1985. Saba, Guido, Diego Valeri critico della letteratura francese, Urbino: Quattro Venti, 1987. Zambon, Vittorio, La poesia di Diego Valeri, Padua: Liviana, 1968.

LORENZO VALLA (CA. 1407–1457) Lorenzo Valla endures in history as one of the most unconventional and anti-authoritarian Humanists of his time. Taken as a whole, his works amount to a Copernican revolution within the Humanistic world, and his contribution to the genesis of the Reformation is yet to be fully assessed. Valla’s critical, rather than deferential, approach to all things ancient ushered Humanism as a whole into a new era. The epoch to which he belonged was populated by idiosyncratic individuals whose intransigence and contentiousness seem to be incompatible with the standard decorum and dialogism made famous by people like Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni. As a young man, Valla distinguished himself for a work (now lost) that already bore most of those spiritual and intellectual traits by which, through his example, most of the late fifteenth-century Humanism was identified. In this first work, De comparatione Ciceronis et Quintiliani (A Comparison of Cicero and Quintilian), Valla not only suggested that an alternative to Ciceronian eloquence may exist but also argued for the superiority of Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria as a more suitable paradigm for the studia humanitatis. Around 1429, when his early detractors denied him a much-desired post in the Roman Curia, Valla traveled north. In Piacenza, his ancestors’ hometown, he brought to completion the first redaction of De voluptate (On Pleasure, 1430). The views expressed in this work were undoubtedly very dear to the Roman Humanist, so much so that the dialogue was heavily edited throughout the years and reissued first with the title De vero falsoque bono (Of the True and False Good, 1433) and again over ten years later with the title De vero bono (Of the True Good, 1444–1449). In this polemic

work Valla exhaustively shaped his own moral philosophy vis-a`-vis the pervading Stoic inclinations of his colleagues. In the second more extended version, Valla chose three Lombard Humanists whose personality well reflected the Stoic, Epicurean, and Christian moral alternatives he wished to compare: Catone Sacco (1394–1397/1463), Maffeo Vegio (1407–1458), and Antonio da Rho (ca. 1398– 1540). Although some traits of Valla’s own position on the topic can be traced back to Vegio’s Epicurean outlook, as Charles Trinkaus noted, it is safe to say that Antonio’s particular brand of piety, sometimes defined as ‘‘Christian Epicureanism,’’ best represented Valla’s own stance (In Our Image and Likeness, 1970). In the first book of the dialogue, the ideal of Stoic honestas (uprightness) is contrasted with that of voluptas (pleasure) in favor of the latter. The conclusion is that voluptas is instinctual, natural, and common to both humans and animals, and so it must of necessity be good. Valla’s chief concern in the first part of the work was the devaluation of late Stoicism as it was epitomized by Boethius’s Consolatio Philosophiae. In Book II, the Epicurean criticism of the Stoic conception of virtue is extended to include a clear-cut rejection of the contemplative ideal of life found in Aristotle, considered too static and too little concerned with the realm of active human life and its pleasures to be viable. Finally, the defense of Christianity is articulated in the third and last book. Here Aristotle once again is the central figure, this time in order to refute his notion of virtue as a mean between two extremes. The purpose of Valla’s first mature work was that of demolishing all philosophical, as opposed to anthropological, interpretations of human virtue. 1945

LORENZO VALLA In 1433, Valla was forced to flee Pavia as a result of the polemic caused by one of his publications in which he severely criticized the juridical methods of his time and undermined the authority of the medieval jurist Bartolo of Sassoferrato. In the following years he resided in several Italian cities, including Milan and Florence, before finally settling in Naples in 1437 as the royal secretary of Alfonso of Aragon. At the court of King Alfonso, who at the time was at war with Pope Eugenius IV, Valla wrote some of his most important works including, given the circumstances, his De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, 1440) and the three books composing his chronicles Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum (The Deeds of Ferdinand, King of Aragon, 1445–1447). Other works belonging to this period are the De libero arbitrio (On Free Will, 1439), the Dialecticae disputationes (Dialectical Disputations, 1439), and the De professione religiosorum (On the Vows of the Religious, 1442). In the brief dialogue De libero arbitrio, Valla returned to his criticism of the Stoic philosopher Boethius, this time on the grounds of the possibility of reconciling God’s foreknowledge with the individual’s free will. The rather ambivalent conclusions arrived at by Valla would nonetheless grant him the esteem of key figures in the history of the Reformation, such as Erasmus and Luther, the latter seeing in his argument a most vital support to his own deterministic view of fate. However, the most original and as-of-yet underrated of Valla’s accomplishments occurred in the realm of formal dialectics. In his Dialecticae disputationes Valla argued for the substitution of Aristotelian (and scholastic) syllogistic logic by a nondeductive ratiocination founded on the rhetorical premises of persuasion and natural language. Valla’s criticism of the Aristotelian and Medieval dialectics—which became the cornerstone of Humanistic dialectics from Rudolph Agricola (ca. 1442–1485) to Peter Ramus (1515–1572)—is based on the assumption that most of the difficulties inherent in formal logic may be readily solved by taking into account grammar and syntax. Most of Valla’s work is dedicated to the numerical reduction of Aristotle’s transcendental and accidental categories. Valla’s simplification of the abstruseness of logic by means of philological analysis made him a precursor of twentieth-century linguistic theory. Valla put philology to a different use in De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio. The spuriousness of this famous document, 1946

which purported that Constantine had bequeathed the secular rule of the empire to Pope Sylvester, had already been effectively argued in the past, most notably by Nicholas of Cusa (ca. 1400–1464). Valla, however, gave proof of the falsity of this important document by means of a meticulous internal criticism and of the study of the diachronic variation of a word’s semantics and application. To be noted is also the Humanist psychological argument. By deploying the characteristic common sense to which many Humanists owed their reputation, Valla sarcastically demonstrated that certain words could not have been spoken by certain people in certain circumstances. Despite the antipapal gist of the treatise and repeated indictments by the Inquisition for his Epicurean and anti-Aristotelian views, he managed to return to Rome under the protection of Pope Nicholas V, who succeeded Eugenius IV in 1448. Nicholas appointed Valla papal scribe and professor of rhetoric at the University of Rome, positions that he retained until his death in 1457. In Rome, Valla composed his last major work, Collatio Novi Testamenti (Collation of the New Testament, 1449), and completed the six books of the Elegantiae linguae Latinae (Elegances of the Latin Language, 1449) that he had begun around 1435. Although the former inaugurated a new kind of exegesis dear to Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Elegantiae linguae Latinae is the work that granted Valla the greatest renown in his own time. After having subordinated the disciplines of philosophy, theology, and law to rhetoric throughout his career, he undertook to do the same with grammar. Believing as he did that the superiority of the culture of antiquity was due to the purity of its language, Valla set out to emend the literary authorities of the past in the attempt to recover the grammar and the syntax that was then current. In his preface to the sixth book of the Elegantiae linguae Latinae Valla famously wrote, ‘‘Errores maximorum virorum deprehendere, id vero quum doctissimi hominis est, tum opus utilissimum, et quo nullum dici possit utilius [...] Ita eum, qui emendat, nisi paucissima sunt, quae emendat, non inferiorem existimare debemus, quam ipsum illum inventorem, nec minorem ab illo, quam ab hoc percipi fructum’’ (To discover the errors of the greatest men, besides pertaining to men who are most instructed, is most useful, granted there is nothing more useful [...] Hence, we are not to value less he who corrects, as long as he limits his corrections, than the author himself, and the product we obtain from the former is not inferior to the

LORENZO VALLA one we get from the latter). These words, and the beliefs thereby maintained, underscore Valla’s entire career and are at the basis of the many controversies provoked by his works. Between 1452 and 1453, Poggio Bracciolini wrote five invectives against Valla, accusing him both personally and professionally, to which Valla answered with his Antidotum in Pogium (Antidote to Poggio, ca. 1453). This altercation and the offensive terms in which it was conducted are the greatest proof of Valla’s contribution to the reformation of the basic tenets of Humanistic thought and deportment. With and after Valla, Humanism was less a cultural movement and more of a personal attitude requiring redefinition by each thinker.

Biography

Dialecticae disputationes, 1439; critical edition in Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, 2 vols., by Gianni Zippel, 1982. De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, 1440; critical edition by Wolfram Setz, 1976; as The Treatise of Lorenzo Valla on the Donation of Constantine, translated by Christopher B. Coleman, 1993. De professione religiosorum, 1442; critical edition by Mariarosa Cortesi, 1986; as The Profession of the Religious, translated by Olga Zorzi Pugliese, 1985. Collatio Novi Testamenti, 1449; critical edition by Alessandro Perosa, 1970. Antidotum in Pogium, ca. 1453; as Antidotum primum: la prima Apologia contro Poggio Bracciolini, critical edition by Ari Wesseling, 1978.

Chronicles Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum, 1445–1447; critical edition by Ottavio Besomi, 1976.

Letters

Lorenzo Valla was born in Rome sometime around 1407, where he was educated by Giovanni Aurispa, among others. He traveled north to Piacenza, where his family originated, and then to Pavia, 1429. He became a professor of rhetoric at the University of Pavia, 1431, but was forced to leave Pavia because of a quarrel caused by one of his publications, 1433. He resided in many Italian cities, including Milan and Florence, and settled in Naples as the royal secretary of Alfonso of Aragon, 1435. He resided again in Rome under the protection of Pope Nicholas V, who appointed him papal scribe and professor of rhetoric at the University of Rome, 1448. Valla died on August 1, 1457. ROCCO RUBINI See also: Humanism Selected Works Collections Opera Omnia, edited by Eugenio Garin, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962.

Philosophical and Philological Treatises De voluptate, 1430; revised as De vero falsoque bono, 1433; revised as De vero bono, 1444–1449; critical edition by Maristella De Panizza Lorch, 1970; as On Pleasure: De Voluptate, translated by A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch, 1977. Elegantiae linguae Latinae, 1435–1449; as De Linguae Latinae Elegantia, critical medition by Santiago Lo´pez Moreda, 2 vols., 1999. De libero arbitrio, 1439; critical edition by Maria Anfossi, 1934; as Dialogue on Free Will, translated by Charles Trinkaus in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, edited by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., 1948.

Epistole, edited by Ottavio Besomi and Mariangela Regogliosi, 1984.

Further Reading Bentley, Jerry H., Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Besomi, Ottavio, and Mariangela Regoliosi (editors), Lorenzo Valla e L’umanesimo italiano, Padua: Antenore, 1986. Blanchard, Scott W., ‘‘The Negative Dialectic of Lorenzo Valla: A Study in the Pathology of Opposition,’’ Renaissance Studies, 14:2 (June), 149–189. Camporeale, Salvatore I., Lorenzo Valla: umanesimo, riforma e controriforma: studi e testi, Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2002. Fois, Mario, Il pensiero cristiano di Lorenzo Valla nel quadro storico-culturale del suo ambiente, Rome: Universita` Gregoriana, 1969. Fubini, Riccardo, Umanesimo e secolarizzazione da Petrarca a Valla, Rome: Bulzoni, 1990. Kristeller, Paul Oskar, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964. Lorch, Maristella, A Defence of Life: Valla’s Theory of Pleasure, Munich: W. Fink, 1985. Mack, Peter, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic, Leiden: Brill, 1993. Panizza, Letizia, ‘‘Lorenzo Valla’s De vero falsoque bono, Lactantius and Oratorical Scepticism,’’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 41 (1978), 76–107. Seigel, Jerrold E., Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. Trinkaus, Charles, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, Chicago and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970. Vasoli, Cesare, La dialettica e la retorica dell’Umanesimo: ‘‘Invenzione’’ e ‘‘Metodo’’ nella cultura del XV e XVI secolo, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1968.

1947

BENEDETTO VARCHI

BENEDETTO VARCHI (1503–1565) Benedetto Varchi is an eminent figure of the Florentine Renaissance. During his years in Florence and in exile, he became acquainted with the most renowned Humanists of his times, Annibal Caro, Pier Vettori, Pietro Bembo, and Sperone Speroni. In 1543, Cosimo I de’ Medici pardoned him and called him to teach in the Florentine academy to enhance the prestige of his lordship. In addition to bringing to Florence, the center of classical and neo-Platonic Humanism, the Aristotelian doctrines learned in Padua and Bologna and the linguistic theories of Pietro Bembo, Varchi also made a significant contribution to Renaissance culture with his clear exposition of the philosophical and literary doctrines of his times. Varchi’s most noteworthy prose works are the Lezioni sopra diverse materie poetiche e filosofiche (Lectures on Different Poetic and Philosophical Subjects), published in 1590, which collect his lectures at the Florentine academy. Here the author discussed literary and philosophical themes following the scholastic methodology of the quaestio, which was still in use in the centers of Aristotelianism where he had studied. Most of the lectures are commentaries on the poetry of Dante and Petrarch. Two important lectures had already appeared in 1549 as Due lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, nella prima delle quali si dichiara un sonetto di M. Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Nella seconda si disputa quale sia piu nobile arte la scultura, o la pittura (Two Lectures by Benedetto Varchi, in the First of Which Is Explained a Sonnet by Michelangelo. In the Second Is Discussed Whether Scultpure or Painting Is the Nobler Art). In the famous lecture on Michelangelo’s poem ‘‘Non ha l’ottimo artista’’ (The excellent artist does not have), probably aimed at convincing Michelangelo to return to Florence, Varchi exalted the work of artists, and particularly of the sculptor, as the art of sculptor is the closest to God’s creative work. The second lecture, on the paragone of the arts, a genre typical of the sixteenth-century artistic literature, casts significant light on issues of concern to Renaissance Humanists and artists. Here, Varchi compared poetry, sculpture, and painting by setting the visual arts within the framework of Aristotelian Ethics and argued that painting and sculpture are equivalent 1948

because they have a common goal (imitation of nature) and background (design). Ultimately, however, he seemed to judge sculpture superior to painting because it more effectively imitates divine creation and deemed poetry, with its capacity for grasping the inner life of its subjects, superior to both. In his attempt to elevate the visual arts to a nobler humanist status, Varchi collected in his paragone, as if in a dialogue, the written opinions of major contemporary artists: Bronzino, Cellini, Michelangelo, Pontormo, Francesco da San Gallo, Tasso, Tribolo, Vasari. Varchi’s most important historical work is the Storia Fiorentina (Florentine History, 1721), in 16 books, commissioned by Cosimo I in 1547 and covering the events from 1527, the year of the republican rebellion, to 1538. The main thesis of the Storia Fiorentina is that the Florentine people failed to restore the republic because they were betrayed by their leaders. Although it unsuccessfully attempts to imitate stylistically the magniloquence of ancient historical prose, the work is notable for the accuracy with which, in an attempt to produce an objective account of the facts, Varchi researched and documented his sources. His models were Polybius and Tacitus, but he also took inspiration from Giovanni Villani, Niccolo` Machiavelli, and Francesco Guicciardini. Another significant works is the dialogue L’Ercolano (1570), a treatise on the questione della lingua that Varchi wrote between 1560 and his death in defense of Annibal Caro against Ludovico Castelvetro. Caro argued that spoken language, which is alive and constantly enriched by new linguistic experiences, is superior to literary language. On the contrary, Castelvetro, following Bembo, defended the literary Tuscan language of the fourteenth century. Varchi tried to defend his friend Caro without departing from Bembo’s doctrine. Distinguishing between spoken and written language, and invoking the Quintilian criterion of the ‘‘usage,’’ he argued in favor of the Florentine spoken by the learned and ennobled by literary use. Varchi was a prolific author. His literary works show little originality and include several love and spiritual poems, almost entirely sonnets inspired by Bembian Petrarchism, as well as Latin poems, for

BENEDETTO VARCHI the most part unpublished. His play La Suocera (The Mother-in-Law, 1569) was modeled upon Terentius’ Hecyra. Among his orations, those dedicated to Lucrezia de’ Medici and the Cardinal Pietro Bembo and the funeral oration to Michelangelo Buonarroti are particularly significant. Varchi’s scientific treatises covered subjects as varied as alchemy, proportions, and games. He translated widely from Greek and Latin authors, including Ovid, Porphyrius, Boethius, and Seneca.

Before he could move to his father’s hometown, Varchi died in Florence on 18 December 1565. SUSANNA BARSELLA Selected Works Collections Opere, 2 vols., Trieste: Dalla sezione letterario-artistica del Lloyd austriaco, 1859–1859.

Essays

Biography Benedetto Varchi was born in Florence, 19 March 1503, to an important family from Montevarchi, near Florence. He studied with Guasparri Mariscotti da Marradi and Francesco Priscianese. At the age of 18, he moved to Pisa to study law. After 1524, he worked as a lawyer but soon abandoned the profession to devote himself to literary studies. He studied Provencal, Greek with Pier Vettori, and philosophy with Francesco Verino. His friendship with Annibal Caro began after the republican insurrection against the Medici in 1527. In this period, he became secretary of Giovanni Gaddi and consolidated his friendship with a group of young republicans belonging to the anti-Medicean party led by the Strozzi family. In 1530, when the imperial troops put Florence under siege, Varchi traveled to Bologna and the main cities of central and northern Italy. In 1535, he corresponded with Pietro Bembo. In 1537, he praised Lorenzo de’ Medici’s murder of his cousin Alexander and attacked the new duke, Cosimo I. Forced to remain in exile, he moved to Venice under the protection of the Strozzi family, who named him preceptor of Piero Strozzi’s brothers. In 1540, Varchi was forced to leave under suspicions of immoral behavior, thus losing the Strozzis’ protection. In Padua, he joined the academy of the Infiammati, founded by Leone Orsini around 1540, teaching a circle of disciples, and cultivated his literary friendships with Caro, Bembo, Aretino, and Sperone Speroni. After a period spent in Bologna, he was pardoned by Cosimo I. He returned to Florence in 1543, where he lectured at the academy on Dante and Petrarch. In 1545, under accusation of pederasty, he was arrested and tried. Due to the numerous intercessions of his Humanist friends, Cosimo pardoned him again and in 1547 asked him to write a history of Florence, completed over the last 20 years of Varchi’s life. In 1558, the duke donated to him the Villa della Topaia at Castello, where he spent the last ten years of his life. In 1565, he took religious orders and shortly thereafter was appointed provost of the Pieve of Montevarchi.

Due lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, nella prima delle quali si dichiara un sonetto di M. Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Nella seconda si disputa quale sia piu nobile arte la scultura, o la pittura, 1549. Lezioni sopra diverse materie poetiche e filosofiche, 1590. L’Ercolano, 1570; critical edition by Antonio Sorella, 1995. Storia fiorentina, 1721.

Poetry ‘‘De’ sonetti di M. Benedetto Varchi, Parte Prima,’’ 1555. ‘‘De’ sonetti di M. Benedetto Varchi, Parte Seconda,’’ 1557. ‘‘Carmina,’’ 1562. ‘‘Epigrammi a Silvano Razzi,’’ edited by Silvano Ferrone, 2003.

Play La suocera, 1549.

Translations Boethius, Della consolazione della filosofia, 1551. Seneca, De benifizii, 1554.

Further Reading Brancato, Dario, ‘‘L’epistola dedicatoria della Consolazione della filosofia di Benedetto Varchi (1551) fra retorica e politica culturale,’’ Studi Rinascimentali, 1 (2003), 83–93. Bruni, Francesco, ‘‘Ideologia e pubblico nella cultura antiumanistica,’’ Sistemi critici e strutture narrative. Ricerche sulla cultura fiorentina del Rinascimento, Naples: Liguori, 1969, 11–42. Lo Re, Salvatore, ‘‘Biografie e biografi di Benedetto Varchi: Giambattista Busini e Baccio Valori,’’ Archivio Storico Italiano, 156 (1998), 671–736. Manacorda, Guido, Benedetto Varchi. L’uomo, il poeta, il critico, Pisa: Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 1903. Montevecchi, Alessandro, Storici di Firenze: studi su Nardi, Nerli e Varchi, Bologna: Patron, 1989. Pirotti, Umberto, ‘‘Aristotelian Philosophy and the Popularization of Learning: Benedetto Varchi and Renaissance Aristotelianism,’’ in The Late Italian Renaissance, 1525– 1630, edited by Eric Cochrane, London: Macmillan, 1970. Pirotti, Umberto, Benedetto Varchi e la cultura del suo tempo, Florence: Olschki, 1971. Samuel, Richard S., ‘‘Benedetto Varchi, the Accademia degli Infiammati, and the Origins of the Italian Academic Movement,’’ Renaissance Quarterly, 29:4 (1976), 599–634. Ward, Michael T., ‘‘Benedetto Varchi and the Social Dimensions of Language,’’ Italica, 68:2 (1991), 176–194.

1949

VARIETY THEATER

VARIETY THEATER The theatrical genre of popular entertainment between musical and operetta, variety theater consisted of many different and successive acts. At first it came out of the official theater institution; then it became an overlapping mixture of different comics grounded on the mobile stage, which continued to change, depending on the audience’s needs and requests. Starting from the last decade of the nineteenth century until 1960, variety theater chiefly sprang out of the rich and luxurious French cafe´-chantant, called taproom concerts (caffe´-concerto), with something in common with the comic tradition of Neapolitan popular plays (pulcinellate, or farces). At the same time it entered the more prestigious revue theater signed by playwrights, poets, and writers, and then the Avanspettacolo, as sceneggiata performed at the cinema halls between film screenings. Compared to other European countries, the Italian cabaret developed later and slowly, ‘‘not only because of historical and political reasons, but also due to the poor attitude towards such a non conformist genre’’ (Alberto Jona, ‘‘Lo spettacolo di intrattenimento,’’ 1997). The variety was one of its main models (especially in the Germanspeaking countries), because they were both trying to create an informal dramaturgy starting from the ‘‘little forms’’ typical of the sketch. In the taprooms, where the song was the protagonist, among dance bands (or piano) and singers, amateur comics and character actors showed up with their popular repertories. Some of them did not attend any theater schools, but they all looked for a break and often collected the chetta by begging among the tables. At the turn of the last century, the theater critic Jarro reported, not without prejudice, on this difficult situation in over-crowded halls: ‘‘A cabaret singer told me: ‘You know, I earn one thousand liras per night.’ When? ‘Maybe after the show?’’’ (Viaggio umoristico nei teatri, 1903). The first theater welcoming this kind of performance was the Salone Margherita in Naples, which opened officially in 1890 in the Galleria Toledo. Then in Rome, in 1909, the Teatro Jovinelli was established by Neapolitan playwright and poet Raffaele Viviani; and shortly after, in 1912, the variety actor and playwright Ettore Petrolini launched 1950

the Sala Umberto. Besides the traditional acts of comic entertainment with dancers and singers (La bella Otero and Lina Cavalieri were mythical stars), the show included different genres: circus attractions, illusionist effects, short films, and, after 1910, farces and melodramas. Some great foreign comics (such as Charlie Chaplin) also performed in Italy. At this time, the national cinema industry was expanding, and while comic films were produced in Turin, dramatic plays were shot in Naples. The cinema soon became a direct competitor of variety theaters to the point of jeopardizing their very survival. Among the traditional mask characters, the most genuine keeper of the commedia dell’arte was Antonio Petito (1822–1876), who at age nine was a success on stage at the San Carlino theater in Naples. He transformed old stock characters like Pulcinella (the English Punch) into burlesque middle-class types. Such characters were also included in the repertoire of the highly popular actor-dramatist Edoardo Scarpetta. This kind of theatrical genre, rich with dialect features (language and attitude), fitted well to entertain troops and veterans during World War I, becoming, as Nicola Fano reminded us, ‘‘the only real national show, the symbol of the unity of Italy’’ (‘‘Varieta,’’ 1998). Some of the most popular Italian performers of the early twentieth century took part in the variety, for example, Nicola Maldacea (1870–1945), a Neapolitan singer who invented the macchietta (literally ‘‘little spot’’). Macchietta is a comic verse song (octosyllabic or hendecasyllabic) based on one character roughly sketched; the rhyme often suggests double meanings and satirical allusions. Famous poets, often anonymously, made a living writing spots for Maldacea. Among them were Salvatore Di Giacomo and Trilussa, whose repertoires comprised satires and mockeries of every social type (superman, communists, feminists, socialists). Leopoldo Fregoli (1867–1936) and Gustavo De Marco (1883–1944) were also great protagonists of the variety theater. Fregoli began at Esedra in Rome in 1890. As a superb imitator, he was able to combine different stock characters and macchiette due to his exceptional comic skills as a mime.

VARIETY THEATER His plastic physiognomy as well as his flexible, wide-ranging voice allowed him to sing as baritone, tenor, or soprano. Thus, he gave birth to a long gallery of male and female characters (sciantose and cocotte), which turned out to be a grotesque and distorted mirror of contemporary Italian society. Fregoli, along with Ettore Petrolini, could gather such worldwide success (including South America) that he was nicknamed mangiapopoli, or people eater. As for De Marco, who was born in a theatrical family, his apprenticeship was in the summer taprooms along Naples promenade. He became one of the city’s most beloved actors, the renowned master whose work was ‘‘raided’’ by his direct heirs: Toto` and Nino Taranto. De Marco’s most famous invention was the puppet-man or comico-zumpo (jumping acrobat comic). Anna Fougez (1898–1966), the pseudonym of Anna Pappacena, was the Italian prodigy child who achieved a remarkable success in Paris at the age of nine. Thanks to her popularity as a singer and an actress, the variety gained a recognized place in the entertainment industry. Fougez’s salary was exceptionally high for that time. In 1928, she founded a company with her husband, the French dancer and choreographer Rene´ Thano. During the reign of Umberto I, the variety introduced jazz and the Charleston, due also to the RussianItalian dancer Lydia Johnson, who replaced the postwar image of the femme fatale soubrette (Fougez) with that of the English girl dressed up with a golden tail-coat and a glittering top hat. A further change was implemented by Raffaele Viviani, who started out as a precocious actor in the Neapolitan popular theaters. He became a celebrated playwright, and his performances displayed acrobatic and mimetic skills along with a bitter melancholic vein. During the 1920s, Viviani wrote plays in which the macchietta developed into acts characterized by social and original patterns. However, in works such as Eden Teatro (1919), a comedy about the life of poor traveling actors, he still retained the variety act structure. Other prominent artists were the Genovese Gilberto Govi (1885–1966), the Catanese Angelo Musco (1872–1937), and the Triestine Angelo Cecchelin (1894–1964). In spite of their regional origins, these performers were able to bring on stage the mood of an entire country. For example, Angelo Cecchelin was known to be ‘‘the only comedian capable of showing a truly hostile attitude toward the Fascist government,’’ because of which he was imprisoned (Nicola Fano, ‘‘Varieta,’’ 1998).

In their 1913 manifesto entitled ‘‘Il Teatro di Varieta`,’’ the Futurists regarded the variety as the model for the avant-garde theater, since it departed from the mimetic patterns of traditional bourgeois comedy. They viewed it as a modern invention, just like electricity, which expressed the living language of the new sensitivity. Nevertheless, the Futurists produced nothing concrete for the variety theater. By the end of the 1930s, the luxurious variety shows, such as the ones staged by the Schwarz brothers (so-called spettacoli di gran varieta`), increasingly focused on the appearance and the richness of the mise-en-sce`ne, thwarting any traditional and political aspects of this genre. The early 1950s marked the decline of the variety theater. At first the revue blended with drama theater (Petrolini and Viviani) and then with television shows by using different acts (comics, duets and sketches). In 1954, the cinema offered a grand tribute to this popular genre by producing Gran Varieta`, directed by Domenico Paolella and featuring Vittorio De Sica, Renato Rascel, and Lea Padovani (as Anna Fougez), Alberto Sordi (as Fregoli). But perhaps the most touching cinematic homage is Luci del Varieta` (Variety Lights, 1951), co-directed by Alberto Lattuada and Federico Fellini. Here a small group of touring music-hall performers, with their delusions of grandeur and their nostalgia for the open road, embody the real creative e´lan of the variety artistic tradition. STEFANO TOMASSINI See also: Antonio Petito Further Reading Antonucci, Giovanni, Lo spettacolo futurista in Italia, Rome: Studium, 1974. Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, Il teatro della rivoluzione, Rome: Tiber, 1929. Cangiullo, Francesco, Le novelle del varieta`, Naples: Richter, 1938. Cecchelin, Angelo, Canzoni e parodie, Trieste: Trani, 1928. De Angelis, Rodolfo, Caffe´ concerto: Memorie d’un canzonettista, Milan: S.A.C.S.E., 1940. De Matteis, Stefano, et al. (editors), Follie del varieta`: Vicende memorie e personaggi 1890–1970, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Falconi, Dino, and Angelo Frattini, Guida alla rivista e all’operetta, Milan: Academia, 1953. Fano, Nicola, ‘‘Varieta`,’’ in Dizionario dello spettacolo del’900, a cura di Felice Cappa e Piero Gelli, Milan: Baldini & Castoldi, 1998. Fazio, Mara, ‘‘Cabaret, anticamera del teatro,’’ in Storia del teatro moderno e contemporaneo, diretta da Roberto Alonge e Guido Davico Bonino, vol. 3, Avanguardie e utopie del teatro. Il Novecento, Turin: Einaudi, 2001.

1951

VARIETY THEATER Fregoli, Leopoldo, Fregoli raccontato da Fregoli, Milan: Rizzoli, 1936. Grassi, Livio (editor), Il teatro di Angelo Cecchelin, Trieste: Lint, 1975. Greco, Franco Carmelo, La scena illustrata: Teatro, pittura e citta` a Napoli nell’Ottocento, Naples: Pironti, 1995. Jarro (Giulio Piccini), Viaggio umoristico nei teatri, Florence: Bemporad, 1903. Jona, Alberto, ‘‘Lo spettacolo di intrattenimento: Cafe´chantant, cabaret, music-hall e altre forme,’’ in Musica in scena: Storia dello spettacolo musicale, edited by Alberto Basso, vol. 6. Dalla musica di scena allo spettacolo rock, Turin: Utet, 1997. Maldacea, Nicola, Memorie, Naples: Bideri, 1936. Marinetti, Filippo, Tommaso, ‘‘Il Teatro di Varieta`’’ (1913), in Teoria e invenzione futurista, edited by Luciano De Maria, Milan: Mondadori, 1983. Narciso, Adolfo, Varieta` dell’Ottocento, Naples: Adriatica, 1944.

Ottolenghi, Vittoria, et al., ‘‘Varieta`,’’ in Enciclopedia del teatro, vol. 9, Rome: Le Maschere, 1962. Pandolfi, Vito, Copioni da quattro soldi, Florence: Landi, 1958. Patrone, Antonella, ‘‘Cabaret,’’ in Enciclopedia del teatro del ’900, a cura di Antonio Attisani, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Ramo, Luciano, Storia del varieta`, Milan: Garzanti, 1956. Segel, Harold B., Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and Avant-Garde Drama, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Tessari, Roberto, Teatro italiano del Novecento: Fenomenologie e strutture 1906–1976, Florence: Le Lettere, 1996. Vianello, Daniele, ‘‘Tra inferno e paradiso: Il ‘limbo’ dei buffoni,’’ Biblioteca teatrale, vols. 49–51 (1999), 13–80. Viviani, Vittorio, Storia del teatro napoletano, Naples: Guida, 1969.

GIORGIO VASARI (1511–1574) Giorgio Vasari, a biographer, art historian, architect, and painter, virtually invented art history as a scholarly discipline. Vasari counted among his ancestors at least one painter and a potter (vasaro or vasaio). His enduring reputation rests largely upon his vast masterpiece, Vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori (Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568). His excellent Humanist education, studying in Florence with young Ippolito and Alessandro De’ Medici, enabled him to develop scholarly and courtly skills that contributed to his success as an artist and writer. He compiled a written record of all his paintings and the payments he received; he also left a vast correspondence, offering insight into the composition of the Vite. In 1562, with the support of Cosimo I, Vasari was the major force behind the founding of the Accademia del Disegno (Florentine Academy of Design), described in the lives of Fra Giovanni Agnolo Montorsoli and Jacopo di Casentino. His stated purpose in the Vite was to honor his fellow artists and to set out his judgments, but he also created the myth of the Florentine rebirth of art and of the central role of Medici patronage. That he was a Tuscanophile is beyond dispute, but he did not neglect artists from other regions, nor did he fail in creating a new perception of art as a profession. 1952

No real tradition for the literature of art existed until the early modern period. Only Vitruvius’s works on architecture and the brief, anecdotal biographies of artists in Pliny’s Naturalis Historia survived from the classical world. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the growth of polemics and treatises on art, involving most notably those by Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo Da Vinci, Lorenzo Ghiberti, and Cennino Cennini, but Vasari had none of the resources of modern libraries, such as systematic historical accounts of artists and their works. Bestowing professional status on painters, sculptors, and architects, once considered craftsmen or ‘‘mechanicals,’’ Vasari’s Vite established a theoretical basis for the arts and connected them to classical antiquity. His correspondence, autobiography, and the Vite all bear witness to his many knowledgeable acquaintances and contacts, including Humanist scholars, patrons, and artists. His understanding of the traditions and popularity of historical biography and saints’ lives, especially those of Plutarch, Jacobus de Voragine, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and his own habits of studying, sketching, and keeping notes about what he saw helped shape the Vite. Vasari’s tireless travels throughout Italy gave him direct contact with the works of sculpture, painting, and architecture he described and analyzed.

GIORGIO VASARI Vasari credited Paolo Giovio (1483–1552), an important scholar and historian at the papal court, with the idea for a book on famous artists, which arose during dinner conversations at the home of Cardinal Farnese, the future Pope Paul III. To produce the Vite, which he began to write around 1542, Vasari relied on his own research and the cooperation of a significant number of sources. Like his fellow Florentine historians, Niccolo` Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini, he used the vernacular to insure a larger readership and saw himself as writing in a tradition of history that was accessible and instructive. By choosing to write in the genre of biography or exemplary history, Vasari could present the visual arts as a topic of scholarly discourse. In general, he drew on the rules of epideictic oration, the oratorical art of praise and blame, based on such works as Cicero’s Rhetorica ad Herennium. The form of Vasari’s individual biographies, which most resembles that of the funeral eulogy, typically includes an introduction; a section on the artist’s ancestry, birth, childhood experiences, economic circumstances, and education; information on his physical attributes and personality traits, especially virtues and defects; a discussion of his relationships with other artists; his discipline; his activities and works in sequence, with emphasis on pivotal works and the development of the artist’s skill; his motivation and desire to innovate; his ability to train young artists; and his reputation. Vasari followed Plutarch’s use of exempla to teach moral action and enlivened his narrative with anecdotes, humor, adventure, and competition that even led to murder. He told a tale of envy and death in the ‘‘Vite di Andrea dal Castagno e Domenico Viniziano,’’ in which Andrea’s jealousy drove him to kill Domenico. His Vite go beyond aesthetic judgments to human psychology and moral judgments. Vasari always attempted to discover environmental factors that might have influenced the artistic and psychological development of an artist: Paolo Uccello achieved too little because of his obsession with theoretical speculation; Perugino’s lack of originality lay in his early poverty and his compensatory drive to make money. The story of Perugino’s youthful poverty has no basis in fact, but it supports Vasari’s discussion of artistic progress. Two editions of the Vite appeared in the midsixteenth century, the Torrentino in 1550 and the Giuntina in 1568, which expanded the number of biographies, including many artists whom Vasari knew personally, and adjusted the thematic emphases. The first edition, which focuses on

Florentine artists and includes only one living artist (Michelangelo) is perhaps more clearly focused than the second. Vasari changed the beginning and end of the first two parts of the work to reflect what he had learned from his experiences and his travels, especially those in 1566; to reinforce his thesis of progress in the arts; and to strengthen the historical basis of the Vite. The second edition, with its inclusion of many more artists of his own generation, including non-Tuscan artists, has a more convincing scope. His more refined aesthetic judgments, especially the weight given to disegno (draftsmanship), led to reassessments of such artists as Perugino, Carpaccio, and Luca De’ Signorelli. The changes in the first six lives in part two reflect a new emphasis on technical skills, including a long passage on disegno in the ‘‘Vita di Battista Franco,’’ showing how the artist’s interest in design, which led him to study in Rome, ensured his eventual success in Venice for his fine drawing. Vasari’s correspondence tells us much about the contributions of Vicenzo Borghini to the revisions as well as Vasari’s pains in checking, correcting, and gaining information. Arranged chronologically, the Vite contains detailed examinations of Italian art from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth centuries. Vasari may have been influenced by Diogenes Laertius’s organizational scheme in his lives of the philosophers according to schools and the succession of masters and their followers. Among the first scholars to describe a cultural renaissance, he applied the historiographical term rinascita`, or rebirth, to describe the revival of the arts, and he carefully organized the Vite according to his revolutionary theory of a three-stage development of art in Renaissance Italy. His ‘‘Vita di Cimabue’’ depicts a kind of divinely inspired break with the Byzantine style of his masters. Signaling the rebirth of art after the demise of classical civilization, the first stage, lasting from about 1250 to 1400, is energized by the stylistic discoveries of Giovanni Cimabue and Giotto, who imitated the colors and forms in nature as well as solid human anatomy. Greater study of the ancients and human anatomy, more rigorous rules and techniques of design and perspective, and greater invention, coloring, and expressive details characterized the second stage, exhibited in the works of major figures such as Masaccio, Ghiberti, Filippo Brunelleschi, and Donatello. Finally, this artistic evolution culminated in the perfection of a third period, in which antiquity and nature were mastered and surpassed by the genius of Leonardo, the grace of Raphael, and above all, Michelangelo’s terribilita` 1953

GIORGIO VASARI (forcefulness). Vasari’s artistic heritage led him to see defects in non-Tuscan artists, such as the Umbrian Perugino or even the great Venetian master Titian, both of whom he found deficient in design. Some of his conclusions in part three tended to undermine his theory of progress in the arts. In the Vite, Vasari revealed the art historian’s task to be one of drawing qualitative distinctions among artists through rigorous study of their works. He used a vocabulary drawn not only from the technical terminology of artists but from classical and early modern rhetoric, literature, and history. His terminology is consistent, if occasionally problematic. His introduction to the three arts and his prefaces to the three parts of the lives, along with the lives of specific artists, such as Donatello, Antonio Pollaiuolo, Leonardo, Jacopo Sansovino, Il Cronaca, Correggio, Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, help to identify his criteria of excellence. The first preface to the lives clearly establishes nature as the origin and standard for the arts. Pervasive in the Renaissance, the conception of imitation, not surprisingly, also becomes central to the process of developing and perfecting maniera (style) and iudizio (judgment). As explained in the ‘‘Vita di Mino da Fiesole,’’ success depends on imitating the best models and the most beautiful elements in nature. Most important, however, is disegno, the foundational skill crucial to achieving art’s fundamental goal of imitating nature and the best models, both ancient and modern. Vasari made motivation, hard work, travel, and continuous study essential to design and, ultimately, to good style. Early artists often created works deficient in design, because they lacked a sufficient knowledge of anatomy and good artistic models. Other essential technical skills include the artist’s mastery of anatomy, colorito (coloring), prospettivo (perspective), scorcio (foreshortening), and lighting effects. Vasari also judged artists for their invenzione (invention), or originality, and variety as well as decoro (decorum) and misura (measure), the depiction of figures in an appropriate fashion and scale to ensure the quality of the whole. Vasari’s vocabulary of evaluation includes a range of comparative terms from rozzo (unrefined) and goffo (clumsy) to grazioso (graceful) and bello (beauty). Vasari looked at art in terms of its vigor, boldness, liveliness, charm, delicacy, softness, and sweetness, opposing these qualities to the flaws of being hard, dry, coarse, awkward, clumsy, or clearcut. The goal of artistic style (maniera) is always to represent nature in the most beautiful, graceful, 1954

and lifelike manner possible, as Vasari suggested in his ‘‘Vita di Raffaello.’’ He often described works or techniques that pleased him as bello; this term refers to the overall finish of a work, reflecting the degree to which the artist has mastered a variety of skills in depicting things naturally. The notion of grazia (grace) constitutes an aesthetic benchmark differing from beauty and proportion and evident only to sound judgment and a good eye. It refers to the quality of a painting that goes beyond technique or beauty, a certain softness or sweetness of style and the ease and naturalness with which the work depicts its subject. Achieving greater naturalness, Masaccio’s continuous study, innovations in design, and better anatomy cleared away the hardness, imperfections, and difficulties of the first era. The third period achieves the superlative: At this stage of development, charm, beauty, and grace characterize the art. Vasari’s continual references to the beauty and grace of a work provide little basis for clear distinctions, but his discussions of nature as a standard, imitation, design, perspective, and proportion established a set of criteria for evaluating works of art that remain in fashion. Vasari’s revolutionary interpretation of his material is documented so extensively and argued so persuasively that it has largely remained the dominant view of Italian Renaissance art. Occasionally, Vasari’s knowledge of the artists was limited: He may not, for example, have seen Giotto’s frescoes in the Arena Chapel, and he had difficulty assessing the contributions of artists, particularly from Siena or Venice, whose works do not fit into his theory of artistic evolution or his own conception of beauty, emphatically based on Tuscan models. Occasionally he made errors of fact or accepted or created stories that lack a factual basis to give suspense to his narrative or to bolster his thesis, but his skillful storytelling and anecdotes, sharing in the spirit of Boccaccio’s novellas, have appealed to generations of fascinated readers. Although the book contains some inconsistencies and that Tuscan prejudice, Vasari’s achievement in writing the Vite is monumental, especially his development of the idea of rebirth and of criteria by which to evaluate art. In his San Luca che ritrae la Madonna (St. Luke Painting the Virgin), found in the SS. Annunziata’s Chapel of St. Luke, he offers, rather surprisingly, a self-portrait in a loving tribute to his profession and his fellow artists. Perhaps he was justified in considering himself the representative of the artists whose Vite have influenced artistic preference and taste for centuries.

GIORGIO VASARI

Biography

Selected Works

Giorgio Vasari was born in Arezzo, 30 July 1511, in a family of modest means; he was sent to Florence in 1524 to study under the Humanist Pierio Valeriano, 1524. He claimed to have studied under Michelangelo, then Andrea Del Sarto and Baccio Bandinelli. He returned to Arezzo in 1527 after the expulsion of his Medici patrons; his father died of plague. Vasari traveled between 1530 and 1545 to Bologna, Rome, Venice, Naples, and other cities and saw works of artists such as Giulio Romano, Correggio, and Titian. In 1546, he gained a commission from the Farnese family to decorate Sala dei Cento Giorni in Rome’s Palazzo della Cancelleria with scenes from the life of Pope Paul III (Farnese). He reported on 8 July 1547, that he had completed a manuscript of his Vite. Vincenzo Borghini received the index of the Vite in 1549. Vasari married Niccolosa Bacci from Arezzo in January 1550, and in May the Torrentino edition of the Vite appeared. He worked on Villa Giulia for Pope Julius III in 1553. Cosimo De’ Medici became Vasari’s lifelong patron around 1554– 1555, beginning with the remodeling of the Palazzo Vecchio. He moved to a home in Florence in Borgo Santa Croce. He began construction of the Uffizi in 1560; he showed his design for the Sala dei Cinquecento to Michelangelo. He began remodeling Pisa’s Piazza dei Cavalieri in 1561, a project completed in 1569. Vasari was a major force behind the foundation of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno in 1562. He visited Arezzo, Cortona, Perugia, Assisi, and Venice and began revising the Vite. He was given charge of decorations for the funeral of Michelangelo in 1564. He initiated the construction of the Vasarian corridor connecting Palazzo Pitti and Palazzo Vecchio in 1565. He traveled around Italy in 1566 to collect new material for second edition of the Vite. He remodeled the church of Santa Croce in Florence. The second revised and enlarged Giuntina edition of the Vite appeared in 1568. Vasari worked in Rome for Pope Pius V in 1570. He received the Knighthood of the Golden Spur of the Order of Saint Peter from Pius V after working on the Sala Regia in the Vatican. He began frescos on the cupola of Florence’s Duomo and unveiled the large frescos on the walls of the Palazzo Vecchio. He returned to Rome to work on the Sala Regia for Pope Gregory XIII. Vasari died in Florence while working on the frescos of the cupola in Florence’s Duomo, 27 June 1574, just two months after Cosimo.

Biographical Works

JULIA CONAWAY BONDANELLA

Le Vite de’ piu´ eccellenti Architetti, Pittori, et Scultori Italiani da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri descritte in lingua toscana, da Giorgio Vasari, Pittore Aretino, con una sua utile & necessaria introduzione a le arti loro, 1550. Le Vite de’ piu´ eccellenti Pittori, Scultori, e Architettori scritte, e di nuovo ampliate da M. Giorgio Vasari Pittore et Architetto Aretino, co’ ritratti loro, et con le nuove vite dal 1550 insino al 1567, 3 vols., 1568. Le vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori scritte da Giorgio Vasari pittore aretino con nuove annotazioni e commenti, 9 vols., edited by Gaetano Milanesi, 1879– 1885; reprinted, 1906 and 1978–1981; reprinted, 1998; as Le vite di’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori, 9 vols., edited by Paola Della Pergola et al., 1962– 1966; reprinted, 1967; as Le vite de’ piu` eccellenti pittori, scultori et architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, edited by Paola Barocchi and Rosanna Bettarini, 1966–1987; as Le vite de’ piu` eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori italiani, da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri nell’edizione per i tipi de Lorenzo Torrentino Firenze 1550, 2 vols., edited by L. Bellosi and A. Rossi, 1986; as The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects by Giorgio Vasari, translated by A. B. Hinds, 1900; revised edition by William Gaunt, 4 vols., 1963; as Vasari on Technique, Being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, translated by Louisa S. Maclehose, 1907; reprinted, 1960 (the technical introduction missing from all other translations); as Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects, translated by Gaston Du C. De Vere, 10 vols., 1912; reprint introduced and annotated by David Ekserdjian, 2 vols., 1996; reprint introduced by Kenneth Clark and edited by Michael Sonino, 3 vols., 1979; as Lives of the Artists, translated by George Bull, 2 vols., 1965, reprinted, 1987; as The Lives of the Artists (selections), translated and edited by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella, 1991.

Other Vasari on Technique, being the Introduction to the Three Arts of Design, translated by Louisa S. Maclehose, 1907; reprinted 1960 (the technical introduction missing from all other translations). Der Literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasaris (letters of Vasari from 1532–1563), edited by Karl Frey, volume 1, 1923; translated by G. Tomassetti, 1923. Der Literarische Nachlass Giorgio Vasari (letters from 1563– 1565), edited by Karl Frey and Hermann Walther Frey, 2 vols., 1930. Il libro delle ricordanze di Giorgio Vasari, edited by Alessandro del Vita, 1927. Il carteggio di Giorgio Vasari dal 1563–65, edited by Alessandro Del Vita, 1938. Vasari literarischer Nachlass: Neue Briefe von Giorgio Vasari (letters from 1557–1573), edited by Hermann Walther Frey, volume 3, 1945; much of volumes 2 and 3 translated by A. Del Vita in Il Vasari, beginning in volume 1, 1927–1940. Vasari on Theatre, selected and translated by Thomas A. Pallen, 1999.

1955

GIORGIO VASARI Further Reading Assunto, Rosario, La critica d’arte nel pensiero medioevale, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1964. Barocchi, Paola, Studi vasariani, Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1984. Barolsky, Paul, Giotto’s Father and the Family of Vasari’s ‘‘Lives,’’ University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. Barolsky, Paul, Michelangelo’s Nose. A Myth and Its Maker, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. Barolsky, Paul, Why Mona Lisa Smiles and Other Tales by Vasari, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Baxandall, Michael, ‘‘The Language of Art History,’’ New Literary History, 10 (1979), 452–65. Boase, Thomas S. R., Giorgio Vasari: The Man and the Book, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. Goldberg, Edward L., After Vasari: History, Art, and Patronage in Late Medici Florence, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.

Jacks, Philip (editor), Vasari’s Florence: Artists and Literati at the Medicean Court, Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Le Molle´, Roland, Georges Vasari et le vocabulaire de la critique d’art dans les ‘‘Vite,’’ Grenoble: Ellug, 1988. Rubin, Patricia Lee, Giorgio Vasari: Art and History, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Satkowski, Leon, Giorgio Vasari: Architect and Courtier, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Scoti-Bertinelli, Ugo, Giorgio Vasari, scrittore, Rome: Studio Bibliografico A. Polla, 1977. Vasari, Giorgio, Il Vasari storiografo e artista: Atti del Congresso Internazionale nel IV centenario della morte, Florence: Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, 1976. Wackernagel, Martin, The World of the Florentine Renaissance Artist: Projects and Patrons, Workshop and Art Market, translated by Alison Luchs, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Zimmerman, T. C. Price, ‘‘Paolo Giovio and the Rhetoric of Life-Writing,’’ in Rhetorics of Life-Writing in the Later Renaissance, edited by T. Mayer and D. R. Woolf, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

SEBASTIANO VASSALLI (1941–) Sebastiano Vassalli emerged as an abstract painter with shows in Milan and Venice in 1964 and 1965. During the same years he pursued a brief but intense career as a poet among the ranks of the Novissimi: He quickly distanced himself from this activity. In 1983 the volume Ombre e destini: Poesie 1977–1981 (Shadows and Destinies: Poems 1977–1981) collected the majority of his poems, previously published by small printing presses. Vassalli’s great success and recognition, as one of the most accomplished and innovative contemporary novelists, began in the cultural and ideological climate of the Italian neo-avant-garde: He debuted in fact in 1967 in the fifth and last meeting of the Gruppo 63 (a group that counted among its members critics and writers such as Edoardo Sanguineti, Alberto Arbasino, Umberto Eco, Giorgio Manganelli, Francesco Leonetti, and, generally speaking, the most important among Italian intellectuals of the time whose works served as models for Vassalli himself). On that occasion, Vassalli read passages from his experimental prose work, still unpublished, Narcisso (Narcissus), to be released in 1968. The text centers on the breakdown in linguistic 1956

unity and deploys an extremely refined rhetorical strategy, a mode of writing that he would pursue throughout his works. In this period of research and fervent literary involvement, he published his first experimental works. Tempo di ma`ssacro (Time of Massacre, 1970), Il millenio che muore (Dying Millennium, 1972), AA: Il libro dell’utopia ceramica (AA: The Book of Ceramic Utopia, 1974), and L’arrivo della lozione (Tonic Arrival, 1976) were all conceived as acrobatic stylistic, syntactic, and phonetic games, fused together in a pronounced satirical vein. The novel Abitare il vento (Inhabiting the Wind, 1980) marks the beginning of an inversion in stylistic tendencies toward profound reflection—or perhaps a crisis—that steered the author in new directions. In the novel, the tragicomic character Cris, caught in a continuous stream of extravagant and outrageous adventures (he becomes involved by chance as a handyman in a kidnapping connected with armed terrorist groups), attempts in vain to dialogue with his author. This Pirandellian meta-narrative game ends with Cris’s suicide—after he declares he would like to hang the author ‘‘from the gibbet of his responsibility.’’ Vassalli further revisited this character

SEBASTIANO VASSALLI in the concluding lines of Arkadia (Arcadia, 1983), the bitter pamphlet with which he not only disengaged himself but also decisively refuted his experience with the neo-avant-garde: ‘‘Guardo le nuvole, altissime, che si muovono sopra la mia testa. Penso a quella frase del Libro dei proverbi che parla di ‘abitare il vento’, che dice: ‘Chi distrugge la propria casa abitera` il vento’ [...] Vivere il vento, abitarci. Continuare ad alzare la posta in gioco. A salire. (Anch’io ho distrutto la mia casa)’’ (I observe the clouds, very high up, that move above my head. I ponder that phrase from The Book of Proverbs that speaks of ‘‘inhabiting the wind,’’ that says: ‘‘Whosoever destroys his own house will inhabit the wind’’ [...] To live in the wind, to be at home in it. Never stop doubling the stakes. To continue rising above. [I too destroyed my own home]). Arkadia also inaugurates the ironical and sour polemic vein which was to accompany Vassalli throughout several of his works: Sangue e suolo (Blood and Soil, 1985) is an entertaining and extremely accurate story-inquiry into bilingualism in the Alto Adige region; L’alcova elettrica (Electric Alcove, 1986) reconstructs a scandalous episode that implicates the magazine Lacerba and some characters involved in the Futurist movement; Marradi (Marradi, 1988) is a polemic appendix to the novel La notte della cometa (The Night of the Comet, 1984), in which the poet Dino Campana is shown as victim of the incongruities surrounding the literary ambient of his time as well as of his family and country; Il neoitaliano: Le parole degli anni Ottanta (The New Italian: Words of the Eighties, 1989) is an exhilarating account, very specific in tracking the ever-degenerating ways of colloquial Italian language at the time. The comic novel Mareblu` (Mareblu, 1982) concluded the phase of experimentation with the stylistic extremes of the avant-garde. It inaugurated an inquiry, developed by Vassalli with a tamed narrative voice, into the character of Italians. The protagonist, Augusto Ricci, custodian of the ‘‘Mareblu`’’ camping grounds in Liguria, shares with Cris (of Abitare il vento) the solitude of a character overwhelmed by the events in which he finds himself forced to act. In his ideological fury as a proletarian in perennial struggle with capitalism, Ricci also illustrates the advantages and shortcomings of an evolving society and the consequent ideological crisis emerging from the Italian Communist Party. Alongside Augusto, the reader experiences various stages of hilarity, contempt, and marvel, charmed above all by the character’s disarming candor. This quality describes all of Vassalli’s protagonists from Campana in La notte

della cometa and Sebastiano in L’oro del mondo (The World’s Gold, 1987) to Antonia in La chimera (The Chimera, 1990), until Casanova in Dux (Dux, 2002). The new tendency of Vassalli’s prose is marked by a legible though not banal quality, a limpid and chosen language, and a docile syntax adapted to the human and earthly landscape it surveys. In La notte della cometa, the character of ‘‘the mad poet’’ becomes, for Vassalli, the emblem of poetry. The novel, as almost all novels during this period, uses archival materials and sometimes newly discovered documents: The result is a biography of Dino Campana translated into story with the assurance of serious and thorough research. L’oro del mondo uses the vehicle of its protagonist Sebastiano (the alter ego of the author) to traverse the years of Fascism into post–World War II as an extended metaphor for Italian historical adolescence. With his historical novel La chimera Vassalli won the Strega Prize and was consequently translated in many countries, including the United States. In it he told the story of Antonia, a beautiful girl raised from birth (in the winter of 1590) in an orphanage and then adopted by peasants. After a series of vicissitudes, she is unjustly accused of witchcraft and burnt alive at the stake in 1610. The action takes place in the region of Novara—the area between Milan and Turin that was the border between French and Spanish dominions; the times are the dark and intolerant age of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the tribunals of the Inquisition. With the passionate tale of Antonia (inspired by archival data), Vassalli portrayed the Italian seicento (sixteenth century) in a more realistic vein than Alessandro Manzoni did in his seminal novel I promessi sposi—one of the sources of inspiration for Vassalli. There is no salvation for Antonia, who during her short life comes to know love and dreams of happiness: Humankind is destined to fall into nothingness. The success of this novel, especially among its young readership, is owed not only to the fascinating tale, but more importantly to Vassalli’s vibrant language. From this moment on, the writer used a narrative register of well-outlined events inspired by the past, molded into an agile combination of story-telling and critical inquiry: Whichever the time period, the reader is always induced to reflect on the present and find a reverberating similitude with the past. In the 1990s, having abandoned his school teaching, Vassalli wrote with intense productivity. The novel Marco e Mattio (Marco and Mattio, 1992) addresses the theme of madness, already broached in La notte della cometa. Taking place 1957

SEBASTIANO VASSALLI in the latter half of the eighteenth century, between Belluno and Venice, the humble story of Mattio (a disarmingly meek madman) unfolds around his encounter with Marco (a no less disturbed but cruel person). There followed Il cigno (The Swan, 1993), a Mafia story set in Palermo between 1893 and 1920; the science fantasy 3012 (1995), a grim picture of a future dominated by hate and war; Cuore di pietra (Stone Heart, 1996), the story of a house in Novara, portrayed as a miniature country, in which the characters’s lives span from the Unification to the present; La notte del lupo (Night of the Wolf, 1998), the tale of Yoshua, son of God, seen as the first incarnation of the pure madman of all possible stories. With Un infinito numero (Infinite Number, 1999) Vassalli reconstructed the ‘‘birth’’ of the Aeneid in the lives of Virgil, his secretary Timodemus, Maecenas, as they travel through the Etruscan country, while Augustus awaits ever so impatiently the masterpiece that is to celebrate his empire. Archeologia del presente (Archeology of the Present, 2001) offers an ironic glimpse into the dreams and hopes of 1968 youths, while Dux recounts the last years that Giacomo Casanova spent in Dux, in Bohemia. With Stella avvelenata (Poisoned Star, 2003) Vassalli told the story of a young clergyman who, in 1441, embarks on a cross-Atlantic voyage in order to establish a utopian colony on the island of Atlantis and discovers America without knowing it. His most recent novel, Amore lontano (Distant Love, 2005), whose title was inspired by Jaufre´ Rudel’s Provenc¸al amor de lonh, presents the fictional profile of seven poets (Homer, Qohe´let, Virgil, Rudel, Villon, Leopardi, Rimbaud). Sebastiano Vassalli’s fundamental characteristics are the ironic demystification of false values in the present and a civic awareness rarely found in contemporary Italian writers. At the beginning of his career, his use of irony remained overall on the linguistic front, tied to the possibilities of play and deformation inherent in the medium. More recently, irony has become humoristic, in the Pirandellian sense of the word: It unveils and mocks but also empathizes with its object.

Biography Sebastiano Vassalli was born in Genova, 25 October 1941. He received a degree in Italian literature from the University of Milan, with a thesis on contemporary art and psychoanalysis. He established the literary reviews Pianura and Ant. Ed and allied himself 1958

with the main politicized avant-garde movement of the time, the Gruppo 63, 1967. During the 1960s Vassalli pursued a career as painter, subsequently abandoned. He won the Strega Prize with La chimera, 1990; the novel was translated into English, Dutch, German, Greek, Danish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and Hungarian. He also won the Tascabile Prize for La notte della cometa and the Villafranca Padovana Prize for Marco e Mattio, 1991. He is a columnist for Il corriere della sera. Vassalli lives and works in Marangana di Biandrate, in the Novara countryside. SILVANA TAMIOZZO GOLDMAN Selected Works Poetry ‘‘Lui (egli),’’ 1965. ‘‘Disfaso,’’ 1968. ‘‘La poesia oggi,’’ 1971. ‘‘Pianura: poesia e prosa degli anni Settanta,’’ 1974. ‘‘Belle lettere (with Giovanni Bianchi),’’ 1979. ‘‘Brindisi,’’ 1979. ‘‘La distanza,’’ 1980. ‘‘Ombre e destini: Poesie 1977–1981,’’ 1983. ‘‘Il finito,’’ 1984.

Fiction Narcisso, 1968. Tempo di ma`ssacro, 1970. Il millennio che muore, 1972. AA: Il Libro dell’utopia ceramica, 1974. L’arrivo della lozione, 1976. Abitare il vento, 1980. Mareblu`, 1982; new edition, 1990. La notte della cometa: Il romanzo di Dino Campana, 1984; as The Night of the Comet, translated by John Gatt, 1989. Sangue e suolo: Viaggio fra gli italiani trasparenti, 1985. L’alcova elettrica. 1913: Il futurismo italiano processato per oltraggio al pudore, 1986. L’oro del mondo, 1987. La chimera, 1990; as The Chimera, translated by Patrick Creagh, 1993. Marco e Mattio, 1992. Il cigno, 1993. 3012: L’anno del profeta, 1995. Cuore di pietra, 1996. La notte del lupo, 1998. Un infinito numero: Virgilio e Mecenate nel paese dei Rasna, 1999. Archeologia del presente, 2001. Dux: Casanova in Boemia, 2002. Stella avvelenata, 2003. Amore lontano, 2005.

Other Arkadia: Carriere, Caratteri, Confraternite degli impoeti d’Italia, 1983. L’antica Pieve di Casalvolone in provincia di Novara (sec. XI e XII), 1984.

VENICE Fiabe romagnole e emiliane, 1986. Marradi (with Attilio Lolini), 1988. Il Neoitaliano: Le parole degli anni Ottanta, 1989; new edition, 1991. Belle lettere (with Attilio Lolini), 1991. Manuale di corpo, 1991. Gli italiani sono gli altri, 1998.

Further Reading Baldissone, Giusi, ‘‘Sebastiano Vassalli,’’ in La piana vercellese: I luoghi delle parole, edited by Giusi Baldissone, Silvana Tamiozzo Goldmann, and Giovanni Tesio, Turin: Centro Studi Piemontesi, 1993. Baranski, Zygmunt G., and Lino Pertile (editors), The New Italian Novel, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993. Barberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1978. Batisti, Silvia, and Mariella Bettarini, Chi e` il poeta? Milan: Gammalibri, 1980.

Cicala, Roberto, and Giovanni Tesio (editors), La Chimera: Storia e fortuna del romanzo di Sebastiano Vassalli, Novara: Interlinea, 2003. Davico Bonino, Guido, ‘‘Neoavanguardia,’’ in Dizionario critico della letteratura italiana, directed by Vittore Branca, Turin: UTET, 1986. Jones, V. R., ‘‘Intertextual Patterning: I promessi sposi in La chimera,’’ Italian Studies, 47 (1992): 51–67. Kerbaker, Andrea, ‘‘Sebastiano Vassalli,’’ Belfagor, 59:2 (March 2004), 179–194. Nesi, Cristina, Sebastiano Vassalli, Fiesole (Florence): Cadmo, 2005. Riccardi, Carla, ‘‘Sebastiano Vassalli,’’ Autografo, 9:25 (February 1992), 71–84. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Abitare il tempo: Note su Sebastiano Vassalli narratore,’’ Autografo, 19 (1990), 39–56. Tamiozzo Goldmann, Silvana, ‘‘Scrittori contemporanei. Sebastiano Vassalli,’’ in ‘‘In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria’’: Verita` e finzioni dell’‘‘io’’ autobiografico, edited by Francesco Bruni, Venice: Marsilio, 2003. Zagarrio, Giuseppe, Febbre, furore e fiele, Milan: Mursia, 1983.

VENICE Gateway to the Orient and cul de sac for the lagoon, city of art and polluted canals, storehouse of those eternal and yet tattered symbols—the gondola, the high water, the carnival, the maschera— Venice is the paradoxical emblem of an irreducible ‘‘Italian spirit.’’ It is at once an island-city, fortress, and port whose exceptional history is entirely linked to the sea. The origins of Venice can be variously traced back to the first records of settlers on the islands of the lagoon (537); to the arrival at Torcello of Bishop Mauro (639); or to the transfer of the bishopric to the island of Olivolo and to the concentration of the inhabitants on the island of Rivoalto (Rialto) in 776. The Veneto State began with the treaty of Aquisgrana between the Franks and the Byzantines (814), which recognized the authority of the doge but left the lagoons under Byzantine influence. With the subjection of the Dalmatian islands, Venice was equal footing with Byzantium in the defense against the Normans (1082). The advent of the Crusades brought Venice many economic advantages. The city acquired much of the declining Byzantine Empire, the Ionian Islands, Durazzo, Eubea, Candia, Gallipoli, the Peloponnesus, a part

of Constantinople, commercial centers in the Mediterranean, in the Black Sea, in the Sea of Azov, and in the Persian Gulf. The economic growth that followed stimulated urban growth. At the same time the city’s administrative structure became more complex: The Maggior Consiglio and the Consiglio dei Dieci acquired authority along with the doge, a balance of powers that saved the city from absolutist adventurers like Biamonte Tiepolo (1310) and Martin Faliero (1355). From 1277 until 1372, Venice clashed regularly with the marine republics, Genoa in particular. To secure the lands that give access to the city, Venice occupied Treviso, Padua, Vicenza, and later Verona, Feltre, Belluno, and Bassano, eventually extending its borders as far as the Alps. After a long conflict with Milan it occupied Brescia and Bergamo. Finally it annexed the Patriarchal Duchy of Udine and Friuli (1420) and established its western borders along the river Adda (1454). The Venetian nobles acquired large estates in the hinterland, beginning the era of the Veneto villas. Spurred by its expanding settlements and the need for security, Venice undertook to redivert the rivers Brenta, Bacchiglione, Sile, and Piave. Meanwhile, despite some Venetian victories 1959

VENICE against the Turks, most notably the Battle of Lepanto (1571), the city began to lose its possessions in the East. Trading through the Red Sea suffered from competition from the Portuguese and Dutch, now creating trade routes to the Indies. An irreversible economic decline set in, but not a cultural one. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Venice, with its festivals, theaters, literary culture, and political autonomy, remained one of the most lively, tolerant, and ‘‘free’’ states in Europe. The arrival of Napoleon, who conceded part of the Venetian territories to the Austrians, marked the dissolution of the city (1797). After the Congress of Vienna, the entire Veneto state passed under Austrian control. The city had a surge of resistance in 1848: it proclaimed a republic and its annexation to Piedmont, even resisting the Austrian siege for five months after the Piedmontese capitulated. In 1866, they became part of the Unified Kingdom of Italy. Venice has been the homeland of the travelers and memoirists such as Marco Polo (1254–1324), whose Il Milione (The Million, 1299) brought news of China back to Venice, and the poets Leonardo Giustinian, (1388–1446), Giorgio Baffo (1694– 1768), and Gaspara Stampa (circa 1523–1554); the printer Aldo Manutio (1449–1515), the adventurer and man of letter Giacomo Casanova (1725–1798), and the dramatists Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806), Carlo Goldoni (1707–1793) and Pietro Chiari (1712– 1758). It was also the home of the journalists Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789) and Gasparo Gozzi (1713–1786), the historians and politicians Paolo Sarpi (1552–1623), Daniele Manin (1804–1857) and Niccolo` Tommaseo (1802–1874). But Venice has also been the elected homeland or temporary residence of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Pietro Aretino, Pietro Bembo, Antonio Canova, Ugo Foscolo, Alessandro Manzoni, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Giorgio Bassani, and Alberto Moravia. Because of its extraordinary cultural life, Venice is a musical center. Five public theaters were established between 1637 and 1642: San Cassian, San Salvador, San Moise´, Santi Giovanni e Paolo, and Novissimo. The eighteenth century saw the creation of four conservatories—Incurabili, Mendicanti, Ospedaletto, and the Pieta`. Of Venice’s theaters, the most justly famous is the Fenice (1792), ‘‘the phoenix,’’ which has literally risen twice from its own ashes (1836 and 1996). The Fenice has hosted approximately 1,500 first performances of works by Monteverdi, Vivaldi, Albinoni, Paisiello, Hasse, Mayr, Latilla, Scarlatti, Handel, Cimarosa, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Mercadante, Verdi, Leoncavallo, 1960

Stravinski, Britten, Nono, Malipiero, and Prokofiev, among others. Venice is equally a center of theatrical culture, beginning with the festive momarie mounted by the companies of Calza (Accesi, Sempiterni, Giardinieri, and Ortolani). Pietro Aretino, Giorgio Vasari, Andrea Palladio, and Titian contributed to their productions, in which the first professional buffoni (buffoons) were used: Francesco Cherea, Zuan Polo, Il Cimador, Il Burchiello, and Il Ruzzante. Performances took place everywhere, outside and inside the houses of the young nobles who organized them (Foscari, Bragadin, Morosini, Pesaro, and Contarini). In the eighteenth century, reformists of the commedia dell’arte sparked an important theatrical debate centering on the dramatic theories and works of Pietro Chiari, Carlo Goldoni, and Carlo Gozzi. The Goldoni tradition emerged as the strongest and most enduring. His theater, Teatro Stabile del Veneto, introduced gas lighting in 1844. Angelo Moro Lin revived the Teatro Veneto in 1870. The works of company dramatists Riccardo Selvatico (1849–1901) and Giacinto Gallina (1852–1897) featured the Venetian dialect, reviving a tradition of theatrical language that continued until after World War II. The special place of theater in Venetian culture originated in the traditional Venetian feste. The feste, dating back to the tenth century, have both a religious and civil character. The rite of the Quem quaeritis, which is generally considered the origin of medieval liturgical drama, was celebrated in lay form, with the doge, supreme ruler of Venice, descending the stairway of the ducal palace. In the Sensa (Ascension), later called Sposalizio col mare (wedding with the sea), the doge dropped a ring into the sea from the Bucintoro (ornate ship used by the doge on solemn occasions), reciting: ‘‘Desponsamus te mare in signo veri perpetuique domini.’’ This deep-rooted festive ritualism could also be seen in popular celebrations: the Guerra dei pugni (war of fists) on the bridges between Nicolotti and Castellani, ancient factions in the city; the spectacular Forze di Ercole (forces of Hercules), human pyramids formed mainly during carnival time; the Cacce dei tori (bull hunts), dating back to the tribute once exacted by the patriarch of Aquileia; the Discesa della Colombina (descent of the dove) from the bell tower of San Marco on the last Thursday before Lent. But the supreme festival was the carnival, which, although widespread throughout Italy, took on a particular symbolic importance in Venice with the adoption of mask characters that inspired so much eighteenth-century literature.

VENICE Some prestigious institutions continue today to bear witness to Venice’s unique cultural history and character. The Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana holds a million volumes, including 13,000 manuscripts, many miniated; 2,883 incunabula; and 24,055 works dating from the sixteenth century. The Jacopo Sansovino library houses the collection of Cardinal Bessarione, which includes important codices of the Iliad, of Greek epigrams, and of Hesiod, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euclid, and Aristotle. The Galleria dell’Accademia, inaugurated in 1750 as the Accademia di Belle Arti, has operated as an art museum since 1807, exhibiting the masterpieces of Venetian and Veneto masters: Paolo Veneziano, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Palma il Vecchio, Veronese, Tintoretto, Giambattista Tiepolo, Francesco Guardi, and Canaletto. The outstanding holdings of the Accademia include the fifteenth-century Teleri, representations of the lives of the patron saints of the confraternities, Storie della Santa Croce (Stories of the Holy Cross) by Vittore Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, and Carpaccio’s impressive Leggenda di Sant’Orsola (Legend of Saint Ursula). Venice has a number of other great museums: the Correr Museum, the Eighteenth Century Museum at Ca’ Rezzonico, the Gallery of Modern Art at Ca’ Pesaro; the Glass Museum at Murano, the Natural History Museum, the Fortuny Museum, the Center of Studies of the History of Cloth and Costumes at Palazzo Mocenigo, the Lace Museum at Burano, the Historic Archives of the Commune of Venice, and Casa Goldoni, which houses 25,000 volumes and unpublished works of the Veneto Theater. The Biennale di Venezia, created for the first International Art Exposition in 1895, is an internationally recognized exhibition. It added a music section in 1930, cinema in 1932, and theater in 1934. The Biennale currently organizes the International Art Exposition, the International Architecture Exhibition, the International Exhibition of Cinema Art, and the International Festivals of Dance, Music, and Theater. The study of Venetian civilization is in principle also the purpose of the Fondazione Cini (1951), located on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, which has eight Institutes of Advanced Studies and one of the most important collections of opera booklets. Today the Fondazione is the venue for international scientific meetings. Lastly Venice has two universities: Ca’ Foscari, for decades the first and only center in Italy for economic study, is known for its Faculty of Oriental Languages and Literature (1964) and Humanities and Industrial Chemistry (1969); and the IUAV University of Venice,

founded in 1926 as the Istituto Universitario di Architettura, which is the only Italian university entirely devoted to the teaching and design of human spaces and environments. The images Venice impressed on its visitors have produced a vast literature. Venice is above all the city of symbolic places, like the piazza and the ghetto, noted in the work of Guy de Maupassant, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, George Byron, and Percy B. Shelley, who also visited the Jewish cemetery at S. Nicolo` del Lido. It is a city of palazzi: the Ca’ Foscari, which inspired Byron to compose The Two Foscari (1821); Palazzo Barbaro, which inspired Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888) and where Robert Browning and Claude Monet once lodged; Palazzo Contarini, with its Giardino degli Spiriti, frequented by Marcel Proust; Palazzo Surian Bellotto, where Jean Jacques Rousseau stayed. The Arsenale fascinated Rainer Maria Rilke and the Ospedale degli Incurabili provided Josif Brodskj with a title for one of his works (1989). The Campo Santo Stefano at carnival time is memorialized in the correspondence of the Goncourts. Venice is still a city of meeting places: the famous caffe`, the Florian; the Quadri, the first to serve Turkish coffee to Honore´ de Balzac, Dumas Father, and Stendhal; Harry’s Bar, which Ernest Hemingway transformed into a legend; the Hotel Danieli, where Charles Dickens, George Sand, Alfred de Musset, and Jean Cocteau stayed. The myth of a Venice as a place where it is ‘‘beautiful to die’’ is reflected Michel Montaigne’s thoughts of coming here to die in Essais (Essays, 1572). Richard Wagner (1883), who was captivated by the similarity of the gondolas to coffins, did die here, as does the old Casanova of Arthur Schnitzler’s Casanovas Heimfahrt (The Return of Casanova, 1918). D’Annunzio, in Il fuoco (The Flame, 1900), also entertained the idea. But the myth achieved supreme literary expression in Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice, 1912), a work set in the decadent atmosphere of the Lido. Luchino Visconti made a film version of Mann’s novella in 1971. Ezra Pound published his first volume of poems, With Tapers Quenched (1908), in Venice. Against these imaginings, there is the Italian Futurists’ invitation to sink Venice, this ‘‘bed with its bottom broken out by caravans of lovers, this hipbath adorned with jewels for cosmopolitan courtesans’’ (F. T. Marinetti et al., Contro Venezia passatista, 1910). Still Venice yields up a rich history, for women as well as men. Caterina Cornaro, queen of Cyprus; Gaspara Stampa, poetess; Veronica Franco, courtesan; the intellectuals Elisabetta Caminer Turra 1961

VENICE and Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi; the muse of Ugo Foscolo—all come from Venice. Luigi Carrer actually narrated the story of the city through seven female cameos, Anello di sette gemme (Ring of Seven Jewels, 1837). ROBERTO CUPPONE

Further Reading Anicetti, Luigi, Scrittori inglesi e americani a Venezia (1816–1960), Treviso: Canova, 1968. Benzoni, Gino, Venezia nell’eta` della Controriforma, Milan: Mursia, 1973. Berengo, Marino, La societa` veneta alla fine del Settecento, Florence: Sansoni, 1956. Cessi, Roberto, Storia della Repubblica di Venezia, 2 vols., Milan-Messina: Principato, 1944–1946. Chambers, David S., The Emperial Age of Venice (1380–1580), London: Thames and Hudson, 1970. Cozzi, Gaetano, Michael Knapton, and Giovanni Scarabello, ‘‘La repubblica di Venezia nell’eta` moderna,’’ in Storia d’Italia, edited by Giovanni Galasso, vols. 12/1 and 12/2, Turin: UTET, 1996–1997. Crouzet Pavan, Elisabeth, Venezia trionfante. Gli orizzonti di un mito, Turin: Einaudi, 2001. Damerini, Gino, Settecento veneziano, Milan: Mondadori, 1939.

Del Negro, Piero, Il mito americano nella Venezia del Settecento, Padua: Liviana, 1986. Dumas, Guy, La fin de la Re´publique de Venise. Aspects et reflets litte´raires, Paris: P.U.F., 1964. Franzina, Emilio, Venezia, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1986. Kanceff, Emanuele, and Gaudenzio Boccazzi (editors), Viaggiatori stranieri a Venezia. Studi critici, Itinerari tematici, Documentazione iconografica, Bibliografia, 2 vols., Turin: CIRVI, 1981. King, Margaret, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. King, Margaret, Humanism, Venice, and Women: Essays on the Italian Renaissance, Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005. Isnenghi, Mario, and Stuart Woolf (editors), Storia di Venezia. L’ ottocento e il novecento, Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2002. Mangini, Nicola, I teatri di Venezia, Milan: Mursia, 1974. Matvejevic, Predrag, Mediterraneo. Un nuovo breviario, Milan: Garzanti 1999. Molmenti, Pompeo, La storia di Venezia nella vita privata dalle origini alla caduta della Repubblica, Turin: Roux e Favale, 1880. Romanin, Samuele, Storia documentata di Venezia, 10 vols., Venice: Filippi, 1853; reprinted, 1973. Venturi, Franco, Settecento riformatore. V. L’Italia dei lumi. 2. La Repubblica di Venezia (1761–1797), Turin: Einaudi, 1990. Zorzi, Alvise, Una citta`, una Repubblica, un impero: Venezia 697-1797, Milan: Mondadori, 1980.

GIOVANNI VERGA, 1840–1922 When D. H. Lawrence arrived in Sicily in 1920, he was fascinated by the works of Giovanni Verga and began translating them. Lawrence was attracted to Verga’s account of primitive, passionate characters as well as to the author’s heterodoxy, his ability to place himself outside rigid ideological frameworks, thus grasping an essential aspect of his work that had been overlooked in the schematic interpretation offered by Benedetto Croce in his essay on the Sicilian novelist in Letteratura della Nuova Italia (1915). Lawrence saw Verga’s work as falling into two phases: In his youthful period, the writer tried his hand at composing disorderly, late romantic novels, while in the second half of his career he was dedicated to realism, as demonstrated by the short story Nedda (1874). In truth, Verga’s oeuvre, which was characterized by recurrent styles and themes, followed a discontinuous evolutionary 1962

line of development so that one cannot accurately speak of a ‘‘conversion’’ to realism. Rather, his stories reflect the radical changes in Verga’s views on the role of art in society. His juvenile illusions were succeeded by the skepticism of his maturity, in which he considered art a luxury for those unable to leave their mark on reality. Like the late Tolstoy, his disappointment in the power of art brought him close to proclaiming its death in contemporary society. Signs of Verga’s literary vocation showed themselves early. On 12 March 1851 he wrote to his uncle Salvatore about his desire to devote himself to literature. At the same time he read books on sociology and spiritism, subjects he would make use of in his works. From his youth, he revealed an eclectic, experimental nature. His first literary attempts, the so-called ‘‘Catanese trilogy,’’ expressed the liberal

GIOVANNI VERGA political and patriotic ideology he learned from Antonio Abate (1825–1888), the author of historical and patriotic novels and contester of the Bourbon monarchy. In 1857, Verga wrote Amore e patria (Love and the Homeland), a historical novel of 35 chapters that blended patriotic themes with romantic suggestions. The work, later repudiated by the writer (he spoke of it only in 1920) and still unpublished in its entirety, was, however, essential to his artistic formation. For the first time, Verga wrote about i vinti (the defeated), a subject taken up in his greater works. His romantic nationalism and liberal ideology were also influenced by Mario Torrisi, a professor of canon law, while his philosophic outlook shows the influence of Antonio Maugeri, whose interests were both in Thomism and positivism. Verga’s passion for literature was also nurtured by his monarchic friend, Nicolo` Niceforo. Verga, for whom philosophy and politics went side by side, remained, like Honore´ de Balzac, a moderate devoted to the monarchy. Perhaps remembering the lessons of Hegel and Giambattista Vico, he denied any and every possibility of political, social, and economic progress. It was in his first published novel, I carbonari della montagna (The Carbonari of the Mountain, 1861–1862), that Verga expressed his political ideals clearly. The novel acknowledges its numerous influences, which include Ugo Foscolo, Alessandro Manzoni, Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi, Victor Hugo, Euge`ne Sue, Walter Scott, and Alexander Dumas (to whom Verga sent a copy of the novel in 1862), in the form of pastiche, a typically youthful mode of homage. The plot is consequently unbalanced, made up of a series of disconnected adventures that are narrated in a declamatory tone. Also of little artistic value was Sulle lagune (On the Lagoons), serialized in La Nuova Europa between 1862 and 1863, a patriotic-romantic novel set in Venice about the love and nationalistic passion of two lovers, Stefano de Keller and Giulia Collini, who run away to escape Austrian persecution. Written in epistolary form, it recalls Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802). Verga’s escape from Sicily to Florence, where he traveled in 1865 and 1869, cut his ties with the culture of the island. In the Tuscan city, with its cosmopolitan tone and openness to experimentation, Verga gained firsthand knowledge of the newest artistic trends and modern forms. As many of his letters to his family testify, Verga discovered in what was then the capital of Italy a more dynamic world, which provided him with the ideal

conditions to overcome the linguistic difficulties of his early works. This is confirmed by a letter of 7 May 1871 to his brother Mario, published by Gino Raya in Bibliografia verghiana: 1840–1971 (1972). He wrote: ‘‘e` indispensabile cominciare da qui la propria strada’’ (it is indispensable to start one’s own path from here). Abandoning a sleepy Sicilian culture was the first step, Verga felt, in creating a modern art and in reaching the great public. It was not by chance, then, that he wrote his first plays with Tuscany as his setting: I nuovi Tartufi (The New Tartuffes, 1980), written in 1866, a satire of the 1865 elections and of clerical hypocrisy in which, through deceit Father Codini ruins the peace of a Tuscan family, and Rose caduche (Short-Lived Roses, 1928), of 1869, a story of ephemeral loves set in aristocratic and refined Florence. On 2 July 1868, Verga wrote to his mother that the theater was his passion, but he became disillusioned soon after. His disillusion became the autobiographical root of the story he recounted many times, the story of characters who are anxious to leave their birthplaces in search of fortune and return defeated and disillusioned. The novel, not drama, however, was the artistic form that Verga eventually favored, a preference that also reflects the influence of his friend Luigi Capuana, whom he met in Florence. In a letter dated 7 June 1918, Verga described Una peccatrice (A Mortal Sin, 1866), as his ‘‘primo lavoro giovanile’’ (first youthful work). The novel, however, shows signs of the more mature work to come. The autobiographical story revolves around Pietro Brusio, a young student from Catania who falls in love with Narcisa Valdesi, the wife of the Count of Prato. He is unable to achieve the literary success he desires, and his love affair ends in failure when Narcisa kills herself. He becomes a vinto, a vanquished man. As portrayed, Pietro is almost a cliche´ of the alienated artist, but Narcisa as a woman who dies for love is a more credible incarnation of the woman represented in Dumas’s works, and in Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata (1853). She is the forerunner of a female type who will appear in many more of Verga’s stories. The plot, which dramatizes the Romantic crisis in art and love, is also typical of Verga’s work. Maria, the protagonist of the epistolary novel Storia di una Capinera (Sparrow, 1871), is another of Verga’s ‘‘vanquished’’ characters. Maria is a novice who returns home when a cholera epidemic breaks out in her convent and soon attracts the love a young neighbor. Confused, she returns to the convent, takes her vow, but eventually dies of 1963

GIOVANNI VERGA love. Verga used a simple, spare language, without rhetorical devices, describing the setting and the characters in highly realistic terms without renouncing symbolic or metaphoric meanings. Furthermore, he experimented with and reconfigured his novelistic materials by compiling documents and testimonies about young women forced to become nuns, including passages from Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (The Betrothed, 1840–1842). The novel consciously mixes fiction with reality. Adopting a method he would use in writing later works, Verga wrote to his mother on 26 June 1869 asking her for information regarding the marriages of the relatives of nuns who had taken vows of seclusion (one of his aunts, Suor Carmela, was a nun in Vizzini). From his house he could see a Badia, or convent, where the Clarisse nuns lived, and where there were also the cells of the mad, where insane nuns were confined. Furthermore, he had personally observed what was happening in Sicily during the cholera epidemic of 1854–1855. On 10 July 1869, he again wrote to his mother in Catania to find out how long the epidemic had lasted. Verga came to rely not only on autobiographical materials but also on documents and information he had researched and analyzed to make his literary inventions more historically accurate. The theme of passionate love was not confined to his youth but returned in his later works, for example in the short stories of I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (The Recollections of Captain D’Arce, 1891). Verga’s first stay in Milan (1872–1875) also opened up fresh perspectives: the metropolitan environment, the meetings with artists and scholars, and his direct encounter with the Lombard proindustrial bourgeoisie prompted him to experiment with new narrative techniques. He was enthusiastic about the dynamism of Milan and wrote to Capuana, inviting him to join him (13 March 1874). There, he wrote Eva (1873) and Tigre reale (The Royal Tiger, 1875) after having read Balzac, whose novels Capuana had given him. Eva mixes psychological interest with the typical amorality of the Milanese scapigliatura. In the novel, the Sicilian artist Enrico Lanti bets that he will kiss a masked ballerina, Eva. She falls in love with the young artist and decides to abandon her theatrical career. The two lovers go to live in an isolated house, but their love is destroyed by their poverty, and Enrico dies of consumption after his return to Sicily. Enrico, the artist and dreamer, is contrasted to Eva, the realist. Both, however, are destined for defeat in a world dominated by materialistic values. So, too, are the main characters of Tigre reale: the 1964

Russian countess Nata, who is contrasted to Erminia, the virtuous wife of her Sicilian lover, Giorgio. Nata’s death and funeral signal the end of any possible alternative to an agricultural and archaic society. Verga had by now lost his youthful hope of attracting the attention of the public and began to fully realize the artist’s isolation in bourgeois society. His disillusionment is reflected in the novel Eros (1875), the story of a passionate and lively youth called Alberto, who ultimately commits suicide. At this point Verga had momentarily exhausted the gallery of good-for-nothings incapable of adapting to the economic laws that govern the aristocracy. He thus turned to the popular world, and began Padron ‘Ntoni, published under the title I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881). With this novel, along with the short stories Vita dei campi (Life in the Country, 1880) and Novelle rusticane (Little Stories of Sicily, 1883), Verga entered the realistic phase of his literary production, completing it with Mastro-Don Gesualdo (1889). In a letter to Felice Cameroni dated 5–6 July 1875, Verga declared his intention to be realistic, not idealistic or romantic, in all his works. His meditations on realism entered a decisive stage at this point. In many of his letters he asked whether realism was to be attained by immersing oneself in the reality of the characters or by keeping one’s distance. In a letter to Capuana dated 14 March 1879, which preceded his most important works, Verga decided that distance and detachment were to be his solutions. He affirmed that a work had to have an autonomous life, and once a work was written, the author must not only disappear from the written page to reach absolute impersonality, but he must also abandon his destiny to the work. Furthermore in a letter to Federico De Roberto dated August 1888 (Lettere sparse, 1979), he insisted that the Naturalists saw reality as it really was and not, as some critics had complained, through a deforming pessimism. Reality for Verga was characterized by the presence of evil and the unhappiness of men faced with an indifferent nature. He represented human beings as marionettes reciting in the great theater of life, continually fighting to survive and to make a name for themselves, compelled by urges that deformed their facial expressions and created what the writer called ‘‘le mille rappresentazioni del grottesco umano’’ (the thousand representations of the human grotesque) in a letter of 21 April 1878 to his friend Salvatore Paolo Verdura. Many scenes in Verga’s works take place against a carnivalesque background, like ‘‘La coda del diavolo’’ (The Tail

GIOVANNI VERGA of the Devil) from Primavera e altri racconti (Spring and Other Tales, 1876), or on religious feast days, as in ‘‘Guerra dei Santi’’ (The War of the Saints), from Vita dei campi. His fictions also take as their setting masked balls, funerals, and magic rites, constantly dramatizing the contrast between being and appearing. The real face of his characters is revealed only in exceptional moments—when they are on their deathbeds or when they commit savage crimes. Verga, by choosing realism, knowingly opposed himself to Gabriele D’Annunzio, as is clear from a letter to Cameroni of 20 November 1889. Luigi Pirandello, in his speech in Catania in 1920 given on the occasion of Verga’s eightieth birthday and now in Saggi, poesie, scritti vari (1960), maintained that Verga was ‘‘il piu` antiletterario degli scrittori’’ (the most anti-literary of writers) while D’Annunzio was a writer of ‘‘parole’’ (words) and not of ‘‘cose’’ (things). Indeed Verga shared with Capuana the hobby of photography: He wanted to photograph reality, not embellish it. His linguistic choices resulted in a particular epic-lyric style that incorporated the spoken dialect and relied on a narrative syntax of free indirect discourse. The narrative and stylistic strategies of realism were put in the service of a complex and ambitious narrative project, the ‘‘Ciclo dei vinti’’ (Cycle of the Vanquished). Influenced by Zola’s narrative, Verga envisioned the cycle as early as 1878 as a fivevolume anatomy of contemporary society, of which each novel would have examined a particular section. As the overall title suggests, the underlying theme of the series would have been the struggle for existence and the ultimate failure that unites all social strata. However, he was able to complete only the first two sections, I Malavoglia and Mastro-Don Gesualdo. Of the other three planned volumes—La duchessa di Gargantas, later La duchessa di Leyra (The Duchess of Leyra), on the aristocracy; L’onorevole Scipioni (The Honorable Scipioni), on the political world; and L’uomo di lusso (The Man of Luxury), on the artistic milieu—he began only the first, after his definitive return to Sicily in 1893, but eventually abandoned it (the extant chapter was published posthumously by Federico De Roberto in the journal La lettura in June 1922). However, his turn toward realism was not an irreversible change, as demonstrated by the novels Il marito di Elena (Elena’s Husband, 1882) and I ricordi del capitano d’Arce, both set against an aristocratic background. Verga was heavily involved in theatrical activity during his maturity, even though he had some

disdain for this form of artistic expression, as his letter to Cameroni on 20 April 1890 shows: ‘‘l’arte per se stessa aristocratica, portata in teatro, ha bisogno del consenso di due o trecento imbecilli’’ (Art, in itself aristocratic, taken to the theater, needs the consensus of two or three hundred imbeciles; Gino Raya, Bibliografia verghiana, 1972). But Verga, in his anxious search for success, returned to the theater with Cavalleria rusticana (1884), inspired by the short story of the same title in Vita dei campi, whose opera version, with music by Pietro Mascagni and a libretto by Giovanni Targioni-Tozzetti and Guido Menasci (1890), guaranteed the writer worldwide fame and wealth. Cavalleria Rusticana renewed Italian dramaturgy by bringing characters from common life on to the stage. The story tells of how Alfio kills Turiddu Macca, who had betrayed him by becoming his wife’s lover. In the dramatic version, Santuzza is seduced and abandoned by Turiddu, and takes her revenge by telling Alfio of his wife’s betrayal. The story intertwines the erotic with the economic theme, confirming that the Sicilian world portrayed by Verga is dominated by two fundamental passions: eros and avidity regarding wealth. Verga’s dramatic works made continual references to Sicilian folklore, as in La Lupa (The She-Wolf, 1896), and his gloomy image of Sicily agreed with that of the sociologist Cesare Lombroso, whom Verga knew. The play Dal tuo al mio (Yours to Mine, 1903) closed Verga’s theatrical activity. Dal tuo al mio, which was rewritten as a short novel and published in 1906, is the story of Luciano, a worker who becomes a political agitator to become rich and betray the interests of his fellow workers. The story confirms Verga’s lack of faith in every attempt to overturn the social order. Verga was critical of the cinema, although many of his works were eventually filmed. His first experience with cinema came in 1909 when L’Association Cinematographique des Auters Dramatiques of Paris asked permission to film Cavalleria rusticana. The film, directed by Emile Chautard, was made in 1910, but Verga did not like it and still held on to his view that cinema was an art whose function was ‘‘abbruttire il pubblico e accecare la gente’’ (to turn audiences into brutes and to blind people), as Raya notes in Verga e il cinema (1984). But when he received his earnings for the film in 1913, he began to rewrite more of his works for the screen. He wrote Caccia al lupo, which was filmed by Giuseppe Sterni and was censored in 1917, as well as a new version of Cavalleria rusticana, divided into 12 scenes, which was produced in 1916 under 1965

GIOVANNI VERGA the direction of Ugo Falena for the Roman film company Tespi. He also wrote the scenario for Tigre reale (1916), directed by Giovanni Pastrone. By this time, however, Verga had completely isolated himself, renouncing the completion of the ‘‘Ciclo dei Vinti’’ and abjuring his work as a novelist. From his seclusion in Catania he resisted the entreaties of his friends, and De Roberto in particular, to return to writing, declaring that what he had to say he had already expressed in his books. His last work, published posthumously in the literary review L’illustrazione italiana in 1922, was the short story ‘‘Una capanna e il tuo cuore’’ (A Hut and Your Heart), written in 1919. Two years before his death in 1922 he had been appointed senator of the Kingdom of Italy, a rightful recognition of the central role that he had played in Italian intellectual life between the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Biography Giovanni Verga was born in Catania on 2 September 1840 to Giovanni Battista Verga Catalano and Caterina di Mauro. He witnessed the insurrection of the city and the repression of the Bourbon troops, which forced his family to take refuge in the lands of Vizzini. From 1852, he began his education, first at the private institute of the Republican poet, Antonio Abate, a distant relative. When a cholera epidemic broke out in 1854, the Verga family returned to Vizzini. Verga enrolled at the University of Catania and studied law but left, preferring a literary career, 1858. He founded the patriotic paper Roma degli Italiani, 1860. He collaborated on other editorial initiatives and enrolled in the Guardia Nazionale, where he remained until 1864. On 5 February, 1863, his father died. He made his first trip to Florence, 1865. In April 1869, Verga returned to Florence and visited Francesco Dall’Ongaro. On 20 November 1872, he moved to Milan, where he lived for many years, before returning to Catania permanently. His mother died in 1878; in the same year, he took up photography. He was in Rome for several months, 1888. He traveled to Paris where he began a love affair, which lasted a lifetime, with Dina Castellazzi, 1889. He traveled to Berlin, 1891. Verga won a legal case for copyright infringement with Pietro Mascagni and the publisher Sonzogno, attaining 143,000 lire for Cavalleria rusticana, 1892. In the company of Luigi Capuana, he met Zola in Rome and in the same year began research for the composition of La duchessa di Leyra, which was never completed, 1895. Following the death of his 1966

brother Pietro, he returned to Catania to care for his three nephews, 1903. He was appointed senator on 3 October 1920. On 27 January 1922, Verga died in Catania of a thrombosis. ALFREDO SGROI See also: Verismo Selected Works Collections I grandi romanzi, edited by Carla Riccardi, and Ferruccio Cecco, Milan: Mondadori, 1972. Tutte le novelle, edited by Carla Riccardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1979. Tutto il teatro, edited by Natale Tedesco, Milan: Mondadori, 1980. Tutti i romanzi, edited by Enrico Ghidetti, Florence: Sansoni, 1984. Edizione nazionale delle opere di Giovanni Verga, Palermo: Banco di Sicilia-Florence: Le Monnier, 19 vols., 1987–. Romanzi, edited by Marzio Pieri, Turin: Utet, 1998.

Novels Amore e patria (1857); excerpts in Casa Verga e altri saggi verghiani, by Federico De Roberto, 1964. I carbonari della montagna, 4 vols., 1861–1862. Sulle lagune, in La Nuova Europa, 1862–1863; edited by Giovanni Niccolai, 1973. Una peccatrice, 1866; as A Mortal Sin, translated by Iain Halliday, 1995. Storia di una capinera, 1871; as Sparrow: The Story of a Songbird, translated by Christine Donougher, 1994; as Sparrow, translated by Lucy Gordan and Frances Frenaye, 1997. Eva, 1873. Tigre reale, 1875. Eros, 1875. I Malavoglia, 1881; as The House by the Medlar Tree, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, 1964. Il marito di Elena, 1882. Mastro-don Gesualdo, 1889; as Mastro-Don Gesualdo, translated by D. H. Lawrence, 1928. Dal tuo al mio, 1906.

Short Stories ‘‘Nedda,’’ 1874. ‘‘Primavera e altri racconti,’’ 1876. ‘‘Vita dei campi,’’ 1880; as Life in the Country, translated by John Gordon Nichols, 2003. ‘‘Novelle rusticane,’’ 1883; as Little Novels of Sicily, translated by D. H. Lawrence, 1925. ‘‘Per le vie,’’ 1883. ‘‘Drammi intimi,’’ 1884. ‘‘La festa dei morti,’’ 1884. ‘‘Vagabondaggio,’’ 1887. ‘‘I ricordi del capitano d’Arce,’’ 1891. ‘‘Don Candeloro e C.i,’’ 1894.

Plays I nuovi Tartufi (1866), 1980. Rose caduche (1869), in Le maschere, June 1928.

GIOVANNI VERGA Cavalleria rusticana (1884), 1896; as Cavalleria rusticana, and Other Stories, translated by D. H. Lawrence, 1926; reprinted, 1975. La lupa, 1896; as The She-Wolf and Other Stories, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, 1958, reprinted, 1973; as The She-Wolf, translated by Brennan Wales, 1995; as The She-Wolf, translated by David Lan and Gwenda Pandolfini, 2000. In portineria, 1896. La caccia al lupo, 1902. La caccia alla volpe, 1902. Dal tuo al mio, 1903. Il mistero, 1921.

Letters Lettere al suo traduttore, edited by Fredi Chiappelli, 1954. Lettere a Dina, edited by Gino Raya, 1963. Lettere d’amore, edited by Gino Raya, 1971. Lettere a Paolina, edited by Gino Raya, 1980. Lettere sparse, edited by Giovanna Finocchiaro Chimirri, 1979. Carteggio Verga-Capuana, edited by Gino Raya, 1984. Verga e gli avvocati, edited by Gino Raya, 1988. I tordi e il professore: lettere inedite di Verga, Capuana, Rapisardi e altri, edited by Giuseppe Dall’Ongaro, 1997. Carteggio Verga-Rod, edited by Giorgio Longo, 2004.

Further Reading Alexander, Alfred, Giovanni Verga: A Great Writer and His World, London: Grant and Cutler, 1972. Alexander, Foscarina, The Aspiration toward a Lost Natural Harmony in the Work of Three Italian Writers: Leopardi, Verga, and Moravia, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990. Bergin, Thomas G., Giovanni Verga, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1931; reprinted, 1969. Borsellino, Nino, Storia di Verga, Bari: Laterza, 1992. Caffo, Fulvia, Sarah Zappulla Muscara`, and Enzo Zappulla (editors), Verga da vedere, Catania: Soprintendenza dei beni culturali e ambientali, 2003. Cecchetti, Giovanni, Giovanni Verga, Boston, Twayne, 1987. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘Giovanni Verga,’’ in La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1915. Croce, Benedetto, La letteratura della nuova Italia, Bari: Laterza, 1922. Di Silvestro, Antonio, Le intermittenze del cuore: Verga e il linguaggio dell’interiorita`, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 2000. Fava Guzzetta, Lia, Verga fra Manzoni e Flaubert, Rome: Studium, 1997. Gambacorti, Irene, Storie di cinema e letteratura: Verga, Gozzano, D’Annunzio, Florence: Societa` editrice fiorentina, 2003. Genovese, Nino, and Sebastiano Gesu` (editors), Verga e il cinema: con un testo di Gesualdo Bufalino e una sceneggiatura verghiana inedita di ‘‘Cavalleria rusticana,’’ Catania: Maimone, 1996. Lawrence, David Herbert, The Collected Letters, edited by Harry Moore, 2 vols., London: Heinemann, 1962. Lo Castro, Giuseppe, Giovanni Verga: una lettura critica, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2001. Lucente, Gregory L., The Narrative of Reality and Myth, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Luperini, Romano, Verga, Bari: Laterza, 1988. Luperini, Romano, Verga moderno, Bari: Laterza, 2005. Moroni, Gabriele, Verga e il teatro del suo tempo: l’esperimento di Cavalleria rusticana, Udine: Campanotto, 1997. Mutti, Roberto (editor), Giovanni Verga scrittore fotografo, Novara: De Agostini, 2004. Nemiz, Andrea, Capuana, Verga, De Roberto: fotografi, Palermo: Edikronos, 1982. Oliva, Gianni, Animali e metafore zoomorfe in Verga, Rome: Bulzoni, 1999. Oliva, Gianni, Verga e i verismi regionali, Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1999. Petrillo, Raymond, Itinerario del primo Verga, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1987. Pirandello, Luigi, Saggi, poesie, scritti vari, Milan: Mondadori, 1960. Ragusa, Olga, Verga’s Milanese Tales, New York: Vanni, 1964. Raya, Gino, Bibliografia verghiana: 1840–1971, Rome: Ciranna, 1972. Raya, Gino, Verga e il cinema, Rome: Herder, 1984. Riccobono, Maria Gabriella, Dai suoni al simbolo: memoria poetica, relazioni analoghe, fonosimbolismo in Giovanni Verga, Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 2002. Russo, Luigi, Giovanni Verga, Bari: Laterza, 1934. Tench, Darby, Fictive Mediation and Mediated Fiction in the Novels of Giovanni Verga, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005. Tropea, Mario, Ironia e realta`: saggi su Verga e Pirandello, Rovito (CS): Marra, 1992. Vacante, Nata`lia, L’estremo realismo di Verga: un percorso genetico bloccato, Bari: B. A. Graphis, 2000. Woolf, David, The Art of Verga: A Study in Objectivity, Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1977. Zappulla, Enzo (editor), Nel mondo di Giovanni Verga, Catania: La Cantinella, 2001. Zappulla Muscara`, Sarah, Invito alla lettura di Verga, Milan: Mursia, 1977.

I MALAVOGLIA, 1881 Novel by Giovanni Verga

In his essay ‘‘L’orologio di Verga’’ (1973), Vitaliano Brancati pointed out that I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree) is a novel that for the first time gave voice to the poetry particular to the uneducated and primitive Sicilian people. It is, indeed, one of Giovanni Verga’s most complex and multidimensional works, written after a long 1967

GIOVANNI VERGA struggle between 1875 and 1880. Its compact style integrates several forms of artistic expression. It is a sociological study of the Sicilian town of Aci Trezza, in which are found all the social classes except the aristocracy; an analysis of Sicilian folklore; an apologue; and much else. The novel’s dialogue is very theatrical, with the author presenting the events with the tones of a popular storyteller, while a free indirect style is used to allow the characters to speak in their own idiom (the Sicilian dialect). Verga’s verismo also resorts to the tranche de vie, the representation of a ‘‘slice of life’’ that gives his narrative a choral dimension as well. He thus recreated a primitive world populated by model characters: the bourgeios (Silvestro), the intellectual (Don Scipione), outlaws and soldiers, corrupt clerics and false revolutionaries, all agitated by passions and enflamed by anxiety and wealth and by a down-to-earth eroticism carefully hidden behind reticent silences. I Malavoglia is the first of the five novels that Verga planned under the general title of I vinti. The story centers on the Toscano family, who are losing their distinct identity and struggle to survive under the historical changes implemented by the Unification of Italy. This is a common occurrence in their small community, where they have collectively become known by the nickname of I Malavoglia (literally, those lacking in drive), an undeserved epithet since, as the narrative explains at the very beginning, they had been for generations ‘‘tutti buona e brava gente di mare’’ (all good people of the sea). The patriarch of the family, Padron ‘Ntoni, is overtaken by a feverish greed and experiences an impressive series of economic reversals after the load of lupines that he tries to buy cheaply and sell at a profit is lost in a shipwreck (ironically the name of the ship is La Provvidenza, or ‘‘Providence’’). The Malavoglia are consequently forced along a long penitential road, marked by suffering and bitter hardships, including exile from the community, before returning to their old condition as independent fishermen. Bastianazzo, Padron ‘Ntoni’s son, dies at sea; another son, Luca, falls in the battle of Lissa while serving in the navy. A third son, ‘Ntoni, falls into disgrace after his military service and ends up in prison on charges of smuggling. Lia, the youngest family member, is dishonored by Don Michele and becomes a prostitute, causing her sister Mena to renounce forever marriage with the man she loves. Progressively the Malavoglia lose their honor and house, but these disasters have a cathartic effect, serving as expiation for the hubris that they had exhibited in their 1968

attempt to improve their social and economic fortunes. Although the nephew Alessi eventually buys back the ancestral home known as ‘‘la casa del nespolo’’ (the house by the medlar tree) from the usurer of the village to whom the Malavoglia had been forced to sell it, little remains of the family, as the unhappy look of ‘Ntoni makes clear in the final pages of the novel. Even implorations to God and to the saints prove futile: The only powerful force in this society is that of the economy. Aci Trezza is a community closed in itself and resents every intrusion from the outside, be it the Church or the government, which ruins the family with military service, high taxes, or by prohibiting contraband. It is a world of primitive struggle, in which individuals rejoice in the ruin of those who would like to better their lot. The characters of the novel interact as if on a great stage, performing roles imposed on them by the static rules of their society. A tragic tone pervades I Malavoglia, even in its socalled comic moments. In this tragedy, there are no winners, since all the characters are subject to the precariousness of life. Indeed, as the author explained in his important theoretical introduction, the purpose of the novel was to document and witness to the vicissitudes of those who are defeated and overwhelmed by what he called ‘‘la fiumana del progresso’’ (the flood of progress), thus articulating a critique of modernity in which human vices such as greed and egoism turn into virtues in the struggle for material success. In this context, as Verga clarified in his preface, the task of the novelist is to observe and not judge, to present reality ‘‘com’e` stata, o come avrebbe dovuto essere’’ (as it was or as it should have been). The formal and thematic novelty of I Malavoglia resulted in a tepid reception on its publication, which led Verga himself to describe the novel as a ‘‘fiasco, fiasco pieno e completo’’ (a failure, a total and utter failure) in a famous letter of 11 April 1881 to Luigi Capuana, published by Gino Raya in the Carteggio Verga-Capuana (1984). It was especially with neo-Realism and its renewed interest in verismo that I Malavoglia began to acquire the status of a classic, and an important contribution to the recognition of the novel was its cinematic interpretation by Luchino Visconti in La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948). More recently, critics such as Romano Luperini have emphasized the originality of the novel, which anticipated narrative strategies such as free indirect discourse typical of modernist fiction (Verga moderno, 2005). ALFREDO SGROI

GIOVANNI VERGA Editions First edition: I Malavoglia, Milan: Treves, 1881. Critical editions: I Malavoglia, edited by Carla Riccardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1965; edited by Gino Tellini, Palermo: Sellerio, 1993; edited by Ferruccio Cecco, Turin: Einaudi, 1995. Translations: as The House by the Medlar Tree, translated by Eric Mosbacher, New York: Grove Press, 1953; as The House by the Medlar Tree, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, New York: New American Library, 1964.

Further Reading Alfieri, Gabriella, Lettera e figura nella scrittura de ‘‘I Malavoglia,’’ Florence: Accademia della Crusca, 1983. Alfieri, Gabriella, Il motto degli antichi. Proverbio e contesto nei ‘‘Malavoglia,’’ Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1985. Brancati, Vitaliano, ‘‘L’orologio di Verga,’’ in Il borghese e l’immensita`, edited by Sandro De Feo and Gian Antonio Cibotto, Milan: Bompiani, 1973. Busticardi, Elisa, Italian Nineteenth-Century Literature: The Novel, London: University of London Press, 1999. Dombroski, Robert, Properties of Writing: Ideological Discourse in Modern Italian Fiction, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Luperini, Romano, Simbolo e costruzione allegorica in Verga, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1989. Luperini, Romano, Verga moderno, Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2005. I Malavoglia: atti del congresso internazionale di studi, Catania, 26–28 novembre 1981, 2 vols., Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1982. Musumarra, Carmelo (editor), I Malavoglia di Giovanni Verga, 1881–1981: letture critiche, Palermo: Palumbo, 1982. Raya, Gino (editor), Carteggio Verga-Capuana, Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1984. Roda, Vittorio, Verga e le patologie della casa, Bologna: CLUEB, 2002. Sipala, Paolo Mario, Il romanzo di ‘Ntoni Malavoglia e altri saggi sulla narrativa italiana da Verga a Bonaviri, Bologna: Patron, 1983.

MASTRO-DON GESUALDO, 1889 Novel by Giovanni Verga

First published in the journal Nuova Antologia in 1888, then extensively revised for its volume publication in 1889, Mastro-Don Gesualdo was the result of over seven years of intense labor. At the center of the plot is Gesualdo Motta, a laborer who,

through sacrifice and hard work, climbs the social ladder until he becomes very rich. His social ascent culminates in his marriage to the fallen noblewoman Bianca Trao, which ushers him into the provincial aristocracy. At this point, however, his downward course begins. His daughter, Isabella (who was probably conceived by his wife as a result of an affair), is hostile to him, and marries the Duke of Leyra, an impoverished older nobleman who dissipates her dowry. In the end, Gesualdo must face death alone, in a small room in Isabella’s palace in Palermo. Gesualdo’s story epitomizes the failure of the Sicilian bourgeoisie to become an autonomous class, but is also a family tragedy, characterized by the conflicts which pit fathers against sons, as in Honore´ de Balzac’s Le pe´re Goriot (1834) or in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons (1862). In this domestic and cultural context, Gesualdo, in betraying his own familial and social roots, is a figure of hubris who has broken the atavistic rules of his society. He thus calls down upon himself a fatal punishment for disowning his father and his class, and is condemned to solitude, forced to fight against everyone to attain, and then to defend, his wealth. Ironically, eventually his riches prove to be, as the Canon Lupi testifies, vanitas vanitatum, a vanity of vanities. In the first version of the novel (1888), the ending is tragic. In the 1889 version, Verga introduces a dissonant note, which makes it comical and suggests a sense of change. In this final version, Mastro-Don Gesualdo is an ironic novel, suspended between parody and tragedy. The first part of the narrative is more linear, probably because the ‘‘rustic’’ tone, similar to that of many short stories, is the most congenial to the writer. The second half, in which the narrative follows overlapping events of private concern (Isabella’s escape and return) and those of a more public nature, lacks compactness. Gesualdo himself is surrounded by a gallery of grotesque and ingenious characters. In this theatrical society everyone assumes a different mask according to his own interests, creating a dizzying series of coups de the´aˆtre. Eros and wealth remain the elements which Gesualdo vainly tries to master. He finally realizes the extent of his folly and of his loss at the end of a long penitential road culminating in death. As critics have pointed out, while I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881) was dominated by the cyclical time of myth, Mastro-Don Gesualdo is constructed as a series of separate scenes progressing linearly. In the words of Robert Dombroski, ‘‘the work’s episodic structure reflects the fragmentation of Gesualdo’s 1969

GIOVANNI VERGA psyche, his natural blindness to everything except what he owns and what he wants’’ (Writer and Society in the New Italy, 1996). It is precisely in this fragmentation of experience that Gesualdo points the way to the figure of the defeated antihero of much of twentieth-century literature. ALFREDO SGROI Editions First edition: Mastro-don Gesualdo, Milan: Treves, 1889. Critical editions: Mastro-Don Gesualdo, edited by Carla Riccardi, Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1979; Mastro-Don Gesualdo, edited by Giancarlo Mazzacurati, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Translations: as Mastro-Don Gesualdo, translated by D. H. Lawrence, London: Cape, 1928; as Mastro-Don Gesualdo: A Novel, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979.

Further reading Il centenario del Mastro-Don Gesualdo, 2 vols., Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1989. Costa, Sarino Armando, Problemi di critica verghiana. Motivi e personaggi dei Malavoglia e del Mastro-Don Gesualdo, Florence: Le Monnier, 1971. Dombroski, Robert, ‘‘Writer and Society in the New Italy,’’ in The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, edited by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Grimaldi, Emma, La costola d’Adamo: proposte di lettura per il Mastro-Don Gesualdo, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1994. Muscariello, Mariella, Gli inganni della scienza: percorsi verghiani, Naples: Liguori, 2001. Salibra, Luciana, Il toscanismo nel Mastro-Don Gesualdo, Florence: Olschki, 1994 Scarpa, Federica. La traduzione della metafora: aspetti della traduzione delle espressioni metaforiche del MastroDon Gesualdo in inglese ad opera di D.H. Lawrence, Rome: Bulzoni, 1989.

NOVELLE Short Stories by Giovanni Verga

Verga wrote a large number of novelle, most of which are assembled in the collections Vita dei campi (Life in the Country, 1880) and Novelle 1970

rusticane (Little Novels of Sicily, 1883). He was a master of the short story and one of the great innovators in the Italian novella tradition. The form was congenial to his pessimistic vision of individuals doomed by culture and nature and allowed him to exercise his powers of synthesis. Once he was able to overcome the rhetorical excesses of his early works, he began to appreciate the expressive potential in the very brevity of the short story. His prose became more and more compact as he moved from his first collection, Primavera e altri racconti (Spring and Other Tales, 1876), to his more mature ones. Verga’s short stories are characterized by the almost total absence of authorial commentary and by a minimum of descriptive passages. The plots are built around elementary and exemplary situations, aiming at maximum expressive concentration and an almost geometrical rigor. This does not mean that the world created in the short story is monotonous: On the contrary, it is truly in these brief texts that Verga found the means for examining reality in all its aspects. All the characters and places of modern society became interesting subjects to him, and he appeared equally at ease with the rustic sketch as with the representation of the tranche de vie or ‘‘slice of life’’ from popular or bourgeois settings. The stories of Vita dei campi center on a particular character who is caught just before performing an act of rebellion that leads to a tragic defeat. This is the case of the eponymous protagonist of ‘‘Jeli il Pastore’’ (Jeli the Herdboy), who ends up in prison after having killed his wife’s lover, or Turiddu Macca, the protagonist of ‘‘Cavalleria Rusticana,’’ who is knifed to death in a duel with his lover’s husband. These short stories capture primitive and violent sentiments and depict a social reality governed by iron laws regarding honor and the economy. Any transgression brings immediate punishment for the guilty party. Verga’s social Darwininsm dictated that in this primitive world, the weak are destined to succumb: Even when they rebel and kill their offenders in a moment of anger, as in the aforementioned ‘‘Jeli il pastore’’ or in ‘‘La Lupa’’ (The She-Wolf), or they destroy themselves, as in ‘‘Rosso Malpelo’’ (the nickname given to a boy working in a sulfur mine), they are destined to be beaten. Individuals succumb to the violent laws of the community, or by the hostility of nature, which afflicts men with epidemics (cholera and malaria) or with other natural disasters (droughts). Attempts to ward off these evils through atavistic rites and superstitions prove futile; even Christianity is reduced to a magical practice. The characters

GIOVANNI VERGA are finally always motivated by the struggle of life and so are unable to experience more profound emotions. The same dynamic is present in Novelle rusticane, in which the link between man and his environment becomes even more evident. The 12 short stories are infused by a bitter irony, present even when the writer evokes a fablelike atmosphere. This is the case of ‘‘Storia dell’asino di San Giuseppe’’ (Story of St. Joseph’s Ass), the protagonist of which is indeed a donkey whose life on earth is a pilgrimage of suffering until its final, liberating death. This tale, like many others in this collection, favors the comic and the grotesque and ends in tragedy. In ‘‘Liberta`’’ (Liberty), the revolutionary potential marked by the arrival of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s troops turns into a furious carnival of the month of July. In the bloody revolt of the peasants, the normal order of the world is momentarily overturned before once more being restored with the intervention of the army. Verga took many of his tales from the traditions of folklore in oral, popular Sicilian culture and reworked them in an ironic manner. From the lowly donkey to the rich canon, ‘‘grasso come un maiale’’ (as fat as a pig) in ‘‘Il Reverendo’’ (His Reverence), from the malaria-ridden peasants to the king himself, the stories represent the full spectrum of social reality. The common men and women are, like the donkey, subordinate to the powerful and succumb without having any possibility of acting, while the king and justice are sovereign beings, surrounded and protected by an almost magical aura. In ‘‘Cos’e` il re’’ (So Much for the King) the protagonist, Cosimo, has an extraordinary experience: He meets the king personally but then bitterly learns that the same sovereign power that appeared to him so benign can decree his death. Another recurrent theme is the social hypocrisy of the community. In ‘‘Pane Nero’’ (Black Bread), Nanni’s daughter Lucia becomes the lover of her master, Don Venerando, while also falling in love with Brasi, his servant. When Don Venerando agrees to give her a substantial dowry to marry Brasi, the man is quite happy to pretend not to notice Lucia’s betrayal. Erotic transgression is accepted, as long as appearances are maintained. In his later collections of stories, Verga experimented with new themes such as psychological situations in Drammi intimi (Intimate Tragedies, 1884), although he returned regularly to the characters and places of rural Sicily that undoubtedly inspired his best narrative results. Although considered one of his least successful collections,

I ricordi del capitano d’Arce (The Recollections of Captain D’Arce, 1891) is interesting for its structure, as the separate short stories, in which Verga attempted to represent the vacuous world of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, are linked by recurrent characters and by the framing device of Captain D’Arce’s narrating voice. A similar structure was used for Don Candeloro e C.i (Don Candeloro and Co., 1894), which follows the vicissitudes of a troupe of wandering artists. In these final stories, the characters live in a continuous fiction, moving, as the title of the last tale says, ‘‘Fra le scene della vita’’ (Among the scenes of life), trapped in an unhappy situation from which only death can free them. ALFREDO SGROI Collected Editions First editions Tutte le novelle, edited by Carla Riccardi, Milan: Mondadori, 1979. Le novelle, edited by Giovanni Tellini, 2 vols., Rome: Salerno, 1980. Novelle, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, 2 vols., Milan: Rizzoli, 1981. Novelle e teatro, edited by Marzio Pieri, Turin: Utet, 2002.

Translations As Little Novels of Sicily, translated by D. H. Lawrence, New York: Seltzer, 1925. As Cavalleria Rusticana and Other Stories, translated by D. H. Lawrence, London: Cape, 1928. As The She-Wolf, and Other Stories, translated by Giovanni Cecchetti, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958; expanded edition, 1973. As Sicilian Stories, edited and translated by Stanley Appelbaum, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002. As Life in the Country, translated by John Gordon Nichols, London: Hesperus, 2003.

Further Reading Ancona, Franzina Carlo Maria, Struttura e linguaggio: analisi di una novella di Giovanni Verga, Palermo: I.L.A. Palma, 1982. Benedetti, Pierpaolo (editor), Cavalleria rusticana: l’archetipo e le sue figure, Rome: SOGEDIT, 1996. Borghi, Giuseppe, Guida all’analisi delle novelle di Verga: 14 novelle annotate e commentate, Foggia: Bastogi, 1982. Borsellino, Nino, Storia di Verga, Bari: Laterza, 1982. Cucinotta, Cosimo, Le maschere di don Candeloro, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1981. Gibellini, Pietro, ‘‘Tre coltellate per compare Turiddu: Lettura antropologica di ‘Cavalleria rusticana,’’’ Strumenti critici, 72 (1993), 205–223. Gioviale, Fernando, L’arcaico futuro: itinerari epico-lirici, Catania: Maimone, 1992.

1971

GIOVANNI VERGA Lucente, Gregory L., The Narrative of Reality and Myth, Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Marchese, Franco (editor), Aveva i capelli rossi, Come leggere un testo letterario: metodi a confronto su Rosso Malpelo, Palermo: Palumbo, 1995. Musumarra, Carmelo (editor), Novelle rusticane di Giovanni Verga, Palermo: Palumbo, 1984.

Oliva, Gianni, L’operosa stagione. Verga, d’Annunzio e altri studi di letteratura postunitaria, Rome: Bulzoni, 1997. Saccone, Eduardo, ‘‘I mondi di Verga: L’ossimoro di ‘Cavalleria Rusticana,’’’ MLN, 117 (2002), 106–114. Sciascia, Leonardo, Introduction to Giovanni Verga, Novelle, edited by Giulio Carnazzi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1981.

VERISMO A necessary starting point for any discussion of verismo is the question of terminology. The tendency to use the terms ‘‘Naturalism,’’ ‘‘realism,’’ and verismo interchangeably can give rise to some ambiguity. To avoid any confusion, it is necessary to distinguish between the three terms. That is because while ‘‘Naturalism,’’ ‘‘realism,’’ and verismo refer to forms of narrative with common and converging features, each term also denotes a quite distinct aesthetic movement. Loosely defined, ‘‘realism’’ is a term that may be applied to those literary texts that reject sentimental Romanticism and choose as their object of inquiry the multifariousness of reality as it manifests itself in its various social aspects. ‘‘Naturalism,’’ and more specifically French literary Naturalism, meanwhile, refers to a corpus of texts roughly written in the same historical period (1870–1900), whose goal is objective observation based on the assumptions of scientific determinism. Thus, the paradigmatic features of the French Naturalist novel, which is recognized as the genre that is historically most readily associable with a scientific method, include the rejection of the idealism of Romanticism; the dispassionate portrayal of moral and social deprivation or some aspect of hereditary pathology; the programmatic claim to ‘‘impersonality’’ that involves the disappearance of the readily identifiable position of the narrator in relation to the characters being represented; and the denunciation of corrupt aspects of contemporary society. In its close, scientific observation of the world, verismo shares with French Naturalism several distinguishing traits. Its privileged focus, however, falls on the formal aspect rather than on its social or scientific dimension, with the result that Naturalist aesthetics is transformed into a 1972

‘‘method’’ of writing, an aspect on which the veristi themselves insist. As will be seen below, the formal issues concerned involve impersonality and the eclipsing of the author. Additionally, despite its profound links with Naturalism, by which it is directly and indirectly inspired, verismo denotes a more sharply defined and distinctly Sicilian poetics and context and is marked by some fairly precise moments of inception, evolution, and eventual demise. In fact, though a number of writers, including the Neapolitan Matilde Serao (1856–1927), the Tuscans Renato Fucini (1843–1921) and Mario Pratesi (1842–1921), and the Genoese Remigio Zena (1850–1917) produced writings in the vein of verismo, the term is used more specifically to refer to three Sicilian authors: Luigi Capuana (1839–1915), Giovanni Verga (1840–1922), and Federico De Roberto (1861–1927). Some historical background will help to put this in perspective. Realist narrative was relatively late in coming to Italy. The social, political, and economic problems that the incomplete unification of Italy had left unresolved, the rift between a partially industrialized north and a predominantly agrarian south, and the slow development of a middle-class reading public contributed to this belated arrival. However, by the 1870s, verismo was rapidly taking shape within the same climate of heated philosophical, scientific, and literary debate and counter-debate over the theories of Positivism and Darwinism that characterized the rest of nineteenth-century Europe. In 1865, Darwin’s Origins of the Species (1859) was translated into Italian, while in 1866 the Neapolitan philosopher Pasquale Villari published La filosofia positiva e il metodo storico, an essay in which positivist

VERISMO philosophy is studied as a method that can be applied to the objective study of reality. What helped to codify the theoretical assumptions already under discussion in Italy was the Naturalism of E´mile Zola. From the prefaces to the second edition of The´re`se Raquin (1868) and L’Assommoir (1877), and continuing through to the lengthy essay ‘‘Le Roman expe´rimental’’ (1880), Zola set forth a methodological procedure based on dispassionate objectivity and determinism. Borrowing from a number of eclectic sources ranging from the novels of Gustave Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, and even Victor Hugo, to the positivist tracts of Auguste Comte and the ideas of the physiologist Claude Bernard, Zola polemically rejected Romanticism and idealism, and insisted on the impersonal character of his scientifically inclined ‘‘experimental novel.’’ In Zola’s program for social investigation, carried out through the agency of novelistic representation, the writer is an observer who scientifically and objectively accumulates data on human nature and records the results of his ‘‘experiment’’: ‘‘C’est l’investigation scientifique, c’est le raisonnement expe´rimental qui combat une a` une les hypothe`ses des ide´alistes, et qui remplace les romans de pure imagination par les romans d’observation et d’expe´rimentation’’ (It is scientific investigation, it is experimental reasoning, that defeats one by one the hypotheses of the idealists, and which replaces the novel of pure imagination with the novel of observation and experimentation; ‘‘Le Roman expe´rimental,’’ 1880). Zola’s Naturalist techniques were first introduced to the Italian reading public by the Milanese literary critic Felice Cameroni in 1873. Cameroni hailed Zola’s novels as masterpieces because of the link between art and science, the faithful reproduction of reality, the focus on hereditary traits, the rejection of romantic sentimentalism, and sociopolitical commitment. It was, however, only with the publication of Zola’s L’Assommoir and the glowing review it received from Capuana in the same year that verismo as a distinct method would start to take shape. During the intervening months between the end of 1877 and the spring of 1878, a small group of writers and literary critics, including Verga, Cameroni, and Capuana himself, started meeting in Milan with the intent of giving expression to a literary method inspired by French Naturalism and aimed at distancing itself from the romantic novel. Capuana’s Giacinta, verismo’s first novel, came out in 1879; the following year, Verga published Vita dei campi (Life in the Country), a collection of eight

short stories, which was followed by I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881). In the same years, the debate on the precepts of Naturalism took on a more specific cast in the critical works of Francesco De Sanctis, the doyen of nineteenth-century Italian critics, who dedicated two essays, ‘‘Studio sopra Emilio Zola’’ (A Study of E´mile Zola, 1877) and ‘‘Zola e L’Assommoir’’ (Zola and L’Assommoir, 1879), to Zola. As defined by De Sanctis, what lies at the heart of Zola’s crude representation of reality, even in its most decadent and dissipated aspects, is a scientifically oriented ‘‘physiological’’ approach. De Sanctis wrote: ‘‘Il suo romanzo e` dunque uno studio piu` acuto o piu` compiuto dell’uomo a base fisiologica...e` un progresso artistico corrispondente al progresso scientifico, che ha reso scienza l’antropologia e la pedagogia’’ (His novel is therefore a sharper and more accomplished study of man from a physiological standpoint...it is a form of artistic progress similar to scientific progress, which has turned into a science anthropology and pedagogy; ‘‘Studio sopra Emilio Zola,’’ in Saggi critici, 1969). According to De Sanctis, such an approach enabled Zola to explore the evolution of the human psyche, shaped by the intricate interplay of the characters’ hereditary instincts and their reactions to their physical and social environment. De Sanctis’s observations on Zola deeply influenced Capuana, a novelist, playwright, and verismo’s most elaborate theoretician and active polemicist. It was with the notions of Capuana, formulated under the aegis of the aesthetics of De Sanctis, that verismo both as a term and as a ‘‘method’’ capable of reconstructing a reality that is ‘‘piu‘ vera del vero,’’ or ‘‘more truthful than the truth,’’ finally took on a more precise configuration. In verismo’s approach to the novel, notions of content are inextricably tied with notions of forma. For Capuana, the content of the novel, which he hailed as the most suitable genre for the accurate scientific depiction of material and psychological phenomena, could be expressed only in terms of form. In an 1881 review of Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia, Capuana formulated one of verismo’s most cogent observations on the interplay between form and content and on the tension between the subjective agency of authorial presence and the impersonality of the reality represented by that agency: ‘‘Il positivismo, il naturalismo esercitano una vera e radicale influenza nel romanzo contemporaneo, ma soltanto nella forma; e tal’influenza si traduce nella perfetta impersonalita` di quest’opera 1973

VERISMO d’arte’’ (Positivism and naturalism have a real, radical influence on the contemporary novel, but only formally, and that influence manifests itself in the perfect impersonality of such a work of art; ‘‘Un terribile e salutare corrosivo nella nostra bislacca letteratura,’’ in Ghidetti, Verga. Guida storicocritica, 1979). In the interplay between the depiction of human nature and the artifice of form, the stylistic restraint that forma entails becomes an integral part of a novel’s content. Indeed, as Capuana argued four years later, verismo’s main focus of interest is the hidden processes behind human nature, but only as they are objectified with rigorous precision and therefore rendered formally viable: ‘‘e` solamente artista colui che ripete, nella forma letteraria, il segreto processo della natura’’ (the artist is only he who can repeat, in literary form, the secret process of nature; Per l’arte, 1885). Capuana is traditionally cast as the most innovative theoretician of verismo, with Verga as its most creative practitioner and novelist. Though it is primarily to Capuana’s theoretical writings that one has to turn to properly understand the underlying assumptions of verismo, the prefaces and introductions that accompany Verga’s fictional texts, together with his letters to other writers and critics, particularly to Capuana himself, contain some of the most insightful observations on the aesthetics of realist fiction. Several recurring themes emerge with striking clarity in these writings: the constant search for truth, or il vero, which is to be depicted with scrupolo scientifico (scientific rigor); the attention to the tension between form and content, since, as Verga wrote, ‘‘mi pare necessaria ed inerente al soggetto la forma’’ (form seems to me necessary and inherent to the subject); and the need to create ‘‘l’illusione della realta`’’ (the illusion of reality) through impersonality and the withdrawal of the author, ‘‘dissimulando e eclissando quanto si puo` lo scrittore’’ (dissimulating and eclipsing the writer as much as possible; in Ghidetti, Verga. Guida storico-critica, 1979). These themes are all taken up in the introduction to the short story ‘‘L’amante di Gramigna’’ (Gramigna’s Mistress, 1880), which has the cogency and the energy of a manifesto. In this introduction, Verga wrote that if artistic creation is to maintain the illusion of verisimilitude, the author has to avoid the ‘‘original sin’’ of authorial intrusion by means of the self-effacement of the writer: ‘‘la mano dell’artista rimarra` assolutamente invisibile, allora avra` l’impronta dell’avvenimento reale, l’opera d’arte sembrera` essersi fatta da se`, aver maturato ed esser sorta spontanea come un fatto 1974

naturale, senza serbare alcun punto di contatto col suo autore, alcuna macchia del peccato d’origine’’ (the hand of the artist will remain absolutely invisible, it will thus have the imprint of a real event; the work of art will seem to have made itself, to have matured and come into being spontaneously, without retaining any point of contact with its author, any stain of the original sin; Tutte le novelle, 1969). The eclipsing of the narrating voice is therefore indispensable, for artistic creation, and integrity is seriously compromised wherever the illusion of spontaneity is lost through the intervention of an author who is visibly seen to be manipulating events and characters. Clearly, then, at the heart of verismo is the issue of ‘‘narrative form.’’ In fact, one of the major achievements of verismo’s prose lies in its distinctive combination of indirect discourse, choral discourse, and the style indirect libre (free indirect style), a combination through which its exponents strive to portray reality with ‘‘perfect impersonality’’ and scientific accuracy. Yet, despite the ‘‘scientific’’ rationalist bias of its aesthetics, one should not lose sight of the fact that verismo accommodates symbolic modes alongside its realistic ones. The fictive world of verismo is dominated by predetermined necessity that denies the possibility of change and excludes any redemptive concept of time; this materialistic pessimism carries symbolically charged significance, which creates an aura of fatalism, immutability, and ritualized circularity. Even the realistic elements making up verismo’s world of perpetuity are invariably reintegrated into the predetermined pattern of rhythmic repetition and mythic presence. Within the symbolic framework of the narrative of verismo, individual characters such as Rosso Malpelo or La Lupa, two of the protagonists of Verga’s short stories Vita dei campi, take on the cast of idealized or archetypal figures, often reflecting the primary and ultimately irreconcilable oppositions of nature/culture, male/ female, ruler/subaltern, and life/death. Verismo’s pessimistic vision of nineteenth-century rural Sicily has been interpreted as the expression in artistic terms of the deep skepticism of its exponents regarding the possibility of change and progress for a people inexorably caught up in the abrupt transition from feudalism to a family-based agricultural capitalism, for which the newly united Italy was ill prepared. This pessimistic view of history, governed by resignation to an overriding preexisting force, informs the world depicted by Federico De Roberto in I Vicere` (The Viceroys, 1894), the last monumental work of verismo.

VERISMO Rather than rural society, the main source of inspiration of Capuana and Verga, De Roberto explored the corrupt moral values and the pathological degeneration of a series of figures belonging to the middle class and the aristocracy in pre- and post-Unification Italy. De Roberto’s particular blend of impersonality, hallucinatory detachment, aggressive indignation, multiple points of view, and irony creates a negative feeling of profound epistemological disturbance, violence, and death. When compared to French Naturalism, verismo was a short-lived movement stretching roughly from 1877 to 1889. It took less than two decades for verismo to emerge, develop, and recede. It has been argued that, unlike French Naturalism, verismo was conceived in a climate that lacked the political and cultural dynamism linked to industrial development. In fact, whereas French Naturalism turns on the experiences of the urban proletariat, verismo took as its context the agricultural classes in rural Sicily. In the years in which verismo generated greatest interest, the literary scene in Italy had remained predominantly romanticized and conservative, and even Verga’s I Malavoglia, one of the masterpieces of verismo, was received with hostility. In the 1890s, both the enthusiasm and the empiricistidealist opposition that verismo had inspired in the preceding years started to fade. The dominant narrative mode began to take on an entirely different configuration, that of decadent symbolism inaugurated by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il piacere (The Pleasure, 1889). However, despite its short existence, the legacy of verismo cannot be ignored, so much so that it has been defined as a decisively modernist movement whose Weltanschauung anticipates many of the devices later developed by such great modernist writers as Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, and Federico Tozzi. GLORIA LAURI-LUCENTE

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto (editor), Il caso Verga, Palumbo: Palermo, 1972. Baguley, David, Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Baguley, David, ‘‘The Nature of Naturalism,’’ in Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Brian Nelson, New York and Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1992.

Baldi, Guido, L’artificio della regressione: tecnica narrativa e ideologia nel Verga verista, Naples: Liguori, 1980. Bigazzi, Roberto, I colori del vero: vent’anni di narrativa: 1860–1880, Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1969. Borsellino, Nino, Storia di Verga, Bari: Laterza, 1982. Capuana, Luigi, Per l’arte, Catania: Giannotta, 1885. Carnazzi, Giulio, Verismo, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 1996. Cecchetti, Giovanni, Il Verga maggiore: sette studi, Nuova Italia: Florence, 1968. Chevrel, Yves, Le naturalisme, Paris: P.U.F., 1982. Davies, Judith, The Realism of Luigi Capuana: Theory and Practice in the Development of Late NineteenthCentury Italian Narrative, London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 1979. Debenedetti, Giacomo, Verga e il naturalismo, Milan: Garzanti, 1976. De Sanctis, Francesco, Saggi critici, edited by Luigi Russo, vol. 3, Bari: Laterza, 1969. Ghidetti, Enrico (editor), Verga: guida storico-critica, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1979. Lucente, Gregory L.,‘‘Critical Treatments of Verga and Verismo: Movements and Trends (1950–1980),’’ Modern Language Notes, 98 (1983), 129–138. Lucente, Gregory L., The Narrative of Realism and Myth. Verga, Lawrence, Faulkner, Pavese, Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979. Luperini, Romano, Pessimismo e verismo in Giovanni Verga, Padua: Livania Editrice, 1968. Luperini, Romano, Verga moderno, Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2005. Madrignani, Carlo Alberto, Capuana e il naturalismo, Bari: Laterza, 1970. Masiello, Vitilio (editor), Il punto su Verga, Bari: Laterza, 1986. Musitelli Paladini, Marina, Nascita di una poetica: il Verismo, Palermo: Palumbo, 1974. Musumarra, Carmelo, Verga e la sua eredita` novecentesca, Brescia: La Scuola, 1981. Naturalismo e verismo. I generi, poetiche e tecniche, Catania: Fondazione Verga, 1988. ´ mile Zola’s Pagano, Tullio, Experimental Fictions: From E Naturalism to Giovanni Verga’s Verism, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Pellini, Pierluigi, In una casa di vetro. Generi e temi del naturalismo europeo, Florence: Le Monnier, 2004. Petronio, Giuseppe, Romanticismo e verismo. Due forme della modernita` letteraria, Milan: Mondadori, 2003. Pirodda, Giovanni, L’eclisse dell’autore: tecnica ed esperimenti verghiani, Cagliari: Editrice Democratica Sarda, 1976. Smith, Jonathan, ‘‘Naturalism and Anti-Naturalism in Italy,’’ in Naturalism in the European Novel: New Critical Perspectives, edited by Brian Nelson, New York and Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1992. Spinazzola, Vittorio, Verismo e positivismo, Milan: Garzanti, 1977. Verga, Giovanni, Tutte le novelle, edited by Corrado Simioni, 2 vols., Milan: Mondadori, 1969. ´ mile, ‘‘Le Roman expe´rimental,’’ in Œuvres comZola, E ple`tes, edited by Henri Mitterand, vol. 10, Paris: Cercle du Livre Pre´cieux, 1968.

1975

SANDRO VERONESI

SANDRO VERONESI (1959–) After earning a degree in architecture at the University of Florence, Sandro Veronesi opted for a writing career, which he began in his mid-twenties with a collection of poetry, Il cielo e il resto (The Sky and the Rest, 1984), his only venture into verse writing. What since followed includes six novels, three books of essays, one theatrical piece, numerous introductions to novels and collections of essays, interviews, screenplays, and television programs. Il cielo e il resto consists of 25 short compositions, none longer than 14 verses, that address the general problem of communication, all of which is underscored by a constant coincidentia oppositorum. These seemingly simple verses speak eloquently to the narrating voice’s quotidian landscape. His first novel, Per dove parte questo treno allegro (Where This Happy Train Leaves For, 1988), is the story of a typical and troubled relationship of the 1980s between a father, an adventurous businessman, deep in debt, who has squirreled away a few hundred thousand dollars in Switzerland, and his son, an insipid 30-year-old who acts half his age and is a do-nothing with strange habits. While the two spend a few strained weeks together, they eventually begin to find some similarities in their lives. With his second novel, Gli sfiorati (The Slighted, 1990), Veronesi approached themes related to the family in a much more dramatic fashion. In a family made up of two previously split ones, a father and son again experience a troubled relationship. However, the protagonist Mete finds comfort in a developing bond with his beautiful 17-year-old stepsister. The story is set in Rome and it is intertwined with other narratives of the various social types one might expect to find in such a chaotic metropolis. Somewhat experimental, this novel verges on the fantastic, while the author offered up a portrait of the early 1990s and its polymorphous, youthful generation, represented here by the literal, and metaphorical, sign of schiumevolezza (foaminess). Faithful to the theme of troubled relationships between two people of different generations, Venite venite B-52 (Come, Come, B-52, 1995) shifts the dynamics to that between father and daughter. As he did in his previous novels, especially in Gli sfiorati, here too Veronesi offered up a gallery of extraordinary characters, beginning with the father, 1976

Ennio Miraglia, a representation of the 1980s consumerist Italy, and his daughter Viola, whose desire to free herself of her father’s Italy is underscored in the novel’s title, referring to her hopes that the American bombers will come and destroy what she abhors. La forza del passato (The Force of the Past, 2000) continues the father–son relationship. This time, however, there are differences: The father is absent (dead), and we move from a positive memory of the dead father to one that questions his son’s knowledge of who he truly was. Gianni Orzan is a writer of children’s books whose life is suddenly shattered when he realizes that what he always believed about his father, and by extension of himself, may have all been a fac¸ade. Through Gianni’s eventual stream-of-consciousness narrative, both he and the novel’s reader constantly shift between the present and the past. Ring City (2001) is a ‘‘children’s novel,’’ for lack of a better term. As such, it figures as a companion piece to La forza del passato, as it is surely a book that Gianni Orzan could have written. Topolino (Mickey Mouse) must confront the Fosterman clan, who has taken over the once-tranquil city of Vocalia, transforming it into a giant boxing ring. Five years in the making, Caos calmo (Calm Chaos, 2005) is Veronesi’s latest novel. Having lost his wife to an unnatural death, the protagonist Pietro Paladini is able to rediscover his existential bearings only after reexamining life from its metaphorical underbelly, in his subsequent dealings with the various people in his life. Veronesi is an assiduous essayist. Much of the material in his nonfiction collections appeared in various dailies, weeklies, and serials such as Il manifesto, L’unita`, Nuovi argomenti, Panta, and Il corriere della sera. These collections, to date, include Cronache italiane (Italian Chronicles, 1992) and Live. Ritratti, sopralluoghi e collaudi (Live. Portraits, Inspections, Tests, 1996), each of which originated chiefly from his journalistic writings. Occhio per occhio. La pena di morte in quattro storie (An Eye for an Eye. The Death Penalty in Four Stories, 1992) is instead a thorough study of the death penalty and how it is administered in four different localities around the world: Sudan, Taiwan, the Soviet Union, and California. In 2002, Bompiani

ALESSANDRO VERRI brought out his previous two collections, together with his Nuove cronache (1996–2002) (New Chronicles 1996–2002), in Superalbo. Le storie complete (Super-register. The Complete Stories). In addition, Veronesi has written numerous introductions for books that range from novels to collections of essays on many topics, including soccer and rock music. Most recently, he ventured into the world of theater with his No Man’s Land (2003), a drama originating from and similar to Danis Tanovic’s film of 2001, but with a good dose of Veronesi’s caustic irony.

Biography Born in Prato on 1 April 1959, Sandro Veronesi studied architecture at the University of Florence, only to opt for a writing career in his mid-twenties. After a number of years in Rome (1985–2003), where he worked at his craft as a writer as well as journalist, essayist, and screenplay writer, Veronesi returned to Prato where he now lives. In 2000, his novel La forza del passato won the Premio Viareggio, L. Repaci, and the Premio Campiello. Among his many activities, he also directs the series ‘‘Mine Vaganti’’ for Fandango Libri, the publishing arm of the cultural cooperative Fandango. ANTHONY JULIAN TAMBURRI Selected Works Fiction Per dove parte questo treno allegro, 1988. Gli sfiorati, 1990.

Venite venite B-52, 1995. La forza del passato, 2000. Ring City, 2001. Caos Calmo, 2005.

Poetry Il cielo e il resto, 1984.

Theater No Man’s Land, 2003.

Nonfiction Cronache italiane, 1992. Occhio per occhio. La pena di morte in quattro storie, 1992. Live. Ritratti, sopralluoghi e collaudi, 1996. Superalbo. Le storie complete, 2002.

Further Reading Carbone, Lorenza Rocco, ‘‘La forza del passato di Sandro Veronesi,’’ Sı`larus: Rassegna Bimestrale di Cultura, 41:213 (2001), 75–78. La Porta, Filippo, ‘‘Sandro Veronesi,’’ in La nuova narrativa italiana: travestimenti e stili di fine secolo, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1995. Lardo, Cristiana, ‘‘Sandro Veronesi: dichiarazione d’amore,’’ in L’ultima letteratura italiana: scrittori a Tor Vergata: interventi ed interviste, edited by Cristiana Lardo and Fabio Pierangeli, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1999. Meli, Stefania, ‘‘Esistenze abusive nei romanzi di Sandro Veronesi,’’ in L’ultima letteratura italiana: scrittori a Tor Vergata: interventi ed interviste, edited by Cristiana Lardo e Fabio Pierangeli, Rome: Vecchiarelli, 1999. Tamburri, Anthony Julian, ‘‘Abitare in limine: Per dove parte questo treno [mica tanto] allegro,’’ Esperienze letterarie, 30:2 (2005), 67–84.

ALESSANDRO VERRI (1741–1816) Alessandro Verri took his first steps into literature within the lively group of writers and essayists (among whom was his brother Pietro, 13 years his senior) who in 1761 founded the Societa` dei Pugni and from 1764 to 1766 published the gazette Il Caffe`. In this pugnacious intellectual environment, he found the opportunity to enhance his social and political awareness by reading the works of thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Etienne Condillac, John Locke, David Hume, Giambattista Vico, and other writers in whom he

discovered an expression of his own feelings of revolt against the heritage of tradition in all its forms, in literature as well as in society. He considered the traditional education that he had experienced in his youth and against which he fought for the rest of his life as bound to undermine the intellectual and moral faculties and to teach the fear of the whip. Probably the brightest and surely one of the most prolific contributors to Il Caffe`, during the two-year life of this polemical and satirical sheet Verri wrote 32 articles on different topics 1977

ALESSANDRO VERRI concerning the necessity of a cultural renewal. His experience as a lawyer working in the context of the prison system (he held the position of ‘‘protector of prisoners’’) led him to write a series of articles about the need for profound change in the legislations existing in Europe and in their conception. He shared the same perspectives of Cesare Beccaria’s enormously influential Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764), which in turn owes much in concept and structure the work of Verri brothers. At the same time, he pursued a radical change of attitude in literature and in language and engaged in a strong polemic against what he and the Caffe` group saw as the crystalized academic institutions whose aim was the defence of pedantry and their symbol, the prestigious Accademia della Crusca, which, with its influential Vocabolario, first published in 1612 and reissued for the fourth time in 1738, set the vernacular of Tuscany as the model of literary Italian. Refusing any imposition of language standards, he asserted the right to a free expression in what was to become the most famous article published in Il Caffe`, ‘‘Rinunzia avanti nodaro degli autori del presente foglio periodico al Vocabolario della Crusca’’ (Renunciation of the Crusca Vocabulary Made in Front of the Notary by the Authors of This Broadsheet, 1764). Under the motto ‘‘Preferire le idee alle parole’’ (prefer ideas to words), Verri rejected any restriction imposed ‘‘all’onesta liberta` de’ loro pensieri, e della ragion loro’’ (to the honest freedom of their thoughts, and their reason). Therefore, since the pretence that a language could have reached its absolute perfection had yet to be demonstrated, and no law demanded worship of what he called the Crusca ‘‘oracles,’’ the new generation of writers should be allowed to invent new words just as Petrarch, Dante, and Boccaccio had done. The polemical vigor of this article brought about a lively debate, to which also contributed, in defence of Alessandro’s thesis, both Beccaria and Pietro Verri. The latter reiterated his brother’s arguments in ‘‘Sui parolai e sullo spirito della letteratura italiana’’ (On Chatterboxes and on the Spirit of Italian Literature, 1765) and clearly synthesized the general proposal and aims of the Caffe` intellectuals in ‘‘Gli studi utili’’ (The Useful Studies, 1765), both published in the journal. During his activity as a journalist and polemist, Verri pursued different directions. He wrote the article ‘‘Di Giustiniano e delle sue leggi’’ (On Giustiniano and His Laws, 1764), soon translated into French and read by the Paris encyclopedists, as he discovered to his satisfaction when he travelled to Paris and London in 1766 on the famous journey in 1978

which he had a falling-out with Beccaria as a result of the latter’s refusal to acknowledge the fundamental contribution given by the Verri brothers to Dei delitti e delle pene as well as the real paternity of the Apologia (Defence, 1765). Between 1761 and 1766 he worked on his monumental Saggio sulla storia d’Italia (Essay on the History of Italy), for which he held great expectations. However, after his move from Milan to Rome in 1767, aware of the risks connected to the publication of this work and fearing the intervention of the Inquisition, he decided to ask the publisher to stop the printing. The period in Rome gradually affected Verri’s personality. In the letters to his brother—documents of primary importance to understand the Italian and European culture of the time—one can find traces of the process through which he shifted from his allegiance to the ideals of the Enlightenment rejection and of his reevaluation of passions and feeling, which can be considered as one of the earliest manifestations of a pre-Romantic sensibility in Italian culture. The political results of this crisis became evident with the posthumous publication of Vicende memorabili dal 1789 al 1801 (Memorable Events from 1789 to 1801, 1858). After working on translations of Shakespeare and Homer and on the plays Pantea and I fatti di Milano (The Events in Milan), published together as Tentativi drammatici (Attempts to Drama, 1779), he wrote a series of novels that would give him great notoriety: Le avventure di Saffo poetessa di Mitilene (The Adventures of Sappho, Poet of Mitilene, 1782); Le notti romane al sepolcro de’ Scipioni (The Roman Nights; or Dialogues at the Tombs of the Scipios), the first part of which was published in 1792, the second in 1804, while the third remained unpublished until 1967; and La vita di Erostrato (The Life of Erostratus, 1815). Le notti romane al sepolcro de’ Scipioni is considered Verri’s masterpiece and evidence of his new poetic sensibility. In it, neoclassical instances merge with the dark atmospheres of pre-Romanticism (as its title suggests, explicitly echoing Edward Young’s Nights), and the text is permeated by the author’s growing pessimism toward history, culture, and human existence.

Biography Alessandro Verri was born in Milan, 9 November 1741, a son of the noblewoman Barbara Dati della Somaglia and of Count Gabriele Verri, magistrate and future President of the Senate of Milan. He was educated at the college of Padri Somaschi in Merate and at the School of S. Alessandro, run by

PIETRO VERRI the Barnabite fathers in Milan, where he studied law, after which he began to practice as ‘‘protector of prisoners.’’ In 1761, he founded, with his brother Pietro and other friends, the Societa` dei pugni, and then the periodical Il Caffe` (1764–1766). In 1766– 1767, Verri traveled to Paris with Cesare Beccaria, where he was introduced to the circle of the French encyclopedists, then to London, and via Paris to Rome. In Rome he fell in love with the Marquise Margherita Boccapadule Gentile and from 1767 on resided there. In 1793, after the tumults and the subsequent revolution, he left Rome and went back to Milan, soon returning, via Florence, to meet Vittorio Alfieri. He died in Rome on 23 September 1816. ALESSANDRO CROCE Selected Works

Letters Carteggio di Pietro e di Alessandro Verri dal 1766 al 1797, edited by Francesco Novati, Emanuele Greppi, Alessandro Giulini, and Giovanni Seregni, 12 vols., 1910– 1942. Viaggio a Parigi e Londra (1766–1767): Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, edited by Gianmarco Gaspari, 1980.

Translations William Shakespeare, Amleto, 1768. William Shakespeare, Otello, 1777. Homer, La Iliade di Omero tradotta in compendio ed in prosa. Illustrata con brevi annotazioni, le quali accennano i luoghi ommessi o abbreviati, espongono il preciso testo letterale, e facilitano la intelligenza del Poema, 1789.

Other Tentativi drammatici, 1779.

Further Reading

Collections Opere Scelte, 2 vols., Milan: Societa Tipografica De’ Classici Italiani, 1822. Lettere e scritti inediti di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, edited by Carlo Casati, 4 vols., Milan: Galli, 1879–1881. I romanzi, edited by Luciana Martinelli, Ravenna: Longo, 1975.

Novels Le avventure di Saffo poetessa di Mitilene, 1782. Le notti romane al sepolcro de’ Scipioni, 1792; expanded edition, Le notti romane. Edizione per la prima volta compiuta, 1804; expanded edition, edited by Renzo Negri, 1967; as The Roman Nights; or Dialogues at the Tombs of the Scipios, translated, 1798. Vita di Erostrato, 1815.

Historical and political treatises Vicende memorabili dal 1789 al 1801, 1858. Saggio sulla storia d’Italia, edited by Barbara Scalvini, 2001.

Apollonio, Mario, Il circolo dei Verri e la cultura del Settecento milanese, Milan: CELUC, 1968. Cerruti, Marco, ‘‘Motivi e figure di un romanzo ‘neoclassico,’’’ Lettere italiane, 14:3 (1964), 251–279. Cerruti, Marco, Neoclassici e giacobini, Milan: Silva, 1969. Chiomenti Vassalli, Donata, I fratelli Verri, Milan: Ceschina, 1960. Cicoira, Fabrizio, Alessandro Verri: sperimentazione e autocensura, Bologna: Patron, 1982. Favaro, Francesca, Alessandro Verri e l’antichita` dissotterrata, Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Ricuperati, Giuseppe, ‘‘L’epistolario dei fratelli Verri,’’ Atti dei Convegni Lincei, 26 (1977), 239–281. Scappaticci, Tommaso, ‘‘Le ragioni di un successo: i romanzi di alessandro Verri,’’ Problemi, 111 (1998), 144–162. Toppan, Bruno, ‘‘Du Caffe`’’ aux ‘‘Nuits romaines’’: Alessandro Verri romancier, Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1984.

PIETRO VERRI (1728–1797) Count Pietro Verri, the leading figure, with Cesare Beccaria, of the northern Italian Enlightenment, was mainly an economist and a moral and political philosopher. Born in a powerful aristocratic family, he lived during the Hapsburg administration of Lombardy and enjoyed the fragile but fruitful convergence of absolutism and Enlightenment favored

by the reformist policies of Maria Theresa of Austria. Verri had a literary education and started out his career as a member of the moderately conservative Accademia dei Trasformati, where he held the name of Abitatore Disabitato. The members of the Accademia used to meet in the house of Count Giuseppe Maria Imbonati to recite their 1979

PIETRO VERRI compositions on conventional topics. In 1753, Giuseppe Parini, who would be recognized as the greatest Italian poet of his age, was also admitted. Before becoming a political official of Hapsburg Lombardy and a influential theorist of political economy, Verri published a collection of satirical poems, written in a plurilinguistic and parodic style, entitled La Borlanda impasticciata (The Messed Up Borlanda, 1751). He also was involved in the debate on contemporary theater: Favoring the model of Goldoni, he wrote about comedy and translated, with Vittoria Ottoboni, plays by the French writer Philippe Ne´ricault Destouches. In 1757, he published the almanac entitled Il gran Zoroastro (The Great Zoroaster), a wry satire of the Milanese aristocracy and of popular prejudices, written in a mixture of languages, including Milanese dialect and Greek. In the following years, he published three more issues of the Il gran Zoroastro and another almanac, Il mal di milza (The Milt Pain, 1764), in which he parodied the controversial issue of torture. This is also the central topic of the Osservazioni sulla tortura (Observations on Torture), written in 1777 but published after Verri’s death, in 1804, by Piero Custodi. The book was the main source for Alessandro Manzoni’s Storia della colonna infame (The Column of Infamy, 1840). Like Cesare Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments, 1764)—the European best seller of the Italian Enlightenment and a text that came out of Verri’s intellectual circle—Verri’s own works on juridical matters aimed at transforming the cultural attitudes of his age. His choice of issues of political relevance was instrumental in shifting the interests of the letterati from detached and abstract subjects to concrete social and cultural themes. The use of a parodic prose to introduce reformist positions also characterizes the Orazione panegirica sulla giurisprudenza milanese (Panegyric Oration on Milanese Jurisprudence, 1763), an ironic description of the Milanese government. With his younger brother Alessandro, the mathematician Paolo Frisi, the economists Carlo Sebastiano Franci and Alfonso Longo, and the philosopher Cesare Beccaria, Verri founded in 1761 the Accademia dei Pugni, a progressive group of aristocrats who met in Verri’s house and promoted a profound change in the role of public intellectuals. Moved by an enthusiast reading of the works of Francis Bacon, Etienne Condillac, Denis Diderot, John Locke, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire, the e´cole de Milan envisioned a radical renovation of Italian culture and political structures, while maintaining the 1980

privileges of their social reality. Besides Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene, the Accademia’s main achievement was the periodical Il Caffe`. Following both the journalistic model inaugurated by Joseph Addison with The Spectator and the ironic and pedagogic e´sprit de philosophie of the French encyclope´distes, from June 1764 to May 1766, every ten days, the review addressed the main problems of philosophy, economy, medicine, and literature. The name Il Caffe` refers to the setting chosen by Verri for the short and witty contributions hosted by the periodical: Inspired by The Spectator, the articles were presented as conversations supposed to have taken place in a Milanese coffee-house. For his unconventional prose and selection of topics— from agriculture to meteorology, from philosophy to economy—Il Caffe` was a milestone in the development of Italian journalistic prose. It also marked the emancipation of cultural discourse from the traditional rhetoric of literary magazines, a journalistic path also followed, with less stylistic and political radicalism, by Giuseppe Baretti’s Frusta letteraria and Giovanni Lami’s Novelle letterarie. Verri contributed to Il Caffe` with 37 articles, some of which were dedicated to literary and linguistic subjects. In ‘‘Sui parolai e sullo spirito della letteratura italiana’’ (On Chatterboxes and on the Spirit of Italian Literature), he criticized the empty formalistic and purist approach to language of the Accademia della Crusca and advocated a new literary language, open to gallicisms and neologisms and based on the social and scientific achievements of his age. In 1763, Verri wrote Meditazioni sulla felicita` (Meditations on Happiness), a treatise on ethics that follows the lines of Locke, Helve´tius, and especially Rousseau. The author’s quintessential interest was in the philosophical implications of pleasure in the fields of economy, ethics, and literature, and the book was immediately considered a manifesto of the Milanese Enlightenment. After Il Caffe` was closed and the group dispersed, Verri had a variety of important posts in the Austrian administration and published his most famous philosophical and economical treatises. In carrying out his official duties for the Austrian administration, he tried to push through many economic and administrative reforms, with little success. In 1772, he was vice-president, and then, in 1780, president, of the Chamber of Counts. He retired from public life in 1786 and lived long enough to welcome the French Revolution. The Meditazioni sull’ economia politica (Reflections on Political Economy, 1771) and the

PIETRO VERRI Riflessioni sulle leggi vincolanti principalmente nel commercio dei grani (Reflections on Binding Laws Regarding Especially the Corn Trade), written in 1769 but published in 1797, were his greatest contributions to economic theory. The small book of 1771, highly appreciated by Voltaire, was reprinted seven times in two years and was soon translated into French, German, and Dutch. The Riflessioni, midway between physiocratism and the theories of Adam Smith, marked the beginning of modern political economy. According to Verri, the organization of society cannot be reduced to economic mechanisms alone. The market is not a spontaneous order but a system of forces that can function only in the presence of rules, which are moral and natural and cannot be described by an autonomous economic science. By systematically developing a typical eighteenth-century idea, Verri associated the individual sentiment of pleasure to the idea of public happiness and welfare: The well-being of many meant an increase of annual production of the nation through the trade of surplus product, and this issue was related to a balance between production and consumption. Achieving the goals of happiness and the public good depends on how the forces that are present in the system are linked together by a guiding mind. The guiding mind is the authority, an institutional framework able to establish conditions that guarantee that the desires of both individuals and the community are simultaneously satisfied. The Discorso sull’ indole del piacere e del dolore (Discourse on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain) was first published anonymously in 1773, then expanded and reissued in 1781 with other previous writings as Discorsi del conte Pietro Verri sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, sulla felicita` e sulla economia politica (Discourses of Count Pietro Verri on the Nature of Pleasure and Pain, on Happiness and on Political Economy). The collection is Verri’s philosophical masterpiece, a work praised by Immanuel Kant in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Following the Sensist epistemology of Condillac and Helvetius and Locke’s gnoseology, Verri developed a negative theory of pleasure, in which the nature of this sentiment is rooted in the reality of pain. The careful exploration of the connection of utility and virtue and the conceptual analysis of the mutual implication of economy and ethics—which are Verri’s personal contributions to the Enlightenment—were addressed also in his last literary enterprises: the Storia di Milano (History of Milan, 1783), the Pensieri sullo stato politico del Milanese (Thoughts on the Political

Condition of the Milanese Territory, 1790), and the journalistic articles written for the Jacobin periodical Termometro politico della Lombardia (1796–1797).

Biography Pietro Verri was born in Milan, 12 December 1728; he was the older brother of Alessandro, born in 1741. He studied literature and philosophy in Monza, Milan, and Rome, completing his studies in Parma, 1747. He traveled to Vienna with his father Gabriele, 1753. Verri entered the Austrian army, 1759–1760. He founded the Societa` dei Pugni, 1761, and founded the Enlightenment journal Il Caffe`, 1764. He became vice-president, 1772, and then president, 1780, of the Chamber of Counts. His wife, Maria Castiglioni, died in 1781, and, soon after, his son also died. He retired to private life in 1786. Verri died in Milan, 28 June 1797. FEDERICO LUISETTI Selected Works Collections Opere filosofiche e di economia politica, 4 vols., Milan: Silvestri, 1818. Opere varie, edited by Nino Valeri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1947. Opere, Del piacere e del dolore ed altri scritti di filosofia ed economia, edited by Renzo De Felice, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964. Del fulmine e delle leggi: scritti giornalistici, 1766–1768, edited by Gianmarco Gaspari, Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1994. Memorie, edited by Enrica Agnesi, Modena: Mucchi, 2001. Scritti di argomento familiare e autobiografico, vol. 5 of Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, edited by Gennaro Barbarisi et al., Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003. I Discorsi e altri scritti degli anni settanta, vol. 3 of Edizione nazionale delle opere di Pietro Verri, edited by Giorgio Panizza et al., Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2004.

Poetry ‘‘La Borlanda impasticciata,’’ 1751.

Political, Philosophical, and Historical Writings Diario Militare (1759–1760), edited Gianni Scalia, 1967. Sul tributo del sale nello stato di Milano, 1760. Saggio sulla grandezza e decadenza del commercio di Milano sino al 1750, 1760. Gli elementi del commercio, 1760. Dialogo sul disordine delle monete nello Stato di Milano, 1763. Meditazioni sulla felicita`, 1763.

1981

PIETRO VERRI Cronaca di Cola de li Picirilli degli avvenimenti pubblici di Milano dell’anno 1763, 1763. Reflessioni sulle leggi vincolanti principalmente nel commercio dei grani, 1769. Meditazioni sull’ economia politica, 1771; as Reflections on Political Economy, translated by Barbara McGilvray and Peter D. Groenewegen, 1993. Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, 1773. Osservazioni sulla tortura e singolarmente sugli effetti che produsse all’occasione delle unzioni malefiche alle quali si attribuı` la pestilenza che devasto` Milano l’anno 1630, 1777. Discorsi del conte Pietro Verri sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, sulla felicita` e sulla economia politica, 1781. Storia di Milano, 1783. Pensieri sullo stato politico del Milanese, 1790.

Letters Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, 12 vols., edited by Francesco Novati et al., 1910–1942. Lettere inedite di Pietro Verri, edited by Mario Zolezzi, 1965. Viaggio a Parigi e Londra, 1766–1767: Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, edited by Gianmarco Gaspari, 1980.

Other Il gran Zoroastro, 1757–1759. Orazione panegirica sulla giurisprudenza milanese, 1763.

Il mal di milza, 1764. Manoscritto da leggersi dalla mia cara figlia Teresa, 1777– 1781.

Further Reading Anglani, Bartolo, Il dissotto delle carte: socialita`, sentimenti e politica tra i Verri e Beccaria, Milan: F. Angeli, 2004. Apollonio, Mario, Il circolo dei Verri e la cultura del Settecento milanese, Milan: CELUC, 1968. Baia Curioni, Stefano, Per sconfiggere l’oblio : saggi e documenti sulla formazione intellettuale di Pietro Verri, Milan: F. Angeli, 1988. Capra, Carlo (editor), Pietro Verri e il suo tempo, 2 vols, Milan: Cisalpino, 1999. Capra, Carlo, I progressi della ragione: vita di Pietro Verri, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002. Dioguardi, Gianfranco, Attualita` dell’illuminismo milanese: Pietro Verri e Cesare Beccaria, Palermo: Sellerio, 1998. Sala Di Felice, Elena, Felicita` e morale in Pietro Verri, Padua: Liviana, 1970. Scianatico, Giovanna, L’ultimo Verri: dall’Antico regime alla Rivoluzione; con l’aggiunta di memorie verriane in appendice, Naples: Liguori, 1990. Valeri, Nino, Pietro Verri, Florence: Le Monnier, 1969. Venturi, Franco, Italy and the Enlightenment, New York: New York University Press, 1972. Venturi, Franco, Settecento riformatore, 5 vols., Turin: Einaudi, 1969–1990.

GIAMBATTISTA VICO (1668–1744) The place of Giambattista Vico within the history of Italian and Western intellectual tradition has become increasingly clear over the last 30 years. His extraordinary achievement—the writing of the Principi di Scienza nuova (Principles of the New Science, 1744), which had engaged him for most of his later life—has finally begun to play a decisive role in contemporary debates. The deepest concern of his masterpiece—and indeed of his thought— was to unveil and heal the general crisis that had overtaken the seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury Europe in every sphere—philosophy, jurisprudence, politics, education, theology, and poetry. This crisis, which the late Renaissance had handed down and the Baroque crystallized, stemmed from several factors that Vico steadily tried to trace back to a few ruinous assumptions shaping the modern age: the crisis of the authority of tradition and the consequent cult of self; the fatal misunderstanding 1982

of the origins of human culture, which leads to illadvised utopian philosophies; the eclipse of the sense of the religious foundations of the world, which results in the subordination of religion to the secular political order and in the loss of moral values that are rooted in religious faith; and the weakening of historical memory. Vico wrote the Scienza nuova to repair what he perceived to be this crumbling edifice of civil society. But he had tackled the critical issues of the time (education, politics, understanding of the subject, and the like) from early on. Because he spent his whole life as a teacher either privately or at the University of Naples, his point of departure in the vast intellectual project he undertook was the crisis in education. He easily detected the signs of this crisis—the inevitably troubled relation between the free-thinking university and the despotic claims of the political order; the breakdown of a unified

GIAMBATTISTA VICO knowledge into a number of specialized, mutually unrelated disciplines; and the close connection between these two questions—and he sought to stem the tide of the disarray. In a series of Inaugural Orations, which he delivered ex officio at the annual opening of the school year in his capacity as professor of rhetoric from 1699 to 1707, in De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (On the Study Methods of Our Time, 1708), and in De mente heroica dissertatio (On the Heroic Mind, 1732), Vico developed a genuinely new idea of the role the university ought to play in shaping the cultural values of modern society. These views became the background against which the full scope of the Scienza nuova can be gauged. The Inaugural Orations span the whole repertory of classical and humanistic ideals of education: The age-old question of Socratic self-knowledge; the utopian ends of a university education, in the sense that education marks the process by which the wise are granted citizenship in the Republic of Letters; the political, ethical, and religious ends of education, which Roman and Renaissance Humanists (Cicero, Salutati, Guarini, Vives, and their like) had theorized; and in general, the connection between doing and knowing—all were explored and laid bare. But his concerns with education, which he basically understood in terms of the enduring values of authority and tradition, were not kept at this level of general noble ideas. In De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione he both lowered his aim (he faced technical pedagogicalcurricular questions) and widened his philosophical focus (he addressed the presuppositions of both Descartes and Bacon). As the title (an echo of the Jesuits’ ratio studiorum) suggests, Vico lucidly grasped the need for a modern educational discourse that differed from that of the past. He opposed the new fashion of the Cartesian geometric method and analytical criticism by proposing a system rooted in the cultivation of memory. And he explicitly opposed Bacon’s conviction that the labyrinth of nature’s secrets can be deciphered by science as if it were merely a Machiavellian scheme of will to power over nature. Such a scheme would be doomed to defeat. By contrast, Vico made poetry the core of the modern curriculum. He privileged it —quite aware of Plato’s banishment of poetry of poetry and of Homer from the Republic—because of poetry’s morality, which is articulated by its encyclopedic compass as well as by its power to express the heterogeneous and multiple voices of experiences transcending the narrow concerns of any individual viewpoint.

If poetry is placed at the center of the curriculum, jurisprudence (which is simultaneously the philosophy of law, the theory of justice, and the theory of the state) turns into the point of the destination of the modern method of studies. On one hand, then, the emphasis on jurisprudence discloses Vico’s sense of the political aims of education; on the other, he vindicated the role of the universities in his time: They were needed because the traditionally rigid boundaries of knowledge are inadequate. New discoveries in the arts and sciences (such as the compass, the telescope, the barometer, knowledge of the circulation of the blood, gunpowder, the building of church cupolas) had changed the configuration of the universe of knowledge. They called for a widening of the boundaries of the curriculum as well as for the reaffirmation of the principle of the unity of knowledge or encyclopedic education. Vico’s educational ideas, which were paradoxically new and at the same time deeply steeped in tradition, were not simply presented in an abstract fashion from the point of view of his experience as a teacher. In his Vita scritta da se` medesimo (Autobiography, 1725; with subsequent sections added in 1728 and 1731), Vico wrote what amounts to a novel of education, the story of his personal and, in a way, exemplary intellectual growth from elementary school to university professor and, finally, to becoming the author of the Scienza nuova. Writing about himself in the third person singular (as if he were another and his life, which he understood in its radically temporal structure, could not coincide with his past and even less with his future), Vico began by questioning conventional forms of self-representation and self-education. The critique of traditional conventions of knowledge would remain the steady trait of his thought. He departed from St. Augustine’s education model: Whereas St. Augustine’s Confessions were told retrospectively, Vico’s Autobiografia is told proleptically, without a hint that the author already knows the end. At stake is the issue of time as constitutive of history, which Vico grasped in its radically open-ended nature and distanced himself from the Cartesian view of the subject as it is made available in the autobiographical section of Descartes’s Discourse on Method, to which Vico directly alluded. Descartes’s understanding of the self as subject is expressed through the decision to abandon the study of disciplines not built on solid rational foundations. The philosopher will no longer be subjected to the false promises of alchemists, to the deceptive predictions of astrologers and the 1983

GIAMBATTISTA VICO impostures of magicians. Descartes also rejected the study of languages, of the orators, historians, and poets, and he made geometry the paradigm of the sciences. This Cartesian hierarchy of intellectual values was said by Vico to be a fiction, a narcissistic self-serving ploy to claim the superiority of his own education system over all others. For him only the historical method gave access to the totality of knowledge (to which he repeatedly referred as ‘‘all studies included in divine and human erudition’’) and, consequently, he narrated his life as if he were the historian of himself. And if Descartes projected the self as essentially a disembodied mind, Vico told the history of his mind in the persuasion that the mind, like the body to which it is inevitably bound experiences shifts and attractions; it grows, learns by trial and error, and never quite knows its purposes. At the heart of this idea of the self and education-of-the-self lies an Augustinian view of the fallen human condition (to which Vico’s fall from a ladder when he was seven years old referred). In this state there is no justifiable rationale for a notion of a pure, inner, and stable self. Rather, for Vico one is what one makes of oneself, and one makes of oneself what one knows. The journey of selfeducation thus follows some predictable guideposts (grammar school, university), and it proceeds as the pursuit of an encyclopedic totality. The four authors he chose to mention—Plato, Tacitus, Bacon, and Grotius—were Vico’s steppingstones in his desire to acquire a broad perspective on the complexities of history and in his place to reconstruct the ancient house of knowledge from its foundation. They were the models for his own claim at being an author. At first, Vico attempted such an encyclopedic discourse by writing De uno (1720), which is a study of the foundation of Roman law as well as the legality of authority. On the strength of this treatise he even attempted to win a law lectureship at the University of Naples. His failure in this attempt (memorably recorded in this Autobiografia) led Vico to the writing of the Scienza nuova (1725), which, in fact, was prepared by a number of other texts especially devoted to an analysis of the political realities of his own times. In effect, Vico did not understand history only in terms of what could be called an existential philosophy of self and of the mind. Quite to the contrary, in two of his works—(The Neapolitan Conspiracy, 1703) and De rebus gestis Antoni Caraphaei (The Life of Antonio Carafa, 1716)—he saw history as politics and wrote not just a history of ancient 1984

times and ancient fossils but a history of the present. In the tradition of the Italian Humanists, who interpreted rhetoric as both a philosophy of language and of history, Vico gave a sober assessment of the political realities of modernity. The De partenopea coniuratione chronicles events that took place in September 1701, where Leopold of Austria sought to establish his hegemony in the Kingdom of Naples over and against the Spaniards. Vico’s writing highlights his consciousness of the threatening, ‘‘Machiavellian’’ nature of secret political action. By contrast, the account of Carafa’s political life, which features the education of a courtier and a general in the imperial court of Vienna, stages Vico’s reflections about the essence of the Baroque age as a culture obsessed with absolute power. Together, these two historical-political works go a long way in shedding the false image of Vico as a thinker outside of his own time. He deliberately took an antiquarian posture to point out the limits of the dominant paradigms of modernity. But the true destination of his thought was the modern age, which he saw as a time of spiritlessness and decay that he purported to repair by offering a new discourse that went counter to the ideas put forth by the founders of modernity— Machiavelli, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Spinoza, Hobbes, and their epigones. These moderns enshrined the present, revelled in the clash between theology and the sciences, and fomented civil dissent. Unlike them, Vico sought to formulate a new philosophical, theological, and political synthesis to salvage the relics of a broken world. The Scienza nuova is such a synthesis or encyclopedia that seeks to reintegrate the sciences in a new totality. The encyclopedic and historical impulse of this masterpiece is evident in the editions of 1725 and 1744. The first edition is addressed to the European university professors in a rhetorical move meant to highlight the educational aim of the work. The specific nature of this aim emerges from the 1744 edition, where Vico purported to provide ‘‘una teologia civile ragionata della provvedenza divina’’ (a rational civil theology of divine providence; paragraph 342). Insofar as it came forth as a Baroque encyclopedia (and, in a way, it resists being assimilated to the ‘‘encyclopedisme’’ of the Enlightenment) it seeks to connect together disciplines such as law, history, politics, and theology that the Renaissance had sundered from each other. What can link them together, Vico believed, is poetry. Many of his insights focus on disparate aspects of the poetic faculty, and they make up the original

GIAMBATTISTA VICO core of his vision. Poetry, Vico thought, originates in the passionate and violent imagination of archaic man from ‘‘ignoranza di cagione’’ (ignorance of causes; paragraph 375). But he pointed out that poetry cannot be equated with the imagination. The imagination, which is a free and spontaneous faculty, is not necessarily productive. By contrast, poetry, poiesis, which means making and creating, stands for the work of art. As such, it involves the education of the turbulence of the passions. This new understanding of poetry as work, which set Vico at odds with the Baroque esthetics (such as, for instance, that of Marino), is rooted in the scholastic, Thomistic, and Dantesque definition of art as a virtue of the practical intellect in the order of making. In such a view, the true and the made (the verum and the factum) are yoked together. Moreover, Vico grafted this understanding of poetry as making on to Cicero’s assertion about the civilizing power of language. This insight into the origin, nature, and role of poetry as capable of unifying all knowledge into an encyclopedic totality was not conceived as only an issue of aesthetics or abstract theorizing. As a matter of fact, he envisioned the Scienza nuova as a ‘‘practice,’’ as a project to rethink the relation between theology and politics in historical life. There is much evidence—available in his historical works, his treatises on education, and the Scienza nuova— to suggest that for some time he entertained the secret notion that he himself might play a role in the politics of his native city, that his philosophy was a political philosophy to be experienced. As is known, he was appointed Royal Historian, but he never enjoyed, if he really wanted to, any power. This final, practical failure made him turn to pure intellectual speculations, at which he excelled. In the necessarily solitary life of thought available to him, he conversed polemically by writing his works with the leading figures of his time. Directly against the founders of the modern age (who were the Epicureans, such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, and who included Spinoza, Bacon, and Campanella), Vico put forth a political theology and acknowledged the founding role of religion in political life and of Providence in the unfolding of universal history. It was this vision that put him at odds with the major intellectual currents of his time and cast him as an eccentric thinker, removed from the orbits of fashionable modern thought. It was this same vision that invested him with the aura of an unpredictable, oracular, and enigmatic figure, forever out of step with and forever ahead of his time.

Biography Giambattista Vico was born in humble circumstances to a bookseller, on June 23, 1668, in Naples; he studied at a Jesuit school. There were two major events in his otherwise quiet life. The first event consisted in the encounter with Monsignor Geronimo Rocca, Bishop of Ischia, who asked him to tutor his nephews in Vatolla, a village in the Cilento. For nine years, from 1685 to 1694, Vico lived away from Naples with the Rocca family, which gave him enough leisure time to study Italian and Latin authors (from Dante to Horace) and philosophy (Plato, Cicero, Descartes, and the like). During this time he wrote a powerful poem, ‘‘Affetti di un disperato’’ (Sufferings of a Wretch), which exudes Epicurean doctrines. In 1699, Vico became professor of rhetoric at the University of Naples. In the same year he married Teresa Caterina Destito, with whom he had eight children. In 1703, he wrote the Principum neapolitanorum coniurationis anni MDCCI historia. In 1704, he published De Studiorum Ratione and, a year later, the De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus, which he dedicated to his friend Paolo Mattia Doria. In 1711, he published the Institutionum oratorium Liber unus. In 1720, he published the De uno, also known as the Diritto universale. In 1723, the second major event of his life occurred: He ran for the civil law lectureship at the university and was compelled to withdraw his candidacy. The failure forced him to focus on his philosophical studies and write his Scienza nuova in forma negativa, which he rewrote in 1730 and published as Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla natura delle nazioni. Disappointed by the general indifference toward the publication of his treatise, Vico wrote orations, poems, and his Autobiography, until two Venetian intellectuals, Carlo Lodoli and Antonio Conti, persuaded him to prepare a Venetian edition. In 1744, the final edition of the Scienza nuova, an aim toward which he dedicated all his energies in the final years of his life, was published. Vico died in Naples on January 23, 1744. GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Selected Works Collections Opere, edited by F. Nicolini, 8 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1911–1941. Opere, edited by Andrea Battistini, 2 vols, Milan: Mondadori, 1990.

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GIAMBATTISTA VICO Educational works Latinae orationes, 1699–1707, as On Humanistic Education: Six Inaugural Orations, translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee, 1993. De nostri temporis studiorum ratione, 1708; as On the Study of Methods of Our Time, translated by Elio Gianturco, 1990. De antiquissima italorum sapientia, 1710; as On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, translated by L. M. Palmer, 1988. Institutiones oratoriae, 1711–1741; as The Art of Rhetoric, translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Arthur W. Shippee, 1996. De mente heroica dissertatio, 1732; as On the Heroic Mind, translated Eilzabeth Sewell and Anthony C. Sirignano, 1976.

Juridical works De uno universi juris pricipio et fine uno, 1720; as Universal right, translated by Giorgio A. Pinton and Margaret Diehl, 2000. De constantia jurisprudentis, 1722.

Historical works De partenopea coniuratione, 1703. De rebus gestis Antoni Caraphaei, 1716; as Statecraft: The Deeds of Antonio Carafa, translated by Giorgio A. Pinton, 2004. Vita scritta da se´ medesimo, 1728; as The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico, translated by Max Harold Fish, 1944. Principi di Scienza nuova, 1725; as The First New Science, translated by Leon Pompa, 2002. Principi di Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni, third edition, 1744; as The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Max Harold Fish and Thomas G. Bergin, 1948; as New Science: Principles of The New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations; translated by David Marsh and introduced by Anthony Grafton, 1999.

Letters Epistole, edited by Manuela Sanna, 1993.

Further Reading Agrimi, Mario, Giambattista Vico nel suo tempo e nel nostro, Naples: CUEN, 1999. Badaloni, Nicola, Introduzione a Vico, Rome: Laterza, 1984. Battistini, Andrea, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in Giambattista Vico, Opere, vol. 1, edited by A. Battistini, Milan: Mondadori, 1990. Battistini, Andrea, La sapienza retorica di Giambattista Vico, Milan: Guerrini, 1995. Cristofolini, Paolo, Vico pagano e barbaro, Pisa: ETS, 2001. Croce, Benedetto, La filosofia di Giambattista Vico (1911), Naples: Bibliopolis, 1997. Goetsch, James Robert, Vico’s Axioms: the Geometry of the Human World, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Grassi, Ernesto, Vico e L’umanesimo, Milan: Guerini e Associati, 1992. Hosle, Vittorio, Introduzione a Vico: la scienza del mondo intersoggettivo, Milan: Guerini, 1997.

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Labio, Catherine, Origins and the Enlightenment: Aesthetic Epistemology from Descartes to Kant, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2004. Lollini, Massimo, Le Muse, le maschere e il sublime: G. B. Vico e la poesia nell’eta` della ragione spiegata, Naples: Guida, 1994. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pressi, 1999. Miner, Rober, Vico Genealogist of Modernity, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2002. Mooney, Michael, Vico in the Tradition of Rhetoric, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pressi, 1985. Papini, Mario, Arbor humanae linguae. L’etimologico di G.B. Vico, Bologna: Cappelli, 1984. Rossi, Paolo, Le sterminate antichita` e nuovi saggi vichiani, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1999. Sanna, Manuela, La fantasia che e` l’occhio dell’ingegno, Naples: Guida, 2001. Sanna, Manuela, and Pizzamiglio, Gilberto (editors), Momenti vichiani del primo Settecento, Naples: Guida, 2001. Stone, Harold Samuel, Vico’s Cultural History: the Production and Transmission of Ideas in Naples, 1685–1750, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997. Tagliacozzo, Giorgio, The Arbor Scientiae Reconceived and the History of Vico’s Resurrection, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1993. Tagliacozzo, Giorgio (editor), Giambattista Vico: an International Symposium, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969. Verene, Donald P. (editor), Vico and Joyce, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987. Vitiello, Vincenzo, Vico e la topologia, Naples: Cronopio, 2000.

PRINCIPI DI SCIENZA NUOVA, 1725; 1744 Philosophical Treatise by Giambattisto Vico

The third edition of the Principi di Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune Natura delle Nazioni (Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations, 1744) is doubtless Vico’s extraordinary, brilliant achievement and a genuinely original classic in the Western canon of philosophical writings. Its novelty in the history of thought is

GIAMBATTISTA VICO revealed, first of all, by the structure and style of its argument. Vico conceived the Scienza nuova as a summa of the many strands of his previous work (including history, metaphysics, law, myth, and politics). Thus, he produced a Baroque encyclopedia, a totality of disjointed parts, and wrote it in the mixed mode of brief philosophical essays, poetic fragments, maxims, fables, and mythographic reinterpretations. The many styles he adopted (and they range from oracular obscurities to rational reflections and lapidary figurations) were chiefly meant to represent the processes of modification of the human mind as it passes through the cycles or three stages of history: the age of the gods, the age of heroes, and the age of man. They also stage the needed erasure of any rigid boundaries conventionally drawn between philosophy and philology, literature and knowledge, the arts and sciences, in the conviction that these disciplines together engender a genuinely historical self-understanding as well as an understanding of universal history. The totalizing purpose of the Scienza nuova is suggested by its title, which echoes those revolutionary tracts of the seventeenth century: Bacon’s philosophical and scientific text Novum Organum, Galileo’s Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze (Two New Sciences Pertaining to Mechanics and Local Motions, 1638), and Newton’s Principia. Unlike, however, these founders of the modern age, who investigated the world of nature, Vico’s attention to the ‘‘nature of nations’’ refers, as a matter of fact, to history, to the processes of nations’ birth, to fossils and relics of antiquity, which preserve the obscure glyphs of humanity’s origins from which he could divine the sense of universal history. The allegorical emblem on the frontispiece of the Scienza nuova (conceived by Vico himself and drawn by Antonio Vaccaro) presents a visual resume of the themes and architectonics of the work. It shows the statue of Homer who, blind and looking inward, stands in a forest clearing, while he is struck from behind by a ray of light. The light is refracted from the breast of a feminine figure, Metaphysics, who in turn receives the light from the eye of heaven. Scattered on the ground without any apparent order, around an altar supporting a globe and at the feet of Homer, lie various objects, such as the wings of Mercury, a rudder, the lituus of divination, a winged cap, the caduceus, the tables of the law, a sword, a cinerary urn, and a plow. These objects can be called hieroglyphics of the ruins of antiquity, ciphers of mythical knowledge that Vico wanted to retrieve in the persuasion that they can

be known because they were made by man. As a matter of fact, this is the principle shaping and delimiting the universe of Vico’s philosophical investigation: We can only know what we make. The interrogation of the sense of these emblems, how they constitute and are rearranged into a unified system of knowledge, runs through the five books of the Scienza nuova. In the ‘‘Idea of the work,’’ which introduces the concerns to be unfolded later and explains the frontispiece illustration, we are given the hermeneutics of the major symbols of Vico’s poetic philosophy: the ray of Providence; the origin of Metaphysics; the discovery of the ideal external history, the philosophy of authority, the new principles of mythology and poetry, the natural theogony or genealogy of the gods arising in the minds of the primitive people, the institution of marriage, burial rites, universal belief in the immortality of the soul, the origins of languages and letters, and the tripartite division of history (ages of the gods, heroes, and men.) The chronological table based on the Egyptians’ three epochs of world history introduces Book 1. Bracketing, as he did, biblical history in the belief that it was ordained directly by God and, therefore, it lies outside of the knowledge world, Vico still started with the biblical myth of the universal flood—or the year 1656 BC of the creation of the world—and lay out the diachronic about parallel histories of, among others, the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. Together, they enact the pattern of universal external history, which Vico explored in all its available ‘‘philological’’ residues, archeological fossils, and symbolic traces to divine the true nature of the modern world. As a matter of fact, appearances to the contrary, the deepest concern of Vico’s thought was not merely the cult of antiquities. It was the modern world. The study of antiquities unveils history’s steady process of decadence, and on this historical knowledge Vico founded his theories of how the modern world, which in his view suffered from a fatal lack of self-understanding, could be rescued from the catastrophe to which it seemed to be doomed. This coherent, highly controlled project unfolded in the Scienza nuova proceeds carefully as a philosophical-epic journey that starts from the fabulous, dark mythic origins of consciousness, proceeds through the realm of pagan mythologies (for example, the poetic geography, poetic astronomy, and so on) of ancient Egyptian traditions, and reaches the land of the Homeric poems before it sets sail toward the modern age. At the center of the Scienza nuova, Vico—who had been taking the 1987

GIAMBATTISTA VICO mask of the epic-philosophical voyager, akin to the Trojan-Roman hero Aeneas—actually delved into the Homeric question in order to discover the nature of Homeric poetry, the sense of the ‘‘author,’’ and the essence of poetry in general. Homer’s poetry cannot be explained in terms of some hidden esoteric, allegorical wisdom or of a self-conscious philosophical theory. Quite to the contrary, poetry originates as a pure creative energy in the turbulence of the passions and in the imagination of archaic man. It follows that Homer is not the sole author of the Greek epics. And in Homeric poems we find not the voice of a single author but the vulgar wisdom, refracted in the many dialects of the tribe, of the whole of ancient Greece. In effect, this discovery of the nature of poetry was viewed by Vico himself as the master key of the Scienza nuova: He acknowledged poetry as the hidden source of knowledge. Only after settling the question of poetry could the Science nuova begin to tackle a vast and intricate range of political and historical concerns (Book IX): the issues of the law, power, and political institutions. No doubt for Vico poetry constituted the imaginative circle within which ideological structures and discourses are contained. And only after such an elaborate discussion of Homer and Plato’s and the neo-Aristotelians’ interpretation of Homer, which Book IV of the Scienza nuova offers, could Vico proceed to draw the logical consequence of his Scienza nuova for the modern age. On the other hand, Book V, which focuses on the radically novel notion of the ricorso (recourse), captures the substance of his project. In a language aimed at casting himself as an author who stands somewhere between Homer and Plato, Vico articulated his central vision of the Scienza nuova. At this point, the work comes forth as a poetic-philosophical epic, reaching its climax in a theological-political project adequate to the modern Christian history of Europe. This treatise, which had begun as a summary of the workings of the mind and the repository of myths, ancient philosophical theories, and doctrines, ends up being, aptly enough, a tract of modern political education. The conclusion to the Scienza nuova lays open the theological foundation of Vico’s vision, and, in this sense, it circles back to the ‘‘dipintura allegorica’’ (allegorical emblem) introducing the Scienza nuova and featuring the altar at the center of the clearing. Over and against the Epicureans and the Machiavellians bent on denying the value of religion (and thus

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misunderstanding that the cause of the modern predicament lies in the skepticism they peddle), Vico heroically drew a picture of a theologicalpolitical order in which history’s sediments of memory are cultivated so that the present and future of history can be appropriately gauged, and, more generally, piety becomes wedded to wisdom. The conclusion is as lucid as it is powerful: ‘‘Unless one is pious, one cannot be truly wise.’’ GIUSEPPE MAZZOTTA Editions First edition Principi di Scienza nuova, Naples: F. Mosca, 1725.

Other editions Principi di Scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni,’’ Naples: Muziana, 1744. Opere, vol. 1, edited by A. Battistini, Milan: Mondadori, 1990. In Opere, vol. 2, edited by A. Battistini, Milan: Mondadori, 1990. La scienza nuova: 1730, edited by Paolo Cristofolini, Naples: Guida, 2004.

Translations As The New Science of Giambattista Vico, translated by Max Harold Fish and Thomas G. Bergin, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948. As New Science: Principles of The New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations; translated by David Marsh and introduced by Anthony Grafton, New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Further Reading Amoroso, Leonardo, Lettura della Scienza Nuova di Vico, Turin: UTET, 1998. Cristofolini, Paolo, La Scienza nuova di Vico: introduzione alla lettura, Rome: NIS, 1995. De Miranda Girolamo, ‘‘Vico e il Sant’Uffizio,’’ in L’inquisizione e gli storici: un cantiere aperto, Rome: Accademia dei Lincei, 2000. Hobbs, Catherine L., Rhetoric on the Margins of Modernity, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. Mazzotta, Giuseppe, The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Pressi, 1999. Papini, Mario, Il geroglifico della storia, Bologna: Cappelli, 1984. Veneziani, Marco (editor), Principj di scienza nuova d’intorno alla comune natura delle nazioni: concordanze e indici di frequenza dell’edizione Napoli 1744, Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1997. Verene, D. P., Vico’s Science of the Imagination, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981.

` RENATA VIGANO

` (1900–1976) RENATA VIGANO Renata Vigano` is best known for her Resistential novel L’Agnese va a morire (Agnese Goes to Die, 1949), by which she achieved long-lasting notoriety, winning the prestigious Viareggio prize shortly after publication. As Giovanni Falaschi remarked, L’Agnese va a morire became not only the official novel of the Resistance but also ‘‘the exemplary novel of the new cultural policy of the Communist Party, the most persuasive work of social realism in Italy’’ (La resistenza armata nella narrativa italiana, 1976). Prior to her life-changing encounter with Communism in 1935, Vigano`’s literary work was lyrical and introspective. Influenced by Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D’Annunzio, she wrote two collections of poems, Ginestra in fiore (Blossoming Broom, 1913) and Piccola fiamma (A Little Flame, 1916). Her first novel, Il lume spento (The Extinguished Lamp, 1933), is the long monologue of a woman who shares her thoughts with her psychiatrist in an asylum. She tells how she killed her lover because he abandoned her after a forced abortion. Vigano`’s mother, to whom the book is dedicated, was afflicted by a mental illness in her last years. L’Agnese va a morire sealed Vigano`’s national literary fame and made her into a beloved figure for several generations of Italian Communists and leftist militants. Soon after the novel’s publication, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, invited Vigano` to collaborate regularly to L’unita`. She contributed articles and short stories on miscellaneous social topics such as the postwar peasants’ struggle for land ownership, the southern question, and the poverty of the elderly, as well as autobiographical and Resistential stories. These were eventually collected in the volume Arriva la cicogna (Here Comes the Stork, 1954). In 1976, filmmaker Giuliano Montaldo adapted L’Agnese va a morire for the big screen, casting Ingrid Thulin in the title role. The film revived Vigano`’s popularity in leftist circles at a time of great expectations for the Italian Communist Party’s access to government. Vigano` passed away just a few weeks before the film’s theatrical release. At the time of her death, she was assembling the Resistential short stories of Matrimonio in brigata (Partisan Wedding, 1976), in which she revisited, with unchanged

spirit and sober style, the main themes of her famous novel. Agnese is a washerwoman who lives in the countryside of the lower Po valley. In September 1943, her ailing husband, a Communist militant, is deported by the Nazis and dies on his way to a German concentration camp. Agnese hosts partisan meetings at her house, while her neighbors regularly entertain German troops. When a German soldier kills Agnese’s cat, she smashes the man’s head with his machine gun as he sleeps. She flees and joins the Communist partisans. Through her year-long experience with the Resistance, working as a courier and vivandie`re, this semiliterate woman evolves into a politically aware individual. In early spring 1945, she is rounded up by the Germans and executed, only a few weeks prior to Liberation Day. Though Vigano` chose a woman partisan as protagonist, she endorsed conventional notions of femininity. For example, she contrasted Agnese’s fidelity to her husband, and later to her Communist commander, to the other female characters, who end up prostituting themselves to survive. In her preface to Donne della Resistenza (Women of the Resistance, 1955), a collection of biographical stories on women partisans from the Bologna region who were killed by the Nazi-Fascists, she wrote: ‘‘An army lost its honor by battering [these women’s] bodies, by unleashing their manly cruelty and power onto the flesh of those who were believed to be weak...[these women] were doubly offended and, therefore, doubly heroic just because they were women and not men; their strength became vast, and we still behold it today, after much time has elapsed.’’ Agnese’s empowerment as a militant woman and her final sacrifice also serve the Communist Party’s political agenda: ‘‘the testimony of these Bolognese women who died as soldiers for the Resistance [should] serve to widen the fight for, and pave the way to, a new order of peace, work, and freedom that will not be late in coming.’’ Agnese eventually realizes that the political fight is part of a larger fight against social injustice (‘‘the rich people’’) led by the Communist Party. The commander was modeled after the author’s husband, who used to organize partisan brigades in the same area where the novel is set. In ‘‘La storia di Agnese 1989

` RENATA VIGANO non e` una fantasia,’’ (Agnese’s Story Is Not Fantasy, 1949), Renata ‘‘the Countess’’ (Vigano`’s battle name) told how she felt disgust when she first met the heavy peasant woman with dirty feet who served as a model for Agnese’s character. As these two very different women worked side by side for the partisan cause, however, Renata came to respect and admire the peasant, because her strong arms are capable of such a mighty blow as the one that killed the German soldier. She confessed: ‘‘I regretted that I was not capable of doing as much. Maybe this is why, in my novel, I changed the color of Agnese’s cat from gray to black.’’ Vigano`’s beloved cat was black. It is only from the point of view of a proletarian endowed with an instinctual, forceful political awareness that the ethical dilemmas of the Resistance can be overcome. By identifying with Agnese, Vigano` could justify the partisans’ morally questionable acts, such as treacherous killings and attacks against the Germans that triggered retaliatory slaughters of innocent civilians. In her last novel, Una storia di ragazze (A Girls’ Story, 1962), Vigano` strongly pitted the morality of the proletarians against the corrupted behavior fostered by the bourgeois lifestyle, subordinating a central feminist question on abortion to her political and moral ideals. In the novel, Vigano` contrasted the choice of Miranda, who comes from a mountain village to the city to work as a servant for a middle-class family, to that of Piera, the vain and selfish daughter of the family for whom Miranda works, when they both end up pregnant by men who will not marry them. Piera is helped by her mother to get an abortion, while Miranda keeps the baby, thanks to her brother’s help. The novel ends on the dialogue between the siblings as they plan a future that includes their newborn child. Both the engineer who refuses to marry Piera and Miranda’s brother are Communists, but between the bourgeois intellectual and the proletarian, only the latter is portrayed as morally righteous. Vigano’s posthumous volume Rosario (Rosary, 1984) is a poetic meditation on the rosary’s 15 mysteries. It attests to her lifelong commitment to denounce, as a writer and a journalist, the suffering and injustices inflicted upon the innocent.

Biography Renata Vigano` was born 17 June 1900 in Bologna to an affluent family; she dropped out of high school because of her family’s financial losses, 1918, but she retained property of an apartment and went to work, first as house servant, then as a 1990

nurse and secretary in a orphanage, a position she held until 1943. She married Antonio Meluschi, a Communist militant writer, with Catholic rite, 1937, and they adopted a boy. After the armistice, 8 September 1943, Vigano` left Bologna with her family to escape both the Allies’ bombings and the Nazi-Fascists’ persecution. In 1944, while her husband was detained by the Germans in the Veneto, she worked as a courier for the partisans in the Ravenna countryside. From October 1944 to April 1945, she aided her husband in organizing the armed resistance to the Nazi-Fascists in the lower Po Valley. She contributed to publications such as Corriere padano, L’unita`, Rinascita, Il ponte, and Il progresso d’Italia. Vigano` died in Bologna, 23 April 1976. FEDERICA BRUNORI DEIGAN See also: Literature of the Resistance Selected Works Poetry Ginestra in fiore, 1913. Piccola fiamma: Liriche (1913–1915), 1916. Rosario, 1984.

Fiction Il lume spento, 1933. L’Agnese va a morire, 1949. Arriva la cicogna, 1954. Una storia di ragazze, 1962. Matrimonio in brigata, 1976; as Partisan Wedding, translated by Suzanne Branciforte, 1999.

Other ‘‘La storia di Agnese non e` una fantasia,’’ 1949; reprinted in L’Agnese va a morire, new edition, Turin: Einaudi, 1994. Mondine, 1952. Donne della Resistenza, 1955. Ho conosciuto Ciro, 1959.

Further Reading Battistini, Andrea, Le parole in guerra: Lingua e ideologia dell’Agnese va a morire, Bologna: Bovolenta, 1982. Battistini, Andrea, and Francesca Lolli (editors), Letteratura e resistenza, Bologna: Clueb, 1997. Branciforte, Suzanne, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in R. Vigano`, Partisan Wedding: Stories, London: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Colombo, Enzo (editor), Matrimonio in brigata: Le opere e i giorni di Renata Vigano` e Antonio Meluschi, Bologna: Grafis Edizioni, 1995. Falaschi, Giovanni, La Resistenza armata nella letteratura italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Klopp, Charles D., ‘‘Nature and Human Nature in Renata Vigano`’s L’Agnese va a morire,’’ Italian Quarterly, 18:73–74 (1975), 35–52.

GIOVANNI VILLANI Luciano, Bernadette, ‘‘Women Writing History: Female Novels of the Resistance,’’ in Gendering Italian Fiction: Feminist Revisions of Italian History, edited by M. O. Marotti and G. Brooke, Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Palumbo, Matteo, ‘‘La fiaba della storia: L’Agnese va a morire di R. Vigano,’’ in Les Femmes e´crivains en Italie aux XIXe et XXe sie`cles, edited by M. A. Rubat de Merac, Aix-en-Provence: Universite´ de Provence, 1993.

Panizza, Letizia, and Sharon Wood, A History of Women’s Writing in Italy, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Perry, Alan R., ‘‘Literary and Cinematic Representations of Sacred Italian Resistance Memory: The Holy PartisanMartyr as Hero,’’ Forum Italicum, 33:2 (1999), 433–457. Russel, Rinaldina (editor), The Feminist Encyclopedia of Italian Literature, Westport-London: Greenwood, 1997. Vassalli, Sebastiano, ‘‘Introduzione,’’ in R. Vigano`, L’Agnese va a morire, Turin: Einaudi, 1994.

GIOVANNI VILLANI (CA. 1280–1348) Giovanni Villani, author of the Cronica (Chronicle), may be considered among the first modern historians. A work in celebration of the history of Florence and of modern times, the Cronica is both a biased expression of Villani’s family values and interests and a firsthand record of the economic and political practices of the author’s native city. While contemplating the ancient ruins during a brief trip to Rome in 1302, Villani resolved to write a work that, like the ruins, memorialized the city whose history it would chronicle. Emphasizing the commemorative objective of the book, he introduced the Cronica as a record for future Florentines of the vicissitudes of the city’s fortune and anticipated that it would inspire pride and solidarity among its inhabitants. His initial division of the work was into twelve books, the first six of which combine history with fantastical material and popular myths and legends, beginning with the Tower of Babel and concluding with the descent of the French Charles of Anjou into Naples in March of 1266. These first six books also attempt a chronology of political rule in Tuscany from approximately 72 BC to the reign of Charles of Anjou and record the various natural disasters and invasions that befell both Florence and Fiesole. With stories of the legendary foundation of Fiesole by King Atlas, its subsequent destruction by the Roman army of Caesar, and the descent of Caesar himself from the town to the banks of the Arno to construct his great city, Villani established an honored history for Florence in the classical tradition. The tone and content of the final six books are radically different. Beginning with the year 1265 and

culminating in an apocalyptic vision, these contain much firsthand information about current events and furnish a detailed picture of the overall political and economic life of thirteenth- and fourteenthcentury Florence. After the devastating flood of 1333, Villani amended and restructured the Cronica, considering Book XI as the start of a ‘‘new volume.’’ In addition, he interrupted Book I with the construction of Florence, thereby extending the work from twelve to thirteen books. The historian’s approach sets him apart from his stylistically more ‘‘medieval’’ predecessors. First, Villani’s reverence for classical antiquity and his interest in adopting a suitably ceremonious linguistic style for the work reveal themselves in his cultivated prose and inclusion of Latin citations. The refinement of the language, the richness of the syntax, and the researched narrative techniques make the Cronica not only a historical document but a literary work. Villani also incorporated into his account a narrative self, repeatedly asserting the credibility of his text by attesting to his own complicity in or observation of various episodes. He even labeled his own perspective with the firstperson plural pronoun, recounting, for example, a story in Book II and then appending the critical evaluation: ‘‘questo non troviamo per autentica cronica’’ (we do not find this to be an authentic story). As a commentator, Villani revealed a moralistic interpretation of history, possibly the result of his strict Christian background. Nonetheless, he treated with even-handedness the tales of the city’s political strife. Despite his own affiliation as a moderate Black Guelf, Villani remembered in the 1991

GIOVANNI VILLANI final book the brave Florentines who acted on behalf of the people, and without political bias, applauded both Guelf and Ghibelline activists such as Giano della Bella, Dante Alighieri, Farinata degli Uberti, Gianni Soldanieri, and Guido Novello, for their efforts and sacrifices. Also unlike many earlier chroniclers, Villani provided statistical data and financial information about both the city of Florence and individual citizens. His technical knowledge of the Florentine economy and details about the cost of goods, drawn from his experience in government as official of the mint and three-time Priore of the city, distinguish the Cronica from other chronicles of the period and give the modern reader a sense of relative value in the medieval society. Finally, the work makes a unique contribution to the field of Dante studies. In addition to containing the oldest extant biography of the poet from the year 1321 (Book IX), the Cronica recreates for Dante scholars the social, political, and cultural context in which the poet and many of the historical figures who appear in his Comedia lived. For these reasons, Villani may be considered among the first modern historians. Although Villani’s work has great documentary importance, however, perhaps its greatest criticism is the author’s method of exposition, as he relied on various preexisting chronicles to compile his history, such as the famous Martinian manuscript, the chronicle of Perugia, French chronicles, and English ones from the Salisbury Abbey. Though methodical and often detail oriented, the historian was sometimes contradictory in his recording of facts and was sloppy in his tracing of lineage. He confused, for example, Richard of Cornwall and Henry III in Book VII and completely misrepresented the family tree of Tancred of Hauteville, whose progeny would rule Sicily. Villani’s abrupt death from the plague of 1348 prompted members of the writer’s family to continue his work. Villani’s younger brother Matteo (d. 1363) brought the chronicle current to the year 1363, at which time he too died from the plague. Matteo’s son, Filippo (ca. 1325–ca. 1408), added only one year to the text and concluded his contribution with the story of the peace between Florence and Pisa in 1364. The Cronica was not published until nearly two centuries after its completion. Books I through X appeared in 1537, while the final books followed in 1554. However, the number of codices that conserve the text and historians’ ability to trace its diffusion even today indicate

1992

that for many years it was considered to be the most authoritative history of Florence.

Biography Giovanni Villani, a son of Villano Stoldo, was born ca. 1280. He apprenticed with bankers and entered the company Peruzzi at age 20. He lived in France and Flanders, 1302–1307, working for the Peruzzi family. He participated in the popular revolts of May 1302 in Bruges (Matines Brugeoises). Villani became an official of the mint, 1316, and held several official posts in the Florentine administration, including that of prior in 1316–1317, 1321–1322, and 1328. He joined the Buonaccorsi banking family in 1322. He served as ambassador to Bologna, October 1329. He was imprisoned as a result of the bankruptcy of the Buonaccorsi family, February 4, 1346. Villani died of the plague in 1348. ERIN M. MCCARTHY Works Nuova Cronica, critical edition, edited by Giuseppe Porta, 3 vols., Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo/Guanda, 1990–1991. Villani, Matteo, Cronica con la continuazione di Filippo Villani, critical edition, edited by Giuseppe Porta, 2 vols., Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembo/Guanda, 1995. Villani’s Chronicle; Being Selections from the First Nine Books of the Croniche Fiorentine, edited by Philip H. Wickstead, translated by Rose E. Selfe, London: Constable, 1906.

Further Reading Green, Louis, Chronicle into History. An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Luzzati, Michele, Giovanni Villani e la compagnia dei Buonaccorsi, Rome: Istituto della enciclopedia italiana, 1971. Pezzarossa, Fulvio, ‘‘Le geste e ‘fatti de’ fiorentini. Riflessioni a margine di un’edizione della Cronica di Giovanni Villani,’’ Lettere Italiane, 45:1(1993), 92–115. Potter, Pala, ‘‘Narrative Structures in Giovanni Villani’s Nuova Cronica,’’ Romance Review, 5:1(1995), 87–99. Ragone, Franca, Giovanni Villani e i suoi continuatori. La scrittura delle cronache a Firenze nel Trecento, Rome: Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 1998. Salvestrini, Francesco, ‘‘Giovanni Villani and the Aetiological Myth of Tuscan Cities,’’ in The Medieval Chronicle II, edited by Erik Kooper, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002.

SIMONA VINCI

SIMONA VINCI (1970–) In 1997, Simona Vinci gained national and international attention with Dei bambini non si sa niente, (What We Don’t Know about Children), one of the most controversial works of fiction of the 1990s. Winner of the Elsa Morante Prize for best first novel, Dei bambini non si sa niente offers a merciless depiction of the alienating childhood of a group of children living in a large building in the industrial outskirts of Bologna. Forbidden games—true initiation rites that take place in the general indifference of the world of adults—are narrated in a dry, paratactic style. Evil in Vinci’s works is expressed almost aseptically, and as a result she has been associated by critics to the Cannibali writers, whose works are characterized by a fascination with the cruel and deviant aspects of contemporary society. Gory details and a gratuitous display of blood and violence are frequent elements in her fiction and serve to make readers aware of the unavoidable presence of evil in human nature. The banality of evil is right before one’s eyes and often within the family itself. Indeed, its quotidian presence is an index of the rupture of the very structures that should create stability and order. Children are, paradoxically, both accomplices and victims of this tragedy. After the collection of short stories In tutti i sensi come l’amore (In Every Sense Like Love, 1998), a series of variations on the theme of love often set against ominous backgrounds, Vinci has returned to the theme of difficult childhood with her more recent works, Come prima delle madri, (Like It Was before the Mothers, 2003) and Brother and Sister (2003). The title Come prima delle madri and the epigraph to the novel are verses from Elsa Morante’s Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini (The World Saved by Children, 1998), and in fact Morante’s influence is evident in Vinci’s meditation on victims and perpetrators within another dysfunctional family. Evil emerges constantly from the world of adults, an inevitable cancer that will eventually disturb and pollute the world of childhood. In turn, childhood and adolescence are forever marred by sin. Following Morante’s tenet that the world of children is magical only as long as it remains undisturbed by adults, Come prima delle madri opens with a fairy-tale atmosphere. The first two parts tell the story of, respectively, the adolescent Pietro

and his mother Tea when she was an adolescent herself. The epilogue closes both stories, as the mother’s initiation to life and her son’s develop in the direction of the gratuitousness of evil and the notion that we transmit to our children our own sense of despair. Vinci uses the fairy-tale to construct a world in which horror is neither simulated nor artificial but actual, a constituting part of life that presents itself in the most obvious forms. Brother and Sister, a radio drama for RAI later published as a short novel, is an interesting reprise of the Brothers Grimm’s tale Bru¨derchen und Schwesterchen, reinterpreted in light of the real news story of two American siblings who, when faced with the possibility of being divided and assigned to different foster parents, barricaded themselves inside their house with guns and dogs. Vinci declared that she was struck by the desire of this family to stay together. Vinci’s short story ‘‘La piu` piccola cosa,’’ published in the anthology Ragazze che dovresti conoscere (Girls You Should Get to Know, 2004), returns to the intertwining of death and sexuality through its protagonist, a girl who can read other people’s minds and learns how to alleviate pain with sex. By exploring the relation between mind and body, Vinci suggested that it is only through physical contact with another living human body that the fear of one’s own death can be overcome and that we can truly relate to someone else. With her vibrant, direct, and at times even poetic style and her unflinching representation of the horrors and dysfunctions of contemporary society, Vinci has emerged as one of them most original and promising new voices in Italian literature. In her latest book, Stanza 411 (Room 411, 2006), Vinci used autobiographic events to discuss and analyze the notion of love. In this long letter addressed to the love of her life, likely to be another writer, Vitaliano Trevisan, whose initials coincide with those on the dedication page, Vinci summed up the futility of finding a rational for loving a person. The letter later acquires more proper essayistic overtones, but it can be read also as a novel. The more you dissect the eventual reasons for loving another person, the more you will find yourself lost in a sea of reflections that deny each other’s validity. 1993

SIMONA VINCI

Biography Simona Vinci was born in Milan, 6 March 1970. She studied modern literature at the University of Bologna, where she wrote a thesis on Lalla Romano. She conducted the cultural TV program Cenerentola, 2000. Dei bambini non si sa niente was awarded the Premio Morante Opera Prima, 2000. Vinci is a member of the editorial board of the Internet literary journal Incubatoio 16, and lives in Budrio, near Bologna. STEFANIA LUCAMANTE Selected Works Fiction Dei bambini non si sa niente, 1997; as A Game We Play, translated by Minna Proctor, 1999; reissued as What We Don’t Know about Children, 2000.

In tutti i sensi come l’amore, 1998; as In Every Sense Like Love, translated by Minna Proctor, 2001. Matildacity, 1998. Corri Matilda, 1998. Brother and Sister, 2003. Come prima delle madri, 2003. Stanza 411, 2006.

Further Reading Jansen, Monica, ‘‘Il mondo salvato dai ragazzini: Un’ottica infantile sulla guerra e sulla violenza in Come prima delle madri di Simona Vinci,’’ in Images litte´raires de la socie´te´ contemporaine, edited by Alain Sarrabayrouse, Grenoble: Universite´ Stendhal, 2005. Lucamante, Stefania, ‘‘Come prima delle madri: Un thriller edipico dai toni noir,’’ Narrativa, 26(2004), 81–96. Menechella, Grazia, ‘‘I corpi ‘a pezzi’ di Simona Vinci, Rocco Fortunato e Sandra Petrignani,’’ Italian Culture, 20:1–2(2002), 135–148.

A VIOLENT LIFE See Una vita violenta (Work by Pier Paolo Pasolini)

LUCHINO VISCONTI (1906–1976) Caught between the political urgencies of neo-Realism and individual artistry, Visconti represents, both biographically and poetically, one of the most productive aesthetic contradictions of Italian cinema. Noble by birth, elitist by education, leftist by choice, Visconti in his first three works impressed fellow filmmakers and critics alike for his militant neo-Realist aesthetic. After 1954, with Senso and Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963), two films intensely resonating with Italian national history, his cinema took an ambitious Gramscian and Lukacsian turn. Finally, his latter and more uneven works, 1994

even when set in the past, displayed an attraction for larger existential themes of European middleclass decadence. Departing from his initial realist thrust or later revisionist impetus, Visconti’s late cinema focused on melodramatic narratives of moral decay, aesthetic pursuit, and death. Educated in a most prominent aristocratic family from Milan, Visconti grew up exposed to Italy’s and Europe’s highbrow, cosmopolitan cultural life, from literature and theater to classic music and opera. Drawn to military life and horse breeding during his twenties, in 1936, Visconti changed his

LUCHINO VISCONTI life radically. Coco Chanel introduced the 30-yearold nobleman to the French film world, where he befriended Jean Renoir and became one of his many stagiaire accessoiriste for Une partie de campagne (1936) and Le Bas-Fonds (1939). The work with Renoir and his film crew in the atmosphere of the Front Populaire turned out to be fundamental: It opened Visconti’s eyes to the politicized film aesthetics of poetic realism. Once back to Italy, he became involved with the leftist group of critics and would-be filmmakers of the film periodical Cinema. The most famous of his essays (cowritten with Gianni Puccini), titled ‘‘Il cinema antropomorfico’’ (Anthropomorphic Cinema, 1943), called for a poetic humanism of humble and ordinary characters, antithetical to mainstream Fascist productions. Meanwhile, although two projects connected to the work of realist writer Giovanni Verga—a literary fixture of the Cinema group—were rejected by the Fascist authorities, an adaptation of James Cain’s novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) was approved. Once one of Renoir’s projects, then passed on to Pierre Che´nal, author of Le Dernier tournant (1938), this became Visconti’s first film. Titled Ossessione (1943) and set in a small town in the Padana Valley, the tragic story of a young wife and her lover killing her older husband powerfully contrasted with Fascist cinema’s preference for bucolic sketches of rural virtue. Influenced by 1930s French cinema, the film exposed, as no Italian film had ever done before, an irreverent mixture of passion, crime, and moral dreariness. Still, Visconti’s explosive film recalled the anticonformist and antiprovincial characters of Gli indifferenti (Time of Indifference, 1929), the controversial novel by Alberto Moravia who, albeit uncredited, worked on the film’s dialogue. After the war, the financial constraints of Italian cinema, not to mention Visconti’s open leftist stance and his ‘‘outrageous’’ first work, thwarted several of his film projects (adaptations from Stendhal, Steinbeck, and Vittorini). His theatrical activity, however, was tireless. Between 1945 and 1948, he was involved in 12 major stage productions, which often dealt more with the crisis of Italian and European bourgeoisie rather than continuing the thematic and political mandate of neo-Realism. In 1947, in light of the forthcoming national elections, the Communist Party (PCI) commissioned Visconti to direct a documentary on the economic exploitation of oppressed Sicilian workers. Titled La terra trema (1948), the film was to have a multi-episodic structure, showing the struggles of, and the ultimately victorious solidarity among, Sicilian fishermen,

miners, peasants, and the urban working class. Close to shooting time, Visconti redesigned the project. Taking inspiration from Giovanni Verga’s masterpiece I Malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881), he maintained only the first original segment (Episode of the Sea). The story of failure to improve one’s family condition remained a tragedy, but one enlightened by a leftist ideological perspective. Cinematically, the film dared to combine the anthropological otherness of Sicilian marginal subjects with more personal pursuits of visual beauty and melodramatic tensions. This arrangement perplexed the most blindly aligned sectors of the Left, including some neo-Realist practitioners. Between 1948 and 1961, Visconti returned to the theater, staging Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. During this time, he worked feverishly on a number of ill-fated film projects. He completed only one short film, Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (Notes on a Current Event, 1951), a touching, but rarely seen, narrative about the murder of young girl by a Roman pedophile. In 1951, he filmed Bellissima, from a script cowritten with Cesare Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d’Amico, and Francesco Rosi, his assistant director (with Franco Zeffirelli) on La terra trema. The story of a mother (Anna Magnani) and her daughter initially caught in dreams of success at Cinecitta` yet later rejecting them in the name of family solidarity and wellbeing was also a statement on the illusions (and fatalities) of the filmmaking process. In 1953, after completing the hagiographic episode Anna Magnani, as part of the film Siamo donne (We the Women), Visconti began adapting a little-known novella by Camillo Boito, entitled Senso. Expanding the historical dimension of the novella and visibly melodramatizing its conflicts, particularly regarding a love story between a Venetian contessa and an amoral Austrian officer, Visconti enriched the narrative with a Lukacsian perspective of individual defiance against history and a Gramscian analysis of the Risorgimento as a failed revolution. The result was a unique historical picture of sumptuous chromatic and musical wealth, with learned homage to the paintings of Francesco Hayez and Giovanni Fattori and the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. While a major critic like Guido Aristarco hailed the film by describing it as a passage point ‘‘from neo-Realism to realism’’ (Visconti himself spoke of ‘‘romantic realism’’), others harshly condemned it with the disparaging attribute, also applied to Visconti’s most recent work in general, of decadent aestheticism. 1995

LUCHINO VISCONTI After years of directing operas and divas (including Maria Callas), Visconti returned to filmmaking in 1957 with Le notti bianche (White Nights), a more intimate story about failed love encounters, adapted from Dostoevskij. At a time when the neoRealist lessons had been vulgarized into regional sketches, whether comedic or sentimental, Visconti’s antisociological engagement with absolute (and impossible) passions and utopias went elsewhere. Framed within the confines of the Kammerspiel genre, his work became ever more personal by unapologetically reappraising individuals’ emotional and existential turmoil. Freely adapted from Giovanni Testori’s Il ponte della Ghisolfa (The Bridge of Ghisolfa, 1958), Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) is one of the most mature results of Visconti’s film career, one that exposed his capacity to transfigure a current event of dramatic sociological urgency into a grand, melodramatic composition. Taking inspiration from Thomas Mann’s tetralogy Joseph und seine Bru¨der (Joseph and His Brothers, 1933–1943), Dostoevskij’s The Idiot (1868–1869), and Nino Rota’s magisterial sound score, the story of five southern Italian brothers immigrating to Milan in the 1950s becomes an epic of family love, cultural adaptation, and nostalgia, but also one of hatred, sado-masochism, and self-destruction. Together with Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) and Federico Fellini’s La dolce vita (1959), Rocco e i suoi fratelli contributed to opening a new season of Italian authorial film culture, at home and abroad, that was highly personal and stylized and not necessarily enthused with overt political significance. On the way to Il gattopardo, Visconti returned to the themes of history and psychosexual family life with a 46-minute film, Il lavoro (The Job, 1962), one of the autonomous segments of Boccaccio ’70 (coauthored with Fellini, Monicelli, and De Sica). Inspired by Guy de Maupassant’s short story Au bord de lit (On the Edge of the Bed, 1883) and set in the familiar universe of Milanese aristocracy, this elegant narrative of conjugal betrayal and sensual decadence foreshadowed Visconti’s next film, Il gattopardo, both thematically and even literally. Perhaps more explicitly than any other work, Visconti’s seventh feature film marked his unrepentant poetic transition from political engagement toward themes at once more personal and universal. Adapted from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s 1958 novel, the story of a conservative Sicilian prince (played by Burt Lancaster) who refuses to join the new bourgeois e´lite and participate in the 1996

formation of the new Italian state did not translate into an ideologically foreseeable portrayal of old exploitations and new socioeconomic alliances. Instead, indulging in aristocratic nostalgia and skeptical of a rising bourgeois materialism, the film unfolded through a melodramatic me´lange of sensual vitalism and death. Il gattopardo’s unmatched blending of accurate and glamorous art direction, operatic music score, and decadent acting styles marked the abandonment of politicized, critical, and belligerent stances toward personal identifications with aristocratic characters’ antimodernist psychology and themes of personal defeat, family disruption, and dramatic historical changes. The Left’s predictable disapproval questioned the magisterial quality of the production. For his next film, Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra, 1965), the title of which recalls the opening verse of Giacomo Leopardi’s poem ‘‘Le ricordanze,’’ Visconti made use of countless theatrical and literary references (for example, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Proust, and D’Annunzio). The film tells the story of an incestuous attraction between brother and sister, united in the suspicion that their mother arranged for her Jewish husband to be deported to Germany during World War II so that she would be free to marry her lover. The heavily psychologized portrayal of an upper-bourgeois family, fraught by the ghosts of murders and incestuous attractions, finally earned him the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, earlier denied to him for worthier works. Amid theatrical successes and aborted film projects, in 1966 Visconti completed La strega bruciata viva (The Witch Burned Alive), an episode of the collective film, Le streghe (The Witches, 1967), on the tragic and ruthlessly planned private life of a film diva forced to interrupt her pregnancy because of contractual obligations. The tense and constraining relationship with producer Dino De Laurentis, whose wife, Silvana Mangano, played the title role, negatively affected both this work—widely deemed too moralistic—and the next film, an adaptation of Albert Camus L’E´tranger (1942). Supported by De Laurentis, who consented to Camus’s wife for strict faithfulness to the original, Lo straniero (The Stranger, 1967) turned out to be a mere filmic illustration. Set in Algiers in the 1930s and chosen for its themes of existential ennui and philosophical relativism, Visconti’s work lacked melodramatic intensity. The last part of Visconti’s career saw a sharp decrease of theatrical activity and a deepening of interest for themes of family dissolution and

LUCHINO VISCONTI nostalgia, as well as a more overt expression of homosexual and thanatotic overtones. His last five films compose what is known as the ‘‘German period,’’ rich in high cultural allusions and, in particular, German literary, musical, and geographical references. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Macbeth and set in the years leading to Nazism, La caduta degli dei (The Damned, 1969) looks at a wealthy German family caught in a spiral of power struggles, sexual transgressions, and murders. The film exposes a Freudian tension between the order of bourgeois and family values and an impending irrational and barbaric energy bringing inner destruction and death. The next project, Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, 1971), from Thomas Mann’s novella, articulates the same decadent themes of solitude, sexual longing, and death in more personal and aesthetic terms. Stripped of Mann’s irony, the filmed story of a German writer falling in love with a young Polish boy while dying of cholera in Venice became a moving elegy, interlaced with larger aesthetic and antimodern considerations (absent from the novella) and a most delicate Mahlerian accompaniment. At the end of the shooting of his next film, Ludwig (1973), Visconti suffered a thrombosis, which until his death affected his physical condition and his cinematic work. The film’s studio cut, reduced by half from its original length, appeared to most to be nothing more than an assemblage of luxurious settings and decadent story lines surrounding the famous Bavarian prince. The full, restored version, released posthumously in 1980, returned the magnificence of a late work, whose narrative cohesiveness and slow pace had been lost and that now finally rendered the protagonist’s eccentric solitude and his desperate pursuit of artistic and aesthetic rather than politically utilitarian goals. The following work, Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece, 1974), saw the return of Burt Lancaster as protagonist and the inevitable disquisitions regarding the coincidence of director’s and main character’s ideology—reminiscent of the notable precedent of Il gattopardo. The film, shot entirely in interiors, depicts the life of a refined and affluent American professor living in solitude in Rome. The life of this divorced and childless man is suddenly disrupted by the appearance of an aristocratic woman and her most eccentric and disturbing entourage. First, the woman bursts into his space, followed by her daughter and her own fiance´, but also by Konrad, the older woman’s younger, aggressive, and sexually ambiguous young lover. Then they all move in the apartment above the

professor’s own flat. The relationship between the professor and Konrad, one of underplayed physical attraction and a mostly intellectual and filial bond, is based on shared passion for Mozart and artworks. But it is also based, at least for the former, on intense nostalgia: The latter enjoys the benefits of young age with its outrageous expressions of rebellions and a large family around him. Their starkest differences, however, pertain to political education. In light of the turmoil of the late 1960s and resonating with Visconti’s ideal of Marxist integrity, the professor denounces the current bourgeoisie’s loss of political and moral commitment. Still, something unifies all characters: Konrad’s ensuing and baffling death, perhaps a suicide, briefly anticipates the professor’s own bereavement. Near his own end, Visconti completed the editing (but not the sound and dialogue synchronization) of L’innocente (The Innocent, 1976), an adaptation of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1892 novel. Aristocratic, atheist, and openly adulterous, the protagonist Tullio Hermil discovers that his ever-faithful wife is pregnant with her lover’s child. Defeated on his own turf, he eventually kills the infant boy, before returning to his own mistress. Refused by her as well, Tullio commits suicide in an act of ultimate pride and self-affirmation. Moral abhorrence and melodramatic story compose this last work, where the film’s ideological regime is starkly separated from the utterly unsympathetic protagonist. Despite different periods of poetic expression, Visconti’s work presents recurring thematic and stylistics features: the romantically mournful conflict between desire and death; the fatalistic contrast between the sumptuous glories of the past or the enthusiasm of a shared political vocation and the impossibility of an equally glorious and rewarding individual existence; and the mortifying solitude of homosexuality, first hidden or narrativized as perversion and later more openly but still elegiacally rendered. Beyond his celebrated, initial inclusion in the Pantheon of neo-Realism, Visconti’s cinema returns over and over to the loss of a plenitude, whether familial, cultural, or historical, embodied in several main characters, from ‘Ntoni (La terra trema), Rocco, and Franz (Senso) to Don Fabrizio (Il gattopardo). Each tries either to embrace or to resist history but ends up alone, witnessing the dissolution of a world, a class, or family. As mentioned above, Visconti’s artistic production was not limited to filmmaking. It also included an impressive stage activity, mostly as director, encompassing 69 works, ranging from art directions to prose and lyrical plays, and ballet. As a 1997

LUCHINO VISCONTI cosmopolitan man of the theater, Visconti constantly challenged the parochialism of the Italian stage. He did so through an unprecedented professional emphasis on the historical accuracy of the mise-en-sce`ne and through countless adaptations of foreign authors—from Cocteau, Hemingway, and Anouilh to Sartre, Dostoevskij, and Tennessee Williams.

Biography Luchino Visconti was born in Milan on November 2, 1906, the son of Giuseppe Visconti, the Duke of Grazzano and Count of Modrone, and Carla Erba, the heiress of a rich industrialist local family. Early on, he showed talent in matters of theater and music as well as in entertaining the highest European social and intellectual circles. After years spent at horse tracks, in 1936 he approached Jean Renoir for work as an assistant director. After a visit to Hollywood in 1938, Visconti moved to Rome where he joined the Marxist critics of Cinema, the Rome-based, Fascist-sponsored, yet progressive film periodical. In 1943, he published his film manifesto ‘‘Il cinema antropomorfico’’ and released first film, Ossessione, hailed as a precursor to neoRealism. Close to the Communist Party, Visconti joined the Resistance but was soon arrested. In the postwar period, after three years of rejected film projects and intense theatrical activity, he completed La terra trema, partially financed by the Communist Party in an effort to influence the 1948 political elections. In 1952, his Parisian direction of Carlo Goldoni’s La locandiera earned his first international stage success. Visconti directed Maria Callas in Gaspare Spontini’s La Vestale at the Teatro all Scala, December 7, 1954. The same year, however, harsh polemics followed the Venice Film Festival’s premiere of Senso, his historicalmelodramatic portrait of the Italian Risorgimento. Three years later, Le notti bianche won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, which in 1960 conferred on Rocco e i suoi fratelli the Jury Award. Between 1963 and 1965, Visconti was awarded the Palm d’or at the Cannes Film Festival for Il gattopardo and the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa. In 1972, he suffered a thrombosis that left him partially paralyzed. In 1975, an accidental fall worsened his condition. In a wheelchair, he completed L’innocente, released posthumously. Visconti died in Rome, on March 17, 1976, due to complications of paralysis. GIORGIO BERTELLINI 1998

See also: Neorealism Selected Works Films Ossessione (based on The Postman Always Rings Twice by James Cain), 1943. La terra trema (freely adapted from Giovanni Verga’s I Malavoglia), 1948. Bellissima, 1951. Anna Magnani (episode of Siamo donne), 1953. Senso (based on Camillo Boito’s short story), 1954. Le notti bianche (White Nights, based on Dostoevskij’s short story), 1957. Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, based on Giovanni Testori’s Il ponte della Ghisolfa), 1960. Il lavoro (The Job, episode of Boccaccio ’70), 1962. Il gattopardo (The Leopard, based on Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel), 1963. Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Sandra), 1965. La strega bruciata viva (episode of Le Streghe), 1967. Lo straniero (The Stranger, based on Albert Camus’s novel), 1967. La caduta degli dei (The Damned), 1969. Morte a Venezia (Death in Venice, based on Thomas Mann’s short story), 1971. Ludwig, 1973. Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Conversation Piece), 1974. L’innocente (The Innocent, based on Gabriele D’Annunzio’s novel), 1976.

Screenplays Senso, edited by G. B. Cavallaro, Bologna: Cappelli, 1955; reprinted, 1977. Le notti bianche, edited by Renzo Renzi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1957. Rocco e i suoi fratelli, edited by Guido Aristarco and Gaetano Carancini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1960. Il film ‘‘Il Gattopardo’’ e la regia di Luchino Visconti, edited by Suso Cecchi D’Amico, Bologna: Cappelli, 1963. Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa, edited by Pietro Bianchi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1965. La caduta degli dei, edited by Stefano Roncoroni, Bologna: Cappelli, 1969. Three Screenplays (White Nights, Rocco and His Brothers, The Job), translated by Judith Green, New York: Orion Press, 1970. Two Screenplays (La terra trema, Senso), translated by Judith Green, New York: Orion Press, 1970. Morte a Venezia, edited by Lino Micciche´, Bologna: Cappelli, 1971. Ludwig, edited by Giuseppe Ferrara, Bologna: Cappelli, 1973. Gruppo di famiglia in un interno, edited by G. Treves, Bologna: Cappelli, 1975. Ossessione, edited by Enzo Ungari and G. B. Cavallaro, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. La terra trema, edited by Enzo Ungari, C. Battistini, and G. B. Cavallaro, introduction by Francesco Rosi, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977. Bellissima, edited by Enzo Ungari, introduction by Cesare Zavattini, Bologna: Cappelli, 1978. Il gattopardo, edited by Lino Micciche´, Naples: Electa, 1996.

LUCHINO VISCONTI Other Il mio teatro, edited by Caterina D’Amico de Carvalho and Renzo Renzi, 2 vols., 1979.

Further Reading Aristarco, Guido, Su Visconti: materiali per un’analisi critica, Rome: La Zattera di Babele, 1986. Bacon, Henry, Visconti: Explorations of Beauty and Decay, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Bruni, David, and Veronica Pravadelli (editors), Studi viscontiani, Venice: Marsilio, 1997. Mancini, Elaine, Luchino Visconti: A Guide to References and Resources, Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986. Mannino, Franco, Visconti e la musica, Lucca: Akademos and Lim, 1994. Micciche`, Lino, Luchino Visconti: un profilo critico, Venice: Marsilio, 1996; reprinted, 2002. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey, Luchino Visconti, London: Secker and Warburg, 1967; revised edition, 1973; reprinted, London: British Film Institute, 2003. Rondolino, Gianni, Visconti, Turin: UTET, 1982. Schifano, Laurence, Luchino Visconti: The Flames of Passion (1987), London: Collins, 1990. Servadio, Gaia, Luchino Visconti: A Biography, London: Eidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981. Tyler, Parker, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (1972), New York: Da Capo Press, 1993.

LA TERRA TREMA, 1948 Film by Luchino Visconti

Visconti’s second feature film is a most emblematic text in the postwar Italian film history. More than Ossessione (1943), the conception, production circumstances, and cinematic style of La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) speak volumes about the dialectic relationship between Visconti’s poetic sensibility and the propaganda urgencies of the Communist Party, which partially financed the film before the 1948 elections. Indeed, the choice of adapting a work of Giovanni Verga (1840–1922) was not just the director’s. For several leftist authors and critics working within the loosely controlled institutions of Italian cinema during Fascism, the Sicilian realist novelist embodied the aspiration of a realistic, and thus new, kind of cinema. From the influential Marxist film teacher

Umberto Barbaro to the group of the Rome-based film periodical Cinema, adapting Verga for the big screen signified pursuing an authentically popular filmic realism, devoted to the representation of marginal and oppressed individuals reacting to capitalist oppression. The first segment of a multi-episode film, and not part of a trilogy as many commentators have for decades erroneously claimed, La terra trema: Episodio del mare (Episode of the Sea) was to be followed by Episodio della Zolfatara (Episode of the Sulfur Mine), Episodio della terra (Episode of the Earth), and a three-part Episodio della citta` (Episode of the City), intercut with the first three segments. Apparently, the single, overall motif was an exposition of the battle against exploitation by, respectively, fishermen, miners, peasants, and urban working classes. Experiencing initial defeat, these subjugated classes would have found final, ‘‘miraculous’’ victory, through personal sacrifice and solidarity. Right before shooting began in November 1947, however, Visconti reorganized the project, replacing the initial militant and documentary-like outline with a more ambitious artistic plan. The tardiness of such rethinking was not improvised. As early as 1941, in an essay titled ‘‘Tradizione e invenzione,’’ (Tradition and Invention), and devoted to Verga’s I malavoglia (The House by the Medlar Tree, 1881), the Lombard filmmaker had exposed his learned and artistic attraction to (as well as his geocultural difference from) the Sicilian drama of oppressed and cursed fishermen. In particular, through a combination of anthropological and artistic viewpoints, Visconti had praised the ahistorical fatalism of Verga’s characters and the musical rhythm of the prose. The resulting filmed story of the Valastro family, from a small coastal village near Catania, wrestling daily for its own survival against poverty and the sea, was not a literal adaptation but a truly creative poetic transfiguration. The urgency of the objective rendering of local characters’ mores, costumes, dialogues, and environment still allowed for the maintenance of an ethnographic otherness, evident in the representation of ancestral rituals, women laundering and men fishing. Yet, the narration did not fall into a folklorist depiction of poor peasants cursed by misfortunes and oppression. Secondly, in his personal pursuit of lyrical realism, Visconti celebrated the audiovisual strictures as well as the enticements of film storytelling, without imposing an all-too-familiar melodramatic format or insisting too forcibly on the trope of 1999

LUCHINO VISCONTI socioeconomic subjugation. Furthermore, his personal political and esthetic engagement led to other crucial differences. In the novel, ‘Ntoni Malavoglia’s ultimately tragic desire to live better, which Verga dubbed as bramosı´a dell’ignoto (yearning for the unknown), did not disrupt the community’s archaic rules of social and family order. Italy was changing, but for the then Milan-based and nostalgic novelist, the marginal Sicilian world of Aci Trezza should have remained one and the same, with every character naturally part of a singular, primitive chorus. In Visconti, instead, economic divergences make all the difference. The story of the Valastro family, whose unremitting poverty and exposure to exploitation provoked daily mortal risks, deadly accidents, divisions, and, finally, disintegration and expulsion from the community, speaks of another kind of timeless, yet inequitable struggle, that of classes. No initial status quo could ever be romanticized. Introduced (but rarely commented) by a didactic voiceover, the 527 shots of the film, edited with a rich array of dynamic filmic solutions, did much more than representing the stillness of the fishermen’s daily life. The use of deep-focus cinematography enabled the representation of characters within the entirety of their social and natural environment. Yet, the use of panoramic and tracking shots, closely following characters’ rebellious new gestures, and the employment of real-life dialect exchanges as sound score (made understandable through Italian subtitles) recalled the celebrated neo-Realist moral and aesthetic tradition. The

process was further enriched by Visconti’s own visual stylizations. Dramatic close-ups of the many protagonists and long shots of the stark landscapes were aimed at introducing defiant notions of beauty and attractiveness, bestowed on an oppressed humanity surrounded by misery. Many all-too-ideologized leftist reviewers found such aestheticizing rendering incompatible with neoRealism’s political mandate. GIORGIO BERTELLINI Further Reading Aristarco, Guido, ‘‘La terra trema,’’ Cinema (Milan), 15 February 1950; now in Storia delle teoriche del film, Turin: Einaudi, 1951. Di Giammatteo, Fernaldo, ‘‘Il primo Visconti. La storia e gli ‘‘eroi del male,’’ Bianco e Nero (Rome), 37 (September/December 1976), 7–27. Micciche`, Lino (editor), La terra trema di Luchino Visconti: Analisi di un capolavoro, Turin: Associazione Philip Morris Progetto Cinema and CSC-Cineteca Nazionale, Lindau, 1993. Rondolino, Gianni, Visconti, Turin: Utet, 1981. Visconti, Luchino ‘‘Tradizione e invenzione’’ (1941), in Lino Micciche`, Visconti e il neorealismo: Ossessione, La terra trema, Bellissima, Venice: Marsilio, 1990; revised edition, 1998. Visconti, Luchino, La terra trema (script), edited by Fausto Montesanti, Rome: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 1951. Visconti, Luchino, Two Screenplays (La terra trema and Senso), translated by Judith Green, New York: Orion Press, 1970. Visconti, Luchino, La terra trema, edited by Enzo Ungari, Claudio Battistini. and G. B. Cavallaro, Bologna: Cappelli, 1977.

LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS The relationship between the visual arts and literature may be understood in a generic sense, as an influence of the former on the latter (and vice versa). It may also be understood in a more restricted sense, by considering both the theoretical or practical, technical and/or aesthetic treatises on art, written not so much by professional historians or critics as by architects, sculptors, and painters, and other writings on art produced by artists and published on various occasions and in various forums (for example, from the nineteenth century onward, in journals). 2000

The treatise writing of the Middle Ages can be traced back principally to directions for preparing colors to be used in painting and miniatures. Toward the end of the fourteenth century, the technical culture of the medieval artist received an organic systematization in the work of Cennino Cennini (who lived between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries). Cennini left no records of his painting, but with Il libro d’arte (The Book of Art, ca. 1398), aside from compiling the tradition of the fourteenth-century bottega (workshop), he prefigured new conceptions of material culture and

LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS artistic techniques and at the same time cleared the way for a new awareness of the nobility of art and the greatness of the artist. In the fifteenth century, with the elaboration of the conception of art as the imitation of nature, which is realized through scientific knowledge of natural laws, the structure of the treatises changed. Indeed, if the practice of art, which had by this point been elevated to the level of the ‘‘liberal’’ arts and become a science of vision, must be guided by scientific rules, the treatises attempted to teach such rules by turning not only to the practitioners of art but also and especially to Humanists (this fact explains why various treatises were written in Latin and later translated into Italian). Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), for example, put the teaching of optics and perspective at the core of his treatise De pictura (On Painting, 1436). Piero della Francesca (1415/ 20–1492) and Jacopo Barozzi, known as il Vignola (1507–1573), both devoted their treatises to the science of perspective, respectively De prospectiva pingendi (On Perspective in Painting, ca. 1480) and Le due regole della prospettiva pratica (Two Rules of Practical Perspective, 1583). The new theoretical system was also developed in texts that did not necessarily take the form of a treatise, as for example in the Commentarii (Commentaries, 1447–1455) by Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378– 1455). A singular, and in certain lines brilliant, work, the Commentarii proceeds in a seemingly independent and, on the qualitative level, discontinuous manner. In the first book, the artist praised antiquity, extracting rules and principles from ancient texts (such as Pliny and Vitruvius); in the second book, which is of extraordinary interest, with great acumen and through direct knowledge he considered the greatest artistic figures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, beginning with Giotto; in the third book, finally, which his death prevented him from finishing, he treated optics, anatomy, and the theory of proportions on the basis of ancient and medieval scientific treatises. Fifteenth-century artistic theory relative to the representation of reality as knowledge culminated in the figure of Leonardo Da Vinci, who in his treatise on painting—which remained in manuscript form until the editio princeps of 1651—maintained that the true artist must achieve the widest and deepest possible experience of reality. Aside from arguing for the complementarity between the artistic work and the scientific investigation, aimed at discovering the laws of nature and the entire universe, the treatise contains a comparison of the different arts that culminates in the assertion

of the superiority of sculpture to painting. Unlike Leonardo, Michelangelo—who did not write a treatise on art but sporadically expressed some ideas on art—placed marble sculpture at the top of the hierarchy of values. Benvenuto Cellini (1500– 1573) supported the thesis according to which painting is superior to sculpture, when he responded in 1546 to the opinion survey of Florentine artists organized by Benedetto Varchi. His Due trattati (Two Treatises, 1568), which Cellini devoted to the goldsmith’s art and sculpture, is more practical than theoretical and contains lively and precise descriptions of his own works, not to mention his opinions and memories of contemporary artists and goldsmiths. In 1548, Paolo Pino (biographical sources documented from 1534 to 1565), whose paintings are lost, published Dialogo della pittura (Dialogue on Painting), a spirited literary text that reflects the penetration of manneristic culture into Venetian circles. In the form of a dialogue, the author treated beauty, both natural and artistic, and the elements of painting, which is held to be superior to sculpture and is divided into design, invention, and color. Like Pietro Aretino and Lodovico Dolce, Pino maintained the superiority of the Venetian school of painting, with its coloristic tradition, to the Florentine school. On the contrary, Giorgio Vasari’s Vite (Lives, 1568) represents a staunch defense of the importance of design, which is held to be the foundation of sculpture and architecture as well. Design is what allows the imitation of nature, which can be perfected by art. Thus the concept of manner was introduced, a concept that was understood at this time as a reconciliation of mimesis and invention as well as the artist’s individual style. In 1587, De’ veri precetti della pittura (On the True Precepts of Painting) by Giovan Battista Armenini (1530–1590) represented a fundamental contribution to manneristic theory. Beginning with its title, this work expresses the tendency to establish theoretical and practical rules to create una bella e dotta maniera (a beautiful and learned manner), by making a choice not only in nature but also in the examples offered by the art of the great masters of every age. Giovan Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) summarized the theoretical orientations of Mannerism in his Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Treatise on the Art of Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture, 1584) and in Idea del tempio della pittura (Idea of the Temple of Painting, 1590). A painter and poet in complete harmony with the spirit of the Counter-Reformation, he conceived of ideal beauty 2001

LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS in a neo-Platonic sense, as an image originating from God and existing in the mind of the artist. In the Trattato, Lomazzo asserted among other things that painting and poetry spring from a single source, thus making himself the spokesman of the theory of ut pictura poesis (as was painting, so was poetry) which, set forth in antiquity by Aristotle and Horace, stretched from the Renaissance to the middle of the eighteenth century. In Idea del tempio della pittura, he represented the system of art with the image of a temple. With an impeccable style and complex organization of the subject, he subdivided the world of art into seven fields, analogues to the seven planets, and then created a series of correspondences between art and all of the world’s occurrences, not to mention between each planet and a paradigmatic artistic figure. Architectural treatises occupied a place of primary importance during the Renaissance and Mannerism, and examined as a whole they form a complex and well-organized system of rules, a kind of code in the structuralist sense (Renato De Fusco, Il codice dell’architettura, 1968). The first important treatise, chronologically, is Leon Battista Alberti’s De aedificatoria (On Building), completed around 1450, appearing in Florence in a Latin edition in 1485 after the author’s death in 1472, and later published in Venice in an Italian translation in 1546. The composition of the Trattato di architettura (Treatise on Architecture) by Antonio di Pietro Averulino, known as il Filarete (ca. 1400– ca. 1469), dates to the 1460s. It is composed of 25 books that follow, for the most part, the plan of a dialogue between the author, his patron Francesco Sforza, and Sforza’s son, Galeazzo. The ancient ideal was strong in Filarete but was accompanied by an enthusiasm that colored antiquity with something of the fantastic. At the center of the text is the theme of the ideal city, Sforzinda, but it also discusses optics, perspective, and a doctrine of colors and fixes the architectural types. Filarete’s text lends itself to a double reading: The first emphasizes the rational and functional aspects of planning, and the second, deeper and hidden, corresponds to magical, symbolic, and, in a broad sense, irrational motivations, which point to an interpretation of some parts of the work in an alchemist key (Sinisi, Filarete nascosto, 1971). In his Trattato di architettura civile e militare (Treatise on Civil and Military Architecture), written at the court of Urbino over a long period, as his notebooks attest, and completed after the death of Federico da Montefeltro in 1482, Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1502) accompanied the 2002

text, which documents the complexity of his interests, with a graphic visualization. Aside from constantly referring to Vitruvius, who is reconsidered with the study and survey of ancient monuments, Martini relied on personal practice and was pronounced for his modernist-like experimental attitude. The treatises of the following century also began with Vitruvius. Prominent among these treatises, for their success in Europe and numerous editions, are those by Sebastiano Serlio; Jacopo Barozzi, known as il Vignola; and Andrea Palladio. Serlio’s Trattato di architettura (Treatise on Architecture), published in eight separate books beginning in 1537, combines the Roman classicist tradition, the Venetian ‘‘pictorial’’ conception, and French decorative exuberance (called by Francis I to Fontainebleau, from 1541 onward Serlio spent his life in France). We are presented with a mine of ideas and a codification of various architectural typologies destined to be widely applied by architects. A didactic exposition of architectural norms and rules in the form of a handbook characterizes Vignola’s Regole delli cinque ordini di architettura (The Rules of the Five Orders of Architecture, 1562), while a canonization of architectural principles that are destined to become almost immutable until the nineteenth century occurred with Palladio’s I quattro libri dell’architettura (The Four Books of Architecture, 1570), in which he sketched out the foundations of the language that would give rise to the vast phenomenon of ‘‘Palladianism,’’ which became very important in Europe and in America. Dell’idea dell’architettura universale (On the Idea of Universal Architecture, published in 1615 but begun in 1591), by Vincenzo Scamozzi (1552– 1616), opened the seventeenth century, though it reflects the cultural climate and architectural problems of the preceding century. For the most part, the seventeenth century reprises many sixteenthcentury theories explicitly and with a complacent taste of erudition. However, the Horation theory of ut pictura poesis evolved to the point where literature was held to be the master of painting and the rules pertaining to dramatic theory—such as unity of time, place, and action—were attributed to painting. The idea of the beautiful became central, and we move from the Vasarian definition of the ‘‘arts of design’’ to that of the ‘‘fine arts.’’ Giovan Battista Agucchi (1570–1632), a pontifical diplomat and writer, composed a treatise on painting, at first in collaboration with the painter Annibale Carraci (1560–1609), and later with the painter Domenico Zampieri, known as il Domenichino (1581–1641), anticipating with his classicist and at

LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS its core idealizing poetic the theorizations of Giovan Pietro Bellori (1615–1696). Both positive and negative judgments of the most important painters are at the center of Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti (The Lives of Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1772) by Giovan Battista Passeri’s (1610–1679), which discusses artists active in Rome who die between 1641 and 1673 and which offers a lively cross-section of the Roman artistic world of the seventeenth century, characterized by its two principal currents—the classicist and the baroque. If it is necessary to emphasize that theories of painting tend to substantially repeat themselves in the texts of the painters and historians of the time, we must also draw attention, however, to the moralistic conception of art that appears in various writings and follows the path traced out by the theorists of the CounterReformation. This is the case in Cardinal Federico Borromeo’s De pictura sacra (On Sacred Painting, 1634) and in the treatise published in Florence in 1652 by the Jesuit father Ottonelli in collaboration with the painter Pietro Da Cortona (1596–1669), in which moral beauty is held to be the principal goal of artistic creation. The eighteenth century saw the birth of aesthetics, art criticism, and historiography in the modern senses of the terms. The numerous, diverse, and often contrasting theories of art cannot be summed up, even if they could be traced back to at least one characteristic phenomenon of the century: the antithetical, but often complementary, relation between the ever-living classical tradition, which culminated in neoclassicism, and anticlassical experiences, which culminated in Romanticism. Italian treatise writing reflected the influence of England, but also of France and Germany. While the learned Giovanni Gaetano Bottari (1689–1775) reinforced the principles of the classical tradition in the dialogues between the painter Carlo Maratta and the writer Bellori in Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno (Dialogues on the Three Arts of Design, 1754), and the writer and engraver Anton Maria Zanetti (1706–1778) continued the Venetian tradition of Marco Boschini (ca. 1605–1681) in the Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture della citta` di Venezia e isole circonvicine (A Description of All the Public Paintings in the City of Venice and the Surrounding Islands, 1733) and the five books of Della pittura veneziana (On Venetian Painting, 1771), the English mode, spread mostly by the presence of British art lovers and collectors in Venice and Rome, can be felt in the writings of Francesco Algarotti, Saverio Bettinelli, and others.

In the field of architecture, treatises range from practical manuals by architects tied to baroque taste, such as L’architettura civile preparata sulla geometria e ridotta alla prospettiva (Civil Architecture Based on Geometry and Reduced to Perspective, 1711) by Ferdinando Maria Galli Bibbiena (1625–1665), to the four treatises of Architettura civile (Civil Architecture, posthumous 1737) by Guarino Guarini (1624–1683), a summa of rationalistic tendencies and mathematical mysticism and a re-appraisal of the structural principles of Gothic architecture; from the theorizations of rationalism and functionalism, peculiar to the Enlightenment, of Carlo Lodoli (1690–1761), whose ideas were collected and transmitted by his enthusiastic admirer, the Venetian Andrea Memmo, in Elementi d’architettura lodoliana (The Elements of Lodoli’s Architecture, 1786) and in Riflessioni sopra alcuni equivoci sensi (Reflections on Some Ambiguous Meanings, 1788), to the full-fledged assertion of neoclassical principles in sharp opposition to the baroque principles contained in the writings of Francesco Milizia (1725 –1798), particularly in Dell’arte di vedere nelle belle arti di disegno (The Art of Seeing in the Fine Arts of Design, 1781) and in the Dizionario delle belle arti di disegno (Dictionary of the Fine Arts of Design, 1787). The Roman Giuseppe Valadier (1762–1839), author of the five-volume manual Architettura pratica (Practical Architecture, 1833), also moved between ties with tradition (from Vitruvius to Palladio to theories of proportionality) and an awareness of the social function of architecture. Count Leopoldo Cicognara (1767–1834), an amateur painter, a friend to writers and artists, and the author of the Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia al secolo di Canova (A History of Sculpture from its Re-Birth in Italy to the Century of Canova, 1813–1818), identified the true neoclassical aesthetic ideal in the art of Antonio Canova, but he also approached the positions of the romantics and purists by defending medieval art. Gothic architecture, which he studied during a visit to England in 1836, was at the core of the theorizations of the architect Pietro Selvatico Estense (1803–1880). Author of the vast Sulla architettura e sulla scultura in Venezia dal Medio Evo sino ai nostri giorni (On Architecture and Sculpture in Venice from the Middle Ages to the Present Day, 1847), Selvatico, moving along lines parallel to John Ruskin, argued for neo-Gothic art and the religious and moral value of the primitives and also published the Storia estetico-critica delle arti del disegno (An Aesthetic–Critical History of the Arts of Design, 1852–1856). 2003

LITERATURE AND VISUAL ARTS In the nineteenth century, with the birth of criticism by experts—that is, scholarly criticism based on the attribution of works to individual artists— a curious figure was that of Giovan Battista Cavalcaselle (1819–1897), one of the first experts. Cavalcaselle used drawing as a crucial instrument for his art historical research, which issued in several fundamental texts written in collaboration with the Englishman Joseph Archer Crowe: The Early Flemish Painters (1856) furnished with illustrative xilographs, some executed by Cavalcaselle himself; A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (1864–1866); A History of Painting in North Italy (1871); and monographs on Titian and Raphael. Camillo Boito (1836–1914), promoter of a renewal of Italian architecture that would be open to the new social and industrial reality and an advocate of a type of restoration respectful of history, devoted himself to theoretical writings, among which were the Architettura del Medio Evo in Italia (The Architecture of the Middle Ages in Italy, 1880). The theoretical elaboration of macchia (patch) painting is owed above all to the writer and critic Diego Martelli (1838–1896), one of the first to reveal impressionist painting to Italy, but the writings of artists such as Giovanni (Nino) Costa (1826–1903), Adriano Cecioni (1836–1886), and Eugenio Cecconi (1842–1903) also helped to make known the ideas of the Macchiaioli, Tuscan painters whose work is characterized by a strong chiaroscuro. At the end of the century, Gaetano Previati (1852–1920), an exponent of symbolist currents, and hence of a painting of ‘‘ideas’’ rich in sentimental resonances, devoted a treatise proper, Principi scientifici del divisionismo (The Scientific Principles of Pointillism, 1906) to the pointillist technique of painting. Nevertheless, in his case, he made use of a rigorously scientific technique involving the decomposition of color, with various points of contact with, but also differences from, French pointillisme. The painter Giulio Aristide Sartorio (1860–1932), the author of Flores et Humus: Conversazioni d’arte (Flores et Humus: Conversations about Art, 1922), also helped to spread the language and taste of the pre-Raphaelites in his writings on art in the journal Il convito. The twentieth century abounded in artists’ writings, sometimes collected and published posthumously, that range from diaries and autobiographical memories to declarations of poetics, while treatises in the strict sense are scarce. If Scultura lingua morta (Sculpture as Dead Language, 1945), a charming book of self-criticism by Arturo Martini (1889–1947), falls into the genre of reflections 2004

on poetics, L’arte del marmo (The Art of Marble, 1945) by Adolfo Wildt (1868–1931), who wanted to transmit his work experiences and his love for sculpture to his students, is disqualified from the theoretical and formal rigidity of the structure of the treatise. At the same time, groups or movements proclaimed programmatic manifestos in which they articulated their own conception of art. The year 1909 saw the publication (printed entirely in Le Figaro) of the first Manifesto of Futurism, drafted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) and signed by a group of artists. This manifesto was followed by others specifically tailored to the various arts, beginning with Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (A Manifesto of Futurist Painters, 1910), written principally by Umberto Boccioni (1882– 1916) and Luigi Russolo (1886–1947), with the collaboration of Carlo Carra` (1881–1966), and also signed by Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Gino Severini (1883–1966). Some Futurists, even after the movement’s end, frequently dedicated themselves to writing. Carra`’s writings are abundant and of notable historical importance, from those published in La voce from 1916 onward (particularly important are his reflections on Giotto and Paolo Uccello, which cleared the way for painting’s richiamo all’ordine, or return to order) and in Valori plastici between 1918 and 1921, to those published in L’ambrosiano and other journals, not to mention in daily newspapers; from essays such as La pittura metafisica (Metaphysical Painting, 1919) and Artisti moderni (Modern Artists, 1943) to his autobiography, La mia vita (My Life, 1945). Severini’s essayistic activity was also prolific, not only in French (Du Cubisme au Classicisme: Esthe´tique du nombre e du compas, 1921), but in Italian as well, with theoretical essays like those in Ragionamenti sulle arti figurative (Thoughts on the Figurative Arts, 1936); essays on individual artists; and his autobiography, La vita di un pittore (A Painter’s Life), almost entirely written between 1943 and 1946 (and partly in 1965) and published in various editions. Without recounting the consistent literary and critical work by Ardengo Soffici and Lorenzo Viani, or the writings of Mino Maccari, Ottone Rosai, Mario Sironi, Osvaldo Licini, and other artists, or lingering briefly on the father of metaphysical painting, Giorgio De Chirico, it is necessary at least to recall the latter’s numerous critical writings in Valori plastici, Il primato artistico italiano, Il convegno, and his autobiographical novel Ebdomero (1942; translated from the French by De

ELIO VITTORINI Chirico himself as Hebdomeros, first Parisian edition in 1929) and Memorie della mia vita (Memories of My Life, 1945). De Chirico’s brother, Alberto Savinio, an acute theorist of metaphysics in articles published in Valori plastici between 1918 and 1922, continued his activity as a critic in the years to come in newspapers and in journals such as Domus. Finally, in 1973, Carlo Levi, who as a painter moved from magical realism to Expressionism, in Quaderno a cancelli (Notebook with Gates, 1979) described his own blindness, in which images and memories appeared to his sightless eyes, and also touched on, from an original perspective, the world of art and its revolutions, in which the figure of Picasso recurs. In recent years, one original text on art, Lettere d’amore sulla belleza (Love Letters on Beauty, 1996), took the form of an epistolary dialogue between the actor Vittorio Gassman (1922– 2000) and the art critic Giorgio Soavi (1923–). In this text, the object of discussion is the primacy among the arts, with the actor arguing for the superiority of the written and spoken word and the critic for figurative images. GIUSEPPINA DAL CANTON See also: Art Criticism Further Reading Assunto, Rosario, ‘‘Trattatistica,’’ in Enciclopedia Universale dell’Arte, vol. 14, Novara De Agostini, 1984. Barocchi, Paola (editor), Scritti d’arte del Cinquecento, 3 vols., Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1971–1977. Barocchi, Paola, Testimonianze e polemiche figurative in Italia. L’Ottocento: Dal bello ideale al Preraffaellismo, Messina and Florence: D’Anna, 1972. Barocchi, Paola, Testimonianze e polemiche figurative in Italia. Dal Divisionismo al Novecento. Messina and Florence, D’Anna, 1974. Barocchi, Paola (editor), Trattati d’arte del Cinquecento: Fra Manierismo e Controriforma, 3 vols., Bari: Laterza, 1960–1962.

Blunt, Anthony Frederick, Artistic Theory in Italy 1450– 1600, Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1940. Boccioni, Umberto, Gli scritti editi e inediti, edited by Zeno Birolli, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971. Bordini, Silvia, Materia e immagine: Fonti sulle tecniche della pittura, Rome: Leonardo De Luca, 1991. Carra`, Carlo, Tutti gli scritti, edited by Massimo Carra`, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978. De Chirico, Giorgio, Il meccanismo del pensiero: Critica, polemica, autobiografia 1911 1943, edited by Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Turin: Einaudi, 1985. De Fusco, Renato, Il codice dell’architettura: Antologia di trattatisti, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1968. Franceschetti, Antonio (editor), Letteratura e arti figurative, 3 vols., Florence: Olscki, 1988. Grassi, Luigi, Teorici e storia della critica d’arte, 3 vols, Rome: Multigrafica, 1970–1979. Lee, Rensselaer W., Ut Pictura Poesis: A Humanistic Theory of Painting, New York: Norton, 1967. Licini, Osvaldo, Errante, erotico, eretico/Osvaldo Licini: Gli scritti letterari e tutte le le lettere raccolti da Zeno Birolli, edited by Gino Baratta et al., Milan: Feltrinelli, 1974. Maccari, Mino, Il Selvaggio di Mino Maccari, edited by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Venice: Neri Pozza, 1955. Savinio, Alberto, Nuova encyclopedia, Milan: Adelphi, 1977. Schlosser, Julius Ritter von, Die Kunstliteratur: Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte, Wien: Anton Schroll, 1924; as La letteratura artistica. Manuale delle fonti della storia dell’arte moderna, translated by Filippo Rossi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1964. Sciolla, Gianni Carlo, Letteratura artistica dell’eta` barocca: Antologia di testi, Turin: Giappichelli, 1983. Sciolla, Gianni Carlo, Letteratura artistica del Settecento: Antologia di testi, Turin: Giappichelli, 1984. Sciolla, Gianni Carlo (editor), Letteratura artistica dell’eta` dell’Umanesimo: Antologia di testi, 1400–1520, Turin: Giappichelli, 1982. Sironi, Mario, Scritti editi e inediti, edited by Ettore Camesasca and Claudia Gian Ferrari, Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980. Venturi, Lionello, History of Art Criticism, translated by Charles Marriot, New York: Dutton, 1936. Zorzi, Ludovico, ‘‘Scena,’’ in Enciclopedia, vol. 12, Turin: Einaudi, 1981.

ELIO VITTORINI (1908–1966) A key figure in the history of contemporary Italian literature, Elio Vittorini has left a legacy as writer, critic, editor, journalist, and as an intellectual deeply committed to examining the social and existential condition of humankind.

Vittorini’s political views, unlike his ideology, underwent significant changes. First there was his youthful support of Fascism, with other writers such as Romano Bilenchi and Vasco Pratolini, who also believed in the original antibourgeois 2005

ELIO VITTORINI revolution proposed by Benito Mussolini. This occurred during his Florentine sojourn (1930–1937), when he gained his editorial skills working for Solaria, Il Bargello, and La Nazione. When he moved to Milan in 1938, he embraced a Marxist ideology that he defined as his liberal communist views, in support of social justice and the workers’ cause. His split with the Italian Communist Party (PCI) followed in 1951. The distancing had started in 1947, after a heated debate with Palmiro Togliatti (see the letter ‘‘Suonare il piffero’’ published in Il Politecnico, January–March, 1947). Vittorini argued with communist leaders Mario Alicata and Togliatti against socialist realism and for the autonomy of art and the separation of culture from party politics. What never changed was his coherence to his duty as an engage´ writer and his belief in the cognitive role of literature. The author’s first exposure to novels came at the age of seven when he read Robinson Crusoe and Arabian Nights—two works that left indelible images linking adventure, travel, the exotic, fantasy, feelings of freedom, and childhood innocence. His cultural apprenticeship was strengthened by his reading, beginning in 1927, of European writers such as Marcel Proust, Andre´ Gide, Franz Kafka, and James Joyce and was further enriched in the 1930s as he read and translated American authors such as Erskine Caldwell, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Edgar Allen Poe, and Ernest Hemingway. He, as did Cesare Pavese, saw in American novelists a new vitality in narrating and an alternative to what was being written in Italy at the time. His anthology Americana did not meet the censor’s approval in 1941, came out minus the author’s personal notes in 1942, and was republished in its entirety in 1968. Vittorini’s intellectual and editorial activities are grounded in the literary debates that took place during the 1920s and 1930s as journals like La Ronda, Strapaese, Solaria, and Novecento were deeply divided in their vision of a rebirth of Italian literature. His belief in the power of journals continued in the postwar years when, in reaction to the elitist and aristocratic literature advocated by Benedetto Croce’s La Critica (1903–1943), he found and edited Il Politecnico (1945–1947) whose goals per una nuova cultura (for a new culture) were outlined in the editorial of the first issue. His overall openness toward new forms of expression is reflected in a variety of editorial undertakings ranging from his collaboration with newspapers such as L’Unita` and Milano Sera, to being editor 2006

for the publishing houses Mondadori and Bompiani, or as director of the Einaudi series ‘‘I Gettoni’’ (1951–1960), which published new voices such as Italo Calvino, Carlo Cassola, Franco Lucentini, and Beppe Fenoglio. The author’s own words from the 1948 preface of Il garofano rosso (The Red Carnation) provide valuable autobiographical information and a clear explanation of what writing meant for him and why his lifelong ambition was not to write books but to write un libro (a book) because he believed in una verita´ (a truth) that he had to tell/narrate. This important preface is the first manifestation of the author’s poetics on writing and on engagement that he illustrated throughout his work. Vittorini’s early attempts to develop a personal style and his goals in examining social and existential topics are evident in his first phase of his creative writing: Piccola borghesia (Petty Bourgeoisie, 1931), Nei Morlacchi: Viaggio in Sardegna (In the Morlacchi: A Journey to Sardinia, 1936), and Il garofano rosso. These early works are important for a study of his experiments with symbolist, fantastic, lyrical, and mythical elements. Moreover, here are already present the author’s most recurring symbols (for example, Robinson Crusoe, the age of seven, childhood, innocence, traveling, and biblical figures) and familiar themes (for instance, the plight of poor workers, a return to the origins, human suffering, social injustices, and definitions of man) that will dominate in his later narratives. In 1929, as Alberto Moravia published his criticism of the Roman bourgeoisie with Gli indifferenti (The Time of Indifference), Vittorini’s own antibourgeois feelings were expressed in the short stories of Piccola borghesia (started in 1927 and completed in 1931) in which the main characters escape the bourgeois daily routine by taking refuge in childhood memories and fantasies. The opening story, ‘‘La mia guerra’’ (My War), is most often quoted by critics and is certainly the most representative of the entire collection. In Viaggio in Sardegna the author experimented with symbols and themes related to traveling. Rather than a single story, it is a series of 35 impressionistic accounts of travels across the island of Sardinia. Sergio Pautasso summarized it best by stating that the major difference between Piccola borghesia and Viaggio in Sardegna is that whereas in the former Vittorini started from reality and moved into the realm of fantasy, in the latter he moved from the fantastic excitement of traveling to a more realistic dimension of the human condition of poor people (Guida a Vittorini,

ELIO VITTORINI 1967). Traveling is synonymous with the feelings of adventure, freedom, and the discovery of something magical linked to the mythical dimension of childhood memories. After the murder of the socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, Mussolini’s race for power became unstoppable. Many believed in his revolution. The first of several chapters of Vittorini’s Il garofano rosso appeared in Solaria in 1933. It was his first full-length novel, rich with autobiographical references that pointed to his youthful ambiguities about Fascism and socialism. The novel gives the appearance of a mosaic because the individual stories (the private and the public, the sentimental and the political) do not completely merge. It is not surprising that in the 1948 preface Vittorini spoke of having written senza piacere (without pleasure) Il garofano rosso and Uomini e no (Men and not Men, 1945), unlike the great pleasure experienced in writing Conversazione in Sicilia (Conversation in Sicily, 1941) and Il Sempione strizza l’occhio al Frejus (The Twilight of the Elephant, 1947). In 1936 Vittorini’s life and his creative work were influenced by several events. Culturally there was the impact of his appreciation of the opera as an art form that combines theater and music, the same elements that would dominate his narrative strategies from here on. Politically he was reacting to the news of the war in Spain. The political events convinced him to stop writing Erica e i suoi fratelli (Erica and Her Brothers) and to begin working on Conversazione in Sicilia. After several revisions, Erica e i suoi fratelli was published in 1956, and it stands as a bridge between Il garofano rosso and Conversazione in Sicilia as it shows the maturing process of the author and his new skills in giving greater psychological depth to his characters. Erica e i suoi fratelli inspired Luchino Visconti’s film Rocco e i suoi fratelli (1960). Circumventing Fascist censorship, the book version of Conversazione in Sicilia came out as Italy and Germany were attacking Russia. It is Vittorini’s masterpiece. It is also his most lyrical, most existential, and most complex narrative, which he would try to match later on with Le citta` del mondo (The Cities of the World, 1969). For the narrator Silvestro Ferrauto, to converse means dialoguing and communicating with a variety of characters that he meets during his journey in the quarta dimensione (fourth dimension), on his way back home to Sicily: poor workers, spies, his mother Concezione, his dead brother Liborio, and several other characters symbolic of civic duties,

resistance to Fascism, and redeeming the mondo offeso, or the abused and offended world. And yet the author considered Il Sempione strizza l’occhio al Frejus his best work. The short novel reads like a chapter or a continuation of Conversazione in Sicilia. Characters, themes, and motifs elaborated in Vittorini’s masterpiece resurface here: the mother, the grandfather, the mondo offeso, dignity, food, music, and human suffering. In 1945, at a time when Neorealist cinema and literature were gaining momentum, Vittorini published his Resistance novel Uomini e no. However, along with Il garofano rosso, it lacks unity because there is no harmony between the historical accounts, the love story between Enne 2 and Berta, and the intermixed chapters in italics, dealing with the main characters’ internal dialogues and fantasies. Encouraged by Ernest Hemingway’s preface to the English translation of Conversazione in Sicilia, Vittorini wrote Le donne di Messina (Women of Messina, 1949), a utopian and choral fiction focusing on the fading dreams in a changing society. This experiment, which echoes Luigi Pirandello’s mythical play La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1933), combines different narrative styles: the diary, storytelling, third-person account, and reportage, as it follows parallel stories that ultimately intersect. During the early 1960s, Italy’s ‘‘economic boom’’ promoted a cultural revival of journals, critics, and writers who were concerned with new linguistic and literary theories. The neoavanguardia and Gruppo 63 dominated the cultural arena. Always open to new ideas, Vittorini provided his own platform with Il Menabo` (1959–1967). This successful journal, coedited by Italo Calvino, enlisted the collaboration of intellectuals and writers such as Franco Fortini and Umberto Eco and launched the so-called ‘‘literature and industry’’ with Ottiero Ottieri, Lucio Mastronardi, and Paolo Volponi. Il Menabo` also kept up with interdisciplinary studies and with theoretical literary trends linked to Roland Barthes and the Parisian group of Tel Quel, as well as with Alain Robbe-Grillet and the nouveau roman. Vittorini’s rich production of essays and literary criticism, which for the most part had appeared in newspapers and journals, was anthologized in 1957 as Diario in pubblico, designed to present his cultural ideological development. In an unfinished sociological essay, Le due tensioni (The Two Tensions, 1967), posthumously published, the Sicilian 2007

ELIO VITTORINI writer theorized on the differences between razionale (rational) and espressivo (expressive) styles of writing. Even in its incomplete form, the 60 short chapters and several pages of notes of Le citta` del mondo give strong indications that this would have been Vittorini’s most ambitious novel since Conversazione in Sicilia, one that was a primary influence on Calvino’s Le citta` invisibili (1972). Its stories deal with a continual state of traveling—an endless quest for freedom and human dignity for the working class. Vittorini was striving for a combination of mythical and metaphysical dimensions that would have given his travelers a universal meaning. Twenty years after his death, at the second international congress dedicated to Vittorini, in 1986, critics were in agreement that there was never so much a question of his role as a major figure of neo-Realism as there was about his being an outstanding author. His merits as a symbolist writer go hand in hand with his intense cultural activities and his exemplary lifelong aspirations of combining engagement and experimentalism while denouncing all forms of provincialism and crystallized ideologies.

Biography Elio Vittorini was born in Syracuse, Sicily, 23 July 1908. He was the first of four children. In 1924, he interrupted his studies and moved near Gorizia, in northern Italy. In 1927, he married Rosa Maria Quasimodo (sister of the famous poet), by whom he had two sons. In 1930, he moved to Florence where he worked as a proofreader and book reviewer for Il Bargello and La Nazione. From 1934 to 1939, Vittorini intensified his activities as a translator of American novelists. In 1936, he visited Milan where he later moved in 1938. In 1937, he began his collaboration with the Fascist journal Il Bargello, lasting just over a year. On 26 July 1943, he was arrested for his anti-Fascist activities; he was released in September of the same year. In 1945, he founded and directed Il Politecnico. In 1946, he began his heated debates, in Rinascita and Il Politecnico, with communist leaders Mario Alicata and Palmiro Togliatti. In 1951, he directed the series ‘‘I Gettoni’’ for Einaudi. In 1959, he became the founder and coeditor of Il Menabo`. In 1963 he underwent major surgery for stomach cancer. Vittorini died in Milan, 12 February 1966. ROCCO CAPOZZI 2008

Selected Works Collections Le opere narrative, 2 vols., edited by Maria Corti, Milan: Mondadori, 1974.

Fiction Piccola borghesia, 1931. Conversazione in Sicilia Nome e lacrime, 1941; reprinted as Nome e lacrime, 1972 (with a selection of short stories and writings 1939–1941); as Conversation in Sicily, translated by Wilfrid David, 1948. Uomini e no, 1945; as Men and Not Men, translated by Sarah Henry, 1985. Il Sempione strizza l’occhio al Frejus, 1947; as The Twilight of the Elephant, translated by Cinina Brescia, 1973. Il garofano rosso, 1948; as The Red Carnation, translated by Anthony Bower, 1952. Le donne di Messina, 1949; as Women of Messina, translated by Frances Frenaye and Frances Keene, 1973. Erica e i suoi fratelli, 1956; as The Dark and the Light, 1960. La Garibaldina, 1956; as La Garibaldina, translated by Frances Keene, 1973. Le citta` del mondo, 1969.

Other Viaggio in Sardegna, 1936. Americana, 1942. Diario in pubblico, 1957. Le due tensioni, 1967. Lettere, 1977. Epistolario americano, edited by Gianpiero Chirico, 2002.

Further Reading Bonsaver, Guido, The Writer and the Written, Leeds, U.K.: Northern Universities Press, 2000. Bonsaver, Guido, ‘‘Vittorini’s American Translations: Parallels, Borrowings and Betrayals,’’ Italian Studies, 53 (1998), 67–93. Briosi, Sandro, Invito alla lettura di Vittorini, Milan: Mursia, 1971. Calvino, Italo (editor), Il Menabo` (special issue), 10 (1967), 67–93. Catalano, Ettore, L’ideologia letteraria del primo Vittorini, Bari: Dedalo, 1977. Corti, Maria, ‘‘Preface’’ to Elio Vittorini, Le opere narrative, Milan: Mondadori, 1974. Crovi, Raffaele, Il lungo viaggio di Vittorini: Una biografia critica, Bologna: Marsilio, 1998. De Nicola, Francesco, Introduzione a Vittorini, Bari: Laterza, 1993. Diffey, Paul, ‘‘Il cuore dell’infanzia: The Function of Childhood in the Novels of Elio Vittorini,’’ Romance Studies, 27 (Spring 1996), 31–45. Ferretti, Giancarlo, L’editore Vittorini, Turin: Einaudi, 1992. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Per Vittorini a vent’anni dalla morte,’’ Nuova Antologia, 121 (1986), 359–375. Girardi, Antonio, Nome e lagrime: Linguaggio e ideologia in Elio Vittorini, Naples: Liguori, 1975. Heiney, Donald, Three Italian Novelists: Moravia, Vittorini, Pavese, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1968.

ELIO VITTORINI LoDico, Onofrio, Elio Vittorini, Caltanisetta: Sciascia, 1984. Madeddu, Anselmo, Da Robinson a Gulliver, Siracusa: Edizioni dell’Ariete, 1997. Panicali, Anna, Vittorini: La narrativa, la saggistica, le traduzioni, le riviste, Milan: Mursia, 1994. Pautasso, Sergio, Guida a Vittorini, Turin: Borla, 1967. Potter, Joy H., Elio Vittorini, Boston: Twayne Books, 1979. Rodondi, Raffaella, Il presente vince sempre: Tre studi su Vittorini, Palermo: Sellerio, 1985. Sipala, Mario and Elena Salibi (editors), Elio Vittorini. Atti del convegno internazionale: Siracusa, 3–5 April 1986, Syracuse: Ediprint, 1986. Zanobini, Folco, Vittorini, Florence: Le Monnier, 1974.

CONVERSAZIONE IN SICILIA, 1941 A Novel by Elio Vittorini

One of the great classics of twentieth-century Italian fiction and Vittorini’s most acclaimed work, Conversazione in Sicilia was begun in 1937, when Fascism was entrenched in all sectors of Italian life and while the author was deeply affected by the events of the civil war in Spain. Published initially in serial format in the journal Letteratura (1938–1939), it appeared in book form in 1941, attracting considerable attention from Fascist censors. Throughout the 1950s, Marxist critics, focusing mainly on the book’s ideological stance, labeled it a Gramscian model of ‘‘national-popular’’ literature as well as a pioneering work of neo-Realism. Following the author’s death, more objective criticism addressed its linguistic and stylistic merits and the outstanding treatment of mythical and allegorical elements in a compelling story about social and self-awareness, human suffering, and social injustices. Some critics, such as Edoardo Sanguineti and Sandro Briosi, have avoided using the term neoRealism in their scrutiny of Conversazione in Sicilia, while analyzing its political symbolism. This novel in fact stands out as an extraordinary lyrical accomplishment. After seeing Giuseppe Verdi’s La traviata in 1936, Vittorini claimed that his writing owed much to the opera for its structure and poetic qualities. Conversazione in Sicilia is divided into

five major parts, each one subdivided into short chapters resembling theatrical scenes imbued with repetitions and leitmotifs, which add musicality to the narrator’s recollections and experiences. The historical background and the existential journey of the narrator are symbolically defined in the opening paragraph: manifesti di giornali squillanti (posters of screaming newspapers), alluding to the posted headlines of war news coming from Spain, rain, silence, solitude, indifference, abstract furies, distant music, and incommunicability. The second paragraph echoes the first one, a strategy applied throughout novel. The plot is simple. On receiving a letter (a deus ex machina) from his father, Silvestro decides to visit Sicily in time for his mother Concezione’s birthday on 8 December. The journey, a return to his roots and to a mythical Sicily and a quest for self-identity and social awareness, begins in the middle of the night. On a train, on a ferryboat, and later in his hometown, Silvestro encounters a variety of characters who stimulate his memories, his senses and, most importantly, his ability to communicate. In Part One and Part Two we are introduced to i piccoli siciliani (the little Sicilians), poor and hungry, who despair of their condition; a Gran Lombardo (a Great Lombard), who preaches altri doveri (other duties); and two Fascist spies nicknamed Baffi (Moustache) and Senza Baffi (No Moustache). In Part Three, Silvestro’s mother appears, and she serves as a guide throughout a Dantesque descent into the world of the sick and umanita` offesa (offended humanity), the grandfather, a Chinese, and a mineworker. In Part Four, the main characters (Ezechiele, Calogero, Porfirio, and Colombo) are the promoters of the revolution, who also suffer for the mondo offeso (offended world). Finally, in Part Five, after meeting the spirit of his dead brother Liborio, not far from a monument in honor of dead soldiers, a parade takes place during which, as at a circus or at the end of a theatrical performance, all the characters march in front of Silvestro. In Conversazione in Sicilia, each character provides the necessary stimulus to keep Silvestro’s ruota del viaggio (wheel of the journey) in motion on the way to social awareness and to an understanding of what makes a man piu` uomo (more of a man). The perfect blending of memory and imagination, past and present, discloses the influence of Marcel Proust and Henri Bergson. In fact, memories and circular time take the protagonist, with each reawakening, back and forth from childhood to the present and from indifference to social awareness. The title of 2009

ELIO VITTORINI the novel refers to the dialogue that is instrumental in changing inertia and indifference into communication and self-knowledge. ROCCO CAPOZZI

UOMINI E NO, 1945 A Novel by Elio Vittorini

Editions First Edition: Conversazione in Sicilia. Nome e Lacrime, Florence: Parenti, 1941. Critical Editions: Conversazione in Sicilia, introducted and annotated by Giovanni Falaschi, Milan: Rizzoli, 1986. Translations: as Conversation in Sicily, translated by Wilfrid David, introduced by Stephen Spender, London: Lindsay Drummond Ltd., 1948; as In Sicily, translated by Wilfrid David, with a preface by Ernest Hemingway, New York: New Directions, 1949; in The Twilight of the Elephant and Other Works: A Vittorini Omnibus, New York: New Directions, 1973; as Conversations in Sicily, translated by Alane Salierno Mason, New York: New Directions, 2000.

Further Reading Bernardi, Franca Bianconi, ‘‘Parola e mito in ‘Conversazione in Sicilia,’’’ in Lingua e Stile, 2 (1966), 161–190. Bernardi, Franca Bianconi, ‘‘Simboli e immagini nella ‘Conversazione’ di Vittorini,’’ Lingua e Stile, 1 (1967), 27–46. Briosi, Sandro, Invito alla lettura di Vittorini, Milano: Mursia, 1988. Campana, John, ‘‘Images of Regeneration in Conversazione in Sicilia,’’ Forum Italicum, 19:1 (1985), 60–77. Campana, John, ‘‘Tecniche di ripetizione nella ‘Conversazione’ vittoriniana,’’ Quaderni d’Italianistica, 6:2 (1986), 209–222. Di Grado, Antonio, Il silenzio delle madri: Vittorini da Conversazione in Sicilia al Sempione, Catania: Edizioni del Prisma, 1980. Falaschi, Giovanni, Introduction to Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia, Milan: Rizzoli, 1986. Fioravanti, Marco, ‘‘Preistoria ideologica di Conversazione in Sicilia,’’ Belfagor, 5:30 (1973), 592–610. Forti, Marco, ‘‘Rilettura sincronica di Conversazione in Sicilia,’’ L’approdo letterario, 35 (September 1966), 37–42. Merry, Bruce, ‘‘Vittorini’s Multiple Resources of Style,’’ Mosaic, 3 (1972), 107–116. Moss, Howard, ‘‘The Role of Weather in the Dialectical Narrative of Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia,’’ Romance Studies, 17:1 (June 1999), 31–39. Napoli, Adriano, ‘‘Silvestro nella selva: Per una lettura del cap. VI di Conversazione in Sicilia,’’ Silarus, 42 (2002), 67–72. Sanguineti, Edoardo, Introduction to Elio Vittorini, Conversazione in Sicilia, Turin: Einaudi, 1966. Toscani, Claudio, Come leggere Conversazione in Sicilia, Milan: Mursia, 1975. Verderame, E., ‘‘I topoi di Vittorini: Metafore e significati in apertura di Conversazione in Sicilia,’’ Misure Critiche, 9:35–36 (1980), 131–160.

2010

Written in 1944, during the last year of the Resistance fight, and published in 1945, immediately after the Liberation, Uomini e no is considered Vittorini’s most politically engage´ novel in delivering an anti-Fascist message. Its central theme of war and the Resistance encouraged critics to include this novel among the most representative of postwar neo-Realist fiction, even though the author resented the label. As in Conversazione in Sicilia, Vittorini addressed the universal themes of hate, violence, suffering and oppression perpetrated by man upon his fellow man. However, here his anger and the strong denunciation of Fascist atrocities are more explicit. The title recalls John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), which Cesare Pavese translated as Uomini e topi in 1944. The narrative structure and style are quite different from the majority of neoRealist novels of the era. Loaded with symbols and metaphors, Uomini e noi is divided into 136 short scenes, suggesting a filmic or rather theatrical staging; 23 are written in italics and in the first person. These are the metafictional scenes through which the narrator focuses on personal thoughts, dreams, and childhood memories, as well as on his own reflections on death and sacrifice for the cause of freedom. The plot follows two parallel stories. One, about love, is personal and concerns the main character Enne 2 and his feelings for Berta (who is not ready to leave her husband, whom she no longer loves). The other, about the Resistance, is collective, and relates to the clandestine activities of Enne 2 and his partisan friends involved in the assassination of the leaders of the local Fascist tribunal. Subsequently the German soldiers retaliate; and for every German killed, ten Italians will die. The story begins as Enne 2 and Berta meet again after a long separation. They take refuge in the apartment of Selva, an elderly lady who lectures them on the need for affection and companionship. Several attempts at killing the local military tribunal fail. Over 100 prisoners are executed and their bodies left on the streets. Acts of inhumanity reach a peak when Giulaj is torn apart by Clemm’s most

ANNIE VIVANTI vicious dog, Kaptain Blut. At the end of the novel, Enne 2 will not be able to join Berta. As he waits in his room for Cane Nero, the leader of the Fascist and Gestapo tribunal, he is ready to make the ultimate sacrifice: He kills his enemy but in the process gets caught and will be killed. In Uomini e no, the symbols of evil are blatant: Cane nero (black dog), for example, stands for Fascists. But the personal and collective stories do not adequately merge, and the rhetoric is at times repetitious. The narration relies mainly on dialogues. As Franco Fortini has shown, the best parts of the novel are those in which Berta speaks to Enne 2 and where the protagonists reflect on evil and death (‘‘Rileggendo Uomini e no,’’ 1973). The influence of Hemingway is most evident in the use of short sentences, questions, and dialogues. Even with some structural shortcomings Uomini e no remains a powerful and original novel, in the midst of neo-Realism, that vehemently denounces violence and inhumanity.

Editions First edition: Uomini e no, Milan: Bompiani, 1945. Translation: as Men and Not Men, translated by Sarah Henry, Burlington, VT,: Marlboro Press, 1985.

Further Reading Cinquemani, A. M., ‘‘Vittorini, Uomini e no and Neorealism,’’ Forum Italicum, 17:2 (1983), 152–163. Esposito, Edoardo, ‘‘L’amore di Enne 2,’’ Belfagor, 6 (1989), 303–320. Falaschi, Giovanni, ‘‘La resistenza armata nella narrativa italiana,’’ Turin: Einaudi, 1976. Falcetto, Bruno, Storia della narrativa neorealista, Milan: Mursia, 1992. Fortini, Franco, ‘‘Rileggendo Uomini e no,’’ Il Ponte, 24 (1973), 982–993. Pautasso, Sergio, Elio Vittorini. Turin: Burla, 1967. Tumiati, Corrado, ‘‘Uomini e no,’’ Il Ponte, October 1945, 655–656. Zappa, Franco, ‘‘Dialettica umana di Vittorini,’’ Studium, December 1945, 357–359.

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ANNIE VIVANTI (1866–1942) Annie Vivanti’s Italian prose and poetry are unique. Her style is clearly of a non-Italian origin, just as her English prose, while closer to the stylistic and literary trends of her British contemporaries, reveals her continental European roots. Her narrative style incorporates multilingual expressions and brilliant nuances. She emphasized irony and humor, but was also unafraid to address serious themes such as rape, prostitution, drug abuse, and racial discrimination. Vivanti never allied herself with contemporary feminist writers such as Sibilla Aleramo, although feminist themes appear in her works. An expert at executing upper-class parlor comedy, she was equally at home with the more sordid aspects of her society—witnessed perhaps when she sang and danced in Italian coffee-houses and dance halls of dubious repute in the late 1880s. Because she often portrayed herself as either protagonist or character in her work, critics such as

Pietro Pancrazi have defined her writing as autobiographical vignettes. Vivanti drew extensively from her travels and her rich life experiences; however, it would be misleading to consider her stories as mere biographical information. Vivanti began her literary career with Lirica (Lyrics, 1890), a collection of poems, which received the endorsement of Nobel laureate poet Giosue` Carducci. His prefatory essay praised Vivanti’s spontaneity and freshness of expression. It launched her into the world of Italian letters and was the source of much assumption about their personal relationship that continued until his death in 1907. Carducci also defended Vivanti after her failed debut as the playwright of Rosa Azzurra (The Blue Rose, 1898), which premiered at the Arena del Sole Theater in Bologna. It starred Irma Gramatica as Lea Toralta, a depressed actress in search of the happiness that is as elusive as a blue rose. In some 2011

ANNIE VIVANTI of her early works, Vivanti assumed the pseudonym of George Marion. During the late 1890s, Vivanti visited the United States, where her father had established himself after the bankruptcy of his London silk business. In New York and Washington she wrote short stories and novellas, dealing mostly with doomed love affairs. She also published literary reviews and articles for American and British magazines, including Pall Mall Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, and Fortnightly Review. She often used the name Mrs. Anita Chartres. In 1898, she wrote a comedy, That Man, which enjoyed a successful run in Washington and a year later at the Herald Square Theater (on Broadway). This play attracted public attention because of the lawsuit brought against the author by her producer, Mrs. A. M. Palmer, who had made unauthorized changes to the play. Vivanti returned to Europe and began the most prolific part of her literary career. Her novel, The Devourers (1910), written and first published in English, was an unequivocal success. Dedicated to ‘‘my wonder child Vivien to read when she has wonder children of her own,’’ it describes how gifted children metaphorically devour their parents. The difficult life of Nancy is based in part on Vivanti’s own experience as the doting mother of a child prodigy. Written in her familiar style of multilingual phrases and multiple epithets, the novel reveals Vivanti’s profound knowledge of the English, American, and Italian cultures, including immigrant life in New York City. There followed a series of best sellers, in several literary genres, most running to many editions, and often in various languages. A polyglot, Vivanti often undertook her own translations. Among these works was L’Invasore (The Invader, 1915), a drama set in World War I that scandalized audiences for its depiction of rape and abortion. Cherie lives a quiet upper-class life with her cousin Luisa, Luisa’s husband, and their daughter Mirella. On the day of Cherie’s eighteenth birthday, the women are left behind to celebrate, while the men depart to defend Belgium against the German invasion. Subsequently, German soldiers assault and rape Luisa and Cherie. Mirella, who is forced to watch, becomes mute. Rescued by the Allied troops, the women are sent to England. After discovering that they are pregnant, Louisa and Cherie face the moral dilemma whether to terminate their pregnancies or bear the children of their enemy. The play was later readapted as a novel, Vae victis! (1917). After this play, Vivanti published several anthologies of short stories: Zingaresca (Like Gypsies, 1918), Gioia 2012

(Joy, 1921), and Perdonate Eglantina! (Pardon Eglantina, 1926), as well as novels. Among these were Naja Tripudians (1920), which deals with young girls forced into prostitution, and for which Vivanti was accused of plagiarism by the BritishAmerican writer Elizabeth Robins. Mea culpa (My Fault, 1926) focused on an interracial affair between the rebellious Irish girl Astrid O’Reylley and Saad Nassir, the Egyptian prince she meets on the ship bound for Cairo. It became the mouthpiece for Vivanti’s political sympathies for the cause of Irish independence. An adventurous traveler, Vivanti described her visit to Egypt in Terra di Cleopatra (Land of Cleopatra, 1925). She also wrote a children’s book, Sua altezza (Your Highness, 1924), later reworked as Il viaggio incantato (The Enchanted Voyage, 1935). Annie Vivanti was a best-selling author both in the English language and in Italian. Her idiosyncratic style and her openness to address provocative themes and ideas assured her a large reading public in her own time and also explains the renewed interest in her work today. Vivanti, who was of Jewish origins, was interned in Arezzo near the end of her life. She also suffered a personal tragedy in the suicide of her daughter Vivien, a violin prodigy.

Biography As her birth certificate confirms, Annie Vivanti was born in London, England, 7 April 1866 (not 1868, as she later claimed). Her father was Anselmo, a Garibaldi supporter, and her mother was Anna Lindau, a German writer, who as Annie’s first teacher ensured that her daughter was fluent in several languages, including English, German, Italian, and French. She married the journalist and solicitor John Smith Chartres, 11 May 1892, and had a daughter, Vivien, who became a renowned child violinist, 1893. Vivanti traveled extensively in Europe and America. During the 1920s, she took up the cause of Irish independece, along with her husband, a member of Sinn Fein. A regular contributor to La stampa and the Fascist newspapers Il popolo d’Italia and L’idea nazionale and a supporter of Benito Mussolini, she was subject to the anti-Semitic laws and confined to house arrest. She converted to Catholicism. Devastated by her daughter’s suicide in 1941, Vivanti died in Turin, 20 February 1942. ANNE URBANCIC

RAFFAELE VIVIANI Selected Works

Terra di Cleopatra, 1925. Il viaggio incantato, 1935.

Fiction Marion, artista di caffe` concerto, 1891. The Hunt for Happiness, 1896. Winning Him Back, 1904. The Devourers, 1910; as I divoratori, translated by Vivanti, 1911. Circe, 1912; as Marie Tarnowska, translated by Vivanti, 1915. Vae victis!, 1917; as The Outrage, translated by Vivanti, 1918. Zingaresca, 1918. Naja tripudians, 1920. Gioia, 1921. ...Sorella di Messalina, 1922; later as Fosca, sorella di Messalina, 1931. Perdonate Eglantina!, 1926. Mea culpa, 1927. Salvate le nostre anime, 1932.

Poetry ‘‘Lirica di Annie Vivanti,’’ 1890.

Plays The Ruby Ring, 1900. L’invasore, 1915. Le bocche inutili, 1918.

Other Sua altezza: Favola candida, 1923.

Further Reading Caporossi, Carlo, ‘‘Per rileggere Annie Vivanti,’’ Nuova Antologia, 137 (January–March 2002), 269–292. Carducci, Giosue`, ‘‘Liriche di Annie Vivanti,’’ Nuova Antologia, 16 (June 1890), 748–755. Croce, Benedetto, ‘‘La Contessa Lara—Annie Vivanti,’’ in La letteratura della nuova Italia, vol. 2, Bari: Laterza, 1914. Lepschy, Anna Laura, ‘‘Towards a Study of Annie Vivanti’s Play L’Invasore,’’ in Theatre, Opera, and Performance in Italy from the Fifteenth Century to the Present, edited by Brian Richardson, Simon Gilson, and Catherine Keen, Leeds: Society for Italian Studies, 2004. Pancrazi, Pietro, Un amoroso incontro della fine dell’Ottocento, Firenze: Le Monnier, 1951. Phelps, Ruth S., Italian Silhouettes, New York: Knopf, 1924. Urbancic, Anne, ‘‘L’America di Annie Vivanti,’’ Rivista di studi italiani, 10 (December 1992), 54–63. Urbancic, Anne, ‘‘Cinematographic Techniques and Stereotypes in the Stories of Annie Vivanti,’’ in Theatre and the Visual Arts, edited by Giuliana Sanguinetti Katz, et al., New York-Ottawa-Toronto: LEGAS, 2001. Urbancic, Anne, ‘‘L’invasore di Annie Vivanti,’’ in Donna: Women in Italian Culture, edited by Ada Testaferri, Toronto: Dovehouse, 1989.

RAFFAELE VIVIANI (1888–1950) A playwright, actor, director, poet, and musician, Raffaele Viviani was one of the most original figures of twentieth-century Italian theater. He started acting at the age of four in a puppet theater at Porta San Gennaro, in Naples. His first important theatrical experience was in 1908 in ’O Scugnizzo (The Urchin), a comic sketch written by Giovanni Capurro and set to music by Francesco Buongiovanni, which Viviani had seen performed by the successful comic actor, Peppino Villani. After ’O Scugnizzo, Viviani’s unforgettable, extraordinarily successful ‘‘characters’’ were born: Il trovatore (The Troubadour), ’O mariunciello (The Petty Thief), Mala vita (Underworld), ’O scupatore (The Sweeper), ’O cucchiere (The Coachman), ’O cantante ’e pianino (The Piano Singer). Viviani invented characters in which the art of distortion

and caricature was tempered by strains of sentimentalism and realism. In 1906, Viviani created his most original macchietta, Fifı` Rino, a puppetlike aristocratic dandy of no scruples. Viviani used a mobile mask in order to produce the most diversified facial mimicry; his body became a dynamic instrument capable of conveying many character attitudes and nuances. This character recurs in others of his texts: Scugnizzo: Via Partenope (Urchin: Via Partenope, 1918), Tuledo ‘e notte (Via Toledo by Night, 1918), and Scalo Marittimo (Sea Port, 1918), a text on emigration, extremely effective and comparable to an historical essay. During these years, Viviani played in cafe´s and bathing establishments in Naples where artists of different backgrounds gathered. Viviani’s own artistic life involved work with 2013

RAFFAELE VIVIANI the macchietta and the melologo, two genres typical of the variety theater, about which Viviani wrote in Eden teatro (Eden Theater, 1919). With the closing of the variety theaters in 1917, Viviani turned to a different kind of theater. He founded a company that produced both theatrical pieces and music, making his debut with the one-act play, ‘O vico (The Alleyway, 1917), in which he tied together several ‘‘characters,’’ already tested, from his repertoire: the water vendor, the expired gentleman, the bully in love, the news vendor, the street sweeper. Viviani invented a new way of writing drama: The sketches he once used to compose for his performances in the variety theaters became autonomous and a new theatrical element. In going from the variety ‘‘number’’ to the one-act play, Viviani gathered together and gave new life to those ‘‘characters’’ he had already presented on the stage, letting them communicate with each other. He originally mixed prose with song and verse, which often became songs as well. Though Viviani had no technical musical competence, he composed the music for his plays by collaborating with transcribers (Enrico Cannio and Eduardo Lanzetta). He was ‘‘a nontranscriber melodist,’’ that is, an artist who composes music but cannot write it down. In fact, he used to hum his melodies to the musicians, which they then transcribed into musical notations. Viviani was known at this time essentially for his audacious mise en sce`nes that celebrated the typologies of the variety theater as well as of the social outcasts. In Tuledo ‘e notte, which debuted on 9 October 1918 at the Teatro Umberto in Naples and met with great success, the protagonist is the popular Via Toledo, a street that at night fills with different characters: the old news vendor (Scarrafone, or Cockroach), the cooked meat vendor (Cientepelle, or Cowbelly), the itinerant coffee vendor (Leopoldo Colletta), the young idler who lives by his wits (Furmella, or Goldbrick), the pizza maker, and the rags vendor, the key characters in this famous work. There is also Rusella, who makes an honest living selling couch grass to coachmen. Rusella is happy because she will finally marry her beloved Pasqualino in the coming May. Her life contrasts to that of the prostitutes Margherita and Ines. Ines is the ‘‘Bammenella ’e copp’ ’e Quartiere,’’ undoubtedly the most famous female character in Viviani’s works, who embodies the tragedy of alienation and poverty. The cast of characters also includes Tummasino and Filiberto, two bullies (both with a claim on Ines) who, after a quarrel, seem to be the masters of the street until the watchmen come. Tummasino is able to escape, while 2014

Filiberto is arrested. Viviani, as he frequently did, played four roles—the pizza maker, the soap vendor, Filiberto Esposito, the coachman—all with remarkable effect. The character of Filiberto Esposito was taken from his famous pie`ce ‘O delinquente, while the other characters are pre-existing stock figures adapted from variety numbers. Viviani described, in a very detailed way, the various places through which the famous street, named after the Spanish Viceroy who opened it, passes: the Vico Berio; the Ponte di Tappia, rich in handicraft shops; the Quartieri, so called because it was the center of the Spanish quarter during the seventeenth century; Via Corsea; and Largo delle baracche, the main square of the Quartieri, a place known for its prostitutes and gangsters. In 1967, under the title of Napoli notte e giorno, the plays Tuledo ‘e notte and La musica dei ciechi (The Music of the Blind, 1928), were staged together under the direction of Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and met with great critical and popular success. This staging was eventually performed in London in 1968 at the Aldwych Theatre. During the 1920s, Viviani produced two tragedies: I pescatori (The Fishermen, 1925) and Zingari (Gypsies, 1926); both deal with stories of abuse and violence. In I pescatori, Cicciariello kills his stepfather, who has raped Catarina, his sister; in Zingari, Viviani showed the violence of community life, paying special attention to its anthropological and ritual elements. He followed these works with Napoli in frac (Naples in Tailcoat, 1926) and Putiferio (1927). In the same year, he staged, with notable success, works by Salvatore Di Giacomo, including the popular Assunta Spina (1910). The end of decade brought Vetturini da nolo (Coachmen to Rent, 1928); La morte di Carnevale (Carnival’s Death, 1928), one of Viviani’s most performed texts; and La festa di Montevergine (Montevergine’s Feast, 1930). The theatrical fashion for the great actor is reflected in Viviani’s productions in the early 1930s. In the three-act plays Guappo di cartone (The Pasteboard Bully, 1932) and L’ultimo scugnizzo (The Last Urchin, 1932) Viviani stressed the protagonist’s opportunities to change his life, to improve his social status. In Guappo di cartone, Sanguetta is released from prison and tries very hard to get a job; in L’ultimo scugnizzo, ’Ntonio Esposito uses subterfuge to secure a letter of introduction for a self-styled lawyer, for whom he will become a general secretary. At the end of the second act, there is the famous ‘‘Rumba degli scugnizzi.’’ These works differ from Viviani’s first theatrical productions,

RAFFAELE VIVIANI which feature many different characters. Neither minor characters nor major protagonists, these characters have a role in articulating a microstory inside a wider story. The ensemble effect of Viviani’s plays and their polyphonic value consist exactly in this; in this way Viviani succeeded in bring into dramatic relief the individuals who compose the crowd of the humble and the underprivileged (the blind, prostitutes, urchins, gypsies). In 1936, Viviani adaptated for the stage Molie`re’s Malade imaginaire. Between 1936 and 1940, he experienced great difficulty entering the national theater circuits and playing in Italy’s most important theaters. He often preferred working as an actor in the works of other playwrights like Eduardo Scarpetta and Ettore Petrolini. In 1942, he wrote Muratori (Bricklayers), a comedy he never staged; in 1947, he composed his last work, I Dieci Comandamenti (The Ten Commandments), written in collaboration with his son Vittorio shortly before his death. Raffaele Viviani was not only a productive and original playwright (he wrote about 70 works, including original works, remakes, collaborations, and translations). He was also the author of an autobiography and of various collections of poems in Neapolitan dialect. In his autobiography, Dalla vita alle scene (From Life to Stage, 1928), he related his personal experiences as a self-taught actorauthor, often omitting—as frequently happens in actors’ autobiographies—important facts and relations, especially his relationship with intellectuals and contemporary writers, from the Futurists to Petrolini, from Angelo Musco to Dario Niccodemi, from Gorkij to Nemirovic-Dancenko. He translated three works by Luigi Pirandello (still unpublished) into the Neapolitan dialect: La patente (The Licence, 1924), Pensaci, Giacomino! (Better Think Twice about It!, 1933) and Bellavita (1943). These translations confirm Viviani’s interpretative skill and his respect for the Sicilian playwright. Viviani’s works are characterized by his unusual use of his Neapolitan dialect. It is a harsh, archaic, onomatopoeic dialect, rich in sonority and so quite different from the Neapolitan of Salvatore Di Giacomo or Eduardo De Filippo. Viviani’s verse, prose, and music are quite complex and difficult and have been interpreted and understood in different ways. That has affected the success and the diffusion of his plays, compared to those of Scarpetta and Eduardo, which are more easily staged, since they are constructed on a more traditional model.

Biography Raffaele Viviani was born in Castellammare di Stabia (Naples) on 10 January 1888, the son of Raffaele and Teresa Sansone. He debuted with a play in prose, Masaniello, 1894. He performed his own numbers, playing by himself or in duet with his sister Luisella, 1895. He married the young Maria Di Maio, with whom he had four children, 1913. He founded a company and made his debut at the Teatro Umberto I in Naples with ‘O vico 1917. Viviani wrote texts and toured with his company, 1918–1929. He was directed by Alessandro Blasetti in the film La tavola dei poveri, 1932. At the Venice Festival, he played the role of Don Marzio in La bottega del caffe` by Carlo Goldoni, 1934. He was hindered by the Fascist censorship, 1936–1940. He wrote Siamo tutti fratelli, an adaptation of a famous work by Antonio Petito, So’ muorto e m’hanno fatto turna` a nascere, 1941. The last years of his life were marked by serious illness. Viviani died in Naples on 22 March 1950. ANTONIA LEZZA Selected Works Collections Trentaquattro commedie scelte da tutto il teatro di Raffaele Viviani, edited by Lucio Ridenti, 2 vols., Turin: ILTE, 1957. Teatro, edited by Guido Davico Bonino, Antonia Lezza, and Pasquale Scialo`, Naples: Guida Editori, 5 vols., 1987–1991. Teatro, edited by Antonia Lezza and Pasquale Scialo`, vol. 6, Naples: Guida Editori, 1994.

Plays ‘O vico, 1917. Scugnizzo: Via Partenope, 1918. Tuledo ‘e notte, 1918; as Via Toledo by Night, translated by Martha King, in 20th Century Italian Drama, edited by Jane House and Antonio Attisani, 1995. Scugnizzo, 1918. Scalo Marittimo, 1918. Caffe` di notte e giorno, 1919. Eden teatro, 1919. Circo Equestre Sgueglia (produced 1922), edited by Edo Bellingeri, 1978. ’O fatto ’e cronaca (produced 1923), 1934. Piazza Municipio, 1924. ‘A figliata, 1924. O pescatori, 1925. Zingari, 1926. Napoli in frac, 1926. Putiferio, 1927. I nullatenenti, 1928. La musica dei ciechi, 1928.

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RAFFAELE VIVIANI Vetturini da nolo, 1928. La morte di Carnevale, 1928. A festa ’a Montevergine, 1930; edited by C. Mazza and C. Trabucco, 1963. Guappo di cartone, 1932. L’ultimo scugnizzo, 1932. La tavola dei poveri (produced 1936), 1954. Muratori, 1957. I Dieci Comandamenti, introducted by Mario Martone, 2000.

Poetry ‘‘Tavolozza,’’ 1931. ‘‘E c’e` la vita,’’ 1940. ‘‘Poesie,’’ edited by Vasco Pratolini and Paolo Ricci, 1956. ‘‘Voci e canti,’’ 1972. ‘‘Poesie,’’ edited by Vittorio Viviani, 1981; revised edition, 1990.

Autobiography Dalla vita alle scene, 1928; enlarged edition, 1977; revised edition, 1988.

Further Reading Andria, Marcello (editor), Viviani, Catalogo della Mostra Viviani: immagini di scena, Naples: Tullio Pironti editore, 2001. Angelini, Franca, Teatro e spettacolo nel primo Novecento, Rome: Laterza, 1996.

Barsotti, Anna, ‘‘Da ’O vico a ’O buvero ’ e Sant’Antonio,’’ Ariel, 3 (1988), 99–120. De Matteis, Stefano, ‘‘Senza famiglia: storie di vicolo,’’ in Lo specchio della vita. Napoli: antropologia della citta` del teatro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991. Leparulo, William E., Raffaele Viviani: momenti del teatro napoletano, Pisa: Giardini, 1975. Lezza, Antonia, ‘‘Teatro dell’emigrazione. Indagini e contributi,’’ in Il sogno italo-americano, edited by Sebastiano Martelli, Naples: CUEN, 1998. Lezza, Antonia, and Pasquale Scialo`, Viviani. L’autore, l’interprete, il cantastorie urbano, Naples: Colonnese Editore, 2000. Lezza, Antonia, and Pasquale Scialo` (editors), Viviani. Teatro, poesia e musica, Naples: CUEN, 2003. Palermo, Antonio, Da Mastriani a Viviani. Per una storia della letteratura a Napoli fra Otto e Novecento, Naples: Liguori, 1987. Puppa, Paolo, ‘‘Itinerari nella drammaturgia del Novecento,’’ in Storia della letteratura italiana. Il Novecento, edited by Emilio Cecchi and Natalino Sapegno, Milan: Garzanti, 1987. Rao, Angela Maria, Raffaele Viviani o della miseria coatta, Florence: Antonio Lalli, 1981. Taviani, Ferdinando, ‘‘Raffaele Viviani inventa un teatro,’’ in Uomini di scena, uomini di libro, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995. Trevisani, Giulio, Raffaele Viviani, Bologna: Cappelli, 1961. Viviani, Vittorio, ‘‘Raffaele Viviani,’’ in Storia del teatro napoletano, preface by Roberto De Simone, Naples: Guida Editori, 1992.

VOICES IN THE EVENING See Le voci della sera (Work by Natalia Ginzberg)

PAOLO VOLPONI (1924–1994) Paolo Volponi began his career in 1948 with a short volume of poetry, Il rimarro (The Green Lizard), introduced by Carlo Bo. This first plaquette was written in post-Hermetic stylistic modes (paratactic, lyrical fragments) and is characterized by the poetic word that, in its approach toward the reality 2016

of the object, makes visuality its cardinal element, restoring the image in its direct immediacy. The background consists of the atmosphere of Urbino (Volponi’s native city), its back alleys, districts, and Appennine landscapes. The various profiles and forms of this scenery are constantly shot through

PAOLO VOLPONI with metaphysical tensions that, although they mark the contours of a youthful poetic exercise, simultaneously constitute themselves as the exterior elements of an interior, psychological subject matter. The poems of Il rimarro have a strong enunciative character, which emanates from the expressivity of a diction, whose lexicon returns us—notwithstanding the expected differences—to Pascoli and Bartolini, to Campana and Cardarelli. Volponi’s second volume of poems, L’antica moneta (The Old Coin, 1955), comprises texts written between 1949 and 1954 and again moves along some of the same lines as his small debut collection, further deepening and developing those lines. In 1950, in the meantime, Volponi moved away from his native city (which he strongly felt was necessary), first conducting a series of projects inquiries, on behalf of Adriano Olivetti, in Abruzzo, Calabria, and Sicily, and then working in Rome for Cepas (Educational Center for Social Assistance). Two of the most important elements that characterize L’antica moneta are the woman and the natural environment, but the spatial referents expand to include, along with the poet’s biographical experience, other topographies and landscapes not exclusively Appennine. The surreal visions characterizing these components, in which the parallels between human and cosmic corporality are frequent, foreshadow the imaginary narrative of Corporale (Corporal, 1974), Il pianeta irritabile (The Irritable Planet, 1978), and Le mosche del capitale (The Flies of Capitalism, 1989). In the volume’s last section, entitled ‘‘Il giro dei debitori’’ (The Circle of Debtors), there is a metrical and syntactic development, with the abandonment of post-Hermetic paratactic fragmentation in favor of the small, hypotactic poem of wider scope. These self-analytical and psychological components were deeply explored, in an anthropological sense, in his next collection, Le porte dell’Appenino (The Gates of the Appennines, 1960), which includes poems written between 1955 and 1959. In this collection are the signs of an evolution from Hermetic suggestiveness and the extreme subjectivity of the first idylls to a new expressive tension, dictated by the need to reconcile private with collective history. Some of the principal motifs of the Volpanian work return: the topos of the countryside of the Marche, the psychological sphere of infantile repression, the theme of distance from the father, the cosmic opening of poetic visions, the presence of a rich bestiary as well as the ever-present, piercing dialectic between staying and leaving (his love-hate relationship with his native city).

The descriptive tension of Le porte dell’Appennino is the prelude to Volponi’s narrative debut, which occurred in 1962 with Memoriale (My Troubles Began), a first-person narration of the vicissitudes of the worker Albino Saluggia, a neurotic who distorts reality through the filter of his illness. From the visual and persecutorial paranoia that drives him, the protagonist-narrator reconstructs the entire sequence of his own bitter troubles within the world of industry, through which his sickness acquires a particular force in becoming a cognitive instrument used to grasp the surrounding world. In his next novel, La macchina mondiale (The Worldwide Machine, 1965), the narrating voice belongs to Anteo Crocioni, a young peasantphilosopher from the urbanized hinterland who, through the observation of flora and fauna, the combinations of machines and futuristic apparatuses, the reading of philosophical and scientific texts, through solitary meditations on the seasons and on familial and social experiences, is developing a vision of a harmonious future by attempting to distinguish the pseudo-scientific formulas for a progressive regeneration of the world. Crocioni’s utopia is recorded in the pages of a ‘‘Treatise’’ (fragments of which appear in the novel), in which men are seen as machines that are able to perfect themselves through labor; the treatise’s intention is to reconcile the natural and the artificial. In this diligent inquiry into truth and equality, into moral and civil justice, the protagonist will struggle against everything and everyone: from his fellow countrymen to the priest, the parishioners, the police, the university professors (the symbols of entrenched power), even his family circle and his wife Massimina, who in the end will abandon him, leaving him alone before the extreme act of suicide. In 1974, Volponi published Corporale, a work in which the neurosis of the rebellious subject dissolves, after some elaborate troubles, in his furious attempt to absorb reality, in solitude, through his passionate ‘‘corporality.’’ In Corporale, Volponi experimented with a kind of ‘‘total’’ writing. Gerolamo Aspri, the protagonist, is an intellectual in some ways akin to his predecessors, Saluggia and Crocioni. In his mad quest to conquer reality, set against events in Italy during the 1960s (the stagnation of economic-industrial development, armed struggle), and obsessed by a fear of the atomic bomb, he will seek refuge in the body of nature, in a farm in the countryside of Urbino, where he builds a nuclear fallout shelter. 2017

PAOLO VOLPONI In this same year, Volponi released another collection of verse, Foglia mortale (Mortal Leaf, 1974), which includes texts composed between 1962 and 1966. The collection is characterized by considerable linguistic structural innovation: linguistic, dialectal inserts and a contrapuntal singsong structure, almost hallucinatory and iterative, in which the phonic calembour dominates and opens up the surreal visions—half-way between automatic writing and the lucidity of rational control—to a high, ideological level. Il sipario ducale (Last Act in Urbino, 1975) is a novel with a substantially traditional narrative frame. It is set in Urbino (where one can hear the echoes of the 1969 massacre in Milan’s Piazza Fontana) and revolves around the experiences of an old anarchist, Professor Subissoni; his companion Vive´s; and Oddino Oddi-Semproni, a young, decadent aristocrat. The urban setting becomes a microcosm in which contemporary Italian troubles are projected and experienced with the torpor typical of the provinces. But beneath this sipario ducale (ducal curtain) run unresolved utopian tensions, which are embodied by Subissoni. Volponi made this character the emblem of a necessary enthusiasm, which jolts the consciences dulled by the problems of contemporaneity. Il pianeta irritbabile is set in an apocalyptic, postatomic landscape. With a rhythm blending cadences from a Jules Verne story, a picaresque novel, and the imaginary adventures of the chivalric poem, it narrates the dramatic fortunes of four protagonists (Epistola the monkey, Plan Calcule the goose, Roboamo the elephant, and a dwarf with many names), all survivors of a nuclear catastrophe. In this dark allegory of the dissolution of the planet, Volponi gave a warning also intended to be a hope and a lesson, that is, the need for economicindustrial development on a human scale, which takes the fate of the planet into consideration. The end of the 1960s witnessed the definitive end to the utopian hopes and plans that had animated so much of Volponi’s earlier work. One fruit of this bitter knowledge is Il lanciatore di giavellotto (The Javelin Thrower, 1981), a novel centered on the life of Damiano Possanza (Damin, in dialect), a young athlete who lives in the provinces during the 1930s, the heyday of Fascism. His painful and tragic adolescent experience is the story of an initiation into a mature age that is revealed to be catastrophic. His purity and sensibility contrast with a world that he is not able to accept. The last stage of this difficult confrontation with a crushing reality is suicide 2018

because of the fatal impossibility of subscribing to life and its horrors. The development of the ‘‘second phase’’ of Volponi’s poetry, begun with Foglia mortale, continued with Con testo a fronte (With Facing Texts, 1986), which contains verse composed between 1967 and 1985. The short poems bring to life a constant dialogue with a novelistic, or pictorial-figurative textuality. The creatural presences of daily life, the figurative projections from the animal kingdom, and the nocturnal, astral, or lunar constant deriving from Leopardi acquire a strongly allegorical force that sharpened Volponi’s disillusionment regarding the possibility of an intervention in the world. One may compare to this a melancholy and profound meditation in his last poetically significant collection, Nel silenzio campale (In the Strenuous Silence, 1990). The short poems, of an epic cast, deal with a cosmic landscape devastated by human irrationality. In 1989, in the meantime, he had released Le mosche del capitale. The novel, narrated in the third person, offers a picture of contemporary industrial reality. The experiences of an enlightened agency executive, Bruto Saraccini, a humanist and poet (a figure representing the author in his experience at a Fiat car factory), reflect frustration at the failure of big industry’s ideals of reform (the elimination of the alienation of labor with the weapon of scientific progress). The disintegration brought about by monetary logic is total, even pervading the structure of the novel and its characters, who become emptied beings, marionettes enslaved to the logic of ownership. The reality of objects, on the contrary, is alive, symbolizing the condemnation of the individual, who is mocked by the instruments of his own creation, but of which he has become the slave. Of Volponi’s final novel, La strada per Roma (The Road to Rome, 1991), only two sections were published in magazines. Originally, the work was to have been entitled Repubblica borghese (The Bourgeois Republic). Largely autobiographical, La strada per Roma tells the story of a young man at the beginning of the 1950s who is fed up with the reactionary atmosphere of Urbino and in search of new existential horizons. He therefore takes the road to the capital, moving from the closed provincial world to the metropolis, but maintaining, however, an ambiguous relationship of attraction-repulsion in his encounters with his native land. Among the great novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, Paolo Volponi was also one of the most original poets of his generation. With

PAOLO VOLPONI naturalness and figurative plasticity, he has expressed, both in poetry and in prose, one of the most acute anthropological dramas of contemporary life: the conflict between the world of nature and the world of social labor and capital, the world of alienating work enslaved to monetary logic, the world of consumption through which the loss of all human dimensions occurs.

Biography Paolo Volponi was born in Urbino, 6 February 1924. He left home and joined the partisans, 1943. He attended the University of Urbino and received a law degree, 1943–1947. He met Adriano Olivetti, 1949; for Olivetti, he conducted a series of inquiries in Abruzzo, Calabria, and Sicily, 1950. Volponi moved to Rome, where he worked for Cepas (Centro educativo per assistenti sociali), 1954. He was appointed director of the Social Services at the Olivetti main office in Ivrea, 1956. He married Giovina Jannello, personal assistant to Adriano Olivetti, 1959; their son Roberto was born, 1962. Volponi won the Viareggio Prize for Le porte dell’Apennino, 1960; the Premio dei Librai Milanesi and Marzotto Prize for Memoriale, 1962 and 1963; and the Strega Prize for La macchina mondiale, 1965. He was appointed secretary of the Agnelli Foundation, 1975, and became an executive member of Consiglio di Amministrazione of RAI television, 1978. He was one of the founders of the Milanese journal Alfabeta, 1979.He was elected senator as an independent of the Communist Party, 1983. His son Roberto died in a plane crash in Havana, 3 September, 1989; he had gone to Cuba in lieu of his father at the last minute. Volponi never recovered from this personal loss and began to suffer from angina pectoris. He won his second Strega Prize for La strada per Roma, 1991. He had heart surgery, 1992; due to illness, he resigned from his parliamentary position, 1993. Volponi died of a heart attack in Ancona, 23 August 1994. MASSIMO FABRIZI Selected Works Collections Poesie e poemetti 1946–66, edited by Gualtiero De Santi, Turin: Einaudi, 1980. Romanzi e prose, edited by Emanuele Zinato, Turin: Einaudi, 2002–2003.

Poetry ‘‘Il ramarro,’’ 1948. ‘‘L’antica moneta,’’ 1955. ‘‘Le porte dell’Appennino,’’ 1960. ‘‘Foglia mortale,’’ 1974. ‘‘Con testo a fronte,’’ 1986. ‘‘Nel silenzio campale,’’ 1990. ‘‘Poesie 1946–1994,’’ 2001.

Fiction Memoriale, 1962; as My Troubles Began, translated by Bele´n Sevareid, 1964; as Memorandum, translated by Bele´n Sevareid, 1968. La macchina mondiale, 1965; as The Worldwide Machine, translated by Bele´n Severeid, 1967. Corporale, 1974. Il sipario ducale, 1975; as Last Act in Urbino, translated by Peter N. Pedroni, 1995. Il pianeta irritabile, 1978. Il lanciatore di giavellotto, 1981. Le mosche del capitale, 1989. La strada per Roma, 1991. La pestilenza, edited by Marco Rustioni, 2002.

Essays Cantonate di Urbino, 1985. Scritti dal margine, 1995. Il leone e la volpe: Dialogo nell’inverno 1994, with Francesco Leonetti, 1995. Del naturale e dell’artificiale, edited by Emanuele Zinato, 1999.

Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Intellettuali e classe operaia, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Baldise, Enrico, Invito alla lettura di Volponi, Milan: Mursia, 1982. Ba`rberi Squarotti, Giorgio, Poesia e narrativa del secondo Novecento, Milan: Mursia, 1967. Bettini, Filippo, et al. (editors), Volponi e la scrittura materialistica, Rome: Lithos, 1995. Bo, Carlo, ‘‘Presentazione,’’ in Paolo Volponi, Il ramarro, Urbino: Istituto d’Arte, 1948. Ferretti, Gian Carlo, Paolo Volponi, Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1972. Luperini, Romano, ‘‘Paolo Volponi,’’ in Il Novecento, Turin: Loescher, 1981. Lucente, Gregory L., ‘‘The Play of Literary Self-consciousness in Paolo Volponi’s Fiction: Violence and the Power of the Symbol,’’ World Literature Today, 61 (Winter 1987), 19–23. Lucente, Gregory L., ‘‘An Interview with Paolo Volponi: One More Time, or, the Mushrooms of Culture,’’ in Criticism: Literature and Culture, Ann Arbor: Michigan Romance Studies, 1996. Paolo Volponi: Scrittura come contraddizione, Milan, Angeli, 1995. Papini, Maria Carla, Paolo Volponi: Il potere, la storia, il linguaggio, Florence: Le Lettere, 1997. Pedulla`, Walter, La rivoluzione della letteratura, Rome: Bulzoni, 1972.

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PAOLO VOLPONI Raffaeli, Massimo (editor), Paolo Volponi: Il coraggio dell’utopia, Ancona: Transeuropa, 1997. Siciliano, Enzo, ‘‘Paolo Volponi,’’ in Letteratura italiana: I Contemporanei, Milan: Marzorati, 1974. Zinato, Emanuele, Volponi, Palermo: Palumbo, 2001.

MEMORIALE, 1962 Novel by Paolo Volponi

Memoriale is the story of the troubled Albino Saluggia, who records the tale of his own sufferings. The protagonist, first in a long line of ‘‘diverse’’ Volponians, is a character with a singular past behind him: Born in Avignon to Italian parents, having moved to Italy during Fascism and then survived a Nazi prison camp, he returns at the end of the war to live with his old, widowed mother in the village of Candia, in the province of Torino. The hope of escaping from the past materializes in the chance to begin work in the industrial world, and the factory is initially seen by Albino in its fascinating and mysterious aspect, immersed in a quasi-sacred atmosphere. For the solitary Albino, afflicted by a paranoid neurosis, this will be the beginning of his painful ordeal, which will last about 11 years and will lead him, in the end, to lay out his memories of this experience by entrusting them to history, almost as a kind of warning to posterity. The factory, an inhuman and alienating place, realizes itself only in its own rational and sanitized functions, and whoever is not a part of this productive logic is marginalized and expelled. Oppressed by the industrial world, the protagonist will begin to imagine secret machinations and conspiracies everywhere, engineered against him by the factory’s doctors (who want to ruin him), the kitchen cooks (guilty of poisoning his pasta), the Carabinieri (accomplices in a criminal project aimed at destroying his life). Even his mother is not spared from his somber and obsessive suspicions. His suspicion of the factory imagines it as an autonomous and selective universe that imposes gnosiological and compartmental categories different from his own. These last become the representative of a Catholic-rustic culture firmly tied to a visceral 2020

and tellurian mythology, a culture whose symbolisms and rhythms are completely different from the alienating, mechanical repetition and economic logic of mass production. The only chance the protagonist has is to integrate the industrial world with his private universe, making it part of his own cultural horizons and natural mythologies. But the attempt fails, rendering the gap between the two worlds unbridgeable: nature versus industry. The principal characteristic of Memoriale is the destruction of the opposition between madness and reason, with an ensuing relativization of the contrast between rational/irrational. The innovation of Volponi’s novel, compared to other contemporary literary works with an industrial theme, consists above all in the functional use of malady and neurosis, employed here as a distorting filter that allows the character to construct, according to his own lens, an alternate autre, a universe at the second level that places itself in conflict with the quotidian reality of the factory and that tends to replace it. Volponi availed himself of a language characterized by lyrical-visionary effusions with a precise ideological purpose: By relativizing the value of the dominant linguisticliterary system, freely crossing the border between lyric and prose, the author emblematically attacked the preconstituted values imposed by the neocapitalistic system. MASSIMO FABRIZI Editions First edition: Memoriale, Milan: Garzanti, 1962. Translations: My Troubles Began, translated by Bele´n Sevareid, New York: Grossman, 1964; as Memorandum, translated by Bele´n Sevareid, London: Calder & Boyars, 1968.

Further Reading Baldacci, Luigi, ‘‘Memoriale,’’ Letteratura, 26–30:56–57 (May–June 1962), 135–137. Barilli, Renato, La barriera del naturalismo: Studi sulla letteratura italiana contemporanea, Milan: Mursia, 1964. Dal Bon, Piero, ‘‘Memoriale tra lingua e stile,’’ Studi novecenteschi, 25:55 (June 1998), 95–134. Guglielmi, Angelo, ‘‘Paolo Volponi: Memoriale,’’ Il verri, 7:4 (1962), 90–94. Patrizi, Giorgio, ‘‘Il primo Volponi: Scoria come alterita`,’’ in Volponi e la scrittura materialistica, Rome: Lithos, 1995. Rossi, Aldo, ‘‘Pretesti sul Memoriale di Paolo Volponi,’’ Paragone-Letteratura, 13:150 (June 1962), 107–116. Zinato, Emanuele, ‘‘Paolo Volponi,’’ Studi novecenteschi, 19:43–44 (June-December 1992), 7–50.

W ¨ LLER (1928–) LINA WERTMU In 1977, Lina Wertmu¨ller became the first woman to be nominated for an Oscar as ‘‘Best Director’’ and for ‘‘Best Original Screenplay.’’ Indeed, for a brief period, during the 1970s, with the American release of Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero ‘stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...’ (Love and Anarchy, 1973), and with the extraordinary reception of Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties, 1975), Wertmu¨ller was both hailed and reviled: hailed as the great new European film auteur and reviled as both reactionary and Communist, as well as misogynist and feminist. Her star rose rapidly, burned brightly, and then appeared to fizzle out and sink just as rapidly, leaving only a memory of its brief trajectory. Wertmu¨ller was willing to try her hand at anything remotely connected with performance arts, ranging from theater to puppets, from radio to television and cinema. She has also been willing to make films that are not ‘‘easy’’ and that, as a result, scandalized not just the reactionary, male chauvinist targets of her barbs, but also progressives and feminists. If there is anything that characterizes Wertmu¨ller’s films it is that they are antiauthoritarian and that they despise male chauvinism, particularly of the Southern Italian variety. This is immediately clear from her first film, I basilischi (The Lizards, 1963), the story of a group of young layabouts in a small Southern town, which is reminiscent of Federico Fellini’s I vitelloni (Vitelloni, 1953). While several of Wertmu¨ller’s films appear to be inspired by works of other directors, and in

particular Fellini, she is clearly responding to the earlier works from an idiosyncratic feminist perspective, and thus in a sense is commenting on them, rather than simply imitating them. The one major difference between I vitelloni and I basilischi is that, not surprisingly, Wertmu¨ller views her characters far less sympathetically than Fellini. While Moraldo, one of the protagonists of I vitelloni, escapes the miasma of small-town life, Antonio, the analogous protagonist of I basilischi, refuses to do so, even when offered the opportunity. The film received critical praise but little commercial success. In the decade that followed, Wertmu¨ller worked with some success in television directing Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca (Gian Burrasca’s Diary, 1964), casting the pop music star Rita Pavone in the title role; responded to Ettore Scola’s Se permettete, parliamo di donne (Let’s Talk about Women, 1964) with Questa volta parliamo di uomini (Let’s Talk About Men, 1965), made a couple of spinoff films with Rita Pavone, Rita la zanzara (Rita the Mosquito, 1965) and Non stuzzicate la zanzara (Don’t Tease the Mosquito, 1968), the latter under the pseudonym of George H. Brown, and, as Nathan Wich, directed what arguably is the first feminist Western, Il mio corpo per un poker (Belle Starr, 1968). Wertmu¨ller directed the four films that made her internationally famous between 1971 and 1975. Mimı` mettallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimı`, 1971), Film d’amore e d’anarchia, Travolti da un insolito destino 2021

¨ LLER LINA WERTMU nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away, 1974), and Pasqualino Settebellezze. The films share a number of characteristics. Starting with Mimı` mettallurgico ferito nell’onore, we find the actors who comprise the core of the ensemble troupe that will reappear in subsequent films: Giancarlo Giannini, Mariangela Melato, and Elena Fiore. In these films, Wertmu¨ller also seems to be constantly pushing the limits of the commedia all’italiana aesthetically and ideologically. Aesthetically, she is far more likely to experiment with focal lens length, zoom shots, extreme camera angles, and montage interludes in which the narrative is advanced entirely by images and music; ideologically, while she continues the commedia’s indictment of the bourgeoisie, politicians, the police establishment, Fascism, the mafia (both as organized crime and as culture), and male chauvinism, she is also quite willing to skewer proletarians, Communists, and feminists, thus creating paradoxes that she refuses to resolve within her films. The result is that, although her frequently outrageous images such as the fisheye lens shots of the naked posterior of Amalia (Elena Fiore) in Mimı` mettallurgico ferito nell’onore and conceits such as the protagonists’ role reversal in Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto delighted some audiences, they left more ‘‘serious’’ viewers puzzled. How could one defend a filmmaker who demeaned women by making their obesity risible and by suggesting that women actually enjoyed being subjugated by brutal men? And how could those men be card-carrying members of the Italian Communist Party? This paradox elicited its best-known reaction in Bruno Bettelheim’s article, ‘‘Surviving,’’ published in The New Yorker on August 2, 1976, in which the famous child psychiatrist and Nazi concentration camp survivor, angered by the apparent glorification of survival at all costs in Pasqualino Settebellezze, questions Wertmu¨ller’s ‘‘the implied moral’’ that those who overcome Fascism degrade even good human beings: ‘‘If a presentation of what is involved in survival is to have any meaning, it cannot restrict itself to stating simply that unless one remains alive one does not survive.’’ Ironically, in so doing, he resolved the paradox presented by this film: It is, in fact, better to die by jumping into a vat of excrement, as Pedro the Anarchist does, than to emulate Pasqualino and survive at any cost. The commercial success and the critical brouhaha, however mixed, surrounding these films was such that Warner Brothers signed Wertmu¨ller to a four-film contract. The director’s first ‘‘American’’ film, La fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una 2022

notte piena di pioggia (A Night Full of Rain, 1978) concerns the troubled love story of an Italian Communist reporter (Giancarlo Giannini) and an American feminist (Candice Bergen). Once again we have a paradox, but the film lacked the transgressive qualities that had made her earlier films famous, if not notorious, and thus was a critical and commercial failure, and Warner’s promptly canceled its contract. The director’s films after the debacle can be divided roughly into three categories. The first category comprises films that echo the characteristics of her more successful films, but which pertain very specifically to Italian sociopolitical problems. Among these we find Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova—si sospettano moventi politici (Blood Feud, 1978), Sotto...sotto...strapazzato da anomala passione (Sotto...sotto, 1984), Notte d’estate con profilo greco, occhi a mandorla e odore di basilica (Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil, 1986), Metalmeccanico e parrucchiera in un turbine di sesso e di politica (The Worker and the Hairdresser, 1997), and Ferdinando e Carolina (1999). The last, a tragicomedy about King Ferdinand of Naples and his young bride, the Austrian princess Carolina, is a costume film told entirely as a flashback, and mixes a comedic look at the sexual obsessions of the young king with images of the victims of his frequently brutal reign. Of these, only Sotto...sotto...strapazzato da anomala passione, the story of a traditional Roman craftsman who believes that his wife is cuckolding him with another woman, touched themes that were universal enough to elicit interest abroad and probably deserves to be included in the pantheon of Wertmu¨ller’s important films. In the films of the second category, rather than creating paradoxes and allowing the viewer to struggle to find answers, Wertmu¨ller provides rather didactic answers. In Un complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra, 1985), we see the women of Naples band together and rise up against the criminality of male members of the Camorra who, in pursuit of drug profits, endanger children’s lives. With In una notte di chiaro di luna (As Long as It’s Love, 1989), the director attempts to address the problem of AIDS, but she proposes a ‘‘Hollywood’’ solution: When the protagonist discovers he has become HIV positive he convinces a rich acquaintance to begin production of large quantities of prophylactics to protect others. The third category comprises films made primarily in the last decade for RAI Fiction, such as Sabato, domenica e lunedı´ (Saturday, Sunday and

¨ LLER LINA WERTMU Monday, 1990), Francesca e Nunziata (Francesca and Nunziata, 2002), and Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (Too Much Romance.... It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers, 2004), all of which star Sophia Loren. The reviews have been generally positive, but none of these films has been released in the United States. Indeed the last film to be released in the United States in 1992 was Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore!), based on the story of an elementary school teacher from Northern Italy who is accidentally sent to teach in a grade school in one of the slums of Naples. This film brings together the two major trends in Wertmu¨ller’s cinema, her transgressive paradox creation and her didacticism and suggests that she sees some light at the end of the tunnel in her battle against male chauvinism, if only in the children.

Biography Born in Rome, 14 August 1928 as Arcangela Felice Assunta Wertmu¨ller von Elgg Spanol von Brauchich, to an aristocratic ancestor of Swiss extraction who served in the Vatican Guard. Her father had wanted her to become a lawyer; instead, after a rebellious youth, she entered the Rome Theater Academy directed by Peter Sharoff in 1947. Upon graduation, she joined the traveling troupe of Maria Signorelli, 1951–1952, and acted as producer, puppeteer, stage manager, and set designer, as well as publicist and radio/TV scriptwriter. During the 1950s, she worked with Guido Salvini, Giorgio De Lullo, Garinei and Giovannini; wrote Due piu` due non fa piu` quattro for Franco Zeffirelli and began her collaboration with Giancarlo Giannini with whom she founded Liberty Films, which will produce her successful films of the 1970s. In 1963, she worked as third assistant director on Federico Fellini’s 8½, a defining experience. She will use a number of his technicians (among them master cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo), when she directed her first film, I basilischi, 1963, and will continue to do so for many years. Became also active in television directing the popular show Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, 1964. During this period she met and married (1968) painter Enrico Job who became her set designer. In addition to directing feature films, she has also written and directed several plays, operas, a number of documentaries, and radio shows. Among her awards, the Vela d’argento at the 1963 Locarno Film Festival for I basilischi. She is the first woman director to be nominated for an Oscar as ‘‘Best Director’’ and

for ‘‘Best Original Screenplay’’ for Pasqualino Settebellezze, 1975. She currently lives in Rome. BEN LAWTON Selected Works Films I basilischi (The Lizards), 1963. Il giornalino di Gian Burrasca, 1964. Questa volta parliamo di uomini, 1965. Rita la zanzara (as George H. Brown), 1966. Non stuzzicate la zanzara, 1968. Il mio corpo per un poker (as Nathan Wich; Belle Starr), 1968. Mimı` mettallurgico ferito nell’onore (The Seduction of Mimı`), 1971. Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero ‘stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza’ (Love and Anarchy), 1973. Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (All Screwed up), 1974. Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzurro mare d’agosto (Swept Away), 1974. Pasqualino Settebellezze (Seven Beauties), 1975. La fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia (A Night Full of Rain), 1978. Fatto di sangue fra due uomini per causa di una vedova—si sospettano moventi politici (Blood Feud), 1978. ` una domenica sera di novembre (made for TV), 1980. E Scherzo del destino in agguato dietro l’angolo come un brigante da strada (A Joke of Destiny), 1983. Sotto . . . sotto . . . strapazzato da anomala passione (Sotto... sotto), 1984. Complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti (Camorra), 1985. Notte d’estate con profilo greco, occhi a mandorla e odore di basilico (Summer Night with Greek Profile, Almond Eyes and Scent of Basil), 1986. In una notte di chiaro di luna (As Long as It’s Love), 1989. Sabato, domenica e lunedı´ (Saturday, Sunday, Monday), 1990. Io speriamo che me la cavo (Ciao, Professore!; adapted from Marcello D’Orta’s book), 1992. Ninfa plebea (The Nymph), 1996. Metalmeccanico e parrucchiera in un turbine di sesso e di politica (The Worker and the Hairdresser), 1996. Ferdinando e Carolina, 1999. Francesca e Nunziata (made for TV; adapted from Maria Orsini Natale’s book), 2002. Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (Too Much Romance . . . It’s Time for Stuffed Peppers), 2004.

Screenplays The Screenplays of Lina Wertmuller: The Seduction of Mimı`, Swept Away, Love and Anarchy, and Seven Beauties, translated by Steven Wagner, New York: Quadrangle/ New York Times Book Co., 1977. Francesca e Nunziata (with Elvio Porta), Rome: Gremese, 2001.

Novels La testa di Alvise su un piatto d’argento, 1981; as The Head of Alvise, 1982. Avrei voluto uno zio esibizionista, 1990.

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¨ LLER LINA WERTMU Further Reading Bettelheim, Bruno, ‘‘Surviving,’’ in The New Yorker, 2 August 1976, pp. 31–52. Biskind, Peter, ‘‘Lina Wertmu¨ller: The Politics of Private Life,’’ in Film Quarterly, 28 (1974–1975): 10–16. Cerulo, Maria Pia, et al. (editors), Lina Wertmuller: Il grottesco e il barocco nel cinema, Assisi: ANCCI, 1993. De´le´as, Josette, ‘‘Lina Wertmu¨ller: The Grotesque in Seven Beauties,’’ in Women Filmmakers: Refocusing, edited by Jacquelin Levitin et al., Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002. Ferita, Ernest, and John R. May, The Parables of Lina Wertmuller, New York: Paulist Press, 1977. Gili, Jean-A., Le cine´ma italien, Paris: Union Ge´ne´ral d’E´ditions, 1978.

Haskell, Molly, ‘‘Swept Away on a Wave of Sexism,’’ in Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women in Film, edited by Patricia Erens, New York: Horizon Press, 1979. Magretta, William, and Joan Magretta, ‘‘Lina Wertmu¨ller and the Tradition of Italian Carnivalesqu Comedy,’’ in Genre, 12 (1979): 25–53. Mariani, Umberto, ‘‘The ‘Anti-Feminism’ of Lina Wertmu¨ller,’’ in Annual of Foreign Films and Literature, 2 (1996): 103–114. Stigliz, Beatrice, ‘‘Images of Extremity: Conflict, Anarchy and Freedom in the Films of Lina Wertmuller,’’ in Holding the Vision: Essays on Film, edited by Douglas Radcliff-Umstead, Kent: Kent State University, 1983.

WOMAN AT WAR See Donna in guerra (Work by Dacia Maraini)

A WOMAN See Una Donna (Work by Sibilla Aleramo)

WOMEN’S HISTORY In Italy, the interest in women’s history as a legitimate area of research was, as in other countries in Western Europe and North America, closely linked to the cultural feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the latter’s goals of establishing a linear history of the emergence of feminism as a political movement and a distinct and unified female 2024

consciousness. Initially most research was carried out outside of the academy by women historians, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists, and writers under the aegis of newly founded women’s centers in Milan, Bologna, Rome, Turin, and Pisa. The first major publication on the history of the Italian feminist movement, Alle origini del

WOMEN’S HISTORY movimento femminile in Italia: 1848–1892 (Origins of the Feminist Movement in Italy, 1963), was written by Marxist historian Franca Pieroni Bortolotti (1925–1985), who presented women’s struggle for emancipation and their acquisition of basic rights against the background of the major political parties and movements at the time of Italy’s reunification. Italian women historians launched a series of debates that questioned the absence of women from history and critiqued the modes and categories of traditional historical writing that perpetuated that absence. Hence, the first phase of feminist historiography centered on expanding the knowledge on and reinterpreting the importance of notable women, religious mystics, heretics, witches, and queens, who had received some mention in political histories. Efforts to recover women’s stories received impetus from the exploratory work of historians of medieval and early modern period (Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Natalie Zemon Davis, Michelle de Certeau) and, in Italy, from the work of microhistorians such as Carlo Ginzburg who shed light on the unpublished accounts of trials of witches, thus recovering these personalities and restoring them with a rare empathy. In 1976, feminist philosopher and critic Luisa Muraro (1940–), the leading figure of the Pensiero della differenza, published the ‘‘feminist’’ historical novel, La signora del gioco (The Lady of the Game, 1976), a series of fictionalized accounts of women who had been accused of witchcraft, while she herself developed her thesis of men’s control over women sexuality by analyzing how such dangerous bodies (corpi pericolosi) became bodies endangered (corpi in pericolo) of erasure from history. These historians formed the vanguard of the shift from economic and social history (histoire totale) to what could be called histoire e´pisodique, an approach to the past through an exemplary event or person. Defined as a move from political to anthropological history, the change in focus also allowed researchers to glimpse elements of religious belief, family life, and sexual practices in the lives of common people. Feminists could thus widen the object of research from the few exceptional women, who had influence or produced writings, to those whose traces had been eliminated from mainstream historical accounts. In the last 30 years, debates of Italian women historians concerning diverse approaches to women’s history have been linked to an examination of their ties to the politics of cultural feminism as well as the problem of their own gender identity as women historians. By the early 1980s, the focus

of the feminist movement in Italy had shifted from political gains to the establishment of informational networks encouraging the study of female subjectivity and the production of theories on women-centered relationships. The movement was still strongly informed by an ideology of separatism since separatism was deemed necessary to the emergence of a new soggettivita` rebelliosa (rebellious subjectivity) (Luisa Passerini, Storie di donne e femministe, 1991). Throughout the 1980s, Italian feminist historians debated issues such as how to define the female historical subject, the role and validity of subjectivity on the part of the female researcher, the dangers of viewing women’s history as a separate but equal discipline, and the need to experiment with new narrative and historical techniques such as autobiography and oral history to foster the emergence of new individual and collective female subjectivities. The essentialist and uniformly defined category of ‘‘woman’’ originally proposed by cultural feminism underwent a series of revisions due to encounters with poststructuralism, deconstruction, and psychoanalysis, theories that challenged the existence of unified, unchanging identities. In 1981, a group of historians (including Maria Luisa Boccia, Gabriella Bonacchi, Marina D’Amelia, Michela De Giorgio, Paola Di Cori, Yasmine Ergas, Angela Groppi, Margherita Pelaja, Simonetta Piccone Stella, and Margherita Pelaja) founded the first journal of women’s history, Memoria, to encourage interdisciplinary viewpoints in women’s studies. In addition to providing a forum for the growing body of women historians in the 33 issues published from 1981–1991, Memoria, like DWF, played an integral role in stimulating debates during the 1980s by assigning space to translations of works by American, French, and English scholars. Participants in the first interdisciplinary conference of feminist history held in Modena in 1982, organized by Annarita Buttafuoco (1951–1999), the editor of Nuova Donna (1978– 1986) and cofounder of the Societa` delle storiche italiane (1989), was aptly titled ‘‘Percorso del femminismo e storia delle donne’’ or ‘‘Feminism and Women’s History.’’ Many participants expressed concern that women’s history was no more than an ideological genealogy of political and psychological forerunners of feminism. Buttafuoco defended the personal affinities present in the historian’s choice of her object of research and argued that the historian’s rapport with the past is reactivated through the process of memory, which determines the selection of what the researcher is 2025

WOMEN’S HISTORY disposed to find alike and different in the women and men s/he chooses to investigate. Nonetheless she challenged a woman’s history based on feminism’s linear narrative of evolution or progress toward a unified female consciousness. In her introduction to the 1987 edition of Franca Pieroni Bortolotti’s writings, Buttafuoco praised Bortolotti but criticized the method of writing women’s history as an appendage to particular political movements. Her prolific and groundbreaking research examined several precursors of the feminist movement (such as Olympe de Gouges and Eleonora de Pimentel) as well as women’s practices in communities and organizations that promoted a womencentered politics that validated an originary female difference. For example, in Le Mariuccine (The Little Marias, 1985), she studies the lay Milanese institution at the end of the nineteenth century, whose members worked to advance the social status of women and the poor. Historiography, scientific research, and feminism were the main subjects of a second conference held in Modena in 1986, although the sections devoted to anthropology, the social sciences, scientific thought, and philosophy reflected the widening of critical approaches. In the same year, the Bolognese conference ‘‘Ragnatele di rapporti: Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne’’ introduced themes of patronage, honor, and women’s networks in conjunction with the theoretical question of power. Here again several women historians challenged the premise of a women’s history based in feminist ideology and rejected the idea of a separate women’s history. Gianna Pomata questioned historians’ dependence on the oppressor/ oppressed model inherited from feminism and emphasized the need to explore the aspects of power that derive from exchange, interdependence, and conditions of reciprocity and complementarity. According to Silvia Mantini, this conference was perhaps the first serious step toward replacing women’s history with gender history defined as the history of relations among groups (Women’s History in Italy, 2000). At both conferences the question of the relationship of the feminist historian to the object of her research was central. In her article Soggettivita` e storia delle donne (Subjectivity and Women’s History, 1990), Paola Di Cori identifies three ways in which women historians have appropriated this term: to define women as the main subject of research; to use interviews and autobiography in order to demonstrate women’s opinions; to rethink their own methodology in light of their experience as women. Other aspects 2026

of feminist critique, for example the dependence on vertical and genealogical structures in theories of entrustment (affidamento), came under attack as Italian women historians sought to unite definitions of subjectivity with methods applicable to historical research. Anna Rossi-Doria has argued that although history is indeed an effort to codify a past we cannot fully understand, subjective memory remains consonant with the traditionally feminine task of sustaining relationships and keeping women’s past alive (Memoria, storia e tradizione delle donne, 1993). The substitution of the word ‘‘gender’’ for ‘‘women’s history’’ also provoked much debate among feminist historians, who were concerned that such a move would dilute the focus on women and the role of subjectivity. Gianna Pomata defended the concept by stating that if women’s history highlighted the particularities of women’s experiences, gender history represents an attempt to cast a wider net, giving it a more general significance and thus more power to shake the inertia of the traditional historical process (‘‘Close-ups and Long Shots,’’ 1998). Pomata acknowledges the influence of American historians Joan Scott and Natalie Zemon Davis on her research of the micro politics of gender relations in the areas of family, dowry systems, and patrilinearity. Gender history for Pomata is the story of how sexual difference has been interpreted by successive generations and its formative impact on relationships between groups and individuals. The Societa` Italiana delle Storiche (SIS, or Italian Association of Women Historians), founded in 1989, has sponsored numerous colloquia and published proceedings that promote empirical research on women’s gendered role in social relations and how these roles relate to social and institutional change. Members of the Societa` also sponsor various programs, including a summer school on women’s history, which is open to female applicants even outside of academia. Its newsletter, Agenda (21 issues, 1989–1999), functioned as a publication devoted to the transmission of women’s history as a discipline. Memoria ceased publication for many reasons, but primarily because its existence seemed to promote the marginalization of women’s history as a field. In the 1980s and early 1990s, articles by Italian feminist historians were not appearing in other national and international journals. Although the five-volume Storia delle Donne in Occidente (A History of Women in the West, 1991), edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, was initially promoted by publisher Vito and Giuseppe Laterza, the final edition did not include any Italian women

WOMEN’S HISTORY contributors. Memoria was eventually replaced in 2002 by a new journal sponsored by the SIS called Genesis. Essays by Italian women historians are now being published more frequently in mainstream reviews such as Quaderni storici, Ricerche storiche, Societa` e storia, Passato e presente, and Quaderni medievali. In addition, in the 1990s, Italian women historians published their own Storia delle donne in Italia (History of Women in Italy) around four themes: religion, marriage, work, and maternity. Sexuality, marriage, family, and domestic space are the basic contexts for these inquires into strategies of women from different historical periods who negotiate these spaces rather than succumb to them. Although women’s efforts may not have always led to the acquisition of rights, Italian women historians seek to delineate discontinuities, ruptures, and continuities in women’s power negotiations in gendered relationships. In the edited volume Corpi e storia: Pratiche, diritti, simboli (Bodies and History: Practices, Rights and Symbols, 2002), which includes the proceedings from the 1999 SIS conference held in Venice, feminist historians examine the images of the female body in antiquity, the impact of the theorization of sexual difference on medicine, the symbolic representation of the body in rituals, various definitions of feminine hygiene, and the rights of the body in a totalitarian state. Indeed, the body is defined as a space that may be controlled, but it is also capable of acting as a source of resistance and change. Feminism itself continues to be the subject of historical inquiry in works by Paola di Cori and Luisa Passerini. Known for her innovative research on memory and oral history, Passerini uses the lens of psychoanalysis in order to show how memory’s selectivity is determined by the desire to produce and explain a narrating self. Most important is also her work on the cultural experience of working class during the Fascist era in Torino: operai e fascismo (Turin: Workers and Fascism, 1984). Finally, new areas of research include revisionist accounts of how Italian women acquired their social and legal rights, as well as studies of genres not usually associated with women (such as travel writing). The debate over the relationship of women’s history to gender history continues. Now women historians concentrate more on how women’s history has changed the way we look at history. As Dinora Corsi writes, this approach shows that both histories effect a reversal of perspective that focuses on the individual rather than the institution, and tries to define the tension

between societal norms and its reception (Un itinerario negli studi di storia medievale, 2003). Women/ gender history has thus evolved into an endeavor, which questions the means and effects of the production of the subject woman in different times and circumstances. CAROL LAZZARO-WEIS See also: Feminist Theory and Criticism Further Reading Bimbi, Franca, and Andrea Del Re (editors), Genere e democrazia. La cittadinanza dell donne a cinquant’anni dal voto, Turin: Rosenberg and Sellier, 1997. Bonacchi, Gabriella, and Angela Groppi (editors), Il dilemma della cittadinanza. Diritti e doveri delle donne, Rome: Laterza, 1993. Bortolotti, Franca Pieroni, Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia 1848–1892, Turin: Einaudi, 1963. Bortolotti, Franca Pieroni, Socialismo e questione femminile in Italia 1892–1922, Milan: Mazzotta, 1974. Bortolotti, Franca Pieroni, Sul movimento politico delle donne, Scritti inediti, Rome: Utopia, 1987. Buttafuoco, Annarita, Le Mariuccine. Storia di una istituzione laica, Milan: Franco Angeli, 1985. Buttafuoco, Annarita, ‘‘Vuoti di memoria: Sulla storiografia politica in Italia,’’ in Memoria, 31 (1991): 61–72. Buttafuoco, Annarita, Questioni di cittadinanza. Donne e diritti sociali nell’Italia liberale, Siena: Protagon, 1997. Corsi, Dinora, ‘‘Un itinerario negli studi di storia medievale,’’ in A che punto e` la storia delle donne in Italia, edited by Anna Rossi-Doria, Rome: Viella, 2003. D’Amelia, Marina (editor), Storia della maternita`, Rome: Laterza, 1997. De Giorgio, Michela, Le italiane dall’unita` a oggi. Modelli culturali e comportamenti sociali, Rome: Laterza, 1992. De Giorgio, Michela, and Christine Klapisch-Zuber (editors), Storia del matrimonio, Rome: Laterza, 1996. De Longis, Rosanna, ‘‘La storia delle donne,’’ in Gli studi delle donne in Italia: una guida critica, edited by Paola Di Cori and Donatella Barazetti, Rome: Carocci, 2001, pp. 299–320. Di Cori, Paola, ‘‘La dimensione della memoria,’’ in Scrittura e scrittrici, edited by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Milan: Longanesi, 1988. Di Cori, Paola, ‘‘Soggettivita` e storia delle donne,’’ in Discutendo di storia: soggettivita`, ricerca, biografia, edited by Maura Palazzo and Anna Scattigno, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990. Di Cori, Paola, La Donna Rappresentata, il corpo, il lavoro, la vita quotidiana nella cultura e nella storia, Rome: Ediesse, 1993. Ergas, Yasmine, ‘‘Tra sesso e genere,’’ in Memoria, 19 (1981): 11–18. Filippini, Dadia, Tiziana Pleboni and Anna Scattigno (editors), Corpi e storia: Donne e uomini dal mondo antico all’eta` contemporanea, Rome: Viella, 2002. Groppi, Angela (editor), Il lavoro delle donne, Rome: Laterza, 1996.

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WOMEN’S HISTORY Mantini, Silvia, ‘‘Women’s History in Italy: Cultural Itineraries and New Proposals in Current Historiographical Trends,’’ in Journal of Women’s History, 12 (2000): 170–198. Passerini, Luisa, Torino operai e fascismo, Rome: Laterza, 1984; as Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class, translated by Robert Lumley and Jude Bloomfield, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Passerini, Luisa, Storie di donne e femministe, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1991. Passerini, Luisa, ‘‘Gender Relations,’’ in Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction, edited by David Forgacs and Robert Lumley, Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pellizari, Maria Rosaria (editor), Le donne e la storia: Problemi di metodo e confronti storiografici, Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995. Pomata, Gianna, ‘‘Storia particolare e storia universale: In margine ad alcuni manuali di storiadelle donne,’’ in Quaderni Storici, 74 (1990): 341–385.

Pomata, Gianna, ‘‘Close-ups and Long Shots: Combining Particular and General in writing the Histories of Men and Women,’’ in Geschlectergeschichte und Allgemeine Geschichte, edited by H. Medick and A. C. Trepp, Go¨ttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 1998. Pomata, Gianna, Lucia Ferrante, and Maura Palazzi (editors), Ragnatele di rapporti. Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier. Rossi-Doria, Anna (editor), Annarita Buttafuoco. Ritratto di una storica, Rome: Jouvence, 2001. Rossi-Doria, Anna (editor), A che punto e` la storia delle donne in Italia, Rome: Viella, 2003. Rossi-Doria, Anna, and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo (editors), La ricerca delle donne. Studi feministi in Italia, Turin: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1987. Rusconi, Roberto, ‘‘Problemi e fonti per la storia religiosa delle donne in Italia alla fine del medioevo (secoli XIII-XV),’’ in Ricerche di Storia Sociale e Religiosa, 48 (1995): 53–75. Zarri, Christina, La memoria di lei: Storia delle donne, storia di genere, Turin: Societa Editrice Internazionale, 1996.

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR I The effect of World War I on European literature was immense, and numerous stories, poems and memoirs were published in its wake. In 1914, the war was seen in Italy as an educational experience necessary for the regeneration of the nation. In literature as well as in public life, it heralded the rebirth of a nationalistic spirit. The rise of the avant-garde had been marked by a rejection of the literary tastes that had dominated the nineteenth century. The Futurists saluted the new century celebrating the superman, war, and art. Artists and intellectuals wanted to erase the last remnants of dreamy Romanticism and looked to the celebration of heroes and the fiery passions of action. Whereas outside of Italy writers such as Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Romain Rolland, and Karl Kraus harshly criticized the war, almost all Italian intellectuals backed intervention, seeing the conflict as the last chance for a long overdue existential settling of scores and as the means for a total renewal of Italian political life. Thus, Renato Serra’s Esame di coscienza di un letterato (The Soul-Searching of Man of Letters, 1915) became a manifesto for many intellectuals and the spiritual legacy of its author, who soon died at the front. It is the tormented and lucid analysis of the 2028

crisis of a generation that believes that through the war it will be able to rediscover the meaning of its own humanity. Italo Svevo and Luigi Pirandello were among the few who held doubts regarding the conflict. Svevo understood the true motivations of the conflict, as is evident in the chapter of La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience, 1923) in which the protagonist meets the Austrian soldiers, played out like a Charlie Chaplin comedy routine. Culturally formed in Germany, Pirandello, in his turn, was clearly uneasy about the unraveling of the cultural unity of his apprenticeship. In Berecche e la guerra (Berecche and the War, 1919), for example, Berecche is the intellectual produced by that very same bourgeoisie that was accused of being cowardly and unpatriotic. His world is turned upside down by war and by history. The political drama of war is also present in the diary of Alfredo Panzini, Il romanzo della guerra nell’anno 1914 (The Novel of the War in 1914, 1914), which describes the year of neutrality of Italy, and Diario sentimentale (A Sentimental Diary, 1923), in which the tragic everydayness of the war and the ensuing political tension are described with bitter irony.

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR I Journals such as La Voce, directed by Giuseppe Prezzolini and with contributors as diverse as Benedetto Croce, Gaetano Salvemini, Giovanni Amendola, Piero Jahier, Giovanni Papini, and Ardengo Soffici, echoed these patriotic sentiments. The journal Lacerba, founded in 1913 by Papini and Soffici, openly supported intervention. Following the theories of philosophers Wilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Gaetano Mosca (1858–1941), it exalted an individualism that saw the conflict as an irreverent and anticonformist moment through which the ‘‘Genius’’ can express the abilities that raise him above the masses. As a result, Lacerba became the official organ of the Futurists, who founded their myths of the technological age upon the rejection of tradition, and justified through them the war as a dash toward progress. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the movement, uses these themes in many of his works, from La bataille de Tripoli (The Battle of Tripoli, 1911) to the Futurist ‘‘synthesis’’ Battaglia + Peso + Odore (Battle + Weight + Smell, 1912), from Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the World’s Only Hygiene, 1915) to L’alcova d’acciaio (The Steel Alcove, 1921). In these works he represents war as a breach with the present, as the exaltation of the machine and of industry, as a party and an orgy, as an excess and an aesthetic experience. Deprived of any conscious political subjectivity, the masses remain as pure energy, to be used by the elite. Soffici also wrote two diaries: Kobilek, giornale di battaglia (Kobilek, a Battle Diary, 1918) and La ritirata del Friuli (The Retreat of Friuli, 1919), in which the direct experience of the war attenuates his superomismo and leads him to a more humane participation in the dangers of war. His populism, however, does not affect his ideology of aristocratic intellectual, manifested here through the opposition between the ruling elite and the masses naturally destined to obey. The same thing can be said for the other great interventionist author, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was at the forefront of the movement in favor of the war, seen as a source of personal glory and as an inspiration for oratorical tours de force that could powerfully affect his readers. For D’Annunzio, war remained a personal aesthetic ideal, and his glorious descriptions of bomb bursts and helmets had nothing to do with the blood and the mud of the trenches. Only the intense prose pieces of Notturno (Nocturnal, 1917), which question the meaning of death with greater sincerity, offer us a glimpse of the more humane side of the writer.

At the other end of the spectrum from Marinetti’s myth of the war as celebration and D’Annunzio’s heroic posturing, a number of texts witness to the inhuman experience of the trenches. Examples include La guerra del ’15 (The War of 1915, 1931), by Giani Stuparich, and Con me e con gli alpini (With Me and with the Alpini, 1919), Piero Jahier’s most famous work based on his experience as commander of a division of mountain troops, the Alpini. Even though Jahier’s Socialist populism leads him to represent the farmer-soldiers as good and generous in their sacrifice for the motherland, Con me e con gli alpini is nevertheless one of the most successful memoirs of World War I. Le scarpe al sole (Shoes in the Sun, 1921), by Paolo Monelli (1891–1984), is full of youthful self-confidence and patriotic pride, of pranks and desperate battles, and many of its pages convey a profound sense of a life dedicated to the poetry of daily events. Although these writers for the most part do not interpret the historic event of the war in political terms, autobiography remains the most appropriate genre to render the biological and ethical upheaval produced by the war. The letters and diaries written by the soldiers and by a few important authors make understandable themes such as the loss of youthful innocence, sacrifice in its psychological and idealistic dimension, and the regression of the soldiers to a primitive state. This, on the contrary, is essentially impossible for genres such as the novel or the short story. For instance, Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Giornale di guerra e di prigionia (A Diary of War and Internment, 1965), published only after his death, is an extraordinary testimony. In October of 1917, the writer, then serving on the front line at Caporetto as a second lieutenant of the Alpini, was captured by the Austrians on the banks of the Isonzo. Curious and exacting, Gadda’s gaze grasps the broadest historical and human context of the events he witnesses, and he already displays his intelligence and sensitivity in his use of language. Gadda’s experience at Cellelager as a prisoner of war was shared by Ugo Betti and by Bonaventura Tecchi, whose Baracca 15C (Barrack 15C, 1961) would later recount their poetic camaraderie. Emilio Lussu’s Un anno sull’altipiano (Sardinian Brigade, 1938)—the source for Francesco Rosi’s film Uomini contro (Men Against, 1970)— also denounces the horror of trench warfare. A democratic interventionist and later an antiFascist, Lussu recalls his experiences with soldiers sent to be slaughtered by their officers, who prove to be militarily inept and who are a symbol of a 2029

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR I power that paid no attention to the useless loss of life that was World War I. In poetry, we must mention the works of Giuseppe Ungaretti and of Umberto Saba. In Allegria di naufragi (Happiness of Shipwrecks, 1919) Ungaretti presents one of the most moving poetic works inspired by the conflict. War is described as an inescapable evil that strikes at man’s existence. Poetry is the only means to reaffirm one’s humanity and to rediscover, through the analogy between the human condition and the outward forms of the landscape, the illusions that lead to survival. In his eight Poesie scritte durante la guerra (Poems Written During the War) included in his Canzoniere (1921), Saba, more sensitive to the inner and psychological rather than to the historical tragedy, recalls episodes of military life with moving realism. His poems, however, do not reach the tragic grandeur of Ungaretti’s experience. The conflict also influenced theatrical production, and theaters were filled with plays aimed at making a healthy profit from the emotions stirred up by the historical context. Dario Niccodemi (1874–1934) was the master of such operations, and works such as La nemica (The Enemy, 1917), the story of a duchess and her two sons who have left for the front, were extremely successful. La nemica combines the devastating effect of the outbreak of the war with the profound divisions among the protagonists. A huge number of texts produced during World War I have been left out of literary studies either because these texts have been seen as having little literary value or because they are forms of occasional writing. Examples include the staggering 3,993,932,090 letters written by soldiers at the front; the many songs born in the trenches and later risen to the status of classics of Italian popular music, such as O’ surdato ‘nnammurato (The Soldier in Love); journalistic writing such as the Scene della Grande Guerra (Scenes from the Great War, 1915), by Luigi Barzini (1874–1947), a war correspondent for Il corriere della sera. All these and more should find their legitimate place in a wider critical context. However, the most profound and incisive accounts of the war are often to be found in works published several years after the end of the conflict, after a lengthy inner re-elaboration, and published as fiction or poems. In these works, the autobiographical dimension has been consciously attenuated and filtered through literary form. It is certainly not easy to understand nowadays the historical moment of World War I, with all those factors such as patriotism and irredentism 2030

that had a high emotional impact and could be used effectively by nationalist and proto-Fascist groups, while intellectuals could find no other weapon save a rather mystifying propaganda. In the ideological chaos of the postwar period, liberal culture, caught between the irreconcilable interests of the bourgeoisie and the working classes, was unable to impose a democratic leadership. Using as leverage the unsatisfied provincial petty bourgeoisie on the one hand and the frustrated demobilized soldiers on the other, Mussolini was able to establish his dictatorship. World War I became a foundational myth, a vehicle for national pride and mobilization. As Mario Isnenghi has pointed out, the dialectic between the trenches and the front, articulated in terms of the patient, resistant masses in the trenches and the stormtrooper as hero and martyr of action, was crucial to the establishment of this mythology of the war (Il mito della grande guerra, 1970). The catastrophic events of World War I are nevertheless marked by an unredeemable sense of failure in the collective imagination and by the definitive collapse of the faith in the inevitable progress of humanity. Even though Italian war literature did not produce works that could match the critical and popular success of novels like Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), or the scope and intensity of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) or Ernst Ju¨nger’s Storm of Steel (1920), it undoubtedly represents the psychological, political, and moral sacrifice of the troops during their long experience in the trenches and at the front. At the very least, it witnesses to the traumatic reality of the conflict, and especially to the ensuing disenchantment and disappointment, in comparison to the ideological investment of interventionism that exalted war, the most barbaric of human experiences, as a noble and edifying event. ANDREA BOSELLO Further Reading Bartoletti, Maria, Memorialistica di guerra, in Storia Letteraria d’Italia, Il Novecento, edited by Armando Balduino and Giorgio Luti, vol. 1, Padova: Piccin, 1989. Cortellessa, Andrea (editor), Le notti chiare erano tutte un’alba: antologia dei poeti italiani nella Prima guerra mondiale, Milan: Mondadori, 1998. Croce, Benedetto, L’Italia dal 1914 al 1918. Pagine sulla guerra, Bari: Laterza, 1965.

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR II Formigari, Francesco, La letteratura di guerra in Italia, 1915–1935, Rome: Istituto Nazionale Fascista di Cultura, 1935. Fussel, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. Gibelli, Antonio, L’officina della guerra. La Grande Guerra e le trasformazioni del mondo mentale, Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1991. Isnenghi, Mario, Il mito della grande guerra, Bari: Laterza, 1970.

Nozzoli, Anna, La cultura e il fascismo, in Storia Letteraria d’Italia, Il Novecento, edited by Armando Balduino and Giorgio Luti, vol. 2, Padova: Piccin, 1989. Omodeo, Adolfo, Momenti della vita di guerra. Dai diari e dalle lettere dei caduti 1915–1918, Bari: Laterza, 1934. Winter, Jay M., Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, New York: Cambridge University, 1996.

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR II Italy entered World War II on 10 June 1940, following Hitler and declaring war on France and England. Indeed, at the end of the war, Italian literature and art described the complex experience of the war precisely as a devilish and incomprehensible nightmare, a historical event that nobody could fully understand, as Mario Tobino writes in Il deserto della Libia (The Desert of Libya, 1952), and as Gennaro Iovine, a witness to the bombings and to other tragic events unheeded by those who want to forget the recent past, says in Eduardo De Filippo’s Napoli Milionaria (Millionaire Naples, 1945). The same postwar feeling was described with precision by Paolo Milano (1904–1988) in Note in margine a una vita assente (Marginal Notes on an Absent Life, 1991). Coming back to Italy from the United States after the war, Milano meets a generation of resigned and cynical Italians. But, as Mario Rigoni Stern writes at the beginning of L’ultima partita a carte (The Last Game of Cards, 2002), a book of profound philosophical reflections, the ethics of the country at war were characterized by irrationalism and narcissism, mystical aestheticism and sensualism, profiteering and careerism. As a result of the various actions undertaken by Fascism to establish power and consensus, at the beginning of World War II there was no cultural or political opposition, but rather a kind of fatalistic sense of acceptance in life as well as in literature and the arts. Thus, Italian culture and literature concentrated on the ‘‘safe’’ description and analysis of the past, in novels such as Riccardo Bacchelli’s Il Mulino del Po (The Mill on the Po River, 1940). Censorship was strong under Fascism. The regime tried to pay off writers and intellectuals, if

possible, or to stop them from thinking and writing, as in the case of Antonio Gramsci (1891– 1937) and Piero Gobetti (1901–1926). Some ‘‘leftist’’ intellectuals were paid to act as informers, as in the case of Ignazio Silone, or simply not to criticize the authorities, as in that of Vasco Pratolini. Thus, during the war, literature was often evasive and equivocal, as in Carlo Cassola’s Alla periferia (To the Suburbs, 1941) and La visita (The Call, 1942), or an exercise in fine writing, as in Giorgio Bassani’s first book, Una citta` di pianura (A City in the Lowland), published in 1940. In that same year, Giuseppe Bottai (1895–1959), who was in charge of Fascist cultural politics, founded the literary review Primato, calling upon writers and thinkers to collaborate for the sake of Italy. On the other hand, some writers tried to use their means and abilities to discuss the contemporary situation. Cesare Pavese’s Paesi tuoi (Places of Yours, 1941) is the story of the author’s internment and the description of his discovery of the violence of men and nature. In this light, it is close to the intense novel Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Christ Has Stopped at Eboli, 1945), by Carlo Levi, as both works immerse the intellectual among the subaltern classes without mediations or hierarchies. However, the strongest critic of the Italian cultural situation turned out to be poetry, which profoundly influenced other forms of art with books such as Mario Luzi’s Avvento notturno (Night Accession, 1940), Eugenio Montale’s Le occasioni (The Occasions, 1939), and Vittorio Sereni’s Frontiere (Borders, 1941). Poetic language was more indirect and complex than the language of narrative, and freer from Fascist censorship. For 2031

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR II Giuseppe Ungaretti poetry is the unveiling of the authentic nature of human beings, and the recovery of the purity and innocence of the self. A clear critique of the violence in which modern man lives is exemplified by his short poem ‘‘Soldato’’ (Soldier). Rewritten at the beginning of World War II, this poem was published with the title ‘‘Fratelli’’ (Brothers) in the collection L’allegria (Mirth, 1943). Writing under the Nazi-Fascist threat over Europe, Ungaretti emphasizes the concepts—and words—fratelli and fragilita` (frailty): Even in the bleakest of times human beings, through fraternity and frailty, have the spiritual power of freeing themselves, and re-establish truth and love. Less optimistic is the vision of the other great contemporary Italian poet, Montale, who does not endorse that brotherhood and humanity can prevail over the evils of war. In his ‘‘La primavera hitleriana’’ (Hitler Spring), written in 1940 and published in the collection La bufera (The Storm, 1956), the poet describes Hitler and Mussolini’s visit to Florence in 1938 as the dark coming, in an apocalyptical setting, of a ‘‘messo infernale’’ (‘‘infernal messenger’’) who arouses the folly and evil of the world. It is but the beginning of the new war: Human life is pervaded by evil, and will be forever the same. For many intellectuals, including Pavese, nonItalian literary traditions helped to construct a critique of the Fascist regime. The anti-idealistic, antirhetorical, and anti-intellectualistic American literary tradition represented by authors such as Ernest Hemingway and William Saroyan, was especially important in this respect. In 1941, Elio Vittorini edited for the Milanese publisher Bompiani an important anthology of American authors, entitled Americana: Raccolta di narratori (Americana: A Collection of Fiction Writers). Although on different registers, many young writers after the war followed ideally in the wake of Americana, from Italo Calvino’s fable-like technique to Carlo Levi’s Expressionism, from Rigoni Stern’s sorrowful epic to Beppe Fenoglio’s linguistic experimentalism. Thus, Americana injected new energies into the stagnating horizon of Italian literature and fostered a reapproach to everyday reality. Many works in this period described city life—for instance, Florence in the novels of Vasco Pratolini, from Tappeto verde (The Green Carpet, 1941) and Via dei Magazzini (Magazzini Street, 1942), to Il quartiere (The Neighborhood, 1944). The satirical sketch could also be used as a form of social, cultural, and political criticism, as in Don Giovanni 2032

in Sicilia (Don Juan in Sicily, 1941), by Vitaliano Brancati, where the hypocrite womanizer Giovanni Percolla and his friends are the typical supporters of the regime. While Italy is about to enter World War II, they care for their private life and talk only of women. Through different expressive modes and with an impasto of languages and registers, Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, 1946) depicts the war as a sort of ‘‘backstage,’’ an oblique and corrosive influence that has worn out the spirit and has caused indolence and madness. On 14 September 1943, following the armistice, Mussolini founded the Repubblica di Salo`, which he called ‘‘the only legal Italian state.’’ The Fascist military factions and many Italians went to Salo` to continue fighting on the side of Germany. A number of works were written on the experience of the republic, from the novel Tiro al piccione (Shooting Pigeons, 1953) by Giose Rimanelli (1926–) to the recent memoir I Balilla andarono a Salo` (The Balillas Went To Salo`, 2002) by Carlo Mazzantini (1925–), at the time a young volunteer, and who shows that even among the repubblichini (the soldiers of Salo`) there was enthusiasm and good faith, to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s compelling metaphorical film Salo` o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Salo` or the 120 Days of Sodom, 1975). Other influential books dedicated to the war aimed at building a new ethos for a new Italy, as in the case of Pavese’s La casa in collina (The House on the Hill, 1949), on the condition of the intellectual during the war, Rigoni Stern’s Il sergente nella neve (The Sergeant in the Snow, 1953), on the experience of the Italian army in Russia, Giancarlo Fusco’s Guerra d’Albania (The Albanian War, 2001), and Primo Levi’s Se questo e` un uomo (If This Be a Man, 1947), on the Nazi concentration camps. It is, however, the experience of the Resistance, the civil war against Nazi-Fascism, that inspired the greatest number of works on World War II. Among them, Vittorini’s Uomini e no (Men and Not Men, 1945), Calvino’s Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, 1947), Renata Vigano`’s L’Agnese va a morire (Agnese Goes to Her Death, 1949), which is recounted from the point of view of the women who fought with the partisans, Carlo Cassola’s La ragazza di Bube (Bube’s Girl, 1960), Beppe Fenoglio’s stories I ventitre´ giorni della citta` di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba, 1952) and Il Partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan, 1968), a novel of great linguistic invention. It was the beginning of

LITERATURE OF WORLD WAR II a new school of writing, of the new culture that Vittorini’s periodical Il Politecnico was calling for, based on a critical description of life and history. Indeed, Curzio Malaparte, who in La pelle (The Skin, 1949) described the degradation of Naples under the Allied Forces, argued in Kaputt (1944) that the new literature needs freedom and reciprocal respect among individuals. Oftentimes it is the diary or autobiography, the personal journey through the atrocities and disenchantment of the war, that provides the most painful testimony, and the symbolic overcoming, of the initial enthusiasm in certain sectors of the Italian population at the beginning of World War II. For instance, the reconstruction of the horrifying and tormented march during the Russian campaign narrated by Nuto Revelli (1919–2004) in La strada del Davai (The Road of Davai, 1966), almost a response, from a different perspective, to the geographical war front described in Primo Levi’s La tregua (The Truce, 1963). Finally, in L’oro del mondo (The Gold of the World, 1987), Sebastiano Vassalli uses the character of Sebastiano (his double) to reconstruct the transition from Fascism to the postwar period as a liberation from the ideological burden of the regime: The ensuing personal

re-education alludes to the painful transformation in the country as a whole. STEFANO ADAMI See also: Holocaust Literature; Resistance, Literature of Further Reading Asor Rosa, Alberto, Scrittori e popolo, Turin: Einaudi, 1965. Bobbio, Norberto, Profilo ideologico del ‘900, Milan: Garzanti, 1990. Bocca, Giorgio, Storia dell’Italia nella guerra fascista, Bari: Laterza, 1969. Bodei, Remo, Il noi diviso, Turin: Einaudi, 2002. Colarizi, Simone, La Seconda Guerra Mondiale e la Repubblica, Turin: Utet, 1984. Fortini, Franco, Dieci inverni, Bari: De Donato, 1973. Fusco, Giancarlo, La lunga marcia, Palermo: Sellerio, 2004. Garin, Eugenio, Intellettuali italiani del novecento, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1974. Hobsbawm, Eric J., Age of the Extremes, London and New York: Pantheon Books, 1994. Isnenghi, Mario, Le guerre degli italiani. Parole, immagini, ricordi 1848–1945, Bologna: Il Mulino, 2005. Pavone, Claudio, Alle origini della Repubblica, Turin: Boringhieri, 1995.

WRITINGS IN THE VERNACULAR LANGUAGE See Prose della volgar lingua (Work by Pietro Bembo)

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Z GIACOMO ZANELLA (1820–1888) earth, ought to create a new world in the name of progress and religious faith. Zanella’s poetry also addresses contemporary historical and social themes. His patriotic ode ‘‘Per gli Ossari di San Martino e Solferino’’ (To the Graveyards of San Martino and Solferino, 1870) celebrates the Italian soldiers and their French allies who died in the battle of Solferino in 1859, during the Second War of Independence. In another ode, ‘‘Il lavoro’’ (Labor, 1865), Zanella focused on working-class life and Irish emigration, which he depicted with Christian piety. The Irish emigrants aroused the poet’s sympathy for a people who chose to escape British oppression in the name of God and faith. Zanella’s interest in science often wrestled with his Catholic beliefs and ideals. His acquaintance with positivist thinkers like Ludwig Peller, Louis Nicolas Me´nard, and Leconte de Lisle may have influenced poems such as ‘‘Materialismo’’ (Materialism, 1876). Addressed to a professor whose wife has died, ‘‘Materialismo’’ criticizes bold scientific experimentations that do not fear death. Zanella’s use of scientific themes is also evident in the narrative poem ‘‘Milton e Galileo’’ (1868), where he reconstructed the encounter of the two men at Arcetri. Darwin’s doctrines inspired ‘‘L’evoluzione’’ (Evolution, 1887), an ode composed in both Italian and neo-Latin, in which a personification of Nature describes the necessity of its laws, comparing human creations to a child’s sandcastle. Zanella wrote extensively on literary history and art: Scritti varii (Various Writings, 1877); Storia

A poet, translator, and literary critic, Giacomo Zanella was a man of strict Catholic background with an uncommon knowledge of positivist scientific theories. Culturally connected with Alessandro Manzoni and Giosue` Carducci, he lived during the years of the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy. His patriotic and nationalist convictions stemmed from a strong sense of regional identity as well as a keen interest in foreign literatures. Zanella’s poetic works comprise 78 poems written and published between 1868 and 1885; a group of five poems that, though never rejected, were never included in his major collections; a collection of 91 sonnets entitled Astichello (1880), named after the river flowing by his house in Cavazzale; and a considerable number of poems composed for private and public celebrations. His entire literary production was collected by Manlio Pastore Stocchi and Ginetta Auzzas in a two-volume critical edition in 1988–1991. In the dedication of his first poetic collection, Versi (Verses, 1868) to his friend Fedele Lampertico, Zanella stated his literary principles: stylistic perfection and a personal predilection for science. For example, a scientific subject is the theme of Zanella’s most famous poem, the ode ‘‘Sopra una conchiglia fossile nel mio studio’’ (On a Fossil Shell in My Study), inspired by a fossil that he had found near Verona. Composed in 1864, the ode, divided into 14 strophes, makes the fossil the springboard for a prophetic meditation on human destiny: The shell attests to the relativity of human history and culture. Humankind, as the last human species on 2035

GIACOMO ZANELLA della letteratura italiana dalla meta` del ‘700 ai giorni nostri (History of Italian Literature from MidEighteenth Century to the Present, 1880); and a collection of essays, Paralleli letterari (Literary Parallels, 1885), which offers interesting comparisons between English and Italian writers (Joseph Addison and Gasparo Gozzi, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Giacomo Leopardi, Thomas Gray and Ugo Foscolo). As a literary critic, Zanella aimed at defining a method of stylistic analysis that departs from the objectivity of a historical approach on the one hand and the subjectivity of Francesco De Sanctis’s philosophical method on the other. However, as Armando Balduino claimed in his introduction to Saggi critici (1990), Zanella remained ‘‘an amateur reader’’ even when acting as a militant critic, considering ‘‘the present and its canons only in relation to the canons and the writers of the past.’’ Zanella’s activity as a translator attested to his skill in comparative literature and was related to his creative endeavors. Well versed in ancient Greek and Latin, he translated classical authors such as Theocritus, Ovid, Anacreon, and Catullus, as well as lesser-known neo-Latin poets (Girolamo Fracastoro, Andrea Navagero). In addition, he translated from modern English, French, Spanish, German, and Swedish. Zanella’s literary testament is the collection of sonnets Astichello, titled after a river in the environs of Vicenza, in the countryside where the poet retired and composed his last works. In Astichello, he dismissed the patriotic vocation and the scientific anxieties of his previous work and indulged in a form of pensive lyrical poetry. The most representative poem in this volume is the sonnet that opens the collection; in it the poet compared himself to the legendary Palinurus, a castaway from Aeneas’s crew in Virgil’s Aeneid. Like Palinurus, the poet expressed his desire to fall asleep and disappear into universal oblivion.

the publication of Versi, King Victor Emmanuel II conferred on him the honor of Ufficiale dell’Ordine della Corona d’Italia, 1868. He became chair of Italian literature (1867), then president (1871) at the University of Padua. His mother died, 1872. Due to a nervous breakdown, he retired from public life, 1875. He was dedicated to historical and literary studies, 1877–1885. He became a member of the Accademia della Crusca, 1886. Due to a second nervous breakdown, Zanella retired to his house at Cavazzale (Vicenza), where he died on 17 May 1888. MATTEO SORANZO Selected Works Collections Versioni poetiche di Giacomo Zanella, 2 vols., Florence: Le Monnier, 1921. Le poesie, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi and Ginetta Auzzas, vol. 1 of Opere, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1988. Saggi critici, edited by Armando Balduino, vol. 4 of Opere, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1990. Poesie rifiutate disperse postume inedite, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi and Ginetta Auzzas, vol. 2 of Opere, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1991. Prose e discorsi di argomento religioso e civile, edited by Tullio Motterle, vol. 5 of Opere, Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 1993.

Poetry ‘‘Versi,’’ 1868. ‘‘Il piccolo calabrese,’’ 1871. ‘‘Astichello,’’ 1880; enlarged edition as Astichello e altre poesie, 1884. ‘‘Poesie,’’ 1877; enlarged edition, 1885. ‘‘L’evoluzione,’’ 1886.

Criticism Scritti varii, 1877. Storia della letteratura italiana dalla meta` del ‘700 ai giorni nostri, 1880. Paralleli letterari, 1885.

Translations

Biography Giacomo Zanella was born in Chiampo (Vicenza), 7 September 1820. He studied theology at the Seminary of Vicenza, 1839–1843 and was ordained a Catholic priest on 6 August 1843. He taught classics and philosophy at the Bishop’s school in Vicenza, 1843–1846. He graduated summa cum laude in philosophy at the University of Padova, 1847. Zanella lost his teaching position as a result of his active involvement in the First War of Independence and became a private tutor, 1853. After 2036

Theocritus, Idilli, 1886. Jean Racine, Ester, 1888. Varie versioni poetiche, 1887.

Letters Carteggio inedito Maffei-Zanella, edited by Michela Rusi, 1990.

Further Reading Azzolin, Giovanni, Giacomo Zanella e la stampa cattolica nazionale e vicentina, Rome: UCIIM, 1989. Bandini, Fernando (editor), Giacomo Zanella e il suo tempo, Vicenza: Accademia Olimpica, 1994.

ANDREA ZANZOTTO Fongaro, Stelio, Giacomo Zanella: poeta antico della nuova Italia, Florence: Le Monnier, 1988. Franzina, Emilio, Il poeta e gli artigiani: etica del lavoro e mutualismo nel Veneto di meta` ’800, Padua: Il Poligrafo, 1988. Giordano, Fausto, Giacomo Zanella ed il mondo classico, Naples: Giannini, 1988. Greenwood, Elizabeth, Vita di Giacomo Zanella, Vicenza, Neri Pozza Editore, 1990. Mutterle, Anco Marzio, ‘‘Le nobili intersezioni: Zanella, Zendrini, Imbriani,’’ in Il Filo della ragione: Studi e testimonianze per Sergio Romagnoli, edited by Enrico Ghidetti and Roberta Turchi, Venice: Marsilio, 1999.

Mutterle, Anco Marzio, Il professore ombroso: Quattro studi su Giacomo Zanella, Udine: Del Bianco, 1988. Pasquazi, Silvio, La poesia di Giacomo Zanella, Florence: Le Monnier, 1967. Rusi, Michela, ‘‘La fortuna americana di Dante e un mediatore italiano,’’ Annali di Ca’ Foscari, 39:1–2 (2000),: 263–276. Spartano, Philip J., Giacomo Zanella: Poet, Essayist, and Critic of the ‘‘Risorgimento,’’ Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica, 1986. Zanzotto, Andrea, ‘‘Giacomo Zanella,’’ in Scritti sulla letteratura, edited by Gian Mario Villalta, vol. 1, Milan: Mondadori, 2001.

ANDREA ZANZOTTO (1921–) Andrea Zanzotto is widely recognized as the most significant poetic voice in Italy after Eugenio Montale and a poet of international stature. A native of the Veneto, he is known for his stylistic inventiveness, his interest in psychoanalysis, and his attempts to find, through language, the origins of myth. Although his verse is considered ‘‘eccentric’’ and places considerable demands on the reader, it is undoubtedly original in its combination of tradition and experimentalism and engages the main currents of modern and contemporary thought. Philosophy, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and new scientific discoveries all find their way into Zanzotto’s poetry. His work has inspired an extensive critical commentary in Italian, French, English, and German that continues to grow year by year. In addition, one should also note Zanzotto’s contributions to literary criticism, as well as his prose writings, which form an important part of his corpus. He has produced translations of such writers as Michel Leiris, George Bataille, and Honore´ de Balzac. Furthermore, a significant number of major translations of Zanzotto’s verse, primarily in French, German, English, and Spanish, testify to his international reputation. Zanzotto’s poetry began to appear on the literary scene in the early 1950s. His first book, Dietro il paesaggio (Behind the Landscape, 1951), established a close link between the poet and the natural world. His elegiac mediations on the landscape reveal the influence of the great nineteenth-century master Giacomo Leopardi. In fact, Giuseppe

Ungaretti called attention to the Leopardian aspects of Zanzotto’s verse: ‘‘What does Andrea Zanzotto present us in Dietro il paesaggio? The secret of a panorama.... It is a Leopardian way to feel the landscape’’ (‘‘Antologia critica,’’ in Andrea Zanzotto, Poesie 1938–1986, 1993). This volume evinces the themes and imagery that form the nucleus of Zanzotto’s poetic vision. The landscape serves as a kind of alter ego, an ‘‘other,’’ in relation to which the poet’s subjectivity defines itself. The recurring symbols of sun, moon, grass, snow, mother, and child depict the flux of the seasons and the fluidity of subjectivity. Over the next half century, Zanzotto has continued to take readers ‘‘behind the landscape’’ to explore the inner recesses of the psyche while also deepening his rich dialogue with poetry. While Elegia e altri versi (Elegy and Other Verses, 1954) remains in the vein of his first volume, Zanzotto’s third book, Vocativo (Vocative, 1957) reveals a growing disquietude over the nature of language. Stylistically more complex than his previous work, Vocativo is divided into two sections, ‘‘Come una bucolica’’ (Like a Bucolic) and ‘‘Prima persona’’ (First Person), which illustrate his concerns with the pastoral landscape and with subjectivity. Haunted by the specters of World War II, he sought refuge in the terrain. In a poem dedicated to deceased comrades, ‘‘I compagni corsi avanti’’ (The Companions Who Have Gone on Ahead), he wrote: ‘‘Oh stringiti alla terra, a terra premi / la tua fantasia. Strugge la mite / notte 2037

ANDREA ZANZOTTO Hitler’’ (Oh cling fast to the earth, to the earth press / your imagination. The gentle night / dissolves Hitler). The experience of the war and the ethical impulse born in the resistance to Fascism are continual presences in Zanzotto’s poetry. In Vocativo the dialogue with the landscape turns inward in poems such as ‘‘Esistere psichicamente’’ (To Exist Psychically) and ‘‘Impossibilita` della parola’’ (The Impossibility of the Word). Given his continuing interests in language and the self, he is known as a ‘‘poet of the psyche.’’ In fact, Eugenio Montale observed that Zanzotto’s poetry explores the tragic division between what scientists term ‘‘the psyche’’ and what religious traditions call ‘‘the soul’’ (Eugenio Montale, ‘‘La poesia di Zanzotto,’’ 1968). Zanzotto’s mistrust of language as an authentic instrument for depicting an unmediated reality becomes more acute in IX Ecloghe (Nine Eclogues, 1962). In the 28 compositions of this book, the dialogue with the landscape gives way to an ironic self-questioning: ‘‘un diagramma dell’‘anima’? Un paese che sempre / piumifica e vaneggia di verde e primavera?’’ (a diagram of the ‘‘soul’’? A town that always preens and raves with green and springtimes? ‘‘Un libro di ecloghe’’). One of Zanzotto’s fixed points of reference has been an explicit dialogue with the masters of the ‘‘high’’ Italian poetic tradition. In addition to Leopardi, there are numerous echoes and rewritings of Dante, Petrarch, D’Annunzio, Montale, and other poets throughout his numerous books. The great shadow of Virgil looms over this volume as Zanzotto’s return to the eclogue signals the beginning of his experimentation and revisitation of classical poetic forms. Calling attention to the conventional aspects of the lyric tradition, Zanzotto questioned and affirmed its validity. In a poem entitled ‘‘Un libro di ecloghe’’ (A Book of Eclogues), he wrote: ‘‘forte / come il vero ed il santo, questo canto che stona / ma commemora norme s’avvince a ritmi a stimuli: / questo che ad altro modo non sa ancora fidarsi’’ (strong like the true and the holy, this song that clashes / but commemorates conventions binds itself to rhythms and stimuli: / this song that still does not know how to entrust itself to another mode). La Belta` (Beauty, 1968) builds on the experimental energy evident in IX Ecloghe and breaks with the style of Zanzotto’s earlier work. Broadening his examination of linguistic realities, the 41 poems of this book burst the bonds linking signifier and signified: ‘‘male s’aggancia / il fatto semantico al fatto fonematico’’ (poorly the semantic / fact 2038

hooks up with the phonemic fact). Informed by the psychoanalytical theories of Jacques Lacan and in dialogue with the linguistic theories of Ferdinand Saussure, as well as with the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida, Zanzotto’s poetry forces the reader to abandon normal reading habits and to confront the parameters of signification: ‘‘Canzoniere epistolario d’amore / di cui tutto fosse fonemi monemi e corteo, / in ogni senso direzione varianza, babele e antibabele’’ (Songbook epistolary of love / in which everything would be phonemes monemes and procession, / in every sense direction variation / Babel and antiBabel; ‘‘Possibili prefazi o riprese o conclusioni’’). Hailed as one of the most innovative books of Italian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, La Belta` intensifies the meta-linguistic and meta-poetic tendencies of the earlier work; mirrors the anger, frustration and disorientation of the 1960s; and contains some of the poet’s most significant lyrics. For example, in ‘‘Retorica su: Lo sbandamento, il principio ‘‘resistenza’’’ (Rhetoric About: The Disbanding, the ‘‘Resistance’’ Principle), Zanzotto examined the difficulty of developing a critical consciousness when the notion of history has been replaced by fragmented microhistories. This volume also includes the famous ‘‘Elegia in pete`l’’ (Elegy in Baby-Talk) and signals the poet’s interest in exploring the realities of human speech in all their myriad forms. The two books that immediately follow La Belta` extend its radical experimentation. For example, Gli sguardi i fatti e senhal (Gazes Facts and Secret Names, 1969) consists of a single long poem of 313 verses. Modeled on the Rorschach test, a psychological instrument for measuring identity, 59 different voices engage in dialogue with a single female voice (who, we learn at the end, represents poetry itself ). All individual voices are arranged like the frames in a film or slide show, thereby creating a cinematic effect. On the thematic level, this poem presents the television coverage of the American moon landing as a rupturing of the mythic fabric that for centuries surrounded the moon in the popular imagination. Zanzotto also framed this scientific and technological event within the political context of the arms race of the 1950s and 1960s and the tensions of the Cold War. In Pasque (Easters, 1973), Zanzotto played on the etymology of pasqua, a Hebrew word and Latin word meaning passage and ‘‘pasture,’’ respectively. Easters for Zanzotto are ‘‘Passovers’’ and passages from one state of being to another. Here he developed a narrative vein in long compositions such as

ANDREA ZANZOTTO the famous ‘‘Pasqua di maggio’’ (Easter in May). The poet also ventured into realism in ‘‘Misteri della pedagogia’’ (The Mysteries of Pedagogy), where the small theater of the classroom becomes a testing ground for theories of knowledge. ‘‘Pasqua a Pieve di Soligo’’ (Easter in Pieve di Soligo), another long composition, revisits a famous poem by Blaise Cendrars and offers a bitterly ironic vision of the false values of consumer capitalism. In 1976, Zanzotto published an important book of poems in dialect, Filo` per il ‘‘Casanova’’ di Fellini (Peasants Wake for Fellini’s ‘‘Casanova’’), stemming from a collaboration with Federico Fellini on his film on the life of Giacomo Casanova starring Donald Sutherland. The first part of the book includes dialogue written for the film in a pseudoVenetian dialect invented by the poet. The second part, consisting of one of Zanzotto’s most important poems, ‘‘Filo`’’ (Peasants Wake; the English title was suggested by Zanzotto himself in homage to Finnegans Wake by James Joyce) was written in the rustic vernacular of Pieve di Soligo. ‘‘Filo`’’ stages a dialogue between poetry and film and registers an encounter between the spoken idiom of a small agricultural community and the brave new visual language of an increasingly global society. A poem in dialect on the continual death/resurgence of the dialects, ‘‘Filo`,’’ according to the critic Gianfranco Contini, represents ‘‘one of the most singular contributions to the repertoire of Italian dialect literature’’ (‘‘Prefazione,’’ Il Galateo in Bosco, 1978). Over the trajectory of a career that spans half a century, Zanzotto has remained remarkably faithful to a nucleus of central issues. Each successive work tends to carry forward the poet’s long-standing concerns with language, self, and reality in always new and challenging stylistic permutations. This dynamic is particularly evident in the trilogy or ‘‘pseudo-trilogy’’ consisting of Il Galateo in Bosco (The Book of Forest Manners, 1978), Fosfeni (Phosphenes, 1983; the title refers to the small points of light seen behind closed eyelids when rubbing them), and Idioma (Idiom, 1986). Geographically, Il Galateo in Bosco is set in the Montello forest to Zanzotto’s south; Fosfeni depicts the mountains to Zanzotto’s north; and Idioma celebrates the poet’s native town, Pieve di Soligo, and its inhabitants and contains poems in standard Italian as well as numerous poems in dialect. Gian Luigi Beccaria called Zanzotto’s trilogy ‘‘one of the most coherent and significant linguistic and poetic experiments in

twentieth-century Italian literature’’ (on the dust jacket of Idioma, 1986). With Meteo (Weather Report, 1996), which includes drawings by Giosetta Fioroni, and Sovrimpressioni (Overimpressions or, more accurately, Ovrimpressions, 2001), Zanzotto seemed to have entered into yet another stage of stylistic variation: ‘‘one moment of experimentation among many others,’’ to cite his own description of the earlier dialect phase of his career (John Welle and Ruth Feldman, ‘‘Translators’ Note,’’ Peasants Wake for Fellini’s ‘Casanova and Other Poems, 1997). The new ‘‘fragmentary’’ style contains elements familiar from previous volumes. In the new work, as much as in the old, Zanzotto remained a polyglot experimentalist, or in his own terms, ‘‘a botanist of grammars.’’ In 1999, an anthology of Zanzotto’s collected poetry and selected prose was published by Mondadori in the prestigious Meridiani series, marking his definitive canonization. In sum, Zanzotto’s engagement with history, his linguistic and stylistic experimentalism (which are vital in the Italian context), and his ability to wed the analytic and the elegiac, in dialogue with Leopardi, Dante, Petrarch, and the other masters of the Italian and European high tradition, have made him one of the most important poets of the second half of the twentieth century.

Biography Andrea Zanzotto was born in Pieve di Soligo (Treviso), 10 October 1921, the son of the painter, designer, and teacher Giovanni Zanzotto, whose opposition to Fascism placed the family in economic difficulties. In 1937, he began his career as a part-time elementary school teacher. In 1938–1939, he studied at the University of Padua under the guidance of Diego Valeri; he obtained his university degree in 1942 with a thesis on Grazia Deledda. In 1943–1945, Zanzotto participated in the Resistance movement with local partisan groups. After the war, he immigrated to Switzerland, where he worked as a teacher, a bartender, and a waiter. He returned to Italy in 1947 and resumed teaching. In 1959, he married Marisa Michieli; their first son, Giovanni, was born in 1960; their second son, Fabio, was born in 1961. In 1950, Zanzotto was awarded the San Babila Prize for inediti (unpublished poems). In 1958–1965, he collaborated with the journal Communita`. In 1959, he was awarded the Cino del Duca Prize for short stories. In 1967, he traveled to Prague with poets Vittorio Sereni, 2039

ANDREA ZANZOTTO Franco Fortini, and Giovanni Giudici for the presentation of an anthology of Italian poetry. In 1970, he traveled to Lugano with Giuseppe Ungaretti for a televised celebration of Ungaretti’s career and began collaboration with the Milanese daily Il corriere della sera. In 1973, he traveled to Romania with the sculptor Augusto Murer. He was awarded the Etna-Taormina Prize in 1977 for his literary production and the Viareggio Prize in 1978 for Il Galateo in Bosco. In 1979, he traveled to London and Cambridge for the International Poetry Festival. In 1982, he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Venice. In 1983, he won the Librex-Montale Prize for Fosfeni; in 1987 he won the Feltrinelli Prize from the Accademia dei Lincei; in 1993 he won the European Poetry Prize from the city of Munster. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Trent. In 1997, he traveled to Holland for a celebration of his poetry sponsored by Poetry International and the Italian Cultural Institute. Zanzotto currently resides in Pieve di Soligo. JOHN P. WELLE

Selected Works Collections Poesie, 1938–1972, edited by Stefano Agosti, Milan: Mondadori, 1973; as Selected Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto, edited and translated by Ruth Feldman and Brian Swan, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Racconti e prose, introduced by Cesare Segre, Milan: Mondadori, 1990. Le poesie e prose scelte, edited by Stefano Dal Bianco and Gian Mario Villalta, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Scritti sulla letteratura, 2 vols., edited by Gian Mario Villalta, Milan: Mondadori, 2001.

Poetry ‘‘Dietro il paesaggio,’’ 1951. ‘‘Elegia e altri versi,’’ 1954. ‘‘Vocativo,’’ 1957; revised 1981. ‘‘IX Ecloghe,’’ 1962. ‘‘La Belta`,’’ 1968. ‘‘Gli sguardi i fatti e senhal,’’ 1969. ‘‘Pasque,’’ 1973. ‘‘Filo`: Per il Casanova di Fellini,’’ 1976; 2nd ed., Filo` e altre poesie, 1981; 3rd ed., Filo` per il ‘‘Casanova’’ di Fellini, 1988; as Peasants Wake for Fellini’s ‘‘Casanova’’ and Other Poems, translated by John P. Welle and Ruth Feldman, 1997. ‘‘Il Galateo in Bosco,’’ 1978. ‘‘Fosfeni,’’ 1983. ‘‘Idioma,’’ 1986. ‘‘Meteo,’’ 1996. ‘‘Sovrimpressioni,’’ 2001.

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Critical Essays Fantasie di avvicinamento, 1991. Aure e disincanti del Novecento letterario, 1994.

Further Reading Abati, Velio, L’imposssibilita` della parola: Per una lettura materialistica della poesia di Andrea Zanzotto, Rome: Bagatto Libri, 1991. Agosti, Stefano, ‘‘L’esperienza del linguaggio di Andrea Zanzotto,’’ in Le poesie e prose scelte, edited by Stefano Dal Bianco and Gian Mario Villalta, Milan: Mondadori, 1999. Allen, Beverly, Andrea Zanzotto: The Language of Beauty’s Apprentice, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Beccaria, Gian Luigi, Dust jacket blurb for Andrea Zanzotto’s Idioma, Milan: Mondadori, 1986. Conti Bertini, Lucia, Andrea Zanzotto o la sacra menzogna, Venice: Marsilio, 1984. Contini, Gianfranco, ‘‘Prefazione,’’ in Andrea Zanzotto, Il Galateo in Bosco, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Hand, Vivienne, Zanzotto, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1994. Montale, Eugenio, ‘‘La poesia di Zanzotto,’’ Il corriere della sera, 1 June 1968; reprinted in Sulla poesia, edited by Giorgio Zampa, Milan: Mondadori, 1976. Spampinato, Graziella, La musa interrogata: L’opera in versi e in prosa di Andrea Zanzotto, Milan: Hefti, 1996. Tassoni, Luigi, Il sogno del caos: ‘‘Microfilm’’ di Zanzotto e la geneticita` del testo, Bergamo: Moretti & Vitali, 1990. Welle, John Patrick, ‘‘Dante and Poetic Communio in Zanzotto’s Pseudo-Trilogy,’’ Lectura Dantis, 10 (Spring 1992), 34–58. Welle, John Patrick, and Ruth Feldman, ‘‘Translators’ Note,’’ in Andrea Zanzotto, Peasants Wake for Fellini’s ‘‘Casanova’’ and Other Poems, by Andrea Zanzotto, translated by John P. Welle and Ruth Feldman, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

IL GALATEO IN BOSCO, 1978 Poems by Andrea Zanzotto

Il Galateo in Bosco (The Book of Forest Manners) is considered Andrea Zanzotto’s most significant volume of poetry and one of the masterworks of twentieth-century Italian literature. Published in 1978 as the first part of a trilogy or ‘‘pseudo-trilogy’’

ANDREA ZANZOTTO continued in 1983 by Fosfeni (Phosphenes) and completed in 1986 with Idioma (Idiom), Il Galateo in Bosco explores links and tensions between nature and culture. Commenting on the tragic contradiction by which modern society places nature on one side of a divide and culture on the other, Zanzotto observed, ‘‘These two elements should come together in harmony, but in truth, they are in constant friction between themselves, in perennial selfdestruction or in very fleeting equilibriums. And yet it is necessary to bring them together with great effort, even if we are not sure we can succeed’’ (Giuliana Massini and Bruno Rivalta, eds., Sulla poesia: Conversazioni nelle scuole, 1981). In Il Galateo in Bosco, as in much of his other work, Zanzotto attempted to bridge the gap between what Charles Percy Snow called ‘‘the two cultures,’’ one consisting of science and technology and the other of the arts and humanities. Zanzotto’s bosco (forest) is both a metaphor for nature in general and the representation of a specific geographical place, that is, the forest of the Montello, a hilly corner of his native Veneto where late Renaissance villas and secluded monasteries once nestled in the shade of an unspoiled woodland. Giovanni Della Casa wrote his sixteenth-century book of manners befitting a courtly society, Il galateo (1558), while residing at a monastery on the edge of the Montello. Zanzotto’s ‘‘Galateo’’ replicates that of Della Casa, but the codes of conduct extend beyond those governing human beings to include all life forms. A number of the book’s poems explore the communicative-like behavior of biological processes, the spontaneous transmission of genetic information, the bio-logic that governs life on an elemental level. The Montello forest was also the site of fierce fighting in World War I. In its territory battles were fought leading to the Italian victory against Austria-Hungary in 1918. The remains of Italian, French, British, and Austro-Hungarian soldiers in the soil of the Montello provide the humus for the biological activity portrayed in the book. Along with the monuments and ossuaries that dot the

landscape, these soldiers attest to the futility of war and the tragic myth of salvational violence that continues to plague humanity. In this way, Zanzotto portrayed the destructive forces inherent in nature as well as the savage impulses repressed in culture. In addition to Giovanni Della Casa, the Renaissance villas of the Montello sheltered other painters and poets, such as Gaspara Stampa, who wrote ‘‘rime e rime, versi italiani e latini’’ (rhymes upon rhymes, Italian and Latin verses) while living in the wood (Andrea Zanzotto, Il Galateo in Bosco, 1978). Zanzotto paid a postmodern homage to these poets and to Petrarchism in general in the famous sonnet sequence entitled ‘‘Ipersonetto’’ (Hypersonnet), consisting of one sonnet for each line of the traditional sonnet plus a sonnet of introduction and conclusion. JOHN P. WELLE Editions First edition: Il Galateo in Bosco, with a preface by Gianfranco Contini, Milan: Mondadori, 1978. Critical edition: ‘‘Il Galateo in Bosco,’’ in Le poesie e prose scelte, edited by Stefano Dal Bianco and Gian Mario Villalta, Milan: Mondadori, 1999.

Further Reading Albath-Folchetti, Maike, Zanzottos Triptychon: Eine Studie der Sammlungen ‘‘Il Galateo in Bosco,’’ ‘‘Fosfeni,’’ und ‘‘Idioma,’’ Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1998. Massini, Giuliana, and Bruno Rivalta (editors), Sulla poesia: Conversazioni nelle scuole, Parma: Pratiche Editrice, 1981. Motta, Uberto, Ritrovamenti di senso nella poesia di Zanzotto, Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1996. Snow, Percy, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Tassoni, Luigi (editor), ‘‘Ipersonetto’’ by Andrea Zanzotto, Rome: Carocci, 2001. Villalta, Gian Mario, La costanza del vocativo: Lettura della ‘‘trilogia’’ di Andrea Zanzotto, Milan: Guerini, 1992. Welle, John P., The Poetry of Andrea Zanzotto: A Critical Study of ‘‘Il Galateo in Bosco,’’ Rome: Bulzoni, 1987.

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CESARE ZAVATTINI

CESARE ZAVATTINI (1902–1989) A journalist, novelist, painter, screenwriter, and film theoretician, Cesare Zavattini is widely known as the multitalented consciousness and chief practitioner of Italian cinematic neo-Realism. Yet, the overall dimension of his work exceeds his masterful cinematic contributions. Born in the small village of Luzzara, situated along the River Po in the Padana valley, throughout a writing career of more than 50 years Zavattini showed a tireless political engagement and a most inventive cultural attachment to a universe of popular characters and stories. Not only did he render the world of classes ‘‘without the means of production’’ with a rich palette of tones, from the witty and humorous to the somber and tragic, but he also designed and arranged countless projects to promote cultural literacy and democratize both the production and consumption of culture. Ultimately, his lifelong contribution to journalism, literature, painting, cinema, and, later, television, including his innumerable and rarely fully realized projects, attained a unique influence in Italian high- and low-brow culture that far exceeded his widely recognized filmic accomplishments. An indefatigable writer and organizer, Zavattini began at a local newspaper, La Gazzetta di Parma, where he authored a series of humorous columns as ‘‘Za,’’ both a nickname and homage to the beloved Italian film serial Za la mort (1914–1924). While in Florence in 1929, he impressed such intellectual figures as Elio Vittorini, Vasco Pratolini, and Eugenio Montale with his talent for short stories, praised for their fantastic, inventive, and surreal style. Collected in his first book, Parliamo tanto di me (We Talk a Lot about Me, 1931), they gave him instant success and popularity. That year he began collaborating with such prestigious journals as Solaria and La Fiera Letteraria and moved to Milan. From the pages of Cinema Illustrazione, a film periodical he would soon direct, he published the famous ‘‘Cronache da Hollywood,’’ fictitious reports from Hollywood, not always recognized as inventive fabrications. By 1934, Zavattini was a major player in the Italian publishing industry (a position he would maintain until the late 1970s), being one of the front men first for Rizzoli and, after 1936, for Mondadori—two of Italy’s major publishing firms. Specializing in humorous periodicals (Le grandi firme, 2042

Settebello), he both commissioned and personally composed short stories, sketches, and cartoons. In 1935 his first screenplay was made into a film, Daro` un milione (I’ll Give a Million, 1935), directed by Mario Camerini and starring Vittorio De Sica. In 1940, he finally moved to Rome, furthering his career as writer, journalist, editor, cultural organizer, and most successfully as screenwriter. In the early 1940s, established filmmaker Alessandro Blasetti and the former star actor Vittorio De Sica directed two of his scripts (the former written with Piero Tellini). The result, Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Four Steps in the Clouds, 1942) and I bambini ci guardano (The Children Are Watching Us, 1943), were later hailed as precursors of neo-Realism. This is the period when Zavattini, working for a number of middle-of-the-road directors, from Camillo Mastrocinque and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia to Amleto Palermi and Mario Bonnard, elected cinema as the prime medium of his expression. International recognition, however, would only come through his collaboration with De Sica. In 1947, he won his first Oscar (and a number of other awards) with Sciuscia` (Shoeshine), for which he wrote both the story and script. In the following years, Zavattini worked on a series of screenplays (alone, but more often in the company of other authors) that, promptly adapted into film, defined Italian postwar realist cinema in Italy and abroad. Aside from his contribution to such masterpieces as Luchino Visconti’s Bellissima (1951) and Alberto Lattuada’s Il cappotto (The Overcoat, 1952), it was a series of films directed by De Sica—Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thief, 1948); Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1950), adapted from Zavattini’s second book Toto` il buono (Toto` the Good Man, 1943); and Umberto D. (1952)—that showed a unique and uncompromising approach to filmmaking. Filmed on location and not in film studios, featuring nonprofessional actors, these films were based on narrative dramatizations of events occurring to marginal subjects, whether children, aged individuals, or members of the lower classes. Their esthetic and political novelty for Italian (and world) film culture was groundbreaking. Zavattini’s involvement with neo-Realism was not just artistic. On December 1953, in his

CESARE ZAVATTINI contribution to the famous Conference of NeoRealism held in Parma, he theorized the principle of the pedinamento (shadowing). Neorealist film authors did not need to invent any fictional narrative: All they had to do was to follow and film an ordinary person for 80 minutes without cuts, thus capturing the truth and natural duration of that individual’s life. Published the next year as ‘‘Il Neorealismo secondo me’’ (Neo-Realism According to Me), his talk appeared also in the Cahiers du Cine´ma, directed by Andre´ Bazin, one of the earliest supporters and interpreters of the aesthetic novelty of neo-Realism. Soon after, Zavattini presented his aesthetic theorizations to Mexican and Cuban filmmakers, among whom neo-Realism was to become a major poetic (and political) reference. In the same years, Zavattini’s cultural activity did not know pause. While defining neo-Realism in several interviews as ‘‘civic engagement and participation in life’’ (Vie Nuove, 22 May 1955; Il Contemporaneo, 2 July 1955), he designed and championed a number of initiatives, often remaining incomplete, a sign of his unstinting and unique entrepreneurial spirit and freedom from aesthetic conventions. In 1952, he conceived a series of loosely formatted documentary films, ‘‘without theme and actors,’’ called Italia mia, with the intention of displaying the wealth and diversity of Italian humanity. Soon the idea changed format: It became a series of books, devoted to specific urban settings, with Rossellini writing on Rome, De Sica on Naples, and Visconti on Milan. None of these volumes materialized, however, except for a photojournalistic portrait of Zavattini’s native Luzzara, Un paese (A Town, 1955), completed with the help of American photographer Paul Strand and revisited years later with photographer Gianni Berengo Gardin as Un paese vent’anni dopo (A Town Twenty Years Later, 1976). Zavattini’s post-1960 collaboration with De Sica, amounting to 24 scripts, was affected by the latter’s more commercial ambitions, visible in such works as La ciociara (Two Women, 1960), Ieri, oggi, e domani (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, 1963), and Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of Finzi-Contini, 1970). Moving beyond neo-Realism, Zavattini constantly looked for other audiovisual formats, increasingly convinced that modern media were to be seen as collective venues in terms of production, circulation, and experience. As film equipment became lighter and more easily transportable, he showed interest in the very short movie, known as film-lampo (lightning-film). On the model of Dziga

Vertov’s antinarrative poetic (kino-eye), Zavattini argued that shorter films enabled and empowered first-time filmmakers to ‘‘catch reality unaware’’ to use Vertov’s famous call to action. For Zavattini, Italian cinema, literature and, increasingly, television had not ventured with enough courage and openness into the most authentic dimensions of Italian human and cultural life, existing in the small provincial towns, the new suburbs, or the pervasive countryside. His writing and painting career reproduced the same intense combination of personal and documentary aspirations. Between ‘‘diaries’’ (to name his celebrated columns regularly published in the periodical Cinema Nuovo), self-portraits, reportages, dossiers, and radio autobiographies, Zavattini strove to expose himself, his curiosities, inclinations, and qualms as he explored facets and truths of the Italian nation. Over the years, his ideas for reportages about Italians’ customs, literacy (or lack thereof ), and language (which inspired projects for TV programs, weeklies’ columns, literary or filmed inquiries), all participated in designing an autobiography of Italy, still largely unknown to itself. In his mind, the effort toward national self-knowledge was not to be limited to recognized and professional authors. Instead, like dispatched correspondents of a newspaper, independent and even amateur ‘‘authors,’’ armed with Super 8 and 16mm cameras, could film short glimpses of reality and broadcast them publicly during the intermissions of conventional film exhibitions. In 1962, he perfected the same idea with the notion of cinegiornali liberi, literally free newsreels, potential sources of counter-information, which an improvised filmmaker could produce at extremely low cost. Unlike several other recognized authors of Italian literature, cinema, and television, Zavattini displayed a constant uneasiness about how every medium tended to institutionalize (and thus limit and regulate) its own expressive and receptive format. The democratization of the poetic creation was for Zavattini always in danger of being curtailed by the media’s expressive protocols and political workings. In 1968, his ideas finally witnessed a brief but concrete realization with the radical and activist Cinegiornali liberi del proletariato (Free Proletarian Newsreels) and with an effective although controversial call for a militant, nonprofessional filmmaking engagement. At the Venice Film Festival, his anti-authorial stance provoked deep conflicts with other established authors (Antonioni, Scola, Fellini, Blasetti, Lattuada), while 2043

CESARE ZAVATTINI Pasolini, Ferreri, Maselli, and others supported his anti-institutional stance. Between lectures in the United States, South America, and the former Soviet Union (where his works were translated), Zavattini proclaimed the antinarrative approaches (film without script, theater without text, painting without subject matter) to critics and fellow practitioners, often all too attached to conventional storytelling. In 1979, he participated in the founding of the Archivio storico audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico (Historical Audiovisual Archive of the Labor and Democratic Movement), an active repository of documentaries, newsreels, and miscellaneous audiovisual material that as information, narrative, or personal diary was to constitute, in Zavattini’s own words, Italy’s ‘‘present and historical memory.’’ At the 1982 Venice Film Festival, he presented his only feature film, La Verita`aaa, a surreal experiment, in which he acted as visionary presenter. Passionate painter, collector, and inventor of a new, undersized painting format, called I miti (The Myths), Zavattini was also an assiduous organizer of art competitions and retrospectives, as well as a promoter of arte naı¨f (naı¨ve art), a folk painterly poetic, nonnaturalistic, and deliberately primitive, best represented by the work of Antonio Ligabue (1899–1965). In 1988, one year before his death, the city of Reggio Emilia hosted the most complete retrospective on his journalistic, literary, filmic, and painterly works, celebrating the Grand Tour of his talent and professional collaborations throughout Italy, Europe, and North and South America.

Biography Cesare Zavattini was born on September 20, 1902, in Luzzara (Reggio Emilia) to a relatively prosperous family of bakers and pastry-cooks; he attended public schools in Bergamo. In 1916, he moved with his family to Segni Scalo, between Rome and Frosinone. In the capital, he attended the first years of high school. In 1920, when his family returned, he pursued a law degree at the University of Parma, without ever completing it. He met Olga Berni, his future wife, and began teaching in local high schools. In 1926, he started his collaboration with La Gazzetta di Parma, writing a series of humorous columns. After military service in Florence in 1929, he moved to Milan in 1930, where he would soon direct the periodical Cinema illustrazione and publish his first books. That year his father died, leaving him, now father of two sons, huge debts. 2044

Mario Camerini directed Daro` un milione from Za’s first screenplay, 1935. In Rome in the early 1940s, he wrote screenplays for several directors and started his collaboration with De Sica. He was cofounder of the Federazione Italiana Circoli del Cinema (FICC), 1947, and of the Associazione Nazionale Autori Cinematografici (ANAC), 1952— two organizations aimed at the promotion of an independent and ‘‘humanistic’’ Italian cinema. His only feature film, La Verita`aaa, was released in 1982. He was an international lecturer and media activist ante litteram, with collaborations, ideas, and projects affecting Italian print, film, radio, and journalism as a whole. In more than 50 years of continuous production, Zavattini was the recipient of major awards and the subject of numerous retrospectives in Italy and abroad, including a medal from the Writers Guild of America (1977), previously conferred only to Charlie Chaplin, the Premio Flaiano (1979), Premio Alcide De Gasperi (1984), and Premio Rossellini (1988). Zavattini died in Rome of natural causes on 13 October 1989 and was buried in his native Luzzara. GIORGIO BERTELLINI See also: Vittorio De Sica; Neorealism Selected Works Collections Una, cento, mille lettere, edited by Silvana Cirillo, Milan: Rizzoli, 1988. Opere, 1931–1986, edited by Silvana Cirillo, introduction by Luigi Malerba, Milan: Bompiani, 1991.

Poetry ‘‘Ligabue,’’ 1968. ‘‘Otto canzonette sporche,’’ 1975.

Other Writings Cronache da Hollywood (1930–1934), edited by Giovanni Negri, introduction by Attilio Bertolucci, 1991. Parliamo tanto di me, 1931. I poveri sono matti, 1937. Io sono il diavolo, 1941. Toto` il buono, 1943. Ipocrita, 1943. Un paese (with photographs by Paul Strand), 1955; as Un paese: Portrait of an Italian Village, translated by Margherite Shore, 1997. Straparole, 1967. Zavattini: Sequences from a Cinematic Life, translated by William Weaver, 1970. Stricarm’ in ’dna parola, 1973; reprinted as Poesie, 1985. Le voglie letterarie, 1974. Un paese vent’anni dopo (with photographs by Gianni Berengo Gardin), 1976. La notte che ho dato uno schiaffo a Mussolini, 1976.

FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI Basta con i soggetti, 1979. Diario cinematografico, Neorealismo ecc., edited by Valentina Fortichiari and Mino Argentieri, preface by Gian Piero Brunetta, 1979; reprinted, 2002.

Films La Verita`aaa, 1982.

Screenplays

Further Reading

Daro` un milione, 1935, directed by Mario Camerini. I bambini ci guardano, 1943, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Sciuscia`, 1946, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Ladri di biciclette, 1948, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Prima comunione, 1950, directed by Alessandro Blasetti. Miracolo a Milano, 1950, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Umberto D., 1951, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Stazione Termini, 1951, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Roma ore 11, 1953, directed by Giuseppe De Santis. L’oro di Napoli, 1954, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Il tetto, 1956, directed by Vittorio De Sica. La ciociara, 1960, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Il giudizio universale, 1961, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Boccaccio ’70, 1962, directed by Vittorio De Sica. I sequestrati di Altona, 1962, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Il boom, 1963, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Ieri oggi domani, 1963, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Matrimonio all’italiana, 1964, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Un monde nouveau, 1965, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Le streghe, 1967, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Woman Seven Times, 1967, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Amanti, 1968, directed by Vittorio De Sica. I girasoli, 1969, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Lo chiameremo Andrea, 1970, directed by Vittorio De Sica. Una breve vacanza, 1973, directed by Vittorio De Sica.

Barilli, Renato (editor), Zavattini pittura, Bologna, Analisi, 1988. Bernardini, Aldo, and Jean A. Gili (editors), Cesare Zavattini, Paris-Bologna: Centre Georges PompidouRegione Emilia Romagna, 1990. Brevini, Franco, ‘‘Zavattini poeta nel dialetto di Luzzara,’’ Il ponte, 47 (June 1991), 98–107. Cirillo, Silvana (editor), Zavattini parla di Zavattini, Rome: Lerici, 1978. Ercole, Pierluigi (editor), Diviso in Due. Cesare Zavattini: Cinema e Cultura Popolare, Reggio Emilia: Diabasis, 1999. Masoni, Tullio, and Paolo Vecchi (editors), Cinenotizie in poesia e prosa: Zavattini e la non-fiction, Turin: Lindau, 2000. Masoni, Tullio, and Paolo Vecchi (editors), Zavattini cinema, Bologna: Analisi, 1988. Moneti, Guglielmo (editor), Lessico zavattiniano: Parole e idee su cinema e dintorni, Venice: Marsilio, 1992. Nuzzi, Paolo (editor), Una vita Za: Le opere e i giorni di Cesare Zavattini. Giornalismo, letteratura, cinema, Parma: Guanda, 1995. Nuzzi, Paolo, and Ottavia Iemma (editors), De Sica & Zavattini: Parliamo tanto di noi, Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1997.

FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI (1923–) Franco Zeffirelli’s directorial debut occurred in 1957 with Camping, a conventional comedy about a young couple’s camping trip. This film, with popular comedian Nino Manfredi, has very little in common with subsequent works, in particular with The Taming of the Shrew (1966), an adaptation of Shakespeare starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, which would give him international fame. While Zeffirelli’s first film moves within that comic limbo that has points of contact with Neorealism but still does not possess the scathing humor of commedia all’italiana (comedy Italianstyle), the second is tied, rather, to the theatrical experiences that precede his definitive turn to the cinema. Luchino Visconti had discovered him in 1947 when, a set assistant at Florence’s Teatro alla Pergola, he was also performing on the radio

and in the cinema, having pursued a diploma at the Accademia delle Belle Arti. He was wasting himself as an actor—better to cultivate stage setting: This was the master’s advice. Thus began an association that had one of its culminating points in 1949, with the European premier of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire. In the meantime, Zeffirelli assisted Visconti in directing La terra trema (1948), Bellissima (1951), and Senso (1954), a turning point for Visconti in which realism and melodrama achieve an original fusion: Zeffirelli’s horizon expanded. His successes as a set designer for the theater led Zeffirelli to directing both in the lyric theater (his staging of operas with Maria Callas are celebrated) and in prose drama, in which he achieved international fame staging certain Shakespearean works. 2045

FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI And it is precisely Shakespeare whom he chose during the 1960s when he decided to return to the set: He turned toward the lighter, more joyful Shakespeare, which allowed him to reach a wide audience. In The Taming of the Shrew, the battle of the sexes is at the center of the plot (and reminds the audience of the tempestuous relation between Burton and Taylor), and, although Zaffirelli remained faithful to the original text, his cinematic adaptation assumed a modern aspect thanks to the transgressive tone, exuberance, and dynamism of the actions, which end up prevailing over the skillful and careful figurative frame. Among the characteristics that stand out in making the film valuable even today are its philological measure, its being rooted in an exquisitely cinematographic imagination, as well as the meta-linguistic awareness of the relation between the theater and the cinema. These are elements that can be found in Zeffirelli’s best films, which are drawn, for the most part, from theatrical (whether prose or operatic) and narrative texts: from Romeo and Juliet (1968) to La traviata (1982), from Othello (1986) to Hamlet (1990) and Jane Eyre (1996). It is in these texts that the influence of melodramatic practices (both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense) seems clearest, practices that in the Shakespearean transcriptions are joined to a taste for exaggerated performances, which are demanded not only by the bard’s dramaturgy but also by the temperament of a director who loves to sing full-throatedly. Exemplary in this sense is Hamlet, with performances by an energetic Mel Gibson and a turbid Glenn Close—melodrama in its purest form. The final duel—set in an immense hall, shot from a low camera angle and cut to movement—is a great moment of cinema. It is a frenzy that corresponds to the temperament of the one who orchestrated it. There have also been setbacks in such a prolific career: from the pretentious adolescent melodrama Endless Love (1981) to the insipid Il giovane Toscanini (The Young Toscanini, 1988) and the dull Storia di una capinera (Sparrow, 1994). But there is also no shortage of imaginative touches that illuminate popular films, such as La traviata, with Placido Domingo and Teresa Stratas, shot in the gray-blue tones of a photography that translates the drama of the heroine into fitting images, or Un te` con Mussolini (Tea with Mussolini, 1999), in which a charming story ‘‘al femminile’’ (in the feminine style) finds the perfect tone halfway between comedy and (bland, or affectionate) satire. More dramatic is the homage that the director pays 2046

to his beloved diva in Callas Forever (2002): in the intense performance of Fanny Ardant, in the tenderness of a gaze that accompanies the singer until the episode when she sadly renounces the project of creating new images for an old performance. In these are displayed the spirit of a Zeffirelli who does not fear rhetoric when it can tackle a subject congenial to him. Instead, at other times, this resolves into a kind of maniacal coherence that brushes up against self-mutilation. When, for example, in Othello (which of all his Shakespearean adaptations is the most questionable), a dying, pitch-black Placido Domingo (an ingenuous racist delusion?) collapses on the extremely white, extremely blond Katia Ricciarelli (Desdemona), the director did not forego any of the gaudy cliche´s of which his career in melodrama is woven. He seeks danger in order to be able to satisfy his pleasure in challenge. ‘‘Se non si prende a cuore il privilegio di vivere,’’ reflected Zeffirelli in his 1986 Autobiography, ‘‘che si puo` fare?’’ (If you don’t take the privilege of living to heart—what can you do?)

Biography Franco Zeffirelli was born in Florence, 12 February 1923 (real name Gianfranco Corsi). He graduated from art school, 1941, and studied architecture at the University of Florence while at the same time directing student theatrical productions, including the staging of operas, 1941–1943. He joined the Resistance fight against the NaziFascists, 1943–1944, then served as an interpreter for the British Army, 1944–1945. He worked as a theatrical set and costume designer, 1945–1947, and as an assistant to the filmmaker Luchino Visconti, 1947–1953. He was a drama and opera director in Milan (Teatro alla Scala), London, and New York, 1950–1966; he staged La traviata in Dallas with Maria Callas, 1958. He worked as an opera director worldwide, 1970–2004. Zeffirelli has been recipient of numerous awards, including an Academy Award nomination (Best Director) for Romeo and Juliet, 1969; David di Donatello (Best Director) for Fratello sole, sorella luna, 1972; OCIC Award at San Sebastia´n International Film Festival for Fratello sole, sorella luna, 1973; European David, 1979; an Emmy for Great Performaces: Pagliacci, 1982; Academy Award nomination (Best Art Direction-Set Decoration) for La traviata, 1983; an Emmy for Great Performances: Cavalleria rusticana, 1986; Special Prize for Outstanding Contribution to World Cinema Karlovy at Vary International Film Festival, 1999; David di Donatello

FRANCO ZEFFIRELLI for career achievement, 2002. He was a congressman in the Italian Parliament, 1994–2000, and opera director at the Arena of Verona, 1995-2004. Zeffirelli currently lives between England and Italy. CRISTINA BRAGAGLIA Selected Works Films Camping, 1957. The Taming of the Shrew (based on Shakespeare’s play), 1966. Romeo and Juliet (based on Shakespeare’s play), 1968. Fratello sole, sorella luna (Brother Sun, Sister Moon), 1972. Gesu` di Nazareth (Jesus of Nazareth), 1977. The Champ, 1979. Endless Love, 1981. La traviata (based on Shakespeare’s play), 1982. Otello (based on Shakespeare’s play), 1986. Il giovane Toscanini (The Young Toscanini), 1988. Hamlet (based on Shakespeare’s play), 1990. Storia di una capinera (based on Giovanni Verga’s short story), 1994. Jane Eyre (based on Charlotte Bronte¨’s novel), 1996.

Un te` con Mussolini (Tea with Mussolini), 1999. Callas Forever, 2002. Tre fratelli, 2005.

Other Il mio Gesu´, 1977; as Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus: A Spiritual Diary, 1984. Zeffirelli: The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli, 1986. La signora dale camelie, Turin: Lindau, 1992 (with others). Zeffirelli: L’arte dello spettacolo, Rome: De Luca, 2001.

Further Reading Barclay, William, Jesus of Nazareth, Nashville: T. Nelson, 1977. D’Amico de Carvalho, Caterina (editor), Zeffirelli. Opere di pittura scenografica: l’arte dello spettacolo, Rome: Edizioni De Luca, 2000. Denson, Alan, Franco Zeffirelli’s Production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Kendal (Westmorland): Alan Denson, 1968. Fuscagni, Carlo, et al., Franco Zeffirelli. Il cinema delle grandi storie, Rome: ANCCI, 2000. Toffolo, Stefano, Romeo e Giulietta e altri drammi shakespeariani: musica, cinema e letteratura dale origini a Franco Zeffirelli a Nino Rota, Padua: Armelin, 2002.

ANNA ZUCCARI See Neera

2047

INDEX A

Abrabanel, Jehudah. See Leone Ebreo Abraham of Suzdal, 1653 Abrakadabra: Storia dell’avvenire (Ghislanzoni), 1718 Abramo quando volse sacrificare Isaac (Belcari), 1651 Abruzzese, Alberto, 769, 1550 Absurdism, 339 Academic humanism, 276 Acade´mie Franc¸aise, 1129 Academies, 1–4 Academy Award(s) Antonioni and, 59 Benigni and, 176, 1663 Bertolucci, B., and, 200 De Sica and, 621 Fellini and, 702 Germi and, 829 Loren and, 624 Pontecorvo and, 1474 Tornatore and, 1890 Wertmu¨ller and, 2021 Zavattini and, 2042 Accademia Aldina, 2 Accademia Concordi, 1922 Accademia D’Amico, 1796 Accademia d’Arte Drammatica, 169, 784, 1206 Pressburger and, 1501 Accademia degli Addormentati, 455 Accademia degli Elevati, 1790 Accademia degli Eterei, 1833 Accademia degli Immobili, 737 Accademia degli Incogniti, 1128, 1129 Tarabotti and, 1823 Terracina and, 1861 Accademia degli Infiammati, 3 Aretino and, 76 Accademia degli Intronati, 407, 1126 Accademia degli Invaghiti, 1781 Accademia degli Invulnerabili, 397 Accademia degli Oziosi, 138, 605 Accademia degli Stravaganti, 138 Accademia degli Studi, 1182 Accademia degli Svegliati, 1163 Accademia degli Umidi, 2, 3, 895 Giambullari, P., and, 840 Accademia degli Umoristi, 1160, 1163 Accademia dei Dubbiosi, 1798 Accademia dei Filodrammatici, 838 Accademia dei Filomusi, 391 Accademia dei Georgofili, 1431 Accademia dei Granelleschi, 880, 883

A canovaccio, 497 A ciascuono il suo (Sciascia), 354, 1706 A colpi di silenzio (Guiducci), 922 A futura memoria (se la memoria ha un futuro) (Sciascia), 1710 A Giarra (Pirandello), 1451 ´ la recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 195, 1594 A A livella (Toto`), 1895 A Luigia Pallavicini caduta da cavallo (Foscolo), 763, 816 A memoria (Maraini), 1142 ‘‘A meza notte, quasi in sulla nona’’ (Burchiello, Il), 331 ‘‘A mia moglie’’ (Saba), 1644, 1647 ‘‘A mon Pe´gase’’ (Marinetti), 1154 ‘A morte dint’ ’o lietto ’e Don Felice (Cecchi, C.), 1401 ‘‘A Napoli’’ (Terracina), 1861 A Pal-ulcai fiuk (Molnar), 1344 A Parigi, viaggio di Geronimo e comp. (Faldella), 1908 A passare la sera (to pass an evening), 206 A quale tribu` appartieni? (Moravia), 1232 A rebours (Huysmans), 580 A Santana (Carducci), 1853 ‘‘A se stesso’’ (Leopardi), 1024 A Senia (Michelstaedter), 1196 ‘‘A Silvia’’ (Leopardi), 1021, 1024 ‘‘A Silvia’’ (Parini), 1485 A tanto caro sangue (Raboni), 1538 ‘A terra d’u ricorde (Pierro), 1444 ‘‘A un asino’’ (Carducci), 202 A un piccolo borghese (Orelli), 1318 A Vienna: Gita col Lapis (Faldella), 679, 1698, 1908 ‘‘A Zacinto’’ (Foscolo), 764, 1088 AA: Il libro dell’utopia ceramica (Vassalli), 1956 Abaritte (Pindemonte), 1446 Abatantuono, Diego, 1663, 1664 Abate, Antonio, 1963 Abba abba (Burgess), 156 Abba, Giuseppe Cesare, 1592 Abbado, Claudio, 718 Abbagnano, Nicola, 659, 1428 Abbate, Fulvio, 1340 Abbattutis, Gian Allesio, 137 Abbot, George, 1684 Abecedary. See Sillabari (Parise, Goffredo) Abelard, Peter, 1703 Abeniacar, Carlo, 635 Abitare altrove (Bigiaretti), 224 Abitare il vento (Vassalli), 1956 ‘‘Abiura dalla trilogia della vita’’ (Pasolini), 1373

I1

INDEX Accademia dei Lincei, 431, 605, 1604, 1943 Bacchelli and, 113 prize by, 1067 Accademia dei Pellegrini, 638 Accademia dei Pugni, 4, 663, 1060 Verri, P., and, 1979 Accademia dei Rozzi, 1480 Accademia dei Segreti, 605 Accademia dei Trasformati, 129, 1349 Verri, P., and, 1979 Accademia dei Virtuosi, 395 Accademia del Cimento, 737 Redi and, 1557 Tarabotti and, 1823 Accademia del disegno, 300 Vasari and, 1952 Accademia, Del disordine e de’ rimedi delle monete nello Stato di Milano nell’anno 1764 (Beccaria), 146 Accademia della Crusca, 2, 26, 92, 736 Bacchelli and, 113 Baretti and, 130 Basile and, 137 Bembo, P., and, 1562 Beni and, 174 dictionary of, 1128 food and, 757 Galilei, G., and, 803, 1716 Grazzini and, 895 Maggi and, 1105 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Passavanti and, 1378 prizes by, 1067 Redi and, 1557, 1558 Salviati and, 1668 Tassoni and, 1842 Verri, A., and, 1977 Accademia della Fama, 1832 Accademia della Fratta, 638 Accademia dell’Addiaccio, 730 Accademia dell’Arcadia, 4, 64–67, 1799. See also Academies Baretti and, 130 Baroque and, 1059 Crescimbeni and, 943 Gravina and, 1189 libretto and, 1050 Monti and, 1220 Accademia dell’Arcadia, Tansillo and, 1822 Accademia delle Arti del Disegno, 440 Accademia delle Belle Arti, 663 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Zeffirelli and, 2045 Accademia delle Scienze, 277, 718 Accademia di Belle Arti, 275, 1961 Giacosa and, 838 Accademia di Maria Cristina di Svezia, 1559 Accademia di Modena, 407 Accademia d’Italia, 1067, 1641 Marinetti and, 1156 Ojetti and, 1303 Papini and, 1347 Accademia Fiorentina, 3, 646 Giambullari, P., and, 840 Grazzini and, 895 Salviati and, 1668

I2

Accademia letteraria, 1487 Accademia Militare, 285 Accademia Nazionale d’Arte, 1607 Accademia Nazionale di Arte Drammatica, 356 Accademia Ortolana, 646 Accademia Pellegrina, 646 Accademia Pomponiana, 2 Accademia Pontaniana, 529, 1268 Pontano and, 1472 Accademia Reale d’Arte Drammatica, 1793 Accademia Sampaolina, 1922 Accademia Scientifico-Letteraria, 612 Accademia Tiberina, 154 Accademia Veneziana, 3 Accademici Incogniti, 1256 Accade´mie Celtique, 1478 Accame, Vincenzo, 821, 1315 Accampamento italiano alla battaglia di Magenta (Fattori), 1592 Accardi, Carla, 705 Accattone (Bertolucci, B.), 198 Accattone (Pasolini), 472, 726, 1285, 1367, 1371, 1607 Accessus ad auctorem (introduction to the author), 257 Accetto, Torquato, 518 Acciaiuoli, Andrea, 257, 313, 1521 Landino and, 994 Accordi (Montale), 522, 1211, 1215 Accortezza (adroitness), 518 Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy, An (Baretti), 130, 1908 Accusatoria (Guicciardini), 912 Acerbi, Giuseppe, 982, 1908 Aceto, arcobaleno (De Luca, E.), 609 Achille pie` veloce (Benni), 179 Achillini, Claudio, 1158, 1162 Petrarch and, 1413 Achmatova, Anna, 1634 ‘‘Acqua alpina’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Acqua azzurra, Acqua chiara (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Acqua passata (Sarfatti), 1682 Acqua Passata: storielle e aneddoti della mia vita (Fucini), 786 Acquainted with Grief. See Cognizione del dolore, La (Gadda) Acque del sabato, Le (Spaziani), 1786 Acque e terre (Quasimodo), 930, 1212, 1526, 1529, 1903 Acque, Le (Joppolo), 976 Acri, Francesco, 1746 Actus beati Francisci (Celano), 230 ‘‘Ad Angelo Mai’’ (Leopardi), 1024, 1599 ‘‘Ad Henricum Angliae regem Epistola de vita et gestis Giudubaldi Urbini Ducis’’ (Castiglione), 409 Ad ora incerta (Levi, P.), 1041 Ad sensum (according to meaning), 312, 1119 ‘‘Ad un moscone. Viaggio sentimentale nel giardino Balzaretti’’ (Tarchetti), 1827 Ad verbum (according to verbal expression), 1119 Adam, Ognibene de. See Salimbene da Parma Adami, Giuseppe, 1760 Adams, John, 147 Addio! (Neera), 1271 ‘‘Addio’’ (Sinisgalli), 1763 Addio amore!, 1734 Addio, gionezza! (Oxilia, N.), 1329, 1922 Addio Lenin (Cerami), 448 Addison, Joseph, 47, 982 Addormentati, 2

INDEX Adelchi (Manzoni, A.), 761, 897, 1134, 1140–1141 Adele: Frammenti di un romanzo (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Adelonda di Frigia (Della Valle, F.), 607 ‘‘Admissible Grace,’’ 380 Adone (Marino), 1126, 1128, 1158 Adorazione dei Magi (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1009 Adorno, Theodor W., 820 Adrian VI (Pope), Aretino and, 74 Adriana (De Roberto), 613 Adriani, Giovan Battista, Borghini, V., and, 302 Adriano in Siria (Metastasio), 1191 Adriatico (Paolini), 1344 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The (Twain), 486 Adventures of Pinocchio, The. See Avventure di Pinocchio, Le (Collodi) Adversus Iudeos et gentes pro catholica fide (Manetti, G.), 1119 Adynaton (hyperbole), 44 Aeneid (Virgil), 81, 90, 555, 712, 932, 1415, 1713 Caro and, 396 Dante and, 562 Folengo and, 748 homosexuality and, 1030 Landino and, 994 Leopardi and, 1018 Manzoni, A., and, 1136 Metastasio and, 1193–1194 Aeronavi dei Savoia: Protofantascienza italiana, Le (De Turris), 1719 ‘‘Aeroplano’’ (Solmi), 1778 Aeropoesia (aeropoetry), 820 Aeropoesia (Marinetti), 1156 Aeschylus, 1288, 1996 Aesop, 210, 463 Giusti and, 861 Trilussa and, 1913 Aesopus communis, 201 Aesthetica in nuce (Croce, B.), 1062 Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce (Eco), 658 Aesthetik (Hegel), 819 ¨ esthetische Theorie (Adorno), 820 A Aeterni patris (Leo XIII), 1704 Aetheismus Triumphatus (Campanella), 1568 Aevo Modernus (The Modern Age), 942 Affabilita` piacevole (pleasing affability), 410 Affairs of Cellini, The (Mayer), 438 Affeminata (Frabotta), 771 Affetti di un disperato (Vico), 1429 Affinita` elettive, Le (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Aforismi Politici (Campanella), 364 Africa (Petrarch), 667, 1001, 1404, 1409, 1415 Settembrini and, 1749 ‘‘Africa, mentre partono’’ (Stecchetti), 488 After Babel (Steiner, G.), 1903 Agamben, Giorgio, 1124, 1428 Agamennone (Alfieri), 22 Aganoor, Vittoria. See Pompilj, Vittoria Aganoor Agence Havas, 1474 Agenda, 2026 Ageno, Franca, 955 Agnello, Francesco, 1275 Agostini, Nicolo` degli, 268, 668 Agostino (Moravia), 1033, 1230 Agostino (Pratesi), 280

Agricola, Rudolph, 1946 ‘‘Agro inverno’’ (Fortini), 760 Agucchi, Giovan Battista, 2002 Ah! Il Mundial (Soldati), 1791 ‘‘Ahi lasso! or e` stagion de doler tanto’’ (Guittone d’Arezzo), 927 ‘‘Ai dolze e gaia terra fiorentina’’ (Davanzati), 571 Ai due lati del muro (Grasso), 1720 Ai margini del caos (Ricciardiello), 1721 ‘‘Ai quindici di piazzale Loreto’’ (Quasimodo), 1527 Ai tempi di re Gioacchino (Roversi), 1629 Aiace (Foscolo), 1288 Aida (Verdi), 1052, 1313 Aime, Federico, 1826 Ainigma, 997 Aiolfo del Barbicone (Barberino, A.), 667 Aiutatemi a dire: Nuove poesie (Aleramo), 16 Ajace (Foscolo), 765 Aksjonov, Vasilij, 1635 Al cinema, 472 Al confine (boundary line), 206 ‘‘Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore’’ (Guinizzelli), 923, 1087 Al di la` (Oriani, A.), 1320 Al di la` del bene e del male (Cavani), 425 Al di la` delle nuvole (Antonioni), 58 Al diavolo la celebrita` (Monicelli, M. and Vanzina), 1208 Al Dio ignoto (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Al fuoco della controversia (Luzi, M.), 1084 ‘‘Al lettore’’ (Saba), 1647 ‘‘Al Metauro’’ (Tasso, T.), 1835 ‘‘Al padre’’ (Quasimodo), 1528 ‘‘Al Principe Don Sigismondo Chigi’’ (Monti, V.), 1218 ‘‘Al Signor di Montgolfier’’ (Monti, V.), 1853 ‘‘Al sonetto’’ (Carducci), 393–394 Aladino (Govoni), 874 Alamanacco, 1859 Alamanni, Luigi, 668 Stampa and, 1798 Alan Ford, 790 Alarcon, Pedro de, 352 Albano, Lucilla, 726 Albenzani, Donato, 256 Albergaccio, 1097 Albergo sul porto, Un (Betti, U.), 207 Alberica Trivulzio. See Belgioioso, Cristina di ‘‘Albero’’ (Quasimodo), 1526 Albert the Great, 1703 Neoplatonism and, 1281 scholasticism and, 1704 Albertarelli, Rino, 788 Albertazzi, Adolfo, 278, 820 Albertazzi, Giorgio, 1545 Puppa and, 1523 Alberti, Gigio, 1663 Alberti, Leandro, 118, 277 Alberti, Leon Battista, 7–10, 70, 104, 202, 303–304, 463, 933, 1001, 1067, 11000, 11001 Castiglione and, 409 classicism and, 480 Ferrara and, 716 Giovanni, D., and, 330 humanism and, 952–953 Landino and, 994 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1181

I3

INDEX Alberti, Leon Battista (cont.) Salutati and, 1662 Vasari and, 1952 Alberti, Rafael, Belli, G., and, 156 Albertini, Luigi, 296, 978 Albertus Teutonicus. See Albert the Great Albini, Giuseppe, Carducci and, 1936 Albini, Sofia Bisi, Maffei, C., and, 1659 Albornoz, Egidio, 276 Albrizzi, Giambattista, 1506 Albrizzi, Giuseppe, 1658 Albrizzi, Isabella Teotochi, 397, 1658 Albrizzi, Teotochi, 1962 Albuquerque, Fernanda Farias de, 1201 Alcaeus, lyric poetry and, 1086 Alcesti (Alfieri, V.), 1051 Alcesti (Euripedes), 1916 Alcesti di Samuele (Savinio), 1688 Alcesti o la recita dell’esilio (Raboni), 1538 Alciato, Andrea, 10–12 Alcibiade fanciullo a scola (Rocco), 1032 Alcippo (Chiabrera), 456 Alcon (Castiglione), 409 Alcune poesie di Ripano Eupilino (Parini, G.), 1349 Alcuni scritti (Cattaneo, C.), 417 Alcuni temi della questione meridionale (Gramsci), 1533 Alcyone (D’Annunzio), 541, 543–544 Aldani, Lino, 1720 Aldanov, Mark, 1634 Aldebaran (Blasetti), 237 Aldobrandini, Pietro, 262, 1160 Marino and, 1163 Aldrovandi, Ulisse, 277 Aleandri, Girolamo, historiography and, 942 Aleardi, Aleardo, 12–14 Neera and, 1271 Pascoli and, 1361 Romanticism and, 1598 Aleramo, Sibilla, 15–19, 653, 910. See also Women’s History Boine and, 270 Campana and, 360, 361 Communism and, 502 Duse and, 652 homosexuality and, 1032 Resistance and, 1579 Vivanti and, 2011 Alessandrini, Goffredo, 1618–1619, 1760 Alessandro nell’Indie (Metastasio), 1190 Alessi, Giovanni, 1339 Alexander VI (Pope), 1691 Alexander, William, 409 Alexandria, 1827 Alexandrine, 277, 289, 291 ‘‘Alexandros’’ (Pascoli), 1360 Alexeieff, Alexandre, 50 Alfabeta, 985, 1017 Alfabeta pirandelliano (Sciascia), 1707 Alfabeto Apocalittico (Sanguineti), 1671 Alfani, Gianni degli, 421 Dolce stil novo and, 641, 642 Al-Farabi, 1281 Alfarache, Guzman, Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Alfieri, Giulia, 20 Soffici and, 1772

I4

Alfieri, Vittorio, 19–25, 108, 213, 277, 388, 397, 784, 1203, 1563, 1908, 1922 Aleardi and, 13 Calzabigi and, 1060 Carrer and, 397 censorship of, 445 Cesarotti and, 453 Debenedetti and, 577 libretto and, 1050–1051 Manzoni and, 1133 Mazzini and, 1175 Monti, V., and, 1218, 1219 neoclassicism and, 1279 Petito and, 1400 Pindemonte and, 1446 Verri, A., and, 1978 Alfonsi, Pietro, 247, 1295 Alfonso e i visionari (Ortese), 687 Alfredo, Alfredo (Germi), 829 Algarotti, Francesco, 26–27, 213, 1312, 1712, 1714, 1715, 1908, 2002. See also Science and Literature Metastasio and, 1191 music and, 1256 Ali (Benelli), 172 Alı` dagli occhi azzurri (Pasolini), 1367 Alibi (Morante), 1225 Alicata, Mario, 1728, 2005 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 333, 486 Alice non lo sa (De Gregori), 1784 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante Alighieri, Joseph, 558 ‘‘All’ Italia’’ (Leopardi), 1590 All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque), 2030 ‘‘All sera’’ (Foscolo), 764, 1088 Alla burchia, 331 Alla cieca (Magris), 1110 Alla citta` di Roma (Rovetta), 1632 ‘‘Alla luna’’ (Leopardi), 1021, 1024 ‘‘Alla luna’’ (Pindemonte), 1446 ‘‘Alla macchina aerostatica’’ (Parini), 1853 Alla periferia (Cassola), 403, 2031 ‘‘Alla Primavera’’ (Leopardi), 1024 ‘‘Alla primavera o Dellefavole antiche’’ (Leopardi), 1019 ‘‘Alla regina d’Italia’’ (Carducci), 390 ‘‘Alla rime’’ (Carducci), 393 Alla scoperta dei letterati (Ojetti), 1303, 1493 ‘‘Alla stazione in una mattina d’autunno’’ (Carducci), 393 ‘‘Alla sua donna’’ (Leopardi), 1019 ‘‘All’amica risanata’’ (Foscolo), 763 All’apparir del vero: Vita di Giacomo Leopardi (Damiani, Rolando), 233 All’aria aperta: scene e macchiette della campagna toscana (Fucini), 786 Allarme sul lago (Banti), 125 Allart, Hortense, 375 Allascoperta deiletterati (De Roberto), 614 Allasio, Marisa, 1584 ‘‘Alle fonti del Clitumno’’ (Carducci), 392 ‘‘Alle fronde dei salici’’ (Quasimodo), 1527, 1580 Alle origini del movimento femminile in Italia 1850–1894 (Bortolotti), 2024–2025 ‘‘Alle soglie’’ (Gozzano), 879 Alleanza della cultura (Sereni, E.), 29 Alleanza per la cultura, 501

INDEX Allegoria di novembre (Palazzeschi), 1333 Allegoria e derisione (Pratolini), 1495 Allegoria mitologica (Boccaccio), 240, 255 Alle´gret, Yves, 1474 ‘‘Allegri Italiani’’ (Jahier), 974 Allegria di naufragi (Ungaretti), 1927, 1929, 1931, 2030 Allegro non troppo (Bozzetto), 51 Alleluia, 1657 Allen, Woody, Fellini and, 702 All’erta sentinella (Serao), 1734 All’illustrissimo signor avvocato Giseppe Alcaini (Goldoni), 880 All’improvviso, 39 All’incrocio dei sentieri (Komla-Ebri), 1201 All’Isonzo (Michelstaedter), 1196 ‘‘All’Italia’’ (Leopardi), 1020, 1024 ‘‘Allo Re delli Viente’’ (Basile), 137 Allonsanfan (Taviani, P. and V.), 1845–1846 All’uscita (Pirandello), 1451 Almanacco dello Specchio, 1389, 1477 Almirante, Giorgio, 980 Almirante, Luigi, 207 Almodo´var, Pedro, 936 Almost Blue (Lucarelli), 633 Alonge, Roberto, 222 Alonso e i visionari (Ortese), 1322 Altare per la madre, Un (Camon), 357 Altavilla, Pasquale, 1400 Altercazione (Medici, Lorenzo), 1178 Althe´nopis (Ramondino), 1547 Althusser, Louis, 726 Altobelli, Gioachino, 1432 Altoviti, Antonio, 298, 440 Altoviti, Bindo, 442 Altre. Conversazioni a Radiotre sui rapporti tra donne e politica, Le (Rossanda), 1614 Altre, Le (Rossanda), 1614 Altre poesie (Betocchi), 204 Altri abusi: viaggi, sonnambulismo e giri dell’oca (Busi), 333 Altri libertini (Tondelli), 1886 Altri Sonetti (Trilussa), 1913 Altri tempi (Blasetti), 236, 237 Altri versi e poesie disperse (Montale), 1213, 1216 Altro da dire (Risi, N.), 1587 Altro mare, Un (Magris), 1109 Altro mondo e` possibile, Un (Scola), 1723 Alunno, Francesco, 518 Alvaro, Corrado, 28–30, 224, 471, 1728. See also Verismo Bigiaretti and, 223 Communism and, 502 Russian influences of, 1634 Scotellaro and, 1726 utopia and, 1939 Amadeus, Victor, 1921 Amadigi (Tasso, B.), 144, 668, 807, 934, 1833, 1921 Amadis de Gaula (Montalvo), 934, 1831, 1840 Amado mio (Pasolini), 1033, 1367 Amado monstruo (Tomeo, J.), 936 Amadoro, Ugo, 51 ‘‘Amando con fin core e con speranza’’ (Vigna), 1753 Amante (Dante), 725 Amanti, Le (Serao), 1734 Amarcord (Fellini), 702, 1792 Guerra and, 909 Ambizione (ambition), 504

Ambizioni sbagliate (Moravia), 1230 Ambleto (Testori), 1869 Ambra (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Ambra (Poliziano), 1464 Ambrogini, Agnolo. See Poliziano, Angelo Ambrose, 1426 Ambrosoli, Francesco, 617 Amedeide (Bucci, A.), 1921 Amedeide (Chiabrera), 455 Amedeo e altri racconti (Debenedetti), 577 Amelio, Gianni, 30–33, 473, 1708 Archibuga and, 68 Cerami and, 448 questione meridionale and, 1533 terrorism and, 1864 Tornatore and, 1889 Amendola, Giorgio, 488 Alvaro and, 28 Boine and, 271 World War I and, 2029 Amendola, Giovanni, 1346 Amerbach, Bonifacius, Alciato and, 12 America, 47–49 America amara (Cecchi, E.), 430 America, primo amore (Soldati), 48, 1774 American Historical Association, 1573 ‘‘American Renaissance’’ (Fortini), 760 Americana, 48 Americana: Raccolta di narratori (Vittorini), 2032 Amerio, Romano, 1019 Amica mia nemica (Risi, N.), 1587 Amiche, Le (Antonioni), 57, 583 Amiche, Le (Pratolini), 1495 Amici della domenica, 161 Amici, Giovanni Battista, 1431 Amici miei (Monicelli, M.), 829, 1209 Amici Pedanti, 388 Amici, viaggi, incontri (Bertolucci, A.), 196 ‘‘Amicizia’’ (Cardarelli), 386 Amicizia (Tobino), 1874 Amico (Dante), 728 Amico, Gianni, Archibugi and, 68 Amico, Un (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Amidei, Sergio, 733, 1728 Rossellini and, 1622 Aminta (Tasso, T.), 39, 717, 902, 1126, 1255, 1834, 1837–1838 Amleto (Bacchelli), 112 Amleto (Boito, A.), 273 Amleto o le consequenze della pieta` filiale (Bene), 169 Ammaestrare divertendo (teaching by entertaining), 1091 Ammaniti, Niccolo`, 33–35, 371, 373, 473, 790, 1664, 1730. See also Cannibali Ammannatini, Manetto, 1297 Amne`sia (Salvatores), 1664 Amo dunque sono (Aleramo), 15 Amodio, Luciano, Guiducci and, 922 Amor (love), 563 ‘‘Amor, che longiamente m’hai menato’’ (Colonne), 1753 ‘‘Amor e` desio che ven da core’’ (Giacomo da Lentini), 835, 1753 ‘‘Amor e` uno desio che ven da core’’ (D’Aquino, R.), 1087 Amor nello specchio (Andreini, G.), 36 ‘‘Amor non vole ch’io clami’’ (Giacomo da Lentini), 1752 Amore amaro (Bernari), 183

I5

INDEX Amore e chiacchiere (Blasetti), 237 Amore e ginnastica (De Amicis), 576 ‘‘Amore e morte’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Amore e patria (Verga, G.), 1963 Amore in citta` (Zavattini), 56 ‘‘Amore, in cui desio ed ho speranza’’ (Pier delle Vigne), 1443 Amore innamorato, et impazzato (Marinella), 1152 Amore lontano (Vassalli), 1958 Amore mio infinito (Nove), 374 Amore nell’arte (Tarchetti), 1827 Amore sconveniente, Un (Bianchini), 217 Amore, Un (Buzzati), 336, 1206 Amorevoli, Giovanni Battista, 498 Amori (Dossi), 649 Amori (Fontana), 1279 Amori (Marino), 1161 Amori (Merini), 1187 Amori d’Oriente (Comisso), 496 Amorosa visione (Boccaccio), 240 Amoroso, Giuseppe, 184 Amoroso raggio, lo (the amorous ray), 1181 Amorum libri (Boiardo), 264 Amphitryon (Molie`re), 423 Amur del temp (Loi), 1071 An ducenda uxor et qualis (Della Casa), 601 An uxor sit ducenda (Della Casa), 601 Anabasi, 705 Anacreon, 390 Chiabrera and, 456 lyric poetry and, 1086 Analyse de la doctrine de Babeuf (Buonarroti, P. and Babeuf), 1769 Anatomy of Criticism (Frye), 820 Anceschi, Luciano, 135, 985, 1059, 1275, 1318 Hermeticism and, 930 Penna and, 1395 Pozzi, A., and, 1488 Risi, N., and, 1586 Sereni, V., and, 1741 Verri, Il and, 1063 Anche il sole fa schifo (Ammaniti), 34, 35 Anche l’ ombra e` sole (Govoni), 874 Anch’io vissi in Arcadia: Storie molto brevi (Tarozzi), 1830 Anchise e Ascanio in fuga da Troia (Bernini, G.), 190 Ancien re´gime, 109, 1192, 1575 Sarpi and, 1683 Ancien The´aˆtre Italien, 498 Ancient odes. See Odi barbare (Carducci) ‘‘Ancor che l’aigua per lo foco lassi’’ (Colonne), 1753 Anderson, Domenico, 1432 Anderson, Lindsay, 158 Anderson, Sherwood, Pavese and, 1381 Ando`, Roberto, 1341, 1730, 1878 Andre´, Fabrizio De, 49, 1258, 1782, 1783 De Gregori and, 1784 in Genoa, 818 Andreas-Salome´, Lou, 425 Andreatta, Beniamino, 279 Andreev, Leonid, 1634 Andrei, Massimo, 1247 Andreini, Francesco, 38, 498 Andreini, Giovan Battista, 36–38, 498, 1127 Andreini, Isabella Canali, 38–41, 498, 1126. See also Commedia dell’arte Petrarchism and, 1421

I6

Andreotti, Giulio, 1711, 1864 Andre´s, Juan, 1633 Andrews, Richard, 1639 Andreyev, Leonid, 1493 Andria (Terence), 89 Andromeda (Ferrari, B.), 1050, 1311 Andromeda (Gravina, G.), 894 Anecdota latina ex Ambrosianae Bibliothecae codicibus (Muratori), 1251 Aneddoti letterari (Biagi, G.), 485 Anelli del Tempo (Guidacci), 919 Anello di sette gemme o venezia e la sua storia. Considerazioni e fantasie di Luigi Carrer (Carrer), 398 Angela (Fracchia), 816 Angela da Foligno, 41–43, 1566 ‘‘Angeli’’ (Quasimodo), 930 Angelica (Metastasio), 1190 Angelica o la notte di maggio (Savinio), 1688 Angelici dolori (Ortese), 1325 Angelina, Franca, 189 Angelini, Cesare, in Milan, 1205 Angelis, Augusto De, 631 Angelo a Berlino (Morandini), 1222 Angelo di bonta`: Storia del secolo passato (Nievo), 1291 Angelo nero (Tabucchi), 203 Angioletti, Giovan Battista, in Milan, 1205 Angiolieri, Cecco, 43–46, 186, 1561 Giovanni, D., and, 330 Rustio di Filippo and, 1635 Angiolini, Carlo, 401 Angiolini, Gaspare, 538 Angiolini, Luigi, 1908 Angiulli, Andrea, 1427 Anglo-American Influences, 46–49 Anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Graf), 46 ‘‘Angolo di via Porpora’’ (Penna), 1396 Anicete-Bougeois, Auguste, 1313 Anidride solforosa (Roversi and Dalla), 1630 Anima bianca (Manfridi), 1121 Anima mundi (spirit of the world), 363 Anima mundi (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Anima nera (Griffi), 446 Animali parlanti (Casti), 463 Animali sacri e profani (Manzini), 1131 Animation, 50–52 Animatore, 465 Anime a nudo (Capuana), 383 Anime a nudo: lettere di donne e di fanciulle (Praga, M.), 1493 Anime oneste (Deledda), 591 Anime salve (Andre´), 1783 Anna (Lattuada), 1584 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 295 Anna Magnani: Vita amori e carriera di un’attrice che guarda diritto negli occhi (Moscati), 233 Annabella, 979 Annales Ecclesiastici (Baronio), 1568 Annales Maximi, 941 Annali d’Italia (Muratori), 943, 946, 1252 Annals (Tacitus), 802 Annata ricca, massaru cuntentu (Martoglio), 1166 Anni di piombo (years of lead), 228, 1863 Anni Ottanta (Meneghello), 1185 Anni Settanta (Meneghello), 1185 ‘‘Annientamento’’ (Ungaretti), 1932

INDEX Anno sull’Altipiano, Un (Lussu), 1609, 2029 Annotazioni et discorsi sopra alcuni luoghi del Decameron (Borghini, V.), 301 Annunciation, 1070 Annunciazione (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1009 Annunziata, Lucia, 981 Annunzio (Announcement), 149 Annunzio, Gabriele d’, 122 Anouilh, Jean, 1794 ‘‘Antagonismo e subalternita` nella produzione di scrittura’’ (Ravera), 1550 Antamoro, Giulio, 776 Ante litteram, 175, 470, 1612, 1689, 1768 Anthologie-Revue de France et d’Italie, 1154 Anthony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 273 Anthropologie structurale (Le´vi-Strauss), 1510 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant), 1980 Anthropology, Literature of, 52–55 Antiafrodisiaco per l’amor platonico (Nievo), 1290 Antiche citta` marinare e commercianti, Le (Aleardi), 13 Antichi monumenti illustrati (Lovatelli, E.), 1660 Antici, Carlo, 1020 ‘‘Anticipo alle mie memorie’’ (Chiarelli), 458 Antico (ancient), 1028 Anticoncezionali dalla parte della donna, 706 Anticrusca, overo Paragone dell-italiana lingua (Beni), 174 Antidannunziana: D’annunzio al vaglio della critica (Lucini), 1079 Antidotum in Pogium (Valla, L.), 1947 Antigone (Alfieri, V.), 21, 22 Antigone (Sophocles), 425, 1916 Antimateria (Bigongiari), 226 Antiochia (Gozzi, G.), 884 Antipiugiu`, 1923 Antipoetry, 45 Antiporta (page that precedes frontispiece), 294 Antiquitates Italicae Medii Aevi (Muratori), 482, 943, 1252, 1568 Antiquitates judaeorum (Josephus), 639 Antisatira in risposta al ‘‘Lusso donnesco’’ (Tarabotti), 1824 Anti-Semitism, 139 Antitesi e le perversita`, Le (Lucini), 1079 Antologia, 737 Giordani, Pietro, and, 851 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Antologia d’antichi scrittori senesi (Tozzi, F.), 1898 Antologia del ‘‘Campiello’’ (Bufalino), 321 Antologia del ‘‘Canzoniere’’ (Saba), 1647 Antologia della letteratura inglese e scelta di scrittori americani (Praz), 1497–1498 Antologia di Viusseux, 417 Antologia Planudea, 1465 Antonelli, Giuseppi, 1432 Antonelli, Luigi, 458, 1848 De Filippo, 585 teatro grottesco and, 1849 Antonelli, Roberto, Petrarch and, 1414 Antoniazzi, Almerina, 336 Antonicelli, Franco, 1044 Tessa and, 1867 Antonietta, Colomba, 1591 Antonio bell’, Il (Bolognini), 280 Antonio e Cleopatra (Boito), 653 Antonio Feltrı´nelli (prize), 1067

‘‘Antonio Labriola,’’ 278 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 56–61, 583, 733, 936, 1721, 1995 censorship of, 446 Debenedetti and, 577 Eco and, 658 Guerra and, 906, 1730 Leone, S., and, 1013 Ottieri and, 1327 television and, 1859 Antonius (Pontano), 1472 ‘‘Anywhere Out of the World’’ (Tabucchi), 686 Apocalittici e integrati (Eco), 49, 658, 789 Apolgeticus de ratione poeticae artis (Savonarola), 1690 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 785, 791, 1771 Savinio and, 1688 Ungaretti and, 1928 Valeri and, 1943 Apollo e Dafne (Bernini, G.), 190 Apollo e Pan (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Apollonio, Carla, 172 Apollonio, Mario, 1924 Apologeticus (Manetti, G.), 1119 Apologia (Dolce), 638 Apologia (Nores), 1059 Apologia degli Accademici di Banchi contra messer Lodovico Castelvetro (Caro), 395, 406 Apologia dei dialoghi (Speroni), 1789 Apologia della Canace and Lezzioni sei in difesa della Canace (Speroni), 1789 ‘‘Apologia dello spirito femminile’’ (Aleramo), 16 Apologia manzoniana (Gadda), 798 Apologia per le opposizioni dell’illustrissimo e reverendissimo signor cardinale Bellarmino alli trattati e risoluzioni di Giovanni Gersone sopra la validita` delle scmuniche (Sarpi), 1683 Apology (Bruni, L.), 1281 Apophthegmata (Guazzo), 904 Apparati effimeri (ephemeral displays), 300 Apparato et feste nelle noze dello illustrissimo Signor duca diFirenze&della duchessa, sua consorte (Giambullari, P.), 839 Appendici (Supplements), 1259 Appio Claudio (Gravina, G.), 894 Apprendisti italiani (Italian apprentices), 1184 Apprezzato professionista di sicuro avvenire, Un (De Santis), 619 Approdo in Grecia (Comisso), 496 Approssimato per difetto (Lagorio), 991–992 Appuntamento con Einstein (Buzzati), 335 Appunti partigiani (Fenoglio), 714 Appunti per un periplo dell’Africa (Cecchi, E.), 430 Appunti su un fatto di cronaca (Visconti, L.), 1995 Apre`s Baudelaire, 785 ‘‘April Fool Birthday Poem for Grandpa’’ (Prima), 965 Aprile (Moretti, N.), 1240 ‘‘Aprile a San Vittore’’ (Solmi), 1779 Aprire (Porta, A.), 1484 Aprire il fuoco (Bianciardi), 219 Aprosdoketon, 272 Apuleius, 210, 450, 486, 1297 Firenzuola and, 730 Neoplatonism and, 1280 Pressburger and, 1499 Aquabella (Loi), 1071 Aquilegia (Ceronetti), 451 Aquilon de Bavie`re (Verona, R.), 666–667

I7

INDEX Aquinas, Thomas, 551, 555, 564, 1426, 1429, 1565 homosexuality and, 1030 scholasticism and, 1703, 1704 Arabella (De Marchi, E.), 611 Aracoeli (Morante), 1225, 1226 Aragon, Louis, 1876 Araldo. See Meglio, Antonio di Matteo di ‘‘Aramei,’’ 840 Arancini (rice balls), 354 Arbasino, Alberto, 47, 61–64, 278, 465, 785, 936, 1261 Gruppo 63 and, 1956 Lucini and, 1079 Manganelli and, 1122, 1123 in Milan, 1206 neo-avant-garde and, 1275, 1276 travel literature and, 1909 Arbizzoni, Guido, 855 Arboit, Angelo, 1399 Arbore, Renzo, 176, 1859 Arboreto salvatico (Rigoni Stern), 1583 Arcadelt, Jacob, 646 Arcadia (accademia). See Academies; Accademia dell’Arcadia Arcadia (Sannazaro), 1379, 1380, 1413, 1638, 1675, 1676–1678, 1907. See also Pastoral Arcadia felice (Marinella), 1152–1153 Arcangeli, Federico, 99 Arcangeli, Francesco, Bertolucci, A., and, 195 Arcari, Antonio, 1434 Archeologia del presente (Vassalli), 1958 Archias, 1405 Archibugi, Francesca, 67–69 Archilocus, 389, 390 Architecture, Literature of, 69–73 Alberti, Leon, and, 8–9 Bernini, G., and, 188–190 Architettura civile (Guarini, G.), 71, 2002 Architettura del Medio-Evo in Italia (Boito, C.), 71, 2003 Architettura futurista (De Marchi, E.), 71 Architettura pratica (Valadier), 2003 Architrave, 278 Archivio musicale, 1259 Archivio storico audiovisivo del movimento operaio e democratico, 2044 Archivio storico italiano, 737 Archivio triennale, 1628 Archivo del Forum Internazionale salia Didattica della Filosofia (Ruffaldi), 1429 Archivo per lo studio delle tradizioni popolari, 1479 Arci Lesbica, 709 Arconati, Giuseppe, 182 ‘‘Ardati il fuoco vecchia puzolent’’ (Burchiello, Il), 330 Ardigo`, Achille, 279 Ardigo`, Roberto, 1427 Salgari and, 1654 Ardizzone, Tony, 964 Arena, Maurizio, 1584 Arendt, Hannah, 707 Areopagitica (Milton), 804 Aretino, Leonardo. See Bruni, Leonardo Aretino, Pietro, 73–80, 231, 519, 639, 1126, 11001 Boccaccio and, 250 Bracciolini, P., and, 304 censorship of, 293 Chigi and, 517

I8

Doni and, 645, 646 Ga`mbara and, 807 Gelli and, 814 Giovio and, 854 homosexuality and, 1031 pasquinades by, 445 Speroni and, 1789 Terracina and, 1861 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1920 in Venice, 1960 Argan, Giulio Carlo, 100 Argeli, Codronchi, Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Argento, Dario, 200, 1014 Argiropulo, Giovanni, 1463 Argo il cieco, ovvero, i sogni della memoria (Bufalino), 322 Argonauti, 3 Argumenti (Medici, Lorenzo), 1181 Argyropoulus, John, 953 Aria, 272 Arie e ricordi (Gatto), 812 Ariel, decadentismo and, 579 Arienti, Giovanni Sabadino degli, 277, 1297 ‘‘Ariete’’ (Quasimodo), 1526 Arioso (Onofri, A.), 1309 Ariosto, Alfonso, 412 Ariosto, Ludovico, 74, 76, 78, 80–95, 164, 175, 267, 348, 463, 492, 518, 668, 717, 783, 1342, 1505, 1561, 1638, 1712, 1795, 1864 Baretti and, 130 Basile and, 136 Bembo, P., and, 163, 167 Benigni and, 176 Bibbiena, B., and, 221 biography of, 232 Boiardo and, 264 book production and, 293 Cavazzoni and, 428 De Sanctis and, 616 Della Casa and, 601 Dolce and, 638 epics and, 665, 1127 Ferrara and, 716 Fonte, M., and, 755 Fregoso and, 117 Galilei, G., and, 804 Ga`mbara and, 807 in Genoa, 816 Gravina and, 1189 homosexuality and, 1032 Monti, V., and, 1219 music and, 1255 Ruzzante and, 1639 Salviati and, 1668 Sommi and, 1780 Tasso, B., and, 1831 Tasso, T., and, 1835 Terracina and, 1861 travel literature and, 1907 Trissino and, 1916 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1920 utopia and, 1938 Ariosto, Shakespeare, e Corneille (Croce), 525 Ariosto’s Bitter Harmony (Ascoli, A.), 83 Aristarco, Guido, 701, 725 Aristide, 201

INDEX Aristides, Aelius, 312 Aristodemo (Dottori), 1127 Aristodemo (Monti, V.), 1218 Aristophanes, 11 Alciato and, 11 Aristotle, 81, 230, 239, 327, 406, 479, 555, 561, 1003, 1058, 1128, 11001 Barbaro and, 127 Beni and, 174 Bruni, L., and, 212 Campanella and, 363 Caro and, 396 classicism and, 479 Ficino and, 720 Giraldi, Giambattista, and, 856 Guarini, B., and, 902 lyric poetry and, 1086 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Michelstaedter and, 1195 Neoplatonism and, 1280 Poliziano and, 1465 scholasticism and, 1702–1703 Speroni and, 1789 Aritmie (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Arius, 443 Arkadia (Vassalli), 1957 Arlecchino e Turandot (Busoni), 499 Arlekin chodataj svadeb (Solov’ev), 499 Arlow, Jacob, 58 Armando (Prati), 826 Armani, Vincenza, 498 Armenini, Giovan Battista, 11001 Armi e bagagli (Fenzi), 817 Armi e politica, 461 Armonia, 1259 Armonie in grigio et in silenzio (Govoni), 521, 873 Armstrong, Regis J., 773 Arnalda di Roca (Aleardi), 13 Arnaldo da Brescia (Niccolini, G.), 1288 Arnheim, Rudolf, De Santis and, 620 Arnolfo of Milan, 230 Arpinati, Leandro, 278 Arpino, Giovanni, 95–97, 465, 1585 in Genoa, 817 Arrabbiati (angry), 914 Arrighi, Antonio, 963 Arrighi, Cletto. See Righetti, Carlo Arriva la cicogna (Vigano`), 1988 Arroganza (arrogance), 326 Arrows in the Gale (Giovannitti), 964 Ars dictaminis, 249–250, 254 Ars dictandi, 1003 Ars Italica, 460 Ars Magna (Lull), 315 Ars moriendi, 189 Ars operandi, 791 Ars poetica (Horace), 81, 92, 818–819, 1091 Art as Experience (Dewey), 820 Art Criticism, 98–103 Art dramatique, 497 Art from the Ashes (Langer), 947 Art ignoble, 497 ‘‘Art of fiction,’’ 447 Artaserse (Metastasio), 1190

Artaud, Antonin, 62, 168, 452, 1248, 1368 Moscato and, 1246 Arte, 36, 1260 ‘‘Arte dei Medici e Speziali,’’ 332 Arte di ben pensare (Sarpi), 1684 Arte e Poesia, 1389 Arte e scienza (Pirandello), 1450, 1848 Arte italiana decorativa e industriale, 275 Arte magica annichilata (Maffei, S.), 1101 Arte poetica (Minturno), 1088 Arte povera (‘‘poor’’ art), 98 Artemisia (Banti), 124, 125 Artes dictandi (arts of diction), 44 Artes mechanicae (mechanical arts), 1009 Arthur Rimbaud (Soffici), 1772 Artifex (falconer), 781 Artisti moderni (Carra`), 2004 Arturo’s Island. See L’Isola di Arturo (Morante) Artusi, Pellegrino, 103–105, 758 As a Man Grows Older. See Senilita` (Svevo) As you like it (Shakespeare), 122 Asch, Ronald G., 516 Asciuti, Claudio, 1721 ‘‘Ascolata’’ (Listen), 360 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 83, 94 Ascoli, Graziadio Isaia, 388, 969 Percoto and, 1399 Ascoli, Isaia, 464 Ascolto il tuo cuore, citta` (Savinio), 1257, 1689 Ashes. See Cenere (Deledda) Ashes of Gramsci, The. See Ceneri di Gramsci, Le (Pasolini) Asie mineure et Syrie (Belgioioso), 151 Asinari, Federico, 1921 Asinus (Pontano), 202 Askesis, 1407 Asolani (Bembo, P.), 1413 Aspara civile tempesta (harsh civil storm), 1178 ‘‘Aspasia’’ (Leopardi), 1024 ‘‘Aspects eccle´siologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et se´culiers dans la seconde moitie´ du XIIIe sie`cle et le de´but du XIVe’’ (Congar), 1703 Aspern Papers, The (James, H.), 1961 ‘‘Assai mi placeria’’ (Protonotaro), 1753 Assedio di Roma, Lo (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Assembling the Lyric Self (Holmes), 1635–1636 Associazione Culturale Hamelin, 465 Associazione nazionalistica italiana, 1346 Associazione Orlando, 708 Associazione sengalese italiana, 1199 Assunta Spina (Di Giacomo), 469, 635, 2014 Assunto primo della scienza deldiritto naturale (Romagnosi), 417 Asterope (D’Annunzio), 544 Asti, Adriana, 844 Astichello (Zanella), 2035 Astrologicorum (Campanella), 364, 365 Astrology, Campanella and, 365 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 936 Atala (Praga, E.), 1491 Atheismus triumphatus (Campanella), 364, 365 Athena¨um, 1596 Atlante occidentale (Del Giudice), 599 Attalo, 51 Attenzione (attention), 368

I9

INDEX Attenzione e poesia (Campo, C.), 368 Attesa (endless sense of waiting), 183 ‘‘Attesa la`’’ (Risi, N.), 1587 Atti degli Apostoli (Rossellini), 1620 Atticus, 1406 ‘‘Attila of the stage,’’ 445 Attilo Regolo (Metastasio), 1191 Atto della Pinta (Folengo), 749 Attorno alla poesia (Loi), 1070 Attualismo (actual idealism), 823 Au bord de lit (Maupassant), 1995 Aubert, Giuseppe, 146, 147 Auctores damnati, 293 Auctoritas, 1703 Auerbach, Erich, 783, 827 Augurello, Giovanni Alessandro, 163 Fedele and, 698 Augustine, Saint, 41, 106, 555, 1262, 1411, 1429, 1924 Capponi, G., and, 375 Casanova, Giacomo, and, 401 classicism and, 479 Dante and, 561 historiography and, 941 homosexuality and, 1030 Neoplatonism and, 1281 Petrarch and, 1402–1403, 1406, 1408, 1412 utopia and, 1938 Vico and, 1983 Augustinians, 415 Augustinus (Janse´nius), 784 Aulalaria (Plautus), 814 Aulenti, Gae, 73 Aurea Roma (Lovatelli, E.), 1660 Aurispa, Giovanni, 716 humanism and, 953 Aurum tellus (Ledda), 1006 Ausonio (Belgioioso), 151 Austen, Jane, 124 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 Aut-Aut Antonioni in, 60 Giudici, G., and, 859 Auto da fe´: cronache in due tempi (Montale), 1213 Auto sacramental, 749 Autobiografia (Petito), 1400 Autobiografia (Saba), 1643 Autobiografia (Vico), 1429 Autobiografia scientifica (Rossi, Aldo), 72 Autobiografie altrui: Poetiche a posteriori (Tabucchi), 1817 Autobiography, 106–109 Autobiography (Franklin), 48 Autobiography (Zeffirelli), 2046 Autobiologia (Giudici, G.), 859 Autocrisi (Prosperi, P.), 1719 Automatic writing, 597 Autonomia ed eteronomia dell’arte (Anceschi), 1063 Autonomia Operaia, Balestrini and, 115 Autore al lettore (Lalli), 932 Autoritratto (Lonzi), 1075 Autoritratto di gruppo (Passerini, L.), 1513 Autunnale Baroccco (Ripellino), 1340 Autunno caldo (hot autumn), 1862 ‘‘Autunno romantico’’ (Marchesa Colombi), 1148 Auzzas, Ginetta, 2035

I10

Avalle, Silvio D’Arco, 927, 1428 as critic, 1063 Avanguardia socialista, 1769 Avanspettacolo, 1950 Avant la lettre, 435 Avant-garde, 168 Avant-garde theater, Benigni and, 176 Avanti!, 887, 979 Sarfatti and, 1681 Avanti! (Wilder, B.), 828 Avanti popo (Camon), 357 Avarchide (Amananni), 668 Averlino, Antonio. See Filarete Averroes, 420, 564, 780 Averroism, 1402 Aversa, Tommaso, 1338 Avery, Tex, 50 ‘‘Avete ‘n vo’ li fior’ e la verdura’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 641 Avicenna, 780, 1281 Avvampato, 2 Avvenire, Cerami and, 448 Avvento notturno (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083, 2031 ‘‘Avventura settimanale’’ (Jahier), 973 Avventure complete della signorina Richmond, Le (Balestrini), 114 Avventure del Barone di Nicastro, Le (Nievo), 1290 Avventure di Guizzardi, Le (Celati), 434 Avventure di Pinocchio, Le (Collodi), 51, 462, 484, 486–487 Avventure di Saffo poetessa di Mitilene, Le (Verri, A.), 1978 Avventure in Africa (Celati), 435 Avventurose disavventure, Le (Basile), 136 Avvertimenti della lingua sopra ‘l Decamerone (Salviati), 1668 Avvertimenti Morali (Muzio), 1264 Axel (l’Isle-Adam), 580 Axur re d’Ormus (Da Ponte), 567 Ay, Carmela! (Sinisterra), 936 Azione Cattolica, 678 Azpilcueta, Martin de, 935

B Ba, Saidou Moussa, 1200 ‘‘Babas del diablo, La’’ (Corta´zar), 936 Babel, Isaac, 1634 Babeuf, Franc¸ois-Noe¨l, 1769 Babilonia (Galdieri), 584 Baccanale in lode de’ vini della Toscana (Redi), 1558 Bacchae (Euripides), 73 Bacchelli, Riccardo, 111–114, 161, 430, 1858 Cardarelli and, 387 historical novels and, 940 music and, 1257 Valeri and, 1943 World War II and, 2031 Baccini, Ida, 464, 484 Bacco (Buonarroti, M.), 329 Bacco in Toscana (Redi), 757, 1558 Bach (Loi), 1071 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1191 Bachmann, Gideon, 1373 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 827 Bachtin, Michail, 1634 Bacio di Guya, Il (Peverelli), 1601 Bacio di Lesbia, Il (Panzini), 1343 Bacio d’una morta, Il (Invernizio, C.), 961

INDEX ‘‘Bacio, Un’’ (Corazzini), 512 ‘‘Backyard’’ (Prima), 965 Bacon, Francis, 199 Enlightenment and, 662 Bacon, Roger, 1704, 1986 Verri, P., and, 1979 Vico and, 1982, 1983, 1984 Badaracco, Elvira, 707 Badoaro, Giacomo, 1311 Badoer, Federico, 3 Baeri, Emma, 707 Baez, Joan, 49 Baffo, Giorgio, 1960 Baglione, Giovanni, 231 ‘‘Bagni popolari’’ (Solmi), 1778 Bagnoregio, Bonaventura da, 1938 Bagutta, 1067 Baj, Enrico, 1671 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 820 Bakunin, Bakunin, 111 Balbo, Cesare, 232, 417, 1922 D’Azeglio, M., and, 573 Risorgimento and, 1591 Balbo, Italo, 718 Balbo, Laura, 706 Balbo, Prospero, 1922 Baldacci, Gaetano, 980 Baldacci, Luigi, 6, 1173 Pascoli and, 1359 Baldelli, Ignazio, 1315 Baldi, Bernardino, 231 Baldi, Guido, 1628 Baldini, Antonio, 430 Cardarelli and, 387 Baldini, Gabriele, 843 Baldinucci, Filippo, 188–189, 231 Baldovino, Angelo, 1452 Balduino, Armando, 2036 Baldus (Folengo), 669, 748, 757, 933, 1002 Baleni, Giovanni, 1652 Balestrini, Nanni, 47, 114–116, 985. See also Neo-avant-garde Campo, R., and, 372 Communism and, 502 in Milan, 1206 Morante and, 1228 as neo-avant-garde, 371, 1275 Ottieri and, 1326 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1476 terrorism and, 1863 Balia, La (Pirandello), 158 Balia, La (Tansillo), 1822 Balilla andarono a Salo`, I (Mazzantini), 2032 Balilla, Il, 464, 788 Balla, Giacoma, 71–72, 793, 1204, 1922, 2004 futurism and, 792 Ballad of the Ancient Mariner, The (Coleridge), 711 Ballando ballando (Scola), 1722 Ballata, 421 ‘‘Ballata’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 Ballata del mare salato, Una (Pratt), 790 Ballata di Rudi, La (Pagliarani), 1332 Ballata levantina (Cialente), 467 Ballata per Lima (Piegai), 1720 Ballate, 642

Ballate (Carrer), 398 Ballate della signorina Richmond, Le (Balestrini), 114 Ballestra, Silvia, 371, 374 with Cannibali, 373 Tondelli and, 1886 Ballet d’action, 538 ‘‘Balletto delle muse, Il’’ (Marino), 1161 Ballo a Fontanigorda (Caproni), 379 Ballo dei sapienti, Il (Corti), 513 Balloons, hot-air, 1853 Balocchi, Vincenzo, 1434 Balordo (good for nothing), 1863 Balsamella (Artusi), 104 Balzac, Honore` de, 150, 215, 2037 Boccaccio and, 250 Capuana and, 382 Corazzini and, 511 fashion and, 694 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Manzoni and, 1136 Pratolini and, 1494 Rasy and, 1549 in Venice, 1961 Balzerani, Barbara, 1865 Bambagliuoli, Graziolo de’, 276 Bambalona, La (De Ce´spedes), 582 Bambina, La (Duranti), 650 Bambini ci guardano, I (De Sica), 281, 622, 627, 2042 Bambini delle rose, I (Melliti), 1202 Bambu´ Cinema & TV, 1206 Banana Republic, 1785 Bancarella, 1067 Bancarotta della scienza, La (Graf), 886 Banchetti, composizioni di vivande et apparecchio generale (Messisburgo), 757 Banda dei sospiri, La (Celati), 435 Bandello a la Diva Violante Borromea Fiorentina Salute (Bandello, M.), 117 Bandello entre l’histoire et l’ecriture (Fiorato), 118 Bandello, Matteo, 116–123 censorship of, 444 in Genoa, 816 homosexuality and, 1031 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 novella and, 1298 Bandello, Vincenzo, 116 Bandiera, Alessandro, 1349 Bandiera, Attilio and Emilio, 1846 Bandiera bianca (Battiato), 1785 Bandiera, La (Pascoli), 1361 Bandiera Nera (Tobino), 1875 Bandinelli, Baccio, 442 Bandinelli, Ranuccio Bianchi, 100 Banditi a Partinico (Dolci), 644 Banfi, Antonio, 1429 Boine and, 271 Pozzi, A., and, 1488 Rebora and, 1556 Banotti, Elvira, 705 Banquet, The. See Convivio (Dante) Banti, Anna, 31, 123–126 Communism and, 502 Resistance and, 1579 Banville, The`odore de, decadentismo and, 580

I11

INDEX Bar sotto il mare, Il (Benni), 179 Bar Sport (Benni), 179 Baracca 15C (Tecchi), 2029 Baracca, Francesco, 1792 Baracca Rossa (Pea), 1390 Baraonda, La (Rovetta), 1631 Baratotti, Galerana. See Tarabotti, Arcangela Baratti, Ottavio, 1432 Baratto, Mario, 866 Barba, Eugenio, 168, 500, 1796 Barbagallo, Angelo, 1241 Barbara (Capriolo), 377 Barbara, Mameli, 51 Barbarani, Berto, 1853 Barbarigo, Pietro Francesco, 1505 Barbaro, Daniele, 1789 Barbaro, Ermolao, 127–128 Mirandola and, 1439 Barbaro, Francesco, 303 Barbaro, Iosafa, 1906 Barbaro`: Le lagrime del prossimo, I (Rovetta), 1631 Barbaro, Umberto, 471, 724, 1728 cinema and, 471 Cinema and, 1284 De Santis and, 619, 620 Longhi and, 1073 neorealism and, 1283 Visconti, L., and, 1998 Barbella, Costantino, 540 Barbera e Champagne (Gaber), 1783 Barberino, Andrea da, 667, 1504, 1792 Barberino, Francesco da, 1296 Rustico di Filippo and, 1636 Ba`rberi-Squarotti, Giorgio, 96, 270 Barbi, Michele, 302 Barbiera, Raffaello, 1659 Barbiere di Siviglia (Paisello), 1259, 1312 Barbieri, Gaetano, 454, 1259 Barbieri, Giovanni Maria, 1753 Barbieri, Niccolo´, 498, 1921 Barbuto, Il. See Rustico di Filippo Barca, La (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083 Bardi, Giovanna, music and, 1255 Bardi, Roberto dei, 1415 Bardo della Selva Nera, Il (Monti, V.), 1219, 1279 Baretti, Giuseppe, 129–131, 277, 497, 982, 1060, 1908, 1922, 1979. See also Enlightenment Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Enlightenment and, 664 Gozzi, C., and, 882 historiography and, 944 travel literature and, 1908 in Venice, 1960 Baretti, Il, 470, 984 Gobetti, P., and, 863 Solmi and, 1779 Bargagli, Girolamo, novella and, 1297 Bargellini, Piero, Betocchi and, 204 Bargello, Il Bilenchi and, 228 Vittorini and, 2005 Baricco, Alessandro, 49, 131–133, 473, 1067, 1791, 1891, 1923 Stampa, La and, 1261 Barile, Antonio, Lagorio and, 991

I12

Barilli, Bruno, 1261 Longhi and, 1073 in Rome, 1607 Ronda, La and, 785 Barilli, Gianni Rossi, 1033, 1198 Barilli, Renato, 101, 279, 430, 785 Calvino and, 345 Cannibali and, 373 Svevo and, 1808 Barks, Carl, 788 Barlaam and Josaphat, 1295 Barlumi di storia (Raboni), 1538 Ba`rnabo delle montagne (Buzzati), 336 Barnes, Djuna, Montale and, 1211 Barney’s Version (Richler), 49 Barnum: Cronache del Grande Show (Baricco), 132 Barnum 2: Altre cronache del Grande Show (Baricco), 132 Barocchi, Paolo, 99 Barocchismo, 1162 Barocco e Novecento (Anceschi), 1059 Barocco in prosa e poesia (Getto), 1059 Barolini, Helen, 964 Barolo, Ottavio Falletti di, 1922 Baron, Hans, 951 Barone rampante, Il (Calvino), 343, 347 Baronio, Cesare, 1568 Baroque, 784. See also Mannerism and Baroque Alfieri, V., and, 19 Algarotti and, 26 architecture, 71 art, 11 Bartoli and, 134 Basile and, 137 Bernini, G., and, 188 books of, 292 Della Casa and, 602 Eco and, 659 Giovio and, 854 Gozzano and, 877 Maggi and, 1104 Manganelli and, 1124 Manzini and, 1131 meraviglia and, 1162–1163 Muratori and, 819 opera and, 1311 Redi and, 1558 in Rome, 1604 Spanish, 936 Tesauro and, 1921 travel literature and, 1905 Vico and, 1982, 1984 Barozzi, Jacopo, 11000, 11001 Barratta, Enrico, 1432 Barre´, Raoul, 50 Barrili, Antongiulio, 816 Barrymore, Ethel, 172 Barrymore, John, 172 Barrymore, Lionel, 172 Barsottini, Geremia, 388 Bartali, Gino, 1792 Bartas, Guillaume Du, 1835 Ba`rtelemi all’ombra (Bompiani), 282 Bartezzaghi, Stefano, 785 Barth, John, 345, 349

INDEX Barthes, Roland, 62, 345, 658, 671, 725, 726, 785 fashion and, 695 Leonetti and, 1016 in Nouvelle critique, 820 Bartoli, Cosimo, 840 Bartoli, Daniello, 133–136, 231, 1568 Ferrara and, 717 Redi and, 1558 Bartolini, Luigi, 627 Bartolini, Miriam, 1882 Bartolisti, 11 Bartolomei, Gabriella, 1317 Bartolomeis, Francesco De, 462 Baruffe chiozzote, Le (Goldoni), 866, 870, 1760 Baruffino Buffone (Vancini and Felisatti), 122 Barzini, Luigi, 432 World War I and, 2030 Basaglia, Franco, 1874 Basetti, Atanasio, 1479 Basevi, Abramo, 1259 Bas-Fonds, Le (Renoir), 1994 Basi e bote (Boito, A.), 273 Basil, Saint, 312 Basile, Giambattista, 136–138, 463, 881, 1128, 1315, 1480, 1560. See also Novella Decameron (Boccaccio) and, 247 Imbriani and, 959 Moscato and, 1247 in Naples, 1269 novella and, 1298 Basilico, Gabriele, 1435 Basilischi, I (Wertmu¨ller), 701, 2021 Bassani, Giorgio, 108, 109, 139–143, 472, 717 Bertolucci, A., and, 195 Communism and, 502 Eco and, 661 in Ferrara, 718 on Holocaust, 948 homosexuality and, 1033 Noventa and, 1301 Piccolo and, 1435 Ragazzoni and, 1539 Tomas di Lampedusa and, 1878 in Venice, 1960 World War II and, 2031 Bassi (poor living quarters), 1552 Bassi, Laura, 1712 Basso, Lelio, 1770 Bassolino, Antonio, 1268 Bassvilliana (Monti, V.), 1218 Bastardo, Il (Banti), 125 Bastardo ovvero gli amori, i travagli e le lacrime di Don Emanuel di Savoia, Il (Lagorio), 992 Bataille de Tripoli, La (Marinetti), 2029 Bataille, George, 2037 Bateau ivre (Baudelaire), 1089 Batines, Paul Colomb de, 1516, 1653 Batoni, Pompeo, 1189 Batrachomyomachy (Homer), 202 Leopardi and, 202 Batracomiomachia, 932, 1843 Battaglia + Peso + Odore (Marinetti), 2029 Battaglia delle belle donne di Firenze con le vecchie, La (Sacchetti, F.), 1648

Battaglia di Algeri, La (Pontecorvo), 1474, 1475 Battaglia di Anghiari, La (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1009 Battaglia di Benevento, La (Guerrazzi, F.), 909, 938, 1590 Battaglia di Legnano, La (Verdi), 1590 Battaglia, Giacinto, 1259 Battaglia, Roberto, 1579 Battaglia, Salvatore, 1063 Battaglia soda, La (Bianciardi), 219 Battaglie di Hieronimo Mutio Giustinopolitano per difesa della italica lingua (Muzio), 1264 Battaglini, Raffaella, Manfridi and, 1122 Battarra, Giovanni, 1478 Battello a vapore, Il, 464 Battiato, Franco, 1785 Batticuore (Camerini), 351 Battiferra, Casandra, 144 Battiferra degli Ammannati, Laura, 143–145 Petrarchism and, 1421 Battisti, Eugenio, 63, 100 Battisti, Lucio, 1783 Battleship Potemkin, The (Eisenstein), 1877 Baudelaire, Charles, 390, 452, 687, 1089, 1812 Cardarelli and, 385 fashion and, 695 lyric poetry and, 1088 Montale and, 1213 Moscato and, 1247 Praga, E., and, 1490 Raboni and, 1537 scapigliatura and, 1697 Ungaretti and, 1928 Baudolino (Eco), 659, 940 Bay Is Not Naples, The. See Mare non bagna Napoli, Il (Ortese) Bazin, Andre´, 627, 1284 Fellini and, 702 Bazlen, Roberto, 342 Campo, C., and, 369 Del Giudice and, 599 Bazzero, Ambrogio, 1563 Bazzoni, Giambattista, 938 Beat movement, 49, 219 Beata Vergine Incoronata (Muzio), 1264 Beati anni del castigo, I (Jaeggy), 971 Beati Paoli, I (Natoli), 1339 Beatrice Cenci (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Beatrice Cenci (Niccolini, G.), 1289 Beaufort, Henry, 305 Beaufort, Jacques-Antoine, 20 Beaumont, Leprince de, 484 Beauvoir, Simone De, 582 Bebe` (Hennequin), 1700 Beca di Dicomano, La (Pulci, Luigi), 1518 Beccadelli, Antonio, 1031, 1437 Pontano and, 1472 Beccari, Guadalberta Alaide, 979, 1147, 1591 Beccaria, Cesare, 4, 145–148, 784, 1060 Enlightenment and, 663, 664, 1979 historiography and, 944 Parini, G., and, 1349 utopia and, 1939 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Becchetti, Piero, 1434 Becchi, Gentile, 1179

I13

INDEX Beck, Julian, 169, 1368 Beckett, Samuel, 47, 738, 1795, 1825 Buzzati and, 339 Camilleri and, 356 Debenedetti and, 577 Morandini and, 1221 Petrignani and, 1422 Valduga and, 1941 Becque, Henri, 1492 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 481, 1191, 1256 Beffa ( joke), 222, 439 Bel composto (beautiful composition), 189 Bel paese, Il (Erba, L.), 674 Bel Paese, Il (Stoppani), 464 Belcari, Feo, 148–150, 231, 1651, 1653. See also Sacra rappresentazione (mystery play) Tornabuoni and, 1888 Belfagor, 219, 987 Belgioioso, Cristina di, (Alberica Trivulzio) 150–152, 1591 Bella addormentata, La (Rosso), 1624 Bella addormentatanel bosco, La (Maraini), 1143 ‘‘Bella ciao,’’ 1581 Bella e dotta maniera, una (a beautiful and learned manner), 11001 Bella estate, La (Pavese), 1382 Bella, Giano della, 1991 Bella giornata (beautiful day), 990 Bella mano, La (Conti), 1675 Bella mbriana (Daniele), 1786 Bella pignotta, La (De Marchi, E.), 611 Bellacoglienza (Dante), 728 Bell’Antonio, Il (Brancati), 311 Bellarmino, Roberto, 1427 Bellavita (Pirandello), 1451, 2014 Bellay, Joachim Du, 1789 Petrarch and, 1413 Belle bandiere, Le (Pasolini), 1369 ´ poque per le scuole (Arbasino), 63 Belle E Belle lettere e i contributi espressivi delle techniche, Le (Gadda), 795 Belle ma povere (Risi, D.), 1584 Belle sconosciuta, Le (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Belleforest, Francois de, 122 Belleperche, Pierre de, 477 Belleza dell’universo, La (Monti, V.), 1605 Bellezza, Dario, 152–154 Bellezza della velocita` (beauty of speed), 792 Belli e perversi Under 25, 2, 1886 Belli, Giuseppe Gioachino, 154–157, 202, 1561, 1605 Pascarella and, 1357 Pierro and, 1444 Romanticism and, 1598 Trilussa and, 1912 Belli, Vincenzo, 1357 Bellincioni, Bernardo, 1380 Bellini e Meyerbeer o la musica drammatica secondo le scuole italiane e germanico-francese (Rovani), 1260 Bellini, Gentile, 1961 Bellini, Lorenzo, 568 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Bellini, Pietro Bagiola, 979 Bellini, Vincenzo, 1051, 1313 Bellissima (Visconti, L.), 1730, 1995, 2042, 2045 Bellissime canzoni (beautiful canzoni), 326 Bello relativo (relative beauty), 1278

I14

Bellocchio, Marco, 158–160, 473, 1865 Cavani and, 425 Cerami and, 448 Bellonci, Maria Villavecchia, 160–162 Bellori, Giovan Pietro, 2002 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Bellow, Saul, 219 Belmoro (Alvaro), 29, 1939 Belo, Francesco, 1604 Belpoliti, Marco, 1040 Belta`, La (Zanzotto), 2038 Bembo, Bernardo, 163 Borghini, V., and, 301 Della Casa and, 600 Bembo, Bonifacio, 450 Fedele and, 698 Bembo, Pietro, 163–168, 721, 1001–1002, 1058, 1299, 1408, 1561, 1562, 1904 Aretino and, 74 Ariosto and, 80, 84, 94 Basile and, 137 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Berni and, 187 Boccaccio and, 81 capitolo and, 778 Castiglione and, 409, 410, 412 Dionisotti and, 1056 Firenzuola and, 730 Ga`mbara and, 807 Giambullari, P., and, 840 Grazzini and, 895 Italian language and, 968 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Matraini and, 1172 music and, 1255 Neoplatonism and, 1282 Petrarch and, 81, 1413, 1420 petrarchismo of, 1160 Salviati and, 1668 Tansillo and, 1821, 1822 Tasso, B., and, 1832 Tasso, T., and, 1834 Trissino and, 1917 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Tuscan and, 1054 Varchi and, 1948 ‘‘Ben fu, temprando il ciel tuo vivo raggio’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 327 ‘‘Ben venga maggio’’ (Poliziano), 1465 Benacus (Bembo, P.), 164 Benandanti, I (Ginzburg, C.), 54 Benassi, Memo, 1544 Benasutti, Marion, 964 Benci, Tommaso, 720 Bencivenga, Edoardo, 625 Benco, Enea Silvio, 1910 Bendidio, Lucrezia, 1834 Bene, Carmelo, 47, 168–171, 172, 1316, 1796 Benedetta in Guysterland (Rimanelli), 964 ‘‘Benedetta sia l’estate’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Benedetti, Aldo De, 693, 1727 Benedetti, Arrigo, 980 Benedetti, Carlo De, 981 Benedetti, Jacopo de’. See Iacopone da Todi Benedetti, Mario, 936

INDEX Benedetto, Luigi Foscolo, 1922 Benedetto, Renato di, music and, 1256 Benedict XIV (Pope), 1101 Muratori and, 1252 Benedictines, 415 Folengo and, 748 ‘‘Benedictio fratri Leoni data’’ (Francis of Assisi), 773, 774 Beneficio (favor), 518 Benelli, Sem, 168, 171–174 Beni, Paolo, 174–176, 1562, 1935 Benigni, Roberto, 176–178, 473, 948, 1730 Cerami and, 448 Tornatore and, 1889 Benincasa, Caterina. See Catherine of Siena Benini, Ferruccio, 194 Chiarelli and, 459 Benivieni, Girolamo, Neoplatonism and, 1282 Benjamin, Walter, 342, 1277, 1314, 1937 fashion and, 697 Fortini and, 760 La Capria and, 989 Benn, Gottfried, 827 Benni, Stefano, 179–180, 785, 1719 Benso, Camillo, 1175, 1591 Bentham, Jeremy, 146 Bentivoglio, Ercole, Terracina and, 1861 Benucci, Alessandra, 86 Benveniste, E´mile, 785, 1511 Benvenuti, Antonia Tissoni, 267, 268 Benvenuto Cellini (Berlioz), 437 Benzoni, Girolamo, 1907 Beolco, Angelo. See Ruzzante, Il Beoni, I (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Berardinelli, Alfonso, 858 Valduga and, 1941 Berardinis, Leo De, 47 Berbezilh, Rigaut de, 572, 1753 Berchet, Giovanni, 181–182, 826, 935, 937, 1061, 1288, 1479 Imbriani and, 959 Porta, C., and, 1485, 1487 Risorgimento and, 1590 Romanticism and, 1596–1597, 1597 Stae¨l and, 1902 Berecche e la guerra (Pirandello), 2028 Berenson, Bernard, 99, 737 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Longhi and, 1073 Berezin, Mabel, 690 Bergalli, Luisa, 883 Stampa and, 1799 Bergamina, Cecilia Gallerana e, 117 Bergamini, Alberto, 979 Bergen, Candice, 2022 Bergman, Ingrid, 1619 Bergson, Henri, 359, 791, 983, 1346 Prezzolini and, 1502 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Ungaretti and, 1928 Berio, Luciano, 1257 Sanguineti and, 1669 Berkoff, Steven, 1121 Berlinghieri (Gozzi, C.), 880 Berlinguer, Enrico, 199 Berlinguer ti voglio bene (Benigni), 176

Berlioz, Hector, 437 Berlusconi, Silvio, 432, 446, 981 in Milan, 1206–1207 television and, 1859 Bermani, Benedetto, 1259 Bernard, Claude Capuana and, 382 Zola and, 1972 Bernard, Ne´ Carlo. See Bernari, Carlo Bernardi, Francesco, 1312 Bernardini, Piero, 465 Bernardinis, Leo De, 1269 Bernardino, Saint, 1567 Bernari, Carlo, 183–185, 1854 in Naples, 1268 Berneri, Giuseppe, 1605 Bernesco, 186 Bernhard, Ernest, 1123 Bernhard, Thomas, 827 Bernhardt, Sarah, 172, 652 Bernhardt, Thomas, 1796 Berni, Francesco, 186–188, 395. See also Bembo, Pietro; Petrarchism Della Casa and, 600 Firenzuola and, 730 Gozzi, C., and, 880 Orlando innamorato (Bioardo) and, 268 Tansillo and, 1822 Bernini, Franco, 1730, 1864 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 71, 188–190. See also Architecture, Literature of in Rome, 1604 Beroaldo, Filippo, Jr., 277 Beroaldo, Filippo, Sr., 277 Berretto a sonagli, Il (Pirandello), 586, 1452 Bersezio, Vittorio, 1922 Bersuire, Pierre, 1408 Petrarch and, 1415 Bertacchi, Giovanni, 1436 Berte, 666 Bertelli, Carlo, 1434 Berthomieu, Andre´, 1775 Bertinazzi, Carlo, 498 Bertini, Francesca, 635, 1329 Berto, Giuseppe, 190–193, 473. See also Neorealism Ottieri and, 1327 Bertola, Aurelio de’ Giorgi, 826, 1446 Bertolazzi, Carlo, 193–194 scapigliati and, 1204 Bertoldino (Croce, G.), 277 Bertoldo (Croce, G.), 277 Bertoldo, Il, Guareschi and, 899–900 Bertoli, Ubaldo, 1580 Bertolini, Francesco, 469 Bertolucci, Attilio, 195–197, 379 Bellezza and, 152 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 31, 197–201, 1014, 1859 Benigni and, 176 Cavani and, 425 Moravia and, 1231 Pasolini and, 1371 Bertolucci, Franco, 1481 Bertolucci, Giusseppe, 176, 177, 199, 1864 Cerami and, 448 Bertolucci secondo il cinema (Amelio), 31

I15

INDEX Besomi, Ottavio, 1160, 1161, 1843 Marino and, 1163 Besozzi, Tommaso, 489 Bessarion, Basil, 2, 1048, 1961 humanism and, 953 Bessi, Rossella, 1521 Besso Sense (Pulci, Luigi), 1518 Bestemmie, canzonacce e parolaccie (De Marchi, E.), 611 ‘‘Bestia, I’’ (Capuana), 383 Bestiari, 1345 Bestiaries, 201–203. See also Anthropology, Literature of Bestiario (Alberti, Leon), 70 Bestiario moralizzato, 201, 202 Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio, 201 Bestiario poetico (Loria), 203 Bestiario politico, 201 Bestie (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Bestie del 902 (Palazzeschi), 203 Bestie del novecento, Le (Palazzeschi), 1334 Beto, Michele, 450 Betocchi, Carlo, 204–205 Caproni and, 379 Pierro and, 1444 Rebora and, 1555 Turoldo and, 1924 Betrothed, The. See Promessi sposi, I (Manzoni, A.) Bettelheim, Bruno, 2022 Betteloni, Vittorio, 1490 Betti, Laura, 32, 69 Pasolini and, 1369 Betti, Ugo, 206–212, 471, 1569 De Filippo, E., and, 585 Tecchi and, 1851 World War I and, 2029 Bettinelli, Saverio, 212–214, 2002 Algarotti and, 27 Enlightenment and, 664 Bettini, Sergio, 100 Bettiza, Enzo, 1911 Bevilacqua, Alberto, 214–216 Bevilacqua, Piero, 1532 Bevione, Giuseppe, 980 Bezzola, Guido, 1434 Biafra (Parise, Goffredo), 1354 Biagi, Enzo, 233, 432, 981 Biagi, Guido, 484 Bianca (Moretti, N.), 1240 Biancamano, Humbert, 1921 Bianchi (White), 736 ‘‘Bianchi Geom. Comm. Gino.’’ (Jahier), 973 Bianchi, Matteo B., 1033 Bianchini, Angela, 216–218, 1802 Bianciardi, Luciano, 218–220 Cassola and, 404 Communism and, 502 Bianco e nero, 471, 1284 Bianco veliero, Il (Calvino), 343 Biancolelli, Domenico, 498 Biase, Carmine Di, 387 Biasin, Gian Paolo, 795 Biason, Renzo, 489 Bibbia napoletana (Bernari), 184 Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da, 89, 220–222, 1639 Trissino and, 1917

I16

Bibbiena, Ferdinando Maria Galli, 2002 Bibbiena, Il. See Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da Bible Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 De Luca, E., and, 609 Italian translation of, 1567 Masino and, 1168 vulgarization of, 444 Biblia en lengua espan˜ola (Usque), 717 Biblioclastia (pyre of books), 444 Biblioteca Ambrosiana, 289, 1048, 1251 ‘‘Biblioteca classica italiana di scienze, letter ed arti’’ (Carrer), 398 Biblioteca dei miei ragazzi, 464 Biblioteca del Verri, 1275 Biblioteca di Documentazione Pedagogica, 465 Biblioteca Internazionale per Ragazzi De Amicis, 465 Biblioteca italiana, La, 181, 982, 1060, 1219, 1596 Giordani, Pietro, and, 850 Biblioteca Marciana (Cellini), 439 Biblioteca modenese, 1873 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 1961 Biblioteca Popolare, 1506 Biblioteca Reale, 1048 Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli (BUR), 1507 Biblioteche Nazionali, 1048 Bichsel, Peter, 1318 Bicicletta, La (Loy, R.), 1077 Bicycle Thief, The. See Ladri di biciclette (De Sica) Bidone, Il (Fellini), 701 Biennale Musica, La, 1261 Biennio Rosso, 888 Biere du pecheur, La (Landolfi), 997 Biffi, Giovan Battista, Enlightenment and, 664 BI¨FZF+18, Simultaneita`, Chimismi lirici (Soffici), 1772 Bigazzi, Luca, Archibuga and, 68 Bigiaretti, Libero, 223–225 Biglietti agli amici (Tondelli), 1886 ‘‘Biglietto falso, Il’’ (Moravia), 1235 Bigongiari, Piero, 225–227 Campo, C., and, 368 Bildungsroman, 132 Busi and, 332 Bilenchi, Romano, 227–229, 1854 Resistance and, 1580 Vittorini and, 2005 Billanovich, Giuseppe, 1414 Bilora (Ruzzante), 1638 Bimbi, Franca, 706 ‘‘Bimbo nel viale, Il’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Bimestre, 153 Bindi, Umberto, 818, 1782 Bindoni, Francesco, 638, 1505 Bini, Alfredo, 1371 Bini, Daniela, 1195 Binni, Walter, 20, 1065, 1560 as critic, 1062 decadentismo and, 580 Leopardi and, 1018 Biografia del figlio cambiato (Camilleri), 233 Biografia del viaggiatori italiani colla bibliografia delle loro opera (San Filippo), 1908 Biography, 230–234 Bioletto, Angelo, 51 Biondina, La (Praga, M.), 1493

INDEX Biondo era e bello (Tobino), 1875 Biondo, Flavio, 234–236 historiography and, 942 humanism and, 952 Renaissance and, 1571 travel literature and, 1906 Bios, 230 Birke, Adolf M., 516 Birraio di Preston, Il (Camilleri), 354, 355 Birth of Tragedy, The (Nietzsche), 1850 Bis, Ernesta, 150 Bisbidis (Sanguineti), 1671 Biscardi, Serafino, 893 Bishop, Elizabeth, Tarozzi and, 1829 Bisicchia, Andrea, 636 Bisio, Claudio, 1663, 1664 Bisticci, Vespasiano da, 231 historiography and, 941 Bixio, Cesare, 351, 621 Bizzoni, Achille, 1699 Black Decameron, The (Frobenius), 250 Blackton, James S., 50 Blado, Antonio, 1505 Blanc, Louis, 1176 Blanchot, Maurice, 452 Leonetti and, 1016 Blanco, Ignacio Matte, 1511 Blanco, Matte, 1941 Blasco, Teresa, 146 Blasetti, Alessandro, 236–239, 582, 828 Soldati and, 1775 television and, 1859 Zavattini and, 2042 Blixen, Karen, Petrignani and, 1423 Blob, 1859 Blocco storico (historic bloc), 889 Blockbuster Video, 1860 Blok, Aleksa`ndr, 499, 882, 1634 Blondel, Henriette, 1133 Blood on the Dining-Room Floor (Stein), 972 Bloom, Harold, 1513, 1707 Blow Up (Antonioni), 56, 58, 936 Bo, Carlo, 183, 936, 985, 1530 Betocchi and, 204 Hermeticism and, 930 Marin and, 1150 Rebora and, 1555 Volponi and, 2016 Boasistuau, Pierre, 122 Bobbio, Norberto, 1428, 1770 Boca de infierno (mouth from hell), 263 Bocca del lupo, La (Zena), 816 Bocca di rosa (Andre´), 1783 Bocca, Giorgio, 233 Boccaccio ‘70 (Visconti, L.), 1995 ‘‘Boccaccio a Napoli’’ (Rea), 1553 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 45, 107, 137, 167, 221, 239–255, 255, 407, 420, 490, 667, 783, 1000, 1299, 1415, 1430, 1437, 1479, 1561, 1566–1567, 1904 Bandello, M., and, 118–119, 121 Basile and, 463 Beni and, 174 biography and, 230 Borghini, R., and, 298

Borghini, V., and, 301 Bruni, L., and, 312 Busi and, 333 Carducci and, 388 Cereta and, 449 Cino da Pistoia and, 475 Comedia (Dante) and, 559–560 Dolce and, 638 Fenoglio and, 712 Firenzuola and, 730 in Florence, 736 in Genoa, 816 historiography and, 941 homosexuality and, 1031 humanism and, 952 Malaparte and, 1114 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Metamorphoses (Apuleius) and, 202 music and, 1254 novella and, 1296 novellas of, 118 Passavanti and, 1378 pastoral genre and, 1379 Petrarch and, 1406, 1409, 1412 Rea and, 1552 Renaissance and, 1571 Salutati and, 1661, 1662 Salviati and, 1668 Sercambi and, 1736–1737 Soffici and, 1772 Tommaseo and, 1884 Tornabuoni and, 1887 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1920 Tuscan and, 1915 in Venice, 1960 Boccalini, Traiano, 262–263 Terracina and, 1862 ‘‘Boccanera’’ (Palazzeschi), 1333 Boccia, Maria Luisa, 2025 Boccioni, Umberto, 792, 793, 1204, 1853, 2004 photography and, 1433 Boccioni’s Fist—Lines of Force (Balla), 793 Bodin, Jean, 1715 Bodini, Vittorio, 936 Bodoni, Giambattista, 292–293 Body in the Mirror, The (Bertolucci, B.), 198 Boethius, 240, 561, 1405, 1407, 1426, 1429 Neoplatonism and, 1281 Petrarch and, 1415 Valla, L., and, 1945 Varchi and, 1949 Boetti, Anne, 1548 Bogarde, Dirk, 425 Boh (Moravia), 1231 Bohe`me, La (Puccini), 838 Bohe´me, La (Giacosa and Illica), 1313 Bohe´miens, 1697 Boiardo e altri studi cavallereschi (Dionisotti), 665 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 82, 186, 263–267, 518, 668, 783. See also Ariosto, Ludovico; Epic Ariosto and, 91 Basile and, 136 Celati and, 435

I17

INDEX Boiardo, Matteo Maria (cont.) Ferrara and, 716 homosexuality and, 1032 Panzini and, 1342 pastoral genre and, 1380 Petrarch and, 1413 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1920 utopia and, 1938 Boileau, Nicolas, 784 Boine, Giovanni, 269–271 Aleramo and, 15 as critic, 1062 Debenedetti and, 577 Sbarbaro and, 1694 Boito, Arrigo, 47, 271–274, 653, 685, 826, 1260 decadentismo and, 579 Duse and, 652 Faldella and, 680, 1698 fantastic and, 685, 686 libretto and, 1051 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 music and, 1254, 1256 Praga, E., and, 1490 in Rome, 1606 scapigliatura and, 1698 Boito, Camillo, 71, 274–276, 580, 1995, 2003 epistolary novel and, 670 fantastic and, 686 Boldrini, Maurizio, 1316 Bolero Film, 769 Bolgnini, Mauro, 311 Bolkan, Florinda, 624 Bo¨ll, Heinrich, 827 ‘‘Bolla de sapone’’ (Trilussa), 1913 Bolle di sapone (Sbarbaro), 1695 Bollore, 23–24 Bologna (city), 276–280 Bologna, Corrado, 1316 Bologna, Ferdinando, 99, 101 Bologna, Onesto da, 276 Bolognesi, Cecilia, 1338 Bolognini, Mauro, 280–282, 829 censorship of, 446 Pasolini and, 1371 Bolzoni, Lina, 3 Bomboniera (Govoni), 874 Bompiani, Ginevra, 282–284 Bona, Mary Jo, 966 Bonacchi, Gabriella, 2025 Bonaffini, Luigi, 359 Bonaiuto, Anna, 1121 Bonanza, 1858 Bonaparte, Giuseppe, 1267 Bonardi, Luigi. See Malerba, Luigi Bonaventure, Saint, 1418, 1426, 1429, 1565, 1703 Bonaviri, Giuseppe, 284–285 Bonciani, Francesco, 1297 Bondo, Flavio, in Rome, 1604 Bonelli, Gianluigi, 789 Bonfantini, Mario, 1580 Bonghi, Ruggero, 1066, 1560, 1659 Bongi, Salvatore, 1736 Bongiorno, Mike, 769 Boni, Ada, 759

I18

Bonifacio VIII (Pope), 504, 550, 564, 956 satire on, 742 Bonifica libaria (book cleansing), 444 Bo¨ninger, Lorenz, 1519 Bonino, Davico, 434 Bonna`, Febo, 1834 Bonnaire, Sandrine, 67 Bonnard, Mario, 2042 Bonno, Giuseppe, 1191 Bonomi, Andrea, 1428 Bononcini, Giovanni, 1311 Bonsanti, Alessandro, 984 Montale and, 1212 Bontempelli, Massimo, 286–289, 784, 785, 984, 1719, 1728, 1854 Alvaro and, 28 De Maria and, 1340 fantastic and, 687 magic realism of, 1233 Masino and, 1167 Ortese and, 1322 Sciascia and, 1707 Bonvesin da la Riva, 289–292, 757, 830 Book Culture, 292–294. See also Printing and Publishing Book of Causes, 1281 Book of Gomorrah (Damian), 1030 ‘‘Book of islands’’ genre, 1906 Book of Sinbad, 1295 Book of the Courtier, The. See Cortegiano, Il (Castiglione) Booth, Walter P., 50, 788 Borboni, Paola, 112, 1689, 1882 Bordello di mare con citta` (Moscato), 1247 Bordiga, Amadeo, 888 Bordone, Benedetto, 1906 Bordwell, David, 727 Borelli, Alda, 1391 Borelli, Lyda, 172, 469, 1329 Boresellino, Nino, 232 Borges, Jorge Louis, 198, 936, 1448, 1711 Buzzati and, 687 Campo, C., and, 370 fantastic and, 687 Sciascia and, 1707 Borgese, Giulia, 432 Deledda and, 591 Moravia and, 1230, 1234 Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio, 295–298, 1854 Brancati and, 308 Corazzini, 511 crepuscolarismo and, 520 as critic, 1062 inept characters of, 1897 Moretti, Mario, and, 1237 Rosso and, 1623 Sciascia and, 1707 Tozzi, F., and, 1896 Borghese, Paolo V, 189 Borghese piccolo piccolo, Un (Cerami), 447, 473 Borghese piccolo piccolo, Un (Monicelli, M.), 1209 Borghese, Scipione, 190 Borghi, Lamberto, 462 Borghini, Maria Selvaggia, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Borghini, Raffaello, 298–300 Borghini, Vincenzio Maria, 300–303 Vasari and, 1953

INDEX Borgia, Lucrezia, 83 Bembo, P., and, 164 Borgna, Gianni, 1782 Borlanda impasticciata, La (Verri, P.), 1979 Born, Bertran de, Dante and, 563 Bornelh, Giraut de, 563 Borromea, Violante, 117 Borromeo, Carlo, 445 Counter-Reformation and, 1203 Borromeo, Federico, 1048, 2002 Borromini, Francesco, 1604 Borsa del Presidente, La (Franceschini and Samueli), 1865 Borsellino, Nino, 1066 Borsellino, Paolo, 1104 Borsetto, Luciana, 493 Borsi, Giosue´, 1569 ‘‘Borsi spetial, crudele e dispietato’’ (Burchiello, Il), 330 Borsias (Strozzi, T.), 518, 668 Borsieri, Pietro, 937, 1061 Romanticism and, 1597 Stae¨l and, 1902 Bortolotti, Franca Pieroni, 2025, 2026 Boschereccia filosofia (rustic philosophy), 439 Boschini, Marco, 123, 2002 Bosco di acacie, Il (Tomizza), 1880 Bosco, Umberto, 232 Petrarch and, 1414 Boscovivo (Manzini), 1131 Bosinade, 1562 Bosis, Adolfo De, 983, 1606 decadentismo and, 580 Bosis, Alfredo De, 1360 Boso, Carlo, 1344 Bossi, Umberto, 981 Bossuet, Jacque-Benigne, 784 Botero, Giovanni in Genoa, 816 in Turin, 1921 Bottai, Giuseppe, 278, 980, 985 in Rome, 1607 World War II and, 2031 Bottari, Giovanni, 1649, 2002 ‘‘Botte e rispota’’ (Montale), 1213 Bottega, 328 Bottega del caffe`, La (Goldoni), 866 Bottegal, Guido, 496 Botteghe Oscure, 141, 1301 Bottego, Vittorio, 489, 1909 Bottini, Antonio, 50 Bottone di Stalingrado, Il (Bilenchi), 228 Boulliau, Ismae¨l, 1823 Bourbon, Charles de, 438 Bourbons, 12 Bourget, Paul, 511, 1734 ‘‘Bourgmestre en bouteille, Le’’ (Erckmann and Chatrian), 685–686 Bourru bienfaisant, Le (Goldoni), 567, 784, 868 Bouwsma, William J., 1573 Bove, Giacomo, 1908 ‘‘Bove, Il’’ (Carducci), 202 Bovio, Libero, 1269 Bowers, Charles, 50 Boy, The (Dolce), 639 Bozheskoe i chelovecheskoe (Tolstoy), 1845

Bozzetti, Cesare, 84 Bozzetti di vita militare (De Amicis), 574 Bozzetto, Bruno, 50, 51–52 Brabant, Charles, 212 Braca, Vincenzo, 1269 Bracci, Tullio Alpinolo, 1922 Bracciolini, Francesco, 932, 954, 1001 Tassoni and, 1842 Bracciolini, Poggio, 202, 235, 303–306, 330, 1661. See also Humanism humanism and, 952 novella and, 1297 in Rome, 1604 Sacchetti, F., and, 1649 Salutati and, 1662 travel literature and, 1906 Bracco, Roberto, 306–308, 1166, 1456 censorship of, 445 De Filippo, E., and, 585 in Naples, 1270 Praga, M., and, 1492 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio, 470, 723–724, 1433, 1793 in Rome, 1606 Bragaglia, Arturo, 1433 Braghetti, Anna Laura, 159, 1865–1866 Braidotti, Rosy, 710 Bramosia dell’ignoto (yearning for the unknown), 1999 Branca, Vittore, 1063, 1066 Brancaccio, Luisa, 34 with Cannibali, 373 Brancati, Vitaliano, 280, 308–311, 445 Camilleri and, 354 music and, 1257 Verga, G., and, 1968 World War II and, 2032 Branchie (Ammaniti), 33, 374, 473 Brandade de morue (Artusi), 104 Brandi, Cesare, 100, 101 Brando, Marlon, 199 Brasca, Santo, 1906 Braschi, Nicoletta, 177 Brava, Anna, 947, 1580 Bravure del Capitano Spavento, Le (Andreini, F.), 498 Bray, John Randolf, 50 Bread and Puppet, 49 Brecht, Bertolt, 114, 168, 819, 1794 Fortini and, 760 Galilei, G., and, 804 Breme, Ludovico Di, 937, 1061 Risorgimento and, 1589 Romanticism and, 1597 Stae¨l and, 1902 Bremond, Claude, in Nouvelle critique, 820 Brera, Gianni, 1792 Breton, Andre´, 686 Bretonne, Restif de la, 400 ‘‘Brevario di estetica’’ (Croce, B.), 1512 Breve discorso sopra la vita e laude della Beattisima Vergine e Madre del Figliuol di Dio (Matraini), 1172 Breve notizia dello stato antico e moderno dell’adunanza degli Arcadi (Crescimbeni), 64 Breve vacanza, Una (De Sica), 624, 627 Brevi discorsi intorno alla Comedia (Cecchini), 498 ‘‘Breviario della necessita`’’ (Betocchi), 204

I19

INDEX Breviario di estetica (Croce, B.), 525, 1062 ‘‘Breviario di quaranta fogli’’ (Capuana), 383 Briatore, Gianfranco, 1719 Bricolage, 1843 Briganta, La (Cutrufelli), 534 Brigantaggio, 383 Brigante di Tacca del Lupo, Il (Germi), 828–829 Brigante, Il (Berto), 191 Briganti, Giuliano, 99 Brigata, La, 751 Rebora and, 1556 Brigate Rosse, 502, 1862 Brigate Rosse. Una storia italiana (Rossanda), 1614 Bright, Jesse, 513 Brignole-Sale, Antongiulio, in Genoa, 816 Brillianti utopie (shining utopias), 1697 ‘‘Brindisi di Girella, Il’’ (Giusti), 861 Brindisi, Un (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083 Brito, Radulphus, 1703 Brizzi, Enrico, 371, 374 with Cannibali, 373 Brodskij, Josif, 1634 in Venice, 1961 Brofferio, Angelo, 1140, 1339, 1922 Brogi, Giacomo, 1432 Broglio, Emilio, 1659 Brolli, Daniele, 34 Cannibali and, 373 Bronson, Charles, 1014 Bronzino, Agnolo, 186, 298 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Varchi and, 1948 Broschi, Carlo, 1190 Brother A., 41 Brother and Sister (Vinci), 1992 Brown, Calvin, 1253 Brown, Judith C., 1032 Browning, Robert, 1213 Tarozzi and, 1829 in Venice, 1961 Brozas, Francisco Sa´nchez de las, Alciato and, 11 Bruck, Edith, 671 Bru¨derchen und Schwesterchen (Grimm), 1993 Brugnolo, Furio, 835 ‘‘Bruna, o tutte le ore in agguato’’ (Frabotta), 772 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 70, 1297 Alberti, Leon, and, 8 classicism and, 480 in Florence, 736 humanism and, 952 Vasari and, 1653, 1953 Brunetie`re, Ferdinand, 820 Bruni, Annalisa, 1739 Bruni, Francesco, 1730 Bruni, Leonardo, 230, 234, 312–314, 638, 952, 1001, 1661. See also Humanism Bracciolini, P., and, 303 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 historiography and, 942 humanism and, 951, 952 Manetti, G., and, 1118 Neoplatonism and, 1281 novella and, 1297 Petrarch and, 1405

I20

Salutati and, 1662 Valla, L., and, 1945 Bruno, Giordano, 202, 315–320, 819, 1126, 1429, 1430, 1481, 1604 Bracciolini, P., and, 304 censorship of, 443 Marino and, 1159 in Naples, 1268 Petrarch and, 1413 Porta, C., and, 605 Tansillo and, 1822 utopia and, 1939 Bruno, Giuliana, 710 Bruscagli, Riccardo, 267 Brusoni, Girolamo, 1128 Tarabotti and, 1823 Bruto (Pascoli), 1361 Bruto, Jutta, 569 ‘‘Bruto Minore’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Bruto primo (Alfieri, V.), 20 Bruto secondo (Alfieri, V.), 19 Brutti, sporchi e cattivi (Scola), 1723 Brutus, 1406 Brutus (Cicero), 234 Brutus, Junius, Alfieri, V., and, 22 Brutus, Marcus, Alfieri, V., and, 22 Bruye`re, Jean La, 784 Bu, I (Guerra), 906 Buazzelli, Dino, 633 Buber, Martin, Pressburger and, 1499 Bubu` (Bolognini), 281 Buca di Montemorello, La’’ (Finiguerri), 1031 Bucci, Agostino, 1921 Bucci, Flavio, 1663 Buccolica, La (Meli), 1182 Buccolicum carmen (Boccaccio), 240, 255, 256, 258 Bu¨cher, Felicitas, 6 Bu¨chner, Georg, 971, 1796 Buco nel muro, Il (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Buco nero (black hole), 1185 Bucoliche elegantissime (Pulci, B.), 1380 Bucolicum Carmen (Petrarch), 1316, 1409, 1416 Buddha, Calasso and, 342 Bueve de Han(s)tone, 666 Bufalino, Gesualdo, 321–325 Bonaviri and, 284 Bufera e altro, La (Montale), 1213, 1216 Bufera, La (Calandra), 940, 1922 Bufera, La (Montale), 2032 Buffalo Bill (De Gregori), 1784–1785 Buffo integrale, Il (Palazzeschi), 1334 Bugiarda, La (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Bugiardo, Il (Goldoni), 1700, 1760 Bugie con le gambe lunghe, Le (De Filippo, E.), 586 Buio (Maraini), 1142 Buio e il miele, Il (Arpino), 96, 817, 1585 Buio e lo splendore (Guidacci), 919 Bulgakov, Michail, 1634 Bulgarelli, Marianna Benti, 1190 Metastasio and, 1193 Bulgarin, Faddej, 1633 Bulifon, Antonio, 1243 Bullock, Alan, 806 Bulmisti, Sandro, 447 Bun˜el, Luis, 936

INDEX Bunin, Ivan, 1634 Bunker, Max, 789 Buon volere (goodwill), 506 Buona creanza (manners), 1128 Buona madre, La (Goldoni), 866 Buona mogli, La (Goldoni), 866, 880 Buona parola, La (De Marchi, E.), 611 Buonafede, Appiano, 129 Buonanotte fiorellino (De Gregori), 1784 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 70, 107, 326–329, 639, 1567, 1604, 11000. See also Visual Arts, Literature and Ariosto and, 80 Cellini and, 439, 442 classicism and, 480 Colonna, V., and, 494 in Florence, 736 homosexuality and, 1031 Petrarch and, 1127, 1413 Petrarchism and, 1421 Varchi and, 1948 Vasari and, 1953–1954 Buonarroti, Pisan Filippo, 1769 Buondelmonti, Cristoforo, 1906 Buongiorno, notte (Bellocchio), 159, 1865 Buongiovanni, Francesco, 2013 Buoni cittadini (good citizens), 1181 Buonincontri, Bruno, 589 Buoninsegni, Francesco, 1824 Buono con bellezza (good with beauty), 1012 Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (Leone, S.), 1014 Buono, Luigi Del, 499 Buono, Oreste Del, 789 BUR. See Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli Buranella, La (Tarozzi) Burbero di buon cuore, Il (Da Ponte), 567 Burch, Noe¨l, 56 Burchiello, Il, 186, 330–332 Gozzi, C., and, 880 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1177 Parini, G., and, 1349 in Venice, 1960 Burckhardt, Jacob, 84, 492, 616, 951 Renaissance and, 1571–1572 Bu¨rger, Gottfried August, 826 Grossi and, 897 Burgess, Anthony, 1247 Belli, G., and, 156 Burla (joke), 786 Burla Riuscita, Una (Svevo), 203, 1807 Burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra, El (Molina), 935 Burlesca, 1562 Burney, Charles, 1190 Burton, Richard, 624, 2045 Buscetta, Tommaso, 1104 Buscia o verita` (Scarpetta), 1700 Busdrago, Francesco, 118 Busenello, Gian Francesco, 1311 Bush, Mary Bucci, 964 Busi, Aldo, 47, 332–334 homosexuality and, 1033 in Milan, 1206 Busoni, Ferruccio, 499 Bussotti, Sylvano, 168, 169

Buti, Francesco de, 559 Butor, Michel, 821 Buttafuoco, Annarita, 708, 2025 Risorgimento and, 1592 Butterfield, Herbert, 941 Buttigliore, Rocco, 1430 Buttitta, Ignazio, 1341, 1481 Buy, Margherita, 1820 Buzzati, Dino, 203, 335–339, 465, 785, 790, 1306, 1719 Bonaviri and, 284 Erba and, 673 fantastic and, 687 in Milan, 1206 Sgorlon and, 1750 Buzzi, Paolo cinema and, 470 futurism and, 793, 1155 Buzzone, Anna Maria, 1580 Byron, Lord, 47, 122 Boccaccio and, 250 Cola di Rienzo and, 482 in Genoa, 815 Guerrazzi, F., and, 908 Neera and, 1271 Pellico and, 1393 Tasso, T., and, 1836 in Venice, 1961 Byronismo, 47

C Ca’ Giocosa, 463 ‘‘C ¸ a ira!’’ (Carducci), 394 Cabala del cavallo pegaseo (Bruno, Giordano), 202 Cabaletta, 272 Cabani, Maria Cristina, 932 Cabanis, Pierre Jean George, 1020, 1133 Cabiria (D’Annunzio), 542, 691, 1727 Cabiria (Pastrone), 469, 488, 723, 1329 Caccia alle volpe nella campagna romagna (Blasetti), 236 Caccia all’uomo (Roversi), 1629 Caccia all’usignuolo (Govoni), 874 Caccia di Diana (Boccaccio), 240 Caccia tragica (De Santis), 619 Cacciari, Massimo, 72, 1428, 1430 Caccini, Giulio, 456, 1310 music and, 1255 Caciucco (a stew), 104 Cacucci, Pino, 1663 Cadaveri eccellenti (Rosi), 1609, 1706 Cadmus, 342 Caduta degli angeli ribelli, La (Giordana), 69 Caduta degli dei, La (Visconti, L.), 1996 Caduta di donna Elvira, La (Gozzi, C.), 881 Caduta di Fetone, La (Buonarroti, M.), 327 ‘‘Caduta, La’’ (Parini, G.), 1350 ´ (Dandolo), 1600–1601 Caduta una donna, E Caesar, Julius, 379 Caesar, Kurt, 789 Cafe´ Procope (Salvatores), 1663 Cafe´-chantant, 1893, 1950 Caffarini, Tommaso, 415 Caffe` concerto (Trilussa), 1913 ‘‘Caffe` del Progresso’’ (Trilussa), 1914

I21

INDEX Caffe´ Europa, 1697 Caffe´ giubbe rosse, 737 Caffe`, Il, 47, 146, 663, 664, 784, 982, 1060, 1712, 1714 Beccaria and, 4 Bettinelli and, 213 Fenoglio and, 714 Parini, G., and, 1349 Romanticism and, 1596 utopian literature and, 1939 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Caffe` illustrato, Il, 429 Caffe´ Martini, 1697 Caffe` Specchi (Morandini), 1222 Caffe´-concerto, 1950 Caffeina d’Europa (caffeine of Europe), 1155 Cafiero, Martino, 306 Cage, John, 1015, 1669 Cagna, Achille Giovanni, 580, 1785, 1922 Cahusac, Luigi de, 1191 Caimano, Il (Moretti, N.), 1241 Cain, James, 1994 Caino (Betti, U.), 208 Caio Gracco (Monti, V.), 1218 Cairati, Bice. See Modignani, Sveva Casati Cajetani, Tommaso de Vio, 1426, 1427 Cajumi, Arrigo, 1540 Calabuig, Ignazio, 1481 Calandra, Edoardo, 580, 940, 1922 Calandra, Giangiacomo, 88 Calandria, La (Bibbiena, B.), 89, 221, 1639 Calasso, Roberto, 341–343, 1325 Calata (Sla`taper), 1756 Calcagnini, Celio, 717 Calcaterra, Carlo, 1159 Calcondila, Demetrio, 1463 Calda vita, la (warm life), 1644 Caldara, Antonio, 1191 Calder, Alexander, Masino and, 1167 Calderari, 1589 Caldero´n (Pasolini), 73, 936, 1500, 1580 Caldero´n, Pedro, 73, 881, 935 Caldi notti del Decameron, Le (Callegari), 250 Caldora, Berlingieri, Bandello, M., and, 118 Calducci, Marina, 1338 Caldwell, Erskine, 1794 neorealism and, 1283 Vittorini and, 2005 Caleffi, Piero, 1580 Calendario (Porta, A.), 1483 Calendario dei pensieri e delle pratiche solari, 204 Calende greche (Bufalino), 322 Caliceti, Giuseppe, 371 with Cannibali, 373 Califfa, La (Bevilacqua, A.), 215 Caligula (Camus), 169 Calipsychia (Bandello, M.), 117 Callaghan, Morley, 48 Callas (Cederna, C.), 433 Callas Fever (Zeffirelli), 2046 Callas, Maria, 168, 432, 1794 Visconti, L., and, 1995 Zeffirelli and, 2045 Callegari, Gian Paolo, 250

I22

Calligrafi, 986 Calligraphers, 296 Callisto, Andronico, 1463 Calloandro fedele (Marini, G.), 1480 Callot, Jacques, 500 Calma di vento (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Calmo, Andrea, 1480, 1562 Caloprese, Gregorio, 893 Calopresti, Mimmo, 1864 Calore, Il (Ramondino), 1547 Caluso, Tommaso Valperga di, 1922 Calvesi, Maurizio, 100 Colonna, F., and, 490 Calvinism, 1684 Calvino, Italo, 47, 67, 83, 279, 343–350, 371, 434, 465, 472, 659, 1064, 1316, 1480, 1856, 2005, 2032 Benni and, 179 Bompiani and, 282 Communism and, 502 D’Arrigo and, 569 death of, 374 Del Giudice and, 598 fantastic and, 687 Landolfi and, 996 Mastronardi and, 1169 Morante and, 1228 Morselli, G., and, 1245 music and, 1257 neorealism and, 1285 Petrignani and, 1422 Piccolo and, 1435 psychoanalysis and, 1513 Resistance and, 1578, 1579 travel literature and, 1909 utopia and, 1940 Vittorini and, 2007 Calvo, Edoardo Ignazio, 1563 Calzabigi, Ranieri de’, 1050–1051, 1060 Metastasio and, 1191 Calzavara, Ernesto, Paolini and, 1345 Calzolaio di Vigevano, Il (Mastronardi), 502, 1169 Calzolari, Pietro, 144 ‘‘Calzoni di Beethoven, I’’ (Noventa), 1301 Camasio, Sandro. See Oxilia, Nino Cambio, Arnolfo di, in Florence, 735 Cambio di Stagione (Riotta), 981 Cambio, Perissone, 646 Cambosu, Salvatore, 1564 Satta and, 1686 Camera da letto, La (Bertolucci), A., 196 Camera Oscura, La, 1432 Camera picta (Mantega), 519 Camera Work, 1433 Camerana, Giovanni, 580, 1922 Faldella and, 680 scapigliatura and, 1698 Camerata de’ bardi, 736, 1049, 1255, 1309 Camerata Fiorentina, 736, 1255 Camere da letto (Izzo), 1120 Camere separate (Tondelli), 1033, 1886 Cameretta, 1487 Cameriera brillante, La (Goldoni), 866 Camerini, Mario, 351–353 De Sica and, 621

INDEX Risi, D., and, 1584 Soldati and, 1775 Camerino, Giuseppe, Svevo and, 1808 Camerino, Pierfrancesco de’ Conti da, 168, 668 Cameroni, Felice, 1697 scapigliatura and, 1699 Zola and, 1972 Camicia bruciata, La (Banti), 125 Camilleri, Andrea, 233, 354–356, 633, 1564. See also Detective Fiction Brancati and, 309 Caminer, Domenico, 982 Caminer, Elisabetta, 982 Cammarano, Salvatore, 1400 Cammina cammina (Olmi), 1305 Cammino della speranza, Il (Germi), 700, 828 Cammino, Il (Joppolo), 976 Cammino, Un (Guidacci), 919 Camo˜es, Luis de, 1713 Petrarch and, 1413 Camon, Ferdinando, 357–358 Campana, Dino, 269, 359–362, 785, 1089. See also Hermeticism Aleramo and, 16 in Genoa, 817 Merini and, 1186 music and, 1257 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Campanella, Tommaso, 363–368, 984, 1127, 1430, 1568. See also Utopian Literature Amelio and, 31 in Genoa, 816 historiography and, 942 Leonetti and, 1016 Marino and, 1159 in Naples, 1268 socialism and, 1768 utopia and, 1939 Vico and, 1984 Campanile, Achille, 1606 Campanile, Pasquale Festa, 1116 Campari, Giuseppe, 1792 Campari, Roberto, 726 Campi Elisi (Banti), 124 Campi elisi (Sinisgalli), 1762 Campiello, Il (Goldoni), 866, 870 Simoni and, 1760 Campiglia, Maddalena, 39 Camping (Zeffirelli), 2045 Campo, 1017 Campo, Cristina, 368–371, 1480 in Genoa, 817 Campo di battaglia (Leonetti), 1017 Campo di Marte, 204, 984 Bigongiari and, 226 Delfini and, 598 Gatto and, 812 Hermeticism and, 930 Landolfi and, 995 Luzi, M., and, 1082 Campo, Rossana, 371–372 with Cannibali, 373 Camporesi, Piero, 54, 1481 Artusi and, 104

Camus, Albert, 169, 1996 Bellonci and, 162 Buzzati and, 335 Canace (Speroni), 1126, 1789 Canali, Luca, 502 Canali, Vittorio, 502 ‘‘Cancellata, La’’ (Betti, U.), 207 Cancellieri, Franco, 769 Cancroregina (Landolfi), 686, 996 Candelaio, Il (Bruno, Giordano), 315, 318–319, 1126, 1430 Candeloro, Giorgio, 946 Candide (Voltaire), 1051, 1290 Candido, 980 Guareschi and, 900 Candido ovvero un sogno fatto in Sicilia (Sciascia), 503, 1707 Candle-Bearer, The. See Candelaio, Il (Bruno, Giordano) Cane di Diogene, Il (Frugoni, F.), 202 Cane sull’Etna, Il (Pomilio), 1470 Canestrari, Renzo, 279 Caneva, Giacomo, 1432 Cangiullo, Francesco, futurism and, 793 Cangrande delle Scala (Dante), 559 Cani dietro le sbarre (Pontecorvo), 1474 Cani e gatti (Scarpetta, V.), 585 Caniff, Milton, 788 Cannarozzo, Franco, 632 Canne al vento (Deledda), 592, 594–595 Canne amiche del mare, Le (Ledda), 1006 Cannella, Salvatore, 1339 Cannes Film Festival Amelio and, 32 Antonioni and, 58–59 Bellocchio and, 159 Bertolucci, B., and, 200 Bozzetto and, 51 L’avventura and, 60 Cannibali, 34, 373–375, 790. See also Ammaniti, Niccolo`; Campo, Rossana; Vinci, Simona Ammaniti and, 1664 detective fiction and, 633 Cannibali, I (Cavani), 425 Cannio, Enrico, 2013 Cannocchiale aristotelico, Il (Tesauro), 1059, 1128, 1921 Canobbio, Andrea, 1923 Canova, Antonio, 1278, 1279 in Venice, 1960 Cansone picole (Marin), 1150 Canta` (Moscato), 1248 Cantare nel buio (Corti), 513 Cantari (oral songs), 241, 254, 267, 665, 667 Cantaroni, Nullo. See Modignani, Sveva Casati Cantastorie, 90 Cantata dei giorni dispari (De Filippo, E.), 586 Cantata dei giorni pari (De Filippo, E.), 586 Cantautori, 49 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 261 Canti (Aleardi), 13 Canti (Leopardi), 973, 1023–1026, 1088, 1364 Canti anonimi (Rebora), 1556 Canti barocchi (Piccolo), 1257, 1340 Canti barocchi e altre liriche (Piccolo), 1436 Canti brevi (Oxilia, N.), 1330 Canti carnascialeschi, 839 Canti dei sensi e dell’idea, I (Joppolo), 975

I23

INDEX Canti del cuore (Tarchetti), 1827 Canti dell’attesa, I (Gozzano), 879 Canti dell’infermita` (Rebora), 1556 Canti dell’isola, I (Negri, Ada), 1273 Canti di Castelvecchio, I (Pascoli), 1089, 1359, 1360, 1364–1365, 1366 ‘‘Canti di marzo’’ (Carducci), 202 Canti Orfici (Campana), 259, 359, 362, 817, 1089 Canti pisani, 1024 Canti popolari del Piemonte (Nigra), 1479 Canti popolari delle province meridionali (Imbriani), 959, 1479 Canti popolari siciliani (Vigo), 1564 Canti popolari toscani, corsi, illirici, e greci (Tommaseo), 1479, 1884 Canti ultimi (Turoldo), 1924 Canti XI de lodi de la signora Lucrezia Gonzaga da Gazuolo (Bandello, M.), 117 Cantica, La (Leonetti), 1016 ‘‘Cantico del Gallo Silvestre’’ (Leopardi), 1027 Cantico delle creature (Francis), 1565 ‘‘Cantico di frate Sole’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Canticum creaturarum’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Canticum de creaturis’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Canticum fratris solis’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Cantimori, Delio, 630 historiography and, 945 Canto al deserto. Storia di Tina, soldato di mafia (Cutrufelli), 534 ‘‘Canto degli ultimi partigiani’’ (Fortini), 1581 Canto dei motori, Il (Folgore), 752 ‘‘Canto della tenebra, Il’’ (Campana), 360 Canto delle crisalidi, Il (Michelstaedter), 1196 Canto delle sirene, Il (Corti), 514 Canto di tirambico de’ partigiani del Sacchi Truffaldino (Gozzi, C.), 881 Canto eroi e macchine della Guerra mussoliniana (Marinetti), 1156 Canto I,28 of Canti XI de le lodi de la signora Lucrezia Gonzaga (Bandello, M.), 117 ‘‘Canto notturno di un pastore errante nell’Asia’’ (Leopardi), 1024, 1633 Canto novo (D’Annunzio), 540 Canto politico (Aleardi), 13 Canto popolare, Il (Pasolini), 1367, 1374 ‘‘Canto sesto’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 Cantoni, Alberto, 1848 Cantoni, Carlo, Baretti and, 129 Cantoni, Remo, Pozzi, A., and, 1488 Cantos. See Cinque Canti (Ariosto, L.) Cantu`, Cesare, 232, 464, 616, 1061, 1481 historical novels and, 938 historiography and, 944 Romagnosi and, 1936 Cantus Circaeus (Bruno, Giordano), 315 Canudo, Ricciotto, 470, 723 Canzioniere Vaticano, 505 Canzona d’amore (Ficino), 721 Canzona di Bacco e Arianna (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Canzone, 84, 143, 392 Canzone carnascialesche (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 ‘‘Canzone dello spostato’’ (Jahier), 973 Canzone di Bacco (Medici, Lorenzo), 757 Canzone di Marinella, La (Andre´), 1783 ‘‘Canzone d’oltremare, La’’ (D’Annunzio), 488 Canzone in morte di Antonio (Vico), 1429 Canzone napoletana, 1267

I24

Canzonetta, 181 Chiabrera and, 456 Canzonette (Chiabrera), 456 Canzonette (odes), 143 Canzonette amorose, 455 ‘‘Canzonette popolari in Recanati negli anni 1820–1822’’ (Leopardi), 1479 Canzonette-La morte (Betti, U.), 208 Canzoni di Re Enzio, Le (Pascoli), 1359 Canzoni piemontesi (Brofferio), 1922 ‘‘Canzoni ucceline’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Canzoniere, 328, 601 Giacomino Pugliese and, 832 Canzoniere (Petrarch), 44, 107, 109, 166, 167, 444, 1000, 1087, 1403, 1410–1412, 1414, 1420, 1566 Dolce and, 638 in Latin, 1055 Pierro and, 1444 Sannazaro and1675, 1675 Canzoniere (Saba), 1646–1648 Canzoniere (Tansillo), 1822 Canzoniere amoroso (Belli, G.), 154 Canzoniere dello spirito (songbook of the spirit), 369 Canzonissima, 739, 1544, 1858 Canzonne morale, 313 Caos calmo (Veronesi, S.), 1976 Caos del Triperuno (Folengo), 749 Caos, Il metodo, Il (Anceschi), 1063 Capaccio, Giulio Cesare, 1161 petrarchismo of, 1160 Capacelli, Francesco Albergati, 277 Gozzi, C., and, 882 ‘‘Capanetta’’ (Pirandello), 1458 ‘‘Capanna e il tuo cuore, Una’’ (Verga, G.), 1966 Capanna indiana, La (Bertolucci), A., 195 Capanna, La (Guerra), 906 Capasso, Aldo, 379 Capella, Martianus, Neoplatonism and, 1281 Capellanus, Andreas, 254 ‘‘Capinera, La’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Capita (Lagorio), 992 Capital (Marx), 501 Capitan cotese, Il, De Roberto and, 614 Capitan Fracassa, 307, 540 decadentismo and, 579 Di Giacomo and, 636 Serao and, 1733 Capitani, Elio De, 423 Capitano, Il (Dolce), 639 Capitano Ulisse (Savinio), 1461, 1688 Capite, Raymond de, 964 Capitolare, 1048 Capitoli, 186, 778 Galilei, G., and, 804 Grazzini and, 895 Capitoli (Boiardo), 265 Capitoli del Mauro et del Bernia et altri authori (Della Casa), 601 Capo d’Europa (Bianchini), 217 Capo sulla neve, Il (Gatto), 812 Capodistria, 1859 Capofabbrica, Il (Bilenchi), 1854 Caporali, Cesare, 262 ‘‘Caporetto 1919’’ (Tessa), 1867 Caposcuola, 1635

INDEX Capote, Truman, 1136 ‘‘Cappan indiana, La’’ (Bertolucci), A., 196 Cappella Albertoni, 189 Cappella Cornaro, 189 Cappella Fonseca, 189 Cappello a tre punte, Il (Camerini), 352, 1775 Cappello, Bianca, Carrer and, 398 Cappello del prete, Il (De Marchi, E.), 611, 631 Cappello di paglia di Firenze, Il (Rota), 1313 Cappello, Giovanni, 1869 Cappi, Alessandro, 1432 Cappiello, Leonetto, 1303 Capponi, Gino, 375–376, 983 in Florence, 737 Giordani, Pietro, and, 851 Giusti and, 860 Capponi, Piero di Gherardo, 298 Cappotto, Il (Lattuada), 2042 Capra, Frank, 351 ‘‘Capra, La’’ (Saba), 1644 Caprara, Antonia, 264 Capria, Raffaele La, in Naples, 1268, 1547 Capricci (caprices), 79 Capricci (Marino), 1161 Capricci del bottaio, I (Gelli), 600, 814 Capricci del conte Ottavio, I (Ojetti), 1303 Capricci per pianoforte (Faldella), 680, 816 Capriccio e ilusione (Comisso), 495 Caprichos (Goya), 154 Caprioglio, Sergio, Guiducci and, 922 Capriolo, Paola, 936 Capriolo, Paola, 377–378 Caproni, Giorgio, 379–381 Bigiaretti and, 223 Erba, L., and, 674 in Genoa, 818 Tarozzi and, 1829 Capua, Eduardo Di, 634 Capua, Giovanni da, 201, 731 Capuana, Luigi, 382–385, 464, 483, 785, 1492. See also Verismo Deledda and, 591 fantastic and, 686 Fogazzaro and, 744 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Martoglio and, 1166 music and, 1257 Neera and, 1271 Positivism and, 1062 questione meridionale and, 1532 in Rome, 1606 Verga, G., and, 1969 verismo and, 1972 Capurro, Giovanni, 2013 Cara (Porta, A.), 1484 Cara Cina (Parise, Goffredo), 1354 Cara Mathilda (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Carabiniere, 32 Carabinieri, I (Joppolo), 976 Carabiniers, Les (Godard), 976 Caracciolo, Battistello, 1480 in Naples, 1268 Caracciolo, Domenico, 1338 Caracciolo, Pietro Antonio, 1269 Caracte`res de The´ophraste, Les (Bruye`re), 784

Caramella, Santino, 1011 Carattere della filosofia moderna, Il (Croce, B.), 525 Caratteri, 598 Carbonari, 1393, 1589 Carbonari della montagna, I (Verga, G.), 1963 Carbone, Maria Teresa, Balestrini and, 115 Carboneria, 150 Mazzini and, 1174 Carcano, Giulio, 47 Maffei, C., and, 1659 scapigliatura and, 1698 Carcere del popolo (people’s prison), 1711 Carcere, Il (Pavese), 1382 Cardano, Gerolamo, 1128 Cardarelli, Vincenzo, 385–387, 430, 785, 984, 1479 Aleramo and, 16 Bacchelli and, 111 Fabbri, Diego, and, 678 Cardillo addolorato, Il (Ortese), 1322 Cardinal Lambertini, Il (Testoni), 1795 Cardinale, Claudia, 404, 1015 Monicelli, M., and, 1208 Cardona, Giorgio Raimondo, 1314 Carducci, Giosue`, 48, 83, 202, 249, 277, 360, 388–394, 464, 483, 540, 737, 1158, 1360, 1853, 1936 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Berchet and, 182 Boito, A., and, 273 Caproni and, 379 crepuscolarismo and, 521 as critic, 1061 Folgore and, 753 Heine and, 826 Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Nobel Prize and, 591 Panzini and, 1342 Pascoli and, 1361 Petrarch and, 1414 Ragazzoni and, 1539 in Rome, 1606 Serra, R., and, 1746 Trilussa and, 1913 Ungaretti and, 1928 Vivanti and, 2011 Zanella and, 2035 Care ombre (Bigiaretti), 223 Care ombre (Farina), 689 Care presenze (Petrignani), 1423 Careggian academy, 2 Careri, Giovanni Francesco Gemelli, 1907 Carestini, Giovanni, 1312 Caretti, Lanfranco, in Ferrara, 718 Cari, Francesco, 1339 Caritas, 924 Carletti, Francesco, 1907 Carli, Gian Rinaldo, 663 Enlightenment and, 664 Carlias (Verino), 668 Carlo, Andrea De cinema and, 472 Del Giudice and, 598 Carlo Gozzi (Simoni), 1760

I25

INDEX Carlomagno nella grotta (Gatto), 812 Carlone (Bigiaretti), 223 Carloni, Massimo, 632 Carlotto, Massimo, 634 Carlyle, Thomas fashion and, 695 Soffici and, 1772 Carmeli, Michelangelo, 1478 Carmen, 313 Carmen (Rosi), 1610 Carmen (Bizet), Arbasino and, 63 Carmi, Maria, 307 Carmina, 409, 1903 Carmina (Boccaccio), 258 Carmina (lyrics), 186 Carmina (Pascoli), 1361 Carmina (Pontano), 1472 Carmina de laudibus Estensium (Boiardo), 264 Carmina figurata (illustrated poems), 821 Carnacina, Luigi, 759 Carne inquieta, La (Re`paci), 1576 Carne, la morte e il diavlo nella letteratura romantica, La (Praz), 580–581, 1497 Carne´, Marcel, 58 Carnera, Primo, 1792 Carnevale, Salvatore, 1037 Carnevale si chiamava Vincenzo (Rossi, Annabella), 54 Carnevali, Emanuale, 964 Caro amore (Venturi, M.), 1601 Caro, Annibal, 143, 186, 395–397, 1126, 1604. See also Castelvetro, Ludovico Borghini, V., and, 301 Castelvetro and, 406 Guarini and, 902 Monti, V., and, 1219 Varchi and, 1948 Caro diario (Moretti, N.), 1240, 1345 Caro Michele (Ginzburg, N.), 671, 1825, 1863 Caro papa’ (Risi, D.), 1585 Carocci, Alberto, 984 Moravia and, 1230 Noventa and, 1301 in Rome, 1607 Carol Michele (Ginzburg, N.), 843 Caronia, Maria, 1548 Carosello, 51, 1857–1858 Carosello napoletano (Giannini, E.), 1270 Carpaccio, Vittore, 1961 Carpentier, Alejo, 936 Carpi, Fiorenzo, 739 Carpi, Pinin, 465 Carpine, Giovanni da Pian del, 1905 Carra`, Carlo, 793, 1204, 2004 in Ferrara, 718 futurism and, 792 Sarfatti and, 1681 Savinio and, 1688 Valeri and, 1943 Carraci, Annibale, –2002 Ariosto and, 92 Carrai, Stefano, 1521 Carrer, Luigi, 232, 397–399, 826 Albrizzi, I., and, 1659 Carretto, Il (Tornatore), 1890

I26

Carrieri, Raffaele, 936 ‘‘Carriola, La’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Carroll, Lewis, 47, 465, 486, 971 Busi and, 333 Carrozza da nolo, La (Lampugnani), 694 Carrozza di rame, La (Sgorlon), 1750 Cart, I (Loi), 1071 Carta e` stanca, La (Ceronetti), 452 Carte Barbieri (Barbieri, Giovanni), 1753 Carte parlanti (Aretino), 75 Carte segrete, 153 Carter, Helena Bonham, 425 Cartland, Barbara, 1602 Cartoline in franchigia (Sbarbaro), 1695 Caruso, Pietro, 620 Carver, Raymond, 49 ‘‘Casa Cecilia,’’ 1551 Casa col mandorlo, La (Tomizza), 1881 ‘‘Casa dei doganieri, La’’ (Montale), 1216 ‘‘Casa del bosco, La’’ (Ortese), 687 ‘‘Casa del Granella, La’’ (Pirandello), 1456, 1459 Casa della vita, La (Praz), 1497 ‘‘Casa di mia nutrice, La’’ (Saba), 1644 Casa di Ramallah, La (Tarantino, A.), 1826 Casa di riposo, 275 Casa in collina, La (Pavese), 1383, 1579 Casa ispirata, La (Savinio), 686 Casa ‘‘La Vita’’ (Savinio), 1688 Casa materna (Morazzoni), 1236 Casa nova, La (Goldoni), 866 Casa si muove, La (Petroni), 1425 Casa sul lago della luna, La (Duranti), 650 Casa sull’acqua, La (Betti, U.), 207 Casa tua ridono, A (Mastronardi), 1170 Casa venduta, La (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Casabella (Persico), 812 Casadei, Alberto, 85 Casagrande, Antonio, 589 Casagrande, Isa Danieli, 589 Casale, Ubertino da, 41 Casalinghe all’inferno (Giacobino), 1033 Casalinghitudine (Sereni, C.), 1738 Casanova (Fellini), 401, 472, 702 Casanova di se stessi (Busi), 333 Casanova, Gaetano, 399 Casanova, Giacomo, 107, 333, 399–402, 567, 1393, 1908 homosexuality and, 1032 utopia and, 1939 in Venice, 1960 Casanovas Heimfahrt (Schnitzler), 1961 Casati, Alessandro, 269 Boine and, 271 Casati, Gaetano, 489 Casati Law, 1936 Cascella, Michelle, Aleramo and, 15 Case della Vetra, Le (Raboni), 1537 Case, Le (Betti, U.), 207, 208 Casella, Alfredo, 1259 Casentino, Jacopo di, 1952 Caserini, Mario, 469 Casetti, Francesco, 198, 726, 1860 Casina (Plautus), 1092 Casini, Tommaso, 855, 1636 Casino Royale (Fleming), 658

INDEX Casiraghi, Tranquillo, 1434 Caso clinico, Un (Buzzati), 335 Caso Courrier, Il (Morazzoni), 1236 Caso Mattei, Il (Rosi), 1609 Caso Moro, Il (Ferrara, Giuseppe), 1864 Casola, Nicola di Giovanni da, 666 Casotto delle Vastasate, 1339 Cassaria, La (Ariosto, L.), 78, 84, 88–89, 221, 1639 Cassarino, Antonio, 1338 Cassini, Senia Argia, 1196 Cassola, Carlo, 218, 403–405, 2005 Bilenchi and, 227 Eco and, 661 Resistance and, 1578, 1579 World War II and, 2031, 2032 Castagne sono buone, Le (Germi), 829 Castagnola, Raffaella, 1179 Castanea, Bernardo di, 834 Castel dell’Ovo, 1267 Castelcapuano o la Vicaria di Napoli nel 1852 (Settembrini), 1748 Castellani, Castellano, 1515, 1653 Sacra rappresentaziione and, 1652 Castellani, Mario, Toto` and, 1895 Castellani, Renato, 1728 Castellano, Il (Trissino), 1916 Castelli, Alfredo, 787 Castelli di rabbia (Baricco), 132, 473, 1923 Castellina, Luciana, 1614 Castellito, Sergio, 67 Castello dei desideri, Il (Benco), 1910 Castello dei destini incrociati, Il (Calvino), 344, 345, 1940 Castello di Trezzo, Il (Bazzoni), 938 Castello di Udine, Il (Gadda), 796 Castelnau, Michel de, 315, 317, 320 Castelnuovo, Enrico, 99, 101 Castelvecchio Museum, 72 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 396, 406–407, 819, 1128. See also Caro, Annibal Borghini, V., and, 301 Caro and, 395 Muratori and, 1252 Petrarch and, 1413 Tassoni and, 1843 Varchi and, 1948 ‘‘Castelvetro’s Annotations to the Inferno: A Second Look at a Scarcely Known Manuscript’’ (Castrelvetro), 406 Casti, Giambattista, 463, 784, 1051, 1633, 1908 Meli and, 1182 Castigationes Plinianae (Barbaro, E.), 127 Castiglionchio, Lapo da, 1412 Castiglione, Baldassare, 3, 94, 117, 122, 166, 220, 408–413, 518, 721, 914 Aretino and, 79 Barbaro, E., and, 128 Bembo, P., and, 167 Busi and, 333 Casa and, 604 censorship of, 444 fashion and, 695 in Genoa, 816 Guarini, B., and, 901 Guazzo and, 904 Mannerism and, 1128 music and, 1254

Muzio and, 1264 Neoplatonism and, 1282 novella and, 1297 pastoral genre and, 1380 Petrarch and, 1413 travel literature and, 1907 Castigo (Serao), 1734 Castigo del discreto, El (Vega, L.), 122 Castigo, Il (Neera), 1271 Castigo sin venganza, El (Vega, L.), 122 Castita` (Dante), 728 Castle of Fratta, The. See Confessioni di un italiano, Le (Nievo) Castogallo (Noventa), 1301 Castri, Massimo, 1795 Castro, Diego Sandoval de, 1242 Catacchio, Onofrio, 790 Catalani, Alfredo, 685 Catalogo dei giocattoli, Il (Petrignani), 1422 Catalogo e` questo, Il (Raboni), 1537 Catani, Vittorio, 1719 Catania, Antonio, 1663 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger), 132 Cateau-Cambre´sis treaty, 444 ‘‘Catena di analogie’’ (chain of analogies), 792 Catena, La (Lussu), 1081 ‘‘Caterina’’ (Moravia), 1235 Catherine of Siena, 414–417, 1566. See also Religion and literature Petrarch and, 1404 Catherine the Great, 147 Catholic Church Beccaria and, 147 Latin and, 1561 Moretti, N., and, 1241 philosophy and, 1428–1429 Catholica disciplina di Principi (Muzio), 1264 Catone in Utica (Metastasio), 1190 Catrina, La (Berni), 186 Cattaneo, Carlo, 417–419, 983, 1061, 1204, 1485. See also Risorgimento historiography and, 944 Romagnosi and, 1936 Rovani and, 1628 Salvemini and, 1665 Cattaneo, Giambattista, 117 Cattaneo, Simonetta, 1181 Catullus, 83 Berni and, 186 Chiabrera and, 456 lyric poetry and, 1087 Marino and, 1161 translation of, 1902–1903 Cava, Gregory La, 438 Cavacchioli, Enrico, 458, 1848 futurism and, 793 teatro grottesco and, 1849 Cavadini, Mattia, 1122, 1318 Cavalca, Domenico, 230, 1480, 1567 Cavalcanti, Bartolomeo, 174, 1790 Cino da Pistoia and, 476 Guinizzelli and, 924 Tobino and, 1875 Cavalcanti, Guido, 106, 380, 419–422. See also Dolce stil novo Dante and, 548, 563 Dolce stil novo and, 641

I27

INDEX Cavalcanti, Guido (cont.) in Florence, 736 Guinizzelli and, 923 Petrarch and, 1411 Vita Nova (Dante) and, 566 Cavalcanti, Ippolito, 758 Cavalcanti, Mainardo, 257 Cavalcanti overo la difesa dell’Anticrusca di Michelangelo Fonte (Beni), 174 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista, 98, 2003 ‘‘Cavalcata dei vari lenguaggi, La,’’ 1563 Cavaliere dell’intelletto, Il (Battiato), 1785 Cavaliere e la morte, Il (Sciascia), 1708 Cavaliere inesistente, Il (Calvino), 83, 348, 502 Cavalieri, Emilio De’, music and, 1255 Cavalieri, Tommaso, 327, 328 homosexuality and, 1031 ‘‘Cavalla storna, La’’ (Pascoli), 1366 Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), 1313 Cavalleria Rusticana (Targioni-Tozzetti and Menasci), 1052 Cavalleria rusticana (Verga, G.), 653, 1848, 1965 Cavallette (Bozzetto), 52 Cavalli bianchi (Palazzeschi), 1333 Cavalli, Francesco, music and, 1256 Cavalli, Gian Giacomo, 1563 Cavalli, Giuseppe, 1434 Cavalli, Patrizia, 423–424 Valduga and, 1942 Cavallina, la ragazza e il diavolo, La (Camon), 357 Cavallo, Jo Ann, 268 Cavallo venduto, Il (Scerbanenco), 1718 Cavallotti, Felice, 1699 Cavandoli, Osvaldo, 51 Cavani, Liliana, 32, 424–427, 776 censorship of, 446 Galilei, G., and, 804 Malaparte and, 1114 television and, 1859 Cavara, Cesare, 1479 Cavarero, Adriana, 708 Cavazzoni, Ermanno, 428–429 Cavazzuti, Giuseppe, 406 Cavicciuoli, Carlo di Messer Guerra, 751 Cavour, Camillo, 150, 978, 983 Cattaneo, C., and, 418 Ca’zorzi, Giacomo. See Noventa, Giacomo Cazzaria, La (Vignali), 1031 Cazzi e canguri. Pochissimi i canguri (Busi), 333 ‘‘C’e` qualcuno che ride’’ (Pirandello), 692 C’e´ sempre un piffero ossesso (Joppolo), 976 C’e´ un punto sulla terra: una donna nel lager di Birkenau (Tedeschi, G.), 948 C ¸ e vice impuni, la lecture (Solmi), 1779 Ceba`, Ansaldo, 455 in Genoa, 816 Cecca. See Giovanni, Francesco di Ceccardi, Ceccardo Roccatagliata, 1694 Cecchelin, Angelo, 1951 Cecchi, Carlo, 1401, 1727, 1796 Serra, R., and, 1746 travel literature and, 1909 Cecchi, Emilio, 47, 48, 423, 430–432, 984. See also Literary Criticism, History of Boine and, 270

I28

Cardarelli and, 387 Cialente and, 467 cinema and, 470 Debenedetti and, 577 Longhi and, 1073 Pea and, 1391 Praz and, 1498 Ronda, La and, 785 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Cecchina, ossia la buona figliuola, La (Goldoni), 1312 Cecchini, Pier Maria, 498 Cecco, Paolo De, 540 Ceccoli, Marino, 1031 Cecconi, Eugenio, 2003 Cecearia (Epicuro), 1380 Cecioni, Adriano, 2003 Cederna, Camilla, 432–434. See also Journalism Cederna, Giuseppe, 1791, 1865 Cefalo (Correggio), 1380 Celan, Paul, 827 Celano, Tommaso da, 230 Celant, Germano, 98 Celati, Gianni, 279, 434–437 Cavazzoni and, 429 cinema and, 472 as neo-avant-garde, 371, 1276 travel literature and, 1909 Celentano, Adriano, 176 Celestial Hierarchy, The (Pseudo-Dionyius), 1281 Celestine V (Pope), 956, 1569 Celibacy, Barbaro, E., and, 127 Ce´line, Louis, 1109 Celati and, 434 Celle, Giovanni dalle, 415 Celli, Giorgio, 1277 Cellin (Shanley), 438 Cellini, Benvenuto, 107, 130, 437–443, 914, 1128, 11000 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Caro and, 395 Soffici and, 1772 Varchi and, 1948 Cellio, Marco Antonio, 1432 Celsitudini (celestial entities), 517 Cena de le ceneri, La (Bruno, Giordano), 315, 320 Cena della beffe, La (Benelli), 168, 172 Cena della beffe, La (Blasetti), 237 Cena e passione (Castellani, C.), 1652 Cena, Giovanni, 1769, 1853 Aleramo and, 15 Cena, La (Scola), 1723 Cenacolo, 540 Cendrars, Blaise, 675 Cene, Le (Grazzini), 172, 896, 1298 Cenere (Deledda), 592, 595–596, 654 Ceneri di Gramsci, Le (Pasolini), 502, 1367, 1374–1375 Cennini, Cennino, 11000 Vasari and, 1952 Cenno critico (Dossi), 648 Censimento delle Edizioni italiane del XVI secolo (EDIT 16), 1049 Censorial jurisprudence, 146 Censorship, 293, 443–446. See also Obscenity Baretti and, 129 Brancati and, 309 De Ce´spedes and, 582

INDEX De Filippo, E., and, 585–586 Fascism and, 2031 Fellini and, 700 Malaparte and, 1112 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 of Moravia, 1231 Tansillo and, 1822 Testori and, 1870 Toto` and, 1894 Trilussa and, 1914 of Vittorini, 2005 Cent nouvelles nouvelles (Malespini, O.), 1298 Centaura, La (Andreini, G.), 36 Cento anni, I (Rovani), 939, 1254, 1259, 1628, 1697 Cento e cento e cento pagine del libro segreto diGabriele D’Annunzio tentato di morire (D’Annunzio), 542 Cento novelle antike, 1295 Cento poesie in vernacolo pisano (Fucini), 786 Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, 678 Centro Cinematografico del Ministero della Marina (De Robertis, F.), 1619 Centro Culturale Virginia Woolf, 707 Centro di Documentazione, 278 Centro di Documentazione, Ricerca e Iniziativa delle Donne, 708 Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, 32, 58, 471, 1728 Archibugi and, 68–69 Bolognini and, 280 Camilleri and, 356 Cavani and, 426 De Santis and, 620 Germi and, 829 Tamaro, S., and, 473 Centro Studi di Letteratura Giovanile, 465 Centro studi e iniziative per la piena occupazione, 643 Centro Studi ‘‘Europa delle corti,’’ 518, 519 Centro Studi ‘‘Matteo Maria Boiardo,’’ 519 Centro Studi Storici per il Movimento di Liberazione delle Donne in Italia, 707 Centuria (Buzzati), 687 Centuria. Cento piccoli romanzi fiume (Manganelli), 1123 C’era due volte (Rodari), 465 C’era una volta (Capuana), 464 C’era una volta il West (Leone, S.), 200, 1014 C’era una volta in America (Leone, S.), 1015 Cerami, Vincenzo, 177, 447–448, 473, 1730 C’eravamo tanto amati (Scola), 1722 Cercando Emma (Maraini), 1143 Cercando l’imperatore (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Cerchi, Umiliana, 1566 Cerchio magico, Il (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Cerchio Spezzato, Il, 705–706 Cere perse (Bufalino), 322 Cereau, Michel de, 1481 Cereta, Laura, 449–451, 1001 Fedele and, 698 Cergoly, Carolus, 1912 Ceronetti, Guido, 451–453 Ceroni, Paolo, 616 Cerruti, Marco, 1563 Certa mediocrita` difficile (a certain difficult mean), 410 Certame coronario, 1067 Certeau, Michelle de, 2025 Certezza del diritto (knowledge of the law), 446 Certi romanzi (Arbasino), 63

Certo giorno, Un (Olmi), 1306 Cerulli, Enrico, 52 Cervantes, Miguel de, 80, 202, 935 Ariosto and, 83 Dialoghi d’amore (Leone Ebreo) and, 1011 Manzoni and, 1138 Meli and, 1182 Montale and, 1212 Petrarch and, 1413 Pressburger and, 1499 Tansillo and, 1822 Tasso, B., and, 1832 Cervante’s Novel of Modern Times (Quint), 83 Cervi, Alcide, 1580 Cervi, Gino, 633, 1858 Cervio, Vincenzo, 758 Cesana, Luigi, 978 Cesare, Elena di, 449 Cesare Mariani (Faldella), 1698 Cesari, Antonio, 616 Cesarini, Virginio, 1604 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, 453–455, 767, 1478, 1658, 1902. See also Italian Language, History of Monti, V., and, 1219 neoclassicism and, 1279 Pindemonte and, 1446 Ceserani, Remo, 946 Cesta Duga Godinu Dana/La strada lunga un anno (De Santis), 619 Cetra d’Italia, La (Boccalini), 262 Chabod, Federico, historiography and, 945 Chaikin-Open, 49 Chailly, Luciano, 335 Chakiris, George, 404 Chalcidius, Neoplatonism and, 1280 Chalk talks, 50 Chambers, David S., 2 Chancerel, Le´on, 499 Chandler, Raymond, 632 Chanel, Coco, 1994 Chanson de Roland, 783 Chansons de femmes (women’s songs), 1754 Chansons de geste, 91, 479, 666, 748, 783, 819 Chants de la mi-mort, Les (Savinio), 1688 Chapelain, Andre´ le, 783 Chaplin, Charlie, 434, 470, 1013, 1950 Charles of Valoid, 736 Charles V (Emperor), 76 Aretino and, 74 Casa and, 600 Castiglione and, 408 Guicciardini and, 914 Trissino and, 1916 Charles VI (King), 1190–1191, 1910 Charles VIII (King), 444 Chartres, Anita. See Vivanti, Annie Chartula (Francis of Assisi), 773 Chasles, Philare`te, Gozzi, C., and, 882 Chatman, Seymour, 57 Chatrian, Alexandre, 686 Tarchetti and, 1827 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 253, 261 Boccaccio and, 250 Chausse´e, Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La, 784 Chautard, Emile, 1965

I29

INDEX Chazina, Nadezda, 1549 ‘‘Che cos’e` la realta`?’’ (Sanvitale), 1678 ‘‘Che fai tu, Eco’’ (Poliziano), 1465 Che fare, 1017 Che fate quel giovane? (Meneghello), 1184 Che le donne non siano della spetie degli uomini (Tarabotti), 1824 Che le donne siano della spetie degli uomini (Tarabotti), 1824 Che ora e`? (Scola), 1723 Che vergogna scrivere (Malerba), 1116 Cheerfulness of Survivors, The. See Allegria di naufragi (Ungaretti) Chekhov, Anton, 1493, 1634, 1794 Bassani and, 142 Duse and, 652 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 Risi, D., and, 1584 Che´nal, Pierre, 1994 Cherchi, Paolo, 1165 Marino and, 1163 Cherif, Mohamed, 1826 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov), 1794 Cherso, Francesco Patrizi da, 1939 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith, 431 Sciascia and, 1706 Chevalier, Maurice, 621 Che´vrefeuille, La (D’Annunzio), 541 Chi e´ cchiu` felice ‘e me? (De Filippo, E.), 585 Chi legge? Un viaggio lungo il Tirreno (Soldati), 1775 Chi ruba un piede e` fortunato in amore (Fo), 1544 Chiabrera, Gabriello, 392, 455–458, 1049, 1127 in Genoa, 816 Marino and, 1161 music and, 1255 Chiacchiere (idle talk), 617 ‘‘Chiamate dell’appigionante, Le’’ (Belli, G.), 156 Chiamatemi Ali (Girolamo and Miccione), 1200 Chiantoni, Giannina, 459 Chiapelli, Maria, Campo, C., and, 368 Chiara Matraini, poetessa lucchese del XVI secolo (Baldacci, L.), 1173 Chiara, Piero, 233 Erba, L., and, 675 Chiarelli, Luigi, 458–462, 631, 1848 Chiarezza, 1645 Chiari, Giuseppe, 867 Chiari, Pietro, 664, 670, 1649 Gozzi, C., and, 880 utopia and, 1939 in Venice, 1960 Chiarini, Giuseppe, 388, 540 Chiarini, Luigi cinema and, 471 De Santis and, 620 Chiaro, Francesco, 1162 Chiaroscuro, 2003 Chiavacci, Gaetano, 1196 Chiavacci, Maria, Campo, C., and, 368 Chiave a stella, La (Levi, P.), 1041 Chiave per padroneggiare il mondo, la (key to master the universe), 345 Chiaves, Carlo, 520 crepuscolarismo and, 521 Chiavi di casa, Le (Amelio), 31 Chiesa, Carlo Alberto Dalla, 1862 Chiesa, Guido, 715

I30

Chiesa, Paolo, 291 Chigi, Agostino, 76 Aretino, P., and, 518 Children’s Literature, 462–466 Childs, James Rives, 401 Chimenz, Siro A., Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Chimera, La (Vassalli), 370, 873, 1957 Chimere (Chiarelli), 460 ‘‘Chimica’’ (chemistry), 1853 ‘‘Chiocciola, La’’ (Giusti), 202, 861 Chioma di Berenice, La (Foscolo), 765 Chiostri, Carlo, 465 Chirico, Andrea de. See also Savinio, Alberto Ungaretti and, 1928 Chirico, Giorgio De, 29, 1687, 2004 in Ferrara, 718 Masino and, 1167 Chirst-Divine Logos, 364 Chitarra, Cenne dalla, 751 Chiti, Jacopo, 1652 Chohra, Nassera, 1200 Chomo´n, Segundo de, 50 Christ in Concrete (Donato), 963 Christ Stopped at Eboli. See Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Levi, C.) Christian mysticism, 41 Christie, Agatha, 1706 Christina (Queen of Sweden), 4 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 64–65 Christina of Bourbon, 1921 Christ’s Passion, 41–42 Chronicles, 941 Chronicon Imperatorum (Ferrara, R.), 265 Chronicon pistoriensis (Manetti, G.), 1119 Chroniques italiennes, 122, 1620 Chronologia reformata (Riccioli), 135 Chrysis (Piccolomini), 1437 Chrysoloras, Manuel, 312, 952 Chung Kuo Cina (Antonioni), 58 Ci troviamo in galleria (Bolognini), 280 ‘‘Ci vendemmia il sole’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Ciabattini, Giuseppe, 632 CIAL. See Confederation internationale d’auteurs litte´raires Cialente, Fausta, 466–468 Ciambelli, Bernardino, 963 Ciampitti, Franco, 1792 Ciampoli, Giovanni, 1604 Cian, Vittorio, 855 Ciancimino, Calogero, 1718 Ciao Futuro (Curtoni), 1719 Ciardi, John, 964 Ciarlatano, Il (Belli, G.), 154 Ciascuno a suo modo (Pirandello), 1452 ‘‘Cibernetica e fantasmi’’ (Calvino), 345 Cicalata (burlesque chatter), 154 Cicero, 234, 242, 250, 561, 802, 819, 1409, 1415, 1417, 1426, 1429, 1504 academies and, 1 Bembo, P., and, 167 Bracciolini, P., and, 303 Casa and, 601 Castelvetro and, 407 Castiglione and, 409 Franco, V., and, 777 Gravina and, 1189

INDEX Latini and, 1003–1004 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Neoplatonism and, 1280 Petrarch and, 1405, 1406, 1407, 1412 publishing of, 293 Sacchetti, F., and, 1648 Salutati and, 1661 utopia and, 1938 Vasari and, 1953 Vico and, 1984 Ciclo degli ultimi (cycle of those who come last), 357 ‘‘Ciclo dei vinti’’ (Verga, G.), 1965 Ciclone chiamata Titti, Un (Lagorio), 991 Cicognini, Giacinto Andrea, 935, 1127, 1311 music and, 1256 Cielo e il resto, Il (Veronesi, S.), 1975 Cielo e´ rosso, Il (Berto), 190, 191 Cielo in una stanza, Il (Paoli), 1782 Cigarini, Lia, 705, 1249 Cigno, 2 Cigno, Il (Vassalli), 1958 Cigno nero, Il (Modignani), 1601 Cigognara, Leopoldo Francesco, 1278, 2003 Cigoli, Lodovico, 802 Cima delle nobildonne (D’Arrigo), 570 Cima, Vittoria, scapigliatura and, 1697 Cimabue, Giovanni, 1953 Cimarosa, Domenico, 1338 Cimenti dell’agnello, I (Ledda), 1006 Ciminelli, Serafino de’. See Serafino Aquilano Cimiteri, I (Pindemonte), 1446 Cimitero cinese, Il (Pomilio), 1470 Cina e´ vicina (Bellocchio), 158 Cina, La (Bartoli, D.), 134 Cina-Giappone (Comisso), 496 Cine Illustrato, Flaiano and, 732 Cinecitta`, 769 Cinegiornali liberi, 2043 Cinegiornali liberi del proletariato (Zavattini), 2043 Cinegrafie, 726 Cine-letterato, 470 Cinema Amelio and, 30–33 Antonioni and, 56–60 Archibugi and, 67–69 Bellocchio and, 158–160 Bertolucci, B., and, 197–201 Blasetti and, 236–239 Camerini and, 351–353 Cavani and, 424 Celati and, 434 De Filippo, E., and, 587 De Santis and, 619 De Sica and, 621–627 Flaiano and, 732–733 Germi and, 828–830 Leone, S., and, 1012–1015 Monicelli, M., and, 1208–1209 Moretti, N., and, 1240–1242 Olmi and, 1305–1307 Pontecorvo and, 1474 Risi, D., and, 1584–1585 Rosi and, 989, 1608 Salvatores and, 1663–1664

Scola and, 1721–1724 Soldati and, 1775–1776 Tarantino, Q., and, 373 Taviani, P. and V., and, 1845–1847 Tornatore and, 1889–1892 Toto` and, 1892–1895 Verga, G., and, 1965 Zavattini and, 2042–2045 Cinema, 208, 471, 1284, 1728, 1994 Cinema (works in film by Pier Paolo Pasolini), 1371–1374 Cine´ma&Cie, 726 Cinema 5, 1860 Cinema and Literary Writers, 468–474 ‘‘Cinema antropomorfico, Il’’ (Visconti, L.), 1994 Cinema carino (cute cinema), 68 Cine´ma d’essai, 31 Cinema di poesia, 1372 ‘‘Cinema di poesia’’ (Pasolini), 1368 Cinema e la lingua orale, Il (Pasolini), 726 Cinema I (Deleuze), 1284 Cinema II (Deleuze), 1284 Cinema Illustrazione, 471 Zavattini and, 2042 Cinema impopolare (Pasoliini), 1373 ‘‘Cine´ma: Langue ou Langage? Le’’ (Metz, C.), 725 Cinema muto (silent cinema), 723 Cinema Olympia, 636 Cinema Paradiso. See Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore) Cine´ma ve´rite´, 198 ‘‘Cinematografia futurista, La,’’ 470 Cinematografo (Blasetti), 237 Cine´matographe, 468 Cineraccio (Sinisgalli), 1762 Cines Company, 470 Cino, Beppe, 325 Cino da Pistoia, 254, 474–478. See also Dolce stil novo Dante and, 563 Dolce stil novo and, 641 Guinizzelli and, 924 Petrarch and, 1411 Cinque Canti (Ariosto, L.), 83, 85, 87–88, 91 Cinque Giornate, 417, 1204 Cinque poesie per il gioco del calcio (Saba), 1791 Cinque storie ferraresi (Bassani), 139, 949 Cinque-centine, 292 Cintura, La (Gamba), 69 Cinzio, Il. See Giraldi, Giambattista Cio` che e` vivo e cio´ che e´ morto nella filosofia di Hegel (Croce, B.), 524 Cio` che piu` importa (Pirandello), 1849 ‘‘Ciocco, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Ciociara, La (De Sica), 472, 621, 624, 2043 ‘‘Ciociara, La’’ (Moravia), 1235 Cioni, Alfredo, 1653 Cioni Mario di Gaspare fu Giulia (Benigni and Bertolucci, G.), 176 Cioran, Emil, 452 Ciotti, Giovan Battista, 1160 Ciotti, Vincenzo Fani, 1719 Ciprı`, Daniele, Archibuga and, 68 Circe, 814 Circe (Gelli), 600 Circoli Debenedetti and, 578 Gatto and, 812

I31

INDEX Circolo del Convegno, 1205 Circolo di Cultura, 1666 Circolo di Granada, Il (Malerba), 1116 Circolo Romano, 1722 Circostanza, La (Olmi), 1306 Cirenaica (Cavazzoni), 428 Ciresi, Rita, 964 Ciriffo Calvaneo (Pulci, Luigi), 668, 1519 Cirillo, Arturo, 1701 Citati, Pietro, 321 Citino, David, 865 Citta` del dottor Malaguti, Le (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Citta` del mondo, Le (Vittorini), 2006 Citta` del sole, La (Amelio), 31 Citta` del sole, La (Campanella), 364, 366–368, 984, 1768, 1939 Citta` della donne, La (Fellini), 702 Citta` della Vergine, La (Tozzi, F.), 1898 Citta` di Miriam, La (Tomizza), 1880 Citta` di pianura, Una (Bassani), 139, 2031 Citta` di vita, La (Palmieri, M.), 1938 Citta` e dintorni (Malerba), 1116 Citta` e la casa, La (Ginzburg, N.), 671, 844 Citta` futura, La (Gramsci), 888 Citta` ha i miei trent’anni, La (Pratolini), 1496 Citta` in amore, Una (Bevilacqua, A.), 215 Citta` invisibili, Le (Calvino), 344, 1909, 1940, 2007 ‘‘Citta`, La’’ (Fenoglio), 715 ‘‘Citta`, La’’ (Tarozzi), 1830 Citta` morta, La (D’Annunzio), 541, 545, 653 ‘‘Citta` nemica, La’’ (Fortini), 760 Citta` nuova, La (Sant’Elia), 71 Citta` reale (real city), 78 Citta` sconosciuta, La (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Citta` si difende, La (Germi), 828 Citta` volante, La (Pazzi, R.), 718 Citti, Sergio, 177, 473 City (Baricco), 132, 1791 City of Ladies (Pizan), 449 City of the Sun. See Citta` del sole, La (Campanella) City Rises, The (Boccioni), 793 ‘‘Civic Humanism,’’ 951 Civica Pinacoteca, 718 Civil conversazione, La (Guazzo), 518, 904, 1128, 1562 Civilization of the Renaissance, The (Burckhardt), 492 Civinini, Guelfo, crepuscolarismo and, 521 Civitoti in pretura, I (Martoglio), 1165 Cixous, He´le`ne, 710 Clair, Rene´, 352, 1867 Clandestino, 1199 Clandestino, Il (Tobino), 1875 ‘‘Clarina’’ (Berchet), 181 Clarissimae Feminae Cassandrae Fedelis venetae. Epistolae et orationes (Fedele), 698 Classe e Stato, 278 Classici della musica italiana, 1257 Classicism, 361, 478–481 Aleardi and, 13 Algarotti and, 26 Carducci and, 388–389 Checchi and, 430 French, 784 Giordani, Pietro, and, 1060 Leopardi and, 1060 Tommaseo and, 1883

I32

Classicismo e illuminismo nell’Ottocento italiano (Timpanaro), 1218 Classics Illustrated, 438 Claudel, Paul, 678, 785 in Genoa, 817 Jahier and, 974 Claudian, 241 Marino and, 1161 Clement VII (Pope), 416 Aretino and, 74 Bembo, P., and, 164 Guicciardini and, 914 Machiavelli and, 1094 Sannazaro and, 1676 Clement VIII (Pope), 262 Clemente, Antonio. See Toto` ‘‘Clemente Rebora’’ (Contini), 1554 Clemenza di Tito, La (Metastasio), 1191 Cleopatra (Alfieri, V.), 21 Clerici, Carlotta, 1121 Clerks (Smith), 1121 Cliente. Inchiesta sulla domanda di prostituzione, Il (Cutrufelli), 534 Clio e le amazzoni (Bellonci), 160 Clizia (Machiavelli), 639, 814, 1092, 1094 ‘‘Clizia nel ‘34’’’ (Montale), 1214, 1217 Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess), 1246–1248 Clorinda (Tansillo), 1822 Close, Glenn, 2046 Clotaldo (Carrer), 397 Cobelli, Giancarlo, 1795 Coca-Cola, 342 Cocai, Merlin. See Folengo, Teofilo Coccapani, Cesare, 1173 Cocchiara, Giuseppe, 1479 Cocco Bill (Jacovitti), 789 Cocteau, Jean, 58, 499, 1794 Moscato and, 1247 in Venice, 1961 ‘‘Coda del diavolo, La’’ (Verga, G.), 1965 Coda di paglia, La (Piovene), 1448 Codice atlantico (Alberti, Leon), 70, 202 Codice di Perela`, Il (Palazzeschi), 1334, 1336–1337 Codice siciliano (D’Arrigo), 569 Codignola, Ernesto, 462 Codignola, Luciano, Bigiaretti and, 223 Codra, Mila di, 546 Codro, Antonio Urceo detto, 276 Cody, William F., 1785 Coeur simple, Un (Flaubert), 1593 Coffee and Cigarettes (Jarmusch), 177 Cognata, La (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Cognizione del dolore, La (Gadda), 795, 796, 799–800, 1512 Cohen, Leonard, 49, 1784 ´ mile, 50 Cohl, E Coi capelli bianchi, Uno (De Filippo, E.), 586 Coi miei occhi (Saba), 1645 Coincidentia oppositorum, 272, 1975 Col dito in terra (Bigongiari), 226 Col permesso del babo (Bracco), 307 Cola di Rienzo, 481–483 Cold War, 48 Coleridge, Samuel, 711 Colette, Petrignani and, 1423 Colizzi, Giacchino. See Attalo Collage, 1341

INDEX Collalto, Pantaloons Antonio, 498 Collatio Laureationis (Petrarch), 1404, 1409, 1416 Collatio Novi Testamenti (Valla, L.), 1946 Collected Poems. See Tutte le poesie (Montale) Collective subject, 2 Collegio di musica del buon pastore, 1338 Colletta, Pietro, Giordani, Pietro, and, 851 Collettivo delle Compagne, 705 Collettivo di via Cherubini, 705 Collettivo Teatrale la Comune, 740 Collezione di sabbia (Calvino), 346 Collezione di studi religiosi, etnologici e psicologici (Einaudi), 1385 Collina di Euridice, La (Puppa), 1523 Collo dell’anitra, Il (Orelli), 1318 Collodi, Carlo, 177, 462, 483–487, 1260. See also Children’s Literature Di Giacomo and, 635 Manganelli and, 1123 music and, 1256 Colloqui con mio fratello (Stu´parich), 1803 Colloqui, I (Gozzano), 521, 876, 878–880, 1088, 1922 Colloquia (Erasmus), 1161 Colomba sacra, La (Marinella), 1152 Colombi e sparvieri (Deledda), 592 Colombi, Marchesa, 1735 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Colombo, Carmela, 1165 Colombo, Cesare, 1434 Colombo, Cristoforo, travel literature and, 1905 Colombo, Furio, 49 Colombo, Lanfranco, 1434 Colombo, Luigi Enrico, 1922 Colonia felice, La (Dossi), 1718, 1939 Colonial Literature, 487–489 Colonna, 1689 Colonna, Francesco, 293, 490–491 Colonna, Giovanni, 1404, 1408, 1415 travel literature and, 1906 Colonna, Livia, 143 Colonna, Ortensia, 143 Colonna, Vittoria, 491–494, 1408, 1567, 1604, 1906 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Buonarroti, M., and, 326, 328 Castiglione and, 411 Ga`mbara and, 806 Petrarch and, 1127, 1413 Petrarchism and, 1421 Stampa and, 1798 Terracina and, 1861 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1918 Colonne, Guido delle, 254, 833, 1752, 1753 Color Manzoni (Tessa), 1868 Colore del tempo, Il (Roberto), 614 Colore della terra, Il (Petroni), 1423 Colosso di Rodi, Il (Leone, S.), 1013 Colpire al cuore (Amelio), 31, 1864 Coltellini, Marco, 1312 ‘‘Coltrice nunziale, La’’ (Percoto), 1398 Columbia Anthology of Poetry, 966 Columbus, Christopher, 456 Comandini, Alfredo, 1431 Comare secca, La (Bertolucci, B.), 1371 Come cadono i fulmini (Petrignani), 1422 Come e` bella la citta` (Gaber), 1783

Come e` profondo il mare (Dalla), 1784 Come fratello e sorella (Petrignani), 1423 Come ladro di notte (Miglieruolo), 1719 ‘‘Come lavoro’’ (Gadda), 795 Come le foglie (Camerini), 352 Come le foglie (Giacosa), 837, 1922 Come leggo io (Tozzi, F.), 1896 Come parli frate? (Moretti, N.), 1240 Come prima delle madri (Vinci), 1992 Come si agisce (Balestrini), 114 Come si guarda un quadro (Marangoni), 99 Come si seducono le donne (Marinetti), 1155 ‘‘Come te voglio ama`’’ (Bracco), 306 Come tu mi vuoi (Pirandello), 1453, 1456 Come un racconto gli anni del Premio Strega (Bellonci), 161 Come un’allegoria (Caproni), 379 ‘‘Come uno degli dei’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 Comedia (Dante), 72, 82, 106, 163, 177, 241–242, 254, 261, 490, 504, 554–559, 640, 667, 994, 1000, 1254, 1430, 1561, 1566 commentaries on, 559–561 Dolce and, 638 in Florence, 735 Francis of Assisi and, 776 Frederick II of Hohenstuafen and, 781 Gelli and, 814 Guinizelli and, 923 Pico della Mirandola and, 326 Porta, C., and, 1485 Settembrini and, 1749 stilnovismo and, 1087 travel literature and, 1905 Comedia delle ninfe fiorentine (Boccaccio), 241 Come´die Italienne, 498 Goldoni and, 867 Come`die larmoyante (tearful comedy), 664, 784 Comedies (plays by Ludovico Ariosto), 88–90 Comencini, Christina, 473, 1820 Comencini, Luigi, 404, 621 Fellini and, 700 Risi, D., and, 1584 Comento de’ miei sonetti (Medici, Lorenzo), 721, 1179, 1180–1181 Comento sopra alcuni de’ suoi sonetti (Medici, Lorenzo), 107 Comento sopra la Comedia (Ficino), 721 Comento sopra la Comedia (Landino), 994 Comerio, Luca, 1434 ‘‘Comic Code Authority,’’ 789 Comic Mysteries. See Mistero Buffo (Fo) Comiche (Celati), 434 Comico-zumpo, 1951 Cominetti, Annibale, 1433 Coming of Fabrizze, The (Capite), 964 Comiso ieri (Bufalino), 321 Comisso, Giovanni, 495–497 homosexuality and, 1033 Russian influences of, 1634 Commare secca, La (Bertolucci, B.), 197, 198 Commedia alla romana, 1607 Commedia all’italiana, 158, 237, 828, 1240, 1609, 1730 Monicelli, M., and, 1208 Zeffirelli and, 2045 Commedia degli zanni (comedy of the zanies), 498 Commedia degli zanni, La (Poli, G.), 500 Commedia dell’arte, 497–501, 605, 740, 1126 Barbieri, N., and, 1921

I33

INDEX Commedia dell’arte (cont.) in Ferrara, 717 Petito and, 1400 commedia dell’Inferno (Sanguini), 1671 Commedia dia dell’arte, 585 Commedia d’italiana, Wertmu¨ller and, 2022 Commedia erudita, 36, 39, 1126, 1413 Ariosto and, 84, 89 Caro and, 395 Commedia regolare, 479 Commedia ridicolosa, 189 Petito and, 1400 Commedia riformata, 865 Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata (Petrocchi), 1063 Commedie (Alfieri, V.), 20 Commedie nuove (new comedies), 1127 Commedie sacre (sacred comedy), 1652 Commedie spirituali (spiritual comedy), 1652 Commediole (little comedies), 156 Commemorazione di Giosue Carducci (Serra, R.), 1746 Commemorazione di Giovanni Pascoli al Teatro Comunale di Cesena (Serra, R.), 1746 ‘‘Commemorazione provvisoria del personaggio-uomo’’ (Debenedetti), 577 ‘‘Commentando il Petrarca’’ (Carducci), 394 Commentari della luogotenenza (Guicciardini), 914, 917 Commentari intorno alla storia della vulgar poesia (Crescimbeni), 1059 Commentaries (on Comedia (Dante)), 559–561 Commentarii (Ghiberti), 11000 Commentarii delle cose dei Turchi (Giovio), 855 Commentarii di Traiano Boccalini romano sopra Cornelio Tacito (Boccalini), 262 Commentarii rerum memorabilium (Piccolomini), 1001, 1438 Commentario al codice di procedura civile (Satta), 1686 Commentario delle piu` notabili e monstruose cose d’Italia e altri luoghi (Lando), 1939 Commentario Dizionario della moda (Meano), 696 Commento alla canzone d’amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni (Pico della Mirandola), 1440 Commento sopra una canzone de amore composta da Girolamo Benivieni (Pico della Mirandola), 326, 1439 Commento sulla sfera (D’Ascoli), 443 ‘‘Commiato’’ (Ungaretti), 1929 Commisario De Vincenzi, Il, 633 Commissario a Roma, Un, 633 Commissario Maigret (Simenon), 356 Commissario Montalbano, 354 Commissario Pepe, Il (Scola), 1722 Common Cause (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Communism, 501–503. See also Socialism Aleramo and, 16 Alvaro and, 29 Bellezza and, 152 Bertolucci, B., and, 200 Bilenchi and, 228 De Santis and, 619 Delfini and, 597 Jovine and, 987 Moretti, N., and, 1241 Morselli, G., and, 1245 Pasolini and, 1367 Pavese and, 1383 Pontecorvo and, 1474

I34

Rossanda and, 1613 Sciascia and, 1708 socialism and, 1770 Tamaro, S., and, 1820 terrorism and, 1862 Toto` and, 1894 Vigano` and, 1988 Visconti, L., and, 1994 Vittorini and, 2005 Como, Martino da, 757 Comoedia, 1434, 1848 Comolli, Jean-Luis, 726 Compagna luna (Balzerani), 1865 ‘‘Compagni corsi avanti, I’’ (Zanzotto), 2037 Compagni, Dino, 504–505 in Florence, 735 Compagnia de’ Gelosi (Andreini, I.), 1126 Compagnia degli Ipocriti, 589 Compagnia dei celestini, La (Benni), 179 Compagnia dei Fideli, La, 36, 37, 1127 Compagnia dei Gelosi, La, 36 Andreini, F., and, 39 Compagnia del Porcospino, La (Maraini), 1143 Compagnia di Prosa Tino Scotti, 1544 Compagnia di Teatro Luca De Filippo, 587 Compagnia Drammatica del Teatro Mediterraneo, 1166 Compagnia Drammatica di Roma, 459, 460 Compagnia Drammatica Siciliana, 1166 Compagnia Fo-Rame, 1544 Compagnia Gastone Monaldi, 459 Compagnia Reale Italiana, 459 Compagnia Virginia Reiter, 459 Compagnie di fanciulli (boys companies), 149 Compagno, Il (Pavese), 1285, 1383 ‘‘Compagnoi dei taglialegna, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Compagnone, Luigi, in Naples, 1268 Company of the Purification, 1652 Comparetti, Domenico, Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Compassioni e disperazioni: Tutte le poesie 1948–1988 (Ceronetti), 452 Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Guarini, B.), 902, 1059, 1088 Compendio di storia della letteratura italiana (Doni), 645 Compiuta Donzella, 505–506 Compleanno dell’iguana (Ballestra), 374 Complicato intrigo di donne, vicoli e delitti, Un (Wertmu¨ller), 2022 Complice il dubbio (Cutrufelli), 534 Composita Solvantur (Fortini), 761 Compositions de Rhe´torique (Martinelli, T.), 498 Composizione del sogno, Il (Malerba), 1116 Compromesso storico (historical compromise), 1862 Compromissione, La (Pomilio), 1470 Compton-Burnett, Ivy, 846 Comte, Auguste, 785 Zola and, 1972 Comune, La, 276, 1544 Comune senso delle proporzioni (Duranti), 651 Comune sentimento del pudore (a common sense of decency), 446 Comunicare, legge della vita (Dolci), 644 Comunicazioni Rivolutzionarie, 705 Comunista, Il (Morselli, G.), 1245 Comunita`, 219, 1184 Giudici, G., and, 859 neo-avant-garde and, 1275 Comunita` Filosofica Diotima, 1250

INDEX Con gli occhi chiusi (Archibugi), 68 Con gli occhi chiusi (Tozzi, F.), 1896, 1898, 1899–1900 Con le stelle (Benelli), 172 Con me e con gli Alpini (Jahier), 973, 974, 2029 ‘‘Con Occhio asciutto’’ (Risi, N.), 1587 Con pochi ritocchi (slightly retouched), 1184 Con quelle idee da canguro (Perriera), 1340 Con testo a fronte (Volponi), 2018 Concerto (De Ce´spedes), 581 Concettismo, 935 Concetto (concept), 326 Concettosa (ingenious), 1158 Conchiglia di Anataj, La (Sgorlon), 1750 Conciliatore, Il, 150, 664, 785, 944, 982, 1204, 1589 Berchet and, 181 Niccolini, G., and, 1288 Pellico and, 1393 Romantics and, 1061, 1596 Concina, Daniele, 1101 Concistoriali Guelfi, 1589 Conclave (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Conclusiones philosophicae, cabalisticae et theologicae (Pico della Mirandola), 1439, 1440 Concordanze della lingua poetica italiana delle origini (Avalle), 927 Concorrenza sleale (Scola), 1723 Concraca Bizantinea, 384 Concretissima utopia, Una (Radice), 67 Condanna, La (Bellocchio), 158 Condillac, Etienne de, 375, 463, 764, 784, 1020, 1138 Meli and, 1182 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Condivi, Ascanio, 231 Condizione di Quasimodo (Bo), 1530 Condorcet, Madame de, 1133 Confalonieri, Federico, 1061, 1393 Risorgimento and, 1589 Confederation internationale d’auteurs litte´raires (CIAL), 583 Confe´rence, La (Artaud), 1248 Confessione (Pulci, Luigi), 1519 Confessione, La (Soldati), 1775 ‘‘Confessione postuma’’ (Zena), 686 Confessiones (Augustine), 41, 106, 565, 1403, 1411, 1983 Mussato and, 1262 Confessiones (Dante), 561 Confessioni di un italiano, Le (Nievo), 48, 108, 939, 1290, 1293–1294, 1563, 1592, 1628 Confessioni di un ottuagenario (Nievo), 939 Confessions (Rousseau), 108 Confessions of Zeno. See Coscienza di Zeno, La (Svevo) Conformista, Il (Bertolucci, B.), 197, 198, 472 Conformista, Il (Moravia), 692, 1033, 1230 Congar, Yves M., 1703 Congedo, 380 ‘‘Congedo’’ (Carducci), 394 Congedo (Simoni), 1760 Congedo del viaggiatore cerimonioso&altre prosopopee (Caproni), 380 Congedo, Il (farewell), 379 Congiuntura, La (Scola), 1722 Congiura dei Lampugnani, La (Hayez), 1590 Congiura dei Pazzi (Alfieri, V.), 19, 22 Congiura di don Giulio d’Este (Bacchelli), 161 Congregazione dell’Indice (Congregation of the Index), 444

Congress of Vienna, 762 Congresso, Il (Bigiaretti), 223 Coniuratio, 20 Conoscenza per errore (Leonetti), 1016 Conoscenza religiosa, 369, 370 Coˆnquete des e´toiles (Marinetti), 1154 Conquista dello Stato, La, 1113 Conquista di Roma, La (Serao), 1606, 1734 Conquisto di Granata, Il (Graziani, G.), 933 Conrad, Joseph, 47, 974 Berto and, 191 Guidacci and, 919 Sanvitale and, 1678 Consagra, Pietro, 705 Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia, 370 Conservatorio di Santa Teresa (Bilenchi), 227 Considerationi sopra i Sette Salmi Penitentiali (Matraini), 1172 Considerazioni sopra i Discorsi del Macchiavelli (Guicciardini), 913 Considerazioni sopra le censure della santita` di papa Paolo V contro la Serenissima repubblica di Venezia (Sarpi), 1683 Considerazioni sopra le Rime del Petrarca (Tassoni), 1059, 1843 Consigli ad un giovane scrittore (Cerami), 447, 473 Consigli di Fabbrica, 888 Consigli di Meneghino, I (Maggi), 1105, 1485, 1563 Consigli et Avvertimenti. See Ricordi (Guicciardini) Consiglio, Alberto, 1728 Consiglio d’Egitto, Il (Sciascia), 354, 1340, 1706 Consiglio dei Dieci, 1959 Consiglio di Guerra, 417 Consiglio politico presentato al governo veneto (Maffei, S.), 1101 Consiglio, Stefano, 1201 Consolatio de morte filiolae (Cereta), 450 Consolatio Philosophiae (Boethius), 240, 1004, 1945 Consolatoria, Accusatoria, Defensoria (Guicciardini), 914 Consolo, Vincenzo, 507–510 Bonaviri and, 284 Bufalino and, 321 Consorterie, 735 Conspiration pour l’egalite´ de Babeuf, La (Buonarroti, P.), 1769 Constantine (Emperor), 954 Constantini, Angelo, 498 Constantini, Paolo, 1435 Constantinopoli (De Amicis), 575 Constitutiones Regni Siciliae (Frederick II of Hohenstaufen), 781 Constitutions of Melfi (Pier delle Vigne), 1442 Consulti medici (Redi), 1558 Consumo del sacro, Il (Gallini), 54 Contadini del Sud (Scotellaro), 53, 1726 Contaminatio, 89 Contarini, Gaspare, 302, 602 Conte di Carmagnola, Il (Manzoni, A.), 765, 1134, 1140–1141, 1569, 1590, 1597 Conte di Kevenhu¨ller, Il (Caproni), 380 Conte, Giuseppe, 1108 Conte, Paolo, 1785, 1792 Conte pecoraio: Storia del nostro secolo (Nievo), 1291 Conte philosophique, 349, 1718 Sciascia and, 1706 Conte, Piedmontese Paolo, 818 Contemporaneo, 219 Bilenchi and, 228 Ottieri and, 1328 Contenutisti, 986 Contes (Perrault), 484

I35

INDEX Contes philosophiques, 1940 Contessa (Ottieri), 1327 Contessa di parma, La (Blasetti), 237, 1775 Contessa Lara, 1606 decadentismo and, 580 Contesto, Il (Rosi), 1609 Contesto, Il (Sciasci), 1706 Conti, Angelo, 1009 Conti, Antonio, 784, 894, 1713 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Conti, Francesco, 1191 Conti, Giusti de’ Casa and, 601 Sannazaro and, 1675 Conti, Niccolo` de’, 305, 1906 Continente misterioso, Il (Salgari), 1655 Contini, Gianfranco, 228, 522, 577, 1065 Capriolo and, 377 as critic, 1063 Faldella and, 679 Francis of Assisi and, 774 Guerra and, 906 Hermeticism and, 930 Pascoli and, 1359 Pea and, 1391 Petrarch and, 1414 Ragazzoni and, 1540 Rebora and, 1554 Riva and, 289 scapigliatura and, 1698 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Tessa and, 1867 Ungaretti and, 1930 Zanzotto and, 2039 Contra hypocritas (Bracciolini, P.), 304 Contrapasso, 555 Contrario di uno, Il (De Luca, E.), 609 Contrasto, 421 Contrat social, Le (Beccaria), 146 Contributo alla critica di me stesso (Croce), 523, 529 Contributo critico allo studio delle dottrine politiche del ‘600 (Manganelli), 1124 Contro ‘l lusso donnesco. Satira menippea (Buoninsegni), 1824 Contro Roma (Papini), 1606 Controfigura, La (Bigiaretti), 224 ‘‘Controfigura, La’’ (Moravia), 1235 Contropassato prossimoj: Un’ipotesi retrospettiva (Morselli, G.), 1245 Convegno, Il, 1196 Chirico, G., and, 2004 Ferrieri and, 1205 Conversations in Sicily. See Conversazione in Sicilia (Vittorini) Conversazione in Sicilia (Vittorini), 53, 508, 1578, 2006, 2008–2009 Conversazioni della Domenica, Le (Ghislanzoni), 1259 Conversini, Giovanni, 1934, 1935 Conversione degli intellettuali al cinema, La (Debenedetti), 471 Convitato di pietra, Il (Cicognini), 935 Convitato di pietra, Il (Da Ponte), 568 Conviti degli antichi (Borghini, V.), 301 Convito, Il, 1606, 2003 decadentismo and, 580 Convitti musicali (musical boarding schools), 1338 Convivio (Dante), 550, 556, 561–562, 1426, 1566, 1903 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen and, 782 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1181

I36

Cook’s Decameron, The (Waters), 250 Cooper, James Fenimore, 48, 464 Copeau, Jacques, 1760, 1794 ‘‘Copernico’’ (Leopardi), 1026 Copernicus, 444, 802–803 Coppi, Fausto, 1792 Coppia aperta, quasi spalancata (Fo), 1545 Coppini, Donatella, 1472 Coppola, Francis Ford, 1890 Fellini and, 702 Coppola, Frank ‘‘Tre dita,’’ 644 Coraggio delle donne, Il (Banti), 124 Corago overo osservazioni per mettere bene in scena le composizioni drammatiche, 1311 Coral, Giampaolo, 1882 Corale della citta` di Palermo per Santa Rosalia (Luzi, M.), 1084 Corazzini, Sergio, 296, 511–513, 785, 1606. See also Crepuscolarismo crepuscolarismo and, 521 Govoni and, 873 lyric poetry and, 1088 Moretti, Mario, and, 1238 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Corbaccio (Boccaccio), 243, 601 Corbie`re, Tristan, 1540 Corda corta, La (Ottieri), 1327 Cordelia, 464, 979 Cori, Paola Di, 2025, 2026 Corinne ou l’Italie (Stae¨l), 1605, 1902 Corinto (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Cormorano, Il (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Cornaro, Andrea, 138 Della Casa and, 600 Cornaro, Caterina, 1961 Cornaro, Luigi, 457 Corneille, Pierre Baretti and, 129 Beni and, 174 Corner, Catterina, Carrer and, 398 Cornu, Francis, 1313 Corollario (Sanguineti), 1671 Corona di ferro, La (Blasetti), 237, 828 Coronaro, Gaetano, 1148 Coronation Oration (Petrarch), 256 Corone, 751 Corpi e storia: Pratiche, diritti, simboli, 2027 Corpo d’altri (Manfridi), 1121 Corpo e` fatto di sillabe, Il (Guggino), 54 Corpo in figure, 709 ‘‘Corpo, Un’’ (Boito, C.), 686 Corporale (Volponi), 2016 Corporazione delle nuove musiche, 1257 Corpus, 1070 Corpus Hermeticus (Ficino), 953 Corpus iuris, 276 Corpus juris civilis, 11 Corra, Bruno, 51, 470, 631 cinema and, 470 Corra, Carlo, 874 Corradini, Enrico, 296, 983, 1346 Correggio, Niccolo` da, 716 pastoral genre and, 1380 Vasari and, 1954

INDEX Corrente Delfini and, 598 Joppolo and, 976 Sereni, V., and, 931 Corrente di vita giovanile, 1741 Correnti, Cesare, 860 Correnti sottopelle, Le (Meneghello), 1185 Correttione d’alcune cose del Dialogo delle lingue di Benedetto Varch (Castelvetro), 406 Corriere dei piccoli, Il, 464, 465, 787, 978 Morante and, 1224 Corriere del Mattino, Il, 636 Scarpetta and, 1701 Corriere del Mezzogiorno, Il, 307 Corriere del Ticino, Il, 1868 Corriere della sera, Il, 488, 489, 542, 978, 980, 1230, 1234 Alvaro and, 28 Arbasino and, 63 Bertolazzi and, 194 Bevilacqua, A., and, 216 Bilenchi and, 228 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Brancati and, 310 Buzzati and, 335, 336 Cecchi, E., and, 430–431 Cederna, C., and, 431 De Roberto and, 614 Del Giudice and, 599 Fallaci and, 683 Farina and, 689 Flaiano and, 733 Fortini and, 761 fumetti and, 787 Garboli and, 809 Malaparte and, 1113 Manganelli and, 1124 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Martoglio and, 1166 Milan and, 1205 Montale and, 1212 Neera and, 1272 Ojetti and, 1303 Ortese and, 1323 Parise, Goffredo, and, 1353 Pasolini and, 1368 Pazzi, R., and, 1389 Praz and, 1498 Raboni and, 1538 Ramat and, 1543 Rasy and, 1549 Simoni and, 1759 Tondelli and, 1887 Veronesi, S., and, 1976 Corriere dell’Adda, 368 Corriere di Napoli, Il, 307 Neera and, 1272 Serao and, 1733 Corriere di Roma, Il, Serao and, 1733 Corriere d’informazione, Il, 1260 Montale and, 1212 Corriere Fotografico, Il, 1433 Corriere italiano, Il, 461 Corriere Padano, 718

Corruption at the Courthouse. See Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia (Betti, U.) Corruzione al Palazzo di Giustizia (Betti, U.), 207, 210–211 Corsaro e la rosa, Il (Modignani), 1601 Corsaro Nero, Il (Salgari), 1655 Corse al trotto (Cecchi, E.), 430 Corsi, Jacopo, music and, 1255 Corsi, Mario, 776 Corsia degli incurabili (Valduga), 1941, 1942 Corsicato, Pappi, 1247 ‘‘Corso all’alba, Il’’ (Praga, E.), 1490 Corso delle cose, Il (Camilleri), 354 Corso di filosofia (Cattaneo, C.), 418 Corso, Gregory, 965 Corta´zar, Julio, 686, 936 Corte, Andrea Della, 1259 Corte nella cultura e nella storiografia, La (Mozzarelli), 519 Cortegiano, Il (Castiglione), 3, 128, 604 Cortellazzo, Mario, 1561 Cortese, Giulio Cesare, 137, 1562 in Genoa, 816 in Naples, 1268 in Rome, 1604 Cortesi, Paolo, 518, 1001 Corti, Maria, 289, 513–515, 985, 1428 as critic, 1063 Malerba and, 1115 Merini and, 1186 in Milan, 1206 Resistance and, 1580 Cortigiana, La (Aretino), 75, 77–78, 807 Cortigiana onesta (honest courtesan), 777, 1918 Cortigiano, Il (Castiglione), Busi and, 333 ‘‘Cortile’’ (Trilussa), 1913 Cortile a Cleopatra (Cialente), 466 Corto viaggio sentimentale (Svevo), 1808 Cortona, Pietro Da, 2002 Corvo bianco, Il (Bigongiari), 226 Corvo, Il (Gozzi, C.), 881 Corvo, Il (Sciascia), 203 Cosa buffa, La (Berto), 191 Cosa di carne, Una (Rosso), 1625 Cosa pasava il convento (Meneghello), 1185 Cosa sara` (Dalla), 1784 Coscienza dello stile ‘comico’ in Ceco Angiolieri (Peirone), 45 Coscienza di sfruttata, La, 706 Coscienza di Zeno, La (Svevo), 108, 191, 692, 826, 1511, 1644, 1805–1808, 1809–1811, 1854, 1910, 1911, 2028 Coscienza sensible, La (Pressburger), 1500 Cose (Sanguineti), 1671 ‘‘Cose che fanno la domenica, Le’’ (Govoni), 874 Cose fiorentine (Guicciardini), 914, 916, 917 Cos’e` il re’’ (Verga, G.), 1970 Cose, Le (Trilussa), 1913 Cose volgari di messer Francesco Petrarca, Le (Bembo, P.), 1420 Cosı´ e` (se vi pare) (Laudisi), 1452 Cosi fan tutte (Da Ponte), 567–568, 1051 ‘‘Cosi giunsi ai giorni della Resistenza’’ (Pasolini), 1581 ‘‘Cosı` m’aiuti Dio’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Cosi ridevano (Amelio), 32 Cosı` sia (Gallarati), 654 Cosima (Deledda), 591 Cosmicita` (cosmicness), 525

I37

INDEX Cosmicomiche, Le (Calvino), 344, 346, 349–350, 1719 Cosmicomics. See Cosmicomiche, Le (Calvino) Cosmographia (Piccolomini), 1438 Cosmography (Ptolemy), 277 Cosmopolitan, 2011 Cossa, Francesco del, 716 Cossio, Vittorio, 51 Costa, Giovanni (Nino), 2003 Costa, Maria Rosa Dalla, 706 Costa, Nino, 1606 Costa, Orazio, 1793 Camilleri and, 356 Fabbri, Diego, and, 677 Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Costa, Pasquale Mario, 634 Costa, Silvana, 336 Costantinopoli (Gozzi, G.), 884 Costanzo, Angelo Di, petrarchismo of, 1160 Costanzo, Maurizio, 1859 Costituzione per i regii studi (Paciaudi), 1935 Costretta Astinenza (Dante), 728 Cotroneo, Roberto, 139 Council of Florence, 952, 1653 Council of Trent, 8, 445, 1566, 1568, 1604, 1684, 1935 Giovio and, 855 Council of Union, 719 Counter-Reformation, 37, 1604, 1768, 11001 censorship during, 444 Sarpi and, 1683 Tansillo and, 1822 Tasso, T., and, 1835 Country of Absence, The (Stefanile), 965 Coupeau, Jacques, 1652 Coups de the´aˆtre, 881, 1246 Courbon, Paul, 438 Courtesan, The. See Cortigiana, La (Aretino) Courts and Patronage, 516–520. See also Renaissance Covino, Peter, 966 Cozza, Francesco, 123 Crack, Il (Roversi), 1630 Craig, Gordon, 499, 653 Crassia, Francesco, 123 Craxi, Bettino, 1864 Creazione continua (continual creation), 1083 Creazione del mondo, La (Marino), 1160 ‘‘Creazzione der monno, La’’ (Belli, G.), 156 Cremaschi, Inisero, 1719 Cre´mieux, Benjamin, 1808 Cremona, Sicarda da, 1656 Creola, La (Marchesa Colombi), 1148 Crepax, Guido, 790 Crepuscolari (twilight poets), 296, 379, 385, 785. See also Borgese, Giuseppe Antonio; Corazzini, Sergio; Gozzano, Guido; Moretti, Marino; Palazzeschi, Aldo Betti, U., and, 14, 208 Oxilia, N., and, 1330 Penna and, 1396 Piccolo and, 1436 Ragazzoni and, 1540 in Rome, 1606 Sbarbaro and, 1694 in Turin, 1922 Valeri and, 1943

I38

Crepuscolarismo, 511, 520–522 Giudici, G., and, 858 Govoni and, 873 Crepuscolo deifilosofi, Il (Papini), 1346 Crepuscolo, Il, 983 scapigliatura and, 1698 Crescenzi, Melchiorre, 1160 Cresceranno i carciofı` a Mimongo (Ottaviano), 35 Cresci, Mario, 1435 Crescimbeni, Giovan Mario, 4, 144, 1059 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 63, 66 historiography and, 943 Crespi, Benigno, 978 Crialese, Emanuele, 1730 Cricket (Plutarch), 202 Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky), 1634 Crime, Disorder, and the Risorgimento (Hughes), 1592 Crime on Goat Island. See Delitto all’isola delle capre (Betti, U.) Crimine d’onore, Un (Arpino), 95 ‘‘Crisi degli ulivi in Liguria, La’’ (Boine), 269 Crisi dell’eroe nel romanzo vittoriano, La (Praz), 1497 Crisi di lettura: Anticronache del vero (Ramat), 1542 Crispi, Francesco, 1103, 1592, 1654 Cristo ‘63 (Bene), 168 Cristo proibito (Malaparte), 1112 Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Levi, C.), 108, 1035–1036, 1038–1039, 1533, 1578, 1726, 1923, 2031 Cristo si e` fermato a Eboli (Rosi, F.), 1610, 1859 Criterion, 1498 ‘‘Critica d’arte’’ (Longhi), 1073 Critica del gusto (Volpe, Galvano), 101, 1429 Critica e gli ermetici, La (Fioravanti), 930 Critica fascista, 980 ‘‘Critica freudiana, La’’ (Lavagetto), 1510 Critica, La, 296 Croce, B., and, 524, 1062, 1429, 1502, 1937 Gobetti, P., and, 862 Naples and, 1268 Vittorini and, 2005 Critica letteraria: questioni teoriche, La (Croce), 523 Critica militante, 1059 Critica sociale, La, 1769 Criticism. See also Feminist Theory and Criticism; Film Theory and Criticism; Literary Criticism, History of; Music Criticism art, 99 dramatic, 63 literary, 26, 63 moral, 63 source, 82–83 spoken, 357 Crito (Bruni, L.), 1281 Crivelli, Taddeo, 716 Croccolo, Carlo, Toto` and, 1895 Croce, Benedetto, 6, 28, 45, 83, 99, 123–124, 161, 232, 278, 296, 462, 498, 499, 523–532, 826, 935, 1212, 1428, 1429, 1430, 1479, 1560, 1936–1937. See also Historiography; Philosophy and Literature Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 aesthetic theories of, 722 Aleramo and, 17 Ariosto and, 91 Basile and, 136 Bassani and, 140 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 297

INDEX Cecchi, E., and, 430 as critic, 1062 Critica, La and, 1502, 2005 Dante and, 1018 De Sanctis and, 616, 1065 Debenedetti and, 577 decadentismo and, 580 Della Valle, F., and, 607 Di Giacomo and, 635 fantastic and, 685 futurism and, 791 Gentile and, 823 Giovio and, 855 Gobetti, P., and, 862 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Gramsci and, 889 Gravina, G., and, 894 historiography and, 945 Leopardi and, 1022 Longhi and, 1073 Marin and, 1150 Marino and, 1158, 1163 Martino and, 53 Michelstaedter and, 1195 Morra and, 1243 in Naples, 1268 Neera and, 1271 Nievo and, 1290 Panzini and, 1342 Papini and, 1347 Pascarella and, 1357 Pascoli and, 1359 Pirandello and, 1450 psychoanalysis and, 1512 Risorgimento and, 1592 Rovani and, 1627 Scarpetta and, 1701 Serafino Aquilano and, 1732 Serao and, 671, 1733 Serra, R., and, 1746 Solmi and, 1778 Tassoni and, 1843 Tessa and, 1867 travel literature and, 1909 Verga, G., and, 1962 World War I and, 2029 Croce di ghiaccio, La (Aldani), 1720 Croce, Giulio Cesare, 277, 532–534, 1562 food and, 757 Croci, Ezio, 1434 Crocifisso (Cellini), 440 Crollo della Baliverna, Il (Buzzati), 337 Cronaca (news), 374 Cronaca (Villani, G.), Borghini, V., and, 301 Cronaca bizantina, 540, 1606 decadentismo and, 580 Serao and, 1733 Cronaca degli avvenimenti di Napoli nel 1850 (Settembrini), 1748 Cronaca dei fatti di Toscana (Giusti), 861 Cronaca della magnifica comunita` di San Daniele del Friuli (Sini, G.), 1562 Cronaca di poveri amanti (Vigano`), 1285 Cronaca di un amore (Resnais), 56 Cronaca di una morte annunciata (Rosi), 936, 1610

Cronaca familiare (Vigano`), 1285 Cronaca grigia, 1697 Cronaca mondana, 696 Cronache, 310 ‘‘Cronache da Hollywood,’’ 2042 Cronache da Hollywood (Zavattini), 471 Cronache degli anni neri (Bilenchi), 1580 Cronache dei poveri amanti (Pratolini), 1033, 1495 Cronache e altre poesie (Pagliarani), 1241 Cronache italiane (Veronesi, S.), 1976 Cronache Latine, 511, 1779 ‘‘Cronache piemontesi’’ (Arpino), 95 Cronache teatrali, 1493 Cronica, 482 Cronica (Romano), 1604 Cronica (Salimbene da Parma), 1480, 1656 Cronica (Villani, G.), 1003, 1990 Cronica delle cose occorenti ne’ tempi suoi (Compagni), 504 Croniche (Sercambi), 1736 Croquis d’un dialogue sur les femmes (Galiani, F.), 1714 Cros, Charles, 1540 Cross, Amanda. See Niccolai, Giulia Crovi, Luca, 631 Crovi, Raffaele, 919 Crowe, Joseph Archer, 2003 Crudeli, Tommaso, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Crudelta` di aria aperta (Maraini), 1143 Cubism, 791 Cuccioni, Tommaso, 1432 Cuccolini, Giulio, 788 Cuccu, Lorenzo, 726 Cucina (kitchen), 103 Cucina casereccia in dialetto napoletano (Cavalcanti, I.), 758 Cucina futurista, La (Marinetti), 758 Cucina rustica regionale, La (Carnacina), 759 Cucina teorico-practica (Cavalcanti, I.), 758 Culicchia, Giuseppe, 371 Cultur der Renaissance in Italien, Die (Burckhardt), 951 Cultura e ideologia di Gianvincenzo Gravina (Quondam), 894 ‘‘Cultura germanica in Italia nell’eta` del Risorgimento’’ (Croce, B.), 826 Cultura, La, 1498 Solmi and, 1779 Cultural anthropology, 52 Culture of Food. See Food, Culture of Culturologia e fenomenologia degli stili (Barilli, R.), 101 Cum gratia et privilegio, 293 Cumani, Maria, 538 Cuntiente e guaje, 1700 Cunto de li cunti overo Lo trattenemiento de’ Peccerille, Lo (Basile), 136, 137, 463, 959, 1128, 1298, 1315, 1480, 1560 Cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi, Il, 758 Cuoco, Vincenzo, 944 Romanticism and, 1599 Cuomo, George, 964 Cuomo, Vincenzo, 1316 Cuor mio (Palazzeschi), 1333 Cuore, 180, 816 Cuore (De Amicis), 464, 1733, 1922 Cuore arido, Un (Cassola), 404 Cuore borghese, Il (Sanvitale), 1678 Cuore di pietra (Vassalli), 1539, 1958 Cuore finto di D. R., Il (Vallorani), 1720

I39

INDEX Cuore: Storia di un anno scolastico, scritta da un alunno di terza di una scuola municipale d’Italia (De Amicis), 575 Cup of the Sun (Waldo), 964 Cura contro il raffreddore, La (Bottini), 50 Cura, La (Battiato), 1785 Curcio, Renato, 1865 ‘‘Curre, curre guaglio`’’ (99Posse), 1664 Cursus (cadences), 249 Curti, Daniela, 911 Curtigghiu di li Raunisi, Lu (Buttitta), 1341 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 63, 106, 1704 Curtiz, Michael, 776 Curtoni, Vittorio, 1719 Curva cieca (Erba, E.), 673 ‘‘Curva minore’’ (Quasimodo), 1527 Curzi, Sandro, 981 Custode Generale (Crescimbeni), 64 Custodi, Piero, 1979 Cutolo, Raffaele, 1890 Cutrufelli, Maria Rosa, 534–536, 706 Cvetaeva, Marina, 1634 Cyberworld (Vietti), 1720 Cycle de Charlemagne, 783 Cymini sectores (hair splitters), 1704 Cyprian, Saint, 396

D D. D. Deliri disarmati (Ceronetti), 451 Da Go´ngora a Mallarme´ (Go´ngora), 936 ‘‘Da poi che ‘l Lauro’’ (Pulci, Luigi), 1518 ‘‘Da poi che la natura ha fine posto’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 475 Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 107, 567–569, 1051. See also Libretto Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Da Quarto a Torino (Bianciardi), 219 Da Quarto al Volturno: Noterelle di uno dei Mille (Abba), 1592 Da te lontano: cultura triestina tra ‘700 e ‘902 (Morandini), 1222 Da un grigio all’altro (Sereni, C.), 1739 Da un paese vicino (Banti), 125 Da Vinci, Leonardo. See Leonardo Da Vinci Dadapolis (Ramondino), 1546 Dafne (Guidi, A.), 66 Daghela avanti un passo! (Bianciardi), 219 ‘‘Dagli Apennini alle Ande’’ (De Amicis), 575 ‘‘Dagli occhi delmie ben si parte e vola’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 328 Dagrada, Elena, 726 Daguerre, Louis, 1431 Dal calamajo di un medico (Dossi), 648 Dal diario (Pasolini), 1580 Dal fondo delle campagne (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083 Dal luogo del sequestro (Tomizza), 1881 ‘‘Dal naso al cielo’’ (Pirandello), 1459 Dal profondo (Negri, Ada), 1273 Dal quaderno di Mario Rossetti (Solmi), 1779 Dal tuo al mio (Verga, G.), 1965 Dal vero (Serao), 1733 D’Alba, Auro, futurism and, 793 D’Alcamo, Cielo, 421, 1561, 1754 D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 146, 982 D’Alessandri, Antonio, 1432 Dali, Salvador, 168 Dalla donna alla luna (Bigiaretti), 224 Dalla, Lucio, 1630, 1784, 1792

I40

‘‘Dalla neutralita` assoluta alla neutralita` attiva ed operante’’ (Mussolini), 979 Dalla parte della donna (Saraceno), 706 Dalla parte di lei (De Ce´spedes), 582 Dalla terra alle stelle (Grifoni), 1718 Dalla terra natale (Capuana), 383 Dalla vita alle scene (Viviani, R.), 2014 Dall’alba al meriggio (Farina), 689 Dallamericaruso (Dalla), 1784 Dalle traduzioni (Quasimodo), 1529 ‘‘Dall’immagine tesa’’ (Rebora), 1556 Dall’inferno (Manganelli), 1123 ‘‘Dall’intensa nuvolaglia’’ (Rebora), 1555 Dallo zdanovismo allo strutturalismo (Guiducci), 922 Dall’Olanda (Sereni, V.), 1742 Dall’Ongaro, Francesco, 826, 1398, 1479 Dall’Orto, Giovanni, 1033–1034 Dalmati, Margherita, 369 D’Alo`, Enzo, 51 ‘‘D’altrui pietoso e sol di se´ spietato’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 327 Dama bianca (Marulli), 1401 D’Ambra, Lucio, 306, 470, 1727 cinema and, 469 D’Amelia, Marina, 2025 Damerini, Gino, 978 Damian, St. Peter, 1030 Damiani, Damiano, 769, 829, 1228 Damiani, Francesco, 473 Damiani, Roberto, 1880 Damiani, Rolando, 233 D’Amico, Fedele, 1259 D’Amico, Scarpelli, 1208 D’Amico, Silvio, 784, 1166, 1793 Chiarelli and, 458–459 Rovetta and, 1632 teatro grottesco and, 1849 D’Amico, Suso Cecchi, 471, 1208 Visconti, L., and, 1730 D’amorosi sensi (of loving senses), 1598 DAMS. See Discipline delle Arti, della Musica, e dello Spettacolo Danae (Taccone), 1467 Danaidi, Le (Graf), 885 Dance and Literature, 537–539 D’Ancona, Alessandro, 45, 464, 820, 1479, 1653, 1908 as critic, 1061 Francis of Assisi and, 774 Gentile and, 822 Iacopone da Todi and, 956 Petrarch and, 1414 Dandolo, Ermellina, 1600 scapigliatura and, 1697 D’Andrea, Francesco, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 D’Angelo, Pascal, 963, 964 Daniel, Arnaut, 557 Dante and, 563 lyric poetry and, 1087 Petrarch and, 1411 Daniele Cortis (Fogazzaro), 744 Daniele, Pino, 1269, 1785–1786 ‘‘Daniello Bartoli e la ‘Ricreazione del Savio’’’ (Raimondi, Ezra), 135 Danna, Daniela, 1034 ‘‘Dannazione’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 D’Annunzio al vaglio dell’humorismo (Lucini), 1079

INDEX D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 47, 48, 230, 394, 469–470, 483, 522, 539–547, 826, 874, 983, 1009, 1052, 1451, 1727, 1792, 1793, 1853, 1996 Aesop and, 203 Aleramo and, 16 Alvaro and, 28 Benelli and, 171 Boito, A., and, 272 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Bracco and, 307 Brancati and, 308 Campana and, 359, 361 Campo, C., and, 370 Capuana and, 383 Cardarelli and, 385 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Chiarelli and, 459 cinema and, 469 Comisso and, 495 Debenedetti and, 577 decadentismo and, 580 Duse and, 652 Fascism and, 691 fashion and, 695 Folgore and, 753 Gatto and, 811 Govoni and, 873 Gozzano and, 876, 879 Liala and, 1045 Longhi and, 1073 Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Lucini and, 1078 lyric poetry and, 1088 Martoglio and, 1166 Michelstaedter and, 1196 in Milan, 1204 Moretti, Mario, and, 1238 music and, 1254, 1257 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Occioni and, 1936 Ojetti and, 1303 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Panzini and, 1342 Pascoli and, 1359 Pastrone and, 723 Penna and, 1396 Prezzolini and, 1502 Ragazzoni and, 1539, 1540 Re`paci and, 1576 in Rome, 1606 Russian influences of, 1634 Saba and, 1643 Sarfatti and, 1681 Sbarbaro and, 1694 Scarpetta and, 1701 Serao and, 1733 Serra, R., and, 1746 Sla`taper and, 1765 socialism and, 1769 Svevo and, 1806 Turoldo and, 1924 Valduga and, 1941 in Venice, 1960, 1961 Verga, G., and, 1965 verismo and, 1974

Vigano` and, 1988 World War I and, 2029 Zanzotto and, 2038 Dante, 45, 72, 82, 93, 107, 163, 167, 490, 504, 547–567, 667, 819, 994, 1000, 1426, 1430, 1480, 1561, 1562, 1566, 1712, 1752, 1991 Ariosto and, 84 autobiography and, 106 Benigni and, 176 Bettinelli and, 213 Boccaccio and, 239 Boito, A., and, 272 Bufalino and, 321 Campo, C., and, 370 capitoli and, 778 Caproni and, 380 Carducci and, 388 Cavalcanti, G., and, 419 Cellini and, 440 Cino da Pistoia and, 475 Cola di Rienzo and, 482 Croce, B., and, 1018 De Sanctis and, 616 Dolce stil novo and, 640, 641, 783 Frederick II of Hohenstuafen and, 781 Gelli and, 814 Giacomo da Lentini and, 834 Giambullari, P., and, 840 Giusti and, 861 Gozzano and, 879 Gravina and, 1189 Guinizzelli and, 923, 924 homosexuality and, 1030 Italian language and, 968 language and, 1054 Latini and, 1004 lyric poetry and, 1087 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Mazzini and, 1175 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1180 music and, 1254 Neoplatonism and, 1281 Pascoli and, 1361 Passavanti and, 1378 pastoral genre and, 1379 Petrarch and, 1403, 1414 Pier delle Vigne and, 1443 Pierro and, 1444 Pressburger and, 1499 Rebora and, 1555 Risorgimento and, 1588 Sacchetti, F., and, 1648 Salutati and, 1661 Sanguineti and, 1669 Sarfatti and, 1681 Settembrini and, 1749 Tansillo and, 1822 Terracina and, 1861 Tobino and, 1875 Tommaseo and, 1884 Tornabuoni and, 1887 translation of, 1901, 1903 Trissino and, 1916 Tuscan and, 1915 Valduga and, 1941

I41

INDEX Dante (cont.) in Venice, 1960 Zanzotto and, 2038 ‘‘Dante’’ (Carducci), 394 Dante Alighieri Society, 1922 Dante, Pietro di, 560 Dante Society, 737 Dante vivo (Papini), 232 Danteum (Terragni), 72 Danubio (Magris), 1109, 1909, 1912 Danza della fata Confetto—Nostalgia di protezione (Pontecorvo), 1475 ‘‘Danza Sacra, La’’ (Fuller), 538 D’Aosta, Anselmo, 1426, 1938 Dapporto, Massimo, 67 D’Aquino, Francesco, 1338 D’Aquino, Jacopo, 1753 D’Aquino, Rinaldo, 833, 1087, 1752, 1753 D’Aragon, Tullia Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Muzio and, 1264 Petrarchism and, 1421 Stampa and, 1798 D’Aragona, Allesandro Visconte, 150 D’Arcais, Francesco, 1259 D’Arcais, Giuseppe Flores, 465 Dardo, Il, 1786 Dare e avere (Quasimodo), 1527 D’Arezzo, Guittone, 1480, 1567 D’Arienzo, Nicola, 635 Dario Fo incontra Ruzante (Fo), 740 Dark Arena, The (Puzo), 963 Daro` un milione (Camerini), 351, 622, 2042 D’Arrigo, Stefano, 47, 569–571, 1564 D’Artagnan, 1166 Darwin, Charles, 103, 382, 1972 Fogazzaro and, 744 Svevo and, 1806 Darwinismo nell’arte (De Sanctis), 1061 D’Ascoli, Cecco, 443, 983 D’Assisi, Chiara, 1566 Daste´, Jean, 499 Dati, Carlo Roberto, 231 Redi and, 1558 Daudet, Alphonse, in Palermo, 1339 Daughter of Iorio, The. See Figlia di Iorio, La (D’Annunzio) D’Avalos, Alfonso, 1264 D’Avalos, Ferrante Francesco, 492 D’Avalos, Maria d’Aragona, 1822 ‘‘Davanti al simulacro di Ilaria del Carretto’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 ‘‘Davanti San Guido’’ (Carducci), 394 Davanzati, Bernardo, 1907 Davanzati, Chiaro, 201, 571–572, 640 Giacomo da Lentini and, 834 D’Aviano, Marco, 1751 David (Bernini, G.), 189 David (Buonarroti, M.), 329 in Florence, 736 David Copperfield (Dickens), 575 David, Jacques-Louis, Alfieri, V., and, 20 David-Ne`el, Alexandra, Petrignani and, 1423 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 2025, 2026 Davis, Phil, 788 Davy, Anna, 1338

I42

Davy Crockett (Bonelli), 789 Davy, Humphry, 1432 Day, The. See Giorno, Il (Parini, G.) D’Azeglio, Cesare Taparelli, 1135, 1592 Risorgimento and, 1590 Romanticism and, 1596 D’Azeglio, Massimo Taparelli, 573–574, 938, 1922. See also Autobiography Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Romanticism and, 1598 De aedificatoria (Alberti, Leon), 11001 De Aetna (Bembo, P.), 163 De America (Piovene), 1448 De Amicis, Edmondo, 464, 489, 574–576, 1659, 1733 cinema and, 470 Di Giacomo and, 635 in Genoa, 816 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 travel literature and, 1909 in Turin, 1922 De amicitia (Cicero), 561, 1648 De amicitia (on friendship), 1003 De amore (Ficino), 326, 721, 1011, 1440 De Amore Coniugali (Pontano), 1472 De Anima (Landino), 994 De anima cum corpore (Riva, B.), 290 De animalibus (Albert the Great), 1704 De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia ex linguae latinae originibus (Vico), 1986 De antiquissima Italorum sapientia ex linguae originibus eruenda libri tres (Vico), 1426 De architectura (Vitruvius), 8, 479, 1380 De arte onesti amandi (Capellanus), 254 De arte verandi cum avibus (Frederick II of Hohenstaufen), 781, 1752 De avaritia (Bracciolini, P.), 303 De Babilonia civitate infernali (Giacomo da Verona), 830 De bello italico adversus Gothicos libri IV (Bruni, L.), 313 De Biasi, Mario, 1434 De Canaria (Boccaccio), 256, 1906 De Cardinalatu (Cortesi), 518 De casibus virorum illustrium (Boccaccio), 230, 239, 255, 941 De Ce´spedes, Alba, 581–583, 671 Fascism and, 692 Resistance and, 1579 De Christiana religione (Ficino), 720, 1567 De civitate Dei (Augustine), 235, 555, 1405, 1938 De coelibatu (Barbaro, E.), 127 De comparatione Ciceronis et Quintiliani (Valla, L.), 1945 De Concini, Ennio, 1729 De Consolatio Philosophiae (Boethius), 1429 De consolatione philosophiae (Boethius), 551, 561, 562, 566, 1405, 1407 De contemptu mundi (Manetti, G.), 1119 De controversia mensium (Riva, B.), 291 De correcta interpretatione (Bruni, L.), 312 ‘‘De Cruce’’ (Riva, B.), 290 De curialium miseriis (Piccolomini), 1437 De Curtis, Antonio. See Toto` De de subeundo maritalis iugo iudicium (Cereta), 449 ‘‘De die iudicij’’ (Riva, B.), 290 De dignitate et excellentia hominis (Manetti, G.), 953, 1001, 1119 De divina proportione (Pacioli), 1008 De ecclesiastica potestate (Quidort), 551

INDEX De ente et uno (Pico della Mirandola), 1440 De Europa (Piccolomini), 1438 De fabula equestris ordinis Costantiniani (Mafffei, S.), 1101 ‘‘De falsis excusationibus’’ (Riva, B.), 290 De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (Valla, L.), 942, 1001, 1946 De felicitate (Ficino), 1179 De Filippo, Eduardo, 47, 184, 352, 356, 584–591, 1796, 1891. See also Commedia dell’arte biography of, 233 Di Giacomo and, 636 Fuitevenne and, 989 Moscato and, 1246 music and, 1257 in Naples, 1269, 1547 Scarpetta and, 1700, 1701 Viviani, R., and, 2014 World War II and, 2031 De Filippo, Peppino, 352, 584 Bracco and, 307 in Naples, 1269 Scarpetta and, 1701 Toto` and, 1895 De Filippo, Titina, 585–587 in Naples, 1269 De fortuna (Pontano), 1001 De Gaspari (Cavani), 426 De genere dicendi philosophorum (Pico della Mirandola), 1439 De gestis italicorum post Henricum Cesarem (Mussato), 1262 De gl’heroici furori (Bruno, G.), 819 De Gregori, Francesco, 1784 De Gubernatis, Angelo, 464, 1243 De Guido Ubaldo Feretrio deque Elisabetha Gonzaga Urbini ducibus (Bembo, P.), 164 De hominis dignitate (Pico della Mirandola), 1938 De iciarchia (Alberti, Leon), 8 De Ierusalem celesti (Giacomino da Verona), 830 De illustribus longaevis (Manetti, G.), 1119 De imitatione (Bembo, P.), 164 De Immortalitate animae (Pomponazzi), 277 De infelicitate principum (Bracciolini, P.), 304 De infinito (Bruno, Giordano), 1939 De ingenius moribus et liberalibus studiis adulescentiae (Vergerio), 1935 De Inventione (Cicero), 1003 De iure naturae et gentium (Pufendorf), 1768 De ‘l sito, fo´rma,&misu´re de´llo Infe´rno di Da`nte (Giambullari, P.), 840 ‘‘De la` del mur’’ (Tessa), 1867 De la lingua che si parlae scrive in Firenze (Giambullari, B.), 814, 840 ‘‘De la mia disı¨anza’’ (Frederick II of Hohenstaufen), 781 De laboribus Herculis (Salutati), 1661 De L’Allemagne (Sta¨el), 1598 De laudibus literarum (Fedele), 699 De laudibus philosophiae (Ariosto, L.), 83 ‘‘De l’Esprit des traductions’’ (Stae¨l), 1902 De liberali mulierum institutione defensio (Cereta), 449 De libero arbitrio (Valla, L.), 1946 De liberorum educatione (Piccolomini), 1438 De l’infinito universo et mondi (Bruno, Giordano), 315, 320 De Luca, Erri in Naples, 1268 Ortese and, 1323

De Luca, Erri, 609–610 De Luca, Lorenzo, 383 De magnalibus urbis Mediolani (Riva, B.), 291 De Marchi, Emilio, 611–612, 631 De Marchi, Pietro, 1318 De Marco, Gustavo, 1893, 1950 De Maria, Federico, 1340 De mente heroica dissertatio (Vico), 1982 De Mille, Cecile B., 1013 De minimo (Bruno, Giordano), 316 De miseria humanae condicionis (Bracciolini, P.), 304 De modernistarum doctrinis, 744 De monibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de diversis nominibus maris (Boccaccio), 239, 255, 1906 ‘‘De morte Raphaelis pictoris’’ (Castiglione), 409 De mulieribus claris (Boccaccio), 230, 240, 255, 257 De Niro, Robert, 199, 1015 De nobilitate animae (Landino), 994 De nobilitate legum et medicine (Salutati), 1661 De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione (Vico), 1982 De officiis (Cicero), 601 De officiis inter potentiores et tenuiores amicos (Della Casa), 601 De officio legati (Barbaro, E.), 127 ‘‘De officio senum erga juvenes...et de educandis liberis’’ (Alberti, Leon), 463 De onesta voluptate et valetudine (Sacchi, B.), 757 De optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia libellus vere aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus (More), 1768, 1938 De oratore (Cicero), 409, 1504 Libro del Cortegiano, Il (Castiglione) and, 412 De origine, vita, studiis et moribus viri clarissimi Dantis aligerii florentini poete illustris, et de operibus compostis ab eodem (Boccaccio), 242 De otio religioso (Petrarch), 1407, 1416 De pari aut impari Evae atque Adae peccato (Cereta), 450 De partenopea coniuratione (Vico), 1983 De partu Virginis (Sannazaro), 1567, 1675 ‘‘De patre cuiusdam Donati’’ (Riva, B.), 290 De peccatore cum Virgine (Riva, B.), 290 De pictura (Alberti, Leon), 8, 11000 De pictura sacra (Borromeo), 2002 De potestate regia et papali (Quidort), 551 De Pretore Vincenzo (De Filippo, E.), 587 De Principatibus (Machiavelli), 1567 De principe (Pontano), 1001, 1472 De’ principi delle belle lettere applicati alle belle arti (Parini, G.), 1279 De profundis (Satta), 1686 De prospectiva pingeni (Francesca), 1001, 11000 ‘‘De quindecim miraculis que debent apparere ante diem iudicij’’ (Riva, B.), 290 De quinquaginta curalitatibus ad mensam (Riva, B.), 757 De’ Raguagli di Parnaso (Boccalini), 262 De raptu Pauli (Ficino), 327 De Raptu Proserpinae (Claudian), 1161 De re aedificatoria (Alberti, Leon), 8, 70, 99 De re aulica (Nifo), 1298 De re uxoria (Barbaro, E.), 127 De rebus gestis Antonii Caraphae (Vico), 232, 1983 De regandi peritia (Nifo), 1098 De regia sapienta (Botero), 1921 De regimine principum (Aquinas), 551

I43

INDEX ‘‘De religiosa habitatione in eremis’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 De remediis utriusque fortunae (Petrarch), 1417 De reprobatione Monarchiae (Vernani), 564 De republica (Cicero), 1938 De rerum natura (Lucretius), 1001 Redi and, 1558 De rerum natura (Telesio), 363 De Rerum Natura Juxta Propria Principia (Telesio), 1427 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 803 De Robertis, Federico, Serra, R., and, 1746 De Robertis, Francesco, 1619 De Robertis, Giuseppe, 785, 983 as critic, 1062 Guidacci and, 918 Manzini and, 1131 Prezzolini and, 1502 Quasimodo and, 1526 Sinisgalli and, 1761 De Roberto, Federico, 308–309, 612–615, 1974. See also Verismo Camilleri and, 354 historical novels and, 939 music and, 1257 Verga, G., and, 1964 verismo and, 1972 De ruina Ecclesiae (Savonarola), 1690 De ruina Mundi (Savonarola), 1690 De Sade, Marquis, 1020, 1373 De saeculo et religione (Salutati), 1661 De Sanctis, Francesco, 100, 390, 484, 523, 615–618, 819–820, 822, 1061, 1064–1065 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Gramsci and, 888–889 Gravina, G., 894 Guerrazzi, F., and, 909 Guicciardini and, 914 historiography and, 945 Marino and, 1163 Noventa and, 1301 Petrarch and, 1414 Romagnosi and, 1936 Settembrini and, 1749 travel literature and, 1905 verismo and, 1972 De Santis, Giuseppe, 58, 473, 619–621, 1283, 1728 in Naples, 1268 Soldati and, 1775 De Sathan cum Virgine (Riva, B.), 290 De secreto conflictu curarum mearum (Petrarch), 1405 De Sermone (Pontano), 1472 De Sica, Vittorio, 281, 351, 445, 472, 587, 621–628, 1609, 1620, 1728, 1951, 2042 Leone, S., and, 1013 in Naples, 1270 neorealism and, 1283 in Rome, 1607 De simplicitate christianae vitae (Savonarola), 1691 De sole et lumine (Ficino), 720 De spectaculis (Tertullian), 479 De spectaculis theatralibus (Concina), 1101 De statua (Alberti, Leon), 8, 70 De Stefani, Alessandro, 1456, 1727 teatro grottesco and, 1849–1850 De Stefani, Livia, 1340

I44

De studiis et litteris tractatulus ad Baptistam Malatestam (Bruni, L.), 313 De Studiorum Ratione (Vico), 1986 De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (Petrarch), 1407, 1408, 1409, 1417 De Summo Bono (Medici, Lorenzo), 1178 De’ teatri antichi e moderni (Maffei, S.), 65, 1101 De Theutonico conflictu (Cereta), 449–450 De tribus regulis S. Augustini (Pulci, A.), 1515 De Trinitate (Augustine), 1408 De tumulis (Pontano), 1472 De Turris, Gianfranco, 1719 De tyranno (Salutati), 1661 De umbris idearum (Bruno), 315 De uno (Vico), 1983 ‘‘De vanitatibus’’ (Riva, B.), 290 De varietate fortunae (Bracciolini, P.), 235, 304, 1906 De vegetabilibus (Albert the Great), 1704 De Vera Nobilitate (Bracciolini, P.), 304 De vera nobilitate (Landino), 994 De verbis romanae locutionis (Bruni, L.), 234, 952 De verborum significatione libri quattuor (Alciato), 11 De’ veri precetti della pittura (Armenini), 11001 De vero bono (Valla, L.), 1945 De vero falsoque bono (Valla, L.), 1945 De Virgilii Culice et Terentii fabulis (Bembo, P.), 164 De viris acetate sua claris (Piccolomini), 1438 De Viris Illustribus (Bisticci), 941 De viris illustribus (Petrarch), 230, 1404, 1415 De vita coelitus comparanda (Ficino), 720 De vita et moribus domini Francisci Petracchi de Florentia secundum Iohannem Bochacii de Certaldo (Boccaccio), 242, 257, 1412 De vita scholastica (Riva, B.), 291 De vita solitaria (Petrarch), 1406, 1407, 1409, 1416 De voluptate (Cereta), 449 De voluptate (Valla, L.), 1001, 1945 De vulgari eloquentia (Dante), 167, 260, 550, 554, 558, 563, 640, 819, 968, 1004, 1087, 1254, 1480, 1561, 1752 Guinizelli and, 923 in Latin, 1000 translation and, 1901 travel literature and, 1905 Trissino and, 1916 Dean, Trevor, 516, 519 Death of a Salesman (Miller, A.), 1995 Death penalty, 146 Debenedetti, Giacomo, 20, 461, 470, 577–578, 1261, 1727 Bigiaretti and, 223 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 as critic, 1063 Guidacci and, 918 Manzini and, 1130 Morante and, 1224 Noventa and, 1301 Penna and, 1396 Saba and, 1645 Tozzi, F., and, 1896–1897 Debussy, Claude, 541 Montale and, 1211 Decadentismo, 539, 579–581, 743 Deledda and, 591 French, 785 Govoni and, 873 Levi, P., and, 1039–1040 Pascoli and, 1362

INDEX ‘‘Decadentismo come problema contemporaneo, Il’’ (Leonetti), 1016 Decadenza (Gualdo), 580 Decadenza della morte (Masino), 1167 Decadenza italiana nella storia europea, La (Quazza), 662 Decameron (Boccaccio), 45, 79, 121, 137, 167, 221, 239, 247–252, 604, 783, 786, 1000, 1254, 1299, 1430, 1479, 1567 Bandello, M., and, 117 Basile and, 463 Borghini, V., and, 301 Branca and, 1063 Bufalino and, 322 Busi and, 333 Dolce and, 638 Fenoglio and, 712 Firenzuola and, 730 in Florence, 736 in Genoa, 816 homosexuality and, 1031 novella and, 1296 Salviati and, 1668 Sercambi and, 1736–1737 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1920 in Tuscan, 1054 Decameron (Pasolini), 250, 472, 1368, 1373 Decameron n. 2 (Guerrini, M.), 250 Decameron proibitissimo (Martinelli, F.), 250 Decameron spirituale (Fano), 444 Decamerone popolare, Il (Sabino), 250 Decameroticus (Ferretti, P.), 250 Decembrio, Angelo, 716 Decembrio, Pier Candido, 231, 234 Neoplatonism and, 1281 De´claration des droits de la femme et de la Citoyenne (Gouges), 707 De´couverte australe par un Homme-Volant, La (Bretonne), 400 Decreto Albertino, 444 Dedalo (Manfredi, M.), 51 Dedalo, Ojetti and, 1303 Dediche (Merini), 1187 De´doublements, 879 Defand, Madame du, 1658 Deffense et illustration de la langue franc¸oyse (Bellay), 1789 Defoe, Daniel, 464, 2005 Manzoni and, 1138 Degli eroici furori (Bruno, Giordano), 1822 Degli Hecatommithi (Giraldi, Giambattista), 857 Degli Indomiti, 27 Degli onesti, Uno (Bracco), censorship of, 445 Degli ultimi casi di Romagna (D’Azeglio, M.), 574 Degli uomini e dei fatti della Compagnia di Gesu`—Memorie Storiche (Bartoli, D.), 134 Degno amore, 20 ‘‘Degno son io ch’io mora’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 475 ‘‘Deh, non mi domandar perche` sospiri’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 476, 642 ‘‘Deh, quando rivedro´ il dolce paese’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 476 Dei (gods), 517 Dei bambini non si sa niente (Vinci), 1992 Dei, Benedetto, 1518 Dei cataclismi sofferti dal nostro pianeta (Fortis, A.), 1716 Dei deliti e delle pene (Beccaria), 145, 146, 663, 944, 1977, 1979 ‘‘Dei difetti della letteratura’’ (Verri, A.), 664 Dei pregi dell’eloquenza popolare (Muratori), 1059 Dei ragazzi, 1857

Dei risorgimento d’Italia negli studi, nelle arti, e ne’ costumi dopo il mille (Bettinelli), 213 Dei sepolcri (Foscolo), 480, 763, 766–767, 1279, 1446, 1589, 1598, 1599, 1902 Deivozioni (Marino), 1161 De´ja` vu (Erba, E.), 673 ‘‘Del brigantaggio merdionale’’ (Jovine), 987 Del ghiaccio e della coagulatione (Bartoli, D.), 135 Del Giudice, Daniele, 598–600, 1345, 1792 Del martello (Della Casa), 601 Del meno (Landolfi), 686 Del modo di trattare i popoli della Valichiana ribellati (Machiavelli), 1092 Del primato morale e civile degli italiani (Gioberti), 944, 1426, 1591 Del principe e delle lettere (Alfieri, V.), 22 Del rinnovamento civile d’Italia (Gioberti), 1572 Del romanzo storico e, in genere, de’ componimenti misti di storia e d’invenzione (Manzoni, A.), 939, 1135, 1628 Del suono, de’ tremori armonici e dell’udito (Bartoli, D.), 135 Del Veltro allegorico in Dante (Troya), 573 Delauney, Robert, 791 Deledda, Grazia, 591–596, 654, 1563, 1569. See also Decadentismo; Verismo Dessı` and, 629 Petrignani and, 1423 Rasy and, 1549 ‘‘Delenda Carthago’’ (Giusti), 861 Deleuze, Gilles, 1284 Delfina bizantina, La (Busi), 333 Delfini, Antonio, 596–598 Garboli and, 809 Delfini, I, 465 D’Elia, Gianni cinema and, 472 Valduga and, 1942 Delillo, Don, 49, 964 Delirio amoroso (Merini), 1187 Delitti di via Medina-Sidonia (Piazzese), 1340 Delitto all’isola delle capre (Betti, U.), 206, 211–212 Delitto di stato (Bellonci), 161 Delitto di via Chiatamone, Il ( Serao), 1734 Delitto Matteotti, Il (Risi, N.), 1587 Della architettura (Cellini), 439 Della caducita` della vita umana (Giacomino da Verona), 831 Della Casa, Giovanni, 137, 186, 518, 600–605, 758, 932, 1088, 1128, 1834 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Muzio and, 1264 Petrarch and, 1127 Petrarchism and, 1420 Stampa and, 1798 ‘‘Della condizione delle donne e del loro avvenire’’ (Belgioioso), 151 Della cosa ultima (Cacciari), 1428 Della croce racquistata (Bracciolini, F.), 933 Della dissimulazione onesta (Accetto), 518 Della eloquenza Italiana (Fontanini), 1064 Della famiglia (Alberti, Leon), 463 Della formazione dei fulmini (Maffei, S.), 1101 Della forza della fantasia umana (Muratori), 1252 Della fotografia, trattato pratico di Giacomo Caneva pittore prospettico (Caneva), 1432 Della guerra de’ Goti (Chiabrera), 455 Della historia vinitiana libri XII (Bembo, P.), 164

I45

INDEX Della imitazione della natura e del vero nell’arte (Perez, F.), 1339 Della letteratura italiana. Libri IV (Settembrini), 1748 Della moneta (Galiani, F.), 663 ‘‘Della nuova scuola drammatica italiana’’ (Foscolo), 765 Della perfetta poesia italiana (Muratori), 65, 819, 943, 1059, 1251 Della pittura veneziana (Boschini), 2002 Della poetica la quinta e la sesta divisione (Trissino), 1915 Della Porta, Giambattista, 605–607, 1126, 1431 Della pubblica felicta` oggetto dei buoni principi (Muratori), 1252 Della ragion di stato (Botero), 1921 Della ragion practica (Gravina), 1059 Della ragione poetica (Gravina, G.), 893, 943 Della scienza chiamata cavalleresca (Maffei, S.), 1101 Della tirannide (Alfieri, V.), 22 Della tragedia (Gravina, G.), 65, 893 Della Valle, Federico, 607–608, 1127 Della Valle, Pietro, 1907 Della vita civile (Palmieri, M.), 463, 952, 1938 Della vita e dell’istituto di S. Ignazio fondatore della Compagnia di Gesu` (Bartoli, D.), 13 Dell’Arco, Maurizio Fagiolo, 100 Dell’arte della guerra (Machiavelli), 1093 Dell’arte di vedere nelle belle arti di disegno (Milizia), 2003 Dell’arte rappresentativa (Riccoboni, L.), 819 Dell’avvvenire del romanzo in Italia (Fogazzaro), 744 Delle antichita` estensi ed italiane (Muratori), 1252 Delle applicazioni dell’italiano Cellio e del Francese Daguerre alla Camera-Oscura (Cappi), 1432 Delle cose di Lucca (Machiavelli), 1094 Delle lodi del Petrarca (Bettinelli), 213 Delle rime di diversi eccelentissimi autori (Domenichi), 1172 Delle speranze d’Italia (Balbo, C.), 1591 Delle ultime sere di Carnovale, Una (Goldoni), 867 Dell’entusiasmo delle belle arti (Bettinelli), 213 Delli travagliuse ammure dei Ciullo e Perna (Cortese), 1562 Dell’idea dell’architettura universale (Scamozzi), 2002 Dell’incisa, Ser Garzo, 1481 Dell’Insalata (Felici), 758 Dello scrivere contro alcuno (Borghini, V.), 300 Dello svolgimento della letteratura nazionale (Carducci), 1061 Dell’opera in musica (Planelli), 1256, 1312 ‘‘Dell’organismo poetico e della poesia popolare italiana’’ (Imbriani), 1479 Dell’origine della poesia rimata (Tiraboschi), 1753 Dell’origine e dell’ufficio della letteratura (Foscolo), 764 Dell’origine, progressi e stato attuale d’ogni letteratura (Andre´s), 1633 Dell’unita` della lingua e dei mezzi di difffonderla (Manzoni, A.), 1136, 1902 Dell’uso e dei pregi della lingua italiana (Napione), 1922 Delminio, Giulio Camillo, 518 Demachy, Robert, 1433 Demau, 705 Demetrio (Metastasio), 1190 Demetrio Pianelli (De Marchi, E.), 611 DeMille, C.B., 351 Demistificazione autoritarismo, 1249 Demofoonte (Metastasio), 1191 Demogorgone (Da Ponte), 567 Demostheses, Bruni, L., and, 312 Denina, Carlo, 664, 1633 Denkwu¨rdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Schreber), 341 Denti (Salvatores), 1664

I46

Denti e spie (Pressburger), 1500 Dentro la sostanza (Risi, N.), 1587 Depardieu, Ge´rard, 199, 1891 De´paysement, 198 Depero, Fortunato, 72 D’Eramo, Luce, 1863 Dernier tournant, Le (Che´nal), 1994 D’Errico, Ezio, 631 Des mois (Landolfi), 997 Descartes, Rene´, 783–784, 1704 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Vico and, 1982, 1984 Descritio hiemis (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Descrittione di tutta Italia (Alberti, Leandro), 277 Descrizione della vita del Croce (Croce, G.), 532 Descrizione di descrizioni (Pasolini), 876 Descrizione di tutte le pubbliche pitture della citta` di Venezia e isole circonvicine (Boschini), 2002 Descrizioni in atto,Le (Roversi), 1630 Deserto dei Tartari, Il (Buzzati), 335, 336, 338–339 Deserto della Libia, Il (Tobino), 489, 1874, 2031 Deserto rosso, Il (Antonioni), 57, 1721 Desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee (Porta, C.), 1486 Desiderio (Pagliero), 620 Desinenza in A, La (Dossi), 648 Desolation Road (Dylan), 1784 Desprez, Josquin, 1732 Dessı`, Giuseppe, 629–630, 1563 D’Este, Alberto, 716 D’Este, Beatrice, 1566 Fedele and, 698 D’Este, Ippolito, 757 Ariosto and, 94 D’Este, Isabella, 517, 519 D’Este, Leonello, 716 D’Este, Luigi, 777 D’Este, Niccolo` III, 1906 Destino si chiama Clotilde, Il (Guareschi), 900 Destouches, Philippe Ne´ricault, 1979 Destra e sinistra: Ragioni e significati (Bobbio), 1770 Destro, Adriana, 54 Destroy (Santacroce), 374 Destruction (Marinetti), 1154 Detective Fiction, 631–634 Sciascia and, 1706 Determinatio (determination), 1703 Detti piacevoli (Poliziano), 1463 Deus ex machina, 739 ‘‘Devota rivelazione’’ (Catherine of Siena), 415 Devotio moderna (modern devotion), 1567 Devoto, Giacomo, as critic, 1062 Devourers, The (Vivanti), 2011 Dewey, John, 462, 820, 1346 D’Holbach, Paul-Henri Thiry, 1020 Alfieri, v., and, 22 Di certe cose (Risi, N.), 1587 Di Giacomo, Salvatore, 156, 469, 634–637, 686, 1950 Bracco and, 307 cinema and, 469 De Filippo, E., and, 585 in Naples, 1268, 1269, 1270 Petito and, 1400 Pierro and, 1444 Serra, R., and, 1746

INDEX Trilussa and, 1914 Viviani, R., and, 2014 Di giorno in giorno (Negri, Ada), 1273 ‘‘Di Giustiniano e delle sue leggi’’ (Verri, A.), 1977 Di loro, Una (Capriolo), 378 Di notte...lungo i canali (Pestriniero), 1720 ‘‘Di nuovo lunedi’’ (Tamaro, S.), 1820 ‘‘Di penne di paone’’ (Davanzati), 572 Di qua dal faro (Consolo), 509 Di questa vita menzognera (Montesano), 1268 ‘‘Di sera, un geranio’’ (Pirandello), 1459 Di una trattazione scientifica della storia letteraria (Graf), 886 Di Vincenzo Gravina tragedie cinque (Gravina, G.), 894 Diabolik (Giussani, A. and L.), 789 Diaconus, Paulus, 250 Diagilev, Sergei, 499 Dialecticae disputationes (Valla, L.), 1946 Dialects, 1053 Dialog della divina Provvidenza (Catherine of Siena), 1566 Dialog della salute, Il (Michelstaedter), 1195 Dialoghi (Speroni), 1789 Dialoghi (Tasso, T.), 1834, 1838–1840 Dialoghi (Zuccolo), 1768 Dialoghi con Leuco`, I (Pavese), 203, 282, 1383, 1385–1386, 1923 Dialoghi d’amore (Bettinelli), 213 Dialoghi d’amore (Leone Ebreo), 721, 1010, 1440 Dialoghi del cantiere, I (Piano), 72 Dialoghi dell’arte poetica con altre prose e lettere (Chiabrera), 456 Dialoghi, I (Settembrini), 1749 Dialoghi mancati, I (Tabucchi), 1816 Dialoghi puttaneschi (Aretino), 75 Dialoghi puttaneschi (whore’s dialogue), 79 Dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori (Algarotti), 26 Dialoghi sopra le tre arti deldisegno (Bellori), 2002 Dialoghi spirituali (Matraini), 1173 Dialogi (Pontano), 1472 Dialogi ad Petrum Paulum Histrum (Bruni, L.), 312 Dialogo (Catherine of Siena), 414 Dialogo contro i poeti (Berni), 186–187 Dialogo d’amore (Speroni), 1789 Dia`logo de la lengua (Valde´s), 934 Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Landolfi), 686 Dialogo del banchetto de’ malcibati (Croce, G.), 532 Dialogo del reggimento di Firenz (Guicciardini), 913 Dialogo della Divina Dottrina (Catherine of Siena), 414 Dialogo della Divina Provvidenza (Catherine of Siena), 414 Dialogo della infinita` d’amore (Tullia d’Aragona), 1919 Dialogo della musica (Doni), 646 Dialogo della musica antica e moderna (Galilei, V.), 1310 Dialogo della Nanna e della Pippa (Aretino), 79 ‘‘Dialogo della Natura e di un Islandese’’ (Leopardi), 1021 Dialogo della pittura (Dolce), 92, 639 Dialogo della pittura (Pino), 11001 Dialogo della signora Tullia D’Aragona della infinita` di amore (Muzio), 1264 ‘‘Dialogo della Terra e della Luna’’ (Leopardi), 1026 ‘‘Dialogo dell’angelo e del giovine morto’’ (Govoni), 874 Dialogo delle bellezze delle donne (Firenzuola), 731 Dialogo delle lingue (Speroni), 1789 Dialogo delle Rivelazioni (Catherine of Siena), 414 Dialogo dell’historia (Speroni), 1790 Dialogo dell’imprese militari e amorose (Giovio), 854 ‘‘Dialogo di Cirstoforo Colombo e di Pietro Gutierrez’’ (Leopardi), 1027

Dialogo di Giovan Battista Gelli sopra la difficolta` di ordinare detta lingua (Gelli), 814 ‘‘Dialogo di Plotino e di Porfirio’’ (Leopardi), 1027 ‘‘Dialogo di Tasso e del suo genio familiare’’ (Leopardi), 1019 ‘‘Dialogo di Timandro e di Eleandro’’ (Leopardi), 1027 Dialogo di tre ciechi (Epicuro), 1380 ‘‘Dialogo di un venditore di almanacchi e di un passaggere’’ (Leopardi), 1027 ‘‘Dialogo di unfolletto e di uno gnomo’’ (Leopardi), 1026 Dialogo facetissimo et ridiculosissmo (Ruzzante), 1639 Dialogo in pubblico (Corti), 514 Dialogo nel quale si ragiona generalmente delle lingue e in particolare della fiorentina e della toscana (Varchi), 396 Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (Galilei, G.), 443, 803, 1128 Dialogo sopra la nobilita` (Parini, G.), 1349 ‘‘Dialogo tra la moda e la morte’’ (Leopardi), 696 Dialogorum Libri IV (Gregory the Great), 1295 Dialogue (Turco, L.), 965 Dialogues. See Ragionamenti (Aretino) Dialogues (Lucian), 1748 Dialogues on the Commerce of Grain (Galiani, F.), 1713, 1714 Dialogues sur le commerce de ble´ (Galiani, F.), 663, 1713 Dialogues with Leuco`. See Dialoghi con Leuco`, I (Pavese) Dialogus consolatorius (Manetti, G.), 1119 Dialogus in symposio (Manetti, G.), 1119 Dialogus Salomonis et Marcolphi (Croce, G.), 532 Diana e la Tuda (Pirandello), 1453 Diana, La, Rebora and, 1556 Diana pietosa (Borghini, R.), 299 Diari (Delfini), 809 Diari (Montale), 818 Diari (Pozzi, A.), 1489 Diario (Giuliani, V.), 1568 Diario (Sereni, C.), 1739 Diario 1940 (Morante), 1224 Diario bizantino (Campo, C.), 369 Diario clandestino: 1945–1947 (Guareschi), 900 Diario d’Algeria (Gatto), 1581 Diario d’Algeria (Sereni, V.), 489, 931, 1741 Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (Montale), 1213, 1216 Diario del contagio del Piemonte nelli anni 1632–1633 e del Congresso allora tenuto in Cherasco per la pace generale d’Europa (Voersio), 1921 ‘‘Diario della poesia e della rima’’ (Betocchi), 204 Diario delviaggio in Spagna (Guicciardini), 913 Diario di un sognatore (Malerba), 1116 Diario di una femminista (Lonzi), 1075 Diario di una schizofrenica (Risi, N.), 1587 Diario di viaggio e visita di Firenze (Albrizzi, I.), 1659 Diario di viaggio in Spagna (Guicciardini), 1907 Diario europeo (Moravia), 1232 Diario in pubblico (Vittorini), 2007 Diario intimo (Tommaseo), 1883 Diario minimo (Eco), 49, 658 Diario napoletano (Rea), 1553 Diario napoletano (Rosi), 1610 Diario notturno e altri scritti (Flaiano), 732 Diario partigiano (Gobetti, A.), 1579 Diario postumo (Montale), 1213 Diario sentimentale dalluglio 1916 al maggio 1917 (Panzini), 1342, 2028 Diario senza le date (Moretti, Mario), 1237 Diario vagabondo (Liala), 1045

I47

INDEX Diaro sentimentale dal maggio 1917 al novembre 1920 (Panzini), 1342 Diaspore europee & Lettere migranti (Gnisci and Moll), 1202 Diavolo al Pontelungo, Il (Bacchelli), 111, 940 Diavolo: appunti per una futura diabologia, Il (Papini), 1347 Diavolo con le zinne, Il (Fo), 1545 Diavolo in corpo (Bellocchio), 158 Diavolo sulle colline, Il (Pavese), 1383 Dicenta, Joaquin, 935 Diceria dell’untore (Bufalino), 321–322, 324–325 Dicerie sacre (Marino), 1161 Dickens, Charles, 47, 215, 464, 575, 1497, 1858 in Genoa, 815 in Venice, 1961 Dickinson, Emily, 159 Guidacci and, 919 Merini and, 1187 Tarozzi and, 1829 Dicta (Iacopone da Todi), 955 Dictatores, 276 Dictionary of English and Italian Languages, A (Baretti), 129 Didascalie per laterrua di un giornale (Magrelli), 1107 Diderot, Denis, 146, 417, 819, 982, 1713 Leopardi and, 1020 Metastasio and, 1191 Verri, P., and, 1979 Didone (Giraldi, Giambattista), 857 Didone abbandonata (Metastasio), 1190, 1193–1194 Die Windrose (Pontecorvo), 1474 Dieci Comandamenti, I (Viviani, R.), 2014 Dieci inverni (Fortini), 760 Dieci lettere di Publio Virgilio Marone scritte dagli Elisi all’Arcadia di Roma sopra gli abusi introdotti nella poesia italiana (Bettinelli), 212–213 Dietro il paesaggio (Zanzotto), 2037 Dietro la porta (Bassani), 140 Dietro le parole (Magris), 1109 Dieux s’ent vont, D’Annunzio reste, Les, 1154 Diez, Friedrich Christian, 1936 Difesa della razza, La, 980 Difesa delle lavoratrici, La, 979 Difesa dell’Orlando furioso (Salviati), 1668 Difesa di Dante (Gozzi, G.), 883 Difetti donneschi, I (Passi), 755 Diffley, Paul B., 175 ‘‘Diffusione e volgarizzazione’’ (Leydi), 1481 Dignita` cavalleresca nel Comune di Firenze, La (Salvemini), 1665 Dilettante di fotografia, Il, 1433 Diluvio, Il (Betti, U.), 207 Dimenticato di menticare (Maraini), 1143 Dimenticatoio (Sinisgalli), 1762 ‘‘Dinanzi alle Terme di Caracalla’’ (Carducci), 392 Dinner Party (Tondelli), 1886 Dio di roserio, Il (Testori), 1206, 1868 Dio Kurt, Il (Moravia), 1231 Dio ne scampi dagli Orsenigo (Imbriani), 959 Dio ti salvi (Bacchelli), 111–112, 940 Diodati, Charles, 409 Dionisotti, Carlo, 221, 665, 1065, 1560 Bembo, P., and, 1056 as critic, 1063 Renaissance and, 1574 Dionysiaca (Nonnus), 342 Diotima, 1029

I48

Diplomazia clandestina (Lussu), 1081 Diporti (Parabosco), 1298 ‘‘Direction de la cure et les principes de sou pouvoir’’ (Freud), 1510 Direttore Generale (General Manager), 1857 Diritti della scuola, I, 987 Morante and, 1224 Diritti dell’anima, I (Giacosa), 837 Diritti dell’uomo e del cittadino, 445 Diritto alla sopravvivenza (Cassola), 404 Diritto universale (Vico), 1986 Disamore (Bigiaretti), 223 Discacciamento de le nuove lettere inutilmente aggiunte ne la lingua toscana (Firenzuola), 730 Disciplina clericalis (Alfonsi), 247, 1295 Discipline delle Arti, della Musica, e dello Spettacolo (DAMS), 279, 660 Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosofia (Labriola), 1428 Discorsi (Borghini, V.), 301 Discorsi all’osteria (Bigiaretti), 224 Discorsi del conte Pietro Verri sull’indole del piacere e del dolore, sulla felicita` e sulla economia (Verri, P.), 1980 Discorsi del poema eroico (Tasso, T.), 1834 Discorsi dell’arte poetica (Tasso, T.), 1834 Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche intorno a due nuove scienze attinenti alla meccanica ed i movimenti locali (Galilei, G.), 803, 1986 Discorsi intorno al comporre deiromanzi, delle commedie e delle tragedie (Giraldi, Giambattista), 856 Discorsi militari (Boine), 270 Discorsi parlamentari (Lussu), 1081 Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Guicciardini), 913 Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio (Machiavelli), 1092, 1096–1097 Discorso (Nores), 1059 Discorso critico sul testo del Decameron (Foscolo), 1060 Discorso d’amore, Un (Bigiaretti), 223 Discorso dell’obbligo di ben parlare la propria lingua (Dati), 1558 Discorso di Logron˜o (Guicciardini), 913 Discorso di un italiano intorno alla poesia romantica (Leopardi), 1018, 1598 Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi (Cinzio, Giovanni), 81–82 Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua (Machiavelli), 89 Discorso naturale (Luzi, M.), 1085 Discorso nel modo di assicurare lo stato alla casa dei Medici (Guicciardini), 913 Discorso nel qual si dichiarano e stabiliscono molte cose pertinenti alla Risposta (Beni), 174 Discorso o Diologo intorno alla nostra lingua (Machiavelli), 1093 Discorso ovvero lettera intorno al comporre delle comedie e delle tragedie (Cinzio, Giovanni), 607 Discorso sopra alcuni punti della storia longobardica in Italia (Manzoni, A.), 1134, 1141 Discorso sopra il vero fine delle lettere e delle scienza (Genovesi), 662, 1713, 1935 Discorso sopra la poesia (Parini, G.), 1350 Discorso sopra l’arte del disegno (Cellini), 439 Discorso sopra le caricature (Parini, G.), 1350 Discorso sopra le cose di Polonia (Guarini, B.), 902 Discorso sopra tutti li primi canti d’Orlando Furioso (Terracina), 1861 Discorso sopra Virgilio (Speroni), 1789 Discorso storico sul teatro italiano (Maffei, S.), 1060 Discorso storico sul testo del Decameron (Foscolo), 765 Discorso su Francesco Petrarca (Aleardi), 14

INDEX Discorso sul testo della Commedia di Dante (Foscolo), 1060 Discorso sul testo della Divina Commedia (Foscolo), 765 Discorso sull’ indole del piacere e del dolore (Verri, P.), 1980 Discorso sulla poesia (Marin), 1150 Discorso sull’arte del dialogo (Tasso, T.), 1839 Discorso sull’indole del piacere e del dolore (Verri), 784 Discorso sull’origine e i progressi dell’arte poetica (Cesarotti), 453 Discours de la me´thode, Le (Descartes), 783–784 Discours de la trage´die (Cornielle), 174 Discours sur la poe´sie dramatique (Brecht), 819 Discours sur Shakespeare et Monsieur de Voltaire (Baretti), 130, 1060, 1922 Discourse (Descartes), 1704 Discourses. See Discorsi (Borghini, V.) Discrezione (discretion), 518 ‘‘Disdetta, La’’ (De Roberto), 613 Disegni fotogenici (photogenic designs), 1431 Disegni milanesi (Gadda), 795 Disegno (Doni), 646 ‘‘Disgelo, Il’’ (Levi, P.), 1043 Disinvoltura (natural spontaneity), 409 Disjecta (Tarchetti), 1827 Disney, Walt, 50, 788 Disoccupata con onore (Cutrufelli), 706 Dispatrio, Il (Meneghello), 47, 1184 ‘‘Disperata fatica, La’’ (Leonetti), 1016 Dispositio, 175 ‘‘Disprezzo della donna’’ (scorn of women), 1155 Disprezzo, Il (Moravia), 472, 1112 ‘‘Disputa amorosa, La’’ (Marino), 1161 Disputa della Virtu´ (Belcari), 149 Disputa delle arti nel Quattrocento, La (Garin), 1937 Disputatio, 994 Disputatio in qua ostenditur praestare comoediam atque tragoediam metrorum vinculis solvere (Beni), 174 Disputatio rose cum viola (Bonvesin da la Riva), 289 Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem (MPico della irandola ), 1441 Disputationes Camaldulenses (Landino), 721, 994, 1001, 1178 Dissertatio adversus Paulum Vergerium (Della Casa), 602 Dissertation on an Ancient Hymn to the Graces (Foscolo), 765 Dissertation upon Italian Poetry (Baretti), 129, 944 ‘‘Dissertazione sopra la Ragione Poetica del Gravina’’ (Conti, Antonio), 894 Dissertazione su Metastasio (Calzabigi), 1191 Dissimulazione (dissimulation), 518 Dissipatio H. G. (Morselli, G.), 1245, 1719 Dissoluto punito ossia Don Giovanni, Il (Da Ponte), 567, 1051 Dissolvimento (Chiarelli), 459 Distica Catonis, 291 Distinti, 1018 Distinti quadretti (distinct pictures), 154 Distruzione (Marinetti), 817 ‘‘Distruzione della sintassi’’ (destruction of syntax), 792 Distruzione della sintassi - Immaginazione senza fili - Parole in liberta`, 792, 1155 Distruzione di Saul e pianto di Davit (Pulci, A.), 1515, 1652 Disubbidienza, La (Moravia), 1230 Ditegli sempre di si (De Filippo, E.), 585 ‘‘Ditirammu’’ (Meli), 1182 Dito in bocca, Il (Jaeggy), 971 Dito nell’occhio, Il (Fo), 738, 1544 Dito puntato, Il (Bigiaretti), 224 Diulgheroff, Nicolay, 1922

Divertimento 1891 (Morselli, G.), 1245 Divertimento, Il (Ottieri), 1327 Divertissement, 191 Divina foresta, La (Bonaviri), 284 Divine Comedy, The. See Comedia (Dante) Divine Names, The (Pseudo-Dionyius), 1281 ‘‘Divine primal qualities,’’ 367 Divisament dou Monde (Polo), 783 Divorzio all’italiana (Germi), 828, 829 Divorzio, Il (Alfiero), 22 Dizionario biografico dei piu` celebri poeti e artisti melodrammatici (Regli), 1259 Dizionario della lingua italiana, 398, 1883 Dizionario delle belle arti di disegno (Milizia), 2003 Dizionario Fotografico ad uso dei dilettanti e professionisti (Gioppi), 1433 Dizionario moderna, Il (Panzini), 1343 Docere delectando (teach and delight), 407 Docta religio (learned religion), 1675 Doctor Kildare, 1858 Doctor Veritas. See Boito, Arrigo ˇ ivago (Pasternak), 1634 Doctor Z Doctrinae cosinandi vigenti (Folengo), 757 Documentary style, 53 Documenti d’Amore (Barberino, F.), 1636 Documenti umani (De Roberto), 613 Documento (Rosselli, A.), 1617 Documento, Flaiano and, 732 Documento umano (human document), 383 Dodeci lettere inglesi sopra varii argomenti, e sopra la letteratura italiana principalmente (Bettinelli), 213 Dodici abati di Challant, I (Mancinelli), 1923 Doge, Il (Palazzeschi), 1334 Doktor Faustus (Mann, T.), 62 ‘‘Dolce ciera, La’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 832 Dolce fico (sweet fig), 1030 Dolce, Ludovico, 82, 92, 638–640, 934, 11001 Borghini, V., and, 301 Ga`mbara and, 807 Matraini and, 1172 Morra and, 1243 Terracina and, 1861 Dolce per se´ (Maraini), 671 Dolce poesia, 326 Dolce stil novo, 254, 571, 640–643, 783, 1636 Stampa and, 1799 ‘‘Dolce vista e ’l bel guardo soave’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 475 Dolce vita, La (Fellini), 701, 1607, 1995 censorship of, 446 Flaiano and, 733 Dolcezze (Corazzini), 512 Dolci, Danilo, 643–645. See also Questione meridionale (southern question) Dolciati, Antonio, 1515 Dolcissimo (Bonaviri), 284 Dolfi, Anna, 596 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 15, 653, 837 Gramsci and, 888 Dolore e gioia (Pascoli), 1361 Dolore, Il (Ungaretti), 1930 Domani (Archibugi), 68 Domani e poi domani (Bernari), 184 Domani parleremo di te (Joppolo), 976 Dombroski, Robert, 690

I49

INDEX Domeneghini, Anton Gino, 51 Domenica d’agosto, Una (Emmer), 1728 Domenica del corriere, La, 789, 980 Domenica, Flaiano and, 732 Domenica letteraria De Roberto and, 614 decadentismo and, 579 Serao and, 1733 Domenichi, Lodovico Matraini and, 1172 novella and, 1298 Petrarchism and, 1421 Terracina and, 1861 Domenichino, Il. See Zampieri, Domenico Domenico di Giovanni. See Burchiello, Il Domenico Morelli, pittore (Di Giacomo), 636 Domingo, Placido, 2046 Dominicans, 415, 550, 1567 Albert the Great and, 1704 Campanella and, 363 Colonna, F., and, 490 in Palmermo, 1338 Dominichi, Lodovico, 1243 Dominici, Bartolomeo, 414, 415 Dominici, Giovanni, 1661 Dominijanni, Ida, 1249 Dominus (lord), 239 Domus Risi, N., and, 1587 Savinio and, 2004 Domus solaciorum (homes for recreation), 781 ´ lvaro o la fuerza del sino (Rivas), 935 Don A Don Camillo (Guareschi), 899 Don Camillo ei i giovani d’oggi (Camerini), 352 Don Candeloro e C.i (Verga, G.), 1970 Don Carlos (Saint-Re´al), 22 Don Chisciotte, 614 Don Chisciotte (Gozzi, C.), 880 Don Chisciotte e Sanchu Panza (Meli), 935 Don Chisciotte in Venezia (Baretti), 129 Don Chisciotti e Sanciu Panza (Meli), 1182 Don Fausto (Goethe), 1400 Don Garzia (Alfieri, V.), 19, 22 Don Giovanni (Da Ponte), 568 Don Giovanni in Sicilia (Brancati), 309, 2032 Don Giovanni involontario (Brancati), 309 Don Giovanni Tenorio (Goldoni), 935 Don Juan, 13 Don Juan (Maraini), 1143 Don Pietro Caruso (Braccco), 306 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 935, 1011, 1499, 1822 Donald Duck, 788 Donatello, Giotto Checchi and, 430 classicism and, 480 in Florence, 736 humanism and, 952 Vasari and, 1953 Donati, Corso, Cavalcanti, G., and, 422 Donati, Forese, Tobino and, 1875 Donati, Francesco, 406 Donati, Guido, Cavalcanti, G., and, 422 Donati, Lucrezia, 1179, 1181 Donati, Sergio, 632

I50

Donation of Constantine, 555 ‘‘Donato del Piano’’ (De Roberto), 613 Donato, Pietro di, 963–964 Doni, Anton Francesco, 201, 330, 638, 645–647, 934 Giambullari, P., and, 840 novella and, 1297 socialism and, 1768 utopia and, 1938–1939 Donizetti, Gaetano, 1633 Donizetti, Giuseppe, 685, 826 Donna bella e crudele (a beautiful and cruel woman), 328 Donna Cannone, La (De Gregori), 1785 Donna che puo` capire, capisca, La (Rosso), 1625 Donna che visse per un sogno, La (Cutrufelli), 535 Donna chenon sitrova, La (Chiari, P.), 670 Donna clitoridea e la donna vaginale, La (Lonzi), 1075 Donna con tre anime (Rosa`), 1718–1719 Donna costante, La (Borghini, R.), 299 Donna crudel (cruel beloved), 778 Donna de Paradiso (Iacopone da Todi), 1070 Donna del fiume, La (Soldati), 1371 Donna del lago (Rossini, G.), 1256 Donna della Domenica (Fruttero and Lucentini), 632, 1923 Donna di dolori (Valduga), 1941, 1942 Donna di garbo, La (Goldoni), 865 ‘‘Donna di Osoppo, La’’ (Percoto), 1398 ‘‘Donna di Paradiso’’ (Todi), 1566 Donna di Porto Pim (Tabucchi), 1816 ‘‘Donna di voi mi lamento’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 832, 1753 Donna e la famiglia, La, 979 Donna e` mobile, La (Scarpetta, V.), 587 Donna e serva (Guiducci), 921 Donna galante ed erudita, La, 979, 1714 Donna in Guerra (Maraini), 1142, 1145–1146, 1863 as film, 1143 Donna innamorata di vero, La (Gozzi, C.), 881 Donna, La, 979 Marchesa Colombi and, 1147 ‘‘Donna, l’amor mi sforza’’ (Guinizzelli), 923 Donna Lionara, giacobina (Maraini), 1143 ‘‘Donna me prega’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 420, 549, 642 Donna mie (Maraini), 1143 Donna non e` gente (Guiducci), 921 ‘‘Donna per vostro amore’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 833 Donna perche´ piangli? La condizione femminile in Africa Nera (Cutrufelli), 534 Donna, Ravera and, 1551 Donna serpente, La (Gozzi, C.), 881 Donna sola, Una (Fo), 1544 Donna, Una (Aleramo), 15, 18–19, 653, 910 Donna vendicativa, La (Gozzi, C.), 881 Donnarumma all’assalto (Ottieri), 502, 1326 ‘‘Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore’’ (Dante), 640, 642 Donne della Resistenza (Vigano`), 1989 Donne di Messina, Le (Vittorini), 2007 Donne di Ravesbru¨ck (Rolfi and Buzzone), 1580 Donne e la letteratura, Le (Rasy), 1549 Donne in poesia (Frabotta), 770 Donne, John, 369, 919 Rosselli, A., and, 1616 Valduga and, 1941 Donne muoiono, Le (Banti), 124 Donne nella vita diStefano Premuda (Stu´parich), 1803 Donneschi difetti, I (Marinella), 1152

INDEX Dono dell’innocente, Il (Dandolo), 1600 Dono, Il (Negri, Ada), 1204, 1273 ‘‘Dono, Il’’ (Parini, G.), 1279 Donzelli, Carmine, 1532 Donzelli, Pietro, 1434 Doplicher, Fabio, 1912 Dopo Campoformio (Roversi), 1629 Dopo i leoni (Guerra), 906 Dopo il pescecane (Malerba), 1116 Dopo il tramonto (Graf), 885 Dopo la laurea (Meis), 382 Doppia notte dei tigli, La (Levi, C.), 1036 Doppia storia, La (Joppolo), 976 ‘‘Dorata’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 Dore´, Gustav, 92 Dorfles, Gillo, 101, 115 Doria, Andrea, 855 Dortela`ta, No´ri. See Giambullari, Pier Francesco D’Orvieto, Simone Prudenzani, 757 Dosiadas of Crete, 821 D’Osmo, Sergio, 1882 Dossetti, Giuseppe, 278 Dossi, Carlo, 47, 580, 647–649, 1563, 1718. See also Scapigliatura Maggi and, 1104 Rovani and, 1628 scapigliatura and, 959, 1697, 1698 utopia and, 1939 Dostoyevsky, Feodor, 541, 1109, 1230, 1451, 1634, 1858, 1995 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Masino and, 1168 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Pirandello and, 1450 Sanvitale and, 1678 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Dotti, Ugo, 232 Dottor Bilop, Il (Bonaviri), 284 ‘‘Dottor Cymbalus, Il’’ (Capuana), 382 Dottori, Carlo de’, 933, 935, 1127 ‘‘Dottrina della vera penitenza’’ (doctrine of true pentitence), 1378 Douceur (sweetness), 341 Dove finiscono le tracce (Bigongiari), 226 Dov’e` la mia patria (Pasolini), 1367 Dove sei? Io sono qui (Cavani), 426 Dovere del medico, Il (Pirandello), 1451 Doveri dell’uomo, I (Mazzini), 1175 Dovizi, Bernardo. See Bibbiena, Bernardo Dovizi da Dowling, Constance, 1383 Down by Law (Jarmusch), 177 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 631, 658, 661 Draghi, Gianfranco, 368 Dramatic criticism, 63 Drame larmoyant, 881 Drami delle maschere, I (Lucini), 1079 Dramma del Foscolo, Il (Tecchi), 1851 Dramma della gelosia—Tutti i particolari in cronaca (Scola), 1722 Drammatica fine di un noto musicista (Buzzati), 335 Drammi della vita militare (Tarchetti), 1827 Drammi intimi (Verga, G.), 1970 Dreigroschenoper, Die (Brecht), 1794–1795 Droghe d’amore, Le (Gozzi, C.), 881 Drop tutto anche tu (Merini), 1187 Drummond, William, 409 ‘‘Drusilla’’ (Sommi), 1781

Dryden, John, 253, 1843 Barbieri, N., and, 1921 ‘‘Dualismo’’ (Boito, A.), 272, 1698 Dubbiosi, 3 Dubitationes additae, 1703 Dubliners (Joyce), 403 Duby, Georges, 2026 Duchartre, Pierre, 499 Duchess of Malfi, The (Webster), 122 Duchessa di Gargantas, La (Verga, G.), 1965 Duchessa di Leyra, La (Verga, G.), 1965 Duchessa di Paliano (Stendahl), 162 Duchessa di San Giuliano, La (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Due amori, I (Ottieri), 1327 Due baci (Tommaseo), 1884 Due citta`, Le (Soldati), 471 ‘‘Due colloqui coi personaggi, I’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Due comedie in comedia, Le (Andreini, G.), 36, 1127 Due Covielli, Li (Bernini, G.), 71, 189 Due donne da buttare (Guiducci), 921 Due dozzine di rose scarlatte (Benedetti, A.), 693 Due italiani a Parigi (Tobino), 1875 Due Leli simili, Li (Andreini, G.), 36 Due lettere anonime (Camerini), 352 Due lezzioni di M. Benedetto Varchi, nella prima delle quali si dichiara un sonetto di M. Michelagnolo Buonarroti. Nella seconda si disputa quale sia piu nobile arte la scultura (Varchi), 1948 Due notti affannose, Le (Gozzi, C.), 881 Due parole di commemorazione sopra Paolo Emiliani Giudici (Aleardi), 14 Due pellegrini, I (Tansillo), 1380, 1822 Due regole dellaprospettiva pratica, Le (Barozzi), 11000 Due Senza (Bigiaretti), 224 ‘‘Due temi svolti’’ (Pagliarani), 1241 Due tensioni, Le (Vittorini), 2007 Due trattati (Varchi), 11000 Due vie, Le (Brandi), 101 Due zittelle, Le (Landolfi), 996 Duecentisti, 1519 Duello, Il (Casanova, Giacomo), 399 ‘‘Du’ggener’umani, Li’’ (Belli, G.), 156 Duje marit ‘mbrugliune (Scarpetta), 1701 Dumas, Alexandre, 162, 652, 1654, 1846 in Genoa, 815 Verga, G., and, 1963 D’una letteratura europea (Mazzini), 1175 Dunhill, Anne, 1153 Dunning, George, 50 Dunsany, Lord, 1456 Duo baci, Li (Andreini, G.), 36 Durano, Giustino, 738 Durante, Checco, 1606 Durante l’estate (Olmi), 1305 Duranti, Francesca, 650–651 Du¨rer, Albrecht, 1708 Durling, Robert M., 90, 91 Durrell, Laurence, 1906 Du¨rrenmatt, Friedrich, 673, 1318 Duse, Eleonora, 272, 541, 596, 652–655, 837, 874 Bracco and, 307 D’Arcais, F., and, 1259 Neera and, 1271 Pirandello and, 1450

I51

INDEX Dutillot, Guillaume, 663 Dux (Sarfatti), 232 DWF, 2025 Dylan, Bob, 49, 1784 Dylan Dog (Sclavi), 790

E E allora mi hanno rinchiusa (Morandini), 1222 E ballando, ballando (Tonelli), 1481 ` fatto giorno (Scotellaro), 1725 E E io, che ho le rose fiorite anche d’inverno? (Busi), 333 E la nave va (Fellini), 702 ` Pesacrenico una tericciola, sulla riva sinistra’’ (Grossi), 897 ‘‘E ` stato cosi (Ginzburg, N.), 842 E E venne un uomo (Olmi), 1305 Early Flemish Painters, The (Cavalcaselle and Crowe), 2003 Earth Trembles, The. See Terra Trema, La (Visconti, L.) Eastwood, Clint, 1014 Ebdomero (Chirico, G.), 2004 Ecce Bombo (Moretti, N.), 1240 Eccesso (excess), 1697 Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Pseudo-Dionyius), 1281 ‘‘Ecclesiastical mysticism,’’ 414 Ecco el Messia—e la Madre Maria (Tornabuoni), 1888 Ecco Homo (Graf), 886 Ecerinis (Mussato), 1262 Echo, 1405, 1798 Eckhart, Meister, 1427 ‘‘Eclipse of the Renaissance’’ (Findlen), 1573 Eclissi (Aldani), 1720 Eclogae (Pontano), 1472 Eclogae piscatoriae (Sannazaro), 1675 Eclogues (Virgil), 64, 1380, 1416 ‘‘Eco di una notte mitica’’ (Pascoli), 1361 Eco, Umberto, 47, 49, 101, 161, 279, 632, 657–662, 725, 726, 785, 790, 821, 936, 985, 1428, 1430, 1508, 1819, 1856, 1860 on comics, 789 as critic, 1063 Gruppo 63 and, 1956 historical novels and, 940 homosexuality and, 1030 Natoli and, 1340 as neo-avant-garde, 1276 science fiction and, 1720 Vittorini and, 2007 Economics (Aristotle), 312 ´ crits (Freud), 1510 E Ed e` subito sera (Quasimodo), 1526, 1529–1530 Ed egli si nascose (Silone), 1755 Eden Teatro, 1951 Viviani, R., and, 2013 Edict of Theodosius, 444 Edipo (Gozzi, G.), 884 Edipo re (Pasolini), 1368, 1371, 1372 Edipus (Testori), 1869 Edison, Thomas A., 50, 468 EDIT 16. See Censimento delle Edizioni italiane del XVI secolo Editio princeps, 186, 267, 1520, 11000 Editrice Nord, 1720 Edizioni della Voce, 1554 Edizioni delle donne, 1548 Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 793

I52

Eduardo (Giammusso), 233 Effe, 707 ‘‘Effetti di un sogno interroto’’ (Pirandello), 1459 Effetti personali (Duranti), 650 Effetti speciali (Amelio), 31 Egemonia (hegemony), 889 Eggs in the Lake (Gioseffi), 965 Egle (Giraldi, Giambattista), 717, 856, 1837 Egloghe (Muzio), 1264 ‘‘Ehi, ce l’hai tu un cavallino’’ (Buzzati), 337 Eichmann, Adolf, 1041 8 anime in una bomba (Marinetti), 1155 81/2. See Otto e mezzo (Fellini) 18 poesie (Sinisgalli), 1761 18BL: Teatro di masse per masse, 692 1862 (Blasetti), 236 Einaudi, Giulio, 283, 464, 947, 1507 Cannibali and, 373 Celati and, 434 Ceronetti and, 451 in Turin, 1923 Einfache Formen (Jolles), 820 Eisenbichler, Konrad, 1653 Eisenstein, Sergei, 1013, 1877 Ekberg, Anita, 701 El Nost Milan (Bertolazzi), 193 Elective Affinities (Goethe), 68 Elegantiae linguae latinae (Valla, L.), 954, 1946 Elegia (Fiammetta), 254 ‘‘Elegia del verme solitario’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 Elegia di Costanza (Boccaccio), 240, 255, 258 Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta (Boccaccio), 242 Elegia e altri versi (Zanzotto), 2037 ‘‘Elegia in pete`l’’ (Zanzotto), 2038 ‘‘Elegia qua fingit Hipplyten suam ad se ipsum scribentem’’ (Castiglione), 409 Elegia sopra un cimitero di campagna (Gray), 454, 767 Elegiarum libri (Sannazaro), 1675 Elegie renane (Pirandello), 1450 Elegie romane (D’Annunzio), 540 ‘‘Elegos per la danzatrice Cumani’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (Gray), 454 Elementi d’architettura lodoliana (Memmo), 2003 Elementi di critica omosessuale (Mieli, M.), 1033, 1197, 1198 Elementi di economia politica (Beccaria), 663 Ele´ments de se´miologie (Barthes), 725 Eleonora (Palli), 670 Eleonora d’Arborea (Dessı`), 629 Elettra (D’Annunzio), 541, 544 Elettra (Gozzi, G.), 883 Elettra (Manfridi), 1121 Elia, Mario Manieri, 101 Eliade, Mircae, 1569 Elianto (Benni), 179 Elias, Norbert, 516, 604 Elias Portolu (Deledda), 592 Eliot, George, 1497 Eliot, Thomas Stearns (T.S.), 47, 1121 Bacchelli and, 112 Camilleri and, 356 Guidacci and, 919 lyric poetry and, 1089 Montale and, 1211 Pagliarani and, 1332

INDEX Pasolini and, 1374 Raboni and, 1537 Elizabeth I (Queen), 608 Elkann, Alain, 1232 Rasy and, 1549 Ella non rispose (Serao), 671 Ellsberg, Peggy Rizza, 966 Elocutio, 175 E´loge de la fuite (Laborit), 1663 Elogia virorum bellica virtute illustrium (Giovio), 855 ‘‘Elogio degli uccelli’’ (Leopardi), 203 ‘‘Elogio della ghigliottina’’ (Gobetti, P.), 862 Elogio dell’imperfezione (Levi-Montalcini), 1716 Eloquentia, 1105 ‘‘Eloquenza invertita’’ (inverted eloquence), 1762 Elsinoire, 370 E´luard, Paul, Fortini and, 760 Elvira (Dossi), 648 Elzeviri, 1205 Embargos (Moscato), 1248 Emblemata cum commentariis (Alciato), 11 Emblematum liber (Alciato), 11 E’mel (Guerra), 906 E´minence grise, 1061 Emma B. vedova Jocasta (Savinio), 1689 Emmer, Luciano, 1728 Emozioni (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Empirismo eretico (Pasolini), 1368, 1373 Emporio pittoresco, 685 Enchiridia (reference books), 294 Enchiridion (Epictetus), 1464 Enciclopedia dantesca, 1004 Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, 809 Enciclopedia italiana (Gentile), 824 Encomio del tiranno (Manganelli), 1123 Encomium Sancti Thomae Quanatis (Valla, L.), 953 Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion, 694 Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, 1574 Encyclopedie´ (Diderot and D’Alembert), 146, 417, 819, 982 Encyclope´die (Voltaire), 1568 Endiminione (Metastasio), 1190 Endless Love (Zeffirelli), 2046 Enea (Bernini, G.), 190 Energie nuove, 984 Gobetti, P., and, 862, 1035 Enfants terribles, 187 Engagement, 784 Engels, Friedrich, 1175 England, 46 English, 1901 English Miscellany, 1498 Enjambements, 811, 1421 Enlightenment, 48, 662–665, 819, 1563, 1565 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Alfieri, V., and, 20 animal tales and, 201 architecture in, 71, 2002 Beccaria and, 145, 1979 Bettinelli and, 212 Casti and, 1182 Cattaneo, C., and, 418 Cesarotti and, 454 Metastasio and, 1192 in Naples, 1268

Parini, G., and, 1349 Pindemonte and, 1445 Romanticism and, 1595 Tiraboschi and, 1872 travel literature and, 1908 Verri, A., and, 1977–1978 Enna, Franco. See Cannarozzo, Franco Enneads (Plotinus), 720 Enrico Dandolo (Gozzi, G.), 884 Enrico IV (Bellocchio), 159 Enrico IV (Pirandello), 1452 Enriquez, Franco, 447 Ensor, James, 499 Entartung (Nordau), 579 Enten Eller (Da Ponte), 567 Enthusiasmi (Faldella), 1698 Entre´e d’Espagne, 666 Entrelacement, 668 Entretiens sur la pluralite´ des mondes (Fontenelle), 1712 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, 827 ‘‘Eo no ti lodo, Dio, e non tiador’’ (Folgo´re), 751 Ephraim, Gotthold, 826 Epic, 665–670 Ariosto and, 1127 Manzoni, A., and, 1136 Epictetus, 1464 Epicuro, Marc’Antonio, 1269 pastoral genre and, 1380 Epicurus, 420 Petrarch and, 1407 ‘‘Epigrafe’’ (Sinisgalli), 1762 Epigrammata (Boiardo), 264 Epigrammata (Folengo), 748 Epigrammaton libri (Sannazaro), 1675 Epigrammi ferraresi (Pagliarani), 1332 Episodio della citta` (Visconti, L.), 1999 Episodio della terra (Visconti, L.), 1999 Episodio della Zolfatara (Visconti, L.), 1998–1999 Epistles (Pico della Mirandola), 1440 ‘‘Epistola’’ (Colonna, V.), 493 Epistola a tuti gli eletti di Dio e fedeli cristiani (Savonarola), 1691 ‘‘Epistola ad Antonium’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Epistola ad custods I’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Epistola ad fideles [recensio ampla]’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Epistola ad fideles [recensio brevis]’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Epistola ad fratrem Leonem’’ (Francis of Assisi), 773 Epistola ad Lucilium (Seneca), 1406 Epistola ad Mahumetem (Piccolomini), 1437 ‘‘Epistola ad quendam ministrum’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi (Boccaccio), 240 Epistola de insulis nuper inventis (Columbo), 1906 Epistola de la vita che dee tenere una donna vedova (Trissino), 1916 Epistola de le lettere nuovamente aggiunte ne la lingua italiana (Trissino), 1916 Epistolae ad Atticum (Cicero), 1409, 1415, 1661 Epistolae, Orationes et Carmina (Barbaro, E.), 127 Epistolario (Casti), 1182 Epistolario (Cereta), 449 Epistolario (Michelstaedter), 1196 Epistolario (Moncallero), 221 Epistolary Novel, 670–672 Epistole (Boccaccio), 258 Epistole allegoriche (Boccaccio), 240, 244 ‘‘Epistole Entomologiche’’ (Gozzano), 877

I53

INDEX Epistole in lode delle donne (Firenzuola), 730 Epistole in versi (Algarotti), 26 Epistulae ad familiares (Cicero), 777, 1417 Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (Seneca), 1162 Epitalami (Marino), 1161 ‘‘Epitaphium Daminis’’ (Milton), 409 Epitia (Giraldi, Giambattista), 857 Epoca, 980 ‘‘Epodes,’’ 389 Epos (Pascoli), 1361 Equicola, Mario, 87 ‘‘Er grillo zoppo’’ (Trilussa), 1914 ‘‘Er libbro der mago’’ (Trilussa), 1913 Er morto de campagna (Pascarella), 1357 ‘‘Er nano Orme`’’ (Trilussa), 1913 ‘‘Er padre e la fija’’ (Belli, G.), 154 ‘‘Er Papa’’ (Belli, G.), 156 ‘‘Er parla` ciovı´le de piu`’’ (Belli, G.), 156 ‘‘Er passa-mano’’ (Belli, G.), 156 ‘‘Er professore de filosofia’’ (Trilussa), 1914 ‘‘Er tempo bbono’’ (Belli, G.), 156 ‘‘Er tratajjone arrabbiato’’ (Belli, G.), 156 ‘‘Era de maggio’’ (Di Giacomo), 634 Era l’anno del sole quieto (Bernari), 183 Era notte a Roma (Rossellini), 1620 ‘‘Era vicino il dı` che ’l Creatore’’ (Stampa), 1798 Eraclea (Scarlatti), 1311 Erasmus, Desiderius Alciato and, 11, 12 banishment of, 444 humanism and, 953 Marino and, 1161 Erato e Apollion (Quasimodo), 930, 1529 Erba, Edoardo, 672–674, 1791 Manfridi and, 1122 Erba, Luciano, 674–676, 1924 in Milan, 1205 Orelli and, 1318 Pozzi, A., and, 1489 Erba sul sagrato (Negri, Ada), 1273 Erbolato (Ariosto, L.), 83, 84, 89 Erckmann, E´mile, 685–686 Tarchetti and, 1827 Ercole (Cinzio, Giovanni), 668 Ercole e Caco (Bandinelli), 442 Ercole I, 89 Eresia della sera (Giudici, G.), 859 Ergas, Yasmine, 2025 Erica e i suoi fratelli (Vittorini), 1854, 2006 Eridanus (Pontano), 1472 Erizzo, Sebastiano, 639 novell and, 1298 Ermanno Raeli (De Roberto), 613 Ermelino, Louisa, 964 Ermetismo. See Hermeticism Ermetismo (Ramat), 1542 Ernani (Verdi), 1590 Ernesto (Saba), 1033, 1645 Ero e Leandro (Boito, A.), 272 Eroi (Benelli), 172 Eroici furori (Bruno, Giordano), 316, 319–320 Eroicocomica, 932 Eros (Bevilacqua, A.), 214 Eros e Priapo: Da furore a cenere (Gadda), 797

I54

Erotopaegnia (Sanguineti), 1670 Errico, Scipione, 1158, 1562 historiography and, 942 Errore di coincidenza (Soffici), 1773 Errore, Lo (Gelli), 814 Es desde´n vengado (Vega, L.), 122 Esame di coscienza di un letterato (Serra, R.), 1746, 2028 Esattezza, 599 Escarpit, Robert, 1062 Eschini, Raffaello, 302 Eschynes, Bruni, L., and, 312 ‘‘Esco dalla lussuria’’ (Sbarbaro), 1695 Escucha (Pausini), 1786 Esenin, Sergej, 1634 Esercizi di dattilografia (Bigiaretti), 224 Esercizi di tiptologia (Magrelli), 1107 Esercizi platonici (Pagliarani), 1332 Esilio (Negri, Ada), 1273 ‘‘Esistere psichicamente’’ (Zanzotto), 2038 Eskimos, 48 Esopi volgari, 201 ‘‘Esortazione al fratello’’ (Corazzini), 511 Esoterico biliardo (Niccolai), 1287 Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali, e particolarmente a quelle che ci son portate dall’India (Redi), 1558, 1712 Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl’insetti (Redi), 1558 Esperimento con l’India (Manganelli), 1123 Esperimento di magia (Buzzati), 337 Esperimento di traduzione della Iliade di Omero (Foscolo), 764, 1279 Esperimento donna (Musa), 1720 Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante (Boccaccio), 243 Esposti, Piera Degli, 473, 1825 E´sprit classique, 784 Essai sur la formation du dogme catholique (Belgioioso), 150 Essai sur la litte´rature russe, 1633 Essais (Montaigne), 1961 Essay sur la poe´sie e´pique (Voltaire), 819 Essay upon Criticism (Newton), 1713 Essays on Petrarch (Foscolo), 765, 1060 Esser, Kajetan, 773 Essere a sinistra (Lussu), 1081 Estense, 1048 Estense, Pietro Selvatico, 2003 Ester (Della Valle, F.), 607 Esteri (cynicism), 1107 Esterina (Bigiaretti), 223 Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Croce, B.), 523, 525, 528–530, 945, 1062 Estienne, Henri, 932 Estratti savonaroliani (Guicciardini), 914 Estratto dell’arte poetica d’Aristotile e considerazioni su la medesima (Metastasio), 1190 Estrella, Diego de, 935 Et in Arcadia ego (Cecchi, E.), 430 Eta` dell’argento (silver age), 282–283 Eternal Husband, The (Dostoyevsky), 1451 ‘‘Eterno’’ (Ungaretti), 1929 ‘‘Eterno femminino regale’’ (Carducci), 390 Ethelwood, Saint, 1069 Ethical Muse of Franco Fortini, The (Peterson), 760 Ethics (Aristotle), 312, 555 Poliziano and, 1465 Ethiopia, anthropology in, 52 Etica e politica (Croce, B.), 531

INDEX Etiro, Partenio, censorship of, 293 Ettore Fieramosca (Blasetti), 237 Ettore Fieramosca (D’Azeglio, M.), 938, 1590 Ettore Fieramosca o la Disfida di Barletta (D’Azeglio, M.), 573 ‘‘Ettore va al lavoro’’ (Fenoglio), 712 Euclid, 1007 Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle), 1119 Eugenius IV (Pope), 234 Bracciolini, P., and, 305 Euridice (Peri), 1467 Euridice (Rinuccini), 1049, 1310 Euripides, 73, 117, 607, 1916 biography and, 230 Dolce and, 638 Niccolini, G., and, 1288 Europa ‘51 (Rossellini), 700, 1619 Europa di notte (Blasetti), 236 Europa riconosciuta, 1203 Europa semilibrera (Piovene), 1448 Europe&Italy (Bozzetto), 51 European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Curtius), 106, 1704 Eutrapelia (ethics), 249 Eva (Verga, G.), 1964 Evangelisti, Valerio, 790, 1721 Evans, Walker, 1434 Evelyn, John, 189 Evil, 190 ‘‘Evil Live’’ (Del Giudice), 599 Evreinov, Nicolaj, 499 Evtusˇenko, Evgenij, 1634 Evviva la guerra! (Serao), 1735 Exact and Very Strange Truth, The (Piazza, Ben), 964 ‘‘Excelsio mio signor’’ (Colonna, V.), 493 Execratio contra fortunam (Cereta), 449 Executive, 219 ‘‘Exempla De Ortulano’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 Exemplario contra los engan˜os y peligros del mundo (Capua, G.), 731 Exemplum, 202 ‘‘Exhortatio ad laudem Dei’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Existentialism, 53 Betti, U., and, 206 Experimentalism, 760 Exposants au public, Les, 793 Expositio in Apocalypsim (Gioacchino da Fiore), 848 Expositiones (Pico della Mirandola), 1441 Expositiones Catonis (Bonvesin da la Riva), 291 Expositiones et Glose Super Comediam Dantis (Pisa, Guido), 559 Expressionism, 1206, 2004 Alvaro and, 28 Bernari and, 183 of Levi, C., 2032 Tessa and, 1867 Extra Dry (Chiarelli), 459 Extracomunitari (noncitizens), 817 Extracomunitario, 1199 Extraordinary Women (Mackenzie), 1032 Eyeless in Gaza (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Eyes Shut. See Con gli occhi chiusi (Tozzi, F.) Ezio (Metastasio), 1190

F Fa un po’ male (Ammaniti), 34 Fabbri, Davide, 34, 790

Fabbri, Diego, 677–679, 1569. See also Religion and literature Fabbri, Gualtiero, 723 cinema and, 470 Fabbri, Marisa, 1246 Fabbrica dei pazzi, La (Guerrazzi, F.), 503 Fabbrica della morte (factory of death), 1185 Fabbricanti del ‘‘bello,’’ I (Risi, N.), 1587 Fabbricone, Il (Testori), 1206 Fabiola (Blasetti), 237 Fables, 201, 462, 783 Fables (Krylov), 1633 Fables, Les (Fontaine), 784 Fabliaux (fables), 783 Fabre, Francois-Xavier, Alfieri, V., and, 25 Fabre, Giorgio, 949 Fabrica del mondo, La (Alunno), 518 Fabritia, La (Dolce), 639 Fabrizi, Aldo, Toto` and, 1895 Fabro, Cornelio, 1429 Fabula di Orpheo (Poliziano), 1031, 1380, 1463, 1466–1468. See also Opera Fabulae Milesiae (Aristide), 210 Fabulatore (storyteller), 738 Faccio, Rina. See Aleramo, Sibilla Facetiae (Bracciolini, P.), 202, 304, 330, 1297 Facezie (Alberti, Leon), 70 Facezie (Domenichi), 1298 Facezie (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Facezie (witty remarks), 330 Fachinelli, Elvio, 706 Fachini, Ginevra Canonici, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Facio, Bartolomeo, 1119 Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri novem (Maximus), 240, 1295 Factory Councils’ Movement, 1770 Factum est alla prova (Testori), 1870 Facultas docendi, 1934 Faenza, Roberto, 473, 1816 Faeti, Antonio, 465 Faire du the´aˆtre une e´cole des mæurs (to turn the theater into a school of behavior), 445 Fairy tales. See Children’s Literature Faitinelli, Pietro de’, Rustio di Filippo and, 1635 Faits divers (news items), 53 Falaschi, Giovanni, 1578 Vigano` and, 1988 Falbalas: Immagini del Novecento (Garboli), 809 Falcone, Giovane, 1104 Falconetto, Jacopo, 1092 Falconi, Armando, 459 Falconry, 781 Faldella, Giovanni, 679–681, 1785, 1826, 1922 in Genoa, 816 scapigliatura and, 959, 1698 travel literature and, 1908 Falena, La (Smareglia), 685 Faliero, Martin, 1959 Falk, Lee, 788 Fallaci, Oriana, 432, 681–684 Falqui, Enrico, Bertolucci, A., and, 195 Falsembiante (Dante), 728 ‘‘Falso e vero verde, Il’’ (Quasimodo), 1527 Falstaff (Verdi), 47, 273, 653 Fama, La, 1259

I55

INDEX Famegia del santolo, La (Gallina), 1795 Famiglia (family), 415 Famiglia (Ginzburg, N.), 843 Famiglia cristiana, La, 770 Tamaro, S., and, 1820 Famiglia dell’antiquario, La (Goldoni), 866 Famiglia difficile, Una (De Filippo, E.), 584 Famiglia, La (Tozzi, F.), 1898 Famiglia Manzoni, La (Ginzburg, N.), 233 Famiglia per Giacomo, Una (Puppa), 1522 ‘‘Famiglia povera, La’’ (Jahier), 973 Famiglia Turchi, La (Soffici), 1771 Famiglie di notte (Puppa), 1523 Familiares (Petrarch), 1403, 1406, 1409, 1417, 1905 Family sayings. See Lessico famigliare (Ginzburg, N.) Famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia, La (Buzzati), 203, 335 Fanalino della Battimonda, Il (Delfini), 597 ‘‘Fanatico’’ (Moravia), 1235 ‘‘Fanciullino, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1089 Fanciullino, Il (Pascoli), 464, 1358 Fanciullio (child-like poetic sensibility), 580 ‘‘Fanciullo, Il’’ (D’Annunzio), 544 Fanfulla della domenica, 384, 540 Carducci and, 391 Collodi and, 483 decadentismo and, 579 Neera and, 1272 Serao and, 1733 Fanfulla, Il, 540, 680, 1357 Collodi and, 483 Fango (Ammaniti), 34, 374 Fano, Francesco Dionigi da, 444 Fantabiblical (Manuli), 51 Fantarca, La (Berto), 191 Fantascienza, 1717, 1720 Fantasia, 51 Fantasia e fantastico (Petrignani), 1423 Fantasie (Berchet), 181, 1598 Fantasio, Il, 634 Fantasma di Trieste, Il (Bettiza), 1911 Fantasmagorie, 50 Fantasmes (fantasies), 686 Fantasmi (Cerami), 447, 473 ‘‘Fantasmi’’ (Pirandello), 1455 Fantastic and Literature, 684–688 Fante, John, 48, 963 Fantesca, La (Della Porta), 606, 1126 Fantoni, Giovanni, 392 Fare le cose mezzanamente (doing things with measure), 604 Fare presto (e bene) perche` si muore (Dolci), 644 Farewell to Arms, A (Hemingway), 2030 Farfalla di Dinard, La (Montale), 818, 1213 Farina (flour), 282–283 Farina, Salvatore, 631, 688–690, 1826 Faldella and, 680 Farinella, La (Croce, G.), 532 Farinelli, Arturo, 1851 Farmacia di turno (De Filippo, E.), 584 Farnese, Alessandro, 143, 395, 645 Castelvetro and, 406 Farnese, Odoardo, 537 Farnese, Pier Luigi, 442 Farse (Sannazaro), 1674

I56

Farse cavaiole, 1269 Farusso, Zanetta, 399 Fasano, Gabriele, 1562 Fascism and Literature, 29, 48, 690–693, 1564 Alvaro and, 28 anthropology and, 53 anti-Semitism and, 139 Bernari and, 183 Bertolucci, B., and, 197 Blasetti and, 236 Bontempelli and, 286–287 Bracco and, 307 Camerini and, 352 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Cederna, C., and, 431 censorship under, 445, 2031 Chiarelli and, 460 De Ce´spedes and, 581 Fenoglio and, 713 Gentile and, 823–824 Levi, C., and, 1035–1037 Malaparte and, 1111 Marinetti and, 1156 Montale and, 1211–1212 Moravia and, 1233 Oriani, A., and, 1319 Papini and, 1347 Pavese and, 1381 Piovene and, 1447 Ramat and, 1542 Rame and, 1544 Salvemini and, 1665 Sciascia and, 1705–1706 Serao and, 1735 Stu´parich and, 1803 television and, 1857 Tessa and, 1867 Tobino and, 1875 Tomasi di Lampedusa and, 1876 Toto` and, 1894 Ungaretti and, 1930 Visconti, L., and, 1994 Vittorini and, 2005 Fascismo: origini e sviluppo, Il (Silone), 1756 Fascist Dictatorship in Italy, The (Salvemini), 1666 Fascist Ministry of Popular Culture, Alvaro and, 28 Fascist Spectacle (Zamponi), 1479 Fascist Virilities (Spackman), 690 ‘‘Fase d’Oriente’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Fashion and Literature, 694–697 Fata (Fairy), 462 Fata galanti, La (Meli), 1182 Fata vergine, La (Carrer), 397 ‘‘Fatali, I’’ (Tarchetti), 686 Fatalita` (Negri, Ada), 1273 Fate bene alle anime del Purgatorio (Rea), 1553 Fatemi la corte (Silvestri, G.), 1701 Fatica della ragione. Contributo per un’ontologia dell’uomo, La (Turoldo), 1924 Fatiche, 438 ‘‘Fatiche di Ercole, Le’’ (Marino), 1161 ‘‘Fatta, La’’ (Fucini), 786 Fattaci (Cerami), 447 Fatti di gente per bene (Bolognini), 281

INDEX Fatto di sague fra due uomini per causa di una vedova—si sospettano moventi politici (Wertmu¨ller), 2022 Fattori, Giovanni Checchi and, 430 Risorgimento and, 1592 Fatum (destiny), 462 Faulkner, William, 215, 219 neorealism and, 1283 Vittorini and, 2005 Faunus (Boccaccio), 258 Fauriel, Claude, 1133 Fausse Maitresse, La (Balzac), 1549 Fausto e Anna (Cassola), 403 Fava, Guido, 563 Faventino, Antonio, 84 Favilla, La, 1398 Faville del maglio, Le (D’Annunzio), 542 Favola boschereccia, 456 ‘‘Favola del disarmo, La’’ (Pascoli), 488 Favola del figlio cambiato, La (Pirandello), 692, 1456 Favola di Belfagor arcidiavolo (Machiavelli), 1091 Favola di Cefalo (Correggio), 716 Favola di Orfeo (Striggio), 1310 ‘‘Favola sommersa’’ (hidden fable), 451 Favole (Alberti, Leon), 70 Favole (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Favole al telefono (Rodari), 465 Favole della dittatura, Le (Sciascia), 203 Favole della volpe (Pirandello), 203 Favole e apologhi (Saba), 203 Favole e memorie (Cardarelli), 386 Favole e novelle (Pignotti, Lorenzo), 463, 1714 Favole esopiane (Gozzi, G.), 202 Favole esopiane (Passeroni), 202 Favole, Le (Trilussa), 1913 ‘‘Favole moderne’’ (Trilussa), 1913 Favole morali (Calvo), 1563 ‘‘Favole rimodernate’’ (Trilussa), 1913 Favole romanesche (Trilussa), 1913 Favolello, Il (Cicero), 1003 ‘‘Favolette,’’ 456 Favule murali (Meli), 202 Faye, Jean-Pierre, 785 Fazel, Shirin Ramzanali, 1201 Fazello, Filippo, 1338 Fazzoletto di Dostoevskij, Il (Manfridi), 1121 Febea. See Terracina, Laura Fede e bellezza (Tommaseo), 417, 1569, 1598, 1883 Fedele, Cassandra, 449, 698–700 Federici, Camillo, 664 French and, 784 Federici, Fortunato, 398 Federici, Vincenzo, 1636 Federicis, Lidia De, 946 Federico, Gennaro Antonio, 1312 Federico, Giuseppe Pipitone, 1339 Federzoni, Giovanni, Carducci and, 1936 Fedor (Brancati), 308 Fedra (D’Annunzio), 541 Fedra (Pizzetti), 1257 Feeling for Time. See Sentimento del tempo (Ungaretti) ‘‘Felice’’ (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Felice, Renzo Di, 946 Felice Sciosciammocca creduto guaglione ‘e n’anno (Petito), 1700

Felici, Costanzo, 758 Felicita` pubblica considerata nei coltivatori di terre proprie (Vasco), 663 Felisatti, Massimo, 122 Felix V (Pope), 1921 Fellini, Federico, 51, 56, 401, 432, 472, 700–704, 936, 1721, 1792, 1951, 1995 Benigni and, 177 Cavazzoni and, 428 censorship of, 446 Flaiano and, 733, 1730 Guerra and, 906 Leone, S., and, 1013 Pasolini and, 1371 Roma, citta` aperta (Rossellini) and, 1729 in Rome, 1607 Rossellini and, 1622 Wertmu¨ller and, 2021 Fellini Satyricon (Fellini), 701 Feltre, Vittorino da. See Ramboldini, Vittorino Feltrinelli, Gian Giacomo, 115, 1507 Feminine realism, 125 Feminine spirit, 16 Feminist Theory and Criticism, 705–711. See also Lesbian and gay writing; Women’s history donna, Una and, 18 Femmes savantes, 3, 1076 Femminielli (transvestites), 433 Femminismo e lotta di classe (Frabotta), 770–771 Fenga, Luigi, 817 Fenice, La, 196, 1108 Fenoglio, Beppe, 48, 465, 711–715, 2005. See also Resistance, Literature of the Lagorio and, 991 Resistance and, 1578 World War II and, 2032 Fenoglio, Calvino, 48 Fenzi, Enrico, 817 Feo, Sandro De, 1894 Ferdinand II of Aragon, 934 Ferdinando (Ruccello), 1269 Ferdinando e Carlina (Wertmu¨ller), 2022 Feria d’agosto (Pavese), 1383 Ferinda, La (Andreini, G.), 36 Ferita dell’aprile, La (Consolo), 507 Ferito a morte (La Capria), 990 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 965 Fermi, Enrico, 32 Fermo con le mani, 1893 Fermo e Lucia (Manzoni, A.), 1138 Fernandel, Toto` and, 1895 Feroniade (Monti, V.), 1279 Ferrania, 1434 Ferrara (city), 716–719 Ferrara, Estense, 83 Ferrara, Francesco Cieco da, 668 Ferrara, Giuliana, 981 Ferrara, Giuseppe, 1864 Ferrara Musica, 718 Ferrara, Riccobaldo Gervasio da, 265 Ferrari, Benedetto, 1050, 1311 Ferrari, Gabriel Giolito de’, 638–639, 1505 Ferrari, Giuseppe, 945, 1427–1428, 1560 Rovani and, 1628

I57

INDEX Ferrari, l’uomo che invento` il mito del cavallino rampante (Biagi, E.), 233 Ferrari, Paolo, 1148 Ferrari, Severino, Carducci and, 1936 Ferrariis, Antonio de, 1937 Ferrario, Davide, 715 Ferraris, Maggiorino, Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Ferravilla, Edoardo, 193 Ferreri, Marco, 176, 1143, 1353 Ferrero, Ernesto, 459 Ferrero, Giuseppe Guido, 855 Ferretti, Emilia, Maffei, C., and, 1659 Ferretti, Gian Carlo, as neo-avant-garde, 1276 Ferretti, Pier Giorgio, 250 Ferri, Baldassarre, 1312 Ferri, Enrico, 1427 Ferri, Giustino, 1606 Ferrieri, Enzo, 1205 Ferroni, Giulio, 1066, 1124 Moretti, Mario, and, 1238 Ferrovia sopraelevata (Buzzati), 335–336 Ferroviere, Il (Germi), 828, 829 Ferrucci, Caterina Francesca, 1591 Festa a Castelluccio (Pontecorvo), 1474 Festa al celeste e nubile santuario (Moscato), 1247 Festa dei magi (Magi Play), 1651 Festa del vitel sagginato (Muzi), 1652 Festa di Montevergine, La (Di Giacomo), 2014 Festa di Santa Susanna (Saint Susanna Play), 1651 Festa parmigiana, La (Bevilacqua, A.), 215 Festa sull’asteroide (Musa), 1720 Feste di una citta`, Le (Ramat), 1542 Feste teatrali, 22 Fetre, Vittorio da, 462 Feuilletton, 671 F.F.S.S. (Arbore), 177 Fiaba dei tre Maghi, La (Antonelli, L.), 1849 ‘‘Fiaba di Giambattista Basile, La’’ (Getto), 137 Fiaba e mistero (Campo, C.), 369 Fiabe delle virtu`, Le (Panzini), 1342 Fiabe e leggende (Praga, E.), 1491 Fiabe italiane (Calvino), 346, 465, 1480 Fiabe teatrali, 867 Fiabe teatrali (Gozzi, C.), 881–882 Fiacchi, Luigi, 463 Fiaccola sotto il moggio, La (D’Annunzio), 541, 874 Fiala, La (Noventa), 1302 Fiale, Le (Govoni), 521, 873 ‘‘Fiamma e` bella, La’’ (D’Annunzio), 546 Fiamma fredda, La (Benco), 1910 Fiammetta (Boccaccio), 1415 Fiammetta, Madonna, 254 Fibonacci, Leonardo, 781 Ficara, Giorgio, 401 ‘‘Ficcami una pennuccia in un baccello’’ (Burchiello, Il), 331 Ficino, Marsilio, 1–2, 326, 327, 605, 719–722, 840, 1010, 1427, 1567. See also Neoplatonism Bibbiena, B., and, 220 Buonarroti, M., and, 328 Castiglione and, 409, 410, 412 Guicciardini and, 912 humanism and, 953 Landino and, 994 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1177

I58

Neoplatonism and, 1280 Pico della Mirandola and, 1440 Poliziano and, 1463 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1518 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 utopia and, 1938 Fidanzati, I (Olmi), 1306 Fido, Franco, 868 Fiducia nella comunicazione (faith in communication), 350 Fiedler, Konrad, 100 Longhi and, 1073 Fiera, La (Di Giacomo), 635 Fiera letteraria, La, 470, 678, 1205, 1756 Fenoglio and, 714 Ortese and, 1322 Petroni and, 1425 Zavattini and, 2042 ‘‘Fieri assalti di crudel fortuna, I’’ (Morra), 1243 Fiesta delle rose: Tramonto romano, La (Lovatelli, E.), 1660 ‘‘Fiesta dell’indipendenza’’ (Bianchini), 217 Fifth estate, 357 Figaro, 272, 791, 1155, 1259 decadentismo and, 579 Figgis, Mike, 1121 Figli d’arte (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Figli dell’aria, I (Salgari), 1718 Figli, I (Bigiaretti), 223 Figlia dell’aria, La (Chiarelli), 460 Figlia di Babilonia, La (Bigongiari), 225 Figlia di Casimiro Clarus, La (Rea), 1552 Figlia di Iorio, La (D’Annunzio), 541, 546–547, 653, 1166 Figlio dell’Impero (Sanvitale), 1679 Figlio di due madri, Il (Bontempelli), 287 Figlio di Jorio, Il (Scarpetta), 1701 Figlioccia, La (Pea), 1391 Figliuol prodigo (Castellani, C.), 1652 Figliuoli della Giovane Italia, 1748 Figurinai, 465 Figurine, 680 Figurine (Faldella), 1698 Filangieri, Gaetano, 663 in Naples, 1268 Filarete, 70, 11001 Filastrocche in cielo e in terra (Rodari), 465 Filberto, Emanuele, 456 Filelfo, Francesco, 305, 518 humanism and, 952 Filelfo, Giovan Mario, 518 Filippi, Filippo, 1259 Filippi, Silvio Spaventa, 978 Filippini, Enrico, 1277 Filippo (Alfieri, V.), 21, 1203 Filippo Strozzi (Niccolini, G.), 1289 Fillı`a. See Colombo, Luigi Enrico Fillippi, Rustico. See Rustico di Filippo Film d’amore e d’anarchia, ovvero ‘stamattina alle 10 in via dei Fiori nella nota casa di tolleranza...’ (Wertmu¨ller), 2021–2022 Film d’art, 469 ‘‘Film dell’impossibile, Il’’ (Cassola), 403 Film parlato (spoken cinema), 724 Film sonoro, Il (Bragaglia, Anton), 724 Film Theory and Criticism, 722–728 Filmcritica, Rasy and, 1549 Film-inchiesta (film as investigation), 236

INDEX Film-lamp (lightning-film), 2043 Films. See Cinema ‘‘Filo`’’ (Zanzotto), 2039 Filo che si svolge in trent’anni, Un (Re´paci), 1576 Filo dell’orizzonte, Il (Tabucchi), 817, 1816 Filo occulto, un (a hidden thread), 154 Filo`: per il Casanova di Fellini (Zanzotto), 472, 2039 Filocolo (Boccaccio), 240, 252–253, 490 Filosofia del cinematografo, La (Papini), 469 Filosofia della luce e luminosi nelle egloghe del Gravina (Quondam), 894 Filosofia della musica (Mazzini), 1175 Filosofia della pratica: Economia ed etica (Croce, B.), 524 Filosofia dell’arredamento, La (Praz), 1497 ‘‘Filosofia dello Spirito’’ (Croce, B.), 524 Filosofia di Giambattista Vico (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297, 524 Filosofia di Marx, La (Gentile), 823 Filosofia e scrittura (Sini, C.), 1316 Filosofia epilogistica (Campanella), 364 Filosofia morale, 326 Filosofia morale, La (Gozzi, C.), 880 Filosofia positiva e il metodo storico, La (Villari), 1972 Filosofo, Il (Aretino), 75 Filosofo inglese, Il (Goldoni), 866 Filostrato (Boccacccio), 241, 253–261, 667, 1437 Filumena Marturano (De Filippo), 585, 586, 589 Fin ‘amors (noble love), 1752 Finale della battaglia, Il (Rasy), 1549 Finamore, Gennaro, 540 Finazzi, Mario, 1434 Fin-de-sie`cle, 579 Findlen, Paul, 1573 ‘‘Fine del ‘68’’ (Montale), 1213 Fine del borghese, La (Buzzati), 335 Fine del gioco, La (Amelio), 31 Fine del mondo, La (Cionti, V.), 1719 Fine del mondo nel nostro solito letto in una notte piena di pioggia, La (Wertmu¨ller), 2022 Fine della modernita`, La (Vattimo), 1428 Fine di stagione (Solmi), 1778 ‘‘Fine di un giorno’’ (Caproni), 379 Fine dicitore (refined speaker), 1913 Finestre d’angolo su Fleur Jaeggy (Pozzi, G.), 971 Finiguerri, Stefano, 1031 Fininvest, 446 ‘‘Finisterre’’ (Montale), 1213 Fink, Guindo, in Ferrara, 718 Fino a Dogali (Oriani, A.), 1319 Fino a Salgare`da (Perrella), 1354 Finti ardori, 39 Finto marito, Il (Scala), 500, 1022 Finzi, Silvia Vegetti, 706 Finzione di Maria, La (Tomizza), 1881 Finzioni (Caproni), 379 Fiocchetto, Giovanni Francesco, 1921 Fiocco, Giuseppe, 99 Fior da fiore (Pascoli), 1361 ‘‘Fior di borrana, se vuoi dire in rima’’ (Burchiello, Il), 331 Fior di memoria pei bambini (Cantu`), 464 Fior di passione (Serao), 671, 1734 Fior di virtu`, 1505 Fiorato, Adelin Charles, 118 Fioravanti, Marco, 930 Fiore (Romano, L.), 1593

Fiore dei Filosofi, 1295 Fiore del dolore, Il (Luzi, M.), 1084 Fiore delle mille e una notte, Il (Pasolini), 1368, 1371, 1373 Fiore di poesia 1953–1999 (Merini), 1187 Fiore e` il nostro segno, Il (Campo, C.), 369 Fiore, Elena, 2022 Fiore, Gioacchino da, 1565, 1938 Fiore, Il (Dante), 552, 728–729 Fiore sotto gli occhi, Il (Martini, Fausto), 1849 Fiorentino, Giovan Angelo, 646, 1296 Fioretti, 201 Fiori del dolore, I (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Fiori italiani (Meneghello), 1184 Fiorilli, Tiberio, 498 Fiorillo, Silvio, 498 Firebrand, The (Cava), 438 Firenze, Torrigiano da, 506 Firenzuola, Agnolo, 186, 463, 730–732. See also Novella Aesop and, 202 novella and, 1297 ‘‘Fischiata XXXIII’’ (Marino), 1158, 1163 Fischiate (jeers), 1161 Fisiologia del Piacere (Mantegazza, M.), 104 Fiske, John, 1481 Fiumana, La (Volpedo), 1481 ‘‘Fiumi, I’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Fiuri de tapo (Marin), 1150 ‘‘522’’: Racconto di una giornata (Bontempelli), 1855 Flaccus, Valeriuys, Bracciolini, P., and, 303 Flagello dei principi (scourge of princes), 74, 519 Flaiano, Ennio, 161, 169, 171, 472, 489, 732–734, 1719, 1728 Fellini and, 1730 Flamini, Francesco, 1516 Flaneur, 360 Flash Gordon (Raymond, A.), 788 Flaubert, Gustave, 785 Capuana and, 382 De Roberto and, 613 in Genoa, 815 Romano, L., and, 1593 Zola and, 1972 Flaubert: The Literarary Formation (1858–1932) (Pozzi, A.), 1489 Flauto e il tappeto, Il (Campo, C.), 369 Flauto magico, Il (Gianini), 51 Fleischer, Dave, 50 Fleischer, Max, 50 Fleiss, Wilhelm, 1509 Fleming, Ian, 658 Flete, William, 415 Fleurs du Mal, Les (Baudelaire), 1089 Flora, Francesco, 1065 Hermeticism and, 931 Florence, 734–738, 1560 academies in, 1 Varchi in, 1948 Florentine academy, 2, 560 Varchi and, 327 Flores et Humus: Conversazioni d’arte (Sartorio), 2003 Flori (Campiglia), 39 Floridante (Tasso, B.), 1832 Florimonte Galeazzo, 604 Florio e Biancifiore, 1480 Flowers from the Tree of Night (Mazziotti), 965 F.M.R., Manganelli and, 1124

I59

INDEX Fo, Dario, 168, 500, 738–743, 1563 Jannacci and, 1783 Paolini and, 1344 Rame and, 1544–1546 Foa`, Luciano, 342 Foa, Vittorio, 1770 Fofi, Goffredo, 989, 1893–1894 Fogazzaro, Antonio, 686, 743–747, 826, 1563, 1569. See also Decadentismo music and, 1256 Pompilj and, 5 Sarfatti and, 1681 Serao and, 1734 Soldati and, 1775 Fogli bianchi (Merini), 1187 Fogli d’album, 1261 Foglia mortale (Volponi), 2017 Foglietta, Oberto, in Genoa, 816 Foglio di via e altri versi (Fortini), 760, 1581 Foiba grande, La (Sgorlon), 1750 Fois, Marcello, 633 Fokin, Mikhail, 499 Fole (Pea), 1390 Folena, Gianfranco, 855 Folengo, Teofilo, 76, 428, 669, 748–750, 757, 933, 1002. See also Heroic-comic poetry Gelli and, 814 zooepics and, 202 Folgo´re, 750–752 Folgore, Luciano, 464, 631, 752–754. See also Futurism futurism and, 793 Folk literature. See Popular culture and literature Fo¨lkel, Ferruccio, 1911 Folla, La, 1204 Folla, La (Valera), 1204, 1699 Folle, folle, folle d’amore per te (Merini), 1187 Follie religiose (Calvo), 1563 Fonda, Henry, 1014 Fondaco nudo (Rea), 1553 Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, 51 Fondazione e manifesto del Futurismo (Marinetti), 791 Fondo Manoscritti degli Autori Moderni e Contemporanei, 515 Fondzione Longhi, 99 Fonema (phoneme), 168 Fons Amoris (Negri, Ada), 1273 Fonseca, Cristo´bal de, 1011 Fontaine, Jean de La, 784, 1827 Trilussa and, 1913 Fontamara (Silone), 1755, 1758–1759 Fontana, Carlo, 1432 Fontana di Trevi, La (Bernini, G.), 71, 189 Fontana, Lucio, 976 Fontana, Ludovico Savioli, neoclassicism and, 1279 Fontanella, Girolamo, 1159 Fontanini, Giusto, 1064 Fonte, Moderata, 450, 755–756 Fonte, Tommaso della, 414 Fonte, Una (Ramat), 1542 Fontenelle, Bernard de, 1712 Fonti dell’ Orlando furioso, Le (Rajna), 267, 1061 Food, Culture of, 756–759. See also Artusi, Pellegrino; Della Casa, Giovanni Footwork: The Patterson Literary Review, 965 Forbidden Friendships (Rocke), 1031

I60

Forcellini, Marco, 1789 Ford, John, 828, 1013 Forestiero, Il (Pea), 1391 Forino, Giovanni, 1432 Foris, Alberto, 664 Forma agens, 327 Forma dell’acqua, La (Camilleri), 354, 633 Forma d’uovo, 1762 Formaggio e i vermi, Il (Ginzburg, C.), 54, 234 Formica, Cicala, 470 Formiche rosse, Le (Rea), 1553 Foro nel parabrezza, Un (Bernari), 183 Forschini, Antonio, 718 Forse che sı` forse che no (D’Annunzio), 541, 1792, 1853 ‘‘Forse il cuore’’ (Quasimodo), 1527 Forte come l’amore (Dandolo), 1600 Forte come un leone (Manzini), 1131 Forte sentire, 20 Forteguerri, Giovanni, novella and, 1297 Forti, Marco, 1477 Fortini, Franco, 279, 759–762, 827, 1856 Bigiaretti and, 223 as critic, 1062–1063 Gerusalemme liberta (Tasso, T.) and, 1841 Guiducci and, 922 Leonetti and, 1016 novella and, 1298 Resistance and, 1581 Vittorini and, 2007 Fortis, Alberto, 1715–1716 Fortis, Leone, 1260, 1698 Fortis, Triestine Leone, 978 Fortnightly Review, 2011 Fortuna (fortune), 1098 ‘‘Fortuna che sollevi in alto stato’’ (Morra), 1243 Fortuna di Dante, La, 559 Fortuna di essere donna, La (Blasetti), 237 Fortunate Pilgrim, The (Puzo), 964 Fortunato, Giustino, questione meridionale and, 1533 Fortunato, Mario, 1199 Fortunatus, Venantius, 821 Fortunio, Gianfrancesco, 167 Forum italicum, 1543 Forza (force), 1181 Forza del destino, La (Verdi), 935 Forza del passato, La (Veronesi, S.), 1975 Forzano, Giovacchino, 47 ‘‘Forzano, Il’’ (Chiabrera), 456 Fosca (Tarchetti), 685, 1828 Foscolo e la danzatrice (Ornelli), 538 Foscolo, Manzoni, Leopardi (Graf), 886 Foscolo, Ugo, 47, 107, 108, 388, 538, 670, 762–769, 826, 937, 1060, 1088, 1203, 1271, 1597, 1598, 1658 Aleardi and, 13 autobiography and, 108 Capponi, G., and, 376 Carrer and, 397, 398 censorship of, 445 Cesarotti and, 453 classicism and, 480 Doni and, 645 in Genoa, 816 Giordani, Pietro, and, 850 Gozzi, C., and, 882

INDEX Gravina, G., and, 894 Mazzini and, 1175 Monti, V., and, 1218 neoclassicism and, 1279 Niccolini, G., and, 1288, 1289 Nievo and, 1290 Orelli and, 1318 Petrarch and, 1413 Pindemonte and, 1446 Quasimodo and, 1531 Risorgimento and, 1589 Romanticism and, 1599 Saba and, 1643 scapigliatura and, 1697, 1698 Settembrini and, 1749 Solmi and, 1778 Stae¨l and, 1902 Tarchetti and, 1826 Tiraboschi and, 1873 Tommaseo and, 1883 in Venice, 1960 Verga, G., and, 1963 Fosfeni (Zanzotto), 2039, 2041 Fossa, Evangelista, 668 Fossati, Ivano, 1783 Fosse, Bob, 701 Fellini and, 702 Forster, E.M., 737 Fotodinamismo (photodynamism), 1433 ‘‘Fotodinamismo futurista’’ (Bragaglia, Anton and Bragaglia, Arturo), 1434 Foto-Film, 1434 Fotogenia, 726 Fotografia, 1434 Fotografia Artistica, La, 1433 Fotografia e l’arte della rappresentazione del vero, La (Ricci), 1433 Fotografia italiana, 1434 Fotografia secondo i processi moderni, La (Gioppi), 1433 Fotologia, 1434 Fotoromanzo, 769–770 Fotostorica, 1434 Foucault, Michel, 942 Cavani and, 426 queer theories of, 1030 Fougez, Anna, 1269, 1951 Foundations of the World Republic (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 4/3/1945 (Dalla), 1784 Fourest, Georges, 1540 Fournier, Alain, 123 Bassani and, 142 Fox, William Henry, 1431 Fra scuola e casa (De Amicis), 576 Frabotta, Antonia, 6. See also Feminist Theory and Criticism Frabotta, Biancamaria, 770–773 Fracassetti, Giuseppe, 1414 Fracchia, Umberto, 816 Fragment of Ancient Poetry, A (Macpherson), 453 Fragmenti (Andreini, I.), 39 Fragmentism, 296 Fragola e panna (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Fragonard, Jean-Honore´, 92 Fragoso, Juan de Matos, 881 Fraire, Manuela, 1548–1549 Frammenti lirici (Rebora), 1554

‘‘Frammento apocrifo di Stratone di Lamsaco’’ (Leopardi), 1027 ‘‘Frammento escluso’’ (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Frammento sull’educazione (Capponi, G.), 376 Frana allo Scalo Nord (Betti, U.), 207 France, Anatole, Ojetti and, 1303 France, Marie de, 201 France-Presse, 1474 Francesca da Rimini (D’Annunzio), 541, 653 Francesca da Rimini (Pellico), 1393, 1400, 1590, 1597 Francesca e Nunziata (Wertmu¨ller), 2023 Francesca, Piero della, 1001, 11000 Ferrara and, 716 Longhi and, 1073 Franceschi, Francesco dei, 92 Franceschini, Alberto, 1865 Francesco (Cavani), 425, 1859 Francesco da Rimini (Zandonai), 1257 Francesco d’Assisi (Curtiz), 776 Francesco De Gregori (De Gregori), 1784 Francesco di Assisi (Cavani), 425, 776 Francesco, giullare di Dio (Rossellini), 776, 1619 Franchetti, Alberto, 546 Franchetti, Alice Hallgarten, 6 Franchetti, Leopoldo, 983 questione meridionale and, 1532 Franchezza (Dante), 728 Franchi, Steva de, 816, 1563 Franci, Carlo Sebastiano, 1979 Francis I (King), 442 Aretino and, 74 Francis of Assisi, 773–777, 1565, 1566 Salimbene da Parma and, 1656 Silone and, 1756 Turoldo and, 1925 Francis of Assisi: Early Documents (Short), 773 Franciscan Spirituals, 41 Franciscans, 415, 550, 1567 Bonaventure and, 1565 Francis of Assisi and, 776 Franciulli, Giuseppe, 464 Franck, Robert, 1434 Franco cacciatore, Il (Caproni), 380 Franco, Ernesto, 817 Franco, Matteo, 1518, 1519 Franco, Niccolo`, 316 Franco, Veronica, 38, 777–780, 1799. See also Petrarchism Petrarchism and, 1421 in Venice, 1961 ‘‘Frangetta, La’’ (Bracco), 306 Frankfurter Allgemeine, 599 Franklin, Benjamin, 48 Frantumi (Boine), 270 Franunmento sulla rivoluzione nazione (Nievo), 1291 Franziska (Tomizza), 1881 Frare, Pierantonio, 175 Frasca, Gabriele, Valduga and, 1942 Frascari, Carlo Amadeo. See Zambonelli ‘‘Frase che segue e` falsa. La frase che precede e` vera, La’’ (Tabucchi), 1819 Frasi e incisi di un canto salutare (Luzi, M.), 1084 Frassati, Alfredo, 978 Frate Francesco (Antamoro), 776 Frate, Il (Grazzini), 895 Frate ‘nnamorato, Lo (Federico, Gennaro), 1312

I61

INDEX Frate Sole (Corsi), 776 ‘‘Fratelli’’ (Ungaretti), 2032 Fratelli, Arnaldo, 461, 1760 Fratelli Cuccoli, I (Palazzeschi), 1334 Fratelli Dinamite, I (Pagot and Pagot), 51 Fratelli d’Italia (Arbasino), 62, 63 Fratelli Rupe, I (Re`paci), 1576 Fratello d’armi, Il (Giacosa), 837 Fratello Sole, Sorella Luna (Zeffirelli), 776 Fraticelli, 482 Freccero, John, 554 Freda, Riccardo, 1729 Freddo al cuore (Lagorio), 992 Freddo dentro, Il (Ravera), 1551 Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, 26, 780–782, 783, 833, 1657 Algarotti and, 1191 Giacomo da Lentini and, 834 Magna Curia of, 926 Pier delle Vigne and, 1442 Sicilian School of Poetry and, 1752 volgare and, 1561 Free Cinema, 158 Free verse, 143 by Alfieri, V., 20 Free will, 151 Freedom of speech, for girls, 6 Fregoli, Leopoldo, 1950 Fregoso, Cesare, 117 French Influences, 783–785 French New Wave, 198 French Revolution, 1568 Alfieri, V., and, 22 Capponi, G., and, 376 Monti, V., and, 1218 Risorgimento and, 1589 French Structuralist school, 54 ‘‘Fresca rosa novella’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 421 Frescobaldi, Dino, 421 Dolce stil novo and, 641, 642 Frescobaldi, Leonardo, 1905 Freud, Sigmund, 341, 684, 686, 1509, 1910 Bertolucci, B., and, 198 Leopardi and, 1022 Masino and, 1168 Ottieri and, 1327 Svevo and, 1807 teatro grottesco and, 1850 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Frezza, Andrea, 32 Friedrich, Hugo, 1158 Friends of Italian Freedom, 1666 Frigidaire, 790 Frigido, 2 Frimault, Paul, 50 Frisi, Paolo, 1979 Frobenius, Leo, 250 Fronda, La, 1340 Frondista (rebel), 228 Front Populaire, 1994 Frontespizio, 204, 985 Hermeticism and, 930 Luzi, M., and, 1082 Rebora and, 1555 Frontiera, 1880

I62

Frontiera (Sereni, V.), 931, 1741, 2031 Frotolla, 1269 Frottole, 1561 Frugoni, Carlo Innocenzo, 213 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Algarotti and, 26, 27 historiography and, 942–943 Frugoni, Francesco Fulvio, 202 Frusta letteraria, La, 47, 664, 982, 1060 Baretti and, 1922, 1979 Frustino, Il (Aleramo), 15 Fruta letteraria, La, 129 Fruttero, Carlo, 632, 1923 Frye, Northrop, 820 Fu Mattia Pascal, Il (Pirandello), 611, 1457–1458, 1606, 1848 Fuanciulla del West, La (Puccini, Giacomo), 48 Fubini, Mario, 1936 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 as critic, 1062 Fucini, Renato, 786–787, 1659 verismo and, 1971–1972 Fuentes, Carlos, 936 Fuga (De Ce´spedes), 582 Fuga, La (Rosso), 1624 Fuggitiva, La (Dandolo), 1601 Fuggitiva, La (Grossi), 897 Fughe incrociate (Tomizza), 1881 Fuitevenne, 989 Fulco, Giorgio, 1161 Marino and, 1163 Fuller, Loie, 538 Fuller, Samuel, neorealism and, 1283 Fumetti, 56, 787–791 Fumetto d’autore (auteur comics), 790 Fumetto nero (dark comics), 789 Fumo di Birkenau, Il (Millu), 948 Fumo di china, 790 Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (Carra`), 793 ‘‘Funerale senza tristezza’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 ‘‘Funere mersit acerbo’’ (Carducci), 394 ‘‘Funes, the Memorious’’ (Borges), 1448 Funi, Achille Masino and, 1167 Sarfatti and, 1681 Funzione delle scienze e significato dell’uomo (Banfi), 1429 Fuochi d’artificio (Chiarelli), 460 Fuochi d’artifizio (Govoni), 873 Fuochi fatui (Sbarbaro), 1695 Fuochi in novembre (Bertolucci, A.), 195 Fuochi sull’Appennino, I (Aleardi), 13 Fuoco greco, Il (Malerba), 1116 Fuoco, Il (D’Annunzio), 541, 545–546, 653, 826, 1257, 1961 Fuor di commedia (outside the play), 78 Fuori, 709 Fuori (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Fuori di casa (Montale), 1213 Fuori scena (Lagorio), 992 Furiosi, I (Balestrini), 115 Furor mathematicus (Sinisgalli), 1761 Fusco, Giovanni Antonioni and, 56 World War II and, 2032 Fusco, Renato De, 101 Fu¨ssli, Johann Henrich, 20

INDEX Futur-Balla, 1923 Futurism, 183, 278, 385, 791–794, 818, 1853, 1951, 2003 Boine and, 269 Buzzi and, 1155 Checchi and, 430 in cinema, 470, 723 Decadentismo and, 579 Folgore and, 752 Govoni and, 874, 1155 Jahier and, 974 Longhi and, 1073 Lucini and, 1079 lyric poetry and, 1089 Marinetti and, 691, 1154 in Milan, 1204 music and, 1257 Palazzeschi and, 1155, 1333 in Palermo, 1340 Papini and, 1346 Pirandello and, 1452 Rebora and, 1555 Sarfatti and, 1681 science fiction and, 1718 Soffici and, 1772 in Turin, 1922 Ungaretti and, 1932 Viviani, R., and, 2014 World War I and, 2028 Futurisme, Le (Marinetti), 1155 Futurismo e Fascismo (Marinetti), 1156 Futurismo e Marinettismo, 793 ‘‘Futurismo e Marinettismo’’ (Papini), 1346 Futuro, 1719, 1720 Futuro della democrazia, Il (Bobbio), 1428 Futuro dell’automobile, Il (Roversi and Dalla), 1630 Futuro Europa, 1720 Futuro ha un cuore antico: Viaggio nell’Unione Sovietica, Il (Levi, C.), 1036

G Gabbianella e il gatto, La (D’alo`), 51 Gabelli, Aristide, 1427 Gaber, Giorgio, 1258, 1783 Gabinetto di lettura, 737 Gabinetto di Minerva, 1910 Gabinetto Vieusseux, 431, 1851 Giusti and, 860 Gaboriau, Emile, 631 Gabriele D’Annunzio (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Gabriele, Trifone, 163 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Gabrielli, Annibale, 459 Gabrielli, Francesco, 498 Gabrielli, Prudenza, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 827 Gadda, Carlo Emilio, 47, 279, 470, 795–801, 1324, 1563 animal tales by, 203 Arbasino and, 62 Belli, G., and, 156 Bilenchi and, 229 detective fiction and, 632 Maggi and, 1104

Manganelli and, 1122 Manzini and, 1130 in Milan, 1205 as neo-avant-garde, 1276 Ottieri and, 1327 Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni, A.) and, 1138 psychoanalysis and, 1512 in Rome, 1607 scapigliatura and, 1698 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Tecchi and, 1851 World War I and, 2029 World War II and, 2032 Gaddi, Giovanni, Caro and, 395 Gaeta, Francesco, 634 Di Giacomo and, 635 Gaeta, Maria Ida, 1071 Gagliuso (Basile), 138 Gaite, Martı´n, 936 Gala, Leone, 1452 Galante conversazione, 1182 Galanti, Giuseppe Maria, in Naples, 1268 Galassi, Jonathan, 965 Galassia, 1719 Galasso, Giuseppe, historiography and, 945 Galatea (Metastasio), 1190 Galatea, Francesco, 328 Galateo, Il. See Ferrariis, Antonio de Galateo, Il (Della Casa), 600, 603–605, 758, 1128 Galateo in Bosco, Il (Zanzotto), 2039, 2040–2041 Galateo, overo de’ costumi (Della Casa), 518 Galateria, Marinella Mascia, 1167 Galdieri, Rocco, 584 in Naples, 1269 Galealto re di Norvegia (Tasso, T.), 1834, 1835 Galep. See Galleppini, Aurelio Galeria, La (Marino), 1088, 1161 Galiani, Celestino, 1713, 1934 Galiani, Ferdinando, 663, 935, 1713 in Naples, 1268 Galilei e Bruno nell’immaginario dei movimenti popolari tra Otto e Novecento (Bertolucci, F.), 1481 Galilei, Galileo, 174, 801–805, 1002, 1128, 1427, 1481, 1604 Accademia della Crusca and, 1716 censorship of, 443 Della Porta and, 605 Enlightenment and, 662 Redi and, 1558 Vico and, 1984 Galilei, Vincenzo, 736, 1309 music and, 1255 Galileo (Cavani), 425 censorship of, 446 Gallarati, Tommaso, 654 Galleppini, Aurelio, 789 Galleria d’Arte Nazaionale, 72 Galleria di bon ton, 1339 Galleria di Minerva, 977 Galleria Toledo, 1950 Galli, Dina, 1760 Gallina, Giacinto, 1759, 1795 Gallini, Clara, 54 Gallismo, 308

I63

INDEX Gallo, Antonio, Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Gallo non ha cantato, Il (Brancati), 311 Galluzzi, Maria Domitilla, 1568 Galt, William. See Natoli, Luigi Galtieri, Nicola, 1193 Galuppi, Baldassarre, music and, 1256 Galuppi, Pasquale, 1428 Gamba, Giuliana, 69 Ga`mbara, Veronica, 805–808 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Petrarchism and, 1421 Gamberini, Italo, 101 Gambero, Francesco, 1340 Gambini, Pier Antonio Quarantotti, 1911 Tomizza and, 1880 Gamerra, Giovanni De, 664 Gamma, 1719 Gandellini, Francesco Gori, Alfieri, V., and, 20 Gandhi, Mahatma, 1756 Gandini, Giovanni, 789 Gangbo, Jadelin Mabiala, 1202 Ganimede (Cellini), 440 ‘‘Gara, La’’ (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Garabaldino al convento, Un (De Sica), 622 Garanzia morale (GM), 789 Garavelli, Bice Mortara, 135 Garay, Nestor, 1882 Garboli, Cesare, 808–810 Pascoli and, 1360 Penna and, 1395 Garconnie`re, La (De Santis), 619 Garden of the Finzi-Continis, The. See Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Il (Bassani) Gardin, Gianni Berengo, 1434, 2043 Gargiulo, Alfredo, 1647 as critic, 1062 donna, Una and, 18 Hermeticism and, 930 Gargiulo, Domenico, in Naples, 1268 Gariazzo, Piero Antonio, 723 Garibaldi (Bianciardi), 219 Garibaldi (Nozza and Montanelli), 233 Garibaldi a Gettysburg (Prosperi, P.), 1720 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 389, 510, 616, 1705, 1846, 1876, 1910 Guerrazzi, F., and, 909 in Palermo, 1339 Risorgimento and, 1592 Garin, Eugenio, 946, 1427, 1937 humanism and, 951 Petrarch and, 1414 Garofalo, Marcello, 1013 Garofano rosso, Il (Vittorini), 1205, 2005 censorship of, 445 Garrone, Sandro Galante, 1580 Garroni, Emilio, 101 Garroni, Umberto, 725 Garufi, Bianca, 1385 Garzoni, Tommaso, 144, 518, 934, 1480 Celati and, 435 Gaspari, Alcide De, 56 Gaspari Contareni Vita (Della Casa), 602 Gasparri’s Law, 446 Gasperi, Alcide De, 426, 507 Gassendi, Pierre, 401

I64

Gassman, Vittorio, 1208, 1585, 1795, 2004 Ragazzoni and, 1541 Risi, D., and, 1584 Gastone, Gian, 737 Gastrite di Platone, La (Tabucchi), 1817 Gastronomo, Il, 759 ‘‘Gatta cenerentola, La’’ (Basile), 138, 463 Gattina, Ferdinando Petruccelli della, 688 ‘‘Gattini ciechi, I’’ (Tomas di Lampedusa), 1878 Gatto, Alfonso, 464, 811–813, 984 Betocchi and, 204 Hermeticism and, 930 Resistance and, 1580–1581 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Gatto, Ettore Lo, Russian influences of, 1634 Gattopardo, Il, 53, 108, 354, 510, 696, 939, 1063, 1339, 1341, 1430 in Palermo, 1340 Gattopardo, Il (Piccolo), 1436 Gattopardo, Il (Tomasi di Lampedusa), 1609–1610, 1706, 1876– 1879, 1995 Gattopardo, Il (Visconti, L.), 1533, 1994 Gatt-Rutter, John, 1808 Gaureschi, Giovanni, 352 Gautier, Marguerite, 1320 Gautier, The´ophile, 497, 538, 684, 685, 686 decadentismo and, 580 Gavazzi, Angela, 1568 Gay Writing. See Lesbian and Gay Writing Gazetta musicale di Firenze, 1258, 1259 Gazetta musicale di Milano, 1258 Gazza ladra, Il (Gianini), 51 Gazzara, Ben, 1890 Gazzeta italiana, La (Belgioioso), 151 Gazzetta del Popolo, La Collodi and, 483 Folgore and, 754 Masino and, 1168 Moravia and, 1230 Re´paci and, 1577 Gazzetta dello sport, 979, 1792 Gazzetta di Milano, 977 Gazzetta di Parma, 196 Zavattini and, 2042 Gazzetta di Venezia, 978 Gazzetta d’Italiana, La, Collodi and, 483 Gazzetta letteraria, La decadentismo and, 579 Di Giacomo and, 634, 636 Gazzetta Musicale, 689 Gazzetta Musicale di Milano, 1260 Gazzetta Piemontese, 679, 978 Gazzetta privilegiata di Milano, 1431 Gazzetta ufficiale di Milano, La, 1260, 1628 Gazzetta Veneta, 664, 883 Gazzettiere (reporter), 262 Gazzettino, 978 Gazzettino rosa, 1699 Geburt der Trago¨die, Die (Nietzsche), 541 Geetz, Clifford, 516 Geisha, La, 584 Gelato al limon, Un (Conte), 1785 Gelli, Giaovan Battista, 84, 201, 813–815. See also Questione della lingua Della Casa and, 600

INDEX Gellius, Aulus, 478 Gello sull’origine della lingua fiorentina, Il (Giambullari, P.), 840 Gelmetti, Vittorio, 169 Gelopea (Chiabrera), 456 Gelosia (Dante), 728 Gelosia (Germi), 829 Gelosia (Oriani, A.), 1320 Gelosia (Scarpetta), 1700 Gelosia, La (Grazzini), 895 Gemella buona e la gemella cattiva, La (Campo, R.), 372 ‘‘Gemelli, I’’ (Jaeggy), 972 Ge´mier, Firmin, 784 Gemini, Erasmo, 600 Genalogie deorum gentilium (Boccaccio), 1661 Gendarme, Er (Chiarelli), 459 Genealogia del fuoco (Pes), 1341 Genealogie deorum gentilium (Boccaccio), 239, 255, 257–258, 941, 1000, 1571 Generale Della Rovere, Il (Rossellini), 1620 Generations of Love (Bianchi), 1033 Genesi (Battiato), 1785 Genesi con la visione di Noe` (Aretino), 75 Genesi del diritto penale (Romagnosi), 1427 Genesis, 2027 Pico della Mirandola and, 1439 Genesis: La creazione e il diluvio (Olmi), 1305 Genet, Jean, 1825 Moscato and, 1246 Genete che perde´ Gerusalemme, La (Piovene), 1448 Genette, Ge´rard, in Nouvelle critique, 820 Ge´nie national (national genius), 685 Genina, Augusto, 471, 1619 Monicelli, M., and, 1208 Genio in fuga, Il (Baricco), 131–132 Genio retortico (rhetorical genius), 454 ‘‘Genio umanitario, Il’’ (Giusti), 861 Gennaro, Nino, 1341 Genoa, 815–818 Genova, Giuseppe Crispi, 1339 Genovesi, Antonio, 662, 1713, 1935 in Naples, 1268 Genres, 818–822 Gente da poco (Tozzi, F.), 1898 Gente del Po (Antonioni), 56, 58 Gente di mare (Comisso), 495 Gente di Roma (Scola), 1723 Gente in Aspromonte (Alvaro), 28 Gente, La (Trilussa), 1913 Gente nel tempo (Bontempelli), 288 ‘‘Gente noiosa e villana’’ (Guittone d’Arezzo), 927 Gente per bene, La (Marchesa Colombi), 1148 Gente perduta, La (Berto), 191 ‘‘Gentil piacevol giovanella, Una’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 476 Gentile, Giovanni, 822–825, 1427, 1936 Gobetti, P., and, 862 Gramsci and, 889 historiography and, 946 Petrarch and, 1414 in Rome, 1607 Ungaretti and, 1930 Gentileschi, Artemisia, 124 Gentilezza, 924, 1181 Gentilhuomo, Il (Muzio), 1264 Gentili, Augusto, 100

Geoffrey of Monmouth, 783 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, 563 Geografia e storia della letteratura italiana (Dionisotti), 1063, 1065 Geografia trasportata al morale, La (Bartoli, D.), 135 Geometria del disordine (Spaziani), 1787 George, Stefan, 827 Georgics (Virgil), 1472, 1843 Georgio, Il (Della Porta), 606 Gerarchia, 980 Sarfatti and, 1681 Geri, Francesco, 456 ‘‘Geri, Il’’ (Chiabrera), 456 German Influences, 825–828 Germania anno zero (Rossellini), 1609, 1619 Germi, Pietro, 237, 828–830 Fellini and, 700 Monicelli, M., and, 1208 questione meridionale and, 1533 Gershwin, Ira, 438 Gerusalemme Conquistata (Tasso, T.), 669, 932, 1834 Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso, T.), 175, 444, 518, 669, 717, 1127, 1315, 1562, 1568, 1668–1669, 1833, 1839, 1840–1842, 1921 censorship of, 444 homosexuality and, 1032 music and, 1255 Gesamtkunswerk (total artwork), 1191 Geschlecht und Charakter (Weininger), 1910 Gessi, Romolo, 489, 1909 Gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium (Arnolfo), 230 Gesta Berengarii iimperatoris (Arnolfo), 230 Gesta Danorum (Grammaticus), 1835 Gesta Ferdinandi regis Aragonum (Valla, L.), 1946 Gesta Romanorum, 1295 Gesta Romanorum (Raboni), 1538 Gesu` bambino (Dalla), 1784 Gesu` fate luce (Rea), 1268, 1552 ‘‘Gesu` peccatore’’ (Papini), 1347 Gesualdo, M. Gio. Andrea, 1413 Getto, Giovanni, 137, 659, 1059 Marino and, 1163 ‘‘Gettoni, I’’ (Einaudi), 284 ‘‘Gettoni, I’’ (Vittorini), 2005 Ghe pensi mi (Marchesi, M.), 1544 Gherardi, Evaristo, 498 Gherardi, Gherardo, 471 Gherardi, Giovanni, 1296 Ghiazza, Silvana, 1927 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 11000 Vasari and, 1952 Ghibli, El, 1201 Ghirelli, Antonio, La Capria and, 989 Ghiribizzi (whims), 1185 Ghirlandaio, David, 328 Ghirlandaio, Domenico, 328 Ghirri, Luigi, 435, 1434 Ghislanzoni, Antonio, 1052, 1260, 1313, 1718 Ghisleri, Michele, 444 Ghost Dance (Maso), 964 ‘‘Gia` mai non mi conforto’’ (d’Aquino, R.), 1753 Giachetti, Fosco, 1882 Giacinta (Capuana), 383, 1972 Giacobino, Margherita, 1033 Giacomelli, Antoinetta, 6 Giacomelli, Mario, 1434

I65

INDEX Giacometti, Alberto, Tasso, T., and, 1836 Giacomino da Verona, 290, 830–832 Giacomino Pugliese, 832–834, 1753. See also Sicilian School of Poetry Giacomo da Lentini, 641, 833, 834–836, 1337, 1443, 1752. See also Frederick II of Hohenstaufen; Sicilian School of Poetry Giacomo, il prepotente, 1122 Giacomo l’idealista (De Marchi, E.), 611 Giacomo l’idealista (Lattuada), 1584 Giaconi, Lara, Pompilj and, 5 Giaconi, Luisa, Pompilj and, 5 Giacoppo (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Giacosa, Giuseppe, 48, 744, 837–839, 1313, 1922 Faldella and, 680 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Praga, M., and, 1492 Giallisti, 632 Giallo, 631, 1116 Giallo Club, 633 Giallo Parma (Bevilacqua, A.), 214 Giambi ed epodi (Carducci), 389, 1606 Giambullari, Bernardo, 668, 814 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1519 Giambullari, Pier Francesco, 839–842. See also Questione della lingua Giametto Viusseux, Montale and, 1212 Giammusso, Maurizio, 233 Gian Pietro da Core: Storia dell’evoluzione dell’Idea (Lucini), 1079 Gianelli, Giulio, 1922 Gianini, Giulio, 51 Gianluca overo de le maschete, Il (Tasso, T.), 1839 Giannettino (Collodi), 484 Giannetto, Il (Parravicini), 464 Giannetto prego` un dı` la mamma che il lasciasse andare a scuola (Collodi), 484 Gianni, Lapo, Dolce stil novo and, 641, 642 Gianni Rodari, 465 Giannina e Bernardone (Cimarosa), 1338 Giannini, Ettore, in Naples, 1270 Giannini, Giancarlo, 2022 Giannini, Guglielmo, 631 Giannone, Pietro, 943, 1934 Metastasio and, 1190 Risorgimento and, 1590 Giappone, Il (Bartoli, D.), 134 Giardini di marzo, I (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Giardiniere contro il becchino, Il (Porta, A.), 1483 Giardino degli epitheti, Il (Spada), 1421 Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Il (Bassani), 109, 140, 142–143, 949, 1539 Giardino dei Finzi-Contini, Il (De Sica), 621, 624, 2043 Giardino d’inverno, 1857 Giardino, Vittorio, 790 Giasone (Cicognini), 1311 Giavioli, Roberto, 51 Gibba, 51 Gibbon, Edward, 108 Gibellini, Pietro, 369 Giberti, Giovan Matteo, 164 Berni and, 186 Gibigianna, La (Bertolazzi), 193 Gibson, Mel, 2046 Gide, Andre´, 183 Svevo and, 1806 Vittorini and, 2005

I66

Giegher, Mattia, 758 Giganti della montagna, I (Pirandello), 1452, 1455–1457, 1794, 1939–1940 Gigli d’oro, 301 Gigli, Girolamo, 784 Gil assenti (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Gilardi, Ando, 1434 Gilbert, Sandra, 966 Gilda del Mac Mahon, La (Testori), 1206 Gillot, Claude, 500 Gilson, Etienne, 1704 Ginestra in fiore (Vigano`), 1988 Ginestra, La (Leopardi), 1114, 1365 ‘‘Ginestra, o il fiore del deserto, La’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Ginevra (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Ginevra Benci (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1009 Ginger e Fred (Fellini), 702 ‘‘Gingillino’’ (Giusti), 861 Ginna, Arnaldo, 51 Ginsberg, Allen, 49 Ginzburg, Carlo, 54, 234, 2025 Ginzburg, Leone, 842 Pavese and, 1381 Russian influences of, 1634 Ginzburg, Natalia, 48, 216, 233, 371, 671, 842–848, 1923 Garboli and, 809 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Morante and, 1228 Parise, Goffredo, and, 1356 Romano, L., and, 1593 terrorism and, 1863 Gioacchino da Fiore, 848–850 Salimbene da Parma and, 1657 Gioanola, Elio, 1022 Svevo and, 1808 Giobbe, Luiggi, 51 Gioberti, Vincenzo, 150, 850–852, 1061, 1426, 1429, 1569, 1922 Cattaneo, C., and, 418 historiography and, 944 Renaissance and, 1572 Risorgimento and, 1591 Giocando a dama con la luna (Morandini), 1222 Giocatore, Il (Betti, U.), 206 Giocatore, Il (Goldoni), 867 Giocatore invisibile, Il (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1206, 1477 Giochi di latte (Maraini), 1143 Gioco a nascondere, canti barocchi e altre liriche (Piccolo), 1436 Gioco dei regni, Il (Sereni, C.), 1739 Gioco del rovescio, Il (Tabucchi), 686, 1815 Gioco della torre, Il (Landolfi), 686 Gioco delle parti, Il (Pirandello), 1493 Gioco di fanciulli (Pressburger), 1499 Gioco d’infanzia (Pisis), 1033 Gioco e il massacro, Il (Flaiano), 733 ‘‘Gioco segreto, Il’’ (Morante), 1224 Gioconda, La (D’Annunzio), 541 Gioia, 979 Gioia (Vivanti), 2011 Gioia, Dana, 965 ‘‘Gioia e la legge, La’’ (Tomasi di Lampedusa), 1878 Gioja, Melchiorre, 1138, 1427 Giolito, Gabriel, 92, 1243 Terracina and, 1861

INDEX Giolitti, Giovanni, 691, 1666 Risorgimento and, 1592 Svevo and, 1807 Gionta, 268 Gioppi, Luigi, 1433 Giordana, Marco Tullio, 69, 1866 Giordani, Paolino, Chiarelli and, 459 Giordani, Pietro, 616, 850–854, 982 as critic, 1060 Leopardi and, 1019 Giordano, Umberto, 1760 Giorgi, Aurelio Bertola De’, 463 Giornale, Il, Cerami and, 448 Giornale de’ letterati, 977, 982, 1712 Giornale de’ letterati d’Italia (Zeno, A.), 784, 867 Giornale dei Balilla, Il, 788 Giornale dei bambini, Il, 484 Giornale dei socialisti, 1302 Giornale della Societa` del quartetto, 1260 Giornale delle donna, 1147 Giornale di bordo (De Roberto), 613 Giornale di bordo (Piano), 72 Giornale di bordo (Soffici), 1771 Giornale di guerra e prigionia (Gadda), 797, 2029 Giornale di Sicilia, Il, 1878 Giornale d’Italia, 570, 586, 979 De Roberto and, 614 Jovine and, 987 Giornale Enciclopedico, 664, 982, 1714 Giornale napoletano della domenica, Imbriani and, 959 Giornale storico della letteratura italiana, 886, 1936 Giornali (Alfieri, V.), 20 Giornalino (little newspaper), 787 Giornalino della domenica, Il, 464 Giornalino di Gian Burrasca (Wertmu¨ller), 2021 Giornata balorda, La (Bolognini), 280 censorship of, 446 Giornata particolare, Una (Scola), 1723, 1792 Giornata uggiosa, Un (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Giornata, Una (Pirandello), 687 Giornate e Notti (Fortini), 1298 Giorni d’ acqua corrente (Cutrufelli), 535 Giorni d’amore (De Santis), 619 ‘‘Giorni della fera, I’’ (D’Arrigo), 570 Giorni di gloria (De Santis), 620 Giorni di guerra (Comisso), 495 Giorni veri, I (Zangrandi), 1579 Giorno aveva cinque teste (Roversi and Dalla), 1630 Giorno degli assassinii, Il (Bernari), 183, 184 ‘‘Giorno dei morti, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1360 Giorno del giudizio, Il (Satta), 1686 Giorno della civetta, Il (Sciascia), 632, 1706, 1709–1710 Giorno della memoria, Il (Gordon, R.), 949 Giorno dopo giorno (Quasimodo), 1527 Giorno, Il, 980 Arbasino and, 63 Buzzati, 339 fashion and, 696 Sanguineti and, 1672 Serao and, 1733 Giorno, Il (Parini, G.), 202, 454, 1350, 1351–1352 Giorno nella vita (Blasetti), 237 Giorno, Un (Vallini), 521 Gioseffi, Daniela, 965

Giostra (Pulci, Luigi), 1468 Giostra di Lorenzo di Medici, La (Pulci, Luigi), 1518 Giostra di Michele Civa, La (Joppolo), 976 Giotti, Virgilio, 1150, 1912 Giovampietro, Renzo, Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 25 Giovanardi, Stefano, 423 Giovane Scuola, 1257 Giovane Toscanini, Il (Zeffirelli), 2046 Giovani (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Giovani amici (Tecchi), 1851 Giovani Blues. Under 25, 1, 1886 Giovani cannibali, 34 Giovani dei Po, I (Calvino), 343 Giovani mariti (Bolognini), 1371 Giovanna d’Arco (Oxilia, N.), 1329 Giovanna d’Arco (Spaziani), 1787 Giovanna d’Arco al rogo (Rossellini), 1619 Giovanni da Procida (Niccolini, G.), 1289 Giovanni dalle Bande Nere. See Medici, Giovanni de’ Giovanni Episcopo (D’Annunzio), 540, 1733 Giovanni, Francesco di, Vasari and, 1653 Giovanni Leone: La carriera di un president (Cederna, C.), 433 Giovanni, Neria De, 282 Giovanni Testori (Cappello), 1869 Giovannitti, Arturo, 964 Giove (Cellini), 438 Giove e le bestie (Trilussa), 202, 1913 ‘‘Giovenezza,’’ 713 ‘‘Giovenile errore, Il’’ (Gozzano), 879 Gioventu´ cannibale. See Cannibali Gioventu´ cannibale (Ammaniti), 34, 374, 474 Gioventu` cannibale: La prima antologia dell’orrore estremo (Einaudi), 373 Gioventu´ che muore (Comisso), 495 Gioventu´ Italiana di Azione Cattolica, 659 Gioventu` perduta (Germi), 828 Gioventu` Universitaria Fascista (GUF), 693 Giovine Italia (Young Italy), 1590 Giovine Italia, La, 910, 1174 Giovinezz, La (De Sanctis), 616 Giovinezza, 23 Giovinezza del secolo XIX (Neera), 1271 Giovinezza di Giulio Cesare (Rovani), 648, 1628 ‘‘Giovinezza, giovinezza’’ (Oxilia, N.), 1330 Giovinezza inventata, Una (Romano, L.), 1594 ‘‘Giovinezza, La’’ (Pindemonte), 1446 Giovio, Paolo, 231, 854–856 Vasari and, 1953 Giraldi, Franco, 582 Giraldi, Giambattista, 668, 717, 856–858, 902, 1126, 1790 Ariosto and, 81–82 as critic, 1058 Decameron (Boccaccio) and, 247 Della Valle, F., and, 607 Mannerism and, 1128 novella and, 1298 Sommi and, 1780 Tasso, T., and, 1837 Giraldi, Giglio Gregorio, 717 ‘‘Giro dei debitori, Il’’ (Volponi), 2016 Giro del mondo (Careri), 1907–1908 Giro di boa, Il (Camilleri), 354 Girogio, Michela De, 2025 Girolamo, Carla De, 1200

I67

INDEX Girone il cortese (Alamanni), 668 ‘‘Gironi aperti’’ (Caproni), 379 Girono di Santi (Guidacci), 919 Girornale delle dame e delle mode di Francia, 979 Girorno, Il, Ottieri and, 1328 Girovago (Ungaretti), 1932 ‘‘Gita a Chiasso,’’ 1275 Gita a Tindari, La (Camilleri), 354 Gite di un artista (Boito, C.), 71 Giu` la testa (Leone, S.), 1015 Giubbe rosse, 997 Giuco delle parti, Il (Gala), 1452 Giuda (Pea), 1390 Giudice e l’interprete, il (the judge and interpreter), 206 Giudice, Gaspare, 233 Giudici, Giovanni, 858–860, 1211 Tarozzi and, 1829 Giudici, Paolo Emiliani, 617 Giudicio sopra la tragedia di Canace e Macareo (Cavalcanti), 1790 Giudizio degli antichi poeti sopra la moderna censura di Dante attribuita ingiustamente a Virgilio (Gozzi, G.), 883 Giudizio d’Oreste, Il (Praga, E.), 1491 Giudizio universale (Buonarroti, M.), 327, 329 ‘‘Giugno’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 ‘‘Giulia’’ (Berchet), 181 Giulia Cappelletti (Carrer), 397 Giuliani, Alfredo, 114, 279, 502, 1275, 1332, 1482 Manganelli and, 1122 Novissimi, I and, 785 Giuliani, Carlo, 818 Giuliani, Veronica, 1568 Giuliano, Salvatore, 191, 507, 643 Giulietta degli spiriti (Fellini), 733 Giulio III (Pope), Aretino and, 75, 76 Giuliotti, Domenico, 1898 Giullare del proletariato, Il (jester of the proletariat), 739 Giullari (jongleurs), 1315 Giungla domestica (Musa), 1720 Giunta, Filippo, 300 Giuoco del Satyricon, Il (Sanguineti), 1123 Giuoco della vita bella, Il (Picone), 751 Giussani, Angela, 789 Giussani, Luciana, 789 Giusti, Giuseppe, 202, 388, 860–862 Neera and, 1271 Risorgimento and, 1590 Romanticism and, 1598 Giustinian, Eufemia, Carrer and, 398 Giustinian, Leonardo, 1480, 1562 music and, 1255 in Venice, 1960 Giustino (Metastasio), 1189 Giustizia e liberta`, 863, 1035, 1038, 1770 Lussu and, 1081 Moravia and, 1230 Pavese and, 1381 Giusto della vita, il, 1083 Giutinopolitano, 1263 Givone, Sergio, 1022 Gladstone, William, 1136 Gli aborti (Govoni), 873 Gli amici di casa (Collodi), 484 Gli ammonitori (Cena), 1769, 1853 Gli amori futuristi (Marinetti), 1156

I68

Gli amori garibaldini (Nievo), 1291 Gli amori pastorali di Dafni e Cloe (Longus), 396 Gli angeli non si sposano (Peverelli), 1601 Gli anmanti timidi o sia L’imbroglio dei due ritratti (Goldoni), 868 Gli anni del giudizio (Arpino), 95 Gli anni perduti (Brancati), 309 Gli anni struggenti (Bevilacqua, A.), 214 Gli antipatici (Fallaci), 681 Gli arancini di Montalbano (Camilleri), 354 Gli arcangeli non giocano a flipper (Fo), 739 Gli Asolani (Bembo, P.), 164, 166–167, 409, 721, 807 Firenzuola and, 730 Gli dei della montagna (Dunsany), 1456 Gli dei torneranno (Sgorlon), 1750 Gli Ebrei 1912–1914 (Saba), 1643 Gli egoisti (Tecchi), 1851 Gli egoisti (Tozzi, F.), 297, 1897 Gli equivoci (Da Ponte), 567 Gli eroi della domenica (Camerini), 1584 Gli esploratori dell’infinito (Novelli, Enrico), 1718 Gli immediati dintorni (Sereni, V.), 1742 Gli imperdonabili (Campo, C.), 369, 1480 ‘‘Gli incanti’’ (Tabucchi), 686 Gli indifferenti (Moravia), 296, 466, 692, 697, 842, 1230, 1233–1234, 1607, 1994, 2006 Gli indomabil (Marinetti), 1156 Gli inganni felici (Zeno, A.), 1050 ‘‘Gli inizi del partigiano Raoul’’ (Fenoglio), 712 Gli invisibili (Balestrini), 115, 1863 Gli ismi contemporanei (Capuana), 382, 1062 Gli italiani di Shakespeare (Manfridi), 1121 ‘‘Gli occhiali’’ (Moravia), 1235 Gli occhiali d’oro (Bassani), 139–140, 1033 ‘‘Gli olenadri’’ (Bianchini), 217 Gli onesti (Tecchi), 1851 Gli onorevoli, 1894 Gli operai della vigna (Papini), 1347 Gli orti (Oxilia, N.), 1330 Gli orti esperidi (Metastasio), 1190 Gli scrittori inutili (Cavazzoni), 428 Gli sfiorati (Veronesi, S.), 1975 Gli sguardi i fatti e senhal (Zanzotto), 2038 Gli sposi di Via Rossetti (Tomizza), 1881 Gli straccioni (Caro), 395, 1126, 1604 Gli strumenti umani (Sereni, V.), 931, 1742, 1744–1745 ‘‘Gli studi utili’’ (Verri, P.), 1977 Gli ultimi (Turoldo), 1924 ‘‘Gli ultimi anni di Clelia Trotti’’ (Bassani), 139 Gli ultimi giorni di Magliano (Tobino), 1874 Gli ultimi giorni di Pompei (Leoni, S.), 1013 Gli ultimi tre giorni di Fernando Pessoa (Tabucchi), 1816 Gli universi di Moras (Catani), 1720 Gli uomini che mascalzoni (Camerini), 351, 353, 621 Gli zii di Sicilia (Sciascia), 1706 Gli zingari e il rinascimento (Tabucchi), 1817 Glia Asolani (Bembo, P.), 164, 166–167 Gl’ingannati, 1126 Gl’innamorati (Goldoni), 866 Glı`uommeri, 1674 Globalization, 132 English and, 1901 travel literature and, 1904 Globe, Le, 785 Gloria, La (Berto), 191

INDEX Gloria, La (D’Annunzio), 541 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 26, 1191, 1312, 1467 GM. See Garanzia morale Gmelin, Hermann, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Gnerre, Francesco, 1034 Gnisci, Armando, 1202 Gnoli, Domenico decadentismo and, 580 Pompilj and, 5 Gnosticism, 272 Ceronetti and, 451 Gobbi, Anna, 32 Gobetti, Ada, 1579, 1778 Gobetti, Piero, 278, 862–864, 984 Levi, C., and, 1035 Re`paci and, 1576 Russian influences of, 1634 socialism and, 1770 Soldati and, 1774 in Turin, 1923 World War II and, 2031 Gocce (Sbarbaro), 1695 Goccie d’inchiostro (Dossi), 647 Godard, Jean-Luc, 198, 472, 976, 1112 Pasolini and, 1372 Godfather, The (Coppola), 1890 Godfather, The (Puzo), 964 Godfrey of Fontaines, 1703 Goethe (Croce, B.), 525 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 68, 737, 819, 826, 1109, 1400, 1846 autobiography and, 108 Boccaccio and, 250 Capriolo and, 377 Cellini and, 437 De Sanctis and, 616 Della Valle, P., and, 1907 Manzoni and, 1133, 1134 Marin and, 1149 Monti, V., and, 1218 in Palermo, 1338 Pirandella and, 1450 Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni, A.) and, 1138 Romanticism and, 1596 in Rome, 1605 Tasso, T., and, 1836 Valeri and, 1943 in Venice, 1961 Goffredo, Il (Tasso, T.), 1834, 1840 Goffredo ovvero Gerusalemme liberata col commento (Beni), 175 Gog (Papini), 1346 Gogol, Nikolaj, 156, 1634 Going On (Geoseffi), 965 Gola, La, 759 Golden Age, 367 Golden Ass, The (Apuleius), 450, 463, 486, 1499 Golden Wedding, The (Pagano, J.), 963 Goldmann, Cesare, 979 Goldoni, Carlo, 107, 277, 397, 460, 497, 567, 587, 819, 865–873, 935, 1312, 1700, 1794. See also Commedia dell’arte Barbieri, N., and, 1921 censorship of, 445 Duse and, 653 Enlightenment and, 664

French and, 784 Ginzburg, N., and, 844 Gozzi, C., and, 880 libretto and, 1050 Maffei, S., and, 1101 Metastasio and, 1191 music and, 1256 Pressburger and, 1500 Simoni and, 1756 Tasso, T., and, 1833 utopia and, 1939 in Venice, 1960 Verri, P., and, 1979 Goldsmith, Oliver, 1827 Golfieri, Gaetano, 1936 Golfo del Paradiso (Lagorio), 992 Golia (Borgese, Giuseppe), 1707 Goliath, the March of Fascisim (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Golino, Valeria, 68, 1663 Goncourt, J. De, 635 Gondoliere, Il, 398 ‘‘Gone was a solely Italian Calvino, son of the Resistance, heir apparent to Cesare Pavese’’ (Barilli, R.), 345 Gonella (Gozzi, C.), 880 Gong, Il (Spaziani), 1787 Go´ngora, 136 Go´ngora, Luis de, 936 Petrarch and, 1413 Gonzaga, Camilla Faa`, 109 Gonzaga, Cesare, 409 Gonzaga, Elisabetta, 117 Gonzaga, Federico, 74, 75 Ariosto and, 88 Castiglione and, 409 Gonzaga, Ferrante, 855 Gonzaga, Francesco, 412, 517, 1464 Fedele and, 698 Gonzaga, Isabella, 1264 Trissino and, 1916 Gonzaga, Ludovico, 517, 519 Gonzaga, Vincenzo, 161 Gora, Claudio, 191 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 503 Gordon, George, 908 Gordon, Robert, 949 Gorgias (Plato), 818 Gorgona, La (Benelli), 172 Gori, Gino, 1625 Gori, Leonardo, 633 Gorky, Maxim, 1634, 1794 Gorrio, Tabia. See Boito, Arrigo Gosetti, Anna, 759 Gotta, Salvator, 465, 1330, 1922 Gotti, Ettore Li, 1649 Gottifredi, Girolamo, 646 Gouges, Olympe de, 707 Governante, La (Brancati), 309, 445 Govi, Gilberto, 816, 1563, 1951 Govoni, Corrado, 464, 873–875. See also Futurism Corazzini and, 511 crepuscolarismo and, 521 in Ferrara, 718 futurism and, 1155 lyric poetry and, 1088

I69

INDEX Govoni, Corrado (cont.) Montale and, 1211 Moretti, Mario, and, 1238 Piccolo and, 1436 Goya, Francisco, 154 Gozzano, Guido, 296, 464, 470, 785, 876–880, 969, 1727, 1785 Cavalli, P., and, 423 cinema and, 469, 470 crepuscolarismo and, 521 Govoni and, 873 Guglielminetti, A., and, 910 lyric poetry and, 1088 Moretti, Mario, and, 1237, 1238 Praga, E., and, 1490 Sanguineti and, 1670 Serra, R., and, 1746 Tarozzi and, 1830 Tessa and, 1867 travel literature and, 1909 Trilussa and, 1914 in Turin, 1922 Gozzi, Carlo, 107, 277, 463, 497, 499, 880–883, 935. See also Commedia dell’arte Baretti and, 130 Giacosa and, 837 Goldoni and, 867 in Venice, 1960 Gozzi, Gasparo, 202, 664, 883–885, 982 Bettinelli and, 213 in Venice, 1960 Gracchus et Poliscena (Bruni, L.), 313 Gracia´n, Baltasar, 1128 Graf, Arturo, 46, 885–887, 1922 as critic, 1061 decadentismo and, 579 Gozzano and, 876 at University of Turin, 1936 Gramatica, 1000 Grammar of the Italian Language, A (Baretti), 129 Grammatica della fantasia (Rodari), 465 Grammatica, Emma, 1760 Bracco and, 307 Grammatica, Irma, 172, 546 Bracco and, 307 Grammatica methodica, 954 Grammatichetta (Alberti, Leon), 8 Grammaticus, Saxo, 1835 Grammelot, 1563 Grammofono della verita`, Il, 754 Gramsci, Antonio, 53, 355, 864, 887–893, 979, 1393, 1428, 1479, 1778. See also Communism Benelli and, 172 Communism and, 501 as critic, 1062 Fortini and, 760 Guiducci and, 921 historical novels and, 938 historiography and, 945–946 Invernizio and, 961 Jovine and, 987 Manzoni and, 1132 Marxism and, 1065 neorealism and, 1285 opera and, 1259

I70

Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni, A.) and, 1138 questione meridionale and, 1533 Re`paci and, 1576 Risorgimento and, 1592 Salvemini and, 1666 Sanguineti and, 1671 Silone and, 1756 World War II and, 2031 Gran Bilile: studio biografico e bibliografico, Il (Imbriani), 959 Gran Bollito (Bolognini), 281 Gran Zoroastro, Il (Verri, P.), 1979 Granacci, Francesco, 328 Granada, Luis de, 935 Granchio, Il (Salviati), 1668 Grand, Antoine Le, 1704 Grand Gennaro, The (LaPolla), 963 Grand guignol, 1794 Grand Hotel, 769 Grand Meaulnes (Fournier), 142 Grande angolo, Il (Niccolai), 1287 Grande appello, Il (Camerini), 351 Grande cocomero, Il (Archibugi), 67, 69 Grande e amara (great and bitter), 1576 Grande Eulalia, La (Capriolo), 377 Grande guerra, La (Monicelli, M.), 1208 Grande letto, Il (Bernari), 184 Grande magia, La (De Filippo), 586 Grande, Maurizio, 726 Grande Milano tradizionale e futurista, La (Marinetti), 1156 ‘‘Grande notizia, Una’’ (Buzzati), 335 Grande pantomima con bandiere, pupazzi piccoli e medi, 740 ‘‘Grande proletaria s’e` mossa’’ (Pascoli), 487 Grande proletaria si e` mossa (Pascoli), 1359 Grande ritratto, Il (Buzzati), 336, 1719 Grande rivolta, La (Balestrini), 115 Grande sera, La (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1477 ‘‘Grande societa` dell’Unita` d’Italia,’’ 1748 Grande strada azzurra, La (Pontecorvo), 1474 Grande vacanza, La (Parise, Goffredo), 1353 Grandgent, C.H., Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Grandi idilli (Leopardi), 202 Grandi magazzini, I (Camerini), 351, 621 Grand’Italia, 1859 ‘‘Grangia, La’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Granucci, Niccolo`, 1298 Grapes of Wrath, The (Ford), 828 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 963 Grass, Gu¨nther, 827 Grassi, Corrado, 1564 Grassi, Ernesto, 951 Grassi, Leonardo, 293 Grassi, Orazio, 804 Grassi, Paolo, 976, 1205 Grasso e` bello! (Rame), 1545 Grasso, Francesco, 1720 Grasso, Gianni, 307 Grasso, Giovanni, 1165 Gravina, Gian Vincenzo, 4, 819, 893–895, 1059. See also Accademia dell’Arcadia; Neoclassicism Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 French and, 784 historiography and, 943 Metastasio and, 1189

INDEX Gravina, Priscus. See Gravina, Gian Vincenzo Gravitas, 1421 Gray, Thomas, 454, 767 Pindemonte and, 1446 Grazia, 979 Grazia (grace), 409, 518, 1278 Graziani, Bartolomeo, 1173 Graziani, Girolamo, 933 Grazie, La (Foscolo), 480, 538, 763, 1279, 1902 ‘‘Grazie, Le’’ (Meli), 1338 Grazzini, Anton Francesco, 172, 186, 330, 895–896 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Decameron (Boccaccio) and, 247 novella and, 1297 Great Expectations (Dickens), 575 Great Schism, 416 Greek, 23 Greenaway, Peter, Fellini and, 702 Greene, Robert, 904 Greenwich (Niccolai), 1287 Gregoretti, Ugo, 32 Amelio and, 31 Pasolini and, 1372 Gregori, Mina, 99 Gregory IX (Pope), 230 Gregory the Great, 1295 Gregory XI (Pope), 414 Greimas, Algirdas, 785 Gremais, A.J., 345 Grendler, Paul, 1574 Gribaudi, Gabriella, 1532 Grido del popolo, Il, 887 Grido e paesaggi, Un (Ungaretti), 1930 Grido, Il (Antonioni), 56, 57 Grido lacerante, Un (Banti), 125 Griffi, Giuseppe Patroni, 446, 2013 homosexuality and, 1033 La Capria and, 989 Griffith, Trevor, 1663 Grifoni, Ulisse), 1718 Grignani, Maria Antonietta, 1243 Grillandi, Massimo, 139 Grillenzoni, 3 Grillo, Angelo Basile and, 136 Boccalini and, 263 Grimm brothers, 136, 463, 465, 826, 1993 Grinzane Cavour (prize), 1067 Grisancich, Claudio, 1912 Gritti, Doge Andrea, 74 Groppi, Angela, 2025 Grossi, Tommaso, 669, 897–899. See also Historical Novel historical novels and, 938 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Porta, C., and, 1487 Risorgimento and, 1590 Grotius, Vico and, 1983 Grotowsky, Jerzy, 500 Grottesco. See Teatro Grottesco Grottesco nell’arte e nella letteratura, Il, 1849 Group 4, 705 Gru¨ber, Johann, 1714–1715 Grundhemen, 1254 Gru¨newald, Mathis, 919

‘‘Gruppo 13,’’ 633 Gruppo 63, 1‘480, 47, 985, 1856 Anceschi and, 1063 Arbasino and, 61, 63 Balestrini and, 114 Calvino and, 345 Cannibali and, 373 Communism and, 502 Eco and, 661 futurism and, 794 Leonetti and, 1016 Malerba and, 1115 Manganelli and, 1124 Maraini and, 1144 Milan and, 1206 Morante and, 1228 as neo-avant-garde, 1275 Niccolai and, 1286–1287 Ottieri and, 1327 Palazzeschi and, 1334 in Palermo, 1340 Pasolini and, 1368 Rosselli, A., and, 1616 Roversi and, 1630 Vassalli and, 1956 Vittorini and, 2007 Gruppo De Agostini, Il, 1508 Gruppo di famiglia in un interno (Visconti, L.), 1498, 1996 Gruppo di Ricerca sulla Famiglia e la Condizione Femminile, 706 Gruppo Femminista per una Medicina delle Donne, 706 Gruppo Universitario Fascista (GUF), 278 Gryllus (Plutarch), 814 ‘‘Guadagno, Il’’ (Jahier), 973 Gualandi, Anselmo. See Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico Gualberto, Giovanni, 734 Gualdo, Luigi, 580, 686 Faldella and, 1698 Guandalini, Ugo, 598 Guappo di cartone (Viviani, R.), 2014 Guardati, Tommaso. See Masuccio Salernitano Guardiani, Francesco, Marino and, 1163 Guardie e ladri (Monicelli, M.), 733 Guardini, Romano, 1314 Guareschi, Giovanni, 899–901, 980 Guarini, Battista, 39, 456, 901–903, 1058, 1088, 1126, 2002 music and, 1255 in Turin, 1921 Guarini, Guarnino, 71 Boiardo and, 264 Guarino, Battista, Gravina, G. an,d894, 894 Guarinus, Thomas, Alciato and, 11 Guarnier, Wilhelm, 1732 Guasconti, Salvatore, 439 Guasti, Cesare, 1801 ‘‘Guata, Manetto, quella scrignutuzza’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 420 Guattari, Fe´lix, Cavani and, 426 Guazzo, Stefano, 518, 904–905, 1128, 1562. See also Courts and Patronage Gubernatis, Angelo De, Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Guccini, Francesco, 49, 1784 in Genoa, 818 Guelfo bianco, 504 Guelph party, 43 Guerazzi, Domenico, Romanticism and, 1598

I71

INDEX Guercio, Antonio Del, 101 Guerin meschino, Bertolazzi and, 194 Guerin sportivo, 1792 Guerino il Meschino (Barberino, A.), 1792 Guerra d’Albania (Fusco), 2032 Guerra d’Attila, 666 Guerra dei mostri, La (Grazzini), 895 Guerra dei poveri, La (Revelli), 1579 ‘‘Guerra dei Santi’’ (Verga, G.), 1965 Guerra del ‘15 (Stu´parich), 1803, 2029 Guerra delle idee, La (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Guerra di redenzione (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Guerra d’infanzia e di Spagna (Ramondino), 936 Guerra e` appena finita (Archibugi), 67 Guerra e il sogno di Momi, La (Pastrone), 50 Guerra in camicia nera (Berto), 191 ‘‘Guerra, La’’ (Amendola, Giorgio), 488 Guerra, La (Goldoni), 1500 Guerra sola igiene del mondo (Marinetti), 2029 Guerra, Tonino, 473, 905–907 Antonioni and, 1730 Ottieri and, 1327 Guerrazzi, Francesco Domenico, 503, 670, 826, 861, 908–910. See also Historical Novel historical novels and, 938 Risorgimento and, 1590 Verga, G., and, 1963 Guerrazzi, Vincenzo, 817 Guerre di Parnaso, Le (Errico), 1158 Guerre, La (Ungaretti), 1931 Guerrieri, Gerardo, Fabbri, Diego, and, 677 Guerrin Meschino (Barberino, A.), 667 Guerrini, Mino, 250 Guerrini, Olindo, 278. See also Stecchetti, Lorenzo Guerrini, Victoria. See Campo, Cristina Guevara, Antonio de, 934 GUF. See Gioventu` Universitaria Fascista; Gruppo Universitario Fascista Guggino, Elsa, 54 Guglielma e malfredo. Storia di un’eresia femminista (Muraro), 1249 Guglielmi, Angelo, 279 Guglielmi, Giuseppe, 1276 Guglielmi, Pietro, 48 Guglielminetti, Amalia, 877, 910–912, 1922 Guglielminetti, Marziano, 877, 1162 Guglielmo Ratcliff (Mascagni), 685 Guglielmo Tell (Rossini, G.), 1590 Guicciardini, Francesco, 855, 861, 912–918. See also Historiography Bembo, P., and, 167 De Sanctis and, 617 historiography and, 942 travel literature and, 1907 Vasari and, 1953 Guida alla studio delle Belle Lettere e al comporre con un manuale dello stile epistolare (Picci), 670 Guida dell’educatore, La, 484 Guidacci, Margherita, 918–920, 1569 Guidi, Alessandro, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Guidi, Giovan Gualberto, 1258 Guidi, Gudio, 1434 Guido, Francesca Maurizio. See Gibba Guidobuona, Camilla Scarampa e, 117 Guiducci, Armanda, 921–922 ‘‘Guigliottina, La’’ (Giusti), 860

I72

Guigni, Gino, 278 Guille´n, Jorge, 936 Guinizzelli, Guido, 106, 276, 420, 563, 566, 836, 923–925, 1935. See also Dolce stil novo Cino da Pistoia and, 476 Dante and, 557 Davanzati and, 572 Dolce stil novo and, 641, 783 lyric poetry and, 1087 Pierro and, 1444 Guinzio, Carolyn, 966 Guitie´errez, Antonio Garcı´a, 935 Guittone d’Arezzo, 505, 566, 640, 925–928 Davanzati and, 571 Guinizzelli and, 923 lyric poetry and, 1087 Gulag Archipelago, The (Solzhenitzyn), 1136 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 400, 464 Gusto (taste), 99 ‘‘Gusto dei primitivi, Il’’ (Venturi, L.), 99 Gusto neoclassico (Praz), 1497 Guzzetta, Lia Fava, 207

H Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il mondo (Vecellio), 694 Hagiography, 230 Hagiomachia (Folengo), 749 Hainsworth, Peter, 799 Hakluyt, Richard, 1907 Halas, John, 51 Hall of Mirrors, 34 Hall, Radclyffe, 1032 Halycon. See Alcyone (D’Annunzio) Hamlet (Shakespeare), 47, 1510 Bene and, 169 Hamlet (Zeffirelli), 2046 ‘‘Hammerless Gun, The’’ (Pascoli), 1360 Hammett, Dashiell, 632 Handke, Peter, 827 Hankins, James, 720 Hanna-Barbera, 51 Happy Days (Beckett), 1795 Hard Labor. See Lavorare stanca (Pavese) Harlequin Mondadori Italia, 1603 Harris, Neil, 268 Harry’s Bar e altre poesie (Niccolai), 1287 Hartmann, Johannes Jakob, 1361 Harvey, Gabriel, 904 Haydn, Franz Joseph, 481, 1191 Guarini, B., and, 901 Hayez, Francesco, 1590 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Hazlitt, William, 107 Hazon, Roberto, 546 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 1678 Heartbeat (Lang), 352 Hebbingham, Hermann, 464 Hebdomeros (Chirico, G.), 2004 Hecatommithi (Giraldi, Giambattista), 1298 Hecyra (Terentius), 1949 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 524, 616, 819 Capuana and, 382 De Sanctis and, 617

INDEX Heidegger, Martin, 53, 827, 1109 Leopardi and, 1022 Heilage, Das (Otto), 1565 Heiligenschein (halo effect), 438 Heine, Heinrich, 150, 394, 616, 685, 826 Carducci and, 389 in Genoa, 817 Marin and, 1149 Nievo and, 1291 Praga, E., and, 1490 Sanguineti and, 1670 scapigliatura and, 1697 Hekuba (Euripides), 117 Helbig, Wolfgang, 1660 Held, Riccardo, Valduga and, 1942 He´liogabale ou l’anarchiste couronne´ (Artaud), 62 Hellman, J.A. Wayne, 773 Hello, Ernest, 41 Hello Jeep (Giobbe), 51 Help? (Bozzetto), 51 Helve´tius, Claude Adrien Alfieri, V., and, 22, 23 Bettinelli and, 213 Hemingway, Ernest Arpino and, 96 Berto and, 191 in Venice, 1961 Vittorini and, 2005, 2007 World War I and, 2030 World War II and, 2032 Hendecasyllabi seu Baiae (Pontano), 1472 Hendecasyllabic verse, 277, 396 Hendrix, Harald, 263 Hennequin, A.N., 1700 Henry III (King), 315 Henry of Ghent, 1703 Henry VII (King), 409, 551 Cino da Pistoia and, 477 Compagni and, 504 Heptame´ron (Navarre), 117, 121, 1298 Heptaplus (Pico della Mirandola), 1440 Heptasyllabic verse, 277 Herder, Johann G. von, 1479 He´relle, Georges, 540 Hermaphrodito (Savinio), 1688 Hermaphroditus, 1031 Hermaphroditus (Beccadelli), 1437 Hermes, 296, 737, 983 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Hermeticism, 204, 361, 674, 827, 929–931 Bigongiari and, 225 Gatto and, 811–812 Landolfi and, 995 Pasolini and, 1367 Petroni and, 1424 Quasimodo and, 1525 Ramat and, 1542 Sereni, V., and, 1741 Spaziani and, 1786 Hermosura de Ange´lica (Vega), 92 Hernadi, Paul, 820 Herodotus, 265, 685, 941 Heroes, 20 Heroic-Comic Poetry, 932–934

Heroides (Ovid), 242, 493, 777, 1415 Herrera, Fernando da, Petrarch and, 1413 Herzen, Aleksandr, 1634 Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Wackenroder), 1851 Hesiod, 283, 720 Heyse, Paul von, Belli, G., and, 156 Highsmith, Patricia, 426 Hilaropecia, 932 Hilarotragoedia (Manganelli), 687, 1122 Hildebrand, Adolf, Longhi and, 1073 Hirst, Bamboo, 1201–1202 Hispano Latin-American Influences, 934–937 Histoire de France (Michelet), 1571 Histoire de la renaissance de la liberte´ en Italie, de ses progre`s, de sa de´cadence, et de sa chute (Sismondi), 1571 Histoire de la Republique de Florence (Allart), 375 Histoire de ma fuite des pirsons de la Re´publique de Venise qu’on appelle les Plombs (Casanova, Giacomo), 400 Histoire de ma vie (Casanova, Giacomo), 107, 333, 399, 1032, 1908 Histoire des re´publiques italiennes du moyen aˆge (Sismondi), 1571 Histoire des sciences mathe´matiques en Italie depuis la renaissance des lettres jusqu’a` la fin du dix-septie`me sie`cle (Libri), 1571–1572 Histoire d’O, 790 Histoire engage´e, 1568 Histoires (Perrault), 484 Histoires et contes fantastiques (Chatrian), 1827 Histoires tragiques extraictes des æuvres italiennes de Bandel (Boaistuau and Belleforest), 122 Historia (Gonzaga, Camilla), 109 Historia Augusta de gistis Henrici VII (Mussato), 1262 Historia de duobus amantibus (Piccolomini), 786, 1297, 1437 Historia de gentibus septentrionablibus (Ma¨nsoon), 1835 Historia de una gaviota y del gato que le ensen˜o´ a volar (Sepu´lveda), 936 Historia del mondo nuovo (Benzoni), 1907 Historia destructionis Troiae (Colonne), 254 Historia in partibus transmarninis gestarum (Tiro), 1840 Historia Langobardorum (Diaconus), 250 Historia magistra vitae (history as teacher of life), 941 Historia monastica (Calzolari), 144 Historia Regum Brittaniae (Wace), 783 Historia Sacra (Muzio), 1264 Historia septem sapientium Romae, 1295 Historiae florentini populi (Biondo), 235, 942 Historiae Florentini populi (Bracciolini, P.), 305 Historiae Florentini populi (Bruni, L.), 313 Historiae patriae (Ripamonti), 1138 Historiae Romanae Fragmenta (Muratori), 482 Historiae venetae libri XII (Bembo, P.), 164 Historiarum ab inclinatione romani imperii decades (Biondo), 235, 952 Historiarum sui temporis libri XLV (Giovio), 855 Historic Right, 1592 Historical Geography of America, The (Stein), 1287 Historical Novel, 937–940 Historie de re´volutions d’Italia (Ferrari, Giuseppe), 945 Historie della vita e dei fatti di Cristoforo Colombo (Columbus), 231 Histories (Herodotus), 265 Historiography, 941–946. See also Literary History History (Livy), 1096 History: A Novel. See Storia, La (Morante) History of Art Criticism (Venturi, L.), 99

I73

INDEX History of Art in Antiquity (Winkelmann), 1278 History of Dramatic Literature (Schlegel), 538 History of Italian Language. See Italian Language, History of History of Italy. See Storia d’Italia (Guicciardini) History of Literary Criticism. See Literary Criticism, History of History of Painting in North Italy, A (Estense and Crowe), 2003 History of Rome (Livy), 240 History of the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides), 918 Hitchcock, Alfred, 31 Hitler, Adolph, 29 Ho fatto il guaio? Riparero´ (De Filippo, E.), 584–585 Ho rubato due versi a Baudelaire (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Ho visto un re (Fo and Jannacci), 1783 Hobbes, Thomas Foscolo and, 763 Leopardi and, 1020 Vico and, 1984 Hochhuth, Rolf, 827 Hocke, Gustav Rene´, 63 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor, 684, 686 Buzzati and, 335 Praga, E., and, 1490 scapigliatura and, 1697 Tarchetti and, 1827 Hoffmansthal, Hugo von, 73, 827 Campo, C., and, 368, 370 Duse and, 652 Hogan’s Alley (Outcault), 787 Hogarth, William, 648 Hohenzollern, Barbara, 517 Ho¨lderlin, Friedrich, Penna and, 1396 Hollander, Robert, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Holmes, Oliver, 1635–1636 Holocaust Literature, 947–950 Levi, P., and, 1039 Homer, 202, 239, 352, 472, 667, 1405, 1407, 1712, 1902 Beni and, 175 biography and, 230 Bruni, L., and, 312 Gravina and, 1189 Neoplatonism and, 1280 Poliziano and, 1463 Vassalli and, 1958 Verri, A., and, 1978 Vico and, 1982 Homeward to America (Ciardi), 964 Homo homini lupus, 1021 Homo sanza littere, 1007 Homosexuality Arbasino and, 62 Aretino and, 75 Brancati and, 309 Buonarroti, M., and, 328 Busi and, 333 Cavalieri and, 328 Cellini and, 438 Hondo (Bonelli), 789 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 1616 Horace, 81, 93, 389, 392, 818–819, 1463, 11001 Ariosto and, 84 Castelvetro and, 407 Chiabrera and, 456 Dante and, 563

I74

Franco, V., and, 777 Gravina and, 1189 Machiavelli and, 1091 Petrarch and, 1404, 1407 Horatio, Ariosto and, 85 Horcynus Orca (D’Arrigo), 569, 1564 Horro vacui (Sinisgalli), 1763 Hortensia, 449 Hortus Hesperidum (Pontano), 1472 Hot-air balloons, 1853 Hotel ele´ctrico, El (Chomo´n), 50 Hoˆtel jde l’Univers—re´citchantant (Moscato), 1247 Hugh of Digne, 1657 Hughes, Stephen, 1592 Hugo, Victor, 150, 785, 1313, 1827, 1858 Boito, A., and, 272 Capuana and, 382 Carducci and, 389 Corazzini and, 511 Manzoni and, 1134 music and, 1256 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Praga, E., and, 1490 Sanvitale and, 1678 Verga, G., and, 1963 Zola and, 1972 Huguenots, Alfieri, V., and, 22 Huidobro, Vicente, 936 Human Instruments. See Gli strumenti umani (Sereni, V.) Humanism, 950–954, 1001 academic, 276 Aesop and, 201 Alciato and, 10–12 Aretino and, 75 Ariosto and, 80 Barbaro, E., and, 127 Baroque and, 1126 Biondo and, 234 Bracciolini, P., and, 303–306 Bruni, L., and, 312 Cereta and, 449 Colonna, F., and, 490 De Sica and, 622 Doni and, 645 Fabbri, Diego, and, 678 Fedele and, 698 Firenzuola and, 730 in Florence, 736 Manetti, G., and, 1118–1119 Matraini and, 1172 of Middle Ages, 230 novella and, 1297 in Palmermo, 1337–1338 Petrarch and, 1402, 1412 Petrarchism and, 1420 Phaedrus and, 201 Piccolomini and, 1437 religion and, 1567 in Rome, 1604 Sannazaro and, 1674 Trissino and, 1915 Valla, L., and, 1945 Varchi and, 1948 Humann, Karl, 1222

INDEX Hume, David, 1715 Verri, A., and, 1977 Humiliati, 289 Humpty Dumpty (Niccolai), 1287 Huppert, Isabelle, 1143 Huxley, Aldous, 31, 644, 1488 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 580 Capuana and, 383 Hydra Mystica (Gravina, G.), 893 Hypnerotomachia, 490 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Colonna, F.), 293, 490 Hyppolytus, 1252 Hystrio (Luzi, M.), 1084

I ‘‘I’ ‘‘I’ ‘‘I’ ‘‘I’

fe’ degli occhi porta al mie veneno’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 328 ho gia` fatto un gozzo in questo stento’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 328 no spero che mai per mia salute’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 475 sto rinchiuso come la midolla/da la sua scorza, qua pover e solo’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 328 Iacopone da Todi, 955–958, 1070. See also Religion and Literature Iamblichus, Neoplatonism and, 1280 IBC. See Instituto per i Beni Artistici, Culturali e Naturali ‘‘Iberia’’ (Boito, A.), 272 Ibsen, Henrik, 15, 653, 888, 1910 Giacosa and, 837 Michelstaedter and, 1195 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Icosameron (Casanova, Giacomo), 400, 1939 Idea del tempio della pittura (Lomazzo), 11001 Idea della bella letteratura alemanna (Bertola), 826 Idea della poesia alemanna (Bertola), 826 Idea della Russia (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Idealista, Un (Neera), 1271 Idee di una donna, Le (Neera), 1271 ‘‘Idee minime sul romanzo’’ (Tarchetti), 1827 Identificazione di una donna (Antonioni), 58 Identite´ italienne (Lonzi), 1075 Ide´ologues, 850 Idilli moravi (Tecchi), 1851 Idioma (Zanzotto), 2039, 2041 Idiot, The (Dostoyevsky), 1995 Idropica (Guarini, B,), 456, 902 Iena di San Giorgio, La (Ceronetti), 451 ‘‘Ieri e oggi’’ (Pravese), 48 Ieri, oggi e domani (De Sica), 621, 2043 ierogamia di Creta, La (Monti, V.), 1279 If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. See Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Calvino) If This Is a Man. See Se questo e` un uomo (Levi, P.) Ifigenia in Tauride (Coltellini), 1312 IGI. See Indice generale degli incunaboli Ignoto toscano (Soffici), 1771 Ildegonda (Grossi), 897 Iliad (Homer), 667 Monti, V., and, 1219 Poliziano and, 1463 translation of, 1902 Iliade di Omero (Monti, V.), 1219 I’ll Give a Million (Lang), 351 Illazioni su una sciabola (Magris), 1109 Illica, Luigi, 838, 1313 Illuminismo. See Enlightenment

Illusione (Zorzi, Guglielmo), 1760 Illustratori, attori e traduttori (Pirandello), 1450 Illustrazione italiana, 1532 Arbasino and, 63 Praga, M., and, 1493 Illustre vulgare (illustrious vernacular), 1054 Imbarazzismi: quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero (Komla-Ebri), 1201 Imbonati, Giuseppe Maria, 1979 Imborghesimento (‘‘bourgeoisification’’), 1497 Imbriani, Vittorio, 464, 959–960, 1479 ‘‘Imbrunire’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Imitatio, 388, 1058 Imitation et transposition du De´came´ron chez Sercambi et Sermini (Marietti), 1736 ‘‘Immaginzazione senza fil’’ (wireless imagination), 792 Immigrato (Methnani and Fortunato), 1199 Immigrazione: dossier statistico, 1199 Imminente sera (Aleramo), 16 Imola, Benvenuto da, 276, 926 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Impastato, 2 Impegno (engagement), 1578 Impegno presente, 278 ‘‘Imperdonabile’’ (unforgivable), 370 Imperia`l, Gianvincenzo, 933 Marino and, 1161 ‘‘Impossibilita` della parola’’ (Zanzotto), 2038 Impresa, 2 Imprese del Conte Orlando, Le (Dolce), 639 Impressioni d’America (Giacosa), 48 Impressionism, 296, 791 Imprimatur, 444 Impromptu (Rosselli, A.), 1617 Impromptus, 397 Improvvisa la vita (Ottieri), 1327 In Albieram Albitiam puellam formosissimam morientem (Poliziano), 1463 In Aristotelis Poeticam commentarii (Beni), 174 In asinarium funus oratio (Cereta), 450 ‘‘In automobile soto la pioggia’’ (Oxilia, N.), 1329 ‘‘In Autunno’’ (Scotellaro), 1725 In Avaritiam admonitio (Cereta), 450 In cerca del mistero (Bertolucci, B.), 200 In Cold Blood (Capote), 1136 In conversazione con la morte (Testori), 1869 In difesa delle donne (Tarabotti), 1824 In Dioscoridem corollari (Barbaro, E.), 127 In exitu (Testori), 1870 ‘‘In Galleria’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 In Lalagen (Poliziano), 1463 ‘‘In limine’’ (Montale), 1215 ‘‘In memoria’’ (Ungaretti), 1928 In memoriam (D’Annunzio), 540 ‘‘In morte del fratello Giovanni’’ (Foscolo), 764 ‘‘In morte del realismo’’ (Pasolini), 404 ‘‘In morte di Carlo Porta’’ (Grossi), 897 In morte di Lorenzo Mascheroni (Monti, V.), 1219 In morte di Ugo Bassville (Monti, V.), 1218 In nome della legge (Germi), 828 In octave, 298 In principio erano le mutande (Campo, R.), 371, 817 In propria persona, 90 In risaia (Marchesa Colombi), 1148

I75

INDEX In se´ circonscriva, 327 In Societa` (Landolfi), 686 In sonno e in veglia (Ortese), 687 In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu (Ardizzone), 964 In tutti i sensi come l’amore (Vinci), 1992 ‘‘In un boschetto trova’ pasturella’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 420 ‘‘In un tempo incerto’’ (Bertolucci, A.), 196 In una notte di charo di luna (Wertmu¨ller), 2022 In utramque partem, 303 In viaggio (Ramondino), 1546 In violas (Poliziano), 1463 Inadmissible Evidence (Osborne), Arbasino and, 63 Inamoramento de Orlando. See Orlando innamorato (Boiardo) Inattuali (out-of-date), 379 Incantesimo (Venturi, M.), 1601 Inchiesta sul Neorealismo (Bernari), 183 Inchieste del commissario Maigret, Le, 633 Inchiostro di Cina (Hirst), 1202 Incontro a Tursi (Betocchi), 1444 Incontro al parco delle terme (Fabbri, Diego), 1569 Incontro inatteso per il consigliere Goethe, Un (Morazzoni), 1236 Incrocci, Agenore, 1729 Incubus (Manuli), 51 Incunabuli, 1048 Indegne (disgraceful), 444 Index librorum prohibitorum, 444, 1822. See also Censorship Tarabotti and, 1823 Index of Prohibited Books, 147 India, 1859 Indian Nocturne. See Notturno indiano (Tabucchi) Indians, 48 Indice dei libri proibiti, 293 Indice del Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale (SBN), 1049 Indice generale degli incunaboli (IGI), 1049 Individualism, 15 in Renaissance, 1570 Individualita`, 109 Indovinelli (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Indovinello veronese, 967 Indulgenze, Le (Bigiaretti), 223 Indulto, 1862 Induno, Gerolamo, 1592 Industria della violenza (industry of violence), 1103 Inept characters, 1896–1897 Ine´s, Juana, 936 Inesplicabil cosa, 24 Inesprimibile nulla (inexpressible nothing), 1929 Inettitudine (inaptness), 1806 Infarinato, 2 ‘‘Infarinato.’’ See Salviati, Lionardo Infedel (Bracco), 306 Inferno (Dante), 94, 106, 249, 554, 555–556 Caproni and, 380 Castelvetro and, 405 film of, 469 Folgo´re and, 751 homosexuality and, 1030 Pier delle Vigne and, 1443 Porta, C., and, 1485 translation of, 1903 Influences. See Anglo-American Influences; French Influences; German Influences; Hispano Latin-American Influences; Russian Influences In-folio, 294

I76

Infurna, Marco, 666 Inganno d’amore, Un (Comisso), 495 Ingegno (intelligence), 1181 ‘‘I’nnammure`te’’ (Pierro), 1444 Innamoramento di Carlo (Boiardo), 268 Innamoramento di Lorenzo de’ Medici (Medici, Lorenzo), 1178 Innamorato, 36 Inni sacri (Manzoni, A.), 1133, 1569 ‘‘Inno a Satana’’ (Carducci), 389, 392 ‘‘Inno ai Patriarchi’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Inno delle Nazioni (Verdi and Boito, A.), 273 Inno primo (Cecchi, E.), 431 Innocent III (Pope), 1119 Innocent VIII (Pope), 445, 1440, 1690 Innocent XI (Pope), 445 In-quarto, 294 Inquietudini di Goldoni, Le (Fido), 868 Inquisition Boccalini and, 263 Bruno and, 316, 443 Casanova, Giacomo, and, 401 Galilei, G., and, 1604 Inquisizione (Fabbri, Diego), 678, 1569 ‘‘Insalata di San Martino’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 InsciAllah (Fallaci), 682 Inseparabile (Romano, L.), 1594 Insomnia, 153 Instabil varieta` (unpredictable variety), 118 Institutio oratoria (Quintilian), 303, 819, 821, 1464, 1938, 1945 Institutionum oratorium Liber unus (Vico), 1986 Instituto di Studi Rinascimentali, 718 Instituto di studi superiori, 431 Instituto per i Beni Artistici, Culturali e Naturali (IBC), 279 Instituzione di sposa eccelente (Muzio), 1264 Insufficienza (inadequate), 380 Intellettuale organico (organic intellectual), 889 Intellettuale tradizionale (traditioinal intellectual), 889 ‘‘Intelligenza’’ (Compagni), 505 Intelligenza (enlightenment), 326 Intercenales (Alberti, Leon), 7, 9, 202 Interlandi, Telesio, 980 Interludio classico (De Maria), 1340 Intermedi, 39 Intermezzo di rime (D’Annunzio), 540 Interno berlinese (Cavani), 425, 426 Interno con figure (Cialente), 467 Interpretation and Overinterpretation (Eco), 659 Interrogatorio a Maria (Testori), 1870 Interrogatorio della Contessa Maria (Palazzeschi), 1335 Intersezioni, 278 Interventismo, 1928 Intervista (Fellini), 702 Intervista con la storia (Fallaci), 681 Intorno ad antiquari e critici (Foscolo), 1873 Intorno al metodo seguito ne’ suoi studi (Muratori), 107 Intorno la sua malattia (Firenzuola), 730 Intrichi d’amore (Tasso, T.), 1835 Introductio ad categoricos syllogismos (Cicero), 1426 Introduction a` la litte´rature fantastique (Todorov), 684 Introduction to the Italian Language, An (Baretti), 129 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham), 146 ‘‘Introduzione’’ (Belli, G.), 154

INDEX Introduzione alla vita di Giacomo Sgarbo (Dessı`), 629 Introduzione allo studio del diritto pubblico universale (Romagnosi), 1427 Introitus, 1069 Intronati, 2, 3 Invectiva in Antonium Luschum (Salutati), 1661 Invective contra medicum quondam (Petrarch), 1407, 1417 Inventare il futuro (Dolci), 644 Inventario privato (Pagliarani), 1331 Inventio, 175 Campanella and, 367 Inventore (inventor), 300 Invernizio, Carolina, 631, 961–963, 1601, 1922. See also Romanzo rosa Invernizio, Liala, 1601 Inverno freddissimo, Un (Cialente), 467 ‘‘Inverno in Abruzzo’’ (Ginzburg, N.), 842 Invettive e licenze (Bellezza), 152 Io (Bellezza), 152 Io amo, tu ami... (Blasetti), 237 Io ballo da sola (Bertolucci, B.), 199 Io cerco moglie! (Panzini), 1342 Io e lui (Moravia), 1231 Io in Affrica (Benelli), 173 Io, in Russia e in Cina (Malaparte), 1112 Io, Io... e gli altri (Blasetti), 237 Io, l’erede (De Filippo, E.), 586 Io non ho mani (Turoldo), 1924 Io non ho paura (Ammaniti), 34, 474 Io non ho paura (Salvatores), 1664 Io sono un autarchico (Moretti, N.), 1240 ‘‘Io sono un uccello di bosco’’ (Scotellaro), 1725 Io speriamo che me la cavo (Wertmu¨ller), 2023 Io, suo padre: Romanzo sportivo (De Ce´spedes), 581 Io venditore di elefanti: una vita per forza fra Dakar, Parigi e Milano (Khouma), 1199 ‘‘Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare’’ (Guinizzelli), 641 Ion (Plato), 818 Ionesco, Euge`ne, 738 Camilleri and, 356 Iorio, Andrea De, 1894 Iphigenia in Tauris (Euripides), 607 Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe), 1943 Ipocalisse (Balestrini), 114 Ipocrito, Lo (Aretino), 75 Ipotesi Cinema, 1306 Ira`m (Boito, A.), 273 Irigary, Luce, 707 Muraro and, 1249 Irving, Washington, 48 Isabella di Morra e Diego Sandoval de Castro (Croce, B.), 1243 ‘‘Isabella Hasson’’ (Savinio), 1688 Isabella Orsini, duchessa di Bracciano (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Isabella, tre caravelle e un cacciaballe (Fo), 739 Isagoge (Porphyry), 1281 Isagogicon moralis disciplinae (Bruni, L.), 312, 313 Isani, Giuseppe, 1894 Isella, Dante, 713, 714, 1563, 1867 Isingrin, Michael, Alciato and, 11 Isman (Loi), 1071 Isnenghi, Mario, 55, 690 Isocrates, 1172 Isola pentagonale (Praz), 1498 Isola. Prose e versi (Gatto), 811

Isolario. Libro nel qual si ragiona di tutte l’isole del mondo (Bordone), 1906 Isole della fortuna, Le (Chiari, P.), 1939 Isolina: La donna tagliata a pezzi (Maraini), 1142 Ispezione, Lotta fino all’alba (Betti, U.), 206–207 Istituto del Teatro d’Opera, 1311 Istituto di Belle Arti (Aleardi), 13 Istituto di Studi Superiori, 1195 Istituto Lombardo, 1219 Istituto Lombardo-Veneto, 417 Istituto per le Scienze Religiose, 278 Istituto pergli studi sul Rinascimento, 1347 Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 519 Istituto Superiore Femminile di Magistero, 1936 Istituto Treccani della Encicipledia Italiana, 1606–1607 Istituto Universitario di Architettura, 1961 Istoria civile del Regno di Napoli (Giannone), 943 Istoria del Concilio tridentino (Sarpi), 444, 942, 1683, 1684 Istoria della Compagnia di Gesu` (Bartoli, D.), 134, 718, 1568 Istoria della devota Susanna (Tornabuoni), 1888 Istoria della volgar poesia (Crescimbeni), 4, 943, 1059 Istoria dell’Interdetto (Sarpi), 444, 1684 Istoria di Judith vedova ebrea (Tornabuoni), 1888 Istoria e dimonstrazioni intorno alle macchie solari e loro accidenti (Beoloco), 802 Istorie, 137 Istorie fiorentine (Machiavelli), 1094 Istrioni (mimes), 1269 Istruzioni (Angela da Foligno), 42 Itaca e oltre (Magris), 1109 ‘‘Italia’’ (Ungaretti), 1929 ‘‘Italia 1944’’ (Fortini), 760 Italia diplomatica (Maffei, S.), 1101 Italia e Germania (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Italia illustrata (Biondo), 235, 952, 1571, 1906 Italia liberata da’ Gothi, La (Trissino), 668, 1832, 1840, 1915 Italia magica (Capriolo), 377 Italia mia (Papini), 1347 Italia militare, 574 Italia musicale, 1259, 1628 ‘‘Italia popolare’’ (Cardarelli), 1479 Italia sacra (Ughelli), 942 Italian-American Literature, 963–966 Italian Ars Nova, 1254 Italian Communist Party. See Communism Italian Language, History of, 967–970 Italian Library, The (Baretti), 129 Italian National Television (RAI), 31, 32, 67 Bertolucci, A., and, 196 Bevilacqua, A., and, 215 Bianchini and, 217 Camilleri and, 355 Campo, C., and, 369 Cavani and, 424, 426 censorship of, 446 Eco and, 659 Fabbri, Diego, and, 678 Lagorio and, 992 Levi, P., and, 1040 monopoly of, 1857 Moretti, N., and, 1240 Olmi and, 1305 Petroni and, 1425 Piovene and, 1448

I77

INDEX Italian National Television (RAI) (cont.) Sanvitale and, 1680 Taviani, P. and V., and, 1846 Tornatore and, 1891 Vinci and, 1993 ‘‘Italian Periodical Literature’’ (Foscolo), 645 ‘‘Italian pulp,’’ 373 Italiani, brava gente (De Santis), 619 Italianische Reisen (Goethe), 1338, 1605 Italianita`, 109 ‘‘Italiano e dialetti’’ (Grassi, C.), 1564 Italiano in America, Un (Severgnini), 981 ‘‘Italy’’ (Pascoli), 1360 Italy and the Rise of a New School of Criticism in the Eighteenth Century (Quigley), 894 Iter italicum (Kristeller), 1574 Iterarium mentis in Deum (Bonaventure), 1418 I-TIGI Canto per Ustica (Del Giudice), 599, 1345 Itinerari della emozioni (Pandolfi, M.), 54 Itinerari, Fenoglio and, 714 Itinerario de Lodovico Bolognese (Varthema), 1906 Itinerario di Paolina (Banti), 124 Itinerario in Terrasanta (Petrarch), 815 Itinerario italiano (Alvaro), 28 Itinerarium ad sepulchrum domini (Petrarch), 1906 Itinerarium Mentis in Deum (Bonaventure), 1429 Itinerarium Syriacum (Petrarch), 1408 Iudit (Della Valle, F.), 1127 Ivanov, Vjaceslav, 1634 Iwerks, Ub, 50 Izzo, Simona, 1120

J Jack Frusciante e` uscito dal gruppo (Brizzi), 374 Jacobbi, Ruggero, 360, 1943 Camilleri and, 356 Hermeticism and, 930 Jacobin period, 21 Jacobini, Maria, 1329 Jacovitti, Benito, 789 Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot), 1713 Jaeggy, Fleur, 971–972 Jahier, Piero, 973–975 World War I and, 2029 Jaja, Donato, Gentile and, 822 Jakobson, Roman, 785 Jalla, Daniela, 947, 1580 James, Henry, 539 fashion and, 694 Serao and, 1733 in Venice, 1961 James, William, 1898 Janacci, Enzo, 1258 Jane Eyre (Zeffirelli), 2046 Janin, Jules, 497 Jannacci, Enzo, 1783 Jannelli, Maurizio, 1201 Janse´nius, 784 Janus (Folengo), 749 Jarmusch, Jim, 177 Jarry, Alfred, 62, 1248, 1848 Je vous e´cris d’un pays lointain (Banti), 125 ‘‘Jeli il Pastore’’ (Verga, G.), 1969

I78

Jemolo, Arturo Carlo, 278 Jenseits von Gut und Bo¨se (Nietzsche), 541 Jenson, Nicholas, 1504 Jerome, Jerome Klapka, 1540 Jerusalem Delivered. See Gerusalemme liberata (Tasso, T.) Jest, Carlo, 1432 Jest, Enrico, 1432 Jesuits, 133 Beni and, 175 Capponi, G., and, 375 Maggi and, 1104 ‘‘Jettura’’ (Gautier, T.), 686 Jeu d’Adam, Le, 783 JFK (Stone), 1865 Jodice, Mimmo, 1435 Joe, The Engineer (Wachtel), 964 Joey Dee Gets Wise (Ermelino), 964 Johannis, Luigi Rapuzzi, 1719 John of Garland, 563 John of Salisbury, 555 John Paul II (Pope), 446 Johnny Stecchino (Benigni), 177 Johnny the Partisan. See Partigiano Johnny, Il (Fenoglio) Johnson, Lydia, 1951 Johnson, Samuel, 129, 130 Jolles, Andre´, 820 Jolly, clown da circo (Camerini), 351, 353 Jonard, Norbert, Svevo and, 1808 Jones, Chuck, 50 Jonze, Spike, Fellini and, 702 Joppolo, Beniamino, 975–977 Jori, Giacomo, 1158 Joseph und seine Bru¨der (Mann, T.), 1995 Josephus, Flavius, 639 Journal (Manzoni, M.), 809 Journal de voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France (Bernini, G.), 189 Journal de voyage en Italie en 1582 et 1583 (Montaigne), 777 Journal des Savants, 784, 982 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, The, 1574 Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, The, 1574 Journalism, 977–982. See also Literary Journals Journals, Literary. See Literary Journals Journey from London to Genoa through England, Portugal, Spain and France (Baretti), 129 ‘‘Joveta di Betania’’ (Banti), 125 Jovine, Francesco, 29, 224, 986–988 Alvaro and, 29 Jovinelli, Giuseppe, 1893 Joyce, James, 47, 539, 658, 1807 Boine and, 270 Cassola and, 403 Celati and, 434 Debenedetti and, 577 Duse and, 652 Gadda and, 795 Guidacci and, 919 Manzini and, 1130 Petrignani and, 1422 Svevo and, 1205, 1806 Vittorini and, 2005 Juan Jose´ (Dicenta), 935 Judit (Della Valle, F.), 607 Jugendbibliothek, 465 Julius Caesar (Forzano), 47

INDEX Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 404 Jumbo, 788 Jung, Carl, 686, 1513 Ju¨nger, Ernst, 2030 Jungian psychology, 100 Junior Mondadori, 464 Jura: ricerche sulla natura delle forme scritte (Meneghello), 1184 Juvarra, Filippo, 1921 Juvenilia (Carducci), 388 Jvens, Ioris, 1859

K K. (Calasso), 342 K e altre cose (Sanguineti), 1671 Kafka, Franz, 183, 673, 827, 1109, 1897 Buzzati and, 339, 687 Calasso and, 342 Pressburger and, 1499 Sanvitale and, 1678 Vittorini and, 2005 World War I and, 2028 Kahn, Gustav, 1154 Kalilah and Dimna, 1295 Kamikazen, ultima notte a Milano (Salvatores), 1206, 1663 Kammerspiele, 335 Kant, Immanuel, 1980 Kaos (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Kappler, Herbert, 577 Kaputt (Malaparte), 1112 Karake` e altri racconti (Chiarelli), 460 Karamzin, Nikolaj, 1633 Kautzki, Louise, 815 Kavafis, Konstantinos, Montale and, 1211 Kazan, Elia, neorealism and, 1283 Keats, John Boccaccio and, 250 Sarfatti and, 1681 Kellogg, Robert, Manzoni and, 1136 Ken Parker, 790 Kent, 219 Kepler, Johannes, 802, 1441 Della Porta and, 605 Ke´renij, Karl, Pressburger and, 1499 Kerouac, Jack, 49, 1886 Kezich, Tullio, 1911 Fellini and, 702 Khan, Kublai, 344 Kheraskov, Michail, 1633 Khouma, Pap, 1199 Khrushchev, Nikita, 1706 Kid, El (Bonelli), 789 Kierkegaard, Søren, 60, 1924 Kiff Tebbi (Camerini), 351 Killer Smile (Scottoline), 964 Kinder-Traum Seminar—Seminario sui bambini in sogno (Moscato), 1247 Kinetoscope, 50, 468 King Lear (Shakespeare), 25, 73, 1795 Kinski, Klaus, 1014 Kipling, Rudyard, 431, 1746 Sciascia and, 1711 Kit Carson (Albertarelli), 788 Klein, Melanie, 1512

Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 826, 1398 Gozzi, G., and, 884 Knigge, Adolph von, 905 ‘‘Knight’s Tale, The’’ (Chaucer), 261 Kobilek (Soffici), 1773, 2029 Koenig, Giovanni Klaus, 101 Kokasse. See Mangini, Mario Ko¨ln, Johann von, 1504 Kolosimo, Peter, 1067 Koltes, Bernard Marie, 1825 Komla-Ebri, Kossi, 1201 Koscina, Sylvia, 1584 Kozlov, Ivan, 1633 Kozma, Janice, 596 Krammer, Teresa, 1147 Kraus, Karl, 342 World War I and, 2028 Krauss, Henning, 666 Kriminal (Bunker), 789 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 951, 1574 Kristeva, Julia, 726 Rasy and, 1548 Krumm, Ermanno, Valduga and, 1942 Krusciov Report, 502 Krylov, Ivan, 1633 Kubati, Ron, 1201 Kuliscioff, Anna, 979, 1769 Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, Die (Burckhardt), 1571 Kunstkammer, 1558 Kunzle, David, 787 Kurosawa, Akira, 1014 Kurosawa, Akira, 1013, 1014

L L’ ‘Alcione’ e noi (Solmi), 1778 L. Cenci (Manfridi), 1121 La Capria, Raffaele, 989–991 ‘‘La grandiosa aneddotica storica di Paolo Giovio’’ (Croce, B.), 855 ‘‘La petite promenade du poe`te’’ (Campana), 360 ‘‘La poetica del Bartoli’’ (Anceschi), 135 ‘‘La signorina’’ (Banti), 125 L’abate Parini e la Lombardia nel secolo passato (Cantu`), 232 Labate, Wilma, 1864 L’abbandono. Racconti dagli anni ottanta (Tondelli), 1886 Labbra tue sincere, Le (Bianchini), 217 Labe´, Louise, 107, 1408 Labirinti del terzo pianeta, I, 1719 Labirinto, Il (Caproni), 379 Laboratorio di Progettazione Teatrale (Aulenti), 73 Laboratorio Teatro Settimo, 1344 Laborintus (Sanguineti), 1670, 1673–1674 Laborit, Henri, 1663 Labrene, Le (Landolfi), 686, 996 Labriola, Antonio, 523, 1428, 1769 L’acacia ferita e altri studi su Montale (Ramat), 1541 Lacan, Jacques, 1509 Lacerba, 359, 737 Folgore and, 754 futurism and, 793 Govoni and, 875 Jahier and, 974 Nietzsche and, 826 Papini and, 1346

I79

INDEX Lacerba (cont.) Soffici and, 1772 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 World War I and, 2029 ‘‘L’Acerba’’ (Cecco), 983 Laclos, Pierre Choderlos de, 1447 L’acqua di Malo (Meneghello), 1184 L’acqua si diverte a farti morire di sete (Joppolo), 976 L’acqua si diverte ad uccidere (Joppolo), 976 Lacrime e le stelle, Le (Chiarelli), 460 Lactantius, 1119 L’Adalgisa (Gadda), 795, 1205 L’Adamo (Andreini, G.), 37 Ladd, Alan, 828 L’addio a Enrico Berlinguer (Bertolucci, B.), 199, 1723 L’Adige, 1759 L’Adone (Marino), 538, 669, 933, 1162, 1164–1165 Ladri di biciclette (Bartolini, L.), 627 Ladri di biciclette (De Sica), 445, 621, 622, 623, 627–628, 1013, 1607, 1728, 2042 Ladri, manichini e donne nude (Fo), 738 Ladro di bambini, Il (Amelio), 31 Ladro di ciliege e altre versioni di poesia, Il (Fortini), 760 Ladro di galline, Il (Jovine), 987 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 2025 Lady of the Camelias, The (Dumas), 652 LaFemina, Gerry, 966 L’Affaire Moro (Sciascia), 502, 1707, 1710–1711 L’affare Clemenceau (Bencivenga), 625 Laforgue, Jean, 401, 511, 785 futurism and, 791 Laforgue, Jules, Solmi and, 1778 Lagerlo¨f, Selma, 591 L’Agnese va a morire (Vigano`), 1285, 1579, 1988, 2032 ‘‘Lago luna alba notte’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 Lagorio, Gina, 991–993 Bellonci and, 160 Sbarbaro and, 1695 Lagrime (Marino), 1161 Lagrime di San Pietro, Le (Tansillo), 1822 Laing, R.D., 1874 L’airone (Bassani), 140 L’aiuola bruciata (Betti, U.), 206, 208 L’aiutante di S. Presidente operaio (Guerrazzi, V.), 817 L’alba dell’ultima sera (Bacchelli), 112 L’albero degli zoccoli (Olmi), 1306, 1859, 1924 L’albero dei sogni (Tomizza), 1880 L’albero della scienza (De Roberto), 613 L’albero delle pere (Archibugi), 68 ‘‘L’album della suocera’’ (Percoto), 1399 L’album di vestiti (Masino), 1167 L’alcova d’acciaio (Marinetti), 1156, 2029 L’alcova elettrica (Vassalli), 1957 ‘‘L’alfier nero’’ (Boito, A.), 272, 686 L’Alfiere, 461 Lalla, piccola Lalla (Pagot and Pagot), 51 L’allegra terza guerra mondiale (Martini, V.), 1718 L’allegria (Ungaretti), 1928, 1931–1933, 2032. See also Allegria di naufragi (Ungaretti) Lalli, Giovan Battista, 932 ‘‘L’allustrascarpe filosofo’’ (Pascarella), 1357 ‘‘L’altare della patria’’ (Dossi), 648 L’altare di Isenheim (Guidacci), 919 L’altercazione (Ficino), 721

I80

L’altra domenica (Arbore), 176, 1859 L’altra meta` (Erba, L.), 675 L’altra verita`: Diario di una diversa (Merini), 1187 L’altrieri. Nero su bianco (Dossi), 647, 1698 L’Amadigi (Tasso, B.), 1831 ‘‘L’amante di Gramigna’’ (Verga, G.), 1973 L’amante furioso (Borghini, R.), 299 Lamantia, Philip, 965 L’amaro calice (Corazzini), 512 L’amaro miele (Bufalino), 322 Lamb, Charles, 431, 1498 Lambert, Christopher, 1664 Lambertenghi, Luigi Enlightenment and, 664 Risorgimento and, 1589 Lamberti, Raffaella, 707 L’ambrosiano, 433, 1868, 2004 Lambruschini, Raffaello, 464 Collodi and, 484 Lamekis ou les Voyages extraordinaires d’un Egyptien dans la Terre inte´rieur (Mouhy), 400 Lament de Marchionn di gamb avert, El (Porta, C.), 1486 ‘‘Lament of Tasso, The’’ (Byron), 1836 ‘‘Lamento d’una mamma napoletana’’ (Gatto), 1581 ‘‘Lamento per il sud’’ (Quasimodo), 1526 Lamerica (Amelio), 32 L’America libera (Alfieri, V.), 22 L’America, ricerca della felicita` (Sarfatti), 1682 L’Americano (Piccinni), 48 L’americano di San Giacomo (Kezich), 1911 Lami, Giovanni, 1979 Lamia (Poliziano), 1465 L’amica delle mogli (Pirandello), 1453 ‘‘L’amica di nonna Speranza’’ (Gozzano), 876 L’amicizia (Tomizza), 1881 L’amico della liberta` italiana, 1769 L’amico di papa (Taiuti), 1701 L’amigo de tuti (Bertolazzi), 194 ‘‘L’amor e ‘l cor gentil sono una cosa’’ (Dante), 923 ‘‘L’amor fa una donna amare’’ (Prato, C.), 1754 L’amore (Rossellini), 1619 L’amore assottiglia il cervello (Gozzi, C.), 881 L’amore coniugale e altri racconti (Moravia), 1230 L’amore dei tre re (Benelli), 172 L’amore delle tre melarance (Cerami), 447 L’amore delle tre melarance (Gozzi, C.), 138, 463, 881, 882 L’amore delle tre melarance. Un travfestimento fiabesco dal canovaccio di Carlo Gozzi (Sanguineti), 1671 L’amore e` un dardo, 1261 L’amore in citta` (Risi, D.), 1584 L’amorosa menzogna (Antonioni), 56 Lampione, Il, 485 Lampugnani, Agostino, 694 Lana, Jacopo della, 276, 559 L’anaconda (Scerbanenco), 1718 Lancaster, Burt, 1498, 1995 Lancellotti, Giovan Paolo, 262 Lanciatore di giavellotto, Il (Volponi), 2017 L’Anconitana (Ruzzante), 1637 Landini,Francesco, music and, 1254 Landino, Cristoforo, 721, 993–995, 1001 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 homosexuality and, 1030 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1178

INDEX Neoplatonism and, 1282 Poliziano and, 1463 Lando, Ortensio, 1768, 1939 Landolfi, Tommaso, 203, 465, 785, 995–999 fantastic and, 686 Russian influences of, 1634 Landoni, Elena, 45 Landscape with a Snake Killed by a Snake (Poussin), 761 Landsknechts, 913 L’anello di Teodosio (Chiarelli), 631 Lang, Fritz, 1013 Lang, Walter, 351 Langdon, Harry, 434 ‘‘L’angel’’ (Loi), 1071 Langella, Giuseppe, 295 L’angelo custode (Jaeggy), 971 L’angelo necessario (Cacciari), 1428 L’angelo nero (Tabucchi), 1816 Langer, Lawrence, 947 Langhe, 96 L’anglomania e l’influsso inglese in Italia nel secolo XVIII (Graf), 886 Langue d’oc, 783 Langue d’oil, 783 L’anguria lirica (Munari), 1089 L’Anima, 1346 L’anima (Boine), 269 L’anima degli altri (De Ce´spedes), 581 L’anima di Hegel e le mucche del Wisconsin (Baricco), 132, 1261 L’anima divisa in due (Soldini), 1206 ‘‘L’anima mia vilment’ e` sbigotita’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 642 L’anno 3000 (Mantegazza), 1939 L’anno che verra` (Dalla), 1784 L’anno degli studenti (Rossanda), 1613 L’anno della vittoria (Rigoni Stern), 1583 L’Anonimo lombardo (Arbasino), 62 Lanterna (Palazzeschi), 1333 Lanterna di Diogene, La (Panzini), 1342 L’antica moneta (Volponi), 2016 L’Anticrusca (Beni), 1562 ‘‘L’antitesi operaia’’ (Calvino), 502 L’Antologia, 376, 983 Lanza, Antonio, 1649 Lanzetta, Eduardo, 2013 Lanzi, Luigi, 98 L’apatista (Goldoni), 868 L’Apicio moderno (Leonardi, F.), 758 Lapide in via delBabuino, Una (Pomilio), 1471 ‘‘Lapide in Via Mazzini, Una’’ (Bassani), 948 Lapis: Percorsi della riflessione femminile, 706 LaPolla, Garibaldi, 963 ‘‘L’appaltatore di teatro’’ (Brofferio), 1339 L’approdo, 1859 Bevilacqua, A., and, 216 Bigongiari and, 226 L’approdo letterario, 196 Bigongiari and, 226 Bilenchi and, 228 Larbaud, Vale´ry, 1807 L’arbore di Diana (Da Ponte), 567 L’arcano (Bonaviri), 284 L’architecturra della citta` (Rossi, Aldo), 72 L’architettura civile preparata sulla geometria e ridotta alla prospettiva (Bibbiena, F.), 2002

L’architettura futurista (Marinetti), 793 L’architrave, 1870 L’arciduca (Borgese, Giuseppe), 295 L’Ardita, 286 L’Arena, 1759 L’aria (Loi), 1071 L’aria delcontinente (Martoglio), 1166 L’aria serena dell’ovest (Soldini), 1206 L’Arialda (Testori), 446, 1206, 1869 L’armata Brancaleone (Monicelli, M.), 1209, 1730 L’armata dei fiumi perduti (Sgorlon), 1750 L’armonia (Mazza), 1279 L’armonia perduta: una fantasia sulla storia di Napoli (La Capria), 989 L’arpa discordata (Tarizzo), 1563 L’arrivo della lozione (Vassalli), 1956 L’Art poe´tique (Boileau), 784 L’arte, 99 L’arte del film (Aristarco), 725 L’arte del marmo (Wildt), 2003 L’arte della commedia (De Filippo, E.), 587 L’arte della fuga (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1206, 1476 ‘‘L’arte dev’essere tutta ineluttabile, tutta universale: ecco perche´ deve scaturire da universali e ineluttabili pensieri’’ (Masino), 1168 L’arte di ben cucinare (Stefani, B.), 758 L’arte di convitare spiegata al popolo (Rajberti), 758 L’arte di Giufa` (Martoglio), 1166 L’arte di persuadere (Prezzolini), 1501 L’Arzigogolo (Grazzini), 895 Lasca, Il. See Grazzini, Anton Francesco Lascaris, Constantinus, 163 Lascaris, Janus, Alciato and, 10 Lascia o raddoppia, 1857 Lasciva (sensual), 1158 L’Asia (Bartoli, D.), 134 L’asino, 488 L’Asino (Dottori), 933, 935 L’asino (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 L’asino d’oro (Machiavelli), 202 L’Aspramonte (Barberino, A.), 667 L’assedio (Bertolucci, B.), 199 L’assedio dell’Alcazar (Genina), 1619 L’assedio di Corinto (Rossini, G.), 1590 L’assedio di Firenze (Guerrazzi, F.), 909, 938, 1590 L’assedio di Firenze (Mazzini), 938 L’assedio di Tortona (Tommaseo), 1884 L’assicuratore (Mastronardi), 1170 L’Association Cinematographique des Auters Dramatiques, 1965 L’assoluto naturale (Parise, Goffredo), 1353 L’Assommoir (Zola), 1972 Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, The. See Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Foscolo) Laste, Natale Dalle, 1789 L’Astico, giornale delle trincee, 973 L’astronave pirata (Crepax), 790 Late Mattia Pascal, The, See Fu Mattia Pascal, Il Lateran Council, 1565 Laterza, Giuseppe, 2026 Laterza, Vito, 2026 Latin Canzoniere (Petrarch) and, 1055 Catholic Church and, 1561 Muzio and, 1264

I81

INDEX ‘‘Latin Averrosim,’’ 548 Latin Goliardic songs, 44 Latin, Literature in, 1000–1002 Alberti, Leon, and, 8 Italian language and, 967–970 Macaronic, 748 Vatin Council II and, 369 Latin Works (Bocaccio), 255–260 Latini, Brunetto, 94, 550, 552, 555, 783, 1003–1005 Cavalcanti, G., and, 422 homosexuality and, 1030 Risorgimento and, 1588 Rustico di Filippo and, 1635 Latinı`e (Spaziani), 1787 L’Atlantide svelata (Walesko), 1718 Lato debole, Il (Cederna, C.), 432, 433 ‘‘L’Atore’’ (Garboli), 809 L’attenzione (Moravia), 1231 Lattes, Franco. See Fortini, Franco L’attivita` letteraria in Italia (Petronio, Gustavo), 946 L’attore (Soldati), 1539, 1776 L’attore americano (Campo, R.), 371 L’Attrice (Piazza), 816 Lattuada, Alberto, 111, 700, 1116, 1951 Risi, D., and, 1584 Zavattini and, 2042 Laudario alla Vergine: Via pulchritudinis (Turoldo), 1925 Laudatio Florentinae urbus (Bruni, L.), 312 Laudato si’, mi’ Signore (Francis of Assisi), 775 Laude (Iacopone da Todi), 955 Laude (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 ‘‘Laude dei pacifici lapponi e dell’olio di merluzzo’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 ‘‘Laudes ad omnes horas’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Laudes de creaturis’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Laudes Dei altissimi’’ (Francis of Assisi), 773, 774 ‘‘Laudes Virginis Mariae’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 Laudi, 148, 1888 Laudi (D’Annunzio), 1089 Laudi del cielo del mare della terra e degli eroi (D’Annunzio), 488, 543 Laudisi, Lamberto, 1452 L’augellino belverde (Gozzi, C.), 881, 882 L’Aulularia (Plautus), 461 Laurana, Paolo, 1706 Laurel and Hardy, 434 Laurentias (Montefeltro), 518 Laurentis, Dino De, 446, 1996 Laurenziana, 1048, 1049 Laurenziano Rediano (Guittone d’Arezzo), 925–926 Lauretis, Teresa De, 709, 1513 Svevo and, 1808 Laus Veneris (Swinburne), 1497 L’autobiografia d’uno spettatore (Calvino), 472 Lauzi, Bruno, 1782 Lava piatt del Meneghin che` mort, El (Porta, C.), 1485 Lavagetto, Mario, 272, 1510 Svevo and, 1808 L’Avanti, 403 Risi, N., and, 1587 L’avare fasteux (Goldoni), 868 Lavaroni, Diego, 147 Lavin, Irving, 189 ‘‘Lavinia Fuggita’’ (Banti), 124

I82

Lavocat, Franc¸oise, 1152 Lavorare stanca (Pavese), 1382, 1387–1388 Lavoratore, Il, 1645 Lavoro culturale, Il (Bianciardi), 218 Lavoro Editoriale, Il, 1886 Lavoro fascista, Il, Bilenchi and, 228 Lavoro, Il (Visconti, L.), 1995 L’Avvenire, 358 ‘‘L’Avvento’’ (Pascoli), 488 L’avventura (Antonioni), 57, 60–61, 1995 censorship of, 446 L’avventura di un povera cristiano (Silone), 1569, 1756 L’avventuriere onorato (Goldoni), 867 L’avventuroso, 788, 789 ‘‘L’avvocato’’ (Gozzano), 876 L’avvocato Patelin (Praga, E.), 1491 L’avvvocato veneziano (Goldoni), 867 Lawrence, D.H., 539 Deledda and, 591 in Genoa, 815 Verga, G., and, 1962 Lawyers, 10–12 Lay, Ubaldo, 633 L’azione, 1694 L’azione parlata (Pirandello), 1450 Lazzari, Francesco, 275 Lazzarina fra i coltelli (Rosso), 1625 Lazzarini, Giulia, 844 Lazzaro (Borgese, Giuseppe), 295 Lazzaro (Pirandello), 1939 L’e` el dı` di mort, alegher! (Tessa), 1204, 1867 Le Goff, Jacques, 1935 Le Roy, Mervyn, 1013 League of Nations, 287 Leaving Las Vegas (Figgis), 1121 Leavitt, David, 737 Leben des Galilei (Brecht), 1794 L’eclisse (Antonioni), 56, 57, 1327 L’Ecloga overo Pasturale (Bellincioni), 1380 Lecoq, Jacque, 500 Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi (Eco), 658, 821, 1063 Lectura in codicem (Cino da Pistoia), 477 Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Freud), 1511 Leda e la schioppa (Meneghello), 1184 Ledda, Gavino, 1005–1007, 1846 L’edera (Deledda), 592 L’editore (Balestrini), 115 ‘‘L’editto’’ (Trilussa), 1914 L’educazione di un pastore (Ledda), 1846 ‘‘L’educcazione’’ (Belli, G.), 156 Leffi, Filippo, 1415 Lega Lombarda, La (D’Azeglio, M.), 573 Lega Nord (Northern League), 1532 Legenda aurea (Varagine), 428, 1295 Legenda aurea (Varazze), 1515, 1651 Legenda maior (Raymond of Capua), 414 Legendaria, 707 Legge deglispazi bianchi, La (Pressburger), 1500 Legge Mammi, 1860 Leggenda del pianista sull’oceano, La (Tornatore), 132, 473, 1891 Leggenda di Sant’Orsola (Carpaccio), 1961 Leggenda eterna (Pompilj), 5

INDEX Leggerezza (lightness), 67 ‘‘Legione Straniera dell’intellettualita` italiana, la,’’ 471 L’egoista (Bertolazzi), 194 Leibnitz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 1427, 1762 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Leiden des jungen Werther, Die (Goethe), 108, 826, 1218 Leila (Fogazzaro), 744 Leiris, Michel, 2037 Lejeune, Philippe, 107 L’elaborazione della lirica leopardiana (Bigongiari), 226 ‘‘L’elixir dell’immortalita`’’ (Tarchetti), 685 L’elixir dell’immortalita`. Traduzione dall’inglese (Tarchetti), 1827 Lemaire, Jean, 1731 Lemmonio Boreo (Soffici), 1771 Lena, La (Ariosto, L.), 84, 88, 89 L’Eneide travestita (Lalli), 932 Leno, Deodata di, 449 Lenore (Bu¨rger), 897 L’Enrico overo Bisantio acquistato (Marinella), 1152 Lente scura, La (Ortese), 1323 Lentini, Jacopo da, 782, 1561 Lenzini, Luca, 877 Leo X (Pope), 1604. See also Medici, Giovanni de’ Alciato and, 12 Aretino and, 74, 76 Ariosto and, 88 Guicciardini and, 912 Trissino and, 1917 Leo XIII (Pope), 444, 1704 Leonardi, Anna Maria Chiavacci, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Leonardi, Claudio, 1568 Leonardi, Francesco, 758 Leonardo Da Vinci, 1007–1010, 11000 Aesop and, 202 Alberti, Leon, and, 70 Bandello, M., and, 122 humanism and, 952 Michelstaedter and, 1196 Vasari and, 1952 Leonardo, Il, 296, 737, 983, 1346 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Nietzsche and, 826 Prezzolini and, 1009, 1502 Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 1313 Leondeff, Doriana, 68 Leone Ebreo, 721, 1010–1012 Mirandol and, 1440 Neoplatonism and, 1282 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Leone, Giovanni, 433 Leone, Sergio, 200, 1012–1015 Leonelli, Giuseppe, 858 Leonetti, Francesco, 279, 985, 1016–1018 Gruppo 63 and, 1956 Leoniceno, Niccolo`, Bembo, P., and, 163 Leopardi (Bigongiari), 226 Leopardi (Sapegno), 1018 Leopardi, Giacomo, 107, 113, 202, 388, 463, 616, 784, 826, 973, 1018–1029, 1088, 1365, 1385, 1408, 1479, 1605, 1633, 1718, 1853, 1996 Bacchelli and, 111 Bigongiari and, 226 Cardarelli and, 385 Celati and, 435

Checchi and, 430 as critic, 1060 De Sanctis and, 616 Della Casa and, 604 fashion and, 696 Giordani, Pietro, and, 850 Gozzano and, 879 Malaparte and, 1114 Michelstaedter and, 1196 Monti, V., and, 1218 Ortese and, 1323 Pascoli and, 1361, 1364 Petrarch and, 1414 Rebora and, 1554 Risorgimento and, 1590 Romanticism and, 1597, 1599 Saba and, 1643 scapigliatura and, 1697 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Solmi and, 1778 Stae¨l and, 1902 Tasso, T., and, 1836 Tommaseo and, 1883 Ungaretti and, 1928 Vassalli and, 1958 Zanzotto and, 2037 Leopardi progressivo (Luporini), 1018 Leopoldo, Pietro, 376 ‘‘Lepidina’’ (Pontano), 1472 L’equilibrio (Guerra), 906 L’era del cinghiale bianco (Battiato), 1785 L’erba voglio, 706, 1249 Rasy and, 1549 L’Ercolano, 396 L’Ercolano (Varchi), 1948 L’eredita` (Bolognini), 281 L’eredita` (Tozzi), 1898 L’eredita` Ferramonti, 1606 Lermolieff-Schwarze. See Morelli, Giovanni L’eroina (Rame), 1545 L’esame, 1205, 1807 ‘‘L’esame di chimica’’ (Levi, P.), 1045 Lesbian and Gay Writing, 709, 1029–1034. See also Homosexuality Mieli, M., and, 1197–1198 Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ), 1029 Leschassier, Jacques, 1684 L’esclusa (Pirandello), 1450 L’esistenza ubbidiente (Dombroski), 690 Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, 2011 L’esperienza (Risi, N.), 1586 L’esperienza futurista (Papini), 1346 ‘‘L’esperienza religiosa’’ (Boine), 269 ‘‘L’espressionismo epistolare di Paolo Giovio’’ (Gianfranco), 855 L’Espresso, 217, 372, 432, 980, 1231 Arbasino and, 63 Frabotta and, 772 Manganelli and, 1124 Moravia and, 472 Parise, Goffredo, and, 1353 Rasy and, 1549 Tondelli and, 1887 Lessico famigliare (Ginzburg, N.), 843, 847–848, 1923 L’estate di San Martino (Betocchi), 204 L’eta` breve (Alvaro), 29

I83

INDEX L’eta` del malessere (Maraini), 1142 as film, 1143 L’eta` della luna (Sinisgalli), 1762 L’eta` dell’argento (Bompiani), 282 L’eta` di Cosimo (Rossellini), 1621 L’eta` di ferro (Rossellini), 1620 L’eta di Stalin (Cavani), 424 L’eternita` e i mostri (Catani), 1719 L’eterno romanzo (Moleti), 1339 Leto, Giulio Pomponio, 2, 479 L’E´tranger (Camus), 1996 L’Etruria vendicata (Alfieri, V.), 22 ‘‘Lettera’’ (Fortini), 760 Lettera a madama Cristina di Lorena (Galilei, G.), 803 Lettera a un bambino mai nato (Fallaci), 682 Lettera ai compilatori della ‘‘Biblioteca italiana’’ (Leopardi), 1597–1598 Lettera alla madre (Bruck), 671 ‘‘Lettera alla madre’’ (Quasimodo), 1528 Lettera all’editore (Manzini), 1131 Lettera aperta alle signore (Marchesa Colombi), 1148 ‘‘Lettera da casa’’ (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Lettera dell’Abate Conti P.V. (Conti, Antonio), 1714 Lettera intorno a’ manoscritti antici (Borghini, V.), 302 Lettera intorno all’invenzione degli occhiali (Redi), 1558 Lettera nazional-popolare (national-popular literature), 889 Lettera ovvero discorso sopra il comporre le satire adatte alle scene (Giraldi, Giambattista), 856 Lettera semiseria di Giovanni Crisostomo al suo figliolo (Berchet), 937 Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliolo (Berchet), 1597 Lettera U. Manoscritto d’un pazzo, La (Tarchetti), 1827 ‘‘Letterati al cinema,’’ 470 Letteratura, 204, 737, 984 Bigongiari and, 226 Cassola and, 403 Conversazione in Sicilia (Vittorini ) and, 2008 Delfini and, 598 Dessı` and, 630 Gadda and, 797 Gatto and, 812 Hermeticism and, 930 Landolfi and, 996 Montale and, 1212 Ramat and, 1543 Tobino and, 1874 Letteratura al femminile (Frabotta), 770 Letteratura come menzogna, La (Manganelli), 1124 Letteratura come vita (Bo), 930, 985 Letteratura della nuova Italia, La (Croce, B.), 462, 525, 1062, 1962 Letteratura dell’italia unita, La (Contini), 522 Letteratura dialettale riflessa, 1833 Letteratura e classi subalterne (Camon), 257 Letteratura e gli de`i, La (Calasso), 342 Letteratura italiana contemporanea, La (Pedulla`), 333 Letteratura italiana: storia e testi, La (Contini), 1065 Letteratura rusticale, 1398 Letterature fiorentina del Quattrocento (Martelli, Mario), 1520 Letterature ingelese (Tomasi di Lampedusa), 47 Letterature moderne, Lagorio and, 992 Lettere (Andreini, I.), 40 Lettere (Aretino), 75 Lettere (Catherine of Siena), 414 Lettere (Della Casa), 602

I84

Lettere (Marino), 1162 Lettere a Carlotta Ponti (Tarchetti), 1827 Lettere a Elisa (Di Giacomo), 636 Lettere a Lesbia Cidonia sopra gli epigrammi (Bettinelli), 213 Lettere a Maria (Aleardi), 13 Lettere a Marina (Maraini), 671, 1142 Lettere ad Antonio (Morante), 1224 Lettere ad un amico lontano (Campo, C.), 369 Lettere agliuomini di Celestino VI (Papini), 1347 Lettere catholiche (Muzio), 1264 Lettere da Capri, Le (Soldati), 1775 Lettere da Santa Margherita (Petroni), 1424 Lettere da una tarantata (Rossi, Annabella), 54 Lettere dall’ergastolo (Settembrini), 1748 Lettere d’amore (Serao), 671, 1734 Lettere d’amore a Maria Cumani (Quasimodo), 1530 Lettere d’amore al cinema (Flaiano), 473 Lettere d’amore sulla belleza (Gassman and Soavi), 2004 Lettere dei condannati a morte della Resistenza italiana (Malvezzi, P. and Pirelli), 1580 Lettere di antifascisti dal carcere e dal confino (Pajetta), 1580 Lettere di una gentildonnafiorentina delsecolo XV aifigliuoli esuli (Guasti), 1801 Lettere di una novizia (Piovene), 671, 1447–1448 Lettere diverse (Gozzi, G.), 884 Lettere d’un’amica (Bettinelli), 213 Lettere e Arti, Solmi and, 1779 Lettere familiari (Franco, V.), 777 Lettere familiari ai suoi tre fratelli (Baretti), 129, 1908 Lettere familiari e dicomplimento (Tarabotti), 1824 Lettere, Le (Serra, R.), 1746 Lettere luterane (Pasolini), 1369 Lettere meridionali, Le (Villari), 1532 Lettere poetiche (Torquato), 85 Lettere sopra la pittura (Algarotti), 26 Lettere sopra l’architettura (Algarotti), 26 Lettere sopra l’Inghilterra, la Scozia e l’Olanda (Angiolini, L.), 1908 Lettere sulla traduzione dell’Eneide del Caro (Algarotti), 26 Lettere sulle vicende della filosofia da Cartesio sino a Kant (Galuppi, P.), 1428 Lettere triestine (Sla`taper), 1765 Lettere virgiliane. See Dieci lettere di Publio Virgilio Marone scritte dagli Elisi all’Arcadia di Roma sopra gli abusi introdotti nella poesia italiana (Bettinelli) Lettere volgari di diversi gentilhuomini del Monferrato (Guazzo), 904 Letters (Bruni, L.), 1281 Letters from Italy (Sharp), 130, 1908 Lettre a` D’Alembert sur les spectacles (Rousseau), 784 Lettre a` M. Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps et de lieu dans la trage´die (Manzoni, A.), 1134 Lettre a M. de Fontanes sur la campagne romaine, 1605 Lettre a` Monsieur Chauvet sur l’unite´ de temps, de lieu et d’action dans la trage´die (Manzoni, A.), 819, 1597 Lettre dalla Palestina (Scola), 1723 Lettre de M. l’Abbe´ Cannella a M. le Baron N.N. sur la literature de Palerme, c’est a` dire des portraits des savants palermitains de nos jours (Cannella), 1339 Lettres persanes (Montesquieu), 146 Lettura di un’immagine (Romano, L.), 1594 Lettura, La, 978 Buzzati and, 336 Giacosa and, 838 Simoni and, 1759

INDEX Letturatura, 1424 Letture di famiglia, 1628 L’Europeo, 185, 432, 980 Brancati and, 310 Fallaci and, 683 Flaiano and, 733 Moravia and, 472 Leva, Enrico De, 634 ‘‘Le`vati dalla porta,’’ 1561 Lever, Franco, 1314 Levi, Carlo, 53, 1035–1039, 1726, 1923, 2004 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 questione meridionale and, 1533–1534 Resistance and, 1578 Saba and, 1645 Scotellaro and, 1725 World War II and, 2031 Levi, Ezio, 289 Levi, Primo, 108, 686, 948, 1039–1045, 1109, 1610, 1923, 2033. See also Holocaust Literature Benigni and, 177 on Holocaust, 947 Loy, R., and, 1077 Resistance and, 1580 World War II and, 2032 Levia gravia (Carducci), 388 Levi-Montalcini, Rita, 109, 1716–1717 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 52, 1509 Eco and, 657 Leonetti and, 1016 L’e´volution des genres dans l’histoire de la litte´rature (D’Ancona and Rajna), 820 ‘‘L’evoluzione’’ (Zanella), 2035 L’evoluzione di Giosue Carducci (Panzini), 1342 Lewis, Matthew Gregory, 169 Lewis, Sinclair, Pavese and, 1381 Leydi, Roberto, 1481 Lezione della Woolf, La (Manzini), 1131 Lezione di fisica (Pagliarani), 1332 Lezione di fisica & Fecalaro (Paglirani), 1332 Lezione di stile, Una (Morazzoni), 1236 Lezioni americane (Calvino), 67, 346, 348, 1064, 1422, 1513 Lezioni d’amore (Valduga), 1941 Lezioni di commercio o sia dell’economia civile (Genovesi), 663 Lezioni di Letteratura italiana (Settembrini), 1061 Lezioni di letteratura italiana (Settembrini), 616, 945, 1749 Lezioni di teatro (De Filippo, E.), 587 Lezioni di volo (Archibugi), 68 Lezioni sopra diverse materie poetiche e filosofiche (Varchi), 1948 Lezioni sull’ ‘‘Andria’’ di Terenzio (Poliziano), 1464 LGBTQ. See Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer L’huomo al punto, cioe` l’huomo alpunto di morte (Bartoli, D.), 134 ‘‘Li mie’ foll’occhi, che prima guardaro’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 642 Liaisons dangereuses, Les (Laclos), 1447 Liala (Amalia Cambiasi Negretti), 1045–1047 Libello (little book), 549 Libellula, La (Rosselli, A.), 1616 ‘‘Li.B.e.R.’’, 465 Liber (Angela da Foligno), 1566 Liber Augustalis (Pier delle Vigne), 1442 Liber de arte coquinaria, 757 Liber de Concordia Novi ac Veteri Testamenti (Gioacchino da Fiore), 848 Liber de coquina, 757

Liber de duobus principiis, 290 Liber de temporibus Historia Fiorentina (Palmieri, M.), 1651 Liber de viris illustribus (Colonna, G.), 1415 Liber Facetiae (Bracciolini, P.), 1649 Liber gomorrhianus (Damian), 1030 Liber Insularum Archipelagi (Buondelmonti), 1906 Libera (Corsicato), 1247 Libera, amore mio...! (Bolognini), 281 Libera nos a Malo (Meneghello), 1184 Libera Universita` delle Donne di Milano, 706 Liberaci dal male (Dandolo), 1601 Liberale, Il, Delfini and, 598 Liberatore, Tanino, 790 Libere donne di Magliano, Le (Tobino), 1874 Liberi tutti (Paolini), 1344 Liberia delle Donne, 1033 Libero, Libero De in Rome, 1607 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Liberovici, Andrea, 1257 ‘‘Liberta`’’ (Verga, G.), 1970 Libertas, 313 Libia d’oro, La (Rovani), 1628 Libido dominandi, 555 Libra, La, 1234 Libraria del Doni fiorentino, La (Doni), 645 Libraries, 1047–1049 Libreria Antica e Moderna, 1646 Libreria Babele, 1033 Libreria del sole, La (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Libreria delle Donne, 1250 Libreria delle Donne of Dogana Street (Muraro), 1249 Libretto, 1049–1052. See also Da Ponte, Lorenzo; Opera ‘‘Libretto d’appunti’’ (Roversi), 1629 Libri d’acciaio, 465 Libri della Famiglia (Alberti, Leon), 8, 9, 104, 303–304 Libri gialli, I (Mondadori series), 631, 1507 Libri, Guglielmo, 1571–1572 Libri per ragazzi, 464 Libri per tutti o Tuttolibri, 1859 Libriparaphraseos Themistii (Barbaro, E.), 127 Libro da banco, 1702 Libro d’arte, Il (Cennini), 11000 Libro de’ colloqui (Pazzi, M.), 1568 Libro de pictura et movimenti umani (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Libro de’ quaranta giorni (Pazzi, M.), 1568 Libro dei cortegiano, Il (Castiglione), 444, 518, 695, 805 in Genoa, 816 Guazzo and, 904 Libro dei morte, Il (Panzini), 1342 Libro dei sogni (Morante), 1224 Libro dei versi, Il (Boito, A.), 272 Libro del Cortegiano, Il (Castiglione), 164, 166, 220, 408, 412–413, 721, 1254, 1297, 1907 language and, 1056 Mannerism and, 1128 Petrarch and, 1413 Libro della Beata Angela da Foligno (Angela da Foligno), 41 Libro dell’amore, El (Ficino), 720 Libro delle chiese abbandonate (Guerra), 906 Libro delle Figurazioni Ideali (Lucini), 1079 Libro delle filastrocche (Rodari), 465 Libro delle rime (book of poems), 1179

I85

INDEX Libro delle rime (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Libro delle tre Scritture (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290, 830 ‘‘Libro di ecloghe, Un’’ (Zanzotto), 2028 Libro di Ipazia (Luzi, M.), 1084 Libro di Mara, Il (Negri, Ada), 1273 Libro di mia vocaboli (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Libro di novelle et di bel parlare gientile, 1295, 1299 Libro muto (Trilussa), 1913 Libro N. 9 (Trilussa), 1913 Libro nero: nuovo diario di Gog, Il (Papini), 1346 Libro pastorale nominato Arcadia (Sannazaro), 65, 137, 166, 1676 Libro per cuoco, 757 Libro per la sera della domenica (Corazzini), 512, 521 Libro primo de le lettere (Aretino, P.), 854 Libro segreto (D’Annunzio), 542 Licei (high schools), 277 Licenza (Valediction), 149 Liceo classico, 361, 1241 Liceo Tasso, 403 Liceo Umberto, 989 Licini, Osvaldo, 2004 ‘‘Licof’’ (Percoto), 1399 L’idea del teatro (Delminio), 518 L’idea liberale, 1271 L’idea nazionale, 459 L’idioma gentile (De Amicis), 575 Lieto fine (Duranti), 650 Life, A. See Vita, Una (Svevo) Life of Benito Mussolini, The (Sarfatti), 1681 Life Sentences for Everybody (Mangione), 964 Life’s a Dream (Barca), 73 Lightning sketches, 50 L’Iguana (Ortese), 1322, 1325–1326 Liguori, Alphonsus, 41 Ligurian, 1053 Like Lesser Gods (Tomasi), 963 Lille, Alain de, 1281 Lilliput Put (Bozzetto), 51 L’illustrazione della domenica, 1357 L’illustrazione italiana, 208, 275, 1303 Deledda and, 591 Guglielminetti, A., and, 911 Raboni and, 1538 Re´paci and, 1577 Simoni and, 1759 L’illustrazione ticinese, 1868 L’imbecille (Pirandello), 1451 L’imboscata (Battiato), 1785 L’imboscata (Fenoglio), 713 L’imbroglio (Moravia), 1230 Limentani, Alberto, 666 Limiti dell’interpretazione,Il (Eco), 659, 1063 L’immobilita` del mutamento (immobility of change), 1083 L’immobilita` dello scriba (Sinisgalli), 1762 L’immorale (Germi), 829 Limone lunare, Il (Dolci), 644 L’impagliatore di sedie (Ottieri), 1327 ‘‘L’imperdonabile voglia di poesia’’ (Campo, C.), 368 L’imperfetta (Ariosto, L.), 88 L’imperio (De Roberto), 614 L’impero in provincia (Jovine), 987 Limpido rivo (Pascoli), 487, 1361 L’impietrito e il velluto (Ungaretti), 1928

I86

L’impostore (Goldoni), 884 L’impresario (Bernini, G.), 189 L’impresario delle Canarie (Metastasio), 1051 L’impresario delle Smirne (Goldoni), 866, 1760 L’impuro folle (Calasso), 341 Lin, Angelo Moro, 1960 Linati, Carlo, 48 in Milan, 1205 L’inaugurazione della primavera (Govoni), 874 L’inavertito (Barbieri), 1921 L’incalco (Tozzi, F,), 297, 1898 L’incantato (Bompiani), 282 L’incendiario (Palazzeschi), 1333 L’incendio nell’oliveto (Deledda), 592 L’incompleto (Leonetti), 1016 L’incontro (Cerami), 447 L’incoronazione di Poppea (Busenello), 1311 L’indicatore genovese, 1175 L’indomani (Neera), 1271 L’indovino (Sinisgalli), 1763 Linea analitica dell’arte moderna: Le figure e le icone, La (Menna), 101 Linea Gotica, La (Ottieri), 1326 Linea K, La (Erba, L.), 674 Linea lombarda, 674, 1104, 1205, 1206, 1489, 1586, 1741 Linea lombarda (Anceschi), 1316 Lineamenti di italiano popolare (Cortellazzo), 1561 L’inetto (Svevo), 1813 L’infamia originaria: Facciamola finita con il cuore e la politica (Melandri), 706 ‘‘L’infanta sepolta’’ (Ortese), 687 L’infermiera di Pisa (Ottieri), 1327 ‘‘L’infermiere di Tata’’ (De Amicis), 575 L’inferno e il limbo (Luzi, M.), 1084 L’Inferno monacale (Tarabotti), 1823 ‘‘L’infinito’’ (Leopardi), 1020, 1024 L’Inghilterra (Bartoli, D.), 134 L’inglese. Lezioni Semiserie (Severgnini), 981 Lingua cortigiana, 167 Lingua della nutrice: percorsi e tracce dell’espressione femminile, La (Rasy), 1549 Lingua e stile, 278 Lingua letteraria e lingua dell’uso (Gadda), 795 Linguaggio come causa d’errore, Il (Prezzolini), 1501 Linguaggio e teoria (Parrini), 1428 Linguaggio moderno dell’architettura (Zevi), 101 Linguistics and Philology, 1053–1058 L’innamorato della montagna (Tarchetti), 1827 ‘‘L’Inno ai Patriarchi’’ (Leopardi), 1019 L’Innocente (D’Annunzio), 540 L’innocente (Visconti, L.), 1997 L’insalubrita` dell’aria (Raboni), 1538 L’insegnamento della filosofia nei licei (Gentile), 824 L’inserzione (Ginzburg, N.), 844 ‘‘L’Instance de la letter dans l’incoscient ou la raison depuis Freud’’ (Freud), 1510 L’insurrection de Milan (Cattaneo, C.), 418, 944 L’integrazione (Bianciardi), 219 L’intervista (Ginzburg, N.), 844 L’intimita` e la storia (Orlando), 1063 L’intrepido, 789 Linus, 1704 Linus, 789 Tondelli and, 1887

INDEX L’Invasore (Vivanti), 2011 L’invenzione della verita` (Morazzoni), 1236 L’invincibile (Oriani, A.), 1320 Lin-Yu.T’Ang, 974 ‘‘L’io singolare proprio mio’’ (Cavalli, P.), 423 Liola` (Pirandello), 586, 1457 Lionello, Alberto, 194, 1522, 1663 Lippi, Lorenzo, 669, 932, 933 L’ippopotamo (Erba, L.), 675 Liquidazione (Sbarbaro), 1695 Lira, La (Marino), 1088, 1127, 1161, 1162 Lirica, 387 Lirica (Vivanti), 2011 Liriche, 1308 Liriche (Cecchi, E.), 431 Lirici francesi, I (Valeri), 1943 Lirici greci (Quasimodo), 1525, 1530–1531 Lirici marinisti (Croce, B.), 1158 Lirici nuovi (Anceschi), 930 Lirismo sintetico (synthetic lyricism), 753 ‘‘L’ironia’’ (Chiarelli), 459 L’irrealta` quotidiana (Ottieri), 1327 Lisa e Mollica (Trilussa), 1914 Lisbon Story (Wenders), 1121 Lisi, Nicola, 785 Betocchi and, 204 Lisi, Virna, 1820 fotoromanzo and, 769 L’Isle, Je´rome Groslot, 1684 Lisle, Leconte de, 390, 392, 2035 decadentismo and, 580 L’Isle-Adam, Villiers de, 580 L’Isola (Stu´parich), 1804 L’isola amorosa (Bonaviri), 284 L’isola dei baci (Marinetti), 1156 L’isola del giorno prima (Eco), 659 L’isola del sole (Capuana), 383 L’isola di arturo (Morante), 1033, 1225, 1228–1229 L’isola meravigliosa (Betti, U.), 206 ‘‘L’istituzione Arcadia,’’ 2 L’istoria della volgar poesia (Crescimbeni), 64 L’istruzione a ungiovane italiano per l’arte di scrivere (Giordani, Pietro), 851 Liszt, Franz, 150 Maffei, C., and, 1659 L’Italia, 611 Imbriani and, 959 L’Italia (Bartoli, D.), 134 L’Italia e la nuova alleanza (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 L’Italia in giallo (Carloni), 632 L’Italia letteraria, 1113 L’Italia libera, 1036 Montale and, 1212 L’Italia liberata dai Goti (Trissino), 1189 L’Italia meridionale (Colldi), 484 L’Italia musicale, 1258 L’Italia non e` un paese povero (Jvens), 1859 L’Italia sotto la neve (Roversi), 1630 L’Italiano (Longanese), 278 L’italiano errante per l’Italia (Comisso), 496 L’italiano inutile (Prezzolini), 1502 L’italiano, Petroni and, 1425 ‘‘L’Italie e la re´volution italienne de 1850’’ (Belgioioso), 151 ‘‘Litania’’ (Caproni), 818

Literary Criticism, History of, 63, 1058–1064. See also Literary History Algarotti and, 26 History of, 1058–1064 Literary History, 1064–1067 Literary Journals, 982–986 Literary Prizes, 1067–1068 Literary Salons. See Salons, Literary Literary transposition, 45 Literature and Visual Arts. See Visual Arts, Literature and Literature in Latin, 1000–1002 Literature of Anthropology. See Anthropology, Literature of Literature of Architecture. See Architecture, Literature of ‘‘Literature of Replenishment, The’’ (Barth), 345–346 Literature of the Resistance. See Resistance, Literature of the Literature of World War I, 2028–2031 Literature of World War II, 2031–2033. See also Holocaust Literature; Resistance, Literature of the Literaturoper, 1257 Litta, Giulio, 1148 Littera all’Alvarotto (Ruzzante), 1638 Litteratura e industria, 183 ‘‘Litterature populaire en Italie, La’’ (Ferrari, Giuseppe), 1560 Little World of the Past. See Piccolo mondo antico (Fogazzaro) Liturgical Drama, 1068–1070. See also Sacra rappresentazione (mystery play) Live. Ritratti sopralluoghi e collaudi (Veronesi, S.), 1976 Lives of the Artists. See Vite de’ piu´ eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Vasari) Living Theater, 49, 169 Living Thoughts of Mazzini, The (Silone), 1756 Livius, 443 Livre dou Tre´sor, Li (Latini), 783, 1003 Livy, Titus, 240, 250, 941 Alfieri, V., and, 22 Mussato and, 1262 Petrarch and, 1415 Sacchetti, F., and, 1648 Lizzani, Carlo De Santis and, 619 Scola and, 1722 Ljubov’k trem apel’sinam (Gozzi, C.), 499, 882 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 936 ‘‘Lo viso e son diviso da lo viso’’ (Giacomo da Lentini), 835 Locandiera, La (Goldoni), 653, 866, 871–872 Locatelli, Domenico, 498 L’occhio del ciclone (Spaziani), 1787 L’occhio di Napoli (La Capria), 989 Locke, John, 464, 1138, 1279 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Capponi, G., and, 375 Enlightenment and, 662 Foscolo and, 763 Leopardi and, 1020 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Locomotiva, La (Guccini), 1784 Locula noctis (Dominici, G.), 1661 Locuzione artificiosa (artificial idiom), 1058 Lodi (Marino), 1161 Lodi, Giovanni da, 257 Lodoli, Carlo, 2002 L’odore del sangue (Parise, Goffredo), 1354 L’odore del sangue, odore del sesso (Martone), 1354

I87

INDEX Lodovici, Cesare Vico, 1848 Lodovico Sforza (Niccolini, G.), 1289 L’Oeil vivant (Starobinski), 1088 Loetscher, Hugo, 1318 Logic (Hegel), 616 Logica come scienza del concetto puro (Croce, B.), 524 Logique, La (Condillac), 764 Logotheta (chief spokesman), 1442 Loi, Franco, 1070–1072 in Milan, 1206 Loiodice, Aroldo Tieri, 1523 Loiodice, Giuliana, 1523 L’Olimpia (Della Porta), 606 L’olimpiade (Metastasio), 1191 L’olivo e l’olivastro (Consolo), 508 Lolli, Rita, 540 Lollobrigida, Gina, 622 fotoromanzo and, 769 Lomazzi, Gaetano, 1431 Lomazzo, Giovan Paolo, 1104, 11001 Lombard, Peter, 1565 Lombardi alla prima crociata (Grossi), 669, 897 Lombardi alla prima crociata (Verdi), 1590 Lombardi in rivolta, I (Isella), 1563 L’ombra della colline (Arpino), 96 L’ombra della giovinezza (Tozzi, F.), 1897 L’ombra della luna (Rasy), 1549 ‘‘L’ombra della magnolia’’ (Montale), 1216 L’ombrellone (Risi, D.), 1585 Lombroso, Cesare, 911, 1427 Salgari and, 1654 Verga, G., and, 1965 L’omo del parco (Sanvitale), 1679 Lomonaco, Francesco, 232 London, Jack, 219, 683 London Mercury, The, 1498 Longanese, Leo, 278, 980, 1111 cinema and, 471 Longepierre, Hilaire-Bernard de Requeleyne, 883 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 737 Boccaccio and, 250 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Manzoni and, 1136 Longhi, Roberto, 99, 278, 1073–1074 Banti and, 123 Bertolucci, A., and, 195 Checchi and, 430 Debenedetti and, 577 Garboli and, 809 in Rome, 1607 Longo, Alfonso, 663, 1979 Enlightenment and, 664 Longolio, Clemzo, 450 L’onorevole Ercole Mallardi (Giacosa), 837 L’onorevole Scipioni (Verga, G.), 1965 Lontano (far away), 1028 ‘‘Lontano amore’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 832 Lontano da dove. Joseph Roth e latradizione ebraico-orientale (Magris), 1109 Lontano da Mogadiscio (Fazel), 1201 ‘‘Lontano lontano,’’ 761 Lonzi, Carla, 705, 1075–1076 L’opera in versi (Montale), 1211 L’opera seria (Calzabigi), 1060

I88

L’Opinione, 1259 L’opium chre´tien (Luzi, M.), 1084 Lopresti, Lucia. See Banti, Anna L’opzione (Sereni, V.), 1742 L’ora del tempo (Orelli), 1318 L’ora di tutti (Corti), 513 Lorca, Federico Garcı´a, 936 L’Ordine nuovo, 888, 979 Gobetti, P., and, 862 L’ordine simbolico della madre (Muraro), 1250 L’orecchio assoluto (Del Giudice), 599 Loredan, Giovan Francesco, 1128 Tarabotti and, 1823 Loreley (Catalani), 685 Loren, Sophia, 237, 471, 589, 624, 1701, 1723 fotoromanzo and, 769 Lorenz, Nicholaus, 1463 Lorenzetti, Piero, Checchi and, 430 Lorenzi, Antonio De, 1361 Lorenzi, Giambattista, 935, 1050 Lorenzini, Carlo. See Collodi, Carlo Lorenzo Benoni (Mazzini), 816 Lorenzo De’ Medici (Pascoli), 1361 Lorenzo e il suo avvvocato (194), 194 Lorenzo, Tina Di, Bracco and, 307 Loria, Arturo, 203, 785 fantastic and, 687 Montale and, 1212 L’origine delle idee (Rezzonico), 1279 L’oro del mondo (Vassalli), 1957, 2033 L’oro di Napoli (De Sica), 587, 1270 L’oro di Napoli (Marotta), 1268 L’orologio (Buzzati), 335 L’orologio (Levi, C.), 1036, 1578 Lorris, Guillaume de, 728, 783 ‘‘L’orzalesi’’ (Chiabrera), 456 Loschi, Antonio, 851 Losey, Joseph, Galilei, G., and, 804 L’ospite (Romano, L.), 159 L’ospite desiderato (Rosso), 1625 L’osservatore triestino, 1910 L’osservatore Veneto, 883, 982 L’osteria del cattivo tempo (Cecchi, E.), 430 L’osteria di Brema (Levi, P.), 1041 Lotman, Yurij M., 1511 Lotta continua, 609, 981 Lotta dell’uomo per la sua sopravvivenza, La (Rossellini), 1620 Lotta politica in Italia, La (Oriani, A.), 1319 L’ottimo (the very best), 301 Louis IX (King), 1657 Louis XII (King), Bandello, M., and, 117 Louis XIV (King), 783 Louis XVI (King), 868 Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Lovatelli, Giovanni, 1660 Lovati, Lovato dei, 951, 1001, 1415 Mussato and, 1262 Lovecraft, H.P., 685 Buzzati and, 687 Lowell, Robert, Tarozzi and, 1829 Lower Depths (Gorky), 1794 Loy, Nanny, 185 Scola and, 1722 Loy, Rosetta, 940, 949, 1077–1078

INDEX Loyola, Ignatius, 41, 144 Lubitsch, Ernst, 470 Lubrano, Giacomo, 1159 Lucan, 87, 556 classicism and, 479 Petrarch and, 1404, 1415 ‘‘Lucania’’ (Scotellaro), 1725 ‘‘Lucania e Paese’’ (Sinisgalli), 1762 Lucarelli, Carlo, 633, 790, 1730 with Cannibali, 373 Lucca, Bonagiunta da, 572, 640, 836 Guinizzelli and, 923 Lucca, Francesco, 1258 ‘‘L’uccellino del freddo’’ (Pascoli), 1364 L’uccello del paradiso (Cavacchioli), 458, 1849 L’uccello nella cupola (Pomilio), 1470 Lucchetti, Daniele, 1345 LUCE. See L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa Luce e il lutto, La (Bufalino), 322 Lucentini, Franco, 632, 1923, 2005 Lucertola di Casarola, La (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Luchetti, Daniele, 1184 Luci del varieta` (Fellini), 700, 1951 Flaiano and, 733 Luci dellamia sera (Aleramo), 16 Lucia di Lammermoor (Donizetti, Giuseppe), 685 Lucian, 87, 265, 941, 1748 Luciani, Sebastiano Arturo, 723 Luciano Serra pilota (Alessandrini), 1619 Lucidi (Firenzuola), 730 Lucini, Gian Piero, 538, 1078–1080, 1089, 1204 crepuscolarismo and, 521 Oriani, A., and, 1320 Lucio Battisti (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Lucio l’avanguardista, 788 Lucius e onos (Lucian), 265 Lucky Luciano (Rosi), 1609 Lucretius, 1001 Bracciolini, P., and, 303 Leopardi and, 1020 Redi and, 1558 Lucrezia Borgia, la sua vita e i suoi tempi (Bellonci), 161 Lucy and I, 1858 Ludovici, Cesare, Chiarelli and, 459 Ludwig (Vistonti, L.), 1996 Luigi, Pier, 395 Luigi Pirandello (Del Giudice), 233 Luisa Sanfelice (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Luisilla (Masino), 1168 Luissa Sanfelice (Menardi), 461 Luka´cs, Georg, 937, 1109, 1877 Manzoni and, 1136 Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni, A.) and, 1138 Lulli, Giovanni Battista, 736 Lullo, Giorgio De, 1796 L’ultima casa prima del bosco (Sanvitale), 1679 L’ultima cena (Leonardo Da Vinci), 122 L’ultima generazione (Destro), 54 L’ultima lacrima (Benni), 179 L’ultima moda, 591 L’ultima partita a carte (Rigoni Stern), 2031 L’ultima valle (Sgorlon), 1750 ‘‘L’ultimo capodanno dell’umanita` (Ammaniti), 34 L’ultimo cireneo (Re`paci), 1576

L’ultimo colloquio di Antonio Foscarini (Carrer), 397 L’ultimo del paradiso (Benigni), 178 L’ultimo fronte (Revelli), 1579 L’ultimo imperatore (Bertolucci, B.), 199 L’ultimo sciuscia` (Giobbe), 51 L’ultimo scugnizzo (Viviano), 2014 L’ultimo viaggio della Canaria (Duranti), 650 Lulu´ (Bertolazzi), 193 Lume spento, Il (Vigano`), 1988 Lumie di Sicilia (Pirandello), 1450 Lumie`re, La, 1432 L’umorismo (Pirandello), 525, 936, 1450, 1848 ‘‘Luna d’inverno’’ (Spaziani), 1787 Luna e i falo`, La (Pavese), 817, 1386–1387, 1923 Luna, Guglielmo Folliero De, 1718 Luna, La (Bertolucci, B.), 197 Lunacharsky, Anatoliy, 1079 Lunaria: Favola teatrale (Consolo), 507 Lunario (Guerra), 906 Lunario del paradiso (Celati), 435 Lunario dell’orfano sannita (Manganelli), 1123 Lunga calza verde, La (Gavioli), 51 Lunga notte di Medea, La (Alvaro), 29 Lunga strada del ritorno, La (Blasetti), 237 ‘‘Lunga strada, soldati a Napoli’’ (Arpino), 95 Lunga vita di Marianna Ucria, La (Maraini), 473, 1142, 1146–1147 as film, 1143 ‘‘Lunghe sere, Le’’ (Sinisgalli), 1762 Lungo equinozio (Bianchini), 216 Lungo, Isidoro Del, 1659, 1801 Lungodora (Bigiaretti), 223 L’Unione Cinematografica Educativa (LUCE), 352 L’Unita, 17, 1503 Camon and, 358 Cerami and, 448 Dessı` and, 630 Garboli and, 809 Gobetti, P., and, 862 Pavese and, 1383 Pontecorvo and, 1474 Ravera and, 1551 Salvemini and, 1666 Sanguineti and, 1672 Veronesi, S., and, 1976 Vittorini and, 2005 L’universale, Bilenchi and, 228 Lu¨nn (Loi), 1071 Luoghi della memoria, I (Isnenghi), 55 L’uomo, 1924 L’uomo che guarda (Moravia), 1232 L’uomo che incontro´ se stesso (Antoni, L.), 1849 L’uomo che incontro´ se stesso (Chiarelli), 458 L’uomo che non ho sposato (Campo, R.), 372 L’uomo che rubo` la Gioconda (D’Annunzio), 470 L’uomo come fine (Moravia), 1230 ‘‘L’uomo dagli occhiali’’ (Morante), 1224 L’uomo dal fiore in bocca (Pirandello), 1451 L’uomo dalla croce (Rossellini), 1619 L’uomo del bluff (Arpino), 96 ‘‘L’uomo del Guicciardini’’ (De Sanctis), 914 L’uomo delle stelle (Tornatore), 1891 L’uomo di lettere difeso ed emendato (Bartoli, D.), 134 L’uomo di lusso (Verga, G.), 1965 L’uomo di paglia (Germi), 829

I89

INDEX L’uomo e` forte (Alvaro), 28 L’uomo e la sua morte (Berto), 191 L’uomo invaso e altre invenzioini (Bufalino), 322 L’uomo, la bestia e la virtu` (Pirandello), 1452 L’uomo nel labirinto (Alvaro), 28 L’uomo parallelo (Guerra), 473, 906 L’uomo senza contenuto (Agamben), 1428 Lupa, La (De Roberto), 614 Lupa, La (Verga, G.), 1965, 1970 Luperini, Romano, 1538 Lupi e agnelli (Trilussa), 202, 1913 Lupo, Salvatore, 1532 Luporini, Cesare, 1018 Lusiads (Camo˜es), 1713 Lussu, Emilio, 1081–1082, 1609 World War I and, 2029 Lustrini (Tarantino, A.), 1825 ‘‘L’usura’’ (Speroni), 1637 Luther, Martin, 1567 Boccaccio and, 250 Luttazzi, Daniele, with Cannibali, 373 L’uva acerba (Cecchi, E.), 431 L’uva puttanella (Scotellaro), 53, 1726 Luxembourg, Rosa, 815 Luxuria, 1030 Luzi, Alfredo, 208 Luzi, Mario, 737, 930, 931, 1082–1086 Betocchi and, 204 Bilenchi and, 228, 229 Campana and, 362 Campo, C., and, 368 Spaziani and, 1786 World War II and, 2031 Luzi, Silvio Maria, 1400 Luzzaschi, Luzzasco, 901 Luzzatto, Sergio, 690 Lydia (Neera), 1271 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 726 Lyra romana (Pascoli), 1361 Lyric Poetry, 1086–1090. See also Stilnovismo Petrarch and, 1127

M ‘‘Ma Dio cos’e`’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 Ma l’amor mio non muore (Caserini), 469 Ma non e´ una cosa seria (Pirandello), 352 Macaire, 666 Macaronic Latin, 748 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 273, 1996 Macbeth (Verdi), 47, 685 Macbetto (Testori), 1869 Maccari, Mino, 984, 1111–1112, 2004 Scola and, 1722 Maccari, Ruggero, 1728 Maccarinelli, Piero, 1121 Maccheronee (Folengo), 669 Maccheroni (Scola), 1723 Macchia (patch), 2003 Macchia, Giovanni, Bigiaretti and, 223 Macchiaioli, 281, 737, 786 Macchiaiolo, 379 Macchiavelli, Loriano, 632 Macchietta, 1950

I90

Macchiette (Collodi), 484, 1259 Macchina ammazzacattivi, La (Magnani), 1619 Macchina mondiale, La (Volponi), 1923, 1939, 2017 Macchinatore dello spettacolo (builder of theatrical machines), 188 Macedonio, Franco, 1882 Machado, Antonio, 936 Macheronea (Odasi), 748 Machiavelli anticristo (Prezzolini), 233 Machiavelli in Inghiltera e altri saggi (Praz), 1497 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 78, 202, 231, 479, 604, 639, 916, 1091–1100, 1426, 1506, 1567, 1715 Alfieri, V., and, 21–22 Ariosto and, 89 Bandello, M., and, 117, 122 Boccaccio and, 250 Campanella and, 363 Castiglione and, 410 censorship of, 444 in Florence, 736 Foscolo and, 763 Gelli and, 814 Guicciardini and, 912 historiography and, 942 Malaparte and, 1111 Mazzini and, 1175 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1181 music and, 1254 Petrarch and, 1405 Pontano and, 1472 Risorgimento and, 1589 Silone and, 1756 travel literature and, 1907 Trissino and, 1916 in Turin, 1921 Vasari and, 1953 Vico and, 1984 Maciste contro lo sceicco (Camerini), 351 Mackenzie, Compton, 1032 Macpherson, James, 453, 1902 Macri, Oreste, 930, 936 Quasimodo and, 1525 Macrobius, Neoplatonism and, 1280 Macromedia Flash, 51 Macry, Paolo, 1532 Madame Butterfly (Puccini, Giacomo), 48, 838 Maddalena, La, 1143 Maddalena, La (Andreini, G.), 37 Maddalena...zero in condotta (De Sica), 622 Madonna del filosofi, La (Gadda), 796 Madonna di fuoco e Madonna di neve (Faldella), 680 ‘‘Madonna, dir vo voglio’’ (Giacomo da Lentini), 835 ‘‘Madonna, il fino amor ched eo vo porto’’ (Guinizzelli), 923 Madonna Oriente, 1249 Madre e figlia (Sanvitale), 1678 Madre, La (Deledda), 591 Madre, La (Moretti, Mario), 1238 Madre Regina (Benelli), 172 ‘‘Madri galanti, Le’’ (Boito, A.), 272 ‘‘Madrigale della neve calda e del caffe` bianco’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 ‘‘Madrigali privati’’ (Montale), 1216 Madruzzo, Cristoforo, 175 Maecena, lyric poetry and, 1087 Maestri del diluvio, I (Alvaro), 28 Maestro di Setticlavio, Il (Boito, C.), 71, 275

INDEX Maestro di Vigevano (Mastronardi), 1169 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 335, 873 Maetteurs en sce`ne, 1013 Mafarka le futuriste (Marinetti), 1155, 1718 Maffei, Andrea, 1398, 1659 Maffei, Clara Spinelli, 1659 scapigliatura and, 1697 Maffei, Giuseppe, 617, 784, 826 libretto and, 1050 Maffei, Scipione, 66, 1060, 1101–1102 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Mafia, 1103–1104 in Palermo, 1340 Mafia Vendetta. See Giorno della civetta, Il (Sciascia) Mafiusi di laVicaria, I (Mosca, Gaspare and Rizzotto), 1103, 1340 Magalotti, Lorenzo, 1714, 1716, 1907 Maggi, Carlo Maria, 499, 1104–1106, 1127, 1563 Muratori and, 1251 Porta, C., and, 1485 Maggiani, Maurizio, 817 Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, 737 Maggio romanesco, Il (Peresio), 1605 Maggior Consiglio, 1959 Maggiorana, Lamberto, 622 Maggiorate fisiche (naturally endowed actress), 619 Magia e invenzione (Erba, L.), 675 Magia in Sicilia, La (Guggino), 54 Magiae naturalis, sive de miraculis rerum naturalium (Della Porta), 605 Magic Mountain, The (Mann, T.), 1327 Magic realism Alvaro and, 28 Oretese and, 1322 Maglabechiana, 1048 Magli, Valeria, 114 Maglia o uncinetto: Racconto linguistico-politico sulia inimicizia tra metafora e metonimia (Muraro), 1249 Magliari, I (Rosi), 1609 Magna Curia, 781, 926, 1442 Magna Moralia (Aristotle), 1119 Magnani, Anna, 1371, 1619, 1728 Toto` and, 1895 Magnati, 735 Magnetti, Adelina, 635 Magnificat: Un incontro con Maria (Merini), 1187 Magnificent Seven, The (Sturges), 1014 Magnificenza (magnificence), 518 Magno, Celio, Petrarchism and, 1421 Magnus. See Raviola, Roberto Magrelli, Valerio, 1106–1108 cinema and, 472 Rasy and, 1549 Magri, Lucio, 1614 Magris, Claudio, 936, 1108–1110, 1222 Pressburger and, 1499 Svevo and, 1808 travel literature and, 1909 in Trieste, 1912 Mai sentita cosi bene (Campo, R.), 371 Mai tardi (Revelli), 1579 Maia (D’Annunzio), 541, 544 Maida, Giovan Alfonso Mantegna di, Terracina and, 1861 Maier, Bruno, 118 Tomizzi and, 1880

Maio, Gianfrancesco De, 1312 Maironi, Franco, music and, 1256 Maironi, Piero, 744 Majakovskij, Vladimir, 1634 Making of the Fascist Self (Berezin), 690 Mal de vivre, 1897 Mal di milza, Il (Verri, P.), 1979 Mal giocondo (Pirandello), 1450 Mala Bocca (Dante), 728 Mala notte (bad night), 330 ‘‘Mala poesia’’ (bad poetry), 597 Mala vita (Di Giacomo), 635 Mala vita (Viviani, R.), 2013 Malabaila, Damiano. See Levi, Primo Malacarne, Francesco, 1432 Malade imaginaire (Molie`re), 2014 Malafemmina (Toto`), 1895 Malagodi, Olindo, 980 Malaguti, Ugo, 1720 Malanga, Gerard, 965 Malaparte, Curzio, 426, 1111–1115 Gramsci and, 892 Petroni and, 1425 World War II and, 2033 Malatesta, Gloria, 67 Malato, Enrico, 1066 Malattia chimata uomo (Camon), 357 Malattia dei sentimenti, La (Antonioni), 60 Malattia del tempo, La (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Malavoglia, I (Verga, G.), 354, 744, 1492, 1532, 1654, 1964, 1967–1969, 1972 Maldacea, Nicola, 1269, 1950 Malde´, Vania De, 1162 ‘‘Male d’Africa, Il’’ (Sereni, V.), 1741 Male dell’arte, Il (Faldella), 679 Male, Il, 790 Male minore, Il (Erba, L.), 674 Male oscuro, Il (Berto), 190, 191 Male universale (universal evil), 190 Male viene dal Nord, Il (Tomizza), 1881 Malebolge, 1277 Maledetta gioventu` (Ravera), 1551 Maledetto imbroglio, Un (Germi), 828, 829 Maleducazione teatrale, La (Arbasino), 63 Malemare (Marrazzo), 1247 Male`na (Tornatore), 1891 Malerba, Luigi, 465, 473, 1115–1118 Guerra and, 906 Malespini, Celio, 1840 Malespini, Orazio, 1298 Malga di Sıˆr, La (Sgorlon), 1751 Malia (Capuana), 384 Malia nella voce, La (Gozzi, C.), 881 Malignita` (malevolence), 1096 Malinconia (black humor), 44 Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 1259, 1567 Malipiero, Girolamo, 444 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 62, 785 lyric poetry and, 1088 Ungaretti and, 1928 Valduga and, 1941 Valeri and, 1943 Malmantile, Il (Lippi), 669, 933 Malmaritata, 1754

I91

INDEX Malo albergo (bad lodging), 330 ‘‘Malocchio, Il’’ (Svevo), 687 Malombra (Fogazzaro), 744, 1256, 1775 Malombra (Soldati), 471 Malora, La (Fenoglio), 712 Malpensante, Il (Bufalino), 322 Malpighi, Marcello, 277 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Maltese, Corrado, 101 Maltese, Curzio, 981 Malvezzi, Piero, 1580 Malvezzi, Teresa Carniani, 1021 Malvezzi, Virgilio, 1128 Mam Africa. Storia di donne e di uptopie (Cutrufelli), 535 Mambriano (Ferrara, F.), 668 Mambro, Francesco, 1865 Mameli, Goffredo, Risorgimento and, 1590 Mamet, David, 673 Mamiani, Terenzo, 151, 464, 1426 Mamma lupara (Cannarozzo), 632 Mamma marcia (Malaparte), 1112 Mamma Roma (Pasolini), 472, 726, 1285, 1367, 1371 Man, Igor, 981 Man of Smoke. See Codice di Perela`, Il (Palazzeschi) Manara, Milo, 790 ‘‘Manca ilfior giovenil de’ miei primi anni’’ (Castiglione), 409 Manciata di more, Una (Silone), 1756 Mancinelli, Laura, 1923 Mancini, Caterina Cattermole. See Contessa Lara Mancini, Franco, 955 Manco male, Il (Maggi), 1105 Mandarins, Les (Beauvoir), 582 Mandelstam, Osip, 1549 Mandragola, La (Machiavelli), 78, 1091, 1099–1100, 1254, 1567 censorship of, 444 Mandrake (Falk and Davis), 788 Mandrake, The. See Mandragola, La (Machiavelli) Mandriali et ode (Basile), 136 Manetti, Antonio di Tuccio, 231, 1297 Manetti, Giannozzo, 255, 314, 1001, 1118–1120 humanism and, 952 Manfre´, Walter, 1121 Manfred (Byron), 1393 ‘‘Manfred’’ (Valduga), 1942 Manfredi, Eustachio, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Manfredi, Manfredo, 51 Manfredi, Nino, 2045 Manfredo Pallavicino (Rovani), 1628 Manfridi, Giuseppe, 1120–1121 Manganella, Renato. See D’Ambra, Lucio Manganelli, Giorgio, 47, 434, 785, 1122–1125, 1513 animal tales by, 203 Buzzati and, 687 Gruppo 63 and, 1956 Merini and, 1186, 1187 in Milan, 1206 as neo-avant-garde, 1276 Petrignani and, 1422 Mangano, Silvana, 619, 1568, 1996 Mangiami pure (Maraini), 1143 Mangiare e bere all’italiana (Caracina), 759 Mangini, Mario, 585 Mangione, Jerre, 963–964 Mani forti, Le (Bernini), 1864

I92

Mani sulla citta`, Le (La Capria and Rosi), 989, 1270, 1609 Mania (Del Giudice), 599 ‘‘Mania de persecuzzione’’ (Trilussa), 1914 Maniaci sentimentali, I (Izzo), 1120 Manicomio primavera (Sereni, C.), 1739 ‘‘Maniera,’’ 1125 Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti (Croce, B.), 28, 823 Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti (Gentile), 823 Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi, 791 Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi, 791, 1257 Manifesto dei pittori futuristi, 791, 793, 1204, 2004 Manifesto del Teatro di Varieta` (Marinetti), 73 Manifesto dell’ UDA (Bernari), 183 Manifesto della danza futurista (Marinetti), 538 Manifesto della fotografia futurista (Marinetti), 1434 Manifesto della letteratura futurista (Marinetti), 792, 874 Manifesto della Pittura Futurista (Boccioni), 1433 Manifesto dell’architettura futurista (Sant’Elia), 71 Manifesto dell’opposizione parlamentare, 616 Manifesto di Rivolta Femminile (Lonzi), 1075 Manifesto, Il, 179, 981, 1614 Celati and, 435 De Luca, E., and, 610 Fortini and, 761 Frabotta and, 772 Veronesi, S., and, 1976 Manifesto per un nuovo teatro (Pasolini), 1368 Manifesto per un partito conservatore e comunista (Delfini), 597 ‘‘Manifesto per un teatro del popolo,’’ 677 Manifesto techico della scultura futurista (Boccioni), 791, 793 Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista, 1155 Manila paloma blanca (Segre, D.), 1345 Manin, Carlo Antonio, 1658 Manin, Daniele Aleardi and, 13 in Venice, 1960 Manji (Tanizaki), 426 Mann, Heinrich, 827 Mann, Thomas, 62, 183, 827, 1277, 1327 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 297 Capriolo and, 377 Gadda and, 795 Svevo and, 1806 in Venice, 1961 Visconti, L., and, 1995 World War I and, 2028 Mannelli, Francesco d’Amaretto, 301 Mannerism, 136, 480. See also Mannerism and Baroque Armenini and, 11001 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 144 Giovio and, 854 lyric poetry and, 1087 Mannerism and Baroque, 1125–1130 Manni, Giuseppe, 1558 Mannino, Franco, 1168 Mano di Venere, La (Chiarelli), 460 Mano tagliata, La (Serao), 1734 Manoscritto del principe, Il (Ando`), 1341, 1878 Mansfield, Katherine, 368 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 Morante and, 1226 Ortese and, 1323 Manso, Giambattista, 174 Marino and, 1163

INDEX Ma¨nsoon, Olof, 1835 Mantegazza, Maria Fantoni, 104, 1939 Mantegazza, Paolo, 103, 1433 Mantegna, Andrea, 162, 518 classicism and, 480 Ferrara and, 716 Mantellaccio, Il (Benelli), 172 Mantello, Il (Buzzati), 335 Ma`ntica, Giuseppe, 1936 Mantini, Silvia, 2026 Mantova, Giovannino da, 1662 Mantovani, Dino, 1290 Mantua, 3 Manuale del perfetto papa`: beati gli orfani! (Busi), 333 Manuale della perfetta Mamma: con qualche contrazione anche per il Papa` (Busi), 333 Manuale dell’uomo domestico (Severgnini), 981 Manuale minimo dell’attore (Fo), 500 Manuli, Guido, 51 Manuscrit de Venise, 783 Manuscrit d’Oxford, 783 Manutio, Aldo, 1960 Manutius, Aldus, 80, 87, 1504 Bembo, P., and, 163, 166 Manuzio, Aldo, 2, 293, 294, 490 Manzini, Gianna, 1130–1132 Manzoni, Alessandro, 47, 68, 109, 113, 147, 232, 352, 463, 483, 538, 761, 819, 935, 937, 939, 1132–1142, 1203, 1240, 1430, 1448, 1481, 1563, 1568–1569, 1858. See also Romanticism Aleardi and, 13 Arbasino and, 62 Bacchelli and, 111 Bartoli, D., and, 134 Bellonci and, 161 Boito, A., and, 273 book production and, 293 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Carducci and, 388 D’Azeglio, M., and, 573 De Amicis and, 575 De Marchi, E., and, 611 De Sanctis and, 616, 617 Enlightenment and, 664 Faldella and, 680 Fogazzaro and, 744 Folgore and, 753 Foscolo and, 765 Giordani, Pietro, and, 851 Giusti and, 860 Grossi and, 897 homosexuality and, 1032 language and, 1054–1055 Maggi and, 1104 Malaparte and, 1114 Mazzini and, 1175 Monti, V., and, 1218 Morazzoni and, 1236 music and, 1256 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Nievo and, 1292 Orelli and, 1318 Parini, G., and, 1349 Pascoli and, 1361 Pirandello and, 1450

Porta, C., and, 1485, 1487 Praga, E., and, 1490, 1491 Rebora and, 1555 Risorgimento and, 1590 Romanticism and, 1596 Rovani and, 1627 Saba and, 1643 Sciascia and, 1706 Silone and, 1755 Testori and, 1869 Tommaseo and, 1883 translation and, 1902 Vassalli and, 1957 in Venice, 1960 Verga, G., and, 1963, 1964 Verri, P., and, 1979 Zanella and, 2035 Manzoni, Matilde, Garboli and, 809 Mao Zedong, 1372 Mar delle Blatte e altre storie, Il (Landolfi), 686 ‘‘Mar delle blatte, Il’’ (Landolfi), 996 Maraini, Dacia, 473, 671, 709, 936, 1142–1147, 1548 Bellonci and, 160 terrorism and, 1863 Maraja, Libico, 51 Marangoni, Matteo, 99 Maratona di New York (Erba, E.), 672 Maratta, Carlo, 2002 Maratti, Carlo, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Marcatre´, Rasy and, 1549 Marc’Aurelio, 51, 700, 1729, 1730 Marceau, Marcel, 500 Marcella, Martha, 449 Marcellini, Romolo, 732 Marcello, Benedetto, 1312 music and, 1256 Marchesa Colombi, 670, 671, 1147–1149 Marchese, Cassandra, 1675 Marchese di Roccaverdina, Il (Capuana), 383–384 Marchesi, Concetto, 1936 Marchesi, Marcello, 1544, 1730 Marchesini, Pieralberto, 1040 Marchetti, Alessandro, 1558 Marchi, Giacomo. See Bassani, Giorgio Marchi, Virgilio, 71 ‘‘Marcia dei braccianti di Melissa’’ (Re´paci), 1576 Marcia su Roma e dintorni (Lussu), 1081 Marciana, 1048, 1049 Marco d’Europa (Sgorlon), 1751 Marco e Mattio (Vassalli), 1957 Marco, Roberto Di, 1017 Marco Visconti (Grossi), 897, 938, 1590 Marcolini, Francesco, 854, 1505 Marcouville, Jean de, 299 Marcovaldo, ovvero le stagioni in citta` (Calvino), 344 Marcuse, Herbert, Ottieri and, 1327 Mare dell’oggettivita` (sea of objectivity), 345 Mare dell’oggettivita`, Il (Calvino), 502 Mare non bagna Napoli, Il (Ortese), 990, 1268, 1323, 1324–1325 Mareblu` (Vassalli), 1957 ‘‘Marechiare’’ (Di Giacomo), 634 Marede` Marede` (Meneghello), 1184 Maremmana, La (Pea), 1391 Marescalco, Il (Aretino), 74, 1031, 1126

I93

INDEX Marescialle e libertini (Arbasino), 63, 1261 Maresciallo Rocca, Il, 633 Maresco, Franco, Archibuga and, 68 Marfisa (Aretino), 74, 76 Marfisa bizzarra, La (Gozzi, C.), 880 Margherita, 979 Margherita Pusterla (Cantu`), 938 Margherite e rosolacci (Scotellaro), 1725 Marguerite of Valois, 1921 Mari, Febo, 596, 654 Mari, Pasquale, Archibugi and, 68 Maria (Romano, L.), 1593 Maria Antonietta Torriani Torelli-Viollier. See Marchesa Colombi Maria Brasca, La (Testori), 1206, 1869 Maria Stuarda (Maraini), 1143 Maria Tudor (Praga, E.), 1491 Mariangeli, Giovanni, 451 Mariani, Gaetano, 689 scapigliatura and, 1699 Marianna Sirca (Deledda), 593 Marı´as, Javier, 936 Mariazi, 1638 Marietti, Marina, 1736 Marijuana della mama e` la piu` bella (Fo), 740 Marilotti, Gianni, 1865 Marimismo, 1413 Marin, Biagio, 1149–1151, 1912 Paolini and, 1345 Pierro and, 1444 Marina, Isabella Villa, Terracina and, 1861 Marinella, Lucrezia, 450, 755, 1152–1153 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 73, 360, 470, 538, 723, 758, 818, 874, 1089, 1154–1157, 1340, 1718, 1853, 2003 Folgore and, 752 futurism and, 691, 791 in Genoa, 817 in Milan, 1204 Palazzeschi and, 1333 Papini and, 1346 photography and, 1433 teatro grottesco and, 1848 World War I and, 2029 Marini, Giovanni Ambrogio, 1128, 1345, 1480, 1786 Marini, Quinti, 1884 Marinismo, 1843 Marinisti, 1158–1160 Marino, Giovanbattista, 277, 538, 669, 933, 935, 1088, 1126, 1127, 1128, 1158, 1160–1165. See also Mannerism and Baroque Chiabrera and, 455 as critic, 1058 De Sanctis and, 617 in Genoa, 816 Gravina and, 1189 Matraini and, 1172 music and, 1254, 1255 in Rome, 1604 Settembrini and, 1749 Tasso, T., and, 1835 in Turin, 1921 Marinoni, Augusto, 1008 ‘‘Mario’’ (Moravia), 1235 Mario e i Cimbri (Niccolini, G.), 1289 Mario, E.A., 634 Mario, Maria e Mario (Scola), 1723

I94

Marionette, che passione! (Rosso), 458, 1625, 1626–1627 Marionette ‘‘ideofore,’’ 452 Mariti, I (Torelli, A.), 837 Marito amante della moglie, Il (Giacosa), 837 Marito di Elena, Il (Verga, G.), 1965 Marito, Il (Dolce), 639 Marito in colegio, Il (Guareschi), 900 Marito per Anna Zaccheo, Un (De Santis), 619 Mariuccine, Le (Buttafuoco), 1592, 2026 Marliani, Giuseppe, 871 Marliani, Maddalena, 871 Marlow, Christopher, Montale and, 1212 Marmi, I (Doni), 646, 1939 Marocco (De Amicis), 575 Maroncelli, Piero, 1393 Marot, Jean, Petrarch and, 1413 Marotta, Giuseppe in Naples, 1268, 1547 in Palermo, 1339 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, 346, 936, 1610, 1815 Bonaviri and, 284 Marradi (Vassalli), 1957 Marrakech Express (Salvatores), 1663 Marrazzo, Pasquale, 1247 Marriage Aleramo on, 15 donna, Una and, 18 Marsuppini, Carlo, 1463 Martegiani, Gina, 1596 Martelli, Diego, 2003 Martelli, Giampaolo, 1112, 1178 Martelli Law, 1200 Martelli, Mario, 1177, 1520, 1521 Martelli, Massimo, 1864 Martelliano, 870 Martello, Pier Jacopo, 277 Martellotti, Guido, 1414 Marthono, Nicolaus de, 1905 Marti, Mario, 44, 45, 1636 Martiados (Filelfo, G.), 518 Martial, 1712 Martin of Troppau, 1656 Martinelli, Franco, 250 Martinelli, Renzo, 1865 Martinelli, Tristano, 498 Martinengo, Ascanio, 175 Martinez, Ronald, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Martini, Arturo, 2003 Martini, Fausto Maria, 520 crepuscolarismo and, 521 De Filippo and, 585 teatro grottesco and, 1849 Martini, Ferdinando Maria cinema and, 469 Scarpetta and, 1701 Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 11001 Martini, Virgilio, 1718 Martino, Ernesto De, 52, 53 Gramsci and, 54 Moscato and, 1247 Martoglio, Nino, 307, 469, 1165–1167 cinema and, 469 Martone, Mario, 1247, 1354, 1730 Martyre de Saint Se´bastien, Le (D’Annunzio), 541

INDEX Marulli, Giacomo, 1401 Marx brothers, 434, 1893–1894 Marx, Karl, 501, 887, 1175, 1372 Fortini and, 760 Mazzini and, 1176 Ottieri and, 1327 Re`paci and, 1576 Salvemini and, 1665 Marxism, 49, 96, 1428 Bellocchio and, 158 Bertolucci, B., and, 198 Croce, B., and, 523 Debenedetti and, 577 Gentile and, 823 Gramsci and, 889, 1065 Guiducci and, 921 Silone and, 1755 Visconti, L., and, 1996 Vittorini and, 2005 Marziano a Roma, Un (Flaiano), 732, 1719 ‘‘Marzo 1823’’ (Manzoni), 1590 ‘‘Marzo in ru Mouffetard’’ (Spaziani), 1787 Marzocco, Il, 387, 983, 1364 Neera and, 1272 Pascoli and, 1358 Sarfatti and, 1681 Marzullo, Benedetto, 279 Masaccio in Florence, 736 humanism and, 952 Vasari and, 1953 Masali, Luca, 1720 Masazuola, 43 Mascagni, Pietro, 499, 541, 685, 1052, 1313, 1965 music and, 1254, 1257 Maschera della fortuna, La (Rak), 137 Maschera di Bertoldo, La (Croce, G.), 532 Maschera e il volto, La (Chiarelli), 458, 1848 Mascherata, La (Moravia), 1230 Maschere, Le (Mascagni), 499 Masina, Giulietta, 701 Masini, Ferruccio, 936 Masino, Paola, 1167–1169 Resistance and, 1581 Mask, The, 499 Maso, Carole, 964 Masques et Bouffons (Sand, G.), 1637 Massari, Lea, 1208 Masse`ra, Aldo Francesco, 1636 Masserizia (possessions), 1888 Massimi, Petronilla Paolini, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Masters, Edgar Lee, 49, 1258, 1825 Pavese and, 1381 Mastrangelina (Alvaro), 29 Mastriani, Francesco, 1481, 1734 socialism and, 1769 Mastro-don Gesualdo (Verga, G.), 939, 1564, 1964, 1969–1970 Mastrocinque, Camillo, 461, 2042 Mastroianni, Marcello, 67, 237, 281, 311, 473, 589, 701, 1114, 1143, 1723, 1816 Monicelliand, 1208 Otto e mezzo and, 704 Mastronardi, Lucio, 502, 1169–1170 Mastropaolo, Michele, 723

Masuccio Salernitano, 1170–1172. See also Novella Matacotta, Franco, Aleramo and, 16 Matarazzo, Francesco, historiography and, 941 Mater dolorosa (Rovetta), 1631 Mater Natura (Andrei), 1247 Materada (Tomizza), 1880, 1911 Materia di Reading e altri reperti (Meneghello), 1184 Material Ghost, The (Perez, G.), 56 Materiale e l’immaginario (Ceserani and Federicis), 94 Materiali per una tragedia tedesca (Tarantino, A.), 1826 Materialism, 382 ‘‘Materialismo’’ (Zanella), 2035 Materna lingua (mother tongue), 1181 Maternita` (Negri, Ada), 1273 Matie`re de Bretagne (Troyes), 783 Matraini, Chiara Contarini, 1172–1174 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Petrarchism and, 1421 Matrigna (stepmother), 1028 Matrimonio all’italiana (De Sica), 589 Matrimonio di Casanova, Il (Simoni), 1760 Matrimonio di Maria, Il (Campo, R.), 372 Matrimonio, Il (Aleardi), 13 Matrimonio in brigata (Vigano`), 1988 Matrimonio in provincia, Un (Marchesa Colombi), 1148 Mattadore, 193 Mattarella, Bernardo, 644 Mattatoio, Il (Pressburger), 1499 Mattei, Enrico, 980 Matteotti, Giacomo, 888, 2006 Matteucci, Carlo, 822 Matteucci, Nicola, 278 Matthau, Walter, 177 Matthew of Paris, 780 Matthiessen, Francis Otto, 760 Mattina ci siam svegliati, Una (Balestrini), 115 Mattino dell’Italia centrale, Il, 683 Mattino d’Italia, Il, 307 Mattino, Il, 185, 978 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 297 Malaparte and, 1113 Serao and, 1733 Mattioda, Enrico, 1478 Mattiola, Francesco, 790 ‘‘Matto delle giundcaie, Il’’ (Fucini), 786 Mattoidi, I (Dossi), 648 Mattoli, Mario, 1701 Maturi, Walter, historiography and, 945 Matute, Ana Marı´a, 936 Maudit, 359, 360 Maupassant, Guy de, 511, 684 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 Porta, C., and, 1486 in Venice, 1961 Visconti, L., and, 1995 Mauriac, Franc¸ois, 678 Mauro, Enzo Di, 1277 Maurus, Rabanus, 821 Maximes, Les (Rochefoucauld), 784 Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman. See Ricordi (Guicciardini) Maximus, Valerius, 1295 Petrarch and, 1415 Sacchetti, F., and, 1648

I95

INDEX Mayer, Edwin Justus, 438 Maykowsky, Vladimir, 739 Maylender, Michele, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Mayr, Sigismundo, 1677 Mazzacurati, Giancarlo, 932, 1730 Paolini and, 1345 Mazzanti, Enrico, 463, 465 Mazzantini, Carlo, 2032 Mazzeo, Joseph, 558 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 151, 616, 816, 826, 1061, 1174–1177, 1910. See also Risorgimento Cattaneo, C., and, 418 Fucini and, 786 Hayez and, 1590 historical novels and, 938 Oriani, A., and, 1319 Risorgimento and, 1590 Romanticism and, 1598 in Rome, 1606 Rovani and, 1628 Salvemini and, 1665 Stu´parich and, 1804 Mazzini Society, 1666 Mazziotti, Maria, 965 Mazzocchi, Silvana, 1865 Mazzoni, Francesco, 1004 Mazzoni, Guido, Carducci and, 1936 Mazzoni, Jacopo Comedia (Dante) and, 560 historiography and, 942 Mazzucato, Alberto, 1259 Mazzucchetti, Lavinia, 1556 Mazzuchelli, Giammaria, 232 McBain, Jill, 1015 McCay, Winsor, 50 McEnroe, John, 132 McLaren, Norman, 50 McLuhan, Marshall, 49, 101 Mea culpa (Vivanti), 2012 Mean Streets (Scorsese), 701 Meano, Cesare, 696 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 857 Medea (Gozzi, G.), 883 Medea (Pasolini), 1368, 1372 Medebac, Girolamo, 865 Medicamenta (Valduga), 1941 Medici, Cosimo de’, 1–2, 439 Aretino and, 74 Borghini, V., and, 300 Cellini and, 442 Giovanni, D., and, 33 Piccolomini and, 1438 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1517 Sacra rappresentazione and, 1651 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Varchi and, 1948 Medici, Ferdinando de’, 1861 Medici, Giovanni de’, 117, 456 Belcari and, 149 Bibbiena, B., and, 221 Borghini, R., and, 299 in Florence, 736 Medici, Giulio de’, 74 Leonardo Da Vinci and, 1009–1010

I96

Poliziano and, 1468 Redi and, 1558 Medici, Ippolito de’, 187 Medici, Leopoldo de’, 231, 737 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 107, 186, 255, 518, 667, 1177–1181, 1652 Buonarroti, M., and, 328 Della Casa and, 601 Fedele and, 698 Ficino and, 720 in Florence, 736 food and, 757 homosexuality and, 1031 humanism and, 953 Landino and, 994 Machiavelli and, 1093, 1097 Neoplatonism and, 1282 Pico della Mirandola and, 1440 Poliziano and, 1463 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1517 Sacchetti, F., and, 1648–1649 Sacra rappresentazione and, 1651 Medici, Maria de’, 456 Marino and, 1161 Medici, Piero de’, 1938 Alberti, Leon, and, 8 Medicina (Campanella), 364 Medicina forte (strong medicine), 1099 Medietas (middle tone), 264, 1421 Medioevo, Il (Volpe, Gioacchino), 945 Medioevo volgare da Montecassino all’Umbria (Baldelli), 1315 Mediolanium, 1203 Meditationi spirituali (Matraini), 1172 Meditazioni di economia politica (Verri, P.), 663, 1980 Meditazioni sull’ economia politica (Verri, P.), 1980 Meditazioni sulla felicita` (Aubert), 147 Mediterranean Runs through Brooklyn, The (Valerio), 964 Mediterranee (Saba), 1647 Mediterraneo (Montale), 1215 Mediterraneo (Salvatores), 69, 1663 Mediterraneo, Flaiano and, 732 Medusa, 1860 Medusa (Graf), 885 Mefistofele (Boito, A.), 273, 685, 826, 1051 Meglio, Antonio di Matteo di, 1651 Meglio gioventu`, La (Giordana), 1866 Meglio gioventu`, La (Pasolini), 1369 Mei, Girolamo, 300 Meis, Angelo Camillo De, 382 Meis, Camillo De, 616 Mela e il serpente, Il (Guiducci), 921 ‘‘Melanconia, La’’ (Pindemonte), 1446 Melandri, Lea, 706, 1513 Melato, Mariangela, 2022 Melchiorri, Tommaso, 1160 Meli, Giovanni, 202, 463, 935, 1182–1183, 1564 in Palermo, 1338 Pierro and, 1444 Melitti, Moshen, 1200, 1202 Melloni, Macedonio, 1431 Melodia (melody), 407 meloromanzo (melonovel), 898 Melusina, una ballata e un diario (Porta, A.), 1483

INDEX Melville, Herman, 570, 1902 Celati and, 435 Montale and, 1212 Melzi, Francesco, 1007 Melzi, Robert, 406 Memmo, Andrea, 2003 Me´moires (Goldoni), 107, 397, 497, 865 Memoirs of My Life and Writings (Gibbons), 108 Memoria, 2025 ‘‘Memoria di donne e bambini nei lager nazisiti’’ (Tedeschi, G.), 948 Memoria felice, La (Gatto), 812 Memoriale (Angela da Foligno), 1566 Memoriale (Volponi), 502, 817, 1922, 2016, 2019–2020 Memoriale dal carcere svizzero (Silone), 1755 Memoriale, Il (Angela da Foligno), 41 Memoriali Bolognesi (Giacomo da Lentini), 834 Memorie (Da Ponte), 107 Memorie (De Amicis), 576 Memorie (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Memorie del mondo somerso (Alvaro), 29 Memorie del presbiterio (Praga, E.), 1491 Memorie del presbiterio. Scene di provinciale (Praga), 1698 Memorie della mia vita (Chirico, G.), 2004 Memorie dell’incoscienza (Ottieri), 1327 Memorie di economia pubblica (Cattaneo, C.), 418 Memorie di un cuoco d’astronave (Mongai), 1720 Memorie di un pulcino, Le (Baccini), 464, 484 Memorie di una ladra (Maraini), 473, 1143 Memorie in valigia (Parati), 1202 Memorie inedite (Giusti), 861 Memorie inutili (Gozzi, C.), 107, 881 Memories (Da Ponte), 568 Memories of the Night (Russolo), 793 Men and Not Men. See Uomini e no (Vittorini) Menabo`, Il, 502, 570, 985, 1856, 1923 Fortini and, 761 Giudici, G., and, 859 Leonetti and, 1016 Mastronardi and, 1169 Vittorini and, 2007 Menaechmi (Plautus), 89, 221, 1916 Firenzuola and, 730 Menante (reporter), 262 Me´nard, Louis Nicolas, 2035 Menardi, Leo, 461 Menasci, Guido, 1052, 1965 Mendelssohn, Felix, 1256 Menecmi, I (Plautus), 461 Meneghello, Luigi, 47, 1184–1186 Resistance and, 1580 Menexenus (Plato), 818 Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo, 1063, 1318, 1365, 1615, 1762 Marin and, 1150 Quasimodo and, 1525 Tessa and, 1867 Mengele, Josef, 1109 Mengs, Anton Raphael, 1278 Menichelli, Pina, 1329 Menna, Filiberto, 101 Menotti, Giancarlo, 1474 Menotti, Mose`, 1434 Mentre la mia bella dorme (Campo, R.), 372 Menzini, Benedetto, 1558

Menzogna del sentimento nell’arte, La (Pirandello), 1450 Menzogna e sortilegio (Morante), 1224 Menzogne della notte, Le (Bufalino), 321, 322 Meo Patacca, Il (Petacca), 1605 Me´pris, Le (Godard), 472, 1112 Meraviglia (aesthetic of wonder), 36, 1127, 1162 Baroque and, 1162–1163 Meravigliosa avventura, La (Silvestri, A.), 1718 ‘‘Meravigliosamente’’ (Giacomo da Lentini), 835, 1752 Meraviglioso, 456 Mercantini, Luigi, Risorgimento and, 1590 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare), 47 Mercurio, 582 Rea and, 1552 Meredyth, Bess, 438 Merezˇkovskij, Dmitry, 1634 Merendanze, Le (Sereni, C.), 697, 1739 Meridiano di Roma, Il, 403 Debenedetti and, 578 Morante and, 1224 Meridionale di Vigevano (Mastronardi), 1169 Meridionalismo (Meridionalism), 1532 ‘‘Meriggio’’ (D’Annunzio), 544, 1451 Merini, Alda, 1186–1189 in Milan, 1206 Merito delle donne, Il (Fonte, M.), 755 Merlin Cocai. See Folengo, Teofilo Meroi, Nives, 609 Merola, Mario, 1269 Merope (Alfieri, V.), 22, 544 Merope (D’Annunzio), 541 Merril, J., Tarozzi and, 1829 Mersenne, Marin, 135 Meschino, altramente detto il Guerrino, Il (Tullia d’Aragona), 1919 Mese in URSS, Un (Moravia), 1232 Mesmerism, 1827 Messa da Requiem, 1136 Messa e` finita, La (Moretti, N.), 1240 Messaggero, Il, 162, 978 Bevilacqua, A., and, 216 Camilleri and, 355 Cerami and, 448 De Ce´spedes and, 581 Fortini and, 761 Manganelli and, 1124 Morandini and, 1222 Petrignani and, 1423 Messaggiero, Il (Tasso, T.), 1839 Messaggio, 793 Messagio dalla camera oscura (Mollino), 1434 Messere, Gregorio, 893 Messico (Cecchi, E.), 430 Messina, Antonello da, 510 Messina, Tommaso da, 1571 Messisburgo, Cristoforo, 757 ‘‘Mesta e pentita de’ miei gravi errori’’ (Stampa), 1800 Meste ombre (sad shades), 1822 Mestiere delle armi, Il (Olmi), 1306 Mestiere di poeta, Il (Camon), 357 Mestiere di scrittore, Il (Camon), 357 Metafora e storia (Raimondi, Ezio), 1063 Metamorfosi, Le (Romano, L.), 1593 Metamorphoses (Apuleius), 201, 730, 1297 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 24, 82, 92, 249, 256, 932, 1050

I97

INDEX Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Expositio (Aristotle), 1704 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 561 Metaphysics of verticality, 1159 Metastasio, Pietro, 4, 20, 568, 784, 826, 935, 1050, 1158, 1189–1194. See also Opera Baretti and, 130 Calzabigi and, 1060 classicism and, 480 music and, 1254 in Palermo, 1338 in Rome, 1605 Metello (Bolognini), 281 Metello (Pratolini), 737 Meteo (Zanzotto), 2039 Metereorum liber (Pontano), 1481 Methnani, Salah, 1199 Metropolis (Porta, A.), 1483 Mettere al mondo il mondo (Muraro), 1250 Mettiteve a fa’ l’ammore co me (Scarpetta), 1701 Mettiteve a fa’ l’ammore cu me (Cirillo), 1701 Mettrie, Julien Offray de La, 1020 Metz, Christian, 725 Metz, Vittorio, 1730 Meun, Jean de, 728, 783 Mexı´a, Pedro, 1298 Mezzera, Franco, 1882 Mezzi di trasporto (Rasy), 1549 Mezzogiorno (Italian South), 184, 1532 Rea and, 1552 Mi riguarda (Sereni, C.), 1739 Mia esistenza d’acquario, La (Rosso), 1624 Mia generazione, La (Labate), 1864 Mia giornata, La (Farina), 689 ‘‘Mia giornata paziente, La’’ (Quasimodo), 1527 ‘‘Mia guerra, La’’ (Vittorini), 2006 Mia madre un secolo (Ramat), 1542 Mia vita, La (Carra`), 2004 Miani, Antonio, 489 Miani, Giovanni, 1909 Micciche`, Lino, neorealism and, 1283 Miccini, Eugenio, 1277 Miccione, Daniele, 1200 Miccoli, Paolo, 1316 Michaux, Henri, 675 Michelangelo. See Buonarroti, Michelangelo Michele Boschino (Dessı`), 629 Michele, Giacomo di. See Folgo´re Michele, Grazia Di, 1786 Michelet, Jules Genoa and, 815 Renaissance and, 1571 Micheletti, Alessandro, 1200 Michelis, Cesare De, 1634 Michelis, Eurialo De, 598 Michelstaedter, Carlo, 827, 1109, 1150, 1195–1197, 1222 Debenedetti and, 577 Pressburger and, 1499 Michetti, Paolo, 540, 541 Michiel, Giustina Renier, 1478, 1659 Carrer and, 398 Microcosmi (Magris), 1109–1110 Microstoria school, 54 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 1456, 1663 Mie invisibilissime pagine, Le (Ragazzoni), 1540

I98

Mie memorie, Le (Garibaldi), 1592 Mie notti con Qohelet (Turoldo), 1924 Mie poesie non cambieranno il mondo, Le (Cavalli, P.), 423 Mie prigioni, Le (Pellico), 1392, 1589, 1597 Mie stagioni, Le (Comisso), 496 Miei ricordi, I (D’Azeglio, M.), 573, 1592, 1922 Miele amaro (Cambosu), 1564, 1686 Mieli, Mario, 1033, 1197–1198. See also Lesbian and Gay Writing Mieli, Paolo, 981 Migiel, Marilyn, 778 Migliacci, Franco, 1792 Miglieruolo, Mauro Antonio, 1719 Miglior vita, La (Tomizza), 1880, 1911 Migliori, Nino, 1434 Migliorini, Bruno, 1793 Mignault, Claude, Alciato and, 11 Migne, J.P., 1704 Mignet, Franc¸ois, 150 Mignon e` partita (Archibugi), 67, 69 Migo figlio! (Farina), 688 Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture (Parati), 1199 Migration Literature, 1199–1203 Miklasevsij, Konstantin, 499 Mikrokosmos (Sanguineti), 1670 Mila, Massimo, 1259, 1922 Milan, 1203–1207, 1560 Milan Football Club, 1860 Milani, Mino, 464 Milanin Milanon (De Marchi, E.), 612 Milano 1883 (Sacchetti, F.), 1698 ‘‘Milano, Agosto 1945’’ (Quasimodo), 1527 Milano non e` Milano (Nove), 374 Milano, Paolo, 2031 Milano sera, 812 Risi, N., and, 1587 Vittorini and, 2005 Milarepa (Cavani), 425 Milazzo, Ivo, 790 Milelli, Domenico, 1827 Miles Gloriosus (Plautus), 1903 Miletto, Checco di, 258 Milione, Il (Paolini), 1345 Milione, Il (Polo), 344, 783, 1960 Military science, 26 Milites Beatae Virginis Mariae, 925 Milizia fascista, 980 Milizia, Francesco, 232, 2003 classicism and, 480 Mill, John Stuart, 1147 Milla´s, Juan Jose´, 936 Mille e una notte, 1561 Millemosche (Guerra and Malerba), 906 Millenio che muore, Il (Vassalli), 1956 Miller, Arthur, 1995 Miller, Henry, 219, 1886 travel literature and, 1906 Millo, Achille, La Capria and, 989 Millu, Liana, 948 Milosz, Czeslaw, Montale and, 1211 ‘‘Milton e Galileo’’ (Zanella), 2035 Milton, John, 37, 409, 1713 Baretti and, 129

INDEX Gailei, G., and, 804 Petrarch and, 1413 Milun et Rolandin, 666 Mimesis (Auerbach), 783 Mimı` mettallurgico ferito nell’onore (Wertmu¨ller), 2021 Minato, Nicolo`, 1050 Minatori della Maremma (Bianciardi and Cassola), 218, 404 MinCulPop. See Ministry of Popular Culture Minerva oscura (Pascoli), 1361 Minestrone, Il (Citti), 177 Minghelli, Giuliana, Svevo and, 1808 Minghetti, Marco, 1659 Minguzzi, Gianfranco, 279 Minicuci, Maria, 54 Ministero della felicita`, Il (Rambelli, R.), 1720 Ministry of Popular Culture (MinCulPop), 632, 691, 980, 1507 Minnie la candida (Bontempelli), 288, 1719 Minoranze etniche in Sicilia, Le (Tornatore), 1890 Minori (minor ones), 301 Minorita, Paolino, 1562 Minotauro (Puppa), 1522 Minotto, Giovanni, 1432 Minturno, Antonio, 1088 Minuetto (Di Giacomo), 635 Minuetto dell’anima nostra, Il (Rosso), 1624 Mio amico Pasqualino, Il (Fellini), 700 Mio Carso, Il (Sla`taper), 1765, 1911 Mio figlio ferroviere (Ojetti), 1303 Mio figlio sconsolato (my inconsolable son), 1187 Mio invincibile amore (my invincible love), 1187 Mio marito (Maraini), 473, 1142 ‘‘Mio mestiere, Il’’ (Ginzburg, N.), 843 Mio padre amore mio (Maraini), 473, 1143 Mio paese, Il (Bigiaretti), 224 ‘‘Mio popolo’’ (Jahier), 974 Mirabile visione, La (Pascoli), 1361 Mirabilia Urbis Romae (Romano), 1603–1604 Miracles n’ont lieu qu’une fois (Alle´gret), 1474 Miracole de Roma, Le, 1604 Miracoli della Val Morel, I (Buzzoti), 336, 337 Miracolo (miracle), 286 Miracolo a Milano (De Sica), 623, 1284, 1728, 2042 Miracolo economico, 344 Miracolo, Il (Rossellini), 700 Miraggi (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Miraglia, Marina, 1434 Miranda (Fogazzaro), 744 Miranda, Francisco de Sa´ de, Petrarch and, 1413 Mirandolina. See Locanderia, La (Goldoni) Mirouer des simples ames, Le (Porete), 1251 Mirra (Alfieri, V.), 20, 23–24 Mirtilla (Andreini, I.), 39 Mirzia (Epicuro), 1380 Miscellanea (Poliziano), 1001 Miscellanea laurenziana (Boccaccio), 255 Miscellaneorum centuria prima (Poliziano), 1465 Mise en sce`nes, 2013 Misera viene in barca, La (Bacchelli), 940 Miserere, 1405 Miseria e nobilita` (De Filippo, E.), 584 Miseria e nobilita` (Scarpetta), 1400, 1701, 1893 Miseria viene in barca (Bacchelli), 111–112 Miserie ‘d monssu´ Travet (Bersezio), 1922 Misogallo, Il (Alfieri, V.), 22, 784

‘‘Missa romana’’ (Campo, C.), 369 Missione al Gran Mogor del p. Ridolfo d’Acquaviva (Bartoli, D.), 134 Missione Timiriazev (Pontecorvo), 1474 Missiroli, Mario, 278, 980, 1795 Missiroli, Roberto, 68 ‘‘Misteri della pedagogia’’ (Zanzotto), 2039 Misteri di Firenze, scene sociali, I (Collodi), 484 Misteri di Genova (Barrili), 816 Misteri di Mulberry, I (Ciambelli), 963 Misteri di Napoli, I (Mastriani), 1734, 1769 Misteri e avventure (Alvaro), 28 Misteri politici della Luna, I (Luna), 1718 Misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana (Eco), 659, 790 Mistero buffo, 1545 Mistero Buffo (Fo), 742–743 Mistero del poeta, Il (Fogazzaro), 744 Mistero di Oberwald, Il (Antonioni), 58 Mistero profano, 1451 Mistica statale (state mystique), 1756 Mistici, I (Campo, C. and Zolla), 369 ‘‘Misura della bellezza, La’’ (Levi, P.), 1040 Misura onesta, Una (Bravia and Jalla), 947 ‘‘Misura, providenza e meritanza’’ (Frederick II of Hohenstaufen), 781 Misurella, Fred, 964 Mite e ordinaria (mild and ordinary), 289 Miti e coscienza del decadentismo italiano (Salinari), 580 Miti, I (Zavattini), 2043 Miti legende e superstizioni nel Medio Evo (Graf ), 886 Mito asburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna, Il (Magris), 1109 Mitridate, Flavio, 1439 Mittel Europa, 1808 Mitteleuropean (Morandini), 1222 ‘Mmiez ‘a Ferrovia (Viviani, R.), 585 Mnemosyne (Praz), 1497 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 500 ‘‘Mobile universo di folate’’ (Piccolo), 1436 Moby Dick (Melville), 570 translation of, 1902 MoCap, 50 Mocenigo, Giovanni, 316, 317 Moda (fashion), 694 Moda, La, 398 Ravera and, 1551 ‘‘Moda nera’’ (Cederna, C.), 432 Mode, Die (Simmel), 694 Modena 1833 citta` della Chartreuse (Delfini), 597 Modena, Gustavo, 397 Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 25 Modernism, 286, 542 in cinema, 1013 decadentismo and, 581 Modernus modus, 1661 Modesta Pozzo de’ Zorzi. See Fonte, Moderata Modesti, Renzo, Pozzi, A., and, 1489 Modignani, Sveva Casati, 1601 Modo che tenne ilDuca Valentino per ammazar Vitellozzo, Oliverotto da Fermo, il Signor Paolo e il Duca di Gravina Orsini in Senigaglia, Il (Machiavelli), 1092 Modugno, Domenico, 1782, 1858 Modus vivendi, 791, 1678 Moe, Nelson, 1592

I99

INDEX ‘‘Mogli di Gogol, La’’ (Landolfi), 996 Mogli e le arance, Le (D’Ambra), 470 Moglie ideale, La (Praga, M.), 1492 Mogol. See Rapetti, Giulio Moira (goddess of destiny), 462 Moissi, fantasma d’amore (Pressburger), 1500 Mokul’skij, Stepan, 500 Mole Antonelliana, 1923 Moleschott, Jacob, 616 Moleta, Vincent, 927 Moleti, Girolamo Ragusa, 1339 Molie`re, Il (Goldoni), 866 Molie`re, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 568, 739, 784, 2014 Barbieri, N., and, 1921 Cavalli, P., and, 423 Garboli and, 809 Jahier and, 974 Pressburger and, 1500 Valduga and, 1941 Molina, Antonio Mun˜oz, 936 Molina, Tirso de, 881, 935 Molino, Walter, 789 Moll, Nora, 1202 Mollino, Carlo, 1434 Molnar, Ferenc, 1344 Molombra (Fogazzaro), 686 Momento della verita`, Il (Rosi), 1609 Momento, Il, 678, 1339 Momigliano, Attilio, 287, 1065, 1936 as critic, 1062 Mommsen, Theodore, 1660 Momolo cortesan (Goldoni), 865 Momus (Alberti, Leon), 7, 933 Mona Lisa (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1007 Monaca di Sciangai e altri racconti, La (Banti), 124 Monache cantano, Le (Banti), 124 Monaciello di Napoli, Il (Ortese), 1322 Monarchia (Dante), 482, 551, 564–565, 1405 Monarchia del Messia (Campanella), 364, 365, 1568 Monarchia di Spagna (Campanella), 363 Moncallero, Giuseppe Lorenzo, 221 Mondadori, Arnoldo, 1318, 1507, 1859, 1867 Mondadori, Leonardo, 1717 Mondatori, Alberto, 1434 Mondi, I (Doni), 646, 1939 Mondo a lo schermo, 237 Mondo di Luigi Ghirri, Il (Celati), 435 Mondo e` una prigione, Il (Petroni), 1423 Mondo, Il, 980, 1607 Alvaro and, 28 Arbasino and, 63 Bianchini and, 217 Bianciardi and, 219 Bilenchi and, 228 Croce, B., and, 28 Flaiano and, 732 Garboli and, 809 Manganelli and, 1123, 1124 Maraini and, 1144 Morselli, G., and, 1246 Ottieri and, 1328 Tobino and, 1874 Vigolo and8, 257 Mondo, Lorenzo, 713

I100

Mondo nuovo, Il (Scola), 1723 Mondo occulto (Capuana), 382 Mondo piccolo (Guareschi), 899 Mondo salvato dai ragazzini, Il (Morante), 1225, 1992 Mondo vecchio sempre nuovo (Bacchelli), 111–112 Mondolfo, Rodolfo, 278, 1770 Monelli, Paolo, 2029 Monet, Claude, in Venice, 1961 Moneta, Teodoro, 978 Mongai, Massimo, 1720 Monicelli, Giorgio, 1717 Monicelli, Mario, 447, 473, 733, 829, 1208–1210, 1730, 1893 Pontecorvo and, 1474 Risi, D., and, 1584 Monk, The (Lewis, M.), 169 Monogatari, 1206 Monoplan du Pape, Le (Marinetti), 1155 Monorhymed alexandrine quatrains, 289 Montagnani, Cristina, 267 Montagnone, Geremia di, 1415 Montaigne (Valeri), 1943 Montaigne, Michel de, 375, 777 Guazzo and, 904 Solmi and, 1778 in Venice, 1961 Montalba´n, Manuel Va´zquez, 936 Montaldo, Giuliano, 732, 1988 Montale (Ramat), 1541 Montale, Eugenio, 47, 379, 582, 1210–1217, 1260, 1261, 1762, 2032. See also Hermeticism animal tales by, 203 Bertolucci, A., and, 195 Bilenchi and, 228, 229 Bufalino and, 321 crepuscolarismo and, 522 as critic, 1063–1064 Del Giudice and, 599 Eco and, 657 Erba, L., and, 674 Fascism and, 691 in Genoa, 817–818 Govoni and, 874 Gozzano and, 876 Hermeticism and, 930 lyric poetry and, 1088, 1089 music and, 1257 Noventa and, 1301 Orelli and, 1318 Pagliarani and, 1332 Pasolini and, 1374 Pea and, 1391 Piccolo and, 1435 Quasimodo and, 1526 Ragazzoni and, 1539, 1540 Ramat and, 1541–1542 Romano, L., and, 1593 Saba and, 1644 Sbarbaro and, 1694 Solmi and, 1778 Spaziani and, 1786 Svevo and, 1809 Turoldo and, 1924 Ungaretti and, 1927 Valduga and, 1942

INDEX Valeri and, 1943 World War II and, 2031 Zanzotto and, 2038 Zavattini and, 2042 Montalvo, Garci Ordon˜ez de, 934, 1831, 1840 Montanari, Danila Comastri, 633 Montanari, Gianni, 1719 Montanari, Massimo, 1574 Montanari, Raul, 374 Montanelli, Indro, 233, 432, 980 Montanhagol, Guilhem de, 572 Montano, Lorenzo, 430 Monte Circello, Il (Aleardi), 13 Monte Corvino, Giovanni da, 1905 Monte Ignoso (Masino), 1168 Monte Mario (Cassola), 404 Montefeltro, Federico da, 518, 11001 Monteleone, Enzo, 1663, 1730 Montesano, Giuseppe, in Naples, 1268 Montesquieu, 1713, 1715 Alfieri, V., and, 22 Beccaria and, 146 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Monteverdi, Angelo, Rebora and, 1556 Monteverdi, Claudio, 36, 456, 537, 1310, 1467 Ariosto and, 92 Monti, Arnaldo, 723, 826 Monti, Augusto, 1381, 1922 Monti, Paolo, 1433 Monti, Pietro, 417, 935 Monti, Vincenzo, 480, 718, 982, 1203, 1218–1221, 1605, 1633, 1853 Giordani, Pietro, and, 850 Iliad (Homer) and, 1902 neoclassicism and, 1279 Tommaseo and, 1883 Monticelli, Guido De, 339 Montignoso (Pea), 1390 Montorsoli, Giovanni Agnolo, 1952 Montresor, James, 568 Moon and the Bonfires, The. See Luna e i falo`, La (Pavese) Moonstruck (Shanley), 438 Mor, 367 Moral criticism, 63 Moral Essays, The. See Operette morali (Leopardi) Moralita` del cieco e dello storpio (Fo), 743 Moralite´s le´gendaires (Laforgue), 785 Morandi, Giorgio, 56 Hermeticism and, 930 Sarfatti and, 1681 Tarozzi and, 1829 Morandini, Giulian, 1221–1223 Morando, Bernardo, 537, 1158 Morante, Elsa, 465, 1223–1229 Bellezza and, 152 fantastic and, 687 homosexuality and, 1033 Ortese and, 1323 Tarantino, A., and, 1825 Vinci and, 1992 Morassi, Antonio, 99 Morasso, Mario, 1922 Moravia, Alberto, 48, 60, 198, 279, 280, 295, 465, 466, 472, 582, 1112, 1230–1235, 1428, 1569, 1727, 1994

Bellezza and, 152 Belli, G., and, 156 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Cassola and, 404 Cavani and, 426 Communism and, 502 fantastic and, 687 Fascism and, 692 fashion and, 697 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 homosexuality and, 1033 inept characters of, 1897 Landolfi and, 996 Manzoni and, 1132 Maraini and, 1143 as neo-avant-garde, 1276 Pratolini and, 1495 Promessi Sposi, I (Manzoni, A.) and, 1138 in Rome, 1607 Sanguineti and, 1669 travel literature and, 1909 in Venice, 1960 Vittorini and, 2006 Moravia desnudo (Saviane), 1231 Morazzoni, Marta, 1235–1237 Bellonci and, 160 Morceau choisi, 1818 Mordi e fuggi (Risi, D.), 1585 More Italian Hours, and Other Stories (Barolini), 964 More, Thomas, 367, 1768, 1938 Doni and, 646 Morel, Fe´de´ric, Alciato and, 11 Morelli, Cosimo, 718 Morelli, Giovanni, 98 Moreni, Domenico, 298 Moreto, Augustin, 935 Moretti, Marcello, 500, 1794 Moretti, Marino, 464, 520, 1237–1239 Corazzini and, 511 crepuscolarismo and, 521 lyric poetry and, 1088 Neera and, 1271 Panzini and, 1343 Moretti, Mario, 1864 Moretti, Nanni, 1240–1242, 1345 Fellini and, 702 Tornatore and, 1889 Morgana (Graf), 885 Morgante, Il (Pulci, Luigi), 444, 667–668, 1517, 1519, 1520–1522, 1938 Mori, Cesare, 1103 Moriae encomium (Erasmus), 953 Moriconi, Valeria, 1523 ‘‘Moriremo lontani’’ (Campo, C.), 369 Morlacchi, Lucilla, 1523, 1715 Morlini, Girolamo, 1297 Mornay, Philippe Duplessis, 1684 Mornings in Florence (Ruskin), 737 Moro, Aldo, 115, 159, 502, 1679, 1707, 1711, 1862 Moro di corpo bianco, Il (Gozzi, C.), 881 ‘‘Moro di Venezia, Il’’ (Giraldi, Giambattista), 857 Morphology of the Folktale (Propp), 345, 820 Morra, Isabella, 1242–1244 Petrarchism and, 1421

I101

INDEX Morrasso, Mario, 1853 Morreale, Ben, 963 Morricone, Ennio, 1015 Morrocchesi, Antonio, Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 25 Morrone, Pietro da, 956 Morsa, La (Pirandello), 1450 Morsa, La (Rosso), 1624 Morselli, Enrico, 1512 Morselli, Guido, 460, 1245–1246, 1719 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1477 Mort de Ce´sar (Voltaire), 19 ‘‘Mort della Gussona, La’’ (Tessa), 1867 ‘‘Mortal Immortal, The’’ (Shelley), 685 ‘‘Mortale immortale, Il’’ (Tarchetti), 685 Morte a Venezia (Vistonti, L.), 1996 Morte accidentale di un anarchico (Fo), 740 ‘‘Morte addosso, La’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Morte al lavoro, La (Amelio), 31 Morte degli amanti, La (Chiarelli), 460 ‘‘Morte del centauro, La’’ (D’Annunzio), 544 ‘‘morte del padre, La’’ (Jahier), 973 Morte del ricco, La (Guidacci), 919 Morte dell’inquisitore (Borges), 1707, 1711 Morte di Adamo, La (Klopstock), 884 Morte di Agag, La (Carrer), 397 Morte di Agrippina, Carrer and, 397 Morte di Carnevale, La (Di Giacomo), 2014 Morte di Ettore, La (Cesarotti), 454 Morte di Megalopoli, La (Vacca), 1720 Morte di Pasolini (Bellezza), 152 Morte di un amico (Rossi, F.), 1371 Morte di un maiale (Bertolucci, B.), 200 Morte di un matematico napoletano (Martone), 1247 Morte e pianto rituale (Martino), 53 Morte in banca, La (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1476 ‘‘Morte, perche´ m’hai fatta sı` gran guerra’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 833, 1753 Morti fortunati (Cavanzzoni), 429 Morto ai paesi (Gatto), 811 Mos gallicus, 11 Mosca (fly), 1212 Mosca, Gaetano, 863 Oriani, A., and, 1320 World War I and, 2029 Mosca, Gaspare, 1103, 1340 Mosca, Giovanni, 900 Moscardino (Pea), 1391 Moscati, Italo, 233 Moscato, Enzo, 1246–1248 in Naples, 1269 Puppa and, 1523 Mosche del capitale, Le (Volponi), 1939, 2016 Mosche d’oro, Le (Banti), 125 Mosche in bottiglia (Sinisgalli), 1762 Moschea (Folengo), 202 Moscheta, La (Ruzzante), 1639, 1640–1641 Mose` (Rossini, G.), 1590 Mose´ (Buonarroti, M.), 329 Moses (Bigongiari), 226 Mossa del cavallo, La (Camilleri), 355 Mostacci, Jacopo, 1443, 1753 Mostra della rivoluzione fascista, 1682 Mostra, La (Magris), 1110 Mostri, I (Risi, D.), 1585, 1722

I102

Mostro, Il (Benigni), 177 Mostro turchino, Il (Gozzi, C.), 881 Mots dans la peinture, Les (Butor), 821 Mots en liberte´ futuriste, Les, 1155 Motta, Luigi, 1718 Motti (witty sayings), 330 Motti e facezie del Pivano Arlotto, 1297 Mouhy, Charles de Fieux de, 400 Mount Allegro (Mangione), 963 Mountain Giants. See Giganti della montagna, I (Pirandello) Movies. See Cinema Movimento di Liberazione della Donna, 707 ‘‘Movimento spaziale,’’ 976 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 481, 567, 1191 Vistonti, L., and, 1996 Mozzarelli, Cesare, 519 Mozzoni, Anna Maria, 1147, 1735 Much ado about nothing (Shakespeare), 122 Mulas, Ugo, 1434 Mulino del Po, Il (Bacchelli), 111, 940, 1858, 2031 Mulino, Il, 278, 1507 ‘‘Mulo sardo lo inganni una volta sola, Il’’ (Frabotta), 772 Multiplane, 50 Munari, Bruno, 51, 1089 Rodari and, 465 Mundo por de dentro, El (Quevedo), 137 Mundus Novus (Vespucci), 1907 Munthe, Axel, 635 Muraro, Luisa, 605, 1249–1251 Pensiero della differenza and, 2025 Muraro, Michelangelo, 100 Murat, Gioacchino, 1267 Muratori (Viviani, R.), 2014 Muratori, I (Erba, E.), 673 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio, 66, 107, 231, 482, 504, 819, 1059, 1251–1253, 1478, 1568, 1713 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Castelvetro and, 406 French and, 784 historiography and, 943 Maggi and, 1105 Manzoni and, 1133 Parini, G., and, 1349 Tiraboschi and, 1872 Muratorian Canon, 1252 Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poe), 631 Muret, Marc-Antoine, 457 Muro della terra, Il (Caproni), 380 Murolo, Ernesto, 585 in Naples, 1269 Murtoleide, La (Marino), 1158, 1161, 1163 Musa decrepita, La (Sinisgalli), 1762 Musa, Gilda, 1720 Musaeus, 1704 Musatti, Cesare, 1327 Muscetta, Carlo, 1062, 1065 Saba and, 1647 Muschietti, Alfredo, 67 Muscia, Niccola, Rustio di Filippo and, 1635 ‘‘Muscia sı` fa dicere e bandire, El’’ (Rustico di Filippo), 1636 Musco, Angelo, 1165 Martoglio and, 1166 Viviani, R., and, 2014 Musco, Catanese Angelo, 1951

INDEX Muse napoletane (Basile), 137, 1269 Muse siciliane, Le (Sanclemente), 1564 Museo Bodoni, 1049 Museo d’ombre (Bufalino), 322 Museo Nazionale del Cinema, 1923 Music and Literature, 1253–1258 Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (Brown, C.), 1253 Music Criticism, 1258–1262 Musica antica e la moderna, La (Galilei, V.), 736 Musica dei ciechi, La (Viviani, R.), 2014 Musica e Musicisti, 1258 ‘‘Musica in piazza, La’’ (Boito, A.), 272 Musica per vecchi animali (Benni), 180 Musical theater, Algarotti and, 26 Musicante di Saint-Merry, Il (Sereni, V.), 1743 Musil, Robert, 827, 1806 Gadda and, 795 World War I and, 2028 Musolino, Benedetto, 1748 Mussafia, Adolfo, 969 Mussato, Albertino, 951, 1001, 1262–1263 Petrarch and, 1415 Salutati and, 1662 Musset, Alfred de, 122 Belgioioso and, 150 Gozzi, C., and, 882 in Venice, 1961 Mussolini, Benito, 28, 29, 198, 690 Bilenchi and, 228 biography of, 232 Bontempelli and, 286–287 colonialism and, 489 Duse and, 654 Felice and, 946 Gentile and, 822 Gobetti, P., and, 862 Guareschi and, 900 journalism and, 979 Julius Cesar and, 47 mafia and, 1103 Malaparte and, 1112 Marinetti and, 1156 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Oriani, A., and, 1320 Rossellini and, 1619 Sarfatti and, 1681 Serao and, 1735 Tessa and, 1867 Ungaretti and, 1932 Vittorini and, 2005 Mussolini, Vittorio, 58 Musti, Manilio Lo Vecchio, 459 Mutazioni (Risi, N.), 1587 ´ lvaro, 936 Mutis, A Muzi, Piero di Mariano, 1515, 1651–1652 Muzio, Girolamo, 1263–1265 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 My Darling Clementine (Ford), 828 Myasin, Leonid, 499 Myricae (Pascoli), 1089, 1359, 1360, 1364, 1365–1366 Myste`res de Paris (Sue), 1654 ‘‘Mystic Luna Park’’ (Ceronetti), 452 ‘‘Mystical marriage,’’ 414

Mystical Theology (Pseudo-Dionyius), 1281 Mysticism, 41 My Troubles Began. See Memoriale (Volponi)

N Na passiata pe Napule e pe fora (Di Giacomo), 635 ‘Na Santarella ( Scarpetta), 1701 Nabokov, Vladimir, 1124, 1634 Petrignani and, 1422 Nabucco (Verdi), 1590 Nabuchodonosor (Cornu), 1313 Nachtstu¨cke (noctural pieces), 684 Nadotti, Maria, 710 Naeniae (Pontano), 1472 Naissance d’un sixie`me Art, La (Canudo), 723 Naja Tripudians (Vivanti), 2012 Name of the Rose, The. See Nome della rosa, Il (Eco) Namias, Rodolfo, 1433 Nana (Zola), 162 Nannini, Gianni, 1663, 1786 Napione, Gianfrancesco Galeni, 1922 Naples, 1267–1270, 1560 academies in, 1 Accademia Pontaniana in, 2 Ramondino in, 1546–1547 Rea in, 1552–1553 Napoletani in America, I (Piccinni), 48 Napoletano, Francesca Bernardini, 1167 Napoli, 636 Napoli ad occhio nudo (Fucinii), 786 Napoli, Gennaro, 634 Napoli in frac (Viviani, R.), 2014 Napoli, Jacopo, 634 Napoli Milionaria! (De Filippo, E.), 585, 587, 2031 Napoli silenzio e grida (Bernari), 184 Napolitanita`, 184 Napolitano, Clemente, 1316 Narboni, Jean, 726 Narciso (Cellini), 440 Narcissism, Aleramo and, 15 Narcisso (Vassalli), 1956 Nardi, Isabella, 1304 Nardi, Jacopo, 231 Nardi, Piero Rovani and, 1627 scapigliatura and, 1699 Narducci, Anton Maria, Petrarch and, 1413 Narrare dopo Pulp Fiction, 373 Narrate, uomini la vostra storia (Savinio), 1257, 1689 Narrativa degli Scapigliati, La (Rosa, G.), 1699 Narrativa italiana del dopoguerra, La (Arpino), 96 Narrativa meridionalista, 29 Narratori delle pianure (Celati), 435 Nascita del giullare (Fo), 743 Nascita e morte della massaia (Masino), 1167, 1168 Naselli, Alberto, 498 Nastro di Moebius, Il (Erba, L.), 674 ‘‘Natale’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Natale del 1835, Il (Pomilio), 1471 Natale in casa Cupiello (De Filippo, E.), 585, 586, 590–591 Natale, Maria Orsini, 1268 Natalia (Cialente), 466 Nati due volte (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1477

I103

INDEX National, Le, 151 Nativity, 1070 Nativity Scene, The. See Natale in casa Cupiello (De Filippo, E.) Natoli, Luigi, 1339 Natura, 1030 ‘‘Natural dimostramento,’’ 420 Natural History (Pliny), 84, 127, 450 Natural Questions (Seneca), 802 ‘‘Naturale e facilmente’’ (Burchiello, Il), 331 Naturalis Historia (Pliny), 1562, 1952 Naturalism, 1971 Naturalismo contemporaneo in letteratura, Il (Daudet), 1339 Nature venature (Magrelli), 1107 Naufragi (Ungaretti), 1932 Naufragio (De Amicis), 575 Navarre, Marguerite de, 121, 407 Bandello, M., and, 117 Boccaccio and, 250 novella and, 1298 Nave bianca, La (Rossellini), 1619 Nave, La (D’Annunzio), 172, 691 Nave per Kobe: Diari giapponesi di mia madre (Maraini), 1143 Navigationi et viaggi (Ramusio), 1907 Navigazioni di Circe (Petrignani), 1422 Naviglio, Luigi, 1719 Naya, Carlo, 1432 Nazaria, Olympica, 449 Nazianzen, Saint, 396 Nazione, La, 226, 978 Bilenchi and, 228 Capuana and, 1062 Collodi and, 483 De Amicis and, 574–575 Montale and, 1212 Tondelli and, 1887 Vittorini and, 2005 Nazis Mussolini and, 29 Resistance and, 1578–1582 Nazzari, Amedeo, 461 Nazzari, Francesco, 982 Ne´ amori ne´ donne; ovvero la stalla ripulita (Casanova, Giacomo), 399, 402 Ne´ bianco ne´ viola (Orelli), 1318 Ne varietur, 137 Neapolitan, 1053, 1562 Basile and, 137 Nebbia al Giambellino (Testori), 1868–1869 Nedda (Verga, G.), 1148, 1962 Neera, 1271–1272 Maffei, C., and, 1659 ‘‘Negazione in letteratura, La’’ (Leonetti), 1016 Negretti, Amalia Liana. See Liala (Amalia Liana Negretti) Negri, Ada, 464, 470, 1204, 1273–1274 Rasy and, 1549 Negri, Anna, 371 Negri, Francesco, 1907 Negromante, Il (Ariosto, L.), 84, 88 Negroni, Leda, 1882 Nei mari estremi (Romano, L.), 1594 Nei Morlacchi: Viaggio in Sardegna (Vittorini), 2005 Neiwiller, Antonio, 1269 Nel blu, dipinto di blu (Modugno), 1782 Nel bosco sibillino (Ramat), 1542

I104

Nel buio dellanotte (De Ce´spedes), 583 ‘‘Nel carcere di Ginevra’’ (Pascoli), 1361 Nel cerchio della prigione (Braghetti and Mambro), 1865 Nel cerchio familiare (Orelli), 1318 Nel chiaro della notte (Tomizza), 1881 Nel condominio di carne (Magrelli), 1107 Nel delta del poema (Bigongiari), 226 Nel magma (Luzi, M.), 1083 Nel museo di Reims (Del Giudice), 599 Nel nome del figlio (Ammaniti), 35 Nel nome del padre (Bellocchio), 158 Nel nome dell’uomo (Montanari, G.), 1719 Nel silenzio campale (Volponi), 2018 ‘‘Nel Trigesimo di mio padre’’ (Scotellaro), 1725 Nel tuo sangue (Testori), 1869 Nel vero anno zero (Sereni, V.), 1742 Nella campagna toscana (Fucini), 786 Nella terra di mezzo (Erba, L.), 675 Nell’anno della tigre (Mazzocchi), 1865 Nell’anno Millenovecento... Dopo il trionfo del socialismo italiano (Grifoni), 1718 ‘‘Nell’annuale della fondazione di Roma’’ (Carducci), 392 Nelle gallasie oggi come oggi (Nove, Scarpa, and Montanari, R.), 374 Nelli, Francesco, 1409 Nelli, Jacopo, 784 Nell’opera del mondo (in the work of the world), 1083 ‘‘Nemesis’’ (Gozzano), 877 Nemica, La (Niccodemi), 2030 Nemici, I (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Nencia da Barberino, La (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Nencioni, Enrico, 48 decadentismo and, 580 Pompilj and, 5 Neoavanguardia, 1156, 1231, 1669 Vittorini and, 2007 Neo-avant-garde, 114, 760, 1275–1278 Campo, R., and, 371 Cassola and, 403 Celati and, 434 Niccolai and, 1286 in Palermo, 1340 Rasy and, 1548 Neoclassici e giacobini, 1563 Neoclassicism, 292, 481, 1278–1280. See also Enlightenment Puppa and, 1523 Neoitaliano: Le parole degli anni Ottanta, Il (Vassalli), 1957 Neoplantonici, I (Settembrini), 1033, 1748 Neoplatonism, 326, 605, 1280–1282 Neorealism, 347, 1283–1286 Alvaro and, 28 Amelio and, 31 animation and, 51 in anthropology, 53 Arpino and, 95 Bernari and, 183 Berto and, 191 Calvino and, 343 Cassola and, 403 censorship of, 446 in cinema, 53 De Santis and, 620 De Sica and, 622 Germi and, 828

INDEX Pasolini and, 1372 photography and, 1434 Pratolini and, 1494 Rea and, 1552 Resistance and, 1578 Rosi and, 1608 Rossellini and, 1622 Sciascia and, 1705 Visconti, L., and, 1994 Zavattini and, 2042 Neorealismo (neorealism), 53 Neorealismo rosa, 1474–1475 Risi, D., and, 1584 ‘‘Neorealismo secondo me, Il’’ (Zavattini), 2043 Neo-sperimentalismo, 1016 Nera (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 Nerbonesi, I (Barberino, A.), 667 Nere, Giovanni dalla Bande, 117 Bandello, M., and, 122 Neri, Francesca, 1664 Nerina (Morante), 1225 Nero e` l’albero dei ricordi, azzurra l’aria (Loy, R.), 1078 Nero Wolfe (Stout), 633 Nerone (Boito, A.), 273 Nerucci, Gherardo, 464 Neruda, Pablo, 936 Nesi, Christina, 514 Nesi, Giovanni, 1938 ‘‘Nessuno mi consola’’ (Sinisgalli), 1762 Nessuno torna indietro (Blasetti), 237 Nessuno torna indietro (De Ce´spedes), 582, 692 Nessuno vince il leone: Variazioni e racconti in versi (Tarozzi), 1829, 1830 Neue Sachlichkeit, 827, 1283 Neumeister, Johann, 1505 Neurosuite (Guidacci), 919 Neutonianismo per le dame (Algarotti), 26, 1712–1714 Nevada (Bianchini), 217 ‘‘Neve e’l ghiaccio e’venti d’oriente, La’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Neve, La (Govoni), 874 ‘‘Nevicata’’ (Carducci), 393 New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century, A (Estense and Crowe), 2003 New Italian Cinema Archibugi, 67–68 Salvatores and, 1663 New Journalism, 681 New Left, 502, 1592 New Life, The. See Vita Nova (Dante) New Lyrics. See Rime nuove (Carducci) New poetry, 152 New York (Parise, Goffredo), 1353 New York Times Book Review, 346 New Yorker, The, 346 Newbigin, Nerida, 1651 Newman, John, Manzoni and, 1136 Newton, Isaac, 1279, 1713 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Enlightenment and, 662 Next: Piccolo libro sulla globalizzazione e il mondo che verra` (Baricco), 132 Neyla (Komla-Ebri), 1201 Niagra, Costantino, Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 Nicæ Council, 443

Niccodemi, Dario, 459 Viviani, R., and, 2014 World War I and, 2030 Niccolai, Giulia, 1286–1288 Niccoli, Niccolo` Bracciolini, P., and, 303 Bruni, L., and, 312 humanism and, 952 Niccolini, Francesco, 1345 Niccolini, Giovanni Battista, 1140, 1288–1290 Niccolo` de’ Lapi ovvero iPalleschi e i Piagnoni (D’Azeglio, M.), 573, 938 Nichetti, Maurizio, 51, 1206 Nicholas of Cusa, 953 Nicholas V (Pope), 1048 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Nicolas Eymerich, inquisitore (Evangelisti), 1721 Nicoll, Allardyce, 498 Nicolucci, Giovan Battista, 668 as critic, 1058 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 551, 1003 Castelvetro and, 406 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Nicosi, Franca. See Ortese, Anna Maria ‘‘Nido, Il’’ (Fortini), 761 Nido, Un (Neera), 1271 Niente e cosı` sia (Fallaci), 681 Nie`pce, Joseph Nice`phore, 1431 Niethammer, Immanuel, 951 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 425, 541, 614, 826 Aleramo and, 115 Campana and, 359 Capuana and, 383 futurism and, 791 in Genoa, 815 Leopardi and, 1022 Michelstaedter and, 1195 Oriani, A., and, 1320 Sarfatti and, 1681 Savinio and, 1688 teatro grottesco and, 1850 Ungaretti and, 1928 Nievo, Ippolito, 48, 108, 1290–1294, 1563, 1628 epistolary novel and, 670 Fogazzaro and, 744 historical novels and, 939 Risorgimento and, 1592 Nifo, Agostino, 1098 novella and, 1298 Night (Wiesel), 948 Night on Earth (Jarmusch), 177 Night Search (Mangione), 964 Night Thoughts (Young), 1716 Nigra, Costantino, 464, 1479 Nigro, Salvatore, 1481 Nihilism, 339 Ninchi, Annibale, 1391 902, 784, 984, 1205 IX Ecloghe (Zanzotto), 2038 1986 (Orwell), 179 1936 (Moravia), 1232 1914 + 1 (Sciascia), 1708 Ninetta del Verzee, La (Porta, C.), 1486, 1825 Ninfa di Fontainebleau (Cellini), 440

I105

INDEX Ninfa plebea (Rea), 1553 Ninfale d’Ameto (Boccaccio), 1379 Ninfale fiesolano (Boccaccio), 242, 490, 1379 ‘‘Ninfee’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Ninon (Chiarelli), 461 Nipote, Collodi, 788 Nipotini dell’Ingegnere, 1276 Nirvana (Salvatores), 1664 Nitti, Francesco Fausto, 1081 Nitti, Saverio, questione meridionale and, 1533 No (Oriani, A.), 1320 No Man’s Land (Veronesi, S.), 1976 No soldato ‘mbriaco dinto a lo vascio de la sie´ Stella (Scarpetta), 1701 No Steady Job for Papa (Benasutti), 964 No svilippo de nobilita` e no sviluppo de miseria (Altavilla), 1400 Nobel Prize Brodskij and, 1634 Bunin and, 1634 Deledda and, 591 Fo and, 740 by Levi-Montalcini, 1716 Sˇolochov and, 1634 Solzhenitzyn and, 1634 Nobile follia, Una (Tarchetti), 685, 1827 Nobilita` et l’eccellenza delle donne, La (Marinella), 755, 1152, 1153 Nocciolo d’oliva (De Luca, E.), 609 Noce, Teresa, 1580 Nodier, Charles, 684 Nodo di parole e di cose, Un (Arbizzoni), 855 Nodo, Il (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Noferi, Adelia, Petrarch and, 1414 Nogarola, Isotta, 449 Noi credevamo (Banti), 125 Noi siamo le signore (Cederna, C.), 432 Noia, La (Moravia), 60, 1231, 1276 Nolhac, Pierre De, 1414 Nomadi, I, 1784 Nome della rosa, Il (Eco), 161, 632, 658, 659, 660–662, 940, 1030, 1428, 1508, 1819 Nome delle parole, Il (Petroni), 1425 Nome sulla sabbia, Il (Tecchi), 1851 Non al denaro, ne´ al cielo (Andre`), 1258 Non c’ e` pace tra gli ulivi (De Santis), 619 ‘‘Non chiderci la parola’’ (Montale), 1215 Non ci resta che piangere (Benigni), 177 Non credere di avere dei diritti, 707, 1250 Non gettate via la scala (Bernari), 183 ‘‘Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 327 ‘‘Non me ne maravigli, donna fina’’ (Davanzati), 572 Non mollare, 1666 Non ora, non qui (De Luca, E.), 609 non poesia (nonpoetry), 1062 ‘‘Non potra` mai dire Amore’’ (Poliziano), 1465 ‘‘Non si entra in Molie`re senza consequenze’’ (Garboli), 809 Non si sa come (Pirandello), 1453 Non stuzzicate la zanzara (Wertmu¨ller), 2021 Non ti pago (De Filippo, E.), 585 Nonfito (unfinished), 326 Nonino, 1067 ‘‘Nonna, La’’ (Morante), 1224 Nonnus, 342 Marino and, 1161 Nono, Luigi, 72

I106

Nord e sud uniti nella lotta (Guerrazzi, F.), 503 Nordau, Max, 579 Nord-Est, 358 Nores, Jason de, 902, 1059 Noris, Assa, 621 Norma (Soumet), 1313 Norton, Charles Eliot, 346 Nostalghia (Tarkovskij), Guerra and, 906 ‘‘Nostalgia’’ (Carducci), 394 Nostos (nostalgia), 282–283 Nostra Dea (Bontempelli), 288 Nostra guerra, La (De Santis), 620 Nostra Signora dei Fiori, 1197–1198 Nostra Signora dei Turchi (Bene), 170 Nostre distanze, Le (Bianchini), 217 Nostri antenati, I (Calvino), 343, 347–348 ‘‘Nota 65’’ (Bernari), 183–184 Nota, Alberto, Tasso, T., and, 1836 Nota bibliografica (Foscolo), 768 Nota bibliografica (Pascoli), 1365 Notarbartolo, Emanuele, 1103 Notari, Elvira, in Naples, 1270 Note a margine (Rossanda), 1614 Note autobiografiche (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Note azzurre (Dossi), 648, 1628 Note d’arte a Valle Giulia (Cecchi, E.), 430 Note in margine a una vita assente (Milano), 2031 ‘‘Note sui Ritratti,’ di Daniello Bartoli’’ (Garavelli), 135 Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio. See Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Pirandello) Notitia vetustatis, 1415 Notizia intorno a Didimo Chierico (Foscolo), 764, 1698 Notizie dei professori di disegno da Cimabue in qua (Baldinucci), 231 Notizie di prosa e di poesia (Betocchi), 204 Notizie naturali e civili su la Lombardia (Cattaneo, C.), 417, 1485 ‘‘Noˆtre Dame’’ (Palazzeschi), 1333 Notte a Castelguelfo, Una (Liala), 1046 Notte brava, La (Bolognini), 280, 1371 Notte d’amore, Una (Chiarelli), 459 Notte dei Pitagorici, La (Asciuti), 1721 ‘‘Notte del ‘43,’ Una’’ (Bassani), 139 Notte del ragno mannaro, La (Sgorlon), 687 Notte della cometa, La (Vassalli), 1957 Notte della vittoria, La (Tondelli), 1886 Notte dell’apocalisse (Pratolini), 1495 ‘‘Notte di marzo’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 Notte di Picasso, La (Erba, E.), 673 Notte di San Lorenzo, La (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Notte di un nevrastenico, La (Bacchelli), 112 ‘‘Notte d’inverno’’ (Carducci), 394 Notte e Giorno (Buonarroti, M.), 329 Notte, fato, e amore in la corte delle selve (Aversa), 1338 Notte in casa del ricco (Betti, U.), 207 Notte, La (Antonioni), 56, 57, 733, 1327 ‘‘Notte, La’’ (Buzzati), 337 Notte, La (Parini, G.), 1279, 1352 Nottetempo, casa per casa (Consolo), 508 Notti bianche, Le (Visconti, L.), 1995 Notti di Cabiria, Le (Fellini), 701, 733, 1371 Notti di Palermu, La (Aversa), 1338 Notti romane (Verri, A.), 480, 1605, 1978 Notti sull’altura (Bonaviri), 284 Nottole ed i Vasi, Le (Lucini), 1079 ‘‘Notturni’’ (Campana), 362

INDEX Notturno (D’Annunzio), 542, 2029 Notturno indiano (Tabucchi), 686–687, 1816, 1818–1819 Nouveau roman, le, 785 Nouvelle critique, 820 Nouvelle He´loı¨se (Rousseau), 146, 768, 1290 Nouvelle Revue Franc¸aise, 1807 Nouvelle revue franc¸aise, 984 Nouvelle vague, 158, 785 Nova de universis philosophia (Cherso), 1939 Nova SF, 1719 Novantesimo minuto (Rosa, Giovanni), 1792 Novaro, Angelo Silvio, 464 Novati, Francesco, 886 Nove, Aldo, 371, 374 with Cannibali, 373 as ‘‘young cannibal,’’ 34 Nove poesie (Trilussa), 1913 Novecento, 1167 Sarfatti and, 1681 Vittorini and, 2005 Novecento (Bertolucci, B.), 31, 132, 197, 199 Novecento Editrice, 1340 Novecento: un monologo (Baricco), 473, 1891 Novelas Esemplares (Cervantes), 202 Novella, 462, 1295–1300. See also Bandello, Matteo; Basile, Giambattista; Boccaccio, Giovanni; Giraldi, Giambattista; Grazzini, Anton Francesco; Novellino, Il; Sacchetti, Franco; Sercambi, Giovanni Bandello and, 116 of Boccaccio, 118 Novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla, La (Svevo), 1807 Novella del grasso legnaiuolo, La (Piccolomini), 786, 1297 Novella del vicomburio, La (Imbriani), 959 Novella di Cacasenno figlio del semplice Bertoldino (Croce, G.), 533 Novellaja fiorentina, La (Imbriani), 959, 1479 Novellaja milanese, La (Imbriani), 959, 1479 Novelle, 250 Novelle (Bandello), 1298 censorship of, 444 in Genoa, 816 Novelle (Bandello, M.), 120–123 Novelle (De Amicis), 575 Novelle (Gualdo), 686 Novelle (Pirandello), 687 Novelle (Sercambi), 1736 Novelle (Sermini), 1297 Novelle (short stories by Giovanni Verga), 1969–1971 Novelle con le labbbra tinte (Marinetti), 1156 Novelle cortesi, 604 Novelle dal ducato in fiamme (Gadda), 798, 1324 Novelle della Pescara (D’Annunzio), 1769 Novelle di Simonetta, Le (Lagorio), 991 Novelle e ragioni (news and reasons), 1365 Novelle edite e rare (Luzi, A.), 207, 208 Novelle letterarie, 1712 Lami and, 1979 Novelle marinaresche di Mastro Catrame, Le (Salgari), 1655 Novelle morali (Soave), 463 Novelle per un anno (Pirandello), 203, 1458–1459 Novelle Porretane (Arienti), 1297 Novelle rusticane (Verga, G.), 1532, 1964, 1969 Novelle scelte (Percoto), 1399 Novelle sentimentali (Serao), 671, 1734

Novelli, Enrico, 1718 Novelli, Ermete, 172, 1793 Bracco and, 307 Novelliere campagnuolo e altri racconti (Nievo), 1291 Novelliere, Il (Sercambi), 1736 Novellieri, 1171 Novellieri allo specchio (Folgore), 753 Novellino (Salernitano), 121, 1297 Novellino, Il, 787, 1295, 1299–1300 Novellino, Il (Masuccio Salernitano), 1170 Novello, Guido, 1991 Noventa, Giacomo, 1301–1302 Paolini and, 1345 Noverre, Jean-Georges, 538 Novismo, 403 Novissimi, I, 785, 1477, 1956 Balestrini and, 115 Novissimi, I (Giuliani, A.), 502, 1275, 1332 Novissimi, I (Porta, A.), 1482 Novissimi. Poesie per gli anni ‘60, Il (Anceschi), 985 Novissimum Testamentum (Sanguineti), 1671 Novum organon (Bacon, R.), 1704, 1986 Novus thesaurus veterum inscriptionum (Muratori), 1252 Nozza, Marco, 233 Nozze dei Centauri, Le (D’Annunzio), 172 Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia, Le (Calasso), 342 Nozze di Cana, Le (Fo), 743 Nozze di Figaro, Le (Da Ponte), 567, 1051 Nozze romane (Merini), 1186 N.U. (Antonioni), 56 Nu belle fatte (Pierro), 1444 Nuccoli, Cecco, 1031 Nucleo zero (D’Eramo), 1863 Nulla di nuovo, come principio di una scienza nuova (Noventa), 1301 Numero, 1540 Sanguineti and, 1673 Nuova Antologia, 275, 595, 1166 De Roberto and, 614 Deledda and, 591 Farina and, 689 Leopardi and, 1021 Neera and, 1272 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Pirandello and, 1455 Scarpetta and, 1701 Serao and, 1733 Nuova Arena, La, 1654 Nuova arma (la macchina), La (Morasso), 1853, 1922 Nuova colonia, La (Pirandello), 692, 1453, 1939, 2007 Nuova Donna, 2025 Nuova Europa, La, 472, 1963 Nuova fibologia (new philology), 302 Nuova gioventu`, La (Pasolini), 1369 Nuova patria, La, Imbriani and, 959 Nuova poetica leopardiana, La (Binni), 1018 Nuova raccolta di scritti per fanciulla (Thouar), 484 Nuova scena, 740, 1544 Nuove cronache (Veronesi, S.), 1976 Nuove forme del teatro contemporaneo, Le (Lodovici), 1848 Nuove liriche (Pompilj), 6 Nuove Odi barbare (Carducci), 392 Nuove poesie 1938–1944 (Quasimodo), 1527, 1529 Nuove Revolverate (Lucini), 1079

I107

INDEX Nuove Tendenze, 793 Nuovi argomenti, 153 Bertolucci, A., and, 196 Fenoglio and, 714 Maraini and, 1144 Morante and, 1223 Moravia and, 1230 Pasolini and, 1368, 1373 Rasy and, 1549 Sanvitale and, 1680 Solmi and, 1779 Veronesi, S., and, 1976 Nuovi campi elisi, I (Sinisgalli), 1762 Nuovi Imbarazzismi: quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero...e a colori (Komla-Ebri), 1201 Nuovi mostri, I (Scola), 1723 Nuovi poemetti (Pascoli), 1360 Nuovi poeti futuristi, I, 793 Nuovi racconti romani (Moravia), 1235 Nuovi saggi critici (De Sanctis), 617 Nuovi Tartufi, I (Verga, G.), 1963 Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore), 1663, 1889–1891 Nuovo commento (Manganelli), 1123 Nuovo Contadino, Giornale del popolo agricoltore, Il, 974 Nuovo corpus di sacre rappresentazioni fiorentini del Quattrocento (Newbigin), 1651 Nuovo Corriere, Il, 226 Bilenchi and, 228 Nuovo corso, Il (Pomilio), 1470 Nuovo Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia, 1873 Nuovo giornale enciclopedico, 982 Nuovo Giornale, Il, Cecchi, E., and, 430 Nuovo incantesimo, Il (Venturi, M.), 1601 ‘‘Nuovo poema misto,’’ 1842 Nuovo Ricoglitore, 1024 Nuovo rinascimento come arte dell’io (Onofri, A.), 1309 Nuti, Franca, 1523 Nuti, Mateo, 1049 Nutricia (Poliziano), 255 Nuvola come tappeto, Una (De Luca, E.), 609 Nuvola d’ira, Una (Arpino), 96 Nuvola verde e altri racconti, La (Joppolo), 976 Nuvolari (Dalla), 1792 Nuvolari, Tazio, 1792 Nuvole, Le (Andre´), 1783 NY: Undici settembre (Riotta), 981 Nymphilexis (Piccolomini), 1437

O ‘O cantante ‘e pianino (Viviani, R.), 2013 ‘‘O caro padre mio’’ (Guinizzelli), 923 ‘‘O carro vuoto sul binario morto’’ (Rebora), 1555 ‘‘O dolce terra aretina’’ (Guittone d’Arezzo), 571 ‘O funneco verde (Di Giacomo), 634 ‘O mariunciello (Viviani, R.), 2013 ‘O mese mariano (Di Giacomo), 635 ‘O miedeco d’ ‘e pazze (Scarpetta, E.), 585, 1701 ‘‘O pioggia dei cieli distrutti’’ (Rebora), 1555 O’ scarfalietto (Scarpetta), 1701 ‘O Scugnizzo (Capurro), 2013 ‘O scupatore (Viviani, R.), 2013 O sensi miei... (Turoldo), 1924 ‘O surdato ‘nnammurato, 2030

I108

‘‘O vaghe montanine pasturelle’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 ‘O vico (Viviani, R.), 2013 ‘O voto (Di Giacomo), 635 Oberdan, Guglielmo, 1910 Oberhofer, Fritz, 650 Oboe sommerso (Quasimodo), 930, 1526, 1529 O’Brien, Willis, 50 Obscenity, 168 Occasione (chance), 1098 Occasioni, Le (Montale), 818, 875, 930, 1212, 1216, 2031 Occhi di Medusa (Maraini), 1143 Occhi e nasi: Ricordi dal vero (Collodi), 484 Occhi sulla graticola (Scarpa, T.), 374 Occhio per occhio. La pena di morte in quattro storie (Veronesi, S.), 1976 Occhipinti, Alessandro Trigona, Manfridi and, 1122 Occidente (Camon), 357 Occioni, Onorato, 1936 Oceano mare (Baricco), 132, 1923 Odasi, Tifi, 748 Ode for Music on Saint Cecilia’s Day (Pope), 1712 Odes (Mazza), 1279 Odi (Parini, G.), 1350 Odi barbare (Carducci), 278, 390, 392–393, 540, 826, 1606 Odi e inni (Pascoli), 1089, 1359, 1364 Odin Theatret, 1796 Odissea (Pindemonte), 1446 Odore di eucalyptus e altri versi (Quasimodo), 930 Odyssey (Homer), 352, 472, 667 Leopardi and, 1018 Petrarch and, 1407 Pindemonte and, 1902 Oedipus Rex (Sophocles), 1510, 1835 ‘‘Of Bards, Lombards, and Longobards’’ (Biasin), 795 Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck), 2010 Off Screen (Bruno, Giuliana and Nadotti), 710 ¨ ffentliche Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek, 289 O Officina, 279, 985 Fortini and, 761 Garboli and, 809 Leonetti and, 1016 neo-avant-garde and, 1275 Pasolini and, 1064 Officina ferrarese (Longhi), 1073 Officine dei sensi,Le (Camporesi), 1481 ‘‘Officium passionis Domini’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Officium pastorum, 1069 Officium Stellae, 1069 ‘‘Ogetti e argomenti per una disperazione’’ (Pagliarani), 1332 Oggi, 598, 980 Flaiano and, 732 ‘‘Oggi tutti gli de`i e tutte le dees son morti’’ (Caproni), 379 Ogier li Danois, 666 Ogni terzo pensiero (Raboni), 1205, 1537 Ogro (Pontecorvo), 1475 Oh, Serafina! (Berto), 191 ‘‘Oime´, lasso, quelle trezze bionde’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 476 Ojetti, Ugo, 614, 1303–1305, 1493 Gramsci and, 892 Olanda (De Amicis), 575 ‘‘Old Italians Dying, The’’ (Ferlinghetti), 965 Old Testament, Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 24–25 Oliva, Achille Bonito, 98

INDEX Olivetti, Adriano, 980 Bigiaretti and, 223 Ottieri and, 1327 Olivi, Jean Pierre, 548 Olivier, Laurence, 844 Olivieri, Renato, 633 Olmi, Ermanno, 1305–1307, 1859, 1924 Archibugi and, 69 Olter desgrazzi de Giovannin Bongee (Porta, C.), 1486 Oltre il cielo, 1719 ‘‘Oltre Montale’’ (Giudici), 1211 Olympics (Bozzetto), 51 ‘‘Om ch’e` saggio non corre leggero’’ (Guinizzelli), 923 ‘‘Omaggio al 606’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 Ombre (Landolfi), 686 ‘‘Ombre’’ (Piccolo), 1435 Ombre dal fondo (Corti), 514 Ombre di fiori sul mio cammino (Liala), 1045 Ombre e destini: Poesie 1979–1983 (Vassalli), 1956 ‘‘Ombre nella sala da pranzo’’ (Jaeggy), 972 ‘‘Omero’’ (Carducci), 394 Omerta` (code of silence), 1706 Ommini e bestie (Trilussa), 202, 1913 Omnia vincit amor (Graf), 886 Omnibus, 980 Omodeo, Adolfo, historiography and, 945 On Persius’s Satyrae (Poliziano), 1464 On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, 965 On Sepulchres. See Dei sepolcri (Foscolo) On Stilicho’s Consulship (Claudian), 241 On the Nature of Gods (Cicero), 802 On the Ocean (De Amicis), 575 On vernacular eloquence (Dante), 781 On World Government. See Monarchia (Dante) Ona famiglia de cilapponi (Dossi), 648 Onda libera (Benigni), 176 Onda per onda (Michelstaedter), 1196 120 Journe´es de Sodome, Les (De Sade), 1373 One Hundred Years of Solitude (Marquez), 346, 1815 O’Neill, Eugene, 1248 Montale and, 1212 Ong, Walter J., 1314 Onofri, Arturo, 1308–1309 Onofri, Massimo, 161, 785 Onofrio, Paolo, 1349 Onore (honor), 518 Onore del vero (Luzi, M.), 1083 Op. Cit ( journal), 101 Opale (Serao), 1733 Open City. See Roma, citta` aperta (Rossellini) Opera, 48, 1310–1314 Algarotti and, 26 Giacosa and, 838 Guarini, B., and, 901–903 Opera (Bozzetto and Manuli), 51 Opera a ben vivere (Pierozzi), 1887 Opera aperta: forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Eco), 657 Opera buffa, 860, 1338 Ope´ra Comique, 499 Opera dei pupi, 92, 1339, 1341 Opera dell’arte di cucinare (Scappi), 757 Opera lirica, 736 Opera nova (Aretino), 74

Opera omnia, 109 Opera omnia (Alciato), 11 Opera quae extant omnia (Piccolomini), 1438 Opera regia, 36 Opera seria (Calzabigi), 1051 Operaismo, 609 Opere (Bellonci), 161 Opere (Della Casa), 600 Opere (Gozzi, C.), 881 Opere (Meneghello), 1184 Opere 1949–1956 (Brancati), 311 Opere di Dio, Le (Berto), 191 Opere di scultura e di plastica di Antonio Canova (Albrizzi, I.), 1658 Opere di Shakespeare (Carcano), 47 Opere e i giorni, Le, 1878 Opere e i giorni, Le (Risi, N.), 1586 Opere edite e inedite (Gozzi, C.), 881 Opere minori (Ariosto, L.), 89 Opere scelte di Tertulliano, 66 Operetta morale, 203, 984 Leopardi and, 1019, 1024 Operette moral del conte Giacomo Leopardi (Stella), 1026 Operette morali (Leopardi), 202, 385, 1020, 1026–1027, 1385, 1718 Operette Morali (Muzio), 1264 Opinione, 278 Guiducci and, 922 Opitz, Martin, 825 Opiz, Johann Ferdinand, 400 Opus coli politici editi e inediti (Settembrini), 1748 Opuscola Beati Francisci Assisiensis (Wadding), 773 Opuscoli miscellanei, 399 Opus Florentinum (Luzi, M.), 1084 ‘‘Or passata e` lasperanza’’ (Ga`mbara), 806 ‘‘Or sei salito, caro signor mio’’ (Boccaccio), 243 Ora di religione: Il sorriso di mia madre, L’ (Bellocchio), 159 ‘‘Ora parra` s’eo savero` cantare’’ (Guittone d’Arezzo), 925 Ora serrata retinae (Magrelli), 1106 Oraculum de novo saeculo (Nesi, G.), 1938 Oral Literature, 1314–1317. See also Popular Culture and Literature Oralandino (Folengo), 749 Oratio, 638 Oratio (Pico della Mirandola), 1439 Oratio ad adolescentes (Basil), 312 Oratio ad Federicum iimperatorem (Manetti, G.), 1118 Oratio de hominis dignitate (Pico della Mirandola), 953, 1001, 1439 Oratio funebris (Della Casa), 602 Oratio in hypocritas (Bruni, L.), 313 Oratio pro Bertucio Lamberto (Fedele), 698 Oratio pro Ecclesia (Savonarola), 1690 Oratio recta (direct speech), 44 ‘‘Oratio super Pater Noster’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Oratione d’Isocrate a Demonico figliuolo d’Ipponico, circa a l’essortazion de’ costumi, che si convengono a tutti i nobilissimi giovani (Matraini), 1172 Oratione sopra il Natale di Nostro Signore (Battiferra degli Ammannati), 144 Orazia, La (Aretino), 75 Orazione a difesa (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Orazione ai nobili di Lucca (Guidiccioni), 395 Orazione di Lionardo Salviati nella quale si dimostra la fiorentina favella, & i fiorentini autori essere a tutte l’altre lingue, cosı` antiche, come moderne, e a tutti gli altri scrittori di qualsivoglia lingua di gran lunga (Salviati), 1668

I109

INDEX Orazione inaugurale (Tarchetti), 1827 Orazione panegirica sulla giurisprudenza milanese (Verri, P.), 1979 Orazione seconda per la Lega (Della Casa), 602 Orazioni (Catherine of Siena), 414 Orazioni (Ruzzante), 1638 Orbecche (Giraldi, Giambattista), 856, 1126, 1790 Orbite (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Orcagna, Andrea di, 331 Orchestrine (Onofri, A.), 1308 Orda comunista (communist horde), 677 Order of the Gesuati, 148 Ordinamenti di Giustizia, 504 Ordine dei Giornalisti ( journalistic style), 980 Ordo iustorum, 1938 Ordo Prophetarum, 1069 Ordo Rachelis, 1069 Ordo scientiarum (Fedele), 698 Ore di citta` (Tessa), 1868 Ore e stagioni (Bigiaretti), 223 O’Reilly, James Columb, 400 Orelli, Giorgio, 538, 1318–1319 in Milan, 1205 Pozzi, A., and, 1489 Orengo, Nico, 1923 Oreste (Alfieri, V.), 22, 1400 Orfeo (Monteverdi, C.), 1467 Orfeo ed Euridice (Alfieri, V.), 1051 Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck), 1467 Orfeo vedovo (Savinio), 1257 Organon (Aristotle), 1702–1703 Oriani, Alfredo, 1319–1321 Oriani, Pippo, 1922 Origen, 941 Origine delle feste veneziane (Albrizzi, I.), 1659 Origine delle feste veneziane (Michiel), 1478–1479 Origines juris civilis (Gravina, G.), 893 Origini del fascismo in Italia, Le (Salvemini), 1666 Origini del teatro italiano, Le (D’Ancona), 1653 Origini del teatro italiano, Le (Toschi), 1480 Origins of the Species (Darwin), 1972 Orione, Luigi, 1755 Orlandi, Guido, 291 Orlandino (Aretino), 76 Orlandino (Folengo), 933 Orlando, Francesco, 1063, 1511 Valduga and, 1941 Orlando Furioso (Ariosto, L.), 80–85, 90–93, 164, 267, 348, 518, 668, 717, 783, 807, 1342, 1505, 1561, 1712, 1795, 1907, 1938 Colonna, V., and, 492 Dolce and, 638 Fonte, M., and, 755 in Genoa, 816 homosexuality and, 1032 music and, 1255 Tasso, B., and, 1831 Terracina and, 1861 Trissino and, 1916 Orlando Furioso (Ronconi), 1123 Orlando Furioso (Sanguineti), 1671 Orlando Furioso (Vivaldi), 92 Orlando Furioso (Tasso, T.), Manzoni, A., and, 1136 Orlando innamorato (Boiardo), 82, 91, 186, 264–266, 267–269, 436, 518, 668, 783, 1342, 1938 homosexuality and, 1032

I110

Orlando innamorato, nuovamente composto (Berni), 268 Orlando, Silvio, 1664 ‘‘Ornamentalism,’’ 751 Ornano, Alfredo, 1434 Ornato, Luigi, 1922 ‘‘Oro a Forcella’’ (Ortese), 1325 Oro, eros e armonia (Mieli, M.), 1198 Orologio (Serafino Aquilano), 1731 Oroscopo (Serafino Aquilano), 1731 Orpheo (Pergolesi), 1467 Orpheus, 1086, 1411, 1704 Petrarch and, 1405 Orpheus. See Fabula di Orpheo (Poliziano) Orphic Songs. See Canti orfici (Campana) Orsaminore, 707 Orsini, Valentino, 1845 Ortensi, Ascanio Censorio degli, 444 Ortese, Anna Maria, 47, 282, 990, 1322–1326 fantastic and, 687 in Naples, 1268, 1547 Orti Oricellari, 814 Ortolani, 2, 3 Orvieto, Adolfo, 983, 1521 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1518 Orvieto, Angiolo, 983 Orvieto, Paolo, 1177 Orwell, George, 179 Osborne, John, 63 Osiris, Wanda, 431 Osservationi intorno alle vipere (Redi), 1558 Osservationi nella volgar linga...in quattro libri (Dolce), 639 Osservatore Veneto, 664 Osservazione intorno a quelle gocciole e fili di vetro che rotte in qualsiasi parte tutte quante si stritolano (Redi), 1558 Osservazioni (Muratori), 1252 Osservazioni in appendice a trenta lettere di Giuseppe Giusti, Le (Artusi), 103 Osservazioni intorno agli animali viventi che si trovano negli animali viventi (Redi), 1558 ‘‘Osservazioni per la pronunzia fiorentina (A gli amatori della lingua fiorentina)’’ (Giambullari, P.), 840 Osservazioni sul volo degli uccelli: poesie 1956–1958 (Balestrini), 114 Osservazioni sulla morale cattolica (Manzoni, A.), 1135, 1140, 1569 Osservazioni sulla tortura (Verri, P.), 1979 Osservazioni sullo stato dell’Italia e del suo avvenire (Belgioioso), 151 Ossessione (Visconti, L.), 57, 620, 1283, 1728, 1994, 1998 Ossi di seppia (Montale), 691, 817–818, 875, 1210, 1215 ‘‘Osso di morto, Un’’ (Tarchetti), 685, 1827 Ossola, Carlo, 519, 1159, 1481 Osteria del Polpetta, 1697 Osteria dell’Ortaglia, 1697 Osteria flegrea (Gatto), 812 Ostrovskij, Aleksandr, 1634 Otello (Verdi), 47, 273, 653 Othello (Shakespeare), 47, 857 Othello (Zeffirelli), 2046 Ottantianus, Porfirius, 821 Ottava rima, 144, 667 Berni and, 186 Castiglione and, 409 Giusti and, 860 Meli and, 1338 Ottaviano, Fulvio, 35

INDEX Ottentotti (Hottentots), 181 Ottieri, Ottiero, 502, 1326–1328 Vittorini and, 2007 Otto e mezzo (Fellini), 701, 703–704, 1721 Otto mesi in due ore, ovvero gli esiliati in Siberia (Donizetti, Gaetano), 1633 Otto, Rudolf, 1565 Ottoboni, Pietro, 66 Ottoboni, Vittoria, 1979 Ottocento (Andre´), 1783 Ottocento europeo (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Ottonari, 360 Ottone, Piero, 981 ‘‘Oulipian’’ exercises, 429 OuLiPo, 785 Our Ancestors. See Nostri antenati, I (Calvino) Our Mutual Friend (Dickens), 575 Our Town (Wilder, T.), 1793 Outcault, R.F., 787 Outline Engravings and Descriptions of the Woburn Abbey Marbles (Foscolo), 765 Ovadia, Moni, 1523 Ovid, 39, 82, 240, 242, 249, 463, 493, 932, 1050, 1411, 1712 Baretti and, 129 classicism and, 479 Dolce and, 638 Franco, V., and, 777 lyric poetry and, 1087 Marino and, 1161 novella and, 1297 Petrarch and, 1404, 1415 Sannazaro and, 1675 Varchi and, 1949 Ovid’s Letter from Sappho to Phaon (Poliziano), 1464 Owen, Robert, 1768 Oxilia, Adolfo, 774 Oxilia, Nino, 1329–1330, 1922 cinema and, 469 crepuscolarismo and, 521 Ozep, Fedor, 1775 Ozick, Cynthia, 948

P Pablo (De Gregori), 1784 ‘‘Pace!’’ (Pascoli), 488 Paci, Enzo, Pozzi, A., and, 1488 Pacioli, Luca, 1007–1008 Padania, La, 981 Padiglione del libro (Scarpa), 72 Padoan, Giorgio, 221 Padova, Marsilio da, 1427 Padova, Minocchio da, 783 Padovan, Adolfo, 469 Padovani, Lea, 1951 Padre di famiglia, Il (Tasso, B.), 1832 Padre di famiglia, Il (Tasso, T.), 1839 ‘‘Padre mio’’ (Sinisgalli), 1762 Padre Padrone (Ledda), 1005 Padre padrone (Taviani, P. and V.), 1006, 1846 ‘‘Padri e figli’’ (Rea), 1553 Padrino desposado, El (Vega, L.), 122 Padrona, La (Betti, U.), 207 Padrona, La (Marchesa Colombi), 1148

Padrone, Il (Parise, Goffredo), 1354 Padrone sono me, Il (Panzini), 1342 Paesaggi (Ojetti), 1303 Paesaggio con serpente: versi 1975–1985 (Fortini), 761 Paese degli Angeli (Meneghello), 1184 Paese dei Balocchi (Meneghello), 1184 Paese deifigli perduti, Il (Cutrufelli), 535 Paese del melodramma, Il (Barilli, B.), 1261 Paese della fame, Il (Camporesi), 54 Paese di cuccagna, Il (Serao), 1734 Paese di Roma (Bigiaretti), 223 Paese di temporali e primule, Un (Pasolini), 1369 Paese d’ombre (Dessı`), 629 Paese, Il (Jahier), 973 Paese senza cielo, Il (Scerbanenco), 1718 Paese sera, 1474, 1672 Rasy and, 1549 Paese, Un (Zavattini), 2043 Paese vent’anni dopo, Un (Zavattini), 2043 Paesetto (Trilussa), 1914 Paesi tuoi (Pavese), 1285, 1382, 2031 Paga delsabato, La (Fenoglio), 712 Pagani, Mario, 1663 Pagano, Francesco Maria, in Naples, 1268 Pagano, Jo, 963 Pagetti, Carlo, science fiction and, 1720 Paglia e polvere (Guidacci), 919 Pagliacci (Leoncavallo), 1313 Pagliarani, Elio, 785, 1331–1333 as neo-avant-garde, 1275 Pagliero, Marcello, 620, 733 Pagot, Nino, 51 Pagot, Toni, 51 Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture, from Giotto to Chagall (Venturi, L.), 99 ‘‘Paio di stivaletti, Un’’ (Collodi), 484 Paisa’ (Rossellini, R.), 1474, 1496, 1610, 1619 Fellini and, 1729 Paisa` (Rossellini), 619, 700, 724, 1284 Paisello, Giovanni, 935, 1312 Pajetta, Giancarlo, 1580 Paladini di Francia, I (Gianini), 51 Paladini, Ettore, 459 Paladino, Mimmo, 1268 Paladino, Vincenzo, Spaziani and, 1786 Palamede (Gravina, G.), 894 Palamon and Arcite (Dryden), 253 Palatina, 370, 1048 Palatine School, 147 Palatino (Guittone d’Arezzo), 925–926 Palazzeschi, Aldo, 296, 1089, 1204, 1333–1337 animal tales by, 203 Bellezza and, 152 Cavalli, P., and, 423 Corazzini and, 511 crepuscolarismo and, 521 futurism and, 793, 1155 Montale and, 1211 Moretti, Mario, and, 1237, 1238 Papini and, 1346 Soffici and, 1772 Ungaretti and, 1928 Valeri and, 1943 Palazzi antichi di Genova, raccolti e disegnati (Rubens), 815

I111

INDEX Palazzo Belgioioso, 1203 Palazzo Besana, 1205 Palazzo Casnedi, 1203 Palazzo Cusani, 1203 Palazzo degli Uffizi, 736 Palazzo del Monte di Pieta`, 1203 Palazzo della Signoria, in Florence, 735 Palazzo Diamanti, 718 Palazzo e il pazzo, Il (Ottieri), 1327 Palazzo nel cielo, Il (Malaguti), 1720 Palazzo Te, 519 Palazzone, Il (Sarfatti), 1681 Palazzoni, Daniela, 1434 Palermi, Amleto, 2042 Palermitana (Folengo), 749 Palermo, 1337–1341 Palermo-Civico-Palermo (Gambero), 1340 Palestra letteraria artistica scientifica (Dossi), 647 Palinodia al Marchese Gino Capponi (Leopardi), 1853 Palio dei buffi, Il (Palazzeschi), 1334 Pall Mall Magazine, 2011 Palla di filo (Leonetti), 1017 Pallade veneta, 977 Palladio, Andrea, 70, 11001, 2002, 2003 classicism and, 480 Trissino and, 1917 in Venice, 1960 Pallavera, Franco. See Soldati, Mario Pallavicino, Ferrante, 1128 Tarabotti and, 1823 Pallavicino, Sforza, 133 Palli, Angelica Bartolomei, epistolary novel and, 670 Pallottino, Paola, 1784 Palluchini, Rodolfo, 99 Palma, Carlo Di, 1143 Palma, Michael, 965 Palma, Silvana, 488 Palmerı´n de Oliva, 934 Palmerino, Il (Dolce), 639, 934 Palmieri, Eugenio Ferdinando, cinema and, 471 Palmieri, Matteo, 463, 1651 Gelli and, 814 humanism and, 952 utopia and, 1938 Palmiro Togliatti (Bocca), 233 Palomar (Calvino), 345, 472 Palombella rossa (Moretti, N.), 1240 Palpebra rovesciata (Porta, A.), 1483 Palude definitiva, La (Manganelli), 1123–1124 Paludi (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Palummella zompae vola (Petito), 587 Palvese, Il, 1910 Pamela (Goldoni), 866 Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (Richardson), 1312 Pampaloni, Geno, Bigiaretti and, 223 Pamphili, Teresa Grillo, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Pan, 1212 Ojetti and, 1303 Pananti, Filippo, 202 Panaro, Alessandra, 1584 Panathenaicus (Aristides), 312 Panchatantra, 201, 463, 1295 Firenzuola and, 202 Panchina, La (Bufalino), 322

I112

Pancrazi, Pietro, 1233, 1803 Panda, Rasy and, 1549 Pandolfi, Mariella, 54 Pandolfi, Vito, Fabbri, Diego, and, 677 Pandolfino, Agnolo, 104 Pane, amore e fantasia (Comencini, L.), 622 Pane degli angeli, Il (Govoni), 874 ‘‘Pane dei morti, Il’’ (Percoto), 1399 Pane e vino (Papini), 1347 Pane e vino (Silone), 1755 Pane e zolfo (Pontecorvo), 1474 Pane, Roberto, 101 Pane selvaggio, Il (Camporesi), 54 Panegirico ad Antonio Casanova (Giordani, Pietro), 850 Panegirico alla sacra maesta` di Napoleone il grande (Giordani, Pietro), 850 Panella, Pasquale, 1784 Panem nostrum (Martini, Fausto), 521 Panepistemon (Poliziano), 1465 Pange Lingua (Aquinas), 1429 Pani, Corrado, 1882 Paniere di chiocciole, Un (Landolfi), 686 Panizza, Letizia, 1153, 1824 Panizzi, Antonio, 268 Pannain, Guido, 1259 Pannartz, Arnold, 1504 Pannunzio, Mario, 598, 980, 1260, 1607 Panofsky, Erwin, 100 Panorama, 180, 433, 980 Panormita, Il. See Beccadelli, Antonio Panta, Veronesi, S., and, 1976 Pantanella: canto lungo la strada (Melitti), 1200, 1202 Pantheism, of Campanella, 364 Panunto. See Romoli, Domenico Panunzio, Constantine, 963 Panzacchi, Enrico, 278 decadentismo and, 579, 580 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Panzieri, Raniero, 1770 Panzini, Alfredo, 278, 1342–1344 Serra, R., and, 1746 World War I and, 2028 Paolazzi, Leo. See Porta, Carlo Paolella, Domenico, 1951 Paoli, Gino, 818, 1782–1783 Paolina. Mistero del Coperto dei Figini (Tarchetti), 1827 Paolini, Marco, 599, 1344–1346, 1791 Puppa and, 1523 Paolo Conte (Conte), 1785 ‘‘Paolo e Virginia’’ (Gozzano), 879 Paolo Giovio: The Historian and the Crisis of Sixteenth-Century Italy (Zimmerman), 855 Paolo il caldo (Brancati), 309 Papaloni, Geno, Arpino and, 96 Papaveri e papere (Marchesi, M.), 1544 Paper Fish (Rosa, T.), 964 Papergang. Under 25, 3, 1886 Papini, Giovanni, 171, 232, 469, 723, 1346–1348, 1569 Boine and, 270 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Campana and, 359, 361 fantastic and, 687 futurism and, 793 Gobetti, P., and, 862

INDEX Gramsci and, 892 Ragazzoni and, 1539 in Rome, 1606 Russian influences of, 1634 Soffici and, 1772 Ungaretti and, 1928 utopia and, 1939 World War I and, 2029 Papiniano (Gravina, G.), 894 Papiro, Il, 359 Pap’occhio, Il (Arbore), 177 Pappacena, Anna. See Fougez, Anna Parabole per domani (Aldani), 1720 Parabosco, Girolamo, 646 novella and, 1298 Parade (Cocteau), 499 Paradise Lost (Milton), 37, 129, 804, 1713 Paradise Regained (Milton), 804 Paradisi, Agostino, neoclassicism and, 1279 Paradiso (Dante), 380, 537, 552, 554, 557–558 Paradiso degli Alberti (Gherardi, Giovanni), 1296, 1649 Paradiso degli Alberti (Prato, G.), 1254 Paradiso monacale, Il (Tarabotti), 1824 Paradiso per 4 ore (Risi, D.), 1584 Paradiso perduto, Il (De Roberto), 613 Paradoxe sur le come´dien (Brecht), 819 Paragone, 123, 153, 737 Arbasino and, 63 Bertolucci, A., and, 196 Campo, C., and, 368, 370 Cassola and, 403 Debenedetti and, 577 Fenoglio and, 714 Garboli and, 809 Giudici, G., and, 859 Lagorio and, 992 Longhi and, 1074 Raboni and, 1538 Rasy and, 1549 Paragone sugli ingegni antichi e moderni (Tassoni), 1843 Paragone-Arte, 99 Paralipomeni della Batracomiomachia (Leopardi), 202 ‘‘Parallel between Dante and Petrarch, A’’ (Foscolo), 107 Parati, Graziella, 1199, 1202 Paravicini, Luigi Alessandro, 464 Parca (goddess of childbirth and destiny), 462 Parelleli letterari (Zanella), 2036 Parentadi, I (Grazzini), 895 Parenti, Franco, 738 Parents terribles, Les (Cocteau), 1794 Parere sul miglior ordinnamento della R. Universita` di Torino (Maffei, S.), 1101 Parere sull’arte comica in Italia (Alfieri, V.), 21 ‘‘Parere sulle tragedie’’ (Alfieri, V.), 21 Pareto, Vilfredo, 863 Oriani, A., and, 1320 World War I and, 2029 Pareyson, Luigi, 659, 1429 Pariani, Laura, 936 Pariati, Pietro, 1050 Parigi sbastigliato (Alfieri, V.), 22 Parignini (Parisians), 181 Parini, Giuseppe, 202, 454, 1203, 1348–1352, 1853, 1979 fashion and, 696

Foscolo and, 763 Giusti and, 861 Manzoni and, 1133 in Milan, 1204 Monti, V., and, 1219 neoclassicism and, 1279 Porta, C., and, 1485 Praga, E., and, 1490 scapigliatura and, 1698 Parini, Jay, 966 ‘‘Parini ovvero della Gloria’’ (Leopardi), 1026 Parise, Giulio Aleramo and, 15 fantastic and, 687 Parise, Goffredo, 446, 1353–1356 Ottieri and, 1327 Parisi, Luciano, 295 Parisienne, La (Becque), 1492 Parisina (Annunzio), 122 Parisina (Byron), 122 Parisina (Mascagni), 1052, 1257 Parla una donna (Serao), 1735 Parlamenti buffi (Celati), 435 Parlamento chimico. Storie di plastica (Niccolini, F.), 1345 Parlamento de Ruzante che l’era vegnu` de campo (Ruzzante), 1638 Parlamento Ottaviano (Denina), 664 ‘‘Parlami d’amore Mariu`’’ (Bixio), 621 ‘‘Parlami d’amore Mariu`’’ (Camerini), 351 Parlerie, 62 Parliamo tanto di me (Zavattini), 471, 2042 Parmenides, Michelstaedter and, 1196 Parnassus, 143 Parodiae morales (Etienne), 932 Parola di alieno (Piegai), 1720 Parola dipinta, La (Pozzi, G.), 821 Parola ebreo, La (Loy, R.), 949, 1077 Parola innamorata, La (Pontiggia, Giancarlo and Mauro), 1277 Parola ritrovata (Sica), 1071 Parole (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Parole (Saba), 1644 Parole al buio, Le (Puppa), 1522 ‘‘Parole contro le parole’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 Parole d’amore (Bacchelli), 112 Parole d’amore scritte macchina (Conte), 1785 Parole della voce, Le (Cuomo), 1316 ‘‘Parole di esortazione alle ‘poverelle’ di San Damiano’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Parole divine dei cantori di strada, Le (Lavaroni), 1481 ‘‘Parole in agitazione’’ (Landolfi), 686 Parole in liberta` (words in freedom), 792, 820, 874, 1154 Parole sono pietre, Le (Levi, C.), 1036, 1923 Parole tra noi leggere, Le (Romano, L.), 1594 ‘‘Paroll d’on lenguagg, I’’ (Noventa), 1302 Parrhasius, Aulus Janus, Alciato and, 10 Parri, Ferruccio, 1036 Parricide, Alfieri, V., and, 19, 22 Parrini, Paolo, 1428 Parrocchie di Regalpetra, Le (Sciascia), 1705 Parrucca, La (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Partegiani, 1158 ‘‘Partenza del boscaiolo, La’’ (Pascoli), 1364 ‘‘Partenza dell’Argonauta, La’’ (Savinio), 1688 Parthenopeus sive Amores (Pontano), 1472 Partia a scacchi, Una (Giacosa), 837

I113

INDEX Particolari: Undici letture novecentesche (Ramat), 1542 Partie de campagne, Une (Renoir), 1994 Partigiano Johnny, Il (Fenoglio), 713, 714–715, 1579, 2032 Partisan Review, 1756 Partita (Porta, A.), 1482, 1484 Partita a carte, Una (Rigoni Stern), 1582 Partita di calcio, La (Roversi), 1630 Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI), 501, 503 Gramsci and, 887 Partito d’azione, 863 Mazzini and, 1175 Meneghello and, 1185 Montale and, 1212 Pomilio and, 1470 Partito della Rifondazione Comunista, 503 Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS), 503 Partito Nazionale Fascista, 1735 Partito Sardo d’Azione (Lussu), 1081 Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), 1081, 1769 Partitura (Moscato), 1247 Partner (Bertolucci, B.), 197 Pascal, Blaise, 375, 1133, 1924 Cardarelli and, 385 Pascarella, Cesare, 156, 1357–1358 Trilussa and, 1912 Pascolato, Maria, 6 Pascoli, Giovanni, 48, 202–203, 394, 464, 487, 1002, 1089, 1358–1366 Bassani and, 142 Carducci and, 389, 1936 colonialism and, 488 Folgore and, 753 Garboli and, 809 Gatto and, 811 Govoni and, 873 Gozzano and, 879 Lucini and, 1078 lyric poetry and, 1088 Michelstaedter and, 1196 Moretti, Mario, and, 1237 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Palazzeschi and, 1333 Pasolini and, 1367, 1374 Penna and, 1396 Prezzolini and, 1502 Quasimodo and, 1531 Ragazzoni and, 1539 Rebora and, 1555 Rinaldi, R., and, 1910 Serra, R., and, 1746 Tarozzi and, 1829 Tessa and, 1867 Trilussa and, 1914 Turoldo and, 1924 Valduga and, 1941 Valeri and, 1943 Vigano` and, 1988 Pascutto, Giovanni, Paolini and, 1345 Pasinetti, Francesco, cinema and, 471 Pasini, Matteo, 638 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 57, 73, 200, 250, 279, 280, 379, 472, 674, 726, 936, 985, 1366–1377, 1479, 1481, 1730 Bellezza and, 152 Belli, G., and, 156

I114

Cassola and, 404 Cavani and, 426 Cerami and, 447 Citti and, 177 colonialism and, 489 Communism and, 502 as critic, 1064 Delfini and, 598 Gozzano and, 876 homosexuality and, 1033 Leone, S., and, 1013 Leonetti and, 1016 Marin and, 1150 Merini and, 1186 Morandini and, 1221 Morante and, 1228 Moravia and, 1235 Moscato and, 1246 as neo-avant-garde, 1275 neorealism and, 1285 Ortese and, 1323 Pagliarani and, 1331 Penna and, 1396 Pierro and, 1444 Pressburger and, 1500 Resistance and, 1578, 1580 Rosselli, A., and, 1616 Tabucchi and, 1817 Tessa and, 1867 Toto` and, 1893 translation and, 1903 travel literature and, 1909 Turoldo and, 1924 Pasqua di Gea (Pirandello), 1450 ‘‘Pasqua di maggio’’ (Zanzotto), 2039 Pasqua rossa, La (Bevilacqua, A.), 215 Pasquale Paolo ossia La rotta di Pontenuovo. Racconto coˆrso del secolo XVIII (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Pasquale Sottocorno (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Pasqualino, Antonio, 1341 Pasqualino, Fortunato, 1341 Pasqualino Settebellezze (Wertmu¨ller), 2021, 2022 Pasquariello, Gennaro, 1269 Pasquati, Giulio, 498 Pasque (Zanzotto), 2038 Pasquinade (lampoon), 445 Pasquinate, 1562, 1604 Pasquinate del Conclave (Aretino), 74 Pasquinesco (satire), 77 Pasquini, Emilio, 331 Pasquino de Roma, 511 Passagen-Werk, Das (Benjamin), 697 Passaggio (Berio), 1257 Passaggio a Shanghai (Hirst), 1202 ‘‘Passaggio alla citta`’’ (Scotellaro), 1725 Passaggio d’Enea, Il (Caproni), 380 Passaggio, Il (Aleramo), 15 homosexuality and, 1032 Passami il sale (Sereni, C.), 1739 ‘‘Passando con pensier per un boschetto’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Passatempo, 1147 ‘‘Passatempo innocuo e senza rischi, Un’’ (an innocuous pastime without risks), 350 Passatismo, 791

INDEX Passato e presente, 2027 Passatore, Franco, 465 Passavanti, Jacopo, 1377–1379, 1480, 1567 ‘‘Passeggiata, La’’ (D’Annunzio), 1540 ‘‘Passeggiata prima di cena, La’’ (Bassani), 139 Passeggiate nella Roma antica (Lovatelli, E.), 1660 Passe´isme (love for the past), 791, 1155 Passenger, The (Antonioni), 58 Passerano, Alberto Radicati di, 1769 Passeri, Giovan Battista, 2002 Passeri, I (Dessı`), 629 Passerini, Gaetana, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Passerini, Gianbattista, 616 Passerini, Luisa, 109, 1513, 2027 Passero e il lebbroso, Il (Sinisgalli), 1762 Passeroni, Giancarlo, 202 Passi, Giuseppe, 755 Passi passagi (Porta, A.), 1483 Passion, the, 41–42 Berto and, 192 Bonvesin da la Riva and, 290 Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Passione, 1070 Passione d’amore (Scola), 1723 Passione dei fratelli Rupe (Re`paci), 1576 ‘‘Passione dell’obbedienza, La’’ (Frabotta), 772 Passione di Gesu´ (Aretino), 75 Passione e ideologia (Pasolini), 1367, 1479, 1564 Passione mia, 67 Passione secondo noi stess, La (Berto), 191 Passione secondo San Giovanni (Tarantino, A.), 1825 Passione: Via Crucis, La (Luzi, M.), 1084 Passo d’addio (Campo, C.), 369 Passo, un altro passo, Un (Betocchi), 204 Passos, John Dos, 1225 Pasternak, Boris, 1634 Pastor Angelicus (Flaiano), 732 Pastor Fido (Guarini, B,), 39, 456, 717, 901, 1058, 1126, 1255, 1921 Pastoral, 1379–1381. See also Sannazaro, Jacopo Pastoralia (Boiardo), 264 Pastore sepolto, Il (Jovine), 987 Pastourelle, 420 Pastrone, Giovanni, 50, 488, 723, 1329, 1727 Patacca, Meo, 1605 Pataffio, Il (Malerba), 1116 Paˆte´ di bourgeois (Moretti, N.), 1240 Patellani, Federico, 1434 Patente, La (Pirandello), 1451, 2014 Pater, Walter, 47 Buonarroti, M., and, 326 Patria, La, 113, 978 Chiarelli and, 461 Imbriani and, 959 Patriots (Battiato), 1785 Patrizi, Francesco, 934 Patrologia graeca (Migne), 1704 Patrologia latina (Migne), 1704 Patti, Guglielmo, 1023 Pattumiera di tutte le arti, la (the dustbin of all the arts), 168 Pauca de T. Livio a Iohanne Boccacio collecta (Boccaccio), 257 Paul II (Pope), 2 Paul III (Pope), 438, 442, 1821 Alciato and, 12 Paul IV (Pope), 444

Paul V (Pope), 1683 Paul, Jean, 648 Paulus (Vergerio), 1935 Paura (Benelli), 172 Paura (non credo piu` all’amore), La (Rossellini), 1619 Paura alla Scala (Buzzati), 337, 1206 Paura del cielo, La (Jaeggy), 972 Paura della liberta` (Levi, C.), 1036, 1038 Paura di Dio (Merini), 1186 Paura e tristezza (Cassola), 404 Paura numero uno, La (De Filippo, E.), 586 Pausini, Laura, 1786 Pautasso, Sergio, 930, 1525, 2006 Pavese, Cesare, 48, 57, 282, 817, 1381–1388, 1428, 1564, 1794, 1922, 1923, 2010 Arpino and, 96 Bigiaretti and, 223 Calvino and, 343, 345 Communism and, 502 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 Guiducci and, 921 homosexuality and, 1033 Jahier and, 974 Lagorio and, 991 Moby Dick (Melville) and, 1902 neorealism and, 1283, 1285 Quasimodo and, 1527 Resistance and, 1578 Romano, L., and, 1593 Vittorini and, 2005 World War II and, 2031 Pavlova, Tatiana, 29, 1760 Pavone, Claudio, 1579 Pavone, Rita, 2021 Paz, Octavio, 936 Pazienza, Andrea, 790 Pazienza dell’arrostito: Giornale e ricordi, La (Ceronetti), 452 Pazza della porta accanto, La (Merini), 1187 Pazzi, Alessandro de’, 819 Pazzi, I (Bracco), 306, 1456 Pazzi, Maria Maddalena de’, 1568 Pazzi, Roberto, 718, 1388–1390 Pazzi sulla montagna, I (De Stefani, A.), 1456, 1850 PCI. See Partito Comunista Italiano PDS. See Partito Democratico della Sinistra Pea, Enrico, 1390–1392 Ungaretti and, 1928 Peace of Constance, 1203 Peanuts (Schulz), 658, 789 Peccati di gioventu`, I (Rosso), 1624 Peccato che sia una canaglia (Blasetti), 237 Peccato di Guenda, Il (Liala), 1046 Peccato, Il (Boine), 270 Peccatrice, Una (Verga, G.), 1963 Pecchio, Giuseppe, 1589 Pecora, Elio, 1395 Pecorone (Fiorentino), 1296 Pedaggio si paga all’altra sponda (Bernari), 183 Pedante, Il (Belo), 1604 Pederiali, Giuseppe, 1720 Pedinamento (stalking), 628 Pedrazzi, Luigi, 278 Pedro of Toledo, 2 Pedrocchi, Federico, 788

I115

INDEX Pedrocchi, Luciano, 769 Pedulla`, Walter, 333, 1066, 1331 Cavazzoni and, 429 Pegaso, 1212 Ojetti and, 1303 Pe`gaso, 1803 Pe´guy, Charles, 785 Cardarelli and, 385 Peirce, Charles S., 658 Peirce, Gugliemo, 183 Peirone, Luigi, 45 Pe´ladan, Sar, 1540 Pelagius, 380, 550 Convivio (Dante) and, 562 Pelaja, Margherita, 2025 Pelle, La (Cavani), 426 Pelle, La (Malaparte), 1112, 1114–1115, 2033 Pellegrini, 3 Pellegrini, Daniela, 705 Pellegrini, Ernestina, 1109 Pellegrino appassionato, Il (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Pellegrino, Camillo, as critic, 1058 Peller, Ludwig, 2035 Pellesini, Giovanni, 498 Pellico, Silvio, 1061, 1392–1395, 1400. See also Romanticism Risorgimento and, 1589, 1590 Romanticism and, 1597 Pellizzari, Lorenzo, 726 Pendolo di Foucault, Il (Eco), 659 Penelope alla guerra (Fallaci), 681 Penelope, La (Della Porta), 606 ‘‘Penitentism,’’ 1864 Penna, Sandro, 1395–1397 Bellezza and, 152 Cavalli, P., and, 423 Hermeticism and, 930 homosexuality and, 1033 Saba and, 1645 Spaziani and, 1786 Tarantino, A., and, 1825 Tarozzi and, 1829 Pennac, Daniel, 372 Penombra che abbiamo attraversato, La (Romano, L.), 1594, 1922 Penombre (Praga, E.), 1490 Pensaci, Giacomino! (Pirandello), 1452, 2014 Pensieri. See Zibaldone di pensieri (Leopardi) Pensieri (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Pensieri (Leopardi), 1021 ‘‘Pensieri d’amore’’ (Monti, V.), 1218 Pensieri e Parole (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Pensieri elementari (Risi, N.), 1587 Pensieri medico-morali (Sarpi), 1684 ‘‘Pensieri sopra lo spirito della letteratura d’Italia’’ (Verri, P.), 663 Pensieri sulla religione (Sarpi), 1684 Pensieri sullo stato politico del Milanese (Verri, P.), 1980 Pensiero debole, 1428 Pensiero della differenza, 1249 Muraro and, 2025 Pensiero della differenza sessuale, Il (Muraro), 1250 Pensiero e Azione, 1174, 1175 ‘‘Pensiero, Il’’ (the thought), 533 Pensiero perverso, Il (Ottieri), 1327 Pensiero religioso politico sociale di Giuseppe Mazzini, Il (Salvemini), 1665

I116

Pensuti, Luigi, 51 Pentamerone (Basile), 463, 1269 Pentamerone, ossia la fiabe delle fiabe (Croce, B.), 136 Pentecost, 1070 ‘‘Pentecoste, La’’ (Manzoni, A.), 1134, 1140, 1490 Pentito (repentant mafioso), 1104 People of the Sierra, The (Pitt-Rivers), 53 Peperoni ripieni e pesci in faccia (Wertmu¨ller), 2023 Peppino (Ventura), 963 Per cause imprecisate (Bernari), 183 Per comprendere il pianto (Balla), 72 Per dove parte questo treno allegro (Veronesi, S.), 1975 ‘‘Per fin’amore vao sı` allegramente’’ (d’Aquino, R.), 1753 Per Giorgio Orelli (Cavadini), 1318 ‘‘Per gli Ossari di San Martino e Solferino’’ (Zanella), 2035 ‘‘Per i morti di piazzale Loreto’’ (Gatto), 1580 Per le antiche scale (Bolognini), 281 Per le antiche scale (Tobino), 1874 Per le tre legazioni riacquistate dal sommo ponetice Pio Settimo (Giordani, Pietro), 851 Per non dimenticare (Martelli, Massimo), 1864 Per qualche dollaro in piu` (Leone, S.), 1014 Per un pugno di dollari (Leone, S.), 1014 Per una definizione di ‘‘poesia’’ (Valduga), 1942 Per via di levare (with some cuts), 1184 Per voce sola (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Pera, Marcello, 1430 Perbenismo (good behavior), 335 Perche´ gli altri dimenticano (Piazza, Bruno), 948 Perche´ la letteratura italiana non sia popolare in Italia (Bonghi), 1066, 1560 ‘‘Perche´ non possiamo non dirci cristiani’’ (Croce, B.), 1429 Perche´ verita` sia libera. Memorie, confessioni, riflessioni e itinerario poetico di David Maria Turoldo (Turoldo), 1925 Percorso del femminismo e storia delle donne, 2025 Percoto, Caterina, 1398–1399 scapigliatura and, 1698 Perdonate Eglantina! (Vivanti), 2011 Pe´rec, Georges, 785 Peregrinus, 1069 Perelli, Luigi, 647 Perengana (Vacca), 1720 Perez, Francesco Paolo, 1339 Perez, Gilberto, 56 Perferia, 153 Perfida Albione, La (the wicked Albion), 47 Pergolesi, Gennaro Antonio, 1312, 1467 Peri, Jacopo, 36, 1310, 1467 in Florence, 736 ‘‘Pericolo, Il’’ (Parini, G.), 1279, 1350 Periferia (Masino), 1168 ‘‘Periferia’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1489 Periodization, 942 Perissinotto, Loredana, 465 Perizi, Nino, 1882 Perlina e Gobetta (Di Giacomo), 635 Permette? Rocco Papaleo (Scola), 1722 Pernicone, Vincenzo, 1649 Perrault, Charles, 136, 463 Basile and, 138 Collodi and, 483 Perrella, Silvio, 1354 Perria, Antonio, 633

INDEX Perriera, Michel as neo-avant-garde, 1276 in Palermo, 1340 Perrone, Ferdinando Maria, 978 Perrot, Michelle, 2026 Perrotta, Filippo, 1339 Perry Mason, 1858 Pers, Ciro di, 1127 Petrarch and, 1413 Perseo (Cellini), 440 Perseveranze, 1259 Persiane chiuse (Comencini, L.), 700 Persico, Edoardo, 812 ‘‘Personaggi, I’’ (Pirandello), 1458, 1461 Persuasione (persuasion), 1195 Persuasione e la rettorica, La (Michelstaedter), 1195 Peruzzi, Baldassare, 221 Peruzzi, Emilia Toscanelli, 1659 Pes, Aurelio, 1341 ‘‘Pesanervi’’ (Bompiani), 283 Pesanteur et la graˆce, La (Weil), 368 Pescatori, I (Viviani, R.), 2014 Pesci rossi (Cecchi, E.), 430 Pestigrafia, 451 Pestriniero, Renato, 1720 Petacci, Claretta, 431 Petarca spirituale, Il (Malipiero), 1567 Peter the Chanter, 1703 Peterson, Thomas E., 760 Petit bourgeois, 688 Petites poe´mes en prose, 1695 Petito, Antonio, 585, 587, 1400–1401 in Naples, 1269 Scarpetta and, 1700 Petito strenge (Santagata), 1401 Petraglia, Sandro, 1730 Petrarca a Colonia (Pirandello), 1936 Petrarca, Francesco. See Petrarch Petrarch, 39, 107, 109, 392, 444, 667, 1316, 1402–1419, 1561, 1566, 1752, 1904 Aretino and, 74, 76 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 144 Bembo, P., and, 163 Bettinelli and, 213 biographies of, 232–233 Boiardo and, 264 Carducci and, 388 Castelvetro and, 406 Cereta and, 449 Cino da Pistoia and, 475 Cola di Rienzo and, 481 commentaries on, 1412–1414 De Sanctis and, 616, 617 Dolce and, 638 Firenzuola and, 730 in Florence, 735 Franco, V., and, 777 Galilei, G., and, 804 in Genoa, 815 Giovanni, D., and, 332 Gozzano and, 879 humanism and, 952 Landino and, 993 Latin and, 1000–1001

Latin works of, 1414–1418 lyric poetry and, 1087, 1127 Manetti, G., and, 1119 Marino and, 1162 Matraini and, 1172 Monti, V., and, 1219 Muratori and, 1252 music and, 1254 Neoplatonism and, 1281 novella and, 1297 Orelli and, 1318 pastoral genre and, 1379 Pierro and, 1444 Renaissance and, 1571 Risorgimento and, 1588 Saba and, 1643 Salutati and, 1662 Sannazaro and, 1675 Savonarola and, 1690 Settembrini and, 1749 Stampa and, 1797 Tansillo and, 1822 Tasso, B., and, 1832 Terracina and, 1861 Tommaseo and, 1884 Tornabuoni and, 1887 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Tuscan and, 1915 Valduga and, 1941 in Venice, 1960 Zanzotto and, 2038 Petrarcha spirituale (Malipiero), 444 Petrarchini, 1127 Petrarchino, 1420 Petrarchism, 1420–1422, 1567 Tansillo and, 1821 Petrarchismo, 1160 Petri Bembi Vita (Della Casa), 602 Petri, Elio, 473 Petriccione, Diego, 1269 Petrignani, Sandra, 466, 1422–1424 Petrocchi, Giorgio, 45 as critic, 1063 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Petrolini, Ettore, 1950 Viviani, R., and, 2014 Petrolio (Pasolini), 489, 1367, 1369 Petroni, Guglielmo, 1424–1425 Petronio, Giuseppe, 1062 Petronio, Gustavo, 51 historiography and, 946 Petrosellini, Giuseppe, 1312 Petrusewicz, Marta, 1532 Pettazzoni, Raffaele, Martino and, 53 Pettrucciani, Mario, Hermeticism and, 930 Peverelli, Luciana, 1601 Pezard, Andre´, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Pezzana, Giacinta, 652 Martoglio and, 1165 Pezzo concertato, 272 Pezzo di terra di cielo, Un (Guggino), 54 Pezzoli, Christina, 589 Pezzoli, Luigi, 397 Phaedo (Bruni, L.), 1281

I117

INDEX Phaedrus, 201, 463 Trilussa and, 1913 Phaedrus (Bruni, L.), 1281 Phaedrus (Plato), 818 Phantasiestu¨cke (pieces of fantasy), 684 Pharsalia (Lucan), 87, 556 Phe´nakistiscope, 50 Phenomenology, 100 Philibert, Emanuel, 1921 Philippe Pe´tain: Processo a Vichy (Cavani), 424 Philology. See Linguistics and Philology Philoponus, John, 1703 Philosophia rationalis (Campanella), 364 Philosophia sensibus demonstrata (Campanella), 363 Philosopho poeticho (poetic philosopher), 720 Philosophus additus artifici, 1512 Philosophy and Literature, 1426–1431 ‘‘Phonosymbolism,’’ 1359 Photo 13, 1434 Photography, 1431–1435 Physics (Aristotle), 555 Physiologus, 572 Pia philosophia (pious philosophy), 1439 Piacere della memoria, Il (Palazzeschi), 1334 Piacere dell’onesta` (Baldovino), 1452 Piacere, Il (D’Annunzio), 540, 580, 696, 1606, 1974 Piacevoli e ridicolose simplicita` di Bertoldino, figlio del gia` astuto Bertoldo (Croce, G.), 532 Piacevoli notti, Le (Straparola), 463 Piacevoli poesie diGiuseppe Baretti torinese (Baretti), 129 Piaggia, Carlo, 489 Piane, Carlo Delle, 1121 Pianella di Scarpinello: Tassoni e la nascita dell’eroicomico, La (Cabani), 932 Pianeta azzurro, Il (Malerba), 1116 Pianeta irritabile, Il (Volponi), 1939, 2016 ‘‘Piangete, donne, et con voi pianga Amore’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 475 Pianissimo (Sbarbaro), 1694 Piano, Renzo, 72 Pianoforte, Il, 1259 Pianta del pane, La (Frabotta), 772 Pianta umana, 108 ‘‘Pianto antico’’ (Carducci), 394 Pianto della Vergine, Il (Basile), 136 Pianura proibita (Garboli), 808 ‘‘Piasente isguardo, Uno’’ (Pier delle Vigne), 1443 Piave, Francesco Maria, 1051, 1313 Piazza Alimonda (Guccini), 818 Piazza, Antonio, 664 in Genoa, 816 Piazza, Ben, 964 Piazza, Bruno, 948 on Holocaust, 947 Piazza D’Azeglio, 103 ‘‘Piazza dei fanciulli la sera’’ (Betocchi), 204 Piazza delle cinque lune (Martinelli, R.), 1865 Piazza d’Italia (Tabucchi), 1815 Piazza, Marina, 706 Piazza mia bella piazza (Duranti), 650 Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo (Garzoni), 518, 1480 Piazzese, Santo, 1340 Pica, Vittorio decadentismo and, 579 Neera and, 1271

I118

Picasso, Pablo, 499, 1771 Ungaretti and, 1928 Picchione, John, 114 as neo-avant-garde, 1276 Pagliarani and, 1331 Picci, Giuseppe, 670 Piccini, Giulio, cinema and, 470 Piccinni, Nicolo`, 48, 1312 Picciotti, 1103 Piccola avventura, La (Archibugi), 67 Piccola borghesia (Vittorini), 2006 Piccola Chelidonio, La (Lucini), 1079 Piccola ladra, La (Di Giacomo), 635 Piccola passeggiata (Buzzati), 335 Piccola rettifica, una (a small rectification), 1184 Piccole morte, Le (Martini, Fausto), 521 Piccole storie del mondo grande (Panzini), 1342 Piccole vacanze, Le (Arbasino), 62 Piccole virtu`, Le (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Piccoli equivoci senza importanza (Tabucchi), 686, 1816 Piccoli maestri, I (Lucchetti), 1345 Piccoli maestri, I (Meneghello), 1184, 1580 Piccoli maestri itineranti (little itinerant masters), 1184 ‘‘Piccolin Messia, El’’ (Tornabuoni), 1888 Piccolo Archimede, Il (Amelio), 31 Piccolo Berto, Il (Saba), 826, 1644 Piccolo Buddha (Bertolucci, B.), 199 Piccolo cabotaggio (Stu´parich), 1804 Piccolo diavolo, Il (Benigni), 177 Piccolo, Fantasio, 1544 Piccolo giudice (little judge), 1708 Piccolo Hans, Il, Rasy and, 1549 Piccolo, Il, 307 Serao and, 1733 Piccolo libro inutile (Corazzini), 521 Piccolo, Lucio, 1435–1437 music and, 1257 in Palermo, 1340 Piccolo mondo antico (Fogazzaro), 744, 746–747, 1256, 1775 Piccolo mondo antico (Soldati), 471, 1584 Piccolo mondo moderno (Fogazzaro), 744 Piccolo naviglio, Il (Tabucchi), 1815 ‘‘Piccolo patriota padovano, Il’’ (De Amicis), 575 Piccolo santo, Il (Bracco), 306 ‘‘Piccolo scrivano fiorentino, Il’’ (De Amicis), 575 Piccolo Teatro di Milano, 193, 446, 678, 976, 1205, 1206, 1544, 1630, 1794, 1816 Piccolo veleno color di rosa (Govoni), 874 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 786, 1001, 1297, 1437–1439 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1518 Piciaudi, Paolo Maria, 1935 Pickler, Teresa, 1203 Pickwick, del leggere e dello scirvere (Baricco), 132 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 326, 721, 1001, 1427, 1439–1442 Barbaro, E., and, 128 Buonarroti, M., and, 328 Fedele and, 698 humanism and, 953 Leone Ebreo and, 1011 Poliziano and, 1465 utopia and, 1938 Pico, Giovan Francesco, 1440 Picone, Michelangelo, 751 Pie`ce a` the`se, 273

INDEX Pie`ce Noire (Moscato), 1246 ‘‘Pied de Momie, Le’’ (Gautier, T.), 695 ‘‘Piedi sull’erba, I’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Piedmontese, 1053 Piegai, Daniela, 1720 Pieno di super, Il (Campo, R.), 371 Pier delle Vigne, 555, 1000, 1442–1444 Pier Paolo Pasolini: La ragione di un sogno (Betti, L.), 69 Piera alta, La (Betti, U.), 208 Pieracci, Margherita, 368 Pieri, Marzio, 1158, 1159 Marino and, 1163 Piermarini, Giuseppe, 1203 Piero, W.S. Di, 965 Pierozzi, Antonino, 149, 1887 Pierri, Michele, Merini and, 1187 Pierro, Albino, 1444–1445 Pierrot impiegato del lotto (Cavacchioli), 1849 Pierrot lunaire (Scho¨nberg), 499 Pieta` (Buonarroti, M.), 329 Pieta` (Dante), 728 Pieta` ingiusta, La (Sereni, V.), 1742 ‘‘Pieta` popolare’’ (Calabuig), 1481 Pieta` trionfante, La (Guarini, G.), 71 Pietoso stile, 254 Pietra del paragone politico (Boccalini), 262 Pietra lunare, La (Landolfi), 686, 996 Pietra oscura (Luzi, M.), 1084 Pietra sopra, Una (Calvino), 346, 1064 Pietragrua, Carlo Luigi, 901 Pietralunga, Mark, 711 Pietrangeli, Antonio, 1728 Scola and, 1722 Pietrangeli, Paolo, 1550 Pietre di Pantalica, Le (Consolo), 508 Pietriboni, Luigi, 459 Pietro il Grande (Donizetti, Gaetano), 1633 Pigafetta, Vicentine Antonio, 1906–1907 Pigionali (Tozzi, F.), 1897 Pigna, Giovanni Battista, 92, 1834 Pignatelli, Ascanio Marino and, 1163 petrarchismo of, 1160 Pignotti, Lamberto, 821, 1277 Pignotti, Lorenzo, 463, 1714 Piissimi, Vittoria, 39, 498 Pilatus, Leontius, 239 Pilota cieco (Papini), 687 Pilota ritorna, Un (Rossellini), 58, 1619 Pindar Chiabrera and, 456 odes by, 455 Pindemonte, Ippolito, 766, 1445–1447, 1633, 1658 neoclassicism and, 1279 Odyssey (Homer) and, 1902 Pinelli, Bartolomeno, 154 Pinelli, Gian Vincenzo, 801 Sarpi and, 1683 Pinelli, Giuseppi, 433 Pinelli, Pino, 740 Pinelli, Tullio, 1729 Fellini and, 1730 Pinelli: una finestra sulla strage (Cederna, C.), 433 Pino, Paolo, 11001

Pinocchio. See Avventure di Pinocchio, Le (Collodi) Pinocchio (Bene), 169. See also Avventure di Pinocchio, Le (Collodi) Pinocchio (Benigni), 177 Pinocchio con gli stivali (Malerba), 1116 Pinocchio innamorato (Cavacchioli), 1849 Pinocchio: un libro parallelo (Manganelli), 1123 Pinter, Harold, 47, 673 Pintor, Luigi, 1614 Pinzochera, La (Grazzini), 895 Pio, Emilia, 117 ‘‘Pioggia d’Agosto’’ (Gozzano), 877 Pioggia d’oro, La (Grossi), 897 ‘‘Pioggia e la sposa’’ (Fenoglio), 712 Piombo, Sebastiano del, Aretino and, 74 Pious IX (Pope), 445 Piovana, La (Ruzzante), 1637 Piovene, Guido, 48, 671, 816, 1447–1449 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Moravia and, 1234 Piovono storie: Romanzo collettivo, 1202 Piovra, La, 633, 1859 Pipa e boccale (Di Giacomo), 635 ‘‘Pipea e boccale’’ (Di Giacomo), 686 ‘‘Pir meu cori allegrari’’ (Protonotaro), 1753 Piramide, La (Palazzeschi), 1334 Pirandello e il Pirandellismo (Sciascia), 1707 Pirandello, Luigi, 158, 352, 458, 470, 500, 587, 724, 826, 936, 1130, 1430, 1449–1462, 1481, 1564, 1727, 1793, 1795, 1849, 1854, 1891, 1936, 2007 animals tales and, 203 Bontempelli and, 288 Bracco and, 307 Bufalino and, 322 Camilleri and, 354, 356 Cassola and, 404 cinema and, 469 Croce, B., and, 525 De Filippo, E., and, 586 De Marchi, E., and, 611 Debenedetti and, 577 Decadentismo and, 579 Duse and, 652 fantastic and, 687 Fascism and, 460, 692 historical novels and, 939 inept characters of, 1897 Martoglio and, 1166 music and, 1257 in Rome, 1606 Rosso and, 1623–1624, 1626 Savinio and, 1688 Sciascia and, 1707 socialism and, 1769 Tabucchi and, 1816 Taviani, P. and V., and, 1845 teatro grottesco and, 1848 Tozzi, F., and, 1896 Trilussa and, 1914 Ungaretti and, 1930 utopia and, 1939 Verga, G., and, 1965 verismo and, 1974 Viviani, R., and, 2014 World War I and, 2028

I119

INDEX Pirandello o del candore (Bontempelli), 1707 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista, 71 Pirani, Mario, 981 Pirata, 1259 Pirati della Malesia, I (Salgari), 1654 Pirelli, Giovanni, 1580 Pisa, Giordano da, 1031, 1567 Pisa, Guido da, 559 Pisa, Lazzarino da, 415 Pisa, Rustichello da, 783 Pisacane, Carlo, 389, 1175 Pisanelle ou la mort parfume´e, La (D’Annunzio), 541 Pisanello, Alberti, Ferrara and, 716 Pisani, Pietro, 1338 Piscopia, Elena Corner, Carrer and, 398 Pisis, Filippo De, 1033 in Ferrara, 718 Masino and, 1167 Piste dell’attentato, Le (Macchiavelli), 632 Pistofilo, Bonaventura, 94 Pistoia, Giovanni da, 329 Pitocchi fortunati, I (Gozzi, C.), 881 ‘‘Pitochi, I’’ (Barbarani), 1854 Pitoe¨ff, Georges, 1461 Pitre´, Giuseppe, 382, 464, 1103, 1339, 1479 Pittoni, Anita, 1911 Pitt-Rivers, Julian, 53 Pittura futurista. Manifesto tecnico, La, 792–793 Pittura metafisica, La (Carra`), 2004 Pittura, scultura futuriste (Boccioni), 1853 Pitture (Marino), 1161 Piu` belle poesie, Le (Merini), 1187 Piu` che l’amore (D’Annunzio), 541, 691 Piu´ donne che uomini (Muraro), 1249 Piu` forte, Il (Giacosa), 838 Piu´ fuoco, piu´ vento (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Piu` grande balena morta della Lombardia, La (Nove), 374 Piu` lungo giorno, Il (Campana), 359, 361 ‘‘Piu` piccola cosa, La’’ (Vinci), 1993 Piumini, Roberto, 465 Pius II (Pope). See Piccolomini, Enea Silvio Pius VI (Pope), 1605 Pivano, Fernanda, 49 Pizan, Christine de, 449 Pizzamiglio, Gilberto, 399 Pizzardo, Tina, 1382 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 541, 546 music and, 1257 Pizzuto, Antonio, 1436 Place of Light, A (Bush), 964 Placido, Michele, 633 Placita philosophica (Guarini, G.), 71 Placucci, Michele, 1479 Plagiarism, 1700 Vivanti and, 2012 Plague-Sower, The (Bufalino). See Diceria dell’untore (Bufalino) Planchon, Roger, 809 Planctus Mariae, 1069 Planelli, Antonio, 1312 music and, 1256 Plaquette, 369 Plateau, Joseph-Antoine-Ferdinand, 50

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Plath, Sylvia, 1077 Merini and, 1187 Moscato and, 1247 Platina. See Sacchi, Bartolomeo Plato, 230, 299, 412, 818, 1011, 1405, 1408, 1429 academies and, 1 Bruni, L., and, 312 Castiglione and, 409 Ficino and, 720 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1177 Michelstaedter and, 1195, 1196 Pico della Mirandola and, 1439 socialism and, 1768 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Vico and, 1982, 1983 Platone, Felice, 891 Platonis Opera Omnia (Ficino), 719, 1281 Platonov, Andrei, 1610 Plausi e botte (Boine), 270 Plautus, 89, 461, 498, 605, 639, 814, 1092, 1916 Bibbiena, B., and, 221 Firenzuola and, 730 Ruzzante and, 1639 translation of, 1903 Playmen, 219 Plazer, 751 Plebe di Roma (plebeians), 154 ‘‘Pledge of Morality,’’ 789 Ple´iade (Ronsard), 456 Pletone, Giorgio Gemisto, 953 Pleynet, Marcelin, 785 Pliny, 84, 127, 450, 685, 1562, 11000 Vasari and, 1952 P-L-M (Ungaretti), 1931 Plotinus, 720 Neoplatonism and, 1280 Plowright, Joan, 844 Plume, La, 1154 Plummelia (Piccolo), 1436 ‘‘Plurilinguism,’’ 795 Plutarch, 21, 202, 814, 941 Alfieri, V., and, 22 biography and, 230 Bruni, L., and, 312 Foscolo and, 763 Po, Aurelio Del, 1193 Po’ di febbrfe, Un (Penna), 1396 Po’ di successo, Un (Berto), 191 Po’ prima del piombo, Un (Garboli), 809 Pochade, 1848 Poche storie (Petrignani), 1423 Podere, Il (Tansillo), 1822 Podere, Il (Tozzi, F.), 295, 1896 Poe, Edgar Allan, 48, 203, 390 Arpino and, 96 Buzzati and, 335, 687 detective fiction and, 631 Manganelli and, 1123 Praga, E., and, 1490 scapigliatura and, 1697 Sciascia and, 1706 Tarchetti and, 1827 Vittorini and, 2005 Poema a fumetti (Buzzati), 336, 337, 790

INDEX Poema dei lunatici, Il (Cavazzoni), 428, 429 Poema del vistito di latte, Il (Marinetti), 1156 Poema osceno, Il (Ottieri), 1327 Poema paradisiaco (Corazzini), 511 Poema paradisiaco (D’Annunzio), 522, 540, 873, 1089 Poema tartaro (Casti), 1633 Poematia (Giraldi, Giambattista), 856 Poe´mes barbares (Lisle), 392 Poemetti (Pascoli), 1089, 1359, 1360, 1366 Poemetti drammatici (Graf), 885 Poemetti in prosa, 874 Poemetti sacri, 455 Poemi (Palazzeschi), 1333 Poemi cavallereschi, 267, 665, 667 Poemi conviviali (Pascoli), 1089, 1359 Poemi del Risorgimento (Pascoli), 1359 Poemi italici (Pascoli), 1359 Poemi lirici (Bacchelli), 112 Poemi tragici (Onofri, A.), 1308 Poems of Ossian (Fortis, A.), 1716 Poer nano (Fo), 738 Poesia Govoni and, 875 Marinetti and, 1154, 1204 Ramat and, 1543 Poesia bernesca, 395 Poesia che parla di se`, La (Spagnoletti), 919 Poesia contende col rasoio, La (Burchiello, Il), 331 Poesia crepuscolare (Borgese, Giuseppe), 520, 1237 Poesia del novecento (Sanguineti), 930 ‘‘Poesia della rottura delle scatole’’ (Ragazzoni), 1540 ‘‘Poesia delle rose, La’’ (Fortini), 760 Poesia di Dante, La (Croce, B.), 525 Poesia di Giovanni Pascoli, La (Checchi), 430 Poesia dialettale del Novecento (Pasolini), 1367 Poesia e errore (Fortini), 760 Poesia e non poesia. Note sulla letteratura europea del secolo decimonno (Croce, B.), 525, 1018 Poesia ed errore (Fortini), 1581 Poesia epico-cavalleresca (epic-chivalric poetry), 666 Poesia ermetica, La (Flora), 929 Poesia giocosa, 43, 1635, 1636 Poesia immagine (poem image), 1388 Poesia in forma di rosa (Pasolini), 1367, 1481 Poesia. Introduzione alla critica e storia della poesia e della letteratura, La (Croce, B.), 525 Poesia italiana 1905–1945, La (Ramat), 1542 Poesia italiana contemporanea (Spagnoletti, Giovanni), 1186 Poesia italiana del Novecento (Debenedetti), 1063 Poesia italiana del Novecento (Sanguineti), Lucini and, 1078 Poesia, La (Croce, B.), 1062 ‘‘Poesia, La’’ (Montale), 1216 ‘‘Poesia, La’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Poesia luogo del nulla, La (Merini), 1187 Poesia popolare e poesia d’arte (Croce, B.), 45, 498 Poesia popolare italiana (D’Ancona), 1479 ‘‘Poesia postermetica fra continuita` e dissolvimento, La’’ (Erba, L.), 674 Poesia, rassegna internazionale multilingue, 173 Poesia relazionale (poetry of relations), 1396 Poesia totale, 1277 Poesia-racconto (poem-story), 1388 Poesie (Betocchi), 204 Poesie (Cardarelli), 386

Poesie (Comisso), 495 Poesie (De Amicis), 575 Poesie (Di Giacomo), 635 Poesie (Gatto), 812 Poesie (Michelstaedter), 1195 Poesie (Orelli), 1318 Poesie (Penna), 1395 Poesie (Quasimodo), 930 Poesie (Roversi), 1629 Poesie (Tommaseo), 1884 ‘‘‘Poesie’ 1940: un libro fantasma’’ (Pautasso), 1525 Poesie 1956–1998 (Spaziani), 1786 Poesie a Casarsa (Pasolini), 1366 Poesie campestri (Pindemonte), 1446 Poesie complete (Aleardi), 13 Poesie dalla mano sinistra (Spaziani), 1787 Poesie del quaderno n. 1 (Delfini), 597 Poesie del sabato (Betocchi), 204 Poesie della fine delmondo (Delfini), 597 Poesie dell’adolescenza e giovanili (Saba), 1646 Poesie di ieri (Sinisgalli), 1762 Poesie di Ossian, antico poeta celtico (Cesarotti), 453 Poesie di Pietro Metastasio (Metastasio), 1189 Poesie di tutti i giorni (Moretti, Mario), 521 Poesie drammatiche (Zeno, A.), 883 Poesie e altre poesie (Magrelli), 1106 Poesie e discorsi dulla poesia (Quasimodo), 1525, 1530 Poesie edite in dialetto milanese (Della Porta), 897 Poesie elettriche (Govoni), 874 Poesie grigioverdi (Alvaro), 28 Poesie, Le (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Poesie, Le (Trilusssa), 1913 Poesie nazionali (Niccolini, G.), 1289 Poesie nuove ed ultime (Tessa), 1867 Poesie per l’amatore di stampe (Roversi), 1629 Poesie per nozze Papadopoli-Mosconi (Carrer), 397 Poesie per un uomo (Guiducci), 922 Poesie per vivere e non vivere (Ceronetti), 452 Poesie popolari (Cavara), 1479 Poesie provinciali (Martini, Fausto), 520, 521 Poesie ritrovate (Luzi, M.), 1084 Poesie scritte col lapis (Moretti, Mario), 520, 1237, 1238 Poesie scritte durante la guerra (Saba), 2030 Poesie siciliane (Meli), 1182, 1338 Poesie tratte da una stampa a penna (Giusti), 860 ‘‘Poeta ha incontrato Charlot, Un’’ (Saba), 470 Poeta muto (mute poet), 538 ‘‘Poeta umoristica del secolo decimoterzo, Un’’ (Casini), 1636 Poe`tes maudits (damned poets), 791, 1490 ‘‘Poetessa d’Italia,’’ 1273 Poeti a braccio, 176 Poeti allo specchio (Folgore), 753 Poeti futuristi, I, 793 Poeti greci e lirici nuovi (Valgimigl), 1530 Poeti inglesi dell’Ottocento (Praz), 1497 Poeti italiani del Novecento (Mengaldo), 1525, 1615, 1762 ‘‘Poetic of Meditation,’’ 1930 Poetica d’Aristotele vulgarizzata et sposta (Castelvetro), 406, 1128 ‘‘Poetica della parola e Salvatore Quasimodo, La’’ (Oreste), 1525 Poetica della sincerita`, 580 Poetica dell’unita` (Borgese, Giuseppe), 297 Poetica, La (Trissino), 1915 Poetica, Una (Quasimodo), 1525, 1530 Poetices libri septem (Scaligero), 819

I121

INDEX Poetics (Aristotle), 81, 92, 174, 479, 818, 1128 Castelvetro and, 406 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 commentaries on, 1058 Giraldi, Giambattista, and, 856 lyric poetry and, 1086 Speroni and, 1789 Poggibonsi, Niccolo` da, 1905 Poggio, Febo del, 327 Poggioli, Renato, 1634 ‘‘Poi ch’a voi piace, amore’’ (Frederick II of Hohenstaufen), 781 ‘‘Poi che spiegat’ho l’ali al bel disio’’ (Tansillo), 1822 Poiche` mi si chiede (Solmi), 1778 Pointillisme, 2003 Pola, Isa, 1760 Polanski, Roman, 1891 Polcri, Alessandro, 1521 Polenton, Sicco, 942 Poli, Francesco, 101 Poli, Giovanni, 500, 1882 Poli, Paolo, Invernizio and, 961 Poli, Umberto. See Saba, Umberto Policastro, Giovanni Brancati di, 1562 Policordo, Il, 153 Poligrafo (editor), 638 Polinice (Alfieri, V.), 19, 22 Poliorama pittoresco, 1432 Politecnico, Il, 761, 784, 983, 985, 1204, 1205 Cattaneo and, 1061 Risi, N., and, 1587 Vittorini and, 2005 World War II and, 2033 Politecnico: Repertorio mensile di studi applicati alla prosperita` e alla cultura sociale, Il (Cattaneo, C.), 417, 418 Politezza (politeness), 518 Politica e cultura (Bobbio), 1428 Politica e cultura (Rinascita), 502 Politics (Aristotle), 312 Politiques, 316 Poliziano, Angelo, 255, 1001, 1463–1469, 1518, 1934. See also Neoplatonism Borghini, R., and, 298 Buonarroti, M., and, 329 De Sanctis and, 617 Fedele and, 698 homosexuality and, 1031 humanism and, 953 Neoplatonism and, 1282 pastorla genre and, 1380 Petrarch and, 1413 Pico della Mirandola and, 1440 Sacchetti, F., and, 1648–1649 Pollaiuolo, Antonio, 1954 Polline, Il (Lagorio), 991 Polo, Marco, 344, 488, 783, 1345, 1904 travel literature and, 1905 in Venice, 1960 Polso teso (Risi, N.), 1586 Poltrona, La (Sgorlon), 1750 Polvere sull’erba, La (Bevilacqua, A.), 215 Polybius, 941 Pomata, Gianna, 708 Pomba, Giuseppe, 1506

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‘‘Pomeriggi del sabato, Il’’ (Tabucchi), 686 Pomilio, Mario, 1470–1471, 1569 in Naples, 1268 Rea and, 1553 Pomo pero (Meneghello), 1184 Pomodoro, Arnaldo, 1017 Pompilj, Guido, 6 Pompilj, Vittoria Aganoor, 5–7 decadentismo and, 580 Neera and, 1271 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 277 Giovio and, 854 Pon, 367 Pona, Francesco, 1128 Ponentino (Rosso), 1624 Ponge, Francis, 675 Pontano, Giovanni, 2, 202, 1001, 1472–1473. See also Pastoral Bracciolini, P., and, 304 humanism and, 953 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 in Naples, 1268 Sannazaro and, 1675 Ponte della Ghisolfa, Il (Testori), 1206, 1868, 1995 Ponte, Il, 737 Arbasino and, 63 Bilenchi and, 228 Dessı` and, 629, 630 Lagorio and, 992 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 1474–1476 Ponti, Carlo, 1422 Ponti, Diana, 498 Ponti sull’oceano (Folgore), 753 Pontiggia, Giancarlo, 1277 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, 1206, 1476–1478 Pontormo, Jacopo da, 1315 Varchi and, 1948 Pop art movement, Buzzati and, 336 Pope, Alexander, 1712 Popolani, 735 ‘‘Popolo’’ (Ungaretti), 1481 Popolo di Lombardia, Il, Buzzati and, 336 Popolo di Roma, Il, 29 Popolo d’Italia, Il, 979 Bilenchi and, 228 Salvemini and, 1666 Sarfatti and, 1681 Ungaretti and, 1930 ‘‘Popolo e popolarita`’’ (Nigro), 1481 Popolo grasso (wealthy merchants), 735–736 Popolo minuto (middle and lower-middle class), 735 Popper, Karl, 1006 Popular Culture and Literature, 1478–1482 Porci con le ali. Diario sessuo-politico di due adolescenti (Ravera), 1550 Porcile (Pasolini), 1368, 1372 Pordenone, Odorico da, 1905 Porete, Marguerite, 1251 Pornocuore (Veneziani, A.), 1316 Porphyry, 1281, 1949 Porpora, Niccolo´, 1190 Porretane (Arienti), 277 Porro, Luigi, 1061 Porro, Nicola, 1481 Porry-Pastorel, Adolfo, 1434

INDEX Porta, Antonio, 1482–1485. See also Neo-Avant-Garde Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1476 Porta, Carlo, 156, 1485–1487, 1563, 1825 Grossi and, 897 historical novels and, 938 Maggi and, 1104 in Milan, 1204, 1206 as neo-avant-garde, 1275 Novissimi, I and, 785 Pierro and, 1444 Romanticism and, 1598 Tessa and, 1867 translation by, 1903 Porta chiusa, La (Praga), 1493 Porta Portese (De Sica), 1013 Porta Portese (Pontecorvo), 1474 Portantina, La (Chiarelli), 459 Porte aperte (Amelio), 31 Porte aperte (Sciascia), 1708 Porte dell’Appenino, Le (Volponi), 2016 ‘‘portento’’ (wonder), 1853 Porter, Edwin S., 50 Portiere di notte, Il (Cavani), 425 Portinari, Folco, 898 Porto dell’amore, Il (Comisso), 495 Porto di Toledo, Il (Ortese), 1323 Porto, Luigi da, 121, 1171, 1298 Porto sepolto, Il (Ungaretti), 1927, 1929, 1931 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 270 ‘‘Poscia ch’albel desir troncate hai l’ale’’ (Morra), 1243 Posillip (Rasy), 1549 ‘‘Positive method,’’ 382 Positivism, 375 Capuana and, 1062 Posse´de´es, Les (Brabant), 212 ‘‘Posta letteraria, La’’ (Campo, C.), 368 Posteritati (Petrarch), 257, 1412, 1415 Postille al ‘‘Nome della rosa’’ (Eco), 658 Postille alla Divina Commedia (Giusti), 861 Postino, Il (Troisi), 1269 Postkarten (Sanguineti), 1670 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Cain), 1994 Posto di blocco (Bigiaretti), 224 Posto di vacanza, Un (Sereni, V.), 1742 Posto, Il (Olmi), 1305 Postuma (Stecchetti), 278 Postumi (Meneghello), 1184 Potenza dei fatelli Rupe (Re`paci), 1576 Potere femminile e sovversione sociale (Costa, M.), 706 Pound, Ezra Balestrini and, 114 in Genoa, 815 Guidacci and, 919 Montale and, 1211 Pasolini and, 1374 Pea and, 1391 Raboni and, 1537 in Venice, 1961 Poupe´es electriques (Marinetti), 1154 Poussin, Nicolas, 761 Ariosto and, 92 Povera gent, La (Bertolazzi), 193 Poveri ma belli (Risi, D.), 1584 Poveri milionari (Risi, D.), 1584

Pozza, Neri, 1581 ‘‘Pozzanghera nera il diciotto aprile’’ (Scotellaro), 1725 Pozzi, Antonia, 1488–1490 Pozzi, Giovanni, 490, 821, 971, 1568 Marino and, 1161 Pozzi, Mario, 1789 Pozzo, Francesco dal, 277 Pozzo, Modesta. See Fonte, Moderata Pozzo, Ugo, 1922 Pozzone, Giuseppe, 1628 Practianae coniurationis commentarium (Poliziano), 1463 Practice of Everday Life, The (Certeau), 1481 Praga, Emilio, 272, 273, 1490–1492, 1793, 1853. See also Scapigliatura decadentismo and, 579 Faldella and, 1698 Righetti and, 1697 scapigliatura and, 1698 Praga, Marco, 306, 459, 1492–1494 Praloran, Marco, 268 Prampolini, Enrico, 72 Pratesi, Mario, 280 Bilenchi and, 227 verismo and, 1971–1972 Prati, Giovanni, 12, 484, 826, 1598 Pascoli and, 1361 Pratica dell’inconscio (unconscious practice), 1513 Prato, Compagnetto da, 1754 Prato, Giovanni Gherardo da, 1649 music and, 1254 Prato, Il (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Prato piu´ verde, Il (Erba, L.), 674 Prato spirituale, Il (Belcari), 148 Pratolini, Vasco, 280, 737, 812, 984, 1494–1497. See also Neorealism Bilenchi and, 229 homosexuality and, 1033 neorealism and, 1285 Resistance and, 1578 Spaziani and, 1786 Vittorini and, 2005 World War II and, 2031, 2032 Zavattini and, 2042 Pratt, Hugo, 790 Praxinoscope, 50 Praz, Mario, 47, 48, 580–581, 1497–1499 Calasso and, 342 Precetti (suggestions), 1009 Prediche sopra Aggeo (Savonarola), 1691 Prediche sopra Amos e Zaccaria (Savonarola), 1691 Prediche sopra Ezechiele (Savonarola), 1691 Prediche sopra Giobbe (Savonarola), 1691 Prediche sopra i Salmi (Savonarola), 1691 Prediche sopra l’Esodo (Savonarola), 1692 Prediche sopra Ruth e Michea (Savonarola), 1691 Prediche volgari (Siena), 1315 Predieri, Luc’Antonio, 1191 Pre´face de Cromwell (Hugo), 785 Prefazione (Goldoni), 865 Prefetto di ferro (iron perfect), 1103 ‘‘Preghiera’’ (Porta, C.), 1563 ‘‘Preghiera davanti al Crocifisso’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Preghiera della sera, La’’ (Rea), 1553 Pre-Humanism, 1001

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INDEX Preludio e canzonette (Saba), 1643 Premessa (Roversi), 1630 Premiers Lundis (Sainte-Beuve), 156 Premio Rapallo-Carige (Duranti), 650 Premio Strega, 1549 Premio Urania, 1720 Premio Viareggio, 1576 Preraffaelliti, simbolisti ed esteti (Graf ), 886 Presa di potere di Ivan lo sciocco, La (Porta, A.), 1484 Presente scialbo (dim present), 1551 Presenza di Orfeo, La (Merini), 1186 Presepi, Guido, 51 Presidentessa, La (Germi), 829 Press Law, 445 Pressburger, Georgio, 1499–1501 ‘‘Prestate nobis de oleo vestrosso’’ (Burchiello, Il), 330 Prete, Antonio, 1022 Prete bello, Il (Laurentiis), 446 Prete bello, Il (Parise, Goffredo), 1353 Preti, Girolamo, 1158, 1162 Preti, Giulio, Pozzi, A., and, 1488 Previati, Gaetano, 2003 Previtali, Giovanni, 99, 101 Prezzo dell’oro, Il (Arpino), 95 Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 233, 983, 1009, 1501–1504, 1771 Boine and, 270 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Gobetti, P., and, 862 Gramsci and, 892 Panzini and, 1343 Papini and, 1346 Russian influences of, 1634 Serra, R., and, 1746 Voce, La and, 1554 World War I and, 2029 Price, George E., 438 Prigione e altri versi, La (Pozza), 1581 Prigioniero (Braghetti and Tavella), 159, 1865–1866 Prima comunione (Blasetti), 237 Prima della rivoluzione (Bertolucci, B.), 197 Prima dell’anno nuovo (Orelli), 1318 Prima, Diane di, 965 Prima donna inamorata, 40 Prima e dopo (Tarozzi), 1830 Prima estasi, La (Rasy), 1549 Prima la musica e poi le parole (Casti), 1051 ‘‘Prima luce’’ (Caproni), 379 Prima luce Caesar profectus est (Caesar, J.), 379 Prima morire (Marchesa Colombi), 671 Prima ora della Academia, La (Lucini), 1079 Prima parte (Tasso, T.), 1834 Prima persona (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1477 Prima veste dei discorsi degli animali (Firenzuola), 202, 463, 731 Primaleo´n, 934 Primaleone, figliuolo di Palmerino (Dolce), 639, 934 Primander (Trismegistus), 720 Primato, 113, 980, 985, 1607 Betocchi and, 204 Primato artistico italiano, Il, Chirico, G., and, 2004 ‘‘Primavera del mare, La’’ (Govoni), 874 Primavera di bellezza (Fenoglio), 713, 714 Primavera e altri racconti (Verga, G.), 1965, 1969 ‘‘Primavera hitleriana, La’’ (Montale), 2032

I124

Prime (Ungaretti), 1932 Prime alla Scala (Montale), 1261 Prime di sere (Sgorlon), 1750 Prime e ultimissime (Betocchi), 204 Prime pioggie d’ottorbre (Pea), 1391 Prime storie, Le (Aleardi), 13 Primera memoria (Matute), 936 Primi (Meneghello), 1184 Primi disegni della repubblica letteraria d’Italia (Muratori), 1251 Primi poemetti (Pascoli), 1360 Primi principi di un’estetica futurista (Soffici), 1772 Primitivism, 359 Primizie del deserto (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083 ‘‘Primo amore, Il’’ (Leopardi), 1019 ‘‘Primo cantore, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Primo dei moderni, 1078 ‘‘Primo foglio, Il’’ (Pagliarani), 1331 Primo libro delle favole (Gadda), 203 Primo libro dell’opere toscane, Il (Battiferra degli Ammannati), 143 Primo Maggio (De Amicis), 576 Primo manifesto per la cinematografia futurista, Il, 723 Primo passo, Il (Nardi, I.), 1303 Primo tempo, 578 Montale and, 1211 Solmi and, 1778, 1779 Primo vere (D’Annunzio), 540 Primo viaggio intorno al globo di Antonio Pigafetta (Pigafetta), 1906 Primoli, Giuseppe Napoleone, 1433 ‘‘Prince and Court: Why and How Should the Court Be Studied Today?’’ (Mozzarelli), 519 Prince, The. See Principe, Il (Machiavelli) Princes, Patronage, and Nobility (Asch and Birke), 516 Princesa (Albuquerque and Jannelli), 1201 Principe costante, Il (Arbasino), 936 Principe delle nuvole (Riotta), 981 Principe e la rosa, Il (Tarozzi), 1830 Principe, Il (Machiavelli), 736, 916, 1092–1094, 1096–1097, 1097–1099, 1506, 1589, 1921 Pontano and, 1472 Silone and, 1756 Principessa e il drago, La (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Principessa filosofa, La (Gozzi, C.), 881 Principessa Tarakanova (Soldati and Ozep), 1775 Principi di scienza nuova (Vico), 294, 943, 1568, 1981, 1986–1988 Principi di una scienza nuova intorno alla natura delle nazioni (Vico), 1599 Principi scientifici del divisionismo (Previati), 2003 Principio del giorno (Signoribus), 818 Principio dell’antiletteratura, Il (Spera), 1699 Principio delrealismo (De Sanctis), 1061 Principio di secolo (Re`paci), 1576 Principum neapolitanorum coniurationis anni MDCCI historia (Vico), 1984–1985 Prineide (Grossi), 897 Printing and Publishing, 292–294, 1504–1509 ‘‘Prinzessin Brambilla’’ (Hoffmann), 686 Priorato delle Arti, 504 Priore (governor), 735 Prisca theologia (ancient theology), 719 Prisciani, Pellegrino, 716 Prisco, Michele in Naples, 1268 Rea and, 1553 Prise de Pampelune, 666

INDEX Prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, La (Rossellini), 1620 Prison Notebooks. See Quaderni del carcere (Gramsci) Prisoner of the Caucasus, The (Pusˇkin), 1633 Pritanio, Lamindo. See Muratori, Ludovico Antonio Privilegium (Petrarch), 256 Pro adventu Serenissimae sarmaticae reginae (Fedele), 699 Pro Archia (Cicero), 242, 1405, 1415 Pro o contro la bomba atomica (Morante), 1225 Pro Patria, Di Giacomo and, 636 Problema del Mezzogiorno, Il. See Questione meridionale (southern question) Problema estetico in San Tommaso (Eco), 657 Proble`mes de linguistı´que ge´ne´rale (Benveniste), 1511 Problemi del socialismo (Basso), 1770 Problemi della scolastica e il pensiero italiano, I (Gentile), 1427 Problemi di estetica e contributi alla storia dell’estetica italiana (Croce, B.), 525, 894 Probus, Aemilius, 265 Processi verbali (De Roberto), 613 Processo a Gesu` (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Processo de famiglia (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Proclama sul fascino (Bellezza), 152 Proclamation of Venice, 13 Proclemer, Anna, Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Proclus, Neoplatonism and, 1280 Prodelki Smeral’diny (Solov’ev), 499 Prodi, Romano, 279 Produrre e Riprodurre, 707 Proemi (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 ‘‘Proemio’’ (Giordani, Pietro), 850 Proemio (Medici, Lorenzo), 1181 Profession: reporter (Antonioni), 58 Professionisti dell’antimafia, I (Sciascia), 1708 ‘‘Professor terremoto, Il’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Profezie (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Profili al tratto (Bigiaretti), 224 Profili di donne (Capuana), 383 Profilo in lineare-B (Rambelli, R.), 1720 Profughi di Parga, I (Berchet), 181, 1598 Profughi fiamminghi, I (Praga, E.), 1491 Profugiorum ab aerumna libra III (Alberti, Leon), 8, 1001 Profumo (Capuana), 383 Profumo di donna (Risi, D.), 1585 Progetto Burlamacchi (Duranti), 650 Programma of Il Concilatore (Borsieri), 1061 Proleterka (Jaeggy), 972 Prologhi (Cardarelli), 386 Prologhi, viaggi, favole (Cardarelli), 386 Prologo ai ‘‘Menechmi’’ di Plauto (Poliziano), 1464 Prologo alle tenebre (Bernari), 184 Prolusione petarchesca (Landino), 994 ‘‘Promedades Architecturales’’ (Leonardo da Vinci), 1763 Promemoria: Lo sterminio degli Ebrei d’Europa (Meneghello), 1184 Promenades dans Rome (Stendhal), 1605 Promessa di Hamadi, La (Ba and Michelleti), 1200 Promessi sposi alla prova, I (Testori), 1869 Promessi sposi, I (Manzoni, A.), 47, 68, 108, 232, 352, 573, 935, 937, 1032, 1132, 1137–1140, 1240, 1430, 1448, 1481, 1569, 1597, 1858, 1869 Giordani, Pietro, and, 851 Grossi and, 897 Praga, E., and, 1491 Tommaseo and, 1883

translation of, 1902 Verga, G., and, 1964 Prometeo (Monti, V.), 1219, 1279 Prometeo (Nono), 72 Prometeo (Vigano´), 538 Prometeo nella poesia (Graf ), 885 Pronea (Cesarotti), 454 Propertius Landino and, 993 lyric poetry and, 1087 ‘‘Proposizioni per una teoria della letteratura’’ (Leonetti), 1016 Propp, Vladimir, 345, 820 Proprieta`, 616 Propsota di alcune correzioni ed aggiunte al vocabolario della Crusca (Monti, V.), 1219–1220 Pros Demonikon (Isocrates), 1172 Prosa, 1131 Prosa d’arte (art prose), 124, 386, 430, 1130 Longhi and, 1073 Moravia and, 1230 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Praz and, 1498 ‘‘Prosa moderna’’ (Pirandello), 1564 Prosciugamento del Mediterraneo, Il (Motta and Ciancimino), 1718 Prose (Saba), 1644 Prose campestri, Le (Pindemonte), 1446 Prose degli Arcadi, 66 Prose della volgar lingua (Bembo, P.), 81, 163, 166, 167–168, 639, 1001–1002, 1058, 1255, 1413, 1420, 1561, 1821, 1904 Decameron (Boccaccio) and, 247 language and, 1055 Prose e poesie edite e inedite di Ugo Foscolo (Carrer), 398 Prose politiche (Mazzini), 1176 Prosimetron, 166 Prosimetrum, 248, 362 Sannazaro and, 1677 Prosperi, Carola, 1922 Prosperi, Piero, 1719, 1720 ‘‘Prosperina’’ (Marino), 1161 Prospettive, 226 Malaparte and, 1112, 1113 Petroni and, 1425 Prospetto (Fachini), 66 Prostitution. See also Franco, Veronica Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Protagonista, Il (Malerba), 1116 Protesta del popolo delle due Sicilie (Settembrini), 1748 ‘‘Protestanti in Italia, I’’ (Jahier), 973 Protonotaro, Stefano, 1753 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 616 Jahier and, 974 Mazzini and, 1176 Proust, Marcel, 62, 228, 1429, 1897, 1996 Bassani and, 139 Bertolucci, A., and, 195 Bonaviri and, 284 Campo, C., and, 370 Gadda and, 795 Ginzburg, N., and, 842 Manzini and, 1130 Romano, L., and, 1594 Svevo and, 1806 in Venice, 1961 Vittorini and, 2005

I125

INDEX Provando e riprovando (trying and trying again), 737 Provando la commedia (Pirandello), 1450 Proverbiade, La (Belli, G.), 154 Proverbios (Goya), 154 ‘‘Provino, Il’’ (Moravia), 1235 Prto di Toledo, Il (Ortese), 282 Psalmi poenitentiales (Petrarch), 1416 Psalterium decem cordarum (Gioacchino da Fiore), 848 Pseudo-Dionysius, 1281 Mirandol and, 1440 PSI. See Partito Socialista Italiano Psicanalisi, La (Morselli, E.), 1512 Psichiatria umana, 1874 Psudolus (Plautus), 1092 Psychoanalysis and Literature, 1509–1514 Tobino and, 1874 Zanzotto and, 2037 Psychological thrillers, 632 Psychomachia (Prudentius), 261 Ptolemy, 277 Ptusˇko, Aleksandr, 50 Pu Yi, 199 Pubblici segreti (Bellonci), 162 ‘‘Puberta`’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Publishing. See Printing and Publishing Pucci, Antonio, 201, 667 Puccini, Giacomo, 48, 1728, 1760 De Roberto and, 614 Giacosa and, 838 Neera and, 1271 Puccini, Gianni, 32 Visconti, L., and, 1994 Pucelle d’Orle´ans, La (Voltaire), 1219 Puerto Escondido (Salvatores), 1663 Puerto Plata Market (Nove), 374 Pufendorf, Samuel, 1768 Puglia, Gerardo, 212 Pugliese, Giacomino, 1337 Puglisi, Giuseppe, 1084 Pugni in tasca, Il (Bellocchio), 158 ‘‘Pugno chiuso, Il’’ (Boito, A.), 272, 686 Pujo, Costant, 1433 Pulci, Antonia, 1515–1517, 1653 Sacra rappresentaziione and, 1652 Tornabuoni and, 1888 Pulci, Bernardo, 1380, 1652, 1653 Tornabuoni and, 1888 Pulci, Luca, 667 Pulci, Luigi, 76, 186, 667, 1468, 1517–1522, 1561. See also Epic; Humanism Aesop and, 201 censorship of, 444 Gelli and, 814 Gozzi, C., and, 880 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1177 Parini, G., and, 1349 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1920 utopia and, 1938 Pulcinella creduto moglie di un finto marito (Scarpetta), 1700 Pulcinella principe in sogno (Mangini and De Filippo, E.), 585 Pulcinellate, 1950 Puliatti, Pietro, 1843 Puliti, Tito, 1430

I126

Pulp fiction, 373 Pungolo, Il, 635, 978, 1259 Di Giacomo and, 636 Faldella and, 1698 Neera and, 1271 Nievo and, 1291 Praga, E., and, 1491 Scarpetta and, 1701 Tarchetti and, 1828 Punto, Il, 162 Pupi e Fresedde, 500 Puppa, Paolo, 1522–1523 Puppi, Lionello, 100 Pura formalita`, Una (Tornatore), 1891 Purgatorio (Dante), 45, 290, 327, 554, 556–557 Dolce stil novo and, 640 Guinizzelli and, 923 Purgatorio de l’Inferno (Sanguineti), 1670 Purgatorio: La notte lava la mente, Il (Luzi, M.), 1084 Purification, 1070 Purismo, 616 Pusˇkin, Aleksandr, 1633 ‘‘Puss in Boots,’’ 463 Pusterla, Fabio, Valduga and, 1942 Pusterla of Porta Ticinese, 275 Pustianaz, Marco, 1034 Putiferio (Viviani, R.), 2014 Putta onorata, La (Goldoni), 866, 880 Puzo, Mario, 963–964 Pynchon, Thomas, 49 Pythagoras, 1426

Q Quadernetto alla polvere (Sinisgalli), 1762 Quaderni del carcere (Gramsci), 53, 355, 501, 889, 891–893, 1062, 1285, 1533, 1592 Quaderni della Voce, 359 Quaderni di Serafino Gubbio operatore (Pirandello), 470, 724, 1450, 1459–1460, 1727, 1854 Quaderni medievali, 2027 Quaderni piacentini, 502, 985 Raboni and, 1538 Quaderni rossi, 1770 Quaderni storici, 2027 Quaderno a cancelli (Levi, C.), 1037, 2004 Quaderno di quattro anni (Montale), 1213 Quaderno di traduzioni (Montale), 1212 Quaderno genovese (Montale), 817, 1211 Quaderno gotico (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083 Quaderno proibito (De Ce´spedes), 582 Quadrante, 288, 1455 Quadri, Franco, 1826 Quadrio, Francesco Saverio, 144 Quaestiones ordinariae (ordinary questions), 1703 Quaggiu` nella biosfera: Tre saggi sul lievito poetico delle scritture (Meneghello), 1185 Quaglio, Emilio Pasquini-Enzo, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Quakera spiritosa, La (Guglielmi, P.), 48 Quakers, 48 Qualcosa di buono (Modignani), 1601 ‘‘Qualcosa era successo’’ (Buzzati), 337 Qualcuno ha bussato alla porta (D’Errico), 631 Qualitas, 1573

INDEX ‘‘Qualunque al bagno vuol mandar la moglie’’ (Burchiello, Il), 331 Qualunquismo (‘‘whateverism’’), 1894, 1914 Quando Dio uscı` di chiesa (Tomizza), 1881 Quando le radici (Aldani), 1720 ‘‘Quando si e` capito il gioco’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Quando si e` qualcuno (Pirandello), 1453 ‘‘Quando vegio rinverdire’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 833 Quanta Cura (Pius IX), 445 Quanto spera di campare Giovanni (Giudici, G.), 859 Quaranta sonetti romaneschi (Trilussa), 1913 Quarantanove gradini, I (Calasso), 342 Quarantasettesima (Bertoli), 1580 Quarantatto (Sciascia), 1706 Quarantun esemplari (Ramat), 1542 Quaresimale (Segneri), 1568 Quark (Bozzetto), 51 Quarta dimensione (Aldani), 1720 Quarta generazione (Chiara and Erba, L.), 675 Quarta parte de le Novelle del Bandello (Bandello, M.), 121 Quartiere, Il (Pratolini), 1285 Quartine: Seconda centuria (Valduga), 1942 Quarto grande, 1164 Quarto romanzo (Svevo), 1806 Quarto Stato, Il (Volpedo), 1481 Quartucci, Carlo, 1796 Quasi d’amore (Bontempelli), 687 Quasi umano (almost human), 578 Quasi un secolo (Bernari), 183 Quasi una vita (Alvaro), 29 Quasimodo, Salvatore, 538, 1428, 1525–1531 Aleramo and, 16 Hermeticism and, 930 lyric poetry and, 1089 Merini and, 1186 Montale and, 1212 Resistance and, 1580 Sinisgalli and, 1761 translation and, 1902 Quatrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy), 952 Quattro dialoghi in materia di rappresentazioni sceniche (Sommi), 1780 Quattro giornate di Napoli (Loy, N.), 185 Quattro giugno, Il (Boito, A.), 271 Quattro libri dell’architettura, I (Palladio), 70, 2002 ‘‘Quattro parti del giorno, Le’’ (Pindemonte), 1446 Quattro passi fra le nuvole (Blasetti), 237, 2042 quattro poesie della vergogna, Le (Merini), 1187 Quattro ragazze Wieselberger, Le (Cialente), 467 Quattrodicesima commensale, La (Marilotti), 1865 Quazza, Guido, 662 Queaneau, Raymond, 785 Queimada (Pontecorvo), 1475 ‘‘Quel che rimane di Calvino’’ (Jahier), 973 Quel che vide Cummeo (Rea), 1552 Quel che vidi and quel che intesi (Costa, N.), 1606 ‘‘Quel partigiano tedesco’’ (Fortini), 1581 Quella che t’assomiglia (Pirandello), 1849 ‘‘Quella felice stella’’ (Ga`mbara), 807 Quella maledetta osteria (De Marchi, E.), 611 ‘‘Quell’antica ragazza’’ (Fenoglio), 712 Quellenforschung, 82 Quello che resta da fare ai poeti (Saba), 1643 Quell’uomo che prega il Signore (Orelli), 1318 Quenouille de Barberine (Musset), 122

Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (Gadda), 632, 795, 796, 800–801, 1607, 2032 Querelle des femmes, 83, 778 Querelle des the´aˆtres, 445, 784 Querenghi, Francesco, 438 Querini Stampalia Foundation, 72 Questa e´ Parigi (Comisso), 496 Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Pirandello), 1452, 1795 Questa volta parliamo di uomini (Wertmu¨ller), 2021 Questi fantasmi! (De Filippo, E.), 585, 587 Questio de aqua et terra (Dante), 552 Questione agaria nella rinascita nazionale italiana, La (Sereni, E.), 946 ‘‘Questione de razza’’ (Trilussa), 1914 Questione del Mezzogiorno, 986 Questione del romanticismo, 1902 Questione della lingua, 3, 166, 186, 814, 1001, 1054, 1902 Bembo, P., and, 1413 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Firenzuola and, 730 Grazzini and, 895 Machiavelli and, 1093 Monti, V., and, 1220 Petrarchism and, 1420 Trissino and, 1915 Varchi and, 1948 Questione dell’Adriatico, La (Salvemini), 1666 Questione femminile, 1249 Questione meridionale (southern question), 53, 191, 889, 1531–1535 Prezzolini and, 1502 Salvemini and, 1665 Serao and, 1733–1734 ‘‘Questione meridionale, La’’ (Risi, N.), 1587 Questione meridionale, La (Salvemini), 889 Questione privata, Una (Fenoglio), 713, 1579 Questioni di frontiera (Fortini), 761 Questo e altro, 370 Questo matrimonio si deve fare (Brancati), 309 Questo muro: 1964–1974 (Fortini), 761 Questo povero corpo (Tedeschi, G.), 948 Quevedo, Francisco, 136, 137 Boccaccio and, 250 Qui e altrove (Minicuci), 54 Qui pro quo (Bufalino), 322 Quidditas, 1573 Quidort, Jean, 551 Quigley, Hugh, 894 Quinario sdrucciolo, 860 Quindici, 985, 1276 Arbasino and, 63 Celati and, 434 Quinet, Edgar, 616 Quinn, Anthony, 701 Quinnice solde so’ cchiu` assaie de seimila lire (Scarpetta), 1700 Quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam, 291 Quint, David, 83, 85 Quinta de Florencia (Vega, L.), 122 Quinta stagione, La (Tomizza), 1880 Quintilian, 303, 478, 819, 821, 1464 Castelvetro and, 407 rhetoric and, 953–954 utopia and, 1938 Valla, L., and, 1945 Quinto evangelio, Il (Pomilio), 1470

I127

INDEX Quinto stato, Il (Camon), 357 Quintus, 1406 Quinzani, Stefana, 1566 Quirini, Giovanni, 1562 Quisquilie (Sbarbaro), 1695 Quo vadis? (De Loy), 1013 Quo vadis baby? (Salvatores), 1664 Quondam, Amedo, 2, 894, 1056 Civil conversatione, La (Guazzo) and, 905 Renaissance and, 1575 Quota Albania (Rigoni Stern), 1583 Quotidiano donna, 707

R Rabbia e l’orgoglio, La (Fallaci), 682 Rabbia gridata, Una (Fenga), 817 Rabbino di Venezia, Il (Pressburger), 1500 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 821, 1906 humanism and, 953 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Rabitti, Giovanna, 1173 Raboni, Giovanni, 1537–1539 in Milan, 1205 Penna and, 1396 Tarozzi and, 1829 Ungaretti and, 1928 Raccolta Aragonese (Medici, Lorenzo), 1463 Raccolta dei proverbi toscani con illustrazioni (Giusti), 861 ‘‘Raccolta del fieno, La’’ (Roversi), 1630 Raccolta, La, 113, 278 Raccolte, Le (Bettinelli), 212 Raccontami quella di Flic (Lagorio), 992 Racconti (Percoto), 1398 Racconti comuni (everyday tales), 435 Racconti del parentado (Fenoglio), 712 Racconti della guerra civile (Fenoglio), 711 Racconti della scapigliatura piemontese (Contini), 1698 Racconti delle fate (Collodi), 484 Racconti di Canterbury, I (Pasolini), 472, 1368, 1373 Racconti di fantascienza (Blasetti), 237 Racconti di padre Brown, I, 633 Racconti drammatici Dessı`), 629 Racconti fantastici (Di Giacomo), 635 Racconti fantastici (Tarchetti), 684, 1827 Racconti italiani dell’Ottocento (Calvino), 687 Racconti romani (Moravia), 280, 1234–1235 Racconti umoristici (Tarchetti), 1827 Raccontiamoci com’e` andata (Lagorio), 992 Racconto d’autunno (Landolfo), 686, 997, 998–999 ‘‘Racconto dell’isola’’ (Goldoni), 1939 Racconto delVajont, Il (Paolini), 1344 Radcliffe, Anne, 908 Radice, Marco Lombardo, 67 Ravera and, 1550 Radici (Guccini), 1784 Radio, censorship of, 445 Radio partigiana, 582 Radiose giornate, Le (Bernari), 184 Raffaele (Brancati), 309 Raffaello e la Fornarina (Aleardi), 13 Ragazza (Garboli), 809 Ragazza Carla, La (Pagliarani), 1331 Ragazza col turbante, La (Morazzoni), 1235

I128

Ragazza con la pistola, La (Monicelli, M.), 1209 Ragazza da marito (De Filippo, E.), 587 Ragazza di Bube, La (Cassola), 404, 2032 Ragazza di Petrovia, La (Tomizza), 1880 Ragazza in nero, La (Bianchini), 217 Ragazza sola (Jovine), 986 Ragazze che dovresti conoscere (Vinci), 1993 Ragazzesole con qualche esperienza (Moscato), 1247 Ragazzi della Via Pal, I (Monicelli, M.), 1208 Ragazzi di Via Panisperna, I (Amelio), 32 Ragazzi di vita (Pasolini), 280, 472, 1235, 1285, 1367, 1371, 1375–1376, 1607 ‘‘Ragazzinaccio’’ (De Roberto), 613 Ragazzo (Jahier), 973 Ragazzo di Trastevere (Griffi), 1033 Ragazzo, Il (Dolce), 639 Ragazzo morto e le comete, Il (Parise, Goffredo), 1353 Ragazzoni, Ernesto, 1539–1541 Rageb, Jo¨rg, 1222 Raggianti, Carlo Ludovico, 100, 724 Raggio d’ombra, Il (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1206 Ragguagli di Parnaso (Boccalini), 1862 Ragguaglio, 854 Raging Bull (Scorsese), 1791 Ragiomento dello Academico Aldeano sopra la poesia giocasa de’ Greci, de’ Latini, e de’ Toscani (Villani, N.), 932 Ragion poetica (Gravina, G.), 819 Ragionamenti (Aretino), 75, 78–80 Ragionamenti (discussions), 79 Guiducci and, 921 Ragionamenti (Firenzuola), 730 Ragionamenti del mio viaggio intorno al mondo (Carletti), 1907 Ragionamenti sulle arti figurative (Severini), 2004 Ragionamento (Gelli), 840 Ragionamento della Nanna e della Antonia (Aretino), 78–80 Ragionamento della poesia (Tasso, B.), 1831 Ragionamento ingenuo (Gozzi, C.), 881 Ragionamento intorno al diletto della tragedia (Cesarotti), 453 Ragione (Dante), 728 Ragioni d’alcune cose segnate nella canzone d’Annibal Caro: Venite a l’ombra de gran gigli d’oro (Castelvetro), 301, 396, 406 Ragioni d’una poesia (Ungaretti), 1929 Ragioni narrative, Le, 1552 ‘‘Ragnatele di rapporti: Patronage e reti di relazione nella storia delle donne,’’ 2026 Ragno, Il (Benelli), 172 Rago, Henry, 964 RAI. See Italian National Television Raimondi, Ezio, 1063 Serra, R., and, 1745 Raimondi, Ezra, 135, 278 Raimondi, Giuseppe, 278 Raimondi, Marcantonio, 74 Rainaldo e Lesengrino, 202 Rajberti, Giovanni, 758, 1908 Rajna, Pio, 82, 267, 665, 820, 1521 as critic, 1061 Rak, Michele, 137 Rakam, 979 Ramat, Silvio, 930, 1541–1543 Rambelli, Loris, 631, 632 Rambelli, Roberta, 1719, 1720 Ramboldini, Vittorino, humanism and, 952 Rame, Franca, 739, 740, 1544–1546. See also Fo, Dario

INDEX Ramondino, Fabrizia, 936, 1546–1548. See also Naples Rampling, Charlotte, 425 Ramponi, Lambertino, 477 Ramponi, Virginia, 498, 1127 Ramus, Peter, 1946 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 1907 Rana dispettosa, La (Bottini), 51 Rancore (Fabbri, Diego), 677 Randagio e` l’eroe (Arpino), 96 Randone, Salvo, Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 25 Ranieri, Antonio, 1024, 1026 scapigliatura and, 1698 ‘‘Rant’’ (Prima), 965 Ranzi, Galatea, Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Rap (Sanguineti), 1257 Rape, donna, Una and, 18 Rapetti, Giulio, 1784 Raphael, 221, 639, 2003 Aretino and, 74 Castiglione and, 409 Cellini and, 442 Vasari and, 1954 ‘‘Rapido saluto, Un’’ (Arpino), 95 Rapimento di Cefalo, Il (Chiabrera), 456 Rapporti colpevoli, I (Tomizza), 1881 Rapporti tra la scena e le arti figurative dalla fine dell’800 (Lonzi), 1075 Rapporto di cose della Magna (Machiavelli), 1907 Rappresentazione allegorica della Volutta`, Virtu` e Fama (Serafino Aquilano), 1731 Rappresentazione del di del giudizio (Meglio), 1651 Rappresentazione del figliuol prodigo (Castellani, C.), 1652 Rappresentazione del figliuol prodigo (Pulci, A.), 1515 Rappresentazione della conversione di Santa Maria Maddalena (Castellani, C.), 1652 Rappresentazione della croce (Raboni), 1538 Rappresentazione della disputa nel tempio (Castellani, C.), 1652 Rappresentazione della Nunziata (Belcari), 149 Rappresentazione della Resurrezione di Gesu´ Cristo (Castellani, C.), 1652 Rappresentazione di Abraam e di Isaacsuo figliuolo (Belcari), 149 Rappresentazione di Barlaam e Josafat (Pulci, B.), 1515, 1652 Rappresentazione di Costantino imperatore (Castellani, C.), 1652 Rappresentazione di San Giovanni e Paolo (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179, 1652 Rappresentazione di San Silvestro papa e Sant’Elena (Castellani, C.), 1652 Rappresentazione di Santa Domitilla (Pulci, A.), 1515 Rapsodia satanica (Oxilia, N.), 1329 Raptosh, Diane, 966 Rarefazioni e parole in liberta` (Govoni), 874 Rascel, Renato, 633, 1951 Rasi, Luigi, 499 Rasoi (Moscato), 1247 Rassegna contemporanea, 940 Rassegna d’Italia, La, Solmi and, 1779 Rassegna internazionale, La, 173 Rassegna musicale, La, 1259 Rassegna settimanale, 786, 983 Rasy, Elisabetta, 1423, 1548–1550. See also Feminist Theory and Criticism Ratio studiorum, 1935 ‘‘Rationes quare Virgo tenetur diligere peccatores’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290

Ratto di ganimede, Il (Buonarroti, M.), 327 Ratto di Prosperpina, Il (Rosso), 1624 Raumgestaltung (shaped space), 101 Ravera, Lidia, 1550–1552 Raviola, Roberto, 789 Raya, Gino, 1963, 1965 Raymond, Alex, 788 Raymond, Georges, 873 Raymond of Capua, 414 Razmataz, 1785 Razzi, Girolamo, Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 143 Re bello, Il (Palazzeschi), 1334 Re cervo, Il (Gozzi, C.), 881 Re del magazzino, Il (Porta, A.), 1483 Re di Girgenti, Il (Camilleri), 355 Re e il lustrascarpe, Il (Rea), 1552 Re in ascolto, Un (Berio), 1257 Re in ascolto, Un (Calvino), 1316 Re Mida (Rea), 1553 ‘‘Re Orso’’ (Boito, A.), 272 Re pensieroso, Il (Betti, U.), 208, 209 Re Torrismondo, Il (Tasso, T.), 1126, 1822, 1835 ‘‘Re Travicello, Il’’ (Giusti), 202, 861 Rea, Domenico, 1552–1553 in Naples, 1268, 1547 Reaccolta aragonese (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1707 Reali di Francia, I (Barberino, A.), 667, 1504 Realism, 1971 Realismo critico, 1231 Realismo magico (magical realism), 286, 687, 1167 Realta` di ieri e di oggi (Tozzi, F.), 1896 Realta` e` un dono, La (Sanvitale), 1678 Realta` vince il sogno (Betocchi), 204 Rebora, Clemente, 269, 1332, 1554–1557, 1569 Aleramo and, 15 Bacchelli and, 112 Boine and, 271 in Milan, 1204 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Piccolo and, 1436 Russian influences of, 1634 Turoldo and, 1924 Valduga and, 1941 Rebora, Roberto, Pozzi, A., and, 1489 Rebus, 1107 ‘‘Rebus’’ (Tabucchi), 1816 Recherche du temps perdu (Proust), 62 Recitar cantando (singing acting), 1255, 1310 Re´citis turques (Belgioioso), 151 Re´cits fantastiques (fantastic narratives), 684 Recreazione poetica (poetic re-creation), 454 Re´cueil de pie`ces curie`uses sur les matie`res les plus interessantes (Passerano), 1769 Recuperanti, I (Olmi), 1306, 1859 Redgrave, Vanessa, 325 Redi, Francesco, 757, 1557–1559, 1712 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Chiabrera and, 455 Redivvo (De Marchi, E.), 611 ‘‘Reduce, Il’’ (Gozzano), 877 Re´e, Paul, 425 Reeds in the Wind. See Canne al vento (Deledda) :riflessi (Palazzeschi), 1333

I129

INDEX Reformation, 1567–1568 Bruno, Giordano, and, 316 Reggimento e costumi di donna (Barberino, F.), 1296 Reggio Emilia, 1580 Reggio, Milioli da, 1656 Regia (stage directing), 1793 Regina disadorna, La (Maggiani), 817 Regina e gli insorti, La (Betti, U.), 206, 208 Regio Teatro alla Canobbiana, 1203 Regional Literature, 1560–1564 Regista (stage director), 1793 Registrazioni di eventi (Roversi), 1630 Regli, Francesco, 1259 Regno dei cieli, Il (Dossi), 647 Regno, Il, 278, 296, 737, 983, 1346 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Regola a ben vivere (Savonarola), 1692 Regole della lingua toscana (rules of the Tuscan language), 302 Regole della vulgar lingua, Le (Fortunio), 167 Regole delli cinque ordini di architettura (Barozzi), 2002 ‘‘Regula bullata’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Regula non bullata’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Regularis concordia (Ethelwold), 1069 Rei, Isabelli, 583 Reim, Riccardo, 1316 Reina di Scozia, La (Della Valle, F.), 607 Reina, Francesco, 1352 Reina, Luigi, 1171 Reinhardt, Max, 500, 1461, 1760 Reiniger, Lotte, 50 Reise durch Sicilien und Grossgriechenland (Riedesel), 1338 Reisebilder (Sanguineti), 1670 Reisz, Karel, 158 Reitlinger, Gerald, 1184 Reivista minima, 685 Relazione della China (Gru¨ber), 1714–1715 Relazione della difesa di Parma (Guicciardini), 913 Relazione di Spagna (Guicciardini), 913 Relazione di un mio viaggio da Venezia a Costantinopoli (Casti), 1908 ‘‘Release of Acetilcolinasterasis in Neuroblastomas, The’’ (Ammaniti), 33 Religion and Literature, 1565–1570. See also Liturgical Drama; Sacra rappresentazione (mystery play) Religione del mio tempo, La (Pasolini), 1581 ‘‘Religione e teatro’’ (Betti, U.), 206, 208 Religiosissimi Fratris Joannis Baptistae Cattanei Genuensis vita (Bandello, M.), 117 Remarks on the Italian Language and Writers (Baretti), 129 Remarque, Erich Maria, 827, 2030 Remorse, Il (De Ce´spedes), 582 Renaissance, 1570–1575. See also Courts and Patronage; Humanism academies in, 1 Alberti, Leon, and, 7, 70 Andreini and, 36 Barbaro, E., and, 127–128 Baroque and, 1125–1126 Battiferra degli Ammannati and, 142 Bembo, P., and, 167 books of, 292 censorship during, 444 Della Casa and, 601

I130

emblem of, 10 Italy and, 46 Landino and, 993–995 Leone Ebreo and, 1011 Morra and, 1242–1244 Neoplatonism and, 1280 religion and, 1567 Stampa and, 1798 Tansillo and, 1821 Tasso, B., and, 1831 travel literature and, 1905, 1906 utopia and, 1938 Varchi and, 1948 Vico and, 1982 Renaissance Courtesy-Book, A. See Galateo, Il (Della Casa) Renaissance Quarterly, 1574 Renaudet, Augustin, 951 Rendiconti, 278 Reni, Guido Ariosto and, 92 in Naples, 1268 Renier, Rodolfo, 886 Renoir, Jean, 1867 Visconti, L., and, 1994 Re`paci, Leonida, 1067, 1576–1578 Re´ponse a` une lettre signe´e (Buonarroti, P. and Babeuf ), 1769 Repubblica borghese (Volponi), 2018 Repubblica degli zoccoli (republic of clogs), 913 Repubblica di Salo`, 2032 Repubblica, La, 133, 980, 1261 Benni and, 179 Camilleri and, 355 Cerami and, 448 Pontecorvo and, 1474 Rosi and, 1610 Repubblica Partenopea, 445 Republic, The (Plato), 818, 1405 socialism and, 1768 Republican Constitution, 445 Republicanism Aleardi and, 13 Alfieri, V., and, 20 Requiem (Tabucchi), 203, 687, 1816 Rerum familiarium libri (Petrarch), 1162, 1403, 1571 Rerum italicarum scriptores (Muratori), 504, 943, 1252, 1568 Rerum memorandum libri (Petrarch), 1416 Rerum senilium libri (Petrarch), 1406 Rerum suo tempore gestarum commentaria (Bruni, L.), 313 Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta (Petrarch), 1403, 1410 Res amissa (Caproni), 380 Resine (Sbarbaro), 1694 Resistance, Literature of the, 1578–1582. See also Literature of World War II Resistenza armata nella narrativa italiana, La (Falaschi), 1578 Resnais, Alain, 56, 785 ‘‘Resplendiente stella de albur’’ (Giacomino Pugliese), 832 Respublica muliebris (republic of women), 449 Respuesta a Sor Filotea (Ine´s), 936 Ressentiment, 207 Restaurare l’uomo (Stu´parich), 1804 Restitutor antiquitatis, 303 Resto del Carlino, Il, 113, 278, 978, 1874 Berto and, 192 Bevilacqua, A., and, 216

INDEX Dessı` and, 630 Tondelli and, 1887 Resurrectio (Blasetti), 236, 237 Resurrection, 1070 Resurrezione (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Resurrezione di Lazzaro (Fo), 743 ‘‘Resurrezione, La’’ (Manzoni, A.), 1133 Retablo (Consolo), 508 Reti, 707 Retorica del processo, 677 Retrofuturo (Curtoni), 1719 Rettorica (Aristotle), 396 Rettorica (Latini), 1003 Rettorica (rhetoric), 1195 Reunification, 1565 Reutter, Georg, 1191 Revelli, Nuto, 1579, 2033 ‘‘Reverendo, Il’’ (Verga, G.), 1970 Reverte, Arturo Pe´rez, 936 Revigni, Jacob da, 477 Revolutionary Princess, 150 Revolverate (Lucini), 1079 Revue Blanche, La, 1154 Revue des Deux Mondes, 151, 1560 Reynaud, Emile, 50 Reynolds, Joshua, 129 Rezzonico, Carlo Castone della Torre di, 1279 Rhetorica (Aristotle), 127, 406 Rhetorica ad Herennium (Cicero), 819, 1953 Rho, Antonio da, Valla, L., and, 1945 Riabilitazione, La (Arpino), 96 Ribalta Gaia, La, 585 Ribera, Renata, 613 Ribino, Antonio, 51 Ribot, The`odule, Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Riccardo III (Bene), 170 Ricchi, Agostino, 277 Ricci, Franco Maria, 790 Ricci, Matteo, 134, 488, 1907 Ricci, Paolo, 183, 1268 Ricci, Teodora, 881 Ricciarda (Foscolo), 765 Ricciardiello, Franco, 1721 Riccioli, Giovanni Battista, 135 Ricco, Mazzeo di, 1753 Riccoboni, Antonio, 174 Riccoboni, Luigi, 498, 819 Riccone torna alla terra, Un (Re´paci), 1576 Ricerca delle radici, La (Levi, P.), 1041 ‘‘Ricerca Letteraria, La’’ (Einaudi), 434 Ricercare, 34, 373 Ricerche angloitaliane (Praz), 1497 Ricerche archeologiche (Lovatelli, E.), 1660 Ricerche storiche, 2027 Ricette regionali italiane, Le (Gosetti), 759 Richa, Giuseppe, 1516 Richardson, Samuel, 670, 1312 Richardson, Tony, 158 Richelieu, Armand Jean, 363, 365 Richepin, Jean, 172 Richezza (Dante), 728 Richiamo all’ordine (return to order), 2004 Richler, Mordecai, 49 Rici, Corrado, 1433

Ricomincio da tre (Troisi), 1269 Ricordanze della mia vita (Setembrini), 1592, 1749 ‘‘Ricordanze, Le’’ (Leopardi), 1024, 1996 Ricordi (Guicciardini), 912, 916–917 Ricordi, Casa, 1258 Ricordi del capitano d’Arce, I (Verga, G.), 1964, 1965, 1970 Ricordi di Londra (De Amicis), 575 Ricordi di un impiegato (Tozzi, F.), 296–297, 1897 Ricordi d’infanzia (Tomasi di Lampedusa), 1878 ‘‘Ricordi d’un como`’’ (Trilussa), 1914 Ricordi-Racconti (Saba), 1643 Ricordo della Basca, Il (Delfini), 597 ‘‘Ricordo una stagione’’ (Spaziani), 1787 Ricotta, La (Pasolini), 726, 1285, 1367, 1372 Ricreazione dei savio, La (Bartoli, D.), 135 ‘‘Ride la gazza, nera sugli aranci’’ (Quasimodo), 1527, 1530 Ridendo l’uccise, E (Florestano), 122 Ridolfi, Rinaldo, 262 Riedesel, Johann Hermann von, 1338 Riegl, Alois, 100 Rien va (Landolfi), 997 Rienzi (Wagner), 482 Rienzo, Cola di, 1404, 1406, 1409 in Rome, 1604 Rifacimento (remake), 186, 268 Riflessione sopra il buon gusto intorno le scienze e le arti (Muratori), 1251 Riflessione sul meccanismo della natura in rapporto alla conservazione e riparazione degli individui (Meli), 1182 Riflessioni sopra alcuni equivoci sensi (Memmo), 2003 Riflessioni sulle leggi vincolanti principalmente nel commercio dei grani (Verri, P.), 1980 Riflesso condizionato (Archibugi), 67 Riforma della dialettica hegeliana, La (Gentile), 823 Riforma letteraria, La, 760, 984 Delfini and, 598 Noventa and, 1301 Righelli, Gennaro, 461 Righetti, Carlo, 1204 scapigliatura and, 1697 Rigoletto (Piave), 1313 Rigoni Stern, Mario, 465, 1582–1583, 2031 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 827 Duse and, 652 Marin and, 1149 Merini and, 1186 Petroni and, 1424 in Venice, 1961 Rima incrociata, 1181 Rimanelli, Giose, 964, 2032 Rimanenze (Sbarbaro), 1695 Rimarro, Il (Volponi), 2016 Rimbaud, Arthur, 359, 452, 580, 785, 1827 Cardarelli and, 385 lyric poetry and, 1088 Penna and, 1396 Soffici and, 1772 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Vassalli and, 1958 Rime (Alfieri, V.), 20 Rime (Andreini, I.), 39, 40 Rime (Bembo, P.), 163, 1421 Rime (Buonarroti, M.), 70, 1604

I131

INDEX Rime (Carducci), 388 Rime (Colonna, V.), 492 Rime (Dante), 1254 Rime (Della Casa), 601 Rime (Firenzuola), 730 Rime (Grazzini), 895 Rime (Guarini, B.), 902 Rime (Magno), 1421 Rime (Marino), 1127, 1160 Rime (Petrarch), 398 Rime (Poliziano), 1465 Rime (Roversi), 1629 Rime (Sannazaro), 1675 Rime (Stampa), 1797 Rime (Tasso, B.), 1832 Rime (Tasso, T.), 1088, 1834 music and, 1255 Rime (Terracina), 1861 Rime (Tullia d’Aragona), 1919 Rime amorose, 492 Rime degli Arcadi, 66 Rime del poeta Burchiello, Le (Doni), 330 Rime della selva, Le (Graf ), 885 Rime delle signore Lucrezia Marinella, Veronica Gambara e Isabella di Morra (Bulifon), 1243 Rime di diversi eccelenti autori bresciani, 806 Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nobilissimi intelletti (Dolce), 1243 Rime di diversi illustri signori napoletani e d’altri nuovamente raccolte et impresse (Dolce), 1243 Rime di diversi Signori napolitani e d’altri (Matraini), 1172 Rime di R. B. detto Filarete (Borghini, R.), 298 Rime di Rustico di Filippo, Le (Federici, V.), 1636 Rime di San Miniato (Carducci), 388 Rime diverse (Muzio), 1264 Rime diverse d’alcune nobilissime et virtuosissime donne (Dominichi), 1243, 1421, 1861 Rime diverse di molti eccellentissimi auttori, 639, 1861 Rime e lettere di Veronica Ga`mbara (Rizzardi), 806 Rime e prose (Della Casa), 600 Rime e ritmi (Carducci), 390 Rime et prose (Matraini), 1172 Rime, Le (Battiferra degli Ammannati), 144 Rime nuove (Carducci), 390, 392, 393–394 Rime petose (Dante), 254 Rime petrose, Le (Merini), 1186–1187 Rime sparse (scattered rhymes), 1411 Rime varie (Maggi), 1105 ‘‘Rimedio: La geografia’’ (Pirandello), 1458 ‘‘Rimembranze, Le’’ (Leopardi), 1021 Rimini (Tondelli), 1886 Rimini, Gregorio da, 1428 Rimmel (De Gregori), 1784 Rimorso (rebite), 54 Rimorso, Il, 671 Rin Tin Tin, 1857 Rina o l’angelo delle Alpi (Invernizio, C.), 961 Rinaldi, Cesare, Marino and, 1161 Rinaldi, Renato, 1910 Rinaldo (Tasso, T.), 1833 Rinascenza della tragedia, La (D’Annunzio), 541 Rinascimento, 1572 Rinascimento Privato (Bellonci), 161 Rinascimento segreto (Simonetta), 1519

I132

Rinascita, 29, 1347 Gatto and, 812 Giudici, G., and, 859 neo-avant-garde and, 1276 Pavese and, 1383 Rinascita, Edizioni, 502 Ring City (Veronesi, S.), 1975 Rinnovamento della filosofia in Italia proposto dal Conte Terenzio Mamiani ed esaminato da Antonio Rosmini Serba, 1427 Rinnovamento, Il, 271 Rinuccini, Ottavio, 455, 1049, 1310 Marino and, 1161 music and, 1255 Rinunzia, La (Vallini), 521 Riondino, David, Ragazzoni and, 1541 Riotta, Gianni, 49, 981 Ripamonti, Giuseppe, 1138 Ripellino, Angelo Maria, 1340, 1635 Ripley’s Game (Cavani), 426 Riposo, Il (Borghini, R.), 298 Ripresa, 421 ‘‘Risata de la duchessa, La’’ (Trilussa), 1914 Risate (laughs), 1161 Riscaldato, 2 ‘‘Riscatto, Il’’ (Gozzano), 879 Riscatto, Il (Graf ), 885 Risi, Dino, 35, 1584–1586, 1894 Scola and, 1722 Risi, Nelo, 1586–1588 in Milan, 1205 Pozzi, A., and, 1489 Riso amaro (De Santis), 619, 1283 Risorgimento, 1560, 1572, 1588–1593 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Aleardi and, 14 Alfieri, V., and, 20 Banti and, 125 Bianciardi and, 219 biography and, 232 Capponi, G., and, 375 Carrer and, 398 D’Azeglio, M., and, 573 De Sanctis and, 615 Gattopardo, Il and, 1430 Leopardi and, 1020 Rovani and, 1628 Salvemini and, 1665 scapigliatura and, 1697 Tiraboschi and, 1872 Tomasi di Lampedusa and, 1876 travel literature and, 1905 Treaty of Campoformio and, 1630 Zanella and, 2035 ‘‘Risorgimento’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Risorgimento e capitalismo (Romeo), 946 Rispondimi (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Risposta all’Apologia diTorquato Tasso (Salviati), 1668 Risposta alle considerazioni o dubbi dell-Ecc.mo Sig. Dottor Malacreta accademico ardito sopra il Pastor Fido (Beni), 174 Risposta alle obiezioni, 792, 1155 Risset, Jacqueline, 1615 Ristori, Adelaide Bracco and, 307

INDEX Manzoni, A., and, 1140 Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 ‘‘Risvegli’’ (Ungaretti), 1933 Risveglio dei faraoni, Il (Mieli, M.), 1198 Risveglio, Il (Fo), 1544 Rita la zanzara (Wertmu¨ller), 2021 Ritirata del Friuli, La (Soffici), 1773, 2029 Ritmi barbari (barbaric rhythms), 1787 Ritornello, 272 Ritorneranno (Stu´parich), 1803 ‘‘Ritorni, I’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 ‘‘Ritorno’’ (Caproni), 380 Ritorno (Fabbri, Diego), 677 ‘‘Ritorno a San Mauro, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Ritorno ad Algeri, Il (Pontecorvo), 1475 Ritorno alla Censura (Brancati), 309, 445 Ritorno all’ordine (return to order), 385, 1688 ‘‘Ritorno di Colombo, Il’’ (Pascoli), 488 Ritorno di Ulisse in Patria, Il (Badoaro), 1311 Ritorno in citta` (Delfini), 597 Ritratti (Cesarotti), 1658 Ritratti (Guccini), 818 Ritratti di signora (Ravy), 1423 Ritratti e profili (Cecchi, E.), 431 Ritratti, I (Trissino), 1916 Ritratti letterari (De Amicis), 575 Ritratti parlanti (Casini), 855 Ritratti umani (Dossi), 648 Ritratto del Serenissimo don Carlo Emanuello duca di Savoia (Marino), 1160, 1921 Ritratto di Giustina Renier Michiel (Albrizzi, I.), 1658 Ritratto di maggio (Rea), 1552 Ritratto d’ignoto (Fabbri, Diego), 678 ‘‘Ritratto d’ignoto’’ (Messina, A.), 510 ‘‘Ritratto d’un Amico’’ (Ginzburg, N.), 843 Ritratto in piedi (Manzini), 1131 Ritratto o modello delle grandezze, delizie e meraviglie della nobilissima citta` di Napoli (Tufo), 1562 Ritt, Martin, 829 Rituali dell’a`rgia, I (Gallini), 54 ‘‘Riunzia avanti nodaro degli autori del presente foglio periodico al Vocabolario della Crusca’’ (Verri, A.), 1977 Riusciranno i nostri eroi a ritrovare l’amico misteriosamente scomparso in Africa? (Scola), 1663, 1722 Riva, Salomone da, 717 Rivalto, Giordano da, 1567 Rivarotta (Meneghello), 1184 Rivas, Duque de, 935 Rive, Robert, 1432 River Full of Craft (Stafanile), 965 Rivera, Diego, 431 Riviera ligure, La, 270 Govoni and, 875 Rebora and, 1556 Sbarbaro and, 1695 Rivista (review), 1759 Rivista Europea, 1259 Rivista illustrate del Popolo d’Italia, La, 980 Rivista italiana, La (Belgioioso), 151 Rivista minima, 680, 689, 1259, 1827 Rivista minima (Praga, E.), 1490, 1698 Rivolta dei santi maledetti, La (Malaparte), 1111 Rivolta Femminile, 705, 706 Rivolta ideale, La (Oriani, A.), 1320

Rivolte del Parnaso, Le (Errico), 1562 Rivoluzionaria professionale (Noce), 1580 ‘‘Rivoluzione contro il Capitale, La’’ (Gramsci), 888 Rivoluzione culturale in Cina, La (Moravia), 1232 Rivoluzione, Delfini and, 598 Rivoluzione disarmista, La (Cassola), 404 Rivoluzione liberale, La, 1770 Gobetti, P., and, 862, 1035 Rivoluzione politica e rivoluzione nazionale (Nievo), 1292 Rivoluzione tipografica (typgraphical revolution), 792 Rizzardi, Felice, 806 Rizzoli, Angelo, 980, 1507 Rizzotto, Giuseppe, 1103, 1340 RLamberto Malatesta (Rovani), 1628 Rob the Rover (Booth), 788 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 577, 785, 2007 Robert, Enif, 109 Roberti, Ercole de’, 716 Roberti, Roberto, 1013 Roberti, Vincenza, 154 Robertson, John George, 894 Robins, Elizabeth, 2012 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 464, 2005 Robot, 1719 Robot e il Minotauro, Il (Vacca), 1720 Rocca, Gina, 1760 Rocca, Lodovico, 1760 Rocca, Stefania, 371, 1664 Rocco, Antonio, 1032, 1128 Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Visconti, L.), 1496, 1533, 1995, 2006 Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Visconti, F.), censorship of, 446 Roche, Denis, 785 Rochefoucauld, Francois La, 784 Rocke, Michael J., 1031 Rockstar, Tondelli and, 1887 Rococo, 71 Rodari, Gianni, 462, 465 Rodenbach, Constantin, 873 Roffiano, Il (Dolce), 639 Rogo (Bigongiari), 226 Rogopag (Pasolini), 1372 Roi Bombance, Le (Marinetti), 1154, 1848 Roi s’amuse, Le (Hugo), 1313 Roiter, Fulvio, 1434 Rojas, Fernando de, 902 Rolfi, Lidia Beccaria, 1580 Rolland, Romain Soffici and, 1772 World War I and, 2028 Rolli, Paolo Antonio, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Roma (Fellini), 701, 1607 Roma (Palazzeschi), 1334 Roma borghese: Assaggiature (Faldella), 680 Roma citta` aperta (Fellini), 700 Roma, citta` aperta (Rossellini), 445, 1208, 1283, 1372, 1607, 1619, 1622–1623, 1728 Fellini and, 1729 Roma, citta´ aperta (Camerini), 352 Roma citta` libera (Pagliero), 733 Roma, Enrico, cinema and, 470 Roma fascista, 980 Roma Flamma, 512 Roma: Imago Urbis, 1607 Roma instaurata (Biondo), 235, 952, 1906

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INDEX Roma nella memoria e nelle immaginazioni del Medio Evo (Graf ), 886 Roma ore 11 (De Santis), 619 Roma senza Papa (Morselli, G.), 1719 Roma sotteranea (Ferri, G.), 1606 Roma triumphans (Biondo), 235 Romagna, Emilia, 279 Romagnosi, Gian Domenico, 417, 1427, 1936 Rebora and, 1556 Roman Academy, 1059 Roman Curia, 4 Roman de la rose, 728, 927, 1418 Roman de la Rose, Le (Lorris and Meung), 783 Roman de Renart, 202 Roman de Troie (Sainte-Maure), 254, 667 Roman Elegies (Goethe), 1450 ‘‘Roman expe´rimental, Le’’ (Zola), 1972 Roman Holiday (Wyler), 1730 Roman Tales. See Racconti romani (Moravia) Romana, Francesca, 1566 Romana, La (Moravia), 1230 Romana, La (Zampa), 733 Roman-a`-cle´f, 1865 Romancero del Cid (Monti, Pietro), 417 Roman-feuilleton, 1654 Romani, Felice, 1313 music and, 1254 Romano`, Angelo, 321 Romano, Enotrio. See Carducci, Giosue` Romano, Ezzelino, 1262 Romano, Giulio, 221, 519 Romano il legionario (Caesar, K.), 789 Romano, Lalla, 1593–1595, 1922 Vinci and, 1993 Romano, Rose, 966 Romans de Dolopathos, Li, 1295 Romantic fiction, Liala and, 1045–1047 Romantic Princess, 150 Romanticism, 819, 1563, 1595–1600 Aleramo and, 16 autobiography and, 106 Berchet and, 181 Boita and, 272 Conciliatore, Il and, 1061 Decadentismo and, 579 German, 826 Manzoni and, 1133 Marin and, 1149 Porta, C., and, 1485 Tiraboschi and, 1872 Tommaseo and, 1883–1885 in Trieste, 1910 Romanticismo (Rovetta), 1632 Romanticismo in Germania, Il (Farinelli), 1851 Romanticismo italiano non esiste, Il (Martegiani), 1596 Romanza rosa, 1045 Romanze (Berchet), 181, 1598 Romanzi del cosmo, I, 1719 Romanzi del Melograno (D’Annunzio), 545 Romanzi della pianura (Camon), 357 Romanzi della Rosa, I ( D’Annunzio), 540 Romanzi e racconti (Isella), 713 Romanzi, I, 83 Romanzieri tra realismo e decadenza (Ramat), 1542 Romanzi-saggio (‘‘essay-novels’’), 1231

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Romanzo cavalleresco (chivalric romance), 666 Romanzo d’appendice, 961 Romanzo del Novecento, Il (Debenedetti), 1063 Romanzo della fanciulla, Il (Serao), 1733 Romanzo della guerra nell’anno 1916, Il (Panzini), 1342 Romanzo di Ferrara, Il (Bassani), 718 Romanzo di figure (Romano, L.), 1594 Romanzo di un maestro, Il (De Amicis), 576 Romanzo familiare, 20 Romanzo in vagone, da Firenze a Livorno, guida storico-unmoristica, Un (Collodi), 484 Romanzo mensile, Il, 978 Romanzo rosa, 1600–1603. See also Invernizio, Carolina; Liala (Amalia Liana Negretti) Romanzo senza idillio (Raimondi, Ezio), 1063 Romanzo sperimentale, Palermo 1967/Gruppo 63, Il (Balestrini), 115 Romanzo, Un (Neera), 1271 Rome, 1560, 1603–1608 Rome, Naples et Florence (Stendhal), 1605 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 121, 273, 1298 Borghini, R., and, 299 Carrer and, 398 Romeo and Juliet (Zeffirelli), 2046 Romeo, Rosario, 946 Rometta e Giulieo (Gangbo), 1202 Romische Elegien (Goethe), 1605 ‘‘Romito del Cenisio’’ (Berchet), 181 Romoli, Domenico, 757 Roncagli, Silvia, 498 Roncaglia, Aurelio, 833 Giacomo da Lentini and, 834 Ronchey, Alberto, 981 Ronco, Albino, 1826 Ronconi, Luca, 37, 1123, 1368, 1671, 1795, 1942 Aulenti and, 73 Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Roncoroni, Luigi, 438 Ronda, La, 111, 385, 785, 984 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Gatto and, 812 Longhi and, 1073 Pascoli and, 1359 Vittorini and, 2005 Rondismo, 112 Rondisti, 111 Rondo`, 272 Rondolino, Gianni, 50 Ronga, Luigi, 1259 Ronsard, Pierre de, 457 Chiabrera and, 456 Room with a View, A (Forster) Rore, Cipriano de, 646 Rosa, Alberto Asor, 1062, 1065, 1481, 1843 Arpino and, 95 Marino and, 1163 Morante and, 1228 Resistance and, 1578 Rosa Azzurra (Vivanti), 2011 Rosa Bellavita (Di Giacomo), 635 Rosa di Bagdad, La (Domeneghini), 51 Rosa di Sion (Pea), 1391 Rosa e il nero, Il (Bene), 169 ‘‘Rosa fresca auletissima’’ (D’Alcamo), 1561, 1754 Rosa, Giovanna, 1699

INDEX Rosa, Giovanni Titta, 1792 Rosa`, Rosa, 1718 Rosa, Tina De, 964 Rosai, Ottone, 2004 Rosales (Luzi, M.), 1084 Rosales, Giovanni, 1084 Rosana, 1652 Rosario (Vigano`), 1989 ‘‘Rosario, Il’’ (De Roberto), 613 Rose caduche (Verga, G.), 1963 Rose di Evita, Le (Orengo), 1923 Rose imperiali, Le (Malerba), 1116 Rose scarlatte (De Sica), 622 Rosenkranz, Karl, 616 Rosi, Francesco, 472, 473, 936, 1038, 1043, 1208, 1608–1613 La Capria and, 989 in Naples, 1270 questione meridionale and, 1533 Sciascia and, 1706 television and, 1859 World War I and, 2029 Rosina perduta, La (Delfini), 597 Rosmini, Antonio, 823, 1061, 1426, 1428, 1569, 1884 Rosmini e Gioberti (Gentile), 823 Rosmunda (Benelli), 172 Rosmunda d’Inghilterra (Niccolini, G.), 1289 ‘‘Rossa’’ (Riva, B.), 290 ‘‘Rossa d’Alvergato, La,’’ 1563 Rossanda, Rossana, 1613–1615 Rosselli, Amelia, 47, 1615–1618 Rosselli, Carlo, 47, 863, 1081 Moravia and, 1231 socialism and, 1770 Rossellini, Roberto, 58, 60, 445, 619, 620, 724, 776, 1208, 1284, 1372, 1609, 1618–1623, 1728, 1729 Cavani and, 425 Fellini and, 700 Joppolo and, 976 neorealism and, 622, 1283 Pontecorvo and, 1474 Pratolini and, 1496 in Rome, 1607 Taviani, P. and V., and, 1845 television and, 1858 Rossetti, Biagio, 716 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Sarfatti and, 1681 Rossetti, Domenico, 1910 Rossi, Aldo, 72 Rossi, Alessandro, 978 Rossi, Annabella, 54 Rossi, Antonio De, 1506 Rossi, Ernesto, Manzoni, A., and, 1140 Rossi, Fausto, 32 Rossi, Franco de’, 716 Pasolini and, 1371 Rossi, Gaetano, 1051 Rossi, Luciano, 1736 Rossi, Niccolo` d’Aristotile de’, 1505, 1636 Rossi, Pino de’, 243 Rossi, Vasco, 1785–1786 Rossi-Doria, Anna, 708, 2026 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio, 1332 Rossini, Carlo Conti, 52 Risorgimento and, 1590

Rossini, Gioacchino, 46, 132, 568, 826, 1260, 1313, 1688 Bacchelli and, 112 libretto and, 1051 music and, 1256 Rosso di San Secondo, Pier Maria, 458, 1623–1627. See also Teatro Grottesco ‘‘Rosso Malpelo’’ (Verga, G.), 1532 Rosso, Mino, 1922 Rossoni, Dino dei, 477 Rostagno, Remo, 465 Roster, Giorgio, 1433 Rosti, Fortunato, Tessa and, 1867 Rota, Nino, 112, 1313, 1995 music and, 1257 Rotaie (Camerini), 351, 353 Rotari, Virginia, 1127 Roth, Joseph, 1806 Roth, Philip, 49, 1040 Rotoscoping, 51 Rouault, George, 499, 1755 Rourke, Mickey, 425 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 108, 375, 670, 768, 784 Alfieri, V., and, 23 Beccaria and, 146 Belli, G., and, 155 Bettinelli and, 213 Casanova, Giacomo, and, 401 Enlightenment and, 662 Foscolo and, 763 Leopardi and, 1019 Meli and, 1182 Metastasio and, 1192 Nievo and, 1290 Petroni and, 1424 in Venice, 1961 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Rousset, Jean, 62 Rovani, Giuseppe, 648, 1260, 1627–1629 historical novels and, 939 music and, 1254, 1256 Romanticism and, 1598 scapigliatura and, 1697 Rovaniana (Dossi), 1628 Rovatti, Pier Aldo, 985 Rovere, Mamiani Della, 1936 Rovere, Teresio, 1827 Rovere, Vittoria Della, 144 Roversi, Roberto, 279, 674, 985, 1629–1631 Dalla and, 1784 Guerra and, 906 Leonetti and, 1016 Rovetta, Gerolamo, 1631–1633 Praga, M., and, 1492 Rovina di Kasch e quel che resta, La (Calasso), 341 Rovine (Faldella), 679 Roy, Rosetta, Bellonci and, 160 Royal Academy of Painting, 130 Rube` (Borgese, Giuseppe), 295, 1854 Rubens, Peter Paul Ariosto and, 92 in Genoa, 815 Rubini, Sergio, 1664 Rubino, Antonio, 788

I135

INDEX Ruccello, Annibale, 1269 Rucellai, Annibale, 600 Rucellai, Giovanni, Trissino and, 1917 Rudel, Jaufre´, 1958 Rudens (Plautus), 1639 Rudini, Antonio Starabba De, 488, 1103 Rudium doctrina, 291 Rudyard Kipling (Cecchi, E.), 430 Rudyard Kipling (Serra, R.), 1746 Ruffaldi, Enzo, 1429 Ruffini, Franco, 221, 222 Ruffini, Giovanni, 816 Rugantino, 1914 Ruggeri, Ruggero, 1760 Ruggiero (Metastasio), 1190 Ruggine (Risi, N.), 1587 Ruinarum urbis Romae descriptio (Bracciolini), 1906 Ruiz, Raoul, 1247 Ruiz, Romero, 1654 Ruiz, Vladimiro Arangio, 1195, 1196 Rulli, Stefano, 1730 Rumba degli scugnizzi (Viviani, R.), 2014 Rumore bianco, Il (Frabotta), 771 Rumori mediterranei, 180 Ruocco, Monica, 1200 Ruoto, La, Petroni and, 1425 Ruscelli, Girolamo, Borghini, V., and, 301 Rusconi, Edilio, 980, 1859 Ruskin, John, 275, 737, 1498, 2003 Sarfatti and, 1681 Rusky Salad Ballads & Webster Poems (Niccolai), 1287 Ruspoli, Maria Isabella Cesi, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Russell, Bertrand, 644 Russia oltre l’Urss (Lagorio), 992 Russiade (Denina), 1633 Russian Influences, 1633–1635 Russo, Ferdinando, 1269 Bracco and, 307 Di Giacomo and, 635 Russo, Luigi, 930 as critic, 1062 Neera and, 1271 Russolo, Luigi, 793, 2004 futurism and, 792 Rusteghi, I (Goldoni), 866, 872–873 Simoni and, 1760 Rustico di Filippo, 43, 44, 186, 420, 1003, 1635–1637 Rusticus (Poliziano), 1464 Ruzzante, Il, 739, 802, 855, 1562, 1637–1642 pastoral genre and, 1380 Simoni and, 1756 Speroni and, 1789 in Venice, 1960

S Saba, Umberto, 109, 470, 599, 826, 1569, 1643–1648, 1791. See also Trieste animal tales by, 203 Campana and, 361 Caproni and, 379 Communism and, 502 Fascism and, 691 homosexuality and, 1033

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lyric poetry and, 1089 Marin and, 1149 Noventa and, 1301 Onofri, A., and, 1308 Pressburger and, 1499 psychoanalysis and, 1512 Solmi and, 1778 Tarozzi and, 1829 Tomizza and, 1880 in Trieste, 1910 World War I and, 2030 Sabatier, Paul, 6 ‘‘Sabato del villaggio, Il’’ (Leopardi), 1021, 1024 Sabato, domenica e lunedi (De Filippo, E.), 585 Sabato, domenica e lunedi (Wertmu¨ller), 2022–2023 Sabato, Il (Pascoli), 1361 Sabato tedesco, Il (Sereni, V.), 1743 Sabba, 449 Sabbia e l’Angelo, La (Guidacci), 919 Sabbie immobili, Le (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1477 Sabbione, Luigi Provana del, 1922 Sabino, Giuseppe, 250 ‘‘Sacca, La’’ (Rigoni Stern), 1582 Sacchetti, Franco, 154, 330, 1648–1650. See also Novella Faldella and, 1698 Gelli and, 814 music and, 1254 Sacchetti, Roberto, 1922 Sacchi, Antonio, 498 Gozzi, C., and, 881 Sacchi, Bartolomeo, 757 Sacco, Catone, 518 Valla, L., and, 1945 Sacco di Lucca, Il (Tommaseo), 1884 Saccone, Eduardo, 91 Sackville, Charles, 453 Sacra rappresentazione (mystery play), 37, 783, 1651–1653, 1887 Belcari and, 148–149 Sacre rappresentazioni dei secoli XIV, XV e XVI raccolte e illustrate (D’Ancona), 1653 Sacre rappresentazioni inglesi, 919 S.A.D.E. ovvero libertinaggio e decadenza del complesso bandistico della gendarmeria (Bene), 168 Sagapo` (Biason), 489 Saggi critici (De Sanctis), 616, 888–889 Saggi critici (Debenedetti), 577 Saggi di pedagogia (Tozzi, F.), 1898 Saggiatore, Il, 1507 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Saggiatore, Il (Galilei, G.), 803 Saggio critico sul Petrarca (De Sanctis), 616, 1414 Saggio critico sulla poesia maccheronica (Panzini), 1342 Saggio dei canti popolari della provincia Marittima e Campagna (Visconti, P.), 1479 Saggio di poesie (Carrer), 397 Saggio di poesie (Monti, V.), 1218 Saggio sopra gli errori popolari degli antichi (Leopardi), 1019 Saggio sopra la favola (Giorgi), 463 Saggio sopra la lingua francese (Algarotti), 26 Saggio sopra la poesia del Petrarca (Foscolo), 1413 Saggio sopra la questione se la qualita` varie de’ popoli siano dallo influsso del clima, ovveramente dalla virtu` della legislazione (Algarotti), 1715

INDEX Saggio sopra l’opera in musica (Algarotti), 26, 1256 Saggio storico sulla rivoluzione napoletana (Cuoco), 944 Saggio sulla filosofia del gusto (Cesarotti), 454 Saggio sulla filsofia delle lingue (Cesarotti), 454 Saggio sulla storia d’Italia (Verri, A.), 1977 Sagra del Signore della Nave (Pirandello), 356, 1451, 1453 Sagredo, Giovan Francesco, 801 Said, Edward, 1533 Sainati, Alfredo, 459 Saint-Denis, Michel, 499 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin de, 156 Debenedetti and, 577 Sainte-Maure, Benoıˆt de, 254 Saint-Re´al, Abbot, 22 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 1174 Sala Napoli, 1893 Sala Umberto, 1950 ‘‘Salamelic’’ (Bracco), 306 Salbitani, Roberto, 1434 Salce, Luciano, 844 Sale, Anton Giulio Brignole, 1128 Salernitano, Masuccio, 121, 1297 Salerno, Enrico Maria, 1585 Sales, Francis de, 41, 134 Salgari, Emilio, 464, 487, 1654–1655, 1718, 1922 Salices (Sannazaro), 1675 Saliera di Francesco I (Cellini), 438 Salieri, Antonio, 567, 1191, 1203 Guarini, B., and, 901 Salimbene da Parma, 1480, 1656–1657 Salinari, Carlo, 580 as critic, 1062 Salinger, J.D., 132 Salis, Claudia, 648 Salmace (Soldati), 1774 Salmi (Aretino), 75 Salo` o le 120 giornate di Sodoma (Pasolini), 1368, 1371, 2032 Salome` (Bene), 169 Salone Margherita, 1950 Salonnie`rres, 1658 Salons, Literary, 1658–1660 Salotto della contessa Maffei, Il (Barbiera), 1659 Salotto fiorentino del secolo scorso, Un (De Amicis), 1659 Salsa alla maitre d’hotel (Artusi), 104 Salsa, Francesco Berio di, 1313 Saltatempo (Benni), 179 Salto mortale (Malerba), 1116 Salto nel buio, Un (Bonfantini), 1580 ‘‘Salubrita` dell’aria, La’’ (Parini, G.), 1350 Salustri, Carlo Alberto. See Trilussa Salutati, Coluccio, 255, 258, 449, 1001, 1412, 1661–1662 Bracciolini, P., and, 303 Bruni, L., and, 312 humanism and, 951 Valla, L., and, 1945 ‘‘Salutatio beate Marie Virginis’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Salutatio virtutum’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 ‘‘Saluto ai poeti crepuscolari, Il’’ (Oxilia, N.), 1330 Salutz (Giudici, G.), 859 Salvadori, Giulio decadentismo and, 580 Serao and, 1734 Salvatore Di Giacomo (Gaeta), 634

Salvatore Giuliano (Rosi), 1609, 1612–1613 Salvatores, Gabriele, 35, 69, 474, 1663–1665 in Milan, 1206 Salvatori, Renato, 1584 Salvemini, Gaetano, 297, 862, 887, 889, 974, 979 historiography and, 945 Prezzolini and, 150 questione meridionale and, 1533 World War I and, 2029 Salvemini, Gaetano, 1665–1667 Salviati, Lionardo, 92, 444, 1668–1669. See also Questione della lingua Salvini, Anton Maria, 1558 Salvini, Guido, 1544 Salvini, Tommaso, 47 Manzoni, A., and, 1140 Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 25 Salza, Abdelkader, 1799 Sampogna, La (Marino), 1161 Samueli, Anna, 1865 San Felice, La (Dumas), 1846 San Filippo, Pietro Amat di, 1908 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 500 San Gimignano, Folgo´re da. See Folgo´re ‘‘San Giovanni Battista’’ (Percoto), 1398 San Luca che ritrae la Madonna (Vasari), 1954 San Michele aveva un gallo (Taviani, P. and V.), 1845 San Silvano (Dessı`), 629 San Tommaso (Castellani, C.), 1652 Sancio Pancia, 512 Sanclemente, Pier Giuseppe, 1564 Sand, George, 497, 1637 Tommaseo and, 1884 in Venice, 1961 Sand, Maurice, 497, 1637 Sandokan: Storia di camorra (Balestrini), 115 Sandrelli, Sandro, 1720 Sandrelli, Stefania, 67 Sandrone astuto (Croce, B.), 532 Sanesi, Ireneo, 499 Sanfedisti, 1589 Sanfelice, Luisa Molina, 1591 Sangallo, Bastiano da, 1094 Sangue blu (Oxilia, N.), 1329 Sangue e suolo (Vassalli), 1957 ‘‘Sangue romagnolo’’ (De Amicis), 575 ‘‘Sangue sardo’’ (Deledda), 591 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 47, 373, 434, 577, 1078, 1669–1674. See also Neo-avant-garde Gozzano and, 877 Gruppo 63 and, 1956 Hermeticism and, 930 Manganelli and, 1123 Moravia and, 1231 music and, 1257 as neo-avant-garde, 371, 1275 Novissimi, I and, 785 opera and, 1260 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1476 Quasimodo and, 1531 Sani dal legare, I (Fo), 738 Sanita` italiana (Italian soundness), 579

I137

INDEX Sannazaro, Jacopo, 39, 137, 166, 1372, 1567, 1674–1678. See also Pastoral Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Della Casa and, 601 humanism and, 953 in Naples, 1268 pastoral genre and, 1379 Petrarch and, 1413 Pontano and, 1472 Ruzzante and, 1638 Stampa and, 1799 Tansillo and, 1822 travel literature and, 1907 Sano (healthy), 269 Sanseverino, Gaetano, 1427 Sanseverino, Roberto, 1519, 1906 Sansoni, Guglilmo, 1434 Sansovino, Francesco, 638 Aretino and, 74 novella and, 1297 Sansovino, Jacopo, 1954, 1961 Santa Lucia (Borgna), 1782 Santa Teresa in estasi (Bernini, G.), 190 Santa Uliva, 1652 Santa verde, La (Govoni), 874 ‘‘Santaccia de Piazza Montanara’’ (Belli, G.), 156 Santacroce, Isabella, 374 with Cannibali, 373 as ‘‘young cannibal,’’ 34 Santagata, Alfonso, 1401 Sant’Agostino (Papino), 1347 ‘‘Sant’Ambrogio’’ (Giusti), 860 Santanelli, Manilo, 1269 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 71, 1922 Sant’Elia, Romualdo Trigona di, 1432 Sant’Eufrasia (Castellani, C.), 1652 Santi Grisanto e Daria (Castellani, C.), 1652 Santippe (Panzini), 1343 Sant’Isidoro: Commentarii di guerra rustica (Faldella), 680 Santo, Il (Fogazzaro), 1569 Santo, Il (Maironi, P.), 744 Santo maledetto (damned saint), 1111 Sant’Onofrio (Castellani, C.), 1652 ‘‘Santoria,’’ 1200 Sant’Orsola (Castellani, C.), 1652 Santucci, Antonio, 278 Sant’Uffizio (Holy Office), 444 Sanvitale, Francesca, 1678–1680 Bellonci and, 160 Sapegno, Natalino, 118, 645, 1560 Cecchi, E., and, 431 as critic, 1062 Leopardi and, 1018 Petrarch and, 1414 Saper vedere (Marangoni), 99 Saper vivere: Norme di buona creanza (Serao), 1734 Sapienta, 1105 Sapore massimo di ogni parola (greatest taste of each word), 370 Saporetto (d’Orvieto), 757 Sappho, 390, 449, 1029 lyric poetry and, 1086 Marino and, 1161 Saraceno, Chiara, 706

I138

‘‘Saresti stato’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Sarf Kolombiny (Schnitzler), 499 Sarfatti, Margherita, 232, 980, 1681–1682. See also Fascism and Literature Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Saroyan, William neorealism and, 1283 World War II and, 2032 Sarpi, Paolo, 444, 801, 1683–1685 historiography and, 942 Sarro, Alessandra Atti di, 1200 Sarro, Domenico, 1190 Metastasio and, 1193 Sartarelli, Marcello, 1580 Sartarelli, Stephen, 965 Sarti, Alessandro, 1468 Sarto della stradalunga, Il (Bonaviri), 284 Sartorio, Giulio Aristide, 2003 Sartre, Jean Paul, 644, 784 Ottieri and, 1327 Sassetti, Filippo, 231 ‘‘Sassi di Matera, I’’ (Rea), 1553 Sasso appeso, Il (Balestrini), 114, 115 Sassoli, Angelo, 767 Sastri, Lina, 1269 Satana dei miracoli (Malaguti), 1720 Satanik (Bunker), 789 Satanism, 389 Satie, Eric, 499 ‘‘Satira del villano,’’ 1561 Satira e Parini, La (Ferrari, P.), 1148 Satire (Ariosto, L.), 83, 93–95, 463, 1032 Satire della Ripa, Le (Merini), 1186 Satta, Salvatore, 1686–1687 Satura (Montale), 1213 Saturno control la terra (Zavattini and Pedrocchi, F.), 788 Saul (Alfieri, V.), 20, 24–25 Carrer and, 397 Saussure, Ferdinand De, 101, 658, 1028, 1511 Leonetti and, 1016 Savelli, Angelo, 447 Puppa and, 1523 Savi dell’Eresia, I (secular magistrates), 445 Saviane, Sergio, 1231 Savinio, Alberto, 470, 686, 785, 1461, 1687–1690, 1719, 2004 music and, 1257 Savonarola, Girolamo, 1567, 1690–1693, 1938 Castellani, C., and, 1652 in Florence, 736 Pico della Mirandola and, 1441 Sacra rappresentazione and, 1651 Sayers, Dorothy, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Sbarbaro, Camillo, 785, 1694–1696 Lagorio and, 991 Sbarbaro: un modo spoglio di esistere (Lagorio), 1695 Sbarigia, Claudia, 67 Sbarra, Francesco, 1050 SBN. See Indice del Servizio Bibliotecario Nazionale Sbodio, Gaetano, 193 Sbodio-Carnaghi, 193 Scabia, Giuliano, 465, 1796 Scacccia, Osvaldo, 1894 Scaglia, Giacomo, 1162 Scala, Bartolomeo, Fedele and, 698

INDEX Scala di seta, La (Chiarelli), 460 ‘‘Scala d’oro, La,’’ 464 Scala, Flaminio, 39, 100, 498, 500 Scala, La, 1203, 1259 Risorgimento and, 1590 Scalfari, Eugenio, 980 Scalia, Gianni, 1017, 1856 Scaligero, Giulio Cesare, 819 Scalo Marittimo (Viviani, R.), 2013 Scalo merci (Vergano), 620 Scalvini, Maria Luisa, 101 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 2002 classicism and, 480 Scampoli (Sbarbaro), 1695 ‘‘‘Scandalo’ del ‘400: Luigi Pulci e i sonetti di parodia religiosa, Uno’’ (Orvieto), 1518 Scandalo della speranza, Lo (Turoldo), 1924 Scandella, Mischa, 1882 Scanderbech, Herina, Terracina and, 1861 Scannabue, Aristarco. See Baretti, Giuseppe Scannasurece (Moscato), 1247 Scapigliatura, 272, 275, 388, 785, 1563, 1697–1699, 1853 decadentismo and, 579 Dossi and, 1939 Faldella and, 679 Fogazzaro and, 744 Imbriani and, 959 in Milan, 1204 Pagliarani and, 1331 Praga, E., and, 1490 Ragazzoni and, 1540 Ramat and, 1542 Rovani and, 1627 Tarchetti and, 1826 Tessa and, 1867 Trilussa and, 1913 in Turin, 1922 Verga, G., and, 1964 Scapigliatura (Nardi), 1699 Scapigliatura democratica, 1699 Scapigliatura e il 6 febbraio, La (Righetti), 1697 Scappaticci, Tommaso, 1342 Scappi, Bartolomeo, 757 Scarabo´cc, I (Guerra), 473, 906 Scaramuccia, La, 485 Collodi and, 1259 Scaravelli, Eugenio, 1212 Scarfoglio, Edoardo, 978 decadentismo and, 580 in Rome, 1606 Serao and, 1733 Scarlatti, Alessandro, 1190, 1311 Scarpa, Carlo, 72 Scarpa, Tiziano, 49, 371, 374 with Cannibali, 34, 373 Scarpe al sole, Le (Monelli), 2029 Scarpelli, Furio, 1728, 1729 Scarpetta, Eduardo, 1269, 1400, 1700–1702, 1893 Viviani, R., and, 2014 Scarpetta, Vincenzo, 584, 587 Scatola sonora (Savinio), 1257 Sceab, Moammed, 1928 Sceicco bianco, Lo (Fellini), 700 Flaiano and, 733

Scelta delle lettere familiari fatta per uso degli studiosi della lingua italiana (Baretti), 130 Scelta, La (Dessı`), 630 ‘‘Scelte opere d’italiani illustri antichi e moderni’’ (Carrer), 398 Scena, La (Chiarelli), 459 Scene della Grande Guerra (Barzini), 2030 Scene di morte a Baghetia (Tornatore), 1890 Scene di provincia (Praga, E.), 1491 Sceneggiata, 1247, 1950 Sceneggiatura come struttura che vuole essere altra struttura (Pasolini), 472 Scerbanenco, Giorgio, 632, 1718 in Milan, 1206 Schechner, Richard, 1671 Schede gramsciane (Sanguineti), 1671 Scheiwiller, Vanni, 1695 Scheps, Ruth, 1717 Schermo, Lo (Blasetti), 237 Scherno degli dei, Lo (Bracciolini, F.), 933 Scherzi musicali (Monteverdi, C.), 1310 Scherzo, 40 Scherzo anacreontico (Redi), 1558 Schiavi (Buonarroti, M.), 326, 329 Schiavitu` (Benelli), 173 Schifo (Dante), 728 Schiller, Friedrich, 333, 616, 826 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Pellico and, 1393 Romanticism and, 1598 Schino, Mirella, 498 Schiumevolezza (foaminess), 1975 Schizzi a penna (Praga, E.), 1490, 1698 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 538, 826, 1140, 1598 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Pirandello and, 1450 Romanticism and, 1597 Schlegel, Friedrich, 826 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Schmarsow, August, 101 Schmitz, Aron Hector. See Svevo, Italo Schmitz, Ettore. See Svevo, Italo Schneider, Maria, 199 Schnitzler, Arthur, 499, 827 in Venice, 1961 Scholastica, La (Ariosto, L.), 88 Scholasticism, 1402, 1565, 1702–1705 Scholes, Robert, Manzoni and, 1136 Scho¨nberg, Arnold, 499 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 168, 616, 1910 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Michelstaedter and, 1195 Svevo and, 1806 Schubert, Franz, 1191 Schu¨ck, Henrick, 591 Schulz, Charles, 658, 789 Schumann, Robert, 1256 Schu¨tz, Wilhelm von, 401 Schwarz, Angelo, 1434 Schwarz Dekameron, Das, 250 Schygulla, Hannah, 473, 1143 Sciaccaluga, Marco, 194 Scialle andaluso, Lo (Morante), 1225 Scialo, Lo (Pratolini), 1495

I139

INDEX Scialo`, Pasquale, 589 Scianna, Ferdinando, 1434 Sciascia, Leonardo, 31, 279, 308, 632, 936, 1705–1711 animal tales by, 203 Bonaviri and, 284 Brancati and, 311 Bufalino and, 322 Camilleri and, 354 Communism and, 502 Ortese and, 1323 in Palermo, 1338, 1340 Tabucchi and, 1817 Scicco bianco, Lo (Fellini), 56 Science and Literature, 1712–1717 Science Citoyenne, la, 1717 Science Fiction, 1717–1721 Scienza degli addii, La (Rasy), 1549 Scienza della legislazione (Filangieri), 663 Scienza della letteratura, La (Capuana), 382 Scienza e la vita, La (De Sanctis), 1061 Scienza fantastica, 1717 Scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Artusi), 103, 758 Scienza nuova, La (Vico), 819, 1059 Sciopero in rovescia (reverse strike), 644 Scioˆri, I (Bertolazzi), 193 Sciosciammocca, Feliciello, 1400 S-ciupte`da, La (Guerra), 906 Sciuscia` (De Sica), 621, 623, 1728, 2042 Sciuscia` (Freda), 1729 Sclavi, Tiziano, 790 Scola, Ettore, 473, 1663, 1721–1725, 1728, 1792 Fellini and, 702 Wertmu¨ller and, 2021 Scola, Giovanni, 664 Scolari, Giovanni, 788 Sconcertazione di stati d’animo (Balla), 72 Sconclusione (Manganelli), 1123 Sconfitta, La (Moretti, N.), 1240 Sconosciuta, La (Tornatore), 1891 Scopa, La, 488 Scoperta dell’alfabeto, La (Malerba), 1115 Scoperta dell’America, La (Pascarella), 1357 Scoperta di Milano, La (Guareschi), 900 Scorciatoie e raccontini (Saba), 1644 ‘‘Scorfani’’ (Moravia), 1235 Scorsese, Martin, 701, 1791 Fellini and, 702 Scot, Michael, 780 Scotellaro, Rocco, 53, 1725–1727. See also Questione meridionale (southern question) Scott, Joan, 2026 Scott, Walter, 388, 464, 937, 1902 D’Azeglio, M., and, 573 Guerrazzi, F., and, 908–909 Manzoni and, 1134, 1139 music and, 1256 Romanticism and, 1597 Verga, G., and, 1963 Scottoline, Lisa, 964 Scotus, John Duns, 1703 Sco`zzari, Filippo, 790 Scrapbook (Mansfield), 1226 Screenwriters, 1727–1731 Scribe, Augustin Euge`ne, 1313

I140

Scriptorum illustrium latinae linguae Libri XVIII (Polenton), 942 Scriti editi ed inediti (Mazzini), 1176 Scritti autobiografici (Settembrini), 1749 Scritti Corsari (Pasolini), 1369 Scritti cristiani (Pomilio), 1471 Scritti danteschi (Casini), 1636 Scritti difilogia (Rajna), 665 Scritti letterari di un italiano vivente (Mazzini), 1175–1176 Scritti servili (Garboli), 809 Scritti sulla questione meridionale (Salvemini), 889 Scritti varii (Zanella), 2035 Scrittirici italiane dell’Ottocento (Sanvitale), 1680 Scrittori della salute, 161 Scrittori d’Italia (Mazzuchelli), 232 Scrittori d’oggi (Pancrazi), 1803 Scrittori e popolo, 1062, 1578, 1843 Scrittori e popolo: saggio sulla letteratura populista in Italia (Rosa, A.), 1481 Scrittori organi di madre lingua (Pressburger), 1500 Scrittrice abita qui, La (Petrignani), 1422 Scrittrici mistiche italiane (Pozzi, G. and Leonardi, C.), 1568 Scrittura contestativa al taglio della tartana (Gozzi, C.), 880 Scrittura plurale, Una (Rosselli, A.), 1615 Scritture in versi (verse writings), 379 Scrupolo scientifico (scientific rigor), 1973 Scugnizzo: Via Partenope (Viviani, R.), 2013 Sculoa di guia (Rota), 1257 Sculpture, Bernini, G., and, 188–190 Scultura lingua morta (Martini, A.), 2003 Sculture (Marino), 1161 Scuola dei dittatori, La (Silone), 1756 Scuola del Culto, Alciato and, 11 Scuola di Bassano, 69 Scuola e` finita, La (Michelstaedter), 1196 Scuola Elementare, 464 Scuola Media, 464 Scuola Nazionale di Cinematografia, La, 236 ‘‘Scuola Normale femminile’’ (Serao), 1733 Scuola Normale Superiore, 822 Scuola padovana di filosofia, 1427 Scuola Poetica Siciliana. See Sicilian School of Poetry Scuola siciliana, 571, 1443 Scuola storica (historical school), 945 Sdegnati, 2 Se il sole muore (Fallaci), 681 Se non ora, quando? (Levi, P.), 948, 1041 Se non son matti nonli vogliamo (Fratelli), 1760 Se permettete, parliamo di donne (Risi), 1722 Se permettete, parliamo di donne (Scola), 2021 Se questo e` fermato a Eboli (Levi, P.), 108, 1043, 1044–1045, 1580, 2032 Se questo e` un uomo (Levi, P.), 947, 948, 1039 Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (Calvino), 345, 350, 1422 Sea Plays, The (O’Neill), 1248 Sea-Gull, The (Chekhov), 844 Secchi, Pietro, Enlightenment and, 664 Secchia rapita, La (Tassoni), 669, 932, 935, 1059, 1842 Secentismo e marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne, Richard Crashaw (Praz), 1497 Secolo, Il, 978, 1433 Secolo Sera, 433 Secolo XIX, Il, Cerami and, 448 Second Vatican Council, 1567 Seconda libraria, La (Doni), 645

INDEX Seconda parte de’ Discorsi sopra le seconde stanze de’ Canti d’Orlando Furioso, La (Terracina), 1861 Seconda volta, La (Calopresti), 1864 Secretum (Petrarch), 1405, 1406, 1409, 1411, 1566 Sedotta e abbandonata (Germi), 829 Seduttore, Il (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Seduzioni (Guglielminetti, A.), 910 Segantini, Giovanni, Neera and, 1271 Seghezzi, Anton Federico, 883 Seghezzi, Niccolo`, 883 Segneri, Paolo, 133, 1568 Segni sul muro (Bellonci), 162 Segno poetico, Il (Accame), 1315 Segre, Cesare, 89, 93, 102, 1428, 1510 as critic, 1063 Segre, Daniele, 1345, 1739 Segretaria, La (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Segretario, Il (Guarini, B.), 902 Segreti dei Gonzaga (Bellonci), 161 Segreti di Milano, I (Testori), 1206, 1868 Segreti segreti (Bertolucci, G.), 1864 Segreto del Bosco Vecchio, Il (Buzzati), 336 Segreto del bosco vecchio, Il (Olmi), 1306 Segreto del nevaio, Il (Farina), 631 Segreto della commedia dell’arte (Terence), 498 Segreto di Luca, Il (Silone), 1756 ‘‘Sei agosto’’ (Gatto), 1581 Sei gironate (Erizzo), 1298 Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Pirandello), 587, 653, 1130, 1452, 1461–1462, 1493 Sei poesie della vecchiaia (Saba), 1647 Sei stato felice, Giovanni (Arpino), 95, 96, 817 Seicentine, 292 Seigner, Emmanuelle, 1664 Self Portrait (Severini), 793 Sella, Giuseppe Venanzio, 1432 Selva d’amore (Aleramo), 16 Selva di concetti scritturali (Capaccio), 1161 Selvaggi della Papuasia, I (Salgari), 1654 Selvaggio, Il, 204, 984 Bilenchi and, 228 Delfini and, 598 Petroni and, 1425 Tobino and, 1874 Selvaggio padrone (Govoni), 874 Selvatico, Luigi, Simoni and, 1756 Selvatico, Pietro, 275, 1433 Selve (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Seme del piangere, Il (Caproni), 380, 818 ‘‘Seme, Il’’ (Fortini), 761 Seme sotto la neve, Il (Silone), 1755 Semidei (demigods), 517 Semideus (Sacco), 518 Seminario sulla gioventu` (Busi), 332, 1206 ‘‘Semiology,’’ 658 Semiotica filologica: Testo e modelli culturali (Segre, C.), 102 ‘‘Semiotics,’’ 658 Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, The (Lotman and Uspenskii), 1511 Semiramide (Metastasio), 1190 Sempione strizza l’occhio al Frejus, Il (Vittorini), 2006 Semplice, Il, 429 Celati and, 435 Sempre aperto teatro (Cavalli, P.), 423

Seneca, 243, 802 Dolce and, 638 Franco, V., and, 777–778 Giraldi, Giambattista, and, 856–857 Gravina and, 1189 Marino and, 1162 Mussato and, 1262 Neoplatonism and, 1280 novella and, 1297 Petrarch and, 1405, 1406, 1407 Varchi and, 1949 Senese, Lucretia, 498 Senhal, 475 Seniles (Petrarch), 1417 Senilita` (Bolognini), 280 Senilita` (Svevo), 1805, 1811–1812, 1910 Sensibilita` italiana nata in Egitto, Una (Marinetti), 1156 Sensisme, 1427 Senso (Boito, C.), 1698, 1995 Senso (Visconti, L.), 725, 1994, 2045 Senso degli altri, Il (Tecchi), 1851 Senso della lirica italiana e altri studi, Il (Bigongiari), 226 Senso: Nuove storielle vane (Boito, C.), 71, 275 Senteniarum Libri (Lombard), 1565 Senti Iolanda come e` triste il sole (Michelstaedter), 1196 Sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Il (Calvino), 343, 465, 1285, 1579, 2032 Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 47, 764, 1628, 1827, 1908 Sentimento del tempo (Ungaretti), 1928, 1933–1934, 1940 Sentimento delcontratio, Il (the feeling of the opposite), 1450 Sentire le donne (Busi), 333 Senza fine (Paoli), 1783 Senza Hitler (Erba, E.), 673 Senza i conforti della religione (Morante), 1225 Senza sangue (Baricco), 132 ‘‘Senza vederlo’’ (Di Giacomo), 635 ‘‘S’eo son distretto inamoratamente’’ (Latini), 1003 Separazioni (Sanvitale), 1678, 1679 Sepolcro, Dionigi da Borgo San, 1406, 1415 Sepoltura, La (Montanari, G.), 1719 Seppelliamo Re John (Prosperi, P.), 1719 Sepu´lveda, Luis, 936 Sequestrati di Altona, I (De Sica), 1609 ‘‘Sequestri’’ (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 ‘‘Sera al parco’’ (Solmi), 1778 ‘‘Sera d’aprile’’ (Luzi, M.), 1082 Serafini, Guglielmo, 598 Serafino Aquilano, 1731–1733 music and, 1254 Serandei, Mario, 620 De Santis and, 619 Serao, Matilde, 123, 432, 631, 671, 1148, 1733–1736 Bracco and, 307 cinema and, 469 Croce, B., and, 671 epistolary novel and, 670 Maffei, C., and, 1659 in Naples, 1268, 1270, 1547 Neera and, 1271 Rasy and, 1549 in Rome, 1606 verismo and, 1971–1972 Serassi, Pier Antonio, 232 Serate d’inverno (Marchesa Colombi), 1148

I141

INDEX Serate italiane, 1922 scapigliatura and, 1698 ‘‘Seratina’’ (Ammaniti and Brancaccio), 34, 374 Serato, Massimo, 747 Serba, Antonio Rosmini, 1427 Sercambi, Giovanni, 1736–1738. See also Novella music and, 1254 novella and, 1296 Serena Cruz, o la vera giustizia (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Serena disperazione, La (Saba), 1910 Serena, Gustavo, 469 Serenata ai morti (Faldella), 680 ‘‘Serenata de la ranocchie, La’’ (Trilussa), 1913 Serenata, La (Pascarella), 1357 Sereni, Clara, 697, 1738–1740 Sereni, Emilio Alvaro and, 29 Communism and, 501 historiography and, 945 Sereni, Vittorio, 369, 379, 489, 931, 1389, 1741–1745 Communism and, 502 Hermeticism and, 930 in Milan, 1205 Orelli and, 1318 Piccolo and, 1436 Pozzi, A., and, 1488, 1489 Raboni and, 1537 Resistance and, 1581 World War II and, 2031 Serenissima, 74 Serenissima (Gallina), 1759 ‘‘Sereno’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Sergente nella neve, Il (Rigoni Stern), 2032 Serie ospedaliera (Rosselli, A.), 1615 Serio ludere, 3 Serlio, Sebastiano, 480, 11001 Sermini, Gentile, 1297 Sermo humilis, 1656 Sermoni (Gozzi, G.), 884 Sermons (Donne), 919 Serpe, Un (Faldella), 680 Serpente, Il (Malerba), 1115 Serpicina, La (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Serra, Maecenas Ettore, 1929 Serra, Renato, 278, 1320, 1745–1747 Carducci and, 1936 Checchi and, 430 as critic, 1062 Panzini and, 1343 World War I and, 2028 Serva amorosa, La (Gondoni), 866 Serva, La (Serao), 1148 Serva padrona, La (Federico, Gennaro), 1312 Servio Tullio (Gravina, G.), 894 Servire il popolo, 158 Servitore del Diavolo, Il (Pea), 1391 Servitore di due padroni, Il (Goldoni), 865, 881, 1794 Sessa, Giovanni Battista, 639 Sessanta posizioni (Arbasino), 63 Sessanta racconti (Buzzati), 335, 337 Sessualita` e Scrittura, 706 Sesti, Mario, 68 Sestina, 143 Seta (Baricco), 132

I142

Seta, Vittorio De, 32 Sette accadimenti in Venezia (Pestriniero), 1720 Sette anni di cinema (D’Ambra), 470 Sette bello, Il (Varaldo), 631 ‘‘Sette canzonette del Golfo’’ (Fortini), 761 Sette colori, I (Rubino), 51 Sette giornate del mondo creato, Le (Tasso, T.), 1568, 1835 Sette giorni a Milano, 1544 Sette lune (Banti), 124 Sette messaggeri, I (Buzzati), 335 Sette peccati di Hollywood, I (Fallaci), 681 Sette salmi penitentiali del santissimo profeta Davit, I (Ammannati), 144 Sette soldati, I (Aleardi), 13 Sette tesi sulla questione del controllo operaio (dopo Stalin) (Panzieri), 1770 Settembrini, Luigi, 464, 1061, 1748–1750 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 De Sanctis and, 616 historiography and, 945 homosexuality and, 1033 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Petrarch and, 1413 Risorgimento and, 1592 Settimelli, Emilio, 470, 874 Settimelli, Wladimoro, 1434 Settimo, ruba un po’meno (Fo), 739, 1544 Settis, Salvatore, 100 Seventh Saracen, The (Morreale), 963 Severgnini, Beppe, 49, 981 Severina (Silone), 1756 Severini, Gino, 793, 2004 futurism and, 792 Sarfatti and, 1681 Severino, Emanuele, 1022 Sexuality Aleramo on, 16 in comics, 789 Franco, V., and, 778 in Latin Goliardic songs, 44 Sfida al labirinto, La (Calvino), 502 Sfida, La (Rosi), 1270, 1608 Sforza, Antonio, 883 Sforza, Ascanio, 449 Sforza, Francesco, 231, 518, 1203 Alciato and, 12 Sforza, Galeazzo, 149 Sforza, Ippolta, 117, 118, 121, 1171 Pulci, Luigi, and, 1518 Sforziade (Filelfo, F.), 518 Sforzinda, 70 Sgalambro, Manlio, 1785 Sgorbi (scribblings), 1185 Sgorlon, Carlo, 687, 1750–1751 Sgricci, Tomasso, 397 Sgt. Kirk, 790 Shaftesbury, Anthony, 375 Shakespeare, William, 47, 122, 253, 398, 404, 1203, 1298, 1456, 1510, 1663, 1794, 1795 Alfieri, V., and, 19, 25 Baretti and, 130 Boccaccio and, 250 Boito, A., and, 272 Campo, C., and, 370

INDEX Cavalli, P., and, 423 Cecchi, E., and, 431 Garboli and, 809 Giraldi, Giambattista, and, 857 Manzoni and, 1134, 1139 Masino and, 1168 Masuccio Salernitano and, 1171 Niccolini, G., and, 1289 Petrarch and, 1413 Romeo and Juliet and, 121 Testori and, 1869 Valduga and, 1941 Verri, A., and, 1978 Visconti, L., and, 1996 Zeffirelli and, 2046 Shane (Stevens), 1014 Shanley, John Patrick, 438 Sharp, Samuel, 130, 1908 Shaw, George Bernard, 739 Duse and, 652 Shawl, The (Ozick), 948 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 685 Cecchi, E., and, 431 in Genoa, 815 Sarfatti and, 1681 in Venice, 1961 Shklovsky, Viktor, 1124 Short Time (Misurella), 964 Short, William J., 773 Si distrae al bivio, Uno (Scotellaro), 1725 Si e´ fermato a Eboli (Levi, C.), 53 Si fa presto a dire fame (Caleffi), 1580 Si gira! (Pirandello), 470, 724, 1450, 1460 Si puo`! (Sereni, C.), 1739 Si sta facendo sempre piu` tardi (Tabucchi), 672, 687, 1816 Siamo donne (Vistonti, L.), 1995 Siamo tutti bambini (Bernari), 183 Siamo uomini o caporali?, 1894 ‘‘Siate Maggioranza,’’ 179 Sibilla, La (Grazzini), 895 Sic et non (Abelard), 1703 Sica, Gabriella, 1071 Sicilia come metafora, La (Sciascia), 1705 ‘‘Sicilia e` ancora una terra amara, La’’ (Sciascia), 1705 Sicilia, La (Comisso), 496 Sicilia nel 1878, La (Franchetti, L. and Sonnino), 1532 Sicilia tradita (Tornatore), 1890 Sicilian, 1053 Sicilian folk art, 92 Sicilian School of Poetry, 783, 1752–1754 Giacomino Pugliese and, 832 Sicilianismo, 1103 Sicilianita´, 355 Siciliano, Enzo, 152 Moravia and, 1232 Sidereus Nuncius (Galilei, G.), 802, 1002 Sidney, Philip, 319, 1677 Petrarch and, 1413 Siebert, Renate, 706 Siena, Bernardino da, 201, 1315 Sienese circle, 44 Siepe e l’orto, La (Alvaro), 28 ‘‘Sigillo dell’esistenza’’ (seal of existence), 342 Siglinda (Peverelli), 1601

Siglo de Oro, 1127 Sigma Epsion (Sereni, C.), 1738 Signa, Boncompagno da, 563 Signonio, Carlo, 277 Signor Alberi ha ragione!, Il (Collodi), 483 Signor Bonaventura, Il (Tofano), 788 ‘‘Signor, che insino a qui’’ (Morra), 1243 Signor G, Il (Gaber), 1783 ‘‘Signor, io soche ‘n me non son piu` viva’’ (Stampa), 1798 Signor Macqueda, Il (Moleti), 1339 Signor Max, Il (Camerini), 351, 621 ‘‘Signor Mu¨nster, Il’’ (Savinio), 1688 Signor Rossi al mare, Il (Bozzetto), 52 Signora (married woman), 125 Signora Ava (Jovine), 987 Signora del gioco (Muraro), 1249, 2025 Signora di Cariddi, La (De Stefani, L.), 1340 Signora di Challant, La (Giacosa), 837 Signora di Montecarlo, La (Soldati and Berthmieu), 1775 Signora e` una vagabonda, La (Rea), 1552 Signora Ernestina, La (Tecchi), 1851 Signora senza camelie, La (Antonioni), 57 Signore & Signori: personaggi illustri e meschini della vita pubblica e privata dell’Italia d’oggi (Cederna, C.), 432 Signore degli occhi, Il (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Signore della folgore, Il (Silvestri, A.), 1718 Signore della scrittura, Le (Petrignani), 1423 Signore e signori (Germi), 829 Signorelli, Pietro Napoli, 397, 935 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Signoria, 276 in Florence, 736 Signoribus, Eugenio De, 818 ‘‘Signorina Felicita, La’’ (Gozzano), 879 Signorina, La (Rovetta), 1631 Signorsi (Liala), 1045 Sigoli, Simone, 1905 Sik Sik, l’artefice magico (Mangini), 585 Silence de Geˆnes, Le (Caproni), 818 Silent Duchess, The. See Lunga vita di Marianna Ucria, La (Maraini) ‘‘Silenzio della ragione’’ (Ortese), 990 Silenzio dell’universo, Il (De Turris), 1719 Sillabari (Parise, Goffredo), 1354, 1356 Sillabo (Pious IX), 445 Silone, Ignazio, 1569, 1755–1759 Alvaro and, 29 World War II and, 2031 Silva de varia leccio´n (Mexı´a), 1298 Silva, Michel de, 412 ‘‘Silvae’’ (Montale), 1216 Silvester, Bernard, 555 Silvestri, Armando, 1718 Silvestri, Giovanni, 1701 Silvestris, Bernard, 1281 Simbiosi storico letteraria (historical-literary symbiosis), 124 Simenon, Georges, 355, 356 D’Errico and, 631 Sciascia and, 1706 Simillimi (Trissino), 1916 Simmel, Georg, 694 Simmias of Rhodes, 821 Simon Boccanegra (Verdi), 935, 1259 Simone, Roberto De, 463

I143

INDEX Simonetta, Marcello, 1519 Simoni, Renato, 306, 500, 1456, 1641, 1759–1761 Simplicita` ingannata, La (Tarabotti), 1823 Simplicius, 1281 Simposio (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Simulazione teatrale (theatrical simulation), 380 Sin, 367 Sinclair, John, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Sindacato degli scrittori, 29 Sindacato Nazionale Scrittori, 224 Sindaco del Rione Sanita`, Il (De Filippo, E.), 587 Sindrome diTourette, La (Cerami), 447 Sine nomine (Petrarch), 1407, 1416 Sinesterra, Jose´ Sanchis, 936 Singleton, Charles, Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Singolar dottrina, La (Romoli), 757 Singolare avventura di viaggio (Brancati), 309 Singolare inclinazione e affezzione (singular inclination and affection), 300 Sini, Carlo, 1316 Sini, Girolamo, 1562 Sinicropi, Giovanni, 1736 Sinisgalli, Leonardo, 1761–1764. See also Hermeticism Hermeticism and, 930 Spaziani and, 1786 Sinner, M. De, 1020 Sinopia, 1389 Sinopie (Orelli), 1318 Sinus, Mario, 284 Sio, Teresa De, 1786 Sion, La passione di Cristo (Pea), 1391 Sior Todero brontolon (Goldoni), 866 Sipario ducale, Il (Volponi), 447, 2017 Sirena delle cinque, La (Balzerani), 1865 ‘‘Sirena, La’’ (Tomasi di Lampedusa), 1878 Sirio (Bertolucci), A., 195 Siroe (Metastasio), 1190 Sironi, Mario, 2004 Sarfatti and, 1681 Sirventes, 835 Sismondi, Jean-Charles-Le´onard Simonde de, 1571–1572 Sistema dei cieli, Il (Rezzonico), 1279 Sistema del benessere, Il (Malaguti), 1720 Sistema di logica come teoria del conoscere (Gentile), 823 Sistema periodico, Il (Levi, P.), 948, 1040 Sistine Chapel, 328, 329 Sitcoms, 1860 Siumo tutti fratelli (Viviani, R.), 1401 Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello). See Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Pirandello) Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Eco), 659 16 ottobre 1945 (Debenedetti), 577 Sketch of a Dialogue on Women (Galiani, F.), 1714 Slapstick. See Celati, Gianni Sla`taper, Scipio, 827, 1150, 1222, 1765–1767, 1910, 1911. See also Trieste Tomizza and, 1880 Sleep (Rosselli, A.), 1615 ‘‘Smammae, Le’’ (Belli, G.), 156 Smareglia, Antonio, 685 Smemorata (Tarozzi), 1829 Smile of the Unknown Mariner, The. See Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio, Il (Consolo) Smith, Kevin, 1121

I144

Smorfie gaie (Bracco), 307 Smorfie tristi (Bracco), 307 Snow, Charles Percey, 1028, 1761 So’ muorto e m’hanno fatto turna` a nascere (Petito), 1401 Soave, Francesco, 463 Soavi, Giorgio, 2004 Soccorso a Dorotea (Bellonci), 161 Soccorso Rosso, 1544 Sociabilite´, 1658 Socialism, 1768–1771 De Amicis and, 575 Fortini and, 760 Silone and, 1756 Socialismo liberale (Roselli, C.), 1770 Socialista moderno, Il, 1302 Societa`, 737 Bilenchi and, 228 Societa` dei Georgofili, 663 Societa` dei Giovani Autori (Chiarelli), 459 Societa` dei Pugni, 146 Verri, A., and, 1977 Societa` delle storiche italiane, 2025 Societa` e storia, 2027 Societa` Fotografica Italiana, 1433 Societa` Italiana degli Autori, 838, 1204 Praga, M., and, 1492 Societa` Italiana delle Storiche, 708, 2026 Societa` Italiana di Antropologia ed Etnologia, 103 Societa` trasparente, La (Vattimo), 1428 Societas militum, 735 Socie`te` Franc¸aise de Photographie, 1433 Society of Jesus, 144 Socrate (Rossellini), 1621 Socrate immaginario (Galiani, F.), 935 Socrate immaginario (Lorenzi), 1050 Socrates, 1029 biography and, 230 Pirandello and, 1450 Sodalitas, 2 Sodati, Mario, 817 Soderini, Lucrezia, 143 Soderini, Pier, 1092 Sodomia, 1030 Sodomie in corpo 11 (Busi), 333 Soergente nella neve. Ricordi della ritirata di Russia, Il (Rigoni Stern), 1582 ‘‘Soeur Philome`ne’’ (Munthe), 635 Soffici, Ardengo, 980, 1204, 1771–1774, 2004 Campana and, 359, 361 futurism and, 793 Gramsci and, 892 Montale and, 1211 Papini and, 1346 Ungaretti and, 1928 World War I and, 2029 Sofonisba (Alfieri, V.), 22 Sofonisba, La (Trissino), 1915 Sofri, Adriano, 609 Soggettiva libera indiretta (free indirect subjective), 57–58 Soggettivita` e storia delle donne (Cori), 2026 Soggettivita` rebelliosa (rebellious subjectivity), 2025 Sognatore italiano, Il, 883, 884 Sognatori, I (Bertolucci, B.), 200 Sogni del pigro, I (Bontempelli), 687

INDEX Sogni di Clitennestra, I (Maraini), 1143 Sogni di Costantino, I (Ramat), 1541–1542 Sogni di sogni (Tabucchi), 1816 Sogni d’oro (Moretti, N.), 1240 Sogni erotici (erotic dreams), 1224 Sogni mancini (Duranti), 650 Sogno, 769 Sogno (ma forse no) (Pirandello), 1453 Sogno a Herrenberg (Morandini), 1222 Sogno bello (Trilussa), 1914 Sogno dalmata, Il (Tomizza), 1881 Sogno di ferragosto, Un (Bigiaretti), 224 Sogno di Parnaso, Il (Dolce), 639 Sogno di un valzer (Brancati), 309 Sogno di una cosa, Il (Pasolini), 1367 Sogno di una notte d’estate (Salvatores), 1663 Sogno d’un mattino di primavera (D’Annunzio), 541, 653 Sogno d’un tramonto d’autunno (D’ Annunzio), 541 Sogno e ironia (Chiaves), 520, 521 Sogno entro un altro sogno (dream within a dream), 1043 Sogno truffato, Un (Archibugi), 67 Sola in casa (Buzzati), 335 Solaio (Pea), 1391 Solari, 366 Solaria, 470, 784, 984 Debenedetti and, 578 Dessı` and, 630 Hermeticism and, 930 Manzini and, 1130 Montale and, 1212 Noventa and, 1301 Petroni and, 1425 Saba and, 1645 Solmi and, 1779 Stu´parich and, 1803 Tecchi and, 1851 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Vittorini and, 2005 Zavattini and, 2042 Soldanieri, Gianni, 1991 Soldati, Mario, 48, 470, 471, 472, 747, 1727, 1774–1777, 1791, 1894 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 music and, 1257 Noventa and, 1301 Pasolini and, 1371 Ragazzoni and, 1539, 1541 Risi, D., and, 1584 travel literature and, 1909 ‘‘Soldato’’ (Ungaretti), 2032 Soldini, Silvio Archibuga and, 68 in Milan, 1206 ‘‘Sole’’ (‘‘Sun’’), 367 Sole (Blasetti), 238 Sole (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Sole 24 ore, Fortini and, 761 Sole a picco, Il (Cardarelli), 386 Sole anche di notte, Il (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Sole del sabato, Il (Moretti, Mario), 1238 Sole, Il, 979 Tarchetti and, 1827 Sole, Leonardo, 1686 ‘‘Sole, Luna e Talia’’ (Basile), 138 Sole non e` tramontato, Il (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296

Sole sorge ancora, Il (Vergano), 620, 1474 Solera, Temistocle, 1313 Soliloque d’un penseur (Casanova, Giacomo), 400 ‘‘Soliloquio delle cose’’ (Corazzini), 511 Solinas, Franco, 1475 Solita canzone del Melibeo, La (Lucini), 1079 Solitarie, Le (Negri, Ada), 1273 Soliti ignoti, I (Monicelli, M.), 1208, 1893 Solitudine, La (Pausini), 1786 ‘‘Solitudine, La’’ (Pindemonte), 1446 Sollers, Philippe, 785 ‘‘Sollicitando un poco meo savere’’ (Giacomo da Lentini), 1753 Solmi, Sergio, 980, 1777–1780 Hermeticism and, 930 Penna and, 1395 Saba and, 1645 Solo un Bacio (Manuli), 51 Sˇolochov, Michail, 1634 ‘‘Solon’’ (Pascoli), 1361 Solov’ev, Vladimir, 499 Solstizio d’inverno, 1933 (Silone), 1758 Solzhenitzyn, Alexander, 1136, 1634 ‘‘Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant’’ (Klein), 1512 Somersi e i salvati, I (Loy, R.), 1077 Sometimes I Dream in Italian (Ciresi), 964 Sommario della storia d’Italia (Balbo, C.), 573 Sommario di pedagogia come scienza filosofica (Gentile), 824 Sommaruga, Angelo, 540, 648, 983 decadentismo and, 580 Sommer, Giorgio, 1432 Sommersi e i salvati, I (Levi, P.), 108, 948, 1041, 1044 Sommi, Leone de’, 857, 1780–1781 Sommo, Judah Leone ben Isaac. See Sommi, Leone de’ Somnium Scripionis (Cicero), 1004 Son of Italy (D’Angelo), 963 ‘‘Sonatore, cantore e dipintore’’ (performer, singer, and painter), 645 Sonego, Rodolfo, 1730 Sonetti (Belli, G.), 154, 1912 Sonetti (Di Giacomo), 634 Sonetti burleschi e realistici dei primi due secoli (Masse`ra), 1636 Sonetti caudati (sonnets with a tail), 186, 330 Sonetti de la semana (Folgo´re), 751 Sonetti de’ mesi (Folgo´re), 750 Sonetti del Burchiello (Domenico di Giovanni), 330, 331 ‘‘Sonetti dell’anniversario’’ (Caproni), 379 Sonetti di Burchiello, etdiMesser Antonio Alamanni, all burchiellesca, I (Grazzini), 330 Sonetti e canzoni (Petrarch), 163 Sonetti e canzoni (Tansillo), 1822 Sonetti, I (Trilussa), 1913 Sonetti lussuriosi (Aretino), 74 Sonetti per l’armamento di un cavaliere (Folgo´re), 751 sonetti romaneschi (Belli), 1605 sonetti romaneschi (Trilussa), 1913 Sonetti sopra i XVI modi (Aretino), 74 Sonetto (Sanguineti), 1257 Song of Myself (Whitman), 362 Songbook, The. See Canzoniere (Petrarch) Songs of Castelvecchio. See Canti di Castelvecchio, I (Pascoli) Songwriters, 1782–1786 Sonnino, Sidney, 979, 983, 1659 questione meridionale and, 1532

I145

INDEX ‘‘Sonno d’Odisseo, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1361 Sono apparso alla madonna (Bene), 170 Sono pazza di te (Campo, R.), 372 Sonzogno, Edoardo, 978 Sophocles, 425, 1510, 1835, 1916, 1996 Alfieri, V., and, 19 Niccolini, G., and, 1288 Sopra alcune tendenze della letteratura europea nel secolo XIX (Mazzini), 1175 ‘‘Sopra e sotto’’ (Pirandello), 1459 Sopra i principii e ‘l modo d’imparare l’arte del disegno (Cellini), 439 Sopra il forno (Della Casa), 601 ‘‘Sopra il monumento di Dante’’ (Leopardi), 1020, 1024, 1590 Sopra il nome suo (Della Casa), 600–601 Sopra la differenza nata tra gli scultori e pittori circa il luogo destroy stato dato alla pittura nelle essequie del gran Michelangolo Buonarroti (Cellini), 439 Sopra la lettera B., perche` ella s’adoperi cosı` spesso nel principio de’ Cognomi (Magalotti), 1716 Sopra lo amore o ver’ Convito di Platone (Ficino), 840 Sopra l’opera in musica (Algarotti), 1312 ‘‘Sopra ujna conchiglia fossile’’ (Zanella), 202 Sopraluoghi in Palestina (Pasolini), 1372 Sordi, Alberto, 447, 1209, 1609, 1951 Monicelli, M., and, 1208 Risi, D., and, 1584 Scola and, 1722 Sorel, Georges, 278 Re`paci and, 1576 Sorelle Boreali, Le (Sgorlon), 1751 Sorelle d’Italia, Le (Boito, A.), 271 Sorelle, Le (Negri, Ada), 1273 Sorelle Materassi (Palazzeschi), 1334 Sorgente amara (Chiarelli), 459 ‘‘Sorgente di pessimismo del Leopardi, Una’’ (Graf ), 885 Sormani, Alberto, Neera and, 1271 Soro, Francesco, cinema and, 471 Sorpasso, Il (Risi, D.), 1584 Sorriso dell’ignoto marinaio, Il (Consolo), 321, 507, 509–510 Sorte, La (De Roberto), 613 Sos Attentura`dos (Ledda), 1006 ‘‘Sospiri di Ergasto, I’’ (Marino), 1162 Soste e ritorni (Solmi), 177 Sostiene Pereira (Tabucchi), 473, 1816, 1902 SotteraneaI (Manfredi, M.), 51 Sottilissime astuzie di Bertoldo (Croce, G.), 532, 757 Sotto falso nome (Campo, C.), 369 Sotto il ristorante cinese (Bozzetto), 51 Sotto il segno dello Scorpione (Taviani, P. and V.), 1845 Sotto il sole giaguaro (Calvino), 348 Sotto il velame (Pascoli), 1361 Sotto la dittatura (Re`paci), 1576 ‘‘Sotto la torre, al parco, di domenica’’ (Pagliarani), 1331 Sotto l’Austria nel Friuli (Percoto), 1398 Sotto specie umana (Luzi, M.), 1084 Sottosopra, 706, 1249 Souhait, 751 Soul of an Immigrant, The (Panunzio), 963 Soumet, Alexandre, 1313 Source criticism, 82–83 ‘‘Souvenirs dans l’exil’’ (Belgioioso), 151 Sovana, Ildebrando di, 735 ‘‘Sovra larive d’un corrente fiume’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Sovrana, 979

I146

Sovversivi (Taviani, P. and V.), 1845 Sozzini, Mariano, 1437 Spaccanapoli (Rea), 1268, 1552 Spaccio de labestia trionfante (Bruno, Giordano), 316, 320 Spackman, Barbara, 690 Spada di Federico II, La (Monti, V.), 1219 Spada di Orlando, La (De Maria), 1340 Spada, Giovan Battista, 1421 Spada, La (Landolfi), 686 Spadolini, Mazzinian Giovanni, 278 Spaghetti Family, The (Bozzetto), 51 ‘‘Spaghetti Westerns,’’ 1014 Spagna (De Amicis), 575 Spagnoletti, Giacinto, 919 Raboni and, 1537 Spagnoletti, Giovanni, Merini and, 1186 Sparare a vista: Come la polizia del regime DC mantiene l’ordine pubblico (Cederna, C.), 433 Sparrow, 965 Sparviera, La (Manzini), 1131 Spasimo di Palermo, Lo (Consolo), 508 Spasmimo (De Roberto), 614 Spatola, Adriano, 1277 Spaventa, Bernardo, 616 Gentile and, 822 Spaventa, Silvio, 1659 Spaventacchio, Lo (Pea), 1390 ‘‘Spazi metrici’’ (Rosselli, A.), 1617 Spaziani, Maria Luisa, 674, 1786–1788 Campo, C., and, 368 Spazio narrante, Lo (Bompiani), 283 Specchio della vera penitenza, Lo (Passavanti), 1377, 1480 Specchio di croce (Cavalca), 1567 Specchio di vera penitenza (Passavanti), 1567 Specchio, Lo, 1529 Specie del sonno, La (Bompiani), 282 ‘‘Specifico del dottor Menghi, Lo’’ (Svevo), 687 Spectacula (Prisciani), 716 Spectator, The, 47, 884, 982, 1716, 1979 Speculum Historiale (Vincent of Beauvais), 1295 Spedale degli Innocenti, 300 Spenser, Edmund, 904 Spera, Francesco, 1699 Speranza, ossia cristianesimo e comunismo, La (Moravia), 1230 Speranzella (Bernari), 184 Sperduti nel buio (Bracco), 306, 469 Sperduti nel buio (Martoglio), 1166 Speroni, Sperone, 3, 457, 1126, 1789–1791 Ruzzante and, 1637 Stampa and, 1798 Varchi and, 1948 Spettacolo d’Italia, Lo (Blasetti), 237 Spettatore Italiano, Lo, 598 Spettatore, Lo, 275 Spettatore siciliano, Lo, 1339 Spettatrice, La (Capriolo), 377 Spiaggia del lupo, La (Lagorio), 992 ‘‘Spiaggia di sera’’ (Caproni), 379 Spiaggia, La (Pavese), 1382 Spicciolata (in dribs and drabs), 1178 Spiemontesizzarsi, 1563 Spigolatore, Lo, 157 Spilimbergo, Irene da, Carrer and, 398 Spillane, Mickey, 632

INDEX Spina, Alessandro, 368, 369 Spina, Filippo, 298 Spina, La (Salviati), 1668 Spinazzola, Vittorio, 937 science fiction and, 1720 Spini, Gherardo, 439 Spinotti, Dante, 1663 Spinoza, Benedict de Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Vico and, 1984 Spira, Giuliano di, 230 Spiracoli (Orelli), 1318 Spiritata, La (Grazzini), 895 Spiritelli (little spirits), 420, 641 Spiriti (Benni), 179 Spiritismo? (Capuana), 382 Spiritismo nell’antica (Betti, U.), 207 ‘‘Spirito in un lampone, Un’’ (Tarchetti), 685, 1827 Spirito ribelle (Lucini), 1079 Spiritual Exercises (Loyola), 144 ‘‘Spirto d’azione, lo’’ (the spirit of action), 898 Spitzer, Leo, 827 ‘‘Splatter’’ fiction, 373 Spleen de Paris, Le (Baudelaire), 687 Splendor (Scola), 1723 Splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilita` numerica, Lo, 792, 1155 Spoken criticism, 357 Spoon River Anthology (Masters), 49, 1382, 1825 ‘‘Sport plurale e cittadinanza sportiva’’ (Porro, N.), 1481 Sports Writing, 1791–1793 Sposa americana, La (Soldati), 1775 Sposa bambina, La (Gatto), 812 Sposa di Messina, La (Carrer), 397 Sposa di Parigi, La (Manfridi), 1121 Sposa persiana, La (Goldoni), 866 Sposare lo staniero (Peverelli), 1601 Sposizioni di Vangeli (Sacchetti, F.), 1648 Spreco (Dolci), 644 Sprezzatura (nonchalance), 409, 412, 518 Spumoso, 2 Sputiamo su Hegel (Lonzi), 705, 1075 Sputnik, 682 Squarotti, Ba`rberi, 319, 1065, 1763 as critic, 1063 Luzi, M., and, 1083 Squarzina, Luigi, 1795 Squilla, Settimontano. See Campanella, Tommaso Squillo, Lo (Pascoli), 1361 SS9, 374 Staatsgymnasium, 1196 Stabat Mater (Tarantino, A.), 1825 ‘‘Stabat Mater’’ (Todi), 1566 Stabat Mater dolorosa (Iacopone da Todi), 955 ‘‘Stabat nuda aestas’’ (D’Annunzio), 544 Staccando l’ombra da terra (Del Giudice), 599, 1792 Stadelmann (Magris), 1110 Stadio di Wimbeldon, Lo (Del Giudice), 598–599 Stadium, 240 Stae¨l, Madame de, 181, 784, 1060, 1596, 1598, 1605 Manzoni and, 1134 translation and, 1902 Stafanis, Silvio De, 465 Stafano, Giuseppe De, 168

Stage Directing, 1793–1797 Stagione, 370 Stagioni della civita` estense (Bruscagli), 167 Stagioni di Giacomo, Le (Rigoni Stern), 1583 Stajano, Corrado, 809 Stajola, Enzo, 622 Stalin, Joseph, 1706 Stalinism, 502 Stampa, Gaspara, 162, 1797–1801. See also Petrarchism Carrer and, 398 Guglielminetti, A., and, 910 Petrarch and, 1127, 1413 Petrarchism and, 1421 in Venice, 1960, 1961 Stampa, La, 132, 469, 899, 978, 980 Bianchini and, 218 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 297 Camilleri and, 355 Camon and, 358 Cerami and, 448 Ceronetti and, 452 Chiarelli and, 460 Corti and, 514 crepuscolarismo and, 520 Dessı` and, 630 Folgore and, 754 Guglielminetti, A., and, 911 Malaparte and, 1113 Manganelli and, 1124 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Morandini and, 1222 Praz and, 1497, 1498 Ragazzoni and, 1541 Rasy and, 1549 Re´paci and, 1577 Stampe dell’800 (Palazzeschi), 1334 Stampiglia, Silvio, 1050, 1311 Stancanelli, Elena, with Cannibali, 373 Standa, 1860 ‘‘Standard of repugnance,’’ 604 Stanislavskij, Konstantin, 499 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Stanno tutti bene (Tornatore), 1891 Stanza 411 (Vinci), 1993 Stanza del figlio, La (Moretti, N.), 1241 Stanza della Commedia of San Giorgio de’ Genovesi, 1269 Stanza della memoria, La (Bolzoni), 3 Stanza separata, La (Garboli), 808 Stanza sull’acqua, La (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Stanze (Bembo, P.), 164 Stanze (Medici, Lorenzo), 1179 Stanze (Poliziano), 1463, 1468–1469 Stanze a Bernardino Martirano (Tansillo), 1822 Stanze alla Ninfa Tabelista (Borghini, R.), 298 Stanze alla Ninfa Trialuce (Borghini, R.), 298 Stanze cominciate per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici (Poliziano), 1468 Stanze della funicolare (Caproni), 380 Stanze, Le (Bigiaretti), 224 Stanze per la commedia (comedy rooms), 498 Stanze per la giostra di Giuliano de’ Medici (Ficino), 721 Stanze per le lagrime di Maria Vergine (Tasso, T.), 1822 Star di casa (Ramondino), 1546 Star, Flaiano and, 732

I147

INDEX Starewitch, Ladislas, 50 Starita, Saverio, 1024 Starkey, David, 519 Starnone, Domenico, in Naples, 1268 Starobinski, Jean, 62, 499, 1088 ‘‘Stasera’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Statius, 261, 1463 classicism and, 479 Marino and, 1161 Petrarch and, 1404 Stato della cose (state of things), 1099 Stato della cose, Lo (Archibugi), 67 ‘‘Stato popolare: Riflessioni intorno al Fascismo’’ (Cardarelli), 1479 Stato rustico, Lo (Imperia`l), 933 Statue d’acqua, Le (Jaeggy), 971 Stazione Termini (De Sica), 624 Stecchetti, Lorenzo, 278, 488 Steele, Richard, 47, 982 Stefaile, Felix, 965 Stefani, Bartolomeo, 758 Stefani, Guglielmo, 978 Stefanini, Luigi, 1429 Stefanini, Ruggero, 289 Stefanino (Palazzeschi), 1335 Stein, Gertrude, 972 Niccolai and, 1287 Steinbeck, John, 219, 963, 2010 Arpino and, 96 Berto and, 191 Montale and, 1212 neorealism and, 1283 Vittorini and, 2005 Steiner, George, 1903 Steiner, Rudolf, 1309 Stella, 1652 Stella, Antonio, 1026, 1506 Stella del libero arbitrio, La (Spaziani), 1787 Stella mattutina (Negri, Ada), 1273 Stella polare (Erba, E.), 673 Stella, Simonetta Piccone, 706, 2025 Stella variabile (Sereni, V.), 1741 Stelle de Roma (Trilussa), 1913 Stelle fredde, Le (Piovene), 1448 Stellvertreter, Der (Hochhuth), 827 Stendhal, 162, 311, 1605, 1620 in Genoa, 815 Sanvitale and, 1678 Tomasi di Lampedusa and, 1876 in Venice, 1961 Sterbini, Cesare, 1313 Sterne, Laurence, 47, 647, 764, 1034, 1628, 1827, 1908 Sternhell, Zeev, 690 Stevens, George, 1014 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 169, 974 Ragazzoni and, 1540 Stieglitz, Alfred, 1433 Stigliani, Tommaso, 1127 Marino and, 1158 Stigliano, Luigi Carafa of, 136–137 Stile all burchia, 330 Stile bernesco, 186 Stile libero, 33, 373 Stilnovismo, lyric poetry and, 1087

I148

Stilnovisti, 571, 1519 Cino da Pistoia and, 641 Folgo´re and, 751 Guinizzelli and, 924 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1179 Rosselli, A., and, 1616 Tansillo and, 1822 Stilnovo, 276 Stirner, Max, 342 Oriani, A., and, 1320 Sto. See Tofano, Sergio Sto lavorando (Sereni, C.), 1739 Stocchi, Manilio Pastore, 2035 Stoicism Alberti, Leon, and, 7 Neoplatonism and, 1280 Stolberg, Luisa, 25 Alfieri, V., and, 20 Stone, Oliver, 1865 ‘‘Stony Rhymes’’ (Dante), 550 Stoppa, Paolo, 633 Stoppani, Antonio, 464 Storaro, Vittorio, 198 ‘‘Storia d’amore’’ (Bassani), 139 Storia degli ermetici (Valli, D.), 930 Storia dei fratelli Rupe (Re`paci), 1576 Storia dei generi letterari italiani, 820 Storia del cinema d’animazione (Rondolino), 50 ‘‘Storia del genere umano’’ (Leopardi), 1026 Storia del PSI nel centenario della nascita (Ottieri), 1327 Storia del regno di Napoli (Croce, B.), 524, 531–532 Storia del terzo Reich, La (Cavani), 424 Storia del Trecento cavata dalle cronache di quel tempo (Grossi), 897 Storia della citta` di rame (Campo, C.), 369 Storia della civilta` letteraria italiana (Squarotti), 1065 Storia della colonna Infame (Manzoni, A.), 147 Storia della critica romantica in Italia (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Storia della Donne in Occidente (Duby and Perrot), 2026 Storia della filosofia italiana (Garin), 946, 1427 Storia della lettatura Americana (Tarozzi), 1829 Storia della letteratura inglese (Praz), 47, 1497 Storia della letteratura inglese nel secolo XIX (Cecchi, E.), 431 Storia della letteratura italiana, 431, 616, 889, 944, 945 Storia della letteratura italiana (Cantu`), 1061 Storia della letteratura italiana (De Sanctis), 1061, 1064, 1268, 1905 Storia della letteratura italiana (Malato), 1066 Storia della letteratura italiana (Tiraboschi), 1059, 1064, 1568, 1872 Storia della letteratura italiana dalla meta` del ‘700 ai giorni nostri (Zanella), 2035–2036 Storia della pittura moderna (Sarfatti), 1681 Storia della Repubblica di Firenze (Capponi, G.), 375 Storia della Resistenza italiana (Battaglia), 1579 Storia della Scapigliatura (Mariani), 689, 1699 Storia della scultura dal suo risorgimento in Italia al secolo di Canova (Cicognara), 2003 ‘‘Storia dell’asino di San Giuseppe’’ (Verga, G.), 1970 Storia dell’astronomia (Leopardi), 1019 Storia delle donne in Italia, 2027 Storia delle teoriche del cinema (Aristarco), 725 Storia delle vittime. Poesie della Resistenza, La (Gatto), 812, 1581 Storia dell’eta` barocca in Italia (Croce, B.), 524–525, 1843 Storia dell’Italia Moderna (Candeloro), 946 Storia d’Europa (Giambullari, P.), 841 Storia d’Europa nel secolo decimonono (Croce, B.), 525, 945

INDEX ‘‘Storia di Agnese non e` una fantasia, La’’ (Vigano`), 1989 Storia di Cristo (Papini), 232, 1347, 1569 ‘‘Storia di dieci giorni’’ (Levi, P.), 1043 Storia di Ester regina (Tornabuoni), 1888– Storia di Fortunato, La (Guerra), 473, 906 Storia di Girolamo Savonarola e de’ suoi tempi, La (Villari), 232 Storia di Matilde (Tarozzi), 1830 Storia di Milano (Verri, P.), 1485, 1980 Storia di Piera (Maraini), 473, 1143 Storia di Pietro Leopoldo (Capponi, G.), 376 Storia di ragazze, Una (Vigano`), 1989 Storia di Sirio: parabola per la nuova generazione, La (Camon), 357 Storia di To¨nle (Rigoni Stern), 1582 Storia di una capinera (Verga, G.), 670, 1399, 1963 Storia di una capinera (Zeffirelli), 2046 Storia di una gamba (Tarchetti), 1827 Storia di un’amicizia (Palazzeschi), 1335 Storia di varj costumi sagri e profani dagli antichi sino a noi pervenuti (Carmeli), 1478 Storia d’Italia (Guicciardini), 855, 912, 916, 917–918, 942 Storia d’Italia dal 1873 al 1917 (Croce, B.), 525, 945 Storia d’Italia nel medioevo (Troya), 573 Storia e cronistoria del Canzoniere (Saba), 1512, 1647 Storia estetico-critica delle arti del disegno (Estense), 2003 Storia Fiorentina (Varchi), 1948 ‘‘Storia fosca’’ (Capuana), 686 Storia italiana, Una (Pratolini), 1495 Storia, La (Croce, B.), 945 ‘‘Storia, La’’ (Montale), 1213 Storia, La (Morante), 1224, 1227–1228 Storia letteraria delle regioni d’italia (Binni and Sapegno), 1560 Storia medievale (Montanari, M.), 1574 Storia nostra (Pascarella), 1357 Storia pittorica dell’Italia dal risorgimento delle b belle arti fin presso la fine delXVIII secolo (Lanzi), 98 Storia ridotta sotta il concetto generale dell’arte, La (Croce, B.), 523 Storia semplice, Una (Sciascia), 1708 Storia sociale della fotografia (Gilardi), 1434 Storia spezzata, La (Venturi, M.), 1601 Storia universale (Cantu`), 616, 944 Storie dei poveri amanti e altri versi (Bassani), 139 Storie del ghetto di Venezia (Manfridi), 1121 Storie della citta` di Dio: racconti e cronache romane (Pasolini), 1367 Storie della Santa Croce (Carpaccio and Bellini), 1961 Storie dell’anno Mille (Guerra), 473, 906 Storie dell’anno Mille (Malerba), 1116 Storie delle mille e una notte, Le (Pasolini), 472 Storie dell’Ottavo Distretto (Pressburger), 1500 Storie di donne e femministe (Passerini, L.), 1513 Storie di palcoscenico (Praga, M.), 1493 Storie di patio (Ramondino), 1547 Storie e leggende napoletane (Croce, B.), 523 Storie ferraresi, Le (Bassani), 140 Storie fiorentine (Guicciardini), 912, 916, 917 Storie, Le (Trilussa), 1913 Storie naturali (Levi, P.), 686, 1040 Storielle vane (Boito, C.), 71, 275 Storm of Steel (Ju¨nger), 2030 Stornelli italiani (Dall’Ongaro), 1479 ‘‘Storno e l’Angelo Centuno, Lo’’ (Pirandello), 1455 Storti, Bebo, 1663 Story of Antonio, The (Arrighi, Antonio), 963 Stout, Rex, 633 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 48, 1394

Stracciafoglio (Sanguineti), 1670 Strachey, Lytton, 431 Stracitta` (ultracity), 286, 984 Strada che va in citta`, La (Ginzburg, N.), 843 Strada del Davai, La (Revelli), 2033 Strada di Agrigentum’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 ‘‘Strada ferrata, La’’ (Praga), 1853 Strada, La (Fellini), 701 Flaiano and, 733 Strada per Roma, La (Volponi), 2018 Strada provinciale delle anime (Celati), 435 Strada sull’acqua, La (Govoni), 874 Strada, Zanobi da, 1409, 1412 Strade di polvere, Le (Loy, R.), 940, 1077 Strade di Princesa, Le (Consiglio), 1201 Straduzione, La (Pariani), 936 Strage de gl’Innocenti, La (Marino), 1162 Stragi delle Filippine, Le (Salgari), 487, 1654 Strana serata, Una (Betti, U.), 208 Strand, Paul, 2043 ‘‘Strane rupi, aspri monti’’ (Tansillo), 1822 Straniera dapper-tutto (foreigner everywhere), 466 Straniero, Lo (Visconti, L.), 1996 Strano caso del dottor Jekyll e del signor Hyde (Stevenson), 169 Strapaesani, 1233 Strapaese Malaparte and, 1111 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 Vittorini and, 2005 Strapaese (ultracountry), 286, 984 Straparola, Giovan Francesco, 463 Decameron (Boccaccio) and, 247 Stratas, Teresa, 2046 Strategia del ragno, La (Bertolucci, B.), 197, 198, 1859 Strategia della tensione, 1862 Streetcar Named Desire, A (Williams, T.), 1994–1995, 2045 Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Bruno, Giuliana), 710 Strega, 161 Strega bruciata viva, La (Visconti, L.), 1996 Strega, La (Grazzini), 895 Strega Prize, 1067 Streghe, Le (Visconti), 1996 Strehler, Giorgio, 47, 168, 193, 335, 500, 1205, 1368, 1794, 1796, 1816 Stretta, 272 Striggio, Alessandro, 1310 Strindberg, August, 335, 1910 Stro`legh (Loi), 1071 Stromboli, terra di Dio (Rossellini), 1619 Strona gioia di vivere, Una (Penna), 1395 Stroncatura, 391 Stroncature (Papini), 1347 Strozzi, Alessandra Macinghi, 217, 1801–1803 Strozzi, Ercole, 167 Bembo, P., and, 163 Strozzi, Giovanni, 313 Strozzi, Tito Vespasiano, 518, 668 Ferrara and, 716 Structuralism, 345 Structures e´le´mentaires de la parente´ (Le´vi-Strauss), 1509 Struttura assente: La ricerca semiotica e il metodo strutturale, La (Eco), 1428 Struttura dell’esistenza, La (Abbagnano), 1428 Struttura e architettura (Brandi), 101

I149

INDEX Strutture e il tempo, Il (Segre, C.), 1063 Stuart, Mary, 607 Studenti, I (Ariosto, L.), 84, 88, 1032 Studi critici (Cecchi, E.), 430 Studi di bestialita` (studies of beastiality), 301 Studi di letterature moderne (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Studi laurenziani (Medici, Lorenzo), 1178 Studi storici sulla rivoluzione napoletana del 1801 (Croce, B.), 523 Studi sul teatro contemporaneo, 172, 1625, 1848 Studi sulla letteratura contemporanea (Capuana), 382 Studia humanitatis, 313, 951, 1934, 1935, 1945 Studies in the Genesis of Romantic Theory in the Eighteenth Century (Robertson), 894 Studii sulla letteatura contemporanea (Capuana), 1062 Studii sulla poesia popolare e civile massimamente in Italia (Nievo), 1290 Studio Fiorentino, 994 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1179 Redi and, 1559 Studio sopra E´mile Zola (De Sanctis), 1061, 1972 Studio su Mallarme´ (Luzi, M.), 1085 Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (Basevi), 1259 Studio Uno, 1858 Study in Scarlet, A (Doyle), 631 Stuepfatto (stupefied), 1556 Stufaiolo, Lo (Doni), 646 Stultitia, 8 Stu´paric, Carlo, 1150 Stu´parich, Giani, 1150, 1803–1805, 1911, 2029. See also Trieste Tomizza and, 1880 Stupore (wonderment), 286 Stupro, Lo (Rame), 1545 Sturges, John, 1014 Sturm und Drang (Goethe), 1605 ‘‘Su’’ (Palezzeschi), 1333 Su fondamenti invisibili (Luzi, M.), 931, 1083 ‘‘Su la vita ‘d campagna’’ (Calvo), 1563 ‘‘Su per la costa, Amor, de l’alto monte’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 475 Subjugation of Women, The (Mill), 1147 Subliminare (subliminal experience), 403 Successo, 224 Suckert, Kurt Erich. See Malaparte, Curzio Sud (Salvatores), 1664 Sudori d’Imeneo, I (Gozzi, C.), 880 Sue, Eugene, 1654 Verga, G., and, 1963 Sugo della vita: Simbolismo e magia del sangue, Il (Camporesi), 1481 ‘‘Sui parolai e sullo spirito della letteratura italiana’’ (Verri, P.), 1977, 1979–1980 Suicide Alfieri, V., and, 19 Antonioni and, 57 of Meili, 1198 of Michelstaedter, 1196 Mirra (Alfieri, V.) and, 23 Morante and, 1226 of Pier delle Vigne, 1443 of Pozzi, A., 1488 of Rovetta, 1632 of Salgari, 1655 of Tenco, 1783 ‘‘Suicidio all’inglese, Un’’ (Tarchetti), 1827 Sul bello (Cigognara), 1278

I150

Sul ‘‘Cacciatore feroce’’ e sulla ‘‘Eleonora’’ diGoffredo Augusto Bu¨rger. Lettera semiseria di Grisostomo al suo figliuolo (Berchet), 181, 1596–1597 ‘‘Sul discorso di madama di Stae¨l. Lettera di un italiano ai compilatori della ‘Biblioteca italiana’’’ (Giordani, Pietro), 851 Sul limitare (Pascoli), 1361 Sul Partito d’azione e gli altri (Lussu), 1081 Sul romanticismo (Manzoni, A.), 1135 Suleiman the Magnificent, 855 Sull’ Oceano (De Amicis), 575, 816 Sulla architettura e sulla scultura in Venezia dal Medio Evo sino ai nostri giorni (Estense), 2003 Sulla collina (Joppolo), 976 Sulla fede (Pressburger), 1500 ‘‘Sulla maniera e l’utilita` della traduzioni’’ (Stae¨l), 181, 1060, 1596 Sulla moderna politica internazionale (Belgioioso), 151 Sulla poesia (Montale), 1213 ‘‘Sulla realta`’’ (Bernari), 183 Sulla soglia (Manzini), 1131 Sulla spiaggia e al di la` del molo (Tobino), 1874 ‘‘Sulla terazza sterminata’’ (Ortese), 687 Sulla traccia di Nives (De Luca, E,), 609 Sulla vita di Galileo Galilei (Viviani, V.), 231 Sulle lagune (Verga, G.), 1963 ‘‘Sulle rive del Lambro’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 Sullo ingegno di Paolo Calliari (Aleardi), 14 Sull’ordine e il disordine dell’ex macello pubblico (Moscato), 1247 Sull’utilita` delle traduzioni (Stae¨l), 784 Sumarokov, Aleksandr, 1633 Summa, 204 Summa (Aquinas), 1030 Summae, 1565 Suo marito (Pirandello), 1450 Suo superchio, 327 Suocera, La (Varchi), 1949 ‘‘Suor Carmelina’’ (Di Giacomo), 635 Suor Filomena (Goncourt), 635 Suor Juana (Maraini), 936, 1143 Suora giovane, La (Arpino), 96 Superalbo. Le storie complete (Veronesi, S.), 1976 Super-Eliogabalo (Arbasino), 62, 1123 Superman, 658 Superuomo di massa: retorica e ideologia nel romanzo popolare (Eco), 658 Superuomo, Il (De Roberto), 614 Superwoobinda (Nove), 374 Supplica, La (Barbieri, N.), 499 Supplimento al Nuovo Dizionario Universale Technologico e di Arti e Mestieri, 1432 Supplire anchora quello che manca (supply what is missing), 407 Suppositi, I (Ariosto, L.), 84, 88–89 Supreme Economic Council of Lombardy, 147 Sur la fortune du De´cameron a` lafin du Trecento (Marietti), 1736 Surmaˆle, Le (Jarry), 62 Surrealism, Bernari and, 183 Sussurro della grande voce, Il (Pressburger), 1500 Sutherland, Donald, 472, 2039 Svetonius, 443 Svevo a Venezia (Puppa), 1522 Svevo, Italo, 108, 191, 280, 295, 826, 1222, 1644, 1805–1813, 1854, 1910, 1911 animal tales by, 203 Debenedetti and, 577 fantastic and, 687

INDEX Fascism and, 691–692 inept characters of, 1897 Manzini and, 1130 Marin and, 1149 in Milan, 1205 Montale and, 1211 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1476 Pressburger and, 1499 psychoanalysis and, 1511 Russian influences of, 1634 Tomizza and, 1880 verismo and, 1974 World War I and, 2028 Sweet Charity (Fosse), 701 Sweet death, 19 Sweet new style, 45, 549, 642 Sweynheym, Konrad, 1504 Swift, Jonathan, 400, 464 Boccaccio and, 250 Swinburne, Algernon, 47 Praz and, 1497 Sylva in scabiem (Poliziano), 1463 Sylvae (Statius), 1463 Sylvester I (Pope), 954 ‘‘Symboles et destins du peuple’’ (Ossola), 1481 Symbolism, 791 Leonardo Da Vinci and, 1009 Lucini and, 1079 Marinetti and, 1154–1155 Pascoli and, 1362 Tessa and, 1867 Ungaretti and, 1932 Symposium (Plato), 326, 409, 412, 1011 Castiglione and, 410 homosexuality and, 1029 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1177 Pico della Mirandola and, 1439 Syste`me de la mode, Le (Barthes), 695

T Tableaux vivants, 819, 821 Tabucchi, Antonio, 203, 473, 672, 936, 1815–1819, 1902 fantastic and, 686–687 in Genoa, 817 Tacca, Ferdinando, 737 Taccone, Baldassarre, 1467 Taccuini (Pascarella), 1357 Taccuino (Campana), 359 Taccuino australe (Del Giudice), 599 Taccuino del vecchio, Il (Ungaretti), 1930 Taccuino di un’ultimista (Sereni, C.), 1739 Taccuino slavo (Guidacci), 919 Taccuino tedesco (Ramondino), 1547 Taci, anzi parla (Lonzi), 705, 1075 Tacitus, 443, 802 Vico and, 1983 Tadino, Felice, 450 Tafuri, Manfredo, 101 Tag Teatro, 500, 1344 Taglio del bosco, Il (Cassola), 403 Tailhade, Laurent, 1540 Taine, Hippolyte, 785 Capuana and, 382

Tairov, Aleksa`ndr, 499 Taiuti, Tonino, 1701 Taking It Home (Ardizzone), 964 Talamini, Giampietro, 978 Talanta (Aretino), 75 Talismano della felicita`, Il (Boni), 759 Talli, Virgilio, 460, 1793 Rosso and, 1626 Tallyrand, Charles Maurice de, 341 Talmud, Calassi and, 342 Tamaro, Attilio, 1911 Tamaro, Susanna, 465, 473, 1819–1821, 1912 Tamburini, Stefano, 790 T’amero` sempre (Camerini), 352 Taming of the Shrew, The (Zeffirelli), 2045, 2046 Tanasso, Elda, 964 Tancredi principe (Asinari), 1921 Tanfucio, Neri. See Fucini, Renato Tani, Stefano, 214–215 Tanini, Antonia. See Pulci, Antonia Tanizaki, Junichiro, 426 Tansi, Drusilla, 1212 Tansillo, Luigi, 1408, 1821–1823 Basile and, 136 pastoral genre and, 1380 Petrarch and, 1413 Petrarchism and, 1421 petrarchismo of, 1160 Terracina and, 1861 Tanto la rivoluzione non scoppiera` (Bernari), 183, 184 Tantucci, Giovanni, 415 Tantum Ergo (Aquinas), 1429 Tape mark 1 (Balestrini), 115 Tappeto verde, Il (Pratolini), 1495, 2032 Tappeto volante, Il (Leonetti), 1016 Tarabotti, Arcangela, 450, 1823–1825 Tarantino, Antonio, 1563, 1825–1826 Tarantino, Quentin, 373, 1664 Taranto, Nino, 1951 Toto` and, 1895 Tarare (Ponte), 567 Tarchetti, Iginio Ugo, 671, 684, 685, 1826–1829 Righetti and, 1697 Tarchiani, Alberto, crepuscolarismo and, 521 Targioni-Tozzetti, Giovanni, 1052, 1965 Tarizzo, Domenico, 1563 Tarozzi, Bianca, 1829–1831 Valduga and, 1942 Tarsia, Galeazzo di, 137 Terracina and, 1861 Tartana degli influssi per l’anno bisestile, La (Gozzi, C.), 880 Tartar Steppe, The. See Deserto dei Tartari, Il (Buzzati) Tartaruga, La, 707 Muraro and, 1249 Tasca, Angelo, 888 Tasso, Bernardo, 144, 668, 934, 1831–1833, 1921 Carrer and, 398 Ga`mbara and, 807 Speroni and, 1789 Tasso napoletano (Fasano), 1562 Tasso, Torquato, 39, 175, 457, 518, 668, 783, 932, 933, 1126, 1158, 1315, 1408, 1562, 1568, 1604, 1822, 1833–1842, 1864 Basile and, 136 Boiardo and, 264

I151

INDEX Tasso, Torquato (cont.) censorship of, 444 epics and, 665 Ferrara and, 717 Gravina and, 1189 Gravina, G., and, 894 homosexuality and, 1032 lyric poetry and, 1087 Manzoni, A., and, 1136 Marino and, 1160 Monti, V., and, 1219 music and, 1254, 1255 in Naples, 1268 Petrarch and, 1413 Petrarchism and, 1421 Salviati and, 1668 Sannazaro and, 1677 Speroni and, 1789 Tansillo and, 1822 in Turin, 1921 Varchi and, 1948 Tassoni, Alessandro, 669, 932, 935, 1059, 1842–1844. See also Heroic-Comic Poetry historiography and, 942 T.A.T. (Sanguineti), 1670 Tatler, The, 884 Tato. See Sansoni, Guglilmo Tattato di architettura (Averulino), 11001 Tattilismo, Il (Marinetti), 1156 Tavella, Paola, 159 ‘‘Taverna dei destini incrociati, La’’ (Calvino), 344 Taviani, Ferdinando, 498 Taviani, Paolo and Vittorio, 1006, 1241, 1845–1848 Tavola ritonda, 667 Tavola rotonda, La (Goldoni), 880 ‘‘tavole genovesi’’ (Signoribus), 818 Tavolozza (Praga, E.), 1490 Taylor, Elizabeth, 2045 Tay-see (Salgari, Emilio), 1654 Te` con Mussolini, Un (Zeffirelli), 2046 Te Deum, 1069 Te l’hegi dito (Ruzzante), 1639 Te lucis ante (Bassani), 139 Te` nel deserto, Il (Bertolucci, B.), 199 Teater (Loi), 1071 Teatri, 1259 Teatri di Napoli: secolo 15–18, I (Croce, B.), 523 Teatri di Stato, 460 Teatro A l’Avogaria, 500 Teatro alla moda, 1256, 1312 Teatro alla Pergola, 2045 Teatro Argentina, 172, 460, 1848 Teatro Biondo, 1341 Teatro borghese, 459 Teatro Carcano, 1203 Teatro Carignano, 1786, 1849 ‘‘Teatro Carignano’’ (Valduga), 1942 Teatro Civile, 1122 Teatro comico all’osteria del Pellegrino, Il (Gozzi, C.), 497, 880 Teatro comico, Il (Goldoni), 497, 587, 865 Teatro Comunale, 718 Teatro con i pupi siciliani, 1341 Teatro contemporaneo italiano e straniero, Il (Carrer), 397

I152

Teatro d’arte, 636, 1257, 1453, 1606 Savinio and, 1688 Teatro de’ Fiorentini, 1269 Teatro degli Indipendenti, 1606 Teatro degli Stracci, 1344 Teatro degli Undici, 288 Teatro dei fantocci (D’Amico, Silvio), 1849 Teatro dei sensibili, 451 Teatro del Fondo, 1269 Teatro del Guerriero, 709 Teatro del mondo (Rossi, Aldo), 72 Teatro della Maddalena, 1548 Teatro della Pergola, 737 Teatro della sorpresa (theater of surprise), 1155 Teatro delle Arti, 211, 1793 Teatro delle favole rappresentative, Il (Scala), 36, 498 Teatro dell’Elfo, 1206, 1663 Teatro di Eduardo, Il, 586 Teatro di massa (Sartarelli, M.), 1580 Teatro di poesia, 172 Teatro di prosa, 460 Teatro di Regia, 500 Teatro di San Bartolomeo, 1269 Teatro di San Giovanni Grisostomo, 865 Teatro di San Luca, 865 Teatro di San Moise`, 865 Teatro di vita, 172 Teatro dialettale siciliano (Capuana), 384 Teatro Ducale, 1203 Teatro e letteratura (Pirandello), 1450 Teatro Eliseo, 1794 Teatro Filodrammatici, 1203 Teatro Fossati, 459 Teatro futurista, 874 Teatro Goldoni, 865 ‘‘Teatro grande’’ (Betti, U.), 206 Teatro Grottesco, 458, 1848–1850 Teatro grottesco, Il (Tilgher), 1848 Teatro Illustrato, Il, 1259 Teatro italiano contemporaneo, Il (Capuana), 382 Teatro italiano o sia scelta di tragedia per uso sulla scena (Maffei, S.), 1101 Teatro Jovinelli, 1950 Teatro La Maddalena, 709 Teatro Laboratorio, 168 Teatro Lirico, 546 Teatro Manzoni, 838, 1624 Praga, M., and, 1492 Teatro Massimo, 1338 Teatro Milanese, 1204 Teatro Minimo, 1166 Pirandello and, 1450 Teatro Nuovo, 635, 1269 Teatro Olimpia, 459, 1544 Teatro Pattriottico, 1203, 1485 Teatro Politeama, 589 Teatro Re, 1203 Teatro San Bartolomeo, 1190 Teatro San Carlino, 1700 Teatro San Carlo, 1269 Teatro San Ferdinando, 587, 635 ‘‘Teatro Santa Chiara’’ (Valduga), 1942 Teatro Sant’Angelo, 865 Teatro Scientifico (Rossi, Aldo), 72

INDEX Teatro senza spettacolo (theater without spectacle), 169 Teatro sintetico (synthetic theater), 1155 Teatro Stabile, 1544, 1912 Teatro Stabile del Veneto, 1960 ‘‘Teatro Trianon’’ (Valduga), 1942 Teatro Umberto, 2013 Teatro Umoristico I De Filippo, 585, 590 Teatro Valle, 584, 1461 Giacosa and, 837 Teatroggi (Maraini), 1143 Tebaldeo, Antonio Bembo, P., and, 163 Ferrara and, 716 Tecchi, Bonaventura, 1851–1852 World War I and, 2029 Technicolor, 236 Technique du coup d’e´tat (Malaparte), 1111 Technology and Literature, 1853–1856 Technopaegnia, 821 Tedaldi, Pieraccio, Rustio di Filippo and, 1635 Tedeschi, Erica, 451 Tedeschi, Giuliana, 948 on Holocaust, 947 ‘‘Tegno di folle ‘mpres,’ a lo ver dire’’ (Guinizzelli), 923 Tel Quel, 785, 985 ‘‘Tela e Cenere’’ (Banti), 125 Tele Biella, 1859 ‘‘Tele+1,’’ 1860 Teleferica, La (Bertolucci, B.), 200 Telefoni bianchi, 623 Telegiornale, 1858, 1859 Telemontecarlo, 1859 Telenovelas, 1860 Telesio, Bernadino, 363, 1427, 1768, 1939 Television, 1857–1860 ‘‘Television Law,’’ 1860 Telunah ‘al ha-zeman (Leone Ebreo), 1011 Tempe presente, 217 Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 47, 1203, 1456, 1794 Tempesta nel nulla (Borgese, Giuseppe), 295 Tempeste (Negri, Ada), 1273 Tempesti, Giulio, 172 Tempi Moderni, Guiducci and, 922 Tempi nostri (Blasetti), 237 Tempi nuovi, 278 Tempi stretti (Ottieri), 1326 Tempier, Etienne, 548 Tempio della Gloria, Il (Lucini), 1079 ‘‘Tempio, Il’’ (Marino), 1161 Tempo, 980, 1434 Tempo di affetti e di mercanti (Bianchini), 1802 Tempo di edificare (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Tempo di letteratura, 403 Tempo di ma`ssacro (Vassalli), 1956 Tempo di uccidere (Flaiano), 161, 472, 489, 732 Tempo di uccidere (Montaldo), 732 ‘‘Tempo e tempi’’ (Montale), 1213 Tempo, Il, 461, 570 Masino and, 1168 Ragazzoni and, 1541 Re´paci and, 1577 Simoni and, 1759 Tempo innamorato (Manzini), 1130

Tempo presente Arbasino and, 63 Manganelli and, 1124 Tempo si e` fermato, Il (Olmi), 1305 Temps revient, Le (Campo, C.), 369 Ten Commandments, The (De Mille), 1013 ‘‘’10 giugno 1920, Il’’ (Delfini), 597 Tenca, Carlo, 983, 1061, 1259, 1698 Percoto and, 1398 Tenco, Luigi, 818, 1782, 1783 Tender Warriors (Vries), 964 Tenente dei Lancieri, Il (Rovetta), 1631 Tenente Sheridan (Camilleri), 355 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, Boccaccio and, 250 Tenore sconfitto ovvero la presunzione punita, Il (Tommassini), 1257 Tentativi drammatici (Verri, A.), 1978 Tentato suicidio (Zavattini), 56 ‘‘Tentazione della prosa, la,’’ 1742 ‘‘Tentazione, La’’ (Valduga), 1942 Tentazioni del Dottor Antonio (Fellini), 701 Tentazioni di Girolamo, Le (Cavazzoni), 428 Tenzone (sonnet exchange), 439, 923 Teodoro in Venezia (Casti), 1051 Teorema (Pasolini), 448, 1368, 1372 Teoria del periodi politici (Ferrari, G.), 1427–1428 Teoria delle illusioniI (theory of illusions), 764 Teoria dell’insurrezione (Lussu), 1081 ‘‘Teoria dello Stato in Sant’Agostino’’ (Pierro), 1445 Teoria e invenzione futurista (Marinetti), 1156 Teoria e storia della storiografia (Croce, B.), 524, 945 Teoria generale del conoscere dello spirito come atto puro (Gentile), 823 Teoria generale della critica (Brandi), 101 Teppisti! (Manfridi), 1121 Terence, 89, 498 novella and, 1297 Terentius, 1949 Terenzio (Goldoni), 866 Teresa (Neera), 1271 Teresa la ladra (Palma), 473, 1143 Teresa of Avila, 41 Teresa Venerdı` (De Sica), 622 Termometro politico della Lombardia, 1980 Terra! (Benni), 179, 1719 ‘‘Terra’’ (Quasimodo), 1526 Terra del rimorso, La (Martino), 53 Terra di Cleopatra (Vivanti), 2012 Terra e la morte, La (Pavese), 1383 Terra imparegiabile (Quasimodo), 1526 Terra madre (Blasetti), 237 Terra mia (Daniele), 1786 Terra promessa, La (Ungaretti), 1930, 1940 Terra puo` finire, La (Re`paci), 1576 Terra santa e altre poesie, La (Merini), 1187 Terra santa, La (Merini), 1187 Terra segreta (Petroni), 1424 Terra senza il Sole, La (Martini, V.), 1718 Terra senza orologi (Guidacci), 919 Terra trema, La (Visconti, L.), 445, 724, 1283, 1284, 1474, 1533, 1607, 1729, 1994, 1998–1999, 2045 Terra vergine (D’Annunzio), 540 Terracina, Laura, 1861–1862 Petrarchism and, 1421 Terracini, Aron Benvenuto, 1936

I153

INDEX Terracini, Umberto, 888 Terragni, Giuseppe, Fascism and, 72 Terre del Sacramento, Le (Jovine), 987 Terremoto, Il (Doni), 646 Terrestrita` del sole (Onofri, A.), 1309 Terribile (forceful), 439 Terribilissimo, 439 Terrorism, 1862–1866 Terry and the Pirates (Caniff ), 658, 788 Tertullian, classicism and, 479 Terza pagina, 979 Terza rima, 83, 143, 778 Bandello, M., and, 117 Belcari and, 148 Berni and, 186 Boccaccio and, 242 Galilei, G., and, 804 Pasolini and, 1374 Tansillo and, 1821 Triumphi (Petrarch) and, 1418 Terze Odi barbare (Carducci), 392 Terze rime (Franco, V.), 777, 1799 Terze rime, Le (Dante), 163 Terzina, 860 Terzo fronte, 1756 Terzo gode, Il (Chiarelli), 459 Tesauro, Emanuele, 933, 1059, 1128, 1921 historiography and, 942 Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia (Boccaccio), 241, 260–261, 667 Tesi fondamentali di un’estetica come scienze dell’espressione (Croce, B.), 529 Tesoretto (Latini), 1003 Tesoro del Presidente del paraguay, Il (Salgari), 1655 Tesoro di Donnina, Il (Farina), 688 Tesoro, Il (Croce, G.), 532 Tessa, Delio, 471, 1867–1868. See also Regional Literature Maggi and, 1104 in Milan, 1204 Testa del delfino, La (D’Arrigo), 570 Testa fra le nuvole, La (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Testa perduta di Damasceno Monteiro, La (Tabucchi), 1816 Testamento (Merini), 1187 Testi Italiani Antichi, 1053 Testimone, Il (Germi), 828 Testimone, Il (Pomilio), 1470 Testimonianze (Papini), 1347 Testoni, Alfredo, 1795 Testori, Giovanni, 99, 1563, 1868–1871, 1995 censorship of, 446 homosexuality and, 1033 Maggi and, 1104 in Milan, 1206 as neo-avant-garde, 1276 Tarantino, A., and, 1825 Tetillo (Scarpetto), 1700 Tetto, Il (De Sica), 624 Tetto murato (Romano, L.), 1593 ‘‘Tetton’’ (Porta, C.), 1486 Tevere, Il, 310 Cardarelli and, 387 Tex (Bonelli), 789 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 123, 1497 Thanatos (Lovatelli, E.), 1660

I154

That Awful Mess on Via Merulana. See Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana (Gadda) That Man (Vivanti), 2011 The´aˆtre du Gymnase, 50 ‘‘The´aˆtre National Populaire,’’ 784 The´aˆtre Optique, 50 Theatrum mundi, 1079 Theatrum Sabaudiae, 1921 Thebaid (Statius), 261 ‘‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’’ (Borges), 198 Themistius, 127 Theo (Testori), 1869 Theocritus, Meli and, 1182 Theodore of Antioch, 781 Theogenius (Alberti, Leon), 8 Theogony (Hesiod), 720 Theologia (Campanella), 364 Theologia platonica de immortalitate animarum (Ficino), 720, 1281, 1518, 1567, 1938 Theology of Aristotle, 1281 Theorius Campus (De Gregori), 1784 Theory of Semiotics, A (Eco), 726 Therese of Lisieux, Saint, 1568 The´re`se Raquin (Zola), 1972 Thibaudet, Jean, 785 Thibaut of Champagne, 563 Thick description, 52 Thie´rry, Augustin, 150 Manzoni and, 1134 Thimig, Hermann, 500 This Gun for Hire (Tuttle), 828 This Quarter, 496 Thomas, Jean-Baptiste, 154 Thomism, 363, 1402 Thomson, James, 1446 Thouar, Pietro, 484 Thoughts on Beauty (Mengs), 1278 Thousand and One Nights, 247 Thovez, Enrico, 1922 Three Circles of Light (Donato), 964 Three Crosses. See Tre croci (Tozzi, F.) Three Guineas (Woolf ), 1249 Thucydides, 915, 918, 941 Thuilius, Joannes, Alciato and, 11 Thulin, Ingrid, 1988 Ti amo, Maria! (Manfridi), 1121 Ti con zero (Calvino), 1719 Ti ho sposato per allegria (Ginzburg, N.), 844 Ti prendo e ti porto via (Ammaniti), 34 Ti saluto filosofia (Malerba), 1116 Tibullus, 83 Ticket (Olmi), 1306 Tieck, Ludwig, 138, 463 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Tiepolo, Biamonte, 1959 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista Ariosto and, 92 Valeri and, 1943 Tieste (Foscolo), 763 Tignola (Benelli), 172 Tigre assenza, La (Campo, C.), 369 Tigre della Malesia, La (Salgari), 1654 Tigre e la neve, La (Benigni), 177 Tigre, Il (Risi, D.), 1585

INDEX Tigre reale (Verga, G.), 1964 Tilgher, Adriano, 172, 278, 460, 1625, 1707 Chiarelli and, 458–459 teatro grottesco and, 1848 Time of Indifference, The. See Gli indifferenti (Moravia) Timoleone (Alfieri, V.), 22 Timone (Boiardo), 265, 716 Timpanaro, Sebastiano, 1218 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, 144, 232, 617, 1059, 1064, 1568, 1753, 1872–1873. See also Literary History historiography and, 944 Tirannia paterna (Tarabotti), 1823 Tiri in porta (Paolini), 1344 Tiro al piccione (Rimanelli), 2032 Tiro, Guglielmo di, 1840 Tirreno. See Lussu, Emilio Tirsi (Castiglione), 409, 1380 Titanic (De Gregori), 1785 Titi Romani Egisippique Atheniensis amicorum historia in latinum versa (Bandello, M.), 117 Titian, 545, 2003 Aretino and, 74 Ariosto and, 92 Valeri and, 1943 Vasari and, 1954 in Venice, 1960 Titus and Gisippus (Bandello, M.), 117 Tizi ed io (Vela), 1601 Tizzani, Vincenzo, 157 Tobia e l’angelo (Tamaro, S.), 1820 Tobino, Mario, 465, 489, 1874–1875 Bilenchi and, 227 Cassola and, 403 Ottieri and, 1327 World War II and, 2031 Tobler, Alfred, 969 Toby Dammit (Fellini), 701 Tocco, Felice, Gentile and, 823 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 150 Tod in Venedig (Mann, T.), 1961 Todi, Jacopone da, 1480 Francis and, 1566 Turoldo and, 1925 Todo Modo (Sciascia), 1706 Todorov, Tzvetan, 345, 684 in Nouvelle critique, 820 Toelette, La, 979 Toesca, Pietro, 98–99 Tofano, Sergio, 788 Toffanin, Giuseppe, 951 Togliatti, Palmiro, 224, 888, 890, 891, 985, 1792 Communism and, 501 Salvemini and, 1666 Vigano` and, 1988 Vittorini and, 2005 Tognazzi, Ricky, 1120 Risi, D., and, 1584 Tognazzi, Ugo, 199, 583 Toledo, Eleonora di, 143 ‘‘Toletta de la marchesa, La’’ (Trilussa), 1914 Tolgo il disturbo (Riski, D.), 1585 Tolomei, Claudio, Firenzuola and, 730 Tolomei, Jacopo, 43 Tolomei, Meo dei, Rustio di Filippo and, 1635

Tolstoy, Leo, 295, 541, 580, 1077, 1132, 1634, 1845, 1858 Sanvitale and, 1678 Tolusso, Fulvio, 1882 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe, 47, 53, 108, 510, 1063, 1341, 1430, 1609–1610, 1876–1879, 1995 Bassani and, 141 Bufalino and, 322 Camilleri and, 354 Eco and, 661 fashion and, 696 Gattopardo, Il and, 1340 historical novels and, 939 in Palermo, 1339 Piccolo and, 1435 Sciascia and, 1706 Tomasi, Mari, 963 Tomasini, Jacopo Filippo, 698 ‘‘Tombeau per Marcella’’ (Caproni), 380 Tomeo, Javier, 936 Tomeo, Niccolo´ Leonico, Fedele and, 698 Tomizza, Fulvio, 1880–1883 in Trieste, 1911 Tomlinson, Charles, 1435 Tommaseo, Niccolo`, 150, 417, 1479, 1569, 1883–1885 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Maggi and, 1104 Percoto and, 1398 Romanticism and, 1598 in Venice, 1960 Tommaso e il fotografo cieco (Bufalino), 322 Tommassini, Vincenzo, music and, 1257 Tondelli, Pier Vittorio, 373, 1886–1887 homosexuality and, 1033 Rasy and, 1549 Tondo Doni (Buonarroti, M.), 329 Tonelli, Anna, 1481 Topo di campagna e il topo di citta` (Presepi), 51 Topolino, 788 Topos, 19, 39, 108 Toppi, Giove, 465 Torah, Calassi and, 342 Torelli, Achille, 837 Torelli, Ippolita, 117 Torino: operai e fascismo (Passerini, L.), 2027 Tormenta, La (De Roberto), 614 Tornabuoni, Lucrezia, 1520, 1887–1889 Tornatore, Giuseppe, 132, 1663, 1730, 1889–1892 Fellini and, 702 To¨rne, Bengt von, 368 Toro, Il (Mazzacurati), 1345 Torossi, Lionello, 1718 Torquato Tasso (Goldoni), 866 Torre, Andrea, 980, 1730 Torre di Arnolfo (Bigongiari), 226 Torre, Faustina Morosina della, 164 Torre, La, 1898 Torre, La (Hofmannsthal), 73 Torrentino, Lorenzo, 855 Torresani, Andrea, 1505 Torri dell’Eden, Le (Van Vogt), 1720 Torriani, Maria Antoinetta. See Marchesa Colombi Torti, Giovanni, Porta, C., and, 1487 Torto ed il diritto del non si puo` (Bartoli, D.), 134 Tortorella, Cino. See Zurlı`, Mago

I155

INDEX Tosca (Puccini), 838 Tosca dei gratti (Lagorio), 992 Toscanini, Arturo, 273 Cederna, C., and, 432 Toschi, Paolo, 1480 Tosi, Piero, 871 Tosti, Francesco Paolo, 540, 634 ‘‘Totale S. E. & O.’’ (Pagliarani), 1331 Totem (Baricco), 132 Toto`, 1208, 1270, 1400, 1701, 1892–1896, 1951 in Naples, 1269 in Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (Tornatore), 1890 Toto` cerca casa (Monicelli, M. and Vanzina), 1208 Toto` diabolicus, 1893 Toto` e i re di Roma (Monicelli, M.), 1584 Toto` e Peppino divisi a Berlino, 1894 Toto` il buono (De Sica), 623, 2042 Tourne´es, 498 Tout se tient (everthing is connected), 659 Tozzetti, Fanny Targioni, 1024 Tozzi, Federigo, 68, 295, 1896–1901 Bilenchi and, 227 Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Cassola and, 403 cinema and, 470 fantastic and, 687 Manzini and, 1130 verismo and, 1974 Tozzi, Pietro Paolo, Alciato and, 11 Tra donne sole (Pavese), 57, 1033, 1383 Tra guerra e rivoluzione (Re`paci), 1576 Tra le mura stellate (Lagorio), 992 Tra Mantova e la Sicilia nel Cinquecento (Zaggia), 855 Tra presenza e assenza: Due modelli culturali in conflitto (Barilli, R.), 101 Tra sera e note (Marin), 1150 Tractato contra li astrologi (Pico della Mirandola), 1441 Tractatus (Iacopone da Todi), 955 Tractatus de tropis loquendi (Peter the Chanter), 1703 Tracy, Antoine Destutt de, 1133 ‘‘Tradizione e invenzione’’ (Visconti, L.), 1999 Tradotta, La, 788 Traduzioni e riduzioni (Pascoli), 1359 Tragedia dell’infanzia (Savinio), 1688 Tragedia di Mayerling (Borgese, Giuseppe), 295 ‘‘Tragedia di un personaggio, La’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Tragedia di un uomo ridicolo, La (Bertolucci, B.), 199 Tragedia milanese, Una (Ottieri), 1327 Tragedia mista, 857 Tragedie (Alfieri, V.), 19 Tragedie di Pier Cornelio tradotte in versi italiani (Baretti), 129 Tragedie: Giocasta, Medea, Didone, Ifigenia, Thieste, hecuba e Marianna (Dolce), 639 Trage´die larmoyante Merope (Maffei, S.), 1101 Tragedies (of Alessandro Manzoni), 1140–1142 Tragedy, Alfieri, V., and, 21 Tragico quotidiano (Papini), 687 Tragico vero, 21 ‘‘Trago¨die des letzen Germanen in Italien, Die’’ (Campana), 359, 362 Traina, Alfonso, 1361 Traite´ sur la Tole´rance (Voltaire), 1706 Trakl, Georg, 827 ‘‘Tra’l bue e l’asino e le pecorelle’’ (Sacchetti, F.), 1648

I156

Tramonto (Simoni), 1760 ‘‘Tramonto della luna, Il’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Tranfaglia, Nicola, 1726 Tranquilli, Secondino. See Silone, Ignazio Trans-avant-garde, 98 ‘‘Transfigurazione’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Transito con catene (Spaziani), 1787 Translatio (transformation), 462, 1901 Translatio imperii (translation of empire), 257 Translation, 1901–1904 Transmissione interrota (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Transparenze (Praga, E.), 1490 Trapassi, Pietro. See Metastasio, Pietro ‘‘Trapezio, Il’’ (Boito, A.), 272 Trapianti (Meneghello), 1185 Trappola colorata, La (Folgore), 631 Traslatori (translators), 407 Trasparenze (Praga), 1853 Trasumanar e organizzar (Pasolini), 1369 Tratato del amor de Dios (Leone Ebreo), 1011 Tratato sulle monete fiorentine (Borghini, V.), 301 Trattatello in laude di Dante (Boccaccio), 242 Trattatello sopra l’origine di Firenze (Gelli), 814 Trattati d’amore (treatises on love), 1011, 1282, 1439 Trattati dell’oreficeria e della scultura (Cellini), 439 Trattato circa il reggimento e il governo della citta` di Firenze (Savonarola), 1691 Trattato d’amore (treatise on love), 1919 Trattato de redimine rectoris (Minorita), 1562 ‘‘Trattato de’ ridicoli’’ (Tesauro), 933 Trattato degli uffici communi (Della Casa), 601 Trattato del governo della famiglia (Pandolfini, A.), 104 Trattato della chiesa e vescovi fiorentini (Borghini, V.), 301 ‘‘Trattato della Discrezione’’ (Catherine of Siena), 415 ‘‘Trattato della Divina Provvidenza’’ (Catherine of Siena), 415 Trattato della lingua (Borghini, V.), 301 Trattato della peste et pestifero contagio di Torino (Fiocchetto), 1921 Trattato della pittura (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1008 Trattato dell’arte della pittura, scoltura et architettura (Lomazzo), 11001 Trattato delle materie beneficiarie (Sarpi), 1684 Trattato delle tre lingue, greca latina e toscana (Della Casa), 601 Trattato dell’Interdetto dela santita` da papa Paolo V (Sarpi), 1683 ‘‘Trattato dell’Obbedienza’’ (Catherine of Siena), 415 ‘‘Trattato dell’Orazione’’ (Catherine of Siena), 415 Trattato di architettura (Filarete), 70 Trattato di architettura (Serlio), 480, 11001 Trattato di architettura civile e militare (Martini, Francesco), 11001 Trattato di Giovanni Marco Villa sopra l’Origine de’ Tempii de’ Giudei, de’ Cristiani e dei Gentil, e la infelice morte di quelli che gli hanno saccheggiati, spogliati e ruinati (Marcouville), 298–299 Trattato di semiotica generale (Eco), 658 Trattenemiento de’ Peccerille, Lo (entertainment for the little ones), 137 Trauerspiel (Gozzano), 876 Trauffant, Franc¸ois, Fellini and, 702 Traumdeutung, Die (Freud), 1509 Travagliuse ammure de Ciullo e Perna (Cortese), 816 Travel Literature, 1904–1909 Travels through Sweden, Finland and Lapland (Acerbi), 1908 ‘‘Traversando la maremma toscana’’ (Carducci), 394

INDEX Traversari, Ambrogio, 148 humanism and, 952 Traversata dell’oasi (Spaziani), 1788 Traversi, Antona censorship of, 445 Praga, M., and, 1492 Traverso, Leone, 827 Campo, C., and, 368 Traviata, La (Verdi), 1794, 1963, 2008 Arbasino and, 63 Traviata, La (Zeffirelli), 2046 Traviata Norma, ovvero: vaffanculo. Ebbene si! (Mieli, M.), 1198 Tre casi sospetti (Bernari), 183, 184 ‘‘Tre cedri, I’’ (Basile), 463 ‘‘Tre cetre, Le’’ (Basile), 138 ‘‘Tre colpi alla porta’’ (Buzzati), 337 Tre croci (Tozzi, F.), 1896, 1900–1901 Tre del Pra’ di Sopra, I (Betti, U.), 208, 471 Tre fratelli (Rosi), 1610 Tre lai (Testori), 1870 Tre Libri di lettere (Doni), 645 Tre Marie, Le (Masino), 1168 Tre maruzze: novella trojana da non mostrarsi alle signore, Le (Imbriani), 959 Tre matrimoni, I (Gozzi, G.), 884 Tre moschettieri, I (Dumas), 162 Tre Narcisi, I (Morante), 1224 Tre operai (Bernari), 183, 1268, 1854 Tre Parche, ne la nativita` del signor Giano, primogenito del signor Cesare Fregoso e de la signora Gostanza Rangona sua consorte (Bandello, M.), 117 Tre parti de le Novelle del Bandello, Le (Bandello, M.), 118, 121 Tre passi nel delirio (Fellini), 701 Tre pecore viziose (Scarpetta), 1701 Tre racconti d’amore (Petroni), 1424 Tre sorelle (Sommi), 1781 Tre talisman, I (Gozzano), 877 Tre tiranni, I (Ricchi), 277 Tre trattati, Li (Giegher), 758 Trea noi due (Rasy), 1549 Treaty of Barcelona, 914 Treaty of Campoformio, 762, 1589 Risorgimento and, 1630 Treaty of Versailles, 1911 Trecentisti, 1519 Trecento, 1054 Trecentonovelle, Il (Bandello, M.), 122, 330 Trecentonovelle, Il (Sacchetti, F.), 1296, 1648 Tredicesima notte, La (Sgorlon), 1751 Tredici canti del Floridoro, I (Fonte, M.), 755 ‘‘Tregua, La’’ (D’Annunzio), 544 Tregua, La (Levi, P.), 108, 948, 1040, 1043–1044, 2033 Tregua, La (Rosi), 1610 Tremaio, note sull’interazione tra lingua e dialetto nelle scritture letterarie, Il (Meneghello), 1184 ‘‘Treni che vanno a Madras, I’’ (Tabucchi), 1819 Trenino della pazienza, Il (Corti), 513 ‘‘Treno ha fischiato, Il’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Treno per Helsinki, Il (Maraini), 1142 Trenta poesie famigliari di Giovanni Pascoli (Delfini), 809 Tre´sor (Latini), 552, 1003 Tretii syn (Platonov), 1610 Treves, Claudio, 278 Trevico-Torino...viaggio nel Fiat Nam (Scola), 1722

Trevisan, Lucio, 633 ‘‘Trevisan March,’’ 666 Trevisan, Vitaliano, 1993 Tribuna illustrata, La, Folgore and, 754 Tribuna, La, 430, 541, 978, 980 Cecchi, E., and, 430 decadentismo and, 579 Moravia and, 1234 Rebora and, 1555 Tribuna politica, 1858 Tribunus, 482 Triennale d’arte, 1796 Trieste, 1910–1912 Trieste e una donna (Saba), 1643 Trieste nei miei ricordi (Stu´parich), 1804, 1911 Trieste non ha tradizioni di cultura (Sla`tper), 1910 Triestinita`, 1911 Trifonov, Yurij, 1635 Triionfo di Camilla, regina dei Volsci, Il (Stampiglia), 1311 Trilogia degli scarrozzanti, La (Testori), 1869 Trilogia della villeggiatura, La (Goldoni), 866 Trilogia di Dorina, La (Rovetta), 1632 Trilogia di Zelinda e Lindoro (Goldoni), 867 Trilogia istriana (Tomizza), 1880 Trilogy of Arlequin and Camille (Goldoni), 868 Trilussa, 1912–1915, 1950 Trinciante, Il (Cervio), 758 Trinkaus, Charles, 951, 1945 Trintignant, Jean Louis, 198 Trinuzia (Firenzuola), 730 Trioinfo della morte (D’Annunzio), 540 ‘‘Trionfi’’ (triuimphs), 479 Trionfi, I (Testori), 1206, 1869 Trionfo, Aldo, 1795 Trionfo d’Amore (Petrarch), 1752 Trionfo della morte, Il (D’Annunzio), 826, 1254, 1257 ‘‘Trionfo della spazzatura, Il’’ (Montale), 1213 Trionfo della vita (D’Annunzio), 545 Trionfo dell’amore, Il (Giacosa), 837 Trionfo di Diana, Il (Cimarosa), 1339 Trismegistus, Hermes, 719, 720 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 668, 730, 1832, 1840 Metastasio and, 1189 Trissino, Gian Giorgio, 1915–1917 Tristam Shandy (Sterne), 1034, 1460 Tristan and Isolde, 272 Tristano corsiniano, 667 Tristano muore: Una vita (Tabucchi), 1816 Tristano Panciatichiano, 667 Tristano Riccardiano, 667 Triste presentimento (Induno), 1592 Tristes tropiques (Le´vi-Strauss), 52 Tristi amori (Giacosa), 837, 1922 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 1827 Trittico dell’obbedienza (Frabotta), 772 Triumphi (Petrarch), 1409, 1418–1419, 1420, 1566 Triumphs. See Trionfi, I (Testori) Triumphus Cupidinis (Petrarch), 1418 Triumphus Eternitatis (Petrarch), 1409, 1418 Triumphus Mortis (Petrarch), 1418 Triumphus Pudicitiae (Petrarch), 1418 Triumphus Temporis (Petrarch), 1418 Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic), 952 Trnka´, Jiri, 50

I157

INDEX Trobar clus, 783 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 253 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 253 Trois contes (Flaubert), 1593 Troisi, Massimo, 177 in Naples, 1269 Trombatore, Gaetano, 909 Tromboncino, Bartolomeo, 92, 806 music and, 1255 Trono di legno, Il (Sgorlon), 1750 Troppo-Donare (Dante), 728 Trotsky, Leon, 1084 Trovador, El (Gutie´rrez), 935 Trovarsi (Pirandello), 1453 Trovatore, Il ( Viviani, R.), 2013 Trovatore, Il (Verdi), 935, 1261 Troya, Carlo, D’Azeglio, M., and, 573 Troyes, Chre´tien de, 783 Truce, The. See Tregua, La (Levi, P.) Trucioli (Sbarbaro), 1695 True History (Lucian), 87 Truth, 15 Tu (you), 345 ‘‘Tu che di Pietro il glorioso manto’’ (Ga`mbara), 807 ‘‘Tu m’hai sı` piena di dolor la mente’’ (Cavalcanti, G.), 642 Tu mi turbi (Benigni), 177 Tu, Mio (De Luca, E.), 609 ‘‘Tu ridi’’ (Pirandello), 1458 Tu ridi (Taviani, P. and V.), 1846 Tu sei Pietro (Merini), 1186 Tu vipera gentile (Bellonci), 161 Tuderto, Jacopo da. See Iacopone da Todi Tuffolina. See Serao, Matilde Tufo, Giovan Battista del, 1562 Tuledo ‘e notte (Viviani, R.), 2013 Tullia D’Aragona, 1918–1920. See also Petrarchism Tuppo, Francesco Del, 1171 Tura, Cosme´7, 716 Turandot (Gozzi, C.), 837, 881 Turati, Filippo, 278, 979, 1769 Turbo e il chiaro, Il (Meneghello), 1185 Turca, La (Andreini, G.), 36 Turco, Lewis, 965 Turco, Marco, 1864 Turgenev, Ivan, 1634 Turin, 1921–1923 Turne´ (Salvatores), 1663 Turner, J.M.W., 737 Turno, Il (Pirandello), 1450 Turoldo, David Maria, 1569, 1924–1926 Turra, Elisabetta Caminer, 664 in Venice, 1961–1962 Turre, Lodovico de la, 450 Turturro, John, 1043 Tuscan, 1053 Decameron (Boccaccio) and, 1054 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 1426 Tusiani, Joseph, 965 Tutor pittore, Il (Belli, G.), 154 Tutte le opere di Niccolo´ Machiavelli (Baretti), 130 Tutte le poesie (Betocchi), 204 Tutte le poesie (Montale), 1215–1217 Tutte le poesie (Penna), 1395 ‘‘Tutte storie’’ (Penna), 1396

I158

Tuttestorie, 535 Tutti i denti del mostro sono perfetti (Ammanati), 474 Tutti i trionfi, carri, mascheaate [sic] o canti carnascialeschi andati per Frenze dal tempo del magnifico Lorenzo vecchio de Medici... infino a questo anno presente 1561 (Varchi), 840–841 Tuttle, Frank, 828 Tutto casa, letto e chiesa (Fo), 1545 Tutto e` forte (Alvaro), 29 Tutto il cinema di Sergio Leone (Garofalo), 1013 Tutto il miele e` finito (Levi, C.), 1036 Tutto in questione (Luzi, M.), 1085 ‘‘Tutto mi salva il dolce salutare’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 476, 642 Tutto per bene (Pirandello), 1452 Tuttobenigni (Bertolucci, G.), 177 Tuttolibri, 218 Tv delle ragazze, 1859 Twain, Mark, 486 in Genoa, 815 Guidacci and, 919 12 registi per 12 citta` (Pontecorvo), 1474 XII scelera Friderici imperatoris (Salimbene da Parma), 1656 24 ore in uno studio cinematografico (Soldati), 471 Twice a Year, 1756 Twilight Zone, 1858 2040: la rivolta (Grasso), 1720 Typographers, 300 Tyrannicide, Alfieri, V., and, 19 Tzahut bedihuta de-qiddushin (Sommi), 1781 Tzara, Tristan, 1688

U ‘U riffanti (Martoglio), 1166 ¨ ber Kunst und Alterthum, 1134 U ¨ ber naive und sentimentalische Dichtung (Schiller), 1598 U Ubermenschlich, 691 Uberti, Farinata degli, 1991 Ubu roi (Jarry), 1248, 1848 Uccellacci e uccellini (Pasolini), 1367, 1371, 1372, 1893 Uccellagiione di starne (Medici, Lorenzo), 1177 Uccelli (Saba), 1647 Uccello, Antonino, 1481 Uccello, Paolo, 2004 Uccidi o muori (Bigiaretti), 224 Uda, Michele, 1701 UDI. See Unione Donne Italiane Uditori (hearers), 44 Ufficiali di Notte, 1031 ‘‘Ufficio Stampa,’’ 980 Ughelli, Ferdinando, 942 Ugone d’Alvernia (Barberino, A.), 667 Ugoni, Camillo, 617 Ulisse (Camerini), 352 ‘‘Ulissidi,’’ 569 Ulrico e Lidia (Grossi), 898 Ultima cena (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1007, 1009 Ultima dea (Riotta), 981 Ultima India (Petrignani), 1423 Ultima stesura (Duranti), 650 Ultime (Ungaretti), 1932 Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (Foscolo), 108, 670, 763, 766, 767–769, 816, 826, 937, 1175, 1271, 1279, 1290, 1589, 1597, 1963 Petrarch and, 1414

INDEX Ultime liriche (Betti, U.), 208 Ultimo diario (Alvaro), 29 Ultimo tango a Parigi (Bertolucci, B.), 197 Ultimo viene il corvo (Calvino), 343 Ultra` (Manfridi), 1121 Ulysses (Joyce), 658, 1807 Umanista (humanist), 94 Umanita` di Cristo (Aretino), 75 Umano (Roversi), 1629 Umber (Loi), 1071 Umbertina (Barolini), 964 Umberto D. (De Sica), 624, 1284, 1728, 2042 Umbrian, 1053 Umgang mit Manschen (Knigge), 905 Una e una notte (Flaiano), 732 Un’altra liberta` (Bassani), 139 Un’altra vita (Moravia), 1231 Un’amicizia difficile (Bigiaretti), 223 Unamuno, Miguel de, Soffici and, 1772 Un’anima persa (Arpino), 96 Un’avventura (Battisti and Rapetti), 1784 Un’avventura di Salvator Rosa (Blasetti), 237 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 48, 1393 ‘‘Uncomfortable Casanova’’ (Wilson), 399 Under the Axe of Fascism (Salvemini), 1666 Underhill, John, 317 Understanding Popular Culture (Fiske), 1481 Underworld (Delillo), 964 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 109, 785, 936, 1481, 1569, 1856, 1927–1934 Bigiaretti and, 223 Caproni and, 379 Cardarelli and, 385 Communism and, 502 Fascism and, 691 Flora and, 929 Folgore and, 753 Govoni and, 874 Hermeticism and, 930 lyric poetry and, 1089 as neo-avant-garde, 1275 Noventa and, 1301 Pasolini and, 1367, 1374 Pea and, 1390 Piccolo and, 1435, 1436 Quasimodo and, 1526 in Rome, 1607 Saba and, 1644 Sinisgalli and, 1761 Turoldo and, 1924 utopia and, 1940 Valeri and, 1943 World War I and, 2030 World War II and, 2032 Zanzotto and, 2037 Unguentarius, 1069 Unheimliche, 684 Un’idea dell’India (Moravia), 1232 Un’illusione platonica e altri saggi (Luzi, M.), 1084 Unione Cinematografica Italiana, 470 Unione Donne Italiane (UDI), 705 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Boccioni), 793 Un’irata sensazione di peggioramento (Ottieri), 1327 Unita`, 812 Unita` socialista, Silone and, 1756

United States, Bianchini and, 217 Unius libri, 362 Univers concentrationnaire, 948 Universita` Popolare, 1910 Universities, 1934–1937 University of Bologna, 1935 University of Padua, 1936 University of Turin, 1936 Universo e dintorni, 1719 Unmanita` del Figliuolo di Dio (Folengo), 749 Uno, nessuno e centomila (Pirandello), 1450 Un’ora della mia giovinezza (Aleardi), 13 ‘‘Unreported inbound Palermo’’ (Del Giudice), 599 Unsee, The (Balestrini), 115 Uocchie de suonno (Di Giacomo), 636 Uomini contro (Rosi), 1208, 1609, 2029 Uomini del marmo (Pontecorvo), 1474 Uomini e cose della vecchia ItaliaI (Croce, B.), 1560 Uomini e libri, Lagorio and, 992 Uomini e lupi (De Santis), 619 Uomini e no (Vittorini), 1205, 1285, 1579, 2006, 2009–2010, 2032 Uomini e topi (Pavese), 2010 Uomini maledetti (Tessa), 1867 Uomini novelli (new men), 392 Uomo a meta`, Un (Seta), 32 Uomo da bruciare, Un (Taviani, P. and V.), 1845 Uomo di Praga, Il (Sgorlon), 1751 Uomo e donna (Betti, U.), 208 Uomo e galantuomo (De Filippo, E.), 584 Uomo finito, Un (Papini), 1346 Uomo provvisorio, Un (Jovine), 986 Uomo, Un (Fallaci), 682 Uomo, un partigiano, Un (Battaglia), 1579 Uomo universale, 441 Updike, John, 345 Urania, 1472, 1717 Urania sulcitana (Vidal, S.), 1563 Urban VI (Pope), 416 Urban VIII (Pope), 456 Bernini, G., and, 190 Campanella and, 363 Ur-Malo (Meneghello), 1184 Urticio, Giovanni Alessandro, 163 Uscita d’emergenza (Santanelli), 1269 Uscita di sicurezza (Silone), 1755 Uspenskii, Boris A., 1511 Usque, Abraham, 717 Ut pictura poesis, 66, 2002 Utile dulci (useful and sweet), 262 Utilita` della memoria (Spaziani), 1787 Utopia e disincanto (Magris), 1109 Utopia, Sarfatti and, 1681 Utopian Literature, 1938–1940

V Va’ dove ti porta il cuore (Tamaro, S.), 473, 1819, 1912 Va e non torna (Kubati), 1201 ‘‘Va in mercato Giorgin, tien qui un Grosso’’ (Burchiello, Il), 331 Vacanza, La (Maraini), 473, 1142 Vacca, Robert, 1719 Vaccari, Franco, 1435 Vaccaria, La (Ruzzante), 1637 Vaccaro, Antonio, 1986

I159

INDEX Vaccaro, Lorenzo, 1268 Vacche, Angela Dalle, 198 Vachtangov, Evgenij, 499 Vade mecum, 1671 Vae victis! (Vivanti), 2011 Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa (Visconti, L.), 1996 Vai pure (Lonzi), 705 Vaiasseide, La (Cortese), 137, 1562 Vailati, Giovanni, 1428 Valadier, Giuseppe, 2003 Valde´s, Juan, 328, 934 ‘‘Valdesi nelle Valli, I’’ (Jahier), 973 Valduga, Patrizia, 1941–1942 Valente, Vincenzo, 634 Valentina Velier (Tecchi), 1851 Valentini, Valaro, 876 Valentino (Ginzburg, N.), 843 Valenzia Candiano (Rovani), 1628 Valera, Paolo, 612, 1204 scapigliatura and, 1699 Valeri, Diego, 464, 1943–1945 Valerian, Bice, 1013 Valerio, Anthony, 964 Vale´ry, Paul, 785 in Genoa, 817 Solmi and, 1778 Vale`ry, Paul, Ojetti and, 1303 Valgimigli, Manara, 1530 Carducci and, 1936 Valigia, La, 1654 Valla, Giorgio, 819 Valla, Lorenzo, 202, 449, 1001, 1935, 1945–1947 Bracciolini, P., and, 304, 305 historiography and, 942 humanism and, 953 Landino and, 994 Petrarch and, 1405 in Rome, 1604 Vallejo, Ce´sar, 936 Valletta, Giuseppe, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Valletta, Nicola, 1478 Valli, Alida, 747 Valli, Donato, 930 ‘‘Valli nemiche al sol’’ (Tansillo), 1822 Valli, Romolo, 1796 Vallini, Carlo, 1922 crepuscolarismo and, 521 Vallisneri, Antonio, 1716 Vallorani, Nicoletta, 1720 ‘‘Valore civile’’ (De Amicis), 575 Valori plastici, 2004 Chirico, G., and, 2004 Valsolda (Fogazzaro), 744 Valussi, Pacifico, Percoto and, 1398 Valzer del diavolo (waltz with the devil), 1131 Vampata di rossore, Una (Rea), 1552 Vampe ed altri modi di festeggiare San Giuseppe in Sicilia, Le (Tornatore), 1890 Vampire indienne, La (Roberti, R.), 1013 Van Cleef, Lee, 1014 Van Kempen, Ludwig, 1406 Van Vogt, A.E., 1720 Vancini, Florestano, 122 Vandelli, Giuseppe, Comedia (Dante) and, 560

I160

Vangelisti, Paul, 965 Vangelo di Guida (Pazzi, R.), 1389 Vangelo secondo Matteo, Il (Pasolini), 1372 Vanina Vanini (Rossellini), 1620 Vanina Vanini e altre cronache italiane (Stendahl), 162 Vanini, Giulio Cesare, 1427 Vanitas vanitatum (vanity of the vain), 1083 ‘‘Vanno in Maremma’’ (Fucini), 786 Vannozzo, Francesco, 1561 Vanvitelli, Luigi, 1268 Vanzina, Stefano, 1208, 1729 Varagin, Jacopo da, 428 Varaldo, Alessandro, 631 Varano, Oliviero di, 1164 Varazze, Jacopo da, 1515, 1651 Varchi, Benedetto, 327, 396, 1935, 1948–1949, 11000 Ammannati and, 143 Borghini, V., and, 301 Caro and, 395 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Gelli and, 814 Giambullari, P., and, 840–841 Giovio and, 855 Matraini and, 1172 Salviati and, 1668 Terracina and, 1861 Tullia d’Aragona and, 1919 Varese, Claudio, in Ferrara, 718 Varianti e altra linguistica (Contini), 1063 Variazioni belliche (Rosselli, A.), 1615 Varieta` di pensieri (Tassoni), 1843 ‘‘Varieta` e digressione. Il laboratorio ariostesco nella trasmissione dei ‘generi’’’ (Mazzacurati), 932 Variety Theater, 1950–1952. See also Petito, Antonio Varium poema (Folengo), 749 Varnai, Ugo. See Meneghello, Luigi Varthema, Lodovico de, 1906 Varzi, Achille, 673 Vasari, Giorgio, 70, 144, 231, 299, 326, 1952–1956, 11001 Aretino and, 75 Borghini, V., and, 300 Cellini and, 438 in Florence, 736 Giovio and, 855 Leonardo Da Vinci and, 1008 Renaissance and, 1571 Sacchetti, F., and, 1649 Sacra rappresentazione and, 1653 Varchi and, 1948 in Venice, 1960 Vasco, Giambattista, 663 Vassalli, Sebastiano, 1540, 1956–1959 Ragazzoni and, 1539 Sciascia and, 1710 World War II and, 2033 Vatican, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Vatican Council II, 369 Vaticano Latino (Guittone d’Arezzo), 925–926 Vattimo, Gianni, 131, 1428 Vaudeville, 1848 Toto` and, 1895 Veaurardier Trial, The (Hennequin), 1701 Vecchi (Petrignani), 1423 Vecchi e i giovani, I (Pirandello), 939, 1450, 1769

INDEX Vecchi, I (De Roberto), 613 Vecchi, Omero. See Folgore, Luciano Vecchia Europa (Tessa), 1867 Vecchia guardia (Blasetti), 236 Vecchie catene (Neera), 1271 Vecchie romanze spagnuole (Berchet), 182, 1479 ‘‘Vecchietti, Il’’ (Chiabrera), 456 Vecchio cielo, nuova terra (Bompiani), 282 Vecchio con gli stivali, Il (Brancati), 309 Vecchio, Pietro Paolo Vergerio il, 1412 Vecchione, Il (Svevo), 1808 Veda, Calasso and, 342 Veder sottile (attentive sight), 330 ‘‘Vedete, donne, bella creatura’’ (Cino da Pistoia), 642 Vedi Napoli e poi muori! (Freda), 1729 Vedova allegra, La (Piovene), 1447 Vedova Fioravanti, La (Moretti, Mario), 1238 Vedova, La (Alessandrini), 1760 Vedova, La (Simoni), 1759 Vedova scaltra, La (Goldoni), 866 Vega, Garcilaso Inga de la, 1011 Vega, Giuseppe de, 1338 Vega, Lope de, 92, 122, 935 Boccaccio and, 250 Boccalini and, 263 ‘‘Veggio il mondo fallir, veggiolo stolto’’ (Terracina), 1861 Vegio, Maffeo, Valla, L., and, 1945 Veglia, 364, 366 ‘‘Veglia’’ (Ungaretti), 1932 Veglia amorosa, La (Borghini), 298 Veglia d’armi (Fabbri, Diego), 678 Veglie di Neri: paesi e figure della compagna toscana, Le (Fucini), 786 Vegri, Caterina, 1566 Vela, Claudio, 84 Romanzo rosa and, 1601 Veleno e Amore (Tobino), 1874 Velieri, I (Amelio), 31 Vella, Giuseppe, 1182 Vellutello, Alessandro, 1413 Velocipede, Il, 680, 1922 scapigliatura and, 1698 Velocita` (Marinetti), 470 Velocita` di fuga (Frabotta), 771 Venanzo, Gianni Di, De Santis and, 619 Vendemmiatore, Il (Tansillo), 1822 Vendicatore dell’ovest (Bonelli), 789 Vendita galline (Busi), 333 Venditori (Erba, E.), 673 Venditti, Antonello, 1784 Venere in pelliccia, La, 790 Venere privata (Scerbanenco), 632 Venetian, 1053 Venezia e la liberta` d’Italia (Nievo), 1291 Veneziani, Antonio, 1316 Veneziani, Marcello, 981 Vengo anch’io (Fo and Jannacci), 1783 Venice, 1560, 1959–1962 academies in, 1 Venice Biennale, 72 Venier, Domenico, 779 Stampa and, 1798 Venire a Venezia (Puppa), 1522 ‘‘Venite all’ombra deigran gigli d’oro’’ (Caro), 395, 406

Venite venite B‐52 (Veronesi, S.), 1975 Venivano dalle stelle (Pederiali), 1720 Ventadour, Bernard de, 783 Ventaglio, Il (Goldoni), 1760 Ventennio, 691 Ventennium, 444 Venti racconti (Manzini), 1131 Ventiquattro cervelli: saggi non critici (Papini), 1347 Ventisei (Sereni, V.), 1743 Ventisette mascherate piacevolissime (Croce, G.), 532 Ventitre´ della citta´ di Alba, I (Fenoglio), 711, 715, 1579 Ventitre´ gironi della citta` di Alba, I (Fenoglio), 2032 ‘‘Vento a Tindari’’ (Quasimodo), 1526, 1527, 1530 Vento alto (Levi, P.), 1043 ‘‘Vento del nord’’ (Masino), 1581 Vento nel vigneto, Il (Sgorlon), 1750 Vento notturno, Il (Betti, U.), 207 Vento sulla sabbia, Il (Cialente), 467 Vento tra le case, Il (Tecchi), 1851 Ventre de Paris, Le (Zola), 1734 Ventre del teatro, Il (Testori), 1869 Ventre di Milano, Il (Valera), 613 Ventre di Napoli, Il (Serao), 1734 Ventrone, Paola, 1653 Ventura, Luigi, 963 Venturi, Adolfo, 98, 99 Venturi, Bruno, 1316 Venturi, Lionello, 99 Venturi, Maria, 1601 Veo, Ettore, cinema and, 470 Vera storia, La (Berio), 1257 Veraldi, Attilio, 633 Veranda, La (Satta), 1686 Verasani, Grazia, 1664 Verato secondo, Il (Guarini, B.), 902, 1059 ‘‘Verba sanctae admonitionis’’ (Francis of Assisi), 774 Verdelot, Philippe, music and, 1254 Verdi, Giuseppe, 46–47, 653, 685, 826, 897, 935, 1052, 1261, 1313, 1910, 2008 Boito, A., and, 273 Ghislanzoni and, 1718 libretto and, 1051 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Manzoni and, 1136 music and, 1254 Risorgimento and, 1590 Svevo and, 1806 Verga, G., and, 1963 Verdi in Technicolor (Sanguineti), 1671 Verdini, Raoul, 51 Verdinois, Federico, 1701 Verga e il cinema (Raya), 1965 Verga e il naturalismo (Debenedetti), 1063 Verga, Giovanni, 53, 470, 483, 538, 653, 670, 744, 785, 1052, 1148, 1313, 1492, 1564, 1706, 1962–1972, 1998. See also Verismo Borgese, Giuseppe, and, 296 Camilleri and, 354 cinema and, 469 crepuscolarismo and, 522 as critic, 1062 De Roberto and, 614 Deledda and, 591 Di Giacomo and, 635 Faldella and, 1698

I161

INDEX Verga, Giovanni (cont.) Giacosa and, 837 historical novels and, 939 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Martoglio and, 1166 music and, 1257 Neera and, 1271 neorealism and, 1283 Ojetti and, 1303 Percoto and, 1399 Pratolini and, 1494 questione meridionale and, 1532 Re`paci and, 1576 in Rome, 1606 Russian influences of, 1634 Salgari and, 1654 Svevo and, 1805 teatro grottesco and, 1848 Tozzi, F., and, 1896 verismo and, 1972, 1973 Visconti, L., and, 1994 Verga, Luigi, 67 Vergani, Orio, 1624 Vergano, Aldo, 620, 1474 Vergerio, Paolo, 602, 1265, 1935 Vergine delle rocce (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1007 Vergine rose (red virgin), 1273 Vergini delle rocce, Le (D’Annunzio), 541, 691 Vergini folli, Le (Guglielminetti, A.), 910 Vergogna (Dante), 728 Verhaeren, Emile, futurism and, 791 Verifica dei poteri (Fortini), 760 Verifiche, 1434 Verino, Ugolino, 668, 1521 Verisimile, 943 Verismo, 28, 1481, 1564, 1972–1975 Capuana and, 384, 1062 Deledda and, 591 Fucini and, 786 Marchesa Colombi and, 1148 Pagliarani and, 1331 Petito and, 1400 Veristi, 308, 744 Verita` (Tozzi, F.), 1898 Verita` dell’Alligatore, La (Carlotto), 634 Verita` di uno (Valeri), 1943 Verita` discoverta dal tempo, La (Bernini, G.), 189 Verita`, la (the truth), 1691 Verita` viene a galla, La (Tobino), 1875 Verita`aa (Zavattini), 177, 2044 Veritas filia Temporis (Bernini, G.), 189 Verlaine, Paul Capuana and, 383 Penna and, 1396 Valeri and, 1943 Verna (Loi), 1071 Vernani, Guido, 551, 564 Verne, Jules, 1718 Vernice del presepe di Natale, La (Govoni), 874 Vero (truth), 1973 Vero e verso (Luzi, M.), 1085 Vero sublime, 21 Verona, Guarino da, 716 Verona illustrata (Maffei, S.), 1101

I162

Verona, Jacopo da, 1905 Verona, Niccolo` da, 783 Verona, Raffaele da, 268, 666–667 Veronelli, Luigi, 759 Veronese, Carlo Antonio, 498 Valeri and, 1943 Veronese, Guarino, 234 Bracciolini, P., and, 305 humanism and, 952 Veronesi, Luigi, 1434 Veronesi, Sandro, 1730, 1976–1977 Veronica Cybo, duchessa di San Giuliano (Guerrazzi, F.), 909 Veronica Franco (Maraini), 1143 Verra` la morte e avra` i tuoi occhi (Pavese), 1383 Verrato, Il (Guarini, B.), 902 Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 1907 Verri, Alessandro, 4, 982, 1060, 1907, 1939, 1977–1979 Beccaria and, 146 classicism and, 480 Enlightenment and, 664 neoclassicism and, 1279 Parini, G., and, 1349 in Rome, 1605 Verri, Il, 278, 985 Arbasino and, 63 Celati and, 434 Dionisotti and, 1063 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1476 Porta, A., and, 1484 Verri, Pietro, 4, 663, 784, 982, 1060, 1485, 1907, 1939, 1979–1982 Beccaria and, 146 Bettinelli and, 213 Enlightenment and, 664 Verri, A., and, 1977, 1979 Versi (Belli, G.), 154 Versi (Camerana), 1698 Versi (Giusti), 860 Versi (Monti, V.), 1218 Versi (Nievo), 1290 Versi (Zanella), 2035 Versi a Dinai (Sbarbaro), 1695 ‘‘Versi a Prosperpina’’ (Sereni, V.), 1741 Versi e memoria (Petroni), 1424 Versi e poesie (Noventa), 1301 Versi e rime (Bacchelli), 112 Versi editi ed inediti (Giusti), 860 Versi guerrieri e amorosi (Raboni), 1537 Versi inediti (Belli, G.), 154 ‘‘Versi livornesi’’ (Caproni), 380 Versi militari, I (Saba), 1645, 1647 Versi sciolti (Paradisi), 1279 Versi sciolti di tre eccellenti moderni autori (Algarotti, Frugoni, C., and Bettinelli), 27, 212–213 Versificatori (verse-makers), 407 ‘‘Versilia’’ (D’Annunzio), 544 Verso la cuna del mondo (Gozzano), 877, 1922 Verso la notte Bakonga (Gangbo), 1202 Verso le sorgenti del Cinghio (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Verso Paola (Sanvitale), 1679 Verso sciolto (free verse), 143 Verso sera (Archibugi), 67, 69 Vescovo, Piermario, 1638 Veselaja smert (Evreinov), 499 Vespertina (Negri, Ada), 1204, 1273

INDEX Vespri siciliani, I (Hayez), 1590 Vespro della Beata Vergine (Tarantino, A.), 1825 Vespro, Il (Parini), 1352 Vespucci, Amerigo, 1907 Vestire gli ignudi (Pirandello), 1493 Vestito piu´ bello, Il (Archibugi), 67 Vesuvio e pane (Bernari), 184 Vetera Humiliatorum monumenta (Tiraboschi), 1872 Vettori, Francesco, 1094 travel literature and, 1907 Vettori, Loreto, 1312 Vettori, Pier, 301, 1907 Giovio and, 855 Salviati and, 1668 Varchi and, 1948 Vetturini da nolo (Di Giacomo), 2014 Via de’ Magazzini (Pratolini), 1495 ‘‘Via dei cinquecento’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1489 Via dei Magazzini (Pratolini), 2032 Via del Campo (Andre´), 1783 Via del rifugio, La (Gozzano), 876, 910, 1088, 1922 Via Dogana, 1250 Via Mirasole, 84 Via Paolo Fabbri 43 (Guccini), 1784 Viaccia, La (Bolognini), 280 Viaggi di Russia (Algarotti), 27, 1908 Viaggi felici (Comisso), 496 Viaggi in occidente (Praz), 1498 Viaggi la more, I (Gadda), 795 Viaggi nel tempo (Cardarelli), 386 Viaggiando con passo di volpe (Maraini), 1143 Viaggiatore, Il (Bigiaretti), 224 Viaggiatore sedentario, Il (Malerba), 1116 Viaggiatori, 1907 Viaggiatori e avventurieri (D’Ancona), 1908 Viaggiatrice, La (Chiari, P.), 670 Viaggio a Parigi e Londra (Verri, P. and A.), 1908 Viaggio a Parigi, Il (Silone), 1756 Viaggio a Roma, Il (Moravia), 1232 Viaggio a Roma senza vedere il Papa, Un (Faldella), 679, 1908 Viaggio di Capitan Fracassa, Il (Scola), 1723 Viaggio di nozze (Traversi), censorship of, 445 Viaggio di un ignorante ossia ricetta per gli ipocondriaci (Rajberti), 1908 Viaggio d’inverno (Bertolucci, A.), 196 Viaggio fatto alSanto Sepolcro, Mariano di, Nanni Viaggio, Il (De Sica), 624 Viaggio, Il (Guerra), 906 Viaggio in Alemagna (Vettori, F.), 1907 Viaggio in Barberia (Bianciardi), 219 Viaggio in Cina (Cassola), 404 Viaggio in Dalmazia (Fortis, A.), 1715–1716 Viaggio in Italia (Piovene), 816, 1448 Viaggio in Italia (Rossellini, R.), 60, 1619 Viaggio in Italia 1983–1985, Un (Ceronetti), 451 Viaggio in Turchia (Alvaro), 28 Viaggio incantato, Il (Vivanti), 2012 Viaggio inutile o della politica come educazione sentimentale (Rossanda), 1613 Viaggio nel Molise (Jovine), 987 Viaggio nella valle del Po alla ricerca di cibi genuini (Soldati), 1775 Viaggio per l’Italia di Giannettino: l’Italia superiore (Collodi), 484 Viaggio sentimentale (Palazzeschi), 1333

Viaggio sentimentale di Yorick lungo la Francia e l’Italia (Sterne), 47 Viaggio terrestre e celeste di Simone Martini (Luzi, M.), 1084 Viandanza, La (Frabotta), 771 Viani, Lorenzo, 1874, 2004 Viareggio, 1067 ‘‘Viatico, Il’’ (Pascoli), 1364 Viazzi, Glauco, 1079 Vicellio, Cesare, 694 Vicende memorabili dal 1791 al 1803 (Verri, A.), 1978 Vicere´, I (De Roberto), 309, 613, 1974 ‘‘Vicino agli occhi e ai capelli sciolti’’ (Pasolini), 1581 Vicissitudine e forma (Luzi, M.), 1085 Vico, Giambattista, 100, 107, 151, 232, 294, 819, 1059, 1426, 1429, 1478, 1568, 1982–1988 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 book production and, 293 Comedia (Dante) and, 560 Croce, B., and, 530 Foscolo and, 764 historiography and, 943 Manzoni and, 1133 Metastasio and, 1190 in Naples, 1268 Pressburger and, 1499 Romanticism and, 1599 Verri, A., and, 1977 ‘‘Vicolo’’ (Quasimodo), 1530 Vicolo della Duchesca (Modignani), 1601 Victor Emmanuel II (King), 1591 Victoria d’Amore (Morando), 537 Vida es suen˜o, La (Caldero´n), 936, 1224 Vidal, Gore, 345 Vidal, Nobilomo. See Simoni, Renato Vidal, Salvatore, 1563 Vidi le muse (Sinisgalli), 1762 Vidor, King, 1775 Vidua, Carlo, 1922 Vie del riferimento, Le (Bonomi), 1428 Vie Nuove, 570 Vietti, Alessandro, 1720 Vieusseux, Giampietro, 375, 376, 737, 983, 1289 Vieux Colombier (Artaud), 1248 ‘‘Vieux Marins, Les’’ (Marinetti), 1154 View from Vesuvius, The (Moe), 1592 Vigada, Pia, 613 Vigano`, Renata, 1285, 1989–1991, 2032. See also Resistance, Literature of the Resistance and, 1579 Vigano´, Salvatore, 538 Vigevani, Alberto, 1206 Vigna di uve nere, La (De Stefani, L.), 1340 Vigna, Pier della, 1753 Vigna vecchia, La (Sinisgalli), 1762 Vignali, Antonio, 1031 Vignola, Il. See Barozzi, Jacopo Vigo, Lionardo, 1564 Vigolo, Giorgio, 1260 music and, 1257 Vilar, Jean, 784 Vile pigrizia (foul laziness), 793 Villa, Angela Ida, 272 Villa del venderdi, La (Bolognini), 281 Villa Gloria (Pascarella), 1357 Villagio incantato, Il (Pestriniero), 1720

I163

INDEX Villani, Filippo, 255, 420 historiography and, 941 Villani, Giovanni, 420, 1990–1992 Borghini, V., and, 301 in Florence, 735 Latini and, 1003 novella and, 1296 Villani, Matteo, 300 Villani, Niccolo`, 932 Villani, Peppino, 2013 Villanova, Carlo, 121 Villari, Pasquale, 232, 1659 Gentile and, 823 questione meridionale and, 1532 verismo and, 1972 Villaroel, Giuseppe, Hermeticism and, 930 Villatauri, I (Tecchi), 1851 Villavecchia, Maria. See Bellonci, Maria Villavecchia Ville charnelle, La (Marinetti), 1154 Villeggiante, La (Romano, L.), 1593 Villiers, Jean Hotman de, 1684 Villino, Il (Bigiaretti), 223 Vincent of Beauvais, 1295, 1656 Vincenzo Gemito: La vita e l’opera (Di Giacomo), 636 ‘‘Vincere i cor piu` saggi’’ (Ga`mbara), 807 Vinci, Simona, 374, 1993–1994 with Cannibali, 34, 373 Vini della Toscana, I (Redi), 1558 Vinti, I (Antonioni), 56 Violent Life, A. See Vita violenta, Una (Pasolini) Violi, Lorenzo, 1691 ‘‘Violini’’ (Montale), 1215 Violino di Cremona, Il (Marchesa Colombi), 1148 Viollier, Eugenio Torelli, 978 Maffei, C., and, 1659 Vip, mio fratello Superuomo (Bozzetto), 51 Virgil, 39, 46, 64, 81, 555, 557, 932, 1380, 1416, 1712, 1713 Algarotti and, 26 Basile and, 137 Beni and, 175 Bettinelli and, 213 Caproni and, 380 Castiglione and, 409 classicism and, 479 Dante and, 562 Fenoglio and, 712 Folengo and, 748 Gravina and, 1189 homosexuality and, 1030 Landino and, 993 Manzoni, A., and, 1136 Meli and, 1182 Metastasio and, 1193 Neoplatonism and, 1280 novella and, 1297 pastoral genre and, 1379 Petrarch and, 1404, 1415 Pontano and, 1472 Sannazaro and, 1675 Tassoni and, 1843 Vassalli and, 1958 ‘‘Virgilio’’ (Carducci), 394 Virgilio, Giovanni del, 256, 552, 1001, 1415 Virgine delle rocce (Leonardo Da Vinci), 1009

I164

Virginia (Alfieri, V.), 19, 22 Virtu`, 441 Virtu` (virtue), Machiavelli and, 1098 Virtu` di Checchina, La (Serao), 1734 Virtuosi, 3 Virzi, Paolo, 1663 Visceralita` indicibile, Una, 706 Visceralita` indicibile, Una (Melandri), 1513 Vischer, Friedrich T., 616 Visconte dimezzato, Il (Calvino), 343, 347 Visconti, Ermes, 538, 784, 1061 Romanticism and, 1597 Visconti, Filippo Maria, 231, 518 censorship of, 445, 446 Visconti, Gian Galeazzo, 1649 Visconti, Giuseppe, Enlightenment and, 664 Visconti, Luchino, 57–58, 472, 620, 724, 725, 871, 1284, 1474, 1498, 1728, 1729, 1794, 1994–2000, 2006. See also Neorealism D’Amico, Suso, and, 1730 De Santis and, 619 Duse and, 654 neorealism and, 622, 1283 Pratolini and, 1496 questione meridionale and, 1533 Testori and, 1870 in Venice, 1961 Zavattini and, 2042 Zeffirelli and, 2045 Visconti, Pietro Ercole, 1479 Visentini, Antonio Tommaso, 498 Visibilita` (visibility), 599 Visioni di case che crollano (Celati), 435 ‘‘Visita’’ (Pirandello), 1459 ‘‘Visita in fabbrica, Una’’ (Sereni, V.), 1745 Visita, La (Cassola), 403, 2031 Visitatio Sepulchri, 1069 Visitatrice, La (Tomizza), 1881 Vissi d’arte (Capriolo), 378 Visual Arts, Literature and, 2000–2005. See also Art Criticism Vita (Cellini), 107, 130, 437, 441–443 Vita (Soffici), 1771 Vita agra, La (Bianciardi), 219, 502 Vita al vento, La (De Maria), 1340 Vita artistica, 1074 ‘‘Vita Beati Alexi’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 Vita Caroli Magni (Acciaiuoli), 1521 Vita che ti diedi, La (Pirandello), 653 Vita Ciceronis (Bruni, L.), 313 Vita da Cion (Benigni), 176 Vita dei campi (Verga, G.), 1964, 1969, 1972, 1974 Vita del Beato Giovanni Colombini (Belcari), 148, 231 Vita del Brunellesco (Manetti, A.), 231 Vita del cardinale Bellarmino (Bartoli, D.), 231 Vita del cavaliere Gio. Lorenzo Bernino (Baldinucci), 188–189 ‘‘Vita del mie amor non e´ ‘l cor mio’’ (Buonarroti, M.), 328 Vita di Alberto Pisani (Dossi), 647–648, 1563, 1698 Vita di Antonio Giacomini (Nardi, J.), 231 Vita di Antonio Veneziano (Sciascia), 1338 Vita di Carlo Goldoni con notizie della commedia italiana prima di lui (Carrer), 397 Vita di Carlo Maria Maggi (Muratori), 1251 Vita di Castruccio Castracani, La (Machiavelli), 231, 1094 Vita di Catherina vergine (Aretino), 75 ‘‘Vita di Cimabue’’ (Vasari), 1953

INDEX Vita di Cola di Rienzo, 230 Vita di Dante (Balbo, C.), 232, 417 Vita di Dante (Bruni, L.), 313 Vita di Erostrato, La (Verri, A.), 1978 Vita di Francesco Ferrucci (Sassetti), 231 Vita di Frate Ginepro, 230 Vita di Gabriele d’Annunzio (Chiara), 233 Vita di Guidubaldo da Montefeltro, duca d’Urbino (Baldi, B.), 231 Vita di Ludovico Ariosto (Ariosto, L.), 94 Vita di Maria vengine (Aretino), 75 Vita di Michelagnolo (Condivi), 231 Vita di Michelangeo nella vita del suo tempo (Papini), 232 Vita di Mussolini (Presepi), 51 Vita di Petrarca (Bruni, L.), 313 Vita di San Tomaso signor d’Aquino (Aretino), 75, 231 Vita di santo Giovanni Battista (Tornabuoni), 1888 Vita di Tubia (Tornabuoni), 1888 Vita di Ugo Foscolo (Artusi), 103 Vita di un pittore, La (Severini), 2004 Vita di Vittoria Colonna (Albrizzi, I.), 1658 Vita difficile, Una (Risi, D.), 1584 Vita d’un uomo: Saggi e interventi (Ungaretti), 109, 1928 Vita e avventure di Riccardo Joanna (Serao), 1734 Vita e` bella, La (Benigni), 176, 177, 948 Cerami and, 448 Vita e´ bella, La (Benigni), 1663 Vita e il libro, La (Borgese, Giuseppe), 296 Vita e morte di Adria e i suoi figli (Bontempelli), 287 Vita eterna, La (Camon), 357 Vita in Egitto (Pea), 1391 Vita in versi (Giudici, G.), 858 Vita intensa, La (Bontempelli), 286 Vita interiore dell’Alfieri (Binni), 20 Vita interiore, La (Moravia), 1231 Vita intima (Prezzolini), 1501 Vita intima, Neera and, 1272 Vita letteraria, La (Faldella), 1698 Vita militare, La (De Amicis), 574 Vita non e` sogno, La (Quasimodo), 1528 Vita Nova, 278 Vita Nova (Dante), 106, 166, 254, 565–567, 640, 1087, 1499, 1566, 1903 Campana and, 362 Cavalcanti, G., and, 419 Guinizelli and, 923 Medici, Lorenzo, and, 1180 Petrarch and, 1403 Pierro and, 1444 Vita Nuova, 737 Pascoli and, 1365 Vita operosa, La (Bontempelli), 286 ‘‘Vita rustica, La’’ (Parini, G.), 1350 Vita sanctissimi patris Petri Damiani heremite et demum episcopi hostiensis ac romane ecclesie cardinalis (Boccaccio), 243, 257 Vita scritta da esso (Alfieri, V.), 20, 108, 1563, 1908, 1922 Vita scritta da lui medesimo (Chiabrera), 457 Vita scritta da se` medesimo (Vico), 107, 1982–1983 Vita secunda (Celano), 230 Vita Socratis et Senecae (Manetti, G.), 1119 ‘‘Vita sognata, La’’ (Pozzi, A.), 1488 Vita solitaria, De (Cereta), 449 ‘‘Vita solitaria, La’’ (Leopardi), 1024 Vita standard di un venditore provvisorio di collant (Busi), 333 ‘‘Vita trionfante’’ (Prezzolini), 1502

Vita, Una (Svevo), 1805–1808, 1812–1813, 1910 Vita violenta, Una (Pasolini), 472, 1285, 1371, 1376–1377, 1607 Vitae parallelae (Plutarch), 21 Vite (Vasari), 299, 300, 1008, 11001 Vite brevi di idioti (Cavazzoni), 428 Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Baglione), 231 Vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti (Passeri), 2002 Vite de’ piu´ eccellenti architetti, pittori e scultori italiani da Cimabue insino a’ tempi nostri (Vasari), 70, 144, 231, 326, 1571, 1653, 1952 Vite degli eccelenti Italiani (Lomonaco), 232 Vite dei Pittori (Vasari), 1649 Vite dei pittori antichi (Dati), 231 Vite dei piu` celebri architetti d’ogni nazione e d’ogni tempo (Milizia), 232 Vite dei santi padri (Cavalca), 230, 1567 Vite delle donne illustri della scrittura sacra (Garzoni), 144 ‘‘Vite di Andrea dal Castagno e Domenico Viniziano’’ (Vasari), 1953 Vite di avventure, di fede e di passione (Croce, B.), 161 Vite di uomini illustri (Giovio), 231 Vite di uomini illustri del XV secolo (Bisticci), 231 Vite di uomini non illustri (Pontiggia, Giuseppe), 1477 Vite in sospreso (Turco, M.), 1864 Vite senza fine (Franco, E.), 817 Vite strozzate (Tognazzi, R.), 1120 Vitelli, Franco, 1725 Vitelloni, I (Fellini), 700 Viterbo, Annio da, 300 Vitruvius, 8, 1380, 11000, 2003 classicism and, 479 Vittelloni, I (Fellini), 2021 Vitti, Monica, 57, 473, 1143 Monicelli, M., and, 1209 Vittoria dell’uomo, La (D’Annunzio), 545 Vittorini, Elio, 48, 53, 508, 582, 784, 936, 985, 1067, 1428, 1854, 1856, 1902, 2005–2011, 2032 Arpino and, 95 Bonaviri and, 284 Calvino and, 345 censorship of, 445 comics and, 789 Communism and, 502 D’Arrigo and, 570 Fascism and, 693 Jahier and, 974 Leonetti and, 1016 Manzini and, 1130 Mastronardi and, 1169 in Milan, 1205 neorealism and, 1285 Pavese and, 1382 Pontiggia, Giuseppe, and, 1476 Resistance and, 1578, 1579 Romano, L., and, 1593 Testori and, 1868 World War II and, 2032 Zavattini and, 2042 Vittorioso, Il, 788–789 Vitullo, Juliann, 666 Vituperium (invective), 44, 330, 923 Viva Caporetto! (Malaparte), 1111 Viva l’Italia (Rossellini), 1620 Vivaldi, Antonio, 92, 1191 libretto and, 1050

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INDEX Vivanti, Annie, 2011–2013 cinema and, 470 Vives, Juan Luis, 953 Vivı` (Masino), 1168 Vivi e i morti, I (Borgese, Giuseppe), 295 Viviani, Raffaele, 584, 1401, 1727, 1894, 1950, 2013–2016 Bracco and, 307 De Filippo and, 585 Moscato and, 1247 in Naples, 1269 Scarpetta and, 1701 Viviani, Vincenzo, 231 Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Vizio di forma (Levi, P.), 686, 1040 Vocabolario degli Academici della Crusca, 736–737, 1129, 1977 Redi and, 1557 Salviati and, 1669 Tuscan and, 1054 Vocabolario di alcune voci aretine (Redi), 1557 Vocativo (Zanzotto), 2037 Vocazione di Vittorio Alfieri (Debenedetti), 20 ‘‘Vocazioni indisinte’’ (Banti), 124 Voce che e` in lei. Antologia della narrativa femminile italiana tra ‘800 e ‘902, La (Morandini), 1222 Voce dal futuro: storia di fantasia e computer, Una (Pestriniero), 1720 Voce dei padroni, La (Cederna, C.), 432 Voce del corvo: Uno vita 1942–2003, La (Leonetti), 1017 Voce della luna, La (Fellini), 177, 428, 702 Voce di Dio, La (Moretti, Mario), 1238 Voce donna (Bianchini), 217 Voce, La, 113, 359, 487, 737, 784, 1062, 1694, 1911, 2004 Belli, G., and, 156 Boine and, 269 Campo, C., and, 369 Cardarelli and, 387 Cecchi, E., and, 430 Folgore and, 754 futurism and, 793 Govoni and, 875 Gramsci and, 887 Jahier and, 973 Manzini and, 1130 Marin and, 1150 Papini and, 1346 Rebora and, 1554 Saba and, 1643, 1645 Sarfatti and, 1681 Serra, R., and, 1746 Sla`tper and, 1910 Soffici and, 1771 Stu´parich and, 1803 Tozzi, F., and, 1898 World War I and, 2029 Voce Repubblicana, La, Flaiano and, 733 Voci (Maraini), 1142 as film, 1143 Voci dal mio passato (Liala), 1045 Voci dal Nord Est: Taccunino Americano (Corti), 514 Voci della sera, Le (Ginzburg, N.), 843, 846–847 Voci di dentro, Le (De Filippo, E.), 586 Voci di giovinezza (Guglielminetti, A.), 910 Vocianesimo, 1765 Voersio, Francesco, 1921

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Vogliamo tutto (Balestrini), 503 ‘‘Vogliendo contentarmi di composte’’ (Rustico di Filippo), 1635 ‘‘Voglio scrivere in verso, in prosa, in tragico, in comico, in sublime, in burlesco, in inchiostro bleu e in inchiostro nero’’ (Nievo), 1291 Voglio tradire mio marit o (Camerini), 351 Vogue, La, 1154 ‘‘Voi chi’ntendendo il terzo ciel movete’’ (Dante), 562 Voices in the Evening. See Voci della sera, Le (Ginzburg, N.) Volare (Modugno), 1782 Volare (Nel blu dipinto di blu), 1858 Volatili del Beato Angelico, I (Tabucchi), 1816 Volere volare (Nichetti), 51 Volevo diventare bianca (Chohra), 1200 Volgare, 148, 1561 Borghini, R., and, 298 Volgari scelti, 289 Volgarizzamenti, 265, 266, 720 Volkonskij, Zinaida, 156, 1633–1634 Volo dal nido, Un (Rovetta), 1632 Volonte´, Gian Maria, 1014, 1038, 1534, 1708, 1864 Volpe e lecamelie, La (Silone), 1756 Volpe, Galvano Della, 101, 725, 1429 Volpe, Gioacchino, 945, 980 Rebora and, 1556 Volpe, Nicola, 1339 Volpedo, Giuseppe Pelizza da, 1481 Volponi, Paolo, 279, 447, 502, 1923, 2016–2020 Bigiaretti and, 223 in Genoa, 817 Ottieri and, 1327 utopia and, 1939 Vittorini and, 2007 Volt. See Ciotti, Vincenzo Fani Volta, Alessandro, 1853 Volta Convention, 500 Volta per sempre, Una (Fortini), 760 Voltaire, 19, 277, 819, 1051, 1568 Alfieri, V., and, 23 Algarotti and, 27 Baretti and, 129, 943 Belli, G., and, 155 Bettinelli and, 213 Boccaccio and, 250 Cesarotti and, 454 Gozzi, C., and, 107 Gozzi, G., and, 884 Gravina, G., and, 894 Meli and, 1182 Monti, V., and, 1219 Nievo and, 1290 Parini, G., and, 1349 Sciascia and, 1707 utopia and, 1940 Verri, A., and, 1977 Verri, P., and, 1979 Volterra, Gabriele da, 415 Volti dell’amore, I (Guglielminetti, A.), 911 Volto Santo, Il (Pea), 1391 Volum I (Andre´), 1783 ‘‘Volvol te levi, vecchia rabbiosa’’ (Guinizzelli), 923 Vorelsungen u¨ber dramatische Literatur (Schlegel), 1597, 1598 Vorgagine, Jacobus de, 1295 Vortice (Oriani, A.), 1320

INDEX Votazione femminile (Serao), 1734–1735 Voyage clandestin, Le (Ruiz, Raoul), 1247 Voyage d’Italie (Metastasio), 1189 Voyages (Hakluyt), 1907 ‘‘Voyelles’’ (Rimbaud), 1827 Voznesenskaya, Julia, 250 Voznesenskij, Andrej, 1634 Vries, Rachel Guido de, 964 Vu’ cumpra, 1199 ‘‘Vulgare de elymosinis’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 ‘‘Vulgare de passione Sancti Job’’ (Bonvesin da la Riva), 290 Vulgata (vulgate), 301 Vuoto d’amore (Merini), 1187 Vuoto e le forme, Il (Guidacci), 919

W Wace, Robert, 783 Wachtel, Chuck, 964 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 1851 Wackernagel, Jacob, 969 Wadding, Luke, 773 Wagner, Richard, 230, 541, 826, 1254 Bracco and, 306 Cola di Rienzo and, 482 Fogazzaro and, 744 Gozzi, C., and, 882 Piccolo and, 1435 Wait until Spring, Bandini (Fante), 963 Waldo, Octavio, 964 Walesko, Emilio, 1718 Wallach, Eli, 1014 Walser, Robert, 971 War and Peace (Tolstoy), 1077, 1132, 1634 War and Peace (Vidor), 1775 Warburg, Aby, 100 Waste Land, The (Eliot, T.S.), 1332, 1497 Waters, I.A., 250 Watteau, Antoine, 500 Waves, The (Woolf ), 1786 Way of the Cross, 1825 Weaver, John, 538 Weaver, William, 346 Webster, John, 122 Wedgwood, Thomas, 1432 Week-end (Porta, A.), 1483 Weekend post-moderno. Cronache dagli anni ottanta, Un (Tondelli), 1886 Weil, Simone, 368, 1568 Campo, C., and, 370 Ottieri and, 1327 Silone and, 1756 Weill, Kurt, 438 Weininger, Otto, 911, 1910 Michelstaedter and, 1195 Well of Loneliness, The (Hall), 1032 Welles, Orson, 168, 1372 Wells, H.G., 1718 Weltanschauug, 401 ‘‘Weltgeschichtlich’’ (Fortini), 761 Wenders, Wim, 1121 Werther (Goethe), 1846 Wertmu¨ller, Lina, 701, 2021–2024 Fellini and, 702

West and Soda (Bozzetto), 51 West, Rebecca, 345 What a Cartoon! (Bozzetto), 51 What Is Art? (Tolstoy), 580 What Is Literature? (Hernadi), 820 Where I Come From: New and Selected Poems (Mazziotti), 965 White Noise (Delillo), 964 Whitman, Walt, 48, 362 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 Pavese and, 1381, 1388 Who Is Reading?, 1775 Why Change Your Wife (DeMille), 351 Wieland, Christoph Martin, 826 Wiesel, Elie, 948 Wilbur, Richard, Tarozzi and, 1829 Wilde, Oscar, 47 Buzzati and, 687 Wilder, Billy, 828 Wilder, Thornton, 1793 Wildt, Adolfo, 2003 Wilkins, E.H., 1414 Willaert, Adriano, 646 William II (Emperor), 359–360 Williams, Tennessee, 1794, 1994–1995, 2045 Williams, William Carlos Belli, G., and, 156 Campo, C., and, 369 Wilson, Edmund, 399 Winkelmann, Johann Joachim, 480, 1278, 1605 Winterlude (Dylan), 1784 ‘‘Wir mu¨ssen’’ (Jahier), 973 Wirrwarr (Sanguineti), 1670 With Tapers Quenched (Pound), 1961 Wolf, Christa, 827 Wolfe, Tom, 681 Wo¨lfflin, Heinrich, 1073 Woman, A. See Donna, Una (Aleramo) Woman at War. See Donna in Guerra (Maraini) Woman in the Wind (Puglia), 212 Women Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65, 66 Aleardi and, 13–14 Belgioioso and, 151 Cereta and, 449 in comedy, 498 Council of Trent and, 445 donna, Una and, 18 Fonte, M., and, 755 Frabotta and, 770–771 prostitution and, 777 Women on War, 965 Women’s Decameron, The (Voznesenskaya), 150 Women’s emancipation movement, Aleramo and, 15 Women’s History, 2024–2028. See also Feminist Theory and Criticism Women’s rights, donna, Una and, 18 Woobinda e altre storie senza lieto fine (Nove), 374 Woodhouse, J.R., 343 Woods, Michael, 1015 Woolf, Virginia, 47, 123, 971, 1249, 1897 Banti and, 124 Bellonci and, 162 Gadda and, 795 Manzini and, 1130

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INDEX Woolf, Virginia (cont.) Ortese and, 1323 Petrignani and, 1423 Rosselli, A., and, 1617 Spaziani and, 1786 Svevo and, 1806 Wordsworth, William, 394 Works and Days (Hesiod), 283 World of Arlequin, The (Nicoll), 498 World War I. See Literature of World War I World War II. See Literature of World War II Wort-ton-drama (poetry-music-drama), 545 Woyzeck (Bu¨chner), 1796 Writing, Berto and, 190–193 Writings in the Vernacular Language. See Prose della volgar lingua (Bembo, P.) Wyatt, Thomas, 107, 1731 Petrarch and, 1413 Wyler, William, 1730

X Xandra (Landino), 993 Xenia I (Montale), 1216 Xenia II (Montale), 1216 Xenophon, 265 Bruni, L., and, 312

Y Yambo. See Novelli, Enrico Yarro. See Piccini, Giulio Yates, Francis, 366 Yeats, W.B., 539 Piccolo and, 1435 ‘‘Yellow Kid,’’ 787 Yes & No (Bozzetto), 51 Yojimbo (Kurosawa), 1014 Young cannibals. See Cannibali Young, Edward, 1716 Yourcenar, Marguerite, Petrignani and, 1423 Ysopets (France), 201

Z Za la Mort (Zavattini), 2042 Zabarella, Francesco, 1412 Zabriskie Point (Antonioni), 58, 473 Guerra and, 906 Zaccarello, Michelangelo, 331 Giovanni, D., and, 330 Zacconi, Ermete, 1391 Bracco and, 307 Don Pietro Caruso and, 306 Saul (Alfieri, V.) and, 25 Zaggia, Massimo, 855 Zaira (Gozzi, G.), 884 Zajcev, Boris, 1634 Zambon, Francesco, 290, 666 Zambonelli, 50 Zampa, Luigi, 733, 1728 Bolognini and, 280 Zampieri, Domenico, 2002 Zampogna verde, La (Tozzi), 1898

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Zampogne (Pirandello), 1450 Zamponi, Falasca, 1479 Zancan, Marina, 1579 Zandonai, Riccardo, 541 music and, 1257 Zanella, Giacomo, 202, 826, 2035–2037 Pascoli and, 1361 Pompilj and, 5 Zanetti, Anton Maria, 2002 Zang Tumb Tumb (Marinetti), 1155 Zangrandi, Giovanna, 1579 Zanitonella (Folengo), 748 Zannoni, Attanasio, 498 Zantedeschi, Francesco, 1432 Zanzotto, Andrea, 465, 472, 674, 1089, 1408, 2037–2041 as neo-avant-garde, 1275 Turoldo and, 1924 Valduga and, 1941 Zappi, Faustina Maratti, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 66 Zappi, Giambattista Felice, Accademia dell’Arcadia and, 65 Zatti, Sergio, 85, 87 Zavattini, Cesare, 51, 56, 196, 237, 471, 733, 788, 1284, 1728, 2042–2045. See also De Sica, Vittorio; Neorealism Benigni and, 177 Bernari and, 183 Bertolucci, A., and, 195 De Santis and, 619 De Sica and, 622, 625, 627 neorealism and, 1283 Scola and, 1722 Soldati and, 1775 Vistoni, L., and, 1995 Zecchi, Pietro, 449 Zecchino d’oro, 1857 Zeffirelli, Franco, 776, 2045–2047 Vistoni, L., and, 1995 Zeim re de’ geni (Gozzi, C.), 881 Zena (Maraini), 1143 Zena, Remigio, 580, 686 in Genoa, 816 verismo and, 1971–1972 Zeno, Apolstolo, 232, 784, 883, 935 classicism and, 480 libretto and, 1050 music and, 1256 Stampa and, 1799 Zeno, Massimo. See Torossi, Lionello Zeri, Federico, 99 Zero (Porta, A.), 1484 Zero maggio a Palermo (Abbate), 1340 Zetzner, Lazarus, Alciato and, 11 Zevi, Bruno, 101 Zibaldone, 1218, 1256, 1853, 1911 Zibaldone (Belli, G.), 155 Zibaldone (Leopardi), 1479 Zibaldone di pensieri (Leopardi), 1019, 1020, 1026, 1028–1029 Zibaldone laurenziano (Boccaccio), 255, 257 Zibaldone magliabechiano (Boccaccio), 255, 256 Zibaldoni (Boccaccio), 243 Zibillo e l’orso, 51 Zigliara, Tommaso Maria, 1427 Zimmerman, T.C. Price, 855 Zingaresca (Vivanti), 2011 Zingaretti, Luca, 355, 633

INDEX Zingari (Viviani, R.), 2014 Zobeide (Gozzi, C.), 881 Zocaro, Ettore, 1894 ‘‘Zola e L’Assommoir’’ (De Sanctis), 1972 Zola, E´mile, 162, 383, 635, 652, 785, 1734 Capuana and, 382 De Roberto and, 613 Lovatelli, Ersilia Caetani, 1660 naturalism of, 1972 Negri, Ada, and, 1273 in Palermo, 1339 Porta, C., and, 1486 Praga, M., and, 1493 Zolla, Ele´mire, 369 Zooepic, 202

Zoom—libri e visioni in rete, 115 Zoroaster, 719 Zorzi, Giacomo Ca’. See Noventa, Giacomo Zorzi, Guglielmo, 1760 Zorzi, Ludovico, 1639 Zozo´s (Manfridi), 1121 Zucca, La (Doni), 645 Zuccari, Anna. See Neera Zuccoli, Grazia Deledda, cinema and, 469 Zuccolo, Ludovico, 1768 Zucconi, Vittorio, 49 Zurlı`, Mago, 1857 Zweig, Arnold, 827 Zweig, Stefan, 827

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